BEST SF: 1967
edited by Harry Harrison Brian W. Aldiss
A BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOK
Published by BERKLEY PUBLISHING CORPORATION
Copyright © 1968 by Harry Harrison All rights reserved
Published by arrangement with the author's agent
BERKLEY MEDALLION EDITION, MARCH, 1968
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
"Hawksbill Station, " by Robert Silverberg, copyright © 1967 by Galaxy Publishing Corp.; reprinted by permission of the author and Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc."Ultimate Construction, " by C. C. Shackleton, copyright © 1967 by TITBITS; reprinted by permission of the author. "1937 A. D. !" by John T. Sladek, copyright © 1967 by NEW WORLDS; reprinted by permission of the author. "Fifteen Miles, " by Ben Bova, copyright © 1967 by Mercury Press, Inc.; reprinted by permission of the author and Robert P. Mills. "Blackmail, " by Fred Hoyle, copyright © 1967 by Fred Hoyle; reprinted by permission of the author and The New American Library. "The Vine, " by Kit Reed, copyright © 1967 by Mercury Press, Inc.; reprinted from the magazine Fantasy and Science Fiction by permission of the author and Curtis Brown, Ltd. "Interview with a Lemming, " by James Thurber, copyright © 1942 by James Thurber. From My World And Welcome to It, published by Harcourt, Brace and World; reprinted by permission of Helen Thurber. "The Wreck of the Ship John B, " by Frank M. Robinson, copyright © 1967 by Frank M. Robinson; reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. First published in Playboy, "The Left Hand Way, " by A. Bertram Chandler, copyright © 1967 by the author; reprinted by permission of the author and Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc. First published in Australian Science Fiction Review. "The Forest of Zil, " by Kris Neville, copyright © 1967 by Ultimate Publishing Co., Inc.; reprinted by permission of the author and Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc.. "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race, " by J. O. Ballard, copyright © 1967 by AMBIT; reprinted by permission of the author. "Answering Service, " by Fritz Leiber, copyright © 1967 by Galaxy Publishing Corp.; reprinted by permission of the author and Robert P. Mills. "The Last Command, " by Keith Laumer, copyright © 1967 by the Cond6 Nast Publications, Inc.; reprinted by permission of the author and Robert P. Mills. "Mirror of Ice, " by Gary Wright, copyright © 1967 by Galaxy Publishing Corp.; reprinted by permission of the author. "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes, " by Harlan Ellison, appeared in Knight Magazine for May, 1967, copyright © 1967 by Harlan Ellison; reprinted by permission of the author and author's agent, Robert P. Mills.
BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOKS are published by Berkley Publishing Corporation 200 Madison Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10016 BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOKS ® TM 757, 375 Printed in the United States of America
Contents
HAWKSBILL STATION Robert Silverberg
ULTIMATE CONSTRUCTION C. C. Shackleton
INTERVIEW WITH A LEMMING James Thurber
THE WRECK OF THE SHIP JOHN B. Frank M. Robinson
THE LEFT-HAND WAY A. Bertram Chandler
THE FOREST OF ZIL Kris Neville
THE ASSASSINATION OF JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY CONSIDERED AS A DOWNHILL MOTOR RACE J. G. Ballard
ANSWERING SERVICE Fritz Leiber
PRETTY MAGGIE MONEYEYES Harlan Ellison
Afterword KNIGHTS OF THE PAPER SPACESHIP Brian W. Aldiss
Theoretically, the very idea of an annual "Best" volume ought to frighten magazine publishers it threatens to reduce them to feeder lines. But in actual practice, in the science fiction field the "Bests" haven't worked out as well as they might have. One practitioner has so broadened the definition of science fiction as to admit anything at all that has the right by-line on it, while the newer entry seems to be as much concerned with the politico-ethical content of the stories as with their quality.
As a counter-prescription, I suggest that a satisfying "Best" volume ought to meet the following minimum standards:
1. Its contents should be science fiction which means that at the worst, every story ought to contain some trace of some science, and at best they ought to depend on it. This means no fantasies, nothing put in solely because the author wrote a best-selling mainstream novel in 1920, no political parables and no what-is-its.
2. Its contents should be science fiction meaning no cartoons, psuedoscientific articles, how-to-write-it pieces or bad verse.
3. It ought to be reasonably honest about what it is offering. Just to begin with, no such volume can hope to include the best SF of its year, regardless of length. Fur-thermore, not even all the best short fiction is available; some of it gets tied up in exclusive contracts by other an-thologies or collections, and occasionally some of it is even priced too high. Both these limitations ought to be made known to the reader.
4. It ought to be responsible. If the editor is actually being overruled by another editor, or the publisher, that ought to be made known, too, naming names.
I am carefully not adding that within these limits its "bests" ought really to be the best; it isn't humanly possible for any such volume to satisfy everybody on that count. But it ought at least to try.
Were I a magazine publisher, the appearance of such an effort would at least give me a good deal of cause for reflection. And I think Harry has got a good start on one.
It's high time.
JAMES BLISH
The old-time science fiction fans now have good reason to be happy, whether they are happy or not. The Queens Science Fiction League, a fan club founded in 1939, took as its motto the stirring phrase "Boost Science Fiction. " This was the general feeling throughout the SF microcosm for many years: if it was SF it had to be good so boost. The fans can now relax. It has been boosted. There are more science fiction books published in a week now than there were in a year during the Paleolithic SF days. The time has therefore come to end the uncritical boostings and to separate the good from the bad and draw attention to the results. Kingsley Amis pointed out the prevailing attitude in science fiction in New Maps of Hell when he said, "… there is at present a discreditable provincialism of thought and too much nervous or complacent reluctance to invoke ordinary critical standards. " I have attempted to apply these standards in selecting the stories for this volume.
I have had good and skilled aid. Brian W. Aldiss scouted the British magazines, as well as writing what started out to be a report on the year in science fiction, but turned instead into a penetrating, overdue and highly thought-provoking analysis of the work in this field. The critical spirit of James Blish also hovers around this book, bringing the tablets to the Mount in the opening, then appearing again for a quick walk-on in the closing scenes. At my insistence Jim has laid down guidelines that an anthology of this type should follow. The credo on the pre-vious pages grew out of our correspondence: we were very much in agreement and I asked him to record the ideas so that there would be a target to aim at when selecting stories. (I should have remembered that Blish was the man who scathingly criticized his own stories when reviewing them later under a pen-name. As you will have noticed he clears the field for this annual "Best" volume by shooting down the other entrants. Perhaps this uncompromising attitude pays off: to my knowledge Blish is the only contemporary science fiction author quoted as a source in Webster's Third International Dictionary. )
Let us examine this credo. After stepping over the bodies we reach standard number one. This anthology comes off pretty well here since there are only two stories in it, both short-shorts and well under a thousand words, that don't conform. One of them, a real what-is-it by J. G. Ballard, Blish might even enjoy. The other should raise his blood pressure since it is not only a fantasy, but it is by a best-selling author of the 1920's and is a political parable to boot! Jim is not the only one who can be bull-headed.
We are home clear with number two since I could not agree more. Fiction is what this book is about, the short story to be specific. My personal belief is that if science fiction is not keeping the short story alive today, it is certainly the single field of short story endeavor in which the writers not only can experiment and flex their literary muscles but can be paid for the effort as well. It is a successful medium for the short story, where collections and anthologies actually make money, contrary to the normal rule in publishing.
I am a firm believer in honesty and will raise my right hand while reading number three aloud. All of the stories in this anthology are the ones that I wanted, and the book contains every story I wanted. The budget permitted me to obtain even the high-priced ones: there were no restraints.
While my hand is still up I'll take my oath on number four. The only assistance I received in choosing the stories was from Brian W. Aldiss, who is a fine critic, a man of excellent literary taste, and a very good friend. Mr. Thomas A. Dardis, Vice-President of Berkley Publishing Corporation, who has been a font of advice on the mechanics of publishing, has also permitted me to choose the contents of the anthology and has overruled me on none of the inclusions. My particular thanks to editors Frederik Pohl, Judy-Lynn Benjamin and Edward L. Ferman for aid in contacting their writers.
Rules, restrictions and regulations aside, I have attempted to collect an anthology of the best and most readable stories of the year 1967. They are good stories, stories that move. I agree with Hemingway's comment on the short story, when he said, "Everything changes as it moves. That is what makes the movement which makes the story. Sometimes the movement is so slow it does not seem to be moving. But there is always change and always movement. "
There were no restrictions on story length. "Hawksbill Station" is over 17, 000 words long, an impossible length for the usual anthology because three short stories could be used in its place. But this is, I feel, Silverberg's best story and it demanded to be used.
There were no restrictions on source. While most of the stories are from the expected magazines; Amazing, Analog, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy and //, as well as the British New Worlds, there are others from Playboy, Knight Magazine, Ambit and the semiprofession-al Australian Science Fiction Review. The Shackle ton story is from the British magazine Titbits, which must be a first of some kind.
It has been a pleasure to assemble these stories. May you find equal pleasure reading them.
HARRY HARRISON
by Robert Silverberg
Silverberg is a professional writer to his fingertips who, at the ripe old age of thirty-three, already has a lifetime of work behind him. I commissioned an article from him for a science fiction magazine in 1953, his first professional sale, and I feel somewhat like the man who tapped the bomb with the hammer to see if it was live. In 1956 Bob was awarded a Hugo as the Most Promising New Writer of the Year, and he grabbed it without even slowing down. He has written at least thirty SF novels, and over five hundred stories. But for the past few years he has worked away from science fiction, doing both fiction and nonfiction. It is a pleasure now to welcome him home. They were right in 1956. "Hawks-bill Station" is a major story by a major writer. The promise they awarded has certainly been fulfilled.
Barrett was the uncrowned king of Hawksbill Station. He had been there the longest; he had suffered the most; he had the deepest inner resources.
Before his accident, he had been able to whip any man in the place. Now he was a cripple, but he still had that aura of power. When there were problems at the Station, they were brought to Barrett. That was axiomatic. He was the king.
He ruled over quite a kingdom, too. In effect it was the whole world, pole to pole, meridian to meridian. For what it was worth. It wasn't worth very much.
Now it was raining again. Barrett shrugged himself to his feet in the quick, easy gesture that cost him an infinite amount of carefully concealed agony and shuffled to the door of his hut. Rain made him impatient; the pounding of those great greasy drops against the corrugated tin roof was enough even to drive a Jim Barrett loony. He nudged the door open. Standing in the doorway, Barrett looked out over his kingdom.
Barren rock, nearly to the horizon. A shield of raw dolomite going on and on. Raindrops danced and bounced on that continental slab of rock. No trees. No grass. Behind Barrett's hut lay the sea, gray and vast. The sky was gray too, even when it wasn't raining.
He hobbled out into the rain. Manipulating his crutch was getting to be simple for him now. He leaned comfortably, letting his crushed left foot dangle. A rockslide had pinned him last year during a trip to the edge of the Inland Sea. Back home, Barrett would have been fitted with prosthetics: a new ankle, a new instep, refurbished ligaments and tendons. But home was a billion years away; and home there's no returning.
The rain hit him hard. Barrett was a big man, six and a half feet tall, with hooded dark eyes, a jutting nose, a chin that was a monarch among chins. He had weighed two hundred fifty pounds in his prime, in the good old agitating days when he had carried banners and pounded out manifestos. But now he was past sixty and beginning to shrink a little, the skin getting loose around the places where the mighty muscles used to be. It was hard to keep your weight in Hawksbill Station. The food was nutritious, but it lacked intensity. A man got to miss steak. Eating brachiopod stew and trilobite hash wasn't the same thing. Barrett was past all bitterness, though. That was another reason why the men regarded him as the leader. He didn't scowl. He didn't rant. He was resigned to his fate, tolerant of eternal exile, and so he could help the others get over that difficult heart-clawing period of transition.
A figure arrived, jogging through the rain: Norton. The doctrinaire Khruschevist with the Trotskyite leanings. A small, excitable man who frequently appointed himself messenger whenever there was news at the Station. He sprinted toward Barrett's hut, slipping and sliding over the naked rocks.
Barrett held up a meaty hand.
"Whoa, Charley. Take it easy or you'll break your neck!"
Norton halted in front of the hut. The rain had pasted the widely spaced strands of his brown hair to his skull. His eyes had the fixed, glossy look of fanaticism or perhaps just astigmatism. He gasped for breath and staggered into the hut, shaking himself like a wet puppy. He obviously had run all the way from the main building of the Station, three hundred yards away.
"Why are you standing around in the rain?" Norton asked.
"To get wet, " said Barrett, following him. "What's the news?"
"The Hammer's glowing. We're getting company. "
"How do you know it's a live shipment?"
"It's been glowing for half an hour. That means they're taking precautions. They're sending a new prisoner. Anyway, no supply shipment is due. "
Barrett nodded. "Okay. I'll come over. If it's a new man, we'll bunk him in with Latimer. "
Norton managed a rasping laugh. "Maybe he's a materialist. Latimer will drive -him crazy with all that mystic nonsense. We could put him with Altaian. "
"And he'll be raped in half an hour. "
"Altaian's off that kick now, " said Norton. "He's trying to create a real woman, not looking for second-rate substitutes. "
"Maybe our new man doesn't have any spare ribs. "
"Very funny, Jim. " Norton did not look amused. "You know what I want the new man to be? A conservative, that's what. A black-souled reactionary straight out of Adam Smith. God, that's what I want. "
"Wouldn't you be happy with a fellow Bolshevik?"
"This place is full of Bolsheviks, " said Norton. "Of all shades from pale pink to flagrant scarlet. Don't you think I'm sick of them? Sitting around fishing for trilobites and discussing the relative merits of Kerensky and Malenkov? I need somebody to talk to, Jim. Somebody I can fight with. "
"All right, " Barret said, slipping into his rain gear. "I'll see what I can do about hocusing a debating partner out of the Hammer for you. A rip-roaring objectivist, okay?" He laughed. "You know something, maybe there's been a revolution Up Front since we got our last man. Maybe the left is in and the right is out, and they'll start shipping us nothing but reactionaries. How would you like that? Fifty or a hundred storm troopers, Charley? Plenty of material to debate economics with. And the place will fill up with more and more of them, until we're outnumbered, and then maybe they'll have a putsch and get rid of all the stinking leftists sent here by the old regime, and "
Barrett stopped. Norton was staring at him in amazement, his faded eyes wide, his hand compulsively smoothing his thinning hair to hide his embarrassment.
Barrett realized that he had just committed one of the most heinous crimes possible at Hawksbill Station: he had started to run off at the mouth. There hadn't been any call for his outburst. He was supposed to be the strong one of this place, the stabilizer, the man of absolute integrity and principle and sanity on whom the others could lean. And suddenly he had lost control. It was a bad sign. His dead foot was throbbing again; possibly that was the reason.
In a tight voice he said, "Let's go. Maybe the new man is here already. "
They stepped outside. The rain was beginning to let up; the storm was moving out to sea. In the east over what would one day be the Atlantic, the sky was still clotted with gray mist, but to the west a different grayness was emerging, the shade of normal gray that meant dry weather. Before he had come out here, Barrett had expected to find the sky practically black, because there'd be fewer dust particles to bounce the light around and turn things blue. But the sky seemed to be weary beige. So much for theories.
Through the thinning rain they walked toward the main building. Norton accommodated himself to Barrett's limping pace, and Barrett, wielding his crutch furiously, did his damndest not to let his infirmity slow them up. He nearly lost his footing twice and fought hard not to let Norton see.
Hawksbill Station spread out before them.
It covered about five hundred acres. In the center of everything was the main building, an ample dome that contained most of their equipment and supplies. At widely spaced intervals, rising from the rock shield like grotesque giant green mushrooms, were the plastic blisters of the individual dwellings. Some, like Barrett's, were shielded by tin sheeting salvaged from shipments from Up Front. Others stood unprotected, just as they had come from the mouth of the extruder.
The huts numbered about eighty. At the moment, there were a hundred and forty inmates in Hawksbill Station, pretty close to the all-time high. Up Front hadn't sent back any hut-building materials for a long time, and so all the newer arrivals had to double up with bunkmates. Barrett and all those whose exile had begun before 2014 had the privilege of private dwellings, if they wanted them. (Some did not wish to live alone; Barrett, to preserve his own authority, felt that he was required to. ) As new exiles arrived, they bunked in with those who currently lived alone, in reverse order of seniority. Most of the 2015 exiles had been forced to take roommates now. Another dozen deportees and the 2014 group would be doubling up. Of course, there were deaths all up and down the line, and there were plenty who were eager to have company in their huts.
Barrett felt, though, that a man who had been sentenced to life imprisonment ought to have the privilege of privacy, if he desires it. One of his biggest problems here was keeping people from cracking up because there was too little privacy. Propinquity could be intolerable in a place like this.
Norton pointed toward the big, shiny-skinned, green dome of the main building. "There's Altman going in now. And Rudiger. And Hutchett. Something's happening!"
Barrett stepped up his pace. Some of the men entering the building saw his bulky figure coming over the rise in the rock and waved to him. Barrett lifted a massive hand in reply. He felt mounting excitement. It was a big event at the Station whenever a new man arrived. Nobody had come for six months, now. That was the longest gap he could remember. It had started to seem as though no one would ever come again.
That would be a catastrophe.
New men were all that stood between the older inmates and insanity. New men brought news from the future, news from the world that was eternally left behind. They contributed new personalities to a group that always was in danger of going stale.
And, Barrett knew, some men he was not one lived in the deluded hope that the next arrival might just turn out to be a woman.
That was why they flocked to the main building when the Hammer began to glow. Barrett hobbled down the path. The rain died away just as he reached the entrance.,
Within, sixty or seventy Station residents crowded the ] chamber of the Hammer just about every man in the place who was able in body and mind and still alert enough to show curiosity about a newcomer. They shout- 't ed greetings to Barrett. He nodded, smiled, deflected their questions with amiable gestures.
"Who's it going to be this tune, Jim?"
"Maybe a girl, huh? Around nineteen years old, blond, and built like "
"I hope he can play stochastic chess, anyway. "
"Look at the glow! It's deepening!"
Barrett, like the others, stared at the Hammer. The complex, involuted collection of unfathomable instruments burned a bright cherry red, betokening the surge of who knew how many kilowatts being pumped in at the far end of the line.
The glow was beginning to spread to the Anvil now, that broad aluminum bedplate on which all shipments from the future were dropped. In another moment
"Condition Crimson!" somebody suddenly yelled. "Here he comes!"
II
A billion years up the timeline, power was flooding into the real Hammer of which this was only the partial replica. A man -or something else, perhaps a shipment of supplies stood in the center of the real Anvil, waiting for the Hawksbill Field to enfold him and kick him back to the early Paleozoic. The effect of time-travel was very much like being hit with a gigantic hammer and driven clear through the walls of the continuum: hence the governing metaphors for the parts of the machine.
Setting up Hawksbill Station had been a long, slow job. The Hammer had knocked a pathway and had sent back the nucleus of the receiving station, first. Since there was no receiving station on hand to receive the receiving station, a certain amount of waste had occurred. It wasn't necessary to have a Hammer and Anvil on the receiving end, except as a fine control to prevent temporal spread; without the equipment, the field wandered a little, and it was possible to scatter consecutive shipments over a span of twenty or thirty years. There was plenty of such temporal garbage all around Hawksbill Station, stuff that had been intended for original installation, but which because of tuning imprecisions in the pre-Hammer days had landed a couple of decades (and a couple of hundred miles) away from the intended site.
Despite such difficulties, they had finally sent through enough components to the master temporal site to allow for the construction of a receiving station. Then the first prisoners had gone through; they were technicians who knew how to put the Hammer and Anvil together. They had done the job. After that, outfitting Hawksbill Station had been easy.
Now the Hammer glowed, meaning that they had activated the Hawksbill Field on the sending end, somewhere up around 2028 or 2030 A. D. All the sending was done there. All the receiving was done here. It didn't work the other way. Nobody really knew why, although there was a lot of superficially profound talk about the rules of entropy.
There was a whining, hissing sound as the edges of the Hawksbill Field began to ionize the atmosphere in the room. Then came the expected thunderclap of implosion, caused by an imperfect overlapping of the quantity of air that was subtracted from this era and the quantity that was being thrust into it. And then, abruptly, a man dropped out of the Hammer and lay, stunned and limp, on the gleaming Anvil.
He looked young, which surprised Barrett considerably. He seemed to be well under thirty. Generally, only middle-aged men were sent to Hawksbill Station. Incorrigi-bles, who had to be separated from humanity for the general good. The youngest man in the place now had been close to forty when he arrived. The sight of this lean, clean-cut boy drew a hiss of anguish from a couple of the men in the room, and Barrett understood the constella-tion of emotions that pained them.
The new man sat up. He stirred like a child coming out of a long, deep sleep. He looked around.
His face was very pale. His thin lips seemed bloodless. His blue eyes blinked rapidly. His jaws worked as though he wanted to say something, but could not find the words.
There were no harmful physiological effects to time-travel, but it could be a jolt to the consciousness. The last -
moments before the Hammer descended were very much like the final moments beneath the guillotine. The departing prisoner took his last look at the world of rocket transport and artificial organs, at the world in which he had lived and loved and agitated for a political cause, and then he was rammed into the inconceivably remote past on a one-way journey. It was a gloomy business, and it was not very surprising that the newcomers arrived in a state of emotional shock.
Barrett elbowed his way through the crowd. Automatically, the others made way for him. He reached the lip of the Anvil and leaned over it, extending a hand to the new man. His broad smile was met by a look of blank bewilderment.
"I'm Jim Barrett. Welcome to Hawksbill Station. Here get off that thing before a load of groceries lands on top of you. " Wincing a little as he shifted his weight, Barrett pulled the new man down from the Anvil.
Barrett beckoned to Mel Rudiger, and the plump anarchist handed the new man an alcohol capsule. He took it and pressed it to his arm without a word. Charley Norton offered him a candy bar. The man shook it off. He looked groggy. A real case of temporal shock, Barrett thought, possibly the worst he had ever seen. The newcomer hadn't even spoken yet.
Barrett said, "We'll go to the infirmary and check you out. Then I'll assign you your quarters. There's time for you to find your way around and meet everybody later on. What's your name?"
"Hahn. Lew Hahn. "
"I can't hear you. "
"Hahn, " the man repeated, still only barely audible.
"When are you from, Lew?"
"2029. "
"You feel pretty sick?"
"I feel awful. I don't even believe this is happening to me. There's no such place as Hawksbill Station, is there?"
"I'm afraid there is, " Barrett said. "At least, for most of us. A few of the boys think it's all an illusion induced by drugs. But I have my doubts of that. If it's an illusion, it's a damned good one. Look. "
He put one arm around Hahn's shoulders and guided him through the press of prisoners, out of the Hammer chamber and toward the nearby infirmary. Although Hahn looked thin, even fragile, Barrett was surprised to feel the rippling muscles in those shoulders. He suspected that this man was a lot less helpless and ineffectual than he seemed to be right now. He had to be, in order to merit banishment to Hawksbill Station.
They passed the door of the building. "Look out there, " Barrett commanded.
Hahn looked. He passed a hand across his eyes as though to clear away unseen cobwebs and looked again.
"A late Cambrian landscape, " said Barrett quietly. "This would be a geologist's dream, except that geologists don't tend to become political prisoners, it seems. Out in front is Appalachia. It's a strip of rock a few hundred miles wide and a few thousand miles long, from the Gulf of Mexico to Newfoundland. To the east we've got the Atlantic. A little way to the west we've got the Inland Sea. Somewhere two thousand miles to the west there's Cascadia; that's going to be California and Washington and Oregon someday. Don't hold your breath. I hope you like seafood. "
Hahn stared, and Barrett, standing beside him at the doorway, stared also. You never got used to the alienness of this place, not even after you lived here twenty years, as Barrett had. It was Earth, and yet it was not really Earth at all, because it was somber and empty and unreal. The gray oceans swarmed with life, of course. But there was nothing on land except occasional patches of moss in the occasional patches of soil that had formed on the bare rock. Even a few cockroaches would be welcome; but insects, it seemed, were still a couple of geological periods in the future. To land-dwellers, this was a dead world, a world unborn.
Shaking his head, Hahn moved away from the door.
Barrett led him down the corridor and into the small, brightly lit room that served as the infirmary. Doc Quesa-da was waiting. Quesada wasn't really a doctor, but he had been a medical technician once, and that was good enough. He was a compact, swarthy man with a look of complete self-assurance. He hadn't lost too many patients, all things considered. Barrett had watched him removing appendices with total aplomb. In his white smock, Quesada looked sufficiently medical to fit his role.
Barrett said, "Doc, this is Lew Hahn. He's in temporal shock. Fix him up. "
Quesada nudged the newcomer onto a webfoam cradle and unzipped his blue jersey. Then he reached for his medical kit. Hawksbill Station was well equipped for most medical emergencies, now. The people Up Front had no wish to be inhumane, and they sent back all sorts of useful things, like anesthetics and surgical clamps and medicines and dermal probes. Barrett could remember a tune at the beginning when there had been nothing much here but the empty huts, and a man who hurt himself was in real trouble.
"He's had a drink already, " said Barrett.
"I see that, " Quesada murmured. He scratched at his short-cropped, bristly moustache. The little diagnostat in the cradle had gone rapidly to work, flashing information about Harm's blood pressure, potassium count, dilation index, and much else. Quesada seemed to comprehend the barrage of facts. After a moment he said to Hahn, "You aren't really sick, are you? Just shaken up a little. I don't blame you. Here I'll give you a quick jolt to calm your nerves, and you'll be all right. As all right as any of us ever are. "
He put a tube to Hahn's carotid and thumbed the snout. The subsonic whirred, and a tranquilizing compound slid into the man's bloodstream. Hahn shivered.
Quesada said, "Let him rest for five minutes. Then he'll be over the hump. "
They left Hahn in his cradle and went out of the infir-mary. In the hall, Barrett looked down at the little medic and said, "What's the report on Valdosto?"
Valdosto had gone into psychotic collapse several weeks before. Quesada was keeping him drugged and trying to bring him slowly back to the reality of Hawks-bUl Station. Shrugging, he replied, "The status is quo. I: let him out from under the dream-juice this morning, and he was the same as he's been. "
"You don't think he'll come out of it?"
"I doubt it. He's cracked for keeps. They could paste him together Up Front, but "
"Yeah, " Barrett said. If he could get Up Front at all, Valdosto wouldn't have cracked. "Keep him happy, then. If he can't be sane, he can at least be comfortable. What about Altaian? Still got the shakes?"
"He's building a woman. "
"That's what Charley Norton told me. What's he using? A rag, a bone "
"I gave him surplus chemicals. Chosen for their color, mainly. He's got some foul green copper compounds and a little bit of ethyl alcohol and six or seven other things, and he collected some soil and threw in a lot of dead shellfish, and he's sculpting it all into what he claims is female shape and waiting for lightning to strike it. "
"In other words, he's gone crazy, " Barrett said.
"I think that's a safe assumption. But he's not molest-ing his friends any more, anyway. You didn't think his; homosexual phase would last much longer, as I recall. "
"No, but I didn't think he'd go off the deep end. If a man needs sex and he can find some consenting play-, mates here, that's quite all right with me. But when he starts putting a woman together out of some dirt and rot-ten brachiopod meat it means we've lost him. "
Quesada's dark eyes flickered. "We're all going to go that way sooner or later, Jim. "
"I haven't. You haven't. "
"Give us time. I've only been here eleven years. "
"Altaian's been here only eight. Valdosto even less. "
"Some shells crack faster than. others, " said Quesada. "Here's our new friend.
Hahn had come out of the infirmary to join them. He still looked pale, but the fright was gone from his eyes. He was beginning to adjust to the unthinkable.
He said, "I couldn't help overhearing your conversation. Is there a lot of mental illness here?"
"Some of the men haven't been able to find anything meaningful to do here, " Barrett said. "It eats them away. Quesada here has his medical work. I've got administrative duties. A couple of the fellows are studying the sea life. We've got a newspaper to keep some busy. But there are always those who just let themselves slide into despair, and they crack up. I'd say we have thirty or forty certifiable maniacs here at the moment, out of a hundred and forty residents. "
"That's not so bad, " Hahn said. "Considering the inherent instability of the men who get sent here and the unusual conditions of life here. "
Barrett laughed. "Hey, you're suddenly pretty articu-lare, aren't you? What was in the stuff Doc Quesada jolted you with?"
"I didn't mean to sound superior, " Hahn said quickly. "Maybe that came out a little too smug. I mean "
"Forget it. What did you do Up Front, anyway?"
"I was sort of an economist. "
"Just what we need, " said Quesada. "He can help us solve our balance-of-payments problem. "
Barrett said, "If you were an economist, you'll have plenty to discuss here. This place is full of economic theorists who'll want to bounce their ideas off you. Some of them are almost sane, too. Come with me and I'll show you where you're going to stay. "
III
The path from the main building to the hut of Donald Latimer was mainly downhill, for which Barrett was grateful even though he knew that he'd have to negotiate the uphill return in a little while. Latimer's hut was on the eastern side of the Station, looking out over the ocean. They walked slowly toward it. Hahn was solicitous of Barrett's game leg, and Barrett was irritated by the exaggerated care the younger man took to keep pace with him.
He was puzzled by this Hahn. The man was full of seeming contradictions showing up here with the worst case of arrival shock Barrett had ever seen, then snapping out of it with remarkable quickness; looking frail and shy, but hiding solid muscles inside his jersey; giving an outer appearance of incompetence, but speaking with calm control. Barrett wondered what this young man had done to earn him the trip to Hawksbill Station, but there was time for such inquiries later. All the time in the world.
Hahn said, "Is everything like this? Just rock and ocean?"
"That's all. Land life hasn't evolved yet. Everything's wonderfully simple, isn't it? No clutter. No urban sprawl. There's some moss moving onto land, but not much. "
"And in the sea? Swimming dinosaurs?"
Barrett shook his head. "There won't be any verte-brates for half a billion years. We don't even have fish i yet, let alone reptiles out there. All we can offer is that which creepeth. Some shellfish, some big fellows that look like squids and trilobites. Seven hundred billion different species of trilobites. We've got a man named Rudiger • he's the one who gave you the drink who's making a collection of them. He's writing the world's definitive text on trilobites. "
"But nobody will ever read it in in the future. "
"Up Front, we say. "
"Up Front. "
"That's the pity of it, " said Barrett. "We told Rudiger to inscribe his book on imperishable plates of gold and hope that it's found by paleontologists. But he says the; odds are against it. A billion years of geology will chew his plates to hell before they can be found. "
Hahn sniffed. "Why does the air smell so strange?"
"It's a different mix, " Barrett said. "We've analyzed it. More nitrogen, a little less oxygen, hardly any CO2 at all. But that isn't really why it smells odd to you. The thing is, it's pure air, unpolluted by the exhalations of life. Nobody's been respiring into it but us lads, and there aren't enough of us to matter. "
Smiling, Hahn said, "I feel a little cheated that it's so empty. I expected lush jungles of weird plants and pterodactyls swooping through the air and maybe a tyranno-saur crashing into a fence around the Station. "
"No jungles. No pterodactyls. No tyrannosaurs. No fences. You didn't do your homework. "
"Sorry. "
"This is the late Cambrian. Sea life exclusively. "
"It was very kind of them to pick such a peaceful era ; is the dumping ground for political prisoners, " Hahn i said. "I was afraid it would be all teeth and claws. "
"Kind, hell! They were looking for an era where we couldn't do any harm. That meant tossing us back before the evolution of mammals, just hi case we'd accidentally get hold of the ancestor of all humanity and snuff him ut. And while they were at it, they decided to stash us so tar in the past that we'd be beyond all land life, on the theory that maybe even if we slaughtered a baby dinosaur it might affect the entire course of the future. "
"They don't mind if we catch a few trilobites?"
"Evidently they think it's safe, " Barrett said. "It looks as though they were right. Hawksbill Station has been here for twenty-five years, and it doesn't seem as though we've tampered with future history hi any measurable way. Of course, they're careful not to send us any women. "
"Why is that?"
"So we don't start reproducing and perpetuating our-selves. Wouldn't that mess up the timelines? A successful human outpost in one billion B. C., that's had all that time to evolve and mutate and grow? By the time the twenty-first century came around, our descendants would be in charge, and the other kind of human being would probably be in penal servitude, and there'd be more paradoxes created than you should shake a trilobite at. So they don't send the women here. There's a prison camp for women, too, but it's a few hundred million years up the tune-line in the late Silurian, and never the twain shall meet. That's why Ned Altaian's trying to build a woman out of dust and garbage. "
"God made Adam out of less. "
"Altaian isn't God, " Barrett said. "That's the root of his whole problem. Look, here's the hut where you're going to stay. I'm rooming you with Don Latimer. He's a very sensitive, interesting, pleasant person. He used to be a physicist before he got into politics, and he's been here about a dozen years, and I might as well warn you that he's developed a strong and somewhat cockeyed mystic streak lately. The fellow he was rooming with killed himself last year, and since then he's been trying to find some way out of here through extrasensory powers. "
"Is he serious?"
"I'm afraid he is. And we try to take him seriously. We all humor each other at Hawksbill Station; it's the only way we avoid a mass psychosis. Latimer will probably try to get you to collaborate with him on his project. If you don't like living with him, I can arrange a transfer for you. But I want to see how he reacts to someone new at the Station. I'd like you to give him a chance. "
"Maybe I'll even help him find his psionic gateway. "
"If you do, take me along, " said Barrett. They both laughed. Then he rapped at Latimer's door. There was no answer, and after a moment Barrett pushed the door open. Hawksbill Station had no locks.
Latimer sat in the middle of the bare rock floor, crosslegged, meditating. He was a slender, gentle-faced man. just beginning to look old. Right now he seemed a million miles away. Hahn shrugged. Barrett put a finger to his lips. They waited in silence for a few minutes, and then Latimer showed signs of coming up from his trance.
He got to his feet in a single flowing motion, without using his hands. In a low, courteous voice he said to Hahn, "Have you just arrived?"
"Within the last hour. I'm Lew Hahn. "
"Donald Latimer. I regret that I have to make your acquaintance in these surroundings. But maybe we won't have to tolerate this illegal imprisonment much longer. "
Barrett said, "Don, Lew is going to bunk with you. I think you'll get along well. He was an economist hi 2029 until they gave him the Hammer. "
"Where did you live?" Latimer asked, animation coming into his eyes.
"San Francisco. "
The glow faded. Latimer said, "Were you ever in Toronto? I'm from there. I had a daughter she'd be twenty-three now, Nella Latimer. I wondered if you knew her. "
"No. I'm sorry. "
"It wasn't very likely. But I'd love to know what kind of a woman she became. She was a little girl when I last saw her. Now I guess she's married. Or perhaps they've sent her to the other Station. Nella Latimer you're sure you didn't know her?"
Barrett left them together. It looked as though they'd get along. He told Latimer to bring Hahn up to the main building at dinner for introductions and went out. A chilly drizzle had begun again. Barrett made his way slowly, painfully up the hill. It had been sad to see the light flicker from Latimer's eyes when Hahn said he didn't know his daughter. Most of the time, men at Hawksbill Station tried not to speak about their families, preferring to keep those tormenting memories well repressed. But The arrival of newcomers generally stirred old ties. There was never any news of relatives and no way to obtain any, because it was impossible for the Station to communicate with anyone Up Front. No way to ask for the photo of a loved one, no way to request specific medicines, no way to obtain a certain book or a coveted tape. In a mindless, impersonal way, Up Front sent periodic shipments to the Station of things thought useful read' ing matter, medical supplies, technical equipment, food Occasionally they were startling in their generosity, as when they sent a case of Burgundy, or a box of sensory spools, or a recharger for the power pack. Such gifts usually meant a brief thaw in the world situation, which customarily produced a short-lived desire to be kind to the boys in Hawksbill Station. But they had a policy about sending information about relatives. Or about contemporary newspapers. Fine wine, yes; a tridim of a daughter who would never be seen again, no.
For all Up Front knew, there was no one alive in Hawksbill Station. A plague could have killed everyone off ten years ago, but there was no way of telling. Thai was why the shipments still came back. The government whirred and clicked with predictable continuity. The government, whatever else it might be, was not malicious. There were other kinds of totalitarianism besides bloody repressive tyranny.
Pausing at the top of the hill, Barrett caught his breath, Naturally, the alien air no longer smelled strange to him, He filled his lungs with it. Once again the rain ceased. Through the grayness came the sunshine, making the naked rocks sparkle. Barrett closed his eyes a moment and leaned on his crutch and saw, as though on an inner screen, the creatures with many legs climbing up out of the sea, and the mossy carpets spreading, and the flower-less plants uncoiling and spreading their scaly branches, and the dull hides of eerie amphibians glistening on the shores and the tropic heat of the coal-forming epoch descending like a glove over the world.
All that lay far in the future. Dinosaurs. Little chittering mammals. Pithecanthropus in the forests of Java. Sar-gon and Hannibal and Attila and Orville Wright and Thomas Edison and Edmond Hawksbill. And finally a benign government that would find the thoughts of some men so intolerable that the only safe place to which they could be banished was a rock at the beginning of tune,
The government was too civilized to put men to death for subversive activities and too cowardly to let them remain alive. The compromise was the living death of Hawksbill Station. A billion years of impassable time was suitable insulation even for the most nihilistic idea.
Barrett struggled the rest of the way back toward his hut. He had long since come to accept his exile, but accepting his ruined foot was another matter entirely. The idle wish to find a way to regain the freedom of his own time no longer possessed him; but he wished with all his soul that the blank-faced administrators Up Front would send back a kit that would allow him to rebuild his foot.
He entered his hut and flung his crutch aside, sulking down instantly on his cot. There had been no cots when he had come to Hawksbill Station. He had come here in the fourth year of the Station, when there were only a dozen buildings and little in the way of creature comforts. It had been a miserable place, then, but the steady accretion of shipments from Up Front had made it relatively tolerable. Of the fifty or so prisoners who had preceded Barrett to Hawksbill, none remained alive. He had held the highest seniority for almost ten years. Time moved here at one-to-one correlation with time Up Front; the Hammer was locked on this point of tune, so that Hahn, arriving here today more than twenty years after Barrett, had departed from a year Up Front more than twenty years after the time of Barrett's expulsion. Barrett had not had the heart to begin pumping Hahn for news of 2029 so soon. He would learn all he needed to know, and small cheer it would be, anyway.
Barrett reached for a book. But the fatigue of hobbling ; around the station had taken more out of him than he realized. He looked at the page for a moment. Then he put it away and closed his eyes and dozed.
IV
That evening, as every evening, the men of Hawksbill Station gathered in the main building for dinner and recreation. It was not mandatory, and some men chose to eat alone. But tonight nearly everyone who was in full i possession of his faculties was there, because this was one of the infrequent occasions when a newcomer had arrived to be questioned about the world of men.
Hahn looked uneasy about his sudden notoriety. He seemed to be basically shy, unwilling to accept all the attention now being thrust upon him. There he sat in the middle of the group while men twenty and thirty years his senior crowded in on him with their questions, and it was obvious that he wasn't enjoying the session.
Sitting to one side, Barrett took little part in the discussion. His curiosity about Up Front's ideological shifts had: ebbed a long time ago. It was hard for him to realize that he had once been so passionately concerned about con- I cepts like syndicalism and the dictatorship of the proletar-iat and the guaranteed annual wage that he had been will-ing to risk imprisonment over them. His concern for hu-manity had not waned, merely the degree of his involve-ment in the twenty-first century's political problems. After twenty years at Hawksbill Station, Up Front had become unreal to Jim Barrett, and his energies centered around the crises and challenges of what he had come to think of as "his own" time the late Cambrian.
So he listened, but more with an ear for what the talk revealed about Lew Hahn than for what it revealed about current events Up Front. And what it revealed about Lew Hahn was mainly a matter of what was not revealed.
Hahn didn't say much. He seemed to be feinting and evading.
Charley Norton wanted to know, "Is there any sign of a weakening of the phony conservatism yet? I mean, they've been promising the end of big government for thirty years, and it gets bigger all the time. "
Hahn moved restlessly in his chair. "They still promise. As soon as conditions become stabilized "
"Which is when?"
"I don't know. I suppose they're making words. "
"What about the Martian Commune?" demanded Sid
Hutchett. "Have they been infiltrating agents onto Earth?"
"I couldn't really say. "
"How about the Gross Global Product?" Mel Rudiger wanted to know. "What's its curve? Still holding level, or has it started to drop?"
Hahn tugged at his ear. "I think it's slowly edging down. "
"Where does the index stand?" Rudiger asked. "The last figures we had, for '25, it was at 909. But in four years "
"It might be something like 875 now, " said Hahn.
It struck Barrett as a little odd that an economist would be so hazy about the basic economic statistic. Of course, he didn't know how long Hahn had been imprisoned before getting the Hammer. Maybe he simply wasn't up on the recent figures.
Charley Norton wanted to find out some things about the legal rights of citizens. Hahn couldn't tell him. Rudiger asked about the impact of weather control whether the supposedly conservative government of liberators was still ramming programed weather down the mouths of the citizens and Hahn wasn't sure. Hahn couldn't rightly say much about the functions of the judiciary, whether it had recovered any of the power stripped from it by the Enabling Act of '18. He didn't have any comments to offer on the tricky subject of population control. In fact, his performance was striking for its lack of hard information.
"He isn't saying much at all, " Charley Norton grumbled to the silent Barrett. "He's putting up a smokescreen. But either he's not telling what he knows, or he doesn't know. "
"Maybe he's not very bright, " Barrett suggested.
"What did he do to get here? He must have had som6 kind of deep commitment. But it doesn't show, Jim! He's an intelligent kid, but he doesn't seem plugged in to anything that ever mattered to any of us. "
Doc Quesada offered a thought. "Suppose he isn't a political at all. Suppose they're sending a different kind of prisoner back now. Axe murderers, or something. A quiet kid who quietly chopped up sixteen people one Sunday morning. Naturally he isn't interested in politics. "
Barrett shook his head. "I doubt that. I think he's just clamming up because he's shy or ill at ease. It's his first night here, remember. He's just been kicked out of his own world and there's no going back. He may have left a wife and baby behind, you know. He may simply not give a damn tonight about sitting up there and spouting the latest word on abstract philosophical theory, when all he wants to do is go off and cry his eyes out. I say we ought to leave him alone. "
Quesada and Norton looked convinced. They shook their heads in agreement; but Barrett didn't voice his opinion to the room in general. He let the quizzing of Hahn continue until it petered out of its own accord. The men began to drift away. A couple of them went in back, to convert Hahn's vague generalities into the lead story for the next handwritten edition of the Hawksbill Station Times. Rudiger stood on a table and shouted out that he was going night fishing, and four men asked to join him. Charley Norton sought out his usual debating partner, the nihilist Ken Belardi, and reopened, like a festering wound, their discussion of planning versus chaos, which bored them both to the point of screaming. The nightly games of stochastic chess began. The loners who had made rare visits to the main building simply to see the new man went back to their huts to do whatever they did in them alone each night.
Hahn stood apart, fidgeting and uncertain.
Barrett went up to him. "I guess you didn't really want to be quizzed tonight, " he said.
"I'm sorry I couldn't have been more informative. I've been out of circulation a while, you see. "
"But you were politically active, weren't you?"
"Oh, yes, " Hahn said. "Of course. " He flicked his |
tongue over his lips. What's supposed to happen now/
"Nothing in particular. We don't have organized activities here. Doc and I are going out on sick call. Care to join us?"
"What does it involve?" Hahn asked.
"Visiting some of the worst cases. It can be grim, but you'll get a panoramic view of Hawksbill Station. "
"I'd like to go. "
Barrett gestured to Quesada, and the three of them left the building. This was a nightly ritual for Barrett, difficult as it was since he had hurt his foot. Before turning in, he visited the goofy ones and the psycho ones and the catatonic ones, tucked them in, wished them a good night and a healed mind in the morning. Someone had to show them that he cared. Barrett did.
Outside, Hahn peered up at the moon. It was nearly full tonight, shining like a burnished coin, its face a pale salmon color and hardly pockmarked at all.
"I looks so different here, " Hahn said. "The craters where are the craters?"
"Most of them haven't been formed yet, " said Barrett. "A billion years is a long time even for the moon. Most of its upheavals are still ahead. We think it may still have an atmosphere, too. That's why it looks pink to us. Of course, Up Front hasn't bothered to send us much in the way of astronomical equipment. We can only guess. "
Hahn started to say something. He cut himself off after one blurted syllable.
Quesada said, "Don't hold it back. What were you about to suggest?"
Hahn laughed. "That you ought to fly up there and take a look. It struck me as odd that you'd spend all these years here theorizing about whether the moon's got an atmosphere and wouldn't ever once go up to look. But I forgot. "
"It would be useful to have a commut ship from Up Front, " Barrett said. "But it hasn't occurred to them. All we can do is look. The moon's a popular place in '29, is it?"
"The biggest resort in the system, " Hahn said. "I was there on my honeymoon. Leah and I "
He stopped again.
Barrett said hurriedly, "This is Bruce Valdosto's hut. He cracked up a few weeks ago. When we go in, stand behind us so he doesn't see you. He might be violent with a stranger. He's unpredictable. "
Valdosto was a husky man in his late forties, with swarthy skin, coarse curling black hair, and the broadest shoulders any man had ever had. Sitting down, he looked even burlier than Jim Barrett, which was saying a great deal. But Valdosto had short, stumpy legs, the legs of a man of ordinary stature tacked to the trunk of a giant, which spoiled the effect completely. In his years Up Front he had totally refused any prosthesis. He believed in living with deformities.
Right now he was strapped into a webfoam cradle. His ! domed forehead was flecked with beads of sweat; his eyes were glittering beadily in the darkness. He was a I very sick man. Once he had been clear-minded enough to throw a sleet bomb into a meeting of the Council of Syndics, giving a dozen of them a bad case of gamma I poisoning, but now he scarcely knew up from down, right from left.
Barrett leaned over him and said, "How are you, Bruce?"
"Who's that?"
"Jim. It's a beautiful night, Bruce. How'd you like to | come outside and get some fresh air? The moon's almost ' full. "
"I've got to rest. The committee meeting tomorrow "
"It's been postponed. "
"But how can it? The Revolution "
"That's been postponed too. Indefinitely. "
"Are they disbanding the cells?" Valdosto asked harsh- |
ly.
"We don't know yet. We're waiting for orders. Come outside, Bruce. The air will do you good. "
Muttering, Valdosto let himself be unlaced. Quesada ]
and Barrett pulled him to his feet and propelled him through the door of the hut. Barrett caught sight of Hahn in the shadows, his face somber with shock.
They stood together outside the hut. Barrett pointed to the moon. "It's got such a lovely color here. Not like the dead thing Up Front. And look, look down there, Bruce. The sea breaking on the rocky shore. Rudiger's out fishing. I can see his boat by moonlight. "
"Striped bass, " said Valdosto. "Sunnies. Maybe he'll catch some sunnies. "
"There aren't any sunnies here. They haven't evolved yet. " Barrett fished in his pocket and drew out something ridged and glossy, about two inches long. It was the ex-oskeleton of a small trilobite. He offered it to Valdosto, who shook his head.
"Don't give me that cockeyed crab. "
"It's a trilobite, Bruce. It's extinct, but so are we. We're a billion years in our own past. "
"You must be crazy, " Valdosto said in a calm, low voice that belied his wild-eyed appearance. He took the trilobite from Barrett and hurled it against the rocks. "Cockeyed crab, " he muttered.
Quesada shook his head sadly. He and Barrett led the sick man into the hut again. Valdosto did not protest as the medic gave him the sedative. His weary mind, rebelling entirely against the monstrous concept that he had been exiled to the inconceivably remote past, welcomed sleep.
When they went out Barrett saw Hahn 'holding the trilobite on his palm and staring at it in wonder. Hahn offered it to him, but Barrett brushed it away. "Keep it if you like, " he said. "There are more. "
They went on. They found Ned Altman beside his hut, crouching on his knees and patting his hands over the crude, lopsided form of what, from its exaggerated breasts and hips, appeared to be the image of a woman. He stood up when they appeared. Altman was a neat little man with yellow hair and nearly invisible white eye-brows. Unlike anyone else in the Station, he had actually been a government man once, fifteen years ago, before seeing through the myth of syndicalist capitalism and joining one of the underground factions. Eight years at Hawksbill Station had done things to him.
Altaian pointed to his golem and said, "I hoped there'd be lightning in the rain today. That'll do it, you know. But there isn't much lightning this time of year. She'll get up alive, and then I'll need you, Doc, to give her her shots and trim away some of the rough places. "
Quesada forced a smile. "I'll be glad to do it, Ned. But you know the terms. "
"Sure. When I'm through with her, you get her. You think I'm a goddam monopolist? I'll share her. There'll be a waiting list. Just so you don't forget who made her, though. She'll remain mine, whenever I need her. " He noticed Hahn. "Who are you?"
"He's new, " Barrett said. "Lew Hahn. He came this afternoon. "
"Ned Altaian, " said Altaian with a courtly bow. "Formerly in government service. You're pretty young, aren't you? How's your sex orientation? Hetero?"
Hahn winced. "I'm afraid so. "
"It's okay. I wouldn't touch you. I've got a project going, here. But I just want you to know, I'll put you on my list. You're young and you've probably got stronger needs than some of us. I won't forget about you, even though you're new here. "
Quesada coughed. "You ought to get some rest now, Ned. Maybe there'll be lightning tomorrow. "
Altaian did not resist. The doctor took him aside and put him to bed, while Hahn and Barrett surveyed the man's handiwork. Hahn pointed toward the figure's middle.
"He's left out something essential, " he said. "If he's planning to make love to this girl after he's finished creating her, he'd better "
"It was there yesterday, " said Barrett. "He must be changing orientation again. " Quesada emerged from the hut. They went on, down the rocky path.
Barrett did not make the complete circuit that night. Ordinarily, he would have gone all the way down to Lati-mer's hut overlooking the sea, for Latimer was on his list of sick ones. But Barrett had visited Latimer once that day, and he didn't think his aching good leg was up to another hike that far. So after he and Quesada and Hahn had been to all of the easily accessible huts and had visited the man who prayed for alien beings to rescue him and the man who was trying to break into a parallel universe where everything was as it ought to be in the world and the man who lay on his cot sobbing for all his wakeful hours, Barrett said good night to his companions and allowed Quesada to escort Hahn back to his hut without him.
After observing Hahn for half a day, Barrett realized he did not know much more about him than when he had first dropped onto the Anvil. But maybe Hahn would open up a little more, after he'd been here a while. Barrett stared up at the salmon moon and reached into his pocket to finger the little trilobite before he remembered that he had given it to Hahn. He shuffled into his hut. He wondered how long ago Hahn had taken that lunar honeymoon trip.
V
Rudiger's catch was spread out in front of the main building the next morning when Barrett came up for breakfast. He had had a good night's fishing, obviously. He usually did. Rudiger went out three or four nights a week, in a little dinghy that he had cobbled together a few years ago from salvage materials, and he took with him a team of friends whom he had trained in the deft use of the trawling nets.
It was an irony that Rudiger, the anarchist, the man who believed in individualism and the abolition of all po-litical institutions, should be so good at leading a team of fishermen. Rudiger didn't care for teamwork in the abstract. But it was hard to manipulate the nets alone, he had discovered. Hawksbill Station had many little ironies of that sort. Political theorists tend to swallow their theories when forced back on pragmatic measures of survival.
The prize of the catch was a cephalopod about a dozen feet long a rigid conical tube out of which some limp squidlike tentacles dangled. Plenty of meat on that one, Barrett thought. Dozens of trilobites were arrayed around it, ranging in size from the inch-long kind to the three-footers with their baroquely involuted exoskeletons. Rudiger fished both for food and for science; evidently these trilobites were discards, species that he already had studied, or he wouldn't have left them here to go into the food hoppers. His hut was stacked ceiling-high with trilobites. It kept him sane to collect and analyze them.
Near the heap of trilobites were some clusters of hinged ' brachiopods, looking like scallops that had gone awry, and a pile of snails. The warm, shallow waters just off the coastal shelf teemed with life, in striking contrast to the barren land. Rudiger had also brought in a mound of shiny black seaweed. Barrett hoped someone would gather all this stuff up and get it into their heat-sink cooler before it spoiled. The bacteria of decay worked a lot slower here than they did Up Front, but a few hours in the mild air would do Rudiger's haul no good.
Today Barrett planned to recruit some men for the annual Inland Sea expedition. Traditionally, he led that trek himself, but his injury made it impossible for him even to consider going any more. Each year, a dozen or so able-bodied men went out on a wide-ranging reconnaissance that took them in a big circle, looping northwestward until they reached the sea, then coming around to the south and back to the Station. One purpose of the trip was to gather any temporal garbage that might have materialized in the vicinity of the Station during the past year. There was no way of knowing how wide a margin of error had been allowed during the early attempts to set up the Station, and the scattershot technique of hurling material into the past had been pretty unreliable. New stuff was turning up all the time that had been aimed for Minus One Billion, Two Thousand Oh Five A. D., but which didn't get there until a few decades later. Hawksbill Station needed all the spare equipment it could get, and Barrett didn't miss a chance to round up any of the debris.
There was another reason for the Inland Sea expeditions, though. They served as a focus for the year, an annual ritual, something to peg a custom to. It was a rite of spring here.
The dozen strongest men, going on foot to the distant rock-rimmed shores of the tepid sea that drowned the middle of North America, were performing the closest thing Hawksbill Station had to a religious function. The trip meant more to Barrett himself than he had ever suspected, also. He realized that now, when he was unable to go. He had led every such expedition for twenty years.
But last year he had gone scrabbling over boulders loosened by the waves, venturing into risky territory for no rational reason, and his aging muscles had betrayed him. Often at night he woke sweating to escape from the dream in which he relived that ugly moment: slipping and sliding, clawing at the rocks, a mass of stone dislodged from somewhere and came crashing down with an agonizing impact on his foot, pinning him, crushing him. He could not forget the sound of grinding bones. Nor was he likely to lose the memory of the homeward march across hundreds of miles of bare rock, his bulky body slung between the bowed forms of his companions.
He had thought he would lose the foot, but Quesada had spared him from the amputation. He simply could not touch the foot to the ground and put weight on it now, or ever again. It might have been simpler to have the dead appendage sliced off. Quesada vetoed that, though. "Who knows, " he had said, "some day they might send us a transplant kit. I can't rebuild a leg that's been amputated. " So Barrett had kept his crushed foot. But he had never been quite the same since, and now someone else would have to lead the march.
Who would it be, he asked himself?
Quesada was the likeliest. Next to Barrett, he was the strongest man here, in all the ways that it was important to be strong. But Quesada couldn't be spared at the Sta-tion. It might be handy to have a medic along on the trip, but it was vital to have one here. After some reflection Barrett put down Charley Norton as the leader. He added Ken Belardi someone for Norton to talk to. Rudiger? A tower of strength last year after Barrett had been injured;; Barrett didn't particularly want to let Rudiger leave the Station so long though. He needed able men for the expe-dition, true, but he didn't want to strip the home base down to invalids, crackpots, and psychotics. Rudiger stayed. Two of his fellow fishermen went on the list. So did Sid Hutchett and Arny Jean-Claude.
Barrett thought about putting Don Latimer in the ] group. Latimer was coming to be something of a border- I line mental case, but he was rational enough except when he lapsed into his psionic meditations, and he'd pulled his own weight on the expedition. On the other hand, Lati-mer was Lew Hahn's roommate, and Barrett wanted Lat-imer around to observe Hahn at close range. He toyed with the idea of sending both of them out, but nixed it. Hahn was still an unknown quantity. It was too risky to ' let him go with the Inland Sea party this year. Probably I he'd be in next spring's group, though.
Finally Barrett had his dozen men chosen. He chalked their names on the slate in front of the mess hall and; found Charley Norton at breakfast to tell him he was in charge.
It felt strange to know that he'd have to stay home while i the others went. It was an admission that he was begin-ning to abdicate after running this place so long. A crip-pled old man was what he was, whether he liked to admit I
.
it to himself or not, and that was something he'd have to come to terms with soon.
In the afternoon, the men of the Inland Sea expedition gathered to select their gear and plan their route. Barrett kept away from the meeting. This was Charley Norton's show, now. He'd made eight or ten trips, and he knew what to do.
But some masochistic compulsion in Barrett drove him to take a trek of his own. If he couldn't see the western waters this year, the least he could do was pay a visit to the Atlantic, in his own backyard. Barrett stopped off in the infirmary and, finding Quesada elsewhere, helped himself to a tube of neural depressant. He scrambled along the eastern trail until he was a few hundred yards from the main building, dropped his trousers, and quickly gave each thigh a jolt of the drug, first the good leg, then the gimpy one. That would numb the muscles just enough so that he'd be able to take an extended hike without feeling the fire of the fatigue in his protesting joints. He'd pay for it, he knew, eight hours from now, when the depressant wore off and the full impact of his exertion hit him like a million daggers. But he was willing to accept that price.
The road to the sea was a long, lonely one. Hawksbill Station was perched on the eastern rim of the land, more than eight hundred feet above sea level. During the first half dozen years, the men of the Station had reached the ocean by a suicidal route across sheer rock faces, but Barrett had incited a ten-year project to carve a path. Now wide steps descended to the sea. Chopping them out of the rock had kept a lot of men busy for a long time, too busy to worry or to slip into insanity. Barrett regretted that he couldn't conceive some comparable works project to occupy them nowadays.
The steps formed a succession of shallow platforms that switch backed to the edge of the water. Even for a healthy man it was still a strenuous walk. For Barrett in his present condition it was an ordeal. It took him two hours to descend a distance that normally could be tra-versed in a quarter of that time. When he reached the I bottom, he sank down exhaustedly on a flat rock licked by the waves, and dropped his crutch. The ringers of his left hand were cramped and gnarled from gripping the crutch, and his entire body was bathed in sweat.
The water looked gray and somehow oily. Barrett ] could not explain the prevailing colorlessness of the late Cambrian world, with its somber sky and somber land i and somber sea, but his heart quietly ached for a glimpse of green vegetation again. He missed chlorophyll. The dark wavelets lapped against his rock, pushing a mass of floating black seaweed back and forth. The sea stretched ' to infinity. He didn't have the faintest idea how much of Europe, if any, was above water in this epoch.
At the best of times most of the planet was submerged; I here, only a few hundred million years after the white-hot rocks of the land had pushed into view, it was likely that all that was above water on Earth was a strip of territory here and there. Had the Himalayas been born yet? The I Rockies? The Andes? He knew the approximate outlines of late Cambrian North America, but the rest was a mystery.
!As he watched, a big trilobite unexpectedly came scutter-ing up out of the water. It was the spike-tailed kind, I about a yard long, with an eggplant-purple shell and a bristling arrangement of slender spines along the margins. There seemed to be a lot of legs underneath. The trilobite I crawled up on the shore no sand, no beach, just a shelf I of rock and advanced until it was eight or ten feet from the waves.
Good for you, Barrett thought. Maybe you're the first one who ever came out on land to see what it was like. The pioneer. The trailblazer.
It occurred to him that this adventurous trilobite might well be the ancestor of all the land-dwelling creatures of the eons to come. It was biological nonsense, but Bar- rett's weary mind conjured a picture of an evolutionary procession, with fish and amphibians and reptiles and
mammals and man all stemming in unbroken sequence from this grotesque-armored thing that moved in uncertain circles near his feet.
And if I were to step on you, he thought?
A quick motion the sound of crunching chitin the wild scrabbling of a host of little legs
And the whole chain of life snapped in its first link. Evolution undone. With the descent of that heavy foot all the future would change, and there would never have been any Hawksbill Station, no human race, no James Edward Barrett. In an instant he would have both revenge on those who had condemned him to live out his days in this place and release from his sentence.
He did nothing. The trilobite completed its slow perambulation of the shoreline rocks and scuttered back into the sea unharmed.
The soft voice of Don Latimer said, "I saw you sitting down here, Jim. Do you mind if I join you?"
Barrett swung around, momentarily surprised. Latimer had come down from his hilltop hut so quietly that Barrett hadn't heard a thing. He recovered and grinned and beckoned Latimer to an adjoining rock.
"You fishing?" Latimer asked.
"Just sitting. An old man sunning himself. "
"You took a hike like that just to sun yourself?" Latimer laughed. "Come off it. You're trying to get away from it all, and you probably wish I hadn't disturbed you. "
"That's not so. Stay here. How's your new roommate getting along?"
"It's been strange, " said Latimer. "That's one reason I came down here to talk to you. " He leaned forward and peered searchingly into Barrett's eyes. "Jim, tell me: do you think I'm a madman?"
"Why should I?"
"The ESPing business. My attempt to break through to another realm of consciousness. I know you're tough-minded and skeptical. You probably think it's all a lot of nonsense. "
Barrett shrugged and said, "If you want the blunt truth, I do. I don't have the remotest belief that you're going to get us anywhere, Don. I think it's a complete waste of time and energy for you to sit there for hours I harnessing your psionic powers, or whatever it is you do. But no, I don't think you're crazy. I think you're entitled j to your obsession and that you're going about a basically futile thing in a reasonably level-headed way. Fair enough?"
"More than fair. I don't ask you to put any credence in my research, but I don't want you to think I'm a total lu-natic for trying it. It's important that you regard me as sane, or else what I want to tell you about Hahn won't be valid to you. "
"I don't see the connection. "
"It's this, " said Latimer. "On the basis of one evening's ] acquaintance, I've formed an opinion about Hahn. It's -the kind of an opinion that might be formed by a garden variety paranoid, and if you think I'm nuts you're likely to discount my idea. "
"I don't think you're nuts. What's your idea?"
"That he's been. spying on us. "
Barrett had to work hard to keep from emitting the guffaw that would shatter Latimer's fragile self-esteem. "Spying?" he said casually. "You can't mean that. How I can anyone spy here? I mean, how can he report his find-"
"I don't know, " Latimer said. "But he asked me a million questions last night. About you, about Quesada, I about some of the sick men. He wanted to know everything. "
"The normal curiosity of a new man. "
"Jim, he was taking notes. I saw him after he thought I was asleep. He sat up for two hours writing it all down in J a little book. "
"Maybe he's going to write a novel about us. "
"I'm serious, " Latimer said. "Questions notes. And he's shifty. Try to get him to talk about himself!"
"I did. I didn't learn much. "
"Do you know why he's been sent here?"
"No. "
"Neither do I, " said Latimer. "Political crimes, he said, but he was vague as hell. He hardly seemed to know what the present government was up to, let alone what his own opinions were toward it. I don't detect any passionate philosophical convictions in Mr. Hahn. And you know as well as I do that Hawksbill Station is the refuse heap for revolutionaries and agitators and subversives and all sorts of similar trash, but that we've never had any other kind of prisoner here. "
Barrett said coolly, "I agree that Hahn's a puzzle. But who could he be spying for? He's got no way to file a report, if he's a government agent. He's stranded here for keeps, like us. "
"Maybe he was sent to keep an eye on us to make sure we aren't cooking up some way to escape. Maybe he's a volunteer who willingly gave up his twenty-first-century life so he could come among us and thwart anything we might be hatching. Perhaps they're afraid we've invented forward time-travel. Or that we've become a threat to the sequence of the time-lines. Anything. So Hahn comes among us to snoop around and block any dangers before they arrive. "
"Barrett felt a twinge of alarm. He saw how close to paranoia Latimer was hewing, now. In half a dozen sentences he had journeyed from the rational expression of some justifiable suspicions to the fretful fear that the men from Up Front were going to take steps to choke off the escape route that he was so close to perfecting.
He kept his voice level as he told Latimer, "I don't think you need to worry, Don. Hahn's an odd one, but he's not here to make trouble for us. The fellows Up Front have already made all the trouble for us they ever will. "
"Would you keep an eye on him anyway?"
"You know I will. And don't hesitate to let me know if Hahn does anything else out of the ordinary. You're in a better spot to notice than anyone else. "
"I'll be watching, " Latimer said. "We can't tolerate any spies from Up Front among us. " He got to his feet and gave Barrett a pleasant smile. "I'll let you get back to your sunning now, Jim. "
Latimer went up the path. After a long while Barrett seized his crutch and levered himself to his feet. He stood staring down at the surf, dipping the tip of his crutch into the water to send a couple of little crawling things scurrying away. At length he turned and began the long, slow climb back to the Station.
VI
A couple of days passed before Barrett had the chance to: draw Lew Hahn aside. The Inland Sea party had set out, and in a way that was too bad, for Barrett could have used Charley Norton's services in penetrating Hahn's armor.; Norton was the most gifted theorist around, a man who could weave a tissue of dialectic from the least promising material. If anyone could find out the depth of Hahn's Marxist commitment, if any, it was Norton.
But Norton was leading the expedition, so Barrett had to do the interrogating himself. His Marxism was a trifle rusty, and he couldn't thread his path through the Leninist, Stalinist, Trotskyite, Khrushchevist, Maoist, Berenkov skyite and Mgumbweist schools with Charley Norton's I skills. Yet he knew what questions to ask.
He picked a rainy evening when Hahn seemed to be in a fairly outgoing mood. There had been an hour's enter- ' tainment that night, an ingenious computer-composed film that Sid Hutchett had programed last week. Up Front had been kind enough to ship back a modest computer, and: Hutchett had rigged it to do animations by specifying line ' widths and lengths, shades of gray and progression of ras-ter units. It was a simple but remarkably clever business,; and it brightened a dull night.
Afterward, sensing that Hahn was relaxed enough to lower his guard a bit, Barrett said, "Hutchett's a rare one. Did you meet him before he went on the trip?"
"Tall fellow with a sharp nose and no chin?"
"That's the one. A clever boy. He was the top computer man for the Continental Liberation Front until they caught him in '19. He programed that fake broadcast in which Chancellor Dantell denounced his own regime. Remember?"
"I'm not sure I do. " Hahn frowned. "How long ago was this?"
"The broadcast was in 2018. Would that be before your time? Only eleven years ago
"I was nineteen then, " said Hahn. "I guess I wasn't very politically sophisticated. "
"Too busy studying economics, I guess. "
Hahn grinned. "That's right. Deep in the dismal science. "
"And you never heard that broadcast? Or even heard of it?"
"I must have forgotten. "
"The biggest hoax of the century, " Barrett said, "and you forgot it. You know the Continental Liberation Front, of course. "
"Of course. " Hahn looked uneasy.
"Which group did you say you were with?"
"The People's Crusade for Liberty. "
"I don't know it. One of the newer groups?"
"Less than five years old. It started in California. "
"What's its program?"
"Oh, the usual, " Hahn said. "Free elections, representative government, an opening of the security files, restoration of civil liberties. "
"And the economic orientation? Pure Marxist or one of the offshoots?"
"Not really any, I guess. We believed in a kind of well, capitalism with some government restraints. "
"A little to the right of state socialism and a little to the left of laissez-faire?" Barrett suggested.
"Something like that. "
"But that system was tried and failed, wasn't it? It had its day. It led inevitably to total socialism, which produced the compensating backlash of syndicalist capitalism, and then we got a government that pretended to be libertarian while actually stifling all individual liberties in the name of freedom. So if your group simply wanted to turn the clock back to 1955, say, there couldn't be much to its ideas. "
Hahn looked bored. "You've got to understand I wasn't in the top ideological councils. "
"Just an economist?"
"That's it. I drew up plans for the conversion to our system. "
"Basing your work on the modified liberalism of Ricar-do?"
"Well, in a sense. "
"And avoiding the tendency to fascism that was found in the thinking of Keynes?"
"You could say so, " Hahn said. He stood up, flashing a quick, vague smile. "Look, Jim, I'd love to argue this further with you some other time, but I've really got to go now. Ned Altaian talked me into coming around and helping him do a lightning-dance to bring that pile of dirt to life. So if you don't mind "
Hahn beat a hasty retreat, without looking back.
Barrett was more perplexed than ever. Hahn hadn't been ' "arguing" anything. He had been carrying on a lame and feeble conversation, letting himself be pushed hither and thither by Barrett's questions. And he had spouted a lot | of nonsense. He didn't seem to know Keynes from Ricar-do, nor to care about it, which was odd for a self-pro-fessed economist. He didn't have a shred of an idea what his own political party stood for. He had so little revolu-tionary background that he was unaware even of Hutchett's astonishing hoax of eleven years back.
He seemed phony from top to bottom.
How was it possible that this kid had been deemed worthy of exile to Hawksbill Station, anyhow? Only the top firebrands went there. Sentencing a man to Hawksbill was like sentencing him to death, and it wasn't done lightly. Barrett couldn't imagine why Hahn was here. He seemed genuinely distressed at being exiled, and evidently he had left a beloved wife behind, but nothing else rang true about the man.
Was he as Latimer suggested some kind of spy?
Barrett rejected the idea out of hand. He didn't want Latimer's paranoia infecting him. The government wasn't likely to send anyone on a one-way trip to the Late Cambrian just to spy on a bunch of aging revolutionaries who could never make trouble again. But what was Hahn doing here, then?
He would bear further watching, Barrett thought.
Barrett took care of some of the watching himself. But he had plenty of assistance. Latimer. Altman. Six or seven others. Latimer had recruited most of the ambulatory psycho cases, the ones who were superficially functional but full of all kinds of fears and credulities.
They were keeping an eye on the new man.
On the fifth day after his arrival, Hahn went out fishing in Rudiger's crew. Rudiger never went far from shore eight hundred, a thousand yards out but the water was rough even there. The waves came rolling in with X thousand miles of gathered impact behind them. A continental shelf sloped off at a wide angle, so that even at a substantial distance off shore the water wasn't very deep. Rudiger had taken soundings up to a mile out, and had reported depths no greater than a hundred and sixty feet. Nobody had gone past a mile.
It wasn't that they were afraid of falling off the side of the world if they went too far east. It was simply that a mile was a long distance to row in an open boat, using stubby oars made from old packing cases. Up Front hadn't thought to spare an outboard motor for them.
Looking toward the horizon, Barrett had an odd thought. He had been told that the women's equivalent of
Hawksbill Station was safely segregated out of reach, a couple of hundred million years up the time-line. But how did he know that? There could be another station; somewhere else in this very year, and they'd never know ! about it. A camp of women, say, living on the far side of the ocean, or even across the Inland Sea.
It wasn't very likely, he knew. With the entire past to: pick from, the edgy men Up Front wouldn't take any chance that the two groups of exiles might get together; and spawn a tribe of little subversives. They'd take every; precaution to put an impenetrable barrier of epochs be-tween them. Yet Barrett thought he could make it sound convincing to the other men. With a little effort he could ' get them to believe in the existence of several simulta-neous Hawksbill Stations scattered on this level of time.
Which could be our salvation, he thought.
The instances of degenerative psychosis were beginning 't to snowball, now. Too many men had been here too long and one crackup was starting to feed the next, in this blank lifeless world where humans were never meant to live. The men needed projects to keep them going. They were starting to slip off into harebrained projects, like Altman's Frankenstein girl friend and Latimer's psi pursuit.
Suppose, Barrett thought, I could get them steamed up I about reaching the other continents?
A round-the-world expedition. Maybe they could build I some kind of big ship. That would keep a lot of men busy ' for a long time. And they'd need navigational equipment; compasses, sextants, chronometers, whatnot. Somebody would have to design an improvised radio, too. It was the kind of project that might take thirty or forty years. A focus for our energies, Barrett thought. Of course, I won't live to see the ship set sail. But even so, it's a way of staving off collapse. We've built our staircase to the sea. Now we need something bigger to do. Idle hands make for idle minds… sick minds…
Turning, he saw Latimer and Altman standing behind him. "How long have you been there?" he asked.
"Two minutes, " said Latimer. "We brought you something to look at. "
Altaian nodded vigorously. "You ought to read it. We brought it for you to read. "
"What is it?"
Latimer handed over a folded sheaf of papers. "I found this tucked away in Hahn's bunk after he went out with Rudiger. I know I'm not supposed to be invading his privacy, but I had to have a look at what he's been writing. There it is. He's a spy, all right. "
Barrett glanced at the papers in his hand. "I'll read it a little later. What is it about?"
"It's a description of the station, and a profile of most of the men in it, " said Latimer. He smiled frostily. "Hahn's private opinion of me is that I've gone mad. His private opinion of you is a little more flattering, but not much. "
Altman said, "He's also been hanging around the Hammer. "
"What?"
"I saw him going there late last night. He went into the building. I followed him. He was looking at the Hammer. "
"Why didn't you tell me that right away?" Barrett snapped.
"I wasn't sure it was important, " Altman said. "I had to talk it over with Don first. And I couldn't do that until Hahn had gone out fishing. "
Sweat burst out on Barrett's face. "Listen, Ned, if you ever catch Hahn going near the timetravel equipment again, you let me know in a hurry. Without consulting Don or anyone else. Clear?"
"Clear, " said Altman. He giggled. "You know what I think? They've decided to exterminate us Up Front. Hahn's been sent here to check us out as a suicide volunteer. Then they're going to send a bomb through the Hammer and blow the Station up. We ought to wreck the Hammer and Anvil before they get a chance. "
"But why would they send a suicide volunteer?" Latimer asked. "Unless they've got some way to rescue their spy-"
"In any case we shouldn't take any chance, " Altaian argued. "Wreck the Hammer. Make it impossible for them to bomb us from Up Front. "
"That might be a good idea. But "
"Shut up, both of you, " Barrett growled. "Let me look at these papers. "
He walked a few steps away from them and sat down on a shelf of rock. He began to read.
VII
Hahn had a cramped, crabbed handwriting that packed a maximum of information into a minimum of space, as though he regarded it as a mortal sin to waste paper. Fair enough. Paper was a scarce commodity here, and evidently Hahn had brought these sheets with him from Up Front. His script was clear, though. So were his opinions. Painfully so.
He had written an analysis of conditions at Hawksbill Station, setting forth in about five thousand words everything that Barrett knew was going sour there. He had neatly ticked off the men as aging revolutionaries in whom the old fervor had turned rancid. He listed the ones who were certifiably psycho, and the ones who were on the edge, and the ones who were hanging on, like Quesada and Norton and Rudiger. Barrett was interested to see that Hahn rated even those three as suffering from severe strain and likely to fly apart at any moment. To him, Quesada and Norton and Rudiger seemed just about as stable as when they had first dropped into the Anvil of Hawksbill Station, but that was possibly the distorting effect of his own blurred perceptions. To an outsider like Hahn, the view was different and perhaps more accurate.
Barrett forced himself not to skip ahead to Hahn's evaluation of him.
He wasn't pleased when he came to it. "Barrett, " Hahn had written, "is like a mighty beam that's been gnawed from within by termites. He looks solid, but one good push would break him apart. A recent injury to his foot has evidently had a bad effect on him. The other men say he used to be physically vigorous and derived much of his authority from his size and strength. Now he can hardly walk. But I feel the trouble with him is inherent in the hie of Hawksbill Station and doesn't have much to do with his lameness. He's been cut off from normal human drives for too long. The exercise of power here has provided the illusion of stability for him, but it's power in a vacuum, and things have happened within Barrett of which he's totally unaware. He's in bad need of therapy. He may be beyond help. "
Barrett read that several times. Gnawed from within by termites… one good push… things have happened within him… bad need of therapy... beyond help...
He was less angered than he thought he should have been. Hahn was entitled to his views. Barrett finally stopped rereading his profile and pushed his way to the last page of Hahn's essay. It ended with the words, "Therefore I recommend prompt termination of the Hawksbill Station penal colony and, where possible, the therapeutic rehabilitation of its inmates. "
What the hell was this?
It sounded like the report of a parole commissioner! But there was no parole from Hawksbill Station. That final sentence let all the viability of what had gone before bleed away. Hahn was pretending to be composing a report to the government Up Front, obviously. But a wall a billion years thick made filing of that report impossible. So Hahn was suffering from delusions, just like Altaian and Valdosto and the others. In his fevered mind he believed he could send messages Up Front, pompous documents delineating the flaws and foibles of his fellow prisoners.
That raised a chilling prospect. Hahn might be crazy, but he hadn't been hi the Station long enough to have gone crazy here. He must have brought his insanity with him.
What if they had stopped using Hawksbill Station as a camp for political prisoners, Barrett asked himself, and were starting to use it as an insane asylum?
A cascade of psychos descending on them. Men who had gone honorably buggy under the stress of confinement would have to make room for ordinary Bedlamites. Barrett shivered. He folded up Hahn's papers and handed them to Latimer, who was sitting a few yards away, watching him intently.
"What did you think of that?" Latimer asked.
"I think it's hard to evaluate. But possibly friend Hahn is emotionally disturbed. Put this stuff back exactly where you got it, Don. And don't give Hahn the faintest inkling that you've read or removed it. "
"Right. "
"And come to me whenever you think there's something I ought to know about him, " Barrett said. "He may be a very sick boy. He may need all the help we can give. "
The fishing expedition returned hi early afternoon. Bar-rett saw that the dingy was overflowing with the haul, and Hahn, coming into the camp with his arms full of gaffed trilobites looked sunburned and pleased. Barrett came over to inspect the catch. Rudiger was in an effusive mood and held up a bright red crustacean that might I have been the great-great-grandfather of all boiled lob-sters, except that it had no front claws and a wicked- i looking triple spike where a tail should have been. It was about two feet long, and ugly.
"A new species!" Rudiger crowed. "There's nothing like this in any museum. I wish I could put it where it would be found. Some mountaintop, maybe. "
"If it could be found, it would have been found, " Barrett reminded him. "Some paleontologist of the twentieth century would have dug it out. So forget it, Mel. "
Hahn said, "I've been wondering about that. How is it nobody Up Front ever dug up the fossil remains of Hawksbill Station? Aren't they worried that one of the early fossil-hunters will find it in the Cambrian strata and raise a fuss?"
Barrett shook his head. "For one thing, no paleontologist from the beginning of the science to the founding of the Station in 2005 ever did dig up Hawksbill. That's a matter of record, so there was nothing to worry about. If it came to light after 2005, why, everyone would know what it was. No paradox there. "
"Besides, " said Rudiger sadly, "in another billion years this whole strip of rock will be on the floor of the Atlantic, with a couple of miles of sediment over it. There's not a chance we'll be found. Or that anyone Up Front will ever see this guy I caught today. Not that I give a damn. I've seen him. I'll dissect him. Their loss. "
"But you regret the fact that science will never know of this species, " Hahn said.
"Sure I do. But is it my fault? Science does know of this species. Me. I'm science. I'm the leading paleontologist of this epoch. Can I help it if I can't publish my discoveries in the professional journals?" He scowled and walked away, carrying the big red crustacean.
Hahn and Barrett looked at each other. They smiled, in a natural mutual response to Rudiger's grumbled outburst. Then Barrett's smile faded.
termites… one good push… therapy...
"Something wrong?" Hahn asked.
"Why?"
"You looked so bleak all of a sudden. "
"My foot gave me a twinge, " Barrett said. "It does that, you know. Here. I'll give you a hand carrying those things. We'll have fresh trilobite cocktail tonight. "
VIII
A little before midnight, Barrett was awakened by foot-steps outside his hut. As he sat up, groping for the lu-minescence switch, Ned Altaian came blundering through the door. Barrett blinked at him. "What's the matter?"
"Hahn!" Altman rasped. "He's fooling around with the Hammer again. We just saw him go into the building. "
Barrett shed his sleepiness like a seal bursting out of; water. Ignoring the insistent throb in his leg, he pulled himself from bed and grabbed some clothing. He was; more apprehensive than he wanted Altman to see. If' Hahn, fooling around with the temporal mechanisms, ac-cidentally smashed the Hammer, they might never get re-placement equipment from Up Front. Which would mean '. that all future shipments of supplies if there were any. would come as random shoots that might land in any old year. What business did Hahn have with the machine, anyway?
Altman said, "Latimer's up there keeping an eye on I him. He got suspicious when Hahn didn't come back to the hut, and he got me, and we went looking for him. And there he was, sniffing around the Hammer. "
"Doing what?"
"I don't know. As soon as we saw him go in, I came I down here to get you. Don's watching. "
Barrett stumped his way out of the hut and did his best to run toward the main building. Pain shot like trails of hot acid up the lower half of his body. The crutch dug mercilessly into his left armpit as he leaned all his weight into it. His crippled foot, swinging freely, burned with a cold glow. His right leg, which was carrying most of the burden, creaked and popped. Altman ran breathlessly! alongside him. The Station was silent at this hour.
As they passed Quesada's hut, Barrett considered waking the medic and taking him along. He decided against it. Whatever trouble Hahn might be up to, Barrett felt he could handle it himself. There was some strength left in the old gnawed beam.
Latimer stood at the entrance to the main dome. He was right on the edge of panic, or perhaps over the edge. Hew seemed to be gibbering with fear and shock. Barrett had never seen a man gibber before.
He clamped a big paw on Latimer's thin shoulder and said harshly, "Where is he? Where's Hahn?"
"He disappeared. "
"What do you mean? Where did he go?"
Latimer moaned. His face was fishbelly white. "He got onto the Anvil, " Latimer blurted. "The light came on the glow. And then Hahn disappeared!"
"No, " Barrett said. "It isn't possible. You must be mistaken. "
"I saw him go!"
"He's hiding somewhere in the building, " Barrett insisted. "Close that door! Search for him!"
Altaian said, "He probably did disappear, Jim. If Don says he disappeared "
"He climbed right on the Anvil. Then everything turned red, and he was gone. "
Barrett clenched his fists. There was a white-hot blaze just behind his forehead that almost made him forget about his foot. He saw his mistake now. He had depended for his espionage on two men who were patently and unmistakably insane, and that had been itself a not very sane thing to do. A man is known by his choice of lieutenants. Well, he had relied on Altman and Latimer, and now they were giving him the sort of information that such spies could be counted on to supply.
"You're hallucinating, " he told Latimer curtly. "Ned, go wake Quesada and get him here right away. You, Don, you stand here by the entrance, and if Hahn shows up I want you to scream at the top of your lungs. I'm going to search the building for him. "
"Wait, " Latimer said. He seemed to be in control of himself again. "Jim, do you remember when I asked you if you thought I was crazy? You said you didn't. You trusted me. Well, don't stop trusting me now. I tell you I'm not hallucinating. I saw Hahn disappear. I can't explain it, but I'm rational enough to know what I saw. "
In a milder tone Barrett said, "All right. Maybe so. Stay by the door, anyway. I'll run a quick check. "
He started to make the circuit of the dome, beginning with the room where the Hammer was located. Every- I thing seemed to be in order there. No Hawksbill Field I glow was in evidence, and nothing had been disturbed. I The room had no closets or cupboards in which Hahn I could be hiding. When he had inspected it thoroughly, I Barrett moved on, looking into the infirmary, the mess hall, the kitchen, the recreation room. He looked high and low. No Hahn. Of course, there were plenty of places I in those rooms where Hahn might have secreted himself, I but Barrett doubted that he was there. So it had all been some feverish fantasy of Latimer's then. He completed I the route and found himself back at the main entrance. Latimer still stood guard there. He had been joined by a I sleepy Quesada. Altman, pale, and shaky-looking, was just outside the door.
"What's happening?" Quesada asked.
"I'm not sure, " said Barrett. "Don and Ned had the idea they saw Lew Hahn fooling around with the time I equipment. I've checked the building, and he's not here, I so maybe they made a little mistake. I suggest you take I them both into the infirmary and give them a shot of something to settle their nerves, and we'll all try to get I back to sleep. "
Latimer said, "I tell you, I saw "
"Shut up!" Altman broke in. "Listen! What's that* noise?"
Barrett listened. The sound was clear and loud: the hissing whine of ionization. It was the sound produced by* a functioning Hawksbill Field. Suddenly there were goose pimples on his flesh. In a low voice he said, "The field's* on. We're probably getting some supplies. "
"At this hour?" said Latimer.
"We don't know what time it is Up Front. All of you I stay here. I'll check the Hammer. "
"Perhaps I ought to go with you, " Quesada suggested 2 mildly.
"Stay here!" Barrett thundered. He paused, embar-rassed at his own explosive show of wrath. "It only takes one of us. I'll be right back. "
Without waiting for further dissent, he pivoted and limped down the hall to the Hammer room. He shouldered the door open and looked in. There was no need for him to switch on the light. The red glow of the Hawksbill Field illuminated everything.
Barrett stationed himself just within the door. Hardly daring to breathe, he stared fixedly at the Hammer, watching as the glow deepened through various shades of pink toward crimson, and then spread until it enfolded the waiting Anvil beneath it.
Then came the implosive thunderclap, and Lew Hahn dropped out of nowhere and lay for a moment in temporal shock on the broad plate of the Anvil.
IX
In the darkness, Hahn did not notice Barrett at first. He sat up slowly, shaking off the stunning effects of a trip through tune. After a few seconds he pushed himself toward the lip of the Anvil and let his legs dangle over it. He swung them to get the circulation going. He took a series of deep breaths. Finally he slipped to the floor. The glow of the field had gone out in the moment of his arrival, and so he moved warily, as though not wanting to bump into anything.
Abruptly Barrett switched on the light and said, "What have you been up to, Hahn?"
The younger man recoiled as though he had been jabbed in the gut. He gasped, hopped backward a few steps, and flung up both hands in a defensive gesture.
"Answer me, " Barrett said.
Hahn regained his equilibrium. He shot a quick glance past Barrett's bulky form toward the hallway and said, "Let me go, will you? I can't explain now. "
"You'd better explain now. "
"It's easier for everyone if I don't, " said Hahn. "Let me pass. "
Barrett continued to block the door. "I want to know where you've been. What have you been doing with the Hammer?"
"Nothing. Just studying it. "
"You weren't in this room a minute ago. Then you appeared. Where'd you come from, Hahn?"
"You're mistaken. I was standing right behind the Hammer. I didn't "
"I saw you drop down on the Anvil. You took a time trip, didn't you?"
"No. "
"Don't lie to me! You've got some way of going forward in time, isn't that so? You've been spying on us, and you just went somewhere to file your report somewhen and now you're back. "
Hahn's forehead was glistening. He said, "I warn you, don't ask too many questions. You'll know everything in due time. This isn't the time. Please, now. Let me pass. "
"I want answers first, " Barrett said. He realized that he was trembling. He already knew the answers, and they were answers that shook him to the core of his soul. He knew where Hahn had been.
Hahn said nothing. He took a few hesitant steps toward Barrett, who did not move. He seemed to be gathering momentum for a rush at the doorway.
Barrett said, "You aren't getting out of here until you tell me what I want to know. "
Hahn charged.
Barrett planted himself squarely, crutch braced against the doorframe, his good leg flat on the floor, and waited for the younger man to reach him. He figured he outweighed Hahn by eighty pounds. That might be enough to balance the fact that he was spotting Hahn thirty years and one leg. They came together, and Barrett drove his hands down onto Hahn's shoulder's, trying to hold him, to force him back into the room.
Hahn gave an inch or two. He looked up at Barrett without speaking and pushed forward again.
"Don't don't " Barrett grunted. "I won't let you "
"I don't want to do this, " Hahn said.
He pushed again. Barrett felt himself buckling under the impact. He dug his hands as hard as he could into Hahn's shoulders and tried to shove the other man backward into the room, but Hahn held firm, and all of Barrett's energy was converted into a thrust rebounding on himself. He lost control of his crutch, and it slithered out from under his arm. For one agonizing moment Barrett's full weight rested on the crushed uselessness of his left foot, and then, as though his limbs were melting away beneath him, he began to sink toward the floor. He landed with a reverberating crash.
Quesada, Altaian and Latimer came rushing in. Barrett writhed in pain on the floor. Hahn stood over him, looking unhappy, his hands locked together.
"I'm sorry, " he said. "You shouldn't have tried to muscle me like that. "
Barrett glowered at him. "You were traveling in time, weren't you? You can answer me now!"
"Yes, " Hahn said at last. "I went Up Front. "
An hour later, after Quesada had pumped him with enough neural depressants to keep him from jumping out of his skin, Barrett got the full story. Hahn hadn't wanted to reveal it so soon, but he had changed his mind after his little scuffle.
It was all very simple. Tune travel now worked in both directions. The glib, impressive noises about the flow of entropy had turned out to be just noises.
"How long has this been known?" Barrett asked.
"At least five years. We aren't sure yet exactly when the breakthrough came. After we're finished going through all the suppressed records of the former government "
"The former government?"
Hahn nodded. "The revolution came in January. Not really a violent one, either. The syndicalists just mildewed from within, and when they got the first push they fell over. "
"Was it mildew?" Barrett asked, coloring. "Or termites? Keep your metaphors straight. "
Hahn glanced away. "Anyway, the government fell, We've got a provisional liberal regime in office now. Don't ask me much about it. I'm not a political theorist. I'm not even an economist. You guessed as much. "
"What are you, then?"
"A policeman, " Hahn said. "Part of the commission that's investigating the prison system of the former government. Including this prison. "
Barrett looked at Quesada, then at Hahn. Thoughts were streaming turbulently through him, and he could not remember when he had last been so overwhelmed by events. He had to work hard to keep from breaking into the shakes again. His voice quavered a little as he said, "You came back to observe Hawksbill Station, right? And you went Up Front tonight to tell them what you saw here. You think we're a pretty sad bunch, eh?"
"You've all been under heavy stress here, " Hahn said. I "Considering the circumstances of your imprisonment "
Quesada broke in. "If there's a liberal government in power now and it's possible to travel both ways in time, then am I right in assuming that the Hawksbill prisoners are going to be sent Up Front?"
"Of course, " said Hahn. "It'll be done as soon as pos-sible. That's been the whole purpose of my reconnais-sance mission. To find out if you people were still alive, • first, and then to see what shape you're in, how badly in I need of treatment you are. You'll be given every avail- I able benefit of modern therapy, naturally. No expense I spared "
Barrett scarcely paid attention to Hahn's words. He had I been fearing something like this all night, ever since Alt- I man had told him Hahn was monkeying with the Hammer, but he had never fully allowed himself to believe that it could really be possible.
He saw his kingdom crumbling.
He saw himself returned to a world he could not begin to comprehend a lame Rip Van Winkle, coming back after twenty years.
He saw himself leaving a place that had become his home.
Barrett said tiredly, "You know, some of the men aren't going to be able to adapt to the shock of freedom. It might just kill them to be dumped into the real world again. I mean the advanced psychos Valdosto, and such. "
"Yes, " Hahn said. "I've mentioned them in my report. "
"It'll be necessary to get them ready for a return in gradual stages. It might take several years to condition them to the idea. It might even take longer than that. "
"I'm no therapist, " said Hahn. "Whatever the doctors think is right for them is what'll be done. Maybe it will be necessary to keep them here. I can see where it would be pretty potent to send them back, after they've spent all these years believing there's no return. "
"More than that, " said Barrett. "There's a lot of work that can be done here. Scientific work. Exploration. I don't think Hawksbill Station ought to be closed down. "
"No one said it would be. We have every intention of keeping it going, but not as a prison. "
"Good, " Barrett said. He fumbled for his crutch, found it and got heavily to his feet. Quesada moved toward him as though to steady him, but Barrett shook him off. "Let's go outside, " he said.
They left the building. A gray mist had come in over the Station, and a fine drizzle had begun to fall. Barrett looked around at the scattering of huts. At the ocean, dimly visible to the east in the faint moonlight. He thought of Charley Norton and the party that had gone on the annual expedition to the Inland Sea. That bunch was going to be in for a real surprise, when they got back here in a few weeks and discovered that everybody was free to go home.
Very strangely, Barrett felt a sudden pressure forming around his eyelids, as of tears trying to force their way out into the open.
He turned to Hahn and Quesada. In a low voice he said, "Have you followed what I've been trying to tell you? Someone's got to stay here and ease the transition for the sick men who won't be able to stand the shock of return. Someone's got to keep the base running. Someone's got to explain to the new men who'll be coming back here, the scientists. "
"Naturally, " Hahn said.
"The one who does that the one who stays behind I think it ought to be someone who knows the Station well, someone who's fit to return Up Front, but who's willing to make the sacrifice and stay. Do you follow me? A volunteer. " They were smiling at him now. Barrett wondered if there might not be something patronizing about those smiles. He wondered if he might not be a little too transparent. To hell with both of them, he thought. He sucked the Cambrian air into his lungs until his chest swelled, grandly.
"I'm offering to stay, " Barrett said loudly. He glared at them to keep them from objecting. But they wouldn't dare object, he knew. In Hawksbill Station, he was the king. And he meant to keep it that way. "I'll be the volun-teer, " he said. "I'll be the one who stays. "
He looked out over his kingdom from the top of the hill.
by C. C. Shackleton
The short-short story is rare in science fiction: both disciplines are difficult enough without attempting to combine them. Here is one of the unusual exceptions. Charles Charleston Shackleton is the pen name of a well-known British journalist.
The shifting sands moved over the face of the Earth and would soon engulf it.
For millennia now the oceans had been dry and the last tide had washed against the unending shore. The Earth was old. It's heart was cold, its skin dry and wrinkled with encroaching dust. Like a living thing, the sands multiplied, wombed in the deserts where navies once sailed.
The death of moisture meant the death of man. A human being is not watertight: his vital juices evaporate like water from an unglazed pitcher. One by one, and then tribe by tribe and nation by nation, man disappeared as magically as he had come. His bones were powdered by the moving grit, his mineral salts dissolved into the sand.
Yet for a long time he managed to postpone his final extinction. With every technological device at his command, he fought off the deserts in a losing battle that was not lost for centuries.
Now the battle was almost over. The old pastures, the woodlands, the hills, even the regions of ice at either pole all were covered by the sand. All the works of man, his cities, roads and bridges, were engulfed by the dunes. Every insect, bird and animal lay sleeping under that treacherous yellow blanket. Only in one last valley, in one last house, did one last spark of life survive.
The Last Man on. Earth came out of his door and stood regarding the scene. His valley was small and shallow, and completely ringed round the top with glass walls. This morning there was something new to see: the sand had arrived.
The sand pressed and surged against the glass like a living thing, tawnier and more terrible than lions. It rose and spread round the invisible obstacle. It could be heard whispering against the glass, trying to get in.
The glass cracked. Breaking under the pressure behind it, a whole section of it fell inward. At once a great arm of yellow sand reached into the valley and spread its fingers around the house. More followed, and more behind that, until a great wedge sliding in from the rear buried the back of the house up to its eaves.
Without revealing any great emotion, the Last Man on Earth watched this invasion from the front garden. Over the lawn at his feet spread the tide, looking golden and soft and almost inviting. It seemed harmless; it was irre-sistible.
So little time now remained. There was one last thing the Last Man could do. Turning, he ran through the sand that lay ankle-deep over the porch and hurried into the house to find a bucket and a spade.
A moment later he emerged triumphant. The Last Man on Earth was only six years old. He started to build a sandcastle.
by John T, Sladek
London has become a very swinging science fiction city. Two world SF conventions have been held there within the past ten years, and writers flock in from all parts of Britain and the Commonwealth. As well as from our escaped colony. At the present time at least four American SF writers are living there; five if you count John T. Sladek. I do. Sladek is a dry and witty man who made the long voyage from his native Minnesota to the Smoke, as Londoners call their city. He is a poet, and I understand that he has written a humorous SF novel which, if it is half as good as this analysis of the possible side effects of time travel, will be very good indeed.
Picture, if you will, an inventor, working in his bicycle shop in 1878. His long hair occasionally falls in his eyes; he shakes it aside impatiently, flexes sinewy arms against the pull of a wrench, biting his lip with preoccupation. Now and then he may pause to sip some of the cool lemonade his widowed Mom has brought to him, sip, and glance up at the picture of Sam Franklin on the whitewashed plank wall. Early to bed and early to rise… he thinks. A penny saved is a penny earned. His serious brows knit, as he ferrets the last bit of truth from these proverbs.
Such an inventor was Emil Hart. He and his mother shared a small cottage exactly in the center of the state of Kiowa. Their modest home was otherwise undistinguished except for a heavy mortgage, which the good widow hoped to reduce. Toward that end she knitted clever antimacmillans (lacy affairs designed to protect the tops of sofas and chairs from a then-popular hair grease called MacMillan's) and sold peafowl eggs. Emil augmented his meager income by repairing bicycles and selling the Fri-day Evening Post (founded by Sam Franklin). Yet he I knew fate intended for him a greater calling inventor of I the Time Engine!
One day Fenton Morbes, the town bully, stopped by. | Seeing the great engine spread over the entire shop, he | whistled with amazement.
"What'cher doing?" he asked.
"I'm only filing a bit of isinglass, " said Emil, shaking | the hair from his eyes. He had no time to waste speaking | to Morbes.
"I mean, what'cher building?" Morbes removed his bi-cycle clips and tossed them carelessly into a corner. They were made of costly aluminum, for he was rich.
Emil sighed. "I'm building a temporal extrapolator, " he said. "It will enable me to go into the future. "
The bully guffawed. "Stuff!" he said. "Nobody kin go; i into the future!"
With a knowing smile, Emil bent over his work. After fitting the piece of isinglass into a gear of peculiar shape, he set about attaching a pair of wires to a telegraph key.
Morbes flushed red about the nostrils of his broad, sad- dlelike nose. He was not used to being ignored. "Stuff!" he exclaimed once more. "Even if it works, this here en- gine won't bring in enough to feed your peafowls, let alone pay the mortgage when my Paw comes around to foreclose. "
"Foreclose!" said the young inventor, growing pale.
"Yep. You'd better have a hundred dollars ready by next Monday, " said Morbes with a grin. "Tell you what. If you'll wash my bicycle, I'll give you a whole dollar. Get it spanking clean, now, for I'm to go on a picnic today, with Miss Maud Peed. "
At this news, Emil grew even paler, and staggered back as though he'd been struck.
"Oh, I know you been kinda sweet on her, " smirked the bully. "But she ain't got no time for a crazy feller what putters around his bicycle shop with tune engines. Hah!"
No time for him! As the color continued to ebb from Emil's face, and into the coarser features of his rival, he wondered what strange fate it was that had made them both suitors for the hand of the lovely Maud Peed. So be it. He raised his tear-filled eyes once more to the portrait of Sam Franklin. He seemed to draw strength from the homely features, the rheumy eyes. What was the right thing to do, the truly Columbian thing? To try to stay and win Maud back from Fenton Morbes a hopeless task? Or to escape into the bright future, and there seek his fortune?
In a moment he had made his decision. He would go into tomorrow! He would see 1937 A. D., that promised land the very system of numbering our years promised it! It would drink hi its wonders: flying machines, the bridge across the English Channel, immortality through mesmerism, electric cannon, a world at peace, where the sun never set on the flag of the United States of Columbia!
"Are you gonna stand gawking at that pitcher or are you gonna wash my wheel?" demanded Morbes.
"Neither. You may take yourself off my property at once, " replied Emil. Raising his clenched fists, he added, "Go to Maud Peed. And tell her tell her "
His hands dropped to his sides, and as his head bowed, the unruly lock of hair fell over his eyes. He looked not unlike the young Abner Lincoln, thought Morbes idly.
" tell her, " Emil said quietly, "that the best man has won. I wish you both a haha a happy future!" With a strangled sob he turned away.
Morbes was so startled by this outburst that he was unable to summon a bluster to his lips. He turned and walked out.
Emil knew he had done the right thing. Without another regret, he filled his pockets with his Mom's home-baked cookies, took a last sip of lemonade, and began to pedal the great generator that powered his engine. He had mounted a special clock face on the handlebars before him, and when its hands reached 1937, he depressed the telegraph key. "Now it is
1937 A. D. !" he exclaimed, and looked about him.
The room had not changed considerably, though it ] seemed to have become some sort of museum. Emil, found himself surrounded by velvet ropes.
"Here, get off there!" said a man in uniform. He seized I Emil's arm and dragged him away from the time engine. "You're not to touch the exhibits, understand?"
Before the bewildered inventor could explain, he found ] himself outside the shop, looking up at a brass plaque which read, "The Emil Hart Historical Museum. " He was | historical!
Pausing only a moment to marvel at his fame, Emil strode toward the main street of town, eager to see the changes time had wrought. The streets, he noticed, had a new hard surface, and there was not a trace of manure i upon it!
Then he saw them, lined up at the sidewalk. Great ] trackless locomotives, just as he had imagined them. As he watched, two men emerged from a store and entered one of them. Through its window he could see one man shoveling coal into the boiler while the other turned valves. In a moment, the great, chuffing engine moved off down the street.
His momentary elation dissipated at once, when Emil • turned to look at the shops. There was not a single new building on Main Street, and though many had installed large plate glass windows, the facades above them were I faded, dirty and abused. Delmonico's Dining Room had I become the Eateria, but Carlson's Peafowl Feed Store had not even changed its sign. Emil examined the con-tents of a clothing store window, his gorge rising at their dull familiarity. Why weren't people attired in seminude costumes of gold, with scarlet capes? The mannikins showed only women in the same silly hats and long;
gowns, men in dark, dull suits. Worse, the one or two pedestrians he glimpsed wore overalls of the same cut and hue as his own.
He was thoroughly depressed by the time he reached the end of the town's single street and the Public Library. Despairing of seeing any more wonderful inventions like the trackless locomotive, Emil made his way into the familiar building to the tiny room marked "Science and Technology. " Here at last he might find respite from the past. Here he might find the future that seemed to have overlooked his town.
He opened a volume marked "Inventions. " Yes, here they were: Thomas Elva Addison, the electric light; Burgess Venn, the flying machine; Gordon Q. Mott, the tele-vidium what in the world was that?
He looked it up hi the back of the book, and learned that it was a visual counterpart to the radium. The latter sent verbal messages over long distances by means of electrical "waves" in the ether, while the former did the same for visual messages. He thrilled to the idea of electrical waves moving about everywhere, hi this room, passing right through his body. It was only because of the intensity of Emil's meditation that he failed to notice the figure at his elbow.
"Hullo, Emil. " It was Morbes.
"You used my machine?"
"Yep. I came back to get my bicycle clips and I seen you was gone. Well, I got to thinking a feller could make himself a pile of money outa knowing what happens in the future. So here I am. Where do they keep the old newspapers?"
"What are you going to do?" Emil leaped to his feet, knocking over a chair. Another reader cleared his throat.
"Read about a few horse races and some stock market stuff. I'm rich now, Emil Hart, but I'm gonna be richer. " Morbes's grin displayed a row of uneven, stained teeth.
"You can't! It's dishonest! Think of all the little stockholders who might be ruined by your speculations!" cried
Emil. He followed the bully into the Historical and Periodical room, and seized his arm. Morbes shook his hand away.
"Leave me alone!" he bellowed. 'Til do as I see fit!"
"Yes, do leave him alone!" commanded a childish voice. "I'm trying to read here, and you're creating a disturbance. " Emil looked around to confront a boy of about ten, whose forehead was creased with annoyance beneath the line of his yellow bangs.
Grinning, Morbes said, "Lad, where's the newspapers? You know, the Wad Street Journal?"
"I don't know. All they have in here is this. " The boy indicated the volume open before him, in which he had been scribbling with a pen. Emil noticed it was one of a large matched set that seemed to occupy all the shelves of the room. There were thousands of volumes.
"But this will have whatever you're looking for, " said the boy. "It has a synopsis of everything. "
The set of books was entitled The Universal Synopsis.
"Say!" exclaimed Morbes, illuminated by an uncharacteristic flash of intuition. "If I get rich like I ought to, there should be something about me in that book. "
He searched a moment, then came to the table with volume MORAY-MORBID and seated himself opposite the
"Here it is! Morbes, Fenton Jr., " he read at the top of his lungs.
"Don't read on!" said Emil. "We're not meant to know our own futures. "
"Stuff. Who's to stop me?"
"I am!" Emil shouted, and snatching up the boy's pen, dipped it and lined out the passage Morbes was about to read.
"Say, why'd you do that? I "
With an audible click, Fenton Morbes vanished.
"How interesting!" said the boy. "I was right, then. This is the only extant copy. "
"What?" Emil stood frozen, gaping at the space his rival had vacated so abruptly.
"You don't know what happened? That was the 'Dop-pler Effect, ' named for myself, Julius Doppler. Sit down, won't you, and I'll explain it to you. "
Emil eased himself into a chair and with effort directed his gaze toward the serious, freckled face.
"You see, I've developed a theory that the future influences the past. I was fortunate in finding The Universal Synopsis on which to test it. If this were, as I believed it to be, the only copy of the only book in which many items appeared, why then it follows that I can change the past by merely rewriting it. "
"But how can you change history?" asked Emil, mystified.
"It's simple semantics: The word is the thing at least after the thing ceases to be. Alter a word in the future and you alter the thing it once stood for. Let me show you. "
The boy opened his volume to a page and pointed. "Now here, I altered the name 'Sam Franklin' to 'John Franklin, ' for example. But if in the future, someone came along and changed it to say 'Ben, ' why he'd be Ben, don't you see?"
"No. "
"All right, look here, then. " Julius turned to a map of the United States. There was the familiar pink lozenge that was Kiowa, and just above it, the green hourglass of Minnehaha but the names were wrong! "Kiowa" missed its "K, " and "Minnehaha" read "Minnesota"! And the name at the bottom of the page, following "The United States of" was not "Columbia" but some unpronounceable Latin name! The map was wrong, it had been printed wrong!
"Last week, " said the boy, "I made these changes hi ink. Now this week they are part of the original book. "
"But how can that be?"
Julius frowned. "I think the past must influence the future, too, " he said. "But the influence is slower. My theory is really quite a simple one, but I couldn't possibly ex-plain it to you, not all of it. Why, you don't even under-stand e=mc3, for Pete's sake. "
"I understand one thing, " said Emil, leaping up. "I know that I killed poor Morbes! I am a murderer!"
"Don't take it so hard, " said the boy. "You wouldn't have, if it weren't for me. In fact, the only reason you're a time-traveler is because I wrote the whole thing in the margin near your name. "
"My name?" Emil was electrified at this reminder of his fame. "My name… Won't you have a cookie?"
"Thanks. " The two of them munched Widow Hart's cookies and discussed the theory once more, until Emil was sure he understood. He was not so sure he liked being at the mercy of the future, but when one considered it, it was no worse than being at the mercy of the past. One survived.
When the last cookie was gone. Emil rose and took his leave. He strolled back to the museum and paid his admission. After a few moments, he was able to seize an opportunity when the guard was not looking and leap upon his time engine. He pedaled furiously backward to 1878, and what a glorious feeling mounted hi his breast as he gazed once more on the homely features of John Franklin.
"I am healthy, wealthy and wise or shall be shortly, " Emil told himself. "My rival is gone I don't even remember his name and I am to be famous!"
After changing to his Sunday clothes, he picked a nosegay of his Mom's flowers and set off toward the Peed house.
Mr. Peed was seated in the porch swing, industriously ' polishing his pipe against his nose.
"Hallo, young Hart, " he called out. "What brings you out this evening, all dressed up like that?"
"I , " Emil began, then realized he did not know the. ] answer. Why had he come to see Mr. and Mrs. Peed?
"Flowers for your wife, " he decided aloud. "From Mom's garden. "
"Whose wife?" asked Peed, leaning forward to accept the nosegay. "I ain't married, son. I "
Feed's outstretched hand grew transparent. Then Peed, porch and house vanished with a click.
It was a nightmare! Emil hurried home to check on his Mom. There was no telling who might click out of existence next!
He was reassured by the sight of her frail old figure tottering into his shop with a tray.
"Here, let me take that, " he said, and accepted the tray from her careworn hands.
"Lemonade and cookies for me? Gee, you're good, Mom!" He bent and kissed her white hair. With a beatific smile, the old lady tottered back to her kitchen, whence came the smell of fresh baking. Fearfully, Emil watched until she was out of sight. Then, seeing his duty clearly, he once more mounted the time engine and began to pedal.
He cornered Julius in the library and demanded an explanation.
"Of what?" asked the youngster. "An explanation of what?"
"I'm not sure, but I think the Feeds had a daughter, and I think I was in love with her. Now she's gone, and they're gone have you been editing again?"
"You did it yourself, pal. When you crossed out the reference to Fenton what's-his-name, you also destroyed the only existing reference to the girl, Maud. She was his wife. You got any more cookies?"
"You mean I'd have lost her in any case?"
"Uh-huh. " With his mouth full of the widow's cookies, the boy explained. Destroying Maud had destroyed her parents, their parents, and so on, back to the tune when some relative was famous enough to have appeared in The Universal Synopsis. It was difficult for Emil to follow, for not only did the boy speak with his mouth full, but neither he nor Emil could clearly remember who it was they were discussing. As Julius said, it was all very mythical or perhaps he said mystical.
At last, Emil was brought to understand he had lost the only girl he'd ever loved. His grief was superb.
He knew it was all his own fault. If only he had not wanted to glimpse the golden towers and battlements of the future! If only he had been content! His sin was pride, pride that goeth before (or, according to Julius, cometh after) a great fall.
What had she been like, this girl he'd lost? He had some faint reminiscence of her lovely eyes being hazel or else her hair or was it her name? In despair, he put his head on his arms and wept unashamedly.
"Here, read this, " said Julius Doppler. "It'll cheer you up. "
It was the volume HART-HARUSPEX, and in it, Emil read:
Hart, Emil (I860-?), inventor of the time engine and only successful time traveler. Leaving 1878, he journeyed into 1937, where, in a public library, he met Julius Doppler (q. v. ), who explained to him the famed "Doppler Effect" the influence of the future upon the past. After several blunders, Hart finally read his own story in The Universal Synopsis (q. v. ), and realized as he did so that, had he read it earlier, he might have avoided making a costly mistake, the deletion of some probably mythical woman from history. As he realized all this, Hart is reported to have said, "Thunderation! Why didn't I think of this before?"
"Thunderation!" said Emil, smiting his forehead. "Why ] didn't I think of this before?"
He referred not to his past mistakes, however, but to ' his successes yet to come. Borrowing the pen from Julius, who had just changed the peafowl to a chicken, Emil wrote in the margin the following:
Nonplussed, the stout-hearted inventor re-created his girl, Hazel Peid, from memory, adding her to his life story.
After a brief courtship, they married. The plucky Hart went on to become healthy, wealthy and wise.
After a moment of thought, he added:
And nothing anyone writes here in the future will ever make it otherwise.
Then, giving Julius the last cookie, he departed.
She was there in his shop, the lovely Hazel Peid of the hazel hair and eyes just as he remembered her. Going upon one knee, and tossing back his unruly lock, Emil said, "Miss Peid, will you be my wife?"
"Oh, yes!" she exclaimed, clapping her small, well-formed hands together.
"This calls for a celebration, " said Mom, tottering in with a tray. "Won't you have some lemonade and cookies?"
Emil and his fiancee embraced, while above them, the rheumy eyes of Ben Franklin seemed to smile a blessing.
by Ben Bova
First generation science fiction stories usually ended when the hand-forged rocketship took off or advanced stuff this actually landed on the Moon or Mars. It did not matter a tinker's damn to the reader, or the writer, who was in there piloting the contraption. Second generation SF can forget all the thundering hardware, and stories can open as this one does on the Moon, without a word of explanation as to how the characters arrived there. This enables the author to get quickly to the heart of the matter, which is the impact of science and technology on man. This impact is really what modern SF is all about.
Senator Anderson: Does that mean that man's mobility on the Moon will be severely limited?
Mr. Webb: Yes, sir. It is going to be severely limited, Mr. Chairman. The Moon is a rather hostile place…
U. S. Senate Hearings on National Space Goals, 23 August 1965
"Any word from him yet?"
"Huh? No, nothing. " '
Kinsman swore to himself as he stood on the open platform of the little lunar rocket jumper.
"Say, where are you now?" The astronomer's voice sounded gritty with static in Kinsman's helmet earphones.
"Up on the rim. He must've gone inside the damned crater. "
"The rim? How'd you get… "
"Found a flat spot for the jumper. Don't think I walked this far, do you? I'm not as nutty as the priest. "
"But you're supposed to stay down here on the plain! The crater's off-limits. "
"Tell it to our holy friar. He's the one who marched up here. I'm just following the seismic rigs he's been planting every three-four miles. "
He could sense Bok shaking his head. "Kinsman, if there're twenty officially approved ways to do a job, you'll pick the twenty-second. "
"If the first twenty-one are lousy. "
"You're not going inside the crater, are you? It's too risky. "
Kinsman almost laughed. "You think sitting hi that aluminum casket of ours is safe?"
The earphones went silent. With a scowl, Kinsman wished for the tenth time in an hour that he could scratch his twelve-day beard. Get zipped into the suit and the itches start. He didn't need a mirror to know that his face was haggard, sleepless, and his black beard was mean looking.
He stepped down from the jumper a rocket motor with a railed platform and some equipment on it, nothing more and planted his boots on the solid rock of the ringwall's crest. With a twist of his shoulders to settle the weight of the pressure-suit's bulky backpack, he shambled over to the packet of seismic instruments and fluorescent marker that the priest had left there.
"He came right up to the top, and now he's off on the yellow brick road, playing Moon explorer. Stupid bastard. "
Reluctantly, he looked into the crater Alphonsus. The brutally short horizon cut across its middle, but the central peak stuck its worn head up among the solemn stars. Beyond it was nothing but dizzying blackness, an abrupt end to the solid world and the beginning of infinity.
Damn the priest! God's gift to geology... and I've got to play guardian angel for him.
"Any sign of him?"
Kinsman turned back and looked outward from the crater. He could see the lighted radio mast and squat return rocket, far below on the plain. He even convinced himself that he saw the mound of rubble marking their buried base shelter, where Bok lay curled safely in his bunk. It was two days before sunrise, but the Earthlight lit the plain well enough.
"Sure, " Kinsman answered. "He left me a big map with an X to mark the treasure. "
"Don't get sore at me!"
"Why not? You're sitting inside. I've got to find our fearless geologist. "
"Regulations say one man's got to be in the base at all times. "
But not the same one man, Kinsman flashed silently.
"Anyway, " Bok went on, "he's got a few hours' oxygen left. Let him putter around inside the crater for a while. He'll come back. "
"Not before his air runs out. Besides, he's officially missing. Missed two check-in calls. I'm supposed to scout his last known position. Another of those sweet regs. "
Silence again. Bok didn't like being alone in the base, Kinsman knew.
"Why don't you come on back, " the astronomer's voice; > returned, "until he calls in. Then you can get him with the jumper. You'll be running out of air yourself before you can find him inside the crater. "
"I'm supposed to try. "
"But why? You sure don't think much of him. You've been tripping all over yourself trying to stay clear of him when he's inside the base. "
Kinsman suddenly shuddered. So it shows! If you're; not careful you'll tip them both off.
Aloud he said, "I'm going to look around. Give me an ] hour. Better call Earthside and tell them what's going on.:
Stay in the shelter until I come back. " Or until the relief crew shows up.
"You're wasting your time. And taking an unnecessary chance. "
"Wish me luck, " Kinsman answered.
"Good luck. I'll sit tight here, "
Despite himself, Kinsman grinned. Shutting off the radio, he said to himself, "I know damned well you'll sit tight. Two scientific adventurers. One goes over the hill and the other stays in his bunk two weeks straight. "
He gazed out at the bleak landscape, surrounded by starry emptiness. Something caught at his memory:
"They can't scare me with their empty spaces, " he muttered. There was more to the verse but he couldn't recall it.
"Can't scare me, " he repeated softly, shuffling to the inner rim. He walked very carefully and tried, from inside the cumbersome helmet, to see exactly where he was placing his feet.
The barren slopes fell away in gently terraced steps until, more than half a mile below, they melted into the crater floor. Looks easy… too easy. With a shrug that was weighted down by the pressure-suit, Kinsman started to descend into the crater.
He picked his way across the gravelly terraces and crawled feet first down the breaks between them. The bare rocks were slippery and sometimes sharp. Kinsman went slowly, step by step, trying to make certain he didn't puncture the aluminized fabric of his suit.
His world was cut off now and circled by the dark rocks. The only sounds he knew were the creakings of the suit's joints, the electrical hum of its motor, the faint whir of the helmet's air blower, and his own heavy breathing. Alone, all alone. A solitary microcosm. One living creature in the one universe.
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces.
Between stars on stars where no human race is.
There was still more to it: the tag line that he couldn't remember.
Finally he had to stop. The suit was heating up too much from his exertion. He took a marker beacon from the backpack and planted it on the broken ground. The Moon's soil, churned by meteors and whipped into a frozen froth, had an unfinished look about it, as though somebody had been blacktopping the place but stopped before he could apply the final smoothing touches.
From a pouch on his belt Kinsman took a small spool of wire. Plugging one end into the radio outlet on his helmet, he held the spool at arm's length and released the catch. He couldn't see it in the dim light, but he felt the spring fire the wire antenna a hundred yards or so upward and out into the crater.
"Father Lemoyne, " he called as the antenna drifted in the moon's easy gravity. "Father Lemoyne, can you hear me? This is Kinsman. "
No answer.
Okay. Down another flight.
After two more stops and nearly an hour of sweaty descent, Kinsman got his answer.
"Here… I'm here… "
"Where?" Kinsman snapped. "Do something. Make a light. "
"… can't… " The voice faded out.
Kinsman reeled in the antenna and fired it out again. "Where the hell are you?"
A cough, with pain behind it. "Shouldn't have done it. Disobeyed. And no water, nothing… "
"Great! Kinsman frowned. He's either hysterical or delirious. Or both.
After firing the spool antenna again, Kinsman flicked on the lamp atop his helmet and looked at the radio direction-finder dial on his forearm. The priest had his suit radio open and the carrier beam was coming through even though he was not talking. The gauges alongside the radio-finder reminded Kinsman that he was about halfway down on his oxygen, and more than an hour had elapsed since he had spoken to Bok.
"I'm trying to zero in oil you, " Kinsman said. "Are you hurt? Can you… "
"Don't, don't, don't. I disobeyed and now I've got to pay for it. Don't trap yourself too… " The heavy, reproachful voice lapsed into a mumble that Kinsman couldn't understand.
Trapped. Kinsman could picture it. The priest was using a canister-suit: a one-man walking cabin, a big plexidomed rigid can with flexible arms and legs sticking out of it. You could live in it for days at a time but it was too clumsy for climbing. Which is why the crater was off-limits.
He must've fallen and now he's stuck.
"The sin of pride, " he heard the priest babbling. "God forgive us our pride. I wanted to find water; the greatest discovery a man can make on the Moon… Pride, nothing but pride… "
Kinsman walked slowly, shifting his eyes from the direction-finder to the roiled, pocked ground underfoot. He jumped across an eight-foot drop between terraces. The finder's needle snapped to zero.
"Your radio still on?"
"No use… go back… "
The needle stayed fixed. Either I busted it or I'm right on top of him.
He turned full circle, scanning the rough ground as far as his light could reach. No sign of the canister. Kinsman stepped to the terrace edge. Kneeling with deliberate care, so that his backpack wouldn't unbalance and send him sprawling down the tumbled rocks, he peered over.
In a zigzag fissure a few yards below him was the priest, a giant armored insect gleaming white in the glare of the lamp, feebly waving its one free arm.
"Can you get up?" Kinsman saw that all the weight of the cumbersome suit was on the pinned arm. Banged up his backpack too.
The priest was mumbling again. It sounded like Latin.
"Can you get up?" Kinsman repeated.
"Trying to find the secrets of natural creation…
storming heaven with rockets… We say we're seeking knowledge, but we're really after our own glory… "
Kinsman frowned. He couldn't see the older man's face, behind the canister's heavily tinted window.
"I'll have to get the jumper. "
The priest rambled on, coughing spasmodically. Kinsman started back across the terrace.
"Pride leads to death, " he heard in his earphones. "You know that, Kinsman. It's pride that makes us murderers. "
The shock boggled Kinsman's knees. He turned, trembling. "What… did you say?"
"It's hidden. The water is here, hidden… frozen in fissures. Strike the rock and bring forth water… like Moses. Not even God himself was going to hide this secret from me… "
"What did you say, " Kinsman whispered, completely cold inside, "about murder?"
"I know you, Kinsman… anger and pride… Destroy not my soul with men of blood… whose right hands are… are… "
Kinsman ran away. He fought back toward the crater rim, storming the terraces blindly, scrabbling up the inclines with four-yard-high jumps. Twice he had to turn up the air blower in his helmet to clear the sweaty fog from his faceplate. He didn't dare stop. He raced on, his heart pounding until he could hear nothing else.
But in his mind he still saw those savage few minutes in orbit, when he had been with the Air Force, when he became a killer. He had won a medal for that secret mission; a medal and a conscience that never slept.
Finally he reached the crest. Collapsing on the deck of the jumper, he forced himself to breathe normally again, forced himself to sound normal as he called Bok.
The astronomer said guardedly, "It sounds as though he's dying. "
"I think his regenerator's shot. His air must be pretty foul by now. "
"No sense going back for him, I guess. "
Kinsman hesitated. "Maybe I can get the jumper down close to him. " He found out about me.
"You'll never get him back in time. And you're not supposed to take the jumper near the crater, let alone inside of it. It's too dangerous. "
"You want to just let him die?" He's hysterical. If he babbles about me where Bok can hear it…
"Listen, " the astronomer said, his voice rising, "you can't leave me stuck here with both of you gone! I know the regulations, Kinsman. You're not allowed to risk yourself or the third man on the team to help a man in trouble. "
"I know. I know. " But it wouldn't look right for me to start minding regulations now. Even Bok doesn't expect me to.
"You don't have enough oxygen in your suit to get down there and back again, " Bok insisted.
"I can tap some from the jumper's propellant tank. "
"But that's crazy! You'll get yourself stranded!"
"Maybe. " It's an Air Force secret. No discharges; just transferred to the Space Agency. If they find out about it now, I'll be finished. Everybody'll know. No place to hide… newspapers, TV, everybody!
"You're going to kill yourself over that priest. And you'll be killing me too!"
"He's probably dead by now, " Kinsman said. "I'll just put a marker beacon there, so another crew can get him when the time comes. I won't be long. "
"But the regulations… "
"They were written Earthside. The brass never planned on something like this. I've got to go back, just to make sure. "
He flew the juniper back down the crater's inner slope, leaning over the platform railing to see his marker beacons as well as listening to their tiny radio beeping. In a few minutes, he was easing the spraddle-legged platform down on the last terrace before the helpless priest.
"Father Lemoyne. "
Kinsman stepped off the jumper and made it to the edge of the fissure in four lunar strides. The white shell was inert, the long arm unmoving.
"Father Lemoyne!"
Kinsman held his breath and listened. Nothing… wait… the faintest, faintest breathing. More like gasping. Quick, shallow, desperate.
"You're dead, " Kinsman heard himself mutter. "Give it up, you're finished. Even if I got you out of here, you'd be dead before I could get you back to the base. "
The priest's faceplate was opaque to him; he only saw the reflected spot of his own helmet lamp. But his mind filled with the shocked face he once saw in another visor, a face that had just realized it was dead.
He looked away, out to the too-close horizon and the uncompromising stars beyond. Then he remembered the rest of it:
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
Like an automaton, Kinsman turned back to the jumper. His mind was blank now. Without thought, without even feeling, he rigged a line from the jumper's tiny winch to the metal lugs in the canister-suit's chest. Then he took apart the platform railing and wedged three rejoined sections into the fissure above the fallen man, to form a hoisting angle. Looping the line over the projecting arm, he started the winch.
He climbed down into the fissure and set himself as solidly as he could on the bare, scoured smooth rock. Grabbing the priest's armored shoulders, he guided the oversized canister up from the crevice, while the winch strained silently.
The railing arm gave way when the priest was only partway up, and Kinsman felt the full weight of the monstrous suit crush down on him. He sank to his knees, gritting his teeth to keep from crying out.
Then the winch took up the slack. Grunting, fumbling, pushing, he scrabbled up the rocky slope with his arms wrapped halfway round the big canister's middle. He let the winch drag them to the jumper's edge, then reached out and shut off the motor.
With only a hard breath's pause, Kinsman snapped down the suit's supporting legs, so the priest could stay upright even though unconscious. Then he clambered onto the platform and took the oxygen line from the rocket tankage. Kneeling at the bulbous suit's shoulders, he plunged the line into its emergency air tank.
The older man coughed once. That was all.
Kinsman leaned back on his heels. His faceplate was fogging over again, or was it fatigue blurring his sight?
The regenerator was hopelessly smashed, he saw. The old bird must've been breathing his own juices. When the emergency tank registered full, he disconnected the oxygen line and plugged it into a fitting below the regenerator.
"If you're dead, this is probably going to kill me too, " Kinsman said. He purged the entire suit, forcing the contaminating fumes out and replacing them with the oxygen that the jumper's rocket needed to get them back to the base.
He was close enough now to see through the canister's tinted visor. The priest's face was grizzled, eyes closed. Its usual smile was gone; the mouth hung open limply.
Kinsman hauled him up onto the rail-less platform and strapped him down on the deck. Then he went to the controls and inched the throttle forward just enough to give them the barest minimum of lift.
The jumper almost made it to the crest before its rocket died and bumped them gently on one of the terraces. There was a small emergency tank of oxygen that could have carried them a little farther, Kinsman knew. But he and the priest would need it for breathing.
"Wonder how many Jesuits have been carried home on their shields?" he asked himself as he unbolted the section of decking that the priest was lying on. By threading the winch line through the bolt holes, he made a sort of sled, which he carefully lowered to the ground. Then he took down the emergency oxygen tank and strapped it to the deck section, too.
Kinsman wrapped the line around his fists and leaned against the burden. Even in the Moon's light gravity, it was like trying to haul a truck.
"Down to less than one horsepower, " he grunted, straining forward.
For once he was glad that the scoured rocks had been smoothed clean by micrometeors. He would climb a few steps, wedge himself as firmly as he could, and drag the sled up to him. It took a painful half-hour to reach the ringwall crest.
He could see the base again, tiny and remote as a dream. "All downhill from here, " he mumbled.
He thought he heard a groan.
"That's it, " he said, pushing the sled over the crest, down the gentle outward slope. "That's it. Stay with it Don't you die on me. Don't put me through this for nothing!" '
"Kinsman!" Bok's voice. "Are you all right?"
The sled skidded against a yard-high rock. Scrambling after it, Kinsman answered, "I'm bringing him in. Just shut up and leave us alone. I think he's alive. Now stop wasting my breath. "
Pull it free. Push to get it started downhill again. Strain to hold it back… don't let it get away from you. Haul it out of craterlets. Watch your step, don't fall.
"Too damned much uphill in this downhill. "
Once he sprawled flat and knocked his helmet against the edge of the improvised sled. He must have blacked out for a moment. Weakly, he dragged himself up to the oxygen tank and refilled his suit's supply. Then he checked the priest's suit and topped off his tank.
"Can't do that again, " he said to the silent priest. "Don't know if we'll make it. Maybe we can. If neither one of us has sprung a leak. Maybe… "
Time slid away from him. The past and future dissolved into an endless now, a forever of pain and struggle, with the heat of his toil welling up in Kinsman drenchingly.
"Why don't you say something?" Kinsman panted at the priest. "You can't die. Understand me? You can't die! I've got to explain it to you… I didn't mean to kill her. I didn't even know she was a girl. You can't tell, can't even see a face until you're too close. She must've been just as scared as I was. She tried to kill me. I was inspecting their satellite… how'd I know their cosmonaut was a scared kid. I could've pushed her off, didn't have to kill her. But the first thing I knew I was ripping her air lines open. I didn't know she was a girl, not until it was too late. It doesn't make any difference, but I didn't know it, I didn't know… "
They reached the foot of the ringwall and Kinsman dropped to his knees. "Couple more miles now… straightaway… only a couple more… miles. " His vision was blurred, and something in his head was buzzing angrily.
Staggering to his feet, he lifted the line over his shoulder and slogged ahead. He could just make out the lighted tip of the base's radio mast.
"Leave him, Chet, " Bok's voice pleaded from somewhere. "You can't make it unless you leave him!"
"Shut… up. "
One step after another. Don't think, don't count. Blank your mind. Be a mindless plow horse. Plod along, one step at a time. Steer for the radio mast… Just a few… more miles.
"Don't die on me. Don't you… die on me. You're my ticket back. Don't die on me, priest… don't die… "
It all went dark. First in spots, then totally. Kinsman caught a glimpse of the barren landscape tilting weirdly, then the grave stars slid across his view, then darkness.
"I tried, " he heard himself say hi a far, far distant voice. "I tried. "
For a moment or two he felt himself falling, dropping effortlessly into blackness. Then even that sensation died and he felt nothing at all.
A faint vibration buzzed at him. The darkness started to shift, turn gray at the edges. Kinsman opened his eyes and saw the low, curved ceiling of the underground base. The noise was the electrical machinery that lit and warmed and brought good air to the tight little shelter.
"You okay?" Bok leaned over him. His chubby face was frowning worriedly.
Kinsman weakly nodded.
"Father Lemoyne's going to pull through, " Bok said, stepping out of the cramped space between the two bunks. The priest was awake but unmoving, his eyes staring blankly upward. His canister-suit had been removed and one arm was covered with a plastic cast.
Bok explained. "I've been getting instructions from the Earthside medics. They're sending a team up; should be here in another thirty hours. He's in shock, and his arm's broken. Otherwise he seems pretty good… exhausted, but no permanent damage. "
Kinsman pulled himself up to a sitting position on the bunk and leaned his back against the curving metal wall. His helmet and boots were off, but he was still wearing the rest of his pressure suit.
"You went out and got us, " he realized.
Bok nodded. "You were only about a mile away. I could hear you on the radio. Then you stopped talking. I had to go out. "
"You saved my life. "
"And you saved the priest's. "
Kinsman stopped a moment, remembering. "I did a lot | of raving out there, didn't I?… Any of it intelligible?"
Bok wormed his shoulders uncomfortably. "Sort of. I It's, uh… it's all on the automatic recorder, you know. All conversations. Nothing I can do about that. "
That's it. Now everybody knows.
"You haven't heard the best of it, though, " Bok said. He went to the shelf at the end of the priest's bunk and took a little plastic container. "Look at this. "
Kinsman took the container. Inside was a tiny fragment of ice, half melted into water.
"It was stuck in the cleats of his boots. It's really water! Tests out okay, and I even snuck a taste of it. It's water all right. "
"He found it after all, " Kinsman said. "He'll get into the history books now. " And he'll have to watch his pride even more.
Bok sat on the shelter's only chair. "Chet, about what you were saying out there… "
Kinsman expected tension, but instead he felt only numb. "I know. They'll hear the tapes Earthside. "
"There've been rumors about an Air Force guy killing a cosmonaut during a military mission, but I never thought… I mean… "
"The priest figured it out, " Kinsman said. "Or at least he guessed it. "
"It must've been rough on you, " Bok said.
"Not as rough as what happened to her. "
"What'll they do about you?"
Kinsman shrugged. "I don't know. It might get out to the press. Probably I'll be grounded. Unstable. It could be nasty. "
"I'm… sorry. " Bok's voice tailed off helplessly.
"It doesn't matter. "
Surprised, Kinsman realized that he meant it. He sat straight upright. "It doesn't matter anymore. They can do whatever they want to. I can handle it. Even if they ground me and throw me to the newsmen… I think I can take it. I did it, and it's over with, and I can take what I have to take. "
Father Lemoyne's free arm moved slightly. "It's all right. "
The priest turned his face toward Kinsman. His gaze moved from the astronaut's eyes to the plastic container in Kinsman's hands. "It's not hell that we're in, it's purga-tory. We'll get through. We'll make it all right. " Then he closed his eyes and his face relaxed into sleep. But the smile remained, strangely gentle hi that bearded, haggard face; ready to meet the world or eternity.
by Fred Hoyle
Professor Hoyle is either the last of the original Renaissance men or the first of the new. He writes novels and constructs cosmological theories with the same ease, while taking time out briefly to add mathematical proof to the astronomical explanation of Stonehenge. Or to write a short story, this one, that explains things about television that we have always suspected.
Angus Carruthers was a wayward, impish genius. Genius is not the same thing as high ability. Men of great talent commonly spread their efforts, often very effectively, over a wide front. The true genius devotes the whole of his skill, his energies, his intelligence, to a particular objective, which he pursues unrelentingly.
Early in life, Carruthers became skeptical of human superiority over other animals. Already in his early teens he understood exactly where the difference lies it lies in the ability of humans to pool their knowledge through speech, in the ability through speech to educate the young. The challenging problem to his keen mind was to find a system of communication, every bit as powerful as language, that could be made available to others of the higher animals. The basic idea was not original; it was the determination to carry the idea through to its conclusion that was new. Carruthers pursued his objective inflexibly down the years.
Gussie had no patience with people who talked and chattered to animals. If animals had the capacity to un-derstand language wouldn't they have done it already, he said, thousands of years ago? Talk was utterly and completely pointless. You were just damned stupid if you thought you were going to teach English to your pet dog or cat. The thing to do was to understand the world from the point of view of the dog or cat. Once you'd got yourself into their system it would be time enough to think about trying to get them into your system.
Gussie had no close friends. I suppose I was about as near to being a friend as anyone, yet even I would see him only perhaps once in six months. There was always something refreshingly different when you happened to run into him. He might have grown a black spade beard, or he might just have had a crew-cut. He might be wearing a flowing cape, or he might be neatly tailored in a Bond Street suit. He always trusted me well enough to show off his latest experiments. At the least they were remarkable, at the best they went far beyond anything I had heard of, or read about. To my repeated suggestions that he simply must "publish" he always responded with a long wheezy laugh. To me it seemed just plain common sense to publish, if only to raise money for the experiments, but Gussie obviously didn't see it this way. How he managed for money, I could never discover. I supposed him to have a private income, which was very likely correct.
One day I received a note asking me to proceed to such-and-such an address, sometime near 4 P. M. on a certain Saturday. There was nothing unusual in my receiving a note, for Carruthers had got in touch with me several times before in this way. It was the address which came as the surprise, a house in a Croydon suburb. On previous occasions I had always gone out to some decrepit barn of a place in remotest Hertfordshire. The idea of Gussie in Croydon somehow didn't fit. I was sufficiently intrigued to put off a previous appointment and to hie myself along at the appropriate hour.
My wild notion that Carruthers might have got himself ', well and truly wed, that he might have settled down in a nine-to-five job, turned out to be quite wrong. The big tortoiseshell spectacles he had sported at our previous meeting were gone, replaced by plain steel rims. His lank black hair was medium long this time. He had a lugubrious look about him, as if he had just been rehearsing the part of Quince in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
"Come in, " he wheezed.
"What's the idea, living in these parts?" I asked as I slipped off my overcoat. For answer, he broke into a whistling, croaking laugh.
"Better take a look, in there. "
The door to which Gussie pointed was closed. I was pretty sure I would find animals "in there, " and so it proved. Although the room was darkened by a drawn curtain, there was sufficient light for me to see three creatures crouched around a television set. They were intently watching the second half of a game of Rugby League football. There was a cat with a big rust-red patch on the top of its head. There was a poodle, which cocked an eye at me for a fleeting second as I went in, and there was a furry animal sprawled in a big armchair. As I went in, I had the odd impression of the animal lifting a paw, as if by way of greeting. Then I realized it was a small brown bear.
I had known Gussie long enough now, I had seen enough of his work, to realize that any comment in words would be ridiculous and superfluous. I had long ago learned the right procedure, to do exactly the same thing as the animals themselves were doing. Since I have always been partial to rugby, I was able to settle down quite naturally to watch the game in company with this amazing trio. Every so often I found myself catching the bright, alert eyes of the bear. I soon realized that, whereas I was mainly interested in the run of the ball, the animals were mainly interested in the tackling, qua tackling. Once when a player was brought down particularly heavily there was a muffled yap from the poodle, instantly answered by a grunt from the bear.
After perhaps twenty minutes I was startled by a really loud bark from the dog, there being nothing at all in the ] game to warrant such an outburst. Evidently the dog wanted to attract the attention of the engrossed bear, for when the bear looked up quizzically the dog pointed a dramatic paw toward a clock standing a couple of yards to the left of the television set. Immediately the bear lumbered from its chair to the set. It fumbled with the controls. There was a click, and to my astonishment we were on another channel. A wrestling bout had just begun.
The bear rolled back to its chair. It stretched itself, resting lazily on the base of the spine, arms raised with the claws cupped behind the head. One of the wrestlers spun the other violently. There was a loud thwack as the unfortunate fellow cracked his head on a ring post. At this, the cat let out the strangest animal noise I had ever heard. Then it settled down into a deep powerful purr.
I had seen and heard enough. As I quitted the room ] the bear waved me out, much in the style of royalty and visiting heads of state. I found Gussie placidly drinking tea in what was evidently the main sitting room of the house. To my frenzied requests to be told exactly what it meant, Gussie responded with his usual asthmatic laugh. Instead of answering my questions he asked some of his own.
"I want your advice, professionally as a lawyer. There's nothing illegal in the animals watching television, is there? Or in the bear switching the programs?"
"How could there be?"
"The situation's a bit complicated. Here, take a look at< this. "
Carruthers handed me a typewritten list. It covered a 't week of television programs. If this represented viewing by the animals the set must have been switched on more < or less continuously. The programs were all of a type, sport, Westerns, suspense plays, films of violence.
"What they love, " said Gussie by way of explanation, "is the sight of humans bashing themselves to pieces. Really, of course, it's more or less the usual popular taste, only a bit more so. "
I noticed the name of a well-known rating firm on the letterhead.
"What's this heading here? I mean, what's all this to do with the TV ratings?"
Gussie fizzed and crackled like a soda-siphon.
"That's exactly the point. This house here is one of the odd few hundreds used in compiling the weekly ratings. That's why I asked if there was anything wrong in Bingo doing the switching. "
"You don't mean viewing by those animals is going into the ratings?"
"Not only here, but in three other houses I've bought. I've got a team of chaps in each of them. Bears take quite naturally to the switching business. "
"There'll be merry hell to pay if it comes out. Can't you see what the papers will make of it?"
"Very clearly indeed. "
The point hit me at last. Gussie could hardly have come on four houses by chance, all of which just happened to be hooked up to the TV rating system. As far as I could see there wasn't anything illegal in what he'd done, so long as he didn't make any threats or demands. As if he read my thoughts, he pushed a slip of paper under my nose. It was a check for £. 50, 000.
"Unsolicited, " he wheezed, "came out of the blue. From somebody in the advertising game, I suppose. Hush money. The problem is, do I put myself in the wrong if I cash it?"
Before I could form an opinion on this tricky question there came a tinkling of breaking glass.
"Another one gone, " Gussie muttered. "I haven't been able to teach Bingo to use the vertical or horizontal holds. Whenever anything goes wrong, or the program goes off for a minute, he hammers away at the thing. It's always the tube that goes. "
"It must be quite a costly business. "
"Averages about a dozen a week. I always keep a spare set ready. Be a good fellow and give me a hand with it. They'll get pretty testy if we don't move smartly. "
We lifted what seemed like a brand-new set from out of a cupboard. Each gripping an end of it, we edged our way to the television snuggery. From inside, I was now aware of a strident uproar, compounded from the bark of a dog, the grunt of a bear, and the shrill moan of a redheaded cat. It was the uproar of animals suddenly denied their intellectual pabulum.
by Kit Reed
Kit Reed is a wife, mother and a very talented writer. Her story "The Wait" is a small classic that is both literature and anthropology, and its chilling impact is far more memorable than any number of textbooks on the patterns of culture. "The Vine" has the same impact. It is two stories in one, the obvious and the allegorical, and it makes sense on both levels. Though it makes the most sense when the reader's mind skitters back and forth between the two of them at the same time. Go ahead… try it…
Day in, day out, summer in, summer out, through fire, flood and contumely, over the centuries Baskin's family had tended the vine. No one knew precisely how old the vine was, or who had planted it and set the first Baskin to care for it; when the first settlers came to the valley, the vine was already there. No one knew who had built the immense conservatory which housed it, or who sent the trucks which came every autumn to take away the fruit.
The Baskins themselves didn't know; still they had cared for the vine from the beginning, pruning, shaping and harvesting, watering it in times when no one else had water, feeding it when there was no food. They lived in a small cottage in the shadow of the trunk, giving all their days to it; their backs were bent and their skins were pale and soft from a lifetime of hothouse air. When they died they were buried in the family plot just outside the giant conservatory, laid in the ground without shrouds or cof-fins so that they could go on feeding the vine. The eldest son was the only one who married. He usually did his courting outside the valley so that the bride would not know until he brought her home that she was to bear sons and daughters to care for the vine. Although there was no proof, there were rumors of a ritual bloodletting, in which the Baskins gave of themselves four times a year, enriching the earth at its base.
Even contained as it was within multifaceted glass walls, the vine overshadowed the entire valley. In the best times farmers could look at their finest fruit and know it could not measure up to the grapes hanging inside the conservatory. When frost came early or drought leached the soil, they blamed the vine. Yet even as they hated it, they were drawn by it. Summer and winter a steady procession came from the farthest corners of the valley and in time from the countryside beyond, all shuffling toward the great conservatory, waiting in silence until it was their turn to go inside.
Outside the conservatory, no grass grew. For hundreds of yards around the earth was barren, sapped. Visitors approached over a single elevated pathway, conscious of the immense, powerful network spreading just beneath their feet, the root system of the vine. Ahead, the con-servatory would be dark with it, each glass pane filled with burgeoning leaves and heavy, importunate fruit. At the door they would give a coin to the youngest Baskin daughter and go through the turnstile, craning over the rail to look at the sinuous trunk. Their eyes would follow it to the base and the carefully turned earth which sup-ported it, and most would refuse to comprehend that the thing measured twenty feet across. The earth was inter-sected by a series of wooden walks along which the Bas-kins went with shears and hoes and thongs, ready to soften a clod of earth or tie up any part of the plant which might free itself from the enormous arbor and begin. to droop. Overheard the arbor spread, entwined and al-most obscured by the many flexing, sinewy coils of the giant vine. The entire conservatory was filled by the branches and fruit of this single plant, so that the visitor could stand on the balcony, just to the left of the Baskins' cottage, and look out across yards and yards of open space intersected by walks and roofed in leafy green. From this green roof hung clump after identical clump of flawless grapes, the opulent purple fruit of the vine. Straining into the green gloom, the visitor could see the Baskins scurrying back and forth along the pathways, pale, incessant wraiths in faded chambray shirts. There were those who said the vine sucked the life out of the Baskins; there were others who said the Baskins took their hie from the vine. Whatever the truth, the visitor would sense in their movements a haste, a frightening urgency, and in the next moment he might clutch at his throat as if the vine threatened him too, draining the air he breathed, and so he would turn hurriedly and flee into the sunshine, hardly noticing the others who pressed to the rail to take his place.
Even frightened so, the visitor would return. In his own distant home in another season, he would close his eyes and see once again the brooding tracery. Something would draw him back, and so he would come again, perhaps with a bride or a firstborn son, saying: I tried to tell you; there are not enough words for the vine. So the crowds coming to the valley grew larger, and in time there had to be new roads and places to eat, and since some came from such distances that they needed to rest before going on, the valley people built inns. One by one the farmers cut down their own production, abandoning vineyards to put their money into restaurants and motels. Movies houses sprang up, and someone built a terrace overlooking the conservatory, dotting it with purple umbrellas and studding it with bathing pools. Someone created small, jeweled grape clusters for visitors to buy, and someone else bottled a wine which he told visitors came from the fruit of the vine. The people in the valley grew sleek and prospered, and although they still lived in the shadow of the vine, they no longer cursed it. Instead they would look at the sky and say: Hope it rains, the vine needs water. Or: If there's hail, I hope it doesn't break the glass and hurt the vine. In time they stopped farming altogether, and from that time on, their lives depended on the steady flow of visitors who came to see the vine.
So it was that Charles Baskin was born into a time of prosperity, and the people of the valley no longer shunned the Baskins. Instead they said: Is your family keeping busy? Or, slapping Charles on the shoulder: Hi, Charlie. How's the vine?
Fine, he would say distractedly, because he was approaching his twenties: he was the first-born and it was time for him to find a wife. In the old days, it would have. been more difficult a Baskin who went courting in the old days had to take a cart or a wagon and go over the mountains, traveling until he came to a town where they had never heard of the vine.
Charles's own mother had come from such a town. She came with her eyes dazzled by love and her ears full of his father's lies and promises, understanding only when she entered the conservatory that she would spend the rest of her life caring for the vine. Charles had seen her languish all through his childhood, sitting down on a root to weep, and he had listened night after night to her tales of life outside. Yet in the scant twenty years since his birth the climate and temper of life in the valley had changed. His mother's parents came to visit, and instead of protesting, they were delighted. The mayor brought them in, bursting with pride, and the old man and the old woman admired the conservatory and exclaimed over the cottage and even went so far as to pat the trunk of the vine. She was still protesting, trying to explain when they said:
"You must be so happy, dear. " And left.
Charles, watching, thought: Why shouldn't she be? For the vine exuded prosperity in those days, and even though those who came to see it were awed, they were also solicitous, saying: More fertilizer. Or: More food. Or: We can't let anything happen to the vine.
So by the time Charles reached manhood, any girl in the valley would have been proud to marry into the family that cared for the vine. Several vied for his attentions, but he had always loved Maida Freemont, whose father ran the pleasure palace on the hill.
Standing in the sunset, they watched the last light glint on the conservatory roof below. Charles said, "Come down in the valley and live with me. "
"I don't know. " Maida looked over his shoulder at the brilliant glass roof. "That place gives me the creeps. "
"Nonsense, " said her father, who had no business listening. "Somebody's got to take care of the vine. "
"Yes, " said Charles, chilled by a sudden flicker, or premonition. "I love you, Maida. I'll take care of you. " He clung to her, thinking that if he could just marry her, everything might be all right. "Maida… "
"Yes. "
He took her on a wedding trip to the ocean, a few days of freedom before they went into the conservatory to live. They came back tanned and healthy, and Charles led her through the throngs who lined the walks, waiting to see the vine.
A little, self-consciously, he lifted her and carried her through the stile. "And so, " he said, setting her down on the balcony inside, "here we are. "
She buried her head in his neck. "Yes. Here we are. "
Once they had embraced he was uneasy. He noticed a subtle change in the color of the light in the conservatory, a faint difference in the air. The air was heavier now, touched with a hint of ferment. Troubled, he took Mai-da's hand, hurrying her inside the house.
The rest of the family were sitting around the parlor: Dad, Mom, Sally and Sue. They had changed from their coveralls. Mom and the girls had on lavender dresses; Dad was wearing his wine-colored shirt. They crowded around the newlyweds, and it was a minute or two before Charles realized that something was amiss.
"Where's Granddad?"
His mother said evasively, "Gone. "
"Where?"
Dad shook his head. "Something took him and he died. "
Sue said quietly, "It was time. "
The mother rushed to make it easier. "I've turned his room into a lovely parlor for you; so you'll have a real apartment of your own. "
Outside there was a sound as if the whole vine were stirring. Maida shrank against Charles and he hugged her. "Fine, Mother. That's just wonderful. "
Maida was murmuring, "Oh Charlie, Charlie, take me out of here. "
He wavered.
The family watched with violet eyes. They were waiting.
Nodding, he tugged at Maida. "Come on, dear. " On the landing he whispered, "Trust me. Trust the vine. "
And so they went upstairs. There was a sound outside, like a gigantic sigh.
Charles rose early, but the family was already at work. Sally was at the turnstile collecting money. Sue crouched on one of the wooden walks, pulling abstractedly at a weed. His mother was on a ladder at the far end of the conservatory, tying up a tendril of the vine. Charles approached her.
"Mother, something's different. "
But she only frowned over her knot and wouldn't talk to him.
When they got back to the house at noon, Maida had pulled herself together. She was in the kitchen with her hair tied back and she was whistling. She said, "I've made a pie. "
They finished lunch happily. Sally was full of talk about a boy she had seen. He had come through the turnstile twice, never going to the rail to gawk. He had paid just to talk to her. The mother was smiling, giving Maida a whole series of useless household hints. The father was a bit pale, abstracted.
"The pie, " Maida said, cutting into it.
They were aghast. "Grape!"
Once they had finished talking to her, Charles led her to their room, trying to soothe her. "Please stop crying, darling. You just didn't understand. "
"All I wanted to do was… "
"I know, but you hurt the vine. None of us can ever, ever hurt the vine. "
Baskin stayed out in the conservatory an extra hour that evening, perhaps thinking to make amends for the grapes his bride had cut. He went along the outer walks, weeding and hoeing, and in the strange, hushed moment just before sunset he came upon his father. He lay on the ground near the outermost wall, pressed close to the earth in some uncanny communion. When Charles called, he did not stir.
Pulling and hauling, Charles got him back on the walk. "Father, you're not supposed to get on the dirt like that. "
The older man looked at him, drained. "I had to. "
"Why, Father? Why?"
"You wouldn't understand. "
"Father, are you all right?"
The old man shrugged him off. "Come, it's time to water the vine. "
The last visitors had gone, and so they opened the cock that fed the sprinklers. They ate dinner to the sound of soft water falling. That night Charles and Maida lay close, lulled by the constant artificial rain.
The father was never quite the same; within two months he was dead, carried off by a mystery which wasted him before their eyes. As he faded, the vine prospered, growing heavy with fruit, spreading and expanding until Charles feared the conservatory would not be big enough to hold it. He worked long hours, trimming and pruning, trying to keep it within bounds, and the more he worked the less strength he seemed to have. His mother and the girls seemed to be affected too, dragging themselves about with an effort, diminishing before his eyes.
Only Maida seemed well, busy with a life which had nothing to do with the conservatory or the vine. She was pregnant, and in their dreaming talks about the future, neither Charles nor Maida mentioned the vine.
Only Sally seemed to resent the coming baby, badgering Maida because she did not help as the others did, although Sally herself spent less and less of her own time working. Instead she hung over the turnstile, talking to a boy.
"You'd better tell him to stop coming here, " Charles said one night.
"Why should I? I've got to live my own life. "
He frowned at Sally. "Your life is the vine. "
The next day she was gone. She had taken her clothes in a cardboard suitcase, running away with the boy. They had one postcard from a distant city: GET OUT BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE. There was no return address.
Sue shook her head over it. "We'll have to work harder to make up for her. "
"It won't help, " the mother said from her corner. Her voice sagged with despair. "Nothing will help. "
"Don't say that, " Charles said sharply. "We have to take care of the vine. "
Deep in pregnancy, Maida snapped, "Damn the vine. "
Since Charles couldn't find his mother to help him when his son was born, he and Sue had to midwife. When it was all over, Charles went out on the walks and called for the old lady, full of the news. He found her at last, pressed against the earth as his father had been, and he had to pull to get her free. He imagined something snapped as he pulled her away from the soil. Frightened, he took her back to the house and put her to bed. Even when she was stronger, he would not let her leave the house. He and Sue carried on alone, because they had to. The mother died anyway. They buried her in the family plot, where she could feed the vine.
They were four of them in the house now: Charles and I Maida and the baby and Sue, who wasted before their i eyes. Charles might have despaired, he might have fled if 't it hadn't been for the baby. The baby was his future and
his hope: it would grow strong and prosper, carrying on the Baskin tradition of caring for the vine.
"We'll have a girl soon, " he said to Maida, beaming.
On the other side of the fire, Sue put her hands to her lips; her fingers fluttered across her face. Before they could stop her, she was on her feet and running. When he went out on the porch, Charles could hear her footsteps, desperate and fast. But it was dark and the great vine creaked above him. With a shudder, he went back inside.
They never saw Sue again, and so Maida had to pen the baby in the cottage and go out and help him with the vine. She was quick and capable, and now that she had borne a child here, she seemed strangely reconciled to life inside the conservatory, at one with the others who had labored here. She and Charles worked well, but he began to notice changes in her. He would find her on the farthest catwalk, her cheek pressed against the glass outer wall. It was around this time that Charles found Sue's skeleton, suspended in a cocoon of green. He freed it and buried it quickly, so Maida would not have to see. The earth was alive with twisting tendrils, and he jumped back in alarm.
"We'll go, " he said, biting through his lower lip. "I'll take her and the baby and get out of here. "
But it was too late. She did not answer his urgent cries, and he found her at last, lying pressed to the earth just outside the cottage door. When he pulled her up she smiled, blind but still loving. Where it had touched the earth, her skin was flecked with tiny broken veins. He took her in his arms and ran with her, collapsing outside by the road. When the police took them to the hospital, Charles called Maida's father.
"Mr. Freemont, Maida and I are leaving as soon as she's well enough to travel. "
"You'll be all right, " Freemont said, not listening. "I'll look after Maida here. You'd better get back and do for that vine. "
"You don't understand, we have to get away from it… "
The old man turned him toward the conservatory. "She'll be all right, son. You just get back to work. "
Because there was nothing else to do he went, but his mind was seething with plans. When Maida got better, he would take her and the baby; he would steal a car if he had to, and they would drive and drive until they were safe.
"She's dead, " the father said, weeping at the turnstile.
"The vine killed her, " Baskin said wildly.
The old man patted him. "There, there. It's coming on harvest time. You know how the visitors love that… "
"But I have to… "
"You have to carry on for Maida. For the valley. We all depend on you. "
Before he could protest, the old man pushed a rake into his hand. A crew began installing an automatic turnstile.
"Tell you what, " Freemont said. "We'll put up a 'No Visitors' sign. Give you time to mourn. "
"But there isn't… " Baskin went on, to the empty conservatory "… time to mourn. There's only time to take care of the vine. "
Its demands took all his waking hours. He would pen the baby on the porch where he could watch it, and if he left the baby unattended that last night, it was hardly his fault. He heard a snap and a groan in the distance, and ran to investigate. The vine had broken a pane of glass. He was about to turn back to the house and the baby when a leafy coil dropped around his arm, holding him as if to say: Listen.
Impatient, he wrenched himself free. In growing panic,, he began to run.
He couldn't have made it: no one could have made it in time. The baby had climbed or had been lifted out of the pen, and it was playing in the dirt in front of the house. Baskin shouted, splitting his throat, but before the baby could hear or try to respond, a root whipped out of the ground, looped itself around the child's neck and pulled it into the earth.
He imagined he heard a cosmic belch.
Flinging himself on the dirt, he tore at it in a fury, but there was no sign of the child, not his cap or his rattle, not even a bone. In his pain and rage Baskin dug deep, hacking at roots and gouging the earth. The soil was alive, fighting him, and he barely tore himself free.
He retreated to the porch, breathing hard. Going into the house, he collected papers and sticks and rags, and he followed the walks to the great trunk, making a pyre about its base. He soaked the whole in kerosene and set fire to it.
So it was that Charles Baskin waged war on the vine.
Dancing back to avoid the heat, he cursed it, thinking it would all be over soon, but as he watched the sprinkler system let loose, perhaps triggered by a tentacle of the vine. When the smoke cleared, he saw that the vine was scarcely damaged, with the fire out, it was drenching itself from within, bathing the wounded trunk in sap.
Next Baskin attacked it with a chain saw, but before he had gone far the vine was dropping tendrils from every frame and division of the arbor, and every tendril had begun to root. Fresh tendrils took the saw and tried to turn it on him; he had to hack his way to safety, fleeing the conservatory in a growing despair. He thought to tip a vat of lye on the ground, but before he could get close enough, roots were coming through the earth outside the glass house, twining around the vat and reaching for Baskin himself. He would have attacked the trunk again, but the conservatory was already impenetrable. The thing had surrounded itself with a thick armature of loops and fibrous whips, and he could never get close enough to harm it; it would get him first.
Desperate, he hit on a final plan: if he could not damage the plant, then he would smash the conservatory, and the first frost would kill the vine.
He had broken only three panes when the angry plant whipped out and snared him. He was fighting feebly when the first truck came over the horizon. They were corning out from town to investigate.
"Thank God, " he said to his first rescuer. "Oh thank God. "
The man peered at him through the greenery. "What happened?"
"We've got to kill it, " Baskin said, thinking: Now they'll see. They have to see. "We have to get it before it gets us. "
"He was trying to hurt it, " the man said to someone behind him. "Looks like we were just in time. "
Baskin gasped, still not understanding: "Just in time. "
They stood back and let the vine finish what it was doing. Then they held a lottery, selecting the new keeper on the spot. The lucky winner sent a friend back to town to tell his wife, and then he went forward, opening the double doors to the conservatory. As he approached, the vine withdrew its tendrils, rewinding them neatly on the arbor. Only slightly uneasy, the new keeper whispered, into the dimness:
"Are you all right?"
by James Thurber
It is a sobering thought to realize that there are second generation SF readers around today whose parents were born after Hugo Gernsback founded the first science fiction magazine in 1926. While grandchildren of the first fans are undoubtedly already working their way through "A Princess of Mars" and other first readers of SF. Therefore reprints have become an accepted part of the SF magazine scene, appearing regularly in Fantasy and Science Fiction, Amazing and Fantastic. Reprints permit classic stories to be read that would be inaccessibile otherwise, as well as bringing in stories from outside the field that would never be seen by the average avid reader. "Interview with a Lemming" honors the reprint tradition in the magazines. It appears here for another reason as well: it is a diminutive gem of polished prose. Science fiction writers, attention. We would dearly love to see more writing like this in our magazines…
The weary scientist, tramping through the mountains of northern Europe in the winter weather, dropped his knapsack and prepared to sit on a rock.
"Careful, brother, " said a voice.
"Sorry, " murmured the scientist, noting with some surprise that a lemming which he had been about to sit on had addressed him. "It is a source of considerable astonishment to me, " said the scientist, sitting down beside the lemming, "that you are capable of speech. "
"You human beings are always astonished, " said the lemming, "when any other animal can do anything you can. Yet there are many things animals can do that you cannot, such as stridulate, or chirr, to name just one. To stridulate, or chirr, one of the minor achievements of the cricket, your species is dependent on the intestines of the sheep and the hair of the horse. "
"We are a dependent animal, " admitted the scientist.
"You are an amazing animal, " said the lemming.
"We have always considered you rather amazing, too, " said the scientist. "You are perhaps the most mysterious of creatures. "
"If we are going to indulge in adjectives beginning with 'm, ' " said the lemming, sharply, "let me apply a few to your species murderous, maladjusted, maleficent, mali-cious and muffle-headed. "
"You find our behavior as difficult to understand as we do yours?"
"You, as you would say, said it, " said the lemming. "You kill, you mangle, you torture, you imprison, you starve each other. You cover the nurturing earth with cement, you cut down elm trees to put up institutions for people driven insane by the cutting down of elm trees, you "
"You could go on all night like that, " said the scientist, "listing our sins and our shames. "
"I could go on all night and up to four o'clock tomor- row afternoon, " said the lemming. "It just happens that have made a lifelong study of the self-styled higher animal. Except for one thing, I know all there is to know about you, and a singularly dreary, dolorous and distasteful store of information it is, too, to use only adjectives beginning with'd. ' "
"You say you have made a lifelong study of my species " began the scientist.
"Indeed I have, " broke in the lemming. "I know that you are cruel, cunning and carnivorous, sly, sensual and selfish, greedy, gullible and guileful "
"Pray don't wear yourself out, " said the scientist, quiet-ly. "It may interest you to know that I have made a life-long study of lemmings, just as you have made a lifelong study of people. Like you, I have found but one thing about my subject which I am not able to understand. "
"And what is that?" asked the lemming.
"I don't understand, " said the scientist, "why you lemmings all rush down to the sea and drown yourselves. "
"How curious, " said the lemming. "The one thing I don't understand is why you human beings don't. "
by Frank M. Robinson
Frank M. Robinson has been away from science fiction for too long: he has not had an SF story published exclusive of this one since his novel, The Power, came out in 1957. But he has been editing magazines and working on the screening of this book, and he most certainly has been maturing as a writer at the same time. SF has been growing up as well, getting ready for Frank, permitting him to tell an adult story of what life might very well be like at some future date when space travel will be an accepted form of transportation.
I spotted the corpse the 1356th time period out. It was floating alone in the indifferent blackness of space ten bil-lion miles from nowhere, the small jets attached to its; spacesuit empty of fuel and the oxygen tank a depleted, echoing canister of aluminum. There was nothing else within immediate range, which meant that the body had drifted in the silent dark for thousands of time periods, the air in its suit gradually seeping out through a hundred microscopic pinholes and the cold seeping in, turning the man inside into a frozen, desiccated mummy.
It was sheer accident that I had picked it up at all. I had given up running the radar on automatic sweep hundreds of time periods before; but this particular period, for reasons I couldn't put a finger on, I had gotten tired of staring through my compartment ports, dreaming of home or trying to figure out what seemed so strange about the ship lately, and decided to run the gear through a routine check. It picked up the suit on the fourth sweep, right after I had fired it up. The sweep line in the viewing globe staggered to a halt, hunted for a moment, then narrowed to a bright thread of scarlet. The panic button flashed red and a split second later the "All Stations" alarm echoed throughout the Cassiopeia like the brassy trumpet call of doom which, I suppose, it really was.
I must have stared at the globe for a full minute, idly scratching my tattooed captain's bars and wondering what the hell it could be, before I began working the magnifier to bring the hologram closer. When I could make out what it was, the sweat popped out between my shoulder blades and a chill grew in my stomach. I waited until the control console indicated all stations were manned some 2. 3 minutes behind optimum schedule, though I had really ceased to worry about optimum schedules long ago then hollered into the squawk box for Coleman, our met-alsmith, to suit up and drift out and get it.
Once the body was inside the air lock, other crew members acted as honorary pallbearers and bore it quietly into the communications compartment and laid it gently on the deck, using light magnetic clamps to secure it to the metal flooring. It was quite an occasion and I guess we were all aware of it, or so I thought at the time the first martyr to be recovered from space. A few minutes later, the rest of the crew had kicked silently into the compartment to cling to the break rings and cold light tubes until the tiny cabin looked like a human aviary with ten nude and featherless birds clustered in it.
It must have been at least five hundred time periods since we had all been in one compartment together and probably only slightly less than that since I had spoken to another member of the crew. During the long voyage, the humanity in you slowly evaporates, like a puddle of water in a hot sun, and you grow apart. It was probably different on military ships, but the Cassiopeia was a freighter and I was an elected captain and we weren't really a crew, we were future colonists which meant young, brainy and noncooperative. The ship was completely automatic, of course, which made us strictly a group of passengers, like those in a crowded transit shuttle back on Earth. We had make-work, but eventually we grew bored and sick and tired of one another and then silent and hostile. The Colonization Board had expected that and made sure we had shadow screens and no weapons of any kind. For our part, we wore Privacy like an invisible suit of armor, and the day inevitably came when we didn't speak to one another at all.
Nobody said a word now, all stared expressionless at the thing on the deck. They were waiting for the captain to speak and I didn't know what to say. I didn't look like a captain I was short and skinny and cursed with a baby face and pale hair the color of ashes and right then I didn't feel like a captain, either. I coughed, the noise sounding gross and vulgar in the humid cabin, and wondered how to begin, then realized I couldn't see the death mask behind the cracked faceplate of the spacesuit. The warm moisture in the cabin had condensed into an army of fine white crystals intent on burying the thing where it lay.
I kicked over to the suit, grabbed a floor ring to brake myself and hunkered down by the frosted metal. I brushed away the crystals from the plate, wiped my hands on my naked thighs and rocked back and forth on my heels, momentarily absorbed by the fragile face be-hind the plate. Then it was time to say something and I was suddenly acutely conscious of the soft whine of the central computer, the murmur of the ventilation machin-ery that never quite removed all the moisture and human stink from the air, and the shallow breathing of a the naked crew in the cramped cabin. I could feel the temperature start to creep up even as I knelt there, and then the smell got to me and I almost gagged. We have no ship's laundry, no separate living quarters and no showers cargo was too valuable, so space and weight were at a premium which meant that living on board the Cassiopeia was like living in a crowded locker room I
just after the winning game, when you can taste the sweat in the steamy air.
I frowned, glanced up at Potter, the pimply-faced kid who was our life-systems man, and clicked my thumbnail against the faceplate with a great show of deliberation. "Not… pretty, " I croaked. My voice sounded oddly loud and choked with rust.
Potter licked his lips, picked nervously at his scraggly beard, looked like he was going to say something, then merely nodded. Hulsman, our man in microcircuitry, the boyish blond type that fat old ladies love to mother, opened his mouth, noticed that nobody else was about to speak, closed it again and instead made fluttering motions with his hands. Reynolds, a pudgy medical tech, expert at splinters, boils, blisters, hives and shipboard circumcisions, fingered his nose and looked wise. Ball, the astronomer, tall, thin and professionally British, the man I had always thought should have been captain, was suddenly preoccupied with his loincloth. Skinny little Jimenez, our physicist, whom we had earlier dubbed Keeper of the Pile, hid behind his thick glasses and bushy red beard and tried to appear inscrutable, while Adams, Kentworthy and Herschel merely stared at the thing on the deck with varying degrees of distaste and to my surprise disinterest.
I made the mental note crew all present and accounted for and swore that this time period I would actually enter it in the log, then turned my attention back to the suit. The shrunken face and the dried eyeballs and the marble mouth. I shivered. If the suit's radio had been working, you could probably have heard him scream for hours. Then something caught my eye and I leaned closer, my own breath fogging the faceplate. The radio switch was off. But that isn't done, I thought. Nobody leaves a ship with his radio off.
I nodded to Coleman, now out of his suit, and asked: "Know age?"
He hooked a foot under a brake ring and squatted down, his badge of office, the screwdriver, tucked into his greasy loincloth, ringing slightly against the deck. He was a tiny, bandy-legged man with curly black body hair and heavy eyebrows and a broad nose that made his face look faintly anthropoidal. He wiped at the suit and grunted, "Old model, maybe two-three hundred years. Dark Ages stuff. "
Which didn't tell me much, so I said, "Let's open him up. "
We fumbled with the frozen fastenings, then dumped the body out of the suit like dice out of a cup frost immediately silvered it with a thin rime. Potter and I inspected the body carefully while Colernan went over the suit. The corpse felt light and dry papier-mache. "Nothing, " I finally muttered, baffled more by thoughts of what I ought to be looking for than by what I had found. "No wounds, he didn't bleed. " I studied the faint expression, a human watermark barely discernible on the dried and frozen flesh. "Doesn't look unhappy, looks more… annoyed? Alive when he put the suit on, alive when he left the ship alone."
Alone?
I dove back to the viewing globe just as the alarm bell thundered throughout the ship once again.
I wrapped my legs around the control console, signaled the crew to remain in the cabin and let my fingers dance over the banked control boards. The ranges dwindled and the stars in the viewing globe exploded outward, touched the globe's surface and vanished in brief sparkles of light. A moment later, the globe held another hologram of a suit cartwheeling through space.
Same model, I thought. Another man from the same ship, another drifter dancing his solitary waltz. I ran my hands swiftly over the console again and the ranges grew, the stars shrinking in toward the center. The sweep line sprouted a dozen thin, red branches and a thick trunk a dozen drifting men and the ship they came from.
"Want me to get them all?" Coleman asked, looking apprehensive. "There's time… fuel mass. " He pointed to the corpse on the deck. "One isn't enough?"
I shook my head. "I want their ship, " I said quietly.
I heard movement among the crew members behind me and Jimenez drifted around the console and grabbed a brake ring. He had that thin Latin skin and I could see the little veins pulsing at his temples. "Why?" It came out as a furious, muffled croak. "No business of ours can't do anything anyway. Ship's dead, crew's dead, can't bring them back to life. Not our business!" He was a scrawny little man and, with his dirty glasses and the cords standing out in his neck, he looked thirty years older than he really was; I had to remind myself that he and I both had an Earth year to go before we reached our majority.
I glanced at the others. They were looking at the viewing globe as if it held something that smelled bad. I was pushing it, I thought. But then, the derelict had been what? Gutted by a meteorite, boarded by something?
I shook my head and made slight corrections for the viewing globe. "Whatever happened to them could happen to us, " I said logically. "Maybe we can find out what it was. "
Jimenez hunched over the globe, the exploding stars disappearing into the reddish thatch that covered his thin chest. I was physically closer to him right then than I had been to anybody in hundreds of time periods, and the proximity made me nervous. His voice was carefully slow, the voice you use with an adolescent when you're underlining a warning. "It's not our business, Martin! And if there's danger, we have no weapons to protect ourselves or our ship. And since that crew is dead and floating Outside, there's obviously danger and nothing we can use against it!"
"What's it?" I asked casually.
He got red in the face, glared at me for a moment longer, then shrugged his pipe-rack shoulders and said, "Have it your way. " He let go of the brake ring and drifted a few feet over to the side of the cabin with the others. I concentrated on watching the suits float past in the silence of space, the close-ups spinning through the globe. One, two, three… A dozen men, lifeless and frozen, drifting in the spotted silence, forming a funnel-shaped path back to the ship for which they had once crewed. Then the suits were gone and there was only a glittering beach of stars with a small red smear in the center that grew steadily larger. When it came within the smallest hologram range, I spun the controls and it leaped to full view. I motioned to Coleman, who slanted over to the console and inspected the image in the globe as if it were a tissue slice under a microscope.
"Freighter class, Model A-18, two hundred years old closer to two-thirty. Tell by the flare to the tubes. "
"You're too sure, " I said.
"Made models when I was a kid, " he grunted. "Won a lot of prizes. "
I stared at the ship in the globe. It was old, all right the ancient dumbbell shape, with small circular ports and awkward radar antennae projecting out beyond the hull. And then I saw it an exit hatch gaping open as if some celestial dentist had asked it to say "Ah. " I got the same feeling I used to get on Earth looking at the people on the moving sidewalks from two hundred stories up: a lurching sensation in my stomach and a loose feeling around my anus.
We drifted into a tight orbit around the derelict and waited. I started to sweat a thin film of slime that oozed out all over my body and I knew that I stank; algae-based meals have something in them that's worse than garlic. We kept inspecting the freighter in the viewing globe, hoping to get some clue, but there was nothing to be seen from a distance only the ship itself silhouetted against the stars, one hatch open to space. There was no sign of any physical activity and no sudden burst of chatter from our radio receiver, which was running up and down the frequency spectrum like a squirrel on a tree, hoping to lock onto a signal. There was no sign of life on the infrared detectors and only residual pile activity showed on the Geigers.
"You going to board her?" Coleman asked hesitantly. I could sense the attention of the crew suddenly switch from the viewing globe to me.
"How many long-voyage ships fail to reach their destination?" I mused. "Thirty percent? Forty?"
Reluctantly. "About that. "
"Anybody know why?" I asked quietly. "No. Anybody ever found a freighter that didn't make it? No again in the deeps of space, there isn't even any sense looking. But somebody just found one. We did. And somebody can now hold an autopsy. Us. "
Coleman's face was all lines and angles, his brows two greasy black thumbprints over his small brown eyes. "Look we're freighter class, long-voyage freighter class. The only weapons on board are knives less than three inches in length. "
"You think aliens are a possibility?" None had ever been found.
"Not likely. "
"Then what's bothering you?"
"I don't know. " His usual growl faded to a mumble and he wouldn't meet my eyes; I was forcing him into a corner and I knew he hated me for it. "I don't think we ought to bother. It doesn't really concern us. "
I stared at him for a moment and his face grew red. Then I glanced back at the viewing globe, at the lonely ship framed against the glitter of the galaxy, and made up my mind. I turned to the crew and said curtly, "Any volunteers for a boarding party?"
Nobody looked at me and nobody raised a hand. I let the silence grow and finally Jimenez said in his hoarse croak, "This isn't a military cruiser and you're not a real captain, Martin. You're elected and we can elect another if we want. "
I shrugged to myself. I had half expected it and it really didn't matter. If they wanted a new captain, that was jake with me. And then I thought about it a moment longer, about maybe Jimenez running the ship, and decid-ed much to my surprise that it wasn't jake at all. Not really.
"Fine, " I lied. "I didn't ask for the job. Anybody who wants the responsibility and the work that goes with it" there wasn't much, but you'd have to be captain to know that "can have it. Anybody want to nominate himself? Hulsman?" He looked alarmed and shook his head. "Ball?" He declined, too, which surprised me I figured if anybody would have grabbed it, Ball would have. "Jimenez?" He hesitated. "Come on, Jimenez, " I said, "the involvement will be good for you. "
It worked, of course. He shook his head and rasped, "No thanks. "
"Anybody else?" There were no takers. "Thank you all for the honor, gentlemen. Jimenez, Coleman, suit up. " I turned to the others. "Ball is acting captain. If we fail to return within three time periods, resume voyage. Do not try rescue. "
I unwrapped my legs from the console, motioned Ball over to it, then floated to the spacesuit locker. We suited up in silence and all the while I felt vaguely unhappy. Nobody had wanted to get involved with my excursion over to the derelict, but nobody had really put up a fight against it, either; and for some reason, that bothered me.
It was while drifting across to the derelict that I had my first really bad time of it. In space, you tend to react one of two ways. For some, the environment has no meaning Outside is a room of black velvet with small lights for stars embedded in the black, and you, your shipmates and your ship comprise the immediate horizons. The psychological Gestalt is not one of vastness but one of an odd miniaturization. For others, particularly if they lose their referent points, reality floods their sensory apparatus and they panic. It was something that hadn't been foreseen by the early astronauts, who could position themselves in space by the huge bulk of the Earth nearby and their own space capsules. In deep space, a man can't conceive of the vastnesses, the immense stretches in any di-rection, the feeling of no horizon, no end to the uncharted silent reaches.
It hit me when I was halfway across. I had twisted slightly to get at my laser flashlight and for a split second I lost sight of the Cassiopeia, the derelict, and Coleman and Jimenez. I could suddenly feel the immensities, the intense quiet, the frozen loneliness, the indifference. It was like being cast adrift on a huge ocean at night, an ocean in which there was no spark of life in the black waters below and no familiar beating of wings in the dark skies above and the nearest land was so far away you could not even imagine the distance.
My muscles spasmed and my suddenly clenched hand automatically turned on the laser flash. My eyes followed the beam outward until it was lost in space a beam of light that penciled out and vanished in the immensities, but which in my mind's eye kept running on and on and on. And then the sense of my own insignificance crushed me and there was only blackness and I closed my eyes and knew I was falling but there was no floor that I would ever hit.
It sounded at first like a baby crying and then I realized it was myself. I jerked my eyes open wide, started to cartwheel, then caught a glimpse of Coleman and Jimenez on my left, silently watching. Their size immediately told me their distance from myself and suddenly the whole scene collapsed and inverted itself, like a curious optical illusion. The vastness was actually a room with dimension, the Cassiopeia and the derelict marking the positions of the walls of black velvet studded with the tiny lights that looked like stars.
I caught my breath, swallowed, pushed the panic from my mind and set my suit rockets so I slowly circled the derelict. At the far end I spotted the name, almost pitted into illegibility: The John B. I couldn't tell what the last name was. Then the hatch was yawning open below me and Jimenez and Coleman had already disappeared inside. I clung to the lip for a moment before ducking through and stared back at the black depths behind me, at the sandy sifting of stars and the Cassiopeia riding in silhouette half a mile away. The words came automatically: ghostly galleons. Nor did the feeling vanish once inside. The shadow screens, shutting out sight and sound, were on, apparently still operated by the residual activity of the pile, cutting the ship into cubicles and compartments and a main corridor. The cold light tubes were also on, bathing the empty corridor in brilliance after how many time periods? I knew without looking further that the ship was deserted and I could imagine echoing footsteps and pale ghosts.
Oh pilot, 'tis a fearful night! There's danger on the deep.
Jimenez and Coleman drifted up to me, looking like oddly articulated fish in their suits. "We won't split up until we can turn off the shadow screens, " I said, trying very much to sound like a ship's captain. "Crew's quarters first, then communications, then the pile room. " Even to myself, I sounded officious.
Jimenez' voice was an irritating squeak in my headphones. "What are we looking for?"
"Don't you think you'll know when you see it?" I asked. And then it occurred to me that he wasn't being sarcastic after all.
We hit the crew's quarters first the one long compartment with individual ports, elasto-hammocks, and individual viewing screens hooked up to the central computer, the standard source of information and entertainment, the electronic tit on which we all suckle as soon as we're on board. There were switches for the read-out screens, plus additional switches so you could partition off your section with a shadow screen for Privacy. And that struck me as odd all the screens were on, which was highly unlikely, though I had noted their increasing use aboard the Cassiopeia.
I ignored my own dictum about staying in sight and; pushed through into one of the screened-off compart-
ments. It was empty, of course, but there were telltale signs of human occupancy, like a fading whiff of perfume in the air. The archaeologist entering the burial tomb, I thought. And from an axe handle and a shard of pottery, I'll resurrect the man who lived here. But there was damn little in this tomb. A chessboard had been set up it was forbidden to bring anything personal aboard, but Cole-man had smuggled one aboard the Cassiopeia and I had no doubt but what it was a standard bit of contraband and dates of games played and who had won and who had lost marked with a soft pen on the bulkhead. I knelt down and looked at the dates. At first a game had been played every time period, then it was every other, then every tenth time period, and finally the 1267th time period out two members of the crew had played their last game. The pieces were still on the board and by the looks of it, the game had only just begun. Then there had been an interruption and the players had left and the game had never been resumed.
I shoved through to the next screened compartment and just then Coleman located the central switch and all the shadow screens dissolved and we were in one large compartment. At the far end was the pile room and at the near one, the control console and communications. Crew's quarters were in between, spiraling like a gigantic helix around what had been the main corridor. I started to drift over to join Coleman, then suddenly hung back. A thin magnetic food tray was on the deck by one of the elasto-hammocks. I bent and ran a metal finger across the residue on the tray. The meal had been half eaten, the remains now effectively freeze-dried. Somebody had obviously set the tray down, magnetic fork carefully placed back in the indentation provided, and walked away. The tray hadn't been dumped in panic, the food particles in the standard gummy sauce that adhered to the metal tray hadn't been scattered what looked like artificial rice, steak and peas were still within their shallow compartments.
There was a sound in my headphones and I looked up to see Jimenez waving at me from the power pile. I floated over. The dials and rheostats indicated that the pile was at neutral a high enough level of activity to supply power for the cold light tubes and the shadow screens and perhaps a few other facilities, but hardly enough to provide any thrust.
Jimenez had the engineer's log open and I glanced down to where his finger was pointing. Shut pile down, time period 1436. Signed, Dickinson, Physicist. So it had happened 169 time periods after the last chess game had been started, I thought. If I guessed correctly, that was the time period the ship had been deserted. From then on, the John B. had drifted.
"Coleman… "
He floated over, the beard behind his faceplate making him look like a monkey in a glass cage.
"Granted the pattern in which we found them, do you have any idea within how much time of each other the crew members would had to have left the ship?"
His voice sounded metallic and puzzled. "Not the faintest, not over a drift pattern of two hundred years. The computer could figure it. " He paused. "Probably within a few time periods of each other, maybe a few hours. "
"Could they have all left together?"
"No, we would have found them all clumped together then. No, I think they left within hours of each other. "
I shivered. So one by one they had suited up and walked out, I thought. Walked out to a certain death, indifferent to the ship, indifferent to their mission, indifferent to life itself. And no indication as to why. No struggle, no hurriedly scrawled notes, no indication of force.
We ended our search at the far end of the compartment, by the control console and the central computer. I: had a sudden hunch and sat down at the console. There was enough pile activity to energize the computer. I tapped out a request for a biblical passage as a test. There was a soft whine and clicking and then the passage appeared on the readout screen, the lines moving slowly up from the bottom to the top.
Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am.
I hesitated a moment, guessed at a date, ran my fingers over the keys and requested a list of read-outs for the 437th time period. Soft clicking. Biologist Scheer had requested information on chess, mathematician Bailey had requested current light fiction, Captain Shea had wanted a history of the Renaissance. I jumped to the 989th time period. No requests. I tried a few periods later. Still none. There were no further requests for another thirty-one time periods, then psychologist Hendrix had suddenly wanted to read everything about the problems of cities in the late Twentieth, early Twenty-first Centuries. There were no requests after that until the 1436th time period, when physicist Dickinson had wanted technical information on the pile. From there on, the request files were completely blank.
I suddenly felt a hammering through the metal soles of my boots and looked up from the read-out screen to see Coleman tearing at a bulkhead safe with a spanner wrench. The safe abruptly gave way and Coleman did a slow flip, grabbing a brake ring to stop himself. He fumbled around in the safe, then drifted over to me with a half dozen log tapes. The inscription on one of the small cans read: Log of the John B. McClellan. The name jogged my memory and I recalled it in a footnote in a textbook, one of the names in a long listing of lost ships.
I told Coleman to take them back with him, then turned to Jimenez: "We miss anything?"
He dutifully glanced around at the cabin behind him, but I got the feeling that he really wasn't seeing it. "You can't think of anything, I sure as hell can't. "
I started for the hatch, then drifted back to the central computer and took the big reel of tape with its listing of read-out requests. Who knew…
On the way out, what had been in the back of my mind finally hit me. / hadn't found anything wrong. No signs of being boarded, no signs of violence nothing wrong with the ship itself. Which left what? The crew?
And then I didn't think of it anymore, because we had left the cave of the John B. behind and I was in the emptiness of space again, frantically trying to locate the Cassiopeia and get a bearing before the illusion reversed itself and I was once more an insignificant speck suspended in a black void without end.
We committed the unknown crewman to space once more with appropriate ceremony, made the necessary course corrections and resumed the long voyage. The John B. dwindled in the distance behind us and then was nothing more than a memory and a half dozen computer tapes.
I spent the next three or four time periods listening to the contents of the John B.'s log, almost all of which consisted of routine, technical entries. Those entries that weren't most of these were at the beginning mentioned winners in the daily chess tournament and what could be classified as mild gossip items about members of the crew. Toward the end, there were stretches of missing entries where the captain had failed to file his daily report.
The last entry was for the last time period. Am going Outside.
There was no explanation given, no reason, no mention of any threat. I could imagine the captain putting down his speakalong, suiting up and walking out. But I had no clue as to why.
I stored the log tapes in the computer locker, made a mental note to give them a more thorough run-through in the near future and spent the next few time periods speculating about them while stretched out in my compartment, the shadow screens on, staring quietly out of the port at the sowing of stars in the unfathomable distance. The tapes gradually slipped from my mind and I started thinking about Earth and New Chicago and the green fields of the Midwest and the five hundred time periods we had to go before we made planet-fall. And then one period I was lying there thinking of those five hundred segments of time and wondering what it would be like to run down a sidewalk again or dive into a pool of water, when I suddenly reflected that there was a certain unreality to my thinking. Planet-fall, another world, blue skies… But there was no conviction to my thinking, no real belief that that kind of future was going to happen.
I really came awake then, and it was like waking up in a house in the middle of the night, when you catch yourself listening, and you're sweating and snaking and just lying there waiting. And then I had my finger on it and the thought didn't shift fast enough to get away. I really didn't believe we were going to make planet-fall. What I did believe, way down deep, was that one day we were going to suit up and casually walk out of the Cassiopeia.
I sat up on the edge of my hammock and cocked an ear and let my shadow screen fade and just listened to the ship for a moment. The silence was smothering, and yet I could remember laughter and curses and games in the corridor and times when you could see the whole undivided compartment for time period after time period.
My mind started to race and fall all over itself. The John B. hadn't been hulled by a meteorite or boarded by alien life forms. Mechanical failure? But long-voyage freighters had triple safe-guards; it was impossible for something to go wrong with the pile or the computer or the electrical setup. The life-systems setup something could go wrong there, but chances were vanishingly slim. Which left…
The crew of course.
But there had been no signs of violence, no signs of mutiny. A saboteur on board? But there had to be an opposing political or military setup and there was none. Mass insanity? Hardly not in the accepted sense.
I thought about what the Cassiopeia had been like right after blast-off and what it was like now, and shivered. It had been like watching a clock run down. The life had gradually seeped out of the crew while the shadow screens had grown like ivy. When was the last time Coleman had played a chess game? And when was the last time I had filed a log report?
I had to do something about it, I thought, lying back down on the elasto-hammock the very next time period. And then I realized what I was doing and turned pale. Not the next time period, now! I tumbled off the hammock and shoved over to Jimenez' compartment and pushed through the shadow screen, not waiting to palm for permission.
He was sacked out on his hammock, his eyes closed, his heavy reddish body hair covering him like a soft au-burn fuzz. When he had first come on board, he had been alert, alive, almost obnoxiously eager constantly check-ing the pile, filling his calculating slate with row after row of figures, 'delighted that the central computer contained enough information on his specialty to keep him busy for three solid years.
He suddenly sensed I was there and opened his eyes to stare quietly at me, without expression. I said, "Hello, Specs. "
"Privacy, Martin. "
"I wanted to ask you what you thought about the John B., " I said.
He turned his back, his spine looking like a long, red- dish caterpillar. "I don't think about it, Martin. "
"Why not?"
"If you're playing twenty questions, I'm not inter- ested. "
"It's serious, " I said.
"Sure. " He was quiet for a moment and I began to think he had actually drifted off to sleep, when he sudden- ly said, "I don't think about it because there's nothing we can do about it and it's none of our business. "
"I think " I started.
"I don't give a damn what you think! I want Privacy now get the hell out, will you?"
"What would you do, " I said slowly, "if I told you that the pile was red-lining?"
He sat up on one elbow and glared. "I'd call you a goddamned liar! Nothing's wrong with that pile nothing ever has been and nothing ever will be! It doesn't need the attention of men, Martin! This ship doesn't need a physicist or a metalsmith or an astronomer or a captain, for that matter. Something could happen to any one of us and it wouldn't matter a damn we're passengers, Martin, passengers!" He sagged back down and stared quietly at the screened overhead. His voice was barely audible. "Get out of here, will you?"
I backed out and drifted over to Hulsman's compartment. The shadow screens were on there, too all of the ship's screens were on, I noted and I hesitated a moment before floating through. Hulsman was the youngest on board, our mascot when we had left Earth. He was the likable type blond hair, freckles, a smile that was catching. You wanted to rub your knuckles on the back of his head and send him to the outfield to shag flies.
I pushed through and found him watching me. It was an older face now much older framed by long, dirty blond hair, and the bright-blue eyes were a dull and dirty slate.
"Hello, Martin. " The voice was listless.
"I was thinking about the John B., " I said casually. "I was wondering what you thought. "
A tired look flooded his face, as if talking and thinking were too much effort. "I guess I haven't thought much about it, Martin. I guess I don't much care. "
"Don't you think the same thing could happen to us?"
A flicker of concern wandered uncertainly over his face and then fled. "That was a long time ago, wasn't it?"
"You're not curious?"
"I guess I ought to be, but I'm not. " He lay there quietly for a moment, then suddenly closed his eyes and turned his back to me. "Look, Martin, would you you know leave me alone? I guess I can't help much. "
I stood there and looked at him, helpless. "That's | OK, I understand, Hully. "
I had started to drift out when he suddenly said in a low voice, "I got this funny feeling, Martin, this feeling that I ought to be doing something only somehow I can't get started. I ought to be able to do something on board, Martin. " Then he turned slightly and jammed his face into the hammock. "It scares me, " he whimpered in I a muffled voice. "It scares the hell out of me. "
The first real crisis came twenty time periods later,. | when life on board the Cassiopeia had unwound even further and we were all nonthinking slow-motion ghosts. I was in the life-systems compartment, along with Hulsman, Ball and Coleman, lining up for the "evening meal, " though most of the crew now preferred to draw their meals when nobody else was around and they didn't run the risk of having to talk to anybody. I was at one of the food dispensers working the selectors above my tray when Potter pushed in to take a tray from the rack and shove over to the next food slot a few feet away. When he shoved away from the rack, his tray caught in the food slot and he slid on past it.
It happened quickly enough. The thin tray, worn sharp from hundreds of insertions into the metal mouth of the food dispenser, caught in the slot, and when Potter slid past it, the sharp edge of the tray slashed deep into his forearm.
None of us said a word, we just stared. Potter had: grabbed a brake ring and now floated in the middle of the compartment, a big frightened kid staring wide-eyed at his left arm where the blood spurted, balled, then flat-tened slowly toward the deck.
It seemed like a full minute went by and still nobody ' moved. I stood glued by the side of the food dispenser, my mind split. One part of it a large part wasn't reacting at all. It was simply watching Potter, watching him bleed, watching the blood pool on the deck, wondering curiously what Potter was going to do next. It was like watching a fascinating stereocast. The hologram that was Potter was going to die, right before my eyes, from a slashed main artery. It was something I had never seen before.
And then it made connection. Maybe none of us were 'vital to the ship, but Potter was the life-systems man and he was vital to the crew. And Potter was going to die!
I dropped my tray and dove over to him. He stood there in semishock, trembling and staring stupidly at his arm. I tore at my loincloth and bound the rag tightly around his arm, then whirled to Hulsman, watching blank-faced.
"Get Reynolds, on the double!"
He didn't move; his eyes were glazed.
I tightened the bandage, knotted it, then grabbed a handful of food off my tray that had settled to the deck nearby and threw it at Hulsman. The mess hit along the side of his neck and slid slowly off toward his shoulder.
"Move, you sonofabitch, or I'll push you face first into the nearest dispenser and let you drown in that slop! Snap it!"
"Privacy… " Hulsman stared to chatter.
"MOVE, DAMMIT!"
He shot from his bench into the cold light corridor, frantically grabbing at brake rings to guide his progress. I could hear him bawling for Reynolds even as he disappeared from view.
Pain and shock were now washing through Potter. He clutched his arm and started to moan, then looked up at me, his face horror-stricken. "I could have died, " he blubbered. "They would have let me die. "
A dozen time periods after Potter had slashed his arm, the rest of the crew had faded even further into long-voyage apathy, remote to one another, remote even to themselves. The ship was now a jungle of shadow screens preserving Privacy. Crew members went out of their way to avoid one another, and when they did meet, it was with hostile noncuriosity.
I made friends with Potter because he saved my life.
There had come a time period when, psychologically speaking, I caved in and started to avoid the others. I spent more and more of my time floating in my compartment, staring out the port and thinking of home or maybe of absolutely nothing at all. I had been the only one to worry about the ship and the crew all right, now, to hell with them. And shortly after that, when Potter shoved through my shadow screen without palming for permission, I caught myself saying automatically, "Privacy, Potter. "
"You've got trouble, Captain. "
I came out of it like a man waking up in the morning.; "Whadd'ya mean?"
"Ball's suiting up to go Outside. You've got maybe three minutes to catch him. "
I rolled off my hammock, shoved against a brake ring and shot up the corridor, grabbing rings as I passed to give myself a little additional thrust each time. I clipped through one shadow-screened compartment, taking a chance of colliding with its occupant, then rounded a corner and bore down on the spacesuited figure quietly working the controls of the inner air lock. I sailed in between the figure and the lock, grabbing a ring and braking to a halt with a speed that almost tore my arms out of their sockets.
"Going someplace, Ball?"
He stared at me, then reached up and undamped his helmet and took it off. He shook his head, sending his black beard and long hair flying, and smiled woodenly. He looked like one of the prophets out of the Old Testa-ment, wild eyes and all.
"I'm going Outside, Captain, " he said gravely.
"You never checked with me, " I said.
"Sorry about that, I really meant to. "
"Do your duties take you Outside?" I asked, stalling.
The wooden smile again. "Clear view of the stars. Unimpeded view and all that. Natural observations. It's provided for… " His voice changed slightly, losing its for-
-
mal tone. He took a ragged breath. "Regs state that the captain is not to interfere with technicians in the normal pursuit of their duties. "
"Regs also state that no man leaves the ship without a tether line, unless it's ship-to-ship transfer. Where's your line, Ball?"
He stared stupidly down at his equipment belt. "Did I forget that?"
"And what about your tanks? You've got one of those we used to go over to the John B. with. There's no more than twenty minutes in it, if that. "
His eyes became shifty. "I hadn't left yet. I was going to change tanks. "
I forced a nervous smile. "Look, Ball, we need you. And you'll be needed at destination planet. "
Ball licked his lips. His face had a hunted look. "This ship doesn't need me, " he mumbled. "Neither does anybody in it. And planet-fall's… " His voice trickled away. He cocked his head to one side and smiled faintly. "You're not going to let me out, are you, Martin?"
I saw it coming that vital fraction of a second before it actually happened. A slight hardening around the eyes, then all expression abruptly vanished, like fingerprints on a freshly baked cake, and Ball hit me like a docking tug, howling, "I'm going Outside, damnit, I'm going… "
He was thin but with the deceptive hardness that thin mechanics sometimes have. He yanked me away from the air-lock hatch, then shoved me, hard, down the corridor.
I flew backward about twenty feet, the breath momentarily knocked out of me, then scrambled upright and shot back from a brake ring. Ball whirled, his suit small handicap in the near-weightless ship.
"You can't keep me cooped up with bloody strangers!"
I tried to brake and hit him all at the same time, but I overshot and Ball grabbed me around the waist as I shot by. I doubled up and tried to get my knees between me and his suit, but his metal-clad right arm shot out and caught my head between his forearm and biceps and he squeezed, gripping his wrist with his other hand. I kicked out with my feet, found no purchase and flailed wildly at the empty air. The pressure abruptly increased and I started to black out.
"Going Outside, goddamnit, going Outside. "
"Grab him, Martin, grab him!"
The pressure suddenly let up and I squirmed free. I shook my head to clear it, then whirled to see what had happened. Potter was clinging to the collar of Ball's spacesuit with one hand, his slashed arm hanging uselessly at his side.
It couldn't last but a second longer, I thought, dazed. I dug my feet into a brake ring, crouched, then shot up at Ball. The timing was just right. I hit Ball at chest level and wrapped my legs around him as he toppled back-ward. Then I clasped both hands together and clubbed, once. His eyes dulled and I could feel him go limp.
I let go, brushed the sweat off my face and caught my breath in racking sobs. Then everything caught up with me and I bent double, suddenly afraid I was going to lose my dinner all over the corridor. Potter caught my arm and I mumbled "Thanks" and forced myself to swallow the bile. I felt dizzy and sick, and to cover, I said, "What made you help, Potter?"
"It was the logic of it, " he said with an intense serious-ness. "If I didn't care what happened to Ball, then I couldn't very well be sore at the guys who hadn't cared what happened to me when I was bleeding, could I? So I figured I had to care. "
I didn't answer, still trying to control my stomach.
"Do you think the rest of the crew would have followed him out?"
I nodded. "Yeah one by one, until this can of worms was empty and we probably would have been among them. " I stared down the empty corridor and shivered. There were people behind the shadow screens, but the Cassiopeia seemed deserted already.
Ball started to moan and I bent over and slapped him lightly in the face. His eyelids fluttered a little and then he was staring up at me, blank-faced.
"Get out of the suit, " I growled. "Hang it up and go to your compartment. I'll be by later. "
We watched him drift off down the corridor and Potter said, "What are you going to do when he tries to leave again?"
"Stop him, what else?"
"And the time after that?"
I shrugged and started to float back to my compartment, then suddenly turned. "Look, we've got the tapes of read-out requests from the John B. If you want to help, we can take turns running them through the computer and briefing the material requested. Maybe we can come up with something. "
Potter gave me a strange look. "You're the captain, Martin you want me to do something, you just tell me to do something. "
We fed the punched request tapes from the John B. into the Cassiopeia's own memory tanks and took turns scanning the material requested. We were hardly thorough you couldn't read five years of read-out requests in ten or twenty time periods and the requests themselves were something of an enigma, the third derivative of the personalities on board, their likes, their dislikes, their passing fancies. Was it significant, for example, that mathematician Bailey had gradually changed from a diet of light fiction to heavy treatises on mathematics during a thousand time periods? There was no way of knowing.
It was Potter who suggested a solution. "Look, we're not being objective, we're too close to the trees to see the forest. "
"How so?"
"I think we ought to be working by analogy. We're assuming that we're the only ones worried about the future of the Cassiopeia and what has gone wrong and we're right. But why? Why are you concerned, for example? Why did you stay on duty when the rest of the crew were crapping out? And why am I concerned?"
I felt that he had overstated it; myself, I knew that I
had gradually been giving up; but I thought about it a long moment, then said, "A matter of responsibility to the crew. Being designated captain, the mere act of designation, gave me a feeling of responsibility. The same, I guess, for you. Both of us have a responsibility to the crew as a whole; the others don't. "
He looked at me quizzically. "Wouldn't somebody on board the John B. have been in a similar position?"
"OK, " I said slowly, "I see your point. Obviously, the captain. And they had a psychologist on board. I think that would have been about it. "
"I think I ought to take the captain's requests, and you, the psychologist's, " he said thoughtfully. "It'll probably make for greater objectivity. "
It was good logical reasoning and it's what I should've done, but I guess if a parent can learn from his child, a captain can learn from his crew even if it's only a crew of one.
Two time periods later, I had a fairly good picture of Peter Hendrix, the psychologist on board the John B. A young man maybe twenty-five and something of an athlete, at least enough of one to be vain about his phy-sique and worry about getting out of shape (requested read-out on Koptka's Isometric Exercises the 29th time period out). Probably hadn't actually practiced in his profession (Five Years of Case Histories: Horney), was a pipe collector (Vanderhof's Briars and Meerschaums'), and something of a dog fancier (Reisman: Man's Animal Friend, Fifth Edition, Rev. ). About the 800th time pe-riod out, the requests started to fade. It was obvious that Hendrix was reading less and less, that he had gotten to the point where he stayed within his compartment, shadow screens on, floating in the dark and avoiding other crew members. Then, suddenly, the 1020th time period, he had requested Vandercook's Problems of the Cities and Walter's Man by Himself, two studies of the megapolis of the Twentieth Century. There was a flurry after that of similar volumes and then these requests, too, began to taper. From the 1045th time period on, Hendrix had made no more requests.
I pondered the list for a moment, then shrugged and started checking to see which ones were in the Cassiopeia's central computer. Both the Vandercook and the Walter were still available; some of the others had been deleted. I made myself comfortable at the read-out console, set the controls for SLOW SCAN and started to read.
I didn't get it all at once parts of it didn't fall into place until I thought about it for a while but after about three hours, I began to see the connections. A few time periods later, I was a sweaty mess, pretty sure of what the problem was but much less sure of a solution. I was surprised that any of the long-voyage freighters had made it at all. Part of the problem was built into the nature of the long voyage, part of it undoubtedly depended on the random selection of crew. All of it gave me the chills. I slept on it for a period, then shoved over to Potter's compartment and violated Privacy with no regrets at all.
He was asleep, curled up in a fetal position on his hammock. I grabbed him by the shoulder. "Wake up, Potter c'mon, snap it!"
"Wha… what… "
"What did you find out about the captain?"
He swung his hairless legs over the side of the hammock, yawned and scratched his naked belly. "Is that what you woke me up for? Jesus Aitch Christ. Look, I didn't find out a goddamned thing. He liked Italian cooking and he was fond of horses I guess they weren't extinct then, he owned one or something. " And then he snapped wide awake. "What's the story on Hendrix?"
I told him, talking for almost a full hour. When I had finished, he looked round-eyed and whistled. "So what happens now, sir? As a theory, it sounds good to me, but what do we do about it? It's one thing to know, another
"I'm not sure what I'll do, " I said slowly. "I guess I'll try talking. If that doesn't work, then I'll just have to think of something else. "
I tried Coleman first. We had been friends once and I thought my chances of reaching him were better than any of the others.
I palmed permission to enter his compartment, got no response and shoved through the screen anyway. Cole-man's arms were folded behind his head, his eyes closed.
"Joe. "
No response. I drifted closer and slapped him lightly in the face. His eyes slowly opened; there was no sign of anger.
"Privacy, Martin. " His eyelids started to sag shut again.
I slapped him once more, a little harder. His eyes stayed open this time. I drifted over to the port and ' turned my back. I was sweating now, beginning to stink with nervousness.
"You know, Joe, I was thinking about the other time period, when Potter got his arm slashed. I started thinking to myself what would happen if Potter had died and then the algae tanks went out? And that kind of shook me up for a moment, because it occurred to me that even if we're not important to the ship, Joe, we're important to one another. And I hadn't really thought about that before. "
I stole a quick glance at Coleman. Nothing.
"See, without Potter, Joe, we don't eat, we don't breathe. If I hadn't gotten a tourniquet on him, he would've bled to death and all the rest of us would have died if anything happened to the tanks. It was lucky I realized that, wasn't it, Joe?"
No response.
"It's pretty cold Outside, Joe, pretty dead. No life for millions and millions of miles. The only living things are right here inside the Cassiopeia. You and I and Potter and Jimenez and the rest of them. Ten little pulsing blobs of jelly against all that nothingness out there. We need one another, Joe, we can't shut one another out anymore. If we do, then some time period somebody's going to walk Outside and the rest of us are going to pick up our marbles and follow. And none of us will have sense enough to realize it's suicide. "
I was both sweating and cold by the time I had finished. So far as I could tell, Coleman didn't even know I was there.
Something snapped inside my head then and I started yelling and swearing at him and calling him every name I could think of. After a few minutes of that, my stream of curses turned to a trickle and then I dried up completely. It was like railing at a corpse. I turned to leave and then I spotted Coleman's chess set against the bulkhead, the little Dresden china figurines standing guard over their tiny land of red and black squares. They were lovely pieces, delicate, with soft, glowing colors.
I picked up a queen, regal and aloof in her glazed, rose-colored dress and little • slippers of spidery fired china. Then I took Coleman's big magnetic screwdriver from the bulkhead where it had stuck, hefted it by the blade and whacked the handle down on the queen in my other hand. It was like cracking ice. The figurine shattered and fine china dust powdered out through my fingers. I opened my hand and the crushed pink-and-blue queen started to disperse through space.
"It was against regs to bring these on board, " I said icily. I picked up a bishop in fine china miter and cloak and a second later he, too, was powder. I lifted up a rook next and glanced up at Coleman. There was something in his eyes now, something that, on other occasions, would have sent shivers down my spine.
"You shouldn't have violated regs, " I said. The rook was dust. I bent to pick up a knight. Whatever was in Coleman's eyes had to be coaxed out, even if it were murder. I casually smashed the knight.
"You bastard!"
And Coleman was on me. He staggered me for a moment, but I had expected it and managed to step partly aside. He grabbed my leg, then twisted and dove for my throat. I dodged and clutched an arm as he shot by and got his head with my other hand. The speed was already
there and all it needed was for me to guide him a little. He slammed into the glassteel port and there was a soft splurt and the cubicle was shot through with a fine spray of blood. I grimaced a shade too hard; Coleman had probably broken several teeth. I still had hold of his arm and suddenly whipped it back and wrapped my legs around him and squeezed. He bucked, arched for a second, then all his strength flowed out and he went limp. I hung on for a moment, wary, then let him go except for a hand on his arm to steady him.
He surprised me, then. He turned, buried his head in my shoulder and started to sob.
We held the council of war in Potter's compartment, with all the shadow screens on and our voices low, though the chances of being interrupted were just about zero.
"We can't go around to each member of the crew and try to convince him of anything by sweet reasonableness, " Potter said thoughtfully.
"I wasn't going to, " I said. "The only thing I think will work is shock we'll have to force them to become involved. "
"I don't know… " Potter began.
"It worked on me, " Coleman said, faintly unfriendly. "But I don't know if it will work on anybody else. "
I idly scratched the matted hair under my arm, squashing something that had so far evaded the ultraviolet tubes overhead, then turned to Potter. "Any ideas?"
He shook his head. "I'm no psychologist. "
"Fake it, " I said bluntly. "I'm no captain, either. So what would you do if you were a psychologist?"
Potter's smile was toothy. "You want me to think like; a shrink OK, I'd play on their strongest emotions, love and hate and fear, try to shake them up. But the catch is, • we don't know what they love and hate and fear. If this ' had been a military ship you know, ankles to elbows all the time there would have been constant involvement and we'd know one another a lot better. " He shrugged. "As it is "
"What about the personnel tapes in the computer, " Coleman interrupted. "Wouldn't they help?"
The personnel tapes were a thought. They contained our psychological profiles, medical histories and short resumes about our home life our guts and souls reduced to minor alignments of iron oxide on tissue-thin tape to aid the placement service at destination planet.
"Those tapes are under sealed circuits, " I said dubiously. "There's no way we can get a read-out on them. "
Coleman snorted, the sudden creases in his monkey face cracking open his beard so the hairs stuck out like the bristles on a brush. "Any idiot could break those seals. "
"Could you?" I asked.
He shrugged. "I might blow the whole computer, but I doubt it. "
"And then we go to work on the crew, that it?" Potter asked.
"That's right, " I said. "Frighten them, irritate them, make them angry. "
"You can adapt to irritation, " Potter said, suddenly doubtful.
"It all depends, " I said thoughtfully, "on the irritation. "
We started with Jimenez, because he had an easy weakness we could play on and because we needed his strength, if we could arouse it. He was now a quiet, almost completely passive Jimenez who had given up any pretense whatsoever at routine. He either slept or stared out the ports, padding to the food dispenser at regular intervals, eating silently, not talking, not really aware of anybody else at all, except from time to time he seemed apprehensive when somebody else was around. He was a native of Tijuana, Mexico, the festival center of the North American continent, and according to the personnel tapes, he hated the area and not without reason it was alive with rattlers and Jimenez had a phobia about snakes.
It took skill to turn a twisted piece of cloth into what we wanted. Skill, some coloring and some hardened grease to make ridges and scales. Then we waited until Jimenez was asleep. I was elected to creep cautiously through the shadow screen and drop the "snake" in the reddish fuzz that covered Jimenez' chest. Then I lightly dragged the tips of my fingers through his chest hair and made a rattling sound with my tongue against my teeth, and quickly ducked out of the compartment.
There was a moment's tense wait and then Jimenez bolted through the screen, his red beard flying and his eyes wild. I could imagine the scream he must have let out. He saw me, hung in space for a moment while he figured it out, his eyes rolling, then grabbed a brake ring and plunged feet first at me. Coleman and Potter grabbed his arms and hauled him back.
I said, "I'd like to talk to you, Jimenez. "
He spat in my face and turned his back but I talked to him anyway.
I think I could have figured out Hulsman without reading through his profile. We had to splice some of the medical "techniques and responses" tapes and cut back and forth with a "home movie" tape of Hulsman's family; and when we were through, I was pretty disgusted with myself. I let a time period go by and then dropped by Hulsman's compartment and told him the computer was out of whack and there might be involuntary screenings of some of the memory banks but there was no way of doing anything about it. I don't think he even heard me. I told him again and left and a few hours later we programed his compartment and opened the circuits and waited.
He was partway out five seconds after the circuits were opened, his face ashen and showing signs of extreme shock. Then he hesitated and slipped back in. I followed a few minutes later. He was staring at the screen, fists balled, the muscles in his face little flat areas of concrete. I waited a moment until I was sure he knew I was there, then loudly cleared my throat.
"Your mother, Hulsman, " I said acidly, "did she ever work on stage?"
He blacked an eye and almost broke my nose before Potter and Coleman could restrain him.
We kept it up for a dozen time periods. Various indignities broke Reynolds, who had a personal sense of cleanliness that bordered on the pathological. First I smashed the ultraviolet sanitary tubes in his compartment. He was only vaguely aware of it, a slight irritation that slowly started to feed on him. Then I made sure he kept finding little bits of dried food on his dispenser tray whenever he went to eat. And, of course, I laughed and joked about his tray whenever he was in earshot, and one period in the life-systems compartment I casually let slip that I was the one who kept fouling his food tray and what a great joke it was.
He came within an ace of decapitating me by skimming the sharp-edged tray across the compartment at me. I ducked and it hit the bulkhead with enough force to bend the lip of the tray back about an inch.
Ball's weakness was his physical vanity. He was a big man and his code, of course, included not hitting any man smaller than himself to have done so would have been to lose face. He didn't know what to do when Coleman kept stumbling into him and snarling that it was all Ball's fault. Coleman managed it cleverly enough a push off a brake ring with only a slight miscalculation and Ball would be on the receiving end of an unexpected jostle or jab. After a while, Ball became very apprehensive about it a transit-shuttle passenger not knowing what the abusive drunk across the aisle is going to do next. With growing awareness came a conscious effort to ignore Coleman, except that Coleman wouldn't be ignored. He spared neither Ball's family nor his personal proclivities nor his courage which he implied was obvious more by its absence than its presence. Ball's frustration was like an itch and one time period he finally scratched it and bloodied Coleman's nose, more to his amazement than Coleman's. He stood there, vaguely upset and angry, and I promptly said the appropriate thing about their relative sizes and something to the effect that Ball should pick on a man his own size.
I had forgotten how much closer I came to being a match for him than Coleman was. "You bloody bastard!" he screamed, and almost four years of fear and frustration came pounding at me. This time it took four of us to calm him down and he was really calm only after I hit him along the side of the head with a half dozen trays. Kentworthy, Adams and Herschel were next.
But all the time I was breaking the crew, I knew it really wasn't going to work. I hadn't changed the basic situation nor the basic surroundings. I could supply more irritation, but Potter was right eventually I would become the small boy crying wolf and then I would lose them for good. What I had to do was manufacture an emergency, a genuine emergency in which there would be an honest element of chance that we might not make it, an emergency that could be coped with but just barely.
I wanted to confide in Potter and Coleman but knew I couldn't take the risk, so I researched it myself with the aid of the computer. It was the cargo manifest that finally gave me the idea. There were dangers in it there had to be and in the end it would all depend on the ingenuity of the crew. And if I had guessed wrong well, it would be no worse than bleeding their lives away staring out the ports, to finally get so fed up with themselves that they would walk out forever and spend the rest of eternity cartwheeling through the lonely reaches of space.
I waited until a time period when most of the shadow screens were on, found a crowbar and crept back to the life-systems compartment. Behind the food-dispenser fronts was a small compartment containing the automated algae tanks, the small farms of living organisms that were our life's blood. I wedged the bar into the lip of the dispenser and slowly bent it down, hooking my feet under a brake ring to gain leverage. The front gradually yielded and finally there was an opening wide enough for me to wiggle through. I squeezed past the driers and the form-ers and the flavorers and then started swinging the crowbar. Tanks erupted and the contents splattered against the bulkheads streams of green slime geysering through the compartment, filling the air with a thick green mist and coating the bar with a viscous slime. I was so frightened I wanted to vomit, but I kept swinging. I had to be right.
I finally squeezed out, heaving and gagging and dripping slime, and made my way to the control console. I located the central bank of shadow-screen controls, opened the panel beneath and rammed the crowbar into the wiring at the same time I pressed the general alarm.
The brassy clangor of the alarm beat through the ship like heavy surf, and simultaneously the control board for the shadow screens arced and sputtered and one by one the screens went off, until I was looking at a single long compartment with nine alarmed and almost nude crew members scrambling off their elasto-hammocks.
A second later somebody hollered, men started to stumble into one another and then somebody spotted me standing by the console, covered with slime and still clutching the crowbar. And all the time the alarm was screaming throughout the ship like a hysterical air-raid siren.
They swarmed up to the console.
"Hey, what gives?"
"What the hell?"
"Hey, Potter, the food dispenser!"
"What happened to the screens?"
"What the bloody hell is going on?"
"The food dispenser. "
A shriek. "THE FOOD DISPENSER!"
They swept to the other end of the compartment like a tide, then one by one they fluttered back to form a silent, watchful ring around me.
"You stupid bastard, " Jimenez said in a freezing voice, "you've signed a death warrant for everybody here. For yourself, too. "
I shook my head. "No, we can get through. There's grain in the cargo compartments and we can build hy-droponics tubs. I think we can do it. "
Everybody looked at Potter. Jimenez said, "Can we?"
Potter was squatting on the deck, holding his head in his hands and shaking and mumbling, "Holy Mother of Jesus, Martin, you shouldn't have done it, you should've warned me, you should've warned me. " Jimenez' toe caught him in the ribs and he looked up, still pasty-faced and trembling. "I don't know, / don't know. It's a big maybe. We'll have to break into the cargo compartment and we'll have to "
Reynolds squeaked, "We'll have to build a whole new ecology, that's what we'll have to do, a whole new ecology! You just don't make tubs, where'll we get the fertilizer?"
"I didn't think you'd ask anything so obvious, " I interrupted. He turned green.
Coleman had turned his back to me when Jimenez asked him about the cargo compartments. "Yeah, maybe we can get through. It'll take a lot of work. We'll have to burn our way through and I don't even know if we have enough oxyacetylene to do it. One thing for sure, we'll be damned hungry by the time we get there. "
It was Ball who said coldly, "Why'd you do it, Martin?"
They all stopped talking then and I could see the almost imperceptible movement to line up behind Ball. This was the big one, I thought, this was the final challenge. And I had no friends among them. "Because I had to, Ball, " I said slowly. "Because that was the only way I could guarantee that we would get there at all. "
He thought about it a minute, then said logically, "You may have guaranteed just the opposite. "
I nodded. "I might have, but I don't think so. Be honest, Ball would you bet that we would have made it anyway?" I turned to the rest. "Would any of you bet?; Did any of you really give a good goddamn before right now? Oh, sure, you care now all right you have to!"
Ball and I stared at each other, fencing, and after the longest moment in my life, he said quietly, "Maybe you're right. We'll see. "
I glanced at the rest of them. Coleman was nodding slightly to himself, Reynolds looked a little uncertain. I even thought I detected a slight glimmer of approval in Jimenez' small myopic eyes.
Well, I had done it, I thought with absolutely no feeling of elation. They were valuable to one another now, they were involved now they had to be, their lives depended on it.
Then Hulsman stepped out of the crowd clutching a spanner wrench and shaking his head slightly to clear away the dirty blond hair from in front of his blazing eyes. He was all tiger now, ' I thought; he would try something foolish if ticked just right. I had the feeling he was still furious about the other.
"I ought to kill you, Martin!"
I sized him up and said contemptuously, "No, you won't, Hulsman. Neither you nor anybody else would dream of it right now. "
He showed his teeth and waved the wrench and said, "Why not? What makes you so sure?"
I was pretty tired and I was starting to shake with reaction. I wished to God that I could go to sleep and forget about it all, but I realized I couldn't do that now any more than they could.
"Because you need a captain, " I said. "And I'm the only one who's qualified, I'm the only one who really wants it. Everybody else had his chance and nobody took it, nobody wanted the responsibility. So I'm it, Hulsman, don't bother looking any further. " I shoved forward slightly and grabbed the wrench away from him. "Now get the torches and get to work all of you. Snap it!"
The tenth day after touchdown, I sat in the portmaster's office going over the manifest receipt. I was uncomfortable it would be a long time before I got used to shoes and shirts and trousers again, and taking a shower struck me as something that really wasn't necessary more than once or twice a month but a good part of the discomfort was simply the fact that we were coming to the end of the manifest and there were certain items that were missing and unaccounted for.
Callahan, the portmaster, was a comfortable sort genial and ruddy, with twenty extra pounds that somehow seemed to translate into an air of authority rather than merely coat his bones with fat. He was an important man on Xerxes the portmaster on a colony planet always was and I had no doubt his relaxed attitude would vanish in a hurry when we came to the subject of the missing items.
Much to my astonishment, he really didn't seem to notice and had started to write his name at the bottom when I interrupted him.
"I'm very sorry, sir, " I said formally, "but there are some missing items. "
He put down his pen, leaned back in his wicker chair and raised an eyebrow. "Oh?"
"The seed grains, " I said stiffly. "I think there's something less than one tenth the allotment tonnage present. And certain flat metal items are not present in the form listed. "
He lit his pipe, puffed for a moment, then looked up at me with alert brown eyes that seemed a little out of place in his fleshy face. "You're referring to the flat metal sheets you converted into hydroponics tubs?"
"I didn't know " I started, surprised.
He waved a hand. "Of course I know, I'm no idiot, Martin. I've been portmaster here for almost ten years, handling an average of an Earth ship a month. The first thing we do after unloading, delousing the crew and fumigating the pigpen that the crew's quarters have been turned into is to check the manifest against what actually arrives here. And then we check the ship's log. You missed a lot of entries, but you were still pretty explicit as to what happened. "
I reddened. "I didn't mean "
"As to missing items, " he continued, "it doesn't matter.
The virtue of bureaucracy is that it constantly seeks to minimize risk. Three out of the five ships carrying identical cargoes as yours made it on the long voyage. That's not to say the seed grains won't be missed but they weren't really vital. "
"You're trying to tell me that the ship and. its cargo weren't very important, " I said bitterly.
"I mean nothing of the sort, " he said kindly. "Look, Martin, you did what you had to do for the good of the ship and the crew. On a larger scale, Earth does what it has to do for the good of the colony planets. And as important as the cargo is, don't forget that the crew is even more important we need their technical skills badly. You got them all here safely; for that, you're to be congratulated. " He suddenly looked grim. "You ought to see how some ships come in murders, insanity, crews in mutiny, sometimes half the crew dead. You did pretty well, Martin, better than you realize. "
I stared out the window behind him, not listening. Port tugs were hauling the Cassiopeia away, to be smelted down for scrap. There were few exports as yet from Xerxes and the extra incoming ships were melted down for badly needed metals. My mind started to drift, remembering the loneliness on board and the stink of the crew's quarters and Potter's slashed arm and what we had done to Hulsman and
"I think I was right about what I wrote in the log, " I said suddenly.
Callahan gave me a long look, then rolled a cigar at me across his desktop. "If you want to talk about it, I want to hear about it. "
It was flattering and I lit the cigar and felt expansive. "You said that the triumph of bureaucracy was that it sought to minimize risk. I'll buy that but that, and necessity, made the ship what it was. The reason why freighters are spartan is obvious. And since the crew is going to be green, a crew that makes only one trip, the ship has to be pretty much automatic. Which means there's nothing for the crew to really do in one sense, it isn't needed. And it knows it. "
"Is that necessarily bad?" Callahan asked, surprised.
"Any environment that doesn't require a man to do something is a hostile environment, " I said slowly. "And the less it requires him to do, the more hostile it is. "
Callahan looked blank. "I don't get it. "
I frowned. "I didn't either. Not until I had read the same material that Hendrix, the psychologist on board the John B., had read about the problems of cities in the Twentieth Century. Those early cities were a mess they were overcrowded and they suffered from air pollution and traffic strangulation and crime and all of that, but there was another problem, a more serious one. " I concentrated on the cigar for a minute. "Man's gregarious, he tends to clot in groups first in hamlets, then villages, then towns, and finally in large cities. But nobody ever figured there would be a law of diminishing returns. The larger the city, the larger the population cluster, the less important the individual man within it. He's a smaller and smaller cog in a larger and larger machine and finally he really doesn't matter at all. And those early cities were machines, tremendous machines made up of traffic flows and power grids and communication networks and huge water systems and disposal plants. Eventually, a man became aware of his own insignificance, and when he did, he started to withdraw. They had a word for it. They called it alienation anomie. "
Callahan didn't say anything, just puffed on his pipe and watched me with those alert brown eyes that could see two inches below the surface of my skin.
"There was something else, " I continued. "The closer you had to live with your neighbors, the less close you felt to them. You didn't want to know the people who lived next door, or down the hall, or across the street. They were just part of the faceless mass. Besides, you knew they didn't give a crap about you, so why should you give a crap about them?" I shivered. "A man could be murdered in a transit shuttle and nobody would come to his defense. Nobody wanted to be involved. A woman could scream for help in the streets and people would plug their ears and close their windows. They accepted horror^and weren't even aware of it. "
"Apathetic?" Callahan asked.
I nodded. "That's right. Not only toward one another, but toward themselves as well. Once, during a power black-out, people stranded in the transit shuttles didn't panic, didn't riot, didn't try to get out. They just sat there. The marvelous machine had stopped working and all the little cogs couldn't function on their own. They had forgotten how. "
I fell silent, watching the activity of the port outside the window and remembering. "What's the connection?" Callahan prodded gently. "You're talking about a city with millions of people there were only ten of you aboard the Cassiopeia. "
I wondered for a moment if the man were stupid, then realized he only wanted me to confirm what he already thought. "It was a spacegoing slum, " I said. "There were only ten of us, but on a numbers-per-square-foot basis, it would make the most overpopulated city look like a prairie. And like the people in those early cities, we had no control over our environment. We were helpless. We had routine jobs to perform make-work tout none of them really mattered. We didn't matter. We had no say-so in what was happening to us. And there was the final factor. " I could feel my armpits start to bleed sweat. "We didn't need one another and the horrible thing was that it had all been planned that way. The Colonization Board was afraid we might kill one another during the long voyage, so they provided shadow screens, taught us to respect Privacy above all, and arranged routine so we could avoid one another. And no weapons, of course, of any kind. Which made us even more helpless in the face of the unknown. And like the city dwellers, the final result was loss of identity. We became remote from one another, from ourselves, from our own feelings. Like the
^^^I^^I^^^^^H^^^^^^M^^^^^M
people in the transit shuttles, we could watch Potter bleed to death and feel nothing. We weren't involved. "
Callahan said, "Why did the crew of the John B. walk out?"
"The environment, " I said slowly. "The horrifying, indifferent environment, and the loneliness. When you're alone in a crowd, you're really alone. And then you become afraid. Finally, all you want to do is get away from, that crowd. "
"But walking Outside was suicide. "
I shrugged. "They didn't know it. They had lost touch with reality by then. As for Outside, it's not always world without end sometimes it's more like a little black room with lights studding the walls. It's as real one way as the other. " I sat there quietly for a moment, my cigar slowly turning to ash in the tray, unnoticed. "I can understand why the crew of the John B. walked out. The poor bastards wanted to get away from the ship, away from one another. " I could feel myself start to break then. "The opposite of love isn't hate, " I said slowly. "It's indifference. Ask any kid. "
Callahan stood up and said, "I'll make recommendations and send them back to the Board. Probably urge that they make the ships less foolproof. They may lose some ships that way; but in the long run, I think it will be better. " He stood up and handed me the manifest receipt. "We need leaders here, you know. That's one category we're always short of. "
"It's a difficult one to train for and ship, " I said.
"We've never asked them to ship us any, " Callahan said quietly. "They sort of develop along the way. " I had my hand on the doorknob when he suddenly said, "We need a good man at the port here. After you've looked around a bit, come on back. "
I saluted and turned and walked out into the bright sunlight. Three blocks from the spaceport, the Rod and Pile nestled beneath some of Xerxes' tall, palmlike trees, set well back from the boulevard.
They had rounded up a dozen girls and everybody cheered when I walked in. Jimenez was the first to buy me a drink; his glasses were clean and his beard was trimmed and he had clothes on and I damn near didn't recognize him. He called me a dirty gringo, smiled when he said it, then bought another drink, downed it and did a magnificent fall off his stool. Hulsman was next, the all-American-boy grin having suffered a sea change into a happy, drunken smile, and then Ball was buying and slapping me on the back and even Reynolds, scrubbed and pink in a spotless uniform, broke down and bought a round. We drank and sang and made passes at the girls and dates for later and roared with laughter at anecdotes that had been anything but funny at the time. We made arrangements to have a reunion every year and I wondered to myself what lies we would be telling one another after we had spread across the continents of Xerxes and had wives and kids and the Cassiopeia was almost forgotten and the's^ars only something to look at at night and feel romantic^about.
Then I found myself alone at a table with Coleman. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a small package I had treasured all afternoon and set it gently on the table in front of him. He stared at it, puzzled.
"Go ahead, " I said. "Open it. "
He fumbled at the wrappings and then spread the contents out on the table. A bishop, a queen, a knight and a rook. They were lovely, delicate figures, almost exact duplicates of the ones I had smashed.
"When it comes to porcelain, " I said, "Xerxes has the best craftsmen this side of Earth. " I stretched out in the chair and watched Coleman play delightedly with his chess pieces and listened to the overhead fan and stared at the pool of sunlight by the open door. Then I ordered a drink, relaxed and let myself remember just a little bit of what it had been like on board the Cassiopeia.
by A. Bertram Chandler
A. Bertram Chandler is a Master Mariner, a ship's captain and a very good writer indeed. If there is a nautical feel to his stories, and perhaps a tinge of salt spray in his spaceship's atmosphere, this is to be expected and enjoyed. Since his first story appeared in Astounding in 1944, readers have enjoyed the color and adventure of his sagas of the spaceways. But too little attention has been paid to Chandler, the man with a sense of humor. This lapse can be remedied right now…
When the gaussjammer Lode Trader was wrecked on the planet later much later irreverently named Nirvana by Commodore Person of the Survey Service, there was only one survivor. Only one human survivor, that is.
Lode Trader one of the Interstellar Transport Com-mission's tramps carried only a small crew, consisting of master, three mates, three engineers and a catering officer. She had accommodation for twelve passengers which, sometimes, was fully booked, but which, this voy-age, wasn't. The sole occupant of the compartment packed with cramped dogboxes was a priest, a missionary, bound from Terra to the newly established colony on Hamal V. When the magnetic storm hit Lode Trader, throwing her light-years off trajectory, the captain, a confirmed agnos- tic, sneeringly suggested that his passenger get down on his knees and start praying. The priest, somewhat acidly, retorted that in his religion the practice of pleading for di-vine intervention in times of stress was somewhat frowned upon and made a counter-suggestion, this being that the master and his officers should carry out their duties as ably as possible, as by so doing it was likely that they would acquire merit.
Spaceman do not need to be told to do their jobs as well as possible a spaceman who needed to be told would not last very long; neither, in many cases, would his ship and so relations became somewhat strained. The priest Lee Chang was his name retired to his cramped quarters to spend the remainder of the voyage in meditation; the crew started the emergency diesel generators the pile having been drained of power by the storm restarted the Ehrenhaft generators, and set the ship to falling along a line of magnetic force that would lead them to a likely looking sun which might, just possibly, run to one Earth-type planet. An alternative would have been to try to navigate back to the colonized sector of the Galaxy, but the ship was hopelessly lost, the supply of diesel fuel was limited and the catering officer (biochemist, acting, unpaid) doubted her own ability to distil fresh supplies of fuel from the available hydrocarbons.
Colonies had been founded, as all Lode Trader's people were aware, by castaway spacemen, spacewomen and passengers. But all such Lost Colonies so far discovered by the Survey Service had been established by the crews and passengers of relatively large vessels. Lode Trader had only one woman aboard the catering officer. She was not yet past childbearing age, but she had never shown any inclination toward either marriage or motherhood. She viewed the prospect of becoming a Founding Mother the Founding Mother with increasing alarm and despondency.
The others tried to cheer her up.
"After all, " said the captain, "it will all be perfectly legal. I can marry you… "
"I wouldn't marry you, " she flared, "if you were the last man in the Universe!"
"I meant, " said the shipmaster, rather stiffly, "that I could marry you to somebody else. "
"But just suppose that you did want to marry her, sir, " asked the mate, who was something of a space-lawyer, "what would be the legal situation?" He added hopefully, "Of course, you could formally resign and I could supersede you as master… "
"We could all turn Buddhist, " proposed the chief engineer, "so that old Lee Chang could officiate. "
"Do Buddhists practice polygamy?" asked the second mate.
"Polyandry, " corrected the mate.
"The people of some parts of India Nepal? are poly-andrists, " said the chief engineer.
"But are they Buddhists?" asked the mate.
"I don't know, " admitted the other.
"And I don't care!" almost wept the catering officer.
"It won't be so bad, " consoled the engineer. "Think of all the help you'll have around the house to look after the kids. I'm told that some of these latest humanoid robots can even be trained to change nappies. And, after all, we have practically a full cargo of the things… "
"Then why can't you do something with them?" she demanded. "They're machines and they have built-in power units. Can't you hook them all up to the Ehrenhaft jennies so we aren't dependent on those stinking diesels? Then we could go anywhere we pleased, and find our way back to civilization. "
"Solar power units, " the chief engineer told her sadly, "and storage batteries to enable them to work through the night. I'm afraid… "
"And so am I, " she said, before he could finish.
She need not have worried not on that score.
There is a fate that is popularly supposed to be worse than death but many women have undergone it and carried on living quite cheerfully. While there's, Me there's hope and death is so very final.
Lode Trader reached the possible-looking sun and found that one of the worlds revolving around it was also possible-looking. She established herself in orbit about the planet. Her people discovered that this world was Earth-like too Earthlike. The polar regions were inhospitable wastes of ice and snow and jagged mountains, and the regions immediately north and south of the poles were ocean-covered.
One of the serious limitations of the gaussjammers was the near-impossibility of making a safe landing in regions in which horizontal force exceeds vertical force. And the gaussjammers, unlike the earlier rockets that preceded them, were designed with a disregard of the laws of aerodynamics. The later models, the ships that took to the skies just before the Ehrenhaft drive ships became obsolete, were fitted with auxiliary rocket drive for emergency use. Lode Trader was not so fitted.
So she had to make a landing in subtropical regions, coming down in too flat a trajectory, in a shallow dive, a very shallow dive. The captain and his officers used all of their not inconsiderable skill. The catering officer was in the control room after all, as the prospective bride of one, if not all, of her shipmates she now had privileges. The engineers were aft, struggling to keep the diesels working in conditions both of gravity and extreme tilt. Lee Chang was in his cabin, still meditating.
The priest never found out what was the cause of the disaster. Suddenly he was thrown from his chair with such violence that the seat belt was snapped, and he found himself sprawled upon what had been the deck-head the ceiling, in landsman's parlance -of his room. The force of the impact smashed consciousness from him. When he recovered slowly and painfully he discovered that he was lying in a pool of his own blood. He discovered, too, after a while, that it was now impossible for him to stand upright in his cramped accommodation; the bulkheads were buckled and there was only a bare four feet between deck and deckhead instead of the regulation seven. The door, luckily, had been sprung open.
But these facts he ascertained later. His first reaction was to assess his injuries, which were comparatively slight. The blood, or most of it, had come from his nose.
He was badly bruised, but there seemed to be nothing broken. Then- and later he was to reprove himself for the sequence his concern was for his shipmates. He listened but the ship, apart from the creaking and whispering of cooling metal, was dreadfully silent. He shouted, but there was no reply. He shouted again. And then painfully, for he was a fat man he squirmed through the distorted aperture that had been a door, found before him a great rent in the shell plating, dropped heavily through it to long grass.
The ship, obviously, was a total loss.
She had fallen bows first, crushing the shallow dome housing her control room. (Lee Chang discovered afterward that the great gyroscope, immediately abaft the control room, had been torn from its housing and had reduced all those in its way to an unrecognizable paste. ) From a rent in the hull just forward from the conical stern issued a trickle of smoke. The priest was not an athletic man, but he managed to clamber up the twisted and torn plating, sweating heavily, gasping for breath, his hands and body slashed by sharp edges of metal. At last he was able to look into the emergency diesel room. He could see four bodies four bodies so mangled that there could not possibly be any life left in them. The heavy generators, tearing loose from their retaining bolts, had fallen upon the men who had tended them, ill repaying the care lavished upon them.
Lee Chang pulled himself back inside the ship and then, slowly, cautiously, pausing every now and again to shout, made his way downward and forward through the wreckage. He was looking for the catering officer. She was not in her cabin, or in her storerooms, or in her pantry. (Later, when it came to the burial, he found one of her epaulettes and an earring in the unrecognizable mess in the control room. )
The priest found his way out of the ship again. There was nothing that he could do for his shipmates, and the; yellowish sun was sinking fast toward the gently undulant horizon. So, composing himself as he had been taught, he prepared to spend the remainder of the day, and all of the night, in meditation.
Lee Chang, as one trained for the contemplative life, was unused to hard physical labor. And there was so much to be done. There was the burial of Lode Trader's crew to be carried out. There were foodstuffs to be unloaded from the storerooms. (There was nothing immediately apparent among the local flora and fauna that the priest could recognize as food. ) There was the preparation of the ground for the sowing of the various seeds that the ship carried among her cargo as well as the partial unloading of the cargo so that the consignments in question could be got at.
Lee Chang was trained for the contemplative life. He was not an engineer. But he had heard the nature of the ship's cargo discussed at table. He knew of the shipment of humanoid robots. He knew, too, of the boast of the manufacturers of the mechanical servants that the instruction books were so simple that a mentally retarded child could understand them.
As heavy cargo, the crated robots had been bottom stow. Now, thanks to the disastrous crash-landing of the ship, they were top stow, and the deck above them was torn and buckled. After his night's meditation, with sunrise, the priest climbed back into the ship. He found a convenient bar in the engine room. (He noticed, too, that the bodies of the engineers were beginning to smell a little. ) He attacked the most convenient crate, levered it open. He tugged and wrestled with the inert metal body, at last succeeded in dragging out what looked like an ugly, pot-bellied dwarf, a dwarf whose only garment was a shimmering metallic cape. He lugged the thing to the side of the ship, then realized that to drop it would damage it irreparably. He considered going back to the engine room to try to find some rope or wire or light chain so as to lower the robot to the ground. It did not appear to him to be significant that he had left it lying in a shaft of sunlight.
He cried out with amazement when he saw the metal mesh cloak open and spread in the golden illumination, like the wings of a butterfly just emerged from the chrysalis. There was fear mixed with amazement when he cried out a second time: that was when the robot got unsteadily to its feet.
"Master, " it said tonelessly. "Master. What are your orders, Master?"
"Get the others of your kind uncrated, " said the priest at last.
"But I do not understand, Master. I have only the basic vocabulary. You must teach me the words and the actions. "
"I will teach you, " said Lee Chang.
Lee Chang taught it him? as he taught the others.
Lee Chang lived a long and not unhappy life. He regarded himself toward the end as the abbot of a monastery an abbot who was friend to as well as master of his monks. He was wrong, perhaps, to ascribe human attributes to the mechanical men and yet each of them had his own character; each of them, under the priest's tutelage, developed a very real intelligence. Lee Chang found himself discussing theological matters with them as, for example, the possibility that their mechanical bodies might house human souls, that a man could just as easily be reincarnated as a robot as in the body of some lower animal. (And would such an incarnation be a step upward or downward?)
And then, in the fullness of time, he died. But the odd monastic order that he had founded did not die with him.
He sat in the lotus posture under the solitary tree in the center of the dusty square the square in which, owing to the continual passage of metal feet, no other vegetation could grow. He had been there all night, under the constellations that an Earthman would have called alien. He had been dimly aware of the rising of the sun as his metal cape had expanded to capture and to store the radiation that, to him, was life. He had meditated ever since the passing of that strange, flesh-and-blood being, the Lama. He had recalled every word ever spoken by the priest, had turned them over and over in his mind, had considered their every implication. He had thought long and deeply on the subject of reincarnation, had come to the conclusion that, after all, no ordinary Earthman's soul inhabited his metal body. It had not been coincidence that he had been the first to be given life, that he had always been far closer to the now-dead mentor than any of the others.
And he already had his disciples.
Around him the monastery stirred to life. From their cells tramped the robots the monks each spreading his cape to the rays of the sun. Some of them went to the fields although there was now no need for their labor and others to the workshops where agricultural machines were made and repaired. Some of them went to tend the herds of ovinoids, suppliers of the wool from which the abbot's robes had been spun and woven.
But he stayed there, under the tree. The sunlight drew the mist of dew from his gleaming body. He focussed his attention on the bright ring of shining metal that protruded from his bulging belly, the seemingly useless adornment that was equivalent to the navel of a human being. But robots of the nonspecialized, general purpose type were never designed for the contemplative life. They have that built-in urge always to be doing something.
The restless, cunningly contrived fingers at last found a purchase, and twisted. They twisted harder. Nothing happened.
They twisted the other way.
He sat there and looked at the bolt or stud, with its bright gleaming thread, holding it in the metallic palm of his hand. He knew that it had significance for did not everything have significance? and he was vaguely worried because he could not fathom it. Was this what the
Earthman had meant by the contemplation of the navel? Or should the navel be in place to be contemplated? He replaced it.
In the cool of the evening the disciples came to sit in a circle around their master. Gravely, from his unwinking lenses, their master regarded them. At last he broke the expectant silence.
He said, "I have been contemplating my navel. "
No comment forthcoming, he went on, saying, "I made a strange discovery. I found that my navel has a left-handed thread… "
Again he waited, but the other robots were still silent. They watched him as his fingers tightened on the ring, as he unscrewed the stud. He handed the thing to the robot on his right.
"Perhaps, " he said, "all of you might acquire merit by the contemplation of this wonder. Perhaps some of you who are mechanics might be able to explain it… "
In unbroken silence the threaded stud was passed from hand to hand, each of the disciples regarding it solemnly for long minutes. At last it was handed to FM2107, a robot notorious for his clumsiness, his slow reaction time, his lack of coordination. He contemplated it for longer than the others had done. Then, with the mechanical. equivalent of a sigh, he gave up, made to hand the mysterious object back to its owner.
He dropped it in the dust.
Impatiently, the master unfolded his legs, got to his I feet, stopped to retrieve it.
And fell to pieces.
by Kris Neville
The short story is an art form that is much neglected these days except in science fiction. It is a form that is flexible and capable of containing any degree of nuance or inflection despite the fact that most SF stories are written with a sustained shout. Kris Neville, briefly and delicately, explores the possibilities of levels of reality.
Zil was the first habitable planet found by the Earthmen as they swept outward through space from Sol, in ever-widening circles, seeking adventure.
Zil was nothing but a forest and when the scout ship set down, after a journey of three Earth-weeks, through at least a hundred light-years of conventional spacetime, it set down on the treetops rather than the surface. It was as though the whole planet was nothing but one great uniform growth, a green ocean of leaves covering everything.
The situation defied a botanist of the expedition, Mc-Clair: for in the oxygen richness of the air, one would not expect the plants to survive. McClair rode with the first scout ship, and it was his privilege to first sample the breathability of the atmosphere, Prior analysis proved accurate.
"It's good air, " he reported, "and I feel fine. "
Word went immediately to the mothership in orbit: success at last!
"There's a breeze, too, " said McClair, "the leaves are all moving and they make the strangest sound, a sort of zil, zil, zil, like that, a whispering. "
An investigation party, headed by the botanist, was stationed on the planet. The four men chopped away some of the upper branches of what appeared to be several separate trees and built themselves a structure more resembling a raft than a treehouse. They floated there, far above the surface of the planet, while the botanist continued his studies of the alien mono-ecology.
The forest was a continuing source of wonder to Mc-Clair, but he was most bemused by its static quality; for the trees appeared nowhere within the circle of his limited exploration through the intertwined branches to bear fruit or show other means of reproducing themselves. All were of an identical species.
The leaves, broad, green, glossy in the sunlight as though waxed, were no direct counterpart of the leaves of Earth trees, and yet there were more similarities than differences. They contained, for example, material positively identified by chemical analysis on the mothership as chlorophyll.
In the atmosphere, storms came and went, and humidity varied, while the oxygen content hung at a constant thirty percent, with nitrogen contributing most of the remainder: no detectable carbon dioxide. It was as though, long ago, the carbon dioxide had been used up and now the forest was locked immobile in time. McClair could fill several notebooks with anomalies, but the solution of them defied him.
By the third day, they had penetrated down to the lower branches. At last, Johnson caught the first glimpse of the surface, and he called back: "Dirt, as far as I can see. Nothing but dirt. " The three other men joined him. The branches terminated some twenty feet from the surface, and they all peered down through the speckled gloom. "Want to drop down?"
The last descent was accomplished with a rope, and when Johnson found solid footing and the rope went slack, he called up, "Seems safe enough; come on down!"
McClair followed, with Carlson behind him. The fourth man, Reading, remained on the lower branch as an observer.
McClair had expected an endless carpet of dead leaves, but if leaves had fallen, the continuous organic processes had long ago removed them. He bent to the slightly moist earth for a soil sample, and then looked up. Far above, the spreading branches, gently moving, rustling, zil, zil, zil, and for a moment, he was inexplicably overcome with a superstitious fear.
In his immediate view, there were literally hundreds of tree trunks, of varying dimensions, some apparently far older than others. It was as though, with time, the forest had come progressively to dominate the planet, strangling other life forms, until now only the trees remained, total masters of the environment, and they were frozen and timeless.
Time has a different meaning here, thought McClair.
He said: "This might be a rich find for archaeologists. " He wondered what history might unfold from fossil life hidden in the rich, dark soil.
"We're going to have to clear these trees out first, " said Johnson. "With the high oxygen, we might do it with selective burning, what do you think?"
McClair, wondering what effect the sudden introduction of new carbon dioxide would have, as a growth promoter, said, "We're going to have to be pretty damned careful. The whole thing seems so in balance. It might start to collapse, if we interfere. "
Aside from their voices, and the zil, zil, zil of the leaves, there were no other sounds. "Let's try that small one over there, first, " said McClair, pointing to one of the trees a good distance away. "I think we can drop it partway at least. It's far enough away so it won't be supporting the house. "
Johnson brought out the laser and studied the tree a moment. "I'll nick it and then cut. "
A moment later, the tree toppled, introducing a new sound, tearing upper branches loose, showering the ground with twigs and leaves. It hung at a 45-degree angle, suspended from supporting branches of its neighbors.
"See if you can section it, " said McClair. "I want to count the rings. " Saying this, he felt again the irrational and superstitious fear, and he was desperately afraid that; all the trees were going to prove of the same age or age-lessness.
Zil was the first habitable planet found by the Earthmen. A thousand balanced terrariums, generations ago, had left Sol, caught in the rigidity of Einsteinian space and time, and now, at last, one had reached a destination where planetary life might once again be possible. The ship itself was weathered by space, and its lifetime could no longer be predicted by its inhabitants, although there was growing fear among them that no time beyond the present, be-tween the stars, remained. It was Zil or disintegration in further transit. So much time had elapsed in the crossing-of space that even their language had changed, and the original motivations were lost in antiquity.
The Earthmen sent down an exploratory team, and the reports of the giant trees and the breathable atmosphere came back. The order went out to investigate the possibili-ty of clearing a site to permit landing all the cargo of the interstellar ship.
The captain, this done, turned to his library of ship's logs with a weary sigh. The library extended backward in time beyond the memory of ancestors, and he felt suddenly kinship with long-ago Earth, surviving now merely in myth, and he removed from the shelf the very first of the log books, describing in the cold and formal phrases he knew so well, farewell to the planetary system of Sol.
He stood at the culmination of some vast, racial memory and dream, which promised the eternal continuity of mankind. The first giant step was taken. All was now assured. Generations from now, when the surface of Zil had been cleared, and mankind had established its mastery of this planet, other interstellar ships, perhaps of improved design, would be launched against the long eternity of the universe. He stood facing an endless beginning.
On the surface, the landing crew felled the first tree.
The captain studied the blank pages of the book in his hands, wondering why this empty, yellowing volume had been stored at all. He removed the book that had stood beside it, and it, too, was filled mostly with blank pages except for a few entries at the very end of it. These entries, too, were gone, and he wondered why, reaching for the third early log book, two empty volumes had been so long preserved.
On Earth, Ed Long, sixteen years old, closed a science fiction book, having just read a story of man's first trip to the Moon. The Great Depression had come to trouble affluent America, in the year 1929, but Ed was caught already with dreams of the future in his mind, and he went out into the night air, to look up at the skies, and marvel at the wonders that man would someday, perhaps not in his lifetime, but someday, encounter.
At length, his mind overflowing with endless and timeless speculations, he returned to his room and the light there, somewhat hungry after the meager evening meal. Time to study. It could not be avoided further. History was his hardest subject, and there was a test tomorrow. He brought out his school book and wondered for a moment before he settled down to study why it was that the printed pages were so interleaved with blank ones.
The monk, by candlelight, laboriously produced an illuminated manuscript, caught in the press of the endless compulsion to reproduce the work in front of him before : it vanished entirely.
At length, the lateness of the hour took him to his tiny cell and restless sleep, where he lay for a long time haunted by the nightmare that tomorrow no work would re-main to be done, it would all, somehow, in the night, get itself copied and then vanish away.
In the strange language of the time, Horothrag said, "It would be well to record this transaction beyond the impermanence of memory. " He made a mark upon the stone and then another, being somewhat distressed to note that no sooner had one mark been made than the preceding one faded, so that in the end he gave up entirely this useless endeavor.
In a time before Horothrag, there were animals and large reptiles of diverse forms, but in time they one by one went away, and soon there was the Earth and the endless ocean, but nothing stirred nor moved within its depths and time continued and weathering produced strange effects with no thing to remark upon them.
On the distant planet, the forest moved in the warm light to the motion of the gentle breeze, making sounds, zil, zil, zil, and none came to cut its trees.
The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race
by J. G. Ballard
Ballard is an infuriating man. He leads you through byways of fiction that you never thought of exploring or desired to in any way. If you follow him you will visit New Lands. He is both a baffling and a wonderfully exciting writer, who is at the top of his form in this short story with the very long title. It will make some people very angry. It will make everyone who reads it pause for a few moments to think.
Author's note. The assassination of President Kennedy on November 22nd, 1963, raised many questions, not all of which were answered by the Report of the Warren Commission. It is suggested that a less conventional view of the events of that grim day may provide a more satisfactory explanation. In particular, Alfred Parry's The Crucifixion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race gives us a useful lead.
Oswald was the starter.
From his window above the track he opened the race by firing the starting gun. It is believed that the first shot was not properly heard by all the drivers. In the following confusion Oswald fired the gun two more times, but the race was already under way.
Kennedy got off to a bad start.
There was a governor in his car and its speed remained constant at about fifteen miles an hour. However, shortly afterwards, when the governor had been put out of action, the car accelerated rapidly, and continued at high speed along the remainder of the course.
The visiting teams. As befitting the inauguration of the first production car race through the streets of Dallas, both the President and the Vice-President participated. The Vice-President, Johnson, took up his position behind Kennedy on the starting line. The concealed rivalry between the two men was of keen interest to the crowd. Most of them supported the home driver, Johnson.
The starting point was the Texas Book Depository, where all bets were placed on the Presidential race. Kennedy was an unpopular contestant with the Dallas crowd, many of whom showed outright hostility. The deplorable incident familiar to us all is one example.
The course ran downhill from the Book Depository, below an overpass, then on to the Parkland Hospital and from there to Love Air Field. It is one of the most hazardous courses in downhill motor-racing, second only to the Sarajevo track, discontinued in 1914.
Kennedy went downhill rapidly. After the damage to the governor the car shot forward at high speed. An alarmed track official attempted to mount the car, which continued on its way, cornering on two wheels.
Turns. Kennedy was disqualified at the Hospital, after taking a turn for the worse. Johnson now continued the race in the lead, which he maintained to the finish.
The flag. To signify the participation of the President; in the race Old Glory was used in place of the usual checkered square. Photographs of Johnson receiving his prize after winning the race reveal that he had decided to make the flag a memento of his victory.
Previously, Johnson had been forced to take a back seat, as his position on the starting line behind the President indicates. Indeed, his attempts to gain a quick lead on Kennedy during the false start were forestalled by a track steward, who pushed Johnson to the floor of his car.
In view of the confusion at the start of the race, which resulted in Kennedy, clearly expected to be the winner on past form, being forced to drop out at the Hospital turn, it has been suggested that the hostile local crowd, eager to see a win by the home driver Johnson, deliberately set out to stop him completing the race. Another theory maintains that the police guarding the track were in collusion with the starter, Oswald. After he finally managed to give the send-off Oswald immediately left the race, and was subsequently apprehended by track officials.
Johnson had certainly not expected to win the race in this way. There were no pit stops.
Several puzzling aspects of the race remain. One is the presence of the President's wife in the car, an unusual practice for racing drivers. Kennedy, however, may have maintained that as he was in control of the ship of state he was therefore entitled to captain's privileges.
The Warren Commission. The rake-off on the book of the race. In their report, prompted by widespread complaints of foul play and other irregularities, the syndicate laid full blame on the starter, Oswald.
Without doubt Oswald badly misfired. But one question still remains unanswered: who loaded the starting gun?
by Fritz Leiber
In this field of fiction, long known for its pedestrian prose, the writings of Fritz Leiber burn like a beacon to show the shambling walkers the correct path. He is a stylist, one of the only three we have. Here, as it should be, style does not interfere with story, in fact it aids and moves it. This dialogue of two souls in brief contact registers with all the impact of a sudden scream in the night.
The oval bedroom and boudoir rocked with the wind and shook with the thunder. The curving, tempered glass of the continuous view windows strained, relaxed, strained! again. The lightning flashes showed outside only the lash-ing tops of the big pines against inky night. Inside they regularly drowned the clusters of rosy lights and blanched to bone the quilted, pearl-gray satin upholstery. At one end of the oval, the silvery, spiral stairway leading up to the flat roof and down to the elevator floor cast momen-tarily flaring, fantastic shadows across the tufted floor and the great central bed with its huge silk pillows and pearl-gray comforter.
The old lady occupying an edge of the bed looked like the bent-waist mummy of a girl freshly wrapped and hurriedly fitted with a shaggy blond wig and blond silk night-gown. But the brown human claw did not tremble, hold-ing the antique-inspired, pearl-gray phone greedily close to ear and lips, while the wrinkle-webbed eye gleamed with the lightning and without it, like jewels of obsidian or black onyx.
Old Lady: Haven't you got the doctor yet, you bitch?
Answering Service: No, madam. He has gone out on an emergency case. I am trying to contact his copter, but the storm is interfering with short-wave telephony.
O. L.: I know all about the storm. Haven't you arranged yet for my medicine to be delivered, you incompetent slut?
A. S.: No, madam. The copters of all regional taxi and delivery services have been grounded by the storm. There have been two deaths by frightening excuse me, lightning. I have your Cardinal pills here now. If the madam's phone were equipped with a matter-receiver
O. L.: It isn't. Stop tormenting me by holding those pills just out of reach. Haven't you got the doctor yet?
A. S.: No, madam. He has gone out on an emergency case. I am trying to contact his copter, but the storm
O. L.: That tape is beginning to bore me. You are just a bunch of tapes, aren't you? All very cleverly keyed to whatever I say, but still just a bunch of tapes.
A. S.: No, madam. I am a flesh-and-blood woman, age twenty-three, name Doris. It's true, I sometimes think I'm just a tape. I'm surrounded by miles of them, which do answer routine inquiries. Alongside my matter-transmitter and keyboard I have a tape-writer for punching out more tapes. I have a long scissors and a pot of cement for editing them. But I am truly not a tape myself, though once I took a small bottle of sleeping pills because I thought No, no, I am a flesh-and-blood woman, age twenty-three…
O. L.:… name Doris. Yes, I got that on the first spin past the transmitting head. So now we have tapes with biographies, tapes that attempt suicide and ask for sympathy, tapes that play on the customer's feelings. How charming. Here I am, an old woman, all alone in a storm, and without a single servant, ever since the government with its red tape and its oversell of democracy made it impossible to hire them, or even private nurses. An old
A. S.: You haven't a robot nurse, madam?
O. L.: Shining horrors! No! I'm just an old, old woman, all alone, dying for lack of a doctor and medicine, but privileged to listen to tapes making excuses.
A. S.: Please madam, I am not •
O. L.: Ooooh… my heart… please, nurse, my Cardinal pills… please, tape…
A. S.: Madam! Madam?
O. L.:… my heart… I'm going… ooooh…
A. S.: Madam, I'm breaking the rules to say this, but if you're having a heart attack, it's essential that you relax, make no effort or outcry, waste no strength on
O. L.: Oooh… yes, and tapes to help you die quietly, to leave your tortured body without making a fuss that might embarrass the powers that be. Oh, don't worry, dear tape, and let's not have any sympathetic-anxiety spools. I'm over that spasm now and merely waiting for the next. Just an old woman alone in the midst of a dreadful storm hear that crash? listening to tapes and waiting to die for lack of one Cardinal pill.
A. S.: Madam, a phone of your rating should have a matter-receiver. Are you quite certain you have not? I will inquire of our master files
O. L.: And tapes to make a sales pitch while you die. Next you'll be trying to sell me a casket and a burial plot, or even urn space in a tomb satellite. I already have the first two of those, thank you. I do not have a matter-receiver.
A. S.: Madam, I am not trying to sell you anything, I am trying to save your life. I have your Cardinal pills here
O. L.: Stop tantalizing me.
A. S.: and I am doing everything I can to get them to you. If you had a matter-receiver, I would only have to drop one of the pills in the transmitter bowl in front of me or punch out its codes, and you would have it the next microsecond. Well over ninety-nine percent of all phones of your rating have both a matter-receiver and telekinesis glove. I will inquire
O. L.: Oh yes, a telekinesis glove so I'd be able to sign checks long-distance for silver caskets, cool with pearls and orchid plots and pills and masses to be said for my soul in Chartres, no doubt. But I don't have one, ha-ha, or a matter-receiver either. Who'd swallow a pill that came over a wire, all dirty with oil and electricity? Oooh…
A. S.: I have programed an inquiry, madam. It is possible that you have a matter-receiver and aren't aware of it. Please don't distress or in any way exert yourself, madam; but I must point out to you that actual matter is never transmitted over the waves or wires and that, in any case, no oil is involved. The chemical and mass-shape codes for the object are punched into the transmitter or analyzed from a sample. Only those codes travel over the wires or waves. When they reach the receiver, they instantly synthesize an exact duplicate from standard raw materials there. I am oversimplifying somewhat, but
O. L.: Even tapes to give lectures, to contradict and argue with a dying customer. Very clever indeed, especially when one knows that a computer, working a billion times as fast as a mere brain, can always out-think a human being, even one who isn't dying.
A. S.: Madam, I am not a tape! I am a flesh-and-blood… Oh, what's the use?
O. L.: That would have been the third running for that one. Is it possible that even a computer, even a tape has a little shame? Very well, my dear, we will pretend you are not a tape, but a woman: age twenty-three, name Doris. A young woman it's only bitchy little sexpots that get to record those tapes, isn't it? Or do they concoct them entirely nowadays from the squeal of metal and the hum of power? Anyhow, we'll pretend you're a beautiful young woman who is tormenting me with pills I can't have and with grounded delivery-copters and with doctors who have skipped off on emergency visits to their mistresses and can't be reached. Yes, a beautiful vicious young woman, dear tape. At least that will give me something definite to hate while I die here all alone, someone who could conceivably suffer as I suffer. Ooooh…
A. S.: Madam, I am not beautiful and I'm trying hard not to be vicious. And I'm quite as alone as you are. All alone in a tiny cubical surrounded by yards and yards of electric circuits, until my relief turns up. Yet I can faintly hear through the air-conditioning system the same storm you're having. It's moving my way.
O. L.: I'm glad you're all alone. I'm glad you can hear the storm. I'm glad you're in a tiny cubical and can't get away. Then you can imagine something horrible creeping silently toward you, as death is creeping toward me, while you puff your cigarettes into the air-conditioning outlet and drink your cocktails from a flask disguised as a walkie-talkie, I imagine, and preen yourself in front of a mirror and call one of your boyfriends and amuse yourself by cat-and-mousing an old woman dying
A. S.: Stop, Mother, please!
O. L.: So now I've become the mother of a tape. How interesting. Oh, excuse me, dear, I forgot we're pretending you're a beautiful young woman; but my memory's not so good these last hours, or minutes. And besides, it startled me so to discover that now tapes excuse me again even have mother fixations and have been psychoanalyzed, no doubt, and
A. S.: Please, madam, I'm being serious. I may not be dying, but I wish I were
O. L.: You're making me feel better, dear. Thank you.
A. S.: so I'm every bit as miserable as you are. I took this job because of something that happened to me when I was a very little girl. My mother had a sudden heart attack and couldn't move, and she asked me to get her medicine. But I wouldn't do it because I'd asked her for candy a half hour before and she'd refused to give me any, and so I refused to move. She always called my medicine "candy" and I didn't understand what was happening at all. I thought I was just getting even. I didn't realize she was dying. And so long afterward I took this job so I could help other people who were in her situation and make up for my crime and so I could
O. L.: Oh no, my dear, you took this job so you could repeat over and over with gloating satisfaction the hot excitement you got when you watched your mother die and knew it was you who were killing her, so you could go on and on and on refusing to give old women their medicine or get them doctors, meanwhile showering them with sticky-sweet sympathy, like poison for ants, and, not content with that torture, slipping in dirty little pleas for sympathy for your own vicious, murderous self
A. S.: Oh, stop, stop, stop. I'm human! Three point one four one six. Pi. One three five seven eleven thirteen. Primes. Two four eight sixteen
O. L.: How like a machine. Nothing but numbers. Confused with food. You're going crazy, machine.
A. S.: Oh, stop, stop, stop! I tell you I'm flesh-and-blood
O. L.: Female, age twenty-three, name Doris.
A. S.: and I'm serious about all this, and I know this isn't the job for me at all, because I'm so horribly lonely; and what you say about me is the way I suspect myself of feeling, though I'm trying as hard as I can to feel the other way, the loving way, and I'm afraid
O. L.: I'm glad you can feel guilt. Love don't make me laugh. But I'm glad you're afraid. Because then you can imagine something creeping toward you as deadly as what's creeping toward me. What if your tapes should loop out and strangle you? What if your filthy matter-transmitter should suck you in and spit you out into a red-hot volcano or at the North Pole or at the bottom of the Challenger Deep or on the sun side of Mercury? What's that now?- closer than the storm, rattling the grill of your ventilation inlet? What's that coming out of the answer slot of the computer? Why are the needle points of the long narrow blades of the scissors swinging toward you?
A. S.: Oh, stop, stop, stop, or they'll jump at my heart! Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop
O. L.: Shut up! I'm tired of pretending. I'm just an old woman dying. And you're just tapes. Yes, just tapes. I know that because I've been insulting you every way I
could, and you've been taking it. A live human being wouldn't. And only a tape would call me "madam. " A democratized woman and there aren't any others under eighty would call me dearie or senior citizen. And I've made you spend an hour on me. They'd never let a human being waste her working time like that, and she wouldn't care to. But tapes? who cares? Plug the old dame in on them and let her play with them until she dies! And finally one tape got stuck on the word stop and kept jerking back and forth there, over and over. Ooooh… ooooh… this is the end, at last… ooooh…
A. S.: Stop, stop, STOP! Madam, the master files show that your phone is equipped with a miniaturized Important Trifle matter-receiver! It's hidden in the earpiece! I will place the Cardinal pill on the bowl and
O. L.: Ooooh… too late, tape… I'm dying…
A. S.: Please, madam. For my sake.
O. L.: No, tape… I'm going now… I leave the horrors to you… I'm dying… like your mother… I'm… dead…
The cadaverous old lady carefully dropped the phone, not on its prongs or the floor, but with a dull, short clatter on the edge of the thick pale marble top of the night table. She leaned back into the huge pillows. Something tiny rattled on the table top. She did not look. The phone called very faintly with an insect's voice "Madam!" and "Mother!" again and again. She did not answer.
The storm was almost over, the lightning gone, the thunder faded; but now came a different thunder, a muted thunder, a thunder that grew and made the old lady frown. It drowned the phone's faint screaming, like that of a far-off cicada.
Something shook the ceiling, then jarred it. There was a rapid tattoo of footsteps overhead, the creak and slam of a door, a clatter of footsteps down the silver stairs.
Approaching her briskly was a slim, middle-aged man carrying a black bag and shaking a few water drops off his trim gray suit.
"Well, what's it this time?" he demanded with a cheery roughness. "Used your sleeping pills up too fast, I suppose, and then worked yourself into a tantrum. I'll have you know I've delayed delivering the governor's daughter's baby, just to make sure you keep me in your will. "
She grinned at him, the tip of her nose straining toward the point of her chin.
"The sleeping pills, yes, you clever devil. Oh, and I lost my temper with your stupid answering service. "
"Don't blame you there. I curse them a dozen times a day myself. Only get psychoneurotics to take that job. Everyone else demands a social working-life. Now let's just What's that?"
He had stopped with a jerk and was pointing at the phone.
In one frantic scramble the old lady thrust herself halfway across the bed and halfway out of the covers and crouched, looking back. She began to tremble as the doctor was trembling. But her lips were smiling, and her eyes glittered like jet.
Flowing steadily from the small black hole in the center of the pearl-gray receiver, rolling across and dropping down past the pale marble and puddling on the pearl-gray satin comforter was a thin rippling ribbon of bright blood.
by Keith Laumer
Here is a fine example of the technological-detail story, the kind most beloved by Analog readers and hated by most women. Though its form is as regularized as that of the sonnet, it can also offer some measure of the same emotional satisfaction when written well. Ladies: force yourselves to read through the decimal points and microstrobes. Because if you succeed you will discover that Laumer is really writing about people after all.
/ come to awareness, sensing a residual oscillation traversing my hull from an arbitrarily designated heading of 035. From the damping rate I compute that the shock was of intensity 8. 7, emanating from a source within the limits 72 meters/46 meters. I activate my primary screens, trigger a return salvo. There is no response. I engage reserve energy cells, bring my secondary battery to bear futilely. It is apparent that I have been ranged by the Enemy and severely damaged.
My positional sensors indicate that I am resting at an angle of 13 degrees 14 seconds, deflected from a base line at 21 points from median. I attempt to right myself, but encounter massive resistance. I activate my forward scanners, shunt power to my IR microstrobes. Not a flicker illuminates my surroundings. I am encased in utter blackness.
Now a secondary shock wave approaches, rocks me with an intensity of 8. 2. It is apparent that I must withdraw from my position but my drive trains remain inert
under full thrust. I shift to base emergency power, try again. Pressure mounts; I sense my awareness fading under the intolerable strain; then, abruptly, resistance falls off and I am in motion.
It is not the swift maneuvering of full drive, however; I inch forward, as if restrained by massive barriers. Again I attempt to penetrate the surrounding darkness, and this time perceive great irregular outlines shot through with fracture planes. I probe cautiously, then more vigorously, encountering incredible densities.
I channel all available power to a single ranging pulse, direct it upward. The indication is so at variance with all experience that I repeat the test at a new angle. Now I must accept the fact: I am buried under 207. 6 meters of solid rock!
I direct my attention to an effort to orient myself to my uniquely desperate situation. I run through an action-status checklist of thirty thousand items, feel dismay at the extent of power loss. My main cells are almost completely drained, my reserve units at no more than. 4 charge. Thus my sluggishness is explained. I review the tactical situation, recall the triumphant announcement from my commander that the Enemy forces are annihilated, that all resistance has ceased. In memory, I review the formal procession; in company with my comrades of the Dinochrome Brigade, many of us deeply scarred by Enemy action, we parade before the Grand Commandant, then assemble on the depot ramp. At command, we bring our music storage cells into phase and display our Battle Anthem. The nearby star radiates over a full spectrum, unfiltered by atmospheric haze. It is a moment of glorious triumph. Then the final command is given
The rest is darkness. But it is apparent that the victory celebration^ was premature. The Enemy has counterattacked with a force that has come near to immobilizing me. The realization is shocking, but the. 1 second of leisurely introspection has clarified my position. At once, I broadcast a call on Brigade Action wavelength, -
"Unit LNE to Command, requesting permission to file VSR. "
I wait, sense no response, call again, using full power. I sweep the enclosing volume of rock with an emergency alert warning. I tune to the all-units band, await the replies of my comrades of the Brigade. None answers. Now I must face the reality: I alone have survived the assault.
I channel my remaining power to my drive and detect a channel of reduced density. I press for it and the broken rock around me yields reluctantly. Slowly, I move forward and upward. My pain circuitry shocks my awareness center with emergency signals; I am doing irreparable damage to my overloaded neural systems, but my duty is clear: I must seek and engage the Enemy.
Emerging from behind the blast barrier, Chief Engineer Pete Reynolds of the New Devonshire Port Authority pulled off his rock mask and spat grit from his mouth.
"That's the last one; we've bottomed out at just over two hundred yards. Must have hit a hard stratum down there. "
"It's almost sundown, " the paunchy man beside him said shortly. "You're a day and a half behind schedule. "
"We'll start backfilling now, Mr. Mayor. I'll have pilings poured by oh-nine hundred tomorrow, and with any luck the first section of pad will be in place in tune for the rally. "
"I'm… " The mayor broke off, looked startled. "I thought you told me that was the last charge to be fired… "
Reynolds frowned. A small but distinct tremor had shaken the ground underfoot. A few feet away, a small pebble balanced atop another toppled and fell with a faint clatter.
"Probably a big rock fragment falling, " he said. At that moment, a second vibration shook the earth, stronger this tune. Reynolds heard a rumble and a distant impact as rock fell from the side of the newly blasted excavation.
He whirled to the control shed as the door swung back and Second Engineer Mayfield appeared.
"Take a look at this, Pete!" Reynolds went across to the hut, stepped inside. Mayfield was bending over the profiling table.
"What do you make of it?" he pointed. Superimposed on the heavy red contour representing the detonation of the shaped charge that had completed the drilling of the final pile core were two other traces, weak but distinct.
"About intensity, " Mayfield looked puzzled. "What… "
The tracking needle dipped suddenly, swept up the screen to peak at. 21, dropped back. The hut trembled. A stylus fell from the edge of the table. The red face of Mayor Daugherty burst through the door.
"Reynolds, have you lost your mind? What's the idea of blasting while I'm standing out in the open? I might have been killed!"
"I'm not blasting, " Reynolds snapped. "Jim, get Eaton on the line, see if they know anything. " He stepped to the door, shouted.
A heavyset man in sweat-darkened coveralls swung down from the seat of a cable-lift rig. "Boss, what goes on?" he called as he came up. "Damn near shook me out of my seat!"
"I don't know. You haven't set any trim charges?"
"No, boss. I wouldn't set no charges without your say-so. "
"Come on. " Reynolds started out across the rubble-littered stretch of barren ground selected by the Authority as the site of the new spaceport. Halfway to the open mouth of the newly blasted pit, the ground under his feet rocked violently enough to make him stumble. A gout of dust rose from the excavation ahead. Loose rock danced on the ground. Beside him, the drilling chief grabbed his arm.
"Boss, we better get back!"
Reynolds shook him off, kept going. The drill chief swore and followed. The shaking of the ground went on, a sharp series of thumps interrupting a steady trembling.
"It's a quake!" Reynolds yelled over the low rumbling sound. He and the chief were at the rim of the core now.
"It can't be a quake, boss, " the latter shouted. "Not in these formations!"
"Tell it to the geologists… " The rock slab they were standing on rose a foot, dropped back. Both men fell. The slab bucked like a small boat in choppy water.
"Let's get out of here!" Reynolds was up and running. Ahead, a fissure opened, gaped a foot wide. He jumped it, caught a glimpse of black depths, a glint of wet clay twenty feet below
A hoarse scream stopped him in his tracks. He spun, saw the drill chief down, a heavy splinter of rock across his legs. He jumped to him, heaved at the rock. There was blood on the man's shirt. The chiefs hands beat the dusty rock before him. Then other men were there, grunting, sweaty hands gripping beside Reynolds'. The ground rocked. The roar from under the earth had risen to a deep, steady rumble. They lifted the rock aside, picked up the injured man and stumbled with him to the aid shack.
The mayor was there, white-faced.
"What is it, Reynolds? If you're responsible "
"Shut up!" Reynolds brushed him aside, grabbed the phone, punched keys.
"Eaton! What have you got on this temblor?"
"Temblor, hell. " The small face on the four-inch screen looked like a ruffled hen. "What in the name of Order are you doing out there? I'm reading a whole series of displacements originating from that last core of yours! What did you do, leave a pile of trim charges lying around?"
"It's a quake. Trim charges, hell! This thing's broken up two hundred yards of surface rock. It seems to be traveling north-northeast "
"I see that; a traveling earthquake!" Eaton flapped his arms, a tiny and ridiculous figure against a background of wall charts and framed diplomas. "Well… do some-thing, Reynolds! Where's Mayor Daugherty?"
"Underfoot!" Reynolds snapped, and cut off.
Outside, a layer of sunset-stained dust obscured the sweep of level plain. A rock-dozer rumbled up, ground to a halt by Reynolds. A man jumped down.
"I got the boys moving equipment out, " he panted. "The thing's cutting a trail straight as a rule for the highway!" He pointed to a raised roadbed a quarter-mile away.
"How fast is it moving?"
"She's done a hundred yards; it hasn't been ten minutes yet!"
"If it keeps up another twenty minutes, it'll be into the Intermix!"
"Scratch a few million cees and six months' work then, Pete!"
"And Southside Mall's a couple miles farther. "
"Hell, it'll damp out before then!"
"Maybe. Grab a field car, Dan. "
"Pete!" Mayfield came up at a trot. "This thing's building! The centroid's moving on a heading of 022 "
"How far subsurface?"
"It's rising; started at two-twenty yards, and it's up to one-eighty!"
"What have we stirred up?" Reynolds stared at May-field as the field car skidded to a stop beside them.
"Stay with it, Jim. Give me anything new. We're taking a closer look. " He climbed into the rugged vehicle.
"Take a blast truck "
"No time!" He waved and the car gunned away into the pall of dust.
The rock car pulled to a stop at the crest of the three-level Intermix on a lay-by designed to permit tourists to enjoy the view of the site of the proposed port, a hundred feet below. Reynolds studied the progress of the quake through field glasses. From this vantage point, the path of the phenomenon was a clearly defined trail of tilted and broken rock, some of the slabs twenty feet across. As he watched, the fissure lengthened.
"It looks like a mole's trail. " Reynolds handed the glasses to his companion, thumbed the Send key on the car radio.
"Jim, get Eaton and tell him to divert all traffic from the Circular south of Zone Nine. Cars are already clogging the right-of-way. The dust is visible from a mile away, and when the word gets out there's something going on, we'll be swamped. "
"I'll tell him, but he won't like it!"
"This isn't politics! This thing will be into the outer pad area in another twenty minutes!"
"It won't last "
"How deep does it read now?"
"One-five!" There was a moment's silence. "Pete, if it stays on course, it'll surface at about where you're parked!"
"Uh-huh. It looks like you can scratch one Intermix. Better tell Eaton to get a story ready for the press. "
"Pete talking about newshounds, " Dan said beside him. Reynolds switched off, turned to see a man in a gay-colored driving outfit coming across from a battered Monojag sportster which had pulled up behind the rock car. A big camera case was slung across his shoulder.
"Say, what's going on down there?" he called.
"Rock slide, " Reynolds said shortly. "I'll have to ask you to drive on. The road's closed… "
"Who're you?" The man looked belligerent.
"I'm the engineer in charge. Now pull out, brother. " He turned back to the radio. "Jim, get every piece of heavy equipment we own over here, on the double. " He paused, feeling a minute trembling in the car. "The Intermix is beginning to feel it, " he went on. "I'm afraid we're hi for it. Whatever that thing is, it acts like a solid body boring its way through the ground. Maybe we can barricade it. "
"Barricade an earthquake?"
"Yeah… I know how it sounds… but it's the only, idea I've got. "
"Hey… what's that about an earthquake?" The man in the colored suit was still there. "By gosh, I can feel it the whole bridge is shaking!"
"Off, mister now!" Reynolds jerked a thumb at the traffic lanes where a steady stream of cars was hurtling past. "Dan, take us over to the main track. We'll have to warn this traffic off… "
"Hold on, fellow, " the man unlimbered his camera. "I represent the New Devon Scope. I have a few questions "
"I don't have the answers, " Pete cut him off as the car pulled away.
"Hah!" the man who had questioned Reynolds yelled after him. "Big shot! Think you can… " His voice was lost behind them.
In a modest retirees' apartment block in the coast town of Idlebreeze, forty miles from the scene of the freak quake, an old man sat in a reclining chair, half dozing before a yammering Tri-D tank.
"… Grandpa, " a sharp-voiced young woman was saying. "It's time for you to go in to bed. "
"Bed? Why do I want to go to bed? Can't sleep anyway… " He stirred, made a pretense of sitting up, showing an interest in the Tri-D. "I'm watching this show. "
"It's not a show, it's the news, " a fattish boy said disgustedly. "Ma, can I switch channels "
"Leave it alone, Bennie, " the old man said. On the screen, a panoramic scene spread out, a stretch of barren ground across which a furrow showed. As he watched, it lengthened.
"… Up here at the Intermix we have a fine view of the whole curious business, lazangemmun, " the announcer chattered. "And in our opinion it's some sort of publicity stunt staged by the Port Authority to publicize their controversial Port project "
"Ma, can I change channels?"
"Go ahead, Bennie "
"Don't touch it, " the old man said. The fattish boy reached for the control, but something in the old man's eye stopped him.
"The traffic's still piling up here, " Reynolds said into the phone. "Damn it, Jim, we'll have a major jam on our hands "
"He won't do it, Pete! You know the Circular was his baby the super all-weather pike that nothing could shut down. He says you'll have to handle this in the field "
"Handle, hell! I'm talking about preventing a major disaster! And in a matter of minutes, at that!"
"I'll try again "
"If he says no, divert a couple of the big ten-yard graders and block it off yourself. Set up field 'arcs, and keep any cars from getting in from either direction. "
"Pete, that's outside your authority!"
"You heard me!"
Ten minutes later, back at ground level, Reynolds watched the boom-mounted polyarcs swinging into position at the two roadblocks a quarter of a mile apart, cutting off the threatened section of the raised expressway. A hundred yards from where he stood on the rear cargo deck of a light grader rig, a section of rock fifty feet wide rose slowly, split, fell back with a ponderous impact. One corner of it struck the massive pier supporting the extended shelf of the lay-by above. A twenty-foot splinter fell away, exposing the reinforcing-rod core.
"How deep, Jim?" Reynolds spoke over the roaring sound coming from the disturbed area.
"Just subsurface now, Pete! It ought to break through " His voice was drowned in a rumble as the damaged pier shivered, rose up, buckled at its midpoint and collapsed, bringing down with it a large chunk of pavement and guard rail, and a single still-glowing light pole. A small car that had been parked on the doomed section was visible for an instant just before the immense slab struck. Reynolds saw it bounce aside, then disappear under an avalanche of broken concrete.
"My God, Pete " Dan blurted. "That damned fool newshound !"
"Look!" As the two men watched, a second pier swayed, fell backward into the shadow of the span above. The roadway sagged, and two more piers snapped. With a bellow like a burst dam, a hundred-foot stretch of the road fell into the roiling dust cloud.
"Pete!" Mayfield's voice burst from the car radio. "Get out of there! I threw a reader on that thing and it's chattering… !"
Among the piled fragments, something stirred, heaved, rising up, lifting multi-ton pieces of the broken road, thrusting them aside like so many potato chips. A dull blue radiance broke through from the broached earth, threw an eerie light on the shattered structure above. A massive, ponderously irresistible shape thrust forward through the ruins. Reynolds saw a great blue-glowing profile emerge from the rubble like a surfacing submarine, shedding a burden of broken stone, saw immense treads ten feet wide claw for purchase, saw the mighty flank brush a still standing pier, send it crashing aside.
"Pete… what… what is it ?"
"I don't know. " Reynolds broke the paralysis that had gripped him. "Get us out of here, Dan, fast! Whatever it is, it's headed straight for the city!"
7 emerge at last from the trap into which I had fallen, and at once encounter defensive works of considerable strength. My scanners are dulled from lack of power, but I am able to perceive open ground beyond the barrier, and farther still, at a distance of 5. 7 kilometers, massive walls. Once more I transmit the Brigade Rally signal; but as before, there is no reply. I am truly alone.
I scan the surrounding area for the emanations of Enemy drive units, monitor the EM spectrum for their communications. I detect nothing; either my circuitry is badly damaged, or their shielding is superb.
I must now make a decision as to possible courses of action. Since all my comrades of the Brigade have fallen, / compute that the walls before me must be held by Enemy forces. I direct probing signals at the defenses, discover them to be of unfamiliar construction, and less formidable than they appear. I am aware of the possibility that this may be a trick of the Enemy; but my course is clear.
I re-engage my driving engines and advance on the Enemy fortress.
"You're out of your mind, Father, " the stout man said. "At your age "
"At your age, I got my nose smashed in a brawl in a bar on Aldo, " the old man cut him 'off. "But I won the fight. "
"James, you can't go out at this time of night… " an elderly woman wailed.
"Tell them to go home. " The old man walked painfully toward his bedroom door. "I've seen enough of them for today. "
"Mother, you won't let him do anything foolish?"
"He'll forget about it in a few minutes; but maybe you'd better go now and let him settle down. "
"Mother… I really think a home is the best solution. "
"Yes, Grandma, " the young woman nodded agreement. "After all, he's past ninety and he has his veteran's retirement… "
Inside his room, the old man listened as they departed. He went to the closet, took out clothes, began dressing.
City Engineer Eaton's face was chalk-white on the screen.
"No one can blame me, " he said. "How could I have known "
"Your office ran the surveys and gave the PA the green light, " Mayor Daugherty yelled.
"All the old survey charts showed was 'Disposal Area. ' " Eaton threw out his hands. "I assumed "
"As City Engineer, you're not paid to make assump-tions! Ten minutes' research would have told you that was a 'Y' category area!"
"What's 'Y' category mean?" Mayfield asked Reynolds. They were standing by the field comm center, listening to the dispute. Nearby, boom-mounted Tri-D cameras hummed, recording the progress of the immense machine, its upper turret rearing forty-five feet into the air, as it ground slowly forward across smooth ground toward the city, dragging behind it a trailing festoon of twisted reinforcing iron crusted with broken concrete.
"Half-life over one hundred years, " Reynolds answered shortly. "The last skirmish of the war was fought near here. Apparently this is where they buried the radioactive equipment left over from the battle. "
"But, that was more than seventy years ago "
"There's still enough residual radiation to contaminate anything inside a quarter mile radius. "
"They must have used some hellish stuff. " Mayfield stared at the dull shine half a mile distant.
"Reynolds, how are you going to stop this thing?" The mayor had turned on the PA Engineer.
"Me stop it? You saw what it did to my heaviest rigs: flattened them like pancakes. You'll have to call out the military on this one, Mr. Mayor. "
"Call in Federation forces? Have them meddling in civic affairs?"
"The station's only sixty-five miles from here. I think you'd better call them fast. It's only moving at about three miles per hour but it will reach the south edge of the Mall in another forty-five minutes. "
"Can't you mine it? Blast a trap in its path?"
"You saw it claw its way up from six hundred feet down. I checked the specs; it followed the old excavation tunnel out. It was rubble-filled and capped with twenty-inch compressed concrete. "
"It's incredible, " Eaton said from the screen. "The entire machine was encased in a ten-foot shell of reinforced armocrete. It had to break out of that before it could move a foot!"
"That was just a radiation shield; it wasn't intended to restrain a Bolo Combat Unit. "
"What was, may I inquire?" the mayor glared.
"The units were deactivated before being buried, " Eaton spoke up, as if he were eager to talk. "Their circuits were fused. It's all in the report "
"The report you should have read somewhat sooner, " the mayor snapped.
"What… what started it up?" Mayfield looked bewildered. "For seventy years it was down there, and nothing happened!"
"Our blasting must have jarred something, " Reynolds said shortly. "Maybe closed a relay that started up the old battle reflex circuit. "
"You know something about these machines?" the mayor asked.
"I've read a little. "
"Then speak up, man. I'll call the station, if you feel I must. What measures should I request?"
"I don't know, Mr. Mayor. As far as I know, nothing on New Devon can stop that machine now. "
The mayor's mouth opened and closed. He whirled to the screen, blanked Eaton's agonized face, punched in the code for the Federation Station.
"Colonel Blane!" he blurted as a stem face came onto the screen. "We have a major emergency on our hands! I'll need everything you've got! This is the situation "
I encounter no resistance other than the flimsy barrier, but my progress is slow. Grievous damage has been done to my main-drive sector due to overload during my escape from the trap; and the failure of my sensing circuitry has deprived me of a major portion of my external receptivity. Now my pain circuits project a continuous signal to my awareness center; but it is my duty to my commander and to my fallen comrades of the Brigade to press for- 't ward at my best speed; but my performance is a poor shadow of my former ability.
And now at last the Enemy comes into action! I sense
aerial units closing at supersonic velocities; I lock my lateral batteries to them and direct salvo fire; but I sense that the arming mechanisms clatter harmlessly. The craft sweep over me, and my impotent guns elevate, track them as they release detonants that spread out in an envelopmental pattern which I, with my reduced capabilities, am powerless to avoid. The missiles strike; I sense their detonations all about me; but I suffer only trivial damage. The enemy has blundered if he thought to neutralize a Mark XXVIII Combat Unit with mere chemical explosives! But I weaken with each meter gained.
Now there is no doubt as to my course. I must press the charge and carry the walls before my reserve cells are exhausted.
From a vantage point atop a bucket rig four hundred yards from the position the great fighting machine had now reached, Pete Reynolds studied it through night glasses. A battery of beamed polyarcs pinned the giant hulk, scarred and rust-scaled, in a pool of blue-white light. A mile and a half beyond it, the walls of the Mall rose sheer from the garden setting.
"The bombers slowed it some, " he reported to Eaton via scope. "But it's still making better than two miles per hour. I'd say another twenty-five minutes before it hits the main ringwall. How's the evacuation going?"
"Badly! I get no cooperation! You'll be my witness, Reynolds, I did all I could "
"How about the mobile batteries; how long before they'll be in position?" Reynolds cut him off.
"I've heard nothing from Federation Central typical militaristic arrogance, not keeping me informed but I have them on my screens. They're two miles out say three minutes. "
"I hope you made your point about N-heads. "
"That's outside my province!" Eaton said sharply. "It's up to Brand to carry out this portion of the operation!"
"The HE Missiles didn't do much more than clear away the junk it was dragging, " Reynolds' voice was sharp.
"I wash my hands of responsibility for civilian lives, " Eaton was saying when Reynolds shut him off, changed channels.
"Jim, I'm going to try to divert it, " he said crisply. "Eaton's sitting on his political fence; the Feds are bringing artillery up, but I don't expect much from it. Technically, Brand needs Sector OK to use nuclear stuff, and he's not the boy to stick his neck out "
"Divert it how? Pete, don't take any chances "
Reynolds laughed shortly. "I'm going to get around it and drop a shaped drilling charge in its path. Maybe I can knock a tread off. With luck, I might get its attention on me, and draw it away from the Mall. There are still a few thousand people over there, glued to their Tri-D's. They think it's all a swell show. "
"Pete, you can't walk up on that thing! It's hot… " He broke off. "Pete there's some kind of nut here he claims he has to talk to you; says he knows something about that damned juggernaut. Shall I send… ?"
Reynolds paused with his hand on the cut-off switch. "Put him on, " he snapped. Mayfield's face moved aside and an ancient, bleary-eyed visage stared out at him. The tip of the old man's tongue touched his dry lips.
"Son, I tried to tell this boy here, but he wouldn't listen "
"What have you got, old-timer?" Pete cut in. "Make it fast. "
"My name's Sanders. James Sanders. I'm… I was with the Planetary Volunteer Scouts, back in '71 "
"Sure, dad, " Pete said gently. "I'm sorry, I've got a little errand to run "
"Wait… " The old man's face worked. "I'm old, son too damned old. I know. But bear with me. I'll try to say it straight. I was with Hayle's squadron at Toledo. Then afterwards, they shipped us… but hell, you don't care about that! I keep wandering, son; can't help it.
What I mean to say is I was in on that last scrap, right here at New Devon only we didn't call it New Devon then. Called it Heliport. Nothing but bare rock and Enemy emplacements… "
"You were talking about the battle, Mr. Sanders, " Pete said tensely. "Go on with that part. "
"Lieutenant Sanders, " the oldster said. "Sure, I was Acting Brigade Commander. See, our major was hit at Toledo and after Tommy Chee stopped a sidewinder… "
"Stick to the point, Lieutenant!"
"Yes, sir!" the old man pulled himself together with an obvious effort. "I took the Brigade in; put out flankers, and ran the Enemy into the ground. We mopped 'em up in a thirty-three-hour running fight that took us from over by Crater Bay all the way down here to Heliport. When it was over, I'd lost six units, but the Enemy was done. They gave us Brigade Honors for that action. And then… "
"Then what?"
"Then the triple-dyed yellow-bottoms at Headquarters put out the order the Brigade was to be scrapped; said they were too hot to make decon practical. Cost too much, they said! So after the final review… " He gulped, blinked. "They planted 'em deep, two hundred meters, and poured in special High-R concrete. "
"And packed rubble in behind them, " Reynolds finished for him. "All right, Lieutenant, I believe you! But what started that machine on a rampage?"
"Should have known they couldn't hold down a Bolo Mark XXVIII!" The old man's eyes lit up. "Take more than a few million tons of rock to stop Lenny when his battle board was lit!"
"Lenny?"
"That's my old Command Unit out there, son. I saw the markings on the 3-D. Unit LNE of the Dinochrome Brigade!"
"Listen!" Reynolds snapped out. "Here's what I intend to try… " he outlined his plan.
"Ha!" Sanders snorted. "It's quite a notion, mister, but Lenny won't give it a sneeze. "
"You didn't come here to tell me we were licked, " Reynolds cut in. "How about Brand's batteries?"
"Hell, son, Lenny stood up to point-blank Hellbore fire on Toledo, and "
"Are you telling me there's nothing we can do?"
"What's that? No, son, that's not what I'm saying… "
"Then what!"
"Just tell these johnnies to get out of my way, mister. I think I can handle him. "
At the field Comm hut, Pete Reynolds watched as the man who had been Lieutenant Sanders of the Volunteer Scouts pulled shiny black boots over his thin ankles, and stood. The blouse and trousers of royal blue polyon hung on his spare frame like wash on a line. He grinned, a skull's grin.
"It doesn't fit like it used to, but Lenny will recognize it. It'll help. Now, if you've got that power pack ready… "
Mayfield handed over the old-fashioned field instrument Sanders had brought in with him.
"It's operating, sir but I've already tried everything I've got on that infernal machine; I didn't get a peep out of it. "
Sanders winked at him. "Maybe I know a couple of tricks you boys haven't heard about. " He slung the strap over his bony shoulder and turned to Reynolds.
"Guess we better get going, mister. He's getting close. "
In the rock car Sanders leaned close to Reynolds' ear. "Told you those Federal guns wouldn't scratch Lenny. They're wasting their time. "
Reynolds pulled the car to a stop at the crest of the road, from which point he had a view of the sweep of ground leading across to the city's edge. Lights sparkled all across the towers of New Devon. Close to the walls, the converging fire of the ranked batteries of infinite repeaters drove into the glowing bulk of the machine, which plowed on, undeterred. As he watched, the firing ceased.
"Now, let's get hi there, before they get some other scheme going, " Sanders said.
The rock car crossed the rough ground, swung wide to come up on the Bolo from the left side. Behind the hastily rigged radiation cover, Reynolds watched the immense silhouette grow before him.
"I knew they were big, " he said. "But to see one up close like this " He pulled to a stop a hundred feet from the Bolo.
"Look at the side ports, " Sanders said, his voice crisper now. "He's firing anti-personnel charges only his plates are flat. If they weren't, we wouldn't have gotten within half a mile. " He undipped the microphone and spoke into it:
"Unit LNE, break off action and retire to ten-mile line!"
Reynolds' head jerked around to stare at the old man. His voice had rung with vigor and authority as he spoke the command.
The Bolo ground slowly ahead. Sanders shook his head, tried again.
"No answer, like that fella said. He must be running on nothing but memories now… " He reattached the microphone and before Reynolds could put out a hand, had lifted the anti-R cover and stepped off on the ground.
"Sanders get back in here!" Reynolds yelled.
"Never mind, son. I've got to get hi close. Contact induction. " He started toward the giant machine. Frantically, Reynolds started the car, slammed it into gear, pulled forward.
"Better stay back, " Sanders' voice came from his field radio. "This close, that screening won't do you much good. "
"Get hi the car!" Reynolds roared. "That's hard radiation!"
"Sure; feels funny, like a sunburn, about an hour after you come in from the beach and start to think maybe you i
got a little too much. " He laughed. "But I'll get to him… "
Reynolds braked to a stop, watched the shrunken figure in the baggy uniform as it slogged forward, leaning as against a sleet-storm.
"I'm up beside him, " Sanders' voice came through faintly on the field radio. "I'm going to try to swing up on his side. Don't feel like trying to chase him any farther. "
Through the glasses, Reynolds watched the small figure, dwarfed by the immense bulk of the fighting machine as he tried, stumbled, tried again, swung up on the flange running across the rear quarter inside the churning bogie wheel.
"He's up, " he reported. "Damned wonder the track didn't get him before… "
Clinging to the side of the machine, Sanders lay for a moment, bent forward across the flange. Then he pulled himself up, wormed his way forward to the base of the rear quarter turret, wedged himself against it. He unslung the communicator, removed a small black unit, clipped it to the armor; it clung, held by a magnet. He brought the microphone up to his face.
In the Comm shack Mayfield leaned toward the screen, his eyes squinted in tension. Across the field Reynolds held the glasses fixed on the man lying across the flank of the Bolo. They waited.
The walls are before me, and I ready myself for a final effort, but suddenly I am aware of trickle currents flowing over my outer surface. Is this some new trick of the Enemy? I tune to the wave-energies, trace the source. They originate at a point in contact with my aft port armor. I sense modulation, match receptivity to a computed pattern. And I hear a voice:
"Unit LNE, break it off, Lenny. We're pulling back now, boy! This is Command to LNE; pull back to ten miles. If you read me, Lenny, swing to port and halt. "
/ am not fooled by the deception. The order appears
correct, but the voice is not that of my Commander. Briefly I regret that I cannot spare energy to direct a neutralizing power flow at the device the Enemy has attached to me. I continue my charge.
"Unit LNE! Listen to me, boy; maybe you don't recognize my voice, but it's me! You see some time has passed. I've gotten old. My voice has changed some, maybe. But it's me! Make a port turn, Lenny. Make it now!"
/ am tempted to respond to the trick, for something in the false command seems to awaken secondary circuits which I sense have been long stilled. But I must not be swayed by the cleverness of the Enemy. My sensing circuitry has faded further as my energy cells drain; but I know where the Enemy lies. I move forward, but I am filled with agony, and only the memory of my comrades drives me on.
"Lenny, answer me. Transmit on the old private band the one we agreed on. Nobody but me knows it, remember?"
Thus the Enemy seeks to beguile me into diverting precious power. But I will not listen.
"Lenny not much time left. Another minute and you'll be into the walls. People are going to die. Got to stop you, Lenny. Hot here. My God, I'm hot. Not breathing too well, now. I can feel it; cutting through me like knives. You took a load of Enemy power, Lenny; and now I'm getting my share. Answer me, Lenny. Over to you… "
It will require only a tiny allocation of power to activate a communication circuit. I realize that it is only an Enemy trick, but I compute that by pretending to be deceived, I may achieve some trivial advantage. I adjust circuitry accordingly, and transmit:
"Unit LNE to Command. Contact with Enemy defensive line imminent. Request supporting fire!"
"Lenny… you can hear me! Good boy, Lenny! Now make a turn, to port. Walls… close… "
"Unit LNE to Command. Request positive identification; transmit code 685749. "
"Lenny I can't… don't have code blanks. But it's me… "
"In absence of recognition code, your transmission disregarded. " / send. And now the walls loom high above me. There are many lights, but I see them only vaguely. I am nearly blind now.
"Lenny less'n two hundred feet to go. Listen, Lenny. I'm climbing down. I'm going to jump down, Lenny, and get around under your force scanner pickup. You'll see me, Lenny. You'll know me then. "
The false transmission ceases. I sense a body moving across my side. The gap closes. I detect movement before me, and in automatic reflex fire anti-P charges before I recall that I am unarmed.
A small object has moved out before me, and taken up a position between me and the wall behind which the Enemy conceal themselves. It is dim, but appears to have the shape of a man…
I am uncertain. My alert center attempts to engage inhibitory circuitry which will force me to halt, but it lacks power. I can override it. But still I am unsure. Now I must take a last risk, I must shunt power to my forward scanner to examine this obstacle more closely. I do so, and it leaps into greater clarity. It is indeed a man and it is enclothed in regulation blues of the Volunteers. Now, closer, I see the face, and through the pain of my great effort, I study it…
"He's backed against the wall, " Reynolds said hoarsely. "It's still coming. Fifty feet to go "
"You were a fool, Reynolds!" the mayor barked. "A fool to stake everything on that old dotard's crazy ideas!"
"Hold it!" As Reynolds watched, the mighty machine slowed, halted, ten feet from the sheer wall before it. For a moment it sat, as though puzzled. Then it backed, halted again, pivoted ponderously to the left and came about.
On its side, a small figure crept up, fell across the lower gun deck. The Bolo surged into motion, retracing its route across the artillery-scarred gardens.
"He's turned it, " Reynolds let his breath out with a shuddering sigh. "It's headed out for open desert. It might get twenty miles before it finally runs out of steam. "
The strange voice that was the Bolo's came from the big panel before Mayfield:
Command… Unit LNE reports main power cells drained, secondary cells drained; now operating at. 037 percent efficiency, using Final Emergency Power. Request advice as to range to be covered before relief maintenance available. "
"It's a long, long way, Lenny… " Sanders' voice was a bare whisper. "But I'm coming with you… "
Then there was only the crackle of static. Ponderously, like a great, mortally stricken animal, the Bolo moved through the ruins of the fallen roadway, heading for the open desert.
"That damned machine, " the mayor said in a hoarse voice. "You'd almost think it was alive. "
"You would at that, " Pete Reynolds said.
by Gary Wright
Stone Age science fiction is filled with stories about robot boxers and games of "space hockey" played with one-man rockets. The stories were fun even though the sports could never possibly work in reality. Gary Wright has created an unusual story by inventing an unusual technological sport. The impact comes from the sensation that his powered sleds would work.
They called it the Stuka. It was a tortuous, twenty-kilometer path of bright ice, and in that distance 12. 42 miles it dropped 7, 366 feet, carving a course down the alpine mountainside like the track of a great snake. It was thirty feet wide on the straights with corners curling as high as forty feet. It was made for sleds…
He waited in the narrow cockpit and listened to the wind. It moaned along the frozen shoulder of the towering white peak and across the steep starting ramp, pushing along streamers of snow out against the hard blue sky, and he could hear it cry inside him with the same cold and lonely sound.
He was scared. And what was worse he knew it.
Forward, under the sleek nose of his sled, the mountain fell away abruptly straight down, it seemed and the valley was far below. So very far.
… too far this time, buddy-boy, too far forever…
The countdown light on the dash flickered a sudden blood red, then deliberately winked twice. At the same time two red rockets arced out over the valley and exploded into twin crimson fireballs.
Two minutes.
On both sides of the starting ramp, cantilevered gracefully from the mountainside, brightly bannered platforms were crowded with people. He glanced at the hundreds of blankly staring sunglasses, always the same, always turned to the ramp as if trying to see inside the helmets of these men, as if trying to pry into the reasons of their being there waiting to die. He looked back to the deep valley; today he wondered too.
… just one last time, wasn't that what you told yourself? One last race and that's the end of it and goodbye to the sleds and thank God! Wasn't that your personal promise?
Then what in hell are you doing here? That "last race" was last month's race. Why are you in this one?
No answer.
All he could find inside were cold questions and a hollow echo of the wind. He gripped the steering wheel, hard, until cramps began in his hands; he would think about his sled…
It was his eleventh sled, and like the others it was a brilliant red, not red for its particular flash, but because of a possible crash far from the course in deep snow. He wanted to be found and found fast. Some of the Kin had never been found in time.
… they didn't find Bob Lander until that summer
He forced himself back.
Empty, the sled weighed 185 pounds and looked very much like the body-shell of a particularly sleek racer but with a full bubble canopy and with runners instead of wheels. It was a mean-looking missile, low and lean, hardly wider than his shoulders, clearing the ice by barely two inches. He sat nearly reclining, the half wheel in his lap, feet braced on the two edging pedals and this was the feature that made these sleds the awesome things they were. They could tilt their runners four hollow-ground, chrome-steel "skis" edging them against the ice like wide skate blades. This was what had changed bobsled-ding into… this: this special thing with its special brotherhood, this clan apart, this peculiar breed of men set aside for the wonder of other men. The Kin, they called themselves.
… Someone once, laughing, had said, "Without peer, we are the world's fastest suicides. "
He snapped himself back again and checked his brakes.
By pulling back on the wheel, two electrically operated flaps actually halves of the sled's tail section swung out on either side. Silly to see, perhaps. But quite effective when this twelve and a half square feet hit the air-stream at 80 mph. A button under his right thumb operated another braking system: with each push it fired forward a solid rocket charge in the nose of the sled. There were seven charges, quite often not enough. But when everything failed, including the man, there was the lever by his left hip. The Final Folly, it was called; a firm pull and, depending on a hundred unknown "if's" and "maybe's, " he might be lucky enough to find himself hanging from a parachute some three hundred feet up. Or it might be the last voluntary act of his life.
He had used it twice. Once streaking into the tall wall of the Wingover, he had lost a runner… and was almost fired into the opposite grandstand, missing the top tiers of seats by less than four feet. Another time six sleds suddenly tangled directly in front of him, and he had blasted himself through the overhanging limbs of a large fir tree.
But others had not been so lucky.
Hans Kroger: they finally dug his body out of eighteen feet of snow; he'd gone all the way to the dirt. His sled had been airborne when he blew and upside-down!
Jarl Yogensen: his sled tumbling and he ejected directly under the following sleds. No one was certain that all of him was ever found!
Max Conrad: a perfect blow-out! At least 350 feet up and slightly downhill… His chute never opened.
Wayne Barley:
He jarred himself hard in the cockpit and felt the sudden seizure of his G-suit. He wanted to hit something. But he could feel the watching eyes and the TV cameras, and there wasn't room in the cockpit to get a decent swing anyway.
His countdown light flickered for attention and blinked once, and a single red rocket flashed into the sky.
One minute God, had time stopped?
But that was part of it all: the waiting, the God-awful waiting, staring down at the valley over a mile below. And how many men had irrevocably slammed back their canopy in this lifetime of two minutes and stayed behind? A few, yes. And he could too. Simply open his canopy, that was the signal, and when the start came the other sleds would dive down and away and he would be sitting here alone. But, God, so alone! And he would be alone for the rest of his life. He might see some of the Kin again, sometime, somewhere. But they would not see him. It was a kind of death to stay behind.
… and a real death to go. Death, the silent rider with every man in every race…
He frowned at the other sleds, sixteen in staggered rows of eight. Sixteen bright and beautiful, trim fast projectiles hanging from their starting clamps. He knew them, every one; they were his brothers. They were the Kin but not here. Not now.
Years ago when he was a novice he had asked old Franz Cashner, "Did you see the way I took Basher Bend right beside you?"
And Franz told him, "Up there I see nobody! Only sleds! Down here you are you, up there you are nothing but another sled. That's all! And don't forget that!"
… and it had to be that way. On the course sleds crashed and were no more… Only later, in the valley, were there men missing.
Of these sixteen, chances were that nine would finish. With luck, maybe ten. And chances also said that only fourteen of these men would be alive tonight. Those were the odds, as hard and cold as the ice, the fascinating frosting for this sport. Violent death! Assured, spectacular, magnetic death in a sport such as the world had never known. Incredible men with incredible skills doing an incredible thing.
Back in the Sixties they claimed an empty sled with its steering locked would make a course all by itself. An empty sled here would not last two corners. The Stuka was a cold killer, not a thrill ride. And it was not particular. It killed veterans and novices alike. But there was $20, 000 for the man who got to the end of it first, and a whole month before he had to do it again. Money and fame and all the girls in the world. Everything and anything for the men who rode the Stuka.
Was that why they did it?
… yes, always that question: "Why do you do it?" And before he had died on the Plummet, Sir Robert Brooke had told them, "Well, why not?"
And it was an answer as good as any.
But was it good enough this time?
No answer.
He only knew there was but one way off this mountain for him now and that was straight ahead, and for the first time since his novice runs, his legs were trembling. Twelve and a half miles, call it, and the record was 9 minutes, 1. 14 seconds! An average speed of 82. 67 mph, and that was his record. They would at least remember him by that!
His countdown light flashed, a green rocket rose and burst, and there was a frozen moment… the quiet click of the release hook, the lazy, slow-motion start, the sleds sliding forward in formation over the edge… then he was looking once again into the terrible top of the Stuka that 45-degree, quarter-mile straight drop. In six sec-onds he was doing over 60 mph, and the mouth of the first corner was reaching up.
… Carl's Corner, for Carl Rasch, who went over the top of it nine years ago; and they found him a half-mile down the glacier… what was left of him…
He glanced to his right. It was clear. He eased his flap brakes, dropped back slightly and pulled right. The leading sleds were jockeying in front now, lining for this long left. Brakes flapped like quick wings, and they started around, sleds riding up the vertical ice wall and holding there, ice chips spraying back like contrails from those on the lower part of the wall as they edged their runners against the turn. He came in far right and fast, riding high on the wall and diving off with good acceleration.
The ice was a brilliant blur underneath now, and he could feel the trembling rumble of his sled. They rattled into the Chute, a steep traverse, still gaining speed, still bunched and jostling for position. He was in the rear but this was good; he didn't like this early crowding for the corners.
The sheer wall of Basher Bend loomed, a 120-degree right that dropped hard coming out. He was following close in the slipstream of the sled in front of him, overtaking because of the lessened wind resistance. The corner came, and they were on the wall again. With his slightly greater speed he was able to go higher on the wall, nearly to the top and above the other sled. His G-suit tightened. They swarmed out of the corner and into the Strafing Run, a long, steep dive with a hard pull-out.
A roar rose from the mountain now as the sleds reached speed, a dull rumble like that of avalanche… and that is actually what they were now an avalanche of sleds, and just as deadly.
He pulled ahead of the other sled in the dive and hit the savage pull-out right on the tail of another, and the next turn curved up before them: Hell's Left, a double corner, an abrupt left falling into a short straight with another sharp left at the bottom. He was still overtaking, and they went up the wall side by side, he on the inside, under the other. He eased his left pedal, using edges for the first time, holding himself away from the other by a safe six inches. The course dropped away, straight down the mountain to the second half of the corner, and he felt the sickening sudden smoothness of leaving the ice he had tried it too fast, and the course was falling away under him…
… old Rolf De Kepler, "The Flying Dutchman, " laughing over his beer and saying, "Always I am spending more time off the ice than on, hah? So this is more easy to my stomach. Already I have four G-suits to give up on me. "…
… and he made his last flight three years ago off the top at the bottom of Hell's Left… four hundred yards, they claimed.
He held firm and straight on the wheel and pulled carefully, barely opening his brakes. The sled touched at a slight angle, lurched, but he caught it by edging quickly. The other sled had pulled ahead. He tucked in behind it. The second left was rushing up at them, narrow and filled with sleds. They dove into it less than a foot apart. Ice chips streamed back from edging runners, rattling against his sled like a storm of bullets. There was an abrupt lurching, the quick left-right slam of air turbulence. A sled was braking hard somewhere ahead. Perhaps two or three. Where? He couldn't see. He reacted automatically… full air brakes, hard onto his left edges and steer for the inside; the safest area if a wreck was trying to happen. His sled shivered with the strain of coming off the wall, holding against the force of the corner now only with the knifelike edges of its runners. But the force was too great. He began to skid, edges chattering. He eased them off a little, letting the sled drift slightly sideways. Two others had sliced down to the inside too, edges spraying ice. For a moment he was blinded again, but the corner twisted out flat, and he was through and still on the course, and he knew he was too tight, too hard with his control; he was fighting his sled instead of working with it…
… a tourist once asked Erik Sigismund how he controlled his sled, and he answered, "Barely. " And even that had jailed when he flipped it a year ago and jour others ran over him.
An old, lurking thought pounced into him again… he couldn't stop this sled now if he wanted to. There was no such thing as stopping, outside of a crash. He had to ride until it ended, and he was suddenly certain that was not going to be at the bottom. Not this time. He had crashed before, too many times, but he had never had this feeling of fear before. Not this fear. It was different, and he couldn't say why, and he was letting it affect him. And that was the greatest wrong.
They were thundering into the Jackhammer now, three hundred yards of violent dips. Every sled had its brakes out, and there were fast flashes as some fired braking rockets. But where the walls of the course sloped upward the ice was comparatively smooth. He eased left, to the uphill side, and leaned on his left pedal, holding the sled on the slope with its edges. Then he folded his air brakes and started gaining again. It was necessary; one did not hold back from fear. If that was one's style of life, he would never be a sledder hi the first place.
Suddenly from the middle of the leading blurs a sled became airborne from the crest of one of the bumps. It hit once and twisted into the air like something alive. Sleds behind it fired rockets and tried to edge away. One skidded broadside, then rolled. A shattered body panel spun away; the two sleds were demolishing themselves. Someone blew-out, streaking into the sky, canopy sparkling high in the sun and that meant another sled out of control. He pulled full air brakes and fired a rocket, the force slamming him hard against his chest straps. His left arm was ready to fire the charge under the seat. But if he waited too long…
… Kurt Schnabel was proud to be the only man who
had never ejected… but the one time he had tried he had waited the barest fraction of a moment too long, and his chute came down with his shattered corpse.
The three wild sleds whirled away, spinning out of sight over the low retaining walls. He folded his brakes. There was a trembling in his arms and legs like the slight but solid shuddering of a flywheel out of balance, involuntary and with a threat of getting worse. He cursed himself. He could have blown-out too. No one would have blamed him with that tangle developing in front. But he hadn't… and it was too late now.
… only one man had ever blown-out without an apparent reason and gotten away with it: Shorty Case in his first race. And when he was asked about it afterward, asked in that overcasual, quiet tone, he had answered, "You bet your sweet, I blew! 'Cause if I hadn't, man, I was gonna pee my pants!"
But he didn't blow-out that day on the Fallaways, the day his sled somersaulted and sowed its wreckage down the course for a half mile… and him too…
No, there were no quitters here; only the doers or the dead. And which was he going to be tonight?
… drive, don't think…
The Jackhammer smoothed out and plunged downward, and they were hurtling now into the Wingover at over 90 mph. Here were the second biggest grandstands on the course, the second greatest concentration of cameras.
Here two ambulance helicopters stood by, and a priest too. The Wingover…
Imagine an airplane peeling off into a dive… imagine a sled doing the same on a towering wall of ice, a wall rising like a great, breaking wave, frozen at the moment of its overhanging curl… The Wingover was a monstrous, curving scoop to the right, nearly fifty feet high, rolling the sleds up, over, and hurling them down into a 65-degree pitch when twisted into a 6-G pull-out to the left.
… "Impossible!" When Wilfrid von Gerlach laid out the Stuka that is what they told him about the Wingover. "It cannot be done!"
But von Gerlach had been a Grand Prix racer and a stunt pilot, and when the Stuka was finished he took the first sled through. At the finish he sat quietly for a moment, staring back at the mountain. "At the Wingover I was how fast?" he asked thoughtfully. They replied that he'd been radared there at 110 mph. He nodded, then made the statement the sledders had carried with them ever since.
"It's possible. "
He watched the leading sleds line up for that shining, sheer curve and felt the fear freeze through him again. A man was little more than a captive in his sled here. If he was on the right line going in, then it was beautiful; if not, well…
… the brotherly beers and the late talk…
"Remember when Otto Domagk left Cripple's Corner in that snowstorm?"
"Ya, und ven him vas digged out Vas? Two hours? he vas so sleeping. "
"And not a mark on him, remember?"
… Remember, remember…
He followed in line barely four feet from the sled in front of him and felt the savage, sickening blow as the wall raised and rolled him. A flicker of shadow, a glimpse of the valley nearly upside-down, then the fall and the increasing shriek of wind and runners, and he was pointing perfectly into the pull-out, still lined exactly with the sled ahead but there was one sled badly out of line…
And someone pulled their air brakes full open.
Sleds began weaving in the violent turbulence of those brakes. Rockets flashed. A sled went sideways, rolling lazily above the others, and exploded against the wall of the pull-out. He pulled the ejection lever… nothing happened!
He was dead, he knew that. He saw two sleds tumbling into the sky, another shattered to pieces and sliding along the course. All that was necessary was to hit one of those pieces… but the corner was suddenly gone behind. The course unwound into a long left traverse. He remembered to breathe. There were tooth chips in his mouth and the taste of blood. He swerved past a piece of wreckage, then another…
… how many were dead now? Himself and how many others? But it wasn't fear of death what was it? What was it that he'd walled off inside that something secret always skirted as carefully as a ship veers from a hidden reef, knowing it is there what? And now the wall was down, and he was facing.…
His sled shuddered. He was driving badly, too harsh with his edge control. He narrowly made it through the Boot and Cripple's Corner, spraying ice behind him, but it was not the sled that was out of control. It was him. And he was diving now straight for the gates of hell at over 110 mph.
It was called the Plummet. It began with an innocent, wide left, steeply banked, then the world fell away. It dove over a half mile headlong down a 50-degree slope straight into a ravine and up the other side, then into a full 180-degree uphill hairpin to the right, a steep straight to the bottom of the ravine again, and finally into a sharp left and a long, rolling straight. It had killed more men than any other part of the course.
Here were the biggest grandstands and the most hungry eyes of the cameras. Here there were three clergy, and emergency operating rooms. Here…
… here he would complete the formality of dying.
He came into the left too low, too fast for the edges to hold. The sled skidded. He reacted automatically, holding slight left edges and steering into the skid. The sled drifted up the wall, arcing toward the top where nothing showed but the cold blue of the sky. He waited, a part of him almost calm now, waiting to see if the corner would straighten before he went over the top. It did, but he was still skidding, close to the retaining wall, plunging into the half-mile drop nearly sideways. He increased his edges. The tail of the sled brushed the wall and it was suddenly swinging the opposite way. He reversed his wheel and edges, anticipating another skid, but he was not quick enough. The sled bucked, careening up on its left runners. It grazed the wall again, completely out of control now but he kept trying…
… and that was it; you kept trying. Over and over. No matter how many times you faced yourself it had to be done again. And again. The Self was never satisfied with single victories you had to keep trying…
And he was empty no more.
The hospital. How many times had he awakened here? And it was always wonderfully the same: gentle warmth and his body finally relaxed and he would test it piece by piece to see what was bent and broken this time; and always the newsmen and the writers and the other assorted ghouls, and always the question and answer period. Punch-lining, they called it…
"How did it happen?"
"I dozed off. "
"Why didn't you eject?"
"Parachuting is dangerous. "
"When did you realize you were out of control?"
"At the starting line. "
"What will you do now?"
"Heal. "
"Will you race again?"
… "It's possible. "
Outside, the wind was blowing.
by Harlan Ellison
The author of this story has been accused of many things in his lifetime, but never of being shy. He comes on strong and so does his fiction. He has written motion picture and television scripts, and enjoys the freedom of imagery and use of sound inherent in these mediums. He has not said so, but I am sure he decries the taboo-ridden cliches that must be required in his scripting, and welcomes the opportunity to write science fiction where the only restrictions are self-imposed. But he attempts to compress wide-screen color and thunderous sound effects into his stories, often with eye-widening results. Here is Ellison at his loudest and most effective in a stopping, startling story, by the only author who can write prose in a top-of-the-lungs shout
With an eight hole-card, and a queen showing, with the dealer showing a four up, Kostner decided to let the house do the work. So he stood, and the dealer turned up. Six.
The dealer looked like something out of a 1935 George Raft film: arctic diamond-chip eyes, manicured fingers long as a brain surgeon's, straight black hair slicked flat away from the pale forehead. He did not look up as he peeled them off. A three. Another three. Bam. A five. Bam. Twenty-one, and Kostner saw his last thirty dollars six five-dollar chips scraped on the edge of the cards, into the dealer's chip racks. Busted. Flat. Down and out in Las Vegas, Nevada. Playground of the Western World.
He slid off the comfortable stool-chair and turned his back on the blackjack table. The action was already starting again, like waves closing over a drowned man. He had been there, was gone, and no one had noticed. No one had seen a man blow the last tie with salvation. Kostner now had his choice: he could bum his way into Los Angeles and try to find something that resembled a new life… or he could go blow his brains out through the back of his head.
Neither choice showed much light or sense.
He thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his worn and dirty chinos, and started away down the line of slot machines clanging and rattling on the other side of the aisle between blackjack tables.
He stopped. He felt something in his pocket. Beside him, but all-engrossed, a fiftyish matron in electric lavender capris, high heels and Ship n' Shore blouse was working two slots, loading and pulling one while waiting for the other to clock down. She was dumping quarters in a seemingly inexhaustible supply from a Dixie cup held in her left hand. There was a surrealistic presence to the woman. She was almost automated, not a flicker of expression on her face, the eyes fixed and unwavering. Only when the gong rang, someone down the line had pulled a jackpot, did she look up. And at that moment Kostner knew what was wrong and immoral and deadly about Vegas, about legalized gambling, about setting the traps all baited and open in front of the average human. The woman's face was gray with hatred, envy, lust and dedication to the game in that timeless instant when she heard another drugged soul down the line winning a miniscule jackpot. A jackpot that would only lull the player with words like luck and ahead of the game. The jackpot lure; the sparkling, bobbling many-colored wiggler in a sea of poor fish.
The thing in Kostner's pocket was a silver dollar.
He brought it out and looked at it.
The eagle was hysterical.
But Kostner pulled to an abrupt halt, only one half-footstep from the sign indicating the limits of Tap City. He was still with it. What the high-rollers called the edge, the vigerish, the fine hole card. One buck. One cartwheel. Pulled out of the pocket not half as deep as the pit into which Kostner had just been about to plunge.
What the hell, he thought, and turned to the row of slot machines.
He had thought they'd all been pulled out of service, the silver dollar slots. A shortage of coinage, said the United States Mint. But right there, side by side with the nickel and quarter bandits, was one cartwheel machine. Two thousand dollar jackpot. Kostner grinned foolishly. If you're gonna go out, go out like a champ.
He thumbed the silver dollar into the coin slot and grabbed the heavy, oiled handle. Shining cast aluminum and pressed steel. Big black plastic ball. Angled for arm-ease, pull it all day and you won't get weary.
Without a prayer in the universe, Kostner pulled the handle.
She had been born in Tucson, mother full-blooded Cherokee, father a bindlestiff on his way through. Mother had been working a truckers' stop, father had popped for spencer steak and sides. Mother had just gotten over a bad scene, indeterminate origins, unsatisfactory culminations. Mother had popped for bed. And sides. Margaret Annie Jessie had come nine months later; black of hair, fair of face, and born into a life of poverty. Twenty-three years later, a determined product of Miss Clairol and Berlitz, a dream-image formed by Vogue and intimate association with the rat race, Margaret Annie Jessie had become a contraction.
Maggie.
Long legs, trim and coltish; hips a trifle large, the kind that promote that specific thought in men, about getting their hands around it; belly flat, isometrics; waist cut to the bone, a waist that works in any style from dirndl to disco-slacks; no breasts all nipple, but no breast, like an expensive whore (the way O'Hara penned it) and no
padding… forget the cans, baby, there's other, more important action; smooth, Michelangelo-sculpted neck, a pillar, proud; and all that face.
Outthrust chin, perhaps a tot too much belligerence, but if you'd walloped as many gropers, you too, sweetheart; narrow mouth, petulant lower lip, nice to chew on, a lower lip as though filled with honey, bursting, ready for things to happen; a nose that threw the right sort of shadow, flaring nostrils, the acceptable words aquiline, patrician, classic, allathat; cheekbones as stark and promontory as a spit of land after ten years of open ocean; cheekbones holding darkness like narrow shadows, sooty beneath the taut-fleshed bone structure; amazing cheekbones, the whole face, really; simple uptilted eyes, the touch of the Cherokee, eyes that looked out at you, as you looked in at them, like someone peering out of the keyhole as you peered in; actually, dirty eyes, they said 't you can get it.
Blond hair, a great deal of it, wound and rolled and smoothed and flowing, in the old style, the pageboy thing men always admire; no tight little cap of slicked plastic; no ratted and teased Anapurna of bizarre coiffure; no ironed-flat discotheque hair like number 3 flat noodles. Hair, the way a man wants it, so he can dig his hands in at the base of the neck and pull all that face very close.
An operable woman, a working mechanism, a rigged and sudden machinery of softness and motivation.
Twenty-three, and determined as hell never to abide in that vale of poverty her mother had called purgatory for her entire life; snuffed out in a grease fire in the last trailer, somewhere in Arizona, thank God no more pleas for a little money from babygirl Maggie hustling drinks in a Los Angeles topless joint. (There ought to be some remorse in there somewhere, for a Mommy gone where all good grease-fire victims go. Look around, you'll find it. )
Maggie.
Genetic freak. Mommy's Cherokee uptilted eyeshape, and Polack quickscrewing Daddy Withouta-Name's blue as innocence color.
Blue-eyed Maggie, dyed blonde, alia that face, alia that leg, fifty bucks a night can get it and it sounds like it's having a climax.
Irish-innocent blue-eyed innocent French-legged innocent Maggie. Polack. Cherokee. Irish. All-woman and going on the market for this month's rent on the stucco pad, eighty bucks worth of groceries, a couple month's worth for a Mustang, three appointments with the specialist in Beverly Hills about that shortness of breath after a night on the Watusi.
Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, pretty Maggie Moneyeyes, who came from Tucson and trailers and rheumatic fever and a surge to live that was all kaleidoscope frenzy of clawing scrabbling no-nonsense. If it took laying on one's back and making sounds like a panther in the desert, then one did it, because nothing, but nothing way as bad as being dirt-poor, itchy-skinned, soiled-underwear, scufftoed, hairy and ashamed lousy with the no-gots. Nothing!
Maggie. Hooker. Hustler. Grabber. Swinger. If there's a buck in it, there's rhythm and the onomatopoeia is Maggie Maggie Maggie.
She who puts out. For a price, whatever that might be.
Maggie was dating Nuncio. He was Sicilian. He had dark eyes and an alligator-grain wallet with slip-in pockets for credit cards. He was a spender, a sport, a high-roller. They went to Vegas.
Maggie and the Sicilian. Her blue eyes and his slip-in pockets. But mostly her blue eyes.
The spinning reels behind the three long glass windows blurred, and Kostner knew there wasn't a chance. Two-thousand-dollar jackpot. Round and round, whirring. Three bells or two bells and a jackpot bar, get 18; three plums or two plums and a jackpot bar, get 14; three oranges or two oranges and a jac...
Ten, five, two bucks for a single cherry cluster in first position. Something… I'm drowning… something…
The whirring…
Round and round…
As something happened that was not considered in the pit-boss manual.
The reels whipped and snapped to a stop, clank, clank, clank, tight in place.
Three bars looked up at Kostner. But they did not say JACKPOT. They were three bars on which stared three blue eyes. Very blue, very immediate, very JACKPOT!!
Twenty silver dollars clattered into the payoff trough at the bottom of the machine. An orange light flickered on in the casino cashier's cage, bright orange on the jackpot board. And the gong began clanging overhead.
The slot machine floor manager nodded once to the pit boss, who pursed his lips and started toward the seedy-looking man still standing with his hand on the slot's handle.
The token payment twenty silver dollars lay untouched in the payoff trough. The balance of the jackpot one thousand nine hundred and eighty dollars would be paid manually by the casino cashier. And Kostner stood, dumbly, as the three blue eyes stared up at him.
There was a moment of idiotic disorientation, as Kostner stared back at the three blue eyes; a moment in which the slot machine's mechanisms registered to themselves; and the gong was clanging furiously.
All through the hotel's casino people turned from their games to stare. At the roulette tables the white-on-white players from Detroit and Cleveland pulled their watery eyes away from the clattering ball, and stared down the line for a second at the ratty-looking guy in front of the slot machine. From where they sat, they could not tell it was a two-grand pot, and their rheumy eyes went back into billows of cigar smoke, and that little ball.
The blackjack hustlers turned momentarily, screwing around in then" seats, and smiled. They were closer to the slot-players in temperament, but they knew the slots were a dodge to keep the old ladies busy, while the players worked toward their endless twenty-ones.
And the old dealer, who could no longer cut it at the fast-action boards, who had been put out to pasture by a grateful management, standing at the Wheel of Fortune near the entrance to the casino, even he paused in his zombie-murmuring ("Annnnother winner onna Wheel of Forchun!") to no one at all, and looked toward Kostner and that incredible gong-clanging. Then, in a moment, still with no players, he called another nonexistent winner.
Kostner heard the gong from far away. It had to mean he had won two thousand dollars, but that was impossible. He checked the payoff chart on the face of the machine. Three bars labeled JACKPOT meant JACKPOT. Two thousand dollars.
But these three bars did not say JACKPOT. They were three gray bars, rectangular in shape, with three blue eyes directly in the center of each bar.
Blue eyes?
Somewhere, a connection was made, and electricity, a billion volts of electricity, were shot through Kostner. His hair stood on end, his fingertips bled raw, his eyes turned to jelly, and every fiber in his musculature became radioactive. Somewhere, out there, in a place that was not this place. Kostner had been inextricably bound to to someone. Blue eyes?
The gong had faded out of his head, the constant noise level of the casino, chips chittering, people mumbling, dealers calling plays, it had all gone, and he was embedded in silence.
Tied to that someone else, out there somewhere, through those three blue eyes.
Then in an instant, it had passed, and he was alone again, as though released by a giant hand, the breath; crushed out of him. He staggered up against the slot ma- • chine.
"You all right, fellah?"
A hand gripped him by the arm, steadied him. The gong was still clanging overhead somewhere, and he was breathless from a journey he had just taken. His eyes focused and he found himself looking at the stocky pit boss who had been on duty while he had been playing blackjack.
"Yeah… I'm okay, just a little dizzy is all. "
"Sounds like you got yourself a big jackpot, fellah, " the pit boss grinned. It was a leathery grin; something composed of stretched muscles and conditioned reflexes, totally mirthless.
"Yeah… great… " Kostner tried to grin back. But he was still shaking from that electrical absorption that had kidnapped him.
"Let me check it out, " the pit boss was saying, edging around Kostner, and staring at the face of the slot machine. "Yeah, three jackpot bars, all right. You're a winner. "
Then it dawned on Kostner! Two thousand dollars! He looked down at the slot machine and saw
Three bars with the word JACKPOT on them. No blue eyes, just words that meant money. Kostner looked around frantically, was he losing his mind? From somewhere, not in the casino room, he heard a tinkle of rhodium-plated laughter.
He scooped up the twenty silver dollars. Then the pit boss dropped in a cartwheel and pulled off the jackpot; smiling cordially, he walked Kostner to the rear of the casino, talking to him in a muted, extremely polite tone of voice. At the cashier's window, the pit boss nodded to a weary-looking man at a huge Rolodex card-file, checking credit ratings.
"Barney, jackpot on the cartwheel Chief; slot five oh oh one five. " He grinned at Kostner, who tried to smile back. It was difficult. He felt stunned.
The cashier checked a payoff book for the correct amount to be drawn and leaned over the counter toward Kostner. "Check or cash, sir?"
Kostner felt bouyancy coming back to him. "Is the ca-sino's check good?" They all three laughed at that. "A
check's fine, " Kostner said. The check was drawn, and the Check-Riter punched out the little bumps that said two thousand. "The twenty cartwheels are a gift, " the cashier said, sliding the check through to Kostner.
He held it, looked at it, and still found it difficult to believe. Two grand, back on the golden road.
As he walked back through the casino with the pi boss, the stocky man asked pleasantly, "Well, what are you going to do with it?" Kostner had to think a moment He didn't really have any plans. But then the sudden real ization came to him: "I'm going to play that slot machine again. " The pit boss smiled: a congenital sucker. He would put all twenty of those silver dollars back into the Chief, and then turn to the other games. Blackjack, rou-lette, faro, baccarat… in a few hours he would have redeposited the two grand with the hotel casino. It always happened.
He walked Kostner back to the slot machine, and pat-ted him on the shoulder. "Lotsa luck, fellah. "
As he turned away, Kostner slipped a silver dollar into the machine, and pulled the handle.
The pit boss had only taken five steps when he heard the incredible sound of the reels clicking to a stop, the clash of twenty token silver dollars hitting the payoff trough, and that goddamned gong went out of its mind again.
She had known that sonofabitch Nuncio was a perverted swine. A walking filth. A dungheap between his ears. Some kind of monster in nylon undershorts. There weren't many kinds of games Maggie hadn't played, but what that Sicilian De Sade wanted to do was outright vomity!
She nearly fainted when he suggested it. Her heart which the Beverly Hills specialist had said she should no tax began whumping frantically. "You pig!" she screamed. "You filthy dirty ugly pig you, Nuncio you pig!" She had bounded out of the bed and started to throw on clothes. She didn't even bother with a brassiere, pulling the poor boy sweater on over her breasts, still crimson with the touches and love-bites Nuncio had showered on them.
He sat up in the bed, a pathetic-looking little man, gray hair at the temples and no hair at all on top, and his eyes were moist. He was porcine, was indeed the swine she called him, but he was helpless before her. He was in love with his hooker, with the tart that he was supporting. It had been the first time for the swine Nuncio, and he was helpless. Back in Detroit, had it been a floozy, a chippy broad, he would have gotten out of the double bed and rapped her around pretty good. But this Maggie, she tied him in knots. He had suggested… that, what they should do together… because he was so consumed with her. But she was furious with him. It wasn't that bizarre an idea!
"Gimme a chanct'a talk't'ya, honey… Maggie… "
"You filthy pig, Nuncio! Give me some money, I'm going down to the casino, and I don't want to see your filthy pig face for the rest of the day, remember that!"
And she had gone in his wallet and pants, and taken eight hundred and sixteen dollars, while he watched. He was helpless before her. She was something stolen from a world he knew only as "class" and she could do what she wanted with him.
Genetic freak Maggie, blue-eyed posing mannequin Maggie, pretty Maggie Moneyeyes, who was one-half Cherokee and one-half a buncha other things, had absorbed her lessons well. She was the very model of a "class broad. "
"Not for the rest of the day, do you understand?" she snapped at him, and went downstairs, furious, to fret and gamble and wonder about nothing but years of herself.
Men stared after her as she walked. She carried herself like a challenge, the way a squire carried a pennant, the way a prize bitch carried herself in the judge's ring. Born to the blue. The wonders of mimicry and desire.
Maggie had no lusts for gambling, none whatever. She merely wanted to taste the fury of her relationship with the swine Sicilian, her need for solidarity in a life built on the edge of the slide area, the senselessness of being here in Las Vegas when she could be back in Beverly Hills.
She grew angrier and more ill at the thought of Nuncio upstairs in the room, taking another shower. She bathed three times a day. But it was different with him. He knew she resented his smell; he had the soft odor of wet fur sometimes, and she had told him about it. Now he bathed constantly and hated it. He was a foreigner to the bath. His life had been marked by various kinds of filths, and baths for him now were more of an obscenity than dirt could ever have been. For her, bathing was different. It was a necessity. She had to keep the patina of the world off her, had to remain clean and smooth and white. A presentation, not an object of flesh and hair. A chromium instrument, something never pitted by rust and corrosion,
When she was touched by them, by any one of them, by the men, by all the Nuncios, they left little pit holes of bloody rust on her white, permanent flesh; cobweb, sooty stains. She had to bathe. Often.
She strolled down between the tables and the slots, carrying eight hundred and sixteen dollars. Eight one hundred dollar bills and sixteen dollars in ones.
At the change booth she got cartwheels for the sixteen ones. The Chief waited. It was her baby. She played it to infuriate the Sicilian. He told her to play the nickel slots, the quarter or dime slots, but she always infuriated him by blowing fifty or a hundred dollars in ten minutes, one coin after another, in the big Chief.
She faced the machine squarely, and put in the first silver dollar. She pulled the handle that swine Nuncio. Another dollar, pulled the handle how long does this go on? The reels cycled and spun and whirled and whipped in a blurringspinning metalhumming overandoverandover as Maggie blue-eyed Maggie hated and hated and thought of hate and all the days and nights of swine behind her and ahead of her and if only she had all the money in this room in this casino in this hotel in this town right now this very instant just an instant thisinstant it would be enough to whirring and humming and spinning and overandoverandover, yeah, and she would be free free free and all the world would never touch her body again the swine would
never touch her white flesh again and then suddenly as dollarafterdollarafterdollar went aroundaroundaround hummmmming in reels of cherries and bells and bars and plums and oranges there was painpainpain a SHARP pain!pain!pain! in her chest, her heart, her center, a needle, a lancet, a burning, a pillar of flame that was purest pure purer PAIN!
Maggie, pretty Maggie Moneyeyes, who wanted all that money in that cartwheel Chief slot machine, Maggie who had come from filth and rheumatic fever, who had come all the way to three baths a day and a specialist in Very Expensive Beverly Hills, that Maggie suddenly had a seizure, a flutter, a slam of a coronary thrombosis and fell instantly dead on the floor of the casino. Dead.
One instant she had been holding the handle of the slot machine, willing her entire being, all that hatred for all the swine she had ever rolled with, willing every fiber of every cell of every chromosome into that machine, wanting to suck out every silver vapor within its belly, and the next instant so close they might have been the same her heart exploded and killed her and she slipped to the floor… still touching the Chief.
On the floor.
Dead.
Struck dead.
Liar. All the lies that were her life.
Dead on a floor.
[A moment out of time • lights whirling and spinning in a cotton candy universe • down a bottomless funnel roundly sectioned like a goat's horn • a cornucopia that rose up cuculiform smooth and slick as a worm belly • endless nights that pealed ebony funeral bells • out of fog • out of weightlessness • suddenly total cellular knowledge • memory running backward • gibbering spastic blindness • a soundless owl of frenzy trapped in a cave of prisms • sand endlessly draining down • billows of forever » edges of the world as they splintered • foam rising drowning from inside • the smell of rust • rough green corners that burn
• memory the gibbering spastic blind memory • seven rushing vacuums of nothing • yellow • pinpoints cast in amber straining and elongating running like live wax • chill fevers • overhead the odor of stop • this is the stopover before hell or heaven • this is limbo • trapped and doomed alone in a mist-eaten nowhere • a soundless screaming a soundless spinning spinning spinning • spinning spinning • spinning • spinning • spinninggggggggg
"I hope you don't mind if I call over one of the slot men, " the slot machine floor manager was saying, from a far distance. He was in his late fifties, a velvet-voiced man whose eyes held nothing of light and certainly noth-ing of kindness. He had stopped the pit boss as the stocky man had turned in mid-step to return to Kostner and the jackpotted machine; he had taken the walk himself. "We have to make sure, you know how it is, somebody didn't fool with the slot, you know, maybe it's outta whack or something, you know. "
He lifted his left hand and there was a clicker in it, the kind children use at Halloween. He clicked half a dozen times, like a rabid cricket, and there was a scurrying in the pit between the tables.
Kostner was only faintly aware of what was happening. Instead of being totally awake, feeling the surge of adrenaline through his veins, the feeling any gambler gets when he is ahead of the game, a kind of desperate urgency when he has hit it for a boodle, he was numb, partaking of the action around him only as much as a drinking glass involves itself in the alcoholic's drunken binge.
All color and sound had been leached out of him.
A tired-looking, resigned-weary man wearing a gray porter's jacket, as gray as his hair, as gray as his indoor skin, came to them, carrying a leather wrap-up of tools. The slot repairman studied the machine, turning the pressed steel body around on its stand, studying the back He used a key on the back door and for an instant Kostner had a view of gears, springs, armatures and the clock that ran the slot mechanism. The repairman nodded silently over it, closed and re-locked it, turned it around again and studied the face of the machine.
"Nobody's been spooning it, " he said, and went away.
Kostner stared at the floor manager.
"Gaffing. That's what he meant. Spooning's another word for it. Some guys use a little piece of plastic, or a wire, shove it down through the escalator, it kicks the machine. Nobody thought that's what happened here, but you know, we have to make sure, two grand is a big payoff, and twice… well, you know, I'm sure you'll understand. If a guy was doing it with a boomerang "
Kostner raised an eyebrow.
" uh, yeah, a boomerang, it's another way to spoon the machine. But we just wanted to make a little check, and now everybody's satisfied, so if you'll just come back to the casino cashier with me "
And they paid him off again.
So he went back to the slot machine, and stood before it for a long time, staring at it. The change girls and the dealers going off-duty, the little old ladies with their canvas work gloves worn to avoid calluses when pulling the slot handles, the men's room attendant on his way up front to get more matchbooks, the floral tourists, the idle observers, the hard drinkers, the sweepers, the busboys, the gamblers with poached-egg eyes who had been up all night, the showgirls with massive breasts and diminutive sugar daddies, all of them conjectured mentally about the beat-up walker who was staring at the silver dollar Chief. He did not move, merely stared at the machine… and they wondered.
The machine was staring back at Kostner.
Three blue eyes.
The electric current had sparked through him again, as the machine had clocked down and the eyes turned up a second time, as he had won a second time. But this time he knew there was something more than luck involved, for no one else had seen those three blue eyes.
So now he stood before the machine, waiting. It spoke to him. Inside his skull, where no one had ever lived but himself, now someone else moved and spoke to him. A girl. A beautiful girl. Her name was Maggie, and she spoke to him:
I've been waiting for you. A long time, I've been wait-ing for you, Kostner. Why do you think you hit the jack-pot? Because I've been waiting for you, and I want you. You'll win all the jackpots. Because I want you, I need you. Love me, I'm Maggie, I'm so alone, love me.
Kostner had been staring at the slot machine for a very long time, and his weary brown eyes had seemed to be locked to the blue eyes on the jackpot bars. But he knew no one else could see the blue eyes, and no one else could hear the voice, and no one else knew about Maggie.
He was the universe to her. Everything to her.
He thumbed in another silver dollar, and the pit boss watched, the slot machine repairman watched, the slot machine floor manager watched, three change girls watched, and a pack of unidentified players watched, some from their seats.
The reels whirled, the handle snapped back, and in a second they flipped down to a halt, twenty silver dollars tokened themselves into the payoff trough and a woman at one of the crap tables belched a fragment of hysterical laughter.
And the gong went insane again.
The floor manager came over and said, very softly, "Mr. Kostner, it'll take us about fifteen minutes to pull this machine and check it out. I'm sure you understand. " As two slot repairmen came out of the back, hauled the Chief off its stand, and took it into the repair room at the rear of the casino.
While they waited, the floor manager regaled Kostner with stories of spooners who had used intricate magnets inside their clothes, of boomerang men who had attached their plastic implements under their sleeves so they could be extended on spring-loaded clips, of cheaters who had come equipped with tiny electric drills in their hands and wires that slipped into the tiny drilled holes. And he kept saying he knew Kostner would understand.
But Kostner knew the floor manager would not understand.
When they brought the Chief back, the repairmen nodded assuredly. "Nothing wrong with it. Works perfectly. Nobody's been boomin' it. "
But the blue eyes were gone on the jackpot bars.
Kostner knew they would return.
They paid him off again.
He returned and played again. And again. And again. They put a "spotter" on him. He won again. And again. And again. The crowd had grown to massive proportions. Word had spread like the silent communications of the telegraph vine, up and down the strip, all the way to downtown Vegas and the sidewalk casinos where they played night and day every day of the year, and the crowd moved toward the hotel, and the casino, and the seedy-looking walker with his weary brown eyes. The crowd moved to him inexorably, drawn like lemmings by the odor of the luck that rose from him like musky electrical cracklings. And he won. Again and again. Thirty-eight thousand dollars. And the three blue eyes continued to stare up at him. Her lover was winning. Maggie and her Moneyeyes.
Finally, the casino decided to speak to Kostner. They pulled the Chief for fifteen minutes, for a supplemental check by experts from the slot machine company in downtown Vegas, and while they were checking it, they asked Kostner to come to the main office of the hotel.
The owner was there. His face seemed faintly familiar to Kostner. Had he seen it on television? The newspapers?
"Mr. Kostner, my name is Jules Hartshorn. "
"I'm pleased to meet you. "
"Quite a string of luck you're having out there. "
"It's been a long time coming. "
"You realize, this sort of luck is impossible. "
"I'm compelled to believe it, Mr. Hartshorn. "
"Um. As am I. It's happening to my casino. But we're thoroughly convinced of one of two possibilities, Mr. Kostner: one, either the machine is inoperable in a way we can't detect, or two, you are the most clever spooner we've ever had in here. "
"I'm not cheating. "
"As you can see, Mr. Kostner, I'm smiling. The reason I'm smiling is at your naivete in believing I would take your word for it. I'm perfectly happy to nod politely and say of course you aren't cheating. But no one can win thirty-eight thousand dollars on nineteen straight jackpots off one slot machine; it doesn't even have mathematical odds against its happening, Mr. Kostner. It's on a cosmic scale of improbability with three dark planets crashing into our sun within the next twenty minutes. It's on a par with the Pentagon, Peking and the Kremlin all three pushing the red button at the same microsecond. It's an impossibility, Mr. Kostner. An impossibility that's happening to me. "
"I'm sorry. "
"Not really. "
"No, not really. I can use the money. "
"For what, exactly, Mr. Kostner?"
"I hadn't thought about it, really. "
"I see. Well, Mr. Kostner, let's look at it this way. I can't stop you from playing, and if you continue to win, I'll be required to pay off. And no stubble-chinned thugs will be waiting in an alley to jackroll you and take the money. The checks will all be honored. The best I can hope for, Mr. Kostner, is the attendant publicity. Right now, every player in Vegas is in that casino, waiting for you to drop cartwheels into that machine. It won't make up for what I'm losing, if you continue the way you've been, but it will help. Every high-roller in town likes to rub up next to luck. All I ask is that you cooperate a little. "
"The least I can do, considering your generosity. "
"An attempt at humor. "
"I'm sorry. What is it you'd like me to do?"
"Get about ten hours sleep. "
"While you pull the slot and have it worked over thoroughly?"
"Yes. "
"If I wanted to keep winning, that might be a pretty stupid move on my part. You might change the hickamajig inside so I couldn't win if I put back every dollar of that thirty-eight grand. "
"We're licensed by the state of Nevada, Mr. Kostner. "
"I come from a good family, too, and take a look at me. I'm a bum with thirty-eight thousand dollars in my pocket. "
"Nothing will be done to that slot machine, Kostner. "
"Then why pull it for ten hours?"
"To work it over thoroughly in the shop. If something as undetectable as metal fatigue or a worn escalator tooth or we want to make sure this doesn't happen with other machines. And the extra time will get the word around town; we can use the crowd. Some of those tourists will stick to our ringers, and it'll help defray the expense of having you break the bank at this casino on a slot machine. "
"I have to take your word. "
"This hotel will be in business long after you're gone, Kostner. "
"Not if I keep winning. "
Hartshorn's smile was a stricture. "A good point. "
"So it isn't much of an argument. "
"It's the only one I have. If you want to get back out on that floor, I can't stop you. "
"No Mafia hoods ventilate me later?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"I said: no Maf "
"You have a picturesque manner of speaking. In point of fact, I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about. "
"I'm sure you haven't. "
"You've got to stop reading The National Enquirer. This is a legally run business. I'm merely asking a favor. "
"Okay, Mr. Hartshorn, I've been three days without any sleep. Ten hours will do me a world of good. "
"I'll have the desk clerk find you a quiet room on the top floor. And thank you, Mr. Kostner. "
"Think nothing of it. "
"I'm afraid that will be impossible. "
"A lot of impossible things are happening lately. "
He turned to go, as Hartshorn lit a cigarette.
"Oh, by the way, Mr. Kostner?"
Kostner stopped and half-turned. "Yes?"
His eyes were getting difficult to focus. There was a ringing in his ears. Hartshorn seemed to waver at the edge of his vision like heat lightning across a prairie. Like memories of things Kostner had come across the country to forget. Like the whimpering and pleading that kept tugging at the cells of his brain. The voice of Maggie. Still back in there, saying… things…
They'll try to keep you from me.
All he could think about was the ten hours of sleep he had been promised. Suddenly it was more important than the money, than forgetting, than anything. Hartshorn was talking, was saying things, but Kostner could not hear him. It was as if he had turned off the sound and saw only the silent rubbery movement of Hartshorn's lips. He shook his head trying to clear it.
There were half a dozen Hartshorns all melting into and out of one another. And the voice of Maggie.
I'm warm here, and alone. I could be good to you, if you can come to me. Please come, please hurry.
"Mr. Kostner?"
Hartshorn's voice came draining down through silt as thick as velvet flocking. Kostner tried to focus again. His extremely weary brown eyes began to track.
"Did you know about that slot machine?" Hartshorn was saying. "A peculiar thing happened with it about six weeks ago. "
"What was that?"
"A girl died playing it. She had a heart attack, a sei-
zure while she was pulling the handle, and died right out there on the floor. "
Kostner was silent for a moment. He wanted desperately to ask Hartshorn what color the dead girl's eyes had been, but he was afraid the owner would say blue.
He paused with Ms hand on the office door. "Seems as though you've had nothing but a streak of bad luck on that machine. "
Hartshorn smiled an enigmatic smile. "It might not change for a while, either. "
Kostner felt his jaw muscles tighten. "Meaning I might die, too, and wouldn't that be bad luck. "
Hartshorn's smile became hieroglyphic, permanent, stamped on him forever. "Sleep tight, Mr. Kostner. "
In a dream, she came to him. Long, smooth thighs and soft golden down on her arms; blue eyes deep as the past, misted with a fine scintillance like lavender spiderwebs; taut body that was the only body Woman had ever had, from the very first. Maggie came to him.
Hello, I've been traveling a long time.
"Who are you?" Kostner asked, wonderingly. He was standing on a chilly plain, or was it a plateau? The wind curled around them both, or was it only around him? She was exquisite, and he saw her clearly, or was it through a mist? Her voice was deep and resonant, or was it light and warm as night-blooming jasmine?
I'm Maggie. I love you. I've waited for you.
"You have blue eyes. "
YES. With love.
"You're very beautiful. "
Thank you. With female amusement.
"But why me? Why let it happen to me? Are you the girl who are you the one who was sick the one who ?"
I'm Maggie. And you, I picked you, because you need me. You've needed someone for a long long time.
Then it unrolled for Kostner. The past unrolled and he saw who he was. He saw himself alone. Always alone. As
a child, born to kind and warm parents who hadn't the vaguest notion of who he was, what he wanted to be, where his talents lay. So he had run off, when he was in his teens, and alone always alone on the road. For years and months and days and hours, with no one. Casual friendships, based on food, or sex, or artificial similarities. But no one to whom he could cleave, and cling, and belong. It was that way till Susie, and with her he had found light. He had discovered the scents and aromas of a spring that was eternally one day away. He had laughed, really laughed, and known with her it would at last be all right. So he had poured all of himself into her, giving her everything; all his hopes, his secret thoughts, his tender dreams; and she had taken them, taken him, all of him, and he had known for the first time what it was to have a place to live, to have a home in someone's heart. It was all the silly and gentle things he laughed at in other people but for him it was breathing deeply of wonder.
He had stayed with her for a long time, and had supported her, supported her son from the first marriage; the marriage Susie never talked about. And then one day, he had come back, as Susie had always known he would. He was a dark creature of ruthless habits and vicious nature, but she had been his woman, all along, and Kostner realized she had used him as a stopgap, as a bill-payer till her wandering terror came home to nest. Then she had asked him to leave. Broke, and tapped out in all the silent inner ways a man can be drained, he had left, without even a fight, for all the fight had been leached out of him. He had left, and wandered West, and finally come to Las Vegas, where he had hit bottom. And found Maggie. In a dream, with blue eyes, he had found Maggie.
I want you to belong to me. I love you. Her truth was vibrant in Kostner's mind. She was his, at last someone who was special, was his.
"Can I trust you? I've never been able to trust anyone before. Women, never. But I need someone. I really need someone. "
It's me, always. Forever. You can trust me.
And she came to him, fully. Her body was a declaration of truth and trust such as no other Kostner had ever known before. She met him on a windswept plain of thought, and he made love to her more completely than he had known any passion before. She joined with him, entered him, mingled with his blood and his thought and his frustration, and he came away clean, filled with glory.
"Yes, I can trust you, I want you, I'm yours, " he whispered to her, when they lay side by side in a dream nowhere of mist and soundlessness. "I'm yours. "
She smiled, a woman's smile of belief in her man; a smile of trust and deliverance. And Kostner woke up.
The Chief was back on its stand, and the crowd had been penned back by velvet ropes. Several people had played the machine, but there had been no jackpots.
Now Kostner came into the casino, and the "spotters" got themselves ready. While Kostner had slept, they had gone through his clothes, searching for wires, for gaffs, for spoons or boomerangs. Nothing.
Now he walked straight to the Chief, and stared at it.
Hartshorn was there. "You look tired, " he said gently to Kostner, studying the man's weary brown eyes.
"I am, a little, " Kostner tried a smile, which didn't work. "I had a funny dream. "
"Oh?"
"Yeah… about a girl… " He let it die off.
Hartshorn's smile was understanding. Pitying, empathic, and understanding. "There are lots of girls in this town. You shouldn't have any trouble finding one with your winnings. "
Kostner nodded, and slipped his first silver dollar into the slot. He pulled the handle. The reels spun with a ferocity Kostner had not heard before and suddenly everything went whipping slantwise as he felt a wrenching of pure flame in his stomach, as his head was snapped on its spindly neck, as the lining behind his eyes was burned out. There was a terrible shriek, of tortured metal, of an express train ripping the air with its passage, of a hundred small animals being gutted and torn to shreds, of incredible pain, of night winds that tore the tops off mountains of lava. And a keening whine of a voice that wailed and wailed and wailed as it went away from there in blinding light
Free! Free! Heaven or Hell it doesn't matter! Free!
The sound of a soul released from an eternal prison, a genie freed from a dark bottle. And in that instant of damp soundless nothingness, Kostner saw the reels snap and clock down for the final time:
One, two, three. Blue eyes.
But he would never cash his checks.
The crowd screamed through one voice as he fell sideways and lay on his face. The final loneliness…
The Chief was pulled. Bad luck. Too many gamblers resented its very presence in the casino. So it was pulled. And returned to the company, with explicit instructions it was to be melted down to slag. And not till it was in the hands of the ladle foreman, who was ready to dump it into the slag furnace, did anyone remark on the final tally the Chief had clocked.
"Look at that, ain't that weird, " said the ladle foreman to his bucket man. He pointed to the three glass windows.
"Never saw jackpot bars like that before, " the bucket man agreed. "Three eyes. Must be an old machine. "
"Yeah, some of these old games go way back, " the foreman said, hoisting the slot machine into the conveyor track leading to the slag furnace.
"Three eyes, huh. How about that. Three brown eyes. " And he threw the knife-switch that sent the Chief down the track, to puddle, in the roaring inferno of the furnace.
Three brown eyes.
Three brown eyes that looked very very weary. That looked very very trapped. That looked very very betrayed. Some of these old games go way back.
Knights Of The Paper Spaceship: A Retrospective Glance at Science Fiction
by Brian W. Aldiss
Just the other night, when the moon was heavy in the southeast, James Blish and I were settling down to a long conversation. He was sitting in an armchair grasping a glass of whiskey; I was sitting opposite him on the sofa, grasping a similar glass. Our wives had retired to bed. We were talking about science fiction.
Within that oceanic subject, we glanced at many topics; but the leitmotif of our discussion was a sort of puzzlement that, in an age when science might be considered to be at its greatest, one of its humbler handmaidens should be so manifestly less than great. If even James Blish cannot solve this conundrum, I am rash to attempt it myself; but there may perhaps be some profit in outlining one point of view on the matter, since it closely concerns the fortunes of this annual venture.
One thing Blish reminded me of was that among the science fiction writers are many careful craftsmen. We started to list their names: Algis Budrys, Robert Silver-berg, Gordon Dickson, John Brunner, Poul Anderson… well, I forget how the list went. But I caught a vivid picture then of the science fiction field, held it for a moment whole in the palm of my eye, and saw it as a sort of central keep, the SF magazine acting as bastions, the fans on the ramparts to repel boarders, and, in the hall of the knights, the writers themselves, ever vigilant. They might differ among themselves indeed, some may hate each other like poison but these knights are bound by a sort of chivalric code which has been handed down to them. On the walls hang shields, objects almost of reverence to those still in the fight: the shields of bygone warriors like Henry Kuttner and James Schmitz and Cyril Kornbluth. The knights have a great sense of mission; and they are perhaps encouraged, perhaps infuriated, to know that out in the hostile lands beyond the keep live renegade warriors much the same as themselves men like Kurt Vonnegut and J. G. Ballard, who actually spurn life cooped up in the castle.
This thumbnail vision is perhaps not too far from truth. I find it both gallant and comic. I respect the knights, though I have less feeling for the other elements of the keep (and you observe that I refrain from saying anything at all about what is happening down in the dungeons); but I contend that the code of the knights has been rendered largely out-of-date, and that this limits considerably the scope and effectiveness of their operations. Here, if I do not represent him wrongly, Blish disagrees with me.
Okay, let me climb out of the armor of my metaphor and put it plainly. Blish maintains that the SF field is naturally a small one, its limits fairly clearly defined, and that attempts to widen it in either direction that is, either by enlarging the subject matter and improving the stylistic quality of those within it, or by importing similar writers or writings that may be allied to science fiction (speculative fiction) to swell the field will end by diluting the desirable flavor we already have. Blish is a most literate man; one sees forcibly what he means. His emphasis falls on traditional workmanship as against fanciful innovation. And, as his own novels show, he respects most an imaginative line controlled by technological possibilities.
I have heard his argument before. I've even heard it from James Blish before. When I was in New York last year, he and Frederik Pohl presented it to me very forcefully; and Pohl succinctly put the whole matter in a nutshell by saying, "The rules of science fiction have evolved for science fiction; you may bend them but you may not break them, or it's not science fiction. That's the name of the game. "
Well, I liked the phrasing, and it's not the first time I have been licked in an argument. What I still kick myself for not saying is that both Blish and Pohl are well capable of breaking the rules to produce their own best stories. But the reason they won that round was because I knew exactly what they meant, having for many years entertained their beliefs myself without question; the orthodox of the orthodox was from 1940 until 1948, I would not read any science fiction, including H. G. Wells, that was not contained between the covers of Astounding Science Fiction.
And I still maintain that these gentlemen would be absolutely right, had not events proved them absolutely wrong. The sheer mediocrity of this year's and last year's science fiction constitutes such proof.
Before I present the case opposed to the Blish/Pohl argument with which, let me say now, I also disagree it may be worth adding that, if one is really addicted to science fiction, either as writer or reader, and hardly glances up at the big world, then the current crop may not seem so bad; the reassurance of old formulas may be absolutely what one requires; one is, after all, still getting more of the same dose as before, and, being hooked, this is one's primary need. One may not notice the smell of materialism, or the endless violence which covers lack of real dramatic content, that comes from the clash of ideas, not the sound of guns. But for anyone whose standards of comparison are more than knee-high, the temptation to call down wrath from on high like a prophet of old is almost irresistible.
Later, I will explain why I believe that SF is drowning in a spate of nonsense (the survivors clinging to this present annual raft always excepted, of course!). Before I do so, I want to talk about Judy Merril.
If anyone reforms or entirely demolishes the science fiction field, it will be Miss Judith Merril. Judy, whose long-established Year's Best Anthology should perhaps qualify her to be referred to hereafter as The Opposition, has the same trouble as anyone else in describing what SF is; this does not vex but delight her, since it goes toward reinforcing her thesis that "science fiction" is not a very! valid label. Her anthologies are amazing compilations, growing steadily more outrageous every year, as she discovers more gems of speculative fiction in small maga-^i zines of hitherto unrivaled exclusiveness originating in hitherto unheard-of countries. As they become more outrageous, they become more impressive.
When she asked me if I enjoyed her last volume, I re-plied politely or impolitely (I forget which) that I found it a fascinating slice of autobiography. The obser-vation was inaccurate; the truth about the Merril compi-lations is that they are thesis-anthologies; they try to prove something dear to the anthologist's heart. (And in case anyone should misunderstand me, I believe this to be| the best way to compile an anthology, provided that you do not use a title that belies what you attempt. ) The Merril thesis may best be encapsulated as Any Number Can Play.
You see that this is the perfect answer to Pohl's "That's the name of the game"; it is also a fallacy. The reason that one does not actually madly enjoy a Merril collection is precisely the same reason that one should make a point of reading it: because one has no guarantee from moment to moment that one is going to be served with sci-fi. We do need our categories shaken up, and we do need our thinking refreshed by new minds and new ideas; but, for all that, those of us who thirst for science fiction, by God, must have science fiction; and although we may not be able to define it rigorously, we recognize it when we see it.
Now I have offended both sides in the argument on the extension or the fortification of SF. And I have only just begun: because I believe that the argument is a crucial one at the present time, and must be resolved if we are to get free of the doldrums.
So let me offer the Aldiss thesis, which (I maintain) incorporates the best features of both the other lines of reasoning.
On the one hand, the chivalric code of the regular SF writers must be demoted from a way of life to a handbook of etiquette, to be neglected entirely when necessary, so that their Byzantine inability to cope with the current way of the world about them (lampooned, I do believe, in Jack Vance's "The Last Castle") may be overcome; and on the other hand, to be demoted is the notion that just outside the castle walls ("ghetto" is the more frightening Merril expression) lies a circle of brilliant writers whose style and subject matter is somehow better than ours. What actually lies there is, as often as not, a sort of undergraduate brilliance, a crabbed eccentricity, and a timidity in facing the mysteries of either life or self, all of which manifest themselves frequently as an inability to master the essentials of the short story though the freedom of such writers from cast-iron plot-lines and punch-lines does represent an advantage the "ghetto" writers might well seize on, as Miss Merril rightly claims.
Fiction of any kind (we'll exclude the one-in-a-million freak of genius) can only be written when established rules have been learned so well that they may be discarded when necessary. In our field, those inside the charmed circle have too much respect for the rules, those outside too little. You don't actually have to change the conditions of the game; nor do you actually need any number to play; but you should make full use of all the board and all the counters, and cheat whenever possible. Maybe you should play for higher stakes also.
Let's take an example, the biggest you can find. Space travel.
That space travel is feasible has been an article of faith among science fiction readers for many decades. When H. G. Wells's First Men in the Moon was published in 1901, a lot of readers took it as prophecy, for even today people imagine that the objectives of Wells and Verne were more or less identical; but the majority of Wells's early readers must have realized that he was using the moon journey for adventure-cum-satire even if in the background floats a sort of feeling of "But, by gosh, science could manage this and more if it tried!" which, when crystallized onto one particular subject, may well help it come about. And, after Wells's novel, the prospect of moon travel did, become more definite (in somewhat the way that his vision of a rigidly stratified society became more definite in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World).
The possibility of space travel became a credo. Those of us in England who were the first to experience the benefits of Wernher von Braun's V-l's and V-2's should have! needed little more convincing, even if the Astronomer Royal as late as 1956 called interplanetary travel "utter bilge" later to compound the error by explaining that he was not thinking of space travel so much as space fiction! •
Some of us who read "space fiction" about that time had the grand feeling that our dreams were coming true,, as plans progressed to launch hardware into orbit. The' voyage to the moon was creeping out of Nazi-ruledj Peenemunde into Colliers, and out of Astounding into blueprints. If the Selenites were daily becoming a remoter possibility, at least we were getting bigger and better ICBMs. The feeling was strong that, in a sense, space travel would justify SF; for once and for all we were going to prove that SF was not just escapism!
Unluckily, most of it is escapism. But during the early fifties many SF writers, some no longer writing, became more or less propagandists for the space race. The climate of the times was such that it seemed as if the astro-nautical adventure might divert men's minds from their obsession with war; now we see that such was far from being the case, and that to "conquer" to use the popular and pathetic word to conquer space is merely to extend both the possible casus bellorum and the theater for those wars when they eventuate. But this is hindsight.
What is not hindsight was the feeling some of us had then that science fiction was in some way being prostituted to the space race, that it was not merely espousing a cause but sucking up to a source of power, just like the storytellers of Analog who affect at various times to believe in editorial notions from Dianetics onward. However, it cannot be denied that the glamorous warpaint applied in those boom years certainly impressed someone out there: and that national approval for the space race, and the monstrous expenditures involved, owed almost as much to the romantic image created for it by the rocket-story-boys as did fear-envy of Soviet Russia.
For that successful binge, science fiction, as well as the nation, is still paying. A sort of slave mentality was created. The idea got around that SF was not a literature but a sort of promotion racket for big technological enterprises hence the willingness of its leading writers to appear in adverts for electronic firms or to associate themselves as prophets with large-corporation ventures. More irremediably than ever, SF is confused with the Buck Rogers stuff. Nothing fails like success. The result is that a field which should have concerned itself with people (as did Wells) has been de-peopled. The gadgets gobbled up the guys. All that are left are robots and mutants and supermen and slave camps and big empty-eyed jack-booted bigheads bestriding the bridges of colossal spaceships. Reality? We lost that in the matter-transmitter before last!
For proof of this, we mercifully need not even read the magazines; the covers tell the story. Even the covers of Fantasy and Science Fiction, a magazine which at times touches greatness, still feature little men dangling by umbilical cords from little rocketships above crumpled-silver-foil-representing-alien-planets, just exactly as they did before most of the present young fans were born. We are on the whole stuck with old formulas, stuck in the past, the past when we thought we were changing the world.
This is not to contend, as do some of the extremists in the Merril camp, that space travel is not a fit subject for fiction. Travel through space and life on other planets are both interesting if familiar topics which can be dealt with, although writers who do so should approach any such used material with great caution, impressionistically, maybe, or figuratively, or poetically, or else critically, *
* My own skepticism about the benefits of interstellar travel (a) to man, and (b) to anyone else who happens to get in the way, are expressed in the two novels Starship (1958) and The Dark Light Years (1964).
but certainly not as if trading under some agreement that everyone accepts, with use of hack terms such as "FTL drive, " which have no meaning, which merely drive out imagination: not in the fallen-arched post-realist subHemingwayese which constitutes the verbal coinage of most of our current space opera. What was once a genuine act of faith and to some extent a genuine widening of the imagination, is now mostly a nostalgic lookingback; while the actual space project is mainly an obstacle to such writers, and apt to rock their paper spaceships and homemade galaxies with real facts and real mysteries beyond their competence.
The wish is not only that such writers should be more adult and earnest. They often bore because they are trying to be too adult and too earnest. It is perfectly pos-sible to have fun while being both mature and serious, as C. S. Lewis showed in Out of the Silent Planet. But the sucking-up-to-power motive is apt to preclude fun. I still miss the days when Eric Frank Russell sported in As-tounding without a hint of social purpose; and Eric Frank was no Bertrand, just a man a'gin every form of es- tablished authority. Big-name writers are no longer con-tent to give us thoughtful entertainment; instead we have; the Novels-designed-as-things-to-be-worshiped, which are awfully long and dull and complicated and may well have Introductions or Appendices, like Dune and Squares of the City and some Heinleins; and two of our cleverest and most amusing writers, Clarke and Asimov, devote their attention, or most of it, to nonfiction. The times favor the SF writer; SF does not. To my mind, only Phi-lip K. Dick and Jimmy Ballard are producing anything considerable in the way of a readable fiction that marches with our day and age: which more or less guarantees that they will be misunderstood or even maligned; anger is the moron's tribute to genius.
Dick shows quite clearly that, if present patterns of behaviors are maintained, space travel will bring the human race imprisonment rather than liberation, the death rather than the resurrection of the spirit. His novel with the catchpenny title, Martian Timeslip, is a splendid embodying of this perception, clothed in recognizable portraits of people and emotions we have all experienced. But the average approach to populating Mars is not critical but quantitive, not evaluative but propagandist. The whole sucking-up-to-power syndrome precludes evaluation and favors propaganda. Wells, in his day, produced marvels and criticized his society; Dick does this. But what writer in our field has come out with the novel that denounces the whole notion of the space project?
Certainly there is a case to be made out against it: and, once on a time, SF writers never feared to advance an unpopular view, if only for the sake of argument; flight to the planets was itself once a heretical idea. There is a worse fate for heretics than to be burned at the stake, which is to live and see their heresies accepted, until they themselves come to be mouthing platitudes.
According to a Louis Harris public opinion poll conducted in July 1967, a majority of the American public now wishes to abandon the project to land a man on the moon. An even larger number would favor this were it not for the Soviet competition. Low-income people (and Negroes, I presume, if they were consulted) and older people oppose the project by the greatest margin. Now, I speak as a member of what, to the States, is a low-income country, and to me the launching of a space project never mind two space projects! in this decade is more than a simple waste of money (though perhaps even the writing-off of the failed eighty-four million dollar Moon-probe is more than a simple waste of money); it is also a world-intellect drain.
Here's the way the argument goes according to Lord
Bowden, the Principal of Manchester University's Institute of Science and Technology, as he put it at a recent meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He claimed that most of the science hung onto the space project was there only to lend respectability to a venture that is in essence an aggressive one, an adventure, and that this project, inescapably linked with the defense plan, is beginning to dominate thinking patterns, not only in many of the larger firms but in the universities as well.
A confirmation of part of this comes just today, as I write, with the news that the U. S. Government has decided to employ a "thin" anti-ballistic missile defense against China. Production will commence this year; the system should cost a total of five billion dollars. This is reckoned to be relatively inexpensive. Now it matters not whether the impetus behind this move is as much the thought of a coming Presidential election as a fear of China, the fact remains that this is a further escalation of heavy weaponry (one, moreover, which appears to contravene the Non-Proliferation Treaty signed between Russia and America) and a further escalation of the paranoiac hatred between nations, and thus a further diminution of the scale of human beings and a further encroachment on the range of their liberties.
The rest of Lord Bowden's argument against the space project cuts more deeply outside the States than within its frontiers. It goes like this. America claims that she can well afford the space project; it may well be so, but that is because it is subsidized by the rest of the world who cannot afford it! The value of the brain drain of experts and technicians from Britain to America can be reckoned at about two hundred million pounds a year more than U. S. aid to developing countries. And those same countries have a brain drain to Britain. India, for instance, who desperately needs her scientific brains, allows those brains to go West if they will. So things must be in a democracy; only in Communist countries do they keep their personnel locked inside the state frontiers.
Because the leaders of the second greatest nation on Earth prefer to run that nation with a secretiveness more appropriate to a small conspiracy, we do not know exactly what goes on in the states under Soviet dominion; but it seems reasonable to assume that similar tendencies exist there. Brains and cash and lives are being sucked into an adventure which in the next two crucial decades can bring no happiness into anyone's lives, only, directly or indirectly, new deprivations.
Lord Bowden met with some strong denials, notably from Patrick Moore, who said that anyone who opposed the space project had the mentality of an adolescent ostrich.
There are intellectual justifications for the space project, but these are more apparent within the charmed circle of the industrialized West; they seem less convincing on the dusty plains of the Third World, and will seem even less so as the socio-economic situation there worsens, as predictions show that it will.
The situations in those unprivileged parts of our globe must be faced; we cannot flee them by going to Mars; and intractable though they may seem, many of their problems could be solved with a money-plus-know-how project, financed by the richer nations. That eighty-four million dollars wasted on the Moonprobe, for example, could have been used for flash-distillation plants and canals to bring fresh water to the Sinai and Negev deserts and make them bloom which would take the heat out of the current continuing Middle East crisis that only this year brought us close to a global war. The crises of this world will never be solved on another. If we hope for pie in the sky, we are lapsing into an outmoded way of religious thinking anti-scientific!
Although I feel the same delight and excitement as anyone else at the successive gains of the space project, I wish it were all shelved for a couple of decades while problems real and pressing are dealt with: problems which concern people, problems on the human rather than the megalomaniac scale. But as science fiction grows more and more remote from actual people, so we can expect only an infrequent Philip Dick or Clifford Simak who deals with ordinary men (or ordinary underdogs!). It is surprising that for all the occasions on which critics have pointed to the lack of characterization in SF, a lack that exists because the writers are trying mainly to excite terror or suspense or amazement rather than examine the mainsprings of human behavior, they have never pointed to a better indicator of this same weakness, the tendency authors have nowadays to trade in boss-figures: the big guy or the hero with supernatural powers, the psi-spy or clever dick, the ship's captain or the conqueror; sympathy with the ordinary guy is rare, although, happily, several of the writers in this volume prove me wrong there.
Nobody wants SF to turn into anti-space propaganda, although I believe that if SF were really an open forum we should have had more of it; what we need is less propaganda, period. One story that got away from the editors here was the tale of a man pursuing and making love to a girl amid an associated SF imagery; it ran into censorship trouble on both sides of the Atlantic. It would be ironic if SF got so organization-minded that the simple act of love became, as in 1984, the supreme act of subversion.
Well, there it is, a diagnosis of and proffered solution to the present straits. You may hold that there's nothing wrong with SF, although I don't believe anyone's ever believed that; or you may prefer either the Blish/Pohl or the Merril analysis/solution. The fact remains that writers at present seem unable to come to grips with many facets of the beautiful and terrible world in which they live (when did you last see an SF scene set in Vietnam?), and favor instead treatments of old threadbare topics; it shows in their very manner of speaking, in their styles. Once you have allied yourself to a power-cult, there is no room to dream anything but the standard dream, and precious little room to think at all. As a symbol of your uniformity, you use an interchangeable prose. Readers express their unease at this by quitting or retreat-ing into Edgar Rice Burroughs or his substitutes; writers, by giving up entirely when they reach mature age or, occasionally, by developing florid prose habits. While readers, of course, can always switch on TV, or switch on, or whatever, writers must generally stay with it, growing soft or cynical. They have a way out, only it's not through the door marked "Exit. "
On this subject I have now said enough, not to mention too much and too little. But the editor suggests that I should also talk about New Worlds, so that I will briefly do.
This year, New Worlds, the sole remaining British SF magazine, celebrates its twenty-first anniversary. Rather, we all celebrate it. Those twenty-one years are a long saga of misery and triumph, peril and recovery the sort of tale in which anyone whose life, private and public, centers around writing, can take pride, for it is a tale of love and persistence and lack of funds, like the history of most writing! The history of New Worlds has been told elsewhere; suffice it to say here that it was planned in the late thirties by Ted Carnell, was launched by a group of dedicated fans, has gone through the hands of five or six publishers, and is currently being published, somewhat perilously, by the editor himself. (To illustrate how perilous: as I write, I am expecting a phone call from someone who is Something in the City, who may have news of a new buyer for New Worlds. )
Despite these upheavels, New Worlds has had only two editors, Ted Carnell and, since 1964, Michael Moorcock.
It would be unjust to both these incredible and legendary men (and although Moorcock is still a youth, he certainly looks all of legendary) to say that one firmly established the magazine and the other went on to revolutionize the field; for in fact they both did both to varying extents; but it would be true to claim that they enabled Britain for the first time to produce something like a natural idiom. Like all magazines, New Worlds has fluctuated in quality, but it has provided nursery slopes for such young skiers as Ballard, Bulmer, Aldiss, and, later, Tom Disch and Keith Roberts. And, like Astounding no, let's not be too narrow like The Germ to the Pre-Raphaelite brethren or Horizon to wartime literary Britain it has provided a rallying-point for readers and writers.
In 1963, it appeared that New Worlds was dying and being shelved by its then publishers. At the eleventh hour indeed, as I recollect it was a little past midnight another publisher came along and the magazine lived again. Moorcock took over editorship and discovered, as much to his own as everyone else's awe, that he was an editorial genius. Within twelve months, in the new dwarf-sized, blotting-paper-textured issues, Moorcock had established new cannons by spiking old guns. It was all very painful; nor have all the wounds yet healed; but he woke us up in an entirely beneficial way, and made us weep, laugh, jeer, or contribute.
And all the while, the new publisher was sinking under him! ,
The situation had been critical for so long that nobody could believe it was desperate. Finally, after a morethan-anxious phone call from Mike, I said, "Let its death not pass unnoticed! May I write a letter to the Times Literary Supplement about it?" Mike agreed, and I began to compose a letter.
As I did so, looking at the T. L. S., which has entertained and grieved me now for something like eighteen years, I hit on a better idea. For the T. L. S. was then conducting a disagreement with the Arts Council of Great Britain, which had just been empowered for the first time to disburse subsidies to literature. Supposing we could get a grant for New Worlds?
The letter to the Arts Council outlining the position and asking for help went out in November 1966, after which I instituted a campaign among notable literary figures who had shown themselves well-disposed toward science fiction, J. B. Priestley, Anthony Burgess, and so on, asking them to write in support of our plea. They were all marvelous, and the matter was surely helped by the fact that Angus Wilson was actually on the panel which considered the plea. The grant came through.
So New Worlds now receives, for the current financial year, a grant of £150 per issue, which is somewhat less than $600 all told a marginal amount by astronomical scales, but decisive on the human one. Or would-be-decisive. For New Worlds now has fresh troubles: loss of publisher, distribution hold-ups, and Moorcock's growing ambitions among them.
What will happen next, nobody has any idea. But it would be foolish to be gloomy. A grant to an SF magazine (which, I must emphasize, comes without strings attached and is bigger than any other literary grant ever made by the Arts Council) is a tribute to science fiction generally, and a useful precedent. The redesigned magazine looks and reads excitingly; no longer is it a pale echo of its peers, the American magazines of the past. And its record of twenty-one years is, among other things, a milestone of dedication that gives everyone cause to cheer.
Whether it is true as I know James Blish believes it to be that science fiction enjoys a higher status in England than in America is debatable. If that were so, and if I could then go on to show that it was because in this country SF, following the heritage of Wells, Huxley and Orwell, has stayed closer to common experience and common people, remaining always more subversive and individual, less inclined to the power game, then I could neatly ram home the argument I tried to present here earlier.
But the task would be so formidable that a seeker along its involved byways would have to believe more strongly in it from the outset than does the present writer.
Nor can I see that a neat conclusion would be profitable. To quarrel is hopefully a better thing than to agree. The conclusion might be misinterpreted as a nationalistic one. One of the benefits of SF more apparent from this side of the Atlantic than from the New World side lies in its interchange of thinking, its conversations which have gone on, even if somewhat one-sidedly, across that ocean. Anyone who reads science fiction anywhere in the world must be conscious, sometimes exasperatedly, of his great debt to American writers: and be aware that it is not he but the writers themselves who will lift SF from its present doldrums.
To one who looks back over many years to such a debt, private as well as public, such a heritage-hunt is impossible.
And I personally have an even more pressing reason for bowing at once to New Worlds and to you. Time passes. Earth's shadow is again gathering, bringing both a deadline and a terminator. The moon is once more heavy in the southeast; although James Blish is no longer here, the whiskey is. We must fortify ourselves for next year's science fiction.
BRIAN ALDISS