* * * *
Dangerous Visions 1
Edited By Harlan Ellison
* * * *
CONTENTS
FOREWORD 1: THE SECOND REVOLUTION
Isaac Asimov
INTRODUCTION: THIRTY-TWO SOOTHSAYERS
Harlan Ellison
Lester del Rey
Robert Silverberg
THE DAY AFTER THE DAY THE MARTIANS CAME
Frederik Pohl
Philip José Farmer
Miriam Allen deFord
Robert Bloch
THE PROWLER IN THE CITY AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
Harlan Ellison
THE NIGHT THAT ALL TIME BROKE OUT
Brian W. Aldiss
* * * *
THE SECOND REVOLUTION
by Isaac Asimov
Today—on the very day that I write this—I receive a phone call from the New York Times. They are taking an article I mailed them three days ago. Subject: the colonization of the Moon.
And they thanked me!
Leaping Luna, how times have changed!
Thirty years ago, when I started writing science fiction (I was very young at the time), the colonization of the Moon was strictly a subject for pulp magazines with garish covers. It was don’t-tell-me-you-believe-all-that-junk literature. It was don’t-fill-your-mind-with-all-that-mush - literature. Most of all, it was escape literature!
Sometimes I think about that with a kind of disbelief. Science fiction was escape literature. We were escaping. We were turning from such practical problems as stickball and homework and fist fights in order to enter a never-never land of population explosions, rocket ships, lunar exploration, atomic bombs, radiation sickness and polluted atmosphere.
Wasn’t that great? Isn’t it delightful the way we young escapers receive our just reward? All the great, mind-cracking, hopeless problems of today, we worried about twenty full years before anyone else did. How’s that for escaping?
But now you can colonize the Moon inside the good, gray pages of the New York Times; and not as a piece of science fiction at all, but as sober analysis of a hard-headed situation.
This represents an important change, and one which has an immediate relationship to the book you now hold in your hand. Let me explain!
I became a science fiction writer in 1938 just at the time John W. Campbell, Jr., was revolutionizing the field with the simple requirement that science fiction writers stand firmly on the borderline between science and literature.
Pre-Campbell science fiction all too often fell into one of two classes. They were either no-science or they were all-science. The no-science stories were adventure stories in which a periodic word of Western jargon was erased and replaced with an equivalent word of space jargon. The writer could be innocent of scientific knowledge, for all he needed was a vocabulary of technical jargon which he could throw in indiscriminately.
The all-science stories were, on the other hand, populated exclusively by scientist-caricatures. Some were mad scientists, some were absent-minded scientists, some were noble scientists. The only think they had in common was their penchant for expounding their theories. The mad ones screeched them, the absent-minded ones mumbled them, the noble ones declaimed them, but all lectured at insufferable length. The story was a thin cement caked about the long monologues in an attempt to give the illusion that those long monologues had some point.
To be sure, there were exceptions. Let me mention, for instance, “A Martian Odyssey” by Stanley G. Weinbaum (who, tragically, died of cancer at the age of thirty-six). It appeared in the July 1934 issue of Wonder Stories—a perfect Campbellesque story four years before Campbell introduced his revolution.
Campbell’s contribution was that he insisted that the exception become the rule. There had to be real science and real story, with neither one dominating the other. He didn’t always get what he wanted, but he got it often enough to initiate what old-timers think of as the Golden Age of Science Fiction.
To be sure, each generation has its own Golden Age—but the Campbellesque Golden Age happens to be mine, and when I say “Golden Age” I mean that one. Thank goodness, I managed to get into the field just in time to have my stories contribute in their way (and a pretty good way it was too, and the heck with false modesty) to that Golden Age.
Yet all Golden Ages carry within themselves the seeds of their own destruction and after it is over you can look back and unerringly locate those seeds. (Lovely, lovely hindsight! How sweet it is to prophesy what has already happened. You’re never wrong!)
In this case, Campbell’s requirement for real science and real stories invited a double nemesis, one for the real science and one for the real stories.
With real science, stories came to sound more and more plausible and, indeed, were more and more plausible. Authors, striving for realism, described computers and rockets and nuclear weapons that were very like what computers and rockets and nuclear weapons came to be in a matter of a single decade. As a result, the real life of the Fifties and Sixties is very much like the Campbellesque science fiction of the Forties.
Yes, the science fiction writer of the Forties went far beyond anything we have in real life today. We writers did not merely aim for the Moon or send unmanned rockets toward Mars; we streaked through the Galaxy in faster-than-light drives. However, all our far-space adventures were based on the way of thought that today permeates NASA.
And because today’s real life so resembles day-before-yesterday’s fantasy, the old-time fans are restless. Deep within, whether they admit it or not, is a feeling of disappointment and even outrage that the outer world has invaded their private domain. They feel the loss of a “sense of wonder” because what was once truly confined to “wonder” has now become prosaic and mundane.
Furthermore, the hope that Campbellesque science fiction would storm upward in an increasingly lofty spiral of readership and respectability somehow was not fulfilled. Indeed, an effect rather unforeseen made itself evident. The new generation of potential science fiction readers found all the science fiction they needed in the newspapers and general magazines and many no longer experienced an irresistible urge to turn to the specialized science fiction magazines.
It happened, therefore, that after a short-lived spurt in the first half of the 1950s, when all the golden dreams seemed to be coming true for the science fiction writer and publisher, there was a recession and the magazines are not more prosperous now than they were in the 1940s. Not even the launching of Sputnik I could stay that recession; rather it accelerated it.
So much for the nemesis brought on by real science. And real story?
As long as science fiction was the creaky medium it was in the Twenties and Thirties, good writing was not required. The science fiction writers of the time were safe, reliable sources; while they lived, they would write science fiction, since anything else required better technique and was beyond them. (I hasten to say there were exceptions and Murray Leinster springs to the mind as one of them.)
The authors developed by Campbell, however, had to write reasonably well or Campbell turned them down. Under the lash of their own eagerness they grew to write better and better. Eventually and inevitably, they found they had become good enough to earn more money elsewhere and their science fiction output declined.
Indeed, the two dooms of the Golden Age worked hand in hand to a certain extent. A considerable number of the Golden Age authors followed the essence of science fiction in its journey from fiction into fact. Men such as Poul Anderson, Arthur C. Clarke, Lester del Rey, and Clifford D. Simak took to writing science fact.
They didn’t change, really; it was the medium that changed. The subjects they had once dealt with in fiction (rocketry, space travel, life on other worlds, etc.) shifted from fiction to fact, and the authors were carried along in the shift. Naturally, every page of non-science fiction written by these authors meant one page less of science fiction.
Lest some knowledgeable reader begin, at this point, to mutter sarcastic comments under his breath, I had better admit, at once and quite openly, that of all the Campbellesque crew, I possibly made the change most extremely. Since Sputnik I went up and America’s attitude toward science was (at least temporarily) revolutionized, I have, as of this moment, published fifty-eight books, of which only nine could be classified as fiction.
Truly, I am ashamed, embarrassed and guilt-ridden, for no matter where I go and what I do, I shall always consider myself as a science fiction writer first. Yet if the New York Times asks me to colonize the Moon and if Harper’s asks me to explore the edge of the Universe, how can I possibly refuse? These topics are the essence of my lifework.
And in my own defense, let me say that I have not entirely abandoned science fiction in its strictest sense either. The March 1967 issue of Worlds of If (on the stands as I write) contains a novelette of mine entitled “Billiard Ball”.
But never mind me, back to science fiction itself....
What was science fiction’s response to this double doom? Clearly the field had to adjust, and it did. Straight Campbellesque material could still be written, but it could no longer form the backbone of the field. Reality encroached too closely upon it.
Again there was a science-fictional revolution in the early Sixties, marked most clearly perhaps in the magazine Galaxy under the guidance of its editor, Frederik Pohl. Science receded and modern fictional technique came to the fore.
The accent moved very heavily toward style. When Campbell started his revolution, the new writers who came into the field carried with them the aura of the university, of science and engineering, of slide rule and test tube. Now the new authors who enter the field bear the mark of the poet and the artist, and somehow carry with them the aura of Greenwich Village and the Left Bank.
Naturally, no evolutionary cataclysm can be carried through without some pretty widespread extinctions. The upheaval that ended the Cretaceous Era wiped out the dinosaurs, and the change-over from silent movies to talkies eliminated a horde of posturing mountebanks.
So it was with science fiction revolutions.
Read through the list of authors in any science fiction magazine of the early Thirties, then read through the list in a science fiction magazine of the early Forties. There is an almost complete change-over, for a vast extinction had taken place and few could make the transition. (Among the few who could were Edmond Hamilton and Jack Williamson.)
Between the Forties and the Fifties there was little change. The Campbellesque period was still running its course and this shows that the mere lapse of ten years is not in itself necessarily crucial.
But now compare the authors of a magazine in the early Fifties with a magazine today. There has been another change-over. Again some have survived, but a whole flood of bright young authors of the new school has entered.
This Second Revolution is not as clean-cut and obvious as the First Revolution had been. One thing present now that was not present then is the science fiction anthology, and the presence of the anthology blurs the transition.
Each year sees a considerable number of anthologies published, and always they draw their stories from the past. In the anthologies of the Sixties there is always a heavy representation of the stories of the Forties and Fifties, so that in these anthologies the Second Revolution has not yet taken place.
That is the reason for the anthology you now hold in your hands. It is not made up of stories of the past. It consists of stories written now, under the influence of the Second Revolution. It was precisely Harlan Ellison’s intention to make this anthology represent the field as it now is, rather than as it then was.
If you look at the table of contents you will find a number of authors who were prominent in the Campbellesque period—Lester del Rey, Poul Anderson, Theodore Sturgeon, and so on. They are writers who are skillful enough and imaginative enough to survive the Second Revolution. You will also find, however, authors who are the products of the Sixties and who know only the new era. They include Larry Niven, Norman Spinrad, Roger Zelazny and so on.
It is idle to suppose that the new will meet universal approval. Those who remember the old, and who find this memory inextricably intertwined with their own youths, will mourn the past, of course.
I will not hide from you the fact that I mourn the past. (I am being given full leeway to say what I want, and I intend to be frank.) It is the First Revolution that produced me and it is the First Revolution that I keep in my heart.
That is why, when Harlan asked me to write a story for this anthology, I backed away. I felt that any story I wrote would strike a false note. It would be too sober, too respectable, and, to put it bluntly, too darned square. So I have agreed to write a foreword instead; a sober, respectable and utterly square foreword.
And I invite those of you who are not square, and who feel the Second Revolution to be your revolution, to meet examples of the new science fiction as produced by the new (and some of the old) masters. You will find here the field at its most daring and experimental; may you therefore be appropriately stimulated and affected!
Isaac Asimov
February 1967
* * * *
HARLAN AND I
by Isaac Asimov
This book is Harlan Ellison. It is Ellison-drenched and Ellison-permeated. I admit that thirty-two other authors (including myself in a way) have contributed, but Harlan’s introduction and his thirty-two prefaces surround the stories and embrace them and soak them through with the rich flavor of his personality.
So it is only fitting that I tell the story of how I came to meet Harlan.
The scene is a World Science Fiction Convention a little over a decade ago. I had just arrived at the hotel and I made for the bar at once. I don’t drink, but I knew that the bar would be where everybody was. They were indeed all there, so I yelled a greeting and everyone yelled back at me.
Among them, however, was a youngster I had never seen before: a little fellow with sharp features and the livest eyes I ever saw. Those live eyes were now focused on me with something that I can only describe as worship.
He said, “Are you Isaac Asimov?” And in his voice was awe and wonder and amazement.
I was rather pleased, but I struggled hard to retain a modest demeanor. “Yes, I am,” I said.
“You’re not kidding? You’re really Isaac Asimov?” The words have not yet been invented that would describe the ardor and reverence with which his tongue caressed the syllables of my name.
I felt as though the least I could do would be to rest my hand upon his head and bless him, but I controlled myself. “Yes, I am,” I said, and by now my smile was a fatuous thing, nauseating to behold. “Really, I am.”
“Well, I think you’re—” he began, still in the same tone of voice, and for a split second he paused, while I listened and the audience held its breath. The youngster’s face shifted in that split second into an expression of utter contempt and he finished the sentence with supreme indifference, “—a nothing!”
The effect, for me, was that of tumbling over a cliff I had not known was there, and landing fiat on my back. I could only blink foolishly while everyone present roared with laughter
The youngster was Harlan Ellison, you see, and I had never met him before and didn’t know his utter irreverence. But everyone else there knew him and they had waited for innocent me to be neatly poniarded—and I had been.
By the time I struggled back to something like equilibrium, it was long past time for any possible retort. I could only carry on as best as I might, limping and bleeding, and grieving that I had been hit when I wasn’t looking and that not a man in the room had had the self-denial to warn me and give up the delight of watching me get mine.
Fortunately, I believe in forgiveness, and I made up my mind to forgive Harlan completely—just, as soon as I had paid him back with interest.
Now you must understand that Harlan is a giant among men in courage, pugnacity, loquacity, wit, charm, intelligence—indeed, in everything but height.
He is not actually extremely tall. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, he is quite short; shorter, even, than Napoleon. And instinct told me, as I struggled up from disaster, that this young man, who was not introduced to me as the well-known fan, Harlan Ellison, was a trifle sensitive on that subject. I made a mental note of that.
The next day at this convention I was on the platform, introducing notables and addressing a word of kindly love to each as I did so. I kept my eye on Harlan all this time, however, for he was sitting right up front (where else?).
As soon as his attention wandered, I called out his name suddenly. He stood up, quite surprised and totally unprepared, and I leaned forward and said, as sweetly as I could:
“Harlan, stand on the fellow next to you, so that people can see you,”
And while the audience (a much larger one this time) laughed fiendishly, I forgave Harlan and we have been good friends ever since.*
Isaac Asimov
February 1967
* IMPERTINENT EDITORIAL FOOTNOTE: While I am fully aware it is unbecoming for a young man to disagree publicly with his elders, my unbounded admiration and unflagging friendship for the Good Doctor, Asimov, compels me to add this footnote to his second Foreword —strictly in the interests of historically accurate reportage, an end to which he has been determinedly devoted for at least twice as long as I’ve been living. There is an unsavory tone inherent in the remark I am alleged to have made to Dr. Asimov, noted above. This tone of contempt was by no means present at the time, not at any time before or since. Any man who would speak to Asimov or about Asimov with contempt is, himself, beneath contempt. My recollection of the incident, however, is perhaps a bit fresher. (Only a cad would remark on the faulty memories and colored nostalgia of our aging Giants In The Field.) I didn’t say, “— you’re a—nothing!” I said, “You aren’t so much.” I grant you, the difference is a subtle one; I was being an adolescent snot; but after reading all those Galaxy-spanning novels about heroic men of heroic proportions, I had been expecting a living computer, mightily thewed, something of a Conan with the cunning of Lije Bailey. Instead, here was this perfectly wonderful, robust, Skylark-shaped Jew with a Mel Brooks delivery and a Wally Cox bowtie. I have never been disappointed by an Asimov story, and I have never been disappointed by Asimov the man. But on that initial occasion, my dreams were somewhat greater than the reality, and the remark was more reflex than malice. Incidentally, Napoleon was 5’ 2”. I am 5’ 5”. This is the first time, I believe, that Dr. Asimov’s facts have been in error. I hope he will be able to live with this; I’m able to live with my height.
—Harlan Ellison
* * * *
THIRTY-TWO SOOTHSAYERS
What you hold in your hands is more than a book. If we are lucky, it is a revolution.
This book, all two hundred and thirty-nine thousand words of it, the largest anthology of speculative fiction ever published of all original stories, and easily one of the largest of any kind, was constructed along specific lines of revolution. It was intended to shake things up. It was conceived out of a need for new horizons, new forms, new styles, new challenges in the literature of our times. If it was done properly, it will provide these new horizons and styles and forms and challenges. If not, it is still one helluva good book full of entertaining stories.
There is a coterie of critics, analysts and readers who contend that “mere entertainment” is not enough, that there must be pith and substance to a story, a far-reaching message or philosophy or superabundance of superscience. While there is certainly merit in their contentions, it has all too often become the raison d’être of the fiction, this sententious preoccupation with saying things. While we can no more suggest that fairy tales are the loftiest level to which modern fiction should attain than that the theory should dwarf the plot, we would be forced to opt for the former rather than the latter, were we chained down with the threat of bamboo shoots under the fingernails.
Happily, this book seems to hit directly in the mid-target area. Each story is almost obstinately entertaining. But each one is filled with ideas as well. Not merely run-of-the-pulps ideas you’ve read a hundred times before, but fresh and daring ideas; in their way, dangerous visions.
Why all this chatter about entertainment versus ideas? In an introduction of some length, to a book of even greater length? Why not let the stories speak for themselves? Because ... though it may waddle like a duck, quack like a duck, look like a duck and go steady with ducks, it need not necessarily be a duck. This is a collection of ducks that will turn into swans before your very eyes. These are stories so purely entertaining that it seems inconceivable the impetus for their being written was an appeal for ideas. But such was the case, and as you wonderingly witness these ducks of entertainment change into swans of ideas, you will be treated to a thirty-three-story demonstration of “the new thing”—the nouvelle vague, if you will, of speculative writing.
And therein, gentle readers, lies the revolution.
* * * *
There are those who say speculative fiction began with Lucian of Samosata or Aesop. Sprague de Camp, in his excellent Science Fiction Handbook (Hermitage House, 1953) offers Lucian, Virgil, Homer, Helidoros, Apuleius, Aristophanes, Thucydides, and calls Plato “the second Greek ‘father of science fiction’.” Groff Conklin, in The Best of Science Fiction (Crown, 1946), suggests the historical origins can be traced without difficulty from Dean Swift’s Gulliver, from Frank R. Stockton’s “The Great War Syndicate,” from Richard Adams Locke’s “The Moon Hoax,” from Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward,” from Verne, from Arthur Conan Doyle, from H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe. In the classic anthology Adventures in Time and Space (Random House, 1946), Healy and McComas opt for the great astronomer Johannes Kepler. My own personal seminal influence for the fantasy that is the basis of all great speculative fiction is the Bible. (Let us all pause for a microsecond in prayer that God does not strike me with a bolt of lightning in the spleen.)
But before I am accused of trying to wrest notoriety from the established historians of speculative fiction, let me assure you I offer these establishments of roots only to indicate I have done my homework and am thus entitled to make the impertinent remarks that follow.
Speculative fiction in modern times really got born with Walt Disney in his classic animated film, Steamboat Willie, in 1928. Sure it did. I mean: a mouse that can operate a paddle-wheeler?
It’s as sensible a starting place as Lucian, after all, because when we get right down to the old nitty-gritty, the beginning of speculative fiction was the first Cro-Magnon who imagined what it was out there snuffling around in the darkness just beyond his fire. If he envisioned it as having nine heads, bee-faceted eyes, fire-breathing jaws, sneakers and a tattersall vest, he was creating speculative fiction. If he saw it as a mountain lion, he was probably just au courant, and he doesn’t count. Besides, he was chicken.
No one can sanely deny that Gernsback’s Amazing Stories in 1926 was the most obvious ancestor of what today, in this volume, we call “speculative fiction”. And if this be accepted, then obeisances must be offered in the direction of Edgar Rice Burroughs, E. E. Smith, H. P. Lovecraft, Ed Earl Repp, Ralph Milne Farley, Captain S. P. Meek, U.S.A. (Ret.) ... that whole crowd. And of course, to John W. Campbell, Jr., who used to edit a magazine that ran science fiction, called Astounding, and who now edits a magazine that runs a lot of schematic drawings, called Analog. Mr. Campbell is generally conceded to be the “fourth father of modern speculative fiction” or somesuch, because it was he who suggested the writers try putting characters inside their machines. Which brings you and me up to about the Forties, with the gadget stories.
But it doesn’t say much about the Sixties.
After Campbell, there were Horace Gold and Tony Boucher and Mick McComas, who pioneered the radical concept that science fiction should be judged by the same high standards as all literary forms. It came as one whale of a shock to most of the poor devils who had been writing and selling in the field. It meant they had to learn to write well, not merely think cute.
With which background we now come trudging knee-deep through awful stories into the Swinging Sixties. Which has not really begun to swing. But the revolution is at hand. Bear with me.
For twenty-odd years the staunch fan of speculative fiction has been beating his chest and wailing that the mainstream of fiction does not recognize imaginative writing. He has lamented the fact that books like 1984 and Brave New World and Limbo and On the Beach have received critical acclaim but have never been labeled “science fiction.” In point of fact, he contended, they were automatically excluded on the simplistic theory that “They’re good books, they can’t be that crazy fictional-science crap.” He seized upon every borderline effort, no matter how dismal (e.g : Wouk’s “The Lomokome Papers,” Ayn Rand’s Anthem, Hersey’s White Lotus, Boulle’s Planet of the Apes), just to reassure himself and strengthen his argument that the mainstream was pilfering from the genre, and that there was much wealth to be divvied in the ouvrage de longue haleine that was science fiction.
That rabid fan is now out of date. He is twenty years behind the times. He can still be heard gibbering paranoically in the background, but he’s now more a fossil than a force. Speculative fiction has been found, has been turned to good use by the mainstream, and is now in the process of being assimilated. Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and Cat’s Cradle, Hersey’s The Child Buyer, Wallis’ Only Lovers Left Alive and Vercors’ You Shall Know Them (to name only a recent scattering) are top-flight speculative novels, employing many of the tools honed by science fiction writers in their own little backwash eddy of a genre. Not an issue of a major slick magazine passes without some recognition of speculative fiction, either by reference to its having foretold some now common-place item of scientific curiosity, or by openly currying favor with the leading names in the field via the inclusion of their work alongside the John Cheevers, the John Updikes, the Bernard Malamuds, the Saul Bellows.
We have arrived, is the inescapable conclusion.
And yet that highly vocal fan, and all the myriad writers, critics and editors who have developed tunnel vision through years of feeling themselves ghettoized, persist in their antediluvian lament, holding back the very recognition for which they weep and moan. This is what Charles Fort called “steam engine time”. When it is time for the steam engine to be invented, even if James Watt doesn’t do it, someone will.
It is “steam engine time” for the writers of speculative fiction. The millennium is at hand. We are what’s happening.
And most of those wailing-wall aficionados of fantasy fiction hate it a lot. Because allofasudden even the bus driver and the dental technician and the beach bum and the grocery bag-boy are reading his stories; and what’s worse, those johnny-come-latelies may not show the proper deference to the Grand Old Masters of the field, they may not think the Skylark stories are brilliant and mature and compelling; they may not care to be confused by terminology that has been accepted in s-f for thirty years, they may want to understand what’s going on; they may not fall in line with the old order. They may prefer Star Trek and Kubrick to Barsoom and Ray Cummings. And thus they are the recipients of the fan-sneer, a curling of the lips that closely resembles the crumbling of an old pulp edition of Famous Fantastic Mysteries.
But even more heinous is the entrance on the scene of writers who won’t accept the old ways. The smartass kids who write “all that literary stuff,” who take the accepted and hoary ideas of the speculative arena and stand them right on their noses. Them guys are blasphemers. God will send down lightning to strike them in their spleens.
Yet speculative fiction (notice how I cleverly avoid using the misnomer “science fiction”? getting the message, friends? you’ve bought one of those s—e f—n anthologies and didn’t even know it! well, you’ve blown your bread, so you might as well hang around and get educated) is the most fertile ground for the growth of a writing talent without boundaries, with horizons that seem never to get any closer. And all them smartass punks keep emerging, driving the old guard out of their jugs with frenzy. And lord! how the mighty have fallen; for most of the “big names” in the field, who dominated the covers and top rates of the magazines for more years than they deserved, can no longer cut it, they no longer produce. Or they have moved on to other fields. Leaving it to the newer, brighter ones, and the ones who were new and bright once, and were passed by because they weren’t “big names”.
But despite the new interest in speculative fiction by the mainstream, despite the enlarged and variant styles of the new writers, despite the enormity and expansion of topics open to these writers, despite what is outwardly a booming, healthy market...there is a constricting narrowness of mind on the part of many editors in the field. Because many of the editors were once simply fans, and they retain that specialized prejudice for the s-f of their youth. Writer after writer is finding his work precensored even before he writes it, because he knows this editor won’t allow discussions of politics in his pages, and that one shies away from stories exploring sex in the future, and this one down here in the baseboard doesn’t pay except in red beans and rice, so why bother burning up all those gray cells on a daring concept when the louse-bug will buy the old madman-in-the-time-machine shtick.
This is called a taboo. And there isn’t an editor in the field who won’t swear under threat of the water torture that he hasn’t got them, that he even sprays the office with insecticide on the off-chance there’s a taboo nesting in the files like a silverfish. They’ve said it at conventions, they’ve said it in print, but there are over a dozen writers in this book alone who will, upon slight nudging, relate stories of horror and censorship that include every editor in the field, even the one who lives in the baseboard.
Oh, there are challenges in the field, and truly controversial, eye-opening pieces get published; but there are so many more that go a-begging.
And no one has ever told the speculative writer, “Pull out all the stops, no holds barred, get it said!” Until this book came along.
Don’t look now, you’re on the firing line in the big revolution.
* * * *
In 1961 this editor...
. . . hold it a second, I just thought of something that had better get said. You may have noticed a lack of solemnity and reserve on the part of the editorial I. It stems not so much from youthful exuberance—though there are legions who will swear I’ve been fourteen years old for the past seventeen—as from a reluctance on the I’s part to accept the harsh reality that the I who is all writer has abrogated a wee portion of the auctorial gestalt to become An Editor. It strikes me as odd that of all the wiser heads in the field, ail the men who are so much more eminently suited to bring forth a book as important as I like to think this one is, that it fell to me. But then, on reflection, it seems inevitable; not so much from talent as from a sense of urgency and a dogged determination that it should be done. Had I known at the outset that it would take over two years to assemble this book, and the heartache and expense involved—I’d have done it anyhow.
So in exchange for all the goodies herein, you will have to put up with the intrusion of the editor, who is a writer like all the other writers here, and who is delighted to be able to play God just this once.
Where was I?
Ah. In 1961 this editor was engaged in putting together a line of paperbacks for a small house in Evanston, Illinois. Among the projects I wanted to put on the assembly line was a collection of stories of speculative fiction, by top writers, all original, and all highly controversial in nature. I hired a well-known anthologist, who did what many might have called a good job. I didn’t happen to think so. The stories seemed to me either silly or pointless or crude or dull. There were some that have since been published elsewhere, even a few ‘best’ stories among them. By Leiber, and Bretnor, and Heinlein, to remember just three. But the book did not excite me the way I felt a collection of this sort should. When I left the firm, another editor tried it with a second anthologist. They got no further. The project died a-borning. I have no idea what happened to the stories these anthologists gathered together.
In 1965, I was entertaining author Norman Spinrad in my itty-bitty Los Angeles tree-house, coyly called “Ellison Wonderland”, from the book of the same title. We were sitting around talking about this and that, when Norman began bitching about anthologists, for one reason or another that now escapes memory. He said he thought I should implement some of the rabble-rousing ideas I had been spreading about “the new thing” in speculative fiction, with an anthology of same. I hasten to point out my “new thing” is neither Judith Merril’s “new thing” nor Michael Moorcock’s “new thing”. Ask for us by our brand names.
I smiled inanely. I’d never edited an anthology, what the hell did I know about it? (An attitude many critics of this book may voice when they finish. But onward ...)
I had, shortly prior to this, sold Robert Silverberg a short story for a forthcoming anthology he was assembling. I had beefed about some minor matter or other, and received a reply, part of which follows in Silverbob’s own inimitable style.
Oct. 2nd, 65. Dear Harlan: You’ll be glad to know that in the course of a long and wearying dream last night I watched you win two Hugos at last year’s Worldcon. You acted pretty smug about it, too. I’m not sure which categories you led, but one of them was probably Unfounded Bitching. Permit me a brief and fatherly lecture in response to your letter of permission on the anthology (which I’m sure will startle the sweet ladies at Duell, Sloan & Pearce)...
At which point he launched into a scathing denunciation of my attitudes toward accepting some piddling amount for anthology reprinting of a second-rate story he should have known better than to include to begin with. There then followed several paragraphs of chitchat intended (unsuccessfully, I might add) to mollify me; paragraphs which are hilarious, but which bear little import for here and now, and so you’ll have to read them in the Syracuse University archives sometime in the future. But now we come down to the pee and the ess, which read thus and so:
“Why don’t you do an anthology? HARLAND ELLISON PICKS OFF-BEAT CLASSICS OF SF, or something. ...”
He signed the letter “Ivar Jorgensen”. But that’s another story.
Spinrad nuhdged me. Edit, edit, mein kind. So I got on the phone longdistance (this is one word, I learned it from my Yiddish grandmother, who blanched every time you suggested making one). To Lawrence Ashmead, at Doubleday. He had never spoken to me before. Had he but known what new horrors! new horrors! awaited him because of his common civility, he would have dropped the offensive instrument out of the eighth-story window of the Ministry of Truth-style building on Park Avenue where Doubleday keeps its Manhattan offices.
But he listened, I wove golden magic threads of spidery-illusion. A big anthology, all new stories, controversial, too fierce for magazines to buy, top writers, headliners from the mainstream, action, adventure, pathos, a cast of thousands, a parsnip in a pear tree.
Hooked. On the spot, hooked. The silver-tongued orator had struck again. Oh, was he bagged on the idea. On October 18th, I received the following letter:
Dear Harlan: The consensus of the editors who have looked at your prospectus for DANGEROUS VISIONS is that we need something more definite to go on. ... Unless you can find out exactly what is available in original stories and can supply me with a fairly definite table of contents, I don’t stand a chance of getting approval on this project from our Publishing Committee. Anthologies are a dime a dozen these days and unless they are special, they just don’t justify a large advance. In fact, it is my policy to limit anthologies (unless they are “special”) to authors who regularly contribute novels to the Doubleday list. So, if you can insure most of the contents of DANGEROUS VISIONS with some definite commitments ... and I know this is tantamount to the situation of the Butterscotch Man who can’t run until he is warm and can’t get warm until he runs, but. ..
Now a piece of historical information. Traditionally, anthologies have been composed of stories already first published in serial, or magazine, form. They can be purchased for hardcover anthologization for a fraction of their original cost. The profit for a writer is made from subsequent sales, paperback reprint, foreign rights, etc And since he has been paid once for the piece already, it is gravy. Thus, a fifteen-hundred-dollar advance against royalties paid to an anthologist means the editor can cop half the bread for himself and stretch the seven hundred and fifty dollars remaining over eleven or twelve authors, and have a pretty good-sized book. This book, however, was conceived as an all-original collection, which meant the stories would have to be written specifically for the book (or, in rare cases, be those stories already long since written and rejected by all the available markets on grounds of taboo, of one sort or another; these latter possibilities were, obviously, far less appealing, for usually, unless a story is exceeding hot, it can be sold somewhere; if no one had bought them, there was a better chance that they were simply gawdawful, rather than too controversial; I was to find out all too soon that my thinking was correct; stories of a controversial nature are often bought by editors not so much because they shock and startle, as because they are by “name authors” who can get away with it; the less well known writers have a much harder time of it; and unless they develop a more prominent name later, and go back to dig these “hot” stories out of their trunk, the stories never get seen).
But for a writer to do a story for the book, my price on acceptance would have to be competitive with the magazines that would offer him first sale. This meant the standard fifteen-hundred-dollar advance would not be enough. Not if this was to be a big, wide-ranging and representative project.
The extra three cents a word for magazine publication looms large to the free-lancer making his living strictly from the genre magazines.
So I needed at least three thousand dollars, double the advance. Ashmead, who is not allowed by Nelson Doubleday to dole out more than fifteen hundred dollars, would have to go to his Publishing Committee and he didn’t think they would be too keen at this stage of the game. They didn’t want to spring for the first fifteen hundred.
So the cadmium-throated orator once again took to the telephone lines. “Hi, Larry sweetheart pussycat!”
What emerged finally was the greatest boondoggle since the Teapot Dome scandal. Ashmead was to give me the first fifteen hundred dollars advance, out of which I would only buy, say, thirty thousand words of the proposed sixty thousand. Then I would send the stories in to him and say I needed another fifteen hundred to complete the project, and if things shaped up as well as we anticipated, there would be little difficulty going to the Committee and asking for the balance.
Now, two hundred and thirty-nine thousand words and nineteen months later, DANGEROUS VISIONS had cost Doubleday three thousand dollars, myself twenty-seven hundred dollars out of pocket (and no anthologist’s fee), and author Larry Niven seven hundred and fifty dollars, which he put into the project to see it done properly. Additionally, four of the authors herein have not yet been paid. Their stories came in late, when the book was ostensibly closed; but having heard about the project, and being fired with it, they wanted to be included, and have agreed to delayed payment, which comes out of Ellison’s share of the profits, not the authors’ royalties.
This introduction has almost run its course. Thank the stars. Many of the incredible incidents that happened in the course of its birthing will have to go untold here. The Thomas Pynchon story. The Heinlein anecdote. The Laumer Affair. The Incident of the Three Brunner stories. The last-minute flight to New York to insure the Dillon illustrations. The Kingsley Amis afterword. The poverty, the sickness, the hate!
Just a few last words on the nature of this book. First, it was intended as a canvas for new writing styles, bold departures, unpopular thoughts. I think with only one or two exceptions each of the stories included fits that intention. Expect nothing, remain wide open to what the authors are trying to do, and be delighted.
There are many authors familiar to readers of speculative fiction whose work is not included here. This was not intended as an all-inclusive anthology. By the very nature of what they write, many authors were excluded because they had said what they had to say years ago. Others found they had nothing controversial or daring to contribute. Some expressed lack of interest in the project. But with one exception this book was never closed to a writer owing to editorial prejudice. Thus, you will find new young writers like Samuel Delany side by side with established craftsmen such as Damon Knight. You will find visitors from other fields such as TV’s Howard Rodman beside veterans of the s-f wars such as the charming (and in this instance frightening) Miriam Allen deFord. You will find traditional writers like Philip José Farmer. Only the new and the different was sought, but in some cases a story was so... so story (as a chair is very much chair), it forced itself to be included.
And last, it has been a privilege to do this book. After the assault of bombast, that may strike the reader as awshucks Jack Paar-style phony humbleness. All that can be offered is the editor’s assurance that the word “privilege” is mild. To have seen the growth of this very lively and arresting volume was to have a peephole not only to the future but to the future of the field of speculative writing.
From which peeping, as these thirty-two soothsayers told their tales of tomorrow, this editor was able to conclude that the wonders and riches he saw in the form, when he was first starting to learn his craft, are truly there. If there be any doubt, move on to the stories themselves. None of them has seen print anywhere before, and for the next year at least, none of them will appear anywhere else, so you have bought wisely; and have rewarded the men who had these dangerous visions.
Thank you for your attention.
Harlan Ellison
Hollywood January
1967
* * * *
Introduction to
EVENSONG:
I have chosen Lester del Rey to lead off the distinguished parade of authors in this anthology for several reasons. First, because ... no, let me give the second reason first, because the first reason is strictly personal. Second, because the Guest of Honor at the 25th Annual World Science Fiction Convention, being held in New York City as this book is published, is Lester del Rey. The Convention’s honoring of Lester, and the smaller honor of starting this book, are only piddles among the glory owing Lester, a debt long in arrears. Lester is one of the few “giants” of the field whose reputation rests not merely on one or two brilliant stories written twenty-five years ago, but on a massive body of work that has grown in versatility and originality with every new addition. Few men in the genre can be considered as seminal an influence as del Rey. Thus, the honors are tiny indeed.
But the first reason is a purely personal one. Lester was responsible for my becoming a professional writer, in many ways (an act that has left him open to unnecessary vilification; I assure you there was no kindness involved; that it would work out this way Lester could never have known). When I arrived in New York in 1955, fresh from having been ejected by Ohio State University, he and his lovely wife Ewie took me into their home in Red Bank, New Jersey, and under the sadistic lash of Lester’s seemingly untiring tutelage (a kind of educational death-of-a-thousand-unkind-cuts Lester assured me would ripen my talent, strengthen my character and tone up my complexion), I began to understand the rudiments of my craft. For it seems to me, even now, on reflection of over ten years, that of all the writers in this field only a few—and Lester the most prominent of that few—can explain what makes good writing. He is the living, snarling refutation of the canard that those who can’t do, teach. His skill as an editor, anthologist, critic and teacher stems directly from his muscularity as a writer.
It has been harshly said of Lester that, once planted, he will argue with the worms for possession of his carcass. Anyone who has ever been ranked across from del Rey in an argument will nod understandingly. And I submit ranked, for Lester is the fairest of men: he will not go for top-point efficiency in a discussion unless the odds are equal: about seven to one. I have never seen him lose an argument. No matter what your subject, no matter if you are the world’s only authority on the topic, del Rey will command an arsenal of facts and theories so inexhaustible and formidable, defeat is assured you. I have seen strong men wither before del Rey. Harridans and shrikes he literally strips naked and sends squalling into toilets. He ranges somewhere around five and a half feet tall, has wispy “baby hair” he finds difficult to comb, wears glasses only slightly thicker than the bottom of a Dr. Pepper bottle, and is powered by some supernatural force the manufacturers of the Pacemaker ought to consider for their machines.
Lester del Rey was born R. Alvarez del Rey, on a tenant farm in Minnesota, in 1915. He has spent most of his life in Eastern cities though close acquaintances occasionally hear him murmur about his father, who was a devoted evolutionist in the boondocks. He has acted as an agent, writing teacher and plot doctor, and is circumspect about the (obviously) endless string of odd jobs he held before becoming a full-time writer thirty years ago. Lester is one of the few writers who can talk incessantly and not let it become a block to his writing the stories he tells. He has talked almost steadily for the past thirty years in bull sessions, lectures, pulpits, writers’ conferences, television and over two thousand hours on Manhattan’s Long John Nebel show, where he has consistently played the role of the Voice of Sanity. His first story was “The Faithful”, sold to Astounding Science Fiction in 1937. His books are much too numerous to catalogue, chiefly because he has ten thousand pseudonyms and pantherishly clevers the bad ones under phony names.
Peculiarly, this first story in the book was the last one received. Among the first ten writers I contacted for this project, Lester was quick to assure me he would send along a story in the next few weeks. One year later, almost to the day, I met him at the Cleveland Science Fiction Convention and accused him of flummery. He assured me the story had gone out months before, that he had heard nothing about it and so had assumed I didn’t want it. This from a professional whose attitude on stories—as imparted to me a decade ago—is to keep the manuscripts in motion till they are bought. Writing for the trunk is masturbation, so saith del Rey. After I returned to Los Angeles from the Convention, “Evensong” came in, with a whey-faced note from del Rey saying he was sending it along just to prove it had been written all the time. He also included an afterword, at my request. One of the fillips I intended to include in this anthology was a few post-fiction comments by the authors, anent their feelings about the story, or their view of why it was a ‘‘dangerous” vision, or how they felt about speculative writing, or their audience, or their place in the Universe ... in other words, anything they felt they might want to say, to establish that rare writer-to-reader liaison. You will find one each of these afterwords following each story, but Lester’s comments about the afterword seem apropos at the outset, for they reflect, in fact, the attitude of many of the authors here, about the act of afterwording. He said:
“The afterword isn’t very bright or amusing, I’m afraid. But I’d pretty much wrapped up what I wanted to say in the story itself. So I simply gave the so-called critics a few words to look up in the dictionary and gnaw over learnedly. I felt that they should at least be told that there is such a form as allegory, even though they may not understand the difference between that and simple fantasy. I’ve always thought a story must stand by itself, and that the writer behind it is of no consequence to its merits. (And I did so have a carbon from which to send this copy of the story I already sent, I did, I did, idid, ididid....)”
* * * *
EVENSONG
by Lester del Rey
By the time he reached the surface of the little planet, even the dregs of his power were drained. Now he rested, drawing reluctant strength slowly from the yellow sun that shone on the greensward around him. His senses were dim with an ultimate fatigue, but the fear he had learned from the Usurpers drove them outward, seeking a further hint of sanctuary.
It was a peaceful world, he realized, and the fear thickened in him at the discovery. In his younger days, he had cherished a multitude of worlds where the game of life’s ebb and flow could be played to the hilt. It had been a lusty universe to roam then. But the Usurpers could brook no rivals to their own outreaching lust. The very peace and order here meant that this world had once been theirs.
He tested for them gingerly while the merest whisper of strength poured into him. None were here now. He could have sensed the pressure of their close presence at once, and there was no trace of that. The even grassland swept in rolling meadows and swales to the distant hills. There were marble structures in the distance, sparkling whitely in the sunlight, but they were empty, their unknown purpose altered to no more than decoration now upon this abandoned planet. His attention swept back, across a stream to the other side of the wide valley.
There he found the garden. Within low walls, its miles of expanse were a tree-crowded and apparently untended preserve. He could sense the stirring of larger animal life among the branches and along the winding paths. The brawling vigor of all proper life was missing, but its abundance might be enough to mask his own vestige of living force from more than careful search.
It was at least a better refuge than this open greensward and he longed toward it, but the danger of betraying motion held him still where he was. He had thought his previous escape to be assured, but he was learning that even he could err. Now he waited while he tested once more for evidence of Usurper trap.
He had mastered patience in the confinement the Usurpers had designed at the center of the galaxy. He had gathered his power furtively while he designed escape around their reluctance to make final disposition. Then he had burst outward in a drive that should have thrust him far beyond the limits of their hold on the universe. And he had found failure before he could span even the distance to the end of this spiral arm of one galactic fastness.
Their webs of detection were everywhere, seemingly. Their great power-robbing lines made a net too fine to pass. Stars and worlds were linked, until only a series of miracles had carried him this far. And now the waste of power for such miracles was no longer within his reach. Since their near failure in entrapping and sequestering him, they had learned too much.
Now he searched delicately, afraid to trip some alarm, but more afraid to miss its existence. From space, this world had offered the only hope in its seeming freedom from their webs. But only micro-seconds had been available to him for his testing then.
At last he drew his perceptions back. He could find no slightest evidence of their lures and detectors here. He had begun to suspect that even his best efforts might not be enough now, but he could do no more. Slowly at first, and then in a sudden rush, he hurled himself into the maze of the garden.
Nothing struck from the skies. Nothing leaped upwards from the planet core to halt him. There was no interruption in the rustling of the leaves and the chirping bird songs. The animal sounds went on unhindered. Nothing seemed aware of his presence in the garden. Once that would have been unthinkable in itself, but now he drew comfort from it. He must be only a shadow self now, unknown and unknowable in his passing.
Something came down the path where he rested, pattering along on hoofs that touched lightly on the spoilage of fallen leaves. Something else leaped quickly through the light underbrush beside the path.
He let his attention rest on them as they both emerged onto the near pathway at once. And cold horror curled thickly around him.
One was a rabbit, nibbling now at the leaves of clover and twitching long ears as its pink nose stretched out for more. The other was a young deer, still bearing the spots of its fawnhood. Either or both might have seemingly been found on any of a thousand worlds. But neither would have been precisely of the type before him.
This was the Meeting World—the planet where he had first found the ancestors of the Usurpers. Of all worlds in the pested galaxy, it had to be this world he sought for refuge!
They were savages back in the days of his full glory, confined to this single world, rutting and driving their way to the lawful self-destruction of all such savages. And yet there had been something odd about them, something that then drew his attention and even his vagrant pity.
Out of that pity, he had taught a few of them, and led them upwards. He had even nursed poetic fancies of making them his companions and his equals as the life span of their sun should near its ending. He had answered their cries for help and given them at least some of what they needed to set their steps toward power over even space and energy. And they had rewarded him by overweening pride that denied even a trace of gratitude. He had abandoned them finally to their own savage ends and gone on to other worlds, to play out the purposes of a wider range.
It was his second folly. They were too far along the path toward unlocking the laws behind the universe. Somehow, they even avoided their own destruction from themselves. They took the worlds of their sun and drove outwards, until they could even vie with him for the worlds he had made particularly his own. And now they owned them all, and he had only a tiny spot here on their world—for a time at least.
The horror of the realization that this was the Meeting World abated a little as he remembered now how readily their spawning hordes possessed and abandoned worlds without seeming end. And again the tests he could make showed no evidence of them here. He began to relax again, feeling a sudden hope from what had been temporary despair. Surely they might also believe this was the one planet where he would never seek sanctuary.
Now he set his fears aside and began to force his thoughts toward the only pattern that could offer hope. He needed power, and power was available in any area untouched by the webs of the Usurpers. It had drained into space itself throughout the aeons, a waste of energy that could blast suns or build them in legions. It was power to escape, perhaps even to prepare himself eventually to meet them with at least a chance to force truce, if not victory. Given even a few hours free of their notice, he could draw and hold that power for his needs.
He was just reaching for it when the sky thundered and the sun seemed to darken for a moment!
The fear in him gibbered to the surface and sent him huddling from sight of the sky before he could control it. But for a brief moment there was still a trace of hope in him. It could have been a phenomenon caused by his own need for power, he might have begun drawing too heavily, too eager for strength.
Then the earth shook, and he knew.
The Usurpers were not fooled. They knew he was here—had never lost him. And now they had followed in all their massive lack of subtlety. One of their scout ships had landed, and the scout would come seeking him.
He fought for control of himself, and found it long enough to drive his fear back down within himself. Now, with a care that disturbed not even a blade of grass or leaf on a twig, he began retreating, seeking the denser undergrowth at the center of the garden where all life was thickest. With that to screen him, he might at least draw a faint trickle of power, a strength to build a subtle brute aura around himself and let him hide among the beasts. Some Usurper scouts were young and immature. Such a one might be fooled into leaving. Then, before his report could be acted on by others, there might be a chance....
He knew the thought was only a wish, not a plan, but he clung to it as he huddled in the thicket at the center of the garden. And then even the fantasy was stripped from him.
The sound of footsteps was firm and sure. Branches broke as the steps came forward, not deviating from a straight line. Inexorably, each firm stride brought the Usurper nearer to his huddling place. Now there was a faint glow in the air, and the animals were scampering away in terror.
He felt the eyes of the Usurper on him, and he forced himself away from the awareness. And, like fear, he found that he had learned prayer from the Usurpers; he prayed now desperately to a nothingness he knew, and there was no answer.
“Come forth! This earth is a holy place and you cannot remain upon it. Our judgment is done and a place is prepared for you. Come forth and let me take you there!” The voice was soft, but it carried a power that stilled even the rustling of the leaves.
He let the gaze of the Usurper reach him now, and the prayer in him was mute and directed outward—and hopeless, as he knew it must be.
“But—” Words were useless, but the bitterness inside him forced the words to come from him. “But why? I am God!”
For a moment, something akin to sadness and pity was in the eyes of the Usurper. Then it passed as the answer came. “I know. But I am Man. Come!”
He bowed at last, silently, and followed slowly as the yellow sun sank behind the walls of the garden.
And the evening and the morning were the eighth day.
* * * *
Afterword:
A writer who thinks seriously about his craft must surely find himself more and more engaged with the ancient problems of philosophy—good and evil, and causality—since these lie deep within every plot and character. As a science fiction writer, trying to scan the patterns of the future, I find myself also inevitably concerned with the question of teleology: is there a purpose and design to the universe and to man? It may not matter. If so, must we follow it blindly? If blind chance rules, can we not shape our own purpose, suitable to our ultimate possibilities? Personally, I take my Invictus straight, with just a dash of bitters. But I take it very seriously. And because I do, “Evensong” is not fiction, but allegory.
* * * *
* * * *
Introduction to
FLIES:
Robert Silverberg is one of my oldest friends. He is an excellent writer. Additionally, he is the compleat professional, which is unfortunately interpreted by the yahoos as meaning he is a story factory. They’re wrong, but that’s beside the point. More on Silverberg the Writer in a moment.
Silverberg the Fellah goes like so: he is from Brooklyn and he doesn’t want any applause. He used to edit a fan magazine called Spaceship which was extremely literate. He graduated from Columbia University. He is married to Bobbie, who is a lovely research physicist, and they live in a stately manse that at one time belonged to Fiorello La Guardia. He has had somewhere between fifty and sixty hardcover books published on topics ranging from zoology to archaeology and back again. His first published story was in 1953, “Gorgon Plant,” which appeared in the Scottish science fiction magazine, Nebula. He won a Hugo in 1956 as Most Promising New Writer, beating out (of all people) the author of this introduction.
Like many writers in the field of speculative fiction, the author of this introduction envies Silverberg’s ability to get the job done. The delusion that genius and madness are but opposing faces of the same rare coin is one to which most writers subscribe, as a cop-out. It allows them to be erratic, beat their wives, demand fresh coffee at six ayem, come in late with manuscripts, default on their obligations, laze around reading paperback novels on the pretext that they are “researching,” pick up stakes and move when things get too regimented, snarl and snap at fans, be tendentious or supercilious. It is safe for all of us to goof off as long as we can bilk the Average Man into believing it is necessary for the creative process. Silverberg does not operate on this principle. He works a steady schedule. He practices his craft five days a week, six hours a day. Writing is what he does, and not to do it means not to be functioning.
Unlike writers who find intricate and brilliant ways to send themselves into slumps, blocks, pressures, binds and hideous life-situations, Silverberg’s orderly work-habits mean he can be relied upon. He has thus produced a large body of work of substantial merit, all the more impressive when one considers how many really memorable novels and stories and non-fiction works he has had published while in his twenties. Now, in his early thirties, Bob Silverberg writes books like Man Before Adam, Lost Cities and Vanished Civilizations, Home of the Red Man: Indian North America Before Columbus, Needle in a Timestack, The Time-Hoppers, and the marvelous book of living fossils, Forgotten by Time. His interests and authority have long since moved out of the realms of fiction, as a casual listing of only a few of his books demonstrates.
Yet Silverberg is a product of the field of science fiction. He is one of the last of the fans-turned-professional, and though the bulk of his income and assignments comes from other kinds of writing, he returns with pleasing regularity to speculative fiction, to re-establish his reputation, to reinforce his roots, to pleasure himself with the kind of stories he can only write in this form. Of these, his latest is presented here. Perhaps it is because of my decade-long friendship with Bob, and my acquaintance with much of what he has written, but I submit “Flies” is one of the most penetrating, most originally-written stories he has ever attempted. And the attempt is a success.
* * * *
FLIES
by Robert Silverberg
Here is Cassiday:
transfixed on a table.
There wasn’t much left of him. A brain-box; a few ropes of nerves; a limb. The sudden implosion had taken care of the rest. There was enough, though. The golden ones didn’t need much to go by. They had found him in the wreckage of the drifting ship as it passed through their zone, back of Iapetus. He was alive. He could be repaired. The others on the ship were beyond hope.
Repair him? Of course. Did one need to be human in order to be humanitarian? Repair, yes. By all means. And change. The golden ones were creative.
What was left of Cassiday lay in dry dock on a somewhere table in a golden sphere of force. There was no change of season here; only the sheen of the walls, the unvarying warmth. Neither day nor night, neither yesterday nor tomorrow. Shapes came and went about him. They were regenerating him, stage by stage, as he lay in complete mindless tranquillity. The brain was intact but not functioning. The rest of the man was growing back: tendon and ligament, bone and blood, heart and elbows. Elongated mounds of tissue sprouted tiny buds that enlarged into blobs of flesh. Paste cell to cell together, build a man from his own wreckage—that was no great chore for the golden ones. They had their skills. But they had much to learn, too, and this Cassiday could help them learn it.
Day by day Cassiday grew toward wholeness. They did not awaken him. He lay cradled in warmth, unmoving, unthinking, drifting on the tide. His new flesh was pink and smooth, like a baby’s. The epithelial thickening came a little later. Cassiday served as his own blueprint. The golden ones replicated him from a shred of himself, built him back from his own polynucleotide chains, decoded the proteins and reasembled him from the template. An easy task, for them. Why not? Any blob of protoplasm could do it—for itself. The golden ones, who were not protoplasm, could do it for others.
They made some changes in the template. Of course. They were craftsmen. And there was a good deal they wanted to learn.
* * * *
Look at Cassiday:
the dossier.
BORN 1 August 2316
PLACE Nyack, New York
PARENTS Various
ECONOMIC LEVEL Low
EDUCATIONAL LEVEL Middle
OCCUPATION Fuel technician
MARITAL STATUS Three legal liaisons, duration eight months, sixteen
months, and two months
HEIGHT Two meters
WEIGHT 96 kg
HAIR COLOR Yellow
EYES Blue
BLOOD TYPE A+
INTELLIGENCE LEVEL High
SEXUAL INCLINATIONS Normal
* * * *
Watch them now:
changing him.
The complete man lay before them, newly minted, ready for rebirth. Now come the final adjustments. They sought the gray brain within its pink wrapper, and entered it, and traveled through the bays and inlets of the mind, pausing now at this quiet cove, dropping anchor now at the base of that slab-sided cliff. They were operating, but doing it neatly. Here were no submucous resections, no glittering blades carving through gristle and bone, no sizzling lasers at work, no clumsy hammering at the tender meninges. Cold steel did not slash the synapses. The golden ones were subtler; they turned the circuit that was Cassiday, boosted the gain, damped out the noise, and they did it very gently.
When they had finished with him, he was much more sensitive. He had several new hungers. They had granted him certain abilities.
Now they awakened him.
“You are alive, Cassiday,” a feathery voice said. “Your ship was destroyed. Your companions were killed. You alone survived.”
“Which hospital is this?”
“Not on Earth. You’ll be going back soon. Stand up, Cassiday. Move your right hand. Your left. Flex your knees. Inflate your lungs. Open and close your eyes several times. What’s your name, Cassiday?”
“Richard Henry Cassiday.”
“How old?”
“Forty-one.”
“Look at this reflection. Who do you see?”
“Myself.”
“Do you have any further questions?”
“What did you do to me?”
“Repaired you, Cassiday. You were almost entirely destroyed.”
“Did you change me any?”
“We made you more sensitive to the feelings’ of your fellow man.”
“Oh,” said Cassiday.
* * * *
Follow Cassiday as he journeys:
back to Earth
He arrived on a day that had been programed for snow. Light snow, quickly melting, an aesthetic treat rather than a true manifestation of weather. It was good to touch foot on the homeworld again. The golden ones had deftly arranged his return, putting him back aboard his wrecked ship and giving him enough of a push to get him within range of a distress sweep. The monitors had detected him and picked him up. How was it you survived the disaster unscathed, Spaceman Cassiday? Very simple, sir, I was outside the ship when it happened. It just went swoosh and everybody was killed. And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.
They routed him to Mars and checked him out, and held him awhile in a decontamination lock on Luna, and finally sent him back to Earth. He stepped into the snowstorm, a big man with a rolling gait and careful calluses in all the right places. He had few friends, no relatives, enough cash units to see him through for a while, and a couple of ex-wives he could look up. Under the rules, he was entitled to a year off with full pay as his disaster allotment. He intended to accept the furlough.
He had not yet begun to make use of his new sensitivity. The golden ones had planned it so that his abilities would remain inoperative until he reached the homeworld. Now he had arrived, and it was time to begin using them, and the endlessly curious creatures who lived back at Iapetus waited patiently while Cassiday sought out those who had once loved him.
He began his quest in Chicago Urban District, because that was where the spaceport was, just outside of Rockford. The slidewalk took him quickly to a travertine tower, festooned with radiant inlays of ebony and violet-hued metal, and there, at the local Televector Central, Cassiday checked out the present whereabouts of his former wives. He was patient about it, a bland-faced, mild-eyed mass of flesh, pushing the right buttons and waiting placidly for the silken contacts to close somewhere in the depths of the earth. Cassiday had never been a violent man. He was calm. He knew how to wait.
The machine told him that Beryl Fraser Cassiday Mellon lived in Boston Urban District. The machine told him that Lureen Holstein Cassiday lived in New York Urban District. The machine told him that Mirabel Gunryk Cassiday Milman Reed lived in San Francisco Urban District.
The names awakened memories: warmth of flesh, scent of hair, touch of hand, sound of voice. Whispers of passion. Snarls of contempt. Gasps of love.
Cassiday, restored to life, went to see his ex-wives.
* * * *
We find one now:
safe and sound.
Beryl Fraser Cassiday Mellon’s eyes were milky in the pupil, greenish where they should have been white. She had lost weight in the last ten years, and now her face was parchment stretched over bone, an eroded face, the cheekbones pressing from within against the taut skin and likely to snap through at any moment. Cassiday had been married to her for sixteen months when he was twenty-four. They had separated after she insisted on taking the Sterility Pledge. He had not particularly wanted children, but he was offended by her maneuver all the same. Now she lay in a soothing cradle of webfoam, trying to smile at him without cracking her lips.
“They said you’d been killed,” she told him.
“I escaped. How have you been, Beryl?”
“You can see that. I’m taking the cure.”
“Cure?”
“I was a triline addict. Can’t you see? My eyes, my face? It melted me away. But it was peaceful. Like disconnecting your soul. Only it would have killed me, another year of it. Now I’m on the cure. They tapered me off last month. They’re building up my system with prosthetics. I’m full of plastic now. But I’ll live.”
“You’ve remarried?” Cassiday asked.
“He split long ago. I’ve been alone five years. Just me and the triline. But now I’m off that stuff.” Beryl blinked, laboriously. “You look so relaxed, Dick. But you always were. So calm, so sure of yourself. You’d never get yourself hooked on triline. Hold my hand, will you?”
He touched the withered claw. He felt the warmth coming from her, the need for love. Great throbbing waves came galloping into him, low-frequency pulses of yearning that filtered through him and went booming onward to the watchers far away.
“You once loved me,” Beryl said. “Then we were both silly. Love me again. Help me get back on my feet. I need your strength.”
“Of course I’ll help you,” Cassiday said.
He left her apartment and purchased three cubes of triline. Returning, he activated one of them and pressed it into Beryl’s hand. The green-and-milky eyes roiled in terror.
“No,” she whimpered.
The pain flooding from her shattered soul was exquisite in its intensity. Cassiday accepted the full flood of it. Then she clenched her fist, and the drug entered her metabolism, and she grew peaceful once more.
* * * *
Observe the next one:
with a friend.
The annunciator said, “Mr. Cassiday is here.”
“Let him enter,” replied Mirabel Gunryk Cassiday Milman Reed.
The door-sphincter irised open and Cassiday stepped through, into onyx and marble splendor. Beams of auburn palisander formed a polished wooden framework on which Mirabel lay, and it was obvious that she reveled in the sensation of hard wood against plump flesh. A cascade of crystal-colored hair tumbled to her shoulders. She had been Cassiday’s for eight months in 2346, and she had been a slender, timid girl then, but now he could barely detect the outlines of that girl in this pampered mound.
“You’ve married well,” he observed.
“Third time lucky,” Mirabel said. “Sit down? Drink? Shall I adjust the environment?”
“It’s fine.” He remained standing. “You always wanted a mansion, Mirabel. My most intellectual wife, you were, but you had this love of comfort. You’re comfortable now.”
“Very.”
“Happy?”
“I’m comfortable,” Mirabel said. “I don’t read much any more, but I’m comfortable.”
Cassiday noticed what seemed to be a blanket crumpled in her lap—purple with golden threads, soft, idle, clinging close. It had several eyes. Mirabel kept her hands spread out over it.
“From Ganymede?” he asked. “A pet?”
“Yes. My husband bought it for me last year. It’s very precious to me.”
“Very precious to anybody. I understand they’re expensive.”
“But lovable,” said Mirabel. “Almost human. Quite devoted. I suppose you’ll think I’m silly, but it’s the most important thing in my life now. More than my husband, even. I love it, you see. I’m accustomed to having others love me, but there aren’t many things that I’ve been able to love.”
“May I see it?” Cassiday said mildly.
“Be careful.”
“Certainly.” He gathered up the Ganymedean creature. Its texture was extraordinary, the softest he had ever encountered. Something fluttered apprehensively within the flat body of the animal. Cassiday detected a parallel wariness coming from Mirabel as he handled her pet. He stroked the creature. It throbbed appreciatively. Bands of iridescence shimmered as it contracted in his hands.
She said, “What are you doing now, Dick? Still working for the spaceline?”
He ignored the question. “Tell me the line from Shakespeare Mirabel. About the flies. The flies and wanton boys.”
Furrows sprouted in her pale brow. “It’s from Lear,” she said. “Wait. Yes. ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.’”
“That’s the one,” Cassiday said. His big hands knotted quickly about the blanket-like being from Ganymede. It turned a dull gray, and reedy fibres popped from its ruptured surface. Cassiday dropped it to the floor. The surge of horror and pain and loss that welled from Mirabel nearly stunned him, but he accepted it and transmitted it.
“Flies,” he explained. “Wanton boys. My sport, Mirabel. I’m a god now, did you know that?” His voice was calm and cheerful. “Good-bye. Thank you.”
* * * *
One more awaits the visit:
swelling with new life.
Lureen Holstein Cassiday, who was thirty-one years old, dark-haired, large-eyed and seven months pregnant, was the only one of his wives who had not remarried. Her room in New York was small and austere. She had been a chubby girl when she had been Cassiday’s two-month wife five years ago, and she was even more chubby now, but how much of the access of new meat was the result of the pregnancy Cassiday did not know.
“Will you marry now?” he asked.
Smiling, she shook her head. “I’ve got money, and I value my independence. I wouldn’t let myself get into another deal like the one we had. Not with anyone.”
“And the baby? You’ll have it?”
She nodded savagely. “I worked hard to get it! You think it’s easy? Two years of inseminations! A fortune in fees! Machines poking around in me—all the fertility boosters—oh no, you’ve got the picture wrong. This isn’t an unwanted baby. This is a baby I sweated to have.”
“That’s interesting,” said Cassiday. “I visited Mirabel and Beryl, too, and they each had their babies, too. Of sorts. Mirabel had a little beast from Ganymede. Beryl had a triline addiction that she was very proud of shaking. And you’ve had a baby put into you, without any help from a man. All three of you seeking something. Interesting.”
“Are you all right, Dick?”
“Fine.”
“Your voice is so flat. You’re just unrolling a lot of words. It’s a little frightening.”
“Mmm. Yes. Do you know the kind thing I did for Beryl? I bought her some triline cubes. And I took Mirabel’s pet and wrung its—well, not its neck. I did it very calmly. I was never a passionate man.”
“I think you’ve gone crazy, Dick.”
“I feel your fear. You think I’m going to do something to your baby. Fear is of no interest, Lureen. But sorrow—yes, that’s worth analyzing. Desolation. I want to study it. I want to help them study it. I think it’s what they want to know about. Don’t run from me, Lureen. I don’t want to hurt you, not that way.”
She was small-bodied and not very strong, and unwieldy in her pregnancy. Cassiday seized her gently by both wrists and drew her toward him. Already he could feel the new emotions coming from her, the self-pity behind the terror, and he had not even done anything to her.
How did you abort a fetus two months from term?
A swift kick in the belly might do it. Too crude, too crude. Yet Cassiday had not come armed with abortifacients, a handy ergot pill, a quick-acting spasmic inducer. So he wrought his knee up sharply, deploring the crudity of it. Lureen sagged. He kicked her a second time. He remained completely tranquil as he did it, for it would be wrong to take joy in violence. A third kick seemed desirable. Then he released her.
She was still conscious, but she was writhing. Cassiday made himself receptive to the outflow. The child, he realized, was not yet dead within her. Perhaps it might not die at all. But it would certainly be crippled in some way. What he drained from Lureen was the awareness that she might bring forth a defective. The fetus would have to be destroyed. She would have to begin again. It was all quite sad.
“Why?” she muttered. “... why?”
* * * *
Among the watchers:
the equivalent of dismay.
Somehow it had not developed as the golden ones had anticipated. Even they could miscalculate, it appeared, and they found that a rewarding insight. Still, something had to be done about Cassiday.
They had given him powers. He could detect and transmit to them the raw emotions of others. That was useful to them, for from the data they could perhaps construct an understanding of human beings. But in rendering him a switching center for the emotions of others they had unavoidably been forced to blank out his own. And that was distorting the data.
He was too destructive now, in his joyless way. That had to be corrected. For now he partook too deeply of the nature of the golden ones themselves. They might have their sport with Cassiday, for he owed them a life. But he might not have his sport with others.
They reached down the line of communication to him and gave him instructions.
“No,” Cassiday said. “You’re done with me now. There’s no need to come back.”
“Further adjustments are necessary.”
“I disagree.”
“You will not disagree for long.”
Still disagreeing, Cassiday took ship for Mars, unable to stand aside from their command. On Mars he chartered a vessel that regularly made the Saturn run and persuaded it to come in by way of Iapetus. The golden ones took possession of him once he was within their immediate reach.
“What will you do to me?” Cassiday asked.
“Reverse the flow. You will no longer be sensitive to others. You will report to us on your own emotions. We will restore your conscience, Cassiday.”
He protested. It was useless.
Within the glowing sphere of golden light they made their adjustments on him. They entered him and altered him and turned his perceptions inward, so that he might feed on his own misery like a vulture tearing at its entrails. That would be informative. Cassiday objected until he no longer had the power to object, and when his awareness returned it was too late to object.
“No,” he murmured. In the yellow gleam he saw the faces of Beryl and Mirabel and Lureen. “You shouldn’t have done this to me. You’re torturing me . . . like you would a fly...”
There was no response. They sent him away, back to Earth. They returned him to the travertine towers and the rumbling slidewalks, to the house of pleasure on 485th Street, to the islands of light that blazed in the sky, to the eleven billion people. They turned him loose to go among them, and suffer, and report on his sufferings. And a time would come when they would release him, but not yet.
* * * *
Here is Cassiday:
nailed to his cross.
* * * *
Afterword:
One of the first science fiction stories I wrote was a deadly grim portrayal of a New York compelled into cannibalism. It was sufficiently realistic so that no one would buy it for four years, and only an inspired promotion job by the editor of this present anthology got it into print at all.
Now, twelve or thirteen years later, I’ve turned from the literal depiction of cannibalism to the symbolic presentation of vampirism, which I suppose indicates a healthy progression of morbidity. Every writer returns to his own obsessions when given a free hand, and every situation he invents, no matter how grotesque, says something about the nature of human relationships. If I seem to be saying that we devour each other, literally or figuratively, that we drain substance from one another, that we practice vampirism and cannibalism, so be it. Beneath any grotesquerie lies its opposite; behind the grimness of cannibalism lies the video sentimentality, “People need people.” To devour, if nothing else.
No apologies offered. No excuses. Just a story, a made-up fiction, a fantasy about future times and other worlds. Nothing more than that.
* * * *
THE DAY AFTER THE MARTIANS CAME
* * * *
Introduction to
THE DAY AFTER THE DAY THE MARTIANS CAME
There is very little that can be said about Frederik Pohl, except everything. He is the editor of Galaxy Magazine; he was the man who, in 1953, conceived and edited the justly famous series of original anthologies called Star Science Fiction Stories; he was the co-author, with Cyril Kornbluth, of The Space Merchants; he was the anthologist who saved Cordwainer Smith’s “Scanners Live in Vain” from obscurity in his 1952 collection, Beyond the End of Time; he was the bloodhound who tracked down Dr. Linebarger, who was Cordwainer Smith, and brought him back to the field of speculative fiction; he is the talent scout who set the tone for all of Ballantine Books’ science fiction; he is the lecturer who roams the United States promulgating the latest in science and incidentally serving as good-will ambassador for the field of speculative fiction; he is the editor who ruthlessly blue-penciled a recent, brilliant story of mine on the grounds the words “douche bag” and “privates” were offensive. Well, no one’s perfect.
Fred Pohl is an extremely tall man in his middle forties, who commutes between the Hudson Street offices of Galaxy and the Red Bank, New Jersey, home of his family. In the former he considers the possibilities of the world we are making for ourselves, and in the latter he studies television programs that carry the seeds of that world. He is obviously disturbed by what he sees. As the story that follows will attest.
Just a phrase or two about this story. It handles a terribly complex problem in the most basic, nitty-gritty terms; reducing irrational human reactions to their lowest possible common denominator, in order that they may be seen for the insensibilities they truly are. It is almost a journalistic story, but do not be fooled by its apparent simplicity; Pohl has gone for the jugular.
* * * *
THE DAY AFTER THE DAY THE MARTIANS CAME
by Frederik Pohl
There were two cots in every room of the motel, besides the usual number of beds, and Mr. Mandala, the manager, had converted the rear section of the lobby into a men’s dormitory. Nevertheless he was not satisfied and was trying to persuade his colored bellmen to clean out the trunk room and put cots in that too. “Now, please, Mr. Mandala,” the bell captain said, speaking loudly over the noise in the lounge, “you know we’d do it for you if we could. But it cannot be, because, first, we don’t have any other place to put those old TV sets you want to save and because, second, we don’t have any more cots.”
“You’re arguing with me, Ernest. I told you to quit arguing with me,” said Mr. Mandala. He drummed his fingers on the registration desk and looked angrily around the lobby. There were at least forty people in it, talking, playing cards and dozing. The television set was mumbling away in a recap of the NASA releases, and on the screen Mr. Mandala could see a picture of one of the Martians, gazing into the camera and weeping large, gelatinous tears.
“Quit that,” ordered Mr. Mandala, turning in time to catch his bellman looking at the screen. “I don’t pay you to watch TV. Go and see if you can help in the kitchen.”
“We been in the kitchen, Mr. Mandala. They don’t need us.”
“Go when I tell you to go, Ernest! You too, Berzie.” He watched them go through the service hall and wished he could get rid of some of the crowd in the lounge as easily. They filled every seat and the overflow sat on the arms of the chairs, leaned against the walls and filled the booths in the bar, which had been closed for the past two hours because of the law. According to the registration slips, they were nearly all from newspapers, wire services, radio and television networks and so on, waiting to go to the morning briefing at Cape Kennedy. Mr. Mandala wished morning would come. He didn’t like so many of them cluttering up his lounge, especially since he was pretty sure a lot of them were not even registered guests.
On the television screen a hastily edited tape was now showing the return of the Algonquin Nine space probe to Mars, but no one was watching it. It was the third time that particular tape had been repeated since midnight and everybody had seen it at least once; but when it changed to another shot of one of the Martians, looking like a sad dachshund with elongated seal flippers for limbs, one of the poker players stirred and cried: “I got a Martian joke! Why doesn’t a Martian swim in the Atlantic Ocean?”
“It’s your bet,” said the dealer.
“Because he’d leave a ring around it,” said the reporter, folding his cards. No one laughed, not even Mr. Mandala, although some of the jokes had been pretty good. Everybody was beginning to get tired of them, or perhaps just tired.
Mr. Mandala had missed the first excitement about the Martians, because he had been asleep. When the day manager phoned him, waking him up, Mr. Mandala had thought, first, that it was a joke and, second, that the day man was out of his mind; after all, who would care if the Mars probe had come back with some kind of animals? Or even if they weren’t animals, exactly. When he found out how many reservations were coming in over the teletype he realized that some people did in fact care. However, Mr. Mandala didn’t take much interest in things like that. It was nice the Martians had come, since they had filled his motel, and every other motel within a hundred miles of Cape Kennedy, but when you had said that you had said everything about the Martians that mattered to Mr. Mandala.
On the television screen the picture went to black and was replaced by the legend Bulletin from NBC News. The poker game paused momentarily.
The lounge was almost quiet as an invisible announcer read a new release from NASA. “Dr. Hugo Bache, the Fort Worth, Texas, veterinarian who arrived late this evening to examine the Martians at the Patrick Air Force Base reception center, has issued a preliminary report which has just been released by Colonel Eric T- ‘Happy’ Wingerter, speaking for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.”
A wire-service man yelled, “Turn it up!” There was a convulsive movement around the set. The sound vanished entirely for a moment, then blasted out:
“—Martians are vertebrate, warm-blooded and apparently mammalian. A superficial examination indicates a generally low level of metabolism, although Dr. Bache states that it is possible that this is in some measure the result of their difficult and confined voyage through 137,000,000 miles of space in the specimen chamber of the Algonquin Nine spacecraft. There is no, repeat no, evidence of communicable disease, although standing sterilization precautions are—”
“Hell he says,” cried somebody, probably a stringer from CBS. “Walter Cronkite had an interview with the Mayo Clinic that—”
“Shut up!” bellowed a dozen voices, and the TV became audible again:
“—completes the full text of the report from Dr. Hugo Bache as released at this hour by Colonel Happy Wingerter.” There was a pause; then the announcer’s voice, weary but game, found its place and went on with a recap of the previous half dozen stories. The poker game began again as the announcer was describing the news conference with Dr. Sam Sullivan of the Linguistic Institute of the University of Indiana, and his conclusions that the sounds made by the Martians were indeed some sort of a language.
What nonsense, thought Mr. Mandala, drugged and drowsy. He pulled a stool over and sat down, half asleep.
Then the noise of laughter woke him and he straightened up belligerently. He tapped his call bell for attention. “Gentlemen! Ladies! Please!” he cried. “It’s four o’clock in the morning. Our other guests-are trying to sleep.”
“Yeah, sure,” said the CBS man, holding up one hand impatiently, “but wait a minute. I got one. What’s a Martian high-rise? You give up?”
“Go ahead,” said a red-haired girl, a staffer from Life.
“Twenty-seven floors of basement apartments!”
The girl said, “All right, I got one too. What is a Martian female’s religious injunction requiring her to keep her eyes closed during intercourse?” She waited a beat. “God forbid she should see her husband having a good time!”
“Are we playing poker or not?” groaned one of the players, but they were too many for him. “Who won the Martian beauty contest? ... Nobody won!” “How do you get a Martian female to give up sex? ... Marry her!” Mr. Mandala laughed out loud at that one, and when one of the reporters came to him and asked for a book of matches he gave it to him. “Ta,” said the man, puffing his pipe alight. “Long night, eh?”
“You bet,” said Mr. Mandala genially. On the television screen the tape was running again, for the forth time. Mr. Mandala yawned, staring vacantly at it; it was not much to see but, really, it was all that anyone had seen or was likely to see of the Martians. All these reporters and cameramen and columnists and sound men, thought Mr. Mandala with pleasure, all of them waiting here for the 10:00 A.M. briefing at the Cape would have a forty-mile drive through the palmetto swamps for nothing. Because what they would see when they got there would be just about what they were seeing now.
One of the poker players was telling a long, involved joke about Martians wearing fur coats at Miami Beach. Mr. Mandala looked at them with dislike. If only some of them would go to their rooms and go to sleep he might try asking the others if they were registered in the motel. Although actually he couldn’t squeeze anyone else in anyway, with all the rooms doubly occupied already. He gave up the thought and stared vacantly at the Martians on the screen, trying to imagine people all over the world looking at that picture on their television sets, reading about them in their newspapers, caring about them. They did not look worth caring about as they sluggishly crawled about on their long, weak limbs, like a stretched seal’s flippers, gasping heavily in the drag of Earth’s gravity, their great long eyes dull.
“Stupid-looking little bastards,” one of the reporters said to the pipe smoker. “You know what I heard? I heard the reason the astronauts kept them locked in the back was the stink.”
“They probably don’t notice it on Mars,” said the pipe smoker judiciously. “Thin air.”
“Notice it? They love it.” He dropped a dollar bill on the desk in front of Mr. Mandala. “Can I have change for the Coke machine?” Mr. Mandala counted out dimes silently. It had not occurred to him that the Martians would smell, but that was only because he hadn’t given it much of a thought. If he had thought about it at all, that was what he would have thought.
Mr. Mandala fished out a dime for himself and followed the two men over to the Coke machine. The picture on the TV changed to some rather poorly photographed shots brought back by the astronauts, of low, irregular sand-colored buildings on a bright sand floor. These were what NASA was calling “the largest Martian city”, altogether about a hundred of the flat, windowless structures.
“I dunno,” said the second reporter at last, tilting his Coke bottle. “You think they’re what you’d call intelligent?”
“Difficult to say, exactly,” said the pipe smoker. He was from Reuter’s and looked it, with a red, broad English squire’s face. “They do build houses,” he pointed out.
“So does a bull gorilla.”
“No doubt. No doubt.” The Reuter’s man brightened. “Oh, just a moment. That makes me think of one. There once was—let me see, at home we tell it about the Irish—yes, I have it. The next spaceship goes to Mars, you see, and they find that some dread terrestrial disease has wiped out the whole race, all but one female. These fellows too, gone. All gone except this one she. Well, they’re terribly upset, and America votes two hundred million dollars for reparations and, well, the long and short of it is, in order to keep the race from dying out entirely they decide to breed a human man to this one surviving Martian female.”
“Gripes!”
“Yes, exactly. Well, then they find Paddy O’Shaughnessy, clown on his luck, and they say to him, ‘See here, just go in chat cage there, Paddy, and you’ll find this female. And all you’ve got to do is render her pregnant, do you see?’ And O’Shaughnessy says, ‘What’s in it for me?’ and they offer him, oh, thousands of pounds. And of course he agrees. But then he opens the door of the cage and he sees what the female looks like. And he backs out.” The Reuter’s man replaced his empty Coke bottle in the rack and grimaced, showing Paddy’s expression of revulsion. “ ‘Holy saints,’ he says, ‘I never counted on anything like this.’ ‘Thousands of pounds, Paddy!’ they say to him, urging him on. ‘Oh, very well then,’ he says, ‘but on one condition.’ ‘And what may that be?’ they ask him. ‘You’ve got to promise me,’ he says, that the children’ll be raised in the Church.’ “
“Yeah, I heard that,” said the other reporter. And he moved to put his bottle back, and as he did his foot caught in the rack and four cases of empty Coke bottle bounced and clattered across the floor.
Well, that was just about more than Mr. Mandala could stand and he gasped, stuttered, dinged his bell and shouted, “Ernest! Berzie! On the double!” And when Ernest showed up, poking his dark plum-colored head out of the service door with an expression that revealed an anticipation of disaster, Mr. Mandala shouted: “Oh, curse your thick heads, I told you a hundred times, keep those racks cleaned out.” And he stood over the two bellmen, fuming, as they bent to the litter of whole bottles and broken glass, their faces glancing up at him sidewise, worried, dark plum and Arabian sand. He knew that all the reporters were looking at him and that they disapproved.
* * * *
And then he went out into the late night to cool off, because he was sorry and knew he might make himself still sorrier.
The grass was wet. Condensing dew was dripping from the fittings of the diving board into the pool. The motel was not as quiet as it should be so close to dawn, but it was quiet enough.. There was only an occasional distant laugh, and the noise from the lounge. To Mr. Mandala it was reassuring. He replenished his soul by walking all the galleries around the room, checking the icemakers and the cigarette machines, and finding all was well.
A military jet from McCoy was screaming overhead. Beyond it the stars were still bright, in spite of the beginnings of dawn in the east. Mr. Mandala yawned, glanced mildly up and wondered which of them was Mars, and returned to his desk; and shortly he was too busy with the long, exhausting round of room calls and checkouts to think about Martians. Then, when most of the guests were getting noisily into their cars and limo-buses and the day men were coming on, Mr. Mandala uncapped two cold Cokes and carried one back through the service door to Ernest.
“Rough night,” he said, and Ernest, accepting both the Coke and the intention, nodded and drank it down. They leaned against the wall that screened the pool from the access road and watched the newsmen and newsgirls taking off down the road toward the highway and the ten o’clock briefing. Most of them had had no sleep. Mr. Mandala shook his head, disapproving so much commotion for so little cause.
And Ernest snapped his fingers, grinned and said, “I got a Martian joke, Mr. Mandala. What do you call a seven-foot Martian when he’s comin’ at you with a spear?”
“Oh, hell, Ernest,” said Mr. Mandala, “you call him sir. Everybody know that one.” He yawned and stretched and said reflectively, “You’d think there’d be some new jokes. All I heard was the old ones, only instead of picking on the Jews and the Catholics and—and everybody, they were telling them about the Martians.”
“Yeah, I noticed that, Mr. Mandala,” said Ernest.
Mr. Mandala stood up. “Better get some sleep,” he advised, “because they might all be back again tonight. I don’t know what for. . .. Know what I think, Ernest? Outside of the jokes, I don’t think that six months from now anybody’s going to remember there ever were such things as Martians. I don’t believe their coming here is going to make a nickel’s worth of difference to anybody.”
“Hate to disagree with you, Mr. Mandala,” said Ernest mildly, “but I don’t think so. Going to make a difference to some people. Going to make a damn big difference to me.”
* * * *
Afterword:
It is and remains my conviction that a story has to speak for itself and that any words a writer adds to it after he has finished telling it are a cop-out, a lie or a mistake. But there is one thing that I would like to say about the reason this story was written. Not to persuade you that it is a good reason, or that the story accomplishes its purpose—you have already made up your mind on those things, as indeed you should have. But to tell you how faithfully nature holds the mirror up to art.
Between the time I wrote “The Day After the Day the Martians Came” and now, I met a minister from a small town in Alabama. Like many churches, not only in Alabama, his is torn on the question of integration. He has found a way, he thinks, to solve it—or at least to ameliorate it—among the white teen-agers in his congregation: he is encouraging them to read science fiction, in the hope that they may learn, first, to worry about green-skinned Martians instead of black-skinned Americans and, second, that all men are brothers ... at least in the face of a very large universe which is very likely to contain creatures who are not men at all.
I like the way this man serves his God. It’s a good scheme. It ought to work. It better work, or God help all of us.
* * * *
* * * *
Introduction to
RIDERS OF THE PURPLE WAGE
Philip José Farmer is one of the few truly good people I have ever met. He is a kind man, with the intonations of that word that connote strength and judiciousness and humanity. He is also indestructible. He has been stomped by masters and somehow managed to come away from the imbroglios undefeated. He has been cheated by schlock publishers, criminally mismanaged by inept agents, shamefully ignored by sententious critics, assaulted by the Furies of Chance and Bad Luck, and still, still managed to produce fifteen books of such singular eminence that he is considered a “writer’s writer” in a field where jealousy and the snide kris in the ribs is s.o.p.
Phil Farmer is in his late forties, a soft-spoken man whose wealth of information on everything from archaeology to the nocturnal habits of Sir Richard Burton (not the actor) is formidable. He is a walker of streets, a drinker of coffee, a smoker of cigarettes, a lover of grandchildren. But most of all, he is a writer of stories. Stories like “The Lovers” that burst on the science fiction field in a 1952 issue of Startling Stories like an explosion in a fresh-air factory. Until Phil Farmer took a long look at the subject, sex was something confined to Bergey covers involving heavily thighed young ladies in brass brassieres. He has examined every facet of abnormal psychology—it seems—in an adult and extrapolative manner most editors would have denied was possible, in 1951. Anyone who cares to deprecate this achievement, in a field where Kimball Kinnisons’s lack of genitalia never seemed to bother editors or aficionados, need only consider that, until Farmer and the vigor of his work, the closest thing the genre had to psychological explorations were the stories of Dr. David H. Keller, which fall somewhat short of the levels attained by, say, Dostoevsky or Kafka.
An editor should never show favoritism. Yet I am compelled by my awe of the story you are about to read, by my incredulity at the pyrotechnic writing, by my jealousy at the richness of thought and excellence of structure, to say simply that this is not merely the longest story in the book—something over 30,000 words—it is easily the best. No, make that the finest. It is a jewel of such brilliance that reexamination and rereading will reveal facet after facet, ramification after ramification, joy after delight that were only partially glimpsed first time around. The explanation of the basis of this story is fully detailed in Phil Farmer’s excellent Afterword, and to attempt an original and pithy comment about what he is saying here would be ludicrous. The man speaks for himself more than well enough. I should like to take a moment, however, to address myself to three elements of Farmer’s work that I think need explication.
The first is his courage. In the face of rejections from editors who are not fit to carry his pencil case, he has persisted in writing stories that demanded considerable cerebration and the knocking down of previous ways of thinking. Though his work has been met with the blank stares of readers accustomed to soft pink and white bunny rabbit stories, he has doggedly gone after one dangerous vision after another. Knowing he could make a substantial living writing pap, knowing the deeper and more unnerving topics would be met by animosity and stupidity, he still held firm to his styles, his concepts, his muse, if you will.
Second is his inability to let go of an idea. The smallest scintilla of a concept leads him outward and ever outward to extrapolations and consequences lesser writers would milk for a tetralogy. He is in the great tradition of all original thinkers. There is no mystery too complex for Farmer to unravel. No line of thought too bizarre for him to attempt a re-evaluation with the tools of logic. No story too big for him to write, no character too obscure for him to incorporate, no universe too distant for him to explore. Tragically, while Farmer writes immense orbits around lesser talents who endlessly examine the nits in their bearded reputations, the field on which he has chosen to shower his gifts largely ignores him.
Third is his style. Which is never the same twice. Which grows geometrically with each new story. Which demands of the reader a kind of intellectual mastication reserved for the best in literature. His work is steak, to be chewed thoroughly and digested; not tapioca pudding that can be gummed without effort.
I have gone on, I realize, at somewhat greater length than I had intended. The reader may chalk this up to the editor’s enthusiasm for the story that follows. It was submitted upon commission, of course, as were all the pieces herein presented. But when it was completed, at 15,000 words, Farmer came to the editor and asked if he might rewrite it, expand it, without payment, for the ideas in it needed room to breathe. Farmer was paid, naturally, and the rewrite was done. But he was not paid nearly enough. Quote an estimate on originality and verve and an unflinching look at tomorrow.
* * * *
RIDERS OF THE PURPLE WAGE
or
The Great Gavage
by Philip Jose Farmer
If Jules Verne could really have looked into the future, say 1966 a.d., he would have crapped in his pants. And Z166, oh, my I
—from Grandpa Winnegan’s unpublished Ms. How I Screwed Uncle Sam & Other Private Ejaculations.
THE COCK THAT CROWED BACKWARDS
Un and Sub, the giants, are grinding him for bread.
Broken pieces float up through the wine of sleep. Vast treadings crush abysmal grapes for the incubus sacrament.
He as Simple Simon fishes in his soul as pail for the leviathan.
He groans, half-wakes, turns over, sweating dark oceans, and groans again. Un and Sub, putting their backs to their work, turn the stone wheels of the sunken mill, muttering Fie, fye, fo, fum. Eyes glittering orange-red as a cat’s in a cubbyhole, teeth dull white digits in the murky arithmetic.
Un and Sub, Simple Simons themselves, busily mix metaphors non-self-consciously.
Dunghill and cock’s egg: up rises the cockatrice and gives first crow, two more to come, in the flushrush of blood of dawn of I-am-the-erection-and-the-strife.
It grows out and out until weight and length merge to curve it over, a not-yet weeping willow or broken reed. The one-eyed red head peeks over the edge of bed. It rests its chinless jaw, then, as body swells, slides over and down. Looking monocularly this way and those, it sniffs archaically across the floor and heads for the door, left open by the lapsus linguae of malingering sentinels.
A loud braying from the center of the room makes it turn back. The three-legged ass, Baalim’s easel, is heehawing. On the easel is the “canvas,” an oval shallow pan of irradiated plastic, specially treated. The canvas is seven feet high and eighteen inches deep. Within the painting is a scene that must be finished by tomorrow.
As much sculpture as painting, the figures are in alto-relief, rounded, some nearer the back of the pan than others. They glow with light from outside and also from the self-luminous plastic of the “canvas.” The light seems to enter the figures, soak awhile, then break loose. The light is pale red, the red of dawn, of blood watered with tears, of anger, of ink on the debit side of the ledger.
This is one of his Dog Series: Dogmas from a Dog, The Aerial Dogfight, Dog Days, The Sundog, Dog Reversed, The Dog of Flinders, Dog Berries, Dog Catcher, Lying Doggo, The Dog of the Right Angle, and Improvisations on a Dog.
Socrates, Ben Jonson, Cellini, Swedenborg, Li Po, and Hiawatha are roistering in the Mermaid Tavern. Through a window, Daedalus is seen on top of the battlements of Cnossus, shoving a rocket up the ass of his son, Icarus, to give him a jet-assisted takeoff for his famous flight. In one corner crouches Og, Son of Fire. He gnaws on a saber-tooth bone and paints bison and mammoths on the mildewed plaster. The barmaid, Athena, is bending over the table where she is serving nectar and pretzels to her distinguished customers. Aristotle, wearing goat’s horns, is behind her. He has lifted her skirt and is tupping her from behind. The ashes from the cigarette dangling from his smirking lips have fallen onto her skirt, which is beginning to smoke. In the doorway of the men’s room, a drunken Batman succumbs to a long-repressed desire and attempts to bugger the Boy Wonder. Through another window is a lake on the surface of which a man is walking, a green-tarnished halo hovering over his head. Behind him a periscope sticks out of the water.
Prehensile, the penisnake wraps itself around the brush and begins to paint. The brush is a small cylinder attached at one end to a hose which runs to a dome-shaped machine. From the other end of the cylinder extends a nozzle. The aperture of this can be decreased or increased by rotation of a thumb-dial on the cylinder. The paint which the nozzle deposits in a fine spray or in a thick stream or in whatever color or hue desired is controlled by several dials on the cylinder.
Furiously, probosdsean, it builds up another figure layer by layer. Then, it sniffs a musty odor of must and drops the brush and slides out the door and down the bend of wall of oval hall, describing the scrawl of legless creatures, a writing in the sand which all may read but few understand. Blood pumppumps in rhythm with the mills of Un and Sub to feed and swill the hot-blooded reptile. But the walls, detecting intrusive mass and extrusive desire, glow.
He groans, and the glandular cobra rises and sways to the fluting of his wish for cuntcealment. Let there not be light! The nights must be his doaka. Speed past mother’s room, nearest the exit. Ah! Sighs softly in relief but air whistles through the vertical and tight mouth, announcing the departure of the exsupress for Desideratum.
The door has become archaic; it has a keyhole. Quick! Up the ramp and out of the house through the keyhole and out onto the street. One person abroad a broad, a young woman with phosphorescent silver hair and snatch to match.
Out and down the street and coiling around her ankle. She looks down with surprise and then fear. He likes this; too willing were too many. He’s found a diamond in the ruff.
Up around her kitten-ear-soft leg, around and around, and sliding across the dale of groin. Nuzzling the tender corkscrewed hairs and then, self-Tantalus, detouring up the slight convex of belly, saying hello to the bellybutton, pressing on it to ring upstairs, around and around the narrow waist and shyly and quickling snatching a kiss from each nipple. Then back down to form an expedition for climbing the mons veneris and planting the flag thereon.
Oh, delectation tabu and sickersacrosanct! There’s a baby in there, ectoplasm beginning to form in eager preanticipation of actuality. Drop, egg, and shoot the chutychutes of flesh, hastening to gulp the Lucky Micromoby Dick, outwriggling its million million brothers, survival of the fightingest.
A vast croaking fills the hall. The hot breath chills the skin. He sweats. Icicles coat the tumorous fuselage, and it sags under the weight of ice, and fog rolls around, whistling past the struts, and the ailerons and elevators are locked in ice, and he’s losing altiattitude fast. Get up, get up! Venusberg somewhere ahead in the mists; Tannhauser, blow your strumpets, send up your flares, I’m in a nosedive.
Mother’s door has opened. A toad squatfills the ovoid doorway. Its dewlap rises and falls bellows-like; its toothless mouth gawps. Ginungagap. Forked tongue shoots out and curls around the boar cuntstrictor. He cries out with both mouths and jerks this way and those. The waves of denial run through. Two webbed paws bend and tie the flopping body into a knot—a runny shapeshank, of course.
The woman strolls on. Wait for me! Out the flood roars, crashes into the knot, roars back, ebb clashing with flood. Too much and only one way to go. He jerkspurts, the firmament of waters falling, no Noah’s ark or arc; he novas, a shatter of millions of glowing wriggling meteors, flashes in the pan of existence.
Thigh kingdom come. Groin and belly encased in musty armor, and he cold, wet, and trembling.
GOD’S PATENT ON DAWN EXPIRES
… the following spoken by Alfred Melophon Voxpopper, of the Aurora Pushups and Coffee Hour, Channel 69B. Lines taped during the 50th Folk Art Center Annual Demonstration and Competition, Beverly Hills, level 14. Spoken by Omar Bacchylides Runic, extemporaneously if you discount some forethought during the previous evening at the nonpublic tavern The Private Universe, and you may because Runic did not remember a thing about that evening. Despite which he won First Laurel Wreath A, there being no Second, Third, etc., wreaths classified as A through Z, God bless our democracy.
A gray-pink salmon leaping up the falls of night
Into the spawning pool of another day.
Dawn—the red roar of the heliac hull
Charging over the horizon.
The photonic blood of bleeding night,
Stabbed by the assassin sun.
and so on for fifty lines punctuated and fractured by cheers, handclaps, boos, hisses, and yelps.
Chib is half-awake. He peeps down into the narrowing dark as the dream roars off into the subway tunnel. He peeps through barely opened lids at the other reality: consciousness.
“Let my peeper go!” he groans with Moses and so, thinking of long beards and horns (courtesy of Michelangelo), he thinks of his great-great-grandfather.
The will, a crowbar, forces his eyelids open. He sees the fido which spans the wall opposite him and curves up over half the ceiling. Dawn, the paladin of the sun, is flinging its gray gauntlet down.
Channel 69B, your favorite channel, LA’s own, brings you dawn. (Deception in depth. Nature’s false dawn shadowed forth with electrons shaped by devices shaped by man.)
Wake up with the sun in your heart and a song on your lips! Thrill to the stirring lines of Omar Runic! See dawn as the birds in the trees, as God, see it!
Voxpopper chants the lines softly while Grieg’s Anitra wells softly. The old Norwegian never dreamed of this audience and just as well. A young man, Chibiabos Elgreco Winnegan, has a sticky wick, courtesy of a late gusher in the oilfield of the unconscious.
“Off your ass and onto your steed,” Chib says. “Pegasus runs today.”
He speaks, thinks, lives in the present tensely.
Chib climbs out of bed and shoves it into the wall. To leave the bed sticking out, rumpled as an old drunkard’s tongue, would fracture the aesthetics of his room, destroy that curve that is the reflection of the basic universe, and hinder him in his work.
The room is a huge ovoid and in a corner is a small ovoid, the toilet and shower. He comes out of it looking like one of Homer’s god-like Achaeans, massively thighed, great-armed, golden-brown-skinned, blue-eyed, auburn-haired—although beardless. The phone is simulating the tocsin of a South American tree frog he once heard over channel 122.
“Open O sesame!”
INTER CAECOS REGNAT LUSCUS
The face of Rex Luscus spreads across the fido, the pores of skin like the cratered fields of a World War I battlefield. He wears a black monocle over the left eye, ripped out in a brawl among art critics during the I Love Rembrandt Lecture Series, Channel 109. Although he has enough pull to get a priority for eye-replacement, he has refused.
“Inter caecos regnat luscus,” he says when asked about it and quite often when not. “Translation: among the blind, the one-eyed man is king. That’s why I renamed myself Rex Luscus, that is, King One-eyed.”
There is a rumor, fostered by Luscus, that he will permit the bioboys to put in an artificial protein eye when he sees the works of an artist great enough to justify focal vision. It is also rumored that he may do so soon, because of his discovery of Chibiabos Elgreco Winnegan.
Luscus looks hungrily (he swears by adverbs) at Chib’s tomentum and outlying regions. Chib swells, not with tumescence but with anger.
Luscus says, smoothly, “Honey, I just want to reassure myself that you’re up and about the tremendously important business of this day. You must be ready for the showing, must! But now I see you, I’m reminded I’ve not eaten yet. What about breakfast with me?”
Riders of the Purple Wage
“What’re we eating?” Chib says. He does not wait for a reply. “No. I’ve too much to do today. Close O sesame!”
Rex Luscus’ face fades away, goatlike, or, as he prefers to describe it, the face of Pan, a Faunus of the arts. He has even had his ears trimmed to a point. Real cute.
“Baa-aa-aa!” Chib bleats at the phantom. “Ba! Humbuggery! I’ll never kiss your ass, Luscus, or let you kiss mine. Even if I lose the grant!”
The phone bells again. The dark face of Rousseau Red Hawk appears. His nose is as the eagle’s, and his eyes are broken black glass. His broad forehead is bound with a strip of red cloth, which circles the straight black hair that glides down to his shoulders. His shirt is buckskin; a necklace of beads hangs from his neck. He looks like a Plains Indian, although Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, or the noblest Roman Nose of them all would have kicked him out of the tribe. Not that they were anti-Semitic, they just could not have respected a brave who broke out into hives when near a horse.
Born Julius Applebaum, he legally became Rousseau Red Hawk on his Naming Day. Just returned from the forest reprimevalized, he is now reveling in the accursed fleshpots of a decadent civilization.
“How’re you, Chib? The gang’s wondering how soon you’ll get here?”
“Join you? I haven’t had breakfast yet, and I’ve a thousand things to do to get ready for the showing. I’ll see you at noon!”
“You missed out on the fun last night. Some goddam Egyptians tried to feel the girls up, but we salaamed them against the walls.”
Rousseau vanished like the last of the red men.
Chib thinks of breakfast just as the intercom whistles. Open O Sesame! He sees the living room. Smoke, too thick and furious for the air-conditioning to whisk away, roils. At the far end of the ovoid, his little half-brother and half-sister sleep on a flato. Playing Mama-and-friend, they fell asleep, their mouths open in blessed innocence, beautiful as only sleeping children can be. Opposite the closed eyes of each is an unwinking eye like that of a Mongolian Cyclops.
“Ain’t they cute?” Mama says. “The darlings were just too tired to toddle off.”
The table is round. The aged knights and ladies are gathered around it for the latest quest of the ace, king, queen, and jack. They are armored only in layer upon layer of fat. Mama’s jowls hang down like banners on a windless day. Her breasts creep and quiver on the table, bulge, and ripple.
“A gam of gamblers,” he says aloud, looking at the fat faces, the tremendous tits, the rampant rumps. They raise their eyebrows. What the hell’s the mad genius talking about now?
“Is your kid really retarded?” says one of Mama’s friends, and they laugh and drink some more beer. Angela Ninon, not wanting to miss out on this deal and figuring Mama will soon turn on the sprayers anyway, pisses down her leg. They laugh at this, and William Conqueror says, “I open.”
“I’m always open,” Mama says, and they shriek with laughter.
Chib would like to cry. He does not cry, although he has been encouraged from childhood to cry any time he feels like it.
—It makes you feel “better and look at the Vikings, what men they were and they cried like habies whenever they felt like it—Courtesy of Channel 202 on the popular program What’s A Mother Done?
He does not cry because he feels like a man who thinks about the mother he loved and who is dead but who died a long time ago. His mother has been long buried under a landslide of flesh. When he was sixteen, he had had a lovely mother.
Then she cut him off.
THE FAMILY THAT BLOWS IS THE FAMILY THAT GROWS
—from a poem by Edgar A. Grist, via Channel 88.
“Son, I don’t get much out of this. I just do it because I love you.” Then, fat, fat, fat! Where did she go? Down into the adipose abyss.
Disappearing as she grew larger.
“Sonny, you could at least wrestle with me a little now and then.” “You cut me off, Mama. That was all right. I’m a big boy now. But you haven’t any right to expect me to want to take it up again.” “You don’t love me any more!”
“What’s for breakfast, Mama?” Chib says.
“I’m holding a good hand, Chibby,” Mama says. “As you’ve told me so many times, you’re a big boy. Just this once, get your own breakfast”
“What’d you call me for?”
“I forgot when your exhibition starts. I wanted to get some sleep before I went.”
“14:30, Mama, but you don’t have to go.”
Rouged green lips part like a gangrened wound. She scratches one rouged nipple. “Oh, I want to be there. I don’t want to miss my own sons artistic triumphs. Do you think you’ll get the grant?”
“If I don’t, it’s Egypt for us,” he says.
“Those stinking Arabs!” says William Conqueror.
“It’s the Bureau that’s doing it, not the Arabs,” Chib says. “The Arabs moved for the same reason we may have to move.”
From Grandpa’s unpublished Ms.: Whoever would have thought that Beverly Hills would become anti-Semitic?
“I don’t want to go to Egypt!” Mama wails. “You got to get that grant, Chibby. I don’t want to leave the clutch. I was born and raised here, well, on the tenth level, anyway, and when I moved all my friends went along. I won’t go!”
“Don’t cry, Mama,” Chib says, feeling distress despite himself. “Don’t cry. The government can’t force you to go, you know. You got your rights.”
“If you want to keep on having goodies, you’ll go,” says Conqueror. “Unless Chib wins the grant, that is. And I wouldn’t blame him if he didn’t even try to win it. It ain’t his fault you can’t say no to Uncle Sam. You got your purple and the yap Chib makes from selling his paintings. Yet it ain’t enough. You spend faster than you get it.”
Mama screams with fury at William, and they’re off. Chib cuts off fido. Hell with breakfast; he’ll eat later. His final painting for the Festival must be finished by noon. He presses a plate, and the bare egg-shaped room opens here and there, and painting equipment comes out like a gift from the electronic gods. Zeuxis would flip and Van Gogh would get the shakes if they could see the canvas and palette and brush Chib uses.
The process of painting involves the individual bending and twisting of thousands of wires into different shapes at various depths. The wires are so thin they can be seen only with magnifiers and manipulated with exceedingly delicate pliers. Hence, the goggles he wears and the long almost-gossamer instrument in his hand when he is in the first stages of creating a painting. After hundreds of hours of slow and patient labor (of love), the wires are arranged.
Chib removes his goggles to perceive the overall effect. He then uses the paint-sprayer to cover the wires with the colors and hues he desires. The paint dries hard within a few minutes. Chib attaches electrical leads to the pan and presses a button to deliver a tiny voltage through the wires. These glow beneath the paint and, Lilliputian fuses, disappear in blue smoke.
The result is a three-dimensional work composed of hard shells of paint on several levels below the exterior shell. The shells are of varying thicknesses and all are so thin that light slips through the upper to the inner shell when the painting is turned at angles. Parts of the shells are simply reflectors to intensify the light so that the inner images may be more visible.
When being shown, the painting is on a self-moving pedestal which turns the painting 12 degrees to the left from the center and then 12 degrees to the right from the center.
The fido tocsins. Chib, cursing, thinks of disconnecting it. At least, it’s not the intercom with his mother calling hysterically. Not yet, anyway. She’ll call soon enough if she loses heavily at poker.
Open O sesame!
SING, O MEWS, OF UNCLE SAM
Grandpa writes in his Private Ejaculations: Twenty-five years after I fled with twenty billion dollars and then supposedly died of a heart attack, Falco Accipiter is on my trail again. The 1KB detective who named himself Falcon Hawk when he entered his profession. What an egotist! Yet, he is as sharpeyed and relentless as a bird of prey, and I would shiver if I were not too old to be frightened by mere human beings. Who loosed the jesses and hood? How did he pick up the old and cold scent?
Accipiter’s face is that of an overly suspicious peregrine that tries to look everywhere while it soars, that peers up its own anus to make sure that no duck has taken refuge there. The pale blue eyes fling glances like knives shot out of a shirtsleeve and hurled with a twist of the wrist. They scan all with sherlockian intake of minute and significant detail. His head turns back and forth, ears twitching, nostrils expanding and collapsing, all radar and sonar and odar.
“Mr. Winnegan, I’m sorry to call so early. Did I get you out of bed?”
“It’s obvious you didn’t!” Chib says. “Don’t bother to introduce yourself. I know you. You’ve been shadowing me for three days.”
Accipiter does not redden. Master of control, he does all his blushing in the depths of his bowels, where no one can see. “If you know me, perhaps you can tell me why I’m calling you?”
“Would I be dumbshit enough to tell you?”
“Mr. Winnegan, I’d like to talk to you about your great-greatgrandfather.”
“He’s been dead for twenty-five years!” Chib cries. “Forget him. And don’t bother me. Don’t try for a search warrant. No judge would give you one. A man’s home is his hassle… I mean castle.“
He thinks of Mama and what the day is going to be like unless he gets out soon. But he has to finish the painting.
“Fade off, Accipiter,” Chib says. “I think I’ll report you to the BPHR. I’m sure you got a fido inside that silly-looking hat of yours.”
Accipiter’s face is as smooth and unmoving as an alabaster carving of the falcon-god Horus. He may have a little gas bulging his intestines. If so, he slips it out unnoticed.
“Very well, Mr. Winnegan. But you’re not getting rid of me that easily. After all…”
“Fade out!”
The intercom whistles thrice. What I tell you three times is Grandpa. “I was eavesdropping,” says the 120-year-old voice, hollow and deep as an echo from a Pharaoh’s tomb. “I want to see you before you leave. That is, if you can spare the Ancient of Daze a few minutes.”
“Always, Grandpa,” Chib says, thinking of how much he loves the old man. “You need any food?”
“Yes, and for the mind, too.”
Der Tag. Dies Irae. Gotterdammerung. Armageddon. Things are closing in. Make-or-break day. Go-no-go time. All these calls and a feeling of more to come. What will the end of the day bring?
THE TROCHE SUN SLIPS INTO THE SORE THROAT OF NIGHT
—from Omar Runic
Chib walks towards the convex door, which rolls into the interstices between the walls. The focus of the house is the oval family room. In the first quadrant, going clockwise, is the kitchen, separated from the family room by six-meter-high accordion screens, painted with scenes from Egyptian tombs by Chib, his too subtle comment on modern food. Seven slim pillars around the family room mark the borders of room and corridor. Between the pillars are more tall accordion screens, painted by Chib during his Amerind mythology phase.
The corridor is also oval-shaped; every room in the house opens onto it. There are seven rooms, six bedroom-workroom-study-toilet-shower combinations. The seventh is a storeroom.
Little eggs within bigger eggs within great eggs within a mega-monolith on a planetary pear within an ovoid universe, the latest cosmogony indicating that infinity has the form of a‘ hen’s fruit. God broods over the abyss and cackles every trillion years or so.
Chib cuts across the hall, passes between two pillars, carved by him into nymphet caryatids, and enters the family room. His mother looks sidewise at her son, who she thinks is rapidly approaching insanity if he has not already overshot his mark. It’s partly her fault; she shouldn’t have gotten disgusted and in a moment of wackiness called it off. Now, she’s fat and ugly, oh, God, so fat and ugly. She can’t reasonably or even unreasonably hope to start up again.
It’s only natural, she keeps telling herself, sighing, resentful, teary, that he’s abandoned the love of his mother for the strange, firm, shapely delights of young women. But to give them up, too? He’s not a fairy. He quit all that when he was thirteen. So what’s the reason for his chastity? He isn’t in love with the fornixator, either, which she would understand, even if she did not approve.
Oh, God, where did I go wrong? And then, there’s nothing wrong with me. He’s going crazy like his father—Raleigh Renaissance, I think his name was—and his aunt and his great-great-grandfather. It’s all that painting and those radicals, the Young Radishes, he runs around with. He’s too artistic, too sensitive. Oh, God, if something happens to my little boy, I’ll have to go to Egypt.
Chib knows her thoughts since she’s voiced them so many times and is not capable of having new ones. He passes the round table without a word. The knights and ladies of the canned Camelot see him through a beery veil.
In the kitchen, he opens an oval door in the wall. He removes a tray with food in covered dishes and cups, all wrapped in plastic.
“Aren’t you going to eat with us?”
“Don’t whine, Mama,” he says and goes back to his room to pick up some cigars for his Grandpa. The door, detecting, amplifying, and transmitting the shifting but recognizable eidolon of epidermal electrical fields to the activating mechanism, balks. Chib is too upset. Magnetic maelstroms rage over his skin and distort the spectral configuration. The door half-rolls out, rolls in, changes its mind again, rolls out, rolls in.
Chib kicks the door and it becomes completely blocked. He decides he’ll have a video or vocal sesame put in. Trouble is, he’s short of units and coupons and can’t buy the materials. He shrugs and walks along the curving, one-walled hall and stops in front of Grandpa’s door, hidden from view of those in the living room by the kitchen screens.
“For he sang of peace and freedom,
Sang of beauty, love, and longing;
Sang of death, and life undying
In the Islands of the Blessed,
In the kingdom of Ponemah,
In the land of the Hereafter.
Very dear to Hiawatha
Was the gentle Chibidbos.”
Chib chants the passwords; the door rolls back.
Light glares out, a yellowish red-tinged light that is Grandpa’s own creation. Looking into the convex oval door is like looking into the lens of a madman’s eyeball. Grandpa, in the middle of the room, has a white beard falling to midthigh and white hair cataracting to just below the back of his knees. Although beard and headhair conceal his nakedness, and he is not out in public, he wears a pair of shorts. Grandpa is somewhat old-fashioned, forgivable in a man of twelve decadencies.
Like Rex Luscus, he is one-eyed. He smiles with his own teeth, grown from buds transplanted thirty years ago. A big green cigar sticks out of one corner of his full red mouth. His nose is broad and smeared as if time had stepped upon it with a heavy foot. His forehead and cheeks are broad, perhaps due to a shot of Ojibway blood in his veins, though he was born Finnegan and even sweats celtically, giving off an aroma of whiskey. He holds his head high, and the blue-gray eye is like a pool at the bottom of a prediluvian pothole, remnant of a melted glacier.
All in all, Grandpa’s face is Odin’s as he returns from the Well of Mimir, wondering if he paid too great a price. Or it is the face of the windbeaten, sandblown Sphinx of Gizeh.
“Forty centuries of hysteria look down upon you, to paraphrase Napoleon,” Grandpa says. “The rockhead of the ages. What, then, is Man? sayeth the New Sphinx, Edipus having resolved the question of the Old Sphinx and settling nothing because She had already delivered another of her kind, a smartass kid with a question nobody’s been able to answer yet. And perhaps just as well it can’t be.”
“You talk funny,” Chib says. “But I like it.”
He grins at Grandpa, loving him.
“You sneak into here every day, not so much from love for me as to gain knowledge and insight. I have seen all, heard everything, and thought more than a little. I voyaged much before I took refuge in this room a quarter of a century ago. Yet confinement here has been the greatest Odyssey of all.
THE ANCIENT MARINATOR
“I call myself. A marinade of wisdom steeped in the brine of over-salted cynicism and too long a life.”
“You smile so, you must have just had a woman,” Chib teases.
“No, my boy. I lost the tension in my ramrod thirty years ago. And I thank God for that, since it removes from me the temptation of fornication, not to mention masturbation. However, I have other energies left, hence, scope for other sins, and these are even more serious.
“Aside from the sin of sexual commission, which paradoxically involves the sin of sexual emission, I had other reasons for not asking that Old Black Magician Science for shots to starch me out again. I was too old for young girls to be attracted to me for anything but money. And I was too much a poet, a lover of beauty, to take on the wrinkled blisters of my generation or several just before mine.
“So now you see, my son. My clapper swings limberly in the bell of my sex. Ding, dong, ding, dong. A lot of dong but not much ding.”
Grandpa laughs deeply, a lion’s roar with a spray of doves.
“I am but the mouthpiece of the ancients, a shyster pleading for long-dead clients. Come not to bury but to praise and forced by my sense of fairness to admit the faults of the past, too. I’m a queer crabbed old man, pent like Merlin in his tree trunk. Samobds, the Thracian bear god, hibernating in his cave. The Last of the Seven Sleepers.”
Grandpa goes to the slender plastic tube depending from the ceiling and pulls down the folding handles of the eyepiece.
“Accipiter is hovering outside our house. He smells something rotten in Beverly Hills, level 14. Could it be that Win-again Winnegan isn’t dead? Uncle Sam is like a diplodocus kicked in the ass. It takes twenty-five years for the message to reach its brain.”
Tears appear in Chib’s eyes. He says, “Oh, God, Grandpa, I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
‘What can happen to a 120-year-old man besides failure of brain or kidneys?“
‘With all due respect, Grandpa,“ Chib says, ”you do rattle on.“
“Call me Id’s mill,” Grandpa says. “The flour it yields is baked in the strange oven of my ego—or half-baked, if you please.”
Chib grins through his tears and says, “They taught me at school that puns are cheap and vulgar.”
‘What’s good enough for Homer, Aristophanes, Rabelais, and Shakespeare is good enough for me. By the way, speaking of cheap and vulgar, I met your mother in the hall last night, before the poker party started. I was just leaving the kitchen with a bottle of booze. She almost fainted. But she recovered fast and pretended not to see me. Maybe she did think she’d seen a ghost. I doubt it. She’d have been blabbing all over town about it.“
“She may have told her doctor,” Chib says. “She saw you several weeks ago, remember? She may have mentioned it while she was bitching about her so-called dizzy spells and hallucinations.”
“And the old sawbones, knowing the family history, called the IRB. Maybe.”
Chib looks through the periscope’s eyepiece. He rotates it and turns the knobs on the handle-ends to raise and lower the cyclops on the end of the tube outside. Accipiter is stalking around the aggregate of seven eggs, each on the end of a broad thin curved branchlike walk projecting from the central pedestal. Accipiter goes up the steps of a branch to the door of Mrs. Applebaum’s. The door opens.
“He must have caught her away from the fornixator,” Chib says. “And she must be lonely; she’s not talking to him over fido. My God, she’s fatter than Mama!”
‘Why not?“ Grandpa says. ”Mr. and Mrs. Everyman sit on their asses all day, drink, eat, and watch fido, and their brains run to mud and their bodies to sludge. Caesar would have had no trouble surrounding himself with fat friends these days. You ate, too, Brutus?“
Grandpa’s comment, however, should not apply to Mrs. Applebaum. She has a hole in her head, and people addicted to fornixation seldom get fat. They sit or lie all day and part of the night, the needle in the fornix area of the brain delivering a series of minute electrical jolts. Indescribable ecstasy floods through their bodies with every impulse, a delight far surpassing any of food, drink, or sex. It’s illegal, but the government never bothers a user unless it wants to get him for something else, since a fornic rarely has children. Twenty per cent of LA have had holes drilled in their heads and tiny shafts inserted for access of the needle. Five per cent are addicted; they waste away, seldom eating, their distended bladders spilling poisons into the bloodstream.
Chib says, “My brother and sister must have seen you sometimes when you were sneaking out to mass. Could they… ?”
“They think I’m a ghost, too. In this day and age! Still, maybe it’s a good sign that they can believe in something, even a spook.”
“You better stop sneaking out to church.”
“The Church, and you, are the only things that keep me going. It was a sad day, though, when you told me you couldn’t believe. You would have made a good priest—with faults, of course—and I could have had private mass and confession in this room.“
Chib says nothing. He’s gone to instruction and observed services just to please Grandpa. The church was an egg-shaped seashell which, held to the ear, gave only the distant roar of God receding like an ebb tide.
THERE ARE UNIVERSES BEGGING FOR GODS
yet He hangs around this one looking for work.
—from Grandpa’s Ms.
Grandpa takes over the eyepiece. He laughs. ‘The Internal Revenue Bureau! I thought it’d been disbanded! Who the hell has an income big enough to report on any more? Do you suppose it’s still active just because of me? Could be.“
He calls Chib back to the scope, directed towards the center of Beverly Hills. Chib has a lane of vision between the seven-egged clutches on the branched pedestals. He can see part of the central plaza, the giant ovoids of the city hall, the federal bureaus, the Folk Center, part of the massive spiral on which set the houses of worship, and the dora (from pandora) where those on the purple wage get their goods and those with extra income get their goodies. One end of the big artificial lake is visible; boats and canoes sail on it and people fish.
The irradiated plastic dome that enfolds the clutches of Beverly Hills is sky-blue. The electronic sun climbs towards the zenith. There are a few white genuine-looking images of clouds and even a V of geese migrating south, their honks coming down faintly. Very nice for those who have never been outside the walls of LA. But Chib spent two years in the World Nature Rehabilitation and Conservation Corps—the WNRCC—and he knows the difference. Almost, he decided to desert with Rousseau Red Hawk and join the neo-Amerinds. Then, he was going to become a forest ranger. But this might mean he’d end up shooting or arresting Red Hawk. Besides, he didn’t want to become a sammer. And he wanted more than anything to paint.
“There’s Rex Luscus,” Chib says. “He’s being interviewed outside the Folk Center. Quite a crowd.”
THE PELLUCIDAR BREAKTHROUGH
Luscus’ middle name should have been Upmanship. A man of great erudition, with privileged access to the Library of Greater LA computer, and of Ulyssean sneakiness, he is always scoring over his colleagues.
He it was who founded the Go-Go School of Criticism.
Primalux Ruskinson, his great competitor, did some extensive research when Luscus announced the title of his new philosophy. Ruskinson triumphantly announced that Luscus had taken the phrase from obsolete slang, current in the mid-twentieth century.
Luscus, in the fido interview next day, said that Ruskinson was a rather shallow scholar, which was to be expected.
Go-go was taken from the Hottentot language. In Hottentot, go-go meant to examine, that is, to keep looking until something about the object—in this case, the artist and his works—has been observed.
The critics got in line to sign up at the new school. Ruskinson thought of committing suicide, but instead accused Luscus of having blown his way up the ladder of success.
Luscus replied on fido that his personal life was his own, and Ruskinson was in danger of being sued for violation of privacy. However, he deserved no more effort than a man striking at a mosquito.
‘What the hell’s a mosquito?“ say millions of viewers. ’Wish the big-head would talk language we could understand.”
Luscus’ voice fades off for a minute while the interpreters explain, having just been slipped a note from a monitor who’s run off the word through the station’s encyclopedia.
Luscus rode on the novelty of the Go-Go School for two years.
Then he re-established his prestige, which had been slipping somewhat, with his philosophy of the Totipotent Man.
This was so popular that the Bureau of Cultural Development and Recreation requisitioned a daily one-hour slot for a year-and-a-half in the initial program of totipotentializing.
Grandpa Winnegan’s penned comment in his Private Ejaculations: What about The Totipotent Man, that apotheosis of individuality and complete psychosomatic development, the democratic Vber-mensch, as recommended by Rex Luscus, the sexually one-sided? Poor old Uncle Saml Trying to force the proteus of his citizens into a single stabilized shape so he can control them. And at the same time trying to encourage each and every to bring to flower his inherent capabilities —if any! The poor old long-legged, chin-whiskered, milk-hearted, flint-brained schizophrenic! Verily, the left hand knows not what the right hand is doing. As a matter of fact, the right hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.
‘What about the totipotent man?“ Luscus replied to the chairman during the fourth session of the Luscan Lecture Series. ”How does he conflict with the contemporary Zeitgeist? He doesn’t. The totipotent man is the imperative of our times. He must come into being before the Golden World can be realized. How can you have a Utopia without Utopians, a Golden World with men of brass?“
It was during this Memorable Day that Luscus gave his talk on The Pellucidar Breakthrough and thereby made Chibiabos Winnegan famous. And more than incidentally gave Luscus his biggest score over his competitors.
“Pellucidar? Pellucidar?” Ruskinson mutters. “Oh, God, what’s Tinker Bell doing now?”
“It’ll take me some time to explain why I used this phrase to describe Winnegan’s stroke of genius,” Luscus continues. “First, let me seem to detour.”
FROM THE ARCTIC TO ILLINOIS
“Now, Confucius once said that a bear could not fart at the North Pole without causing a big wind in Chicago.
“By this he meant that all events, therefore, all men, are interconnected in an unbreakable web. What one man does, no matter how seemingly insignificant, vibrates through the strands and affects every man.”
Ho Chung Ko, before his fido on the 30th level of Lhasa, Tibet, says to his wife, “That white prick has got it all wrong. Confucius didn’t say that. Lenin preserve us! I’m going to call him up and give him hell.”
His wife says, “Let’s change the channel. Pai Ting Place is on now, and…”
Ngombe, 10th level, Nairobi: “The critics here are a bunch of black bastards. Now you take Luscus; he could see my genius in a second. I’m going to apply for emigration in the morning.”
Wife: “You might at least ask me if I want to go! What about the kids… mother… friends… dog… ?” and so on into the lionless night of self-luminous Africa.
“… ex-president Radinoff,” Luscus continues, “once said that this is the ‘Age of the Plugged-In Man.’ Some rather vulgar remarks have been made about this, to me, insighted phrase. But Radinoff did not mean that human society is a daisy chain. He meant that the current of modern society flows through the circuit of which we are all part. This is the Age of Complete Interconnection. No wires can hang loose; otherwise we all short-circuit. Yet, it is undeniable that life without individuality is not worth living. Every man must be a hapax legomenon …“
Ruskinson jumps up from his chair and screams, “I know that phrase! I got you this time, Luscus!”
He is so excited he falls over in a faint, symptom of a widespread hereditary defect. When he recovers, the lecture is over. He springs to the recorder to run off what he missed. But Luscus has carefully avoided defining The Pellucidar Breakthrough. He will explain it at another lecture.
Grandpa, back at the scope, whistles. “I feel like an astronomer. The planets are in orbit around our house, the sun. There’s Accipiter, the closest, Mercury, although he’s not the god of thieves but their nemesis. Next, Benedictine, your sad-sack Venus. Hard, hard, hard! The sperm would batter their heads flat against that stony ovum. You sure she’s pregnant?
“Your Mama’s out there, dressed fit to kill and I wish someone would. Mother Earth headed for the perigee of the gummint store to waste your substance.”
Grandpa braces himself as if on a rolling deck, the blue-black veins on his legs thick as strangling vines on an ancient oak. “Brief departure from the role of Herr Doktor Sternscheissdreckschnuppe, the great astronomer, to that of der Unterseeboot Kapitan von Schooten die Fischen in der Barrel. Ach! I zee yet das tramp Schteamer, Deine Mama, yawing, pitching, rolling in the seas of alcohol. Compass lost; rhumb dumb. Three sheets to the wind. Paddlewheels spinning in the air. The black gang sweating their balls off, stoking the furnaces of frustration. Propellers tangled in the nets of neurosis. And the Great White Whale a glimmer in the black depths but coining up fast, intent on broaching her bottom, too big to miss. Poor damned vessel, I weep for her. I also vomit with disgust.
“Fire one! Fire two! Baroom! Mama rolls over, a jagged hole in her hull but not the one you’re thinking of. Down she goes, nose first, as befits a devoted fellationeer, her huge aft rising into the air. Blub, blub! Full fathom five!
“And so back from undersea to outer space. Your sylvan Mars, Red Hawk, has just stepped out of the tavern. And Luscus, Jupiter, the one-eyed All-Father of Art, if you’ll pardon my mixing of Nordic and Latin mythologies, is surrounded by his swarm of satellites.“
EXCRETION IS THE BITTER PART OF VALOR
Luscus says to the fido interviewers. “By this I mean that Winnegan, ”like every artist, great or not, produces art that is, first, secretion, unique to himself, then excretion. Excretion in the original sense of ‘sifting out.’ Creative excretion or discrete excretion. I know that my distinguished colleagues will make fun of this analogy, so I hereby challenge them to a fido debate whenever it can be arranged.
“The valor comes from the courage of the artist in showing his inner products to the public. The bitter part comes from the fact that the artist may be rejected or misunderstood in his time. Also from the terrible war that takes place in the artist with the disconnected or chaotic elements, often contradictory, which he must unite and then mold into a unique entity. Hence my ‘discrete excretion’ phrase.”
Fido interviewer: “Are we to understand that everything is a big pile of shit but that art makes a strange sea-change, forms it into something golden and illuminating?”
“Not exactly. But you’re close. I’ll elaborate and expound at a later date. At present, I want to talk about Winnegan. Now, the lesser artists give only the surface of things; they are photographers. But the great ones give the interiority of objects and beings. Winnegan, however, is the first to reveal more than one interiority in a single work of art. His invention of the alto-relief multilevel technique enables him to epipha-nize—show forth—subterranean layer upon layer.”
Primalux Ruskinson, loudly, “The Great Onion Peeler of Painting!”
Luscus, calmly after the laughter has died: “In one sense, that is well put. Great art, like an onion, brings tears to the eyes. However, the light on Winnegan’s paintings is not just a reflection; it is sucked in, digested, and then fractured forth. Each of the broken beams makes visible, not various aspects of the figures beneath, but whole figures. Worlds, I might say.
“I call this The Pellucidar Breakthrough. Pellucidar is the hollow interior of our planet, as depicted in a now forgotten fantasy-romance of the twentieth-century writer, Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of the immortal Tarzan.”
Ruskinson moans and feels faint again. “Pellucid! Pellucidar! Luscus, you punning exhumist bastard!”
“Burroughs’ hero penetrated the crust of Earth to discover another world inside. This was, in some ways, the reverse of the exterior, continents where the surface seas are, and vice versa. Just so, Winnegan has discovered an inner world, the obverse of the public image Everyman projects. And, like Burroughs’ hero, he has returned with a stunning narrative of psychic dangers and exploration.
“And just as the fictional hero found his Pellucidar to be populated with stone-age men and dinosaurs, so Winnegan’s world is, though absolutely modern in one sense, archaic in another. Abysmally pristine. Yet, in the illumination of Winnegan’s world, there is an evil and inscrutable patch of blackness, and that is paralleled in Pellucidar by the tiny fixed moon which casts a chilling and unmoving shadow.
“Now, I did intend that the ordinary ‘pellucid’ should be part of Pellucidar. Yet ‘pellucid’ means ‘reflecting light evenly from all surfaces’ or ’admitting maximum passage of light without diffusion or distortion.‘ Winnegan’s paintings do just the opposite. But—under the broken and twisted light, the acute observer can see a primeval luminosity, even and straight. This is the light that links all the fractures and multilevels, the light I was thinking of in my earlier discussion of the ’Age of the Plugged-In Man‘ and the polar bear.
“By intent scrutiny, a viewer may detect this, feel, as it were, the photonic fremitus of the heartbeat of Winnegan’s world.”
Ruskinson almost faints. Luscus’ smile and black monocle make him look like a pirate who has just taken a Spanish galleon loaded with gold.
Grandpa, still at the scope, says, “And there’s Maryam bint Yusuf, the Egyptian backwoodswoman you were telling me about. Your Saturn, aloof, regal, cold, and wearing one of those suspended whirling manycolored hats that’re all the rage. Saturn’s rings? Or a halo?”
“She’s beautiful, and she’d make a wonderful mother for my children,” Chib says.
“The chick of Araby. Your Saturn has two moons, mother and aunt. Chaperones! You say she’d make a good mother! How good a wife! Is she intelligent?”
“She’s as smart at Benedictine.”
“A dumbshit then. You sure can pick them. How do you know you’re in love with her? You’ve been in love with twenty women in the last six months.”
“I love her. This is it.”
“Until the next one. Can you really love anything but your painting? Benedictine’s going to have an abortion, right?”
“Not if I can talk her out of it,” Chib says. To tell the truth, I don’t even like her any more. But she’s carrying my child.“
“Let me look at your pelvis. No, you’re male. For a moment, I wasn’t sure, you’re so crazy to have a baby.”
“A baby is a miracle to stagger sextillions of infidels.”
“It beats a mouse. But don’t you know that Uncle Sam has been propagandizing his heart out to cut down on propagation? Where’ve you been all your life?”
“I got to go, Grandpa.”
Chib kisses the old man and returns to his room to finish his latest painting. The door still refuses to recognize him, and he calls the gum-mint repair shop, only to be told that all technicians are at the Folk Festival. He leaves the house in a red rage. The bunting and balloons are waving and bobbing in the artificial wind, increased for this occasion, and an orchestra is playing by the lake.
Through the scope, Grandpa watches him walk away.
“Poor devil! I ache for his ache. He wants a baby, and he is ripped up inside because that poor devil Benedictine is aborting their child. Part of his agony, though he doesn’t know it, is identification with the doomed infant. His own mother has had innumerable—well, quite a few—abortions. But for the grace of God, he would have been one of them, another nothingness. He wants this baby to have a chance, too. But there is nothing he can do about it, nothing.
“And there is another feeling, one which he shares with most of humankind. He knows he’s screwed up his life, or something has twisted it. Every thinking man and woman knows this. Even the smug and dimwitted realize this unconsciously. But a baby, that beautiful being, that unsmirched blank tablet, unformed angel, represents a new hope. Perhaps it won’t screw up. Perhaps it’ll grow up to be a healthy confident reasonable good-humored unselfish loving man or woman. ‘It won’t be like me or my next-door neighbor,’ the proud, but apprehensive, parent swears.
“Chib thinks this and swears that his baby will be different. But, like everybody else, he’s fooling himself. A child has one father and mother, but it has trillions of aunts and uncles. Not only those that are its contemporaries; the dead, too. Even if Chib fled into the wilderness and raised the infant himself, he’d be giving it his own unconscious assumptions. The baby would grow up with beliefs and attitudes that the father was not even aware of. Moreover, being raised in isolation, the baby would be a very peculiar human being indeed.
“And if Chib raises the child in this society, it’s inevitable that it will accept at least part of the attitudes of its playmates, teachers, and so on ad nauseam.
“So, forget about making a new Adam out of your wonderful potential-teeming child, Chib. If it grows up to become at least half-sane, it’s because you gave it love and discipline and it was lucky in its social contacts and it was also blessed at birth with the right combination of genes. That is, your son or daughter is now both a fighter and a lover.”
ONE MAN’S NIGHTMARE IS ANOTHER MAN’S WET DREAM
Grandpa says.
“I was talking to Dante Alighieri just the other day, and he was telling me what an infemo of stupidity, cruelty, perversity, atheism, and outright peril the sixteenth century was. The nineteenth left him gibbering, hopelessly searching for adequate enough invectives.
“As for this age, it gave him such high-blood pressure, I had to slip him a tranquilizer and ship him out via time machine with an attendant nurse. She looked much like Beatrice and so should have been just the medicine he needed—maybe.”
Grandpa chuckles, remembering that Chib, as a child, took him seriously when he described his time-machine visitors, such notables as Nebuchadnezzar, King of the Grass-Eaters; Samson, Bronze Age Rid-dler and Scourge of the Philistines; Moses, who stole a god from his Kenite father-in-law and who fought against circumcision all his life; Buddha, the Original Beatnik; No-Moss Sisyphus, taking a vacation from his stone-rolling; Androcles and his buddy, the Cowardly Lion of Oz; Baron von Richthofen, the Red Knight of Germany; Beowulf; Al Capone; Hiawatha; Ivan the Terrible; and hundreds of others.
The time came when Grandpa became alarmed and decided that Chib was confusing fantasy with reality. He hated to tell the little boy that he had been making up all those wonderful stories, mostly to teach him history. It was like telling a kid there wasn’t any Santa Claus.
And then, while he was reluctantly breaking the news to his grandson, he became aware of Chib’s barely suppressed grin and knew that it was his turn to have his leg pulled. Chib had never been fooled or else had caught on without any shock. So, both had a big laugh and Grandpa continued to tell of his visitors.
“There are no time machines,” Grandpa says. “Like it or not, Miniver Cheevy, you have to live in this your time.
“The machines work in the utility-factory levels in a silence broken only by the chatter of a few mahouts. The great pipes at the bottom of the seas suck up water and bottom sludge. The stuff is automatically carried through pipes to the ten production levels of LA. There the inorganic chemicals are converted into energy and then into the matter of food, drink, medicines, and artifacts. There is very little agriculture or animal husbandry outside the city walls, but there is superabundance for all. Artificial but exact duplication of organic stuff, so who knows the difference?
“There is no more starvation or want anywhere, except among the self-exiles wandering in the woods. And the food and goods are shipped to the pandoras and dispensed to the receivers of the purple wage. The purple wage. A madison-avenue euphemism with connotations of royalty and divine right. Earned by just being born.
“Other ages would regard ours as a delirium, yet ours has benefits others lacked. To combat transiency and rootlessness, the megalopolis is compartmented into small communities. A man can live all his life in one place without having to go elsewhere to get anything he needs. With this has come a provincialism, a small-town patriotism and hostility towards outsiders. Hence, the bloody juvenile gang-fights between towns. The intense and vicious gossip. The insistence on conformity to local mores.
“At the same time, the small-town citizen has fido, which enables him to see events anywhere in the world. Intermingled with the trash and the propaganda, which the government thinks is good for the people, is any amount of superb programs. A man may get the equivalent of a Ph.D. without stirring out of his house.
“Another Renaissance has come, a fruition of the arts comparable to that of Pericles’ Athens and the city-states of Michelangelo’s Italy or Shakespeare’s England. Paradox. More illiterates than ever before in the world’s history. But also more literates. Speakers of classical Latin outnumber those of Caesar’s day. The world of aesthetics bears a fabulous fruit. And, of course, fruits.
“To dilute the provincialism and also to make international war even more unlikely, we have the world policy of homogenization. The voluntary exchange of a part of one nation’s population with another’s. Hostages to peace and brotherly love. Those citizens who can’t get along on just the purple wage or who think they’ll be happier elsewhere are induced to emigrate with bribes.
“A Golden World in some respects; a nightmare in others. So what’s new with the world? It was always thus in every age. Ours has had to deal with overpopulation and automation. How else could the problem be solved? It’s Buridan’s ass (actually, the ass was a dog) all over again, as in every time. Buridan’s ass, dying of hunger because it can’t make up its mind which of two equal amounts of food to eat.
“History: a pons asinorum with men the asses on the bridge of time.
“No, those two comparisons are not fair or right. It’s Hobson’s horse, the only choice being the beast in the nearest stall. Zeitgeist rides tonight, and the devil take the hindmost!
“The mid-twentieth-century writers of the Triple Revolution document forecast accurately in some respects. But they de-emphasized what lack of work would do to Mr. Everyman. They believed that all men have equal potentialities in developing artistic tendencies, that all could busy themselves with arts, crafts, and hobbies or education for education’s sake. They wouldn’t face the ‘undemocratic’ reality that only about ten per cent of the population—if that—are inherently capable of producing anything worth while, or even mildly interesting, in the arts. Crafts, hobbies, and a lifelong academic education pale after a while, so back to the booze, fido, and adultery.
“Lacking self-respect, the fathers become free-floaters, nomads on the steppes of sex. Mother, with a capital M, becomes the dominant figure in the family. She may be playing around, too, but she’s taking care of the kids; she’s around most of the time. Thus, with father a lower-case figure, absent, weak, or indifferent, the children often become homosexual or ambisexual. The wonderland is also a fairyland.
“Some features of this time could have been predicted. Sexual permissiveness was one, although no one could have seen how far it would go. But then no one could have foreknown of the Panamorite sect, even if America has spawned lunatic-fringe cults as a frog spawns tadpoles. Yesterday’s monomaniac is tomorrow’s messiah, and so Sheltey and his disciples survived through years of persecution and today their precepts are embedded in our culture.”
Grandpa again fixes the cross-reticules of the scope on Chib.
“There he goes, my beautiful grandson, bearing gifts to the Greeks. So far, that Hercules has failed to clean up his psychic Augean stable. Yet, he may succeed, that stumblebum Apollo, that Edipus Wrecked. He’s luckier than most of his contemporaries. He’s had a permanent father, even if a secret one, a zany old man hiding from so-called justice. He has gotten love, discipline, and a superb education in this starred chamber. He’s also fortunate in having a profession.
“But Mama spends far too much and also is addicted to gambling, a vice which deprives her of her full guaranteed income. I’m supposed to be dead, so I don’t get the purple wage. Chib has to make up for all this by selling or trading his paintings. Luscus has helped him by publicizing him, but at any moment Luscus may turn against him. The money from the paintings is still not enough. After all, money is not the basic of our economy; it’s a scarce auxiliary. Chib needs the grant but won’t get it unless he lets Luscus make love to him.
“It’s not that Chib rejects homosexual relations. Like most of his contemporaries, he’s sexually ambivalent. I think that he and Omar Runic still blow each other occasionally. And why not? They love each other. But Chib rejects Luscus as a matter of principle. He won’t be a whore to advance his career. Moreover, Chib makes a distinction which is deeply embedded in this society. He thinks that uncompulsive homosexuality is natural (whatever that means?) but that compulsive homosexuality is, to use ah old term, queer. Valid or not, the distinction is made.
“So, Chib may go to Egypt. But what happens to me then?
“Never mind me or your mother, Chib. No matter what. Don’t give in to Luscus. Remember the dying words of Singleton, Bureau of Relocation and Rehabilitation Director, who shot himself because he couldn’t adjust to the new times.
“ What if a man gain the world and lose his ass?‘”
At this moment, Grandpa sees his grandson, who has been walking along with somewhat drooping shoulders, suddenly straighten them. And he sees Chib break into a dance, a little improvised shuffle followed by a series of whirls. It is evident that Chib is whooping. The pedestrians around him are grinning.
Grandpa groans and then laughs. “Oh, God, the goatish energy of youth, the unpredictable shift of spectrum from black sorrow to bright orange joy! Dance, Chib, dance your crazy head off! Be happy, if only for a moment! You’re young yet, you’ve got the bubbling of unconquerable hope deep in your springs! Dance, Chib, dance!”
He laughs and wipes a tear away.
SEXUAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE
is so fascinating a book that Doctor Jespersen Joyce Bathymens, psycholinguist for the federal Bureau of Group Reconfiguration and In-tercommunicability, hates to stop reading. But duty beckons.
“A radish is not necessarily reddish,” he says into the recorder. “The Young Radishes so named their group because a radish is a radicle, hence, radical. Also, there’s a play on roots and on redass, a slang term for anger, and possibly on ruttish and rattish. And undoubtedly on rude-ickle, Beverly Hills dialectical term for a repulsive, unruly, and socially ungraceful person.
“Yet the Young Radishes are not what I would call Left Wing; they represent the current resentment against Life-In-General and advocate no radical policy of reconstruction. They howl against Things As They Are, like monkeys in a tree, but never give constructive criticism. They want to destroy without any thought of what to do after the destruction.
“In short, they represent the average citizen’s grousing and bitching, being different in that they are more articulate. There are thousands of groups like them in LA and possibly millions all over the world. They had normal life as children. In fact, they were born and raised in the same clutch, which is one reason why they were chosen for this study. What phenomenon produced ten such creative persons, all mothered in the seven houses of Area 69-14, all about the same time, all practically raised together, since they were put together in the playpen on top of the pedestal while one mother took her turn baby-sitting and the others did whatever they had to do, which… where was I?
“Oh, yes, they had a normal life, went to the same school, palled around, enjoyed the usual sexual play among themselves, joined the juvenile gangs and engaged in some rather bloody warfare with the Westwood and other gangs. All were distinguished, however, by an intense intellectual curiosity and all become active in the creative arts.
“It has been suggested—and might be true—that that mysterious stranger, Raleigh Renaissance, was the father of all ten. This is possible but can’t be proved. Raleigh Renaissance was living in the house of Mrs. Winnegan at the time, but he seems to have been unusually active in the clutch and, indeed, all over Beverly Hills. Where this man came from, who he was, and where he went are still unknown despite intensive search by various agencies. He had no ID or other cards of any kind, yet he went unchallenged for a long time. He seems to have had something on the Chief of Police of Beverly Hills and possibly on some of the Federal agents stationed in Beverly Hills.
“He lived for two years with Mrs. Winnegan, then dropped out of sight. It is rumored that he left LA to join a tribe of white neo-Amerinds, sometimes called the Seminal Indians.
“Anyway, back to the Young (pun on Jung?) Radishes. They are revolting against the Father Image of Uncle Sam, whom they both love and hate. Uncle is, of course, linked by their subconsciouses with unco, a Scottish word meaning strange, uncanny, weird, this indicating that their own fathers were strangers to them. All come from homes where the father was missing or weak, a phenomenon regrettably common in our culture.
“I never knew my own father… Tooney, wipe that out as irrelevant. Unco also means news or tidings, indicating that the unfortunate young men are eagerly awaiting news of the return of their fathers and perhaps secretly hoping for reconciliation with Uncle Sam, that is, their fathers.
“Uncle Sam. Sam is short for Samuel, from the Hebrew Shemu’el, meaning Name of God. All the Radishes are atheists, although some, notably Omar Runic and Chibiabos Winnegan, were given religious instruction as children (Panamorite and Roman Catholic, respectively).
“Young Winnegan’s revolt against God, and against the Catholic Church, was undoubtedly reinforced by the fact that his mother forced strong catfeartics upon him when he had a chronic constipation. He probably also resented having to learn his catechism when he preferred to play. And there is the deeply significant and traumatic incident in which a catheter was used on him. (This refusal to excrete when young will be analyzed in a later report.)
“Uncle Sam, the Father Figure. Figure is so obvious a play that I won’t bother to point it out. Also perhaps on jigger, in the sense of ‘a fig on thee!’—look this up in Dante’s Inferno, some Italian or other in Hell said, ‘A fig on thee, God!’ biting his thumb in the ancient gesture of defiance and disrespect. Hmm? Biting the thumb—an infantile characteristic?
“Sam is also a multileveled pun on phonetically, orthographically, and semisemantically linked words. It is significant that young Winnegan can’t stand to be called dear; he claims that his mother called him that so many times it nauseates him. Yet the word has a deeper meaning to him. For instance, samhar is an Asiatic deer with ihree-pointed antlers. (Note the sam, also.) Obviously, the three points symbolize, to him, the Triple Revolution document, the historic dating point of the beginning of our era, which Chib claims to hate so. The three points are also archetypes of the Holy Trinity, which the Young Radishes frequently blaspheme against.
“I might point out that in this the group differs from others I’ve studied. The others expressed an infrequent and mild blasphemy in keeping with the mild, indeed pale, religious spirit prevalent nowadays. Strong blasphemers thrive only when strong believers thrive.
“Sam also stands for same, indicating the Radishes’ subconscious desire to conform.
“Possibly, although this particular analysis may be invalid, Sam corresponds to Samekh, the fifteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. (Sam!
Ech!?) In the old style of English spelling, which the Radishes learned in their childhood, the fifteenth letter of the Roman alphabet is O. In the Alphabet Table of my dictionary, Webster’s 128th New Collegiate, the Roman O is in the same horizontal column as the Arabic Dad. Also with the Hebrew Mem. So we get a double connection with the missing and longed-for Father (or Dad) and with the overdominating Mother (or Mem).
“I can make nothing out of the Greek Omicron, also in the same horizontal column. But give me time; this takes study.
“Omicron. The little O! The lower-case omicron has an egg shape. The little egg is their father’s sperm fertilized? The womb? The basic shape of modern architecture?
“Sam Hill, an archaic euphemism for Hell. Uncle Sam is a Sam Hill of a father? Better strike that out, Tooney. It’s possible that these highly educated youths have read about this obsolete phrase, but it’s not con-firmable. I don’t want to suggest any connections that might make me look ridiculous.
“Let’s see. Samisen. A Japanese musical instrument with three strings. The Triple Revolution document and the Trinity again. Trinity? Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Mother the thoroughly despised figure, hence, the Wholly Goose? Well, maybe not. Wipe that out. Tooney.
“Samisen. Son of Sam? Which leads naturally to Samson, who pulled down the temple of the Philistines on them and on himself. These boys talk of doing the same thing. Chuckle. Reminds me of myself when I was their age, before I matured. Strike out that last remark, Tooney.
“Samovar. The Russian word means, literally, self-boiler. There’s no doubt the Radishes are boiling with revolutionary fervor. Yet their disturbed psyches know, deep down, that Uncle Sam is their ever-loving Father-Mother, that he has only their best interests at heart. But they force themselves to hate him, hence, they self-boil.
“A samlet is a young salmon. Cooked salmon is a yellowish pink or pale red, near to a radish in color, in their unconsciouses, anyway. Samlet equals Young Radish; they feel they’re being cooked in the great pressure cooker of modern society.
“How’s that for a trinely furned phase—I mean, finely turned phrase, Tooney? Run this off, edit as indicated, smooth it out, you know how, and send it off to the boss. I got to go. I’m late for lunch with Mother; she gets very upset if I’m not there on the dot.
“Oh, postscript! I recommend that the agents watch Winnegan more closely. His friends are blowing off psychic steam through talk and drink, but he has suddenly altered his behavior pattern. He has long periods of silence, he’s given up smoking, drinking, and sex.”
A PROFIT IS NOT WITHOUT HONOR
even in this day. The gummint has no overt objection to privately owned taverns, run by citizens who have paid all license fees, passed all examinations, posted all bonds, and bribed the local politicians and police chief. Since there is no provision made for them, no large buildings available for rent, the taverns are in the homes of the owners themselves.
The Private Universe is Chib’s favorite, partly because the proprietor is operating illegally. Dionysus Gobrinus, unable to hew his way through the roadblocks, prise-de-chevaux, barbed wire, and booby-traps of official procedure, has quit his efforts to get a license.
Openly, he paints the name of his establishment over the mathematical equations that once distinguished the exterior of the house. (Math prof at Beverly Hills U. 14, named Al-Khwarizmi Descartes Lobachev-sky, he has resigned and changed his name again.) The atrium and several bedrooms have been converted for drinking and carousing. There are no Egyptian customers, probably because of their supersensitivity about the flowery sentiments painted by patrons on the inside walls.
A BAS, ABU
MOHAMMED WAS THE SON OF A VIRGIN DOG .
THE SPHINX STINKS
REMEMBER THE RED SEA!
THE PROPHET HAS A CAMEL FETISH
Some of those who wrote the taunts have fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers who were themselves the objects of similiar insults. But their descendants are thoroughly assimilated, Beverly Hillsians to the core. Of such is the kingdom of men.
Gobrinus, a squat cube of a man, stands behind the bar, which is square as a protest against the ovoid. Above him is a big sign:
ONE MAN’S MEAD IS ANOTHER MAN’S POISSON
Gobrinus has explained this pun many times, not always to his listener’s satisfaction. Suffice it that Poisson was a mathematician and that Poisson’s frequency distribution is a good approximation to the binomial distribution as the number of trials increases and probability of success in a single trial is small.
When a customer gets too drunk to be permitted one more drink, he is hurled headlong from the tavern with furious combustion and utter ruin by Gobrinus, who cries, “Poisson! Poisson!”
Chib’s friends, the Young Radishes, sitting at a hexagonal table, greet him, and their words unconsciously echo those of the Federal psycholinguist’s estimate of his recent behavior.
“Chib, monk! Chibber as ever! Looking for a chibbie, no doubt! Take your pick!”
Madame Trismegista, sitting at a little table with a Seal-of-Solomon-shape top, greets him. She has been Gobrinus’ wife for two years, a record, because she will knife him if he leaves her. Also, he believes that she can somehow juggle his destiny with the cards she deals. In this age of enlightenment, the soothsayer and astrologer flourish. As science pushes forward, ignorance and superstition gallop around the flanks and bite science in the rear with big dark teeth.
Gobrinus himself, a Ph.D., holder of the torch of knowledge (until lately, anyway), does not believe in God. But he is sure the stars are marching towards a baleful conjunction for him. With a strange logic, he thinks that his wife’s cards control the stars; he is unaware that card-divination and astrology are entirely separate fields.
What can you expect of a man who claims that the universe is asymmetric?
Chib waves his hand at Madame Trismegista and walks to another table. Here sits
A TYPICAL TEEMAGER
Benedictine Serinus Melba. She is tall and slim and has narrow lemur-like hips and slender legs but big breasts. Her hair, black as the pupils of her eyes, is parted in the middle, plastered with perfumed spray to the skull, and braided into two long pigtails. These are brought over her bare shoulders and held together with a golden brooch just below her throat. From the brooch, which is in the form of a musical note, the braids part again, one looping under each breast. Another brooch secures them, and they separate to circle around behind her back, are brooched again, and come back to meet on her belly. Another brooch holds them, and the twin waterfalls flow blackly over the front of her bell-shaped skirt.
Her face is thickly farded with green, aquamarine, a shamrock beauty mark, and topaz. She wears a yellow bra with artificial pink nipples; frilly lace ribbons hang from the bra. A demicorselet of bright green with black rosettes circle her waist. Over the corselet, half-concealing it, is a wire structure covered with a shimmering pink quilty material. It extends out in back to form a semifuselage or a bird’s long tail, to which are attached long yellow and crimson artificial feathers.
An ankle-length diaphanous skirt billows out. It does not hide the yellow and dark-green striped lace-fringed garter-panties, white thighs, and black net stockings with green clocks in the shape of musical notes. Her shoes are bright blue with topaz high heels.
Benedictine is costumed to sing at the Folk Festival; the only thing missing is her singer’s hat. Yet, she came to complain, among other things, that Chib has forced her to cancel her appearance and so lose her chance at a great career.
She is with five girls, all between sixteen and twenty-one, all drinking P (for popskull).
“Can’t we talk in private, Benny?” Chib says.
“What for?” Her voice is a lovely contralto ugly with inflection.
“You got me down here to make a public scene,” Chib says.
“For God’s sake, what other kind of scene is there?” she shrills. “Look at him! He wants to talk to me alone!”
It is then that he realizes she is afraid to be alone with him. More than that, she is incapable of being alone. Now he knows why she insisted on leaving the bedroom door open with her girlfriend, Bela, within calling distance. And listening distance.
“You said you was just going to use your finger!” she shouts. She points at the slightly rounded belly. “I’m going to have a baby! You rotten smooth-talking sick bastard!”
“That isn’t true at all,” Chib says. “You told me it was all right, you loved me.”
“ ‘Love! Love!’ he says! What the hell do I know what I said, you got me so excited! Anyway, I didn’t say you could stick it in! I’d never say that, never! And then what you didl What you did! My God, I could hardly walk for a week, you bastard, you!”
Chib sweats. Except for Beethoven’s Pastoral welling from the fido, the room is silent. His friends grin. Gobrinus, his back turned, is drinking scotch. Madame Trismegista shuffles her cards, and she farts with a fiery conjunction of beer and onions. Benedictine’s friends look at their Mandarin-long fluorescent fingernails or glare at him. Her hurt and indignity is theirs and vice versa.
“I can’t take those pills. They make me break out and give me eye trouble and screw up my monthlies! You know that! And I can’t stand those mechanical uteruses! And you lied to me, anyway! You said you took a pill!“
Chib realizes she’s contradicting herself, but there’s no use trying to be logical. She furious because she’s pregnant; she doesn’t want to be inconvenienced with an abortion at this time, and she’s out for revenge.
Now how, Chib wonders, how could she get pregnant that night? No woman, no matter how fertile, could have managed that. She must have been knocked up before or after. Yet she swears that it was that night, the night he was
THE KNIGHT OF THE BURNING PESTLE
OR
FOAM, FOAM ON THE RANGE
“No, no!” Benedictine cries.
“Why not? I love you,” Chib says. “I want to marry you.”
Benedictine screams, and her friend Bela, out in the hall, yells, ‘What’s the matter? What happened?“
Benedictine does not reply. Raging, shaking as if in the grip of a fever, she scrambles out of bed, pushing Chib to one side. She runs to the small egg of the bathroom in the corner, and he follows her.
“I hope you’re not going to do what I think… ?” he says.
Benedictine moans, “You sneaky no-good son of a bitch!”
In the bathroom, she pulls down a section of wall, which becomes a shelf. On its top, attached by magnetic bottoms to the shelf, are many containers. She seizes a long thin can of spermatocide, squats, and inserts it. She presses the button on its bottom, and it foams with a hissing sound even its cover of flesh cannot silence.
Chib is paralyzed for a moment. Then he roars.
Benedictine shouts, “Stay away from me, you rude-ickle!”
From the door to the bedroom comes Bela’s timid, “Are you all right, Benny?”
“I’ll all-right her!” Chib bellows.
He jumps forward and takes a can of tempoxy glue from the shelf. The glue is used by Benedictine to attach her wigs to her head and will hold anything forever unless softened by a specific defixative.
Benedictine and Bela both cry out as Chib lifts Benedictine up and then lowers her to the floor. She fights, but he manages to spray the glue over the can and the skin and hairs around it. •
“What’re you doing?” she screams.
He pushes the button on the bottom of the can to full-on position and then sprays the bottom with glue. While she struggles, he holds her arms tight against her body and keeps her from rolling over and so moving the can in or out. Silently, Chib counts to thirty, then to thirty more to make sure the glue is thoroughly dried. He releases her.
The foam is billowing out around her groin and down her legs and spreading out across the floor. The fluid in the can is under enormous pressure in the indestructible unpunchable can, and the foam expands vastly if exposed to open air.
Chib takes the can of defixative from the shelf and clutches it in his hand, determined that she will not have it. Benedictine jumps up and swings at him. Laughing like a hyena in a tentful of nitrous oxide, Chib blocks her fist and shoves her away. Slipping on the foam, which is ankle-deep by now, Benedictine falls and then slides backward out of the bedroom on her buttocks, the can clunking.
She gets to her feet and only then realizes fully what Chib has done. Her scream goes up, and she follows it. She dances around, yanking at the can, her screams intensifying with every tug and resultant pain. Then she turns and runs out of the room or tries to. She skids; Bela is in her way; they cling together and both ski out of the room, doing a half-turn while going through the door. The foam swirls out so that the two look like Venus and friend rising from the bubble-capped waves of the Cyprian Sea.
Benedictine shoves Bela away but not without losing some flesh to Bela’s long sharp fingernails. Bela shoots backwards through the door toward Chib. She is like a novice ice skater trying to maintain her balance. She does not succeed and shoots by Chib, wailing, on her back, her feet up in the air.
Chib slides his bare feet across the floor gingerly, stops at the bed to pick up his clothes, but decides he’d be wiser to wait until he’s outside before he puts them on. He gets to the circular hall just in time to see Benedictine crawling past one of the columns that divides the corridor from the atrium. Her parents, two middle-aged behemoths, are still sitting on a flato, beer cans in hand, eyes wide, mouths open, quivering.
Chib does not even say goodnight to them as he passes along the hall. But then he sees the fido and realizes that her parents had switched it from EXT. to INT. and then to Benedictine’s room. Father and mother have been watching Chib and daughter, and it is evident from father’s not-quite dwindled condition that father was very excited by this show, superior to anything seen on exterior fido.
“You peeping bastards!” Chib roars.
Benedictine has gotten to them and on her feet and she is stammering, weeping, indicating the can and then stabbing her finger at Chib. At Chib’s roar, the parents heave up from the flato as two leviathans from the deep. Benedictine turns and starts to run towards him, her arms outstretched, her longnailed fingers curved, her face a medusa’s. Behind her streams the wake of the livid witch and father and mother on the foam.
Chib shoves up against a pillar and rebounds and skitters off, helpless to keep himself from turning sidewise during the maneuver. But he keeps his balance. Mama and Papa have gone down together with a crash that shakes even the solid house. They are up, eyes rolling and bellowing like hippos surfacing. They charge him but separate, Mama shrieking now, her face, despite the fat, Benedictine’s. Papa goes around one side of the pillar; Mama, the other. Benedictine has rounded another pillar, holding to it with one hand to keep her from slipping. She is between Chib and the door to the outside.
Chib slams against the wall of the corridor, in an area free of foam. Benedictine runs towards him. He dives across the floor, hits it, and rolls between two pillars and out into the atrium.
Mama and Papa converge in a collision course. The Titanic meets the iceberg, and both plunge swiftly. They skid on their faces and bellies towards Benedictine. She leaps into the air, trailing foam on them as they pass beneath her.
By now it is evident that the government’s claim that the can is good for 40,000 shots of death-to-sperm, or for 40,000 copulations, is justified. Foam is all over the place, ankle-deep—knee-high in some places—and still pouring out.
Bela is on her back now and on the atrium floor, her head driven into the soft folds of the flato.
Chib gets up slowly and stands for a moment, glaring around him, his knees bent, ready to jump from danger but hoping he won’t have to since his feet will undoubtedly fly away from under him.
“Hold it, you rotten son of a bitch!” Papa roars. “I’m going to kill you! You can’t do this to my daughter!”
Chib watches him turn over like a whale in a heavy sea and try to get to his feet. Down he goes again, grunting as if hit by a harpoon. Mama is no more successful than he.
Seeing that his way is unbarred—Benedictine having disappeared somewhere—Chib skis across the atrium until he reaches an unfoamed area near the exit. Clothes over his arm, still holding the defixative, he struts towards the door.
At this moment Benedictine calls his name. He turns to see her sliding from the kitchen at him. In her hand is a tall glass. He wonders what she intends to do with it. Certainly, she is not offering him the hospitality of a drink.
Then she scoots into the dry region of the floor and topples forward with a scream. Nevertheless, she throws the contents of the glass accurately.
Chib screams when he feels the boiling hot water, painful as if he had been circumcised unanesthetized.
Benedictine, on the floor, laughs. Chib, after jumping around and shrieking, the can and clothes dropped, his hands holding the scalded parts, manages to control himself. He stops his antics, seizes Benedictine’s right hand, and drags her out into the streets of Beverly Hills. There are quite a few people out this night, and they follow the two. Not until Chib reaches the lake does he stop and there he goes into the water to cool off the bum, Benedictine with him.
The crowd has much to talk about later, after Benedictine and Chib have crawled out of the lake and then run home. The crowd talks and laughs quite a while as they watch the sanitation department people clean the foam off the lake surface and the streets.
“I was so sore I couldn’t walk for a month!” Benedictine screams.
“You had it coming,” Chib says. “You’ve got no complaints. You said you wanted my baby, and you talked as if you meant it.”
“I must’ve been out of my mind!” Benedictine says. “No, I wasn’t! I never said no such thing! You lied to me! You forced me!”
“I would never force anybody,” Chib said. “You know that. Quit your bitching. You’re a free agent, and you consented freely. You have free will.”
Omar Runic, the poet, stands up from his chair. He is a tall thin red-bronze youth with an aquiline nose and very thick red lips. His kinky hair grows long and is cut into the shape of the Pequod, that fabled vessel which bore mad Captain Ahab and his mad crew and the sole survivor Ishmael after the white whale. The coiffure is formed with a bowsprit and hull and three masts and yardarms and even a boat hanging on davits.
Omar Runic claps his hands and shouts, “Bravo! A philosopher! Free will it is; free will to seek the Eternal Verities—if any—or Death and Damnation! I’ll drink to free will! A toast, gentlemen! Stand up, Young Radishes, a toast to our leader!”
And so begins
THE MAD P PARTY
Madame Trismegista calls, “Tell your fortune, Chib! See what the stars tell through the cards!”
He sits down at her table while his friends crowd around.
“O.K., Madame. How do I get out of this mess?”
She shuffles and turns over the top card.
“Jesus! The ace of spades!”
“You’re going on a long journey!”
“Egypt!” Rousseau Red Hawk cries. “Oh, no, you don’t want to go there, Chib! Come with me to where the buffalo roam and…”
Up comes another card.
“You will soon meet a beautiful dark lady.”
“A goddam Arab! Oh, no, Chib, tell me it’s not true!”
“You will win great honors soon.”
“Chib’s going to get the grant!”
“If I get the grant, I don’t have to go to Egypt,” Chib says. “Madame Trismegista, with all due respect, you’re full of crap.”
“Don’t mock, young man. I’m not a computer. I’m tuned to the spectrum of psychic vibrations.”
Flip. “You will be in great danger, physically and morally.”
Chib says, “That happens at least once a day.”
Flip. “A man very close to you will die twice.”
Chib pales, rallies, and says, “A coward dies a thousand deaths.”
“You will travel in time, return to the past.”
“Zow!” Red Hawk says. “You’re outdoing yourself, Madame. Careful! You’ll get a psychic hernia, have to wear an ectoplasmic truss!”
“Scoff if you want to, you dumbshits,” Madame says. “There are more worlds than one. The cards don’t lie, not when I deal them.”
“Gobrinus!” Chib calls. “Another pitcher of beer for the Madame.”
The Young Radishes return to their table, a legless disc held up in the air by a graviton field. Benedictine glares at them and goes into a huddle with the other teemagers. At a table nearby sits Pinkerton Legrand, a gummint agent, facing them so that the fido under his oneway window of a jacket beams in on them. They know he’s doing this. He knows they know and has reported so to his superior. He frowns when he sees Falco Accipiter enter. Legrand does not like an agent from another department messing around on his case. Accipiter does not even look at Legrand. He orders a pot of tea and then pretends to drop into the teapot a pill that combines with tannic acid to become P.
Rousseau Red Hawk winks at Chib and says, “Do you really think it’s possible to paralyze all of LA with a single bomb?”
“Three bombs!” Chib says loudly so that Legrand’s fido will pick up the words. “One for the control console of the desalinization plant, a second for the backup console, the third for the nexus of the big pipe that carries the water to the reservoir on the 20th level.”
Pinkerton Legrand turns pale. He downs all the whiskey in his glass and orders another, although he has already had too many. He presses the plate on his fido to transmit a triple top-priority. Lights blink redly in HQ; a gong clangs repeatedly; the chief wakes up so suddenly he falls off his chair.
Accipiter also hears, but he sits stiff, dark, and brooding as the diorite image of a Pharaoh’s falcon. Monomaniac, he is not to be diverted by talk of inundating all LA, even if it will lead to action. On Grandpa’s trail, he is now here because he hopes to use Chib as the key to the house. One “mouse”—as he thinks of his criminals—one “mouse” will run to the hole of another.
“When do you think we can go into action?” Huga Wells-Erb Heins-turbury, the science-fiction authoress, says.
“In about three weeks,” Chib says.
At HQ, the chief curses Legrand for disturbing him. There are thousands of young men and women blowing off steam with these plots of destruction, assassination, and revolt. He does not understand why the young punks talk like this, since they have everything handed them free. If he had his way, he’d throw them into jail and kick them around a little or more than.
“After we do it, we’ll have to take off for the big outdoors,” Red Hawk says. His eyes glisten. “I’m telling you, boys, being a free man in the forest is the greatest. You’re a genuine individual, not just one of the faceless breed.”
Red Hawk believes in this plot to destroy LA. He is happy because, though he hasn’t said so, he has grieved while in Mother Nature’s lap for intellectual companionship. The other savages can hear a deer at a hundred yards, detect a rattlesnake in the bushes, but they’re deaf to the footfalls of philosophy, the neigh of Nietzsche, the rattle of Russell, the honkings of Hegel.
“The illiterate swine!” he says aloud. The others say, “What?”
“Nothing. Listen, you guys must know how wonderful it is. You wereintheWNRCC.”
“I was 4-F,” Omar Runic says. “I got hay fever.”
“I was working on my second M.A.,” Gibbon Tacitus says.
“I was in the WNRCC band,” Sibelius Amadeus Yehudi says. ‘We only got outside when we played the camps, and that wasn’t often.“
“Chib, you were in the Corps. You loved it, didn’t you?”
Chib nods but says, “Being a neo-Amerind takes all your time just to survive. When could I paint? And who would see the paintings if I did get time? Anyway, that’s no life for a woman or a baby.”
Red Hawk looks hurt and orders a whiskey mixed with P.
Pinkerton Legrand doesn’t want to interrupt his monitoring, yet he can’t stand the pressure in his bladder. He walks towards the room used as the customers’ catch-all. Red Hawk, in a nasty mood caused by rejection, sticks his leg out. Legrand trips, catches himself, and stumbles forward. Benedictine puts out her leg. Legrand falls on his face. He no longer has any reason to go to the urinal except to wash himself off.
Everybody except Legrand and Accipiter laugh. Legrand jumps up, his fists doubled. Benedictine ignores him and walks over to Chib, her friends following. Chib stiffens. She says, “You perverted bastard! You told me you were just going to use your finger!”
“You’re repeating yourself,” Chib says. “The important thing is, what’s going to happen to the baby?”
“What do you care?” Benedictine says. “For all you know, it might not even be yours!”
“That’d be a relief,” Chib says, “if it weren’t. Even so, the baby should have a say in this. He might want to live—even with you as his mother.”
“In this miserable life!” she cries. “I’m going to do it a favor. I’m going to the hospital and get rid of it. Because of you, I have to miss out on my big chance at the Folk Festival! There’ll be agents from all over there, and I won’t get a chance to sing for them!”
“You’re a liar,” Chib says. “You’re all dressed up to sing.”
Benedictine’s face is red; her eyes, wide; her nostrils, flaring.
“You spoiled my fun!”
She shouts, “Hey, everybody, want to hear a howler! This great artist, this big hunk of manhood, Chib the divine, he can’t get a hardon unless he’s gone down on!”
Chib’s friends look at each other. What’s the bitch screaming about? So what’s new?
From Grandpa’s Private Ejaculations: Some of the features of the Panamorite religion, so reviled and loathed in the 21st century, have hecome everyday facts in modern times. Love, love, love, physical and spkituall It’s not enough to just kiss your children and hug them. But oral stimulation of the genitals of infants by the parents and relatives has resulted in some curious conditioned reflexes. 1 could write a book about this aspect of mid-2.znd century life and probably will.
Legrand comes out of the washroom. Benedictine slaps Chib’s face. Chib slaps her back. Gobrinus lifts up a section of the bar and hurtles through the opening, crying, “Poisson! Poisson!”
He collides with Legrand, who lurches into Bela, who screams, whirls, and slaps Legrand, who slaps back. Benedictine empties a glass of P in Chib’s face. Howling, he jumps up and swings his fist. Benedictine ducks, and the fist goes over her shoulder into a girlfriend’s chest.
Red Hawk leaps up on the table and shouts, “I’m a regular bearcat, half-alligator, half…”
The table, held up in a graviton field, can’t bear much weight. It tilts and catapults him into the girls, and all go down. They bite and scratch Red Hawk, and Benedictine squeezes his testides. He screams, writhes, and hurls Benedictine with his feet onto the top of the table. It has regained its normal height and altitude, but now it flips over again, tossing her to the other side. Legrand, tippytoeing through the crowd on his way to the exit, is knocked down. He loses some front teeth against somebody’s knee cap. Spitting blood and teeth, he jumps up and slugs a bystander.
Gobrinus fires off a gun that shoots a tiny Very light. It’s supposed to blind the brawlers and so bring them to their senses while they’re regaining their sight. It hangs in the air and shines like
A STAR OVER BEDLAM
The Police Chief is talking via fido to a man in a public booth. The man has turned off the video and is disguising his voice.
“They’re beating the shit out of each other in The Private Universe.”
The Chief groans. The Festival has just begun, and They are at it already.
“Thanks. The boys’ll be on the way. What’s your name? I’d like to recommend you for a Citizen’s Medal.”
“What! And get the shit knocked out of me, too! I ain’t no stoolie; just doing my duty. Besides, I don’t like Gobrinus or his customers. They’re a bunch of snobs.”
The Chief issues orders to the riot squad, leans back, and drinks a beer while he watches the operation on fido. What’s the matter with these people, anyway? They’re always mad about something.
The sirens scream. Although the bolgani ride electrically driven noiseless tricycles, they’re still dinging to the centuries-old tradition of warning the criminals that they’re coming. Five trikes pull up before the open door of The Private Universe. The police dismount and confer. Their two-storied cylindrical helmets are black and have scarlet roaches. They wear goggles for some reason although their vehicles can’t go over 15 m.p.h. Their jackets are black and fuzzy, like a teddy bear’s fur, and huge golden epaulets decorate their shoulders. The shorts are electric-blue and fuzzy; the jackboots, glossy black. They carry electric shock sticks and guns that fire chokegas pellets.
Gobrinus blocks the entrance. Sergeant O’Hara says, “Come on, let us in. No, I don’t have a warrant of entry. But I’ll get one.”
“If you do, I’ll sue,” Gobrinus says. He smiles. While it is true that government red tape was so tangled he quit trying to acquire a tavern legally, it is also true that the government will protect him in this issue. Invasion of privacy is a tough rap for the police to break.
O’Hara looks inside the doorway at the two bodies on the floor, at those holding their heads and sides and wiping off blood, and at Ac-cipiter, sitting like a vulture dreaming of carrion. One of the bodies gets up on all fours and crawls through between Gobrinus’ legs out into the street.
“Sergeant, arrest that man!” Gobrinus says. “He’s wearing an illegal fido. I accuse him of invasion of privacy.”
O’Hara’s face lights up. At least he’ll get one arrest to his credit. Legrand is placed in the paddywagon, which arrives just after the ambulance. Red Hawk is carried out as far as the doorway by his friends. He opens his eyes just as he’s being carried on a stretcher to the ambulance and he mutters.
O’Hara leans over him. ‘What?“
“I fought a bear once with only my knife, and I came out better than with those cunts. I charge them with assault and battery, murder and mayhem.”
O’Hara’s attempt to get Red Hawk to sign a warrant fails because Red Hawk is now unconscious. He curses. By the time Red Hawk begins feeling better, he’ll refuse to sign the warrant. He won’t want the girls and their boy friends laying for him, not if he has any sense at all.
Through the barred window of the paddywagon, Legrand screams, “I’m a gummint agent! You can’t arrest me!”
The police get a hurry-up call to go to the front of the Folk Center, where a fight between local youths and Westwood invaders is threatening to become a riot. Benedictine leaves the tavern. Despite several blows in the shoulders and stomach, a kick in the buttocks, and a bang on the head, she shows no signs of losing the fetus.
Chib, half-sad, half-glad, watches her go. He feels a dull grief that the baby is to be denied life. By now he realizes that part of his objection to the abortion is identification with the fetus; he knows what Grandpa thinks he does not know. He realizes that his birth was an accident—lucky or unlucky. If things had gone otherwise, he would not have been born. The thought of his nonexistence—no painting, no friends, no laughter, no hope, no love—horrifies him. His mother, drunkenly negligent about contraception, has had any number of abortions, and he could have been one of them.
Watching Benedictine swagger away (despite her torn clothes), he wonders what he could ever have seen in her. Life with her, even with a child, would have been gritty.
In the hope-lined nest of the mouth
Love flies once more, nestles down,
Coos, flashes feathered glory, dazzles,
And then flies away, crapping,
As is the wont of hirds,
To jet-assist the takeoff.
—Omar Runic
Chib returns to his home, but he still can’t get back into his room. He goes to the storeroom. The painting is seven-eighths finished but was not completed because he was dissatisfied with it. Now he takes it from the house and carries it to Runic’s house, which is in the same clutch as his. Runic is at the Center, but he always leaves his doors open when he’s gone. He has equipment which Chib uses to finish the painting, working with a sureness and intensity he lacked the first time he was creating it. He then leaves Runic’s house with the huge oval canvas held above his head.
He strides past the pedestals and under their curving branches with the ovoids at their ends. He skirts several small grassy parks with trees, walks beneath more houses, and in ten minutes is nearing the heart of Beverly Hills. Here mercurial Chib sees
ALL IN THE GOLDEN AFTERNOON, THREE LEADEN LADIES
drifting in a canoe on Lake Issus. Maryam bint Yusuf, her mother, and aunt listlessly hold fishing poles and look towards the gay colors, music, and the chattering crowd before the Folk Center. By now the police have broken up the juvenile fight and are standing around to make sure nobody else makes trouble.
The three women are dressed in the somber clothes, completely body-concealing, of the Mohammedan Wahhabi fundamentalist sect. They do not wear veils; not even the Wahhabi now insist on this. Their Egyptian brethren ashore are clad in modern garments, shameful and sinful. Despite which, the ladies stare at them.
Their menfolk are at the edge of the crowd. Bearded and costumed like sheiks in a Foreign Legion fido show, they mutter gargling oaths and hiss at the iniquitous display of female flesh. But they stare.
This small group has come from the zoological preserves of Abyssinia, where they were caught poaching. Their gummint gave them three choices. Imprisonment in a rehabilitation center, where they would be treated until they became good citizens if it took the rest of their lives. Emigration to the megalopolis of Haifa, Israel. Or emigration to Beverly Hills, LA.
What, dwell among the accursed Jews of Israel? They spat and chose Beverly Hills. Alas, Allah had mocked them! They were now surrounded by Finkelsteins, Applebaums, Siegels, Weintraubs, and others of the infidel tribes of Isaac. Even worse, Beverly Hills had no mosque. They either traveled forty kilometers every day to the 16th level, where a mosque was available, or used a private home.
Chib hastens to the edge of the plastic-edged lake and puts down his painting and bows low, whipping off his somewhat battered hat. Maryam smiles at him but loses the smile when the two chaperones reprimand her.
“Ya kelbl Ya ibn kelh!” the two shout at him.
Chib grins at them, waves his hat, and says, “Charmed, I’m sure, mesdames! Oh, you lovely ladies remind me of the Three Graces.”
He then cries out, “I love you, Maryam! I love you! Thou art like the Rose of Sharon to me! Beautiful, doe-eyed, virginal! A fortress of innocence and strength, filled with a fierce motherhood and utter faithfulness to thy one true love! I love thee, thou art the only light in a black sky of dead stars! I cry to you across the void!”
Maryam understands World English, but the wind carries his words away from her. She simpers, and Chib cannot help feeling a momentary repulsion, a flash of anger as if she has somehow betrayed him. Nevertheless, he rallies and shouts, “I invite you to come with me to the showing! You and your mother and aunt will be my guests. You can see my paintings, my soul, and know what kind of man is going to carry you off on his Pegasus, my dove!”
There is nothing as ridiculous as the verbal outpourings of a young poet in love. Outrageously exaggerated. 1 laugh. But I am also touched. Old as I am, I remember my first loves, the fire, the torrents of words, lightning-sheathed, ache-winged. Dear lasses, most of you are dead; the rest, withered. I blow you a kiss.
—Grandpa
Maryam’s mother stands up in the canoe. For a second, her profile is to Chib, and he sees intimations of the hawk that Maryam will be when she is her mother’s age. Maryam now has a gently aquiline face —“the sweep of the sword of love”—Chib has called that nose. Bold but beautiful. However, her mother does look like a dirty old eagle. And her aunt—uneaglish but something of the camel in those features.
Chib suppresses these unfavorable, even treacherous, comparisons. But he cannot suppress the three bearded, robed, and unwashed men who gather around him.
Chib smiles but says, “I don’t remember inviting you.”
They look blank since rapidly spoken LA English is a hufty-magufty to them. Abu—generic name for any Egyptian in Beverly Hills—rasps an oath so ancient even the pre-Mohammed Meccans knew it. He forms a fist. Another Arab steps towards the painting and draws back a foot as if to kick it.
At this moment, Maryam’s mother discovers that it is as dangerous to stand in a canoe as on a camel. It is worse, because the three women cannot swim.
Neither can the middle-aged Arab who attacks Chib, only to find his victim sidestepping and then urging him on into the lake with a foot in the rear. One of the young men rushes Chib; the other starts to kick at the painting. Both halt on hearing the three women scream and on seeing them go over into the water.
Then the two run to the edge of the lake, where they also go into the water, propelled by one of Chib’s hands in each of their backs. A bolgan hears the six of them screaming and thrashing around and runs over to Chib. Chib is becoming concerned because Maryam is having trouble staying above the water. Her terror is not faked.
What Chib does not understand is why they are all carrying on so. Their feet must be on the bottom; the surface is below their chins. Despite which, Maryam looks as if she is going to drown. So do the others, but he is not interested in them. He should go in after Maryam. However, if he does, he will have to get a change of clothes before going to the showing.
At this thought, he laughs loudly and then even more loudly as the bolgan goes in after the women. He picks up the painting and walks off laughing. Before he reaches the Center, he sobers.
“Now, how come Grandpa was so right? How does he read me so well? Am I fickle, too shallow? No, I have been too deeply in love too many times. Can I help it if I love Beauty, and the beauties I love do not have enough Beauty? My eye is too demanding; it cancels the urgings of my heart.”
THE MASSACRE OF THE INNER SENSE
The entrance hall (one of twelve) which Chib enters was designed by Grandpa Winnegan. The visitor comes into a long curving tube lined with mirrors at various angles. He sees a triangular door at the end of the corridor. The door seems to be too tiny for anybody over nine years old to enter. The illusion makes the visitor feel as if he’s walking up the wall as he progresses towards the door. At the end of the tube, the visitor is convinced he’s standing on the ceiling.
But the door gets larger as he approaches until it becomes huge. Commentators have guessed that this entrance is the architect’s symbolic representation of the gateway to the world of art. One should stand on his head before entering the wonderland of aesthetics.
On going in, the visitor thinks at first that the tremendous room is inside out or reversed. He gets even dizzier. The far wall actually seems the near wall until the visitor gets reorientated. Some people can’t adjust and have to get out before they faint or vomit.
On the right hand is a hatrack with a sign: hang your head here. A double pun by Grandpa, who always carries a joke too far for most people. If Grandpa goes beyond the bounds of verbal good taste, his great-great-grandson has overshot the moon in his paintings. Thirty of his latest have been revealed, including the last three of his Dog Series: Dog Star, Dog Would, and Dog Tiered. Ruskinson and his disciples are threatening to throw up. Luscus and his flock praise, but they’re restrained. Luscus has told them to wait until he talks to young Winnegan before they go all-out. The fido men are busy shooting and interviewing both and trying to provoke a quarrel.
The main room of the building is a huge hemisphere with a bright ceiling which runs through the complete spectrum every nine minutes. The floor is a giant chessboard, and in the center of each square is a face, each of a great in the various arts. Michelangelo, Mozart, Balzac, Zeuxis, Beethoven, li Po, Twain, Dostoyevsky, Farmisto, Mbuzi, Cupel, Krishnagurti, etc. Ten squares are left faceless so that future generations may add their own nominees for immortality.
The lower part of the wall is painted with murals depicting significant events in the lives of the artists. Against the curving wall are nine stages, one for each of the Muses. On a console ahove each stage is a giant statue of the presiding goddess. They are naked and have overripe figures: huge-breasted, broad-hipped, sturdy-legged, as if the sculptor thought of them as Earth goddesses, not refined intellectual types.
The faces are basically structured like the smooth placid faces of classical Greek statues, but they have an unsettling expression around the mouths and eyes. The lips are smiling but seem ready to break into a snarl. The eyes are deep and menacing, don’t sell me out, they say.
IF YOU DO…
A transparent plastic hemisphere extends over each stage and has acoustic properties which keep people who are not beneath the shell from hearing the sounds emanating from the stage and vice versa.
Chib makes his way through the noisy crowd towards the stage of Polyhymnia, the Muse who includes painting in her province. He passes the stage on which Benedictine is standing and pouring her lead heart out in an alchemy of golden notes. She sees Chib and manages somehow to glare at him and at the same time to keep smiling at her audience. Chib ignores her but observes that she has replaced the dress ripped in the tavern. He sees also the many policemen stationed around the building. The crowd does not seem in an explosive mood. Indeed, it seems happy, if boisterous. But the police know how deceptive this can be. One spark…
Chib goes by the stage of Calliope, where Omar Runic is extemporizing. He comes to Polyhymnia’s, nods at Rex Luscus, who waves at him, and sets his painting on the stage. It is titled The Massacre of the Innocents (subtitle: Dog in the Mangef).
The painting depicts a stable.
The stable is a grotto with curiously shaped stalactites. The light that breaks—or fractures—through the cave is Chib’s red. It penetrates every object, doubles its strength, and then rays out jaggedly. The viewer, moving from side to side to get a complete look, can actually see the many levels of light as he moves, and thus he catches glimpses of the figures under the exterior figures.
The cows, sheep, and horses are in stalls at the end of the cave. Some are looking with horror at Mary and the infant. Others have their mouths open, evidently trying to warn Mary. Chib has used the legend that the animals in the manger were able to talk to each other the night Christ was born.
Riders of the Purple Wage
Joseph, a tired old man, so slumped he seems backboneless, is in a corner. He wears two horns, but each has a halo, so it’s all right.
Mary’s back is to the bed of straw on which the infant is supposed to be. From a trapdoor in the floor of the cave, a man is reaching to place a huge egg on the straw bed. He is in a cave beneath the cave and is dressed in modern clothes, has a boozy expression, and, like Joseph, slumps as if invertebrate. Behind him a grossly fat woman, looking remarkably like Chib’s mother, has the baby, which the man passed on to her before putting the foundling egg on the straw bed.
The baby has an exquisitely beautiful face and is suffused with a white glow from his halo. The woman has removed the halo from his head and is using the sharp edge to butcher the baby.
Chib has a deep knowledge of anatomy, since he has dissected many corpses while getting his Ph.D. in art at Beverly Hills U. The body of the infant is not unnaturally elongated, as so many of Chib’s figures are. It is more than photographic; it seems to be an actual baby. Its viscera is unraveled through a large bloody hole.
The onlookers are struck in their viscera as if this were not a painting but a real infant, slashed and disemboweled, found on their doorsteps as they left home.
The egg has a semitransparent shell. In its murky yolk floats a hideous little devil, horns, hooves, tail. Its blurred features resemble a combination of Henry Ford’s and Uncle Sam’s. When the viewers shift to one side or the other, the faces of others appear: prominents in the development of modern society.
The window is crowded with wild animals that have come to adore but have stayed to scream soundlessly in horror. The beasts in the foreground are those that have been exterminated by man or survive only in zoos and natural preserves. The dodo, the blue whale, the passenger pigeon, the quagga, the gorilla, orangutan, polar bear, cougar, lion, tiger, grizzly bear, California condor, kangaroo, wombat, rhinoceros, bald eagle.
Behind them are other animals and, on a hill, the dark crouching shapes of the Tasmanian aborigine and Haitian Indian.
“What is your considered opinion of this rather remarkable painting, Doctor Luscus?” a fido interviewer asks.
Luscus smiles and says, “I’ll have a considered judgment in a few minutes. Perhaps you’d better talk to Doctor Ruskinson first. He seems to have made up his mind at once. Fools and angels, you know.”
Ruskinson’s red face and scream of fury are transmitted over the fido.
“The shit heard around the world!” Chib says loudly.
“INSULT! SPITTLE! PLASTIC DUNG! A BLOW IN THE FACE OF ART AND A KICK IN THE BUTT FOR HUMANITY! INSULT! INSULT!“
“Why is it such an insult, Doctor Ruskinson?” the fido man says. “Because it mocks the Christian faith, and also the Panamorite faith? It doesn’t seem to me it does that. It seems to me that Winnegan is trying to say that men have perverted Christianity, maybe all religions, all ideals, for their own greedy self-destructive purposes, that man is basically a killer and a perverter. At least, that’s what I get out of it, although of course I’m only a simple layman, and…”
“Let the critics make the analysis, young man!” Ruskinson snaps. “Do you have a double Ph.D., one in psychiatry and one in art? Have you been certified as a critic by the government?
“Winnegan, who has no talent whatsoever, let alone this genius that various self-deluded blowhards prate about, this abomination from Beverly Hills, presents his junk—actually a mishmash which has attracted attention solely because of a new technique that any electronic technician could invent—I am enraged that a mere gimmick, a trifling novelty, cannot only fool certain sectors of the public but highly educated and federally certified critics such as Doctor Luscus here— although there will always be scholarly asses who bray so loudly, pompously, and obscurely that…”
“Isn’t it true,” the fido man says, “that many painters we now call great, Van Gogh for one, were condemned or ignored by their contemporary critics? And…”
The fido man, skilled in provoking anger for the benefit of his viewers, pauses. Ruskinson swells, his head a bloodvessel just before aneurysm.
“I’m no ignorant layman!” he screams. “I can’t help it that there have been Luscuses in the past! I know what I’m talking about! Winnegan is only a micrometeorite in the heaven of Art, not fit to shine the shoes of the great luminaries of painting. His reputation has been pumped up by a certain clique so it can shine in the reflected glory, the hyenas, biting the hand that feeds them, like mad dogs…”
“Aren’t you mixing your metaphors a little bit?” the fido man says.
Luscus takes Chib’s hand tenderly and draws him to one side where they’re out of fido range.
“Darling Chib,” he coos, “now is the time to declare yourself. You know how vastly I love you, not only as an artist but for yourself. It must be impossible for you to resist any longer the deeply sympathetic vibrations that leap unhindered between us. God, if you only knew how I dreamed of you, my glorious godlike Chib, with…”
“If you think I’m going to say yes just because you have the power to make or break rhy reputation, to deny me the grant, you’re wrong,“ Chib says. He jerks his hand away.
Luscus’ good eye glares. He says, “Do you find me repulsive? Surely it can’t be on moral grounds…”
“It’s the principle of the thing,” Chib says. “Even if I were in love with you, which I’m not, I wouldn’t let you make love to me. I want to be judged on my merit alone, that only. Come to think of it, I don’t give a damn about anybody’s judgment. I don’t want to hear praise or blame from you or anybody. Look at my paintings and talk to each other, you jackals. But don’t try to make me agree with your little images of me.”
THE ONLY GOOD CRITIC IS A DEAD CRITIC
Omar Runic has left his dais and now stands before Chib’s paintings. He places one hand on his naked left chest, on which is tattooed the face of Herman Melville, Homer occupying the other place of honor on his right breast. He shouts loudly, his black eyes like furnace doors blown out by explosion. As has happened before, he is seized with inspiration derived from Chib’s paintings.
“Call me Ahab, not Ishmael.
For 1 have hooked the Leviathan.
I am the wild ass’s colt born to a man.
Lo, my eye has seen it all!
My bosom is like wine that has no vent.
I am a sea with doors, but the doors are stuck.
Watch out! The skin will burst; the doors will break.
‘You are Nimrod, I say to my friend, Chib.
And now is the hour when God says to his angels,
If this is what he can do as a beginning, then
Nothing is impossible for him.
He will be blowing his horn before
The ramparts of Heaven and shouting for
The Moon as hostage, the Virgin as wife,
And demanding a cut on the profits
From the Great Whore of Babylon.“
“Stop that son of a bitch!” the Festival Director shouts. “He’ll cause a riot like he did last year!”
The bolgani begin to move in. Chib watches Luscus, who is talking to the fido man. Chib can’t hear Luscus, but he’s sure Luscus is not saying complimentary things about him.
“Melville wrote of me long before I was born.
I’m the man who wants to comprehend
The Universe but comprehend on my terms.
I am Ahab whose hate must pierce, shatter,
All impediment of Time, Space, or Subject
Mortality and hurl my fierce
Incandescence into the Womb of Creation,
Disturbing in its Lair whatever Force or
Unknown Thing-in-Itself crouches there,
Remote, removed, unrevealed.”
The Director gestures at the police to remove Runic. Ruskinson is still shouting, although the cameras are pointing at Runic or Luscus. One of the Young Radishes, Huga Wells-Erb Heinsturbury, the science-fiction authoress, is shaking with hysteria generated by Runic’s voice and with a lust for revenge. She is sneaking up on a Time fido man. Time has long ago ceased to be a magazine, since there are no magazines, but became a government-supported communications bureau. Time is an example of Uncle Sam’s left-hand, right-hand, hands-off policy of providing communications bureaus with all they need and at the same time permitting the bureau executives to determine the bureau policies. Thus, government provision and free speech are united. This is fine, in theory, anyway.
Time has preserved several of its original policies, that is, truth and objectivity must be sacrificed for the sake of a witticism and science-fiction must be put down. Time has sneered at every one of Heinstur-bury’s works, and so she is out to get some personal satisfaction for the hurt caused by the unfair reviews.
“Quid nunc? Cui bono?
Time? Space? Substance? Accident?
When you die—Hell? Nirvana,
Nothing is nothing to think about.
The canons of philosophy boom.
Their projectiles are duds.
The ammo heaps of theology blow up,
Set off by the saboteur Reason.
“Call me Ephraim, for I was halted
At the Ford of God and could not tongue
The sibilance to let me pass.
Riders of the Purple Wage
Well, I can’t pronounce shibboleth, But I can say shit!“
Huga Wells-Erb Heinsturbury kicks the Time fido man in the balls. He throws up his hands, and the football-shaped, football-sized camera sails from his hands and strikes a youth on the head. The youth is a Young Radish, Ludwig Euterpe Mahlzart. He is smoldering with rage because of the damnation of his tone poem, Jetting The Stuff Of Future Hells, and the camera is the extra fuel needed to make him blaze up uncontrollably. He punches the chief musical critic in his fat belly.
Huga, not the Time man, is screaming with pain. Her bare toes have struck the hard plastic armor with which the Time man, recipient of many such a kick, protects his genitals. Huga hops around on one foot while holding the injured foot in her hands. She twirls into a girl, and there is a chain effect. A man falls against the Time man, who is stooping over to pick up bis camera.
“Ahaaa!” Huga screams and tears off the Time man’s helmet and straddles him and beats him over the head with the optical end of the camera. Since the solid-state camera is still working, it is sending to billions of viewers some very intriguing, if dizzying, pictures. Blood obscures one side of the picture, but not so much that the viewers are wholly cheated. And then they get another novel shot as the camera flies into the air again, turning over and over.
A bolgan has shoved his shock-stick against her back, causing her to stiffen and propel the camera in a high arc behind her. Huga’s current lover grapples with the bolgan; they roll on the floor; a Westwood juvenile picks up the shock-stick and has a fine time goosing the adults around him until a local youth jumps him.
“Riots are the opium of the people,” the police chief groans. He calls in all units and puts in a call to the chief of police of Westwood, who is, however, having his own troubles.
Runic beats his breast and howls
“Sir, I exist! And don’t tell me,
As you did Crane, that that creates
No obligation in you towards me.
I am a man; I am unique.
I’ve thrown the Bread out the window,
Pissed in the Wine, pulled the plug
From the bottom of the Ark, cut the Tree
For firewood, and if there were a Holy
Ghost, I’d goose him.
But I know that it all does not mean
A God damned thing,
That nothing means nothing,
That is is is and not-is not is is-not
That a rose is a rose is a
That we are here and will not he
And that is all we can know!“
Ruskinson sees Chib coming towards him, squawks, and tries to escape. Chib seizes the canvas of Dogmas from a Dog and batters Ruskinson over the head with it. Luscus protests in horror, not because of the damage done to Ruskinson but because the painting might be damaged. Chib turns around and batters Luscus in the stomach with the oval’s edge.
“The earth lurches like a ship going down,
Its hack almost broken by the flood of
Excrement from the heavens and the deeps,
What God in His terrible munificence
Has granted on hearing Ahab cry,
Bullshitl Bullshit!
“I weep to think that this is Man
And this his end. But wait!
On the crest of the flood, a three-master
Of antique shape. The Flying Dutchman!
And Ahab is astride a ship’s deck once more.
Laugh, you Fates, and mock, you Norns!
For I am Ahab and I am Man,
And though 1 cannot break a hole
Through the wall of What Seems
To grab a handful of What Is,
Yet, I will keep on punching.
And I and my crew will not give up,
Though the timbers split beneath our feet
And we sink to become indistinguishable
From the general excrement.
“For a moment that will burn on the
Eye of God forever, Ahab stands
Outlined against the blaze of Orion,
Fist clenched, a bloody phallus,
Like Zeus exhibiting the trophy of
The unmanning of his father Cronus.
Riders of the Purple Wage
And then he and his crew and ship
Dip and hurtle headlong over
The edge of the world.
And from what I hear, they are still
F
a
l
l
i
n
g
Chib is shocked into a quivering mass by a jolt from a bolgan’s electrical riot stick. While he is recovering, he hears his Grandpa’s voice issuing from the transceiver in his hat.
“Chib, come quick! Accipiter has broken in and is trying to get through the door of my room!”
Chib gets up and fights and shoves his way to the exit. When he arrives, panting, at his home he finds that the door to Grandpa’s room has been opened. The IRB men and electronic technicians are standing in the hallway. Chib bursts into Grandpa’s room. Accipiter is standing in its middle and is quivering and pale. Nervous stone. He sees Chib and shrinks back, saying, “It wasn’t my fault. I had to break in. It was the only way I could find out for sure. It wasn’t my fault; I didn’t touch him.”
Chib’s throat is closing in on itself. He cannot speak. He kneels down and takes Grandpa’s hand. Grandpa has a slight smile on his blue lips. Once and for all, he has eluded Accipiter. In his hand is the latest sheet of his Ms.
THROUGH BALAKLAVAS OF HATE, THEY CHARGE TOWARDS GOD
For most of my life, I have seen only a truly devout few and a great majority of truly indifferent. But there is a new spirit abroad. So many young men and women have revived, not a love for God, but a violent antipathy towards Him. This excites and restores me. Youths like my grandson and Runic shout blasphemies and so worship Him. If they did not believe, they would never think about Him. I now have some confidence in the future.
TO THE STICKS VIA THE STYX
Dressed in black, Chib and his mother go down the tube entrance to level 13B. It’s luminous-walled, spacious, and the fare is free. Chib tells the ticket-fido his destination. Behind the wall, the protein computer, no larger than a human brain, calculates. A coded ticket slides out of a slot. Chib takes the ticket, and they go to the bay, a great incurve, where he sticks the ticket into a slot. Another ticket protrudes, and a mechanical voice repeats the information on the ticket in World and LA English, in case they can’t read.
Gondolas shoot into the bay and decelerate to a stop. Wheelless, they float in a continually rebalancing graviton field. Sections of the bay slide back to make ports for the gondolas. Passengers step into the cages designated for them. The cages move forward; their doors open automatically. The passengers step into the gondolas. They sit down and wait while the safety meshmold closes over them. From the recesses of the chassis, transparent plastic curves rise and meet to form a dome.
Automatically timed, monitored by redundant protein computers for safety, the gondolas wait until the coast is clear. On receiving the go-ahead, they move slowly out of the bay to the tube. They pause while getting another affirmation, trebly checked in microseconds. Then they move swiftly into the tube.
Whoosh! Whoosh! Other gondolas pass them. The tube glows yel-lowly as if filled with electrified gas. The gondola accelerates rapidly. A few are still passing it, but Chib’s speeds up and soon none can catch up with it. The round posterior of a gondola ahead is a glimmering quarry that will not be caught until it slows before mooring at its destined bay. There are not many gondolas in the tube. Despite a 100-million population, there is little traffic on the north-south route. Most LAers stay in the self-sufficient walls of their clutches. There is more traffic on the east-west tubes, since a small percentage prefer the public ocean beaches to the municipality swimming pools.
The vehicle screams southward. After a few minutes, the tube begins to slope down and suddenly it is at a 45-degree angle to the horizontal. They flash by level after level.
Through the transparent walls, Chib glimpses the people and architecture of other cities. Level 8, Long Beach, is interesting. Its homes look like two cut-quartz pie plates, one on top of another, open end on open end, and the unit mounted on a column of carved figures, the exit-entrance ramp a flying buttress.
At level 3A, the tube straightens out. Now the gondola races past establishments the sight of which causes Mama to shut her eyes. Chib squeezes his mother’s hand and thinks of the half-brother and cousin who are behind the yellowish plastic. This level contains fifteen per cent of the population, the retarded, the incurable insane, the too-ugly, the monstrous, the senile aged. They swarm here, the vacant or twisted faces pressed against the tube wall to watch the pretty cars float by.
“Humanitarian” medical science keeps alive the babies that should. —by Nature’s imperative—have died. Ever since the 20th century, humans with defective genes have been saved from death. Hence, the continual spreading of these genes. The tragic thing is that science can now detect and correct defective genes in the ovum and sperm. Theoretically, all human beings could be blessed with totally healthy bodies and physically perfect brains. But the rub is that we don’t have near enough doctors and facilities to keep up with the births. This despite the ever decreasing drop in the birth rate.
Medical science keeps people living so long that senility strikes. So, more and more slobbering mindless decrepits. And also an accelerating addition of the mentally addled. There are therapies and drugs to restore most of them to “normalcy,” but not enough doctors and facilities. Some day there may be, but that doesn’t help the contemporary unfortunate.
What to do now? The ancient Greeks placed defective babies in the fields to die. The Eskimos shipped out their old people on ice floes. Should we gas our abnormal infants and seniles? Sometimes, I think it’s the merciful thing to do. But I can’t ask somebody else to pull the switch when I won’t.
I would shoot the first man to reach for It.
—from Grandfa’s Private Ejaculations
The gondola approaches one of the rare intersections. Its passengers see down the broad-mouthed tube to their right. An express flies towards them; it looms. Collision course. They know better, but they can’t keep from gripping the mesh, gritting their teeth, and bracing their legs. Mama gives a small shriek. The fliers hurtles over them and disappears, the flapping scream of air a soul on its way to underworld judgment.
The tube dips again until it levels out on 1. They see the ground below and the massive self-adjusting pillars supporting the megapolis. They whiz by over a little town, quaint, early 21st century LA preserved as a museum, one of many beneath the cube.
Fifteen minutes after embarking, the Winnegans reach the end of the line. An elevator takes them to the ground, where they enter a big black limousine. This is furnished by a private-enterprise mortuary, since Unde Sam or the LA government will pay for cremation but not for burial. The Church no longer insists on interment, leaving it to the religionists to choose between being wind-blown ashes or underground corpses.
The sun is halfway towards the zenith. Mama begins to have trouble breathing and her arms and neck redden and swell. The three times she’s been outside the walls, she’s been attacked with this allergy despite the air conditioning of the limousine. Chib pats her hand while they’re riding over a roughly patched road. The archaic eighty-year-old, fuel-cell-powered, electric-motor-driven vehicle is, however, rough-riding only by comparison with the gondola. It covers the ten kilometers to the cemetery speedily, stopping once to let deer cross the road.
Father Fellini greets them. He is distressed because he is forced to tell them that the Church feels that Grandpa has committed sacrilege. To substitute another man’s body for his corpse, to have mass said over it, to have it buried in sacred ground is to blaspheme. Moreover, Grandpa died an unrepentant criminal. At least, to the knowledge of the Church, he made no contrition just before he died.
Chib expects this refusal. St. Mary’s of BH-14 has declined to perform services for Grandpa within its walls. But Grandpa has often told Chib that he wants to be buried beside his ancestors, and Chib is determined that Grandpa will get his wish.
Chib says, “I’ll bury him myself! Right on the edge of the graveyard!”
“You can’t do that!” the priest, mortuary officials, and a federal agent say simultaneously.
“The hell I can’t! Where’s the shovel?”
It is then that he sees the thin dark face and falciform nose of Ac-cipiter. The agent is supervising the digging up of Grandpa’s (first) coffin. Nearby are at least fifty fido men shooting with their minicam-eras, the transceivers floating a few decameters near them. Grandpa is getting full coverage, as befits the Last Of The Billionaires and The Greatest Criminal Of The Century.
Fido interviewer: “Mr. Accipiter, could we have a few words from you? I’m not exaggerating when I say that there are probably at least ten billion people watching this historic event. After all, even the grade-school kids know of Win-again Winnegan.
“How do you feel about this? You’ve been on the case for 26 years. The successful conclusion must give you great satisfaction.”
Accipiter, unsmiling as the essence of diorite: “Well, actually, I’ve not devoted full time to this case. Only about three years of accumulative time. But since I’ve spent at least several days each month on it, you might say I’ve been on Winnegan’s trail for 26 years.“
Interviewer: “It’s been said that the ending of this case also means the end of the IRB. If we’ve not been misinformed, the IRB was only kept functioning because of Winnegan. You had other business, of course, during this time, but the tracking down of counterfeiters and gamblers who don’t report their income has been turned over to other bureaus. Is this true? If so, what do you plan to do?”
Accipiter, voice flashing a crystal of emotion: “Yes, the IRB is being disbanded. But not until after the case against Winnegan’s granddaughter and her son is finished. They harbored him and are, therefore, accessories after the fact.
“In fact, almost the entire population of Beverly Hills, level 14, should be on trial. I know, but can’t prove it as yet, that everybody, including the municipal chief of police, was well aware that Winnegan was hiding in that house. Even Winnegan’s priest knew it, since Winnegan frequently went to mass and to confession. His priest claims that he urged Winnegan to turn himself in and also refused to give him absolution unless he did so.
“But Winnegan, a hardened ‘mouse’—I mean, criminal, if ever I saw one, refused to follow the priest’s urgings. He claimed that he had not committed a crime, that, believe it or not, Uncle Sam was the criminal. Imagine the effrontery, the depravity, of the man!”
Interviewer: “Surely you don’t plan to arrest the entire population of Beverly Hills 14?”
Accipiter: “I have been advised not to.”
Interviewer: “Do you plan on retiring after this case is wound up?”
Accipiter: “No. I intend to transfer to the Greater LA Homicide Bureau. Murder for profit hardly exists any more, but there are still crimes of passion, thank God!”
Interviewer: “Of course, if young Winnegan should win his case against you—he has charged you with invasion of domestic privacy, illegal housebreaking, and directly causing his great-great-grandfather’s death—then you won’t be able to work for the Homicide Bureau or any police department.”
Accipiter, flashing several crystals of emotion: “It’s no wonder we law enforcers have such a hard time operating effectively! Sometimes, not only the majority of citizens seem to be on the law-breaker’s side but my own employers…”
Interviewer: “Would you care to complete that statement? I’m sure your employers are watching this channel. No? I understand that Win-
negan’s trial and yours are, for some reason, scheduled to take place at the same time. How do you plan to be present at both trials? Heh, heh! Some fido-casters are calling you The Simultaneous Man!“
Accipter, face darkening: “Some idiot clerk did that! He incorrectly fed the data into a legal computer. The confusion of dates is being straightened out now. I might mention that the clerk is suspected of deliberately making the error. There have been too many cases like this…”
Interviewer: “Would you mind summing up the course of this case for our viewers’ benefit? Just the highlights, please.”
Accipiter: “Well, ah, as you know, fifty years ago all large private-enterprise businesses had become government bureaus. All except the building construction firm, the Finnegan Fifty-three States Company, of which the president was Finn Finnegan. He was the father of the man who is to be buried—somewhere—today.
“Also, all unions except the largest, the construction union, were dissolved or were government unions. Actually, the company and its union were one, because all employees got ninety-five per cent of the money, distributed more or less equally among them. Old Finnegan was both the company president and union business agent-secretary.
“By hook or crook, mainly by crook, I believe, the firm-union had resisted the inevitable absorption. There were investigations into Fin-negan’s methods: coercion and blackmail of U. S. Senators and even U. S. Supreme Court Justices. Nothing was, however, proved.”
Interviewer: “For the benefit of our viewers who may be a little hazy on their history, even fifty years ago money was used only for the purchase of nonguaranteed items. Its other use, as today, was as an index of prestige and social esteem. At one time, the government was thinking of getting rid of currency entirely, but a study revealed that it had great psychological value. The income tax was also kept, although the government had no use for money, because the size of a man’s tax determined prestige and also because it enabled the government to remove a large amount of currency from circulation.”
Accipiter: “Anyway, when old Finnegan died, the federal government renewed its pressure to incorporate the construction workers and the company officials as civil servants. But young Finnegan proved to be as foxy and vicious as his old man. I don’t suggest, of course, that the fact that his uncle was President of the U.S. at that time had anything to do with young Finnegan’s success.”
Interviewer: “Young Finnegan was seventy years old when his father died.”
Accipiter: “During this struggle, which went on for many years, Finnegan decided to rename himself Winnegan. It’s a pun on Win Again. He seems to have had a childish, even imbecilic, delight in puns, which, frankly, I don’t understand. Puns, I mean.“
Interviewer: “For the benefit of our non-American viewers, who may not know of our national custom of Naming Day… this was originated by the Panamorites. When a citizen comes of age, he may at any time thereafter take a new name, one which he believes to be appropriate to his temperament or goal in life. I might point out that Uncle Sam, who’s been unfairly accused of trying to impose conformity upon his citizens, encourages this individualistic approach to life. This despite the increased record-keeping required on the government’s part.
“I might also point out something else of interest. The government claimed that Grandpa Winnegan was mentally incompetent. My listeners will pardon me, I hope, if I take up a moment of your time to explain the basis of Uncle Sam’s assertion. Now, for the benefit of those among you who are unacquainted with an early 20th-century classic, Finnegans Wake, despite your government’s wish for you to have a free lifelong education, the author, James Joyce, derived the title from an old vaudeville song.”
(Half-fadeout while a monitor briefly explains “vaudeville.”)
“The song was about Tim Finnegan, an Irish hod carrier who fell off a ladder while drunk and was supposedly killed. During the Irish wake held for Finnegan, the corpse is accidentally splashed with whiskey. Finnegan, feeling the touch of the whiskey, the ‘water of life,’ sits up in his coffin and then climbs out to drink and dance with the mourners.
“Grandpa Winnegan always claimed that the vaudeville song was based on reality, you can’t keep a good man down, and that the original Tim Finnegan was his ancestor. This preposterous statement was used by the government in its suit against Winnegan.
“However, Winnegan produced documents to substantiate his assertion. Later—too late—the documents were proved to be forgeries.”
Accipiter: “The government’s case against Winnegan was strengthened by the rank and file’s sympathy with the government. Citizens were complaining that the business-union was undemocratic and discriminatory. The officials and workers were getting relatively high wages, but many citizens had to be contented with their guaranteed income. So, Winnegan was brought to trial and accused, justly, of course, of various crimes, among which were subversion of democracy.
“Seeing the inevitable, Winnegan capped his criminal career. He somehow managed to steal 20 billion dollars from the federal deposit vault. This sum, by the way, was equal to half the currency then existing in Greater LA. Winnegan disappeared with the money, which he had not only stolen but had not paid income tax on. Unforgivable. I don’t know why so many people have glamorized this villain’s feat. Why, I’ve seen fido shows with him as the hero, thinly disguised under another name, of course.“
Interviewer: “Yes, folks, Winnegan committed the Crime Of The Age. And, although he has finally been located, and is to be buried today—somewhere—the case is not completely closed. The Federal government says it is. But where is the money, the 20 billion dollars?”
Accipiter: “Actually, the money has no value now except as collectors’ items. Shortly after the theft, the government called in all currency and then issued new bills that could not be mistaken for the old. The government had been wanting to do something like this for a long time, anyway, because it believed that there was too much currency, and it only reissued half the amount taken in.
“I’d like very much to know where the money is. I won’t rest until I do. I’ll hunt it down if I have to do it on my own time.”
Interviewer: “You may have plenty of time to do that if young Winnegan wins his case. Well, folks, as most of you may know, Winnegan was found dead in a lower level of San Francisco about a year after he disappeared. His grand-daughter identified the body, and the fingerprints, earprints, retinaprints, teethprints, blood-type, hair-type, and a dozen other identity prints matched out.”
Chib, who has been listening, thinks that Grandpa must have spent several millions of the stolen money arranging this. He does not know, but he suspects that a research lab somewhere in the world grew the duplicate in a biotank.
This happened two years after Chib was born. When Chib was five, his grandpa showed up. Without letting Mama know he was back, he moved in. Only Chib was his confidant. It was, of course, impossible for Grandpa to go completely unnoticed by Mama, yet she now insisted that she had never seen him. Chib thought that this was to avoid prosecution for being an accessory after the crime. He was not sure. Perhaps she had blocked off his “visitations” from the rest of her mind. For her it would be easy, since she never knew whether today was Tuesday or Thursday and could not tell you what year it was.
Chib ignores the mortuarians, who want to know what to do with the body. He walks over to the grave. The top of the ovoid coffin is visible now, with the long elephantlike snout of the digging machine sonically crumbling the dirt and then sucking it up. Accipiter, breaking through his lifelong control, is smiling at the fidomen and rubbing his hands.
“Dance a little, you son of a bitch,” Chib says, his anger the only block to the tears and the wail building up in him.
The area around the coffin is cleared to make room for the grappling arms of the machine. These descend, hook under, and lift the black, irradiated-plastic, mocksilver-arabesqued coffin up and out and onto the grass. Chib, seeing the IRB men begin to open the coffin, starts to say something but closes his mouth. He watches intently, his knees bent as if getting ready to jump. The fidomen close in, their eyeball-shaped cameras pointing at the group around the coffin.
Groaning, the lid rises. There is a big bang. Dense dark smoke billows. Accipiter and his men, blackened, eyes wide and white, coughing, stagger out of the cloud. The fidomen are running every-which way or stooping to pick up their cameras. Those who were standing far enough back can see that the explosion took place at the bottom of the grave. Only Chib knows that the raising of the coffin lid has activated the detonating device in the grave.
He is also the first to look up into the sky at the projectile soaring from the grave because only he expected it. The rocket climbs up to five hundred feet while the fidomen train their cameras on it. It bursts apart and from it a ribbon unfolds between two round objects. The objects expand to become balloons while the ribbon becomes a huge banner.
On it, in big black letters, are the words
WINNEGANS FAKE!
Twenty billions of dollars buried beneath the supposed bottom of“ the grave burn furiously. Some bills, blown up in the geyser of fireworks, are carried by the wind while IRB men, fidomen, mortuary officials, and municipality officials chase them.
Mama is stunned.
Accipiter looks as if he is having a stroke.
Chib cries and then laughs and rolls on the ground.
Grandpa has again screwed Uncle Sam and has also pulled his greatest pun where all the world can see it.
“Oh, you old man!” Chib sobs between laughing fits. “Oh, you old man! How I love you!”
While he is rolling on the ground again, roaring so hard his ribs hurt, he feels a paper in his hand. He stops laughing and gets on his knees and calls after the man who gave it to him. The man says, “I was paid by your grandfather to hand it to you when he was buried.”
Chib reads.
I hope nobody was hurt, not even the IRB men.
Final advice from the Wise Old Man In The Cave. Tear loose. Leave LA. Leave the country. Go to Egypt. Let your mother ride the purple wage on her own. She can do it if she practices thrift and self-denial. If she can’t, that’s not your fault.
You are fortunate indeed to have been born with talent, if not genius, and to he strong enough to want to rip out the umbilical cord. So do it. Go to Egypt. Steep yourself in the ancient culture. Stand before the Sphinx. Ask her (actually, it’s a he) the Question.
Then visit one of the zoological preserves south of the Nile. Live for a while in a reasonable facsimile of Nature as she was before mankind dishonored and disfigured her. There, where Homo Sapiens(?) evolved from the killer ape, absorb the spirit of that ancient place and time.
You’ve been painting with your penis, which I’m afraid was more stiffened with bile than with passion for life. Learn to paint with your heart. Only thus will you become great and true.
Paint.
Then, go wherever you want to go. I’ll be with you as long as you’re alive to remember me. To quote Runic, “I’ll be the Northern Lights of your soul.”
Hold fast to the belief that there will be others to love you just as much as I did or even more. What is more important, you must love ‘ them as much as they love you.
Can you do this?
* * * *
Afterword:
I’m strangely indifferent about getting a man onto the Moon. I say strangely because I’ve been reading science fiction since 1928, and selling science fiction stories since 1952. Moreover, I fully expected, and hoped and, prayed, that we would be on Mars by 1940. About the time I was eighteen, I gave up this early date but still knew that someday maybe 1970, we’d make it.
Also, I’ve been a military and commercial electronic technical writer since 1957 and at present am working for a company which is intimately concerned with the Saturn and Apollo space programs. Ten years ago, I would have been close to ecstasy if I could have worked on a space project. Rockets, Moon landings, airlocks, and all that.
But in the past eight years I’ve been increasingly interested in, and worried over, terrestrial problems. These are population explosions; birth control; the rape of Mother Nature; human, and animal “rights”; international conflicts; and specially mental health. I’d like to see us explore space, but I don’t think we have to. If the U.S. wants to spend its (my) money on space rockets, fine. I realize full well that space projects are more than going to pay their present expenses someday. Technological discoveries made along the way, serendipitous findings, plus such things as weather control, etc., will eventually make all this effort and expense worth while. I like to think so.
But let’s spend at least an equal amount of money and research on trying to find out what makes people tick and mistick. If there has to be a choice between the two different kinds of projects, get rid of the space project. If this be treason, so be it. People are more important than rockets; we’ll never be in harmony with that Nature which exists outside our atmosphere; we’re doing an inept enough job of getting into harmony with sublunary Nature.
The idea for this story was sparked off when I attended a lecture at the home of Tom and Terry Pincard. Lou Barron spoke of the Triple Revolution document, among other things. This publication contains a letter sent on March 22nd. 1964, by the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution to President Lyndon B. Johnson, the politically safe reply from the President’s Assistant Special Counsel, and the Triple Revolution report itself. The writers of the document know that mankind is on the threshold of an age which demands a fundamental re-examination of existing values and institutions. The three separate and mutually reinforcing revolutions are (1) the Cybernation Revolution, (2) the Weaponry Revolution, and (3) the Human Rights Revolution.
I will not outline this document; even this would take much space. But for those interested in the crises of our times, in what must be planned and done, and in the immediate and distant future, this document is vital. It may be acquired by writing to: The Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution, P.O. Box 4068, Santa Barbara, California.
Lou Barron was the first to mention the Triple Revolution in my presence and the last since. Yet this document may be a dating point for historians, a convenient pinpointing to indicate when the new era of “planned societies” began. It may take a place alongside such important documents as the Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence, Communist Manifesto, etc. Since the lecture, I’ve come across references to it in two magazines, but there were no elucidations. And during the lecture, Lou Barron said that the TRD, despite its importance, was still unknown to some economists and political science professionals on the UCLA campus
Barron’s lecture gave me the glimmerings of a story based on a future society extrapolated from present trends. I probably would not have done anything about it if Harlan Ellison, some months later, had not asked me for a story for this anthology. As soon as I heard that there would be no tabus, my eye rolled in a frenzy which some people may think coarse instead of fine. Up from the unconscious came the paraphrase of the Zane Grey title, Riders of the Purple Sage. Other things clicked into place as extrapolations followed.
Several things I’d like to make clear. One, this story represents only one of a dozen, each with entirely different future worlds, that I could write. The implications of the Triple Revolution document are many.
Two, the story here shows only the bones of what I wanted to write. Theoretically, there was no word limit, but in practice there had to be a stopping point The 30,000 words here passed this, but the editors were indulgent. Actually, I wrote 40,000 words but forced myself to cut out many chapters and then to reduce those chapters left in. This resulted in 20,000 words which I later built up to 30,000 again. I had a number of episodes and of letters from various U.S. Presidents to various bureaus. The letters and replies were to show how the Great Withdrawal was initiated and how the enclosed multileveled cities were begun. A more detailed description of the physical construction of a community, THE OOGENESIS OF BEVERLY HILLS, LEVEL 14, was cut out, with the municipally organized jousts between teen-age gangs during the Folk Festival, a scene between Chib and his mother which would have given their relationship in more depth, a scene from a fido play based on the early days of the Panamorite sect, and about a dozen other chapters.
Three, the Triple Revolution document writers, it seems to me, are looking ahead only to the next fifty years. I jumped to 2166 a.d. because I’m sure that energy-matter conversion and duplication of material objects will be available by then. Probably before then. This belief is based on present developments in physics. (The protein computers mentioned in the story have already been predicted in a recent Science News Letter. I anticipated this in a science fiction story in 1955. As far as I know, my prediction was the first mention of protein computers in literature of any kind, science fiction, scientific, or otherwise.) Mankind will no longer have to rely on agriculture, stock-raising, fishing, or mining. Moreover, the cities will tend to become completely independent of national governments except as they need them to avoid international war. The struggle between the city-states and federal government is only implied in this story.
Four, the Triple Revolution document writers showed humility and good sense when they stated that they did not know as yet how to plan our society They insist that a study of great width and depth must be made first and then the carrying out of recommendations should be done cautiously.
Five, I doubt that this will be done with the depth and caution required. The times are too pressing; the hot breath of Need is on our necks. Besides, the proper study of mankind has always been too much entangled with politics, prejudice, bureaucracy, selfishness, stupidity, ultra-conservatism, and one trait all of us share: downright ignorance.
Six, despite which, I understand that our world must be planned, and I wish the planners good luck in their dangerous course.
Seven, I could be wrong.
Eight, I hope I am.
This story was written primarily as a story, not as a sounding board for ideas or as a prophecy. I became too interested in my characters. And, although the basic idea came from Lou Barron, he is responsible for nothing in the story. In fact, I doubt very much that he will like it.
Whatever the reception to the story, I had fun writing it.
* * * *
THE MALLEY SYSTEM
* * * *
Introduction to
THE MALLEY SYSTEM
In a context almost obstinately dedicated to new, young voices in speculative fiction, it is bewildering to find a story by a woman who has been a professional longer than I’ve lived! It is either a testimonial to the invigorating qualities inherent in this kind of writing, or to the singular nature of the woman. I would opt for the latter, as would you, had you ever met Miriam deFord. She is the kind of person who would deliver you a glance to wither asparagus should you mention semantic nonsense like “senior citizen” or “sun city”. She would then, most likely, level you with a scathing aphorism from Schoepenhauer (“The first forty years of life give us the text: the next thirty supply the commentary’’’) or possibly Ortega y Gasset (“A girl of fifteen generally has a greater number of secrets than an old man, and a woman of thirty more arcana than a chief of state”). And if neither of those did it, then how about a fast fummikomi on the right instep?
Miriam Allen deFord, aside from being the auctorially renowned deFord who wrote The Overbury Affair and Stone Walls—semi-classic studies in crime and punishment—is the author of ten, no, make that eleven books of history or biography. She is a stellar light in the field of crime fact and fiction. She is a favorite of s-f and fantasy readers She has published incredible amounts of Latin translations, literary biography and criticism, articles on political and sociological themes; she was for many years a labor journalist; she is a much-published poet, including a volume of collected verse, Penultimates. A Philadelphian by birth, she lives and has lived most of her life where her heart is, in San Francisco. In private life she is Mrs. Maynard Shipley, whose late husband (who died in 1934) was a well-known writer and lecturer on scientific subjects.
I won’t mention Miss deFord’s age but I feel that a miracle is being suppressed. In a time when Everyman questions the sanity of the Universe, every morsel of wonder must be heralded, to reassure us one and all that there is hope and harmony in the scheme of things. For let us face the sad but omnipresent fact: most people of maturity, of substantial age, in our culture, are crotchety hearkeners after their lost youth but Miriam deFord defies convention. For charm, few can equal her. For persuasiveness, none can approach. (Proof of this last is that the editor of this book wanted to retitle her story “Cells of Memory,” or somesuch silly nonsense thing. Miss deFord “persuaded” the editor that he was making an ass of himself. Her original title stands, and the editor, though defeated, was not made to feel demeaned by the lady’s arguments. That, children, is known as class.) But none of these, and certainly not her age, are what draw our attention. The vigor of her writing, the originality and uncompromising view she brings to a perplexing, pressing contemporary problem is what arrests us here.
Miriam Allen deFord serves the invaluable purpose, in this anthology and in the field as a whole, of being an object lesson. It is not merely the tots who can think hard, new thoughts and set them down in a compelling manner. If the writer be a writer, to hell with chronological labels. Knowing her age or not, you would have been impressed with the story. It makes one pause to consider how valid are the claims of writers who beg off for wretched writing on the grounds of age. Miriam deFord has a swift kick for them, even as her story has a swift kick for us. Hie!
* * * *
THE MALLEY SYSTEM
by Miriam Allen deFord
SHEP:
“Is it far?” she asked. “I have to get home for my school telecast; I just slipped out to buy a vita-sucker. I’m in cybernetics already, and I’m only seven,” she added boastfully.
I forced my voice out of a croak.
“No, only a step, and it won’t take you a minute. My little girl asked me to come and get you. She described you so I’d know you.”
The child looked doubtful.
“You don’t look old enough to have a little girl. And I don’t know who she is.”
“Right down here.” I held her skinny shoulder firmly.
“Down these steps? I don’t like—”
I glanced around quickly; nobody in sight. I pushed her through the dark doorway and fastened the bolt.
“Why, you’re a bomb-site squatter!” she cried in terror. “You couldn’t have a—”
“Shut up!” I clamped my hand over her mouth and threw her on the pile of rags that served me for a bed. Her feeble struggle was only an incitation. I ripped her shorts from her shaking legs.
Oh, God! Now, now, now! The blood tickled.
The child tore her head loose and screamed, just as I was sinking into blissful lassitude. Furious, I circled her thin neck and pounded her head against the cement floor until blood and brains leaked from the shattered skull.
Without moving further, I let myself fall asleep. I never heard the pounding on the door.
* * * *
CARLO:
“There’s one!” Ricky said, pointing down.
My eyes followed his finger. Huddled under the framework of the moving sidewalk was a dark inert bundle.
“Can we get down?”
“He did, and he’s high on goofer-dust or something, or he wouldn’t be there.”
There was nobody in sight; it was nearly twenty-four o’clock, and people were either home or still in some joy-joint. We’d been roaming the streets for hours, looking for something to break the monotony.
We managed, hand over hand. Those things are electrified but you learn how to avoid the hot spots.
Ricky pulled out his atom-flash. It was an old geezer—in his second century, looked like—and dead to the world. He ought to’ve had more sense, at his age. He deserved whatever we gave him.
We gave him plenty. Boy, he waked up right away and started screeching, but I fixed that with a heel on his face. You ought to’ve seen him when we got his clothes off—nasty-gray hair on his chest, all his ribs showing, but a big potbelly, and withered where we started carving. It was disgusting: we marked him up but good. He might have seen us, so I pushed his eyes in. Then I gave him a boot in the throat to keep him quiet, we went through his pockets—he didn’t have much left after all the goofer he’d bought, but we took his credit codes in case we could figure out a way to use them without being caught—and we left him there and started to climb back.
We were halfway up when we heard the damned cop-copter buzzing above us.
* * * *
RACHEL:
“You’re crazy,” he snarled at me. “What the hell do you think—that I married you by ancient rites and you have some kind of hold on me?”
I could scarcely talk for crying.
“Don’t you owe me some consideration?” I managed to say. “After all, I gave up other men for you.”
“Don’t be so damned possessive. You sound like some throwback to the Darker Age. When I want you and you want me, oke. The rest of the time we’re both free. And it was the other men that gave you up, wasn’t it?”
That put the stop-off to it. I reached behind the video-wall, where I’d cashed the old-fashioned laser gun Grandpa gave me when I was a kid—it still worked, and he’d shown me how to use it—and I let him have it. Phft-phft, right between his lying lips.
I couldn’t stop till it was empty. I guess I kalumphed then. The next thing I knew my son Jon by my first man opened the door with his print-key and there we both were, flat on die floor, but I was the only one alive. Oh, curse Jon and his degree in humanistics and his sense of civic duty!
* * * *
RICHIE B:
Utterly uncontempojust! He was only a lousy Extraterry, and I was only having some fun. This is 2083, isn’t it, and the new rules were issued two years ago, and Extraterries are supposed to know their place and not bull in where they’re not wanted. The play-park was posted “Humans Only”, and there he was, standing right by the booth where I had a date to meet Marta. He had a tape in his paw, so I guess he was a tourist, but they ought to find out what’s what before they buy their tickets. Oughtn’t to be allowed on Earth at all, to my way of thinking.
Instead of running, he had the nerve to speak to me. “Can you tell me,” he began in that silly wheezing voice they have, with the filthy accent.
I was early, so I thought I’d see what happened next. “Yee-oh, I can tell you.” I mimicked him. “One thing I can tell you is, you’ve got too many fingers on those forepaws to suit my taste.”
He looked bewildered and I could hardly keep from laughing. I looked around—those booths are private and there was nobody near, and I could see clear to the helipark and Marta wasn’t in sight yet. I reached under my wraparound and got out my little snickeree I carry to defend myself.
“And I hate prehensile tails,” I added. “I hate ‘em, but I collect ‘em. Gimme yours.”
I leaned down and grabbed it and began to saw at the base.
Then he did yell and try to run, but I held fast. I’d just meant to scare him a little, but he made me mad. And the violet-colored blood turned me sick, and that made me still madder. I was on guard for him to try to hit me, but damned if he didn’t just flop in a faint. Hell, you can’t tell about those Extraterries—for all I know, he might have been a she.
I got the tail off, and shook it to drain the blood, and I was all set to give him—it—one behind the ear and dump it down under the bushes, when I heard somebody coming up. I thought it was Marta, and she’s always game for a kick, so I called, “Hey, saccharine, look at the souvenir I just got for you!”
But it wasn’t Marta. It was one of those slimy Planet Fed snoopers.
* * * *
BRATHMORE:
I am hungry again. I am a strong, vital person: I need real nourishment. Do those fools expect me to live on neutro-synthetics and predigestos forever? When I am hungry I must eat.
And this time I was lucky. My little notice brings them always, but not always just what I need; then I have to let them go and wait for the next one. Just the right age—juicy and tender, but not too young. Too young there is no meat on the bones
I am methodical; I keep a record. This was Number 78. And all in four years, since I got the inspiration to put the notice in the public communitape. “Wanted: partner for dance act, man or girl, 16-23 years old.” Because after that, if they really are dancers, their muscles get tough.
With the twenty-hour week, every other compute-tender and service trainee goes in for some Leisure Cult, and I had a hunch a lot of them want to be pro dancers. I didn’t say I was on tridimens or sensalive or in a joy-joint, but where else could I be?
“How old are you? Where have you trained? How long? What can you do? I’ll turn on the music, and you show me.”
They didn’t show me long—long enough for me to give them the full once-over. I have a real office, on the 270th floor of the Sky-High Rise, no less. All very respectable. My name—or a name I use—on the door. “Entertainment Business”.
The satisfactory ones, I say, “Oke. Now we’ll go to my practice hall, and we’ll see how we do together.”
We go up and copt over—but that’s to my hide-out. Sometimes they get nervous, but I soothe them. If I can’t, I land at the nearest port and just say, “All out, brother or sister as the case may be. I can’t work with anyone who hasn’t confidence in me.”
Twice the fuzz has come to my office on some simpleton’s complaint, but I’ve got that fixed. I wouldn’t have thought of dancing if I didn’t have my credentials. You’d have known me once—I was a pro myself for twenty years.
The ones that disappear, nobody ever bothers about. Usually they haven’t told anybody where they were going. If they have, and I’m asked, I just say they never came, and nobody can prove they did.
So here’s Number 78. Female, nineteen, nice and plump but not muscle-bound yet.
Once home, the rest’s easy. “Get into your tutu, sister, and we’ll go to the practice room. Dressing room right-in there.”
The dressing room’s gassed when I press the button. It takes about six minutes. Then to my specially fitted kitchen. Clothes into the incinerator. Macerator and dissolver for metal and glass. Contact lenses, jewelry, money, all goes in: I’m no thief. Then into the oven, well greased and seasoned.
About half an hour, the way I like it. After dinner, when I clean up, the macerator will take care of the bones and teeth. (And gallstones once, believe it or not.) I dial a few drinks to sharpen my appetite, and get out my knife and fork—genuine antiques, cost me a lot, from the days when people ate real meat.
Rich and steaming, brown on the outside and oozing nice. My stomach rumbles in delight. I take my first delicious bite.
Aagh! What in the name of all— What was wrong with her? She must have been in one of those far-out poison-fancier teenster gangs! An awful pain shot right through me. I doubled up. I don’t remember screaming, but they tell me they heard me clear out on the speedway, and somebody finally broke in and found me.
They flew me to the hospital, and I had to have half my stomach replaced.
And of course they found her too.
* * * *
“Extremely interesting,” said the visiting criminologist from the African Union. He and the warden, sitting in the warden’s office, watched on the wide screen as the techs removed the brain probes and, flanked by the roboguards, led out the four men and the woman—or was that last one a woman too? it was hard to tell—dazed and shuffling, to the rest cubicles. “You mean this is done every day?”
“Every single day of their term. Most of them have life sentences.”
“And it is done with all prisoners? Or just all felons?”
The warden laughed.
“Not even all felons,” he answered “Only what we cad Class 1 homicide, rape, and mayhem. It would hardly be advisable to let a pro burglar live daily through his latest burglary—he’d just note the weak points and educate himself to make a better job of the next one after he got out!”
“And does it act as a deterrent?”
“If it didn’t, we couldn’t use it. We have a provision, you know, in the Inter-American Union, against ‘cruel and unusual punishment’. This is no longer unusual, and our Supreme Court and the Appeals Court of the Terrestrial Regions have both ruled that it is not cruel. It is therapeutic.”
“I meant deterrent to other would-be criminals on the outside.”
“All I can say is that every secondary school in the Union includes a course in elementary penology, with a dozen screen-viewings of this procedure. We’ve had a lot of publicity. I’ve been interviewed often. And out of two thousand inmates of this institution, which is of average size, those five are the only present subjects for this treatment. Our homicide rate in this Union has gone down from the highest to the lowest on Earth in the ten years since we began.”
“Ah, yes, I was aware of that, of course. It is why I was relegated to investigate, to see whether it might be desirable for us too. I understand I am only the latest of such visitors.”
“Quite true. The East Asian Union is considering it now, and several other Unions are hoping to put it on their agenda.”
“But in the other sense of deterrence, as it affects the people themselves? How does that work out? Of course I know they couldn’t continue their criminal careers at present, but what is the psychological effect on them here and now?”
“The principle,” said the warden, “was defined by Lachim Malley, our noted penologist—”
“Indeed yes, one of the very great.”
“We think so. His idea came originally from a very minor and banal bit of folk history. Back in the old days, when they had privately owned stores and people were paid wages to work in them, it used to be the custom, in shops that sold pastries and confectionery and such delicacies, which the young particularly crave—and also, I believe, in breweries and wineries—to allow new employees to eat or drink their fill. It was found that soon they became satiated, and then actually averse to the very thing they had so much craved—which of course saved a good deal of money in the long run.
“It occurred to Malley that if an atrocious criminal should be obliged to relive constantly the episode which led to his incarceration—have it stuffed into him daily, so to speak, the incessant repetition would have a similar effect on him. Since we can now activate any part of the brain painlessly by electric probes in exact areas, the experiment was feasible. We here in this prison were the first to put it into practice.”
“And does it so affect them?”
“At first some of the most vicious—that mass cannibal you saw, or the child molester, for example—seem actually to revel in the reliving of their crimes. The less deteriorated dread and shrink from it from the beginning. And even the worst—those who are only at the beginning of their terms—gradually become first bored, then sated, and eventually, in time, completely alienated from their former impulses. Terribly remorseful, too, some of them; I’ve had hardened criminals get down on their knees and beg me to let them forget. But of course I can’t.”
“And after they have served their time? For I suppose, as in our Union, a life sentence really means not more than fifteen years.”
“About twelve, with us, on the average. But some of these—that last case, for instance—can never be safely released. They become reconciled, on the whole. For, apart from that daily ordeal, their lives aren’t bad here. They live comfortably, they have every opportunity for education and recreation, where possible we arrange for conjugal visits, and many of them pursue useful careers as if they were not imprisoned.”
“But what of those who are freed? Have any of them reverted to crime? Have you had any recidivists among them?”
The warden looked embarrassed.
“No, we’ve never had any subject of the Malley System come back here,” he said reluctantly. “In fact, I feel it my duty to tell you that there is one slight disadvantage in the System.
“So far, we’ve never had one subject who could be released to the general community when his term was over. Everyone of them up to now has had to be transferred instead to a mental hospital.”
The African criminologist was silent. Then his eyes strayed around the office in which he sat. For the first time he noticed the armorplated walls, the shatterproof glass, the electronic weapons trained on the door and ready to be activated by pressure on a button on the warden’s desk.
The warden followed his glance, and flushed.
“I’m afraid I’m just chicken,” he said defensively. “Actually, the subjects are kept under strict surveillance and the roboguards have orders to shoot to kill. But I keep remembering my predecessor’s experience, when he and Lachim Malley—”
“I know, naturally,” said the African, “that Malley died suddenly while he was visiting this prison. A heart attack, I understand.”
“My predecessor was a little too careless,” remarked the warden with a grim smile “He had complete faith in Malley’s System, and he didn’t even have roboguards to back up the techs, or have the subjects frisked for shivs before their daily recapitulation. There were more subjects then, too—at least fourteen that day. So when they simultaneously overpowered the techs, with the probes already in place, and broke for this office—
“Oh yes, Malley died of a heart attack. So did my predecessor. Right through the heart, in both cases.”
* * * *
Afterword:
Since fact crime and mystery shorts make up a major part of my writing, it is natural that even in science fiction the subject should appeal to me. This particular extrapolation came to me suddenly out of the blue, as much of my science fiction does. Murders are committed by people in a highly emotional state, even if the emotion is only rabid thrill-seeking; and that being so, what worse punishment could be inflicted than to force a repetition of the experience until the murderer is either wildly remorseful or (as seems more likely, and as I indicated) reduced to complete psychic breakdown.
Granted that mankind has a future, and that we somehow catch up socially and psychologically with our technical achievements, some such penological gambit might well suggest itself to future criminologists. Whether it would be any more of a deterrent to others than the chance of execution is today, is another question. And despite my disclaimer, I am not at all sure that the highest court of appeals of the time would not decide that the punishment was even crueler than the crime.
* * * *
* * * *
Introduction to
A TOY FOR JULIETTE
What follows is, in the purest sense, the end-result of literary feedback. Recently the story editor of a prime-time television series, pressed for a script to shoot, sat down and wrote one himself rather than wait for the vagaries of a freelance scenarist’s schedule and dalliance. When he had completed the script, which was to go before the cameras in a matter of days, he sent it as a matter of form to the legal department of the studio. For the clearance of names, etc. Later that day the legal department called him back in a frenzy. Almost scene-for-scene and word-for-word (including the title), the non-s-f story editor had copied a well-known science fiction short story. When it was pointed out to him, the story editor blanched and recalled he had indeed read that story, some fifteen years before. Hurriedly, the story rights were purchased from the well-known fantasy writers who had originally conceived the idea. I hasten to add that I accept the veracity of the story editor when he swears he had no conscious knowledge of imitating the story. I believe him because this sort of unconscious plagiarism is commonplace in the world of the writer. It is inevitable that much of the mass of reading a writer does will stick with him somehow, in vague concepts, snatches of scenes, snippets of characterization, and it will turn up later, in the writer’s own work; altered, transmogrified, but still a direct result of another writer’s work. It is by no means “plagiarism”. It is part of the answer to the question asked by idiots of authors at cocktail parties: “Where do you get your ideas?”
Poul Anderson dropped me a note several months ago explaining that he had just written a story he was about to send out to market when he realized it paralleled the theme of a story he had read at a writers’ conference we had both attended, just a month or so before. He added that his story was only vaguely similar to mine, but he wanted to apprise me to the resemblance so there would be no question later. It was a rhetorical letter: I’m arrogant, but not arrogant enough to think Poul Anderson needs to crib from me. Similarly, at the World Science Fiction Convention held last year in Cleveland, the well-known German fan Tom Schlück and I were introduced. (Tom had been brought over by the fans as Fan Guest of Honor, an exchange tradition in fandom perpetuated by the TransAtlantic Fan Fund.) The first thing he did after we shook hands was to hand me a German science fiction paperback. I had some difficulty understanding why he had given me the gift. Tom opened the book—a collection of stories pseudonymously written by top German s-f fan-pro Walter Ernsting. The flyleaf said: “To Harlan Ellison with thanks and compliments.” I still didn’t understand. Then Tom turned to the first story, which was titled “Die Sonnenbombe”. Under the title it said: (Nach einer Idee von Harlan Ellison). I wrinkled my brow. I still didn’t understand. I recognized my own name, which looks the same in all languages save Russian, Chinese, Hebrew or Sanskrit, but I don’t read German, and I’m afraid I stood there like a clot. Tom explained that the basic idea of a story I had written in 1957—”Run for the Stars”—had inspired Ernsting to write “Die Sonnenbombe”. It was the literary feedback, halfway across the world. I was deeply touched, and even more, it was a feeling of justification. Every writer save the meanest hack hopes his words will live after he goes down the hole, that his thoughts will influence people. It isn’t the primary purpose of the writing, of course, but it’s the sort of secret wish that parallels the Average Man having babies, so his name doesn’t die with him. And here, in my hands, was the visible proof that something my mind had conjured up had reached out and ensnared another man’s imagination. It was obviously the sincerest form of flattery. And by no means “plagiarism”. It was the literary feedback. The instances of this action-reaction among writers are numberless, and some of them are legend. It is the reason for writers’ seminars, workshops, conferences and the endless exchange of letters among writers. What has all of this—or any of it—to do with Robert Bloch, the author of the story that follows? Everything.
In 1943 Robert Bloch had published a story titled “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper”. The number of times it has been reprinted, anthologized, translated into radio and TV scripts, and most of all plagiarized, are staggering. I read it in 1953, and the story stuck with me always. When I heard its dramatization on the Molle Mystery Theater, it became a recurring favorite memory. The story idea was simply that Jack the Ripper, by killing at specific times, made his peace with the dark gods and was thus allowed to live forever. Jack was immortal, and Bloch traced with cold methodical logic a trail of similar Ripper-style murders in almost every major city of the world, over a period of fifty or sixty years. The concept of Jack—who was never apprehended—living on, from era to era, caught my imagination. When it came time to put this anthology together, I called Robert Bloch and suggested that if Jack were, in fact, immortal, why then he would have to go on into the future. The image of a creature of Whitechapel fog and filth, the dark figure of Leather Apron, skulking through a sterile and automated city of the future, was an anachronism that fascinated me. Bob agreed, and said he would set to work at once. When his story came in, it was (pardon the word) a delight, and I bought it at once. But the concept of Jack in the future would not release my thoughts. I dwelled on it with almost morbid fascination. Finally I asked Bob if he minded my doing a story for this book that took up where his left off. He said he thought it would be all right. It was, as I’ve said, in the purest sense, the act of literary feedback. And again, the sincerest form of flattery. Bloch had literally triggered the creative process in another writer.
The story that follows Robert Bloch’s story is the product of that feedback. Mr. Bloch has kindly and graciously agreed to write the introduction to my story, in an effort to gain revenge for the introduction to his story. Tied in a knot, the two introductions, the two stories and the two afterword: seem to have melded into a unified whole that demonstrate; more admirably than any million words of literary critique; what it is that one writer obtains from another.
What this particular editor has obtained from that particular writer named Robert Bloch is far more than a story idea. I first saw Bloch—tall, debonair, sharp-featured, bespectacled, smoking through a long cigarette holder reminiscent of Eric von Stroheim—at the Midwest Science Fiction Convention at Beatley’s-on-the-Lake Hotel in Belle-fontaine, Ohio, in 1951. I was almost eighteen. I was obnoxious, wide-eyed and hungry to know all there was about science fiction. Bloch was at that time, and had been for many years, a living legend. Even though a recognized professional with many books and stories to his credit, he had always made himself available to even the grubbiest fan anxious to cadge a story or article for some half-legible fan magazines. Gratis, of course. He was the perennial toast-master, his wit a combination of cornball and cutlass-incisive. He knew everyone, and everyone knew him. Up to this pillar of fantasy walked the snot Ellison.
I do not recall what happened on that occasion, the mists of time and the ravages of senility having already reached me at age thirty-three, but it must have been memorable, because someone took our photograph, and I still have a copy: myself looking smug as a potato bug and Bloch staring down on me with a peculiar expression that says benevolence, toleration, amused confusion and stark terror. I have been privileged to call myself a friend of Robert Bloch’s since that time.
One more small anecdote, then I’ll let Bloch speak for himself on the subjects of his career, his childhood and the nature of violence. When I arrived in Hollywood in 1962, literally without a dollar in my pocket (I had ten cents, a wife, a son, and we had been so broke driving cross-country we had only eaten the contents of a box of pecan pralines for the last three hundred miles), in a battered 1951 Ford, Robert Bloch—who was not all that well off himself—loaned me enough money to get a place to stay and food to eat. He waited three years to be repaid, and never once asked for the considerable sum. He is one of God’s Good People, as anyone who has ever come anywhere near him can attest. It is one of the giant dichotomies of our times that a man as gentle, amusing, empathic and peaceful as Bloch can write the gruesome and warped stories he produces with alarming regularity. One can only offer by way of amelioration Sturgeon’s lament that after he had written one—and one only—story about homosexuality, everyone accused him of being a fag. Bloch is an entity quite apart and diametrically opposite from the horrors he sets on paper. (I might suggest the reader remember this writer’s lament when he comes to the story after Bloch’s.)
And now, beaming with memorabilia and bonhomie, here is Bloch:
“As a small child I skipped several grades of grammar school, thus finding myself in the company of older and bigger youngsters who introduced me to the savage jungle of the playground, with its secret pecking order and ceaseless torment of the weak by the strong. Fortunately for myself, I never became a physical victim nor was I an over-compensating bully; in some strange fashion I found that I was able to lead my companions into various intricate imaginative games as a substitute activity. We dug trenches in the back yard and played war; the open front porch became a deck of a pirate ship and captured victims walked the plank (a leaf from the dining-room table) to jump off into the ocean of the front lawn. But I dimly recognized that the shows and circuses I devised didn’t hold the interest of my playmates nearly as well as the games which were surrogates for violence. And later on, as they were inevitably lured towards the venerated violences of boxing, wrestling, football and other adult-approved outlets for outrage on the human person, I retreated to reading, sketching, drama and the enjoyment of the theater and motion pictures.
“The silent version of The Phantom of the Opera scared the daylights out of me as an eight-year-old, but a part of me was objective enough to find a fascination in this demonstration of the power of make-believe. I began to read widely in the field of imaginary violence. When, at the age of fifteen, I began corresponding with the fantasy writer. H. P. Lovecraft, he encouraged me to try my own at writing. As a high school comic I’d discovered that I could make audiences laugh: now I began to realize that I could move them emotionally in other directions.
“At seventeen, I sold my first story to Weird Tales magazine and thus found a lifelong vocation. Since then I’ve made magazine appearances with upwards of four hundred short stories, articles and novelettes. I’ve conducted magazine columns, seen stories reprinted in close to a hundred anthologies here and abroad; twenty-five books, novels and short-story collections have been published. In addition, I’ve ghost-written for politicians and spent a term writing almost every conceivable variety of advertising copy. I adapted thirty-nine of my own stories for a radio series, and in recent years have concentrated largely on scripts for television and motion pictures.
“In the beginning my work was almost entirely in the field of fantasy, where the violent element was openly and obviously a product of imagination. The mass violence of World War II caused me to examine violence at its source—on the individual level. Still unwilling or unable to cope with its present reality, I retreated into history and re-created, as a prototype of apparently senseless violence, the infamously famous mass murderer who styled himself ‘Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper’. This short story was to see endless reprint and anthologization, plus frequent dramatizing on radio, and finally appeared on television; at latest report it popped up as a dramatic reading in Israel. For some reason the notion of Jack the Ripper’s survival in the present day touched a sensitive spot in the audience psyche.
“I myself was far from insensitive to this incarnation of violence in our midst, and I beat a hasty retreat from further consideration. As the war continued and real-life violence came dangerously near, I concentrated for a time upon humor and science fiction. It wasn’t until 1945, when my first short-story collection (The Opener of the Way) appeared, that I rounded out its contents with a new effort, ‘One Way to Mars,’ in which a pseudo-science-fictional form is employed to describe the psychotic fugue of a contemporary man of violence.
“A year later I wrote my first novel, The Scarf—the first-person account of a mass murderer. Since that time, while still employing fantasy and science fiction for satire and social criticism, I’ve devoted many of my subsequent short stories and almost all of my novels (Spiderweb, Shooting Star, The Kidnaper, The Will to Kill, Psycho, The Dead Beat, Firebug, The Couch, Terror) to a direct examination of violence in our society.
“Psycho was inspired by a somewhat guarded newspaper account of a mass murderer in a small town close to the one where I resided; I knew none of the intimate details of the crimes, but I wondered just what sort-of individual could perpetrate them while living as an apparently normal citizen a notoriously gossip-ridden and constrictedly conventional environment. I created my schizophrenic character out of what I thought was whole cloth, only to discover, some years later, that the rationale I evolved for him was frighteningly close to his aberrated reality.
“Some of my other characters have also proved to be a bit too real for comfort. When I wrote The Scarf, for example, the editors insisted on deleting a short section in which the protagonist indulges in a bit of sadistic fantasy. He imagines what it would be like to take a high-powered rifle up to the top of a tall building and start shooting people below at random. Farfetched, said the editors. Today, I have the last laugh—but it’s not necessarily a laugh of amusement.
“The Scarf, incidentally, was just republished in paperback. After twenty years, I naturally went through the book to update a few slang phrases and topical references. But my protagonist didn’t need any changing; the passage of time alone did the job for me. Twenty years ago I wrote him as a villain—today he emerges as an anti-hero.
“For the violence has come into its own now; the violence I examined, and at times projected and predicted, has become today’s commonplace and accepted reality. This, to me, is far more terrifying than anything I could possibly imagine.”
* * * *
Ellison again. In an attempt to unify the whole, and believing firmly that Bloch’s piece loses very little impact for the revelation, this section of the book has been structured to be read all of a piece. I urge you to go from Bloch to his afterword to his introduction to the Ellison to his afterword. It is a case of age before beauty
Or possibly Beauty before the Beast.
* * * *
A TOY FOR JULIETTE
by Robert Bloch
Juliette entered her bedroom, smiling, and a thousand Juliettes smiled back at her. For all the walls were paneled with mirrors, and the ceiling was set with inlaid panes that reflected her image.
Wherever she glanced she could see the blonde curls framing the sensitive features of a face that was a radiant amalgam of both child and angel; a striking contrast to the rich, ripe revelation of her body in the filmy robe.
But Juliette wasn’t smiling at herself. She smiled because she knew that Grandfather was back, and he’d brought her another toy. In just a few moments it would be decontaminated and delivered, and she wanted to be ready.
Juliette turned the ring on her finger and the mirrors dimmed. Another turn would darken the room entirely; a twist in the opposite direction would bring them blazing into brilliance. It was all a matter of choice—but then, that was the secret of life. To choose, for pleasure.
And what was her pleasure tonight?
Juliette advanced to one of the mirror panels, and passed her hand before it. The glass slid to one side, revealing the niche behind it; the coffin-shaped opening in the solid rock, with the boot and thumb-screws set at the proper heights.
For a moment she hesitated; she hadn’t played that game in years. Another time, perhaps. Juliette waved her hand and the mirror moved to cover the opening again. She wandered along the rows of panels, gesturing as she walked, pausing to inspect what was behind each mirror in turn. Here was the rack, there the stocks with the barbed whips resting against the dark-stained wood. And here was the dissecting table, hundreds of years old, with its quaint instruments; behind the next panel, the electrical prods and wires that produced such weird grimaces and contortions of agony, to say nothing of screams. Of course the screams didn’t matter in a soundproofed room.
Juliette moved to the side wall and waved her hand again; the obedient glass slid away and she stared at a plaything she’d almost forgotten. It was one of the first things Grandfather had ever given her, and it was very old, almost like a mummy case. What had he called it? The Iron Maiden of Nuremberg, that was it—with the sharpened steel spikes set inside the lid. You chained a man inside, and you turned the little crank that closed the lid, ever so slowly, and the spikes pierced the wrists and the elbows, the ankles and the knees, the groin and the eyes. You had to be careful not to get excited and turn too quickly, or you’d spoil the fun.
Grandfather had shown her how it worked, the first time he brought her a real live toy. But then, Grandfather had shown her everything. He’d taught her all she knew, for he was very wise. He’d even given her her name—Juliette—from one of the old-fashioned printed books he’d discovered by the philosopher De Sade.
Grandfather had brought the books from the Past, just as he’d brought the playthings for her. He was the only one who had access to the Past, because he owned the Traveler
The Traveler was a very ingenious mechanism, capable of attaining vibrational frequencies which freed it from the time-bind. At rest, it was just a big square boxlike shape, the size of a small room. But when Grandfather took over the controls and the oscillation started, the box would blur and disappear. It was still there, Grandfather said—at least, the matrix remained as a fixed point in space and time—but anything or anyone within the square could move freely into the Past to wherever the controls were programed. Of course they would be invisible when they arrived, but that was actually an advantage, particularly when it came to finding things and bringing them back. Grandfather had brought back some very interesting objects from almost mythical places—the great library of Alexandria, the Pyramid of Cheops, the Kremlin, the Vatican, Fort Knox—all the storehouses of treasure and knowledge which existed thousand; of years ago. He liked to go to that part of the Past, the period before the thermonuclear wars and the robotic ages, and collect things. Of course books and jewels and metal; were useless, except to an antiquarian, but Grandfather was a romanticist and loved the olden times.
It was strange to think of him owning the Traveler, but of course he hadn’t actually created it. Juliette’s father was really the one who built it, and Grandfather took possession of it after her father died. Juliette suspected Grandfather had killed her father and mother when she was just a baby, but she could never be sure. Not that it mattered; Grandfather was always very good to her, and besides, soon he would die and she’d own the Traveler herself.
They used to joke about it frequently. “I’ve made you into a monster,” he’d say. “And someday you’ll end up destroying me. After which, of course, you’ll go on to destroy the entire world—or what little remains of it.”
“Aren’t you afraid?” she’d tease.
“Certainly not. That’s my dream—the destruction of everything. An end to all this sterile decadence. Do you realize that at one time there were more than three billion inhabitants on this planet? And now, less than three thousand! Less than three thousand, shut up inside these Domes, prisoners of themselves and sealed away forever, thanks to the sins of the fathers who poisoned not only the outside world but outer space by meddling with the atomic order of the universe. Humanity is virtually extinct already; you will merely hasten the finale.”
“But couldn’t we all go back to another time, in the Traveler?” she asked.
“Back to what time? The continuum is changeless; one event leads inexorably to another, all links in a chain which binds us to the present and its inevitable end in destruction. We’d have temporary individual survival, yes, but to no purpose. And none of us are fitted to survive in a more primitive environment. So let us stay here and take what pleasure we can from the moment. My pleasure is to be the sole user and possessor of the Traveler. And yours, Juliette—”
Grandfather laughed then. They both laughed, because they knew what her pleasure was.
Juliette killed her first toy when she was eleven—a little boy. It had been brought to her as a special gift from Grandfather, from somewhere in the Past, for elementary sex play, but it wouldn’t cooperate, and she lost her temper and beat it to death with a steel rod. So Grandfather brought her an older toy, with brown skin, and it cooperated very well, but in the end she tired of it and one day when it was sleeping in her bed she tied it down and found a knife.
Experimenting a little before it died, Juliette discovered new sources of pleasure, and of course Grandfather found out. That’s when he’d christened her “Juliette”; he seemed to approve most highly, and from then on he brought her the playthings she kept behind the mirrors in her bedroom. And on his restless rovings into the Past he brought her new toys.
Being invisible, he could find them for her almost anywhere on his travels—all he did was to use a stunner and transport them when he returned. Of course each toy had to be very carefully decontaminated; the Past was teeming with strange micro-organisms. But once the toys were properly antiseptic they were turned over to Juliette for her pleasure, and during the past seven years she had enjoyed herself.
It was always delicious, this moment of anticipation before a new toy arrived. What would it be like? Grandfather was most considerate; mainly, he made sure that the toys he brought her could speak and understand Anglish—or “English” as they used to call it in the Past. Verbal communication was often important, particularly if Juliette wanted to follow the precepts of the philosopher De Sade and enjoy some form of sex relation before going on to keener pleasures.
But there was still the guessing beforehand. Would this toy be young or old, wild or tame, male or female? She’d had all kinds, and every possible combination. Sometimes she kept them alive for days before tiring of them—or before the subtleties of which she was capable caused them to expire. At other times she wanted it to happen quickly; tonight, for example, she knew she could be soothed only by the most primitive and direct action.
Once Juliette realized this, she stopped playing with her mirror panels and went directly to the big bed. She pulled back the coverlet, groped under the pillow until she felt it. Yes, it was still there—the big knife with the long, cruel blade. She knew what she would do now: take the toy to bed with her and then, at precisely the proper moment, combine her pleasures. If she could time her knife thrust—
She shivered with anticipation, then with impatience.
What kind of toy would it be? She remembered the suave, cool one—Benjamin Bathurst was his name, an English diplomat from the time of what Grandfather called the Napoleonic Wars. Oh, he’d been suave and cool enough, until she beguiled him with her body, into the bed. And there’d been that American aviatrix from slightly later on in the Past, and once, as a very special treat, the entire crew of a sailing vessel called the Marie Celeste. They had lasted for weeks!
Strangely enough, she’d even read about some of her toys afterwards. Because when Grandfather approached them with his stunner and brought them here, they disappeared forever from the Past, and if they were in any way known or important in their time, such disappearances were noted. And some of Grandfather’s books had accounts of the “mysterious vanishing” which took place and was, of course, never explained. How delicious it all was!
Juliette patted the pillow back into place and slid the knife under it. She couldn’t wait, now; what was delaying things?
She forced herself to move to a vent and depress the sprayer, shedding her robe as the perfumed mist bathed her body. It was the final allurement—but why didn’t her toy arrive?
Suddenly Grandfather’s voice came over the auditor.
“I’m sending you a little surprise, dearest.”
That’s what he always said; it was part of the game.
Juliette depressed the communicator-toggle. “Don’t tease,” she begged. “Tell me what it’s like.”
“An Englishman. Late Victorian Era. Very prim and proper, by the looks of him.”
“Young? Handsome?”
“Passable.” Grandfather chuckled. “Your appetites betray you, dearest.”
“Who is it—someone from the books?”
“I wouldn’t know the name. We found no identification during the decontamination. But from his dress and manner, and the little black bag he carried when I discovered him so early in the morning, I’d judge him to be a physician returning from an emergency call.”
Juliette knew about “physicians” from her reading, of course; just as she knew what “Victorian” meant. Somehow the combination seemed exactly right.
“Prim and proper?” She giggled. “Then I’m afraid it’s due for a shock.”
Grandfather laughed. “You have something in mind, I take it.”
“Yes.”
“Can I watch?”
“Please—not this time.”
“Very well.”
“Don’t be mad, darling. I love you.”
Juliette switched off. Just in time, too, because the door was opened and the toy came in.
She stared at it, realizing that Grandfather had told the truth. The toy was a male of thirty-odd years, attractive but by no means handsome. It couldn’t be, in that dark garb and those ridiculous side whiskers. There was something almost depressingly refined and mannered about it, an air of embarrassed repression.
And of course, when it caught sight of Juliette in her revealing robe, and the bed surrounded by mirrors, it actually began to blush.
That reaction won Juliette completely. A blushing Victorian, with the build of a bull—and unaware that this was the slaughterhouse!
It was so amusing she couldn’t restrain herself; she moved forward at once and put her arms around it.
“Who—who are you? Where am I?”
The usual questions, voiced in the usual way. Ordinarily. Juliette would have amused herself by parrying with answers designed to tantalize and titillate her victim. But tonight she felt an urgency which only increased as she embraced the toy and pressed it back toward the waiting bed.
The toy began to breathe heavily, responding. But it was still bewildered. “Tell me—I don’t understand. Am I alive? Or is this heaven?’
Juliette’s robe fell open as she lay back. “You’re alive, darling,” she murmured. “Wonderfully alive.” She laughed as she began to prove the statement. “But closer to heaven than you think.”
And to prove that statement, her free hand slid under the pillow and groped for the waiting knife.
But the knife wasn’t there any more. Somehow it had already found its way into the toy’s hand. And the toy wasn’t prim and proper any longer, its face was something glimpsed in nightmare. Just a glimpse, before the blinding blur of the knife blade, as it came down, again and again and again—
The room, of course, was soundproof, and there was plenty of time. They didn’t discover what was left of Juliette’s body for several days.
Back in London, after the final mysterious murder in the early morning hours, they never did find Jack the Ripper....
* * * *
Afterword:
A number of years have passed since I sat down at the typewriter one gloomy winter day and wrote “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” for magazine publication. The magazine in which it appeared gave up its ghost, and interest in ghosts, a long time ago. But somehow my little story seems to have survived. It has since pursued me in reprint, collection, anthologies, foreign translations, radio broadcasts and television.
So when the editor of this anthology proposed that I do a story and suggested, “What about Jack the Ripper in the future?” I was capable of only one response.
You’ve just read it.
* * * *
THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
* * * *
Introduction to
THE PROWLER IN THE CITY AT
THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
This is Robert Bloch, writing about Harlan Ellison. And believe me, it isn’t easy.
His contribution to this anthology happens to be a sequel to my own, so he asked me to write an introduction, purely as a matter of poetic injustice.
I am not about to do a biographical sketch of the man; surely he wouldn’t need me for that. Ellison has told the story of his life so many times, you’d think he’d know it by heart.
So I’m forced to fall back upon the consideration of Ellison as a phenomenon—a most phenomenal phenomenon—which has impinged upon my awareness, and the awareness of everyone in the science fictional genre, for the past fifteen years.
When I first met him (the preceding May I’d seen him), at the World Science Fiction Convention of 1952, Harlan Ellison was a promising young man of eighteen. Today he is a promising young man of thirty-three. That’s not a put-down, nor is it meant to be.
At eighteen he gave promise of becoming an outstanding fan. At thirty-three he gives promise of becoming an outstanding writer. Not only promise, but evidence.
As a fan he was articulate, ambitious and aggressive. As a professional writer, these qualities are still very obvious in all his work, and added to them is yet another conveniently alliterative quality—artistry.
Read his short stories, novels, articles and criticism. You may not always agree with what he says or the way in which he says it, but the artistry is there; the blend of emotion and excitement delivered with deep conviction and commitment. No matter what the apparent grammatical form may be, one is conscious that Ellison is really always writing in first person.
I mention emotion. Ellison often operates out of extremes that range from compassionate empathy to righteous indignation. He writes what he feels—and you feel what he writes.
I mention excitement. This is an inner climate: a constant tornado in which a part of Ellison remains as the eye—and a most perceptive one. There is small tranquillity to be found in his life or in his work. Ellison is definitely not one of those writers who cultivate the serenity of Buddha as they sit around contemplating their novels.
I mentioned conviction. Since he’s not an obscurantist, his convictions come through loud and clear—in prose and in personal address. Those convictions create both admirers and enemies. Part gadfly, part raw ego, Ellison has been criticized by those who persist in regarding these qualities as admirable in a soldier, a politician or a business executive but somehow degrading in a creative artist. Ellison survives the strife; he is the only living organism I know whose natural habitat is hot water.
I mentioned commitment. The purpose and tenacity have carried him through a wide range of experience; a hitch in the army, a liaison with teenage gangs in search of background material, an editorial stint, and the eternal gauntlet run by every writer who must temper his work to the taste of other arbiters.
Ellison has often clashed with those who attempted to direct his writing. In his progress from Cleveland to New York to Chicago he has left in his wake a trail of editorial gray hairs, many of them torn out by the roots. In Hollywood he has played picador to producers, his barbs forever poised and ready to be placed when he became aware of the bull.
Some people admire his nerve. Others hate his guts. But he has a way of proving—and improving—himself.
This anthology is a case in point.
During the fifteen years in which Ellison moved from fandom to professional status, literally hundreds of science fiction readers, writers and editors have dreamed of the publication of an anthology of this sort.
They dreamed it.
Ellison made it a reality.
I am aware that I’ve said nothing about Ellison’s wit, or the sensitivity embodied in his work which has won for him both the World Science Fiction Conventions’s Hugo and the Science Fiction Writers of America’s Nebula. You can assess those qualities for yourself by reading the story which follows.
It is a tour de force, surely, in the grand tradition of the Grand Guignol; a lineal literary descendant of such fearsome father figures as the Marquis de Sade and Louis-Ferdinand Celine. On the blood-spattered surface it is an obscenity, a violent rape of the senses and sensibilities.
But beneath the crude and shocking allusions to Eros and Thanatos is the meaningful portrayal of the Man Obsessed—the Violent Man whose transition from the past to the future leaves us with a deeper insight into the Violent Man of today.
For Jack the Ripper is with us now. He prowls the night, shunning the sun in a search for the blazing incandescence of an inner reality—and we see him plain in Ellison’s story, to the degree that we can see (and admit to) the violence which lurks within our own psyches. Here all that is normally forbidden is abnormally released and realized. Metaphyscial maundering? Before you make up your mind, read the story and let the Ripper rip you into an awareness of the urges and forces most of us will neither admit nor submit to; forces which, withal, remain potent within ourselves and our society. And ponder, if you will, upon the parable of Jack’s dilemma as he seeks—in a phrase we all use but seldom comprehend—to “carve out a career” for himself.
An obscenity, yes. But a morality, too; a terrible morality implicit in the knowledge that the Ripper’s inevitable and ultimate victim is always himself.
Even as you and I.
—Robert Bloch
* * * *
THE PROWLER IN THE CITY AT
THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
by Harlan Ellison
First there was the city, never night. Tin and reflective, walls of antiseptic metal like an immense autoclave. Pure and dust-free, so silent that even the whirling innards of its heart and mind were sheathed from notice. The city was self-contained, and footfalls echoed up and around—flat slapped notes of an exotic leather-footed instrument. Sounds that reverberated back to the maker like yodels thrown out across mountain valleys. Sounds made by humbled inhabitants whose lives were as ordered, as sanitary, as metallic as the city they had caused to hold them bosom-tight against the years. The city was a complex artery, the people were the blood that flowed icily through the artery. They were a gestalt with one another, forming a unified whole. It was a city shining in permanence; eternal in concept, flinging itself up in a formed and molded statement of exaltation; most modern of all modern structures, conceived as the pluperfect residence for the perfect people The final end-result of all sociological blueprints aimed at Utopia. Living space, it had been called, and so, doomed to live they were, in that Erewhon of graphed respectability and cleanliness.
Never night.
Never shadowed.
... a shadow. A blot moving against the aluminum cleanliness. The movement of rags and bits of clinging earth from graves sealed ages before. A shape.
He touched a gunmetal-gray wall in passing: the imprint of dusty fingers. A twisted shadow moving through anti-septically pure streets, and they become—with his passing—black alleys from another time.
Vaguely, he knew what had happened. Not specifically, not with particulars, but he was strong, and he was able to get away without the eggshell-thin walls of his mind caving in. There was no place in this shining structure to secrete himself, a place to think, but he had to have time. He slowed his walk, seeing no one. Somehow—inexplicably—he felt ... safe? Yes, safe For the first time in a very long time.
A few minutes before he had been standing in the narrow passageway outside No. 13 Miller’s Court. It had been 6:15 in the morning. London had been quiet as he paused in the passageway of M’Carthy’s Rents, in that fetid, urine-redolent corridor where the whores of Spitalfields took their clients. A few minutes before, the foetus in its bath of formaldehyde tightly-stoppered in a glass bottle inside his Gladstone bag, he had paused to drink in the thick fog, before taking the circuitous route back to Toynbee Hall. That had been a few minutes before. Then, suddenly, he was in another place and it was no longer 6:15 of a chill November morning in 1888.
He looked up as light flooded him in that other place. It had been soot silent in Spitalfields, but suddenly, without any sense of having moved or having been moved, he was flooded with light. And when he looked up he was in that other place. Paused now, only a few minutes after the transfer, he leaned against the bright wall of the city, and recalled the light. From a thousand mirrors. In the walls, in the ceiling. A bedroom with a girl in it. A lovely girl. Not like Black Mary Kelly or Dark Annie Chapman or Kate Eddowes or any of the other pathetic scum he had been forced to attend. ...
A lovely girl. Blonde, wholesome, until she had opened her robe and turned into the same sort of slut he had been compelled to use in his work in Whitechapel....
A sybarite, a creature of pleasures, a Juliette she had said, before he used the big-bladed knife on her. He had found the knife under the pillow, on the bed where she had led him—how shameful, unresisting had he been, all confused, clutching his black bag with all the tremors of a child, he who had moved through the London night like oil, moved where he wished, accomplished his ends unchecked eight times, now led toward sin by another, merely another of the tarts, taking advantage of him while he tried to distinguish what had happened to him and where he was, how shameful—and he had used it on her.
That had only been minutes before, though he had worked very efficiently on her.
The knife had been rather unusual. The blade had seemed to be two wafer-thin sheets of metal with a pulsing, glowing something between. A kind of sparkling, such as might be produced by a Van de Graaf generator. But that was patently ridiculous. It had had no wires attached to it, no bus bars, nothing to produce even the crudest electrical discharge. He had thrust the knife into the Gladstone bag, where now it lay beside the scalpels and the spool of catgut and the racked vials in their leather cases, and the foetus in its bottle. Mary Jane Kelly’s foetus.
He had worked efficiently, but swiftly, and had laid her out almost exactly in the same fashion as Kate Eddowes: the throat slashed completely through from ear-to-ear, the torso laid open down between the breasts to the vagina, the intestines pulled out and draped over the right shoulder, a piece of the intestines being detached and placed between the left arm and the body. The liver had been punctured with the point of the knife, with a vertical cut slitting the left lobe of the liver. (He had been surprised to find the liver showed none of the signs of cirrhosis so prevalent in these Spitalfields tarts, who drank incessantly to rid themselves of the burden of the dreary lives they moved through, grotesquely. In fact, this one seemed totally unlike the others, even if she had been more brazen in her sexual overtures. And that knife under the bed pillow ...) He had severed the vena cava leading to the heart. Then he had gone to work on the face.
He had thought of removing the left kidney again, as he had Kate Endowes’. He smiled to himself as he conjured up the expression that must have been on the face of Mr. George Lusk, chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, when he received the cardboard box in the mail. The box containing Miss Eddowes’ kidney, and the letter, impiously misspelled:
From hell, Mr. husk, sir, I send you half the kidne I took from one woman, prasarved it for you, tother piece I fried and ate it; was very nice. I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate while longer. Catch me when you can, Mr. husk.
He had wanted to sign that one “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” or even Spring-Heeled Jack or maybe Leather Apron, whichever had tickled his fancy, but a sense of style had stopped him. To go too far was to defeat his own purposes. It may even have been too much to suggest to Mr. Lusk that he had eaten the kidney. How hideous. True, he had smelled it...
This blonde girl, this Juliette with the knife under her pillow. She was the ninth. He leaned against the smooth steel wall without break or seam, and he rubbed his eyes. When would he be able to stop? When would they realize, when would they get his message, a message so clear, written in blood, that only the blindness of their own cupidity forced them to misunderstand! Would he be compelled to decimate the endless regiments of Spitalfields sluts to make them understand? Would he be forced to run the cobbles ankle-deep in black blood before they sensed what he was saying, and were impelled to make reforms?
But as he took his blood-soaked hands from his eyes, he realized what he must have sensed all along: he was no longer in Whitechapel. This was not Miller’s Court, nor anywhere in Spitalfields. It might not even be London. But how could that be?
Had God taken him?
Had he died, in a senseless instant between the anatomy lesson of Mary Jane Kelly (that filth, she had actually kissed him!) and the bedroom disembowelment of this Juliette? Had Heaven finally called him to his reward for the work he had done?
The Reverend Mr. Barnett would love to know about this. But then, he’d have loved to know about it all. But “Leather Apron” wasn’t about to tell. Let the reforms come as the Reverend and his wife wished for them, and let them think their pamphleteering had done it, instead of the scalpels of Jack.
If he was dead, would his work be finished? He smiled to himself. If Heaven had taken him, then it must be that the work was finished. Successfully. But if that was so, then who was this Juliette who now lay spread out moist and cooling in the bedroom of a thousand mirrors? And in that instant he felt fear.
What if even God misinterpreted what he had done?
As the good folks of Queen Victoria’s London had misinterpreted. As Sir Charles Warren had misinterpreted. What if God believed the superficial and ignored the real reason? But no! Ludicrous. If anyone would understand, it was the good God who had sent him the message that told him to set things a-right.
God loved him, as he loved God, and God would know.
But he felt fear, in that moment.
Because who was the girl he had just carved?
“She was my granddaughter, Juliette,” said a voice immediately beside him.
His head refused to move, to turn that few inches to see who spoke. The Gladstone was beside him, resting on the smooth and reflective surface of the street. He could not get to a knife before he was taken. At last they had caught up with Jack. He began to shiver uncontrollably.
“No need to be afraid,” the voice said. It was a warm and succoring voice. An older man. He stook as with an ague. But he turned to look. It was a kindly old man with a gentle smile. Who spoke again, without moving his lips. “No one can hurt you. How do you do?”
The man from 1888 sank slowly to his knees. “Forgive me. Dear God, I did not know.” The old man’s laughter rose inside the head of the man on his knees. It rose like a beam of sunlight moving across a Whitechapel alleyway, from noon to one o’clock, rising and illuminating the gray bricks of soot-coated walls. It rose, and illuminated his mind.
“I’m not God. Marvelous idea, but no, I’m not God. Would you like to meet God? I’m sure we can find one of the artists who would mold one for you. Is it important? No, I can see it isn’t. What a strange mind you have. You neither believe nor doubt. How can you contain both concepts at once...would you like me to straighten some of your brain-patterns? No. I see, you’re afraid. Well, let it be for the nonce. We’ll do it another time.”
He grabbed the kneeling man and drew him erect.
“You’re covered with blood. Have to get you cleaned up. There’s an ablute near here. Incidentally, I was very impressed with the way you handled Juliette. You’re the first, you know. No, how could you know? In any case, you are the first to deal her as good as she gave. You would have been amused at what she did to Caspar Hauser. Squeezed part of his brain and then sent him back, let him live out part of his life and then—the little twit—she made me bring him back a second time and used a knife on him. Same knife you took, I believe. Then sent him back to his own time. Marvelous mystery. In all the tapes on unsolved phenomena. But she was much sloppier than you. She had a great verve in her amusements, but very little éclat. Except with Judge Crater; there she was—” He paused, and laughed lightly. “I’m an old man and I ramble on like a muskrat. You want to get cleaned up and shown around, I know. And then we can talk.
“I just wanted you to know I was satisfied with the way you disposed of her. In a way, I’ll miss the little twit. She was such a good fuck.”
The old man picked up the Gladstone bag and, holding the man spattered with blood, he moved off down the clean and shimmering street. “You wanted her killed?” the man from 1888 asked, unbelieving.
The old man nodded, but his lips never moved. “Of course. Otherwise why bring her Jack the Ripper?”
Oh my dear God, he thought, I’m in hell. And I’m entered as Jack.
“No, my boy, no no no. You’re not in hell at all. You’re in the future. For you the future, for me the world of now. You came from 1888 and you’re now in—” he stopped, silently speaking for an instant, as though computing apples in terms of dollars, then resumed “—3077. It’s a fine world, filled with happy times, and we’re glad to have you with us. Come along now, and you’ll wash.”
* * * *
In the ablutatorium, the late Juliette’s grandfather changed his head.
“I really despise it,” he informed the man from 1888, grabbing fingerfuls of his cheeks and stretching the flabby skin like elastic. “But Juliette insisted. I was willing to humor her, if indeed that was what it took to get her to lie down. But with toys from the past, and changing my head every time I wanted her to fuck me, it was trying; very trying.”
He stepped into one of the many identically shaped booths set lush into the walls. The tambour door rolled down and there was a soft chukk sound, almost chitinous. The tambour door rolled up and the late Juliette’s grandfather, now six years younger than the man from 1888, stepped out, stark naked and wearing a new head. “The body is fine, replaced last year,” he said, examining the genitals and a mole on his right shoulder. The man from 1888 looked away. This was hell and God hated him.
“Well, don’t just stand there, Jack.” Juliette’s grandfather smiled. “Hit one of those booths and get your ablutions.”
“That isn’t my name,” said the man from 1888 very softly, as though he had been whipped.
“It’ll do, it’ll do ... now go get washed.”
Jack approached one of the booths. It was a light green in color, but changed to mauve as he stopped in front of it. “Will it-”
“It will only clean you, what are you afraid of?”
“I don’t want to be changed.”
Juliette’s grandfather did not laugh. “That’s a mistake,” he said cryptically. He made a peremptory motion with his hand and the man from 1888 entered the booth, which promptly revolved in its niche, sank into the floor and made a hearty zeeeezzzz sound. When it rose and revolved and opened, Jack stumbled out, looking terribly confused. His long sideburns had been neatly trimmed, his beard stubble had been removed, his hair was three shades lighter and was now parted on the left side, rather than in the middle. He still wore the same long, dark coat trimmed with astrakhan, dark suit with white collar and black necktie (in which was fastened a horseshoe stickpin) but now the garments seemed new, unsoiled of course, possibly synthetics built to look like his former garments.
“Now!” Juliette’s grandfather said. “Isn’t that much better? A good cleansing always sets one’s mind to rights.” And he stepped into another booth from which he issued in a moment wearing a soft paper jumper that fitted from neck to feet without a break. He moved toward the door.
“Where are we going?” the man from 1888 asked the younger grandfather beside him. “I want you to meet someone,” said Juliette’s grandfather, and Jack realized that he was moving his lips now. He decided not to comment on it. There had to be a reason.
“I’ll walk you there, if you promise not to make gurgling sounds at the city. It’s a nice city, but I live here, and frankly, tourism is boring.” Jack did not reply. Grandfather took it for acceptance of the terms.
They walked. Jack became overpowered by the sheer weight of the city. It was obviously extensive, massive, and terribly clean. It was his dream for Whitechapel come true. He asked about slums, about doss houses. The grandfather shook his head. “Long gone.”
So it had come to pass. The reforms for which he had pledged his immortal soul, they had come to pass. He swung the Gladstone and walked jauntily. But after a few minutes his pace sagged once more: there was no one to be seen in the streets.
Just shining clean buildings and streets that ran off in aimless directions and came to unexpected stops as though the builders had decided people might vanish at one point and reappear someplace else, so why bother making a road from one point to the other.
The ground was metal, the sky seemed metallic, the buildings loomed on all sides, featureless explorations of planed space by insensitive metal. The man from 1888 felt terribly alone, as though every act he had performed had lea inevitably to his alienation from the very people he had sought to aid.
When he had come to Toynbee Hall, and the Reverend Mr. Barnett had opened his eyes to the slum horrors of Spitalfields, he had vowed to help in any way he could. It had seemed as simple as faith in the Lord what to do, after a few months in the sinkholes of Whitechapel. The sluts, of what use were they? No more use than the disease germs that had infected these very same whores. So he had set forth as Jack to perform the will of God and raise the poor dregs who inhabited the East End of London. That Lord Warren, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, and his Queen, and all the rest thought him a mad doctor, or an amok butcher, or a beast in human form did not distress him. He knew he would remain anonymous through all time, but that the good works he had set in motion would proceed to their wonderful conclusion.
The destruction of the most hideous slum area the country had ever known, and the opening of Victorian eyes But all time had passed, and now he was here, in a world where slums apparently did not exist, a sterile Utopia that was the personification of the Reverend Mr. Barnett’s dreams—but it didn’t seem ... right.
This grandfather, with his young head.
Silence in the empty streets.
The girl, Juliette, and her strange hobby.
The lack of concern at her death.
The grandfather’s expectation that he, Jack, would kill her. And now his friendliness.
Where were they going?
[Around them, the City. As they walked, the grandfather paid no attention, and Jack watched but did not understand. But this was what they saw as they walked:
[Thirteen hundred beams of light, one foot wide and seven molecules thick,
erupted from almost-invisible slits in the metal streets, fanned out and washed the surface of the buildings; they altered hue to a vague blue and washed down the surface of the buildings; they bent and covered all open surfaces, bent at right angles, then bent again, and again, like origami paper figures; they altered hue a second time, soft gold, and penetrated the surfaces of the buildings; expanding and contracting in solid waves, washing the inner surfaces; they withdrew rapidly into the sidewalks; the entire process had taken twelve seconds.
[Night fell over a sixteen block area of the City. It descended in a solid pillar
and was quite sharp-edged, ending at the street corners. From within the area of darkness came the distinct sounds of crickets, marsh-frogs belching, night birds, soft breezes in trees, and faint music of unidentifiable instruments.
[Panes of frosted light appeared suspended freely in the air, overhead. A
wavery insubstantial quality began to assault the topmost levels of a great structure directly in front of the light-panes. As the panes moved slowly down through the air, the building became indistinct, turned into the motes of light, and floated upward. As the panes reached the pavement, the building had been completely dematerialized. The panes shifted color to a deep orange and began moving upward again. As they moved a new structure began to form where the previous building had stood, drawing—it seemed—motes of light from the air and forming them into a cohesive whole that became, as the panes ceased their upward movement, a new building. The light-panes winked out of existence.
[The sound of a bumblebee was heard for several seconds. Then it ceased.
[A crowd of people in rubber garments hurried out of a gray pulsing hole in
the air, patted the pavement at their feet, then rushed off around a corner, from where emanated the sound of prolonged coughing. Then silence returned.
[A drop of water, thick as quicksilver, plummeted to the pavement, struck,
bounded, rose several inches, then evaporated into a crimson smear in the shape of a whale’s tooth, which settled to the pavement and lay still.
[Two blocks of buildings sank into the pavement and the metal covering was
smooth and unbroken, save for a metal tree whose trunk was silver and slim, topped by a ball of foliage constructed of golden fibres that radiated brightly in a perfect circle. There was no sound.
[The late Juliette’s grandfather and the man from 1888 continued walking.]
“Where are we going?”
“To Van Cleef’s. We don’t usually walk; oh, sometimes; but it isn’t as much pleasure as it used to be. I’m doing this primarily for you. Are you enjoying yourself?”
“It’s ... unusual.”
“Not much like Spitalfields, is it? But I rather like it back there, at that time. I have the only Traveler, did you know? The only one ever made. Juliette’s father constructed it, my son. I had to kill him to get it. He was thoroughly unreasonable about it, really. It was a casual thing for him. He was the last of the tinkerers, and he might just as easily have given it to me. But I supposed he was being cranky. That was why I had you carve up my granddaughter. She would have gotten around to me almost any time now. Bored, just silly bored is what she was—”
The gardenia took shape in the air in front of them, and turned into the face of a woman with long white hair. “Hernon, we can’t wait much longer!” She was annoyed.
Juliette’s grandfather grew livid. “You scum bitch! I told you pace. But no, you just couldn’t, could you? Jump jump jump, that’s all you ever do. Well, now it’ll only be feddels less, that’s all. Feddels, damn you! I set it for pace, I was working pace, and you ... !”
His hand came up and moss grew instantly toward the face. The face vanished, and a moment later the gardenia reappeared a few feet away. The moss shriveled and Hernon, Juliette’s grandfather, dropped his hand, as though weary at the woman’s stupidity. A rose, a water lily, a hyacinth, a pair of phlox, a wild celandine, and a bull thistle appeared near the gardenia. As each turned into the face of a different person, Jack stepped back, frightened.
All the faces turned to the one that had been the bull thistle. “Cheat! Rotten bastard!” they screamed at the thin white face that had been the bull thistle. The gardenia-woman’s eyes bulged from her face, the deep purple eyeshadow that completely surrounded the eyeball making her look like a deranged animal peering out of a cave. “Turd!” she shrieked at the bull thistle-man. “We all agreed, we all said and agreed; you had to formz a thistle, didn’t you, scut! Well, now you’ll see...”
She addressed herself instantly to the others. “From now! To hell with waiting, pace fuck! Now!”
“No, dammit!” Hernon shouted. “We were going to paaaaace!” But it was too late. Centering in on the bull thistle-man, the air roiled thickly like silt at a river-bottom, and the air blackened as a spiral began with the now terrified face of the bull thistle-man and exploded whirling outward, enveloping Jack and Hernon and all the flower-people and the City and suddenly it was night in Spitalfields and the man from 1888 was in 1888, with his Gladstone bag in his hand, and a woman approaching down the street toward him, shrouded in the London fog.
(There were eight additional nodules in Jack’s brain.)
The woman was about forty, weary and not too clean. She wore a dark dress of rough material that reached down to her boots. Over the skirt was fastened a white apron that was stained and wrinkled. The bulbed sleeves ended midway up her wrist and the bodice of the dress was buttoned close around her throat. She wore a kerchief tied at the neck, and a hat that looked like a wide-brimmed skimmer with a raised crown. There was a pathetic little flower of unidentifiable origin in the band of the hat. She carried a beaded handbag of capacious size, hanging from a wrist-loop.
Her step slowed as she saw him standing there, deep in the shadows. Saw him was hardly accurate: sensed him.
He stepped out and bowed slightly from the waist. “Fair evenin’ to ye, Miss. Care for a pint?”
Her features—sunk in misery of a kind known only to women who have taken in numberless shafts of male blood-gorged flesh—re-arranged themselves. “Coo, sir, I thought was ‘im for true. Old Leather Apron hisself. Gawdamighty, you give me a scare.” She tried to smile. It was a rictus. There were bright spots in her cheeks from sickness and too much gin. Her voice was ragged, a broken-edged instrument barely workable.
“Just a solicitor caught out without comp’ny,” Jack assured her. “And pleased to buy a handsome lady a pint of stout for a few hours’ companionship.”
She stepped toward him and linked aims. “Emily Mat-thewes, sir, an’ pleased to go with you. It’s a fearsome chill night, and with Slippery Jack abroad not safe for a respectin’ woman such’s m’self.”
They moved off down Thrawl Street, past the doss houses where this drab might flop later, if she could obtain a few coppers from this neat-dressed stranger with the dark eyes.
He turned right onto Commercial Street, and just abreast of a stinking alley almost to Flower & Dean Street, he nudged her sharply sidewise. She went into the alley, and thinking he meant to steal a smooth hand up under her petticoats, she settled back against the wall and opened her legs, starting to lift the skirt around her waist. But Jack had hold of the kerchief and, locking his fingers tightly, he twisted, cutting off her breath. Her cheeks ballooned, and by a vagary of light from a gas standard in the street he could see her eyes go from hazel to a dead-leaf brown in an instant. Her expression was one of terror, naturally, but commingled with it was a deep sadness, at having lost the pint, at having not been able to make her doss for the night, at having had the usual Emily Matthewes bad luck to run afoul this night of the one man who would ill-use her favors. It was consummate sadness at the inevitability of her fate.
I come to you out of the night. The night that sent me down all the minutes of our lives to this instant. From this time forward, men will wonder what happened at this instant. They will silently hunger to go back, to come to my instant with you and see my face and know my name and perhaps not even try to stop me, for then I would not be who I am, but only someone who tried and failed. Ah. For you and me it becomes history that will lure men always; but they will never understand why we both suffered, Emily; they will never truly understand why each of us died so terribly.
A film came over her eyes, and as her breath husked out in wheezing, pleading tremors, his free hand went into the pocket of the greatcoat. He had known he would need it, when they were walking, and he had already invaded the Gladstone bag. Now his hand went into the pocket and came up with the scalpel.
“Emily...softly.
Then he sliced her.
Neatly, angling the point of the scalpel into the soft flesh behind and under her left ear. Sternocleidomastoideus. Driving it in to the gentle crunch of cartilage giving way. Then, grasping the instrument tightly, tipping it down and drawing it across the width of the throat, following the line of the firm jaw. Glandula submandibularis. The blood poured out over his hands, ran thickly at first and then burst spattering past him, reaching the far wall of the alley. Up his sleeves, soaking his white cuffs. She made a watery rattle and sank limply in his grasp, his fingers still twisted tight in her kerchief; black abrasions where he had scored the flesh. He continued the cut up past the point of the jaw’s end, and sliced into the lobe of the ear. He lowered her to the filthy paving. She lay crumpled, and he straightened her. Then he cut away the garments laying her naked belly open to the wan and flickering light of the gas standard in the street. Her belly was bloated. He started the primary cut in the hollow of her throat. Glandula thyreoeidea. His hand was sure as he drew a thin black line of blood down and down, between the breasts. Sternum. Cutting a deep cross in the hole of her navel. Something vaguely yellow oozed up. Plica umbilicadis media. Down over the rounded hump of the belly, biting more deeply, withdrawing for a neat incision. Mesenterium dorsale commune. Down to the matted-with-sweat roundness of her privates. Harder here. Vesica urinaria. And finally, to the end, vagina.
Filth hole.
Foul-smelling the red lust wet hole of sluts.
And in his head, succubi. And in his head eyes watching. And in his head minds impinging. And in his head titillation
* * * *
for a gardenia
a water lily
a rose
a hyacinth
a pair of phlox
a wild celandine
and a dark flower with petals of obsidian, a stamen of onyx, pistils of anthracite, and the mind of Hernon, who was the late Juliette’s grandfather.
* * * *
They watched the entire horror of the mad anatomy lesson. They watched him nick the eyelids. They watched him remove the heart. They watched him slice out the fallopian tubes. They watched him squeeze, till it ruptured, the “ginny” kidney. They watched him slice off the sections of breast till they were nothing but shapeless mounds of bloody meat, and arrange them, one mound each on a still-staring, wide-open, nicked-eyelid eye. They watched.
They watched and they drank from the deep troubled pool of his mind. They sucked deeply at the moist quivering core of his id. And they delighted:
Oh God how Delicious look at that. It looks like the uneaten rind of a Pizza or look at That It looks like lumaconi oh God IIIIwonder what it would be like to Tasteit!
See how smooth the steel.
He hates them all, every one of them, something about a girl, a venereal disease, fear of his God, Christ, the Reverend Mr. Barnett, he... he wants to fuck the reverend’s wife!
Social reform can only be brought about by concerted effort of a devoted few. Social reform is a justifiable end, condoning any expedient short of decimation of over fifty per cent of the people who will be served by the reforms. The best social reformers are the most audacious. He believes it! How lovely!
You pack of vampires, you filth, you scum, you...
He senses us!
Damn him! Damn you, Hernon, you drew off too deeply, he knows we’re here, that’s disgusting, what’s the sense now? I’m withdrawing!
Come back, you’ll end the formz....
... back they plunged in the spiral as it spiraled back in upon itself and the darkness of the night of 1888 withdrew. The spiral drew in and in and locked at its most infinitesimal point as the charred and blackened face of the man who had been the bull thistle. He was quite dead. His eyeholes had been burned out; charred wreckage lay where intelligence had lived. They had used him as a focus.
The man from 1888 came back to himself instantly, with a full and eidetic memory of what he had just experienced. It had not been a vision, nor a dream, nor a delusion, nor a product of his mind. It had happened. They had sent him back, erased his mind of the transfer into the future, of Juliette, of everything after the moment outside No. 13 Miller’s Court. And they had set him to work pleasuring them, while they drained off his feelings, his emotions and his unconscious thoughts; while they battened and gorged themselves with the most private sensations. Most of which, till this moment—in a strange feedback—he had not even known he possessed. As his mind plunged on from one revelation to the next, he felt himself growing ill. At one concept his mind tried to pull back and plunge him into darkness rather than confront it. But the barriers were down, they had opened new patterns and he could read it all, remember it all. Stinking sex hole, sluts, they have to die. No, that wasn’t the way he thought of women, any women, no matter how low or common. He was a gentleman, and women were to be respected. She had given him the clap. He remembered. The shame and the endless fear till he had gone to his physician father and confessed it. The look on the man’s face. He remembered it all. The way his father had tended him, the way he would have tended a plague victim. It had never been the same between them again. He had tried for the cloth. Social reform hahahaha. All delusion. He had been a mountebank, a clown ... and worse. He had slaughtered for something in which not even he believed. They left his mind wide open, and his thoughts stumbled ... raced further and further toward the thought of
EXPLOSION!IN!HIS!MIND!
He fell face forward on the smooth and polished metal pavement, but he never touched. Something arrested his fall, and he hung suspended, bent over at the waist like a ridiculous Punch divested of strings or manipulation from above. A whiff of something invisible, and he was in full possession of his senses almost before they had left him. His mind was forced to look at it:
He wants to fuck the Reverend Mr. Barnett’s wife.
Henrietta, with her pious petition of Queen Victoria—”Madam, we, the women of East London, feel horror at the dreadful sins that have been lately committed in our midst...”—asking for the capture of himself, of Jack, whom she would never, not ever suspect was residing right there with her and the Reverend in Toynbee Hall. The thought was laid as naked as her body in the secret dreams he had never remembered upon awakening. All of it, they had left him with opened doors, with unbounded horizons, and he saw himself for what he was.
A psychopath, a butcher, a lecher, a hypocrite, a clown.
“You did this to me! Why did you do this?”
Frenzy cloaked his words. The flower-faces became the solidified hedonists who had taken him back to 1888 on that senseless voyage of slaughter.
Van Cleef, the gardenia-woman, sneered. “Why do you think, you ridiculous bumpkin? (Bumpkin, is that the right colloquialism, Hermon? I’m so uncertain in the mid-dialects.) When you’d done in Juliette, Hernon wanted to send you back. But why should he? He owed us at least three formz, and you did passing well for one of them.”
Jack shouted at them till the cords stood out in his throat. “Was it necessary, this last one? Was it important to do it, to help my reforms... was it?”
Hernon laughed. “Of course not.”
Jack sank to his knees. The City let him do it. “Oh God, oh God almighty, I’ve done what I’ve done ... I’m covered with blood... and for nothing, for nothing...”
Cashio, who had been one of the phlox, seemed puzzled. “Why is he concerned about this one, if the others don’t bother him?”
Nosy Verlag, who had been a wild celandine, said sharply, “They do, all of them. Probe him, you’ll see.”
Cashio’s eyes rolled up in his head an instant, then rolled down and refocused—Jack felt a quicksilver shudder in his mind and it was gone—and he said lackadaisically, “Mm-hmm.”
Jack fumbled with the latch of the Gladstone. He opened the bag and pulled out the foetus in the bottle. Mary Jane Kelly’s unborn child, from November 9th, 1888. He held it in front of his face a moment, then dashed it to the metal pavement. It never struck. It vanished a fraction of an inch from the clean, sterile surface of the City’s street.
“What marvelous loathing!” exulted Rose, who had been a rose.
“Hernon,” said Van Cleef, “he’s centering on you. He begins to blame you for all of this.”
Hernon was laughing (without moving his lips) as Jack pulled Juliette’s electrical scalpel from the Gladstone, and lunged. Jack’s words were incoherent, but what he was saying, as he struck, was: “I’ll show you what filth you are! I’ll show you you can’t do this kind of thing! I’ll teach you! You’ll die, all of you!” This is what he was saying, but it came out as one long sustained bray of revenge, frustration, hatred and directed frenzy.
Hernon was still laughing as Jack drove the whisper-thin blade with its shimmering current into his chest. Almost without manipulation on Jack’s part, the blade circumscribed a perfect 360° hole that charred and shriveled, exposing Hernon’s pulsing heart and wet organs. He had time to shriek with confusion before he received Jack’s second thrust, a direct lunge that severed the heart from its attachments. Vena cava superior. Aorta. Arteria pulmonalis. Bronchus principalis.
The heart flopped forward and a spreading wedge of blood under tremendous pressure ejaculated, spraying Jack with such force that it knocked his hat from his head and blinded him. His face was now a dripping black-red collage of features and blood.
Hernon followed his heart, and fell forward, into Jack’s arms. Then the flower-people screamed as one, vanished, and Hernon’s body slipped from Jack’s hands to wink out of existence an instant before it struck at Jack’s feet. The walls around him were clean, unspotted, sterile, metallic, uncaring.
He stood in the street, holding the bloody knife.
“Now!” he screamed, holding the knife aloft. “Now it begins!”
If the city heard, it made no indication, but
[Pressure accelerated in temporal linkages.]
[A section of shining wall on a building eighty miles away changed from silver to rust.]
[In the freezer chambers, two hundred gelatin caps were fed into a ready trough.]
[The weathermaker spoke softly to itself, accepted data and instantly constructed an intangible mnemonic circuit.] and in the shining eternal city where night only fell when the inhabitants had need of night and called specifically for night...
Night fell. With no warning save: “Now!”
* * * *
In the City of sterile loveliness a creature of filth and decaying flesh prowled. In the last City of the world, a City on the edge of the world, where the ones who had devised their own paradise lived, the prowler made his home in shadows. Slipping from darkness to darkness with eyes that saw only movement, he roamed in search of a partner to dance his deadly rigadoon.
He found the first woman as she materialized beside a small waterfall that flowed out of empty air and dropped its shimmering, tinkling moisture into an azure cube of nameless material. He found her and drove the living blade into the back of her neck. Then he sliced out the eyeballs and put them into her open hands.
He found the second woman in one of the towers, making love to a very old man who gasped and wheezed and clutched his heart as the young woman forced him to passion. She was killing him as Jack killed her. He drove the living blade into the lower rounded surface of her belly, piercing her sex organs as she rode astride the old man. She decamped blood and viscous fluids over the prostrate body of the old man, who also died, for Jack’s blade had severed the penis within the young woman. She fell forward across the old man and Jack left them that way, joined in the final embrace.
He found a man and throttled him with his bare hands, even as the man tried to dematerialize. Then Jack recognized him as one of the phlox, and made neat incisions in the face, into which he inserted the man’s genitals.
He found another woman as she was singing a gentle song about eggs to a group of children. He opened her throat and severed the strings hanging inside. He let the vocal cords drop onto her chest. But he did not touch the children, who watched it all avidly. He liked children.
He prowled through the unending night making a grotesque collection of hearts, which he cut out of one, three, nine people. And when he had a dozen, he took them and laid them as road markers on one of the wide boulevards that never were used by vehicles, for the people of this City had no need of vehicles.
Oddly, the City did not clean up the hearts. Nor were the people vanishing any longer. He was able to move with relative impunity, hiding only when he saw large groups that might be searching for him. But something was happening in the City. (Once, he heard the peculiar sound of metal grating on metal, the shrikkk of plastic cutting into plastic—though he could not have identified it as plastic—and he instinctively knew it was the sound of a machine malfunctioning.)
He found a woman bathing, and tied her up with strips of his own garments, and cut off her legs at the knees and left her still sitting up in the swirling crimson bath, screaming as she bled away her life. The legs he took with him.
When he found a man hurrying to get out of the night, he pounced on him, cut his throat and severed off the arms. He replaced the arms with the bath-woman’s legs.
And it went on and on, for a time that had no measure. He was showing them what evil could produce. He was showing them their immorality was silly beside his own.
But one thing finally told him he was winning. As he lurked in an antiseptically pure space between two low aluminum-cubes, he heard a voice that came from above him and around him and even from inside him. It was a public announcement, broadcast by whatever mental communications system the people of the City, on the edge of the World used.
OUR CITY IS PART OF US, WE ARE PART OF OUR CITY. IT RESPONDS TO OUR MINDS AND WE CONTROL IT. THE GESTALT THAT WE HAVE BECOME IS THREATENED. WE HAVE AN ALIEN FORCE WITHIN THE CITY AND WE ARE GEARING TO LOCATE IT. BUT THE MIND OF THIS MAN IS STRONG. IT IS BREAKING DOWN THE FUNCTIONS OF THE CITY. THIS ENDLESS NIGHT IS AN EXAMPLE. WE MUST ALL CONCENTRATE. WE MUST ALL CONSCIOUSLY FOCUS OUR THOUGHTS TO MAINTAINING THE CITY. THIS THREAT IS OF THE FIRST ORDER. IF OUR CITY DIES, WE DIE.
It was not an announcement in those terms, though that was how Jack interpreted it. The message was much longer and much more complex, but that was what it meant, and he knew he was winning. He was destroying them. Social reform was laughable, they had said. He would show them.
And so he continued with his lunatic pogrom. He butchered and slaughtered and carved them whenever he found them, and they could not vanish and they could not escape and they could not stop him. The collection of hearts grew to fifty and seventy and then a hundred.
He grew bored with hearts and began cutting out their brains. The collection grew.
For numberless days it went on, and from time to time in the clean, scented autoclave of the City, he could hear the sounds of screaming. His hands were always sticky.
Then he found Van Cleef, and leaped from hiding in the darkness to bring her down. He raised the living blade to drive it into her breast, but she
van ished
He got to his feet and looked around. Van Cleef reappeared ten feet from him. He lunged for her and again she was gone. To reappear ten feet away. Finally, when he had struck at her half a dozen times and she had escaped him each time, he stood panting, arms at sides, looking at her.
And she looked back at him with disinterest.
“You no longer amuse us,” she said, moving her lips.
Amuse? His mind whirled down into a place far darker than any he had known before, and through the murk of his blood-lust he began to realize. It had all been for their amusement. They had let him do it. They had given him the run of the City and he had capered and gibbered for them.
Evil? He had never even suspected the horizons of that word. He went for her, but she disappeared with finality.
He was left standing there as the daylight returned. As the City cleaned up the mess, took the butchered bodies and did with them what it had to do. In the freezer chambers the gelatin caps were returned to their niches, no more inhabitants of the city need be thawed to provide Jack the Ripper with utensils for his amusement of the sybarites. His work was truly finished.
He stood there in the empty street. A street that would always be empty to him. The people of the City had all along been able to escape him, and now they would. He was finally and completely the clown they had shown him to be. He was not evil, he was pathetic.
He tried to use the living blade on himself, but it dissolved into motes of light and wafted away on a breeze that had blown up for just that purpose.
Alone, he stood there staring at the victorious cleanliness of this Utopia. With their talents they would keep him alive, possibly alive forever, immortal in the possible expectation of needing him for amusement again someday. He was stripped to raw essentials in a mind that was no longer anything more than jelly matter. To go madder and madder, and never to know peace or end or sleep.
He stood there, a creature of dirt and alleys, in a world as pure as the first breath of a baby.
“My name isn’t Jack,” he said softly. But they would never know his real name. Nor would they care. “My name isn’t Jack!” he said loudly. No one heard.
“MY NAME ISN’T JACK, AND I’VE BEEN BAD, VERY BAD, I’M AN EVIL PERSON BUT MY NAME ISN’T JACK!” he screamed, and screamed and screamed again, walking aimlessly down an empty street, in plain view, no longer forced to prowl. A stranger in the city.
* * * *
Afterword:
The paths down which our minds entice us are often not the ones we thought we were taking. And the destinations frequently leave something to be desired in the area of hospitality. Such a case is the story you have just read.
It took me fifteen months—off and on—to write ‘The Prowler In The City At The Edge Of The World.” As I indicated in my introduction to Bob Bloch’s story, it was first a visual image without a plot—the creature of filth in the city of sterile purity. It seemed a fine illustration, but it was little more than that, I’m afraid. At best I thought it might provide a brief moment of horror in a book where realism (even couched in fantasy) was omnipresent.
I suggested the illustration to Bloch and he did his version of it. But the folly of trying to put one man’s vision in another man’s head (even when the vision was directly caused by the vision of the first man) was obvious.
So I decided to color my own illustration. With Bloch’s permission. But what was my story? I was intrigued by the entire concept of a Ripper, a killer of obvious derangement who nonetheless worked in a craftsmanlike manner to such estimable ends that he was never apprehended. And the letters of braggadocio he had sent to the newspapers and the police and George Lusk of the East London vigilantes. The audacity of the man! The eternal horror of him! I was hooked.
But I still had no story.
Still, I tried to write it. I started it two dozen times—easily—in the fifteen months during which I edited this anthology. Started it and slumped to a stop after a page or two, surfeited with my own fustian. I had nothing but that simple drawing in my head, Jack in the autoclave. The story languished while I wrote a film and a half-dozen TV scripts and two dozen stories and uncountable articles, reviews, criticisms, introductions, and edited this book. (For those who think a writer is someone who gets his name on books, let me assure you that is an “author.” A “writer” is the hapless devil who cannot keep himself from putting every vagrant thought he has ever had down on paper. I am a writer. I write. That’s what I do. I do a lot of it.) The story gathered dust.
But a writer I once admired very much had told me that a “writer’s slump” might very well not be a slump at all, but a transitional period. A plateau period in which his style, his views and his interests might be altering. I’ve found this to be true. Story ideas I’ve gotten that have not been able to be written, I’ve let sit. For years. And then, one day, as if magically, I leap on the snippet of story and start over and it gets itself written in hours. Unconsciously I had been working and working that story in my mind during the years in which other work had claimed me consciously. In my Writer’s Brain I knew I simply did not have the skill or insight to do the story I wanted to do, and had I bulled through (as I did when I was much younger and needed to get it all said), I would have produced a half-witted, half-codified story.
This was precisely the case with “The Prowler.” As the months passed, I realized what I was trying to do was say something about the boundaries and dimensions of evil in a total society. It was not merely the story of Jack, it was the story of the effects on evil, per se, of an evil culture.
It was becoming heady stuff. So I realized I could not write it from just the scant information on Jack I could recall from Bloch’s “Yours Truly, Jack The Ripper,” or from an E. Haldeman-Julius “Little Blue Book” I had read in junior high school, or even from the passing references, by Alan Hynd and by Mrs. Belloc Lowndes in The Lodger, I had encountered. I suddenly had a project on my hands. The integrity of the story demanded I do my homework.
So I read everything I could lay my hands on. I scoured the bookstores and the libraries for source books on Jack. And in this respect, I must express my gratitude and pleasure for the books by Tom A. Gullen, Donald McCormick, Leonard P. Matters and The Harlot Killer, edited by Allan Barnard, which only served to fire my curiosity about this incredible creature known as Jack.
I was hooked. I read ceaselessly about the slayings. And without my even knowing it, I began to form my own conclusions as to who Jack might have been.
The concept of the “invisible killer”—an assassin who could be seen near the site of a crime and not be considered a suspect—stuck with me. The audacity of the crimes and their relatively open nature—in streets and courts and alleys—seemed to insist that an “invisible killer” was my man. Invisible? Why, consider, in Victorian London, a policeman would be invisible, a midwife would be invisible, and ... a clergyman would be invisible.
The way in which the poor harlots were butchered indicated two things to me: a man obviously familiar with surgical technique, and a man addicted to the concept of femininity prevalent at the time.
But most of all, the pattern and manner of the crimes suggested to me—over and above the obvious derangement of the assassin—that the clergyman-butcher was trying to make a statement. A grisly and quite mad statement, to be sure. But a statement, nonetheless.
So I continued my reading with these related facts in mind. And everywhere I read, the name of the Reverend Samuel Barnett appeared with regularity. He was a socially conscious man who lived in the general area, at Toynbee Hall. And his wife had circulated the petition to Queen Victoria. He had the right kind of background, he certainly had the religious fervor to want to see the slums cleared at almost any cost.
My mind bridged the gap. If not Barnett—to which statement, even in fiction, about a man long since dead, would be attached the dangers of libel and slander—then someone close to Barnett. A younger man, perhaps. And from one concept to another the theory worked itself out, till I had in my Writer’s Brain a portrait of exactly who Jack the Ripper was and what his motives had been.
(I was gratified personally to read Tom Cullen’s book on the Ripper, after this theory had been established in my mind, and find that in many ways—though not as completely or to the same suspect—he had attached the same drives to his Ripper as I to mine.)
Now began a period of writing that stretched out over many weeks. This was one of the hardest stories I ever wrote. I was furious at the limitations of the printed page, the line-for-line rigidity of QWERTYUIOP. I wanted to break out, and the best I could do was use typographical tricks, which are in the final analysis little more than tricks. There must be some way a writer can write a book that has all the visual and sensory impact of a movie!
In any case, my story is now told.
The Jack I present is the Jack in all of us, of course. The Jack that tells us to stand and watch as a Catherine Genovese gets knifed, the Jack that condones Vietnam because we don’t care to get involved, the Jack that we need. We are a culture that needs its monsters.
We have to deify our Al Capones, our Billy the Kids, our Jesse Jameses, and all the others including Jack Ruby, General Walker, Adolf Hitler and even Richard Speck, whose Ripper-like butchery of the Chicago nurses has already begun to be thought of as modern legend.
We are a culture that creates its killers and its monsters and then provides for them the one thing Jack was never able to have: reality. He was a doomed man who wanted desperately to be recognized for what he had done (as consider the notes he wrote), but could not come out in the open for fear of capture. The torn-in-two directions of a man who senses that the mob will revere him, even as they kill him.
That is the message of the story. You are the monsters.
* * * *
THE NIGHT THAT ALL TIME BROKE OUT
* * * *
Introduction to
THE NIGHT THAT ALL TIME BROKE OUT
Brian Aldiss is an English fellah who won a Hugo for his Hothouse series a few years back, and a Nebula last year for “The Saliva Tree” (in a tie) for best novella. He also did this novel called The Dark Light-Years which was all about shit. Now that is what I call a dangerous vision.
He lives in Oxford, England. He was born August 18, 1925, in East Dereham, Norfolk. He submits he has no religion, and he is divorced and now remarried to Margaret (I am told), a delightful and charming girl.
Aldiss books include Starship, Hothouse, Greybeard, Who Can Replace a Man!, Earthworks and he is co-editor (with Harry Harrison) of Nebula Awards Two. He is also, incidentally, literary editor of the Oxford Mail. He was Guest of Honor at the 23rd World Science Fiction Convention, held in London in August 1965.
As editor of this anthology, I knew very little about Aldiss save that I admired his writing and wanted a story by him within these covers. Having received, read and purchased the off-center item that follows, I feel my responsibility in the matter is at an end. I will, therefore, allow Mr. Aldiss (pronounced Old-iss) to speak his piece unfootnoted:
“Born in 1925, I can recall being taken to school—kindergarten—past rows of unemployed waiting for the dole, my nurse being very scared of them. That would be the great depression.
“I began writing almost as soon as I could read and have really never stopped. Wrote science fiction at the age of six before I knew what it was all about; wrote pornography at boarding school before I knew what it was all about! Spent four years in the armed forces (1943-47), being just old enough to be sent out to Burma on active service and see a little of the Japanese war. These adolescent years made a great impression—I saw India, Burma, Assam, Ceylon, Sumatra, Malaya, Hong Kong.
“After all that, I didn’t want to do anything; I never have, except live and write. I drifted into bookselling, thinking that at least it would give me a chance to read. After a while I stopped private writing and tried to write for a public. It worked. I threw up bookselling. My writing career has been happy and widened my horizons and brought me in touch with many pleasant and interesting people. In this respect, I have been tremendously fortunate. My ill-luck came in my marriage, a battle that lasted some fifteen years—but that’s over now and I’m happily remarried.
“In England, I am very well known, billed on my latest paperback as ‘Britain’s Premier Science Fiction Author’—it may not be accurate but it certainly rattles the opposition! Within the small field, I am very versatile, writing novels and short stories of different kinds, producing anthologies (the three I did for Penguin Books are still selling like hot cakes), appearing at conventions and on literary panels and on TV and radio. I also edit with Harry Harrison, a magazine devoted purely to s-f lit crit: SF Horizons.
“In 1964 with my marriage at an impasse, I bought a secondhand Land Rover and drove off to Yugoslavia for six months, traveling round, especially down in the south, Macedonia and all that. A book has come out of the experience. In time, I hope to cover all the other ex-Byzantine states. And I like travelling in Communist countries—the fact that when the chips are down they are on the other side of the fence gives life a mild frisson. Not that the Yugoslavs weren’t pleasant.
“I still am a man without ambition—except one; I know I am the world’s best s-f writer; I want others to know it too!”
* * * *
THE NIGHT THAT ALL TIME BROKE OUT
by Brian W. Aldiss
The dentist bowed her smiling to the door, dialling a cab for her as he went. It alighted on the balcony as she emerged.
It was a non-automatic type, old-fashioned enough to be considered chic. Fifi Fevertrees smiled dazzlingly at the driver and climbed in.
“Extra-city service,” she said. “The village of Rouseville, off Route Z4.”
“You live in the country, huh?” said the cab driver, sailing up into the pseudo-blue, and steering like a madman with one foot.
“The country’s okay,” Fifi said defensively. She hesitated and then decided she could allow herself to boast. “Besides, it’s even better now they got the time mains out there. We’re just being connected to the time main at our house—it should be finished when I get home.”
The cabby shrugged. “Reckon it’s costly out in the country.”
“Three payts a basic unit.”
He whistled significantly.
She wanted to tell him more, wanted to tell him how excited she was, how she wished Daddy was alive to experience the fun of being on the time main. But it was difficult to say anything with a thumb in her mouth, as she looked into her wrist mirror and probed to see what the dentist had done to her.
He’d done a good job. The new little pearly tooth was already growing firmly in the pink gum. Fifi decided she had a very sexy mouth, just as Tracey said. And the dentist had removed the old tooth by time gas. So simple. Just a whiff of it and she was back in the day before yesterday, reliving that pleasant little interlude when she had taken coffee with Peggy Hackenson, with not a thought of any pain. Time gas was so smart these days. She positively glowed to think they would have it themselves, on tap all the while.
The bubble cab soared up and out of one of the dilating ports of the great dome that covered the city. Fifi felt a momentary sorrow at leaving. The cities were so pleasant nowadays that nobody wished to live outside them. Everything was double as expensive outside, too, but fortunately the government paid a hardship allowance for anyone like the Fevertrees, who had to live in the country.
In a couple of minutes they were sailing down to the ground again. Fifi pinpointed their dairy farm, and the cabby set them neatly down on their landing balcony before holding out his paw for an extortionate number of kilo-payts. Only when he had the cash did he lean back and unlock Fifi’s door with one foot. You couldn’t put a thing over these chimp drivers.
She forgot all about him as she hurried down through the house. This was the day of days! It had taken the builders two months to install the central timing—two weeks longer than they had originally anticipated—and everyone had been in an awful muddle all that time, as the men trundled their pipes and wires through every room. Now all was orderly once more. She positively danced down the stairs to find her husband.
Tracey Fevertrees was standing in the kitchen, talking to the builder. When his wife burst in, he turned and took her hand, smiling in a way that was merely soothing to her, though it disturbed the slumbers of many a local Rouseville maiden. But his good looks could hardly match her beauty when she was excited as she was at present.
“Is it all in working order?” she asked.
“There is just one last-minute snag,” Mr. Archibald Smith said grudgingly.
“Oh, there’s always a last-minute snag! We’ve had fifteen of them in the last week, Mr. Smith. What now?”
“It’s nothing that should affect you here. It’s just that, as you know, we had to pipe the time gas rather a long way to you from the main supply down at Rouseville works, and we seem to have a bit of trouble maintaining pressure. There’s talk of a nasty leak at the main pit in the works, which they’re having a job to plug. But that shouldn’t worry you.”
“We’ve tested it all out here and it seems to work fine,” Tracey said to his wife. “Come on and I’ll show you!’
They shook hands with Mr. Smith, who showed a traditional builderly reluctance to leave the site of his labours. Finally he moved off, promising to be back in the morning to pick up a last bag of tools, and Tracey and Fifi were left alone with their new toy.
Among all the other kitchen equipment, the time panel hardly stood out. It was situated next to the nuclear unit, a discreet little fixture with a dozen small dials and twice that number of toggle switches.
He pointed out to her how the time pressures had been set: low for corridors and offices, higher for bedrooms, variable for the living room. She rubbed herself against him and made an imitation purr.
‘You are thrilled, aren’t you, honey?” she asked.
“I keep thinking of the bills we have to pay. And the bills to come—three payts a basic unit—wow!” Then he saw her look of disappointment and added, “But of course I love it, darling. You know I’m going to be delighted.”
Then they bustled through the house, with the controls on. In the kitchen itself, they set themselves back to a recent early midmorning. They floated in time past at the time of day Fifi favoured most for kitchen work, when the breakfast chores were over and it was long before the hour when lunch need be planned and dialled. Fifi and Tracey had selected a morning when she had been feeling particularly calm and well; the entire ambience of that period swept over them now.
“Marvellous! Delicious! I can do anything, cook you anything, now!”
They kissed each other, and ran into the corridor, crying, “Isn’t science wonderful!”
They stopped abruptly. “Oh no!” Fifi cried.
The corridor was in perfect order, the drapes in place and gleaming metallically by the two windows, controlling the amount of light that entered, storing the surplus for off-peak hours, the creep-carpet in place and resprayed, carrying them smoothly forward, the panelling all warm and soft to the touch. But they were time-controlled back to three o’clock of an afternoon a month ago, a peaceful time of day—except that a month ago the builders had been at work here.
“Honey, they’ll ruin the carpet! And I just know the panelling will not go back properly! Oh, Tracey, look—they’ve disconnected the drapes, and Smithy promised not to!”
He clutched her shoulder. “Honey, everything’s in order, honest!”
“It’s not! It’s not in order! Look at these dirty old time tubes everywhere, and all these cables hanging about! They’ve ruined our lovely dust-absorbent ceiling—look at the way it’s leaking dirt over everything!”
“Honey, it’s the time effect!’ But he had to admit that he could not credit the perfect corridor his eyes registered; he was carried away like Fifi by his emotions of a month ago when he viewed the place as it had been then, in the hands of Smithy and his terrible men.
They reached the end of the passage and jumped into the bedroom, escaping into another time zone. Peeping back through the door, Fifi said tearfully, “Gosh, Trace, the power of time! I guess we just have to alter the controls for the corridor, eh?”
“Sure, we’ll tune in to a year ago, say a nice summer’s afternoon along the passage. You name it, we dial it! That’s the motto of Central Time Board, isn’t it? Anyhow, how do you like the time in here?”
After gazing round in the bedroom, she lowered her long lashes at him. “Mm, sort of relaxed, isn’t it?”
“Two o’clock in the morning, honey, early spring, and everyone in the whole zone sleeping tight. We aren’t likely to suffer from insomnia now!”
She came and stood against him, leaning on his chest and looking up at him. “You don’t think that maybe eleven at night would a more—well, bedroom time?”
‘You know I prefer the sofa for that sort of thing, honey. Come and sit on it with me and see what you think about the living room.”
The living room was one flight down, with only the garage and the dairy on the two floors below between them and the ground. It was a fine large room with fine large windows looking over the landscape to the distant dome of the city, and it had a fine large sofa standing in the middle of it.
They sat down on this voluptuous sofa and, past associations being what they were, commenced to cuddle. After a while Tracey reached down to the floor and pulled up a hand-switcher that was plugged into the wall.
“We can control our own time from here, without getting up, Fifi! You name the time and we flip back to it.”
“If you’re thinking of what I think you’re thinking, then we’d better not go back more than ten months because we weren’t married before that.”
“Now, come on, Mrs. Fevertrees, are you getting old-fashioned or something? You never let that thought bother you before we were married.”
“I did too!—Though maybe more after than at the time, when I was sort of carried away.”
He stroked her pretty hair gently. “Tell you what I thought we could try sometime—dial back to when you were twelve. You must have been very sexy in your pre-teens, and I’d sure as hell love to find out. How about it?”
She was about to deliver some conventional female rebuke, but her imagination got the best of her. “We could work back to when we were tots!”
“Attaboy! You know I have a touch of the Lolita complex!”
“Trace—we must be careful unless in our excitement we shoot back past the day we were born, or we’ll wind up little blobs of protoplasm or something.”
“Honey, you read the brochures! When we get up enough pressure to go right past our birth dates, we simply enter the consciousness of our nearest predecessors of the same sex—you your mother, me my father, and then your grandmother and my grandfather. Farther back than that, time pressure in the Rouseville mains won’t let us go.”
Conversation languished under other interests until Fifi murmured dreamily, “What a heavenly invention time is! Know what, even when we’re old and grey and impotent, we’ll be able to come back and enjoy ourselves as we were when we were young. We’ll dial back to this very instant, won’t we?”
“Mmmm,” he said. It was a universally shared sentiment.
That evening, they dined off a huge synthetic lobster. In her excitement over being on the time mains, Fifi had somehow dialled a slightly incorrect mixture—though she swore there was a misprint in the cookbook programming she had fed the kitchputer—and the dish was not all it should be. But they dialled themselves back to the time of one of the first and finest lobsters they had ever eaten together, shortly after their meeting two years before. The remembered taste took off the disappointment of the present taste.
While they were eating, the pressure went.
There was no sound. Externally, all was the same. But inside their heads, they felt themselves whirling through the days like leaves blown over a moor. Mealtimes came and went, and the lobster was sickening in their mouths as they seemed to chew in turn turkey, or cheese, or game, or trifle or sponge pudding or ice cream or breakfast cereal. For several mind-wrenching moments they sat there at table, petrified, while hundreds of assorted tastes chased themselves over their taste buds. Tracey jumped up gasping and cut off the time flow entirely at the switch by the door.
“Something’s gone wrong!” he exclaimed. “It’s that guy Smith. I’ll dial him straightaway. I’ll shoot him!”
But when Smith’s face floated up in the vision tank, it was as bland as ever.
“The fault’s not mine, Mr. Fevertrees. As a matter of fact, one of my men just dialled me to say that there’s trouble at the Rouseville time works, where your pipe joins the main supply. Time gas is leaking out. I told you this morning they were having some bother there. Go to bed, Mr. Fevertrees—that’s my suggestion. Go to bed, and in the morning all will probably be fixed again.”
“Go to bed! How dare he tell us to go to bed!’ Fifi exclaimed. “What an immoral suggestion! He’s trying to hide something, that man. I’ll bet this is some mistake of his and he’s covering up with this story about a leak at the time works.”
“We can soon check on that. Let’s drive down there and see!”
They caught the elevator down to the ground floor and climbed into their land vehicle. City folk might laugh at these little wheeled hovercraft, so quaintly reminiscent of the automobiles of bygone days, but there was no doubt that they were indispensable in the country outside the domes, where free public transport did not reach.
The doors opened and they rolled out, taking off immediately and floating forward a couple of feet above the ground. Rouseville lay over a low hill, and the time works was just on the far fringe of it. But as they sighted the first houses, something strange happened.
Though all was quiet, the land vehicle began to jerk around wildly. Fifi was flung about, and the next moment they were stuck in a hedge.
“Heck, these things are heavy! I must learn to drive one sometime!” Tracey said, climbing out.
“Aren’t you going to help me down, Tracey?”
“Aw, I’m too big to play with girls!”
“You gotta help me! I lost my dolly!’
“You never had no dolly! Nuts to you!”
He ran on across the field and she had to follow him, calling as she ran. It was just so difficult trying to control the clumsy heavy body of an adult with the mind of a child.
She found her husband sitting in the middle of the Rouseville road, kicking and waving his arms. He giggled at her. “Tace go walkey-walkey!” he said.
But in a few moments they were able to move along again on foot, though it was painful for Fifi, whose mother had been lame toward the end of her life. Together they hobbled forward, two young things in old postures. When they entered the little domeless village, it was to find most of the inhabitants about, and going through the whole spectrum of human age-characteristics, from burbling infancy to rattling senility. Obviously, something serious had happened at the time works.
Ten minutes and a few generations later, they arrived at the gates. Standing below the Central Time Board sign was Smith. They did not recognize him; he was wearing an anti-time gas mask, its exhaust spluttering as it spat out old moments.
“I thought you two might turn up!” he exclaimed. “Didn’t believe me, eh? Well, you’d better come in with me and see for yourselves. They’ve struck a major gusher and the cocks couldn’t stand the pressure and collapsed. My guess is they’ll have to evacuate the whole area before they get this one fixed.”
As he led them through the gates, Tracey said, “I just hope this isn’t Ruskie sabotage!”
“Rusty what?”
“Ruskie sabotage. The work of the Russians. I presume this plant is secret?”
Smith stared, at him in amazement. “You gone crazy, Mr. Fevertrees? The Russian nation got time mains just the same as us. You were on honeymoon in Odessa last year, weren’t you?”
“Last year, I was on active service in Korea, thank you!”
“Korea?!”
With mighty siren noises, a black shape bearing red flashing lights above and below its bulk settled itself down in the Time Board yard. It was a robot-piloted fire engine from the city, but its human crew tumbled out in a weird confusion, and one young fellow lay yelling for his pants to be changed before the Time Board could issue them with anti-time gas masks. And then there was no fire for them to extinguish, only the great gusher of invisible time that by now towered over the building and the whole village, and blew to the four corners, carrying unimagined or forgotten generations on its mothproof breath.
“Let’s get forward and see what we can see,” Smith said. “We might just as well go home and have a drink as stand here doing nothing.”
“You are a very foolish young man if you mean what I suppose you to mean,” Fifi said, in an ancient and severe voice. “Most of the liquor currently available is bootleg and unsafe to consume—but in any case, I believe we should support the President in his worthy attempt to stamp out alcoholism, don’t you, Tracey darling?”
But Tracey was lost in an abstraction of strange memory, and whistling “La Paloma” under his breath to boot.
Stumbling after Smith, they got to the building, where two police officials stopped them. At that moment a plump man in a formal suit appeared and spoke to one of the police through his gas mask. Smith hailed him, and they greeted each other like brothers. It turned out they were brothers. Clayball Smith beckoned them all into the plant, gallantly taking Fifi’s arm—which, to reveal his personal tragedy, was about as much as he ever got of any pretty girl.
“Shouldn’t we have been properly introduced to this gentleman, Tracey?” Fifi whispered to her husband.
“Nonsense, my dear. Rules of etiquette have to go by the board when you enter one of the temples of industry.” As he spoke, Tracey seemed to stroke an imaginary side whisker.
Inside the time plant chaos reigned. Now the full magnitude of the disaster was clear. They were pulling the first miners out of the hole where the time explosion had occurred; one of the poor fellows was cursing weakly and blaming George Til for the whole terrible matter.
The whole time industry was still in its infancy. A bare ten years had elapsed since the first of the subterrenes, foraging far below the Earth’s crust, had discovered the time pockets. The whole matter was still a cause for wonder, and investigations were as yet at a comparatively early stage.
But big business had stepped in and, with its usual big-heartedness, seen that everyone got his fair share of time, at a price. Now the time industry had more capital invested than any other industry in the world. Even in a tiny village like Rouseville, the plant was worth millions. But the plant had broken down right now.
“It’s terrible dangerous here—you folks better not stay long,” Clayball said. He was shouting through his gas mask. The noise here was terrible, especially since a news commentator had just started his spiel to the nation a yard away.
In answer to a shouted question from his brother, Clayball said, “No, it’s more than a crack in the main supply. That was just the cover story we put out. Our brave boys down there struck a whole new time seam and it’s leaking out all over the place. Can’t plug it! Half our guys were back to the Norman Conquest before we guessed what was wrong.” He pointed dramatically down through the tiles beneath their feet.
Fifi could not understand what on earth he was talking about. Ever since leaving Plymouth, she had been adrift, and that not entirely metaphorically. It was bad enough playing Pilgrim Mother to one of the Pilgrim Fathers, but she did not dig this New World at all. It was now beyond her comprehension to understand that the vast resources of modern technology were fouling up the whole time schedule of a planet.
In her present state, she could not know that already the illusions of the time gusher were spreading across the continent. Almost every communication satellite shuttling above the world was carrying more or less accurate accounts of the disaster and the events leading up to it, while their bemused audiences sank back through the generations like people plumbing bottomless snowdrifts.
From these deposits came the supply of time that was piped to the million million homes of the world. Experts had already computed that at present rates of consumption all the time deposits would be exhausted in two hundred years. Fortunately, other experts were already at work trying to develop synthetic substitutes for time. Only the previous month, the small research team of Time Pen Inc., of Ink, Penn, had announced the isolation of a molecule nine minutes slower than any other molecule known to science, and it was firmly expected that even more isolated molecules would follow.
Now an ambulance came skidding up, with another behind it. Archibald Smith tried to pull Tracey out of the way.
“Unhand me, varlet!” quoth Tracey, attempting to draw an imaginary sword. But the ambulance men were jumping out of their vehicles, and the police were cordoning off the area.
“They’re going to bring up our brave terranauts!” Clayball shouted.
He could hardly be heard above the hubbub. Masked men were everywhere, with here and there the slender figure of a masked nurse. Supplies of oxygen and soup were being marshalled, searchlights swung overhead, blazing down into the square mouth of the inspection pit. The men in yellow overalls were lowering themselves into the pit, communicating to each other by wrist radio. They disappeared. For a moment a hush of awe fell over the building and seemed to spread to the crowds outside.
But the moment stretched into minutes, and the noise found its way back to its own level. More grim-faced men came forward, and the commentators were pushed out of the picture.
“It thinks me we should suffer ourselves to get gone from here, by God’s breath!” Fifi whispered faintly, clutching at her homespun with a trembling hand. “This likes me not!”
At last there was activity at the head of the pit. Sweating men in overalls hauled on ropes. The first terranaut was pulled into view, wearing the characteristic black uniform of his kind. His head lolled back, his mask had been ripped away, but he was fighting bravely to retain consciousness.
Indeed, a debonair smile crossed his pale lips, and he waved a hand at the cameras. A ragged cheer went up from the onlookers.
This was the intrepid breed of men that went down into the uncharted seas of time gas below the Earth’s crust, risking their lives to bring back a nugget of knowledge from the unknown, pushing back still further the boundaries of science, unsung and unhonoured by all save the constant battery of world publicity.
The ace commentator had struggled through the crowd to reach the terranaut and was trying to question him, holding a microphone to his lips while the hero’s tortured face swam before the unbelieving eyes of a billion viewers.
“Hell down there. ... Dinosaurs and their young,” he managed to gasp, before he was whisked into the first ambulance. “Right down deep in the gas. Packs of ‘em, ravening. ... Few more hundred feet lower and we’d have fetched ... fetched up against the creation ... of the world. ...”
They could hear no more. Now fresh police reinforcements were clearing the building of all unauthorized persons before the other terranauts were returned to the surface, although of their earth capsule there was as yet no sign. As the armed cordon approached, Fifi and Tracey made a dash for it. They could stand no more, they could understand no more. They pelted for the door, oblivious to the cries of the two masked Smiths. As they ran out into the darkness, high above them towered the great invisible plume of the time gusher, still blowing, blowing its doom about the world.
For some while they lay gasping in the nearest hedge. Occasionally one of them would whimper like a tiny girl, or the other would groan like an old man. Between times, they breathed heavily.
Dawn was near to breaking when they pulled themselves up and made along the track toward Rouseville, keeping close to the fields.
They were not alone. The inhabitants of the village were on the move, heading away from the homes that were now alien to them and beyond their limited understanding. Staring at them from under his lowering brow, Tracey stopped and fashioned himself a crude cudgel from the hedgerow.
Together, the man and his woman trudged over the hill, heading back for the wilds like most of the rest of humanity, their bent and uncouth forms silhouetted against the first ragged banners of light in the sky.
“Ugh glumph hum herm morm glug humk,” the woman muttered.
Which means, roughly translated from the Old Stone, “Why the heck does this always have to happen to mankind just when he’s on the goddam point of getting civilized again?”
* * * *
Afterword:
If ever a dangerous vision was rooted in real life, “The Night That All Time Broke Out” is. I should explain that I am at present living in a remote corner of Oxfordshire, England, where I have purchased a marvelous old sixteenth-century house, all stone and timber and thatch, and considerably slumped in disrepair. I said to my friend Jim Ballard, the s-f writer, “It looks as if it’s some strange vegetable form that has grown out of the ground,” and he replied, “Yes, and it looks as if it’s now growing back in again.”
In an effort to keep the house above ground, my wife and I decided to have it put on to main drainage and fill in the old cesspit. Our builders immediately surrounded the place with gigantic ditching systems and enormous pipes. In the thick of it all, I wondered how future generations would cope with similar problems. The result you see here.
At a rough count, this is my one hundred and tenth published story. I gave up work ten years ago and took up writing instead. It was one of the best ideas I ever had. I believe my story presented here contains one of the whackiest ideas I ever had. (Let’s hope there are a few more whacky ideas in my head—I’d hate to have to go back to work....)
* * * *