SHALL THE DUST PRAISE THEE?

Introduction to

SHALL THE DUST PRAISE THEE?:

Somehow, inexplicably, I have grown rather fond of Damon Knight, 1st president and founder of the Science Fiction Writers of America. After thought, I must chalk it up to the fact that he is married to Kate Wilhelm, who is a better writer than I am, which offends me, but is one of those truths one must finally face up to. She is also lots prettier. Ergo, because Kate is a better writer than I, I recognize that she is a better person than I, and being a better person, there must be something she sees in Damon that makes him lovable and worth while, and out of respect and admiration for Kate, I have let it slop over onto Damon. A sticky and entirely unseemly situation, at best.

Now there are those who contend Damon Knight is worth while in his own right. As author of Hell’s Pavement and The Analogs and Mind Switch, which many contend are brilliant novels of pure speculative fiction. As editor of A Century of Science Fiction and Cities of Wonder and 13 French Science Fiction Stories and eleven other anthologies, touted as the peak of literacy in the genre. As critic of the scene, epitomized by his collection of essays, In Search of Wonder, which helped win him a Hugo in 1956 as Best Science Fiction Book Reviewer. All this is said in defense of Damon Knight. There may even be merit in it.

Yet if this be so, if Knight is indeed the paragon his fans would have us believe, then explain the following:

Knight, sitting in a restaurant with friends, watching James Blish and myself at another table, as Blish explained in pantomime a hilarious newspaper cartoon to me, totally bewildered and bursting into tears when Blish refused to explain the meaning of his bizarre hand movements. …

Knight, having incurred the wrath of a host of writers in attendance at the Milford (Pa) SF Writers Conference (of which he is the founder and director, since 1956), finding two fifteen-foot hardwood pilings inserted through front and back windows of his car, not uttering a word of anger or protest, but merely sulking for two days….

Knight, managing not only to sell “The Man in the Jar” to a leading magazine, but having the audacity to include it in his latest collection, Turning On, without cleaning up the specious logic of the denouement….

Knight, having a surfeit of brilliant Kate Wilhelm stories already bought up for his Orbit series of original science fiction anthologies, refusing to sell a perfect gem of a Kate story to this anthology, forcing the poor woman to sell it to him for some nebulous far-distant collection he is putting together. …

Each of these imponderables forces the conclusion that Damon Knight is a spoilsport. Now how’s that for feet of clay!

Spoilsport was born in Baker, Oregon, in 1922. He was semi-educated in Hood River, Oregon, public schools. He spent a year after high school studying at the WPA Art Center in Salem, Oregon, then moved to New York and joined an early fraternity of science fiction buffs called The Futurians in 1941. He did some science fiction illustration (which he admits was bad), worked for Popular Publications as an assistant editor on their pulp magazines, and as a reader for the Scott Meredith Literary Agency. He has been a free-lance writer since 1950, pouting all the while.

His first story sale (a result of flagrant intimidation and temper tantrums) was to Donald Wollheim (now editor of Ace Books) at Stirring Science Fiction when he was eighteen; since then he has sold close to a hundred stories, five novels, four collections of stories and the previously noted anthologies, et. al.

About this Damon Knight story: he sent it in despite the fact that I told him bluntly there was no place for his kind of fellow in such an august collection. I liked it well enough, but I was going to send it back, just to show him nobody likes a smartass, when I received a letter from Kate. She said he had been making her life a living hell. They live in “a large delicate Victorian mansion in Milford, with three active boys, three tomcats and an indeterminate number of tropical fish,” and Damon was really taking it out on Kate because I’d asked her for a story, but not him, and he threatened her that if his story was rejected and hers sold, he would have her shanghaied onto a white slave boat sailing to Marrakech.

Needless to say, he got his way, as usual. Thus, you will find in this anthology one Damon Knight story, and none by Kate Wilhelm. We’re taking this up at the next ‘Inquisition of the Science Fiction Writers of America.

SHALL THE DUST PRAISE THEE?

by Damon Knight

The Day of Wrath arrived. The sky pealed with trumpets, agonized, summoning. Everywhere the dry rocks rose, groaning, and fell back in rubble. Then the sky split, and in the dazzle appeared a throne of white fire, in a rainbow that burned green.

Lightnings flickered away toward the horizons. Around the throne hovered seven majestic figures in white, with golden girdles across their paps; and each one carried in his gigantic hand a vial that smoked and fumed in the sky.

Out of the brightness in the throne came a voice: “Go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth.”

And the first angel swooped down, and emptied his vial in a torrent of darkness that smoked away across the bare earth. And there was silence.

Then the second angel flew down to earth, and darted this way and that, with his vial unemptied: and at last turned back to the throne, calling, “Lord, mine is to be poured out upon the sea. But where is the sea?”

And again there was silence. For the dry, dusty rocks of the earth stretched away limitless under the sky; and where the oceans had been, there were only runneled caverns in the stone, as dry and empty as the rest.

The third angel called, “Lord, mine is for the rivers and fountains of waters.”

Then the fourth angel called, “Lord, let me empty mine.” And he poured out his vial upon the sun: and in an instant grew hot with a terrible radiance: and he soared back and forth letting fall his light upon the earth. After some time he faltered and turned back to the throne. And again there was silence.

Then out of the throne came a voice saying, “Let be.”

Under the wide dome of heaven, no bird flew. No creature crawled or crept on the face of the earth; there was no tree, and no blade of grass.

The voice said, “This is the day appointed. Let us go down.”

Then God walked on the earth, as in the old time. His form was like a moving pillar of smoke. And after Him trooped the seven white angels with their vials, murmuring. They were alone under the yellow-gray sky.

“They who are dead have escaped our wrath,” said the Lord God Jehovah. “Nevertheless they shall not escape judgment.” The dry valley in which they stood was the Garden of Eden, where the first man and the first woman had been given a fruit which they might not eat. To eastward was the pass through which the wretched pair had been driven into the wilderness. Some little distance to the west they saw the pitted crag of Mount Ararat, where the Ark had come to rest after a purifying Flood.

And God said in a great voice, “Let the book of life be opened; and let the dead rise up from their graves, and from the depths of the sea.”

His voice echoed away under the sullen sky. And again the dry rocks heaved and fell back; but the dead did not appear. Only the dust swirled, as if it alone remained of all earth’s billions, living and dead.

The first angel was holding a huge book open in his arms. When the silence had endured for some time, he shut the book, and in his face was fear; and the book vanished out of his hands.

The other angels were murmuring and sighing together. One said, “Lord, terrible is the sound of silence, when our ears should be filled with lamentations.”

And God said, “This is the time appointed. Yet one day in heaven is a thousand years on earth. Gabriel, tell me, as men reckoned time, how many days have passed since the Day?”

The first angel opened a book and said, “Lord, as men reckoned time, one day has passed since the Day.”

A shocked murmur went through the angels.

And turning from them, God said, “Only one day: a moment. And yet they do not rise.”

The fifth angel moistened his lips and said, “Lord, are You not God? Shall any secrets be hid from the Maker of all things?”

“Peace!” said Jehovah, and thunders rumbled off toward the gloomy horizon. “In good season, I wilt cause these stones to bear witness. Come, let us walk further.”

They wandered over the dry mountains and through the empty canyons of the sea. And God said, “Michael, you were set to watch over these people. What was the manner of their last days?”

They paused near the fissured cone of Vesuvius, which in an aeon of heavenly inattention had twice erupted, burying thousands alive.

The second angel answered, “Lord, when last I saw them, they were preparing a great war.”

‘Their iniquities were past belief,” said Jehovah. “Which were the nations of those that prepared the war?”

The second angel answered, “Lord, they were called England and Russia and China and America.”

“Let us go then to England.”

Across the dry valley that had been the Channel, the island was a tableland of stone, crumbling and desolate. Everywhere the stones were brittle and without strength. And God grew wroth, and cried out, “Let the stones speak!”

Then the gray rocks fountained up into dust, uncovering caverns and tunnels, like the chambers of an empty anthill. And in some places bright metal gleamed, lying in skeins that were graceful but without design, as if the metal had melted and run like water.

The angels murmured; but God said, “Wait. This is not all.”

He commanded again, “Speak!” And the rocks rose up once more, to lay bare a chamber that was deeper still. And in silence, God and the angels stood in a circle around the pit, and leaned down to see what shapes glittered there.

In the wall of that lowest chamber, someone had chiseled a row of letters. And when the machine in that chamber had been destroyed the fiery metal had sprayed out and filled the letters in the wall, so that they gleamed now like silver in the darkness.

And God read the words.

“WE WERE HERE. WHERE WERE YOU?”

Afterword:

This story was written some years ago, and all I remember about it is that my then agent returned it with loathing, and told me I might possibly sell it to the Atheist Journal in Moscow, but nowhere else.

The question asked in the story is a frivolous one to me, because I do not believe in Jehovah, who strikes me as a most improbable person; but it seems to me that, for someone who does believe, it is an important question.

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