The Complete Dangerous Visions

by Anthology

  Sam had, to put it mildly, violated a public trust. (Translation: he hadn’t spent his money on what they wanted.)

  He was guilty of a crime against humanity. (Judge and jury, definer of crime? Humanity. All heart.)

  It did not matter in the least that twenty billion dollars (or twenty-two, or twenty-three, or a hundred) could not have saved the earth. Earth was finished, smothered by her most illustrious spawn. It would take a few years yet, while she gasped for breath and filled the bedpan. But she was through.

  Man had never cared overmuch for facts.

  He believed what he wanted to believe.

  (“Things may be bad, but they are getting better. All we have to do is like be relevant, you know? Enforce the Law. Consult the swami. Have a hearing. Salvation through architecture. When the going gets tough the tough get going. All problems have solutions.”)

  There was one other thing that made Sam’s sin inexcusable.

  You see, animals have no votes.

  The defense?

  It was clear, simple, correct, and beyond dispute. It was therefore doomed.

  (“We’ll give him a fair trial, then hang him.”)

  Way down deep where convictions solidify, Big Man had expected to meet his counterpart on other worlds. (“Ah, Earthling, you surprise I speak your language so good.”) He had failed. He had found only barren rocks at the end of the road.

  From this, he had drawn a characteristically modest conclusion.

  Man, he decided, was alone in the accessible universe.

  This was a slight error. There were primitive men who would not have made it, but there were no more primitive men.

  The plain truth was that it was Earth that was unique and alone. Earth had produced life. Not just self-styled Number One, not just Superprimate. No. He was a late arrival, the final guest.

  (“All these goodies just for me!“)

  Alone? Man?

  Well, not quite.

  There were a million different species of insects. (Get the spray-gun, Henry.) Twenty thousand kinds of fish. (I got one, I got one!) Nine thousand types of birds. (You can still see a stuffed owl in a museum.) Fifteen thousand species of mammals. (You take this arrow, see, and fit the string into the notch . . . )

  Alone? Sure, except for the kangaroos and bandicoots, shrews and skunks, bats and elephants, armadillos and rabbits, pigs and foxes, raccoons and whales, beavers and lions, moose and mice, oryx and otter and opossum—

  Oh well, them.

  Yes.

  They too had come from the earth. Incredible, each of them. Important? Only if you happened to think that the only known life in the universe was important.

  Man didn’t think so. Not him.

  Not the old perfected end-product of evolution.

  He didn’t kill them all, of course. He hadn’t been around that long. The dinosaurs had managed to become extinct without his help. There were others.

  He did pretty well, though. He could be efficient, give him that.

  He started early. Remember the ground sloth, the mammoth, the mastodon? You don’t? Odd.

  He kept at it. He was remarkably objective about it, really. He murdered his own kin as readily as the others. The orang had gone down the tube when Sam was a boy, the gorilla and the chimp and the gibbon a little later.

  Sorry about that, gang.

  In time, he got them all. It was better than in the old days. He took no risks, dug no traps, fired no guns. He simply crowded them out. When there were billions upon billions of naked apes stacked in layers over the earth, there was no room for anything else.

  Goodbye, Old Paint.

  So long, Rover.

  Farewell, Kitty-cat.

  Nothing personal, you understand.

  All in the name of humanity. What higher motive can there be?

  This is a defense?

  What in hell did Sam do?

  In hell, he did this:

  Sam Gregg decided that mankind could not be saved. Not should not (although Sam, it must be confessed, did not get all choked up at the thought of human flesh) but could not. It was too late, too late when Sam was born. Man had poisoned his world and there were no fresh Earths.

  Man could not survive on other planets, not without drastic genetic modifications.

  And man would not change, not voluntarily.

  After all, he was perfect, wasn’t he?

  That left the animals. Earth’s other children, the ones pushed aside. The dumb ones. The losers. The powerless.

  You might call it the art of the possible.

  Did they matter? If they were the only life in the universe? Who knew? Who decided?

  Well, there was Sam. A nut, probably. Still, he could play God as well as the next man. He had the money.

  Pick a world, then. Not Mars. Too close, and there were still those ex-human beings running around there. Don’t want to interfere with them.

  Sam chose Titan, the sixth moon of Saturn. It was plenty big enough; it had a diameter of 3550 miles. It had an atmosphere of sorts, mostly methane. He liked the name.

  Besides, think of the view.

  It was beyond human engineering skill to convert Titan into a replica of Mother Earth in her better days. Tough, but that’s the way the spheroid rebounds.

  However, with atomic power generated on Titan a great deal could be done. It was, in fact, titanic.

  The life-support pods—enormous energy shields—made it possible to create pockets in which breathable air could be born. It just required heat and water and chemical triggers and doctored plants—

  A few little things.

  A bit of the old technological razzle-dazzle.

  Men could not live there, even under the pods. Neither could the animals that had once roamed the earth.

  Sam’s animals were different, though. He cut them to fit. That was one thing about genetics. When you knew enough about it, you could make alterations. Not many, perhaps. But enough.

  Getting the picture?

  Sam did not line the critters up two by two and load them into the Ark. (Noah, indeed.) He could not save them all. Some were totally gone, some were too delicate, some were outside the range of Sam’s compassion. (Who needs a million kinds of bugs?) He did what he could, within the time he had.

  He sent sex cells, sperm and ova, one hundred sets for each species. (Was that what was in the box? Yes, Junior.) Animals learn some things, some more than others, but most of what they do is born into them. Instinct, if you like. There was a staggering amount of information in that little box.

  The problem was to get it out.

  Parents have their uses, sometimes.

  But robots will do, if you build them right. You can build a long, long program into a computer. You can stockpile food for a few years.

  So—get the joint ready. Then bring down the ship and reseal the pods. Activate the mechanisms. Fertilize the eggs. Subdivide the zygotes. Put out the incubators. Fill the pens.

  And turn ‘em loose.

  Look out, world.

  That was what Sam Gregg did with his money.

  They didn’t actually execute him, the good people of Earth. There was not even a formal trial. They just confiscated what was left of his money and put him away in a Nice Place with the other crazies.

  It would be pleasant to report that Sam died happy and that his dust was peaceful in its urn. In fact, Sam was sorry to go and he was even a little bitter.

  If he could have known somehow, he might—or might not—have been more pleased.

  Millions of lonely miles from the dead earth, she floated there in the great nothing. Beneath the shimmering pods that would last for thousands of years, a part of her was cool rather than cold, softer than the naked rocks, flushed with green.

  Saturn hovered near the horizon, white and frozen and moonlike.

  The ancient lifeways acted out their tiny dramas, strange under an alien sky. They had changed little, most of them.

  There was one excepti
on.

  It might have been the radiation.

  Then again, the raccoon had always been a clever animal. He had adroit hands, and he could use them. He had alert eyes, a quick intelligence. He could learn things, and on occasion he could pass on what he knew.

  Within ten generations, he had fashioned a crude chopping tool out of flaked stone.

  Within twenty, he had built a fire.

  That beat man’s record by a considerable margin, and the point was not lost on those who watched.

  A short time later, the dog showed up, out in the shadows cast by the firelight. He whined. He thumped his shaggy tail. He oozed friendship.

  The raccoons ignored him for a few nights. They huddled together, dimly proud of what they had done. They thought it over.

  Eventually, one of the raccoons threw him a bloody bone, and the dog came in.

  Don’t like the ending?

  A trifle stark?

  Is there no way we can communicate with them from out of the past? Can’t we say something, a few words, now that we are finished?

  Ah, man. Ever the wishful thinker.

  Still talking.

  Sam had tried. He was human; he made the gesture.

  There was a small plaque still visible on the outside of the silent ship that had brought them here. It was traditional in spaceflights, but Sam had done it anyhow.

  It could not be read, of course.

  It could not be deciphered, ever.

  But it was there.

  It said the only words that had seemed appropriate to Sam:

  Good luck, old friends.

  Afterword

  I won’t write an editorial. I have already cheerfully sinned: there is a message in my story. If you didn’t receive it, look out your window. Or pry open the lid on your coffin.

  What triggers a story? Harlan triggered this one. If he had not asked for it, I probably would not have written it, at least not now. So he is to blame.

  But why this particular story? I can’t explain, of course. No writer can. You might be interested in a few personal notes:

  It is early in September, 1969. I’ve just come back from a month in the mountains of Colorado. I consider myself a trout fisherman, dry flies only. (I don’t keep many of them; I return them to the streams. Cheers.) I walked a lot, through country that was almost deserted twenty years ago. I can testify that there are few streams so remote that someone has not tossed a beer can into them. Trailers are everywhere, a pox on the land. Kleenex hangs from the bushes, the final mark of man. Beaver dams are ripped apart for sport. Trees are slashed with initials. There are even, so help me, Development Schemes. Ain’t nature keen?

  When I was in Kenya a few years ago, I did a little demographic work with just one tribe. Back in 1850, the first explorer in the area (a missionary type named Krapf) estimated that there were about 70,000 Kamba. A bit later, in 1911, the British took a kind of a census. There were 230,000 Kamba. As of right now, the figure is pushing 900,000. This, mind you, is on the same land area. You should see it.

  I saw the pictures from Mars. You did too. It does not look one hell of a lot like Barsoom.

  The summer is ending and soon the cold winds will blow. When fall comes, we feed the raccoons on our porch. They have to eat a fair amount before winter. They look at me and I look at them. There will be fewer of them this year, and more of them will be hurt and dragging shattered feet. Bulldozers have torn their environment apart. Old men set traps and the kids blaze away with popguns.

  This morning, driving to work and trailing exhaust fumes, I saw raw sewage from an overflow line dumped into the lake.

  Had enough?

  Me too.

  I hope someone reads my story, and doesn’t like it.

  THE 10:00 REPORT IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY . . .

  Edward Bryant

  Introduction

  As I sit down to write this introduction to Ed Bryant and his story, he lies sleeping in the blue bedroom with the enormous bird kite hanging from the ceiling, in the “west wing” of my home here in Los Angeles. About half an hour ago he took home his date, a gorgeous lady named Roz, who had too much cheap wine to drink and got kittenish as hell.

  It ain’t easy to write about Bryant. He has become one of my very closest friends, and all the things I’d like to tell about him, like the morning I’d lost touch with reality and desperately needed to know what day it was, and he told me with grave seriousness that it was “National Mackerel Commemorative Day,” won’t mean a thing to you. You’d have to know Bryant and his warped, utterly black sense of guillotine humor to know what a trauma that was.

  For openers, he is a rare delight as a human being; a genuinely good man with the kind of sensible morality and ethic that Jim Sutherland says is holding the frangible world together. For seconds, he is a joy to the heart of any writer who takes another writer “under his wing” and hopes the acolyte will break away and develop his own voice, his own successful career. On that point, in short, Bryant is getting it on. In one year he’s sold twenty-five very good, very professional stories and articles. And he’s getting laid regularly now. For a WASP from Wyoming, that’s enormous forward-striding.

  Yet Bryant is peculiar, and it is this peculiarity that makes him something that should be on display in the Smithsonian. Today, for instance, I said to him, “Ed, you’re getting weirder and weirder. I can’t put my finger on it, man, but you seem to be getting more surreal.” He looked at me from above his ginger-colored mustache with the odd unfocused stare of a Polynesian water bird, and mumbled, “You mean I’m not relating to everyday objects.” Yes, I agreed, that was it. “Start relating, Ed. Talk to your rug, listen to your hand, get chummy with a coffee pot and the doorknobs. Make friends.” He stared at me.

  “I can’t talk to my rug,” he said sadly, “it’s too self-involved. It has piles.”

  I walked away.

  Born 27 August 1945 in White Plains, New York, Edward Winslow Bryant, Jr. moved at the age of six months with his family to southern Wyoming, where the elders took up cattle ranching. He attended a one-room country school for the first four grades and spent the rest of his secondary education in Wheatland, Wyoming (population 2350). Thus far his life parallels that of Lincoln. He attended college at the University of Wyoming, treading water for a year as an embryo aerospace engineer then, recognizing the error of his ways, switched to liberal arts. He received his B.A. in English in 1967 and an M.A. in the same field a year later. In his “official” biography, Bryant lays down all the preceding dull information, neglecting to mention the one truly important act of his otherwise pedestrian life. He noticed, picked up and bought the August 1957 issue of Amazing Stories and became a—shhhh!—science fiction fan. Somehow, he managed to keep it a secret from all of those in the literary world who’ve seen him burst on the scene these last couple of years, who envision him as being untainted by the fannish life, a pure creature of Mainstream Literary Origins. Nonsense. He was a fan, a grubby, scrofulous fan who published an illiterate fanmagazine called Ad Astra.

  (Incidentally, that August 1957 Amazing Stories included in its contents one of the classic tales of modern sf, “The Plague Bearers,” which opened with these deathless lines:

  I came up behind the Screamie as he grabbed the girl, and shoved the bayonet into his neck. It was a rusty blade, and went in crookedly. I had to stick him again to finish the job. He fell, moaning and clutching at his streaming neck. I kicked him under some rubble.

  Modesty forbids me heaping the unstinting praise due the author of that now-classic tale of man’s nobility, but it is easy to see where Bryant’s deranged inspiration came from. Yechhh.)

  Because of this unnatural interest in Things God Never Intended Man to Screw Around With At Toward, he attended the first and second Clarion (Penna.) College Workshops in SF & Fantasy, 1968 and 1969, which is where I first encountered him. Bryant tells it like this:

  “. . . a traumatic experience which Changed My Life; I received the
criticism, instruction and encouragement necessary to make me believe that maybe, just maybe, there was something in my writing worth sharing with the universe.”

  In actuality, the pathetic quality of his attempts at writing so touched the hearts of all of us on the staff—Robin Scott Wilson, Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm, Fritz Leiber, Fred Pohl and a lady anthologist whose name escapes me—that we labored harder with him than those who genuinely had talent. You know how it is: you always feel warmth for the retard in the group.

  Well, as it turned out, Bryant, this lame, who up till then had been making a precarious living in and around Wheatland, Wyoming as a deejay, shipping clerk in a stirrup buckle factory and as general layabout, fastened leechlike on your editor and the next thing I knew he was inhabiting (like some fetid troglodyte) the blue bedroom here at Ellison Wonderland. Like the man who came to dinner, he ventured out of Wyoming to attend the SFWA banquet, West Coast division, in early 1969, stayed awhile and went away till September of that year, when he returned, saying he was just “stopping by.” Nine months later I was compelled to hire a young lady of great personal warmth and questionable morality, to lure him away to New York. I wanted to change the linen and air out the blue bedroom. He returned here in March of 1971 and as of this writing he doesn’t look like he’s ever going to leave. The pile of gnawed bones is growing larger in the blue bedroom. The smell is something Lovecraft would have called “a stygian uncleanliness, foul beyond description, spoor of the pit and festooned with moist evil.”

  Nonetheless, Bryant keeps working, his only saving grace. He’s appeared in Quark, Orbit, National Lampoon, New Dimensions, the LA Free Press, Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Worlds of Tomorrow, If, New Worlds, Infinity, Nova, Universe, both Clarion anthologies and a host of men’s magazines, such as the quality periodical Swingle, which refuses to run a photo of a woman unless she has 53D breasts.

  Appearances in these one-handed publications have so permanently warped Bryant’s already twisted view of the universe that when I had a few dates with a young lady who is the current rage of the sexploitation films, he ran amuck and wound up at one of her film producers’, and the next thing I knew he had a part in a class epic titled—are you ready for a consummate horror?—FLESH GORDON.