The Complete Dangerous Visions

by Anthology

  The only additional comments that need be entered here—there are volumes of silent comments one might make about humbleness and the way men are forced to spend their lives—are that Tom Sherred is a fine writer and it’s a shame he never got in more holes, because we have little enough by his hand; and the following, dated 23 November 1969:

  “Last night I was held up and slugged,

  if it matters to the reader.”

  A final comment that will assume greater significance after you’ve read “Bounty,” to which pleasure I now commend you.

  ADDENDA

  All of the Sherred-originated material just presented came in sometime in 1968. I sat down to write Tom’s introduction in June of 1971. I mailed it off with other introductions, to Doubleday’s indefatigable editorix, Judith Glushanok, at three ayem of a Sunday night, air mail special delivery. Ten days later the package had not arrived in New York. I was able to reproduce most of the “lost” material from my carbons, but Tom’s introduction had been made up of original pages by myself, joined with his own comments, which I had not duplicated. Panicked that the book might go to press minus one introduction, I called Tom Sherred in Detroit. I had not talked to him in quite a while, and it was good to hear his voice again. But he seemed a little lonely, and when I said he should write as much as he cared to write for the emergency introduction, to let it go at least the two pages he’d supplied previously or do as much more as he cared to do, to let his typewriter simply run away with itself, he replied, “I’m afraid those days are gone forever.” We ended the conversation with Tom’s promise to send what he could soonest, and I hung up with a curiously unsettled feeling.

  That was on a Wednesday. On Friday Tom’s biographical material came in, a revised version of what he had written two years before; and I must confess I have seldom been as touched as I was by the single page he had written. And so this addenda, and Tom’s page that follows, are being added to that initial preamble.

  In his covering note to me, Tom apologized for not being able to provide the two pages I’d indicated I’d wanted. His last line was, “Hell I don’t think there are two pages in anyone’s life.”

  As the capsule comments that follow will testify, Tom Sherred’s life puts the lie to that belief.

  I only hope his penultimate paragraph is dead wrong.

  “I understand I was born in 1915, just long enough to teach me that no one under 50 is to be trusted. A National Youth Administration scholarship got me into Wayne University and general economic conditions let me wander through 47 states before Alaska and Hawaii became part of the Union. I ended up in the old Packard Motor toolroom, with a belief that there were easier ways to earn a living. There were lots of ways.

  “I tried technical writing (not many writers can run a planer or know what a Keller does). Then I got into the advertising business which is more profitable than anything legal. I finally decided to go straight.

  “Along the way I tried science fiction which is generally fun to do and has the added advantage that, to the right editor, nothing and nowhere nohow is verboten. Marriage and two children set up an entirely new set of priorities, and it became difficult to think about anything besides a weekly, steady paycheck; no more, or at least very little, fiction.

  “Divorce changed things around again, and I came up with Alien Island, a novel. It sold to Ballantine and I had the world by the tail, I thought. It took a stroke to change my mind. A mild stroke, true, but still a stroke.

  “I don’t suppose I will ever write again. Certainly not in the quantities or with the ease I once had, and this annoys me in a sort of abstract way. ‘Bounty’ is the latest, perhaps the last, I will ever write.

  “I am still convinced that it was fun while it lasted.”

  Bounty

  In May, the first week there was one death. The second, there were four, the third, nineteen. The fourth week, 39 people were killed.

  Most were shot by pistol, rifle, or shotgun. Four were killed with knives, two by meat cleavers, and one by a dinner fork worked methodically through the spinal cord. It was not the dinner fork that aroused comment but the evident fact that someone had finished his or her meal with its duplicate.

  The Mayor said, “This has got to stop.”

  The Governor said, “This has got to stop.”

  The President, through his Secretary for Health and Welfare, said somewhat the same thing.

  The Police Commissioner and Prosecuting Attorney said there would be no stone left unturned and the FBI said, regretfully, that it was a local matter.

  No one ever was quite sure who was on or who was behind the Committee but the advertisement—one issue, double-page spread—had been authentic, had paid off in hard cash; within the city limits, ten thousand dollars cash for the death of anyone caught in the process of armed robbery and one hundred thousand to the estate of anyone killed while attempting to halt armed robbery.

  Such an advertisement was definitely not in the public interest and every bristling aspect of the law said so. The suburban booster sheet that had originally printed the ad promised not to do it again.

  But this kept on and over the weeks and a few square miles—cities are crowded in their sprawl—over two million dollars had been paid without quibble and sometimes at night secretly, because Internal Revenue considers no income tainted. Things became complex when three policemen in varying parts of the city incautiously let their off-duty holstered guns be spotted by strangers or by fellow customers in a store. Too rapidly for the innocent police to identify themselves, a swirl of action, and three men were dead—all painlessly. Further executions were eliminated by the flaunting of police badges in public, with consequent reduction of vice squad arrests.

  By July, pedestrians after dark carried large flashlights and in business districts made no abrupt movements. Vigilante groups at first hired doddering men and women to hobble decoy in certain areas; later, as techniques became perfected, heavily armed and suicidal senior citizens acted as independent Q-ships and frail-looking women waited endlessly at bus stops or lugged expensive-looking packages back and forth across parking lots. Behind grocery store partitions and drycleaner’s curtains sat or lazed volunteer part-time, full-time, and nighttime guards.

  By September four hundred plus had been killed. Court dockets were clogged with scheduled homicide trials while the incidence of armed and unarmed robberies slid almost to zero. Police are forbidden to accept rewards but cabin cruisers, summer cottages, snomobiles and trips to Hawaii can be bought and paid for by midnight cash. No one dared to resist arrest.

  Then the reward system was extended outstate where rates of crime had been increasing. The 11 by 14 advertising was traced to a small shop on Center Street, but the owner had moved to Winnipeg. The first to die—four men, two of them brothers—tried to hold up an outstate bank. Their dress oxfords clashed with their hunting costumes and the bank manager, one teller, and two customers were waiting.

  Armed and unarmed robbery died out together with some three hundred probably-guilty persons but the Governor at last appealed for federal aid, pleading his entire legal system was breaking down. Officials of the three bordering states and Canada on the north were equally interested in his plea. Nothing was accomplished at a series of top level conferences.

  In sudden succession the three bordering states had their own operating Committees, apparently unconnected with the first. Then other cities some miles away and then other states. A reliable estimate of reward money earned and paid out ran to half a billion dollars before the object was attained, as the reward system spread totally east and totally west of the Mississippi.

  In New York City proper, children began to be seen playing in Central Park at dusk and even after.

  With all rumors dissected, with duplicate reports discounted, and counting the death-welcoming onslaughts of unarmed applicants for free hundred-thousand-dollar survivor benefits, over the next three years the casualty list was somewhat less than automotiv
e deaths in 1934. The fourth year there was a presidential election.

  The winning candidate ran on a Law and Order platform. Two Secret Service men on inauguration day, while mingling with the gay crowd, incautiously let their .44 Magnums be seen and were dismembered quite quickly. After the first session of Congress a Federal ban on portable weapons was passed. This included weapons carried by law enforcement officers. Scotland Yard loaned fourteen quarterstaff specialists to the FBI police school and some seventeen thousand homicide cases were nolle prossed.

  Montessori kindergartens expanded curricula to include judo and karate and General Motors phased out its Soapbox Derby and awarded black belts to the most worthy. Popular Science & Mechanix Illustrated ran a series on car-spring crossbows. Deer became an everyday sight and somewhat of a nuisance in the streets of Saginaw and Sebewaing.

  At present the House Un-American Activities Committee is investigating the sky-rocketing import of Japanese chemical sets for adults.

  Afterword

  Bounty could have been a much longer story, written in collaboration with Allan Hayes. Allan, a member of equally good standing in both the SFWA and the Michigan Bar and a surprisingly Puritan soul, couldn’t find fast enough an eleven-foot pole not to touch it with. So it came out the way it did.

  If Alfred Hitchcock were still mixed up with movies, and had a script by Robert Heinlein to start with, the opening scene might look like this:

  A long shot of a woman getting off a bus at a lonely transfer point. You know it is a transfer point because a closeup shows the woman, who is at least an unattractive fifty years old in her housemaid’s uniform, looking for another bus in the distance. It isn’t in sight. The woman opens her purse, counts her day’s wages for probably the fourth time, and looks guiltily around. She should never have exposed all that money. The villain enters, stage right; he wants the money. He gets it. He may even slap the old lady around a bit, regardless of how she cringes and pleads. Another closeup would show him pleading when she pulls out a .38 Banker’s Special and carefully empties it into him. Then Hitchcock would show the old charwoman in the phone booth (which has until now been shown as hopelessly, tantalizingly out of reach). She dials the operator.

  “Operator,” she says. “Get me the police. I want to report a robbery.” And she’s giggling.

  STILL-LIFE

  K.M. O’Donnell

  Introduction

  “Still-Life,” and its thirty-two-year-old author, “K. M. O’Donnell,” represent several very special things for you, me, and Again, Dangerous Visions. They represent, for openers, what may well be an extraordinary new kind of fiction: fantasy that becomes reality by inference. And they represent the almost pathological integrity of the typical sf writer.

  On the latter matter, let me do a fast mea culpa. Due to the length of time it has taken to assemble this book properly—five years in the making, cast of thousands, all-singing, all-dancing, all-talking—a number of writers have suffered some rather substantial inconvenience. Dick Lupoff, whose story appears toward the end of the anthology, has suffered the most, and I’ll comment on that in his introduction. But Mr. “O’Donnell” has suffered second most. He sold me this story on 11 August 1969. As I write this preface to the story, it is two full years later, and this book will be published over six months beyond that point. Mr. “O’Donnell” subsequently wrote a fine novel titled Universe Day (Avon, 1971) which I urge you to locate and purchase and read. He wanted to include “Still-Life” as a portion of that novel. Because the anthology was not yet published, and because every story in this book is an original that has never appeared anywhere previously, in any form, I was compelled to turn down Mr. “O’Donnell’s” request that the story be included in the novel prior to publication of A,DV. I felt like a monster, but the rationale for my monstrousness was inescapable.

  A,DV—like DV before it, and as TLDV will be—is a joint project. Every man and woman involved is responsible to, and benefits from, every other man and woman in the book. There will be many who will buy this book because it has a new Bradbury herein, or a new Vonnegut, or a full-length Le Guin. That clout will help Jim Hemesath and Ken McCullough and Evelyn Lief and all the other kids whose names are not—as yet—box office. The name “K. M. O’Donnell” is a name with which to contend. His short story, “Final War,” missed winning a Nebula by only six votes, and has become very well known. Universe Day will make him many new fans. We needed the clout that could be obtained from a previously-unpublished “O’Donnell” yarn. I had to say no. He and I are responsible to forty-two other writers and artists, even as they and I bear that responsibility to him.

  It is to his credit, and an example of the high-principled good faith that is the constant rule among sf writers (though not always the case with their publishers), that Mr. “O’Donnell” understood and revised his plans for the novel so “Still-Life” could appear here first. To our greater glory. This is hardly an unusual case, where a sf writer will suffer loss of money or prestige or convenience, rather than break his word to another member of the sf fraternity. I cannot think of many other lines of work—or other kinds of writing—where such uprightness exists. I can’t think of many sf writers who’d cop to the term “gentleman,” but if states and governments acted half as well toward one another, this would be a much less twitchy world.

  In case you haven’t caught on, this is a deep and sincere thankyou to Mr. “O’Donnell.”

  And so I can stop using them, you may wonder why there are quotation marks around the name “O’Donnell.” Well, it’s because the name is Malzberg. Barry N. Malzberg. Under his own name he wrote Screen and Oracle of the Thousand Hands for Olympia Press in 1969, but under “K. M. O’Donnell” he has written The Empty People (Lancer, 1969), Final War and Other Fantasies (Ace, 1969) and Dwellers of the Deep (Ace, 1970). Why he uses the pseudonym, only Barry can say, but had I worked as an editor for a certain publisher whom shall go nameless whom, I’d change my name, too!

  Mr. Malzberg was born and lives in Manhattan, married Joyce Zelnick in 1964, spawned a daughter (Stephanie Jill) in 1966, and has appeared in such prestigious collections as Best SF: 1968, Best from the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction: 18th Series, Nova 1 and most of the top periodicals in the field.

  Messrs. Malzberg and O’Donnell are presently full-time freelance writers (an occupation rapidly going the way of the auk, the passenger pigeon and the Rational Man); there are a couple of writing fellowships in his background, six months in the Army, somewhat longer than that working in city and state civil services, and stints as editor of a number of magazines.

  “Still-Life”—as I noted earlier—seems to me a new kind of fiction. I wish I could invent a term like “neorealistic” or “fabulorooted” the way the literateurs do, but frankly I cannot even devise a category. It is one of those stories that you read and find yourself thinking, “Jesus, I wondered about that at the time, thought what if Michael Collins up there in the Command Module got pissed off that Armstrong and Aldrin got all the glory walking on the Moon and just said, to hell with you guys, and took off.” It’s the kind of story that becomes reality even as it’s written, that somehow carries all the past, present and future, plus future possibilities and alternate time-tracks of the now within itself. It is a strange and oddly unforgettable piece of fiction, and in its own special way it is the most dangerous vision in this book.

  Still-Life

  IN BED, ASLEEP, HIS WIFE

  He lies curled in a foetal posture, the joint of his thumb enjambed against a cheek, his mouth open, emitting even curls of breath. In the darkness he thinks that he hears his wife cry and turns toward her, one hand reaching to curve around the fullness of her back, then he finds her flesh under his hands and grips her as if he were holding a panel of wood. “You shouldn’t do that,” he groans, “you shouldn’t do that, you upset me, I don’t know what’s really going on here any more,” and then runs his hands all the way down the length of her body, lingering
on her buttocks, moving around the cup of her stomach and against her cunt. “Stop it,” she says to him, “what are you doing? you woke me up, I was sleeping, you can’t do something like this everytime you want to,” but he does not hear; he is eager now, trapped in his own necessities and even though Control warned against activities of this sort during the final days before mission he finds himself quite helpless, quite stricken, as he rises above to mount her. “Oh darling, darling,” he cries, “the moon, the moon,” and plunges thickly into her and she says again, “what are you doing?” her voice girlish, high, suddenly pleading as if she were being pinned against a fence by a gang of strangers but it is too late, far too late for all of that and he begins to work in her, two or three limpid pulls of the prick and he is finished, the orgasm a seizure rather than a culmination and he falls from her body to his side of the bed. Even though he is still alert, he decides that it would be best for him to feign passing into an immediate sleep and so he does this, regularizing his breathing, hunching slowly into the pillow and the simulation becoming the fact he shortly does fall asleep, leaving his wife lying quietly beside him, one arm sprawled across his stomach in a gesture that might have had more meaning a few moments ago but which, for her, gives her a feeling of mute tenderness and she strokes the planes of his cheek saying “all right, all right baby, it’s all right now” but for all the good this does him at the present moment she might as well be on the other side of the moon and he trapped in the damned capsule.

  AT BREAKFAST, A HINT OF VIGOR

  They gather for breakfast: it is the first time they have done so in several weeks because, during the last stages of the preparation, he has had to be on the grounds before 5 A.M., has, in fact, slept in the dormitory several times but now that the training has been completed and the focus of the preparations has shifted to countdown on the great ship, he is able to breakfast with his family again. He has two children, both boys, ages nine and six; his wife is 37 but does not, she is told by everyone, look it and in certain sweaters, certain postures, she can affect the breastline of a very young woman. The boys are restless and beyond discipline this morning, tossing flakes from the cereal boxes at one another, calling in high, taunting voices; it seems that they are still enmeshed in some dispute of a few days past involving, perhaps, theft. His wife attempts to calm them but he says no, no, it is perfectly all right; he does not want to interfere with routine, only try to get back into it and the younger boy says, “but how can you do that dad if you’re going to the moon in a week?” He would answer that if he could but then the older boy says quickly, “don’t be stupid, he’s not going to the moon, he’s just going to fly around it, they won’t be ready to go to the moon for six months yet! how can you be so stupid?” and slaps the younger violently three or four times across the head. The younger begins to cry and inverts the cereal box on the table, the older starts an anticipatory cry of his own, perhaps feeling that his mother’s punishment will be less if he already seems to be in agony and his wife, her face streaked and discontent, lunges from the stove to seize both of them in either hand. It seems for a moment that she is going to do a kind of qualified violence, just as she has competently done so many times when the boys have gotten out of hand, but in a quick shift of light, her face changes, becomes remote, saddens somehow and she says, “you know, I can’t really take much more of this: we’re supposed to be some kind of American ideal and yet I can’t even control these children, I can’t control anything any more, not even you,” and she begins to weep and he rises from the table saying “all right, everyone, look lively now, be snappy because if we have any more of this nonsense I’ll sic the moon creatures on you,” this has been a very effective line at some times in the past, dissolving tension toward laughter but this time they only look at him, all three, with glazed and numb expressions and feeling more than slightly ineffective, he sits again and then, unable to confront the plate of eggs, those blind eyes winking, he lunges to his feet and seizing his service cap and mumbling something about lack of consideration at the worst time he staggers from the house, reminding himself as he comes onto the street that he will definitely have to buy his wife some flowers tonight so that they can somehow smooth the damned thing over.