The Complete Dangerous Visions

by Anthology

  David sold “The Trouble with Tribbles” in 1967. It was nominated for a Hugo award in the category of Best Dramatic Presentation by the World Science Fiction Convention (held in Berkeley in 1968), and came in second behind another Star Trek script, which is pretty fair for a first-timer. At that convention, incidentally, the ancient and onerous fan custom of auctioning off an hour of a writer’s time—the monies to be donated to the convention sinking fund—if you have attended a sf convention you know the word “sinking” is used advisedly—was once again pursued. Your editor was auctioned off for seventy-two dollars, Gerrold was auctioned off for twenty-two dollars and one of his furry little tribbles was auctioned off for twenty-two dollars and fifty cents, which says something about the market value of six foot tall, one hundred and fifty pound, brown-haired, hazel-eyed Star Trek scenarists, as compared to useless balls of fluff. But then, no one ever denied that Star Trek “trekkies” are bats from the git-go.

  Moving right along . . .

  Since the unseemly notoriety attendant on airing of his script, David (born an Aquarian on 1/24/44) sold other teleplay treatments and episodes to Star Trek, most of which never got past the preliminary stages. The sanity and ethics of some of the Star Trek production personnel has frequently been called into question, but in this case the lucidity of their caution and good sense shines through like a nova.

  Surging forward from this impressive career opener, David struck forcefully on several creative fronts:

  He was hired to write a film treatment for Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and was fired (David swears) for doing it right. That is, the “producer,” a Hollywood type gentleman who’d bought the book because his girl friend had read it, though he hadn’t, fired David when our Gerrold told him to take his girl friend’s ideas for the way the movie should be written and jam them up his, her, or both their nether apertures in the key of C#. (He was also hired to develop an original screen story titled Whatever Happened to Millard Fillmore?) As of this writing, neither film has seen release, though Gerrold has.

  He sold a plethora of stories to magazines and original anthologies, including Harry Harrison’s NOVA and A,DV. The story you are about to read was David’s third or fourth submission. He first submitted a very long, incredibly moronic thing called “In the Deadlands.” Very dumb story. Full of pages of pseudo artsycraftsy nonsense like this:

  The men tramped all that day.

  Tramp.

  Tramp.

  Tramp.

  Tramp.

  Tramp.

  They tramped into the night.

  And that’s all there’d be on the damned page. I’d have had to pay him five thousand dollars for the use of the silly thing, just on page-count alone. No, we are much better off with the story herein offered. Besides, it’s a goodie.

  He wrote novels and sold them. The Flying Sorcerers (originally titled “The Misspelled Magishun”) in collaboration with Larry Niven, published in August of 1971 by Ballantine. Yesterday’s Children, bought but as of this writing unpublished by Dell. Spring 1972, The Space Skimmer, from Ballantine and a book of short stories, still untitled. When Harlie Was One, from Ballantine, late 1972,, and a sequel to The Space Skimmer in early 1973. Additionally, a first hardcover sale: to Random House: The Man Who Folded Himself.

  He edited anthologies. The much-touted and long-awaited Generation, from Dell, featuring new writers; and Protostars from Ballantine.

  All of this while working full-time as a clerk in a liquor store. Now tell me Gerrold doesn’t have all the credentials for being a great science fiction writer!

  But all kidding aside, folks . . .

  David recently returned from a five month stay in Ireland. He lived in a suburb of Dublin called Dun Laoghaire, just four blocks from James Joyce Tower and a few miles from fellow expatriate sf’er Anne McCaffrey. He swears he had nothing to do with feeding the Protestants to the Catholics.

  Let’s see, is there anything else you should know about Gerrold? Mmm, yeah, a few things.

  • He graduated from San Fernando Valley State College in 1967 with a B.A. in Theater Arts, and prior to his graduation attended Los Angeles Valley Junior College where he majored in Art and Journalism, and then University of Southern California majoring in Cinema.

  • His professional career began in 1963 at the age of 19 when he produced a ten-minute animated educational film called A Positive Look at Negative Numbers for which he wrote the script, did the animation, inked and painted eels and there from received honorable mention for same from the Educational Film Library Association.

  • He plays the violin. Not terribly distinguishedly.

  • He is an alumnus of the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity, out of which your editor was hurled in 1954 at Ohio State University, and about which your editor assures you nothing good can be said. Scratch two points for Gerrold.

  • In 1968, when he received his Hugo nomination, he was 23 years old, the youngest active member of the Writers Guild of America, the guild of the Hollywood TV and film writers.

  And finally, about this story, and its acquisition, the following must be said, merely to keep Gerrold in his place. Next to your editor, whose ego problems have been diagnosed in detail by no less a psychiatric authority than the European sf novelist Stanislaw Lem (whose conclusions about me terminate just this side of my being incarcerated as a dangerous psychopath), David Gerrold has an egomania terrible to confront. When he offered this story for publication, though it was worth the same money offered to all other authors in the book, I insisted he take one-third the rate, just to break into A,DV. It was an act of love and compassion, not parsimoniousness, I assure you.

  For without these little acts intended to bring David back to Earth regularly, with a background and a promise of wonders such as David has already shown, he would be barely tolerable.

  I know you will read this story, bearing these facts in mind, with reserve and dispassion. And when you tell him how much you liked it, do it left-handedly.

  After all, we have to live with him.

  With a Finger in My I

  When I looked in the mirror this morning, the pupil was gone from my left eye. Most of the iris had disappeared too. There was just a blank white area and a greasy smudge to indicate where the iris had previously been.

  At first I thought it had something to do with the contact lenses, but then I realized that I don’t wear lenses. I never have.

  It looked kind of odd, that one blank eye staring back at me, but the unsettling thing about it was that I could still see out of it. When I put my hand over my good right eye, I found that the eyesight in my left was as good as ever and it worried me.

  If I hadn’t been able to see out of it, I wouldn’t have worried. It would have meant only that during the night I had gone blind in that eye. But for the pupil of the eye to just fade away without affecting my sight at all—well, it worried me. It could be a symptom of something serious.

  Of course, I thought about calling the doctor, but I didn’t know any doctors and I felt a little bit embarrassed about troubling a perfect stranger with my problems. But there was that eye and it kept staring at me, so finally I went looking for the phone book.

  Only, the phone book seemed to have disappeared during the night. I had been using it to prop up one end of the bookshelf and now it was gone. So was the bookshelf—I began to wonder if perhaps I had been robbed.

  First my eye, then the phone book, now my bookshelf had all disappeared. If it had not been that today was Tuesday, I should have been worried. In fact, I was already worried, but Tuesday is my day to ponder all the might-have-beens that had become never-wases. Monday is my day to worry about personal effects (such as eyes and phone books) and Monday would not be back for six days. I was throwing myself off schedule by worrying on a Tuesday. When Monday returned, then I would worry about the phone book, if I didn’t have something else of a more pressing nature to worry about first.

  (I find that pigeonholing
my worrying like that helps me to keep an orderly mind—by allotting only so much time to each problem I am able to keep the world in its proper perspective.) But there was still the matter of the eye and that was upsetting me. Moreover, it was distorting my perspective.

  I resolved to do something about it immediately. I set out in search of the phone, but somewhere along the way that too had disappeared, so I was forced to abandon that exploration.

  It was very frustrating—this distressing habit of disappearing that the inanimate objects had picked up. Every time I started to look for something, I found that it had already vanished, as if daring me to find it. It was like playing hide-and-go-seek, and since I had long ago given up such childish pastimes, I resolved not to encourage them any further and refused to look for them any more. (Let them come to me.)

  I decided that I would walk to the doctor. (I would have put on my cap, but that would have meant looking for it and I was afraid that it too would have disappeared by the time I found it.)

  Once outside, I noticed that people were staring at me in a strange way as they passed. After a bit, I realized that it must have been my eye. I had forgotten completely about it, not realizing that it might look a bit strange to others.

  I started to turn around to go back for my sunglasses, but I knew that if I started to look for them, they too would surely disappear. So I turned around and headed once again for the doctor’s.

  “Let them come to me,” I muttered, thinking of the sunglasses. I must have startled the old lady I was passing at the time because she turned to stare at me in a most peculiar manner.

  I shoved my hands into my coat pockets and pushed onward. Almost immediately I felt something hard and flat in my left-hand pocket. It was my sunglasses in their case. They had indeed come to me. It was rewarding to see that I was still the master of the inanimate objects in my life.

  I took the glasses out and put them on, only to find that the left lens of the glasses had faded to a milky white. It matched my eye perfectly, but I found that, unlike my eye, I was quite unable to see through the opaqued lens. I would just have to ignore the stares of passersby and proceed directly on to the doctor’s office.

  After a bit, however, I realized that I did not know where I was going—as I noted earlier, I did not know any doctors. And I most certainly knew that if I started to search for the office of one, I would probably never find it at all. So I stood on the sidewalk and muttered to myself, “Let them come to me.”

  I must confess that I was a little bit leery of this procedure—remembering what had happened with the sunglasses—but in truth, I had no alternative. When I turned around I saw a sign on the building behind me. It said, “Medical Center.” So I went in.

  I walked up to the receptionist and I looked at her and she looked at me. She looked me right in the eye (the left one) and said, “Yes, what can we do for you?”

  I said, “I would like to see a doctor.”

  “Certainly,” she said. “There goes one down the hall now. If you look quickly, you can catch a glimpse of him. See! There he goes!”

  I looked and she was right—there was a doctor going down the hall. I could see him myself. I knew he was a doctor because he was wearing golf shoes and a sweater; then he disappeared around a bend in the corridor. I turned back to the girl. “That wasn’t exactly what I meant,” I said.

  “Well, what was it you meant?”

  I said, “I would like for a doctor to look at me.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

  “I thought I did,” I said, but very softly.

  “No, you didn’t,” she said. “And speak up. I can hardly hear you.” She picked up her microphone and spoke into it, “Dr. Gibbon, puh-lease come to reception . . .” Then she put down her microphone and looked at me expectantly.

  I did not say anything. I waited. After a moment, another man in golf shoes and sweater came out of one of the nearby doors and walked over to us. He looked at the girl behind the desk and she said to him, “This gentleman would like a doctor to look at him.”

  The doctor took a step back and looked at me. He looked me up and down, then asked me to turn around and he looked at me some more. Then he said, “Okay,” and walked back into his office.

  I asked, “Is that all?”

  She said, “Of course, that’s all. That’s all you asked for. That will be ten dollars please.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “I wanted him to look at my eye.”

  “Well,” she said, “you should have said so in the first place. You know we’re very busy here. We haven’t got time to keep calling doctors down here to look at just anyone who wanders in. If you had wanted him to look at your eye in particular, you should have said so.”

  “But I don’t want someone to just look at my eye,” I said. “I want someone to cure it.”

  “Why?” she said. “Is there something wrong with it?”

  I said, “Can’t you see? The pupil has disappeared.”

  “Oh,” she said. “So it has. Did you look for it?”

  “Yes, I did,” I said. “I looked all over for it—that’s probably why I can’t find it.”

  “Maybe you left it somewhere,” she cooed softly. ‘Where was the last place you were?”

  “I wasn’t anywhere,” I said.

  “Well, maybe that’s your trouble.”

  “I meant that I stayed home last night. I didn’t go anywhere! And I don’t feel very well.”

  “You don’t look very well,” she said. “You should see a doctor.”

  “I already have,” I said. “He went down that hall.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I remember now.”

  “Look,” I said. I was starting to get a little angry. “Will you please get me an appointment with a doctor?”

  “Is that what you want—an appointment?”

  “Yes, that is what I want.”

  “You’re sure that’s all you want now? You’re not going to come back later and complain that we didn’t give you what you want?”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “I’m not going to come back.”

  “Good. That’s what we want to be sure of.”

  By now, everything seemed to be all wrong. The whole world seemed to be slipping off sideways—all squished together and stretched out and tilted so that everything was sliding down towards the edge. So far, nothing had gone over, but I thought I could see tiny cracks appearing in the surface.

  I shook my head to clear it, but all that did was to produce a very distinct rattling noise—like a very small walnut in a very large shell.

  I sat down on the couch to wait—I was still unable to think clearly. The fog swirled in thicker than ever, obscuring everything. Visibility had been reduced to zero and the controllers were threatening to close down all operations until the ceiling lifted. I protested, no—wasn’t the ceiling all right where it was?—but they just ignored me.

  I stood up then and tried to push the ceiling back by hand, but I couldn’t reach it and had to stand on a chair. Even then, the surface of it was hard and unyielding. (Although, I was close enough to see that there were numerous cracks and flaws in it.)

  I started to push on it again, but a strong hand on my shoulder and a deep voice stopped me. “Lay down on the couch,” she said. “Just close your eyes. Relax. Lie back and relax.”

  “All right,” I said, but I did not lay on my back. I lay on my stomach and pressed my face into the hard unyielding surface.

  “Relax,” she said again.

  “I’ll try,” I said, forcing myself.

  “Look out the window,” the doctor said. “What do you see?”

  “I see clouds,” I said.

  “What kind?”

  “What kind???”

  “Yes. What kind?”

  I looked again. “Cottage cheese clouds. Little scuds of cottage cheese clouds.”

  “Cottage cheese clouds—?” asked the doctor.

&
nbsp; “Yes,” I said. “Cottage cheese clouds. Hard and unyielding.”

  “Large curd or small curd?”

  “Huh?” I asked. I rolled over and looked at her. She did not have on golf shoes, but she was wearing a sweater. Instead of the golf shoes, she had on high heels. But she was a doctor—I could tell that. Her shoes still had cleats.

  “I asked you a question,” she rumbled in that deep voice of hers.

  “Yes, you did,” I agreed. “Would you mind repeating it?”

  “No, I wouldn’t mind,” she said and waited quietly.

  I waited also. For a moment there was silence between us. I pushed the silence to one side and asked, “Well, what was it?”

  This time she answered, “I asked whether the clouds were large curd or small curd.”

  “I give up,” I said. “What were they?”

  “That’s very good of you to give up—otherwise we’d have had to come in after you and take you by force. By surrendering your misconceptions now you have made it so much easier for both of us.”

  The whole thing was coming disjointed and teetered precariously on the edge. Bigger cracks were beginning to appear in the image and tiny pieces were starting to slip out and fall slowly to the ground where they shattered like so many soap bubbles.

  “Uh—” I said. “Uh, Doctor—there’s something wrong with my eye.”

  “Your I?”

  “Uh, yes. The pupil is gone.”

  “The pupil is gone from your I?” The doctor was astounded. “How astounding!”

  I could only nod—so I did. (A bit too hard perhaps. A few more pieces came flaking off and fluttered gently to the floor. We watched for a bit.)

  “Hm,” she said. “I have a theory about that. Would you like to hear it?”

  I didn’t answer. She was going to tell me her theory whether I wanted to hear it or not.

  “The world is coming to an end,” she whispered conspiratorially.