by Anthology
Now his older daughter, Nancy, made perfectly good sense. She never seemed to think of anything but boys. A few more years, and she’d be married, with offspring of her own in the making. It pleased him to think of her.
Lorette glanced toward him. Catching his eyes on her, she smiled. He knew he was going to miss that smile, just as he missed Jimmy’s. And Beth’s. But he was still young. There would be more children, other smiles.
A bell chimed as the front door opened. That would be Thea back from her errands. As she came in from the entryway, Lorette ran to her. She gave the child a quick peck of a kiss, then turned to the mirror at her side. A light flicked itself on, illuminating her face. She removed her hat carefully, not disturbing the precise pattern of curls that capped her skull.
Lorette left her mother, returning her attention to the little life forms sucking strength from their own mother’s body.
Thea said, “I confirmed our names on the waiting list, but it may be years before anything turns up.”
“Too bad,” Winston muttered with a shrug. “I’d rather have liked to keep this one.”
Thea nodded, but she seemed distracted. Her eyes glittered. “You should have seen the people at Life Administration. Some of them were actually begging for permits. I mean it, Win, actually begging.”
She dropped into her favorite chair with a sigh, and went on, “One woman cried. In public. Believe me, it was humiliating to see. And it’s not as if they didn’t know . . .”
Just the idea of seeing a person cry was disquieting. Winston recoiled from the thought. He didn’t want to hear about it. But Thea seemed to be taking morbid delight in telling him all of the sordid details. He sat still, trying not to hear the words she poured at him.
The image of a woman crying in public persisted in his mind. He railed at it, resenting it. The woman had no right to do such a thing. She’d certainly known beforehand what the situation was. Everyone knew.
It was all so simple, so logical, so reasonable. There was a limit to the population the planet could support in comfort. That limit had been reached long ago. For a time, during the age of the Emotionalist Revolution, there had been chaos. But when the furor died down, cooler heads prevailed. With the return to sense and sanity, a logical solution had been sought—and found.
A life permit was issued to every individual. It entitled him to reproduce and rear one offspring—one human to take the place of one human. A pair of children to each couple. Simple. One for one.
Since not every individual did reproduce a replacement for himself, the permits of those who died childless could be redistributed, allowing some couples to rear a third child to its adulthood. The population balance was maintained constant.
But children were so—well—cute.
With or without logic, people wanted children. They wanted to fondle baby forms, cuddle toddlers, bask in the unquestioning and unqualified love given by the very young. So there was no official attempt to limit the number—not of little ones.
After all, very small children took up very little space and were a very small drain on the world’s resources. It wasn’t until they grew—not officially until they reached the age of five—that they were considered to become individuals, and a concern of society as a whole.
Lorette would be five tomorrow.
“I brought the capsule and arranged the pickup,” Thea said.
Winston nodded. Looking toward his daughter, he said, “It’s bedtime, honey.”
“Now?”
“Yes, now.”
“Can’t I watch Tammy’s babies? Just a while more?”
“No.”
She pouted, but she didn’t argue.
“Give daddy a big hug,” he told her.
She came to him, throwing her arms around his neck. He felt the warmth of her body, and he remembered Jimmy and Beth.
“Come along to bed.” Thea took the child’s hand.
Laughing, Lorette began to tell her mother some story about Tammy and the kittens.
“Be sure you drink all your milk,” Winston called after them as Thea led the child from the room.
He leaned back, sipping his cocktail and not thinking anything at all. He reclined in quiet, blank comfort, hardly aware of the soft music and Tammy’s steady purr.
When Thea returned, he asked, “You gave her the capsule?”
Thea nodded. Wordlessly, she passed by him and went on into her bedroom.
He found himself getting to his feet. For no reason he went to Lorette’s room. She was curled on her side in the bed, her hair in a loose tow tousle, her face soft and smooth by the dim nightlight. Small pink lips. Long pale lashes. A tiny ear, perfectly formed, half-hidden under stray hair. The sheet over her stirred slightly at the gentle shallow motion of her breathing.
Even as he watched, the motion stopped.
He turned his back. The collection service would be here soon. They would take care of everything now, just as they had twice before. It was all very simple.
He walked back into the living room. Tammy was still purring. The silence seemed very deep, the purr very loud. He looked down at the squirming suckling pieces of Tammy’s self that worked their dim-formed forepaws at her belly.
Suddenly, for no reason at all that he could understand, Winston began to cry.
Afterword
“Soundless Evening” is a nexus of a multitude of ideas, thoughts, theories and possible ramifications. It isn’t a prophecy but an exploration. It is set in a future but, like most of Dangerous Visions and this book, it concerns now. With this particular story I must agree with Robert Silverberg, who said in DV that the story has to speak for itself. Anything else I might add would be superfluous. At least it should be, if the story is at all successful.
Gahan Wilson
Introduction
Many years ago, when the Earth was young and dinosaurs like Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post and Blue Book roamed the world, I was in Philadelphia for a sf convention. Or maybe it was New York. After a while all sf conventions look alike. At some, Heinlein makes a surprise entrance just as he wins a Hugo award, wearing a white dinner jacket, scaring the hell out of those who believed a) he was on the opposite coast and b) there is an order to the Universe. At others, fans fall through motion picture screens and make it difficult for Samaritans to he good. But that’s another story. Sadly, as this is written, I learned that John W. Campbell, since 1937 editor of Analog (formerly Astounding), will never attend another convention: his death on July nth, 1971 has thrown the entire field into shock and, whether he was loved, admired, tolerated or disliked, there is no denying he was the single most important formative force in modern sf, a man who was very much his own man, who lived by his own lights and by dint of enormous personal magnetism influenced everyone in the genre. The overwhelming sentiment is that he will be sorely missed and we will never be the same again. Nor will conventions, where John Campbell’s presence was always felt.
But back in the antediluvian era when I attended the convention I’m trying to recall, John Campbell was very much with us, and meeting him at a convention was not as startling as the encounter I’m about to relate.
Wandering through one of the many party suites late one night in Chicago (or was it Seattle?) I chanced upon a very tall, slim man, with a sketch pad, leaning against a wall, drawing sketches like mad. I managed to get behind him and I crawled up onto a window ledge to look over his shoulder (I said tall, didn’t I?) so I could see what he was drawing. He was cartooning his impressions of the weird fans in the room at the time. I instantly struck up a kinship with him, for I, too, saw the fans with one big eye in the middle of the forehead, with green, ichor-dripping hides, with claws instead of hands, with slavering jaws and hairy ears.
I asked him his name, and he said, “Gahan Wilson.”
He pronounced it GAY-un.
He said he was from Collier’s, and he was going to do a cartoon-and-text piece on sf conventions.
Even
then, in San Francisco—or possibly Cleveland—I was a slavish fan of the peculiar and singular cartoons of Gahan Wilson. Now it is fifteen years later and that piece on conventions never appeared, Collier’s is gone, but Gahan Wilson is still very much alive. I would have said alive and well, but . . . well . . . one need only examine the contents of his three books (Gahan Wilson’s Graveside Manner [Ace, 1965]; The Man in the Cannibal Pot [Doubleday, 1967]; I Paint What I See [Simon & Schuster, 1971]) to realize that Gahan is anything but well. At least in terms acceptable to straights the world over. Nonetheless, Gahan Wilson has become—through his regular cartoons in Playboy, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and other periodicals—the premier cartoonist of the bizarre. It has been many years, in fact, since even Chas. Addams gave him a run for the money. When someone at a party says, “I saw the wildest cartoon . . .” and begins to describe it, chances are nine out of ten that they’ll be describing a Wilson monstrousness. (Who, after all, can forget that desiccated Santa clogging the chimney, or the death of the sandwich man, or the vampire in the Intensive Care ward?)
What few people who admire Gahan Wilson know, is that he writes. Not just captions, you understand, but criticism, book reviews, and stories. Ah, mm, yes. Stories.
When it came time to assemble this book, I contacted Gahan and suggested he invent a whole new kind of story, a combination of words and pictures in which one could not survive without the other. A verbalization, as it were, of the peculiarly Gahanoid humor seeping (one might even venture festooned) from his cartoons. I said it could be possibly termed a “vieword” story. Gahan liked the sound of the word, and what he contributed follows. I think you will find this initial vieword offering a nonpareil addition to the rotting body of Mr. Wilson’s deranged work. Further, he promises us more vieword stories, in other places, from time to time. It behooves each of us to indulge our vile masochism by insisting that he keep that promise.
But for the nonce, here is and here is Wilson for himself. Gahan? Are you there? Oh, there you are; well, drop down at once, clean up all that sickly green stuff, and tell the people about yourself.
“I am a simple, Midwestern lad, born in Evanston, Illinois. I had a delightful early youth, dwelling in a brick warren with a cinder back yard which crawled with other infants. Hallowe’ens were of the Bradburian genre in Evanston, leaves scuttling down the broad streets, a delightfully scary old gentleman in a huge old house nearby to torment, soaping of windows (only the rotten kids used wax), and like that. We played games in the basements, behind the parked cars (some of which had window-shades in the back windows), until we dropped. We wore shorts, the boys, at least, and the girls had pigtails. Then organized sports hit the scene and life turned, by degrees, into a ghastly hell which still raises the small hairs at the back of my neck when I think of it. With the approach of high school this ghastly phase of my life drew to its end and I discovered the world was full of creeps, back alley wanderers, dreamers, chickens, twitching cripples, and that we were not at all as bad as we had been convinced, and that we could have our own kind of fun. This led to a fantastic blossoming which has not yet stopped. From birth, I guess, I wanted to be a cartoonist. There exists a crude, hand-drawn comic strip (showing some space opera type battling robots) which has scrawls in the balloon instead of words, indicating my bent was set before literacy. I went to a couple of commercial art schools during summers and found they taught a superficial kind of art, that nobody could teach being funny, and so took a full four years at The Art Institute of Chicago, a good course, consisting entirely of actual work, painting, drawing, graphics, under teachers of various persuasions. A solid trade school approach. Then a brief stay in the Air Force (it turned out I was 4F, after all) and then a brief stay in Europe (France, mostly), and then an attack on the New York markets which paid off, mostly because of a series of flukes as I was then considered really far out and all the usual entrances to the better markets seemed hopelessly closed. What happened was that the regular cartoon editor of Collier’s left for Look, and the art director, who’d taken over on a temporary basis, not knowing what sort of cartoons he should buy, bought mine. Then, when they got a new man in, he kept on doing it, bless his heart. After Collier’s vanished I tied in with Hef at Playboy, and have never regretted it. He is a superb editor and exceptionally fair in his treatment of those who work for him. And, yes, the Mansion is all they say it is. I took a wander in Europe for a couple of years (for me, at least, London is the best big city in the world) and enjoyed it very, very much. I am now married to a beautiful, intelligent, and talented woman who writes for major magazines under the name of Nancy Winters. She is far better than I deserve but, so far, I am getting away with it.”
The first time Reginald Archer saw the thing, it was, in its simplicity, absolute. It owned not the slightest complication or involvement. It lacked the tiniest, the remotest, the most insignificant trace of embellishment. It looked like this:
A spot. Nothing more. Black, as you see, somewhat lopsided, as you see—an unprepossessing, unpretentious spot.
It was located on Reginald Archer’s dazzlingly white linen tablecloth, on his breakfast table, three and one half inches from the side of his egg cup. Reginald Archer was in the act of opening the egg in the egg cup when he saw the spot.
He paused and frowned. Reginald Archer was a bachelor, had been one for his full forty-three years, and he was fond of a smoothly running household. Things like black spots on table linens displeased him, perhaps beyond reason. He rang the bell to summon his butler, Faulks.
That worthy entered and, seeing the dark expression upon his master’s face, approached his side with caution. He cleared his throat, bowed ever so slightly, just exactly the right amount of bow, and, following the direction of his master’s thin, pale, pointing finger, observed, in his turn, the spot.
“What,” asked Archer, “is this doing here?”
Faulks, after a moment’s solemn consideration, owned he had no idea how the spot had come to be there, apologized profusely for its presence, and promised its imminent and permanent removal. Archer stood, the egg left untasted in its cup, his appetite quite gone, and left the room.
It was Archer’s habit to retire every morning to his study and there tend to any little chores of correspondence and finance which had accumulated. His approach to this, as to everything else, was precise to the point of being ritualistic; he liked to arrange his days in reliable, predictable patterns. He had seated himself at his desk, a lovely affair of lustrous mahogany, and was reaching for the mail which had been tidily stacked for his perusal, when, on the green blotter which entirely covered the desk’s working surface, he saw:
He paled, I do not exaggerate, and rang once more for his butler. There was a pause, a longer pause than would usually have occurred, before the trustworthy Faulks responded to his master’s summons. The butler’s face bore a recognizable confusion.
“The spot, sir—” Faulks began, but Archer cut him short.
“Bother the spot,” he snapped, indicating the offense on the blotter. “What is this?”
Faulks peered at the in bafflement.
“I do not know, sir,” he said. “I have never seen anything quite like it.”
“Nor have I,” said Archer. “Nor do I wish to see its likes again. Have it removed.”
Faulks began to carefully take away the blotter, sliding it out from the leather corner grips which held it to the desk, as Archer watched him icily. Then, for the first time, Archer noticed his elderly servant’s very odd expression. He recalled Faulks’ discontinued comment.
“What is it you were trying to tell me, then?” he asked.
The butler glanced up at him, hesitated, and then spoke.
“It’s about die spot, sir,” he said. “The one on the tablecloth. I went to look at it, after you had left, sir, and, I cannot understand it, sir—it was gone!”
“Gone?” asked Archer.
“Gone,” said Faulks.
The butler glanced down at the blotter, which he now held before him, and started.
“And so is this, sir!” he gasped, and, turning round the blotter, revealed it to be innocent of the slightest trace of a
Conscious, now, that something very much out of the ordinary was afoot, Archer gazed thoughtfully into space. Faulks, watching, observed the gaze suddenly harden into focus.
“Look over there, Faulks,” said Archer, in a quiet tone. “Over yonder, at the wall.”
Faulks did as he was told, wondering at his master’s instructions. Then comprehension dawned, for there, on the wallpaper, directly under an indifferent seascape, was:
Archer stood, and the two men crossed the room.
“What can it be, sir?” asked Faulks.
“I can’t imagine,” said Archer.
He turned to speak, but when he saw his butler’s eyes move to his, he looked quickly back at the wall. Too late—the was gone.
“It needs constant observation,” Archer murmured, then, aloud: “Look for it, Faulks. Look for it. And when you see it, don’t take your eyes from it for a second!”
They walked about the room in an intensive search. They had not been at it for more than a moment when Faulks gave an exclamation.
“Here, sir!” he cried. “On the window sill!”
Archer hurried to his side and saw:
“Don’t let it out of your sight!” he hissed.
As the butler stood, transfixed and gaping, his master chewed furiously at the knuckles of his left hand. Whatever the thing was, it must be taken care of, and promptly. He would not allow such continued disruption in his house.
But how to get rid of it? He shifted to the knuckles of his other hand and thought. The thing had, he hated to admit it, but there it was, supernatural overtones. Perhaps it was some beastly sort of ghost.
