by Anthology
Then a gate caught him too.
You can’t beat the gates.
It was the last Race, so the crowd released its pity and relaxed its fear for all the racers. The stadium was filled with it. The Race was over now and they mourned their heroes well. But in the process they prepared themselves to carry on. We did not race, they thought. We must go on living. They felt a load had been lifted from them. They felt almost lighthearted.
But suddenly there was a commotion. People turned to look. It was the wrong time for a disturbance and they resented it.
“The Champion,” someone said.
John, too, looked behind and saw the Champion standing. His expression had not changed. He still looked bored.
The Champion did beat the gates, they remembered together.
Was he going to speak? John wondered. He had never spoken voluntarily before. John stood and turned around to see better. Then he noticed Rita pulling on the Champion’s arm.
“No, no!” she screamed. Dignitaries tried to hold him back, and were shrugged off. The Champion began to walk down the ramp.
John still did not understand until someone screamed, “He’s going to race!” Yes, he thought as he watched the Champion come down the ramp toward him, it could only mean that.
But why? John wondered, and heard voices in the crowd echo his question. He had everything in the world he could want. He had travel and women and food and adventure and fame. He had earned it already and did not have to earn it again.
The Champion looked at some in the crowd as he passed. John was one of those whose eyes met his—for long minutes it seemed—and he felt drowned in sadness. He felt the Champion was trying to tell him something.
Was that it? Could the Champion be tired of his life? Was there something about it none of them knew—something to confirm John’s nagging doubts—that could make him do this? The wine had his head so hot, so confused. It was a terrifying idea and John fought to put it from his mind. Surely that wasn’t what the Champion had tried to tell him. But the way he had looked at him.
Then the Champion was walking onto the field. He spoke briefly with the announcer, who appeared not to know what to do. The announcer disappeared for a few minutes, then reappeared at the microphone.
“The Champion will defend his title,” he said softly.
A silver-gray car, the color of the Champion’s hair, was rolled onto the track. With no hesitation he climbed in and allowed it to be pushed to the line.
The crowd was becoming hysterical. “No, don’t let him,” John heard, and turned to see Rita struggling with two of the dignitaries. But the crowd picked it up. “Don’t let him,” they began to chant. “Don’t let him,” John chanted with them. But when he looked back the Race had begun.
The Champion had won the first time by driving straight down the center lane. He knew the odds and didn’t try to outmaneuver the gates. Others had tried his system without success. But there was no doubt it had worked for him and he was using it again this time. Already he was beginning the second mile and still moving. Did he have some special charm? The Champion made it. Would the luck that brought him through the first time bring him through again?
Then suddenly the Champion was gone, an unseen but felt red explosion inside a silver-gray lump of aluminum. The crane did not move, as though it could not believe its next task.
There was a deep and long silence.
Then there was a growing noise in the stadium. John realized part of it was coming from him. At first it was inarticulate, like the cries of animals, then it found words. “He’s gone,” someone screamed. “There’s no more Champion.” “We’ve lost him.” The Champion didn’t make it.
A pounding grew in John’s head and became a refrain with which he led the crowd. “We need a Champion. We need a Champion.”
He did not know its origin, not even, really, its meaning. But it was there, throbbing in his head, overwhelming him completely. It had now been communicated to the others and the whole stadium shook with the sound. “We need a Champion! We need a Champion! We need a Champion!”
Then suddenly it was, “I will be the Champion! I will be the Champion! I will be the Champion!”
Then he was running, down the ramp, toward the track, waving his arms and shouting, “I will, I will, I will!”
And behind him came others.
Afterword
Sometimes it seems to me the modern world can only be viewed as conspiracy. The Right tends to credit communism with planning race riots and campus disorders. SDS believes the military-industrial complex conspires to keep the Viet Nam war alive and deadly. And how difficult it is to believe it was Oswald alone, or James Earl Ray alone, or even Sirhan alone. Having no faith that God is alive, let alone in control, we credit men with the most prodigious powers of conspiring to make us unhappy.
There’s a nice paradox here. We need to have faith in the ability of our fellow men to conspire against us. Even those of us who reject most conspiratorial theories find them fascinating and somehow reassuring. Because if we can’t believe that a god planned our troubles, and if we don’t believe men planned them, then we come face to face with the unplanned event, the random twitch, chaos and the void.
The writer must impose some sort of order on the chaos of experience, and writers have, it seems to me, relied more and more on the idea of conspiracy as a pattern of organization. Such different novels as Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 are built around conspiracies. In the case of the latter, as with many of the black humorists, an absurd universe requires an absurd conspiracy. We see, in Earth, Burroughs and others, a protagonist who creeps behind the proscenium arch of the puppet show for a look at those pulling the strings. He may find the controllers as mad as the puppets, or he may find that they too have strings, connected to others with strings, connected to . . . Despite the release of dark laughter at such knowledge, it is not a pleasant experience.
This is another conspiracy story and it is not pleasant. It was most unpleasant to write, and I usually enjoy writing. It began with the image of a race rigged against any possibility of winning, of men going down to fling themselves like moths against steel gates because someone has learned to manipulate some of their best qualities to keep them enslaved. Usually I let an idea gestate, but I pushed this one, I think because I didn’t want to understand it too well. I wanted to share the ignorance and terror of my protagonist as he groped for understanding.
He never sees behind the curtains, though he suspects—because he is something of a misfit in his beehive world—that all is not for the best. He wonders, in a rare use of metaphor, what is at the bottom of the iceberg, but he never finds out. Nor do you, except as you use what I’ve given you from his limited point of view to extrapolate.
So you build your own conspiracy. And you decide why the Champion went down and whether his act liberated or further enslaved the world he abandoned. And you make up your mind what Aristotle and Hugh Hefner have to do with the story. And you tell me whether it could ever happen or not.
IN RE GLOVER
Leonard Tushnet
Introduction
Along with such great unsolved mysteries of the universe as a) Who was Kaspar Hauser? b) What significance did the Easter Island statues originally have? c) Did Pancho Villa really shoot Ambrose Bierce d) What was Jack the Ripper’s real identity? and e) How did Erich Segal ever become a popular writer? two things have long puzzled me:
1. Why, though there are numerous sf writers who are Jewish, has there been so little Hebraically-based sf or fantasy? The background is certainly rich enough.
2. Why, though it is certainly ripe for being poked fun at, has there been so little memorable humorous sf and fantasy? God knows much of what’s written is laughable without intentionally being meant to evoke laughter.
With the exceptions of a few Avram Davidson stories, an extraordinary new novel from Ballantine by Isidore Haiblum titled The Tsaddik of the
Seven Wonders, an occasional dybbuk or golem, a marvelous Carol Carr short in Orbit 5 titled “Look, You Think You’ve Got Troubles,” some of the early Fredric Brown cavorts, Harry Harrison’s Bill, the Galactic Hero, some Sheckley, some Goulart and most of Larry Eisenberg’s stuff (remember “What Happened to Auguste Clarot?” in DV?), there’s neither very much yiddishe sf or very much funny sf. If it weren’t for Isaac Bashevis Singer, where would we be?
Though these two conundrums will never be satisfactorily solved, every once in a while we get some lunatic in our midst—like Lafferty—who does that dandy little rigadoon and we naively believe the balance will at last be corrected. But it’s only one story, by one writer, and when it has faded into the past, we wonder again.
Wonder no more.
Both questions are answered, at least temporarily, with Leonard Tushnet.
The mad M.D. from Maplewood, New Jersey—who piously refuses to impart any personal information on himself—here whips off an hilarious vision that includes among its many dangers, the possibility of having one’s heart attack oneself, from laughter. With the Vonnegut and the Wilson and the McCullough and the Blish stories, it helps bring things more into balance, proving that we of the sf world are not such humorless bastards as we may seem to the outside world.
(On the other hand, any genre that can contain Asimov, without blushing, can hardly he said to be humorless.)
(Dr. A. indeed!)
And while we have no further specs for the private life of Dr. Tushnet, here are publication vitae that may tell you almost more than you wanted to know about where more Tushnet can be located.
Nonetheless, there is no questioning that the Tushnet terpsichore is a mitzvah.
Short Stories (* indicates science fiction)
Ball State Forum
A Goodly Apple, Bobby Booby
The Christian
Cards
Cimarron Review
Dangerous Books
De Kalb Literary Arts Quarterly
Poire Helene
Diagnostica
The Dance of Justice
The Barred Hut
Discourse
Thanks
Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine
In the Calendar of Saints*
The Chelmlins*
Gifts from the Universe**
The Worm Shamir*
Lord of Sensation*
Matchmaker, Matchmaker*
Aunt Jennie’s Tonic*
Forum
A Little Fatherly Advice
The Rod of Aesculapius
Four Quarters
The Nearest Field
Obituary
Bandierra Rosa
Jewish Currents
The Ban
The Gastric Jews
The Yellow Passport
Jewish Frontier
The Sewing Machine***
The Culture Vulture
The View Depends on Where You Sit
Benefit of Clergy
A Jewish Heart
Journal of the A.M.A.
The Weight of Evidence
Maelstrom
Lotte
Medical Opinion & Review
A Cynical Fable
Midwestern University Quarterly
Summer Job
Modern Age,
New York Is Full of Lonely People
Mosaic
Adoshem******
National Jewish Monthly
The Non-Resister
New Dimensions
A Plague of Cars
New Frontiers
Supper on the Table
New Mexico Quarterly
The Logic of Magic
Nimrod
Balaam
Penman
The Integration of DeWitt Manor
Per Se
The Discount Store
Prairie Schooner
A Pious Old Man with a Beard
A Week with Lilith
Raisins in the Cabbage
The Klausners****
The Village Priest
Reconstructionist
Experiment in Paradise*****
A Joyful Noise
Reign of the Sacred Heart
A Minor Miracle
Roanoke Review
Some Pounds of Flesh
Today Magazine
For Which the First
Twigs
The Red Dress
University Review
Mother of the Gracchi
I’m Not a Snob
A Short Flight into the Invisible
Wind
When Fond Recollection
Books (non-fiction)
To Die With Honor (Citadel Press, 1965)
The Medicine Men (St. Martin’s Press, 1971)
The Uses of Adversity (Thomas Yoseloff, 1966)
Articles
Chicago Jewish Forum
King Chaim Rumkowski
Eucharist
A Priest at the Bedside
Jewish Currents
The Little Doctor*
Journal of History of Medicine
The Ghetto of Lodz, Murder by Disease
** Included in anthology, Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction, Doubleday, 1969
*** Dramatized and produced (1964, 1966)
**** Included in anthology, Best American Short Stories of 1971, Houghton Mifflin, 1971
***** Included in anthology, They Fought Back, ed. Yuri Suhl, (Crown, 1967)
In re Glover
In re Glover finally reached the Supreme Court. The nine Justices, in their Friday conference, were unanimous that a writ of certiorari be granted and that the case be heard. Unanimous on those points, they had already made up their separate minds about various phases of the case and each of them was already preparing a memorandum for his opinion. In re Glover would set landmarks in law, in a new field of law as well as in the laws of wills, mortmain, trusts, and homicide, with overtones to be subtly discussed in obiter dicta bearing on euthanasia and medical and legal malpractice.
It looked, on the surface, like a simple case of merely determining the facts, ordinarily not in the purview of such an august body as the Supreme Court of the United States. Ralph Glover, the brilliant and dynamic founder of the many-sided business empire bearing his name had died—or had he? If he were dead, his four sons by his first wife and his two daughters by his second (both wives having predeceased him, if that term could be used without prejudice) were due to inherit the entire estate, share and share alike, after a number of relatively minor bequests had been paid; the great Glover Foundation, the internationally known medical research institution, was to get nothing, having been the recipient of munificent gifts during its founder’s lifetime; the Federal government and the states of residence of the heirs were eargerly anticipating the considerable inheritance taxes. If he were not dead, the trustees of the tax-free Glover Foundation would continue to receive, as they had for five years now, all revenues from the many corporations constituting the Glover enterprises; the children were to fend for themselves, meaning that the sons and sons-in-law would have to find jobs; and the Federal and State governments would have to wait until Glover’s actual demise to collect.
Mr. Allen Freundlich, J., in the succinct manner for which he was noted, summarized the scientific background thus: (i) When living tissues are frozen, the ice crystals formed by the frozen intracellular water occupy a larger space than liquid water; hence the cell walls are ruptured and tissue death ensues. (2) The chemical, dimethylsulfoxide, commonly know as DMSO, had the remarkable property of being able to bind to itself intracellular water, so that below o° Centigrade no ice crystals are formed and cell structure, except for its physical state, remains unchanged. (3) When DMSO is injected intravenously into the body of a small mammal, that mammal by a quick-freezing process could withstand the lowering of its body temperature to well below the freezing point of water and could then remain in that frozen state, like packaged meat in a supermarket, withou
t tissue damage and with suspension of all vital functions. (4) It could then be slowly returned to its normal temperature and those functions would return, including resumption of activity in the higher cerebral centers. Rats, so frozen and later thawed out, ate and drank and copulated and ran easily through the paths of mazes they had previously learned, just as they had before the artificially induced hibernation or state of suspended animation. Experiments had demonstrated that such hibernation was without harm for at least ten years and probably longer, but it was only ten years ago that the first batch of animals had been frozen. (5) What was true of rats was true of larger mammals, including primates. Rhesus monkeys, a gibbon, and two chimpanzees had successfully survived the process; the chimpanzees had thereafter been mated and been shown to be fertile. (6) The procedure had no ill effects on the animals other than that they developed cataracts, opacification of the lenses of the eyes, a condition easily correctible by surgery. (7) Once thawed out, however, re-freezing could not take place without damage to vital organs; why this should occur was not known.
