by Anthology
I stopped screaming.
They watched me a moment.
I stared back at them.
They went away, leaving me in the dim light.
I found my way to the bed and stretched out on it, tasting blood and salt. Far away, in another room, a woman was screaming. She’s the one who breaks things too. She’s the blonde. Or she used to be before her hair turned color. I remember her. I remember her sleek loins, the moment when our friendship had changed, the moment when we had lain together, the moment of sliding, sleek, long, trembling penetration, that special closeness that changes always and forever any friendship. I remembered our falling away after that special closeness—and the discovery that the short minutes of connection, the fleeting seconds of tight, wet togetherness had only served to indicate how bad the loneliness was the rest of the time.
And now she was screaming. She was too old to find, in copulation, even fleeting seconds of warmth and light. And I guess I had started her. I was sorry my screaming had triggered hers. I was sorry I had caused the scene at the bus. I was sorry that I was a Stunted. But sorrow, after all, does absolutely nothing. It is much like holy water. It is not even used to quench the thirst.
That was three weeks ago. And I still don’t want to remember. I listen for the fan shuttle, for the thumpa-thumpa of its blades. I lie awake until five or six in the morning, thinking that surely it must just be late. Sometimes, like now, I force myself to remember. I am too old for delusion. I am sixty-five. I was twenty-four when the operation failed. I am sixty-five. My hands are liver-spotted. My hair is very white. White as the snow outside, you might say. So I am remembering now, and the room is quiet. The snow falls against the pane, quietly. I snap my fingers to break the quiet, but it seems as if there is no noise. I snap again. There is no noise. And now I think I will have to scream for Belias and the second one without a name . . .
Afterword
The most common civilian reaction to the discovery that you are a writer is to be asked, usually in a tone of fatuous condescension (after all, you don’t have a regular job, do you; you don’t follow the Great American Tradition of the nine-to-five existence, do you?) something quite like, “Where do you get all your ideas?” To answer this in depth would require seven or eight hours of the questioner’s time. Considering his attention span is usually one minute and forty-eight seconds and that he has never read a book in his life (recent studies show that fifty-eight per cent of the American public is willing to admit just that), a seven hour response would not be fitting. So you shrug and say, “From life,” or some other equally vague and pointless generality.
But since this is labeled as an afterword, and since you are reading it, a complete answer is obviously in order this time. Not seven or eight hours’ worth, but just a few minutes on this story alone.
A writer of any genre of fiction—aside from the Western and the historical novel—must keep abreast of developments in physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, social science, and philosophy. This is especially so for writers of science fiction. It is with one, beady eye open for possible plots, therefore, that I devour magazines and books in many different fields. When I first discovered Marshall McLuhan’s philosophic mutterings in The Medium is the Massage and War and Peace in the Global Village, I realized that here was a veritable gold mine of story ideas.
McLuhan theorizes, among other things, that the world has and will continue to become, due to electronics—telstar in particular—a Global Village. He foresees the day when national boundaries might disappear, all men might become as citizens of a single town, increased swiftness and completeness of communication bringing an understanding between men heretofore impossible. For my first extrapolation on McLuhan, I wrote a novel, The Fall of the Dream Machine, which tried to depict what would happen to the power cencentration in such a drastically shrunken world. Logically, the power structure would be managed by fewer hands than at any time in history. It might very well be possible, then, to have our first global dictator, though he would have to be a businessman rather than a politician. A second attempt at this extrapolation produced a short story, “A Dragon in the Land”, that dealt with the growth of understanding between people due to a world-shrinking war. The story dealt more with human relationships than had the novel. I liked it better, but it still did not sum up all I felt about the Global Village concept. Next came a mainstream novel titled Hung (from the catchphrase “hung-up”) set in the present in the hippie subculture of a small university. I was trying to show that our world was already being compressed and what it was meaning to us. A war in Asia, for example, something we would once have been able to sweep under the rug (considering the country is a minor one), was setting moral reverberations around the world. This is a sign that McLuhan is on the right track. When Hung was finished, however, I knew I had still not said exactly what I felt about McLuhan’s prophecy-philosophy. Yes, it would require another story. A science fiction story. Thus came the piece you have just read.
I wanted to show both the good and bad aspect of such a “world neighborhood.” Surely, there might be an end to nations, better understanding between peoples, and an end to war. But it would mean something else, too, something altogether unpleasant. In a world so tightly knit, what will happen to ethnic backgrounds? Will we become merely an amalgam, a bland mixture, and not retain the individual, rich heritages? And what will happen to those who can’t manage to blend with the Great All? The Global Village, with its whiz-bag, flash-crackle, snap-pow electronics, will try to brainwash and standardize its citizens as no society ever has before—simply because there will be no alternatives for the disenchanted, no place else to go . . .
In this story, the hero is alienated from the Global Village of the Empathists because of a medical-scientific problem. In a larger sense, he represents any man who is alienated from society for whatever reasons. The truly frightening thing is that he is living in a future wherein, by and large, everyone is happier than at any other time in history. Yet his existence is a nightmare. Even in Utopia, then, there are dark corners. The Global Village might be nice, but it will not be a place for loners, for those who are different, for the iconoclast. It will be a place of glass walls that can’t risk vibrations. And if you don’t fit, the only thing you can do is exactly what the hero of this little story does. Scream for the one without a name and hope he will kill you this time . . .
GETTING ALONG
James Blish (with Judith Ann Lawrence)
Introduction
For over thirty years James Blish has been the most consistent, loudest voice in the field for literacy, grace and technical expertise in writing speculative fiction. Both as himself and as “William Atheling, Jr.” he has fought the good fight: as the former, by example, with stories of power and rigorously-manipulated imagination, with elegance in his writing, with a frequently cerebral appeal too often ignored in sf . . . and as the latter, with critical writings that have informed and sustained an entire generation of new writers, proffering literary standards by which to judge our best and our worst. Of all the writers one might call “giant,” Jim Blish is certainly most deserving of the title.
Further, he is impeccably honest.
No one has greater cause to know this than your editor. I won’t go into it—I have elsewhere, if I recall—but Jim’s position seems always to have been one that is best encapsulated by a quotation from a silent Doug Fairbanks film, Don Q, Son of Zorro (1925), in which Fairbanks, as Don Cesar de Vega, apologizes for having offended someone, and when his compatriots bring him to task for it, he tells them, “When you’re in the right, fight; when you’re in the wrong, acknowledge it.” I’ve seen Jim Blish do that in print, and knowing how difficult it is to backtrack, I take it to be a singular mark of the man’s honesty.
Further, he is incorruptible.
He values his integrity more highly than any man I’ve ever met. Hired to do a series of adaptations of Star Trek scripts for Bantam paperbacks, Jim found himself
confronted, on one occasion, by a puzzle that might have stumped Solomon. The filmed version of one script was vastly different from the original version written by a certain sf writer. Jim had to please the Bantam people, the producers of the show, the honchos at Paramount Pictures, and he didn’t want to insult the sf writer who’d done the script, which original he’d liked. You or I, we’d have just sidestepped the problem and adapted something else; but Jim carefully took the best of both versions and wrote a marvelously ameliorative paragraph explaining that this was a version cannibalizing both. And everyone was content.
Further, he is patient with those who need to learn.
Without flying into the towering rage taken as refuge by so many other observers of the sf scene—and I shamefacedly admit to being one of those lesser mortals—he has over and over again tried to point out to advocates of the Old Wave/New Wave controversy that every writer tagged, as being a member of the “New Wave,” has vehemently denied it. Even Blish’s calm and reasoned sanity, however, has done little to stifle the, er, piercing tirades of those who would not only deny writers hungry to test the parameters of the sf equation their new forms and daring experiments . . . but continue to joust with paper tigers by insisting that the more avant-garde wish to deny that right to their brothers and sisters tagged “Old Wave.” It is, at core, a moron’s jehad. As Blish has noted, patient with the dull and even the humorless who are doomed to see the world with tunnel vision, the universe of speculative fiction is wide enough, colorful enough, rich enough, to support all forms, all styles, all writers.
Which brings me to “Getting Along.”
A very special piece of work, even in a book devoted to the extra-special.
It is a story, certainly, and brilliant parody, of course—of which, more in a moment—but it is something else. It operates on a level of social intercourse once peopled by the likes of Alexander Woollcott, Bernard Shaw, Periander, James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Dorothy Parker, not to mention H. L. Mencken. It pokes gentle but (again) piercing fun at a philosophical position so humorless that its proponents conceive of the very act of laughter anathema. It is James Blish doing what he does better than anyone else in our midst—letting the hot air out of gasbags—and having just a grand time doing it.
And, if an editor may be pardoned the liberty, since it is painfully apparent to one who has encountered the unlettered youth of our nation in several hundred colleges these last five years and found the names Herman Melville and Gustave Flaubert unknown to an alarming number of those who consider themselves hip because they know the names of every instrumentalist in Blood, Sweat & Tears or Three Dog Night—the parodies may be a trifle obscure, so I would like to identify the authors being lampooned.
It should be understood that this suggests no contempt on the editor’s part for the reader’s intelligence, but merely one further attempt to make this volume as complete and uplifting an experience as, say, an Evening with Bobby Sherman.
However, to insure no one will take offense at the act of kindness, I suggest you read “Getting Along” first, try to identify for yourself the authors being parodied, and just skip everything that comes between the space below (including the upside-down part) and the next big space in the copy. Everything in-between those spaces identifies the authors parodied in the nine letters. After you’ve read the story you can come back and see how many you were able to recognize. It’ll be more fun that way.
Okay, start skipping now.
The parodies run like so . . .
The combination in the fifth letter is due to the fact that the two men wrote almost identical stories—“Two Bottles of Relish” and “A Touch of Nutmeg Makes It”—although for the parody Blish drew pretty generally on all the stories in Collier’s Fancies and Goodnights and, of course, Dunsany’s famous Jorkens stories. Similarly, the Doyle section is a mixture of Sherlock Holmes and The Land of Mist. I’m not sure it’s necessary, but there may be readers who have forgotten that John Cleland wrote Fanny Hill and that “Victor Appleton” is the name signed to the Tom Swift books. Anyhow, in letters 6, 8 and 9 it seems clear that the author had no specific works in mind.
And perhaps it might be suggested that Jim show letter number 5 to Lady Dunsany, who should find it amusing.
Now that you’ve skipped over the information pertaining to the parodies, and have reserved the joy of figuring them out for yourselves before coming back to test your erudition, it is time to catalogue the Blish books to date, and to offer Jim and his lovely wife, Judith Ann Lawrence, with whom he wrote this delight, a chance to state their vital specifics.
In science fiction, these are the Blish titles:
The Warriors of Day
And All the Stars a Stage
The Duplicated Man
Titan’s Daughter
(with Robert W. Lowndes)
The Night Shapes
Jack of Eagles
So Close to Home
The Cities in Flight Series:
The Star Dwellers
1. They Shall Have Stars
Mission to the Heart Stars
2. A Life for the Stars
Welcome to Mars!
3. Earthman, Come Home
Best SF Stories of James Blish
4. The Triumph of Time
A Torrent of Faces
The Seedling Stars
(with Norman L. Knight)
The Frozen Year
Star Trek 1/2/3/4
Vor
Spock Must Die!
Galactic Cluster
Anywhen
A Case of Conscience
Fantasy titles are Black Easter and The Day after Judgment; an historical novel, Dr. Mirabilis; a teenage novel, The Vanished Jet; brilliant criticism in The Issue at Hand and More Issues at Hand; as editor, Thirteen O’Clock (early stories of C. M. Kornbluth), New Dreams This Morning, The Nebula Award Stories, Fifth Volume and Kalki, the James Branch Cabell Society Journal.
In preparation at this writing: Beep, King Log, Histories of Witchcraft and Demonology & Magic (two volumes), and The Sense of Music.
Of Judy A.L. Blish, much can be said. Not the least of which is that she sub-authored this story/parody/happening with her husband Jim. It can also be said of her that she is a talented artist and draftsman; that she designed the covetously handsome Nebula awards of the Science Fiction Writers of America, a three-dimensional rendering of any sf writer’s dream of what a neat award should look like; that she writes well; that she is a woman of uncommon good sense and almost unbelievable empathy; that she will be pissed-off I haven’t given her as much space as Jim. But she knows me. And like an angel, forgives me more than she should.
They both live in England, at the moment, and here is what they write of themselves, sort of in the spirit of just, er, getting along . . .
“JB born 1921 in Orange, N. J.; educated Rutgers (B. Sc. 1942) and Columbia; U. S. Army 1942–44; trade newspaper editor 1945–52, public relations counsel (both agency and corporate) 1952–69; now full time free lance author. M. 1945 Virginia Kidd, two children; rem. 1964 Judith Ann Lawrence. 27 books in print, one in press, three in process; represented in 64 anthologies not counting A,DV; translated into 18 languages. One of the three founders of the Milford Science Fiction Writers Conference; vice president of SFWA, two years; winner of Hugo award for best novel of 1958, A Case of Conscience; guest of honor, Pittcon (1960) and Lunacon (1967) and principal speaker at Phillycon (1968). Have also written Westerns, detectives, sport stories, popular science articles, poetry, plays, literary criticism, music criticism, TV scripts and feature films.”
“O god Jim says I have to do this too. Won’t give birthdate to anybody. BFA Columbia 1957. Taught school, ran elevators, secretaried & all that. Now freelance illustrator—19 books, many magazine spots, mostly sf. Married to all the above. Like it. Isn’t that enough? Refuse to satisfy any more prurient curiosity.
“This was not a cold story collected out of the air. It was collected out of a ho
t British summer night at about 4 a.m., and climbed out of a nice warm bed and wrote its idea down, on a still warm electric typer.”
Getting Along
[For a year before going to England my wife and I lived in an elaborately decorated Brooklyn brownstone which we suspected of having been a fin du siecle bordello. In the master bedroom was a combination wallsafe which nobody, including the landlady, knew how to open. Curiosity and avarice finally got the better of us and we hired a professional cracksman to do the job.
[Inside we found no jewels, deeds to eighty-four square feet of Wall Street, or gold eagles, but only a packet of yellowed, flaking-edged letters in a feminine hand. We do not know how much credence to place in the story they tell, but we are certain we have never before seen one quite like it.—J. B.]
LETTER THE FIRST
Dear Madam,
In view of your many past kindnesses to me in a time of tribulation more than ordinary even for my misfortunate self, I respond, albeit not without reluctance to intrude further upon your ready sympathies, to your request for further particulars of my handkerchiefly history.
Know then, dear Madam, that I first saw the light of day in Winnetka, Illinois in the year of Our Lord 18—. I was four years old at the time of which I speak, my dear mama having been cruelly cast into debtors’ prison four years, eight months and two weeks earlier. We crept out of the gate in the chill dawn that day and the turnkey bade us all a fond farewell. He kissed my dear mama and the three younger children decorously, and pressed half a dollar into my dear mama’s hand.
Now, Madam, my dear mama had been trained in a famous School of Needlework in a small Thamesside town, where she helped to make part of the trousseau for Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter; hut in the far West of that day, inhabited as it was preponderantly by buffalo, Red Indians and boisterous bullfighters and roadrunners, there was but little call for services so gentle, and her health had been much weakened by long privation and insomnia. Hence it fell out that, after a lingering struggle with the pthisis, she was called to her long reward when I was but ten æ; leaving me, as I need hardly add, even less prepared than she for the nurturing and education of my brother and sisters, in view of the sheltered nature of my earliest years.
