A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  Lew seemed right pleased by that.

  Oh, you lousy bastards, just you wait!

  “You ’bout ready to go meet your first lady?”

  “Ready as I’ll ever be. Lew,” I said, and got up.

  “Cool smoke, isn’t it?” Aaron said.

  I took the corncob out of my mouth. “Pure dee-light,” I smiled. I hadn’t even lit the fucking thing.

  They walked me over to Marigold Street and as we came up on a little house with yellow shutters and a white picket fence, Lew said, “This’s Ira’s house. Quilla June is his daughter.”

  “Well, land sakes,” I said, wide-eyed.

  Ira’s lean jaw muscles jumped.

  We went inside.

  Quilla June was sitting on the settee with her mother, an older version of her, pulled thin as a withered muscle. “Miz Holmes,” I said, and made a little curtsey. She smiled. Strained, but smiled.

  Quilla June sat with her feet right together, and her hands folded on her lap. There was a ribbon in her hair. It was blue.

  Matched her eyes.

  Something went thump in my gut.

  “Quilla June,” I said.

  She looked up. “Mornin’, Vic.”

  Then everyone sort of stood around looking awkward, and finally Ira began yapping and yipping about get in the bedroom and get this unnatural filth over with so they could go to Church and pray the Good Lord wouldn’t Strike All Of Them Dead with a bolt of lightning in the ass, or some crap like that.

  So I put out my hand, and Quilla June reached for it without looking up, and we went in the back, into a small bedroom, and she stood there with her head down.

  “You didn’t tell ’em, did you?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  And suddenly, I didn’t want to kill her at all. I wanted to hold her. Very tight. So I did. And she was crying into my chest, and making little fists and beating on my back, and then she was looking up at me and running her words all together: “Oh, Vic, I’m sorry, so sorry, I didn’t mean to, I had to, I was sent out to, I was so scared, and I love you and now they’ve got you down here, and it isn’t dirty, is it, it isn’t the way my Poppa says it is, is it?”

  I held her and kissed her and told her it was okay, and then asked her if she wanted to come away with me, and she said yes yes she really did. So I told her I might have to hurt her Poppa to get away, and she got a look in her eyes that I knew real well.

  For all her propriety, Quilla June Holmes didn’t much like her prayer-shouting Poppa.

  I asked her if she had anything heavy, like a candlestick or a club, and she said no. So I went rummaging around in that back bedroom, and found a pair of her Poppa’s socks, in a bureau drawer. I pulled the big brass balls off the headboard of the bed, and dropped them into the sock. I hefted it. Oh. Yeah.

  She stared at me with big eyes. “What’re you going to do?”

  “You want to get out of here?”

  She nodded.

  “Then just stand back behind the door. No, wait a minute, I got a better idea. Get on the bed.”

  She laid down on the bed. “Okay,” I said, “now pull up your skirt, pull off your pants, and spread out.” She gave me a look of pure horror. “Do it,” I said. “If you want out.”

  So she did it, and I rearranged her so that her knees were bent and her legs open at the thighs, and I stood to one side of the door, and whispered to her, “Call your Poppa. Just him.”

  She hesitated a long moment, then she called out, in a voice she didn’t have to fake, “Poppa! Poppa, come here, please!” Then she clamped her eyes shut tight.

  Ira Holmes came through the door, took one look at his secret desire, his mouth dropped open, I kicked the door closed behind him and walloped him as hard as I could. He squished a little, and spattered the bedspread, and went very down.

  She opened her eyes when she heard the thunk! and when the stuff splattered her legs she leaned over and puked on the floor. I knew she wouldn’t be much good to me in getting Aaron into the room, so I opened the door, stuck my head around, looked worried, and said, “Aaron, would you come here a minute, please?” He looked at Lew, who was rapping with Mrs Holmes about what was going on in the back bedroom, and when Lew nodded him on, he came into the room. He took a look at Quilla June’s naked bush, at the blood on the wall and bedspread, at Ira on the floor, and opened his mouth to yell, just as I whacked him. It took two more to get him down, and then I had to kick him in the chest to put him away. Quilla June was still puking.

  I grabbed her by the arm and swung her up off the bed. At least she was being quiet about it, but man did she stink.

  “Come on!”

  She tried to pull back, but I held on, and opened the bedroom door. As I pulled her out. Lew stood up, leaning on his cane. I kicked the cane out from under the old fart and down he went in a heap. Mrs Holmes was staring at us, wondering where her old man was: “He’s back in there,” I said, heading for the front door. “The Good Lord got him in the head.”

  Then we were out in the street, Quilla June stinking along behind me, dry-heaving and bawling and probably wondering what had happened to her underpants.

  They kept my weapons in a locked case at the Better Business Bureau, and we detoured around by my boarding house where I pulled the crowbar I’d swiped from the gas station out from under the back porch. Then we cut across behind the Grange and into the business section, and straight into the BBB. There was a clerk who tried to stop me, and I split his gourd with the crowbar. Then I pried the latch off the cabinet in Lew’s office, and got the .30-06 and my .45 and all the ammo, and my spike, and my knife, and my kit, and loaded up. By that time Quilla June was able to make some sense.

  “Where we gonna go, where we gonna go, oh Poppa Poppa Poppa . . .!”

  “Hey, listen, Quilla June, Poppa me no Poppa. You said you wanted to be with me . . . well. I’m goin’up, baby, and if you wanna go with, you better stick close.”

  She was too scared to object.

  I stepped out the front of the shopfront, and there was that green box sentry, coming on like a whippet. It had its cables out, and the mittens were gone. It had hooks.

  I dropped to one knee, wrapped the sling of the .30-06 around my forearm, sighted clean, and fired dead at the big eye in the front. One shot, spang!

  Hit that eye, the thing exploded in a shower of sparks, and the green box swerved and went through the front window of THE MILL END SHOPPE, screeching and crying and showering the place with flames and sparks. Nice.

  I grabbed Quilla June by the arm and started off toward the south end of Topeka. It was the closest exit I’d found in my wandering, and we made it in about fifteen minutes, panting and weak as kittens.

  And there it was.

  A big air-intake duct.

  I pried off the clamps with the crowbar, and we climbed up inside. There were ladders going up. There had to be. It figured. Repairs. Keep it clean. Had to be. We started climbing. It took a long, long time.

  Quilla June kept asking me, from down behind me, whenever she got too tired to climb, “Vic. do you love me?” I kept saying yes. Not only because I meant it. It helped her keep climbing.

  WE CAME UP a mile from the access dropshaft. I shot off the filter covers and the hatch bolts, and we climbed out. They should have known better down there.

  You don’t fuck around with Jimmy Cagney.

  They never had a chance.

  Quilla June was exhausted. I didn’t blame her. But I didn’t want to spend the night out in the open; there were things out there I didn’t like to think about meeting even in daylight. It was getting on toward dusk.

  We walked toward the access dropshaft.

  Blood was waiting.

  He looked weak. But he’d waited.

  I stooped down and lifted his head. He opened his eyes, and very softly he said, “Hey.”

  I smiled at him. Jesus, it was good to see him. “We made it back, man.”

  He tried to get
up, but he couldn’t. The wounds on him were in ugly shape. “Have you eaten?” I asked.

  “No. Grabbed a lizard yesterday . . . or maybe it was day before. I’m hungry, Vic.”

  Quilla June came up then, and Blood saw her. He closed his eyes. “We’d better hurry, Vic,” she said. “Please. They might come up from the dropshaft.”

  I tried to lift Blood. He was dead weight. “Listen, Blood, I’ll leg it into the city and get some food. I’ll come back quick. You just wait here.”

  “Don’t go in there, Vic,” lie said. “I did a recon the day after you went down. They found out we weren’t fried in that gym. I don’t know how. Maybe mutts smelled our track. I’ve been keeping watch, and they haven’t tried to come out after us. I don’t blame them. You don’t know what it’s like out here at night, man . . . you don’t know . . .”

  He shivered.

  “Take it easy, Blood.”

  “But they’ve got us marked lousy in the city. Vic. We can’t go back there. We’ll have to make it someplace else.”

  That put it on a different stick. We couldn’t go back, and with Blood in that condition we couldn’t go forward. And I knew, good as I was solo. I couldn’t make it without him. And there wasn’t anything out here to eat. He had to have food, at once, and some medical care. I had to do something. Something good, something fast.

  “Vic,” Quilla June’s voice was high and whining, “come on! He’ll be all right. We have to hurry.”

  I looked up at her. The sun was going down. Blood trembled in my arms.

  She got a pouty look on her face. “If you love me, you’ll come on!”

  I couldn’t make it alone out there without him. I knew it. If I loved her. She asked me, in the boiler, do you know what love is?

  IT WAS A SMALL fire, not nearly big enough for any roverpak to spot from the outskirts of the city. No smoke. And after Blood had eaten his fill. I carried him to the air-duct a mile away, and we spent the night inside, on a little ledge. I held him all night. He slept good. In the morning, I fixed him up pretty good. He’d make it; he was strong.

  He ate again. There was plenty left from the night before. I didn’t eat. I wasn’t hungry.

  We started off across the blast wasteland that morning. We’d find another city, and make it.

  We had to move slow, because Blood was still limping. It took a long time before I stopped hearing her calling in my head. Asking me, asking me: do you know what love is? Sure I know.

  A boy loves his dog.

  . . . AND COMFORT TO THE ENEMY

  Stanley Schmidt

  It’s hard to imagine what could give a race with an interstellar spaceship technology so severe a racial trauma that they never, never insulted strangers again . . .!

  Carla felt the chill of approaching winter more than I did. I had been here for nearly a year, and for all that time the twenty-year winter had been advancing stealthily as the Little Sun hurtled away toward aphelion. I was used to the cold. But Carla had only come out from Earth to join me a few days ago, after my boss finally decided to make my assignment here permanent. Spending all that time in Florida had done little to prepare her for the bleak hills and cold air here.

  Today I was showing her Centaurus Historical Park, jointly maintained by humans and Redskins as a memorial to their first meeting here a few decades earlier. The climb from the quaint little Mayflower village was strenuous enough to take her mind off the cold, and she showed revived interest as we strolled among the historic boulders on the hilltop. Hardly anyone else was there, either human or Redskin (a corruption of “Reska” which happened to fit), so we could read the plaques set in the rockfaces at our leisure.

  Carla paused for a long time in front of the one which told how the first Redskins here had had to be rescued from their own laws against antagonizing alien races—laws which to civilized humans seemed almost incredibly harsh. Finally she said quietly. “Mike. J think that’s why I feel uneasy about them.”

  “Huh?” I said, surprised, “Who?”

  “The Redskins.” She drew her sweater tighter around her shoulders and motioned toward the plaque. “They were going to slaughter their own people because one of them might have trivially annoyed a human. I know there’s been no trouble since, but I can’t help thinking there’s something sinister about them that may show up someday. Humans wouldn’t treat their own like that!”

  I put my arm around her and tried to think how to dispel her vague worries. Thoughts like that weren’t going to make frontier life any easier for her. Before I found words, an unmistakably accented voice behind us said quietly, “Please don’t be too sure of that.”

  Carla jumped a foot and whirled around with a little shriek to find herself facing a Redskin. He was shorter than Carla, hairless, his skin toughened and darkened almost to brown by age and work, and his face might have been drawn by a human caricaturist. But I hoped Carla would recognize his smile and the twinkle in his eyes.

  Just in case, I hastened to introduce her. “Carla, this is Kirlatsu, a good friend of mine from the day I landed here and a real old-timer on the Reska spaceways. Kirlatsu, my wife, Carla.”

  Kirlatsu extended his hand and Carla took it, a trifle timidly. “Very happy to meet you, Carla,” I’m sorry if I startled you. But I overheard your comment and I wouldn’t want Mike’s wife to get the wrong idea. Our colonization laws are extreme—but so were the events that produced them. I know. I was there.

  “I knew Ngasik well. Our paths crossed in several sirla during our dlazol, and though he was four years older, we were close friends on Slepo IV . . .”

  The last time Kirlatsu actually saw Ngasik was the night the first tunnel ship came. When dusk fell they and a few other young men of Sirla Tsardong still sat—as usual—around a flickering campfire, plying Ngasik for the tales he told so well at the end of a hard day’s work. His supply was seemingly inexhaustible—nobody could remember hearing him repeat a yam—and his gift of gab held listeners enthralled for hours. But tonight stories were not forthcoming.

  Instead Ngasik’s gaze kept wandering off to the uninvited new ship, a hundred yards away at the other end of the clearing. The big gibbous moon and fireflies flitting in and out of the forest gave enough light to make out its ludicrous outline, with the top half a mirror image of the bottom, but little more. Its crew had retired into it for the night, and a couple of ports still glowed in its side. Ngasik would stop in midsentence, stare wistfully at those ports, and murmur things like, “They’ve come all the way out here just to do away with the one way of life that really suited me!” Finally one of the others laughed at him. “Come on, Ngasik! This doesn’t come as a shock to anybody. We’ve been hearing progress reports on tunnel-ship development for a couple of years now. And why should you care? You’re no criminal.” Ngasik couldn’t see exactly who had spoken, but he glared across the fire at the voice. “For some of us,” he said coolly, “space was the one place we could find something like independence. What’s it going to be with government inspectors coming out in their own ships to check up on us all the time?”

  “Safer,” his critic muttered. A couple of people on the other side of the fire got up and went to their huts. Kirlatsu, here on his first job, did not yet find alien wilderness as congenial as Ngasik. He suggested mildly, “The only reason we haven’t had them from the start is that warp ships are too expensive to run without a big payload, and we didn’t know there was another way. Maybe it’s a good idea. Suppose some sirla met another race with an advanced technology and decided to stir up trouble. If that had happened before there were tunnel ships to patrol the colonies . . .”

  “Frankly,” Ngasik interrupted, “I don’t think anybody seriously expects that to happen. I’ve been in space four years—some people for sixteen. No sign of alien intelligence. The old philosophers were right. We’re probably unique, a long shot that hit once.”

  By ones and twos, members of the circle gave up on getting the usual stories and drifted off t
o their huts. Eventually only Ngasik and Kirlatsu remained. Lacking the distraction of Ngasik’s narrative, Kirlatsu grew more and more conscious of the wild noises from the surrounding forest, and they made him uncomfortable. They seemed even louder and more persistent than usual tonight—especially those deep, wavering, chilling howls. And the bugs were intensely annoying—the dome of fence-field over the camp was fine for keeping out big prowling animals, but nearly worthless against small crawling and flying things. Kirlatsu found himself swatting at them constantly. Finally, losing his temper, he raised a heavily shod foot and stamped viciously at a beetlelike thing on the ground, so big it must have found a “soft” place in the field between two generators to get in. As it died, it emitted a long moan, high-pitched and falling. To Kirlatsu it sounded exactly like, “. . . Shot that hit once.”

  “Did you hear that?” he gasped.

  Ngasik shrugged. “Mimic,” he said. “Not uncommon. I’ve seen a couple of those around lately. Didn’t know they did that, though.”

  Kirlatsu stood up. “My imagination’s running away with me,” he said apologetically. “Good night, Ngasik.” He went off to his hut, a modest but comfortable structure of native rock and wood, and locked himself in. Shortly he heard Ngasik extinguishing the fire and going off to his own hut, and stretched out to try to sleep.

  It’s not just my imagination! Kirlatsu thought defensively as sleep continued to elude him. There’s something different in the air tonight. Something’s brewing. Those noises really are worse. The forest seemed to scream at him. A plaintive, agitated series of those howls sounded nearby. Another seemed to answer it from far off.

  Suddenly there were sounds very nearby—the rustles and thumps of large animals moving in the grass, and a familiar chattering. Kirlatsu knew even before he jumped up to look out his window that they were tsapeli, but he had never known them to come this close to camp before.