A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  “What was that, Pete?”

  “Oh, uh, they’re small, that’s what. Don’t you think?”

  “Regulation size, I dunno,” said Willie.

  The tubes were rows of ten soft plastic hoops about six feet across, and looking through them, one could see the far diagonal end of the chamber. The tubes were a couple of hundred feet long.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it, Peter saw.

  People were torming in the tubes.

  All down the line, men, women, children were leaping with abandon head first into the upper ends of the tubes and with their arms pressed against their sides, they were falling through the hoops. As they fell they collided with the hoops and glanced off. On and on, fast, ricocheting down and disappearing at the bottom.

  “Did you get an egg, Pete?” Willie said, examining knob controls by the side of tube number 5.

  Peter looked wildly about the room, back into the lobby, to find a place to get eggs. He couldn’t see any counter besides the one for belts, nor anything that should be called an egg. What was an egg?

  “Here, these guys have one,” said Marvin, and he walked over to the tube numbered 7 where three small children and their parents were torming. The children jumped into the rings fearlessly, touched several times, and disappeared at the bottom of the tubes, while a conspicuous green display registered a number from zero to ten beside the topmost ring.

  The “egg” was resting on the floor behind them. Marvin asked the father of the family, and then he stooped to pick up the egg. The egg was a light, foot-long metal ellipsoid, perfectly featureless except for a hole in one end. After turning the tube on with the numbered key, Willie took the egg and centered it in the topmost ring; a magnetic field drew it to the exact center and held it there. When Willie reversed a switch, the egg dropped slickly down the tube.

  “A little too far to the left, I think,” said Willie.

  “Aligned pretty well, I’d say. Just a touch off.”

  “Too far to the left,” Peter said with conviction.

  So Willie played with two knobs until the path of the egg satisfied him. Then he said quickly, “Who wants to go first?”

  Peter nearly panicked when he thought about jumping into the rings and practically free-falling two hundred feet head down. Very nearly panicked. He couldn’t see what was down at the bottom of the huge room, but he did see the tormers come up each time through doors in the floor. He tried to assure himself that if he were to jump into the tube, he too would come up through a door in the floor.

  “Wait for Teague and Sam,” he said.

  “Is it aligned?” Teague asked when he came back.

  “Fairly well,” said Willie.

  “Well then, go ahead.”

  Willie stepped up to the tube without a word, tossed his watch and car keys to Teague, and leaped gracefully down the tube. He touched four times and then they lost sight of him. The exhibition took a little under two seconds. Then it was Marvin’s turn.

  Marvin slicked back his hair, waved his meaty arms, and dove in. He collided right away with the third ring, which event threw him off-balance and caused him to touch five more times on the way down. At this point Willie came up through the floor.

  Now it was Peter’s turn.

  My friends are unafraid, thought Peter. That, at least, has been proved to my satisfaction. Also, this is a fancy establishment. I think it is amazingly strange, but definitely fancy. Also there are children falling down the tubes, and none of them is getting hurt, and no one is worrying about them. Therefore, in all probability, I am perfectly safe.

  What I must be concerned with, then, is being skillful. The score is based on the number of rings touched, that much is clear. If a person’s aim is accurate initially, he will touch fewer rings. If his corrections are adequate when he touches a ring, he will touch fewer rings afterward. What I must do is . . .

  “Go, Pete,” said Sam. “It looks to be aligned all right from the way Willie went.”

  Skill, Peter realized, should not concern him in the least until he had satisfied himself about the matter of safety. He realized also that he wasn’t satisfied. He was still scared to death.

  “Don’t you want to take your watch off?”

  He took off his watch.

  He held his breath involuntarily and jumped into the tube.

  The dive was a bad one. He hit the second ring at the top of its curve, solidly, and it bounced him off and sent him spinning. The tube’s magnetic field swung him around and he found himself soaring up into space, outside the rings. He flew straight up, head over heels, terror-stricken, until a secondary field caught him and fastened him on the ceiling.

  “No!” he cried, trying to sound as annoyed as possible instead of scared. He looked down dizzily at the floor below.

  “Grab a hand rail!” Sam called. Teague was coming up through the floor and when he saw Peter on the ceiling, he burst out laughing.

  “Hey, that’s pretty neat,” he chuckled.

  Peter found a railing and pulled himself back to the balcony. He dropped down to the carpeted floor. “Yeah,” he smiled, checking his heavy breathing. His miscalculation had been an honest one, he realized, one for which he would not be ostracized.

  “Try again, man.”

  No, not again, he thought. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.” He grinned.

  No, no. He hopped in more gingerly this time, plummeted into the third ring, and clung to it for dear life. Below him seven more rings hovered vertiginously against the pale-green background of carpet a hundred feet down. He crawled along the rim of the ring, then, to face toward the middle. Stretching his hands in front of him and letting go with his feet, he fell, and hit every remaining ring on the way down.

  A long curved ramp and a magnetic field stopped him at the bottom. As he lay sprawled on the wide, smooth floor, he saw a series of conveyors curving upward and disappearing into the walls. He stepped onto one. The ride was quick. At the top, a trap door opened and he was lifted onto the main-floor balcony in time to see Teague drop off into a three-touch fall.

  “You okay, Pete?”

  “Yeah, Marvin. What’s wrong?”

  “An eight-point!” said Sam. “Outa practice, huh?”

  “Yeah, maybe,” he answered. “Field isn’t, uh, very strong, is it?”

  “Strongest field I’ve been in, myself.”

  “Yeah.”

  Peter made a seven-touch the next time and flew around the outside of two rings on the way. He came up through the door in the floor and wrote “7” on his score sheet. Willie caught his error and explained to him: “You went outside on the way down, Pete. Twice.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “That’s an extra two points, you know. Tryin’ to cheat yourself?”

  Peter made the correction, and Willie asked, “You ever do a torm before, Pete? Honest now.”

  “You think I’m trying to impress somebody or something?” He grinned, slapping Willie on the back.

  “I know,” said Willie in a low voice, “that you tend to do that.”

  Peter lined up his next jump carefully, sighting all the way down and then listing forward in what he thought was a professional-looking posture. He swung his arms to take off, and a muscle went in his back.

  He went tense from the momentary cramp, stiffened from head to foot, and fell seven rings without touching.

  When he hit bottom he turned over once and stopped short on his knees, still tensed. An older man lay near him on the floor, and before he could get up the man called to him.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “No, I’m all right.” Peter smiled coolly.

  “Well, I’m hurt,” the man said, and propped himself up on one knee.

  Peter helped the man to the up conveyor while the man explained. “I’ve got a trick knee, see, and I got it locked up on the way down. No fault of the equipment, understand. The equipment’s perfectly safe.”

  Peter remembered that afterward. The equip
ment’s perfectly safe.

  The man thanked him when they reached the torming balcony above and a place to sit down. Peter said, “It’s all right,” and left to get his wristwatch from tube 5’s scoring desk.

  I am a very misdirected person, he thought. I waste my energies. I find no joy in social paradise.

  He said good night to all his friends, gave them some money for the torming, returned his belt, and took the bus home.

  He found his wife still reading McCall’s on the sofa. The television was still on, and the late evening news was playing. He waited for a greeting from her; anything, but she ignored him and continued to read the magazine.

  Finally, he volunteered: “It was okay, we had fun.”

  She turned a page and continued to read.

  “Nan?”

  “Yes, Peter?” She looked up.

  “Are you watching television? I’m going to shut it off.”

  “Go right ahead, I’m not watching.” She returned to the page.

  Peter watched her in the silent room for a long time, thinking about boring evenings and dull purgatories and culturally competitive paradises and wives.

  And then his face brightened up all at once. He went over to Nancy on the sofa, bent over her from behind with his hands on her shoulders and his face close to hers.

  He said, “Hey, honey, tomorrow night I’m going to take you torming.”

  She looked up this time.

  “Oh. Great,” she said. “Strong alignment?”

  ORNITHANTHROPUS

  B. Alan Burhoe

  Can courage ever link dissimilar organisms in symbioses?

  SCHADOW was awakened by his woman.

  He sat up from the blankets of marsh cotton, stretching his wings above his head until they touched the low ceiling of woven reeds.

  “The skyhunter is dying,” she said. “We must leave.”

  His heart twisted. “Dying? Are you sure?”

  “See for yourself.” She turned to gather their meager possessions in her thin arms.

  He left their cabin and knew the truth of her words even before he had reached the forward opening. He felt the skyhunter’s fading life in the uneasy quivering that shook the wood framework of the gondola. He cursed. Anger flared, turning to rage, fading to a sinking feeling of impotence.

  A pale yellow tentacle curled through the opening. The amber eye at its tip regarded him.

  “Ah, my ponderous friend. What is the matter?” Schadow asked soothingly.

  The tentacle wrapped about his waist, reassuring, sad.

  On reaching the opening, he looked out and up. The hydrogen-filled balloon-bladder that kept the skyhunter airborne had turned from a healthy crimson to a dusky brown, run with streaks of copper. The airpaddles were clenched as if in pain. The cartilage ribs to which the-framework of the gondola was fastened sagged, hardly capable of holding it or the hundred and seven human members of the Seacliff Clan. The sixty green and crimson fishing tentacles hung lifeless toward the glittering sea a half-kilometer below. The single foretentacle that had greeted him snaked away and moved listlessly in the air. He wanted to say something, to reassure the animal, the living dirigible that had been his home and friend and protector all his life, to let his calm voice—

  “Schadow.”

  He turned, recognized the old man who stood behind him. “Grandfather?”

  “There is little time. You must move fast.”

  “And you?”

  “You know my duty. We have lived as one, the skybeast and I—we will die as one. You are now Clan Elder. You know what you must do.”

  Schadow nodded. For a moment they clasped hands, Schadow studying the patriarch’s tired, rawhide face. Then he went back to his cabin. Behind him, Grandfather jumped into the air and fluttered up to the head of the skyhunter. It tried to push him away but the ancient one found power in his wings and stayed close, patting the head and talking softly of yesteryear.

  SCHADOW gathered the clan at the aft opening and, when he was sure that he had missed no one ordered his people into the sky. One by one they jumped, arms tightly grasping children or belongings. Their wings flapped until they hit an upcurrent: then they glided into formation, armed men taking the vulnerable positions. Last to leave was Schadow. He threw himself from the gondola, falling toward the distant water, stretched his wings, flew.

  Together, silent, they headed toward the land until Schadow judged they had reached a safe distance.

  He looked back at the skyhunter.

  The bladder was now almost totally copper. The three hydrogen bags were scarcely visible through the once transparent hide. As the wind pivoted the derelict sky beast Schadow saw Grandfather flying close to its head. He saw the creature give one last attempt to push the old man away with its tentacle, saw it fail, saw them grasp one another one last time, enemies once, now brothers.

  “It’s going to suicide,” said one warrior.

  Before he had spoken the last word a spark flared in the depths of the bladder. The skyhunter was enveloped in a savage burst of fire that reflected softly off the wispy clouds above and more fiercely off the sea below. Man, beast and gondola became a single inferno that twisted in the air and tumbled into the waves.

  The thunder struck at the Seacliff Clan, enveloped and passed it.

  For a few moments the fliers were given increased lift. They took advantage of it and glided in silence toward the granite shore.

  A pack of winged amphibians, like tiny pale dragons, soared out from the cliffs to meet them, screaming their challenge and bravado, voicing them all the louder when they were ignored.

  “Where do we go now?” asked his woman as Schadow glided in next to her.

  “Give me my harness,” he said, partly answering her query.

  He took the harness of leather straps and silver buckles and dressed himself in midair, fitting the fastenings around his chest and placing the scabbard along his spine. He pulled out the sword of strong white bone and tested its edges, honed over the years to razor sharpness.

  “You must go to Starport,” he called to his people. “Wait there for five days. If I have not returned by that time you will know that I have failed to tame a skyhunter and that you must choose a new Clan Elder from among you.”

  He said nothing more. Nothing else was left to say.

  They flew away, a few lifting their spirits from the depths of the tragedy enough to wish him luck. He watched them until they seemed no larger than insects against the brightening blue of the post-dawn horizon. Then he banked, caught the thermal that swept up from the coastal cliffs, dropped into an easy glide to conserve his energy for the ordeal ahead.

  THEY had called the colony world Pishkun, from an ancient Sioux word that meant cliff, for indeed it was a land of cliffs as well as rift valleys, crevices and faults—a granite world of eternal upheaval where the thunder of earthquakes was as common as the roar of the ocean. When the colonists had first reached and named Pishkun they had taken its unfriendly nature as a challenge. Thus, after a million years of frustrated dreams that had begun when early man had first looked at the eagle and felt envy, Ornithanthropus had finally been born, for only in the air could life be sustained with any permanency on this world.

  Esthetics had played a greater part in the design of the birdfolk than functional engineering. The wings had been placed at the shoulder blades and were powered by a complex system of muscles that started at the keel-like breastbone, joined the trapezius and ran up the lower part of each wing. The bones were hollow for lightness and the lower eyelids, which were transparent, could cover the eyes to protect them from windblast. To a basicform human, the birdfolk were the symbol of beauty in motion.

  Schadow, who was of the fiftieth generation of his kind, cared little for the history of his people. He knew it—the basicforms at Starport had told it to him when he had visited that antigrav trading station in his adolescence—but he had found the story only of peripheral interest. Only life, health, the sky, his
woman and the skyhunter he must tame meant anything to him.

  The day passed into early afternoon without tiring him as he skimmed along the updrafts and climbed for a wider view. Over the sea almost a kilometer away he saw a young skyhunter, shining like a blood jewel over the silver-streaked greenness of the waves. But it was already fishing. It would be too strong for him to outlast. He looked inland.

  The nostrils of his knife-blade nose flared. The muscles in his sunken cheeks tightened like braided rawhide. His eyes slitted and the greasy black hair lifted from his scalp. Unsteadily he moved the sword in his hands. What he saw was barely a dot on the horizon but every instinct in him identified it. It was a skyhunter heading for the sea and therefore hungry, therefore weakened.

  For a scant moment he debated falling toward the land and foraging for something to eat, then tossed the idea aside. The beast would know by his smell whether or not he had a full belly and it had best sense that he was as hungry as it, unarmed except for the sword, naked except for the harness-equal with it in all respects including courage.

  HE STUDIED every facet of the land and air around him. The ground was a tumbled mess of bare rock, strewn boulders, cascades, bogs and patches of brown and green where simple land plants had eked out a living despite the endless assaults upon them by the planet’s ever-changing crust. He looked away from the tortured land. With a sense ingrained into him through generations of running upon the winds he looked at the air mass around him and mapped every current in his mind. He saw the draft that swept up from the sea cliffs below him like a sun-warmed glass curtain to touch the inversion layer four kilometers above; saw a large thermal off to his right, marked where it started on the ground near a dust devil, a huge cylinder of moving bubbles of heated air that rose to reach the cumulus clouds that dotted the sky; saw a second curtainlike current rise from cliffs of red granite to his left, but this one bent and rushed dangerously across the jagged top; saw the bulk of dead air that sat ahead of him, shimmering now and then in the form of a seaward breeze.