Orbit 16 - [Anthology]

by Ed By Damon Knight

  * * * *

  When you walk barefoot in sand for even a short distance your feet begin to ache. This is because the natural shape of the sand fits into the curve of the arch so that the whole sole of your foot is in contact with the ground. This is a condition your feet are unused to. Also, notice how your toes throw out little roostertails of sand that fall behind your heels. The motion imparted to those grains is waste energy. Think of how many pounds of sand you lift with your feet on even a ten-mile walk.

  * * * *

  Walking again, hungry now, Henderson saw something scuttling along the top of the next sand ridge. A sand lizard! Maybe he could catch it. He slid down the pile he stood on and with long strides tried to climb the steep ridge. The sand underfoot cascaded away in sheets. He struggled to hurry more efficiently. He reached the top of the ridge. There was nothing in sight.

  Particles of quartz or feldspar that are larger than sand are called gravel. Particles smaller than sand are dust or the tinier constituents of clay. The parameters of sand differ from country to country.

  Windblown sand is all-pervading. It acts as an abrasive and will erode rock somewhat faster than water could. If all the sand in the world were diamond dust, life on Earth would be impossible.

  * * * *

  Henderson read the last lines of page 370, the last words of the night. His moonlight stroll had brought him ninety thousand steps closer to where he was going.

  He looked for a well-situated dune, one that would provide shade and shelter from the flying dust that intermittently blew, as if, like rosin, to polish him.

  He would sleep seven hours and then walk around the dune, or find another, or cool off as best he could in the simmering water. Then, awake, he would lie still and dream of philosophy and sand castles, until night came again.

  * * * *

  Don’t you wonder where Henderson is wandering? No doubt most of you do. But don’t, it’s not important. Sand is more important than Henderson. You don’t think so? Well, it’s very simple. Sand, after all, is real, and Henderson is nothing more than a figment of his own imagination.

  * * * *

  Friedriche Frierhoff opened his eyes and saw that the beach was empty. He realized that he had succumbed to sleep, though he had tried so hard to stay awake. His readings in the book of the American master, Henderson, had convinced him that he would never truly comprehend his situation until he saw the desert beach in the daytime. Only with the aid of the sun’s direct rays could he hope to jar his world view back into focus. But today’s attempt, his second, had failed like the first. He simply found it impossible to keep from sleeping after a whole night of walking. Perhaps he should stay where he was, attempt to sleep in the cold, without a blanket. No, that probably wouldn’t help, and it wouldn’t bring him any closer to where he was going. He would get up and continue on his way. Perhaps further reading in Henderson’s Sandial would suggest some alternate method of analyzing and resolving his dilemma.

  That Henderson! What a frivolous title he had chosen for his masterwork of ontology. Perhaps the man fancied himself a poet as well as a philosopher. We all have our idiosyncrasies. The gemlike perfection of his thought was undeniable.

  Friedriche got up and began his nightly wandering. It was too bad his memories of his Gymnasium course in astronomy were so faint. He vaguely feared that the star he chose as the polestar was different each night.

  * * * *

  Friedriche walks. He has no illusions about his abilities or his lack of plans. He can only hope that someone will find him. He walks because he finds his predicament boring. He is used to pacing as he thinks, and anyway it keeps him warm. Over the course of a few hours he digests what he has read. Then he sits down to rest and he reads a few more lines of Henderson’s book. Sitting with the book in his lap, he realizes that he has no idea how long he’s been lost. Then he remembers that it doesn’t matter. He reads on slowly, pondering each word.

  * * * *

  A concern for time is a characteristic most typical of humanness. Perhaps that is how we shall judge the alien species we will someday meet. Do they have clocks? If they do, if they are as obsessed with time as we are,--we shall nobly grant them the patent of humanity.

  The exiles and refugees of our civilization must often surprise themselves with their adherence to the patterns that are almost a part of their genetic legacy. Even when they no longer wait, they wait. They note the time, feel the need of a clock. It is hard to escape one’s own madness.

  A man lost where he knows not the local rites of Cronos has a special dilemma. He can estimate the advent of noon and mark thee limits of night and day as they are passed. But at any single moment he is at a loss. His lame guesses are only less futile than the knowledge that his wristwatch, if it has slopped, is right twice a day. In desperation he may seek to resort to the venerable expedient of the sundial, only to realize that he is not sure how to read one, and to remember their inaccuracy. If he is floating on the sea he lacks a screen for a shadow’s projection. If he is in the desert, he lacks even the stick to cast it. When he realizes this he will grumble and rack his brains, until finally he drops his head in defeat, and looks, vanquished, at the ground, only to see his own shadow.

  * * * *

  Exhausted, Friedriche shivers. The fat tome under his arm has begun to be a fatiguing burden. He holds it in his left hand for a while, and then in his right. He holds it with his short fingers, spine up, then down. He holds it with his elbow against his ribs. He holds it in his armpit, and against his chest. He shuttles it from place to place on his anatomy. He tries balancing it on his head; he laughs. The transfers come more and more rapidly; each resting place is used up after a few steps.

  The book falls from his limp hand, he drops after it, and lies, legs out, a T square. He leans back and his scalp feels the grating of the sand. He aches with concentration after trying to unravel the convolutions of Henderson’s thought in a long, long sentence. It refuses to fall into place with satisfying clinks like a chain when it is laid down link by link on a hard surface. He decides to read the passage in question over again. Doing so, he finds the problem, a key preposition he had missed. He smiles.

  * * * *

  Language is not a natural element. But like sand it has granularity. It is not amorphous, but composed of discrete particles. Units of energy modulated by meaning, sometimes encoded in print. As with sand, the contemplation of the particle does not lead to comprehension of the whole. The contemplation of the whole may leave, still, the particle in doubt. The one can be many, and the many composed of indistinguishable ones. This is the paradox that Henderson treats of in his writings.

  * * * *

  Friedriche lacks for nothing. He shapes himself to the circumstance. He sleeps in the oven and lets the sun fire him with a glaze. His surroundings lack identity and substance. Homeostasis is maintained within him; locked in his mind are its reference standards, templates for the truth.

  * * * *

  The ancient Egyptians discovered glass in a primitive process that gave a shiny glaze to their pottery. It sometimes left a noticeable layer of glass on the surface of the utensil. They soon realized that if they made the glass thick enough it could stand alone, without the pottery.

  Sand alone is very hard to melt; very high temperatures are necessary. Adding potash facilitates the process; lime is added as well. The lime, for the glass as for us, gives sturdiness. Without it glass would crumble, as without our bones we would collapse inward upon ourselves like the morbid white stars, to a cold, compact existence and a colder end. Many times have men likened themselves to pottery. What then is the glaze—the veneer of civilization, or an externalization of the spirit?

  * * * *

  Friedriche retires, to anneal and fix in the cool gray heat of a sand dune’s shadow. Henderson has molded him, shaped the contours; the desert and the beach, the silent walk, run over and away from him like water, and leave no sign. Gradually he relaxes and slumbers.


  * * * *

  Frierhoff is a master of metaphor. He rarely reads a page number, but gauges the progress of his studies by the thickness of the remaining pages between thumb and forefinger. So should lives be measured.

  * * * *

  Awake and walking again, Henderson began to have hallucinations. The sand turned to ashes. Obviously, he had been dwelling too long on the symbolism to be divined in his situation, too long on universal metaphors and world views. Strange that he should have hallucinations now; the juice and flesh of raw lizard fill his belly, and his morale is high. There are irritating grains of sand caught in his mouth, and between his teeth. They grate there. He spits some out, but there are always a few left. He enumerates them with his tongue. His morale is high. Civilization is surely just over the next ridge.

  Breaking his rule, Henderson counts aloud, calling out the numbers to the cupped ears of the sand. Not even an echo answers. Finally he hears his own voice, and telling himself that he has a sore throat, he counts softly, and then silently, but he grins. What matter if silica chooses to become a crumbly combustion product? All that can be counted is identical. Distinctions cancel out. Henderson traverses the lunar plain.

  We mistakenly isolate Earth from the milieu of the galaxy because of the trivial fact of our existence on it. Some writers dream wild dreams of exotic worlds circling alien stars and perfunctorily dismiss the wonders of their home world. Familiarity has bred ennui. Perhaps we should leave the old place and hit the high spots in the next star cluster. Give the Magna Mater a chance to rest from the hectic task of raising her mad children. Let all the old echoes die, the associations fade away, until the silence of a world refreshed is untainted by a human noise.

  * * * *

  The ash has turned to sand again. Henderson wryly considers the transmutation. It isn’t hard to believe himself an alchemist. Certainly the subtle book he carries is appropriately obscure and profound. His readings continued and he made regular progress. One night, after he’d caught a sand lizard, he added five pages to his regular program. He walked one hundred thousand steps. He was tempted to make the effort every night. He hurried to reach the end of Frierhoff’s book. The words slip by like the sand underfoot.

  * * * *

  Earth and sky are one. There are rains that provide a tenuous communication. They drop stones and fish, frogs, angel hair, ice, and blood, signaling the dirt in some mystic code. In a wide swath from China to Australia there are one hundred million tons of tektites: aerodynamically shaped pieces of moon glass, the chips chiseled from the crater Tycho. And every day ten tons of meteorites and one thousand tons of stellar dust add their mass to the Earth.

  In darkness relieved only by starlight, it seems to Henderson that he stands at the edge of the world. Behind him there is nothing, and before him, far at the opposite horizon, the sky closes around the sea. Die allumfassend Metapher is tied in his belt and hangs over his left shoulder. He stands slackly, in the manner of a schoolboy, and fingers a seashell. He throws it in the water. He knows it will come back again. In his mind he counts the waves that will pile themselves on the beach before it returns. Henderson puts his right hand in his pocket and walks on.

  * * * *

  For men, time is rhythm. We divide time into discrete units, then count them as they pass. The ticks of moving gears and balance wheel, with the hands of a clock. The vibration of a quartz crystal or the resonance of an atom, with an array of alphanumeric tubes. Or the grains of sand that are the hallowed model for it all. We count them, not one by one, but as a whole. Thus is half a paradox resolved. Though the contemplation of the particle reveals nothing of the whole, the contemplation of the whole hints something of the indistinguishable ones.

  * * * *

  Friedriche is sitting in the sand. He has finished Sandial and it has left a warm glow behind it. Barely breathing, he is afraid to hasten the inevitable end of the spell. He looks at the book fondly, and considers rereading it. Looking up from page one, he sees a figure on the horizon.

  * * * *

  Henderson sits; page 605 is the top of the highest ridge for a mile in any direction. The ocean can be faintly heard. He wonders that the sound fades at all in the silence. The sun sets at his back. He closes the book on his index finger and scans for sand lizards. Looking behind him, he notes his own footprints, undisturbed since the previous night. Squinting, he sees a dark figure on the dunes yet ahead of him.

  * * * *

  An hourglass has the seductive shape of a houri; the great erotic hips, the parabolic breasts, the slim waist. Sand and its transparent son join in the hollow algebraic shape. The discontinuous crystalline grains and the smooth, unit, amorph. They join, and together take the measure of infinity.

  * * * *

  They get up.

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  * * * *

  The Memory Machine

  Termites will destroy the foundation of the Taj Mahal and it was the rats that killed off the dinosaurs by eating their feet.

  —W. C. Fields

  * * * *

  Our Own Correspondence Corner

  After looking at the cover on the March issue, I am weak and wobbly. It is the best that Wesso has painted by far.

  I only read “Poisoned Air” because it was in a.s. “The Affair of the Brains” was good. “Vampires of Space”—what else could you expect?—swell, of course. “The Hammer of Thor” was just another doom-of-the-world bunk-bunk.

  Yours till space ships drink milk.

  James Blish

  4250 Kenwood Ave.

  Chicago, 111.

  —Astounding Stories, September 1932

  Here is an announcement of great value: For a long time our fair magazines have been defiled, and now the spwsstfm has been organized to combat the evil.

  Our society needs your help. If you are in sympathy with our great cause, drop me a post card, giving your full name and address.

  The society (Society for the Prevention of Wire Staples in stf Magazines) is bound to wield power among publishers and editors with your help. Every one—readers, authors and printers— is invited to join this campaign. Our motto is: pull the wire staples out of stf magazines!

  Drop us a card now!

  Bob Tucker

  P.O. Box 260

  Bloomington, Illinois

  —Astounding Stories, November 1934

  According to Einstein, the mass of a body increases with its speed until at the speed of light that mass, no matter how small originally, is infinite. Now it seems to me that this rule should apply to light itself which HAS mass (as is evidenced by the fact that a ray of light will bend in obedience to a strong gravitational field such as that of the sun). This mass should, at light’s speed, be infinite. Consequently, the inertia of a beam of light should be infinite.

  Now an object with an inertia amounting to infinity could not be affected by any conceivable force. If at rest, it could never be moved. And if already moving—as is the beam of light under question—it could neither be stopped nor turned from its path. Yet light can be stopped by a piece of tissue paper. How can you explain this paradox?

  Isaac Asimov

  174 Windsor Place

  Brooklyn, New York

  —Astounding Stories, December 1937

  And her left ear was a plumber’s friend: gurgle, slurp, tiddly-urn-turn, blork!

  She might have been just twenty years old, with the look of womanhood just settling into her features. Her hair was light brown, streaming rebelliously down her back. Her eyes were siphons, greedily sucking in all around her. Her nose and mouth were music in counterpoint . . .

  —”Of Love, Free Will and Grey

  Squirrels on a Summer Evening,”

  by Stephen Goldin, Vertex,

  August 1974

  Whom, Heem?

  She lifted away some of her shining hair and revealed an ear which had obviously been designed by whomever it is that holds the patent on the chambered nautilus.

  —”A
gnes, Accent and Access,”

  by Theodore Sturgeon, Galaxy,

  October 1973

  He put out feelers to some leading socialists whom, he thought, might be induced to join the Fabians . . .

  —H. G. Wells, by Norman and

  Jean MacKenzie (Simon and

  Schuster, 1973)

  Academic Humor Department (Division of Near Things)

  Just as genetic differences at particular loci are not sufficient to indicate racial differences, similarities for particular gene frequencies between two populations does not necessarily indicate racial identity. An apt illustration of this is found in the tests performed by Fisher, Ford and Huxley to detect PTC tasting among the chimpanzees of the London zoo. As with humans, this ability in chimpanzees is a genetically determined characteristic, and can be measured by observing their reaction to a PTC solution; the nontasters swallow the solution and the tasters spit it out. Remarkably, the frequencies of nontasters among the chimpanzees were found to be similar to the frequencies of nontasters among Englishmen. Of course, Englishmen and chimpanzees differ in other respects!