—Genetics, by Monroe W. Strickberger
Crazy Like a Foux, etc.
“If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, I think you’re foux—crazy,” the mathematician interrupted in a voice that was only half jesting.
—Sledgehammer, by Walter Wager
On another level, it is fantasy with the inherent appeal of all fantasy, with drugs forming the deux ex machina.
—”Science Fiction: Above the
Human Landscape,” by Willis E.
McNelly, Edge, Autumn-Winter 1973
No, But Our Mother Was a Mez-cohen
Abruptly they started as a great section in the wall swung outward. Five strange things came out, warily, watchfully. They were tall, taller than Jan, nearly seven feet tall, and their bodies were small in the abdomen, and large in the chest. Their limbs were long and straight, and seemed more jointed than human limbs, but they were covered with cloths, as the Gaht-men covered themselves in the ceremonies, only these were finer cloths. . . .
“Who are you?” asked Meg, her voice soft and silvery in Jan’s ears. The five made no direct answer. Only the leader said something in a strange way, like the Mez-kahns—the brown men from the south—something Jan could not understand.
“You aren’t Mez-kahns?” asked Meg doubtfully.
—”The Invaders,” by Don A. Stuart
(John W. Campbell, Jr.), Astounding
Stories, June 1935
Or If Not Quite, Almost
Like an evanescent mote in a beam of sunshine, they vanished into the illimitable inane.
—”Lost in the Dimensions,” by
Nat Schachner, Astounding Stories,
November 1937
<
* * * *
IN DONOVAN’S TIME
C. L. Grant
What we need is a goal, a purpose—something to lift up our heads and our hearts and make us realize that it’s truly good to be alive. . . . Right? Right?
Once in a very great while, and getting greater all the time, Donovan tried to remember what it had been, could have been like before he started walking; but the effort, a weak one at best, was momentary and rewardless, and now that he was so close to the end, quite without purpose. Whatever it had all been like, he decided, it really wasn’t worth knowing. Today was the time, and tomorrow the time to be. So he waited.
While, round his neck, prominent in a soiled pouch suspended from a tarnished gold chain, his coin: a wafer silver and worn that he would use only once, half of a dollar for a lifetime view. He twisted his neck to rub against the chain and anticipation forced a grin, a small one, a sly one, but still it was a grin, and he was heartened by it. Whatever had been was no longer, and perhaps had never been, a concern: the coin demanded his waiting. So he waited.
The people were quiet, and the crowd they formed all along the Avenue was not moving. It was a period of relief, too infrequent not to be savored. Those braver and stronger were able to relax and take their minds off their fooling. Now there was no worry about stumbling, being pushed, being downed, being caught in a deadly intersection flux where they could easily be turned around so they would be moving dangerously, fatally backward. They were quiet; they were resting. Some looked up while stretching their necks to renew their acquaintance with the haze of might-have-been blue sky. Others twisted shoulders and hips gingerly, then vigorously to ease and bury the cramps and stiffness. Almost all of them dropped their hands from the shoulders of the person in front, first to pockets and pouches and secret places to touch their coins and offer brief thanks, then to flex their fingers and arms before swiftly repositioning them to prevent themselves from being pressed forward.
A May wind that hinted of winter and summer in alternate gusts cascaded down the Avenue. A noon sun glinted blindly off glass, aluminum and polished blue steel.
The crowd waited to move again.
Then, apparently without reason, someone laughed, loudly, with such natural gusto and infectious good humor that a silent dam was flattened, and it was at last the time to talk.
Donovan, a full head and more taller than most around him, looked anxiously to the woman at his side. She was pale, and even without the pressure of advance, he could see that her arms were already beginning to tremble.
“You okay, Alice?”
Her answering grin was hard and quick, her mind obviously concentrating on feeding her muscles strength she did not have. Her post, a squat, dark-skinned man in front of her, had straps on his overcoat, and Donovan wondered how long it would be before she clutched at them for support and was angrily, fiercely shaken off. He tried to judge whether or not it would be worth the trouble to figure a way she might be saved. And he knew he was dreaming. It had been at least two days since she last even made an attempt to answer his questions or laugh at his jokes. She was losing, and they both knew it. And she was beginning to hate him for his strength, and they knew that too.
I wonder, he thought, if all great leaders had troubles like mine.
I wonder, he thought, if she’d give me her coin.
“Hey, Donovan,” someone behind him shouted impatiently (it sounded like the man who claimed to have been a plastics president; not that anyone cared). “How are we doing?”
Donovan, slightly shaken by his last, almost ghoulish thought, stretched up off his heels, squinting past the glare of the windows at the nearest signpost half a block away. “It looks like Fiftieth coming right up.”
“Are you sure? I thought we were there last night.”
“Positive, pal,” he said, showing his displeasure and disdain by not looking around.
“Okay, Donovan, if you say so. Thanks anyway.”
“Don’t mention it. Again.”
Then he ducked his head to rub his neck in an effort to hide the fact that he was smiling. It felt good, putting down a man with a voice like that. But Donovan did understand how much easier it was now to lose your place when you were so close to the Building. Tensions were higher and anxiety easier to succumb to, and more often now than before, there were some who tried desperately to bull ahead through the crowd. They seldom lasted long; their screams were short. Donovan looked again and nodded to himself. They were nearing the surge from the West Side out of the Lincoln Tunnel. The going was slower, the casualties more frequent. He considered himself more than a little lucky that he was in the center of the street, away from the grinding pressures at the crowd’s edge, where those who normally fought to stay away from shop and door windows were those immediately faced with the crossbuck of every intersection flow. My God, he thought, it must be hell in Times Square.
There was a sharp, splintering crack. Despite the danger of losing his balance, Donovan turned quickly toward the sound, searching until he spotted a whirlpool movement. Someone, or two or three, had been tripped, pushed or just squeezed out, and through plate glass. If they were still alive, they would probably starve to death. Once out, there was no getting back in. The helicopters that came twice a day and dropped tiny packets of food paid no attention to the pieces of clothing that sometimes waved weakly from upper-story windows. Some, in a grand gesture, would throw their coins into the crowd, but it was only a gesture, because few dared to bend down to retrieve them.
“How many, Donovan?” a woman called.
“How the hell should I know, Sal?”
“Well, dammit, boy, go on over there and look!”
And the crowd laughed.
“Donovan?”
“Yes, Annie.”
“Will my coin fit?”
“They all do, dear.”
“Thank you, Donovan. I just wanted to know.”
“That’s all right, dear.”
And the crowd, well trained, did not laugh.
Somewhere, back when there was time, they began to call themselves Donovan’s Doers, refusing him a title but remembering his name. They depended on him to be wary of the traps, the sudden forward lurch that resulted when a group ahead of them f
ell. They assigned him the task of keeping track of their progress, telling them jokes, making them laugh, forcing them to move when they could move no longer. Whenever the time for talk ended, there was always his voice; and it seemed to them, and to Donovan, that he had always been there. He was the only constant. The Doers were always changing.
“Hey, Donovan, tell us a story.”
It wasn’t a child.
“I don’t know if I have enough time. Seems to be a movement up there, a block or two, give or take.”
A woman called out something in Italian and several people laughed. Donovan frowned, not wanting to be the butt of a joke he couldn’t understand. In his position it wouldn’t be right.
“Hey, Donovan, you know what she said?”
He shook his head as if he really didn’t care, and the crowd laughed.
“She said maybe you’re too busy cuddling up to your post.”
There was more laughter, echoing now, and Donovan looked down at Alice, hoping for a smile. But she was staring dead ahead, her fingers twisted weakly in her post’s shoulder straps, her arms so bent that her elbows nearly touched the squat man’s coat. He started to say something, but a man, a new one by the voice, interrupted him with the beginnings of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” and those who still had the energy joined him. They were mostly off-key, but uncaringly so, and the words eventually swung to a ribald burlesque of the original. A fat man began to jounce in time to the music until he was kicked into stopping. The pitch rose slightly, the tempo picked up; an old woman suddenly screamed hysterically and fell. There was a moment’s hesitation before ranks formed and she was helped to her feet. She sobbed, put out her hands, and was silent. Damn, Donovan thought, and marked the place where she stood. He decided he didn’t want to look that way when they started again. There were times, he admitted sourly to himself, when he hated being a leader. Sometimes it just wasn’t any fun.
And thinking of the old woman reminded him of the girl beside him.
“Hey, Alice,” he said softly to the sweep of her dark hair and the slope of her breast. “Keep your eye on the Building. Believe me, it’s the best way, girl. Just watch it, don’t let it go. See how it grows, the closer we get? Just think of it, Alice, the whole world, the whole damn world at your feet. At last. No more dark streets, no more buildings to blot out the sun; nothing but sky and sky and a hell of a lot of more sky. Free, Alice, and we’re getting there. Damn, but we’re getting there.”
She nodded once, but did not look up.
“Hey, Donovan, tell us a story!”
And what did she see? he thought with questioning bitterness. Was she trying to remember the black street long since colored in red and pink and papered with layers of cloth? Was she trying to bring back that first-day stench of excrement and sweat that too soon faded into the equally meaningless pulp beneath their feet? Or was it the Building that bowed her head?
“Donovan!”
An elderly man had been his post once, too short to see anything, so he had spoken to himself of the street beneath his shuffling, filthy shoes, constantly reconstructing the lives of the people he trod upon. Then he died, was carried along until Donovan saw him slip and heard the man ahead cursing. “Ease,” Donovan had ordered then, and the woman behind him shortened her steps, Donovan slowed and the old man fell. “Done,” Donovan said, and stepped over him.
“For Christ’s sake, Donovan!”
Damn their souls, he thought, why the hell don’t they leave me alone!
And they were moving again, with millions of shuffling feet numbing him into automatic response, with pressure just great enough to keep his arms bent. His eyes stared until they watered (once he thought he was going blind), searching for the traps (he would have been cast aside), the sudden speedups (to die by the road without seeing), the tides of the streets emptying into the Avenue, upsetting the delicate balance between pushing and falling. He saw hair and hats, and one or two faces that whitened before they sank. He called out, demanding, screaming until he was hoarse and lesser men spelled him, though it wasn’t the same. There was an hour and a half and he heard and considered the rumor that the George Washington Bridge had finally collapsed; and it took him only a moment to believe it. There was a panic second when he tripped and refused to look down, only grateful that his post had stiffened in time to save him. Two more hours and he was into the Fiftieth Street flux.
Squeezed. Pressed. Shouting above the din. Raising perilously an arm to mark the way. Kicked. Elbowed. Squeezed. Pressed.
And the passage was done.
For the first time in weeks, he wanted to sit down and rest. But they were cheering him, and it was a rare thing and he wondered, as they eased to let his arms spring up in a V, what the rest of the world made of it.
They moved on; there was a lurch on his right and a vacuum quickly filled but he ignored it, willed himself to forget it until he was able to spare himself a look, and saw a tweedy, sniffling man where Alice had been. God, she must have been tired, he thought.
Then they stopped. There was silence. Heavy breathing. The May wind of summer and winter.
Donovan, shaking off Alice’s defeat (who was she? he wondered), judged this to be the time, lifted his head and intoned, “In the beginning—”
“All right, Donovan!”
“Tell it, Donovan, tell it!”
“A bit louder, Donovan, we got some new people back here can’t hear you!”
“In the beginning, I said, there was a man, a most ordinary man who said: It’s such a beautiful day, I think I’ll take me a walk along the Avenue. And this man he said as much to his friends and neighbors and boss and doorman. Walk with me, he said, aren’t you weary of looking up at lights and buildings and people and just plain things that sneer and leer and laugh at your living? Well, they nodded and looked and puzzled and wondered. I have an inspiration, the man said. For one thin, very ordinary fifty-cent half-a-dollar coin, we can look down on this goddamned world and tell it what we think; a lifetime view to put us in our place.”
A lurch. A scream. Hush. Amen!
“Don’t ask me any more, he said, but by God I’m going to walk, and I’m going to climb. And by God he did.”
A window cracked but the commotion was muffled by the cadence clapping that picked up his words.
“And believe it or not, he was joined by every one of those friends and neighbors and his boss and the doorman. And where do you think he went to get that fifty-cent lifetime view of the whole goddamned world?”
“To the john, you stupid idiot!”
A chorus of laughter one beat later.
“To the movies!”
Jeers now.
“No no no, you benighted heathen, to the Building!”
Cheers now, and applause.
“To that beautiful Building, my Doers. And when they saw what he was doing, they went with him, and before him, and after him. They emptied those air-conditioned buildings, they fled those creepy darkened movie theaters, they streamed from every borough, every town, every state. And by God, as I stand here now, every last one of them was going to the Building!”
There was shouting, incoherent and tumultuous. Donovan grinned and perspired and nodded, and took time out to flex his fingers, touch the pouch.
“Now you won’t believe this, friends, but they came from Frisco and Detroit and L.A. and Dallas. From Mobile and Bismarck and Prescott and Nome. To the Building! Not some fat-assed mountain; not some swollen-bellied plane; but, goddammit, to the biggest, bestest, most King Kong famous Building in the whole goddamned world! That’s what they did, my Doers. By God, that’s what they did.”
“Why?”
There was silence after confusion, stunned and shocked, and the wind turned winter. Donovan glared and did an unexpected thing: he dropped his hands and turned around, showing his face and the eyes that hated. It was his first challenge, and he was too angry to be afraid, and those around him too amazed to close in and crush him. A woman gasped
and not a few began to cry. Donovan was furious and it hurt them where they lived.
“Who . . .” He stammered, stuttered, blinked rapidly in anger. “Who’s the son of a bitch who said that?”
“I did, you scrawny misbegotten slob.”
Donovan, slipping in mire, whirled around beneath hysterical arms. “Well, where the hell are you, you coward?”
Orbit 16 - [Anthology] Page 21
