Year's Best SF 2

by David G. Hartwell

  “Oh, but to have a chance to live in the same town with Jack Williamson,” Tonia said. “To run into him at the supermarket, and maybe even get to take one of his classes.”

  “Maybe you should take Cross's job offer,” I said.

  “I can't.” Her cheeks went bright red again. “I've already got a job.” She straightened up and addressed the tour group. “We'll be coming to the turnoff to the ranch soon,” she said. “Jack Williamson lived here with his family from 1915 till World War II, when he joined the army, and again after the war until he married Blanche.”

  The bus slowed almost to a stop and turned onto a dirt road hardly as wide as the bus was that led off between two fields of fenced pastureland.

  “The farm was originally a homestead,” Tonia said, and everyone murmured appreciatively and looked out the windows at more dirt and a couple of clumps of yucca.

  “He was living here when he read his first issue of Amazing Stories Quarterly,” she said, “and when he submitted his first story to Amazing. That was ‘The Metal Man,’ which, as you remember from yesterday, he saw in the window of the drugstore.”

  “I see it!” the tall man shouted, leaning forward over the back of the driver's seat. “I see it!” Everyone craned forward, trying to see, and we pulled up in front of some outbuildings and stopped.

  The driver whooshed the doors open, and everyone filed off the bus and stood in the rutted dirt road, looking excitedly at the unpainted sheds and the water trough. A black heifer looked up incuriously and then went back to chewing on the side of one of the sheds.

  Tonia assembled everyone in the road with her clipboard. “That's the ranch house over there,” she said, pointing at a low green house with a fenced yard and a willow tree. “Jack Williamson lived here with his parents, his brother Jim, and his sisters Jo and Katie. It was here that Jack Williamson wrote “The Girl from Mars” and The Legion of Space, working at the kitchen table. His uncle had given him a basket-model Remington typewriter with a dim purple ribbon, and he typed his stories on it after everyone had gone to bed. Jack Williamson's brother Jim…” she paused and glanced at me, “owns the ranch at this time. He and his wife are in Arizona this weekend.”

  Amazing. They'd managed to miss them all, but nobody seemed to mind, and it struck me suddenly what was unusual about this tour. Nobody complained. That's all they'd done on the Wild Bill Hickok tour. Half of them hadn't known who he was, and the other half had complained that it was too expensive, too hot, too far, the windows on the bus didn't open, the gift shop didn't sell Coke. If their tour guide had announced the wax museum was closed, he'd have had a riot on his hands.

  “It was difficult for him to write in the midst of the family,” she said, leading off away from the house toward a pasture. “There were frequent interruptions and too much noise, so in 1934 he built a separate cabin. Be careful,” she said, skirting around a clump of sagebrush. “There are sometimes rattlesnakes.”

  That apparently didn't bother anybody either. They trooped after her across a field of dry, spiny grass and gathered around a weathered gray shack.

  “This is the actual cabin he wrote in,” Tonia said.

  I wouldn't have called it a cabin. It hardly even qualified as a shack. When I'd first seen it as we pulled up, I'd thought it was an abandoned outhouse. Four gray wood-slat walls, half falling down, a sagging gray shelf, some rusted cans. When Tonia started talking, a farm cat leaped down from where it had been sleeping under what was left of the roof and took off like a shot across the field.

  “It had a desk, files, bookshelves, and later a separate bedroom,” Tonia said.

  It didn't look big enough for a typewriter, let alone a bed, but this was obviously what all these people had come to see. They stood reverently before it in the spiky grass, like it was the Washington Monument or something, and gazed at the weathered boards and rusted cans, not saying anything.

  “He installed electric lights,” Tonia said, “which were run by a small windmill, and a bath. He still had occasional interruptions—from snakes and once from a skunk who took up residence under the cabin. He wrote ‘Dead Star Station’ here, and ‘The Meteor Girl,’ his first story to include time travel. ‘If the field were strong enough,’” he said in the story, “‘we could bring physical objects through space-time instead of mere visual images.’”

  They all found that amusing for no reason I could see and then stood there some more, looking reverent. Tonia came over to me. “Well, what do you think?” she said, smiling.

  “Tell me about him seeing ‘The Metal Man’ in the drugstore,” I said.

  “Oh, I forgot you weren't with us at the drugstore,” she said. “Jack Williamson sent his first story to Amazing Stories in 1928 and then never heard anything back. In the fall of that year he was shopping for groceries, and he looked in the window of a drugstore and saw a magazine with a picture on the cover that looked like it could be his story, and when he went in, he was so excited to see his story in print, he bought all three copies of the magazine and went off without the groceries he'd been carrying.”

  “So then he had prospects?”

  She said seriously, “He said, ‘I had no future. And then I looked in the drugstore window and saw Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories, and it gave me a future.’”

  “I wish somebody would give me a future,” I said.

  “‘No one can predict the future, he can only point the way.’ He said that, too.”

  She went over to the shack and addressed the group. “He also wrote ‘Nonstop to Mars,’ my favorite story, in this cabin,” she said to the group, “and it was right here that he proposed the idea of colonizing Mars and…” She paused, but this time it was the stiff tall man she glanced at. “…invented the idea of androids.”

  They continued to look. All of them walked around the shack two or three times, pointing at loose boards and tin cans, stepping back to get a better look, walking around it again. None of them seemed to be in any hurry to go. The Deadwood tour had lasted all of ten minutes at Mount Moriah Cemetery, with one of the kids whining, “Can't we go now?” the whole time, but this group acted like they could stay here all day. One of them got out a notebook and started writing things down. The couple with the kid took her over to the heifer, and all three of them patted her gingerly.

  After a while Tonia and the driver passed out paper bags and everybody sat down in the pasture, rattlesnakes and all, and had lunch. Stale sandwiches, cardboard cookies, cans of lukewarm Coke, but nobody complained. Or left any litter.

  They neatly packed everything back in the bags and then walked around the shack some more, looking in the empty windows and scaring a couple more farm cats, or just sat and looked at it. A couple of them went over to the fence and gazed longingly over it at the ranch house.

  “It's too bad there's nobody around to show them the house,” I said. “People don't usually go off and leave a ranch with nobody to look after the animals. I wonder if there's somebody around. Whoever it is would probably give you a tour of the ranch house.”

  “It's Jack's niece Betty,” Tonia said promptly. “She had to go up to Clovis today to get a part for the water pump. She won't be back till four.” She stood up, brushing dead grass and dirt off her skirt. “All right, everybody. It's time to go.”

  There was a discontented murmuring, and one of the kids said, “Do we have to go already?”, but everybody picked up their lunch bags and Coke cans and started for the bus. Tonia ticked off their names on her clipboard as they got on like she was afraid one of them might jump ship and take up residence among the rattlesnakes.

  “Carter Stewart,” I told her. “Where to next? The drugstore?”

  She shook her head. “We went there yesterday. Where's Underhill?” She started across the road again, with me following her.

  The tall man was standing silently in front of the shack, looking in at the empty room. He stood absolutely motionless, his eyes fixed on the gray weathered boards, and when T
onia said, “Underhill? I'm afraid we need to go,” he continued to stand there for a long minute, like he was trying to store up the memory. Then he turned and walked stiffly past us and back to the bus.

  Tonia counted heads again, and the bus made a slow circle past the ranchhouse, turning around, and started back along the dirt road. Nobody said anything, and when we got to the highway, everyone turned around in their seats for a last look. The old couple dabbed at their eyes, and one of the kids stood up on the rear seat and waved goodbye. The tall man was sitting with his head buried in his hands.

  “The cabin you've just seen was where it all started,” Tonia said, “with a copy of a pulp magazine and a lot of imagination.” She told how Jack Williamson had become a meteorologist and a college professor, as well as a science fiction writer, traveled to Italy, Mexico, the Great Wall of China, all of which must have been impossible for him to imagine, sitting all alone in that poor excuse for a shack, typing on an old typewriter with a faded ribbon.

  I was only half listening. I was thinking about the tall guy, Underhill, and trying to figure out what was wrong about him. It wasn't his stiffness—I'd been at least that stiff after a day in the car. It was something else. I thought about him standing there, looking at the shack, so fixed, like he was trying to carry the image away with him.

  He probably just forgot his camera, I thought, and realized what had been nagging at me. Nobody had a camera. Tourists always have cameras. The Wild Bill Hickok gang had all had cameras, even the kids. And videocams. One guy had kept a videocam glued to his face the whole time and never seen a thing. They'd spent the whole tour snapping Wild Bill's tombstone, snapping the figures in the wax museum even though there were signs that said, NO PICTURES, snapping each other in front of the saloon, in front of the cemetery, in front of the bus. And then buying up slides and postcards in the gift shop in case the pictures didn't turn out.

  No cameras. No gift shop. No littering or trespassing or whining. What kind of tour is this? I thought.

  “He predicted ‘a new Golden Age of fair cities, of new laws and new machines,’” Tonia was saying, “‘of human capabilities undreamed of, of a civilization that has conquered matter and Nature, distance and time, disease and death.’”

  He'd imagined the same kind of future I'd imagined. I wondered if he'd ever tried selling his ideas to farmers. Which brought me back to the job, which I'd managed to avoid thinking about almost all day.

  Tonia came and stood across from me, holding on to the center pole. “‘A poor country kid, poorly educated, unhappy with his whole environment, longing for something else,’” she said. “That's how Jack Williamson described himself in 1928.” She looked at me. “You're not going to take the job, are you?”

  “I don't think so,” I said. “I don't know.”

  She looked out the window at the fields and cows, looking disappointed. “When he first moved here, this was all sagebrush and drought and dust. He couldn't imagine what was going to happen any more than you can right now.”

  “And the answer's in a drugstore window?”

  “The answer was inside him,” she said. She stood up and addressed the group. “We'll be coming into Portales in a minute,” she said. “In 1928, Jack Williamson wrote, ‘Science is the doorway to the future, scientification, the golden key. It goes ahead and lights the way. And when science sees the things made real in the author's mind, it makes them real indeed.’”

  The tour group applauded, and the bus pulled into the parking lot of the Portales Inn. I waited for the rush, but nobody moved. “We're not staying here,” Tonia explained.

  “Oh,” I said, getting up. “You didn't have to give me door-to-door service. You could have let me out at wherever you're staying, and I could have walked over.”

  “That's all right,” Tonia said, smiling.

  “Well,” I said, unwilling to say goodbye. “Thanks for a really interesting tour. Can I take you to dinner or something? To thank you for letting me come?”

  “I can't,” she said. “I have to check everybody in and everything.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Well…”

  Giles the driver opened the door with a whoosh of air.

  “Thanks,” I said. I nodded to the old couple. “Thanks for sharing your seat,” and stepped down off the bus.

  “Why don't you come with us tomorrow?” she said. “We're going to go see Number 5516.”

  Number 5516 sounded like a county highway and probably was, the road Jack Williamson walked to school along or something, complete with peanuts and dirt, at which the group would gaze reverently and not take pictures. “I've got an appointment tomorrow,” I said, and realized I didn't want to say goodbye to her. “Next time. When's your next tour?”

  “I thought you were just passing through.”

  “Like you said, a lot of nice people live around here. Do you bring a lot of tours through here?”

  “Now and then,” she said, her cheeks bright red.

  I watched the bus pull out of the parking lot and down the street. I looked at my watch. 4:45. At least an hour till I could justify dinner. At least five hours till I could justify bed. I went in the Inn and then changed my mind and went back out to the car and drove out to see where Cross's office was so I wouldn't have trouble in the morning, in case it was hard to find.

  It wasn't. It was on the south edge of town on Highway 70, a little past the Motel Super 8. The tour bus wasn't in the parking lot of the Super 8, or at the Hillcrest, or the Sands Motel. They must have gone to Roswell or Tucumcari for the night. I looked at my watch again. It was 5:05.

  I drove back through town, looking for someplace to eat. McDonald's, Taco Bell, Burger King. There's nothing wrong with fast food, except that it's fast. I needed a place where it took half an hour to get a menu and another twenty minutes before they took your order.

  I ended up eating at Pizza Hut (personal pan pizza in under five minutes or your money back). “Do you get a lot of tour bus business?” I asked the waitress.

  “In Portales? You have to be kidding,” she said. “In case you haven't noticed, Portales is right on the road to nowhere. Do you want a box for the rest of that pizza?”

  The box was a good idea. It took her ten minutes to bring it, which meant it was nearly six by the time I left. Only four hours left to kill. I filled up the car at Allsup's and bought a sixpack of Coke. Next to the magazines was a rack of paperbacks.

  “Any Jack Williamson books?” I asked the kid at the counter.

  “Who?” he said.

  I spun the rack around slowly. John Grisham. Danielle Steel. Stephen King's latest thousand-page effort. No Jack Williamson. “Is there a bookstore in town?” I asked the kid.

  “Huh?”

  He'd never heard of that either. “A place where I can buy a book?”

  “Alco has books, I think,” he said. “But they closed at five.”

  “How about a drugstore?” I said, thinking of that copy of Amazing Stories.

  Still blank. I gave up, paid him for the gas and the sixpack, and started out to the car.

  “You mean a drugstore like aspirin and stuff?” the kid said. “There's Van Winkle's.”

  “When do they close?” I asked, and got directions.

  Van Winkle's was a grocery store. It had two aisles of “aspirin and stuff” and half an aisle of paperbacks. More Grisham. Jurassic Park. Tom Clancy. And The Legion of Time by Jack Williamson. It looked like it had been there a while. It had a faded fifties-style cover and dog-eared edges.

  I took it up to the check-out. “What's it like having a famous writer living here?” I asked the middle-aged clerk.

  She picked up the book. “The guy who wrote this lives in Portales?” she said. “Really?”

  Which brought us up to 6:22. But at least now I had something to read. I went back to the Portales Inn and up to my room, opened a can of Coke and all the windows, and sat down to read The Legion of Time, which was about a girl who'd traveled back in time
to tell the hero about the future.

  “The future has been held to be as real as the past,” the book said, and the girl in the book was able to travel between one and the other as easily as the tour had traveled down New Mexico Highway 18.

  I closed the book and thought about the tour. They didn't have a single camera, and they weren't afraid of rattlesnakes. And they'd looked out at the Llano Flatto like they'd never seen a field or a cow before. And they all knew who Jack Williamson was, unlike the kid at Allsup's or the clerk at Van Winkle's. They were all willing to spend two days looking at abandoned shacks and dirt roads—no, wait, three days. Tonia'd said they'd gone to the drugstore yesterday.

  I had an idea. I opened the drawer of the nightstand, looking for a phone book. There wasn't one. I went downstairs to the lobby and asked for one. The blue-haired lady at the desk handed me one about the size of The Legion of Time, and I flipped to the Yellow Pages.

  There was a Thrifty Drug, which was a chain, and a couple that sounded locally owned but weren't downtown. “Where's B. and J. Drugs?” I asked. “Is it close to downtown?”

  “A couple of blocks,” the old lady said.

  “How long has it been in business?”

  “Let's see,” she said. “It was there when Nora was little because I remember buying medicine that time she had the croup. She would have been six, or was that when she had the measles? No, the measles were the summer she…”

  I'd have to ask B. and J. “I've got another question,” I said, and hoped I wouldn't get an answer like the last one. “What time does the university library open tomorrow?”

  She gave me a brochure. The library opened at 8:00 and the Williamson Collection at 9:30. I went back up to the room and tried B. and J. Drugs. They weren't open.

  It was getting dark. I closed the curtains over the open windows and opened the book again. “The world is a long corridor, and time is a lantern carried steadily along the hall,” it said, and, a few pages later, “If time were simply an extension of the universe, was tomorrow as real as yesterday? If one could leap forward—”