The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 1

by Gordon Van Gelder

  I recalled my wandering eyes, and I kept a few of the others turned toward Saint Stephen’s until the cloudbanks breasted the range about an hour later. By then, though, the weather satellite had passed over and picked the thing up also. It reported quite an extensive cloud cover on the other side. The storm had sprung up quickly, as they often do here on Cygnus. Often, too, they disperse just as quickly, after an hour or so of heaven’s artillery. But then there are the bad ones—sometimes lingering and lingering, and bearing more thunderbolts in their quivers than any Earth storm.

  Bettys position, too, is occasionally precarious, though its advantages, in general, offset its liabilities. We are located on the gulf, about twenty miles inland, and are approximately three miles removed (in the main) from a major river, the Noble; part of Betty does extend down to its banks, but this is a smaller part. We are almost a strip city, falling mainly into an area some seven miles in length and two miles wide, stretching inland, east from the river, and running roughly parallel to the distant seacoast. Around eighty percent of the 100,000 population is concentrated about the business district, five miles in from the river.

  We are not the lowest land about, but we are far from being the highest. We are certainly the most level in the area. This latter feature, as well as our nearness to the equator, was a deciding factor in the establishment of Beta Station. Some other things were our proximity both to the ocean and to a large river. There are nine other cities on the continent, all of them younger and smaller, and three of them located upriver from us. We are the potential capital of a potential country.

  We’re a good, smooth, easy landing site for drop-boats from orbiting interstellar vehicles, and we have major assets for future growth and coordination when it comes to expanding across the continent. Our original raison d’être, though, was Stopover, repair-point, supply depot, and refreshment stand, physical and psychological, on the way out to other, more settled worlds, further along the line. Cyg was discovered later than many others—it just happened that way—and the others got off to earlier starts. Hence, the others generally attract more colonists. We are still quite primitive. Self-sufficiency, in order to work on our population: land scale, demanded a society on the order of that of the mid-nineteenth century in the American southwest—at least for purposes of getting started. Even now, Cyg is still partly on a natural economy system, although Earth Central technically determines the coin of the realm.

  Why Stopover, if you sleep most of the time between the stars?

  Think about it awhile, and I’ll tell you later if you’re right.

  The thunderheads rose in the east, sending billows and streamers this way and that, until it seemed from the formations that Saint Stephen’s was a balcony full of monsters, leaning and craning their necks over the rail in the direction of the stage, us. Cloud piled upon slate-colored cloud, and then the wall slowly began to topple.

  I heard the first rumbles of thunder almost half an hour after lunch, so I knew it wasn’t my stomach.

  Despite all my eyes, I moved to a window to watch. It was like a big, gray, aerial glacier plowing the sky.

  There was a wind now, for I saw the trees suddenly quiver and bow down. This would be our first storm of the season. The turquoise fell back before it, and finally it smothered the sun itself. Then there were drops upon the windowpane, then rivulets.

  Flint-like, the highest peaks of Saint Stephen’s scraped its belly and were showered with sparks. After a moment it bumped into something with a terrible crash, and the rivulets on the quartz panes turned into rivers.

  I went back to my gallery, to smile at dozens of views of people scurrying for shelter. A smart few had umbrellas and raincoats. The rest ran like blazes. People never pay attention to weather reports; this, I believe, is a constant factor in man’s psychological makeup, stemming perhaps from an ancient tribal distrust of the shaman. You want them to be wrong. If they’re right, then they’re somehow superior, and this is even more uncomfortable than getting wet.

  I remembered then that I had forgotten my raincoat, umbrella, and rubbers. But it had been a beautiful morning, and W.C. could have been wrong...

  Well, I had another cigarette and leaned back in my big chair. No storm in the world could knock my eyes out of the sky.

  I switched on the filters and sat and watched the rain pour past.

  Five hours later it was still raining, and rumbling and dark.

  I’d had hopes that it would let up by quitting time, but when Chuck Fuller came around the picture still hadn’t changed any. Chuck was my relief that night, the evening Hell Cop.

  He seated himself beside my desk.

  “You’re early,” I said. “They don’t start paying you for another hour.”

  “Too wet to do anything but sit. Rather sit here than at home.”

  “Leaky roof?”

  He shook his head.

  “Mother-in-law. Visiting again.”

  I nodded.

  “One of the disadvantages of a small world.”

  He clasped his hands behind his neck and leaned back in the chair, staring off in the direction of the window. I could feel one of his outbursts coming.

  “You know how old I am?” he asked, after a while.

  “No,” I said, which was a lie. He was twenty-nine.

  “Twenty-seven,” he told me, “and going to be twenty-eight soon. Know where I’ve been?”

  “No.”

  “No place, that’s where! I was born and raised on this crummy world! And I married and I settled down here—and I’ve never been off it! Never could afford it when I was younger. Now I’ve got a family...”

  He leaned forward again, rested his elbow on his knees, like a kid. Chuck would look like a kid when he was fifty. —Blond hair, close-cropped, pug nose, kind of scrawny, takes a suntan quickly, and well. Maybe he’d act like a kid at fifty, too. I’ll never know.

  I didn’t say anything because I didn’t have anything to say.

  He was quiet for a long while again.

  Then he said, “You’ve been around.”

  After a minute, he went on:

  “You were born on Earth. Earth! And you visited lots of other worlds too, before I was even born. Earth is only a name to me. And pictures. And all the others—they’re the same! Pictures. Names...”

  I waited, then after I grew tired of waiting I said, “ ‘Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn...’ ”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s the beginning to an ancient poem. It’s an ancient poem now, but it wasn’t really ancient when I was a boy. Just old. I had friends, relatives, even in-laws, once myself. They are not just bones now. They are dust. Real dust, not metaphorical dust. The past fifteen years seem fifteen years to me, the same as to you, but they’re not. They are already many chapters back in the history books. Whenever you travel between the stars you automatically bury the past. The world you leave will be filled with strangers if you ever return— or caricatures of your friends, your relatives, even yourself. It’s no great trick to be a grandfather at sixty, a great-grandfather at seventy-five or eighty—but go away for three hundred years, and then come back and meet your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson, who happens to be fifty-five years old, and puzzled, when you look him up. It shows you just how alone you really are. You are not simply a man without a country or without a world. You are a man without a time. You and the centuries do not belong to each other. You are like the rubbish that drifts between the stars.”

  “It would be worth it,” he said.

  I laughed. I’d had to listen to his gripes every month or two for over a year and a half. It had never bothered me much before, so I guess it was a cumulative effect that day—the rain, and Saturday night next, and my recent library visits, and his complaining, that had set me off.

  His last comment had been too much. “It would be worth it.” What could I say to that?

  I laughed.

&
nbsp; He turned bright red.

  “You’re laughing at me!”

  He stood up and glared down.

  “No, I’m not,” I said, “I’m laughing at me. I shouldn’t have been bothered by what you said, but I was. That tells me something funny about me.”

  “What?”

  “I’m getting sentimental in my old age, and that’s funny.”

  “Oh.” He turned his back on me and walked over to the window and stared out. Then he jammed his hands into his pockets and turned around and looked at me.

  “Aren’t you happy?” he asked. “Really, I mean? You’ve got money, and no strings on you. You could pick up and leave on the next I-V that passes, if you wanted to.”

  “Sure I’m happy,” I told him. “My coffee was cold. Forget it.”

  “Oh,” again. He turned back to the window in time to catch a bright flash full in the face, and to have to compete with thunder to get his next words out. “I’m sorry,” I heard him say, as in the distance. “It just seems to me that you should be one of the happiest guys around...”

  “I am. It’s the weather today. It’s got everybody down in the mouth, yourself included.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “Look at it rain, will you? Haven’t seen any rain in months...”

  “They’ve been saving it all up for today.”

  He chuckled.

  “I’m going down for a cup of coffee and a sandwich before I sign in. Can I bring you anything?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Okay. See you in a little while.”

  He walked out whistling. He never stays depressed. Like a kid’s moods, his moods, up and down, up and down... And he’s a Hell Cop. Probably the worst possible job for him, having to keep his attention in one place for so long. They say the job title comes from the name of an antique flying vehicle—a hellcopper, I think. We send our eyes on their appointed rounds, and they can hover or soar or back up, just like those old machines could. We patrol the city and the adjacent countryside. Law enforcement isn’t much of a problem on Cyg. We never peek in windows or send an eye into a building without an invitation. Our testimony is admissible in court—or, if we’re fast enough to press a couple buttons, the tape that we make does an even better job—and we can dispatch live or robot cops in a hurry, depending on which will do a better job.

  There isn’t much crime on Cyg, though, despite the fact that everybody carries a sidearm of some kind, even little kids. Everybody knows pretty much what their neighbors are up to, and there aren’t too many places for a fugitive to run. We’re mainly aerial traffic cops, with an eye out for local wildlife (which is the reason for all the sidearms).

  S.P.C.U. is what we call the latter function—Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Us—which is the reason each of my hundred-thirty eyes has six forty-five caliber eyelashes.

  There are things like the cute little panda-puppy—oh, about three feet high at the shoulder when it sits down on its rear like a teddy bear, and with big, square, silky ears, a curly pinto coat, large, limpid, brown eyes, pink tongue, button nose, powder puff tail, sharp little white teeth more poisonous than a Quemeda Island viper’s, and possessed of a way with mammal entrails like unto the way of an imaginative cat with a rope of catnip.

  Then there’s a snapper, which looks as mean as it sounds: a feathered reptile, with three horns on its armored head—one beneath each eye, like a tusk, and one curving skyward from the top of its nose—legs about eighteen inches long, and a four-foot tail which it raises straight into the air whenever it jogs along at greyhound speed, and which it swings like a sandbag—and a mouth full of long, sharp teeth.

  Also, there are amphibious things which come from the ocean by way of the river on occasion. I’d rather not speak of them. They’re kind of ugly and vicious.

  Anyway, those are some of the reasons why there are Hell Cops—not just on Cyg, but on many, many frontier worlds. I’ve been employed in that capacity on several of them, and I’ve found that an experienced H.C. can always find a job Out Here. It’s like being a professional clerk back home.

  Chuck took longer than I thought he would, came back after I was technically off duty, looked happy though, so I didn’t say anything. There was some pale lipstick on his collar and a grin on his face, so I bade him good morrow, picked up my cane, and departed in the direction of the big washing machine.

  It was coming down too hard for me to go the two blocks to my car on foot.

  I called a cab and waited another fifteen minutes. Eleanor had decided to keep Mayor’s Hours, and she’d departed shortly after lunch; and almost the entire staff had been released an hour early because of the weather. Consequently, Town Hall was full of dark offices and echoes. I waited in the hallway behind the main door, listening to the purr of the rain as it fell, and hearing its gurgle as it found its way into the gutters. It beat the street and shook the windowpanes and made the windows cold to touch.

  I’d planned on spending the evening at the library, but I changed my plans as I watched the weather happen. —Tomorrow, or the next day, I decided. It was an evening for a good meal, a hot bath, my own books and brandy, and early to bed. It was good sleeping weather, if nothing else. A cab pulled up in front of the Hall and blew its horn.

  I ran.

  The next day the rain let up for perhaps an hour in the morning. Then a slow drizzle began; and it did not stop again.

  It went on to become a steady downpour by afternoon.

  The following day was Friday, which I always have off, and I was glad that it was.

  Put dittoes under Thursday’s weather report. That’s Friday.

  But I decided to do something anyway.

  I lived down in that section of town near the river. The Noble was swollen, and the rains kept adding to it. Sewers had begun to clog and back up; water ran into the streets. The rain kept coming down and widening the puddles and lakelets, and it was accompanied by drum solos in the sky and the falling of bright forks and sawblades. Dead skytoads were washed along the gutters, like burnt-out fireworks. Ball lightning drifted across Town Square; Saint Elmo’s fire clung to the flag pole, the Watch Tower, and the big statue of Wyeth trying to look heroic.

  I headed uptown to the library, pushing my car slowly through the countless beaded curtains. The big furniture movers in the sky were obviously non-union, because they weren’t taking any coffee breaks. Finally, I found a parking place and I umbrellaed my way to the library and entered.

  I have become something of a bibliophile in recent years. It is not so much that I hunger and thirst after knowledge, but that I am news-starved.

  It all goes back to my position in the big mixmaster. Admitted, there are some things faster than light, like the phase velocities of radio waves in ion plasma, or the tips of the ion-modulated light-beams of Duckbill, the comm-setup back in Sol System, whenever the hinges of the beak snap shut on Earth—but these are highly restricted instances, with no application whatsoever to the passage of shiploads of people and objects between the stars. You can’t exceed lightspeed when it comes to the movement of matter. You can edge up pretty close, but that’s about it.

  Life can be suspended though, that’s easy—it can be switched off and switched back on again with no trouble at all. This is why I have lasted so long. If we can’t speed up the ships, we can slow down the people—slow them until they stop—and let the vessel, moving at near-lightspeed, take half a century, or more if it needs it, to convey its passengers to where they are going. This is why I am very alone. Each little death means resurrection into both another land and another time. I have had several, and this is why I have become a bibliophile: news travels slowly, as slowly as the ships and the people. Buy a newspaper before you hop aboard a ship and it will still be a newspaper when you reach your destination—but back where you bought it, it would be considered a historical document. Send a letter back to Earth and your correspondent’s grandson may be able to get an answer back to your great-grands
on, if the message makes real good connections and both kids live long enough.

  All the little libraries Out Here are full of rare books—first editions of best sellers which people pick up before they leave Someplace Else, and which they often donate after they’ve finished. We assume that these books have entered the public domain by the time they reach here, and we reproduce them and circulate our own editions. No author has ever sued, and no reproducer has ever been around to be sued by representatives, designates, or assigns.

  We are completely autonomous and are always behind the times, because there is a transit-lag which cannot be overcome. Earth Central, therefore, exercises about as much control over us as a boy jiggling a broken string while looking up at his kite.

  Perhaps Yeats had something like this in mind when he wrote that fine line, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” I doubt it, but I still have to go to the library to read the news.

  The day melted around me.

  The words flowed across the screen in my booth as I read newspapers and magazines, untouched by human hands, and the waters flowed across Betty’s acres, pouring down from the mountains now, washing the floors of the forest, churning our fields to peanut-butter, flooding basements, soaking its way through everything, and tracking our streets with mud.