The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 1

by Gordon Van Gelder

  Inside, I listened to the thunder and the rain, and I watched the apocalypse off in the distance.

  Delirium of city under storm—

  The buildings across the way were quite clear in the pulsing light of the thing. The lamps were turned off in my apartment so that I could better appreciate the vision. All of the shadows seemed incredibly black and inky, lying right beside glowing stairways, pediments, windowsills, balconies; and all of that which was illuminated seemed to burn as though with an internal light. Overhead, the living/not living insect-thing of fire stalked, and an eye wearing a blue halo was moving across the tops of nearby buildings. The fires pulsed and the clouds burnt like the hills of Gehenna; the thunders burbled and banged; and the white rain drilled into the roadway which had erupted into a steaming lather. Then a snapper, tri-horned, wet-feathered, demon-faced, sword-tailed, and green, raced from around a corner, a moment after I’d heard a sound which I had thought to be a part of the thunder. The creature ran, at an incredible speed, along the smoky pavement. The eye swooped after it, adding a hail of lead to the falling raindrops. Both vanished up another street. It had taken but an instant, but in that instant it had resolved a question in my mind as to who should do the painting. Not El Greco, not Blake; no: Bosch. Without any question, Bosch—with his nightmare visions of the streets of Hell. He would be the one to do justice to this moment of the storm.

  I watched until the sizzlecloud drew its legs up into itself, hung like a burning cocoon, then died like an ember retreating into ash. Suddenly, it was very dark and there was only the rain.

  Sunday was the day of chaos.

  Candles burned, churches burned, people drowned, beasts ran wild in the streets (or swam there), houses were torn up by the roots and bounced like paper boats along the waterways, the great wind came down upon us, and after that the madness.

  I was not able to drive to Town Hall, so Eleanor sent her flyer after me.

  The basement was filled with water, and the ground floor was like Neptune’s waiting room. All previous high-water marks had been passed.

  We were in the middle of the worst storm in Betty’s history.

  Operations had been transferred up onto the third floor. There was no way to stop things now. It was just a matter of riding it out and giving what relief we could. I sat before my gallery and watched.

  It rained buckets, it rained vats; it rained swimming pools and lakes and rivers. For a while it seemed that it rained oceans upon us. This was partly because of the wind which came in from the gulf and suddenly made it seem to rain sideways with the force of its blasts. It began at about noon and was gone in a few hours, but when it left our town was broken and bleeding. Wyeth lay on his bronze side, the flagpole was gone, there was no building without broken windows and water inside, we were suddenly suffering lapses of electrical power, and one of my eyes showed three panda-puppies devouring a dead child. Cursing, I killed them across the rain and the distance. Eleanor wept at my side. There was a report later of a pregnant woman who could only deliver by Caesarean section, trapped on a hilltop with her family, and in labor. We were still trying to get through to her with a flyer, but the winds... I saw burnt buildings and the corpses of people and animals. I saw half-buried cars and splintered homes. I saw waterfalls where there had been no waterfalls before. I fired many rounds that day, and not just at beasts from the forest.

  Sixteen of my eyes had been shot out by looters. I hope that I never again see some of the films I made that day.

  When the worst Sunday night in my life began, and the rains did not cease, I knew the meaning of despair for the third time in my life.

  Eleanor and I were in the Trouble Center. The lights had just gone out for the eighth time. The rest of the staff was down on the third floor. We sat there in the dark without moving, without being able to do a single thing to halt the course of chaos. We couldn’t even watch it until the power came back on.

  So we talked.

  Whether it was for five minutes or an hour, I don’t really know. I remember telling her, though, about the girl buried on another world, whose death had set me to running. Two trips to two worlds and I had broken my bond with the times. But a hundred years of travel do not bring a century of forgetfulness— not when you cheat time with the petite mort of the cold sleep. Time’s vengeance is memory, and though for an age you plunder the eye of seeing and empty the ear of sound, when you awaken your past is still with you. The worst thing to do then is to return to visit your wife’s nameless grave in a changed land, to come back as a stranger to the place you had made your home. You run again then, and after a time you do forget, some, because a certain amount of actual time must pass for you also. But by then you are alone, all by yourself: completely alone. That was the first time in my life that I knew the meaning of despair. I read, I worked, I drank, I whored, but came the morning after and I was always me, by myself. I jumped from world to world, hoping things would be different, but with each change I was further away from all the things I had known.

  Then another feeling gradually came upon me, and a really terrible feeling it was: There must be a time and a place best suited for each person who has ever lived. After the worst of my grief had left me and I had come to terms with the vanished past, I wondered about a man’s place in time and in space. Where, and when in the cosmos would I most like to live out the balance of my days? —To live at my fullest potential? The past was dead, but perhaps a better time waited on some as yet undiscovered world, waited at one yet-to-be-recorded moment in its history. How could I ever know? How could I ever be sure that my Golden Age did not lay but one more world away, and that I might be struggling in a Dark Era while the Renaissance of my days was but a ticket, a visa, and a diary-page removed? That was my second despair. I did not know the answer until I came to the Land of the Swan. I do not know why I loved you, Eleanor, but I did, and that was my answer. Then the rains came.

  When the lights returned we sat there and smoked. She had told me of her husband, who had died a hero’s death in time to save him from the delirium tremens which would have ended his days. Died as the bravest die—not knowing why—because of a reflex, which after all had been a part of him, a reflex which had made him cast himself into the path of a pack of wolf-like creatures attacking the exploring party he was with—off in that forest at the foot of Saint Stephen’s—to fight them with a machete and to be torn apart by them while his companions fled to the camp, where they made a stand and saved themselves. Such is the essence of valor: an unthinking moment, a spark along the spinal nerves, predetermined by the sum total of everything you have ever done, wished to do or not to do, and wish you had done, or hadn’t, and then comes the pain.

  We watched the gallery on the wall. Man is the reasoning animal? Greater than beasts but less than angels? Not the murderer I shot that night. He wasn’t even the one who uses tools or buries his dead. —Laughs, aspires, affirms? I didn’t see any of those going on. —Watches himself watch himself doing what he knows is absurd? Too sophisticated. He just did the absurd without watching. Like running back into a burning house after his favorite pipe and a can of tobacco. —Devises religions? I saw people praying, but they weren’t devising. They were making last-ditch efforts at saving themselves, after they’d exhausted everything else they knew to do. Reflex.

  The creature who loves?

  That’s the only one I might not be able to gainsay.

  I saw a mother holding her daughter up on her shoulders while the water swirled about her armpits, and the little girl was holding her doll up above her shoulders, in the same way. But isn’t that—the love—a part of the total? Of everything you have ever done, or wished? Positive or neg? I know that it is what made me leave my post, running, and what made me climb into Eleanor’s flyer and what made me fight my way through the storm and out to that particular scene.

  I didn’t get there in time.

  I shall never forget how glad I was that someone else did. Johnny Keams blin
ked his lights above me as he rose, and he radioed down:

  “It’s all right. They’re okay. Even the doll.”

  “Good,” I said, and headed back.

  As I set the ship down on its balcony landing, one figure came toward me. As I stepped down, a gun appeared in Chuck’s hand.

  “I wouldn’t kill you, Juss,” he began, “but I’d wound you. Face that wall. I’m taking the flyer.”

  “Are you crazy?” I asked him.

  “I know what I’m doing. I need it, Juss.”

  “Well, if you need it, there it is. You don’t have to point a gun at me. I just got through needing it myself. Take it.”

  “Lottie and I both need it,” he said. “Turn around!”

  I turned toward the wall.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “We’re going away, together—now!”

  “You are crazy,” I said. “This is no time...”

  “C’mon, Lottie,” he called, and there was a rush of feet behind me and I heard the flyer’s door open.

  “Chuck!” I said. “We need you now! You can settle this thing peacefully, in a week, in a month, after some order has been restored. There are such things as divorces, you know.”

  “That won’t get me off this world, Juss.”

  “So how is this going to?”

  I turned, and I saw that he had picked up a large canvas bag from somewhere and had it slung over his left shoulder, like Santa Claus.

  “Turn back around! I don’t want to shoot you,” he warned.

  The suspicion came, grew stronger.

  “Chuck, have you been looting?” I asked him.

  “Turn around!”

  “All right, I’ll turn around. How far do you think you’ll get?”

  “Far enough,” he said. “Far enough so that no one will find us—and when the time comes, we’ll leave this world.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think you will, because I know you.”

  “We’ll see.” His voice was further away then.

  I heard three rapid footsteps and the slamming of a door. I turned then, in time to see the flyer rising from the balcony.

  I watched it go. I never saw either of them again.

  Inside, two men were unconscious on the floor. It turned out that they were not seriously hurt. After I saw them cared for, I rejoined Eleanor in the Tower.

  All that night did we wait, emptied, for morning.

  Somehow, it came.

  We sat and watched the light flow through the rain. So much had happened so quickly. So many things had occurred during the past week that we were unprepared for morning.

  It brought an end to the rains.

  A good wind came from out of the north and fought with the clouds, like En-ki with the serpent Tiamat. Suddenly, there was a canyon of cobalt.

  A cloudquake shook the heavens and chasms of light opened across its dark landscape.

  It was coming apart as we watched.

  I heard a cheer, and I croaked in unison with it as the sun appeared.

  The good, warm, drying, beneficial sun drew the highest peak of Saint Stephen’s to its face and kissed both its cheeks.

  There was a crowd before each window. I joined one and stared, perhaps for ten minutes.

  When you awaken from a nightmare you do not normally find its ruins lying about your bedroom. This is one way of telling whether or not something was only a bad dream, or whether or not you are really awake.

  We walked the streets in great boots. Mud was everywhere. It was in basements and in machinery and in sewers and in living room clothes closets. It was on buildings and on cars and on people and on the branches of trees. It was broken brown blisters drying and waiting to be peeled off from clean tissue. Swarms of skytoads rose into the air when we approached, hovered like dragon-flies, returned to spoiling food stores after we had passed. Insects were having a heyday, too. Betty would have to be deloused. So many things were overturned or fallen down, and half-buried in the brown Sargassos of the streets. The dead had not yet been numbered. The water still ran by, but sluggish and foul. A stench was beginning to rise across the city. There were smashed-in store fronts and there was glass everywhere, and bridges fallen down and holes in the streets... But why go on? If you don’t get the picture by now, you never will. It was the big morning after, following a drunken party by the gods. It is the lot of mortal man always to clean up their leavings or to be buried beneath them.

  So clean we did, but by noon Eleanor could no longer stand. So I took her home with me, because we were working down near the harbor section and my place was nearer.

  That’s almost the whole story—light to darkness to light—except for the end, which I don’t really know. I’ll tell you of its beginning, though...

  I dropped her off at the head of the alleyway, and she went on toward my apartment while I parked the car. Why didn’t I keep her with me? I don’t know. Unless it was because the morning sun made the world seem at peace, despite its filth. Unless it was because I was in love and the darkness was over, and the spirit of the night had surely departed.

  I parked the car and started up the alley. I was halfway before the corner where I had met the org when I heard her cry out.

  I ran. Fear gave me speed and strength and I ran to the corner and turned it.

  The man had a bag, not unlike the one Chuck had carried away with him, lying beside the puddle in which he stood. He was going through Eleanor’s purse, and she lay on the ground—so still!—with blood on the side of her head.

  I cursed him and ran toward him, switching on my cane as I went. He turned, dropped her purse, and reached for the gun in his belt.

  We were about thirty feet apart, so I threw my cane.

  He drew his gun, pointed it at me, and my cane fell into the puddle in which he stood.

  Flights of angels sang him to his rest, perhaps.

  She was breathing, so I got her inside and got hold of a doctor—I don’t remember how, not too clearly, anyway—and I waited and waited.

  She lived for another twelve hours and then she died. She recovered consciousness twice before they operated on her, and not again after. She didn’t say anything. She smiled at me once, and went to sleep again.

  I don’t know.

  Anything, really.

  It happened again that I became Betty’s mayor, to fill in until November, to oversee the rebuilding. I worked, I worked my head off, and I left her bright and shiny, as I had found her. I think I could have won if I had run for the job that fall, but I did not want it.

  The Town Council overrode my objections and voted to erect a statue of Godfrey Justin Holmes beside the statue of Eleanor Schirrer which was to stand in the Square across from cleaned-up Wyeth. I guess it’s out there now.

  I said that I would never return, but who knows? In a couple years, after some more history has passed, I may revisit a Betty full of strangers, if only to place a wreath at the foot of the one statue. Who knows but that the entire continent may be steaming and clanking and whirring with automation by then, and filled with people from shore to shining shore?

  There was a Stopover at the end of the year and I waved goodbye and climbed aboard and went away, anywhere.

  I went aboard and went away, to sleep again the cold sleep.

  Delirium of ship among stars—

  Years have passed, I suppose. I’m not really counting them anymore. But I think of this thing often: Perhaps there is a Golden Age someplace, a Renaissance for me sometime, a special time somewhere, somewhere but a ticket, a visa, a diary-page away. I don’t know where or when. Who does? Where are all the rains of yesterday?

  In the invisible city?

  Inside me?

  It is cold and quiet outside and the horizon is infinity. There is no sense of movement.

  There is no moon, and the stars are very bright, like broken diamonds, all.

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  The Electric Ant – Philip K. Dick />
  Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) took a writing course in 1951 with Anthony Boucher and went on to make his first professional sale to F&SF not long after. (Another writer who got his start in that same class, Ron Goulart, broke in sooner.) From there, Mr. Dick spent three decades as a professional science fiction writer until his early death. Posthumously, his work has flourished in print and on screen, where film adaptations have been many and varied. His F&SF contributions include classics like “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” “Explorers We,” and this story of a man recovering from an accident.

  At four-fifteen in the afternoon, T.S.T., Garson Poole woke up in his hospital bed, knew that he lay in a hospital bed in a three-bed ward, and realized in addition two things: that he no longer had a right hand and that he felt no pain.

  They had given me a strong analgesic, he said to himself as he stared at the far wall with its window showing downtown New York. Webs in which vehicles and peds darted and wheeled glimmered in the late afternoon sun, and the brilliance of the aging light pleased him. It’s not yet out, he thought. And neither am I.

  A fone lay on the table beside his bed; he hesitated, then picked it up and dialed for an outside line. A moment later he was faced by Louis Danceman, in charge of Tri-Plan’s activities while he, Garson Poole, was elsewhere.

  “Thank God you’re alive,” Danceman said, seeing him; his big, fleshy face with its moon’s surface of pock marks flattened with relief. “I’ve been calling all—”

  “I just don’t have a right hand,” Poole said.

  “But you’ll be okay. I mean, they can graft another one on.”

  “How long have I been here?” Poole said. He wondered where the nurses and doctors had gone to; why weren’t they clucking and fussing about him making a call?