The Best Science Fiction of 1949

by Everett F. Bleiler

  “It all sounds quite wonderful, Spender.”

  “But you won’t stay?”

  “No. Thanks, awfully.”

  “And you certainly won’t let me stay, without trouble. I’ll have to kill you all.”

  “You’re optimistic.”

  “I have something to fight for and live for, that makes me a better warrior. I’ve got a religion now. It’s learning how to smell and breathe all over. And how to lie in the sun getting a tan, letting the sun get into you. And how to hear music and how to read a book. What does your civilization have to offer?” The captain shifted his feet. He shook his head. “I’m sorry all this is happening. I’m sorry about it all.”

  “I am too. I guess I’d better take you back now so you can start the attack.”

  “I guess so.”

  “I won’t kill you, captain. When it’s all over, you’ll still be alive.”

  “What?”

  “Yes. I decided that when I began all this. You would be the one I would leave alive. I never

  intended touching you. I don’t intend to now.”

  “Well,” said the captain.

  “I won’t kill you, I’ll save you out from the rest,” said Jeff Spender. “When they’re all dead, maybe

  you’ll change your mind.”

  “No,” the captain said, “I won’t change. There’s too much Earth blood in me. I’ll have to kill you.”

  “Even when you have a chance to stay here?”

  “It’s funny, but yes, even with that. I don’t know why. I’ve never asked myself. Well, here we are.” They had reached the place where they had met now. “Will you come on quietly with me, Spender? That is my last offer.”

  “Thanks, no.” Spender put out his hand. “And one last thing? If you win, do me a favor? See what can be done to restrict tearing this planet apart, at least for fifty years, until the archaeologists have had a decent time of it, will you?” “Right.”

  “And one more thing. If it’ll help you any, just think of me as a very crazy fellow who went berserk one summer day and never was right again. It’ll be a little easier on you, perhaps. Do that.”

  “I’ll think it over. So long, Spender. Good luck.”

  “You’re an odd one,” said Spender as the captain walked back down the trail in the warm blowing wind.

  The captain returned like something lost to his dusty men. He kept squinting at the sun and breathing hard.

  “Is there a drink?” he wondered. He felt the bottle put cool into his hand. “Thanks.” He drank. He wiped his mouth. “All right,” he said. “Take it easy, we have all afternoon. I don’t want any more lost. You’ll have to kill him. He won’t come down. Make it a clean shot if you can. Don’t mess him. Get it over with.” He took another cool drink.

  “I’ll kick his bloody brains out,” said Whitie.

  “No, through the chest,” said the captain. He could see Spender’s strong, clearly determined face.

  “His bloody brains,” said Whitie.

  The captain handed him the bottle jerkingly. “You heard what I said, through the chest.”

  Whitie talked to himself.

  “Now,” said the captain.

  They spread again, walking and then running, and then walking on the hot hillside places where there would be sudden cool grottoes that smelled of moss, and sudden open blasting places that smelled of sun on stone.

  I hate being clever, thought the captain, when you don’t really feel clever and don’t want to be clever. To sneak around and make plans and feel big about making them. I hate this feeling of thinking I’m doing right when I’m not really certain I am. Who are we, anyway? The majority? Is that the answer. The majority is always holy, isn’t it? It is always right, is it not? Always, always; just never wrong for one little insignificant, tiny moment, is it? Never ever wrong in ten million years? He thought: What is this majority and who are in it? And what do they think and how did they get that way and will they ever change and how the devil did I get caught in this rotten majority? I don’t feel comfortable. Is it claustrophobia, fear of crowds, or common sense? Can one man be right, while all the world thinks they are right. Let’s not think about it. Let’s crawl around and act exciting and glamorous and run around and pull the trigger. There, and there!

  The men ran and ducked and ran and squatted in shadow and showed their teeth and tightened their eyes and lifted their guns and tore holes in the summer air, holes of sound and heat.

  Spender remained where he was, firing only on occasion. “Bloody brains all over!” Whitie kept yelling as he ran up the hill.

  The captain aimed his gun at Whitie. He stopped and put it down and stared at it in horror. “What were you doing?” he asked of his limp hand and the gun. His eyes widened and shut and he gasped and

  could not breathe.

  He had almost shot Whitie in the back.

  “God help you!” breathed the captain. “What are you doing? What’s happening!”

  He opened his eyes to see Whitie still running, then falling to lie safe under an outcrop.

  “What goes on?” The captain stared up. From where he lay he could see it all. Spender was being gathered in by a loose running net of men. At the top of the hill, behind two rocks, Spender lay, grinning with exhaustion, great islands of sweat under each arm. The captain saw the rocks. There was an interval of about four inches giving free access through to Spender’s chest.

  “Hey, you!” Whitie cried. “A bullet in your head, I will!” The captain waited. Go on, Spender, he thought. Get out, like you said you would. You’ve only got a few more minutes to escape. Get out and come back later. Go on, get out. You said you would. Go down in the tunnels you said you found and lie there and live for months and years, reading your fine books and bathing in your temple pools. Go on, now, man, before it’s too late.

  Spender did not move from his position on the hill. “What’s wrong with him?” the captain asked himself. The captain picked up his gun. He watched the running, hiding men. He looked at the towers of the little clean Martian village, like sharply carved chess pieces lying in the afternoon. He saw the rocks and the interval between where Spender’s chest showed through.

  Whitie was running up, screaming in fury.

  “No, Whitie,” said the captain. “I can’t let you do it. Nor the others. No, none of you. Only me.” He raised the gun and sighted it.

  Will I be clean after I do this? he thought. Is it right that it’s me who does it? Yes, it is. I know what I’m doing for what reason and it’s right, because I think I’m the right person. I hope and pray I can live up to this. He nodded his head in a jerking move at Spender.

  “Go on,” he called in a loud whisper which nobody heard. “I’ll give you thirty seconds more to get away, to escape. Thirty seconds, boy!”

  The watch ticked on his wrist. The captain watched it tick. The men were running. Spender did not

  move. The watch ticked for a long time, very loudly in his ears. “Go on, Spender, go on, get away!”

  The thirty seconds were up.

  The gun was sighted. The captain drew a deep breath. “Spender,” he said, exhaling.

  He pulled the trigger.

  All that happened was that a faint powdering of rock went up in the sunlight. The echoes of the

  report faded.

  The captain stood up and called to his men. “He’s dead.”

  The other men did not believe him. Their angles had prevented their seeing that particular fissure in

  the rocks. They saw their captain run up the hill, alone, and thought him either very brave or insane.

  The men came after him a minute later.

  They gathered around the body and somebody said, “In the chest?”

  The captain looked down. “In the chest,” he said. He saw how the rocks had changed color under Spender. “I wonder why he waited, I wonder why he didn’t escape like he planned. I wonder why he stayed on and got himself killed?”

  “Who
knows,” someone said.

  Spender lay there, with his hands clasped, one around the gun, another around an aluminum book that shone in the sun.

  Was it because of me? thought the captain. Was it because I refused to give in, myself? Did Spender hate the idea of killing me? Am I any different than these others here? Is that what did it? Did he figure he could trust me? What other answer is there?

  None. He squatted beside the silent body.

  I’ve got to live up to this, he thought. I can’t let him down, now. If he figured there was something in me that was like himself, and couldn’t kill me because of it, then what a job I have ahead of me! That’s it, all right. I’m Spender all over again, but I think before I shoot. I don’t shoot at all; I don’t kill. I do things with people. And he couldn’t kill me because I was himself under a slightly different condition.

  The captain felt the sunlight on the back of his neck. He heard himself saying, “If only he had come to me and talked it over before he shot anybody, we could have worked out something, somehow.”

  “Worked out what” said Whitie. “What could we have worked out with his likes?”

  There was a singing of heat in the land, off the rocks and off the blue sky. “I guess you’re right,” said the captain. “We could never have got together. Spender and myself, maybe. But Spender and you and the others, no, never. He’s better off now. Let me have a drink of water from that canteen.”

  It was the captain who suggested the empty sarcophagus for Spender. They put him into it with waxes and wine, his hands folded over his chest. The last they saw of him was his peaceful face.

  They stood for a moment in the ancient vault. “I think it would be a good idea for you to think of Spender from time to time,” said the captain.

  They turned and walked from the hall and shut the marble door with the name Spender marked on it and the dates 1950-1978 under that.

  The next afternoon, Whitie did some target practice in one of the dead cities, shooting out the crystal windows and blowing the tops off the fragile towers. The captain caught Whitie and knocked his teeth out.

  Remember the three monkeys, Speak No Evil, Hear No Evil, and See No Evil? There should have been a fourth one, Do No Evil, but he became civilized…

  No Connection

  By Isaac Asimov

  Raph was a typical American of his times. Remarkably ugly, too, by American standards of our times. The bony structure of his jaws was tremendous and the musculature suited it. His nose was arched and wide and his black eyes were small and forced wide apart by the span of said nose. His neck was thick, his body broad, his fingers spatulate, with strongly curved nails.

  If he had stood erect, on thick legs with large, well-padded feet, he would have topped two and a half yards. Standing or sitting, his mass neared a quarter of a ton.

  Yet his forehead rose in an unrestricted arc and his cranial capacity did not stint. His enormous hand dealt delicately with a pen, and his mind droned comfortably on as he bent over his desk.

  In fact, his wife and most of his fellow-Americans found him a fine-looking fellow.

  Which shows the alchemy of a long displacement along the time-axis.

  Raph, Junior, was a smaller edition of our typical American. He was adolescent and had not yet lost the hairy covering of childhood. It spread in a dark, close-curled mat across his chest and back, but it was already thinning and perhaps within the year he would first don the adult shirt that would cover the proudly-naked skin of manhood.

  But, meanwhile, he sat in breeches alone, and scratched idly at a favorite spot just above the diaphragm. He felt curious and just a little bored. It wasn’t bad to come with his father to the museum when people were there. Today was a Closed-Day, however, and the empty corridors rang lonesomely when he walked along them.

  Besides, he knew everything in it - mostly bones and stones.

  Junior said: ‘What’s that thing?’

  ‘What thing?’ Raph lifted his head and looked over his shoulder. Then he looked pleased. ‘Oh, that’s something quite new. That’s a reconstruction of Primate Primeval. It was sent to me from the North River Grouping. Isn’t it a nice job, though?’ And he returned to his work, in the grip of a momentary twinge of pleasure. Primate Primeval wasn’t to go on exhibition for a week at least - not until he prepared an honorable place for it with suitable surroundings, but, for the moment, it was in his office and his own private darling.

  Raph looked at the ‘nice job’ with quite other emotions, however. What he saw was a spindly figure of contemptuous size, with thin legs and arms, hair-covered and owning an ugly, small-featured face with large, protruding eyes.

  He said: ‘Well, what is it, Pa?’

  Raph stirred impatiently: ‘It’s a creature that lived many millions of years ago, we think. That’s the way we think it looks.’

  ‘Why?’ insisted the youngster.

  Raph gave up. Apparently, he would have to root out the subject and do away with it.

  ‘Well, for one thing we can tell about the muscles from the shape of the bones, and the positions where the tendons would fit and where some of the nerves would go. From the teeth we can tell the type of digestive system the animal would have, and from the foot-bones, what type of posture it would have. For the rest, we go by the principle of Analogy, that is, by the outside appearance of creatures that exist today that have the same kind of skeleton. For instance, that’s why he’s covered with red hair. Most of the Primates today - they’re little insignificant creatures, practically extinct - are red-haired, have bare callosities on the rump —’

  Junior scurried behind the figure and satisfied himself on that score.

  ‘-have long, fleshy probosces, and short, shriveled ears. Their diets are unspecialized, hence the rather all-purpose teeth, and they are nocturnal, hence the large eyes. It’s all simple, really. Now, does that dispose of you, younester?’

  And then Junior, having thought and thought about it, came out with a disparaging: ‘He looks just like a Eekah to me, though. Just like an ugly, old Eekah.’

  Raph stared at him. Apparently he had missed a point: ‘An Eekah?’ he said, ‘What’s an Eekah? Is that an imaginary creature you’ve been reading about?’

  ‘Imaginary! Say, Pa, don’t you ever stop at the Recorder’s?’

  This was an embarrassing question to answer, for ‘Pa’ never did, or at least, never since his maturity. As a child, the Recorder, as custodian of the world’s spoken, written and recorded fiction, had, of course, had an unfailing fascination. But he had grown up —

  He said, tolerantly: ‘Are there new stories about Eekahs? I remember none when I was young.’

  ‘You don’t get it, Pa.’ One would almost suppose that the young Raph was on the very verge of an exasperation he was too cautious to express. He explained in wounded fashion: ‘The Eekahs are real things. They come from the Other World. Haven’t you heard about that! We’ve been hearing about it in school, even, and in the Group Magazine. They stand upside down in their country, only they don’t know it, and they look just like Ol’ Primeval there.’

  Raph collected his astonished wits. He felt the incongruity of cross-examining his half-grown child for archaeological data and he hesitated a moment. After all, he had heard some things. There had been word of vast continents existing on the other hemisphere of Earth. It seemed to him that there were reports of life on them. It was all hazy - perhaps it wasn’t always wise to stick so closely to the field of one’s own interest.

  He asked Junior: ‘Are there Eekahs here among the Groupings?’

  Junior nodded rapidly: ‘The Recorder says they can think as good as us. They got machines that go through the air. That’s how they got here.’

  ‘Junior!’ said Raph severely.

  ‘I ain’t lying,’ Junior cried with aggrieved virtue. ‘You ask the Recorder and see what he says.’

  Raph slowly gathered his papers together. It was Closed-Day, but he could find the Recorder at h
is home, no doubt.

  The Recorder was an elderly member of the Red River Gur-row Grouping and few alive could remember a time when he was not. He had succeeded to the post by general consent and filled it well, for he was Recorder for the same reason that Raph was curator of the museum. He liked to be, he wanted to be, and he could conceive no other life.

  The social pattern of the Gurrow Grouping is difficult to grasp unless born into it, but there was a looseness about it that almost made the word ‘pattern’ incongruous. The individual Gurrow took whatever job he felt an aptitude for, and such work as was left over and needed to be done was done either in common, or consecutively by each according to an order determined by lot. Put so, it sounds too simple to work, but actually the traditions that had gathered with the five thousand years since the first Voluntary Grouping of Gurrahs was supposed to have been established, made the system complicated, flexible - and workable.

  The Recorder was, as Raph had anticipated, at his home, and there was the embarrassment of renewing an old and unjustly neglected acquaintanceship. He had made use of the Recorder’s reference library, of course, but always indirectly -yet he had once been a child, an intimate learner at the feet of accumulated wisdom, and he had let the intimacy lapse.

  The room he now entered was more or less choked with recordings and, to a lesser degree, with printed material. The Recorder interspersed greetings with apologies.

  ‘Shipments have come from some of the other Groupings,’ he said. ‘It needs time for cataloguing, you know, and I can’t seem to find the time I used to.’ He lit a pipe and puffed strongly. ‘Seems to me I’ll have to find a full-time assistant. What about your son, Raph? He clusters about here the way you did twenty years ago.”