The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction 8 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Alfred Bester

  ~ * ~

  Granny Williams arrived home in style by taxi just as dinner was ready to be served, and just as her daughter had announced for the third time that she was going to call the police right now and just as her son-in-law had said for the twentieth time to give Granny a chance, she had been taking care of herself for eighty-seven years and could hardly get into trouble now.

  “Well,” said Granny, as her son-in-law and both grandchildren ran forward to take her packages, “what a day I’ve had.” She smiled happily at everyone and added, “No surprises, now, till we all sit down.”

  “Are you all right?” said her daughter. “I was so worried.”

  Granny stared. “Of course I’m all right,” she said. “Did you think I was arrested or something?”

  When everyone was sitting in comparative quiet, at the dinner table, with dessert dishes (both grandchildren, in their excitement, had almost refused chocolate pudding) cleared away, and coffee cups set out, Granny leaned back in her chair and said with relish, “Now.” She waved at her grandchildren and added, “You get my packages, but be careful.”

  Hastily the grandchildren gathered the packages, not at all carefully, and brought them to Granny’s lap. “Now,” she said, drawing out the suspense as long as possible. “Are we all ready?” The grandchildren signified hysterically that they were all ready. Cautiously Granny lifted one package, turned it over and over, and set it down on the table. Her grandchildren, nearly expiring with curiosity, cried at once, “For me? Granny, for me?” Granny shook her head. “You just wait,” she said. Finally she selected another package, poked it experimentally, and then formally handed it to her daughter. “For you,” she said.

  No one breathed while her daughter opened the package, with all due care for folding the wrappings, winding pieces of string, drawing out the operation. Finally, incredibly, a box appeared.

  “Candy,” said her daughter. “Granny, how nice of you!” She showed the box around appreciatively.

  “Open it, open it,” shouted the grandchildren.

  “After Granny is through, we will all have a piece.”

  Next, the son-in-law opened his present. “A tie,” he said with great enthusiasm. “Look, everyone, a beautiful blue and red and orange and green tie!”

  The younger grandchild, the little girl who was supposed to look like Granny as a child, received a set of dishes and set immediately to serving everyone a second portion of chocolate pudding upon them. The older grandchild received a cowboy gun.

  “Gee, Granny,” he said. “Gee.”

  “You see,” Granny explained, regarding her family lovingly. “I went and lost my list.”

  “Too bad,” said her daughter, opening the candy box.

  “A shame,” said her son-in-law, regarding his tie dubiously.

  “And,” Granny went on, “I had to try to remember what you all wanted.”

  “This is what I wanted,” said her older grandchild immediately. “Hands up,” he added to his father.

  “And,” Granny said to her daughter and son-in-law, “I met the most surprising young man. Right about lunch time, when I was just going into a restaurant for a cup of tea, he rushed right past me, and nearly knocked me down. It was very rude of him, but he was in a great hurry.” Granny stopped and laughed at the expressions on the faces of her daughter and her son-in-law. “He stopped and apologized to me,” she went on, “and would you believe it? He said he was going to be married. He said,” she continued, sighing romantically, “that after three years of courting his lady had finally consented.”

  “Amazing,” said her son-in-law.

  “Charming,” said his wife.

  “It was positively sentimental,” said Granny happily.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  JULES VERNE

  It is almost unbelievable that a Jules Verne story can have remained untranslated for 71 years; but F&SF’s publication of Gil Braltar marks the first appearance in English of one of the Master’s most amusing imaginative satires. The story first came out as a makeweight to fill out the bulk of le chemin de france (1887), an historical novel about the efforts of German “counter-revolutionary” troops to re-establish the monarchy after the French Revolution; when the flight to France appeared in English, the short filler was omitted. Long out of print and unavailable even in France, this may well be the least known of all Verne’s tales; but I think you’ll find it a lively bit of foolishment, emphasizing the fact that Verne was as much a humorist as a prophet—and revealing for the first time the secret behind British control of the Rock of Gibraltar.

  I. O. Evans, discoverer and translator of Gil Braltar, has recently established himself as the foremost Verne enthusiast and authority in our language. His anthology jules verne: master of science fiction (Rinehart, 1957) belongs on the shelves of every scholar in s.f.; even more welcome to the general reader should be his Fitzroy edition of Verne (London: Bernard Hanison), which will bring back into print the most desirable and unobtainable of the voyages extraordinaires at the rate of six a year, starting with a floating city, the begum’s fortune, and five weeks in a balloon.

  GIL BRALTAR

  (translated by I. O. EVANS)

  There were seven or eight hundred of them at least. Of medium height, but strong, agile, supple, framed to make prodigious bounds, they gamboled in the last rays of the sun, now setting over the mountains which formed serried ridges westward of the roadstead. Its reddish disc would soon disappear, and darkness was already falling in the midst of that basin surrounded by the distant Sierras of Sanorre and Ronda and by the desolate country of Cuervo.

  Suddenly all the band became motionless. Their leader had just appeared on the crest resembling the back of a skinny mule which forms the top of the mountain. From the military post perched on the distant summit of the great Rock nothing could be seen of what was taking place under the trees.

  “Sriss. . . . Sriss”—they heard their leader, whose lips, thrust forward like a hen’s beak, gave that whistle an extraordinary intensity.

  “Sriss. . . . Sriss”—the strange army repeated the call in perfect unison.

  A remarkable being that leader: tall in height, clad in a monkey’s skin with the fur outwards, his head shaggy with unkempt hair, his face bristling with a short beard, his feet bare, their soles as hard as a horse’s hoof.

  He lifted his hand and extended it towards the lower crest of the mountain. All simultaneously repeated that gesture with a military—or rather with a mechanical—precision, as though they were marionettes moved by the same spring. He lowered his arm. They lowered their arms. He bent towards the ground. They bent down in the same attitude. He picked up a stick and waved it about. They waved their sticks in windmill fashion like his.

  Then the leader turned: gliding into the bushes, he crawled between the trees. The troop crawled after him.

  In less than ten minutes they were descending the rain-worn mountain paths, but not even the movement of a pebble would have disclosed the presence of that army on the march.

  In a quarter of an hour the leader halted: they halted as though frozen to the ground.

  Two hundred yards below them appeared the town, stretched along the length of the roadstead, with numerous lights revealing the confused mass of piers, houses, villas, barracks. Beyond, the riding-lights of the warships, merchant-vessels, pontoons, anchored out at sea, were reflected from the surface of the still water. Farther beyond, the lighthouse projected its beams.

  At that moment there sounded a cannon, the “first gunfire,” discharged from one of the concealed batteries. Then could also be heard the rolling of drums and the shrill sound of the fifes.

  This was the hour of Retreat, the hour to go indoors: no stranger had the right thereafter to move about the town without being escorted by an officer of the garrison. It was the hour for the crews to go aboard their ships. Every quarter of an hour the patrols took to the guardroom the stragglers and the drunks. Then all was
silent.

  General MacKackmale could sleep with both eyes shut.

  It seemed that England had nothing to fear, that night, for the Rock of Gibraltar.

  ~ * ~

  II

  Everybody knows that formidable Rock. It somewhat resembles an enormous crouching lion, its head towards Spain, its tail dipping into the sea. Its face discloses teeth—seven hundred cannon pointing from the casemates—”an old woman’s teeth,” as they are called, but those of an old woman who can bite if she is attacked.

  Thus England is firmly placed here, as she is at Aden, Malta, and Hong Kong, on cliffs which, aided by the progress of mechanization, she will someday convert into revolving fortresses.

  Meanwhile Gibraltar assures to the United Kingdom the incontestable domination of the fifteen miles of that Strait which the club of Hercules struck open in the depths of the Mediterranean Sea between Abyla and Calpe.

  Have the Spanish given up the idea of, regaining their Peninsula? Unquestionably, for it seems to be impregnable by land and by sea.

  But there was someone who cherished the idea of reconquering this fragment of their Peninsula. It was the leader of the band, a strange being—or perhaps rather a madman. This hidalgo bore the name of Gil Braltar, a name which, to his mind at least, had predestined him to that patriotic conquest. His reason had not been able to resist it, and his place should have been in a mental home. He was well known, but for ten years nobody knew what had become of him. Had he happened to wander off into the outer world? In fact, he had not left his ancestral home: he lived there like a cave man in the woods, in the caverns, and especially in the unexplored depths of the Cave of San Miguel, which, it was reputed, led right down to the sea. He was thought of as dead. He was still alive, nonetheless, after the style of a savage, bereft of human reason, and obeying only his animal instincts.

  ~ * ~

  III

  He slept well, did General MacKackmale, with both eyes shut, though longer than was permitted by regulations. With his long arms, his round eyes deeply set under their beetling brows, his face embellished with a stubbly beard, his grimaces, his semi-human gestures, the extraordinary jutting-out of his jaw, he was remarkably ugly, even for an English general. Something of a monkey but an excellent soldier nevertheless, in spite of his ape-like appearance.

  Yes, he slept in his comfortable apartments on Waterport Street, that winding road which traverses the town from the Waterport Gate to the Alameda Gate. Was he perhaps dreaming that England would seize Egypt, Turkey, Holland, Afghanistan, the Sudan, the Boer Republics—in short every part of the globe at her convenience? And this at the very moment when she was in danger of losing Gibraltar!

  The door of his bedroom opened with a crash.

  “What’s up?” shouted the General, sitting erect with a bound.

  “Sir,” replied the aide-de-camp who had just burst in like a bomb-shell, “the town has been invaded!”

  “The Spanish?”

  “Presumably, sir.”

  “They have dared—”

  The General did not complete his sentence. He got up, wrenched off the nightcap which adorned his head, jumped into his trousers, pulled on his cloak, slid down into his boots, clapped on his helmet, and buckled on his sword even while saying: “What’s that racket I can hear?”

  “It’s the clatter of lumps of rock falling like an avalanche on the town.”

  “Then there’s a lot of them?”

  “Yes, sir, there must be.”

  “Then all the bandits of the coast must have joined forces to take us by surprise—the smugglers of Ronda, the fishermen of San Roque, the refugees who are swarming in the villages?” “Yes, sir, I’m afraid so.”

  “Well, has the Governor been warned?”

  “No, sir; we can’t possibly get through to his residence on Europa Point. The gates have been seized, and the streets are full of the enemy.”

  “What about the barracks at the Waterport Gate?”

  “We can’t possibly get there either. The gunners must have been locked up in their barracks.”

  “How many men have you got with you?”

  “About twenty, sir—men of the Third Regiment who have been able to get away.”

  “By Saint Dunstan!” shouted General MacKackmale. “Gibraltar taken from England by those—those—orange-vendors! It’s not going to happen! No! It shan’t!”

  At that very instant the bedroom door opened, to admit a strange being who jumped onto the General’s shoulders.

  ~ * ~

  IV

  “Surrender!” he howled in raucous tones which sounded more like the roar of a beast than like a human voice.

  Several men, who had entered with the aide-de-camp, were about to throw themselves on that being when, seeing him by the light of the room, they recoiled.

  “Gil Braltar!” they cried.

  It was indeed that hidalgo whom nobody had seen for a long time—that savage from the Cave of San Miguel.

  “Will you surrender?” he howled.

  “Never!” replied General MacKackmale.

  Suddenly, just as the soldiers were surrounding him, Gil Braltar emitted a prolonged and shrill “Sriss.” At once the courtyard of the house and then the house itself were filled with an invading army.

  Could it be credible! They were monkeys, they were apes—hundreds of them! They had come to seize from the English that Rock of which they themselves are the true owners, that hill on which they had dwelt even before the Spanish, and certainly long before Cromwell had dreamed of conquering it for Britain. [I have less information than M. Verne on the dreams of Cromwell, who died in 1658; but Gibraltar was conquered, in 1704, in the name of Queen Anne—much to the surprise of Charles, arch-duke of Austria, who believed that the English were fighting the War of the Spanish Succession on his behalf.—a.b.]

  Yes, indeed it was! And their numbers made them formidable, these tailless apes with whom one could live on good terms only by tolerating their thieving; those cunning and audacious beasts whom one took care not to molest because they revenged themselves by rolling enormous rocks on the town.

  And now these apes had become an army led by a madman as fierce as themselves—by this Gil Braltar whom they knew, who shared their independent life. They were the soldiers of this four-legged William Tell whose whole existence was devoted to the one idea—to drive the foreigners from Spanish soil!

  What a disgrace for the United Kingdom if the attempt succeeded! The English, conquerors of the Hindoos, of the Abysinians, of the Tasmanians, of the Australian Black-fellows, and of so many others, to be overcome by mere apes! If such a catastrophe took place, all that General MacKackmale could do would be to blow out his brains. He could never survive such a dishonor.

  However, before the apes whom their leader’s whistle had summoned had entered the room, a few of the soldiers had been able to throw themselves upon Gil Braltar. The madman, endowed with superhuman strength, struggled, and only after great difficulty was he overcome. The monkey skin which he had borrowed had fallen from his head, and he was thrust into a corner almost naked, gagged, bound, unable to move or to utter a cry. A little later General MacKackmale rushed from the house resolved, in the best military tradition, to conquer or die.

  The danger was no less outside. A few of the soldiers had been able to rally, probably at the Waterport Gate, and were advancing toward the General’s house, and a few shots could be heard in Waterport Street and the market-place. Nonetheless, so great was the number of apes that the garrison of Gibraltar was in danger of being forced to abandon the place. And then, if the Spaniards made common cause with the monkeys, the forts would be abandoned, the batteries deserted, and the fortifications would not have a single defender.

  Suddenly the situation was completely changed.

  Indeed, in the torchlight the apes could be seen beating a retreat. At their head marched their leader, brandishing his stick. And all, copying the movements of his arms and legs, were foll
owing him at the same speed.

  Then had Gil Braltar been able to free himself from his bonds, to escape from that room where he had been imprisoned? It could not be doubted. But where was he going now? Was he going towards Europa Point, to the residence of the Governor, to attack him and call on him to surrender?

  The madman and his army descended Waterport Street. Then, having passed the Alameda Gate, they set off obliquely across the Park and up the slopes.

  An hour later, not one of the invaders of Gibraltar remained.

  ~ * ~

  Then what had happened?

  This was disclosed later, when General MacKackmale appeared on the edge of the Park.