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The Best From
Fantasy and Science Fiction
Fifth Series
Ed by Anthony Boucher
No copyright 2012 by MadMaxAU eBooks
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CONTENTS
Fredric Brown Imagine: A Proem
Damon Knight You’re Another
Arthur C. Clarke This Earth of Majesty
Mildred Clingerman Birds Can’t Count
Avram Davidson The Golem
Zenna Henderson Pottage
Charles Beaumont The Vanishing American
Alice Eleanor Jones Created He Them
Four Vignettes:
Fredric Brown Too Far
James Blish A Matter of Energy
Anthony Boucher Nellthu
Isaac Asimov Dreamworld
Shirley Jackson One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts
Raymond E. Banks The Short Ones
Mildred Clingerman The Last Prophet
P.M. Hubbard Botany Bay
Walter M. Miller, Jr. A Canticle for Leibowitz
L. Sprague de Camp Lament by a Maker
Richard Matheson Pattern for Survival
Isaac Asimov The Singing Bell
Chad Oliver and Charles Beaumont The Last Word
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FREDERIC BROWN
IMAGINE: A PROEM
Imagine ghosts, gods and devils.
Imagine hells and heavens, cities floating in the sky and cities sunken in the sea.
Unicorns and centaurs. Witches, warlocks, jinns and banshees.
Angels and harpies. Charms and incantations. Elementals, familiars, demons.
Easy to imagine, all of those things: mankind has been imagining them for thousands of years.
Imagine spaceships and the future.
Easy to imagine; the future is really coming and there’ll be spaceships in it.
Is there then anything that’s hard to imagine?
Of course there is.
Imagine a piece of matter and yourself inside it, yourself aware, thinking and therefore knowing you exist, able to move that piece of matter that you’re in, to make it sleep or wake, make love or walk uphill.
Imagine a universe—infinite or not, as you wish to picture it—with a billion, billion, billion suns in it.
Imagine a blob of mud whirling madly around one of those suns.
Imagine yourself standing on that blob of mud, whirling with it, whirling through time and space to an unknown destination.
Imagine!
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DAMON KNIGHT
In its second issue, F&SF published what is still one of my favorite stories: that wry and logical variant of the Last Man theme, Damon Knight’s Not With a Bang. (Formally, damon knight should he written with minuscules, like e. e. cummings; but printers and copyreaders are apt to be stuffy about such niceties.) Since then, Knight has proved himself (in numerous magazines, professional and amateur) to be the ablest critic of science-fantasy now writing. He is also easily one of the ablest creators, as in this zany and entrancing adventure, which begins with pratfalls and goes on through speculations on luck, randomness and time to an unexpected ending which explains many things in your own life . . . and incidentally the origin of the Manhattan skyline. If that synopsis sounds a bit wacky . . . well, I don’t know where you’ll find a wackier (or more enjoyable) tale of future speculation than this.
YOU’RE ANOTHER
It was a warm spring Saturday, and Johnny Bornish spent the morning in Central Park. He drew sailors’ lying on the grass with their girls; he drew old men in straw hats, and Good Humor men pushing their carts. He got two quick studies of children at the toy-boat pond, and would have had another, a beauty, except that somebody’s damned big Dalmatian, romping, blundered into him and made him sit down hard in the water.
A bright-eyed old gentleman solemnly helped him arise. Johnny thought it over, then wrung out his wet pants in the men’s rest room, put them back on and spread himself like a starfish in the sun. He dried before his sketchbook did, so he took the bus back downtown, got off at Fourteenth Street and went into Mayer’s.
The only clerk in sight was showing an intricate folding easel to a tweedy woman who didn’t seem to know which end was which. Johnny picked up the sketchbook he wanted from a pile on the table, and pottered around looking at lay figures, paper palettes and other traps for the amateur. He glimpsed some interesting textured papers displayed in the other aisle and tried to cross over to them, but misjudged his knobby-kneed turning circle, as usual, and brought down a cascade of little paint cans. Dancing for balance, somehow he managed to put one heel down at an unheard-of angle, buckle the lid of one of the cans and splash red enamel all over hell.
He paid for the paint, speechless, and got out. He had dropped the sketchbook somewhere, he discovered. Evidently God did not care for him to do any sketching today.
Also, he was leaving little red heel-prints across the pavement. He wiped off his shoe as well as he could with some newspaper from the trashbasket at the corner, and walked down to the Automat for coffee.
The cashier scooped in his dollar and spread two rows of magical dimes on the marble counter, all rattling at once like angry metal insects. They were alive in Johnny’s palm; one of them got away, but he lunged for it and caught it before it hit the floor.
Flushed with victory, he worked his way through the crowd to the coffee dispenser, put a china cup under the spigot and dropped his dime in the slot. Coffee streamed out, filled his cup and went on flowing.
Johnny watched it for a minute. Coffee went on pouring over the lip and handle of the cup, too hot to touch, splashing through the grilled metal and gurgling away somewhere below.
A white-haired man shouldered him aside, took a cup from the rack and calmly filled it at the spigot. Somebody else followed his example, and in a moment there was a crowd.
After all, it was his dime. Johnny got another cup and waited his turn. An angry man in a white jacket disappeared violently into the crowd, and Johnny heard him shouting something. A moment later the crowd began to disperse.
The jet had stopped. The man in the white jacket picked up Johnny’s original cup, emptied it, set it down on a busboy’s cart, and went away.
Evidently God did not care for him to drink any coffee, either. Johnny whistled a few reflective bars of “Dixie” and left, keeping a wary eye out for trouble.
At the curb a big pushcart was standing in the sunshine, flaming with banana yellows, apple reds. Johnny stopped himself. “Oh, no,” he said, and turned himself sternly around, and started carefully down the avenue, hands in pockets, elbows at his sides. On a day like what this one was shaping up to be, he shuddered to think what he could do with a pushcart full of fruit.
How about a painting of that? Semi-abstract—”Still Life in Motion.” Flying tangerines, green bananas, dusty Concord grapes, stopped by the fast shutter of the artist’s eye. By Cézanne, out of Henry Moore. By heaven, it wasn’t bad.
He could see it, big and vulgar, about a 36 by 30— (stretchers: he’d have to stop at Mayer’s again, or on second thought somewhere else, for stretchers), the colors grayed on a violet ground, but screaming at each other all the same like a gaggle of parakeets. Black outlines here and there, weaving a kind of cockeyed carpet pattern through it. No depth, no light-and-dark—flat Easter-egg colors, glowing as enigmatically as a Parrish cut up into jigsaw pieces. Frame it in oyster-white moulding—wham~ The Museum of Modem Art!
The bananas, he thought, would have to go around this way, distor
ted, curved like boomerangs up in the foreground. Make the old ladies of Oshkosh duck. That saturated buttery yellow, transmuted to a poisonous green . . . He put out a forefinger absently to stroke one of the nearest, feeling how the chalky smoothness curved up and around into the dry hard stem.
“How many, Mac?”
For an instant Johnny thought he had circled the block, back to the same pushcart: then he saw that this one had only bananas on it. He was at the corner of Eleventh Street; he had walked three blocks, blind and deaf.
“No bananas,” he said hurriedly, backing away. There was a shriek in his ear. He turned; it was a glitter-eyed tweedy woman, brandishing an enormous handbag.
“Can’t you watch where you’re—”
“Sorry, ma’am,” he said, desperately trying to keep his balance. He toppled off the curb, grabbing at the pushcart. Something slithery went out from under his foot. He was falling, sliding like a bowling ball, feet first toward the one upright shaft that supported the end of the pushcart. . . .
The first thing that he noticed, as he sat there up to his chest in bananas, with the swearing huckster holding the cart by main force, was that an alert, white-haired old gentleman was in the front rank of the crowd, looking at him.
The same one who—?
And come to think of it, that tweedy woman—
Ridiculous.
All the same, something began to twitch in his memory. Ten confused minutes later he was kneeling asthmatically on the floor in front of his closet, hauling out stacks of unframed paintings, shoeboxes full of letters and squeezed paint tubes, a Scout ax (for kindling), old sweaters and mildewed magazines, until he found a battered suitcase.
In the suitcase, under untidy piles of sketches and water-colors, was a small cardboard portfolio. In the portfolio were two newspaper clippings.
One was from the Post, dated three years back: it showed Johnny, poised on one heel in a violent adagio pose, being whirled around by the stream of water from a hydrant some Third Avenue urchins had just opened. The other was two years older, from the Journal: in this one Johnny seemed to be walking dreamily up a wall—actually, he had just slipped on an icy street in the upper Forties.
He blinked incredulously. In the background of the first picture there were half a dozen figures, mostly kids.
Among them was the tweedy woman.
In the background of the second, there was only one. It was the white-haired old man.
Thinking it over, Johnny discovered that he was scared. He had never actually enjoyed being the kind of buffoon who gets his shirttail caught in zippers, is trapped by elevators and revolving doors, and trips on pebbles; he had accepted it humbly as his portion, and in between catastrophes he’d had a lot of fun.
But suppose somebody was doing it to him?
A lot of it was not funny, look at it any way you like. There was the time the bus driver had closed the door on Johnny’s foot and dragged him for three yards, bouncing on the pavement. He had got up with nothing worse than bruises—but what if that passenger hadn’t seen him in time?
He looked at the clippings again. There they were, the same faces—the same clothing, even, except that the old man was wearing an overcoat. Even in the faded half-tones, there was a predatory sparkle from his rimless eyeglasses; and the tweedy woman’s sharp beak was as threatening as a hawk’s.
Johnny felt a stifling sense of panic. He felt like a man waiting helplessly for the punch line of a long bad joke; or like a mouse being played with by a cat.
Something bad was going to happen next.
The door opened; somebody walked in. Johnny started, but it was only the Duke, brawny in a paint-smeared undershirt, with a limp cigarette in the corner of his mouth. The Duke had a rakish Errol Flynn mustache, blending furrily now into his day-old beard, and a pair of black, who-are-you-varlet brows. He was treacherous, clever, plausible, quarrelsome, ingenious, a great brawler and seducer of women—in short, exactly like Cellini, except he had no talent.
“Hiding?” said Duke, showing his big teeth.
Johnny became aware that, crouched in front of the closet that way, he looked a little as if he were about to dive into it and pull overcoats over his head. He got up stiffly, tried to put his hands in his pockets, and discovered he still had the clippings. Then it was too late. Duke took them gently, inspected them with a judicial eye and stared gravely at Johnny. “Not flattering,” he said. “Is that blood on your forehead?”
Johnny investigated; his fingers came away a little red, not much. “I fell down,” he said uncomfortably.
“My boy,” Duke told him, “you are troubled. Confide in your old uncle.”
“I’m just —Look, Duke, I’m busy. Did you want something?”
“Only to be your faithful counselor and guide,” said Duke, pressing Johnny firmly into a chair. “Just lean back loosen the sphincters and say the first thing that comes into your mind.” He looked expectant.
“Ugh,” said Johnny.
Duke nodded sagely. “A visceral reaction. Existentialist. You wish to rid yourself of yourself—get away from it all. Tell me, when you walk down the street, do you feel the buildings are about to close on you? Are you being persecuted by little green men who come out of the woodwork? Do you feel an overpowering urge to leave town?”
“Yes,” said Johnny truthfully.
Duke looked mildly surprised. “Well?” he asked, spreading his hands.
“Where would I go?”
“I recommend sunny New Jersey. All the towns have different names—fascinating. Millions of them. Pick one at random. Hackensack, Perth Amboy, Passaic, Teaneck, Newark? No? You’re quite right—too suggestive. Let me see. Something farther north? Provincetown. Martha’s Vineyard—lovely this time of the year. Or Florida—yes, I can really see you, Johnny, sitting on a rotten wharf in the sunshine, fishing with a bent pin for pompano. Peaceful, relaxed, carefree . . .”
Johnny’s fingers stirred the change in his pocket. He didn’t know what was in his wallet—he never did—but he was sure it wasn’t enough. “Duke, have you seen Ted Edwards this week?” he asked hopefully.
“No. Why?”
“Oh. He owes me a little money, is all. He said he’d pay me today or tomorrow.”
“If it’s a question of money—” said the Duke after a moment.
Johnny looked at him incredulously.
Duke was pulling a greasy wallet out of his hip pocket. He paused with his thumb in it. “Do you really want to get out of town, Johnny?”
“Well, sure, but—*
“Johnny, what are friends for? Really, I’m wounded. Will fifty help?”
He counted out the money and stuffed it into Johnny’s paralyzed palm. “Don’t say a word. Let me remember you just as you are.” He made a frame of his hands and squinted through it. He sighed, then picked up the battered suitcase and went to work with great energy throwing things out of the dresser into it. “Shirts, socks, underwear. Necktie. Clean handkerchief. There you are.” He closed the lid. He pumped Johnny’s hand, pulling him toward the door. “Don’t think it hasn’t been great, because it hasn’t. So on the ocean of life we pass and speak to one another. Only a look and a voice; then darkness and silence.”
Johnny dug in his heels and stopped. “What’s the matter?” Duke inquired.
“I just realized—I can’t go now. I’ll go tonight. I’ll take the late train.”
Duke arched an eyebrow. “But why wait, Johnny? When the sunne shineth, make hay. When the iron is hot, strike. The tide tarrieth for no man.”
“They’ll see me leave,” said Johnny, embarrassed.
Duke frowned. “You mean the little green men actually are after you?” His features worked; he composed them with difficulty. “Well, this is— Pardon me. A momentary aberration. But now don’t you see, Johnny, you haven’t got any time to lose. If they’re following you, they must know where you live. How do you know they won’t come here?”
Johnny, flushing, could thin
k of no adequate reply. He had wanted to get away under cover of darkness, but that would mean another five hours at least. . . .
“Look here,” said Duke suddenly, “I know the very thing. Biff Feldstein—works at the Cherry Lane. Your own mother won’t admit she knows you. Wait here.”
He was back in fifteen minutes, with a bundle of old clothes and an object which turned out, on closer examination, to be a small brown beard.
Johnny put it on unwillingly, using gunk from a tube Duke had brought along. Duke helped him into a castoff jacket, color indistinguishable, shiny with grease, and clapped a beret on his head. The result, to Johnny’s horrified gaze, looked like an old-time Village phony or a peddler of French postcards. Duke inspected him judicially. “It’s magnificent, but it isn’t war,” he said. “However, we can always plant vines. Allons! I am the grass; I cover all!”
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