The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction Fifth Series

by Edited by Anthony Boucher

  He'd said: "Maggie, it's silly and sweet of you to hope for a deus ex machina, come to save civilization, but have you considered we may mean nothing to them emotionally? Haven't you ever watched ants struggling with a load too big for them? How much did you care? Even if, like God, you marked the fall of every sparrow, you might simply be conducting a survey or expressing colossal boredom, like the people who delight in measuring things. You know what I mean—if so and so were laid end to end…" and right there the talk had turned back to sex.

  ~ * ~

  "So," Maggie said aloud. "I'm being watched. Catalogued. Maybe photographed. Either that, or I'm nuts, loony, strictly for the birds." She grabbed the dull book and began to read again, not quite sure what she was looking for. She studied the photographs in the book, and for the first time it struck her how self-consciously posed some of the birds looked. "Hams," Maggie dismissed them. "Camera hogs." She glanced at herself in the mirror, hesitated, then got up and combed her hair and lipsticked her mouth. In the mirror she could see Gomez peering cautiously from the typewriter lid towards a spot over the window cooler. The shadowy coolness of the room lightened for a moment, and Gomez' eyes registered the change, but Maggie didn't mind. She was posing sultrily and liking the effect. Maggie had decided to cooperate for the time being and give the unseen watcher an eyeful.

  Mind you, she was thinking furiously, if this is camouflage, it's out of my class… maybe out of this world. Then how am I to prove it? It might be easier just to go quietly nuts… But I've got too much to do this week to go crazy. Next week, perhaps. What am I saying! Fie on this character, whoever it may be. With my tilted, eagle eye I will ferret him out!

  Cheered, she began to do sitting-up exercises. Next, she stood on her head. Unfortunately she couldn't see anything, since her only garment fell down around her ears.

  Mark opened her bedroom door and peered in.

  "Good God, Maggie!" he said. "What's up?"

  Maggie's head emerged from the folds of the slip, and she lay full length on the rug. "Just a game," she said. "Wanta play?"

  "Please, Maggie," he said plaintively. "Not just now. I've got to go polish the car."

  "Idiot," Maggie said. "I'm studying photography… I think. Go away, you're apt to ruin the exposure."

  "I am not," Mark said doggedly. "It's a lovely exposure, it's just that I have to—"

  "—polish the car!" Maggie threatened him with a shoe. Mark sighed and withdrew, closing the door gently behind him.

  Maggie got up and dressed in shirt and shorts and tried the headstand again. Gomez watched her with wide, startled eyes. Next she bent down and peered back between her legs while turning slowly to survey all four sides of the room. Nothing. Wearily she sat a moment on the rug, rubbing her aching brow. Her eyes felt sandy, and she rubbed them, too. She glanced at Gomez and saw that he looked like two cats, one barely offsetting the other, like a color overlay on a magazine page that wasn't quite right. She rubbed her eyes harder to dispel the illusion, and just then she saw the watcher.

  She and the watcher stared at each other across the intervening space and across the little black box the watcher held. Even now his image was not clear to Maggie. One moment he was there, the next he was a something-nothing, then he was gone.

  Maggie rubbed furiously at her eyes again and brought him back to her vision. This time she was able to hold him there, though the image danced and swam and her eyes watered a little with the effort. It was just like any illusion, she thought; once you know the trick of looking at it, you feel stupid not to have seen it at once.

  "Peek-a-boo," she said. "I see you. But stop wiggling."

  The watcher's expression did not change. He continued to gaze at her raptly. But all the rest of him changed. He reminded Maggie of mirages she'd seen, thinking and flattening mountain tops. Was he human? A moment ago, he might have been. But now he was a great whirl of gray petals with the black box and the staring eyes remaining still and cool in the center. The eyes were large, dark and unblinking. The gray petals now drooped like melted wax and flowed into stiffening horizontal lines like a stylized Christmas tree, and the liquid eyes became twin stars decorating its apex, with the black box dangling below like a gift tied to a branch. The tree dissolved and turned into a vase-shape, with delicate etchings of light on the gray that reminded Maggie of fine lace.

  Maggie got up purposefully and walked towards the fluidly shifting image. The watcher shrank into a small square shape that was like a window open onto cold, slanting lines of rain. Maggie reached out a hand and touched the solid plaster wall.

  "Nuts," Maggie said. "I know you're there. Come out, come out, and we'll all take tea."

  The watcher's gaze now turned toward her feet, and his form lengthened and narrowed so drastically that he reminded Maggie of nothing so much as a barber pole with gray and white stripes. The barber pole grew an appendage that pointed downward. It seemed to be pointing at Gomez, who had seated himself just where Maggie might most conveniently step on him, and was yawning as unconcernedly as if the watcher did not exist, or as if he were quite used to him. The watcher grew another appendage, raised the black box, and just then a tiny shaft of light touched Gomez on the nose.

  Maggie watched carefully, but Gomez did not seem to be hurt. He began to wash his face. "Is it a camera, then?" Maggie asked. No answer. She looked wildly around the room, grabbed up the framed photograph of her mother-in-law and showed it to the watcher. The staring eyes looked dubious. But by dint of using her eyebrows and all her facial muscles Maggie finally made her question clear to him. One appendage disappeared into the black box and drew out a tiny replica of Gomez yawning. It was a perfect little three-dimensional figurine, and Maggie coveted it with all her heart. She reached for it, but the wavering barber pole drew itself up stiffly, the eyes admired the figurine a few moments, glared haughtily at Maggie, and the figurine disappeared. Maggie's face expressed her disappointment

  "What about me?" Maggie pointed to herself, pantomimed the way he held the box, then touched her own nose lightly. The eyes at the top of the barber pole gazed at her blandly. The barber pole shuddered. Then the watcher pantomimed that Maggie should pick up Gomez and hold him. Maggie did, and again the little shaft of light hit Gomez on the nose.

  "Hey!" Maggie said. "Did you get me, too? Let me see." No response from the watcher. "Oh well," Maggie said, "maybe that one wasn't so good. How about this pose?" She smiled and pirouetted gracefully for the watcher, but the watcher only looked bored. There's nothing so disconcerting, Maggie thought, as a bored barber pole. She subsided into deep thought. Come to think of it, Gomez had been with her each time she'd sensed the presence of the thing.

  "Blast and damn," she said. "I will not play a supporting role for any cat, even Gomez." She made fierce go-away motions to the image-maker. She shoved Gomez outside the bedroom. She created a host of nasty faces and tried them on for the watcher. She made shooing motions as if he were a chicken. Finally, in a burst of inspiration she printed the address of the Animal Shelter on a card and drew pictures of cats all around it. She held it up for the barber pole to read. The eyes looked puzzled, but willing. The little black box was being folded into itself until now it was no larger than an ice cube. The barber pole swelled into a caricature of a woman, a woman with enormous brandy-snifter-size breasts and huge flopping buttocks. The eyes were now set in a round, doughy, simpering face that somehow (horribly, incomprehensibly) reminded Maggie of her own. The watcher then, gazing straight at Maggie, mimicked all the nasty faces she'd made, stood on his (her?) head, peered between his legs, smiled and pirouetted, pretended to leer at himself in a mirror, and then, very deliberately, indicated with one spiraling finger atop his head that Maggie was nuts. He gave her one look of pure male amusement and disappeared.

  "Come back and fight," Maggie said. "I dare you to say that again." She rubbed her eyes without much hope, and she was right. The watcher was gone.

  Rather forlornly, Maggie took to h
er bed again. "It's the worst hangover I've ever had," Maggie moaned. "So maybe I wasn't looking my best, but it's a bitter blow…"

  The worst of it was, she could never tell anybody, even Mark. What woman could ever admit she had less charm than a beat-up old tomcat? "But I've found out one thing," Maggie thought. "I know now what dogs and cats stare at when people can't see anything there…" But she almost wept when she remembered her old day-dream—of watchers lovingly studying and guiding mankind, or at least holding themselves ready to step in and help when the going got too rough. Suppose, though, the watchers considered mankind no more than servants to the other animals? Feeding and bathing them, providing warm houses and soft, safe beds…

  It was a sickening thought. Maggie harbored it for two minutes, and then resolutely dismissed it from mind.

  "Fiddlesticks! He wasn't that stupid. In fact, he was a damn smart-aleck. So he liked Gomez. So what? Maybe he's a woman-hater."

  She settled back against her pillow and opened the bird book:

  Remember, birds can't count. When you build your blind, let two people enter it. Let one person go away, and the birds will return without fear, thinking they are safe, In this way, you will get good, natural pictures of our friends eating, fighting, and mating…

  Mark opened the bedroom door and walked in. "Maggie?"

  "Hmm?" Maggie went on reading.

  "I couldn't polish the car…" Mark grinned at her.

  "Why not?" Maggie dropped the dull book with alacrity. She knew that grin.

  "I kept thinking about that new game you were playing… Some type of photography, did you say? Then I know the perfect name for it."

  "What?"

  "It's called see-the-birdie, and it isn't a new game at all—it's just part of an old one."

  Maggie stretched luxuriously and made an apparently irrelevant remark: "So long, hangover."

  <>

  ~ * ~

  AVRAM DAVIDSON

  The word “golem.” in Hebrew, meant originally anything incomplete or not fully formed: a needle without an eye, a woman who has not conceived ... or a man without a soul—an automaton. It is in this last meaning that the word occurs so often and so wondrously in Jewish legend that it is familiar even to gentiles; and it may be no accident that modern robotics derives from the Czech author Capek, since the greatest golem of all these robot-precursors was created in Prague, the golem has been the title of at least two classic horror films; Avram Davidson, however, sees no horror in the theme, but rather a gentle, shrewd and delightful humor.

  THE GOLEM

  The grey-faced person came along the street where old Mr. and Mrs. Gumbeiner lived. It was afternoon, it was autumn, the sun was warm and soothing to their ancient bones. Anyone who attended the movies in the twenties or the early thirties has seen that street a thousand times. Past these bungalows with their half-double roofs Edmund Lowe walked arm-in-arm with Leatrice Joy and Harold Lloyd was chased by Chinamen waving hatchets. Under these squamous palm trees Laurel kicked Hardy and Woolsey beat Wheeler upon the head with a codfish. Across these pocket-handkerchief-sized lawns the juveniles of the Our Gang comedies pursued one another and were pursued by angry fat men in golf knickers. On this same street—or perhaps on some other one of five hundred streets exactly like it.

  Mrs. Gumbeiner indicated the grey-faced person to her husband.

  "You think maybe he's got something the matter?" she asked. "He walks kind of funny, to me."

  "Walks like a golem,," Mr. Gumbeiner said indifferently.

  The old woman was nettled.

  "Oh, I don't know," she said. "I think he walks like your cousin Mendel."

  The old man pursed his mouth angrily and chewed on his pipestem. The grey-faced person turned up the concrete path, walked up the steps to the porch, sat down in a chair. Old Mr. Gumbeiner ignored him. His wife stared at the stranger.

  "Man comes in without a hello, goodbye, or howareyou, sits himself down, and right away he's at home … The chair is comfortable?" she asked. "Would you like maybe a glass of tea?"

  She turned to her husband.

  "Say something, Gumbeiner!" she demanded. "What are you, made of wood?"

  The old man smiled a slow, wicked, triumphant smile.

  "Why should I say anything?" he asked the air. "Who am I? Nothing, that's who."

  The stranger spoke. His voice was harsh and monotonous.

  "When you learn who—or, rather, what—I am, the flesh will melt from your bones in terror." He bared porcelain teeth.

  "Never mind about my bones!" the old woman cried. "You've got a lot of nerve talking about my bones!"

  "You will quake with fear," said the stranger. Old Mrs. Gumbeiner said that she hoped he would live so long. She turned to her husband once again.

  "Gumbeiner, when are you going to mow the lawn?"

  "All mankind—" the stranger began.

  "Shah! I'm talking to my husband … He talks eppis kind of funny, Gumbeiner, no?"

  "Probably a foreigner," Mr. Gumbeiner said complacently.

  "You think so?" Mrs. Gumbeiner glanced fleetingly at the stranger. "He's got a very bad color in his face, nebbich, I suppose he came to California for his health."

  "Disease, pain, sorrow, love, grief—all are nought to—"

  Mr. Gumbeiner cut in on the stranger's statement.

  "Gall bladder," the old man said. "Guinzburg down at the shule looked exactly the same before his operation. Two professors they had in for him, and a private nurse day and night."

  "I am not a human being!" the stranger said loudly.

  "Three thousand seven hundred fifty dollars it cost his son, Guinzburg told me. 'For you, Poppa, nothing is too expensive—only get well,' the son told him."

  "I am not a human being!"

  "Ai, is that a son for you!" the old woman said, rocking her head. "A heart of gold, pure gold." She looked at the stranger. "All right, all right, I heard you the first time. Gumbeiner! I asked you a question. When are you going to cut the lawn?"

  "On Wednesday, odder maybe Thursday, comes the Japaneser to the neighborhood. To cut lawns is his profession. My profession is to be a glazier—retired."

  "Between me and all mankind is an inevitable hatred," the stranger said. "When I tell you what I am, the flesh will melt—"

  "You said, you said already," Mr. Gumbeiner interrupted.

  "In Chicago where the winters were as cold and bitter as the Czar of Russia's heart," the old woman intoned, "you had strength to carry the frames with the glass together day in and day out. But in California with the golden sun to mow the lawn when your wife asks, for this you have no strength. Do I call in the Japaneser to cook for you supper?"

  "Thirty years Professor Allardyce spent perfecting his theories. Electronics, neuronics—"

  "Listen, how educated he talks," Mr. Gumbeiner said admiringly. "Maybe he goes to the University here?"

  "If he goes to the University, maybe he knows Bud?" his wife suggested.

  "Probably they're in the same class and he came to see him about the homework, no?"

  "Certainly he must be in the same class. How many classes are there? Five in ganzen: Bud showed me on his program card." She counted off on her fingers. "Television Appreciation and Criticism, Small Boat Building, Social Adjustment, The American Dance … The American Dance—nu, Gumbeiner—"

  "Contemporary Ceramics," her husband said, relishing the syllables. "A fine boy, Bud. A pleasure to have him for a boarder."

  "After thirty years spent in these studies," the stranger, who had continued to speak unnoticed, went on, "he turned from the theoretical to the pragmatic. In ten years' time he had made the most titanic discovery in history: he made mankind, all mankind, superfluous; he made me."

  "What did Tillie write in her last letter?" asked the old man.

  The old woman shrugged.

  "What should she write? The same thing. Sidney was home from the Army, Naomi has a new boyfriend—"

  "He made
ME!"

  "Listen, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is," the old woman said, "maybe where you came from is different, but in this country you don't interrupt people while they're talking … Hey. Listen—what do you mean, he made you? What kind of talk is that?"