Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume One

by Short Story Anthology

  "Huh? I don't believe that either."

  "I'm glad it doesn't show. But that's why, though Jeff is a dear, there never was a chance that I could fall in love with him. But how I feel about him doesn't matter; the important thing is that he loves you."

  "What? That's the silliest thing you've said yet! Oh, he likes me—or did. But that's all." I gulped. "And it's all I want. Why, you should hear the way he talks to me."

  "I have. But boys that age can't say what they mean; they get embarrassed."

  "But—"

  "Wait, Holly. I saw something you didn't because you were knocked cold. When you and I bumped, do you know what happened?"

  "Uh, no."

  "Jeff arrived like an avenging angel, a split second behind us. He was ripping his wings off as he hit, getting his arms free. He didn't even look at me. He just stepped across me and picked you up and cradled you in his arms, all the while bawling his eyes out."

  "He did?"

  "He did."

  I mulled it over. Maybe the big lunk did kind of like me, after all.

  Ariel went on, "So you see, Holly, even if you don't love him, you must be very gentle with him, because he loves you and you can hurt him terribly."

  I tried to think. Romance was still something that a career woman should shun . . . but if Jeff really did feel that way—well . . . would it be compromising my ideals to marry him just to keep him happy? To keep the firm together? Eventually, that is?

  But if I did, it wouldn't be Jones & Hardesty; it would be Hardesty & Hardesty.

  Ariel was still talking: "—you might even fall in love with him. It does happen, hon, and if it did, you'd be sorry if you had chased him away. Some other girl would grab him; he's awfully nice."

  "But—" I shut up for I heard Jeff's step—I can always tell it. He stopped in the door and looked at us, frowning.

  "Hi, Ariel."

  "Hi, Jeff."

  "Hi, Fraction." He looked me over. "My, but you're a mess."

  "You aren't pretty yourself. I hear you have flat feet."

  "Permanently. How do you brush your teeth with those things on your arms?"

  "I don't."

  Ariel slid off the bed, balanced on one foot. "Must run. See you later, kids."

  "So long, Ariel."

  "Good-by, Ariel. Uh . . . thanks."

  Jeff closed the door after she hopped away, came to the bed and said gruffly, "Hold still."

  Then he put his arms around me and kissed me.

  Well, I couldn't stop him, could I? With both arms broken? Besides, it was consonant with the new policy for the firm. I was startled speechless because Jeff never kisses me, except birthday kisses, which don't count. But I tried to kiss back and show that I appreciated it.

  I don't know what the stuff was they had been giving me but my ears began to ring and I felt dizzy again.

  Then he was leaning over me. "Runt," he said mournfully, "you sure give me a lot of grief."

  "You're no bargain yourself, flathead," I answered with dignity.

  "I suppose not." He looked me over sadly. "What are you crying for?"

  I didn't know that I had been. Then I remembered why. "Oh, Jeff—I busted my pretty wings!"

  "We'll get you more. Uh, brace yourself. I'm going to do it again."

  "All right." He did.

  I suppose Hardesty & Hardesty has more rhythm than Jones & Hardesty.

  It really sounds better.

  * * *

  Afterword by Eric Flint

  Once we settled on Clarke's Rescue Party as the opening story for the anthology, the choice for the second story was practically automatic: This one.

  Well . . . not quite. The part that was more or less automatic was that it would be some story by Robert Heinlein. The question of which story in particular, however, was something we had to kick back and forth for a while.

  We faced a bit of a problem. For all of us as teenagers, the Heinlein was not really the Heinlein who wrote short stories. It was the Heinlein who wrote that seemingly inexhaustible fountain of young adult novels: Rocket Ship Galileo, Citizen of the Galaxy, Have Spacesuit—Will Travel, Tunnel in the Sky, Time for the Stars, The Star Beast, Farmer in the Sky, Space Cadet, The Rolling Stone, Starman Jones . . . the list seemed to go on and on.

  If books had infinite pages—or book buyers had infinitely deep pockets—we would have selected one of those short YA novels for the anthology. Alas, pages are finite and the pockets of customers more finite still, so we had to find another alternative.

  We chose this story, because of all Heinlein's short fiction it probably best captures the spirit of his great young adult novels. Most of Heinlein's short fiction is quite different, often much grimmer, and—speaking for me, at least, if not necessarily Jim or Dave—not something which had much of an impact on me in my so-called formative years.

  Plus, there was another bonus. Again, for me at least. I'm sure I first read this story when I was thirteen. I think that because I remember being absolutely fascinated by the fact that: a) the protagonist from whose viewpoint the story is told is a girl; b) she was really bright; c) she was often confused by her own motives and uncertain of herself, for all that she pretended otherwise.

  Leaving factor "a" aside, factors "b" and "c" described me at that age to a T. That bizarre age in a boy's life when girls had gone from being a very familiar, well-understood and mostly boring phenomenon to something that had suddenly become incredibly mysterious, even more fascinating—and completely confusing.

  After reading the story, I remember thinking that I really, really hoped Heinlein knew what he was talking about—and that the depiction of women and girls you generally ran across in science fiction of the time was baloney. With few exceptions, in SF of the time, a female character was doing well if she achieved one-dimensionality. And that dimension was invariably good looks. This was no help at all. I already knew girls were good-looking. What I neededto know was everything else—everything that Heinlein had put at the center of his story.

  A year later I was fourteen and I had my first girlfriend, who remained so throughout my high school years. And whatever doubts I might have had that Robert A. Heinlein was the Heinlein were dispelled forever.

  JACK WILLIAMSON

  1908 - 2006

  Jack Williamson was a science fiction writer of substance for over 60 years. Raised on an isolated New Mexico homestead, Williamson discovered science fiction via the pulp magazines. Inspired by their contents to try to his hand at writing, his first published story, "The Metal Man," was featured in Amazing Storiesin 1928. He was from the first an adaptable writer, responsive to the changing nature of his markets and equally comfortable with both story and novel forms. .

  The best of Williamson's pre-World War II work was probably the Legion of Space series — The Legion of Space (1934), The Cometeers(1936) and One Against the Legion(1939) — depicting the far-flung, universe-shaking, space opera adventures of four buccaneering soldiers. More or less unaided, they save the human worlds from threats both internal and external in conjunction with the woman whose hereditary role it is to guard against a doomsday device called AKKA.

  By the end of the forties, Williamson had published what will probably remain his most significant work, the Seetee series. Its success led to the comic strip, Beyond Mars, which ran for three years in the New York Daily News. Also in the 1940s came Humanoids, his most famous series.

  In the 1950s, Williamson embarked on a second career in academia. He taught the modern novel and literary criticism until his retirement in 1977, while also being deeply involved in promoting science fiction as an academic subject. He had taken a PhD with the University of Colorado in 1964 on H.G. Wells' early science fiction, and expanded his thesis into a work ultimately titled H.G. Wells: Critic of Progress (1973). In 1973 he received a Pilgrim Award for his academic work.

  In the 1980s, Williamson began to produce work of an astonishing youthfulness. Manseed (1982) uses the space-opera forma
t to investigate, with renewed freshness, the imaginative potential of genetic engineering. Lifeburst (1984) is an exercise in interstellar realpolitik, grim and engrossing in its depiction of the parceling out of Earth, and sophisticated in its presentation of sexual material. Its sequel, Mazeway (1990), has a juvenile air in its vivid presentation of the eponymous galactic test that the young protagonists must pass to render humanity eligible for higher things.

  In 1976 Williamson was given the second Grand Master Nebula Award (his sole predecessor was Robert A. Heinlein).

  The Cosmic Express, by Jack Williamson

  Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding tumbled out of the rumpled bed-clothing, a striking slender figure in purple-striped pajamas. He smiled fondly across to the other of the twin beds, where Nada, his pretty bride, lay quiet beneath light silk covers. With a groan, he stood up and began a series of fantastic bending exercises. But after a few half-hearted movements, he gave it up, and walked through an open door into a small bright room, its walls covered with bookcases and also with scientific appliances that would have been strange to the man of four or five centuries before, when the Age of Aviation was beginning.

  Yawning, Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding stood before the great open window, staring out. Below him was a wide, park-like space, green with emerald lawns, and bright with flowering plants. Two hundred yards across it rose an immense pyramidal building--an artistic structure, gleaming with white marble and bright metal, striped with the verdure of terraced roof-gardens, its slender peak rising to help support the gray, steel-ribbed glass roof above. Beyond, the park stretched away in illimitable vistas, broken with the graceful columned buildings that held up the great glass roof.

  Above the glass, over this New York of 2432 A. D., a freezing blizzard was sweeping. But small concern was that to the lightly clad man at the window, who was inhaling deeply the fragrant air from the plants below--air kept, winter and summer, exactly at 20° C.

  With another yawn, Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding turned back to the room, which was bright with the rich golden light that poured in from the suspended globes of the cold ato-light that illuminated the snow-covered city. With a distasteful grimace, he seated himself before a broad, paper-littered desk, sat a few minutes leaning back, with his hands clasped behind his head. At last he straightened reluctantly, slid a small typewriter out of its drawer, and began pecking at it impatiently.

  For Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding was an author. There was a whole shelf of his books on the wall, in bright jackets, red and blue and green, that brought a thrill of pleasure to the young novelist's heart when he looked up from his clattering machine.

  He wrote "thrilling action romances," as his enthusiastic publishers and television directors said, "of ages past, when men were men. Red-blooded heroes responding vigorously to the stirring passions of primordial life!"

  * * * * *

  He was impartial as to the source of his thrills--provided they were distant enough from modern civilization. His hero was likely to be an ape-man roaring through the jungle, with a bloody rock in one hand and a beautiful girl in the other. Or a cowboy, "hard-riding, hard-shooting," the vanishing hero of the ancient ranches. Or a man marooned with a lovely woman on a desert South Sea island. His heroes were invariably strong, fearless, resourceful fellows, who could handle a club on equal terms with a cave-man, or call science to aid them in defending a beautiful mate from the terrors of a desolate wilderness.

  And a hundred million read Eric's novels, and watched the dramatization of them on the television screens. They thrilled at the simple, romantic lives his heroes led, paid him handsome royalties, and subconsciously shared his opinion that civilization had taken all the best from the life of man.

  Eric had settled down to the artistic satisfaction of describing the sensuous delight of his hero in the roasted marrow-bones of a dead mammoth, when the pretty woman in the other room stirred, and presently came tripping into the study, gay and vivacious, and--as her husband of a few months most justly thought--altogether beautiful in a bright silk dressing gown.

  Recklessly, he slammed the machine back into its place, and resolved to forget that his next "red-blooded action thriller" was due in the publisher's office at the end of the month. He sprang up to kiss his wife, held her embraced for a long happy moment. And then they went hand in hand, to the side of the room and punched a series of buttons on a panel--a simple way of ordering breakfast sent up the automatic shaft from the kitchens below.

  Nada Stokes-Harding was also an author. She wrote poems--"back to nature stuff"--simple lyrics of the sea, of sunsets, of bird songs, of bright flowers and warm winds, of thrilling communion with Nature, and growing things. Men read her poems and called her a genius. Even though the whole world had grown up into a city, the birds were extinct, there were no wild flowers, and no one had time to bother about sunsets.

  "Eric, darling," she said, "isn't it terrible to be cooped up here in this little flat, away from the things we both love?"

  "Yes, dear. Civilization has ruined the world. If we could only have lived a thousand years ago, when life was simple and natural, when men hunted and killed their meat, instead of drinking synthetic stuff, when men still had the joys of conflict, instead of living under glass, like hot-house flowers."

  "If we could only go somewhere--"

  "There isn't anywhere to go. I write about the West, Africa, South Sea Islands. But they were all filled up two hundred years ago. Pleasure resorts, sanatoriums, cities, factories."

  "If only we lived on Venus! I was listening to a lecture on the television, last night. The speaker said that the Planet Venus is younger than the Earth, that it has not cooled so much. It has a thick, cloudy atmosphere, and low, rainy forests. There's simple, elemental life there--like Earth had before civilization ruined it."

  "Yes, Kinsley, with his new infra-red ray telescope, that penetrates the cloud layers of the planet, proved that Venus rotates in about the same period as Earth; and it must be much like Earth was a million years ago."

  "Eric, I wonder if we could go there! It would be so thrilling to begin life like the characters in your stories, to get away from this hateful civilization, and live natural lives. Maybe a rocket--"

  * * * * *

  The young author's eyes were glowing. He skipped across the floor, seized Nada, kissed her ecstatically. "Splendid! Think of hunting in the virgin forest, and bringing the game home to you! But I'm afraid there is no way.--Wait! The Cosmic Express."

  "The Cosmic Express?"

  "A new invention. Just perfected a few weeks ago, I understand. By Ludwig Von der Valls, the German physicist."

  "I've quit bothering about science. It has ruined nature, filled the world with silly, artificial people, doing silly, artificial things."

  "But this is quite remarkable, dear. A new way to travel--by ether!"

  "By ether!"

  "Yes. You know of course that energy and matter are interchangeable terms; both are simply etheric vibration, of different sorts."

  "Of course. That's elementary." She smiled proudly. "I can give you examples, even of the change. The disintegration of the radium atom, making helium and lead and energy. And Millikan's old proof that his Cosmic Ray is generated when particles of electricity are united to form an atom."

  "Fine! I thought you said you weren't a scientist." He glowed with pride. "But the method, in the new Cosmic Express, is simply to convert the matter to be carried into power, send it out as a radiant beam and focus the beam to convert it back into atoms at the destination."

  "But the amount of energy must be terrific--"

  "It is. You know short waves carry more energy than long ones. The Express Ray is an electromagnetic vibration of frequency far higher than that of even the Cosmic Ray, and correspondingly more powerful and more penetrating."

  The girl frowned, running slim fingers through golden-brown hair. "But I don't see how they get any recognizable object, not even how they get the radiation turned back into matter."

>   "The beam is focused, just like the light that passes through a camera lens. The photographic lens, using light rays, picks up a picture and reproduces it again on the plate--just the same as the Express Ray picks up an object and sets it down on the other side of the world.

  "An analogy from television might help. You know that by means of the scanning disc, the picture is transformed into mere rapid fluctuations in the brightness of a beam of light. In a parallel manner, the focal plane of the Express Ray moves slowly through the object, progressively, dissolving layers of the thickness of a single atom, which are accurately reproduced at the other focus of the instrument--which might be in Venus!

  "But the analogy of the lens is the better of the two. For no receiving instrument is required, as in television. The object is built up of an infinite series of plane layers, at the focus of the ray, no matter where that may be. Such a thing would be impossible with radio apparatus because even with the best beam transmission, all but a tiny fraction of the power is lost, and power is required to rebuild the atoms. Do you understand, dear?"

  "Not altogether. But I should worry! Here comes breakfast. Let me butter your toast."

  A bell had rung at the shaft. She ran to it, and returned with a great silver tray, laden with dainty dishes, which she set on a little side table. They sat down opposite each other, and ate, getting as much satisfaction from contemplation of each other's faces as from the excellent food. When they had finished, she carried the tray to the shaft, slid it in a slot, and touched a button--thus disposing of the culinary cares of the morning.

  She ran back to Eric, who was once more staring distastefully at his typewriter.

  "Oh, darling! I'm thrilled to death about the Cosmic Express! If we could go to Venus, to a new life on a new world, and get away from all this hateful conventional society--"

  "We can go to their office--it's only five minutes. The chap that operates the machine for the company is a pal of mine. He's not supposed to take passengers except between the offices they have scattered about the world. But I know his weak point--"