Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume One

by Short Story Anthology

  "I do not wish to give up."

  Congresswoman Li-hsing was considerably older than she had been when Andrew had first met her. Her transparent garments were long gone. Her hair was now close-cropped and her coverings were tubular. Yet still Andrew clung, as closely as he could within the limits of reasonable taste, to the style of clothing that had prevailed when he had first adopted clothing more than a century before.

  "We've gone as far as we can, Andrew," Li-hsing admitted. "We'll try once more after recess, but, to be honest, defeat is certain and then the whole thing will have to be given up. All my most recent efforts have only earned me certain defeat in the coming congressional campaign."

  "I know," said Andrew, "and it distressed me. You said once you would abandon me if it came to that Why have you not done so?"

  "One can change one's mind, you know. Somehow, abandoning you became a higher price than I cared to pay for just one more term. As it is, I've been in the Legislature , for over a quarter of a century. It's enough."

  "Is there no way we can change minds, Chee?"

  "We've changed all that are amenable to reason. The rest - the majority - cannot be moved from their emotional antipathies."

  "Emotional antipathy is not a valid reason for voting one way or the other."

  "I know that, Andrew, but they don't advance emotional antipathy as their reason."

  "It all comes down to the brain, then," Andrew said cautiously. "But must we leave it at the level of cells versus positrons? Is there no way of forcing a functional definition? Must we say that a brain is made of this or that? May we not say that a brain is something - anything - capable of a certain level of thought?"

  "Won't work," said Li-hsing. "Your brain is manmade, the human brain is not. Your brain is constructed, theirs developed. To any human being who is intent on keeping up the barrier between himself and a robot, those differences are a steel wall a mile high and a mile thick."

  "If we could get at the source of their antipathy, the very source-"

  "After all your years," Li-hsing said, sadly, "you are still trying to reason out the human being. Poor Andrew, don't be angry, but it's the robot in you that drives you in that direction."

  "I don't know," said Andrew. "If I could bring myself . . . "

  [Reprise]

  If he could bring himself . . .

  He had known for a long time it might come to that, and in the end he was at the surgeon's. He had found one, skillful enough for the job at hand-which meant a surgeon-robot, for no human surgeon could be trusted in this connection, either in ability or in intention. The surgeon could not have performed the operation on a human being, so Andrew, after putting off the moment of decision with a sad line of questioning that reflected the turmoil within himself, had put First Law to one side by saying "I, too, am a robot."

  He then said, as firmly as he had learned to form the words even at human beings over these past decades, "I order you to carry through the operation on me."

  In the absence of the First Law, an order so firmly given from one who looked so much like a man activated the Second Law sufficiently to carry the day.

  Andrew's feeling of weakness was, he was sure, quite imaginary. He had recovered from the operation. Nevertheless, he leaned, as unobtrusively as he could manage, against the wall. It would be entirely too revealing to sit.

  Li-hsing said, "The final vote will come this week, Andrew. I've been able to delay it no longer, and we must lose. And that will be it, Andrew."

  "I am grateful for your skill at delay. It gave me the time I needed, and I took the gamble I had to." "What gamble is this?" Li-hsing asked with open concern.

  "I couldn't tell you, or even the people at Feingold and Martin. I was sure I would be stopped. See here, if it is the brain that is at issue, isn't the greatest difference of all the matter of immortality. Who really cares what a brain looks like or is built of or how it was formed. What matters is that human brain cells die, must die. Even if every other organ in the body is maintained or replaced, the brain cells, which cannot be replaced without changing and therefore killing the personality, must eventually die.

  "My own positronic pathways have lasted nearly two centuries without perceptible change, and can last for centuries more. Isn't that the fundamental barrier: human beings can tolerate an immortal robot, for it doesn't matter how long a machine lasts, but they cannot tolerate an immortal human being since their own mortality is endurable only so long as it is universal. And for that reason they won't make me a human being."

  "What is it you're leading up to, Andrew?" Li-hsing asked.

  "I have removed that problem. Decades ago, my positronic brain was connected to organic nerves. Now, one last operation has arranged that connection in such a way that slowly-quite slowly-the potential is being drained from my pathways."

  Li-hsing's finely. wrinkled face showed no expression for a moment. Then her lips tightened. "Do you mean you've arranged to die, Andrew? You can't have. That violates the Third Law."

  "No,", said Andrew, "I have chosen between the death of my body and the death of my aspirations and desires. To have let my body live at the cost of the greater death is what would have violated the Third Law."

  Li-hsing seized his arm as though she were about to shake him. She stopped herself. "Andrew, it won't work! Change it back."

  "It can't be done. Too much damage was done. I have a year to live more or less. I will last through the two-hundredth anniversary of my construction. I was weak enough to arrange that."

  "How can it be worth it? Andrew, you're a fool."

  "If it brings me humanity, that will be worth it. If it doesn't, it will bring an end to striving and that will be worth it, too."

  Then Li-hsing did something that astonished herself. Quietly, she began to weep.

  It was odd how that last deed caught the imagination of the world. All that Andrew had done before had not swayed them. But he had finally accepted even death to be human, and the sacrifice was too great to be rejected.

  The final ceremony was timed, quite deliberately, for the two hundredth anniversary. The World President was to sign the act and make the people's will law. The ceremony would be visible on a global network and would be beamed to the Lunar state and even to the Martian colony.

  Andrew was in a wheelchair. He could still walk, but only shakily. With mankind watching, the World President said, "Fifty years ago, you were declared The Sesquicentennial Robot, Andrew." After a pause, and in a more solemn tone, he continued, "Today we declare you The Bicentennial Man, Mr. Martin."

  And Andrew, smiling, held out his hand to shake that of the President.

  Andrew's thoughts were slowly fading as he lay in bed. Desperately he seized at them. Man! He was a man!

  He wanted that to be his last thought. He wanted to dissolve-die with that.

  He opened his eyes one more time and for one last time recognized Li-hsing, waiting solemnly. Others were there, but they were only shadows, unrecognizable shadows. Only Li-hsing stood out against the deepening gray. Slowly, inchingly, he held out his hand to her and very dimly and faintly felt her take it.

  She was fading in his eyes as the last of his thoughts trickled away. But before she faded completely, one final fugitive thought came to him and rested for a moment on his mind before everything stopped.

  "Little Miss," he whispered, too low to be heard.

  RAY BRADBURY

  1920 – 2012

  Ray Bradbury is a beloved author whose career has touched on science fiction, fantasy, horror, and beyond, from classics such as The Martian Chronicles (1950) and Fahrenheit 451 (1951), to the screenplay for Moby Dick in 1956.

  Bradbury discovered science fiction fandom in the 1930s, publishing a fanzine, Futuria Fantasia, and eventually meeting Ray Harryhausen, Forrest J. Ackerman and Henry Kuttner. Bradbury made his first professional sale in 1941, and within two years his style began to coalesce: poetic, evocative, and consciously symbolic, it features stro
ng nostalgic and occasionally macabre elements.

  The Martian Chronicles (dramatized as a TV miniseries in 1980) earned Bradbury a fine reputation. Its closely interwoven stories, linked by recurrent images and themes, tell of the repeated attempts by humans to colonize Mars, of the way they bring their old prejudices with them, and of their repeated, ambiguous meetings with the shape-changing Martians. Despite the science fiction scenario, there is no hard technology. The mood is of loneliness and nostalgia, and a pensive regret suffuses the book.

  Based upon the success of the Chronicles, Bradbury found a new market for short stories in the "slicks," magazines such as Esquire, Saturday Evening Post, McCall's and Collier's Weekly. Of the more than 300 stories he published thereafter, only a handful originally appeared in science fiction magazines. This was one of the most significant breakthroughs into the general market made by any genre-science fiction writer.

  Bradbury followed Chronicles with his first novel, Fahrenheit 451(adapted for film by Francois Truffaut in 1966). A tale of a dystopian future in which books are burned because ideas are dangerous, it charts the painful spiritual growth of its renegade hero, a book-burning "fireman" and secret reader.

  Bradbury's prolific subsequent writing ranged from novels to poetry, from theater to screenplays. His work has appeared in well over 800 anthologies, and has continually inspired others, an example of which is the anthology of stories in Bradbury settings, The Bradbury Chronicles: Stories in Honor of Ray Bradbury(1991). He won the Nebula Grand Master Award in 1989.

  ***

  "A Sound of Thunder" is a science fiction short story by Ray Bradbury, first published in Collier's magazine in the June 28, 1952 issue and Playboy in June 1956. As of 1984 it was the most re-published science fiction story up to the present time. It is based on the idea of the butterfly effect (though the story predates that phrase).

  A Sound of Thunder, by Ray Bradbury

  By far one of the most singularly frightening of all stories ever written, Bradbury explores the idea that one tiny mistake which occurs on a prehistoric time travel hunting expedition can change the history of the entire world. The scope and sequence of the words and images are incomparable, and even though several movies have been made of this story, none of them have done justice to the fear generated by the written word. Begs to question science and inventions and the idea that this could really happen.

  The sign on the wall seemed to quaver under a film of sliding warm water. Eckels felt his eyelids blink over his stare, and the sign burned in this momentary darkness:

  TIME SAFARI, INC.

  SAFARIS TO ANY YEAR IN THE PAST.

  YOU NAME THE ANIMAL.

  WE TAKE YOU THERE.

  YOU SHOOT IT.

  Warm phlegm gathered in Eckels' throat; he swallowed and pushed it down. The muscles around his mouth formed a smile as he put his hand slowly out upon the air, and in that hand waved a check for ten thousand dollars to the man behind the desk.

  "Does this safari guarantee I come back alive?"

  "We guarantee nothing," said the official, "except the dinosaurs." He turned. "This is Mr. Travis, your Safari Guide in the Past. He'll tell you what and where to shoot. If he says no shooting, no shooting. If you disobey instructions, there's a stiff penalty of another ten thousand dollars, plus possible government action, on your return."

  Eckels glanced across the vast office at a mass and tangle, a snaking and humming of wires and steel boxes, at an aurora that flickered now orange, now silver, now blue. There was a sound like a gigantic bonfire burning all of Time, all the years and all the parchment calendars, all the hours piled high and set aflame.

  A touch of the hand and this burning would, on the instant, beautifully reverse itself. Eckels remembered the wording in the advertisements to the letter. Out of chars and ashes, out of dust and coals, like golden salamanders, the old years, the green years, might leap; roses sweeten the air, white hair turn Irish-black, wrinkles vanish; all, everything fly back to seed, flee death, rush down to their beginnings, suns rise in western skies and set in glorious easts, moons eat themselves opposite to the custom, all and everything cupping one in another like Chinese boxes, rabbits into hats, all and everything returning to the fresh death, the seed death, the green death, to the time before the beginning. A touch of a hand might do it, the merest touch of a hand.

  "Unbelievable." Eckels breathed, the light of the Machine on his thin face. "A real Time Machine." He shook his head. "Makes you think, If the election had gone badly yesterday, I might be here now running away from the results. Thank God Keith won. He'll make a fine President of the United States."

  "Yes," said the man behind the desk. "We're lucky. If Deutscher had gotten in, we'd have the worst kind of dictatorship. There's an anti everything man for you, a militarist, anti-Christ, anti-human, anti-intellectual. People called us up, you know, joking but not joking. Said if Deutscher became President they wanted to go live in 1492. Of course it's not our business to conduct Escapes, but to form Safaris. Anyway, Keith's President now. All you got to worry about is-"

  "Shooting my dinosaur," Eckels finished it for him.

  "A Tyrannosaurus Rex. The Tyrant Lizard, the most incredible monster in history. Sign this release. Anything happens to you, we're not responsible. Those dinosaurs are hungry."

  Eckels flushed angrily. "Trying to scare me!"

  "Frankly, yes. We don't want anyone going who'll panic at the first shot. Six Safari leaders were killed last year, and a dozen hunters. We're here to give you the severest thrill a real hunter ever asked for. Traveling you back sixty million years to bag the biggest game in all of Time. Your personal check's still there. Tear it up."Mr. Eckels looked at the check. His fingers twitched.

  "Good luck," said the man behind the desk. "Mr. Travis, he's all yours."

  They moved silently across the room, taking their guns with them, toward the Machine, toward the silver metal and the roaring light.

  First a day and then a night and then a day and then a night, then it was day-night-day-night. A week, a month, a year, a decade! A.D. 2055. A.D. 2019. 1999! 1957! Gone! The Machine roared.

  They put on their oxygen helmets and tested the intercoms.

  Eckels swayed on the padded seat, his face pale, his jaw stiff. He felt the trembling in his arms and he looked down and found his hands tight on the new rifle. There were four other men in the Machine. Travis, the Safari Leader, his assistant, Lesperance, and two other hunters, Billings and Kramer. They sat looking at each other, and the years blazed around them.

  "Can these guns get a dinosaur cold?" Eckels felt his mouth saying.

  "If you hit them right," said Travis on the helmet radio. "Some dinosaurs have two brains, one in the head, another far down the spinal column. We stay away from those. That's stretching luck. Put your first two shots into the eyes, if you can, blind them, and go back into the brain."

  The Machine howled. Time was a film run backward. Suns fled and ten million moons fled after them. "Think," said Eckels. "Every hunter that ever lived would envy us today. This makes Africa seem like Illinois."

  The Machine slowed; its scream fell to a murmur. The Machine stopped.

  The sun stopped in the sky.

  The fog that had enveloped the Machine blew away and they were in an old time, a very old time indeed, three hunters and two Safari Heads with their blue metal guns across their knees.

  "Christ isn't born yet," said Travis, "Moses has not gone to the mountains to talk with God. The Pyramids are still in the earth, waiting to be cut out and put up. Remember that. Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler-none of them exists." The man nodded.

  "That" - Mr. Travis pointed - "is the jungle of sixty million two thousand and fifty-five years before President Keith."

  He indicated a metal path that struck off into green wilderness, over streaming swamp, among giant ferns and palms.

  "And that," he said, "is the Path, laid by Time Safari for your use,

  It floats si
x inches above the earth. Doesn't touch so much as one grass blade, flower, or tree. It's an anti-gravity metal. Its purpose is to keep you from touching this world of the past in any way. Stay on the Path. Don't go off it. I repeat. Don't go off. For any reason! If you fall off, there's a penalty. And don't shoot any animal we don't okay."

  "Why?" asked Eckels.

  They sat in the ancient wilderness. Far birds' cries blew on a wind, and the smell of tar and an old salt sea, moist grasses, and flowers the color of blood.

  "We don't want to change the Future. We don't belong here in the Past. The government doesn't like us here. We have to pay big graft to keep our franchise. A Time Machine is finicky business. Not knowing it, we might kill an important animal, a small bird, a roach, a flower even, thus destroying an important link in a growing species."

  "That's not clear," said Eckels.

  "All right," Travis continued, "say we accidentally kill one mouse here. That means all the future families of this one particular mouse are destroyed, right?"

  "Right"

  "And all the families of the families of the families of that one mouse! With a stamp of your foot, you annihilate first one, then a dozen, then a thousand, a million, a billion possible mice!"

  "So they're dead," said Eckels. "So what?"

  "So what?" Travis snorted quietly. "Well, what about the foxes that'll need those mice to survive? For want of ten mice, a fox dies. For want of ten foxes a lion starves. For want of a lion, all manner of insects, vultures, infinite billions of life forms are thrown into chaos and destruction. Eventually it all boils down to this: fifty-nine million years later, a caveman, one of a dozen on the entire world, goes hunting wild boar or saber-toothed tiger for food. But you, friend, have stepped on all the tigers in that region. By stepping on one single mouse. So the caveman starves. And the caveman, please note, is not just any expendable man, no! He is an entire future nation. From his loins would have sprung ten sons. From their loins one hundred sons, and thus onward to a civilization. Destroy this one man, and you destroy a race, a people, an entire history of life. It is comparable to slaying some of Adam's grandchildren. The stomp of your foot, on one mouse, could start an earthquake, the effects of which could shake our earth and destinies down through Time, to their very foundations. With the death of that one caveman, a billion others yet unborn are throttled in the womb. Perhaps Rome never rises on its seven hills. Perhaps Europe is forever a dark forest, and only Asia waxes healthy and teeming. Step on a mouse and you crush the Pyramids. Step on a mouse and you leave your print, like a Grand Canyon, across Eternity. Queen Elizabeth might never be born, Washington might not cross the Delaware, there might never be a United States at all. So be careful. Stay on the Path. Never step off!"