Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume One

by Short Story Anthology

  But at least, he thought, I still have my dignity. With dignity he set down his drink glass, turned, walked toward the doors of the room. He passed through the doors. He walked down a long carpeted hall. A villa servant dressed in purple opened a door for him; he found himself standing out in the night darkness, on a veranda, alone.

  Not alone.

  It had followed after him. Or it had already been here before him; yes, it had been expecting. It was not really through with him.

  "Here I go," he said, and made a dive for the railing; it was six stories down, and there below gleamed the river and death, not what the Arabic poem had seen.

  As he tumbled over, it put an extension of itself on his shoulder.

  "Why?" he said. But, in fact, he paused. Wondering. Not understanding, not at all.

  "Don't fall on my account," it said. He could not see it because it had moved behind him. But the piece of it on his shoulder -- it had begun to look like a human hand. And then it laughed.

  "What's funny?" he demanded, as he teetered on the railing, held back by its pseudo-hand.

  "You're doing my task for me," it said. "You aren't waiting; don't have time to wait? I'll select you out from among the others; you don't need to speed the process up."

  "What if I do?" he said. "Out of revulsion for you?"

  It laughed. And didn't answer.

  "You won't even say," he said.

  Again no answer. He started to slide back, onto the veranda. And at once the pressure of its pseudo-hand lifted.

  "You founded the Party?" he asked.

  "I founded everything. I founded the anti-Party and the Party that isn't a Party, and those who are for it and those who are against, those that you call Yankee Imperialists, those in the camp of reaction, and so on endlessly. I founded it all. As if they were blades of grass."

  "And you're here to enjoy it?" he said.

  "What I want," it said, "is for you to see me, as I am, as you have seen me, and then trust me."

  "What?" he said, quavering. "Trust you to what?"

  It said, "Do you believe in me?"

  "Yes," he said. "I can see you."

  "Then go back to your job at the Ministry. Tell Tanya Lee that you saw an overworked, overweight, elderly man who drinks too much and likes to pinch girls' rear ends."

  "Oh, Christ," he said.

  "As you live on, unable to stop, I will torment you," it said. "I will deprive you, item by item, of everything you possess or want. And then when you are crushed to death I will unfold a mystery."

  "What's the mystery?"

  "The dead shall live, the living die. I kill what lives; I save what has died. And I will tell you this: there are things worse than I. But you won't meet them because by then I will have killed you. Now walk back into the dining room and prepare for dinner. Don't question what I'm doing; I did it long before there was a Tung Chien and I will do it long after."

  He hit it as hard as he could.

  And experienced violent pain in his head.

  And darkness, with the sense of falling.

  After that, darkness again. He thought, I will get you. I will see that you die too. That you suffer; you're going to suffer, just like us, exactly in every way we do. I'll nail you; I swear to God I'll nail you up somewhere. And it will hurt. As much as I hurt now.

  He shut his eyes.

  Roughly, he was shaken. And heard Mr. Kimo Okubara's voice. "Get to your feet, common drunk. Come on!"

  Without opening his eyes he said, "Get me a cab."

  "Cab already waiting. You go home. Disgrace. Make a violent scene out of yourself."

  Getting shakily to his feet, he opened his eyes and examined himself. Our leader whom we follow, he thought, is the One True God. And the enemy whom we fight and have fought is God too. They are right; he is everywhere. But I didn't understand what that meant. Staring at the protocol officer, he thought, You are God too. So there is no getting away, probably not even by jumping. As I started, instinctively, to do. He shuddered.

  "Mix drinks with drugs," Okubara said witheringly. "Ruin career. I see it happen many times. Get lost."

  Unsteadily, he walked toward the great central door of the Yangtze River villa; two servants, dressed like medieval knights, with crested plumes, ceremoniously opened the door for him and one of them said, "Good night, sir."

  "Up yours," Chien said, and passed out into the night.

  At a quarter to three in the morning, as he sat sleepless in the living room of his conapt, smoking one Cuesta Rey Astoria after another, a knock sounded at the door.

  When he opened it he found himself facing Tanya Lee in her trenchcoat, her face pinched with cold. Her eyes blazed, questioningly.

  "Don't look at me like that," he said roughly. His cigar had gone out; he relit it. "I've been looked at enough," he said.

  "You saw it," she said.

  He nodded.

  She seated herself on the arm of the couch and after a time she said, "Want to tell me about it?"

  "Go as far from here as possible," he said. "Go a long way." And then he remembered: no way was long enough. He remembered reading that too. "Forget it," he said; rising to his feet, he walked clumsily into the kitchen to start up the coffee.

  Following after him, Tanya said, "Was -- it that bad?"

  "We can't win," he said. "You can't win; I don't mean me. I'm not in this; I just wanted to do my job at the Ministry and forget it. Forget the whole damned thing."

  "Is it non-terrestrial?"

  "Yes." He nodded.

  "Is it hostile to us?"

  "Yes," he said. "No. Both. Mostly hostile."

  "Then we have to --"

  "Go home," he said, "and go to bed." He looked her over carefully; he had sat a long time and he had done a great deal of thinking. About a lot of things. "Are you married?" he said.

  "No. Not now. I used to be."

  He said, "Stay with me tonight. The rest of tonight, anyhow. Until the sun comes up." He added, "The night part is awful."

  "I'll stay," Tanya said, unbuckling the belt of her raincoat, "but I have to have some answers."

  "What did Dryden mean," Chien said, "about music untuning the sky? I don't get that. What does music do to the sky?"

  "All the celestial order of the universe ends," she said as she hung her raincoat up in the closet of the bedroom; under it she wore an orange striped sweater and stretch-pants.

  He said, "And that's bad?"

  Pausing, she reflected. "I don't know. I guess so."

  "It's a lot of power," he said, "to assign to music."

  "Well, you know that old Pythagorean business about the 'music of the spheres.' " Matter-of-factly she seated herself on the bed and removed her slipperlike shoes.

  "Do you believe in that?" he said. "Or do you believe in God?"

  " 'God'!" She laughed. "That went out with the donkey steam engine. What are you talking about? God, or god?" She came over close beside him, peering into his face.

  "Don't look at me so closely," he said sharply drawing back. "I don't ever want to be looked at again." He moved away, irritably.

  "I think," Tanya said, "that if there is a God He has very little interest in human affairs. That's my theory, anyhow. I mean, He doesn't seem to care if evil triumphs or people or animals get hurt and die. I frankly don't see Him anywhere around. And the Party has always denied any form of --"

  "Did you ever see Him?" he asked. "When you were a child?"

  "Oh, sure, as a child. But I also believed --"

  "Did it ever occur to you," Chien said, "that good and evil are names for the same thing? That God could be both good and evil at the same time?"

  "I'll fix you a drink," Tanya said, and padded barefoot into the kitchen.

  Chien said, "The Crusher. The Clanker. The Gulper and the Bird and the Climbing Tube -- plus other names, forms, I don't know. I had a hallucination. At the stag dinner. A big one. A terrible one."

  "But the stelazine --"

 
"It brought on a worse one," he said.

  "Is there any way," Tanya said somberly, "that we can fight this thing you saw? This apparition you call a hallucination but which very obviously was not?"

  He said, "Believe in it."

  "What will that do?"

  "Nothing," he said wearily. "Nothing at all. I'm tired; I don't want a drink -- let's just go to bed."

  "Okay." She padded back into the bedroom, began pulling her striped sweater over her head. "We'll discuss it more thoroughly later."

  "A hallucination," Chien said, "is merciful. I wish I had it; I want mine back. I want to be before your peddler got me with that phenothiazine."

  "Just come to bed. It'll be toasty. All warm and nice."

  He removed his tie, his shirt -- and saw, on his right shoulder, the mark, the stigma, which it had left when it stopped him from jumping. Livid marks which looked as if they would never go away. He put his pajama top on then; it hid the marks.

  "Anyhow," Tanya said as he got into the bed beside her, "your career is immeasurably advanced. Aren't you glad about that?"

  "Sure," he said, nodding sightlessly in the darkness. "Very glad."

  "Come over against me," Tanya said, putting her arms around him. "And forget everything else. At least for now."

  He tugged her against him then, doing what she asked and what he wanted to do. She was neat; she was swiftly active; she was successful and she did her part. They did not bother to speak until at last she said, "Oh!" And then she relaxed.

  "I wish," he said, "that we could go on forever."

  "We did," Tanya said. "It's outside of time; it's boundless, like an ocean. It's the way we were in Cambrian times, before we migrated up onto the land; it's the ancient primary waters. This is the only time we get to go back, when this is done. That's why it means so much. And in those days we weren't separate; it was like a big jelly, like those blobs that float up on the beach."

  "Float up," he said, "and are left there to die."

  "Could you get me a towel?" Tanya asked. "Or a washcloth? I need it."

  He padded into the bathroom for a towel. There -- he was naked now -- he once more saw his shoulder, saw where it had seized hold of him and held on, dragged him back, possibly to toy with him a little more.

  The marks, unaccountably, were bleeding.

  He sponged the blood away. More oozed forth at once and, seeing that, he wondered how much time he had left. Probably only hours.

  Returning to bed, he said, "Could you continue?"

  "Sure. If you have any energy left; it's up to you." She lay gazing up at him unwinkingly, barely visible in the dim nocturnal light.

  "I have," he said. And hugged her to him.

  A Little Something for Us Tempunauts, by Philip K. Dick

  Wearily, Addison Doug plodded up the long path of synthetic redwood rounds, step by step, his head down a little, moving as if he were in actual physical pain. The girl watched him, wanting to help him, hurt within her to see how worn and unhappy he was, but at the same time she rejoiced that he was there at all. On and on, toward her, without glancing up, going by feel. . . like he's done this many times, she thought suddenly. Knows the way too well. Why?

  "Addi," she called, and ran toward him. "They said on the TV you were dead. All of you were killed!"

  He paused, wiping back his dark hair, which was no longer long; just before the launch they had cropped it. But he had evidently forgotten. "You believe everything you see on TV?" he said, and came on again, haltingly, but smiling now. And reaching up for her.

  God, it felt good to hold him, and to have him clutch at her again, with more strength than she had expected. "I was going to find somebody else," she gasped. "To replace you."

  "I'll knock your head off if you do," he said. "Anyhow, that isn't possible; nobody could replace me."

  "But what about the implosion?" she said. "On reentry; they said --"

  "I forget," Addison said, in the tone he used when he meant, I'm not going to discuss it. The tone had always angered her before, but not now. This time she sensed how awful the memory was. "I'm going to stay at your place a couple of days," he said, as together they moved up the path toward the open front door of the tilted A-frame house. "If that's okay. And Benz and Crayne will be joining me, later on; maybe even as soon as tonight. We've got a lot to talk over and figure out."

  "Then all three of you survived." She gazed up into his careworn face. "Everything they said on TV. . ." She understood, then. Or believed she did. "It was a cover story. For -- political purposes, to fool the Russians. Right? I mean, the Soviet Union'll think the launch was a failure because on reentry --"

  "No," he said. "A chrononaut will be joining us, most likely. To help figure out what happened. General Toad said one of them is already on his way here; they got clearance already. Because of the gravity of the situation."

  "Jesus," the girl said, stricken. "Then who's the cover story for?"

  "Let's have something to drink," Addison said. "And then I'll outline it all for you."

  "Only thing I've got at the moment is California brandy."

  Addison Doug said, "I'd drink anything right now, the way I feel." He dropped to the couch, leaned back, and sighed a ragged, distressed sigh, as the girl hurriedly began fixing both of them a drink.

  The FM-radio in the car yammered, ". . . grieves at the stricken turn of events precipitating out of an unheralded. . ."

  "Official nonsense babble," Crayne said, shutting off the radio. He and Benz were having trouble finding the house, having been there only once before. It struck Crayne that this was somewhat informal a way of convening a conference of this importance, meeting at Addison's chick's pad out here in the boondocks of Ojai. On the other hand, they wouldn't be pestered by the curious. And they probably didn't have much time. But that was hard to say; about that no one knew for sure.

  The hills on both sides of the road had once been forests, Crayne observed. Now housing tracts and their melted, irregular, plastic roads marred every rise in sight. "I'll bet this was nice once," he said to Benz, who was driving.

  "The Los Padres National Forest is near here," Benz said. "I got lost in there when I was eight. For hours I was sure a rattler would get me. Every stick was a snake."

  "The rattler's got you now," Crayne said.

  "All of us," Benz said.

  "You know," Crayne said, "it's a hell of an experience to be dead."

  "Speak for yourself."

  "But technically --"

  "If you listen to the radio and TV." Benz turned toward him, his big gnome face bleak with admonishing sternness. "We're no more dead than anyone else on the planet. The difference for us is that our death date is in the past, whereas everyone else's is set somewhere at an uncertain time in the future. Actually, some people have it pretty damn well set, like people in cancer wards; they're as certain as we are. More so. For example, how long can we stay here before we go back? We have a margin, a latitude that a terminal cancer victim doesn't have."

  Crayne said cheerfully, "The next thing you'll be telling us to cheer us up is that we're in no pain."

  "Addi is. I watched him lurch off earlier today. He's got it psychosomatically -- made it into a physical complaint. Like God's kneeling on his neck; you know, carrying a much-too-great burden that's unfair, only he won't complain out loud. . . just points now and then at the nail hole in his hand." He grinned.

  "Addi has got more to live for than we do."

  "Every man has more to live for than any other man. I don't have a cute chick to sleep with, but I'd like to see the semis rolling along Riverside Freeway at sunset a few more times. It's not what you have to live for; it's that you want to live to see it, to be there -- that's what is so damn sad."

  They rode on in silence.

  In the quiet living room of the girl's house the three tempunauts sat around smoking, taking it easy; Addison Doug thought to himself that the girl looked unusually foxy and desirable in her stretched-tigh
t white sweater and micro-skirt and he wished, wistfully, that she looked a little less interesting. He could not really afford to get embroiled in such stuff, at this point. He was too tired.

  "Does she know," Benz said, indicating the girl, "what this is all about? I mean, can we talk openly? It won't wipe her out?"

  "I haven't explained it to her yet," Addison said.

  "You goddam well better," Crayne said.

  "What is it?" the girl said, stricken, sitting upright with one hand directly between her breasts. As if clutching at a religious artifact that isn't there, Addison thought.

  "We got snuffed on reentry," Benz said. He was, really, the crudest of the three. Or at least the most blunt. "You see, Miss. . ."

  "Hawkins," the girl whispered.

  "Glad to meet you, Miss Hawkins." Benz surveyed her in his cold, lazy fashion. "You have a first name?"

  "Merry Lou."

  "Okay, Merry Lou," Benz said. To the other two men he observed, "Sounds like the name a waitress has stitched on her blouse. Merry Lou's my name and I'll be serving you dinner and breakfast and lunch and dinner and breakfast for the next few days or however long it is before you all give up and go back to your own time; that'll be fifty-three dollars and eight cents, please, not including tip And I hope y'all never come back, y'hear?" He voice had begun to shake; his cigarette, too. "Sorry, Miss Hawkins," he said then. "We're all screwed up by the implosion at reentry. As soon as we got here in ETA we learned about it. We've known longer than anyone else; we knew as soon as we hit Emergence Time."