Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume One

by Short Story Anthology

  “Something did.”

  “What? I don't believe it. We'd remember.”

  “Do you remember the first moon landing? Aldrin and Armstrong?”

  “Of course. We watched it at Earl's Lunar Landing Party.”

  “They landed on the biggest, flattest place they could find on the moon. They sent back several hours of jumpy home movies, took a lot of very clear pictures, left corrugated footprints all over the place. And they came home with a bunch of rocks.

  “Remember? People said it was a long way to go for rocks. But the first thing anyone noticed about those rocks was that they were half melted.

  “Sometime in the past, oh, say the past hundred thousand years; there's no way of marking it closer than that—the sun flared up. It didn't stay hot enough long enough to leave any marks on the Earth. But the moon doesn't have an atmosphere to protect it. All the rocks melted on one side.”

  The air was warm and damp. I took off my coat, which was heavy with rainwater. I fished the cigarettes and matches out, lit a cigarette and exhaled past Leslie's ear.

  “We'd remember. It couldn't have been this bad.”

  “I'm not so sure. Suppose it happened over the Pacific? It wouldn't do that much damage. Or over the American continents. It would have sterilized some plants and animals and burned down a lot of forests, and who'd know? The sun is a four percent variable star. Maybe it gets a touch more variable than that, every so often.”

  Something shattered in the bedroom. A window? A wet wind touched us, and the shriek of the storm was louder.

  “Then we could live through this,” Leslie said hesitantly.

  “I believe you've put your finger on the crux of the matter. Skol!” I found my champagne and drank deep. It was past three in the morning, with a hurricane beating at our doors.

  “Then shouldn't we be doing something about it?”

  “We are.”

  “Something like trying to get up into the hills! Stan, there're going to be floods!”

  “You bet your ass there are, but they won't rise this high. Fourteen stories. Listen, I've thought this through. We're in a building that was designed to be earthquake proof. You told me so yourself. It'd take more than a hurricane to knock it over.

  “As for heading for the hills, what hills? We won't get far tonight, not with the streets flooded already. Suppose we could get up into the Santa Monica Mountains; then what? Mudslides, that's what. That area won't stand up to what's coming. The flare must have boiled away enough water to make another ocean. It's going to rain for forty days and forty nights! Love, this is the safest place we could have reached tonight.”

  “Suppose the polar caps melt?”

  “Yeah ... well, we're pretty high, even for that. Hey, maybe that last flare was what started Noah's Flood. Maybe it's happening again. Sure as hell, there's not a place on Earth that isn't the middle of a hurricane. Those two great counter-rotating hurricanes, by now they must have broken up into hundreds of little storms—”

  The glass doors exploded inward. We ducked, and the wind howled about us and dropped rain and glass on us.

  “At least we've got food!” I shouted. “If the floods maroon us here, we can last it out!”

  “But if the power goes, we can't cook it! And the refrigerator—”

  “We'll cook everything we can. Hard boil all the eggs—”

  The wind rose about us. I stopped trying to talk.

  Warm rain sprayed us horizontally and left us soaked. Try to cook in a hurricane? I'd been stupid; I'd waited too long. The wind would tip boiling water on us if we tried it. Or hot grease—

  Leslie screamed, “We'll have to use the oven!”

  Of course. The oven couldn't possibly fall on us.

  We set it for 400 degrees and put the eggs in, in a pot of water. We took all the meat out of the meat drawer and shoved it on a broiling pan. Two artichokes in another pot. The other vegetables we could eat raw.

  What else? I tried to think.

  Water. If the electricity went, probably the water and telephone lines would too. I turned on the faucet over the sink and started filling things: pots with lids, Leslie's thirty-cup percolator that she used for parties, her wash bucket. She clearly thought I was crazy, but I didn't trust the rain as a water source; I couldn't control it.

  The sound. Already we'd stopped trying to shout through it. Forty days and nights of this and we'd be stone deaf. Cotton? Too late to reach the bathroom. Paper towels! I tore and wadded and made four plugs for our ears.

  Sanitary facilities? Another reason for picking Leslie place over mine. When the plumbing stopped, there was always the balcony.

  And if the flood rose higher than the fourteenth floor, there was the roof. Twenty stories up. If it went higher than that, there would be damned few people left when it was over.

  And if it was a nova?

  I held Leslie a bit more closely, and lit another cigarette one-handed. All the wasted planning, if it was a nova. But I'd have been doing it anyway. You don't stop planning just because there's no hope.

  And when the hurricane turned to live steam, there was always the balcony. At a dead run, and over the railing, in preference to being boiled alive.

  But now was not the time to mention it.

  Anyway, she'd probably thought of it herself.

  * * * *

  The lights went out about four. I turned off the oven, in case the power should come back. Give it an hour to cool down, then I'd put all the food in Baggies.

  Leslie was asleep, sitting up in my arms. How could she sleep, not knowing? I piled pillows behind her and let her back easy.

  For some time, I lay on my back, smoking, watching the lightning make shadows on the ceiling. We had eaten all the foie gras and drunk one bottle of champagne. I thought of opening the brandy, but decided against it, with regret.

  A long time passed. I'm not sure what I thought about. I didn't sleep, but certainly my mind was in idle. It only gradually came to me that the ceiling, between lightning flashes, had turned gray.

  I rolled over, gingerly, soggily. Everything was wet.

  My watch said it was nine-thirty.

  I crawled around the partition into the living room. I'd been ignoring the storm sounds for so long that it took a faceful of warm whipping rain to remind me. There was a hurricane going on. But charcoal-gray light was filtering through the black clouds.

  So. I was right to have saved the brandy. Floods, storms, intense radiation, fires lit by the flare—if the toll of destruction was as high as I expected, then money was about to become worthless. We would need trade goods.

  I was hungry. I ate two eggs and some bacon—still warm—and started putting the rest of the food away. We had food for a week, maybe ... but hardly a balanced diet. Maybe we could trade with other apartments. This was a big building. There must be empty apartments, too, that we could raid for canned soup and the like. And refugees from the lower doors to be taken care of, if the waters rose high enough...

  Damn! I missed the nova. Life had been simplicity itself last night. Now ... Did we have medicines? Were there doctors in the building? There would be dysentery and other plagues. And hunger. There was a supermarket near here; could we find a scuba rig in the building?

  But I'd get some sleep first. Later we could start exploring the building. The day had become a lighter charcoal-gray. Things could be worse, far worse. I thought of the radiation that must have sleeted over the far side of the world, and wondered if our children would colonize Europe, or Asia, or Africa.

  MICHAEL MOORCOCK

  b. 1939

  Michael Moorcock has been a pioneering science fiction author and editor for decades. He began contributing to fanzines in the 1950s, and after leaving school was professionally publishing in commercial heroic fantasy magazines. His first science fiction novel was The Sundered Worlds (1965), a metaphysical space opera which introduced his recurring concept of the "multiverse," a universe in which multiple parallel w
orlds co-exist and intersect. Also introduced was the figure of the Eternal Champion, who would appear in various manifestations in much of Moorcock's future work, helping tie it together into one enormous series.

  Moorcock's Elric stories, with the melancholy albino hero Elric of Melnibone and his supernatural chaos-inducing sword Stormbringer, were published intermittently beginning in 1965 and constitute Moorcock's first consequential work. In contrast, the protagonist of the Jerry Cornelius series, also begun in 1965, was a portmanteau antihero painted initially in the pop colors of 1960s "Swinging London." Elric turned inside out, Cornelius was an anarchic streetwise urban ragamuffin with James Bond gear, and amorally deft at manipulating everything from women to the multiverse itself.

  In the 1960s Moorcock became editor of New Worlds magazine. For some time he had bemoaned the dearth of literate and humane science fiction and fantasy, and he now began to publish works from authors such as Brian W. Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany and Norman Spinrad. Their works were soon identified as comprising a "New Wave" in the genre.

  Among Moorcock's noteworthy science fiction work thereafter is the Karl Glogauer series, which includes the Nebula award-winning Behold the Man (1969), the Oswald Bastable books (1971-81) and the far-future Dancers at the End of Time series (1972-89). What may be his finest single novel, Mother London(1988), centrally features the city with which he has been obsessed from his early, vivid memories of World War II bombing.

  Moorcock continues even today to simultaneously exploit and dramatically expand the typical topics and settings of science fiction.

  A Slow Saturday Night at the Surrealist Sporting Club, by Michael Moorcock

  Being a Further Account of Engelbrecht the Boxing Dwarf and His Fellow Members

  I happened to be sitting in the snug of the Strangers' Bar at the Surrealist Sporting Club on a rainy Saturday night, enjoying a well-mixed Existential Fizz (2 parts Vortex Water to 1 part Sweet Gin) and desperate to meet a diverting visitor, when Death slipped unostentatiously into the big chair opposite, warming his bones at the fire and remarking on the unseasonable weather. There was sure to be a lot of flu about. It made you hate to get the tube but the buses were worse and had I seen what cabs were charging these days? He began to drone on as usual about the ozone layer and the melting pole, how we were poisoning ourselves on GM foods and feeding cows to cows and getting all that pollution and cigarette smoke in our lungs and those other gloomy topics he seems to relish, which I suppose makes you appreciate it when he puts you out of your misery.

  I had to choose between nodding off or changing the subject. The evening being what it was, I made the effort and changed the subject. Or at least, had a stab at it.

  "So what's new?" It was feeble, I admit. But, as it happened, it stopped him in midmoan.

  "Thanks for reminding me," he said, and glanced at one of his many watches. "God's dropping in-oh, in about twelve minutes, twenty-five seconds. He doesn't have a lot of time, but if you've any questions to ask him, I suggest you canvass the other members present and think up some good ones in a hurry. And he's not very fond of jokers, if you know what I mean. So stick to substantial questions or he won't be pleased."

  "I thought he usually sent seraphim ahead for this sort of visit?" I queried mildly. "Are you all having to double up or something? Is it overpopulation?" I didn't like this drift, either. It suggested a finite universe, for a start.

  Our Ever-Present Friend rose smoothly. He looked around the room with a distressed sigh, as if suspecting the whole structure to be infected with dry rot and carpenter ants. He couldn't as much as produce a grim brotherly smile for the deathwatch beetle that had come out especially to greet him. "Well, once more into the breach. Have you noticed what it's like out there? Worst on record, they say. Mind you, they don't remember the megalithic. Those were the days, eh? See you later." "Be sure of it." I knew a moment of existential angst. Sensitively, Death hesitated, seemed about to apologize, then thought better of it. He shrugged. "See you in a minute," he said. "I've got to look out for God in the foyer and sign him in. You know." He had the air of one who had given up worrying about minor embarrassments and was sticking to the protocol, come hell or high water. He was certainly more laconic than he had been. I wondered if the extra work, and doubling as a seraph, had changed his character.

  With Death gone, the Strangers' was warming up rapidly again, and I enjoyed a quiet moment with my fizz before rising to amble through the usual warped and shrieking corridors to the Members' Bar, which appeared empty.

  "Are you thinking of dinner?" Lizard Bayliss, looking like an undis-infected dishrag, strolled over from where he had been hanging up his obnoxious cape. Never far behind, out of the WC, bustled Englebrecht the Dwarf Clock Boxer, who had gone ten rounds with the Greenwich Atom before that overrefined chronometer went down to an iffy punch in the eleventh. His great, mad eyes flashed from under a simian hedge of eyebrow. As usual he wore a three-piece suit a size too small for him, in the belief it made him seem taller. He was effing and blinding about some imagined insult offered by the taxi driver who had brought them back from the not altogether successful Endangered Sea Monsters angling contest in which, I was to learn later, Engelbrecht had caught his hook in a tangle of timeweed and wound up dragging down the Titanic, which explained that mystery. Mind you, he still had to come clean about the R101. There was some feeling in the club concerning the airship, since he'd clearly taken bets against himself. Challenged, he'd muttered some conventional nonsense about the Maelstrom and the Inner World, but we'd heard that one too often to be convinced. He also resented our recent rule limiting all aerial angling to firedrakes and larger species of pterodactyls.

  Lizard Bayliss had oddly colored bags under his eyes, giving an even more downcast appearance to his normally dissolute features. He was a little drained from dragging the Dwarf in by his collar. It appeared that, seeing the big rods, the driver had asked Bayliss if that was his bait on the seat beside him. The irony was, of course, that the Dwarf had been known to use himself as bait more than once, and there was still some argument over interpretation of the rules in that area, too. The Dwarf had taken the cabbie's remark to be specific not because of his dimuni-tive stockiness, but because of his sensitivity over the rules issue. He stood to lose a few months, even years, if they reversed the result.

  He was still spitting on about "nitpicking fascist anoraks with severe anal-retention problems" when I raised my glass and yelled: "If you've an important question for God, you'd better work out how to phrase it. He's due in any second now. And he's only got a few minutes. At the Strangers' Bar. We could invite him in here, but that would involve a lot of time-consuming ritual and so forth. Any objection to meeting him back there?"

  The Dwarf wasn't sure he had anything to say that wouldn't get taken the wrong way. Then, noticing how low the fire was, opined that the Strangers' was bound to offer better hospitality. "I can face my maker any time," he pointed out, "but I'd rather do it with a substantial drink in my hand and a good blaze warming my bum." He seemed unusually oblivious to any symbolism, given that the air was writhing with it. I think the Titanic was still on his mind. He was trying to work out how to get his hook back.

  By the time we had collected up Oneway Ballard and Taffy Sinclair from the dining room and returned to the Strangers', God had already arrived. Any plans the Dwarf had instantly went out the window, because God was standing with his back to the fire, blocking everyone's heat. With a word to Taffy not to overtax the Lord of Creation, Death hurried off on some urgent business and disappeared back through the swing doors.

  "I am thy One True God," said Jehovah, making the glasses and bottles rattle. He cleared his throat and dropped his tone to what must for him have been a whisper. But it was unnatural, almost false, like a TV presenter trying to express concern while keeping full attention on the autoprompt. Still, there was something totally convincing about God as a presence. You knew you were in his aura, and you knew yo
u had Grace, even if you weren't too impressed by his stereotypical form. God added: "I am Jehovah, the Almighty. Ask of me what ye will."

  Lizard knew sudden inspiration. "Do you plan to send Jesus back to Earth, and have you any thoughts about the 2:30 at Aintree tomorrow?"

  "He is back," said God, "and I wouldn't touch those races, these days.

  Believe me, they're all bent, one way or another. If you like the horses, do the National. . . . Take a chance. Have a gamble. It's anybody's race, the National."

  "But being omniscent," said Lizard slowly, "wouldn't you know the outcome anyway?"

  "If I stuck by all the rules of omniscience, it wouldn't exactly be sporting, would it?" God was staring over at the bar, checking out the Corona-Coronas and the melting marine chronometer above them.

  "You don't think it's hard on the horses?" asked Jillian Burnes, the transexual novelist, who could be relied upon for a touch of compassion. Being almost seven feet tall in her spike heels, she was also useful for getting books down from the higher shelves and sorting out those bottles at the top of the bar that looked so temptingly dangerous.

  "Bugger the horses," said God, "it's the race that counts. And anyway, the horses love it. They love it."

  I was a little puzzled. "I thought we had to ask only substantial questions?"

  "That's right?" God drew his mighty brows together in inquiry.

  I fell into an untypical silence. I was experiencing a mild revelation concerning the head of the Church of England and her own favorite pasatiempi, but it seemed inappropriate to run with it at that moment.

  "What I'd like to know is," said Engelbrecht, cutting suddenly to the chase, "who gets into Heaven and why?"

  There was a bit of a pause in the air, as if everyone felt perhaps he'd pushed the boat out a little too far, but God was nodding. "Fair question," he said. "Well, it's cats, then dogs, but there's quite a few human beings, really. But mostly it's pets."