The Year's Best Science Fiction 11 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  I kept on that way. The great igneous bubbles were almost uniform. I always took the highest exit. Once I got inside a bubble with no exit and had to backtrack. After that I scanned first. I kept my searchlight on.

  I’d gone through seven or seventeen bubbles before I could start to think about what had happened.

  That spider had almost certainly not been my crusoe— or else there was a troop of them dragging a rifle like an artillery piece. And it hadn’t likely been an hitherto-unknown, theoretically impossible, live vacuum-arthropod—or else the exotic biologists were in for a great surprise and I’d been right to wet my pants. No, it had most likely been a tracking or tracking-and-attack robot of some sort. Eight legs are a useful number, likewise eight hands. Were the jaws for cutting through suit armor? Maybe it was a robot pet for a lonely being. Here, Spid!

  The second explosion? Either the crusoe had fired into the chamber from the other side, or else the spider had carried a bomb to explode when it touched me. Fine use to make of a pet! I giggled. I was relieved, I guess, to think it likely that the spider had been “only” a robot.

  Just then—I was in the ninth or nineteenth bubble—the inside of my helmet misted over everywhere. I was panting and sweating and my dehumidifier had overloaded. It was as if I were in a real peasouper of a fog. I could barely make out the black loom of the wall behind me. I switched out my headlight. My time dial showed seventy-two minutes gone. I switched it off and then I did a queer thing.

  I leaned back very carefully until as much of my suit as possible touched rock. Then I measuredly thumped the rock ten times with the butt of my Swift and held very still.

  Starting with ten would mean we were using the decimal system. Of course there were other possibilities, but . . .

  Very faintly, coming at the same rate as mine, I heard six thuds.

  What constant started with six? If he’d started with three, I’d have given him one, and so on through a few more places of pi. Or if with one, I’d have given him four—and then started to worry about the third and fourth places in the square root of two. I might take his signal for the beginning of a series with the interval of minus four and rap him back two, but then how could he rap me minus two? Oh why hadn’t I simply started rapping out primes? Of course all the integers, in fact all the real numbers, from thirty-seven through forty-one had square roots beginning with six, but which one ... ?

  Suddenly I heard a scratching...

  * * * *

  My searchbeam was on again, my helmet had unmisted, my present bubble was empty.

  Just the same I scuttled out of it, still trending upward where I could. But now the holes wouldn’t trend that way. They kept going two down for one up and the lines of bubbles zigzagged. I wanted to go back, but then I might hear the scratching. Once the bubbles started getting smaller. It was like being in solid black suds. I lost any sense of direction. I began to lose the sense of up-down. What’s moon-gravity to the numbness of psychosis? I kept my searchlight on although I was sure the glow it made must reach ten bubbles away. I looked all around every bubble before I entered it, especially the overhang just above the entry hole.

  Every once in a while I would hear somebody saying Six! Six? Six! like that and then very rapidly seven-eight-nine-five-four-three-two-one-naught. How would you rap naught in the decimal system? That one I finally solved: you’d rap ten.

  Finally I came into a bubble that had a side-hole four feet across and edged at the top with diamonds. Very fancy. Was this the Spider Princess’ boudoir? There was also a top hole but I didn’t bother with that—it had no decor. I switched off my searchlight and looked out the window without exposing my head. The diamonds were stars. After a bit I made out what I took to be the opposite lip of the fissure I’d first dove in, only about one hundred feet above me. The rim-wall beyond looked vaguely familiar, though I wasn’t sure about the notch. My time dial said one hundred eighteen minutes gone as I switched it off. Almost time to start hoping for rescue. Oh great!—with their ship a sitting duck for the crusoe they wouldn’t be expecting. I hadn’t signaled a word besides Extreme Emergency.

  I moved forward and sat in the window, one leg outside, my Swift under my left arm. I plucked a flash grenade set for five seconds from my belt, pulled the fuse and tossed it across the fissure, almost hard enough to reach the opposite wall.

  I looked down, my Swift swinging like my gaze.

  The fissure lit up like a boulevard. Across from me I knew the flare was dropping dreamily, but I wasn’t looking that way. Right below me, two hundred feet down, I saw a transparent helmet with something green and round and crested inside and with shoulders under it.

  Just then I heard the scratching again, quite close.

  I fired at once. My shell made a violet burst and raised a fountain of dust twenty feet from the crusoe. I scrambled back into my bubble, switching on my searchlight. Another spider was coming in on the opposite side, its legs moving fast. I jumped for the top-hole and grabbed its rim with my free hand. I’d have dropped my Swift if I’d needed my other hand, but I didn’t. As I pulled myself up and through, I looked down and saw the spider straight below me eyeing me with its uptilted opalescent eyes and doubling its silver legs. Then it straightened its legs and sprang up toward me, not very fast but enough against Luna’s feeble gravitational tug to put it into this upper room with me. I knew it mustn’t touch me and I mustn’t touch it by batting at it. I had started to shift the explosive shell in my gun for a slug, and its green-banded body was growing larger, when there was a green blast in the window below and its explosion-front, booming my suit a little, knocked the spider aside and out of sight before it made it through the trap door of my new bubble. Yet the spider didn’t explode, if that was what had happened to the first one; at any rate there was no second green flash.

  My new bubble had a top hole too and I went through it the same way I had the last. The next five bubbles were just the same too. I told myself that my routine was getting to be like that of a circus acrobat—except who stages shows inside black solidity?—except the gods maybe with the dreams they send us. The lava should be transparent, so the rim-wall peaks could admire.

  At the same time I was thinking how if the biped humanoid shape is a good one for medium-size creatures on any planet, why so the spider shape is a good one for tiny creatures and apt to turn up anywhere and be copied in robots too.

  The top hole in the sixth bubble showed me the stars, while one half of its rim shone white with sunlight.

  Panting, I lay back against the rock. I switched off my searchlight. I didn’t hear any scratching.

  The stars. The stars were energy. They filled the universe with light, except for hidey holes and shadows here and there.

  Then the number came to me. With the butt of my Swift I rapped out five. No answer. No scratching either. I rapped out five again.

  Then the answer came, ever so faintly. Five knocked back at me.

  Six five five—Planck’s Constant, the invariant quantum of energy. Oh, it should be to the minus 29th power, of course, but I couldn’t think how to rap that and, besides, the basic integers were all that mattered.

  I heard the scratching . . .

  I sprang and caught the rim and lifted myself into the glaring sunlight . . . and stopped with my body midway.

  Facing me a hundred feet away, midway through another top-hole—he must have come very swiftly by another branch of the bubble ladder—he’d know the swiftest ones—was my green-crested crusoe. His face had a third eye where a man’s nose would be, which with his crest made him look like a creature of mythology. We were holding our guns vertically.

  We looked like two of the damned, half out of their holes in the floor of Dante’s hell.

  I climbed very slowly out of my hole, still pointing my gun toward the zenith. So did he.

  We held very still for a moment. Then with his gun butt he rapped out ten. I could both see and also hear it through the rock.

 
; I rapped out three. Then, as if the black bubble-world were one level of existence and this another, I wondered why we were going through this rigamarole. We each knew the other had a suit and a gun (and a lonely hole?) and so we knew we were both intelligent and knew math. So why was our rapping so precious?

  He raised his gun—I think to rap out one, to start off pi.

  But I’ll never be sure, for just then there were two violet bursts, close together, against the fissure wall, quite close to him.

  He started to swing the muzzle of his gun toward me. At least I think he did. He must know violet was the color of my explosions. I know I thought someone on my side was shooting. And I must have thought he was going to shoot me—because a violet dagger leaped from my Swift’s muzzle and I felt its sharp recoil and then there was a violet globe where he was standing and moments later some fragment twinged lightly against my chest—a playful ironic tap.

  He was blown apart pretty thoroughly, all his constants scattered, including—I’m sure—Planck’s.

  * * * *

  It was another half hour before the rescue ship from Circumluna landed. I spent it looking at earth low on the horizon and watching around for the spider, but I never saw it. The rescue party never found it either, though they made quite a hunt—with me helping after I’d rested a bit and had my batteries and oxy replenished. Either its power went off when its master died, or it was set to “freeze” then, or most likely go into a “hide” behavior pattern. Likely it’s still out there waiting for an incautious earthman, like a rattlesnake in the desert or an old, forgotten land mine.

  I also figured out, while waiting in Gioja crater, there near the north pole on the edge of Shackleton crater, the only explanation I’ve ever been able to make, though it’s something of a whopper, of the two violet flashes which ended my little mathematical friendship-chant with the crusoe. They were the first two shells I squeezed off at him— the ones that skimmed the notch. They had the velocity to orbit Luna, and the time they took—two hours and five minutes—was right enough.

  Oh, the consequences of our past actions!

  <>

  * * * *

  Fritz Leiber is the original S-F man. By which I mean any number of things, beginning with his beginning in the field a good thirty years ago (which would make him Senior Writer for the volume if it were not for Alfred Jarry antedating everybody.) Nor is it simply seniority, but also scope. Leiber began as a Lovecraft disciple, went from fantasy for Unknown, to s-f for Astounding, and then to popular-science writing and editing. In Leiber’s case, S is not just for Science, or Satire, or Speculation, though they are all there, but for Snakes as well as Spiders (the Time-Change stories), and for Shakespeare (“Four Ghosts in Hamlet” in last year’s FSSF), and Sword-and-Sorcery. (F, of course, is for Fafhrd and the Mouser.) And this year he has expanded his range a bit more, by writing the first authorized post-Burroughs Tarzan book (Tarzan and the Valley of Gold, Ballantine, 1966).

  What started me on all this, really, was snakes. Looking through the odds and ends set aside for these notes, I found an undated news item which I had clipped and never mailed, headlined: SNAKES, TOOLS OF WAR, STILL IN DEMAND DESPITE YEMEN TRUCE. Seems you can always tell when fighting will break out down there by following the dips and rises in snake stocks. The snakes are neither weapons nor “native superstition.” They are kept as pets by desert fighters because they are the most reliable and effective eye-wipers in a sandstorm: A guerilla with sand in his eye grabs his pet serpent firmly and inserts its twitching tail into the corner of his eye to remove the source of irritation.

  They tried goggles, but the goggles cracked and clouded in the desert storms. Snakes die in captivity—but they are plentiful. Snakes are available in the desert—and apparently the Arabs do not share our (Western) “instinctive” prejudice against snakes.

  Which brings us to the twin questions posed in the next “arena” variant: How many of our instincts are cultural products? How many of our limitations are cultural prejudices? Or, if you take everything away from a man except the faculties contained inside his skin, what has he got going for him that is still available?

  I warn you beforehand, this is not the kind of story I usually publish—not the kind anyone usually publishes, it would seem. The author says he collected 113 rejection slips, over thirteen years, before it sold—not, as one might have expected, to an adventure magazine, but to The Colorado Quarterly.

  That was where Larry Ashmead, Doubleday’s new s-f editor, saw it. Ashmead sent me a copy. Both of us wrote to Malec, asking what else he had done.

  It seems this was his first published story, but he had lots more that hadn’t sold. And I know why: Malec does everything wrong— only it comes out right.

  There is a Jack London kind of Tightness to his wrongness.

  You probably won’t like it—right away. (And then you find it doesn’t go away.)

  Anyhow, here is the first one; Doubleday will publish a collection, Extrapolus, in the spring.

  * * * *

  PROJECT INHUMANE

  ALEXANDER B. MALEC

  Biev wasn’t exactly made into a laughing stock. The ones in power, the Directorates of Financing, weren’t quite sure whether to limit his funds altogether on the experiment in question, therefore killing any future efforts, or to extend to him the fiat of a blank check, or simply to liquidate him, his associates, and the whole endeavor on the contention that the project was mad, fruitless, pointless, undecipherable, a waste of the People’s money, and ... a mite dangerous to all.

  Said the Prime Factor on the Directorate of Financing, “It would appear that Friend Biev has a tiger by the tail.”

  Biev was the kind of person that in a Western society would be termed a screwball and doomed to menial garbage-emptying and ditchdigging chores, since he didn’t conform to the proper behavior-personality-interest pattern of an overlaid, rectangular-hole-punched pasteboard computer card. Instead, Biev was in a society where his kind were looked upon as crude ore to be assayed and appreciated. A tongue-in-cheek appreciation, it was true, but appreciation nonetheless, with a bit of eyebrow-raising and tongue-wagging as kind of a price to pay for being unorthodox. And more than just different, he was the epitome of the Different. Persons less individual than Biev cast envious eyes upon him—where in a Western society they threw stones—and thanked their gods that they didn’t have to be like him since the world already had a Biev. If homage was in the coin of envy, you might say Biev was the Unorthodox’s Unorthodox.

  The education of Biev had been a tossed salad of unrelated subjects, from Sanskrit to what’s the bee really saying when it buzzes, from refractory properties of the Ionosphere in January to the PSI pressure in Mindanao Deep. All these having the sole commonality of being contained in the cranium of one Pierre Biev, scientist.

  How Biev climbed up the technological hierarchy was by methods as random as the subjects he had studied. A piece of work published in Pro-Scientific, a bit of hornblowing here, a bit of pushing there, a child’s tantrum now and then when he didn’t get his way, and a bit of fawning and flattering of superiors—the latter method, while useful to his move upward, also showed chinks in his personality, the very human happenstance of a shoddy character trait or two. He was something of a salesman too, a one-track salesman, who managed to make his point of view prevail over the doubts and resistance of those who held the purse strings. Little could these exchequers be blamed, however, for their stone-hard reluctance being transmuted into semi-rotten squash before the freshness of approach, the originality of the man, which left them agog.

  So he got his money, his work sites, and personnel.

  And he succeeded. Not often; more like one out of five tries in any given project, which in scientific circles is a batting average close to astonishing.

  It was enough to assure him of a larger allocation of money, more technicians at his disposal, of a say in the exclusive Presidium Scientific.

  Biev couldn�
��t say how many projects he was at any instant conducting. Some were in the idea stage, some in seminar discussion, some already in fund endowment, and the early data of some were even now being correlated by computer. At any time he was immersed in at least six projects in full swing, and at any time projects were being phased out due to utter failure; some were phased out prior to a wait-and-see unsureness of results, and there were the hang-fire ones that couldn’t as yet be labeled anything and that awaited some new light cast upon them either through independent inspiration or a new approach to appraisal of their data.

  So Biev was busy. And happy, too. That is, until Project SC 109A PB exploded and fragmented the whole of his scientific circle into a round of arguing, philosophizing, and what have you. SC 109A PB, incidentally, stood for Scientific, the 109th such try, the first change or addition to that try (A), and the Projecteer’s initials—Biev’s own conceit and insistence.

  For scientists argue. They love to argue. The meat and gist of any question scientific is just a plain lot of discourse, a good chunk of disagreement, some quarreling, and maybe even a clipboard thrown in a rage. This is the method. And they argued anywhere; at lunch, in the corridors, even in the men’s room. Time was, some recalcitrant—Biev’s opinion—wrote a chemical formula of impossible structure on the bathroom mirror in soap. In turn, Biev wrote his own notation below, also in soap, which said in effect: go refer to your high school chemistry primer. A little later that day, that same formula was reproduced at the tail-end of a string of equations proving that that same formula could indeed occur. The author even took the trouble to mark down some bibliography. After some looking through this bibliography in the local library, Biev made his way back to the men’s-room mirror and wrote—in small print—congratulations!