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

by Edited By Judith Merril

  “How can I settle my children’s future?”

  “Come on, no use arguing. You are coming now, alive or dead, fit or unfit.”

  Speechless, Arison let himself be marched off to a light military vehicle.

  In five minutes he was in the rocktrain, an armored affair with strong windows. In ten more minutes, with the train moving off, he was stripped of his civilian clothes and possessions (to be returned later to his wife, he learnt), had his identity disc extracted and checked and its Relief tagend removed, and a medical checkup was begun on him. Apparently this was satisfactory to the military authorities. He was given military clothing.

  He spent a sleepless night in the train trying to work out what he had done with this, what would be made of that, who Mihányo could call upon in need, who would be likely to help her, how she would manage with the children, what (as nearly as he could work it out) they would get from a pension which he was led to understand would be forthcoming from his firm, how far they could carry on with their expected future.

  A gray pre-dawn saw the train’s arrival at Veruam. Food-less (he had been unable to eat any of the rations) and without sleep, he gazed vacantly at the marshaling-yards. The body of men traveling on the train (apparently only a few were Remployees) were got into closed trucks and the long convoy set out for Emmel.

  At this moment Hadolaris’ brain began to re-register the conceleration situation. About half a minute must have passed since his departure from Oluluetang, he supposed, in the Time of his top bunker. The journey to Emmel might take up another two minutes. The route from Emmel to that bunker might take a further two and a half minutes there, as far as one could work out the calculus. Add the twenty-years’ (and southward journey’s) sixteen to seventeen minutes, and he would find himself in that bunker not more than some twenty-two minutes after he had left it. (Mihan, Deres and the other two would all be nearly ten years older and the children would have begun to forget him.) The blitz was unprecedentedly intense when he had left, and he could recall (indeed it had figured in several nightmares since) his prophecy to XN 1 that a breakthrough might be expected within the hour. If he survived the blitz, he was unlikely to survive a breakthrough; and a breakthrough of what? No one had ever seen the Enemy, this Enemy that for Time immemorial had been striving to get across the Frontier. If It got right over, the twilight of the race was at hand. No horror, it was believed at the Front, could equal the horror of that moment. After a hundred miles or so he slept, from pure exhaustion, sitting up in a cramped position, wedged against the next man. Stops and starts and swerves woke him at intervals. The convoy was driving at maximum speeds.

  At Emmel he stumbled out to find a storm lashing down. The river was in spate. The column was marched to the depot. Hadolar was separated out and taken in to the terminal building where he was given inoculations, issued with “walker,” quickgun, em-kit, prot-suit and other impedimenta, and in a quarter of an hour (perhaps seven or eight seconds up at the top bunker) found himself entering a polyheli with thirty other men. This had barely topped the first rise and into sunlight when explosions and flarings were visible on all sides. The machine forged on, the sight-curtains gradually closing up behind and retreating grudgingly before it. The old Northern vertigo and somnambulism re-engulfed Had. To think of Kar and their offspring now was to tap the agony of a ghost who shared his brain and body. After twenty-five minutes they landed close to the foot of a rocktrain line. The top-bunker lapse of “twenty-two minutes” was going, Had saw, to be something less. He was the third to be bundled into the rocktrain compartments, and one hundred ninety seconds saw him emerging at the top and heading for bunker W. XN 1 greeted his salute merely with a curt command to proceed by rocket to the top bunker. A few moments more and he was facing XN 2.

  “Ah, here you are. Your Relief was killed so we sent back for you. You’d only left a few seconds.” A ragged hole in the bunker wall testified to the incident. The relief’s cadaver, stripped, was being carted off to the disposal machine.

  “XN 2. Things are livelier than ever. They certainly are hot stuff. Every new offensive from here is pitched back at us in the same style within minutes, I notice. That new cannon had only just started up when back came the same shells—I never knew They had them. Tit for tat.”

  Into H’s brain, seemingly clarified by hunger and exhaustion and much emotion, flashed an unspeakable suspicion, one that he could never prove or disprove, having too little knowledge and experience, too little overall view. No one had ever seen the Enemy. No one knew how or when the War had begun. Information and communication were paralysingly difficult up here. No one knew what really happened to Time as one came close to the Frontier, or beyond it. Could it be that the conceleration there became infinite and that there was nothing beyond the Frontier? Could all the supposed missiles of the Enemy be their own, somehow returning? Perhaps the war had started with a peasant explorer lightheartedly flinging a stone northwards, which returned and struck him? Perhaps there was, then, no Enemy?

  “XN 3. Couldn’t that gun’s own shells be reflected back from the Frontier, then?”

  “XN 2. Impossible. Now you are to try to reach that forward missile post by the surface—our tunnel is destroyed —at 15° 40’ East—you can just see the hump near the edge of the I/R viewer’s limit—with this message; and tell him verbally to treble output.”

  The ragged hole was too small. H left by the forward port. He ran, on his “walker,” into a ribbon of landscape which became a thicket of fire, a porcupine of fire, a Nessus-shirt to the Earth, as in a dream. Into an unbelievable super-crescendo of sound, light, heat, pressure and impacts he ran, on and on up the now almost invisible slope.

  <>

  * * * *

  Time can run backwards; the future is as real as the past; and the same event can be in one man’s future and another man’s past.

  Using or proving these propositions, scientists groped along the boundaries between physics and philosophy at the American Physical Society meeting here today.

  Time plays a major role, as the search for a theory to explain the universe and all its constituents continues.

  ... It was also suggested that we live in only one particular model of the universe, one of the several models permitted by the theory of relativity. In this universe, it has been speculated, past and future are distinguishable by the fact that it is expanding. Future time is linked to a larger universe. If shrinking occurred, time might seem to run backwards. (From a news report of a meeting of the Physical Sciences Association.)

  * * * *

  Meanwhile, Fred Hoyle has published (Galaxies, Nuclei, and Quasars, Harper and Row, 1965) a book questioning his own “steady-state” theory of cosmology, in the light of new information about quasars; and all around, it seems, the more we know, the less we seem to know—and the more we seem on the verge of Knowing. (Just what, we will have to wait a bit to find out—trusting in Time to keep moving forward for a while.)

  The last word, for this year, comes in still one more “first,” from a freshman at Knox College in Illinois.

  * * * *

  ADO ABOUT NOTHING

  BOB OTTUM, JR.

  Today we reached the end of the universe. It was a big sign with red letters all lit up.

  this is the end of the universe-

  do not proceed beyond this point

  We pulled the ship in close and cut all the power. Frank hollered over the intercom:

  “What in the hell is this?”

  We didn’t have any charts of the area. The reason we had come out this far was so that I could make some. No ship had ever been out this far before.

  “Well, Frank, I ... I guess it’s the end of the universe. That’s what the sign says.”

  “Dammit, there isn’t any end to the universe! It just keeps on going! You know that as well as I do. If this is your idea of a joke . . .”

  “Ah, Frank, I didn’t put the sign there. This is uncharted area, you know,
and . . .”

  “Well, give me a fix and we’ll fly around the thing!”

  “But Frank, it says . . .”

  “I see what it says! Now give me a fix!”

  “Yes sir. We’re in section six, semisection nine, sector three, parallel eight, diagonal seven, subsector . . .”

  “Johnny?”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you ever read that story about the guys who are out in a space ship, and they come to a wall?”

  “No sir.”

  “Well, they try to get past the wall, and when they do, they die, because the wall is what separates heaven from the rest of the universe.”

  “Oh.”

  “It looks solid, doesn’t it?”

  “Well, yeah, but that could just be an optical illusion.”

  “Do you think we ought to chance revving her up to full power and going ahead?”

  “Well, I don’t know sir. Maybe one of us better get out and have a close look at the thing. It could be just a cloud of dust particles that .. .”

  “Can we pull in any closer?”

  “Maybe. If it is solid, then it may have some gravity of its own. Then it would just pull us right smack into it.”

  “Are you a religious man, Johnny?”

  “No ... I, uh ... well, how do you mean?”

  “I mean like believing that this is the wall that separates heaven from the rest of the universe. Do you think there is a heaven?”

  “I guess there’s a heaven. But I never thought . . .”

  “We could even be dead right now. Like, you know, maybe we crashed into an asteroid or something. Maybe we’re dead, and now we’ve reached heaven.”

  “I don’t feel like I’m dead. Wouldn’t we have remembered it if we had crashed?”

  “Yeah, I guess so. One of us is going to have to go out there and have a look.”

  “I’ll go, Frank.”

  “No you won’t. The Space Administration needs men like you. I’ll go.”

  “But Frank, what if . . .”

  “Aw, come on! All this upset over nothing! Let’s behave like a couple of men.”

  “Okay. You’re right. Can I help you put on your suit?”

  “Yeah. Meet me in the pressure room.”

  Ours was one of the two-man jobs, used only for charting. One of us sat at either end. He flew, and I drew. The pressure room was right in the middle of the ship. I helped the captain put on his suit, and then went back to watch him on the television monitor.

  “How is it out there, Frank?”

  “I’m fine. I’m almost there. I think I can see the ... the . J . well, I’ll be damned!”

  “Is something the matter? Frank?”

  He was right up against the wall. It was solid all right. I could see him hunched over in one little spot.

  “Johnny?”

  “Yes sir?”

  “Have you got a quarter?”

  “A ... a what?”

  “A quarter. Twenty-five cents.”

  “Well, I don’t know, sir. What do you need a quarter for?”

  “You find me one. I’m coming back for it.”

  There was some money in the ship. I don’t know why, but for some reason, somebody had known to have some money on board. When the captain got back, I gave him the money.

  “Why do you want a quarter, Frank?”

  “You’d better get one for yourself, too. And start getting your suit on. I’ll be right back.”

  He took the quarter and left. And he came right back. But there was something wrong. His eyes were all glassy, and his mouth just hung loosely at the jaw. His eyebrows were turned up, and his forehead was all wrinkled.

  “What is it, Frank? What’s the matter?”

  “It was nothing. Really. It was nothing.”

  * * * *

  When I got about twenty feet away from the wall, I could see them. There were hundreds of them, plastered all over it. Old signs. There was an “Eat At Joe’s,” and a great big “Kilroy was here,” and hearts with names in them. As I got closer, I could even see the hand-scrawled four-letter words with crude drawings.

  As I got right up against the wall, I noticed the little white square sign. It said,

  obviously you are not convinced that this is the end of the universe. if you will place a quarter in the slot below, the peep-hole will open, and you can see for yourself.

  And the captain was right. I paid my quarter and looked through the peep-hole. But it was nothing.

  <>

  * * * *

  SUMMATION

  Burroughs would have been lost . . . Edgar Rice Burroughs, that is. Since the days of his novel The Warlord of Mars things have changed in outer space. Yet William Burroughs, he of Naked Lunch and Nova Express fame, would have loved nearly every minute of it.

  At ten o’clock on Sunday morning, when the decent folk of London were still in their beds, delegates to the 23rd World Science Fiction Convention in London were discussing “The Robot in the Executive Suite,” speculating on practical optimums for robot construction.

  Only one lonely bug-eyed monster appeared at the convention— at the costume ball/ and Penguin Books had great difficulty in persuading a Dalek [Unautomated, man-sized U.K. version of Robbie the Robot— controls, mike, etc., are inside, as is operator.] to appear. Monsters and Martians get harder to find every day. Science fiction, since the good old days when Hugo Gernsback first named the genre “Scientifiction” and printed space operatics in pulp magazines, has come of a respectable age. Unlikely Martians are of less interest than what one British writer, J. G. Ballard, has called “inner space,” a very real world. In the space age Jules Verne can’t shine a candlepower before the reality of Gemini.

  This was the opening of the Spectator’s report on the World Science Fiction Convention in London last August. The London Sunday Times Magazine, shortly afterward, came out with a special s-f section: an article on the Clarke-Kubrick movie, one on the BBC’s (then) forthcoming s-f drama series, and a thoughtful profile of John W. Campbell, editor of Analog, which summed up:

  . . . Life to Campbell is a gigantic experiment in form, and earth the forcing-house—an impeccable vision, but one not warmed (in his theories, that is) by a feeling for the pain or personal potential of the individuals in the experiment. That kind of gentleness in expression seemed to disappear with Don A. Stuart.

  So that, ironically, as s-f becomes increasingly respectable, John Campbell, its acknowledged father-figure, can’t really claim his throne. He provides the continuity, he shaped much of the thought, he made many reputations. S-f narrowed from the vastness of space to the greater complexity of “sociological” s-f with him presiding. But now it is narrowing towards the highly focused, upside-down detail of “innerspace.” The tone is personal and subjective, the quality of expression important. . . . There is even a literary magazine: SF Horizons. None of this is Campbell’s style.

  You may disagree with the views of either or both reporters (Bill Butler in the Spectator, Pal Williams in the Times Magazine). What is significant is that they had views, and expressed them intelligently; that neither one approached the job in the role of literary slummer, or even intrepid anthropologist among the fantasists, but simply and seriously as observers reporting on a field they knew and understood, and believed to be of interest to other readers.

  I was about to say, it couldn’t happen here—but I suspect the difference in attitude is not so much spatial as temporal. What has already happened there is just beginning to happen here.

  Which is to say: the big news in s-f this year is mostly not in s-f—not this side of the ocean. (Exceptions: the establishment of the SFWA; and Doubleday’s expanded publishing schedule, under the supervision of Lawrence P. Ashmead, who looks to be the best thing that has happened to s-f book publishing here in a long time.)

  In a sense, the biggest news of the year is that it is harder than ever to locate on the literary map any reliable boundary line between s-f a
nd anything else. The other side of the coin, whose tail is the lack of focus and esprit in the specialty field here, is, I suppose, the diminishment of spirited opposition or snobbism directed at the field. To some extent, this is a self-reproducing cycle; to a greater degree, the changing faces on both sides are being shaped by pressures initiating entirely outside the local literary scene, particularly such adjacent areas as education, advertising, psychology, and the Think Factory phenomenon. The s-f label becomes ludicrous, not to say invisible, when advertisements like the star-sprinkled page with the cute little capsule through whose wide-vision window a cheery astronaut and his mouth organ illustrate the pitch: “Three billion people will look up to you ... on Dec. 16, 1965, the Hohner Harmonica became the first musical instrument to be played in outer space,” appear in the same sort of magazines which now publish such stories as “Game,” “Somewhere Not far from Here,” “The Girl Who Drew the Gods,” “The Drowned Giant” (and Stanley Elkin’s “Perlmutter at the East Pole” in the Post), with neither apologies, explanations, nor exclamation points.