The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 1 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  You become certain of something else: that isn’t a voice you recognize. If you ever heard it before, you certainly don’t remember it. Then the content of it hits you. Can I do anything? You get mad again.

  “Yeah,” you growl. “Hand me a glass of water.” You don’t have your thumb on the button, so you just say what pops into your mind. You shake yourself like a wet bird dog, take a deep breath, and lean on the control again.

  Before you can open your mouth, you’re in a hailstorm of hysterical laughter. “Glass of water...uh-uh-uh...that’s good...you don’t know what this means,” says the voice, suddenly sober and plaintive. “I’ve waited so long. I’ve listened to your music and the sound from your stereos. You never talk, you never say anything at all. I never even heard you cough before.”

  Part of your mind reacts to that: That’s unnatural, not even to cough, or laugh aloud, or hum. Must be a conditioning. But most of it explodes at this stranger, this— intruder, talking away like that without a word of explanation, of apology . . . talking as if that voice of all voices had a right to be there.

  “I was beginning to think you were deaf and dumb. Or maybe even that you weren’t there at all. That was the thing that scared me the most.”

  “Shut up,” you hiss, with all the fury, all the deadly warning you can command.

  “I knew they wouldn’t,” the voice continues happily. “They’d never put anyone out here by himself. That would be too—” It stops abruptly as you release the button.

  “My God!” you think. “The dam has boist! That character’ll chunter along like that for the duration!”

  You press the button quickly, hear “—all alone out here, you get scared to look out the viewp—” and you cut off again.

  That stuff like an invisible mist you see melting away is all the conjecture, those great half-formed plans of shipping out with Walkinok or the Wirehaired Terror.

  You were going to review your courses, remember? Slow and easy—take a week on spatial ballistics or spectroscopy. Think it all through for a day between sentences. Or laugh over the time you and the Shank got tanked up at the canteen and pretended you were going to tie up the C.O. and jet him off with Colonel Provost, the head PD man, for a shipmate. The General would get all the psychodynamics he needed. The General was always talking psychodynamics, Provost was always doing psychodynamics.

  Well, it seemed funny at the time, anyway. It wasn’t so much the beer. It was knowing the General and knowing Colonel Provost that made it funny. How funny, would it be with a stranger?

  They give you someone to talk to. They give you someone you haven’t anything to talk to about! That idea of putting a girl behind the bulkhead, now, that was a horrible idea. It was torture. Well, so’s this. Maybe worse.

  A thought keeps knocking and you finally back off and let it in. Something to do with the button. You push it and you can hear your shipmate. You release it and...shut off the intercom?

  No, by the Lord, you don’t! When you were coughing, you were off that button. Can I do anything?

  Now what the hell kind of business is this? (And that detached part of your mind reaches hungrily for the pulses of fury: ah, it feels good!) Do you mean to sit there and tell me (you rage silently at the PD men who designed this ship) that even if I don’t push that button, my shipmate can hear everything that goes on with me? The intercom’s open on the other side all the time, open on this side only when I push the button—is that it?

  You turn and glare out the viewport, staring down the cold, distant eye of infinity, and Where the hell, you storm silently, is my privacy?

  This won’t do. It won’t do at all. You figured right from the start that you and your shipmate would be pretty equal, but on a ship, even a little two-passenger can like this, someone’s got to be in command. Given that the other compartment has the same stereos, the same dispensers, the same food and water and everything else, and the only difference between these living quarters is that button— who’s privileged? Me, because I get to push the button? Or my shipmate, who gets to listen in on me when I so much as cough?

  “I know!” you think suddenly. “That’s a PD operative in there! A psychodynamics specialist assigned to observe me!”

  * * * *

  You almost laugh out loud; relief washes over you. PD work is naturally hush-hush. You’ll never know how many hours during your course you were under hypnosis. It was even rumored around that some guys had cerebral surgery done by the PD boys and never knew it. The boys had to work in secret for the same reason you don’t stir your coffee with an ink-stick—PD is one field where the tools must leave no mark.

  Well, fine, fine. At last this shipmate makes some sense: at last you’ve got an answer you can accept. This ship, this trip, is of and for a cadet—but it’s PD business. The only non-cadet who’d conceivably be aboard would have to be a PD tech.

  So you grin and reach for the button. Then, remembering the way it works, that the intercom’s open from your side when you’re off the button, you draw your hand back, face the bulkhead, and say easily, “Okay, PD, I’m on to you. How’m I doing?” You wonder how many cadets tumble to the trick this soon. You push the button and wait for the answer.

  The answer is “Huh?” in a mixture of shyness and mystification.

  You let go the button and laugh. “No sense stringing it out, Lieutenant.” (This is clever. Most PD techs are looeys; one or two are master sergeants. Right or not, you haven’t hurt his feelings.) “I know you’re a PD man.”

  There’s a silence from the other side. Then: “What’s a PD man?”

  You get a little sore. “Now see here, Lieutenant, you don’t have to play any more of these psych games.”

  “Gosh, I’m no lieutenant. I—”

  You cut him off quickly. “Sergeant, then.”

  “You got me all wrong,” says that damnable high voice.

  “Well, you’re PD, anyway.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not.”

  You can’t take much more of this. “Then what the hell are you?”

  A silence. And as it beats by, that anger and that fear of torture begin to mount, hand in hand.

  “Well?” you roar.

  “Well,” says the voice, and you can practically see it shuffle its feet. “I’m not anything. I’m fifteen years old ...”

  You drag out your senior-class snap; there’s a way of talking to fourth and third classmen that makes ‘em jump. “Mister, you give an account of yourself, but now. What’s your name?”

  “Skampi.”

  “Skampi? What the hell kind of a name is that?”

  “It’s what they call me.”

  Did you detect a whisper of defiance there? “Sir!”

  The defiance disappears instantly. “It’s what they call me . . . sir.”

  “And what are you doing on my ship, mister?”

  A frightened gulp. “I—I’m sorry—uh—sir. They put me on.”

  “They?”

  “At the Base . . . sir,” he amended quickly.

  “You were on the Base just how long, mister?” That “mister” can be a lead-shot whiplash if you do it right. It was sure being done right.

  “I don’t know, sir.” You have the feeling the punk’s going to burst into tears again. “They took me to a big laboratory and there were a lot of sort of booths with machines in them. They asked me all kinds of questions about did I want to be a spaceman. Well, I did. I always did, ever since I was a kid. So, after a while, they put me on a table and gave me a shot and when I woke up, I was here.”

  “Who gave you a shot? What was his name?”

  “I never ... I didn’t find out, sir.” A pause. “A big man. Old. He had gray hair, very short, and green eyes.”

  Provost, by God. This is PD business, all right, but from where you sit, it’s monkey business.

  “You know any spatial ballistics?”

  “No, sir. Some day, I—”

  “Astrogation?”

  �
�Only what I picked up myself. But I’ll—”

  “Gravity mechanics? Differentials? Strength of materials? Light-metal fission? Relativity?”

  “I—“

  “Well? Well? Speak up, mister!”

  “I heard of them, sir.”

  “ ‘I heard of them, sir!’ “ you mimic savagely. “Do you know what this ship is for?”

  “Oh, yes, sir! Everybody knows that. This is the Long Haul. When you come back from this, you get your commission and they give you a starship!” And if the voice had shuffled its feet once, now its eyes shone.

  “You figure to get a starship, mister?”

  “Well, I—I—”

  “You think they give commands to Boy Scouts just because the Boy Scout wants to go to space awful bad?”

  No answer.

  You jeer, “Have you got the slightest idea how much training a cadet has to go through, how much he has to learn?”

  “Well, no, but I guess I will.”

  “Sir!”

  “Sir. They put me aboard, all those officers who asked me the questions and everything. It must be all right. Hey!” he says excitedly, all the crushed timidity disappearing, to be replaced by a bubbling enthusiasm. “I know! We have all this time...maybe you’re supposed to teach me astrogation and relativity and all that.”

  Your jaw drops at the sheer childishness of it. And then something really ugly drifts up and smothers everything else.

  * * * *

  For some reason, your mind flashes back to the bus, the day you got to Base. You can remember back easily to all the faces you worked with, those who made it and those who didn’t. But your class had thirty-eight cadets in it and that bus must have held fifty. What happened to the rest? You’d always assumed they went into other sections-ground crew, computer men, maintenance. Suppose they’d been sorted out, examined for some special trait or talent that only the PD men knew about? Suppose they were loaded right aboard ships, each with a graduate cadet?

  And why?

  Suppose these punks, greenhorns, Boy. Scouts, children —suppose they were the ones slated for a commission? Suppose guys like you, thinking all this while you were the cream of the crop, and the top cream off that—suppose all along you’d tested out as second-grade material. Suppose you were the one who did the sweating and cramming and took the hazing and the demerits and the lousy mess-hall food, not to command a starship, not to get a commission, but just to be a private tutor to a boy genius who wanted to go to space awful bad?

  This wouldn’t make sense anywhere else but in the star-ship service. It barely made sense there, but look:

  A starship commander might make two trips in his whole career, that’s all. Eighteen years each round trip, with his passengers in coldpacks and a cargo of serums, refractories, machine tools and food concentrate for the xenologists and mineralogists who were crazy enough to work out there.

  Training the commander for such a ship was easy, as far as operating knowledge was concerned, though there was a powerful lot of it. But training him to stay conscious, awake and aware—and alone—for all those years was something else again. Few men like that were born; they had to be made. ’

  Most of your recluses, your hermits, all through history, have been guys who had things drastically wrong with them. There couldn’t be anything wrong with a starship commander. He had to be captain and deck crew, and know his black-hole as well (though most of the drive machinery down there was automatic) and stay alert—stay sane—in a black, mad, weightless emptiness God never made him for.

  * * * *

  Give him more books and pictures, games and music than even he would have time for and you’d still not be sure he’d stay sane unless he had some very special inner resources.

  These (and one other thing) were what a cadet was screened for and what he was trained in. PD packed him full of technical knowledge, psyched him to a fare-thee-well, and when they figured he was machine-finished and carrying a high gloss, they sealed him in a space can and threw it out for the Long Haul.

  The course was pre-set, and it might last 14 months, and it might last three years, and after a guy got back (if he got back), he would be fit to take out a starship or he would not. As for the shipmate—well, you’d always assumed that PD was looking for a way to shake down two guys at once so they could be together on a starship.

  Maybe, some day, the ships would carry eight, ten at once, and at last natural human gregariousness would have a chance to compete with the pall of black distances. So far, though, psychic disorientation had made everything that was latently mean and murderous in a man explode into action. Putting more than a single human being on those boats to nurse them through was just asking for slaughter. And shipwreck.

  The other thing required of you besides technical ability and these inner resources is—youth. You’re only twenty-two, so full of high-intensity training that, as Walkinok once said, you feel your brain convolutions are blown out smooth like a full bladder. And you’ve compacted this knowledge, coded it, used it. You’re so full of it that it’s bound to ooze out onto anyone around you.

  You’re twenty-two and you’re sealed up in a can with a thirsty-headed fifteen-year-old who knows nothing, but wants to go to the stars awful bad. And you can forget how stupid he seems to be, too, because you can bet your bulging cortex that the kid has such an enormous I.Q. that he can afford to act stupid and cry.

  What a dirty, rotten, lousy deal to put you through all this just to shave seven years off the age of a starship commander! Next thing you know, they’d put a diapered baby in with a work-weary sucker of a fine-honed cadet and get three star trips out of him instead of two!

  And what’s to become of you? After you’ve done your generous stint of tutoring, they pin a discharge emblem on your tunic and say, “Well done, Cadet. Now go raise Brussels sprouts.” And you stand at attention and salute the downy-cheeked squirt in all the gold braid and watch him ride the gantry crane to the control cabin you’ve aimed at and sweated for ever since you were weaned!

  You sprawl there in that living space, so small that you can’t stand up in it, and you look at that bland belly of a bulkhead with its smooth, round navel of a button, and you think, “Well, there’s a lot of guts back of that.” You heave a deep breath, while still the detached part of your mind looks on. Now it’s saying wonderingly, “Aren’t you the guy who was scared because nothing could get him excited any more?” And you speak and your voice comes out sounding quite different from anything you’ve ever heard from anyone before. Maybe you’ve never been this mad before.

  “Who told you to say that?”

  * * * *

  You push the button and listen.

  “Say what-uh-sir?”

  “About me teaching you. Anybody at Base?”

  He seems to be thinking. “Why, no, sir. I just thought it would be a good idea.”

  You don’t say anything. You just hold the button down.

  He says diffidently, “Sort of pass the time?” When you still don’t say anything, he adds wistfully, “I’d try. I’d try awful hard.”

  You let go the button and growl, “I just bet you would. You just thought it up all your own little self, huh?”

  “Well, yes.

  “You’re a bright boy. You’re a real, smart, ambitious little louse!”

  You push the button real quick, but all you get is an astonished silence.

  You say, real composed, almost gentle, “That ‘louse,’ now, that’s not just a figure of speech, little boy. I mean that. I mean you’re a crummy little crawler looking to suck blood after somebody else has done all the work. You know what you do? You just make like you’re all alone in this can. You don’t talk to me and you don’t listen to me and I’ll do you a favor—I’ll forget all about you, too. I’m not going to bat your eyeballs together just yet, but don’t call me generous, little boy—never that. It’s just that I can’t reach in there just now.”

  “No!” That boy can make a
real piteous noise when he wants to. “No, no! Wait—please!”

  “Well?”

  “I don’t under—I mean I’m sorry, Cadet. I’m honest-to-Pete sorry. I never meant—”

  But you cut him off. You lie back and close your eyes. You’re thrumming with fury right down to your toenails.

  This says your internal observer, is all right. This is living.

  * * * *

  So the weeks pass, and so do more weeks. You shoot a star and make some notes, and wait a while and shoot it again, and pretty soon you have enough data to fool around with. You get your stylus and block, and the point darts around the way you want it to, and those old figures sit up and lie down and rush around just the way you want them to. You laugh when you do it; wouldn’t Junior just love to learn some of these tricks?