The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 20 Classic Science Fiction Tales

by Frank Belknap Long

“Or like the eel of Earth’s seas, Jimmy, that must be spawned in the depths of the great cold ocean, and swim slowly back to the bright highlands and the shining rivers of Earth. Young eels do not resemble their parents, Jimmy. They’re white and thin and transparent and have to struggle hard to survive and grow up.

  “Jimmy, you were planted here by your parents to grow wise and strong. Deep in your mind you knew that we had come to seek you out, for we are all born human, and are bound one to another by that knowledge, and that secret trust.

  “You knew that we would watch over you and see that no harm would come to you. You called out to us, Jimmy, with all the strength of your mind and heart. Your Uncle Al was in danger and you sensed our nearness.

  “It was partly your knowledge that saved him, Jimmy. But it took courage too, and a willingness to believe that you were more than human, and armed with the great proud strength and wisdom of the Shining Ones.”

  * * * *

  The voice grew suddenly gentle, like a caressing wind.

  “You’re not old enough yet to go home, Jimmy! Or wise enough. We’ll take you home when the time comes. Now we just want to have a talk with Uncle Al, to find out how you’re getting along.”

  Jimmy looked down into the river and then up into the sky. Deep down under the dark, swirling water he could see life taking shape in a thousand forms. Caddis flies building bright, shining new nests, and dragonfly nymphs crawling up toward the sunlight, and pollywogs growing sturdy hindlimbs to conquer the land.

  But there were cottonmouths down there too, with death behind their fangs, and no love for the life that was crawling upward. When Jimmy looked up into the sky he could see all the blazing stars of space, with cottonmouths on every planet of every sun.

  Uncle Al was like a bright caddis fly building a fine new nest, thatched with kindness, denying himself bright little Mardi Gras pleasures so that Jimmy could go to school and grow wiser than Uncle Al.

  “That’s right, Jimmy. You’re growing up—we can see that! Uncle Al says he told you to bide from the cottonmouths. But you were ready to give your life for your sister and Uncle Al.”

  “Shucks, it was nothing!” Jimmy heard himself protesting.

  “Uncle Al doesn’t think so. And neither do we!”

  * * * *

  A long silence while the river mists seemed to weave a bright cocoon of radiance about Jimmy clinging to the bank, and the great circular disk that had swallowed up Uncle Al.

  Then the voices began again. “No reason why Uncle Al shouldn’t have a little fun out of life, Jimmy. Gold’s easy to make and we’ll make some right now. A big lump of gold in Uncle Al’s hand won’t hurt him in any way.”

  “Whenever he gets any spending money he gives it away!” Jimmy gulped.

  “I know, Jimmy. But he’ll listen to you. Tell him you want to go to New Orleans, too!”

  Jimmy looked up quickly then. In his heart was something of the wonder he’d felt when he’d seen his first riverboat and waited for he knew not what. Something of the wonder that must have come to men seeking magic in the sky, the rainmakers of ancient tribes and of days long vanished.

  Only to Jimmy the wonder came now with a white burst of remembrance and recognition.

  It was as though he could sense something of himself in the two towering spheres that rose straight up out of the water behind the disk. Still and white and beautiful they were, like bubbles floating on a rainbow sea with all the stars of space behind them.

  Staring at them, Jimmy saw himself as he would be, and knew himself for what he was. It was not a glory to be long endured.

  “Now you must forget again, Jimmy! Forget as Uncle Al will forget—until we come for you. Be a little shantyboat boy! You are safe on the wide bosom of the Father of Waters. Your parents planted you in a rich and kindly loam, and in all the finite universes you will find no cosier nook, for life flows here with a diversity that is infinite and—Pigtail! She gets on your nerves at times, doesn’t she, Jimmy?”

  “She sure does,” Jimmy admitted.

  “Be patient with her, Jimmy. She’s the only human sister you’ll ever have on Earth.”

  “I—I’ll try!” Jimmy muttered.

  * * * *

  Uncle Al and Pigtail came out of the disk in an amazingly simple way. They just seemed to float out, in the glimmering web. Then, suddenly, there wasn’t any disk on the river at all—just a dull flickering where the sky had opened like a great, blazing furnace to swallow it up.

  “I was just swimmin’ along with Pigtail, not worryin’ too much, ’cause there’s no sense in worryin’ when death is starin’ you in the face,” Uncle Al muttered, a few minutes later.

  Uncle Al sat on the riverbank beside Jimmy, staring down at his palm, his vision misted a little by a furious blinking.

  “It’s gold, Uncle Al!” Pigtail shrilled. “A big lump of solid gold—”

  “I just felt my hand get heavy and there it was, young fella, nestling there in my palm!”

  Jimmy didn’t seem to be able to say anything.

  “High school books don’t cost no more than grammar school books, young fella,” Uncle Al said, his face a sudden shining. “Next winter you’ll be a-goin’ to high school, sure as I’m a-sittin’ here!”

  For a moment the sunlight seemed to blaze so brightly about Uncle Al that Jimmy couldn’t even see the holes in his socks.

  Then Uncle Al made a wry face. “Someday, young fella, when your books are all paid for, I’m gonna buy myself a brand new store suit, and hie myself off to the Mardi Gras. Ain’t too old thataway to git a little fun out of life, young fella!”

  LESSON IN SURVIVAL

  Originally published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1952.

  School was out. The dismissal bell tolled, and the children rushed in delight from the classroom, and went careening and shouting down garden paths bright with blue and yellow flowers. Overhead a cheery noonday sun beamed down on the emerging schoolmaster, a tall, dark-haired young man whose eyes followed his retreating charges with a warm and eager gratefulness.

  Brian Andrews enjoyed teaching, but not on such a day as this. It is a strain to change one’s occupation at a moment’s notice, but fishing was not an occupation to Brian. It was as natural as breathing.

  There were red and yellow trout flies pinned to his hat, and a supple bamboo rod had come to life in his hand. He flicked it as he strode along, counting his blessings one by one. He was free, and independent, and young. He liked his job, and the quiet, dreamy little town with its cloistered air of belonging to an earlier, less mechanized age. He liked to cross the village green and slap the big antique fire-bell opposite the war monument, eliciting a hollow boom, and he liked to go padding along Main Street in his moccasin shoes.

  “There’s the new young schoolmaster! A college man, but you’d never think it to look at him.”

  Then there was Jenny Fleming. It hadn’t taken him long to get to know Jenny well enough to tease her about her freckles while she unwrapped sandwiches on a shady bank, and made light of his attempts to kiss her.

  He supposed he’d soon have to write off “free” and be content to remain resolutely independent.

  The best thing about the trout stream was its nearness. He had only to cross a deep-elbowed road and ascend a red clay bank to plunge into the leafy green solitude of a truly enchanted stretch of woodland. Enchanted in every way. Jenny would be waiting for him with a luncheon basket beside a willow-shadowed pool, and further down the stream the children would be fishing with worms.

  He was quite sure the laughter of the children wouldn’t bring the schoolroom back. It would be the completely natural laughter of youngsters at play, freed for the moment from all adult stuffiness and tyranny.

  He caught his breath when he actually saw her, wait
ing for him by the pool. She’d removed her stockings and gone wading in the cool, sparkling water, and now she was sitting on the bank drawing her stockings on again.

  He went whistling up to her, picked up the lunch basket and looked inside.

  “Ham sandwiches,” he said. “What could be nicer?”

  She did not get up to snatch the basket from him and mingle her laughter with his. She simply leaned back against, a slanting willow tree, her eyes searching his face in troubled concern.

  “Sit down, Brian,” she said. “I want to talk to you.”

  Surprised, he sat down beside her on the sloping bank. “Hungry men make poor listeners, honeybunch.” He smiled in mock distress. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  She said without smiling: “Brian, the planes went over again yesterday.”

  All of the levity went out of Brian Andrews’ eyes. He stared down at the shadowed pool, his mouth suddenly dry.

  “I didn’t hear them,” he said, quickly. “I was busy all day.”

  “Not too busy to know that every man, woman and child in Fairview is under sentence of death. How can you make yourself forget we’re living on borrowed time.”

  “Just a minute now—”

  “It’s true, isn’t it?” she persisted.

  “True or false, you’ve got to shut your mind to it. If you don’t it will darken the sunlight for you.”

  “Is that your secret, Brian? Have you shut your, mind?”

  “I can avoid thinking about it for days at a stretch,” he told her. “I keep remembering I came to Fairview to take a teaching job, and go fishing, and fall in love with you. The simple truth keeps me sane.”

  “How sane, Brian? Subconsciously you’re in bad shape, just us, the rest of us are. It doesn’t really help not to be honest about it.”

  “You’re forgetting, what a big country this is,” he told her. “The planes can’t bomb every isolated village, every tiny cluster of houses. Even if they could, bombing on that scale would boomerang. They’d expose themselves to retaliation on a scale which would make interesting source material for future historians—of another intelligent species.”

  She looked at him steadily for a moment, with understanding and a kind of pity, as if she herself had once clung as tenaciously to hope, and believed quite as firmly that the smaller villages would be spared.

  “It may not come tomorrow,” she said. “It may not come for a year. Yes, we’ll have time to pretend. Tell, me—what in the future would you prize most highly? A single long month of waiting? Two?”

  He said with stubborn pride: “Fairview itself. If we cling with courage to what we have here, we can face the future without fear. That in itself is a victory—perhaps the only true victory mankind can ever know.”

  “We’ve lived in Fairviews too long!” she said. “We did not see the danger until it was too late.”

  “What good would seeing the danger have done?” he asked. “We know now that man will never succeed in controlling his own destiny. What would you have had our best minds do?”

  She laughed suddenly. Her laughter rang out defiant and challenging in the peaceful wood.

  “Every age brings a new approach to reality, Brian,” she answered. “The Atomic Age brought tools so bright we should have found in them the answer to all of our problems. We should have used our genius to banish war forever.”

  He looked at her, amazed by her vehemence, sensing for the first time a depth of eloquence in her thinking which challenged his own reasoned convictions at a vital point.

  “You’ll have to admit we’ve tried,” he said. “We’ve tried desperately hard to—follow through.”

  “Not hard enough,” she said. “A race can only be judged by its success.”

  “Then our race has been judged,” he said. “It has failed, and the judgment is in, and nothing can be changed. I still say that Fairview can give us courage.”

  Jenny shook her head. “Only because, when you walk in its quiet streets, you think of the men who once struggled to build ten thousand other Fairviews, each new and each different. If you go back and try to stand where your ancestors stood, your illusions will start to crumble.”

  “I take it you don’t think Fairview is the answer.” He forced laughter into his voice. “I haven’t noticed any crumbling. Honestly I haven’t. If I dropped a trout fly lightly, on that pool, and caught a two-pounder, my happiness would be complete.”

  “You only think it would. You can never shut out the roar of the planes going over, Brian. We had the tools, but we lacked the boldness really to try.”

  Brian stood up suddenly, staring down at Jenny Fleming sitting on the bank, the sunlight bright on her berry-brown shoulders.

  “I still say that Fairview is a positive good in itself. His voice had lost none of its confidence. “We’re lucky to be young, and in Fairview. Let the great bombers come. Their wings will cast no shadow for me while I can go on remembering there are speckled trout in that pool, and that you are very beautiful.”

  “Brian—”

  “I have my work, and it is good work. Teaching eager young minds to explore the buried past of the earth, to grasp the almost, miraculous beauty of its mountains, rivers and fossils. That’s what I like most about Fairview. We still have blackboards. We still have reading, writing and arithmetic. But you can also start early on the really important things.

  “Every kid in Fairview with an eager, inquiring mind can use the classroom telescope, and look out across space at the tunneling stars and the Great Nebula in Andromeda.”

  “It is good work, Brian. But if Fairview should be bombed—”

  He bent suddenly, and helped her to her feet. “Fairview will not be bombed,” he said.

  She laid a finger on his lips. “We’ve argued enough,” she said.

  He nodded in quick agreement. “Come on, let’s dance!”

  “If we had some music—”

  “We’ll dance anyway. Shall we make it a waltz?”

  “All right, Brian.”

  It was no more than a faint, distant humming—at first, like the drowsy murmur of bees in a noonday glade. Bees drowsy with nectar, too sluggish to be dangerous.

  They danced on the cool bank, around and around in mock solemnity, hardly aware of the sound, never associating it with danger until it was suddenly thunderous in their ears.

  They looked up then and saw the flight of jet bombers screaming across the sky, huge and vulture-black and wobbling a little with the weight of their bomb loads. They looked up and saw the bomb descending. Incredibly tiny it seemed, like a flickering dust mote that persisted in its dancing until the sun’s glare claimed it.

  They flattened themselves just as the silence gave way to a rumbling and then to a roaring. There were flashes of light between the trees, a vast flickering, a reddening of the entire forest. Then silence again, complete, mind-numbing.

  In stunned horror Brian raised himself, and saw Jenny Fleming’s limp body lying motionless at his feet. He was aware of pain, and a tumultuous stirring deep within his own body as if something imprisoned in his flesh were struggling furiously to free itself.

  Shivering, he closed his eyes, then opened them quickly. The body of his companion had begun to shatter, to break into many gleaming pieces. Like a brittle mold of over-hardened clay it crumbled and flew apart, the arms splintering into fragments, the face separating itself from the rest of the head, and rolling down the bank into the pool. The face did not immediately sink, but continued to stare up masklike for an instant through a deepening film of water, as if puzzled by something it could not quite understand.

  From the fragments on the bank a long, glistening shape crawled its bulging, many-faceted eyes probing the forest gloom. Had there been human eyes to watch, the shape would have seeme
d to move with a dignity and grace absurd in a creature so lowly.

  But there were no human eyes in the forest shadows. Neither were there human ears to hear it say: “The play is over, Chica Maca. You are inflicting upon yourself quite unnecessary torment.”

  The creature paused, then went on: “You gave a magnificent performance! You lived the part as it was meant to be lived!”

  Chica Maca awoke, to reality then, completely: He detached himself from the many manipulative props controlling the eyes, lips, vocal organs and limbs of the artificial man body, and crawled swiftly forth. For a moment he lay motionless in the shadows, his many-faceted eyes acknowledging with pleasure the admiration of his teaching associate Raca Clacan. Then he moved with a dignity and a grace peculiarly masculine to the edge of the stage, and stared down over the bright lights at his student audience. The students were just beginning to stir, to-awaken as he had done, from the bright compelling magic of the stage to prosaic reality. They lay motionless in their classroom tunnels, a glistening sea of upturned heads, and supine bodies, packed so closely into the vast hall they, seemed almost to be one great crawling organism.

  Chica Maca stared down with a deep satisfaction. The drama reconstruction had taken many days, of patient research, but certainly it had been worth the effort. In education there could be no substitute for the archaeological drama. Act it out! When the characters were those of a long-vanished intelligent species, debating great issues of survival, the historical lesson could not fail to be spectacularly high-lighted.

  A Masterpiece of reconstruction, truly a masterpiece! He thought of the sound recordings of man speech excavated from caverns in the earth sealed from within by a heat so terrific it had melted the surface rocks. He remembered how difficult it was to preserve all of the semantic overtones and fine shadings when such recordings were revamped as passages of dramatic dialogue couched in the infinitely more subtle speech idioms of a more advanced species.