Big Book of Science Fiction

by Groff Conklin

  “Otherwise?”

  Tom Wolfe looked up.

  “Otherwise, he’d get well, in 1938.”

  Tom Wolfe arose from his chair. “You mean, get well, walk around, back there, be well, and cheat the mortician?”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  Tom Wolfe stared at the phial and one of his hands twitched. “What if I destroyed the virus and refused to let you inoculate me?”

  “You can’t do that!”

  “But—supposing?”

  “You’d ruin things.”

  “What things?”

  “The pattern, life, the way things are and were, the things that can’t be changed. You can’t disrupt it. There’s only one sure thing, you’re to die, and I’m to see to it.”

  Wolfe looked at the door. “I could run off, go back by myself.”

  “We control the machine. You wouldn’t get out of the house. I’d have you back here, by force, and inoculated. I anticipated some such trouble when the time came; there are five men waiting down below. One shout from me—you see, it’s useless. There, that’s better. Here now.”

  Wolfe had moved back and now had turned to look at the old man and the window and this huge house. “I’m afraid I must apologize. I don’t want to die. So very much I don’t want to die.”

  The old man came to him and shook his hand. “Think of it this way; you’ve had two more months than anyone could expect from life, and you’ve turned out another book, a last book, a new book, think of that, and you’ll feel better.”

  “I want to thank you for this,” said Thomas Wolfe, gravely. “I want to thank both of you. I’m ready.” He rolled up his sleeve. “The inoculation.”

  And while Bolton bent to his task, with his free hand Thomas Wolfe pencilled two black lines across the top of the first manuscript and went on talking:

  “There’s a passage from one of my old books,” he said, scowling to remember it. “. . . of wandering forever and the earth . . . Who owns the Earth? Did we want the Earth? that we should wander on it? Did we need the Earth that we were never still upon it? Whoever needs the Earth shall have the Earth; he shall be upon it, he shall rest within a little place, he shall dwell in one small room forever . . .”

  Wolfe was finished with the remembering.

  “Here’s my last book,” he said, and on the empty yellow paper facing it he blocked out vigorous huge black letters with pressures of the pencil: Forever and the Earth, by Thomas Wolfe.

  He picked up a ream of it and held it tightly in his hands, against his chest, for a moment. “I wish I could take it back with me. It’s like parting with my son.” He gave it a slap and put it aside and immediately thereafter gave his quick hand into that of his employer, and strode across the room, Bolton after him, until he reached the door where he stood framed in the late afternoon light, huge and magnificent. “Goodbye, goodbye!” he cried.

  The door slammed. Tom Wolfe was gone.

  ~ * ~

  They found him wandering in the hospital corridor.

  “Mr. Wolfe!”

  “What?”

  “Mr. Wolfe, you gave us a scare, we thought you were gone!”

  “Gone?”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Where? Where?” He let himself be led through the midnight corridors. “Where? Oh, if I told you where, you’d never believe.”

  “Here’s your bed, you shouldn’t have left it.”

  Deep into the white death bed, which smelled of pale, clean mortality awaiting him, a mortality which had the hospital odor in it; the bed which, as he touched it, folded him into fumes and white starched coldness.

  “Mars, Mars,” whispered the huge man, late at night. “My best, my very best, my really fine book, yet to be written, yet to be printed, in another year, three centuries away . . .”

  “You’re tired.”

  “Do you really think so?” murmured Thomas Wolfe. “Was it a dream? Perhaps. A good dream.”

  His breathing faltered. Thomas Wolfe was dead.

  ~ * ~

  In the passing years, flowers are found on Tom Wolfe’s grave. And this is not unusual, for many people travel to linger there. But these flowers appear each night. They seem to drop from the sky. They are the color of an autumn moon, their blossoms are immense and they burn and sparkle their cold, long petals in a blue and white fire. And when the dawn wind blows they drip away into a silver rain, a shower of white sparks on the air. Tom Wolfe has been dead many, many years, but these flowers never cease. . . .

  <>

  ~ * ~

  THE MINIATURE

  by John D. MacDonald

  AS Jedediah Amberson stepped through the bronze, marble and black-glass doorway of the City National Bank on Wall Street, he felt the strange jar. It was, he thought, almost a tremor. Once he had been in Tepoztlan, Mexico, on a Guggenheim grant, doing research on primitive barter systems, and during the night a small earthquake had awakened him.

  This was much the same feeling. But he stood inside the bank and heard the unruffled hum of activity, heard no shouts of surprise. And, even through the heavy door he could hear the conversation of passers-by on the sidewalk.

  He shrugged, beginning to wonder if it was something within himself, some tiny constriction of blood in the brain. It had been a trifle like that feeling which comes just before fainting. Jedediah Amberson had fainted once.

  Fumbling in his pocket for the checkbook, he walked, with his long loose stride, over to a chest-high marble counter. He hadn’t been in the main office of the bank since he had taken out his account. Usually he patronized the branch near the University, but today, finding himself in the neighborhood and remembering that he was low on cash, he had decided to brave the gaudy dignity of the massive institution of finance.

  For, though Jed Amberson dealt mentally in billions, and used such figures familiarly in dealing with his classes in economics, he was basically a rather timid and uncertain man and he had a cold fear of the scornful eyes of tellers who might look askance at the small check he would present at the window.

  He made it out for twenty dollars, five more than he would have requested had he gone to the familiar little branch office.

  Jedediah Amberson was not a man to take much note of his surroundings. He was, at the time, occupied in writing a text, and the problems it presented were so intricate that he had recently found himself walking directly into other pedestrians and being snatched back onto the curb by helpful souls who didn’t want to see him truck-mashed before their eyes. Just the day before he had gone into his bedroom in mid-afternoon to change his shoes and had only awakened from his profound thoughts when he found himself, clad in pajamas, brushing his teeth before the bathroom mirror.

  He took his place in the line before a window. He was mentally extrapolating the trend line of one of J. M. Keynes’ debt charts when a chill voice said, “Well!”

  He found that he had moved up to the window itself and the teller was waiting for his check. He flushed and said, “Oh! Sorry.” He tried to push the check under the grill, but it fluttered out of his hand. As he stooped to get it, his hat rolled off.

  At last recovering both hat and check, he stood up, smiled painfully and pushed the check under the grill.

  The young man took it, and Jed Amberson finally grew aware that he was spending a long time looking at the check. Jed strained his neck around and looked to see if he had remembered to sign it. He had.

  Only then did he notice the way the young man behind the window was dressed. He wore a deep wine-colored sports shirt, collarless and open at the throat. At the point where the counter bisected him, Jedediah could see that the young man wore green-gray slacks with at least a six-inch waistband of ocher yellow.

  Jed had a childlike love of parties, sufficient to overcome his chronic self-consciousness. He said, in a pleased tone, “Ah, some sort of festival?”

  The teller had a silken wisp of beard on his chin. He leaned almost frighteningly clos
e to the grill, aiming the wisp of beard at Amberson as he gave him a careful scrutiny.

  “We are busy here,” the teller said. “Take your childish little game across street and attempt it on them.”

  Though shy, Jedediah was able to call on hidden stores of indignation when he felt himself wronged. He straightened slowly and said, with dignity, “I have an account and I suggest you cash my check as quickly and quietly as possible.

  The teller glanced beyond Jedediah and waved the silky beard in a taut half circle, a “come here” gesture.

  Jedediah turned and gasped as he faced the bank guard. The man wore a salmon-pink uniform with enormously padded shoulders. He had a thumb hooked in his belt, his hand close to the plastic bowl of what seemed to be a child’s bubble pipe.

  The guard jerked his other thumb toward the door and said, “Ride off, honorable sir.”

  Jedediah said, “I don’t care much for the comic-opera atmosphere of this bank. Please advise me of my balance and I will withdraw it all and put it somewhere where I’ll be treated properly.”

  The guard reached out, clamped Jed’s thin arm in a meaty hand and yanked him in the general direction of the door. Jed intensely disliked being touched or pushed or pulled. He bunched his left hand into a large knobby fist and thrust it with vigor into the exact middle of the guard’s face.

  The guard grunted as he sat down on the tile floor. The ridiculous bubble pipe came out, and was aimed at Jed. He heard no sound of explosion, but suddenly there was a large cold area in his middle that felt the size of a basketball. And when he tried to move, the area of cold turned into an area of pain so intense that it nauseated him. It took but two tiny attempts to prove to him that he could achieve relative comfort only by standing absolutely still. The ability to breathe and to turn his eyes in their sockets seemed the only freedom of motion left to him.

  The guard said, tenderly touching his puffed upper lip, “Don’t drop signal, Harry. We can handle this without flicks.” He got slowly to his feet, keeping the toy weapon centered on Jedediah.

  Other customers stood at a respectful distance, curious and interested. A fussy little bald-headed man came trotting up, carrying himself with an air of authority. He wore pastel-blue pajamas with a gold medallion over the heart.

  The guard stiffened. “Nothing we can’t handle, Mr. Green-bush.”

  “Indeed!” Mr. Greenbush said, his voice like a terrier’s bark. “Indeed! You seem to be creating enough disturbance at this moment. Couldn’t you have exported him more quietly?”

  “Bank was busy,” the teller said. “I didn’t notice him till he got right up to window.”

  Mr. Greenbush stared at Jedediah. He said, “He looks reasonable enough, Palmer. Turn it off.”

  Jed took a deep, grateful breath as the chill area suddenly departed. He said weakly, “I demand an explanation.”

  Mr. Greenbush took the check the teller handed him and, accompanied by the guard, led Jed over to one side. He smiled in what was intended to be a fatherly fashion. He said, glancing at the signature on the check, “Mr. Amberson, surely you must realize, or your patrons must realize, that City National Bank is not the sort of organization to lend its facilities to inane promotional gestures.”

  Jedediah had long since begun to have a feeling of nightmare. He stared at the little man in blue pajamas. “Promotional gestures?” - .

  “Of course, my dear fellow. For what other reason would you come here dressed as you are and present this . . . this document.”

  “Dressed?” Jed looked down at his slightly baggy gray suit, his white shirt, his blue necktie and cordovan shoes. Then he stared around at the customers of the bank who had long since ceased to notice the little tableau. He saw that the men wore the sort of clothes considered rather extreme at the most exclusive of private beaches. He was particularly intrigued by one fellow who wore a cerise silk shirt, open to the waist, emerald green shorts to his knees, and calf-length pink nylons.

  The women, he noticed, all wore dim shades of deep gray or brown, and a standard costume consisting of a halter, a short flared skirt that ended just above the knees and a knit cap pulled well down over the hair.

  Amberson said, “Uh. Something special going on.”

  “Evidently. Suppose you explain.”

  “Me explain! Look, I can show you identification. I’m an Associate Professor of Economics at Columbia and I—” He reached for his hip pocket. Once again the ball of pain entered his vitals. The guard stepped over to him, reached into each of his pockets in turn, handed the contents to Mr. Greenbush.

  Then the pressure was released. “I am certainly going to give your high-handed procedures here as much publicity as I can,” Jed said angrily.

  But Greenbush ignored him. Greenbush had opened his change purse and had taken out a fifty-cent piece. Greenbush held the coin much as a superstitious savage would have held a mirror. He made tiny bleating sounds. At last he said, his voice thin and strained, “Nineteen forty-nine mint condition! What do you want for it?”

  “Just cash my check and let me go,” Jed said wearily. “You’re all crazy here. Why shouldn’t this year’s coin be in mint condition?”

  “Bring him into my office,” Greenbush said in a frenzy.

  “But I—” Jed protested. He stopped as the guard raised the weapon once more. Jed meekly followed Greenbush back through the bank. He decided that it was a case of mistaken identity. He could call his department from the office. It would all be straightened out, with apologies.

  With the door closed behind the two of them, Jed looked around the office. The walls were a particularly liverish and luminescent yellow-green. The desk was a block of plastic balanced precariously on one slim pedestal no bigger around than a lead pencil. The chairs gave him a dizzy feeling. They looked comfortable, but as far as he could see, they were equipped only with front legs. He could not see why they remained upright.

  “Please sit there,” Greenbush said.

  Jed lowered himself into the chair with great caution. It yielded slightly, then seemed to clasp him with an almost embarrassing warmth, as though he sat on the pneumatic lap of an exceptionally large woman.

  Greenbush came over to him, pointed to Jed’s wristwatch and said, “Give me that, too.”

  “I didn’t come for a loan,” Jed said.

  “Don’t be ass. You’ll get all back.”

  Greenbush sat behind his desk, with the little pile of Jed’s possessions in front of him. He made little mumbling sounds as he prodded and poked and pried. He seemed very interested in the money. He listened to the watch tick and said, “Mmm. Spring mechanical.”

  “No. It runs on atomic power,” Jed said bitterly. Greenbush didn’t answer.

  From the back of Jed’s wallet, Greenbush took the picture of Helen. He touched the glossy surface, said, “Two-dimensional.”

  After what seemed an interminable period, Mr. Greenbush leaned back, put the tips of his fingers together and said, “Amberson, you are fortunate that you contacted me.”

  “I can visualize two schools of thought on that,” Jed said stiffly.

  Greenbush smiled. “You see, Amberson, I am coin collector and also antiquarian. It is possible National Museum might have material to equip you, but their stuff would be obviously old. I am reasonable man, and I know there must be explanation for all things.” He fixed Jed with his sharp bright eyes, leaned slowly forward and said, “How did you get here?”

  “Why, I walked through your front door.” Jed suddenly frowned. “There was a strange jar when I did so. A dislocation, a feeling of being violently twisted in here.” He tapped his temple with a thin finger.

  “That’s why I say you are fortunate. Some other bank might have had you in deviate ward by now where they’d be needling out slices of your frontal lobes.”

  “Is it too much to ask down here to get a small check cashed?”

  “Not too much to ask in nineteen forty-nine, I’m sure. And I am ready to believe you
are product of nineteen forty-nine. But, my dear Amberson, this is year eighty-three under Grad-zinger calendar.”

  “For a practical joke, Greenbush, this is pretty ponderous.”

  Greenbush shrugged, touched a button on the desk. The wide draperies slithered slowly back from the huge window. “Walk over and take look, Amberson. Is that your world?”