As if reading his thoughts, Jonathon asked, ‘Will you be remaining here or will you return to your homeworld?’
The question surprised Reynolds; it was the first time the alien had ever evidenced a personal interest in him. ‘I’ll stay here. I’m happier.’
‘And there will be a new director?’
‘Yes. How did you know that? But I think I’m going to be famous again. I can get Kelly retained.’
‘You could have the job yourself,’ Jonathon said.
‘But I don’t want it. How do you know all this? About Kelly and so on?’
‘I listen to the stars,’ Jonathon said in its high warbling voice.
‘They are alive, aren’t they?’ Reynolds said suddenly.
‘Of course. We are permitted to see them for what they are. You do not. But you are young.’
‘They are balls of ionized gas. Thermonuclear reactions.’
The alien moved, shifting its neck as though a joint lay in the middle of it. Reynolds did not understand the gesture. Nor would he ever. Time had run out at last.
Jonathon said, ‘When they come to you, they assume a disguise you can see. That is how they spend their time in this universe. Think of them as doorways.’
‘Through which I cannot pass.’
‘Yes. ‘
Reynolds smiled, nodded and passed into the lock. It contracted behind him, engulfing the image of his friend. A few moments of drifting silence, then the other end of the lock furled open.
The pilot was a stranger. Ignoring the man, Reynolds dressed, strapped himself down and thought about Jonathon. What was it that it had said? I listen to the stars. Yes, and the stars had told it that Kelly had been fired?
He did not like that part. But the part he liked even less was this: when it said it, Jonathon had not blinked.
(1) It had been telling the truth. (2) It could lie without flicking a lash.
Choose one.
Reynolds did, and the tug fell toward the moon.
<
* * * *
WHEN THE VERTICAL WORLD BECOMES HORIZONTAL
by Alexei Panshin
Alexei Panshin, who won a Nebula Award for his novel Rite of Passage, contributes a warm, happy story about the day the world’s consciousness changed. This is an odd story, unlike any you’ve read before in science fiction; you could call it a very far out children’s story. Or maybe it’s an unusually sophisticated story for grown-ups.
* * * *
THE RAIN is coming closer, sending the heat running before it. I can see the rain, hanging like twists of smoke over the roofs. The city will be scrubbed clean.
This is an acute moment. The wind is raising gooseflesh on my arms. I can feel the thunder as electricity and the electricity as thunder. Down in the street I hear voices calling around the corner. I think I even hear the music.
This is the moment. I know it’s here.
I’ve been waiting so long. I’ll savor this last bit of waiting. The dark is so dark, so close-wrapped. The electricity is white. The streets are going to steam.
There has never been a better moment since the world began. This is it! It’s here.
It’s never happened since the last time, and it’s going to happen now. The beginning of the world was a better moment. It was exalting. As nearly as I can tell, there have been two good moments since. I missed them both.
I’m going to be here for this one.
So are you.
I know the sun is baking the sidewalks. The heat is now. But listen with your skin. Rain is in the air.
It’s going to be good. When you see the rain and steam and sun and people all mixed together in the afternoon, you’ll know their tune is the one that’s been in your head all along. Close your eyes. Feel the wind rising.
I’ll tell you how good it’s going to be. I’ll tell you what it was like for someone who knew even less than you do about what is happening.
Woody Asenion was raised in the largest closet of an apartment at 206 W. 104th St. in Manhattan. Once there had been four—Papa, Granny, Mama and him—but now there were only two. There was room now for Woody to stretch out, but at night he still slept at Papa’s feet, just like always, for the comfort of just like always.
Woody had never been out of the closet without permission. Well, once. When he was very small he had slipped out into the apartment one night and wandered the aisles alone until the blinking and bubbling became too frightening to bear and the robot found him, shook a finger at him and led him back home. He had never done it again.
But on this day, the vertical world was turning horizontal. People were no longer cringing and bullying. They were starting to think of other things.
It was already this close: When Woody’s father, who was very vertical, flung the door of the closet open while in the grip of an intense excitement, Woody had his hand on the knob and the knob three quarters turned. That was a quarter-turn more than he usually dared when he toyed with strange thoughts of an afternoon.
Mr. Asenion broke Woody’s grip on the knob with an automatic gesture. “You promised your papa,” he said and rapped his knuckles with a demodulator he happened to have in his hand. But the moment was quickly forgotten in his excitement.
“I had it all backwards! I had it all backwards! It’s the particular that represents the general.”
That was part of the vertical world turning horizontal, too. Since he had flunked out of Columbia University in 1928, Mr. Asenion had been working on a Dimensional Redistributor. He had been seeking to open gateways to the many strange dimensions that exist around us. He had never been successful.
He had never been successful in the vertical world, either. He had fallen out of its bottom. He told himself that he did not fit because he hadn’t yet found his place. He was very vertical. He knew the power that would be his if he ever invented the Dimensional Redistributor, and so labored all the harder through the many years of failure. It was his key to entry at the top of the pyramid.
But suddenly, on this day when the vertical world was turning horizontal, enough people being ready for that to happen, he had been struck with a crucial insight as he was standing with a demodulator in his hand. He suddenly saw that you could turn things around. The answer was not many gateways to many strange dimensions. It was one gateway, one gateway into this world.
He knew how to build it, too.
“I’ll need a 28K-916 Hersh.,” he said. That was a vacuum tube with special rhodomagnetic properties that had been out of stock for forty-two years.
There was only one place in New York, perhaps in all the world, where such a tube might be found, Stewart’s Out-of-Stock Supply. Stewart’s has everything that is out of stock, and Mr. Asenion had seen a 28K-916 Hersh. there in 1934. He had not needed it then, however.
Stewart’s has everything out of stock that an out-of-date inventor might need, but they may not sell it to you if they disapprove of you. Mr. Asenion had not been welcome in Stewart’s since the fall of 1937 when he had incautiously announced his ambitions under stern cross-questioning.
“Woodrow,” Mr. Asenion said, “you must go to Stewart’s in Brooklyn. They will have a 28K-916 Hersh. It’s all I need to finish my machine. Then I will rule the world.”
“Brooklyn?” said Woody. “I’ve never been to Brooklyn, Papa.”
He had heard of Brooklyn from the lips of his dead mother. She said she had been to Brooklyn once.
Sometimes he had thought about Brooklyn when his father was experimenting and he was alone in the closet.
He had seen the Heights of Brooklyn once, the great towering wall of rock that conceals all but the spires of the land beyond. Or he believed that he had. Sometimes he thought that he must have imagined it when he was small. He would know if he should ever see it again. But to go to Brooklyn?
“It’s farther than I’ve ever been. Why don’t you go, Papa?”
“There are reasons,” said Mr. Asenion with dignity. “At this special moment, I must sta
y with my machine. Further inspiration may come to me. I must be ready.”
He had a point. Lack of success in the vertical world is no index of lack of skill in invention. He had something in the Dimensional Redistributor. What’s more, his insight on this day when the vertical world was turning horizontal, was valid: with the particular representing the general, one reversed gateway, and a 28K-916 Hersh. in place, his Dimensional Redistributor would work. And there are even alternatives to the 28K-916 Hersh. which inspiration can reveal and ingenuity confirm.
Woody shook his head in fear and excitement. “I can’t do it.”
Mr. Asenion heard only the fear. “There’s no need to be afraid, just because it’s Brooklyn. I’ll write out the way, just as I always do. And I’ll send the robot along to keep you company. You will be safe as long as you stick to the path and carry your umbrella.”
The robot nodded dumbly from behind Mr. Asenion. When Woody had run errands in the neighborhood, it had always kept him silent company.
“I don’t want to,” said Woody.
“I command you to go. You owe it to me, your father, for all the many years I’ve fed you and kept a roof over your head and let you sleep at my feet”
He was right if you look at things vertically.
“All right” said Woody. “I will go.”
Mr. Asenion patted Woody on the head. “Good boy,” he said.
When the Dimensional Redistributor was in operation, he meant to pat the whole world on the head when it did what he said. “Good boy,” he would say.
As soon as Mr. Asenion turned away, Woody kicked the robot. It could not complain, but it did look reproachful.
So there you have Woody Asenion, raised in a closet, lower than the lowest in the vertical world, somebody who knows even less than you do about what is going on. He is even more limited than you know. Last birthday, Woody was thirty-seven years old.
Woody gave the robot one of his hands and held his map and directions tight in the other so as not to lose his way, said goodbye to his father, who turned away to putter with his machine, and with one deep breath cleared the first three thresholds—the door of the closet, the door of the apartment, and the door of the building at 206 W. 104th St. in Manhattan—and stood blinking in the sun, heat and sidewalk traffic. There were threats, noise and distraction all about him. Cars clawed and roared at each other, seeking advantage. Signs in bright colors loomed at Woody yelling, “Number *1* in Quantity,” and “Do As You’re Told, Son,” and “Step Backward.” It was confusing to Woody, but he knew that if he did not panic, if he followed his instructions, stayed on the path and did not lose his umbrella, he could pass through the danger unscathed.
He let his breath out. The air in the street was wet and sticky. The sunlight was oppressive. He seized the robot’s hand all the tighter, and they set off down the street. It was the robot who carried the rolled umbrella.
The people they threaded through were these:
Three white men—one in a business suit, one an old man, one a bum.
Two black men—one grateful, one not.
A student.
Three old women.
Five Puerto Ricans of both sexes and various ages.
Two young women—one bitter, one not.
A minister of the Church of God.
A group of snazzy black buccaneers talking bad.
And a little girl who also lived at 206 W. 104th St in Manhattan.
“Hi, Woody,” she said. “Hi, It.”
Five of these twenty-five saw Woody Asenion walking along the street with his hand in the hand of a tall skinny cuproberyl robot and knew him immediately to be their inferior. All the others weren’t sure or didn’t care about things like that any more.
That’s how close the vertical world was to turning horizontal. But it hadn’t happened yet.
The map led Woody directly to the subway station. There was a hooded green pit, an orange railing, and stairs leading down.
In his closet, when Woody was small, he could feel the force of the subway train. When it prowled, the building would shudder. His mother had told him not to be afraid.
Woody and the robot, on their errands in the neighborhood, had twice walked past the stairpit into the subway. Once Woody had stepped three steps down and then back up again quickly. That was like a half-turn of the doorknob to the closet, but more daring. And now their directions led them down the stairs. Woody looked to the robot for assurance. The robot nodded, held Woody’s hand and took each stair first.
It was cooler in the dark cavern under the street. Only one light was visible, a yellow light in a huddled booth. Woody and the robot walked between dim pillars to the booth in the distance. Sitting on a stool in the booth was a blue extraterrestrial. It looked something like a hound, something like Fred MacMurray. It was dressed in a blue Friends of the New York Subway System uniform.
Woody looked at his directions. “Four toll tokens,” he said to the alien in the tollbooth.
The alien said, “Are you Woody Asenion?”
Woody stepped behind the robot. “How did you know me?”
The alien waved at him and turned away for the telephone. “Just forget I asked. It really isn’t important, Woody.” He dialed a number. While he waited for the ring, he said, “I’d only buy two toll tokens, if I were you. You’ll only need two. Oh, hello, Oishnor. Listen, ‘it’s about to rain.’ Right.”
Woody looked at his directions. They said to buy four toll tokens. He set his jaw. “Four toll tokens, please,” he said. “And how did you know me?”
“I was set here to ask,” said the blue alien in the blue Friends of the New York Subway System uniform. “We’re just observers here for the rain and we wanted to have warning.”
“Rain?” said Woody.
“The weather forecast says that when Woody Asenion goes to Brooklyn it’s going to rain.” The alien passed four tokens under the grill of the booth. “See if it doesn’t.”
“Oh, is that how it is,” said Woody, who wasn’t sure how weather forecasts were made. He hadn’t thought he was that important, though of course he was. Well, he was safe. The robot had the umbrella.
Woody and the robot turned away. There was a white electric sign on the other side of the booth. It had a black arrow and black letters that blinked and said, “To the Subway.” They followed the arrow. Behind them, the tollbooth closed and the yellow light went off.
The directions and map mentioned the black arrow and the sign. Woody and the robot walked through the darkness between the metal pillars until they came to another stair. An automatic machine guarded the top of the stair. It held out a hand until Woody gave it two toll tokens and then it let them pass.
There was light at the bottom of the stairs and the stairs were very tall. Down they walked, down and down, until Woody was not at all sure that he wanted to go to Brooklyn at all, even to buy his father a 28K-916 Hersh to finish his Dimensional Redistributor and control the world.
The station was a great vaulted catacomb. The walls were covered with grime-coated mosaics celebrating the muses of Science and Industry. Woody and the robot were all alone on the echoing platform.
Then suddenly a wind blew through the station, fluttering the map and directions in Woody’s hand, a chill wind. Following the wind, the squealing, clashing and roaring of the great behemoth. Following the noise, the subway train itself. It hurtled into the station under the tight command of its pilot, whom Woody could see seated in the front window, and came to a stop with a tortured screech of metal. A voice more commanding than even Mr. Asenion’s said, “Passengers will stand clear of the moving platform as trains enter and leave the station!” A shelf of metal moved silently out to the train as a pair of doors slammed open in front of them. Woody squeezed the robot’s hand hard.
The robot nodded reassuringly and led Woody onto the metal shelf and aboard the train. One last look. The shelf began to withdraw and the doors closed like a trap, and Woody was committed.
Woody was afraid. He sat, uneasy as a cricket, on the seat next to the robot. Blackness hurtled by the window behind his head. There was great constantly modulating noise. All the passengers stared straight ahead.
But this was no ordinary subway train, even though it now ran on an obscure local line. There was a plaque on the wall across from Woody. It said, “This train, the Lyman R. Long, was dedicated at the New York World’s Fair as the Subway Train of the Future, July 7, 1939.” In no time at all, this great old train brought them into the gleaming Central Station of the New York Subway System.
They left the Subway Train of the Future then, and ventured out into the echoing bustle of this bright high-ceilinged underground world. The walls were alive with texture and color. High overhead, dominating Central Station, was a great stained glass window lit like a neon sign. It, too, celebrated the muses of Science and Industry, but it was much grander.
Universe 4 - [Anthology] Page 21
