The Year's Best Science Fiction 10 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  A typical case is described by an Arizona gentleman who writes that he was recently notified by a machine of the Internal Revenue Service that he had not paid his taxes. In fact, he had paid his taxes and had a canceled check to prove it.

  Feeling a bit smug about catching a machine off base, he mailed back a photostat of the check and suggested that the machine take a flying leap at the moon. A few weeks later the machine wrote again, complaining that he had not paid his taxes and notifying him, in that sullen way machines have, that he not only owed a substantial fine but was also facing a long term in Leavenworth Prison.

  Another photostat was mailed to the machine, but its reply was more menacing than before. At this point the Arizona man perceived that he was in the idiotic position of arguing with a machine which was programmed not to listen to him.

  “My first thought was one of incoherent rage against that stupid construction of tubes and transistors,” he writes. “But as my anger subsided, I was struck by the happy thought that, if I were a machine, I would be able to respond with an equally placid stupidity that might eventually drive him to blow a vacuum tube.”

  The Arizona man was suffering one form of machine envy. Another form is described by a bank teller, whom we shall call Bob. The machines which make Bob’s bank a model of customer service and banking efficiency insist that all check deposits be accompanied by a coded deposit slip which the machines mail to the bank’s customers.

  Not long ago, Bob reports, a man came to his window to deposit a check. He did not have his coded deposit slip. Bob explained that the machines could not process the check without the coded deposit slip.

  In the interest of greater customer service and efficiency, Bob suggested, the man should go home, find his coded deposit slip and return with it. The man’s response was, in Bob’s words, “absolutely the vilest stream of abuse I have ever heard.”

  Bob is firmly convinced that if he, Bob, had been a recorded announcing machine, he would have suffered no distress. If he had been able to say, in a metallic voice, “I am sor-ry, sir, but the ob-jec-tives of great-er customer ser-vice and banking ef-ficiency pre-clude my accepting your check with-out a prop-er de-pos-it slip,” he would not have felt any embarrassment about the customer’s tirade.

  Visibly increasing numbers of civil servants have already mechanized themselves so successfully that their enraged victims rarely show any desire to knock them to the floor.

  “The trick in mechanizing is not to smile,” explains Harry, who is a cog in a Federal licensing office here. “The reason people never punch machines is because machines know better than to smile when they give a human the business.” Harry’s office works like this:

  The license applicant comes to window one and asks for a license. There he is told he must first fill out Form A at window two. At window two he is told that he cannot fill out Form A until he has executed Form B at window three. Harry works window three. His job is to tell the applicant that he cannot fill out Form B until he has executed Form A. Usually the applicant explodes at this point and says:

  “If I cannot get Form A without executing Form B, and if I cannot get Form B without executing Form A, how am I supposed to get my license?” At this point Harry refuses to smile. “I am sorry, sir,” he says, “but those are the regulations,” and he displays his shirt collar, on which is written the warning, “Do not spindle or fold.”

  If the applicant persists, Harry refers him to Mrs. Barger, his superior. Mrs. Barger refers him to Mr. Clott, her superior, who refers him to Mr. Whipsnade, the department chief, who happens to be away on a 52-week vacation.

  Everybody in Harry’s office has machine envy. It is a classic example of what the machines are talking about when they sit around brooding that they are in danger of being replaced by people.

  <>

  * * * *

  Rick Raphael is another newsman: like Baker, working in Washington; like Reed, a comparative newcomer to SF; like Wilson, clinging to his label, although he is now a senatorial press secretary.

  Like Wilson again—or Simak—Raphael is the true-hybrid breed of news-SF man, deriving his fiction largely from the other side(s) of his double (or triple) life. (Covered AEC and rocket tests at Los Alamos and White Sands for seven years; the Nuclear Reactor Testing Station in Idaho for five; member of the National Association of Science Writers; now handles science-oriented legislative projects for his senator.) “The Thirst Quenchers,” title story of his first book (Gollancz, 1965), was the bastard brother of a documentary film on water problems which won a National Radio and Television News Directors’ Award for Boise Station KBOI and writer-director Raphael; both pieces came out of “six years of riding snow cats, and plodding ungracefully on skis and snowshoes in the company of the Columbia Basin Snow Survey supervisor, learning and reporting the vital mechanics and sciences of his art.” His first novel, Code Three, about the highways of the future, will be published this spring by Simon and Schuster.

  “Sonny” (which has also been reprinted in Analog III) is a different kind of story—I think. It is true, however, that Raphael put in eleven years as an Army career man (coast artillery private to armored division infantry officer, via the paratroops, cryptography, a bit of interpreting, and World War II). I have no reliable information about his background in ESP.

  * * * *

  SONNY

  Rick Raphael

  Private Jediah Cromwell was homesick for the first time since his induction into the Army. If he had gotten homesick on any of at least a dozen other occasions during his first two weeks in the service, he might never have gotten beyond the induction center. But the wonders and delights of his first venture beyond the almost inaccessible West Virginia hills of his birth had kept him too awed and interested to think about home.

  When Cletus Miller headed up the trail to Bluebird Gulch, Ma felt him coming around the bend below the waterfall a mile across the gorge. She laid down her skinning knife and wiped her hands clean of the blood of the rabbits Jed had brought in earlier in the morning. “Sonny,” she called to Jed, “trouble’s acoming.”

  Jediah crossed the corn patch to her side. “What kinda trouble, Ma?”

  “Cletus Miller’s comin’,” Ma Cromwell said. “He ain’t been up here since the week afore your Pa died. I don’t know what it is but it’s bound to be trouble.”

  A few minutes later Miller hallooed from the bottom of the garden patch, then trudged up to the cabin.

  “Set and rest, Cletus,” Ma said. “Sonny, fetch Cletus a coolin’ dip.” Jed ambled down to the spring sluice and dippered out a pint of clear, mountain water.

  “Got mail fer you,” Cletus said, waving an envelope. “Guvermint mail. Fer Sonny.”

  Two weeks later, Jediah swung down the mountain to Owl Creek, carrying a small sack with his good clothes and shoes in it. The draft notice was stuffed into his overall pockets along with biscuits and meat Ma had insisted he take.

  “Go along now, Sonny,” she had directed him, “and don’t you fret none about me. The corn’s ‘most ready. You got a good supply of firewood in, more’n enought to last me all winter. If your guvermint needs us Cromwells to fight, then I reckon its our bounden duty. Your grandsire and greatgrandsire both wuz soldiers and if’n your Pa hadn’t gone and gotten his leg busted and twisted afore the guvermint called him I reckon he’d have been one, too. I’ve learned you all I can and you can read ‘n write ‘n do sums. Just mind your manners and come on home when they don’t need you no more.”

  In Owl Creek the first real part of the excitement hit Jed. He had been as far as Paulsburg, twenty miles farther and that was almost as big as the county seat at Madison. Now he was going to go even beyond Madison —right to the city. And then maybe the Army would send him more places.

  The Army did.

  Everything had been wonderful, almost overwhelming, from the moment he boarded a bus for the first time in his life until he arrived at Fort McGruder. He could hardly believe t
he wealth of the government in issuing him so many clothes and giving him so much personal gear. And while the food wasn’t what Ma would have cooked, there was lots of it. He liked the other recruits who had ridden down to McGruder with him, even though a couple of the city fellows had been kind of teasing.

  He liked the barracks although his bunk mattress wasn’t as soft as Ma’s eiderdown comforts. He liked everything—until the sergeant had cussed at him this afternoon.

  Now Jed lay on his bunk and counted the springs on the upper bunk occupied by Private Harry Fisher. It was close to eight o’clock and the barracks were full of scores of young soldiers. A crap game was going on three bunks away and across the aisle; another country boy was picking at a guitar. The bunk above sagged with the weight of Harry Fisher, who was reading a book.

  Jed’s mind kept coming back to the cussin’ out he had gotten, just for not knowing the Army insisted on a body wearing shoes no matter what he was doing. Jed had never been cussed at before in his entire life. True, Ma never hesitated about taking a willow switch to him when he was a young ‘un, or a stob of kindling when he got older. But she always whupped him in a gentle fashion, never losing her temper and always explaining with each whistling swing of switch or club, just what he’d done wrong and why this was for the good of his immortal soul.

  Thinking about Ma, Jed got homesick. He closed his eyes and looked around for Ma. She was stirring a pot of lye ashes over the fireplace and when she felt Jed in the cabin she closed her eyes. “Sonny,” she said, “you in trouble?”

  Lying on his bunk at Fort McGruder, Jed smiled happily and thought back an answer. “Nope, Ma. Jest got to wonderin’ what you wuz doing.”

  Whatever Ma was going to say was lost amid the yells and growls of the men in the barracks as the electricity went off. “Who turned the lights off?” Fisher cried from the top bunk. “It’s not ‘lights out’ time yet.”

  The noise jerked Jed back to the present and his eyes opened. The lights came on.

  “Where are the dice,” one of the crapshooters barked. “I rolled a seven just when the lights went out.”

  The noise died down and the game resumed. Fisher lay back on his bunk and went back to his book. Jed’s mind reached out for home again. “Ma,” he called out, “you say something?”

  The lights went out and the yells went up throughout the two-story barracks.

  Jed opened his eyes and the lights came on.

  At the end of the barracks, Corporal Weisbaum came out of his sacredly private room and surveyed the recruits. “Awright,” he roared, “so which one of you is the wise guy making with the lights?”

  “So nobody, corporal,” a recruit sitting on the end bunk answered. “So the lights went out. Then they come back on. So who knows? Maybe the Army ain’t paying its light bills. I had a landlady back in Brooklyn who usta do the same thing anytime I got late with her rent mon…”

  “Shaddup,” Weisbaum snarled. “Maybe it was power trouble. But if it happens again and I find out one of you monkeys is bein’ smart, the whole platoon falls out and we’ll get a little night air exercising.” He stalked back into his room and slammed the door.

  The barracks buzzed angrily for a few moments. Jed sat up and peered up at Fisher.

  “That there officer shorely don’t talk very nice, you know that Harry,” Jed said.

  Fisher laid down the book and peered under his thick-rimmed glasses at the lanky mountain boy.

  “How old are you, Jed,” he asked.

  “Nineteen.”

  “Lived up in the hills all those years?” Fisher inquired.

  “Yup,” Jed replied. “This is the furthinest I’ve ever been.” His normally cheerful face fell slightly. “Kinda makes me lonesome in a way, though. Folks back home jest plain don’t talk thataway one to the other.”

  Fisher leaned over the edge of his bunk. “Let me tell you something, Jed. Don’t let talk like that worry you. First of all, he’s no officer. And second, he doesn’t really mean it and it’s just a way the Army has of making men of us. You’ll hear lots more and lots worse before you get back to those West Virginia hills of yours.”

  Jed lay back down on the bunk. “Mebbo so,” he admitted. “Don’t mean I gotta like it much, though. Ma never talked thataway to me, no matter how bad a thing I done.”

  Jed closed his eyes and thought of home. Ought to say goodnight to Ma. He let his mind reach out to the cabin almost two states distant.

  The lights went out in the barracks, two of the crapshooters started swinging at each other in the dark and the commotion drifted upwind to the platoon sergeant’s room in another barracks two buildings away.

  In the confused yells and the shouting of Corporal Weisbaum, Jed gave up trying to say goodnight to Ma and opened his eyes again.

  The lights in the barracks came back on just as Platoon Sergeant Mitchell walked in the front door.

  The two crapshooters were tangled in a heap in the center aisle of the barracks, still swinging. Corporal Weisbaum had the Brooklyn recruit by the front of his T-shirt, waving a massive fist under the boy’s nose.

  “AT EASE!” Mitchell boomed. The barracks shook and suddenly there was quiet. “Now just what is going on here?” he demanded.

  Weisbaum released his grip on the recruit and the two brawlers scrambled to their feet. The corporal glared at the forty-odd recruits in the barracks. “I warned you mush heads what would happen the next time one of you fiddled with them lights. Now I’m gonna give you just five minutes to fall out in front in fatigues and combat boots. MOVE!”

  “Lay off,” one of the recruits muttered, “nobody touched the lights. They just went off.”

  Weisbaum turned a cold stare on the youngster. “Just went out, eh? O.K. Let’s see. Sergeant Mitchell, did the lights go out in your building?”

  The sergeant shook his head.

  “Did you notice if the lights were out in any other buildings when you came up?” Again Mitchell shook his head.

  “Just this barracks, huh?”

  Mitchell nodded.

  There was a moment of silence. “Five minutes, you jugheads,” Weisbaum roared. “Five minutes or I’ll have your flabby hides hung like wallpaper in my room.”

  By the time the platoon got back in the barracks after a five-mile walk around the perimeter of the post, Taps were sounding and the lights went out as soon as the men hit their bunks. The talking was over. Jed felt better after the pleasant walk in the night air. He decided Ma would be asleep anyway by this time. He turned his head into his pillow and was snoring in ten seconds.

  Once Jed began getting the feel of what was wanted of him, his training improved and the wrath of the platoon sergeants and corporals was directed elsewhere. The recruits moved rapidly through the hardening period and with each day, Jed found the going easier. By the time the platoon was ready for the rifle range, Jed hadn’t had time to give more than a brief occasional thought about home.

  When the supply sergeant issued him his M-14 rifle, Jed carried it back to the barracks like a young bridegroom carrying his beloved across their first threshold.

  “Harry,” he said in an awed voice to his bunkmate, “ain’t that jest about the most bee-ootiful thing you ever did see?”

  Fisher was sitting on the lower bunk beside Jed, working the action on his own rifle. “It’s a lovely weapon, allright. I just hope I can hit the side of a barn with it.”

  “Hit a barn with it,” Jed said in amazement, “why, Harry, with this here gun I could hit a squirrel in the eye two ridges away and let you pick which eye.”

  Fisher grinned. “I’ve heard you mountain boys are pretty good with a rifle. We’ll see just how good you are next week when we go out on the range.”

  The following Monday morning on the range, the platoon gathered around Corporal Weisbaum.

  “Awright, you bums,” the corporal sneered, “here’s where we separate the men from the boys. Don’t let the noise shake you too bad and if it kicks you in the
shoulder a little, don’t flinch. Remember what you learned in dry fire practice—hold ‘em and squeeze ‘em off. This is just familiarization fire, so don’t worry if you don’t hit the first few shots.”

  He gestured. “Awright. First order on the firing line.”

  Twenty men of the platoon, Jed included, moved up the embankment to the firing positions. Two hundred yards away the big targets were lined up like billboards along the line of pits.

  From the range control tower in the middle of the firing line, the bullhorn speakers blared. “Familiarization fire. Prone position.” Twenty riflemen dropped to their knees and then forward onto their bellies, their cheeks cuddling the stocks of the rifles.