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

by Edited By Judith Merril

  “Sir, we’ve got to show you something right now,” Harry stammered. “It’s urgent, colonel.”

  “Now see here Fisher,” the colonel said, “we’ve got proper channels for any problems you might have and I don’t take care of those things at my quarters. I have an office in post headquarters and with the permission of your company commander, you can see my adjutant during duty hours. Or the chaplain.”

  “Please, sir,” Harry gulped. “It’s awfully important.”

  “Well,” the colonel hesitated, “this is most unusual.”

  “Yes, sir, it is most unusual,” Harry agreed.

  “All right,” the post commander sighed, “what is it?”

  “Sir, are your house lights all working?” Harry repeated.

  “Now look here, Fisher, if this is some sort of a gag, I’ll see that…”

  “No, sir,” Harry repeated strenuously, “I really mean the question.”

  The colonel glanced back over his shoulder into the house. He turned back to the pair. “Yes, the lights appear to be all functioning.”

  Harry turned to Jed. “Talk to your mother, Jed,” he whispered.

  Jed shut his eyes. “Ma,” he thought, “it’s me agin!”

  The lights went out all over the colonel’s quarters.

  Colonel Cartwright gasped and stared at the mountain boy standing with his eyes closed.

  “All right, Jed,” Harry said, “break it off.”

  “Jest a minute, Ma,” Jed thought, “Harry wants me.” He opened his eyes and the lights came on.

  “How did he do it?” the colonel breathed.

  “He thought them out, sir,” Harry said.

  “He… WHAT?” Cartwright spluttered.

  “That’s right, sir,” Harry repeated. “He ‘thought’ them out. Jed, get Ma on the line again.”

  Jed shut his eyes. The lights went out again.

  Colonel Cartwright sagged against the door jam. He moaned, “How long has this one been running around loose?”

  “Colonel,” Harry said cautiously, “he does the same thing with radios, telephones, cars, anything requiring electrical power. He just shuts it off.”

  The post commander looked stunned.

  “That’s not all either, sir,” Harry continued. “He can ‘think’ bullets to a target.”

  “Come in the house,” the colonel said weakly. “That’s an order, soldiers.”

  Three weeks later, Sergeants First Class Harold Fisher and Jediah Cromwell were putting the finishing touches to their own private room. Jed sank down onto the soft mattress on the big bed. “Glory be, Harry, I jest can’t seem to catch my breath, we’ve been movin’ so fast ‘n doin’ so much. All them there tests with them tanks and them airyplanes in Californy and that other funny place. Ma thought it wuz kinda funny I had so much time fer jest a-sittin’ ‘n chattin’ with her. Now we’re here ‘n I ain’t allowed to say nothing to her.

  He stole a proud glance at the new chevrons on the sleeve of his fancy, blue dress uniform. “Gosh but Ma would be proud to hear about all what’s happened to us. I purely wish I could tell her.”

  Harry snapped up from the bureau drawer where he had been placing his clothing.

  “Watch it, Jed. You know what the general said. Now don’t you go and queer this deal for us just because you’re getting a little homesick,” Harry warned. “We’re the only Army GI’s in this outfit and this is pretty plush. You know what the general said, ‘no talking with Ma until you get permission.’ Remember?”

  Jed sighed. “Oh, I remember, rightly enough. Only I shore wish they’d let me just think ‘hello’ to her. I ain’t never been so far from her afore and its gonna take a heap of powerful mind-talk to get to her.”

  “Never you mind, now Jed,” Harry said, “you’ll get all the chances you want to talk with her. Just be patient.”

  He turned back to his clothing. There was a knock at the door and then it opened to admit a small, conservatively-dressed civilian. Both sergeants jumped to their feet.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” the civilian said. “I’m George Wadsworth, first secretary at the Embassy here.” He looked around the room and smiled. “Your quarters satisfactory, men?” Both soldiers nodded happily.

  “Good,” Wadsworth said. “Oh, by the way Sergeant Cromwell,” he turned to Jed, “we’ve just learned that our hosts plan to launch their manned Moon rocket within the next hour or so. Isn’t that interesting?”

  Jed nodded vigorously.

  “I thought so, too,” Wadsworth continued. “I should imagine that your mother would find this quite interesting as well, don’t you think, Sergeant Cromwell?”

  “ ‘Deed she would, sir,” Jed said enthusiastically.

  “Quite so,” Wadsworth said mildly. “Why don’t you just take the rest of the day off and tell her all about it. While you’re at it, you might bring her up to date on your trip. And there’s a wonderful view of the Kremlin from this window. I’m sure she’ll be interested in all this. Just have a nice long chat. Take all day. Take two days if you like. No hurry, you know.”

  He smiled and turned to leave the room. “Don’t forget to tell her about your airplane ride, too,” he added and then walked to the door.

  “Thank you, sir,” Jed called out after him.

  Jed grinned happily and lay down on the nice, soft mattress.

  “Ma,” he thought, concentrating harder than he ever did before, “it’s me agin.”

  All electrical power went off over the western dominions of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

  <>

  * * * *

  Forty years ago, the Theory of Evolution went to court in Tennessee. William Jennings Bryan won a Pyrrhic victory, and the Great Controversy was settled at last.

  Twenty years ago, controversy returned—this time not Religion embattled against Science, but a fight between scientific-political ideologies. The USSR claimed Dr. Lysenko had demonstrated the pre-Darwinian (Lamarckian) theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics. American scientists laughed.

  A decade later, Lysenko was “out” in his own country; and a young instructor at the University of Michigan started playing With worms. By now, several thousands of flatworms have run mazes, suffered electric shocks, had bright lights shined in their eyes, eaten their shredded relatives, bathed in solutions of RNAse—and firmly established the fact that acquired characteristics can be inherited (not to mention, ingested).

  Although the worms are running—or wriggling, more likely-all over the “free world,” the center of activity is Dr. James V. McConnell’s Planaria Research Group, at the University of Michigan. In last year’s Annual, I reported happily on the PRCs highly unsettling publication, The Worm Runner’s Digest. Now Prentice-Hall has brought out The Worm Re-Turns, a sampler from the Digest (featuring more of the satiric than the serious side of recent events in the evolution of Evolution—but with a gleeful “compulsory introduction,” by Arthur Koestler providing a colorful account of the subversive behavior of flatworms).

  “As matters stand at present,” the introduction explains, “the asexual transmission of learnt experience can no longer be denied, whereas its sexual transmission is passionately denied by orthodox science—which leads to the perversely paradoxical conclusion that the lower animals must have an incomparably more efficient evolutionary mechanism at their disposal than the higher ones. Thus Coli bacteria have the privilege of inheriting acquired immunity against streptomycin, whereas the evolution in higher animals depends on chance alone; the lower species are capable of profiting from the past experience of the race, in the higher species it is wasted.”

  Which brings us roughly even with the present state of confusion—except for the contribution provided by Dr. Nesvadba.

  * * * *

  THE LAST SECRET WEAPON OF THE THIRD REICH

  Josef Nesvadba

  “Nobody has yet been able to prove,” I ended on a flourish of oratory, “that man is not the slave
of heredity, that in all he thinks he does not depend on his forebears, and that there is any other hope of changing him than by crossbreeding like horses or rabbits. There’s no need to give me that scornful smile,” I said to the doctor sitting by my side. “You believe that environment is the strongest influence on people, because you are living in a new society. But you can’t prove it by experiment, because you can’t play with people like you can with dogs or guinea pigs.”

  We were in the night train; the heating was not working and so we were trying to keep warm by getting heated about our theories. There was a blonde of about seventeen sitting facing me; I could not see her eyes, but I hoped she was listening. It was for her that I was making such eloquent speeches; the doctor seemed rather a dangerous rival.

  “I’m smiling because I have just remembered an experiment on people that might apply here,” he answered quietly. “I heard it about a year ago, from our pharmacist Hutzvalek, who had a peculiar experience toward the end of the last war.”

  * * * *

  It was shortly before the siege of Berlin, when Patton was directing his offensive in the west, and when every day the German railways were losing engine after engine to the boiler-busters. Loyal Nazis had only one hope— the secret weapon Goebbels had promised them. V one and V two were ancient history in London by then, but the Allied offensive still went forward. Nobody with any sense thought the talk about secret weapons was anything but bluff. Hutzvalek thought so too; he worked in the chemist’s shop near the Michle gasworks, and made a lot of money on the side, manufacturing complexion creams at home from stolen lanolin. He was getting along fine, and he loved his wife; they had not been married long, because her parents would not agree and only gave in because marriage would save her from having to go and work in Germany. They had no cause to think well of Hutzvalek; he was reputed to be far too fond of gaiety, women and home-made wine; in those days they drank wine made from bread. After his marriage, though, he settled down properly, employed his father and mother-in-law in his complexion-cream business, and waited contentedly for the war to end. Until one morning in February when the Gestapo came for him.

  They handcuffed him to the door, socked his father-in-law on the jaw, kicked his wife, who was begging them on her knees to let him go. They knocked his mother-in-law down, tossed the newborn baby out of her cradle and woke up the two-year-old boy.

  They took five books out of the bookcase and ripped the featherbed open. Yet it was not the Gestapo after all.

  They got out of the Mercedes beyond the city, took off their leather coats and led Hutzvalek deep into the woods, following secret paths. Nobody said a word to him and he thought he was going to be executed. He tried to explain how he had come by all that lanolin, to soften their hearts, but nobody answered, although his German was quite good, really.

  Deep in the woods was a hunting lodge where a foreigner was expecting them, dressed in a tweed jacket such as nobody wore in the Protectorate. He offered Hutzvalek Chesterfield cigarettes and Golden Milk chocolate.

  “Aren’t you the Gestapo?” Hutzvalek was flabbergasted and looked round the room. They were alone.

  “No, we’re not the Gestapo,” the foreigner spoke fluent Czech. “And you’ve not been arrested, either. You’re mobilized from now on.”

  “What’s the idea? Whatever for? The war’s going to end in a week or two. Moscow announced in the news last night . . .” The foreigner frowned.

  “I am Colonel Borovetz,” he said, and assumed that put him in a better position to judge the state of the war. “The war is going to end—unless the Germans succeed in using their last secret weapon. . . .” He got up and began to walk uneasily back and forth. He slowly unlocked the handcuffs Hutzvalek still had on his wrists.

  “What sort of a weapon have they got?” asked the pharmacist, and wondered why Borovetz should need to mobilize just him. Was the secret weapon something to do with drugs?

  “That’s just what we’ve got to find out,” the colonel shouted at him. “We have been informed that the last measures to be taken by the supreme command of the SS are called ‘Heil Herod’, but we don’t know anything more than that. We do not even know what it is to be used on. All we know is that the most successful murderous types from the front and the rear are being called in and housed in a deserted factory near Bohosudov. The place is so well guarded that we have so far failed to find out the first thing about it, although we have lost a number of our men in the attempt. It has therefore been decided that we must manage to get someone inside to take part in the whole campaign. . . .”

  “Who is it going to be?” asked Hutzvalek, who thought the whole idea of espionage in the very last days of the war a ridiculous one. “Who is going to manage to get inside?”

  Borovetz placed a photograph in front of him: “One of the first who was brought in to take part in the tests of the secret weapon was Sturmbannführer Yeschke. . . .” The pharmacist racked his brains to think where he had seen this fellow in the black uniform. Then the colonel laid a pocket mirror by the side of the photograph and Hutzvalek sprang back. It was his own face looking up at him.

  “That’s just not possible,” he gasped.

  “The two of you are as like as two peas. We shall get rid of him and have you taken to the secret laboratory. In a fortnight you will report back. We know that none of those working on the project stay there for more than a fortnight. You will ring me at this number, or else you can leave a description of the weapon in the hiding place under the Hus monument. . . .”

  “I’m a pharmacist,” Hutzvalek protested. “I’ve only done a couple of weeks’ military training, that was before Munich—and I don’t know the first thing about the SS equipment. I’ll give myself away before I’ve said two words.”

  “You are the only man who resembles any of these cutthroats, and we’ve searched right through the records of all the Allied armies. The future of humanity depends on your mission, in your hands lies our victory over Hitler, Brother,” the colonel spoke like a Czech legionary, and looked sadly at the red mark left by the iron handcuffs on Hutzvalek’s wrists. Up till then the pharmacist had assumed that they would defeat Hitler without him. He shook his head. “You will be paid a hundred thousand Swiss francs for your report,” the colonel went on. Hutzvalek did some quick mental arithmetic. That would be enough to buy a little chemist’s shop. In Switzerland. Was it worth risking his life for? Borovetz got impatiently to his feet. He opened a drawer and pulled out a short American army repeater fitted with a silencer. So it was a question of life or death anyway. The pharmacist nodded quickly.

  “If I die, my children are to get the money, Brother. . . He did not feel afraid, yet. It felt more like taking out life insurance, or selling his own face.

  * * * *

  That was the only thing that interested the guards outside the Bohosudov factory; they just checked the documents with the face. Sitting frowning by the side of the driver was the exact likeness of Sturmbannführer Yeschke, unshaven and bad-tempered after a sleepless night’s journey back from the front. They took him past a lot of barbed wire inside the gate and through an empty workshop to the next guard. Here they asked for the password, but memory was Hutzvalek’s strong point, and they took him on to the entrance to the underground. Here he was taken over by a tall, not so young blonde in uniform, whose name appeared to be Leni.

  “Can you start right away?” she asked. Hutzvalek-Yeschke nodded. The sooner he got it over the better. All of it. Whatever it was. In an underground cell that looked more like a hotel room he flopped down on a soft bed, wiped the sweat from his brow, loosened the Iron Cross that was strangling him and gazed round at the walls. He expected to see drawings of the secret weapon there, but instead he found Germanic beauties, naked and fair-haired, displayed to his gaze in the most alluring positions. What had these nudes got to do with the last secret weapon of the third Reich? He could not see it at all. Soon the door opened and Leni came in, wearing a dressing-gown. She was ce
rtainly quicker at getting out of her uniform than Hutzvalek was. Putting a bottle of brandy down on the table, she flung herself upon him. At first he tried to fight her off, then he realized that it was not a wrestling match.

  “Is this sort of thing allowed?” he asked doubtfully later on, as they lay side by side on the soft featherbed in the corner.

  “What d’you mean, allowed?” she did not understand.

  “Well, I mean, here, where we are manufacturing the secret weapon . . .” She started to laugh, but not for long. She got off the bed and then he realized that she was not Leni; as she raised her arm in the Aryan salute he saw the hair under her arm was ginger. She picked up her dressing gown and the bottle of brandy from the table and marched off as briskly as a soldier on parade.

  That was the last straw. For a week they’d been chasing him around the training ground, making him cram his head with Yeschke’s deeds of heroism and the faces of Yeschke’s many relations; seven whole days from morning till night the pharmacist had had to learn off by heart the orders of the SS—and all that in order to find out not the secret weapon, but the sexual capacities of some slut of a wardress?