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

by Edited By Judith Merril

  Irving was so unnerved by his discovery, that he could neither eat nor sleep for days. The weakness engendered by his regimen produced a purpose tremor in his right hand that made it hazardous for him to lower a plate of hot soup, and indeed resulted in the near scalding of a customer. It was obvious of course that for the first time a clear-cut indication of the existence of sentient human life on Mars had come to the fore. But why was the message in Hebrew? Irving Pirokin decided to break the pact of secrecy which he and cousin Sam had tentatively entered into, and he showed the translated message to his brother-in-law, Ephraim Zeitz, now Dr. Zeitz, then a theological student specializing in the history of the Lost Tribes of Israel.

  Zeitz poured himself into his project, using his time and resources without stint and finally came up with the theory, which, with certain minor changes, is still considered the most likely explanation of the affair of the clicks.

  “As is well known,” writes Dr. Zeitz, “the image of ‘a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night,’ could well have represented a primitive atomically energized rocket. We know from the Old Testament how preoccupied the Israelites were with survival, inasmuch as the general evil-doings of mankind had already led the Lord to the near annihilation of mankind by flood. It is quite logical, therefore, that a more advanced group of Israelites, the Lost Tribes, were not transported by Tiglathpilaser as is popularly supposed. By utilizing methods of locomotion involving their atomic knowhow, they managed to breach the barrier of space travel and land on other planets, among them Mars.”

  Dr. Zeitz sent an elaboration of this position to the Pentagon, where a prematurely negative response was elicited. But when a field investigator verified the clicks at Irving Pirokin’s receiver, the full machinery of the military was belatedly put into motion. Despite all attempts at keeping the story secret, it was broken to the press by a relative who received twenty-five dollars for scoring a news beat for the metropolitan tabloid in question. It was in this way that the military missions of hostile powers first became apprised of the cryptic clicks.

  It soon became apparent that the only place where the mysterious signals could be detected was either at Sam’s rig or at Irving’s rig. But this phenomenon was easily explained by the vagaries of the layers of the Ionosphere, which often produce these apparent freaks of unique reception. More disturbing was the torrent of criticism which began to erupt in an attempt to demolish the hypothesis of Dr. Zeitz.

  “Surely Mars cannot hold these Israelites,” wrote one scholar. “The surface temperature of Mars is too high to sustain life and the absence of C02 in the atmosphere would make the preparation of carbonated water, a staple in the ancient Hebrew diet, impossible.”

  “But,” rebutted Dr. Zeitz, “it is this very lack of C02 in the atmosphere that proves my hypothesis. Carbon dioxide is rare on Mars because it is being collected and confined to vessels of carbonated beverage which are sealed.”

  In the interest of complete honesty, we must make mention of those German scholars who have raised the counter hypothesis which conjectures that the Hyksos were the space migratory group. Utilizing what little is known of the Hyksos alphabet, they have decoded the message to read “streitwagen,” the German word for “chariot,” the invention of which is commonly credited to the Hyksos.

  The debate rages on and the military intelligence groups of both East and West are now engaged in exhaustive surveys of the Martian question. At the present writing, it is almost certain that the West is in the driver’s seat, chiefly on the data furnished by the Pirokins.

  And what of the Pirokins, themselves? They are both still hard at work on their odd jobs.

  “Even a scientist must eat,” says Irving Pirokin. But they are not lionized by their neighbors. Perhaps the familiarity of daily, intimate contact makes the breeding of contempt inevitable.

  Max Flenner, a neighborhood haberdasher who is admittedly not on good terms with Irving since he was the recipient of the soup-spilling incident, says the following: “Irving was always weak in the head. Every Friday they chop liver in the back and he picks up the clicks.” We shook our head in doubt.

  “That hardly accounts for the same signals being picked up by his cousin in Philadelphia.”

  Mr. Flenner raised his eyebrows in disdain. “They don’t chop liver in Philadelphia?”

  <>

  * * * *

  And of course, science sometimes does “catch up with science fiction.” All of a sudden, everybody’s racing into space, and nobody’s writing about it: at least not science fiction. (Don’t hardly get much sci-fi about helicopters or television any more, either.) But—

  “The universe that lies about us, visible only in the privacy, the intimacy of night, is incomprehensibly vast. Yet the conclusion that life exists across this vastness seems inescapable. We cannot yet be sure whether or not it lies within reach, but in any case, we are a part of it all; we are not alone!”

  So ends the all-time best nonfiction SF-adventure book, We Are Not Alone, by Walter Sullivan, science editor of The New York Times.

  Here’s how it begins: “In November, 1961, the most august scientific body in the United States convened a meeting at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. While it was not held in secret, in the official sense, every effort was made to avoid publicity because of the sensational nature of the question to be discussed.

  “The subject was ‘intelligent Extraterrestrial Life.’ Yet this was no gathering of wild-eyed dreamers. The convener was the Space Science Board of the National Academy of Sciences. The host was one of the world’s most distinguished astronomers, and several others among the eleven men present were internationally recognized leaders in their highly diverse fields.

  “The subjects in which the conferees were expert all bore, in some way, on the problem of whether there is intelligent life elsewhere than on earth and, if so, how to communicate with such beings. The participants shared a strong feeling that such civilizations exist. ...”

  * * * *

  THE TWERLIK

  Jack Sharkey

  It lay like a blanket over the cool gray sands, its fibrous substance extended to ultimate length in all directions, like a multispoked umbrella shorn of its fabric.

  From each of its radiated arms—or legs; the Twerlik could employ them as it chose—innumerable wirelike filaments stretched outward at right angles to these limbs, flat upon the gray sands. And from them in turn jutted hairlike cilia, so that the entire body—had it been suitably stained and raised against a contrasting backdrop—resembled nothing so much as an enormous multiplumed fan, open to a full circle and laid over an area of ten square miles. Yet weighed upon Earth scales, its entire mass would have been found to tilt the needle barely beyond the one-pound mark. And its arms and filaments and cilia clung so tightly to the sand, and were so pallid of hue, that even were a man to lie face down upon it and stare with all his might, he would not be certain he saw anything but sand beneath him.

  It could not break apart, of course. In its substance lay strengths beyond its own comprehension. For the planet upon which it had been born was too distant from its star to have developed cellular life; the Twerlik was a single, indestructible molecule, formed of an uncountable number of interlinked atoms. But—like the radar-grid it resembled —it could see, by the process of subtraction. Mild waves of light from the cold, distant star bathed it eternally. And so, objects that thrust in between the Twerlik and its source of life were recorded as negations upon its sensitive cilia, and the composite blotting-out of the light was sorted and filed and classified in its elongated brain in a fractional instant, so that it knew what went on in its vicinity.

  It could see. And it could think. And it could do.

  What it did, over endless ages, was convert some of the energy absorbed from the distant star into power. It used the power to work upon the atoms of the gray sand upon which it lay, and at a peripheral rate of about half an inch per Earth year,
it turned the sand into its own substance and thus grew. The larger it became, after all, the more its surface could catch the faint light from the star. And the more light it could catch, on its planet whose rotation was equal to its period of revolution, the more sand it could transmute; and the more sand it transmuted, the larger it became.

  That was its entire cycle of life. The Twerlik was content with it. Absorb, transmute, grow. Absorb, transmute, grow. So long as it could do these things, the Twerlik would be happy.

  Then, part way through its hundred billionth trip around the dim, distant star, the men of Earth came.

  * * * *

  Its first awareness of their arrival was a sort of bloating sensation, not unlike a mild twinge of nausea, as the cilia far beneath the gleaming fires of the rocket-thrust began hungrily to overabsorb.

  The Twerlik did not know what was occurring, exactly, but it soon got itself under control, and would not let those cilia nearest the descending fires partake overly of the unexpected banquet. It made them take a share proportionate to their relationship in size to the rest of the enormous body, and it urged the rest of itself to partake similarly. By the time the slim metal rocket had come down, midway between the outermost fringes of the Twerlik and its splayed-out central brain, the creature had been able to feed more than in the previous three periods of the planetary revolution.

  “This thing which has come,” it told itself; “is therefore a good thing.”

  It was pleased at this new concept. Until the ship had come, the Twerlik had simply assumed that life was being lived to its peak. Now it knew there were better things. And this necessity to parcel out absorbable energy to its limbs was new, also. It gave the Twerlik a greater awareness of its own brain as the key motivator of this farflung empire which was itself. “I am a me,” it realized, “and the rest of my extensions are but my parts!” It almost glowed with delight—not to mention an overload of absorbed energy —at the thought of all it had learned in a few moments. And then it realized what “moments” were, too; until the arrival of the ship, everything had been the same, and so the vast eons it had been there registered as no longer than an eyeblink would to a man, because it had had no shorter events for comparison of time. “So quickly!” the Twerlik mused. “I know what goodness and betterment are; I know that I am a me; I know the difference between a moment and an eon.”

  The Twerlik was abruptly aware, then, of yet another new sensation: gratitude. “This tall thing,” it said, and at the same time filed away its first knowledge of differentiation in heights for later reference, “has done the me a service, in a moment, and the me is bettered, and grateful!”

  And then it knew its first pain, as this rush of new concepts attempted to file themselves in subatomic synaptic structures incapable of coping with such a swift influx.

  The Twerlik’s brain throbbed with this cramming. To ease the pain, it used a fraction of the energy it had absorbed from the fires of the rocket, and enlarged the surface of the thinking section. Wisely—for it was growing wiser by the moment—it overenlarged it, that it might not again know pain should more concepts try to engrave themselves upon its consciousness. And just in time, too. For it suddenly needed room for concepts of foresight, prudence, headache, remedy and alertness.

  Being lost in its own introspections, it turned its mind once more to the New Thing on the planet as it felt another increase in the absorption of its cilia. It did some rapid subtraction from the shifts in light from its star, and then it “saw” that there were things like unto itself emerging from the tall thing.

  Its brain instantly added the concept of pity to the collection.

  For these like-creatures were stunted travesties of the Twerlik. Only four limbs, and a limb stub on top. And these four fairly developed limbs had but five filaments to each, and no apparent cilia, save upon the useless limb stub. And the five filaments upon each of the two limbs nearest the me were bound up in layers of something that was not part of the creatures at all.

  “These magnificent creatures,” mourned the Twerlik, “having so little of their own, have yet shared their largesse with me!” For the creatures were bearing bulky objects out of the tall thing, and setting them upon the gray sand and upon the Twerlik itself. And from these objects there flared a great deal of brightness and warmth, and the creatures were standing amid this brightness and warmth, and doing incomprehensible things with four-limbed objects that had no life at all . . . and the cilia of the Twerlik were absorbing all they could of this unexpected feast.

  “I can grow now!” it told itself. “I can grow in a short period as I have never in my life grown before. I can spread out until I cover the entire—planet.” The Twerlik puzzled over the latest addition to its increasing concepts. From where had this strange idea come, this idea of a gigantic ball of solid material swinging about a star? And it suddenly knew that those other four-limbed nonliving creatures were called “chairs” and “tables,” and that the poorly developed things were named “men.”

  The Twerlik tried to solve this puzzle. How were these concepts reaching it? It checked its subtractions, but there was nothing new blocking the starlight. It checked its absorptions, but its rate of drainage upon the spilled-over warmth and light from the “electric heaters” and the “lamps”—and it realized, again enlarging its brain to store these concepts—was just as it had been. Yet these new ideas were reaching it somehow. The ideas came from the “men,” but in what manner the Twerlik could not determine.

  Then it checked into yet another one of its newfound concepts, “pressure,” and found that there was something incomprehensible occurring.

  Its first awareness of this concept had been when the “spaceship” (“Larger, brain, larger!”) had pressed down upon the limbs and filaments and cilia of the me. Then secondary awarenesses that told the Twerlik of differentiations in “pressure” came when the “men” had trodden upon it, and again when the “chairs” and “tables” and “electric heaters” and “lamps” had been “set up.” (“More room, brain, more room!”) But there was a new kind of “pressure” upon the me. It came and went. And it was sometimes very heavy, sometimes very faint, and it struck only near the “men” at its fullest, being felt elsewhere along the cilia in a “circle” (“Grow!”) about them, but less powerfully, and in a larger “circle” about that one, but much less powerfully.

  What was it, this thing that came and went, and rammed and fondled and stabbed and caressed, so swiftly, so differently—and all the time kept filling its increasing brain with new concepts?

  The Twerlik narrowed its field of concentration, starting at the outermost “circle,” moving inward to the next, and drawing closer and closer to the “men,” seeking the source of this strange alternating pressure. And then it found it.

  It came from the “mouths” of the men. They were “talking.” The Twerlik was receiving “sound.”

  Its brain began to hurt terribly, and once again it made use of its newly absorbed energies and grew more brain-part for the me. Then it “listened” (“More! More!”) to the “talking,” and began to “learn.”

  These men were only the first. There would be others, now that they knew that the “air” and “gravitation” and “climate” were “okay.” There would be “houses” and “streets” and “children” and “colonization” and “expansion.” And—the Twerlik almost shuddered with joy—light!

  These men-things needed light constantly. They could not “see” without light. There would be more heaters, more lamps, campfires, chandeliers, matches, flares, movies, candles, sparklers, flashlights— (“Grow! Grow! GROW!”)

  Right here! On this spot they would begin! And all that spilled over from their wanton use of energy would belong to the me!

  “Gratitude” was a poor word to express the intensity of the Twerlik’s emotions toward these men-things now. It had to help them, had to repay them, had to show them how much their coming meant.

  But how? The greatest thi
ng in creation, so far as the Twerlik was concerned, was energy. And they had energy to spare, energy aplenty. It could not give them that as a gift. It had to find out what they valued most, and then somehow give this valued thing to them, if it could.

  Desperately, it “listened,” drawing in concept upon concept, seeking and prying and gleaning and wondering. . ..

  It took all that they said, and filed it, cross-indexed it, sorted it, seeking the thing which meant more than anything to these men-things. And slowly, by winnowing away the oddments that cluttered the mainstream of the men-things’ ambitions and hopes, the Twerlik learned the answer.

  And it was within its power to grant!