The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1

by Carol Emshwiller

  There must be others. There must be because they were no good alone. They meant nothing as one, but more than one began something new and bigger. What might three or four make? She didn’t know, but she would look and she would find them.

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1957

  Hunting Machine

  IT SENSED Ruthie McAlister’s rapid heartbeat, just as it sensed any other animal’s. The palms of her hands were damp, and it felt that, too—it also felt the breathing, in and out. And it heard her nervous giggle.

  She was watching her husband, Joe, as he leaned over the control unit of the thing that sensed heartbeats, the gray-green thing they called the hound, or Rover, or sometimes the bitch.

  “Hey,” she said. “I guess it’s OK, huh?”

  Joe turned a screw with his thumbnail and pulled out the wire attached to it. “Gimme a bobby pin.”

  Ruthie reached to the back of her head. “I mean it’s not dangerous, is it?”

  “Naw.”

  “I don’t just mean about it.” She nodded at the gray-green thing. “I mean, I know you’re good at fixing things like this, like the time you got beer for nothing out of the beer vendor and, golly, I guess we haven’t paid for a TV show for years. I mean, I know you can fix things right, only won’t they know when we bring it back to be checked out?”

  “Look, these wardens are country boys, and besides, I can put this thing back so nobody knows.”

  The gray-green thing squatted on its six legs where Joe could lean over it; it sensed that Ruthie’s heartbeat had slowed almost normal, too, and it heard her sigh.

  “I guess you’re pretty good at this, huh, Joe?” She wiped her damp hands on her green tunic. “That’s the weight dial, isn’t it?” she asked, watching him turn the top one.

  He nodded. “Fifteen hundred pounds,” he said slowly.”

  “Oo, was he really and truly that big?”

  “Bigger.” And now the thing felt Joe’s heart and breathing surge.

  They had been landed day before yesterday, with them geodesic tent, pneumatic forms beds, automatic camping stove, and pocket air conditioner. Plus portable disposal automatic blow-up chairs and tables, pocket TV set, four disposable hunting costumes apiece (one for each day), and two folding guns with power settings.

  In addition, there was the bug-scat, go-snake, sun-stop, and the gray-green hunter, sealed by the warden and set for three birds, two deer and one black bear. They had only the bear to go. Now Joe McAlister had unsealed the controls, released the governer and changed the setting to brown bear, 1500 pounds.

  “I don’t care,” he said, “I want that bear.”

  “Do you think he’ll still be there tomorrow?”

  Joe patted one of the long jointed legs of the thing. “If he’s not, ol’ bitch here will find him for us.”

  Next day was clear and cool and Joe breathed big, expanding breaths and patted his beginning paunch. “Yes, sir,” he said, “This is the day for something big—something really big, that’ll put up a real fight.”

  He watched the red of the sunrise fade out of the sky while Ruthie turned on the stove and then got out her make-up kit. She put sun-stop on her face, then powdered it with a tan powder. She blackened her eyelids and purpled her lips; after that, she opened the stove and took out two disposable plates with eggs and bacon.

  They sat in the automatic blow-up chairs, at the automatic blow-up table. Joe said that there was nothing like North air to give you an appetite, and Ruthie said she bet they were sweltering back at the city. Then she giggled.

  Joe leaned back in his chair and sipped his coffee. “Shooting deer is just like shooting a cow,” he said. “No fight to ’em at all. Even when ol’ hound here goads ’em, they just want to run off. But this bear’s going to be different. Of course bears are shy, too, but ol’ hound knows what to do about that.”

  “They say it’s getting to be so there aren’t many of the big kind left.”

  “Yes, but one more won’t hurt. Think of a skin and head that size in our living room. I guess anybody that came in there would sure sit up and take notice.”

  “It won’t match the curtains,” his wife said.

  “I think what I’ll do is pack the skin up tight and leave it somewhere up here, till the warden checks us through. Then, maybe a couple of days later, I’ll come back and get it.”

  “Good idea.” Ruthie had finished her coffee and was perfuming herself with bug-scat.

  “Well, I guess we’d better get started.” They hung their folded up guns on their belts. They put their dehydrated, self heating lunch in their pockets. They slung on their cold-unit canteens. They each took a packet containing chair, table, and sun shade; then Joe fastened on the little mike that controlled the hunter. It fit on his shoulder where he could turn his head to the side and talk into it.

  “All right, houn’ dog,” he said, shoulder hunched and head tilted, “get a move on, boy. Back to that spot where we saw him yesterday. You can pick up the scent from there.”

  The hunting machine ran on ahead of them. It sent faster than anything it might have to hunt. Two miles, three miles—Joe and Ruthie were left behind. They followed the beam it sent back to them, walking and talking and helping each other over the rough spots.

  About eleven o’clock, Joe stopped, took off his red hunting hat and mopped his balding forehead with the new bandana he’s bought at Hunter’s Outfitters in New York. It was then he got the signal. Sighted, sighted, sighted…

  Joe leaned over his mike. “Stick on him, boy. How far are you? Well, try to move him down this way if you can.” He turned to his wife. “Let’s see, about three miles… we’ll take half hour out for lunch. Maybe we’ll get there a couple of hours from now. How’s it going, kid?”

  “Swell,” Ruthie said.

  The big bear sat on the rocks by the stream. His front paws were wet almost to the elbows. There were three torn fish heads lying beside him. He ate only the best parts because he was a good fisher; and he looked, now, into the clean cold water for another dark blue back that would pause on its way upstream.

  It wasn’t a smell that made him turn. He had a keen nose, but the hunting machine was made to have no smell. It was the gray dead lichen’s crackle that made him look up. He stood still, looking in the direction of the sound and squinting his small eyes, but it wasn’t until it moved that he saw it.

  Three quarters of a ton, he was; but like a bird, or a rabbit, or a snake, the bear avoided things that were large and strange. He turned back the way he always took, the path to his rubbing tree and to his home. He moved quietly and rapidly, but the thing followed.

  He doubled back to the stream again, then, and waded down it on the opposite side from the thing—but still it followed, needing no scent. Once the hunting machine sighted, it never lost its prey.

  Heart beat normal respiration normal, it sensed. Size almost 1600 pounds.

  The bear got out on the bank and turned back, calling out in low growls. He stood upon his hind legs and stretched his full height. Almost two men tall, he stood and gave warning.

  The hunting machine waited twenty yards away. The bear looked at it a full minute; then he fell back on all fours and turned South again. He was shy and he wanted no trouble.

  Joe and Ruthie kept on walking North at their leisurely pace until just noon. Then they stopped for lunch by the side of the same stream the bear had waded, only lower down. And they used its cold water on their dehydrated meal—beef and onions, mashed potatoes, a lettuce salad that unfolded in the water like Japanese paper flowers. There were coffee tablets that contained a heating unit, too, and fizzled in the water like firecracker fuses until the water was hot, creamy coffee.

  The bear didn’t stop to eat. Noon meant nothing to him. Now he moved with more purpose, looking back and squinting his small eyes.

  The hunter felt the heart beat faster, the breathing heavy, pace increasing. Direction generally South.

  Jo
e and Ruthie followed the signal until it suddenly changed. It came faster; that meant they were near.

  They stopped and unfolded their guns. “Let’s have a cup of coffee first,” Ruthie said.

  “OK, Hon.” Joe released the chairs which blew themselves up to size. “Good to take a break so we can really enjoy the fight.”

  Ruthie handed Joe a fizzing cup of coffee. “Don’t forget you want ol’ Rover to goad some.”

  “Uh huh. Bear’s not much better than a deer without it. Good you reminded me.” He turned and spoke softly into the little mike.

  The hunting machine shortened the distance slowly. Fifteen feet, ten, five. The bear heard and turned. Again he rose up, almost two men tall, and roared his warning sound to tell the thing to keep back.

  Joe and Ruthie shivered and didn’t look at each other. They heard it less with their ears, and more with their spines—with an instinct they had forgotten.

  Joe shook his shoulder to shake away the feeling of the sound. “I guess the ol’ bitch is at him.”

  “Good dog,” Ruthie said. “Get ’im, boy.”

  The hunter’s arm tips drew blood, but only in the safe spots—shoulder scratches at the heavy lump behind his head, thigh punctures. It never touched the veins, or arteries.

  The bear swung at the thing with his great paw. His claws screetched down the body section but didn’t so much as make a mark on the metal. The blow sent the thing thirty feet away, but it got up and came back so fast the bear couldn’t see it until it was there, thrusting at him again. He threw it again and again, but it came back every time. The muscles, claws and teeth were nothing to it. It was made to withstand easily more than what one bear could do, and it knew with its built-in knowledge, how to make a bear blind-angry.

  Saliva came to the bear’s mouth and flew out over his chin as he moved his heavy head sideways and back. It splashed, gummy on his cheek and made dark, damp streaks across his chest. Only his rage was real to him now, and he screamed a deep rasp of frustration again and again.

  Two hundred yards away, Joe said, “Some roar!”

  “Uh huh. If noise means anything, it sounds like he’s about ready for a real fight.”

  They both got up and folded up the chairs and cups. They sighted along their gun barrels to see that they were straight. “Set ’em at medium,” Joe said. “We want to start off slow.

  They came to where the bear was, and took up a good position on a high place. Joe called in his mike to the hunter thing. “Stand by, houn’ dog, and slip over here to back us up.” Then he called to the bear. “Hey, boy. This way, boy. This way.”

  The gray-green thing moved back and the bear saw the new enemy, two of them. He didn’t hesitate; he was ready to charge anything that moved. He was only five feet away when their small guns popped. The force knocked him down, and he rolled out of the way, dazed; he turned again for another charge, and came at them, all claws and teeth.

  Joe’s gun popped again. This time the bear staggered, but still came on. Joe backed up, pushing at his gun dial to raise the power. He bumped into Ruthie behind him and they both fell. Joe’s voice was a crazy scream. “Get him.”

  The hunting machine moved fast. Its sharp forearm came like an upper cut, under the jaw, and into the brain.

  He lay, looking smaller, somehow, but still big, his ragged fur matted with blood. Fleas were alive on it, and flies already coming. Joe and Ruthie looked down at him and took big breaths.

  “You shouldna got behind me,” Joe said as soon as he caught his breath. “I coulda kept it going longer if you’d a just stayed out of the way.”

  “You told me to,” Ruthie said. “You told me to stay right behind you.”

  “Well, I didn’t mean that close.”

  Ruthie sniffed. “Anyway,” she said, “how are you going to get the fur off it?”

  “Hmmmph.”

  “I don’t think that moth-eaten thing will make much of a rug. It’s pretty dirty, too, and probably full of germs.”

  Joe walked around the bear and turned its head sideways with his toe. “Be a big messy job, all right, skinning it. Up to the elbows in blood and gut, I guess.”

  “I didn’t expect it to be like this at all,” Ruthie said. “Why don’t you just forget it. You had your fun.”

  Joe stood, looking at the bear’s head. He watched a fly land on its eye and then walk down to a damp nostril.

  “Well come on.” Ruthie took her small pack. “I want to get back in time to take a bath before supper.”

  “OK.” Joe leaned over his mike. “Come on ol’ Rover, ol’ hound dog. You did fine.”

  Original Science Fiction Stories, May 1957

  Hands

  WAS THIS REALITY, this sinuous, moving blur, or was it that other, flat life where things were just things? Sometimes he wasn’t sure as now, without his glasses.

  The table moved astigmatically, menacing. He saw his hands groping across the top of it, big, lumpy, distorted. Some day these hands would do something not good; he could tell that just by looking at them.

  But he couldn’t go down to eat without his glasses; he didn’t dare, because of the hands.

  “Ah.” He had found them, caught them—the glasses—and he gasped his relief. They had been there all the time, thin and invisible, hiding from him so he couldn’t come back to the unstretchable now, but he had found them anyway.

  He put them on and the table became flat and ordinary, the slant-walled room, his room again (sixty a month with meals, such as they were), the floor, slid and secure. Most of all the hands became his hands, big, but long-fingered, sensitive and beautiful

  Once these hands had been his livelihood, but he had lost the tip of a single finger of the left hand in a silly way with a carving knife. A finger and a livelihood, a way of life in exchange (by a sharp knife) for a slice of meat, and that was the end of it.

  He sold the cello and took this job, eight to four every day with a lunch pail, off on Saturdays and Sundays. Somehow there hadn’t been this other reality waiting for him behind his glasses in those better times. It was always there now. And what was it that made him put down his glasses and rub his eyes and then not be able to find them again…in time? He had always to feel for them and to look about in this nightmare world where all things were his enemies.

  Well, they didn’t get away this time. He had them and he dared go down and eat.

  Would she be there? That was the question. The parsnip in a tight skirt, bitter and stringy. He hated parsnips, but he loved her. She had breasts like melons. A parsnip with melon breasts is what she was. He hated parsnips. Did he dare go down?

  All the girls (still girls?) at the dime-a-dance were off on Mondays and so, if the week had not stretched yesterday, it was the parsnips’s night off. No one ever dated him, and Rammsey always dated her. Would it be the same tonight?

  The old Scotch lady was the only one still eating. The sauerkraut was cold and there were no hotdogs left. Of course she wasn’t there. He was late. Sauerkraut and milk. Better than nothing (or was it)? He might even have preferred parsnips. Bite them off and chew them up until they’re tender.

  Anyway, there was nothing to think about since she wasn’t here, but his hands buttering bread (margarine, of course), and forking sauerkraut—big, beautiful hands. He liked them when they did what he wanted them to, but they were dangerous and not really to be trusted.

  He met her on the stairway as he was going back to his room. It was a narrow stairway, a tight squeeze for a big breasted parsnip and a man (man?) to pass each other. But they didn’t pass. She stopped; her breasts almost touched him.

  “Good evening, Jay.”

  Were the eyes still mocking, and what expression was under the painted mouth? Sometime he would have to look straight at her.

  His hello was a mumble.

  “Had a hard day at the office I suppose.”

  Office! She knew very well where he worked.

  “It’s Monday,” she said.


  Still he didn’t answer.

  “No work tonight, thank God.” Her breast did touch him then, lightly—a nudge, a reminder. “But no Rammsey.”

  He glanced at her quickly but couldn’t read her face.

  “I can do anything I please,” she said.

  Why should he ask her out just to be rejected? “No Rammsey?”

  “No Rammsey. I’m fed up. Want to go out?”

  It was a trap. It must be. He would say yes and then there would be the same torment, the same insinuations.

  “I mean it, you know.” She said. “I haven’t a cent. Not even enough for a movie magazine, and there’s an awfully good show at the Orpheum. I’ve been wanting to see it all week. Let’s go.”

  “Yes. Yes.” He would go and everything would be all right this time. With no more Rammsey it would be different. Rammsey had been the trouble all along.

  “Well,” she said, “I’ll get my coat. Be with you in ten minutes.”

  Back in his room he combed his hair again and put on his tie. Did he really want to go or not? Perhaps he would just stay up here in his room and forget about it. Then there would be no danger. He would be safe from her, and she, safe (from him?). No. He wouldn’t go and that was that. She could knock on his door and call to him, but he wasn’t’ going to answer. She could use all the tricks she wanted, but he wouldn’t open.

  Just to make sure he went to the door and turned the key. Then he pulled off his shoes and lay down on the bed and waited. He put his hands behind his head. He would keep them there, not letting them take his glasses off.

  He waited. Five minutes was a long time and ten minutes longer still, but when the knock came it startled him. How loud it was.

  “Jay? Are you there? What’s holding you up?”

  He sat up on the bed and stared at the door.

  “We’ll be late if you don’t hurry.”

  Slowly he reached for his shoes.

  “Jay?”