The Second Science Fiction Megapack

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  * * * *

  Dear Ed, how are you? Sam and I are fine and hope you are fine. Is it nice up there like they say with food and close grone on trees? I drove by Springfield yesterday and it sure looked funny all the buildings down but of coarse it is worth it we have to keep the greasers in their place. Do you have any trouble with them on Venus? Drop me a line some time. Your loving sister, Alma.

  * * * *

  Dear Alma, I am fine and hope you are fine. It is a fine place here fine climate and easy living. The doctor told me today that I seem to be ten years younger. He thinks there is something in the air here keeps people young. We do not have much trouble with the greasers here they keep to theirselves it is just a question of us outnumbering them and staking out the best places for the Americans. In South Bay I know a nice little island that I have been saving for you and Sam with lots of blanket trees and ham bushes. Hoping to see you and Sam soon, your loving brother, Ed.

  * * * *

  Sam and Alma were on their way shortly. Poprob got a dividend in every nation after the emigration had passed the halfway mark. The lonesome stay-at-homes were unable to bear the melancholy of a low population density; their conditioning had been to swarms of their kin. After that point it was possible to foist off the crudest stripped-down accommodations on would-be emigrants; they didn’t care. Black-Kupperman did a final job on President Hull-Mendoza, the last job that genius of hypnotics would ever do on any moron, important or otherwise. Hull-Mendoza, panic stricken by his presidency over an emptying nation, joined his constituents. The Independence, aboard which traveled the national government of America, was the most elaborate of all the spaceships—bigger, more comfortable, with a lounge that was handsome, though cramped, and cloakrooms for Senators and Representatives. It went, however, to the same place as the others and Black-Kupperman killed himself, leaving a note that stated he “couldn’t live with my conscience.” The day after the American President departed, Barlow flew into a rage. Across his specially built desk were supposed to flow all Poprob high-level documents, and this thing—this outrageous thing—called Poprobterm apparently had got into the executive stage before he had even had a glimpse of it! He buzzed for Rogge-Smith, his statistician. Rogge-Smith seemed to be at the bottom of it. Poprobterm seemed to be about first and second and third derivatives, whatever they were. Barlow had a deep distrust of anything more complex than what he called an “average.”

  While Rogge-Smith was still at the door, Barlow snapped, “What’s the meaning of this? Why haven’t I been consulted? How far have you people got and why have you been working on something I haven’t authorized?”

  “Didn’t want to bother you, Chief,” said Rogge-Smith. “It was really a technical matter, kind of a final cleanup. Want to come and see the work?”

  Mollified, Barlow followed his statistician down the corridor. “You still shouldn’t have gone ahead without my okay,” he grumbled. “Where the hell would you people have been without me?”

  “That’s right, Chief. We couldn’t have swung it ourselves; our minds just don’t work that way. And all that stuff you knew from Hitler—it wouldn’t have occurred to us. Like poor Black-Kupperman.”

  They were in a fair-sized machine shop at the end of a slight upward incline. It was cold. Rogge-Smith pushed a button that started a motor, and a flood of arctic light poured in as the roof parted slowly. It showed a small spaceship with the door open. Barlow gaped as Rogge-Smith took him by the elbow and his other boys appeared: Swenson-Swenson, the engineer; Tsutsugimushi-Duncan, his propellants man; Kalb-French, advertising.

  “In you go, Chief,” said Tsutsugimushi-Duncan. “This is Poprobterm.”

  “But I’m the World Dictator!”

  “You bet, Chief. You’ll be in history, all right—but this is necessary, I’m afraid.”

  The door was closed. Acceleration slammed Barlow cruelly to the metal floor. Something broke, and warm, wet stuff, salty tasting, ran from his mouth to his chin. Arctic sunlight through a port suddenly became a fierce lancet stabbing at his eyes; he was out of the atmosphere.

  Lying twisted and broken under the acceleration, Barlow realized that some things had not changed, that Jack Ketch was never asked to dinner however many shillings you paid him to do your dirty work, that murder will out, that crime pays only temporarily.

  The last thing he learned was that death is the end of pain.

  GHOST, by Darrell Schweitzer

  “You can never get used to this town, Henry,” I said. “Even after five years, the weirdness is still in my face, daily.”

  “So nu? It’s Tinseltown, Hollywood U.S.A., kiddo. You were expecting maybe Little Rock, Arkansas?”

  “I don’t know what I was expecting—”

  “You’re the one who lives here. I’m from New York, remember?”

  That was only one of the infinite number of things which, subtly, didn’t make any sense at all. Henry Jessel was from the one city in the country where most people don’t have cars, even feel the need for them, and he was driving the rented car he’d insisting on getting at the airport to pick me up at my place. Here we were on the Harbor Freeway, amid some of the worst driving conditions in the world, where you can theoretically get from anywhere to anywhere in forty-five minutes but in practice sometime between half an hour and next week. He was the one who wanted to be independent, or absorb the L.A. experience or something. He was driving. I think he did it to impress upon me that he was in control.

  “Yo! Look out!”

  He swerved. The lunatic who had never heard of turn signals and probably thought solid matter could pass through solid matter if you only wish upon a star cleared our fender by inches.

  “Tinseltown, kiddo,” Henry said again, remembering to breathe.

  Henry Jessel was nine years my junior, but he’d always somehow been the leader in our friendship or partnership or whatever it was. He had all but seized control of my life, which entitled him to take fifteen percent of my income and call me “kiddo.” Henry Jessel was my literary agent. He got me my first novelization job, Captain Cut-Throat, the book version of a pirate movie which had lasted in the theaters almost a whole day; a book which sold dozens of copies. Then he loaded me on a plane for the Coast, where I, Jerry Jack Miller, became one of the least-known, best-paid writers in Hollywood, or anywhere else for that matter.

  And I didn’t even work in movies. Not exactly. Which was the problem. I was a ghost. My specialty was writing novels for TV stars who pretended to be novelists, which paid extraordinarily well, but my name seldom made it even into the dedication. I felt like I was pouring my talents down a black hole.

  “I just can’t do it anymore,” I said. “I stare at the blank screen and I can’t.”

  “You are behind on your next book,” Henry said, gravely.

  As we absorbed the quintessential Los Angeles experience, sitting grid locked in traffic in the dry-roasting August heat while the car’s air-conditioner strained desperately to cope, it all came out, how I’d loved it all at first, and done all the touristy things in the first few weeks out here: Disneyland, Universal, Hollywood Boulevard and the Walk of Fame—and that was where the disillusion began to set in, because Hollywood Boulevard is a wreck, with many of the great Deco theaters just burned-out shells between blocks of shabby storefronts and outlets for we-want-your-bucks religious cults; and there’s even a crack in Elvis’s star, right there in the sidewalk and nobody really cares except maybe the enormous dinosaur looking down over the rooftops; but for a while still I found the smaller weird things, the fun things, which kept me going for a while, like the Ackermansion and the Museum of Jurassic Technology and Frankenstein’s Restaurant (where the tables are haunted); and Venice Beach is really very nice, and I even made the pilgrimage to Bronson Canyon where they filmed any number of matinee westerns, not to mention Robot Monster; but I suppose it was when I saw Donald Fucking Duck’s footprints in the cement in front of Grauman’s Chinese, right next to Shirley Templ
e’s and Humphrey Bogart’s that it came to me, Hey, this whole goddamn town is a lie, which makes me the lie behind the lie—and—and—

  Henry reached over and put his hand on my shoulder in a fatherly way and said, “You don’t have to live in Hollywood, not at this stage of your career. Later, yes, but for now you could write your books just as well from a trailer park in Nebraska, and if you’d like me to arrange it—”

  “That’s not the point, Henry.”

  “No it isn’t. You aren’t getting to the point. Jerry, when you talk to me, I will listen. But when you just kvetch, I will let it wash over me like water over a stone until you get to the point. And, incidentally, Donald Duck doesn’t have a middle name, so watch it.”

  Traffic started moving again. In time we squeezed by the scene of a multiple-car accident, where it didn’t look like anyone was hurt but there were cops everywhere and people waving their arms and shouting; only we couldn’t hear what they were saying because the windows were up the and the air conditioning was on (which made it all unreal, like a movie with the soundtrack turned off), and that was when I got to the point we’d both been waiting for.

  “I’m nothing, Henry, nobody. I’m not an writer. I’m the guy who does space-operas for Carl Sanderson to put his name on. The man is an absolute fake. He’s a Schwarzenegger rip-off and even his muscles are fake. He’s supposed to be this square-jawed hero, but I happen to know that his jaw’s a fake too. It’s prosthetic. He got it from the same company that does Jack Palance’s cheekbones and Kirk Douglas’s chin. Christ, the way that moron gets on the talk shows you’d think he actually thinks he wrote those books, or can even read them.”

  “The man is an actor, Jerry. That’s his job. He’s been a cowboy, a gladiator, the robot on Cybercops, and now he’s the mercenary captain on Galactic Avengers. He’s fully capable of playing the role of a writer if the powers that be back in New York want to shell out hundreds of thousands of bucks for books with his name on them, and if he doesn’t actually know how to spell ‘the’ the same way twice in a row, that is a small and incidental detail which you and I are paid very well to take care of.”

  “I’m just a hack, Henry. I want to be something more, something real.”

  Since we were caught motionless in traffic again, Henry was able to turn to me with a look of genuine alarm on his face and say, “Jerry, you’re not having an attack of artistic integrity, are you?”

  “Well I—”

  “Jerry, remember what you were before I made you what you are. You’d published a few pretty sonnets in quarterlies which paid you in copies, and then there were your short stories for which the publishers sometimes threw in a packet of bird-seed; and then I said to you, ‘Put yourself in my hands,’ and you put yourself there, and now you live in a gorgeous house in Palos Verdes and you got a gorgeous wife and gorgeous kids, and your bank account is not at all below six figures. I’d say you’re doing pretty well, Jerry, but remember, it’s part of a bargain you and I made five years ago, and I get plans for you in the future too, but for it all to work, you’ve got to do your part while I do my part. I am sure you understand that, Jerry. I do not phrase that as a question. I made you an offer and you accepted, of your own free will, knowing what it would entail.”

  “Ah, Mephistopheles—”

  Once more he touched me on the shoulder in that father-knows-best sort of way and said, “I will take care of everything, Jerry. I’m your agent. Trust me.”

  And again the traffic started moving, pretty briskly this time, and all I said now was, “Where are we going anyway?”

  “You haven’t figured out?”

  “Henry, this is Los Angeles, which is like Manhattan only horizontal. It’s so big you can see the curvature of the Earth in some of the parking lots. No, I don’t know where we’re going or what it is exactly we’re trying to accomplish.”

  “Think of it as emergency therapy, Jerry. Something to get the creative juices flowing.”

  “A sanatorium then, for shock treatment?”

  “More of a secret, something which, as they’d say in the military, is available on a need-to-know basis. Now you need to know, so that’s where we’re going.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “So you’re psychic now, too?”

  “No need, Jerry. But as your literary agent, I do have certain talents.”

  “You and Carl Sanderson both.”

  “Exactly.”

  There was an ominous resonance to that last line, but I didn’t say anything more and just stared out the window as we got off the Freeway a little past Burbank and turned and turned again and again; and if Henry knew where he was going then maybe he really did have special powers. Maybe I even dozed off for a while because as the sun went down I start I looked at my reflection in the windshield and for a long moment of helpless, utter horror, I saw not my own face, but that of Carl Sanderson, heroic space mercenary of large screen and small; then I was clawing away at my face and it came off and underneath was a robot and cowboy and a gladiator and Kermit the Frog and a bug-eyed, drooling Smile Face and then just a skull, which cracked into dust and bits, and there I was sitting in the car next to Henry with no head at all, and he reached over and screwed a giant light bulb into my neck; which he switched on somehow, and put a paper mask on top of it, which started to burn through from the heat of the bulb—

  And then the car came gently to a stop and Henry nudged me.

  “Hey, kiddo.”

  I put my hands to my face to make sure I was really me.

  “We’re here,” he said.

  Here was somewhere north of the Hollywood Hills, where the desert almost starts, in a non-committal way. We walked across a parking lot just a little bit too small to have its own moon to a completely nondescript bungalow which had a little brass sign by the door that read SIMULACRUM STUDIOS INC., which told me nothing at all, but told Henry enough that he got out an I.D. card of some sort, slid it into a lock, and the door buzzed open.

  “I hope we’re not late,” I said. “The traffic.”

  “They know about that.”

  After a minute or two, I didn’t doubt that “they” knew about everything, because we’d just walked into what could have been the set for a spy movie. Henry used the I.D. card again, and again. Doors buzzed open. Panels slid back. Guys in uniforms made phone calls in hushed tones. We had to place our hands on scanners. The next thing, I was sure, was that we’d be crowded into a phone booth and there’d be no question that Henry knew what the secret number was, and then the floor would drop out…but no, it was just endless escalators, like the ones at Universal Studios where by the time you’re halfway down you realize you’ve left your stomach behind in the stratosphere and there’s a dinosaur waiting to eat you up at the bottom in the Jurassic Park ride…but I digress, and down we went, and down, and down, until we came to yet another series of vast, sealed off, secret rooms where scientists in lab coats passed silently this way and that and there wasn’t a crackling Jacob’s Ladder or cackling hunchbacked assistant in sight.

  At last a very polite lady who could well have been the Chief Assistant Sub-Deputy Aide at the C.I.A. ushered us into a little circular theater of some kind and closed the door behind us.

  I thought I heard air hiss, as if we’d been sealed into a space capsule.

  The lights dimmed.

  “Henry, what is this?”

  “Be quiet. It’s what you’ve got to see.”

  A panel slid back in the ceiling. Apparatus lowered.

  And for a moment after that I thought we were going to die, or at least be blinded by the searing flash, because the thing coming out of the ceiling looked was a dead ringer for the gigantic laser that almost took Sean Connery’s balls off in Goldfinger—but the beam was gentle. It just touched the floor in front of us and then other beams shot out from the walls on either side, and in front of us, and right over our heads, and all these beams of light mixed and whir
led somehow, like paint you drop onto one of those little gizmos that spins the paper; only the result wasn’t just sunburst splotches and streaks. Not after a second or two anyway. A shape began to form in the middle of the air. It spread out, and split, until it had what we distinctly two legs, which lowered themselves down to the floor. The lights changed color now, and texture, if light can be said to have texture. From the apparatus came a high-pitched whining and the smell of ozone. The light rippled, like a reflection on a pool in sunlight, and the thing before us was definitely human-shaped now, a man, yes; I could make out the face, a little, a bit more.