by Various
He healed Musetti Antonio, the hunchback who lived in the cinderblock shack at the end of Via Sant'Erasmo, who was lordotic and scoliotic both, who liked to fish, who liked to drink, who'd always lived alone. The foreigner appeared before him, but the hunchback was a man of few words, and the legend would begin instead from the lips of the fishermen who would, later that day, watch Tonio approach them on the mall—upright, perfectly balanced, and sober.
And he healed the daughter of the convent grounds manager, a pretty girl with cow eyes and, although no one knew it, lymphatic cancer, too. And no one ever would. He healed her harelip as well, and this they would see; this, the tiny miracle, a feat any hospital could have achieved, would be the miracle that followed him.
He took the familiar gravel road back to the hotel.
The concierge had been right, of course. He would be leaving tomorrow. Tonight the La Spezia newspaper —and the next day the national Corriere della Serra — would have the news, would know of this town's miracles.
The villagers had been superstitious. Like all mortals, they were afraid of losing the grace, the blessing, the magic, by talking about it too much, by taking its name in vain, and so they had kept the miracles to themselves. Not even the concierge, a member of another class, had heard of the events.
But this evening word would get out. The man who ran the small stationery store for Scuola Civica students would, this very evening, take the jolting bus to La Spezia. He would meet his cousin for drinks. They would drink with a man whose sister sold advertising space for the La Spezia Luce del Golfo.
He would leave early tomorrow—before the journalists could find him. He had to leave. Legends depended on people who disappeared—by death, martyrdom, inexplicable departure—even resurrection, if need be.
He would be gone tomorrow, but the next day, the very next, he would appear in another village—two or five or seven hundred kilometers away. There, the miracles would begin again.
And there would be no record of his journey.
The gravel road began to curve, and he recognized the bend.
As he approached the rock, he knew that the small green body would still be there. A bird had found it—working on the eyes before leaving it to the ants, which trailed like black threads down the side of the rock— and the body was shrunken, the bones pronounced. But it was still there.
He stared at it, and behind his eyes, in the darkness, in the fires, compassion flickered like cool water, and softened the pain of memory. For a moment the shrieking—the guilt, the horror of what he had done so long ago against the Voice, the Other—was again muted.
He wanted it to live.
The small green body rolled over suddenly, raised up on its forelegs, and lowered itself back down again. The skull was smooth, no longer distorted. The ribs and spine no longer showed under the skin.
The lids blinked at him. The tongue darted out once as though tasting the compassion.
He did not look at it again.
The miracle was over, and the voices had returned. The shrieking, the fire, the endless night, were in his skull again.
He closed his eyes and found the man whose shoulder had taken the bullet when the gun went off in his hotel room. He healed him while a nurse was changing the bandage. She cried out, crossed herself and began to weep as though she'd known and loved the man for years.
Again the voices and the fire softened.
He kept his eyes closed and sent his hand to the woman with the ulcerated ankle who had been on his bed with her dying daughter. He healed her while her husband stared at the floor. Distracted by sorrow and memories, the man would not notice what had happened for almost an hour.
He kept his eyes closed, and with one pass over the village, the bay and hills, disturbed the protein synthesis and cell-wall growth of a trillion microbes, and cleansed the village of every pestis organism in it.
Eyes still closed, he located the body of the spindly girl where she lay in the darkness of the earth, and as he did, he knelt down on the gravel, which pressed into him like thorns.
This would consume him, he knew. It would demand more of him than all the others together.
Three kilometers away, in the small cemetery by the highway to Livorno and Pisa, the girl was making her way up through the earth, pounding and shattering the casket with her bare hands, breaking her bones as she did, scraping her flesh raw as she clawed up through the earth.
He did not let her breathe yet. He did not want dirt in her lungs.
When she was free of the ground, wobbling end staggering without consciousness across the grass, he let her breathe at last, and healed her hands, her raw flesh, and cleansed the embalming fluids from her body.
He did not wash the dirt from her hair and face and dress. Her family would have to do this. He could not, should not, shape all of it.
When she found the road that would lead her home, he left her.
He got up. For the half hour the girl had needed to escape her grave, his own pain—the fire, the shrieks, the guilt—had been softer.
They returned now, as he'd known they would.
He resumed his walk toward the hotel.
The girl would be his greatest legend. She would reverberate throughout the country. The whole village would be interrogated by the world. Emissaries from the Vatican would arrive, and stay for months. Journalists from the continent would make this the third largest story of the year.
Like the other miracles, it would bring many people closer to believing. It would bring so many of them back—
—to the Voice—
—who are in heaven. And seeing this—the legends, all the bodies brought back—perhaps the Voice, the voice in his nightmare, the one he had lived with since the beginning of time, would at last forgive him for his part in the rebellion, would at last see in him the son who never wanted to fall, who never should have fallen.
He would change his face, of course. For each village it would be a slightly different one, all of them hauntingly familiar, but each a little different. And he would not run out of faces. This country alone—with its museums full of works by Giotto, Bellini, Castagno, della Francesca, Tintoretto, da Vinci, Buonarotti, all the others—had enough to last him for millennia, all of them faces that mortals could indeed expect miracles from.
Remember the household pet? Hard to believe there were times when spaniels, retrievers, cats, even chickens, roamed at will through the backyards of America. Here, thanks to scholar John Kessel, is a fresh look at one of the most prophetic sf classics of the 50s.
The Monuments of Science Fiction
by JOHN KESSEL
Chapter 3: Those Fabulous 50's
INTRODUCTION:
One of the major techniques of 1950's science fiction was extrapolation. In the typical extrapolative science fiction story, the author takes some present-day trend and extends it into the future, then looks at the consequences of this projection. As practiced by masters like Pohl, Kornbluth, Leiber and Winkler in the pages of Galaxy Science Fiction, the extrapolative story offered an unexampled means of cautionary social criticism. Reading these tales today, we are often amazed at the accuracy of their predictions. This is what sf is all about.
"Starship Nurse of the Pecos and the Locked Room Murder of Hellwood Hall" first appeared in Galaxy in 1954. The Science Fiction Writers of America have voted Winkler's story one of the ten best social sf stories of all time. For this special critical volume, the extant magazine version has been collated against Winkler's original manuscript by his literary executor, the noted academic critic John Joseph Kessel.
STARSHIP NURSE OF THE PECOS
AND THE LOCKED ROOM MURDER OF HELLWOOD HALL
by V.H. Winkler
He hauled back with the sledgehammer and pulped the mewling kitten's head against the floor. The dawn was just coming up through the eye-level basement windows; a pale shaft of light, lancing through the gloom, made a patch of brightness on the wall directly above the animal's
oozing corpse. A sign, Jim Tapwater thought.
"Did you get him?" Betty's nervous voice from the top of the stairs.
"Of course I got him!" Tapwater was annoyed at having to get out of bed early for a mere kitten; he'd expected at least a Class III stray, maybe even a Rex. He shivered at the cold air seeping into the basement through the broken window. That was how the damned thing'd gotten in. The wire mesh was torn away: Jim jammed a piece of masonite from his workbench into the window well. Jesus, his hands were cold!
It was no use trying to go back to sleep then. Betty heated some yeast-cakes and plastibacon while Jim put down two cups of burnt-barley "coffee." He listened to the morning radio report; nothing new. Two teenagers out necking in Sumner Park, torn up by a starving dogpack. The boy was dead, the girl in critical. It was getting to seem like they'd never clean up the Southeast area. There had to be two, three hundred dogs, most of them Dobermans, shepherds, just in the park.
Betty talked at him about Christmas shopping and the relatives; Jim stared at the dregs at the bottom of his cup. Suddenly the phone rang. She jumped up to get it.
"It's PECOS, Jim. They've got a problem down at the university."
Daddy bought Suzie a puppy for her birthday. The puppy grew up and ran through the neighborhood, a delight to the whole family. He made many neighborhood dogs into mothers. The children of Suzie's puppy and the other dogs were given away to relatives and strangers or sent to the animal shelter. Some of them died. Some of them were neglected and became strays. Most of them lived long enough to become mothers and fathers themselves, of other cute little puppies. Hundreds of them. And these hundreds of little mutts grew up in their own good (rapid) time, and bore more puppies, and so on unto the nth generation.
Next door to Suzie lived Dawn, and Dawn's daddy bought her a kitty....
Forty years later Jim Tapwater was born, and by that time no one gave his child a puppy or a kitty. And no one left his child alone in the back yard, because of the stories you heard about how one of those damned strays had attacked a baby and....
By the time Jim was six, his mom and dad had taken to wearing sidearms and shooting animals on sight...
When Jim was fifteen, the national government started to break down (but that's another story).
When Jim was seventeen, he joined the newly formed Omicron Sector of the Pet Elimination Corps and spent four years at the PECOS Academy in Terre Haute, Indiana, learning the latest methods of selective extermination of wild dogs, cats, hamsters, gerbils, tiny turtles, goldfish, parakeets, rats (rats?) and ducks. He graduated in the top five percent of a class that desperately drew on the brightest and most dedicated youths of their generation, enlisted in the brightest and most desperate cause of American history: the mortal struggle to wrest control of the land from an estimated nine billion savage, ruthless pests which had once been man's best friends, the comfort of the aged, the companions of the hearth, the best of show. It was a call to idealism that, at seventeen, few youths had felt more strongly than Jim Tapwater. But idealism does not last.
The brightness was gone, Jim thought to himself as he drove the Studebaker Electrocoupe through the shabby and deserted streets. Only the desperation remained. The fifteen years in the Corps that had seen him rise to command rank — the patches at the shoulder of his olive-drab uniform indicated he was a Senior Medical Detective on the Starshift — had also seen his marriage turn sour and his ambition buried in a heap of bureaucratic details and cat litter. Six, seven hundred thousand animals he must have been responsible for eliminating, he thought, seven hundred thousand of the filthy suckers — and who knows how many lives saved, how many trees preserved, how many tons of fecal material he had prevented — prevented — from stinking up the godforsaken world! For what?
Jim jerked the wheel hard to the right to avoid the corpse of a Great Dane that lay rotting in the street. A roverbot had probably smashed him days before, but you could count on the public not to call a cleanup detail. Damnfool civilians never did a thing to prevent this problem, then complained on the first warm day that the stench was too great for them to bear. They'd have to get used to stenches if this kept up — and it wouldn't be just dogs that would lie rotting in the streets. He smiled grimly and adjusted his nose-filters.
That was the heart of his discontent. He's been trying to ignore it, to avoid having to face it down for over a year now. They were losing the battle. All the effort, all the men lost, all the stinking, soul-grinding work, and they were still losing. If no breakthrough was made in R&D, they'd have maybe eight or ten years before the land of the free and the home of the brave was one giant litterbox, from sea to shining sea. Sic transit gloria mundi.
The Studebaker hummed past the barriers into the business district. Here there was comparative safety, if you didn't know the facts. Jim knew, however, that the gray-suited financiers, the right-thinking American Truehearts, were no safer here than a libertarian in commie Russia. The dangers were only more subtle than in the no-man's-land of the suburbs. Still, the city looked more lively here. There were pedestrians on the sidewalks, earlybird women out shopping in these last days before the holidays, and numerous cars in the streets. Christmas ads flashed from streetside glowsigns: "The gift that keeps on Giving — industrial diamonds"; "Starlight Lounge: Simon DoVideo and his Big Band"; "Poochyfeed Poison Yummies, with Giblet Gravy"; "The Clean Home, the Odorfree™ Home." Streetcorner Santas rang their bells. It looked very normal for such an early morning — but when he stopped for a light, Jim saw that the jolly, red-clad men carried hand stunners clipped to their belts. Smart Santas.
He pulled into the parking lot behind the Joseph McCarthy Building — PECOS headquarters. He was out of the car, turning his collar up against the cold as he walked toward the security entrance, when he saw smoke pouring out from under the hood of one of the parked cars. There was someone beating on the windows, trying to get out!
Fifteen years with PECOS had not dulled his reflexes. Jim ran over to the car — a DeSoto Eisenhower — waved the woman back from the glass, and kicked in the window with his booted foot. It took him just three blows. He reached in, grabbed the door handle and yanked it open, then snatched the woman's wrist and half dragged her out. She was blonde, and had a figure that would poach an egg.
"Are you all right?" he asked. Her eyes were violet. Her breasts heaved with excitement.
"I—I think so." She had a voice to match her body: thrilling, upholstered.
By that time Willis, the colored man who swept out the security entrance, had come out to the car. Smoke was still billowing out through the grille and from around the edges of the hood. There was an acrid, burnt-wiring smell to it.
"What y'all think's the mattah, Mistah Tapwatah?" the clean old Negro asked.
"We'll soon find out." Jim cautiously slipped his hand under the front chrome, tripped the hoodlatch and opened her up. More smoke clouded up, then dissipated. "No fire problem," he said tersely.
"What was it?" the blonde asked. She'd already calmed down. She was good.
He poked through the scorched wiring. "Chicks. You got a nest of baby chicks in here. Probably crawled in last night, in the cold, and rode all the way into town with you. You're lucky they didn't short you out earlier. You're going to need a new coil." He waved away the last of the smoke and closed the hood.
"Ah dassn't stay out heah too long, Mistah Tapwatah." The old man shuffled from foot to foot. He'd been a model employee ever since his political re-education. A little slower, though.
"Right, Willis. You go along. We'll come in in a minute."
"I have to thank you for helping me," the girl said. "I don't know why I couldn't get the door opened."
"Don't mention it." Jim grinned, and they walked together into the building. "What's your name?"
"Doris ... Doris Blackwell. I'm the new assistant nurse on the Starshift." He saw her glance at his insignia. "That's your outfit?" Her voice was noncommittal, but Jim thought he heard an invitation b
eneath it. It certainly looked as though the woman inside those starched nurse's whites could offer him more togetherness than he was getting from Betty. And Doris's steady violet eyes told him there was some grit behind her beauty.
"That's right," he said finally. "You'll be working under me."
He recalled the reason he was there. "Did Ike call you about this business out at the university?"
"Yes."
"Well, let's get cracking. Probably been a hundred animals born while we've been talking here." He grinned at her again.
Ike Hertz was a big, gruff man, with iron-gray hair cut to a short, military brush. He'd been in the navy back when the Reds had launched an all-out on Quemoy and Matsu in '92, and had fought alongside the hundred-year-old General Chiang Kai-shek's armies through the whole Yangtze campaign. Now, thirty years later, he was still fond of quoting the General's sayings. He was briefing them on the way out to the university in the PECOS Starshift Attack Van.
"General Chiang always said," Ike gestured with his cigar at the six men and women crowded into the van's rear, "that the difference between murder and war is a matter of public policy." He paused to let the import of his words sink in. "Now what we've got here may look like a murder — but Doctor Victor Dunklepopulos was doing top-secret work for PECOS. So what looks like an everyday crime of violence to these egghead fellowtravelers at the university, is to us — PECOS, the FBI, and the CIA — an act of war. But whose war is it? And how was it done?"
Jim arched his back and stretched. Doris sat beside him, hanging on Hertz's incisive words. She had told him more about herself, and it looked like they could get along very well together. But first there was their job.
