The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  Naked, hungry, and thirsty came we into the world, and naked, hungry, and thirsty do we scamper our lives out upon it, under the huge and never-changing sun.

  The same tale it is, and the same traditional ending it has as that I had from my father and his father before him. Suck air, grab clusters, and hear the last holy observation of our history:

  “Looking about us, we can say with pardonable pride that we have been about as thoroughly liberated as it is possible for a race and a planet to be!”

  Let Me Live in a House

  CHAD OLIVER

  Chad Oliver (Symmes Chadwick Oliver, 1928–1993) was a prolific US anthropologist and science fiction writer whose short fiction appeared in major science fiction and fantasy magazines over a forty-year career. His science fiction novels were less successful, but he was an award-winning writer of Westerns.

  In the introduction to A Star Above It: Selected Short Stories by Chad Oliver, volume 1, writer Howard Waldrop credits Oliver’s introduction to speculative fiction to an early illness. “When he was twelve, Oliver was hit with rheumatic fever. Gone were bicycles, fly rods, baseball bats…One day by mistake, he was brought, along with [his preferred] air-combat [pulp fiction], one of the old encyclopedia-sized Amazing Stories. Chad leafed through it, came across Edmond Hamilton’s ‘Treasure on Thunder Moon,’ read it and pronounced it ‘the greatest piece of literature ever written!’ ” Soon, Oliver was devouring as much science fiction as he could find and “the letter columns of the SF magazines were full of things signed ‘Chad Oliver, the Loony Lad of Ledgewood.’ ”

  Although born in Ohio, Oliver spent most of his life in Texas, where he took his MA at the University of Texas (his 1952 thesis, “They Builded a Tower,” was an early academic study of science fiction) and also founded Texas’s first SF fanzine, Moon Puddle. After taking a PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles, he became professor of anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin. He also helped found the Turkey City Workshop, popularized by noted cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling.

  Oliver’s science fiction consistently reflected both his professional training and his place of residence: much of it is set in the outdoors in the US Southwest, and most of his characters are deeply involved in outdoor activities. Oliver was also always concerned with the depiction of Native American life and concerns: The Wolf Is My Brother (1967), which is not SF, features a sympathetically characterized Native American protagonist. Most of Oliver’s science fiction, too, could be thought of as Westerns of the sort that eulogize the land and the people who survive in it.

  His first published story, “The Land of Lost Content,” appeared in Super Science Stories in November 1950. He collaborated with noted weird horror writer Charles Beaumont on the two-story Claude Adams series (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1955). Oliver’s first novel, a juvenile, was Mists of Dawn (1952), a time travel story whose young protagonist is cast back fifty thousand years into a prehistoric conflict between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons. Shadows in the Sun (1954), set in Texas, describes with some vividness its protagonist’s paranoid discovery that all the inhabitants of a small town are aliens, but that it may be possible for Earth to gain galactic citizenship, and that he can work for that goal by living an exemplary life on his home planet.

  Oliver was a pioneer in the application of competent anthropological thought to science fiction themes, and though occasional padding sometimes stifled the warmth of his early stories, he was a careful author whose speculative thought deserves to be more widely known and appreciated.

  “Let Me Live in a House” showcases Oliver at his very best—a paranoid, tense science fiction story (first published in 1954) that was made into a Night Gallery episode by Rod Serling and explores ideas of identity and existence. This story was also published under the title “A Friend to Man.”

  LET ME LIVE IN A HOUSE

  Chad Oliver

  It was all exactly perfect, down to the last scratch on the white picket fence and the Frigidaire that wheezed asthmatically at predictable intervals throughout the night. The two white cottages rested lightly on their fresh green lawns, like contented dreams. They were smug in their completeness. They had green shutters and substantial brass door knockers. They had clean, crisp curtains on the windows, and knickknacks on the mantelpieces over the fireplaces. They had a fragment of poetry, caught in dime-store frames in the halls: Let me live in a house by the side of the road and be a friend to man.

  One of the cottages had a picture of crusty old Grandfather Walters, and that was important.

  Soft and subtle sounds hummed through the warm air. One of the sounds was that of a copter, high overhead, but you couldn’t see it, of course. A breeze sighed across the grass, but the grass was motionless. Somewhere, children laughed and shouted as they clambered and splashed in the old swimming hole.

  There were no children, naturally—nor any swimming hole, for that matter.

  It was all exactly perfect, though. Exactly. If you didn’t know better, you’d swear it was real.

  Gordon Collier breathed in the smell of flowers that didn’t exist and stared without enthusiasm at the white clouds that drifted along through a robin’s-egg-blue sky.

  “Damn it all,” he said.

  He kicked at the green grass under his feet and failed to dent it. Then he walked into his snug white cottage and slammed the door behind him, hard.

  Helen called from the kitchen: “Don’t slam the door, dear.”

  “I’m sorry,” Gordon said. “It slipped.”

  Helen came bustling in. She was an attractive, if hardly spectacular, woman of thirty. She had brown hair and a domestic manner. She kissed her husband lightly. “Been over at the Walters’?” she asked.

  “How did you guess?” Gordon said. Where did she think he had been—outside?

  “Now, Gordey,” Helen admonished him. “You needn’t snap my head off for asking a civil question.”

  “Please don’t call me ‘Gordey,’ ” Gordon said irritably. Then he relented—it wasn’t her fault, after all. He gave her news about the Walters. “Bart’s playing football,” he related for the millionth time, “and Mary is watching tri-di.”

  “Will they be dropping over for cards tonight?” Helen asked.

  She’s playing the game to the hilt, Gordon thought. She’s learned her part like a machine. I wish I could do that.

  “They’ll be over,” he said.

  Helen’s eyes lighted up happily. She had always loved company, Gordon remembered. “My!” she exclaimed. “I’d better see about supper.” She smiled eagerly, like a dog at a rabbit, and hustled away back to the kitchen.

  Gordon Collier watched his wife go, not without admiration of a sort. They had certainly picked well when they picked Bart, who could sit for hours with his electric football game, reliving the past, or who could with equal absorption paint charmingly naive pictures about the stars. Mary, too, was fine—as long as she had her tri-di set, her life was complete. But when they had picked his wife, they had hit the nail on the head. She was perfect in her part—she gave the impression of actually believing in it.

  Gordon frowned sourly at himself. “The trouble with you, Gordon,” he said softly, “is that you just haven’t learned your lines very well.”

  There was a reason for that, too—but he preferred not to think about it.

  After supper—steak and fried potatoes and salad and coffee—the doorbell rang. It was, of course, the Walters.

  “Well!” exclaimed Helen. “If it isn’t Bart and Mary!”

  In they came—Mary, gray at forty, looking to see if the tri-di was on, and Barton, big and wholesome as a vitamin ad, bounding through the door as though it were the enemy goal line.

  Four people, Gordon thought. Four people, utterly alone, four human beings, pretending to be a society.

  Four people.

  They exchanged such small talk as there was. Since they had all been doing precisely the
same things for seven months, there wasn’t much in the way of startling information to be passed back and forth. The bulk of the conversation was taken up with Mary’s opinion of the latest tri-di shows, and it developed that she liked them all.

  She turned on Gordon’s set, which didn’t please him unduly, and for half an hour they watched a variety show—canned and built into the set, of course—that was mainly distinguished by its singular lack of variety of any sort. Finally, in desperation, Gordon got out the cards.

  “We’ll make it poker tonight,” he decided as they all sat down at the collapsible green card table. He dealt out four hands of three-card draw, shoved a quarter into the center of the table, and settled back to enjoy the game as best he could.

  It wasn’t easy. Mary turned up the tri-di in order to hear better, and Barton engaged with furious energy in his favorite pastime—replaying the 1973 Stanford–Notre Dame game, with himself in the starring role.

  At eleven o’clock sharp Helen served the cheese and crackers.

  At midnight, they heard the new sound.

  It was a faint whistle, and it hissed over their heads like an ice-coated snake. It sizzled in from far away, and then there was a long, still pause. Finally, there was a shadowy suggestion of a thump.

  Gordon instantly cut off the tri-di set. They all listened, opened a window, and looked out. He couldn’t see anything—the blue sky had switched to the deep purple of night and the only glimmer of light came from the porch lamp on the cottage next door. There was nothing to see, and all that he heard were the normal sounds that weren’t really there—the chirp of crickets, the soft sigh of the breeze.

  “Did you hear it?” he asked the others.

  They nodded, uncertain and suddenly alone. A new sound? How could that be?

  Gordon Collier walked nervously out of the room, followed by Barton. He clenched his fists, feeling the clammy sweat in the palms of his hands, and fought to keep the fear from surging up within him. They walked into a small hall and Gordon pressed a button. A section of the wall slid smoothly back on oiled runners, and the two men walked into the white, brightly lighted equipment room.

  Gordon kept his hand steady and flipped on the outside scanners. He couldn’t see a thing. He tried the tracer screen, and it was blank. Barton tried the radio, on the off chance that someone was trying to contact them. There was silence.

  They checked the radar charts for the past hour. They were all quite normal—except the last one. That one had a streak on it, a very sharp and clear and unmistakable streak. It was in the shape of an arc, and it curved down in a grimly familiar way. It started far out in space and it ended. Outside—outside in the ice and the rocks and the cold.

  “Probably a meteor,” Barton suggested.

  “Probably,” Gordon agreed dubiously, and made a note to that effect in the permanent record.

  “Well, what else could it have been?” Barton challenged.

  “Nothing,” Gordon admitted. “It was a meteor.”

  They swung the wall shut again, covering the tubes and screen and coils with flowered wallpaper and Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. They returned to the living room, where their wives still sat around the card table waiting for them. The room was as comfortable as ever, and the tri-di set was on again.

  It was all just as they had left it, Gordon thought—but it was different. The room seemed smaller, constricted, isolated. The temperature had not changed, but it was colder. Millions and millions of miles flowed into the room and crawled around the walls….

  “Just a meteor, I guess,” Gordon said.

  They went on with their game for another hour, and then Barton and Mary went home to bed. Before they left, they invited Gordon and Helen to visit them the next night.

  The house was suddenly empty.

  Gordon Collier held his wife in his arms and listened to the Frigidaire wheezing in the kitchen and the water dripping from a half-closed faucet. Outside, there were only the crickets and the wind.

  “It was only a meteor,” he said.

  “I know,” said his wife.

  They went to bed then, but sleep was slow in coming. They had a home, of course, a little white cottage in a green yard. They had two nice neighbors and blue skies and a tri-di set. It was all exactly perfect, and there was certainly nothing to be afraid of.

  But it was a long way back, and they had no ship.

  —

  When Gordon Collier awoke in the morning, he knew instantly that something was wrong. He swung himself out of bed and stood in the middle of the room, half-crouched, not sure what he was looking for.

  The room seemed normal enough. The twin beds were in their proper places, the rug was smooth, his watch was still on the dresser where he had left it. He looked at the alarm clock and saw that it hadn’t gone off yet. His wife was still asleep. What had awakened him?

  He stood quite still and listened. At once, he heard it. It came from outside, out by the green lawn and the blue skies. He walked to the window to make certain that his senses weren’t playing tricks on him. The sound was still there—another new sound. Another new sound where there could be no new sounds, but only the old ones, repeating themselves over and over again….

  He closed the window, trying to shut it out. Perhaps, he told himself, it wasn’t exactly a new sound after all; perhaps it was only the old sound distorted by a faulty speaker or a bad tube. There had been gentle breezes before, summery puffs and wisps of air, and even the gentle patter of light rain once every two weeks. He listened again, straining his ears, but he did not open the window. His heart beat spasmodic in his chest. No, there could be no doubt of it!

  The wind was rising.

  Helen moaned in her sleep and Gordon decided not to waken her. She might need her sleep and then some before this was over, he knew. He dressed and walked out into the hall, pressed the button that opened the equipment room, and went inside. He checked everything—dials, scanners, charts. Again, they were all quite normal except one. One of the tracers showed a faint line coming in from the ice and the rocks, in toward the two isolated cottages that huddled under the Bubble.

  Presumably, it was still there—whatever it was.

  The significant question was easily formulated: what did the line represent, the line that had curved down out of space and had now cut across the ice almost to his very door? What could it represent?

  Gordon Collier forced himself to think logically, practically. It wasn’t easy, not after seven months of conditioned living that had been specially designed so that he wouldn’t think in rational terms. He closed the door, shutting off the little white house and all that it represented. He sat down on a hard metal chair with only the gleaming machines for company. He tried.

  It was all too plain that he couldn’t contact Earth. His radio wouldn’t reach that far, and, anyhow, who was there to listen at the other end? The ship from Earth wasn’t due for another five months, so he could expect no help from that source. In an emergency, the two women wouldn’t be of much help. As for Bart, what he would do would depend on what kind of an emergency he had to face.

  What kind of an emergency was it? He didn’t know, had no way of knowing. The situation was unprecedented. It was nothing much on the face of it—a whistle and a thump and a few lines on a tracer. And the wind, his mind whispered, don’t forget the wind. Nothing much, but he was afraid. He looked at his white, trembling hands and doubted himself. What could he do?

  What was out there?

  The wall slid open behind him and he bit his lip to keep from crying out.

  “Breakfast is ready, dear,” his wife said.

  “Yes, yes,” Gordon murmured shakily. “Yes, I’m coming.”

  He got to his feet and followed his wife out of the room, back into the comfortable cottage that he knew so well. He kept his eyes straight ahead of him as he walked and tried not to listen to the swelling moan of the wind that couldn’t blow.

  —

  Gordon Collier drank
his coffee black and dabbled at the poached converter eggs, trying to fake an appetite that he did not feel. His wife ate her breakfast in normal fashion, chattering familiar morning-talk in an inconsequential stream. Gordon didn’t pay much attention until a stray sentence or two struck home:

  “Just listen to that wind, Gordey,” she said, with only a trace of strain in her voice. “I declare, I believe we’re in for a storm!”

  Collier forced himself to go on drinking his coffee, but he was badly shaken. Her mind won’t even accept the situation for what it is, he thought with a chill. She’s going to play the game out to the bitter end. I’m ALONE.

  “That’s right, dear,” he said evenly, fighting to keep his voice steady. “We’re in for a storm.”

  Outside, the wind whined around the corners of the lit cottage and something that might have been thunder rumbled in from far away.

  —

  The afternoon was a nightmare.

  Gordon Collier stood at the window and watched. He didn’t want to do it, but something deep within him would not let him turn away. His wife stayed huddled in front of the tri-di, watching a meaningless succession of pointless programs, and doubtless she was better off than he was. But he had to watch, even if it killed him. Dimly, he sensed that it was his responsibility to watch.

  There wasn’t much to see, of course. The robin’s-egg-blue sky had turned an impossible, leaden gray, and the white clouds were tinged with a dismal black. The neat green grass seemed to have lost some of its vitality; it looked dead, like the artificial thing that it was. From far above his head—almost to the inner surface of the Bubble, he judged—little flickerings of light played across the sky.

  The visual frequencies were being tampered with, that was all. It wouldn’t do to get all excited about it.

  The sounds were worse. Thunder muttered and rolled down from above. The faint hum of a copter high in the sky changed to a high-pitched screech, the sound of an aircraft out of control and falling. He waited and waited for the crash, but of course it never came. There was only the screech that went on and on and on, forever.