The Big Book of Science Fiction

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

  “He did what he thought was best. Now, he says we’ve got to wipe that vermin off the face of the Earth and send it to hell. He’s sent for some gas.”

  “Marion,” softly called the voice without lips, the voice without ivory teeth, or fleshy tongue, from beyond the gleaming copper tubes.

  “I want to talk to him,” she said into the silence. “I’m sure it’s Bernard, and he’ll understand me.”

  “Very well. We’ve tried that too. But it doesn’t answer.”

  She grasped the microphone in her fingers like a stone curiously polished by the sea.

  “Bernard,” she breathed. “Bernard, here I am.”

  Her voice spurted from the loudspeaker like water from a fountain, strangely altered, distilled. It rebounded from the tree trunks and scattered among the leaves, ran along the stems like a noisy sap, crept among the twigs and weeds in the hollows of the ground. It flooded the lawn, soaked into the shrubbery, filled the paths, disturbed the surface of the pond with undetectable ripples.

  “Bernard. Do you hear me? I want to help you.”

  And the voice answered, “Marion. I’m waiting for you. I’ve been waiting for you so long, Marion.”

  “Here I am, Bernard,” she said, and her voice was light and fresh, it soared over the children’s sandbox, glided between the swings, the merry-go-round, the seesaws, between the rings and trapeze that hung from the crossbar.

  “He’s calling me. I have to go,” she said.

  “It’s a trap,” voices called behind her. “Stay here. There’s nothing human in there.”

  “What do I care? That’s Bernard’s voice.”

  “Look,” said someone.

  A spotlight came on like an eye opening and pierced the black air like a tangible bar of light. And she saw a mass of darkness, sparkling, bubbling, foaming, made of clusters of big bubbles that broke at the surface of a sphere of flabby, viscous coal. It was a living sponge of jet, breathing and swallowing.

  “Filth from space,” said the solemn voice of the professor, behind her.

  “I’m coming, Bernard,” said Marion, and she dropped the microphone and threw herself forward. She dodged the hands that tried to stop her and began running down the graveled path. She leaped over the copper-meshed web and passed between the gleaming tongues of the flamethrowers.

  “It’s a trap,” called a deep voice behind her. “Come back. The creature has absorbed some of your husband’s knowledge—it’s using it as a lure. Come back. That isn’t human. It has no face.”

  But no one followed her. When she turned her head, she saw the men standing up, grasping their lances and looking at her, horrified, their eyes and teeth gleaming with the same metallic light as the buttons of their uniforms.

  She rounded the pond. Her feet struck the cement pavement with soft, dull sounds, then they felt the cool, caressing touch of the grass again.

  She wondered even as she ran what was going to happen, what would become of her, but she told herself that Bernard would know for her, that he had always known, and that it was best that way. He was waiting for her beyond that black doorway through which his voice came with so much difficulty, and she was about to be with him.

  A memory came suddenly into her mind. A sentence read or heard, an idea harvested and stored away, to be milled and tasted now. It was something like this: men are nothing but empty shells, sometimes cold and deserted like abandoned houses, and sometimes inhabited, haunted by the beings we call life, jealousy, joy, fear, hope, and so many others. Then there was no more loneliness.

  And as she ran, exhaling a warm breath that condensed into a thin plume of vapor, looking back at the pale, contracted faces of the soldiers, dwindling at every step, she began to think that this creature had crossed space and searched for a new world because it felt itself desperately hollow and useless in its own, because none of those intangible beings would haunt it, and that she and Bernard would perhaps live in the center of its mind, just as confidence and anxiety, silence and boredom live in the hearts and minds of men. And she hoped that they would bring it peace, that they would be two quiet little lights, illuminating the honeycombed depths of its enormous, unknown brain.

  She shuddered and laughed. “What does it feel like to be eaten?” she asked herself.

  She tried to imagine a spoonful of ice cream melting between her lips, running cool down her throat, lying in the little dark warmth of her stomach.

  “Bernard,” she cried. “I’ve come.”

  She heard the men shouting behind her.

  “Marion,” said the monster with Bernard’s voice, “you took so long.”

  She closed her eyes and threw herself forward. She felt the cold slip down her skin and leave her like a discarded garment. She felt herself being transformed. Her body was dissolving, her fingers threading out, she was expanding inside that huge sphere, moist and warm, comfortable, and, she understood now, good and kind.

  “Bernard,” she said, “they’re coming after us to kill us.”

  “I know,” said the voice, very near now and reassuring.

  “Can’t we do anything—run away?”

  “It’s up to him,” he said. “I’m just beginning to know him. I told him to wait for you. I don’t know exactly what he’s going to do. Go back out into space, maybe? Listen.”

  —

  And, pressed together, inside a cave of flesh, surrounded by all those trees, that strange grass, and that hostile light, cutting like a scalpel into that palpitating paste of jet, they heard the approaching footsteps, distinct, stealthy, of the human killers who ringed them, fingers clenched on their copper lances, faces masked, ready to spew out a lethal grey mist…a broken branch, a liquid rustling, a stifled oath, a click.

  The Man Who Lost the Sea

  THEODORE STURGEON

  Theodore Sturgeon (1918–1985) was a US writer of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, who was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2000. At the height of his popularity in the 1950s, Sturgeon was among the most anthologized English-language authors alive. He won both the Hugo Award and Nebula Award. Sturgeon’s best-known novel may be More Than Human (1953), winner of the International Fantasy Award. Moving beyond fiction, Sturgeon wrote more than one hundred book reviews and the screenplays for the highly regarded Star Trek episodes “Shore Leave” and “Amok Time,” which are noted for their invention of several conventions of Vulcan culture, such as the Vulcan hand symbol, the Vulcan salutation “Live long and prosper,” and pon farr, the Vulcan mating ritual.

  Sturgeon’s relationship to the world of science fiction was at times fraught during his career. His best work fit no particular category and he sometimes used story structures more familiar to mainstream literary readers. For example, even though he had work published in Astounding Science Fiction, Sturgeon felt more comfortable submitting work to the magazine Unknown than Astounding, because Astounding had a more restrictive remit. Although Sturgeon contributed to and helped shape John W. Campbell’s “Golden Age of Science Fiction,” he was much less comfortable in that mode than writers like A. E. van Vogt, Robert Heinlein, or Isaac Asimov. Sturgeon was much more of an influence on and precursor to writers like Harlan Ellison and Samuel R. Delany (and, later, the Humanists of the 1990s). Sturgeon’s work could be overly sentimental at times, and he sometimes relied too heavily on exploring the angst of teenagers, but he also managed to plumb the depths of great passion and empathy for his characters—in a way uncommon to science fiction at the time.

  Unknown folded and Sturgeon left the field for a brief time, after which his work caught on with newer markets like Galaxy Science Fiction, which published most of his best post-1950 fiction. Increasingly, Sturgeon felt free to write on more “adult” themes, including the then-taboo subject of homosexuality. Sex in all of its permutations interested Sturgeon intensely. (At one point, too, Sturgeon took to nudism; the writer and editor Thomas Monteleone first encountered Sturgeon, a literary hero, in this mode w
hen he visited Sturgeon’s apartment to conduct an interview.)

  The lyrical “The Man Who Lost the Sea” (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1959) pushed back against a romanticized, can-do vision of travel to the moon, while engaging in another kind of (deeper and more profound) romanticism. In one sense, “The Man Who Lost the Sea” renovates a particular astronaut trope in science fiction. But it also has elements in common with the stories by Delany and Knight in this volume that more sharply undercut Golden Age science fiction assumptions.

  This story was also Arthur C. Clarke’s favorite. In the introduction to The Ultimate Egoist, Volume I: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon (1994), Clarke wrote, “[It was] a small masterpiece…the one which had the greatest impact on me, for personal as well as literary reasons. I too lost the sea for many years, and only rediscovered it in later life…I can’t even reread it without the skin crawling on the back of my neck.”

  THE MAN WHO LOST THE SEA

  Theodore Sturgeon

  Say you’re a kid, and one dark night you’re running along the cold sand with this helicopter in your hand, saying very fast witchy-witchy-witchy. You pass the sick man and he wants you to shove off with that thing. Maybe he thinks you’re too old to play with toys. So you squat next to him in the sand and tell him it isn’t a toy, it’s a model. You tell him look here, here’s something most people don’t know about helicopters. You take a blade of the rotor in your fingers and show him how it can move in the hub, up and down a little, back and forth a little, and twist a little, to change pitch. You start to tell him how this flexibility does away with the gyroscopic effect, but he won’t listen. He doesn’t want to think about flying, about helicopters, or about you, and he most especially does not want explanations about anything by anybody. Not now. Now, he wants to think about the sea. So you go away.

  The sick man is buried in the cold sand with only his head and his left arm showing. He is dressed in a pressure suit and looks like a man from Mars. Built into his left sleeve is a combination timepiece and pressure gauge, the gauge with a luminous blue indicator which makes no sense, the clock hands luminous red. He can hear the pounding of surf and the soft swift pulse of his pumps. One time long ago when he was swimming he went too deep and stayed down too long and came up too fast, and when he came to it was like this: they said, “Don’t move, boy. You’ve got the bends. Don’t even try to move.” He had tried anyway. It hurt. So now, this time, he lies in the sand without moving, without trying.

  His head isn’t working right. But he knows clearly that it isn’t working right, which is a strange thing that happens to people in shock sometimes. Say you were that kid, you could say how it was, because once you woke up lying in the gym office in high school and asked what had happened. They explained how you tried something on the parallel bars and fell on your head. You understood exactly, though you couldn’t remember falling. Then a minute later you asked again what had happened and they told you. You understood it. And a minute later…forty-one times they told you, and you understood. It was just that no matter how many times they pushed it into your head, it wouldn’t stick there; but all the while you knew that your head would start working again in time. And in time it did….Of course, if you were that kid, always explaining things to people and to yourself, you wouldn’t want to bother the sick man with it now.

  Look what you’ve done already, making him send you away with that angry shrug of the mind (which, with the eyes, are the only things which will move just now). The motionless effort costs him a wave of nausea. He has felt seasick before but he has never been seasick, and the formula for that is to keep your eyes on the horizon and stay busy. Now! Then he’d better get busy—now; for there’s one place especially not to be seasick in, and that’s locked up in a pressure suit. Now!

  So he busies himself as best he can, with the seascape, landscape, sky. He lies on high ground, his head propped on a vertical wall of black rock. There is another such outcrop before him, whip-topped with white sand and with smooth flat sand. Beyond and down is valley, salt flat, estuary; he cannot yet be sure. He is sure of the line of footprints, which begin behind him, pass to his left, disappear in the outcrop shadows, and reappear beyond to vanish at last into the shadows of the valley.

  Stretched across the sky is old mourning-cloth, with starlight burning holes in it, and between the holes the black is absolute—wintertime, mountaintop sky-black.

  (Far off on the horizon within himself, he sees the swell and crest of approaching nausea; he counters with an undertow of weakness, which meets and rounds and settles the wave before it can break. Get busier. Now.)

  Burst in on him, then, with the X-15 model. That’ll get him. Hey, how about this for a gimmick? Get too high for the thin air to give you any control, you have these little jets in the wingtips, see? and on the sides of the empennage: bank, roll, yaw, whatever, with squirts of compressed air.

  But the sick man curls his sick lip: oh, git, kid, git, will you?—that has nothing to do with the sea. So you git.

  Out and out the sick man forces his view, etching all he sees with a meticulous intensity, as if it might be his charge, one day, to duplicate all this. To his left is only starlit sea, windless. In front of him across the valley, rounded hills with dim white epaulettes of light. To his right, the jutting corner of the black wall against which his helmet rests. (He thinks the distant moundings of nausea becalmed, but he will not look yet.) So he scans the sky, black and bright, calling Sirius, calling Pleiades, Polaris, Ursa Minor, calling that…that…Why, it moves. Watch it: yes, it moves! It is a fleck of light, seeming to be wrinkled, fissured, rather like a chip of boiled cauliflower in the sky. (Of course, he knows better than to trust his own eyes just now.) But that movement…

  As a child he had stood on cold sand in a frosty Cape Cod evening, watching Sputnik’s steady spark rise out of the haze (madly, dawning a little north of west); and after that he had sleeplessly wound special coils for his receiver, risked his life restringing high antennas, all for the brief capture of an unreadable tweetle-eep-tweetle in his earphones from Vanguard, Explorer, Lunik, Discoverer, Mercury. He knew them all (well, some people collect match-covers, stamps) and he knew especially that unmistakable steady sliding in the sky.

  This moving fleck was a satellite, and in a moment, motionless, uninstrumented but for his chronometer and his part-brain, he will know which one. (He is grateful beyond expression—without that sliding chip of light, there were only those footprints, those wandering footprints, to tell a man he was not alone in the world.)

  Say you were a kid, eager and challengeable and more than a little bright, you might in a day or so work out a way to measure the period of a satellite with nothing but a timepiece and a brain; you might eventually see that the shadow in the rocks ahead had been there from the first only because of the light from the rising satellite. Now if you check the time exactly at the moment when the shadow on the sand is equal to the height of the outcrop, and time it again when the light is at the zenith and the shadow gone, you will multiply this number of minutes by eight—think why, now: horizon to zenith is one-fourth of the orbit, give or take a little, and halfway up the sky is half that quarter—and you will then know this satellite’s period. You know all the periods—ninety minutes, two, two and a half hours; with that and the appearance of this bird, you’ll find out which one it is.

  But if you were that kid, eager or resourceful or whatever, you wouldn’t jabber about it to the sick man, for not only does he not want to be bothered with you, he’s thought of all that long since and is even now watching the shadows for that triangular split second of measurement. Now! His eyes drop to the face of his chronometer: 0400, near as makes no never mind.

  He has minutes to wait now—ten?…thirty?…twenty-three?—while this baby moon eats up its slice of shadowpie; and that’s too bad, the waiting, for though the inner sea is calm there are currents below, shadows that shift and swim. Be busy. Be busy. He must
not swim near that great invisible amoeba, whatever happens: its first cold pseudopod is even now reaching for the vitals.

  Being a knowledgeable young fellow, not quite a kid anymore, wanting to help the sick man too, you want to tell him everything you know about that cold-in-the-gut, that reaching invisible surrounding implacable amoeba. You know all about it—listen, you want to yell at him, don’t let that touch of cold bother you. Just know what it is, that’s all. Know what it is that is touching your gut. You want to tell him, listen:

  —

  Listen, this is how you met the monster and dissected it. Listen, you were skin-diving in the Grenadines, a hundred tropical shoal-water islands; you had a new blue snorkel mask, the kind with faceplate and breathing tube all in one, and new blue flippers on your feet, and a new blue speargun—all this new because you’d only begun, you see; you were a beginner, aghast with pleasure at your easy intrusion into this underwater otherworld. You’d been out in a boat, you were coming back, you’d just reached the mouth of the little bay, you’d taken the notion to swim the rest of the way. You’d said as much to the boys and slipped into the warm silky water. You brought your gun.

  Not far to go at all, but then beginners find wet distances deceiving. For the first five minutes or so it was only delightful, the sun hot on your back and the water so warm it seemed not to have any temperature at all, and you were flying. With your face under the water, your mask was not so much attached as part of you, your wide blue flippers trod away yards, your gun rode all but weightless in your hand, the taut rubber sling making an occasional hum as your passage plucked it in the sunlit green. In your ears crooned the breathy monotone of the snorkel tube, and through the invisible disk of plate glass you saw wonders. The bay was shallow—ten, twelve feet or so—and sandy, with great growths of brain-, bone-, and fire-coral, intricate waving sea-fans, and fish—such fish! Scarlet and green and aching azure, gold and rose and slate-color studded with sparks of enamel-blue, pink and peach and silver. And that thing got into you, that…monster.