The Big Book of Science Fiction

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

  The light increased slowly, in the way that it had disappeared. At four o’clock in the afternoon you could already distinguish a person’s shadow at a distance of four yards.

  After the sun went down, the complete darkness returned. They built a fire in the yard, but the flames were weak and translucent and consumed very little of the wood. At midnight it was difficult to convince them that they should go to bed. Only the children slept. Those who had matches struck one from time to time and chuckled to themselves.

  At four thirty in the morning they were up and outside. No dawn in the history of the world was ever awaited like this one. The sun was brighter. Unaccustomed eyes were closed. The blind men extended the palms of their hands toward the rays, turned them over to feel the heat on both sides. Different faces came forth, with voices you could recognize, and they laughed and embraced each other. Their loneliness and their differences disappeared in that boundless dawn. The blind people were kissed and hugged, carried in triumph. Men cried, and this made their eyes, unaccustomed to the light, turn even redder. About noon the flames became normal and for the first time in three weeks, they had a hot cooked meal. Little work was done for the rest of the day. Flooded with light, they absorbed the scenes about them, walking through the places where they had dragged themselves in the darkness.

  And the city? What had happened to the people there? This was a terribly sobering thought and those who had relatives ceased to smile. How many had died or suffered extreme hardships? Waldas suggested that he should investigate the situation the next day. Others volunteered, and it was decided that three should go.

  V

  The three refugees left as the sun was coming up, walking along the road that would lead them to the railroad tracks.

  They went around a curve and the city came into view. After the first bridges, the tracks began to cross streets. Waldas and his companions went down one of them. The first two blocks seemed very calm, with a few persons moving about, perhaps a bit more slowly. On the next corner they saw a group of people carrying a dead man, covered with a rough cloth, to a truck. The people were crying.

  A brown army truck went by, its loudspeaker announcing an official government bulletin. Martial law had been declared. Anyone invading another’s property would be shot. The government had requisitioned all food supplies and was distributing them to the needy. Any vehicle could be commandeered if necessary. It advised that the police be immediately notified of any buildings with bad odors so that they could investigate the existence of corpses. The dead would be buried in common graves.

  Waldas didn’t want to return to his own apartment building. He remembered the voices calling through the half-opened doors and he, in his stocking feet, slipping away, leaving them to their fate. He would have to telephone the authorities if there was a bad odor. He had already seen enough; he didn’t want to stay there. His young companion had talked to an officer and had decided to look for his family immediately.

  Waldas asked if the telephones were working and learned that some of the automatic circuits were. He dialed his brother-in-law’s number and after a short while there was an answer. They were very weak but alive. There had been four deaths in the apartment house. Waldas told them briefly how he had been saved and asked if they needed anything. No, they didn’t, there was some food, and they were a lot better off than most.

  Everyone was talking to strangers, telling all kinds of stories. The children and the sick were the ones who had suffered most. They told of cases of death in heartbreaking circumstances. The public services were reorganizing, with the help of the army, to take care of those in need, bury the dead, and get everything going again. Waldas and his middle-aged companion didn’t want to hear any more. They felt weak, weak with a certain mental fatigue from hearing and seeing incredible things in which the absurd wasn’t just a theory but what really had happened, defying all logic and scientific laws.

  The two men were returning along the still empty tracks, walking slowly under a pleasantly clouded sky. A gentle breeze rustled the leaves of the green trees and birds flitted among their branches. How had they been able to survive in the darkness? Waldas thought about all this as his aching legs carried him along. His scientific certainties were no longer valid. At that very moment men still shaken by the phenomenon were working electronic computers making precise measurements and observations, religious men in their temples explaining the will of God, politicians dictating decrees, mothers mourning the dead that had remained in the darkness.

  Two exhausted men walked along the ties. They brought news, perhaps better than could be expected. Mankind had resisted. By eating anything resembling food, by drinking any kind of liquid, people had lived for three weeks in the world of the blind. Waldas and his companion were returning sad and weakened, but with the secret and muffled joy of being alive. More important than rational speculations was the mysterious miracle of blood running through one’s veins, the pleasure of loving, doing things, moving one’s muscles, and smiling.

  Seen from a distance the two were smaller than the straight tracks that enclosed them. Their bodies were returning to their daily routine, subject to the forces and uncontrollable elements in existence since the beginning of time. But, as their eager eyes took in every color, shade, and movement, they gave little thought to the mysterious magnitude of their universe, and even less to the plight of their brothers, their saviors, who still walked in darkness.

  There were planets, solar systems, and galaxies. They were only two men, bounded by two impassive rails, returning home with their problems.

  “Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman

  HARLAN ELLISON®

  Harlan Ellison (1934– ) is an iconic US writer of speculative fiction who has won multiple Hugo, Nebula, and Edgar Awards. His published works include more than 1,700 short stories, novellas, screenplays, comic book scripts, teleplays, and essays, and a wide range of criticism covering literature, film, television, and print media. Ellison edited two iconic, groundbreaking science fiction anthologies, Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972)—several stories from which have been reprinted in this volume. He was considered one of the leading American members of the New Wave movement. He received the 1993 World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. In 2006, Ellison was awarded the prestigious title of grand master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. A documentary chronicling his life and works, Dreams with Sharp Teeth, was released in May 2008. In 2011 Ellison was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

  Ellison also produced the original script for “The City on the Edge of Forever,” often regarded as one of the best episodes of the Star Trek series, though Ellison remains displeased with the revisions made to his script for filming. Ellison also wrote two notable episodes of the original run of The Outer Limits, “Soldier” and “Demon with a Glass Hand.” His stories have been adapted for film, television, and video games numerous times. In the 1960s Ellison traveled with rock groups such as the Rolling Stones, and his novel of the 1950s rockabilly scene, Spider Kiss (1961), was much admired by music critic Greil Marcus.

  Notable short fiction by Ellison includes “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” (1968 Hugo Award winner), “The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World” (1969 Hugo Award winner), “The Deathbird” (1974 Hugo Award winner), “A Boy and His Dog” (1969 Nebula Award winner), “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” (1974 Edgar Award winner), and “Paladin of the Lost Hour” (1986 Hugo Award winner).

  Ellison’s short story “ ‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman,” originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1965, received a Hugo and a Nebula Award. Ellison wrote it in six hours in order to present it the next day at the Milford Writer’s Workshop, run by Damon Knight. The story is often regarded as among his finest and is one of the most reprinted stories in the English language.

  “REPENT, HARLEQUIN!” SAID THE TICKTOCKMAN

  Harlan Ellison®<
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  There are always those who ask, what is it all about? For those who need to ask, for those who need points sharply made, who need to know “where it’s at,” this:

  The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others—as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and officeholders—serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the Devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Civil Disobedience

  That is the heart of it. Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning; the end will take care of itself.

  —

  But because it was the very world it was, the very world they had allowed it to become, for months his activities did not come to the alarmed attention of The Ones Who Kept The Machine Functioning Smoothly, the ones who poured the very best butter over the cams and mainsprings of the culture. Not until it had become obvious that somehow, someway, he had become a notoriety, a celebrity, perhaps even a hero for (what Officialdom inescapably tagged) “an emotionally disturbed segment of the populace,” did they turn it over to the Ticktockman and his legal machinery. But by then, because it was the very world it was, and they had no way to predict he would happen—possibly a strain of disease long defunct, now, suddenly, reborn in a system where immunity had been forgotten, had lapsed—he had been allowed to become too real. Now he had form and substance.

  He had become a personality, something they had filtered out of the system many decades before. But there it was, and there he was, a very definitely imposing personality. In certain circles—middle-class circles—it was thought disgusting. Vulgar ostentation. Anarchistic. Shameful. In others, there was only sniggering: those strata where thought is subjugated to form and ritual, niceties, proprieties. But down below, ah, down below, where the people always needed their saints and sinners, their bread and circuses, their heroes and villains, he was considered a Bolívar; a Napoleon; a Robin Hood; a Dick Bong (Ace of Aces); a Jesus; a Jomo Kenyatta.

  And at the top—where, like socially attuned Shipwreck Kellys, every tremor and vibration threatening to dislodge the wealthy, powerful, and titled from their flagpoles—he was considered a menace; a heretic; a rebel; a disgrace; a peril. He was known down the line, to the very heart-meat core, but the important reactions were high above and far below. At the very top, at the very bottom.

  So his file was turned over, along with his time card and his cardioplate, to the office of the Ticktockman.

  The Ticktockman: very much over six feet tall, often silent, a soft purring man when things went timewise. The Ticktockman.

  Even in the cubicles of the hierarchy, where fear was generated, seldom suffered, he was called the Ticktockman. But no one called him that to his mask.

  You don’t call a man a hated name, not when that man, behind his mask, is capable of revoking the minutes, the hours, the days and nights, the years of your life. He was called the Master Timekeeper to his mask. It was safer that way.

  “This is what he is,” said the Ticktockman with genuine softness, “but not who he is. This time card I’m holding in my left hand has a name on it, but it is the name of what he is, not who he is. The cardioplate here in my right hand is also named, but not whom named, merely what named. Before I can exercise proper revocation, I have to know who this what is.”

  To his staff, all the ferrets, all the loggers, all the finks, all the commex, even the mineez, he said, “Who is this Harlequin?”

  He was not purring smoothly. Timewise, it was jangle.

  However, it was the longest speech they had ever heard him utter at one time, the staff, the ferrets, the loggers, the finks, the commex, but not the mineez, who usually weren’t around to know, in any case. But even they scurried to find out.

  Who is the Harlequin?

  —

  High above the third level of the city, he crouched on the humming aluminum-frame platform of the airboat (foof! airboat, indeed! swizzleskid is what it was, with a tow-rack jerry-rigged) and he stared down at the neat Mondrian arrangement of the buildings.

  Somewhere nearby, he could hear the metronomic left-right-left of the 2:47 p.m. shift, entering the Timkin roller-bearing plant in their sneakers. A minute later, precisely, he heard the softer right-left-right of the 5:00 a.m. formation, going home.

  An elfin grin spread across his tanned features, and his dimples appeared for a moment. Then, scratching at his thatch of auburn hair, he shrugged within his motley, as though girding himself for what came next, and threw the joystick forward, and bent into the wind as the airboat dropped. He skimmed over a slidewalk, purposely dropping a few feet to crease the tassels of the ladies of fashion, and—inserting thumbs in large ears—he stuck out his tongue, rolled his eyes, and went wugga-wugga-wugga. It was a minor diversion. One pedestrian skittered and tumbled, sending parcels everywhichway; another wet herself; a third keeled slantwise and the walk was stopped automatically by the servitors till she could be resuscitated. It was a minor diversion.

  Then he swirled away on a vagrant breeze, and was gone. Hi-ho. As he rounded the cornice of the Time-Motion Study Building, he saw the shift, just boarding the slidewalk. With practiced motion and an absolute conservation of movement, they sidestepped up onto the slow-strip and (in a chorus line reminiscent of a Busby Berkeley film of the antediluvian 1930s) advanced across the strips ostrich-walking till they were lined up on the expresstrip.

  Once more, in anticipation, the elfin grin spread, and there was a tooth missing back there on the left side. He dipped, skimmed, and swooped over them; and then, scrunching about on the airboat, he released the holding pins that fastened shut the ends of the homemade pouring troughs that kept his cargo from dumping prematurely. And as he pulled the trough-pins, the airboat slid over the factory workers and one hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth of jelly beans cascaded down on the expresstrip.

  Jelly beans! Millions and billions of purples and yellows and greens and licorice and grape and raspberry and mint and round and smooth and crunchy outside and soft-mealy inside and sugary and bouncing jouncing rumbling clittering clattering skittering fell on the heads and shoulders and hardhats and carapaces of the Timkin workers, tinkling on the slidewalk and bouncing away and rolling about underfoot and filling the sky on their way down with all the colors of joy and childhood and holidays, coming down in a steady rain, a solid wash, a torrent of color and sweetness out of the sky from above, and entering a universe of sanity and metronomic order with quite-mad coocoo newness. Jelly beans!

  The shift workers howled and laughed and were pelted, and broke ranks, and the jelly beans managed to work their way into the mechanism of the slidewalks, after which there was a hideous scraping as the sound of a million fingernails rasped down a quarter of a million blackboards, followed by a coughing and a sputtering, and then the slidewalks all stopped and everyone was dumped thisawayandthataway in a jackstraw tumble, still laughing and popping little jelly bean eggs of childish color into their mouths. It was a holiday, and a jollity, an absolute insanity, a giggle. But…

  The shift was delayed seven minutes.

  They did not get home for seven minutes.

  The master schedule was thrown off by seven minutes.

  Quotas were delay
ed by inoperative slidewalks for seven minutes.

  He had tapped the first domino in the line, and one after another, like chik chik chik, the others had fallen.

  The System had been seven minutes’ worth of disrupted. It was a tiny matter, one hardly worthy of note, but in a society where the single driving force was order and unity and equality and promptness and clocklike precision and attention to the clock, reverence of the gods of the passage of time, it was a disaster of major importance.

  So he was ordered to appear before the Ticktockman. It was broadcast across every channel of the communications web. He was ordered to be there at seven o’clock dammit on time. And they waited, and they waited, but he didn’t show up till almost ten thirty, at which time he merely sang a little song about moonlight in a place no one had ever heard of, called Vermont, and vanished again. But they had all been waiting since seven, and it wrecked hell with their schedules. So the question remained: who is the Harlequin?

  But the unasked question (more important of the two) was: how did we get into this position, where a laughing, irresponsible japer of jabberwocky and jive could disrupt our entire economic and cultural life with a hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth of jelly beans?…

  Jelly for God’s sake beans! This is madness! Where did he get the money to buy a hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth of jelly beans? (They knew it would have cost that much, because they had a team of Situation Analysts pulled off another assignment, and rushed to the slidewalk scene to sweep up and count the candies, and produce findings, which disrupted their schedules and threw their entire branch at least a day behind.) Jelly beans! Jelly…beans? Now wait a second—a second accounted for—no one has manufactured jelly beans for over a hundred years. Where did he get jelly beans?