The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  Then the whole world seemed to explode into brightness that pulsated and dazzled, that splashed brilliance into my astonished eyes until I winced them shut to rest their seeing and saw the dark inversions of the radiance behind my eyelids.

  I forced my eyes open again and looked sideways so the edge of my seeing was all I used until I got more accustomed to the glory.

  Between the two cartons was an opening like a window would be, but little, little, into a wonderland of things I could never tell. Colors that had no names. Feelings that made windy moonlight a puddle of dust. I felt tears burn out of my eyes and start down my cheeks, whether from brightness or wonder, I don’t know. I blinked them away and looked again.

  Someone was in the brightness, several someones. They were leaning out of the squareness, beckoning and calling—silver signals and silver sounds.

  “Mrs. Klevity,” I thought. “Something bright.”

  I took another good look at the shining people and the tree things that were like music bordering a road, and grass that was the song my evening grass hummed in the wind a last, last look, and began to back out.

  I scrambled to my feet, clutching my jammas. “Mrs. Klevity.” She was still sitting at the table, as solid as a pile of bricks, the sketched face under the wild hair a sad, sad one.

  “Yes, child.” She hardly heard herself.

  “Something bright …” I said.

  Her heavy head lifted slowly, her blind face turned to me. “What, child?”

  I felt my fingers bite into my jammas and the cords in my neck getting tight and my stomach clenching itself. “Something bright!” I thought I screamed. She didn’t move. I grabbed her arm and dragged her off-balance in her chair. “Something bright!”

  “Anna.” She righted herself on the chair. “Don’t be mean.”

  I grabbed the bedspread and yanked it up. The light sprayed out like a sprinkler on a lawn.

  Then she screamed. She put both hands up to her heavy face and screamed, “Leolienn! It’s here! Hurry, hurry!”

  “Mr. Klevity isn’t here,” I said. “He hasn’t got back.”

  “I can’t go without him! Leolienn!”

  “Leave a note!” I cried. “If you’re there, you can make them come back again and I can show him the right place!” The upsurge had passed make-believe and everything was realer than real.

  Then, quicker than I ever thought she could move, she got paper and a pencil. She was scribbling away at the table as I stood there holding the spread. So I dropped to my knees and then to my stomach and crawled under the bed again. I filled my eyes with the brightness and beauty and saw, beyond it, serenity and orderliness and—and uncluttered cleanness. The miniature landscape was like a stage setting for a fairy tale—so small, so small—so lovely.

  And then Mrs. Klevity tugged at my ankle and I slid out, reluctantly, stretching my sight of the bright square until the falling of the spread broke it. Mrs. Klevity worked her way under the bed, her breath coming pantingly, her big, ungainly body inching along awkwardly.

  She crawled and crawled and crawled until she should have come up short against the wall, and I knew she must be funneling down into the brightness, her face, head and shoulders, so small, so lovely, like her silvery voice. But the rest of her, still gross and ugly, like a butterfly trying to skin out of its cocoon.

  Finally only her feet were sticking out from under the bed and they thrashed and waved and didn’t go anywhere, so I got down on the floor and put my feet against hers and braced myself against the dresser and pushed. And pushed and pushed. Suddenly there was a going, a finishing, and my feet dropped to the floor.

  There, almost under the bed, lay Mrs. Klevity’s shabby old-lady black shoes, toes pointing away from each other. I picked them up in my hands, wanting, somehow, to cry. Her saggy lisle stockings were still in the shoes.

  Slowly I pulled all of the clothes of Mrs. Klevity out from under the bed. They were held together by a thin skin, a sloughed-off leftover of Mrs. Klevity that only showed, gray and lifeless, where her bare hands and face would have been, and her dull gray filmed eyes.

  I let it crumple to the floor and sat there, holding one of her old shoes in my hand.

  The door rattled and it was gray, old, wrinkled Mr. Klevity.

  “Hello, child,” he said. “Where’s my wife?”

  “She’s gone,” I said, not looking at him. “She left you a note there on the table.”

  “Gone—?” He left the word stranded in mid-air as he read Mrs. Klevity’s note.

  The paper fluttered down. He yanked a dresser drawer open and snatched out spool-looking things, both hands full. Then he practically dived under the bed, his elbows thudding on the floor, to-hurt hard. And there was only a wiggle or two and his shoes slumped away from each other.

  I pulled his cast-aside from under the bed and crawled under it myself. I saw the tiny picture frame—bright, bright, but so small.

  I crept close to it, knowing I couldn’t go through it. I saw the tiny perfection of the road, the landscape, the people—the laughing people who crowded around the two new rejoicing figures—the two silvery, lovely young creatures who cried out in tiny voices as they danced. The girl-one threw a kiss outward before they all turned away and ran up the winding white road together.

  The frame began to shrink, faster, faster, until it squeezed to a single bright bead and then blinked out.

  All at once the house was empty and cold. The upsurge was gone. Nothing was real any more. All at once the faint ghost of the smell of eggs was frightening. All at once I whimpered, “My lunch money!”

  I scrambled to my feet, tumbling Mrs. Klevity’s clothes into a disconnected pile. I gathered up my jammas and leaned across the table to get my sweater. I saw my name on a piece of paper. I picked it up and read it.

  Everything that is ours in this house now belongs to Anna-across-the-court, the little girl that’s been staying with me at night.

  —Ahvlaree Klevity

  I looked from the paper around the room. All for me? All for us? All this richness and wonder of good things? All this and the box in the bottom drawer, too? And a paper that said so, so that nobody could take them away from us.

  A fluttering wonder filled my chest and I walked stiffly around the three rooms, visualizing everything without opening a drawer or door. I stood by the stove and looked at the frying pan hanging above it. I opened the cupboard door. The paper bag of eggs was on the shelf. I reached for it, looking back over my shoulder almost guiltily.

  The wonder drained out of me with a gulp. I ran back over to the bed and yanked up the spread. I knelt and hammered on the edge of the bed with my clenched fists. Then I leaned my forehead on my tight hands and felt my knuckles bruise me. My hands went limply to my lap, my head drooping.

  I got up slowly and took the paper from the table, bundled my jammas under my arm and got the eggs from the cupboard. I turned the lights out and left.

  I felt tears wash down from my eyes as I stumbled across the familiar yard in the dark. I don’t know why I was crying—unless it was because I was homesick for something bright that I knew I would never have, and because I knew I could never tell Mom what really happened.

  Then the pale trail of light from our door caught me and I swept in on an astonished Mom, calling softly, because of the sleeping kids, “Mom! Mom! Guess what!”

  Yes, I remember Mrs. Klevity because she had eggs for breakfast! Every day! That’s one of the reasons I remember her.

  <>

  * * * *

  IN THE HOUSE, ANOTHER

  by Joseph Whitehill

  I said somewhere earlier that this was the year for Other Creatures: extraterrestrials most of all, but by no meant all. Again and again the underlying theme in the most thoughtful stories—be they careful science-fictional extrapolations, or the wildest flights of fantastic imaginings—is the daily more urgent need to learn the means and modes of communication with All Those Others.

&nbs
p; What is an Other? We have had (besides a variety of e-t’s) dopplegangers and gremlins, computers and communists, apes, ants, and A. Snowman (or woman), a tele-path, a tribal chief, a Holy man, and the unclassifiable flora of Pogoland.

  Now Mr. Whitehill, an engineer as well as an author (“The Angers of Spring,” and “Able, Baker, and Others”) offers a description with lab-report conciseness, accuracy, and attention to detail.

  * * * *

  The Other had remained unseen in the house for hours. Hunching its dorsal structure and tilting its hairy skull sideways, it peered out into the dining room through the crack in the kitchen door. Its dark motionless eyes were fixed on the back of the man finishing his supper. Unaware of its presence, the man pushed back his chair, belched lightly, and stood up. The Other shuddered in disgust at the obscenity. The man stirred the boxer at his feet until it awoke and yawned with wet curled tongue, and stretched itself to its feet. The man took a scrap from his plate and tossed it to his dog, gathered his pipe and tobacco pouch from the sideboard, and, with the stiff walk of a full man, ambled out of sight into the living room. At his whistle, the dog followed. Though its neighborhood reputation was one of vicious aggression toward strangers, the dog, too, seemed unaware of the presence of the Other in the house.

  The Other remained in the kitchen, slumped in frustration against the refrigerator. Patience. There was time enough. No need yet to advance upon this man they called the Thinker. The Other crossed its freckled forepaws over its thorax, distorting the two spongy bags hanging there. This distortion, was habitual, and went unmarked. The Other waited, its conchoidal hearing organs alert to the sounds from the living room. All were homely sounds; the thump of another log added to the fire... the ringing rapping of the Thinker’s pipe on the metal ash tray... his sensual groan as he settled into the big deep chair before the fire... the scratching of the match and the spasmodic wheezy gurgling of the pipe as the Thinker drew it alive.

  ... Wait... wait. Not now. Later. Plenty of time. The Other sensed the first diffusion of the powerful tar esters of the tobacco smoke. Its sensitive olfactory neuro-termini rebelled, and its triangular proboscis twitched involuntarily.

  The Thinker began to think. Mechanically, his hand sought out the dog’s occiput, and he soothed both himself and the dog with his symbiotic scratching. Required, said his brain, a stable amplifier capable of measurement of uni-potential electrostatic charges of minimal magnitude. For purposes of discussion, assume a design point of five microvolt D.C. registration....

  Twenty minutes passed. The dog had fallen asleep again, and the Thinker’s pipe required relighting. He ignored it. Direct amplification is out of the question, because random grid bias variation alone may reach five hundred microvolts.

  The Other moved quietly into the dining room, walking with a liquid lateral sway. It looked around the arched opening of the living room and gazed intently at the immobile form sunk in the chair. Dancing firelight played over his strong hard face, softening it almost to a boy’s. The dog raised its head and looked at the Other, clinging there to the door jamb, then dropped his muzzle again between his fore-paws. The Thinker did not stir. Thus, a comparator must be devised which will convert applied D.C. potential into a proportional A.C. signal....

  An inchoate wave of hunger swept over the observing Other. Its red claws indented the soft wood of the door jamb, and in a somatic wrench of restraint, it turned and climbed the stairs. In its climbing it made a distinctly audible swishing sound, and under its weight a loose stair tread skirled loudly. In the living room, the sleeping dog’s ear flicked at the sound of the squeaking board, but the Thinker thought on.

  He was a skilled concentrator, with his brain an obedient assistant. His ears had heard the sounds of the moving Other, but their alerting message had been silenced at his thalamic switchboard. The ratiocination must not be intruded upon. Currently available D.C. to A.C. converters are either synchronous switches or synchronously exited capacity diaphrams....

  Upstairs, the Other moved wraithlike through the rooms, looking, touching, searching. It encountered a chair draped with the Thinker’s soiled linen. It clawed among the linen in an aimless fashion, grasping pieces at random and elevating them to its eye level. It found a stocking and rammed its clawed forepaw into the opening all the way down to the toe, then held up the encased limb and swiveled it, looking at it from all sides with blank, unblinking eyes. It inspected a hole in the heel of the sock through which it could see its own skin color against the white of the sock. Enraged, it ripped off the sock, turning it inside out, and flung it onto the dresser. In futile irritation, it moved jerkily about the room, eyes flickering over the furniture and passing on. All these things around it were possessions of the Thinker downstairs. He had sat in each chair here, he had slept in that bed... his presence impinged on the Other’s consciousness even up here where it had gone to lie in wait. He must come soon. This hunger could not be allayed so for long. It was becoming a crying, keening thing, imperious, and insatiable by such titillating hints of the real man, warm and soft, as lay all around it.

  As if to torture itself, the Other swayed into the bathroom and began examining the personal toilet articles of the Thinker. It held up a razor and tossed it idly in one paw. With its prehensile claws, it opened the shaving lotion and sniffed. It swirled, the badger brush around in the wooden shaving bowl to see the lather rise. Why does he not come?

  An hour passed. The winter night chill crept into the house, drawing tight the strands of tense silence.

  Feedback of at least a hundred db will be required to stabilize the amplifier’s A.C. gain characteristic.... The Thinker’s pipe had burned down to a bitter dottle in the bottom of the bowl. The fitful firelight cast only occasional candle-bright glimpses of the room where he sat. The dog snored gently and stirred in its deep sleep. Electromagnetic excitation of the moving diaphram requires objectionably large quantities of A.C. fundamental energy...

  At last the Other could wait no longer. It descended the stairs with haste and entered the living room. Its claw found the switch of the living room light, but it hesitated.

  Its incarnadine labia gaped and it spoke.

  “Dear, aren’t you ever coming to bed?”

  <>

  * * * *

  A SERIOUS SEARCH FOR WEIRD WORLDS

  by Ray Bradbury

  I do not know which was the most pleasantly startling: that this article was written by Ray Bradbury, genius of anti-science-fiction; that Life magazine devoted fourteen beautifully illustrated pages to it; or that the United States Government, in I960, should have provided the basis for it.

  * * * *

  In the shadows of a West Virginia valley, a Giant wakes —and listens. Owls sweeping the Green Bank wilderness see the Giant turn sleeplessly hour on hour, its vast 85-foot Ear cupped to the showering radiation of the Milky Way. Jabberings, cacklings and maniacal chitterings of electromagnetic star-talk bombard the Ear. Calmly the Ear feeds this static to tape machines and memory systems humming in its metal Brain nearby. Afflicted by ghost voices of lightnings which prowl far-traveling suns, the Ear, nursed by men, sleeps at dawn.

  Does this sound like science fiction? Ten seconds from now will the Martian spider-kings invade, capture the Ear, and disintegrate the mad scientists who built it?

  No. The Ear is a competently machined, absolutely real radio telescope finished in March 1959 at Green Bank, W. Va. The scientists of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory moving in its vast shadow are not mad. Their daring but dead-serious work is called Project Ozma.

  Named for the princess of the faraway Land of Oz, the project began work on April 8, 1960. Periodically since then it has been searching for life on other worlds. Some fine evening the scientists of Ozma hope to hear a faint echo of humanity calling back down the vast slope of space.

  Simultaneously, in nearby Sugar Grove, W. Va., the Navy is rearing an even greater beast out of mythology via technology. The Navy’s el
ectronic ear will stand half as high as the Empire State Building. Its dish will stretch 600 feet from rim to rim. Cradled in two titanic Ferris wheel structures, the Sugar Grove ear will gather cosmic signals from 60 light years deep in space.

  How many stars are there in the universe for our radio-telescope ears to listen to? Write the number 10. Then add 19 zeros after it. Of this unthinkable number, how many stars have planets rushing about them? A conservative estimate, says Harlow Shapley, Harvard professor emeritus of astronomy, is one in a thousand.

  How many such one-in-a-thousand worlds will lie just the right distance from their suns so that a moderate temperature will encourage life? One in a thousand.

  How many of these far fewer worlds will be large enough to bind and keep an atmosphere? One in a thousand.

  And finally, how many of this vastly reduced number will have a proper atmosphere, with carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen enough to stir up cellular life such as exists on Earth? Again, says Shapley, one in a thousand.