The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction Sixth Series

by Edited by Anthony Boucher

  As I say, this is probably not the only hypothesis which will fit the facts. But it has been a most disquieting experience. Not only because I am sorry for poor Durward. Suppose this sort of thing were to become common? And how if, some other time, I were not the explorer but the explored?

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  ~ * ~

  WILL STANTON

  Like every other human experience, it took different forms in retrospect, depending (as always) on how it directly affected the person concerned. This is the way it seemed to the boy, because it was his birthday.

  THE LAST PRESENT

  I left the house about ten o’clock that morning. I had leather puttees over my hiking breeches, and a knapsack for my lunch, and my field glasses in a case slung over my shoulder. The hand ax and a knife and canteen were fastened to my belt—my mother kidded me about that.

  “Do you expect one belt to hold up all that and your pants, too?” she said. “That’s asking a lot.”

  I didn’t make any excuses. After all she’d bought me most of the stuff herself.

  “I want you back by four,” she said; “I’ve got something I want you to do. That’s four o’clock sharp, now, not any later and not any earlier.” I had a pretty good idea what it was all about, after all it was my birthday. But neither of us let on. I went down the front steps and out to the street.

  It was pretty quiet for a Saturday morning—a couple of people in their front yards raking leaves, but none of the kids around. I walked halfway down the block and went into the alley across the field in back of Pokey Michael’s house. Pokey was my best friend. We’d done a lot of exploring together and hiking up the mountain, and we had plans for building a boat as soon as we got time for it.

  I crossed the creek and started on the trail up the mountain. Ordinarily Pokey would have been going with me and probably some other friends, but this Saturday they had made some kind of excuse. I was pretty sure I’d be seeing most of them back at my house around four o’clock. Almost every year my folks had some kind of surprise for my birthday, and I thought this time it would probably be a barbecue in the back yard for all my friends, and of course cake and ice cream and favors.

  I got to Rocky Ridge just twenty-eight minutes after I’d left the house by my watch. I’d done it in better time before, but I wasn’t trying to set any records. From there I could see a good bit of town—the roofs, anyway. You couldn’t see my roof, or Pokey’s—too many trees, but you could see Spud Ashley’s roof and the window of his room. With field glasses you could even send semaphore signals back and forth—we planned to learn the code some day.

  When I’d rested a minute, I hit the trail again for the steepest part of the climb. It was scrub oak through there and heavy underbrush so you couldn’t see twenty feet to either side. All the time I was climbing I kept thinking about my birthday present—it was going to be a rifle I was pretty sure. Not an air rifle, I’d had one of those for years, but a real one, a .22.

  The main reason I thought I was going to get it was the way my folks joked about giving me something else. “You’re so crazy about hiking and camping,” my mother said, “you ought to have something you could use outdoors. Like woolen underwear.”

  “That’s no present,” my dad said. “He’d rather have something from a hardware store—maybe something that would help him earn some spending money. What I had in mind was a lawn mower.” Just as if I couldn’t have borrowed one if I wanted to. No, I felt that if I wasn’t going to get the rifle they wouldn’t have joked about it.

  Finally I came to the place where our special trail began. We’d blazed a tree to mark it, or actually what we’d done was blaze a tree up the path a ways. You’d start at the tree and come back fifty paces and head to the right, only we’d made it a rule never to leave the trail twice in the same place so as to make a path anybody could follow. Each time we’d take a little different route until we came to a big rock out of sight of the main trail and that’s where our secret trail really began. We’d cut it through the thick brush, and after a couple hundred yards it led to a cave that nobody outside our club had ever seen. Of course the mountain was full of caves, probably some that had never been discovered, but this was our special one.

  Looking through the brush in front of it you could see Rocky Ridge. What that meant was that we had a communication system with the whole town. Say Spud was home, he could get a telephone call from one of the other fellows and semaphore the call to the Ridge. Then whoever was there could relay the message to the cave. That way if any other gang of kids from town tried to sneak up on us or anything, they wouldn’t have much luck.

  I built a fire and fixed my lunch. I had a can of spaghetti I cooked in my mess kit, and a banana and cupcakes and water from my canteen. After lunch I rolled a corn-silk cigarette. We had agreed that none of us in the society would ever use tobacco until we’d finished high school, but if anyone wanted to have a com-silk smoke after a meal it was relaxing, and we didn’t see how it could do any harm.

  Usually from the cave you could hear the train whistle at two-ten, but that afternoon I missed it. I didn’t think my watch could be far off—I had it regulated so it only gained five minutes a week but that day I didn’t hear the train whistle. At two-thirty I made sure the fire was out and cleaned up camp. That gave me plenty of time to take it easy going down the trail and still get home by four. It had been a good day—warm for October, and not much wind. I got to the Ridge by three-twenty and stopped for a minute to rest and take a look around. It was quiet. Generally on a Saturday you could hear the noise of horns and traffic from downtown, but there wasn’t a sound. Only birdcalls and rustling in the underbrush, but nothing mechanical or human. Ordinarily you’re so used to human sounds you don’t even hear them. But when they stop you notice it. You can tell right away. I didn’t wait any longer—I started down the trail again, walking fast.

  I crossed the creek and started running through the field in back of Pokey’s and up the alley to the street. Then I stopped. The street was the same as in the morning—I mean the houses and trees. But there weren’t any people in sight and there was something else—something crazy. It was furniture. All along the street, in front of every house there was a table or stand of some kind, with guns piled on them. It was like all the people had gone through their houses and taken every gun and knife and weapon and piled them out front for the garbage man or somebody to pick up. But why would they do it—and all at the same time? I stood there for a minute or more just looking up and down the street. Then I heard the first noise.

  It was coming from an empty car parked across the street. Somebody had left the radio going and there was a man’s voice. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, it was too hard to understand. But he seemed to be giving orders— telling people what to do.

  I stood there watching the car for a minute and then I heard the other sound—the tapping. Like somebody trying to get my attention and then waiting and then starting again. I whirled around. It was Pokey’s father crouched behind their front window, tapping on the glass. He had been light-heavyweight champ of the Marines, so Pokey said, but he looked old and small. He was motioning me not to come any closer. I couldn’t tell where Pokey was, or his mother, or anybody else on the block. I was all alone.

  Then all I knew was I was running. With my knapsack and field glasses bouncing up and down and the canteen slapping against my leg. I had to get home whatever happened. Ten houses to go—it seemed to take forever. Then I was crashing through the hedge and across the lawn and up the steps. The last thing I saw—the last thing I remember was our card table set up on the grass with a gun on it. A new one—a rifle—a .22.

  I’ve told the story I don’t know how many times now, at night when we lie on our bunks talking in whispers. Then I tell them about the hike and the cooking lunch and so on. All it amounted to was kid stuff, but they want me to tell it, over and over. It’s because I had those few hours, I guess, when I was still free to do as I plea
sed after everyone else knew.

  It’s what I think about more than anything else. Whenever I wake up I keep my eyes closed for a minute to see if I can smell pine needles and hear the train whistle—the two-ten train. Then I’ll know I just dozed off after lunch and I can go down the trail and they’ll be waiting for me—Pokey and my folks with the birthday party and all.

  The light is coming in the windows, turning the walls and ceiling gray, and another day is started. A lot of them here have given up—they say there’s nothing left to hope for. Maybe they’re right, but I keep waiting.

  Someday I’ll hear the train whistle, and then all this will be over and I can go home.

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  ~ * ~

  WARD MOORE

  Ordinarily the longest story in a collection would be apt to have the longest introduction. But Ward Moore weaves so urgent a spell here that I’d like merely to say that Mr. Moore is one of the handful of unquestionable artists now writing in this field of what he calls “improbabilia” and that this story reveals his artistry at its best.

  NO MAN PURSUETH

  One of the minor symptoms Hesione noticed that Sunday morning was the way all the later editions of the papers were folded with the front pages outside, instead of the comic sections. FIVE MORE PLANES VANISH, said a conservative headline. AMNESIA VICTIMS’ STORIES IN WEIRD COINCIDENCE, announced another. PRETTY GIRL AMNESIAC ATTACKED; INCOHERENT, proclaimed a tabloid. Hesione bought a Herald Tribune and discarded most of it on the stool beside her, keeping only the news and drama sections.

  “Just a cup of coffee, please,” she said to the clerk, smiling automatically at him as if he were in the audience—which of course potentially he was. “I’ll decide after whether I’m hungry or not.”

  She did little more than glance through the article on the theater page headed, Hesione Hadstone’s “Lady Cicely” Still Fresh and Bright After 24 Weeks; Shaw’s Brassbound Ideally Suited to Her Talents; Will Play Lady Macbeth Next Season. She did not even read it through again, but turned back to the news as she sipped her second cup of coffee.

  The five lost planes—a TWA between Chicago and Los Angeles, a Delta bound for Memphis, a B-51 taking off from La Guardia, and two small private planes, one in Vermont, the other in Ohio—made it 29 for the week and 81 since the disaster became epidemic. The CAA was still trying to make up its mind whether to order all planes grounded. Senators argued that Communist sabotage was responsible, in spite of last week’s news, leaking through the Iron Curtain, of planes disappearing in the Soviet Union and China, just as all over the rest of the world. Neither meteorologists nor aeronautical engineers had satisfactory explanations to offer.

  As for the amnesiacs, there was still no connection established with the vanishing planes except the coincident number of cases which had begun to be heard of in the last months, at the same time the plane losses jumped. The newspapers called them amnesiacs, but- as near as Hesione could make out, they were merely men and women—astonishingly, children also—who appeared to suffer peculiar hallucinations during some sort of blackout lasting for anything from a few minutes to several days. There was no apparent pattern in their experiences giving a clue to the cause. Drivers of cars turned up on roads they had never intended to take, often miles from prospective destinations. They had been driving along normally—all agreed on this—either fast or slowly according to inclination, when suddenly the familiar scene was replaced by an utterly strange one. Sometimes their cars were on no road at all, but bouncing over plowed fields or rocky river beds. Even when the tires remained on thoroughfares, they were no longer like those of the moment before. Concrete changed to blacktop or tarred sand, gravel, stone blocks or packed earth. Often the wayside signs were in strange languages.

  The amnesiacs, seized by terror, babbled on their return of people in unusual costumes—”fancy dress” was the commonest phrase used in description, and often the only one in their stories that made sense—who were rarely friendly, more often hostile, and always unaccountable. The bewildered wanderers, fleeing their nightmare either in cars or on foot, suddenly found themselves back in the United States, dazedly begging help or explanation.

  Others had similar experiences. Housewives, going from refrigerator to deep-freeze cabinet, stepped into unknown rooms or unaccustomed streets. A step or two might find them back in their own kitchen, convinced they had suffered a momentary delusion; sometimes they moved in alien surroundings for days before they walked back into the familiar, five or fifty or five hundred miles from home.

  “Makes you wonder, huh, Miss Hadstone?”

  Hesione started, then turned her you-are-one-of-my-public smile on the man reading the Herald Tribune over her shoulder. He was no one she knew, though he looked faintly like an unsuccessful agent, but for the last five years she had gotten used to being recognized by strangers. She nodded, not too encouragingly (seedy characters often tried to borrow money; men often thought actresses—stars or walk-ons—were easy pick-ups), but not too discouragingly either. He might not be a customer for Shaw or Shakespeare, but popularity never hurt anyone on the stage.

  “And they’re scared. Everyone’s scared. Because they can’t figure it out.”

  “It’s frightening,” said Hesione simply.

  “Only because no one knows what’s happening,” agreed the man, seating himself on the stool beside her and taking off his hat to show thin, muddy hair brushed in evenly spaced stripes over a glossy bald head. “Because they’re unwilling to know.”

  “Unwilling?” Hesione inflected incredulously. “Surely everyone is frantic to find out.”

  “Are they?” he asked comfortably. “Yet when someone wants to tell them, they jeer.”

  Hesione raised her eyebrows.

  “Peterberry,” said the man, introducing himself, “Alonso Peterberry. Sometimes known as America’s Number Three Science Fiction Fan.”

  “Oh,” murmured Hesione, drawing back a little from contamination.

  “Sure,” confirmed Mr. Peterberry proudly. “I’ll let Sam and” (could the word be furry?) “fight it out for first and second, but did either of them ever put out a zine like Fan Dango? Of course there was more egoboo in the Fantods— that was printed, but I had to drop it for a spell of gafia. And it’s the consensus of opinion that Dango tops anything else in” (did he say fapper?).

  “Oh,” repeated Hesione, hoping that the word might be common to her language and his.

  “Well,” said Mr. Peterberry, “I’ve sent the explanation to every prozine in the world and I bet they’ll all print it. Even Gold and Boucher.”

  “That’s very interesting, Mr. Peterberry,” said Hesione, gathering up her Herald Tribune and reached for her check.

  “Well, don’t you want to know about it?”

  “Oh yes, but the truth is, I’m in a rush-”

  “I’ll condense it. The time-space continuum has been warped.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  He took a grimy envelope from his pocket, looked at it with a certain fresh curiosity, then tore it in half. With a pencil he drew a straight line across each of the halves. “One dimension,” he explained. “A one-dimensional space continuum.”

  “I see,” conceded Hesione, unseeing.

  He stood one of the scraps of envelope upright so that the lines impinged perpendicularly on each other. “A one-dimensional space continuum warped,” he instructed triumphantly.

  “But…”

  “Imagine four dimensions instead of one. Length, breadth, height and time. A time-space continuum. Do the same thing. That’s what’s happened. Plane—or car or man—going along this line”—he pointed a gnawed finger—”in our normal time-space continuum. He hits the point of fracture here. Suddenly he’s in a different continuum. When he returns—if he does—he is no longer at the place of departure. Because the earth revolved (haven’t checked fully, but so far there seem to be cases of eastbound travelers) and time passes. Logical?”

 
“Yes,” agreed Hesione, dazed. “But. . .”

  “Now you want to know what caused the warp.”

  “Not at all. I mean, I-”

  “All I can say is that it must be a tremendous force, like solar energy. Of a land not known to physicists. Might account for some of the old miracles better than Velikovsky.”