by William Tenn
HERE COMES CIVILIZATION:
THE COMPLETE SCIENCE FICTION OF WILLIAM TENN VOLUME II
William Tenn
INTRODUCTION
Robert Silverberg
The lone lamentable thing about this two-volume collection of William Tenn's science fiction (of which this is Volume Two, and if you don't already own Volume One, Immodest Proposals, you should run right out and buy it) is its subtitle: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn. In a properly ordered world, the complete science fiction of William Tenn would fill many more volumes than these mere piddling two. You could not get the complete science fiction of Robert A. Heinlein or Philip K. Dick or Isaac Asimov into just two volumes, be they the size of the Manhattan telephone directory. Even Ray Bradbury, who like William Tenn has primarily been a short-story writer, would need half a dozen or more omnibus-sized books. As for the complete science fiction of Robert Silverberg—well, you get the idea.
But here we have the complete William Tenn—the gesammelte Werke of a man who has been writing the stuff for more than half a century—and the whole megalith takes only these two volumes. This is truly lamentable, and I lament it herewith. There should be eight volumes this size. There should be eighteen. If you believe that the stories in these two books are brilliant, intricately inventive, and tremendously funny, which I assure you they are, then you ought to read the stories he didn't get around to writing.
They are, let me confidently assert, absolutely terrific. The least of them would burn a hole in your memory bank forever. When I think of all the magnificent unwritten William Tenn stories languishing out there in the limbo of nonexistence, I want to weep. The great trilogy set in the parallel universe where Horace Gold and John Campbell are the rival emperors of a decadent Byzantine Empire—the dozen mordant tales of the Solomonic decisions of the Chief Rabbi of Mars—the intricate reverse deconstruction of Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps"—you'd love them. I guarantee it. But where are they? Nowhere, that's where. Phil—that's what I call "William Tenn," Phil, because that happens to be his real name, Philip Klass—never got around to writing them. And though he's only in his ninth decade and still posing as an active writer, the same pose that he has hidden behind for the past fifty years, I don't think he ever will.
I'll tell you why, too.
It's this Scheherezade business. In her introduction to Volume One, Connie Willis lets us know that Charles Brown of Locus magazine once referred to Phil as "the Scheherezade of science fiction." I confess I have some issues with that tag—it is very hard for me to envision Scheherezade as a diminutive male Jewish octogenarian with a grizzled beard, and I bet you that Sultan Shahryar would have had an even tougher time with it—but I do see Charles' point. Scheherezade had the gift of gab. She was one of the world's great storytellers, right up there with Homer and Dickens and the Ancient Mariner, a spellbinder whose tales everybody still knows and loves a thousand years later. When she spoke, you had no choice but to listen. Of course, Scheherezade was telling you about Sinbad the Sailor and Ali Baba and Aladdin, irresistible, imperishable stories. But she must also have been quite a talker, because she had to get the Sultan's attention first, so that he would let her tell the stories that would distract him from cutting off her head.
Phil Klass—I remind you, that is the natal name of the man who wrote the Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn—is quite a talker too. And it is my belief that he let the other eight, or ten, or sixteen volumes of the Complete Science Fiction evaporate into the smoky air of ten million cocktail parties instead of writing the damn stuff down.
My image of Phil, a man whom I've known since 1956 or thereabouts, is that of a small man with constantly moving jaws. He was talking a mile a minute when I met him at some gathering of our colleagues in New York in the 1950s, he has talked at the same dizzyingly rapid rate all through the succeeding decades, and, though it's a few years since I've seen him, since we live on opposite coasts of North America these days, I'm quite certain that he is talking right now, back there in far-off Pennsylvania. Now, of course, this being the twenty-first century long fabled in song and story by the members of our little guild, his verbal velocity really ought to be measured metrically, and so we can consider that nowadays he talks at 1.6 kilometers a minute, but the effect is just the same, which is that of a man bubbling over with immensely interesting ideas, all of which he wants to share with you in a single outpouring of breath.
Among those ideas, I'm afraid, were some of his best stories. We professional writers are all taught, back in the days when we were would-be writers who read Writer's Digest and studied books on how to double-space manuscripts, that writers must never talk about work in progress, because there is a real risk of talking the work away. Phil knew all about that rule long before I had ever heard the name of John W. Campbell, Jr. He didn't care, or else he is just such a compulsive talker that he can't stop himself. I can remember his talking about a long story that he was writing called "Winthrop Was Stubborn" for something like a year, back in the vicinity of 1956 and the early months of 1957. I got to know the story very well in that time, to the point where I began to think I was writing it myself. I also came to believe that the story wasn't being written at all, merely talked, and great was my surprise when it actually appeared in the August, 1957 issue of Galaxy (I remember the date very well, because I had a story in the same issue) under editor Horace Gold's title of "Time Waits for Winthrop." You will find that story—Phil's, not mine—in the first volume of this set, under his original, and preferred, title of "Winthrop Was Stubborn."
"Winthrop Was Stubborn" is the exception that proves the rule. Phil almost talked that one away, but somehow he wrote it, anyway. It's a sly, splendidly mordant story, almost as good as the ones you can't read because Phil never bothered to write them. He did the same thing with the novel contained in this volume, Of Men and Monsters, talked and talked and talked about writing an actual novel, which he had never done before, and which none of us expected to live long enough to see, even after a piece of it appeared in Galaxy in 1963. By that time it had been at least a thousand and one nights in the making, perhaps more; yet it was five years more before the complete opus was offered to an incredulous world by Ballantine Books.
Of Men and Monsters is, unless I've lost count, the only novel Phil Klass has managed to finish. (His other long story, "A Lamp for Medusa," is just a novella.) He's talked the rest away at parties. Some went into thin air and were never heard of again. Others did get written, but not by Phil. You've heard of Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein? Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke? Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard? The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald? All of these should have borne the William Tenn byline. But he talked about them and talked about them and talked about them at party after party ("my Long Island story," is what he called Gatsby and "my definitive space-opera novel," is how he described Battlefield Earth) and the ideas for them sounded terrific. And finally, when they realized he was never actually going to write them, those other guys went ahead and did the job for him. It's a crying shame, one of the great scandals of twentieth-century literature.
Well, now and then he did, over the past five decades plus, actually sit down and write something, and I suppose we should be grateful for the small fraction of the Complete Works of William Tenn that NESFA Press was able to publish in these two slender volumes. Let us rejoice that we do, because, as I said somewhere or other once, he is a writer of witty, cynical, and often darkly comic science fiction—I k
now I said it, because I'm quoted to that effect on the back cover of these books—and, moreover, he is a superb writer of witty, cynical, and often darkly comic science fiction. I will cherish these two books forever, and so should you. And we all should hope that Phil, as he continues to live long and prosper, will perhaps do a little writing once in a while, and give us a few down payments against the magnificent third volume of the Collected Works that he owes us all.
HERE COMES CIVILIZATION
BERNIE THE FAUST
That's what Ricardo calls me. I don't know what I am.
Here I am, I'm sitting in my little nine-by-six office. I'm reading notices of government surplus sales. I'm trying to decide where lies a possible buck and where lies nothing but more headaches.
So the office door opens. This little guy with a dirty face, wearing a very dirty, very wrinkled Palm Beach suit, he walks into my office, and he coughs a bit and he says:
"Would you be interested in buying a twenty for a five?"
That was it. I mean, that's all I had to go on.
I looked him over and I said, "Wha-at?"
He shuffled his feet and coughed some more. "A twenty," he mumbled. "A twenty for a five."
I made him drop his eyes and stare at his shoes. They were lousy, cracked shoes, lousy and dirty like the rest of him. Every once in a while, his left shoulder hitched up in a kind of tic. "I give you twenty," he explained to his shoes, "and I buy a five from you with it. I wind up with five, you wind up with twenty."
"How did you get into the building?"
"I just came in," he said, a little mixed up.
"You just came in," I put a nasty, mimicking note in my voice. "Now you just go right back downstairs and come the hell out. There's a sign in the lobby—NO BEGGARS ALLOWED."
"I'm not begging." He tugged at the bottom of his jacket. It was like a guy trying to straighten out his slept-in pajamas. "I want to sell you something. A twenty for a five. I give you..."
"You want me to call a cop?"
He looked very scared. "No. Why should you call a cop? I haven't done anything to make you call a cop!"
"I'll call a cop in just a second. I'm giving you fair warning. I just phone down to the lobby and they'll have a cop up here fast. They don't want beggars in this building. This is a building for business."
He rubbed his hand against his face, taking a little dirt off, then he rubbed the hand against the lapel of his jacket and left the dirt there. "No deal?" he asked. "A twenty for a five? You buy and sell things. What's the matter with my deal?"
I picked up the phone.
"All right," he said, holding up the streaky palm of his hand. "I'll go. I'll go."
"You better. And shut the door behind you."
"Just in case you change your mind." He reached into his dirty, wrinkled pants pocket and pulled out a card. "You can get in touch with me here. Almost any time during the day."
"Blow," I told him.
He reached over, dropped the card on my desk, on top of all the surplus notices, coughed once or twice, looked at me to see if maybe I was biting. No? No. He trudged out.
I picked the card up between the nails of my thumb and forefinger and started to drop it into the wastebasket.
Then I stopped. A card. It was just so damned out of the ordinary—a slob like that with a card. A card, yet.
For that matter, the whole play was out of the ordinary. I began to be a little sorry I hadn't let him run through the whole thing. Listening to a panhandler isn't going to kill me. After all, what was he trying to do but give me an off-beat sales pitch? I can always use an off-beat sales pitch. I work out of a small office, I buy and sell, but half my stock is good ideas. I'll use ideas, even from a bum.
The card was clean and white, except where the smudge from his fingers made a brown blot. Written across it in a kind of ornate handwriting were the words Mr. Ogo Eksar. Under that was the name and the telephone number of a hotel in the Times Square area, not far from my office. I knew that hotel: not expensive, but not a fleabag either—somewhere just under the middle line.
There was a room number in one corner of the card. I stared at it and I felt kind of funny. I really didn't know.
Although come to think of it, why couldn't a panhandler be registered at a hotel? "Don't be a snob, Bernie," I told myself.
A twenty for a five, he'd offered. Man, I'd love to have seen his face if I'd said: Okay, give me the twenty, you take the five, and now get the hell out of here.
The government surplus notices caught my eye. I flipped the card into the waste-basket and tried to go back to business.
Twenty for five. What kind of panhandling pitch would follow it? I couldn't get it out of my mind!
There was only one thing to do. Ask somebody about it. Ricardo? A big college professor, after all. One of my best contacts.
He'd thrown a lot my way—a tip on the college building program that was worth a painless fifteen hundred, an office equipment disposal from the United Nations, stuff like that. And any time I had any questions that needed a college education, he was on tap. All for the couple, three hundred, he got out of me in commissions.
I looked at my watch. Ricardo would be in his office now, marking papers or whatever it is he does there. I dialed his number.
"Ogo Eksar?" he repeated after me. "Sounds like a Finnish name. Or maybe Estonian. From the eastern Baltic, I'd say."
"Forget that part," I said. "This is all I care about." And I told him about the twenty-for-five offer.
He laughed. "That thing again!"
"Some old hustle that the Greeks pulled on the Egyptians?"
"No. Something the Americans pulled. And not a con game. During the depression, a New York newspaper sent a reporter around the city with a twenty-dollar bill which he offered to sell for exactly one dollar. There were no takers. The point being, that even with people out of work and on the verge of starvation, they were so intent on not being suckers that they turned down an easy profit of nineteen hundred percent."
"Twenty for one? This was twenty for five."
"Oh, well, you know, Bernie, inflation," he said, laughing again. "And these days it's more likely to be a television show."
"Television? You should have seen the way the guy was dressed!"
"Just an extra, logical touch to make people refuse to take the offer seriously. University research people operate much the same way. A few years back, a group of sociologists began an investigation of the public's reaction to sidewalk solicitors in charity drives. You know, those people who jingle little boxes on street corners: Help the Two-Headed Children, Relief for Flood-Ravaged Atlantis? Well, they dressed up some of their students..."
"You think he was on the level, then, this guy?"
"I think there is a good chance that he was. I don't see why he would have left his card with you, though."
"That I can figure—now. If it's a TV stunt, there must be a lot of other angles wrapped up in it. A giveaway show with cars, refrigerators, a castle in Scotland, all kinds of loot."
"A giveaway show? Well, yes—it could be."
I hung up, took a deep breath, and called Eksar's hotel. He was registered there all right. And he'd just come in.
I went downstairs fast and took a cab. Who knew what other connections he'd made by now?
Going up in the elevator, I kept wondering. How did I go from the twenty-dollar bill to the real big stuff, the TV giveaway stuff, without letting Eksar know that I was on to what it was all about? Well, maybe I'd be lucky. Maybe he'd give me an opening.
I knocked on the door. When he said, "Come in," I came in. But for a second or two I couldn't see a thing.
It was a little room, like all the rooms in that hotel, little and smelly and stuffy. But he didn't have the lights on, any electric lights. The window shade was pulled all the way down.
When my eyes got used to the dark, I was able to pick out this Ogo Eksar character. He was sitting on the bed, on the side nearest me. He was
still wearing that crazy rumpled Palm Beach suit.
And you know what? He was watching a program on a funny little portable TV set that he had on the bureau. Color TV. Only it wasn't working right. There were no faces, no pictures, nothing but colors chasing around. A big blob of red, a big blob of orange, and a wiggly border of blue and green and black. A voice was talking from it, but all the words were fouled up. "Wah-wah, de-wah, de-wah."
Just as I came in, he turned it off. "Times Square is a bad neighborhood for TV," I told him. "Too much interference."
"Yes," he said. "Too much interference." He closed up the set and put it away. I wished I'd seen it when it was working right.
Funny thing, you know? I would have expected a smell of liquor in the room, I would have expected to see a couple of empties in the tin trash basket near the bureau. Not a sign.
The only smell in the room was a smell I couldn't recognize. I guess it was the smell of Eksar himself, concentrated.
"Hi," I said, feeling a little uncomfortable because of the way I'd been with him back in the office. So rough I'd been.
He stayed on the bed. "I've got the twenty," he said. "You've got the five?"
"Oh, I guess I've got the five, all right," I said, looking in my wallet hard and trying to be funny. He didn't say a word, didn't even invite me to sit down. I pulled out a bill. "Okay?"
He leaned forward and stared, as if he could see—in all that dimness—what kind of a bill it was. "Okay," he said. "But I'll want a receipt. A notarized receipt."
Well, what the hell, I thought, a notarized receipt. "Then we'll have to go down. There's a druggist on Forty-fifth."
"Okay," he said, getting to his feet with a couple of small coughs that came one, two, three, four, right after one another. "The bathroom's out in the hall. Let me wash up and we'll go down."
I waited for him outside the bathroom, thinking that he'd grown a whole hell of a lot more sanitary all of a sudden.
I could have saved my worries. I don't know what he did in the bathroom, but one thing I knew for sure when he came out: soap and water had nothing to do with it. His face, his neck, his clothes, his hands—they were all as dirty as ever. He still looked like he'd been crawling over a garbage dump all night long.
