Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II
Page 55
The only trouble with that was that all of his weapons had been given to him by the Olympians. Wouldn't they know how to deal with them?
He seized a spear as a horde of golden-skinned men swirled off the side of the mountain and rose to meet them. Sighting somewhere in the center of the group, he pressed the button. The spear buzzed out of his hand and plunged downward, spitting three Olympians like so much shish kebab.
Beside him, he heard a similar noise as Polydectes let a weapon go, too. The king's success was even greater—he got four flying outsiders. Now that they were in combat, Polydectes was concentrating on nothing but the kill, the most efficient kill, as befitted a barbarian monarch.
A sheet of flame flashed down from one of the carpets as someone brought another weapon into play. An entire group of ascending Olympians vanished. They turned and sought shelter in the mountain again.
Now, they had the advantage. The long, purple cone of a ray gun raked across a carpet and exploded it. Then another shattered outward. The priestesses brought their craft up higher, out of the ray gun's obvious range.
"Won't work," Polydectes told Percy crisply, as if he'd been advising him on military strategy for the past five campaigns. "They'll come up one at a time now and burn us down. Whatever this thing is that we're flying, we've got to go in after them!"
Percy nodded. He gestured to Athena who, making an overhead motion to the other priestesses, spun the little wheel rapidly. They swooped down, the fore-part of a long parabola of carpets.
Take me now, my son, came the urgent summons. Now!
Percy grabbed the lizard-like head out of the bag by a lock of something on the back that was very much like green hair and held it out in front of him. He reached around and whipped out the harpe.
The purple rays died out. He heard screams of terror from below. "A Gorgon, a Gorgon!"
"Yes," he said grimly. "It's coming back, along with the sucker that did the job!"
They touched the ground, and he leaped down, clicking his boot switches into action. With this much extra speed, he'd match a sword against a ray gun any old time!
Except that from the mouth of the immense cave halfway up the mountain a dozen golden-skinned men poured out wearing identical boots and blasting purple cones ahead of them! And they moved so much faster than he did, their boots were either better-fueled or better-made.
Polydectes behind him accounted for one of them. And a sheet of flame flapping down from one of the nearest descending carpets burned half of the rest out of existence. He ran on toward the cave desperately trying to dodge and circle around the burst-provoking rays.
One of the Olympians angled in front of him. Percy cursed, realizing he would never be able to reach him in time to use the harpe. The fellow's ray gun came up.
And Medusa struck.
Percy, catching her agony in his mind, realized what the effort had cost her. But the Olympian fell forward in cracking fragments; he had been completely ossified on the spot!
So another aspect of the legend was true! Medusa could—
He was inside the cave now and had no time to think. In front of him, there was a rank of determined and armed Olympians, some sixty or seventy deep. And beyond them, over their heads, his eyes rapidly followed intricate whorls of wiring and shimmering instruments to where—at the rear of the cave—a little whirlpool of red energy was growing larger in the rocky ceiling.
At this very moment, they were acquiring reinforcements from the dread other side!
Feverishly, he poured into the attack, slashing them from before him like so many scallion heads on the restaurant cutting board. Beside him, he could hear Polydectes roaring and the men of Seriphos as they poured up.
But he couldn't make it! He'd have to climb those Olympian-filled steps. He knew it despairingly as he hacked and dodged, slew and was ripped himself. He saw that the little whirlpool had grown larger now, that a huge machine had taken shape on the other side and was coming through.
Throw me, Percy! the Gorgon abruptly screamed in his mind.
He brought his arm back and threw the head straight at the skimming scarlet circle high overhead. There was a moment of last instruction that thrummed inside his brain, then the shrill agony of dissolution as the head touched the red energy whirlpool and exploded.
The Olympians screamed their despair when the dust had blown aside sufficiently to show that the entrance was gone. It had been sealed again forever, Percy knew. Never again would they be able to pool their bits of half-knowledge and rebuild their side.
The men of Seriphos pressed in for the completion of the kill. A few Olympians managed to escape out of the cage mouth and soar away, but those who remained fought listlessly.
What were those last instructions the Gorgon had shot at his mind? The poem! The poem!
Which poem? The one beginning: "And thence came the son of Danae, flaming with courage and spirit—"?
—|—
He was standing on a sunny hilltop in the northern part of a small island. There was no one near him.
Percy looked around stupidly. What—
Then, as his mind settled slowly and he remembered the advice Medusa had frantically telepathed to him, he understood. He wasn't happy, but he understood.
Now that the Perseus sequence was over in that particular space-time universe, it was possible only to arrive at the beginning of the one in the next. And while the parchment was gone, the poem related to him, to Percy-Perseus. With that subjective aura and the psychological impetus the Gorgon had given him, he had only to remember the lines of the poem to be precipitated into the next universe.
Why? So that this time there would be no mistake. So that this time he would not be talked into slaying the last surviving Gorgon and removing from humanity the fountain of ancient peaceful wisdom which could nourish it. So that this time he would not—at long, long last—be a sucker.
He regretted it. He especially regretted the loss of Ann, whom he had hardly come to know.
But, come to think of it, wouldn't there be another Ann Drummond in this universe? Yes, and couldn't he be even more successful? He knew his way around now. He'd do that little job for the Gorgon, all right, but first Percy—or Perseus as he might as well call himself here—was going to strut a little. He was carrying a small armory, he knew his power—and he wasn't taking any con games from any man.
No, this time Seriphos was going to hear from him right at the start.
He started down the hill-side, not noticing the young man paddling furiously in a just-materialized bathtub out in the bay.
Nor did he notice the squad of King Polydectes's soldiers eating their uninteresting meal in a clump of bushes halfway down the hill. Nor, if he had seen them, would he have known that their commander was the type to have annoying strangers knocked out from behind so their fine clothes could be stolen at leisure.
Especially was their commander that type after a hot, irritating day spent fruitlessly chasing harpies in the hills by order of King Polydectes...
AFTERWORD
So I finally did what I'd been dreaming of doing since coming out of the army in 1945: I began studying Greek. "Why in the world," my good friend Calder Willingham wanted to know, "start that, for the first time in your life at your age? At your goddam age?"
"What has age got to do with it?" I replied. "After all, there is the story about Cato. Cato began studying Greek at eighty!"
Calder spread his hands at me. "All right. But at least that guy already had a fairly good grounding in Latin."
But I went ahead with it. I intended to support my Greek habit with science-fiction stories. Unfortunately, the two just didn't mix. In several months, I was deeply in debt (something I was, anyway, in most often), and starving.
Fred Pohl learned of it, and got me an assignment that went to both problems.
The Ziff-Davis magazine Fantastic Adventures had bought a cover painting for a future issue. They needed a short novel to go with it.
I didn't know. I stared at the cover repro Fred had brought along with him to my apartment on New York's East 95th Street (one block south of Spanish Harlem, two or three blocks north of where the echt rich East Side then ended), and I just didn't know. There was an undoubted Medusa head, snake locks and all, on the cover, but it was dripping blood on the boots of a fellow dressed in unquestionably seventeenth-century clothing, a fellow waving what looked like an eighteenth-century Scottish broadsword in the air in front of a fourteenth-century castle wall.
I pointed this out to Fred.
"Now don't get all technical on me," he chided. "So it's a bit off-period. All they want in the story from the cover is the cut-off Medusa head. Make believe you're seeing it not on the cover but on an authentic black-krater vase, and tell the story your way. Now, what should I say to the editor of Fantastic Adventures? Do you want the assignment, or don't you want the assignment?"
"I want the assignment," I said, looking at the closed door of my almost-empty refrigerator. "Thanks, Fred."
"All right," he said. "And it's due in exactly one week. That's Thursday—dead deadline."
I thanked him again, and let him out of the apartment. Then I borrowed enough money to put in a supply of bread, cheese, and Benzedrine, and went to work.
I spent two days looking for a satisfactory quote to head the piece. Where I got that particular Pindar translation, I no longer have the slightest idea—but I could find things in my salad and bachelor days that only amaze and confound me now at eighty.
Then, mumbling a prayer to my favorite god, Thoth, the Egyptian god of scribes, I began typing. I used as the locale of the opening scene, the apartment I had been living in before the one I was in now. It was the apartment I described in the story "Will You Walk a Little Faster." I left out my neighbor, Lester del Rey, but I included the drunken landlady-superintendent.
The piece began to work, and I let it have its head. It was a strange story, rather unlike anything I'd ever done before, a peculiar mixture of humor and action and alternate-world-stuff.
(Actually, it was only when George Zebrowski recently identified all the elements for me that I at last got a handle on what kind of narrative it really was: a Harold Shea story, the kind of thing that was done, and done much better, by Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp, back about 1940, 1941.)
Doing mostly without sleep—and doing without much food, either—I got about two-thirds of the way into the novel, before it suddenly turned and bit me. The texture changed and changed radically. I felt I needed to stop writing and take a week or two off to think about how it was supposed to end.
But I couldn't. I had a deadline that would be crossed within forty-eight hours, as phone calls from the anxious editor reminded me. And I owed Fred Pohl much for the favor he had done me.
Red-eyed and muscle-cramped (and hungry!), I ploughed on. And that's what it literally felt like—ploughing a frozen field.
I finished it and took it to the Ziff-Davis office, without a rewrite or a reread. They liked it and bought it.
I was much ashamed. I felt I had, with premeditation and malice aforethought, written a piece of junk. When the issue of Fantastic Adventures that featured "Medusa" hit the stands, I chucked the magazine into a box under my bed and piled all kinds of miscellaneous papers on top of it. I haven't reread the novel in all these years, and I didn't want to include it in this collection. But my wife has (inexplicably) told me for a long time that she likes it; and my brother Morton—whose taste I trust almost as much as Fruma's—insists that it is nowhere nearly as bad as I think; and George Zebrowski—a critic of whom my opinion is very high indeed—George Zebrowski says...
So I finally took the magazine out of the box and reread the story.
And. Well. Hell. It's not so bad.
Written 1951——Published 1951
ESSAY
ON THE FICTION IN SCIENCE FICTION
If there is one quality common above all others to both science fiction and the historical moment which has produced it, that quality is Change. Change is the recurrent motif of most science fiction: Change in human societies, human technologies, human attitudes. Change even in the very structure of human bodies and minds. And the quality of Change affects the field itself to such an extent—originating from a constantly developing and expanding audience—that today I am no longer capable of defining the medium in which I have been working for eight years, so many times have my own style and themes mutated to meet its demands.
From the point of view of any critic of conventional literature, however, science fiction can be very easily categorized: it is one of the several divisions of popular commercial fiction, of which the others are Western, detective, sports, and love stories. Such a critic would not hesitate to label such luminaries in the field as Sturgeon and Bradbury as ordinary commercial writers who happen to specialize in science fantasy and who, as such, are more interested in a steady production of material of proved saleability than in the steady derivation from their work of new, unfamiliar, and possibly unpopular creative azimuths. He would point out with a yawn, this critic, that science fiction's special literary conventions—such as Outer Space and Murdering Monsters Out to Destroy the Earth—are merely high-stepping versions of basics in Western and detective stories—the Wide Open Spaces and the Monstrous Murderer About to Destroy Our Heroine. He would go on, this critic, to nod wearily at the argument that science fiction has peculiarities shared by no other branch of letters; he would observe that every aspect of commercial writing has its eccentricities, but that eccentricities do not a literature make...
And yet, I have come to know a great many science-fiction writers of substantial talent who have, variously proportioned, the following characteristics in common: (1) They share a passionate belief in science fiction as a means of literary expression that has particular validity and significance in this age. (2) They are deeply concerned with their own development as writers in the new and untried channels of their medium. (3) They are resolutely dedicated to the proposition that while man may not live by bread alone, bread is nonetheless a good beginning and should be purchasable by arts as well as crafts.
Rather odd commercial writers, these, worrying about esthetic questions as well as word rates, closely questioning the integrity of each narrative performance in their field while exchanging market gossip and trade talk—odd, and markedly unlike their colleagues, the Shoot-Em-Down Daltons and the Love-Em-Up Desdemonas in the media immediately adjoining on the newsstands and bookstores. Admittedly this phenomenon has occurred briefly in other areas of commercial writing, the detective story, for example. But there was one Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler was hardly his prophet.
Then again, the occasional sincere and highly capable author working the well-hewn quarries of realistic crime and timeless West comes to feel an unpleasant constrictive sensation about the more imaginative places of his mind. The reverse is true of the science-fiction writer, who has infinity—literally!—at his disposal, an infinity of concept as well as of cosmos from which he must fashion dimensioned narratives that will be significant to creatures of his species, time, and place. In other words, a Dorothy L. Sayers works in a medium whose limitations are decreed by its definition, while an Olaf Stapledon or a C.S. Lewis is limited only by his skills, his sensitivity, and the thematic range of his intellect. Is it any wonder that science fiction has tended to attract those writers who are interested not only in literature but also in the proliferating problems of our time, a time which one day sees strong conventions smashed in their yellow molds and the next is witness to a revival and reunderstanding of myths centuries upon centuries old?
But then there are those, in and out of the field, who will claim that all this talk of Art and Expression-of-the-Age is so m
uch noonday nonsense. They disagree with the dictum that science fiction has to do primarily with people—that whether the people are modern Homo sapiens hammering out the first rocket, twenty-fifth-century mutants hammering out the first xxl-yyrdk, robots trying to form labor unions, androids fighting to have the manufacturer's label removed from their backsides, or monocotyledonous Arcturians pathetically attempting to smuggle themselves past Terran Immigration disguised as lima beans, it is first and foremost with their problems and view of themselves as people that the SF writer has to deal successfully. It is with their characters as individuals or their collective personality as an alien community that he must grapple long before he has a story. There are still those, in other words, who feel that science fiction is essentially the field of the wonderful gimmick, the dramatized gadget, the engineer's doodle made into flesh and bone and narrative action. They crawl, these folks, out of the cave of the past and cry constantly for more science, more science in science fiction.
This is the group that plays Scylla to the litterateur's Charybdis. Against them, the average science-fiction writer has been able to develop only the thinnest, most pathetic defense. At least he can reply to the exotics who challenge the artistic substance of his work with the many-lunged rebuttal of vox populi; he can dig his fists truculently into his hips and remind sneering estheticians that that part of our heritage which today's taste would call "fine arts" was popular art in its own time, that the masses flocked to watch Michelangelo sculpt and crowds of standees sweated to see Euripides' latest; and that while popularity, by itself, is no guarantee of future fame, it would seem historically important enough to dim the immortality aspirations of most present-day "serious fiction," for which—according to its publishers—apathy among the buying, reading public has been growing steadily. But the critic who successfully charges the science-fiction writer with inadequate or—much, much worse—inaccurate science has smitten him hip, thigh, and jawbone, and left him a thing of gibbering, barely audible apologies.