Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II

by William Tenn

  He arrived at the wall just as the sweating men finally pulled the slab they had cut out away and to one side. A great mob of people had been watching anxiously. It was getting close to dawn, and everyone knew it.

  The Aaron was sweating, too. His eyes were red-rimmed. He looked as if he had just about passed the point of complete exhaustion. "Eric," he said, "this is where we need you most. There are no maps from this point on. In there," he pointed at the hole, "only an Eye can lead us."

  Eric nodded, adjusted his forehead glow lamp and stepped through the hole.

  He looked about him. Yes, the usual tunnels and corridors. It would have been most unpleasant if the Monsters had not employed their basic insulating material in the walls of their spaceships. Here men could live as they were accustomed to live.

  Calling back through the hole, he reported the information to the Aaron. A huge sigh of relief went up from the crowd outside. "Good enough," the Aaron said. "Go on ahead—you know what you have to find. We'll be enlarging the hole."

  Eric started off. Roy the Runner came through the hole after him, then a series of the youngest, most agile warriors. They formed a single line, constantly enlarging itself from the hole.

  He did know what he had to find, but, as he looked for it, past unfamiliar tunnels and completely unknown intersections, he was troubled by an odd factor he had great difficulty in pinning down. Then, as he came around a curve, and into a larger burrow just big enough to provide a temporary though extremely tight meeting place for all of the Aaron People, he understood what was bothering him. The odor—or rather, the absence of one.

  These burrows were virgin. Men had never lived and died within them.

  "Good enough," he said. "We can camp here until the take-off." And he posted sentries. No need really, but discipline was discipline.

  Roy carried the message back swiftly. In a little while, people began to arrive: first expeditionary policemen, who set off areas for each section, then the sections themselves. Rachel came in with Section 15; by that time, the place was getting pretty crowded. The last one in was the Aaron—two husky policemen carried him on their shoulders and had to push hard to make their way through.

  They could all hear a distant thumping by then. The Monsters were moving about and working on the machinery.

  The Aaron put a megaphone to his lips. "Now hear me, my people!" he called out in a tired, cracked voice. "We have accomplished our Plan. We are all safely inside the burrows of a spaceship which is about to depart for the stars. We have plenty of food and water and can stay out of sight until long after the take-off."

  He paused, took a deep breath before going on. "This is a cargo ship, my people. It will make many stops, on many worlds. At each stop, one or more sections will leave the ship and stay in hiding on the planet until their numbers have increased substantially. After all, anywhere that Monsters can live, humans can. Anywhere the Monsters have a settlement, men will thrive. Anything the Monsters provide for themselves, we can probably use. We have learned this on Earth—and we have learned it thoroughly."

  The floor began vibrating as the motors went on. They felt the ship shake and start to move.

  The Aaron lifted his arms above his head. People everywhere fell to their knees. "The universe!" the Aaron cried ecstatically. "My people, henceforth the universe is ours!"

  —|—

  When the ship had stopped accelerating and they could move about freely, Eric and the other section leaders collected their groups and led them to adjoining burrows. Men paced off the areas that their families would occupy. Women began preparing food. And children ran about and played.

  It was wonderful the way the children adjusted to the acceleration and the strange, new burrows. Everyone who watched them at their games agreed that they made the place feel like home.

  AFTERWORD

  Originally, this novel was no more than an outline, one of several requested in the early 1960s by a publisher who had read and liked my short stories and novelettes. The publisher had asked "for a couple of outlines," so I submitted proposals for two novels I very much wanted to write. At the last moment, to give the impression that I was a red-hot, eight-cylinder writer, I added a third, pretty much made up as I typed.

  Perhaps inevitably, this was the one, Of Men and Monsters, that knocked out the publisher. The other two outlines were dismissed outright as much too complex, and even uninteresting, but Of Men and Monsters—wow!, bingo!, "yes, we do want that one."

  I reacted with dismay, for something much like that had happened to me many times before. Most editors had not been impressed by proposals and outlines for work I badly wanted to do, even though they almost always had purchased the completed pieces—which, of course, I had had to write on spec.

  But this time... The rejection of the other two outlines had been so emphatic, and the ardor with which Of Men and Monsters was embraced had been so vigorous, that there was no question as to the only book the publisher would now buy.

  I responded as I usually did to such crises: I went into block. (I used to tell my writing classes at Penn State that I was convinced that Shakespeare was only the tenth best writer of his time: the other nine were all suffering from writer's block.) The outline was esthetically meaningless to me: It was a tale of Earth conquered by aliens and regained by humanity—it was essentially a dramatization and fulfillment of the cheap "ancestor science" of the later novel.

  I pried and poked at the outline and could not get much past a fairly good opening sentence: "Mankind consisted of 128 people." Eventually, in one of my periodic rereadings of Swift, I came across the quotation from the voyage to Brobdingnab that I later used; it gave me enough to name and complete the first part—Priests for Their Learning—as well as titles for the other two parts.

  Something like the picaresque occurred to me as a possible form, a complicated journey with rogues, or at least with incompetents. And the journey could be a maturing process, too, of course: we watch the boy become a man.

  But I still had no novel, at least none with a point.

  Various things happened. I sold the completed first part to Fred Pohl, the new editor of Galaxy. The money from the sale was terribly needed just then, but I still had to go out and get a high-paying job in advertising. Then what was to be the original publisher shrugged out of science fiction and, of course, my unfinished novel. I began writing good nonfiction, and found that I very much enjoyed doing it. I left advertising. I had done well enough to make it to the level of account executive, but I found advertising as well as the man who as my boss personified it far too fantastic to be believable to a mere science-fiction writer. And I tried to go back to the book.

  But my phone rang constantly, pulling me from the typewriter (this was before the day of the inexpensive answering machine), and my callers all had bright ideas that took hours to detail or personal crises that were terribly complex and interminable. My wife, Fruma, who was now working as an editor at Harper and Row, pointed out that I picked up friends far too easily, among them cab drivers who had driven me for ten blocks, vacuum-cleaner salesmen who had made me feel guilty because we had no rugs for them to demonstrate on, and female solicitors for good-cause petitions who fell in love with me when I told them I couldn't sign because I was in favor only of very bad things. One evening, when my supper got cold because the phone rang each and every time as soon as I had hung up on the previous caller, she shook her head at me and noted, "You've done it, Phil. You've essentially used up New York City as a place to live."

  I denied it. I felt there must be a way for a fellow even as chummy as I to go on writing and living in Manhattan. I decided to get an office, or a writer's equivalent of one.

  There was an ad for an unfurnished room—toilet in the hall—above a low-grade men's clothing store on Sixth Avenue that was only three blocks away from the New York Public Library building. The rent (remember please, we're talking about the 1960s) was twenty-eight dollars a month.

  For
five dollars more a month, they said I could use their phone for local calls. I thanked them, but no. Absolutely no phone.

  Fruma and I dragged a cot, a chair and a typewriter table up the stairs and into the room. We learned that the clothing store ended its day at 6:30 PM and put up a metal gate, unlockable only from the outside, in front of the store. There was no back entrance. We both decided that made the place ideal for me.

  "All you have to do," Fruma told me, "is to remember to bring up some food at six o'clock before you get locked in. And absolutely not to make friends with any of the clerks in the store or the traffic cop at the corner. And write. And write. And write."

  "You can visit me," I reminded her. "The one window in the room looks down into the street. Even after the gate closes, I can yell at you from upstairs."

  "You write," she said. "You write that novel."

  All well and good, I thought, as I lay on the cot nights, counting the multitudes of yellow plaster cracks in the ceiling. But still, still, what was the point of that novel that I was supposed to be doing nothing but writing? What was it that I cared about saying that the novel would say? Or, to put it another way, what was it about myself or my society that I wanted to investigate, using the novel as an excuse? It had been years since I had tried so hard to pursue affluence by becoming a literary hack, only to discover, as I have noted elsewhere in this volume, that I just did not have the vitally necessary talent of hackhood. I had learned that I couldn't keep writing unless what I wrote had some important meaning, at least for me.

  All right, so the boy becomes a man. How? Well, for one thing, he ought to have a substantial and important sexual experience. With whom, with what kind of person? I brooded on that, night after lonely night, until, one afternoon, I broke and went home to Fruma, just—I explained to myself—to have a shower.

  And in the shower it was that I first thought of her: Rachel Esthersdaughter. She would speak for me; she would explain the book to me. I hurried back to Sixth Avenue and completed the novel in several all-day and all-night sessions, not doing my duodenal ulcer any particular good.

  I showed it to Fruma, who liked it even more than I. And then came the rewriting, making the first two parts mesh with the all-essential third, removing every solecism and cheapness Fruma and I could detect. (I did not remove as many of them from the first part as the second: after all, that was where the immature, half-formed characters had their domain.)

  Here, I was interrupted by the most important event of my adult life, after my meeting and marrying Fruma—the move from the Village to State College, Pennsylvania, so that I could start teaching at Penn State. How much I was to find that I loved teaching is, I suppose, neither here nor there in this essay; but for what it's worth, those twenty-three years of teaching completed the construction of the person who's writing this essay.

  So—before I go on—I have to say it again: teaching was the only thing I ever did that was as good as writing when the writing was going at its best. And it was wonderful living among colleagues who spent their lives pursuing truth and beauty—however much many of them in the course of this were brutally chasing truth and beauty away.

  I had acquired a new agent, Henry Morrison, who sold the novel and several short-story collections, as a package, to Ballantine Books for enough money so that Fruma and I could buy our first house.

  We loved that house. Gray Pennsylvania stone. We adored it.

  And I was proud of the novel, something not usually true of my attitude when pieces of mine get published. I felt it was a pretty fair book, and the few reviews I got tended to agree with me. Judy Merril, in Fantasy & Science Fiction, and George Zebrowski, in Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers, were especially nice about it.

  Of Men and Monsters did enjoy a couple of printings, a couple of foreign translations. But it was really not noticed very much.

  And it made very little money for the publisher. Or for me.

  But, dammit, I've reread the book as it is printed here. And it was worth the writing.

  Written 1965——Published 1968

  AFTERWORD TO THE TWO VOLUMES

  WILLIAM TENN: THE SWIFTEST TORTOISE

  George Zebrowski

  "The incredible William Tenn," as he has been dubbed by Brian Aldiss, began the whole school of comic and satiric SF in the 1940s. Or, one might say, he restarted a tradition that began with Jonathan Swift.

  Usually, we hold Verne and Wells, along with Mary Shelley, to be the great foundations of modern SF. There was "Swiftness" even in them, but in Tenn it ran purer than in any other SF writer of his generation. He quickly seized upon a way of looking at things, at once funny, bitter, and serious, that made him the natural heir to the more softly celebrated tradition of Voltaire and Swift. Eric Frank Russell, Frederik Pohl, Damon Knight, Robert Sheckley, Fredric Brown, Cyril M. Kornbluth, Harlan Ellison, Norman Kagan, R.A. Lafferty, Barry Malzberg, and Douglas Adams, among others, have all echoed Tenn's work one way or another, as his ways influenced them, often through inexplicit ways. I find it humorous when reviewers of Tenn bollix up their timelines and speak of Tenn's stories being influenced by ones that were published later.

  Although Tenn is serious humorist, ever alert at catching the reader's understanding before he has a chance to object, Tenn's swift reason has had a double problem. The science-fiction genre has always made it difficult to tell the serious writers from the entertainers, through the manner of publication and because the entertainers often claim to be serious, or have it claimed for them; also, satirists and funny men have rarely risen high in the genre (in terms of awards and sales) purely on the strength of this kind of work. Tenn was a pioneer whose example was imitated by writers who developed in different ways, and who also became known for the angle opened up by Tenn, thus diffusing the effect he might have had if his plumage had not been confused with that of imitators; which is to say that he was a monarch butterfly mistaken for a viceroy (viceroy butterflies taste bitter to birds, monarchs sweet, but you won't know which is which until you bite into one); which is to say again that Tenn was influential, for better and worse.

  One can also say that Tenn imitators might have been more acceptable to some editors of the 1950s, because they were milder versions of Tenn—less serious and not so critical of the world and human nature. Tenn's stories are always deceptively disturbing at some level, even when they are breathlessly readable, amusing, or cute. His conventionality of form is all surface, while his critical radicalism flows deeply, gleefully washing away our preconceptions.

  An outgoing but sensitive man, Tenn fell silent by the end of the 1960s, even as his work was gathered and reprinted several times into an impressive, though editorially limited, six-volume set from Ballantine Books (1968). I had the feeling, from conversations with him, that he sometimes imagined his work to be unworthy. He went on to become an award-winning college teacher, leaving behind a body of work sufficient to secure the reputation of any major writer in the field.

  He published one notable story in the 1970s, "On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi," which had long been expected. He had been talking about it since the 1950s. I urged Jack Dann, who was then editing Wandering Stars (Harper & Row, 1974), to extract the story from the author. The story was well received, garnering awards nominations and appearing in a best-of-the-year collection.

  It should be noted that Tenn contributed to the thinking that is so necessary to accomplished science fiction. Children of Wonder (1953) was his pioneering foray into editing a theme anthology. It was notable for its variety of stories and selection of authors from outside the genres, and for its introduction and notes. The anthology was a first-year selection of the Science Fiction Book Club. Two incisive essays, "On the Fiction in Science Fiction" (1955), and "Jazz Then, Musicology Now" (1972) remain required reading for anyone who cares about the ideals of literate science fiction.

  Tenn's first two decades include a number of notable stories:

  "Brooklyn Project" was called b
y Fritz Leiber a "marvelously cynical" time-travel story.

  "Firewater" is one of the most sophisticated stories ever published by John W. Campbell. It has the distinction of having made Campbell relax his ban on stories in which human beings are bested by aliens, and features the unforgettable lament by Larry for the loss of what he was and what he will never be, as humanity struggles to keep its sanity before the seemingly superior aliens who have taken up residence on earth. This story should have taken all the awards in its year of publication. Read it along with the later "There Were People on Bikini, There Were People on Attu."

  "Generation of Noah" is one of the finest atomic threat stories ever written. Along with "Firewater," it was reprinted in best-of-the-year collections.

  "It Ends With a Flicker" (originally "Of All Possible Worlds"), "Wednesday's Child" (a fascinating sequel to the often reprinted "Child's Play"), "Time Waits for Winthrop" (also known as "Winthrop Was Stubborn"), "Eastward Ho!", and "The Malted Milk Monster" drew honorable mentions in Judith Merril's best-of-the-year collections; "Bernie The Faust" took pride of place as the first story in the 1964 collection. "Winthrop" shows a remarkable use of exotic ideas, among them fairly advanced biological concepts, another feature of Tenn's stories that makes them unusual for the 1950s.

  "The Discovery of Morniel Mathaway" shows an insight into the successful creative process that is too often banally presented. Jacques Sadoul called it "the most beautiful example of a temporal paradox offered by science fiction."

  "The Custodian," with its plea for the blending of art and utility, and "Down Among the Dead Men," with its clever use of offstage space opera, both manage to do what few SF stories ever do—move us emotionally and intellectually.