The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 2 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  “But it was no good. There was no arguing with Mortimer Griffiths.” She rose and went to bed. And the next day she left for Aberystwyth and married Llewellyn Time Machine.

  They went to 1954 for their honeymoon. And two days after they had gone Grandfather came back from the Moon.

  “Finished the harvest?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said my father.

  “Have you mended the fence in Ten Acre?”

  “Never mind the fence in Ten Acre,” said my father. “Gran has married Llewellyn Time Machine.”

  That was a terrible moment. For a long time my grandfather stood stroking his beard. Then suddenly he shot out his long arm and grasped a chopper.

  “Where are they?” he roared. “Where are they?”

  My father, pale, said nothing.

  Grandfather seized him by the throat and shook him.

  “Where are they?” he repeated.

  “In—in 1954,” gasped my father.

  Grandfather let him go. “Get the tractor out,” he ordered.

  “Where are you going?”

  “1954,” said Grandfather.

  He was gone for nearly a week.

  Then he came back, alone. He was in a good mood, quite talkative for him.

  “Hired a Time Machine in Llandudno,” he said, beaming. “Chased them right back to the Middle Ages. Llewellyn caught the Black Death. And I smashed his Time Machine to pieces with my little chopper.”

  “And Gran?” asked my father.

  “Stranded in the Middle Ages, with no money, and no means of getting back,” said Grandfather with immense satisfaction. “She was taking the veil when I last saw her. Damp the nunnery looked. Damp and cold.

  “Teach her to go hankering after spaceships,” said my grandfather.

  <>

  * * * *

  THE DOORSTOP

  by R. Bretnor

  Almost all of Reginald Bretnor’s fiction, prior to the past year, has been “funny”—if so boisterous a word can be applied to the loving laughter with which the author directs us to regard the naked souls of his subjects.

  During 1956 Mr. Bretnor published two perfectly serious stories, both of them distinguished by the same qualities of perceptiveness, compassion, and literacy that have made his humor memorable. “The Past and Its Dead People,” in f&sf, was to my mind the finest single story to appear in any science-fantasy magazine during the year. Unfortunately, it was neither fantasy nor science-fiction, and could not validly be included in this anthology. “The Doorstop,” from Astounding, represents, so far as I know, Bretnor’s first venture into straight science-fiction.

  * * * *

  Dr. Cavaness scarcely heard the metallurgist and the chemist reading their detailed technical reports. He tried to look at them, he tried to fasten his attention on their words. But always his glance drifted, to the square, strong face of the Air Force major general sitting across from him, off to the vast industrial landscape of Detroit framed in the window of the Directors’ Room, back to the other faces there—back to the thing, the Doorstop, bronze-bright and dumbbell-shaped, isolated in its bell jar, alone on the polished plain of brown mahogany. And always, refusing discipline, his mind shied from close contact with the here and now, where the Doorstop had undeniable reality, where these men were gathered with their cold answer to the riddle he did not want to solve.

  Occasionally a fragment of a phrase came through to him—And when the oxidation rate ... as yet unanalyzed ... a rare-earth compound or—And every fragment sent his mind to seek a refuge in his memories, to find him pictures of a world gardened with all the good, familiar things, a world safe in the narrow limits set by common sense, a world to which the shadow of the Doorstop could never penetrate.

  His mind recalled the moment forty years ago when he and Eleanor had found their first kiss floating on the sweet night air, and shared it, there on the cool brick porch, spontaneously. The stars were close. The friendly stars were winking points of light, as small as glowworms, as near, as intimate. Nightfall created them; at daybreak they dissolved. And there had been no need to think of them, of what they really were. Not then. Then there had been no Doorstop.

  His mind touched fear, and anger at the fear. Immediately it flipped the pages of the past, pages of friends and fishing trips, of midnight calls to childbirth, hypochondria, surgery —pages of precious trials and triumphs and routines. That was his life, the busy hours, the days succeeding days, the months, the seasons, the gently moving years, all compassed by his family, his patients, and his town. That was his world, expanding rarely to include a little of Detroit; more rarely still, three weeks in California or in Canada; and sometimes, unavoidably, admitting through its walls the harsh awareness of wars abroad, of strange barbarities in stranger lands —of dark realities that had to stay unreal.

  The voices in the unreal present lectured on, the chemist first, the metallurgist next, using the long-linked words of their technologies. Dr. Cavaness’s mind, escaping them, found him the safety of a day when he was twelve, rising excitedly at dawn, mounting his new red bike, whistling his happy dog, riding green-bordered, unpaved roads out to his uncle’s farm. He let himself be drawn into that day: there was the calm white house, the barn, the sunlit hill, and there was Uncle Matt shouting hello at him—and Uncle Matt was going to show him where beavers had built themselves a dam across the creek—and—

  The picture vanished. Abruptly, cruelly, he was seventeen, and Uncle Matt was dead. The funeral service in the afternoon, the coffin covered with the flowering earth, the solemn, silent supper afterward—all this was over; he lay awake in bed, sadly and quietly understanding it. Lying there, he thought of how the minister had spoken of eternity. He tried to puzzle out the meaning of the word, tried really hard—and suddenly he seemed to see the endless years, innumerable, incomprehensible, receding to a frozen void that strangled sanity. Fear seized him, and anger at the fear, anger at this rude violation of his world by vastnesses less understandable than death. He called on God to drive the mystery out, extinguish it—but God, appallingly, had grown too great, unthinkably remote, as inconceivable as all the wastes of Time. Desperately, then, young Howard Cavaness had wrestled the idea, thrusting it out beyond the wall again, denying its existence to himself—

  The scene receded suddenly, surrendering to another, more vivid, stronger still. It was an autumn night a year ago, cold, crystal-clear; and he and Eleanor were driving home after the show, after a dull main feature and a short or two. One of the shorts had been about astronomy, about the giant telescope at Palomar, how it was built and used, and what it saw. The narrator had spoken of the moon, the sun, the planets near and far, of light that reached the earth in seconds, minutes, hours. He had discussed the nearest stars, a few light-years away; the nearest neighboring galaxies, seen as they were a million years before; the myriad island universes each with its own infinity of suns, stretched to the ends of space, a billion years remote—a thousand million years, each single one of which meant six quadrillion miles. To Dr. Cavaness, the numbers had been words and nothing more. He scarcely thought about them as he drove, leaving the glare of neons far behind, turning into the shadowed, winding road that crossed the hill. Finally they reached the crest. He saw the sky. From end to end, it was alive with light.

  Somehow he stopped the car. Just as it had when he was seventeen, the Mystery and its magnitude seized into him. Deep in his soul, his brain, the marrow of his bones, he felt the dreadful distances between the stars.

  * * * *

  At the Directors’ Table, Dr. Cavaness forced his eyes to open, his clenching hands under its edge to part. Deliberately he forced himself to look around, to see the general’s face, the long-familiar face of young Ted Froberg, his one-time partner’s son, the listening faces of scientists, engineers, and men from government. Inanely his mind echoed the first comment it had made on his arrival: “Look at the big-shots— pretty fast company for a small-town G.P.!” He tried again
to laugh a little at himself for having been impressed, and found no laughter. He made his glance move on—on past the Doorstop—discovering with a curious sense of shock that the mineralogist had resumed his seat, and that farther down a different man, a biophysicist from Princeton, was talking now. Immediately his mind shut out the words; immediately it took him back a week in time, back to his first acquaintance with the Doorstop—when it had been just that and nothing more.

  He saw it there again, holding the door ajar as he had seen it then—a twelve-inch dumbbell on a five-inch cone, corroded green as any Roman sword, as any sunken galleon’s gun dredged from the sea. He saw the clouded crystal hemispheres at either end, obscured by dust which could not quite obscure two pinpoint brilliancies. Entering, he halted; put his golf clubs down. He felt the strangeness of its lines and curves. Frowning, he pushed it with his foot, finding it heavier than it ought to be. Annoyance rose in him, at Eleanor, cluttering the house with all these antiques.

  “Hello?” he called to her. “Ellie, what is this thing?”

  Her voice replied out of the kitchen, “Did you have a good game, dear? I’m glad you’re back for lunch.” Drying her hands, she came into the hall. “What thing? Oh, that. I got it just today from Mrs. Hobbs. It’s...well, it’s a doorstop.” She kissed him. “You don’t mind, do you, dear? I only had to pay four-fifty for it, after all.”

  “Ellie, that’s not what I mean. I can see you’re using it for a doorstop. I mean, what is it? What was it meant to be originally?”

  She laughed. “Goodness, I don’t know. It looks awfully old. Maybe it’s something off a sailing ship—one of those things they wrapped the ropes around.”

  He knelt. He turned it carefully over on its side. “Could be,” he said. “Gosh knows it weighs enough. But if it is, what are those two glass ends for, and these holes reaching up into it right next to them? And what’s that sort of socket in its base?” Uneasily, the feeling of its strangeness grew on him. Somehow it wasn’t right. It didn’t fit.

  Shaking his head, he put the Doorstop back against the door. He rose.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I just don’t like the thing. It... it’s queer.”

  “Oh, don’t be superstitious.” She laughed at him. “Perhaps they got it off a Chinese ship, a junk or something. What difference does it make? Anyhow, now it’s just a doorstop.”

  Taking his arm, she led him off to lunch, where there were other matters to discuss.

  After that he had said nothing more about it. Three or four times a day, going in or out, he had paused to look at it, experiencing the same sensation of uneasiness. On each occasion he had shrugged, telling himself that it was hers, that if she liked it that was all right with him.

  Then, three evenings later, instantaneously, all this had altered. It was a hot, dull evening under a sweltering sky, and he was waiting for her in the hall. The Doorstop stood against the big front door, holding it open to welcome in any unlikely breeze. The tiny focal points of light at the exact center of its now polished hemisphere gleamed in the curdling dusk. The sun’s departure had not diminished them. They shone more brightly than they had before. They shone—

  And suddenly, before his eyes, they changed.

  They did not move; there was no movement visible. The inner one, the one toward the hall, had disappeared. The other, which had been pointing straight out through the door, was now displaced by forty-five degrees. It pointed outward still, but to the sky.

  He saw. For several seconds he did not understand. And then the first chill wave of comprehension struck at him. He had assumed those minute brilliancies to be reflections of the outer light; he had ignored their immobility. They shone where light was not; they were inside the hemispheres. They were inside the Doorstop, and part of it, part of its armored and mysterious purposes. It was no simple artifact. Alien to him and strange, it was a mechanism, a machine.

  The Doorstop stood there against the door. He stared at it. The questions sounded in his skull. What was it? What was it made to do? Where was it from? The questions and the contradictions hammered him—its thick corrosion, as though it were a thing out of past ages before machines were born; the wrongness of its planes and curving surfaces; the two infinitesimal fires shifting fast as thought. He stood there staring at the Doorstop, and felt an answer stirring in his mind, stirring like something vast and dark and cold beneath the summer surface of the sea. Instantly, angrily, he rejected it.

  When Eleanor came down the stairs to join him, he told her nothing. They drove to dinner; they returned; finally they went to bed. And all the while, withdrawn into himself, he fought the obstinate irrationalities, trying to bend them to familiar shapes, seeking an answer native to his world.

  He found it. It lay there ready-made, compounded for him out of the threat of war, out of repeated rumors, tensions, secrecies—the paper perils of the day and year, co-cooned in headlines which could be torn and burned and thrown away. In these, he told himself, the Doorstop had had its origin. Men had conceived it. Men had employed the magic of their sciences to give it form and plan its functioning. Somewhere, in the not-yet-believable mythology of arming for destruction and defense, it had its place.

  He thought of guarded factories, locked laboratories, of dangerous knowledge, spies and counter-spies. The mystery was explained; he was relieved of the necessity for explanation, for doubt, for further thought. The Doorstop was a simple thing, as understandable as friend or enemy, as easily acted on. Whatever knowledge it might yield should either be protected from all eyes or torn from it. He thought of Teddy Froberg, grown up now, an electronics engineer working behind the ramparts of Security. Young Ted would know about the Doorstop; where it belonged; how to dispose of it.

  He told himself all this repeatedly; each repetition was a stone to seal the chasm menacing his world, to seal away that other answer still pressing upward to his consciousness. He wrapped himself in certainty. Imagining the military importance of the Doorstop, he let himself enjoy the thrill of touching great affairs. He chuckled at the thought of how surprised young Ted would be. After a time, he slept.

  Next morning, after breakfast, he called on Mrs. Hobbs, the antique dealer, and questioned her. Peevishly she assured him that everything in her shop was come by honestly, that he was welcome to go right over and ask that Cory boy, who’d sold it to her.

  He went right over; and the Cory boy, snatching a four-bit bribe, told him that he had found the Doorstop down near the railroad tracks, half buried in the ground where there had been a sort of fire.

  Afterward he drove into Detroit.

  * * * *

  At the Directors’ Table, Dr. Howard Cavaness recalled how the expression on Ted Froberg’s face had changed at the unwrapping of the Doorstop, how he himself had been surprised at that astonishment. He recalled going home and telling Eleanor, too frequently, never to say a word to anyone. He recalled the noncommittal questioners, civilian, military, who had come to them, to Mrs. Hobbs, and to the Cory boy. And he remembered how, during those few days, the shadow of disquiet had attended him, waiting for moments when his guard was down—how it had crept upon him in his sleep, in the cold, drifting dreams where Uncle Matt was dead, and lost, and irretrievable in the immensities of time and space—

  Once more, in anger, his mind repelled the thought. Once more it framed his still-life of reality, letting him clutch the safety painted there. He felt his forearms press the hard brown wood. He felt the quickened beating of his heart, and frowned. Words reached him, and he raised his head. He knew the voice. He recognized his name.

  “. .. Our gratitude to Dr. Cavaness—”

  He looked up to the left, over the bell jar and the Doorstop. Ted Froberg was the speaker now. Tall, seriously intense, he stood behind his chair.

  “. . . Who, even though his background isn’t technical, recognized the importance of the instrument. I guess I don’t need to tell you what a lucky thing that was.
” He paused. He grinned at Dr. Cavaness. “That’s about all,” he said. “If there are any questions, I’ll try to answer them.”

  Then, gathering his courage in his hands, Dr. Cavaness spoke. “Well, how about it, Ted?” he asked. “Now that you’ve got it figured out, what is that gadget? What country is it from?”

  He waited. Only the fall of silence answered him. He saw young Froberg’s grin erase itself. He felt the quick, astounded glances gossiping.

  “You mean I get three guesses?” He laughed aloud.

  And no one echoed him.

  There was a whispering round the table; its volume grew; three or four men started to speak at once. Raising his hand, young Froberg quieted them. “Wait,” he said softly, soberly. “I’ve known Dr. Cavaness all my life. I think I understand.”

  He sat down on the table’s edge, leaned over toward Dr. Cavaness. “Look, Dr. Howie, let me go over this again. I’ll outline it. We don’t know what this object is, or what it’s for, or even what it’s made of—at least, not accurately. They’ll probably learn more back East, with their facilities. However, we’ve found out what it does. Believe me, that’s enough to hold us for a while.”