A Century of Science Fiction

by Damon Knight

  So much for the essential facts of this very singular story. Unless we dismiss it all as the ingenious fabrication of Mr. Wace, we have to believe one of two things: either that Mr. Cave’s crystal was *in two worlds at once, and that while it was carried about in one it remained stationary in the other, which seems altogether absurd, or else that it had some peculiar relation of sympathy with another and exactly similar crystal in this other world, so that what was seen in the interior of the one in this world was, under suitable conditions, visible to an observer in the corresponding crystal in the other world, and vice versa. At present, indeed, we do not know of any way in which two crystals could so come en rapport, but nowadays we know enough to understand that the thing is not altogether impossible. This view of the crystals as en rapport was the supposition that occurred to Mr. Wace, and to me at least it seems extremely plausible. . . .

  And where was this other world? On this, also, the alert intelligence of Mr. Wace speedily threw light. After sunset, the sky darkened rapidly—there was a very brief twilight interval indeed—and the stars shone out. They were recognizably the same as those we see, arranged in the same constellations. Mr. Cave recognized the Bear, the Pleiades, Aldebaran, and Sirius; so that the other world must be somewhere in the solar system, and, at the utmost, only a few hundreds of millions of miles from our own. Following up this clue, Mr. Wace learnt that the midnight sky was a darker blue even than our midwinter sky, and that the sun seemed a little smaller. And there were two small moons, “like our moon but smaller, and quite differently marked,” one of which moved so rapidly that its motion was clearly visible as one regarded it. These moons were never high in the sky, but vanished as they rose: that is, every time they revolved they were eclipsed because they were so near their primary planet. And all this answers quite completely, although Mr. Cave did not know it, to what must be the condition of things on Mars.

  Indeed, it seems an exceedingly plausible conclusion that, peering into this crystal, Mr. Cave did actually see the planet Mars and its inhabitants. And if that be the case, then the evening star that shone so brilliantly in the sky of that distant vision was neither more nor less than our own familiar Earth.

  For a time the Martians—if they were Martians—do not seem to have known of Mr. Cave’s inspection. Once or twice one would come to peer, and go away very shortly to some other mast, as though the vision was unsatisfactory. During this time Mr. Cave was able to watch the proceedings of these winged people without being disturbed by their attentions, and although his report is necessarily vague and fragmentary, it is nevertheless very suggestive. Imagine the impression of humanity a Martian observer would get who, after a difficult process of preparation and with considerable fatigue to the eyes, was able to peer at London from the steeple of St. Martin’s Church for stretches, at longest, of four minutes at a time. Mr. Cave was unable to ascertain if the winged Martians were the same as the Martians who hopped about the causeways and terraces, and if the latter could put on wings at will. He several times saw certain clumsy bipeds, dimly suggestive of apes, white and partially translucent, feeding among certain of the lichenous trees, and once some of these fled before one of the hopping, round-headed Martians. The latter caught one in its tentacles, and then the picture faded suddenly and left Mr. Cave most tantalisingly in the dark. On another occasion a vast thing, that Mr. Cave thought at first was some gigantic insect, appeared advancing along the causeway beside the canal with extraordinary rapidity. As this drew nearer Mr. Cave perceived that it was a mechanism of shining metals and of extraordinary complexity. And then, when he looked again, it had passed out of sight.

  After a time Mr. Wace aspired to attract the attention of the Martians, and the next time that the strange eyes of one of them appeared close to the crystal Mr. Cave cried out and sprang away, and they immediately turned on the light and began to gesticulate in a manner suggestive of signalling. But when at last Mr. Cave examined the crystal again the Martian had departed.

  Thus far these observations had progressed in early November, and then Mr. Cave, feeling that the suspicions of his family about the crystal were allayed, began to take it to and fro with him in order that, as occasion arose in the daytime or night, he might comfort himself with what was fast becoming the most real thing in his existence.

  In December Mr. Wace’s work in connection with a forthcoming examination became heavy, the sittings were reluctantly suspended for a week, and for ten or eleven days—he is not quite sure which—he saw nothing of Cave. He then grew anxious to resume these investigations, and, the stress of his seasonal labours being abated, he went down to Seven Dials. At the corner he noticed a shutter before a bird fancier’s window, and then another at a cobbler’s. Mr. Cave’s shop was closed.

  He rapped and the door was opened by the step-son in black. He at once called Mrs. Cave, who was, Mr. Wace could not but observe, in cheap but ample widow’s weeds of the most imposing pattern. Without any very great surprise Mr. Wace learnt that Cave was dead and already buried. She was in tears, and her voice was a little thick. She had just returned from Highgate. Her mind seemed occupied with her own prospects and the honourable details of the obsequies, but Mr. Wace was at last able to learn the particulars of Cave’s death. He had been found dead in his shop in the early morning, the day after his last visit to Mr. Wace, and the crystal had been clasped in his stone-cold hands. His face was smiling, said Mrs. Cave, and the velvet cloth from the minerals lay on the floor at his feet. He must have been dead five or six hours when he was found.

  This came as a great shock to Wace, and he began to reproach himself bitterly for having neglected the plain symptoms of the old man’s ill-health. But his chief thought was of the crystal. He approached that topic in a gingerly manner, because he knew Mrs. Cave’s peculiarities. He was dumfounded to learn that it was sold.

  Mrs. Cave’s first impulse, directly Cave’s body had been taken upstairs, had been to write to the mad clergyman who had offered five pounds for the crystal, informing him of its recovery; but after a violent hunt, in which her daughter joined her, they were convinced of the loss of his address. As they were without the means required to mourn and bury Cave in the elaborate style the dignity of an old Seven Dials inhabitant demands, they had appealed to a friendly fellow-tradesman in Great Portland Street. He had very kindly taken over a portion of the stock at a valuation. The valuation was his own, and the crystal egg was included in one of the lots. Mr. Wace, after a few suitable condolences, a little off-handedly proffered perhaps, hurried at once to Great Portland Street. But there he learnt that the crystal egg had already been sold to a tall, dark man in grey. And there the material facts in this curious, and to me at least very suggestive, story come abruptly to an end. The Great Portland Street dealer did not know who the tall dark man in grey was, nor had he observed him with sufficient attention to describe him minutely. He did not even know which way this person had gone after leaving the shop. For a time Mr. Wace remained in the shop, trying the dealer’s patience with hopeless questions, venting his own exasperation. And at last, realising abruptly that the whole thing had passed out of his hands, had vanished like a vision of the night, he returned to his own rooms, a little astonished to find the notes he had made still tangible and visible upon his untidy table.

  His annoyance and disappointment were naturally very great. He made a second call (equally ineffectual) upon the

  Great Portland Street dealer, and he resorted to advertisements in such periodicals as were likely to come into the hands of a bric-a-brac collector. He also wrote letters to The Daily Chronicle and Nature, but both those periodicals, suspecting a hoax, asked him to reconsider his action before they printed, and he was advised that such a strange story, unfortunately so bare of supporting evidence, might imperil his reputation as an investigator. Moreover, the calls of his proper work were urgent. So that after a month or so, save for an occasional reminder to certain dealers, he had reluctantly to abandon the quest for the c
rystal egg, and from that day to this it remains undiscovered. Occasionally, however, he tells me, and I can quite believe him, he has bursts of zeal, in which he abandons his more urgent occupation and resumes the search.

  Whether or not it will remain lost for ever, with the material and origin of it, are things equally speculative at the present time. If the present purchaser is a collector, one would have expected the enquiries of Mr. Wace to have reached him through the dealers. He has been able to discover Mr. Cave’s clergyman and “Oriental”—no other than the Reverend James Parker and the young Prince of Bosso-Kuni in Java. I am obliged to them for certain particulars. The object of the Prince was simply curiosity—and extravagance. He was so eager to buy because Cave was so oddly reluctant to sell. It is just as possible that the buyer in the second instance was simply a casual purchaser and not a collector at all, and the crystal egg, for all I know, may at the present moment be within a mile of me, decorating a drawing-room or serving as a paper-weight—its remarkable functions all unknown. Indeed, it is partly with the idea of such a possibility that I have thrown this narrative into a form that will give it a chance of being read by the ordinary consumer of fiction.

  My own ideas in the matter are practically identical with those of Mr. Wace. I believe the crystal on the mast in Mars and the crystal egg of Mr. Cave’s to be in some physical, but at present quite inexplicable, way en rapport, and we both believe further that the terrestrial crystal must have been— possibly at some remote date—sent hither from that planet, in order to give the Martians a near view of our affairs. Possibly the fellows to the crystals on the other masts are also on our globe. No theory of hallucination suffices for the facts.

  Like Kornbluth, Pohl, Tucker, Asimov and a few others, Marion Zimmer Bradley came up from the ranks. She was a science fiction fan, then a letter hack (in the days when s.f. magazines had flourishing letter departments); then she became a professional writer. Her work is distinctively feminine in tone, but lacks the cliches, overemphasis and other kittenish tricks which often make female fiction unreadable by males.

  Whether this story is fantasy or science fiction depends, in a sense, on how you interpret it: the author has made it possible to read it either way. For me, it is science fiction; and the key to it is in this evocative phrase: “Nights when she lay wakeful, sweating with terror while the winds rose and fell again and her imagination gave them voices . .

  The story first appeared in If, February 1959.

  THE WIND PEOPLE

  BY MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY

  It had been a long layover for the Starholm’s crew, hunting heavy elements for fuel—eight months, on an idyllic green paradise of a planet; a soft, windy, whispering world, inhabited only by trees and winds. But in the end it presented its own unique problem.

  Specifically, it presented Captain Merrihew with the problem of Robin, male, father unknown, who had been born the day before, and a month prematurely, to Dr. Helen Murray.

  Merrihew found her lying abed in the laboratory shelter, pale and calm, with the child beside her.

  The little shelter, constructed roughly of green planks, looked out on the clearing which the Starholm had used as a base of operations during the layover; a beautiful place at the bottom of a wide valley, in the curve of a broad, deep-flowing river. The crew, tired of being shipbound, had built half a dozen such huts and shacks in these eight months.

  Merrihew glared down at Helen. He snorted, “This is a fine situation. You, of all the people in the whole damned crew—the ship’s doctor! It’s—it’s—” Inarticulate with rage, he fell back on a ridiculously inadequate phrase. “It’s— criminal carelessness!”

  “I know.” Helen Murray, too young and far too lovely for a ship’s officer on a ten-year cruise, still looked weak and white, and her voice was a gentle shadow of its crisp self. “I’m afraid four years in space made me careless.”

  Merrihew brooded, looking down at hen Something about ship-gravity conditions, while not affecting potency, made conception impossible; no child had ever been conceived in space and none ever would. On planet layovers, the effect wore off very slowly; only after three months aground had Dr. Murray started routine administration of anticeptin to the twenty-two women of the crew, herself included. At that time she had been still unaware that she herself was already carrying a child.

  Outside, the leafy forest whispered and rustled, and Merrihew knew Helen had forgotten his existence again. The day-old child was tucked up in one of her rolled coveralls at her side. To Merrihew, he looked like a skinned monkey, but Helen’s eyes smoldered as her hands moved gently over the tiny round head.

  He stood and listened to the winds and said at random, “These shacks will fall to pieces in another month. It doesn’t matter, we’ll have taken off by then.”

  Dr. Chao Lin came into the shack, an angular woman of thirty-five. She said, “Company, Helen? Well, it’s about time. Here, let me take Robin.”

  Helen said in weak protest, “You’re spoiling me, Lin.” “It will do you good,” Chao Lin returned. Merrihew, in a sudden surge of fury and frustration, exploded, “Damn it, Lin, you’re making it all worse. He’ll die when we go into overdrive, you know as well as I do!”

  Helen sat up, clutching Robin protectively. “Are you proposing to drown him like a kitten?”

  “Helen, I’m not proposing anything. I’m stating a fact.” “But it’s not a fact. He won’t die in overdrive because he won’t be aboard when we go into overdrive!”

  Merrihew looked at Lin helplessly, but his face softened. “Shall we—put him to sleep and bury him here?”

  The woman’s face turned white. “No!” she cried in passionate protest, and Lin bent to disengage her frantic grip. “Helen, you’ll hurt him. Put him down. There.”

  Merrihew looked down at her, troubled, and said, “We can’t just abandon him to die slowly, Helen—”

  “Who says I’m going to abandon him?”

  Merrihew asked slowly, “Are you planning to desert?” He added, after a minute, “There’s a chance he’ll survive. After all, his very birth was against all medical precedent. Maybe—”

  “Captain—” Helen sounded desperate—“even drugged, no child under ten has ever endured the shift into hyperspace drive. A newborn would die in seconds.” She clasped Robin to her again and said, “It’s the only way—you have Lin for a doctor, Reynolds can handle my collateral duties. This planet is uninhabited, the climate is mild, we couldn’t possibly starve.” Her face, so gentle, was suddenly like rock. “Enter my death in the log, if you want to.”

  Merrihew looked from Helen to Lin, and said, “Helen, you’re insane!”

  She said, “Even if I’m sane now, I wouldn’t be long if I had to abandon Robin.” The wild note had died out of her voice, and she spoke rationally, but inflexibly. “Captain Merrihew, to get me aboard the Starholm, you will have to have me drugged or taken by force; I promise you I won’t go any other way. And if you do that—and if Robin is left behind, or dies in overdrive, just so you will have my services as a doctor— then I solemnly swear that I will kill myself at the first opportunity.”

  “My God,” said Merrihew, “you are insane!”

  Helen gave a very tiny shrug. “Do you want a madwoman aboard?”

  Chao Lin said quietly, “Captain, I don’t see any other way. We would have had to arrange it that way if Helen had actually died in childbirth. Of two unsatisfactory solutions, we must choose the less harmful.” And Merrihew knew that he had no real choice.

  “I still think you’re both crazy,” he blustered, but it was surrender, and Helen knew it.

  Ten days after the Starholm took off, young Colin Reynolds, technician, committed suicide by the messy procedure of slicing his jugular vein, which—in zero gravity—distributed several quarts of blood in big round globules all over his cabin. He left an incoherent note.

  Merrihew put the note in the disposal and Chao Lin put the blood in the ship’s blood bank for surgery,
and they hushed it up as an accident; but Merrihew had the unpleasant feeling that the layover on the green and windy planet was going to become a legend, spread in whispers by the crew. And it did, but that is another story.

  Robin was two years old when he first heard the voices in the wind. He pulled at his mother’s arm and crooned softly, in imitation.

  “What is it, lovey?” .

  “Pretty.” He crooned again to the distant murmuring sound.

  Helen smiled vaguely and patted the round cheek. Robin, his infant imagination suddenly distracted, said, “Hungry. Robin hungry. Berries.”

  “Berries after you eat,” Helen promised absently, and picked him up. Robin tugged at her arm.

  “Mommy pretty, too!”

  She laughed, a rosy and smiling young Diana. She was happy on the solitary planet; they lived quite comfortably in one of the larger shacks, and only a little frown line between her eyes bore witness to the terror which had closed down on her in the first months, when every new day had been some new struggle—against weakness, against unfamiliar sounds, against loneliness and dread. Nights when she lay wakeful, sweating with terror while the winds rose and fell again and her imagination gave them voices, bleak days when she wandered dazedly around the shack or stared moodily at Robin. There had been moments—only fleeting, and penanced with hours of shame and regret—when she thought that even the horror of losing Robin in those first days would have been less than the horror of spending the rest of her life alone here, when she had wondered why Merrihew had not realized that she was unbalanced, and forced her to go with them; by now, Robin would have been only a moment’s painful memory.

  Still not strong, knowing she had to be strong for Robin or he would die as surely as if she had abandoned him, she had spent the first months in a somnambulistic dream. Sometimes she had walked for days at a time in that dream; she would wake to find food that she could not remember gathering. Somehow, pervasive, the dream voices had taken over; the whispering winds had been full of voices and even hands.