A Century of Science Fiction

by Damon Knight

  I didn’t get as far as the camp. I met the man long before that. He was walking in the middle of the street with a selfassurance, a lack of caution, that was absolutely stupefying. His leather-visored cap, the bandoleer he’d squeezed on over his overalls, the carbine he was carrying by the strap—were these really enough to give him that swaggering confidence, that complete detachment, as if he were convinced of his own invulnerability?

  All the same, when I hailed him he seized the weapon quickly and brought it up to his hip. He handled it with impressive skill.

  I stepped away from the bus with the flat tires, behind which I’d hidden when I first heard his footsteps.

  “What are you doing there? Aren’t you in camp with the rest?” He stared at me, finger on the trigger.

  “That’s just it, I’m looking for the camp—my wife may be there. I’ve got to find her, you understand?”

  He relaxed a little. His teeth showed in a smile. “Are you really trying to get into a camp?”

  “Into the one where I’ll find my wife, yes. I’ve got to find her. The war is over, isn’t it?”

  His smile widened. “Sure, it’s good and over. For a long time! And as long as you want to go to the camp, why, I’ll just take you there.”

  He turned, holding his weapon by the strap again. Another man, a skinny little guy with the thick glasses of the nearsighted, had just appeared at the corner of a devastated bakery. The Garand rifle sticking up over the shoulder of his checkered jacket seemed as huge as it was incongruous. Five others followed him, but these were weaponless, their shoulders drooping, eyes full of dull pain. They were being pushed along from behind by the barrels of machine pistols.

  “This gentleman wants to go to the camp!”

  The tone of his voice chilled me. The armed men broke out into astonishing smiles; the others were staring at me with bewilderment, and the little nearsighted man let out a sort of yelp: “A volunteer! Now I’ve seen everything, everything!” He stamped his feet with joy.

  The man with the leather visor was bowing with artificial politeness. “Will the gentleman allow himself to be searched?”

  The nearsighted little guy began to go awkwardly through my pockets. He finished by taking out my billfold, examined it, closed it, then made as if to hand it back. When I went to take the billfold, it slipped through his fingers, and it almost seemed to me that he’d done it on purpose.

  I bent over, feeling as if I were in the midst of a nightmare, watching myself live through a story invented by myself with God knows what goal of horrid pleasure. At the moment when I was about to pick up the billfold, somebody’s foot sent me flying into the middle of the street.

  I got up. Behind the porthole-thick glasses, the nearsighted little man’s eyes were like those of a fish. No more malignant, no more friendly.

  Now I’m marching with the rest. The man with the leather visor walks a hundred and fifty feet ahead of us across the wreckage and rubble. The nearsighted little man and his skirmishers follow us in dispersed order.

  “What came over you? Are you crazy or what?” It’s the man next to me, muttering between his teeth, without turning his head toward me. On the collar of his navy-blue uniform are the gilded insignia of the Public Transportation Service. To keep his hands from trembling, he’s squeezing them together behind his back.

  “I want to find my wife. She must be in a camp.”

  “My wife was at the camp, too. She was there with me. Then yesterday they came looking for her.”

  “The Shrills?”

  “No, of course not. The Shrills don’t come into the camps. They’re satisfied to hang around the outside. It’s these guys here that come looking for people.”

  “These men? But who are they? I thought . .

  He chuckles. “You see the little guy with the big glasses? Don’t argue with him—do whatever he tells you. I saw him kill two women with his rifle, that tried to escape from camp.”

  A nauseating thing. I had thought the Shrills were rotten; but the Shrills aren’t men.

  “What now? Where are they taking us?”

  “I don’t know. When they take away a bunch like this, you never see them again. I waited for my wife. They didn’t bring her back.”

  “Maybe they’re regrouping people in other camps? Maybe we’re going to the camp where your wife is already?”

  He shrugs. “You’re kidding! You’ve seen what happened, haven’t you? You’ve seen how those vermin destroyed everything, killed everybody, in four days? You’ve seen these characters that are guarding us? If they’re taking us someplace else, it’s because it’s useful to them—the Shrills. That’s all.”

  “If that’s how it really is, why not run for it?”

  He turns his head toward me with a wan smile. “Go ahead, try!”

  At the entrance to the Winter Circus, a number of Shrills are crouching on their barbed legs. They’re the first I’ve seen since the ones I burned this morning, in front of the hotel. I stop short, my blood frozen. It goes beyond fear—it’s an unconquerable repulsion that glues my feet to the ground.

  A hand pushes me between the shoulder blades; it’s the little nearsighted man. “Keep going—they won’t eat you!”

  The other guards guffaw.

  Does that curious noise come from the Circus—that whirring sound, thin and yet loud, that reminds me of the sound of crickets in the wastelands of Provence? And where does that heavy, thick, stale odor come from, that green smell? . . .

  I don’t see anything at first except the circular fence set up on the outside of the track. And in that cage, a Shrill. He’s standing upright, the anterior legs stiffened horizontally, and pivoting slowly around. I realize immediately why he’s turning that way, and I feel the hairs prickle on the back of my neck: a man is facing him, walking slowly around him, with a saber bayonet in his hand.

  I hear one of the men next to me whisper, “My God!” while our guards push us into a box. I go closer to the railing, fascinated. Down there, the man and the Shrill are keeping their faces turned toward each other. They’re both on the defensive, watching each other, waiting. Sweat is streaming down the torso of the man with the bayonet. He has leather leggings on his calves; he’s a soldier. I can’t tell if it’s brute fear or the courage of despair that I see in his eyes. Both, maybe.

  Those legs, sharp as saw blades, have suddenly lashed the air. The man has leaped aside, with astonishing agility. A notch is cut into his bare shoulder.

  The low grating sound which fills the whole Circus is suddenly amplified, and at the same instant I see what the terrible spectacle in the cage has kept me from noticing. They are there, filling the seats, in the penumbra surrounding the track. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Almost frozen motionless, prodigiously attentive. The Shrills.

  But that isn’t the worst. Among the Shrills I can make out men, and some women too, their faces pale with anxious pleasure, their mouths half open, eyes fixed, riveted in the same expectancy. One of them is dressed in her best. She’s wearing a white hat, and a resplendent clip in the lapel of her tailored suit. I can’t take my eyes off that clip. ~ Once more, the heavy collective vibration has turned feverish. There’s a yell from the jeweled woman. The man in the cage tears himself out of a clinch at the very moment when that parrot’s beak is about to seize him by the nape. Blood spurts out of his torn back. From where I am, I can hear the whistling in his lungs.

  “You’re next! Get ready!” The man with the leather visor is looking at us through the railing in which we’re confined. He shows his uneven teeth in an open smile.

  “You can’t let it go on! You can’t! Don’t you understand?” One of my companions, a fat man who till now has never stopped taking off his rimless glasses and putting them on again, is clinging to the bars, making them shake with his own trembling. “You can’t! You’re a man like us!”

  The other man falls back a step. “Why can’t I? It’s a fair fight, isn’t it? For one thing, we give you a bayonet.
And then, your opponent doesn’t have the right to shrill. The audience either, of course.”

  He adds, turning his head away. “What do you think, I invented this game?” ,

  Others are throwing themselves on the bars, too. One of them, a big young man in blue jeans, sobs hysterically and falls to his knees. Only the man in the navy-blue bus driver’s jacket, the one who spoke to me before, remains to one side. He’s pale, his nostrils are pinched; he holds himself very straight, closing his eyes. If he weren’t here, I’d grab hold of the bars, too, I’d howl, too, the way the rest are doing.

  The murmur has suddenly turned to an intense humming, like the sound that comes from an overturned hive. I can’t help looking. The soldier has managed to leap onto his enemy’s back. His courage is too much for men. Why so much vitality, when there’s no hope?

  Then everything happens very quickly. The bayonet scythes through the air. The Shrill’s head leaps like a football, while the huge trembling body, in a final spasm, sends the man rolling in the sawdust. He springs up, hurls himself back. His weapon rips open the green abdomen, which bursts and empties itself; then he attacks the corselet and splits it. But it’s all over. The long, armored legs are moving only in an imperceptible, interminable shiver. The feverish humming fills my ears. I hear the voice of the man with the leather visor:

  “You’re in luck! It’s not often that one of them gets it in the neck! When that happens, the games are postponed till the next day. Come on, get going!”

  “The first days of May, they’re the best for vacations. Remember the woods? The smell of the woods? The smell of leaves? Remember the squirrel in Mervent forest? The mill at the water’s edge? Remember the lost clearing, where the silence is so beautiful that it makes you weep? The only sound is that of the green woodpecker. Rap, rap! it sounds like a stubborn elf who’s knocking endlessly at the door. His wife doesn’t want to let him in, so he knocks, he knocks. . . . In May we’ll go back there!”

  So spoke Maria .

  It’s May, and I’m rolling across the countryside, but it’s in a truck that stinks of fuel oil and sweat, packed in with strangers, dejected men and women, their eyes empty.

  Those who guard us have metal helmets or cloth caps. With their weapons between their knees, they are at the same time watchful and distant, as if detached from us.

  I watch them. Some are dull brutes, others half mad, still others are cowards. But they are men. Don’t they understand what they’re doing? I look at them, but they will not meet my gaze. I know how they react when questions are added to these looks. One of us is lying on the floor, his forehead laid open by a blow from a rifle butt. . . .

  When the truck stops, the first thing I see is the farmhouse. It seems so simple, so natural, with its old rough-cast walls, its untrimmed vines climbing around the garret windows, so simple and so beautiful that tears come to my eyes. But it is immured in silence, and no one moves in the house, nor in the deserted stable, nor in the vacant barnyard. Even the doghouse is empty. On the tractor seat is a baby doll, one of those big celluloid dolls that little girls dress up in wool jumpers. It has an arm missing.

  Then I look beyond, at the fields.

  “Gelatinous masses, like heaps of yellowish cocoons, piles of insect nests.” That was the way my neighbor, the writer, described the Shrill towns.

  The paths we follow to get to it are hard and beaten, as if thousands of feet have trodden them before us. When the first Shrills show themselves, a few of my companions fall to their knees and have to be dragged. . . .

  I don’t think I’ll ever go insane, or I would be insane now. How could we have let ourselves be pushed, dragged, into the interior of ... of what, in fact? What kind of town are these domes joined together, piled up one on another, these hills of moist cotton secreted no doubt by the same creatures who live in them?

  Someone laughs nearby, a girl with short hair who looks around her with a happy expression, as if in a dream. That one, perhaps, has found her deliverance.

  In the tunnels, the stale, viscous smell grows so thick you can almost feel it. A pale, cold daylight, without brilliance, springs from no visible source, maybe just from these fibrous walls which, when you bump into them accidentally—and not without repulsion—deposit on your sleeves cottony, gluey particles, feebly luminous.

  Other guards have replaced the first ones, and there are Shrills with them now. We walk, but we no longer know where we’re going. Some are crying soundlessly, but they don’t know they’re crying. Are we really living through this, have we forgotten who we are?

  The tunnels cross and multiply without ever rising or descending. And why should we be surprised when we cross that larger gallery, as big as a subway station, with walls pierced by a thousand cells? Why should we be surprised if, in each one of these cells, an oblong form is stretched out, enveloped as in a cocoon by that cottony, gluey substance? We’re no longer of this world, are we? And the outside has never existed.

  They don’t move, but their eyes are open. They don’t speak, their features are frozen, but in their pupils shines the wavering spark of life. Horror and despair, incredulity, hatred and madness.

  More tunnels. More cells. Hundreds, thousands of cells, and then the end. Time is suddenly suspended. Silence, and the waiting Shrills.

  Their bellies are gigantic, swollen to the bursting point. These are the females. The first days of May—egg-laying time.

  Why does that old man suddenly begin to struggle, and that woman with the dyed hair, too? Since three guards can hold them easily? Since the sting of the female Shrill is so quick? Since ankylosis and paralysis, in a few minutes at most, will seize their numbed members, their defeated muscles, leaving only the vital organs functioning, and the brain clear?

  That blond hair, spread out on the floor of a cell, is like Maria ’s hair, and those golden eyes that stare at me are like Maria ’s eyes. This blond woman looking at me, entangled in her nightmare, frozen with horror—does she already feel inside her the slow working of incubation? How long has she been there, and how many little Shrills will be born inside her, to feed on her, before they emerge from her torn flesh into the gray light of the tunnels?

  I’ve found you, Maria . For you might easily be Maria , mightn’t you? Do you want to be? You’re of my race and you’re my wife, and I’ve searched for you and found you. The Shrills don’t understand what we are. The Shrills keep us in camps the way we keep herds on the range, but we’re not cattle. The Shrills lead us to combat like bulls in the ring, but we’re men, just the same. The Shrills store us and pile us up the way wasps store up their provision of flies for the winter, but we’re not flies. And the female Shrills lay their eggs in us and leave us to be devoured alive by their little ones, but in spite of everything you are Maria and I’m the one you loved. The Shrills don’t understand that, never will understand it and that’s why we’re greater than the Shrills, Maria .

  Two guards take me by the elbows. I point with my chin toward the shadow from which the wide-open golden eyes still stare at me.

  “Next to that one is where I want to be!”

  “All right,” says one of the two without looking at me. And he adds, with an odd catch in his voice, “You realize, we’re not responsible!”

  Not responsible? No, of course not. No one is responsible, or else everyone is.

  The man who drank my whiskey had it by heart: “And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle . . . and their faces were as the faces of men. . . . And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions.”

  The female Shrill is coming nearer. . . . She doesn’t even seem horrible to me.

  The pattern for invading monstrosities like those in Veillof's story was set by H. G. Wells, in The War of the Worlds. Inevitably, there came a reaction to this, expressed in Out of the Silent Planet, by C. S. Lewis:

  His mind, like so many minds of his generation, was richly furnished with bogies. He had re
ad his H. G. Wells and others. His universe was peopled with horrors such as ancient and mediaeval mythology could hardly rival. No insect-like, vermiculate or crustacean Abominable, no twitching feelers, rasping wings, slimy coils, curling tentacles, no monstrous union of superhuman intelligence and insatiable cruelty seemed to him anything but likely on an alien world. The sorns would be . . . would be . . . he dared not think what the sorns would be. And he was to be given to them. Somehow this seemed more horrible than being caught by them. Given, handed over, offered. He saw in imagination various incompatible monstrosities—bulbous eyes, grinning jaws, horns, stings, mandibles. Loathing of insects, loathing of snakes, loathing of things that squashed and squelched, all played their horrible symphonies over his nerves. But the reality would be worse: it would be an extraterrestrial Otherness—something one had never thought of, never could have thought of.

  In that moment Ransom made a decision. He could face death, but not the sorns. He must escape when they got to Malacandra, if there were any possibility. Starvation, or even to be chased by sorns, would be better than being handed over. If escape were impossible, then it must be suicide.

  All this terror turns out to be wasted, of course, when we meet the grave, intellectual sorns of Lewis’ Mars.

  But the acceptance of other beings as superior and benevolent, replacing a stereotyped pattern, itself became stereotyped. Science fiction has an attractive habit of saying “Yes, but . . ” even to itself. The story you are going to read next, written by a Lancaster, Pennsylvania, patent attorney, skin diver and former chemical engineer, was written to suggest that Wells may have been right in the first place. It originally appeared in Astounding, August 1959. It is a compact, brutally powerful piece of work, and in its own terms I think you will find it unanswerable.