Next Tuesday Tammy Nesbit asked? What do you mean I don’t understand how you can know that now. And then she thought a moment and she did understand and so did all the rest of us. Oh Tammy said the newspaper.
The newspaper yes Edith said. Sobbing harder.
Edith was reading the death notices Sid Fischer explained God knows why she was bothering to look at them just curiosity I guess and all of a sudden she lets out this terrible cry and says she sees her sister’s name. Sudden passing, a heart attack.
Her heart is weak Edith told us. She’s had two or three bad attacks this year.
Lois Thomason went to Edith and put her arms around her the way Lois does so well and said there there Edith it’s a terrible shock to you naturally but you know it must have been inevitable sooner or later and at least the poor woman isn’t suffering any more.
But don’t you see Edith cried she’s still alive right now maybe if I phone and say go to the hospital right away they can save her? They might put her under intensive care and get ready for the attack before it even comes. Only I can’t say that can I? Because what can I tell her? That I read about her death in next week’s newspaper? She’ll think I’m crazy and she’ll laugh and she won’t pay any attention to me. Or maybe she’ll get very upset and drop dead right on the spot all on account of me. What can I do oh God what can I do?
You could say it was a premonition my wife suggested. A very vivid dream that had the ring of truth to you. If your sister puts any faith at all in things like that maybe she’ll decide it can’t hurt to see her doctor and then—
No Mike Nesbit broke in you mustn’t do any such thing Edith. Because they can’t save her. No way. They didn’t save her when the time came.
The time hasn’t come yet said Edith.
So far as we’re concerned said Mike the time has already come because we have the newspapers that describe the events of November 30 in the past tense. So we know your sister is going to die and to all intents and purposes is already dead. It’s absolutely certain because it’s in the newspaper and if we accept the newspaper as authentic then it’s a record of actual events beyond any hope of changing.
But my sister Edith said.
Your sister’s name is already on the roll of the dead. If you interfere now it’ll only bring unnecessary aggravation to her family and it won’t change a thing.
How do you know it won’t Mike?
The future mustn’t be changed Mike said. For us the events of that one day in the future are as permanent as any event in the past. We don’t dare play around with changing the future not when it’s already signed sealed and delivered in that newspaper. For all we know the future’s like a house of cards. If we pull one card out say your sister’s life we might bring the whole house tumbling down. You’ve got to accept the decree of fate Edith. You’ve got to. Otherwise there’s no telling what might happen.
My sister Edith said. My sister’s going to die and you won’t let me do anything to save her.
8.
Edith carrying on like that put a damper on the whole Thanksgiving celebration. After a while she pulled herself together more or less but she couldn’t help behaving like a woman in mourning and it was hard for us to be very jolly and thankful with her there choking back the sobs. The Fischers left right after dinner and we all hugged Edith and told her how sorry we were. Soon afterward the Thomasons and the Harrises left too.
Mike looked at my wife and me and said I hope you aren’t going to run off also.
No I said not yet there’s no hurry is there?
We sat around some while longer. Mike talked about Edith and her sister. The sister can’t be saved he kept saying. And it might be very dangerous for everybody if Edith tries to interfere with fate.
To get the subject away from Edith we started talking about the stock market. Mike said he had bought Natomas Transamerica and Electronic Data Systems which he said was due to rise from 36¾ on November 22 to 47 by the 30th. I told him I had bought Natomas too and I told him my other stocks and pretty soon he had his copy of the December 1 paper out so we could check some of the quotations. Looking over his shoulder I observed that the print was even blurrier than it had seemed to me Tuesday night which was the last occasion I had examined my paper and also the pages seemed very grey and rough.
What do you think is going on I said? The paper definitely seems to be deteriorating.
It’s entropic creep he said.
Entropic creep?
Entropy you know is the natural tendency of everything in nature to come apart at the seams as time goes along. These newspapers must be subject to unusually strong entropic strains because of their anomalous position out of their proper place in time. I’ve been noticing how the print is getting harder to read and I wouldn’t be surprised if it became completely illegible in another couple of days.
We hunted up the prices of my stocks in his paper and the first one we saw was Bausch & Lomb hitting a high of 149¾ on November 30.
Wait a second I said I’m sure the high is supposed to be 149 even.
Mike thought it might be an effect of the general blurriness but no it was still quite clear on that page of stock market quotations and it said 149¾. I looked up Natomas and the high that was listed was 56⅞. I said I’m positive it’s 57. And so on with several other stocks. The figures didn’t jibe with what I remembered. We had a friendly little discussion about that and then it became not so friendly as Mike implied my memory was faulty and in the end I jogged down the street to my place and got my own copy of the paper. We spread them both out side by side and compared the quotes. Sure enough the two were different. Hardly any quote in his paper matched those in mine, all of them off an eighth here, a quarter there. What was even worse the figures didn’t quite match the ones I had noted down on the first day. My paper now gave the Bausch high for November 30 as 149½ and Natomas as 56½ and Disney as 117. Levitz 104, EG&G 23⅝. Everything seemed to be sliding around.
It’s a bad case of entropic creep Mike said.
I wonder if the newspapers were ever identical to each other I said. We should have compared them on the first day. Now we’ll never know whether we all had the same starting point.
Let’s check out the other pages Bill.
We compared things. The front page headlines were all the same but there were little differences in the writing. The classified ads had a lot of rearrangements. Some of the death notices were different. All in all the papers were similar but not anything like identical.
How can this be happening I asked? How can words on a printed page be different one day from another?
How can a newspaper from the future get delivered in the first place Mike asked?
9.
We phoned some of the others and asked about stock prices. Just trying to check something out we explained. Charlie Harris said Natomas was quoted at 56 and Jerry Wesley said it was 57¼ and Bob Thomason found that the whole stock market page was too blurry to read although he thought the Natomas quote was 57½. And so on. Everybody’s paper slightly different.
Entropic creep. It’s hitting hard.
What can we trust? What’s real?
10.
Saturday afternoon Bob Thomason came over very agitated. He had his newspaper under his arm. He showed it to me and said look at this Bill how can it be? The pages were practically falling apart and they were completely blank. You could make out little dirty traces where there once had been words but that was all. The paper looked about a million years old.
I got mine out of the closet. It was in bad shape but not that bad. The print was faint and murky yet I could still make some things out clearly. Natomas 56¼. Levitz Furniture 103½. Disney 117¼. New numbers all the time.
Meanwhile out in the real world the market has been rallying for a couple of days right on schedule and all my stocks are going up. I may go crazy but it looks at least like I’m not going to take a financial beating.
11.
Monday
night November 29. One week since this whole thing started. Everybody’s newspaper is falling apart. I can read patches of print on two or three pages of mine and the rest is pretty well shot. Dave Bruce says his paper is completely blank the way Bob’s was on Saturday. Mike’s is in better condition but it won’t last long. They’re all getting eaten up by entropy. The market rallied strongly again this afternoon. Yesterday the Giants got beaten by St. Louis and at lunch today I collected my winnings from Butch Hunter. Yesterday also Sid and Edith Fischer left suddenly for a vacation in Florida. That’s where Edith’s sister lives, the one who’s supposed to die tomorrow.
12.
I can’t help wondering whether Edith did something about her sister after all despite the things Mike said to her Thanksgiving.
13.
So now it’s Tuesday night November 30 and I’m home with the Post and the closing stock prices. Unfortunately I can’t compare them with the figures in my copy of tomorrow’s Times because I don’t have the paper any more it turned completely to dust and so did everybody else’s but I still have the notes I took the first night when I was planning my market action. And I’m happy to say everything worked out perfectly despite the effects of entropic creep. The Dow Industrials closed at 831.34 today which is just what my record says. And look at this list of highs for the day where my broker sold me out on the nose:
Levitz Furniture
103¾
Bausch & Lomb
149
Natomas
57
Disney
116¾
EG&G
23¾
So whatever this week has cost me in nervous aggravation it’s more than made up in profits.
Tomorrow is December 1 finally and it’s going to be funny to see that newspaper again. With the headlines about Nixon going off to China and the people wounded in the bank robbery and the currency negotiations in Rome. Like an old friend coming home.
14.
I suppose everything has to balance out. This morning before breakfast I went outside as usual to get the paper and it was sitting there in the bushes but it wasn’t the paper for Wednesday December 1 although this is in fact Wednesday December 1. What the newsboy gave me this morning was the paper for Monday November 22 which I never actually received the day of the first mixup.
That in itself wouldn’t be so bad. But this paper is full of stuff I don’t remember from last Monday. As though somebody had reached into last week and switched everything around, making up a bunch of weird events. Even though I didn’t get to see the Times that day I’m sure I would have heard about the assassination of the Governor of Missouri. And the earthquake in Peru that killed ten thousand people. And Mayor Lindsay resigning to become Nixon’s new Secretary of State. Especially about Mayor Lindsay resigning to become Nixon’s new Secretary of State. This paper has to be a joke.
But what about the one we got last week? How about those stock prices and the sports results?
When I get into the city this morning I’m going to stop off first thing at the New York Public Library and check the file copy of the November 22 Times. I want to see if the library’s copy is anything like the one I just got.
What kind of newspaper am I going to get tomorrow?
15.
Don’t think I’m going to get to work at all today. Went out after breakfast to get the car and drive to the station and the car wasn’t there nothing was there just gray everything gray no lawn no shrubs no trees none of the other houses in sight just gray like a thick fog swallowing everything up at ground level. Stood there on the front step afraid to go into that gray. Went back into the house woke up my wife told her. What does it mean Bill she asked what does it mean why is it all gray? I don’t know I said. Let’s turn on the radio. But there was no sound out of the radio nothing on the TV not even a test pattern the phone line dead too everything dead and I don’t know what’s happening or where we are I don’t understand any of this except that this must be a very bad case of entropic creep. All of time must have looped back on itself in some crazy way and I don’t know anything I don’t understand a thing.
Edith what have you done to us?
I don’t want to live here any more I want to cancel my newspaper subscription I want to sell my house I want to get away from here back into the real world but how how I don’t know it’s all gray gray gray everything gray nothing out there just a lot of gray.
THE MUTANT SEASON
This little story has an odd history appended to it. Roger Elwood, he who edited innumerable anthologies of new stories in the 1970’s, phoned me one day in January, 1972 and asked if I could—as a favor—hurriedly write something for a book for young readers he was doing called Androids, Time Machines, and Blue Giraffes. The stories were supposed to follow themes—robots, mutants, time travel, space travel, etc.—and for some reason he had come up short in the mutant category.
I was in a short-story-writing phase then, and even though I had no particular mutant-theme idea sitting around waiting to be written, I sat right down and improvised a six-page story about a tribe of mutants who regularly gather at a holiday resort, but who, being mutants, visit the resort off season so that they will remain inconspicuous. It was the sort of decent, professional job that I had learned to turn out on demand many years earlier, when I was just beginning my career and had discovered that if I made myself useful to editors who were having inventory problems I’d find it very much easier to pay my rent each month.
Elwood was happy with the story, and so, I suppose, were the readers of his book. I had earned $75 in not very many hours—$75 was still a visible amount of money in 1972—and had earned a little karmic credit by doing an editor a favor, besides. I put “The Mutant Season” out of my mind and went on to other things.
It remained out of my mind for fifteen years—until the ingenious Byron Preiss, a man who until his untimely death in 2005 earned a nice living by coming up with unusual ideas for books and finding people to write them, suggested to me that “The Mutant Season” might very successfully be turned into a series of novels by some younger writer, with a fee going to me for supplying the underlying concept. I responded with polite incredulity. My hastily written 1200-word story to be spun out not simply into a novel but a series of novels? Was he serious? Yes, indeed, he was. My story had merely provided a flicker of insight into the subterranean and surreptitious world of mutants living among us; the idea deserved exploration at much greater length, he said. I shrugged. All right, I told him. Go ahead. You have my blessing.
Byron promptly got the mighty Doubleday-Bantam publishing combine interested in the project: a quartet of books. Now came the job of finding writers to write them. I mildly suggested that my wife, who had begun writing science fiction under her maiden name of Karen Haber and had had every story she had written so far accepted for publication—an impressive total of three short stories, I think, or maybe four—might be a good candidate to do one of the books. This was in the summer of 1987, at the World Science Fiction Convention in Brighton, England. Byron, a man who did nothing by halves, instantly decided that Karen would be the ideal choice to write all four novels. Lou Aronica of Bantam, also a man given to taking bold visionary leaps, enthusiastically seconded the proposal, even though it involved hiring a writer who had no more than a few short stories to her credit to produce four books. I was startled, but maintained an amiable silence as this discussion unfolded. Karen was silent too, but hers was the silence of shock, not of diplomacy. Then and there the deal was put together: Karen would expand my tiny story of 1972 into a vast saga spanning hundreds of thousands of words.
The weird thing is that it all worked out. Karen laboriously constructed the first volume over a period of seven or eight months, and—behold—it was okay. “So that’s how you write a novel,” she said, and set about doing the second one. It was a lot easier for her than the first, and a better book besides. Then came the third…and the fourth. The publisher was pleased,
the sales figures were satisfying, and she moved on to other book-length projects.
I’ve been entangled in the publishing world more than half a century now. You would think that I’ve seen just about everything, and you would be right. But new surprises always seem to come along. “The Mutant Season”—mine of 1972—did indeed give rise to four substantial novels, written by my very own Significant Other. Wonders never do cease, do they? At any rate, here’s the story that started it all.
——————
It snowed yesterday, three inches. Today a cruel wind comes ripping off the ocean, kicking up the snowdrifts. This is the dead of winter, the low point of the year. This is the season when the mutants arrive. They showed up ten years ago, the same six families as always, renting all the beach houses on the north side of Dune Crest Road. They like to come here in winter when the vacationers are gone and the beaches are empty. I guess they don’t enjoy having a lot of normals around. In winter here there’s just the little hard core of year-round residents like us. And we don’t mind the mutants so long as they don’t bother us.
I can see them now, frolicking along the shore, kids and grown-ups. The cold doesn’t seem to affect them at all. It would affect me plenty, being outside in this weather, but they don’t even trouble themselves with wearing overcoats. Just light windbreakers and pullovers. They have thicker skins than we do, I guess—leathery-looking, shiny, apple-green—and maybe a different metabolism. They could almost be people from some other planet, but no, they’re all natives of the U.S.A., just like you and me. Mutants, that’s all. Freaks is what we used to call them. But of course you mustn’t call them that now.
The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 3: Something Wild Is Loose: 1969-72 Page 42
