by Anthology
Have you ever looked from an open cockpit to see the wing struts trembling and the ground swinging far below? There is nothing like it. I pulled back on the stick and gave it more throttle and rose and rose until I was looking down on the backs of all the birds and I could not be certain which of the tiny roofs I saw was the house where I live or the factory where I work. Then I forgot looking down, and looked up and out, always remembering to look over my shoulder especially, and to watch the sun where the S.E. 5a’s of the Royal Flying Corps love to hang like dragonflies, invisible against the glare.
Then I looked away and I saw it, almost on the horizon, an orange dot. I did not, of course, know then what it was; but I waved to the other members of the Jagstaffel I command and turned toward it, the Fokker thrilling to the challenge. It was moving with the wind, which meant almost directly away from me, but that only gave the Fokker a tailwind, and we came at it—rising all the time.
It was not really orange-red as I had first thought. Rather it was a thousand colors and shades, with reds and yellows and white predominating. I climbed toward it steeply with the stick drawn far back, almost at a stall. Because of that I failed, at first, to see the basket hanging from it. Then I leveled out and circled it at a distance. That was when I realized it was a balloon. After a moment I saw, too, that it was of very old-fashioned design with a wicker basket for the passengers and that someone was in it. At the moment the profusion of colors interested me more, and I went slowly spiraling in until I could see them better, the Easter egg blues and the blacks as well as the reds and whites and yellows.
It wasn’t until I looked at the girl that I understood. She was the passenger, a very beautiful girl, and she wore crinolines and had her hair in long chestnut curls that hung down over her bare shoulders. She waved to me, and then I understood.
The ladies of Richmond had sewn it for the Confederate army, making it from their silk dresses. I remembered reading about it. The girl in the basket blew me a kiss and I waved to her, trying to convey with my wave that none of the men of my command would ever be allowed to harm her; that we had at first thought that her craft might be a French or Italian observation balloon, but that for the future she need fear no gun in the service of the Kaiser’s Flugzeugmeisterei.
I circled her for some time then, she turning slowly in the basket to follow the motion of my plane, and we talked as well as we could with gestures and smiles. At last when my fuel was running low I signaled her that I must leave. She took, from a container hidden by the rim of the basket, a badly shaped, corked brown bottle. I circled even closer, in a tight bank, until I could see the yellow, crumbling label. It was one of the very early soft drinks, an original bottle. While I watched she drew the cork, drank some, and held it out symbolically to me.
Then I had to go. I made it back to the field, but I landed dead stick with my last drop of fuel exhausted when I was half a kilometer away. Naturally I had the Fokker refueled at once and went up again, but I could not find her balloon.
I have never been able to find it again, although I go up almost every day when the weather makes it possible. There is nothing but an empty sky and a few jets. Sometimes, to tell the truth, I have wondered if things would not have been different if, in finishing the Fokker, I had used the original, flammable dope. She was so authentic. Sometimes toward evening I think I see her in the distance, above the clouds, and I follow as fast as I can across the silent vault with the Fokker trembling around me and the throttle all the way out; but it is only the sun.
3: Loco Parentis
DAD: He’s beautiful, isn’t he?
MOM: So new and unscratched! Like a car in the showroom, or a turbine that’s never turned! Like a new watch!
DAD: You’re just enthusing, aren’t you? Are you trying to tell me something?
MOM: I mean he’s beautiful, just as you said. Stop scratching yourself.
NURSE: Isn’t he lovely? But he’s only ten months old. He’ll need all sorts of care. Cleaning and feeding.
DAD: Oh, I know all about that. I’ve watched.
MOM: You mean we know.
NURSE: You’ll both learn, I’m sure. (Leaves baby and exits.)
DAD: What did you mean, about the turbine? I’ve heard that because there are so many couples like us, who want children but can’t have them, they build robots, half-living simulacra, like children, to satisfy the instinct. Once a month they come at night and change them for larger so that you think the child’s growing. It’s like eating wax fruit.
MOM: That’s absurd. But they mutate the germ plasm of chimpanzees (Pan satyrus) to resemble the human, producing half-people simians to be cared for. It’s as if the organ played its music when there was no one to hear except the organ grinder’s monkey.
DAD: (Drawing away the baby blanket) He’s not a mutated chimp. See how straight his legs are.
MOM: (Touching) He’s not a machine. Feel how warm he is with the real warmth, even when none of his parts are moving.
SON: May I play outside?
MOM: With whom?
SON: With Jock and Ford. We’re going to fly kites and climb trees.
MOM: I’d rather you didn’t play with Ford. I saw him when he fell and cut his knee. The blood didn’t come in proper spurts, but just flowed out, like something draining.
DAD: I’d just as soon you avoided Jock. He eats too much fruit, and I don’t approve of his taste in clothing.
SON: He doesn’t wear any.
MOM: That’s what your father means.
SON: I love his sister. (Goes out)
DAD: Don’t cry. They grow up so fast. Hasn’t everyone always told you?
MOM: (Still sobbing) It isn’t that. Jock’s sister!
DAD: She’s a lovely girl. Hauntingly beautiful, in fact.
MOM: Jock’s sister!
SON: (Re-entering, followed by a middle-aged couple) Mom, Dad, these people tell me that they’re my real parents; and now that I’ve grown enough to be very little trouble, except for tuition, they’ve come to claim me.
MR. DUMBROUSKI: We’ve explained to the boy how useful foster parent-things are, allowing real people necessary leisure.
MRS. DUMBROUSKI: I’ve always said it’s an honorable calling; and by filling desk space in offices when they’re supposed to be at work, the father-things usefully increase the prestige of their nominal supervisors. Don’t they, dear?
MR. DUMBROUSKI: Yes indeed. I’ve got several working for me, although I’d never admit it at the office.
SON: Goodbye, Mom and Dad. I know one or both of you may be a machine or an ape or both, but I’ll never forget you. I won’t come to see you, because someone might see me coming in, but I’ll never forget you. (To Mr. Dumbrouski:) Will I know which is which when I’ve had time to think about it?
NURSE: Isn’t he lovely? But he’s only ten months old. He’ll need all sorts of care. Cleaning and feeding.
DAD: Like a new bamboo shoot!
MOM: Like a new headlight socket just coming out of the plating tank!
NURSE: You’ll learn, I’m sure. (Leaves baby and exits)
JUNIOR: May I just sit here by the clock to eat my banana?
MOM & DAD: My son!
Afterword
Three stories: If you liked them you have three people to thank, of whom you yourself are one. If Harlan and I have messed with your mind in the pages just past it was because you have a mind to mess with. Many of the things you thought I said, you said.
Three ways of playing with time: If you’re authentic enough, and so deep up the blue hole nothing contrasts with your authenticity, you’ve gone back—haven’t you? Or, you’re mature in an instant (we all were) and Mother is only a tall woman with copper hair, Father a short man with hairy arms. Or, you recite (having arrived from there last night) the enigmatic myths of the future.
Three guesses: Do you need them? I am Robot; I fly the soaring Fokker, though only in my mind (and yours, I hope); my parents were and are as described, and these
are some of my Dangerous Visions, my hang-ups. You and I have walked among three wraiths. There are others.
Head up! You may be a prince (or princess) of Mars.
TIME TRAVEL FOR PEDESTRIANS
Ray Nelson
Introduction
Recently, here in Los Angeles, and I presume all around our vital, healthy country, drive-ins and local neighborhood movie theaters played a charming double-bill. The upper, or A feature, was something called I Suck Your Blood; the lower half of the bill, the B feature, was I Eat Your Skin. After the hysterical convulsions pass, kindly note these two bum flicks were coded GP, which means kids can see them, but only with the consent and accompaniment of an adult. At the same time, a sex film titled 101 Acts of Love was being shown in the area, with an X rating, meaning if you’re a Catholic and go to see it, you’ll burn in eternal hellfire. Kids strictly forbidden.
This is hardly an original thought I’m about to lay on you, but doesn’t it seem strange to anyone else out there that it’s okay for kids to see people having their necks bitten, their flesh eaten and their bodies used for fertilizer, but it is considered corrupting for them to watch two people having sex?
Where I’m going with this is toward Ray Nelson, but I’d like to make a couple of conversational stops on the way.
You see, DV (and surely A,DV will see a repetition of the problem) had some acceptability problems with certain libraries, with some bookstores, and when it was reprinted in the Science Fiction Book Club a number of scoutmasters and outraged mommies and common garden-variety guardians of public morality (like Keating, the head wimp of the Citizens for Decent Literature, on whose squamous skull a curse of succotash!) fired the book back with bleats of horror that their delicate children were being sent such mind-rotting filth that would obviously pollute their precious bodily fluids. In the general introduction I quoted one lady who wrote me directly. She was not alone in her vehemence.
It is to Doubleday’s and Larry Ashmead’s eternal glory that never once did they warn me away from “controversial” material, either in subject matter or treatment or language. The same has held true with this volume. They said, in fact, get it on, and do what has to be done. As a result, this book contains stories like Ray Nelson’s that I’m sure will bleach white the hair of librarians and others invested with the fraudulent chore of protecting delicate young minds.
To simply state that Ray’s story is a zinger and needs no further defense than its quality would be the wise course for me here, but as I have never been known to exist in a territory of wisdom, I’ll go on and make a few comments about censorship, about protecting those who need no protection, about hypocrisy, and about “dirty” language.
Those of you who’ve heard these things need not attend. The test afterward only counts for half your grade.
In any case: having traveled around the country a good deal these past few years, lecturing at colleges and high schools, I’ve found that while people under-thirty are no less susceptible to slogans and simplistic answers than their over-thirty counterparts, on the whole they don’t have the same hangups about language and topics of forbidden discussion to which their elders subscribe. When I was nineteen I was still a virgin, but when I pass a high school now, and see the fifteen, sixteen and seventeen year old girls, I am struck by the resemblance to a casting call for Irma La Douce, and I am hip to the fact that young people are getting it on sexually much earlier than when I was their age. I think that’s all to the good. Times have changed. The Pill and mass communications dissemination of hygienic information have made most of the restrictions against premarital sex invalid and outdated. Young people are reaching each other in some very natural, normal ways that were verboten to generations past, and along with that tacit acceptance of the body and its many uses, comes an acceptance of language. It is, for instance, virtually impossible today to shock kids by a discussion of masturbation. Everyone knows guys masturbate, and so do girls. If it comes up in conversation it’s an accepted, like television or the jumbo jet. They grew up with it, and all the taboos about even owning up to the fact that you play with yourself strike them as pointless and hincty.
Which, perforce, brings me to Ray Nelson, “Time Travel for Pedestrians” and the hypocrisy of protecting those who need no protection. Ray’s story deals, in small part, with the concept of masturbation as a triggering device for time travel. Its inclusion here, as well as publication of the stories by Piers Anthony, Richard Lupoff and Ben Bova, not to mention just the title of the Vonnegut story, promise trouble with bluenoses. Understand please, these stories are not to me “dirty” or “offensive” in any way. My contention is that nothing should be forbidden to a creator in the pursuit of an idea. But I am not fool enough to think these stories will slip by unnoticed when the hawklike eyes of the NODL and Citizens for Decent Everything get their white sheets on.
We had some of this, as I’ve said, with DV. In fact, for almost three years we could not get an edition contracted in Great Britain, because the publishers kept turning the book down as “unpublishable.” In the light of subsequent books released with ease in England, this now seems wholly ridiculous, but when we first acquired an English publisher, Leslie Frewin, we insisted the book be published as it stood, in its entirety, without deletions or concessions to censorship. Frewin agreed, but when the book was about to go to press, I learned that they were dropping the Theodore Sturgeon story because it dealt with incest, the Philip K. Dick story because it postulated God as a Chinese Communist, my own story because it used the word “fuck” and because it was clinically descriptive of a slaying by Jack the Ripper, and several others, including a story by Miriam Allen de Ford—on grounds I’ve yet to be able to name. Naturally, they were enjoined to cease publication, and the book was yanked away from them.
Fortunately, a more reliable and (one would presume) daring publisher in London, David Bruce & Watson, bought the rights and have published Dangerous Visions in two handsome volumes. But this was not the only instance of outright fear on the part of reprint houses to pick up the book. In Germany we were stuck with a wretched house, Heyne, who not only dropped stories without permission, but cut all the prefatory material, altered titles, changed copy beyond the normal considerations of translation into German, and in all botched DV hideously. (I have taken steps to insure there will be no repetitions of this with A,DV, but a pending lawsuit against Heyne is the residue of lack of foresight initially.)
I report all this in the (probably) vain hope that those who have nothing better to do with their time than worry that someone else will read what he wants to read, will think twice before pulling A,DV from library shelves or lobbying against it in their Saturday afternoon purity meetings.
For the rest of you, who can be shocked only by Calleys and Mansons and repression and violence, when you read this story you will more than likely say, “What the hell was all the shouting about? It isn’t offensive. Is this Ellison on the hype again?” To you I say, these words were intended for the backward, the frightened, the sexually and emotionally constipated who exist in vast numbers out there.
And I’m sure this long preamble will surprise Ray Nelson, who never thought his story would be a bone of contention. Which brings me, at long last, to Radell Faraday Nelson himself, and his personal statistics, herewith proffered in his own words:
“When I was about fifteen years old I remembered being born. I didn’t know that’s what I was remembering until much later. There were no words in the memory, just the feeling of being squeezed rhythmically again and again. It wasn’t unpleasant.
“I was born in a hospital in Schenectady, N.Y. on Oct. 3, 1931 at (for those who are astrologically inclined) 2 a.m. I was the fruit of the union of mixed RH factors, and my head was too big for my body. I looked like, they tell me, one of those beings from the distant future, from a time when the body has all but wasted away from disuse. But I lived. I have one brother who lived, too. And many sisters who were stillborn.
&nb
sp; “Sometimes I think my sisters are near me, whispering things to me, guarding me from harm. I picture them covered with fine soft womb hair, all hunched over with their noses on their knees, floating just at the edge of my field of vision so that I can almost see them but not quite.
“As a child I was carried from place to place by my parents, not seeing the world around me too much, but talking to beings that only I could see. We traveled from one state to another, following my father’s work, and as I ran, dreaming, along a stone wall on the edge of the Grand Canyon, I struck my head against a branch and almost fell over the cliff. I still have the scar, just above my left eyebrow.
“The best scar on my body, however, is on one side of my lower stomach (the right side) where my appendix was removed. I had had a bellyache for a long time but I was very brave about it and as a result almost died in the last minute operation that was performed on me after I collapsed on the basketball court at high school. I couldn’t do anything rough for over a year after that for fear I might open up again, so I discovered reading. I read science fiction and Little Literary Reviews, neither of which left any visible scars, at least on my body.
“That was how I became a science fiction fan and hippie, though that was before the word hippie had been invented. I was deeply religious and everybody hated me because, when one of my classmates stole a ballpoint pen in a drugstore, I went back and paid for it. They left many little scars all over my torso, particularly the ass. There’s another interesting scar on my left forearm, while we’re on the subject.
“That’s where, after I graduated from college and was working as a silk screen printer in Oakland, California, I held a candleflame under my arm and cooked the flesh until it turned black, in order to show that the spirit need not be troubled by the sufferings of the flesh. Fortunately the friends of mine who were present had promised in advance not to turn me over to the mental authorities. It was interesting to watch the scab form and then, a few months later, crumble and fall away to reveal the image of a perfect egg in white skin on a field of tan.