The Complete Dangerous Visions

by Anthology

  “Don’t you understand?” said the angel. “I am only trying to protect you.”

  “From what?”

  “From the knowledge of good and evil. Only gods and angels can stand to know what evil there is in the best of earthly things. For you it is a forbidden fruit, so drink. Drink and forget.”

  I needed time to think. Stalling, I asked, “Where are we?”

  “This is the land of Woomtoom, beyond time and outside space. All these paths lead back into the world, at different points in history.”

  “There seem to be thousands of them,” I said.

  “But all are for your feet and yours alone,” said the angel. “Now drink, and return to your body.”

  “No,” I said softly.

  “So be it,” said the angel, pouring out the cup in the dust at his feet. I stepped forward and the angel raised his sword.

  “You cannot return now,” said the winged being. “You must remain here. You can never return to the world.”

  But then I remembered again that according to the Bible it was possible to wrestle with angels, and win! I pretended to lunge forward, and the angel’s sword swung downward toward me, but at the last possible split-second I sidestepped and avoided the sword at the same time as I leaned close and grabbed the angel’s arm. To his intense amazement, I threw him, with a simple Judo spring-hip throw, then threw myself onto him from the rear, in spite of his wildly thrashing wings. The sword flew harmlessly from his hand and skittered into the dust well out of arm’s reach, while I leaned in between his two wings, passed my right arm around his neck and snapped the hand back toward me so that it grasped my left arm just above the elbow. Then I placed the palm of my left hand against the back of the angel’s head, pressing forward with it while pulling back with the other.

  “Give up?” I demanded.

  The angel only struggled all the harder.

  I tightened the choke hold.

  “What do you say now?” I asked coldly.

  There was no answer, only more thrashing and writhing. I squeezed harder, and the struggling grew weaker and finally ceased. I held the choke a little longer, just to make sure, then let go. The angel rolled over in the dust, completely limp.

  I listened for his heartbeat, felt for his pulse.

  There was nothing. The angel was dead.

  I picked up the sword and the empty cup and, choosing a direction at random, began walking.

  I opened my eyes and looked up at the Hindu hypnograph on the lower face of the upper bunk above me. Nearby the tape spun uselessly in my tape recorder. Flap flap flap flap.

  I sat up and turned the machine off.

  By the clock only about an hour had passed. It seemed more like two thousand years.

  I was still pretty high, but I knew, somehow, that the peak of the “trip” had passed. I got dressed and went downstairs.

  The mail had come. It was lying next to the front door, under the mail slot. I picked it up and glanced over it. There were two form letters, one from the John Birch Society and one from the Peace and Freedom Party. They both wanted me to join their organizations. Each wanted my help in fighting the other.

  I took a coin from my pocket and looked at it for a while, smiling to myself.

  Then I flipped it.

  Afterword

  I have not written much science fiction in the last few years, though the little I have written has been well-received. The reason for this is simple. In spite of regularly repeated claims that the science fiction field enjoys a freedom of thought and speech greater than that found in any other field, my own experience has been that this boasted freedom is a pure illusion. In spite of the courageous efforts of such pioneers as Avram Davidson, Damon Knight, Phil Dick and Judith Merril, not one of my stories has reached print without either minor or major deletions designed to mollify the bluenoses.

  There is a constant cry from editorial circles for new ideas and new writing approaches, but when this demand is answered by stories which dare to indicate that the sexual morality or the political system we now enjoy may not last forever, or that even today there may be a rather large leap from where things are to where they officially are said to be, the call for “something new” is instantly replaced by calculations of what middle-western high-school librarians might consider proper. I love the science fiction field. I have loved it ever since childhood, but it seems to me that science fiction only rarely does more than scratch the surface of its potential, so long as it remains contained within the boundaries imposed by such calculations, so, even though, or perhaps because, I love the genre so well, I have turned my hand to other fields for the most part.

  It is possible that, had not Harlan dared to break through the Middle-westernlibrarian Barrier, I would never have written another science fiction story. His anthology, Dangerous Visions, is the first ray of real hope I have seen in this country. One of the standard cornball plots in the field is the one where one man saves the whole universe. I used the plot once, in Eight O’Clock in the Morning, but I never really believed in it until now. It may well turn out that one man, Harlan Ellison, actually will save the dying universe of science fiction writing.

  In literature there is only one unforgivable sin, and that is not the portrayal of sex or violence or unpopular religious and philosophical ideas. The one unforgivable sin is boredom. And science fiction, in recent years, has become boring. There have been signs of life in England, but up until Dangerous Visions the U.S. has gradually been sinking into the mud. Made-up jargon has passed for technology, allowing the old entrenched fan to feel smug while making the story almost impossible for the new reader to understand. Story after story has revolved around phony “plants” of unimportant or incorrect tidbits of science. Story after story has marched the same old WASP engineer paperdoll through the same old story lines, most of which were very good when they were used by H. G. Wells, but which are now showing signs of wear.

  “Time Travel for Pedestrians” is a story I have had in my head for several years, ever since some experiences with LSD and numerous other drugs that showed me, among other things, how limited my views and the views of other SF writers were. When, at the annual science fiction convention in Oakland, Harlan mentioned that he was looking for stories for a second volume of Dangerous Visions, I instantly left the convention, went home and wrote “Time Travel” at one sitting, in an ecstasy of freedom and creative delight. I have been off drugs for over a year now, but in writing this story I got zonked out of my mind all over again. I still feel pretty high now, as I write this.

  But what I’m high on is hope, the hope that now that Harlan has broken the ice we’ll see some real fireworks again in the field . . . we’ll see some controversy, some brilliance, some writing that has a real sense of life, some real guts and glory. I like Star Trek a lot, but I can’t see tying down magazine and book science fiction to what could easily be broadcast over family TV. Even Star Trek, which feeds off ideas tried and proven in the magazine field, will eventually go stale unless there is a massive influx of new approaches and ideas in the field as a whole. Like, it’s no use picking a blank mind.

  But now I’m high on hope, fellow fans.

  Zonked out of my mind.

  Please, baby, don’t bring me down.

  CHRIST, OLD STUDENT IN A NEW SCHOOL

  Ray Bradbury

  Introduction

  Ladies and gentlemen, a man who needs no introduction . . .

  Probably no other writer in this book could I get away with introducing in that way. But who in the civilized, book-reading world doesn’t know the name Ray Bradbury? When the time came to write a few words to preface Ray, I suddenly was struck with the impossibility of the act. There have been whole treatises written on Bradbury, his poetic images, his humanity, his blue period, his chrome period . . . who the hell was I to write about him?

  Well, I’m a Bradbury fan, and that’s not bad for openers. Not only because it indicates an affection for the man and his work t
hat stretches back over twenty-one years to that first reading of “Pillar of Fire” in a copy of August Derleth’s excellent The Other Side of the Moon anthology I’d pilfered from the Cleveland Heights High School library, but because too many chuckleheads have taken to balming their own mingey little egos by mumbling Bradbury ain’t as good as we thought he was. I sneer at them; may the milk of their mothers turn to yogurt; may all their children be harelipped; may they (in the words of an ancient Yiddish curse) be so poor they come to me for a loan and may I be so poor I haven’t got it!

  Ray Bradbury is very probably better than we ever imagined him to be in our wildest promotion of him as the first sf writer to escape the ghetto and win approbation from such as Isherwood, Wilder, Fadiman, Algren, Gilbert Highet, Graham Greene, Ingmar Bergman, Francois Truffault and Bertrand Russell, for God’s sake!

  Let’s face it, fellow sf readers, we’ve been living off Ray Bradbury’s success for twenty years. Every time we try to hype some non-believer into accepting sf and fantasy as legitimate literature, we refer him or her to the works of Ray Bradbury. Who the hell else have we produced who has approached the level of Bradbury for general acceptance? I mean, there’s a Viking Portable Library edition of RAY BRADBURY. Sure, Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov are well-known and much-beloved, but if you go out on the street and buttonhole the average shmendrik, and ask him to name a dozen famous American writers, if he isn’t a dullard who’d name Erich Segal and Leon Uris and Jacqueline Whatshername, he’ll rattle off Hemingway, Steinbeck, Mickey Spillane, maybe Faulkner, and very probably Bradbury. That’s a load of ego-boost for all of us, and it’s about time someone said it. When we do the conversion bit with scoffers, we whirl them over to the meager sf racks in most bookstores and we may find no Delany, no Lafferty, no Knight or Disch or Dickson, but by God we always find The Martian Chronicles.

  And we say, “Here try this. You’ll love it.” And the chances are we’ve handed the reluctant one “Small Assassin” or “Mars is Heaven!” or “The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl” or Fahrenheit 451 or “I Sing the Body Electric” or “The Veldt” or “The Long Rain” or “A Sound of Thunder” or “The Jar” or . . . jeezus, once you get started it’s impossible to stop remembering all those great moments you had from all those fine Bradbury stories, and I don’t just mean excitement like seeing “The Kilimanjaro Machine” in Life or seeing “The Jar” done so it scared the piss out of you on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. I mean those private blessed moments when you lay up on your back under a tree or on a sofa or down on the floor, and started reading something that began, “It was a warm afternoon in early September when I first met the Illustrated Man.”

  I mean come on, all you smartass literary cynics who make points off other men’s careers, can you ever really forget that thing that called to the foghorn from the sea? Can you really forget Uncle Einar? Can you put out of your mind all the black folk leaving for Mars, years before the black folk started telling you they wanted out? Can you forget Parkhill in “—And the Moon Be Still as Bright” doing target practice in one of the dead Martian cities, “shooting out the crystal windows and blowing the tops off the fragile towers”? There aren’t many guys in our game who’ve given us so many treasurable memories.

  And the really lovely thing about Bradbury is that he started out a fan, a runny-nosed, hungry-to-make-it fan like so many of us. Hung up on Lovecraft and Burroughs and Poe and Weird Tales and Walt Disney and Hemingway and Saroyan and Dickens and Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, homage to all of whom he has paid in his fictions. But he had it, he had that extra spark that fired him, and he made it; big enough and good enough and forever enough that now we take him a bit too much for granted.

  We see The Illustrated Man made into a not-too-distinguished film, and Fahrenheit 451 and the not-yet-released Picasso Summer and maybe even some day (if they lick the script) The Martian Chronicles, and it becomes very chic to dismiss Ray Bradbury as though he were a literary snail like Segal. Well, not here, my friends. Here, Ray Bradbury gets his praise, because . . . well, it’s my book in large part, and twice I’ve been in Bradbury’s company where great things happened, and anybody wants to put down the author of “Henry IX” (which, under the title “A Final Sceptre, a Lasting Crown” I tried to buy for DV), well they got to fight me first. And I’m mean.

  I was going to go into detail about those two swell times I had with Bradbury—one at the newsstand on Cahuenga and Hollywood Boulevards, the other an afternoon we spent on the same podium with Frank Herbert, where the spark-gap was leapt and seven hundred California English teachers wept and laughed and gave us a standing ovation and for one of the rare moments in my life I truly believed, down to the gut core of myself, that it was the noblest thing in the world to be a writer—but space doesn’t permit, and besides I’d rather tell it to you when we meet and have more time to talk.

  So I’ll just tag out by saying Ray Bradbury is a man who has written some 300 stories that have been collected in books like The October Country, Dark Carnival, The Golden Apples of the Sun, The Illustrated Man, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Anthem Sprinters, I Sing the Body Electric!, The Martian Chronicles, A Medicine for Melancholy, The Machineries of Joy, Dandelion Wine and Fahrenheit 451. He wrote the screenplay for John Huston’s production of Moby Dick (which, strangely, looks much better on a TV screen than in a theater). He also wrote the script for an animated film history of Hallowe’en in collaboration with Chuck Jones, The Halloween Tree, and he’s now at work on a stage play titled Leviathan ‘99. He wrote a “space age cantata” dealing with the possible images of Christ on other worlds, Christus Apollo, music by Jerry Goldsmith, and he is a very good, kind, committed man who was in no small part responsible for getting LBJ booted out of office.

  And he’s the only man whose poetry I would have included in this, a book of stories. Well, maybe Robert Graves . . .

  Christ, Old Student in a New School

  O come, please come, to the Poor Mouth Fair

  Where the Saints kneel round in their underwear

  And say out prayers that most need saying

  For needful sinners who’ve forgotten praying;

  And in every alcove and niche you spy

  The living dead who envy the long-since gone

  Who never wished to die.

  Then, see the Altar! There the nailed-tight crucifix

  Where Man in place of Christ gives up the ghost,

  And priests with empty goblets offer Us

  As Host to Jesus Who, knelt at the rail,

  Wonders at the sight

  Of Himself kidnapped off cross and man nailed there

  In spite of all his cries and wails and grievements.

  Why, why? he shouts, these nails?

  Why all this blood and sacrifice?

  Because, comes from the belfries, where

  The mice are scuttering the bells and mincing rope

  And calling down frail Alleluiahs

  To raise Man’s hopes, said hopes being blown away

  On incensed winds while Christ waits there

  So long prayed to, He has Himself forgot the Prayer.

  Until at last He looks along a glance of sun

  And asks His Father to undo this dreadful work

  This antic agony of fun.

  No more! He echoes, too. No more!

  And from the cross a murdered army cries: No more!

  And from above a voice fused half of iron

  Half of irony gives man a dreadful choice.

  The role is his, it says, Man makes and loads his dice,

  They sum at his behest

  He Dooms himself. He is his own jest.

  Let go? Let be?

  Why do you ask this gift from Me?

  When, trussed and bound and nailed,

  You sacrifice your life, your liberty,

  You hang yourself upon the tenterhook!

  Pull free!

  Then suddenly, upon that cross immense,

 
As Christ Himself gives stare

  Three billion men-in-one blink wide their eyes, aware!

  Look left! Look right!

  At hands, as if they’d never seen a hand before,

  Or spike struck into palm

  Or blood adrip from spike,

  No! never seen the like!

  The wind that blew the benedictory doors

  And whispered in the cove and dovecot sky

  Now this way soughed and that way said:

  Your hand, your flesh, your spike.

  You will to give and take,

  Accept the blow, lift the hammer high

  And give a thunderous plunge and pound,

  You make to die.

  You are the dead.

  You the assassin of yourself

  And you the blood

  And you the one Foundation Ground on which red spills

  You the whipping man who drives

  And you the Son who sweats all scarlet up the hills

  to Calvary;

  You the Crowd gathered for the thrill and urge

  You both composer and dear dread subject of the dirge

  You are the jailor and the jailed,

  You the impaler and you the one that your own

  Million-fleshed self in dreams by night

  Do hold in thrall and now at noon must kill.

  Why have you been so blind?

  Why have you never seen?

  The slave and master in one skin

  Is all your history, no more, no less,

  Confess! This is what you’ve been!

  The crowd upon the cross gives anguished roar;

  A moment terrible to hear.

  Christ, crouched at the rail, no more can bear

  And so shuts up his ears with hands.

  The sound of pain he’s long since grown to custom in his wits,

  But this! the sound of wilful innocence awake

  To self-made wounds, these children thrown

  To Revelation and to light

  Is too much for his sanity and sight.