The Complete Dangerous Visions

by Anthology

  “Felici-tee!” my aunt trilled. “Do not oppose him! It is sacrilege!”

  But I did not heed her; to do so would have been the death of us all. I stared boldly into the eyes of the villain.

  “Do you dare,” I said, “risk single combat with one not of your world, who sneers at your base superstitions?”

  His eyes narrowed calculatingly, but he did not hesitate; he had courage, this evil priest, I must allow him that. We closed in furious engagement. For a while, I thought I had met my master, for he was fresh, and I both tired and wine-benumbed; but at last he lay exhausted beneath me.

  Pulling his weapon from my flesh—no difficult task, now—I arose; but my triumph was short-lived. The squattering creatures were back in the room, hordes of them, in panic flight.

  “Deadloin!” they croaked in terrified batrachian voices. “The deadloin is coming!”

  Turning in bewilderment, I beheld again the mask on the wall. Its expression was now truly malignant, and from it was coming such torrents of ink that paper to carry it would have deforested all of Canada. The black tide rolled across the tesselated floor toward us. There was nothing to do but flee—but my erstwhile companions had neither will nor strength left to do so. As I paused at the door, I saw it overwhelm them.

  My last memory of that enchanted realm is of the despairing music of the invisible creatures. I shall carry it in my heart well into the next 253 pages.

  LETTER THE SEVENTH

  In order to protect himself and his researches from the fear and malice of the ignorant, and the prying of journalists, my third uncle had changed his name to Philip H. Essex and removed his laboratory to a remote island off the Jersey coast. There is no traffic with the island from the mainland, and to reach it I had to take a small launch sent for me by the doctor.

  The Charon of this ferry was a sinister and taciturn creature of great strength—though I discovered when we disembarked that he limped—and shagginess, rather resembling a Lord Byron who had somehow tried to turn himself into an ape. He was so surly that I wondered why my uncle tolerated him, although he did certainly seem able to keep his own counsel, and his attitude toward the doctor was outright servile.

  This question, however, vanished from my mind when I saw Dr. Essex’s residence, which looked not so much like a laboratory as a stockade. Once he had made me comfortable in his study, however, he explained this very readily.

  “There are wild beasts on this island,” he said. “Yes, wild. Lots of them. Wouldn’t do to venture outside. Wouldn’t do at all.”

  He fell to ruminating. I prompted him.

  “How did it happen? Oh, well . . . easily enough. These are dangerous waters, around the island. Rocks. Shoals. Some years ago, a supply ship for a zoo, bound for Florida, got caught in a storm and was beached. None of the crew survived, but many of the animals got ashore.

  “And bred. Oh, yes, they breed.

  “Incredible, eh? But come along and I’ll show you.”

  He arose and led me to his surgery, a huge place, almost like a dynamo shed. Here, in a cage against one wall, was a tawny young lioness, pacing and pacing.

  “Rather a windfall for me,” my uncle said. “Experimental animals, free of charge. And extraordinary ones. None of your commonplace white rats or guinea-pigs for me.”

  The lioness glared at him as though she had half-understood the import of his remark in some dim, savage corner of her mind. I felt quite sorry for her, though indeed she seemed quite as dangerous as he had suggested.

  The suggestion preyed upon me later that night, nor was sleep sped by what seemed to be a remote throbbing of drums. Were there other people on this island as well, besides my uncle, his sinister boatman and myself? He had not said so; nor could I imagine how there could come to be drum-thumping savages this close to a great center of civilization like Long Branch, N. J. Perhaps it was only some trick of the waves.

  Then I became aware of a truly terrifying animal sound, a sort of muffled screaming—yet unlike the cry of an animal too, in that it seemed to come with almost mechanical regularity. It was all the more frightening in that its source seemed to be somewhere inside the stockade—perhaps inside the house itself!

  Putting on a wrapper, I opened my bedroom door. Yes, the sound was indeed inside the house, and it was not hard to track down; it was coming from my uncle’s surgery, under the door of which an eerie greenish light streamed. I knelt and peered through the keyhole, and beheld an astonishing sight.

  The lioness had been removed from her cage and was now pinioned to the far wall of the shed, as if crucified. In this position she looked rather like some misshapen human creature in golden furs. My uncle, his face impassive and yet somehow Satanic in the green light, was systematically and intimately tickling her with a long white feather.

  As I watched, paralyzed, the mechanical screaming began gradually to take on a human quality, like the voice of a woman, and to be interspersed with panting, gasps and groans. When at last the poor tormented creature also began to giggle, I could bear it no more, and fled.

  It took me most of the next day to nerve myself up to asking my uncle the meaning of this scene, and when I did, his face darkened menacingly.

  “Still I suppose you can do no harm,” he said after a moment. “And the work I am prosecuting here is the culmination of the work of thousands of men—this man a suggestion and that an experiment, until at last only one vigorous experimental and intellectual effort is needed—mine—to finish the great work.

  “Very few laymen can possibly understand the power that the nervous system has over the very shape of the total living organism. Here and there you will find a few people who say glibly that their illness of the moment may be psychosomatic, by which they mean no more than that their footling emotions have made them sick . . . which happens more often than either they or that charlatan Freud ever dreamed. But very few indeed realize that the energy which drives the nervous system itself, which I have called orgroan energy, could under proper control reorganize their whole physical being.

  “But the control must be very precise. Specifically, the stimuli involved must be applied delicately to those organs of the mature corpus which are most richly supplied with nerve-ends.

  “These are, of course, the sense-organs, as any first-form student of anatomy knows. But while most of the senses are localized in the tongue, the ear and so on, there are no specific organs of touch. This is why all my predecessors missed the essential clue, which in fact must be found in moral philosophy, not in science. Almost every philosopher has spoken—at one time or another—of the human rites of mating as a form of animalism, or, at the very least, a kind of animality. Very well. Suppose we should turn the equation upside down? The key for turning an animal into a man must lie through the sense of touch in what is called the erogenous zones.

  “And in fact I have succeeded—or almost succeeded—in transforming animals into men by this route. A complete transformation still eludes me, but all my results show that I am on the right track . . . It is perhaps unfortunate that the sensory areas involved are also the ones most richly supplied with pain axons, but one can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”

  “But,” I said, “aren’t there laws against . . . vivisection?”

  “Pah! I’m not cutting animals up. Quite the contrary. I’m giving them the chance to use their own misdirected nervous energy to make themselves into something finer than their Creator did . . . their Creator, and all the forces of evolution.

  “Of course . . .” he paused, and put the tips of his fingers together. “Of course, they don’t see it in quite that light. Not yet. They don’t understand. They fear me. Indeed I think many of them hate me; that is why I must have the stockade. But they’ll come around.

  “You’ve met my boatman. He’s come around. He was a baboon to begin with; closer to the human than the bears and tigers and so on that I’ve worked with since. And the breeding is a problem. You see, my work doesn’
t affect the genes, so the cubs of these creatures revert to type. But there again, that’s only a hurdle, not an impassable wall. I shall conquer it. I shall conquer it!”

  “Perhaps you will,” I said. “In fact I can hardly doubt it. But if you don’t mind, I’d prefer not to see it happen. I shall be going back to the mainland in the morning.”

  “No,” he said. “No, I’m afraid I can’t let you do that. I already have good reason to mistrust your discretion . . . and people might misunderstand, and come to interfere. You’ll have to remain here. But there’s nothing to fear, as long as you stay inside the stockade. I can’t guarantee your safety otherwise.”

  The threat was clear, but after what I had seen, and the revelation of the true nature of the ferryman—who was inside the stockade—I resolved not to stay in that House of Orgroan another moment longer than I could possibly help. And indeed, I stole out of it late that night—while my uncle was occupied in his horrible theatre of green light—and, as I thought, forever.

  The jungle was very dark but the beating of the drums guided me to the rude village which had been built by Dr. Essex’s creatures. After a few ticklish moments of suspicion, I was welcomed. The males among them were sufficiently human to be conscious of the fact that they had never seen a white, hairless woman before, and to be consumed with the hope of fathering cubs more human—rather than less, as was, as my uncle had told me, the rule—than their parents; and yet they were also sufficiently animal to make their attempts at such parenthood remarkably more emphatic than any I had ever encountered before.

  It was several days before I was able to get them off this subject for more than a few hours at a time, nor did I make any real attempt to change it until I felt that it had been completely exhausted, and perhaps even become somewhat of a sore one. But then I soon found other ways in which their longing to be human expressed itself.

  Obviously, once cast out of the stockade as unsuccessful experiments, they had to adapt to the new conditions in which they found themselves, and gradually managed to do so, though of course with many failures. These methods and expedients they called the New Ways. But there was among them a very vocal group which still longed for the Old Ways of life within the enclosure, and this expressed itself in a pathetic attempt to talk like P. H. Essex, Ph.D. Strange it was to hear, issuing from these furry faces, this gabble of “thought-variants,” “sixth-order forces,” “inertialess drives,” “second foundations,” “rational nobility” and other such terms which had no bearing at all upon the kind of life they were now leading.

  This might have been merely pitiable or merely comic, or a mixture of both, depending upon one’s temperament, had I not discovered that this longing for the Old Ways was no longer limited to mere talk. A substantial number of the creatures were planning a return to the enclosure, by force if necessary. The consequences of this course could well be serious for all concerned, for brutish though they were, these creations of Dr. Essex had fire.

  In the dead of the night before the storm broke, therefore, I persuaded (or rather bribed) one of the youngest of them to help me steal the boat, and with a sigh of relief found myself on the way back to the mainland. Even today, however, when I hear the piercing voices of the yahoos in the streets, I sometimes shudder and long for the rational nobility of the horse, though I can’t figure out how he gets into the story at all.

  LETTER THE EIGHTH

  “Why, bless my pushbuttons!” my fourth uncle chuckled chinnily. “If it isn’t my niece, Felicity!”

  The young inventor looked up from his giant hydraulic microscope as I entered, a trace of a twinkle in his serious blue eyes. Under the microscope, he had been puzzledly studying his own thumb, but now, rising, he thrust it into his mouth and made me welcome.

  “Tell me, Uncle Tom (for that was his name),” I responded antiphonally, “why were you studying your thumb?”

  He looked carefully under his workbench, behind the doors, out the window and up the flue before replying.

  “I am surrounded by scientific crooks and international spies,” he gritted flintily. “I must take the utmost precautions against theft.”

  I could well understand this. Arranged around the eighteen-year-old genius’ workbench were cabinets containing models of some of his previous marvelous inventions: the clockwork nightingale, the rocket calliope, the Steam Drive, the Earth-Moon ladder, the psionic stamplicker, the British telephone system and the marine dowser. Most of these had been cast in bronze, but even those made of Tomasite, the young inventor’s wonder plastic, were scratched, dented and chipped from having been stolen at least once per book since about 1897.

  At last, however, he seemed satisfied, and resumed his seat. “Now, here’s my plan,” he declared. “I find that the chases, adventures and mysteries in which I am constantly becoming involved leave me very little time for research. Also, they are constantly disrupting the work and the income of the Enterprises Construction Company, and sometimes the whole town of Workville—”

  Abruptly he was interrupted as a stout, stubble-faced man burst into the laboratory. “Brand my lil ole circus sideshow, Tom,” he sighed complainingly, “but yore mother an’ sister will be plumb ornery with me if you don’t make it home for grub agin tonight!”

  Tom grinned. “Okay,” he said, and when the chubby man went out, he added, “That was Chow Ping Plonker, the former chuck-wagon cook who tends galley in the laboratory. If I do not eat at home, I have to eat his cooking, and I get rather tired of mashed mongoose fritters. But that is part of the problem. We all need time to eat and sleep, too.”

  “Whew!” I exclaimed bewilderedly. “But how do you propose to deal with the problem, Uncle Tom? It seems insoluble.”

  “By a division of labor,” he replied. “Hereafter I will leave all the inventing to my father. After all, it was he who made all the basic discoveries of our age, no matter what the history books say—the dirigible, the great searchlight, the war tank, the motorcycle and many more. I shall devote myself entirely to chasing our enemies.”

  “But that will not leave you very much more time for eating and sleeping,” I objected.

  “I will need less,” he confided confidently. “I shall convert myself into a terrible hunting machine.”

  “A robot?” I cried gloomily. “That seems inhuman!”

  “No, indeed,” he replied cheerfully. “For my brain, my senses and all my important organs will remain untouched. They will only be reinforced mechanically. I shall become not a robot, but a cyborg!”

  The breathtakingness of this idea took my breath away. “I hope you make out all right,” I panted breathlessly. “If I may help you in any way, you have only to ask me!”

  “Thank you, Felicity,” he replied judiciously. “But now it is time for us to go to dinner.”

  The work on the cyborg progressed rapidly, and soon I was able to give the young inventor substantial help in selecting what parts of his healthy young physique he should retain.

  On our first trial, the mechanical parts of the mechanism—which was to be eight feet tall when completely assembled—blew out. But before it did so it behaved very well. Uncle Tom was enthusiastic. So was I. It seemed clear that soon he would achieve his goal of converting himself into an inexhaustible hunter of any sort of quarry.

  But then, his enemies struck!

  I was studying an anatomical diagram in the laboratory when in burst young Harlan Ames, head of the plant’s security division.

  “What ever is the matter?” I cried, pulling up my work trousers hastily.

  “The cyborg project!” he yelped furiously. “It is ruined!”

  “But why? How?”

  “Some fiend has stolen Tom’s thumb!”

  LETTER THE NINTH

  South of Prospect Park the brownstones rise wild, and there are mortgages there no mustard has ever cut. When I first came there, I had already been told that the place was evil, and little did I marvel at such tales after I saw it, for indeed it s
eemed implicit with the mystery of some primal earth. The very cats were sickly and stunted, and about the tumbled maws and lids of the ancient ash-cans many dead Puerto Ricans tottered or lay rotting.

  Nevertheless, I was myself shaken and disappointed with the ways of men and their creations, and welcomed my self-exile in that dismal valley. The old people of Red Hook had in particular muttered frightenedly against your establishment, where, they said evasively, strange rites were practiced when the sinister stars looked down; but I found you less aged or wild than I had expected, and those reputedly darksome rites familiar to me from much past experience. Indeed, they brought a certain respite and restfulness to my haunted and frustrated soul. Of course, the screams of the things in the upper two storys of the house were sometimes a little alarming, and in the morning it was more than alarming to find the rank back garden littered with powder-puffs which clearly had been terribly beaten in the course of some nameless quarrel; and sometimes, up there, late at night, one could also hear the mindless whining and pounding of flutes, lutes, cutes and other ancient Greek instruments.

  Yet I remained queerly content, in a sort of orgiastic numbness, like an unearthly jewel which had found its rest at last in the clammy slime of some rayless, bottomless ocean. When the creeping smog masked the malicious stars with colors no man could name, I would sometimes steal from the house and wander through the morbid vegetation of the park, looking with queer approval upon the wetly rigid, unplantlike shadows which they-threw across the flabby turf. Of my half-waking dreams during such wanderings, I dare not speak.

  But the end came at last. On one such night, a gigantic, glowing stone of indescribable shape descended from the murky sky among the tenebrous shadows of the ancient monuments of Grand Army Plaza, preceded by a blast of absolute coldness which made me shiver to my marrow even in my woolies. I was frozen with terror; though I was perilously close to this eldritch visitor from the illimitable inane, I could do naught but watch.