Antigrav : Cosmic Comedies by SF Masters

by Philip Strick

  I propose this story to be 25,000 words in length, a cover story in fact. (You and Ronald Walotsky will see the possibilities here, and Walotsky, I assure you, draws horses very well.) Although I am quite busy, the successful author of fifteen stories in this field, two of the novels published in hardcover, I could make time in my increasingly heavy schedule to get the story to you within twelve hours of your letter signifying outline approval. I think that an advance in this case of fifty dollars would be quite reasonable and look forward to hearing from you by return mail, holding off in the meantime from plunging into my next series of novels which, of course, are already under lucrative contract.

  * * *

  Dear Mr Malzberg:

  We’re not getting anywhere.

  What in God’s name is funny about a man who perceives ‘motives and consequences to be entirely fractured . .. torn apart?’ Our readers, let me assure you, have enough troubles of their own; they are already quite aware of this or do not want to be aware of it. Our readers, an intelligent and literate group of people numbering into the multiple thousands, have long since understood that life is unfair and inequitable, and they are looking for entertainment, release, a little bit of joy.

  Don’t you understand that this commission was for a funny story? There is nothing funny about your proposal, nor do I see particular humour in an allegory which will make use of the appearance of the Devil.

  Perhaps we should forget this whole thing. There are other writers I would rather have approached, and it was only at the insistence of your friends that I decided to give you a chance at this one. We are heavily inventoried, as I have already said, on the despairing stuff, but if in due course you would like to send me one of your characteristic stories, on a purely speculative basis, I will consider it as a routine submission.

  * * *

  Dear Editor:

  Please wait a minute or just a few minutes until you give me another chance to explain myself. I was sure that the two story ideas you have rejected, particularly the second, were quite funny; but editorial taste, as we professional writers know, is the prerogative of the editor; and if you don’t see the humour, I can’t show it to you, humour being a very rare and special thing. I am however momentarily between novels, waiting for the advance on the series contract to come through and would be able to write you a story at this time; let me propose one final idea to you before you come to the wrong conclusion that I am not a funny writer and go elsewhere, to some wretched hack who does not have one quarter of the bubbling humour and winsomely comprehensive view of the foibles of the human condition that I do.

  I would like to write a story about a science-fiction writer, a highly successful science-fiction writer but one who nevertheless, because of certain limitations in the field and slow payment from, editors, is forced to make do on an income of three thousand four hundred and eighty-three dollars a year (last year) from all of his writings and, despite the pride and delight of knowing that he i§ near or at the top of his field, finds getting along on such an income, particularly in the presence of a wife and family, rather difficult, his wife not understanding entirely (as she should understand) that science fiction is not an ultimately lucrative field for most of us but repays in satisfaction, in great satisfactions. This writer, who we shall call Barry, is possessed after a while by his fantasies; the partitions, in his case, between reality and fantasy have been sheared through by turmoil and economic stress, and he believes himself in many ways to be not only the creator but the receptacle of his ideas, ideas which possess him and stalk him through the night.

  Barry is a gentle man, a man with a gracious sense of humour, a certain je ne sais quoi about him which makes him much celebrated at parties, a man whose occasionally sinister fictions serve only to mask his gay and joyous nature ... but Barry is seized by his fantasies; people do not truly understand him, and now at last those aforementioned walls have crumpled : he takes himself to be not only the inventor but the hero of his plot ideas. Now he is in a capsule set on Venus flyby looking out at the green planet while he strokes his diminutive genitals and thinks of home; now again he is an archetypical alien, far from home, trying to make convincing contact with humanity; now yet again he is a rocketship, an actual physical rocketship, a phallic object extended to great length and power, zooming through the heavens, penetrating the sky.

  I’ll do this at 1500 words for five dollars down. Please let me hear from you.

  * * *

  Dear Mr Malzberg:

  This was a doomed idea from the start. I hope you won’t take this personally, but you need help.

  * * *

  Dear Editor:

  My husband is at Aqueduct today, living in a motel by night, and says that he will be out of touch for at least a week, but I know he would have wanted me to acknowledge your letter, and as soon as he returns I assume he’ll be in touch with you.

  I assume also that in saying that he needs ‘help’ you are referring to the fact that, as he told me, you were commissioning a story from him with money in front, and I hope that you can send us a cheque as soon as possible, without waiting his return. He said something about a hundred or a thousand dollars, but we’ll take fifty.

  Joyce Malzberg

  Trolls

  Robert Borski

  Grady said, ‘You watch out for trolls now. Hear?’

  I nodded politely, slightly. ‘Sure, Grady, sure. You know me.’ Even so: I meant to get me one of those mothers. Maybe two.

  ‘I’m not kidding, Harrison. You better be careful.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Okay already, I’ll be careful. Just quit your bitching.’ Sometimes Grady gets like that: all stubborn in the head and authoritative. We have to humour him, then. Otherwise, he goes crazy. ‘I’m just going out for some fresh air. Be back in an hour or so.’

  I think he might have mumbled something into his beard, but I didn’t hear him, because I was leaving, dispeeding. Out I went. The back door, across the lot, and into the garage. Heap was waiting for me.

  (Now here’s ten feet of jaguar steel with burnished chrome fenders and a hunched glass back: and it was all mine.)

  I finished walking in. ‘Hello, old buddy,’ I says to Heap. ‘How you been and all?’

  No answer, of course. Heap seldom answers, so right away I ask, ‘You ready for some troll-hunting?’

  Heap gives smile-grin up in grillwork. That means yes in car.

  ‘Okay baby,’ I said climbing in, ‘let’s go get ’em.’

  I turned the key and Heap fired up from inside, lizard-gut burning acid. Eyes opened, and glare lights phased out hungrily. I found the wheel and massaged Heap’s metal brain with the foot pedals. Smelled troll blood already, felt so good.

  We were gonna get one, maybe two. So I coaxed Heap out onto the street, tail end hot hot hot.

  It was July. Good troll-hunting weather. Summer nights like these usually brought them out in droves (making up perhaps for those troll-less winters). I knew we had a good chance of catching one, although two would bring our average up.

  Like altogether now, I guess me and Heap had killed on up to thirty-six trolls. (That’s no brag, either, only telling facts.) Match that against three years’ driving experience and you get an average of one troll a month. Not bad, eh?

  Course me and Heap were nowheres near establishing a record. Not when some Johnny down in Phoenix was putting them away six, seven a month. But we might make the ratings someday and that was good enough for us KayCee folk.

  Right, Heap?

  Anyways, see, we were on concrete now, on the inroads of the Intercity. Snakebelly smooth as far as the eye could see, miles and miles of highway with only slapdash yellow signs marking the exits and entrances: old Intercity 16. It was our favourite road and we were happy to be back on familiar territory.

  Seems funny when you think about it, though. That back when Grady was my age—

  Case I forgot to mention it, Grady’s my stepfather on my brother’s side. The guy
who was always warning me to look out for trolls (he worried about me so).

  —none of this was here. They had greens and scenes instead. Trunks with trees, and grass, rockribs and weeds.

  I guess there were a lot of ecology-minded hicks around in those days.

  But nowadays, in 1994, it’s different. We’re more into the concrete revolution. Cities have become our lifeblood, the roads our arteries. So now you can’t escape them. They’re ubiquitous. Everywhere you go, everyplace you see: concrete. In greystone blocks or flatbed lamina.

  Just beautiful.

  With all our food being produced synthetically or in hydroponic centres, what’s the use of having countryside anyway?

  No use. That’s why we got rid of it, got concretized. Made more sense, wouldn’t you say?

  And in a way, all this pavement was responsible for the surfacing of trolls. With their type of country—the picnic-type—being slowly wiped out, they had nowhere else to go.

  You could almost say they were like jackrabbits.

  Back when God’s country was underdeveloped and raw, there were droves and droves of jackrabbits hunkering up and down the countryside. Yet very few people ever noticed them. But then when they started building transcontinental highways and expressways, these rabbits started getting pushed out of their own territory. They had to start crossing concrete to get anywhere, and that’s when people started noticing them; when they were scurrying across the road or getting trammelled under the wheels, crunch crunch.

  Well, trolls were sort of the same way.

  They were limited in the places they could make the nature scene. A few oases here and there. A stretch of grass and weeds up near the riverside. But that’s about all. And in every case, these places were surrounded with concrete.

  (But now, you see, this doesn’t mean anything unless you realize several things. Like the fact that trolls are masters of disguise. They look exactly like you or me or Joe Bob next door. Only thing is, they’re hicks at heart. That’s right, hicks. They miss the greenery and the growing things. The cut-fresh smell of grass, the scratch-quick scurry of leaves. That’s why they ramble about so: they’re looking for some place to flake out on. Someplace green, like oases or along the Missouri River. To get there, though, they have to park their cars nearby, and cut across the remaining concrete on foot. Which is illegal. Which is where me and Heap come in. We try and juice ’em before they can make it to where they’re headed. Or if we miss them first time around, we try again when the trolls have to leave by the same way they came.

  Troll-hunting: that’s how it’s done and what it’s all about. I hope you paid attention, friend.

  All right. We were on snakebelly smooth again, old Intercity 16. Everything was going fine. Heap was burning ass, my eyes were eagle-sharp, on the lookout. Weather, too, was good. Up above, at least as far above as the upper limits of Heap’s hunched glass back, the sky was clear, with fixated stars. Temperaturewise, the air was city-warm and muggy. All of which was great. There were bound to be trolls out tonight.

  Heap squealed his wheels in anticipation, drawing my adrenalin to the surface. Another three to four miles, and we would be in troll country. I started to watch the outer lanes for parked cars.

  Last time me and Heap were out here, about three weeks ago, we bagged a starry-eyed grandma troll. She was walking along the road with a fistfull of green when we came around the bend and juiced her. Splot! All over the road and half over the car. Took me two weeks just to pick her out of Heap’s grillwork.

  But the satisfaction of it all. What can I say? Every time me and Heap wiped out a troll, my spine felt like it had been short-circuited, like electrocuted fudge. That, plus knowing we were probably gonna make the ratings someday made everything worth any trouble involved. And that included cleaning up Heap’s grillwork.

  So you really can’t blame me for being the way I was. It was in my blood. Heap’s too. We were born troll killers.

  Which brings us back to tonight, and those old familiar riffs about how we were gonna get one, maybe two. Because now we were there, in troll country.

  I slowed down, turning the infra-red darksight system on. Heap was purring beneath me like a contented cyclotron. It was dangerous, driving this way, though, so we kept our eyes peeled. Didn’t want to run into a shadowload of parked car. In fact—

  . . . hey, wait a minute. I thought I saw something ...

  Yes, there it was. Just what we were looking for. A parked car, up ahead to the left. That >meant there was a troll some-wheres around here. (There were also no other cars in sight. Which meant the troll was ours. Good. Good.)

  All excited like, I felt my temples start to pound. I was breathing heavier, too, like I was about to reach orgasm. My palms were sweaty. I doubt if I blinked once.

  We cruised up the road a smooth forty-five, taking it easy. And then I saw him: the troll. He was running left-to-right, some 75 yards away, all at a zigzag. Immediately, I unmasked Heap, hoping the lights would blind him. They didn’t, though, 65 I guess because our manoeuvre wasn’t all that unexpected 60 (this troll had obviously been around for a while). But he was a goner just the same 50. His car was to our rear, and the nearest 45 embankment was a hundred yards past the perpendicular line running up from his shoulder blades 39 and he certainly wasn’t about to turn back now. In fact, his only chance was to face us head on 25 and try to dodge us like a matador 20 would a bull. Which wasn’t going to be easy 15 because me and Heap were experts at this sort of thing 10 having done it countless times before 9 and never having lost one yet 8. We were closer now. I could see him 7 dancing in the light. But what was that 6 in his hand? 5 Flowers? And why did 4 he suddenly 3 look so familiar 2 as he feigned right, but instead I went left, which 0—

  I heard the muted thud of impact.

  —is where we hit him, crash slam.

  Several things happened at once, then. Out of the corners of my eyes, I saw the troll’s shattered body bounce silently down the road, like something out of a speeded-up soundless movie, all bloodied and broken, while up in my head, in my mind’s eye, I was replaying the last few seconds before impact.

  Backwards from ten: there was that funny little troll running with short, tired strides, his arms swinging back-forth, his beard lightning yellow in the lights. There was Heap and me nosing in on him, relentlessly, doggingly, like some archfiend out of the pulp tradition (me and Heap were weaned on Capt. Whizzflash). Next there was a silence, the sky dark with frozen salt and shadows; then there was the collision at zero, and the recognition. The fire inside, the acid belly broth. Then there was no more Grady, cause he was a troll, and me and Heap had just zonked him for number thirty-seven.

  You can understand how shocked we were.

  But it was like I told you: trolls were tricky sons of bitches. They could be almost anyone, maybe even you reading this or Joe Bob next door. And it makes no difference who you are, cause like Grady and me and Heap were real close, and the best of buddies and all, but as it turned out, he was troll and he had to go, you know.

  So take warning, you trolls hereabout. Otherwise, we’ll get you no matter how much it hurts hurts hurts.

  Right, Heap?

  Elephant With Wooden Leg

  John Sladek

  Note: Madmen are often unable to distinguish between dream, reality, and . . . between dream and reality. None of the incidents in Henry LaFarge’s narrative ever happened or could have happened. His ‘Orinoco Institute’ bears no relation to the actual think tank of that name, his ‘Drew Blenheim’ in no way resembles the famous futurologist, and his ‘United States of America’ is not even a burlesque upon the real United States of Armorica.

  I couldn’t hear him.

  ‘Can’t hear you, Blenheim. The line must be bad.’

  ‘Or mad, Hank. I wonder what that would take?’

  ‘What what?’

  ‘What would it take to drive a telephone system out of its mind, eh? So that it wasn’t just giving wrong num
bers, but madly right ones. Let’s see: Content-addressable computer memories to shift the conversations ...’

  I stopped listening. A bug was crawling up the window frame across the room. It moved like a cockroach, but I couldn’t be sure.

  ‘Look, Blenheim, I’m pretty busy today. Is there something on your mind?’

  He ploughed right on. ‘... so if you’re trying to reserve a seat on the plane to Seville, you’d get a seat at the opera instead. While the person who wants the opera seat is really making an appointment with a barber, whose customer is just then talking to the box-office of Hair, or maybe making a hairline reservation ...’

  ‘Blenheim, I’m talking to you.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What was it you called me up about?’

  ‘Oh, this and that. I was wondering, for instance, whether parrots have internal clocks.’

  ‘What?’ I still couldn’t be sure whether the bug was a cockroach or not, but I saluted just in case.