A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  Our home was far from any sign of civilization. It was very rarely that anyone came by; I was alone with my son. The tragedy of his mother slowly grew less vivid to me. I hardly thought about it any longer. The blatter would never be investigated. But if anyone ever should become curious, she had died in an accident.

  I taught Ricky to talk. It was wonderful to watch him trying to utter his first words and to see the happy smile flashing across his face, when he said “father” for the first time.

  Ricky was four, his body was well developed for his age. He could run around and chatter tirelessly.

  One day, I took him out into the yard. It was a cool, clear morning.

  “What’s rustling there, father?” he asked me.

  “The wind, son.”

  “It sounds so pretty.”

  The wind produced much rustling. The gentle rubbing together of the leaves in the nearest trees. The hissing of the blades of grass as they brushed one another. The rustling of the faraway stream. It sounded like music.

  Ricky stood there, feet planted far apart, head bowed, face intent, and listened.

  The wind, however, brought not just rustling to us. It also carried along the scent of moist earth, of animals and flowers.

  “Father, I want to see!”

  I did not answer him.

  “Tell me what you’re seeing, father.”

  “I see trees that are a hundred times your size. I see the tall grass swaying slightly in the breeze. I see the sun, Altair, that causes everything to grow.”

  I had described for him a hundred times how a tree, grass, corn, animals and plants looked. But usually I could not find the words necessary to make him understand I could only explain how I saw them, but how can a blind child conceive green, red or yellow?

  His hands were his eyes. He lived in a world that was different from mine.

  We stayed outdoors a long while. I led him through the tall grass. His fingers felt along the stems, carefully and gently. He was quite solemn when we returned to the house.

  We often sat outside the house. The setting sun cast a red glow onto his face. He crouched at my side and turned his head to the sun. We remained silent and listened to the bustling that the wind created.

  Then the day arrived when the empty eyesockets filled out and the eyelids grew taut. I didn’t mention it to him, but I hoped that perhaps a miracle would occur and he might be able to see.

  Ricky frequently rubbed his hands against his eyelids, and he wondered about the balls that had formed.

  “Ricky, try to lift your eyelids, just try it.”

  “I have tried, tried again, but I can’t. I can’t raise them. They won’t move.”

  “Then try once more. Keep trying.”

  He made an effort. His face twisted from the effort. His shadowy eyelids jerked. His face was damp with perspiration.

  “I can’t,” he sobbed.

  Ricky pressed his head against my chest. His body was shaken as if by convulsions.

  “It’s no use, father, it’s no use. I’ll be blind forever.”

  I caressed his small body. He pressed closer to me. I cleared my throat. He was crying softly to himself, and his tears were falling on my shirt. I turned his head to one side and tried to raise an eyelid. I succeeded, and an eye stared lifelessly at me. An eye such as I had never seen.

  An eye that glistened in many colors.

  An eye that consisted of only a pupil.

  An eye that was the color of a lily.

  In fright, I let the eyelid slip shut. I took Ricky back into the house. I gave him only brief answers that evening, I was worried.

  Was the past to rise from the grave? Were the lilies about to threaten me again? They had taken my wife. Now, my son, too?

  I was sitting in my room. I heard front door openings and I went to the window. Ricky was going out in the yard.

  He acted unsure of himself. He put one foot in front of the other in a hesitating manner. Then he stood still. His nostrils began to move a little. His lips opened. He walked slowly along. He went down the path that was paved with flat stones, opened the gate to the yard and walked into the thicket. The wind brought me an odor that I knew all too well. Ricky was strutting along.

  I woke from my paralysis, leaped over the windowsill and raced after my son.

  “Ricky, stop there,” I yelled to him. He didn’t listen to me. His steps became quicker, more purposeful. He went along unerringly.

  Then I saw them.

  I bad caught up to Ricky and was pulling him back.

  “Let go, father. Let go. I’ve got to go to them. The perfume. I’ve got to go to them.”

  He fought against me. He struggled with me. I was frightened, and I knew that my concern had not been unwarranted.

  Under a bush, there were five lilies.

  “I’ve got to go, father. Please let me go. Don’t you see, father? I’ve just got to go.”

  I saw, all too well. I thought about my wife and about the dependence with which she had become attached to these damned flowers. And I wasn’t going to lose my son, too.

  The wind veered and pushed the odor away from us.

  Ricky suddenly stood motionless.

  “Where are you?” he asked. But the wind could not answer him.

  I saw the disappointment that was imaged on his face.

  My hands were still trembling when we went into the living room.

  While Ricky was asleep, I went out and looked at the lilies. They had taken away from me my wife, but they were not going to get my son.

  My wife died when I chopped them down. But my son became normal. Did the plants, perhaps, have less power over my son?

  I stooped and began to pull out the flowers by the roots. I intended to bury the flowers in some faraway place. Then I heard my son scream. I threw down the plants, heedlessly, and ran to him.

  He was sitting on his bed and was staring at me. I examined him. His breathing was difficult. His eyelids twitched and then—very slowly—they slipped back. I was unable to move. Finally both eyes gleamed at me.

  The eyes were alive, really alive. They were multi-colored, and the hues flowed into one another. A horribly beautiful symphony of colors.

  The eyes took possession of me. They became bigger, even bigger. The display of colors began to turn wildly. The hues flowed back and forth. They mixed together and broke free again. I felt my body stiffening as the eyes gained control of my physical self.

  The colors moved ever quicker, ever livelier, ever more madly. I shouted; my head was ready to burst. The colors were eating into my brain. Everything was darkening around me. I fell to the floor helplessly.

  When I awoke, I was sitting outside the house. I turned my head. I felt weak, as if I had had a beating.

  “Come.” I heard a soft voice in my mind. A tender, quiet, enticing voice that conveyed to my body a sweet excitement that I had never experienced until then.

  “Come.” I sensed it again.

  I arose and went around the house. “Come,” it lured me again.

  My son was lying there where I had buried his mother.

  “Come,” it insisted.

  Those five lilies turned toward me. “Come.”

  They were beautiful. They were superb. They were splendid. They were all my longing. They were my fulfillment.

  My son was caressing one of these splendid creations. He stroked the tender stem and the soft bud.

  “Come, caress us. Come!”

  I crouched down before them. I extended my hand, hesitatingly. The flowers were too beautiful, they were too precious to be touched by my clumsy hands. I was afraid of hurting them.

  My fingers slid along the stem and came to the flower petals, soft like velvet. Awe radiated through my body. When the sun set, the blossoms of the magnificences closed up.

  “Go!” they breathed.

  “Come again, when the sun rises,” they whispered to me.

  “Go!” they repeated.

  I stood
up and went into the house with my son. I fell asleep soon. When the sun rose, the enticement was back again.

  In a short time, I acquired power over my body. I defended myself against the enticement of the flowers. I fought a useless battle. The enticement was there, stronger than anything that I had ever undergone in my life. Now I finally understood my wife, understood her actions, now that I was going through the same things. The enticement became stronger with every passing second, became even stronger and tore up my inmost being. My power of opposition broke up like dead grass. I needed the beauty, the gentleness, the sweetness of the flowers, as an addict longs for his narcotics. The enticement was present, it drowned all my inhibitions, my objections, my fears. My opposition had been too meager, I had lost the battle, which really had been no battle.

  The enticement was here again, insinuating and sweet. “Come!”

  And I came. END

  THE CURE-ALL

  Winston K. Marks

  What sort of disease is totally incurable? It was no academic question to Nick—he had it!

  What was happening was far from apparent during the earlier days of the epidemic. When a guy is sick he expects to get well. His doctor expects him to get well. His worst enemy expects him to get well—unless the illness is declared terminal.

  I think I might have been one of the first to notice what was happening, or maybe I was just the first to give it a second thought. And that could be because I had less on my mind to distract me.

  I was panhandling during summer vacation, bed panhandling, that is, after my second year of pre-medics. The work of a hospital orderly at the Cape was demanding only in the hours you put in. My duties consisted mainly of gathering specimens from the hordes of astronauts during their months of quarantine and debriefing after their return from out there.

  They were a crummy lot as a rule. First thing you did was hose them down so you could stand to be in the same room with them. Then you took scrapings and samples of sputum, exhalation and excretions for the lab boys, to see if they’d brought anything back with them they hadn’t left with. Then an intern, made up like a surgeon, would take a 6cc blood sample.

  Toivo Leskinenn, Storekeeper First Class, left Earth an albino, and returned from planet-hopping in the 9th System a pink-cheeked, brown-eyed, black-haired stranger.

  His Finnish features and fingerprints were unchanged. But what shook me up was that after nineteen months of typical strain and privation in space, Physical Therapy reported him in perfect condition. No emaciation or digestive problems, and surprisingly little perspiration accumulation.

  While the medics were marveling over the change in Toivo’s hair and eye-color, I was thinking more about how exceptionally healthy he appeared. He bounced out of his sauna and stood under the cold shower for ten minutes singing folk songs to himself.

  Then he came out, shook like a dog and sprayed me with a huge sneeze. That’s when I caught the bug.

  The incubation period, as I think of it, was eight days. On the ninth, I had three eggs and halfa pound of bacon for breakfast, a 16-ounce steak for lunch and half a gallon of beef stew for dinner. Which was not bad for a light eater like me.

  I went to bed early to digest and to reflect over my sudden appetite. But I fell asleep at once, fully expecting to feel awful in the middle of the night.

  Instead, I awoke to a remarkable sensation of well-being, physically and mentally. I was first one in the shower for a change, and I emerged with a soul-satisfying sneeze that wakened my three dormmates.

  Fat Paul stirred, sniffled and muttered, “You’re catching my damned cold.”

  Among them, Paul, Harry and Solly kept a nasty cold going all the time. Although I had been immune to colds all my life, I wondered if he migjht be right. Then I noticed that the annoying post-nasal drip with which I was born was gone. I stepped out onto our private patio facing the sunrise and breathed in the bland early morning Florida air while I toweled myself.

  Solly came out in his robe, stepping gingerly so as not to jiggle the bags under his eyes. Unlike the rest of us, Solly was a full-time, year-around orderly with a magic feel for the dice and a perpetual hangover from boozing away the money he won in the floating games.

  He grunted, “You look like you just discovered the sunrise.”

  I said, “I feel wonderful this morning, Solly.”

  Harry came out in his shorts, hollow-chested and wan from sharing Fat Paul’s’ cold. “How come you never get infected, Nick?” he asked. “I manage to pick up every cruddy bug the astros bring back. You don’t even catch a cold.”

  At twenty, you don’t think much about your health as long as you’re not hurting, but this morning on the way to the hospital at Cape K. I found myself pitying the chronic ills of my fellow workers and appreciating a new awareness of my lusty physicality. And I thought back to Toivo Leskinenn and his fantastic resistance to the ravages of prolonged space exploration on alien planets.

  A fortnight later I had something else to ponder. The required semi-monthly physical checkup showed I had gained half an inch in height and ten much-needed pounds, in spite of my appetite having diminished to its usual birdlike norm.

  It was trying to rain when I parked my electro next to Harry’s in front of our little beach hut in the dorm complex on a Wednesday night. Low barometer. That meant Fat Paul’s sinuses would be hurting.

  They were all there as I hauled in a little late, but nothing else was as usual. Skinny Harry was gulping a thick, homemade milkshake while Fat Paul was sipping a small glass of orange juice. It should have been the other way around. And a goblet of beer, flat and untouched; sat at Solly’s elbow. Fat Paul, who never went swimming because of his sinuses, was trying to talk Solly into the loan of his swimming trunks.

  “You’ll split ’em,” Solly was saying as I came in. “But go ahead. Just buy me a new pair if you wreck them.”

  A minute later Fat Paul surprised us all by racing across the beach into the surf in Solly’s trunks find nary a split. “That boy’s lost some weight,” Harry observed thoughtfully.

  I said, “How long has he been on this orange juice kick?”

  He shrugged, and Solly asked, “How long you been off cigarettes, Nick?”

  We looked at each other. Then we all stared at Solly’s flat beer, still untasted. “Funny thing,” he said. “Ever since I started sneezing the other day I sort of lost my taste for the stuff. And I notice we’ve all been sneezing more than usual.”

  Harry said, “You and Paul and I kinda gorged ourselves night before last. I always come down with Paul’s cold when I eat too much.”

  I said, “Paul hasn’t had a cold for almost a week,” which not-so-fat Paul confirmed a minute later as he came dripping out of the ocean.

  We got no further in our probe of the situation at that time because the phone hooted four times. This meant, push the will-comply button and don’t bother to pick up the receiver. All four of us were wanted at the base decontam unit on the double.

  Paul wrapped on a terrycloth and went in Harry’s electro. Solly went with me. “Damn!” Solly muttered. “ ‘I was hoping not to catch extra duty tonight.”

  “Missing a big game tonight?” I asked.

  “Game, shmame! They’ve retrieved the Rook 17 from dead orbit like they talked about trying this afternoon. That means we got a lot of sick people on our hands. Nothing else is heading in that would call for hoot-owl duty.”

  It was indeed the Rook 17 tilted at a crazy angle on the docking pad. The regular swing-shift orderlies had already removed all living crewmen, some 42 out of the complement of 58 who had signed on for interstellar explo three years ago. There wasn’t too much for us to do at first.

  For a change there were more medics around than orderlies and nurses. The place was crawling with brass of every military denomination.

  Not a natural-born eager beaver, Solly nevertheless was determined to elbow his way through in time to show a prompt punch-in time, which made for a clean rec
ord and more overtime pay regardless of how little you accomplished after you made the clock go “ding.”

  In his hurry he jostled a large female navy nurse, who scowled at him. “What’s the rush, Baggy-eyes?” Then she backed off and blinked through her bi-contacts. “Well, Solly, on the wagon long?”

  Then it came to me. My roommate’s droopy lids were wide open, the whites of his eyes snowy as a fresh pillowcase and the bags under them almost completely smoothed out. “Where’s the action?” he asked without dignifying her question with a reply.

  “Third deck below. Ward C. They’ve got them all in there, and if you two are on duty help get some ice pronto.”

  We found Harry and Paul already at the ice-bins scooping the large poly buckets full of chips. “Big fevers, I guess,” said Paul as he backed away with a full pail in each hand.

  Night nurse Roark came up and snatched one of his dripping buckets. “They caught something big out there, and it wasn’t salmon. The poor devils are burning up;”

  No less than an air force chicken colonel medic blocked our way to the down escalator. He pointed to the open-door size aperture across the corridor. “ ‘Take the chute, damn-it! They need that ice down there!” You get good velocity down a three-floor chute and you land running, which was the idea . . . through double doors into Ward C, which had been set up with several rows of narrow trough-like beds lined with rubbery sheets. Harry and Paul finished covering one incumbent, but Solly and I were directed to one of the remaining cadaverous torsos that wore nothing but a blistering red blush. As I leaned over to empty my ice pails I could feel the man’s body heat on my bare arms at least a foot above him. And from the pitiable look of his emaciated frame, he had little fuel left on his bones to support the energy loss. His cheeks were sucked in like he had a mouthful of vacuum, and his eyes bugged like he was trying to spit it out. I was at the feet, Solly at the chest. And just as we were both emptying our second buckets of ice chips on the hopeless carcass, Solly sneezed right in the patient’s face.