The Science Fiction Megapack

by Bova, Ben; Brown, Frederic

  Newspapers, magazines and every other medium added to the assault, never letting it cool. It was the most horrendous campaign, for sheer concentration, that had ever battered at the public mind. The public reeled, blinked, shook its head to clear it, gawked, and rushed out to buy.

  Christmas was not going to be a failure after all. Department store managers who had, grudgingly and under strong sales pressure, made space for a single coffin somewhere at the rear of the store, now rushed to the telephones like touts with a direct pronouncement from a horse. Everyone who possibly could got into the act. Grocery supermarkets put in casket departments. The Association of Pharmaceutical Retailers, who felt they had some claim to priority, tried to get court injunctions to keep caskets out of service stations, but were unsuccessful because the judges were all out buying caskets. Beauty parlors showed real ingenuity in merchandising. Roads and streets clogged with delivery trucks, rented trailers, and whatever else could haul a coffin. The Stock Market went completely mad. Strikes were declared and settled within hours. Congress was called into session early. The President got authority to ration lumber and other materials suddenly in starvation-short supply. State laws were passed against cremation, under heavy lobby pressure. A new racket, called boxjacking, blossomed overnight.

  The Advertising Manager who had put the thing over had been fighting with all the formidable weapons of his breed to make his plant managers build up a stockpile. They had, but it went like a toupee in a wind tunnel. Competitive coffin manufacturers were caught napping, but by Wednesday after Thanksgiving they, along with the original one, were on a twenty-four hour, seven-day basis. Still only a fraction of the demand could be met. Jet passenger planes were stripped of their seats, supplied with Yankee gold, and sent to plunder the world of its coffins.

  It might be supposed that Christmas goods other than caskets would take a bad dumping. That was not so. Such was the upsurge of prosperity, and such was the shortage of coffins, that nearly everything—with a few exceptions—enjoyed the biggest season on record.

  On Christmas Eve the frenzy slumped to a crawl, though on Christmas morning there were still optimists out prowling the empty stores. The nation sat down to breathe. Mostly it sat on coffins, because there wasn’t space in the living rooms for any other furniture.

  There was hardly an individual in the United States who didn’t have, in case of sudden sharp pains in the chest, several boxes to choose from. As for the rest of the world, it had better not die just now or it would be literally a case of dust to dust.

  Of course everyone expected a doozy of a slump after Christmas. But our Advertising Manager, who by now was of course Sales Manager and First Vice President also, wasn’t settling for any boom-and-bust. He’d been a frustrated victim of his choice of industries for so many years that now, with his teeth in something, he was going to give it the old bite. He gave people a short breathing spell to arrange their coffin payments and move the presents out of the front rooms. Then, late in January, his new campaign came down like a hundred-megatonner.

  Within a week, everyone saw quite clearly that his Christmas models were now obsolete. The coffin became the new status symbol.

  The auto industry was of course demolished. Even people who had enough money to buy a new car weren’t going to trade in the old one and let the new one stand out in the rain. The garages were full of coffins. Petroleum went along with Autos. (Though there were those who whispered knowingly that the same people merely moved over into the new industry. It was noticeable that the center of it became Detroit.) A few trucks and buses were still being built, but that was all.

  Some of the new caskets were true works of art. Others—well, there was variety. Compact models appeared, in which the occupant’s feet were to be doubled up alongside his ears. One manufacturer pushed a circular model, claiming that by all the laws of nature the foetal position was the only right one. At the other extreme were virtual houses, ornate and lavishly equipped. Possibly the largest of all was the “Togetherness” model, triangular, with graduated recesses for Father, Mother, eight children (plus two playmates), and, in the far corner beyond the baby, the cat.

  The slump was over. Still, economists swore that the new boom couldn’t last either. They reckoned without the Advertising Manager, whose eyes gleamed brighter all the time. People already had coffins, which they polished and kept on display, sometimes in the new “Coffin-ports” being added to houses. The Advertising Manager’s reasoning was direct and to the point. He must get people to use the coffins; and now he had all the money to work with that he could use.

  The new note was woven in so gradually that it is not easy to put a finger on any one ad and say, “It began here.” One of the first was surely the widely-printed one showing a tattooed, smiling young man with his chin thrust out manfully, lying in a coffin. He was rugged-looking and likable (not too rugged for the spindly-limbed to identify with) and he oozed, even though obviously dead, virility at every pore. He was probably the finest-looking corpse since Richard the Lion-Hearted.

  Neither must one overlook the singing commercials. Possibly the catchiest of these, a really cute little thing, was achieved by jazzing up the Funeral March.

  It started gradually, and it was all so un-violent that few saw it as suicide. Teen-agers began having “Popping-off parties”. Some of their elders protested a little, but adults were taking it up too. The tired, the unappreciated, the ill and the heavy-laden lay down in growing numbers and expired. A black market in poisons operated for a little while, but soon pinched out. Such was the pressure of persuasion that few needed artificial aids. The boxes were very comfortable. People just closed their eyes and exited smiling.

  The Beatniks, who had their own models of coffin—mouldy, scroungy, and without lids, since the Beatniks insisted on being seen—placed their boxes on the Grant Avenue in San Francisco. They died with highly intellectual expressions, and eventually were washed by the gentle rain.

  Of course there were voices shouting calamity. When aren’t there? But in the long run, and not a very long one at that, they availed naught.

  * * *

  It isn’t hard to imagine the reactions of the rest of the world. So let us imagine a few.

  The Communist Block immediately gave its Stamp of Disapproval, denouncing the movement as a filthy Capitalist Imperialist Pig plot. Red China, which had been squabbling with Russia for some time about a matter of method, screamed for immediate war. Russia exposed this as patent stupidity, saying that if the Capitalists wanted to die, warring upon them would only help them. China surreptitiously tried out the thing as an answer to excess population, and found it good. It also appealed to the well-known melancholy facet of Russian nature. Besides, after pondering for several days, the Red Bloc decided it could not afford to fall behind in anything, so it started its own program, explaining with much logic how it differed.

  An elderly British philosopher endorsed the movement, on the grounds that a temporary setback in Evolution was preferable to facing up to anything.

  The Free Bloc, the Red Bloc, the Neutral Bloc and such scraps as had been too obtuse to find themselves a Bloc were drawn into the whirlpool in an amazingly short time, if in a variety of ways. In less than two years the world was rid of most of what had been bedeviling it.

  Oddly enough, the country where the movement began was the last to succumb completely. Or perhaps it is not so odd. Coffin-maker to the world, the American casket industry had by now almost completely automated box-making and gravedigging, with some interesting assembly lines and packaging arrangements; there still remained the jobs of management and distribution. The President of General Mortuary, an ebullient fellow affectionately called Sarcophagus Sam, put it well. “As long as I have a single prospective customer, and a single Stockholder,” he said, mangling a stogie and beetling his brows at the one reporter who’d showed up for the press conference, “I’ll try to put him in a coffin so I can pay him a dividend.”

  * * *<
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  Finally, though, a man who thought he must be the last living human, wandered contentedly about the city of Denver looking for the coffin he liked best. He settled at last upon a rich mahogany number with platinum trimmings, an Automatic Self-Adjusting Cadaver-contour Innerspring Wearever-Plastic-Covered Mattress with a built in bar. He climbed in, drew himself a generous slug of fine Scotch, giggled as the mattress prodded him exploringly, closed his eyes and sighed in solid comfort. Soft music played as the lid closed itself.

  From a building nearby a turkey-buzzard swooped down, cawing in raucous anger because it had let its attention wander for a moment. It was too late. It clawed screaming at the solid cover, hissed in frustration and finally gave up. It flapped into the air again, still grumbling. It was tired of living on dead small rodents and coyotes. It thought it would take a swing over to Los Angeles, where the pickings were pretty good.

  As it moved westward over parched hills, it espied two black dots a few miles to its left. It circled over for a closer look, then grunted and went on its way. It had seen them before. The old prospector and his burro had been in the mountains for so long the buzzard had concluded they didn’t know how to die.

  The prospector, whose name was Adams, trudged behind his burro toward the buildings that shimmered in the heat, humming to himself now and then or addressing some remark to the beast. When he reached the outskirts of Denver he realized something was amiss. He stood and gazed at the quiet scene. Nothing moved except some skinny packrats and a few sparrows foraging for grain among the unburied coffins.

  “Tarnation!” he said to the burro. “Martians?”

  A half-buried piece of newspaper fluttered in the breeze. He walked forward slowly and picked it up. It told him enough so that he understood.

  “They’re gone, Evie,” he said to the burro, “all gone.” He put his arm affectionately around her neck. “I reckon it’s up to me and you agin. We got to start all over.” He stood back and gazed at her with mild reproach. “I shore hope they don’t favor your side of the house so much this time.”

  EGOCENTRIC ORBIT, by John Cory

  Near the end of his fifteenth orbit as Greenland slipped by noiselessly below, he made the routine measurements that tested the operation of his space capsule and checked the automatic instruments which would transmit their stored data to Earth on his next pass over Control. Everything normal; all mechanical devices were operating perfectly.

  This information didn’t surprise him, in fact, he really didn’t even think about it. The previous orbits and the long simulated flights on Earth during training had made such checks routine and perfect results expected. The capsules were developed by exhaustive testing both on the ground and as empty satellites before entrusting them to carry animals and then the first human.

  He returned to contemplation of the panorama passing below and above, although as he noted idly, above and below had lost some of their usual meaning. Since his capsule, like all heavenly bodies, was stable in position with respect to the entire universe and, thanks to Sir Isaac Newton and his laws, never changed, the Earth and the stars alternated over his head during each orbit. “Up” now meant whatever was in the direction of his head. He remembered that even during his initial orbit when the Earth first appeared overhead he accepted the fact as normal. He wondered if the other two had accepted it as easily.

  For there had been two men hurled into orbit before he ventured into space. Two others who had also passed the rigorous three-year training period and were selected on the basis of over-all performance to precede him. He had known them both well and wondered again what had happened on their flights. Of course, they had both returned, depending upon what your definition of return was. The capsules in which they had ventured beyond Earth had returned them living. But this was to be expected, for even the considerable hazards of descent through the atmosphere and the terrible heating which occurred were successfully surmounted by the capsule.

  Naturally, it had not been expected that the satellites would have to be brought down by command from the ground. But this, too, was part of the careful planning—radio control of the retro-rockets that move the satellite out of orbit by reducing its velocity. Of course, ground control was to be used only if the astronaut failed to ignite the retro-rockets himself. He remembered everyone’s surprise and relief when the first capsule was recovered and its occupant found to be alive. They had assumed that in spite of all precautions he was dead because he had not fired the rockets on the fiftieth orbit and it was necessary to bring him down on the sixty-fifth.

  Recovery alive only partially solved the mystery, for the rescuers and all others were met by a haughty, stony silence from the occupant. Batteries of tests confirmed an early diagnosis: complete and utter withdrawal; absolute refusal to communicate. Therapy was unsuccessful.

  * * *

  The second attempt was similar in most respects, except that command return was made on the thirty-first orbit after the astronaut’s failure to de-orbit at the end of the thirtieth. His incoherent babble of moons, stars, and worlds was no more helpful than the first.

  Test after test confirmed that no obvious organic damage had been incurred by exposure outside of the Earth’s protective atmosphere. Biopsy of even selected brain tissues seemed to show that microscopic cellular changes due to prolonged weightlessness or primary cosmic-ray bombardment, which had been suggested by some authorities, were unimportant. Somewhat reluctantly, it was decided to repeat the experiment a third time.

  The launching was uneventful. He was sent into space with the precision he expected. The experience was exhilarating and, although he had anticipated each event in advance, he could not possibly have foreseen the overpowering feeling that came over him. Weightlessness he had experienced for brief periods during training, but nothing could match the heady impression of continuous freedom from gravity.

  Earth passing overhead was also to be expected from the simple laws of celestial mechanics but his feeling as he watched it now was inexpressible. It occurred to him that perhaps this was indeed why he was here, because he could appreciate such experiences best. He had been told the stars would be bright, unblinking, and an infinitude in extent, but could mere descriptions or photographs convey the true seeing?

  On his twenty-first orbit he completed his overseeing the entire surface of the planet in daylight. He had seen more of Earth than anyone able to tell about it, but only he had the true feeling of it. The continents were clearly visible, as were the oceans and both polar ice caps. The shapes were familiar but in only a remote way. A vague indistinctness borne of distance served to modify the outlines and he alone was seeing and understanding. On the dark side of the planet large cities were marked by indistinct light areas which paled to insignificance compared to the stars and his sun.

  He speculated about the others who had only briefly experienced these sights. Undoubtedly they weren’t as capable of fully grasping or appreciating any of these things as he was. It was quite clear that no one else but he could encompass the towering feeling of power and importance generated by being alone in the Universe.

  At the end of the twenty-fifth orbit he disabled the radio control of the retro-rockets and sat back with satisfaction to await the next circuit of his Earth around Him.

  DEAD RINGER, by Lester del Rey

  Dane Phillips slouched in the window seat, watching the morning crowds on their way to work and carefully avoiding any attempt to read Jordan’s old face as the editor skimmed through the notes. He had learned to make his tall, bony body seem all loose-jointed relaxation, no matter what he felt. But the oversized hands in his pockets were clenched so tightly that the nails were cutting into his palms.

  Every tick of the old-fashioned clock sent a throb racing through his brain. Every rustle of the pages seemed to release a fresh shot of adrenalin into his blood stream. This time, his mind was pleading. It has to be right this time....

  Jordan finished his reading and shoved the folder
back. He reached for his pipe, sighed, and then nodded slowly. “A nice job of researching, Phillips. And it might make a good feature for the Sunday section, at that.”

  It took a second to realize that the words meant acceptance, for Phillips had prepared himself too thoroughly against another failure. Now he felt the tautened muscles release, so quickly that he would have fallen if he hadn’t been braced against the seat.

  He groped in his mind, hunting for words, and finding none. There was only the hot, sudden flame of unbelieving hope. And then an almost blinding exultation.

  * * *

  Jordan didn’t seem to notice his silence. The editor made a neat pile of the notes, nodding again. “Sure. I like it. We’ve been short of shock stuff lately and the readers go for it when we can get a fresh angle. But naturally you’d have to leave out all that nonsense on Blanding. Hell, the man’s just buried, and his relatives and friends—”

  “But that’s the proof!” Phillips stared at the editor, trying to penetrate through the haze of hope that had somehow grown chilled and unreal. His thoughts were abruptly disorganized and out of his control. Only the urgency remained. “It’s the key evidence. And we’ve got to move fast! I don’t know how long it takes, but even one more day may be too late!”

  Jordan nearly dropped the pipe from his lips as he jerked upright to peer sharply at the younger man. “Are you crazy? Do you seriously expect me to get an order to exhume him now? What would it get us, other than lawsuits? Even if we could get the order without cause—which we can’t!”

  Then the pipe did fall as he gaped open-mouthed. “My God, you believe all that stuff. You expected us to publish it straight!”