New Writings in SF 28 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Kenneth Bulmer

  * * * *

  That’s all really. As I say he was disturbed for a few months, but even that was less obvious after a while. He rang through one evening in November to say that he was just leaving the plant. I took the call myself and said ‘Thank you’, and ‘I’ll see you later then’, or some other obvious remark, and there was nothing at all in his voice or his words to distinguish that call from the ones he had made every evening for years. He didn’t come in, and at twenty-two I raised the alarm as a precaution: thinking that he had been delayed at the plant. At four we sent out a small search party to follow his route, and later that day there was a big sweep with as many volunteers as they could get from the pool and a lot of personnel servitors. People were very anxious and several citizens wanted to help; so they were issued with masks and deployed in the block lanes, where Mrs. Rhiak fell off a monorail and broke a wrist. There was no trace at all of Mr. Coombes.

  To me there is a pattern in what I’ve told you, and of all its parts it is the cat which worries me most. Mr. Coombes was certain that the cat died, and I’m sure he came to believe that if it was not there the voice must have taken it. But I believe myself that it had been paralysed, then galvanized, by terror; and had simply run away: so that it should be the most ordinary element in the pattern: far more natural for instance than Rachel Kwe escaping from Earth to a glass bowl, and more credible than alien voices in the Midlands. But all those other things are just events. Very unusual events it is true, but Mr. Coombes had had an unusual life, and things which seemed to me unbelievable were a commonplace to him.

  It is easy to explain the disappearance of the cat. What worries me; or at least undermines my reasoning with bad dreams, is that it completes a neat array of symbols. I think that for Mr. Coombes cats were a talisman of true survival. We survive too, but he saw the last small birds of his childhood die in the air, and the other free animals of his maturity: rats and people; scutter fearfully to the safe cages of their blocks and gullies, while cats still prowl down plastic corridors as if they were in living jungle. In the summertime they go on the roofs and stretch out in the sun: dozing on their backs like babies with their paws in the air, or they chase paper blown by the wind. In winter they sit by the heat vents and wash themselves and snap at the small insects blown up through the ducts, or they hunt through the service levels and eat the insects there. A cat lying with its eyes closed for hours in the sun might as well be anywhere at any time, and cats stalking mice through long grass a hundred years ago cannot have been more absorbed than our cats stalking cockroaches among the drying frames.

  Mr. Coombes made himself stand easily in crowded cubicles and accept greetings and handclasps with a smile; and would see through the bars some underfed cat washing itself with its eyes closed, and he would envy it.

  Now Mr. Coombes came to believe that the dead cat had gone through a door which he might pass alive. His only evidence was his own need and I believe none of it, and yet since he disappeared I worry. I know it is nonsense but I connect Rachel Kwe and the cat and Mr. Coombes and I imagine that the voice came again. Of course it didn’t because there was no vertigo, but I imagine that it came again and that William Coombes walked into it. He had always been obsessed with the possibility of escape, but I don’t think of him as escaping. He had already seen the only escape, in acceptance: there can be nowhere else to go that would have any meaning for a man.

  I remember that when he found the cat he could not bring himself to leave it alone to die.

  He was so bound to Earth that when he thought of escape he thought of translation to some other, empty, Earth. But suppose one escaped to something one could not sense, or could sense but not interpret: to be trapped in one’s own skin, or darkness or infinity or the little broken gyro of one’s own unoriented mind?

  We have a song here which fits to the tune of Vostock Ferry. Its chorus goes ‘No one to share my bath. No one to share my bath. We’re five to a bed but that’s all I ask, No one to share my bath.’

  Probably he just died.

  <>

  * * * *

  THE WAY ERVING WENT

  Grahame Leman

  Here is a forceful and demotic example of the old saw that there are more outside than in. Grahame Leman, who last appeared in New Writings in SF volume 23, points up sharply the proposition that comedy strikes more directly to the vital heart of our human affairs than ever tragedy can, especially if your buddy goes blue and whump, into the bargain.

  * * * *

  I

  Erving has disappeared, and I don’t think I can stand it in this bin without Erving. It’s not just that he has disappeared, and so isn’t here: it’s the way he went. Well, let’s take it from the beginning:

  If it’s a rest you’re wanting, some respite from the Sturm und Drang of life in these Americas at the dirty end of the twentieth century, don’t you make the (my!) big mistake of acting crazy to get yourself put away in the bin. All right, I do know the only way to get into a hospital at all these days - unless you’re a millionaire, have the kind of job that carries Gold Cross with it, or are dying with useful spare parts to spare - is to act too crazy to be safe on the street and get yourself certified and binned. But believe one who’s tried it: you’re two three times better off on the outside, sweating twelve hours a day to keep up with the cybersystem, sleeping five to a room, spending five hours of the rest of the day processing pollutants out of tapwater, and trying to believe the food the government says is safe is safe; even if you had a fine friend like Erving inside with you. Much better off.

  Since the taxpayer stopped taxpaying for exponential annual increase in research funds, cost-benefit analysis has hit science some blows, and research has to pay or else; while the population explosion and the soaring incidence of pollution-induced disease had finished Medicare before it hardly began, and patients have to pay their way in some kind of coin.

  This bin (a half-heartedly converted military camp down in NJ) lives by doing cut-price contract research for European and Third World countries and corporations, and they keep the prices down by getting plenty of mileage out of the experimental preparations (that is, the people here apart from the staff). Professor Oehler is using me to find out whether or not shock treatment will suppress artificial psychoses induced by lysergic acid derivatives; Doctor (of philosophy, psychopharmacologist) Trice is trying to see if he can develop a non-addictive major analgesic before he kills me; I have been pressed into some Australian researcher’s somatic group therapy trials; and Doctor (medic, specializing sexology) Myra Feuerbach is trying to induce functional impotence in me by crash hypnosis, in aid of the population problem. It’s all voluntary, of course: they have to ask you to sign their piece of paper, and if you won’t sign they can’t touch you, the government is very hot on that; but after they’ve given you the crash course of spider 98, the complex of huts where they keep the people who don’t volunteer and attract a diagnosis of antisocial tendencies, most of us do volunteer; even Erving volunteered.

  What with the post-shock amnesias, the acid fugues, the painful withdrawals from addictions to Trice’s unlucky shots, the violence in the somatic group therapy (only last week I won a black eye and two cracked ribs fending off a butch ex-teamster who had been shot full of barb and told to act out his philithy phantasies), and of course the sexual obsessions implanted in me by fire-eyes Feuerbach’s graunched hypnoses, it’s a wonder I can manage to keep the ward clean and do the laundry and the dishes (that’s my occupational therapy, for reality-testing and to keep my manual dexterities in fine tune).

  Doctor Ellen (sour redhead from Seattle, psychiatric intern) Born, who supervises the symbolic group therapy, didn’t love Erving: like me, only much more so, Erving was bright, well and curiously read, been around, and he could put pickled Born down in argument without straining; which made her tell him (in spite of the fact that her idea of a warm human response was, notoriously, a smouldering fit of the sulks) that paranoiacs are all
alike, they can make any kind of cold sense but no kind of warm sense - which was why Erving was a mere preparation while she was a quack.

  Erving had gotten into this bin here by pestering the FBI, the air force, the space force, sundry congressmen, anybody who would stand still for it: telling them he was a Martian investigator, come to discover why the surface of Ølorn appeared so diseased from a great distance, and that we Ølornians must do what he (Erving) said - before we wiped ourselves out in some ecocrash. Well, as they told him, more than a dozen sensible men have been to Mars to see (keeping their hair short and changing their underpants daily: all the way thither, there, and back again), and we just know, like scientifically, that there’s no life on Mars at all like Erving: which makes Erving a nut, grade A; especially as he kept insisting he was the only (inconsistently) man alive who knew how to save us from an early and irremediable disaster - because people who see themselves like that do very often kill people without warning, for reasons that don’t make any consensually valid kind of sense to the consensus.

  It didn’t bother Erving when Born, one of the other quacks, or one of his enemies among the patients threw the no-life-on-Mars objection at him: of course there’s no Erving-like life on Mars now, he used to say, because the true Martians had made a few itsy mistakes with the Martial ecosystem and had had to move off, most of them to some other star a few years off; but a few to what Erving would call Ølorn (pronounced ‘fer-lawn’, and supposed to be the name of our Earth in the Old High Martial tongue), where they degenerated in a few centuries into henge-builders, metaphysicians, cave-painters, prophets, Homeridae, geometers, and primitive rabble of that kind. Hadn’t we ever wondered, he used to ask, why he from Mars was just plain what we call human on Ølorn?: well, that was why, it was obvious once you knew the history.

  Now, I just don’t have the brains Erving had (you know how it is, I can appreciate a thought once someone else has thought it, no matter how far out, but I can’t think such thoughts myself): I could never have gotten myself into the bin by thinking up a ramified, rebuttal-proof (you should have heard his refutations of refutations of his claims) delusional system like Erving’s lovely messiah-from-Mars routine.

  What I did, I just tried to tell everybody the plain truth all the time: I had discovered as a child that people think you are at least mad and probably bad, too, if you do that. For instance, I used to teach my students at Columbia (till they fired me) that there is no such thing as knowledge, nothing can be known, and what passes for scientific knowledge is just the current fashion in preconceptions and about as durable as this season’s skirt length or keynote colour; and I still tell the quacks here the same thing: if I was comfortably dead like Hume or Kant, they might cite me in the jargonized papers and reports they keep endlessly writing; as I’m uncomfortably alive, they write me down in the case file as dysfunctionally out of touch with consensually valid reality, and wonder aloud where I can hear them about the possibility of curing scepticism by surgical intervention (cutting things out of my head or implanting things in it). But what got me in here, I guess, was my campaign insisting that we would have to do a crash cull of nine in ten of the people on Earth, to avoid a more toxic ecocrash (including myself, as a philosopher with none of the skills, such as horsemanship, that would be needed in a de-industrialized world): well, you know who my father is - I am too important to laugh off or put in jail, but there is no harm in saying I am mad and disregarding my simple arithmetic on that count.

  * * * *

  Nobody, least of all the Born, believed that the symbolic group therapy would do anybody any good, bar providing well-paid work for Born and passing the time for the preparations (sorry, patients): she didn’t think she would change the minds of people who were all either more intelligent or tougher characters than she was, and we didn’t think we would succumb to the going theodicy and become reconciled to life, either in here or out there. The Born used to treat the sessions as pure entertainment: cabaret, circus with clowns for the kiddies, Roman circus with Christians for the grown-ups, carny With monsters; like the boxing in prisons, this got quite a reputation as a free show, and we used to have to put up with visiting researchers, medics, politicos, and sundry girl friends from all over the state and even from the big cities.

  The star turn was the Born trying to knock down Erving’s ramified messiah-from-Mars routine: she spent a lot of her spare time browsing about in the xenological literature about life on other bodies in the solar system, and she used to pitch Erving some real wild screw balls.

  For instance, she used to say that diggers on Mars had found nothing in the Martial strata to suggest an evolution of even large living things with rudimentary brains, so how did Erving account for the existence of ‘true Martians’?: and Erving used to say, the trouble with her idea of evolution was that it was just too parochial, both in space and in time; that people evolved in the universe, not on planets — which explained the puzzling discontinuity in the fossil records, discreditably neglected by the blinkered evolutionists of Ølorn. Or she would ask why, if there had been true Martians all along, they had never come to call before?: and Erving just said they did in earlier times, having dropped in now and again to remind the degenerate plantations of the uses of fire, to do the consulting mathematical astronomy for sundry henge-builders, and anything else that seemed useful when they happened to be passing and looked in; but, after one of their ships blew up and left a whole crew stranded in the part of Ølorn we call Greece, they didn’t risk landing for many centuries. So why didn’t they come now more often, the Born would go on, now that we were signalling our proliferation by radiating television Westerns, newsak, old movies, relevant documentaries, and late night yak shows to the neighbouring stars?: and Erving would say, did she visit pestiferous slums precisely because she read in her paper how pestiferous they were, or didn’t she roll up the window of the cab going thru Harlem?

  The only way the Born could cheat a win in these gladiations, was to turn after a while to one of the distinguished visitors and tell them to notice the characteristic hermetic elaboration of a full-blown delusional system, prognosis lousy.

  Erving used to cheer me up, when I felt black guilty and blue low about copping out of the struggle for negative growth and escaping in here, where nobody will expect me to know what to do next about the pullulating population, the pollution, the shortages, and the politicians’ daily ritual speeches exalting Growth as the answer to all these ‘transient’ problems.

  ‘Suppose’, Erving would say, ‘Ølorn is destroyed in some ecocrash - well, so what?: surely, that would be better than things going on as they go only more so? Don’t forget what all your scientists say, that there must be hundreds of millions of planets in the universe bearing intelligent life: so whatever happens here is about as important as one bacterium in a culture dying a little sooner instead of living a little longer; a wrong evolutionary move will be cancelling itself, that’s all. What you have here on Ølorn is a comedy of presumption, not some grand hubristic Tragedy.’

  Tragedy or comedy?; comedy or Tragedy?: that’s what I keep thinking now. Now: since last night: when Erving disappeared.

  The Born once brought a friend of hers down from New York City to lecture us on the dramatic genres (‘So you’re all role-players, you bums; it follows you should get some of those deep insights from Buck’s inside view of the drammer, right?’): a high-yaller Jewish television writer, with a funny right half to his face - the alcoholic adman who spawned him used to knock him about in the cradle (once too hard) when he cried at night. According to him, Tragedy is sentimental, deceiving: a way of slopping a sugar coat of such goodies as glory, destiny, dignity, whataveyou on things like defeat and death, that should be taken straight; whereas comedy is clear-eyed, informative: shows you stupid mistakes you don’t have to make for yourself to convince yourself.

  ‘Mind you’, I remember him saying, ‘You might want to take a good look at me and discount my line. Just try t
o imagine me shaving in front of the bathroom mirror, then sitting down at the typewriter to knock together some glory and dignity to wear around.

  * * * *

  As I was saying, Erving went last night. While I was polishing the brass in the topstaff john, Erving sneaked in and hauled me off to the furnace room for a quiet talk. There were some makings behind our ward’s own loose brick, back of the boiler, and I rolled a fat joint for us to share; but get this straight, I’m used to the stuff, and it was weak weed anyway, cut to Hell; so there’s no need to think I wasn’t clear-headed. After some chit-chat about the deliberate starvation policy of the new Indian government, Erving made me wedge the bench between the front of the boiler and the only door to the furnace room, and sit on it so we wouldn’t be discovered.

  ‘Frank’, he said: ‘I got to say so long. More like good-bye. Thing is, I’m leaving Ølorn tonight - for good, I guess.’

  ‘What you mean, you’re leaving here, Erving? You leave here, about fifteen-point-five current experiments going to get screwed up to nothing - and three quacks are going to lose grant renewal. How you think you’re going to get out of here Erving? Are the Black Panthers coming for you with a regiment of armour or something.

  ‘Well, I got to be leaving, Frank. Listen, did you see the Sunday supplements in the television lounge yesterday? Did you see how the scientists say they have discovered a USO - that is. Unprecedented Stellar Object, around the co-ordinates of Vega in the Lyre? Did you see how the Russians on the moon have accused Italian photographers of making unauthorized pictures of the private lives of their crews up there? Well, Frank, that wasn’t no stellar object; and it wasn’t no Italian paperazzi with long lenses: that was my wife come for me.’