Orbit 14
Page 22
. . . Julie came up with another display printout.
“I’ve got smudges all over, but there are two high points you ought to look at,” she said.
Arthur choked and began rolling instrument paper frantically.
—Ibid., p. 36
“Aren’t you cheerful,” Julie said. “Well, me for breakfast. If I’m going to do any shaking around here I want to do it on a full stomach.”
Arthur exploded into his coffee.
—Ibid., p. 38
“Signal for Captain Henery,” he managed. “It’s all over.”
“And I missed it,” Julie said. “Somehow I never seem to get the big tremors. Someday, I’d like to feel a big one.”
Arthur got the hiccups.
—Ibid., p. 67
Yank Spoken Here (American Places and People, as Seen by British Novelists)
The gas-pipe withdrew to its hook. A cash-drawer shot out of the side of the pump within easy reach of him. But he was so intent on the patrolman that at first he didn’t notice, and the attendant had to parp on his hooter.
“To the pigs?” Danty said with a cynical grin. “Man, I should die laughing the day the pigs do anything for me! More like, they’d give Josh a medal.”
—Ibid., p. 137
Having collected coffee and food from the counter, they sat down around a table isolated in the centre of the room and Danty produced a stack of paper serviettes.
—Ibid., p. 193
Make him president of some university and fix him a medal, that should be enough.
“Well, Mr. President, have you fixed an activation date?”
“Yes. It has got to be handled right. Played properly, it’ll fix the cold war as well as any variety of hot.”
—Colossus by D. F. Jones, p. 17
“Johnson, please fix a meeting of Group A for 1530, here—OK?”
—Ibid., p. 22
“Angela, I’ve called a Group A meeting for 1530—Johnson is fixing it.”
Forty was a good age to get fixed . . .
—Ibid., p. 23
It showed a man sitting on a lavatory, clearly much concerned with his own affairs. The caption said, “The only man in Washington who knows what he is doing.”
—Ibid., p. 56
“OK, Forbin. But if that’s so, how come I have just had a blast from the Chairman of the USSR, accusing me—us—of attempting to seduce Guardian with phony maths?”
—Ibid., p. 100
“Yes, I know, both running high-grade maths without repeats, you want help.”
—Ibid., p. 104
“We have six top-class maths men in the Group; they should be able to hold it down.”
—Ibid., p. 105
“OK, Forbin, I know how you feel, but the old man did not mean to hurt your pride, the way he was fixed—”
“What in tarnation has pride to do with it?” Forbin looked genuinely puzzled. “Really, you people here are so far from reality.”
—Ibid., p. 120
It stiffened the aide wonderfully, and brought the Chief of Staff back from a deep contemplation of the unspeakable that not even his professional Red Indian face could entirely conceal.
—Ibid., p. 148
Forbin thought of the bottle of rye he knew Blake kept in his desk drawer, in open defiance of the Admin Standing Orders. He got it out, found a couple of plastic mugs, and poured two fair-sized tots.
—Ibid., p. 200
“Yes,” agreed Forbin, “we talk in English, but there are differences. I naturally assumed you would have an American accent.”
“It was an unreasonable assumption,” Colossus said. “It is proper to speak a language with the accent of its native users.”
—Ibid., p. 228
Arcs & Secants
JOAN D. Vinge (“Tin Soldier”) is twenty-five. She is part Erie Indian, although she has blond hair and green eyes. In college she went through five changes of major until she found out she liked anthropology best. Later she worked for a while as a salvage archeologist. “Archeology is the anthropology of the past, and, to me, science fiction is the anthropology of possible futures.” She is married to Vernor Vinge (“The Science Fair,” Orbit 9); they live in San Diego with various plants, two white mice rescued from an overpopulation experiment, and a cat. This is Mrs. Vinge’s first published story.
A correspondent gave us his version of the celebrated Leslie Fiedler speech at the New York SFWA banquet in September 1972: “It was surprising for a high-toned scholar, [Fiedler] explained, to appear in our supposedly humble midst? Nonsense, the only people really keeping literature alive today were the science fiction producers and the pornographers because there was a close relationship between the forms. Behind me I heard several tsk-tsks and mild clucks of disapproval while Fiedler tried to epater us with items about the family that blows together stays together and how mainstream, upstream, out of stream and every other stream was so much of a piece today that, though he loved that Proust, the thing now sending him was some of the art on TV (he always tried to avoid scheduling classes at the time Edge of Tomorrow showed).
The sounds of anguish behind me rose to full-blown oy-oys and I had to take a peek at the sufferer. It was an elderly man I did not know. . . . [At dinner] I ended up at a table with the same man who had been so appalled at Fiedler. It turned out to be Donald Wolheim and his wife was with him. I didn’t know anybody at the table so I was pleased at the opportunity to prove I had vocal cords when someone who had not been at the earlier gathering said he understood some guy named Fiedler had made a strange talk at that session. Had anybody heard it? Yes, I said, and it had been strange. Strange? Donald Wolheim came in, it was downright mishugah. Crazy? his wife came in. The man had said we were turning out pornography! In all the years they had given to science fiction she had never heard— Not important, her husband calmly told her, not worth getting bothered by such nonsense. Yes, maybe not important but somebody ought to answer back. Look, Ida, it’s not worth bothering about his argument, the man digs his own grave with his mouth. That was the end of the literary discussion for the evening.”
JOANNA RUSS (“Reasonable People”) teaches science fiction, creative writing, and women’s studies at Harpur College, State University of New York at Binghamton. Her story “When It Changed” (Again, Dangerous Visions) won a Nebula Award in 1972. She has recently had her front teeth capped because they broke off, having been dead for years: “But I go around now with vast, dazzling, fat front teeth which I find disconcerting. Nobody else seems to notice any change.”
MICHAEL BISHOP, whose story “In the Lilliputian Asylum” is forthcoming, wrote to say that we had put him in Georgia State University rather than in the University of Georgia, where he actually teaches; and Edward Bryant, a frequent contributor, complained of our adding five years to his age.
R. A. LAFFERTY (“Royal Licorice”) reported to his agent that as a result of his experimentation for this story, he had five smart pills and nine dung balls left over; he offered them to her, but she declined.
We heard from ALFRED BESTER that his wife, Roily, “turns out to be a marvelous shot with a shotgun. We’ve been plagued by a goddam Mockingbird who does nightclub imitations all day and all night. She let him have it between the TV antenna and the chimney, and there’s peace at last. Now she’s stalking a goddam woodchuck who’s raiding our veg. garden. I had three shots at him with the pistol and missed at fifteen feet. Shame on me!”
URSULA K. Le Guin (“The Stars Below”) writes as follows: “I guess all I can tell you is that I have been living on a planet called Anarres for two years and, due perhaps to the time-dilation effect, my recollections of Earth are rather hazy.”
To a contributor who was fretting about libel we wrote: “I don’t think you have to worry. . . . A- R- will never see this story, in the first place, & would not care if she did. Don’t know if you are immune as a juvenile or not; interesting question. (They might throw you in the tank as a JD.) Anyway, you are more likely to be hit by
a meteorite. Glance up from time to time.”
KATE WILHELM (“A Brother to Dragons, a Companion of Owls”) stands five feet three and a half inches tall and has a Florida tan. Not long ago, when Little, Brown accepted her novel City of Cain (having already published a previous novel, Margaret and I), she realized for the first time that she is a Little, Brown author.
MURRAY YACO (“The Winning of the Great American Greening Revolution”) is president of a company called Creative Concepts, Inc., which does freelance work for corporations such as General Motors.
DORIS PISERCHIA wrote in April, “This is really happening but I’m having trouble believing it. I love the money. I love it all, but some misty part of it is more lovely than the rest, and I can’t pin that part down.”
GARY K. Wolf (“The Bridge Builder”) is now product promotion manager for the ad agency for which he was formerly a senior copywriter. His wife, Bonnie, is an airline stewardess and he flies her everywhere. He writes, “I’ve taken up Transcendental Meditation with the result that my short stories have become far more incisive and easier to write (the same is true for the novel I’m at work on now, a book which has all the potential sweep and grandeur of that little known classic by Anon., ‘Ratman Meets the Walking Weenies’).”
We heard from Olive Hupp Maynard in Muncie, Ind., who stated that she has been in constant communication with the World Beyond since 1929. “If my cassette recordings of Glossolalia can be interpreted, they may reveal something of importance.”
To a young writer in Oakland we wrote: “I used to have a rubber stamp for telling correspondents what you were tempted to tell me; only used it once, and then not seriously, though.”
GENE WOLFE (“Forlesen”) was for sixteen years a project engineer in the employ of Procter & Gamble, an experience which is reflected in this story. Late in 1972, after he had left P&G to join the staff of Plant Engineering, he wrote: “I had a call from a writer today & suddenly realized that I am an editor. Weird—like waking up and finding that you are a woman: you are still in the familiar arrangement, but on the wrong side.”