The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 1

by Gordon Van Gelder

  “It’s like a penny,” she said, once, eyes closed.

  “No, it’s not!” the children cried.

  “It’s like a fire,” she said, “in the stove.”

  “You’re lying, you don’t remember!” cried the children.

  But she remembered and stood quietly apart from all of them, and watched the patterning windows. And once, a month ago, she had refused to shower in the school shower rooms, had clutched her hands to her ears and over her head, screaming the water mustn’t touch her head. So after that, dimly, dimly, she sensed it, she was different and they knew her difference and kept away.

  There was talk that her father and mother were taking her back to Earth next year; it seemed vital to her that they do so, though it would mean the loss of thousands of dollars to her family. And so the children hated her for all these reasons, of big and little consequence. They hated her pale snow face, her waiting silence, her thinness and her possible future.

  “Get away!” The boy gave her another push. “What’re you waiting for?”

  Then, for the first time, she turned and looked at him. And what she was waiting for was in her eyes.

  “Well, don’t wait around here!” cried the boy, savagely. “You won’t see nothing!”

  Her lips moved.

  “Nothing!” he cried. “It was all a joke, wasn’t it?” He turned to the other children. “Nothing’s happening today. Is it?”

  They all blinked at him and then, understanding, laughed and shook their heads. “Nothing, nothing!”

  “Oh, but,” Margot whispered, her eyes helpless. “But, this is the day, the scientists predict, they say, they know, the sun...”

  “All a joke!” said the boy, and seized her roughly. “Hey, everyone, let’s put her in a closet before teacher comes!”

  “No,” said Margot, falling back.

  They surged about her, caught her up and bore her, protesting, and then pleading, and then crying, back into a tunnel, a room, a closet, where they slammed and locked the door. They stood looking at the door and saw it tremble from her beating and throwing herself against it. They heard her muffled cries. Then, smiling, they turned and went out and back down the tunnel, just as the teacher arrived.

  “Ready, children?” She glanced at her watch.

  “Yes!” said everyone.

  “Are we all here?”

  “Yes!”

  The rain slackened still more.

  They crowded to the huge door.

  The rain stopped.

  It was as if, in the midst of a film concerning an avalanche, a tornado, a hurricane, a volcanic eruption, something had, first, gone wrong with the sound apparatus, thus muffling and finally cutting off all noise, all of the blasts and repercussions and thunders, and then, secondly, ripped the film from the projector and inserted in its place a peaceful tropical slide which did not move or tremor. The world ground to a standstill. The silence was so immense and unbelievable that you felt that your ears had been stuffed or you had lost your hearing altogether. The children put their hands to their ears. They stood apart. The door slid back and the smell of the silent, waiting world came in to them.

  The sun came out.

  It was the color of flaming bronze and it was very large. And the sky around it was a blazing blue tile color. And the jungle burned with sunlight as the children, released from their spell, rushed out, yelling, into the summertime.

  “Now, don’t go too far,” called the teacher after them. “You’ve only one hour, you know. You wouldn’t want to get caught out!”

  But they were running and turning their faces up to the sky and feeling the sun on their cheeks like a warm iron; they were taking off their jackets and letting the sun burn their arms.

  “Oh, it’s better than the sun lamps, isn’t it?”

  “Much, much better!”

  They stopped running and stood in the great jungle that covered Venus, that grew and never stopped growing, tumultuous, even as you watched it. It was a nest of octopuses, clustering up great arms of flesh-like weed, wavering, flowering in this brief spring. It was the color of rubber and ash, this jungle, from the many years without sun. It was the color of stones and white cheeses and ink.

  The children lay out, laughing, on the jungle mattress, and heard it sigh and squeak under them, resilient and alive. They ran among the trees, they slipped and fell, they pushed each other, they played hide-and-seek and tag, but most of all they squinted at the sun until tears ran down their faces, they put their hands up at that yellowness and that amazing blueness and they breathed of the fresh fresh air and listened and listened to the silence which suspended them in a blessed sea of no sound and no motion. They looked at everything and savored everything. Then, wildly, like animals escaped from their caves, they ran and ran in shouting circles. They ran for an hour and did not stop running.

  And then—

  In the midst of their running, one of the girls wailed.

  Everyone stopped.

  The girl, standing in the open, held out her hand.

  “Oh, look, look,” she said, trembling.

  They came slowly to look at her opened palm.

  In the center of it, cupped and huge, was a single raindrop.

  She began to cry, looking at it.

  They glanced quickly at the sky. “Oh. Oh.”

  A few cold drops fell on their noses and their cheeks and their mouths. The sun faded behind a stir of mist. A wind blew cool around them. They turned and started to walk back toward the underground house, their hands at their sides, their smiles vanishing away.

  A boom of thunder startled them and like leaves before a new hurricane, they tumbled upon each other and ran. Lightning struck ten miles away, five miles away, a mile, a half mile. The sky darkened into midnight in a flash.

  They stood in the doorway of the underground for a moment until it was raining hard. Then they closed the door and heard the gigantic sound of the rain falling in tons and avalanches everywhere and forever.

  “Will it be seven more years?”

  “Yes. Seven.”

  Then one of them gave a little cry.

  “Margot!”

  “What?”

  “She’s still in the closet where we locked her.”

  “Margot.”

  They stood as if someone had driven them, like so many stakes, into the floor. They looked at each other and then looked away. They glanced out at the world that was raining now and raining and raining steadily. They could not meet each other’s glances. Their faces were solemn and pale. They looked at their hands and feet, their faces down.

  “Margot.”

  One of the girls said, “Well... ?”

  No one moved.

  “Go on,” whispered the girl.

  They walked slowly down the hall in the sound of cold rain. They turned through the doorway to the room, in the sound of the storm and thunder, lightning on their faces, blue and terrible. They walked over to the closet door slowly and stood by it.

  Behind the closet door was only silence.

  They unlocked the door, even more slowly, and let Margot out.

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  One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts - Shirley Jackson

  Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) wrote a dozen books, including the masterpiece The Haunting of Hill House, but she is probably best-known for her short story, “The Lottery,” which drew hundreds of outraged letters when it first appeared in The New Yorker in 1948. Barry Malzberg has pointed out that if F&SF had existed at the time, the story could easily have appeared in our pages without raising any such fuss. And indeed, Ms. Jackson contributed four imaginative tales during the ’50s, all of which were well received by our readers, including this classic.

  Mr. John Philip Johnson shut his front door behind him and came down his front steps into the bright morning with a feeling that all was well with the world on this best of all days, and wasn’t the sun warm and good, and didn’t his shoes feel comfortable after
the resoling, and he knew that he had undoubtedly chosen the precise very tie which belonged with the day and the sun and his comfortable feet, and, after all, wasn’t the world just a wonderful place? In spite of the fact that he was a small man, and the tie was perhaps a shade vivid, Mr. Johnson irradiated this feeling of well-being as he came down the steps and onto the dirty sidewalk, and he smiled at people who passed him, and some of them even smiled back. He stopped at the newsstand on the corner and bought his paper, saying “Good morning” with real conviction to the man who sold him the paper and the two or three other people who were lucky enough to be buying papers when Mr. Johnson skipped up. He remembered to fill his pockets with candy and peanuts, and then he set out to get himself uptown. He stopped in a flower shop and bought a carnation for his buttonhole, and stopped almost immediately afterward to give the carnation to a small child in a carriage, who looked at him dumbly, and then smiled, and Mr. Johnson smiled, and the child’s mother looked at Mr. Johnson for a minute and then smiled too.

  When he had gone several blocks uptown, Mr. Johnson cut across the avenue and went along a side street, chosen at random; he did not follow the same route every morning, but preferred to pursue his eventful way in wide detours, more like a puppy than a man intent upon business. It happened this morning that halfway down the block a moving van was parked, and the furniture from an upstairs apartment stood half on the sidewalk, half on the steps, while an amused group of people loitered, examining the scratches on the tables and the worn spots on the chairs, and a harassed woman, trying to watch a young child and the movers and the furniture all at the same time, gave the clear impression of endeavoring to shelter her private life from the people staring at her belongings. Mr. Johnson stopped, and for a moment joined the crowd, and then he came forward and, touching his hat civilly, said, “Perhaps I can keep an eye on your little boy for you?”

  The woman turned and glared at him distrustfully, and Mr. Johnson added hastily, “We’ll sit right here on the steps.” He beckoned to the little boy, who hesitated and then responded agreeably to Mr. Johnson’s genial smile. Mr. Johnson brought out a handful of peanuts from his pocket and sat on the steps with the boy, who at first refused the peanuts on the grounds that his mother did not allow him to accept food from strangers; Mr. Johnson said that probably his mother had not intended peanuts to be included, since elephants at the circus ate them, and the boy considered, and then agreed solemnly. They sat on the steps cracking peanuts in a comradely fashion, and Mr. Johnson said, “So you’re moving?”

  “Yep,” said the boy.

  “Where you going?”

  “Vermont.”

  “Nice place. Plenty of snow there. Maple sugar, too; you like maple sugar?

  “Sure.”

  “Plenty of maple sugar in Vermont. You going to live on a farm?”

  “Going to live with Grandpa.”

  “Grandpa like peanuts?”

  “Sure.”

  “Ought to take him some,” said Mr. Johnson, reaching into his pocket. “Just you and Mommy going?”

  “Yep.”

  “Tell you what,” Mr. Johnson said. “You take some peanuts to eat on the train.”

  The boy’s mother, after glancing at them frequently, had seemingly decided that Mr. Johnson was trustworthy, because she had devoted herself wholeheartedly to seeing that the movers did not—what movers rarely do, but every housewife believes they will—crack a leg from her good table, or set a kitchen chair down on a lamp. Most of the furniture was loaded by now, and she was deep in that nervous stage when she knew there was something she had forgotten to pack—hidden away in the back of a closet somewhere, or left at a neighbor’s and forgotten, or on the clothesline—and was trying to remember under stress what it was.

  “This all, lady?” the chief mover said, completing her dismay.

  Uncertainly, she nodded.

  “Want to go on the truck with the furniture, sonny?” the mover asked the boy, and laughed. The boy laughed too and said to Mr. Johnson, “I guess I’ll have a good time at Vermont.”

  “Fine time,” said Mr. Johnson, and stood up. “Have one more peanut before you go,” he said to the boy.

  The boy’s mother said to Mr. Johnson, “Thank you so much; it was a great help to me.”

  “Nothing at all,” said Mr. Johnson gallantly. “Where in Vermont are you going?”

  The mother looked at the little boy accusingly, as though he had given away a secret of some importance, and said unwillingly, “Greenwich.”

  “Lovely town,” said Mr. Johnson. He took out a card, and wrote a name on the back. “Very good friend of mine lives in Greenwich,” he said. “Call on him for anything you need. His wife makes the best doughnuts in town,” he added soberly to the little boy.

  “Swell,” said the little boy.

  “Goodbye,” said Mr. Johnson.

  He went on, stepping happily with his new-shod feet, feeling the warm sun on his back and on the top of his head. Halfway down the block he met a stray dog and fed him a peanut.

  At the corner, where another wide avenue faced him, Mr. Johnson decided to go on uptown again. Moving with comparative laziness, he was passed on either side by people hurrying and frowning, and people brushed past him going the other way, clattering along to get somewhere quickly. Mr. Johnson stopped on every corner and waited patiently for the light to change, and he stepped out of the way of anyone who seemed to be in any particular hurry, but one young lady came too fast for him, and crashed wildly into him when he stooped to pat a kitten which had run out onto the sidewalk from an apartment house and was now unable to get back through the rushing feet.

  “Excuse me,” said the young lady, trying frantically to pick up Mr. Johnson and hurry on at the same time, “terribly sorry.”

  The kitten, regardless now of danger, raced back to its home. “Perfectly all right,” said Mr. Johnson, adjusting himself carefully. “You seem to be in a hurry.”

  “Of course I’m in a hurry,” said the young lady. “I’m late.”

  She was extremely cross and the frown between her eyes seemed well on its way to becoming permanent. She had obviously awakened late, because she had not spent any extra time in making herself look pretty, and her dress was plain and unadorned with collar or brooch, and her lipstick was noticeably crooked. She tried to brush past Mr. Johnson, but, risking her suspicious displeasure, he took her arm and said, “Please wait.”

  “Look,” she said ominously, “I ran into you and your lawyer can see my lawyer and I will gladly pay all damages and all inconveniences suffered therefrom but please this minute let me go because I am late”

  “Late for what?” said Mr. Johnson; he tried his winning smile on her but it did no more than keep her, he suspected, from knocking him down again.

  “Late for work,” she said between her teeth. “Late for my employment. I have a job and if I am late I lose exactly so much an hour and I cannot really afford what your pleasant conversation is costing me, be it ever so pleasant.”

  “I’ll pay for it,” said Mr. Johnson. Now these were magic words, not necessarily because they were true, or because she seriously expected Mr. Johnson to pay for anything, but because Mr. Johnson’s flat statement, obviously innocent of irony, could not be, coming from Mr. Johnson, anything but the statement of a responsible and truthful and respectable man.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “I said that since I am obviously responsible for your being late I shall certainly pay for it.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said, and for the first time the frown disappeared. “I wouldn’t expect you to pay for anything—a few minutes ago I was offering to pay you. Anyway,” she added, almost smiling, “it was my fault.”

  “What happens if you don’t go to work?”

  She stared. “I don’t get paid.”

  “Precisely,” said Mr. Johnson.

  “What do you mean, precisely? If I don’t show up at the office exactly twenty min
utes ago I lose a dollar and twenty cents an hour, or two cents a minute or...” She thought. “...Almost a dime for the time I’ve spent talking to you.”

  Mr. Johnson laughed, and finally she laughed, too. “You’re late already,” he pointed out. “Will you give me another four cents worth?”

  “I don’t understand why.”

  “You’ll see,” Mr. Johnson promised. He led her over to the side of the walk, next to the buildings, and said, “Stand here,” and went out into the rush of people going both ways. Selecting and considering, as one who must make a choice involving perhaps whole years of lives, he estimated the people going by. Once he almost moved, and then at the last minute thought better of it and drew back. Finally, from half a block away, he saw what he wanted, and moved out into the center of the traffic to intercept a young man, who was hurrying, and dressed as though he had awakened late, and frowning.

  “Oof,” said the young man, because Mr. Johnson had thought of no better way to intercept anyone than the one the young woman had unwittingly used upon him, “Where do you think you’re going?” the young man demanded from the sidewalk.”

  “I want to speak to you,” said Mr. Johnson ominously.

  The young man got up nervously, dusting himself and eyeing Mr. Johnson. “What for?” he said. “What’d I do?”

  “That’s what bothers me most about people nowadays,” Mr. Johnson complained broadly to the people passing. “No matter whether they’ve done anything or not, they always figure someone’s after them. About what you’re going to do,” he told the young man.

  “Listen,” said the young man, trying to brush past him, “I’m late, and I don’t have any time to listen. Here’s a dime, now get going.”

  “Thank you,” said Mr. Johnson, pocketing the dime. “Look,” he said, “what happens if you stop running?”

  “I’m late,” said the young man, still trying to get past Mr. Johnson, who was unexpectedly clinging.

  “How much you make an hour?” Mr. Johnson demanded.