The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 1

by Gordon Van Gelder

  I hit the library cafeteria for lunch, where I learned from a girl in a green apron and yellow skirts (which swished pleasantly) that the sandbag crews were now hard at work and that there was no eastbound traffic past Town Square.

  After lunch I put on my slicker and boots and walked up that way.

  Sure enough, the sandbag wall was already waist high across Main Street; but then, the water was swirling around at ankle level, and more of it falling every minute.

  I looked up at old Wyeth’s statue. His halo had gone away now, which was sort of to be expected. It had made an honest mistake and realized it after a short time.

  He was holding a pair of glasses in his left hand and sort of glancing down at me, as though a bit apprehensive, wondering perhaps, there inside all that bronze, if I would tell on him now and ruin his hard, wet, greenish splendor. Tell... ? I guess I was the only one around who really remembered the man. He had wanted to be the father of this great new country, literally, and he’d tried awfully hard. Three months in office and I’d had to fill out the rest of the two-year term. The death certificate gave the cause as “heart stoppage,” but it didn’t mention the piece of lead which had helped slow things down a bit. Everybody involved is gone now: the irate husband, the frightened wife, the coroner. All but me. And I won’t tell anybody if Wyeth’s statue won’t, because he’s a hero now, and we need heroes’ statues Out Here even more than we do heroes. He did engineer a nice piece of relief work during the Butler Township floods, and he may as well be remembered for that.

  I winked at my old boss, and the rain dripped from his nose and fell into the puddle at my feet.

  I walked back to the library through loud sounds and bright flashes, hearing the splashing and the curses of the work crew as the men began to block off another street. Black, overhead, an eye drifted past. I waved, and the filter snapped up and back down again. I think H.C. John Keams was tending shop that afternoon, but I’m not sure.

  Suddenly the heavens opened up and it was like standing under a waterfall.

  I reached for a wall and there wasn’t one, slipped then, and managed to catch myself with my cane before I flopped. I found a doorway and huddled.

  Ten minutes of lightning and thunder followed. Then, after the blindness and the deafness passed away and the rains had eased a bit, I saw that the street (Second Avenue) had become a river. Bearing all sorts of garbage, papers, hats, sticks, mud, it sloshed past my niche, gurgling nastily. It looked to be over my boot tops, so I waited for it to subside.

  It didn’t.

  It got right up in there with me and started to play footsie.

  So, then seemed as good a time as any. Things certainly weren’t getting any better.

  I tried to run, but with filled boots the best you can manage is a fast wade, and my boots were filled after three steps.

  That shot the afternoon. How can you concentrate on anything with wet feet? I made it back to the parking lot, then churned my way homeward, feeling like a riverboat captain who really wanted to be a camel driver.

  It seemed more like evening that afternoon when I pulled up into my damp but unflooded garage. It seemed more like night than evening in the alley I cut through on the way to my apartment’s back entrance. I hadn’t seen the sun for several days, and it’s funny how much you can miss it when it takes a vacation. The sky was a sable dome, and the high brick walls of the alley were cleaner than I’d ever seen them, despite the shadows.

  I stayed close to the lefthand wall, in order to miss some of the rain. As I had driven along the river I’d noticed that it was already reaching after the high-water marks on the sides of the piers. The Noble was a big, spoiled, blood sausage, ready to burst its skin. A lightning flash showed me the whole alley, and I slowed in order to avoid puddles.

  I moved ahead, thinking of dry socks and dry martinis, turned a corner to the right, and it struck at me: an org.

  Half of its segmented body was reared at a forty-five degree angle above the pavement, which placed its wide head with the traffic-signal eyes saying “Stop,” about three and a half feet off the ground, as it rolled toward me on all its pale little legs, with its mouthful of death aimed at my middle.

  I pause now in my narrative for a long digression concerning my childhood, which, if you will but consider the circumstances, I was obviously quite fresh on it an instant:

  Born, raised, educated on Earth, I had worked two summers in a stockyard while going to college. I still remember the smells and the noises of the cattle; I used to prod them out of the pens and on their way up the last mile. And I remember the smells and noises of the university: the formaldehyde in the Bio labs, the sounds of Freshmen slaughtering French verbs, the overpowering aroma of coffee mixed with cigarette smoke in the Student Union, the splash of the newly-pinned frat man as his brothers tossed him into the lagoon down in front of the Art Museum, the sounds of ignored chapel bells and class bells, the smell of the lawn after the year’s first mowing (with big, black Andy perched on his grass-chewing monster, baseball cap down to his eyebrows, cigarette somehow not burning his left cheek), and always, always, the tick-tick-snick-stamp! as I moved up or down the strip. I had not wanted to take General Physical Education, but four semesters of it were required. The only out was to take a class in a special sport. I picked fencing because tennis, basketball, boxing, wrestling, handball, judo all sounded too strenuous, and I couldn’t afford a set of golf clubs. Little did I suspect what would follow this choice. It was as strenuous as any of the others, and more than several. But I liked it. So I tried out for the team in my Sophomore year, made it on the epee squad, and picked up three varsity letters, because I stuck with it through my Senior year. Which all goes to show: Cattle who persevere in looking for an easy out still wind up in the abattoir, but they may enjoy the trip a little more.

  When I came out here on the raw frontier where people all carry weapons, I had my cane made. It combines the better features of the epee and the cattle prod. Only, it is the kind of prod which, if you were to prod cattle with, they would never move again.

  Over eight hundred volts, max, when the tip touches, if the stud in the handle is depressed properly...

  My arm shot out and up and my fingers depressed the stud properly as it moved.

  That was it for the org.

  A noise came from beneath the rows of razor blades in its mouth as I scored a touch on its soft underbelly and whipped my arm away to the side—a noise halfway between an exhalation and “peep”—and that was it for the org (short for “organism-with-a-long-name-which-I-can’t-remember”).

  I switched off my cane and walked around it. It was one of those things which sometimes come out of the river. I remember that I looked back at it three times, then I switched the cane on again at max and kept it that way till I was inside my apartment with the door locked behind me and all the lights burning.

  Then I permitted myself to tremble, and after a while I changed my socks and mixed my drink.

  May your alleys be safe from orgs.

  Saturday.

  More rain.

  Wetness was all.

  The entire east side had been shored with sandbags. In some places they served only to create sandy waterfalls, where otherwise the streams would have flowed more evenly and perhaps a trifle more clearly. In other places they held it all back, for a while.

  By then, there were six deaths as a direct result of the rains.

  By then, there had been fires caused by the lightning, accidents by the water, sicknesses by the dampness, the cold.

  By then, property damages were beginning to mount pretty high.

  Everyone was tired and angry and miserable and wet, by then. This included me.

  Though Saturday was Saturday, I went to work. I worked in Eleanor’s office, with her. We had the big relief map spread on a table, and six mobile eyescreens were lined against one wall. Six eyes hovered above the half-dozen emergency points and kept us abreast of the actions taken upon th
em. Several new telephones and a big radio set stood on the desk. Five ashtrays looked as if they wanted to be empty, and the coffee pot chuckled cynically at human activity.

  The Noble had almost reached its high-water mark. We were not an isolated storm center by any means. Upriver, Butler Township was hurting, Swan’s Nest was adrip, Laurie was weeping into the river, and the wilderness in between was shaking and streaming.

  Even though we were in direct contact we went into the field on three occasions that morning—once, when the north-south bridge over the Lance River collapsed and was washed down toward the Noble as far as the bend by the Mack steel mill; again, when the Wildwood Cemetery, set up on a storm-gouged hill to the east, was plowed deeply, graves opened, and several coffins set awash; and finally, when three houses full of people toppled, far to the east. Eleanor’s small flyer was buffeted by the winds as we fought our way through to these sites for on-the-spot supervision; I navigated almost completely by instruments. Downtown proper was accommodating evacuees left and right by then. I took three showers that morning and changed clothes twice.

  Things slowed down a bit in the afternoon, including the rain. The cloud cover didn’t break, but a drizzle-point was reached which permitted us to gain a little on the waters. Retaining walls were reinforced, evacuees were fed and dried, some of the rubbish was cleaned up. Four of the six eyes were returned to their patrols, because four of the emergency points were no longer emergency points.

  ... And we wanted all of the eyes for the org patrol.

  Inhabitants of the drenched forest were also on the move. Seven snappers and a horde of panda-puppies were shot that day, as well as a few crawly things from the troubled waters of the Noble—not to mention assorted branch-snakes, stingbats, borers, and land-eels.

  By 1900 hours it seemed that a stalemate had been achieved. Eleanor and I climbed into her flyer and drifted skyward.

  We kept rising. Finally, there was a hiss as the cabin began to pressurize itself. The night was all around us. Eleanor’s face, in the light from the instrument panel, was a mask of weariness. She raised her hands to her temples as if to remove it, and then when I looked back again it appeared that she had. A faint smile lay across her lips now and her eyes sparkled. A stray strand of hair shadowed her brow.

  “Where are you taking me?” she asked.

  “Up, high,” said I, “above the storm.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s been many days,” I said, “since we have seen an uncluttered sky.”

  “True,” she agreed, and as she leaned forward to light a cigarette I noticed that the part in her hair had gone all askew. I wanted to reach out and straighten it for her, but I didn’t.

  We plunged into the sea of clouds.

  Dark was the sky, moonless. The stars shone like broken diamonds. The clouds were a floor of lava.

  We drifted. We stared up into the heavens. I “anchored” the flyer, like an eye set to hover, and lit a cigarette myself.

  “You are older than I am,” she finally said, “really. You know?”

  “No.”

  “There is a certain wisdom, a certain strength, something like the essence of the time that passes—that seeps into a man as he sleeps between the stars. I know, because I can feel it when I’m around you.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then maybe it’s people expecting you to have the strength of centuries that gives you something like it. It was probably there to begin with.”

  “No.”

  She chuckled.

  “It isn’t exactly a positive sort of thing either.”

  I laughed.

  “You asked me if I was going to run for office again this fall. The answer is ‘no.’ I’m planning on retiring. I want to settle down.”

  “With anyone special?”

  “Yes, very special, Juss,” she said, and she smiled at me and I kissed her, but not for too long, because the ash was about to fall off her cigarette and down the back of my neck.

  So we put both cigarettes out and drifted above the invisible city, beneath a sky without a moon.

  I mentioned earlier that I would tell you about Stopovers. If you are going a distance of a hundred forty-five light-years and are taking maybe a hundred-fifty actual years to do it, why stop and stretch your legs?

  Well, first of all and mainly, almost nobody sleeps out the whole jaunt. There are lots of little gadgets which require human monitoring at all times. No one is going to sit there for a hundred-fifty years and watch them, all by himself. So everyone takes a turn or two, passengers included. They are all briefed on what to do till the doctor comes, and who to awaken and how to go about it, should troubles crop up. Then everyone takes a turn at guard mount for a month or so, along with a few companions. There are always hundreds of people aboard, and after you’ve worked down through the role you take it again from the top. All sorts of mechanical agents are backing them up, many of which they are unaware of (to protect against them, as well as with them—in the improbable instance of several oddballs getting together and deciding to open a window, change course, murder passengers, or things like that), and the people are well-screened and carefully matched up, so as to check and balance each other as well as the machinery. All of this because gadgets and people both bear watching.

  After several turns at ship’s guard, interspersed with periods of cold sleep, you tend to grow claustrophobic and somewhat depressed. Hence, when there is an available Stopover, it is utilized, to restore mental equilibrium and to rearouse flagging animal spirits. This also serves the purpose of enriching the life and economy of the Stopover world, by whatever information and activities you may have in you.

  Stopover, therefore, has become a traditional holiday on many worlds, characterized by festivals and celebrations on some of the smaller ones, and often by parades and world-wide broadcast interviews and press conferences on those with greater populations. I understand that it is now pretty much the same on Earth, too, whenever colonial visitors stop by. In fact, one fairly unsuccessful young starlet, Marilyn Austin, made a long voyage Out, stayed a few months, and returned on the next vessel headed back. After appearing on tri-dee a couple times, sounding off about interstellar culture, and flashing her white, white teeth, she picked up a flush contract, a third husband, and her first big part in tapes. All of which goes to show the value of Stopovers.

  I landed us atop Helix, Betty’s largest apartment-complex, wherein Eleanor had her double-balconied corner suite, affording views both of the distant Noble and of the lights of Posh Valley, Betty’s residential section.

  Eleanor prepared steaks, with baked potato, cooked corn, beer—everything I liked. I was happy and sated and such, and I stayed till around midnight, making plans for our future. Then I took a cab back to Town Square, where I was parked.

  When I arrived, I thought I’d check with the Trouble Center just to see how things were going. So I entered the Hall, stamped my feet, brushed off excess waters, hung my coat, and proceeded up the empty hallway to the elevator.

  The elevator was too quiet. They’re supposed to rattle, you know? They shouldn’t sigh softly and have doors that open and close without a sound. So I walked around an embarrassing corner on my way to the Trouble Center.

  It was a pose Rodin might have enjoyed working with. All I can say is that it’s a good thing I stopped by when I did, rather than five or ten minutes later.

  Chuck Fuller and Lottie, Eleanor’s secretary, were practicing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and keeping the victim warm techniques, there on the couch in the little alcove off to the side of the big door to T.C.

  Chuck’s back was to me, but Lottie spotted me over his shoulder, and her eyes widened and she pushed him away. He turned his head quickly.

  “Juss...” he said.

  I nodded.

  “Just passing by,” I told him. “Thought I’d stop in to say hello and take a look at the eyes.”

  “Uh—everything’s going real well,” he sa
id, stepping back into the hallway. “It’s on auto right now, and I’m on my—uh, coffee break. Lottie is on night duty, and she came by to—to see if we had any reports we needed typed. She had a dizzy spell, so we came out here where the couch...”

  “Yeah, she looks a little—peaked,” I said. “There are smelling salts and aspirins in the medicine chest.”

  I walked on by into the Center, feeling awkward.

  Chuck followed me after a couple of minutes. I was watching the screens when he came up beside me. Things appeared to be somewhat in hand, though the rains were still moistening the one-hundred-thirty views of Betty.

  “Uh, Juss,” he said, “I didn’t know you were coming by...”

  “Obviously.”

  “What I’m getting at is—you won’t report me, will you?”

  “No, I won’t report you.”

  “... And you wouldn’t mention it to Cynthia, would you?”

  “Your extracurricular activities,” I said, “are your own business. As a friend, I suggest you do them on your own time and in a more propitious location. But it’s already beginning to slip my mind. I’m sure I’ll forget the whole thing in another minute.”

  “Thanks, Juss,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “What’s Weather Central have to say these days?” I asked, raising the phone.

  He shook his head, so I dialed and listened.

  “Bad,” I said, hanging up. “More wet to come.”

  “Damn,” he announced, and lit a cigarette, his hands shaking. “This weather’s getting me down.”

  “Me too,” said I. “I’m going to run now, because I want to get home before it starts in bad again. I’ll probably be around tomorrow. See you.”

  “Night.”

  I elevated back down, fetched my coat, and left. I didn’t see Lottie anywhere about, but she probably was, waiting for me to go.

  I got to my car and was halfway home before the faucets came on full again. The sky was torn open with lightnings, and a sizzlecloud stalked the city like a long-legged arachnid, forking down bright limbs and leaving tracks of fire where it went. I made it home in another fifteen minutes, and the phenomenon was still in progress as I entered the garage. As I walked up the alley (cane switched on) I could hear the distant sizzle and the rumble, and a steady half-light filled the spaces between the buildings, from its flash-burn-flash-burn striding.