I was a monster and I found this ethos. You are a monster. It’s up to you.
Gerry stirred.
Hip Barrows stopped tossing the knife and held it still. Gerry moaned and coughed weakly. Hip pulled the limp
head back, cupped it in the palm of his left hand. He set the point of the knife exactly on the center of Gerry’s larynx.
Gerry mumbled inaudibly. Hip said, “Sit quite still, Gerry.” He pressed gently on the knife. It went in deeper than he wanted it to. It was a beautiful knife. He said, “That’s a knife at your throat. This is Hip Barrows. Now sit still and think about that for a while.”
Gerry’s lips smiled but it was because of the tension at the sides of his neck. His breath whistled through the not-smile.
“What are you going to do?”
“What would you do?”
“Take this thing off my eyes. I can’t see.”
“You see all you need to.”
“Barrows. Turn me loose. I won’t do anything to you. I promise. I can do a lot for you, Barrows. I can do anything you want.”
“It is a moral act to kill a monster,” said Hip. “Tell me something, Gerry. Is it true you can snatch out the whole of a man’s thought just by meeting his eyes?”
“Let me go. Let me go,” Gerry whispered.
With the knife at the monster’s throat, with this great house which could be his, with a girl waiting, a girl whose anguish for him he could breathe like ozoned air, Hip Barrows prepared his ethical act.
When the blindfold fell away there was amazement in the strange round eyes, enough and more than enough to drive away hate. Hip dangled the knife. He arranged his thought, side to side, top to bottom. He threw the knife behind him. It clattered on the tiles. The startled eyes followed it, whipped back. The irises were about to spin. . .
Hip bent close. “Go ahead,” he said softly.
After a long time, Gerry raised his head and met Hip’s eyes again.
Hip said, “Hi.”
Gerry looked at him weakly. “Get the hell out of here,” he croaked.
Hip sat still.
“I could’ve killed you,” said Gerry. He opened his eyes a little wider. “I still could.”
“You won’t though.” Hip rose, walked to the knife and picked it up. He returned to Gerry and deftly sliced the knots of the cord which bound him. He sat down again.
Gerry said, “No one ever . . . I never . . .” He shook himself and drew a deep breath. “I feel ashamed,” he whispered. “No one ever made me feel ashamed.” He looked at Hip, and the amazement was back again. “I know a lot. I can find out anything about anything. But I never . . . how did you ever find out all that?”
“Fell into it,” said Hip. “An ethic isn’t a fact you can look up. It’s a way of thinking.”
“God,” said Gerry into his hands. “What I’ve done . . . the things I could have. . . .”
“The things you can do,” Hip reminded him gently. “You’ve paid quite a price for the things you’ve done.”
Gerry looked around at the huge glass room and everything in it that was massive, expensive, rich. “I have?”
Hip said, from the scarred depths of memory, “People all around you, you by yourself.” He made a wry smile. “Does a superman have super-hunger, Gerry? Super-loneliness?”
Gerry nodded, slowly. “I did better when I was a kid.” He shuddered. “Cold. . . .”
Hip did not know what kind of cold he meant, and did not ask. He rose. “I’d better go see Janie. She thinks maybe I killed you.”
Gerry sat silently until Hip reached the door. Then he said, “Maybe you did.”
Hip went out.
Janie was in the little anteroom with the twins. When Hip entered, Janie moved her head slightly and the twins disappeared.
Hip said, “I could tell them too.”
“Tell me,” Janie said. “They’ll know.”
He sat down next to her. She said, “You didn’t kill him.” “No.”
She nodded slowly, “I wonder what it would be like if he died. I—don’t want to find out.”
“He’ll be all right now,” Hip said. He met her eyes. “He was ashamed.”
She huddled, cloaking herself, her thoughts. It was a waiting, but a different one from that he had known, for she was watching herself in her waiting, not him.
“That’s all I can do. I’ll clear out.” He breathed once, deeply.
“Lots to do. Track down my pension checks. Get a job.”
“Hip—”
Only in so small a room, in such quiet, could he have heard her. “Yes, Janie.”
“Don’t go away.”
“I can’t stay.”
“Why?”
He took his time and thought it out, and then he said, “You’re a part of something. I wouldn’t want to be part of someone who was . . . part of something.”
She raised her face to him and he saw that she was smiling.
He could not believe this, so he stared at her until he had to believe it.
She said, “The Gestalt has a head and hands, organs and a mind. But the most human thing about anyone is a thing he learns and . . . and earns. It’s a thing he can’t have when he’s very young; if he gets it at all, he gets it after a long search and a deep conviction. After that it’s truly part of him as long as he lives.”
“I don’t know what you mean. I—you mean I’m . . . I could be part of the . . . No, Janie, no.” He could not escape from that sure smile. “What part?” he demanded.
“The prissy one who can’t forget the rules. The one with the insight called ethics who can change it to the habit called morals.”
“The still small voice!” He snorted. “I’ll be damned!” She touched him. “I don’t think so.”
He looked at the closed door to the great glass room. Then he sat down beside her. They waited.
It was quiet in the glass room.
For a long time the only sound was Gerry’s difficult breathing. Suddenly even this stopped, as something happened, something—spoke.
It came again.
Welcome.
The voice was a silent one. And here, another, silent too, but another for all that. It’s the new one. Welcome, child! Still another: Well, well, well! We thought you’d never make it. He had to. There hasn’t been a new one for so long . . Gerry clapped his hands to his mouth. His eyes bulged.
Through his mind came a hush of welcoming music. There was warmth and laughter and wisdom. There were introductions; for each voice there was a discrete personality, a comprehensible sense of something like stature or rank, and an accurate locus, a sense of physical position. Yet, in terms of amplitude, there was no difference in the voices. They were all here, or, at least, all equally near.
There was happy and fearless communion, fearlessly shared with Gerry—cross-currents of humor, of pleasure, of reciprocal thought and mutual achievement. And through and through, welcome, welcome.
They were young, they were new, all of them, though not as new and as young as Gerry. Their youth was in the drive and resilience of their thinking. Although some gave memories old in human terms, each entity had lived briefly in terms of immortality and they were all immortal.
Here was one who had whistled a phrase to Papa Haydn, and here one who had introduced William Morris to the Rossettis. Almost as if it were his own memory, Gerry saw Fermi being shown the streak of fission on a sensitive plate, a child Landowska listening to a harpsichord, a drowsy Ford with his mind suddenly lit by the picture of a line of men facing a line of machines.
To form a question was to have an answer.
Who are you?
Homo Gestalt.
I’m one; part of; belonging . .
Welcome.
Why didn’t you tell me?
You weren’t ready. You weren’t finished. What was Gerry before he met Lone?
And now . . . is it the ethic? Is that what completed me? Ethic is too simple a term. But yes, yes . . . mul
tiplicity is our first characteristic; unity our second. As your parts know they are parts of you, so must you know that we are parts of humanity. Gerry understood then that the things which shamed him were, each and all, things which humans might do to humans, but which humanity could not do.
He said, “I was punished.”
You were quarantined.
And—are you . . . we . . . responsible for all humanity’s accomplishments?
No! We share. We are humanity!
Humanity’s trying to kill itself.
(A wave of amusement, and a superb confidence, like joy.)
Today, this week, it might seem so. But in terms of the history of a race . . . O new one, atomic war is a ripple on the broad face of the Amazon!
Their memories, their projections and computations flooded in to Gerry, until at last he knew their nature and their function; and he knew why the ethos he had learned was too small a concept. For here at last was power which could not corrupt; for such an insight could not be used for its own sake, or against itself. Here was why and how humanity existed, troubled and dynamic, sainted by the touch of its own great destiny.
Here was the withheld hand as thousands died, when by their death millions might live. And here, too, was the guide, the beacon, for such times as humanity might be in danger; here was the Guardian of Whom all humans knew—not an exterior force nor an awesome Watcher in the sky, but a laughing thing with a human heart and a reverence for its human origins, smelling of sweat and new-turned earth rather than suffused with the pale odor of sanctity.
He saw himself as an atom and his Gestalt as a molecule. He saw these others as a cell among cells, and he saw in the whole the design of what, with joy, humanity would become. He felt a rising, choking sense of worship, and recognized it for what it has always been for mankind—self-respect. He stretched out his arms, and the tears streamed from his strange eyes. Thank you, he answered them. Thank you, thank you . .
And humbly, he joined their company.
THE LONG TOMORROW
Leigh Brackett
“No city, no town, no community of more than one thousand people or two hundred buildings to the square mile shall be built or permitted to exist anywhere in the United States of America.”
constitution of the united states Thirtieth Amendment
Book One
1
Len Colter sat in the shade under the wall of the horse barn, eating pone and sweet butter and contemplating a sin. He was fourteen years old, and he had lived all of them on the farm at Piper’s Run, where opportunities for real sinning were comfortably few. But now Piper’s Run was more than thirty miles away, and he was having a look at the world, bright with distractions and gaudy with possibilities. He was at the Canfield Fair. And for the first time in his life Len Colter was faced with a major decision.
He was finding it difficult.
“Pa will beat the daylights out of me,” he said, “if he finds out.”
Cousin Esau said, “You scared?” He had turned fifteen just three weeks ago, which meant that he would not have to go to school any more with the children. He was still a long way from being counted among the men, but it was a big step and Len was impressed by it. Esau was taller than Len, and he had dark eyes that glittered and shone all the time like the eyes of an unbroken colt, looking everywhere for something and never quite finding it, perhaps because he did not know yet what it was. His hands were restless and very clever.
“Well?” demanded Esau. “Are you?”
Len would have liked to lie, but he knew that Esau would not be fooled for a minute. He squirmed a little, ate the last bite of pone, sucked the butter off his fingers, and said, “Yes.”
“Huh,” said Esau. “I thought you were getting grown-up. You should have still stayed home with the babies this year. Afraid of a licking!”
“I’ve had lickings before,” said Len, “and if you think Pa can’t lay ’em on, you try it some time. And I ain’t even cried the last two years now. Well, not much, anyway.” He brooded, his knees hunched up and his hands crossed on top of them, and his chin on his hands. He was a thin, healthy, rather solemnfaced boy. He wore homespun trousers and sturdy hand-pegged boots, covered thick in dust, and a shirt of coarse-loomed cotton with a narrow neckband and no collar. His hair was a light brown, cut off square above the shoulders and again above the eyes, and on his head he wore a brown flat-crowned hat with a wide brim.
Len’s people were New Mennonites, and they wore brown hats to distinguish themselves from the original Old Mennonites, who wore black ones. Back in the Twentieth Century, only two generations before, there had been just the Old Mennonites and Amish, and only a few tens of thousands of them, and they had been regarded as quaint and queer because they held to the old simple handcraft ways and would have no part of cities or machines. But when the cities ended, and men found that in the changed world these of all folk were best fitted to survive, the Mennonites had swiftly multiplied into the millions they now counted.
“No,” said Len slowly, “it’s not the licking I’m scared of. It’s Pa. You know how he feels about these preachin’s. He forbid me. And Uncle David forbid you. You know how they feel. I don’t think I want Pa mad at me, not that mad.”
“He can’t do no more than lick you,” Esau said.
Len shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Well, all right. Don’t go, then.”
“You going, for sure?”
“For sure. But I don’t need you.”
Esau leaned back against the wall and appeared to have forgotten Len, who moved the toes of his boots back and forth to make two stubby fans in the dust and continued to brood. The warm air was heavy with the smell of feed and animals, laced through with wood smoke and the fragrances of cooking. There were voices in the air, too, many voices, all blended together into a humming noise. You could think it was like a swarm of bees, or a wind rising and falling in the jack pines, but it was more than that. It was the world talking.
Esau said, “They fall down on the ground and scream and roll.”
Len breathed deep, and his insides quivered. The fairgrounds stretched away into immensity on all sides, crammed with wagons and carts and sheds and stock and people, and this was the last day. One more night lying under the wagon, wrapped up tight against the September chill, watching the fires burn red and mysterious and wondering about the strangers who slept around them. Tomorrow the wagon would rattle away, back to Piper’s Run, and he would not see such a thing again for another year. Perhaps never. In the midst of life we are in death. Or he might break a leg next year, or Pa might make him stay home like Brother James had had to this time, to see to Granma and the stock.
“Women, too,” said Esau.
Len hugged his knees tighter. “How do you know? You never been.”
“I heard.”
“Women,” whispered Len. He shut his eyes, and behind the lids there were pictures of wild preachings such as a New Mennonite never heard, of great smoking fires and vague frenzies and a figure, much resembling Ma in her bonnet and voluminous homespun skirts, lying on the ground and kicking like Baby Esther having a tantrum. Temptation came upon him, and he was lost.
He stood up, looking down at Esau. He said, “I’ll go.”
“Ah,” said Esau. He got up too. He held out his hand, and Len shook it. They nodded at each other and grinned. Len’s heart was pounding and he had a guilty feeling as though Pa stood right behind him listening to every word, but there was an exhilaration in this, too. There was a denial of authority, an assertion of self, a sense of being. He felt suddenly that he had grown several inches and broadened out, and that Esau’s eyes showed a new respect.
“When do we go?” he asked.
“After dark, late. You be ready. I’ll let you know.”
The wagons of the Colter brothers were drawn up side by side, so that would not be hard. Len nodded.
“I’ll pretend like I’m asleep, but I won’t be.”
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br /> “Better not,” said Esau. His grip tightened, enough to squeeze Len’s knuckles together so he’d remember. “Just don’t let on about this, Lennie.”
“Ow,” said Len, and stuck his lip out angrily. “What do you think I am, a baby?”
Esau grinned, lapsing into the easy comradeship that is becoming between men. “ ’Course not. That’s settled, then. Let’s go look over the horses again. I might want to give my dad some advice about that black mare he’s thinking of trading for.”
They walked together along the side of the horse barn. It was the biggest barn Len had ever seen, four or five times as long as the one at home. The old siding had been patched a good bit, and it was all weathered now to an even gray, but here and there where the original wood was protected you could still see a smudge of red paint. Len looked at it, and then he paused and looked around the fairground, screwing up his eyes so that everything danced and quivered.
“What you doing now?” demanded Esau impatiently.
“Trying to see.”
“Well, you can’t see with your eyes shut. Anyway, what do you mean, trying to see?”
“How the buildings looked when they were all painted like Gran said. Remember? When she was a little girl.”
“Yeah,” said Esau. “Some red, some white. They must have been something.” He squinted his eyes up too. The sheds and the buildings blurred, but remained unpainted.
“Anyway,” said Len stoutly, giving up, “I bet they never had a fair as big as this one before, ever.”
“What are you talking about?” Esau said. “Why, Gran said there was a million people here, and a million of those automobiles or cars or whatever you called them, all lined up in rows as far as you could see, with the sun just blazing on the shiny parts. A million of ’em!”
“Aw,” said Len, “there couldn’t be. Where’d they all have room to camp?”
“Dummy, they didn’t have to camp. Gran said they came here from Piper’s Run in less than an hour, and they went back the same day.”
“I know that’s what Gran said,” Len remarked thoughtfully. “But do you really believe it?”
American Science Fiction Four Classic Novels 1953-56 Page 41