The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction 8 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Alfred Bester

  ~ * ~

  The Best from

  Fantasy & Science Fiction 8

  Edited by Anthony Boucher

  No copyright 2011 by MadMaxAU eBooks

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  Contents

  introduction

  C. S. LEWIS Ministering Angels

  POUL ANDERSON Backwardness

  KIT REED The Wait

  ISAAC ASIMOV The Up-To-Date Sorcerer

  FRITZ LEIBER A Deskful Of Girls

  DAMON KNIGHT Eripmav

  BRIAN W. ALDISS Poor Little Warrior!

  SHIRLEY JACKSON The Omen

  JULES VERNE Gil Braltar

  AVRAM DAVIDSON The Grantha Sighting

  C. M. KORNBLUTH Theory Of Rocketry

  RON GOULART A New Lo!

  JOHN SHEPLEY Gorilla Suit

  ZENNA HENDERSON Captivity

  ALFRED BESTER The Men Who Murdered Mohammed

  ~ * ~

  INTRODUCTION

  I should like, in the name of science fiction, to challenge the claim of the Beat Generation (and their transatlantic colleagues, the Angry Young Men) to speak with the voice of today.

  To be sure, there are some resemblances between science-fictioneers and the Beatniks. We also speak an argot of our own; we sometimes tend toward a sort of exclusive gregariousness; and a possibly undue proportion of us are bearded. (Of the authors in this volume, Jules Verne possessed a Beard of Beards, one of the great facial outcroppings of all time; Alfred Bester and Avram Davidson are more modestly adorned—and I even happen at the moment to be enjoying a small beard myself, though it won’t last long if my wife has anything to say about it, and I fear she has.)

  But the differences outweigh any superficial smiliarities. For one thing, we are not A Generation, but something more like a genealogy. The authors here presented have birth dates ranging from 1828 (Verne, from whom we all descend) to 1933 (Reed). To Speak For Today’s Generation is often to seem eccentric today and démodé tomorrow; to speak for tomorrow, as we have tried to do for most of a century, seems frequently more meaningful for today—and holds up surprisingly well tomorrow: science fiction that has been outdated by fact is often conceptually valid and still stimulating.

  It is in these basic concepts that the contrast is sharpest between us and the Beat. As best one can make out from the shreds of Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Zen that seem to make up the Beat evangel, the sole concern of the individual should be his own individual existence, and indeed primarily the sensations of this very instant of that existence.

  Now this is, for the individual, a tenable and even a tempting (if hardly a novel) philosophy. For a generation (and a many-generationed world) which possesses space travel and atomic fission and fusion, it is a luxury, and quite conceivably a suicidal one.

  If a single theme can be said to run through all of science fiction, it is that man and his world affect each other. S.f. is essentially the story both of the impact of the scientific future upon man, and of the impact of man upon that future. This, I submit, is not a “literature of escape” as it has often been labeled (unless by “escape” one means a velocity of seven miles per second), but an imaginative literature firmly grounded in the harshest realism—a realism notably lacking in fiction obsessed with personal woes in vacuo.

  But please do not let the unwontedly serious tone of this introduction put you off. Science fiction (and fantasy too) usually has a substratum of serious meaning; but its surface remains entertainment, ranging from adventure to melodrama to satire to parable to horror tale to— But the list is too long: almost every story in this collection belongs to a different category from all the others. And sometimes the story most serious in intention may be the liveliest and funniest, as in the case of C. S. Lewis’ Ministering Angels— which you should start in on now.

  anthony boucher

  Berkeley, California

  <>

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  C. S. LEWIS

  Dr. Robert S. Richardson’s controversial article, The Day after We Land on Mars—first published in the Saturday Review and later expanded for F&SF (December 1955)— contained the provocative prediction that “we may be forced into first tolerating and finally openly accepting an attitude toward sex that is taboo in our present social framework. ... To put it bluntly, may it not be necessary for the success of the project to send some nice girls to Mars at regular intervals to relieve tensions and promote morale?” C. S. Lewis takes it from there in his first short story of space travel—a tale of the First Martian Expedition which is perceptive, human, and warmly comic.

  MINISTERING ANGELS

  The Monk, as they called him, settled himself on the camp chair beside his bunk and stared through the window at the harsh sand and black-blue sky of Mars. He did not mean to begin his ‘work’ for ten minutes yet. Not, of course, the work he had been brought there to do. He was the meteorologist of the party, and his work in that capacity was largely done; he had found out whatever could be found out. There was nothing more, within the limited radius he could investigate, to be observed for at least twenty-five days. And meteoro­logy had not been his real motive. He had chosen three years on Mars as the nearest modern equivalent to a hermitage in the desert. He had come there to meditate: to continue the slow, perpetual rebuilding of that inner structure which, in his view, it was the main purpose of life to rebuild. And now his ten minutes’ rest was over. He began with his well-used formula. ‘Gentle and patient Master, teach me to need men less and to love thee more.’ Then to it. There was no time to waste. There were barely six months of this lifeless, sinless, unsuffering wilderness ahead of him. Three years were short. . . but when the shout came he rose out of his chair with the practised alertness of a sailor.

  The Botanist in the next cabin responded to the same shout with a curse. His eye had been at the microscope when it came. It was maddening. Constant interruption. A man might as well try to work in the middle of Piccadilly as in this infernal camp. And his work was already a race against time. Six months more ... and he had hardly begun. The flora of Mars, these tiny, miraculously hardy organisms, the ingenuity of their contrivances to live under all but impossible conditions—it was a feast for a lifetime. He would ignore the shout. But then came the bell. All hands to the main room.

  The only person who was doing, so to speak, nothing when the shout came was the Captain. To be more exact, he was (as usual) trying to stop thinking about Clare, and get on with his official journal. Clare kept on interrupting from forty million miles away. It was preposterous. ‘ Would have needed all hands,’ he wrote…hands…his own hands ... his own hands, hands, he felt, with eyes in them, travelling over all the warm-cool, soft-firm, smooth, yielding, resisting aliveness of her. ‘Shut up, there’s a dear,’ he said to the photo on his desk. And so back to the journal, until the fatal words ‘had been causing me some anxiety’. Anxiety—oh God, what might be happening to Clare now? How did he know there was a Clare by this time? Anything could happen. He’d been a fool ever to accept this job. What other newly married man in the world would have done it? But it had seemed so sensible. Three years of horrid separation but then ... oh, they were made for life. He had been promised the post that, only a few months before, he would not have dared to dream of. He’d never need to go to Space again. And all the by-products; the lectures, the book, probably a title. Plenty of children. He knew she wanted that, and so in a queer way (as he began to find) did he. But damn it, the journal. Begin a new paragraph…And then the shout came.

  It was one of the two youngsters, technicians both, who had given it. They had been
together since dinner. At least Paterson had been standing at the open door of Dickson’s cabin, shifting from foot to foot and swinging the door, and Dickson had been sitting on his berth and waiting for Paterson to go away.

  ‘What are you talking about, Paterson?’ he said. ‘Who ever said anything about a quarrel?’

  ‘That’s all very well, Bobby,’ said the other, ‘but we’re not friends like we used to be. You know we’re not. Oh, I’m not blind. I did ask you to call me Clifford. And you’re always so stand-offish.’

  ‘Oh, get to Hell out of this!’ cried Dickson. ‘I’m perfectly ready to be good friends with you and everyone else in an ordinary way, but all this gas—like a pair of school girls—I will not stand. Once and for all—’

  ‘Oh look, look, look,’ said Paterson. And it was then that Dickson shouted and the Captain came and rang the bell and within twenty seconds they were all crowded behind the biggest of the windows. A spaceship had just made a beautiful landing about a hundred and fifty yards from camp.

  ‘Oh boy!’ exclaimed Dickson. ‘They’re relieving us before our time.’

  ‘Damn their eyes. Just what they would do,’ said the Botanist.

  Five figures were descending from the ship. Even in space suits it was clear that one of them was enormously fat; they were in no other way remarkable.

  ‘Man the air lock,’ said the Captain.

  ~ * ~

  Drinks from their limited store were going round. The Captain had recognised in the leader of the strangers an old acquaintance, Fer­guson. Two were ordinary young men, not unpleasant. But the remaining two?

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said the Captain, ‘who exactly—I mean we’re delighted to see you all of course—but what exactly…?’

  ‘Where are the rest of your party?’ said Ferguson.

  ‘We’ve had two casualties, I’m afraid,’ said the Captain. ‘Sackville and Dr Burton. It was a most wretched business. Sackville tried eating the stuff we call Martian cress. It drove him fighting mad in a matter of minutes. He knocked Burton down and by sheer bad luck Burton fell in just the wrong position: across that table there. Broke his neck. We got Sackville tied down on a bunk but he was dead before the evening.’

  ‘Hadna he even the gumption to try it on the guinea pig first?’ said Ferguson.

  ‘Yes,’ said the Botanist. ‘That was the whole trouble. The funny thing is that the guinea pig lived. But its behaviour was remarkable. Sackville wrongly concluded that the stuff was alcoholic. Thought he’d invent a new drink. The nuisance is that once Burton was dead, none of us could do a reliable post-mortem on Sackville. Under analysis this vegetable shows—’

  ‘A-a-a-h,’ interrupted one of those who had not yet spoken. ‘We must beware of oversimplifications. I doubt if the vegetable substance is the real explanation. There are stresses and strains. You are all, without knowing it, in a highly unstable condition, for reasons which are no mystery to a trained psychologist.’

  Some of those present had doubted the sex of this creature. Its hair was very short, its nose very long, its mouth very prim, its chin sharp, and its manner authoritative. The voice revealed it as, scientifically speaking, a woman. But no one had had any doubt about the sex of her nearest neighbour, the fat person.

  ‘Oh, dearie,’ she wheezed. ‘Not now. I tell you straight I’m that flustered and faint, I’ll scream if you go on so. Suppose there ain’t such a thing as a port and lemon handy? No? Well, a little drop more gin would settle me. It’s me stomach reelly.’

  The speaker was infinitely female and perhaps in her seventies. Her hair had been not very successfully dyed to a colour not unlike that of mustard. The powder (scented strongly enough to throw a train off the rails) lay like snow drifts in the complex valleys of her creased, many-chinned face.

  ‘Stop,’ roared Ferguson. ‘Whatever ye do, dinna give her a drap mair to drink.’

  ‘ ‘E’s no ‘art, ye see,’ said the old woman with a whimper and an affectionate leer directed at Dickson.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said the Captain. ‘Who are these—ah—ladies and what is this all about?’

  ‘I have been waiting to explain,’ said the Thin Woman, and cleared her throat. ‘Anyone who has been following World-Opinion-Trends on the problems arising out of the psychological welfare aspect of interplanetary communication will be conscious of the growing agreement that such a remarkable advance inevitably demands of us far-reaching ideological adjustments. Psychologists are now well aware that a forcible inhibition of powerful biological urges over a protracted period is likely to have unforeseeable results. The pioneers of space travel are exposed to this danger. It would be unenlightened if a supposed ethicality were allowed to stand in the way of their protection. We must therefore nerve ourselves to face the view that immorality, as it has hitherto been called, must no longer be regarded as unethical—’

  ‘I don’t understand that,’ said the Monk.

  ‘She means,’ said the Captain, who was a good linguist, ‘that what you call fornication must no longer be regarded as immoral.’

  ‘That’s right, dearie,’ said the Fat Woman to Dickson, ‘she only means a poor boy needs a woman now and then. It’s only natural.’

  ‘What was required, therefore,’ continued the Thin Woman, ‘was a band of devoted females who would take the first step. This would expose them, no doubt, to obloquy from many ignorant persons. They would be sustained by the consciousness that they were performing an indispensable function in the history of human progress.’

  ‘She means you’re to have tarts, duckie,’ said the Fat Woman to Dickson.

  ‘Now you’re talking,’ said he with enthusiasm. ‘Bit late in the day, but better late than never. But you can’t have brought many girls in that ship. And why didn’t you bring them in? Or are they following?’

  ‘We cannot indeed claim,’ continued the Thin Woman, who had apparently not noticed the interruption, ‘that the response to our appeal was such as we had hoped. The personnel of the first unit of the Women’s Higher Aphrodisio-Therapeutic Humane Organisation (abbreviated WHAT-HO) is not perhaps ... well. Many excellent women, university colleagues of my own, even senior colleagues, to whom I applied, showed themselves curiously conventional. But at least a start has been made. And here,’ she concluded brightly, ‘we are.’

  And there, for forty seconds of appalling silence, they were. Then Dickson’s face, which had already undergone certain contortions, became very red; he applied his handkerchief and spluttered like a man trying to stifle a sneeze, rose abruptly, turned his back on the company, and hid his face. He stood slightly stooped and you could see his shoulders shaking.

  Paterson jumped up and ran towards him; but the Fat Woman, though with infinite gruntings and upheavals, had risen too.

  ‘Get art of it, Pansy,’ she snarled at Paterson. ‘Lot o’ good your sort ever did.’ A moment later her vast arms were round Dickson; all the warm, wobbling maternalism of her engulfed him.

  ‘There, sonny,’ she said, ‘it’s goin’ to be OK. Don’t cry, honey. Don’t cry. Poor boy, then. Poor boy. I’ll give you a good time.’

  ‘I think,’ said the Captain, ‘the young man is laughing, not crying.’

  It was the Monk who at this point mildly suggested a meal.

  ~ * ~

  Some hours later the party had temporarily broken up.

  Dickson (despite all his efforts the Fat Woman had contrived to sit next to him; she had more than once mistaken his glass for hers) hardly finished his last mouthful when he said to the newly arrived technicians:

  ‘I’d love to see over your ship, if I could.’

  You might expect that two men who had been cooped up in that ship so long, and had only taken off their space suits a few minutes ago, would have been reluctant to re-assume the one and return to the other. That was certainly the Fat Woman’s view. ‘Nar, nar,’ she said. ‘Don’t you go fidgeting, sonny. They seen enough of that ruddy ship for a bit, same as me. ‘Tain’t
good for you to go rushing about, not on a full stomach, like.’ But the two young men were marvellously obliging.

  ‘Certainly. Just what I was going to suggest,’ said the first. ‘OK by me, chum,’ said the second. They were all three of them out of the air lock in record time.

  Across the sand, up the ladder, helmets off, and then:

  ‘What in the name of thunder have you dumped those two bitches on us for?’ said Dickson.

  ‘Don’t fancy ‘em?’ said the Cockney stranger. ‘The people at ‘ome thought as ‘ow you’d be a bit sharp set by now. Ungrateful of you, I call it.’

  ‘Very funny to be sure,’ said Dickson. ‘But it’s no laughing matter for us.’

  ‘It hasn’t been for us either, you know,’ said the Oxford stranger. ‘Cheek by jowl with them for eighty-five days. They palled a bit after the first month.’

  ‘You’re telling me,’ said the Cockney.

  There was a disgusted pause.

  ‘Can anyone tell me,’ said Dickson at last, ‘who in the world, and why in the world, out of all possible women, selected those two horrors to send to Mars?’