The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction Fifth Series

by Edited by Anthony Boucher

  Ralph turned to Cynthia.

  “I have undercontrolled, haven’t I?”

  She shook her head. “I am forbidden to suggest. I am here to try to save you from the Short Ones and the Short Ones from you in case of emergency. I can now state that you have about used up your quota of violent deaths and another holocaust will cause the board to fail you for mismanagement.”

  Ralph sighed. He had feared overcontrol and fallen into the error of undercontrol. God, it was frustrating. . . .

  Ralph was allowed a half-hour lunch break while Cynthia took over the board. He tried to devise a safe way of toppling King Giron but could think of none. The victory was Giron’s. If Giron was content, Ralph could do nothing. But if Giron tried any more violence— Ralph felt the blood sing in his ears. If he was destined to fail, he would make a magnificent failure of it!

  Then he was back at the board beside Cynthia and under the helmet and the world of the short Ones closed in on him. The scenes of the slaughter remained with him vividly, and he sought Telfus, the sole survivor, now a man with one eye and a twisted leg who nevertheless continued to preach Hillerism and tell about the god who was big enough to let Short Ones run their own affairs. He was often laughed at, more often stoned, but always he gathered a few adherents.

  Telfus even made friends with a Captain of Giron’s guard.

  “Why do you persist in Hillerism?” asked the Captain. “It is obvious that Hiller doesn’t care for his own priests enough to protect them.”

  “Not so,” said Telfus. “He cares so much that he will trust them to fall on their knees or not, as they will, whereas the old gods were usually striking somebody dead in the market place because of some fancied insult. I cannot resist this miracle-less god. Our land has been sick with miracles.”

  “Still you’ll need one when Giron catches up with you.”

  “Perhaps tomorrow. But if you give me a piece of silver for Hiller, I will sleep in an inn tonight and dream your name to him.”

  Ralph sought out King Giron.

  That individual seemed sleek and fat now, very self-confident. “Take all of the statues of Hiller and Melton and any other leftover gods and smash them,” ordered the King. “The days of the gods are over. I intend to speed up the building of statues to myself, now that I control the world.”

  The idols to the King went up in the market places. The people concealed doubt and prayed to him because his military was strong. But this pretense bothered Giron.

  “The people cannot believe I’m divine,” said King Giron. “We need a mighty celebration. A ritual to prove it. I’ve heard from a Guard Captain of Telfus, this one-eyed beggar who still clings to Hiller. I want him brought to my palace for a celebration. I want the last survivor of the Hiller massacre dressed in a black robe and sacrificed at my celebration. Then the people will understand that Gironism defies all gods and is eternal.”

  Ralph felt a dryness on the inside of his mouth. He watched the guards round up the few adherents of Hillerism and bring them to the palace. He watched the beginnings of the celebration to King Giron.

  There was irony, he thought. Just as violence breeds violence, so non-violence breeds violence. Now the whole thing had to be done over again, only now the insolence of the Gironists dug into Ralph like a scalpel on a raw nerve.

  Rank upon rank of richly clad soldiers, proud merchants, laughing Gironists crowded together in the center of the courtyard where the one-eyed man and a dozen of his tattered followers faced death.

  “Now, Guards,” said King Giron, “move out and kill them. Place the sword firmly at the neck and cleave them down the middle. Then there will be twice as many Hillers!”

  Cheers! Laughter! Oh, droll, divine King Giron!

  Ralph felt the power surging in the dial under his hand, ready but not yet unleashed. He felt the dizzying pull of it, the knowledge that he could rip the flesh apart and strip the bones of thousands of Gironists. The absolute power to blast the conceited ruler from his earth. To smash bodies, stone, sand, vegetation, all—absolute, absolute power ready to use.

  And King Giron laughed as the swordsman cleft the first of the beggarly Hillers.

  Ralph was a seething furnace of rage. “Go! Go! Go!” his mind told his hands.

  Then Cynthia did a surprising thing. “Take your hands off the dials,” she said. “You’re in a nasty spot. I’m taking over.”

  His temples throbbed but with an effort he removed his hands from the dials. Whether she was helping him or hurting him, he didn’t know, but she had correctly judged that he had reached his limit.

  One by one the followers of Hillerism died. He saw the vein along her throat throb, and he saw her fingers tremble on the dials she tried to hold steady. A flush crept up her neck. Participation in the world below was working on her too. She could see no way out and he understood it.

  The cruel, fat dictator and his unctuous followers, the poor, set-upon martyrs—even the symbol of Telfus, his last follower, being a crippled and helpless man. A situation like this could trigger a man into unleashing a blasting fury that would overload the circuits and earn him revenge only at the cost of a crack in his skull. In real life, a situation of white-hot seething public emotion would make a government official turn to his H-bombs with implacable fury and strike out with searing flames that would wash the world clean, taking the innocent along with the guilty, unblocking great segments of civilization, radioactivating continents and sending the sea into an eternal boil.

  And yet -- GOD DAMN IT, YOU HAD TO STOP THE GIRONS!

  Cynthia broke. She was too emotionally involved to restrain herself. She bit her lips and withdrew her hands from the dials with a moan.

  But the brief interruption had helped Ralph as he leaned forward and took the dials in her place. His anger had subsided suddenly into a clear-minded determination.

  He thought-waved Telfus. “I fear that you must go,” he said. “I thank you for keeping the faith.”

  “You’ve been a most peculiar god,” said Telfus, warily watching the last of his friends die. His face was white; he knew he was being saved for the last.

  “Total violence solves nothing.”

  “Still it would be nice to kick one of these fellows in the shins,” said Telfus, the sweat pouring from his face. “In the natural order of things an occasional miracle cannot hurt.”

  “What would you have me do?”

  Telfus passed a hand over his face. “Hardly a moment for thoughtful discussion,” he groaned. He cried out in passionate anguish as his closest friend died. Ralph let the strong emotions of Telfus enter his mind, and then gradually Telfus caught hold of himself.

  “Well,” he said, “if I could only see King Giron die…”

  “Never mind the rest?” asked Ralph.

  “Never mind the rest,” said Telfus. “Men shouldn’t play gods.”

  “How right you are!” cried Ralph.

  “Telfus!” cried King Giron. “You see now how powerful I am! You see now that there are no more gods!”

  “I see a fool,” said Telfus as the guard’s sword fell. The guard struck low to prolong the death for the King’s enjoyment and Telfus rolled on the ground trying to hold the blood in his body. The nobles cheered and King Giron laughed and clapped his hands in glee. The guards stood back to watch the death throes of Telfus.

  But Telfus struggled to a sitting position and cried out in a voice that was strangely powerful as if amplified by the voice of a god.

  “I’ve been permitted one small miracle,” he said. “Under Hiller these favors are hard to come by.”

  There was an electric silence. Telfus pointed his empty hand at King Giron with the forefinger extended, like a gun. He dropped his thumb.

  “Bang,” he said.

  At that moment Ralph gave vent to his pent-up steam of emotions in one lightning-quick flip of the dial of destruction, sent out with a prayer. A microsecond jab. At that the earth rocked and there was a roaring as the nearby seas c
hanged the shoreline.

  But King Giron’s head split open and his insides rushed out like a fat, ripe pea that had been opened and shucked by a celestial thumb. For a second the empty skin and bones stood upright in semblance of a man and then gently folded to the ground.

  “Not bad,” said Telfus. “Thanks.” He died.

  It was interesting to watch the Gironists. Death—death in battle or natural death—was a daylight-common thing. Dignified destruction is a human trade. But the unearthly death of the King brought about by the lazy fingering of the beggar— what person in his time would forget the flying guts and the empty, upright skin of the man who lived by cruelty and finally had his life shucked out?

  Down below in the courtyard the Gironists began to get rid of their insignia. One man dropped Giron’s book into a fire. Another softly drew a curtain over the idol of Giron. Men slunk away to ponder the non-violent god who would always be a shadow at their shoulder—who spoke seldom but when he spoke was heard for all time. Gironism was dead forever.

  ~ * ~

  Up above a bell rang and Ralph jerked up from his contemplation with surprise to hear the rainlike sound, the applause and the approval of the audience in the Life Hall. Even Gerard was leaning over the press-box rail and grinning and nodding his head in approval, like a fish.

  Ralph still had some time in the chair, but there would be no more trouble with the Short Ones. Already off somewhere a clerk was filling out the certificate.

  He turned to Cynthia. “You saved me by that interruption.”

  “You earned your way,” she said.

  “I’ve learned much,” he said. “If a god calls upon men for faith, then a god must return it with trust, and it was Telfus, not I, whom I trusted to solve the problem. After all, it was his life, his death.”

  “You’ve grown,” she said.

  “We have grown,” he said, taking her hand under the table and not immediately letting go.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  MILDRED CLINGERMAN

  Earlier in this volume I mentioned the marked diversity of Mildred Clingerman’s stories— a fact which you can confirm by reading the sharply different tales hitherto anthologized by me, by Groff Conklin and by August Derleth. Or you can find sufficient evidence simply in the contrast between the frivolous and rather naughty Birds Can’t Count and this narrative of a wealthy bore whose only distinction was that he knew the forgotten cause of—but Mrs. Clingerman lets her story develop and reveal itself so easily that a blurb has no business even stating the theme.

  THE LAST PROPHET

  It was said of Reggie Pfister that he had an uncanny knack for appearing at the best and noisiest parties, wherever in the world they might be. To those scribes who reported the cavortings of international society, Reggie was as much a fixture as the fat ex-king, though not nearly so colorful. Reggie, too, was fat and rich; but nobody hung on his words, nobody scrambled to join his retinue. Reggie didn’t have any retinue. Hostesses welcomed him for the reason that unattached, eligible males are always welcomed; but because of his well-known hobby and his penchant for droning on about it in a soft, flat monotone, people tended to avoid him whenever possible.

  At very large parties, however, there were always a few who were unaware of his reputation as an amiable bore. Across the room from him, somebody would be struck by his likeness to a jolly (but spiritual) monk; somebody else (usually female) would recall acres of oil wells all labeled Pfister; or occasionally somebody’s attention would be caught by the significant way Reggie glanced at his watch, then wrote in a worn little notebook. These were the people who threaded their way to his table.

  Reggie’s face always glowed with delight when this happened. Hopping up excitedly, Reggie pushed chairs about, signaled waiters, shook hands, and bounced on his toes till his guests, dizzied by his swooping, flightlike gestures, collapsed in their chairs gratefully. For the first few minutes Reggie was content to let the others talk—not because Reggie had finally learned to approach potential listeners warily (he hadn’t), but because he liked the feeling that at any moment now he’d have the opportunity to present these smart, sophisticated people with some real news!

  When he decided the time had come, almost any casual remark was enough to set Reggie going. Somebody might say, “It’s a dull party,” or “Weren’t you in Rome last week?”

  Then Reggie would say: “That’s a very interesting question. I’m glad you brought that up. . . .” And always he’d gallop on his hobbyhorse while his guests stared at him and nudged each other under the table. “. . . I’m sure you’ve noticed it,” the flat voice would be hurrying now. “Everybody has noticed it at one time or another, but nobody does anything about it—like the weather, hmmm? But I have. Done something about it, I mean. For fifteen years I’ve kept records on it . . . right here in this little old notebook. I’ve gone to the noisiest parties—trying to play fair, you know. Must be scientific about these things, or a project’s worthless. Worthless. As of this moment, I’ve recorded 12,938 occasions it has happened, all personally witnessed. No doubtfuls included, you understand.- If there’s so much as a giggle, say, from the terrace, I’m utterly ruthless with myself. I don’t record it, though I am often tempted . . . yes, yes, very tempted. My record is four in one twenty-four hour period. I should so much like to make it five. . . .”

  There was always one at the table who had failed to follow Reggie’s tricky transition. In fact, in his eagerness to plunge into his subject, Reggie often forgot to lead into it at all. Asked what the hell he was talking about, Reggie would laugh and slap his thighs, and then take out his handkerchief and blow his nose. This seemed to have a sobering effect on everybody. Reggie, leaning carefully over his untouched drink, would tap the table with a pudgy forefinger, stare one by one into the glum faces around him, and ask a question.

  “Haven’t you ever noticed those dead-silent lulls that fall on groups of people? At a party like this one, for instance. Sooner or later this very night there’ll come those few seconds when nobody is saying anything. When it happens, glance at your watch. You know what time it will be? Twenty minutes after the hour.” The pudgy finger lifted as if to halt protests. Nobody offered any. “Now mind you, some, people will tell you that it also occurs at twenty minutes to the hour. I’ll be honest with you. Sometimes it does. But out of 12,938 recorded instances, that has only happened, in my experience, 119 measly times. That clearly indicates to me just one thing: human fallibility. You discount human fraility, ordinary wear and tear, and the natural blurring after so long a time of the built-in blueprint for the human brain, and. I’ll guarantee that, from the beginning, we were supposed to be quiet at twenty minutes after every hour.”

  At this point, Reggie’s listeners would be drooping listlessly over empty glasses and staring out at the gaiety around them with the sour faces of castaways watching a ship disappear over the horizon. But the waiters were heaving into view with drinks. Reggie saw to that. Almost anybody with a fresh drink before him will pause long enough to take a sip or two. Reggie counted on their doing so. Because now he was approaching the great heart of the matter. It was imperative that this time Reggie be allowed to finish what he had to say. But first he must fill them in, he thought, on some of the background.

  “I’ve tracked this thing all over the world.” (Reggie never varied his background-opener.) “I spent years hunting out the wisest men in every corner of the globe. To every one of them I put the same question: Why? Why? Most of them just laughed at me. . . Now, I’m not blaming them. I can see how, just at first, my question might sound pretty unimportant to a busy man—the world being in the shape it is, and all. Their mistake was, they didn’t ponder it long enough. If they’d bothered to think about it awhile, they’d have seen as clearly as I do that, given the answer to what makes people fall silent at twenty minutes past the hour, we’d have a lot of other answers to some pretty deep questions. Like, Who are we? for instance, and Is there a God?
Well. To make a long story short, I finally ran across a couple of old magi, real wise men of the East, like in the Bible. They study the stars and charts and ancient old tablets and books, you know. So I asked them, and they didn’t laugh. ‘Come back,’ they said, ‘in seven years and we’ll try to answer your question.’ So back I went, seven years later—that was a couple of years ago—and I find just this one feeble old man still alive, but he had the answer for me!