The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction Fifth Series

by Edited by Anthony Boucher

  “Now I don’t insist that you believe it. The answer, I mean. You people can look on it as a theory, if you like. But I’ll frankly admit that I regard it as prophecy. That poor little old man . . .! After his partner died, he’d worked on alone. He had a lot of dignity. The day before he died he took my hand and told me how lucky I was—said I was chosen to publish the good news and alert mankind. That made me feel good. But you have no idea how difficult it is! People don’t seem to be interested. Oh, they’ll listen politely enough for a while, but they never wait to find out the answer. . . .”

  It was on the Riviera that Reggie’s voice halted just at this point—one of those evenings when he was most hopeful of reaching his hearers. For a moment the whole room was quiet. Except for the wind that could be heard in the oleanders outside, the hush was complete. But only for a few seconds. Even while Reggie was consulting his watch, noise flowed back, with a woman’s laughter bobbing atop the wave.

  “You see!” Reggie crowed. “Twenty minutes after twelve!” But his guests were gone.

  That kind of thing was always happening to Reggie. In Cairo or New York, in Madrid or Washington, D.C.—especially in Washington, D.C. It was there that Reggie had the devastating experience of barely opening his mouth when several people said, “I’m glad you brought that up,” and what with all of them talking politics very fast and loud, completely drowned out Reggie’s soft drone.

  In Hollywood Reggie got only as far as the two magi, when a pert starlet insisted there should be three magi, and where was Reggie from?

  “Why, I’m from East Fairview, Pennsylvania,” he admitted shyly.

  Whereupon the starlet dragged him off to a bedroom and draped him in a bedspread, proclaiming him for the rest of the evening as the third wise man from the East. The other two, she said, were a helluva lot brighter. They’d already given up and gone home.

  In San Francisco Reggie poured out his story to a fascinated audience, up to the moment when he was about to divulge the prophecy. But in San Francisco everybody insisted on the right to think (and prophesy) for himself, and it all ended in the hurling of some high-class vocabulary and fisticuffs.

  Reggie boarded a fast plane home to East Fairview, having wired his housekeeper to uncover the furniture in the drawing room and prepare for a big party. He invited all his relatives and in-laws, his old school chums, and the girls he’d left behind him. It was a very nice party. For the first time in his life, Reggie was able to record five dead-silent lulls; but even this triumph was questionable, since he later discovered that none of his relatives ever spoke to each other anyway. And as for relating the prophecy, Reggie hadn’t a chance. He had forgotten that a prophet is without honor under his own rooftree.

  Back again in New York, Reggie faced the fact that time was running out. There’s something about an unshared hotel room, he thought, that presents any fact in the dreariest possible light.

  Silently, he addressed his image in the bureau mirror: Here am I, a lonely man, with a story to tell. I have news, and nobody listens. I’m fat and funny-looking and my voice is all wrong. Until fifteen years ago I led a perfectly useless existence. I’m not very smart; somebody else had to give me all the answers. I’ve shared food with people, and drinks, and roomspace, but I’ve never shared a great experience. I’d like to share this. I’m the only man alive who knows . ..

  Suddenly Reggie Pfister remembered that he was a rich man. He remembered it in a spirit of humility. If nobody would listen freely, then perhaps he could pay to be heard.

  ~ * ~

  The psychiatrist’s office was cool and quiet, except for the murmuring of the two nurses in the receptionist’s cubicle. Reggie was very early for his appointment; he had been anxious to escape the hotel room and the bureau mirror. There was another patient waiting too, a young woman with the blank, unwritten-on face of a child. Reggie tried not to stare at her. He had the feeling that it might be bad form to show undue interest in patients waiting in the outer rooms of psychiatrists. But the young woman troubled him. She was very pale, and she was trembling. She turned the pages of the magazine she held with the excessive quietness and caution of a child who has been scolded too often and too harshly. Reggie, stealing little peeps at her over his own magazine, saw that she was crying. He had never before seen anybody weep in just that way. Two little unbroken streams of tears poured smoothly down her face and dripped onto her soft collar. She was scarcely making a sound.

  Impulsively Reggie went to sit beside her. He glanced at the receptionist’s cubicle. He and the girl were out of the line of sight of the nurses. They would have had to lean out their little window to watch the two patients; besides, they were now discussing hats. No interference there, Reggie thought, and he took the girl in his arms.

  She fitted against him without resistance, pressing her head against his shoulder. After a while, when her trembling had subsided, Reggie wiped her eyes and her nose and smoothed back the fine, straight hair. He was rewarded with a small, tentative smile.

  “I’m so frightened,” the girl whispered, leaning very close to Reggie’s ear, as if she were telling an important secret.

  “Tell me why,” Reggie whispered back.

  “All the paths are dark,” the girl said, “and I am afraid to turn corners.”

  “Yes,” Reggie said. “And what else?”

  “When I cry out in the night, nobody answers . . . and . . . and there are beasts in the forest who devour children, even very good children. Not a bit like in stories . . . Will you tell me a story?”

  Reggie’s eyes closed almost involuntarily, as if he wanted to contain for the moment his fierce joy. He shifted his arm then and drew her closer to him.

  “Listen. . . .” he said. “Once upon a time—a very long time ago, when the world was young, a father gathered his children around him and said, ‘I must go away for a time. I have work to do far away—so far that, though I shall travel faster than your good thoughts, yet will I not have reached the realm when your children’s children are old. I do not like to leave my children fatherless, but I am needed elsewhere. I leave you with my boundless love, and lest you grow weary with longing for counsel, I bid you be silent and listen at such times every day—’ “

  Reggie paused and smiled down at the girl’s rapt face. “And then,” he continued, “the father set a kind of little clock humming in every child’s head, with the times for listening clearly marked, so none could forget. Then he said, “When I have finished my work, I will come home.’ He kissed every child goodby and asked them all to be good, and then he went away.”

  “Did the old witch get them?” the girl asked in alarm.

  “The old witch?” Reggie asked.

  “You know. It’s part of the game. . . . The father says, ‘I’m going downtown to smoke my pipe, and I won’t be back till the broad daylight. Don’t let the old witch get you.’ Then the children are supposed to say ‘Tick-a-lock’ so they’ll be safe behind the locked door. But mostly they forget that part,” the girl mused.

  Reggie nodded. “Yes, I expect these children forgot it, too. By and by, they, or their descendants, forgot a number of things. They forgot the trick of listening in a certain, special way; so that, as the father traveled farther and farther, and his voice grew smaller and smaller, finally they couldn’t hear him at all. But the little clocks still kept humming—every child ever after was bom with one built-in—and every day people still fell silent at the right times though they no longer knew why.”

  The girl stirred in his arms. “And then what happened?”

  Reggie sighed. “The next part hasn’t happened yet. In the meantime the world grows darker and darker without counsel, and you and I are afraid of the beasts in the forest. . . . But almost any day now,” Reggie’s face brightened, “something very nice will happen. You really mustn’t be afraid because—” Reggie struggled for the right words to phrase the prophecy, but found none. The girl waited quietly. In their cubicle, the two nurses were
silent, too. Reggie stared at the clock on the wall. Twenty minutes after three.

  Suddenly, out of the silence, there was a great deal of noise, as of the ripping of an enormous cloth, big enough to shroud the world. Then came a mighty rolling-back sound, as if the sky had parted and curled back on itself like two halves of a scroll. Light poured down into the waiting room, and the weight of it bowed the heads of all within. There was a sound like bells, and a sound like thunder. There was an immutable sound like power, and a joyous sound like glory. Reggie heard and noted the chill undertones of justice, but was most aware of the tender tones of love. Both the light and the sound grew and grew till they merged and became the Voice:

  MY DEAR, OBEDIENT CHILDREN, I AM COMING HOME. . . .

  There was a cessation of sound, and only the light remained. Then one of the nurses screamed, and the scream died away into a long, sobbing wail. This very human ululation brought Reggie’s head up sharply. The old distress call of the pack found an instant response in his quickened heartbeat, and in the prickling down his backbone. It brought Reggie’s head around to stare downward through the window behind him, however briefly. Still holding the girl, Reggie’s arms were now wooden, and unaware. His mouth was dry and he swallowed spasmodically to rid it of the metallic taste of adrenalin.

  Below him the pack squirmed and crawled like maggots seeking an opening into the dark, sweet body of the earth. Reggie saw enacted with terrible clarity all that was animal in humankind. Under a rising accompaniment of wordless babble the monstrous pantomime unrolled for him. Reggie was lost in it and part of it, tooth and claw, till suddenly he caught sight of a man with his back to a wall, his arms and head raised defiantly, not against the howling mob, but against the sky. The puny, clenched fists of the man were so sad and wonderful that Reggie smiled. . . . There was something in the gesture that returned all Reggie’s humanity to him. The pack moved on, but Reggie turned and looked at the girl.

  Bathed in the great light, her face showed no fear. When her serene eyes met his, Reggie was able for a moment to meet her gaze without faltering. Except that . . . His eyes closed in shame for the niggling little shred of vanity and disappointment he was wrestling with. If only I could have had another minute ... he thought.

  “You are troubled,” she said.

  “It’s nothing really,” Reggie said. “It’s just that I wanted to tell you something, but time ran out.”

  <>

  ~ * ~

  P. M. HUBBARD

  P. M. Hubbard is the most skilled and graceful writer of light (and occasionally serious) verse whom Punch has discovered since A. P. Herbert. (Memo to American publishers: A collection of his delightful poetry is long overdue.) In this story, written especially for F&SF, he brings a poet’s seme of concise beauty to a classic and ever tragic theme of science fiction.

  BOTANY BAY

  It was one of those evenings you get in England around midsummer, that seem to go on indefinitely. I could build up a nice bit of atmosphere about that evening, but it wouldn’t be true. If there was an atmosphere, I didn’t feel it; and on the facts, even as presented, I don’t see why there should have been. And the petrol-station was a perfectly ordinary one, and the man on duty, to all appearances, a perfectly ordinary man.

  The man filled her up, speaking with a pleasant richness in what I took to be the local voice. Then he went inside for change, and I got out and walked around a bit to stretch my legs. The road followed the valley here, with hills—I suppose chalk downs—rising sharply on the far side. It was really starting to get dark at last, and the narrow strip of tarmac reflected like water the tremendous sultry glow that lay across the tops of the hills. There were a few stars showing, and one in particular, a steady orange-gold, over the high skyline right opposite the pumps.

  I fetched up beside the door of the garage, looking at the collection of spares and accessories they always put in the window at these places. The man must have thought I was still in the car. He came straight out of the door, leaving me behind him, and walked towards the pumps. He had the money in his hand. Then he stopped, just as I was going to speak to him, and uttered a sound which I could hardly believe I’d heard, only my stomach was still sickened at it. When I pulled myself together, I decided he was ill, and went to him. He was still standing there, with the line of pumps between him and the car, gazing up at the sky, where the orange-yellow star, clearer now, gazed back.

  I said, “Are you all right?” I didn’t touch him or anything. He was perfectly steady on his feet, just standing there, and I still wasn’t sure. Then I came abreast of him and saw his face. I haven’t described his appearance before, because he wasn’t the sort of man you find it necessary to describe—just an ordinary man in overalls, a bit on the small side and quiet-spoken, but very ordinary. Now he had a look on his face that needs describing, but isn’t easy to describe—not adequately. It was a look of longing, a sort of shocking hunger, but so overlaid with hopelessness that the impression was one of complete passivity. He didn’t move because there was nothing he could do. The sound he had uttered had been squeezed out of him; it was quite involuntary. He was looking at the star.

  I said, “Are you all right?” again. It was an idiotic question to ask a man with that look on his face, but it was the sort of thing one does say. He heard me the second time. He turned and held out the money to me, but in a tentative sort of way, and not quite within my reach, as though he couldn’t get me properly focused. I moved up and took it from him. That seemed to rouse him. He looked at me, rearranging his disintegrated features. “I thought you were in the car,” he said. The voice, with its soft country burr, was quite unchanged.

  It seemed to be dark now all at once. The orange star glowed in the sky, but he did not look at it. It didn’t look right to me, but I don’t notice that sort of thing much, and I think now it was probably quite normal. There again, there was no reason, even on the facts, why it should have been anything else.

  I said, “That star—” but he cut me very short. “That’s not a star, sir,” he said. “More what you’d call a planet.” He spoke exactly as a countryman speaks to a townsman, putting him right, but no disrespect intended. He was in every way perfectly ordinary again.

  “All right,” I said, “a planet it is. But look, chum. I don’t want to interfere, and I’m sorry if you didn’t know I was there. But I heard you and saw your face just now, and there’s something very wrong. If there’s anything I can do—”

  He turned his back while I was still speaking and started walking towards the garage. He said, “I wonder why the hell They let me remember.”

  He went inside and I followed him. In the last glimmer of daylight we groped our way into the little boarded box of an office and sat down on hard chairs. The air smelt of petrol and oiled metal. I could see the outline of a cash register and above it the stolid, frowning profile against the luminous window. “I didn’t ought to remember, not by rights,” he said. “They said—” He caught his breath, and I felt sick at the stomach again. “They said”—this time the word was harsh with a sort of incredulous defiance—”They said we’d remember nothing that was any good to us—just enough to keep us unhappy. They must have got the mixture wrong.” He thought for a bit. “A couple of hundred of us there must have been, my time. Too many to handle properly, perhaps. Used to be forty or fifty in a batch, generally, but They had been having a lot of trouble. Don’t all get there, of course. Even They don’t know everything, and there’s a lot of wastage. What happens to the ones that miss nobody knows, but They wouldn’t care, so long as they get us off. Still, there must be a lot of us about, remembering enough to keep us unhappy. It’s nicely done, really. You’ve got to hand it to them. They are clever all right.”

  He chuckled, a soft country chuckle, and then caught his breath again, so that I felt my heart thud twice in the sudden, hollow silence.

  The window frame lit up silver with the lights of an oncoming car. I got up, clutching
with both hands at the solid reality of a country garage. Somebody sounded a horn outside, and he said, “I’ll have to ask you to move your car, sir. You’re blocking the pumps.”

  “I will,” I said. I got in and started her up. Then, seeing no reason to do anything else, I drove on.

  ~ * ~

  It was nearly a year before I went there again. I had no need to stop this time, and did not mean to. Nevertheless, I found I had been hoping to see him outside by the pumps; and when I did not, I hesitated on the throttle, and then stopped the car and walked back.

  I didn’t know the man who came out. He was a lot older, probably the boss. I suddenly found myself in a difficulty. I said, “Oh—I was hoping to see the chap who was here.”

  He looked at me a bit sharp. “Newman, you mean?” he said. “I don’t know his name. About a year ago. A smallish chap, fair.”

  “That’s right, Newman. What d’you want him for? Any sort of trouble?” He seemed eager.