The Mammoth Book Of Science Fiction

by Mike Ashley (Editor)

  “True enough. And you can prove tigers’ claws or 17-desoxybethylene are miracle-drugs, if you stress the cures and explain away the regrettable fatalities.”

  “Touché,” said Matt. “Fire ahead.”

  “Also, I’ve already admitted that my weak point is getting things on a statistical basis. I’ve been collecting data for years –” he gestured toward a row of fat notebooks beside his records – but things like poker hands, which you can tabulate easily, are obviously least likely to illustrate my point – they’re too simple, mechanically, to enjoy much freedom of action. Besides . . .” He smiled faintly.

  “Go on,” said Matt. “You think this is a weak link . . . sounds irrational. Seriously, it impressed me as genuine observation.”

  “Glad to know it, Doctor. Well, you know that the presence of an observer changes conditions so you can’t know what would have happened with no observer. That won’t perceptibly affect motion of a falling body, or other such elementary cases. But in complex, versatile systems, I believe the effect increases enormously. I believe physical processes know they’re being observed and evade analysis – I’m using ‘know’ as engineers do when they use the expression ‘How does the valve know force is applied?’ ”

  Carl was drawn off guard: “There’s a traffic light at Tenth and Capitol I swear goes red just as I reach it – oh, four times in five. I tried keeping count once, and I’m certain the frequency changed while I was doing it.”

  “More likely your car than the light. Anyway, there you are. If you can’t get statistics, you have to fall back on intuition, and that isn’t science.”

  “Well, then,” Carl made amends to his professional conscience, “there isn’t much point bothering with it, is there?”

  “Sometimes I fear not. But if enough people were thinking along those lines, someone might hit on a way to fool the resistance. Anyway, amuse yourself applying my theory and see how it fits.” The Major dismissed the topic and talked electronics for the rest of the visit.

  “Well,” Matt grinned afterward, “isn’t that a honey of a mania? His science is top-drawer stuff, too. Tell you what: I’ll lay you a dollar even that you’ll be taking him ‘whole fun and half earnest,’ as he puts it, by Christmas. I know you won’t cheat for that little: in fact, knowing you, it’ll make you confess if you weaken.”

  Carl laughed and took him up. Which meant that he had to take the Major’s suggestion at least in half earnest. But he needed amusement. In addition to a merciless load of work at an institute half destaffed by flu, he had worries: his wife Clare, of whom he was somewhat fond, had the flu too, followed by pneumonia and complicated by allergic reaction to the antibiotics applied. Having had a fortnight off during the emergency, he could not decently get down to their little apartment more than once or twice in the next fortnight, and he was a type who worried quietly but effectively. He found Major Burnside’s fantasy a distraction, and even hoped it would later appeal to Clare’s lively sense of humor.

  So he collected instances: The dollar pencil that dropped on its rubber and vaulted into the plumbless depths of a hot-air register; the tiny rip in the sleeve of his white jacket that snagged on the tap of a coffee-urn, causing him to slop a cup of scalding coffee over trousers and ankle; the page of vital report that blew off his worktable and slid craftily behind a newspaper in the wastebasket; and a dozen more commonplace acts of malice by familiar objects.

  He had to convince himself that the laws of chance adequately covered each incident; but also he had to grapple with underlying implications. So Sunday afternoon he seized a breathing-space to go up, armed with a clearance from Matt, to reason with the Major.

  “Look here, sir,” he began. “Gathering data is the first step, but you’ve got to have some general theory. Ruling out literal Gremlins, why should objects be actively hostile?”

  The Major looked up from a soldering job, with a twinkle: “If I give you a theory, will you be the least bit more persuaded? All right: why do we like organization, control, applied power?”

  Carl reflected: “Oh . . . I suppose it’s the nature of life to extend itself by organization of the environment – tools and so on.”

  “Excellent. Well, the mass of the Universe behaves in exactly the opposite way – disorganizing, devolving. Any reason why this much vaster process shouldn’t have – well, a sort of counter-life? Well, then, to it, our organizing activities would be equivalent to fires, contrary winds, rust. Up to a few thousand years ago, the effects of life were trivial – a little photosynthesis and burrowdigging that mattered no more to counter-life than geological erosion matters to us. But now Man is organizing matter and energy on an expanding scale – a regular epidemic of natural disasters to counter-life. So, of course, it resists and fights back.”

  “Hold on!” Carl protested. “After all, our activities cause increased breakdown of material, on the whole. That should be gratifying to it, not disconcerting.”

  “Yes – but we organize some matter very highly, and might eventually reverse the whole trend. Anyway, the further we go, the more opposition we generate.”

  “Pretty trivial opposition. Guerilla warfare.”

  The Major smiled. “Napoleon and Hitler were softened up for the real counter-offensive by guerilla warfare. How much of your life does it waste, for example?”

  Carl thought that over. That morning, he had lost half an hour over a broken shoelace, a shaving-cream cap that escaped down the sink, a shirt-collar loop that refused to hitch over its button, and a handful of money that scattered jubilantly when his trouser pocket snared a finger. He had accordingly breakfasted on peanuts and, on ward rounds, had covered himself with mediocrity in the eyes of Dr Svindorff.

  He changed his point of attack – or perhaps fell back on his own second line?

  “But how does it work?” he asked. “I mean, we know the laws of mechanics, and they don’t leave scope for free action.”

  “Oh, don’t they? We operate by chemistry, and yet we feel we have plenty of freedom. Simple mechanical systems made of docile materials don’t have much freedom, true. But we can’t extrapolate that fact to cover all cases.”

  “Docile materials?”

  “Metals, for example. Passive, like plant life. And we cast them in geometric forms. And even then they trick us. We get endless amusement out of games played with the simplest geometric form of all, the sphere, from billiards to baseball. What do we know of possibilities in really subtle systems of matter – fabrics, paper, rubber, ready to rebound from the almost organic forms forced on them?”

  “Hm! Aren’t those organic materials?”

  “Exorganic. What populations are more fanatical for liberty than those that have just been liberated from obnoxious control? And note this: we organize matter only for special purposes; matter tries to waste our energies out of systematic hostility. The aspirin tablet that eludes you and wastes two minutes of your time has won a victory in a battle we’re not even consciously fighting yet.”

  Carl rationed himself one last question – the topper: “Do you consider that individual objects have personality – that soldering iron, for instance?”

  “I have an impression they enjoy a sort of merged or cooperative mentality – but certain forms have more or less individuality too. This iron –” He reached for it backhanded; his cuff touched a kink in the cord and the iron swiveled in its cradle to graze his wrist. He snatched his hand away, sending the iron clattering across the bench; but he caught it neatly before it had singed the wood, and set it in the cradle as if he were handling a cobra. “Yes! That soldering iron – or its cord – has plenty of personality; one of the most treacherous tools I’ve ever owned. And you’ll notice how they use our very actions to thwart us, just as we use mechanical laws to make them act constructively. Of course, clumsiness gives them opportunity. I should have switched that off.”

  Carl attributed the little accident to autosuggestion, a Freudian slip, and went away shaking his head.
He had never met so well-integrated a delusion. By heaven, he hadn’t found the flaw yet! He hoped it would amuse Clare – she was often mighty sharp at analyzing such things.

  The following evening was his night off. He entered the apartment house with two large shopping bags of staples and Clare’s favorite delicacies, to find that he would have to heft them up six flights, the elevator being out of order.

  He set them, panting, on the floor of the seventh flight while he opened the door. The door-check resisted sullenly, and he had to put his heel in the opening while he scooped up the groceries.

  As he turned, something jerked violently at the small of his back – the belt of his trenchcoat somehow, impossibly, had snubbed over the doorknob.

  Surprise, as much as the jerk, unbalanced him. His other heel slipped on the waxed linoleum of the landing. He lurched against the door, which now yielded like a swooning maiden, and he dove into the living room, frantically trying to save the toppling bags. The belt let go with the timing of a trained athlete, and everything went flying. He snatched at the top of one bag, and the sturdy paper ripped like tissue. With his other hand he came down solidly on a carton of cream that had rolled to the precise spot requisite, like an outfielder intercepting a fly.

  Clare, in her bathrobe, came scurrying to the bedroom door, to find him arising from among the debris. The door had closed decisively on a bag of eggs; a small sack of flour, disgorging at one corner, smirked raffishly against a sofaleg.

  “Gracious!” Clare said, between mirth and peevishness. “Must you be clumsy?”

  Through Carl’s mind, before he realized it, flashed, Well, they’re not going to make trouble between me and Clare! And he gave the soft answer that turneth away wrath.

  After supper, he tried to turn the episode to account by using it to introduce the Major’s fantasy.

  At the end, Clare said languidly, “Well, anyone who ever kept house wouldn’t think he was so crazy!”

  They spent the next hour swapping instances: the row of books that always toppled the way you didn’t want them; the garment that slid silkily to the floor if one arm hung over an edge; the drawerful of articles that restacked themselves to wedge it shut; the ball of paper that avoided the gaping waste-basket and dove easily into the narrow cranny behind; the balcony door that normally refused to latch and banged in every breeze, but that had swung shut and smartly locked her out; and so on.

  It was fun and did amuse Clare; but afterward he wondered if he should have put such fantastic ideas into her still feverish mind. Also, he worried about having humored the Major quite so far; it was really very unprofessional!

  Next day, however, Matt eased the latter burden considerably by saying, “Dr Svindorff is working on the Major’s case – at my instigation. We can’t prove that Ruth Elvira wants to enjoy his worldly goods in his absence; but there’s no more reason to keep him here than a million other harmless cranks. Let him exercise his persuasive powers on the public along with Flat-Earthers, telekineticists, and prophets of Judgment Day come Jan. 19 . . . though, personally, I’ll be sorry to lose him. I find him a diversion.”

  Carl felt the same. Candidly, he was itching to lick the Major’s theory, over and above liking the man. But the odd hours they spent with the Major in his ward-cell-laboratory were devoted to mere yarns:

  “– The wind snagged his parka on this one stub of branch, and there he was haltered over a five-hundred-foot drop, with the blizzard settling down . . . The jeep door knocked his glasses onto the one bit of rock within yards – thirty miles from town, dozens of hairpin bends, and the hills full of Huks –”

  Amusing, but . . . against violent backgrounds of far outposts, violent accidents seemed natural enough; while by contrast, the freaks of civilized life grew pale and trifling. The magnificent phantasmagoria seemed to be sinking in a swamp of believe-it-or-not curiosities.

  Half wishing to rescue things from anticlimax, Carl finally demanded, “You called all this just so much guerilla action. What shape would the real offensive take?”

  The Major racked his tools and turned, as if the matter demanded his full attention: “Isn’t it obvious? When we think of atomic war, we’re afraid of the blast and fires and secondary radiation. But, to my mind, the big danger comes afterward . . . Ever drive down the Hudson, past those endless cliffs of apartment blocks, and wonder what would happen if a few power lines and water mains were cut, with no repair in sight? Lord! Those millions would be strangled, thrown back on techniques they’d utterly forgotten, pitted against materials that had learned to – defend themselves.”

  “Yes,” Carl said slowly, “that would be an opportunity.”

  The Major sat down and clasped his hands over a knee.

  “Look, Doctor, this may sound fantastic, but I’m mad anyway according to you. It’s calculated that there must be millions of habitable planets, of which many have had ample time to develop space travel. Yet we’ve never had a certified visitor. Why?”

  “I’ve heard it discussed. We’re just a minor unit on the outskirts, for one thing.”

  “Quite true,” the Major nodded. “Yet, if there were no more than a few hundred exploring races, surely one would have gotten around to us. Isn’t it just possible that something deadlocks all life at a certain stage – some universal feed-back mechanism? And, on my theory, you can see what it would be – progress piling up resistance from counter-life. Past a crucial point, you might tip the balance in favor of life – but we’re not nearly so close to that stage yet as we are to a blow-up. One slip, and we’re done.”

  “Well, wouldn’t thinkers on other worlds have seen the danger, if it’s real?”

  “Oh, I’m not so conceited – or mad – as to suppose I’m the only mind in the Universe to notice the obvious. But one is likely to see it too late, or not be able to persuade his contemporaries. I’m not making much headway, am I?”

  Carl departed considerably relieved. You might come to take Gremlins half seriously, as personifying an active principle behind freak accidents; but as a cosmic threat engulfing the world and myriads of populated planets, they were merely silly. Carl suddenly felt himself back in daylight, free of the insidious suspicion that after all there might be something in what the old boy said. He knew once more that mechanics explained all accidents, if you only had time and patience to analyze them.

  He said as much to Matt in the cafeteria.

  “So I lose my bet, do I?” Matt smiled wistfully: “Well, the bet’s off anyway . . . Dr Svindorff says that Angus G. will be leaving before Christmas. But I thought you were drifting toward his siren song. Weren’t you, honestly?”

  “Out of idle amusement. It’s lost: its fascination.”

  That afternoon, a phone call from Clare wiped out all other concerns. Clare had been out the day before and gotten caught in the rain – now she had a misery and a temperature of 102. Carl felt a nasty qualm of apprehension; even a poor psychiatrist knew that in these cases the real danger was in relapse. He mortgaged his free time for the month ahead, and got the evening off.

  He arrived at the apartment to find Clare in bed with their electric blanket huddled around her, not even trying to read. She greeted him with an anxiety that showed she too knew about relapses: “Do you think I’m going to be very sick?”

  “Not if we keep you warm and quiet.” He fixed the best light snacks he knew and fed her by hand.

  At the end, she suddenly asked, “How’s that old man with the theory about objects?” and hastened on, not waiting for a reply, “He’s perfectly right.”

  She looked about fourteen, and valuable, bundled up with her brindled hair loose and her face worried. Carl scored himself for having filled her head with nonsense; though, of course, her fever would just have fastened on something else.

  He jollied her seriously: “Well, I think bacteria are more dangerous than objects, in your case.”

  “These bacteria wouldn’t have had a chance at me,” she said firmly, “without som
e mighty funny coincidences. I got wet because I dropped my last carfare money, and it rolled like mad, and when it came to a crack, I’ll swear it just swiveled and eased itself in. And I wouldn’t have dropped it if my finger hadn’t been hurt from when the window-cord broke and the window came down on my hand. And I wouldn’t have gotten so wet if I’d had my slicker – but you remember how that went all funny when that bottle of cleaner on the shelf came uncorked and spilled over it.”

  Carl sighed. “You wouldn’t have gotten wet at all if you hadn’t tried to be noble and get back into harness before you were ready. Now, take this, and you’ll sleep ten hours and wake up feeling fine.”

  But the last thing she said as she drowsed off was, “Shouldn’ve given’m chance. They know when you can’t fight’m, ’n they pile on you.”

  He pulled the sofa to the bedroom door, so he could hear the least murmur, made himself a bed and turned in. He knew he was exhausted, and was determined to avoid being a soft target for either germs or Gremlins by getting overfatigued . . .

  He woke in the dead of night, with an extra-sensory perception of something wrong. He rolled to his elbow. The air was abnormally chilly, even for a low-cost apartment in December.

  Clare stirred, and he called softly, “You all right?”

  She mumbled feverishly, “No. I’m coooold.”

  His hand found the floor-lamp without actually knocking it over. Naturally, the switch was in the one position where he had to flounder to reach it, and when it did click, nothing happened.

  Oh, fine, he thought. Electricity’s off. Furnace controls dead!

  He strode over to the bed. The electric blanket, of course, was a mere flimsy fabric. He patted Clare’s hunched shoulder. “I’ll get another blanket. Where’s the flash?”

  “On the table,” she wheezed, and groped on the far side of the bed. There was a muffled bump, and she lamented weakly, “I had it and it just knocked against something and flipped out of my fingers.”

  “Don’t look for it,” he said. “Keep wrapped up. I can find my way in the dark.” No use wasting precious minutes, he thought, blundering around looking for the flash, while it, neatly ensconced in some improbable nook, gloated just out of his reach. He started around the foot of the bed toward the bathroom door . . .