The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 4 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  The first time. Awful! Somehow, he had never quite believed in space madness.

  Suddenly he remembered Jerry. Poor Jerry!

  Gar lurched from the washroom back into the control room. Jerry was awake. He looked up at Gar, forcing a smile to his lips. “Hello, Dr. Elton,” Jerry said.

  Gar stopped as though shot.

  “It’s happened, Dr. Elton, just as you said it would,” Jerry said, his smile widening.

  “Forget that,” Gar growled. “I took a yellow pill I’m back to normal again.”

  Jerry’s smile vanished abruptly. “I know what I did now,” he said. “It’s terrible. I killed six people. But I’m sane now. I’m willing to take what’s coming to me.”

  “Forget that!” Gar snarled. “You don’t have to humor me now. Just a minute and I’ll untie you.”

  “Thanks, Doctor,” Jerry said. “It will sure be a relief to get out of this strait jacket.”

  Gar knelt beside Jerry and untied the knots in the ropes and unwound them from around Jerry’s chest and legs.

  “You’ll be all right in a minute,” Gar said, massaging Jerry’s limp arms. The physical and nervous strain of sitting there immobilized had been rugged.

  Slowly he worked circulation back into Jerry, then helped him to his feet.

  “You don’t need to worry, Dr. Elton,” Jerry said. “I don’t know why I killed those people, but I know I would never do such a thing again. I must have been insane.”

  “Can you stand now?” Gar said, letting go of Jerry.

  Jerry took a few steps back and forth, unsteadily at first, then with better co-ordination. His resemblance to a robot decreased with exercise.

  Gar was beginning to feel sick again. He fought it.

  “You OK now, Jerry boy?” he asked worriedly.

  “I’m fine now, Dr. Elton,” Jerry said. “And thanks for everything you’ve done for me.”

  Abruptly Jerry turned and went over to the air-lock door and opened it.

  “Good-by now, Dr. Elton,” he said.

  “Wait!” Gar screamed, leaping toward Jerry.

  But Jerry had stepped into the air lock and closed the door. Gar tried to open it, but already Jerry had turned on the pump that would evacuate the air from the lock.

  Screaming Jerry’s name senselessly in horror, Gar watched through the small square of thick glass in the door as Jerry’s chest quickly expanded, then collapsed as a mixture of phlegm and blood dribbled from his nostrils and lips, and his eyes enlarged and glazed over, then one of them ripped open and collapsed, its fluid draining down his cheek.

  He watched as Jerry glanced toward the side of the air lock and smiled, then spun the wheel that opened the air lock to the vacuum of space, and stepped out.

  And when Gar finally stopped screaming and sank to the deck, sobbing, his knuckles were broken and bloody from pounding on bare metal.

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  * * * *

  RIVER OF RICHES

  by Gerald Kersh

  For some reason, s-f has enjoyed a rather more reputable name in Great Britain than it has here—or at least a good many more “literary” British authors have written it. {Kipling, Wells, Dunsany, Doyle, Chesterton, Priestley, Collier, Coppard, to name a few.)

  In this country, fantasy, beginning with Hawthorne, has a long record of respectability; but even the best science fiction (with the notable exception of a few offbeat efforts by “major” writers, such as Stephen Vincent Benét’s “By the Waters of Babylon”) could be found ordinarily only in pulp magazines.

  All this, of course, was B.B.—Before the Bomb. Then when s-f did achieve a measure of popular approval here, one of the first science-fiction stories printed in a top national magazine was by a British author. (Not the first. Heinlein beat Kersh to The Saturday Evening Post by about two months, early in 1947.)

  Though Mr. Kersh lives in this country now, and is one of the more colorful lights in the New York literary firmament, much of his work retains the flavor of the traditionally English adventure story. This one is a tale told in a barroom, by that classic adventurer, the “younger son of a younger son.”

  * * * *

  About the man called Pilgrim there was a certain air of something gone stale. “Seedy” is the word for it, as applied to a human being. It was difficult to regard him except as a careful housewife regards a pot of homemade jam upon the surface of which she observes a patch of mildew. Sweet but questionable, she says to herself, but it is a pity to waste it. Give it to the poor. So, as it seemed to me, it was with Pilgrim.

  He was curiously appealing to me in what looked like a losing fight against Skid Row, and maintained a haughty reserve when the bartender, detaining him as he abstractedly started to stroll out of MacAroon’s Grill, said, “Dad-die be a dollar-ten, doc.”

  Pilgrim slapped himself on the forehead, and beat himself about the pockets, and cried, “My wallet! I left it at home.”

  “Oh-oh,” the bartender said, lifting the counter flap.

  Then I said, “Here’s the dollar-ten, Mike. Let the man go.”

  But Pilgrim would not go. He took me by the arm, and said in the old-fashioned drawling kind of Oxford accent, “No, but really, this is too kind! I’m afraid I can’t reciprocate. As a fellow limey you will understand. One’s position here becomes invidious. You see, I have only just now lost two fortunes, and am in the trough of the wave between the second and the third—which I assure you is not farther off than the middle of next month. I must get to Detroit. But allow me to introduce myself by the name by which I prefer to be known: John Pilgrim. Call me Jack. In honesty, I ought to tell you that this is not my real name. If some plague were to wipe out the male members of my family in a certain quarter of Middlesex, in England, I should be addressed very differently; and ride my horses, to boot. As matters stand, I am the younger son of a younger son, cast out with a few thousand pounds in my pocket, to make my fortune in Canada.”

  I asked, “Was that your first fortune?”

  “Heavens, no! Man on the boat had an infallible system shooting dice. I arrived in Canada, sir, with four dollars and eighteen cents—and my clothes. I roughed it, I assure you. Clerk in a hardware store, dismissed on unjust suspicion of peculation; errand boy at a consulate, kicked out for what they called ‘shaking down’ an applicant for a visa, which was a lie; representative of a wine merchant, wrongly accused of drinking the samples. I went through the mill, I do assure you. And now I am offered a lucrative post in Detroit.”

  “Doing what?” I asked.

  He said, “Checking things for a motor company.”

  “What things?”

  “A word to the wise is sufficient. This is strictly hush-hush. Less said the better, what? But I can put you in the way of a few million dollars if you have time and money to spare.”

  “Pray do so,” I said.

  “I will. But not being a complete fool I will not be exact in my geography. Do you know Brazil? I know where there is a massive fortune in virgin gold in one of the tributaries of the Amazon. . . . Oh, dear, it really is a bitter fact that men with money who want some more insist on having the more before they lay out the less! Yet I tell you without the least reserve that I got about ten thousand ounces of pure gold out of the people who live by that river”

  “How did you manage that?” I asked.

  Pilgrim smiled at me, and said, “I dare say you have heard of the tocte nut? No? . . . Well, the tocte nut comes from Ecuador. It is something like an English walnut, only perfectly oval, almost. As in the case of the walnut, the kernel of the tocte nut resembles in its lobes, twists and convolutions, the human brain. It is bitter to eat, and is used generally by children for playing with, as we used to play with marbles.

  “Ah, but this is in Ecuador. Go into Brazil, into a certain tributary of the Amazon, and I can show you a place where these nuts—or close relations of theirs—are taken very seriously indeed. The tribesmen do not call them tocte, but tictoc, and only adults p
lay with these nuts in Brazil—for extremely high stakes too. Fortunes—as they are counted in these wild parts—are won or lost on one game with the tictoc nuts. The savages have a saying there: ‘Tic-toe takes twenty years to learn.’ To proceed: ...”

  From vicissitude to vicissitude is the destiny of the younger son (he said). I could, of course, have written to my elder brother for money. In fact I did. But he didn’t answer. In the end, I shipped as cook on a freighter bound for South America. I suspect it was running guns. The crew was composed of the offscourings of Lapland, Finland, Iceland and San Francisco.

  I jumped ship first opportunity, with nothing in my pockets but the papers of an oiler named Martinsen which I must have picked up by accident, and looked, as one does, for a fellow countryman. Luckily—I have the most astonishing luck—I overheard a man in a bar ordering whisky and soda without ice. Blood calls to blood. I was at his elbow in a trice.

  He was a huge fellow, and was about to go to the place —Which, if you’ll forgive me, I won’t mention—prospecting for rubies. Desirous of civilized company, he invited me to come along with him—said he would make it worth my while—offered me a share in the profits. He found the equipment, of course: quinine, rifles, trade goods, shotguns, soap and all that.

  His idea was that, the market being good just then, if the worst came to the worst we might make our expenses out of snake skin and alligator hide. His name was Grimes, but he knew a gentleman when he saw one. But he was accident prone. Exploring mud for rubies, Grimes stood on a log to steady himself. The log came to life, opened a pair of jaws, and carried him off—an alligator, of course. They tell me that a mature alligator can, with his jaws, exert a pressure of nearly one thousand pounds’ weight. It upset me, I don’t mind telling you. Ever since then I have never been able to look at an alligator without disgust. They bring me bad luck.

  The following morning I awoke to find my attendants all gone. They had paid themselves in trade goods, leaving me with only what I slept in—pajamas—plus a rifle, a bandoleer of .30-.30 cartridges, my papers and some dried beef.

  Goodness only knows what might have happened to me if I had not been rescued by cannibals—and jolly fine fellows they were too. Sportsmen, I assure you. They only ate women past marriageable age. They took me to their chief. I thought I was in a pretty sticky spot, at first, but he gave me some stew to eat—it was monkey, I hope—and while I ate I looked about me. Anyone could see with half an eye that the old gentleman wanted my rifle.

  Now I reasoned as follows: I am outnumbered about two hundred and fifty to one by savages armed with spears and poisoned arrows. In the circumstances my rifle must be worse than useless. Better make a virtue of the inevitable and give it to him before he takes it away. Be magnanimous, Jack!

  So, expressing delight at the flavor of the stew, I gave him the rifle and the bandoleer. He was overwhelmed with joy and gratitude and wanted to know what he could do for me. He offered me girls, more stew, necklaces of human teeth. I conveyed to him that I might prefer a few rubies. Heartbroken, he said that he had none of the red stones, only the green ones, and handed me a fistful of emeralds to the value, conservatively, of a thousand rifles at a hundred and twenty dollars apiece.

  I thanked him politely, controlling my emotions as our sort of people are brought up to do. But he mistook my impassive air for disappointment. He was downcast for a moment or two. Then he brightened and said to me, “Wait. I have something that will make you very rich. It has made me chief. But now I am too old to play. I will give it to you.”

  Then he fumbled in what might laughingly be described as his clothes, and produced—guess what—a nut! Upon my word, a common nut, something like a walnut, but smooth and much larger in circumference at one end than at the other. Through years of handling, it had a wonderful patina, like very old bronze. “You know tictoc?” the old boy asked.

  “I know tocte,” I said. “It is a game played by children in Ecuador.”

  “You play?” he asked.

  “Never. In Ecuador I have seen it played. In England we call it marbles.”

  “Of these places,” said the chief, “I have never heard. Here, it is tictoc.”

  Then he went on to explain—it took all night—that the tictoc nut was not like other nuts. Everything, said the chief, everything could think a little. Even a leaf had sense enough to turn itself to the light. Even a rat. Even a woman. Sometimes, even a hard-shelled nut. Now when the world was made, the deuce of a long time ago, man having been created, there was a little intelligence left over for distribution. Woman got some. Rats got some. Leaves got some. Insects got some. In short, at last there was very little left.

  Then the tictoc bush spoke up and begged, “A little for us?”

  The answer came, “There are so many of you, and so little left to go around. But justice must be done. One in every ten million of you shall think with a man, and do his bidding. We have spoken.”

  So, the old geezer affirmed, the kernel of the tictoc nut came to resemble the human brain. Stroking his great knife, he assured me that he had many times seen one, and the resemblance was uncanny. Superficially, you understand.

  To only one tictoc nut in ten million was vouchsafed the gift of thought. And the nuts, being very prolific, grew in the jungles in great profusion. Anyone who could find the ten-millionth nut, the thinking nut, was assured of good fortune, the old savage told me, because this nut would obey its master.

  “Now play tictoc,” he said.

  I said, “But I don’t know how.”

  He did not answer, but led me to a strip of ground Stamped flat and level, and polished by innumerable feet. At one end someone had described a circle drawn with ocher. In this circle were arranged ten nuts in this pattern:

  The object of the game was to knock the ten nuts out of the circle in the fewest possible shots. As a game, I should say that tictoc was much more difficult than pool, pyramids or snooker. You shot from a distance of about seven feet. It was a good player who could clear the circle in five shots; a remarkable one who could do it in four; a superlative one who could do it in three, flipping the oval tictoc nut with a peculiar twist of the thumb.

  Several young fellows were playing, but more were betting their very loincloths on the champion, who had recently made a Three.

  “Now,” the old codger whispered, “rub the tictoc between your hands, breathe on it and shout without sound —shout at the back of your mind—telling it what to do. Challenge the champion. Stake your shirt.”

  The top of my pajamas could be no great loss. Furthermore, I had the emeralds, you know. So I took it off and offered my challenge. The young buck felt the cotton and put down against it a necklace of good nuggets, the largest of which was about as big as a grape.

  He played first. On his first shot, out went five. Second, out went four. The last was easy. He had scored a Three.

  And now it was my turn. Caressing my nut I said to it, without talking, “Now, old thing, show them what you can do. Try for a One, just to astonish the natives.”

  Without much hope, and with no skill at all, I flipped my nut. It seemed to stop halfway, gyrating. Everybody laughed, and my opponent reached for my pajama top— when, suddenly, my nut kind of shouldered its way forward into the circle, and with something devilishly like careful aim, spun its way into the ten and pushed them, one by one, beyond the bounds of the ring.

  You never heard such a shout! I had broken a record. Picking my nut up, I caressed it and warmed it in my hand.

  The chief said, “This I have never seen. Two, yes. One, no. I know what it is—the markings inside that nut must exactly match the markings of your brain. You are a lucky man.”

  Feeling the weight of the necklace I had won, I asked, “Is there any more stuff like this hereabout?”

  He said no, they didn’t regard it especially. The ex-champion had won it downstream, where they picked it out of the river bed and gave it to their women for ornaments. A string of your enem
y’s teeth meant something. But the yellow stuff was too soft and too heavy. “If you want it, take your tictoc nut and you can win as much of it as you can carry away—you and ten strong men.”

  I promised him that when I came back I would bring more guns and bullets, hatchets, knives, and all his heart could desire, if he would lend me a good canoe and the services of half a dozen sturdy men to paddle it, together with food and water. He agreed, and we took off.

  In fine, I cleaned out that village and went on downstream with two war canoes, all loaded with gold and other valuables, such as garnets, emeralds, et cetera. I should have left it at that. But success had gone to my head.

  On the way I stayed the night in the shack of a petty trader, a Portuguese, from whom I bought a whole suit of white-duck clothes, a couple of shirts, and pants and some other stuff. “Your fame has gone before you,” he said, looking enviously at me and then at the gold nuggets I had paid him with. “They call you the Tictoc Man up and down the river. Now I happen to know that no white man can play tictoc—it takes twenty years to learn. How do you do it?”