Callahan's Place 02 - Time Travelers Strictly Cash (v5.0)

by Spider Robinson

  Onward to a pleasant surprise. Somehow or other I got on Doubleday's SF review list a couple of years back, and as a result my stove here in Nova Scotia has never lacked for fire-starter. Honest to God, you never saw such stuff in your life. Comic-books without the pictures. But I hear they've got a new SF editor lately, and here on my desk, by Jesus, is an actual first-rate science-fiction novel from Doubleday, Newton and the Quasi-Apple, by Stanley Schmidt. I'd never have read it if I hadn't recognized Stanley's name from some fine stories in Analog, but I'm glad I gave it a chance. The planet of Ymrek, see, is at a crisis point in its cultural development. The civilized types in the city of Yngmer are threatened by the barbarian Ketaxil, and have for defense only crude cannon which they don't know how to aim very well. A pair of human xenologists reluctantly decide to interfere by giving the Yngmerians technological aid in the form of "quasi-matter," a wondrous stuff they hope to pass off as "nothing more than simple magic." Unfortunately, at the same time a native genius named Terek has singlehandedly duplicated the work of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton, deducing laws of motion with which he hopes to save the day by inventing ballistics, to aim the cannon better. The local shaman reacts little better than did Galileo's inquisitors, and just as Terek has begun to convince him that perhaps il se muovo after all, in come the xenologists—with quasi-matter trinkets that don't obey Newton's Laws! Poor Terek is ceremonially proclaimed a Dunce, and the rest of the book deals with the attempts of the meddling but well-intentioned xenologists to set things right. It's a dandy, and I'm proud of Stanley for his refusal to yield to temptation and pull rabbits out of a hat for an ending. My only complaint is his failure to explain quasimatter rather than simply describe it—but as a man with a trunkfull of letters saying, "your last story was okay—but it's not science fiction," possibly I should shut up. Tasty stuff, Stan.

  Cliff Simak's new book, Enchanted Pilgrimage is another one of those that gave me mixed feelings. If there's a sequel planned, I withdraw most of my objections, but as it stands it raises more questions than it answers.

  To say that it's well told would be more unnecessarily redundant than is absolutely called for—it is, after all, a Simak. The characters are well-drawn, the menaces chilling, the succession of events compelling. But the book frustrates me, dammit. The first half reads like alternate-universe sword-and-sorcery—a little strange for Cliff, but what the hell. In this alternate universe men have never really left the Middle Ages, and goblins, trolls, elves and unicorns festoon the countryside. A quest is undertaken (incidentally, quests involving a chalice or grail are a separate subgenre called cup-and-sorcery) by a band of good joes. Fine.

  Then halfway through the book, a modern-day human appears from our time-stream, complete with firestick and a Honda dragon, and one not unnaturally assumes that some of the strange goings-on are going to get mundane explanations. Only some do, and some don't, and one of the most impressive menaces turns out for no apparent reason to be an alien, which dies in giving birth to a robot (!) that seems to do nothing to advance the plot. We learn that there are three alternate universes (why only three?) and that the third of these is a "humanist" world in which all the problems of man have been solved—but all we ever get to see of it is two characters who appear only by rumor. Nor do we ever learn how travel between the universes is managed, nor why only one not-especially-bright inhabitant of our own time-stream (named Jones, forsooth) pulled it off. Worst, the quest turns out to have been a wild-goose chase for all but one of its members.

  Oh hell—Cliff is just too good a craftsman to leave such gaping holes in the foundations: there has to be a sequel. But I wish there'd been words to that effect somewhere in the galleys.

  The missing man in Katherine MacLean's book of the same name seems to be the protagonist—the one we are given just doesn't seem real to me. No, amend that: he seems real for the first chapter (which, if my memory serves, appeared somewhere or other as a novelette—and a damned good one) —1980 update; to give you an idea how well my memory serves me, the shortest version, a novella, won the Nebula in 1971— and then vanishes, leaving behind a cardboard simulacrum. There's just no consistency to his character: he's an ex-teengang member, big and strong when the plot requires it, but most of the time he acts like a timid chump; he is a professional empath, and yet he gets suckered into buying the metaphysics of a sociopath gang leader with nary a quiver. And the final group of villains to be dragged onstage, comic-opera Com-Yew-Nists Who Want To Make The World A Conformist Utopia So They Can Power Trip Us (but get this: they're telepathic, see…) went down like two tablespoons of peanut butter.

  Which leaves me astounded. For years I have watched Kate MacLean write circles around a large lot of folks, and upon receiving the first novel I've seen by her I rejoiced, expecting something above average. But this is barely adequate. The first chapter, in which we meet George, the high-sensitivity empath who works as a lo-cater for the Rescue Squad, is really excellent—but the book as a whole lacks an internal consistency somehow, and suspending that disbelief starts to give you cramps. I'm disappointed. I don't object to a simple series-of-episodes—but the cast should be continuous.

  Getting near the bottom, now. Funny SF novels, when they work, are among the funniest things ever written: e.g., Niven & Gerrold's The Flying Sorcerer, a sizable chunk of Keith Laumer's work, and the new Bester novel. Some are a trifle strained, but still make you giggle consistently: e.g. Bob Toomey's World of Trouble. And some are as strained as the stuff that goes in I.V. bottles: e.g., The Wilk Are Among Us, by Isidore Haiblum.

  Since Stan Schmidt's book had turned out so well, I decided to try the one that came with it; but when I got to the part where the ferocious and homicidal nill says to the alien protagonist, "If I wasn't a bit under the weather, and you didn't have that crude mind-block on—really, under ordinary conditions it wouldn't do at all, you know—I'd give you such a hit!" I began to suspect that the stack of handkerchiefs I'd laid in against tears of laughter might be superfluous. Everybody in the book is named Leonard or Ernest or Marvin, extraterrestrials who've never heard of Earth call each other boychik, and at odd intervals Haiblum succumbs to Zelazny's Syndrome: the habit of stringing together sentence fragments.

  As paragraphs.

  In groups of six of seven.

  For no discernible reason.

  Like a freshman art student.

  Making a collage.

  Or some.

  Thing.

  Followed by two skipped lines and a block of more or less standard copy. There's a lot of action, a cast of thousands, and a plot that would confound a panel consisting of Keith Laumer, P. G. Wodehouse and Avram Davidson, and if you use an Ashley wood-burning stove and don't subscribe to a newspaper you'll be interested to know that the hardcover edition fits snugly into the firebox and will support a good base of kindling and mixed hardwood. I recommend maple if you can get it.

  And so at last we come to Sprague de Camp's Antique Shoppe.

  I know there are a horde of you Lovecraft freaks out there, and maybe some of you are Trekkie-type groupies, and I really truly do believe that a reviewer has a duty to finish a book before publishing his views on it, but honest to Christ, fellas. The Life of H. P. Lovecraft by L. Sprague de Camp is simply above and beyond the call of whatever Baen is underpaying me. ["Sold!" he shrieked.—Ed.] It is no bigger than a Smith-Corona portable, clearly the result of a literally incredible amount of time and energy, and I tried, cross my heart. But do any of you really want to know that at the age of two, Lovecraft's golden curls led his landlady to call him "Little Sunshine"?

  I have in my possession a volume of comparable size, which was commissioned by state legislature, printed at taxpayers' expense in 1947, and bought by the same taxpayers for the State University Library system, from which I ultimately stole it, leaving behind five identical copies none of which has ever been checked out. It is an 800-page study of the ruffed grouse, a bird so stupid you can blow out the brains of one with
out disturbing the one next to it. It took six men to write, and one of the men later produced a 400-page sequel. I take it down from the shelf whenever I'm feeling especially useless and futile, and pore over the maps and graphs and close-ups of grouse droppings, and I feel better.

  At long last I've found a companion volume.

  If you're an English major who believes you must know the man to properly read and evaluate his works (don't laugh—I was one once) then by all means pick this book up—if you can (little joke there). If you're an Ashley user, I should advise you that the binding is damnably difficult to destroy, and it's too big to use all at once. If you're H. P. Lovecraft, let me know what you think of it.

  And so opens 1975 in the SF publishing world. Me, I think I'm going to get back in the time-capsule and get some sleep. Wake me up when Heinlein's next book comes out, will you? Thanks.

  Also concerning

  "Spider Versus The Hax Of Sol III":

  God, that hurt to proofread.

  One final word on this column. Since its publication I have had an opportunity to apologize privately to L. Sprague de Camp, an apology he most graciously accepted; I would like to do so now publicly. When I first met that worthy gentleman, he suggested with exquisitely gentle politeness that perhaps I had been a trifle harsh in reviewing his Lovecraft biography. I suggest that what I was was a horse's ass. To heap scorn and abuse on a book one doesn't happen to be excited about, on the grounds of its thoroughness, is the mark of an amateur playing to the bloodthirsty. One of the major agonies of reviewing is that you cannot recall an opinion which later reflection reveals to be fatheaded. There isn't enough time for anything but snap judgements, and often you end up regretting them, and there's no practical way to retract them. Writing a book gives you time for reflection: a year after you mail off the manuscript, they mail it back copy-edited and you re-read it carefully, changing what now strikes you as imprudent or ill-advised. Six months later you get galley proofs—again you can make sure that's what you meant to say. A few months after that, people are reading it—and there's still time to make changes for the paperback edition.

  A book review column is always due last week. You hammer it out on horseback, race to the post office, nap on the doorstep for a few hours until they open up, mail the manuscript—and then the next time you see it is the same time everybody else does, in print. It generally has not been copy-edited; all your mistakes and syntactical horrors are intact and the typesetter has suggested some of his own. It contains opinions you cannot imagine yourself having entertained, let alone expressed, and if you sit down right now and dash off a letter to recant or clarify it will see print five or six months from now; half the readers won't know what the hell you're talking about. It's too late.

  This is the only time I've ever had an opportunity to retract something I said in a column, and it feels good.

  No one interested in the life of H. P. Lovecraft should be without Sprague de Camp's definitive biography.

  Ironic update: Stan Schmidt, whom I praised in this first column, turned into my employer. "Doc" Schmidt became editor of Analog, for which magazine I did quarterly book-reviews. Funny how things work out.

  DOG DAY EVENING

  It absolutely had to happen. I mean, it was so cosmically preordained-destined-fated flat out inevitable that I can't imagine how we failed to be expecting it. Where else on God's earth could Ralph and Joe possibly have ended up but at Callahan's Place?

  It was Tall Tales Night at Callahan's, the night on which the teller of the most outrageous shaggy-dog story gets his night's tab refunded. "Animals" had been selected as the night's generic topic, and we had suffered through hours of stinkers about pet rocks and talking dogs and The Horse That Was Painted Green and the Fastest Dog in the World and the Gay Rooster and a dozen others you probably know already. In fact, most of the Tale-Tellers had been disqualified when someone shouted the punchline before they got to it—often after only a sentence or two. The fireplace was filled to overflowing with broken glasses, and it was down to a tight contest between Doc Webster and me. I thought I had him on the run too.

  A relative newcomer named B. D. Wyatt had just literally crapped out, by trying to fob off that old dumb gag about the South Sea island where "there lives a bird whose digestive system is so incredibly rank that, if its excrement should contact your skin, re-exposure of the contaminated skin to air is invariably fatal." Named for its characteristic squawk, it is of course the famous Foo Bird, and the punchline—as I'm certain you know already—is, "If the Foo shits, wear it." Unfortunately for B. D. ("Bird Doo"?), we already knew it too. But it gave me an idea.

  "You know," I drawled, signalling Callahan for a fresh Bushmill's, "like all of us, I've heard that story before. So many times, in fact, that I decided there might be a grain of truth in it—hidden, of course, by a large grain of salt. So my friend Thor Lowerdahl and I decided to check it out. We investigated hundreds of South Seas islands without success, until one day our raft, the Liki Tiki, foundered on an uncharted atoll. No sooner did we stagger ashore than we heard a distant raucous cry: 'Foo! Foo!'

  "Instantly, of course, we dove back into the surf, and didn't stick our heads up until we were far offshore. We treaded water for a while, hoping for a glimpse of the fabulous bird, to no avail. Suddenly a seal passed us underwater, trailing a cloud of sticky brown substance. Some of it got on Thor's leg, and with a snort of disgust, he wiped it off. He expired at once. Realizing the truth in an instant, I became so terrified that I swam back to the States."

  I paused expectantly, and Fast Eddie (sensing his cue) obliged me with a straight line.

  "What truth, Jake?"

  "That atoll," I replied blithely, "was far more dangerous than anyone suspected—as any seal can plainly foo."

  A general howl arose. Long-Drink chanced (by statistical inevitability) to have his glass to his mouth at the time; he bit a piece off clean and spat it into the fireplace. I kept my face straight, of course, but inwardly I exulted. This time I had Doc Webster beat for sure, and with an impromptu pun at that. I ordered another.

  But when the tumult died down, the Doc met my eyes with a look of such mild, placid innocence that my confidence faltered.

  "Fortunate indeed, Jacob," he rumbled, patting his ample belly, "that you should have rendered so unbearable a pun. It reminds me of a book about a bear I read the other day by Richard Adams—Shardik, it's called. Any of you read it?"

  There were a few nods. The Doc smiled and sipped scotch.

  "For those of you who missed it," he went on, "it's about a primitive empire that forms around an enormous, semimythical bear. Well, it happens I know something about that empire that Adams forgot to mention, and now's as good a time as any to pass it along. You see, the only way to become a knight in Shardik's empire was to apply for a personal interview with the bear. This had its drawbacks. If he liked your audition, you were knighted on the spot—but if you failed, Lord Shardik was quite likely to club your head off your shoulders with one mighty paw. Even so, there were many applicants—for the peasantry were poor farmers, and if a candidate failed for knighthood his family received, by way of booby-prize, a valuable sheepdog from the Royal Kennels. This consoled them greatly, for truly it is written…"

  And here he actually paused to sip his scotch again, daring us to guess the punchline:

  "… 'For the mourning after a terrible knight, nothing beats the dog of the bear that hit you.' "

  A howl again began to arise—and then suddenly a howl arose.

  I mean a real howl.

  So of course we all swiveled around in our chairs, and damned if there wasn't a guy with a German shepherd sitting near the door. I hadn't seen them come in, and it took me a second to notice that the dog had a glass of gin on the floor in front of him, half-empty.

  As we gaped, open-mouthed, the dog picked up the half-full glass in his teeth (without spilling a drop), carried it to the hearth, and with a flick of his powerful head, flung it
into the fireplace hard enough to bust it. He turned and looked at us then, wagging his tail as if to make sure we understood that he was commenting on the Doc's tale. Then, to underline the point, he turned back to the fireplace, lifted his leg and put out a third of the fire.

  We roared with laughter, a great simultaneous outburst of total glee, and the dog trotted proudly to his master. I looked the guy over: medium height, a little thin, nose like an avalanche about to happen and a great sprawling fungus of a mustache clinging to its underside. He wore Salvation Army rejects like Mr. Emmett Kelly used to wear, clothes that looked like what starts fires in old warehouses. But his eyes were alert and aware, and he was obviously quite proud of his dog.

  Then he caught Callahan's eye, and winced. "You got a house rule on dogs, Mister?" he asked. You could hardly see his lips move under that ridiculous mustache.

  Callahan considered the matter. "We try not to be human-chauvinists around here," he allowed at last. "But if he dumps on my floor, I'll clean it up with your shirt. Fair enough?"

  "Are you kiddin'?" the guy mumbled. "This dog mess on the floor? Why, this is the Smartest Dog In The World."

  He said it just like that, with capital letters.

  "Uh-huh," said Long-Drink. "He talks, right?"

  A strange gleam came into the shabby man's eyes.

  "Yep."