“Forgive me,” he muttered hoarsely. He licked his lips nervously, shaking his head. He remained there kneeling for a long time, unable to get up.
“No, no forgiveness. I can’t fool myself; I’m one of them now,” he said. He arose and stared at his hands, and then began to walk. Slowly, methodically, he trudged along, fumbling with the folded piece of paper in his pocket, knowing now that he had lost everything.
The snow had frozen in his hair, and he knew his head was white from snow—the head of an old man. His face was white too. He followed Broadway for a while, then cut to Central Park West. The snow was unbroken before him. It lay covering everything, a sign of the long winter setting in.
“North was right,” he said quietly to the ocean of white that was Central Park. He looked at the heaps of rubble seeking cover beneath the snow. “I can’t hold out any longer.” He looked at the address—Malory, 218 West 42nd Street—and continued onward, almost numb with the cold.
His eyes were narrowed to slits, and lashes and head were frosted and white. Katterson’s throat throbbed in his mouth, and his lips were clamped together by hunger. 70th Street, 65th. He zigzagged and wandered, following Columbus Avenue, Amsterdam Avenue for a while. Columbus, Amsterdam—the names were echoes from a past that had never been.
What must have been an hour passed, and another. The streets were empty. Those who were left stayed safe and starving inside, and watched from their windows the strange giant stalking alone through the snow. The sun had almost dropped from the sky as he reached 50th Street. His hunger had all but abated now; he felt nothing, knew just that his goal lay ahead. He faced forward, unable to go anywhere but ahead.
Finally 42nd Street, and he turned down towards where he knew Malory was to be found. He came to the building. Up the stairs, now, as the darkness of night came to flood the streets. Up the stairs, up another flight, another. Each step was a mountain, but he pulled himself higher and higher.
At the fifth floor Katterson reeled and sat down on the edge of the steps, gasping. A liveried footman passed, his nose in the air, his green coat shimmering in the half-light. He was carrying a roasted pig with an apple in its mouth on a silver tray. Katterson lurched forward to seize the pig. His groping hands passed through it, and pig and footman exploded like bubbles and drifted off through the silent halls.
Just one more flight. Sizzling meat on a stove, hot, juicy, tender meat filling the hole where his stomach had once been. He picked up his legs carefully and set them down, and came to the top at last. He balanced for a moment at the top of the stairs, nearly toppled backwards but seized the banister at the last second, and then pressed forward.
There was the door. He saw it, heard loud noises coming from behind it. A feast was going on, a banquet, and he ached to join in. Down the hall, turn left, pound on the door.
Noise growing louder.
“Malory! Malory! It’s me, Katterson, big Katterson! I’ve come to you! Open up, Malory!”
The handle began to turn.
“Malory! Malory!”
Katterson sank to his knees in the hall and fell forward on his face when the door opened at last.
The Silent Colony
It’s not unusual or particularly disgraceful for a young writer to imitate the work of the writers he admires. That’s one way to discover, from the inside, how those writers achieve the effects that the young writer finds so admirable. I’m not talking now of the various reworkings of the themes of Joseph Conrad that I’ve done over a period of years, or my deliberate pastiche of C.L. Moore, In Another Country. Those were the stunts of a mature writer having a little fun. I mean a novice’s flat-out imitation of his betters purely for the sake of mastering their stylistic or structural techniques.
When I was beginning my career in the early 1950’s there was a group of about a dozen science-fiction writers whose work held special meaning for me—Henry Kuttner, Cyril Kornbluth, James Blish, Alfred Bester, etc. (In 1987 I brought my favorite stories by those writers together in the autobiographical anthology, Robert Silverberg’s Worlds of Wonder, more recently issued under the title, Science Fiction 101, which I recommend to any beginning writer who is as hungry to see print as I was fifty-plus years ago.) There was a particular cluster within my group of favorites whose work I paid special attention to: Robert Sheckley, Philip K. Dick, Jack Vance. Their stories seemed to me the epitome of what I wanted my science fiction to be like; and from time to time during the first five or six years of my career I would—consciously and unabashedly—do something in the mode of one of those three, so that I could see, word by word, how they went about constructing such splendid stories.
“The Silent Colony” is one of my Sheckley imitations: an attempt at mimicking his cool, lucid style and his ingenious plotting. I wrote it late in the busy autumn of 1953; Sheckley, who was then about 25 years old, had begun selling only a year or two earlier, but already his fiction was appearing in leading slick magazines like Colliers and Esquire as well as in every s-f publication from the top-ranked Astounding and Galaxy to the wildest and wooliest of pulps. He had even had a collection of his stories published in book form by a major publisher. It was a dazzling beginning to a career: I, seven years younger, envied him frantically. If I couldn’t be Robert Sheckley, I could at least learn to write like him. “The Silent Colony,” it seems to me now, is a creditable try at a Sheckley story, given the difference in our ages and technical skills. It didn’t sell to Esquire, or even Galaxy, but it did sell. On the strength of my contract for my novel Revolt on Alpha C I had acquired an agent by then—Scott Meredith, who represented such top figures in the field as Vance, Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, and Poul Anderson—and in June of 1954, after nine tries, he sold it (for $15) to Robert W. Lowndes, editor of Future Science Fiction. Lowndes needed a very short story to fill his next issue, the Future dated October, 1954, to be published in August; and so, most unusually, “The Silent Colony” was in print just a couple of months after it was accepted.
I spent the summer of 1954 editing a mimeographed newspaper in a children’s camp a hundred miles north of New York City; and great was my pride when the October Future arrived up there and I displayed my story to my fellow campers—three pages tucked away at the end of the issue, with stories by Philip K. Dick, Algis Budrys, and Marion Zimmer Bradley much more prominently displayed. I didn’t mind its inconspicuousness. One didn’t expect a little snippet of a story like that to be featured prominently. And Dick, Budrys, and Bradley all were older than I was and each of them had been writing professionally for two or three years already, so I didn’t begrudge them their names on the cover. What mattered was that I was in the issue too—my first short story to be published in a widely distributed American magazine. Only three pages now: but bigger and better things were to come. I was sure of that.
~
Skrid, Emerak, and Ullowa drifted through the dark night of space, searching the worlds that passed below them for some sign of their own kind. The urge to wander had come over them, as it does inevitably to all inhabitants of the Ninth World. They had been drifting through space for eons; but time is no barrier to immortals, and they were patient searchers.
“I think I feel something,” said Emerak; “the Third World is giving off signs of life.”
They had visited the thriving cities of the Eighth World, and the struggling colonies of the Seventh, and the experienced Skrid had led them to the little-known settlements on the moons of the giant Fifth World. But now they were far from home.
“You’re mistaken, youngster,” said Skrid. “There can’t be any life on a planet so close to the sun as the Third World—think of how warm it is!”
Emerak turned bright white with rage. “Can’t you feel the life down there? It’s not much, but it’s there. Maybe you’re too old, Skrid.”
Skrid ignored the insult. “I think we should turn back; we’re putting ourselves in danger by going so close to the sun. We’ve seen enough.”
“No, Skr
id, I detect life below.” Emerak blazed angrily. “And just because you’re leader of this triad doesn’t mean that you know everything. It’s just that your form is more complex than ours, and it’ll only be a matter of time until—”
“Quiet, Emerak.” It was the calm voice of Ullowa. “Skrid, I think the hothead’s right. I’m picking up weak impressions from the Third World myself; there may be some primitive life-forms evolving there. We’ll never forgive ourselves if we turn back now.”
“But the sun, Ullowa, the sun! If we go too close—” Skrid was silent, and the three drifted on through the void. After a while he said, “All right, let’s investigate.”
The three accordingly changed their direction and began to head for the Third World. They spiraled slowly down through space until the planet hung before them, a mottled bowl spinning endlessly.
Invisibly they slipped down and into its atmosphere, gently drifting towards the planet below. They strained to pick up signs of life, and as they approached the life-impulses grew stronger. Emerak cried out vindictively that Skrid should listen to him more often. They knew now, without doubt, that their kind of life inhabited the planet.
“Hear that, Skrid? Listen to it, old one.”
“All right, Emerak,” the elder being said, “you’ve proved your point. I never claimed to be infallible.”
“These are pretty strange thought-impressions coming up, Skrid. Listen to them, they have no minds down there,” said Ullowa. “They don’t think.”
“Fine,” exulted Skrid. “We can teach them the ways of civilization and raise them to our level. It shouldn’t be hard, when time is ours.”
“Yes,” Ullowa agreed, “they’re so mindless that they’ll be putty in our hands. Skrid’s Colony, we’ll call the planet. I can just see the way the Council will go for this. A new colony, discovered by the noted adventurer Skrid and two fearless companions—”
“Skrid’s Colony, I like the sound of that,” said Skrid. “Look, there’s a drifting colony of them now, falling to earth. Let’s join them and make contact; here’s our chance to begin.”
They entered the colony and drifted slowly to the ground among them. Skrid selected a place where a heap of them lay massed together, and made a skilled landing, touching all six of his delicately constructed limbs to the ground and sinking almost thankfully into a position of repose. Ullowa and Emerak followed and landed nearby.
“I can’t detect any minds among them,” complained Emerak, frantically searching through the beings near him. “They look just like us—that is, as close a resemblance as is possible for one of us to have to another. But they don’t think.”
Skrid sent a prying beam of thought into the heap on which he was lying. He entered first one, then another, of the inhabitants.
“Very strange,” he reported. “I think they’ve just been born; many of them have vague memories of the liquid state, and some can recall as far back as the vapor state. I think we’ve stumbled over something important, thanks to Emerak.”
“This is wonderful!” Ullowa said. “Here’s our opportunity to study newborn entities firsthand.”
“It’s a relief to find some people younger than yourself,” Emerak said sardonically. “I’m so used to being the baby of the group that it feels peculiar to have all these infants around.”
“It’s quite glorious,” Ullowa said, as he propelled himself over the ground to where Skrid was examining one of the beings. “It hasn’t been for a million ten-years that a newborn has appeared on our world, and here we are with billions of them all around.”
“Two million ten-years, Ullowa,” Skrid corrected. “Emerak here is of the last generation. And no need for any more, either, not while the mature entities live forever, barring accidents. But this is a big chance for us—we can make a careful study of these newborn ones, and perhaps set up a rudimentary culture here, and report to the Council once these babies have learned to govern themselves. We can start completely from scratch on the Third Planet. This discovery will rank with Kodranik’s vapor theory!”
“I’m glad you allowed me to come,” said Emerak. “It isn’t often that a youngster like me gets a chance to—” Emerak’s voice tailed off in a cry of amazement and pain.
“Emerak?” questioned Skrid. There was no reply.
“Where did the youngster go? What happened?” Ullowa said.
“Some fool stunt, I suppose. That little speech of his was too good to be true, Ullowa.”
“No, I can’t seem to locate him anywhere. Can you? Uh, Skrid! Help me! I’m—I’m—Skrid, it’s killing me!”
The sense of pain that burst from Ullowa was very real, and it left Skrid trembling. “Ullowa! Ullowa!”
Skrid felt fear for the first time in more eons than he could remember, and the unfamiliar fright-sensation disturbed his sensitively balanced mind. “Emerak! Ullowa! Why don’t you answer?”
Is this the end, Skrid thought, the end of everything? Are we going to perish here after so many years of life? To die alone and unattended, on a dismal planet billions of miles from home? Death was a concept too alien for him to accept.
He called again, his impulses stronger this time. “Emerak! Ullowa! Where are you?”
In panic, he shot beams of thought all around, but the only radiations he picked up were the mindless ones of the newly born.
“Ullowa!”
There was no answer, and Skrid began to feel his fragile body disintegrating. The limbs he had been so proud of—so complex and finely traced—began to blur and twist. He sent out one more frantic cry, feeling the weight of his great age, and sensing the dying thoughts of the newly born around him. Then he melted and trickled away over the heap, while the newborn snowflakes of the Third World watched uncomprehending, even as their own doom was upon them. The sun was beginning to climb over the horizon, and its deadly warmth beat down.
Absolutely Inflexible
Despite the rigors of college work, I wrote short stories steadily throughout 1954—one in April, two in May, three in June, two in October after the summer break. And I eventually sold them all, too. But progress was slow and often discouraging, and it wasn’t until the summer of 1955 that there was any pattern of consistent sales.
I had finished my third year of college by then, and—though I intended to return for the final year and collect my degree—I was already beginning to believe that I might actually be able to earn a modest living of some sort as a professional science-fiction writer. The evidence in favor of that, so far, was pretty slim: “Gorgon Planet,” “The Silent Colony,” the book Revolt on Alpha C, and then a couple of stories, “The Martian” and “Yokel with Portfolio,” that were bought by a minor magazine called Imagination in February and May of 1955. My total income from all of that was $352.60 spread over a year and a half, not a great deal even in those days. But I was finding it easier and easier to construct short stories that—to me—seemed at least as good as most of those that the innumerable s-f magazines of the day were publishing, and I was getting encouraging response from my agent about the new pieces I sent him once or twice a month. What I didn’t know was that most of the boom-era magazines that had begun publication in 1953 were on their last legs by the early months of 1955, and that my agent’s enthusiasm didn’t mean much, because it was his usual practice to send a cheery note (ghostwritten by one of his employees) about any story that stood half a chance of being published by someone, somewhere, eventually. So I stepped up my pace of production as the college year came to its close, and by June of 1955 I was writing a story a week.
“Absolutely Inflexible” was among them—one of my first successful tries at the time-paradox theme. I suppose it’s more than a little indebted to Robert A. Heinlein’s classic “By His Bootstraps,” but what time-paradox story isn’t? And it has some strength of its own, enough to have seen it through an assortment of anthology appearances over the years, and even, for a while, to be a best-seller for one of the pioneering on-line publishers of th
e 1990s. It was bought, after making the rounds for about six months, by the veteran editor-publisher Leo Margulies, who ran it in the July 1956 issue of the underrated magazine he had founded and edited, Fantastic Universe.
~
The detector over in one corner of Mahler’s little office gleamed a soft red. He indicated it with a weary gesture of his hand to the sad-eyed time jumper who sat slouched glumly across the desk from him, looking cramped and uncomfortable in the bulky spacesuit he was compelled to wear.
“You see,” Mahler said, tapping his desk. “They’ve just found another one. We’re constantly bombarded with you people. When you get to the Moon, you’ll find a whole Dome full of them. I’ve sent over four thousand there myself since I took over the bureau. And that was eight years ago—in 2776. An average of five hundred a year. Hardly a day goes by without someone dropping in on us.”
“And not one has been set free,” the time jumper said. “Every time-traveler who’s come here has been packed off to the Moon immediately. Every one.”
“Every one,” Mahler said. He peered through the thick shielding, trying to see what sort of man was hidden inside the spacesuit. Mahler often wondered about the men he condemned so easily to the Moon. This one was small of stature, with wispy locks of white hair pasted to his high forehead by perspiration. Evidently he had been a scientist, a respected man of his time, perhaps a happy father (although very few of the time jumpers were family men). Perhaps he possessed some bit of scientific knowledge that would be invaluable to the twenty-eighth century; perhaps not. It did not matter. Like all the rest, he would have to be sent to the Moon, to live out his remaining days under the grueling, primitive conditions of the Dome.
“Don’t you think that’s a little cruel?” the other asked. “I came here with no malice, no intent to harm whatsoever. I’m simply a scientific observer from the past. Driven by curiosity, I took the Jump. I never expected that I’d be walking into life imprisonment.”
To Be Continued: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume One Page 6