I can't tell you how many people I've talked to in the years since who think we won that game. But the home run killed the rally. Stromboni could have hit that ball clear out of the Solar System and it still would've only been two runs. We needed three.
It was only after the game, when souvenir hunters began searching for the ball, and mathematicians offered up calculations on its probable trajectory, that anyone realized something special had happened. Seventy-two hours would pass before the first sighting from Farside confirmed that the ball had not come down.
It still hasn't. Some government transportation officials wanted it retrieved, arguing that it might become a navigation hazard in the future. But after fielding protests from fans and figuring out what it would cost, they decided to leave it alone. Their team had won, after all, and they could afford to be magnanimous.
Stratosphere became famous. Over time, the sting of our defeat was replaced by pride in what he had done. It will never be done again, of course, because they deadened the balls before the following season.
He didn't adjust. He kept trying to hit that monumental blast that would turn a game around in an instant. I think he managed two home runs that season, and three the next, but the team finished third both years and didn't make the Series.
Though Stromboni enjoyed his celebrity, it was brief and ended badly. We traded him to Tycho for a couple of slick-fielding infielders, and he went into a slump from which he never recovered. By this time he was dating Claudette Raines, the French astronomer from Farside who'd discovered his ball. Their public romance made for great copy but didn't do much for his hitting. She came to some of his games, and they were seen cavorting at popular watering holes when he should have been resting up for games or practicing his fielding.
But real trouble didn't set in until one of the big Indian studios bought the film rights to Stromboni's story. The actress who played the astronomer was some ten years younger and much better-looking than Claudette, and Stratosphere fell for her hard. He dumped the scientist for the screen imitation, alienating most of what remained of his fan base. The electronic tabloids ate it up. The film flopped. The two women, who by the time of the wrap party weren't speaking to one another or to Stromboni, returned to Earth, leaving Stratosphere up here with his work, his drinking buddies, his faltering baseball career, and his fading legend.
Two years later—still playing for Tycho but mostly riding the bench—Stromboni was caught in a small rockslide at a job site. A falling rock pierced his outer suit and he died within minutes. An investigation revealed that he had failed to seal the inner lining.
But that was Stromboni. He never cared much for rules, in baseball or anywhere else. His carelessness cost him his life. He was thirty-six years old.
Hardly anyone talks about him anymore, or the championship we almost won. Most of the guys who played with him are gone. And the game is different now: twenty teams in the league, half of them playing in those new magneto-domes. The balls are manufactured to precise specifications. No one will ever come close to doing what he did.
And I guess that's as near to immortality as anyone gets, in this corner of the Solar System or anywhere else. That ball will be up there forever. It's like Armstrong's first footprint, only you don't have to put a fence around it. Two hundred years from now, little kids will know his name: Joe “Stratosphere” Stromboni, the only human being to put a baseball into orbit around Earth's airless Moon.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Classic Reprint: Sea Wrack by Edward Jesby
Introduction by Ted White
I started working for The Magazine in the early spring of 1963 as an Assistant Editor, although I didn't get a mention on the masthead until the November 1963 issue (and what a great issue that was, with a beautiful wraparound cover by Hannes Bok, illustrating “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” by Roger Zelazny), and my basic job was to read “the slush pile.” This is what unsolicited manuscripts from unknown authors was (and still is, I assume) called.
Avram Davidson, then the Editor, had hired me, but I saw him infrequently, because he was then living in Milford, Pennsylvania, and subsequently moved to Mexico. The man I saw weekly was Ed Ferman, then fresh out of college and newly the Managing Editor. Ed's father, Joe, was The Magazine's Publisher, and Ed held down the “editorial offices” on 53rd Street in Manhattan. And once a week I'd take the subway in from Brooklyn to pick up a fresh load of unread manuscripts, and turn in those I believed deserved consideration from Avram.
I put “editorial offices” in quotes, because the office was in fact a couple of side rooms off the lobby on the ground floor of an apartment building, and to get to it one walked through the building management offices. Unprepossessing, to say the least, but adequate to The Magazine's needs.
Usually, unless Ed was busy, we'd chat for a half hour to an hour before I returned to Brooklyn. I was only a few years older than Ed, but I'd been a science fiction fan for more than a decade, and had been writing professionally for several years, first as a jazz critic and journalist and then, starting in 1962, as a science fiction writer. I knew the field far better than Ed, and he told me ten years later that our informal gossip had been invaluable to him, filling him in on what was generally going on at the time, bringing him up to speed.
I was with The Magazine for five years, leaving to become the editor of rival magazines, Amazing Stories and Fantastic, in 1968. In the course of those five years I was promoted to Associate Editor, and took on a variety of other duties—the occasional book review, several editorials, story and coming-next-month blurbs, and some copyediting—but my main task remained reading the slush pile.
A year or so in I decided to keep track of some statistics, and I established the fact that I was reading an average of 600 manuscripts a month, and rejecting all but a half-dozen of them. Of those that I passed on (originally to Avram and later to Ed, when he took over the position of Editor), at least one would be purchased. This resulted in each issue having at least one of “my” stories, a story I had found in the slush pile.
I was proud of that statistic. It held for most of those five years. I was known, during my ten-year reign at Amazing and Fantastic, for discovering and promoting new authors, but that “tradition” had actually started with The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, five years earlier.
Not every editor gave such attention to his slush pile. In fact, the fellow who'd held my position before me was fired for automatically rejecting every manuscript—dumping them into the return mail in the mailbox on 53rd Street directly in front of the office on his way out. And it's easy to understand why he did that, because most of those stories were pretty awful. Some of them were handwritten. Some were childishly written. Some of them were just plain inappropriate for a science fiction or fantasy magazine, for any number of reasons. And it was obvious that the authors of a few of these stories were mentally disturbed.
Many of these stories were obviously unsuitable within their first paragraphs, and could be quickly dealt with. The real time-wasters for me were the adequately written stories which just didn't work, but required a complete reading to establish that—some of them fairly long.
One person sent a brief story every day for a week. His last story, at the end of that week, had a note appended to it which said, “Since you haven't bought any of my stories yet, I'm not going to send you any more.” It apparently hadn't occurred to him that it took the postal service several days to deliver his stories, and that acceptances or rejections would take equally long to get back to him. I'd rejected them all, and wasn't sorry to hear that I wouldn't be seeing any more.
Another author sent me close to two dozen stories over a period of several months, all of which I rejected. I came to recognize his submissions from the envelopes they arrived in, and I'd sigh when I saw one. Bland, a bit glib, they almost worked, but eventually fell flat. They covered a broad spectrum of story-types, ranging from bar stories to the man who kills his wife by inventing
a time machine (a classic story which crops up frequently in slush piles).
One day I saw that author's name in one of Fred Pohl's magazines—Galaxy or If or Worlds of Tomorrow—and I was a bit surprised. Then I got one from him that I liked. It was completely different from the stories which preceded it. It was “hard-science” fiction, cleanly told. It was “Becalmed on Mercury.” And the author's name was Larry Niven. I never saw any of the stories I'd rejected published elsewhere; they'd been the “dues” Larry had paid, learning to become a salable writer and finding his real voice as an author.
Edward Jesby's “Sea Wrack” was just another manila envelope in the week's pile of envelopes until I opened it and read the story. It hit me between the eyes. Where had this guy come from? I passed it along with a note that this was one we had to buy, something I rarely did. And I wasn't surprised to see it in a subsequent issue. I thought of Jesby as one of my discoveries, like Thomas Burnett Swann (whose first story Avram lost when he didn't respond quickly enough; it was published in the British Science-Fantasy).
We didn't hear any more from Jesby for several years (Gordon tells me his “Ogre!” was in the Sept. 1968 issue, just after I'd left The Magazine), but a few months after we'd published “Sea Wrack,” I had a call from Terry Carr, an old friend who was then an editor at Ace Books. “What can you tell me about Jesby and this story?” he wanted to know. I couldn't tell him much, but he told me that he and Don Wollheim had selected it for their new World's Best Science Fiction anthology, and I felt vindicated all over again.
For me that anthology selection validated my belief in the value of combing the slush pile for new and unknown authors. It wasn't a thankless task—it was a necessary and valuable task. It was like panning for gold. Every so often you turn up a big shiny nugget.
* * * *
Sea Wrack by Edward Jesby
Greta Hijukawa-Rosen sat on the beach watching her escort maneuver a compression hover board above the waters of the Mediterranean. He stood on the small round platform, balancing it a few inches above the spilling tops of the wind-driven waves with small movements of his legs. The board operated on the power sent to it from the antennae above the chateau, but he operated on his own.
"Viterrible,” Greta thought, stretching to lift the underside of her small breasts to the full heat of the sun. She giggled, wondering what her sisters would think of her use of a commercial word, and then shrugged and looked at her own golden tan comparing it to her escort's dark brown color. Abuwolowo was humus brown. “Deep as leaf mold,” she said, speaking aloud, and stood up to watch him lift the thin platform to its maximum altitude of six or seven meters. His figure rapidly diminished in size as he sent it wobbling in gull-like swoops out over the Mediterranean. Ultimately it was boring, she decided, there was no real danger. He had a caller fitted into his swim belt, and if he fell into the water, the board he rode on would save him, diving into the water and lifting him to safety. Now he was very far out, and all that was visible above the wave tops was the black bobbing ball of his head.
"I suppose I should have a feeling of loss.” There was contempt in her voice, and it came from her knowledge that all she knew of loss was what she had read about in a recent television seminar on great books, but she gasped, losing reality, when she saw the head in close to the beach.
Looking desperately for her binocular lorgnette, she asked, “Abuwolowo?” in a shout, but the head was white, and not merely the color of untanned skin, but a flat artificial white, like the marble statues in the garden of the summer home. Now, to her further horror, the rest of the apparition appeared out of the shallows. Above the blue sea, silhouetted against the paler sky, was a black figure with a dead white head. It staggered through the chopping waves with efforts to lift its legs free. When the creature succeeded in lifting its feet clear she was reassured. It was wearing swim fins, and she ran forward to help.
After she had gotten her hand onto the large soft arm she asked, “Are you all right?” The man nodded and kindly leaned a bit of his weight onto her. She was thankful, the figure stood a foot above her six foot three inch height, and its shoulders were broader than Abuwolowo's Nigerian span.
Firmly enscounced on the sand, the man made a magician's pass at his neck and lifted the covering away from his face. He shot a quick look at the sky with black eyes that filled huge sockets and said, “Bright.” He looked down at the sand, and after a few stertorous breaths spoke. “Thank you.” He paused, reaching into his armpit, and continued, “Basker hit me out there."
Breathing more easily, he was easy to understand. The liquid mumbling of his first words had disappeared, and he looked directly at her. “Pretty,” he said, “pretty deserves an explanation. A basker drove me into the bottom. Something scared it from in the air and it dove."
"Basker?” she asked, wanting to hear the strange soft cadences of the voice that issued from the round head with its huge eyes.
"Basker shark,” he said, “lying on the surface and it dove. I had no time to signal or to warn.” He fell forward, breathing easily, but she saw blood welling from a cut on his back as he slumped onto his knees. “Excuse,” he mouthed, when she gave a small touched cry. There was a long gash traversing his back from the left shoulder blade to his waist at his right side, and the rubbery material of his suit had rolled back and pulled the wound open. She tried to lift him, but his weight was too great, and all she succeeded in doing was to push him over into the sand. She straddled him and pulled at his long thick arm, trying to turn him over, but that too was impossible. Flat as he looked spread out on the sand, with long thin legs and a midsection that had no depth, he was still enormously heavy. She jumped away from him and looked out into the sea. Abuwolowo was coming in toward the shore and she frantically waved and shouted, throwing her long pigtail and the points of her body in spastic jerks until he rode his board up onto the beach. “There's a man hurt here,” she said, turning her back to him until the sand blasting up from the vehicle's air jets had subsided.
"Man?” Abuwolowo questioned, but he heaved at the collapsed figure. “He's as heavy as a whale. It's no use, I'll go up to the house and get help.” He ran off in long loping strides that brought him to the elevator in the cliff with an instantaneous violation of distance that was dreamlike. She stayed to watch her charge, fascinated by the long breaths he took. Easy inhalations that moved down his length in a wave from his chest to midriff in a series that seemed to never stop. One breath starting before the other had finished.
She waited silently, forgoing her usual monkey chatter to herself, eschewing fashion in the presence of the impassive white straw-colored hair, whose only life showed in the delicate flutter of petal nostrils. Finally, after no time had passed for her, Abuwolowo returned with four of the servants, strong squat men from neighboring Aegean islands. Puffing, their legs bowed under the weight, they half carried, half dragged the wounded man to the elevator and folded him into it under Abuwolowo's direction. Abuwolowo climbed over him, and braced between the walls, walked up the sides of the car until he was perched above the body. He held the up button down with a strong toe, the doors closed, and the elevator whirred invisibly away.
Greta had prepared for dinner, dressing and making her face up with unusual care, and was coming down the great ramp that swept into the entrance hall when she heard her brother-in-law talking to some of the guests. She stopped, amused, he was not really talking, but lecturing in a voice that his Kirghiz accent made even more didactic than he intended.
"Amazing,” he was saying, “the recuperative powers they have. After we had gotten him off the kitchen truck, and onto the largest reclining ottoman in the casual room, he sat right up. He smiled at me. He stretched.” Her brother-in-law paused, either overcome with amazement or staring down someone who appeared to be about to interrupt. “As I was saying,” he went on in measured periods, “He stretched."
Greta could not resist her chance. She slipped down the ramp, and crossed to the speaker
. “He stretched, and then what?"
Hauptman-Everetsky gave her the limited courtesy of his chill smile. “He stretched, and his water suit opened up and came off like a banana skin. He checked under his arm, the gill slit, you know, and climbed off the ottoman. He ignored me and turned around, and the cut was healed. There was only a thin line to show where it had been."
Greta moved away, not waiting to hear the inevitable repetition and embellishments her brother-in-law would give to his reactions. She passed through the archway that led to the casual room, undisturbed by the slight malfunction of the pressure curtain that allowed a current of air to lift the hem of her long skirt.
The man from the sea was standing in front of the panoramic glass watching the slow turning of the sights from the islands’ perimeter. A passing flow of scenery that was magnified and diminished by the tastes programmed into the machine. Just at this moment it was dwelling on the lights of the skyscrapers of Salonika. He was engrossed, but her cousin Rolf was questioning him with his usual inquisitiveness. Dwarfed by the figure next to him, he blurted questions in his fluting high American tones.
The question she heard as she approached was, “And you came all that way?” Rolf's voice did not hold disbelief, it held pleasure, a childish love for a reaccounting of adventure.
"Surely,” the huge man said, “I have said it. I came from outside Stavangafjiord. I was following an earth current. I hoped it might teach me something about the halibut's breeding. But I felt that was foolish, and so I hunted down the coast until I came to here.” He turned back to the glass to catch the artistic dwindling of the city as the machine withdrew his view to a great height. “And,” he said, coming politely back to his interrogator, “And the dolphins told me, when they were racing off Normandy, that the waters here were warm, and” he paused, noticing Greta, “and the women beautiful, with yellow hair, and brown limbs."
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