I waited. A black-bonneted head came out. Looked me over. I was in Uniform: suit, shirt, tie. Only a fool wears anything else at hospital check-out desks or in traffic court. Head withdrew. The Creature returned. I was let off; all she wanted was name and address and phone number, which she already had. Checking. I started to go, once again having won a Great Victory over an Established Faith (did Harlan tell you about how I got the tax people off my back by writing The President?).
"Uh . . .Mister offutt . . .you WILL pay this, won't you?"
I swear. I gave her my best don't-you-wish-you-knew-who-your-father-was look and departed. With wife and offutt-spring.
That became one of our three favorite stories to tell captive audiences dumb enough to beholden themselves by coming out to drink my liquor. (The other two are how-andy-scared-off-the-prowler-with-a-Daisy-air-rifle-while-scared-to-death-the-bb's-would-rattle, and how-andy-damnear-chopped-off-his-left-thumb-with-a-machete-while-cutting-weeds-and-thank-Mithra-he-types-with-only-the-index-finger-on-that-hand-anyhow.) Come out for a drink and we'll tell you. If you mix with 7-up or cola, you get cheap Ky bourbon. If you drink it bare, or with water or soda, you'll get Maker's Mark and the stories will be painless.
Anyhow, one night we told our friend Bill Hough the hospital story and he didn't laugh and beam at me as if I were god. Before I could snatch his drink and throw him out, he said:
"Ever think what might've happened if they'd called your bluff back?"
I gave Bill another drink and wrote the story next day. It was turned down by Redbook, Satevepost (which immediately went bust), Atlantic, Good House, and the agent I had at that time! Here's what he said:
"I'm sorry but—and I don't believe 'For Value Received' would make it. It has humor and truth to a point, but it's against the rules to spoof the medical profession . . . ."
So, obviously, this IS a dangerous vision. To dwarfs, anyhow. We're surrounded by them.
Introduction to
MATHOMS FROM THE TIME CLOSET
Gene Wolfe is a quiet, mostly amiable man with a sense of humor that has all the gentility of a carnivorous plant. I like and admire him more than I've ever told him. He is the author of a so-so novel, Operation Ares, and a horde of short stories that are well into the category labeled brilliant. He lives on Betty Drive in Hamilton, Ohio, the state from which I came; and when I left, Ohio got Gene, as the act of a benevolent God.
During the 1971 Nebula awards in New York, I sat in front of Gene during one of the most painful incidents it has ever been my gut-wrench to witness, and the way Gene reacted to it says much about the man.
Isaac Asimov had been pressed into service at the last moment to read the winners of the Nebulas. Gene was up in the short story category for his extravagantly excellent "The Island of Doctor Death And Other Stories" from Damon Knight's ORBIT 7 (Gene has appeared nine times in the eight ORBIT collections as of this writing) (thereby attesting to Damon's perspicacity as an editor) (taught the kid everything he knows, except table manners at banquets) (he throws peanuts and peas). Isaac had not been given sufficient time to study the list, which was handwritten, and he announced Gene as the winner. Gene stood up as the SFWA officers on the platform went pale and hurriedly whispered words to Ike. Ike went pale. Then he announced he'd made an error. There was "no award" in the short story category. Gene sat back down and smiled faintly.
Around him everyone felt the rollercoaster nausea of stomachs dropping out backsides. Had it been me, I would have fainted or screamed or punched Norbert Slepyan of Scribner's, who was sitting next to me. Gene Wolfe just smiled faintly and tried to make us all feel at ease by a shrug and a gentle nod of his head.
His three short stories in this book mark a departure in my DV policies: when I started assembling stories, I said no one writer would have more than a single story in the series. One shot and that was it. But I bought "Loco Parentis" in 1968, one of my first purchases, at the Milford SF Writers Conference, and the following year when the Conference was held in Madeira Beach, Gene showed up with "Robot's Story" and "Against the Lafayette Escadrille," neither of which I could resist. So I bought all three and Gene devised an umbrella overtitle for the group, and it subsequently allowed Bernard Wolfe and James Sallis to sell me more than one. There is simply no defense against a Gene Wolfe story.
For me, his is one of the wildest and richest imaginations in the genre.
Here is what he says of himself:
"The usual middle class upbringing for kids born, as I was, in the worst of the depression. No brothers or sisters, the family moving around as my father tried to earn a living. (Mostly, he was trying to sell cash registers, God help him.) He was a man who was home only on weekends, and brought me one or two lead soldiers every time he came, until I had a corrugated board box of them so heavy I could not pick it up. If we're so much richer now, why can't you buy those lead soldiers anymore?
"My mother was from the deep south (North Carolina) descended through her mother from one of those real Scarlett O'Hara families that lost it all in the Civil War. (Oddly enough, my father's family also had roots in North Carolina, having come from there north about 1830, and I may be distantly related to Thomas Wolfe.) I remember her taking me to be shown to her parents, and how no one would explain why Grandfather kept those funny chickens that could not be let in with the regular chickens ("Or they'll kill 'em!") or the scarred white dog which had to be chained up when there were other dogs around. Grandfather had a wooden leg he kept out in front of him and was as deaf as a stump when he didn't want to hear you; I wish I could have known him better.
"Something must have happened during my school days, but I mostly remember that it was very hot. I am left-handed, and the chairs had their broad arm on the wrong side. My hands were always sweating and sticking to the paper. I remember that.
"The sports for which I showed some ability, boxing and shooting, were unimportant beside such necessities as basketball. I was good at baseball, except for the parts which involve catching or throwing the ball. In Junior High I acquired a distaste for compulsory athletics which has never deserted me.
"My father, who had little money to spare for sending a son to college (he was operating a food business or a restaurant by this time, I'm not quite sure when the change was made), obtained the promise of a senatorial appointment to West Point for me. Unfortunately by the time I graduated from High School in 1949 there had been a readjustment of the power structure, and the new man, a short-sighted fellow named L. B. Johnson, refused to honor his predecessor's commitment.
"A few years later I found myself a private in the 7th Infantry Division, attempting to excavate a foxhole with the buttons of my shirt. I had dropped out of Texas A&M, which is a land grant college and something of cross between V.M.I. and Tom Disch's CAMP CONCENTRATION but very cheap if you live in the state, and learned to my sorrow the meaning of 'student deferment.' That was the Korean Police Action—remember that?
"The G.I. bill let me return to school at the University of Houston, and I got a B.S.M.E. there in 1956, following which I flew Texas, something I sometimes regret. I still hold the job I took when I graduated—that is to say, I'm working for the same employer, but since the job is Research and Development things change almost from month to month.
"I have a wife and four children. They seem like more."
MATHOMS FROM THE TIME CLOSET
Gene Wolfe
1: Robot's Story
It's a cold night, and the wind comes in so there's no inside, only two outsides: the one there where it howls up from the river, and the one in here—a little more sheltered, a little warmed by our breath. Che's poster flutters on the wall as though he's trying to talk; the kids would say "rap."
The kids are the older ones, three sitting crosslegged on Candy's mattress. (That's the Chillicothe Candy: there are fifty others up and down Calhoun Street.) The kids are the younger ones, runaways: two virgin (or nearly) girl groupies, and a thin, sad boy who never talks. The
kids are Robot, who has been down the hall where the plumbing works (it is stopped up here) and comes in, step, step, step, thinking about each move his legs make.
I've talked to Robot more than to any of the others because he is (perhaps) the least hostile and the most interesting. Robot is about nineteen, very tall, with a round, small head and a shock of black hair. Robot was custom-built, he tells me, in the thirty-third century to be the servant of an ugly woman who lived in a house floating on nothingness. Whenever Robot feels depressed he says: "I don't know how good I was made. Maybe I'm going to work for a thousand years; maybe I'm more than half used up already."
Robot says he is five. He escaped, or so he once told me, by spinning the dials of the ugly woman's time closet and stepping in while they were still in motion. This, as he explains, was to prevent his whenabouts (emphasized by his voice so that I'll notice the word) becoming known; but he had hoped to arrive in the thirteenth century B.C., a period which exercises a fascination for him.
Candy and the two boys with her ignore him, and after watching them for a moment he sits on the floor with the groupies (self-proclaimed) and the sad-faced boy and me. The boy is almost asleep, but to get Robot talking I ask, "Don't you wish you were back now, Robot?"
He shakes his head. "This is better. That was a drag all the time." He thinks for a moment, then asks, "Do you mind if I tell a story?" I tell him to go ahead, and so do the groupies, but he still hesitates. "You don't mind? I'm programmed for them, and there wasn't anyone who would listen there, so I never got to get them out. When I get them out they're checked off, you know? It's kind of like being constipated."
The sad boy says, "Go on." This, I think, is what Robot has been waiting for.
"This is a fairy story," Robot begins. "It goes way back to the days when the little one-man scout ships went out from here in every direction looking for habitable spheres, scattering like sperm from semen dropped in the sea."
I had not known Robot possessed such a strain of eloquence, and I look closely at him. His eyes are staring straight ahead and his mouth is a round O, the way he holds it when he is pretending there is a speaker in his throat.
"Those days continued for many, many years, you must understand. And every year the ships left in tens or hundreds—up toward the pole star; out like spokes around the sun; down past the Southern Cross. This is about one of the ships that went down.
"It dropped for years, but it didn't count years. The pilot was asleep, and in a hundred days he would breathe three times. In a year, maybe, he would turn over and then plastic hands would come out of the wall and turn him right again. The ship woke him up when they had gotten somewhere.
"He woke up, and it knew he had forgotten almost everything except what he'd been dreaming of, so it explained it all to him while it rubbed him and gave him something to eat. When it was finished he thought, 'What a tourist I was to let them talk me into this.' Then he got up to see what this world he found was.
"It wasn't anything special; as near as he could see mostly high grass—higher than your head. He landed and the air was all right and he got out and did all the things he was supposed to do, but there was really nothing there but all this grass."
(I wondered if the "grass" in the story was an unconscious reflection of the kids' obsession with marijuana; or if for Robot as for Whitman it represented the obliterations of time.)
"Then just when he was getting ready to go, this really lovely chick came out of the grass. No noise, you dig? No drums, no trumpets. She just pushed it back like a chick will push back her hair and came out. He was crazy about her as soon as he saw her, and they made a deal.
"He couldn't take her back in the ship with him and she wouldn't have gone anyway. But she told him she'd live with him there if he'd do three things, and she made him write them out in his own blood. He had to swear first of all that he'd do all the work, and never ask her to do anything. Then that he wouldn't tell people back here what he'd found, and that he wouldn't ask her any questions.
"He wrote it all and he signed it, and she had him build them a house, like out of sod and the grass and pieces of his ship. He dug a cistern and planted some seeds he'd had in the ship to get things started for the colony people who were supposed to come after him. And that was it, except that sometimes she would catch the soft little animals that lived in the grass and eat them. She never gave him any and he never asked for any, and they were too quick for him to catch himself.
"He got older but she didn't, and he thought that was groovy. He was getting to be an old guy but he still had a young wife as pretty as a girl. He had to do everything like he had agreed, but otherwise she was always nice. She sang a lot without words and played a thing like a flute, and she told him all the time what a great guy he was.
"Then one day just after sundown when he'd been out hoeing the crops and was just about to go in he saw a new spark up among the stars. He watched it for a long time, trying to straighten up his back and rubbing the white hair around his face. After that he saw it every night for three nights, moving across the sky. Then on the fourth day, when he was carrying water from the cistern there was a kind of whizz in the air and something big hit the ground a long way off. He was starting to think about that when his wife came down the path. She wasn't carrying anything, or doing anything to make her look different from the way she usually did, and she didn't wear clothes, but there was a kind of glow to her like she'd brushed her hair a little more than usual and maybe toweled herself harder when she washed. She went walking right past him and never said a thing.
"He watched her walk through all the place he'd cleared to grow food and when she got to the grass she just kept going, opening it with her hands and stepping in. Then he yelled, 'Where are you going?'
"She didn't even turn her head, but she yelled back, 'I'm going to get myself a new fool.' "
Robot pauses.
One of the groupies asks, "Is that all there is to it?"
Robot doesn't answer. Candy has come over, and she's saying, "Robot, we want you to go out and cop a nickel for us." Which means: "Buy us five dollars worth of marijuana."
Robot stands and holds out his hand, and one of the boys squatting on Candy's mattress laughs and says, "If we had it we'd cop ourselves." For a moment I think of lending Robot my coat (his own orange one belonged to a hotel doorman, and is so worn in spots that the lining shows through the napless fabric) but the way people usually do, I think too long before saying anything. He goes out, Candy and her two friends settle down on the mattress to wait for him, and now I think we are all going to sleep.
2: Against the Lafayette Escadrille
I have built a perfect replica of a Fokker triplane, except for the flammable dope. It is five meters, seventy-seven centimeters long and has a wing span of seven meters, nineteen centimeters, just like the original. The engine is an authentic copy of an Oberursel UR II. I have a lathe and a milling machine and I made most of the parts for the engine myself, but some had to be farmed out to a company in Cleveland, and most of the electrical parts were done in Louisville, Kentucky.
In the beginning I had hoped to get an original engine, and I wrote my first letters to Germany with that in mind, but it just wasn't possible; there are only a very few left, and as nearly as I could find out none in private hands. The Oberursel Worke is no longer in existence. I was able to secure plans though, through the cooperation of some German hobbyests. I redrew them myself translating the German when they had to be sent to Cleveland. A man from the newspaper came to take pictures when the Fokker was nearly ready to fly, and I estimated then that I had put more than three thousand hours into building it. I did all the airframe and the fabric work myself, and carved the propeller.
Throughout the project I have tried to keep everything as realistic as possible, and I even have two 7.92 mm Maxim "Spandau" machineguns mounted just ahead of the cockpit. They are not loaded of course, but they are coupled to the engine with the Fokker Zentralsteuerung
interrupter gear.
The question of dope came up because of a man in Oregon I used to correspond with who flies a Nieuport Scout. The authentic dope, as you're probably aware, was extremely flammable. He wanted to know if I'd used it, and when I told him I had not he became critical. As I said then, I love the Fokker too much to want to see it burn authentically, and if Antony Fokker and Reinhold Platz had had fireproof dope they would have used it. This didn't satisfy the Oregon man and he finally became so abusive I stopped replying to his letters. I still believe what I did was correct, and if I had it to do over my decision would be the same.
I have had a trailer specially built to move the Fokker, and I traded my car in on a truck to tow it and carry parts and extra gear, but mostly I leave it at a small field near here where I have rented hangar space, and move it as little as possible on the roads. When I do because of the wide load I have to drive very slowly and only use certain roads. People always stop to look when we pass, and sometimes I can hear them on their front porches calling to others inside to come and see. I think the three wings of the Fokker interest them particularly, and once in a rare while a veteran of the war will see it—almost always a man who smokes a pipe and has a cane. If I can hear what they say it is often pretty foolish, but a light comes into their eyes that I enjoy.
Again, Dangerous Visions Page 22