Science Fiction Discoveries

by Carol

  “No.” He thought his answer was perfectly honest, and the contrast between this perfectly honest statement and some of his earlier ones showed up the earlier ones for what they were. Who had he been trying to fool? Who was it that men always tried to fool?

  “And was it,” she asked, “my lamenting that drove you off? I lament no longer for my life.”

  “Nor for the veil that fell between us?”

  The true answer was there in her grave eyes, if he could read it through the stretching, subtle, impenetrable veils.

  The red circles held narrow dagger-blades of urgent warning on all the walls, and warning voices boomed like thunder across the golden, convoluted plain. The evacuation ship lay like a thick pool of bright and melted-looking metal in the field, with its hundred doors open for quick access, and a hundred machines carrying tourists and their baggage aboard. The veil was falling early again this year. Stretching in a row across the gravity-inversion sky, near one side of the directionless horizon, explosions already raged like an advancing line of silent summer thunderstorms.

  Hagen, hurrying out onto the field, stopped a hurrying machine. “My companion, the woman Ailanna, is she aboard the ship?”

  “No list of names of those aboard has been compiled, Man.” The timbre of the metal voice was meant to be masterly, and reassuring even when the words were not.

  Hagen looked around him at the surface of the city, the few spare towers and the multitudinous burrowed entrances. Over the whole nearby landscape more machines were racing to reach the ship with goods or perhaps even tourists who had somehow not gotten the warning in comfortable time, or who were at the last moment changing their minds about becoming settlers. Was not Ailanna frantically looking amid the burrows for Hagen, looking in vain as the last moments fell? It was against logic and sense that she should be, but he could not escape the feeling that she was.

  Nevertheless the doors on the ship were closed or closing now. "Take me aboard,” he barked at the machine.

  “At once, Man.” And they were already flying across the plain.

  Aboard ship, Hagen looked out of port as they were hurled into the sky, then warped through the sideward modes of space, twisted out from under the falling veil before it could clamp its immovable knots about the atoms of the ship and passengers and hold them down forever. There was a last glimpse of the yellow plain, and then only strange flickers of light from the abnormal space they were traversing briefly, like a cloud.

  “That was exciting!” Out of nowhere Ailanna threw herself against him with a hug. “I was worried there, for a moment, that you'd been left behind.” She was ready now to forgive him a flirtation with a girl of a hundred and thirty years ago. It was nice that he was forgiven, and Hagen patted her shoulder; but his eyes were still looking^ upward and outward, waiting for the stars.

  An Occurrence at the Owl Creek Rest Home

  by Arthur Jean Cox

  Arthur Jean Cox is a southern-Califomia writer. His best known previous science-fiction stories are "A Collection of Ambroses” and “Straight Shooters Always Win ” and he is widely known as a literary expert in scholarly and historical areas.

  1

  George Clay had toiled for seventy-two years toward a certain end ... and then, after all his trouble, was informed by an officious clerk that his permission to Terminate had been rescinded.

  "But,” he protested, “my case is in no way exceptional”

  “That's true,” agreed the clerk, indifferently toying with the calendar on his desk. ‘The Commissioners decision is ... ah ... unusual. But of course it is final. Not subject to review or appeal. Come back in half a century,” he added, not unkindly but casting an impatient glance at the door. “Perhaps we can do something for you then. Mind you, we make no promises.”

  With a weary sigh George turned away...

  “Father?”

  . . . and lay staring at the iron frame at the foot of his familiar iron bed.

  He gazed at it for a long moment before he quite realized what it meant: his anxious interview had been a dream.

  “Father!”

  Now that he was awake, was he any better off? His eyes wandered listlessly, seeing without noting the too-familiar scene about him. Yes ... he permitted the thought to form: Yes, he was better off. After all, there was an obvious escape from this situation. Sooner or later he would die.

  He rolled his head to the right, looked past the two rows of beds and out the windows at the end of the ward. It was afternoon, judging by the shadows. He could see the spacious green lawn that encircled the Owl Creek Rest Home, a black smudge that was of course the paved road or street, and a green haze of trees on the other side of the road. As he watched, a car went by on the road—coming from somewhere and going somewhere. Ah! The scene swam before his eyes.

  Good God! what he wouldn’t give to be well and strong and out there, moving across the lawn toward that greater outside world, in the fresh air and sunshine. “What he wouldn’t give—?” What did he have to give? Nothing. He was seeing now all of that world he would ever see again. He would probably never rise from this bed.

  “Father!”

  He became aware that he had heard that word several times now, each time becoming more peremptory. He lolled his head to the left and saw, without any great surprise, his daughter sitting in the wooden chair between his bed and the wall at this end of the ward. What did surprise him was that her husband was standing beside her, smiling upon him in a closed-mouth way that was probably meant to be reassuring. His daughter was a trim little woman of forty-five, in a trim little dark suit that matched her hair and black eyes. Hugh was also dressed in black. George couldn’t remember having seen Hugh wear that suit before: but then he hadn’t seen his son-in-law in—what was it?—some two years now. He was relieved to see that Nurse Mildred Paine was standing just inside the doorway, looking on: it mustn’t be quite four yet, if she was still on duty. The sight of her pleasant face (strange that he should ever have thought it too narrow and gaunt) was comforting. It meant he wasn’t alone with the Enemy.

  He knew what they were seeing: An old, wasted man lying in a bed the size of a grave, the skin stretched so tautly across his skull that it seemed a break in it would show the white bone underneath.

  “To what”—his voice came out unexpectedly broken, as if it were part hoot, part croak: both of which sounds were appropriate to Owl Creek. “To what,” he began again, “do I owe the honor of this visit?”

  “Father, we simply wished to see you,” said Edith, in an admonitory tone. Perhaps his question had sounded more ironical than he had intended. “You must know, Father, that you have been ill. Very ill. And Hugh and I have come to see you, as an act of attention.”

  “Oh?” He turned his eyes toward Mildred.

  “Yes. You have been sick, George,” she said. “You’ve been unconscious since yesterday noon. You have had a fever. Doctor Murray was going to have you taken to the General if there wasn’t any change for the better by this afternoon. But now you won’t have to go. Your pulse is normal and strong. You’re going to be all right...”

  “... for a while,” he appended, wearily. He looked at his waiting offspring and her spouse with a new understanding. “You may not need those dark clothes for a while, but keep them handy. Who knows? They might not even lose their press before you have to take them out again.”

  Edith raised an impatient and ironical eyebrow. Hugh pretended not to understand.

  “You’re looking well, Father,” said Edith, with a trace of feeling in her voice that he reluctantly recognized as disapproval. He decided not to be difficult. After all, it was probably impossible for Edith to completely eradicate disapproval from her tone, it was so habitual with her.

  “Yes, I seem to feel all right.... I’m not quite sure, though.” He introspected a bit. “There’s something wrong. There’s a feeling I can’t quite ... Good God!” he exclaimed, making a discovery. “Good God, yes! I’m hungry! Why, I haven�
��t been hungry in years!” He greeted his appetite as an old and dear friend, whom he had never thought to see again. He laughed with pleasure, which caused his other visitors to exchange a diagnostic glance. “You didn’t bring me any candy, did you?” he asked the two. “No? Well—” eyeing the half dozen roses on the windowsill—‘I'm so hungry I could almost eat them.”

  “I’ll get you some food,” promised Mildred, and departed for the kitchen.

  Edith turned a look of irrational dislike at the retreating white dress. “Paine!” she said, disgustedly. “What a name for a nurse!” She got up from the chair. “But enough of this idle chit-chat. Some of us have work to do, even”—she attempted a smile and a small joke—“even if some of us do just lie around all day. You have to get back to the office, remember, Husband.”

  She deposited a kiss like ice water on her father’s forehead and walked out the door.

  Hugh ceremoniously extracted two one-dollar bills from his wallet and dropped them on the broad windowsill which served as George’s night table. "There you are, my boy,” he said, with his head tilted playfully to one side. "Buy yourself some cigarettes.”

  "I don’t smoke,” said George, a trifle testily. "Never have.”

  "Great! Great! That way you’ll live to a ripe old age.” And he patted George on his narrow and bony shoulder. He turned to leave but paused in the doorway to look back. "Well, anyway, Dad,” he said, "you’ve led a full life.”

  2

  A full life.

  It hadn’t seemed so to George. Not that it had been empty, either. He had had a happy childhood and a good education. He had fallen in love, married, raised a family, worked. How he had worked! But he had never gotten to do many of the things he had meant to do. He had wanted to travel, to see Europe, Africa and the Orient, to view the great art treasures of the world (for he was a Sunday painter: one good enough, he had been told, to have painted on the other days of the week, too). That had been his and his wife’s lifetime dream. But he had kept putting it off. "Let’s wait,” he would say to his wife, "until both Edith and Tommy are out of college.” Or, later, "Let’s wait until I’ve established Tommy in business.” Or, still later, "Let’s wait until I’ve helped Edith’s husband over this rough spot; and then, Violet—” turning to his wife, whose dark hair was slowly streaking with gray—"then we’ll see the world.”

  But it hadn’t worked out that way. Tommy was always getting into scrapes and having to be helped out of them. Once he forged his father’s name to a thousand-dollar check and disappeared. He turned up again two years later, repentant in a sailor suit, so genuinely remorseful that George welcomed him back into his home and his business. Edith’s husband had a problem with drink: he couldn’t get enough of it. She was constantly calling on her father to set him on his feet again. When that husband got hold of the wrong kind of alcohol, she didn’t mourn him long. Six months later she married Hugh Gates, a young fellow in her father s employ.

  Things went well enough after that, for a while. That Round-the-World Trip slowly rose up above the horizon into George’s view. And then—debacle! Tommy again forged his father’s name, this time to bigger checks and to company papers, and fled, leaving his Old Man broke. George had to go into bankruptcy and start all over again. He created a new company and, through sheer know-how and industry, made it pay—but not until he had paid his creditors every cent he owed them, just as Sir Walter Scott, his boyhood hero, had done under similar circumstances. He had never seen Tommy again.

  In the meantime he had brought the man who had married The Boss’s Daughter into a kind of partnership with him. Hugh had none of Tommy’s faults. He didn’t drink much or gamble at all. He also had none of Tommy’s high spirits. A curious thing about Hugh was that he didn’t seem to have any interests of any sort. He didn’t like sports, movies, or books. He collected nothing and had no hobbies ... Unless the accumulation of capital could be said to be his hobby.

  So now George said to Violet: “We have no savings, but that doesn’t matter. I’ll turn the business over to Hugh so that you and I can travel.”

  He arranged the matter to his own and Hugh’s satisfaction ... and Violet died.

  For some months he plunged himself again into work, as a land of special consultant and spur to Hugh, who was more talented as a salesman than as an executive. Then he fell ill with an “influenza” that lasted for months. He was only sixty-five but, recovering, he found himself an old man. No amount of rest or exercise would restore his strength, and his vision was considerably impaired. The trip was indefinitely postponed. Perhaps, he thought, he would never take it now. That was a great loss, but, really, why should he despair? He still had things to look forward to. He could spend his last years in peace and with enough money to give some graces to his life. He had his home and his family. And he thought, “This house has been silent too long. Til invite Edith and Hugh to move out of their apartment in the city and come to live with me. It’ll be pleasant having company.”

  The children moved in.

  Although he naturally thought that they were living with him, he gradually became aware that he was living with them* And it soon became clear that Hugh resented the money George drew from the firm. He was entered on the books as a liability. Hugh took to philosophizing aloud at the dinner table that we must all be producers in this life or fall by the wayside. Edithu developed a little habit of referring to her father as The Consumer—which she evidently regarded as a pleasantry. And then one day, when he was very ill, Hugh brought him some papers to sign, and he afterwards found that he had signed away his income.

  “Look, Dad, why are you so upset? The company needs that money to meet obligations. It’s only temporary. And, besides—” shaking his head sadly—“I told you what you were signing. Your memory’s . going, Dad.”

  “You’re a liar, Hugh,” said George. “You told me lies. And you never will restore that income to me.” He retired to his room ... for he still had the sole use of a room in the house he had built. He explored various avenues in hopes of regaining what was his. They were all dead ends. His old friend and lawyer, Stanley Abrams, had died. He himself was too ill and weak to fight. He was tired ... so tired. He had turned over everything to his children and now they treated him as an incumbrance and a nuisance. They discarded his paintings in the trash, ignored his questions, shook their heads solemnly at his jokes, and served him his dinner in his room when they had company.

  He had repeated the mistake of Lear.

  One day Hugh took him for a drive. It wasn’t a very long drive, but he never came back from it. It ended in the driveway of the Owl Creek Rest Home.

  3

  Nurse Mildred Paine came back with food: A clear broth, a small slice of white turkey meat, a five-ounce glass of grapefruit juice, Jello. “This was all I was able to wangle for you, George. The dietician was afraid to give you even this much, after your illness. You may find yourself nauseous.”

  But he didn’t. He gulped the food down, ravenously, and looked around vainly for more.

  He usually felt depressed after the youngsters had gone, and certainly their visit had been little joy. But somehow, now, he couldn’t remain depressed. His spirits kept lifting—involuntarily, as it were. Maybe it was the meat. Whatever it was, he felt surprisingly good.

  But there was a bad sign: His arm itched and, scratching it, he saw the outer skin flake off, almost in a single sheaf, as if he were a snake shedding its skin. In a moment he was itching all over. Mildred put up a screen and gave him a sponge bath and his skin peeled from him in great strips. He saw her concern. It meant that the nutrients weren’t reaching the surface of his body, which sometimes occurred in the last stages of deterioration.

  But underneath his old skin his new skin glowed pinkly.

  Mildred called in Trucky Maoriano to lift him onto his chair while she changed his sheets; but George could almost have clambered onto his chair without assistance. He sat there, exchanging jokes with Trucky, and
felt very good. He bobbed like a cork on the waves with elation. But when Mildred put her hand on his forehead, she found no fever.

  He lay between the clean sheets, refreshed. Renewed.

  When Buena Valdez, the second shift nurse, came on, he slyly neglected to inform her that he had already eaten and was served a dinner along with the rest of the ward. Of course, one of them—Zorbedian, the second bed down on the other side—snitched on him, but when Buena came back to shake her finger at him, like a little girl scolding her dolly, he told her he had already avoided prosecution by swallowing the evidence: the fish, whipped potatoes, peas, roll and butter, custard pudding, and very weak coffee.

  That night hunger kept jostling him awake. Finally, George gave up, sat up in bed, and looked around. A rectangle of moonlight lay half on his bed and half on the floor to his right, and regularly spaced rectangles of moonlight overlapped each of the beds on this side of the room. He listened. Silence, except for the habitual night sounds of the ward: sighs, snores, groans, and Horace Hendershot in the next bed muttering a reply to something someone had said to him fifty years ago.

  George swung his legs over the side of the bed into the moonlight and looked down. Would he fall if he tried to stand? No, he wouldn’t. Or to walk? Again, no. He padded to the door of the ward and looked out.

  He was in luck. Nurse Ruth Hoskins was away from her desk, which was an oasis of light in the hall separating the women’s ward from the men. A small lamp displayed her blotter and what lay on it: A cup of coffee. And beside it—a sweet roll. With almonds! And maple frosting! He was so hungry he had hardly any control over his actions. He gobbled down the sweet roll and drained off the coffee in a very few seconds; and then, after a moment of reflection, ate all the sugar in the sugar bowl, that being the only other food present. He had tucked the dollar bills Hugh had left him into the breast pocket of his pajamas and he now put one under the empty cup. He felt some small qualms about that, but thought he could bear up under them. After all, she had access to other food and he hadn't. He went back to bed, smiling as he thought of Nurse Hoskins's outrage when she found her snack gone.