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The Year’s Greatest
Science Fiction and Fantasy 1
Ed by Judith Merril
Proofed By MadMaxAU
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction by Orson Welles
Preface by Judith Merril
THE STUTTERER by R. R. Merliss
THE GOLEM by Avram Davidson
JUNIOR by Robert Abernathy
THE CAVE OF NIGHT by James E. Gunn
THE HOOFER by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
BULKHEAD by Theodore Sturgeon
SENSE FROM THOUGHT DIVIDE by Mark Clifton
POTTAGE by Zenna Henderson
NOBODY BOTHERS GUS by Algis Budrys
THE LAST DAY OF SUMMER by E. C. Tubb
ONE ORDINARY DAY, WITH PEANUTS by Shirley Jackson
THE ETHICATORS by Willard Marsh
BIRDS CAN’T COUNT by Mildred Clingerman
OF MISSING PERSONS by Jack Finney
DREAMING IS A PRIVATE THING by Isaac Asimov
THE COUNTRY OF THE KIND by Damon Knight
THE PUBLIC HATING by Steve Allen
HOME THERE’S NO RETURNING by Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore
THE YEAR’S S-F by Judith Merril
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INTRODUCTION
by
ORSON WELLES
one thing’s sure about science-fiction: there’s too much of it.
A leading editor in the field announces that the boom days are over, but the yearly amount of the stuff that still gets into print is pretty staggering.
My advice to any but the most bug-eyed addict would be to abstain from the novels. “S.F.” is often at its aching worst in “book-length” versions. Good novels (Heinlein’s “Puppet Masters,” for instance) are about as rare as ambergris and a lot harder to identify. My wife, who loathes everything remotely galactic, who alternately yawns and shudders at the prospect of journeying in either time or outer space, and herself travels almost exclusively by train, went shopping with a publisher—a friend of ours who claims to be an “S.F.” expert—and presented me on Christmas with an eight-foot shelf of this season’s crop of the novels. Ploughing through the bulk of this brightly-jacketed little library only confirmed a previous opinion: one of the oddest aspects of this whole publishing phenomenon is that there still seems to be more outright claptrap between hard covers than soft, and that the short stories come off much better than the long ones.
Why? Well, I guess these tales are, after all, our modern fables and it’s certain that the fable as a form generally succeeds when not too extended.
If there remains such a thing as a novice reader in this literature, my suggestion would be for him to begin with the magazines until he knows a few authors, and to steer clear of the bookstores. Against this, of course, our theoretical novice might happen on a poorish issue of whatever monthly he sampled first. An anthology is probably best for a beginning, and I don’t think he could do better than with this one.
For the real aficionado— he’ll be relieved to find that he has nothing familiar from other collections to skip—I reckon he’ll find most of his favorite authors, and these at the top of their form. The range is interestingly wide—from that convincing gadgetry dear to many of the fans, to the wildest and freest sort of nonsense. In this last area I join the enthusiasts. It’s by bringing pure fantasy into currency that science-fiction makes its real and very healthy contribution to our popular literature, at least for my money.
I’m going to try to persuade my wife to read this book. There’s a good hope that a first-rate sampler such as this may convert even her. If “S.F.—The Year’s Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy” doesn’t sell her on our twentieth-century fairy tales, she’ll just have to stick with the Grimm brothers.
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PREFACE
the stories in this book, says Mr. Orson Welles, are fables of our time. I think this is a good way to describe them since, like older fables, science-fantasy makes use of the imaginative background and unusual circumstance to add emotional urgency and dramatic power to what are basically problems in philosophy and morality.
Unlike Aesop, the writers of these stories seldom conclude with a clear-cut moral. In a century whose most impressive accomplishments (atom bombs, orlon, rockets, radar, cancer cures, what-have-you-?) are built upon “scientific” concepts with such names as relativity and the uncertainty principle, the inquiring artist does well merely to formulate a coherent question.
The questions you will find most often put in here might be compressed in one composite query:—
How can we learn to live at peace with ourselves and with each other in the complexities of the world we are rebuilding with our new machines?
Fortunately, the stories are not so compressed. A good story must inevitably be unique and individual as the man or woman who wrote it. Unfortunately, if it’s answers that you want, you will not find them here—except occasionally, prefaced with what if?, I wonder, or supposing that . . .
The serious-minded reader will also have to forgive our authors if they resort to the frivolities of space-ships and flying bath-mats, robots and talking rats, to make their points. Even in s-f, a writer is only secondarily a philosopher; his first big job is entertainment.. . and that hasn’t changed since Aesop’s time at all.
-J.M.
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THE STUTTERER
by
R. R. Merliss
Right now, today, we can—and do—build machines that can think logically better and faster than we can. Others in our growing arsenal of tools can hear better, see farther, hit harder, last longer, remember more accurately. We have not yet built anything to live livelier, feel more strongly, or dream at all. We have not learned how to make a soul—yet.
“The Stutterer”—a first story, by the way, written by a Los Angeles physician—presents the problems (and tough ones they are) of an android, an artificial man, built to be as much as possible exactly like a human being—with just two very important differences. He is not fertile; he is indestructible.
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Out of the twenty only one managed to escape the planet. And he did it very simply, merely by walking up to the crowded ticket window at one of the rocket ports and buying passage to Earth. His Army identification papers passed the harassed inspection of the agent, and he gratefully and silently pocketed the small plastic stub that was handed him in exchange for his money.
He picked his way with infinite care through the hordes of ex-soldiers clamoring for passage back to the multitudinous planets from which they had come. Then he slowly climbed the heavy ramp into the waiting rocket.
He saw with relief that the seats were strongly constructed, built to survive the pressure of many gravities, and he chose one as far removed as possible from the other passengers.
He was still very apprehensive, and, as he waited for the rocket to take off, he tried hard to remember the principles of the pulse drive that powered the ship, and whether his additional weight would upset its efficiency enough to awaken suspicion.
The seats filled quickly with excited hurrying passengers. Soon he heard the great door clang shut, and saw the red light flicker on, warning of the take-off. He felt a slow surge of pressure as the ship arose from the ground, and his chair creaked ominously with the extra weight. He became fearful that it might collapse, and he strained forward trying to shift some of the pressure through his feet to the floor. He sat that way, tense and immobile, for
what seemed a long time until abruptly the strain was relieved and he heard the rising and falling whine of the rockets that told him the ship was in pulse drive, flickering back and forth across the speed of light.
He realized that the pilots had not discovered his extra weight, and that the initial hazards were over. The important thing was to look like a passenger, a returning soldier like the others, so that no one would notice him and remember his presence.
His fellow travelers were by this time chatting with one another, some playing cards, and others watching the tele-depth screens. These were the adventurers who had flocked from all corners of the galaxy to fight in the first national war in centuries. They were the uncivilized few who had read about battle and armed struggle in their history books and found the old stories exciting.
They paid no attention to their silent companion who sat quietly looking through the quartz windows at the diamond-bright stars, tacked against the blackness of infinity.
The fugitive scarcely moved the entire time of the passage. Finally when Earth hung out in the sky like a blue balloon, the ship cut its pulsations and swung around for a tail landing.
The atmosphere screamed through the fins of the rocket, and the continents and the countries, and then the rivers and the mountains took shape. The big ship settled down as gently as a snowflake, shuddered a few times and was quiet.
* * * *
The passengers hurriedly gathered up their scattered belongings and pushed toward the exit in a great rush to be out and back on Earth.
The fugitive was the last to leave. He stayed well away from the others, being fearful that, if he should touch or brush up against someone, his identity might be recognized.
When he saw the ramp running from the ship to the ground, he was dismayed. It seemed a flimsy structure, supported only by tubular steel. Five people were walking down it, and he made a mental calculation of their weight —about eight hundred pounds he thought. He weighed five times that. The ramp was obviously never built to support such a load.
He hesitated, and then he realized that he had caught the eye of the stewardess waiting on the ground. A little panicky, he stepped out with one foot and he was horrified to feel the steel buckle. He drew back hastily and threw a quick glance at the stewardess. Fortunately at the moment she was looking down the field and waving at someone.
The ramp floor was supported by steel tubes at its edges and in its exact center. He tentatively put one foot in the middle over the support and gradually shifted his weight to it. The metal complained creakily, but held, and he slowly trod the exact center line to Earth. The stewardess’ back was turned toward him as he walked off across the field toward the customhouse.
He found it comforting to have under his feet what felt like at least one yard of cement. He could step briskly and not be fearful of betraying himself.
There was one further danger: the customs inspector.
He took his place at the end of the line and waited patiently until it led him up to a desk at which a uniformed man sat, busily checking and stamping declarations and traveling papers. The official, however, did not even look up when he handed him his passport and identification.
“Human. You don’t have to go through immigration,” the agent said. “Do you have anything to declare?”
“N-no,” the traveler said. “I d-didn’t bring anything in.”
“Sign the affidavit,” the agent said and pushed a sheet of paper toward him.
The traveler picked up a pen from the desk and signed “Jon Hall” in a clear, perfect script.
The agent gave it a passing glance and tossed it into a wire basket.
Then he pushed his uniform cap back exposing a bald head. “You’re my last customer for a while, until the rocket from Sirius comes in. Guess I might as well relax for a minute.” He reached into a drawer of the desk and pulled out a package of cigarettes, of which he lit one.
“You been in the war, too?” he asked.
Hall nodded. He did not want to talk any more than he had to.
The agent studied his face.
“That’s funny,” he said after a minute. “I never would have picked you for one of these so-called adventurers. You’re too quiet and peaceful looking. I would have put you down as a doctor or maybe a writer.”
“N-no,” Hall said. “I w-was in the war.”
“Well, that shows you can’t tell by looking at a fellow,” the agent said philosophically. He handed Hall his papers. “There you are. The left door leads out to the copter field. Good luck on Earth!”
Hall pocketed the stamped documents. “Thanks,” he said. “I’m glad to be here.”
He walked down the wide station room to a far exit and pushed the door open. A few steps farther and he was standing on a cement path dug into a hillside.
* * * *
Across the valley, bright in the noon sun lay the pine covered slopes of the Argus mountains, and at his feet the green Mojave flowering with orchards stretched far to the north and south. Between the trees, in the center of the valley, the Sacramento River rolled southward in a man-made bed of concrete and steel giving water and life to what had a century before been dry dead earth.
There was a small outcropping of limestone near the cement walk, and he stepped over to it and sat down. He would have been happy to rest and enjoy for a few moments his escape and his triumph, but he had to let the others know so that they might have hope.
He closed his eyes and groped across the stars toward Grismet. Almost immediately he felt an impatient tug at his mind, strong because there were many clamoring at once to be heard. He counted them. There were seventeen. So one more had been captured since he had left Grismet.
“Be quiet,” he told them. “I’ll let you see, after a while. First I have to reach the two of us that are still free.”
Obediently, the seventeen were still, and he groped some more and found another of his kind deep in an ice cave in the polar regions of Grismet.
“How goes it?” he asked.
The figure on Grismet lay stretched out at full length on the blue ice, his eyes closed. He answered without moving: “They discovered my radiation about an hour ago. Pretty soon, they’ll start blasting through the ice.”
The one on Earth felt the chill despair of his comrade and let go. He groped about again until he found the last one, the only other one left. He was squatting in the cellar of a warehouse in the main city of Grismet.
“Have they picked up your trail yet?” he asked.
“No,” answered the one in the cellar. “They won’t for a while. I’ve scattered depots of radiation all through the town. They’ll be some time tracking them all down, before they can get to me.”
In a flash of his mind, Hall revealed his escape and the one on Grismet nodded and said: “Be careful. Be very careful. You are our only hope.”
Hall returned then to the seventeen, and he said with his thoughts: “All right, now you can look.” Immobile in their darkness, they snatched at his mind, and as he opened his eyes, they, too, saw the splendors of the mountains and the valley, the blue sky, and the gold sun high overhead.
* * * *
The new man was young, only twenty-six. He was lean and dark and very enthusiastic about his work. He sat straight in his chair waiting attentively while his superior across the desk leafed through a folder.
“Jordan. Tom Jordan,” the older man finally said. “A nice old Earth name. I suppose your folks came from there.”
“Yes, sir,” the new man said briskly.
The chief closed the folder.
“Well,” he said, “your first job is a pretty important one.”
“I realize that, sir,” Jordan said. “I know it’s a great responsibility for a man just starting with the Commission, but I’ll give it everything I have.”
The chief leaned back in his seat and scratched his chin thoughtfully.
“Normally we start a beginner like you working in a pair with an older man.
But we just haven’t got enough men to go around. There are eight thousand planets there”—he pointed with his thumb over his shoulder to a wall-sized map of the galaxy—”and we’ve got to cover every one. It seems reasonable that if he escaped this planet, he’ll go to another that will by its atmosphere or its temperature give him some natural advantage over us—some place that is either burning hot or at absolute zero, or perhaps with a chlorine or sulfur dioxide atmosphere. That’s why,” —he hesitated a minute, but continued because he was a truthful man—”I picked you for Earth. It’s the most populated of all the planets and it seems the least likely one that he would choose.”
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