The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 1 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  “Very soon now,” said Pater, “you will begin feeling an irresistible urge… to sink to the bottom, to take root there in some sheltered location which will be your lifetime site. Perhaps you even have an understanding already with some—ah—charming young polyp of the opposite gender, whom you would invite to share your home-site. Or, if not, you should take all the more pains to make that site as attractive as possible, in order that such a one may decide to grace it with—”

  “Uh-huh,” said Junior understandingly. “That’s what the fellows mean when they say any of ‘em’ll fall for a few high-class rocks.”

  Pater marshaled his thoughts again. “Well, quite apart from such material considerations as selecting the right rocks, there are certain—ah—matters we do not ordinarily discuss.”

  Mater blushed a more pronounced lavender. The three maiden aunts, rooted to their boulder within easy earshot of Pater’s carrying voice, put up a respectable pretense of searching one another for water-fleas.

  “No doubt,” said Pater, “in the course of your harum-scarum adventurings as a normal polyp among polyps, you’ve noticed the ways in which the lower orders reproduce themselves—the activities of the fishes, thexrustacea, the marine worms will not have escaped your attention.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Junior, treading water.

  “You will have observed that among these there takes place a good deal of—ah—maneuvering for position. But among intelligent, firmly rooted beings like ourselves, matters are of course on a less crude and direct plane. What among lesser creatures is a question of tactics belongs, for us, to the realm of strategy.” Pater’s tone grew confiding. “Now, Junior, once you’re settled, you’ll realize the importance of being easy in your mind about your offspring’s parentage. Remember, a niche in brine saves trying. Nothing like choosing your location well in the first place. Study the currents around your prospective site—particularly their direction and force at such crucial times as flood-tide. Try to make sure you and your future mate won’t be too close down-current from anybody else’s site, since in a case like that accidents can happen. You understand, Junior?”

  “Uh-huh,” acknowledged Junior. “That’s what the fellows mean when they say don’t let anybody get the drop on you.”

  “Well,” said Pater flatly.

  “But it all seems sort of silly,” said Junior stubbornly. “I’d rather just keep moving around and not have to do all that figuring. And the ocean’s full of things I haven’t seen yet. I don’t want to grow down!”

  Mater paled with shock. Pater gave his spawn a scalding, scandalized look. “You’ll learn! You can’t beat Biology,” he said thickly, creditably keeping his voice down. “Junior, you may go!”

  Junior bobbled off, and Pater admonished Mater sternly: “We must have patience, my dear! All children pass through these larval stages…”

  “Yes, dear,” sighed Mater.

  At long last, Junior seemed to have resigned himself to making the best of it.

  With considerable exertions, hampered by his increasing bottom-heaviness, he was fetching loads of stones, seaweed and other debris to a spot downslope, and there laboring over what promised to be a fairly ambitious cairn. Judging by what they could see of it, his homesite might even prove a credit to the colony (thus Mater mused) and attract a mate who would be a good catch (so went Pater’s thoughts).

  Junior was still to be seen at times along the reef in company with his free-swimming friends among the other polyps, at some of whom his parents had always looked askance, fearing they were by no means well-bred. In fact, there was strong suspicion that some of them—waifs from the disreputable shallows district in the hazardous reaches just below the tide-mark—had never been bred at all, but were products of budding, a practice frowned on in polite society.

  However, Junior’s appearance and rate of locomotion made it clear he would soon be done with juvenile follies. As Pater repeated with satisfaction, you can’t beat Biology; as one becomes more and more bottle-shaped the romantic illusions of youth must inevitably perish.

  “I always knew there was sound stuff in the youngster,” declared Pater expansively.

  “At least he won’t be able to go around with those ragamuffins much longer,” breathed Mater thankfully.

  “What does the young fool think he’s doing, fiddling round with soapstone?” grumbled Pater, peering critically through the green to try to make out the details of Junior’s building. “Doesn’t he know it’s apt to slip its place in a year or two?”

  “Look, dear,” hissed Mater acidly, “isn’t that the little polyp who was so rude once?… I wish she wouldn’t keep watching Junior like that. Our northwest neighbor heard positively that she’s the child of an only parent!”

  “Never mind,” Pater turned to reassure her. “Once Junior is properly rooted, his self-respect will cause him to keep riffraff at a distance. It’s a matter of psychology, my dear; the vertical position makes all the difference in one’s thinking.”

  The great day arrived.

  Laboriously Junior put a few finishing touches to his construction—which, so far as could be seen from a distance, had turned out decent-looking enough, though it was rather questionably original in design, lower and flatter than was customary.

  With one more look at his handiwork, Junior turned bottom-end-down and sank wearily onto the finished site. After a minute, he paddled experimentally, but flailing tentacles failed to lift him—he was already rooted, and growing more solidly so by the moment.

  The younger polyps peered from the hollows of the reef in roundeyed awe touched with fear.

  “Congratulations!” cried the neighbors. Pater and Mater bowed this way and that in acknowledgment. Mater waved a condescending tentacle to the three maiden aunts.

  “I told you so!” said Pater triumphantly.

  “Yes, dear,” said Mater meekly.

  Suddenly there were outcries of alarm from the dwellers down-reef. A wave of dismay swept audibly through all the nearer part of the colony. Pater and Mater looked round and froze.

  Junior had begun paddling again, but this time in a most peculiar manner—with a rotary twist and a sidewise scoop which looked awkward, but which he performed so deftly that he must have practiced it. Fixed upright as he was now on the platform he had built, he looked for all the world as if he were trying to swim sidewise.

  “He’s gone mad!” squeaked Mater, grasping at the obvious straw.

  “I—” gulped Pater, “I’m afraid not.”

  At least, they saw, there was method in Junior’s actions. He went on paddling in the same fashion—and now he, and his platform with him, were farther away than they had been, and growing more remote all the time.

  Parts of the homesite that was not a homesite revolved in some way incomprehensible to eyes that had never seen the like. And the whole affair trundled along, rocking at bumps in the sandy bottom, and squeaking painfully; nevertheless, it moved.

  The polyps watching from the reef swam out and frolicked after Junior, watching his contrivance go and chattering questions, while their parents bawled at them to keep away from that.

  The three maiden aunts shrieked faintly and swooned in one another’s tentacles. The colony was shaken as it had not been since the tidal wave.

  “COME BACK!” thundered Pater. “You CAN’T do that!”

  “Come back!” shrilled Mater. “You can’t do that!”

  “Come back!” gabbled the neighbors. “You can’t do that!”

  But Junior was past listening to reason. Junior was on wheels.

  <>

  * * * *

  THE CAVE OF NIGHT

  by

  James E. Gunn

  . . . and so we leave behind us the troubled waters of Junior’s native coastal shelf, and with a gentle swish and a graceful swoop we warp through space and time, to find ourselves again on Mother Earth, the last words of our distant friends still ringing in our ears . . .

  YOU CAN�
��T DO THAT!

  A new invention is a terrifying thing—on terra firma, underseas, or up above the stratosphere. James Gunn, who has distinguished himself by turning out more good solid “new-idea” stories during the past year than just about any other writer in s-f, here suggests a way to peddle your new product to the old folks at home and make ‘em like it.

  * * * *

  The phrase was first used by a poet disguised in the cynical hide of a newspaper reporter. It appeared on the first day and was widely reprinted. He wrote:

  “At eight o’clock, after the Sun has set and the sky is darkening, look up! There’s a man up there where no man has ever been.

  “He is lost in the cave of night…”

  The headlines demanded something short, vigorous and descriptive. That was it. It was inaccurate, but it stuck.

  If anybody was in a cave, it was the rest of humanity. Painfully, triumphantly, one man had climbed out. Now he couldn’t find his way back into the cave with the rest of us.

  What goes up doesn’t always come back down.

  That was the first day. After it came twenty-nine days of agonized suspense.

  The cave of night. I wish the phrase had been mine.

  That was it, the tag, the symbol. It was the first thing a man saw when he glanced at the newspaper. It was the way people talked about it: “What’s the latest about the cave?” It summed it all up, the drama, the anxiety, the hope.

  Maybe it was the Floyd Collins influence. The papers dug up their files on that old tragedy, reminiscing, com­paring; and they remembered the little girl—Kathy Fiscus, wasn’t it?—who was trapped in that abandoned, California drain pipe; and a number of others.

  Periodically, it happens, a sequence of events so acci­dentally dramatic that men lose their hatreds, their ter­rors, their shynesses, their inadequacies, and the human race momentarily recognizes its kinship.

  The essential ingredients are these: A person must be in unusual and desperate peril. The peril must have dura­tion. There must be proof that the person is still alive. Rescue attempts must be made. Publicity must be wide­spread.

  One could probably be constructed artificially, but if the world ever discovered the fraud, it would never for­give.

  Like many others, I have tried to analyze what makes a niggling, squabbling, callous race of beings suddenly share that most human emotion of sympathy, and, like them, I have not succeeded. Suddenly a distant stranger will mean more than their own comfort. Every waking mo­ment, they pray: Live, Floyd! Live, Kathy! Live, Rev!

  We pass on the street, we who would not have nodded, and ask, “Will they get there in time?”

  Optimists and pessimists alike, we hope so. We all hope so.

  In a sense, this one was different. This was purposeful. Knowing the risk, accepting it because there was no other way to do what had to be done, Rev had gone into the cave of night. The accident was that he could not return.

  The news came out of nowhere—literally—to an unsuspecting world. The earliest mention the historians have been able to locate was an item about a ham radio oper­ator in Davenport, Iowa. He picked up a distress signal on a sticky-hot June evening.

  The message, he said later, seemed to fade in, reach a peak, and fade out:

  “… and fuel tanks empty. —ceiver broke… transmit­ting in clear so someone can pick this up, and… no way to get back… stuck…”

  A small enough beginning.

  The next message was received by a military base radio watch near Fairbanks, Alaska. That was early in the morn­ing. Half an hour later, a night-shift worker in Boston heard something on his short-wave set that sent him rush­ing to the telephone.

  That morning, the whole world learned the story. It broke over them, a wave of excitement and concern. Or­biting 1,075 miles above their heads was a man, an officer of the United States Air Force, in a fuelless spaceship.

  All by itself the spaceship part would have captured the world’s attention. It was achievement as monumental as anything Man has ever done and far more spectacular. It was liberation from the tyranny of Earth, this jealous mother who had bound her children tight with the apron strings of gravity.

  Man was free. It was a symbol that nothing is completely and finally impossible if Man wants it hard enough and long enough.

  There are regions that humanity finds peculiarly con­genial. Like all Earth’s creatures, Man is a product and a victim of environment. His triumph is that the slave became the master. Unlike more specialized animals, he distributed himself across the entire surface of the Earth, from the frozen Antarctic continent to the Arctic icecap.

  Man became an equatorial animal, a temperate zone animal, an arctic animal. He became a plain dweller, a valley dweller, a mountain dweller. The swamp and the desert became equally his home.

  Man made his own environment.

  With his inventive mind and his dexterous hands, he fashioned it, conquered cold and heat, dampness, aridness, land, sea, air. Now, with his science, he had con­quered everything. He had become independent of the world that bore him.

  It was a birthday cake for all mankind, celebrating its coming of age.

  Brutally, the disaster was icing on the cake.

  But it was more, too. When everything is considered, per­haps it was the aspect that, for a few, brief days, united hu­manity and made possible what we did.

  It was a sign: Man is never completely independent of Earth; he carries with him his environment; he is always and forever a part of humanity. It was a conquest mel­lowed by a confession of mortality and error.

  It was a statement: Man has within him the qualities of greatness that will never accept the restraints of circum­stance, and yet he carries, too, the seeds of fallibility that we all recognize in ourselves.

  Rev was one of us. His triumph was our triumph; his peril—more fully and finely—was our peril.

  Reverdy L. McMillen, III, first lieutenant, U.S.A.F. Pilot. Rocket jockey. Man. Rev. He was only a thousand miles away, calling for help, but those miles were straight up. We got to know him as well as any member of our own family.

  The news came as a great personal shock to me. I knew Rev. We had become good friends in college, and fortune had thrown us together in the Air Force, a writer and a pilot. I had got out as soon as possible, but Rev had stayed in. I knew, vaguely, that he had been testing rocket-powered airplanes with Chuck Yeager. But I had no idea that the rocket program was that close to space.

  Nobody did. It was a better-kept secret than the Man­hattan Project.

  I remember staring at Rev’s picture in the evening news­paper—the straight black hair, the thin, rakish mustache, the Clark Gable ears, the reckless, rueful grin—and I felt again, like a physical thing, his great joy in living. It ex­pressed itself in a hundred ways. He loved widely, but with discrimination. He ate well, drank heartily, reveled in expert jazz and artistic inventiveness, and talked inces­santly.

  Now he was alone and soon all that might be extin­guished. I told myself that I would help.

  That was a time of wild enthusiasm. Men mobbed the Air Force Proving Grounds at Cocoa, Florida, wildly vol­unteering their services. But I was no engineer. I wasn’t even a welder or a riveter. At best, I was only a poor word mechanic.

  But words, at least, I could contribute.

  I made a hasty verbal agreement with a local paper and caught the first plane to Washington, D. C. For a long time, I liked to think that what I wrote during the next few days had something to do with subsequent events, for many of my articles were picked up for reprint by other newspapers.

  The Washington fiasco was the responsibility of the Senate Investigating Committee. It subpoenaed everybody in sight—which effectively removed them from the vital work they were doing. But within a day, the Committee realized that it had bitten off a bite it could neither swal­low nor spit out.

  General Beauregard Finch, head of the research and de­velopment program, was the tough morsel the Committ
ee gagged on. Coldly, accurately, he described the develop­ment of the project, the scientific and technical research, the tests, the building of the ship, the training of the pros­pective crewmen, and the winnowing of the volunteers down to one man.

  In words more eloquent because of their clipped pre­cision, he described the takeoff of the giant three-stage ship, shoved upward on a lengthening arm of combining hydrazine and nitric acid. Within fifty-six minutes, the remaining third stage had reached its orbital height of 1,075 miles.

  It had coasted there. In order to maintain that orbit, the motors had to flicker on for fifteen seconds.

  At that moment, disaster laughed at Man’s careful cal­culations.