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

by Edited By Judith Merril

  So that’s easy to understand—you can’t trust two human beings together. Not for long enough. If you don’t believe it, look at the bulkhead. It’s there because it has to be there.

  Being a peaceable guy, it scares you a little to know how dangerous you are.

  Makes you a little proud, though, doesn’t it?

  Be proud of this, too—that they trust you to be alone so much. Sure, there is a shipmate; but by and large you’re alone, and that’s what’s expected of you. What most people, especially Earthside people, never find out is that a man who can’t be by himself is a man who knows, away down deep, that he’s not good company. You could probably make it by yourself altogether ... but you must admit you’re glad you don’t have to. You have access to the other side of the bulkhead, when you need it. If you need it. It didn’t take you too long to figure out you’d use it sparingly.

  You have books and you have games, you have pictures and text tapes and nine different euphorics (with a watchdog dispenser, so you can never become an addict) all of which help you, when you need help, to explore yourself. But having another human mind to explore is a wonderful idea—a wonder tempered by the knowledge—oh, how smart you were to figure it out in time!—that the other mind is a last resort. If you ever use up the potentialities it holds for you, you’re through, brother!

  So you have endurance contests with yourself to see how long you can leave that bulkhead alone.

  You go back over your life, the things you’ve done. People have written whole novels about 24 hours in a man’s life. That’s the way you think it all out, slowly, piece by piece; every feature of every face and the way they were used; what people did and why. Especially why. It doesn’t take any time to remember what a man did, but you can spend hours in thinking about why he did it.

  You live it again and it’s like being a little god, knowing what’s going to happen to everyone.

  When you reported to Base, there was a busload of guys with you. Now you know who would go all the way through the course and wind up out here; reliving it, you can put yourself back in the bus again and say, “That stranger across the aisle is Pegg. He isn’t going to make it. He’ll go home on furlough three months from now and he’ll try to kill himself rather than come back. The freckled nape in the seat ahead of you belongs to the redhead Walkinok, who will throw his weight around during his first week and pay expensively for it afterward. But he’ll make it.”

  You make friends with the shy dark guy next to you. His name is Stein and he looks like a big-brain. He’s easy to talk to and smart, the kind of fellow who always goes straight to the top. And he won’t last even until the first furlough; two weeks is all he can take, and you never see him again. But you remember his name. You remember everything and you go back over it and remember the memories in between the memories. Did somebody on that bus have shoes that squeaked? Back you go and hunt for it. If it happened, you’ll remember it.

  They say anyone can recall this way; but for you, with what the psycho-dynamicians have done to you—or is it for you?—you can do more of this than anybody. There isn’t anything that ever happened in your whole life that you can’t remember. You can start at the beginning and go all the way through. You can start at the beginning and jump years in a second and go through an episode again ... get mad again . . . fall in love again.

  And when you get tired of the events themselves, you can run them off again, to find out why. Why did Stein go through those years of study and preparation, those months of competition, when all the time he didn’t want to be in the Space Service? Why did Pegg conceal from himself that he wasn’t fit for the Space Service?

  So you cast back, comb, compare and ponder, keeping busy. If you’re careful, just remembering lasts a long time, wondering why lasts even longer; and in between times, there are the books and stereos, the autochess and the music ... until you’re ready to cast and comb in your memories again. But sooner or later—later, if you’re especially careful—you’ll get restless and your life as it was played out, and the reasons why it was played just that way, all that gets old. You can think of no new approach to any of it and learn nothing more from it..

  That’s where the centerline bulkhead comes in handy. Its very shape is a friendly thing to you; the hull on your left is curved, being part of the ship’s side, but the bulkhead is a flat wall. Its constant presence is a reminder that it has a function, like everything else in your world; that it is, by nature, a partition; that the existence of a partition presupposes another compartment; and that the other compartment is the size and shape of this one and designed for a similar purpose—to be a dwelling for someone.

  With no sound nor sign of occupancy, the bulkhead still attests the life behind it, just by being there. It’s a friendly flatness, a companionable feature of your world, and its company pervades all your thinking.

  You know it’s your last resort, but you know, too, that it’s a rich one, and when at last you’re driven to use it, you’ll enter another kind of world, more complex and more engrossing than your own, just for the work it takes to get from place to place and the mystery of the fog between the places. It’s a mind, another human mind, sharing this prison with you when at last you need sharing more than anything whatever in all of space.

  Who is it?

  You think about that. You think a whole lot about that. Back at Base, in your last year, you and the other cadets thought about that more than anything. If they’d ever given you the shadow of a hint...but no; wondering about it was apparently part of your training. You knew only that on your Long Haul, you would not be alone. You had a pretty good idea that the choice of a shipmate for you would be a surprise.

  You looked around you at mess, in class, in the dormitory; you lay awake at night dealing out their faces in a sort of solitaire game; and sometimes you thought about one and said, “That’d be fine. We’d get along.” And sometimes you said, “That stinker? Lock me up with him and that bulkhead won’t be tough enough. I’ll kill him after the third day, so help me!”

  And after they tapped you for your first Haul, this was the only thing you were scared about—who’d be your shipmate. Everything else, you thought you could handle. You knew your job inside out and backward and it wouldn’t whip you. You were sharp-tuned, fine-honed, ready for anything that was under your own control. You were even confident about being alone; it wouldn’t get you. Not a chance.

  Away down deep, no man believes he can be driven out of his mind, just as he cannot believe—really believe—that he will be dead. That’s the kind of thing that happens to someone else.

  * * * *

  But this business of a shipmate—this wasn’t under your control. You didn’t control who it would be and you wouldn’t control the guy after blastoff. It was the only unknown and therefore the only thing that scared you.

  Amendment: there was a certain amount of control. The intercom button was on your side of the bulkhead. Leave it alone and you didn’t have to so much as know you had a shipmate until you were good and ready.

  Being able to shut off a voice isn’t control, though. You don’t know what your shipmate will do. Or be.

  In those last tight days before blastoff, there was one thing you became overwhelmingly aware of. Esprit de corps, they call it. You and the other graduates were hammered into a mold—and hammered some more until the resiliency was gone out of you. You were alike and you did things alike because you had grown to want to. You knew for certain that one of this tight, trustworthy little group would be picked for you; their training and yours, their whole lives and yours, pointed toward this ship, this Haul.

  Your presence on this ship summed up your training; your training culminated in your presence on the ship. Only a graduate cadet was fit to man the ship; the ship existed solely for the graduate cadet. This was something so self-evident that you never thought about it.

  Not until now.

  Because now, a few minutes ago, you were ready to push that
button. You couldn’t know if you’d broken all records for loneliness, for duration of solitary confinement, but you’d tried. You’d looked through the viewport until it ceased to mean anything. You’d read until you didn’t care any more. You’d lived the almost-life of the stereos until you couldn’t make believe you believed them. You’d listened to music until it didn’t matter. And you’d gone over and over your life from its very beginnings until you’d completely lost perspective on it or anything and anyone in it.

  You’d found that you could go back to the viewport and cycle through the whole thing again, but you’d done that, too, so often that the whole matrix of personal involvement was emptied out. Then the flatness of the bulkhead made itself felt. In a way, it seemed to bulge toward you, crowd you against the ship’s side, and you knew it was getting to be time you pushed that button and found out for sure.

  Who?

  * * * *

  Pete or Krakow or that crazy redheaded Walkinok? Or Wendover (you all called him Bendover) with all those incomprehensible shaggy-dog stories? Harris?’ Beerbelly Flacker or Gohen the Wire-haired Terror? Or Shank (what you all called him was a shame)? Or Gindes, whose inexplicable nickname was Mickey Mouse? You’d sort of hoped it would be Gindes, not because you liked him, but more because he was the one classmate you’d never known very well. He always used to look on and keep his mouth shut. He’d be much more fun to explore than, say, old Shank, who was so predictable that you could practically talk in chorus with him.

  So you’ve tortured yourself, just for the sake of torture, with your thumb over the intercom button, until even the torture dried out and blew away.

  You pushed.

  You found out, first of all, that the intercom apparently had its own amplifier, energized when you held the button down, and that it took forever—well, three or four seconds, anyway—to warm up. First nothing, then a carrier, then the beginning of a signal; then, at last, the voice of your shipmate, rushing up to full volume, as loud and as clear as if the bulkhead did not exist. And you get off that button as if it had turned into a needle; and you’re backed against the outboard bulkhead, deep in shock, physically in silence, but with that voice going on and on and on unbelievably in your unbelieving brain.

  It was crying.

  It wept wearily, as though you had tuned in toward the end of a long session of wild and lonesome grief. It cried quietly, exhaustedly, without hope. And it cried in a voice that was jokingly wrong for this place—a light, high voice, nearly a contralto. It was wrong, altogether wrong.

  The wild ideas come first: Stowaway?

  You almost laugh. For days before blastoff, you were drugged and immersed in high-frequency fields; hypnotized, worked and reworked mentally and physically. You were passively fed and passively instructed.

  You don’t know now and you may never know all they did to you. But you can be sure it was done inside six concentric rings of “security” of one kind and another, and you can be sure that your shipmate got the same. What it amounted to was concentrated attention from a mob of specialists, every sleeping and waking second from the time you beered it up at the class farewell dinner to the time the accelerator tug lifted your ship and carried it screaming up and outward. Nobody was in this ship but those who belonged in it; that you can absolutely bank on.

  Mad idea, the second. For a while, you don’t even dare think it, but with that kind of voice, that crying, you have to think of something. So you do and you’re scared, scared in a way you’ve never imagined before, and to a degree you didn’t think was possible. There’s a girl in there!

  * * * *

  You run those wordless syllables, those tired sobs, through your mind again, seeking for vocalizations as separated from the breathy, painful gasping that accompanied them. And you don’t know. You just can’t be certain.

  So punch the button again. Listen some more.

  Or ask.

  But you can’t. The crazy idea might be true and you couldn’t stand that They couldn’t—they just couldn’t— put a girl on these ships with you and then stow her behind the bulkhead.

  Then you have an instant fantasy about that. You kneel (bumping your skull on the cover) and feel frantically around the bulkhead, where it meets deck-plates, nose compartment, overhead, after-bulkhead; and all around your fingers ride the bead of a weld. You sit back, sweating a little and half-laughing at yourself. Scratch off one fantasy; there’ll be no sliding partitions into any harems this trip.

  You stop laughing and think. “They couldn’t be that cruel!” You’re on a test run, sure, and it isn’t the ship that’s being tested. You know that and you accept it. But tests, tests...must you throw a glass vase on a brick sidewalk to find out if it’s brittle? You see one of your own hands going up and out to check for a panel, a joint again. You sneer at it, at your own hand, and watch it stop in embarrassment.

  Well, say they weren’t that cruel. Whom did they put in there?

  Not Walkinok. Not Shank. Not Harris or Cohen or any cadet. A cadet wouldn’t lie there and cry like that, like a child, a schoolgirl—a baby.

  Some stranger, then.

  Now the anger comes, shouldering out all the fear. They wouldn’t! This ship is everything a cadet was born for— no, made for. That tight leash that bound you with the others, all your thinking, an easy thing you all shared and never had to think about—that was a thing that didn’t admit strangers.

  Aside from that—beyond that—this wasn’t a matter of desecrated esprit; it was a matter of moral justice. Nobody but a cadet deserves a ship! What did you give your life to and what for? Why did you give up marriage, and freedom, and all the wonderful trivialities called “fun” that made most human lives worth living? Why did you hold still for Base routines and the hazing you got from the upper classmen?

  Just to have some stranger, someone who wasn’t even a cadet, wander in without training, shaping, conditioning, experience...and get on your ship?

  * * * *

  No, it has to be a cadet. It couldn’t be anything else. Even a cadet who could break down and cry—that’s a more acceptable idea than its being a woman or a stranger.

  You’re still angry, but now it’s the kind of anger that goads you, not the kind that stops you. You push the button. You hear the carrier, then the beginnings of something else . . . Breathing. Difficult, broken breathing, the sound of someone too tired to cry any more, even when crying has changed nothing and there are still more tears to come.

  “What the hell are you bawling about?” you yell.

  The breathing goes on and on. Finally it stops for a moment and then a long, whispery, shuddery sigh.

  “Hey!” you shout. “Hey—you in there!”

  But there is no answer. The breathing is fainter, more regular. Whoever it is is going to sleep.

  You press even harder on the button, as if that would do any good, and you yell again, this time not even “Hey!” but a blunter, angrier syllable. You can think only that your shipmate chooses—chooses, by God!—not to answer you.

  You’re breathing hard now, but your shipmate isn’t. You hold your breath and listen. You hear the deep, quiet inhalations, and then a small catch, and a little sigh, the ghost of half a sob.

  “Hey!”

  Nothing.

  You let the button go and in the sharp silence that replaces the carrier’s faint hum, the same wordless syllable builds and builds inside you until it bursts free again. You can tell from the feel of your throat and the ringing in your ears that it’s been a long, long time since you used your voice.

  You’re angry and you’re hurt from these insults to yourself and to your Service. And you know what? You feel good. Some of the stereos you have are pretty nice; they take you right into battle, into the arms of beautiful women, into danger, and from time to time you could get angry at someone in them. You could—but you haven’t for a long time now. You haven’t laughed or been angry ever since...since...well, you can’t even remember when. You’d fo
rgotten how and you’d forgotten just when it was you forgot. And now look. The heart’s going, the sweat...

  This is fine.

  Push the button again, take another little sip of anger. It’s been aging; it’s vintage stuff. Go ahead.

  You do, and up comes the carrier.

  “Please,” begs the voice. “Please, please . . . say something else.”

  * * * *

  Your tongue is paralyzed and you choke, suddenly, when you swallow wrong. You cough violently, let go the button and pound yourself on the chest. For a moment, you’re in bad shape. Coughing makes your thinking go in spurts, and your thinking is bouncing up and down on the idea that, until now, you didn’t really believe there was anyone in there at all. You get your wind and push the button again.

  The voice asks, “Are you all right? Can I do anything?”