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

by Edited By Judith Merril

  A disturbance in the outer office kept me from thinking up a retort. There were some subdued screams, some scuffling of heavy shoes, the sounds of some running feet as applicants got away. The outer door to Sara’s office was flung open.

  Framed in the doorway, breast high, floated the Swami!

  * * * *

  He was sitting, cross-legged, on a hotel bathmat. From both front corners, where they had been attached by loops of twine, there peeked Auerbach cylinders. Two more rear cylinders were grasped in Lieutenant Murphy’s strong hands. He was propelling the Swami along, mid air, in Atlantic City Boardwalk style.

  The Swami looked down at us with aloof disdain, then his eyes focused on the old man. His glance wavered; he threw a startled and fearful look at the cylinders holding up his bathmat. They did not fall. A vast relief overspread his face, and he drew himself erect with more disdain than ever. The old man was not so aloof.

  “Harry Glotz!” he exclaimed. “Why you ... you faker! What are you doing in that getup?”

  The Swami took a casual turn about the room, leaning to one side on his magic carpet as if banking an airplane.

  “Peasant!” He spat the word out and motioned grandly toward the door. Lieutenant Murphy pushed him through.

  “Why, that no good bum!” the old man shouted at me. “That no-good from nowhere! I’ll fix him! Thinks he’s something, does he? I’ll show him! Anything he can do I can do better!”

  His rage got the better of him. He rushed through the door, shaking both fists above his white head, shouting imprecations, threats, and pleading to be shown how the trick was done, all in the same breath. The new lieutenant cast a stricken look at us and then sped after his charge.

  “Looks as if we’re finally in production,” I said to Sara.

  “That’s only the second one,” she said mournfully. “When you get all six of them, this joint’s sure going to be jumping!”

  I looked out of her window at the steel and concrete walls of the factory. They were solid, real, secure; they were a symbol of reality, the old reality a man could understand.

  “I hope you don’t mean that literally, Sara,” I answered dubiously.

  <>

  * * * *

  POTTAGE

  by

  Zenna Henderson

  However far-fetched telekinesis or anti-gravity, or both, may be to you or me, Clifton’s story has the real feeling of personal experience. He was a personnel man; and he has also, as a long-time resident of Southern California, made an extensive personal study of virtually every kind of claim for psi, from crackpot cults and mystic fakes to the serious investigations in parapsychology now being conducted in several universities.

  Miss Henderson, likewise, writes of what she knows. She is a schoolteacher, currently working in Europe for the U. S. Army. As for her “People,” and their special powers and problems: I have read everything she has written about them—and they seem a great deal more real to me than, for instance, Eskimos or Equatorial Pygmies. (This is the third or fourth story in the “People” series. A book-length collection is now being prepared for publication—soon, I hope.)

  * * * *

  You get tired of teaching after a while. Well, maybe not of teaching itself, because it’s insidious and remains a tug in the blood for all of your life, but there comes a day when you look down at the paper you’re grading or listen to an answer you’re giving a child and you get a boinnng! feeling. And each reverberation of the boing is a year in your life, another set of children through your hands, another beat in monotony, and it’s frightening. The value of the work you’re doing doesn’t enter into it at that moment and the monotony is bitter on your tongue.

  Sometimes you can assuage that feeling by consciously savoring those precious days of pseudo freedom between the time you receive your contract for the next year and the moment you sign it. Because you can escape at that moment, but somehow—you don’t.

  But I did one spring. I quit teaching. I didn’t sign up again. I went chasing after—after what? Maybe excitement—maybe a dream of wonder—maybe a new bright wonderful world that just must be somewhere else because it isn’t here-and-now. Maybe a place to begin again so I’d never end up at the same frightening emotional dead end. So I quit.

  But by late August the emptiness inside me was bigger than boredom, bigger than monotony, bigger than lusting after freedom. It was almost terror to be next door to September and not care that in a few weeks school starts— tomorrow school starts—first day of school. So, almost at the last minute, I went to the placement bureau. Of course it was too late to try to return to my other school, and besides, the mold of the years there still chafed in too many places.

  “Well,” the placement director said as he shuffled his end-of-the-season cards, past Algebra and Home EC and PE and High-School English, “there’s always Bendo.” He thumbed out a battered-looking three-by-five. “There’s always Bendo.”

  And I took his emphasis and look for what they were intended and sighed.

  “Bendo?”

  “Small school. One room. Mining town, or used to be. Ghost town now.” He sighed wearily and let down his professional hair. “Ghost people, too. Can’t keep a teacher there more than a year. Low pay—fair housing—at someone’s home. No community activities—no social life. No city within fifty or so miles. No movies. No nothing but children to be taught. Ten of them this year. All grades.”

  “Sounds like the town I grew up in,” I said. “Except we had two rooms and lots of community activities.”

  “I’ve been to Bendo.” The director leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head. “Sick community. Unhappy people. No interest in anything. Only reason they have a school is because it’s the law. Law-abiding anyway. Not enough interest in anything to break a law, I guess.”

  “I’ll take it,” I said quickly before I could think beyond the feeling that this sounded about as far back as I could go to get a good running start at things again.

  He glanced at me quizzically. “If you’re thinking of lighting a torch of high reform to set Bendo afire with enthusiasm, forget it. I’ve seen plenty of king-sized torches fizzle out there.”

  “I have no torch,” I said. “Frankly I’m fed to the teeth with bouncing bright enthusiasm and hugs PTA’s and activities until they come out your ears. They usually turn out to be the most monotonous kind of monotony. Bendo will be a rest.”

  “It will that,” the director said, leaning over his cards again. “Saul Diemus is the president of the board. If you don’t have a car the only way to get to Bendo is by bus—it runs once a week.”

  I stepped out into the August sunshine after the interview and sagged a little under its savage pressure, almost hearing a hiss as the refrigerated coolness of the placement bureau evaporated from my skin.

  I walked over to the quad and sat down on one of the stone benches I’d never had time to use, those years ago when I had been a student here. I looked up at my old dorm window and, for a moment, felt a wild homesickness—not only for years that were gone and hopes that had died and dreams that had had grim awakenings, but for a special magic I had found in that room. It was a magic—a true magic—that opened such vistas to me that for a while anything seemed possible, anything feasible—if not for me right now, then for others, someday. Even now, after the dilution of time, I couldn’t quite believe that magic, and even now, as then, I wanted fiercely to believe it. If only it could be so! If only it could be so!

  I sighed and stood up. I suppose everyone has a magic moment somewhere in his life and, like me, can’t believe that anyone else could have the same—but mine was different! No one else could have had the same experience! I laughed at myself. Enough of the past and of dreaming. Bendo waited. I had things to do.

  I watched the rolling clouds of red-yellow dust billow away from the jolting bus, and cupped my hands over my face to get a breath of clean air. The grit between my teeth and the smothering sift of dust across m
y clothes was familiar enough to me, but I hoped by the time we reached Bendo we would have left this dust plain behind and come into a little more vegetation. I shifted wearily on the angular seat, wondering if it had ever been designed for anyone’s comfort, and caught myself as a sudden braking of the bus flung me forward.

  We sat and waited for the dust of our going to catch up with us, while the last-but-me passenger, a withered old Indian, slowly gathered up his gunny-sack bundles and his battered saddle and edged his Levied velveteen-bloused self up the aisle and out to the bleak roadside.

  We roared away, leaving him a desolate figure in a wide desolation. I wondered where he was headed. How many weary miles to his hogan in what hidden wash or miniature greenness in all this wilderness.

  Then we headed straight as a die for the towering redness of the bare mountains that lined the horizon. Peering ahead I could see the road, ruler straight, disappearing into the distance. I sighed and shifted again and let the roar of the motor and the weariness of my bones lull me into a stupor on the border between sleep and waking.

  A change in the motor roar brought me back to the jouncing bus. We jerked to a stop again. I looked out the window through the settling clouds of dust and wondered who we could be picking up out here in the middle of nowhere. Then a clot of dust dissolved and I saw

  BENDO POST OFFICE

  GENERAL STORE

  Garage & Service Station

  Dry Goods & Hardware

  Magazines

  In descending size on the front of the leaning, weather-beaten building propped between two crumbling smoke-blackened stone ruins. After so much flatness it was almost a shock to see the bare tumbled boulders crowding down to the roadside and humping their lichen-stained shoulders against the sky.

  “Bendo,” the bus driver said, unfolding his lanky legs and hunching out of the bus. “End of the line—end of civilization—end of everything!” He grinned and the dusty mask of his face broke into engaging smile patterns.

  “Small, isn’t it?” I grinned back.

  “Usta be bigger. Not that it helps now. Roaring mining town years ago.” As he spoke I could pick out disintegrating buildings dotting the rocky hillsides and tumbling into the steep washes. “My dad can remember it when he was a kid. That was long enough ago that there was still a river for the town to be in the bend o’.”

  “Is that where it got its name?”

  “Some say yes, some say no. Might have been a feller named Bendo.” The driver grunted as he unlashed my luggage from the bus roof and swung it to the ground.

  “Oh, hi!” said the driver.

  I swung around to see who was there. The man was tall, well built, good-looking—and old. Older than his face— older than years could have made him because he was really young, not much older than I. His face was a stern unhappy stillness, his hands stiff on the brim of his Stetson as he he’d it waist high.

  In that brief pause before his “Miss Amerson?” I felt the same feeling coming from him that you can feel around some highly religious person who knows God only as a stern implacable vengeful deity, impatient of worthless man, waiting only for an unguarded moment to strike him down in his sin. I wondered who or what his God was that prisoned him so cruelly. Then I was answering, “Yes, how do you do?” And ‘ e touched my hand briefly with a “Saul Diemus” and turned to the problem of my two large suitcases and my record player.

  I followed Mr. Diemus’ shuffling feet silently, since he seemed to have slight inclination for talk. I hadn’t expected a reception committee, but kids must have changed a lot since I was one, otherwise curiosity about teacher would have lured out at least a couple of them for a preview look. But the silent two of us walked on for a half block or so from the highway and the post office and rounded the rocky corner of a hill. I looked across the dry creek bed and up the one winding street that was residential Bendo. I paused on the splintery old bridge and took a good look. I’d never see Bendo like this again. Familiarity would blur some outlines and sharpen others, and I’d never again see it, free from the knowledge of who lived behind which blank front door.

  The houses were scattered haphazardly over the hillsides, and erratic flights of rough stone steps led down from each to the road that paralleled the bone-dry creek bed. The houses were not shacks but they were unpainted and weathered until they blended into the background almost perfectly. Each front yard had things growing in it, but such subdued blossomings and unobtrusive planting that they could easily have been only accidental massings of natural vegetation.

  Such a passion for anonymity…

  “The school—” I had missed the swift thrust of his hand.

  “Where?” Nothing I could see spoke school to me.

  “Around the bend.” This time I followed his indication and suddenly, out of the featurelessness of the place, I saw a bell tower barely topping the hill beyond the town, with the fine pencil stroke of a flagpole to one side. Mr. Diemus pulled himself together to make the effort.

  “The school’s in the prettiest place around here. There’s a spring and trees, and—” He ran out of words and looked at me as though trying to conjure up something else I’d like to hear. “I’m board president,” he said abruptly. “You’ll have ten children from first grade to second-year high school. You’re the boss in your school. Whatever you do is your business. Any discipline you find desirable—use. We don’t pamper our children. Teach them what you have to. Don’t bother the parents with reasons and explanations. The school is yours.”

  “And you’d just as soon do away with it and me, too,” I smiled at him.

  He looked startled. “The law says school them.” He started across the bridge. “So school them.”

  I followed meekly, wondering wryly what would happen if I asked Mr. Diemus why he hated himself and the world he was in and even—oh, breathe it softly—the children I was to “school.”

  “You’ll stay at my place,” he said. “We have an extra room.”

  I was uneasily conscious of the wide gap of silence that followed his pronouncement, but couldn’t think of a thing to fill it. I shifted my small case from one hand to the other and kept my eyes on the rocky path that protested with shifting stones and vocal gravel every step we took. It seemed to me that Mr. Diemus was trying to make all the noise he could with his shuffling feet. But, in spite of the amplified echo from the hills around us, no door opened, no face pressed to a window. It was a distinct relief to hear suddenly the happy unthinking rusty singing of hens as they scratched in the coarse dust.

  I hunched up in the darkness of my narrow bed trying to comfort my uneasy stomach. It wasn’t that the food had been bad—it had been quite adequate—but such a dingy meal! Gloom seemed to festoon itself from the ceiling and unhappiness sat almost visibly at the table.

  I tried to tell myself that it was my own travel weariness that slanted my thoughts, but I looked around the table and saw the hopeless endurance furrowed into the adult faces and beginning faintly but unmistakably on those of the children. There were two children there. A girl, Sarah (fourth grade, at a guess), and an adolescent boy, Matt (seventh?) —too silent, top well mannered, too controlled, avoiding much too pointedly looking at the empty chair between them.

  My food went down in limps and quarreled fiercely with the coffee that arrived in square-feeling gulps. Even yet— long difficult hours after the meal—the food still wouldn’t lie down to be digested.

  Tomorrow I could slip into the pattern of school, familiar no matter where school was, since teaching kids is teaching kids no matter where. Maybe then I could convince my stomach that all was well, and then maybe even start to thaw those frozen unnatural children. Of course they well might be little demons away from home—which is very often the case. Anyway, I felt, thankfully, the familiar September thrill of new beginnings.

  I shifted in bed again, then stiffening my neck, lifted my ears clear of my pillow.

  It was a whisper, the intermittent hissing I had bee
n hearing. Someone was whispering in the next room to mine. I sat up and listened unashamedly. I knew Sarah’s room was next to mine, but who was talking with her? At first I could get only half words and then either my ears sharpened or the voices became louder.

  “… and did you hear her laugh? Right out loud at the table!” The quick whisper became a low voice. “Her eyes crinkled in the corners and she laughed.”

  “Our other teachers laughed, too.” The uncertainly deep voice must be Matt.

  “Yes,” Sarah whispered. “But not for long. Oh, Matt! What’s wrong with us? People in our books have fun. They laugh and run and jump and do all kinds of fun stuff and nobody—” Sarah faltered, “no one calls it evil.”

  “Those are only stories,” Matt said. “Not real life.”

  “I don’t believe it!” Sarah cried. “When I get big I’m going away from Bendo. I’m going to see—”