Big Book of Science Fiction

by Groff Conklin

  Followed another series of grunts, and the sound of heavy footsteps, followed by angry snarls. Then came the sound of heavy bodies hurled about. Two of the Venerian beasts were fighting outside my prison. Of all the events of that journey, this one stands out most clearly; the quarrel of those two Venerian monsters, whose shape I did not even know, snarling and biting each other under the rain, while I hung in the cave without the power of motion.

  The battle trailed off to one side and ended in grunting moans, which in turn faded into a sound suggestive of eating. One of the invisible beasts had evidently been victorious and was celebrating—noisily. Finally this sound also ceased, and there was only the steady beat of the rain.

  It seemed to grow heavier, and I began to wonder how that mattered on a planet where it was always raining. Far in the distance, I heard the roll of thunder; and I noted without really thinking about it that they had thunderstorms on Venus as well as on earth.

  The rain fell harder; again came the-peal of thunder, and as it rolled I could see lightning flickering, far in the distance. A new, wild hope rose in me. Lightning was light; if one of those flashes came near enough—

  For a time it seemed that it would not. The lightning flashed away among the distant clouds, the thunder continued to boom, but the storm seemed about to pass off to one side and away from me. I was just giving up hope when there were simultaneously a terrific crash and a dazzling burst of lightning across the door of the cave.

  With a twist of the shoulders, I was out and riding. It was as dark as before out there, but I was now in the open, where I could travel on any flash of lightning that came, and I did, in a long series of jerking leaps. Another flash—I was among the clouds. Another—I was more than halfway through them. I believed I could see the stars of space beyond. Another flash below me, and I was at last out of the atmosphere of that grim and slimy planet and riding the ether in the light of the stars.

  When I reached the earth and the room on Bank Street, dawn was just coming up behind the skyscrapers. 1 felt cold and numb all over; the old man was standing in the center of the room, looking at me anxiously.

  “Thank God!” he said, as I opened my eyes and moved a palsied hand. “I had begun to fear that you could not make the return trip, and I would have to look for you—although that is very difficult for a person of my constitution.”

  “I need some coffee,” was all I said; and as I looked at him, I noticed how very much he resembled the Venerians I had seen.

  “Was it an interesting journey?” he asked.

  “Wonderful; but I need some coffee,” I repeated. “I’ll tell you about it later.”

  I staggered out and down the stairs. And that’s just the trouble about my story. There wasn’t any later.

  For after I fumbled through a day’s work at the bank, I got to thinking about things, and I wasn’t quite sure whether I wanted to go back there again alone; that is, until I had talked to someone else about it. When I did summon up nerve enough to go back, a couple of evenings later, I found there wasn’t any name beside the top button in the row in the hall, and nobody answered the bell when I rang. So I pushed the button marked “Super” and a fat women with scraggly hair came out;

  As I remarked before, I didn’t even know the old man’s name. “Who lives on the top floor?” I asked.

  “Nobody,” she said. “Not now, anyway.” She gave me a suspicious look. “If you’re another one of them G-men, I want to see your badge.”

  So there it is. I went away. I’m not a G-man, I don’t want them looking for me when I have to work in a bank. It could be that the old man gave me some kind of dope, and that he was mixed up in the racket somehow. I don’t know. But if he was, why did he have all those old rolls of sheepskin up there? They were genuine, all right. And any scientific people I’ve talked to since say that my description of Venus is just about what it would look like. Me, I just don’t know.

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  ~ * ~

  FOREVER AND THE EARTH

  by Ray Bradbury

  AFTER seventy years of writing short stories that never sold, Mr. Henry William Field arose one night at 11:30 and burned ten million words. He carried the manuscripts downstairs through his dark old mansion and threw them into the furnace.

  “That’s that,” he said, and thinking about his lost art and his misspent life, he put himself to bed, among his rich antiques. “My mistake was in ever trying to picture this wild world of 2257 a.d. The rockets, the atom wonders, the travels to planets and double suns. Nobody can do it. Everyone’s tried. All of our modern authors have failed.”

  Space was too big for them, and rockets too swift, and atomic science too instantaneous, he thought. But at least the other writers while failing, had been published, while he, in his idle wealth, had used the years of his life for nothing.

  After an hour of feeling this way, he fumbled through the night rooms to his library and switched on a green hurricane lamp. At random, from a collection untouched in fifty years, he selected a book. It was a book three centuries yellow and three centuries brittle, but he settled into, it and read hungrily until dawn....

  At nine o’clock, Henry William Field rushed from his library, called his servants, televised lawyers, friends, scientists, litterateurs.

  “Come at once!” he cried.

  Within the hour, a dozen people hurried into the study where Henry William Field sat, very disreputable and hysterical with an odd, feeding joy, unshaven and feverish. He clutched a thick book in his brittle arms and laughed if anyone even said good morning.

  “Here you see a book,” he said at last, holding it out, “written by a giant, a man born in Asheville, North Carolina, in the year 1900. Long gone to dust, he published four huge novels. He was a whirlwind. He lifted up mountains and collected winds. He left a trunk of pencilled manuscripts behind when he lay in bed at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in the year 1938, on September 15th, and died of pneumonia, an ancient and awful disease.”

  They looked at the book.

  Look Homeward, Angel.

  He drew forth three more. Of Time and the River. The Web and the Rock. You Can’t Go Home Again.

  “By Thomas Wolfe,” said the old man. “Three centuries cold in the North Carolina earth.”

  “You mean you’ve called us simply to see four books by a dead man?” his friends protested.

  “More than that! I’ve called you because I feel Tom Wolfe’s the man, the necessary man, to write of space, of time, huge things like nebulae and galactic war, meteors and planets; all the dark things he loved and put on paper were like this. He was born out of his time. He needed really big things to play with and never found them on Earth. He should have been born this afternoon instead of one hundred thousand mornings ago.”

  “I’m afraid you’re a bit late,” said Professor Bolton.

  “I don’t intend to be late!” snapped the old man. “I will not be frustrated by reality. You, professor, have experimented with time-travel. I expect you to finish your time machine this month. Here’s a check, a blank check, fill it in. If you need more money, ask for it. You’ve done some traveling already, haven’t you?”

  “A few years, yes, but nothing like centuries—”

  “We’ll make it centuries! You others—” he swept them with a fierce and shining glance “—will work with Bolton. I must have Thomas Wolfe.”

  “What!” They fell back before him.

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s the plan. Wolfe is to be brought to me. We will collaborate in the task of describing the flight from Earth to Mars, as only he could describe it!”

  They left him in his library with his books, turning the dry pages, nodding to himself. “Yes. Oh, dear Lord, yes, Tom’s the boy, Tom is the very boy for this.”

  ~ * ~

  The month passed slowly. Days showed a maddening reluctance to leave the calendar, and weeks lingered on until Mr. Henry William Field began to scream silently.

  At the end
of the month, Mr. Field awoke one midnight. The phone was ringing. He put his hand out in the darkness.

  “Yes?”

  “This is Professor Bolton calling.”

  “Yes, Bolton?”

  “I’ll be leaving in an hour,” said the voice.

  “Leaving? Leaving where? Are you quitting? You can’t do that!”

  “Please, Mr. Field, leaving means leaving.”

  “You mean, you’re actually going?”

  “Within an hour.”

  “To 1938? To September 15th?”

  “Yes!”

  “You’re sure you’ve the date written down? You’ll arrive before he dies? Be sure of it! Good Lord, you’d better get there a good hour before his death, don’t you think?”

  “A good hour.”

  “I’m so excited I can’t hold the phone. Good luck, Bolton. Bring him through safely!”

  “Thank you, sir. Goodbye.”

  The phone clicked.

  Mr. Henry William Field lay through the ticking night. He thought of Tom Wolfe as a lost brother to be lifted infect from under a cold, chiseled stone, to be restored to- blood and fire and speaking. He trembled each time he thought of Bolton whirling on the time wind back to other calendars and other faces.

  Tom, he thought, faintly, in the half-awake warmth of an old man calling after his favorite and long-gone child, Tom, where are you tonight, Tom? Come along now, we’ll help you through, you’ve got to come, there’s need of you. I couldn’t do it, Tom, none of us here can. So the next best thing to doing it myself, Tom, is helping you to do it. You can play with rockets like jackstraws, Tom, and you can have the stars, like a handful of crystals. Anything your heart asks, it’s here. You’d like the fire and the travel, Tom, it was made for you. Oh, we’ve a pale lot of writers today, I’ve read them all, Tom, and they’re not like you. I’ve waded in libraries of their stuff and they’ve never touched space, Tom; we need you for that! Give an old man his wish then, for God knows I’ve waited all my life for myself or some other to write the really great book about the stars, and I’ve waited in vain. So, whatever you are tonight, Tom Wolfe, make yourself tall. It’s that book you were going to write. It’s that good book the critics said was in you when you stopped breathing. Here’s your chance, will you do it, Tom? Will you listen and come through to us, will you do that tonight, and be here in the morning when I wake? Will you, Tom?

  His eyelids closed down over the fever and the demand. His tongue stopped quivering in his sleeping mouth.

  The clock struck four.

  Awakening to the white coolness of morning, he felt the excitement rising and welling in himself. He did not wish to blink, for fear that the thing which awaited him somewhere in the house might run off and slam a door, gone forever. His hands reached up to clutch his thin chest.

  Far away . . . footsteps . . .

  A series of doors opened and shut. Two men entered the bedroom.

  Field could hear them breathe. Their footsteps took on identities. The first steps were those of a spider, small and precise: Bolton. The second steps were those of a big man, a large man, a heavy man.

  “Tom?” cried the old man. He did not open his eyes.

  “Yes,” said the voice, at last.

  Tom Wolfe burst the seams of Field’s imagination, as a huge child bursts the lining of a too-small coat.

  “Tom Wolfe, let me look at you!” If Field said it once he said it a dozen times as he fumbled from bed, shaking violently. “Put up the blinds, for God’s sake, I want to see this! Tom Wolfe, is that you?”

  Tom Wolfe looked down from his tall thick body, with big hands out to balance himself in a world that was strange. He looked at the old man and the room and his mouth was trembling.

  “You’re just as they said you were, Tom!”

  Thomas Wolfe began to laugh and the laughing was huge, for he must have thought himself insane or in a nightmare, and he came to the old man and touched him and he looked at Professor Bolton and felt of himself, his arms and legs, he coughed experimentally and touched his own brow. “My fever’s gone,” he said. “I’m not sick any more.”

  “Of course not, Tom.”

  “What a night,” said Tom Wolfe. “It hasn’t been easy. I thought I was sicker than any man ever was. I felt myself floating and I thought, this is fever. I felt myself traveling, and thought, I’m dying fast. A man came to me. I thought, this is the Lord’s message. He took my hands. I smelled electricity. I flew up and over, and I saw a brass city. I thought, I’ve arrived. This is the city of heaven, there is the Gate! I’m numb from head to toe, like someone left in the snow to freeze. I’ve got to laugh and do things or I might think myself insane. You’re not God, are you? You don’t look like him.”

  The old man laughed. “No, no, Tom, not God, but playing at it. I’m Field.” He laughed again. “Lord, listen to me. said it as if you should know who Field is. Field, the financier, Tom, bow low, kiss my ring-finger. I’m Henry Field, I like your work. I brought you here. Come here.”

  The old man drew him to an immense crystal window.

  “Do you see those lights in the sky, Tom?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Those fireworks?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re not what you think, son. It’s not July Fourth, Tom. Not in the usual way. Every day’s Independence Day now. Man has declared his Freedom from Earth. Gravitation without representation has been overthrown. The Revolt has long since been successful. That green Roman Candle’s going to Mars. That red fire, that’s the Venus rocket. And the others, you see the yellow and the blue? Rockets, all of them!”

  Thomas Wolfe gazed up like an immense child caught amid the colorized glories of a July evening when the set-pieces are awhirl with phosphorous and glitter and barking explosion.

  “What year is this?”

  “The year of the rocket. Look here.” And the old man touched some flowers that bloomed at his touch. The blossoms were like blue and white fire. They burned and sparkled their cold, long petals. The blooms were two feet wide, and they were the color of an autumn moon. “Moon-flowers,” said the old man. “From the other side of the moon.” He brushed them and they dripped away into a silver rain, a shower of white sparks, on the air. “The year of the rocket. That’s a title for you, Tom. That’s why we brought you here, we’ve need of you. You’re the only man could handle the sun without being burnt to a ridiculous cinder. We want you to juggle the sun, Tom, and the stars, and whatever else you see on your trip to Mars.”

  “Mars?” Thomas Wolfe turned to seize the old man’s arm, bending down to him, searching his face in unbelief.

  “Tonight. You leave at six o’clock.”

  The old man held a fluttering pink ticket on the air, waiting for Tom to think to take it.

  ~ * ~

  It was five in the afternoon. “Of course, of course I appreciate what you’ve done,” cried Thomas Wolfe.

  “Sit down, Tom. Stop walking around.”

  “Let me finish, Mr. Field, let me get through with this, I’ve got to say it.”

  “We’ve been arguing for hours,” pleaded Mr. Field, exhaustedly.

  They had talked from breakfast until lunch until tea, they had wandered through a dozen rooms and ten dozen arguments, they had perspired and grown cold and perspired again.

  “It all comes down to this,” said Thomas Wolfe, at last. “I can’t stay here, Mr. Field. I’ve got to go back. This isn’t my time. You’ve no right to interfere—”

  “But, I—”

  “I was amidst my work, my best was yet to come, and now you hurry me off three centuries. Mr. Field, I want you to call Mr. Bolton back. I want you to have him put me in his machine, whatever it is, and return me to 1938, my rightful place and year. That’s all I ask of you.”

  “But, don’t you want to see Mars?”

  “With all my heart. But I know it isn’t for me. It would throw my writing off. I’d have a huge handful of experience that I
couldn’t fit into my other writing when I went home.”

  “You don’t understand, Tom, you don’t understand at all.”

  “I understand that you’re selfish.”

  “Selfish? Yes,” said the old man. “For myself, and for others, very selfish.”

  “I want to go home.”

  “Listen to me, Tom.”

  “Call Mr. Bolton.”