It was strange, three days later, to sit in the quiet observatory, with the power-packs humming around me, and to watch Chaka move into the field of the telescope. I felt a brief glow of triumph, like an astronomer who has calculated the orbit of a new planet and then finds it in the predicted spot among the stars. The cruel face was in profile when I saw it first, apparently only thirty feet away at the extreme magnification I was using. I waited patiently, in serene confidence, for the moment that I knew must come—the moment when Chaka seemed to be looking directly toward me. Then with my left hand I held the image of an ancient god who must be nameless, and with my right I tripped the capacitor banks that fired the laser, launching my silent, invisible thunderbolt across the mountains.
Yes, it was so much better this way. Chaka deserved to be killed, but death would have turned him into a martyr and strengthened the hold of his regime. What I had visited upon him was worse than death, and would throw his supporters into superstitious terror.
Chaka still lived; but the All-Seeing would see no more. In the space of a few microseconds, I had made him less than the humblest beggar in the streets.
And I had not even hurt him. There is no pain when the delicate film of the retina is fused by the heat of a thousand suns.
The Longest Science-fiction Story Ever Told
First published in Galaxy, October 1966, as ‘A Recursion in Metastories’
Collected in The Wind from the Sun
When he published this story, editor Frederik Pohl boasted how clever he was to get an infinite number of words on a single page.
Dear Mr Jinx:
I’m afraid your idea is not at all original. Stories about writers whose work is always plagiarised even before they can complete it go back at least to H. G. Wells’s ‘The Anticipator’. About once a week I receive a manuscript beginning:
Dear Mr Jinx:
I’m afraid your idea is not at all original. Stories about writers whose work is always plagiarized even before they can complete it go back at least to H. G. Wells’s ‘The Anticipator.’ About once a week I receive a manuscript beginning:
Dear Mr Jinx:
I’m afraid your idea is not…
Better luck next time!
Sincerely,!
Morris K. Mobius!
Editor, Stupefying Stories
Better luck next time!
Sincerely,!
Morris K. Mobius!
Editor, Stupefying Stories
Better luck next time!
Sincerely,!
Morris K. Mobius!
Editor, Stupefying Stories
Playback
First published in Playboy, December 1966
Collected in The Wind from the Sun
It is incredible that I have forgotten so much, so quickly. I have used my body for forty years; I thought I knew it. Yet already it is fading like a dream.
Arms, legs, where are you? What did you ever do for me when you were mine? I send out signals, trying to command the limbs I vaguely remember. Nothing happens. It is like shouting into a vacuum.
Shouting. Yes, I try that. Perhaps they hear me, but I cannot hear myself. Silence has flowed over me, until I can no longer imagine sound. There is a word in my mind called ‘music’; what does it mean?
(So many words, drifting before me out of the darkness, waiting to be recognised. One by one they go away, disappointed.)
Hello. So you are back. How softly you tiptoe into my mind! I know when you are there, but I never feel you coming.
I sense that you are friendly, and I am grateful for what you have done. But who are you? Of course, I know you’re not human; no human science could have rescued me when the drive field collapsed. You see, I am becoming curious. That is a good sign, is it not? Now that the pain has gone—at last, at last—I can start to think again.
Yes, I am ready. Anything you want to know. It is the least that I can do.
My name is William Vincent Neuberg. I am a master pilot of the Galactic Survey. I was born in Port Lowell, Mars, on August 21, 2095. My wife, Janita, and my three children are on Ganymede. I am also an author; I’ve written a good deal about my travels. Beyond Rigel is quite famous….
What happened? You probably know as much as I do. I had just phantomed my ship and was cruising at phase velocity when the alarm went. There was no time to move, to do anything. I remember the cabin walls starting to glow—and the heat, the terrible heat. That is all. The detonation must have blown me into space. But how could I have survived? How could anyone have reached me in time?
Tell me—how much is left of my body? Why cannot I feel my arms, my legs? Don’t hide the truth; I am not afraid. If you can get me home, the biotechnicians can give me new limbs. Even now, my right arm is not the one I was born with.
Why can’t you answer? Surely that is a simple question!
What do you mean you do not know what I look like? You must have saved something!
The head?
The brain, then?
Not even—oh, no…!
I am sorry. Was I away a long time?
Let me get a grip on myself. (Ha! Very funny!) I am Survey Pilot First Class Vincent William Freeburg. I was born in Port Lyot, Mars, on August 21, 1895. I have one… no, two children….
Please let me have that again, slowly. My training prepared me for any conceivable reality. I can face whatever you tell me. But slowly.
Well, it could be worse. I’m not really dead. I know who I am. I even think I know what I am.
I am a—a recording, in some fantastic storage device. You must have caught my psyche, my soul, when the ship turned into plasma. Even though I cannot imagine how it was done, it makes sense. After all, a primitive man could never understand how we record a symphony….
All my memories are trapped in a tape or a crystal, as they once were trapped in the cells of my vaporised brain. And not only my memories. ME. I. MYSELF—VINCE WILLBURG, PILOT SECOND CLASS.
Well, what happens next?
Please say that again. I do not understand.
Oh, wonderful! You can do even that?
There is a word for it, a name….
The multitudinous seas incarnadine. No. Not quite.
Incarnadine, incarnadine…
REINCARNATION!!
Yes, yes, I understand. I must give you the basic plan, the design. Watch my thoughts very carefully.
I will start at the top.
The head, now. It is oval—so. The upper part is covered with hair. Mine was br—er—blue.
The eyes. They are very important. You have seen them in other animals? Good, that saves trouble. Can you show me some? Yes, those will do.
Now the mouth. Strange—I must have looked at it a thousand times when I was shaving, but somehow…
Not so round—narrower.
Oh, no, not that way. It runs across the face, horizontally….
Now, let’s see… there’s something between the eyes and the mouth.
Stupid of me. I’ll never be a cadet if I can’t even remember that….
Of course—NOSE! A little longer, I think.
There’s something else, something I’ve forgotten. That head looks raw, unfinished. It’s not me, Billy Vinceburg, the smartest kid on the block.
But that isn’t my name—I’m not a boy. I’m a master pilot with twenty years in the Space Service, and I’m trying to rebuild my body. Why do my thoughts keep going out of focus? Help me, please!
That monstrosity? Is that what I told you I looked like? Erase it. We must start again.
The head, now. It is perfectly spherical, and weareth a runcible cap….
Too difficult. Begin somewhere else. Ah, I know—
The thighbone is connected to the shinbone. The shinbone is connected to the thighbone. The thighbone is connected to the shinbone. The shinbone…
All fading. Too late, too late. Something wrong with the playback. Thank you for trying. My name is… my name is…
Mother—wh
ere are you?
Mama—Mama!
Maaaaaaa…
The Cruel Sky
First published in Boy’s Life, July 1967
Collected in The Wind from the Sun
A case of premonition? I’m not sure. However, now that I’m confined to a wheelchair by Post-Polio Syndrome, I could do with an anti-gravity device.
By midnight, the summit of Everest was only a hundred yards away, a pyramid of snow, pale and ghostly in the light of the rising Moon. The sky was cloudless, and the wind that had been blowing for days had dropped almost to zero. It must be rare indeed for the highest point on Earth to be so calm and peaceful; they had chosen their time well.
Perhaps too well, thought George Harper; it had been almost disappointingly easy. Their only real problem had been getting out of the hotel without being observed. The management objected to unauthorised midnight excursions up the mountain; there could be accidents, which were bad for business.
But Dr Elwin was determined to do it this way, and he had the best of reasons, though he never discussed them. The presence of one of the world’s most famous scientists—and certainly the world’s most famous cripple—at Hotel Everest during the height of the tourist season had already aroused a good deal of polite surprise. Harper had allayed some of the curiosity by hinting that they were engaged in gravity measurements, which was at least part of the truth. But a part of the truth that, by this time, was vanishingly small.
Anyone looking at Jules Elwin now, as he forged steadily toward the twenty-nine-thousand-foot level with fifty pounds of equipment on his shoulders, would never have guessed that his legs were almost useless. He had been born a victim of the 1961 thalidomide disaster, which had left more than ten thousand partially deformed children scattered over the face of the world. Elwin was one of the lucky ones. His arms were quite normal, and had been strengthened by exercise until they were considerably more powerful than most men’s. His legs, however, were mere wisps of flesh and bone. With the aid of braces, he could stand and even totter a few uncertain steps, but he could never really walk.
Yet now he was two hundred feet from the top of Everest….
A travel poster had started it all, more than three years ago. As a junior computer programmer in the Applied Physics Division, George Harper knew Dr Elwin only by sight and by reputation. Even to those working directly under him, Astrotech’s brilliant Director of Research was a slightly remote personality, cut off from the ordinary run of men both by his body and by his mind. He was neither liked nor disliked, and, though he was admired and pitied, he was certainly not envied.
Harper, only a few months out of college, doubted if the Doctor even knew of his existence, except as a name on an organisation chart. There were ten other programmers in the division, all senior to him, and most of them had never exchanged more than a dozen words with their research director. When Harper was co-opted as messenger boy to carry one of the classified files into Dr Elwin’s office, he expected to be in and out with nothing more than a few polite formalities.
That was almost what happened. But just as he was leaving, he was stopped dead by the magnificent panorama of Himalayan peaks covering half of one wall. It had been placed where Dr Elwin could see it whenever he looked up from his desk, and it showed a scene that Harper knew very well indeed, for he had photographed it himself, as an awed and slightly breathless tourist standing on the trampled snow at the crown of Everest.
There was the white ridge of Kanchenjunga, rearing through the clouds almost a hundred miles away. Nearly in line with it, but much nearer, were the twin peaks of Makalu; and closer still, dominating the foreground, was the immense bulk of Lhotse, Everest’s neighbour and rival. Farther around to the west, flowing down valleys so huge that the eye could not appreciate their scale, were the jumbled ice rivers of the Khumbu and Rongbuk glaciers. From this height, their frozen wrinkles looked no larger than the furrows in a ploughed field; but those ruts and scars of iron-hard ice were hundreds of feet deep.
Harper was still taking in that spectacular view, reliving old memories, when he heard Dr Elwin’s voice behind him.
‘You seem interested. Have you ever been there?’
‘Yes, Doctor. My folks took me after I graduated from high school. We stayed at the hotel for a week, and thought we’d have to go home before the weather cleared. But on the last day the wind stopped blowing, and about twenty of us made it to the summit. We were there for an hour, taking pictures of each other.’
Dr Elwin seemed to digest this information for rather a long time. Then he said, in a voice that had lost its previous remoteness and now held a definite undercurrent of excitement: ‘Sit down, Mr—ah—Harper. I’d like to hear more.’
As he walked back to the chair facing the Director’s big uncluttered desk, George Harper found himself somewhat puzzled. What he had done was not in the least unusual; every year thousands of people went to the Hotel Everest, and about a quarter of them reached the mountain’s summit. Only last year, in fact, there had been a much-publicised presentation to the ten-thousandth tourist to stand on the top of the world. Some cynics had commented on the extraordinary coincidence that Number 10,000 had just happened to be a rather well-known video starlet.
There was nothing that Harper could tell Dr Elwin that he couldn’t discover just as easily from a dozen other sources—the tourist brochures, for example. However, no young and ambitious scientist would miss this opportunity to impress a man who could do so much to help his career. Harper was neither coldly calculating nor inclined to dabble in office politics, but he knew a good chance when he saw one.
‘Well, Doctor,’ he began, speaking slowly at first as he tried to put his thoughts and memories in order, ‘the jets land you at a little town called Namchi, about twenty miles from the mountain. Then the bus takes you along a spectacular road up to the hotel, which overlooks the Khumbu Glacier. It’s at an altitude of eighteen thousand feet, and there are pressurised rooms for anyone who finds it hard to breathe. Of course, there’s a medical staff in attendance, and the management won’t accept guests who aren’t physically fit. You have to stay at the hotel for at least two days, on a special diet, before you’re allowed to go higher.
‘From the hotel you can’t actually see the summit, because you’re too close to the mountain, and it seems to loom right above you. But the view is fantastic. You can see Lhotse and half a dozen other peaks. And it can be scary, too—especially at night. The wind is usually howling somewhere high overhead, and there are weird noises from the moving ice. It’s easy to imagine that there are monsters prowling around up in the mountains….
‘There’s not much to do at the hotel, except to relax and watch the scenery, and to wait until the doctors give you the go-ahead. In the old days it used to take weeks to acclimatise to the thin air; now they can make your blood count shoot up to the right level in forty-eight hours. Even so, about half the visitors—mostly the older ones—decide that this is quite high enough for them.
‘What happens next depends on how experienced you are, and how much you’re willing to pay. A few expert climbers hire guides and make their own way to the top, using standard mountaineering equipment. That isn’t too difficult nowadays, and there are shelters at various strategic spots. Most of these groups make it. But the weather is always a gamble, and every year a few people get killed.
‘The average tourist does it the easier way. No aircraft are allowed to land on Everest itself, except in emergencies, but there’s a lodge near the crest of Nuptse and a helicopter service to it from the hotel. From the lodge it’s only three miles to the summit, via the South Col—an easy climb for anyone in good condition, with a little mountaineering experience. Some people do it without oxygen, though that’s not recommended. I kept my mask on until I reached the top; then I took it off and found I could breathe without much difficulty.’
‘Did you use filters or gas cylinders?’
‘Oh, molecular filters—they’re quit
e reliable now, and increase the oxygen concentration over a hundred per cent. They’ve simplified high-altitude climbing enormously. No one carries compressed gas any more.’
‘How long did the climb take?’
‘A full day. We left just before dawn and were back at nightfall. That would have surprised the old-timers. But of course we were starting fresh and travelling light. There are no real problems on the route from the lodge, and steps have been cut at all the tricky places. As I said, it’s easy for anyone in good condition.’
The instant he repeated those words, Harper wished that he had bitten off his tongue. It seemed incredible that he could have forgotten who he was talking to, but the wonder and excitement of that climb to the top of the world had come back so vividly that for a moment he was once more on that lonely, wind-swept peak. The one spot on Earth where Dr Elwin could never stand….
But the scientist did not appear to have noticed—or else he was so used to such unthinking tactlessness that it no longer bothered him. Why, wondered Harper, was he so interested in Everest? Probably because of that very inaccessibility; it stood for all that had been denied to him by the accident of birth.
Yet now, only three years later, George Harper paused a bare hundred feet from the summit and drew in the nylon rope as the Doctor caught up with him. Though nothing had ever been said about it, he knew that the scientist wished to be the first to the top. He deserved the honour, and the younger man would do nothing to rob him of it.
‘Everything OK?’ he asked as Dr Elwin drew abreast of him. The question was quite unnecessary, but Harper felt an urgent need to challenge the great loneliness that now surrounded them. They might have been the only men in all the world; nowhere amid this white wilderness of peaks was there any sign that the human race existed.
Elwin did not answer, but gave an absent-minded nod as he went past, his shining eyes fixed upon the summit. He was walking with a curiously stiff-legged gait, and his feet made remarkably little impression in the snow. And as he walked, there came a faint but unmistakable whine from the bulky backpack he was carrying on his shoulders.
A Meeting With Medusa Page 15