Star Science Fiction 4 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Frederik Pohl

  “We could run away,” she said. “We could try to reach the Primitives in the Highlands. They say there are several thousand of them north of the Grampians.”

  He shook his head. “The Co-ordinators would allow an Illiterate to escape, but not a Technician. Besides, we can’t even be sure that the Primitives exist.”

  “Are you afraid?” asked Thalia.

  “Yes, for both of us. It will be better when I am sent to the Reservation. Then we shall be able to meet frequently.”

  She gripped his hand tightly. “After the operation, you may not love me any more.”

  “You can teach me all over again.”

  “I—I may not want to. You’ll feel different about things. With the Prefrontals, nothing matters deeply. You’ll get bored, and make love to some Prefrontal woman, and won’t be able to understand how I feel about it.”

  He stopped, put his arm round her and whispered: “Look at the stars. They’re the memory patterns of the cosmos. They are patterns of inconceivable purpose on the brain of space. To them, Nova Mancunia is nothing. It is not even the characteristic of a diseased astrospore! The constellations are outside our time. They shone with the same brilliance when Lake Manchester was a teeming city. They will continue to shine when Nova Mancunia is a more doubtful legend than Troy.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” she said slowly. “But when you talk like that I want to believe without understanding.”

  “Do the stars,” he asked, “seem still and tranquil?”

  “When we look at them together,” she answered, “I begin to think we might borrow their stillness.”

  She heard him laugh softly. “They are hurtling by at millions of kilometers an hour,” he said. “They are burning themselves to death to illuminate a journey without destination. They are racing headlong to extinction, or else they are the only still points in a whirlpool of space. Which is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Neither do I; and that, my darling, is the greatest secret in the world. Just as they might be dying by the trillion, so we might expand one moment of life into eternity.”

  Slowly, insistently, he pulled her down into the grassy hollow where they stood. Down through a tunnel of darkness to the oldest innocence of all. Presently, in its own compelling ritual, love became a communicable experience of death.

  There they lay, a Technician Beta Male and an Illiterate Female; each, in a different fashion, awaiting the slow metabolism of resurrection.

  * * * *

  Dr. Krypton stared absently through his office window at the Deputy Director’s glass windmill. The enigma remained. Some day, perhaps, the sails would cease to turn, and the passport of a Co-ordinator Alpha would lie on the psychiatrist’s desk.

  Revolution or evolution? It seemed to be the peculiar genius of twenty-fifth-century man to be an enemy of both.

  The psychiatrist heard the door open and said, without turning round: “Good morning, Dr. Byron. If one and a half squirrels ate one and a half nuts in one and a half minutes, how many nuts would nine squirrels eat in nine minutes?”

  “Fifty-four,” said Byron, after a short pause.

  “Three seconds,” observed Krypton. “You are moderately alert. ... I trust you achieved catharsis last night?”

  “I did. I killed her!”

  Dr. Krypton turned to face his visitor. “That is interesting. Why did you not kill yourself also?”

  “Because I needed to live in order to kill you.”

  “You are probably stronger than I am,” said the psychiatrist calmly. “It appears that Nova Mancunia will presently need a new Co-ordinator Alpha. And neurosurgeons are difficult to replace. Unfortunately, Dr. Byron, you cannot kill the system.”

  “I can try.”

  “You can fail. That is all. Now you had better begin your failure by killing me.”

  Byron moved forward, then suddenly stopped. He moved forward again, then stopped. His whole body was trembling. Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead.

  “I am afraid,” said the psychiatrist, “that I took advantage of the deep hypnosis to rearrange, temporarily, your pattern of compulsion and tabu. As you see, it was quite justified. If you can lay a hand on me, I assure you there will be no resistance. I have considered your case since yesterday. There does not seem to be any alternative to a prefrontal leucotomy —officially.”

  “And unofficially?” asked Byron, staring at him dully.

  “I shall operate on you, Dr. Byron, but I shall merely make an incision, then close it. There will be no severance of brain fiber.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, my dear fellow, the human race needs you. Until that need is manifest, you will live in the Prefrontal Reservation.”

  “One of us is quite mad,” said Byron slowly.

  “I am,” admitted Krypton. “It is incurable. You see, I too have no faith in Nova Mancunia. The present society is not static, and there will come a time when it will fail. That will be the signal for a return to humanity.”

  “Did you make me kill her?” demanded Byron abruptly.

  “I did. You, perhaps, will need to die before a new society is established. I have merely made it easier for you.”

  For a minute, Dr. Byron remained silent. When he spoke, his voice was quiet, his manner calm. “When will you operate?”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  “Are you really not going to cut the fiber, or is that suggestion part of the treatment?”

  Dr. Krypton smiled as he ushered his guest out “It is an interesting point, because you will never know.”

  <>

  * * * *

  DAMON KNIGHT

  Damon Knight is a lean man with a large head, which he all the time uses for thinking, thinking, thinking. Much of his thinking turns, in time, into the sort of total-penetration book reviewing that has earned him awards and resulted in his being one of the few reviewers in any medium whose essays are reissued in hard covers. (There are those who have questioned the accuracy of some of his judgments, but there is no one who can doubt the good faith, the work and the skill that go into making them.) What thinking time is left, Knight devotes to the creation of bizarre cultures and of off-beat aliens, as for example those aliens in-

  IDIOT STICK

  The ship came down out of a blue sky to land in a New Jersey meadow. It sank squashily into the turf. It was about a mile long, colored an iridescent blue-green, like the shell of a beetle.

  A door opened, and a thin, stick-bodied man came out to sniff the cool air. The sky overhead was full of fluffy cumulus clouds and criss-crossing contrails. Across the river, the tall buildings of New York were picturesquely gilded by the early sun.

  A dun-colored Army copter came into view, circling the ship at a cautious distance. The stick man saw it, blinked at it without interest, and looked away.

  The river was smooth and silvery in the sunlight. After a long time the sound of bullhorns came blaring distantly across the marshes. Then there was a clanking and a roaring, and two Army tanks pulled into sight, followed by two more. They deployed to either side, and slewed around with their 90 mm. guns pointing at the ship.

  The alien watched them calmly. More helicopters appeared, circling and hovering. After a while a gray-painted destroyer steamed slowly into view up the river.

  More tanks arrived. There was a ring of them around the spaceship, rumbling and smelling of Diesel oil. Finally a staff car pulled up, and three perspiring general officers got out of it

  From his low platform the alien looked down with a patient expression. His voice carried clearly: “Good morning,” he said, “this is a ship of the Galactic Federation. We come in peace; your guns will not fire, please take them away. Now then. I shall tell you what I am, going to do. The Federation wishes to establish a cultural and educational organization upon your continent; and for your land and your cooperation, we will pay you generously. Here, catch these.” He raised his arm, and a cloud of glittery obj
ects came toward them.

  One of the officers, white-faced, tugged at the pistol in his belt holster; but the objects dropped harmlessly in and around the car. The eldest officer picked one up. It was insubstantial to the touch, more like a soap bubble than anything else. Then it tingled suddenly in his palm. He sat down, glassy-eyed.

  The other two shook him. “Frank! Frank!”

  His eyes slowly cleared; he looked from one to the other. “Are you still here?” he said faintly, and then: “My God!”

  “Frank, what was it? Did it knock you out?”

  The eldest officer looked down at the glittery thing in his hand. It felt now like nothing in particular; just a piece of plastic, perhaps. There was no more tingle. The zip was gone out of it.

  “It was—happiness,” he said.

  The rest of the objects glittered and gleamed in the rank grass around the car. “Go on,” called the alien encouragingly, “take all you want. Tell your superiors—tell your friends. Come one, come all! We bring happiness!”

  * * * *

  Within half a day, the word was out

  Work stopped in New York offices. By ferry and tube, people poured across the river. The governor flew in from Trenton and was closeted with the aliens for half an hour. He emerged with a dazed and disbelieving look, wearing a shoulder bag full of the glittering little capsules.

  The crowd milled around the ship, muddy to the knee. Every hour the thin alien appeared and tossed out another handful of capsules. There were shouts and screams; the crowd clotted briefly where the capsules fell, then spread apart again like filings released from a magnet.

  Dull, used-up capsules littered the grass. Everywhere you saw the dazed expression, the transported look of a man who had had one.

  Some few of the capsules got carried home to wives and children. The word continued to spread. No one could describe the effect of the capsules satisfactorily. It lasted only a few seconds, yet seemed to take a long time. It left them satiated and shaken. It was not pleasure of any specific kind, they said. It was happiness and they wanted more.

  Expropriation measures to give the aliens what they wanted passed the state and national legislatures with blinding speed. There was furious debate elsewhere, but nobody who had had one of the capsules was in any doubt that he was getting a bargain. And the kicker was, “What else can we do?”

  The aliens, it appeared, wanted five hundred acres of level ground to put up certain buildings and other structures. Their explanations to the press and public were infrequent and offhand in tone. Some people found them unsatisfactory. When asked why the aliens had chosen a site so near heavily populated centers, rather than wasteland which would have been plentiful elsewhere, the spokesman replied (he was either the same stick-thin man who had appeared first, or one just like him): “But then who would build us our buildings?”

  New York, it seemed, represented a source of native labor to the aliens.

  The pay would be generous: three capsules a day a man.

  When the aliens announced they were hiring, half the population of New York tried to get over onto the Jersey flats. Three-quarters of the population of Hoboken, Jersey City, Hackensack and Paterson was already there.

  In the queues that eventually formed out of the confusion, the mayor of New York City was seen alongside an upstate senator and two visiting film stars.

  Each person, as he reached the head of the line, was handed a light metal or plastic rod, five feet long, with a curved handle and a splayed tip. The lucky workers were then herded out onto the designated acreage. Some of it was marshland, some was a scraggly part of the New Jersey parks system, some was improved land. The buildings on the site, a few homes, some factories and warehouses, had all been evacuated but not torn down. The workers with their rods were lined up at one edge of this territory, facing the opposite side.

  “When the command ‘Go’ is heard,” said the alien’s voice clearly, “you will all proceed directly forward at a slow walking pace, swinging your sticks from side to side.”

  The voice stopped. Apparently that was going to be all.

  * * * *

  In the middle of the line, young Ted Cooley looked at his neighbor, Eli Baker. They both worked in the same pharmaceuticals house, and had come out together to try their luck. Cooley was twenty-five, blond and brawny; Baker, about the same age, was slight and dark. Their eyes met, and Baker shrugged, as if to say, Don’t ask me.

  It was a clear, cool day. The long line of men and women stood waiting in the sunlight.

  “Go!” said the alien’s voice.

  The line began to move.

  Cooley stepped forward and waggled his stick hesitantly. There was no feeling of movement in the stick, but he saw a line of darkness spring out on the ground ahead of him. He paused instinctively, thinking that the stick must be squirting oil or some other liquid.

  Up and down the line, other people were stopping, too. He looked more closely, and saw that the ground was not wet at all. It was simply pressed down flat, dirt, stones, weeds, everything all at once, to form one hard, dark surface.

  “Keep going,” said the alien’s voice.

  Several people threw down their sticks and walked away. Others moved forward cautiously. Seeing that nothing happened to them when they stepped on the dark strip, Cooley moved forward also. The dark ground was solid and firm underfoot. As he moved forward, swinging the stick, the dark area spread; and looking closely now, he could see the uneven ground leap downward and darken as the stick swept over it.

  “Get in rhythm,” called the voice. “Leave no space between one man’s work and the next.”

  The line moved forward, a little raggedly at first, then faster as they got the hang of it. The dark, hard strip, running the whole length of the area, widened as they moved. Everything under the business end of the stick was instantly compressed and smoothed down. Looking closely, you could see the traces of anything that had been there before, like the patterns in marbled linoleum: stones, sticks, grass and weeds.

  “How the heck does it work?” said Baker, awed.

  “Search me,” said Cooley. In his hands, the tube felt light and empty, like the aluminum shaft of a tank vacuum cleaner. He didn’t see how it could possibly have any mechanism inside. There were no controls; he hadn’t turned anything on to make it operate.

  A few yards ahead there was a stone wall, overgrown with weeds. “What’s going to happen when we come to that?” Baker asked, pointing.

  “Search me.” Cooley felt bewildered; he walked mechanically forward, swinging the stick.

  The wall grew nearer. When they were within a few paces of it, a rabbit burst suddenly out of cover. It darted one way, then the other, hind legs pumping hard. Confused by the advancing line, it leaped for the space between Baker and Cooley.

  “Look out!” shouted Cooley instinctively. Baker’s swinging stick went directly over the rabbit.

  Nothing happened. The rabbit kept on going.

  Cooley and a few others turned to watch it. It bounded away across the level strip, and disappeared into the tall grass on the other side.

  * * * *

  Baker and Cooley looked at each other. “Selective,” said

  Cooley through dry lips. “Listen, if I-” He shortened his grip on the stick, moving the splayed end toward himself.

  “Better not,” said Baker nervously.

  “Just to see-” Cooley slowly brought the stick nearer, slowly thrust the tip of one shoe under it.

  Nothing happened.

  He moved the stick nearer. Bolder, he ran it over his leg, his other foot. Nothing. “Selective!” he repeated. “But how?”

  The weeds were dried vegetable fiber. The stick compressed them without hesitation, stamped them down flat like everything else. His trousers were dried vegetable fiber, part of them, anyhow—cotton. His socks, his shoelaces—how did the stick know the difference?

  They kept on going.

  When they came, to the stone wall,
Cooley waved his stick at it. A section of the wall slumped, as if a giant had taken a bite out of it. He waved it again.

  The rest of the wall fell.

  Somebody laughed hysterically. The line was advancing. The wall was just a lighter stripe in the smooth floor over which they walked.

  The sun crept higher. Behind the line of men and women stretched a level, gleaming floor. “Listen,” said Cooley nervously to Baker, “how bad do you want those happiness gadgets?”

  Baker looked at him curiously. “I don’t know, what do you mean?”