It happened again that I became Betty’s mayor, to fill in until November, to oversee the rebuilding. I worked, I worked my head off, and I left her bright and shiny, as I had found her. I think I could have won if I had run for the job that fall, but I did not want it.
The Town Council overrode my objections and voted to erect a statue of Godfrey Justin Holmes beside the statue of Eleanor Schirer which was to stand in the Square across from cleaned-up Wyeth. I guess it’s out there now.
I said that I would never return, but who knows? In a couple years, after some more history has passed, I may revisit a Betty full of strangers, if only to place a wreath at the foot of the one statue. Who knows but that the entire continent may be steaming and clanking and whirring with automation by then, and filled with people from shore to shining shore?
There was a Stopover at the end of the year and I waved good-bye and climbed aboard and went away, anywhere.
I went aboard and went away, to sleep again the cold sleep. Delirium of ship among stars . . .
Years have passed, I suppose. I’m not really counting them anymore. But I think of this thing often: Perhaps there is a Golden Age someplace, a Renaissance for me sometime, a special time somewhere, somewhere but a ticket, a visa, a diary page away. I don’t know where or when. Who does? Where are all the rains of yesterday?
In the invisible city?
Inside me?
It is cold and quiet outside and the horizon is infinity. There is no sense of movement.
There is no moon, and the stars are very bright, like broken diamonds, all.
THE HAUNTED FUTURE
Fritz Leiber
* * *
As I pontificate elsewhere in this book, much has been made of the prophetic aspect of SF. Those predictions that are “accurate” (if you wink at them a little) are usually concerned with hardware, or, on a higher level of sophistication, with the broad cultural changes triggered by that hardware. It is a jump from predicting the atomic bomb to predicting atomic submarines or breeder reactors, and it is another jump from there to predicting SAC and the AEC. Few authors have accurately predicted the way the cultural changes will seep inside our everyday lives and alter the experience and quality of it: from SAC to the McCarthy trials. Most SF can predict the car, some SF can predict the drive-in theater, but SF that can predict the changes in teen-age sexual behavior as a result of the drive-in is vanishingly rare.
Fritz Leiber’s “The Haunted Future” is a strongly prophetic story—not in detail, but in feeling and mood, in depicting the Zeitgeist in which we are submerged. Here—shot through with Leiber’s usual silver/black poetry and filtered through his strikingly theatrical eye—is a world of surface serenity and underlying turmoil, of health masquerading as insanity and insanity masquerading as health, of mass depersonalization vs. rampaging individuality, a controlled world where They “put the tranquillity in with a needle,” if They can’t lull and soothe you into it any other way. Crawl into this world and look around. You’ll recognize it. It is you. It is me. It is us. It is now.
G.D.
* * *
My strangest case, bar none, from the Psychotic Years was the Green Demon of New Angeles.
—From the notebooks of Andreas Snowden
It would be hard to imagine a more peaceful and reassuring spot, a spot less likely to harbor or attract horrors, even in America of the Tranquil early twenty-first century, than the suburb—exurb, rather—of Civil Service Knolls. Cozy was the word for the place—a loose assembly of a half thousand homes snuggling down in the warm moonlight a mountain ridge away from the metropolis of New Angeles. With their fashionably rounded roofs the individual houses looked rather like giant mushrooms among the noble trees. They were like mushrooms too in the way they grew with the families they housed—one story for the newlyweds, two for the properly childrened and community-seasoned, three for those punchdrunk with reproduction and happy living. From under their eaves spilled soft yellow light of the exact shade that color analysts had pronounced most homelike.
There were no streets or roads, only the dark pine-scented asphalt disks of sideyard landing spots now holding the strange-vaned shapes of ‘copters and flutteryplanes locked for the night, like sleeping dragonflies and moths. While for the ground-minded there was the unobtrusive subway entrance. Even the groceries came by underground tube straight to the kitchen in response to the housewife’s morning dialing, delivery having at last gone underground with the other utilities. Well-chewed garbage vanished down rust-proof ducts in the close company of well-bred bacteria. There were not even any unsightly dirt paths worn in the thick springy lawns—the family hypnotherapist had implanted in the mind of every resident, each last baldie and toddler, the suggestion that pedestrians vary their routes and keep their steps light and rather few.
No nightclubs, no bars, no feelie pads, no mess parlors, no bongo haunts, no jukebox joints, no hamburg havens, no newsstands, no comic books; no smellorama, no hot rods, no weed, no jazz, no gin.
Yes, tranquil, secure and cozy were all good words for Civil Service Knolls—a sylvan monument to sane, civilized, progressive attitudes.
Yet fear was about to swoop there just the same. Not fear of war, missile-atomic or otherwise—the Cold Truce with Communism was a good fifty years old. Not fear of physical disease or any crippling organic infirmity—such ills were close to the vanishing point and even funerals and deaths—again with the vital aid of the family hypnotherapist—were rather pleasant or at least reassuring occasions for the survivors. No, the fear that was about to infiltrate Civil Service Knolls was of the sort that must be called nameless.
A householder crossing a stretch of open turf as he strolled home from the subway thought he heard a whish directly overhead. There was nothing whatever blackly silhouetted against the wide stretch of moon-pale sky, yet it seemed to him that one of the moon-dimmed stars near the zenith quivered and shifted, as if there were an eddy in the air or sky. Heaven had wavered. And weren’t there two extra stars there now?—two new stars in the center of the eddy—two dim red stars close-placed like eyes?
No, that was impossible, he must be seeing things—his own blasted fault for missing his regular soothe session with the hypnotherapist! Just the same, he hurried his steps.
The eddy in the darkness overhead floated in pace with him awhile, then swooped. He heard a louder whish, then something brushed his shoulder and claws seemed to fasten there for an instant.
He gasped like someone about to vomit and leaped forward frantically.
From the empty moon-glowing darkness behind him came a cackle of grim laughter.
While the householder desperately pounded upon his own front door, the eddy in the darkness shot up the height of a sequoia, then swooped on another section of Civil Service Knolls. It hovered for a while above the imposing two-story residence of Judistrator Wisant, took a swing around the three-story one of Securitor Harker, but in the end drifted down to investigate a faintly glowing upstairs window in another three-story house.
Inside the window an athletically handsome matron, mother of five, was leisurely preparing for bed. She was thinking, rather self-satisfiedly, that (1) she had completed all preparations for her family’s participation in the Twilight Tranquillity Festival tomorrow, high point of the community year; (2) she had thrown just the right amount of cold water on her eldest daughter’s infatuation for the unsuitable boy visiting next door (and a hint to the hypnotherapist before her daughter’s next session would do the rest); and (3) she truly didn’t look five years older than her eldest daughter.
There was a tap at the window.
The matron started, pulling her robe around her, then craftily waved off the light. It had instantly occurred to her that the unsuitable boy might have had the audacity to try to visit her daughter illicitly and have mistaken bedroom windows—she had read in magazine articles that such wild lascivious young men actually existed in parts of America, though—thank Placidity!—not as re
gular residents of Civil Service Knolls.
She walked to the window and abruptly waved it to full transparency and then with a further series of quick sidewise waves brought the room’s lights to photoflood brilliance.
At first she saw nothing but the thick foliage of the sycamore a few yards outside.
Then it seemed to her as if there were an eddy in the massed greenery. The leaves seemed to shift and swirl.
Then a face appeared in the eddy—a green face with the fanged grin of a devil and hotly glowing eyes that looked like twin peepholes into Hell.
The matron screamed, spun around and sprinted into the hall, shouting the local security number toward the phone, which her scream triggered into ear-straining awareness.
From beyond the window came peals of cold maniacal laughter.
Yes, fear had come to Civil Service Knolls—in fact, horror would hardly be too strong a term.
Some men lead perfect lives—poor devils!
—Notebooks of A.S.
Judistrator Wisant was awakened by a familiar insistent tingling in his left wrist. He reached out and thumbed a button. The tingling stopped. The screen beside the bed glowed into life with the handsome hatchet face of his neighbor Securitor Harker. He touched another button, activating the tiny softspeaker and micromike relays at his ear and throat.
“Go ahead, Jack,” he murmured.
Two seconds after his head had left the pillow a faint light had sprung from the walls of the room. It increased now by easy stages as he listened to a terse secondhand account of the two most startling incidents to disturb Civil Service Knolls since that tragic episode ten years ago when the kindergarten hypnotherapist went crazy and called attention to her psychosis only by the shocking posthypnotic suggestions she implanted in the toddlers’ minds.
Judistrator Wisant was a large, well-built, shaven-headed man. His body, half covered now by the lapping sheet, gave the impression of controlled strength held well in reserve. His hands were big and quiet. His face was a compassionate yet disciplined mask of sanity. No one ever met him and failed to be astounded when they learned afterward that it was his wife, Beth, who had been the aberrating school hypnotherapist and who was now a permanent resident of the nearby mental hospital of Serenity Shoals.
The bedroom was as bare and impersonal as a gymnasium locker room. Screen, player, two short bedside shelves of which one was filled with books and tapes and neatly stacked papers, an uncurtained darkened windoor leading to a small outside balcony and now set a little ajar, the double bed itself exactly half slept in—that about completed the inventory, except for two 3-D photographs on the other bedside shelf of two smiling, tragic-eyed women who looked enough alike to be sisters of about twenty-seven and seventeen. The photograph of the elder bore the inscription, “To my Husband, With all my Witchy Love. Beth,” and of the younger, “To her Dear Daddikins from Gabby.”
The topmost of the stacked papers was a back cover cut from a magazine demurely labeled Individuality Unlimited: Monthly Bulletin. The background was a cluster of shadowy images of weird and grim beings: vampires, werewolves, humanoid robots, witches, murderesses, “Martians,” mask-wearers, naked brains with legs. A central banner shouted: NEXT MONTH: ACCENT THE MONSTER IN YOU! In the lower left-hand corner was a small sharp photo of a personable young man looking mysterious, with the legend “David Cruxon: Your Monster Mentor.” Clipped to the page was a things-to-do-tomorrow memo in Joel Wisant’s angular script: “10 ack emma: Individuality Unlimited hearing. Warn them on injunction.”
Wisant’s gaze shifted more than once to this item and to the two photographs as he patiently heard out Harker’s account. Finally he said, “Thanks, Jack. No, I don’t think it’s a prankster—what Mr. Fredericks and Mrs. Ames report seeing is no joke-shop scare-your-friends illusion. And I don’t think it’s anything that comes in any way from Serenity Shoals, though the overcrowding there is a problem and we’re going to have to do something about it. What’s that? No, it’s nobody fooling around in an antigravity harness—they’re too restricted. And we know it’s nothing from outside—that’s impossible. No, the real trouble, I’m afraid, is that it’s nothing at all—nothing material. Does the name Mattoon mean anything to you? . . .
“I’m not surprised, it was a hundred years ago. But a town went mad because of an imaginary prowler, there was an epidemic of insane fear. That sort of thing happening today could be much worse. Are you familiar with Report K? . . .
“No matter, I can give you the gist of it. You’re cleared for it and ought to have it. But you are calling on our private line, aren’t you? This stuff is top restricted. . . .
“Report K is simply the true annual statistics on mental health in America. Adjusted ones showing no significant change have been issued through the usual channels. Jack, the real incidence of new psychoses is up 15 percent in the last eight months. Yes, it is pretty staggering and I am a close-mouthed old dog. No, it’s been pretty well proved that it isn’t nerve viruses or mind war, much as the Kremlin boys would like to see us flip and despite those irrational but persistent rumors of a Mind Bomb. Analysis is not complete, but the insanity surge seems to be due to a variety of causes—things that we’ve let get out of hand and must deal with drastically.”
As Wisant said those last words he was looking at the “Accent the Monster” banner on the Individuality Unlimited Bulletin. His hand took a stylus, crossed out the “Warn them on” in his memo, underlined “injunction” three times and added an exclamation point.
Meanwhile he continued, “As far as Mr. Fredericks and Mrs. Ames are concerned, here’s your procedure. First, instruct them to tell no one about what they thought they saw—tell them it’s for the public safety—and direct them to see their hypnotherapists. Same instructions to family members and anyone to whom they may have talked. Second, find the names of their hypnotherapists, call them and tell them to get in touch with Dr. Andreas Snowden at Serenity Shoals—he’s up on Report K and will know what reassurance techniques or memory-wiping to advise. I depend on Snowden a lot—for that matter he’s going to be with us tomorrow when we go up against Individuality Unlimited. Third, don’t let anything leak to the press—that’s vital. We must confine this outbreak of delusions before any others are infected. I don’t have to tell you, jack, that I have a reason to feel very deeply about a thing like this.” His gaze went to the photo of his wife. “That’s right, Jack, we’re sanitary engineers of the mind, you and I—we hose out mental garbage!”
A rather frosty smile came into his face and stayed there while he listened again to Harker.
After a bit he said, “No, I wouldn’t think of missing the Tranquillity Festival—in fact they’ve got me leading part of it. Always proud to—and these community occasions are very important in keeping people sane. Gabby? She’s looking forward to it too, as only a pretty, sweet-minded girl of seventeen can who’s been chosen Tranquillity Princess. She really makes it for me. And now hop to it, Jack, while this old man grabs himself some more shut-eye. Remember that what you’re up against is delusions and hallucinations, nothing real.”
Wisant thumbed off the phone. As his head touched the pillow and the light in the room started to die, he nodded twice, as if to emphasize his last remark.
Serenity Shoals, named with a happy unintended irony, is a sizable territory in America’s newest frontier: the Mountains of Madness.
—Notebooks of A.S.
While the scant light that filtered past the windoor died, the eddy in the darkness swung away from the house of Judistrator Wisant and sped with a kind of desperation toward the sea. The houses and lawns gave out. The wooded knolls became lower and sandier and soon gave way to a wide treeless expanse of sand, holding a half-dozen large institutional buildings and a tent city besides. The buildings were mostly dark, but with stripes of dimly lit windows marking stairwells and corridors; the tent city likewise had its dimly lit streets. Beyond them both the ghostly breakers of the Pacific were barely visib
le in the moonlight.
Serenity Shoals, which has been called a “sandbox for grownups,” was one of twenty-first-century America’s largest mental hospitals and now it was clearly filled beyond any planned capacity. Here dwelt the garden-variety schizos, manics, paranoids, brain-damageds, a few exotic sufferers from radiation-induced nerve sickness and spaceflight-gendered gravitational dementia and cosmic shock, and a variety of other special cases—but really all of them were simply the people who for one reason or another found it a better or at least more bearable bargain to live with their imaginings rather than even pretend to live with what society called reality.
Tonight Serenity Shoals was restless. There was more noise, more laughter and chatter and weeping, more movement of small lights along the corridors and streets, more shouts and whistles, more unscheduled night parties and night wanderings of patients and night expeditions of aides, more beetlelike scurryings of sand-cars with blinking headlights, more emergencies of all sorts. It may have been the general overcrowding, or the new batch of untrained nurses and aides, or the rumor that lobotomies were being performed again, or the two new snackbars. It may even have been the moonlight—Luna disturbing the “loonies” in the best superstitious tradition.
For that matter, it may have been the eddy in the darkness that was the cause of it all.
Along the landward side of Serenity Shoals, between it and the wasteland bordering Civil Service Knolls, stretched a bright new wire fence, unpleasantly but not lethally electrified—one more evidence that Serenity Shoals was having to cope with more than its quota.
Back and forth along the line of the fence, though a hundred yards above, the eddy in the darkness beat and whirled, disturbing the starlight. There was an impression of hopeless yearning about its behavior, as if it wanted to reach its people but could not pass over the boundary.
From the mangy terrace between the permanent buildings and the nominally temporary tents, Director Andreas Snowden surveyed his schizo-manic domain. He was an elderly man with sleepy eyes and unruly white hair. He frowned, sensing an extra element in the restlessness tonight. Then his brow cleared and smiling with tender cynicism, he recited to himself:
A Day in the Life Page 17