Star SHort Novels - [Anthology]

by Edited By Frederik Pohl

  “What about Russia?” somebody wanted to know. “Has there been any protest filed about what happened this afternoon?”

  “It’s hard to tell for sure about Russia—her news sources are pretty well bottled up—but Matthews got a cable through. There hasn’t been any protest—they’ve got trouble of their own nearer home. They’re shrinking, and shrinking fast. The Chinese are shrinking too, nowhere near so fast though. The ratio is about four to one, Matthews says. The Japanese are jittery as hell, but the Chinese seem to think it’s a great joke.”

  “Who on?” Mayberry asked.

  “Matthews didn’t say.”

  “If this keeps up,” Mayberry said, stroking his black, satyr’s beard, now about the size of a number-two paintbrush, “we aren’t going to have a man’s world any longer.”

  “A child’s world?” Hemworth asked.

  “Women and children’s.”

  “Why women? They’re shrinking as fast as the men from all reports. The world’s going to belong to the kids, obviously.”

  “Indirectly, yes. Physically, they’ll have the upper hand— but they’ll turn to their mothers for advice as they’ve always done. The world of the adult male is done for. Hemworth is probably one of its last representatives.”

  Oren, who had been too weary to take any part in the discussion, now suggested that we have something to eat and go to bed. Hemworth volunteered to get the food together for us. He had just left the room when two heavy explosions rocked the building. Most of us were knocked off our feet. I fell heavily, the glass in my hand breaking with a clatter which was lost in the crash of breaking windows. My first thought was of Russian retaliation. The sounds were those of explosives near at hand. We struggled to our feet and stood for a minute without speaking, waiting for the next blast. I noticed that my hand was bleeding badly from the broken glass.

  While we were waiting, Wilbur Oren and a half-dozen of the older Chilekings burst in, frightened, we believed. They were; but they were defiant, too.

  “No one’s ever going to be killed again by that gun,” young Oren shouted.

  “What gun?” his father asked.

  “The one that sunk theStalingrad. I’ve seen to that. And I’m going to fix every other gun in the United States.”

  The boy was obviously in a state of psychic shock. His skin was pale, pupils dark and dilated, voice pitched in a high monotone. “We blew it sky high. Now figure out some other way to kill people.”

  “Wilbur,” his father said, “how do you expect us to protect ourselves in case of attack?”

  “There won’t be any attack,” Wilbur said. “We’ll give other countries a chance to destroy their weapons—if they won’t do it themselves, we’ll do it for them.”

  “Wilbur, my boy,” Oren said in a fatherly squeak, “you are not yourself. You need rest. Now you run along-”

  Wilbur stopped him in midsentence. “I’m not taking orders from you any longer. We’ve taken a vow”—he indicated the group of Chilekings about him—”not to stop until every gun and bomb in the United States is destroyed. You can’t make them without us, and you can’t stop us from destroying the ones you have. Can you?” he asked.

  Oren searched the faces of his fellow officers looking for help.

  “Can you?” Wilbur persisted, picking his father up bodily and holding him so that their faces were on a level. “Can you, Daddy?”

  “No,” Oren said, “I can’t.”

  With that Oren set his father down, not gently, and with his band of big-headed, soft-faced Chilekings at his heels turned and lumbered, in the awkward way the blown-up children have for the first two or three weeks, out of the “building.

  And he was as good as his word, better than his word. Without him the Second Children’s Crusade (which has swept the world with all the fanaticism and a thousand times the effectiveness of the First) might never have been. The moral shock, if that is what it was, which Wilbur Oren received the day he saw the human suffering caused by the shots he fired at the Stalingrad gave him a drive, an eloquence which carried all before him.

  * * * * * * * *

  It has been my plan to speak only in passing of those events of which I do not have a firsthand knowledge. The first Chileking Demilitarization Mission to Russia is an example. I was not a member of this Mission and much has been written of it by those who were. I propose to say only what is necessary concerning this, and like events, to fill in the background for my very personal eyewitness account. Chronologically I am far ahead of myself in mentioning this Mission at all. But having mentioned it, I will dispose of it now. The American Chilekings under Wilbur Oren—and I do mean under, for he dominated them as only hero-worshiping children are capable of being dominated—were fanatically set on the destruction of all armaments—so set, that when they did not find immediate like-mindedness in the Russian Chilekings they proceeded without a minute’s hesitation and with childlike logic and brutality to blast a large section of the Russian countryside to a moonlike bareness. And the Russian Chilekings, for they were in complete control there, accepted this act as children do the losing of a game. It had been played, they had lost, and, since it had not seemed a very interesting game in the first place, they did not care to play it over in an effort to try for a win the second time. Children, we discovered, have none of an adult’s normal pride. They have short memories. They are incapable of the concentrated effort which a retaliatory program requires. And, except for the mesmeric power exercised over them by Wilbur Oren, I doubt that we would have experienced this long period of Demilitarization. The land is still strewn with the wreckage effected by this one Chileking. Forts, garrisons, training fields, factories, ammunition stores, bomb depots, the result of years of patriotic and scientific effort were all smashed in a decade. And not only in America —everywhere.

  In a sense it was our fault—this world-wide destruction. We had permitted our children to form “pen leagues,” to correspond with children of other countries, to exchange handiwork. We had let the sense of nationality become undermined in them. They had begun to feel like a “band of brothers,” these children of the world. [In our schools and churches, in spite of the efforts of clear thinkers from 1940 on, there had been a concerted attempt on the part of men and women, themselves without any concept of national dignity or integrity, to indoctrinate our children with a pacific internationalism. Because we took no stock in this un-American fanaticism, we took for granted (as in the old days we took so many things for granted about our children) that our children did not believe in it, either. How wrong and stupid we were! They were inexperienced and impressionable. And they came to power with these ideas of brotherhood and equality simmering in their undeveloped minds. And since those ideas, except for our laxness, would never have been there, it is unfair to blame the destruction of the past fifty years wholly on them. We had our own guilty part to play in the razing of every fort, the demolition of every station for experimenting with guided missiles.]

  Of course it is true that, except for one fact, the entire Demilitarization Program might not have succeeded as it did: if Wilbur Oren had subsequently suffered Subtraction as most Chilekings did, he would not have continued to exercise his enormous power over them. But because he never changed physically nor lessened a whit in his fiery determination to rid the world of what had, at the critical moment of the change, caused him so much suffering, he has remained for all these years the Chileking’s dictator. This, quite probably, although it also is chronologically out of place, is as good a place as any to speak of the varieties of Chilekings and Smalfri that have so far made their appearance. Subtraction has taken place at almost every age—at ages when the size loss was so small as to be almost unnoticeable. The youngest Subtracted person, in so far as our records go, was four. The oldest, ninety-two. Subtraction seems to take place when a certain degree of “maturity” has been reached; although the word “maturity” is a controversial one (to use an adjective which dates me). Some, those who
are late Subtractees for the most part, insist that Subtraction simply indicates a kind of rigidity, an end of spiritual and mental growth. Some four- and six-year-olds, born without curiosity, without the ability or desire to enlarge themselves spiritually or mentally, shrink early, they say. Most are Subtracted in their forties, with a considerable number experiencing the change in the decades on each side of forty. Some few are never Subtracted at all. These people have always struck me as being childlike, in spite of the fact that some have been eminent in their professions, poets, scientists, musicians, and so forth. These un-Subtracted adults have always, both by virtue of their size and the quality of their minds, been very much at home with the Chilekings. And alas, they, who might have been expected to caution, to guide, and restrain the Chilekings in their excesses, have been the very ones, out of the entire adult population, who have had the least inclination to do so.

  * * * * * * * *

  So then, there were Smalfri of all ages. Men of fifty the same size as early Shrinkees of eight and ten; and of course, the same size as the un-Shrunk toddlers of two and three. (These poor babies, the real babies, never knew quite what to make of us whiskered pygmies of their own size. There we stood, eyes on a level with theirs, but with no desire to catch frogs, suck lollipops or play in the mud.) There was prevalent in the first years of the Chileking Era a slang labelling of the small which has since been superseded by more exact terms. “Real Babes,” “No Babes,” and “Go Babes,” were the phrases used then. I was a “Go Babe,” as were all shrunken adults. “No Babes” were those who had experienced Subtraction while young and who oftentimes were confused with the “Real Babes”—those who, as is no doubt plain in the terminology itself, were real babies; that is, veritable infants.

  Chilekings also had their classifications. Amplification took place at various ages—occasionally very early, occasionally very late. Sometimes, though this is unusual, a person who had never been amplified, who had accomplished what was once considered a “normal” growth and who was expected to finish life without ever becoming a Smalfri either, was belatedly overamplified, swollen to gigantic proportions. This was quite unusual however and there have never been enough of these oddities about to be more than passing curiosities.

  Occasionally [Great understatement.] in this narrative I find myself ruminating about matters and meanings which rightly have no part in an “eyewitness” account. The matters I have been discussing in the above paragraphs are common knowledge to all now alive and as such have no particular interest. However, since this manuscript will be published only in a form approved by the Chileking Commission for Preservation of Old Records, I needn’t worry about the inclusion of matter extraneous to the central purpose of my narrative. It will be stricken out, anyway, if not wanted. [Right.] In view of this I want to make a final point, for my own satisfaction. Although the rationale of these processes has not yet been completely understood, yet it is clear that thereis a rationale. It was and is no hit-or-miss matter. There is some meaning in these physical alterations, a correspondence of some kind between inner growth or shrinkage and the outer waxing or waning. But exactly what this correspondence is, we are not yet able to say, though many studies are now in progress. One change in attitudes obvious to all, has been caused by the discrepancy which now exists between the outer appearance and the inner reality. In the old days, “big” meant adult. “Big” can mean anything now, so far as the interior person is concerned. “Big” means “big” now, nothing more. So, by analogy, “black” is coming to mean “black”; “white,” “white”; “little,” “little,” and nothing more. The visual surface is less and less meaningful. The result has been, I’m afraid, an undermining of standards. If things are not what they appear, it is very easy to call them what you like. And what you “like” is seldom what’s good for you.

  * * * * * * * *

  This is all beside the point—which is to report what I saw with my own eyes; but it is difficult for a thinking, feeling man to make a mechanical recording machine of himself at this late date in life. What I next saw with my own eyes was that roomful of gnomes expressing pity to Oren for the derangement of his son—pity, as later events have proved, which was entirely uncalled for. Wilbur Oren had taken that night the first steps which would little by little elevate him to a position as dictator of the Chilekings—and that meant of Smalfri as well.

  Hemworth, alone, wasted no time on expressions of sympathy but went outside to examine the damage caused by this latest blast. The rest of us were too exhausted mentally and physically to care what had happened.

  The knowledge that if we went to sleep we would awaken the size of gnats would not have kept us from sleeping that night. We turned in where we were, cuddling up like a cage-ful of wizened monkeys trying to keep warm on a chilly evening. The fire died out. Getting logs into it was not worth the labor. Some had a drink before sleeping. It was a mistake. We had not yet learned to adjust our intake to our reduced capacities. That night, which should have been one of prayer and contemplation, was one instead of drunken snores and sodden sleep.

  I was still sleeping next morning when David came in. “Come on out, Daddy,” he said when he had awakened me, “and see how quiet it is.”

  I got up without awakening the others and limped along beside David, stiff and sore. (The Chilekings have never, to this day, learned that our legs are shorter than theirs. They either leave us far behind them, unless we jog trot to keep up with them or, impatient with our slowness, grab our arms and pull us along at a pace which is both physically painful and psychically hateful.) That morning with David was my first, though since many times reaffirmed, experience of this. “Can’t you hurry up, Daddy?” he called back fretfully, as if my steps were small out of a deliberate desire on my part to impede him.

  But he was right about the quietness. Not a boat moved on the bay, not a train-on a rail. No factory whistles sounded. No planes flashed across the sky. On the highways there were a few slow-moving autos. It was one of those fine, clear, windy mornings common to San Francisco in the fall when, in spite of the abundance of water, there is a tang of desert dryness in the air. On such days I have often thought I could look from the Presidio into the open windows of the office buildings in San Francisco and read the letters rolling out from under the typists’ fingers. In spite of this wonderful magnifying clarity, there was nothing to be seen on the morning of November 2nd, except a dead world—or an apparently dead world. For I knew that behind those solid and shining walls there was hidden an emotional activity so quivering and feverishly alive as to put into the shade all of yesterday’s merely mechanical movement.

  As I stood there at David’s knee looking, pitying, speculating, Mayberry came out to us. He pulled his wrist watch, which he could no longer keep on his arm, out of some placket or fold of his clothes. It was near eight o’clock.

  He looked about the Post. “It didn’t take long for discipline to disappear, did it? Oren’s sick. I’m calling all officers and men together at eleven. Usual routines are impossible, of course, but we’d better decide what we are to do—or what we can do. San Francisco is going to need martial law before the day’s over—only God knows who she can get to maintain it.”

  “I say,” somebody called, “I don’t think I look so bad.” It was Hemworth, scrambling awkwardly down the steps of the officers’ barracks where he had gone to sleep, “like a man,” instead of sleeping with us Smalfri on the messroom floor. He was bundled up in a towel. “How do you like my swaddling clothes?” he asked jauntily. He took a look around. “Well, boys, it has, I take it, really struck.”

  It had struck. That day, I suppose, was the most momentous the world has ever known. Everywhere on that day, as later investigation proved, men and women were Subtracted, and children inflated. On remote South American rancheros, in equatorial jungles, in the Ukraine, even in the Vatican. There were thousands of suicides that day: men and women who thought they were alone in their gnomish reduction and pr
eferred to die rather than face the world so dwarfed. There were many deaths not self-sought; on ships where wholesale reduction made it impossible to bring the ship into port. The recent teledrama, “Subtraction at Sea,” has made magnificent use of the horrors of such a situation. There was heroism at sea, too. The English passenger ship Laurentia with 1200 aboard came safely into New York harbor in spite of the fact that every man and woman on board was Subtracted.

  The wars that were in progress that day died in mid-stride. What could men do with weapons they could no longer handle? Of what value were planes to men who could no longer control them? Russia was, I suppose it has been agreed, the most seriously affected. She had in India with her army of occupation, no children. The Indians had on the other hand, innumerable Chilekings available who, because of the agelong oriental philosophy of parental regard, were far more easily controlled by the Indian Smalfri than were Chilekings elsewhere. These Chilekings, together with the Indian adults, who as a whole were very tardy shrinkers, placed almost the entire Russian army there in prison camps. Then, with the breakdown of all international transportation, and with conditions in Russia as chaotic as elsewhere, Russia simply abandoned this expeditionary force of hers. Today they have become thoroughly assimilated into the Indian nation. The Chileking delegate from India to the last International Congress here was the son of one of these reduced Russian soldiers.