The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy

by Edited by The Playboy Editors

  It was true. She kept tapping on the prison wall, spelling out messages of comfort and chin up. He kissed her lingeringly and with full conviction.

  “Going to get another hour of work in, sweets. If Juridical Jonny hasn’t gone to the bathroom on my IBM. Sleep tight. Love you fulsomely.”

  Two hours later Killer Quarles was still proclaiming what a loud man he was and Sheriff Slate’s hands were still hovering like trapped mynas over his holsters. As Walter’s hands hovered like trapped and irreverently screeching mynas over his typewriter. He had placed the night covering over the cage and Jonnikins was tomb still, but Walter was excruciatingly aware of the bird, heard its roaringly silent comments on the state of letters in the nation and the accumulation of clanking deadlines for the grubs. Below, deep down from these Santa Monica hills, in the valley of collectors and disbursers who had come to a standstill waiting for Walter’s new script, the valley which, like an impervious mouth breathed with chesty beggings for more Yancy shoot-downs, all the lights were blinking in a rhythm Walter took to be one, two, one-two. Over the typewriter keys Walter’s fingers twitched, one, two, one-two. There was nothing for it. He got up with a growl, crossed the room, whipped the covering from the cage.

  Immediately the bright pellet eyes were on him and the festering black throat was going strong, one, two, one-two. Then other throaty pulses. Highs, lows, chirpy middle-range tones.

  Walter reached for a pad and pencil and began to make notations, dots for the short and hyphenated sounds, dashes for the sustained ones.

  The bird sang, the pencil flew.

  When the sheet was half covered with these markings, Walter went to the bookcase and ran his finger along the shelf with the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He took down the “M” volume. He sat at the desk and opened this volume to the entry for “Morse Code.” There it was, from A to Z.

  He wrote for a bit, put shaking hand to wet forehead, said, “My God, my God,” and wrote some more.

  The bird sang, gruh-greeg, gurree.

  In a husky, strangulated voice, Walter began to read the words on his pad:

  “Call yourself a writer? You haven’t got one drop of talent. You’re an uninspired hack. You couldn’t write your way out of a paper bag. Your badmen and sheriffs are all finger-crooking fairies pretending to talk tough. Fairies who can’t stop talking garbage and for once reach for their guns . . .”

  The bird stared bold and sang, gurree, gurrah.

  “Oh, my living, forgiving God,” Walter whispered. “It is high time that woman left this house. The malice, the malice she bears me.”

  Then he was filled with a fury. He was remembering what Henny Juris had done to the squirrel that night he came back to quarters and once again found his sheets, his shirts, the letters from his fiancée and his money indiscriminately gone to the bathroom on. Henny had taken Rumpy up by the neck and thrown it from the barracks and far into the night.

  At this moment Walter felt that he had been gone to the bathroom on from head to foot.

  He went to the cage, opened it and reached in for the sooty concertizer. He got his hand firmly on the black, rotten throat, but he could not squeeze, he couldn’t. He took his enormous compact burden to the picture window and cranked open the mobile pane to one side and pushed the outside screen open. He held the struggling, fluttering bird out through the window, toward the blue and red banana trees.

  “Back where you came from,” Walter whispered. “Even if you have to change trains.”

  He loosened his fingers. Jonnikins flew off in a whir of foul feathers, singing festeringly, gurrah, gurree.

  Walter stared after him, breathing heavy. He felt full of felony but there was relief in it, release. At last he took up his pencil and pad from the desk, along with the volume of the Britannica, and started down the hall to the bedroom, down past Daisy-Dear’s room from which came the sounds of histrionic humming and drawers being slammed.

  Walter had the strong feeling that here now was something tangible that Christine should know. Her horizons were not wide enough, praise be, to allow for the full working out of truly poisonous processes. She had to know how far Daisy-Dear had overstayed her human welcome, how close to absolute crisis they’d all come.

  He stood over her bed and said softly, “Chris? Hon? Hear me? Something you should see.”

  He listened to her weighty, troubled breathing. She was not snoring, really, but there was this low rasping and catching in her throat. Irregular. Sometimes slow, sometimes hurried. Vague, dissipating smile on her face.

  He stiffened.

  Listened more carefully to the smothered sounds.

  What?

  One, two . . . ?

  He listened some more.

  He sat down on the edge of the bed and began to make notations, dashes for the long rasps, dots for the short, run-together ones. His hand was shaking so much that at one point the pencil slipped from his fingers.

  He flipped open the reference volume and tried to focus his eyes on the chart. Forced his rebellious hand to write, letter by letter, word by word.

  When he had enough lines transcribed, Walter Jack Commice held the pad up and began to read with disheveled lips, feeling that he had been gone to the bathroom on by the world’s population of squirrels, birds and wives:

  “Who ever said you’re a writer? There’s not a drop of talent in your veins. You’re the hack of hacks. You couldn’t write home for money. All your tough guys are absurd little fairies and that’s why . . .”

  My God . . .

  Chris breathed suckingly, snugly, privately, smilingly, one, two, one-two . . .

  <>

  ~ * ~

  THE SENSIBLE MAN

  BY AVRAM DAVIDSON

  Avram Davidson is a winner of science fiction’s highest honor, the Hugo Award (named for sci-fi pioneer Hugo Gernsback), as well as the Mystery Writers of America Award. He is a past editor of the respected Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. His story which follows, “The Sensible Man” was published in the February 1959 issue of playboy, two years before the first human being orbited the earth in a space capsule. The story, by thus graduating from science fiction to science-fact through the courtesy of history, gains new dimensions without losing any of its original irony and Davidsonian bite.

  ~ * ~

  ED BAKER STAYED DUMB, though puzzled, to the last —which was when Randal Wilcox put the last can of microfilm in the suitcase. Randal had to lift up the sheaf of papers to fit it in, and Baker recognized the one on top and he gave a startled squeak. He put out one hand. “The Project Director--” He said that much before Randal Wilcox shot him.

  It was only in fiction, Wilcox thought, as he finished packing, that the man-about-to-kill gave a full resume of his reasons to the victim-select. But there really wasn’t enough time, so poor Ed Baker had to die only partly informed. The glimpse of the top paper, the one on the liquid oxygen gauge, had told him a lot. And he wouldn’t have come all the way up here after his lab partner in the Project if he hadn’t suspected —well, something.

  “Randy,” he’d said, half-arguing, half-pleading, “this is no time for you to go off like this—fishing?—you heard the news —the Russians--”

  Wilcox at first thought to bluff him, tell him he needed at least a short vacation before the satellite program—Project Moonbeam—went into accelerated activity, as it was bound to do with the Sputnik beeping away like an alarm bell in the night. Let Ed think that the suitcase open on the bed meant he was still unpacking. But then he realized, with one of the intuitive flashes which so often came to help him in tight places, that there was a better way. He continued packing.

  “You haven’t even asked the Project Director for a leave of absence,” Ed stumbled on. A good scientist, Ed—but awfully slow about everything else. “Or he’d have asked me.”

  So Randal said nothing further to his lab partner. He just shot him.

  ~ * ~

  Wilcox got across the border w
ith no difficulty, of course. The Embassy in Ottawa hadn’t expected him, but they at once provided a car which took him directly to Halifax, where there was a Russian ship. No tiresome business about passports or anything of that sort. A week later he was in Moscow.

  Grisha Ivanov said to him, “Of course you are very welcome, Mr. Baker. But would you mind telling us where your partner, Mr. Wilcox is? The disappearance of both of you has been noted, but it would seem that only you have left the United States.”

  “That is true—but I am Wilcox. I thought that if we both vanished and I posed as Baker it would confuse things at that end. Which would help things at this end,” Randal said. And he told the Soviet science chief that Ed Baker was in his, Wilcox’, car, under the waters of Lake Tippset.

  Ivanov didn’t even blink. “It is too bad,” he said, “that you weren’t able to convince Mr. Baker to accompany you. However--”

  “There was no time.” Randy was somewhat nettled. “And Ed doesn’t—didn’t—convince so easily.”

  The Russian nodded. “And what’s, ah, ‘convinced’ you, Mr. Wilcox? You are known to us only as a scientist—not as a Leninist scientist.”

  Wilcox smiled on one side of his face. It was a young face— young and smooth—but hard. “My politics are those of any sensible man—of every sensible man. For most of my life the democracies—pardon me—the capitalist nations—were in the lead. So I was with them. Now the lead has passed to you, so I am with you.” He smiled again, the same way. “If you’ll have me . . .”

  The Russian smiled, too, this time. A fleeting-swift smile. His face was neither as young nor as smooth as the American’s, but it was just as hard. “We are very glad to have you ... I have been able to give the information you brought with you only the most hasty examination, but—tell me: Can you build a satellite to hold a man—keep him alive while he circles between Earth and Moon and observes both—and then return him safely?”

  “No,” said Wilcox.

  “Neither can we . . . that is, not until now. Your information, it would seem, supplies the elements missing in mine. Together . . . but now let us get to work.”

  ~ * ~

  Wilcox had nothing to complain of in his new life. If he asked for personnel, he got personnel. If he requested materials, he received materials. At no time was there any talk of “economy” or “budget” or “making do.” As for his private comforts, they were so well provided for that he never asked.

  It was only a few months from his arrival in his new homeland—the homeland of “every sensible man”—that the Wilcox-Ivanov artificial satellite was ready. He wondered, briefly, how far Project Moonbeam had gotten, with two of its best teammates no longer with it. Still not off the drawing board, probably. He said as much to Grisha Ivanov as they approached the take-off area. The Soviet scientist only grunted.

  “Our man will be rather cramped in his moon,” Randal observed, looking inside. “How long will he stay up, do you suppose?”

  Ivanov shrugged. “Who knows? Two weeks? Six weeks? We shall see.”

  Wilcox nodded. Cramped . . . more cramped than Ed Baker, in his, Randal’s, car under Lake Tippset. Poor old foolish Ed. Had they found him yet? Nothing was said about it here . . . Suddenly Randal’s eyes fell upon a space in the maze of dials and devices. He frowned. “Where is the control to start him back to Earth?” he asked.

  “Removed,” said Grisha, crisply. “Decided against.”

  “Who ‘decided’?” Wilcox demanded, angry. “I--”

  “You? You have nothing to say.” Grisha’s voice was cold. Wilcox looked at him, astonished. “You joined us from opportunism only. Yesterday you betrayed your own country. Tomorrow—and they will very certainly catch up with us, if not tomorrow, then the day after—in which case you will betray us—for the same reason. So you are not trusted. You have nothing to say. The man stays up.”

  Wilcox started to speak, thought better of it. The sensible man never argues. “Very well . . . who is the man, by the way?”

  “You,” said Grisha Ivanov, calmly.

  The Red guards seized Wilcox. “We are giving you the chance to test your own work—the device you enabled us to build. Much of the information will be sent automatically, but some of it you will send. The human brain is by no means obsolete. As long as you send, you will be fed. How long will the food supply last? Who knows how much a man in cislunar space requires? That is part of the experiment . . . No, I do not think you will court suicide by refusing to report. You are, after all, a sensible man.”

  ~ * ~

  Randal Wilcox speeds around the Earth faster than any human has ever sped before. It is very cramped in the satellite he helped build, but it is dangerous for him to try to move, anyhow: he is studded with attachments—needles, tubes, wires, catheters, electrodes, which spring from his flesh. He travels from the southeast in a rapid orbit and sees the planet which was his former home turn and spin beneath him. It is a splendid sight. Meteors dart past him—none, so far, have hit him—but every so often he sends in reports about them. About them and about gamma rays and light refraction and sundry other matters. Whenever his report is transmitted, a light flashes and a fresh supply of liquid food is allowed to drip into his veins.

  The stars blaze hugely. Cloud masses drift across the face of Earth. But very often he can make out clearly the country he betrayed . . . the Gulf, the Rockies, the Great Lakes . . . Whenever he passes over it, he sends out a signal of his own, over and over, until the turning planet tilts and turns its other face to him and shows the ice-capped poles, the Urals, the Caucases . . .

  Everyone hears it. Blip blip blip beep beep beep blip blip blip . . . Everyone knows it is Randal Wilcox, sending out his SOS. But of course no one can help him at all.

  Even if anyone wanted to.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  SOUVENIR

  BY J. G. BALLARD

  J. G. Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930, was interned by the Japanese during World War Two, repatriated to England in 1946, studied medicine at Cambridge, became a copywriter for a London ad agency, an RAF pilot and a science-fiction author. His novels include “The Drowned World” and “The Wind from Nowhere,” and among his short-story collections are “The Voices of Time” “Billenium” and “Passport to Eternity.” “Souvenir” defies pigeonholing. Is it fantasy? Is it science fiction? Does it matter? It doesn’t, of course. All that matters is the quiet, thoroughgoing art Ballard brings to this study of the fate inevitably met, in this imperfect world, by that which is too great, too Godlike, too far beyond our understanding.

  ~ * ~

  On the morning after the storm the body of a drowned giant was washed ashore on the beach five miles to the northwest of the city. The first news of its arrival was brought by a nearby farmer and subsequently confirmed by the local newspaper reporters and the police. Despite this the majority of people, I among them, remained skeptical, but the return of more and more eyewitnesses attesting to the vast size of the giant was finally too much for our curiosity. The library where my colleagues and I were carrying out our research was almost deserted when we set off for the coast shortly after two o'clock, and throughout the day people continued to leave their offices and shops as accounts of the giant circulated around the city.

  By the time we reached the dunes above the beach, a substantial crowd had gathered, and we could see the body lying in the shallow water two hundred yards away. At first the estimates of its size seemed greatly exaggerated. It was then at low tide, and almost all the giant's body was exposed, but he appeared to be little larger than a basking shark. He lay on his back with his arms at his sides, in an attitude of repose, as if asleep on the mirror of wet sand, the reflection of his blanched skin fading as the water receded. In the clear sunlight his body glistened like the white plumage of a seabird.

  Puzzled by this spectacle and dissatisfied with the matter-of-fact explanations of the crowd, my friends and I stepped down from the dunes onto the s
hingle. Everyone seemed reluctant to approach the giant, but half an hour later two fishermen in wading boots walked out across the sand. As their diminutive figures neared the recumbent body, a sudden hubbub of conversation broke out among the spectators. The two men were completely dwarfed by the giant. Although his heels were partly submerged in the sand, the feet rose to at least twice the fishermen's height, and we immediately realized that this drowned leviathan had the mass and dimensions of the largest sperm whale.

  Three fishing smacks had arrived on the scene and with keels raised remained a quarter of a mile offshore, the crews watching from the bows. Their discretion deterred the spectators on the shore from wading out across the sand. Impatiently everyone stepped down from the dunes and waited on the single slopes, eager for a closer view. Around the margins of the figure the sand had been washed away, forming a hollow, as if the giant had fallen out of the sky. The two fishermen were standing between the immense plinths of the feet, waving to us like tourists among the columns of some water-lapped temple on the Nile. For a moment I feared that the giant was merely asleep and might suddenly stir and clap his heels together, but his glazed eyes stared skyward, unaware of the minuscule replicas of himself between his feet.