A Treasury of Great Science Fiction 1

by Anthony Boucher (ed)

  Clarissa smiled and leaned forward into his arms, putting her cheek against his shoulder. From there, unseen, she murmured, “I’ll always ‘love you, dear.”

  For a long moment he did not speak. Then, holding her in one arm, not watching her face, he began.

  “Ever since we met, Clarissa darling, things have been happening that—worried me. About you. I’m going to tell you if I can. I think there’s something, or someone, very powerful, watching over you and forcing you into some course, toward some end I can’t do more than guess at. I’m going to try to tell you exactly why I think so, and if I have to stop without finishing, you’ll know I don’t stop on purpose. I’ll have been stopped.”

  Leasing paused, a little awed at his own daring in defying that Someone whose powerful hand he had felt hushing him before. But no pad of silence was pressed against his lips this time and he went on wonderingly, expecting each word he spoke to be the last. Clarissa lay silent against his shoulder, breathing quietly, not moving much. He could not see her face.

  And so he told her the story, very simply and without references to his own bewilderment or to the wild conclusions he had reached. He told her about the moment in the park when she had been drawn away down a funnel of luminous rings. He reminded her of the vanishment of the summerhouse. He told of the dreamlike episode on the hallway here, when he called irrationally into the mirrored dimness, or thought he called. He told her of their strange, bemused ride uptown the night before, and how the pattern swung the streets around under their wheels. He told her of his two vivid dreams through which she-yet not she—had moved so assuredly. And then, without drawing any conclusions aloud, he asked her what she was thinking.

  She lay still a moment longer in his arms. Then she sat up slowly, pushing back the smooth dark hair and meeting his eyes with the feverish brilliance that had by now become natural to her.

  “So that’s it,” she said dreamily, and was silent.

  “What is?” he asked almost irritably, yet suffused now with a sense of triumph because the Someone had not silenced him after all, had slipped this once and let the whole story come out into open air at last. Now at last he thought he might learn the truth.

  “Then I was right,” Clarissa went on. “I was fighting something last night. It’s odd, but I never even knew it was there until the moment I began to fight it. Now I know it’s always been there. I wonder—”

  When she did not go on, Leasing said bluntly, “Have you ever realized that . . . that things were different for you? Tell me, Clarissa, what is it you think of when you, when you stand and lock at something trivial so long?”

  She turned her head and gave him a long, grave look that told him more plainly than words that the whole spell was not yet dissolved. She made no answer to the question, but she said.

  “For some reason I keep remembering a fairy story my aunt used to tell me when I was small. I’ve never forgotten it, though it certainly isn’t much of a story. You see—”

  She paused again, and her eyes brightened as he looked, almost as if lights had gone on behind them in a dark room full of mirrors. The look of expectancy which he knew so well tightened the lines of her face for a moment, and she smiled delightedly, without apparent reason and not really seeming to know she smiled.

  “Yes,” she went on. “I remember it well. Once upon a time, in a kingdom in the middle of the forest; a little girl was born. All the people in the country were blind. The sun shone so brightly that none of them could see. So the little girl went about with her eyes shut too, and didn’t even guess~ that such a thing as sight existed.

  “One day as she walked alone in’ the woods she heard a voice beside her. ‘Who are you?’ she asked the voice, and the voice replied, I am your guardian.’ The little girl said, ‘But I don’t need a guardian. I know these woods very well. I was born here.’ The voice said, ‘Ah, you were born here, yes, but you don’t belong here, child. You are not blind like the others.’ And the little girl exclaimed, ‘Blind? What’s that?’

  “I can’t tell you yet,’ the voice answered, ‘but you must know that you are a king’s daughter, born among these humble people as our king’s children sometimes are. My duty is to watch over you and help you to open your eyes when the time comes. But the time is not yet. You are too young—the sun would blind you. So go on about your business, child, and remember I am always here beside you. The day will come when you open your eyes and see.”

  Clarissa paused. Leasing said impatiently, “Well, did she?”

  Clarissa sighed. “My aunt never would finish the story. Maybe that’s why I’ve always remembered it.”

  Leasing started t~ speak. “I don’t think—” But something in Clarissa’s face stopped him. An exalted and enchanted look, that Christmas-morning expression carried to fulfillment, as if the child were awake and remembering what many-lighted, silver-spangled glory awaited him downstairs. She said in a small, clear voice.

  “It’s true. Of course it’s true! All you’ve said, and the fairy tale too. Why; I’m the king’s child. Of course I am!” And she put both hands to her eyes in a sudden childish gesture, as if half expecting the allegory of blindness to be literal.

  “Clarissa!” Leasing said.

  She looked at him with wide, dazzled eyes that scarcely knew him. And for a moment a strange memory came unbidden into his mind and brought terror with it. Alice, walking with the Fawn in the enchanted woods where nothing has a name, walking in friendship with her arm about the Fawn’s neck. And the Fawn’s words when they came to the edge of the woods and memory returned to them both. How it started away from her, shaking off the arm, wildness returning to the eyes that had looked as serenely into Alice’s as Clarissa h-ad looked into his. “Why—I’m a Fawn,” it said in astonishment. “And you’re a Human Child!”

  Alien species.

  “I wonder why I’m not a bit surprised?” murmured Clarissa. “I must have known it all along, really. Oh, I wonder what comes next?”

  Leasing stared at her, appalled. She was very like a child now, too enraptured by the prospect of—of what?—to think of any possible consequences. It frightened him to see how sure she was of splendor to come, and of nothing but good in that splendor. He hated to mar the look of lovely anticipation on her face, but he must. He had wanted her to help him fight this monstrous possibility if she could bring herself to accept it at all. He had not expected instant acceptance and instant rapture. She must fight it—

  “Clarissa,” he said, “think! If it’s true . . . and we may be wrong. . .don’t you see what it means? He. . .they won’t let us be together, Clarissa. We can’t be married.”

  Her luminous eyes turned to him joyously.

  “Of course we’ll be married, darling. They’re only looking after me, don’t you see? Not hurting me, just watching. I’m sure they’d never do anything to hurt me. Why darling, for all we know you may be one of us, too. I wonder if you are. It almost stands to reason, don’t you think? Or why would they have let us fall in love? Oh, darling—”

  Suddenly he knew, that someone was standing behind him. Someone—For one heart-stopping moment he wondered if the jealous god himself had come down to claim Clarissa, and he dared not turn his head. But when Clarissa’s shining eyes lifted to the face beyond his, and showed no surprise, he felt a little reassurance.

  He sat perfectly still. He knew he could not have turned if he wanted. He could only watch Clarissa, and though no words were spoken in that silence, he saw her expression change. The rapturous joy drained slowly out of it. She shook her head, bewilderment and disbelief blurring the ecstasy of a moment before.

  “No?” she said to that standing someone behind him.

  “But I thought—Oh, no, you mustn’t! You wouldn’t! It isn’t fair!”

  And the dazzling dark eyes flooded with sudden tears that doubled their shining. “You can’t, you can’t!” sobbed Clarissa, and flung herself forward upon Leasing, her arms clasping his neck hard as she wept
incoherent protest upon his shoulder.

  His arms closed automatically around her while his mind spun desperately to regain its balance. What had happened? Who—

  Someone brushed by him. The aunt. He knew that, but with no sense of relief even though he had half-expected that more awesome. Someone at whose existence he could still only guess.

  The aunt was bending over them, pulling gently at Clarissa’s shaking shoulder. And after a moment Clarissa’s grip on his neck loosened and she sat up obediently, though still catching her breath in long, uneven sobs that wrung Leasing’s heart.

  He wanted desperately to do or say whatever would comfort her most quickly, but his mind and his body were both oddly slowed, as if there were some force at work in the room which he could not understand. As if he were moving against the momentum of that singing machinery he had fancied he sensed so often—moving against It, while the other two were carried effortlessly on.

  Clarissa let herself be pulled away. She moved as boneleasly as a child, utterly given up to her grief, careless of everything but that. The tears streaked her cheeks and her body drooped forlornly. She held Leasing’s hands until the last, but when he felt her fingers slipping from his the loss of contact told him, queerly, as nothing else quite had power to tell, that this was a final parting. They stood apart over a few feet of carpet, as if inexorable miles lay between them. Miles that widened with every passing second. Clarissa looked at him through her tears, her eyes unbearably bright, her lips quivering, her hands still outstretched and curved from the pressure of his clasp.

  This La all. You have sewed your purpose—now go. Go and forget.

  He did not know what voice had said it, or exactly in what words, but the meaning came back to him clearly now. Go and forget.

  There was strong music in the air. For one last moment. he stood in a world that glittered with beauty and color because it was Clarissa’s, glittered even in this dark apartment with its many, many mirrors. All about him be could see reflecting Clarissa’s from every angle of grief and parting, moving confusedly as she let her hands begin to drop. He saw a score of Clarissa’s dropping their curved hands—but he never saw them fall. One last look at Clarissa’s tears, and then . . . and then—

  Lethe.

  Dyke let his breath out in a long sigh. He leaned back in his creaking chair and looked at Leasing without expression under his light eyebrows. Leasing blinked stupidly back. An instant ago he had stood in Clarissa’s apartment; the touch of her fingers was still warm in his hands. He could hear her caught breath and see the reflections moving confusedly in the mirrors around them—

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “Reflections—Clarissa—I almost remembered something just then—” He sat up and stared at Dyke without seeing him, his brow furrowed. “Reflections,” he said again. “Clarissa—lots of Clarissa’s—but no aunt! I was looking at two women in the mirror, but I didn’t see the aunt! I never saw her—not once! And yet I . . . wait . . . the answer’s there, you know . . . right there, just in reach, if I could only—”

  Then it came to him in a burst of clarity. Clarissa had seen it before him; the whole answer lay in that legend she had told. The Country of the Blind! How could those sightless natives hope to see the king’s messenger who watched over the princess as she walked that enchanted wood? How could he remember what his mind had never been strong enough to comprehend? How could he have seen that guardian except as a presence without shape, a voice without words, moving through its own bright sphere beyond the sight of the blind?

  “Cigarette?” said Dyke, creaking his chair forward.

  Leasing reached automatically across the desk. There was no further sound but the rustle of paper and the scratch of a match, for a little while. They smoked in silence, eying one another. Outside feet went by upon gravel. Men’s voices called distantly, muffled by the night. Crickets were chirping, omnipresent in the dark.

  Presently Dyke let down the front legs of his chair with a thump and reached forward to grind out his unfinished cigarette.

  “All right,” he said. “Now—are you still too dose, or can you look at it objectively?”

  Leasing shrugged. “I can try.”

  “Well, first we can take it as understood—at least for the moment—that such things as these just don’t happen. The story’s full of holes, of course. We could tear it to pieces in ten minutes if we tried.”

  Leasing looked stubborn. “Maybe you think—”

  “I haven’t begun to think yet. We haven’t got to the bottom of the thing, naturally. I don’t believe it really happened exactly as you remember. Man, how could it? The whole story’s still dressed up in a sort of allegory, and we’ll have to dig deeper still to uncover the bare facts. But just as it stands—what a problem! Now I wonder—”

  His voice died. He shook cut another cigarette and scratched a match abstractedly. Through the first cloud of exhaled smoke lie went on.

  “Take it all as read, just for a minute. Unravel the allegory in the allegory-the king’s daughter born in the Country of the Blind. You know, Leasing, one thing strikes me that you haven’t noticed yet. Ever think how completely childish Clarissa seems? Her absorption in trivial things, for instance. Her assumption that the forces at work about her must be protective, parental. Yes, even that glow you spoke of that affected everything you saw and heard when you were with her. A child’s world is like that. Strong, clear colors. Nothing’s ugly because they have no basis for comparison. Beauty and ugliness mean nothing to a child. I can remember a bit from my own childhood—that peculiar enchantment over whatever interested me. Wordsworth, you know—‘Heaven lies about us in our infancy,’ and all the rest. And yet she was adult enough, wasn’t she? Past twenty, say?”

  He paused, eying the tip of his cigarette. “You know,” he said, “it sounds like a simple case of arrested development, doesn’t it? Now, now, wait a minute! I only said sounds like it. You’ve got sense enough to recognize a moron when you see one. I don’t say Clarissa was anything like that. I’m just getting at something—

  “I’m thinking about my own little boy. He’s eleven now, and getting adjusted, but when he first started school he had an I. Q. away above the rest of the class, and they bored him. He didn’t want to play with the other kids. Got to hanging around the house reading until my wife and I realized something had to be done about it. High I. Q. or not, a kid needs other kids to play with. He’ll never learn to make the necessary social adjustments unless he learns young. Can’t grow up psychically quite straight unless be grows up with his own kind. Later on a high I. Q. will be a fine thing, but right now it’s almost a handicap to the kid.” He paused. “Well, see what I mean?”

  Leasing shook his head. “I can’t see anything. I’m still dizzy.”

  “Clarissa,” said Dyke slowly, “might—in the allegory, mind you, not in any real sense—be the king’s daughter. She might have been born of . . . well, call it royal blood . . . into a race of inferiors, and never guess it until she began to develop beyond their level. Maybe the . . . the king felt the same as I did about my own child—she needed the company of inferiors . . . of children—while she was growing up. She couldn’t develop properly among—adults. Adults, you see, so far developed beyond anything we know that when they’re in the same room with you, you can’t even remember what they looked like.”

  It took Leasing a good minute after Dyke stopped speaking to realize just what he meant. Then he sat up abruptly and said, “Oh, no! It can’t be that. Why, I’d have known—”

  “You ought,” Dyke remarked abstractedly, “to watch my kid play baseball. While he’s playing, it’s the most important thing in life. The other kids never guess he has thoughts that go beyond, the game.”

  “But . . . but the shower of gold, for instance,” protested Leasing. “The presence of the god . . . even the—”

  “Wait a minute! Just wait, now. You remember yourself that you jumped at conclusions about the god. Made him up compl
etely out of a glimpse of what looked like a golden shower, and the memory of the Danae legend, and the feeling of a presence and a purpose behind what happened. If you’d seen what looked like a burning bush instead of a shower, you’d have come up with a completely different theory involving Moses, maybe. As for the presence and the visions—” Dyke paused and gave him a narrowed look. He hesitated a moment. “I’m going to suggest something about those later on. You won’t like it. First, though, I want to follow this . . . this allegory on through. I want to explain fully what might lie beyond this obvious theory on Clarissa. Remember, I don’t take it seriously, but neither do I want to leave it dangling.

  It’s fascinating, just as it stands. It seems very clearly to indicate—in the allegory—the existence of homo superior, here and now, right among us.

  “Supermen?” Leasing echoed. With an obvious effort he forced his mind into focus and sat up straighter, looking at Dyke with a thoughtful frown. “Maybe. Or maybe, Lieutenant, do you ever read Cabell? In one of his books somewhere I think he has a character refer to a sort of super-race that Impinges on ours with only one . . . one facet He uses the analogy of geometry, and suggests that the other race might be represented by cubes that show up as squares on the plane geometric surface of our ‘world, though in their own they have a cubic mass we never guess.” He frowned more deeply, and was silent.

  Dyke nodded. “Something like that, maybe. Fourth dimension stuff—people restricting themselves into our world temporarily, and for a purpose.” He pulled at his lower lip and then repeated, “For a purpose. That’s humiliating! I’m glad I don’t really believe it’s true. Even considering the thing academically is embarrassing enough. Homo superior, sending his children among us—to play.”