The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 7 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  She clung to him, her shoulders shaking, and pressed her face against his coat. “My father died,” she said, and somehow he knew that these were her first tears, that she had sat tearless through the wake and funeral and had not broken down till now.

  He put his arms around her gently. He had never kissed her and he did not kiss her now, not really. His lips brushed her forehead and briefly touched her hair—that was all. “I’m sorry, Julie,” he said. “I know how much he meant to you.”

  “He knew he was dying all along,” she said. “He must have known it ever since the Strontium 90 experiment he conducted at the laboratory. But he never told anyone—he never even told me. . . . I don’t want to live. Without him there’s nothing left to live for—nothing, nothing, nothing!”

  He held her tightly. “You’ll find something, Julie. Someone. You’re young yet. You’re still a child, really.”

  Her head jerked back, and she raised suddenly tearless eyes to his. “I’m not a child! Don’t you dare call me a child!”

  Startled, he released her and stepped back. He had never seen her angry before. “I didn’t mean—” he began.

  Her anger was as evanescent as it had been abrupt. “I know you didn’t mean to hurt my feelings, Mr. Randolph. But I’m not a child, honest I’m not. Promise me you’ll never call me one again.”

  “All right,” he said. “I promise.”

  “And now I must go,” she said. “I have a thousand things to do.”

  “Will—will you be here tomorrow?”

  She looked at him for a long time. A mist, like the aftermath of a summer shower, made her blue eyes glisten. “Time machines run down,” she said. “They have parts that need to be replaced—and I don’t know how to replace them. Ours—mine may be good for one more trip, but I’m not sure.”

  “But you’ll try to come, won’t you?”

  She nodded. “Yes, I’ll try. And, Mr. Randolph?”

  “Yes, Julie?”

  “In case I don’t make it—and for the record—I love you.”

  She was gone then, running lightly down the hill, and a moment later she disappeared into the grove of sugar maples. His hands were trembling when he lighted his pipe, and the match burned his fingers. Afterward he could not remember returning to the cabin or fixing supper or going to bed, and yet he must have done all of those things, because he awoke in his own room, and when he went into the kitchen there were supper dishes standing on the drain-board.

  He washed the dishes and made coffee. He spent the morning fishing off the pier, keeping his mind blank. He would face reality later. Right now it was enough for him to know that she loved him, that in a few short hours he would see her again. Surely even a run-down time machine should have no trouble transporting her from the hamlet to the hill.

  He arrived there early and sat down on the granite bench and waited for her to come out of the woods and climb the slope. He could feel the hammering of his heart and he knew that his hands were trembling. Day before yesterday I saw a rabbit, and yesterday a deer, and today, you.

  He waited and he waited, but she did not come. She did not come the next day either. When the shadows began to lengthen and the air grow chill, he descended the hill and entered the grove of sugar maples. Presently he found a path and he followed it into the forest proper and through the forest to the hamlet. He stopped at the small post office and checked to see if he had any mail. After the wizened postmaster told him there was none, he lingered for a moment. “Is—is there a family by the name of Danvers living anywhere around here?” he blurted.

  The postmaster shook his head. “Never heard of them.”

  “Has there been a funeral in town recently?

  “Not for nigh onto a year.”

  After that, although he visited the hill every afternoon till his vacation ran out, he knew in his heart that she would not return, that she was lost to him as utterly as if she had never been. Evenings he haunted the hamlet, hoping desperately that the postmaster had been mistaken; but he saw no sign of Julie, and the description he gave of her to the passers-by evoked only negative responses.

  Early in October he returned to the city. He did his best to act toward Anne as though nothing had changed between them; but she seemed to know the minute she saw him that something had changed. And although she asked no questions, she grew quieter and quieter as the weeks went by, and the fear in her eyes that had puzzled him before became more and more pronounced.

  He began driving into the country Sunday afternoons and visiting the hilltop. The woods were golden now, and the sky was even bluer than it had been a month ago. For hours he sat on the granite bench, staring at the spot where she had disappeared. Day before yesterday I saw a rabbit, and yesterday a deer, and today, you.

  Then, on a rainy night in mid-November, he found the suitcase. It was Anne’s, and he found it quite by accident. She had gone into town to play bingo, and he had the house to himself; and after spending two hours watching four jaded TV programs, he remembered the jigsaw puzzles he had stored away the previous winter.

  Desperate for something—anything at all—to take his mind off Julie, he went up to the attic to get them. The suitcase fell from a shelf while he was rummaging through the various boxes piled beside it, and it sprang open when it struck the floor.

  He bent over to pick it up. It was the same suitcase she had brought with her to the little apartment they had rented after their marriage, and he remembered how she had always kept it locked and remembered her telling him laughingly that there were some things a wife had to keep a secret even from her husband. The lock had rusted over the years, and the fall had broken it.

  He started to close the lid, paused when he saw the protruding hem of a white dress. The material was vaguely familiar. He had seen material similar to it not very long ago—material that brought to mind cotton candy and sea foam and snow.

  He raised the lid and picked up the dress with trembling fingers. He held it by the shoulders and let it unfold itself, and it hung there in the room like gently falling snow. He looked at it for a long time, his throat tight. Then, tenderly, he folded it again and replaced it in the suitcase and closed the lid. He returned the suitcase to its niche under the eaves. Day before yesterday I saw a rabbit, and yesterday a deer, and today, you.

  Rain thrummed on the roof. The tightness of his throat was so acute now that he thought for a moment that he was going to cry. Slowly he descended the attic stairs. He went down the spiral stairway into the living room. The clock on the mantel said 10:14. In just a few minutes the bingo bus would let her off at the corner, and she would come walking down the street and up the walk to the front door. Anne would . . . Julie would. Julianne?

  Was that her full name? Probably. People invariably retained part of their original names when adopting aliases; and having completely altered her last name, she had probably thought it safe to take liberties with her first. She must have done other things, too, in addition to changing her name, to elude the time police. No wonder she had never wanted her picture taken! And how terrified she must have been on that long-ago day when she had stepped timidly into his office to apply for a job! All alone in a strange generation, not knowing for sure whether her father’s concept of time was valid, not knowing for sure whether the man who would love her in his forties would feel the same way toward her in his twenties. She had come back all right, just as she had said she would.

  Twenty years, he thought wonderingly, and all the while she must have known that one day I’d climb a September hill and see her standing, young and lovely, in the sun, and fall in love with her all over again. She had to know because the moment was as much a part of her past as it was a part of my future. But why didn’t she tell me? Why doesn’t she tell me now?

  Suddenly he understood.

  He found it hard to breathe, and he went into the hall and donned his raincoat and stepped out into the rain. He walked down the walk in the rain, and the rain pelted his face and ran in dr
ops down his cheeks, and some of the drops were raindrops, and some of them were tears. How could anyone as agelessly beautiful as Anne—as Julie—was be afraid of growing old? Didn’t she realize that in his eyes she couldn’t grow old—that to him she hadn’t aged a day since the moment he had looked up from his desk and seen her standing there in the tiny office and simultaneously fallen in love with her? Couldn’t she understand that that was why the girl on the hill had seemed a stranger to him?

  He had reached the street and was walking down it toward the corner. He was almost there when the bingo bus pulled up and stopped, and the girl in the white trench coat got out. The tightness of his throat grew knife-sharp, and he could not breathe at all. The dandelion-hued hair was darker now, and the girlish charm was gone; but the gentle loveliness still resided in her gentle face, and the long and slender legs had a grace and symmetry in the pale glow of the November streetlight that they had never known in the golden radiance of the September sun.

  She came forward to meet him, and he saw the familiar fear in her eyes—a fear poignant now beyond enduring because he understood its cause. She blurred before his eyes, and he walked toward her blindly. When he came up to her, his eyes cleared, and he reached out across the years and touched her rain-wet cheek. She knew it was all right then, and the fear went away forever, and they walked home hand in hand in the rain.

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  * * * *

  NIGHTMARE IN TIME

  by Fredric Brown

  Chances are that no one could have composed this short-shortshort horror story except a man who worked as a proofreader for some twenty years, before turning in desperation to writing.

  * * * *

  Professor Jones had been working on his time theory for many years.

  “And I have found the key equation,” he told his daughter one day. ‘Time is a field. This machine I have made can manipulate, even reverse, that field.”

  Pushing a button as he spoke, he said, “This should make time run backward run time make should this,” said he, spoke he as button a pushing.

  “Field that, reverse even, manipulate can made have I machine this. Field a is time.” Day one daughter his told he, “Equation key the found have I and.”

  Years many for theory time his on working been had Jones Professor.

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  * * * *

  LOOKING BACKWARD

  by Jules Feiffer

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  * * * *

  THREE PROLOGUES AND AN EPILOGUE

  by John Dos Passos

  A shift in viewpoint, lighting, or perspective may serve to study the background as well as the figure. Most of the selections so far have been concerned with individual insights; in the group that follows the focus shifts to the outlook for society.

  Jules Feiffer’s cartoon made graphic use of a device for this purpose that was also effectively employed, recently, in Gore Vidal’s Visit to a Small Planet: the detached observer’s viewpoint (from space or time). George Elliott used, instead, the reflection of a single individual in the mirrors of two cultures, to shed light on both. Ward Moore (who follows this selection) makes use of retroflection—a sort of hindsight-in-advance gained by viewing through sympathetic and familiar eyes a society that could result from ours.

  John Dos Passos is probably the outstanding contemporary practitioner of a less common and non-science-fiction technique for the same purpose. In his “mural novels,” he interweaves and counterposes strands of fact and story lines in such a way as to compel the mental eye to follow a pattern which composes a sort of aerial view of society. This can, sometimes, constitute Einstein’s famous “pause to wonder” in its most immediate form—as in these excerpts from Midcentury.

  I should like to express my gratitude to the editors of Audit (published at the University of Buffalo), where I first saw this printed as a unified whole.

  * * * *

  I.

  Walking the earth under the stars,

  musing midnight in midcentury,

  a man treads the road with his dog;

  the dog, less timebound in her universe of stench and

  shrill, trots eager ahead.

  The man too senses smells:

  the frosted pasture and the cold loblollies,

  he warmsweet of cows, and perhaps a hint of the passing of a skunk; hears

  the hoot, hoot, hoot-hoot of the horned owl,

  as full of faraway foreboding as the hoot of a

  woodbuming locomotive heard across the plains as a child long ago; sees

  Orion overhead sport glistening Rigel

  and Betelgeuse, and the three belt buttons

  that point out Sirius, and Belletrix that indicates

  smoldering Aldebaran.

  Eyes sweep

  the bluedomed planetarium pivoting on the

  polestar which the meditative Greeks and the Bedouin dreamed

  engraved with the quaint creatures of the

  zodiac; the spheres spun to music

  and cherubim, benign to man,

  with halcyon voices chanted

  glory to God.

  The dog stops short, paw poised, sniffs deep

  and takes off yelping after some scuttle in the underbrush.

  The man walks on alone.

  Thoughts swarm; braincells, as multitudinous as the wan

  starpoints that merge into the Milky Way overhead, trigger notions; tonight,

  in the century’s decline,

  new fantasies prevail. Photoelectric calculators

  giddy the mind with number mechanically multiplying immensities by

  billions of lightyears.

  A million hostile chinamen a month; a hundred and thirty thousand

  miscellaneous manmouths a day added to the population of the planet Earth.

  But rockets successfully soar and satellites trundle on their punctual trails

  above the stratosphere. Sam the Rhesus returns in his space capsule, his little face as inscrutable as when he went up. An aeronaut from a twelvemilehigh balloon spies moisture in the Venusian atmosphere. Norbert Weiner says his calculators are hep; watch out if they get a will of their own. A certain Dr. Otto Struve has predicted the possibility of ten million lifebreeding planets among the island galaxies, and, at Green Bank, West Virginia.

  (far from the sins of the world)

  they are building a radio telescope the size of a

  baseballfield, tipped sixty stories up in the air, where the

  physicists of project Osma plan to listen for messages

  emitted with intelligent intent

  from tau Ceti or epsilon Eridani.

  A million men on a million nights, heirs of a

  million generations, ponder the proliferation of their millions to the

  millionth power till

  multitude bursts into nothingness,

  and numbers fail.

  I feel the gravel underfoot, the starlit night about me. The nose smells, the

  ears hear, the eyes see. “Willfully living?” “Why not?” Having survived up to now at least the death-dealing hail of cosmic particles, the interpreting mind says “I am here.”

  In the underbrush under the pines my dog yelps in hot chase. Furry bodies

  jostle in the dark among the broken twigs. Fangs snap, claws tear; barks, growls, snarls, panting breath as jaws close on the soft hairs under the throat. A shriek, not animal not human, a shriek of unembodied agony rips the night.

  In the silence my dog panting drags a thick carcass through the brambles out

  on the road

  and places at her master’s feet

  in the starlight

  a beautiful raccoon

  that was alive and is dead.

  This much is true.

  * * * *

  II.

  Man is a creature that builds

  institutions

  out of abnegation of lives linked for a purpose

  the way th
e flowerlike polyps, the coralmakers of the warm salt seas

  build

  from incrusted layers of discarded careers:

  niggerheads, atolls, great barrier reefs

  and coquina benches forming the limestone basements of peninsulas where

  civilizations flourish and flower and fall frazzled to seed.

  Man’s institutions fashion his destiny,

  as the hive, the nest, the hill, the sixsided cellular comb of the honeybee,

  serried, tiered,

  grouped according to impulses

  inherent in the genes,

  fashion the social insect, his castes and functional diversities:

  the winged males and females, the blind workers, the soldiers, the nasuti,

  the alternates of the “fourth caste”

  of the pale termites,

  dwellers in dark,

  whose complex society has so astonished the naturalists.