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

by Edited By Judith Merril

  It varies, too, with every country, as do the habits of the various artists. In Italy your barber is apt to sing—a dangerous habit and excruciating for the tone-deaf; moreover he may add gestures to his little aria of a sudden and lop off an earlobe with a fine air of effortless self-distinction. Personally, I would rather have the stuff grow all the way down my back and into my chair than trust an Italian when overcome with emotion and garlic. I have seen it happen. A cousin of Polk-Mowbray still bears a cropped right ear; indeed, he is lucky to have as much of it left as he has—only a wild swerve prevented its total disappearance. Talk about living dangerously!

  In places like Germany, for example, one is lucky to be able to get away without a severed carotid. As for the Balkans, they, too, have their fearsome methods, and I have known cases where people took to beards and shingles rather than face up to reality. Of course, the moment they get leave they fly back to Fenner, who cuts back all the undergrowth and serenely removes whatever may have been picked up by the static electricity. At least that was the excuse that Munnings-Mather gave for all the hairpins and Gramophone needles Fenner found in his beard.

  As for the French—they leave me speechless, positively beating the air. They will either do you a style pompier, piling the muck up on the top of your head and pressure-greasing it until you leave marks on the ceiling of every lift you enter, or else they treat you to a razor cut of such topiary ferocity that you come out feeling sculpted. They cut into the stuff as if it were cheese. No. No. You can have Paris. Let me keep my modest tonsure and my Short-Back-and-Sides Outlook. The style Fenner (vintage 1904) is my sort of thing.

  Why, in Vulgaria, once, things got so bad that Polk-Mowbray was driven, positively driven, to Take Steps—and you know how much he hated the naked thrust of Action. It was during the Civil War when the country was Communist all the week and Royalist at the weekends. Every Saturday morning the Royalist troops came down from the hills and took the Praesidium; every Monday morning they were driven back with heavy losses. Monday was payday for the Communist forces, Saturday that of the Royalist army. This had a strange effect on the hairdressing business, for during the week you only found heavily nationalized barbers at work, while at the weekend you could borrow the live Royal barbers from the other side. The Communists used an unpretentious pudding-basin cut which had been worked out in terms of the dialectic, lightly driving a harrow across the scalp and then weeding with finger and thumb. They were short of instruments because the Five-Year Plan hadn’t started to work due to lack of foreign capital. Anyway, during the week you were in the hands of some horny peasant, while if you waited till Sunday you could get a sort of Viennese pompadour which fanned away into wings at the back like a tail coat and carried sideburns of a corkscrew pattern which once made Polk-Mowbray look so like Elizabeth Barrett Browning that the British Council man, Gool, suggested ... but that is another story.

  Yes, the Balkan barber, conditioned by the hirsute nature of his client, has developed a truly distressing style of action—suited to the nature of the terrain I don’t doubt, but nonetheless frightful to those who have been decently brought up. They positively plunge into one’s nostrils, hacking and snipping as if they were clearing a path in the jungle; then before one can say “moustache cup” they crawl into one’s ears, remorselessly pruning at what (to judge by the sound) must be something as intractable as a forest of holm oak. I could tell you grim tales of punctured eardrums, of inhaled hair, but I shall spare you. You know.

  But I think you had left before Polk-Mowbray entered his Do-It-Yourself phase; the state of Vulgarian barbary must have touched him off. He saw an advertisement for an instrument called, I think, The Gents Super Hair Regulator, which from the brochure appeared to be an ingenious comb and razor blade in one; you trimmed as you combed, so to speak. Nothing simpler, nothing more calculated to please. Polk-Mowbray, deeply moved by the discovery, ordered a dozen, one for each member of the Chancery. He was beside himself with pride and joy. Speaking from a full heart, he said: “From today our troubles are over. I want each one of you from now on to use his little Regulator and so boycott these heathen barbers of Vulgaria.” Well, I don’t know if you know the Regulator? No? Be warned then. It is not a toy for frolicking amateurs. The keenest professional skill is needed to work it. Otherwise, it takes huge lumps out of your hair in the most awkward places, leaving gaunt patches of white scalp glimmering through. By lunchtime on that fatal day, the whole Chancery looked as if it had been mowed down by ringworm or mange. Worse still, de Mandeville contracted a sort of scalp-rot which turned his whole skull green. A sort of deathly verdigris set in. He had to keep his hair in a green baize bag for over a week while Fenner’s Follicle Food did its healing work— lucky I had brought a bottle with me. But, of course, the sight nearly drove Polk-Mowbray berserk, especially as at that time the two were at daggers drawn. De Mandeville had sworn to try and drive his chief mad by a sort of verbal Chinese torture. To every remark made to him, he would only reply “Charmed, I’m sure,” with a kind of snakelike sibilance. It doesn’t sound much, but I assure you that after a few days of endless repetition of this phrase (accompanied by the fearful sight of the green baize bag on his head), Polk-Mowbray was practically beaten to his knees.

  But probably the most horrifying instance of mass barbary that I recall was what befell the little party of guileless Finns who submitted themselves to a Vulgarian perm in preparation for the National Lepers’ Day Ball. That could not be bettered as an illustration of the Things One Is Up Against in the Service. Five of them, including the Ambassadress, were partially electrocuted owing to a faulty fuse. How is it, I ask myself, that they did not know that the light and power arrangements of Vulgaria were so capricious? Yet, they did not. Polk-Mowbray, who was wooing the Communists, had given the Minister for Interior an electric razor which, whenever it was plugged in, fused the lights of the capital. Something of this order must have happened to the innocent Finns. With their crowning glories tied into those sort of pressurized domes attached to the ceiling by a live wire, they were suddenly aware that everything was turning red-hot and beginning to smoke fearfully; the atmosphere was rapidly beginning to resemble that of a Turkish bath that has got out of control. But the Finns are normally an unemotional race and not much given to fruitless ratiocination. It was not until sparks an inch long began to sprout from their fingers that they began to wonder dimly if all was well. By then it was too late.

  They were far too hot to hold. The barbers who manfully tried to disengage them retired hastily with burns and shock. In fact they might have been there to this day, fried to a crisp, had not the Diplomatic Corps been passing at that moment in full tenue. We were winding our way across the town to lay a rather limp wreath on the Leper Memorial when we saw the smoke and heard the shrill ululations of the feckless barbers. It was more than lucky, too, that Dovebasket should have a pair of rubberized pliers in his uniform pocket. He darted into the smoke-filled cavern and brought his mechanical genius to bear on the situation, snipping the live wires which attached our poor colleagues to the roof. The Finns rolled moaning to the floor in their golden domes, looking like so much science fiction. “Give them air,” we all cried shrilly, and willing hands carried them out and laid them in a row upon the pavements. All this had the superficial air of being a mass burial, and I personally believe that had it been anyone but the Finns, that would indeed have been the case. But the Finns can take anything with equanimity. Water was carefully poured over them from plastic buckets. They smoked, they smelled like chops frying, but at last they came to their senses.

  We did not see them again until the ball that night which closed Leper Week. My dear chap, you have never imagined such hair. It was positively psychoanalytic. Golden wigs of such hellish, blinding, metallic brilliance. The demon barbers had certainly done their work. ... Ah I But I see that Fenner is free at last. More of this anon.

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  * * * *

  THE QUAKER CANN
ON

  by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth

  “Social science fiction” is too often thought of as limited either to angry satire or to ponderous Utopian novels. Certainly the Pohl-Kornbluth combination has been noted primarily for a highly specialized kind of satirical novel set in a stiflingly overpopulated, advertising-drenched, cold-war-like future.

  This kind of novel, whose objective is to pinpoint some of the more flagrant of our cultural absurdities, must of necessity assume the continuation of some sort of peace on Earth, however uneasy or precarious (just as the last group of stories here have done). The novelette that follows is unusual in several respects:

  First, it is an atom-war story which is neither about the onset of the war nor its aftermath, but the war itself.

  Second, it is a straightforward, serious, subjectively sympathetic Pohl-Kornbluth collaboration (completed by Mr. Pohl after Mr. Kornbluth’s sudden death).

  Third, it is concerned less with the effects on our society of another war, than with those of our culture on such a war.

  * * * *

  LIEUTENANT JOHN KRAMER did crossword puzzles during at least eighty per cent of his waking hours. His cubicle in Bachelor Officers Quarters was untidy; one wall was stacked solid with newspapers and magazines to which he subscribed for their puzzle pages. He meant, from week to week, to clean them out but somehow never found time. The ern, or erne, a sea eagle, soared vertically through his days and by night the ai, a three-toed sloth, crept horizontally. In edes, or Dutch communes, dyers retted ecru, quaffing ades by the tun and thought was postponed.

  John Kramer was in disgrace and, at thirty-eight, well on his way to becoming the oldest first lieutenant in the North American (and Allied) Army. He had been captured in ‘82 as an aftermath of the confused fighting around Tsingtao. A few exquisitely unpleasant months passed and he then delivered three TV lectures for the yutes. In them he announced his total conversion to Neo-Utilitarianism, denounced the North American (and Allied) military command as a loathesome pack of war-waging, anti-utilitarian mad dogs, and personally admitted the waging of viral warfare against the United Utilitarian Republics.

  The yutes, or Utilitarians, had been faithful to their principles. They had wanted Kramer only for what he could do for them, not for his own sweet self, and when they had got the juice out of him they exchanged him. In ‘83 he came out of his fog at Fort Bradley, Utah, to find himself being court-martialed.

  He was found guilty as charged, and sentenced to a reprimand. The lightness of the sentence was something to be a little proud of, if not very much. It stood as a grudging tribute to the months he had held out against involutional melancholia in the yute Blank Tanks. For exchanged PW’s, the severity of their courts-martial was in inverse proportion to the duration of their ordeal in Utilitarian hands. Soldiers who caved in after a couple of days of sense-starvation could look forward only to a firing squad. Presumably a returned soldier dogged (or rigid) enough to be driven into hopeless insanity without cooperating would have been honorably acquitted by his court, but such a case had not yet come up.

  Kramer’s “reprimand” was not the face-to-face bawling-out suggested to a civilian by the word. It was a short letter with numbered paragraphs which said (1) you are reprimanded, (2) a copy of this reprimand will be punched on your profile card. This tagged him forever as a foul ball, destined to spend the rest of his military life shuffling from one dreary assignment to another, without hope of promotion or reward.

  He no longer cared. Or thought he did not; which came to the same thing.

  He was not liked in the Officers Club. He was bad company. Young officers passing through Bradley on their way to glory might ask him, “What’s it really like in a Blank Tank, Kramer?” But beyond answering, “You go nuts,” what was there to talk about? Also he did not drink, because when he drank he went on to become drunk, and if he became drunk he would cry.

  So he did a crossword puzzle in bed before breakfast, dressed, went to his office, signed papers, did puzzles until lunch, and so on until the last one in bed at night. Nominally he was Commanding Officer of the 561st Provisional Reception Battalion. Actually he was (with a few military overtones) the straw boss of a gang of clerks in uniform who saw to the arrival, bedding, feeding, equipping, inoculation and transfer to a training unit of one thousand scared kids per week.

  On a drizzle-swept afternoon in the spring of ‘85 Kramer was sounding one of those military overtones. It was his appointed day for a “surprise” inspection of Company D of his battalion. Impeccable in dress blues, he was supposed to descend like a thunderbolt on this company or that, catching them all unaware, striding arrogantly down the barracks aisle between bunks, white-gloved and eagle-eyed for dust, maddened at the sight of disarray, vengeful against such contraband as playing cards or light reading matter. Kramer knew, quite well, that one of his orderly room clerks always telephoned the doomed company to warn that he was on his way. He did not particularly mind it. What he minded was unfair definitions of key words, and ridiculously variant spellings.

  The permanent-party sergeant of D Company bawled “Tench-hut!” when Kramer snapped the door open and stepped crisply into the ‘barracks. Kramer froze his face into its approved expression of controlled annoyance and opened his mouth to give the noncom his orders. But the sergeant had miscalculated. One of the scared kids was still frantically mopping the aisle.

  Kramer halted. The kid spun around in horror, made some kind of attempt to present arms with the mop and failed.

  The mop shot from his soapy hands like a slung baseball bat, and its soggy gray head schlooped against the lieutenant’s dress-blue chest.

  The kid turned white and seemed about to faint on the damp board floor. The other kids waited to see him destroyed.

  Kramer was mildly irritated. “At ease,” he said. “Pick up that mop. Sergeant, confound it, next time they buzz you from the orderly room don’t cut it so close.”

  The kids sighed perceptibly and glanced covertly at each other in the big bare room, beginning to suspect it might not be too bad after all. Lieutenant Kramer then resumed the expression of a nettled bird of prey and strode down the aisle. Long ago he had worked out a “random” selection of bunks for special attention and now followed it through habit. If he had thought about it any more, he would have supposed that it was still spy-proof; but every noncom in his cadre had long since discovered that Kramer stopped at either every second bunk on the right and every third on the left, or every third bunk on the right and every second on the left-depending on whether the day of the month was odd or even. This would not have worried Kramer if he had known it; but he never even noticed that the men beside the bunks he stopped at were always the best-shaved, best-policed and healthiest looking in each barracks.

  Regardless, he delivered a certain quota of meaningless demerits which were gravely recorded by the sergeant. Of blue-eyed men on the left and brown-eyed men on the right (this, at least, had not been penetrated by the noncoms) he went on to ask their names and home towns. Before discovering crossword puzzles he had memorized atlases, and so he had something to say about every home town he had yet encountered. In this respect at least he considered himself an above-average officer, and indeed he was.

  It wasn’t the Old Army, not by a long shot, but when the draft age went down to fifteen some of the Old Army’s little ways had to go. One experimental reception station in Virginia was trying out a Barracks Mother system. Kramer, thankful for small favors, was glad they hadn’t put him on that project. Even here he was expected, at the end of the inspection, to call the “men” around him and ask if anything was bothering them. Something always was. Some gangling kid would scare up the nerve to ask, gee, lieutenant, I know what the Morale Officer said, but exactly why didn’t we ever use the megaton-head missiles, and another would want to know how come Lunar Base was such a washout, tactically speaking, sir. And then he would have to rehearse the dry “recommended discussion themes” from
the briefing books; and then, finally, one of them, nudged on by others, would pipe up, “Lieutenant, what’s it like in the Blank Tanks?” And he would know that already, forty-eight hours after induction, the kids all knew about what Lieutenant John Kramer had done.

  But today he was spared. When he was halfway through the rigmarole the barracks phone rang and the sergeant apologetically answered it.

  He returned from his office-cubicle on the double, looking vaguely frightened. “Compliments of General Grote’s secretary, sir, and will you please report to him at G-l as soon as possible.”

  “Thank you, sergeant. Step outside with me a moment.” Out on the duckboard walk, with the drizzle trickling down his neck, he asked: “Sergeant, who is General Grote?”

  “Never heard of him, sir.”

  Neither had Lieutenant Kramer.

  He hurried to Bachelor Officers Quarters to change his sullied blue jacket, not even pausing to glance at the puzzle page of the Times, which had arrived while he was at “work.” Generals were special. He hurried out again into the drizzle.