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

by Edited By Judith Merril

  But what?

  There was nothing dangerous about sensory deprivation, he lied. It was only a rest. Nobody was hurting him. Looked at in the right way, it was a chance to do some solid thinking like you never got tune for in real life-strike that. In outside life. For instance, what about freshing up on French irregular verbs? Start with avoir. Tu as, vous avez, nous avons. Voi avete, noi ab-biamo, du habst . . . Du habst? How did that get in there? Well, how about poetry?

  It is an Ancient Mariner, and he stops the next of kin.

  The guests are met, the feast is set, and sisters under

  the skin

  Are rag and bone and hank of hair, and beard and

  glittering eye

  Invite the sight of patient Night, etherized under the

  sky.

  I should have been a ragged claw; I should have said

  ‘I love you’;

  But-here the brown eyes lower fell-I hate to go

  above you.

  If Ripsaw fail and yutes prevail, what price dough’s

  Quaker cannon? So Grote-

  Kramer stopped himself, barely in time. Were there throat mikes? Were the yutes listening in?

  He churned miserably in his cotton bonds, because, as near as he could guess, he had probably been in the Blank Tank for less than an hour. D day, he thought to himself, praying that it was only to himself, was still some six weeks away and a week beyond that was seven. Seven weeks, forty-nine days, eleven hundred and, um, seventy-six hours, sixty-six thousand minutes plus. He had only to wait those minutes out, what about the diary?, and then he could talk all he wanted. Talk, confess, broadcast, anything, what difference would it make then?

  He paused, trying to remember. That furtive thought had struggled briefly to the surface but he had lost it again. It would not come back.

  He tried to fall asleep. It should have been easy enough. His air was metered and the CO2 content held to a level that would make him torpid; his wastes cathe-terized away; water and glucose valved into his veins; he was all but in utero, and unborn babies slept, didn’t they? Did they? He would have to look in the diary, but it would have to wait until he could remember what thought it was that was struggling for recognition. And that was becoming harder with every second.

  Sensory deprivation in small doses is one thing; it even has its therapeutic uses, like shock. In large doses it produces a disorientation of psychotic proportions, a melancholia that is all but lethal; Kramer never knew when he went loopy.

  IV

  He never quite knew when he went sane again, either, except that one day the fog lifted for a moment and he asked a WAC corporal, “When did I get back to Utah.” The corporal had dealt with returning yute prisoners before. She said only: “It’s Fort Hamilton, sir. Brooklyn.”

  He was in a private room, which was bad, but he wore a maroon bathrobe, which was good-at least it meant he was in a hospital instead of an Army stockade. (Unless the private room meant he was in the detention ward of the hospital.)

  Kramer wondered what he had done. There was no way to tell, at least not by searching his memory. Everything went into a blurry alternation of shouting relays of yutes and the silence of the Blank Tanks. He was nearly sure he had finally told the yutes everything they wanted to know. The question was, when? He would find out at the court-martial, he thought. Or he might have jotted it down, he thought crazily, in the diary.

  Jotted it down in the... ?

  Diary!

  That was the thought that had struggled to come through to the surface!

  Kramer’s screams brought the corporal back in a hurry, and then two doctors who quickly prepared knockout needles. He fought against them all the way.

  “Poor old man,” said the WAC, watching him twitch and shudder in unconsciousness. (Kramer had just turned forty.) “Second dose of the Blank Tanks for him, wasn’t it? I’m not surprised he’s having nightmares.” She didn’t know that his nightmares were not caused by the Blank Tanks themselves, but by his sudden realization that his last stay in the Tanks was totally unnecessary. It didn’t matter what he told the yutes, or when! They had had the diary all along, for it had been on him when Mabry thrust him in the rocket; and all Ripsaw’s secrets were in it!

  The next time the fog lifted for Kramer it was quick, like the turning on of a light, and he had distorted memories of dreams before it. He thought he had just dreamed that General Grote had been with him. He was alone in the same room, sun streaming in a window, voices outside. He felt pretty good, he thought tentatively, and had no time to think more than that because the door opened and a ward boy looked in, very astonished to find Kramer looking back at him. “Holy heaven,” he said. “Wait there!” He disappeared. Foolish, Kramer thought.

  Of course he would wait. Where else would he go?

  And then, surprisingly, General Grote did indeed walk in.

  “Hello, John,” he said mildly, and sat down beside the bed, looking at Kramer. “I was just getting in my car when they caught me.”

  He pulled out his pipe and stuffed it with tobacco, watching Kramer. Kramer could think of nothing to say. “They said you were all right, John. Are you?”

  “I-.think so.” He watched the general light his pipe. “Funny,” he said. “I dreamed you were here a minute ago.”

  “No, it’s not so funny; I was. I brought you a present.”

  Kramer could not imagine anything more wildly improbable in the world than that the man whose combat operation he had betrayed should bring him a box of chocolates, bunch of flowers, light novel or whatever else was appropriate. But the general glanced at the table by Kramer’s bed.

  There was a flat, green-leather-covered box on it. “Open it up,” Grote invited.

  Kramer took out a glittering bit of metal depending from a three-barred ribbon. The gold medallion bore a rampant eagle and lettering he could not at first read.

  “It’s your D.S.M.,” Grote said helpfully. “You can pin it on if you like. I tried,” he said, “to make it a Medal of Honor. But they wouldn’t allow it, logically enough.”

  “I was expecting something different,” Kramer mumbled foolishly.

  Grote laughed. “We smashed them, boy,” he said gently. “That is, Mick did. He went straight across Polar Nine,, down the Ob with one force and the Yenisei with another. General dough’s got his forward command in Chebarkul now, loving every minute of it. Why, I was in Karpinsk myself last week-they let me get that far-of course, it’s a rest area. It was a brilliant, bloody, backbreaking show. Completely successful.”

  Kramer interrupted in sheer horror: “Polar Nine? But that was the cover-the Quaker cannon!”

  General Grote looked meditatively at his former aide. “John,” he said after a moment, “didn’t you ever wonder why the card-sorters pulled you out for my staff? A man who was sure to crack in the Blank Tanks, because he already had?”

  The room was very silent for a moment. “I’m sorry, John. Well, it worked-had to, you know; a lot of thought went into it. Novotny’s been relieved. Mick’s got his biggest victory, no matter what happens now; he was the man that led the invasion.” The room was silent again. Carefully Grote tapped out his pipe into a metal wastebasket. “You’re a valuable man, John. Matter of fact, we traded a major general to get you back.” Silence.

  Grote sighed and stood up. “If it’s any consolation to you, you held out four full weeks in the Tanks. Good thing we’d made sure you had the diary with you. Otherwise our Quaker cannon would have been a bust.” He nodded good-bye and was gone. He was a good officer, was General Grote. He would use a weapon in any way he had to, to win a fight; but if the weapon was destroyed, and had feelings, he would come around to bring it a medal afterwards.

  Kramer contemplated his Distinguished Service Medal for a while. Then he lay back and considered ringing for a Sunday Times, but fell asleep instead.

  Novotny was now a sour, angry corps commander away off on the Baltic periphery because of him; a million and a h
alf NAAARMY troops were dug in the heart of the enemy’s homeland; the greatest operation of the war was an unqualified success. But when the nurse came in that night, the Quaker cannon-the man who had discovered that the greatest service he could perform for his country was to betray it-was moaning in his sleep.

  <>

  * * * *

  QUAKE, QUAKE, QUAKE

  by Paul Dehn and Edward Gorey

  It is a traditionally slim volume of illustrated verses. The drawings are quaintly Victorian in atmosphere; the verse is conventional in rhyme and meter. And the book as a whole is just about as comfortingly familiar as the latest word (if one could hear it) from a bacteriological warfare laboratory.

  Paul Dehn, who wrote the verses, is an established British poet, a movie critic for the London Daily Herald, and the co-author of Seven Days to Noon. Edward Gorey, the illustrator, has published several pictorial books, the best known here being The Hapless Child.

  Quake, Quake, Quake is divided into several sections: “A Leaden Treasury of English Verse”; “Rhymes for a Modern Nursery”; “Weather Forecast”; “From a Soviet Child’s Garden of Verses”; “From a Modern Student’s Song Book”; and “From a Modern Hymnal.”

  * * * *

  I

  O nuclear wind when wilt thou blow

  That the small rain down can rain?

  Christ, that my love were in my arms

  And I had my arms again.

  II

  Rock of ages cleft for me,

  Let me hide myself in thee.

  While the bombers thunder past,

  Shelter me from burn and blast;

  And though I know all men are brothers

  Let the fallout fall on others.

  III

  My wife and I worked all alone

  In a little lab we called our own.

  Six months saw our project flower

  And we sold the results to a foreign power.

  Ha, ha, ha! He, he, he!

  Little brown bug, don’t I love thee?

  IV

  Home they brought her warrior dead:

  She could neither weep nor pray,

  For that same bomb from which he bled

  Had killed her ninety miles away.

  V

  Two blind mice,

  See how they run!

  They each ran out of the lab with an oath,

  For a small gamma ray had been aimed at them both.

  Did you ever see such a neat little growth

  On two blind mice?

  VI

  Weather forecasts:

  Rain before seven,

  Dead before eleven.

  A red sky at night

  Means it went off all right

  VII

  Quake, quake, quake

  On the cold gray course, O Man.

  Eager to do for others

  The service we did for Japan.

  O hell to the armament race

  For the bomb that is better and bigger!

  O hell to the thumb on the switch

  And the finger touching the trigger.

  The Christian scientists fire

  Their satellites over the hill;

  But O for the touch of a vanish’d Hand

  And the sound of a Voice that is still.

  Quake, quake, quake

  On thy cold gray course, O Man,

  Seeking to end the world so soon

  After it just began.

  VIII

  Ring-a-ring o’ neutrons,

  A pocket full of positrons,

  A fission! A fission!

  We all fall down.

  <>

  * * * *

  JUDAS BOMB

  by Kit Reed

  And then, of course, there is still the possibility of peace— if you find the prospect peaceful.

  Mrs. Reed here suggests some prospects derived from the present trends in urban teenage gang behavior. (The trouble with these reductii ad absurdum is they don’t always seem so absurd—ten years later. We can only hope.)

  If anyone can cope with the peaceless peace, by the way, I am convinced it will be the Connecticut housewives. There was Mrs. Schoolfield (Kaatje Hurlbut), wife of a New York newspaperman, raising three children exurbanly, writing four hours a day, six days a week for eighteen years (the first twelve without selling a word of it)—and still able to get up and out for a pre-dawn stroll to watch the sky.

  And now a “faculty wife,” married to an English Professor at Wesleyan University. In the eight years since she finished college, Mrs. Reed has been twice named New England Newspaperwoman of the year; published two novels (most recently, Mother Isn’t Dead, She’s Only Sleeping, Houghton Mifflin, 1961); acquired two children; and published short stories in such diversified media as F&SF, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, and the Yale Literary Magazine. With a two-year-old and an infant son at home, she says she can now manage “only one” freelance newspaper job—besides her fiction, that is.

  * * * *

  It happened, in the days when the young ruled, that Washington got a bomb. The Hypos found out about it when one of the Judas Gang got swell-headed and started to brag. He stepped over the marker into Hypo country around Delaware, and the Hypos got him and he didn’t brag any more. Little Easter, Franko’s man, took care of him, and while Little Easter was working on him he said the Hypos had better lay off because Washington knew where he was, and Washington had a bomb. Little Easter finished what he was doing and then he told Franko and the Hypos held a council of war.

  From Buffalo and Philadelphia and Albany the Hypos came, and they parked their ‘cicles in ramshackle Rockefeller Center, Franko’s pad, and they parleyed, sitting cross-legged in the deserted square where skaters had glided before the gangs moved out of the neighborhoods into the city and the country and the world. They sat, in silver-sheen jackets sewn for them by the squares, and they talked about the bomb, oblivious of the beer cans, the garbage, the cigarette butts that littered the ground and piled high in the corners.

  Franko said, “You know what they’re gonna do with that bomb.”

  Netta Rampo was tall and broad and tough. She was from Trenton, and she ran the Hypettes. She made a gesture. “That’s what they’ll do.”

  “Oh, man. ‘worse’n that. They’re not gonna use it on us. We don’t bug them half as much as the Comradskis. They’ll find a way to drop it over there. Then—” Franko ground his boot heel into Netta Rampo’s hand. “That’s what’ll happen to us.” She didn’t even wince. “It’ll be the last rumble, man. We’ll get it from all over—Kiev, Leningrad, Peiping—they’ll be plantin’ bombs like appleseed, and it’ll be the end.”

  Billy from Philly, sprawled on his elbows, kicked at the dirt. “So?”

  “So we gotta stop ‘em.” Automatically, Franko zipped and unzipped his jacket. Twenty heads turned toward him. Twenty pairs of eyes coldly looked him up and down. “We gotta get a bomb. We gotta get that bomb.”

  They talked long into the night, and it was decided that one of them would have to do the job—alone. They wrangled on, and every once in a while one of them would interrupt Franko and Little Easter would get him and it would be very quiet after that.

  “Okay,” Franko said at dawn. “We gotta decide who’s going. Netta’s out because she’s a girl.”

  “Bug you,” Netta said.

  “So it’s gotta be one of us guys. We’ll face off for it. Guy that’s still standing up at the end gets the job. I’ll take on any one of you guys, starting now. Anybody...”

  “Forget it, Franko.” A dark form stood up.

  In the dimness, Little Easter started forward. “Nobody interrupts Franko...”

  Franko pulled him back.

  “Except Johnny Fairhair.” Fairhaired Johnny was big, bigger than Netta Rampo, and he was sturdy as a rhino and muscled like a bull. He had big, black eyes and the ugliest face in Christendom, and to his shoulders fell hair as pale and silky as that of a child. “Forge
t it, Franko.” He headed for his ‘cicle, parked in a corner of the rink. “I’ll go.”

  Billy from Philly looked after him and said softly, “Just as well. He’s nearly twenty. He’s almost through.”

  Without seeming to look at him, Johnny wheeled and threw his knife. It stuck in the back of Billy from Philly’s hand.

  He set out for Washington without a weapon or a plan, traveling until the brightness of the dawn warned him to take his ‘cicle down. He set down at a deserted landmark, the last Howard Johnson’s on the Jersey Turnpike, stepping carefully through the shattered glass front, looking into every possible hiding place before he settled down to sleep. Day fell, and the deserted building was silent, except for the occasional drone of a ‘cicle overhead.