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

by Edited By Judith Merril

  “That’s so, Doc. There are the two small meteorite holes, but they would not get direct beams from there.”

  “Fine. Then keep ‘em just like that. Take care they don’t get warmed. Don’t try anything the instruction-sheet says. The point is that though the success of the Hapson freeze is almost sure, the resuscitation isn’t. In fact it’s very dodgy indeed—a poorer than twenty-five per cent chance at best. You get lethal crystal formations building up, for one thing. What I suggest is that you try to get ‘em back exactly as they are. Our apparatus here will give them the best chance they can have. Can you do that?”

  Gerald Troon thought for a moment. Then he said:

  “We don’t want to waste this trip—and that’s what’ll happen if we pull the derelict out of our side to leave a hole we can’t mend. But if we leave her where she is, plugging the hole, we can at least take on a half-load of ore. And if we pack that well in, it’ll help to wedge the derelict in place. So suppose we leave the derelict just as she lies, and the men, too, and seal her up to keep the ore out of her. Would that suit?”

  “That should be as good as can be done,” the doctor replied. “But have a look at the two men before you leave them. Make sure they’re secure in their bunks. As long as they are kept in space conditions about the only thing likely to harm them is breaking loose under acceleration, and getting damaged.”

  “Very well, that’s what we’ll do. Anyway, we won’t be using any high acceleration the way things are. The other poor fellow shall have a proper space-burial...”

  An hour later both Gerald and his companion were back in the Celestis’s living-quarters, and the First Officer was starting to maneuver for the spiral-in to Psyche. The two got out of their spacesuits. Gerald pulled the derelict’s log from the outside pocket, and took it to his bunk. There he fastened the belt, and opened the book.

  Five minutes later Steve looked across at him from the opposite bunk, with concern.

  “Anything the matter, Cap’n? You’re looking a bit queer.”

  “I’m feeling a bit queer, Steve...That chap we took out and consigned to space, he was Terence Rice, wasn’t he?”

  “That’s what his disc said,” Steve agreed.

  “H’m.” Gerald Troon paused. Then he tapped the book. “This,” he said, “is the log of the Astarte. She sailed from the moon-station third of January, 2149—forty-five years ago—bound for the Asteroid Belt. There was a crew of three: Captain George Montgomery Troon, engineer Luis Gompez, radio-man Terence Rice____

  “So, as the unlucky one was Terence Rice, it follows that one of those two back there must be Gompez, and the other—well, he must be George Montgomery Troon, the one who made the Venus landing in 2144... and, incidentally, my grandfather....”

  * * * *

  “Well,” said my companion, “they got them back all right. Gompez was unlucky, though—at least I suppose you’d call it unlucky—anyway, he didn’t come through the resuscitation. George did, of course....

  “But there’s more to resuscitation than mere revival. There’s a degree of physical shock in any case, and when you’ve been under as long as he had there’s plenty of mental shock, too.

  “He went under, a youngish man with a young family; he woke up to find himself a great-grandfather; his wife a very old lady who had remarried; his friends gone, or elderly; his two companions in the Astarte, dead.

  ‘That was bad enough, but worse still was that he knew all about the Hapson System. He knew that when you go into a deep-freeze the whole metabolism comes quickly to a complete stop. You are, by every known definition and test, dead.... Corruption cannot set in, of course, but every vital process has stopped; every single feature which we regard as evidence of life has ceased to exist....

  “So you are dead....

  “So if you believe, as George does, that your psyche, your soul, has independent existence, then it must have left your body when you died.

  “And how do you get it back? That’s what George wants to know—what he keeps searching for. That’s why he’s over there now, praying to be told____”

  I leaned back in my chair, looking across the Place at the dark opening of the church door.

  “You mean to say that that young man, that George who was here just now, is the very same George Montgomery Troon who made the first landing on Venus, half a century ago?” I said.

  “He’s the man,” he affirmed.

  I shook my head, not for disbelief, but for George’s sake.

  “What will happen to him?” I asked.

  “God knows,” said my neighbor. “He is getting better; he’s less distressed than he was. And now he’s beginning to show touches of the real Troon obsession to get into space again.

  “But what then?... You can’t ship a Troon as crew. And you can’t have a Captain who might take it into his head to go hunting through Space for his soul....”

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  * * * *

  THE LONG NIGHT

  by Ray Russell

  This short sad story of the last days of Argo III—as lost a soul as ever lifted jets—is included (along with some happier interludes in the Emperor’s early life) in Mr. Russell’s collection, Sardonicus and Other Stories (Ballantine, 1961). The author, who was executive editor of Playboy for most of its first seven years, has now turned full-time writer. Besides the short-story collection, and the movie of the same name, he has recently published a novel. The Case Against Satan (Obolensky, 1962).

  * * * *

  The once young Argo III—now gnarled by age and debauchery—was on the run. After a lifetime of atrocities, all committed in the names of Humanity, Freedom, Fair Play, The Will Of The Majority, Our Way Of Life, and The Preservation Of Civilization As We Know It, an aroused populace led by his son, Argo IV, was out gunning for him. He raced from asteroid to asteroid, but his enemies followed close behind. He tried elaborate disguises and plastic surgery, but the infra-violet, ultra-red dimension-warp contact lenses of his son’s agents saw through all facades. He grew so weary that once he almost gave himself up—but he blanched at the thought of what he had made the official and now sacred mode of execution: a seven day death in the grip of the Black Elixir.

  Now, his space ship irretrievably wrecked, he was crawling through the dark on the frozen gray sands of Asteroid Zero—so named by him because it was uninhabited, had no precious metals, and was even unvegetated because sunless through being in the eternal shadow of giant Jupiter. Argo’s destination, as he crawled, was the cave of The Last Wizard. All other wizards had been wiped out in Argo’s Holy Campaign Against Sorcery, but it was rumored one wizard had escaped to Zero. Argo silently prayed the rumor was true and The Last Wizard still alive.

  He was: revoltingly old, sick, naked, sunken in squalor, alive only through sorcery—but alive. “Oh, it’s you,” were the words with which he greeted Argo. “I can’t say I’m surprised. You need my help, eh?”

  “Yes, yes!” croaked Argo. “Conjure for me a disguise they cannot penetrate I I entreat, I implore you!”

  “What kind of disguise might that be?” cackled The Last Wizard.

  “I know for a fact,” said Argo, “because wizards have confessed it under torture, that all human beings are weres —that the proper incantation can transform a man into a werewolf, a weredog, a werebird, whatever were-creature may be locked within his cellular structure. As such a creature, I can escape undetected!”

  “That is indeed true,” said The Last Wizard. “But suppose you become a werebug, which could be crushed underfoot? Or a werefish, which would flip and flop in death throes on the floor of this cave?”

  “Even such a death,” shuddered Argo, “would be better than a legal execution.”

  “Very well,” shrugged The Last Wizard. He waved his hand in a theatrical gesture and spoke a thorny word.

  That was in July of 2904. A hundred years later, in July of 3004, Argo was still alive on Zero. He could not, with accuracy, be described as happy, howeve
r. In fact, he now yearns for and dreams hopelessly of the pleasures of a death under the Black Elixir. Argo had become that rare creature, a werevampire. A vampire’s only diet is blood, and when the veins of The Last Wizard had been drained, that was the end of the supply. Hunger and thirst raged within Argo. They are raging still, a trillionfold more intense, for vampires are immortal. They can be killed by a wooden stake through the heart, but Zero is unvegetated and has no trees. They can be killed by a silver bullet, but Zero can boast no precious metals. They can be killed by the rays of the sun, but because of Jupiter’s shadow, Zero never sees the sun. For this latter reason, Argo is plagued by an additional annoyance: vampires sleep only during the day, and there is no day on Zero.

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  * * * *

  TO AN ASTRONAUT DYING YOUNG

  by Maxine W. Kumin

  Mrs. Kumin has published one book of poetry (Halfway, Holt, 1961), and several children’s books. She is an instructor in English at Tufts University, currently on leave to study on a Radcliffe grant.

  * * * *

  Tell us: are you dead yet? The elephant ears of our radar still read you, wobbling over our heads like a baby star.

  They say you will orbit us now once every ninety minutes for years. And nothing about you will rot in your climate.

  Down here it is spring. Whole townships huddle outdoors in the evening,

  round-eyed as the cattle once were, but this time watching and waving

  as your little light winks overhead, as it tilts and veers to the west.

  You sit in the contour chair that fitted your torso best

  but by summer, who will still think to measure your perigee?

  Only the faithful few who set up a rescue committee.

  Such ingenuity! Think now; can God have invented it?

  We know that when planes crack open and spill the unlucky ones out,

  there are tag ends to go on. He stands by to pick up the pieces

  we label, and grieving, hand back to His care at requiem masses.

  Even the dead at sea have a special path to His bosom.

  Combing the mighty waves, He grapples up souls from the bottom.

  But there you go again, locked up in your perfect manhood,

  coasting beyond the reach of the last seraph in the void.

  Not one levitating saint can rise from the golden pavement

  high enough over the ridgepole to yank you back into His tent.

  This was a comfortable kingdom, the dome of it tastefully pearled

  till you cut loose. Your kind of death is out of God’s world.

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  * * * *

  SUMMATION: S-F, 1961

  by Judith Merril

  For some years now, those of us working in what even we still quaintly call “the science-fiction field” have been increasingly aware of the floating-island nature of that “field.” And if it seemed at times that we were simply drifting out to sea, it is now becoming sharply evident that the direction of drift, all along, was into the “mainstream.” The specialized cult of science fiction (for which many of us still, and I expect will, feel a lingering nostalgia) is rapidly disappearing, as the essential quality is absorbed into the main body of literature.

  More properly, I should say, reabsorbed. S-f had its beginnings in mainstream writing. The literary-sociological analysis of the compartmentalizing of this kind of fiction during the first half of the twentieth century will undoubtedly provide scholastic adventure for innumerable future thesis-writers. For those of us actively interested in the (flooded) field at the present time, it is enough to understand that the reabsorption has not been one-sided. For any prodigal to effect his return, it is necessary not only that the parent body be prepared to offer welcome, but that the wanderer has found cause to come home.

  These causes have been varied and complex, ridiculous and sublime: they have included such things as the influence of “the syndicate” on magazine distribution, the International Geophysical Year, Kingsley Amis’ book of lectures and Willy Ley’s lectures on books. (The rest of the list I leave to those scholars of tomorrow.) But whatever the causes, the results are obvious.

  * * * *

  At the beginning of 1956, when the First Annual of this series was being readied for the press, I counted thirteen science-fiction magazines in this country, and four more in England. (Most of them were quarterlies or bimonthlies; it averaged out to about ten altogether each month.) That first annual contained, proudly, three (out of eighteen) stories from sources outside the specialty magazines; the Honorable Mentions listed seven more. And the Summation pointed with a sort of ghetto pride to the fact that thirty or forty of Our Kind of Stories had crossed the line in ‘55, and found respectable lodging in literary and “slick” magazines.

  This year, sixteen of the thirty fiction and verse selections are from general fiction magazines, or books. There are five s-f magazines published here, and two in England—five-and a half a month average, with the three bimonthlies.

  In ‘56, I was able to include three “name” writers from outside the specialty field. This year, there are only thirteen stories by writers known in the field. Most striking is the number of writers from non-fiction fields who have made their first story efforts in s-f; most gratifying is the growing number of serious young writers who are devoting themselves equally to s-f and “quality” media.

  This is the internal evidence. From outside come such items as the previously mentioned seminar of the Modern Language Association (or the word from my scout in Sausalito that s-f is the top seller in the beatniks’ favorite bookstore). There is The Twilight Zone on TV, which no one (except us Old School Ties) thinks of as s-f. There is The Saturday Evening Post, printing without special comment an average of one fantasy or s-f story per issue....

  Which brings up a point. The welcome offered to s-f is warm, as only a homecoming can be. But by the same token, the critics, editors, reviewers, publishers, who are uncle and aunt, elder brother, sister, and cousins, who all stayed correctly at home while we went wandering in lurid pulp-paper lands, are not prepared to meet us on the grounds of our own choosing—and certainly not to recognize us by the identity we assumed “outside.”

  Thus, much of the best science fiction published today is under wrappers and headings that either angrily disclaim the “science-fiction” label, or ignore it completely. As for the broader field defined in this book as “S-F,” the most special labeling it’s likely to get is “unusual” or “offbeat.”

  The cult is dead, or at the least, moribund. But one may hope it has infused new life into the culture.

  I should like to take this opportunity to extend my thanks to a few of the people whose assistance becomes more and more necessary, as the source material spreads itself thin. For suggestions or submissions of material, my thanks to Madeline Tracy Brigden, of Mademoiselle; to Anthony Boucher; to Laura Cohen; and to Willard Marsh. For help in obtaining permission for stories, and in assembling the final manuscript, to Robert Mills, Frederik Pohl, Joseph Ferman, Mrs. Brigden, my family, and—far beyond the call of duty— S & S editrix, Barbara Norville. And for opinions on the selections, my especial gratitude to Virginia Blish.

  Judith Merril

  Milford, 1962

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  * * * *

  BOOKS

  by Anthony Boucher

  I have been trying for some time to understand why I, as a reviewer, am so much more resentful of uninspired routine books in science fiction than I am of similar publications in the mystery-suspense field. And I think I am beginning to see the reason.

  To be sure, the current publishing standards are even lower for s-f-in-book-form than they are for mysteries. The very crudest sex-and-sadism private-eye paperbacks have a certain professional competence in keeping a story moving that is rare at any level of today’s s-f; and the suspense field is certain to provide at least one intelligent, literate, original, creative novel in a week’
s reviewing load, while the s-f reviewer is lucky if he finds one over a span of months.

  But why do I simply shrug and stop reading if a whodunit turns out to be weary and derivative, while I feel acutely embittered when I find the same qualities in s-f?

  I see now that it is because s-f is a form which, more than almost any other, by its very nature demands creative originality. The detective story and even the more modern psychological crime novel are—like the western, the love story, the historical romance—fixed forms, in which the creative challenge lies largely in seeing what the author can do within established boundaries. S-f is—or perhaps better, should and must be a literature of stimulus and fresh horizons.