He said abruptly, “They want me back.”
She heard the four words without comprehension; they conveyed no message to her. She searched his face as though the expression would enlighten her. “What did you say?”
“They want me back,” he repeated. “They need me.”
“But that’s outrageous! First they send you to this savage world, then they decide they’ve made a mistake and whistle for you to come back.”
“It isn’t like that,” protested Ash. “They didn’t force me; I didn’t have to accept the suggestion. Everyone agreed, on the basis of the very little we knew, that the people and society here (if either existed) would most likely be closer to the epoch I would naturally have fitted than the one into which I was born. I needn’t have come; having come, I could have returned.”
“Force! What do you call the pressure of ‘everyone agreed’ if not force? And it was for your own good too. That excuse for wickedness must prevail from one end of the universe to the other. I wonder if your people are really less barbarian than mine.”
He refused to argue, to defend the beings who threatened—if vainly—the life she led with her husband and son, the minute good Ash was doing in Evarts County, the hope that he could do more and on a larger scale. Ash in his humility thought them superior to him; she had never questioned this till now. But suppose their evolution had not been toward better than the development Ash represented, but worse—a subtle degeneracy? Suppose in gaining the abilities so awesome to Ash they had lost some of his probity and uprightness, reverting to a morality no higher— little higher, she amended in all honesty—than that of the earth in the year 1960?
“Of course you won’t go?”
“They need me.”
“So do I. So does young Ash.”
He smiled tenderly at her. “I will not weigh the need of millions, nor the need of love and comfort against the need for life. Such judgments lead only to self-justification, cruelty disguised as mercy, and destruction for the sake of rebuilding.”
“Then you won’t go?”
“Not unless you tell me to.”
Next day she walked through the orchard, recalling again its desolate condition before Ash came, Josey’s face, her own unsettled heart. She walked through the new orchard where the young trees flourished without a twisted limb or fruitless branch. She walked through the new farm, never so hopeless as the homeplace, yet abused, exploited, ravaged. The fields were fair and green, the pasture lush and succulent. She came to the spot where she had been the day before and the music filled her ears and mind.
Fiercely she tried to recapture her reasoning, her indictment. The music did not plead, cajole, argue with her. It was itself, outside such utility. Yet it was not proud or inexorable; removed from her only in space and time and growth; not in fundamental humanity. It was far beyond the simple components of communication she had learned from Ash, yet it was not utterly and entirely outside her understanding.
She listened for a long time—hours, it seemed. Then she went to the house. Ash put his arms around her and again, as so often, she was amazed how he could be loving without a tincture of brutality. “Oh, Ash,” she cried. “Oh, Ash!”
Later she said, “Will you come back?”
“I hope so,” he answered gravely.
“When—when will you go?”
“As soon as everything is taken care of. There won’t be much; you have always attended to the business matters.” He smiled; Ash had never touched money or signed a paper. “I’ll take the train from Henryton; everyone will think I’ve gone East. After a while you can say I’ve been kept by family affairs. Perhaps you and the boy will leave after a few months, presumably to join me.”
“No. I’ll stay here.”
“People will think—”
“Let them,” she said defiantly. “Let them.”
“I can find you anywhere, you know, if I can come back.”
“You won’t come back. If you do you’ll find me here.”
* * * *
She had no difficulties with the harvest. As Ash said, she had taken care of the business end since her father’s death. Hands were always eager to work at the Maxill’s; produce merchants bid against each other for the crop. But next year?
She and the land could wither together without a husband’s care. The lines on her face would deepen, her hair would gray, her mouth sag. The trees would die little by little, the fruit grow sparser, less and less perfect. The corn would come up more irregularly year by year, sickly, prey to parasites; stunted, gnarled, poor. Finally so little would grow it wouldn’t pay to plant the fields. Then the orchards would turn into dead wood, the hardier weeds take over, the land become waste. And she ...
She knew she was hearing the sounds, the music, only in her imagination. But the illusion was so strong, so very strong, she thought for the moment she could distinguish Ash’s own tones, his message to her, so dear, so intimate, so reassuring.___
“Yes,” she said aloud. “Yes, of course.”
Because at last she understood. In the winter she would walk all over the land. She would pick up the hard clods from the ground and warm them in her fingers. In the spring she would plunge her arms into the sacks of seed, deeply, to the elbows, over and over. She would touch the growing shoots, the budding trees; she would walk over the land, giving herself over to it.
It would not be as though Ash were still there. It could never be like that. But the earth would be rich; the plants and trees would flourish. The cherries, apricots, plums, apples and pears would not be as many or so fine as they had been, nor the corn so even and tall. But they would grow, and her hands would make them grow. Her five-fingered hands.
Ash would not have come for nothing.
<
* * * *
SOMETHING INVENTED ME
by R. C. Phelan
1960 was the year for breakthroughs and breakdowns in communications. The most dramatic to my mind (after “Ozma”) was the device called the “People-Machine” built by an outfit called Simulmalics, Inc., the machine is a conventional IBM 704; but programmed with a—sensationally —unconventional “mathematical model of the United States electorate,” distilled from thousands of pollsters’ files. Designed by a Director of Columbia’s Bureau of Applied Social Research and a Yale psychologist, the machine’s first job was for the Democratic campaign committee In the Presidential election.
Meanwhile, Cornell researchers were teaching another electronic brain how to read. The “Perceptron” is designed with “electrical counterparts of eyes, nerve fibers, and nerve cells,” to enable it to read and use ordinary language, instead of mathematical codes. During the same year, the Air Force put a new type of IBM to work translating technical works from Russian into English.
All this might have been happier news had it not coincided with a rash of metal-wig-flipping by Brains already in use: wrong scoring in college tests, for instance, and a hilarious series of goofs in a robotized Providence, R. I., post office. Tends to make one wonder if we may not be “building in” more parallels-with the human brain than we intended?
* * * *
Tom Trimble and I have been next-door neighbors all our lives, though our houses are six miles apart. We run adjoining ranches in that part of Texas where cedar, prickly pear, and prairie dogs are the chief nuisances and, in a dry year, twenty-five acres of land are needed to support a single cow. When we were boys and our fathers owned the ranches, they were friends, as Tom and I were.
They shared only one thing: the cost of bringing a tutor down from the North each year to teach Tom and me through the winter. One year the tutor stayed at our house, the next year with the Trimbles. The specialties of these young men varied—one was mathematical, one was historical, and several of them were literary.
A ranch is a big and sparsely furnished place, where a boy’s imagination gets a hard workout. A good supply of books is much appreciated and used. For a year or two, in our teen
s, Tom and I agreed that we would very likely become great writers. Our literary tutors encouraged us.
Because riding twelve miles a day on horseback was a bore, I used to stay for weeks at the Trimbles’ house when the tutor was there, and the next year Tom would stay with us. We kept in touch with our families over the party-line telephone, receiving instructions and reporting on our behavior. We liked this arrangement all the better since, as host and guest, we could get out of more work than we could alone on the separate ranches.
Sometimes we liked to show off before our elders by discussing learned matters with the tutor in a man-to-man way. Or, if we chose, we could easily show off before him by outriding him or speaking border Spanish with the cowhands. Tom and I were completely at home in any level of the ranch society. At sixteen and seventeen we rode high, the masters of every situation. But at eighteen we were sent off to the University of Texas, where we discovered a big, bewildering new world. We went different ways in it, and our friendship melted slowly, like a snowman, keeping its form for a long time but shrinking. Before we were graduated, a wildcatter, drilling three hundred yards south of the Trimbles’ dipping vat, brought in a flowing well of oil. To this day no oil has been discovered on my family’s land.
Tom and I joined different services in the war. Returning with our wives, we settled down on the ranches. My father had died of a heart attack in 1944, and my mother was glad to hand over to me the job of managing the ranch.
Events had made Tom’s problems simpler than mine. His father had been murdered in a political plot. His mother had allowed every drop of crude oil to be pumped out of the Trimble wells and piped away. There remained only some vast empty spaces far beneath the surface of the ranch, and twenty-three million dollars of oil money in San Angelo banks. There had been twenty-four million, but Tom’s mother, a sweet, quiet woman, had returned to Natchez to marry her high-school sweetheart, now a widower in the cotton business. She had taken with her a make-up case containing a million dollars in cash and had left all the rest, along with the ranch, to her son.
But the ranch now had no water. Once the oil wells were pumped out, the water wells had gone dry on their own. Tom merely bought water a hundred miles to the east, and built a pipeline that brought it to his cows and his household plumbing.
On my mother’s ranch we had no oil, but we did have water. Our postwar problems were not much different from those of the 1930’s. In good years we had money in the bank, and in bad years we owed money to the bank, and either way our mode of life was the same. Small cattlemen live like that.
Tom, with his millions, lived differently. His first wife bore him a daughter, built an addition to the ranch house that was twice as big as the original structure, and divorced him. His second wife, a movie star, added a swimming pool and more guest suites to the house, and adopted three children.
His third wife was a sadly smiling, alcoholic beauty six years older than Tom. She stayed the longest, and while she was there they entertained so elaborately that they needed all the facilities the first two wives had installed, plus more housing for the staff. Tom sent his big plane to New York or Hollywood for weekend guests.
In those years the strongest connection between the two ranches was the old party-line telephone, though it was rarely used. Once or twice a year Tom phoned to invite Anne and me to one of his parties. Once or twice we went, and then we gave up going. We had seen the expenditure and had been impressed, and there was nothing else. We were content to sit on our own porch on Sunday evenings and hear, diminished by six miles of Western silence, the throb of engines as planes took off, bearing guests home to Hollywood, New Orleans, or Cuernavaca.
Eventually the decay of her beauty drove the third wife from drink to madness, and she was shut up in a private institution. The parties stopped; Tom lived alone. He trimmed his staff of cooks, gardeners, pilots, mechanics, and maids, until there remained only a few people to care for him and his cattle. And after a year of living in this solitude, Tom published a novel.
It was called Early Noon, and was a study of a Scottish family on a Peruvian plantation in the 1880’s. Many reviewers called it first-rate, and when I read it I agreed with them. It was so thorough, so surely based on a lifetime knowledge of time and place, that it convinced me that Tom was a kind of genius. I wondered if he had got his knowledge from drugged dreams. He was not Scottish and had never been to Peru. He could hardly have bought the novel for cash, as he bought his water, his house, and his guests, because no one who wrote like that would stoop to ghostwriting. I decided that Tom himself had done the work.
One day not long ago my wife called me to the phone. “It’s Tom,” she said.
“Can you come over?” he asked quietly. His request alarmed me. I understood that he meant right now. He had not telephoned in more than a year.
I got into my little plane and, flying low, followed the old horse trail and the telephone line beside it. (It is possible to drive from my ranch to Tom’s, but the trip takes more than an hour.) From the air, the wings, pools, terraces, and garages that Tom’s wives had added to the original house looked like a jumble of movie sets of different scales and periods. Landing on Tom’s big paved strip, I taxied my little plane up to the old house, which turns its back to the recent additions and faces open country.
Tom was sitting on the old front porch, drinking Scotch. We are both thirty-eight now, but he looks younger than that, and younger than I. A rancher looks competent and calm, even in a bad year; being boss gives him that. But Tom had added to his calm the arrogance, the elegance, all the last refinements that money can confer, and had ended up in indifference and boredom. Still he was an impressive sight in his rancher’s clothes and boots and British grooming. His eyes looked tired.
Drinking, we talked about cattle for a while. We watched a vapor trail that seemed to create itself as an invisibly distant bomber drew it in the sky. When the long white stroke had blurred, Tom asked, “Have you read my book?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t write it.”
“Who did?”
“Nobody. It’s a long story. That’s why I asked you to come—I want to tell you.
“You know things have gone badly for me since the war. The ranch doesn’t support me; I support it. Guests have come and gone for years, yet often I feel that in all that time I haven’t spoken to another person. Laura lives now in a specially created environment, but the world they arrange for her pleasure in the sanitarium is no more artificial than the one I live in.
“I have been bored; tortured with boredom. So I decided to look back over my life until I found an ambition somewhere—or even just a good intention—and pick it up again and carry it out. The best thing I could find was my old resolve to be a writer. Do you remember when we used to talk about it?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I bought a typewriter and sat in front of it for weeks. Nothing happened. Or rather, the inevitable happened. Sitting there, empty as a drum, I began to figure out how money could be converted even into talent—or anyway into an imitation of it.
“Do you remember the old theory about putting ten monkeys to work at ten typewriters, just hitting the keys at random? The argument was that if you kept them at it a million years they would write the complete works of Shakespeare. Along with trillions of pages of gibberish, of course. It was a question of mathematical probability— sooner or later, in a million years, one of the monkeys would just happen to hit the keys in the sequence that would produce Hamlet, and another would do Lear, and so on.
“But monkeys are old-fashioned and too slow; now we have electrons. Every time a new calculating machine appears, somebody announces that it can solve in thirty seconds problems that would require seven years of figuring with pencil and paper. Or something like that. And this is possible because the work is done by streams of electrons moving along wires at the speed of light.
“The problem, then, was simple: change the work of the electrons from
calculating to typing. In effect, devise an automatic typewriter that would race along, completely out of control, at maybe a million words a minute. With no mind to guide it, the thing would produce staggering mountains of nonsense, but would, by the laws of probability, make sense a tiny fraction of the time.”
“And you actually did it,” I said.
“Well, I had it done. In New York I found a man to put the machine together—a fellow named David R. Sere. He worked for I.B.M., designing computers. I hired him away from them and brought him here. I outlined the problem to him in New York. He chose the components he thought he would need and rode with them in a freight car all the way to San Angelo. He slept beside them on a cot, the way a kid sleeps by his bull at the Fat Stock Show.”
“Then you have the thing here?”
The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6 - [Anthology] Page 8