The Year's Best Science Fiction 5

by Judith Merril

  Mariana looked down. She still had the block of switches in her hands and the fifth switch still read doctor.

  The wall said, “I assume from your silence that you will accept treatment. The doctor will be with you immediately.”

  The inexplicable terror returned to Mariana with compulsive intensity.

  She switched off the doctor.

  She was back in the starless dark. The rocks had grown very much colder. She could feel icy feathers falling on her face—snow.

  She lifted the block of switches and saw, to her unutterable relief, that the sixth and last switch now read, in tiny glowing letters: Mariana.

  * * * *

  AN INQUIRY CONCERNING THE CURVATURE OF THE EARTH’S SURFACE AND DIVERS INVESTIGATIONS OF A METAPHYSICAL NATURE by Roger Price

  from Monocle

  This is not a droodle.

  Anyhow, I don’t think it is...

  In recent months I have grown increasingly concerned about the tendency on the part of Western Man [Bret Maverick, to name but one.] to make a cult of conservatism and orthodoxy. New Ideas, except in the field of tax-evasion, are viewed with suspicion and, in most instances, hostility. This is unhealthy. Science has taught us that we must constantly re-examine our basic premises and consider any innovation in the light of today’s knowledge and accept or reject it on its own merits.

  Fortunately Washington is not unaware of this situation and certain elements there are attempting to create a more favorable atmosphere for fresh, original thinking—in spite of the opposition of intrenched conservatives such as Admiral Rickover (who recently refused even to consider a revolutionary plan submitted by a high-ranking Pentagon official to install steam power in submarines).

  These more progressive elements, represented mostly by alert southern and mid-western Congressmen, have just sponsored a New Movement which I have become interested in.

  This Group call themselves the “Flat Earthers” and they don’t believe in all those old-fashioned, 17th century theories about the earth being a round ball which spins around the sun at a speed of 19,000 miles per hour. You must admit they have a point there because if the Earth were spinning that fast we would feel a constant breeze. Also if the earth were globular it is difficult to understand—from a purely pragmatic point of view—why the oceans and lakes do not slop over and inundate the land masses located beneath them (i. e. Australia, Brazil, Illinois, etc).

  This Movement may turn out to be idealistic and premature but nevertheless I believe it should have “its day in court.” We must remember that people once laughed at men whose names are now household words as familiar to us as our own; men such as Oliver and Wilmer Write, Eli Fulton and Thomas Steamboat [Inventor of the Steamboat.]. The Flat Earthers are quite progressive in all of their ideas and they plan to get national publicity for their Movement next New Year’s Day by pushing a number of people off the edge. Their only difficulty so far has been in obtaining volunteers [If you have anyone you would like to see used in this capacity don’t write to me; I have my own list.].

  Of course, the Flat Earthers have run into a certain amount of opposition, mostly from a rival group composed of reactionaries, alleged scientists and people like that (you know the type) who call themselves the “Round Earthers” and still cling to the antique notion that the earth is spherical. These Round Earthers are ineffectual however because of internal bickering within their own membership. One extremist faction wants to do away with the Flat Earthers altogether by pushing them over the edge. But cooler heads have pointed out that this could be interpreted by some as positive evidence of Pro-Flatearthism. It presents an interesting problem.

  * * * *

  DAY AT THE BEACH by Carol Emshwiller

  from Fantasy and Science Fiction

  The first Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Conference was held in 1956. Among those invited were a number of artists, agents, editors, and publishers in the field. So artist Ed “Emsh” came up for the week—with his family.

  Carol Emshwiller had then published two or three stories; but she didn’t know she was a writer, and the bated-breath humility with which she asked if she possibly might be allowed to sit in on workshop meetings has come back to haunt us Older Hands each summer since. Each summer, I mean, when Carol pops out of the playpen-and-baby-bottle laden car, an infant (at least figuratively) under one arm, and her newest manuscript under the other. (Ed carries two kids and his brushes in his teeth—nothing to it when you get the knack.)

  The first time I read Day at the Beach was in one of these workshop sessions. After that, I just waited for someone to print it first, so I could next....

  * * * *

  “It’s Saturday,” the absolutely hairless woman said, and she pulled at her frayed, green kerchief to make sure it covered her head. “I sometimes forget to keep track of the days, but I marked three more off on the calender because I think that’s how many I forgot, so this must be Saturday.”

  Her name was Myra and she had neither eyebrows nor lashes nor even a faint, transparent down along her cheeks. Once she had had long, black hair, but now, looking at her pink, bare face, one would guess she had been a redhead.

  Her equally hairless husband, Ben, sprawled at the kitchen table waiting for breakfast. He wore red plaid Bermuda shorts, rather faded, and a tee shirt with a large hole under the arm. His skull curved above his staring eyes more naked-seeming than hers because he wore no kerchief or hat.

  “We used to always go out on Saturdays,” she said, and she put a bowl of oatmeal at the side of the table in front of a youth chair.

  Then she put the biggest bowl between her husband’s elbows.

  “I have to mow the lawn this morning,” he said. “All the more so if it’s Saturday.”

  She went on as if she hadn’t heard. “A day like today we’d go to the beach. I forget a lot of things, but I remember that.”

  “If I were you, I just wouldn’t think about it.” Ben’s empty eyes finally focused on the youth chair and he turned then to the open window behind him and yelled, “Littleboy, Littleboy,” making the sound run together all L’s and Y. “Hey, it’s breakfast, Boy,” and under his breath he said, “He won’t come.”

  “But I do think about it. I remember hot dogs and clam chowder and how cool it was days like this. I don’t suppose I even have a bathing suit around any more.”

  “It wouldn’t be like it used to be.”

  “Oh, the sea’s the same. That’s one thing sure. I wonder if the boardwalk’s still there.”

  “Hah,” he said. “I don’t have to see it to know it’s all gone for firewood. It’s been four winters now.”

  She sat down, put her elbows on the table and stared at her bowl. “Oatmeal,” she said, putting in that one word everything she felt about the beach and wanting to go there.

  “It’s not that I don’t want to do better for you,” Ben said. He touched her arm with the tips of his fingers for just a moment. “I wish I could. And I wish I could have hung on to that corned beef hash last time, but it was heavy and I had to run and there was a fight on the train and I lost the sugar too. I wonder which bastard has it now.”

  “I know how hard you try, Ben. I do. It’s just sometimes everything comes on you at once, especially when it’s a Saturday like this. Having to get water way down the block and that only when there’s electricity to run the pump, and this oatmeal; sometimes it’s just once too often, and then, most of all, you commuting in all that danger to get food.”

  “I make out. I’m not the smallest one on that train.”

  “God, I think that everyday. Thank God, I say to myself, or where would we be now. Dead of starvation that’s where.”

  She watched him leaning low over his bowl, pushing his lips out and making a sucking sound. Even now she was still surprised to see how long and naked his skull arched, and she had an impulse, seeing it there so bare and ugly and thinking of the commuting, to cover it gently with her two hands, to cup it and make he
r hands do for his hair; but she only smoothed at her kerchief again to make sure it covered her own baldness.

  “Is it living, though? Is it living, staying home all the time, hiding like, in this house? Maybe it’s the rest of them, the dead ones, that are lucky. It’s pretty sad when a person can’t even go to the beach on a Saturday.”

  She was thinking the one thing she didn’t want to do most of all was to hurt him. No, she told herself inside, sternly. Stop it right now. Be silent for once and eat, and, like Ben says, don’t think; but she was caught up in it somehow and she said, “You know, Littleboy never did go to the beach yet, not even once, and it’s only nine miles down,” and she knew it would hurt him.

  “Where is Littleboy?” he said and yelled again out the window. “He just roams.”

  “It isn’t as if there were cars to worry about any more, and have you seen how fast he is and how he climbs so good for three and a half? Besides, what can you do when he gets up so early.”

  He was finished eating now and he got up and dipped a cup of water from the large pan on the stove and drank it. “I’ll take a look,” he said. “He won’t come when you call.”

  She began to eat finally, watching him out the kitchen window and listening to him calling. Seeing him hunched forward and squinting because he had worn glasses before and his last pair had been broken a year ago. Not in a fight, because he was careful not to wear them commuting even then, when it wasn’t quite so bad. It was Littleboy who had done it, climbed up and got them himself from the very top drawer, and he was a whole year younger. Next thing she knew they were on the floor, broken.

  Ben disappeared out of range of the window and Little-boy came darting in as though he had been huddling by the door behind the arbor vitae all the time.

  He was the opposite of his big, pink and hairless parents, with thick and fine black hair growing low over his forehead and extending down the back of his neck so far that she always wondered if it ended where hair used to end before, or whether it grew too far down. He was thin and small for his age, but strong-looking and wiry with long arms and legs. He had a pale, olive skin, wide, blunt features and a wary stare, and he looked at her now, waiting to see what she would do.

  She only sighed, lifted him and put him in his youth chair and kissed his firm, warm cheek, thinking, what beautiful hair, and wishing she knew how to cut it better so he would look neat.

  “We don’t have any more sugar,” she said, “but I saved you some raisins,” and she took down a box and sprinkled some on his cereal.

  Then she went to the door and called, “He’s here, Ben. He’s here.” And in a softer voice she said, “The pixy.” She heard Ben answer with a whistle and she turned back to the kitchen to find Littleboy’s oatmeal on the floor in a lopsided oval lump, and him, still looking at her with wise and wary brown eyes.

  She knelt down first, and spooned most of it back into the bowl. Then she picked him up rather roughly, but there was gentleness to the roughness, too. She pulled at the elastic topped jeans and gave him two hard, satisfying slaps on bare buttocks. “It isn’t as if we had food to waste,” she said, noticing the down that grew along his backbone and wondering if that was the way the three year olds had been before.

  He made an Aaa, Aaa, sound, but didn’t cry, and after that she picked him up and held him so that he nuzzled into her neck in the way she liked. “Aaa,” he said again, more softly, and bit her just above the collar bone.

  She dropped him down, letting him kind of slide with her arms still around him. It hurt and she could see there was a shallow, half-inch piece bitten right out.

  “He bit me again,” she shouted, hearing Ben at the door. “He bit me. A real piece out even, and look, he has it in his mouth still.”

  “God, what a…”

  “Don’t hurt him. I already slapped him good for the floor and three is a hard age.” She pulled at Ben’s arm. “It says so in the books. Three is hard, it says.” But she remembered it really said that three was a beginning to be cooperative age.

  He let go and Littleboy ran out of the kitchen back toward the bedrooms.

  She took a deep breath. “I’ve just got to get out of this house. I mean really away.”

  She sat down and let him wash the place and cross two bandaids over it. “Do you think we could go? Do you think we could go just one more time with a blanket and a picnic lunch? I’ve just got to do something.”

  “All right. All right. You wear the wrench in your belt and I’ll wear the hammer, and we’ll risk taking the car.”

  She spent twenty minutes looking for bathing suits and not finding them, and then she stopped because she knew it didn’t really matter, there probably wouldn’t be anyone there.

  The picnic was simple enough. She gathered it together in five minutes, a precious can of tuna fish and hard, homemade biscuits baked the evening before when the electricity had come on for a while, and shriveled, worm-eaten apples, picked from neighboring trees and hoarded all winter in another house that had a cellar.

  She heard Ben banging about in the garage, measuring out gas from his cache of cans, ten miles’ worth to put in the car and ten miles’ worth in a can to carry along and hide someplace for the trip back.

  Now that he had decided they would go, her mind began to be full of what-ifs. Still, she thought, she would not change her mind. Surely once in four years was not too often to risk going to the beach. She had thought about it all last year too, and now she was going and she would enjoy it.

  She gave Littleboy an apple to keep him busy and she packed the lunch in the basket, all the time pressing her lips tight together, and she said to herself that she was not going to think of any more what-ifs, and she was going to have a good time.

  Ben had switched after the war from the big-finned Dodge to a small and rattly European car. They fitted into it cozily, the lunch in back with the army blanket and a pail and shovel for playing in the sand, and Littleboy in front on her lap, his hair brushing her cheek as he turned, looking out.

  They started out on the empty road. “Remember how it was before on a weekend?” she said, and laughed. “Bumper to bumper, they called it. We didn’t like it then.”

  A little way down they passed an old person on a bicycle, in jeans and a bright shirt with the tail out. They couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, but the person smiled and they waved and called, “Aaa.”

  The sun was hot, but as they neared the beach there began to be a breeze and she could smell the sea. She began to feel as she had the very first time she had seen it. She had been born in Ohio and she was twelve before she had taken a trip and come out on the wide, flat, sunny sands and smelled this smell.

  She held Littleboy tight though it made him squirm, and she leaned against Ben’s shoulder. “Oh, it’s going to be fun!” she said. “Littleboy, you’re going to see the sea. Look, darling, keep watching, and smell. It’s delicious.” And Littleboy squirmed until she let go again.

  Then, at last, there was the sea, and it was exactly as it had always been, huge and sparkling and making a sound like… no, drowning out the noises of wars. Like the black sky with stars, or the cold and stolid moon, it dwarfed even what had happened.

  Theypassed the long, brick bathhouses, looking about as they always had, but the boardwalks between were gone, as Ben had said, not a stick left of them.

  “Let’s stop at the main bathhouse.”

  “No,” Ben said. “We better keep away from those places. You can’t tell who’s in there. I’m going way down beyond.”

  She was glad, really, especially because at the last bathhouse she thought she saw a dark figure duck behind the wall.

  They went down another mile or so, then drove the car off behind some stunted trees and bushes.

  “Nothing’s going to spoil this Saturday,” she said, pulling out the picnic things, “just nothing. Come, Littleboy.” She kicked off her shoes and started running for the beach, the basket bouncing against her knee. />
  Littleboy slipped out of his roomy sneakers easily and scampered after her. “You can take your clothes off,” she told him. “There’s nobody here at all.”

  When Ben came, later, after hiding the gas, she was settled, flat on the blanket in old red shorts and a halter, and still the same green kerchief, and Littleboy, brown and naked, splashed with his pail in the shallow water, the wetness bringing out the hairs along his back.

  “Look,” she said, “nobody as far as you can see and you can see so far. It gives you a different feeling from home. You know there are people here and there in the houses, but here, it’s like we were the only ones, and here it doesn’t even matter. Like Adam and Eve, we are, just you and me and our baby.”

  He lay on his stomach next to her. “Nice breeze,” he said.

  Shoulder to shoulder they watched the waves and the gulls and Littleboy, and later they splashed in the surf and then ate the lunch and lay watching again, lazy, on their stomachs. And after a while she turned on her back to see his face. “With the sea it doesn’t matter at all,” she said and she put her arm across his shoulder. “And we’re just part of everything, the wind and the earth and the sea too, my Adam.”

  “Eve,” he said and smiled and kissed her and it was a longer kiss than they had meant. “Myra. Myra.”

  “There’s nobody but us.”

  She sat up. “I don’t even know a doctor since Press Smith was killed by those robbing kids and I’d be scared.”

  “We’ll find one. Besides, you didn’t have any trouble. It’s been so damn long.” She pulled away from his arm. “And I love you. And Littleboy, he’ll be way over four by the time we’d have another one.”

  She stood up and stretched and then looked down the beach and Ben put a hand around her ankle. She looked down the other way. “Somebody’s coming,” she said, and then he got up too.