It was May 17th, a warm, sunny day. In the fields, along the fence that ran around the perimeter, hundreds of curious observers were stationed, their eyes riveted to people just like them, whose life passed twice as slowly. From within the city came the thin, harmonious voice of the antenna. It had a bell-like resonance. The present writer was there that day and he observed a group of four children playing with a ball. “How old are you?” I asked the oldest one. “Last month I was twenty,” she answered politely, but with exaggerated slowness. And their way of running was strange: all soft, viscous movements, like a film shot in slow motion. Even the ball had less bounce for them.
Beyond the fence were the lawns and paths of a garden; the barrier surrounding the buildings began at about fifty meters. A breeze moved the leaves in the trees, yet languidly, it seemed, as if they were leaden. Suddenly, about three in the afternoon, the remote hum of antenna grew more intense and rose like a siren, an unbearable piercing whistle. I will never forget what happened. Even today, at a distance of years, I awake in the dead of night with a start, confronting that horrible vision.
Before my eyes the four children stretched monstrously. I saw them grow, fatten, become adults. Beards sprouted from male chins. Transformed this way and half naked, their childhood clothes having split under the pressure of the lightning growth, they were seized with terror. They opened their mouths to speak, but what came out was a strange noise I had never heard before. In the vortex of unleashed time, the syllables all ran together, like a record played at a higher, mad speed. That gurgling quickly turned into a wheeze, then a desperate shout.
The four children looked around for help, saw us and rushed toward the railing. But life burned inside them; at the railing, a matter of seven or eight seconds, four old people arrived, with white hair and beards, flaccid and bony. One managed to seize the fence with his skeletal hands. He collapsed at once, together with his companions. They were dead. And the decrepit bodies of those poor children immediately gave off a foul odor. They were decomposing, flesh fell away, bones appeared, even the bones – before my very eyes – dissolved into a whitish dust.
Only then did the fatal scream of the machine subside and finally fall silent. Mediner’s prophecy came true. For reasons that will forever remain unknown, the time machine had reversed its operation, and a few seconds were enough to swallow three or four centuries of life.
Now a gloomy, sepulchral silence has frozen the city. The shadow of abject old age has fallen over the skyscrapers, which had just been resplendent with glory and hope. The walls are wrinkled; ominous lines and creases have appeared, oozing black liquids amid a fringe of rotting spider webs. And there is dust everywhere. Dust, stillness, silence. Of the two hundred thousand wealthy, fortunate people who had wanted to live for centuries there remained nothing but white dust, collecting here and there, as on millennial tombs.
Mother
PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER
Philip José Farmer (1918– ) is a powerful and energetic writer of fantasy and SF who has published over fifty novels and hundreds of short stories. His most famous novels and stories are the Riverworld series, beginning with To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971), which feature such historical personages as Richard Francis Burton, Mark Twain, and Jack London as central characters. He entered the genre with a powerful short story, “The Lovers” (1952), a mixture of alien biology and sex that earned him a not-undeserved reputation as a taboo-breaker and a somewhat shocking writer, if not downright disgusting. He has written most often about psychology, sex, and race, often all three at once.
Leslie A. Fiedler called him the best living science fiction writer. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says, “Farmer is governed by an instinct for extremity. Of all science fiction writers of the first or second rank, he is perhaps the most threateningly impish, and the most anarchic.”
Farmer was so underpaid and underappreciated for so long in his career that when Kurt Vonnegut wrote of a fictional hack SF writer Kilgore Trout, who was psychologically and philosophically profound while writing of absurd things, Farmer identified with Trout and ultimately obtained Vonnegut’s permission to write an SF novel under that name – even though Vonnegut had really been thinking of himself.
Farmer’s chief mode is a startling confrontation with psychological states and symbols made literal and manifest. This story certainly does that. It is Freudian science fiction.
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I
“Look, Mother. The clock is running backward.”
Eddie Fetts pointed to the hands on the pilot room dial.
Dr. Paula Fetts said, “The crash must have reversed it.”
“How could it do that?”
“I can’t tell you. I don’t know everything, Son.”
“Oh!”
“Well, don’t look at me so disappointedly. I’m a pathologist, not an electronician.”
“Don’t be so cross, Mother. I can’t stand it. Not now.”
He walked out of the pilot room. Anxiously, she followed him. The burial of the crew and her fellow scientists had been very trying for him. Spilled blood had always made him dizzy and sick; he could scarcely control his hands enough to help her sack the scattered bones and entrails.
He had wanted to put the corpses in the nuclear furnace, but she had forbidden that. The Geigers amidships were ticking loudly, warning that there was invisible death in the stern.
The meteor that struck the moment the ship came out of Translation into normal space had probably wrecked the engine room. So she had understood from the incoherent high-pitched phrases of a colleague before he fled to the pilot room. She had hurried to find Eddie. She feared his cabin door would still be locked, as he had been making a tape of the aria “Heavy Hangs the Albatross” from Gianelli’s Ancient Mariner.
Fortunately, the emergency system had automatically thrown out the locking circuits. Entering, she had called out his name in fear he’d been hurt. He was lying half unconscious on the floor, but it was not the accident that had thrown him there. The reason lay in the corner, released from his lax hand; a quart free-fall Thermos, rubber-nippled. From Eddie’s open mouth charged a breath of rye that not even Nodor pills had been able to conceal.
Sharply she had commanded him to get up and onto the bed. Her voice, the first he had ever heard, pierced through the phalanx of Old Red Star. He struggled up, and she, though smaller, had thrown every ounce of her weight into getting him up and onto the bed.
There she had lain down with him and strapped them both in. She understood that the lifeboat had been wrecked also, and that it was up to the captain to bring the yacht down safely to the surface of this charted but unexplored planet, Baudelaire. Everybody else had gone to sit behind the captain, strapped in crash-chairs, unable to help except with their silent backing.
Moral support had not been enough. The ship had come in on a shallow slant. Too fast. The wounded motors had not been able to hold her up. The prow had taken the brunt of the punishment. So had those seated in the nose.
Dr. Fetts had held her son’s head on her bosom and prayed out loud to her God. Eddie had snored and muttered. Then there was a sound like the clashing of the gates of doom – a tremendous bong as if the ship were a clapper in a gargantuan bell tolling the most frightening message human ears may hear – a blinding blast of light – and darkness and silence.
A few moments later Eddie began crying out in a childish voice, “Don’t leave me to die, Mother! Come back! Come back!”
Mother was unconscious by his side, but he did not know that. He wept for a while, then he lapsed back into his rye-fogged stupor – if he had ever been out of it – and slept. Again, darkness and silence.
It was the second day since the crash, if “day” could describe that twilight state on Baudelaire. Dr. Fetts followed her son wherever he went. She knew he was very sensitive and easily upset. All his life she had known it and had tried to get between him and anything that would cause troub
le. She had succeeded, she thought, fairly well until three months ago when Eddie had eloped.
The girl was Polina Fameux, the ash-blond long-legged actress whose tridi image, taped, had been shipped to frontier stars where a small acting talent meant little and a large and shapely bosom much. Since Eddie was a well-known Metro tenor, the marriage made a big splash whose ripples ran around the civilized Galaxy.
Dr. Fetts had felt very bad about the elopement, but she had, she hoped, hidden her grief very well beneath a smiling mask. She didn’t regret having to give him up; after all, he was a full-grown man, no longer her little boy. But, really, aside from the seasons at the Met and his tours, he had not been parted from her since he was eight.
That was when she went on a honeymoon with her second husband. And then she and Eddie had not been separated long, for Eddie had gotten very sick, and she’d had to hurry back and take care of him, as he had insisted she was the only one who could make him well.
Moreover, you couldn’t count his days at the opera as a total loss, for he vised her every noon and they had a long talk – no matter how high the vise bills ran.
The ripples caused by her son’s marriage were scarcely a week old before they were followed by even bigger ones. They bore the news of the separation of Eddie and his wife. A fortnight later, Polina applied for divorce on grounds of incompatibility. Eddie was handed the papers in his mother’s apartment. He had come back to her the day he and Polina had agreed they “couldn’t make a go of it,” or, as he phrased it to his mother, “couldn’t get together.”
Dr. Fetts was, of course, very curious about the reason for their parting, but, as she explained to her friends, she “respected” his silence. What she didn’t say was that she had told herself the time would come when he would tell her all.
Eddie’s “nervous breakdown” started shortly afterward. He had been very irritable, moody, and depressed, but he got worse the day a so-called friend told Eddie that whenever Polina heard his name mentioned, she laughed loud and long. The friend added that Polina had promised to tell some day the true story of their brief merger.
That night his mother had to call in a doctor.
In the days that followed, she thought of giving up her position as research pathologist at De Kruif and taking all her time to help him “get back on his feet.” It was a sign of the struggle going on in her mind that she had not been able to decide within a week’s time. Ordinarily given to swift consideration and resolution of a problem, she could not agree to surrender her beloved quest into tissue regeneration.
Just as she was on the verge of doing what was for her the incredible and the shameful, tossing a coin, she had been vised by her superior. He told her she had been chosen to go with a group of biologists on a research cruise to ten preselected planetary systems.
Joyfully, she had thrown away the papers that would turn Eddie over to a sanatorium. And, since he was quite famous, she had used her influence to get the government to allow him to go along. Ostensibly, he was to make a survey of the development of opera on planets colonized by Terrans. That the yacht was not visiting any colonized globes seemed to have been missed by the bureaus concerned. But it was not the first time in the history of a government that its left hand knew not what its right was doing.
Actually, he was to be “rebuilt” by his mother, who thought herself much more capable of curing him than any of the prevalent A, F, J, R, S, K, or H therapies. True, some of her friends reported amazing results with some of the symbol-chasing techniques. On the other hand, two of her close companions had tried them all and had gotten no benefits from any of them. She was his mother; she could do more for him than any of those “alphabatties”; he was flesh of her flesh, blood of her blood. Besides, he wasn’t so sick. He just got awfully blue sometimes and made theatrical but insincere threats of suicide or else just sat and stared into space. But she could handle him.
II
So now it was that she followed him from the backward-running clock to his room. And saw him step inside, look for a second, and then turn to her with a twisted face.
“Neddie is ruined, Mother. Absolutely ruined.”
She glanced at the piano. It had torn from the wall-racks at the moment of impact and smashed itself against the opposite wall. To Eddie it wasn’t just a piano; it was Neddie. He had a pet name for everything he contacted for more than a brief time. It was as if he hopped from one appellation to the next, like an ancient sailor who felt lost unless he was close to the familiar and designated points of the shoreline. Otherwise, Eddie seemed to be drifting helplessly in a chaotic ocean, one that was anonymous and amorphous.
Or, analogy more typical of him, he was like the nightclubber who feels submerged, drowning, unless he hops from table to table, going from one well-known group of faces to the next, avoiding the featureless and unnamed dummies at the strangers’ tables.
He did not cry over Neddie. She wished he would. He had been so apathetic during the voyage. Nothing, not even the unparalleled splendor of the naked stars nor the inexpressible alienness of strange planets, had seemed to lift him very long. If he would only weep or laugh loudly or display some sign that he was reacting violently to what was happening. She would even have welcomed his striking her in anger or calling her “bad” names.
But no, not even during the gathering of the mangled corpses, when he looked for a while as if he were going to vomit, would he give way to his body’s demand for expression. She understood that if he were to throw up, he would be much better for it, would have gotten rid of much of the psychic disturbance along with the physical.
He would not. He had kept on raking flesh and bones into the large plastic bags and kept a fixed look of resentment and sullenness.
She hoped now that the loss of his piano would bring tears and shaking shoulders. Then she could take him in her arms and give him sympathy. He would be her little boy again, afraid of the dark, afraid of the dog killed by a car, seeking her arms for the sure safety, the sure love.
“Never mind, Baby,” she said. “When we’re rescued, we’ll get you a new one.”
“When – !”
He lifted his eyebrows and sat down on the bed’s edge.
“What do we do now?”
She became very brisk and efficient.
“The ultrad automatically started working the moment the meteor struck. If it’s survived the crash, it’s still sending SOSs. If not, then there’s nothing we can do about it. Neither of us knows how to repair it.
“However, it’s possible that in the last five years since this planet was located, other expeditions may have landed here. Not from Earth but from some of the colonies. Or from nonhuman globes. Who knows? It’s worth taking a chance. Let’s see.”
A single glance was enough to wreck their hopes. The ultrad had been twisted and broken until it was no longer recognizable as the machine that sent swifter-than-light waves through the no-ether.
Dr. Fetts said with false cheeriness, “Well, that’s that! So what? It makes things too easy. Let’s go into the storeroom and see what we can see.”
Eddie shrugged and followed her. There she insisted that each take a panrad. If they had to separate for any reason, they could always communicate and also, using the DFs – the built-in direction finders – locate each other. Having used them before, they knew the instruments’ capabilities and how essential they were on scouting or camping trips.
The panrads were lightweight cylinders about two feet high and eight inches in diameter. Crampacked, they held the mechanisms of two dozen different utilities. Their batteries lasted a year without recharging, they were practically indestructible and worked under almost any conditions.
Keeping away from the side of the ship that had the huge hole in it, they took the panrads outside. The long wave bands were searched by Eddie while his mother moved the dial that ranged up and down the shortwaves. Neither really expected to hear anything, but to search was better than doing nothing.
> Finding the modulated wave-frequencies empty of any significant noises, he switched to the continuous waves. He was startled by a dot-dashing.
“Hey, Mom! Something in the 1000 kilocycles! Unmodulated!”
“Naturally, Son,” she said with some exasperation in the midst of her elation. “What would you expect from a radio-telegraphic signal?”
She found the band on her own cylinder. He looked blankly at her. “I know nothing about radio, but that’s not Morse.”
“What? You must be mistaken!”
“I – I don’t think so.”
“Is it or isn’t it? Good God, Son, can’t you be certain of anything!”
She turned the amplifier up. As both of them had learned Galacto-Morse through sleeplearn techniques, she checked him at once.
“You’re right. What do you make of it?”
His quick ear sorted out the pulses.
“No simple dot and dash. Four different time-lengths.”
He listened some more.
“They’ve got a certain rhythm, all right. I can make out definite groupings. Ah! That’s the sixth time I’ve caught that particular one. And there’s another. And another.”
Dr. Fetts shook her ash-blond head. She could make out nothing but a series of zzt-zzt-zzt’s.
Eddie glanced at the DF needle.
“Coming from NE by E. Should we try to locate?”
“Naturally,” she replied. “But we’d better eat first. We don’t know how far away it is, or what we’ll find there. While I fix a hot meal, you get our field trip stuff ready.”
“O.K.,” he said with more enthusiasm than he had shown for a long time.
The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II Page 16