The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II

by David G. Hartwell

  We now enter an era of plenty and a time of new concerns. The old evils are gone: we must resolutely prohibit a flamboyant and perhaps unnatural set of new vices.

  The three girls gulped down breakfast, assembled their homework, and departed noisily for school.

  Elizabeth poured coffee for herself and Gilbert. He thought she seemed pensive and moody. Presently she said, “It’s so beautiful here . . . We’re very lucky, Gilbert.”

  “I never forget it.”

  Elizabeth sipped her coffee and mused a moment, following some vagrant train of thought. She said, “I never liked growing up. I always felt strange – different from the other girls. I really don’t know why.”

  “It’s no mystery. Everyone for a fact is different.”

  “Perhaps . . . But Uncle Peter and Aunt Emma always acted as if I were more different than usual. I remember a hundred little signals. And yet I was such an ordinary little girl . . . Do you remember when you were little?”

  “Not very well.” Gilbert Duray looked out the window he himself had glazed, across green slopes and down to the placid water his daughters had named the Silver River. The Sounding Sea was thirty miles south; behind the house stood the first trees of the Robber Woods.

  Duray considered his past. “Bob owned a ranch in Arizona during the 1870s: one of his fads. The Apaches killed my father and mother. Bob took me to the ranch, and then when I was three he brought me to Alan’s house in San Francisco, and that’s where I was brought up.”

  Elizabeth sighed. “Alan must have been wonderful. Uncle Peter was so grim. Aunt Emma never told me anything. Literally, not anything! They never cared the slightest bit for me, one way or the other . . . I wonder why Bob brought the subject up – about the Indians and your mother and father being scalped and all . . . He’s such a strange man.”

  “Was Bob here?”

  “He looked in a few minutes yesterday to remind us of his Rumfuddle. I told him I didn’t want to leave the girls. He said to bring them along.”

  “Hah!”

  “I told him I didn’t want to go to his damn Rumfuddle with or without the girls. In the first place, I don’t want to see Uncle Peter, who’s sure to be there . . .”

  II

  From Memoirs and Reflections:

  I insisted then and I insist now that our dear old Mother Earth, so soiled and toil-worn, never be neglected. Since I pay the piper (in a manner of speaking), I call the tune, and to my secret amusement I am heeded most briskly the world around, in the manner of bellboys, jumping to the command of an irascible old gentleman who is known to be a good tipper. No one dares to defy me. My whims become actualities; my plans progress.

  Paris, Vienna, San Francisco, St. Petersburg, Venice, London, Dublin, surely will persist, gradually to become idealized essences of their former selves, as wine in due course becomes the soul of the grape. What of the old vitality? The shouts and curses, the neighborhood quarrels, the raucous music, the vulgarity? Gone, all gone! (But easy of reference at any of the cognates.) Old Earth is to be a gentle, kindly world, rich in treasures and artifacts, a world of old places – old inns, old roads, old forests, old palaces – where folk come to wander and dream, to experience the best of the past without suffering the worst

  Material abundance can now be taken for granted: Our resources are infinite. Metal, timber, soil, rock, water, air: free for anyone’s taking. A single commodity remains in finite supply: human toil.

  Gilbert Duray, the informally adopted grandson of Alan Robertson, worked on the Urban Removal Program. Six hours a day, four days a week, he guided a trashing machine across deserted Cuperinto, destroying tract houses, service stations, and supermarkets. Knobs and toggles controlled a steel hammer at the end of a hundred-foot boom; with a twitch of the finger, Duray toppled powerpoles, exploded picture windows, smashed siding and stucco, exploded picture windows, smashed siding and stucco, pulverized concrete. A disposal rig crawled fifty feet behind. The detritus was clawed upon a conveyor belt, carried to a twenty-foot orifice, and dumped with a rush and a rumble into the Apathetic Ocean. Aluminum siding, asphalt shingles, corrugated fiber-glass, TVs and barbecues, Swedish Modern furniture, Book-of-the-Month selections, concrete patio-tiles, finally the sidewalk and street itself: all to the bottom of the Apathetic Ocean. Only the trees remained, a strange eclectic forest stretching as far as the eye could reach: liquidambar and Scotch pine; Chinese pistachio, Atlas cedar, and ginkgo; white birch and Norway maple.

  At one o’clock Howard Wirtz emerged from the caboose, as they called the small locker room at the rear of the machine. Wirtz had homesteaded a Miocene world; Duray, with a wife and three children, had preferred the milder environment of a contemporary semicognate: the popular Type A world on which man had never evolved.

  Duray gave Wirtz the work schedule. “More or less like yesterday – straight out Persimmon to Walden, then right a block and back.”

  Wirtz, a dour and laconic man, acknowledged the information with a jerk of the head. On his Miocene world he lived alone, in a houseboat on a mountain lake. He harvested wild rice, mushrooms, and berries; he shot geese, ground-fowl, deer, young bison, and had once informed Duray that after his five-year work-time he might just retire to his lake and never appear on Earth again, except maybe to buy clothes and ammunition. “Nothing here I want, nothing at all.”

  Duray had given a derisive snort. “And what will you do with all your time?”

  “Hunt, fish, eat, and sleep, maybe sit on the front deck.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “I just might learn to fiddle. Nearest neighbor is fifteen million years away.”

  “You can’t be too careful, I suppose.”

  Duray descended to the ground and looked over his day’s work: a quarter-mile swath of desolation. Duray, who allowed his subconscious few extravagances, nevertheless felt a twinge for the old times, which, for all their disadvantages, at least had been lively. Voices, bicycle bells, the barking of dogs, the slamming of doors, still echoed along Persimmon Avenue. The former inhabitants presumably preferred their new homes. The self-sufficient had taken private worlds; the more gregarious lived in communities on worlds of every description: as early as the Carboniferous, as current as the Type A. A few had even returned to the now-uncrowded cities. An exciting era to live in: a time of flux. Duray, thirty-four years old, remembered no other way of life; the old existence, as exemplified by Persimmon Avenue, seemed antique, cramped, constricted.

  He had a word with the operator of the trashing machine; returning to the caboose, Duray paused to look through the orifice across the Apathetic Ocean. A squall hung black above the southern horizon, toward which a trail of broken lumber drifted, ultimately to wash up on some unknown pre-Cambrian shore. There never would be an inspector sailing forth to protest; the world knew no life other than mollusks and algae, and all the trash of Earth would never fill its submarine gorges. Duray tossed a rock through the gap and watched the alien water splash up and subside. Then he turned away and entered the caboose.

  Along the back wall were four doors. The second from the left was marked “G. DURAY.” He unlocked the door, pulled it open, and stopped short, staring in astonishment at the blank back wall. He lifted the transparent plastic flap that functioned as an air-seal and brought out the collapsed metal ring that had been the flange surrounding his passway. The inner surface was bare metal; looking through, he saw only the interior of the caboose.

  A long minute passed. Duray stood staring at the useless ribbon as if hypnotized, trying to grasp the implications of the situation. To his knowledge no passway had ever failed, unless it had been purposefully closed. Who would play him such a spiteful trick? Certainly not Elizabeth. She detested practical jokes and if anything, like Duray himself, was perhaps a trifle too intense and literal-minded. He jumped down from the caboose and strode off across Cupertino Forest: a sturdy, heavy-shouldered man of about average stature. His features were rough and uncompromising; his brown hair w
as cut crisply short; his eyes glowed golden-brown and exerted an arresting force. Straight, heavy eyebrows crossed his long, thin nose like the bar of a T; his mouth, compressed against some strong inner urgency, formed a lower horizontal bar. All in all, not a man to be trifled with, or so it would seem.

  He trudged through the haunted grove, preoccupied by the strange and inconvenient event that had befallen him. What had happened to the passway? Unless Elizabeth had invited friends out to Home, as they called their world, she was alone, with the three girls at school . . . Duray came out upon Stevens Creek Road. A farmer’s pickup truck halted at his signal and took him into San Jose, now little more than a country town.

  At the transit center he dropped a coin in the turnstile and entered the lobby. Four portals designated “LOCAL,” “CALIFORNIA,” “NORTH AMERICA,” and “WORLD” opened in the walls, each portal leading to a hub on Utilis.4

  Duray passed into the “California” hub, found the “Oakland” portal, returned to the Oakland Transit Center on Earth, passed back through the “Local” portal to the “Oakland” hub on Utilis, and returned to Earth through the “Montclair West” portal to a depot only a quarter mile from Thornhill School,5 to which Duray walked.

  In the office Duray identified himself to the clerk and requested the presence of his daughter Dolly.

  The clerk sent forth a messenger who, after an interval, returned alone. “Dolly Duray isn’t at school.”

  Duray was surprised; Dolly had been in good health and had set off to school as usual. He said, “Either Joan or Ellen will do as well.”

  The messenger again went forth and again returned. “Neither one is in their classrooms, Mr. Duray. All three of your children are absent.”

  “I can’t understand it,” said Duray, now fretful. “All three set off to school this morning.”

  “Let me ask Miss Haig. I’ve just come on duty.” The clerk spoke into a telephone, listened, then turned back to Duray. “The girls went home at ten o’clock. Mrs. Duray called for them and took them back through the passway.”

  “Did she give any reason whatever?”

  “Miss Haig says no; Mrs. Duray just told her she needed the girls at home.”

  Duray stifled a sigh of baffled irritation. “Could you take me to their locker? I’ll use their passway to get home.”

  “That’s contrary to school regulations, Mr. Duray. You’ll understand, I’m sure.”

  “I can identify myself quite definitely,” said Duray. “Mr. Carr knows me well. As a matter of fact, my passway collapsed, and I came here to get home.”

  “Why don’t you speak to Mr. Carr?”

  “I’d like to do so.”

  Duray was conducted into the principal’s office, where he explained his predicament. Mr. Carr expressed sympathy and made no difficulty about taking Duray to the children’s passway.

  They went to a hall at the back of the school and found the locker numbered 382. “Here we are,” said Carr. “I’m afraid that you’ll find it a tight fit.” He unlocked the metal door with his master key and threw it open. Duray looked inside and saw only the black metal at the back of the locker. The passway, like his own, had been closed.

  Duray drew back and for a moment could find no words.

  Carr spoke in a voice of polite amazement. “How very perplexing! I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anything like it before! Surely the girls wouldn’t play such a silly prank!”

  “They know better than to touch the passway,” Duray said gruffly. “Are you sure that this is the right locker?”

  Carr indicated the card on the outside of the locker, where three names had been typed: “DOROTHY DURAY, JOAN DURAY, ELLEN DURAY.” “No mistake,” said Carr, “and I’m afraid that I can’t help you any further. Are you in common residency?”

  “It’s our private homestead.”

  Carr nodded with lips judiciously pursed, to suggest that insistence upon so much privacy seemed eccentric. He gave a deprecatory little chuckle. “I suppose if you isolate yourself to such an extent, you more or less must expect a series of emergencies.”

  “To the contrary,” Duray said crisply. “Our life is uneventful, because there’s no one to bother us. We love the wild animals, the quiet, the fresh air. We wouldn’t have it any differently.”

  Carr smiled a dry smile. “Mr. Robertson has certainly altered the lives of us all. I understand that he is your grandfather?”

  “I was raised in his household. I’m his nephew’s foster son. The blood relationship isn’t all that close.”

  III

  From Memoirs and Reflections:

  I early became interested in magnetic fluxes and their control. After taking my degree, I worked exclusively in this field, studying all varieties of magnetic envelopes and developing controls over their formation. For many years my horizons were thus limited, and I lived a placid existence.

  Two contemporary developments forced me down from my “ivory castle.” First: the fearful overcrowding of the planet and the prospect of worse to come. Cancer already was an affliction of the past; head diseases were under control; I feared that in another ten years immortality might be a practical reality for many of us, with a consequent augmentation of population pressure.

  Secondly, the theoretical work done upon “black holes” and “white holes” suggested that matter compacted in a “black hole” broke through a barrier to spew forth from a “white hole” in another universe. I calculated pressures and considered the self-focusing magnetic sheaths, cones, and whorls with which I was experimenting. Through their innate properties these entities constricted themselves to apexes of a cross section indistinguishable from a geometric point. What if two or more cones (I asked myself) could be arranged in contra position to produce an equilibrium? In this condition charged particles must be accelerated to near light-speed and at the mutual focus constricted and impinged together. The pressures thus created, though of small scale, would be far in excess of those characteristic of the “black holes”: to unknown effect.

  I can now report that the mathematics of the multiple focus are a most improbable thicket, and the useful service I enforced upon what I must call a set of absurd contradictions is one of my secrets. I know that thousands of scientists, at home and abroad, are attempting to duplicate my work; they are welcome to the effort. None will succeed. Why do I speak so positively? This is my other secret.

  Duray marched back to the Montclair West depot in a state of angry puzzlement. There were four passways to Home, of which two were closed. The third was located in his San Francisco locker: the “front door,” so to speak. The last and the original orifice was cased, filed, and indexed in Alan Robertson’s vault.

  Duray tried to deal with the problem in rational terms. The girls would never tamper with the passways. As for Elizabeth, no more than the girls would she consider such an act. At least Duray could imagine no reason that would so urge or impel her. Elizabeth, like himself, a foster child, was a beautiful, passionate woman, tall, dark-haired, with lustrous dark eyes and a wide mouth that tended to curve in an endearingly crooked grin. She was also responsible, loyal, careful, industrious; she loved her family and Riverview Manor. The theory of erotic intrigue seemed to Duray as incredible as the fact of the closed passways. Though for a fact, Elizabeth was prone to wayward and incomprehensible moods. Suppose Elizabeth had received a visitor who for some sane or insane purpose had forced her to close the passway? . . . Duray shook his head in frustration, like a harassed bull. The matter no doubt had some simple cause. Or on the other hand, Duray reflected, the cause might be complex and intricate. The thought, by some obscure connection, brought before him the image of his nominal foster father, Alan Robertson’s nephew, Bob Robertson. Duray gave his head a nod of gloomy asseveration, as if to confirm a fact he long ago should have suspected. He went to the phone booth and called Bob Robertson’s apartment in San Francisco. The screen glowed white and an instant later displayed Bob Robertson’s alert, clean, and ha
ndsome face. “Good afternoon, Gil. Glad you called; I’ve been anxious to get in touch with you.”

  Duray became warier than ever. “How so?”

  “Nothing serious, or so I hope. I dropped by your locker to leave off some books that I promised Elizabeth, and I noticed through the glass that your passway is closed. Collapsed. Useless.”

  “Strange,” said Duray. “Very strange indeed. I can’t understand it. Can you?”

  “No . . . not really.”

  Duray thought he detected a subtlety of intonation. His eyes narrowed in concentration. “The passway at my rig was closed. The passway at the girls’ school was closed. Now you tell me that the downtown passway is closed.”

  Bob Robertson grinned. “That’s a pretty broad hint, I would say. Did you and Elizabeth have a row?”

  “No.”

  Bob Robertson rubbed his long aristocratic chin. “A mystery. There’s probably some very ordinary explanation.”

  “Or some very extraordinary explanation.”

  “True. Nowadays a person can’t rule out anything. By the way, tomorrow night is the Rumfuddle, and I expect both you and Elizabeth to be on hand.”

  “As I recall,” said Duray, “I’ve already declined the invitation.” The Rumfuddlers were a group of Bob’s cronies. Duray suspected that their activities were not altogether wholesome. “Excuse me; I’ve got to find an open passway, or Elizabeth and the kids are marooned.”

  “Try Alan,” said Bob. “He’ll have the original in his vault.”

  Duray gave a curt nod. “I don’t like to bother him, but that’s my last hope.”

  “Let me know what happens,” said Bob Robertson. “And if you’re at loose ends, don’t forget the Rumfuddle tomorrow night. I mentioned the matter to Elizabeth, and she said she’d be sure to attend.”

  “Indeed. And when did you consult Elizabeth?”