Connoisseur's SF

by Tom Boardman

  The car bore.

  $6 × 1075.

  5th Day: West 270. 17th Greater Federation.

  At a kiosk on the station Franz bought a clip of razor blades and glanced at the brochure put out by the local chamber of commerce.

  “12,000 levels, 98 cents a foot, unique Elm Drive, fire safety records unequalled…”

  He went back to the train, shaved, and counted the thirty dollars left. He was now ninety-five million Great-Miles from the suburban station on 984th Street and he knew he couldn’t delay his return much longer. Next time he’d save up a couple of thousand.

  $7 × 10127.

  7th Day: West 270. 212th Metropolitan Empire.

  Franz peered at the indicator.

  “Aren’t we stopping here?” he asked a man three seats away. “I wanted to find out the market average.”

  “Varies. Anything from fifty cents a—”

  “Fifty!” Franz shot back, jumping up. “When’s the next stop? I’ve got to get off!”

  “Not here, son.” He put out a restraining hand. “This is Night Town. You in real estate?”

  Franz nodded, holding himself back. “I thought…”

  “Relax.” He came and sat opposite Franz. “It’s just one big slum. Dead areas. In places it goes as low as five cents. There are no services, no power.”

  It took them two days to pass through.

  “City Authority are starting to seal it off,” the man told him. “Huge blocks. It’s the only thing they can do. What happens to the people inside I hate to think.”

  He chewed on a sandwich. “Strange, but there are a lot of these black areas. You don’t hear about them, but they’re growing. Starts in a back street in some ordinary dollar neighbourhood; a bottleneck in the sewage disposal system, not enough ash cans, and before you know it—a million cubic miles have gone back to jungle. They try a relief scheme, pump in a little cyanide, and then—brick it up. Once they do that they’re closed for good.”

  Franz nodded, listening to the dull humming air.

  “Eventually there’ll be nothing left but these black areas. The City will be one huge cemetery. What a thought!”

  10th Day: East 90 feet. 755th Greater Metropolitan—

  “Wait!” Franz leapt out of his seat and stared at the indicator panel.

  “What’s the matter?” someone opposite asked.

  “East!” Franz shouted. He banged the panel sharply with his hand but the lights held. “Has this train changed direction?”

  “No, it’s eastbound,” another of the passengers told him. “Are you on the wrong train?”

  “It should be heading west,” Franz insisted. “It has been for the last ten days.”

  “Ten days!” the man exclaimed. “Have you been on this sleeper for ten days? Where the hell are you going?”

  Franz went forward and grabbed the car attendant.

  “Which way is this train going? West?”

  The attendant shook his head. “East, sir. It’s always been going east.”

  “You’re crazy,” , Franz snapped. “I want to see the pilot’s log.”

  “I’m afraid that isn’t possible. May I see your ticket, sir?”

  “Listen,” Franz said weakly, all the accumulated frustration of the last twenty years mounting inside Mm. “I’ve been on this…”

  He stopped and went back to his seat.

  The five other passengers watched Mm carefully.

  “Ten days,” one of them was still repeating in an awed voice.

  Two minutes later someone came and asked Franz for his ticket.

  “And of course it was completely in order,” the police surgeon commented.

  He walked over to M. and swung the spot out of his eyes.

  “Strangely enough there’s no regulation to prevent anyone else doing the same thing. I used to go for free rides myself when I was younger, though I never tried anything like your journey.”

  He went back to the desk.

  “We’ll drop the charge,” he said. “You’re not a vagrant in any indictable sense, and the Transport authorities can do nothing against you. How this curvature was built into the system they can’t explain. Now about yourself. Are you going to continue this search?”

  “I want to build a flying machine,” M. said carefully. “There must be free space somewhere. I don’t know… perhaps on the lower levels.”

  The surgeon stood up. “I’ll see the sergeant and get him to hand you over to one of our psychiatrists. He’ll be able to help you with that dream.”

  The surgeon hesitated before opening the door, “Look,” he began to explain sympathetically, “you can’t get out of time, can you? Subjectively it’s a plastic dimension, but whatever you do to yourself you’d never be able to stop that clock—” he pointed to the one on the desk “—or make it run backwards. In exactly the same way you can’t get out of the City.”

  “The analogy doesn’t hold,” M. said. He gestured at the wails around them and the lights in the street outside. “All this was built by us. The question nobody can answer is: what was here before we built it?”

  “It’s always been here,” the surgeon said. “Not these particular bricks and girders, but others before them. You accept that time Has no beginning and no end. The City is as old as time and continuous with it.”

  “The first bricks were laid by someone,” M. insisted. “There was the Foundation.”

  “A myth. Only the scientists believe in that, and even they don’t try to make too much of it. Most of them privately admit that the Foundation Stone is nothing more than a superstition. We pay it lip service out of convenience, and because it gives us a sense of tradition. Obviously there can’t have been a first brick. If there was, how can you explain who laid it, and even more difficult, where they came from?”

  “There must be free space somewhere,” M. said doggedly. “The City must have bounds.”

  “Why?” the surgeon asked. “It can’t be floating in the middle of nowhere. Or is that what you’re trying to believe?”

  M. sank back limply. “No.”

  The surgeon watched M. silently for a few minutes and paced back to the desk. “This peculiar fixation of yours puzzles me. You’re caught between what the psychiatrists call paradoxical faces. I suppose you haven’t misinterpreted something you’ve heard about the wall?”

  M. looked up. “Which wall?”

  The surgeon nodded to himself. “Some advanced opinion maintains that there’s a wall around the City, through which it’s impossible to penetrate. I don’t pretend to understand the theory myself. It’s far too abstract and sophisticated. Anyway I suspect they’ve confused this wall with the bricked-up black areas you passed through on the Sleeper. I prefer the accepted view that the City stretches out in all directions without limits.”

  He went over to the door. “Wait here, and I’ll see about getting you a probationary release. Don’t worry, the psychiatrists will straighten everything out for you.”

  When the surgeon had left M. stared emptily at the floor, too exhausted to feel relieved. He stood up and stretched himself, walking unsteadily round the room.

  Outside the last pilot lights were going out and the patrolman on the catwalk under the roof was using his torch. A police car roared down one of the avenues crossing the street, its rails screaming. Three lights snapped on along the street and then one by one went off again.

  M. wondered why Gregson hadn’t come down to the station.

  Then the calendar on the desk riveted his attention.

  The date exposed on the fly leaf was 12 August.

  That was the day he had started off on his journey.

  Exactly three weeks ago.

  Today!

  Take a west-bound Green to 298th Street, cross over at the intersection and get a Red elevator up to Level 237. Walk down to the station on Route 175, change to a 438 suburban and go down to 795th Street. Take a Blue line to the Plaza, get off at 4th and 275th, turn left at the roundabout
and

  You’re back where you first started from. $HELL × 10.

  Isaac Asimov

  The Fun They Had

  Margie even wrote about it that night in her diary. On the page headed 17 May, 2155, she wrote, “Today Tommy found a real book!”

  It was a very old book. Margie’s grandfather once said that when he was a little boy his grandfather told him that there was a time when all stories were printed on paper.

  They turned the pages, which were yellow and crinkly, and it was awfully funny to read words that stood still instead of moving the way they were supposed to—on a screen, you know. And then, when they turned back to the page before, it had the same words on it that it had had when they read it the first time.

  “Gee,” said Tommy, “what a waste. When you’re through with the book, you just throw it away, I guess. Our television screen must have had a million books on it and it’s good for plenty more. I wouldn’t throw it away.”

  “Same with mine,” said Margie. She was eleven and hadn’t seen as many telebooks as Tommy had. He was thirteen.

  She said, “Where did you find it?”

  “In my house.” He pointed without looking, because he was busy reading. “In the attic.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “School.”

  Margie was scornful. “School? What’s there to write about school? I hate school,” Margie always hated school, but now she hated it more than ever. The mechanical teacher had been giving her test after test in geography and she had been doing worse and worse until her mother had shaken her head sorrowfully and sent for the County Inspector.

  He was a round little man with a red face and a whole box of tools with dials and wires. He smiled at her and gave her an apple, then took the teacher apart. Margie had hoped he wouldn’t know how to put it together again, but he knew how all right and after an hour or so, there it was again, large and black and ugly with a big screen on which all the lessons were shown and the questions were asked. That wasn’t so bad. The part she hated most was the slot where she had to put homework and test papers. She always had to write them out in a punch code they made her learn when she was six years old, and the mechanical teacher calculated the mark in no time.

  The Inspector had smiled after he was finished and patted her head. He said to her mother, “It’s not the little girl’s fault, Mrs Jones. I think the geography sector was geared a little too quick. Those things happen sometimes. I’ve slowed it up to an average ten-year level. Actually, the overall pattern of her progress is quite satisfactory,” And he patted Margie’s head again.

  Margie was disappointed. She had been hoping they would take the teacher away altogether. They had once taken Tommy’s teacher away for nearly a month because the history sector had blanked out completely…

  So she said to Tommy, “Why would anyone write about school?”

  Tommy looked at her with very superior eyes. “Because it’s not our kind of school, stupid. This is the old kind of school that they had hundreds and hundreds of years ago,” He added loftily, pronouncing the word carefully, “Centuries ago.”

  Margie was hurt. “Well, I don’t know what kind of school they had all that time ago.” She read the book over his shoulder for a while, then said, “Anyway, they had a teacher.”

  “Sure they had a teacher, but it wasn’t a regular teacher. It was a man.”

  “A man? How could a man be a teacher?”

  “Well, he just told the boys and girls things and gave them homework and asked them questions.”

  “A man isn’t smart enough.”

  “Sure he is. My father knows as much as my teacher.”

  “He can’t. A man can’t know as much as a teacher.”

  “He knows almost as much I betcha.”

  Margie wasn’t prepared to dispute that. She said, “I wouldn’t want a strange man in my house to teach me.”

  Tommy screamed with laughter, “You don’t know much, Margie. The teachers didn’t live in the house. They had a special building and all the kids went there.”

  “And all the kids learned the same thing?”

  “Sure, if they were the same age.”

  “But my mother says a teacher has to be adjusted to fit the mind of each boy and girl it teaches and that each kid has to be taught differently.”

  “Just the same they didn’t do it that way then. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to read the book.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t like it,” Margie said quickly. She wanted to read about those funny schools.

  They weren’t even half finished when Margie’s mother called, “Margie! School!”

  Margie looked up. “Not yet, mamma.”

  “Now,” said Mrs. Jones. “And it’s probably time for Tommy, too.”

  Margie said to Tommy, “Can I read the book some more with you after school?”

  “Maybe,” he said, nonchalantly. He walked away whistling, the dusty old book tucked beneath his arm.

  Margie went into the schoolroom. It was right next to her bedroom, and the mechanical teacher was on and waiting for her. It was always on at the same time every day except Saturday and Sunday, because her mother said little girls learned better if they learned at regular hours.

  The screen was lit up, and it said: “Today’s arithmetic lesson is on the addition of proper fractions. Please insert yesterday’s homework in the proper slot.”

  Margie did so with a sigh. She was thinking about the old schools they had when her grandfather’s grandfather was a little boy. All the kids from the whole neighbourhood came, laughing and shouting in the school-yard, sitting together in the schoolroom, going home together at the end of the day. They learned the same things so they could help one another on the homework and talk about it.

  And the teachers were people…

  The mechanical teacher was flashing on the screen: “When we add the fractions ½ and ¼—”

  Margie was thinking about how the kids must have loved it in the old days. She was thinking about the fun they had.

  Eric Frank Russell

  Diabologic

  He made one circumnavigation to put the matter beyond doubt. That was standard space-scout technique; look once on the approach, look again all the way round. It often happened that second and closer impressions contradicted first and more distant ones. Some perverse factor in the probability sequence frequently caused the laugh to appear on the other side of a planetary face.

  Not this time, though. What he’d observed coming in remained visible right around the belly. This world was occupied by intelligent life of a high order. The unmistakable markings were there in the form of dockyards, railroad marshalling grids, power stations, space-ports, quarries, factories, mines, housing projects, bridges, canals, a hundred and one other signs of life that spawns fast and vigorously.

  The space-ports in particular were highly significant. He counted three of them. None held a flightworthy ship at the moment he flamed high above them but in one was a tubeless vessel undergoing repair. A long, black, snouty thing about the size and shape of an Earth-Mars tramp. Certainly not as big and racy-Iooking as a Sol-Sirius liner.

  As he gazed down through his tiny control-cabin’s armour-glass he knew that this was to be contact with a vengeance. During long, long centuries of human expansion more than seven hundred inhabitable worlds had been found, charted, explored and in some cases exploited. AH contained life. A minority held intelligent life. But up to this moment nobody had found one other life form sufficiently advanced to cavort among the stars.

  Of course, such a discovery had been theorized. Human adventuring created an exploratory sphere that swelled into the cosmos. Sooner or later, it was assumed, that sphere must touch another one at some point within the heavenly host. What would happen then was anybody’s guess. Perhaps they’d fuse, making a bigger, shinier biform bubble. Or perhaps both bubbles would burst. Anyway, by the looks of it the touching-time was now.

  If he’
d been within reach of a frontier listening-post he’d have beamed a signal detailing this find. Even now it wasn’t too late to drive back for seventeen weeks and get within receptive range. But that would mean seeking a refuelling dump while he was at it. The ship just hadn’t enough for such a double run plus the return trip home. Down there they had fuel. Maybe they’d give him some and maybe it would suit his engines. And just as possibly it would prove useless.

  Right now he had adequate power reserves to land here and eventually get back to base. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. So he tilted the vessel and plunged into the alien atmosphere, heading for the largest space-port of the three.

  What might be awaiting him at ground level did not bother him at all. The Terrans of today were not the nervy, apprehensive Terrans of the earthbound and lurid past. They had become space-sophisticated. They had learned to lounge around with a carefree smile and let the other life forms do the worrying. It lent an air of authority and always worked. Nothing is more intimidating than an idiotic grin worn by a manifest nonidiot.

  Quite a useful weapon in the diabological armoury was the knowing smirk.

  His landing created a most satisfactory sensation. The planet’s point-nine Earth-mass permitted a little extra dexterity in handling the ship. He swooped it down, curved it up, dropped tail-first, stood straddle-legged, on the tail-fins, cut the braking blast and would not have missed centring on a spread handkerchief by more than ten inches.

  They seemed to spring out of the ground the way people do when cars collide on a deserted road. Dozens of them, hundreds. They were on the short side, the tallest not exceeding five feet. Otherwise they differed from his own pink faced, blue eyed type no more than would a Chinese covered in fine grey fur.

  Massing in a circle beyond range of his jet-rebound, they stared at the ship, gabbled, gesticulated, nudged each other, argued, shrugged shoulders, and generally behaved in the manner of a curious mob that has discovered a deep, dark hole with strange noises issuing therefrom. The noteworthy feature about their behaviour was that none were scared, none attempted to get out of reach either openly or surreptitiously. The only thing about which they were wary was the chance of a sudden blast from the silent jets.