Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  She is silent a moment. “Hello,” she says finally.

  “I’m sorry about yesterday.”

  “I waited a long time for you.”

  I shrug. “I made up my mind that it was no use to come. But then I changed my mind again.”

  She tries to look angry. But I know she is pleased to see me again—else why did she come here today? She cannot hide her inner pleasure. Nor can I. I point across the street to the cocktail lounge.

  “A daiquiri?” I say. “As a peace offering?”

  “All right.”

  Today the lounge is crowded, but we find a booth somehow. There is a brightness in her eyes that I have not seen before. I sense that a barrier is crumbling within her.

  “You’re less afraid of me, Helen,” I say.

  “I’ve never been afraid of you. I’m afraid of what could happen if we take the risks.”

  “Don’t be. Don’t be.”

  “I’m trying not to be afraid. But sometimes it seems so hopeless. Since they came here—”

  “We can still try to live our own lives.”

  “Maybe.”

  “We have to. Let’s make a pact, Helen. No more gloom. No more worrying about the terrible things that might just happen. All right?”

  A pause. Then a cool hand against mine.

  “All right.”

  We finish our drinks, and I present my Credit Central to pay for them, and we go outside. I want her to tell me to forget about this afternoon’s work and come home with her. It is inevitable, now, that she will ask me, and better sooner than later.

  We walk a block. She does not offer the invitation. I sense the struggle inside her, and I wait, letting that struggle reach its own resolution without interference from me. We walk a second block. Her arm is through mine, but she talks only of her work, of the weather, and it is a remote, arm’s-length conversation. At the next corner she swings around, away from her apartment, back toward the cocktail lounge. I try to be patient with her.

  I have no need to rush things now, I tell myself. Her body is not a secret to me. We have begun our relationship topsy-turvy, with the physical part first; now it will take time to work backward to the more difficult part that some people call love.

  But of course she is not aware that we have known each other that way. The wind blows swirling snowflakes in our faces, and somehow the cold sting awakens honesty in me. I know what I must say. I must relinquish my unfair advantage.

  I tell her, “While I was ridden last week, Helen, I had a girl in my room.”

  “Why talk of such things now?”

  “I have to, Helen. You were the girl.”

  She halts. She turns to me. People hurry past us in the street. Her face is very pale, with dark red spots growing in her cheeks.

  “That’s not funny, Charles.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be. You were with me from Tuesday night to early Friday morning.”

  “How can you possibly know that?”

  “I do. I do. The memory is clear. Somehow it remains, Helen. I see your whole body.”

  “Stop it, Charles.”

  “We were very good together,” I say. “We must have pleased our Passengers because we were so good. To see you again—it was like waking from a dream, and finding that the dream was real, the girl right there—”

  “No!”

  “Let’s go to your apartment and begin again.”

  She says, “You’re being deliberately filthy, and I don’t know why, but there wasn’t any reason for you to spoil things. Maybe I was with you and maybe I wasn’t, but you wouldn’t know it, and if you did know it you should keep your mouth shut about it, and—”

  “You have a birthmark the size of a dime,” I say, “about two inches below your left breast.”

  She sobs and hurls herself at me, there in the street. Her long silvery nails rake my cheeks. She pummels me. I seize her. Her knees assail me. No one pays attention; those who pass by assume we are ridden, and turn their heads. She is all fury, but I have my arms around hers like metal bands, so that she can only stamp and snort, and her body is close against mine. She is rigid, anguished.

  In a low, urgent voice I say, “We’ll defeat them, Helen. We’ll finish what they started. Don’t fight me. There’s no reason to fight me. I know, it’s a fluke that I remember you, but let me go with you and I’ll prove that we belong together.”

  “Let—go—”

  “Please. Please. Why should we be enemies? I don’t mean you any harm. I love you, Helen. Do you remember, when we were kids, we could play at being in love? I did; you must have done it too. Sixteen, seventeen years old. The whispers, the conspiracies—all a big game, and we knew it. But the game’s over. We can’t afford to tease and run. We have so little time, when we’re free—we have to trust, to open ourselves—”

  “It’s wrong.”

  “No. Just because it’s the stupid custom for two people brought together by Passengers to avoid one another, that doesn’t mean we have to follow it. Helen—Helen—”

  Something in my tone registers with her. She ceases to struggle. Her rigid body softens. She looks up at me, her tearstreaked face thawing, her eyes blurred.

  “Trust me,” I say. “Trust me, Helen!”

  She hesitates. Then she smiles.

  * * * *

  In that moment I feel the chill at the back of my skull, the sensation as of a steel needle driven deep through bone. I stiffen. My arms drop away from her. For an instant, I lose touch, and when the mists clear all is different.

  “Charles?” she says. “Charles?”

  Her knuckles are against her teeth. I turn, ignoring her, and go back into the cocktail lounge. A young man sits in one of the front booths. His dark hair gleams with pomade; his cheeks are smooth. His eyes meet mine.

  I sit down. He orders drinks. We do not talk.

  My hand falls on his wrist, and remains there. The bartender, serving the drinks, scowls but says nothing. We sip our cocktails and put the drained glasses down.

  “Let’s go,” the young man says.

  I follow him out.

  * * * *

  Copyright © 1968 by Damon Knight.

  NORMAN SPINRAD

  (1940– )

  Best known for his novel Bug Jack Barron and other, often controversial, New Wave writing, Norman Spinrad has been everything from literary agent to sandalmaker to radio talk show host to welfare investigator. Mostly he is a survivor, and continues to write years after being diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer.

  Spinrad graduated from Bronx High School of Science and City College of New York and sold his first story to Astounding in 1963. In the late 1960s his bad boy style, filled with violence and profanity, made him both commercial and controversial; Britain’s biggest news chain banned New Worlds magazine for carrying Spinrad’s work. A decade later the field had changed enough that his work was mainstream, and Spinrad went on to twice head the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Association and edit a number of anthologies.

  The story’s title is a reference to Bob Dylan’s 1965 counterculture hit song, “Like a Rolling Stone.”

  NO DIRECTION HOME, by Norman Spinrad

  First published in New Worlds Quarterly 2, September 1971

  “But I once did succeed in stuffing it all back in Pandora’s box,” Richarson said, taking another hit. “You remember Pandora Deutchman, don’t you, Will? Everybody in the biochemistry department stuffed it all in Pandora’s box at one time or another, I seem to vaguely remember one party when you did it yourself.”

  “Oh you’re a real comedian, Dave,” Goldberg said, stubbing out his roach and jamming a cork into the glass vial which he had been filling from the petcock; at the end of the apparatus’ run. “Any day now, I expect you to start slipping strychnine into the goods. That’d be pretty good for a yock, too.”

  “You know, I never thought of that before. Maybe you got something there. Let a few people go out with a smile, satisfaction guaran
teed. Christ, Will, we could tell them exactly what it was and still sell some of the stuff.”

  “That’s not funny, man,” Goldberg said, handing the vial to Richarson, who carefully snugged it away with the others in the excelsior-packed box. “It’s not funny because it’s true.”

  “Hey, you’re not getting an attack of morals, are you? Don’t move, I’ll be right back with some methalin—that oughta get your head straight.”

  “My head is straight already. Canabinolic acid, our own invention.”

  “Canabinolic acid? Where did you get that, in a drugstore? We haven’t bothered with it for three years.”

  Goldberg placed another empty vial in the rack under the petcock and opened the valve. “Bought it on the street for kicks,” he said. “Kids are brewing it in their bathtubs now.” He shook his head, almost a random gesture. “Remember what a bitch the original synthesis was?”

  “Science marches on!”

  “Too bad we couldn’t have patented the stuff,” Goldberg said as he contemplated the thin stream of clear green liquid entering the open mouth of the glass vial. “We could’ve retired off the royalties by now.”

  “If we had the Mafia to collect for us.”

  “That might be arranged.”

  “Yeah, well maybe I should look into it,” Richarson said as Goldberg handed him another full vial. “We shouldn’t be pigs about it, though. Just about ten percent off the top at the manufacturing end. I don’t believe in stifling private enterprise.”

  “No really, Dave,” Goldberg said, “maybe we made a mistake in not trying to patent the stuff. People do patent combo psychedelics, you know.”

  “You don’t mean people, man, you mean outfits like American Marijuana and Psychedelics, Inc. They can afford the lawyers and grease. They can work the FDA’s head. We can’t.”

  Goldberg opened the petcock valve. “Yeah, well at least it’ll be six months or so before the Dope Industry or anyone else figures out how to synthesize this new crap, and by that time I think I’ll have just about licked the decay problem in the cocanol extraction process. We should be one step ahead of the squares for at least another year.”

  “You know what I think, Will?” Richarson said, patting the side of the half-filled box of vials. “I think we got a holy mission, is what. I think we’re servants of the evolutionary process. Every time we come up with a new psychedelic, we’re advancing the evolution of human consciousness. We develop the stuff and make our bread off it for a while, and then the Dope Industry comes up with our synthesis and mass produces it, and then we gotta come up with the next drug out so we can still set our tables in style. If it weren’t for the Dope Industry and the way the drug laws are set up, we could stand still and become bloated plutocrats just by putting out the same old dope year after year. This way, we’re doing some good in the world, we’re doing something to further human evolution.”

  Goldberg handed him another full vial. “Screw human evolution,” he said. “What has human evolution ever done for us?”

  * * * *

  “As you know, Dr. Taller, we’re having some unforeseen side-effects with eucomorfamine,” General Carlyle said, stuffing his favorite Dunhill with rough-cut burley. Taller took out a pack of Golds, extracted a joint, and lit it with a lighter bearing an Air Force rather than a Psychedelics, Inc. ensignia. Perhaps this had been a deliberate gesture, perhaps not.

  “With a psychedelic as new as eucomorfamine, General,” Taller said, “no side-effects can quite be called ‘unforeseen’. After all, even Project Groundhog itself is an experiment.”

  Carlyle lit his pipe and sucked in a mouthful of smoke which was good and carcinogenic; the General believed that a good soldier should cultivate at least one foolhardy minor vice. “No word-games, please, Doctor,” he said. “Eucomorfamine is supposed to help our men in the Groundhog moonbase deal with the claustrophobic conditions; it is not supposed to promote faggotry in the ranks. The reports I’ve been getting indicate that the drug is doing both. The Air Force does not want it to do both. Therefore, by definition, eucomorfamine has an undesirable side-effect. Therefore, your contract is up for review.”

  “General, General, psychedelics are not uniforms, after all. You can’t expect us to tailor them to order. You asked for a drug that would combat claustrophobia without impairing alertness or the sleep cycle or attention-span or initiative. You think this is easy? Eucomorfamine produces claustrophilia without any side-effect but a raising of the level of sexual energy. As such, I consider it one of the minor miracles of psychedelic science.”

  “That’s all very well, Taller, but surely you can see that we simply cannot tolerate violent homosexual behavior among our men in the moonbase.”

  Taller smiled, perhaps somewhat fatuously. “But you can’t very well tolerate a high rate of claustrophobic breakdown, either,” he said, “You have only four obvious alternatives, General Carlyle: continue to use eucomorfamine and accept a certain level of homosexual incidents, discontinue eucomorfamine and accept a very high level of claustrophobic breakdown, or cancel Project Groundhog. Or…“

  It dawned upon the General that he had been the object of a rather sophisticated sales pitch. “Or go to a drug that would cancel out the side-effect of eucomorfamine,” he said. “Your company just wouldn’t happen to have such a drug in the works, would it?”

  Dr. Taller gave him a we’re-all-men-of-the-world grin. “Psychedelics, Inc. has been working on a sexual suppressant,” he admitted none too grudgingly. “Not an easy psychic spec to fill. The problem is that if you actually decrease sexual energy, you tend to get impaired performance in the higher cerebral centers, which is all very well in penal institutions, but hardly acceptable in Project Groundhog’s case. The trick is to channel the excess energy elsewhere. We decided that the only viable alternative was to siphon it off into mystical fugue-states. Once we worked it out, the biochemistry became merely a matter of detail. We’re about ready to bring the drug we’ve developed—trade name nadabrin—into the production stage.”

  The general’s pipe had gone out. He did not bother to relight it. Instead, he took 5 mg. of lebemil, which seemed more to the point at the moment. “This nadabrin,” he said very deliberately, “it bleeds off the excess sexuality into what? Fugue-states? Trances? We certainly don’t need a drug that makes our men psychotic.”

  “Of course not. About three hundred micrograms of nadabrin will give a man a mystical experience that lasts less than four hours. He won’t be much good to you during that time, to be sure, but his sexual energy level will be severely depressed for about a week. Three hundred micrograms to each man on eucomorfamine, say every five days, to be on the safe side.”

  General Carlyle relit his pipe and ruminated. Things seemed to be looking up. “Sounds pretty good,” he finally admitted. “But what about the content of the mystical experiences? Nothing that would impair devotion to duty?”

  Taller snubbed out his roach. “I’ve taken nadabrin myself,” he said. “No problems.”

  “What was it like?”

  Taller once again put on his fatuous smile. “That’s the best part of nadabrin,” he said. “I don’t remember what it was like. You don’t retain any memories of what happens to you under nadabrin. Genuine fugue-state. So you can be sure the mystical experiences don’t have any undesirable content, can’t you? Or at any rate, you can be sure that the experience can’t impair a man’s military performance.”

  “What the men don’t remember can’t hurt them, eh?”

  “What was that, General?”

  “I said I’d recommend that we give it a try.”

  * * * *

  They sat together in a corner booth back in the smoke, sizing each other up while the crowd in the joint yammered and swirled around them in some other reality, like a Bavarian merrygoround.

  “What are you on?” he said, noticing that her hair seemed black and seamless like a beetle’s carapace, a dark metal helmet framing her pale face in glor
y. Wow.

  “Peyotadrene,” she said, her lips moving like incredibly jeweled and articulated metal flower-petals. “Been up for about three hours. What’s your trip?”

  “Canabinolic acid,” he said, the distortion of his mouth’s movement casting his face into an ideogramic pattern which was barely decipherable to her perception as a foreshadowing of energy release. Maybe they would make it.

  “I haven’t tried any of that stuff for months,” she said. “I hardly remember what that reality feels like.” Her skin luminesced from within, a translucent white china mask over a yellow candle-flame. She was a magnificent artifact, a creation of jaded and sophisticated gods.

  “It feels good,” he said, his eyebrows forming a set of curves which, when considered as part of a pattern containing the movement of his lips against his teeth, indicated a clear desire to donate energy to the filling of her void. They would make it. “Call me old-fashioned maybe, but I still think canabinolic acid is groovy stuff.”

  “Do you think you could go on a sex-trip behind it?” she asked. The folds and wrinkles of her ears had been carved with microprecision out of pink ivory.

  “Well, I suppose so, in a peculiar kind of way,” he said, hunching his shoulders forward in a clear gesture of offering, an alignment with the pattern of her movement through space-time that she could clearly perceive as intersecting her trajectory. “I mean, if you want me to ball you, I think I can make it.”

  The tiny gold hairs on her face were a microscopic field of wheat shimmering in a shifting summer breeze as she said: “That’s the most meaningful thing anyone has said to me in hours.”

  The convergence of every energy configuration in the entire universe toward complete identity with the standing wave pattern of its maximum ideal structure was brightly mirrored for the world to see in the angle between the curves of his lips as he spoke.