The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 3: Something Wild Is Loose: 1969-72

by Robert Silverberg

  A shriek from the bathroom. Christ, what have I done now? I better go see.

  Sara, naked, kneels on the cold tiles. Her head is in the bathtub and she’s clinging with both hands to the bathtub’s rim and she’s shaking violently.

  “You okay?” I ask. “What happened?”

  “Like a kick in the back,” she says hoarsely. “I was at the sink, washing my face, and I turned around and something hit me like a kick in the back and knocked me halfway across the room.”

  “You okay, though? You aren’t hurt?”

  “Help me up.”

  She’s upset but not injured. She’s so upset that she forgets that she’s naked, and without putting on her robe she cuddles up against me, trembling. She seems small and fragile and scared. I stroke her bare back where I imagine she felt the blow. Also I sneak a look at her nipples, just to see if they’re still standing up after her date with Jimmy the Greek. They aren’t. I soothe her with my fingers. I feel very manly and protective, even if it’s only my cruddy dumb sister I’m protecting.

  “What could have happened?” she asks. “You weren’t pulling any tricks, were you?”

  “I was in bed,” I say, totally sincere.

  “A lot of funny things have been going on around this house lately,” she says.

  Cindy, catching me in the hallway between Geometry and Spanish: “How come you never call me any more?”

  “Been busy.”

  “Busy how?”

  “Busy.”

  “I guess you must be,” she says. “Looks to me like you haven’t slept in a week. What’s her name?”

  “Her? No her. I’ve just been busy.” I try to escape. Must I push her again? “A research project.”

  “You could take some time out for relaxing. You should keep in touch with old friends.”

  “Friends? What kind of friend are you? You said I was silly. You said I was disgusting. Remember, Cindy?”

  “The emotions of the moment. I was off balance. I mean, psychologically. Look, let’s talk about all this some time, Harry. Some time soon.”

  “Maybe.”

  “If you’re not doing anything Saturday night—”

  I look at her in astonishment. She’s actually asking me for a date! Why is she pursuing me? What does she want from me? Is she itching for another chance to humiliate me? Silly and disgusting, disgusting and silly. I look at my watch and quirk up my lips. Time to move along.

  “I’m not sure,” I tell her. “I may have some work to do.”

  “Work?”

  “Research,” I say. “I’ll let you know.”

  A night of happy experiments. I unscrew a light bulb, float it from one side of my room to the other, return it to the fixture, and efficiently screw it back in. Precision control. I go up to the roof and launch another beer can to the moon, only this time I loft it a thousand feet, bring it back, kick it up even higher, bring it back, send it off a third time with a tremendous accumulated kinetic energy, and I have no doubt it’ll cleave through space. I pick up trash in the street from a hundred yards away and throw it in the trash basket. Lastly—most scary of all—I polt myself. I levitate a little, lifting myself five feet into the air. That’s as high as I dare go. (What if I lose the power and fall?) If I had the courage, I could fly. I can do anything. Give me the right fulcrum and I’ll move the world. O, potentia! What a fantastic trip this is!

  After two awful days of inner debate I phone Cindy and make a date for Saturday. I’m not sure whether it’s a good idea. Her sudden new aggressiveness turns me off, slightly, but nevertheless it’s a novelty to have a girl chasing me, and who am I to snub her? I wonder what she’s up to, though. Coming on so interested in me after dumping me mercilessly on our last date. I’m still angry with her about that, but I can’t hold a grudge, not with her. Maybe she wants to make amends. We did have a pretty decent relationship in the nonphysical sense, until that one stupid evening. Jesus, what if she really does want to make amends, all the way? She scares me. I guess I’m a little bit of a coward. Or a lot of a coward. I don’t understand any of this, man. I think I’m getting into something very heavy.

  I juggle three tennis balls and keep them all in the air at once, with my hands in my pockets. I see a woman trying to park her car in a space that’s too small, and as I pass by I give her a sneaky little assist by pushing against the car behind her space; it moves backward a foot and a half and she has room to park. Friday afternoon, in my gym class, I get into a basketball game and on five separate occasions when Mike Kisiak goes driving in for one of his sure-thing lay-ups I flick the ball away from the hoop. He can’t figure out why he’s off form and it really kills him. There seem to be no limits to what I can do. I’m awed at it myself. I gain skill from day to day. I might just be an authentic superman.

  Cindy and Harry, Harry and Cindy, warm and cozy, sitting on her living-room couch. Christ, I think I’m being seduced! How can this be happening? To me? Christ. Christ. Christ. Cindy and Harry. Harry and Cindy. Where are we heading tonight?

  In the movie house Cindy snuggles close. Midway through the flick I take the hint. A big bold move: slipping my arm around her shoulders. She wriggles so that my hand slides down through her armpit and comes to rest grasping her right breast. My cheeks blaze. I do as if to pull back, as if I’ve touched a hot stove, but she clamps her arm over my forearm. Trapped. I explore her yielding flesh. No padding there, just authentic Cindy. She’s so eager and easy that it terrifies me. Afterward we go for sodas. In the shop she turns on the body language something frightening—gleaming eyes, suggestive smiles, little steamy twistings of her shoulders. I feel like telling her not to be so obvious about it. It’s like living one of my own wet dreams.

  Back to her place, now. It starts to rain. We stand outside, in the very spot where I stood when I polted her the last time. I can write the script effortlessly. “Why don’t you come inside for a while, Harry?” “I’d love to.” “Here, dry your feet on the doormat. Would you like some hot chocolate?” “Whatever you’re having, Cindy.” “No, whatever you’d like to have.” “Hot chocolate would be fine, then.” Her parents aren’t home. Her older brother is fornicating in Scarsdale. The rain hammers at the windows. The house is big, expensive-looking, thick carpets, fancy draperies. Cindy in the kitchen, puttering at the stove. Harry in the living room, fidgeting at the bookshelves. Then Cindy and Harry, Harry and Cindy, warm and cozy, together on the couch. Hot chocolate: two sips apiece. Her lips near mine. Silently begging me. Come on, dope, bend forward. Be a mensch. We kiss. We’ve kissed before, but this time it’s with tongues. Christ. Christ. I don’t believe this. Suave old Casanova Blaufeld swinging into action like a well-oiled seducing machine. Her perfume in my nostrils, my tongue in her mouth, my hand on her sweater, and then, unexpectedly, my hand is under her sweater, and then, astonishingly, my other hand is on her knee, and up under her skirt, and her thigh is satiny and cool, and I sit there having this weird two-dimensional feeling that I’m not an autonomous human being but just somebody on the screen in a movie rated X, aware that thousands of people out there in the audience are watching me with held breath, and I don’t dare let them down. I continue, not letting myself pause to examine what’s happening, not thinking at all, turning off my mind completely, just going forward step by step. I know that if I ever halt and back off to ask myself if this is real, it’ll all blow up in my face. She’s helping me. She knows much more about this than I do. Murmuring softly. Encouraging me. My fingers scrabbling at our undergarments. “Don’t rush it,” she whispers. “We’ve got all the time in the world.” My body pressing urgently against hers. Somehow now I’m not puzzled by the mechanics of the thing. So this is how it happens. What a miracle of evolution that we’re designed to fit together this way! “Be gentle,” she says, the way girls always say in the novels, and I want to be gentle, but how can I be gentle when I’m riding a runaway chariot? I push, not with my mind but with my body, and suddenly I feel this wondrous velvety s
oftness enfolding me, and I begin to move fast, unable to hold back, and she moves too and we clasp each other and I’m swept helter-skelter along into a whirlpool. Down and down and down. “Harry!” she gasps and I explode uncontrollably and I know it’s over. Hardly begun, and it’s over. Is that it? That’s it. That’s all there is to it, the moving, the clasping, the gasping, the explosion. It felt good, but not that good, not as good as in my feverish virginal hallucinations I hoped it would be, and a backwash of letdown rips through me at the realization that it isn’t transcendental after all, it isn’t a mystic thing, it’s just a body thing that starts and continues and ends. Abruptly I want to pull away and be alone to think. But I know I mustn’t, I have to be tender and grateful now, I hold her in my arms, I whisper soft things to her, I tell her how good it was, she tells me how good it was. We’re both lying, but so what? It was good. In retrospect it’s starting to seem fantastic, overwhelming, all the things I wanted it to be. The idea of what we’ve done blows my mind. If only it hadn’t been over so fast. No matter. Next time will be better. We’ve crossed a frontier; we’re in unfamiliar territory now.

  Much later she says, “I’d like to know how you make things move without touching them.”

  I shrug. “Why do you want to know?”

  “It fascinates me. You fascinate me. I thought for a long time you were just another fellow, you know, kind of clumsy, kind of immature. But then this gift of yours. It’s ESP, isn’t it, Harry? I’ve read a lot about it. I know. The moment you knocked me down, I knew what it must have been. Wasn’t it?”

  Why be coy with her?

  “Yes,” I say, proud in my new manhood. “As a matter of fact, it’s a classic poltergeist manifestation. When I gave you that shove, it was the first I knew I had the power. But I’ve been developing it. You wouldn’t believe some of the things I’ve been able to do lately.” My voice is deep; my manner is assured. I have graduated into my own fantasy self tonight.

  “Show me,” she says. “Poltergeist something, Harry!”

  “Anything. You name it.”

  “That chair.”

  “Of course.” I survey the chair. I reach for the power. It does not come. The chair stays where it is. What about the saucer, then? No. The spoon? No. “Cindy, I don’t understand it, but—it doesn’t seem to be working right now…”

  “You must be tired.”

  “Yes. That’s it. Tired. A good night’s sleep and I’ll have it again. I’ll phone you in the morning and give you a real demonstration.” Hastily buttoning my shirt. Looking for my shoes. Her parents will walk in any minute. Her brother. “Listen, a wonderful evening, unforgettable, tremendous—”

  “Stay a little longer.”

  “I really can’t.”

  Out into the rain.

  Home. Stunned. I push…and the shoe sits there. I look up at the light fixture. Nothing. The bulb will not turn. The power is gone. What will become of me now? Commander Blaufeld, space hero! No. No. Nothing. I will drop back into the ordinary rut of mankind. I will be…a husband. I will be…an employee. And push no more. And push no more. Can I even lift my shirt and flip it to the floor? No. No. Gone. Every shred, gone. I pull the covers over my head. I put my hands to my deflowered maleness. That alone responds. There alone am I still potent. Like all the rest. Just one of the common herd, now. Let’s face it: I’ll push no more. I’m ordinary again. Fighting off tears, I coil tight against myself in the darkness, and, sweating, moaning a little, working hard, I descend numbly into the quicksand, into the first moments of the long colorless years ahead.

  THE WIND AND THE RAIN

  The modern-day excitement—bordering on hysteria—over Saving the Planet is actually nothing new. Conservationist movements go back into the nineteenth century. The fervor of the recent converts might lead us to believe that ecological awareness was unknown prior to, say, 1982 or thereabouts; but in fact the very rhetoric used today is old stuff, first espoused by the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot before the grandparents of the modern environmentalists were born.

  I will not raise my voice in support of the reduction of ancient redwood trees to toilet tissue and the turning of national parks into freeway interchanges, and I do think that global warming (which was not much of an issue when I wrote the stories included in this book) is a very serious problem indeed. But I have an innate dislike of hysteria, rhetoric, and hysterical rhetoric, and so my sympathy with the current eco-terrorist groups who seem to demand an immediate return to the pre-Homeric pastoral age is rather limited, and I’m speaking euphemistically when I say that. But although I did resign from the Sierra Club many years back in protest against its extremist positions, I do regard myself as preferring natural beauty to urban pollution, and have demonstrated that over the years by supporting organizations that seem to me to strike a reasonable balance between the need to protect our environment and the realities of modern-day high-population-density life.

  And so when Roger Elwood and Virginia Kidd announced in 1971 that they were editing an anthology of stories devoted to enhancing our ecological awareness, I was happy to take part. (I probably wouldn’t do so today; the whole subject has become a cliché, and I hate to be part of a herd. And too much science fiction has been written in the past twenty years that is designed to enhance our awareness of this or that special cause; I don’t want to add to the supply.)

  “The Wind and the Rain,” which I wrote in November, 1971 for the Elwood-Kidd book Saving Worlds, is, I suppose, more of a sermon than a story. But it does have characters, of a sort, and a plot, of a sort, and some verbal special effects of a kind that I enjoyed experimenting with in those days.

  Its basic theme—that 20th-century mankind made a big mess out of its only planet—is still valid here in the 21st, and should come as no great surprise to any reader, which is why stories of this kind now seem to me to be mere flogging of the obvious. But I call the attention of modern-day eco-worriers to the story’s opening sentence, which states a powerful countertheme that should never be forgotten:

  The planet cleanses itself.

  Indeed so. The world is a big, solid place, and it can look after itself. Our petty depredations will be undone, in time, by the natural actions of the global ecology. People who go around saying that the planet is endangered don’t know what they’re saying. The planet will survive in fine shape, given enough time for it to undo the mess we have made. We’re the ones who are placed in jeopardy by our wastrel ways. Pious moaning about Saving the Planet disguises the main issue and defeats the purpose of the conservationists. The planet doesn’t care whether the mean global temperature rises five or six degrees and all low-lying cities are drowned—but we will. The planet doesn’t even give a damn whether we become extinct: it won’t be the first time that a species has been kiboshed. The rain forests will come back, a couple of million years hence, even if we clear-cut every last sapling next month. Seal-like creatures will re-evolve even if we turn the whole present population of them into fur coats. The thing for us to remember is that if we don’t mend our ways we will make the world uninhabitable for ourselves. If the Save-the-Planet folks would only stop talking about saving the planet and focus on saving Us, its current dominant inhabitants, we might stand a much better chance of still being the dominant inhabitants fifty thousand years from now.

  ——————

  The planet cleanses itself. That is the important thing to remember, at moments when we become too pleased with ourselves. The healing process is a natural and inevitable one. The action of the wind and the rain, the ebbing and flowing of the tides, the vigorous rivers flushing out the choked and stinking lakes—these are all natural rhythms, all healthy manifestations of universal harmony. Of course, we are here too. We do our best to hurry the process along. But we are only auxiliaries, and we know it. We must not exaggerate the value of our work. False pride is worse than a sin: it is a foolishness. We do not deceive ourselves into thinking we are important. If we were
not here at all, the planet would repair itself anyway within twenty to fifty million years. It is estimated that our presence cuts that time down by somewhat more than half.

  The uncontrolled release of methane into the atmosphere was one of the most serious problems. Methane is a colorless, odorless gas, sometimes known as “swamp gas”. Its components are carbon and hydrogen. Much of the atmosphere of Jupiter and Saturn consists of methane. (Jupiter and Saturn have never been habitable by human beings.) A small amount of methane was always normally present in the atmosphere of Earth. However, the growth of human population produced a consequent increase in the supply of methane. Much of the methane released into the atmosphere came from swamps and coal mines. A great deal of it came from Asian rice fields fertilized with human or animal waste; methane is a by-product of the digestive process.

  The surplus methane escaped into the lower stratosphere, from ten to thirty miles above the surface of the planet, where a layer of ozone molecules once existed. Ozone, formed of three oxygen atoms, absorbs the harmful ultraviolet radiation that the sun emits. By reacting with free oxygen atoms in the stratosphere, the intrusive methane reduced the quantity available for ozone formation. Moreover, methane reactions in the stratosphere yielded water vapor that further depleted the ozone. This methane-induced exhaustion of the ozone content of the stratosphere permitted the unchecked ultraviolet bombardment of the Earth, with a consequent rise in the incidence of skin cancer.