Partners in Wonder

by Harlan Ellison

  “Speaking of Fay Wray,” I vouchsafe, “why don’t we do what we did at the Westercon a couple of years ago: you do the cartoons, I’ll do the captions.”

  “What’s that got to do with Fay Wray?”

  “Forsooth and odds’blood, my liege,” I paradiddle, “we’ll do cartoons about King Kong.”

  So me and Rotsler, this incredible creative mind from surely another dimension, we sit there and he does these great cartoons and I do these merely brilliant captions, and Judy-Lynn Benjamin passes them around and everybody falls out.

  So I get the idea if they’re that funny, we ought to get them Xerox’d and staple them together and sell the folios for a buck apiece. It’s not that we needed the money, it was simply there was nothing else interesting to do, except bait Lin Carter, and wouldn’t I be a swine to do that to a guy who is really a fine fantasy editor!

  I take the drawings and I make the mistake of running into this person named James Warren, see, a sort of kind of inept Sammy Glick with delusions of potency, and I say to him, “I’m going to get these printed up as a lark, and sell them for a bean apiece.”

  Next thing I know, Warren has cut himself in—he thinks—as the producer of the gig, plying his entrepreneur talents with a skill that would make a Mississippi riverboat gambler nod in envy.

  He offers to get the folios printed up at a minimal cost, a thousand or so folios, and then run it in one of his magazines…or something like that. (It’s difficult, later, to reconstruct precisely what deal Warren has made; he talks fast, his hands move quickly, and business arrangements with him are like a Chinese dinner: half an hour later you’re poor again.)

  The upshot is that we got one hundred copies of the original folio, and it cost fifty-some bucks. Don’t ask me how he managed to find the one place in St. Louis that would charge ten times what normal repro costs should be…I don’t know. Suffice it to say, after we’d sold the folios—which went in about fifteen minutes—and paid off the kids who’d done the actual work of running the stuff to and from the printer, Rotsler and I made about ten bucks each. Warren demanded his cut. What cut? I asked. He got unhappy. That’s nice. I don’t like Jim Warren.

  Anyhow, everybody who’s seen these cartoons thinks they are hilarious. Only Rotsler hates them. Go please the world.

  INTRODUCTION

  A. E. VanVogt and Harlan Ellison

  THE HUMAN OPERATORS

  Surely the strangest collaboration in this book, not only in terms of method of execution, but in melding of talents, is this one. It came about purely by chance when Isaac Asimov, a man well-known as a fink who don’t keep his promises like nice guys do, decided two years after he’d agreed to collaborating, that he wanted to continue writing “Asimov’s History of Everything,” or whatever it was he was involved in at the time, rather than honoring a solemn promise and writing a short story for which he might have made fifty, maybe even sixty dollars. So. Exeunt Asimov, and I have a whole in the book. (When Asimov exits, what you have is not a hole, it is a whole!)

  And one night, in a fever dream, I sit up and say to the walls, “Hey, how about A. E. Van Vogt?” When I heard myself say it, I realized I was feverish, and I lay back down again quickly. A malaise that can cause symptoms like that should not be fooled with.

  But the next day, the thought persisted.

  I argued with myself. Look, Ellison, I said, first of all, Van is in the middle of a bunch of new novels and won’t have the time. Yeah, but what a weird story you two would turn out, I answered. Sure, sure, I agreed, but why in the world would the man who wrote “Slan!” and “The Weapon Shops of Isher” and “The World of Null-A” and books that were classics before I could hold a pencil properly, want to link up with me, ya snotnose. Yeah, but what a weird story you two would turn out, I answered. But we don’t write anything alike, I argued. Van thinks in these blocks of concepts, and he’s hip to all kinds of technology and stuff what I don’t know a spanner from a toilet plunger; what’re you trying to do, make me look like some kind of nitwit, approaching a man like Van Vogt? Yeah, but what a weird—

  So I called Van and suggested it, thinking he would drop me down an airshaft somewhere, but damned if he didn’t really dig the idea. He said, “Give me a title, and we’ll start from there.”

  So I remembered, when I was at the World Science Fiction Convention in St. Louis in 1969, most of the elevators in the hotel were automatic, and late one night, through a fog of dumb fannish gossip and weariness, standing at the back of an elevator, I heard some girl mumble something about there being no human operators, and I’d thought, What a dynamite title for a story, and at that moment months later, talking to Van on my kitchen phone, I thought, What a perfect Van Vogt title. So I said, “How about ‘The Human Operators,’ Van?” And he instantly said, yes, he thought that would be fine, and he’d run out a plot and do the first section.

  When the initial pages arrived, Alfred E. Van Vogt won my undying respect. He had understood more precisely than even I, with thirteen (and more) collaborations under my belt, the nature of the creative act for two writers. He had gauged his own strengths and weaknesses and written sections all through the story, leaving the sections he felt he could not handle to me. I will not tell you which are which, suffice it to say he had pinned the problems of working together exactly.

  The story had to wait for some months until I had worked my way out of a film and book bind, but when I got to it, the story went amazingly well and amazingly fast. In some very important ways, I think it may be the best story of the bunch, for it combines that which I do well and that which Van does well, and seems not at all to have included that which each of us does miserably.

  To cap this introduction, I’d like to include Van’s letter to me upon receipt of the story. I hadn’t spoken to his late wife, the well-known writer E. Mayne Hull, about this collaboration at that time, but if her pleasure was half as great as Van’s and mine, then she didn’t mind retyping it…if she had to…but you’ll understand that remark when I’ve turned you over to Van.

  Dear Harlan:

  I have today received a remarkable story, entitled “The Human Operators,” and I wish to congratulate you on your outstanding craftsmanship, in its execution. Reading it reminded me that I used to, when I was writing confession stories back in the Thirties, utilize much simpler words than I do now. So you may, in addition to writing a good story, have also done me a good turn in the sense of stirring an old, and almost abandoned ability: to write simply. About that, we shall see.

  As I told you on the phone, I have been a collaborator before. Each collaboration, with one exception, was different from yours and mine. At the time when I married Mayne, she had been selling small fiction items to $5 and $10 markets in Canada—church publications, if I recall it correctly—and quite a few articles to the magazine sections of newspapers. She also had picked up a couple of rejection letters from American slick magazines, a particularly good one being from the old Liberty urging her to try again.

  Nonetheless, when she got her first science-fictional idea (after we saw a motion picture, “Captains of the Clouds,” with James Cagney, during WWII)—her thought being that the whole future of mankind depended on whether or not a single transatlantic plane got across with what it had aboard—I discovered that my role consisted of teaching her to write such a story. (At that time I did not think of it as a collaboration.) I always said that my role in its writing was adding certain adjectives and pictorial phrases, like the way the moon shines on clouds. She tended to be a little too sparing of such. But of course my head-shake after I had read a scene, and my picking up my pen and marking up that scene, was more than just adjective adding: it was definitely teaching. (She caught on quickly, and so my contribution to the stories was helping her think through a story pattern that would enable her to evade writing certain critical scenes entirely. I wish I thought this sharply these days.)

  I jump now about twenty years to my collaboration with James Schmi
tz on a long novelette titled “Research Alpha.” Jim is an outliner; something I had never done for myself, to my great distress, when I confronted the world of TV. And so I wrote segments of the story here and there, and on that basis I was able to help in the outline. When that was done, Jim said, “Now that the outline is done, it doesn’t matter who writes it.” I said, “Okay—you write it.” Which he pretty well did—the first draft, that is. Whereupon I rewrote it, adding scenes, etc. Meanwhile, I had dragooned Mayne into typing my draft. It developed that she objected so strongly to certain scenes, she refused to type them. I consulted with Jim, and he agreed to change them to fit in with her objections. I wrote those new versions to her satisfaction, and that was that. All this for an eventual $630 check from Fred Pohl—he would only pay 3¢ a word for it, and I had to give Mayne half of my half for what she had done on it.

  My next collaboration—not too long ago—was with Forry. It appeared in his collection Forrest Ackerman and Friends, and he furnished me with a title, “Laugh, Clone, Laugh.” For Forry I did much the same as I did for you—I wrote portions here and there. What makes it particularly relevant here is that when you called me, I asked you to do for me exactly what Forry had done: furnish me with a title. As an aside, Fred and Judy of Galaxy several times showed me, or sent me, cover illustrations and asked me if I could work up a story around them. I never could. So evidently words trigger me, not pictures.

  For you, also, as you may recall, I wrote sections here and there, including a beginning, and a solution in the control room. Like Forry, you evidently sat down, and worked the ideas and some of the sentences into your own much simpler way of writing. By simpler, I also mean vivid, and beautiful.

  I’m assuming that some of your other collaborations turned out great, but it is hard for me to believe that there will be many stories in this partnership writing collection that are better than “The Human Operators.” You have my congratulations, sir. You are a craftsman.

  One more thought: I imagine there was a time in my own writing when I could have come forward with the feeling of the ships loving it out there in space on their own. But this was not in any of the segments I sent you, and is an outstanding original addition to the initial idea.

  With best wishes.

  Sincerely,

  Van

  The Human Operators

  [To be read while listening to Chronophagie, “The Time Eaters”: Music of Jacques Lasry, played on Structures Sonores Lasry-Baschet (Columbia Masterworks Stereo MS 7314).]

  Ship: the only place.

  Ship says I’m to get wracked today at noon. And so I’m in grief already.

  It seems unfair to have to get wracked three whole days ahead of the usual once-a-month. But I learned long ago not to ask Ship to explain anything personal.

  I sense today is different; some things are happening. Early, I put on the spacesuit and go outside—which is not common. But a screen got badly scored by meteor dust; and I’m here, now, replacing it. Ship would say I’m being bad because: as I do my job, I sneak quick looks around me. I wouldn’t dare do it in the forbidden places, inside. I noticed when I was still a kid that Ship doesn’t seem to be so much aware of what I do when I’m outside.

  And so I carefully sneak a few looks at the deep black space. And at the stars.

  I once asked Ship why we never go toward those points of brilliance, those stars, as Ship calls them. For that question, I got a whole extra wracking, and a long, ranting lecture about how all those stars have humans living on their planets; and of how vicious humans are. Ship really blasted me that time, saying things I’d never heard before, like how Ship had gotten away from the vicious humans during the big war with the Kyben. And how, every once in a long while Ship has a “run-in” with the vicious humans but the defractor perimeter saves us. I don’t know what Ship means by all that; I don’t even know what a “run-in” is, exactly.

  The last “run-in” must have been before I was big enough to remember. Or, at least, before Ship killed my father when I was fourteen. Several times, when he was still alive, I slept all day for no reason that I can think of. But since I’ve been doing all the maintenance work—since age fourteen—I sleep only my regular six-hour night. Ship tells me night and Ship tells me day, too.

  I kneel here in my spacesuit, feeling tiny on this gray and curving metal place in the dark. Ship is big. Over five hundred feet long, and about a hundred and fifty feet thick at the widest back there. Again, I have that special out-here thought: suppose I just give myself a shove, and float right off toward one of those bright spots of light? Would I be able to get away? I think I would like that; there has to be someplace else than Ship.

  As in the past, I slowly and sadly let go of the idea. Because if I try, and Ship catches me, I’ll really get wracked.

  The repair job is finally done. I clomp back to the airlock, and use the spider to dilate it, and let myself be sucked back into what is, after all—I’ve got to admit it—a pretty secure place. All the gleaming corridors, the huge storerooms with their equipment and spare parts, and the freezer rooms with their stacks of food (enough, says Ship, to last one person for centuries), and the deck after deck of machinery that it’s my job to keep in repair. I can take pride in that. “Hurry! It is six minutes to noon!” Ship announces. I’m hurrying now.

  I strip off my spacesuit and stick it to the decontamination board and head for the wracking room. At least, that’s what I call it. I suppose it’s really part of the engine room on Underdeck Ten, a special chamber fitted with electrical connections, most of which are testing instruments. I use them pretty regularly in my work. My father’s father’s father installed them for Ship, I think I recall.

  There’s a big table, and I climb on top of it and lie down. The table is cold against the skin of my back and butt and thighs, but it warms me up as I lie here. It’s now one minute to noon. As I wait, shuddering with expectation, the ceiling lowers toward me. Part of what comes down fits over my head, and I feel the two hard knobs pressing into the temples of my skull. And cold; I feel the clamps coming down over my middle, my wrists, my ankles. A strap with metal in it tightens flexibly but firmly across my chest.

  “Ready!” Ship commands.

  It always seems bitterly unfair. How can I ever be ready to be wracked? I hate it! Ship counts: “Ten…nine…eight…one!”

  The first jolt of electricity hits and everything tries to go in different directions; it feels like someone is tearing something soft inside me—that’s the way it feels.

  Blackness swirls into my head and I forget everything. I am unconscious for a while. Just before I regain myself, before I am finished and Ship will permit me to go about my duties, I remember a thing I have remembered many times. This isn’t the first time for this memory. It is of my father and a thing he said once, not long before he was killed. “When Ship says vicious, Ship means smarter. There are ninety-eight other chances.”

  He said those words very quickly. I think he knew he was going to get killed soon. Oh, of course, he must have known, my father must, because I was nearly fourteen then, and when he had become fourteen, Ship had killed his father, so he must have known.

  And so the words are important. I know that; they are important; but I don’t know what they mean, not completely.

  “You are finished!” Ship says.

  I get off the table. The pain still hangs inside my head and I ask Ship, “Why am I wracked three days earlier than usual?”

  Ship sounds angry. “I can wrack you again!”

  But I know Ship won’t. Something new is going to happen and Ship wants me whole and alert for it. Once, when I asked Ship something personal, right after I was wracked, Ship did it again, and when I woke up Ship was worrying over me with the machines. Ship seemed concerned I might be damaged. Ever after that, Ship has not wracked me twice close together. So I ask, not really thinking I’ll get an answer; but I ask just the same.

  “There is a repairing I want you to do
!”

  Where, I ask. “In the forbidden part below!”

  I try not to smile. I knew there was a new thing going to happen and this is it. My father’s words come back again. Ninety-eight other chances.

  Is this one of them?

  I descend in the dark. There is no light in the dropshaft. Ship says I need no light. But I know the truth. Ship does not want me to be able to find my way back here again. This is the lowest I’ve ever been in Ship.

  So I drop steadily, smoothly, swiftly. Now I come to a slowing place and slower and slower, and finally my feet touch the solid deck and I am here.

  Light comes on. Very dimly. I move in the direction of the glow, and Ship is with me, all around me, of course. Ship is always with me, even when I sleep. Especially when I sleep.

  The glow gets brighter as I round a curve in the corridor, and I see it is caused by a round panel that blocks the passage, touching the bulkheads on all sides, flattened at the bottom to fit the deckplates. It looks like glass, that glowing panel. I walk up to it and stop. There is no place else to go.

  “Step through the screen!” Ship says.

  I take a step toward the glowing panel but it doesn’t slide away into the bulkhead as so many other panels that don’t glow slide. I stop.

  “Step through!” Ship tells me again.

  I put my hands out in front of me, palms forward, because I am afraid if I keep walking I will bang my nose against the glowing panel. But as my fingers touch the panel they seem to get soft, and I can see a light yellow glow through them, as if they are transparent. And my hands go through the panel and I can see them faintly, glowing yellow, on the other side. Then my naked forearms, then I’m right up against the panel, and my face goes through and everything is much lighter, more yellow, and I step onto the other side, in a forbidden place Ship has never allowed me to see.