Modern Classics of Science Fiction Read online

  The words stopped meaning anything, as they always did at that point. I didn’t want to read any farther; it was all nonsense, anyway. I was the king of the world.

  I got up and went away, out into the night, blind to the dulls who thronged the rooms I passed.

  Two squares away was the commerce area. I found a clothing outlet and went in. All the free clothes in the display cases were drab: those were for worthless floaters, not for me. I went past them to the specials, and found a combination I could stand – silver and blue, with a severe black piping down the tunic. A dull would have said it was “nice.” I punched for it. The automatic looked me over with its dull glassy eye, and croaked, “Your contribution book, please.”

  I could have had a contribution book, for the trouble of stepping out into the street and taking it away from the first passer-by; but I didn’t have the patience. I picked up the one-legged table from the refreshment nook, hefted it, and swung it at the cabinet door. The metal shrieked and dented, opposite the catch. I swung once more to the same place, and the door sprang open. I pulled out clothing in handfuls till I got a set that would fit me.

  I bathed and changed, and then went prowling in the big multi-outlet down the avenue. All those places are arranged pretty much alike, no matter what the local managers do to them. I went straight to the knives, and picked out three in graduated sizes, down to the size of my fingernail. Then I had to take my chances. I tried the furniture department, where I had had good luck once in a while, but this year all they were using was metal. I had to have seasoned wood.

  I knew where there was a big cache of cherry wood, in good-sized blocks, in a forgotten warehouse up north at a place called Kootenay. I could have carried some around with me – enough for years – but what for, when the world belonged to me?

  It didn’t take me long. Down in the workshop section, of all places, I found some antiques – tables and benches, all with wooden tops. While the dulls collected down at the other end of the room, pretending not to notice, I sawed off a good oblong chunk of the smallest bench, and made a base for it out of another.

  As long as I was there, it was a good place to work, and I could eat and sleep upstairs, so I stayed.

  I knew what I wanted to do. It was going to be a man, sitting, with his legs crossed and his forearms resting down along his calves. His head was going to be tilted back, and his eyes closed, as if he were turning his face up to the sun.

  In three days it was finished. The trunk and limbs had a shape that was not man and not wood, but something in between: something that hadn’t existed before I made it.

  Beauty. That was the old word.

  I had carved one of the figure’s hands hanging loosely, and the other one curled shut. There had to be a time to stop and say it was finished. I took the smallest knife, the one I had been using to scrape the wood smooth, and cut away the handle and ground down what was left of the shaft to a thin spike. Then I drilled a hole into the wood of the figurine’s hand, in the hollow between thumb and curled finger. I fitted the knife blade in there; in the small hand it was a sword.

  I cemented it in place. Then I took the sharp blade and stabbed my thumb, and smeared the blade.

  I hunted most of that day, and finally found the right place – a niche in an outcropping of striated brown rock, in a little triangular half-wild patch that had been left where two roads forked. Nothing was permanent, of course, in a community like this one that might change its houses every five years or so, to follow the fashion; but this spot had been left to itself for a long time. It was the best I could do.

  I had the paper ready: it was one of a batch I had printed up a year ago. The paper was treated, and I knew it would stay legible a long time. I hid a little photo capsule in the back of the niche, and ran the control wire to a staple in the base of the figurine. I put the figurine down on top of the paper, and anchored it lightly to the rock with two spots of all-cement. I had done it so often that it came naturally; I knew just how much cement would hold the figurine steady against a casual hand, but yield to one that really wanted to pull it down.

  Then I stepped back to look: and the power and the pity of it made my breath come short, and tears start to my eyes.

  Reflected light gleamed fitfully on the dark-stained blade that hung from his hand. He was sitting alone in that niche that closed him in like a coffin. His eyes were shut, and his head tilted back, as if he were turning his face up to the sun.

  But only rock was over his head. There was no sun for him.

  * * *

  Hunched on the cool bare ground under a pepper tree, I was looking down across the road at the shadowed niche where my figurine sat.

  I was all finished here. There was nothing more to keep me, and yet I couldn’t leave.

  People walked past now and then – not often. The community seemed half deserted, as if most of the people had flocked off to a surf party somewhere, or a contribution meeting, or to watch a new house being dug to replace the one I had wrecked.… There was a little wind blowing toward me, cool and lonesome in the leaves.

  Up the other side of the hollow there was a terrace, and on that terrace, half an hour ago, I had seen a brief flash of color – a boy’s head, with a red cap on it, moving past and out of sight.

  That was why I had to stay. I was thinking how that boy might come down from his terrace and into my road, and passing the little wild triangle of land, see my figurine. I was thinking he might not pass by indifferently, but stop: and go closer to look: and pick up the wooden man: and read what was written on the paper underneath.

  I believed that sometime it had to happen. I wanted it so hard that I ached.

  My carvings were all over the world, wherever I had wandered. There was one in Congo City, carved of ebony, dusty-black; one on Cyprus, of bone; one in New Bombay, of shell; one in Chang-teh, of jade.

  They were like signs printed in red and green, in a color-blind world. Only the one I was looking for would ever pick one of them up, and read the message I knew by heart.

  TO YOU WHO CAN SEE, the first sentence said, I OFFER YOU A WORLD …

  There was a flash of color up on the terrace. I stiffened. A minute later, here it came again, from a different direction: it was the boy, clambering down the slope, brilliant against the green, with his red sharp-billed cap like a woodpecker’s head.

  I held my breath.

  He came toward me through the fluttering leaves, ticked off by pencils of sunlight as he passed. He was a brown boy, I could see at this distance, with a serious thin face. His ears stuck out, flickering pink with the sun behind them, and his elbow and knee pads made him look knobby.

  He reached the fork in the road, and chose the path on my side. I huddled into myself as he came nearer. Let him see it, let him not see me, I thought fiercely.

  My fingers closed around a stone.

  He was nearer, walking jerkily with his hands in his pockets, watching his feet mostly.

  When he was almost opposite me, I threw the stone.

  It rustled through the leaves below the niche in the rock. The boy’s head turned. He stopped, staring. I think he saw the figurine then. I’m sure he saw it.

  He took one step.

  “Risha!” came floating down from the terrace.

  And he looked up. “Here,” he piped.

  I saw the woman’s head, tiny at the top of the terrace. She called something I didn’t hear; I was standing up, tight with anger.

  Then the wind shifted. It blew from me to the boy. He whirled around, his eyes big, and clapped a hand to his nose.

  “Oh, what a stench!” he said.

  He turned to shout, “Coming!” and then he was gone, hurrying back up the road, into the unstable blur of green.

  My one chance, ruined. He would have seen the image, I knew, if it hadn’t been for that damned woman, and the wind shifting.… They were all against me, people, wind and all.

  And the figurine still sat, blind eyes turned up to t
he rocky sky.

  * * *

  There was something inside me that told me to take my disappointment and go away from there, and not come back.

  I knew I would be sorry. I did it anyway: took the image out of the niche, and the paper with it, and climbed the slope. At the top I heard his clear voice laughing.

  There was a thing that might have been an ornamental mound, or the camouflaged top of a buried house. I went around it, tripping over my own feet, and came upon the boy kneeling on the turf. He was playing with a brown and white puppy.

  He looked up with the laughter going out of his face. There was no wind, and he could smell me. I knew it was bad. No wind, and the puppy to distract him – everything about it was wrong. But I went to him blindly anyhow, and fell on one knee, and shoved the figurine at his face.

  “Look –” I said.

  He went over backwards in his hurry: he couldn’t even have seen the image, except as a brown blur coming at him. He scrambled up, with the puppy whining and yapping around his heels, and ran for the mound.

  I was up after him, clawing up moist earth and grass as I rose. In the other hand I still had the image clutched, and the paper with it.

  A door popped open and swallowed him and popped shut again in my face. With the flat of my hand I beat the vines around it until I hit the doorplate by accident and the door opened. I dived in, shouting, “Wait,” and was in a spiral passage, lit pearl-gray, winding downward. Down I went headlong, and came out at the wrong door – an underground conservatory, humid and hot under the yellow lights, with dripping rank leaves in long rows. I went down the aisle raging, overturning the tanks, until I came to a vestibule and an elevator.

  Down I went again to the third level and a labyrinth of guest rooms, all echoing, all empty. At last I found a ramp leading upward, past the conservatory, and at the end of it voices.

  The door was clear vitrin, and I paused on the near side of it looking and listening. There was the boy, and a woman old enough to be his mother, just – sister or cousin, more likely – and an elderly woman in a hard chair, holding the puppy. The room was comfortable and tasteless, like other rooms.

  I saw the shock grow on their faces as I burst in: it was always the same, they knew I would like to kill them, but they never expected that I would come uninvited into a house. It was not done.

  There was that boy, so close I could touch him, but the shock of all of them was quivering in the air, smothering, like a blanket that would deaden my voice. I felt I had to shout.

  “Everything they tell you is lies!” I said. “See here – here, this is the truth!” I had the figurine in front of his eyes, but he didn’t see.

  “Risha, go below,” said the young woman quietly. He turned to obey, quick as a ferret. I got in front of him again. “Stay,” I said, breathing hard. “Look –”

  “Remember, Risha, don’t speak,” said the woman.

  I couldn’t stand any more. Where the boy went I don’t know; I ceased to see him. With the image in one hand and the paper with it, I leaped at the woman. I was almost quick enough; I almost reached her; but the buzzing took me in the middle of a step, louder, louder, like the end of the world.

  * * *

  It was the second time that week. When I came to, I was sick and too faint to move for a long time.

  The house was silent. They had gone, of course … the house had been defiled, having me in it. They wouldn’t live here again, but would build elsewhere.

  My eyes blurred. After a while I stood up and looked around at the room. The walls were hung with a gray close-woven cloth that looked as if it would tear, and I thought of ripping it down in strips, breaking furniture, stuffing carpets and bedding into the oubliette.… But I didn’t have the heart for it. I was too tired. Thirty years.… They had given me all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory thereof, thirty years ago. It was more than one man alone could bear, for thirty years.

  At last I stooped and picked up the figurine, and the paper that was supposed to go under it – crumpled now, with the forlorn look of a message that someone has thrown away unread.

  I sighed bitterly.

  I smoothed it out and read the last part.

  YOU CAN SHARE THE WORLD WITH ME. THEY CAN’T STOP YOU. STRIKE NOW – PICK UP A SHARP THING AND STAB, OR A HEAVY THING AND CRUSH. THAT’S ALL. THAT WILL MAKE YOU FREE. ANYONE CAN DO IT.

  Anyone. Someone. Anyone.

  L. SPRAGUE DE CAMP

  Aristotle and the Gun

  L. Sprague de Camp is a seminal figure, one whose career spans almost the entire development of modern fantasy and SF. Much of the luster of the “Golden Age” of Astounding during the late ’30s and the ’40s is due to the presence in those pages of de Camp, along with his great contemporaries Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, and A. E. van Vogt. At the same time, for Astounding’s sister fantasy magazine, Unknown, he helped to create a whole new modern style of fantasy writing – funny, whimsical, and irreverent – of which he is still the most prominent practitioner. De Camp’s stories for Unknown are among the best short fantasies ever written, and include such classics as “The Wheels of If,” “The Gnarly Man,” “Nothing in the Rules,” “The Hardwood Pile,” and (written in collaboration with Fletcher Pratt) the famous “Harold Shea” stories that would later be collected as The Compleat Enchanter. In science fiction, he is the author of Lest Darkness Fall, in my opinion one of the three or four best Alternate Worlds novels ever written, as well as the at-the-time highly controversial novel Rogue Queen, and a body of expertly crafted short fiction such as “Judgment Day,” “Divide and Rule,” and “A Gun for Dinosaur.”

  “Aristotle and the Gun,” published in 1956, would prove to be de Camp’s last science-fiction short story for more than a decade. After this, he would devote his energies to turning out a long sequence of critically acclaimed historical novels (including The Bronze God of Rhodes and An Elephant for Aristotle, two of my favorite historical novels) and, like Isaac Asimov (and at about the same time), a number of non-fiction books on scientific and technical topics. He would not return to writing fantasy and SF to any significant degree until the mid-’70s, and, although his presence enriched several other fields, it was sorely missed in ours. Still, if de Camp had to stop writing SF for a time, this was a good story to go out with – de Camp at the height of his powers, writing in his usual vivid, erudite, and slyly witty way about some of the subjects – and the historical personages – that interested him the most.

  De Camp’s other books include The Glory That Was, The Search for Zei, The Tower of Zanid, The Great Fetish, and, with Fletcher Pratt, The Land of Unreason. His short fiction has been collected in The Best of L. Sprague de Camp, A Gun for Dinosaur, and The Purple Pterodactyls. His most recent book is The Honorable Barbarian. He lives in Texas with his wife, writer Catherine Crook de Camp.

  From:

  Sherman Weaver, Librarian

  The Palace

  Paumanok, Sewanhaki

  Sachimate of Lenape

  Flower Moon 3, 3097

  To:

  Messire Markos Koukidas

  Consulate of the Balkan Commonwealth

  Kataapa, Muskhogian Federation

  My dear Consul:

  You have no doubt heard of our glorious victory at Ptaksit, when our noble Sachim destroyed the armored chivalry of the Mengwe by the brilliant use of pikemen and archery. (I suggested it to him years ago but never mind.) Sagoyewatha and most of his Senecas fell, and the Oneidas broke before our countercharge. The envoys from the Grand Council of the Long House arrive tomorrow for a peace-pauwau. The roads to the South are open again, so I send you my long-promised account of the events that brought me from my own world into this one.

  If you could have stayed longer on your last visit, I think I could have made the matter clear, despite the language difficulty and my hardness of hearing. But perhaps, if I give you a simple narrative, in the order in which things happened to me, truth will transpire.
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br />   Know, then, that I was born into a world that looks like this on on the map, but is very different as regards human affairs. I tried to tell you of some of the triumphs of our natural philosophers, of our machines and discoveries. No doubt you thought me a first-class liar, though you were too polite to say so.

  Nonetheless, my tale is true, though for reasons that will appear I cannot prove it. I was one of those natural philosophers. I commanded a group of younger philosophers, engaged in a task called a project, at a center of learning named Brookhaven, on the south shore of Sewanhaki twenty parasangs east of Paumanok. Paumanok itself was known as Brooklyn, and formed part of an even larger city called New York.

  My project had to do with the study of space-time. (Never mind what that means but read on.) At this center we had learned to get vast amounts of power from sea water by what we called a fusion process. By this process we could concentrate so much power in a small space that we could warp the entity called space-time and cause things to travel in time as our other machines traveled in space.

  When our calculations showed that we could theoretically hurl an object back in time, we began to build a machine for testing this hypothesis. First we built a small pilot model. In this we sent small objects back in time for short periods.

  We began with inanimate objects. Then we found that a rabbit or rat could also be projected without harm. The time-translation would not be permanent; rather, it acted like one of these rubber balls the Hesperians play games with. The object would stay in the desired time for a period determined by the power used to project it and its own mass, and would then return spontaneously to the time and place from which it started.

  We had reported our progress regularly, but my chief had other matters on his mind and did not read our reports for many months. When he got a report saying that we were completing a machine to hurl human beings back in time, however, he awoke to what was going on, read our previous reports, and called me in.

  “Sherm,” he said, “I’ve been discussing this project with Washington, and I’m afraid they take a dim view of it.”