The Year's Best Science Fiction 5 Page 16

  Out of the corner of his eye, Mose saw the critter leaping quickly in pursuit of one of them. It snatched it up and turned to Mose, with the coin held between its fingers, and a sort of thrumming noise was coming out of the nest of worms on top of it.

  It bent and scooped up more of them and cuddled them and danced a sort of jig, and Mose knew, with a sinking heart, that it had been silver the critter had been hunting.

  So Mose got down on his hands and knees and helped the critter gather up all the dollars. They put them back into the cigar box and Mose picked up the box and gave it to the critter.

  The critter took it and hefted it and had a disappointed look. Taking the box over to the table, it took the dollars out and stacked them in neat piles and Mose could see it was very disappointed.

  Perhaps, after all, Mose thought, it had not been silver the thing had been hunting for, Maybe it had made a mistake in thinking that the silver was some other kind of metal.

  Mose got down the oatmeal and poured it into some water and put it on the stove. When it was cooked and the coffee was ready, he carried his breakfast to the table and sat down to eat.

  The critter still was standing across the table from him, stacking and restacking the piles of silver dollars. And now it showed him with a hand held above the stacks, that it needed more of them. This many stacks, it showed him, and each stack so high.

  Mose sat stricken, with a spoon full of oatmeal halfway to his mouth. He thought of all those other dollars, the iron kettle packed with them, underneath the floor boards in the living room. And he couldn’t do it; they were the only thing he had - except the critter now. And he could not hive them up so the critter could go and leave him too.

  He ate his bowl of oatmeal without tasting it and drank two cups of coffee. And all the time the critter stood there and showed him how much more it needed.

  ‘I can’t do it for you,’ Old Mose said. ‘I’ve done all you can expect of any living being. I found you in the woods and I gave you warmth and shelter. I tried to help you, and when I couldn’t, at least I gave you a place to die in. I buried you and protected you from all those other people and I didn’t pull you up when you started growing once again. Surely you can’t expect me to keep on giving endlessly.’

  But it was no good. The critter could not hear him and he did not convince himself.

  He got up from the table and walked into the living room with the critter trailing him. He loosened the floor boards and took out the kettle, and the critter, when it saw what was in the kettle, put its arms around itself and hugged in happiness.

  They lugged the money out to the machine shed and Mose built a fire in the forge and put the kettle in the fire and started melting down that hard-saved money.

  There were times when he thought he couldn’t finish the job, but he did.

  The critter got the basket out of the birdcage and put it down beside the forge and dipped out the molten silver with an iron ladle and poured it here and there into the basket, shaping it in place with careful hammer taps.

  It took a long time, for it was exacting work, but finally it was done and the silver almost gone. The critter lugged the basket back into the birdcage and fastened it in place.

  It was almost evening now and Mose had to go and do the chores. He half expected the thing might haul out the bird-cage and be gone when he came back to the house. And he tried to be sore at it for its selfishness - it had taken from him and had not tried to pay him back - it had not, so far as he could tell, even tried to thank him. But he made a poor job of being sore at it.

  It was waiting for him when he came in from the barn carrying two pails full of milk. It followed him inside the house and stood around and he tried to talk to it. But he didn’t have the heart to do much talking. He could not forget that it would be leaving, and the pleasure of its present company was lost in his terror of the loneliness to come.

  For now he didn’t even have his money to help ward off the loneliness.

  As he lay in bed that night, strange thoughts came creeping in upon him - the thought of an even greater loneliness than he had ever known upon this runty farm, the terrible, devastating loneliness of the empty wastes that lay between the stars, a driven loneliness while one hunted for a place or person that remained a misty thought one could not define, but which it was most important one should find.

  It was a strange thing for him to be thinking, and quite suddenly he knew it was no thought of his, but of this other that was in the room with him.

  He tried to raise himself, he fought to raise himself, but he couldn’t do it. He held his head up a moment, then fell back upon the pillow and went sound asleep.

  Next morning, after Mose had eaten breakfast, the two of them went to the machine shed and dragged the birdcage out. It stood there, a weird alien thing, in the chill brightness of the dawn.

  The critter walked up to it and started to slide between two of the bars, but when it was halfway through, it stepped out again and moved over to confront Old Mose.

  ‘Good-by, friend,’ said Mose. ‘I’ll miss you.’

  There was a strange stinging in his eyes.

  The other held out its hand in farewell, and Mose took it and there was something in the hand he grasped, something round and smooth that was transferred from its hand to his.

  The thing took its hand away and stepped quickly to the birdcage and slid between the bars. The hands reached for the basket and there was a sudden flicker and the birdcage was no longer there.

  Mose stood lonely in the barnyard, looking at the place where there was no birdcage and remembering what he had felt or thought - or been told? - the night before as he lay in bed.

  Already the critter would be there, out between the stars, in that black and utter loneliness, hunting for a place or thing of person that no human mind could grasp.

  Slowly Mose turned around to go back to the house, to get the pails and go down to the barn to get the milking done.

  He remembered the object in his hand and lifted his still clenched fist in front of him. He opened his fingers and the little crystal ball lay there in his palm - and it was exactly like the one he’d found in the slitted flap in the body he had buried in the garden. Except that one had been dead and cloudy and this one had the living glow of a distant-burning fire.

  Looking at it, he had the strange feeling of a happiness and comfort such as he had seldom known before, as if there were many people with him and all of them were friends.

  He closed his hand upon it and the happiness stayed on - and it was all wrong, for there was not a single reason that he should be happy. The critter finally had left him and his money was all gone and he had no friends, but still he kept on feeling good.

  He put the ball into his pocket and stepped spryly for the house to get the milking pails. He pursed up his whiskered lips and began to whistle and it had been a long, long time since he had even thought to whistle.

  Maybe he was happy, he told himself, because the critter had not left without stopping to take his hand and try to say good-by.

  And a gift, no matter how worthless it might be, how cheap a trinket, still had a basic value in simple sentiment. It had been many years since anyone had bothered to give him a gift.

  It was dark and lonely and unending in the depths of space with no Companion. It might be long before another was obtainable.

  It perhaps was a foolish thing to do, but the old creature had been such a kind savage, so fumbling and so pitiful and eager to help. And one who travels far and fast must likewise travel light. There had been nothing else to give.

  * * * *

  MARIANA by Fritz Leiber

  from Fantastic

  The first definite and absolutely unchangeable selection I made for this edition of SF was Fritz Leiber’s story, “The Silver Eggheads,” from Fantasy and Science Fiction.

  That was in January of ‘59. For some sixteen months since, F&SF has remained incurably readable. In the same period of time,
Leiber has been turning out stories, and yet better stories, at such a rate that Fantastic broke every rule in the business and published one complete all-Leiber issue last November.

  The arithmetic of anthology selection, in such a case, is evident, and so is the usual lady’s prerogative. But I mourn for the “Eggheads,” and urge you all to storm your back-number magazine stores for it.

  And one more thing (that’s the other prerogative, no?)— We’re all going to have to slop saying scornfully, “I mean good science fiction—not that Buck Rogers stuff!” Leiber it writing the Buck Rogers comic strip now. . . .

  * * * *

  Mariana had been living in the big villa and hating the tall pine trees around it for what seemed like an eternity when she found the secret panel in the master control panel of the house.

  The secret panel was simply a narrow blank of aluminum—she’d thought of it as room for more switches if they ever needed any, perish the thought!—between the air-conditioning controls and the gravity controls. Above the switches for the three-dimensional TV but below those for the robot butler and maids.

  Jonathan had told her not to fool with the master control panel while he was in the city, because she would wreck anything electrical, so when the secret panel came loose under her aimlessly questing fingers and fell to the solid rock floor of the patio with a musical twing her first reaction was fear.

  Then she saw it was only a small blank oblong of sheet aluminum that had fallen and that in the space it had covered was a column of six little switches. Only the top one was identified. Tiny glowing letters beside it spelled trees and it was on.

  When Jonathan got home from the city that evening she gathered her courage and told him about it. He was neither particularly angry nor impressed.

  “Of course there’s a switch for the trees,” he informed her deflatingly, motioning the robot butler to cut his steak. “Didn’t you know they were radio trees? I didn’t want to wait twenty-five years for them and they couldn’t grow in this rock anyway. A station in the city broadcasts a master pine tree and sets like ours pick it up and project it around homes. It’s vulgar but convenient.” ‘

  After a bit she asked timidly, “Jonathan, are the radio pine trees ghostly as you drive through them?”

  “Of course not! They’re solid as this house and the rock under it—to the eye and to the touch too. A person could even climb them. If you ever stirred outside you’d know these things. The city station transmits pulses of alternating matter at sixty cycles a second. The science of it is over your head.”

  She ventured one more question: “Why did they have the tree switch covered up?”

  “So you wouldn’t monkey with it—same as the fine controls on the TV. And so you wouldn’t get ideas and start changing the trees. It would unsettle me, let me tell you, to come home to oaks one day and birches the next. I like consistency and I like pines.” He looked at them out of the dining-room picture window and grunted with satisfaction.

  She had been meaning to tell him about hating the pines, but that discouraged her and she dropped the topic.

  About noon the next day, however, she went to the secret panel and switched off the pine trees and quickly turned around to watch them.

  At first nothing happened and she was beginning to think that Jonathan was wrong again, as he so often was though would never admit, but then they began to waver and specks of pale green light churned across them and then they faded and were gone, leaving behind only an intolerably bright single point of light—just as when the TV is switched off. The star hovered motionless for what seemed a long time, then backed away and raced off toward the horizon.

  Now that the pine trees were out of the way Mariana could see the real landscape. It was flat gray rock, endless miles of it, exactly the same as the rock on which the house was set and which formed the floor of the patio. It was the same in every direction. One black two-lane road drove straight across it—nothing more.

  She disliked the view almost at once—it was dreadfully lonely and depressing. She switched the gravity to moon-normal and danced about dreamily, floating over the middle-of-the-room bookshelves and the grand piano and even having the robot maids dance with her, but it did not cheer her. About two o’clock she went to switch on the pine trees again, as she had intended to do in any case before Jonathan came home and was furious.

  However, she found there had been changes in the column of six little switches. The trees switch no longer had its glowing name. She remembered that it had been the top one, but the top one would not turn on again. She tried to force it from “off” to “on” but it would not move.

  All the rest of the afternoon she sat on the steps outside the front door watching the black two-lane road. Never a car or a person came into view until Jonathan’s tan roadster appeared, seeming at first to hang motionless in the distance and then to move only like a microscopic snail although she knew he always drove at top speed—it was one of the reasons she would never get in the car with him.

  Jonathan was not as furious as she had feared. “Your own damn fault for meddling with it,” he said curtly. “Now we’ll have to get a man out here. Dammit, I hate to eat supper looking at nothing but those rocks! Bad enough driving through them twice a day.”

  She asked him haltingly about the barrenness of the landscape and the absence of neighbors.

  “Well, you wanted to live way out,” he told her. “You wouldn’t ever have known about it if you hadn’t turned off the trees.”

  “There’s one other thing I’ve got to bother you with, Jonathan,” she said. “Now the second switch—the one next below—has got a name that glows. It just says house. It’s turned on—I haven’t touched it! Do you suppose…”

  “I want to look at this,” he said, bounding up from the couch and slamming his martini-on-the-rocks tumbler down on the tray of the robot maid so that she rattled. “I bought this house as solid, but there are swindles. Ordinarily I’d spot a broadcast style in a flash, but they just might have slipped me a job relayed from some other planet or solar system. Fine thing if me and fifty other multi-megabuck men were spotted around in identical houses, each thinking his was unique.”

  “But if the house is based on rock like it is…”

  “That would just make it easier for them to pull the trick, you dumb bunny!”

  They reached the master control panel. “There it is,” she said helpfully, jabbing out a finger… and hit the house switch.

  For a moment nothing happened, then a white churning ran across the ceiling, the walls and furniture started to swell and bubble like cold lava, and then they were alone on a rock table big as three tennis courts. Even the master control panel was gone. The only thing that was left was a slender rod coming out of the gray stone at their feet and bearing at the top, like some mechanistic fruit, a small block with the six switches—that and an intolerably bright star hanging in the air where the master bedroom had been.

  Mariana pushed frantically at the house switch, but it was unlabeled now and locked in the “off” position, although she threw her weight at it stiff-armed.

  The upstairs star sped off like an incendiary bullet, but its last flashbulb glare showed her Jonathan’s face set in lines of fury. He lifted his hands like talons.

  “You little idiot!” he screamed, coming at her.

  “No, Jonathan, no!” she wailed, backing off, but he kept coming.

  She realized that the block of switches had broken off in her hands. The third switch had a glowing name now: Jonathan. She flipped it.

  As his fingers dug into her bare shoulders they seemed to turn to foam rubber, then to air. His face and gray flannel suit seethed iridescently, like a leprous ghost’s, then melted and ran. His star, smaller than that of the house but much closer, seared her eyes. When she opened them again there was nothing at all left of the star or Jonathan but a dancing dark after-image like a black tennis ball.

  She was alone on an infinite flat rock plain u
nder the cloudless, star-specked sky.

  The fourth switch had its glowing name now: stars.

  It was almost dawn by her radium-dialed wristwatch and she was thoroughly chilled, when she finally decided to switch off the stars. She did not want to do it—in their slow wheeling across the sky they were the last sign of orderly reality—but it seemed the only move she could make.

  She wondered what the fifth switch would say. rocks? air? Or even… ?

  She switched off the stars.

  The Milky Way, arching in all its unalterable glory, began to churn, its component stars darting about like midges. Soon only one remained, brighter even than Sirius or Venus —until it jerked back, fading, and darted to infinity.

  The fifth switch said doctor and it was not on but off.

  An inexplicable terror welled up in Mariana. She did not even want to touch the fifth switch. She set the block of switches down on the rock and backed away from it.

  But she dared not go far in the starless dark. She huddled down and waited for dawn. From time to time she looked at her watch dial and at the night-light glow of the switch-label a dozen yards away.

  It seemed to be growing much colder.

  She read her watch dial. It was two hours past sunrise. She remembered they had taught her in third grade that the sun was just one more star.

  She went back and sat down beside the block of switches and picked it up with a shudder and flipped the fifth switch.

  The rock grew soft and crisply fragrant under her and lapped up over her legs and then slowly turned white.

  She was sitting in a hospital bed in a small blue room with a white pin-stripe.

  A sweet, mechanical voice came out of the wall, saying, “You have interrupted the wish-fulfillment therapy by your own decision. If you now recognize your sick depression and are willing to accept help, the doctor will come to you. If not, you are at liberty to return to the wish-fulfillment therapy and pursue it to its ultimate conclusion.”