The Year's Best Science Fiction 5 Read online

  “She was never alive,” said Chico. “Sure,” he went on, feeling their eyes on him suddenly. “It’s something left over from a movie studio. Liquid rubber skinned over a steel frame. A prop, a dummy.”

  “Oh, no, it’s real!”

  “We’ll find a label somewhere,” said Chico. “Here.”

  “Don’t!” cried the first boy.

  “Hell.” Chico touched the body to turn it, and stopped. He knelt there, his face changing.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Tom.

  Chico took his hand away and looked at it. “I was wrong.” His voice faded.

  Tom took the woman’s wrist. “There’s a pulse.”

  “You’re feeling your own heartbeat.”

  “I just don’t know… maybe… maybe…”

  The woman was there and her upper body was all moon pearl and tidal cream and her lower body all slithering ancient green-black coins that slid upon themselves in the shift of wind and water.

  “There’s a trick somewhere!” cried Chico, suddenly.

  “No. No!” Just as suddenly Tom burst out in laughter. “No trick! My God, my God, I feel great! I haven’t felt so great since I was a kid!”

  They walked slowly around her. A wave touched her white hand so the fingers faintly softly waved. The gesture was that of someone asking for another and another wave to come in and lift the fingers and then the wrist and then the arm and then head and finally the body and take all of them together back down out to sea.

  “Tom.” Chico’s mouth opened and closed. “Why don’t you go get our truck?”

  Tom didn’t move.

  “You hear me?” said Chico.

  “Yes, but—”

  “But what? We could sell this somewhere, I don’t know—the university, that aquarium at Seal Beach or… well, hell, why couldn’t we just set up a place? Look.” He shook Tom’s arm. “Drive to the pier. Buy us three hundred pounds of chipped ice. When you take anything out of the water you need ice, don’t you?”

  “I never thought.”

  “Think about it! Get moving!”

  “I don’t know, Chico.”

  “What you mean? She’s real, isn’t she?” He turned to the boys. “You say she’s real, don’t you? Well, then, what are we waiting for?”

  “Chico,” said Tom. “You better go get the ice yourself.”

  “Someone’s got to stay and make sure she don’t go back out with the tide!”

  “Chico,” said Tom. “I don’t know how to explain. I don’t want to get that ice for you.”

  “I’ll go myself, then. Look, boys, build the sand up here to keep the waves back. I’ll give you five bucks apiece. Hop to it!”

  The sides of the boys’ faces were bronze-pink from the sun which was touching the horizon now. Their eyes were a bronze color looking at Chico.

  “My God!” said Chico. “This is better than finding ambergris!” He ran to the top of the nearest dune, called, “Get to work!” and was gone.

  Now Tom and the two boys were left with the lonely woman by the north rock and the sun was one-fourth of the way below the western horizon. The sand and the woman were pink-gold.

  “Just a little line,” whispered the second boy. He drew his fingernail along under his own chin, gently. He nodded to the woman. Tom bent again to see the faint line under either side of her firm white chin, the small almost invisible line where the gills were or had been and were now almost sealed shut, invisible.

  He looked at the face and the great strands of hair spread out in a lyre on the shore.

  “She’s beautiful,” he said.

  The boys nodded without knowing it.

  Behind them, a gull leaped up quickly from the dunes. The boys gasped and turned to stare.

  Tom felt himself trembling. He saw the boys were trembling, too. A car horn hooted. Their eyes blinked, suddenly afraid. They looked up toward the highway.

  A wave poured about the body, framing it in a clear white pool of water.

  Tom nodded the boys to one side.

  The wave moved the body an inch in and two inches out toward the sea.

  The next wave came and moved the body two inches in and six inches out toward the sea.

  “But—” said the first boy.

  Tom shook his head.

  The third wave lifted the body two feet down toward the sea. The wave after that drifted the body another foot down the shingles and the next three moved it six feet down.

  The first boy cried out and ran after it.

  Tom reached him and held his arm. The boy looked helpless and afraid and sad.

  For a moment there were no more waves. Tom looked at the woman, thinking, she’s true, she’s real, she’s mine… but… she’s dead. Or will be if she stays here.

  “We can’t let her go,” said the first boy. “We can’t, we just can’t!”

  The other boy stepped between the woman and the sea. “What would we do with her,” he wanted to know, looking at Tom, “if we kept her?”

  The first boy tried to think. “We could—we could—” He stopped and shook his head. “Oh, my gosh.”

  The second boy stepped out of the way and left a path from the woman to the sea.

  The next was a big one. It came in and went out and the sand was empty. The whiteness was gone and the black diamonds and the great threads of the harp.

  They stood by the edge of the sea, looking out, the man and the two boys, until they heard the truck driving up on the dunes behind them.

  The last of the sun was gone.

  They heard footsteps running down the dunes and someone yelling.

  They drove back down the darkening beach in the light truck with the big-treaded tires, in silence. The two boys sat in the rear on the bags of chipped ice. After a long while, Chico began to sweat steadily, half to himself, spitting out the window.

  “Three hundred pounds of ice. Three hundred pounds of ice! What do I do with it now? And I’m soaked to the skin, soaked! You didn’t even move when I jumped in and swam out to look around! Idiot, idiot! You haven’t changed! Like every other time, like always, you do nothing, nothing, just stand there, stand there, do nothing, nothing, just stare!”

  “And what did you do, I ask, what?” said Tom, in a tired voice, looking ahead. “The same as you always did, just the same, no different at all. You should’ve seen yourself.”

  They dropped the boys off at their beach-house. The youngest spoke in a voice you could hardly hear against the wind.

  “Gosh, nobody’ll ever believe…”

  The two men drove down the coast and parked.

  Chico sat for two or three minutes waiting for his fists to relax on his lap, and then he snorted.

  “Hell. I guess things turn out for the best.” He took a deep breath. “It just came to me. Funny. Twenty, thirty years from now, middle of the night, our phone’ll ring. It’ll be one of those two boys, grown up, calling long-distance from a bar somewhere. Middle of the night, them calling to ask one question. It’s true, isn’t it? they’ll say. It did happen, didn’t it? Back in 1958, it really happened to us? And we’ll sit there on the edge of the bed, middle of the night, saying, Sure, boy, sure, it really happened, to us, in 1958. And they’ll say, Thanks, and we’ll say, Don’t mention it, any old time. And we’ll all say good night. And maybe they won’t call again for a couple of years.”

  The two men sat on their front-porch steps in the dark.

  “Tom?”

  “What?”

  Chico waited a moment.

  “You’re not going away.”

  It was not a question but a quiet statement.

  Tom thought about it, his cigarette dead in his fingers. And he knew he would never go away now. For tomorrow and the day after and the day after the day after that, he knew he would walk down and go swimming there in all the green lace and the white fires and the dark caverns in the hollows under the waves. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

  “That’s right, Chico. I’
m staying here.”

  Now the silver looking-glasses advanced in a crumpling line all along the coast from a thousand miles north to a thousand miles south. The mirrors did not reflect so much as one building or one tree or one highway or one car or even one man himself. The mirrors reflected only the quiet moon and then shattered into a billion bits of glass that spread out in a glaze on the shore. Then the sea was dark awhile, preparing another line of mirrors to rear up and surprise the two men who sat there for a long time, never once blinking their eyes, waiting.

  * * * *

  THE DREAMSMAN by Gordon R. Dickson

  from Star Science Fiction #6 (Ballantine Books, 1959)

  Every profession has its fringe benefits, and Gordy Dickson is one of science fiction’s. A big rangy ex-Canadian from the tall beer country of Minnesota, he turns up, not quite often enough, at conventions and conferences with his guitar over one shoulder and a sort of shining shield of great good humor over the other. One of these days a bright song publisher will introduce nonconvention-goers to the Dickson-Cogswell-Anderson science-fantasy ballads and blues. Meantime, novels like his explosive Dorsai! in ASF last year, and short stories like this one fill the gap moderately well.

  * * * *

  Mr. Wilier is shaving. He uses an old-fashioned straight-edged razor and the mirror above his bathroom washbasin reflects a morning face that not even the fluffy icing of the lather can make very palatable. Above the lather his skin is dark and wrinkled. His eyes are somewhat yellow where they ought to show white and his sloping forehead is embarrassingly short of hair. No matter. Mr. Wilier poises the razor for its first stroke—and instantly freezes in position. For a second he stands immobile. Then his false teeth clack once and he starts to pivot slowly toward the northwest, razor still in hand, quivering like a directional antenna seeking its exact target. This is as it should be. Mr. Wilier, wrinkles, false teeth and all, is a directional antenna. Mr. Wilier turns back to the mirror and goes ahead with his shaving. He shaves skilfully and rapidly, beaming up at a sign over the mirror which proclaims that a stitch in time saves nine. Four minutes later, stitchless and in need of none, he moves out of the bathroom, into his bedroom. Here he dresses rapidly and efficiently, at the last adjusting his four-in-hand before a dresser mirror which has inlaid about its frame the message Handsome is as handsome does. Fully dressed, Mr. Wilier selects a shiny malacca cane from the collection in his hall closet and goes out behind his little house to the garage.

  His car, a 1937 model sedan painted a sensible gray, is waiting for him. Mr. Wilier gets in, starts the motor and carefully warms it up for two minutes. He then backs out into the May sunshine. He points the hood ornament of the sedan toward Buena Vista and drives off.

  Two hours later he can be seen approaching a small yellow-and-white rambler in Buena Vista’s new development section, at a considerate speed two miles under the local limit. It is 10:30 in the morning. He pulls up in front of the house, sets the handbrake, locks his car and goes up to ring the doorbell beside the yellow front door.

  The door opens and a face looks out. It is a very pretty face with blue eyes and marigold-yellow hair above a blue apron not quite the same shade as the eyes. The young lady to which it belongs cannot be much more than in her very early twenties.

  “Yes?” says the young lady.

  “Mr. Wilier, Mrs. Conalt,” says Mr. Wilier, raising his hat and producing a card. “The Liberty Mutual Insurance agent, to see your husband.”

  “Oh!” says the pretty face, somewhat flustered, opening the door and stepping back. “Please come in.” Mr. Wilier enters. Still holding the card, Mrs. Conalt turns and calls across the untenanted small living room toward the bedroom section at the rear of the house, “Hank!”

  “Coming!” replies a young baritone. Seconds later a tall, quite thin man about the same age as his wife, with a cheerfully unhandsome face, emerges rapidly into the living room.

  “The insurance man, honey,” says the young lady, who has whisked off her apron while Mr. Wilier was turned to face the entrance through which the young man has come. She hands her husband the card.

  “Insurance?” says young Mr. Conalt frowning, reading the card. “What insurance? Liberty Mutual? But I don’t— we don’t have any policies with Liberty Mutual. If you’re selling—”

  “Not at the moment,” says Mr. Wilier, beaming at them as well as the looseness of his false teeth will permit. “I actually am an insurance agent, but that hasn’t anything to do with this. I only wanted to see you first.”

  “First before what?” demands Mr. Conalt, staring hard at him.

  “Before revealing myself,” says Mr. Wilier. “You are the two young people who have been broadcasting a call to any other psi-sensitives within range, aren’t you?”

  “Oh, Hank!” gasps Mrs. Conalt; but Conalt does not unbend.

  “What are you talking about?” he demands.

  “Come, come,” replies Mr. Wilier deprecatingly.

  “But, Hank—” begins Mrs. Conalt.

  “Hush, Edie. I think this guy—”

  “Oh, wad the power the Giftie gie us, to see oorselves as ithers see us—more or less, if you young people will pardon the accent.”

  “What’s that? That’s Robert Burns, isn’t it,” says Hank. “It goes—it would frae mony an error free us.” He hesitates.

  “And foolish notion. Yes,” says Mr. Wilier. “And now that the sign and counter-sign have been given, let us get down to facts. You were broadcasting, both of you, were you not?”

  “Were you receiving?” demands Hank.

  “Of course,” says Mr. Wilier unperturbed. “How else would I know what quotation to use for a password?” He beams at them again. “May I sit down?”

  “Oh, of course!” says Edie hastily. They all sit down. Edie bounces up again. “Would you like some coffee, Mr. —er—” she glances over at the card, still in Hank’s hands —”Wilier?”

  “Thank you, no,” replies Mr. Wilier, clacking his teeth. “I have one cup of coffee a day, after dinner. I believe in moderation of diet. But to the point. You are the people I heard.”

  “Say we were,” says Hank finally. “You claim to be psi-sensitive yourself, huh?”

  “Claim? No doubt about it, my boy. Ash tray?” He lifts his hand. An ash tray on an end table across the room comes sailing on the air like a miniature ceramic UFO to light gently upon his upturned palm. Mr. Wilier sets it down and closes his eyes.

  “You have seven dollars in your wallet, Hank. One five-dollar bill and two singles. At this moment you are interrupting your main line of thought to wonder worriedly what happened to the third one-dollar bill, as you had eight dollars in the wallet earlier this morning. Rest easy. You were stopped by the newspaper delivery boy shortly after ten this morning while you were mowing the lawn and paid him eighty cents. The two dimes change are in your right-hand pants pocket.”

  He opens his eyes. “Well?”

  “All right,” says Hank with a heavy sigh. “You sold me. We can’t do anything like that, Edie and I. We can just read each other’s minds—and other people’s if they’re thinking straight at us.” He stares a little at Mr. Wilier. “You’re pretty good.”

  “Tut,” says Mr. Wilier. “Experience, nothing else. I will be a hundred and eighty-four next July 12th. One learns things.”

  “A hundred and eighty-four!” gasps Edie.

  “And some months, ma’am,” says Mr. Wilier, giving her a little half-bow from his chair. “Sensible living, no extravagances and peace of mind—the three keys to longevity. But to return to the subject, what caused you young people to send out a call?”

  “Well, we—” began Edie.

  “What we thought,” says Hank, “is that if there were any more like us, we ought to get together and decide what to do about it. Edie and I talked it all over. Until we met each other we never thought there could be anybody else like ourselves in the world. But if there were two of us, then it stood to reason there must
be more. And then Edie pointed out that maybe if a bunch of us could get together we could do a lot for people. It was sort of a duty, to see what we could do for the rest of the world.”

  “Very commendable,” says Mr. Wilier.

  “I mean, we could read the minds of kids that fall in a well and get trapped—and send emergency messages maybe. All sorts of things. There must be a lot more we haven’t thought of.”

  “No doubt there are,” says Mr. Wilier.

  “Then you’re with us?” says Hank. “Together, I’ll bet we can darn near start a new era in the world.”

  “Well, yes,” replies Mr. Wilier. “And no. A hundred and eighty-four years have taught me caution. Moreover, there is more to the story than you young people think.” He clacks his teeth. “Did you think you were the first?”

  “The first?” echoes Hank.

  “The first to discover you possess unusual abilities. I see by the expression on year faces you have taken just that for granted. I must, I’m afraid, correct that notion. You are not the first any more than I was. There have been many.”

  “Many?” asked Edie faintly.

  “A great number within my experience,” says Mr. Wilier, rubbing his leathery old hands together.

  “But what happened to them?” asked Edie.

  “Many things,” replies Mr. Wilier. “Some were burned as witches, some were put in insane asylums. Fifteen years ago one was lynched in a small town called Pashville. Yes, indeed. Many things happen.”

  The two others stare at him.

  “Yeah?” says Hank. “How come you’re in such good shape, then?”

  “Ah, that’s the thing. Look before you leap. I always have. It pays.”

  “What—what do you mean?” asks Edie.

  “I mean it’s fortunate I was around to hear you when you broadcast.” Mr. Wilier turns to her. “Lucky for you I reached you before you went ahead trying to put this help-the-world plan of yours into effect.”

  “I still think it’s a good notion!” says Hank almost fiercely.

  “Because you’re young,” replies Mr. Wilier with a slight quaver in his voice. “And idealistic. You wouldn’t want to expose your wife to the sort of thing I’ve mentioned, eh?”