The Year's Best Science Fiction 5 Read online

  “Anything Hank decides!” says Edie stoutly.

  “Well, well,” says Mr. Wilier, shaking his head. “Well, well, welll”

  “Look here!” says Hank. “You can’t tell me there’s no way of putting what we’ve got to good use.”

  “Well…” says Mr. Wilier.

  “Look. If you want out,” says Hank, “you just get in your car—”

  Mr. Wilier shakes his head.

  “No,” he says. And suddenly his face lights up with a smile. He beams at them. “You’d really let me go?”

  “Shove off,” says Hank.

  “Goodl” cried Mr. Wilier. He does not move. “Congratulations, both of you. Forgive me for putting you both to the test this way but for the sake of everybody else in the Colony, I had to make sure you were ready to go through with it before I told you anything.”

  “Colony?” says Edie.

  “Anything?” says Hank.

  Nine hours later, just at dusk, a small, gray 1937 sedan in good repair is to be seen approaching the gate of a certain military installation in New Mexico. It stops at the wide gate and two MPs in white helmets approach it. There is a short conversation between them and the driver, and then they march rather stiffly and woodenly back to their small, glassed-in gatehouse. The sedan proceeds on into the interior of the installation.

  A little under an hour later, after several more like conversations, the sedan parks. Its three occupants leave it for another gate, another guard, another compound within another area, and finally find themselves standing at the foot of an enormous tall, tapering metallic creation.

  There are some half-dozen guards around this creation, but after a short conversation with the oldest of the party they have all stretched out beside their weapons and gone to sleep.

  “Here we are,” says the oldest of the party, who is, of course, Mr. Wilier.

  The other two are speechless and stare at the enormous ship beside them. They seem rather impressed.

  “Will it—” falters Edie, and then her voice fails her.

  “Will it take the two of you to Venus? Absolutely,” says Mr. Wilier, fondling the smooth head curve of his malacca walking stick. “I had a long talk with one of the chief men who designed it, just a week ago. You just follow these instructions—” He reaches for an inside pocket of his coat and withdraws a typewritten sheet of paper, which he hands to Hank- “Just run down the list on this, doing everything in order, and off you go.”

  Hank takes the paper rather gingerly. “Seems like stealing,” he mumbles.

  “Not when you stop to think,” says Mr. Wilier. “It’s for the Colony, for the ultimate good of humanity.” He puts a wrinkled hand confidentially on Hank’s arm. “My boy, this has come so suddenly to both of you as to be quite a severe shock, but you will adjust to it in time. Fate has selected you two young people to be of that dedicated band of psychical pioneers who will one day lift humanity from this slough of fear and pain and uncertainty in which it has wallowed ever since the first man lifted his face to the skies in wonder. Have faith in your own destiny.”

  “Yeah,” says Hank, still doubtful. But Edie is gazing with shining eyes at Mr. Wilier.

  “Oh!” she says. “Isn’t it wonderful, Hank?”

  “Yeah,” says Hank.

  “Well, then,” says Mr. Wilier, patting them both on the arm and pushing them gently to the metal ladder of a framework tower that stretches up alongside the ship. “Up you go. Don’t worry about the controls. This is built on a new, secret principle. It’s as easy to drive as a car.”

  “Just a minute!” cries a sudden, ringing voice. They all hesitate and turn away from the ship. Approaching rapidly through the air from the northwest is something that can only be described as a scintillant cloud of glory. It swoops in for a landing before them and thins away to reveal a tall, handsome man in a tight sort of coverall of silver mesh.

  “Up to your old tricks, again, Wilo, aren’t you?”, he barks at Mr. Wilier. “Can’t keep your hands off? Want everything your own way, don’t you?”

  “Fools rush in,” says Mr. Wilier, “where angels fear to tread.”

  “What?” demands Hank, looking from one to the other. “What’s all this about? Who’re you?”

  “You wouldn’t understand if I told you,” says the tall man. “The point is, having psi-talents puts you under my protection. Half a dozen people a year I have to come chasing in and rescue. And all on account of him!” He glares at Mr. Wilier.

  “I still don’t—” Hank begins.

  “Of course not. How could you? If Wilo here had started leaving things alone as little as a hundred years ago, you humans would have developed into probationary members of Galactic Society by this time. Natural evolution. More psi-talents in every generation. Recognition of such. Alteration of local society. But no, not Wilo. The minute he discovers anyone with psi-talent he points them toward destruction. I have to save them. The only safe way to save them with Wilo around is to take them off the planet. Wilo knows this. So—no progress for humanity.”

  Hank blinks a couple of times.

  “But how come?” he cries, staring at Mr. Wilier. “He’s one himself! I mean, he can do all sorts of things Edie and I can’t do—”

  “Nonsense!” says the tall man. “He’s just sensitive. An antenna, you might say. He can feel when real ones are sending.”

  “But—the ash tray…” falters Edie.

  “There, there, I scan you perfectly,” soothes the tall man. “Illusion. Nothing more. Even an ordinary intelligence can learn something in a hundred and eighty-four years and some months, after all. Wilo, Master Hypnotist. That’s the way he used to bill himself back in his days on the stage. He hypnotized you, just as he hypnotized these soldiers.”

  “With a glance,” mutters Mr. Wilier darkly.

  “Unfortunately very true,” says the tall man. He glares at Mr. Wilier again. “If it wasn’t for the fact that we truly advanced civilization members can’t harm anyone—!”

  He turns back to Hank and Edie.

  “Well,” he sighs heavily, “come along. This world will have to stay stuck in its present stage of development until something happens to Wilo, or he changes his mind.”

  Edie stares at the old man.

  “Oh, Mr. Wilier!” she says. “Why can’t you let people just go ahead and develop like Hank and I did?”

  “Bah!” says Wilier. “Humbug!”

  “But the world would be a much better place!”

  “Young lady!” snaps Mr. Wilier. “I like it the way it is!” He turns his back on them.

  “Come on,” says the tall man.

  They take off. Mr. Wilier turns back to look at them as they ascend into the new rays of the just-risen moon and the New Mexico night sky, trailing clouds of glory as they go.

  The clouds of glory light up the landscape.

  “Bah!” says Mr. Wilier again. With a snap of his fingers he produces some flash paper which, at the touch of flame from a palmed match, flares brightly for a moment. It’s one tiny recalcitrant beacon of.stability and permanence in the whole of the madly whirling, wild and evolving universe.

  * * * *

  MULTUM IN PARVO by Jack Sharkey

  from Gent

  Once upon a time, little children used to frighten naughty parents at bedtime with a radio program known as “The Shadow.” And out of those dim and dear days comes Bruce Elliott, who used to write the show—before he turned to comic books, mysteries, science fiction, magic, and heaven-knows-how-much-else, only to wind up respectably editing a happily not-too-respectable magazine duo.

  For satire, fantasy, wit with spice, and all around fun, Gent and The Dude are giving some stiff competition these days to a magazine which will not be referred to here as Playboy. These excerpts from a still running series of historical frictions (Return of Parvo, Parvo Rides Again, etc.) by Jack Sharkey have been selected as those most appropriate to a family science-fantasy anthology.

  * * *
*

  ROBOTS

  The first robot was constructed by Max Roe and Harold Bott, in the year 1653, for exhibition at the World’s Fair at Istanbul (not Constantinople). It was a rather rough construction, consisting mainly of a tin hand to hold cards and a glass eye for viewing them. It had one function: to play poker. Max and Harold taught it everything they knew, taking great pains to root out a distressing habit it had of trying to fill inside straights, and soon it was a better player than either of them. It had a painted mouth which never changed expression, which came in handy when it was only bluffing.

  Anyhow, they lugged it down to Istanbul (not Constantinople) for the Fair, and proceeded to set it up in the tent near the center of the exposition. After completing the job, they stepped around the corner to the brewer’s exhibit to sample the wares on display there, and to clean out the little reed pipe which they used to signal the robot to begin its play (alcohol was the perfect cleanser for it). [Hence the phrase, “To wet one’s whistle.”]

  While they were gone, however, the paraphernalia of the next tent (that of Omar, the Trussmocker), was delivered to theirs by mistake, and when they returned they were horrified to discover that their robot was laden with barbells and other weights of enormous tonnage.

  “Max!” gasped Harold, “we can’t lift up the lid to get at the starting switch!”

  “Heavens,” Max groaned, “you’re right!”

  “Say,” said a man in the crowd which had come to see the robot, “ain’t that thing gonna play poker for us?”

  “I’m afraid not,” said Max, indicating the weighted-down lid. “We can’t get at the starting switch.”

  “Can’t you do it by strength alone?” asked the man.

  “Nope,” said Harold, sadly. “It’s going to take jacks or better to open.”

  * * * *

  AIRCRAFT

  As most people know, the first man to fly was called Icarus, who should have had more sense. He and his father escaped from jail on an island (men of Alcatraz take note) by the expedient of attaching feathers to their arms with beeswax (it sounds reckless, I know, but this was before cellophane tape), and flapped away into the skies.

  Well, everything was going fine till Icarus, who was a little dopey, decided to take a look at the sun, up close. Naturally, the beeswax began to melt and dribble away, and he began to lose his feathers.

  “Say, son,” his father observed, flapping down where it was cooler, “your topside is dripping. You’d better flip over on your back and come lower, so’s the wax’ll get hard again.”

  But Icarus said no, and flew still higher, till the wax began running like water, the feathers fluttered away and Icarus plunged down toward the ocean, his right “wing” completely gone.

  “Son,” said his father, “are you falling?”

  Icarus replied, “It’s a matter of a pinion, Dad.”

  “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, son,” said his father as Icarus vanished into the sea, “Loop before you leak!”

  Moral: He who levitates is washed.

  * * * *

  VAMPIRISM

  This habit was begun in 1357 by a group of five men who felt that they weren’t getting enough out of their diet, which consisted mainly of turnips.

  “Say, men,” said the eldest, named George, “we’re just missing something in our nutrition. How about we go and terrorize the countryside and maybe get us something we can really sink our teeth into?”

  The others thought this a fine idea, and soon the near-by villages were getting it in the neck.

  “My people,” said the Mayor of the largest village, “it’s about time we stop this leeching. That gang’s been putting the bite on us long enough.”

  “So okay, so what do we do?” asked the villagers.

  “We go out to the mausoleum where they sleep all day, and we try and touch their hearts by pointing out what we have at stake,” he said.

  “We’ll hammer the point home,” the villagers agreed.

  So they took five sharpened sticks and went out to where the five men were sleeping. Gus, the blacksmith, had brought his hammer and proceeded to open the first of the five coffins and nailed the vampire before he could fly.

  “Hurry, Gus,” said the Mayor, “the other four are going batty.”

  But Gus came up to him empty-handed. “I’m sorry, Your Honor,” he said, “but I got carried away and used up all five stakes on that first guy.”

  “Idiot,” said the Mayor, “look what you’ve done! The other four have flipped their lids and flown the crypt!”

  “It’s all my fault,” said Gus, “for putting all my pegs in one casket.”

  * * * *

  ATOMIC FISSION

  This was discovered in 1944 by two scientists who were working in their lab on something else entirely. Sam, the younger man, came up to Ted, the older man, and said, “Say, Ted, how you getting on with that circular radio-wave of yours?”

  “Not so good, Sam,” said Ted, showing him a diagram. “I’ve devised this thing to carry a magnetic current in a circle, but that’s all the farther I am. I call it a cyclotron.”

  “What?” said Sam, abused. “Ten years we’ve been working on this project, and all you have is this diagram? Why, it’s nothing but a circle, a plain old cipher.”

  “I never took up drafting,” Ted admitted sadly. “Anyhow, that’s the shape it should be.”

  “Years of work, and you draw a cipher,” Sam muttered. “I’ll show you what I think of this diagram!”

  And with that, he rolled the blueprint into a cylinder and ran it through the pencil-sharpener, leaving the scraps on the floor.

  Immediately an angry crowd of janitors gathered, all of them telling the two scientists what they thought of that litter.

  Instantly the building vanished in a white-hot blast, followed by a mushroom-shaped cloud.

  And to this day, that’s what happens when you get a critical mass at a ground zero.

  For the last item, I was going to give the history of Fallout. I had to save it for last because— Well, look for yourself...

  * * * *

  FALLOUT

  That covers everything, doesn’t it?

  * * * *

  FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON by Daniel Keyes

  from Fantasy and Science Fiction

  Daniel Keyes is a reformed science-fiction editor (Marvel, some few years ago) turned high-school English teacher. Either of these dubious professions should be enough to keep a sensible man on the spectator’s side of a byline. If he didn’t write the stuff when he could buy it from himself, one might think the rigors of New York City’s blackboard jungle would prevent him from beginning now.

  One way and another, it is difficult to believe that this is Keyes’ second published story—much more difficult after reading it than before.

  * * * *

  progris riport 1—martch 5, 1965

  Dr. Strauss says I shud rite down what I think and evrey thing that happins to me from now on. I dont know why but he says its importint so they will see if they will use me. I hope they use me. Miss Kinnian says maybe they can make me smart. I want to be smart. My name is Charlie Gordon. I am 37 years old and 2 weeks ago was my birthday. I have nuthing more to rite now so I will close for today.

  progris riport 2—martch 6

  I had a test today. I think I faled it. and I think that maybe now they wont use me. What happind is a nice young man was in the room and he had some white cards with ink spilled all over them. He sed Charlie what do you see on this card. I was very skared even tho I had my rabits foot in my pockit because when I was a kid I always faled tests in school and I spilled ink to.

  I told him I saw a inkblot. He said yes and it made me feel good. I thot that was all but when I got up to go he stopped me. He said now sit down Charlie we are not thru yet. Then I dont remember so good but he wantid me to say what was in the ink. I dint see nuthing in the ink but he said there was picturs there other pepul saw som
e picturs. I coudnt see any picturs. I reely tryed to see. I held the card close up and then far away. Then I said if I had my glases I coud see better I usally only ware my glases in the movies or TV but I said they are in the closit in the hall. I got them. Then I said let me see that card agen I bet Ill find it now.

  I tryed hard but I still coudnt find the picturs I only saw the ink. I told him maybe I need new glases. He rote somthing down on a paper and I got skared of faling the test. I told him it was a very nice inkblot with littel points al around the eges. He looked very sad so that wasnt it. I said please let me try agen. Ill get it in a few minits becaus Im not so fast somthnes. Im a slow reeder too in Miss Kinnians class for slow adults but I’m trying very hard.

  He gave me a chance with another card that had 2 kinds of ink spilled on it red and blue.

  He was very nice and talked slow like Miss Kinnian does and he explaned it to me that it was a raw shok. He said pepul see things in the ink. I said show me where. He said think. I told him I think a inkblot but that wasnt rite eather. He said what does it remind you—pretend something. I closd my eyes for a long time to pretend. I told him I pretned a fowntan pen with ink leeking all over a table cloth. Then be got up and went out.

  I dont think I passd the raw shok test.

  progris report 3—martch 7

  Dr Strauss and Dr Nemur say it dont matter about the inkblots. I told them I dint spill the ink on the cards and I coudnt see anything in the ink. They said that maybe they will still use me. I said Miss Kinnian never gave me tests like that one only spelling and reading. They said Miss Kinnian told that I was her bestist pupil in the adult nite scool becaus I tryed the hardist and I reely wantid to lern. They said how come you went to the adult nite scool all by yourself Charlie. How did you find it. I said I askd pepul and sunibody told me where I shud go to lern to read and spell good. They said why did you want to. I told them becaus all my life I wantid to be smart and not dumb. But its very hard to be smart. They said you know it will probly be tempirery. I said yes. Miss Kinnian told me. I dont care if it herts.