Star Science Fiction 4 - [Anthology] Read online

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  Star Science Fiction 4

  Edited By Frederik Pohl

  Proofed By MadMaxAU

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  Table of Contents

  Introduction: a pinch of stardust

  A cross of centuries, Henry Kuttner

  the advent on channel twelve, C. M. Kornbluth

  space-time for springers , Fritz Leiber

  man working , Richard Wilson

  helping hand , Lester del Rey

  the long echo , Miriam Allen deFord

  tomorrow’s gift , Edmund Cooper

  idiot stick , Damon Knight

  the immortals , James E. Gunn

  * * * *

  A PINCH OF STARDUST

  That ominous mushroom-shaped cloud you see is not another H-bomb; it’s the population explosion that is currently going off.

  Since 1950 the rate of population growth throughout the world has more than doubled. Now every seven months the world population increases by one per cent—twenty-odd million persons more at the end of July than there were on New Year’s Day—an additional New York City or London born every ten weeks—a 40,000-man state capital born while you slept last night

  Nature is kind enough to compound the interest on our human investment, so that the one per cent dividend every seven months amounts to doubling the original capital in just about forty years.

  Forty years?

  Why, that means that the world should greet the new millennium with between five and six billion mouths to feed. Forty years later we will have doubled again, to more than ten billion; which means that for the first time in the history of the race a voting majority will be present; of all the human men, women and children since the first homo sap, more than half will then be alive on the earth.

  That’s a lot of people. ...

  But only a beginning, it seems. Doubling a number ten times is the same as multiplying by a thousand (plus a bit). In ten times forty years, then, for every man alive today there will be one thousand and twenty-four. Before 2360 a.d., that is to say, there will be nearly three trillion persons cluttering up the face of the earth.

  And already, more than half the world’s people are barely scraping by for food. What then? Where will all those people find food?

  They won’t.

  They’ll starve, most of them; or never be born, because the persons who would have been their parents starved first.

  We can be grateful that we won’t live to see that particular event. . . .

  * * * *

  Or won’t we?

  For those are based on static figures, assuming that the rate of growth remains the same.

  But it isn’t remaining the same at all. It doubled—the rate of increase doubled—in the past eight years. It only has to double a few more times to reach the probable maximum rate of population increase—that is, let’s say, one child each year for every woman of child-bearing age.

  That makes an annual increase of some 15 per cent.

  At that rate—why, we double our population in some five years, instead of in forty. Instead of reaching the thousandfold increase before 2360 a.d., we come to it in the first decades of the next century, when some of us may very well still be alive. . . .

  And hungry.

  * * * *

  Now, there’s the problem: Malthusian law is about to be re-enacted; if we don’t do something soon the world’s in a pickle.

  What to do?

  Why, when you come right down to it, that’s the kind of question that the eight writers in this present volume (and their colleagues) are well equipped to answer. Shall we have a hydrogen war, to cut the race down to a corporal’s guard again and start the whole bloomin’ thing over? Shall we build enormous rocket ships to carry our surplus population to colonize the asteroids? Shall we invent a cheap and habit-forming contraceptive pill—found a sweeping new religion with vows of chastity for all—encourage lawful cannibalism and make the weaker serve the needs of the stronger so that a few, at least, may survive?

  Ask our science-fiction authors. It is their business to give

  an answer. And while it is not obligatory on them that the answer be right, it is the basic rule of their business that it must stimulate thought. And that stimulus may yet turn up a few right answers, on this and other problems—

  At a time when the world needs them very much indeed.

  Frederik Pohl

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  * * * *

  HENRY KUTTNER

  It is the custom in these pages to attempt to introduce each writer in a light vein, but here, and in the story that follows, lightness is hardly possible. Not long after Henry Kuttner wrote this story he began a new and demanding writing job for the movies; put in his first day at the studio and worked rather long; found himself tired and went home. He died in his sleep that night. Henry Kuttner was a young man, and a man who was much admired and much loved. There is no replacing him. There is only a permanent vacuum where the fine stories he would yet have written should have joined those fine stories already complete; and a permanent, personal loss to all of his friends.

  A CROSS OF CENTURIES

  They called him Christ. But he was not the Man who had toiled up the long road to Golgotha five thousand years before. They called him Buddha and Mohammed; they called him the Lamb, and the Blessed of God. The called him the Prince of Peace and the Immortal One.

  His name was Tyrell.

  He had come up another road now, the steep path that led to the monastery on the mountain, and he stood for a moment blinking against the bright sunlight. His white robe was stained with the ritual black.

  The girl beside him touched his arm and urged him gently forward. He stepped into the shadow of the gateway.

  Then he hesitated and looked back. The road had led up to a level mountain meadow where the monastery stood, and the meadow was dazzling green with early spring. Faintly, far away, he felt a wrenching sorrow at the thought of leaving all this brightness, but he sensed that things would be better very soon. And the brightness was far away. It was not quite real any more. The girl touched his arm again and he nodded obediently and moved forward, feeling the troubling touch of approach­ing loss that his tired mind could not understand now.

  I am very old, he thought.

  In the courtyard the priests bowed before him. Mons, the leader, was standing at the other end of a broad pool that sent back the bottomless blue of the sky. Now and again the water was ruffled by a cool, soft breeze.

  Old habits sent their messages along his nerves. Tyrell raised his hand and blessed them all.

  His voice spoke the remembered phrases quietly.

  “Let there be peace. On all the troubled earth, on all the worlds and in God’s blessed sky between, let there be peace. The powers of—of——” his hand wavered; then he remembered—”the powers of darkness have no strength against God’s love and understanding. I bring you God’s word. It is love; it is understanding; it is peace.”

  They waited till he had finished. It was the wrong time and the wrong ritual. But that did not matter, since he was the Messiah.

  Mons, at the other end of the pool, signaled. The girl beside Tyrell put her hands gently on the shoulders of his robe.

  Mons cried, “Immortal, will you cast off your stained garment and with it the sins of time?”

  Tyrell looked vaguely across the pool.

  “Will you bless the worlds with another century of your holy presence?”

  Tyrell remembered some words.

  “I leave in peace; I return in peace,” he said.

  The girl gently pulled off the white robe, knelt, and removed Tyrel
I’s sandals. Naked, he stood at the pool’s edge.

  He looked like a boy of twenty. He was two thousand years old.

  Some deep trouble touched him. Mons had lifted his arm, summoning, but Tyrell looked around confusedly and met the girl’s gray eyes.

  “Nerina?” he murmured.

  “Go in the pool,” she whispered. “Swim across it.”

  He put out his hand and touched hers. She felt that wonderful current of gentleness that was his indomitable strength. She pressed his hand tightly, trying to reach through the clouds in his mind, trying to make him know that it would be all right again, that she would be waiting—as she had waited for his resurrection three times already now, in the last three hundred years.

  She was much younger than Tyrell, but she was un­mortal too.

  For an instant the mists cleared from his blue eyes.

  “Wait for me, Nerina,” he said. Then, with a return of his old skill, he went into the pool with a clean dive.

  She watched him swim across, surely and steadily. There was nothing wrong with his body; there never was, no matter how old he grew. It was only his mind that stiffened, grooved deeper into the iron ruts of time, lost its friction with the present, so that his memory would fragment away little by little. But the oldest memories went last, and the automatic memories last of all.

  She was conscious of her own body, young and strong and beautiful, as it would always be. Her mind...there was an answer to that too. She was watching the answer.

  I am greatly blessed, she thought. Of all women on all the worlds, I am the Bride of Tyrell, and the only other immortal ever born.

  Lovingly and with reverence she watched him swim. At her feet his discarded robe lay, stained with the mem­ories of a hundred years.

  It did not seem so long ago. She could remember it very clearly, the last time she had watched Tyrell swim across the pool. And there had been one time before that—and that had been the first. For her; not for Tyrell.

  He came dripping out of the water and hesitated. She felt a strong pang at the change in him from strong sureness to bewildered questioning. But Mons was ready. He reached out and took Tyrell’s hand. He led the Messiah toward a door in the high monastery wall and through it. She thought that Tyrell looked back at her, with the tenderness that was always there in his deep, wonderful calm.

  A priest picked up the stained robe from her feet and carried it away. It would be washed clean now and placed on the altar, the spherical tabernacle shaped like the mother world. Dazzling white again, its folds would hang softly about the earth.

  It would be washed clean, as Tyrell’s mind would be washed clean too, rinsed of the clogging deposit of mem­ories that a century had brought.

  The priests were filing away. She glanced back, beyond the open gateway, to the sharply beautiful green of the mountain meadow, spring grass sensuously reaching to the sun after the winter’s snow. Immortal, she thought, lifting her arms high, feeling the eternal blood, ichor of gods, singing in deep rhythm through her body. Tyrell was the one who suffered. I have no price to pay for this—wonder.

  Twenty centuries.

  And the first century must have been utter horror.

  Her mind turned from the hidden mists of history that was legend now, seeing only a glimpse of the calm White Christ moving through that chaos of roaring evil when the earth was blackened, when it ran scarlet with hate and anguish. Ragnarok, Armageddon, Hour of the Anti­christ—two thousand years ago!

  Scourged, steadfast, preaching his word of love and peace, the White Messiah had walked like light through earth’s descent into hell.

  And he had lived, and the forces of evil had destroyed themselves, and the worlds had found peace now—had found peace so long ago that the Hour of the Antichrist was lost to memory; it was legend.

  Lost, even to Tyrell’s memory. She was glad of that. It would have been terrible to remember. She turned chill at the thought of what martyrdom he must have endured.

  But it was the Day of the Messiah now, and Nerina, the only other immortal ever born, looked with reverence and love at the empty doorway through which Tyrell had gone.

  She glanced down at the blue pool. A cool wind ruffled its surface; a cloud moved lightly past the sun, shadowing all the bright day.

  It would be seventy years before she would swim the pool again. And when she did, when she woke, she would find Tyrell’s blue eyes watching her, his hand closing lightly over hers, raising her to join him in the youth that was the springtime where they lived forever.

  Her gray eyes watched him; her hand touched his as he lay on the couch. But still he did not waken.

  She glanced up anxiously at Morn.

  He nodded reassuringly.

  She felt the slightest movement against her hand.

  His eyelids trembled. Slowly they lifted. The calm, deep certainty was still there in the blue eyes that had seen so much, in the mind that had forgotten so much. Tyrell looked at her for a moment. Then he smiled.

  Nerina said shakily, “Each time I’m afraid that you’ll forget me.”

  Mons said, “We always give him back his memories of you, Blessed of God. We always will.” He leaned over Tyrell. “Immortal, have you truly wakened?”

  “Yes,” Tyrell said, and thrust himself upright, swing­ing his legs over the edge of the couch, rising to his feet in a swift, sure motion. He glanced around, saw the new robe ready, pure white, and drew it on. Both Nerina and Mons saw, that there was no more hesitancy in his actions. Beyond the eternal body, the mind was young and sure and unclouded again.

  Mons knelt, and Nerina knelt too. The priest said softly, “We thank God that a new Incarnation is per­mitted. May peace reign in this cycle, and in all the cycles beyond.”

  Tyrell lifted Nerina to her feet. He reached down and drew Mons upright too.

  ‘Mons, Mons,” he said, almost chidingly. “Every cen­tury I’m treated less like a man and more like a god. If you’d been alive a few hundred years ago—well, they still prayed when I woke, but they didn’t kneel. I’m a man, Mons. Don’t forget that.”

  Mons said, “You brought peace to the worlds.”

  “Then may I have something to eat, in return?”

  Mons bowed and went out. Tyrell turned quickly to Nerina. The strong gentleness of his arms drew her close.

  “If I never woke, sometime—” he said. “You’d be the hardest thing of all to give up. I didn’t know how lonely I was till I found another immortal.”

  “We have a week here in the monastery,” she said. “A week’s retreat, before we go home. I like being here with you best of all.”

  “Wait a while,” he said. “A few more centuries and you’ll lose that attitude of reverence. I wish you would. Love’s better—and who else can I love this way?”

  She thought of the centuries of loneliness be had had, and her whole body ached with love and compassion.

  After the kiss, she drew back and looked at him thoughtfully.

  “You’ve changed again,” she said. “It’s still you, but—”

  “But what?”

  “You’re gentler, somehow.”

  Tyrell laughed.

  “Each time, they wash out my mind and give me a new set of memories. Oh, most of the old ones, but the total’s a little different. It always is. Things are more peaceful now than they were a century ago. So my mind is tailored to fit the times. Otherwise I’d gradually become an anachronism.” He frowned slightly. “Who’s that?”

  She glanced at the door.

  “Mons? No. It’s no one.”

  “Oh? Well . . . yes, we’ll have a week’s retreat. Time to think and integrate my retailored personality. And the past—” He hesitated again.

  She said, “I wish I’d been born earlier. I could have been with you—”

  “No,” he said quickly. “At least—not too far back.”

  “Was it so bad?”

  He shrugged.

  “I don’t know how true my memor
ies are any more. I’m glad I don’t remember more than I do. But I re­member enough. The legends are right.” His face shad­owed with sorrow. “The big wars ... hell was loosed. Hell was omnipotent! The Antichrist walked in the noon­day sun, and men feared that which is high. . . .” His gaze lifted to the pale low ceiling of the room, seeing beyond it “Men had turned into beasts. Into devils. I spoke of peace to them, and they tried to kill me. I bore it. I was immortal, by God’s grace. Yet they could have killed me. I am vulnerable to weapons.” He drew a deep, long breath. “Immortality was not enough. God’s will pre­served me, so that I could go on preaching peace until, little by little, the maimed beasts remembered their souls and reached up out of hell.. . .”