Star SHort Novels - [Anthology] Read online

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  STAR Short Novels

  Edited By Frederik Pohl

  Proofed By MadMaxAU

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  Contents

  LITTLE MEN by Jessamyn West

  FOR I AM A JEALOUS PEOPLE! by Lester del Rey

  TO HERE AND THE EASEL by Theodore Sturgeon

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  Introduction

  this book had to be. There are stories in science fiction which cannot be told in a few words, and yet will not fill a book; stories which, caught in the limbo between short stories and full-length novels, may flicker briefly in a magazine but are less than likely to manage the permanence of book publication. And yet—they deserve to live.

  For science fiction has much to say to all of us; it is not merely a clutch of thrills (though it can have its tingling excitement!), nor a literature of escape (though good reading is always good fun). Science fiction, at its best, is a mirror in which we see our world, our future, and ourselves. Like the diffraction grating of the physicists, it reflects, and it analyzes. Turn it upon whatever subject you will; the image is caught, torn apart, and returned to you, in neat spectroscopic bands. You may not recognize your own face or your own home town in the picture at first glance; but they are there, all the same, in aspects you perhaps had never before seen.

  For we know ourselves by our extremes. We study the delusions of paranoia to understand what tiny tremors disturb our dreams; the vegetable quiet of the catatonic helps explain our slowness, sometimes, to respond to a challenge. Science fiction shows us extremes. We do not expect, you and I, to find ourselves in a world where Martians invade. But perhaps thinking about horn-skinned, bloodless aliens from another planet will teach us something about getting along with the divergent races, creeds, and sects who are our own human cousins.

  Science fiction is the truthful expansion of a lie. The science-fiction writer may start out with whatever enormous lie he chooses to state; he may say that the Earth has been invaded by Martians, or that it is possible to travel in time, or that a dog can be bred to be smarter than a man. But once he has told his lie he is ruled by it as tyrannically as the Civil War historian is ruled by Lee’s surrender: For the purposes of his story, that lie is true and incontrovertible, and cannot be ignored.

  Jessamyn West, in the present volume, tells us a magnificent lie in her “Little Men.” Having got off her whopper, she shows what becomes of the world—if; and it would be a courageous man who, granting the basic statement of the story, could find fault with a single word of the things that follow. Theodore Sturgeon’s lie involves a single man; the statement concerns only the man, and the story is the story of the man’s life alone. And Lester del Rey— ah, Lester del Rey. Read that one for yourself. I shall not attempt to describe it, only to say that I can imagine no more thought-provoking theme, nor can I imagine any way of writing it but in a science-fiction story. . . .

  I hope you’ll like these stories; I think you will. If so, thanks in large measure are due the authors—not only the three represented in this book, but the score or more of others who, for one reason or another, could not be. Collectively, these men and women are writing far more than their share of the most stimulating and satisfying stories in the world today; and it is a great pleasure for me to unveil this showcase of three pieces selected from the very top.

  Frederik Pohl

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  Little Men

  By JESSAMYN WEST

  When I was a boy there were men who made appearances on school platforms as the last survivor of the battle of Gettysburg, or as the last living man to have seen Lincoln. I always felt sorry for them. It seemed a pity to have been born a man, capable of having done something yourself, and then in the end be remembered only because you once saw another man. I used to sit on a hard chair and tilt my head at the old man on the platform and wonder how he would have felt at twenty if some one had told him, “Sixty years from now you’ll be remembered only because the image of another man once moved across your eyes. They won’t care who you were or are. You’ll just be a mirror reflecting someone else.” I thought then that the twenty-year-old would have been fighting mad to hear those words and would have hit fist against palm and sworn to be a man in his own right and be remembered for himself.

  It is because I can remember so clearly my feeling as a boy for those old men, that it seems doubly strange now, and doubly bitter too, to be one of them myself, to be writing as a “last survivor” and as an “eyewitness.” But the likeness isn’t absolute. I didn’t just “see Lincoln.” The thing that happened, actually happened to me first and not to another. If it wasn’t something I did, what I write of is at least not something done by another or done to me. And now that I am myself an old man, and have seen the changes that have come since that day sixty years ago, I am convinced that we can not always be thinking of ourselves and the figure we cut, but must have some concern for the wishes of other people.

  * * * * * * * * Note

  What happened to me sixty years ago has since happened to almost every living man and woman. Some now think that they see signs of a gradual change back to the old way. I myself have seen none of these signs. But if there are signs of a change it is all the more important that authentic records of the first days of the Chileking Era be made. It is for these reasons that I am assenting to the wishes of the Committee for the Commemoration of the First Sixty Years, and setting down for them my memories of that first terrible hour and the scarcely less terrible days that followed. And, as I have said, it is fitting that I should do this since I not only saw with my own eyes the unbelievable and indeed horrifying changes of that October morning, but I myself was the first man on any continent to experience Subtraction.

  [NOTE - Asterisks have been used throughout this account to indicate a deletion of material. Two kinds of material have been deleted: 1. Excessive and boring statements of the narrator’s personal opinions, prejudices, complaints, and general homesickness for life as it was lived when he was a boy. 2. Paragraphs and sometimes pages either recounting events of which he was not an eyewitness or belaboring matters which are of everyday familiarity to us all.

  When possible I have left enough of the narrator’s text to permit the reader to see the trend of his thinking—or as is more often the case—feeling. In any case all cuts have been made with an eye to increasing the pertinence and readability of the manuscript.

  If there are those who would like to read the document in its entirety (it runs about half again as long as the published manuscript), photostatic copies will be made available for their perusal by the Committee for Commemoration.

  S.L.H., EDITOR]

  My son and daughter, were they alive, should have their memories of that fateful day included with mine, for what I experienced first as an adult, they experienced first as children. I do not myself believe that Addition was for them as horrifying and shattering an experience as Subtraction was for me but I suppose Addition has played, if anything, a more substantial part in the world reversals which we have seen in the past half century.

  There is no need for me to write of those reversals. We live among them. I had no hand in them, and more frequently than not opposed them. I shall however try to keep my account unbiased and factual and simply report what happened in those terrible days. Those horrors I know as no one else can. I was then the first man, as I am now one of the few survivors. I would not have chosen, as I said before, to be remembered for this. It was not after all something I did, but something that happened to me willy-nilly. I had thought my name in my old age would be associated with memorable developments in military tactics, particularly with those having to do with
the use of guided missiles. But so far from my name being remembered in that connection, there are today very few people who even remember the enormous future the guided missile was thought to have in 1950. That is being sanguine: few even remember the name, and those who do lump it indiscriminately with the catapult or battering-ram. They forget that there are those alive who, except for the events of that fateful October, would have carried the guided missile to a point of perfection, few, even then, foresaw. But I do not propose to sigh either for past glories or for enterprises of the future which died stillborn.

  * * * * * * * *

  It is my purpose to write of what happened, not of what did not happen. And I make no apology for using in this account the phraseology of my youth. It is, in a sense, appropriate that the facts of those days should be written in the language then used. The Chilekings have authorized the use of many new, and more often than not, fantastic terms for the description of those early events. “Subtraction” is but one of many instances of this. I remember their shouts during November, when they ranged up and down the streets crying, “Daddy’s been Subtracted. Daddy’s been Subtracted.” “Diminished” would have been a much more exact and dignified word, but constant repetition has established the other. So I shall employ the classic usage of my youth except where it is entirely lacking in a suitable or understandable terminology.

  I am an old man now, ninety-four years of age, but I shall never, though my existence should be extended for another century (and I most earnestly hope that this will not happen) lost my constant awareness of even the minutiae of that October morning.

  I was then, as you have doubtless already deduced, thirty-four years old. I was a captain in the old army; stationed at the Presidio in San Francisco, California, and living in San Francisco. I was married. I had two children; a girl, Mary Frances, aged eleven, and a boy, David, aged eight. My career to this point had been unusually satisfying. I had published two books: The Use of the Phipps-Viorsky Tank in Mountainous Terrain and Modern Co-ordination of Tank and Artillery.

  I mention these books particularly because I had been at work on a revision of the Phipps-Viorsky manual on the evening of October thirtieth. Amy, my wife, was in Pacific Grove for the evening, nursing her mother who was down with an attack of erysipelas. Mary Frances and David had been busy all evening making a pumpkin jack-o’-lantern. I helped them with the carving of the teeth, a bit of workmanship which required more exactitude in the handling of a knife than they possessed. I let them stay up a little past their bedtime in order that they might finish it. They took it upstairs with them when they went to bed and put it on the newel post in the hall, “so that we’ll all be scared when we wake up in the morning.” My God! Fright was something they never needed to plan for again.

  After they went to bed I sat in my own room for some time meditating upon the coming elections; turning over in my mind a mechanical problem associated with the new Russian developments of so-called “jet repulsors.” I was not pleased with what my mind encountered in either situation.

  It had never been my habit to waste time in any non-utilitarian perusal of the landscape, nor to permit the loss of emotional energy in a sentimental identification with its transitory aspects. It was not, then, according to any established custom that I sat until late that night by my window, looking across the moonlit city. The night was mild as fall nights in California always are, and it was fog-free. That is somewhat unusual here by the Coast, but October, more than any other month, brings such nights. We had had early rain that year and there was already a little smoke of green on the hills, and a smell of this false spring in the air.

  I remember these things so clearly, I suppose, because I have so often gone back in my memory to those first hours before my Smalfri transformation (to employ a Chileking word used—as many have forgotten—humorously, at first and with no thought that it would find universal acceptance). Gone back to them at first with an intensity that I hoped might break the barriers of reality; for what happened to me that night seemed then not only shocking, but degrading. You who will read this have had that experience blunted for you by repetition. It is impossible for you to remember a time when it was not. You have heard tell of how it was with your grandfather, and his son, and how it will be with you. You were born with the anticipation of it in your blood. It was not so with me. I was the first man. My children were the first children. Try to think how it would be with you if you came to that experience unprepared. But you cannot, no more than you can imagine a world without death. But the first man who saw the rot of death? I have thought some about him in the past sixty years. No, no, the fact that my experience has since been shared by most human beings has never reconciled me to it, nor changed my opinion of its essential character.

  The world was not, on that October night, in a state to inspire confidence or happiness; but I thought as I looked out onto the moonlit waters that I at least was equipped to be of service to my country in an emergency, and that on this very night, products of my mind, both mechanical and theoretical, were being of assistance to more than one nation in the maintenance of the status quo. Status quo! That is not a word one hears nowadays either; and my concern for it at that particular time is added proof of an irony that lies close to the very core of things.

  I undressed slowly that night, taking, as I have said, an unwonted pleasure in the moonlit landscape. Before getting into bed I opened the door that separated my room from David’s so that I would be able to hear him if he, by chance, called out to me in the night. But it was he who heard my cries, and came to me!

  The next morning I awakened after a night of deep, heavy, unrefreshing sleep. I awakened while the light was still gray against my closed lids, and with the sense of having just emerged from some very disturbing and portentous dream. I lay with closed eyes trying to work my way back into that dream, to discover what it had been to leave me in this unwonted state of uneasiness and oppression. But the dream eluded me completely; only the feeling of a heaviness, at once physical and psychical remained, unchanging. I opened my eyes sufficiently to see that a particularly heavy fog had come up in the night and that the screens were beaded and dripping. This would account for the pressure I felt on my chest, this choking fog that had come up in the night. I was still more than half-asleep and felt overwhelmed by the weight and amount of bedclothes about me. My pajamas seemed to have slipped from my shoulders so that my hands were engulfed in sleeves. I managed to get my left hand free, and thrust it down beneath the covers to gain some leverage in hoisting myself up. There it encountered a circular metallic object almost as broad across as my palm. I let my hand close about it, speculating as to what it could be and how it had gotten into my bed. I lay with closed eyes amusing myself by trying to identify it by sense of touch alone. I decided that it must be a bracelet belonging to Mary Frances; it would slip over two or three of my fingers but not over my entire hand. When I had identified it as best I could by the feel of it alone, I lifted it to have a look. As chance would have it I raised it at such an angle that I saw first of all the inscription engraved inside it. “Amy—Robert” That was my wedding ring! What had happened to me, or it, to cause it to lie in my hand as large as a napkin ring, or a child’s bracelet?

  I held it near my wrist and saw that my wrist was very little larger in circumference. A horrible throb of sick apprehension beat through my whole body. If what I seemed to see existed actually as I saw it, something horrible, something beyond the bounds of known phenomena had taken place. If what I seemed to see did not actually exist as seen, then I was mad, living in an hallucination. My mind flinched from either conclusion. It lurched in a wounded way after some other, after any other, conclusion. I tried to remember whether I had ever read of a person suffering from an optical illusion which distorted for him the apparent size of objects. But this was not, if it was illusion, optical alone. My hand, as well as my eye, reported that either my hand had shrunk, or the ring increased in size.

 
It is useless to try to report in cold logical sentences my first sensations that morning. My mind twitched; it swung in nauseating arcs from one impossibility to another. I laid my hand on my brow, I traced nose, chin and mouth. I felt my teeth, my ears. They felt to my hand as they should. If then my hand had shrunk, so had they. I was in an agony of apprehension and horror. I must get to the bottom of the matter, but when I got there I would find myself either a madman or an appalling monstrosity. I must go on—and I could not. I cried. I sweat. I called out, and my voice echoed in the room as thin as the squeak of a trapped rat.

  Then I was calm, as a man who has screamed for days in fear of death is somehow able at the last minute to face the firing squad with honor and dignity. I struggled to sit up, uncover myself; but I was so bound about with my pajamas, so weighed down with bedclothes that I made little headway. I saw with horror the flailings of my feet far above even the middle of the bed. Finally I worked myself free of the bedclothes with infinite patience, undid the saucerlike buttons of my pajamas, untied the ropelike belt, and sat mother-naked on my pillow. There could be no doubt about it; I was a dwarf, a midget, a monstrosity, a hop-o’-my-thumb, no longer than the pillow I sat on. Either that, or every material object in the room had grown to six times its usual size. My body was not the body of a baby or a child; it was a man’s body, hairy and sinewy. The feet were middle-aged feet, calloused and warped by years of shoe-wearing; the legs bulged with the muscles of my early soldiering days. This was myself, complete in every nick and scar and pockmark, but diminished, diminished.