Star Science Fiction 6 - [Anthology] Read online

  But that’s not what I got. Oh, Nels, I am Tice Angerhelm all right, I am your brother and I’m dead. You can call where I am Hell since it’s everything I hated.

  Nels, it smells of everything that I ever wanted. It smells the way the hay smelled when I had my old Willys roadster and I made the first girl I ever made that August evening. You can go ask her. She’s Mrs. Prai Jesselton now. She lives over on the East side of St. Paul. You never knew I made her and if you don’t think this is so, you can listen for yourself.

  And you see, I am somewhere and I don’t know what kind of a where it is.

  Nels, this is me, Tice Angerhelm, and I’m going to scream this out loud with what I’ve got instead of a mouth. I am going to scream it loud so that any human ear that hears it can put it on this silly, silly Soviet gadget and take it back. TAKE THIS MESSAGE TO NELSON ANGERHELM, 2322 RIDGE DRIVE, HOPKINS, MINNESOTA. And I’m going to repeat that a couple more times so that you’ll know that it’s your brother talking and I’m somewhere and it isn’t Heaven and it isn’t Hell and it isn’t even really out in space. I am in something different from space, Nels. It is just a somewhere with me in it and there isn’t anything but me. In with me there’s everything.

  In with me there is everything I ever thought and everything I ever did and everything I ever wanted.

  All the opposites are the same. Everything I hated and everything I loved, it’s all the same. Everything I feared and everything I yearned for—that’s the same. I tell you it’s all the same now and the punishment is just as bad if you want something and get it as if you want something and don’t get it.

  The only thing that matters is those calm, nice moments in life when you don’t want anything, Nels. You aren’t anything. When you aren’t trying for anything and the world is just around you, and you get simple things like water on the skin, when you yourself feel innocent and you are not thinking about anything else.

  That’s all there is to life, Nels. And I’m Tice and I’m telling you. And you know I’m dead, so I wouldn’t be telling you a lie.

  And I especially wouldn’t be telling you on this Soviet cylinder, this Soviet gismo which will go back to them and bother them.

  Nels, I hope it won’t bother you too much, if everybody knows about that girl. I hope the girl forgives me but the message has got to go back.

  And yet that’s the message—everything I ever feared—I feared something in the war and you know what the war smells like. It smells sort of like a cheap slaughter house in July. It smells bad all around. There’s bits of things burning, the smell of rubber burning and the funny smell of gun powder. I was never in a big war with atomic stuff. Just the old sort of explosions. I’ve told you about it before and I was scared of that. And right in with that I can smell the perfume that girl had in the hotel there in Melbourne, the girl that I thought I might have wanted until she said something and then I said something and that was all there was between us. And I’m dead now.

  And listen, Nels—

  Listen, Nels, I am talking as though it were a trick. I don’t know how I know about the rest of us—the other ones that are dead like me. I never met one and I may never talk to one. I just have the feeling that they are here too. They can’t talk.

  It’s not that they can’t talk, really.

  They don’t even want to talk.

  They don’t feel like talking. Talking is just a trick. It is a trick that somebody can pick up and I guess it takes a cheap, meaningless man, a man who lived his life in spite of Hell and is now in that Hell. That’s the kind of silly man it takes to remember the trick of talking. Like a trick with coins or a trick with cigarettes when nothing else matters.

  So I am talking to you, Nels. And Nels, I suppose you’ll die the way I do. It doesn’t matter, Nels. It’s too late to change—that’s all.

  Goodbye, Nels, you’re in pretty good shape. You’ve lived your life. You’ve had the wind in your hair. You’ve seen the good sunlight and you haven’t hated and feared and loved too much.

  * * * *

  When the old man got through dictating it, the F.B.I. man and I asked him to do it again.

  He refused.

  We all stood up. We brought in the assistant.

  The old man still refused to make a second dictation from the sounds out of which only he could hear a voice.

  We could have taken him into custody and forced him but there didn’t seem to be much sense to it until we took the recording back to Washington and had this text appraised.

  He said goodbye to us as we left his house.

  “Perhaps I can do it once again maybe a year from now. But the trouble with me, gentlemen, is that I believe it. That was the voice of my brother, Tice Angerhelm, and he is dead. And you brought me something strange. I don’t know where you got a medium or spirit reader to record this on a tape and especially in such a way that you can’t hear it and I could. But I did hear it, gentlemen, and I think I told you pretty good what it was. And those words I used, they are not mine, they are my brother’s. So you go along, gentlemen, and do what you can with it and if you don’t want me to tell anybody that the U.S. government is working on mediums, I won’t.”

  That was the farewell he gave us.

  We closed the local office and hurried to the airport. We took the tape back with us but a duplicate was already being teletyped to Washington.

  That’s the end of the story and that is the end of the joke. Potariskov got a copy and the Soviet Ambassador got a copy.

  And Khrushchev probably wondered what sort of insane joke the Americans were playing on him. To use a medium or something weird along with subliminal perception in order to attack the U.S.S.R. for not believing in God and not believing in death. Did he figure it that way?

  Here’s a case where I hope that Soviet espionage is very good. I hope that their spies are so fine that they know we’re baffled. I hope that they realize that we have come to a dead end, and whatever Tice Angerhelm did or somebody did in his name way out there in space recording into a Soviet Sputnik, we Americans had no hand in it.

  If the Russians didn’t do it and we didn’t do it, who did do it?

  I hope their spies find out.

  <>

  * * * *

  Gordon R. Dickson lives a cloistered life in the midwest, but he knows some fascinating people. It is our privilege to meet them one by one, in his countless first-rate science-fiction stories; but it will be a long time before we meet one more painstaking, more confident—and more wrong!— than-

  THE DREAMSMAN

  by Gordon R. Dickson

  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?”

  “Anything Hank decides!” says Edie stoutly.

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

  “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 i
n 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.

  “Good!” 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.”