Star Science Fiction 4 - [Anthology] Read online

  Gummitch continued to feel a great deal of sympathy for his parents in their worries about Sissy and he longed for the day when he would metamorphose and be able as an acknowledged man-child truly to console them. It was heart-breaking to see how they each tried to coax the little girl to talk, always attempting it while the other was absent, how they seized on each accidentally word like note in the few sounds she uttered and repeated it back to her hope-fully, how they were more and more possessed by fears not so much of her retarded (they thought) development as of her increasingly obvious maliciousness, which was directed chiefly at Baby . . . though the two cats and Gum­mitch bore their share. Once she had caught Baby alone in his crib and used the sharp corner of a block to dot Baby’s large-domed lightly downed head with triangular red marks. Kitty-Come-Here had discovered her doing it, but the woman’s first action had been to rub Baby’s head to obliterate the marks so that Old Horsemeat wouldn’t see them. That was the night Kitty-Come-Here hid the abnormal psychology books.

  Gummitch understood very well that Kitty-Come-Here and Old Horsemeat, honestly believing themselves to be Sissy’s parents, felt just as deeply about her as if they actually were and he did what little he could under the present circumstances to help them. He had recently come to feel a quite independent affection for Baby—the miserable little proto-cat was so completely stupid and defenseless—and so he unofficially constituted himself the creature’s guardian, taking his naps behind the door of the nursery and dashing about noisily whenever Sissy showed up. In any case he realized that as a potentially adult mem­ber of a felino-human household he had his natural re­sponsibilities.

  Accepting responsibilities was as much a part of a kitten’s life, Gummitch told himself, as shouldering un­sharable intuitions and secrets, the number of which con­tinued to grow from day to day.

  There was, for instance, the Affair of the Squirrel Mir­ror.

  Gummitch had early solved the mystery of ordinary mir­rors and of the creatures that appeared in them. A little observation and sniffing and one attempt to get behind the heavy wall-job in the living room had convinced him that mirror beings were insubstantial or at least hermetically sealed into their other world, probably creatures of pure spirit, harmless imitative ghosts—including the silent Gum­mitch Double who touched paws with him so softly yet so coldly.

  Just the same, Gummitch had let his imagination play with what would happen if one day, while looking into. the mirror world, he should let loose his grip on his spirit and let it slip into the Gmnmitch Double while the other’s spirit slipped into his body—if, in short, he should change places with the scentless ghost kitten. Being doomed to a life consisting wholly of imitation and completely lacking in opportunities to show initiative—except for the behind-­the-scenes judgment and speed needed in rushing from one mirror to another to keep up with the real Gummitch­ would be sickeningly dull, Gummitch decided, and he resolved to keep a tight hold on his spirit at all times in the vicinity of mirrors.

  But that isn’t telling about the Squirrel Mirror. One morning Gummitch was peering out the front bedroom window that overlooked the roof of the porch. Gummitch had already classified windows as semi-mirrors having two kinds of space on the other side: the mirror world and that harsh region filled with mysterious and dangerously organized-sounding noises called the outer world, into which grownup humans reluctantly ventured at intervals, donning special garments for the purpose and shouting loud farewells that were meant to be reassuring but achieved just the opposite effect. The coexistence of two kinds of space presented no paradox to the kitten who carried in his mind the 27-chapter outline of Space-Time for Springers—indeed, it constituted one of the mirror themes of the book.

  This morning the bedroom was dark and the outer worldwas dull and sunless, so the mirror world was unusually difficult to see. Gummitch was just lifting his face toward it, nose twitching, his front paws on the sill, when what should rear up on the other side, exactly in the space that the Gummitch Double normally occupied, but a dirty brown, narrow-visaged image with savagely low forehead, dark evil walleyes, and a huge jaw filled with shovel-like teeth.

  Gummitch was enormously startled and hideously fright­ened. He felt his grip on his spirit go limp, and without volition he teleported himself three yards to the rear, mak­ing use of that faculty for cutting corners in space-time, traveling by space-warp in fact, which was one of his powers that Kitty-Come-Here refused to believe in and that even Old Horsemeat accepted only on faith.

  Then, not losing a moment, he picked himself up by his furry seat, swung himself around, dashed downstairs at top speed, sprang to the top of the sofa, and stared for several seconds at the Gummitch Double in the wall-mirror—not relaxing a muscle strand until he was completely con­vinced that he was still himself and had not been transformed into the nasty brown apparition that had confronted him in the bedroom window.

  “Now what do you suppose brought that on?” Old Horsemeat asked Kitty-Come-Here.

  Later Gummitch learned that what he had seen had been a squirrel, a savage, nut-hunting being belonging wholly to the outer world (except for forays into attics) and not at all to the mirror one. Nevertheless he kept a vivid memory of his profound momentary conviction that the squirrel had taken the Gummitch Double’s place and been about to take his own. He shuddered to think what would have happened if the squirrel had been actively interested in trading spirits with him. Apparently mirrors and mirror-situations, just as he had always feared, were highly con­ductive to spirit transfers. He filed the information away in the memory cabinet reserved for dangerous, exciting and possibly useful information, such as plans for climbing straight up glass (diamond-tipped claws!) and flying higher than the trees.

  These days his thought cabinets were beginning to feel filled to bursting and he could hardly wait for the moment when the true rich taste of coffee, lawfully drunk, would permit him to speak.

  He pictured the scene in detail: the family gathered in conclave at the kitchen table, Ashurbanipal and Cleopatra respectfully watching from floor level, himself sitting erect on chair with paws (or would they be hands?) lightly touching his cup of thin china, while Old Horsemeat poured the thin black steaming stream. He knew the Great Transformation must be close at hand.

  At the same time he knew that the other critical situation in the household was worsening swiftly. Sissy, he realized now, was far older than Baby and should long ago have undergone her own somewhat less glamorous though equal­ly necessary transformation (the first tin of raw horse-meat could hardly be as exciting as the first cup of coffee). Her time was long overdue. Gummitch found increasing horror in this mute vampirish being inhabiting the body of a rapidly growing girl, though inwardly equipped to be nothing but a most bloodthirsty she-cat. How dreadful to think of Old Horsemeat and Kitty-Come-Here having to care all their lives for such a monster! Gummitch told himself that if any opportunity for alleviating his parents’ misery should ever present itself to him, he would not hesitate for an instant.

  Then one night, when the sense of Change was so burst­ingly strong in him that he knew tomorrow must be the Day, but when the house was also exceptionally unquiet with boards creaking and snapping, taps adrip, and curtains mysteriously rustling at closed windows (so that it was clear that the many spirit worlds including the mirror one must be pressing very close), the opportunity came to Gummitch.

  Kitty-Come-Here and Old Horsemeat had fallen into especially sound, drugged sleeps, the former with a bad cold, the latter with one unhappy highball too many (Gummitch knew he had been brooding about Sissy). Baby slept too, though with uneasy whimperings and joggings—moonlight shone full on his crib past a window shade which had whiningly rolled itself up without human or feline agency. Gummitch kept vigil under the crib, with eyes closed but with wildly excited mind pressing outward to every boundary of the house and even stretching here and there into the outer world. On this night of all nights sleep was unthinkable.

  The
suddenly he became aware of footsteps, footsteps so soft they must, he thought, be Cleopatra’s.

  No, softer than that, so soft they might be those of the Gummitch Double escaped from the mirror would at last and padding up toward him through the darkened halls. A ribbon of fur rose along his spine.

  Then into the nursery Sissy came prowling. She looked slim as an Egyptian princess in her long thin yellow night-gown and as sure of herself, but the cat was very strong in her tonight, from the flat intent eyes to the dainty canine teeth slightly bared—one look at her now would have sent Kitty-Come-Here running for the telephone number she kept hidden, the telephone number of the special doctor—and Gummitch realized he was witnessing a monstrous suspension of natural law in that this being should be able to exist for a moment without growing fur and changing round pupils for slit eyes.

  He retreated to the darkest corner of the room, suppress­ing a snarl.

  Sissy approached the crib and leaned over Baby in the moonlight, keeping her shadow off him. For a while she gloated. Then she began softly to scratch his cheek with a long hatpin she carried, keeping away from his eye, but just barely. Baby awoke and saw her and Baby didn’t cry. Sissy continued to scratch, always a little more deeply. The moonlight glittered on the jeweled end of the pin.

  Gummitch knew he faced a horror that could not be countered by running about or even spitting and screech­ing. Only magic could fight so obviously supernatural a manifestation. And this was also no time to think of consequences, no matter how clearly and bitterly etched they might appear to a mind intensely awake.

  He sprang up onto the other side of the crib, not uttering a sound, and fixed his golden eyes on Sissy’s in the moon-light. Then he moved forward straight at her evil face, stepping slowly, not swiftly, using his extraordinary knowledge of the properties of space to walk straight through her hand and arm as they flailed the hatpin at him. When his nose-tip finally paused a fraction of an inch from hers his eyes had not blinked once, and she could not look away. Then he unhesitatingly flung his spirit into her like a fistful of flaming arrows and he worked the Mirror Magic.

  Sissy’s moonlit face, feline and terrified, was in a sense the last thing that Gummitch, the real Gummitch-kitten, ever saw in this world. For the next instant he felt himself enfolded by the foul black blinding cloud of Sissy’s spirit, which his own had displaced. At the same time he heard the little girl scream, very loudly but even more distinctly, “Mommy!”

  That cry might have brought Kitty-Come-Here out of her grave, let alone from sleep merely deep or drugged. Within seconds she was in the nursery, closely followed by Old Horsemeat, and she had caught up Sissy in her arms and the little girl was articulating the wonderful word again and again, and miraculously following it with the com­mand—there could be no doubt, Old Horsemeat heard it too—”Hold me tight!”

  Then Baby finally dared to cry. The scratches on his check came to attention and Gummitch, as he had known must happen, was banished to the basement amid cries of horror and loathing chiefly from Kitty-Come-Here.

  The little cat did not mind. No basement would be one-tenth as dark as Sissy’s spirit that now enshrouded him for always, hiding all the file drawers and the labels on all the folders, blotting out forever even the imagining of the scene of first coffee-drinking and first speech.

  In a last intuition, before the animal blackness closed in utterly, Gummitch realized that the spirit, alas, is not the same thing as the consciousness and that one may lose­—sacrifice—the first and still be burdened with the second.

  Old Horsemeat had seen the hatpin (and hid it quickly from Kitty-Come-Here) and so he knew that the situation was not what it seemed and that Gummitch was at the very least being made into a sort of scapegoat. He was quite apologetic when he brought the tin pans of food to the basement during the period of the little cat’s exile. It was a comfort to Gummitch, albeit a small one. Gummitch told himself, in his new black halting manner of thinking, that after all a cat’s best friend is his man.

  From that night Sissy never turned back in her develop­ment. Within two months she had made three years’ prog­ress in speaking. She became an outstandingly bright, light-footed, high-spirited little girl. Although she never told anyone this, the moonlit nursery and Gummitch’s magnified face were her first memories. Everything before that was inky blackness. She was always very nice to Gummitch in a careful sort of way. She could never stand to play the game “Owl Eyes.”

  After a few weeks Kitty-Come-Here forgot her fears and Gummitch once again had the run of the house. But by then the transformation Old Horsemeat had always warned about had fully taken place. Gummitch was a kitten no longer but an almost burly torn. In him it took the psychological form not of sullenness or surliness but an extreme dignity. He seemed at times rather like an old pirate brooding on treasures he would never live to dig up, shores of adventure he would never reach. And sometimes when you looked into his yellow eyes you felt that he had in him all the materials for the book Slit Eyes Look at Life —three or four volumes at least—although he would never write it. And that was natural when you come to think of it, for as Gummitch knew very well, bitterly well indeed, his fate was to be the only kitten in the world that did not grow up to be a man.

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  * * * *

  RICHARD WILSON

  Some writers count themselves well fixed for working space when they can command a corner of a kitchen table on which to cramp their typewriters, their stacks of manuscript and their overflowing ashtrays. Richard Wilson comes of another breed. Space? The man reeks of space. He owns a house of enormous dimensions, a dozen rooms or more; and, what’s more, even the house has a house, for there is a separate summer cottage a few yards away. (And a tiny two-room shed just beyond that!) Morbid is this obsession with buildings; and now we see how alarmingly it has spread into his creative life as well. Proof? Why, just look at the more-than-skyscraping colossus in which he has chosen to show us his—

  MAN WORKING

  Like everybody else in Chicago I took a rueful pride in the Mile-Hi Building, which soared 528 stories up from the Loop and whose architecture was such that it whistled like a teakettle whenever the wind was strong off Lake Michigan.

  Fallon’s Folly, some called it, after the visionary architect who had devoted his declining years to getting it built, then died happy—mercifully before the depression descended and curled everybody’s hair. Just the way that the treasury secretary said it would.

  When the boom busted, the Mile-Hi Building became the whitest of white elephants. Its operators had no choice but to close off all but the lower ten stories. They felt lucky to be able to rent out even that much space. The top 518 stories had been abandoned to the cobwebs, it was generally supposed.

  But I found out, after I ran into Buddy Portendo, that there was life in the old elephant yet.

  My name is Jack Norkus. I saw Buddy in the B/G coffee shop. We had known each other in those high-living days when I was a publicity man (for an assortment of talents that had included the midget crooner and the giant Japanese boxer) and when Portendo was a hanger-on at the Chicago Stadium.

  Well, Portendo was still a hanger-on, but he obviously had a better grasp now than I did. His clothes—natty—and his shoes—recently shined—showed that. I was out of a job and trying to stretch my shine through a third day by giving it a rub now and then against the backs of my pants legs.

  I told Portendo I had a chance to make a small commission if I could find a mind-reading act for Orrie Einhora’s TV show that night. There didn’t seem to be such an act left in town. Presumably they were all down in Miami, on the theory that unemployment was the same either in Miami or Chicago, but warmth was warmth.

  “You’re lucky you ran into me,” Portendo said. “You name it, we’ve got it.” When I asked him who “we” was, he took me over to the other side of the Loop to the Mile-Hi Building. “You been up before, haven’t you?”

  “Oh, sure,” I
said. It was a lie.

  * * * *

  We walked through the ornate but faded lobby to the one bank of elevators still in service. An elevator waited, door open, but Portendo ignored it. He steered me into the next one to come down, winked at the operator and said “Ten.” The operator gave me a look but said nothing. At ten he let out a shabby man with a worn plastic briefcase. Then the doors closed, the operator pressed the Pass button and the elevator went up one more story.

  There were cobwebs, all right, and a scurrying mouselike sound and semi-darkness.

  I stuck close to Buddy Portendo, who said what sounded like “Haven’t lost your grip, have you?” I mumbled something, and then we were at a yawning shaft with a faded sign, Express to Observatory. Someone had lettered on the wall in green chalk: SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF SPACE TRAVEL—523-11.

  Out toward the center of the shaft, where it was just possible to reach them without toppling into the depths, were what looked like two old-fashioned sad irons, handles down, flat sides up. They were suspended without visible means of support. Like me, I thought, then I gasped and grabbed Buddy Portendo as he seemed about to hurl himself into the open shaft