The Year's Best Science Fiction 11 - [Anthology] Read online

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  The Year’s Best

  Science Fiction 11

  Ed by Judith Merril

  Proofed By MadMaxAU

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  CONTENTS

  SOMETHING ELSE Robert J. Tilley

  THE VOLCANO DANCES J. G. Ballard

  SLOW TUESDAY NIGHT R. A. Lafferty

  BETTER THAN EVER Alex Kirs

  COMING-OF-AGE DAY A. K. Jorgensson

  THE WALL Josephine Saxton

  THE SURVIVOR Walter F. Moudy

  MOON DUEL Fritz Leiber

  PROJECT INHUMANE Alexander B. Malec

  THOSE WHO CAN, DO Bob Kurosaka

  SUSAN Alistair Bevan

  YESTERDAYS’ GARDENS Johnny Byrne

  THE ROACHES Thomas M. Disch

  GAME Donald Barthelme

  J IS FOR JEANNE E. C. Tubb

  TERMINAL Ron Goulart

  THE PLOT Tom Herzog

  INVESTIGATING THE BIDWELL ENDEAVORS David R. Bunch

  THE CASE Peter Redgrove

  THERE’S A STARMAN IN WARD 7 David Rome

  EYES DO MORE THAN SEE Isaac Asimov

  MAELSTROM II Arthur C. Clarke

  TWO LETTERS TO LORD KELVIN Alfred Jarry

  WARRIOR Gordon R. Dickson

  MARS IS OURS! Art Buchwald

  SCARFE’S WORLD Brian W. Aldiss

  A SINGULAR CASE OF EXTREME ELECTROLYTE BALANCE ASSOCIATED WITH

  FOLIE A DEUX Robert D. Tschirgi

  A MAGUS John Ciardi

  THE CIRCULAR RUINS Jorge Luis Borges

  THE GIRL WHO DREW THE GODS Harvey Jacobs

  THE DROWNED GIANT J. G. Ballard

  CIRCE UNDERSEA George MacBeth

  SOMEWHERE NOT FAR FROM HERE Gerald Kersh

  IN THE RUINS Roald Dahl

  TRAVELLER’S REST David I. Masson

  ADO ABOUT NOTHING Bob Ottum, Jr.

  SUMMATION

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  INTRODUCTION

  I generally skip introductions myself—at least until after I read the book. But I hope you’re reading this one, because you may be disappointed otherwise.

  This is not a collection of science-fiction stories.

  It does have some science fiction in it—I think. (It gets a little more difficult each year to decide which ones are really science fiction—and frankly I don’t much try any more.)

  There are two selections full of good honest hard-science stuff. The biochemical one is a sort of bible story, and the astrophysical one is about an astral pataphysician. And there are a couple of planet-type stories by Leiber and Clarke—two solid science-fiction names if ever there were—about life (or death) on (or in or around) the moon.

  I can also offer a galore of space ships, a gaggle of monstrous or otherwise odd alien creatures, and a fair-sized battalion of robots and other kinds of thinking machines, as well as some telepathists and general Wielders of Powers, some disembodied entities, and a mess of mythological and magical beings (one giant, one sorceress, a devil-sticks dancer, and assorted semi- and demigods).

  But if you think that makes the book a collection of fantasy and science fiction, I’m afraid I still have to beg off—unless you choose to Include under “fantasy” everything that is not rigidly “realistic” —assuming you know what that means. I don’t.

  What this book is, is a collection of imaginative speculative writing reflecting, I believe, clearly and sharply the problems and conflicts of civilized man today, and his hopes and apprehensions for the future.

  The stories and poems and essays here have been selected from as wide a range as I could cover of books and periodicals published here and in England last year. About half the entries are from the genre magazines. The rest are from books and from such diverse sources as Mademoiselle and Escapade, The Colorado Quarterly and the Washington Post, Playboy and the Saturday Review (and Ambit and King in England). The youngest author is an eighteen-year-old college freshman; the oldest a ninety-three-year-old (if still alive) Parisian legend.

  You will, I think, find the attitudes, treatments, topics, as varied as the sources.

  Some of it is even science fiction.

  Judith Merril

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  MOON DUEL

  FRITZ LEIBER

  First hint I had we’d been spotted by a crusoe was a little tick coming to my moonsuit from the miniradar Pete and I were gaily heaving into position near the east end of Gioja crater to scan for wrecks, trash, and nodules of raw metal.

  Then came a whish which cut off the instant Pete’s hand lost contact with the squat instrument. His gauntlet, silvery in the raw low polar sunlight, drew away very slowly, as if he’d grown faintly disgusted with our activity. My gaze kept on turning to see the whole shimmering back of his helmet blown off in a gorgeous sickening brain-fog and blood-mist that was already falling in the vacuum as fine red snow.

  A loud tock then and glove-sting as the Crusoe’s second slug hit the miniradar, but my gaze had gone back to the direction Pete had been facing when he bought it—in time to see the green needle-flash of the Crusoe’s gun in a notch in Gioja’s low wall, where the black of the shadowed rock met the gem-like starfields along a jagged border. I unslung my Swift [All-purpose vacuum rifle named for the .22 cartridge which as early as 1940 was being produced by Winchester, Remington, and Norma with factory loads giving it a muzzle velocity of 4,140 feet, almost a mile, a second.] as I dodged a long step to the side and squeezed off three shots. The first two shells must have traveled a touch too high, but the third made a beautiful fleeting violet globe at the base of the notch. It didn’t show me a figure, whole or shattered, silvery or otherwise, on the wall or atop it, but then some crusoes are camouflaged like chameleons and most of them move very fast.

  Pete’s suit was still falling slowly and stiffly forward. Three dozen yards beyond was a wide black fissure, though exactly how wide I couldn’t tell because much of the opposite lip merged into the shadow of the wall. I scooted toward it like a rat toward a hole. On my third step, I caught up Pete by his tool belt and oxy tube while his falling front was still inches away from the powdered pumice, and I heaved him along with me. Some slow or over-drilled part of my brain hadn’t yet accepted he was dead.

  Then I began to skim forward, inches above the ground myself, kicking back against rocky outcrops thrusting up through the dust—it was like fin-swimming. The crusoe couldn’t have been expecting this nut stunt, by which I at least avoided the dreamy sitting-duck slowness of safer, higher-bounding moon-running, for there was a green flash behind me and hurtled dust faintly pittered my soles and seat. He hadn’t been leading his target enough. Also, I knew now he had shells as well as slugs.

  I was diving over the lip three seconds after skoot-off when Pete’s boot caught solidly against a last hooky outcrop. The something in my brain was still stubborn, for I clutched him like clamps, which made me swing around with a jerk. But even that was lucky, for a bright globe two yards through winked on five yards ahead like a mammoth firefly’s flash, but not quite as gentle, for the invisible rarified explosion-front hit me hard enough to boom my suit and make the air inside slap me. Now I knew he had metal-proximity fuses on some of his shells too—they must be very good at mini-stuff on his home planet.

  The tail of the pale green flash showed me the fissure’s bottom a hundred yards straight below and all dust, as ninety percent of them are—pray God the dust was deep. I had time to thumb Extreme Emergency to the ship for it to relay automatically to Circumluna. Then the lip had cut me off from the ship and I had lazily fallen out of the glare into the blessed black
ness, the dial lights in my helmet already snapped off—even they might make enough glow for the crusoe to aim by. The slug had switched off Pete’s.

  Ten, twelve seconds to fall and the opposite lip wasn’t cutting off the notched crater wall. I could feel the Crusoe’s gun trailing me down—he’d know moon-G, sticky old five-foot. I could feel his tentacle or finger or claw or ameboid bump tightening on the trigger or button or what. I shoved Pete away from me, parallel to the fissure wall, as hard as I could. Three more seconds, four, and my suit boomed again and I was walloped as another green flash showed me the smooth-sifted floor moving up and beginning to hurry a little. This flash was a hemisphere, not a globe—it had burst against the wall—but if there were any rock fragments they missed me. And it exactly bisected the straight line between me and Pete’s silvery coffin. The crusoe knew his gun and his Luna—I really admired him, even if my shove had pushed Pete and me, action and reaction, just enough out of the target path. Then the fissure lip had cut the notch and I was readying to land like a three-legged crab, my Swift reslung, my free hand on my belted dust-shoes.

  * * * *

  Eleven seconds’ fall on Luna is not much more than two on earth, but either are enough to build up a velocity of over fifty feet a second. The dust jarred me hard, but thank God there were no reefs in it. It covered at least all the limbs and front of me, including my helmet-front—my dial lights, snapped on again, showed a grayness fine-grained as flour.

  The stuff resisted like flour, too, as I unbelted my dust-shoes. Using them for a purchase, I pulled my other arm and helmet-front free. The stars looked good, even gray-dusted. With a hand on each shoe, I dragged out my legs and, balancing gingerly on the slithery stuff, got each of my feet snapped to a shoe. Then I raised up and switched on my headlight. I hated that. I no more wanted to do it than a hunted animal wants to break twigs or show itself on the skyline, but I knew I had exactly as long to find cover as it would take the crusoe to lope from the notch to the opposite lip of the fissure. Most of them lope very fast, they’re that keen on killing.

  Well, we started the killing, I reminded myself. This time I’m the quarry.

  My searchlight made a perverse point of hitting Pete’s shimmering casket, spread-eagled, seven-eighths submerged, like a man floating on his back. I swung the beam steadily. The opposite wall was smooth except for a few ledges and cracks and there wasn’t any overhang to give a man below cover from someone on top.

  But a section of the wall on my side, not fifty yards away, was hugely pocked with holes and half-bubbles where the primeval lava had foamed high and big against the feeble plucking of lunar gravity. I aimed myself at the center of that section and started out. I switched off my headlight and guided myself by the wide band of starfields.

  You walk dust-shoes with much the same vertical lift and low methodical forward swing as snowshoes. It was nostalgic, but hunted animals have no time for memory-delicatessen.

  Suddenly there was more and redder brightness overhead than the stars. A narrow ribbon of rock along the top of the opposite wall was glaringly bathed in orange, while the rim peaks beyond glowed faintly, like smoldering volcanoes. Light from the orange ribbon bounced down into my fissure, caroming back and forth between the walls until I could dimly see again the holes I was headed for.

  The crusoe had popped our ship—both tanks, close together, so that the sun-warmed gasses, exploding out into each other, burned like a hundred torches. The oxyaniline lasted until I reached the holes. I crawled through the biggest. The fading glow dimly and fleetingly showed a rock-bubble twelve feet across with another hole at the back of it. The stuff looked black, felt rough yet diamond-hard. I risked a look behind me.

  The ribbon glow was darkest red—the skeleton of our ship still aglow. The ribbon flashed green in the middle— a tiny venomous dagger—and then a huge pale green firefly winked where Pete lay. He’d saved me a fourth time.

  I had barely pushed sideways back when there was another of those winks just outside my hole, this one glaringly bright, its front walloping me. I heard through the rock faint tings of fragments of Pete’s suit hitting the wall, but they may have been only residual ringings, from the nearer blast, in my suit or ears.

  I scrambled through the back door in the bubble into a space which I made out by crawling to be a second bubble, resembling the first even to having a back door. I went through that third hole and turned around and rested my Swift’s muzzle on the rough-scooped threshold. Since the crusoe lived around here, he’d know the territory better wherever I went. Why retreat farther and get lost? My dial lights showed that about a minute and a half had gone by since Pete bought it. Also, I wasn’t losing pressure and I had oxy and heat for four hours—Circumluna would be able to deliver a rescue force in half that time, if my message had got through and if the crusoe didn’t scupper them too. Then I got goosy again about the glow of the dial lights and snapped them off. I started to change position and was suddenly afraid the crusoe might already be trailing me by my transmitted sounds through the rock, and right away I held stock still and started to listen for him.

  No light, no sound, a ghost-fingered gravity—it was like being tested for sanity-span in an anechoic chamber. Almost at once dizziness and the sensory mirages started to come, swimming in blue and burned and moaning from the peripheries of my senses—even waiting in ambush for a crusoe wouldn’t stop them; I guess I wanted them to come. So though straining every sense against the Crusoe’s approach, I had at last to start thinking about him.

  It’s strange that men should have looked at the moon for millennia and never guessed it was exactly what it looked like: a pale marble graveyard for living dead men, a Dry Tortuga of space where the silver ships from a million worlds marooned their mutineers, their recalcitrants, their criminals, their lunatics. Not on fertile warm-blanketed earth with its quaint adolescent race, which such beings might harm, but on the great silver rock of earth’s satellite, to drag out their solitary furious lives, each with his suit and gun and lonely hut or hole, living by recycling his wastes; recycling, too, the bitter angers and hates and delusions which had brought him there. As many as a thousand of them, enough to mine the moon for meals and fuel-gases and to reconquer space and perhaps become masters of earth—had they chosen to cooperate. But their refusal to cooperate was the very thing for which they’d been marooned, and besides that they were of a half thousand different galactic breeds. And so although they had some sort of electronic or psionic or what-not grapevine—at least what happened to one maroon became swiftly known to the others—each of them remained a solitary Friday-less Robinson Crusoe, hence the name.

  I risked flashing my time dial. Only another thirty seconds gone. At this rate it would take an eternity for the two hours to pass before I could expect aid if my call had got through, while the crusoe— As my senses screwed themselves tighter to their task, my thoughts went whirling off again.

  Earthmen shot down the first crusoe they met—in a moment of fumbling panic and against all their training. Ever since then the crusoes have shot first, or tried to, ignoring our belated efforts to communicate.

  * * * *

  I brooded for what I thought was a very short while about the age-old problem of a universal galactic code, yet when I flashed my time dial again, seventy minutes had gone somewhere.

  That really froze me. He’d had time to stalk and kill me a dozen times—he’d had time to go home and fetch his dogs!—my senses couldn’t be that good protection with my mind away. Why even now, straining them in my fear, all [ got was my own personal static: I heard my heart pounding, my blood roaring, I think for a bit I heard the Brownian movement of the air molecules against my eardrums.

  What I hadn’t been doing, I told myself, was thinking about the crusoe in a systematic way.

  He had a gun like mine and at least three sorts of ammo.

  He’d made it from notch to fissure-lip in forty seconds or less—he must be a fast loper, whatever number fee
t; he might well have a jet unit.

  And he’d shot at the miniradar ahead of me. Had he thought it a communicator?—a weapon?—or some sort of robot as dangerous as a man . . . ?

  My heart had quieted, my ears had stopped roaring, and in that instant I heard through the rock the faintest scratching.

  Scratch-scratch, scratch-scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch it went, each time a little louder.

  I flipped on my searchlight and there coming toward me across die floor of the bubble outside mine was a silver spider as wide as a platter with four opalescent eyes and a green-banded body. Its hanging jaws were like inward-curving notched scissor blades.

  I fired by automatism as I fell back. The spider’s bubble was filled with violet glare instantly followed by green. I was twice walloped by explosion-fronts and knocked down.

  That hardly slowed me a second. The same flashes had shown me a hole in the top of my bubble and as soon as I’d scrambled to my feet I leaped toward it.

  I did remember to leap gently. My right hand caught the black rim of the hole and it didn’t break off and I drew myself up into the black bubble above. It had no hole in the top, but two high ones in the sides, and I went through the higher one.