The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 7 - [Anthology] Read online

  * * * *

  The Year’s Best

  Science Fiction and Fantasy 7

  Ed by Judith Merril

  Proofed By MadMaxAU

  * * * *

  CONTENTS

  ONEIROMACHIA by Conrad Aiken

  A PASSAGE FROM THE STARS by Kaatje Hurlbut

  AMONG THE DANGS by George P. Elliott

  IMMEDIATELY YOURS by Robert Beverly Hale

  PARKY by David Rome

  THE FASTEST GUN DEAD by Julian F. Grow

  ALL THE TEA IN CHINA by R. Bretnor

  THE PORTOBELLO ROAD by Muriel Spark

  OTTMAR BALLEAU X 2 by George Bamber

  THE DANDELION GIRL by Robert F. Young

  NIGHTMARE IN TIME by Fredric Brown

  LOOKING BACKWARD by Jules Feiffer

  THREE PROLOGUES AND AN EPILOGUE by John Dos Passos

  IT BECOMES NECESSARY by Ward Moore

  MY TRIAL AS A WAR CRIMINAL by Leo Szilard

  A PRIZE FOR EDIE by J. F. Bone

  FREEDOM by Mack Reynolds

  HIGH BARBARY by Lawrence Durrell

  THE QUAKER CANNON by Frederik Pohl & C. M. Kornbluth

  QUAKE, QUAKE, QUAKE by Paul Dehn & Edward Gorey

  JUDAS BOMB by Kit Reed

  A SMALL MIRACLE OF FISHHOOKS AND STRAIGHT PINS by David R. Bunch

  THE TUNNEL AHEAD by Alice Glaser

  EXTRATERRESTRIAL TRILOGUE ON TEHRAN SELF-DESTRUCTION

  by Sheri S. Eberhart

  THE COUNTDOWN by John Haase

  THE BEAT CLUSTER by Fritz Leiber

  IN TOMORROW’S LITTLE BLACK BAG by James Blish

  THE SHIP WHO SANG by Anne McCaffrey

  A PLANET NAMED SHAYOL by Cordwainer Smith

  THE ASTEROIDS, 2194 by John Wyndham

  THE LONG NIGHT by Ray Russell

  TO AN ASTRONAUT DYING YOUNG by Maxine W. Kumin

  SUMMATION:

  SF, 1961 by Judith Merril

  Books by Anthony Boucher

  HONORABLE MENTIONS

  * * * *

  ONEIROMACHIA

  by Conrad Aiken

  An Introduction to this poem, or to its author, would be certainly tautological, and probably presumptuous. The poem serves rather as an introduction to the book, stating tho case for the literature of the imagination far more effectively (literately, and imaginatively) than I should hope to do myself. “Oneiromachia” will be included in a new book of Mr. Aiken’s poetry. The Morning Song of lord Zero, to be published shortly by Oxford University Press.

  * * * *

  We are the necromancers who once more

  magically make visible the night

  recapture that obscure obscene delight

  fathom its undertow and in one net

  fish up foul fables we must not forget

  have them alive and slippery in our hands:

  what are we but divided selves that move

  to find in all that glittering thrash our love?

  We’ll summon in one dream all motives forth

  and you shall be the south and I the north

  and we will speak that language of the brain

  that’s half of Portugal or all of Spain

  or of those yet unsounded seas

  that westward spawn beneath the menstrual moon:

  what are we but divided souls that live

  or strive to in the sundered self of love?

  Splinter the light and it will dream a rainbow

  loosen the rainbow it will stream in light

  divide the brightness and you’ll build a wall.

  But we’ll a twilight be, a go-between

  of midnight and of daybreak, and beget

  marvels and monsters we must not forget:

  these are the language that love dared not speak

  without which we can neither make nor break.

  <>

  * * * *

  A PASSAGE FROM THE STARS

  by Kaatje Hurlbut

  Loosen the rainbow, Mr. Aiken says... or splinter the light. They are the same thing seen from different sides of any prism. It is this function precisely, and uniquely, that defines the scope of what I mean by the derived initials of my title. “S-F” means all the ways of filtering feelings and Ideas through imagination so as to project them in another form—no less “true,” but a great deal less expected.

  Kaatje Hurlbut has been writing for eighteen years, and is a fairly regular reader of science fiction, but this is her first s-f story. In telling me how it came about, she described graphically the working of this “prism effect”:

  “I went out before dawn one cold morning in October ‘57 to see the first Sputnik.... It must have uprooted me, because I began to see how beautiful the earth is in approach ... and these two things impressed me tremendously: first, how precious it is—a flourishing globe of life in the lifeless dark of space; and second, that it is ours, it is home....”

  This story was published, she adds, on “the day Shepard made his space flight. I was delighted. I fell launched too.” Actually, she was well launched some time before that. Since her first appearance in Mademoiselle, six years ago. Miss Hurlbut’s stories have been published in a cross-section of leading national magazines, both slick and literary, and two before this have been reprinted in “best” anthologies: a collection from Mademoiselle, and The Best American Short Stories, 1961.

  * * * *

  The people of Pomeroy’s Cove gave Mr. Paradee the sky. They gave it all to him, from dawn to dawn—with thunderheads and flights of geese and the red moon rising. At first it was a joke, one of those non-sympathetic jokes reserved for the newcomer by members of a small village, a defensive measure designed to hold him in place while being inspected for acceptability. For, one fall when the cove had just settled down to a long snug winter—summer visitors gone for the year—Mr. Paradee turned up, purchased land from Miss Pomeroy and built his house on a point beside the marsh. His manner was one of extreme reserve couched in the punctilious deference of his old-fashioned way—with one astonishing exception: he would rap on doors at night and call them out to see the northern lights; he would stop them in the lane in the morning to ask if they had seen the crimson of the dawn; in the evening he would call to them and point over the marsh at a sundog’s mocking glow. They cocked their heads and wondered about him.

  The truth was, Mr. Paradee had lived his entire life in the deep streets of the city. When he came to Pomeroy’s Cove to live, he couldn’t get over how big the sky was, how changing it was and how magnificent. It was as simple as that.

  A retired bookkeeper, he was a small, quiet man, stooped a little by nearly fifty years of bending over the ledgers he kept for a button factory; when he spoke, it was with the earnestness of one unaccustomed to casual small talk; a chronic squint rendered his expression gently quizzical. Until he came to Pomeroy’s Cove—he had no family —the years of his life had been much like the factory’s books, meticulously correct and hopelessly predictable.

  When Mr. Paradee retired he invested his life’s savings to bring about two supreme ambitions. One was to have a home—his own house with a yard and a white picket fence. The other was to have a great many friends. But his shyness made him compromise in this by setting himself up as a ham radio operator. Through his short-wave he could roam the earth that throbbed with sound, and discover friendly voices which spoke across the night into the morning and pass along a scrap of gossip or a good story from Reykjavik to Singapore, from Johannesburg to Sydney.

  But he found, to his happiness, that he hadn’t time for his short-wav
e adventures during the days—though often in the night he switched it on—for Pomeroy’s Cove soon gave him the sky in earnest. Not only the sky but also tulip bulbs to start a garden and birthday cakes and advice about his gutters. Their dogs walked beside him down the lane, their children sat on his steps in the sun and held serious talks with him, and on summer evenings he sat on their porches with them, rocking, swatting mosquitoes and murmuring comfortably.

  The dim long tunnel of his loneliness seemed far behind him now. For as yet no echo had come from the tunnel to haunt him, to chill his heart and make him tremble, as if with cold.

  Besides Mr. Paradee there were only six other families on the cove, if Miss Pomeroy could be counted as a family. An elderly maiden who lived alone, she had inherited the cove and its land from her family, which had settled there in the 1600’s. The Pomeroy estate had been intact for almost 300 years.

  To the indignation of her contemporaries in the neighborhood, Miss Pomeroy had shattered the precedent of generations of family by selling, in recent years, parcels of land here and there—the land on which Mr. Paradee and the others had built their homes. “For company,” she snapped with a none-of-your-business inflection to those who demanded to know why, and who knew it was not for money.

  She herself lived in a Victorian house on a knoll overlooking the point. But the original Pomeroy house, by now called the Settler’s Cottage, was built in 1690 and stood back from the water at the head of the cove. It was out of sight, hidden among the trees.

  A massive stone structure, deep-roofed with great chimneys at either end, it had been neglected for almost 100 years. But recently Miss Pomeroy had given in to years of pestering by the local Historical Society and had assumed the expense of having the Settler’s Cottage restored to the last candlestick and kettle. During the summers a caretaker, whom she engaged, received the trickle of visitors who roamed the old rooms, admiring trestle table, spinning wheel and little, bubbly windowpanes.

  But now that the cottage was livable again, it became a source of irritation to Miss Pomeroy. One evening, as she and Mr. Paradee sat on his porch and rocked, she unburdened herself to him. They were the only two people on the cove without families, and they found that in having this in common they had much.

  “It’s a mockery,” she said bitterly, “to keep that wonderful old house as a museum with visitors tiptoeing about, pointing and whispering. Somebody ought to live there.”

  “You must have had handsome offers for it.”

  “Offers!” she snorted. “From people who could afford anything, anywhere—who want a private museum to hold forth in. Something quaint,” she grimaced, “for a summer place. Well, they’ll not have it,” she went on grimly. “That old cottage was a home to my people when they built it, a place to live, because they weren’t just playing at living. They knew what mattered, and they went all the way.”

  As they rocked in silence for a moment or two, Mr. Paradee wondered what those people of hers had been like —people who knew what mattered and went all the way. They don’t seem real any more, he thought sadly. They’re only a legend.

  “As far as that goes—” she began again presently.

  “As far as what goes?”

  “Things that matter. It’s my opinion that people matter. And Historical Society or no, that’s still my house. And one of these days the Settler’s Cottage”—here she quoted from the society’s pamphlet—” ‘an authentic seventeenth-century dwelling, a chapter in the history of our great heritage,’ is going to get a taste of corned-beef hash and yelling children! Ha!”

  “I wonder,” Mr. Paradee chuckled, “what the society will say?”

  “Say? They’ll be speechless!” She became sober then and said, “It has to be; I’m not going to back down. The cottage has to go as the rest of the cove has gone: to young families with their lives to live. Of course, you were an exception.” Her penetration disconcerted Mr. Paradee when she added, “You looked to me like a man born away from home who had spent his life trying to get back. Well, all of you are home now. And after a while somebody will turn up—just as you and the others did—and the cottage will be waiting.”

  Sensing an undercurrent in her words, Mr. Paradee asked shyly, “Did you ever want a family?”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “Very much once. But after all, what is a family for? Something to give yourself to; something that matters, so that you can give. At night, when I see all your lights down on the point, I feel as if I almost had a family. One of these days I’ll look over at the woods and see smoke rising from the chimneys of the Settler’s Cottage.” After a reflective pause she added dryly, “I expect we’ll see a little smoke rising from the Historical Society too.”

  “I’ve spent a lifetime,” Mr. Paradee said after they rocked for a moment in silence, “thinking I knew what mattered. To be home, just to be home.” He shook his head and said slowly, “But I’m not so sure—I’m not so sure there isn’t more to it than that.”

  As time went on, Mr. Paradee’s sky flourished, his garden flowered and his picket fence sported a yearly coat of dazzling white; the path which led from the lane to his gate widened, as he and his friends and their children and dogs passed back and forth; his short-wave crackled with friendly voices from New Zealand, Scotland, Australia and Alaska—and with other voices, deep in the night, which at first he could not identify. He often said to himself, cautiously at first, but after a while with confidence, “I’m happy.”

  But then one spring—as the winds of March roared over the cove—Mr. Paradee began to wake at night. He would lie in the dark, listening and wondering what it was that would not let him sleep. When for a moment the wind held its breath, he could hear the distant pounding of the surf and, now and then, the herald sound of an early flight of geese. These were the sounds he loved; they would no more wake him than the swinging pendulum of his clock on the mantel. It wouldn’t come to him until he was dropping off to sleep again; just for a moment he would know what had waked him: an unaccountable space within him, a curious emptiness.

  In time it waked him often, and it frightened him, for it was too much like the old emptiness, the old ache he had lived with for so long back in the days when all that mattered to him was to be home. Well, he was home. Why did it keep coming back to him, like an echo?

  * * * *

  Night after night the ghostly echo woke him and, when he could not go back to sleep, he would find himself sitting in a rocker beside his short-wave where he would listen and listen. When at last there was silence, he often would go out on the porch and look up into the night, not thinking, as he used to, how beautiful it was, but how vast and how cold.

  Summer came and passed. In September all the visitors —house guests and a few boarders—went home, leaving a trail of footprints and sand castles along the beach.

  Every year—after they had left and the caretaker from the Settler’s Cottage had locked up and gone for the winter —Pomeroy’s Cove celebrated the end of the season with a picnic on the ocean. They would all decide on a day, having first consulted Mr. Paradee on the likely behavior of his sky—who in turn consulted the Coast Guard weather report. With baskets of lunch they would cross the cove and walk over the dunes to the sea. They usually left about noon and returned at dusk.

  Just before noon on the day of the picnic Mr. Paradee glanced out his window and saw a billow of clouds low in the east. They didn’t look like much, but nevertheless he snapped on the short-wave to wait for twelve sharp and the weather report.

  Waiting, he checked the picnic basket and found that he had forgotten the salt. As he reached to open a cupboard to get the shaker, static from the radio receiver was interrupted by a high-pitched musical tone. Startled, Mr. Paradee went quickly and shut the door to the yard and hurried back to the radio. He adjusted the volume, turning it low, and listened with his ear close to the set. In a moment he heard a quiet, familiar voice.

  “Paradee?”

  He snapped on the tra
nsmitter and spoke barely above a whisper. “This is Paradee. Hello, out there!”

  “Hello, Paradee. It’s good to hear your voice again.”

  “How are you?” asked Mr. Paradee. “Everything all right? I haven’t heard from you folks in weeks. I was beginning to think you’d moved on.”

  “No. We are still standing by. Our situation is very grave.”

  “Oh?” Mr. Paradee was silent for a moment, his face clouded with concern. “But, see here. Didn’t you get in touch with Cook in New Zealand? What about MacIntyre in Scotland and Burns in Alaska?”

  “We were in touch with them, Paradee. But we weren’t able to convince them. One can hardly blame them.”

  “Oh, wouldn’t you know it!” Mr. Paradee snorted with impatience. “I suppose they thought it was some other ham trying to pull off the hoax of the century! Why, those fellows have miles of land, away off from anywhere. I know they could help you.”