The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 1 - [Anthology] Read online

  “Gall bladder,” the old man said. “Guinzburg down at the shule looked exactly the same before his operation. Two professors they had in for him, and a private nurse day and night.”

  “I am not a human being!” the stranger said loudly.

  “Three thousand seven hundred fifty dollars it cost his son, Guinzburg told me. ‘For you. Poppa, nothing is too expensive—only get well,’ the son told him.”

  “I am not a human being!”

  “Ai, is that a son for you!” the old woman said, rocking her head. “A heart of gold, pure gold.” She looked at the stranger. “All right, all right, I heard you the first time. Gumbeiner! I asked you a question. When are you going to cut the lawn?”

  “On Wednesday, odder maybe Thursday, comes the Japaneser to the neighborhood. To cut lawns is his profession. My profession is to be a glazier—retired.”

  “Between me and all mankind is an inevitable hatred,” the stranger said. “When I tell you what I am, the flesh will melt—”

  “You said, you said already,” Mr. Gumbeiner interrupted.

  In Chicago where the winters were as cold and bitter as the Czar of Russia’s heart,” the old woman intoned, “you had strength to carry the frames with the glass together day in and day out. But in California with the golden sun to mow the lawn when your wife asks, for this you have no strength. Do I call in the Japaneser to cook for you supper?”

  “Thirty years Professor Allardyce spent perfecting his theories. Electronics, neuronics—”

  “Listen, how educated he talks,” Mr. Gumbeiner said, admiringly. “Maybe he goes to the University here?”

  “If he goes to the University, maybe he knows Bud?” his wife suggested.

  “Probably they’re in the same class and he came to see him about the homework, no?”

  “Certainly he must be in the same class. How many classes are there? Five in ganzen: Bud showed me on his program card.” She counted off on her fingers. “Television Appreciation and Criticism, Small Boat Building, Social Adjustment, The American Dance The American Dance—nu, Gumbeiner—”

  “Contemporary Ceramics,” her husband said, relishing the syllables, “A fine boy, Bud. A pleasure to have him for a boardner.”

  “After thirty years spent in these studies,” the stranger, who had continued to speak unnoticed, went on, “he turned from the theoretical to the pragmatic. In ten years’ time he had made the most titanic discovery in history: he made mankind, all mankind, superfluous: he made me.”

  “What did Tillie write in her last letter?” asked the old man.

  The old woman shrugged.

  “What should she write? The same thing. Sidney was home from the Army, Naomi has a new boy friend—”

  “He made me!”

  “Listen, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is,” the old woman said; “maybe where you came from is different, but in this country you don’t interrupt people the while they’re talking. . . . Hey. Listen—what do you mean, he made you? What kind of talk is that?”

  The stranger bared all his teeth again, exposing the too-pink gums.

  “In his library, to which I had a more complete access after his sudden and as yet undiscovered death from entirely natural causes, I found a complete collection of stories about androids, from Shelley’s Frankenstein through Capek’s R.U.R. to Asimov’s—”

  “Frankenstein?” said the old man, with interest. “There used to be Frankenstein who had the soda-wasser place on Halstead Street: a Litvack, nebbich.”

  “What are you talking?” Mrs. Gumbeiner demanded. “His name was Frankenthal, and it wasn’t on Halstead, it was on Roosevelt.”

  “—clearly shown that all mankind has an instinctive antipathy towards androids and there will be an inevitable struggle between them—”

  “Of course, of course!” Old Mr. Gumbeiner clicked his teeth against his pipe. “I am always wrong, you are always right. How could you stand to be married to such a stupid person all this time?”

  “I don’t know,” the old woman said. “Sometimes I wonder, myself. I think it must be his good looks.” She began to laugh. Old Mr. Gumbeiner blinked, then began to smile, then took his wife’s hand.

  “Foolish old woman,” the stranger said; “why do you laugh? Do you not know I have come to destroy you?”

  “What!” old Mr. Gumbeiner shouted. “Close your mouth, you!” He darted from his chair and struck the stranger with the flat of his hand. The stranger’s head struck against the porch pillar and bounced back.

  “When you talk to my wife, talk respectable, you hear?”

  Old Mrs. Gumbeiner, cheeks very pink, pushed her husband back in his chair. Then she leaned forward and examined the stranger’s head. She clicked her tongue as she pulled aside the flap of gray, skin-like material.

  “Gumbeiner, look! He’s all springs-and wires inside!”

  “I told you he was a golem, but no, you wouldn’t listen,” the old man said.

  “You said he walked like a golem.”

  “How could he walk like a golem unless he was one?”

  “All right, all right...You broke him, so now fix him.”

  “My grandfather, his light shines from Paradise, told me that when MoHaRaL—Moreynu Ha-Rav Löw—his memory for a blessing, made the golem in Prague, three hundred? four hundred years ago? he wrote on his forehead the Holy Name.”

  Smiling reminiscently, the old woman continued, “And the golem cut the rabbi’s wood and brought his water and guarded the ghetto.”

  “And one time only he disobeyed the Rabbi Low, and Rabbi Löw erased the Shem Ha-Mephorash from the golem’s forehead and the golem fell down like a dead one. And they put him up in the attic of the shule and he’s still there today if the Communisten haven’t sent him to Moscow. . . . This is not just a story,” he said.

  “Avadda not!” said the old woman.

  “I myself have seen both the shule and the rabbi’s grave,” her husband said, conclusively.

  “But I think this must be a different kind golem, Gumbeiner. See, on his forehead: nothing written.”

  “What’s the matter, there’s a law I can’t write something there? Where is that lump clay Bud brought us from his class?”

  The old man washed his hands, adjusted his little black skullcap, and slowly and carefully wrote four Hebrew letters on the gray forehead.

  “Ezra the Scribe himself couldn’t do better,” the old woman said, admiringly. “Nothing happens,” she observed, looking at the lifeless figure sprawled in the chair.

  “Well, after all, am I Rabbi Low?” her husband asked, deprecatingly. “No,” he answered. He leaned over and examined the exposed mechanism. “This spring goes here . . . this wire comes with this one . . .” The figure moved. “But this one goes where? And this one?”

  “Let be,” said his wife. The figure sat up slowly and rolled its eyes loosely.

  “Listen, Reb Golem” the old man said, wagging his finger. “Pay attention to what I say—you understand?”

  “Understand...”

  “If you want to stay here, you got to do like Mr. Gumbeiner says.”

  “Do-like-Mr.-Gumbeiner-says . . .”

  “That’s the way I like to hear a golem talk. Malka, give here the mirror from the pocketbook. Look, you see your face? You see on the forehead, what’s written? If you don’t do like Mr. Gumbeiner says, he’ll wipe out what’s written and you’ll be no more alive.”

  “No-more-alive . ..”

  “That’s right. Now, listen. Under the porch you’ll find a lawnmower. Take it. And cut the lawn. Then come back. Go.”

  “Go...” The figure shambled down the stairs. Presently the sound of the lawnmower whirred through the quiet air in the street just like the street where Jackie Cooper shed huge tears on Wallace Beery’s shirt and Chester Conklin rolled his eyes at Marie Dressier.

  “So what will you write to Tillie?” old Mr. Gumbeiner asked.

  “What should I write?” old Mrs. Gumbeiner shrugged. “I’ll wri
te that the weather is lovely out here and that we are both, Blessed be the Name, in good health.”

  The old man nodded his head slowly, and they sat together on the front porch in the warm afternoon sun.

  <>

  * * * *

  JUNIOR

  by

  Robert Abernathy

  Abernathy is a problem. He doesn’t write enough, because he has another serious hobby—photography— and spends most of his spare time—nine to five daily—working in classified research for the U.S. Government. Perhaps it is just as well that he doesn’t turn out more fiction; he’s enough of an irritation now—if you happen to be an editor collecting the “best of the year”—because almost everything he does write belongs in that category.

  Most notable this year was a short sharp piece called “Single Combat” (very different indeed from the bubbling good humor of “Junior”). It is listed with its source in the back of this book, in the Honorable Mentions, along with a number of other stories we could not include in a single volume, but which you may wish to find and read for yourself.

  * * * *

  “Junior!” bellowed Pater.

  “Junior!” squeaked Mater, a quavering echo.

  “Strayed off again—the young idiot! If he’s playing in the shallows, with this tide going out…” Pater let the sentence hang blackly. He leaned upslope as far as he could stretch, angrily scanning the shoreward reaches where light filtered more brightly down through the murky water, where the sea-surface glinted like bits of broken mirror.

  No sign of Junior.

  Mater was peering fearfully in the other direction, toward where, as daylight faded, the slope of the coastal shelf was fast losing itself in green profundity. Out there, beyond sight at this hour, the reef that loomed sheltering above them fell away in an abrupt cliffhead, and the abyss began.

  “Oh, oh,” sobbed Mater. “He’s lost. He’s swum into the abyss and been eaten by a sea monster.” Her slender stem rippled and swayed on its base, and her delicate crown of pinkish tentacles trailed disheveled in the pull of the ebbtide.

  “Pish, my dear!” said Pater. “There are no sea monsters. At worst,” he consoled her stoutly, “Junior may have been trapped in a tidepool.”

  “Oh, oh,” gulped Mater. “He’ll be eaten by a land monster.”

  “There ARE no land monsters!” snorted Pater. He straightened his stalk so abruptly that the stone to which he and Mater were conjugally attached creaked under them. “How often must I assure you, my dear, that WE are the highest form of life?” (And, for his world and geologic epoch, he was quite right.)

  “Oh, oh,” gasped Mater.

  Her spouse gave her up. “JUNIOR!” he roared in a voice that loosened the coral along the reef.

  Round about, the couple’s bereavement had begun attracting attention. In the thickening dusk tentacles paused from winnowing the sea for their owners’ suppers, stalked heads turned curiously here and there in the colony. Not far away a threesome of maiden aunts, rooted en brosse to a single substantial boulder, twittered condolences and watched Mater avidly.

  “Discipline!” growled Pater. “That’s what he needs! Just wait till I—”

  “Now, dear—” began Mater shakily.

  “Hi, folks!” piped Junior from overhead.

  His parents swiveled as if on a single stalk. Their offspring was floating a few fathoms above them, paddling lazily against the ebb; plainly he had just swum from some crevice in the reef nearby. In one pair of dangling tentacles he absently hugged a roundish stone, worn sensuously smooth by pounding surf.

  “WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?”

  “Nowhere,” said Junior innocently. “Just playing hide-and-go-sink with the squids.”

  “With the other polyps,” Mater corrected him primly. She detested slang.

  Pater was eyeing Junior with ominous calm. “And where,” he asked, “did you get that stone?”

  Junior contracted guiltily. The surfstone slipped from his tentacles and plumped to the sea-floor in a flurry of sand. He edged away, stammering, “Well, I guess maybe… I might have gone a little ways toward the beach…”

  “You guess! When I was a polyp,” said Pater, “the small fry obeyed their elders, and no guess about it!”

  “Now, dear—” said Mater.

  “And no spawn of mine,” Pater warmed to his lecture, “is going to flout my words! Junior… COME HERE.”

  Junior paddled cautiously round the homesite just out of tentacle-reach. He said in a small voice, “I won’t.”

  “DID YOU HEAR ME?”

  “Yes,” admitted Junior.

  The neighbors stared. The three maiden aunts clutched one another with muted shrieks, savoring beforehand the language Pater would now use.

  But Pater said “Ulp!”—no more.

  “Now, dear,” put in Mater quickly. “We must be patient. You know all children go through larval stages.”

  “When I was a polyp…” Pater began nastily. He coughed out an accidentally inhaled crustacean, and started over: “No spawn of mine…” Trailing off, he only glared, then roared abruptly, “SPRAT!”

  “I won’t!” said Junior reflexively, and backpaddled into the coral shadows of the reef.

  “That wallop,” seethed Pater, “wants a good polyping. I mean—” He glowered suspiciously at Mater and the neighbors.

  “Dear,” soothed Mater, “didn’t you notice…?”

  “OF COURSE I— Notice what?”

  “What Junior was doing. Carrying a stone. I don’t suppose he understands why, just yet, but…”

  “A stone? Ah, uh, to be sure, a stone. Why… Why, my dear, do you realize what this MEANS?”

  Pater was once more occupied with improving Mater’s mind. It was a long job, without foreseeable end—especially since he and his helpmeet were both firmly rooted for life to the same tastefully decorated homesite (garnished by Pater himself with colored pebbles, shells, urchins, and bits of coral in the rather rococo style which had prevailed during Pater’s courting days as a free-swimming polyp).

  “Intelligence, my dear,” pronounced Pater, “is quite incompatible with motility. Just think—how could ideas congeal in a brain shuttled hither and yon, bombarded with ever-changing sense-impressions? Look at the lower species, which swim about all their lives, incapable of taking root or thought! True Intelligence, my dear—as distinguished from Instinct, of course—presupposes the fixed viewpoint!”

  He paused. Mater murmured, “Yes, dear,” as she always did at this point.

  Junior undulated past, swimming toward the abyss. He moved a bit heavily now; it was growing hard for him to keep his maturely thickening afterbody in a horizontal posture.

  “Just look at the young of our own kind,” said Pater, “Scatterbrained larvae, wandering greedily about in search of new stimuli. But, praise be, they mature at last into sensible, sessile adults. While yet the unformed intellect rebels against the ending of carefree polyphood, instinct, the wisdom of Nature, instructs them to prepare for the great change!”

  He nodded wisely as Junior came gliding back out of the gloom of deep water. Junior’s tentacles clutched an irregular basalt fragment which he must have picked up down the rubble-strewn slope. As he paddled slowly along the rim of the reef, the adult anthozoans located directly below looked up and hissed irritable warnings. He was swimming a bit more easily now, and, if Pater had not been a firm believer in Instinct, he might have been reminded of the grossly materialistic theory, propounded by some iconoclast, according to which a maturing polyp’s tendency to grapple objects was merely a matter of taking on ballast.

  “See!” declared Pater triumphantly. “I don’t suppose he understands why, just yet… but Instinct urges him infallibly to assemblei the materials for his future homesite.”

  Junior let the rock fragment fall, and began plucking restlessly at a coral outcropping.

  “Dear,” said Mater, “don’t you think you ought to tell him…?”

&nbs
p; “Ahem!” said Pater. “The wisdom of Instinct—”

  “As you’ve always said, a polyp needs a parent’s guidance,” remarked Mater.

  “Ahem!” repeated Pater. He straightened his stalk and bellowed authoritatively, “JUNIOR! Come here!”

  The prodigal polyp swam warily close. “Yes, Pater?”

  “Junior,” said his parent solemnly, “now that you are growing up, it behooves you to know certain facts.”

  Mater blushed a delicate lavender and turned away on her side of the rock.