Tales From the Spaceport Bar Read online

  Mr. Clarke commented that readers often ask him if the White Hart actually existed. "Well, it did; I based the background (and some incidental characters) in the White Horse, which was in Fetter Lane, just north of Fleet Street in London. In the years immediately after World War II, this was the weekly rendezvous of the London science-fiction community.”

  The author also wrote 2001 and 2010, among other best-selling science-fiction novels. He is chancellor of the University of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon), where he now lives, and is the inventor of the stationary-orbit communications satellite, for which —alas!—he receives no royalties.

  SOCIAL LAPSES

  by Darrell Schweitzer

  A slime-beast from Fomulhaut Five,

  quite drunk in an old spaceport dive,

  proposed to nine men, six cats, and a hen,

  and bar stools, at least twenty-five.

  Clearly there are some forms of the SF bar story shorter than anything possible in prose. Darrell Schweitzer, who has recently "journeymanned” the limerick, as he puts it, has been writing fiction longer than that, and is the author of numerous short stories; a story-cycle, We Are All Legends; and a novel, The Shattered Goddess. He has edited several nonfiction anthologies, most recently Discovering Stephen King. He also wrote a Conan novel, then rewrote it as a limerick.

  ONE FOR THE ROAD

  by Gardner Dozois

  "I believe that it is illegal for a bar not to have a TV set"

  I don’t go to bars much—I got out of the habit when my generation was "into” sitting around in rooms with posters of Ch6 on the wall and passing funny little cigarettes back and forth, and even now that we’re all middle-class again, with mortgages and potbellies and expense accounts, and my idea cf a pleasant evening well-spent no longer consists of listening to the same side of a Grateful Dead album thirty-five times in a row, even now I haven’t really gotten back into the swing of being a barfly again.

  Still, every now and then, like tonight, I’ll want to put down a few drinks on the way back from work, to fortify myself to face life in the haven of domestic tranquility I call home. Last night had been particularly rough, and I d been getting these blistering, vindictive phone calls from Stacy all day, the kind of call where she starts screaming and slams the receiver down halfway through... but you don’t want to hear about that. Suffice it to say that it was one of the few nights of the year when I wanted to get drunk, wanted that mean, bleak, self-pitying edge that only lots of quickly ingested alcohol can give you, no more euphoric drug need apply...and unless you’re a back-alley wino, the only place to do that kind of serious, solitary, and sorrowful drinking is in a bar.

  Trouble is, I don’t like most bars—either they’re assembly-line pickup joints for homy suburbanities who Eire looking for their own Mr. Goodbar, or they’re glitter palaces full of trendy people dancing to disco music and smiling at their own reflections in each other’s mirror sunglasses, or they’re places with sawdust on the floor where rednecks and urban cowboys watch football on a blaring TV set and wait for a good excuse to beat the crap out of each other. "Not my bag,” as we used to say back in the days when it was obligatory for everybody to say things like that. I did know one fairly decent place, though, on a shady side street near the Institute and the Museum, and that’s where I ended up.

  I’d been in there once or twice while I was working on the film about the metric system with some of the Museum staffers, and I’d liked it there. It was a quiet little place, lit dimly enough to avoid glare but not dimly enough to become Hernando’s Hideaway, drawing a clientele mostly composed of professional people and technical people, with an occasional scattering of footsore tourists recuperating from the Grand Tour of the Museum. There was no jukebox or Space Invaders game. There was a TV set, of course—in fact, I believe that it is illegal for a bar not to have one—and it may even have been tuned to a football game, but its volume control was kept low enough so that it hardly mattered, except to those clustered at that end of the bar.

  I was all the way at the other end of the bar, which was somewhat crowded tonight, and had just gotten outside of my first solitary drink, staring glumly at myself in the mirror and feeling like Philip Marlowe during one of his whinier paragraphs, when the man came into the bar and sat down beside me on the only unoccupied stool.

  He was wearing a well-cut but somewhat rumpled suit, wire-rimmed glasses, and wore his hair just a bit longer than the modish nape-of-the-neck length that is the mark of conformity now that the real avant-gardists are affecting Mohawk hairdos and boot-camp skincuts. He was somewhere in his late forties or early fifties, with one of those smooth, rubbery faces that made it difficult to tell which. I had seen that young-old face somewhere before, although I was having difficulty remembering just where. He flagged down the bartender—who said something to him in the jocular tone that bartenders reserve for regulars—and was served a healthy Double-Knock, which he immediately poured down his throat, all at once, as if it were iced tea. He set the glass down, had it refilled, and tossed it off again. Then—while the bartender was pouring his third drink—he took off his wristwatch and held it up close to his face with both hands. "About five hours to midnight,” he announced aloud to no one in particular, "maybe a little more, maybe a little less.” He dived into his third drink. The watch he put carefully down on the bar in front of him. It was one of the newest and most expensive of digital watches, with more controls than the cockpit of a 747, and must have cost at least five hundred dollars.

  I had been watching all this out of the corner of my eye, mildly intrigued in spite of my better judgment. He felt my eyes on him. He scowled, tossed down the rest of his drink, and then turned his head toward me. "Do you know anything about quantum mechanics?” he asked in a conversational voice. "About the electromagnetic generation of instabilities? About runaway oscillation? About black holes?”

  "Not a damn thing,” I said cheerfully. My field is computer graphics.

  "Good,” he said. He fell silent, staring into his glass, and after a few moments I realized that he wasn’t going to say anything more.

  I sighed. I never could leave well enough alone. "Why did you ask me that?” I said.

  "What?” he replied absently. He was staring at his watch in a preoccupied way, occasionally pinging the dial face with a fingernail.

  "If I know anything about black holes.”

  He turned to look at me again, hesitated, and then called for the bartender to give him another drink. I let the bartender hit me again also. When our glasses were full, he raised his to his lips, but took only a small sip this time before setting it down again. "When I was at school,” he said ruminatively, glancing at me again, "there was, appropriately enough, a rather sophomoric little game that we used to occasionally play at parties. It consisted of asking everyone there what they would do if they knew—knew without the possibility of a doubt— that the world was going to come to an end that evening. A stupid game, but if enough people answered you began to notice some interesting patterns.”

  "Such as?” I said. My-years as a doper had given me a great deal of tolerance for nonlinear conversations.

  He smiled approvingly at me. "After a while, you’d notice that there were really only three basic answers to the question. Some people would say that they’d spend their remaining time screwing, or eating an enormous meal, or getting drunk or stoned, or listening to their favorite music, or walking in the woods... or whatever. This is basically the sensualist’s reply, the Dionysian reply. Other people would say that they would try to escape somehow, no matter how hopeless it looked, that they’d spend their last moments searching frantically for some life-sparing loophole in whatever doom was posited—this is either the pragmatist’s reply or the wishful thinker’s reply, depending on how you look at it. The remaining people would say that they would try to come to terms with the oncoming doom, accept it, settle their own minds and try to find peace within themselves; they’d meditate, or pray, or si
t quietly at home with their families and loved ones, cherishing each other as they waited for the end—this is basically the Apollonian reply, the mystic’s reply.” He smiled. "There was some blurring of categories, of course: sometimes the loophole-seeking response would be to petition God to intervene and stop the catastrophe, and sometimes there would be a sensual edge to the lavishness of the orgy of meditation the contemplatives were planning to indulge in...but for the most part, the categories were valid.”

  He paused to down about half of his drink, swishing it around in his mouth before swallowing, as if he were about to gargle with it. "The next question we’d ask them,” he said, "was even more revealing. We’d ask them: If you were the only one who knew that the world was about to end, would you tell anyone else? The mystics almost always said that they would tell, to give people time to prepare their souls; at the very least, they would tell those people they loved the most. Some of the loophole-seekers said that they would tell, give everyone a chance to find their own loopholes; some said that they wouldn’t tell, that their own chances for survival would be better if they didn’t have to contend with a worldwide panic; and some said that they’d just tell a small circle of like-minded friends —depends on just how pragmatic they were, I guess. Almost all of the sensualists said that they would not tell, that it was kinder if everyone else— and particularly their loved ones—could enjoy their last hours without knowing the shadow that was hanging over them... although at least one sensualist said that the only sensual pleasure he would get out of the whole thing would be the fun of telling everyone else the bad news...”

  Moving with exaggerated care, he polished off his drink and set it carefully back on the water ring it had made on the bar top. He turned to face me again. ‘'Would you tell anyone, if you knew?”

  I thought about it. "If I did, would there be anything anybody could do to stop it from happening?” "Nothing at all.”

  "Any way that anybody could escape from it?” "Not unless they can figure out a way to get clean off the planet in above five hours’ time.”

  "In that case...” I said, fingering my chin, "in that case, I don’t think I would say anything.” "Good,” the man said, "then I won’t either.”

  He got up off the stool and strode out of the place, leaving his five-hundred-dollar watch on the bar.

  The bartender drifted over to see if he could con me into a refill. "Who was that weirdo?” I said.

  "Jeez,” the bartender said, "I thought you knew him. That was Dr. Fine, from over at the Institute.” Then I remembered where I’d seen that young-old face: it had been staring at me out of a recent Time cover, accompanying an article that hailed Dr. Fine as one of the most brilliant experimental physicists in the world.

  It’s been about an hour now, and I keep looking at Dr. Fine’s watch, toying with it, pushing it around on top of the bar with my finger. It’s a damn expensive watch, and I keep thinking that soon he’ll notice that it’s gone, that he’ll certainly come back into the bar for it in a moment or two.

  But I’m starting to get worried.

  Gardner Dozois reports that he has actually asked many people the question raised in this story, and that the replies tend to fall into the categories he has reported, save for the one woman who wanted to spend her last hours flying out to California to punch a certain controversial writer in the nose. What would Dozois do if the world were about to end? "In reality, go out and find some loophole," he says.

  The optimistic Mr. Dozois made a very distinguished beginning to his career in the early 1970s, with so many stories being nominated for awards (but, alas, never winning) that he founded the still-flourishing Hugo and Nebula Losers' Club, from which he was summarily expelled when he won a Nebula for "The Peacemaker” in 1984. He is the author of the novel Strangers and the collection The Visible Man, and has edited many anthologies, including the ongoing series The World’s Best Science Fiction. He is now the editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

  ELEPHAS FRUMENTI

  by L Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt

  Gavagan’s is an old-fashioned bar, somewhere in the

  northeastern United States in the 1950s.

  The thin, balding man in tweeds almost tipped over his glass as he set it down with a care that showed care had become necessary. "Think of dogs,” he said. "Really, my dear, there is no practical limit to what can be accomplished by selective breeding.”

  "Except that where I come from, we sometimes think of other things,” said the brass-blonde, emphasizing the ancient New Yorkerjoke with a torso-wiggle that was pure Police Gazette.

  Mr. Witherwax lifted his nose from the second Martini. "Do you know them, Mr. Cohan?” he asked.

  Mr. Cohan turned in profile to swab a glass. 'That would be Professor Thott, and a very educated gentleman, too. I don’t rightly know the name of the lady, though I think he has been calling her

  Ellie, or something like that. Would you like to be meeting them, now?”

  "Sure. I was reading in a book about this selective breeding, but I don’t understand it so good, and maybe he could tell me something about it.”

  Mr. Cohan made his way to the end of the bar and led ponderously toward the table. "Pleased to meet you, Professor Thott,” said Witherwax.

  "Sir, the pleasure is all mine, all mine. Mrs. Jonas, may I present an old friend of mine, yclept Witherwax? Old in the sense that he is aged in the admirable liquids produced by Gavagan’s, while the liquids themselves are aged in wood, ha-ha—a third-premise aging. Sit down, Mr. Witherwax. I call your attention to the remarkable qualities of alcohol, among which peripeteia is not the least.” "Yeah, that’s right,” said Mr. Witherwax, his expression taking on a resemblance to that of the stuffed owl over the bar. "What I was going to ask—”

  "Sir, I perceive that I have employed a pedantry more suitable to the classroom, with the result that communication has not been established. Peripeteia is the reversal of r61es. While in a state of saintly sobriety, I pursue Mrs. Jonas; I entice her to alcoholic diversions. But after the third Presidente, she pursues me, in accordance with the ancient biological rule that alcohol increases feminine desire while decreasing masculine potency.”

  From the bar, Mr. Cohan appeared to have caught only a part of this speech. "Rolls we ain’t got,” he said. "But you can have some pretzel sticks.” He reached under the bar for the bowl. "All gone; and I just laid out a new box this morning. That’s where Gavagan’s profits go. In the old days it was the free lunch, and now it’s pretzel sticks.” "What I was going to ask—” said Witherwax. Professor Thott stood up and bowed, a bow which ended in his sitting down again rather suddenly. "Ah, the mystery of the universe and music of the spheres, as Prospero might have phrased it! Who pursues? Who flies? The wicked. One preserves philosophy by remaining at the Platonian mean, the knife edge between pursuit and flight, wickedness and virtue. Mr. Cohan, a round of Presidentes, please, including one for my aged friend.”

  "Let me buy this one,” said Witherwax firmly. "What I was going to ask was about this selective breeding.”

  The professor shook himself, blinked twice, leaned back in his chair, and placed one hand on the table. "You wish me to be academic? Very well; but I have witnesses that it was at your own request.”

  Mrs. Jonas said: "Now look what you’ve done. You’ve got him started and he won’t run down until he falls asleep.”

  "What I want to know—” began Witherwax, but Thott beamingly cut across: "I shall present only/ the briefest and most nontechnical of outlines,” he said. "Let us suppose that, of sixteen mice, you took the two largest and bred them together. Their children would in turn be mated with those of the largest pair from another group of sixteen. And so on. Given time and material enough, and making it advantageous to the species to produce larger members, it would be easy to produce mice the size of lions.”

  "Ugh!” said Mrs. Jonas. "You ought to give up drinking. Your imagination gets gruesome.”

&n
bsp; "I see,” said Witherwax, "like in a book I read once where they had rats so big they ate horses, and wasps the size of dogs.”

  "I recall the volume,” said Thott, sipping his Presidente. "It was The Food of the Gods, by H. G. Wells. I fear, however, that the method he describes was not that of genetics and therefore had no scientific validity.”

  "But could you make things like that by selective breeding?” asked Witherwax.

  "Certainly. You could produce houseflies the size of tigers. It is merely a matter of—”

  Mrs. Jonas raised a hand. "Alvin, what an awful thought. I hope you don’t ever try it.”

  'There need be no cause for apprehension, my dear. The square-cube law will forever protect us from such a visitation.”

  "Huh?” said Witherwax.

  "The square-cube law. If you double the dimensions, you quadruple the area and octuple the masses. The result is—well, in a practical nontechnical sense, a tiger-sized housefly would have legs too thin and wings too small to support his weight.”

  Mrs. Jonas said: "Alvin, that’s impractical. How could it move?”

  The professor essayed another bow, which was even less successful than the first, since it was made from a sitting position. "Madame, the purpose of such an experiment would not be practical but demonstrative. A tiger-sized fly would be a mass of jelly that would have to be fed from a spoon.” He raised a hand. "There is no reason why anyone should produce such a monster; and since nature has no advantages to offer insects of large size, it will decline to produce them. I agree that the thought is repulsive; myself, I should prefer the alternative project of producing elephants the size of flies—or swallows.”