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  Fantastic Creatures

  AN ANTHOLOGY OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION

  edited by ISAAC ASIMOV Martin Greenberg

  Charles Waugh

  FRANKLIN WATTS

  New York/London/Toronto/Sydney 1981

  * * *

  McCaffrey—Copyright © 1974 by Anne McCaffrey; reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Virginia Kidd.

  Biggie—Copyright © i960 by Ziff-Davis Publishing Company; reprinted by permission of Kirby McCauley, Ltd.

  Ritchie—Copyright © 1976 by Davis Publications. First published in ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE. Reprinted by permission of the Larry Sternig Literary Agency.

  Harrison—Copyright © 1957 by the Conde Nast Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Sayre—Copyright © 1980 by the Ultimate Publishing Company. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Gray—Copyright © 1931 by the Ziff-Davis Publishing Company. Every effort has been made to locate Mr. Gray or his estate, and a reprinting fee has been placed in escrow for the use of the story. Dee—Copyright © 1953 by the Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 843 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10022, agents for the author’s estate.

  Smith—Copyright © 1955 by Galaxy Publishing Company; copyright © 1963 by Cordwainer Smith. Reprinted by permission of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., agents for the author’s estate.

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Main entry under title:

  Fantastic creatures.

  Contents: Introduction / by Isaac Asimov—The smallest dragonboy / by Ann McCaffrey—The Botticelli horror / by Lloyd Biggie, Jr.—[etc.]

  1. Science fiction, American. 2. Children’s stories, American. [1. Science fiction. 2. Short stories] I. Asimov, Isaac, 1920- . II. Greenberg,

  Martin, 1918- . III. Waugh, Charles.

  PZ5F2147 [Fic] 81-10412

  ISBN O-53I-O4342-8 AACR2

  This collection copyright © 1981 by Isaac Asimov, c/o Nightfall, Inc.;

  Charles Waugh, and Martin Greenberg All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  INTRODUCTION by Isaac Asimov

  When civilization was young, what a fantastic planet we lived on. Strange creatures abounded wherever human beings looked. We’ve lost that wonder now, and it is hard for us even to imagine what it must have been like when even a short journey might bring us unbelievable sights.

  Try to imagine . . .

  Suppose you knew what cats, dogs, and various barnyard animals were like, as well as frogs, snakes, turtles, raccoons, and so on. And suppose you had never heard of anything else. Then suppose that, for the first time in your life, you saw an elephant, a giraffe, a camel, an ostrich, or even an armadillo.

  Could you possibly have imagined these, or any of a hundred others, if you had never seen or heard of them?

  Perhaps you might have imagined a bird as large as an ostrich, but would you have thought of its long neck or imagined it scudding across the plains on its two long legs, moving as quickly as a horse? Or if you had imagined an ox ten feet high at its shoulders, would you have thought of pulling its nose into a long snakelike appendage and making two giant fans of its ears?

  It is no wonder that to early humans the earth seemed full of living wonders. It must have seemed that there was no limit to what might exist. Centaurs, sphinxes, harpies, mermaids, unicorns, winged horses, dragons, vampires, werewolves—almost anything that could entice, entrance, or affright was imagined.

  But then, after 1500, the world began to shrink, and step-by-step the wonders retreated. Mermaids became sea cows; unicorns became rhinoceroses and narwhals; dragons became cobras.

  Yet the world did not grow entirely tame, for even though imaginary creatures dwindled, there were new real discoveries. When the French naturalist Cuvier maintained that the animals on the American continents were just small and degenerate copies of those from the Old World, Thomas Jefferson had a moose stuffed and sent to him. Cuvier had to admit that no old-world deer could match that.

  When Australia was explored, zoologists nearly went mad with wonder as whole new classes of animals—from the great red kangaroo on down—were revealed. They wouldn’t believe the duckbill platypus really existed when a skin was sent to them. They thought it was a practical joke, that portions of skins of several creatures had been deftly stitched together.

  Even older portions of the world had their surprises. As late as 1900, Europeans first spotted deep in the forests of Africa a new large mammal, a shy creature called the okapi—a shorter-necked relative of the giraffe with tentative zebralike stripes on its hindquarters.

  The sea could hide quite a bit. The giant squid was finally discovered. It was not quite as big as the legendary kraken, but it was large enough to fight desperately for its life against the sperm whale. In the 1930s an odd fish that inhabited the middle depths was discovered. This discovery was not unusual except that the fish belonged to a group of sea creatures that were ancestors to land vertebrates (like ourselves) and were thought to have been extinct since the time of the dinosaur!

  We can’t help but dream of still more discoveries. Sea serpents slither in our imaginations; we even look for one in the tame and constricted waters of the Scottish Loch Ness. The Yeti (or Abominable Snowman) furtively makes its way up the slopes of Mount Everest, and Sasquatch (or Big Foot) hides from us in the forests of the American Northwest.

  We can’t even let go of the creatures we feared and loved in ancient days. The mermaids still sit on the rocks, combing their sea-green hair; centaurs still gallop through the woods while Pegasus wheels and soars up into the clouds; the dank forests of Eastern Europe still echo from the howl of the werewolf while the vast cities of the Western world lie prey to the skulking vampire.

  Well, why not? Surely we can have the best of both worlds. Reality may be all about us, but we can nevertheless suspend disbelief and read tales, even today, that return us to fantasy.

  In fact, by extending sober reality, we can spin new fantasies that the ancients never dreamed of.

  The ancients knew only one world, and though it seemed big and fearsome and unknown, it remained only one. We now know that there are other worlds circling the sun, and in the last few centuries imaginative writers have filled every one of them with strange creatures of fancy. They have been the very stuff of science fiction.

  But then in the last couple of decades, fantasy withered again before the awesomeness of stark reality. There are today twelve sets of human footprints on the moon, and objects made by human hands have rested upon the rocky surfaces of Mars and Venus. Human-made space probes, hooked to human eyes, have shown us the scarred surfaces of the planet Mercury and of satellites such as Phobos, Ganymede, Callisto, Dione, Rhea, and Mimas. They have shown us the smooth icy cover of Europa and Enceladus, the live volcanoes of Io, the thick, smoggy atmosphere of Titan, the monstrous Earth-sized storms in the writhing atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn, and the amazing and unexpected complexity of the structure of Saturn’s rings.

  All this was undreamed of when wondering eyes, unaided by technology, swept the night sky and connected the stars to form figures of animals and heroes. But all that has been revealed is inanimate. The strange life dreamed of by science fiction writers has retreated as did the strange life once dreamed of by folktale constructors.

  Where are the underground intelligences of the moon? Where are the wise and indomitable canal builders of Mars, wringing a despairing life out of a drying and dying world? Where is the rich, rank life belonging to the swamps and sea
s of wet and cloudy Venus?

  Gone, all gone!

  Well, it doesn’t matter. We can cling as stubbornly to the old dreams of life in the solar system as we do to the monsters that peopled the Greek myths and the medieval European folktales.

  Besides, there is the still farther beyond. Our own solar system is but one small family of worlds, and within that there is certainly one richly inhabited member—Earth. But our solar system is only one of a couple hundred billion in our galaxy alone, and there are a hundred billion other galaxies—all kinds of galaxies containing all kinds of stars circled by all kinds of planets bearing on them (surely!) all kinds of amazing creatures.

  We can’t reach those planets yet, but we can imagine them. And we can imagine them more elaborately and better than the ancients ever could—not because we’re smarter than they were, but because we now have a wider experience with a greater variety of reality than they ever had the chance to have.

  So here is a book of fantastic creatures as old as primitive human dreams and as new as the next century’s headlines, as familiar as folktales yet as strange as science fiction—and all for your pleasure.

  THE SMALLEST DRAGONBOY by Ann McCaffrey

  Many societies have rites of passage in which adolescents must complete certain ceremonial tasks before being considered adults or being allowed to assume adult responsibilities. On the strange world of Pern, for example, a young man cannot become a full-fledged warrior—a dragonrider—unless he is chosen from among many boys by one of Pern’s telepathic dragons. But sometimes, even getting the chance to be chosen can be difficult.

  * * *

  Although Keevan lengthened his walking stride as far as his legs would stretch, he couldn’t quite keep up with the other candidates. He knew he would be teased again.

  Just as he knew many other things that his foster mother told him he ought not to know, Keevan knew that Beterli, the most senior of the boys, set that spanking pace just to embarrass him, the smallest dragonboy. Keevan would arrive, tail fork-end of the group, breathless, chest heaving, and maybe get a stern look from the instructing wingsecond.

  Dragonriders, even if they were still only hopeful candidates for the glowing eggs which were hardening on the hot sands of the Hatching Ground cavern, were expected to be punctual and prepared. Sloth was not tolerated by the Weyrleader of Benden Weyr. A good record was especially important now. It was very near hatching time, when the baby dragons would crack their mottled shells, and stagger forth to choose their lifetime companions. The very thought of that glorious moment made Keevan’s breath catch in his throat. To be chosen—to be a dragonrider! To sit astride the neck of a winged beast with jeweled eyes: to be his friend, in telepathic communion with him for life; to be his companion in good times and fighting extremes; to fly effortlessly over the lands of Pern! Or, thrillingly, between to any point anywhere on the world! Flying between was done on dragonback or not at all, and it was dangerous.

  Keevan glanced upward, past the black mouths of the weyr caves in which grown dragons and their chosen riders lived, toward the Star Stones that crowned the ridge of the old volcano that was Benden Weyr. On the height, the blue watch dragon, his rider mounted on his neck, stretched the great transparent pinions that carried him on the winds of Pern to fight the evil Thread that fell at certain times from the skies. The many-faceted rainbow jewels of his eyes glistened fleetingly in the greeny sun. He folded his great wings to his back, and the watch pair resumed their statuelike pose of alertness.

  Then the enticing view was obscured as Keevan passed into the Hatching Ground cavern. The sands underfoot were hot, even through heavy wher-hide boots. How the bootmaker had protested having to sew so small! Keevan was forced to wonder why being small was reprehensible. People were always calling him “babe” and shooing him away as being “too small” or “too young” for this or that. Keevan was constantly working, twice as hard as any other boy his age, to prove himself capable. What if his muscles weren’t as big as Beterli’s? They were just as hard. And if he couldn’t overpower anyone in a wrestling match, he could outdistance everyone in a footrace.

  “Maybe if you run fast enough,” Beterli had jeered on the occasion when Keevan had been goaded to boast of his swiftness, “you could catch a dragon. That’s the only way you’ll make a dragonrider!”

  “You just wait and see, Beterli, you just wait,” Keevan had replied. He would have liked to wipe the contemptuous smile from Beterli’s face, but the guy didn’t fight fair even when a wingsecond was watching. “No one knows what Impresses a dragon!”

  “They’ve got to be able to find you first, babe!”

  Yes, being the smallest candidate was not an enviable position. It was therefore imperative that Keevan Impress a dragon in his first hatching. That would wipe the smile off every face in the cavern and accord him the respect due any dragonrider, even the smallest one.

  Besides, no one knew exactly what Impressed the baby dragons as they struggled from their shells in search of their lifetime partners.

  “I like to believe that dragons see into a man’s heart,” Keevan’s foster mother, Mende, told him. “If they find goodness, honesty, a flexible mind, patience, courage—and you’ve got that in quantity, dear Keevan—that’s what dragons look for. I’ve seen many a well-grown lad left standing on the sands, Hatching Day, in favor of someone not so strong or tall or handsome. And if my memory serves me”—which it usually did: Mende knew every word of every Harper’s tale worth telling, although Keevan did not interrupt her to say so—“I don’t believe that F’lar, our Weyrleader, was all that tall when bronze Mnementh chose him. And Mnementh was the only bronze dragon of that hatching.”

  Dreams of Impressing a bronze were beyond Keevan’s boldest reflections, although that goal dominated the thoughts of every other hopeful candidate. Green dragons were small and fast and more numerous. There was more prestige to Impressing a blue or brown than a green. Being practical, Keevan seldom dreamed as high as a big fighting brown, like Canth, F’nor’s fine fellow, the biggest brown on all Pern. But to fly a bronze? Bronzes were almost as big as the queen, and only they took the air when a queen flew at mating time. A bronze rider could aspire to become Weyrleader! Well, Keevan would console himself, brown riders could aspire to become wingseconds, and that wasn’t bad. He’d even settle for a green dragon: they were small, but so was he. No matter! He simply had to Impress a dragon his first time in the Hatching Ground. Then no one in the Weyr would taunt him anymore for being so small.

  Shells, Keevan thought now, but the sands are hot!

  “Impression time is imminent, candidates,” the wingsecond was saying as everyone crowded respectfully close to him. “See the extent of the striations on this promising egg.” The stretch marks were larger than yesterday.

  Everyone leaned forward and nodded thoughtfully. That particular egg was the one Beterli had marked as his own, and no other candidate dared, on pain of being beaten by Beterli at his first opportunity, to approach it. The egg was marked by a large yellowish splotch in the shape of a dragon backwinging to land, talons outstretched to grasp rock. Everyone knew that bronze eggs bore distinctive markings. And naturally, Beterli, who’d been presented at eight Impressions already and was the biggest of the candidates, had chosen it.

  “I’d say that the great opening day is almost upon us,” the wingsecond went on, and then his face assumed a grave expression. “As we well know, there are only forty eggs and seventy-two candidates. Some of you may be disappointed on the great day. That doesn’t necessarily mean you aren’t dragonrider material, just that the dragon for you hasn’t been shelled. You’ll have other hatchings, and it’s no disgrace to be left behind an Impression or two. Or more.”

  Keevan was positive that the wingsecond’s eyes rested on Beterli, who’d been stood off at so many Impressions already. Keevan tried to squinch down so the wingsecond wouldn’t notice him. Keevan had been reminded too often that he was eligible to be a candidate by on
e day only. He, of all the hopefuls, was most likely to be left standing on the great day. One more reason why he simply had to Impress at his first hatching.

  “Now move about among the eggs,” the wingsecond said. “Touch them. We don’t know that it does any good, but it certainly doesn’t do any harm.”

  Some of the boys laughed nervously, but everyone immediately began to circulate among the eggs. Beterli stepped up officiously to “his” egg, daring anyone to come near it. Keevan smiled, because he had already touched it—every inspection day, when the others were leaving the Hatching Ground and no one could see him crouch to stroke it.

  Keevan had an egg he concentrated on, too, one drawn slightly to the far side of the others. The shell had a soft greenish-blue tinge with a faint creamy swirl design. The consensus was that this egg contained a mere green, so Keevan was rarely bothered by rivals. He was somewhat perturbed then to see Beterli wandering over to him.

  “I don’t know why you’re allowed in this Impression, Keevan. There are enough of us without a babe,” Beterli said, shaking his head.

  “I’m of age.” Keevan kept his voice level, telling himself not to be bothered by mere words.

  “Yah!” Beterli made a show of standing on his toetips. “You can’t even see over an egg; Hatching Day, you better get in front or the dragons won’t see you at all. 'Course, you could get run down that way in the mad scramble. Oh, I forget, you can run fast, can’t you?”

  “You’d better make sure a dragon sees you, this time, Beterli,” Keevan replied. “You’re almost overage, aren’t you?”

  Beterli flushed and took a step forward, hand half-raised. Keevan stood his ground, but if Beterli advanced one more step, he would call the wingsecond. No one fought on the Hatching Ground. Surely Beterli knew that much.

  Fortunately, at that moment, the wingsecond called the boys together and led them from the Hatching Ground to start on evening chores. There were “glows” to be replenished in the main kitchen caverns and sleeping cubicles, the major hallways, and the queen’s apartment. Firestone sacks had to be filled against Thread attack, and black rock brought to the kitchen hearths. The boys fell to their chores, tantalized by the odors of roasting meat. The population of the Weyr began to assemble for the evening meal, and the dragonriders came in from the Feeding Ground on their sweep checks.