Modern classics of fanta.., p.5
Modern Classics of Fantasy, page 5
“Esther!” Herman cried, shocked. “Doesn’t my health mean anything?”
“Of course, darling. Only I thought maybe you could stand it for—”
He snatched his hat, tie, and jacket, and slammed the door. Outside, though, he stood indeterminedly. He could hear his wife crying, and he realized that, if he succeeded in getting the gnome to remove the curse, he would forfeit an opportunity to make a great deal of money.
He finished dressing more slowly. Esther was right, to a certain extent. If he could tolerate his waterless condition
“No!” he gritted decisively. “Already my friends avoid me. It isn’t right that a respectable man like me should always be drunk and not take a bath. So we’ll make less money. Money isn’t everything—”
And with great determination he went to the lake.
But that evening, before going home, Mike walked out of his way to stop in at the concession. He found Greenberg sitting on a chair, his head in his hands, and his body rocking slowly in anguish.
“What is it, Mr. Greenberg?” he asked gently.
Greenberg looked up. His eyes were dazed. “Oh, you, Mike,” he said blankly. Then his gaze cleared, grew more intelligent, and he stood up and led Mike to the bar. Silently, they drank beer. “I went to the lake today,” he said hollowly. “I walked all around it hollering like mad. The gnome didn’t stick his head out of the water once.”
“I know,” Mike nodded sadly. “They’re busy all the time.”
Greenberg spread his hands imploringly. “So what can I do? I can’t write him a letter or send him a telegram; he ain’t got a door to knock on or a bell for me to ring. How do I get him to come up and talk?”
His shoulders sagged. “Here, Mike. Have a cigar. You been a real good friend, but I guess we’re licked.”
They stood in an awkward silence. Finally Mike blurted: “Real hot, today. A regular scorcher.”
“Yeah. Esther says business was pretty good, if it keeps up.”
Mike fumbled at the Cellophane wrapper. Greenberg said: “Anyhow, suppose I did talk to the gnome. What about the sugar?”
The silence dragged itself out, became tense and uncomfortable. Mike was distinctly embarrassed. His brusque nature was not adapted for comforting discouraged friends. With immense concentration he rolled the cigar between his fingers and listened for a rustle.
“Day like this’s hell on cigars,” he mumbled, for the sake of conversation. “Dries them like nobody’s business. This one ain’t, though.”
“Yeah,” Greenberg said abstractedly. “Cellophane keeps them—”
They looked suddenly at each other, their faces clean of expression.
“Holy smoke!” Mike yelled.
“Cellophane on sugar!” Greenberg choked out.
“Yeah,” Mike whispered in awe. “I’ll switch my day off with Joe, and I’ll go to the lake with you tomorrow. I’ll call for you early.”
Greenberg pressed his hand, too strangled by emotion for speech. When Esther came to relieve him, he left her at the concession with only the inexperienced griddle boy to assist her, while he searched the village for cubes of sugar wrapped in Cellophane.
The sun had scarcely risen when Mike reached the hotel, but Greenberg had long been dressed and stood on the porch waiting impatiently. Mike was genuinely anxious for his friend. Greenberg staggered along toward the station, his eyes almost crossed with the pain of a terrific hangover.
They stopped at a cafeteria for breakfast. Mike ordered orange juice, bacon and eggs, and coffee half-and-half. When he heard the order, Greenberg had to gag down a lump in his throat.
“What’ll you have?” the counterman asked.
Greenberg flushed. “Beer,” he said hoarsely.
“You kidding me?” Greenberg shook his head, unable to speak. “Want anything with it? Cereal, pie, toast—”
“Just beer.” And he forced himself to swallow it. “So help me,” he hissed at Mike, “another beer for breakfast will kill me!”
“I know how it is,” Mike said around a mouthful of food.
On the train they attempted to make plans. But they were faced by a phenomenon that neither had encountered before, and so they got nowhere. They walked glumly to the lake, fully aware that they would have to employ the empirical method of discarding tactics that did not work.
“How about a boat?” Mike suggested.
“It won’t stay in the water with me in it. And you can’t row it.”
“Well, what’ll we do then?”
Greenberg bit his lip and stared at the beautiful blue lake. There the gnome lived, so near to them. “Go through the woods along the shore, and holler like hell. I’ll go the opposite way. We’ll pass each other and meet at the boathouse. If the gnome comes up, yell for me.”
“O. K.,” Mike said, not very confidently.
The lake was quite large and they walked slowly around it, pausing often to get the proper stance for particularly emphatic shouts. But two hours later, when they stood opposite each other with the full diameter of the lake between them, Greenberg heard Mike’s hoarse voice: “Hey, gnome!”
“Hey, gnome!” Greenberg yelled. “Come on up!”
An hour later they crossed paths. They were tired, discouraged, and their throats burned; and only fishermen disturbed the lake’s surface.
“The hell with this,” Mike said. “It ain’t doing any good. Let’s go back to the boathouse.”
“What’ll we do?” Greenberg rasped. “I can’t give up!”
They trudged back around the lake, shouting half-heartedly. At the boathouse, Greenberg had to admit that he was beaten. The boathouse owner marched threateningly toward him.
“Why don’t you maniacs get away from here?” he barked. “What’s the idea of hollering and scaring away the fish? The guys are sore—”
“We’re not going to holler any more,” Greenberg said. “It’s no use.”
When they bought beer and Mike, on an impulse, hired a boat, the owner cooled off with amazing rapidity, and went off to unpack bait.
“What did you get a boat for?” Greenberg asked. “I can’t ride in it.”
“You’re not going to. You’re gonna walk.”
“Around the lake again?” Greenberg cried.
“Nope. Look, Mr. Greenberg. Maybe the gnome can’t hear us through all that water. Gnomes ain’t hardhearted. If he heard us and thought you were sorry, he’d take his curse off you in a jiffy.
“Maybe.” Greenberg was not convinced. “So where do I come in?”
“The way I figure it, some way or other you push water away, but the water pushes you away just as hard. Anyhow, I hope so. If it does, you can walk on the lake.” As he spoke, Mike had been lifting large stones and dumping them on the bottom of the boat. “Give me a hand with these.”
Any activity, however useless, was better than none, Greenberg felt. He helped Mike fill the boat until just the gunwales were above water. Then Mike got in and shoved off.
“Come on,” Mike said. “Try to walk on the water.”
Greenberg hesitated. “Suppose I can’t?”
“Nothing’ll happen to you. You can’t get wet; so you won’t drown.”
The logic of Mike’s statement reassured Greenberg. He stepped out boldly. He experienced a peculiar sense of accomplishment when the water hastily retreated under his feet into pressure bowls, and an unseen, powerful force buoyed him upright across the lake’s surface. Though his footing was not too secure, with care he was able to walk quite swiftly.
“Now what?” he asked, almost happily.
Mike had kept pace with him in the boat. He shipped his oars and passed Greenberg a rock. “We’ll drop them all over the lake—make it damned noisy down there and upset the place. That’ll get him up.”
They were more hopeful now, and their comments, “Here’s one that’ll wake him,” and “I’ll hit him right on the noodle with this one,” served to cheer them still further. And less than half the rocks had been dropped when Greenberg halted, a boulder in his hands. Something inside him wrapped itself tightly around his heart and his jaw dropped.
Mike followed his awed, joyful gaze. To himself, Mike had to admit that the gnome, propelling himself through the water with his ears, arms folded in tremendous dignity, was a funny sight.
“Must you drop rocks and disturb us at our work?” the gnome asked.
Greenberg gulped. “I’m sorry, Mr. Gnome,” he said nervously. “I couldn’t get you to come up by yelling.”
The gnome looked at him. “Oh. You are the mortal who was disciplined. Why did you return?”
“To tell you that I’m sorry, and I won’t insult you again.” “Have you proof of your sincerity?” the gnome asked quietly.
Greenberg fished furiously in his pocket and brought out a handful of sugar wrapped in Cellophane, which he tremblingly handed to the gnome.
“Ah, very clever, indeed,” the little man said, unwrapping a cube and popping it eagerly into his mouth. “Long time since I’ve had some.”
A moment later Greenberg spluttered and floundered under the surface. Even if Mike had not caught his jacket and helped him up, he could almost have enjoyed the sensation of being able to drown.
* * * *
L. SPRAGUE DE CAMP
The Gnarly Man
L. Sprague de Camp is a seminal figure, one whose career spans almost the entire development of modern fantasy and SF. Much of the luster of the “Golden Age” of Astounding during the late, 1930s and the 1940s is due to the presence in those pages of de Camp (along with his great contemporaries Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, and A. E. van Vogt). At the same time, for Astounding’s sister fantasy magazine, Unknown, de Camp helped to create a whole new modern style of fantasy writing—funny, whimsical, and irreverent—of which he is still the most prominent practitioner. De Camp’s stories for Unknown are among the best short fantasies ever written, and include such classics as “The Wheels of If,” “Nothing in the Rules,” “The Hardwood Pile,” and (written in collaboration with Fletcher Pratt), the famous “Harold Shea” stories that would later be collected as The Complete Enchanter. In science fiction, he is the author of Lest Darkness Fall, in my opinion one of the three or four best Alternate Worlds novels ever written, as well as the at-the-time highly controversial novel Rogue Queen, and a body of expertly crafted short fiction such as “Judgment Day,” “Divide and Rule,” “A Gun for Dinosaur,” and “Aristotle and the Gun.”
De Camp’s other books include The Glory That Was, The Search for Zei, The Tower of Zanid, The Hostage of Zir, The Great Fetish, The Reluctant King and, with Fletcher Pratt, The Carnelian Cube and The Land of Unreason, and the collection Tales from Gavagan’s Bar. He has also written a long sequence of critically acclaimed historical novels, including The Bronze God of Rhodes, An Elephant for Aristotle, and The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate, as well as a number of non-fiction books on scientific and technical topics, literary biographies such as his painstaking examination of the life of H. P. Lovecraft, Lovecraft: A Biography, and Dark Valley Destiny: The Life of Robert E. Howard (written in collaboration with Catherine Crook de Camp and Jane Whittington Griffin), and critical/biographical studies of fantasy and fantasy writers such as Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers, As an anthologist, he edited the historically significant Swords & Sorcery in 1963, an attempt to preserve and revive an at-the-time Endangered Literary Species he called “Heroic Fantasy,” and many a young reader was introduced to Robert E. Howard’s “Conan the Barbarian” stories or C. L. Moore’s “Jirel of Joiry” stories for the first time in the pages of that anthology; he followed it up with two other important anthologies, The Spell of Seven, The Fantastic Swordsmen., and Warlocks and Warriors. His short fiction has been collected in The Best of L. Sprague de Camp, A Gun for Dinosaur, The Purple Pterodactyls, and Rivers in Time. De Camp has won the Grand Master Nebula Award, and the Gandalf or Grand Master of Fantasy Award. He lives in Texas with his wife, writer Catherine Crook de Camp, in collaboration with whom he has produced his most recent books, The Stones of Nomuru, The Incorporated Knight, The Pixilated Peeress, and The Swords of Zinjahan.
De Camp was the quintessential Unknown writer. Nobody did a better job than de Camp of capturing that elusive tone and mood—bright, playful, deliberately anachronistic, smart, sassy, ironic—that characterized the best of the stories from that magazine…and de Camp himself has rarely done a better job of writing an “Unknown-style” story than he does in the sly tale that follows, one of the most acclaimed and popular from Unknown’s first year of publication.
* * * *
DR. MATILDA SADDLER first saw the gnarly man on the evening of June 14th, 1946, at Coney Island. The spring meeting of the Eastern Section of the American Anthropological Association had broken up, and Dr. Saddler had had dinner with two of her professional colleagues, Blue of Columbia and Jeffcott of Yale. She mentioned that she had never visited Coney and meant to go there that evening. She urged Blue and Jeffcott to come along, but they begged off.
Watching Dr. Saddler’s retreating back, Blue of Columbia crackled: “The Wild Woman from Wichita. Wonder if she’s hunting another husband?” He was a thin man with a small gray beard and a who-the-Hell-are-you-Sir expression.
“How many has she had?” asked Jeffcott of Yale.
“Three to date. Don’t know why anthropologists lead the most disorderly private lives of any scientists. Must be that they study the customs and morals of all these different peoples, and ask themselves, ‘If the Eskimos can do it why can’t we?’ I’m old enough to be safe, thank God.”
“I’m not afraid of her,” said Jeffcott. He was in his early forties and looked like a farmer uneasy in store-bought clothes. “I’m so very thoroughly married.”
“Yeah? Ought to have been at Stanford a few years ago, when she was there. It wasn’t safe to walk across the campus, with Tuthill chasing all the females and Saddler all the males.”
Dr. Saddler had to fight her way off the subway train, as the adolescents who infest the platform of the B.M.T.’s Stillwell Avenue Station are probably the worst-mannered people on earth, possibly excepting the Dobu Islanders of the Western Pacific. She didn’t much mind. She was a tall, strongly built woman in her late thirties, who had been kept in trim by the outdoor rigors of her profession. Besides, some of the inane remarks in Swift’s paper on occulturation among the Arapaho Indians had gotten her fighting blood up.
Walking down Surf Avenue toward Brighton Beach, she looked at the concessions without trying them, preferring to watch the human types that did and the other human types that took their money. She did try a shooting gallery, but found knocking tin owls off their perch with a .22 too easy to be much fun. Long-range work with an army rifle was her idea of shooting.
The concession next to the shooting gallery would have been called a sideshow if there had been a main show for it to be a sideshow to. The usual lurid banner proclaimed the uniqueness of the two-headed calf, the bearded woman, Arachne the spider-girl, and other marvels. The piece de resistance was Ungo-Bungo the ferocious ape-man, captured in the Congo at a cost of twenty-seven lives. The picture showed an enormous Ungo-Bungo squeezing a hapless Negro in each hand, while others sought to throw a net over him.
Although Dr. Saddler knew perfectly well that the ferocious apeman would turn out to be an ordinary Caucasian with false hair on his chest, a streak of whimsicality impelled her to go in. Perhaps, she thought, she could have some fun with her colleagues about it.
The spieler went through his leather-lunged harangue. Dr. Saddler guessed from his expression that his feet hurt. The tattooed lady didn’t interest her, as her decorations obviously had no cultural significance, as they have among the Polynesians. As for the ancient Mayan, Dr. Saddler thought it in questionable taste to exhibit a poor microcephalic idiot that way. Professor Yogi’s legerdemain and fire-eating weren’t bad.
A curtain hung in front of Ungo-Bungo’s cage. At the appropriate moment there were growls and the sound of a length of chain being slapped against a metal plate. The spieler wound up on a high note:
“—ladies and gentlemen, the one and only Ungo-Bungo!” The curtain dropped.
The ape-man was squatting at the back of his cage. He dropped his chain, got up, and shuffled forward. He grasped two of the bars and shook them. They were appropriately loose and rattled alarmingly. Ungo-Bungo snarled at the patrons, showing his even yellow teeth.
Dr. Saddler stared hard. This was something new in the ape-man line. Ungo-Bungo was about five feet three, but very massive, with enormous hunched shoulders. Above and below his blue swimming trunks, thick grizzled hair covered him from crown to ankle. His short stout-muscled arms ended in big hands with thick gnarled fingers. His neck projected slightly forward, so that from the front he seemed to have but little neck at all.
