A touch of inifinity, p.1
A Touch of Inifinity, page 1
21-01-2023
STORIES OF DOOMED WORLDS
AND STRANGE FUTURES
A TOUCH OF INFINITY is the first collection of the best stories of one of the most remarkable talents to appear in science-fiction recently. A writer with an eye to the unique and a real feeling for the stars, Harlan Ellison has made his name a selling feature wherever fantasy is read.
Among these stories you will read the astonishing novelette of the human booby-trap, the man whose personal sacrifice was to save the defenders of a lost-cause planet; you will be startled by the robot who lost his obligations to serve his makers, and gripped by the duel of wits between a wrecked spaceman and a machine turned homicidal maniac.
There are many other vivid scenes, and events on a half dozen fierce and wonderful worlds, in this unusual new volume.
Turn this book over for
second complete novel
Table of Contents
105
BLIND LIGHTNING
A TOUCH OF INFINITY
by
HARLAN ELLISON
ACE BOOKS, INC.
23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.
A TOUCH OF INFINITY
Copyright ©, 1960, by Harlan Ellison
All Rights Reserved
Copyright acknowledgments: Back to the Drawing
Boards, Blind Lightning, © 1956, 1958, by King-Size Publications, Inc. Run for the Stars, © 1957, by Royal Publications, Inc. Life Hutch, The Sky is Burning, © 1956, 1958, by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Final Trophy, © 1957, by Headline Publications, Inc.
Dedicating books is something like paying off social obligations. Seldom does one get the chance
“to clear away two debts in the same book, but the
Ace coin has two sides, so this side of the coin is for: Bev and Jerry.
THE MAN WITH NINE LIVES
Copyright ©, 1960, by Harlan Ellison
Printed in U. S. A.
INTRODUCTION.
A number of years ago I liked to read books. I read all sorts of them and my favorites were Antoine de St. Exupéry, Joseph Conrad, Hemingway, William March and Immanuel Kant.
I never read science fiction.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like it, or thought it was foolish, or even that I didn’t have the time for what others have called “escape” fiction. It was simply that I had hot discovered the printed starfields and the playful romps through the interstices of inverspace rampant in the s-f publications.
That, however, was a different life, and I was a different sort of man, and who the hell ever thought I’d wind up making my bread pounding a typewriter?
My first touch of fever came in Cleveland, Ohio. My uncle was a dentist. I had to get a tooth filled, my uncle had a liberal selection of old and dull magazines and I sought something more Ellisonian in taste at the drug store yon.
I will never forget that day, or that magazine I bought, because they changed my life. It seems ludicrous to say that a pulp science fiction magazine could change a man’s life, but it did.
The cover showed a gigantic metal robot clutching a beautiful, brass-bra-enclosed broad, firing a bolt of lurid red flame-and-stuff from a fingertip.
It was a copy of the now-defunct Startling Stories and
I devoured it voraciously. And bought a copy of Amazing, and a copy of Astounding, and read “The Other Side Of The Moon” edited by Derleth (which included Bradbury’s “Pillar Of Fire” that has never left me) and I was hooked.
That was how it began, and it progressed through stages of virulence. I became a fan. I became a fan magazine publisher. I became a fan writer. And then, one day, my career had been hustling along for three or four years, I had over two hundred and fifty stories all published and a couple books under my belt…and I was writing an introduction for a collection of my own stories.
Suddenly, I realized I was lost. I was a full-time writer, even an editor, and people were coming up to me at cocktail parties, smiling toothily, and asking me, “Tell me, Harlan, how did you ever start writing?”
Well, now I’ve told you. And if you want to know anything about the stories in this book, read them. That’s the most direct method.
Harlan Ellison
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Peculiarly enough, everybody in the following is a bastard. Well, perhaps not a bastard, exactly, but not very nice, either. The hero is a coward, a looter, a turncoat and in all ways a despicable little bounder. You’ll probably like him; he’s one of my favorite people. The good guys in this one are murderers, at least by action if not intent. The bad guys are just like you or me, except they’re golden, and the basic situation is calculated to give you an extreme pain in the belly. It was originally called “The Last Man On Deaid’s World” but Larry Shaw said, “Do you serious?” so I let him stick his own title on it, and since it was better, anyhow, what the hell. His title was
RUN FOR THE STARS
I
They found him looking at what was left of the body of a fat shopkeeper. He was hunkered down with his back to the blasted store-front, and didn’t hear them come in. The scream of the Kyben ships scorching the city’s streets mingled too loudly with the screams of the dying.
They crept up behind him, three men with grimy faces and determined stares. They grabbed him suddenly, twisting his hands up behind his back, bringing a sharp, surprised scream from him. Bills and change tinkled from his hands, scattered across the rubble-strewn floor.
Benno Tallant twisted his head painfully and looked up at the men holding him. “Lemme got He was dead! I only wanted to get enough money to buy food with! Honest to Cod, lemme go!” Tears gathered in the comers of his eyes from the pains in his twisted arms.
One of the men holding him—a stocky, plump man of indeterminate age and a lisping speech—snapped, “In case you hadn’t noticed, lootie, this is a grocery you were robbing. There’s food all over the shop. Why not use that?” He gave the arm he held another half-twist Tallant bit his lip. There was no use arguing with these men; he couldn’t tell them the money was to get narcotics. They would kill him and that would be the end of it. This was a time of war. The city—the entire planet—was under siege by the Kyben, and they killed looters. Perhaps it was better that way; in death the insatiable craving for the dream-dust would stop, and he would be free.
But the thought of death—as it usually did—sent chills coursing down through his legs, numbing his muscles. He sagged in their grip.
The pig-faced man grunted in disgust. “This the best we can do, for cripes sake? There’s got to be someone better for this job. Look at the miserable little slob—he’s practically jelly!”
The blond man shook his head. He was obviously the leader of the group. A patch of high forehead was miraculously clean among the filth and grime of his skin; he rubbed his hand over his face now, blotting away the clean area. “No, Shep, I think this is our man.”
He turned to Tallant, stooped down and studied the quaking looter. He put his hand to Tallant’s right eye and spread the lids. “A dustie. Perfect.” He stood up, added, “We’ve been looking for you all day, fellow.”
“I never saw you before in my life, what do you want with me? Lemme go, willya!”
His voice was rising in pitch, almost hysterically. Sweat poured down over his face as though a stream had been opened at the hairline.
The tall, blond man spoke hurriedly, glancing over his shoulder. “Come on, let’s get him out of here. We’ll let Doc Budder go to work on him.” He motioned them to lift the quaking man, and as he rose, added, “There’s a good five hours’ work there.”
The lisping man named Shep inserted, “And those yellow bastards up there may not give us that long.”
The pig-faced man nodded agreement, and as though to punctuate their feelings, a high-pitched woman’s scream struck through the fast-falling dusk of Deaid’s World. They stopped, and Tallant thought he might go mad, right there, right in their arms, because of the scream, and these men, and no dust, and the entire world shattering around him.
He tried to slump again, but the pig-faced man dragged him erect. They made their way through the shop, kicking up fine clouds of concrete dust. They paused at the shambles of the store-front, and peered into the gathering darkness. Outside, the explosion of a fuel reservoir superimposed itself over the constant blast and scream of Kyben attack.
Silence fell for an instant. Then, before a new breath could be drawn, a screaming missile whined overhead and ripped through the face of an apartment building across the street. Metalwork and concrete flew in all directions, shattering on the blasted pavement, sending bits of stuff cascading over them.
They watched with tight faces for an instant. Then, hauling their human burden, slipped quietly and quickly into the evening.
Behind them, the fat shopkeeper lay amidst the debris of his store, dead, safe, and uncaring.
II
Benno Tallant awoke during the operation, his throat burning with dryness, his head swimming in fatigue. He saw his stomach open, the bare entrails staring up nakedly at him. A grizzled little man, with sharp spikes of white beard dotting his cheeks, was carefully settling a knobbed block of metal into the flesh. He promptly fainted again.
When he awoke the second time, he was in a cold room, lying naked to the groin on an operating table, his head slightly higher than his feet. The red, puckered scar that ran from the bottom of his rib cage to the inside of his thigh stared up at him. The pinhead gleam of a metal wire-tip stuc k up in the center of the scar. Abruptly, he remembered.
They stopped his screaming by forcing a wadded-up towel into his mouth.
The tall, blond man from the ruined shop stepped into Tallant’s arc of vision. He had washed the filth from his face, and he wore a dun-colored military uniform, with the triple studs of a Commander on the lapel.
“I’m Parkhurst, fellow. Head of Resistance, now that the President and his staff are dead. We have use for you, mister, but there isn’t much time left…so if you want to stay alive, calm down.”
They pulled the towel from Benno Tallant’s mouth and for a moment his tongue felt like a thick, prickly leaf. The picture of his stomach, split and wet, came back to him once more. “What was that? What have you done to me?” He was crying; the tears oozed out of the comers of his eyes, running ziggily down his cheeks into the comers of his mouth, and down his chin again.
“Take it easy,” said a voice from Tallant’s left. He turned his head painfully, and saw the grizzled man with the spiky beard. It was a doctor; the doctor who had been inserting the metal cube in Tallant’s stomach the first time he had awakened. Tallant assumed this was Doc Budder.
The nearly bald man continued, “Why this snivelling garbage, Parkhurst? There are a dozen men left in the post who would’ve volunteered. We would have lost a good man, but at least we’d know the thing was being carried by someone who could do the job.”
He caught his breath as he finished speaking, a thick, phlegmy cough making him steady himself on the edge of the operating table. “Too many cigarettes…he managed to gasp out.
Parkhurst shook his head and pointed at Tallant. “The best possible job can be done by somebody who’s afraid of the thing. By someone who will run. The running will take time, and that’s all that will be left to insure our living till we get to Earth, or another outpost.”
“Do you have any doubt this man will run?”
Doc Budder rubbed the bristling stubble on his chin. It rasped in the silence of the room. “Mmm. I guess you’re right, Parkhurst—you usually ore—it’s just that…
Parkhurst cut -him off with friendly impatience. “Never mind, Doc. How soon can we have him up and around?” Doc Budder coughed once more, deeply, said, “I had the epidermizer on him…he’s knitting nicely. I’ll put it back on him but, uh, say Parkhurst, y'know, all those cigarettes, my nerves are a little jumpy…I wonder, uh, would you have a little, uh, something to sort of steady me?” A hopeful gleam appeared in the old man’s eyes, and Tallant recognized it at once for what it really was. The old man was a dustie, too. Or a winehead.
Parkhuhst turned away from staring at Tallant. “Look, Doc. This is a bad time for everybody. My wife got burned down in the street when the Kyben struck three days ago, and my kids were burned in the school. I know it’s rough on you, Doc, but if you don’t so help me God stop bugging for whiskey, I’m going to kill you, Doc. I’m going to kill you.”
He had spoken softly, pacing his words, but the desperation in his voice was apparent. It was the tone of a man with terrible anguish in him, and a terrible burden on his shoulders.
“Now. How soon can we get him out of here, Doc?”
Doc Budder’s eyes swept across the room hopelessly, and -his tongue washed his lips. He spoke hurriedly, nervously. “I’ll—I’ll put the epidermizer back on it. It should be set in another four hours. There’s no weight on the organs; he shouldn’t feel a thing.”
Benno listened closely. The fear was gagging him, and he felt the nervous tics starting in his upper arm and his cheek. Doc Budder wheeled a slim, tentacled machine to the operating table, and lifted a telescoping arm from its clamp. On the end was a rectangular nickel-steel box with a small hole in it. Budder threw a switch, and a shaft of light struck out from the hole, washed the scar.
Even as Benno watched, the wound seemed to color, pucker more. He couldn’t feel the thing they had put in his stomach, but he knew it was there.
A sudden cramp hit him.
He cried in pain.
Parkhurst’s face turned white. “What’s the matter with him?”
Doc Budder pushed aside the telescoping arm of the epidermizer, leaned over Tallant, who lay there breathing with difficulty, his face wrenched into an expression of terrible pain. “What’s the matter?”
“It hurts—it—here—” he indicated his stomach. “Pain, all over here, hurts like hell .…do something!”
The fat little doctor stepped back with a sigh. He slapped the telescoping arm back into position with a careless motion. “It’s all right. Self-induced cramp. I didn’t think there’d be any deleterious after-effects.
“But,” he added, with a malicious glance at Parkhurst, “I’m not as good a doctor, as sober and upstanding a doctor, as the Resistance could use, if it had its choice, so you never know.”
Parkhurst waved a hand in annoyance. “Oh, shut up, Doc.”
Doc Budder pulled the sheet up over Tallant’s chest, and the dustie whined in pain. Budder snarled down at him, “Shut up that goddammed whining, you miserable slug. The machine’s healing you through the sheet, you haven’t got a thing to worry about—right now. There are women and kids out there,” he waved toward the wall, “suffering a lot worse than you.”
He turned toward the door, Parkhurst following, lines of thought slicing across the blond man’s forehead.
Parkhurst stopped with a hand on the knob. “We’ll be back with food for you later. Don’t try to get out. Aside from the fact that there’s a guard on the door—and that’s the only way out of here—you might open that incision and bleed to death before we could find you.”
He clicked the light switch, stepped out, and closed the door. Tallant heard voices outside the door, softly, as though coining through a blanket of moss, and he’ knew the guard was standing ready outside.
Tallant’s thoughts weren’t deterred by the darkness. He remembered the dream-dust, and the pains shot up in him again; he remembered the past, and his mouth choked up; he remembered awakening during the operation, and he wanted to scream. The next six hours were a bright, thinking hell.
III
The lisping man, Shep, came for him. He had cleaned up, also, but there were fine tracings of dirt around his nose, and under his nails, and in the lines of pocketing beneath his eyes. He had one thing in common with the other men Tallant had seen; he was weary to the core.
Shep shot the telescoping arm of the epidermizer into its clamp, and rolled the machine back against the wall. Tallant watched him carefully, and when Shep turned down the sheet, examining the now thin, white line that had been the incision, Benno raised himself on his elbows, and asked, “How’s it going outside?”
Shep raised his gray eyes and did not answer.
He left the room, reappeared a few minutes later with a bundle of clothes. He threw them on the operating table next to Tallant, and helped the looter to sit up. “Get dressed,” he said shortly.
Tallant sat up, and for a moment his belly-hunger for the dream-dust made him gag. He put a shaking hand through his brown hair. “L-listen,” he began, speaking confidentially to the Resistance man, “do y-you know where I can lay my hands on some dream-dust? I-I can make it worth your while, I’ve got—”
Shep turned on him, and the lisping man’s hand slammed against Tallant’s face, leaving a burning red mark. “No, mister, you listen to me. In case you don’t know it, there’s a Kyben battle armada on its way across. space, headed directly for Deaid’s World. We’ve only been hit by an advance scout party, and they’ve nearly demolished the planet as it is.
“About two million people are dead out there, buddy. Do you know how many people that is? That’s almost the entire population of this planet. And you sit there asking me to get you your snuff!
