Again dangerous visions, p.22
Again, Dangerous Visions, page 22
“Probably discovered I moved out last night. At midnight.”
“Moved out of the hospital? My god, girl! You’ve run away from home!”
She shook her very blonde hair. “No doctor. I moved to home. It’s quite a lovely room, although it certainly smells odd.”
He nodded. “That’s air. O2 and some other stuff, nitrogen, hydrogen; you know. No antiseptics. No medicines. Possibly a little chintz, and some mothballs. Take some getting used to, I guess.” He gazed at her, brows down. “But you’re a . . . resident here. A resident resident, I mean, not a medical one. Let’s don’t go into it; I’ve been on the damned Hospital Board twenty years, and I’ve been living with the infamous Barber case all twenty of ’em. You can’t leave. You have a hell of a bill here. Or your irascible, independent, atavistic, heroic old S.O.B. of a father does.”
She pulled off the surgery cap and her hair flew as she shook her head with a very bright smile. “Nope. He doesn’t. I signed some papers assuming all my own bills, debts, etcetera etcetera the day I turned twenty-one. I’m his daughter, you know; I agree with him. He didn’t much like that, but I used the word ‘independent’ and he shut up pretty fast. That’s Sacrament at his—my house. Then I told him my plan. That really shut him up, after he stopped laughing.”
Dr. Spaninger waited. Then he sighed, looked at his watch, and leaned back, lighting another cigaret. She also had a cigaret out; he pushed the lighter back into his pocket.
“Don’t play woman with me, Doctor,” he said. “You’re much too independent, competent and professional for me to insult you by lighting your cigaret. Besides, I’ve diapered you a few times. Never sent a bill, either.” He watched a snake of smoke writhe up to the ceiling. “All right Mary Ann, I’ll bite. What’s your Plan?”
“Was. It’s completed. I started here on the first of September, at $120 a month. September hath thirty days. That’s four whole U.S. rasbuckniks a day.”
“Um-hm. Shameful. We do everything we can to keep you yunkers out of the profession, including starve you out.”
“We won’t go into that either, overworked but wealthy old physician. Well, as of midnight last night I had worked ten days. That’s forty dollars worth. I moved out. And left a note at the desk; I’m to receive only eighty dollars this month. We’re even.”
He leaned back and laughed. Loudly. Long. Eventually he grew rather red in the face and leaned over to slap his knee. His concerned young ward warned him about his blood pressure. He nodded, gasping and choking.
“Wait till they hear this! Wait’ll Eli Hutch hears this! Oh, wonderful! We’re shut of the Barber case at last!” He looked at her and frowned again. “Unless the rest of the Board decides to sue you . . . hm. I’ll take care of that in advance. The only Barber I want to hear about hereafter is Doctor Barber. I hope I never hear the name Robert S. Barber again!”
“That’s not very charitable, but Daddy and I are opposed to charity anyhow. I promise you this: my son won’t be named Rober—what you said. He will be named William Robert Joseph Barber, OK?”
Dr. William Joseph Spaninger stared at her. “What . . . son?”
She shrugged. “Oh, the one I’ll eventually have. I’m trying to decide now which of my fellow interns is the most promising-looking.” She smiled at him. “No, I will not be an OB patient any ways soon. Not till I’ve finished up here, anyhow. And probably not till after I’m married.”
“Thank god. But that’s a dang lie—you’re stuck on young Chris Andrews and you know it.” He studied her thoughtfully. “Well. How the devil do you plan to exist on eighty bucks this month?”
“I won’t have to. I am receiving forty dollars from Daddy. He says the bill was his responsibility, anyhow. We accept our responsibilities in my family.”
Dr. Spaninger waved a hand at the hospital. “Nonsense. This is your family, and I haven’t found two people here willing to accept responsibility in the past twenty years. And I hope you will allow me, as a token of an old girl-watcher’s admiration for a very good-looking one, to give you a check for exactly $40 for your birthday. Your father’s giving you the forty sounds suspiciously like charity, and I really hate to see the old bas—rascal start changing, now. He’s a great man. Just for god’s sake don’t ever tell him so. And . . . carry on his work.”
“I intend to. I’ll spend the rest of my life bucking the System and marking ‘please’ in all those nasty do not write in this space blocks and punching extra holes in computer cards. But he’s a greater man than you think, O Revered Father-image. I said I was receiving the money from him, Doctor. I did not say anything about charity. It’s a business arrangement; Daddy pays only for value received. For the duration of the month, on my hours off-duty from here, I’m on KP at home.”
Afterword
This one wasn’t too dangerous because it will probably happen. Only the IR (I do not call them “service” because I do not lie) people are more arrogant than hospital exchequers. They have to be; it’s amazing how much costs have risen since free Medicare came along. If it paid all the bill for those people who are now going in hospital for rests, your tax bill and mine would be even worse. Since it doesn’t, we have to pay for them when we’re hospitalized, just like everything at the grocery is a penny or 3 higher because you and I help defray the cost of shoplifters.
Besides, “For Value Received” is half-true. Down to the break, when Bob Barber calls the hospital’s bluff. Bob Barber is me. Jodie is my wife. Mary Ann is my daughter Scotty. I wanted to visit my wife when I wanted to, not when it was convenient for the hospitaleers. So I carried a black bag, acted brusque and Belonging, and was naturally mistaken for a member of the American Magicians’ Association: AMA. The creature at the desk said everything to me the one in the story does. I owed a lousy forty bucks, and was not accustomed to being treated as if I were at a world sf convention or something. So I called her bluff. I said exactly what Mary Ann’s dad says in the story. After staring at me in shocked silence, she backed apoplectically away and went into a little opaque-glass cubicle. (Just like the guy at the car lot. You know; he always has to go ask the boss if he can let you have the cigaret lighter for only $9.95 instead of $10.00.)
I waited. A black-bonneted head came out. Looked me over. I was in Uniform: suit, shirt, tie. Only a fool wears anything else at hospital check-out desks or in traffic court. Head withdrew. The Creature returned. I was let off; all she wanted was name and address and phone number, which she already had. Checking. I started to go, once again having won a Great Victory over an Established Faith (did Harlan tell you about how I got the tax people off my back by writing
The President?).
“Uh . . . Mister offutt . . . you will pay this, won’t you?”
I swear. I gave her my best don’t-you-wish-you-knew-who-your-
father-was look and departed. With wife and offutt-spring.
That became one of our three favorite stories to tell captive audiences dumb enough to beholden themselves by coming out to drink my liquor. (The other two are how-andy-scared-off-the-prowler-with-a-Daisy-air-rifle-while-scared-to-death-the-bb’s-would-rattle, and how-andy-damnear-chopped-off-his-left-thumb-with-a-machete-while-cutting-weeds-and-thank-Mithra-he-types-with-only-the-index-finger-on-that-hand-anyhow.) Come out for a drink and we’ll tell you. If you mix with 7-up or cola, you get cheap Ky bourbon. If you drink it bare, or with water or soda, you’ll get Maker’s Mark and the stories will be painless.
Anyhow, one night we told our friend Bill Hough the hospital story and he didn’t laugh and beam at me as if I were god. Before I could snatch his drink and throw him out, he said:
“Ever think what might’ve happened if they’d called your bluff back?”
I gave Bill another drink and wrote the story next day. It was turned down by Redbook, Satevepost (which immediately went bust), Atlantic, Good House, and the agent I had at that time! Here’s what he said:
“I’m sorry but—and I don’t believe ‘For Value Received’ would make it. It has humor and truth to a point, but it’s against the rules to spoof the medical profession . . .”
So, obviously, this is a dangerous vision. To dwarfs, anyhow. We’re surrounded by them.
Introduction to
“MATHOMS FROM THE TIME CLOSET”
Gene Wolfe is a quiet, mostly amiable man with a sense of humor that has all the gentility of a carnivorous plant. I like and admire him more than I’ve ever told him. He is the author of a so-so novel, Operation Ares, and a horde of short stories that are well into the category labeled brilliant. He lives on Betty Drive in Hamilton, Ohio, the state from which I came; and when I left, Ohio got Gene, as the act of a benevolent God.
During the 1971 Nebula awards in New York, I sat in front of Gene during one of the most painful incidents it has ever been my gut-wrench to witness, and the way Gene reacted to it says much about the man.
Isaac Asimov had been pressed into service at the last moment to read the winners of the Nebulas. Gene was up in the short story category for his extravagantly excellent “The Island of Doctor Death And Other Stories” from Damon Knight’s ORBIT 7 (Gene has appeared nine times in the eight ORBIT collections as of this writing) (thereby attesting to Damon’s perspicacity as an editor) (taught the kid everything he knows, except table manners at banquets) (he throws peanuts and peas). Isaac had not been given sufficient time to study the list, which was handwritten, and he announced Gene as the winner. Gene stood up as the SFWA officers on the platform went pale and hurriedly whispered words to Ike. Ike went pale. Then he announced he’d made an error. There was “no award” in the short story category. Gene sat back down and smiled faintly.
Around him everyone felt the rollercoaster nausea of stomachs dropping out backsides. Had it been me, I would have fainted or screamed or punched Norbert Slepyan of Scribner’s, who was sitting next to me. Gene Wolfe just smiled faintly and tried to make us all feel at ease by a shrug and a gentle nod of his head.
His three short stories in this book mark a departure in my DV policies: when I started assembling stories, I said no one writer would have more than a single story in the series. One shot and that was it. But I bought “Loco Parentis” in 1968, one of my first purchases, at the Milford SF Writers Conference, and the following year when the Conference was held in Madeira Beach, Gene showed up with “Robot’s Story” and “Against the Lafayette Escadrille,” neither of which I could resist. So I bought all three and Gene devised an umbrella overtitle for the group, and it subsequently allowed Bernard Wolfe and James Sallis to sell me more than one. There is simply no defense against a Gene Wolfe story.
For me, his is one of the wildest and richest imaginations in
the genre.
Here is what he says of himself:
“The usual middle class upbringing for kids born, as I was, in the worst of the depression. No brothers or sisters, the family moving around as my father tried to earn a living. (Mostly, he was trying to sell cash registers, God help him.) He was a man who was home only on weekends, and brought me one or two lead soldiers every time he came, until I had a corrugated board box of them so heavy I could not pick it up. If we’re so much richer now, why can’t you buy those lead soldiers anymore?
“My mother was from the deep south (North Carolina) descended through her mother from one of those real Scarlett O’Hara families that lost it all in the Civil War. (Oddly enough, my father’s family also had roots in North Carolina, having come from there north about 1830, and I may be distantly related to Thomas Wolfe.) I remember her taking me to be shown to her parents, and how no one would explain why Grandfather kept those funny chickens that could not be let in with the regular chickens (“Or they’ll kill ’em!”) or the scarred white dog which had to be chained up when there were other dogs around. Grandfather had a wooden leg he kept out in front of him and was as deaf as a stump when he didn’t want to hear you; I wish I could have known him better.
“Something must have happened during my school days, but I mostly remember that it was very hot. I am left-handed, and the chairs had their broad arm on the wrong side. My hands were always sweating and sticking to the paper. I remember that.
“The sports for which I showed some ability, boxing and shooting, were unimportant beside such necessities as basketball. I was good at baseball, except for the parts which involve catching or throwing the ball. In Junior High I acquired a distaste for compulsory athletics which has never deserted me.
“My father, who had little money to spare for sending a son to college (he was operating a food business or a restaurant by this time, I’m not quite sure when the change was made), obtained the promise of a senatorial appointment to West Point for me. Unfortunately by the time I graduated from High School in 1949 there had been a readjustment of the power structure, and the new man, a short-sighted fellow named L. B. Johnson, refused to honor his predecessor’s commitment.
“A few years later I found myself a private in the 7th Infantry Division, attempting to excavate a foxhole with the buttons of my shirt. I had dropped out of Texas A&M, which is a land grant college and something of cross between V.M.I. and Tom Disch’s camp concentration but very cheap if you live in the state, and learned to my sorrow the meaning of ‘student deferment.’ That was the Korean Police Action—remember that?
“The G.I. bill let me return to school at the University of Houston, and I got a B.S.M.E. there in 1956, following which I flew Texas, something I sometimes regret. I still hold the job I took when I graduated—that is to say, I’m working for the same employer, but since the job is Research and Development things change almost from month to month.
“I have a wife and four children. They seem like more.”
MATHOMS FROM THE TIME CLOSET
By Gene Wolfe
1: Robot’s Story
It’s a cold night, and the wind comes in so there’s no inside, only two outsides: the one there where it howls up from the river, and the one in here—a little more sheltered, a little warmed by our breath. Che’s poster flutters on the wall as though he’s trying to talk; the kids would say “rap.”
The kids are the older ones, three sitting crosslegged on Candy’s mattress. (That’s the Chillicothe Candy: there are fifty others up and down Calhoun Street.) The kids are the younger ones, runaways: two virgin (or nearly) girl groupies, and a thin, sad boy who never talks. The kids are Robot, who has been down the hall where the plumbing works (it is stopped up here) and comes in, step, step, step, thinking about each move his legs make.
I’ve talked to Robot more than to any of the others because he is (perhaps) the least hostile and the most interesting. Robot is about nineteen, very tall, with a round, small head and a shock of black hair. Robot was custom-built, he tells me, in the thirty-third century to be the servant of an ugly woman who lived in a house floating on nothingness. Whenever Robot feels depressed he says: “I don’t know how good I was made. Maybe I’m going to work for a thousand years; maybe I’m more than half used up already.”
Robot says he is five. He escaped, or so he once told me, by spinning the dials of the ugly woman’s time closet and stepping in while they were still in motion. This, as he explains, was to prevent his whenabouts (emphasized by his voice so that I’ll notice the word) becoming known; but he had hoped to arrive in the thirteenth century B.C., a period which exercises a fascination for him.
Candy and the two boys with her ignore him, and after watching them for a moment he sits on the floor with the groupies (self-proclaimed) and the sad-faced boy and me. The boy is almost asleep, but to get Robot talking I ask, “Don’t you wish you were back now, Robot?”
He shakes his head. “This is better. That was a drag all the time.” He thinks for a moment, then asks, “Do you mind if I tell a story?” I tell him to go ahead, and so do the groupies, but he still hesitates. “You don’t mind? I’m programmed for them, and there wasn’t anyone who would listen there, so I never got to get them out. When I get them out they’re checked off, you know? It’s kind of like being constipated.”
The sad boy says, “Go on.” This, I think, is what Robot has been waiting for.
“This is a fairy story,” Robot begins. “It goes way back to the days when the little one-man scout ships went out from here in every direction looking for habitable spheres, scattering like sperm from semen dropped in the sea.”
I had not known Robot possessed such a strain of eloquence, and I look closely at him. His eyes are staring straight ahead and his mouth is a round O, the way he holds it when he is pretending there is a speaker in his throat.
“Those days continued for many, many years, you must understand. And every year the ships left in tens or hundreds—up toward the pole star; out like spokes around the sun; down past the Southern Cross. This is about one of the ships that went down.
“It dropped for years, but it didn’t count years. The pilot was asleep, and in a hundred days he would breathe three times. In a year, maybe, he would turn over and then plastic hands would come out of the wall and turn him right again. The ship woke him up when they had gotten somewhere.
“He woke up, and it knew he had forgotten almost everything except what he’d been dreaming of, so it explained it all to him while it rubbed him and gave him something to eat. When it was finished he thought, ‘What a tourist I was to let them talk me into this.’ Then he got up to see what this world he found was.
“It wasn’t anything special; as near as he could see mostly high grass—higher than your head. He landed and the air was all right and he got out and did all the things he was supposed to do, but there was really nothing there but all this grass.”
(I wondered if the “grass” in the story was an unconscious reflection of the kids’ obsession with marijuana; or if for Robot as for Whitman it represented the obliterations of time.)
“Moved out of the hospital? My god, girl! You’ve run away from home!”
She shook her very blonde hair. “No doctor. I moved to home. It’s quite a lovely room, although it certainly smells odd.”
He nodded. “That’s air. O2 and some other stuff, nitrogen, hydrogen; you know. No antiseptics. No medicines. Possibly a little chintz, and some mothballs. Take some getting used to, I guess.” He gazed at her, brows down. “But you’re a . . . resident here. A resident resident, I mean, not a medical one. Let’s don’t go into it; I’ve been on the damned Hospital Board twenty years, and I’ve been living with the infamous Barber case all twenty of ’em. You can’t leave. You have a hell of a bill here. Or your irascible, independent, atavistic, heroic old S.O.B. of a father does.”
She pulled off the surgery cap and her hair flew as she shook her head with a very bright smile. “Nope. He doesn’t. I signed some papers assuming all my own bills, debts, etcetera etcetera the day I turned twenty-one. I’m his daughter, you know; I agree with him. He didn’t much like that, but I used the word ‘independent’ and he shut up pretty fast. That’s Sacrament at his—my house. Then I told him my plan. That really shut him up, after he stopped laughing.”
Dr. Spaninger waited. Then he sighed, looked at his watch, and leaned back, lighting another cigaret. She also had a cigaret out; he pushed the lighter back into his pocket.
“Don’t play woman with me, Doctor,” he said. “You’re much too independent, competent and professional for me to insult you by lighting your cigaret. Besides, I’ve diapered you a few times. Never sent a bill, either.” He watched a snake of smoke writhe up to the ceiling. “All right Mary Ann, I’ll bite. What’s your Plan?”
“Was. It’s completed. I started here on the first of September, at $120 a month. September hath thirty days. That’s four whole U.S. rasbuckniks a day.”
“Um-hm. Shameful. We do everything we can to keep you yunkers out of the profession, including starve you out.”
“We won’t go into that either, overworked but wealthy old physician. Well, as of midnight last night I had worked ten days. That’s forty dollars worth. I moved out. And left a note at the desk; I’m to receive only eighty dollars this month. We’re even.”
He leaned back and laughed. Loudly. Long. Eventually he grew rather red in the face and leaned over to slap his knee. His concerned young ward warned him about his blood pressure. He nodded, gasping and choking.
“Wait till they hear this! Wait’ll Eli Hutch hears this! Oh, wonderful! We’re shut of the Barber case at last!” He looked at her and frowned again. “Unless the rest of the Board decides to sue you . . . hm. I’ll take care of that in advance. The only Barber I want to hear about hereafter is Doctor Barber. I hope I never hear the name Robert S. Barber again!”
“That’s not very charitable, but Daddy and I are opposed to charity anyhow. I promise you this: my son won’t be named Rober—what you said. He will be named William Robert Joseph Barber, OK?”
Dr. William Joseph Spaninger stared at her. “What . . . son?”
She shrugged. “Oh, the one I’ll eventually have. I’m trying to decide now which of my fellow interns is the most promising-looking.” She smiled at him. “No, I will not be an OB patient any ways soon. Not till I’ve finished up here, anyhow. And probably not till after I’m married.”
“Thank god. But that’s a dang lie—you’re stuck on young Chris Andrews and you know it.” He studied her thoughtfully. “Well. How the devil do you plan to exist on eighty bucks this month?”
“I won’t have to. I am receiving forty dollars from Daddy. He says the bill was his responsibility, anyhow. We accept our responsibilities in my family.”
Dr. Spaninger waved a hand at the hospital. “Nonsense. This is your family, and I haven’t found two people here willing to accept responsibility in the past twenty years. And I hope you will allow me, as a token of an old girl-watcher’s admiration for a very good-looking one, to give you a check for exactly $40 for your birthday. Your father’s giving you the forty sounds suspiciously like charity, and I really hate to see the old bas—rascal start changing, now. He’s a great man. Just for god’s sake don’t ever tell him so. And . . . carry on his work.”
“I intend to. I’ll spend the rest of my life bucking the System and marking ‘please’ in all those nasty do not write in this space blocks and punching extra holes in computer cards. But he’s a greater man than you think, O Revered Father-image. I said I was receiving the money from him, Doctor. I did not say anything about charity. It’s a business arrangement; Daddy pays only for value received. For the duration of the month, on my hours off-duty from here, I’m on KP at home.”
Afterword
This one wasn’t too dangerous because it will probably happen. Only the IR (I do not call them “service” because I do not lie) people are more arrogant than hospital exchequers. They have to be; it’s amazing how much costs have risen since free Medicare came along. If it paid all the bill for those people who are now going in hospital for rests, your tax bill and mine would be even worse. Since it doesn’t, we have to pay for them when we’re hospitalized, just like everything at the grocery is a penny or 3 higher because you and I help defray the cost of shoplifters.
Besides, “For Value Received” is half-true. Down to the break, when Bob Barber calls the hospital’s bluff. Bob Barber is me. Jodie is my wife. Mary Ann is my daughter Scotty. I wanted to visit my wife when I wanted to, not when it was convenient for the hospitaleers. So I carried a black bag, acted brusque and Belonging, and was naturally mistaken for a member of the American Magicians’ Association: AMA. The creature at the desk said everything to me the one in the story does. I owed a lousy forty bucks, and was not accustomed to being treated as if I were at a world sf convention or something. So I called her bluff. I said exactly what Mary Ann’s dad says in the story. After staring at me in shocked silence, she backed apoplectically away and went into a little opaque-glass cubicle. (Just like the guy at the car lot. You know; he always has to go ask the boss if he can let you have the cigaret lighter for only $9.95 instead of $10.00.)
I waited. A black-bonneted head came out. Looked me over. I was in Uniform: suit, shirt, tie. Only a fool wears anything else at hospital check-out desks or in traffic court. Head withdrew. The Creature returned. I was let off; all she wanted was name and address and phone number, which she already had. Checking. I started to go, once again having won a Great Victory over an Established Faith (did Harlan tell you about how I got the tax people off my back by writing
The President?).
“Uh . . . Mister offutt . . . you will pay this, won’t you?”
I swear. I gave her my best don’t-you-wish-you-knew-who-your-
father-was look and departed. With wife and offutt-spring.
That became one of our three favorite stories to tell captive audiences dumb enough to beholden themselves by coming out to drink my liquor. (The other two are how-andy-scared-off-the-prowler-with-a-Daisy-air-rifle-while-scared-to-death-the-bb’s-would-rattle, and how-andy-damnear-chopped-off-his-left-thumb-with-a-machete-while-cutting-weeds-and-thank-Mithra-he-types-with-only-the-index-finger-on-that-hand-anyhow.) Come out for a drink and we’ll tell you. If you mix with 7-up or cola, you get cheap Ky bourbon. If you drink it bare, or with water or soda, you’ll get Maker’s Mark and the stories will be painless.
Anyhow, one night we told our friend Bill Hough the hospital story and he didn’t laugh and beam at me as if I were god. Before I could snatch his drink and throw him out, he said:
“Ever think what might’ve happened if they’d called your bluff back?”
I gave Bill another drink and wrote the story next day. It was turned down by Redbook, Satevepost (which immediately went bust), Atlantic, Good House, and the agent I had at that time! Here’s what he said:
“I’m sorry but—and I don’t believe ‘For Value Received’ would make it. It has humor and truth to a point, but it’s against the rules to spoof the medical profession . . .”
So, obviously, this is a dangerous vision. To dwarfs, anyhow. We’re surrounded by them.
Introduction to
“MATHOMS FROM THE TIME CLOSET”
Gene Wolfe is a quiet, mostly amiable man with a sense of humor that has all the gentility of a carnivorous plant. I like and admire him more than I’ve ever told him. He is the author of a so-so novel, Operation Ares, and a horde of short stories that are well into the category labeled brilliant. He lives on Betty Drive in Hamilton, Ohio, the state from which I came; and when I left, Ohio got Gene, as the act of a benevolent God.
During the 1971 Nebula awards in New York, I sat in front of Gene during one of the most painful incidents it has ever been my gut-wrench to witness, and the way Gene reacted to it says much about the man.
Isaac Asimov had been pressed into service at the last moment to read the winners of the Nebulas. Gene was up in the short story category for his extravagantly excellent “The Island of Doctor Death And Other Stories” from Damon Knight’s ORBIT 7 (Gene has appeared nine times in the eight ORBIT collections as of this writing) (thereby attesting to Damon’s perspicacity as an editor) (taught the kid everything he knows, except table manners at banquets) (he throws peanuts and peas). Isaac had not been given sufficient time to study the list, which was handwritten, and he announced Gene as the winner. Gene stood up as the SFWA officers on the platform went pale and hurriedly whispered words to Ike. Ike went pale. Then he announced he’d made an error. There was “no award” in the short story category. Gene sat back down and smiled faintly.
Around him everyone felt the rollercoaster nausea of stomachs dropping out backsides. Had it been me, I would have fainted or screamed or punched Norbert Slepyan of Scribner’s, who was sitting next to me. Gene Wolfe just smiled faintly and tried to make us all feel at ease by a shrug and a gentle nod of his head.
His three short stories in this book mark a departure in my DV policies: when I started assembling stories, I said no one writer would have more than a single story in the series. One shot and that was it. But I bought “Loco Parentis” in 1968, one of my first purchases, at the Milford SF Writers Conference, and the following year when the Conference was held in Madeira Beach, Gene showed up with “Robot’s Story” and “Against the Lafayette Escadrille,” neither of which I could resist. So I bought all three and Gene devised an umbrella overtitle for the group, and it subsequently allowed Bernard Wolfe and James Sallis to sell me more than one. There is simply no defense against a Gene Wolfe story.
For me, his is one of the wildest and richest imaginations in
the genre.
Here is what he says of himself:
“The usual middle class upbringing for kids born, as I was, in the worst of the depression. No brothers or sisters, the family moving around as my father tried to earn a living. (Mostly, he was trying to sell cash registers, God help him.) He was a man who was home only on weekends, and brought me one or two lead soldiers every time he came, until I had a corrugated board box of them so heavy I could not pick it up. If we’re so much richer now, why can’t you buy those lead soldiers anymore?
“My mother was from the deep south (North Carolina) descended through her mother from one of those real Scarlett O’Hara families that lost it all in the Civil War. (Oddly enough, my father’s family also had roots in North Carolina, having come from there north about 1830, and I may be distantly related to Thomas Wolfe.) I remember her taking me to be shown to her parents, and how no one would explain why Grandfather kept those funny chickens that could not be let in with the regular chickens (“Or they’ll kill ’em!”) or the scarred white dog which had to be chained up when there were other dogs around. Grandfather had a wooden leg he kept out in front of him and was as deaf as a stump when he didn’t want to hear you; I wish I could have known him better.
“Something must have happened during my school days, but I mostly remember that it was very hot. I am left-handed, and the chairs had their broad arm on the wrong side. My hands were always sweating and sticking to the paper. I remember that.
“The sports for which I showed some ability, boxing and shooting, were unimportant beside such necessities as basketball. I was good at baseball, except for the parts which involve catching or throwing the ball. In Junior High I acquired a distaste for compulsory athletics which has never deserted me.
“My father, who had little money to spare for sending a son to college (he was operating a food business or a restaurant by this time, I’m not quite sure when the change was made), obtained the promise of a senatorial appointment to West Point for me. Unfortunately by the time I graduated from High School in 1949 there had been a readjustment of the power structure, and the new man, a short-sighted fellow named L. B. Johnson, refused to honor his predecessor’s commitment.
“A few years later I found myself a private in the 7th Infantry Division, attempting to excavate a foxhole with the buttons of my shirt. I had dropped out of Texas A&M, which is a land grant college and something of cross between V.M.I. and Tom Disch’s camp concentration but very cheap if you live in the state, and learned to my sorrow the meaning of ‘student deferment.’ That was the Korean Police Action—remember that?
“The G.I. bill let me return to school at the University of Houston, and I got a B.S.M.E. there in 1956, following which I flew Texas, something I sometimes regret. I still hold the job I took when I graduated—that is to say, I’m working for the same employer, but since the job is Research and Development things change almost from month to month.
“I have a wife and four children. They seem like more.”
MATHOMS FROM THE TIME CLOSET
By Gene Wolfe
1: Robot’s Story
It’s a cold night, and the wind comes in so there’s no inside, only two outsides: the one there where it howls up from the river, and the one in here—a little more sheltered, a little warmed by our breath. Che’s poster flutters on the wall as though he’s trying to talk; the kids would say “rap.”
The kids are the older ones, three sitting crosslegged on Candy’s mattress. (That’s the Chillicothe Candy: there are fifty others up and down Calhoun Street.) The kids are the younger ones, runaways: two virgin (or nearly) girl groupies, and a thin, sad boy who never talks. The kids are Robot, who has been down the hall where the plumbing works (it is stopped up here) and comes in, step, step, step, thinking about each move his legs make.
I’ve talked to Robot more than to any of the others because he is (perhaps) the least hostile and the most interesting. Robot is about nineteen, very tall, with a round, small head and a shock of black hair. Robot was custom-built, he tells me, in the thirty-third century to be the servant of an ugly woman who lived in a house floating on nothingness. Whenever Robot feels depressed he says: “I don’t know how good I was made. Maybe I’m going to work for a thousand years; maybe I’m more than half used up already.”
Robot says he is five. He escaped, or so he once told me, by spinning the dials of the ugly woman’s time closet and stepping in while they were still in motion. This, as he explains, was to prevent his whenabouts (emphasized by his voice so that I’ll notice the word) becoming known; but he had hoped to arrive in the thirteenth century B.C., a period which exercises a fascination for him.
Candy and the two boys with her ignore him, and after watching them for a moment he sits on the floor with the groupies (self-proclaimed) and the sad-faced boy and me. The boy is almost asleep, but to get Robot talking I ask, “Don’t you wish you were back now, Robot?”
He shakes his head. “This is better. That was a drag all the time.” He thinks for a moment, then asks, “Do you mind if I tell a story?” I tell him to go ahead, and so do the groupies, but he still hesitates. “You don’t mind? I’m programmed for them, and there wasn’t anyone who would listen there, so I never got to get them out. When I get them out they’re checked off, you know? It’s kind of like being constipated.”
The sad boy says, “Go on.” This, I think, is what Robot has been waiting for.
“This is a fairy story,” Robot begins. “It goes way back to the days when the little one-man scout ships went out from here in every direction looking for habitable spheres, scattering like sperm from semen dropped in the sea.”
I had not known Robot possessed such a strain of eloquence, and I look closely at him. His eyes are staring straight ahead and his mouth is a round O, the way he holds it when he is pretending there is a speaker in his throat.
“Those days continued for many, many years, you must understand. And every year the ships left in tens or hundreds—up toward the pole star; out like spokes around the sun; down past the Southern Cross. This is about one of the ships that went down.
“It dropped for years, but it didn’t count years. The pilot was asleep, and in a hundred days he would breathe three times. In a year, maybe, he would turn over and then plastic hands would come out of the wall and turn him right again. The ship woke him up when they had gotten somewhere.
“He woke up, and it knew he had forgotten almost everything except what he’d been dreaming of, so it explained it all to him while it rubbed him and gave him something to eat. When it was finished he thought, ‘What a tourist I was to let them talk me into this.’ Then he got up to see what this world he found was.
“It wasn’t anything special; as near as he could see mostly high grass—higher than your head. He landed and the air was all right and he got out and did all the things he was supposed to do, but there was really nothing there but all this grass.”
(I wondered if the “grass” in the story was an unconscious reflection of the kids’ obsession with marijuana; or if for Robot as for Whitman it represented the obliterations of time.)
