A large anthology of sci.., p.271
A Large Anthology of Science Fiction, page 271
“You can tell me now if you like, Joe,” said Julie, slipping her slim feet back into her shoes.
“Come on, Julie,” said Joe, helping her erect. “Let’s take a look around from all four sides while I get up enough nerve to speak.”
Together they examined the city which was bathed in silvery moonlight. But there was no flicker or beam of any other sort. They were still completely alone in a deserted world. The wind was freshening and becoming gusty.
As they leaned against the rail and lighted cigarettes Joe put his arm around Julie and drew her close. She snuggled up next to him, and he thought he detected a faint shudder. The same thought was going through his own head. It was no use pretending or hoping any further. They were the last two persons on Earth.
CAREFULLY Joe took the final drag on his cigarette and flicked it out into space. Silently they watched it curve outward and then fall downward like a tiny meteor. The wind caught it and swept it against the building and out of sight.
“Look, Joe!” exclaimed Julie, pointing southward. “Lightning. A storm is approaching. And that’s where the other storm came from. Remember?”
“Yes, I do,” said Joe shakily. “It’s already spattering rain.”
He drew the girl close to him and she raised her face to meet his eyes. There was no fear in her features now.
“I love you, babe,” whispered Joe. And he kissed her just as there was a tremendous clap of thunder . . .
In a vast room of indefinable shape, surrounded by nebulous glimmerings of busy machinery and suffused with light from an indeterminable source, three manlike figures gathered in conference around a huge desk. Beyond them was something akin to a door which was open and on Which was the glowing sign:
THE UNIVERSE MASTER
Bookkeeping Department
Through the door could be glimpsed rows and rows of desks which stretched for miles. On each desk was a large, shiny, complicated looking adding machine. On the side of each desk was a tray filled with cards. The operators, all dressed alike and immobile of face, fed the cards into their machines, pushed buttons and pulled levers with deft speed.
But there was no sound. Even the supervisors made no sound as they walked along the aisles to pick up the tally sheets pouring from the machines and fed them into overhead pneumatic tubes which conveyed them to a giant machine at the near end of this gigantic room.
At first glance the colossal machine looked like an over-sized newspaper press. A second glance showed that it was a super-adding machine—an adding machine to end all adding machines. Atop this unbelievable pile of equipment which was more than five stories tall, a row of digits which ran into some sixty figures was constantly changing, increasing the growing total.
In the mistily outlined office the first man was speaking. He was highly annoyed.
“I don’t want to hear any more about these so-called efficient machines. They are no good. Here we are working overtime for the seventh straight night, and still we can’t balance the books. You, Fletcher!” And he pointed his finger at a tall and gloomy-faced individual. “You talked me into installing this machine business—this system.
“I have been closing out planets for the Universe Master for eons with good, simple, old-fashioned astral buttons—and never one bit of trouble. And the first time we try this efficiency method of yours, we can’t strike a balance. If the total doesn’t come out right on this run, we are going to junk all this stuff and go back to the old method.”
Fletcher looked woebegone. “I am sorry, sir. I simply can’t understand what has gone wrong. You called me back from a very important way-station in the Arcturus System. How much, may I ask, are we off tally? Did you deduct for the number of special deputy agents I listed?”
For the first time the third man spoke. He was apparently in charge of this particular department.
“Certainly,” he snorted. “We do not make such elemental errors in this division, Fletcher.” He went on to say their books showed a total balance of 7,768,984,435 homo sapiens, but that their pick-up showed only 7,768,984,433. “We are two short,” he continued. “It isn’t much, but we cannot close the books until they balance.”
JUST then a fourth man came striding hastily into the office. He was carrying two cards in his hand.
“As per your orders, sir,” he addressed the boss, “I started the Solar machinery once more to check the entire mechanism. Some stray pair might possibly have got away on an experimental rocket flight. But I think I found the trouble more simply. One of the operators found these two cards clipped together in the back of file box NY Seven-three-one-four. I think that is the file for a place called New York.”
The boss took the two cards and read aloud. “Joseph Gordon Dunn, Three thirty-four East Fifty-third Street, New York City, U.S.A., Earth. Julia Marguerite Crosby, Twenty-two Grove Street, New York City, U.S.A., Earth.”
“Of course!” exclaimed Fletcher, beaming. “That’s the pair of humans I put at the foot of my list as alternate deputies. I made a notation to that effect in my report.”
“Well,” rumbled the boss, slightly mollified, “they had no business getting lost. Go get them, Fletcher, and place them in the active deputy file, and then you can return to your Arcturus survey. We will close the Earth account at once. And get rid of those infernal machines. They’re a confounded nuisance. I could close out an entire galaxy with an abacus . . .”
So, there was a loud clap of thunder just as Joe Dunn kissed Julie Crosby. And then, suddenly, the wind and storm froze into rigid silence. There was nothing left on the top of the R.C.A. Building to cast a human shadow.
1945
THE PIPER’S SON
C.L. Moore
It’d be wonderful to belong to a race of telepaths, able to read the minds of your neighbors! It would—maybe. But it would be more apt to be a hell, with every nontelepath hating you.
The Green Man was climbing the glass mountains, and hairy, gnomish faces peered at him from crevices. This was only another step in the Green Man’s endless, exciting odyssey. He’d had a great many adventures already—in the Flame Country, among the Dimension Changers, with the City Apes who sneered endlessly while their blunt, clumsy fingers fumbled at deathrays. The trolls, however, were masters of magic, and were trying to stop the Green Man with spells. Little whirlwinds of force spun underfoot, trying to trip the Green Man, a figure of marvelous muscular development, handsome as a god, and hairless from head to foot, glistening pale green. The whirlwinds formed a fascinating pattern. If you could thread a precarious path among them—avoiding the pale yellow ones especially—you could get through.
And the hairy gnomes watched malignantly, jealously, from their crannies in the glass crags.
Al Burkhalter, having recently achieved the mature status of eight full years, lounged under a tree and masticated a grass blade. He was so immersed in his daydreams that his father had to nudge his side gently to bring comprehension into the half-closed eyes. It was a good day for dreaming, anyway—a hot sun and a cool wind blowing down from the white Sierra peaks to the east. Timothy grass sent its faintly musty fragrance along the channels of air, and Ed Burkhalter was glad that his son was second-generation since the Blowup. He himself had been born ten years after the last bomb had been dropped, but secondhand memories can be pretty bad too.
“Hello, Al,” he said, and the youth vouchsafed a half-lidded glance of tolerant acceptance.
“Hi, Dad.”
“Want to come downtown with me?”
“Nope,” Al said, relaxing instantly into his stupor.
Burkhalter raised a figurative eyebrow and half turned. On an impulse, then, he did something he rarely did without the tacit permission of the other party; he used his telepathic power to reach into Al’s mind. There was, he admitted to himself, a certain hesitancy, a subconscious unwillingness on his part, to do this, even though Al had pretty well outgrown the nasty, inhuman formlessness of mental babyhood. There had been a time when Al’s mind had been quite shocking in its alienage. Burkhalter remembered a few abortive experiments he had made before Al’s birth; few fathers-to-be could resist the temptation to experiment with embryonic brains, and that had brought back nightmares Burkhalter had not had since his youth. There had been enormous rolling masses, and an appalling vastness, and other things. Prenatal memories were ticklish, and should be left to qualified mnemonic psychologists.
But now Al was maturing, and daydreaming, as usual, in bright colors. Burkhalter, reassured, felt that he had fulfilled his duty as a monitor and left his son still eating grass and ruminating.
Just the same, there was a sudden softness inside of him, and the aching, futile pity he was apt to feel for helpless things that were as yet unqualified for conflict with that extraordinarily complicated business of living. Conflict, competition, had not died out when war abolished itself; the business, of adjustment even to one’s surroundings was a conflict, and conversation a duel. With Al, too, there was a double problem. Yes, language was in effect a tariff wall, and a Baldy could appreciate that thoroughly, since the wall didn’t exist between Baldies.
Walking down the rubbery walk that led to town center, Burkhalter grinned wryly and ran lean fingers through his well-kept wig. Strangers were very often surprised to know that he was a Baldy, a telepath. They looked at him with wondering eyes, too courteous to ask how it felt to be a freak, but obviously avid. Burkhalter, who knew diplomacy, would be quite willing to lead the conversation.
“My folks lived near Chicago after the Blowup. That was why.”
“Oh.” Stare. “I’d heard that was why so many—” Startled pause.
“Freaks or mutations. There were both. I still don’t know which class I belong to,” he’d add disarmingly.
“You’re no freak!” They’d didn’t protest too much.
“Well, some mighty queer specimens came out of the radioactive-affected areas around the bomb-targets. Funny things happened to the germ plasm. Most of ’em died out; they couldn’t reproduce; but you’ll still find a few creatures in sanitariums—two heads, you know. And so on.”
Nevertheless they were always ill-at-ease. “You mean you can read my mind—now?”
“I could, but I’m not. It’s hard work, except with another telepath. And we Baldies—well, we don’t, that’s all.” A man with abnormal muscle development wouldn’t go around knocking people down. Not unless he wanted to be mobbed. Baldies were always sneakingly conscious of a hidden peril: lynch law. And wise Baldies didn’t even imply that they had an . . . extra sense. They just said they were different, and let it go at that.
But one question was always implied, though not always mentioned. “If I were a telepath, I’d . . . how much do you make a year?”
They were surprised at the answer. A mindreader certainly could make a fortune, if he wanted. So why did Ed Burkhalter stay a semantics expert in Modoc Publishing Town, when a trip to one of the science towns would enable him to get hold of secrets that would, get him a fortune?
There was a good reason. Self-preservation was a part of it. For which reason Burkhalter, and many like him, wore toupees. Though there were many Baldies who did not.
Modoc was a twin town with Pueblo, across the mountain barrier south of the waste that had been Denver. Pueblo held the presses, photolinotypes, and the machines that turned scripts into books, after Modoc had dealt with them. There was a helicopter distribution fleet at Pueblo, and for the last week Oldfield, the manager, had been demanding the manuscript of “Psychohistory,” turned out by a New Yale man who had got tremendously involved in past emotional problems, to the detriment of literary clarity. The truth was that he distrusted Burkhalter. And Burkhalter, neither a priest nor a psychologist, had to become both without admitting it to the confused author of “Psychohistory.”
The sprawling buildings of the publishing house lay ahead and below, more like a resort than anything more utilitarian. That had been necessary. Authors were peculiar people, and often it was necessary to induce them to take hydrotherapic treatments before they were in shape to work out their books with the semantic experts. Nobody was going to bite them, but they didn’t realize that, and either cowered in corners, terrified, or else blustered their way around, using language few could understand. Jem Quayle, author of “Psychohistory,” fitted into neither group; he was simply baffled by the intensity of his own research. His personal history had qualified him too well for emotional involvements with the past—and that was a serious matter when a thesis of this particular type was in progress.
Dr. Moon, who was on the Board, sat near the south entrance, eating an apple which he peeled carefully with his silver-hilted dagger. Moon was fat, short, and shapeless; he didn’t have much hair, but he wasn’t a telepath; Baldies were entirely hairless. He gulped and waved at Burkhalter.
“Ed . . . urp . . . want to talk to you.”
“Sure,” Burkhalter said, agreeably coming to a standstill and rocking on his heels. Ingrained habit made him sit down beside the Boardman; Baldies, for obvious reasons, never stood up when nontelepaths were sitting. Their eyes met now on the same level. Burkhalter said, “What’s up?”
“The store got some Shasta apples flown in yesterday. Better tell Ethel to get some before they’re sold out. Here.” Moon watched his companion eat a chunk, and nod.
“Good. I’ll have her get some. The copter’s laid up for today, though; Ethel pulled the wrong gadget.”
“Foolproof,” Moon said bitterly. “Huron’s turning out some sweet models these days; I’m getting my new one from Michigan. Listen, Pueblo called me this morning on Quayle’s book.”
“Oldfield?”
“Our boy,” Moon nodded. “He says can’t you send over even a few chapters.”
Burkhalter shook his head. “I don’t think so. There are some abstracts right in the beginning that just have to be clarified, and Quayle is—” He hesitated.
“What?”
Burkhalter thought about the Edoepus complex he’d uncovered in Quayle’s mind, but that was sancrosanct, even though it kept Quayle from interpreting Darius with cold logic. “He’s got muddy thinking in there. I can’t pass it; I tried it on three readers yesterday, and got different reactions from all of them. So far ‘Psychohistory’ is all things to all men. The critics would lambaste us if we released the book as is. Can’t you string Oldfield along for a while longer?”
“Maybe,” Moon said doubtfully. “I’ve got a subjective novella I could rush over. It’s light vicarious eroticism, and that’s harmless; besides, it’s semantically O.K.’d. We’ve been holding it up for an artist, but I can put Duman on it. I’ll do that, yeah. I’ll shoot the script over to Pueblo and he can make the plates later. A merry life we lead, Ed.”
“A little too merry sometimes,” Burkhalter said. He got up, nodded, and went in search of Quayle, who was relaxing on one of the sun decks.
Quayle was a thin, tall man with a worried face and the abstract air of an unshelled tortoise. He lay on his flexiglass couch, direct sunlight toasting him from above, while the reflected rays sneaked up on him from below, through the transparent crystal. Burkhalter pulled off his shirt and dropped on a sunner beside Quayle. The author glanced at Burkhalter’s hairless chest and half-formed revulsion rose in him: A Baldy . . . no privacy . . . none of his business . . . fake eyebrows and lashes; he’s still a—
Something ugly, at that point.
Diplomatically Burkhalter touched a button, and on a screen overhead a page of “Psychohistory” appeared, enlarged and easily readable. Quayle scanned the sheet. It had code notations on it, made by the readers, recognized by Burkhalter as varied reactions to what should have been straight-line explanations. If three readers had got three different meanings out of that paragraph—well, what did Quayle mean? He reached delicately into the mind, conscious of useless guards erected against intrusion, mud barricades over which his mental eye stole like a searching, quiet wind. No ordinary man could guard his mind against a Baldy. But Baldies could guard their privacy against intrusion by other telepaths—adults, that is. There was a psychic selector band, a—
Here it came. But muddled a bit. Darius: that wasn’t simply a word; it wasn’t a picture, either; it was really a second life. But scattered, fragmentary. Scraps of scent and sound, and memories, and emotional reactions. Admiration and hatred. A burning impotence. A black tornado, smelling of pine, roaring across a map of Europe and Asia. Pine scent stronger now, and horrible humiliation, and remembered pain . . . eyes . . . Get out!
Burkhalter put down the dictograph mouthpiece and lay looking up through the darkened eye-shells he had donned. “I got out as soon as you wanted me to,” he said. “I’m still out.”
Quayle lay there, breathing hard. “Thanks,” he said. “Apologies. Why you don’t ask a duello—”
“I don’t want to duel with you,” Burkhalter said. “I’ve never put blood on my dagger in my life. Besides, I can see your side of it. Remember, this is my job, Mr. Quayle, and I’ve learned a lot of things—that I’ve forgotten again.”
“It’s intrusion, I suppose. I tell myself that it doesn’t matter, but my privacy—is important.”
Burkhalter said patiently, “We can keep trying it from different angles until we find one that isn’t too private. Suppose, for example, I asked you if you admired Darius.” Admiration . . . and pine scent . . . and Burkhalter said quickly, “I’m out. O.K.?”
“Thanks,” Quayle muttered. He turned on his side, away from the other man. After a moment he said, “That’s silly—turning over, I mean. You don’t have to see my face to know what I’m thinking.”
“You have to put out the welcome mat before I. walk in,” Burkhalter told him.
“I guess I believe that. I’ve met some Baldies, though, that were . . . that I didn’t like.”
“There’s a lot on that order, sure. I know the type. The ones who don’t wear wigs.”
