Star Science Fiction Stories No. 2 Read online

  Star Science Fiction 2

  Edited By Frederik Pohl

  Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

  Contents

  Disappearing Act by Alfred Bester

  The Clinic by Theodore Sturgeon

  The Congruent People by A. J. Budrys

  Critical Factor by Hal Clement

  It’s a Good Life by Jerome Bixby

  A Pound of Cure by Lester del Rey

  The Purple Fields by Robert Crane

  FYI by James Blish

  Conquest by Anthony Boucher

  Hormones by Fletcher Pratt

  The Odor of Thought by Robert Sheckley

  The Happiest Creature by Jack Williamson

  The Remorseful by C. M. Kornbluth

  Friend of the Family by Richard Wilson

  Editor’s Note

  One of the pleasures (there are many) of making a living out of science fiction is this: You get to read so many good stories. This, it is true, was not always so. There was a time when science fiction wore many of the trappings of a cult, and a small one at that; its readers were a devoted but tiny handful; its writers were mostly young and almost invariably amateur, and about as soon as they had begun to acquire skill enough to tell a story really well, they abandoned science fiction in favor of “serious” work. Some, like Nathan Schachner (whose brilliant biographies belong in every library), seem lost to us forever; others, happily, have come back. (Witness such repatriates as Kuttner and Kornbluth, who effectively gave up science fiction in order to produce pace-setting mysteries and detective stories; or Fletcher Pratt, who took a prolonged recess to create some of the finest short histories around; or Murray Leinster and John Wyndham, who spent their sabbaticals in the “slick” magazines.)

  It was a hard time for science-fiction editors. After reading enormous quantities of what can only be called drivel they might be fortunate enough to find one flickering gleam of talent; by the time it was fanned into flame, they could rely on the conviction that it would be illuminating some other field of writing.

  But now—praise be to Klono, brazen god of spacemen!— things are different. Editors still find talent flickering in the mass of unsolicited material, and the writers who show it still develop their powers from weak beginnings to a solid capacity for serious work. But now they don’t have to go afield to do it; when they are ready for serious work, they do it right in the science-fiction field.

  And they do it very well—as I hope you will agree when you have read the fourteen new stories that follow. Most of the top-ranking writers in science fiction permitted your editor to read their newest and best work to make this selection, not one story of which has ever appeared in print before, and my deepest regret is that we hadn’t space to include twice as many stories as are here presented.

  To the fourteen writers represented, and to the many others who could not be fitted in, sincere thanks are due from,,,

  Frederik Pohl

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  * * * *

  ALFRED BESTER

  When the science-fiction readers assembled in convention last year in Philadelphia, a ballot was held to select the best science-fiction magazine, best short story and best novel in the field for the year 1953. Some of the voting was close; in one case, at least, so close that duplicate prizes were awarded. But in the “Best Novel” category only one book counted: The Demolished Man, a brilliant trail-blazing job by Alfred Bester, which won the award in a walk. Playwright and radio-scripter as well as novelist, the energetic Mr. Bester demonstrates to any doubters that he is master of the short-story form as well with-

  Disappearing Act

  This one wasn’t the last war or a war to end war. They called it the War for the American Dream. General Carpenter struck that note and sounded it constantly. There are fighting generals (vital to an army), political generals (vital to an administration), and public relations generals (vital to a war). General Carpenter was a master of public relations. Forthright and FourSquare, he had ideals as high and as understandable as the mottoes on money. In the mind of America he was the army, the administration, the nation’s shield and sword and stout right arm. His ideal was the American Dream.

  “We are not fighting for money, for power, or for world domination,” General Carpenter announced at the Press Association dinner.

  “We are fighting solely for the American Dream,” he said to the 137th Congress.

  “Our aim is not aggression or the reduction of nations to slavery,” he said at the West Point Annual Officer’s Dinner.

  “We are fighting for the meaning of civilization,” he told the San Francisco Pioneers’ Club.

  “We are struggling for the ideal of civilization; for culture, for poetry, for the Only Things Worth Preserving,” he said at the Chicago Wheat Pit Festival.

  “This is a war for survival,” he said. “We are not fighting for ourselves, but for our dreams; for the Better Things in Life which must not disappear from the face of the earth.”

  America fought. General Carpenter asked for one hundred million men. The army was given one hundred million men. General Carpenter asked for ten thousand H-Bombs. Ten thousand H-Bombs were delivered and dropped. The enemy also dropped ten thousand H-Bombs and destroyed most of America’s cities.

  “We must dig in against the hordes of barbarism,” General Carpenter said. “Give me a thousand engineers.”

  One thousand engineers were forthcoming, and a hundred cities were dug and hollowed out beneath the rubble.

  “Give me five hundred sanitation experts, three hundred traffic managers, two hundred air-conditioning experts, one hundred city managers, one thousand communication chiefs, seven hundred personnel experts. . .”

  The list of General Carpenter’s demand for technical experts was endless. America did not know how to supply them.

  “We must become a nation of experts,” General Carpenter informed the National Association of American Universities. “Every man and woman must be a specific tool for a specific job, hardened and sharpened by your training and education to win the fight for the American Dream.”

  “Our Dream,” General Carpenter said at the Wall Street Bond Drive Breakfast, “is at one with the gentle Greeks of Athens, with the noble Romans of . . . er Rome. It is a dream of the Better Things in Life. Of music and art and poetry and culture. Money is only a weapon to be used in the fight for this dream. Ambition is only a ladder to climb to this dream. Ability is only a tool to shape this dream.”

  Wall Street applauded. General Carpenter asked for one hundred and fifty billion dollars, fifteen hundred ambitious dollar-a-year men, three thousand able experts in mineralogy, petrology, mass production, chemical warfare and air-traffic time study. They were delivered. The country was in high gear. General Carpenter had only to press a button and an expert would be delivered.

  In March of A.D. 2112 the war came to a climax and the American Dream was resolved, not on any one of the seven fronts where millions of men were locked in bitter combat, not in any of the staff headquarters or any of the capitals of the warring nations, not in any of the production centers spewing forth arms and supplies, but in Ward T of the United States Army Hospital buried three hundred feet below what had once been St. Albans, New York.

  Ward T was something of a mystery at St. Albans. Like any army hospital, St. Albans was organized with specific wards reserved for specific injuries. All right arm amputees were gathered in one ward, all left arm amputees in another. Radiation burns, head injuries, eviscerations, secondary gamma poisonings and so on were each assigned their specific location in the hospital organization. The Army Medical Corps had designated nineteen classes of combat injury which included every
possible kind of damage to brain and tissue. These used up letters A to S. What, then, was in Ward T?

  No one knew. The doors were double locked. No visitors were permitted to enter. No patients were permitted to leave. Physicians were seen to arrive and depart. Their perplexed expressions stimulated the wildest speculations but revealed nothing. The nurses who ministered to Ward T were questioned eagerly but they were close-mouthed.

  There were dribs and drabs of information, unsatisfying and self-contradictory. A charwoman asserted that she had been in to clean up and there had been no one in the ward. Absolutely no one. Just two dozen beds and nothing else. Had the beds been slept in? Yes. They were rumpled, some of them. Were there signs of the ward being in use? Oh yes. Personal things on the tables and so on. But dusty, kind of. Like they hadn’t been used in a long time.

  Public opinion decided it was a ghost ward. For spooks only.

  But a night orderly reported passing the locked ward and hearing singing from within. What kind of singing? Foreign language, like. What language? The orderly couldn’t say. Some of the words sounded like ... well, like: Cow dee on us eager tour.

  Public opinion started to run a fever and decided it was an alien ward. For spies only.

  St. Albans enlisted the help of the kitchen staff and checked the food trays. Twenty-four trays went in to Ward T three times a day. Twenty-four came out. Sometimes the returning trays were emptied. Most times they were untouched.

  Public opinion built up pressure and decided that Ward T was a racket. It was an informal club for goldbricks and staff grafters who caroused within. Cow de on us eager tour indeed!

  For gossip, a hospital can put a small town sewing circle to shame with ease, but sick people are easily goaded into passion by trivia. It took just three months for idle speculation to turn into downright fury. In January, 2112, St. Albans was a sound, well-run hospital. By March, 2112, St. Albans was in a ferment, and the psychological unrest found its way into the official records. The percentage of recoveries fell off. Malingering set in. Petty infractions increased. Mutinies flared. There was a staff shake-up. It did no good. Ward T was inciting the patients to riot. There was another shake-up, and another, and still the unrest fumed.

  The news finally reached General Carpenter’s desk through official channels.

  “In our fight for the American Dream,” he said, “we must not ignore those who have already given of themselves. Send me a Hospital Administration expert.” The expert was delivered. He could do nothing to heal St. Albans. General Carpenter read the reports and broke him.

  “Pity,” said General Carpenter, “is the first ingredient of civilization. Send me a Surgeon General.”

  A Surgeon General was delivered. He could not break the fury of St. Albans and General Carpenter broke him. But by this time Ward T was being mentioned in the dispatches.

  “Send me,” General Carpenter said, “the expert in charge of Ward T.”

  St. Albans sent a doctor, Captain Edsel Dimmock. He was a stout young man, already bald, only three years out of medical school but with a fine record as an expert in psychotherapy. General Carpenter liked experts. He liked Dimmock. Dimmock adored the general as the spokesman for a culture which he had been too specially trained to seek up to now, but which he hoped to enjoy after the war was won.

  “Now look here, Dimmock,” General Carpenter began. “We’re all of us tools, today—sharpened and hardened to do a specific job. You know our motto: A job for everyone and everyone on the job. Somebody’s not on the job at Ward T and we’ve got to kick him Out. Now, in the first place, what the hell is Ward T?”

  Dimmock stuttered and fumbled. Finally he explained that it was a special ward set up for special combat cases. Shock cases.

  “Then you do have patients in the ward?”

  “Yes, sir. Ten women and fourteen men.”

  Carpenter brandished a sheaf of reports. “Says here the St. Albans patients claim nobody’s in Ward T.”

  Dimmock was shocked. That was untrue, he assured the general.

  “All right, Dimmock. So you’ve got your twenty-four crocks in there. Their job’s to get well. Your job’s to cure them. What the hell’s upsetting the hospital about that?”

  “W-Well, sir. Perhaps it’s because we keep them locked up.”

  “You keep Ward T locked?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why?”

  “To keep the patients in, General Carpenter.”

  “Keep ‘em in? What d’you mean? Are they trying to get out? They violent, or something?”

  “No, sir. Not violent.”

  “Diinmock, I don’t like your attitude. You’re acting damned sneaky and evasive. And I’ll tell you something else I don’t like. That T classification. I checked with a Filing Expert from the Medical Corps and there is no T classification. What the hell are you up to at St. Albans?”

  “W-Well, sir. . . We invented the T classification. It … They ... They’re rather special cases, sir. We don’t know what to do about them or how to handle them. W-We’ve been trying to keep it quiet until we’ve worked out a modus operandi, but it’s brand new, General Carpenter. Brand new!” Here the expert in Dinimock triumphed over discipline. “It’s sensational. It’ll make medical history, by God! It’s the biggest damned thing ever.”

  “What is it, Dimmock? Be specific.”

  “Well, sir, they’re shock cases. Blanked out. Almost catatonic. Very little respiration. Slow pulse. No response.”

  “I’ve seen thousands of shock cases like that,” Carpenter grunted. “What’s so unusual?”

  “Yes, sir. So far it sounds like the standard Q or R classification. But here’s something unusual. They don’t eat and they don’t sleep.”

  “Never?”

  “Some of them never.”

  “Then why don’t they die?”

  “We don’t know. The metabolism cycle’s broken, but only on the anabolism side. Catabolism continues. In other words, sir, they’re eliminating waste products but they’re not taking anything in. They’re eliminating fatigue poisons and rebuilding worn tissue, but without sleep. God knows how. It’s fantastic.”

  “That why you’ve got them locked up? Mean to say... D’you suspect them of stealing food and cat naps somewhere else?”

  “N-No, sir.” Dimmock looked shamefaced. “I don’t know how to tell you this, General Carpenter. I. . . We lock them up because of the real mystery. They. . . Well, they disappear.”

  “They what?”

  “They disappear, sir. Vanish. Right before your eyes.”

  “The hell you say.”

  “I do say, sir. They’ll be sitting on a bed or standing around. One minute you see them, the next minute you don’t. Sometimes there’s two dozen in Ward T. Other times none. They disappear and reappear without rhyme or reason. That’s why we’ve got the ward locked, General Carpenter. In the entire history of combat and combat injury there’s never been a case like this before. We don’t know how to handle it.”

  “Bring me three of those cases,” General Carpenter said.

  Nathan Riley ate French toast, eggs benedict; consumed two quarts of brown ale, smoked a John Drew, belched delicately and arose from the breakfast table. He nodded quietly to Gentleman Jim Corbett, who broke off his conversation with Diamond Jim Brady to intercept him on the way to the cashier’s desk.

  “Who do you like for the pennant this year, Nat?” Gentleman Jim inquired.

  “The Dodgers,” Nathan Riley answered.

  “They’ve got no pitching.”

  “They’ve got Snider and Furillo and Campanella. They’ll take the pennant this year, Jim. I’ll bet they take it earlier than any team ever did. By September 13th. Make a note. See if I’m right.”

  “You’re always right, Nat,” Corbett said.

  Riley smiled, paid his check, sauntered out into the street and caught a horsecar bound for Madison Square Garden. He got off at the corner of 50th and Eighth Avenue and walked ups
tairs to a handbook office over a radio repair shop. The bookie glanced at him, produced an envelope and counted out fifteen thousand dollars.

  “Rocky Marciano by a TKO over Roland La Starza in the eleventh,” he said. “How the hell do you call them so accurate, Nat?”

  “That’s the way I make a living,” Riley smiled. “Are you making book on the elections?”

  “Eisenhower twelve to five. Stevenson—”

  “Never mind Adlai.” Riley placed twenty thousand dollars on the counter. “I’m backing Ike. Get this down for me.”

  He left the handbook office and went to his suite in the Waldorf where a tall, thin young man was waiting for him anxiously.