Damon Knight - Orbit 16

Friedriche is sitting in the sand. He has finished Sandial and it has left a warm glow behind it. Barely breathing, he is afraid to hasten the inevitable end of the spell. He looks at the book fondly, and considers rereading it. Looking up from page one, he sees a figure on the horizon.

Henderson sits; page 605 is the top of the highest ridge for a mile in any direction. The ocean can be faintly heard. He wonders that the sound fades at all in the silence. The sun sets at his back. He closes the book on his index finger and scans for sand lizards. Looking behind him, he notes his own footprints, undisturbed since the previous night. Squinting, he sees a dark figure on the dunes yet ahead of him.

An hourglass has the seductive shape of a houri; the great erotic hips, the parabolic breasts, the slim waist. Sand and its transparent son join in the hollow algebraic shape. The discontinuous crystalline grains and the smooth, unit, amorph. They join, and together take the measure of infinity.

They get up.

Termites will destroy the foundation of the Taj Mahal and it was the rats that killed off the dinosaurs by eating their feet.

—W. C. Fields

Our Own Correspondence Corner

After looking at the cover on the March issue, I am weak and wobbly. It is the best that Wesso has painted by far.

I only read “Poisoned Air” because it was in a.s. “The Affair of the Brains” was good. “Vampires of Space”—what else could you expect?—swell, of course. “The Hammer of Thor” was just another doom-of-the-world bunk-bunk.

Yours till space ships drink milk.

James Blish

4250 Kenwood Ave.

Chicago, 111.

—Astounding Stories , September 1932

Here is an announcement of great value: For a long time our fair magazines have been defiled, and now the spwsstfm has been organized to combat the evil.

Our society needs your help. If you are in sympathy with our great cause, drop me a post card, giving your full name and address.

The society (Society for the Prevention of Wire Staples in STF Magazines) is bound to wield power among publishers and editors with your help. Every one—readers, authors and printers— is invited to join this campaign. Our motto is: PULL THE WIRE STAPLES OUT OF STF MAGAZINES!

Drop us a card now!

Bob Tucker

P.O. Box 260

Bloomington, Illinois

—Astounding Stories , November 1934

According to Einstein, the mass of a body increases with its speed until at the speed of light that mass, no matter how small originally, is infinite. Now it seems to me that this rule should apply to light itself which HAS mass (as is evidenced by the fact that a ray of light will bend in obedience to a strong gravitational field such as that of the sun). This mass should, at light’s speed, be infinite. Consequently, the inertia of a beam of light should be infinite.

Now an object with an inertia amounting to infinity could not be affected by any conceivable force. If at rest, it could never be moved. And if already moving—as is the beam of light under question—it could neither be stopped nor turned from its path. Yet light can be stopped by a piece of tissue paper. How can you explain this paradox?

Isaac Asimov

174 Windsor Place

Brooklyn, New York

—Astounding Stories, December 1937

And her left ear was a plumber’s friend: gurgle, slurp, tiddly-urn-turn, blork!

She might have been just twenty years old, with the look of womanhood just settling into her features. Her hair was light brown, streaming rebelliously down her back. Her eyes were siphons, greedily sucking in all around her. Her nose and mouth were music in counterpoint . . .

—”Of Love, Free Will and Grey

Squirrels on a Summer Evening,”

by Stephen Goldin, Vertex,

August 1974

Whom, Heem?

She lifted away some of her shining hair and revealed an ear which had obviously been designed by whomever it is that holds the patent on the chambered nautilus.

—”Agnes, Accent and Access,”

by Theodore Sturgeon, Galaxy,

October 1973

He put out feelers to some leading socialists whom, he thought, might be induced to join the Fabians . . .

—H. G. Wells , by Norman and

Jean MacKenzie (Simon and

Schuster, 1973)

Academic Humor Department (Division of Near Things)

Just as genetic differences at particular loci are not sufficient to indicate racial differences, similarities for particular gene frequencies between two populations does not necessarily indicate racial identity. An apt illustration of this is found in the tests performed by Fisher, Ford and Huxley to detect PTC tasting among the chimpanzees of the London zoo. As with humans, this ability in chimpanzees is a genetically determined characteristic, and can be measured by observing their reaction to a PTC solution; the nontasters swallow the solution and the tasters spit it out. Remarkably, the frequencies of nontasters among the chimpanzees were found to be similar to the frequencies of nontasters among Englishmen. Of course, Englishmen and chimpanzees differ in other respects!

—Genetics , by Monroe W. Strickberger

Crazy Like a Foux, etc.

“If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, I think you’re foux —crazy,” the mathematician interrupted in a voice that was only half jesting.

—Sledgehammer , by Walter Wager

On another level, it is fantasy with the inherent appeal of all fantasy, with drugs forming the deux ex machina.

—”Science Fiction: Above the

Human Landscape,” by Willis E.

McNelly, Edge, Autumn-Winter 1973

No, But Our Mother Was a Mez-cohen

Abruptly they started as a great section in the wall swung outward. Five strange things came out, warily, watchfully. They were tall, taller than Jan, nearly seven feet tall, and their bodies were small in the abdomen, and large in the chest. Their limbs were long and straight, and seemed more jointed than human limbs, but they were covered with cloths, as the Gaht-men covered themselves in the ceremonies, only these were finer cloths. . . .

“Who are you?” asked Meg, her voice soft and silvery in Jan’s ears. The five made no direct answer. Only the leader said something in a strange way, like the Mez-kahns—the brown men from the south—something Jan could not understand.

“You aren’t Mez-kahns?” asked Meg doubtfully.

—”The Invaders,” by Don A. Stuart

(John W. Campbell, Jr.), Astounding

Stories, June 1935

Or If Not Quite, Almost

Like an evanescent mote in a beam of sunshine, they vanished into the illimitable inane.

—”Lost in the Dimensions,” by

Nat Schachner, Astounding Stories,

November 1937

What we need is a goal, a purpose—something to lift up our heads and our hearts and make us realize that it’s truly good to be alive. . . . Right? Right?

Once in a very great while, and getting greater all the time, Donovan tried to remember what it had been, could have been like before he started walking; but the effort, a weak one at best, was momentary and rewardless, and now that he was so close to the end, quite without purpose. Whatever it had all been like, he decided, it really wasn’t worth knowing. Today was the time, and tomorrow the time to be. So he waited.

While, round his neck, prominent in a soiled pouch suspended from a tarnished gold chain, his coin: a wafer silver and worn that he would use only once, half of a dollar for a lifetime view. He twisted his neck to rub against the chain and anticipation forced a grin, a small one, a sly one, but still it was a grin, and he was heartened by it. Whatever had been was no longer, and perhaps had never been, a concern: the coin demanded his waiting. So he waited.