Damon Knight - Orbit 15

Lambert sat on the bed and took out a cigarette. He started to light it and then put it back in his pocket. He studied his hands for a while and thought about a practice in the country.

“Bill,” he said, “You knew Ernie wasn’t a man, didn’t you? You knew after that first day, I think. Most of the patients do. I think Bobby probably knows, somewhere inside, that Andy isn’t real, that he couldn’t be real. We all know, because we know that Ernie and Andy are too good to be true. Nobody has time to follow us around everywhere, and talk to us whenever we want to talk, and not talk when we don’t want to. Nobody cares as much about us as Andy and Ernie. They can’t. Nobody has time. They have to worry about themselves a lot of the time.”

Lambert stopped talking. He looked at Bill. Bill was looking back at him, into his eyes.

“I’m your doctor. Your doctor. Your life is in my hands, but I can’t be with you all the time. I can’t always be thinking about what you need. I’ve got other patients.”

Lambert looked down at his hands again. “I’ve got other patients, and a wife, and money problems, and I’ve got to eat and get some sleep sometimes. And I worry about myself sometimes, too. You see? Do you see, Bill? About Ernie? About Andy?”

Bill said nothing.

The two men sat together awhile, and then Lambert said goodbye and went away.

It was silent in the room for some time. It was clean, and odorless, and very sunny. And silent.

“Ernie?” said Bill. “I’ll take that cigarette now.”

“Sure, Bill,” said Ernie as the screen lit up. “Or maybe you’d like to try one of my cigars?”

It strikes me as funny, don’t you?

—Dorothy Kilgallen

Toward, a More Kreative Speling

“Why’s the dog named Bisk?”

“Short for b,i,s,q,u,i,t. You want to see something whorish and altogether delightful? Call her by name, then ask if she wants one of those things I spelled.”

Blake leaned close to the dog, now sitting as on a throne, smiling as at a circus, and said, “Good girl, Bisk, want a bisquit?”

—”Monitored Dreams and Strategic

Cremations: 1: The Bisquit Position,”

by Bernard Wolfe, in Again, Dangerous Visions, edited by

Harlan Ellison (Doubleday, 1972), p. 287f.

Lady Lean had bent to whisper something in her ear Blake had heard, “Girl, sweet thing, want a bisquit?”

—Ibid., p. 293

“. . . You come here and give me all the best bisquits. I’ve been long without.”

—Ibid., p. 295 127

“... Report to your brain what’s craving all over your eyes from all over your bed. Be my lavish bisquit man.”

—Ibid., p. 296

Now she did the only thing she knew to do, when the ultimately wanted was not forthcoming, flopped over on her back in the bisquit position.

—Ibid., p. 301

The magnificently blue eye quivered, began to take the dim view, then dimmer, then closed altogether, and Bisk was cool again, as finally, Blake thought, with luck, we’ll all, the invaded and the sucked, all bisquit wanters, be free from burning.

—Ibid., p. 303

Quis Judicet?

In the six years since the initiation of the “Obit” series, its stories have won four of the yearly Nebula awards. In one year, seven of the eight nominees for “Best short story of the Year” were Obit selections. Obit 12 maintains the past regorous standards for inventiveness, excitement, intelligence and style . . . Of course, Obit 12 is a Science Fiction Book Club selection.

—Review signed “LKF” in the

Lewiston (Maine) Daily Sun

and Lewiston Evening Journal

Although this book doesn’t mark Heinlein’s first incursion into an area previously the province of Traveller’s Companion and Grove Press, et. al., it does signal the farest out he’s reached. In the ebullient Glory Road, Hero had hankey-pankey only with the Princess.... [This book] teaches you the heart-wrenching sorrow of having to part, after a normal lifetime, with someone you have loved ... an ephemeral, who’s span is only a pitifully short 50 or 70 years. . . . It’s the thundering thrill of the great Diasphora . . .

—Review by Richard Ashby of Time Enough for Love,

by Robert A. Heinlein ( Vertex , October 1973)

Pay Attention, Dammit!

The young man lying rigid on the platform, without moving a muscle, began to ascend horizontally. He arose slowly, almost imperceptively at first, but soon with a steady and unmistakable acceleration.

—”Levitation,” by Joseph Payne Brennan,

in Stories Not for the Nervous, edited

by Alfred Hitchcock (Random House, 1965)

Watch Out for Those Snakes—They’re Made of

Meconium, the Miracle Metal

Deep in thought, she had arrived at the great computer building and had crossed the magnificent inner hall without gawking at the famous sculpture depicting man overpowering the Lae-conia of science.

—”Dull Drums,” by Anne McCaffrey,

in Future Quest, edited by

Roger Elwood (Avon, 1973)

Scalpel. Retractor . . .

She would mildly bawl out Caesar for biting by the slack of the neck and trying to rape his mother Cleopatra—he really should have been called Caesarean—with Mark Antony interestedly looking on.

—”Cat Three,” by Fritz Leiber

(F&SF, October 1973)

Colding Marchmain held out his hand to Gloria Blake, but she elevated and turned away, shielding her sympathetic nervous system from his learned scrutiny.

“I don’t want you to leave for Earth just now,” she said. “I keep getting glimpses of other rooms. Bare rooms, with people weeping.”

“You’ve experienced it all before,” he said reasonably. “You’ve had it explained to you. You’re a Sensitive of the Unrealised Multi-Schizophrenic Type B. It’s nothing to worry about.”

“Oh, you have it all memorised.” She turned back to him, so that he could see fully that clear luminous face of hers, with the long nose, well-chiseled lips, and lucid blue eyes, framed in coils of her gretchen-green hair. He gauged the degree of contraction of her pupils. “You have lived with me on Turpitude for five years, yet how much do you understand about responding to me?” she said.

“This is an au revoir, Gloria, not a first-class row!”

“There are times when I don’t want you, times when I do. I want you now, and you insist on going back to Earth, not caring at all if you shatter the composure of my mood.”

Studying her kinesics, he saw she was not as concerned as she pretended.

“Haven’t we had this conversation before? I know how you modulate your sensory input, Gloria, my love, and I remain fascinated because there’s not another woman like you, not anywhere on the Zodiacal Planets. You can use heat and thirst, social isolation, and dance, to induce your deliriums. By your breathing and your fasting and your sleeplessness, you alter your body chemistry. Your very gestures and words are so rhythmic that one conversation puts you in a trance. That’s why you are too subliminally aware for your own good. And for mine.”

She moved towards him in a serpentine way and positioned her mouth some fifty centimetres from his, as she breathed, “I didn’t say you didn’t understand me; I said you didn’t understand how to respond to me. To go to Earth is such a crude thing.”