Damon Knight: Orbit 14

“Or a theologian, philosopher, priest, or doctor.”

“I don’t think I like those either.”

“Well, that’s the end of the menu as far as I know,” his son said. “I’ll tell you what—I’ll send him in and you can talk to him yourself; he’s right outside.”

“That little fellow in the dark suit?” Forlesen asked. His son, whose head was thrust out the door already, paid no attention.

After a moment the small man came in carrying his bag, and Forlesen’s son placed a chair close to the coffin for him and went into the bedroom. “Well, what’s it going to be,” the small man asked, “or is it going to be nothing?”

“I don’t know,” Forlesen said. He was looking at the weave of the small man’s suit, the intertwining of the innumerable threads, and realizing that they constituted the universe in themselves, that they were serpents and worms and roots, the black tracks of forgotten rockets across a dark sky, the sine waves of the radiation of the cosmos. “I wish I could talk to my wife.”

“Your wife is dead,” the small man said. “The kid didn’t want to tell you. We got her laid out in the next room. What’ll it be? Doctor, priest, philosopher, theologian, actor, warlock, national hero, aged loremaster, or novelist?”

“I don’t know,” Forlesen said again. “I want to feel, you know, that this box is a bed—and yet a ship, a ship that will set me free. And yet . . . It’s been a strange life.”

“You may have been oppressed by demons,” the small man said. “Or revived by unseen aliens who, landing on the Earth eons after the death of the last man, have sought to re-create the life of the twentieth century. Or it may be that there is a small pressure, exerted by a tumor in your brain.”

“Those are the explanations?” Forlesen asked.

“Those are some of them.”

“I want to know if it’s meant anything,” Forlesen said. “If what I suffered—if it’s been worth it.”

“No,” the little man said. “Yes. No. Yes. Yes. No. Yes. Yes. Maybe.”

Together we must rise to ever higher and higher platitudes.

—Mayor Daley

Say No More

Then several miles to the southeast, an entire section of the country literally blew up, in a fiery eruption that shot a mile into the air. The conclusion, when it reached me, was terrific.

—Armageddon 2419 A.D. by Philip Francis Nowlan

I Was a Phosphorescent Stringer for the East Village Other

Once he had awakened, at the sound of great batlike creatures flying overhead; he had seen them swooping low, coming in flat trajectories across the wasteland toward his pit in the earth. But they seemed unaware that he—and the shadow thing—lay in the hole. They defecated thin, phosphorescent stringers that fell glowing through the night and were lost on the plains . . .

—“The Deathbird” by Harlan Ellison, Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 1973

Sitzmarks in the Sands of Time

If voyages were to be made from the earth to any of the planets, or even to the moon, the distances are so great that starting from rest as the travelers would do, they would have to attain a high velocity in a very short space of time. ... In interplanetary travel, where the travelers start from the earth at a velocity of zero, that is to say from rest, the acceleration must start and must be very rapid, so that the travelers will press, not with weight alone, but with a combination of weight and the force of positive acceleration against the base of the chamber in the projectile, or “ship,” as it may be termed. Now this pressure will be so enormous that, in order to reach a planet, or even to reach the moon in any reasonable time, it would probably be sufficient to kill the person, just as he would be killed by a fall—let us say, for instance, from the Washington Monument. On striking the earth, he would be killed by negative acceleration. ... So since our readers like interplanetary stories, since they unceasingly ask for them in letters to us, and since there is any amount of science, mechanical, astronomical and other to be gleaned therefrom, we certainly shall be glad to continue to give them, even in face of the fact that we are inclined to think that interplanetary travel may never be attained.

—“Acceleration in Interplanetary

Travel” by T. O’Conor Sloane, Ph.D., Amazing Stories, November 1929

Radio receivers today are used largely for three types of entertainment—from the receiver owner’s viewpoint. It is used to pick up certain programs which the listener wants to hear. Such programs as dramatic and comedy and news reports; to a lesser extent symphony programs. Second, it is used by housewives, evidently, as a sort of anaesthetic gadget while doing the routine, boring household tasks. The listener’s mind isn’t made so conscious of the dull job. The soap-opera programs are designed to catch that audience. Third, and by far the greatest use for radio, is as background music for some other occupation. Is your set on at the moment, for such a purpose? It may be a bridge game, a magazine or book, or the monthly bills that is in the forefront of your consciousness; the music is a very pleasant and unobtrusive background.

Of those three functions, television can supply only one. It can’t be unobtrusive; you have to watch it. But you can’t watch it, if you’re doing housework, bills, playing bridge, or reading. And dialogue cast for television use is unintelligible unless you do watch; try following the sense of a motion picture sometime by closing your eyes and listening only to the sound accompaniment. Even the music sounds bad; it was paced to point up and emphasize the action, not to be listened to for itself alone.

My own hunch is that too few people will buy the expensive, four hundred dollar television receivers to support the commercial advertiser’s very expensive show.

—-“Communication and Noncommunication” by John W. Campbell, Jr., Astounding Science Fiction, June 1945

Hazardous Offplanet Duty Department (Hubba! Hubba! Division)

“. . . Besides, you can see that the ladies hurried to answer the call. Miss McBride’s blond hair is somewhat uncombed and she is not completely dressed. She’s not wearing her . . .”

“A gentleman wouldn’t notice,” Arthur bandied. “A sneaky gentleman would notice and never tell.”

“. . . wearing her boots,” Dan finished, smugly.

—“Earthquake” by William E. Cochrane, Analog, April 1973, p. 25

. . . Julie came up with another display printout.

“I’ve got smudges all over, but there are two high points you ought to look at,” she said.

Arthur choked and began rolling instrument paper frantically.

—Ibid., p. 36

“Aren’t you cheerful,” Julie said. “Well, me for breakfast. If I’m going to do any shaking around here I want to do it on a full stomach.”

Arthur exploded into his coffee.

—Ibid., p. 38

“Signal for Captain Henery,” he managed. “It’s all over.”

“And I missed it,” Julie said. “Somehow I never seem to get the big tremors. Someday, I’d like to feel a big one.”

Arthur got the hiccups.

—Ibid., p. 67

Yank Spoken Here (American Places and

People, as Seen by British Novelists)

The gas-pipe withdrew to its hook. A cash-drawer shot out of the side of the pump within easy reach of him. But he was so intent on the patrolman that at first he didn’t notice, and the attendant had to parp on his hooter.

—The Wrong End of Time by John Brunner, p. 11

“To the pigs?” Danty said with a cynical grin. “Man, I should die laughing the day the pigs do anything for me! More like, they’d give Josh a medal.”