The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

“I said no,” the doctor replied.

“But I’m afraid the President insists—”

Dr. Stephen Olie rose slowly from his chair, feeling a chill going through his body. Then something seemed to break in his mind; in a moment of blind, screaming rage he fought them off, smashing his fists against the wall, throwing chairs through windows, tearing his clothes and cursing, as the Secret Service men—doubtless afraid of damaging the holder of the Great Gift—fell back and looked at him, fearfully.

He felt filled with rage and hate. He had not asked that the gift be given to him; he had not even realized it when it at first was. Every trace of love or even compassion for humanity seemed to leave him, now—a mob, greedy and grasping for life, avid for it, having together no thoughts or hopes except for themselves—not caring if their incessant demands and ceaseless pressure to be healed drained the healer dry and left him dead of fatigue; just so long as they themselves were made whole.

Save me! was the relentless cry. Save me! And not one, not a single damned one of them, paused to say (with even a trace of concern): Physician, heal thyself . . .

And as the rage and hatred mounted up in him he felt-suddenly—a great change. This time it was unmistakable, though the why of it was as unanswerable as the why of the other, earlier change. Or the how. And with the change descended a great calm. Strangely, he now felt better. Different, certainly, but better.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I’ll see the senator now. I am much better. . . .

“Laryngitis, hmm?” he said, happily, as the senator croaked at him. “Well, let’s just see what we can do.”

Smiling, feeling the power surge in him, he felt the senatorial pulse and touched the senatorial throat. The senator took a horrible gasp, turned blue and dropped dead at his feet.

The Secret Service men stared at Dr. Olie, moved toward him, moved—except for one—away from him. The exception clasped him grimly on the shoulder. And at once fell, choking, to the floor. In a second he was still. Dr. Olie shrugged.

“It’s really very simple,” he said, answering the unvoiced question. “You’ve all heard of the power of life and death.” Those in the room shrank back still farther from him. He got up from his chair, stretched. “Now,” he said, “it’s complete, you see. Now it’s complete. . . .”

No one tried to stop him as he walked out. The word had spread rapidly. He went to his hotel room and there, humming tunelessly, he cut his common carotid artery with a razor blade.

Somewhere along the way, in the work on each of these Annuals, the shape begins to appear.

It is in the nature of speculation that it cannot dwell continuously on one subject: there is just so much that one man’s knowledge and imagination can do with a theme; then he needs either fresh information or a fresh topic. Perhaps because writers inside the field stimulate each other, perhaps under the impact of outside events, the same kind of topical drift seems to occur in SF as a whole. Each Annual, at least, has proved to have some distinct emphasis of its own; each one is different from the others.

To some degree, these pattern shifts are predictable—or at least recognizably expectable, when they occur. I have mentioned the new writers entering the field, and the closing gaps between “culture camps.” These changes, I believe, are part of a much wider and more important phenomenon.

I think there is a desperate and determined—if often intuitive and unconscious—effort on behalf of thinking, imaginative people, from all backgrounds, in all intellectual and social microcosms, to place themselves in a “whole culture,” to “despecialize,” while there is still time; to widen, by whatever efforts they can make, the intellectual environment that limits our evolution toward sapience and sanity.

Certainly, the direction of the broad SF field these past ten years has been continuously and (one cannot but feel) meaningfully toward areas most likely to attract just these newcomers: the examination of human behavior, both individually and in groups; an investigation into the nature of interpersonal communication; an attempt to formulate a relationship between man and the technological environment he has created, and is continuing to create, for himself; and the study of man in his most immediate natural environment—that is to say, the mind-body relationship.

It is in, or out of, this last trend that the big qualitative change occurred this year. I expected to find a large number of automation stories, learning-process stories, political-sociological-anthropological stories—perhaps a few psychiatry and/ or religion stories. I was not prepared for a broad-spectrum probing of the essential nature of life and death; the meaning and mechanics of mortality; the significance of procreation and of child-rearing; the metaphysics, and biophysics of death.

“Don’t see you in here much any more, Mr. Hale,” Geraghty said as he set my glass in front of me.

“Must be eighteen months,” I said. “But my wife’s out of town and I thought I’d drop by for old time’s sake.” I looked down the long bar and round at the booths against the opposite wall, and added, “It looks as though you don’t see anybody much any more. I never saw the place so empty at this time of evening. Will you have one?”

“Sparkling soda, if you please, Mr. Hale, and thank you very much.” Geraghty got down a bottle and poured for himself. I never knew him to drink anything stronger than a beer, and that rarely.

”Things have changed,” he went on after a pause. “You know what caused it, of course.”

I shook my head.

“Contact, naturally. Like it’s changed everything else.”

I stared at him for a moment, and then I had to chuckle. I said, “Well, I knew it had hit a lot of things—like the churches in particular. But I wouldn’t have thought it would affect you.”

“Oh, yes.” He hoisted himself on a stool behind the bar; that was new since I used to come here regularly. Eighteen months ago he wouldn’t have the chance to sit down all evening long; he’d be dead on his feet when the bar closed. “I figure it this way. Contact has made people more careful in some ways, and less in others. But it’s cut out a lot of reasons for going to bars and for drinking. You know how it used to be. A bartender was a sort of professional open ear, the guy to spill your troubles to. That didn’t last long after Contact came in. I knew a tenderhearted bartender who went on being like that for a while after Contact. He got himself loaded to here with lonely guys—and gals too.” Geraghty laid his palm on the top of his head.

“Occupational risk!” I said.

“Not for long, though. It hit him one day what it would be like if they all came home to roost, so he went and had them all expunged and started over with people he chose himself, the way anyone else does. And round about then it all dried up. People don’t come and spill their troubles any more. The need has mostly gone. And the other big reason for going to bars—chance company—that’s faded out too. Now that people know they don’t have to be scared of the biggest loneliness of all, it makes them calm and mainly self-reliant. Me, I’m looking round for another trade. Bars are closing down all over.”

“You’d make a good Contact consultant,” I suggested, not more than half-joking. He didn’t take it as a joke, either.

“I’ve considered it,” he said seriously. “I might just do that. I might just.”