The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

Jake said, “Wha-a-a-t the hell?” Right while he watched, those letters changed around until they said “I’LL EAT ANYTHING!”

Jake said, “Rg-l-s-p-ch?” which was a pretty complicated word for Jake.

The letters sat there for a while and finally they changed and said, “WELL?”

By that time Jake had gotten a little bit of control over himself, and he said, “Who the Bill Hill Blazes are you, anyhow?”

“The letters wriggled around and said, “I AM PROTEUS.” They wriggled around again and said, “I HAVE COME A LONG WAY.” They wriggled around again and said, “I DO NOT KNOW WHERE THE HELL I AM.” They wriggled around again and said, “I AM LOST. I AM STARVING.” They wriggled around again and said, “GIVE ME FOOD, CHOP-CHOP.”

“You already et muh mule,” said Jake, since he’d figured out that this Proteus must have eaten Mule.

“YOUR MULE WAS FULL OF LICE./I NEED SOMETHING WITH VITAMINS AND/MINERALS TO GET ME OUT OF THIS/HOLE.”

“Well, you ain’t gettin’ nothin’ from me,” said Jake, and he let those letters have it right in the vowels with his shotgun. The letters got together in one heap and hopped back into the mine.

Jake walked right up to the mine and squinted into it and shined his flashlight into it. He was so scared by that time that he didn’t know he was scared any more. And he was angry about Mule, too.

Jake said, “Hey! You in there?”

Nobody said anything in the mine, so Jake took his shotgun and shot it into the mine a couple of times.

Almost right away something went bam! bam! in the mine, and Jake’s old felt hat got pulled right off his head and he felt a breeze across his left cheek. He yelled, “Hey! Hey!” He turned around to get the hat but there wasn’t much left of it so he loaded up and charged straight into the mine. If he’d looked back, he’d have seen the little shot pellets that had torn his hat and almost his cheek bouncing along right behind him. They finally passed him, but he didn’t see them because it was too dark.

Jake got in to about the place where that rock had gotten up and he saw something he sure hadn’t seen before. There was a big crack in the floor—it wasn’t really big, but it was pretty wide and it looked like it went down a long, long way. Jake shined his flashlight down into it and he couldn’t see anything like a bottom anywhere. There was a kind of green slime all the way down the side of the crack.

All this sort of made Jake shiver, because he wasn’t a fissure man, and so he walked on into the cave, waving his flashlight all over the place before he took a step.

All of a sudden a “STOP” sign jumped up in front of Jake. Jake let the sign have it with both barrels, but all the little pieces hopped back together and turned into a rattlesnake.

Jake swung his shotgun down holding the barrels and he missed the snake and that took care of the shotgun. He started stomping around after the snake—he had on high leather boots, so he didn’t have to worry—and when he finally got his foot right smack on the snake it wasn’t a snake anymore, it was a two-inch nail, and Jake cussed like the devil and jumped up and down with one leg.

The nail turned into a rubber ball and bounced away. Jake hobbled after the ball as fast as he could. Finally he caught the ball and he went wham right down on the ground, because it wasn’t a rubber ball any more, it was a portable hi-fi-stereo combination radio-TV set with built-in jacks for earphones and a war movie going on.

Jake lay there with his hand stuck underneath the TV-radio. Then the war movie cut off and an announcer came on and said, “We now have a special announcement. Everybody needs vitamins. You need vitamins, I need vitamins. I need vitamins more than you do, because I’ve had to do without them for three thousand years. I’ve been crawling around under the ground everyday, day in and day out. It’s hot, sweaty work, and I get tired and dragged out. Won’t you contribute your vitamins to the Vitamins for Half-Dead Greek Gods Association/5763 Red Lane/ Rum-Tum-Tummy, Nebraska? Thank you.” A Messerschmitt went wham! into a tree.

Jake got red in the face and said, “No! No! No! I ain’t gonna give you any of my grub! I’m gonna get my gasoline and burn you up, that’s what I’m gonna do!” He jerked his hand from under the TV set and stood up.

Right away he had to duck again, because the TV set turned into a locomotive and went pounding out of the mine at full throttle. Jake heard a lot of crashing outside, and he guessed what it was. He showed his teeth and limped out into the open heat of the sun.

The back of his shack was flying up into the air board by board. By the time Jake got back there, all the tins were either open and hollowed out, or gone. There were the big letters on the floor: “AND I’M STILL HUNGRY, TOO!!” The letters turned into an MG and va-voomed back into the mine.

Jake didn’t stop to think about what the thing’s still being hungry might mean. His foot hurt, and his hand hurt, and he was mad as hell. He waded into what was left of his cellar and started searching for the gasoline cans.

By the time he found the cans, the sun was almost down and the light was dim. Jake’s eyes weren’t any too good anyway, and he walked toward a big black spot he thought was the mine and when he got to it it wasn’t there any more, it was a little more to his left. Jake shook his head and flicked on his flashlight and went inside, muttering “I’m gonna burn you up” all the time.

At first he didn’t notice, but the farther and farther that Jake got into the mine, the less and less it looked like a mine to him. There was something funny about the walls, and maybe about the ground. All of a sudden old Jake got a pretty scary idea, and his chest got all knotted up inside, and he turned around to scram out of there.

Just then the mine started shaking, and the ground sort of pushed up, and Jake fell down. He didn’t even have a chance to get close to the mouth of that cave before CHOMP !

The last two selections for this year are both concerned with the sort of Immortality that gets capitalized—that of the gods, the demigods, the saints and angels.

There are virtually no other similarities, between stories or authors.

Robert Rohrer is a nineteen-year-old student at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia—another of the Wunderkinder, who reports that he wrote his first salable story at thirteen, and sold it two years later. “I like music; I play the piano, and write more than I study. ... My father is a physics professor and can’t understand why I’m not a scientist.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in Radzymin, Poland, in 1904. He came to the United States in 1935, and has worked since then as writer and book reviewer for the Jewish Daily Forward in New York. He has received awards and grants in several countries for his work, and his stories have been appearing, over the last two or three years, in most of the “quality” magazines in this country.

In a prison where souls bound for Sheol—Earth they call it there—await destruction, there hovered the female soul Yechida. Souls forgot their origin. Purah, the Angel of Forgetfulness, he who dissipates God’s light and conceals His face, holds dominion everywhere beyond the Godhead. Yechida, unmindful of her descent from the Throne of Glory, had sinned. Her jealousy had caused much trouble in the world where she dwelled. She had suspected all female angels of having affairs with her lover Yachid, had not only blasphemed God but even denied him. Souls, she said, were not created but had evolved out of nothing: they had neither mission nor purpose. Although the authorities were extremely patient and forgiving, Yechida was finally sentenced to death. The judge fixed the moment of her descent to that cemetery called Earth.