Judith Merril: The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 7

An Introduction to this poem, or to its author, would be certainly tautological, and probably presumptuous. The poem serves rather as an introduction to the book, stating tho case for the literature of the imagination far more effectively (literately, and imaginatively) than I should hope to do myself. “Oneiromachia” will be included in a new book of Mr. Aiken’s poetry. The Morning Song of lord Zero, to be published shortly by Oxford University Press.

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Loosen the rainbow, Mr. Aiken says… or splinter the light. They are the same thing seen from different sides of any prism. It is this function precisely, and uniquely, that defines the scope of what I mean by the derived initials of my title. “S-F” means all the ways of filtering feelings and Ideas through imagination so as to project them in another form — no less “true,” but a great deal less expected.

Kaatje Hurlbut has been writing for eighteen years, and is a fairly regular reader of science fiction, but this is her first s-f story. In telling me how it came about, she described graphically the working of this “prism effect”:

“I went out before dawn one cold morning in October ‘57 to see the first Sputnik…. It must have uprooted me, because I began to see how beautiful the earth is in approach… and these two things impressed me tremendously: first, how precious it is — a flourishing globe of life in the lifeless dark of space; and second, that it is ours, it is home….”

This story was published, she adds, on “the day Shepard made his space flight. I was delighted. I fell launched too.” Actually, she was well launched some time before that. Since her first appearance in Mademoiselle, six years ago. Miss Hurlbut’s stories have been published in a cross-section of leading national magazines, both slick and literary, and two before this have been reprinted in “best” anthologies: a collection from Mademoiselle, and The Best American Short Stories, 1961.

The people of Pomeroy’s Cove gave Mr. Paradee the sky. They gave it all to him, from dawn to dawn — with thunderheads and flights of geese and the red moon rising. At first it was a joke, one of those non-sympathetic jokes reserved for the newcomer by members of a small village, a defensive measure designed to hold him in place while being inspected for acceptability. For, one fall when the cove had just settled down to a long snug winter — summer visitors gone for the year — Mr. Paradee turned up, purchased land from Miss Pomeroy and built his house on a point beside the marsh. His manner was one of extreme reserve couched in the punctilious deference of his old-fashioned way — with one astonishing exception: he would rap on doors at night and call them out to see the northern lights; he would stop them in the lane in the morning to ask if they had seen the crimson of the dawn; in the evening he would call to them and point over the marsh at a sundog’s mocking glow. They cocked their heads and wondered about him.

The truth was, Mr. Paradee had lived his entire life in the deep streets of the city. When he came to Pomeroy’s Cove to live, he couldn’t get over how big the sky was, how changing it was and how magnificent. It was as simple as that.

A retired bookkeeper, he was a small, quiet man, stooped a little by nearly fifty years of bending over the ledgers he kept for a button factory; when he spoke, it was with the earnestness of one unaccustomed to casual small talk; a chronic squint rendered his expression gently quizzical. Until he came to Pomeroy’s Cove — he had no family — the years of his life had been much like the factory’s books, meticulously correct and hopelessly predictable.

When Mr. Paradee retired he invested his life’s savings to bring about two supreme ambitions. One was to have a home — his own house with a yard and a white picket fence. The other was to have a great many friends. But his shyness made him compromise in this by setting himself up as a ham radio operator. Through his short-wave he could roam the earth that throbbed with sound, and discover friendly voices which spoke across the night into the morning and pass along a scrap of gossip or a good story from Reykjavik to Singapore, from Johannesburg to Sydney.

But he found, to his happiness, that he hadn’t time for his short-wave adventures during the days — though often in the night he switched it on — for Pomeroy’s Cove soon gave him the sky in earnest. Not only the sky but also tulip bulbs to start a garden and birthday cakes and advice about his gutters. Their dogs walked beside him down the lane, their children sat on his steps in the sun and held serious talks with him, and on summer evenings he sat on their porches with them, rocking, swatting mosquitoes and murmuring comfortably.

The dim long tunnel of his loneliness seemed far behind him now. For as yet no echo had come from the tunnel to haunt him, to chill his heart and make him tremble, as if with cold.

Besides Mr. Paradee there were only six other families on the cove, if Miss Pomeroy could be counted as a family. An elderly maiden who lived alone, she had inherited the cove and its land from her family, which had settled there in the 1600’s. The Pomeroy estate had been intact for almost 300 years.

To the indignation of her contemporaries in the neighborhood, Miss Pomeroy had shattered the precedent of generations of family by selling, in recent years, parcels of land here and there — the land on which Mr. Paradee and the others had built their homes. “For company,” she snapped with a none-of-your-business inflection to those who demanded to know why, and who knew it was not for money.