Judith Merril - The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6

A swiftly born desire was expressed aloud, “I wonder— if there’s no great urge for hurry—could I change the contract? Could we settle upon a price for the complete job and let me take my time doing it?”

“But wouldn’t that mean prolonging your stay here?”

“Would that matter? To anyone but the caretakers? I don’t think Mrs. Brown would mind. I am getting two meals at the inn and have only sandwiches for lunch, which I can get myself.”

“That’s all right. But aren’t you dreadfully lonely here? I should think you would be glad to get away from it.”

“I love it. There’s no place where I’d rather be.”

“Mr. Woods once said something like that—and added, ‘Now and hereafter.’ He occasionally said fanciful things like that, though he had a wonderfully acute mind.”

“Did Mr. Woods spend much of his life here?”

“Most of it. All of the last half of his life.”

“And his family?”

“He had none. His mother died when he was born, and his father a good many years ago. He was the only child.”

“Didn’t he ever marry?”

“Good grief! No!”

He stared at her with the same sort of astonishment that the caretaker had shown when she asked about the portrait. She asked about it again. “That’s a portrait of him when young, isn’t it?”

His mouth fell open. It seemed a long time before he spoke again. “Do you mean to say that you didn’t know about him?”

“Why should I?” She sounded snappish. “I never heard of him until I was engaged to catalogue the library. What was there about him that I should have heard?”

“He was—well, frankly, in olden days he would have been thought a monster.” He lowered his voice as if it were a subject not to be broached aloud. “He was frightful to look upon.”

“With a slit lip?”

“Why, yes. I thought you said—”

“Did he look like a little old gnome?”

“No. Well—er, yes, I suppose you might say he did in the final years. All of his hair came out, and he wasted away. But in his younger days his shoulders were massive —which made it all the worse in a way.”

“In what way?”

“By way of emphasizing his deformity. His legs—they stopped at the knees. His feet were where his kneecaps should have been.”

With a blanched face she almost shouted, “How can God do such cruel inhuman things?”

“I know. I always felt that way when I saw him.” He turned toward the portrait. “He nearly drove the artist wild about that. I don’t know just what he had in mind.”

“But I do. He commissioned the making of a shell appropriate for his personality.” The phrases came back to her, Nobody will recognize it as me, but nobody ever sees the real me. “What a hell on earth!” she said, choking on the words.

“It was, of course. And he had seventy-two years of it. And yet, although I never could bear to look directly at him—he had beautiful eyes, by the way, if you could forget the rest for a minute—yes, though I was uncomfortable in his presence, when I was out of it I felt a pygmy. Partly because I knew his mind was much better than mine. But also because his words carried over in memory; and he had the most moving voice I’ve ever heard. Well, stay on and do the work as you like. It might be some recompense to him if he could know that someone had the same feeling about the place that he had.”

She did not stir until the sound of a moving car faded into nothingness. Then, breathless with eagerness, she climbed the four flights of steps to the tower. It made no difference who shared it with her—the youth of the portrait or- the gnome of her hallucination. She even liked to think that the latter was beside her, that the sorrows of the world ceased to be reflected in his eyes as they led the way, while hers followed, to the land of fulfilled desires.

About the author:

(I pass this on, as I got it, after reading the story—JM)

Elizabeth Emmett was born in Rhode Island, in a Victorian home newly built by her English immigrant father. She came into a world made brilliant by the fall colors of New England’s flowering: 1883 was a year after Emerson and Longfellow died; nine years before Whitman and Whittier would follow; the heyday of William James, and the last decade of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Among the treasures of her past. Miss Emmett appears to value equally her mother’s Mayflower descent and her father’s English edition, three-volume, illustrated Shakespeare which, she says, “I still enjoy reading from more than any other copies.”

Miss Emmett submitted her first story to a magazine at the age of thirteen. Fifteen years later in 1911, she made her first sale, “for $35. Twenty-five, really, because the agent took ten as a minimum fee...” Since then, she has written and sold magazine verse, light articles, humor, history, a few short stories, and novels (“The Land He Loved,” “Secret in a Snuffbox”).

“Having always been deaf—or ‘hard of hearing’—” she writes with characteristic distaste for inaccuracy (in the name of euphemism or anything else), “I learned that whatever happiness I had must come from myself, books, garden, etc....” Modern medical technology makes the statement seem quaint; modern mores would likely supply “less a-social” refuges than books and garden.

The eventual hearing aid came (unfortunately?) “too late to get me into any part of social life, but there’s plenty at home to keep me both busy and interested. I do all the work, inside and out...” including mowing the lawn “with considerable cussing,” chasing rabbits and wood-chucks out of the garden which is “now going back to the wild state... I walk to the library and post office about twice a week, though old legs are beginning to rebel. And I loved walking as much as Thoreau did. Once in a great while I go on some short trip with a friend or relative. It was a trip to the ‘castle’ built by the actor William Gillette, in Connecticut, that started ‘Enchantment.’...”

This remarkable report does not actually concern a major breakthrough of the past year. The original publication of the discovery of Thiotimoline is, after all, fourteen years old now. But I feel that s-f readers have almost a vested interest In the progress of time research—as indeed also in the Good Doctor himself—and that the selection was especially appropriate here between Miss Emmett’s strangely convincing traffic with the past, and Marshall King’s story of young Purnie’s time-play.

(Transcript of a speech delivered at the 12th annual meeting of the American Chronochemical Society.)

Gentlemen:

I have been called the founder of chronochemistry and in response I cannot resist a certain sense of pride. To have originated a new science is a privilege given to very few.

I can still remember, quite clearly, that day in 1947 when I first dropped a pinch of thiotimoline into water and thought I noticed something odd. To be sure, it dissolved rapidly; but I was used to that. It always seemed to vanish the instant it touched the water.

But I had never handled a sample of thiotimoline quite as pure as the pinch I had obtained that July day and, as I watched the white powder drop toward the water, I distinctly remember myself thinking, “Why, that dissolved before it hit the water.”

Well, it’s an old story to you, I know, though I still like to linger on the thrill of the slow awakening of certainty; of the measurements taken; of the first crude timings by eye; of the more delicate work of the original endochronometer—the same instrument now at the Smithsonian.