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

The floppers came up, one on each side of him. They grabbed his arms close to the shoulder. Hitchcock yipped with surprise, turned his head, and found the solicitous, repulsive face of a flopper only inches from his own.

With a strangled, terrified cry, he lunged from the chair. The floppers kept him from falling headlong on the floor. Wild-eyed, he struggled to get loose from them, but they held on. He kicked at them desperately. They dragged him backwards. His feet flailed the air.

“Make them let me go!” he begged. “Make these filthy monsters let me go!”

Reese sat back and relaxed. He was sorry he had to do this to the man, but it did somehow give him a pleasant feeling.

It wasn’t, after all, as if Hitchcock was a really good man,

“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” he apologized. “They’ve been taught to take a sick man to the clinic. I couldn’t stop them now if I wanted to.” He spread his hands helplessly. “As I’ve said before, they’re rather stupid.”

One of the floppers moved behind Hitchcock and held both his arms. The other flopper took an ampule from the pouch on its harness. Hitchcock stared at the shiny needle with the fascination of sheer terror. “Don’t let him!” he screamed. “Don’t let him! It’s murder!”

The flopper peeled Hitchcock’s sleeve up and stabbed the needle into the fleshy part of his arm. Hitchcock uttered a faltering cry, shuddered, and sagged.

“Oh, it’s only a mild sedative,” Reese assured him cheerfully. “We wouldn’t dare trust them with anything stronger. But you shouldn’t have struggled so much.”

Hitchcock hung laxly in the flopper’s arms. His eyes had a glassy look. The floppers wrapped a blanket tightly around him. His mouth moved as if he was trying to speak, but no Words came out.

“The ship is going to leave without you,” Ben Reese said. “I’m sorry about that, because I don’t think I’m going to enjoy your company for the next year. We’ll tell them... I t hinkwe’ll tell them you’re sick. A... a local disease—one we don’t want to spread on other planets. There aren’t any diseases like that, of course, but that doesn’t matter.”

He was very apologetic about the whole thing.

Hitchcock was making apoplectic noises now. “Outrage! Criminal! I’ll have the law on you!” For a man of firm moral fiber, some of his comments were remarkably unprintable.

Ben Reese shrugged. “I’m afraid there isn’t any law here,” he apologized. “We didn’t need any, till you came along. I ... I’m sorry we have to do this to you, but—well, we can’t let you go back to Earth. You’d agitate to have our charter revoked and... and then you’d organize this gigantic interstellar aid program, and destroy the floppers’ only hope of ever being anything more than animals. We... we just can’t let you do that.”

By this time, Hitchcock was wrapped in the blanket like a mummy. Gently, the floppers lifted him and laid him in the cradlelike stretcher. “You won’t get away with this!” he threatened wrathfully.

The floppers fumbled deftly with the straps, securing him. Their digitless hands were remarkably dexterous. All Hitchcock could move was his head and his mouth.

“Oh, we’ll have to let you go next year, of course,” Reese admitted. He wasn’t disturbed by the thought. “But that is a whole year away. We’ll have plenty of time to prepare the public for you. If we give them the whole truth now, I rather doubt they’ll be much impressed with your partial truths later on. I’ll send instructions about that to our business office on Lambda. Just to announce that the floppers are beginning to evolve should be a good start, and—”

He smiled. He felt wonderful. Perhaps treating Hitchcock this way was lousy and unethical, but even Hitchcock himself would have to admit that—when everything was considered—it was definitely a moral act.

The floppers began to wheel Hitchcock out of the room. Hitchcock was raving.

“You can’t do this to me!” he protested. “You can’t!”

“Really?” Ben Reese wondered innocently. He knew it was cruel, but the temptation was too strong.

“Really, Mr. Hitchcock,” he said, “I must have proof.”

Slowly, the procession marched past the bier of the Dead One, who was nameless because he was dead, and who had been their leader. Each one, as he came to the bier, crouched low in obeisance, then moved on. The shaman stood over the bier, his pelt stained green to signify that he personified the Dead One. He acknowledged each obeisance by raising his arms.

Shokk-elorrisch stood beside the bier, and he also acknowledged the obeisances, for he was the new leader in the Dead One’s stead. Already, he held the tool-stone in his hand, and he chanted the four harsh syllables: “My eyes shall find the path for your feet; my hand shall feed you and my pelt shall warm you; I am all of you; I give you my self.”

This he spoke to each one who made obeisance to him, and each one responded: “Show me the path!”

The procession shuffled on, and formed ranks beyond the bier. And when the last one made his obeisance, the three eldest-born from the Dead One’s body came forward. They lifted the vine-woven sling which cradled the Dead One. Flanked by Shokk-elorrisch on one side and the shaman on the other—all of them chanting: “You are all of us; your eyes saw the path; your hand fed us; your pelt warmed our bodies. We are grateful; we honor you; we sanctify the memory of you; we give you back to yourself!”

Chanting this, their tread matched to the chant, they advanced to the edge of the cliff. There they stopped, and the cadenced rhythm of their chant broke with the cry, “We cast you out!” and they hurled the Dead One into the foaming sea. And the sons of the Dead One and the shaman turned to Shokk-elorrisch. They made obeisance to him, and they said: “Show us the path!”

But Shokk-elorrisch did not answer, nor did he show them any sign that he heard. Standing at the cliff edge, the wind rippling his pelt and the waves crashing on rocks far below, he faced out to sea and made obeisance to the Olympians who lived on the round mountain, there on the island that rose from the horizon—the Olympians, who never had to migrate in search of new hunting ground, and who watched from the boulder that floated like a cloud in the wind—who watched but took no part in the things they witnessed.

And he wondered, even as he made obeisance to them, why they kept themselves aloof, and what was the source of their powers, and whether his people, too, could achieve those powers—to become the equals of those strange and enigmatic beings.

And he wondered, too, would they teach him? Would they teach him if he went to that mountain—out there in the ocean? Would they permit him to learn the secret of their powers?

He wondered how to cross those tattered waves—how to climb that shore and ascend to the crest of that mountain.

Thinking thus, Shokk-elorrisch knew what his path would be. And the path of his people.

Toward greatness. Toward the mastery of Nature.

Toward glory.

Last year I took occasion to do considerable sniping at some sins of omission, and a few commissions, in Kingsley Amis’s critical book on science fiction, “New Maps of Hell.” When my first fine fury began to die down, it occurred to me that my fire might better have been aimed at the general literary reviewers (who took the Amis dicta as a sort of newstyle Holy Writ) than at the author, who never claimed infallibility for himself.

One of Mr. Amis’s sharpest criticisms of science fantasy in general was the lack of good humorous writing in the field. From the examples he cited, and those he did not, I suspect we do not always laugh at the same jokes. Not always: at least one exception (and probably several more) appeared in the series of parodies published in Punch last year, when that venerable institution of humor announced it had ordered “SF stories in the manner of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope ...” etc.