The Best of Sci-Fi-5

This time the focus is summed up in the title of the editorial reprinted some pages farther on from John W. Campbell Jr.’s erstwhile Astounding, now—take a deep breath— retitled Analog Science Fact and Fiction: “What Do You Mean… Human?”

In a rather different sense, this is of course the query underlying all fiction, and all art. But the stories in this book, almost all, treat the question also in the special science-fiction sense as well—exploring with postulated answers and what if’s the boundaries of distinction by which we define ourselves.

Ray Bradbury, who needs no introduction in or out of the science-fiction field (even Mr. Amis knows his name!) selects a delicate and haunting legendary boundary to explore.

Tom, kneedeep in the waves, a piece of driftwood in his hand, listened.

The house, up toward the coast highway in the late afternoon, was silent. The sounds of closets being rummaged, suitcase locks snapping, vases being smashed, and of a final door crashing shut, all had faded away.

Chico, standing on the pale sand, flourished his wire-strainer to shake out a harvest of lost coins. After a moment, without glancing at Tom, he said, “Let her go.”

So it was every year. For a week, or a month, their house would have music swelling from the windows, there would be new geraniums potted on the porch-rail, new paint on the doors and steps. The clothes on the wire-line changed from harlequin pants to sheath-dresses to hand-made Mexican frocks like white waves breaking behind the house. Inside, the paintings on the walls shifted from imitation Matisse to pseudo-Italian Renaissance. Sometimes, looking up, he would see a woman drying her hair like a bright yellow flag on the wind. Sometimes the flag was black or red. Sometimes the woman was tall, sometimes short, against the sky. But there was never more than one woman at a time. And, at last, a day like today came…

Tom placed his driftwood on the growing pile near where Chico sifted the billion footprints left by people long vanished from their holidays.

“Chico. What are we doing here?”

“Living the life of Reilly, boy!”

“I don’t feel like Reilly, Chico.”

“Work at it, boy!”

Tom saw the house a month from now, the flowerpots blowing dust, the walls hung with empty squares, only sand carpeting the floors. The rooms would echo like shells in the wind. And all night every night, bedded in separate rooms, he and Chico would hear a tide falling away and away down a long shore, leaving no trace.

Tom nodded, imperceptibly. Once a year he himself brought a nice girl here knowing she was right at last and that in no time they would be married. But his women always stole silently away before dawn, feeling they had been mistaken for someone else, not being able to play the part. Chico’s friends left like vacuum cleaners, with a terrific drag, roar, rush, leaving no lint unturned, no clam unprized of its pearl, taking their purses with them like toy dogs which Chico had petted as he opened their jaws to count their teeth.

“That’s four women so far this year.”

“Okay, referee.” Chico grinned. “Show me the way to the showers.”

“Chico—” Tom bit his lower lip, then went on. “I been thinking. Why don’t we split up?”

Chico just looked at him.

“I mean,” said Tom, quickly, “maybe we’d have better luck, alone.”

“Well, I’ll be god-damned,” said Chico, slowly, gripping the strainer in his big fists before him. “Look here, boy, don’t you know the facts? You and me, we’ll be here come the year 2000. A couple of crazy dumb old gooney-birds drying their bones in the sun. Nothing’s ever going to happen to us now, Tom, it’s too late. Get that through your head and shut up.”

Tom swallowed and looked steadily at the other man. “I’m thinking of leaving—next week.”

“Shut up, shut up, and get to work!”

Chico gave the sand an angry showering rake that tilled him forty-three cents in dimes, pennies, and nickels. He stared blindly at the coins shimmering down the wires like a pinball game all afire.

Tom did not move, holding his breath.

They both seemed to be waiting for something.

The something happened.

“Hey… hey… oh, hey… !”

From a long way off down the coast a voice called.

The two men turned slowly.

“Hey… hey… oh, hey… !”

A boy was running, yelling, waving, along the shore two hundred yards away. There was something in his voice that made Tom feel suddenly cold. He held onto his own arms, waiting.

“Hey!”

The boy pulled up, gasping, pointing back along the shore.

“A woman, a funny woman, by the North Rock!”

“A woman!” The words exploded from Chico’s mouth and he began to laugh. “Oh, no, no!”

“What you mean, a ‘funny’ woman?” asked Tom.

“I don’t know,” cried the boy, his eyes wide. “You got to come see! Awfully funny!”

“You mean drowned?”

“Maybe! She came out of the water, she’s lying on the shore, you got to see, yourself… funny…” The boy’s voice died. He gazed off north again. “She’s got a fish’s tail.”

Chico laughed. “Not before supper, thanks.”

“Please,” cried the boy, dancing now. “No lie! Oh, hurry!”

He ran off, sensed he was not followed, and looked back in dismay.

Tom felt his lips move. “Boy wouldn’t run this far for a joke, would he, Chico?”

“People have run further for less.”

Tom started walking. “All right, son.”

“Thanks, mister, oh, thanks!”

The boy ran. Twenty yards up the coast, Tom looked back. Behind him, Chico squinted, shrugged, dusted his hands wearily, and followed.

They moved north along the twilight beach, their skin weathered in tiny lizard folds about their burnt pale-water eyes, looking younger for their hair cut close to the skull so you could not see the gray. There was a fair wind and the ocean rose and fell with prolonged concussions.

“What,” said Tom, “what if we get to North Rock and it’s true? What if the ocean has washed some thing up?”

But before Chico could answer, Tom was gone, his mind racing down a coast littered with horseshoe crabs, sand-dollars, starfish, kelp, and stone. From all the times he’d talked on what lives in the sea, the names returned with the breathing fall of waves. Argonauts, they whispered, codlings, pollacks, houndfish, tautog, tench, sea-elephant, they whispered, gillings, flounders, and beluga the white whale and grampus the sea-dog… always you thought how these must look from their deep-sounding names. Perhaps you would never in your life see them rise from the salt meadows beyond the safe limits of the shore, but they were there, and their names, with a thousand others, made pictures. And you looked and wished you were a frigate-bird that might fly nine thousand miles around to return some year with the full size of the ocean in your head.

“Oh, quick!” The boy had run back to peer in Tom’s face. “It might be gone!”

“Keep your shirt on, boy,” said Chico.

They came around the North Rock. A second boy stood there, looking down.

Perhaps from the corner of his eye, Tom saw something on the sand that made him hesitate to look straight at it, but fix instead on the face of the boy standing there. The boy was pale and he seemed not to breathe. On occasion he remembered to take a breath, his eyes focused, but the more they saw there on the sand the more they took time off from focusing and turned blank and looked stunned. When the ocean came in over his tennis shoes, he did not move or notice.

Tom glanced away from the boy to the sand.

And Tom’s face, in the next moment, became the face of the boy. His hands assumed the same curl at his sides and his mouth moved to open and stay half open and his eyes, which were light in color, seemed to bleach still more with so much looking.