The Best of Sci-Fi-5

They stood by the edge of the sea, looking out, the man and the two boys, until they heard the truck driving up on the dunes behind them.

The last of the sun was gone.

They heard footsteps running down the dunes and someone yelling.

They drove back down the darkening beach in the light truck with the big-treaded tires, in silence. The two boys sat in the rear on the bags of chipped ice. After a long while, Chico began to sweat steadily, half to himself, spitting out the window.

“Three hundred pounds of ice. Three hundred pounds of ice! What do I do with it now? And I’m soaked to the skin, soaked! You didn’t even move when I jumped in and swam out to look around! Idiot, idiot! You haven’t changed! Like every other time, like always, you do nothing, nothing, just stand there, stand there, do nothing, nothing, just stare!”

“And what did you do, I ask, what?” said Tom, in a tired voice, looking ahead. “The same as you always did, just the same, no different at all. You should’ve seen yourself.”

They dropped the boys off at their beach-house. The youngest spoke in a voice you could hardly hear against the wind.

“Gosh, nobody’ll ever believe…”

The two men drove down the coast and parked.

Chico sat for two or three minutes waiting for his fists to relax on his lap, and then he snorted.

“Hell. I guess things turn out for the best.” He took a deep breath. “It just came to me. Funny. Twenty, thirty years from now, middle of the night, our phone’ll ring. It’ll be one of those two boys, grown up, calling long-distance from a bar somewhere. Middle of the night, them calling to ask one question. It’s true , isn’t it? they’ll say. It did happen, didn’t it? Back in 1958, it really happened to us? And we’ll sit there on the edge of the bed, middle of the night, saying, Sure, boy, sure, it really happened, to us, in 1958. And they’ll say, Thanks, and we’ll say, Don’t mention it, any old time. And we’ll all say good night. And maybe they won’t call again for a couple of years.”

The two men sat on their front-porch steps in the dark.

“Tom?”

“What?”

Chico waited a moment.

“You’re not going away.”

It was not a question but a quiet statement.

Tom thought about it, his cigarette dead in his fingers. And he knew he would never go away now. For tomorrow and the day after and the day after the day after that, he knew he would walk down and go swimming there in all the green lace and the white fires and the dark caverns in the hollows under the waves. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

“That’s right, Chico. I’m staying here.”

Now the silver looking-glasses advanced in a crumpling line all along the coast from a thousand miles north to a thousand miles south. The mirrors did not reflect so much as one building or one tree or one highway or one car or even one man himself. The mirrors reflected only the quiet moon and then shattered into a billion bits of glass that spread out in a glaze on the shore. Then the sea was dark awhile, preparing another line of mirrors to rear up and surprise the two men who sat there for a long time, never once blinking their eyes, waiting.

Every profession has its fringe benefits, and Gordy Dickson is one of science fiction’s. A big rangy ex-Canadian from the tall beer country of Minnesota, he turns up, not quite often enough, at conventions and conferences with his guitar over one shoulder and a sort of shining shield of great good humor over the other. One of these days a bright song publisher will introduce nonconvention-goers to the Dickson-Cogswell-Anderson science-fantasy ballads and blues. Meantime, novels like his explosive Dorsai! in ASF last year, and short stories like this one fill the gap moderately well.

Mr. Wilier is shaving. He uses an old-fashioned straight-edged razor and the mirror above his bathroom washbasin reflects a morning face that not even the fluffy icing of the lather can make very palatable. Above the lather his skin is dark and wrinkled. His eyes are somewhat yellow where they ought to show white and his sloping forehead is embarrassingly short of hair. No matter. Mr. Wilier poises the razor for its first stroke—and instantly freezes in position. For a second he stands immobile. Then his false teeth clack once and he starts to pivot slowly toward the northwest, razor still in hand, quivering like a directional antenna seeking its exact target. This is as it should be. Mr. Wilier, wrinkles, false teeth and all, is a directional antenna. Mr. Wilier turns back to the mirror and goes ahead with his shaving. He shaves skilfully and rapidly, beaming up at a sign over the mirror which proclaims that a stitch in time saves nine. Four minutes later, stitchless and in need of none, he moves out of the bathroom, into his bedroom. Here he dresses rapidly and efficiently, at the last adjusting his four-in-hand before a dresser mirror which has inlaid about its frame the message Handsome is as handsome does . Fully dressed, Mr. Wilier selects a shiny malacca cane from the collection in his hall closet and goes out behind his little house to the garage.

His car, a 1937 model sedan painted a sensible gray, is waiting for him. Mr. Wilier gets in, starts the motor and carefully warms it up for two minutes. He then backs out into the May sunshine. He points the hood ornament of the sedan toward Buena Vista and drives off.

Two hours later he can be seen approaching a small yellow-and-white rambler in Buena Vista’s new development section, at a considerate speed two miles under the local limit. It is 10:30 in the morning. He pulls up in front of the house, sets the handbrake, locks his car and goes up to ring the doorbell beside the yellow front door.

The door opens and a face looks out. It is a very pretty face with blue eyes and marigold-yellow hair above a blue apron not quite the same shade as the eyes. The young lady to which it belongs cannot be much more than in her very early twenties.

“Yes?” says the young lady.

“Mr. Wilier, Mrs. Conalt,” says Mr. Wilier, raising his hat and producing a card. “The Liberty Mutual Insurance agent, to see your husband.”

“Oh!” says the pretty face, somewhat flustered, opening the door and stepping back. “Please come in.” Mr. Wilier enters. Still holding the card, Mrs. Conalt turns and calls across the untenanted small living room toward the bedroom section at the rear of the house, “Hank!”

“Coming!” replies a young baritone. Seconds later a tall, quite thin man about the same age as his wife, with a cheerfully unhandsome face, emerges rapidly into the living room.

“The insurance man, honey,” says the young lady, who has whisked off her apron while Mr. Wilier was turned to face the entrance through which the young man has come. She hands her husband the card.

“Insurance?” says young Mr. Conalt frowning, reading the card. “What insurance? Liberty Mutual? But I don’t— we don’t have any policies with Liberty Mutual. If you’re selling—”

“Not at the moment,” says Mr. Wilier, beaming at them as well as the looseness of his false teeth will permit. “I actually am an insurance agent, but that hasn’t anything to do with this. I only wanted to see you first.”

“First before what?” demands Mr. Conalt, staring hard at him.

“Before revealing myself,” says Mr. Wilier. “You are the two young people who have been broadcasting a call to any other psi-sensitives within range, aren’t you?”

“Oh, Hank!” gasps Mrs. Conalt; but Conalt does not unbend.