Dangerous Visions (29 page)

"Shouldn't we have been properly introduced to this gentleman, Tracey?" Fifi whispered to her husband.

"Nonsense, my dear. Rules of etiquette have to go by the board when you enter one of the temples of industry." As he spoke, Tracey seemed to stroke an imaginary side whisker.

Inside the time plant chaos reigned. Now the full magnitude of the disaster was clear. They were pulling the first miners out of the hole where the time explosion had occurred; one of the poor fellows was cursing weakly and blaming George III for the whole terrible matter.

The whole time industry was still in its infancy. A bare ten years had elapsed since the first of the subterrenes, foraging far below the Earth's crust, had discovered the time pockets. The whole matter was still a cause for wonder, and investigations were as yet at a comparatively early stage.

But big business had stepped in and, with its usual bigheartedness, seen that everyone got his fair share of time, at a price. Now the time industry had more capital invested than any other industry in the world. Even in a tiny village like Rouseville, the plant was worth millions. But the plant had broken down right now.

"It's terrible dangerous here—you folks better not stay long," Clay-ball said. He was shouting through his gas mask. The noise here was terrible, especially since a news commentator had just started his spiel to the nation a yard away.

In answer to a shouted question from his brother, Clayball said, "No, it's more than a crack in the main supply. That was just the cover story we put out. Our brave boys down there struck a whole new time seam and it's leaking out all over the place. Can't plug it! Half our guys were back to the Norman Conquest before we guessed what was wrong." He pointed dramatically down through the tiles beneath their feet.

Fifi could not understand what on earth he was talking about. Ever since leaving Plymouth, she had been adrift, and that not entirely metaphorically. It was bad enough playing Pilgrim Mother to one of the Pilgrim Fathers, but she did not dig this New World at all. It was now beyond her comprehension to understand that the vast resources of modern technology were fouling up the whole time schedule of a planet.

In her present state, she could not know that already the illusions of the time gusher were spreading across the continent. Almost every communication satellite shuttling above the world was carrying more or less accurate accounts of the disaster and the events leading up to it, while their bemused audiences sank back through the generations like people plumbing bottomless snowdrifts.

From these deposits came the supply of time that was piped to the million million homes of the world. Experts had already computed that at present rates of consumption all the time deposits would be exhausted in two hundred years. Fortunately, other experts were already at work trying to develop synthetic substitutes for time. Only the previous month, the small research team of Time Pen Inc., of Ink, Penn, had announced the isolation of a molecule nine minutes slower than any other molecule known to science, and it was firmly expected that even more isolated molecules would follow.

Now an ambulance came skidding up, with another behind it. Archibald Smith tried to pull Tracey out of the way.

"Unhand me, varlet!" quoth Tracey, attempting to draw an imaginary sword. But the ambulance men were jumping out of their vehicles, and the police were cordoning off the area.

"They're going to bring up our brave terranauts!" Clayball shouted.

He could hardly be heard above the hubbub. Masked men were everywhere, with here and there the slender figure of a masked nurse. Supplies of oxygen and soup were being marshalled, searchlights swung overhead, blazing down into the square mouth of the inspection pit. The men in yellow overalls were lowering themselves into the pit, communicating to each other by wrist radio. They disappeared. For a moment a hush of awe fell over the building and seemed to spread to the crowds outside.

But the moment stretched into minutes, and the noise found its way back to its own level. More grim-faced men came forward, and the commentators were pushed out of the picture.

"It thinks me we should suffer ourselves to get gone from here, by God's breath!" Fifi whispered faintly, clutching at her homespun with a trembling hand. "This likes me not!"

At last there was activity at the head of the pit. Sweating men in overalls hauled on ropes. The first terranaut was pulled into view, wearing the characteristic black uniform of his kind. His head lolled back, his mask had been ripped away, but he was fighting bravely to retain consciousness. Indeed, a debonair smile crossed his pale lips, and he waved a hand at the cameras. A ragged cheer went up from the onlookers.

This was the intrepid breed of men that went down into the uncharted seas of time gas below the Earth's crust, risking their lives to bring back a nugget of knowledge from the unknown, pushing back still further the boundaries of science, unsung and unhonoured by all save the constant battery of world publicity.

The ace commentator had struggled through the crowd to reach the terranaut and was trying to question him, holding a microphone to his lips while the hero's tortured face swam before the unbelieving eyes of a billion viewers.

"Hell down there . . . . Dinosaurs and their young," he managed to gasp, before he was whisked into the first ambulance. "Right down deep in the gas. Packs of 'em, ravening . . . . Few more hundred feet lower and we'd have fetched . . .fetched up against the creation . . .of the world . . . ."

They could hear no more. Now fresh police reinforcements were clearing the building of all unauthorised persons before the other terranauts were returned to the surface, although of their earth capsule there was as yet no sign. As the armed cordon approached, Fifi and Tracey made a dash for it. They could stand no more, they could understand no more. They pelted for the door, oblivious to the cries of the two masked Smiths. As they ran out into the darkness, high above them towered the great invisible plume of the time gusher, still blowing, blowing its doom about the world.

For some while they lay gasping in the nearest hedge. Occasionally one of them would whimper like a tiny girl, or the other would groan like an old man. Between times, they breathed heavily.

Dawn was near to breaking when they pulled themselves up and made along the track toward Rouseville, keeping close to the fields.

They were not alone. The inhabitants of the village were on the move, heading away from the homes that were now alien to them and beyond their limited understanding. Staring at them from under his lowering brow, Tracey stopped and fashioned himself a crude cudgel from the hedgerow.

Together, the man and his woman trudged over the hill, heading back for the wilds like most of the rest of humanity, their bent and uncouth forms silhouetted against the first ragged banners of light in the sky.

"Ugh glumph hum herm morm glug humk," the woman muttered.

Which means, roughly translated from the Old Stone, "Why the heck does this always have to happen to mankind just when he's on the goddam point of getting civilised again?"

Afterword:

If ever a dangerous vision was rooted in real life, "The Night That All Time Broke Out" is. I should explain that I am at present living in a remote corner of Oxfordshire, England, where I have purchased a marvellous old sixteenth-century house, all stone and timber and thatch, and considerably slumped in disrepair. I said to my friend Jim Ballard, the s-f writer, "It looks as if it's some strange vegetable form that has grown out of the ground," and he replied, "Yes, and it looks as if it's now growing back in again."

In an effort to keep the house above ground, my wife and I decided to have it put on to main drainage and fill in the old cesspit. Our builders immediately surrounded the place with gigantic ditching systems and enormous pipes. In the thick of it all, I wondered how future generations would cope with similar problems. The result you see here.

At a rough count, this is my one hundred and tenth published story. I gave up work ten years ago and took up writing instead. It was one of the best ideas I ever had. I believe my story presented here contains one of the whackiest ideas I ever had. (Let's hope there are a few more whacky ideas in my head—I'd hate to have to go back to work . . . .)

Originally, one of the lesser (but no less important) intents of this anthology was to commission and bring to the attention of the readers stories by writers well outside the field of speculative fiction. The names William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Alan Sillitoe, Terry Southern, Thomas Berger and Kingsley Amis were listed in my preliminary table of contents. The name Howard Rodman was also listed. Circumstances almost Machiavellian in nature prevented the appearance here of the former sextet. Howard Rodman is with us. I am honored.

You are a fan of Rodman's work if you watch television at all. Because, if you watch TV in even the most peripheral way, you do it to catch the best programs, and if that is the case you have seen Rodman's work. (A comment: how odd it seems to me that science fiction fans, the ones who choose to exist in dream worlds of flying skyways, cities of wonder, marvelous inventions, dilating doors, tri-vid and "feelies," are the ones who most vocally despise modern television. The bulk of the fans I have met, when they discover I spend part of my time writing for the visual media, rather superciliously tell me they seldom watch, as though watching
at all
might be considered gauche. How sad it must be for them, to see television, space travel and all the other predictions of Gernsbackian "scientifiction" turned over to the Philistines. I suppose, in a way, it's a small tragedy, like having been so hip for years that you knew Tolkien was great, and now suddenly finding every
shmendrick
in the world reading paperback editions of
Lord of the Rings
on the IRT. But it is a far, far better thing, I submit, to have TV as the mass media it is, even as gawdawful as it is ninety-six per cent of the time, than to relegate it to the hideously antiseptic fate intended for it by the s-f of 1928.)

Howard Rodman has been nominated for and won more awards for television drama than anyone currently working in the medium. His famous
Naked City
script, "Bringing Far Places Together," won Emmys and Writers' Guild awards not only for himself but for the series, the director and the stars. Students of exemplary teleplays will recall last season's
Bob Hope-Chrysler Theater
drama, "The Game with Glass Pieces." It was, in point of fact, Howard Rodman's style that set the tone for the best of both
Naked City
and
Route 66
during their auspicious tenures on the channelways.

Howard Rodman was born in the Bronx, and decided at the age of ten to be a writer. He took that decision seriously at age fifteen and from fifteen to sixteen read a minimum of one volume of short stories daily; from sixteen to seventeen read only plays, five or six a day; and from seventeen to twenty-one he wrote 3000 words a day: short stories, scenes from plays, poems, narrative sequences, etc. He graduated from Brooklyn College and later did his graduate work at Iowa University. At twenty-one he went into the army (where among his assignments he was required to inspect the brothels of Lille as a sergeant in counterintelligence). He has had over a hundred and fifty short stories published, several hundred poems, forty one-act plays, four three-act plays (and has been included in volumes of best plays of the year). For the past ten years he has been active in radio, television and motion pictures. At forty-seven, Howard Rodman—big, hearty, incredibly witty and erudite Howard Rodman—the film buff, has been married, divorced and remarried to the lovely and talented actress Norma Connolly. They have four children, several of whom can be ranked as geniuses by the most stringent criteria.

I am particularly pleased that Howard is able to appear in this anthology, not merely because his story is something very different and very special from the others in this book, but for a number of secondary reasons, herewith noted: Long before I came to Hollywood, I was an admirer of Rodman's scripts. They seemed to me to embody the ideals a scenarist should strive for in a medium dedicated to drumming stench-deterrents for the hair, mouth, underarms and spaces between the toes. I made it a point to meet Rodman, within the first few months in Clown Town, and from him I learned an important lesson. A lesson any writer can use. Don't be afraid. That simple; don't let them scare you. There's nothing they can do to you. If they kick you out of films, do TV. If they kick you out of TV, write novels. If they won't buy your novels, sell short stories. Can't do that, then take a job as a bricklayer. A writer always writes. That's what he's for. And if they won't let you write one kind of thing, if they chop you off at the pockets in the market place, then go to another market place. And if they close off all the bazaars, then by God go and work with your hands till you
can
write, because the talent is always there. But the first time you say, "Oh, Christ, they'll kill me!" then you're done. Because the chief commodity a writer has to sell is his courage. And if he has none, he is more than a coward. He is a sellout and a fink and a heretic, because writing is a holy chore.
That
is what I learned from Howard Rodman.

Another reason for my delight at Rodman's inclusion among these pages is the tenor of the story he has told. It is a gentle story, seemingly commonplace and not very "dangerous." Yet when I first read it, and these thoughts occurred to me, I paused with the warning
read it again
signaling me from inside. Rodman is devious. So I read it again, and aside from the understatement of the handling, the pain of the concept struck me. He has attempted something very difficult, and in its own way unsettling. He has made a sage comment on the same subject which
I
commented upon, in the second paragraph of this introduction. (The part in parentheses.) It is the kind of story Heinlein used to write, and which Vonnegut has done several times, but which
most
speculative writers would not even consider. They are too far away in space. Rodman still has substantial ties with the here and now. And it is this concern (and affection) for the tragedy of the here and now that has prompted the story of the man who went to the moon—twice.