Dangerous Visions (44 page)

"Yes," Sam said. "The whole world hurts."

The boy turned away as Sam heard the car in the drive. It was Dr. Yancey. The man came in with brisk steps and Sam had a moment of quick, consuming hatred for the other man; the solid, green envy of the sick for the well.

Dr. Yancey spoke first to the boy. "Hello, Randy. How are you today?"

For a moment Sam did not think the boy would answer.

Randall looked at the doctor without particular interest. "I am young," he said finally, in falsetto.

"He says that sometimes to people," Sam said. "I think he means he's all right."

Yancey went into the kitchen and brought back water and a yellow capsule. "This won't put you under." He handed the capsule and water to Sam and Sam downed them dutifully. He let Yancey help him from the chair to the couch. Expert fingers probed him. The boy watched with some interest.

"You're swollen, but there aren't any real signs of serious organ failure. You really ought to be in a hospital."

"Not yet," Sam said softly. "There's the boy." He looked up at Yancey. "How long, Doc?" He asked it not really wanting to know and yet wanting to know.

"Not very long now, Sam. I think the cancer's spread to the spine." He kept his voice low and turned to see if the boy was listening.

Randall got up from the floor. He moved quietly and gracefully out of the room and down the hall. A light clicked on in the study.

"He's sort of unnerving," Sam said. "He'll go back in the study and get down books and turn pages. I've got a good encyclopedia back there and some medical books I use in damage cases. I suppose he likes the pictures. Sometimes he spends hours back there."

 
Some say Ubu'l Kassim destroyed his father two months before the coming. The shock of death and birth weakened the mother thing and she died a few years after. His life was confused, moving from relative to relative, slow maturation. Something within him hid from the world until early manhood
.
 

Item: The books were puzzling. There was so much in them that was so clearly wrong, but they were not cruel of themselves, only stupid and careless. He remembered the mother-thing and wondered why he had hurt her. The father-thing was hurt also, but he had not done that. There was no love in the father-thing, but the father-thing had never hurt him.

The books were no help.

Alone, unaided by what the world had become and what it meant to him, he made his decision. He made it for the one time and the one thing, putting the rest back, delaying.

The pill was effective for a few hours and then it began to wear off. He took another and checked the boy. Randall lay in his bed, small body lost in covers, breathing slowly, evenly, his eyes open.

"Where is the mother?" he asked.

There were two feelings. Sam had the desire to destroy the boy and an equal feeling to catch the child up and hold him close. He did neither. He rearranged the covers.

"She's gone far away," he said softly to the boy.

Randall nodded.

Sam straightened the study. The boy had been at his books again. He put them back on the shelves. He went to his own bed. Sleep came quickly.

Outside, in the neighborhood, most lights were still on. People stared uneasily at their television screens. There was another confrontation, this time in the Near East. Hands moved closer to the red button, the button that man had made. The President spoke and tensions eased, for some. The world, for what it was and what all men had made it, would remain for a while.

For Sam there was a dream.

The faces of a thousand clients came and blended into one sick and ignorant and prejudiced face, a "never-had" and "never-will" face that whined the injustice of life as it spawned children to be supported by the myriad public doles. It was a face that Sam knew well, a face that pleaded for divorce and demanded alimony and plotted rape and confessed murder. It was a face that hated all minorities and majorities of which it was not the leading member, that cursed fate and defrauded welfare. Partly the face was familiar and he knew it, for it was his own face.

It was a dream built of fifteen years of practice. It was not a nightmare, for it was far better than life.

The dream fit life though, and at the moment of dreaming, if he could have made a rational choice, if the instinct for life had not been so strong and inbred, he would have chosen death.

He came almost to wakefulness once, but he slid back into the well where there was only one tiny circle of light. Ann and the boy were there. They touched him with soft hands. He turned them into the circle of life and their faces could be seen and those faces bore the same marks as his client-self face, cruel, sick, angry, and in pain. Their hands still touched him and he writhed to escape, revolted at the touch. With horrible pain and with tearing and burning he retched the gorge within him away.

He awoke.

Only one pair of hands was real.

Randall stood by the bed. The boy's hands were laid lightly across the bed, resting and unmoving on Sam's chest. There was something in the boy's face, an awareness, a feeling. Sam could not read it all, but there was satisfaction and accomplishment and perhaps even love. Then expression wandered away. The boy yawned and removed his hands. He walked away and Sam soon heard the rustle of the silk comforter from the boy's bedroom.

A spasm of empty pain came. Sam got up weakly and made it to the kitchen and took another pill and sat for a while on the couch until it took effect. He came back past the boy's room and looked in. Randall lay straight in bed. There was a bright sheen of sweat on the child's forehead. His eyes were open, watching and waiting.

"I am young," the child said again, plaintively and to no one.

"Yes," Sam said softly. "So very young."

"There was a head thing," Randall said slowly, searching for words. "Hurt doggy." He reached a small finger out and laid it on Sam's wrist. "Fish always hungry. I gave to them." He shook his head. "See words. Can't say them." Confidence came in his voice. "I will grow more quickly now." He moved his hands off Sam's wrist and closer to the abdomen. "All gone now. All gone every place," he said, and the look of Sam's bedroom came fleetingly again.

Sam watched without comprehension.

The cold, lost eyes watched him and the next words turned Sam's blood cold. The boy's voice came up in volume and with a ferocity that Sam had never heard before. "See things on teevee, read them in the books and papers, so many bad things, all hate out there like others hate me." He touched his own small head. "So many things in here not ready yet." The eyelids closed tight and a tiny tear came at each corner. "Not sorry. I will grow older," Randall said, his voice a cruel, unhuman promise.

 
There was Another who was born in a manger and died on a cross. That One was sheltered for a while and maturity was unforced.
But the new One, the One born for our times, would see man's consuming hate of all others, so consuming that the hate extends even to himself. See it in Alabama and Vietnam and even in the close world around Him. See it on television and read of it in the newspapers and then grow unsheltered in this world of mass and hysterical communication.
Then plan. Then decide.
This one would come to maturity and ripen angry.
 

Afterword:

As this story appears I will have passed my fortieth birthday, a dangerous time in itself. I suppose that this is a story that I've wanted to do for a very long time, but the writing of it and particularly the finishing of it, the polishing that makes a told-tale into a story, had a depressing effect upon me. I was unable to shake the feeling that in some way I was flaunting God. There was a time when I seriously considered withdrawing the story, but I'm glad now that I didn't. In its way "Lord Randy, My Son" is a deeply religious story, combining that part of me which is best with that part of the world I recognize as worst, but then it's always been a bad but interesting world. I am a lawyer by profession and I will admit that parts of the dream sequence are intensely personal.

If a writer is ever happy with any story, except the "next" one that he's
going
to do, then I'm happy with this one.

When it came time to write this introduction for Poul Anderson's story, I found—with panic rising—that somehow Poul had not been asked for biographical data to be worked into the piece. Each of the other writers had been asked and had sent in his background, as well as the afterword. I had an afterword for "Eutopia," but nothing on Anderson. For a moment I wondered why Poul and no one else had been overlooked. And then it became obvious to me. You would not have to threaten me with thumbscrews or the iron boot to get me to admit I am a sucker for Poul Anderson's work. Nor would it take pressure for me to confess I have read just about everything the man has written in the field of speculative fiction for the past sixteen years. Therefore, such familiarity bred an unconscious feeling in this editor that an introduction could be written with no facts at all. I would rather believe that than the alternative, which is that I'm a forgetful imbecile. One
must
cling to the cornerstones of one's personal religion.

I have my favorite Anderson stories, so do you. I have re-read "UnMan" and "Guardians of Time" and the Hoka stories (written with Gordy Dickson) and "The High Crusade" and "Three Hearts and Three Lions" at least three times each, and several of them half a dozen times. When it became clear that I would have to dredge up biographical facts from
somewhere
, I began scrounging my bookshelves for Anderson volumes: it was slim pickings, I was only able to pull down thirty-two books. The man is
incapable
of writing a dull word!

But aside from the obvious credentials, such as that he has won two Hugos, he is married and has a daughter named Astrid and lives in Orinda, California; he graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in physics; his
Perish by the Sword
, a mystery novel, won the first Macmillan Cock Robin Award; in 1959 he was Guest of Honor at the World Science Fiction Convention; he sold his first stories in 1947 (both were novelettes, "Tomorrow's Children" and "Logic") to
Astounding
; he was born in Bristol, Pennsylvania; aside from all of these rather mundane facts (and the singular one that
Esquire
, world-re-nowned for its depth of perceptivity and exhaustive research into anything it prints, cleverly managed—in its January 1966 issue—to label a full-page color photo of Poul with the name A. E. van Vogt, and Van's photo was slug-lined Poul Anderson), there are
secrets
so deeply buried that only personal acquaintance with the man's work can unearth them. So for the first time anywhere, in its own way a dangerous vision, the veil is ripped aside and the
truth
about Poul Anderson can be told:

Because of Anderson's extreme height and his penchant for writing stories about mightily thewed heroes, many of them either reincarnations or descendants of Viking conquerors, the rumor has persisted that Anderson is of Norse ancestry. This is sheer flummery. Poul Anderson (pronounced slightly softer than
pull
) is
actually
one meter tall in stockinged feet (and he wears those
odious
clocked lisle socks), tubby and golden-furred, with a round blunt-muzzled head and small black eyes. Except for his stubby-fingered hands, he resembles nothing so much as a giant teddy bear. It is a tribute to his powers of personal persuasion and the kindness of those around him that he is able to pass himself off as a gangling six-footer with a bushy head of hair and a raconteur's manner of speaking with wildly gesticulating hands the size of picnic hams.

Poul Anderson has never written one word of the stories credited to him. They have
all
been written by F. N. Waldrop, an asthmatic mail clerk in the rural free delivery office of Muscatine, Iowa. Anderson, by dint of threats and personal vilification, has kept Waldrop in thrall for better than twenty years. The fact that Anderson kidnaped Waldrop's three children in 1946 has not helped the situation much, either.

And as a last laughable untruth, Poul Anderson insists the story which follows is not "dangerous" and could have sold to any magazine. Tell that to
McCall's
or
Boy's Life
after you've read it. And please address all libel suits to F. N. Waldrop, RFD, Muscatine, Iowa.

"
Gif thit nafn
!"

The Danska words barked from the car radio as a jet whine cut across the hum of motor and tires. "Identify yourself!" Iason Philippou cast a look skyward through the bubbletop. He saw a strip of blue between two ragged green walls where pine forest lined the road. Sunlight struck off the flanks of the killer machine up there. It wailed, came about, and made a circle over him.

Sweat started cold from his armpits and ran down his ribs.
I must not panic
, he thought in a corner of his brain.
May the God help me now
. But it was his training he invoked. Psychosomatics: control the symptoms, keep the breath steady, command the pulse to slow, and the fear of death becomes something you can handle. He was young, and thus had much to lose. But the philosophers of Eutopia schooled well the children given into their care. You will be a man, they had told him, and the pride of humanity is that we are not bound by instinct and reflex; we are free because we can master ourselves.

He couldn't pass as an ordinary citizen (no, they said mootman here) of Norland. If nothing else, his Hellenic accent was too strong. But he might fool yonder pilot, for just a few minutes, into believing he was from some other domain of this history. He roughened his tone, as a partial disguise, and assumed the expected arrogance.

"Who are you? What do you want?"

"Runolf Einarsson, captain in the hird of Ottar Thorkelsson, the Lawman of Norland. I pursue one who has brought feud on his own head. Give me your name."