Dangerous Visions (49 page)

It is called mooning the sky egg and working up the air. What we do, we stick a structure such as an egg, one with smooth brown walls and little specky windows, up into the sky, up into the blue, high, high, impossibly, almost, high, high as we can go in thought, in any thought. Then we pick a task for the baser one of our selves—every-one being at least two selves as I guess is almost universally unarguably understood—and put him on the rock pile of his job. My self with leg chains, the self that longs to go up on a little Tower for a small victory and a concealment of chains, but never makes it, I have been putting here of late on a job that is called rolling the air, or on a job that is about the equivalent of rolling the air, this job being called unrolling the air. Either of these jobs requires very little or no physical labor, not a prohibitive amount of mental strength or mental health, and either of these jobs can keep a person's self well occupied for quite a long, long time. And sometimes in thinking of it I am at a loss to know why this type, or a closely related type, of work shouldn't just as well be all the people's tasks for a lifetime of achievement.

To roll the air, I first divide, mentally, all the air in my task block into neat, uniform strips, each strip being as wide and as thick as I want it to be for it to make the kind of roll I think will best fit in with the overall air-rolling mission for that day. And this stripping-the-air, as I speak of it, necessarily lends itself to almost, or quite, an infinite number of variations in strip width and strip thickness. I can have every other strip the same, every third strip the same, side-by-side strips the same, no two strips the same, all of the strips the same, five strips the same, then vary four or five or six and on and on. But I do always try to keep to some recognizable pattern, some sense, as it were, in my stripping. And I never start the actual roll part of the job until I have completed the entire stripping of the task block or, as you might say, my complete air area, and have tabbed it in my mind. Then, after stripping the complete air area and tabbing it firmly in my mind, it is just the jolly and diverting task of sitting there on my chains in the middle of the street on an edge of the task block and amidst the smirking, the coughing and the bright sayings of the crowd, starting my roll and winding in! Of course I have to be mentally sharp, up on my toes, as the saying is, to keep each strip stacked with its sister or brother size, which can have a very great bearing on the intensity of my task when it comes to the unrolling part of the job. Because I'm just doing this as a kind of exercise actually, or a diversion in achievement, we could say, and I have absolutely no intention or desire to permanently rearrange the air in the task block or, as we said, the air area. To leave it that way, permanently rearranged, indeed would make me feel unworthy, and from such an act very guilty of a violation of nature.

And up in the sky-high egg, high, high away from the chains, the tanks, the tasks, and all the tonsured, greasy, bald, curled or shave-cut peering heads—all, All! malicious watchers—how goes it? Well, it goes fine there. And how means it? Well, it means fine there. Ummm . . .mm . . .mmm . . .mmmm . . .Oh, the blisses of swaying in the sky-high egg . . .

Afterword:

When I am not writing literary stories (and verse) that pay usually nothing or very close to that, or science-fiction-fantasy stories that pay usually closer to nothing than they should, I earn my living doing things (in a civilian capacity) for the U. S. Air Forces. Because I do not have to depend upon my writing for a livelihood, I wear no editor's and no publisher's collar when I sit down to that white paper. Which isn't to say that I wouldn't like to earn a living as a writer. But I should also like to keep my writer's soul intact. And since I'm no fool in such matters, I've accepted a compromise. It's a hard compromise really, because the other work takes considerable time and energy away from the writing. But then the whole bit is a bit of a compromise, I suppose, the whole little drama of the kicking and threshing around between the long sleep of the Before and the longer sleep of the After.

Except in Moderan! In Moderan there is no sleep of the After. Those chaps are designed for forever. And do they compromise? You'd better believe they do not! They just sit back at the switch panels of War Rooms for around-the-clock launching of war heads—
varoom varoom varoom
—in their main game of war. And when an uneasy truce flares up, they don't plant flowers or rush off to Sunday school. They are their true-bad selves. They know how to earn mean-points in peace as well as in war. And they don't bend or pretend. Hate is their main virtue, as war is their main play. And entirely admirable they, because they have no hypocrisy. They step right out there and say it in the daylight, speak of good launchings, of Strongholds honeycombed and of arms and legs of enemies stacked by the Wall.

So I've overdrawn it. But I'm saying something in both these stories about truth and untruth, as indeed what else does a serious writer ever have in mind? The I in both is true. In one the I suffers a great deal, being a dreamer, from the niggling nagging cares of the everyday world and its people. But he escapes to truth finally in his sky-high egg, after first confounding his tormentors and saying something to them in his own way (the absurd air-rolling and -unrolling tasks) which they no doubt do not understand. In the other story the I has arrived at truth a long time ago. Just by being a Moderan master, shiny and sure, he is at truth, the cold unarguable truth of the switch panels, the War Rooms, the "replacements" to live forever, the introven, as opposed to the absurd hopes and unsureties of the flabby flesh-bum and his talk of decency, whatever in the world such an alien word could mean! . . .In one story the I has to escape into fantasy for the world of truth he wants. In the other there is no escape required. He has the world he wants, the only world he knows really, and the only one he can see as possibly workable for a satisfying life forever. The world of the flesh-bum, replete with flesh-hopes and flesh-doubts, is merely an absurdity the Moderan people have left a long time ago and far back.

The act of compiling most anthologies (I observed, prior to starting work on the volume before you) is ludicrously easy. There are men and women who have made whole careers of the act. An act about as complicated as clearing one's throat. I will not for a moment minimize the distillation of taste and selectivity that must be present in the editor for an anthology to be enjoyable and well rounded; it is the sole quality a reader needs to make him an anthologist. (And when even that is absent, why, of course, the book that results is not fit to be purchased.) But essentially, even at its best, the assembling of other men's work into a coherent, or "themed," grouping is not a particularly laboring labor. It merely requires a complete backlog of old pulp magazines, a number of friends with eidetic memories, and a clear line to the copyright office to ascertain what is in the public domain.

The book in your hands is rather another matter. I don't intend to make any great claims for myself as an anthologist, or suggest that some special kind of bravery was necessary to take on the job (only a special kind of stupidity). But this book entailed the actual prodding and pushing of specific writers to unleash themselves, to open up fully and write stories they had perhaps always wanted to write, but had never felt they could sell. It took the laborious months of sifting through manuscript after manuscript to find stories that were offbeat and compelling enough to live up to the advance publicity this book has received, and be as rich and explosive as I felt they had to be to justify the existence of DANGEROUS VISIONS. Not just "another anthology" was good enough. It was, then, not simply the collecting of crumbling pulp-paper tearsheets or mildewed carbons from scrivener's trunks, but the creation of almost an entity, a living thing.

The initial list of contributors I hoped would appear in the final version to be published was constantly revised. One writer was desperately ill, another was in a two-year slump, a third was so shackled by his wife's doctor's bills he had contracted to do a garbage novel under another man's more famous by-line, and still another had left the country on assignment from a major slick publication. Revise, revise, grope and revise. And when it seemed impossible to build the meat of the book as I wanted it—in the early stages I panicked more readily than now—I contacted the literary agents and sent them the prospectus for the book, asking them to select submissions carefully.

From one agent I received string-bundled stacks of refuse dredged out of reject drawers. (One ms. in one batch had a reject note from Dorothy McIlwraith, editor of the long-defunct
Weird Tales
, stuck inside. I hesitate to think how long
that
one had been kicking around.) From another agent I received incredibly inferior work by a top-name professional in the mainstream. From a third I received a story so blatantly licentious it must certainly have been written for one of those "private printings" we hear about. That it was dreadfully bad must have been the reason for its not having been sold, for the sexual explications in it were sufficient to get it in print at least in
Eros
. But from my own agent, Robert P. Mills (a very good agent indeed), I received only two submissions. Both of which I bought. One was by John Sladek, elsewhere in this volume; the second was "The Doll-House" by James Cross.

I confess I had never heard of James Cross before receiving this story. He was not known to me as a science fiction writer, which isn't odd because ordinarily he isn't one. In point of fact, there is no such person as "James Cross." He is a pseudonym. He has asked that his true name be kept privileged information, and so it shall be, here at least. Thus it is no wonder I looked upon this manuscript as perhaps just another quickie submission, one of the scatter-gun offerings I had been getting from the agents. I should have known better. Bob Mills does not work that way. "The Doll-House" is a bravura effort. It is as singular and effective a story as John Collier's "Evening Primrose" or Richard Matheson's "Born of Man and Woman" or Charles Beaumont's "Miss Gentilbelle." It is a one-time happening. It is part science fiction and almost entirely fantasy and completely chilling.

Of "Cross," the author writes the following:

"For a year now I have been both professor of sociology at George Washington University and associate director of the university's Social Research Group, where my current assignment is directing a national study on the incidence of various psychosomatic symptoms and the use of psychotropic drugs among the adult population of the United States.

"Before that, for more than a decade, I was involved in specialized foreign research for the U. S. Information Agency and other branches of the government—work dealing with the collection of sociological and psychological intelligence and with the measurement of propaganda effectiveness. This particular type of research was my field since the beginning of World War II. Earlier, I was a newspaperman. I have degrees from Yale, Columbia and Southern California.

"I live in Chevy Chase, Maryland. I am happily married and have four interesting (if sometimes deplorable) children, ranging down from eighteen to two. My wife is a very good public relations consultant. In my spare time, when I am not writing, I am reading, sleeping, eating, traveling, playing golf or tennis, or watching ball games on TV. In the course of my life I have: been a theatrical press agent; taught at three universities; played semi-pro ball (left-handed knuckle ball and "junk" pitcher); been a naval officer and later a foreign service officer; written and acted in an abortive educational TV show.

"'James Cross' is a pen name. I started using it because: (a) I publish articles in various professional journals under my given name, and I did not want to get the two entities mixed up or give reviewers a chance at the easy jibe that as a writer of suspense novels I was a good sociologist and as a sociologist a good writer of suspense novels; (b) most of my writing was done while I worked for the government and had to be cleared in advance—even fiction. 'James Cross' was a way of making me unofficial.

"I have had four novels published to date:
Root of Evil, The Dark Road, The Grave of Heroes
, and in February 1967 Random House brought out
To Hell for Half-a-Crown
, a suspense novel with an international setting. All have appeared in hardcover and paperback reprint and have been translated into such languages as French, Italian, Swedish, Dutch and Norwegian.
The Dark Road
was serialized in the
Saturday Evening Post
. I have had two book club sales, but since they were Swedish and Dutch, the circulation was relatively limited and did not make me rich. Pity."

Ellison again. Thus "James Cross" prepares us for that for which there is no preparation: a genuine experience. "The Doll-House" is a marvelous story.

Those of you with tiny daughters will never again, after reading this story, be able to watch them playing on the floor with their Barbie dolls in their playhouses, without a chill quiver of memory.

"Two hundred and fifty dollars for your lousy Alumnae Fund," Jim Eliot said, holding the canceled check in his hand. "What the hell do you think they're going to do with it—name some building after you, the Julia Wardell Eliot memorial gateway?"

His wife looked at him coldly.

"Just because you went to the sort of place that gets its money from the state legislature, and all the professors are under civil service . . ."

"All right, all right, knock it off—only next time try balancing the checkbook first; you're lucky it didn't bounce. How the hell much do you think we have in the account?"

"How do I know? You're the great brain, you check the balance."

"About twenty-five dollars, plus my pay check tomorrow—$461.29 exactly, after deductions. And next week the mortgage, and the gas and electricity, and oil, and the doctor and the dentist and the car payments, and any bills you've run up for clothes."