The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 2 Read online

  “No,” I said shortly. “I’ve been much too busy. You didn’t get on the cover of Time magazine by blind chance, you know.”

  He was laughing helplessly. “How goes that song,” he finally asked me, his eyes damp, “‘God Bless America’?”

  I stopped the car abruptly. “I think I feel something,” I said. “Professor, I like you.”

  “I like you too, Norris,” he told me. “Norris, my boy, what do you think of ladies?”

  “Delicate creatures. Custodians of culture. Professor, what about meat-eating?”

  “Shocking barbarous survival. This is it, Norris!”

  We yanked open the doors and leaped out. We stood on one foot each, thumbed our noses and stuck out our tongues.

  Allowing for the time on the train, this was the 1,962nd time I had done it in the past two months. One thousand, nine hundred and sixty-one times the professor had arranged for spiders to pop out at me from books, from the television screen, from under steaks, from desk drawers, from my pockets, from his. Black widows, tarantulas, harmless (hah!) big house spiders, real and imitation. One thousand, nine hundred and sixty-one times I had felt the arachnophobe’s horrified revulsion; each time I felt I had thrown major voluntary muscular systems into play by drawing up one leg violently, violently swinging my hand to my nose, violently grimacing to stick out my tongue.

  My body had learned at last. There was no spider this time; there was only Miss Phoebe: a vague, pleasant-feeling something like the first martini. But my posture of defense this 1,962nd time was accompanied by the old rejection and horror. It had no spider, so it turned on Miss Phoebe. The vague first-martini feeling vanished like morning mist burned away by the sun.

  I relaxed cautiously. On the other side of the car so did Professor Leuten. “Professor,” I said, “I don’t like you any more.”

  “Thank you,” he said coldly. “Nor do I like you.”

  “I guess we’re back to normal,” I said. “Climb in.” He climbed in and we started off. I grudgingly said: “Congratulations.”

  “Because it worked? Don’t be ridiculous. It was to be expected that a plan of campaign derived from the principles of Functional Epistemology would be successful. All that was required was that you be at least as smart as one of Professor Pavlov’s dogs, and I admit I considered that hypothesis the weak link in my chain of reasoning....”

  We stopped for a meal from the canned stuff in the back of the car about one o’clock and then chugged steadily north through the ruined countryside. The little towns were wrecked and abandoned. Presumably refugees from the expanding Plague Area did the first damage by looting; the subsequent destruction just—happened. It showed you what would just happen to any twentieth-century town or city in the course of a few weeks if the people who wage endless war against breakdown and dilapidation put aside their arms. It was anybody’s guess whether fire or water had done more damage.

  Between the towns the animals were incredibly bold. There was a veritable army of rabbits eating their way across a field of clover. A farmer-zombie flapped a patchwork quilt at them, saying affectionately: “Shoo, little bunnies! Go away, now! I mean it!”

  But they knew he didn’t, and continued to chew their way across his field.

  I stopped the car and called to the farmer. He came right away, smiling. “The little dickenses!” he said, waving at the rabbits. “But I haven’t the heart to really scare them.”

  “Are you happy?” I asked him.

  “Oh, yes!” His eyes were sunken and bright; his cheekbones showed on his starved face. “People should be considerate,” he said. “I always say that being considerate is what matters most.”

  “Don’t you miss electricity and cars and tractors?”

  “Goodness, no. I always say that things were better in the old days. Life was more gracious, I always say. Why, I don’t miss gasoline or electricity one little bit. Everybody’s so considerate and gracious that it makes up for everything.”

  “I wonder if you’d be so considerate and gracious as to lie down in the road so we can drive over you?”

  He looked mildly surprised and started to get down, saying: “Well, if it would afford you gentlemen any pleasure—”

  “No; don’t bother after all. You can get back to your rabbits.”

  He touched his straw hat and went away, beaming. We drove on. I said to the professor: “Chapter Nine: ‘How to be in Utter Harmony with Your Environment.’ Only she didn’t change herself, Professor Leuten; she changed the environment. Every man and woman in the Area is what Miss Phoebe thinks they ought to be: silly, sentimental, obliging and gracious to the point of idiocy. Nostalgic and all thumbs when it comes to this dreadful machinery.”

  “Norris,” the professor said thoughtfully, “we’ve been associated for some time. I think you might drop the ‘professor’ and call me ‘Leuten.’ In a way we’re friends—”

  I jammed on the worn, mushy brakes. “Out!” I yelled, and we piled out. The silly glow was enveloping me fast. Again, thumb to nose and tongue out, I burned it away. When I looked at the professor and was quite sure he was a stubborn old fossil I knew I was all right again. When he glared at me and snapped: “Naturally I withdraw my last remark, Norris, and no gentleman would hold me to it,” I knew he was normal. We got in and kept going north.

  The devastation became noticeably worse after we passed a gutted, stinking shambles that had once been the town of Meshoppen, Pa. After Meshoppen there were more bodies on the road and the flies became a horror. No pyrethrum from Kenya. No DDT from Wilmington. We drove in the afternoon heat with the windows cranked up and the hood ventilator closed. It was at about Meshoppen’s radius from La Plume that things had stabilized for a while and the Army Engineers actually began to throw up barbed wire. Who knew what happened then? Perhaps Miss Phoebe recovered from a slight cold, or perhaps she told herself firmly that her faith in Professor Leuten’s wonderful book was weakening; that she must take hold of herself and really work hard at being in utter harmony with her environment. The next morning—no Army Engineers. Zombies in uniform were glimpsed wandering about and smiling. The next morning the radius of the Plague Area was growing at the old mile a day.

  I wanted distraction from the sweat that streamed down my face. “Professor,” I said, “do you remember the last word in Miss Phoebe’s letter? It was ‘forever.’ Do you suppose…?”

  “Immortality? Yes; I think that is well within the range of misapplied F.E. Of course complete mastery of F.E. ensures that no such selfish power would be invoked. The beauty of F.E. is its conservatism, in the kinetic sense. It is self-regulating. A world in which universal mastery of F.E. has been achieved— and I now perceive that the publication of my views by the Hopedale Press was if anything a step away from that ideal—would be in no outward wise different from the present world.”

  “Built-in escape clause,” I snapped. “Like yoga. You ask ’em to prove they’ve achieved self-mastery, just a little demonstration like levitating or turning transparent but they’re all ready for you. They tell you they’ve achieved so much self-mastery they’ve mastered the desire to levitate or turn transparent. I almost wish I’d read your book, Professor, instead of just editing it. Maybe you’re smarter than I thought.”

  He turned brick-red and gritted out: “Your insults merely bore me, Norris.”

  The highway took a turn and we turned with it. I braked again and rubbed my eyes. “Do you see them?” I asked the professor.

  “Yes,” he said matter-of-factly. “This must be the retinue of the Duchess of Carbondale.”

  They were a dozen men shoulder to shoulder barricading the road. They were armed with miscellaneous sporting rifles and one bazooka. They wore kilt-like garments and what seemed to be bracelets from a five-and-ten. When we stopped they opened up the center of the line and the Duchess of Carbondale drove through in her chariot—only the chariot was a harness-racing sulky and she didn’t drive it; the horse was led by a skinny teen-age g
irl got up as Charmian for a high-school production of Antony and Cleopatra. The Duchess herself wore ample white robes, a tiara and junk jewelry. She looked like your unfavorite aunt, the fat one, or a grade-school teacher you remember with loathing when you’re forty, or one of those women who ring your doorbell and try to bully you into signing petitions against fluoridation or atheism in the public schools.

  The bazooka man had his stovepipe trained on our hood. His finger was on the button and he was waiting for the Duchess to nod. “Get out,” I told the professor, grabbing my briefcase. He looked at the bazooka and we got out.

  “Hail, O mortals,” said the Duchess.

  I looked helplessly at the professor. Not even my extensive experience with lady novelists had equipped me to deal with the situation. He, however, was able to take the ball. He was a European and he had status and that’s the starting point for them: establish status and then conduct yourself accordingly. He said: “Madame, my name is Konrad Leuten. I am a doctor of philosophy of the University of Gottingen and a member of the faculty of the University of Basle. Whom have I the honor to address?”

  Her eyes narrowed appraisingly. “O mortal,” she said, and her voice was less windily dramatic, “know ye that here in the New Lemuria worldly titles are as naught. And know ye not that the pure hearts of my subjects may not be sullied by base machinery?”

  “I didn’t know, madame,” Leuten said politely. “I apologize. We intended, however, to go only as far as La Plume. May we have your permission to do so?”

  At the mention of La Plume she went poker-faced. After a moment she waved at the bazooka man. “Destroy, O Phraxanartes, the base machine of the strangers,” she said. Phraxanartes touched the button of his stovepipe. Leuten and I jumped for the ditch, my hand welded to the briefcase-handle, when the rocket whooshed into the poor old Ford’s motor. We huddled there while the gas tank boomed and cans and bottles exploded. The noise subsided to a crackling roar and the whizzing fragments stopped coming our way after maybe a minute. I put my head up first. The Duchess and her retinue were gone, presumably melted into the roadside stand of trees.

  Her windy contralto blasted out: “Arise, O strangers, and join us.”

  Leuten said from the ditch: “A perfectly reasonable request, Norris. Let us do so. After all, one must be obliging.”

  “And gracious,” I added.

  Good old Duchess! I thought. Good old Leuten! Wonderful old world, with hills and trees and bunnies and kitties and considerate people…

  Leuten was standing on one foot, thumbing his nose, sticking out his tongue, screaming: “Norris! Norris! Defend yourself!” He was slapping my face with his free hand. Sluggishly I went into the posture of defense, thinking: Such nonsense. Defense against what? But I wouldn’t hurt old Leuten’s feelings for the world—

  Adrenalin boiled through my veins, triggered by the posture. Spiders. Crawling hairy, horrid spiders with purple, venom-dripping fangs. They hid in your shoes and bit you and your feet swelled with the poison. Their sticky, loathsome webs brushed across your face when you walked in the dark and they came scuttling silently, champing their jaws, winking their evil gem-like eyes. Spiders!

  The voice of the Duchess blared impatiently: “I said, join us, O strangers. Well, what are you waiting for?”

  The professor and I relaxed and looked at each other. “She’s mad,” the professor said softly. “From an asylum.”

  “I doubt it. You don’t know America very well. Maybe you lock them up when they get like that in Europe; over here we elect them chairlady of the Library Fund Drive. If we don’t, we never hear the end of it.”

  The costumed girl was leading the Duchess’s sulky onto the road again. Some of her retinue were beginning to follow; she waved them back and dismissed the girl curtly. We skirted the heat of the burning car and approached her. It was that or try to outrun a volley from the miscellaneous sporting rifles.

  “O strangers,” she said, “you mentioned La Plume. Do you happen to be acquainted with my dear friend Phoebe Bancroft?”

  The professor nodded before I could stop him. But almost simultaneously with his nod I was dragging the Duchess from her improvised chariot. It was very unpleasant, but I put my hands around her throat and knelt on her. It meant letting go of the briefcase but it was worth it.

  She guggled and floundered and managed to whoop: “Don’t shoot! I take it back, don’t shoot them. Pamphilius, don’t shoot, you might hit me!”

  “Send ’em away,” I told her.

  “Never!” she blared. “They are my loyal retainers.”

  “You try, Professor,” I said.

  I believe what he put on then was his classroom manner. He stiffened and swelled and rasped towards the shrubbery: “Come out at once. All of you.”

  They came out, shambling and puzzled. They realized that something was very wrong. There was the Duchess on the ground and she wasn’t telling them what to do the way she’d been telling them for weeks now. They wanted to oblige her in any little way they could, like shooting strangers, or scrounging canned food for her, but how could they oblige her while she lay there slowly turning purple? It was very confusing. Luckily there was somebody else to oblige, the professor.

  “Go away,” he barked at them. “Go far away. We do not need you any more. And throw away your guns.”

  Well, that was something a body could understand. They smiled and threw away their guns and went away in their obliging and considerate fashion.

  I eased up on the Duchess’s throat. “What was that guff about the New Lemuria?” I asked her.

  “You’re a rude and ignorant young man,” she snapped. From the corner of my eye I could see the professor involuntarily nodding agreement. “Every educated person knows that the lost wisdom of Lemuria was to be revived in the person of a beautiful priestess this year. According to the science of pyramidology—”

  Beautiful priestess? Oh.

  The professor and I stood by while she spouted an amazing compost of lost-continentism, the Ten Tribes, anti-fluoridation, vegetarianism, homeopathic medicine, organic farming, astrology, flying saucers, and the prose-poems of Khalil Gibran.

  The professor said dubiously at last: “I suppose one must call her a sort of Cultural Diffusionist. . . .” He was happier when he had her classified. He went on: “I think you know Miss Phoebe Bancroft. We wish you to present us to her as soon as possible.”

  “Professor,” I complained, “we have a roadmap and we can find La Plume. And once we’ve found La Plume I don’t think it’ll be very hard to find Miss Phoebe.”

  “I will be pleased to accompany you,” said the Duchess. “Though normally I frown on mechanical devices, I keep an automobile nearby in case of—in case of—well! Of all the rude—!”

  Believe it or not, she was speechless. Nothing in her rich store of gibberish and hate seemed to fit the situation. Anti-fluoridation, organic farming, even Khalil Gibran were irrelevant in the face of us two each standing on one leg, thumbing our noses and sticking out our tongues.

  Undeniably the posture of defense was losing efficiency. It took longer to burn away the foolish glow....

  “Professor,” I asked after we warily relaxed, “how many more of those can we take?”

  He shrugged. “That is why a guide will be useful,” he said. “Madame, I believe you mentioned an automobile.”

  “I know!” she said brightly. “It was asana yoga, wasn’t it? Postures, I mean?”

  The professor sucked an invisible lemon. “No, madame,” he said cadaveously, “it was neither siddhasana nor padmasana. Yoga has been subsumed under Functional Epistemology, as has every other working philosophical system, Eastern and Western—but we waste time. The automobile?”

  “You have to do that every so often, is that it?”

  “We will leave it at that, madame. The automobile, please.”

  “Come right along,” she said gaily. I didn’t like the look on her face. Madam Chairlady was about to spring a
parliamentary coup. But I got my briefcase and followed.

  The car was in a nearby barn. It was a handsome new Lincoln, and I was reasonably certain that our fair cicerone had stolen it. But then, we had stolen the Ford.

  I loaded the briefcase in and took the wheel over her objections and we headed for La Plume, a dozen miles away. On the road she yelped: “Oh, Functional Epistemology—and you’re Professor Leuten!”

  “Yes, madame,” he wearily agreed.

  “I’ve read your book, of course. So has Miss Bancroft; she’ll be so pleased to see you.”

  “Then why, madame, did you order your subjects to murder us?”

  “Well, Professor, of course I didn’t know who you were then, and it was rather shocking, seeing somebody in a car. I, ah, had the feeling that you were up to no good, especially when you mentioned dear Miss Bancroft. She, you know, is really responsible for the re-emergence of the New Lemuria.”

  “Indeed?” said the professor. “You understand, then, about Leveled Personality Interflow?” He was beaming.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Leveled Personality Interflow!” he barked. “Chapter Nine!”

  “Oh. In your book, of course. Well, as a matter of fact I skipped—”

  “Another one,” muttered the professor, leaning back.

  The Duchess chattered on: “Dear Miss Bancroft, of course, swears by your book. But you were asking—no, it wasn’t what you said. I cast her horoscope and it turned out that she is the Twenty-Seventh Pendragon!”

  “Scheissdreck,” the professor mumbled, too discouraged to translate.

  “So naturally, Professor, she incarnates Taliesin spiritually and”—a modest giggle—“you know who incarnates it materially. Which is only sensible, since I’m descended from the high priestesses of Mu. Little did I think when I was running the Wee Occult Book Shoppe in Carbondale!”

  “Ja,” said the professor. He made an effort. “Madame, tell me something. Do you never feel a certain thing, a sense of friendliness and intoxication and goodwill enveloping you quite suddenly?”