Fortunately, I am a professional of enviable imperturbability and these things do not bother me. I doubt whether anyone could have guessed that I was disturbed except for the short screaming fit of rage I indulged myself with.
I checked with Playboy and made sure the story was mine to do with as I please, despite the fact it was based on their photo. It was!
My next step was to send the story to F & SF, explaining to them (as is my wont in such cases) that it was a reject and giving them the exact circumstances. They took it, anyway.
Fortunately, F & SF works reasonably quickly and Playboy works abominably slowly. Consequently “Eyes Do More Than See” appeared in F & SF a year and a half before the story-triad appeared in Playboy. I spent an appreciable length of time hoping Playboy would get indignant letters complaining that the situations in the triad had been stolen from an Asimov story. I was even tempted to write such a letter myself under a false name (but I didn’t).
I contented myself, instead, with the thought that by the time Playboy had published its triad, my little story had not only been published elsewhere but had been reprinted twice and was slated to appear in still a third anthology. (And this collection represents a fourth, and how do you like that, Mr. Hefner?)
First appearance--The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1965. @, 1965, by Mercury Press, Inc.
Eyes Do More than See
After hundreds of billions of years, he suddenly thought of himself as Ames. Not the wavelength combination which, through all the universe was now the equivalent of Ames--but the sound itself. A faint memory came back of the sound waves he no longer heard and no longer could hear.
The new project was sharpening his memory for so many more of the old, old, eons-old things. He flattened the energy vortex that made up the total of his individuality and its lines of force stretched beyond the stars.
Brock’s answering signal came.
Surely, Ames thought, he could tell Brock. Surely he could tell somebody.
Brock’s shifting energy pattern communed, “Aren’t you coming, Ames?”
“Of course.”
“Will you take part in the contest?”
“Yes!” Ames’s lines of force pulsed erratically. “Most certainly. I have thought of a whole new art-form. Something really unusual.”
“What a waste of effort! How can you think a new variation can be thought of after two hundred billion years. There can be nothing new.”
For a moment Brock shifted out of phase and out of communion, so that Ames had to hurry to adjust his lines of force. He caught the drift of other-thoughts as he did so, the view of the powdered galaxies against the velvet of nothingness, and the lines of force pulsing in endless multitudes of energy-life, lying between the galaxies.
Ames said, “Please absorb my thoughts, Brock. Don’t close out. I’ve thought of manipulating Matter. Imagine! A symphony of Matter. Why bother with Energy. Of course, there’s nothing new in Energy; how can there be? Doesn’t that show we must deal with Matter?”
“Matter!”
Ames interpreted Brock’s energy-vibrations as those of disgust.
He said, “Why not? We were once Matter ourselves back--back--Oh, a trillion years ago anyway! Why not build up objects in a Matter medium, or abstract forms or--listen, Brock--why not build up an imitation of ourselves in Matter, ourselves as we used to be?”
Brock said, “I don’t remember how that was. No one does.”
“I do,” said Ames with energy, “I’ve been thinking of nothing else and I am beginning to remember. Brock, let me show you. Tell me if I’m right. Tell me.”
“No. This is silly. It’s--repulsive.”
“Let me try, Brock. We’ve been friends; we’ve pulsed energy together from the beginning--from the moment we became what we are. Brock, please!”
“Then, quickly.”
Ames had not felt such a tremor along his own lines of force in--well, in how long? If he tried it now for Brock and it worked, he could dare manipulate Matter before the assembled Energy-beings who had so drearily waited over the eons for something new. The Matter was thin out there between the galaxies, but Ames gathered it, scraping it together over the cubic light-years, choosing the atoms, achieving a clayey consistency and forcing matter into an ovoid form that spread out below.
“Don’t you remember, Brock?” he asked softly. “Wasn’t it something like this?”
Brock’s vortex trembled in phase. “Don’t make me remember. I don’t remember.”
“That was the head. They called it the head. I remember it so clearly, I want to say it. I mean with sound.” He waited, then said, “Look, do you remember that?”
On the upper front of the ovoid appeared HEAD.
“What is that?” asked Brock.
“That’s the word for head. The symbols that meant the word in sound. Tell me you remember, Brock!”
“There was something,” said Brock hesitantly, “something in the middle.” A vertical bulge formed.
Ames said, “Yes! Nose, that’s it!” And NOSE appeared upon it. “And those are eyes on either side,” LEFT EYE--RIGHT EYE.
Ames regarded what he had formed, his lines of force pulsing slowly. Was he sure he liked this?