It’s like that. The one word people. One word, and you’ve got the handle on them, the motivater of this existence.
“Adolescent,” “Puritan,” “passing,” “wino”—they all do it. Granted, it’s a dubious sort of categorization…still, it works. And like the old wives poultice of spiderwebs that was laughed at, as a remedy for bruises, cuts and the removal of a mouse under the eye, when a recent medical breakthrough found a cure for these containing many chemical elements found in spiderwebs, it must be concluded that in the final analysis, what works…works.
Bringing me to Nicole Shahin.
Pronounced Shane.
And she’s the fastest gun in the East.
Have to be. Shot me down and I didn’t even see her draw.
Moth on the Moon
Streiter got so pissed-off arguing, he gave me a shove.
“One more of those, you ignoramus, and I’ll put you in the infirmary,” I said. It embarrassed me: every time I got in a beef, my voice automatically dropped three octaves. It was my “B” movie villain voice.
The Unit watch-on-duty got between us. A medium-sized apple, neither of us would poke him, he’d crumble like a lunar frog’s dust dream. A big ugly piece of furniture like Streiter, a berserker like me when I got hot.
“Come on, back off, both of you!” He pushed us away from the common center, himself. There was enough leverage. I hit one side of the bubble, Streiter the other. Cramped quarters on the Moon can do it, drive you up the curve of the bubble every time.
“I’m tired of him copping out for every mistake he makes,” Streiter snarled. “And then dreaming up elves and gnomes to take the blame!”
“Don’t blame me for your lack of imagination.”
“Moth! You’re fulla shit, friend!”
“Is Shed number three gone, or isn’t it?”
“Yeah…gone, so what! How’d you screw it up. C’mon, it must have been a helluva sweet move to completely destroy a three ton storage shed…what’s your story?”
“It was a moth.”
Streiter growled and came for me again. The WOD headed him off at the pass between the compUvac and the feeder, and threatened him with the cooler, so he simmered down.
“Now that one takes the prize,” Streiter rolled his eyes. “A moth, a goddam moth, for chrissakes, on the moon!”
“Is the shed gone?” I asked, quietly, rationally.
“Yeah, the shed is gone.”
“It was a moth. It came swooping down, and chewed it up, the entire shed.”
“Oh, Christ, I give up!”
Streiter turned and stumped out of the control bubble. The WOD stared at me a minute. His eyebrows quivered. “Terry,” he said, softly, “report to the medic in twenty minutes. I’ll get a relief for you.”
He left, and I stared out at the lunar surface for a long time. Twenty minutes can be a long time.
It was a moth, dammit!
“They’re the Blinds,” he said, softly.
“They were created out of an experiment with self-regenerating cell tissue. They lie flaccid and dormant, just flaps of flesh, without eyes or sense organs or souls, until a thought passes them by. Then they fasten on it, litterally pull themselves hand-over-hand up that thought…”
The old Indian rope trick, Wyckoff thought picturesquely.
“…until they’ve established a form for themselves. They have only one drive; survival. They’ll do anything to keep living, such life as it may be. They’ll take any form, anything at all—a man, a cockroach, a gull in the sky, anything that has the faintest tinge of thought in it, even a witless thing like a paramecium—and they build from that. But they’ll do anything to stay alive.”
“The Blinds,” repeated Wyckoff.
“Yes, that’s right,” the little fat man nodded.
He was perspiring.
“You dirty little weasel,” Wyckoff said quietly. “It’s both refreshing and discouraging to find out that cowardice hasn’t been bred out in this future you’re from.”
“Why, I—”
“You eat worms! Shut up. Let me think, crud.”
Speechless, we stand before Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” or one of the hell images of Bosch, and we find our senses reeling; vanishing into a daydream mist of what must this man have been like, what must he have suffered? A passage from Dylan Thomas, about birds singing in the eaves of a lunatic asylum, draws us up short, steals the breath from our mouths and the blood and thoughts stand still in the body as we are confronted with the absolute incredible achievement of what he has done. So imperfect, so faulty, so broken the links in communication between humans, that to pass along one corner of a vision we have had to another creature is an accomplishment that fills us with wonder and pride. How staggering is it then, to see, to know what Bosch and Van Gogh and Thomas knew and saw. To live for a microsecond what they lived. To look out of their eyes and view the universe from a new angle. This, then is the temporary, fleeting, transient, incredibly valuable priceless gift from the genius to those of us crawling forward moment after moment in time, with nothing to break our routine but death.
How amazed, how stopped like a broken clock we are, when we are in the presence of the genius. When we see what his incredible talents—wrought out of torment—have created; what magnificence, or depravity, or beauty, perhaps in a spare moment, only half-trying; he has brought it forth for the rest of eternity and the world to treasure.
And how awed we are, when caught surprised in the golden web of true genius—so that finally, for the first time we know that all the rest of it was kitsch; it is made so terribly, crushingly obvious to us, just how mere, how petty, how mud-condemned we are, and that the only grandeur we will ever know is that which we know second hand from our geniuses. That the closest we will come to our “Heaven,” while alive, is through our unfathomable geniuses, however imperfect or bizarre they may be.
And is this, then, why we treat them so shamefully, harm them, drive them inexorably to their personal madhouses, kill them?
Who is it, we wonder, who really still the golden voices of the geniuses, who turn their visions to dust?
Who, the question asks itself, unbidden, are the savages and who the princes?
Fortunately, the night comes quickly, and answers can be avoided till the next time, and till the next marvelous singer of strange songs is stilled in the agonies of his rhapsodies.
Snake in the Mind
Shadows lived in that house. A heavy, somnolent madness that pressed against the inner walls and made the very glass of the dark windows bulge outward as though bloated. Carrie had warned me there was a slithering horror in the place, even before either of us had known for certain I would be coming to town, but I had snickered at her, and rummaging on the bookshelves of my own jolly pad in Los Angeles, had tossed the copy of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House at her.
“Jackson already wrote it up, Punkin’,” I laughed. “If you were living in Transylvania or some dark corner of Brittany, I might buy it…but Brooklyn? Come on, kiddo!”
She’d smiled wanly, looking up at me from the sofa, and there had been a wispy, thin, almost timorous smile on her elf face. Brave, and quite frightened. “You’ll see,” was what she left me with.
And now, here I was in New York, and walking up the steps of the Romaine house in Flatbush (how ridiculous, what a sillyass place for weirdness, in the heart of comfortable mediocrity and middle-class lack of imagination); and I had to admit that what she had promised was true. The house was a typical no-style 1920’s monstrosity, with front porch, attic windows and dormers at attention, glass-paneled front doors, mail slot silently pursed as though capable of secrets, if only it would speak.
But there was more: there was the filtered stink of dust long-since gone; of old clothes bundled together; of parchment-skinned hags dead in their apartments with old Life and Newsweek stacks ceiling-high, and forty million dollars in small change under the floorboards; of velour drapes drawn ag
ainst the sun; of heavy jungle or empty desert. Of non-place, of nontime, of aloneness.
Poe and Hawthorne and Lovecraft tried to speak of the terrifying desolateness of moors or graveyards or empty stretches of the sea, but for sheer wanton loneliness, there is nothing like a Brooklyn street in late Fall, October, November, when the leaves mat like dark, coagulated blood in the gutters, and the chill wind spins down through the cross-streets, chasing the subway trains like hungry dogs after meat wagons. Empty, chill, helpless, it is the end of the universe, and anyone stupid enough to be caught away from a bubbling TV set or a good nineteen-broad orgy, deserves to stand out there and shiver. Not entirely from the cold.
So I walked up the steps, and turned the old-fashioned door chine in its metal frame, and heard the rasping ringaling of it far inside. The door burst open inward almost immediately, and Carrie, little gnome, was standing there in her Greenwich Village outfit, long hair brushed back in a single braid, her eyes alive, as though I’d come to save her: “Welcome to Dante’s Inferno!” she murmured.
Rudy was a prelim fighter. One, two, a right cross just under the heart. The Mob kept him around for laughs, he was a gentle kid. Rudy did twenty-one years with the Mob. Since he’d been seventeen.
But when Rudy was thirty-eight, he was a little too old to be called the kid any more, and he wanted out of the Mob. Not for any specific reasons, there wasn’t any heat going, but just because he felt restless, had the feeling there were other things to do.
Rudy had always heard it said: nobody leaves the Mob. Yet, surprisingly, there was no trouble when he told them he wanted out. Why not? He didn’t have anything they wanted, or were afraid to turn loose of. Especially knowledge. Rudy had been a hitter, and what he knew was old and unimportant. So they gave a nice buncha twenties, smacked his back, and said so long, Rudy.
In this book everything has been invented except the truth. If there is no truth, there is no book. If there is no invention there is no book. Who can be offended by the truth? Who can be offended by invention?
—JOHN BERRY
prefatory note to
“Krishna Fluting”
“My fingertips are covered with the scars of people I’ve touched. The flesh remembers those touches. Sometimes I feel as though I am wearing heavy woolen gloves, so thick are the memories of all those touches. It seems to insulate me, to separate me from mankind. I very often refrain from washing my hands for days and days, just to preserve whatever layers of touches might be washed away by the soap.
“Faces and voices and smells of people I’ve known have passed away, but still my hands carry the records with them. Layer after layer of the laying-on of hands. Is that altogether sane? I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it for a very long time, when I have the time.
“If I ever have the time.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: the concept embodied in T—’s speech, page—, is not original. Nor has it been plagiarized; rather, it is that peculiar melding of originality and plagiarism that occurs, I am told, in all those of an artistic bent. It was spurred to life by something someone else had written. In this case, Salinger. I was reading Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and when I read across the line: “I have scars on my hands from touching certain people,” I stopped dead, without going further, dashed into the next room and the typewriter, and wrote T—’s speech, even before that section of the novel had been drafted. It laid out for me a particularly important facet of his character; a facet in fact, which planned a direction I had only vaguely, till then, considered for the book. What that speech did, in effect, was build the very cornerstone of my book, and set my thoughts to considering depths I would not otherwise have attempted in what was originally intended as a straight adventure novel. When I went back, and found that Salinger had gone on to say almost precisely what I had said, I felt awkward, small boy kicking turf, embarrassed. I have no doubt no one would consider that I had “borrowed” in writing that paragraph, for in the main, readers are barely aware of what a writer tries to do with his mechanics…but I would know there was a debt there, and so, this note. It would be safe to say, then, that this novel was strongly influenced by J.D. Salinger. Though I’m certain he would find such an idea presumptuous, it remains true, in a much murkier sense than merely his works triggering my thoughts. Those words opened doors my mind knew were there, but had never considered looking beyond. At least in this book. And in that degree, I feel Mr. Salinger has helped to make this a worthier effort. My thanks to him.
Harlan Ellison
Hollywood 1963
Pieces of things that will never be written. Where they came from I choose to remember, for the stimulus is often more memorable and important than the shabby fiction it produces. Where they reside, is here, for whatever pleasure or momentary empathy they may cause. Where they are going? Probably no further, for having been set down, they accomplish what they were intended for. A spark gap effect, a bridging of the mind through concepts. By imposing the necessary artificiality of plot and character on them, they become greater than themselves. They become stories.
Which ought to more than satisfactorily answer, for all time (at least as far as I am concerned) the question raised by drunkards and dilettantes at cocktail partties: “Where do you get your ideas?”
About the stories in this book. Each story has its own little prefatory note by the undersigned, but a few words before you attack them (and as a reviewer has noted, they attack you). For the most part these are old stories. I would not write them this way were I writing them today. Several of them I find painfully amateurish. Most of the stories were written in the late Fifties. When I was learning my craft. This is by way of explanation, not excuse. I still stand behind the stories, even though they were written by quite another Harlan Ellison—or series of Harlan Ellisons.
That they are once again in print is due not only to the Author’s continuing need for money and ego-boosting, but to the requests of a large number of readers who have encountered the later works, and have made querulous noises about the ones that came before. Due also to the interest of Belmont’s lovely editoress Gail Wendroff, who insisted on including four of the stories from my first collection, A Touch of Infinity, among these other, never-before-anthologized pieces. And to the urgings of my literary agent, Mr. Robert P. Mills, a man whose interest in my career has kept me, on numerous occasions, from throwing in the bloodied towel.
It has been a long way from courage and Andy Porter and Silverbob and raw strips of flesh that might (and may yet) some day be stories. A long way, and yet truly a hyperspace jump, for the journey is made through the mind of the creator, by way of lands without signposts; and if those lands could be named, if they were not the Terra Incognita in which this Author dwells much of the time, it might be seen by the light of revelation that they were Right Here, all the time.
You have been very kind, and I thank you.
HARLAN ELLISON
Hollywood, 1967
Several months ago I bought a pair of very handsome low-modern filing cabinets, in which to store my moldering manuscripts. Until that time, they had been dumped in piles in whatever handy drawer or closet I was not using for clothes or record albums or books. In filing the six hundred-odd manuscripts (with their attendant chipping and falling triangles of yellow-brown page edges—the man who invents a cheap yellow second sheet that doesn’t turn doggie-poo brown within five minutes of exposure to the sun will win the undying thanks of professional writers the world over) I found stories I had not reread since I’d written them years before. A heart blow of nostalgia hit me (not to mention a stomach-punch of nausea) as I reread them, sitting there in my Alexander Shields bathrobe on the floor. Many of them were about how itsy-teeny we poor Humans are in the Universe. There was one in which all the saucers were coming here to use us for a parking lot in an overcrowded universe (titled “A Lot Of Saucers,” naturally); and there was one where we went to extend the hand of Dominant Homo Sapiens to our poor benighted alien b
rothers, and were ordered to take our spaceship around back by the service entrance; and one in which we became smorgasbord for a troupe of alien actors; and—well, you get what I mean. Pretty awful. Only once did I really get to it in nitty-gritty terms. That once, a story I still like immensely is
The Sky Is Burning
THEY CAME flaming down out of a blind sky, and the first day ten thousand died. The screams rang in our heads, and the women ran to the hills to escape the sound of it. But there was no escape for them—nor for any of us! The sky was aflame with death, and the terrible, unbelievable part of it was—the death, the dying was not us!
It started late in the evening. The first one appeared as a cosmic spark struck in the night. Then, almost before the first had faded back into the dusk, there was another, and then another, and soon the sky was a jeweler’s pad, twinkling with unnameable diamonds.
I looked up from the Observatory roof, and saw them all, tiny pinpoints of brilliance, cascading down like raindrops of fire. And somehow, before any of it was explained, I knew: this was something important. Not important the way five extra inches of plastichrome on the tail-fins of a new copter are important…not important the way a war is important…but important the way the creation of the universe had been important, the way the death of it would be. And I knew it was happening all over Earth.
There could be no doubt of that. All across the horizon, as far as I could see, they were falling and burning and burning. The sky was not brighter appreciably, but it was as though a million new stars had been hurled up there to live for a brief microsecond.
Even as I watched, Portales called to me from below. “Frank! Frank, come down here! This is fantastic!”
I swung down the catwalk into the telescope dome and saw him hunched over the refraction eyepiece. He was pounding his fist against the side of the vernier adjustment box. It was a pounding of futility and strangeness. A pounding without meaning behind it. “Look at this, Frank. Will you take a look at this?” His voice was a rising inflection of disbelief.