Next, you are not going to believe.
I’m sitting there reading, and suddenly I feel this pressure against the seat of my jeans. Next thing I know, I am tumbled over on my head and a trapdoor is opening up out of the ground. Yeah, a trapdoor disguised as solid earth.
Next, you will really not believe.
Up out of this hole comes — may I be struck by green lightning if I’m a liar — a gnome! Or maybe he was a elf or a sprite, or some such thing. All I know is that this gnome character is wearing a pair of pegged charcoal slacks, a spread–collar turquoise shirt, green suede loafers, a pork–pie hat with a circumference of maybe three feet, a long, clinky keychain (what the Hell kinda keys could a gnome have?), repulsive loud tie and sunglasses.
Now maybe you would be too stoned to move, or not believe your eyes, and let a thing like that rock you permanently. But I got a good habit of believing what I see — especially when it’s in Technicolor — and besides, more out of reflex than anything else, I grabs.
I’d read some Grimm–type fairy tales, and I know the fable about how if you grab a gnome or a elf, he’ll give you what you want, so like I said, I grabs.
I snatch this little character, right around his turquoise collar.
“Hold, man!” says the gnome. “What kinda bit is this? I don’t dig this thing atall! Unhand me, Daddy–O!”
“No chance,” I answer, kind of in a daze, still not quite sure this is happening to me, “I want a bag of gold or something.”
The gnome looks outraged for a second, then he gives a kind of a half laugh and says, “Ho, Diz, you got the wrong cat for this caper. You’re comin’ on this gig too far and slow! Maybe a fourth–year gnome could hip this gold bit, but me, I’m a party–boy. Flunked outta my Alma Mammy first year. No matriculation — no magiculation! Readin’ me, laddy–buck?”
“Uh, yeah, I guess,” I ventured, slowly, “you mean you can’t give me a bag of gold like in the fairy tale?”
“Fairy tale, schmerry tale. Maybe one ersatz Korean peso, Max, but that is definitely it. That is where magic and I parts company. In short, nein, man.”
“Hmmm,” I hmmmed, tightening my grip a little, he shouldn’t get ideas I was letting him get away.
I thought a big think for a minute, then I said, “How come you flunked out of school?”
I thought I detected a note of belligerence in the gnome’s voice when he answered, “How would you dig this class stuff, man? Go to class today, go to class tomorrow, yattata–yattata–yat from all these squared–up old codgers what think they are professors? Man, there is so much more else to be doing of note! Real nervous–type stuff like playin’ with a jazz combo we got up near campus. You ain’t never heard such music!” He appeared to just be starting, “We got a guy on the sackbut what is the coolest. And on dulcimer there is a little troll what can not only send you — but bring you back. And on topa’ all this . . . ”
I cut him short, “How about this usual three wishes business? Anything to that?”
“I can take a swing at it, man, but like I says, I’m nowhere when it comes to magicking. I’m not the most, if that’s the least. Might be a bit sloppy, but I can take a whirl, Earl.”
I thought again for a second and then nodded: “Okay,” setting him down on the turf, but not yet letting loose his collar, “but no funny business. Just a straight commercial proposition. Three wishes, with no strings, for your freedom.”
“Three?” he was incredulous. “Man, one is about all this power pack can stand at this late date. No, it would seem that one is my limit, guy. Be taking it or leaving it.”
“All right, then, one. But no legal loopholes. Let’s do it all honest and above–board magic. Deal?”
“Reet!” says he, and races off into The Woods somewhere when I let loose.
I figured he was gone for good, and while I’m waiting, I start to think back on the events of the last few minutes. This is something woulda made Ripley go outta business. The gnome, I figure, is overdue, and so I begin rationalizing why he didn’t come back and finally arrive at the conclusion that there is no honor among gnomes. Besides, he had a shifty look to him when he said there would be no tricks in the magic.
But he comes back in a minute, his keychain damn near tripping him up, he’s so loaded down with stuff and paraphernalia. Real weird lookin’ items, too.
“Copped ’em from the lab over at the U.,” he explains, waving a hand at the untidy pile of stuff. “Well, here goes. Remember, there may be more of a mess than is usual with an experienced practitioner, but I’m strictly a goony–bird in this biz, Jack.”
“Hey, wait a minute with this magic stuff . . . ” I began, but he waved me off impatiently, and began manipulating his implements.
So he starts drawing a star–like thing on the ground, pouring some stinkin’ stuff into a cauldron, mixing it up, muttering some gibberish that I could swear had “Oo–bop–shebam” and “Oo–shooby–dooby” in there somewhere, and a lot of other.
Pretty soon he comes over, sprinkles some powder on me, and I sneeze, almost blowing him over.
“Gesundheit,” he mutters, staring at me nastily.
He sprinkles some more powder on me, mutters something that sounded like, “By the sacred ring–finger of The Great Gods Bird and Pres, man, hip this kid to what he craveth. Go, go, go, man!”
“Now,” he inquires, around a bag in which he is rattling what sounds like bones, “whaddaya want?”
I had been thinking it out, in between incantations, and I had decided what I wanted: “Make me so’s I can run faster than anyone in the school, willya.” I figured then Underfeld would have to take me on the team.
The little gnome nods as if he understands, and starts runnin’ around and around outside this star–like thing, in ever–decreasing circles, faster’ n’ faster, till I can hardly make him out.
Then he slows down and stops, puffing away like crazy, mumbles something about, “Gotta lay off them clover stems,” and so saying throws this pink powder on me, yelling as loud as he can, “FRACTURED!” Up goes a puff of pink smoke and what looks like a side–show magician’s magnesium flare, and the next thing I know, he and the stuff is gone, and I’m all alone in The Woods.
So that’s the yarn.
Hmmm? What’s that? Did he make me so I could run faster than anyone else in the school? Oh, yeah, sure.
You know anybody wants to hire a sixteen–year–old centaur?
The shadow goes on before us. This story is such a thing: a message from the future to a young writer nowhichway mature enough to have understood what it meant. A foreshadowing of adult concerns, intimations of mortality. When I wrote this disturbing little fantasy, I was twenty-four years old – but hardly what one might call mature. It was written in the early days of my career when I was still using the accoutrements of “science fiction” – before I came to understand that I was not a “science fiction writer.” (Any more than Agatha Christie was a “railroad train writer” because Murder in the Calais Coach 14 took place aboard the Orient Express.) But it was a concept beyond the years of the arrested adolescent who write it. I had not yet lived sufficient time to understand how our older selves are obsessed both in a personal and a literary sense by the enigma of The End. What lies beyond the final sentence, the typographical period, the darkness on the other side. At twenty-four, and again at age twenty-eight when I wrote the original introduction for this story in this volume, I was barely sensitive enough to understand that there is The End. And so I wrote an introductory note (which these words replace) that spoke, confusedly, of initial confusions about coming to live in Los Angeles. The confusions passed quickly, for they were not truly about where I lived . . . but about living itself. Now, on the trembling edge of age fifty, preparing this book for its new publication, I read the introduction to this story and knew, at last, that what I had sensed, coming to
me from the writer who now addresses you, across more than twenty years, was a message of mortality; a gentle alert informed by the dire and disturbing experiences that had brought me to the City of the Angels. I did not then know what the shadow message meant, but it came to me as an image; an image of
The Sky Is Burning
They came flaming down out of a lemon 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 appreciably brighter, 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.
I nudged him aside and slid into the bucket. The scope was trained on Mars. The Martian sky was burning, too. The same pinpoints of light, the same intense pyrotechnics spiraling down. We had alloted the evening to a study of the red planet, for it was clear in that direction, and I saw it all very sharply, as brightnesses and darkness again, all across the face of the planet.
“Call Bikel at Wilson,” I told Portales. “Ask him about Venus.”
Behind me I heard Portales dialing the closed circuit number, and I half–listened to his conversation with Aaron Bikel at Mt. Wilson. I could see the flickering reflections of the vid–screen on the phone, as they washed across the burnished side of the scope. But I didn’t turn around; I knew what the answer would be.
Finally, he hung up, and the colors died: “The same,” he said sharply, as though defying me to come up with an answer. I didn’t bother snapping back at him. He had been bucking for my job as Director of the Observatory for nearly three years now, and I was accustomed to his antagonisms — desperately as I had to machinate occasionally, to keep him in his place.
I watched for a while longer, then left the dome.
I went downstairs, and tuned in my short–wave radio, trying to find out what Tokyo or Heidelburg or Johannesburg had to say. I wasn’t able to catch any mention of the phenomena during the short time I fiddled with the sweep, but I was certain they were seeing it the same everywhere else.
Then I went back to the Dome, to change the settings on the scope.
After an argument with Portales, I beamed the scope down till it was sharp to just inside the atmospheric blanket. I tipped in the sweeper, and tried a fast scan of the sky, but continued to miss the bursts of light at the moment of their explosion. So I cut in the photo mechanism, and set a wide angle to it. Then I cut off the sweep, and started clicking them off. I reasoned that the frequency of the lights would inevitably bring one into photo focus.
Then I went downstairs, and back to the short–wave. I spent two hours with it, and managed to pick up a news broadcast from Switzerland. I had been right, of course.
Portales rang me after two hours and said we had a full reel of photos, and should he have them developed. This was too big to trust to his adolescent whims, and rather than have him fog up a valuable photo, I told him to leave them in the container, and I’d be right up, to handle it myself.
When the photos came out of the solution, I had to finger through thirty or forty of empty space before I caught ten that had what I wanted.
They were not meteorites.
On the contrary.
Each of the flames in the sky was a creature. A living creature. But not human. Far from it.
The photos told what they looked like, but not till the Project Snatch ship went up and sucked one off the sky did we realize how large they were, that they glowed with an inner light of their own and — that they were telepathic.
From what I can gather, it was no problem capturing one. The ship opened its cargo hatch, and turned on the sucking mechanisms used to drag in flotsam from space. The creature, however, could have stopped itself from being dragged into the ship, merely by placing one of its seven–taloned hands on either side of the hatch, and resisting the sucker. But it was interested, as we learned later; it had been five thousand years, and they had not known we had come so far, and the creature was interested. So it came along.
When they called me in, along with five hundred–odd other scientists (and Portales managed to wangle himself a place in the complement, through that old charlatan Senator Gouverman), we went to the Smithsonian, where they had had him installed, and marveled . . . just stood and marveled.
He — or she, we never knew — resembled the Egyptian god Ra. It had the head of a hawk, or what appeared to be a hawk, with great slitted eyes of green in which flecks of crimson and amber and black danced. Its body was thin to the point of emaciation, but humanoid with two arms and two legs. There were bends and joints on the body where no such bends and joints existed on a human, but there was a definite chest cavity, and obvious buttocks, knees, and chin. The creature was a pale, milky white, except on the hawk’s–crest which was a brilliant blue, fading down into white. Its beak was light blue, also blending into the paleness of its flesh. It had seven toes to the foot, seven talons to the hand.
The God Ra. God of the Sun. God of light.
The creature glowed from within with a pale, but distinct aura that surrounded it like a halo. We stood there, looking up at it in the glass cage. There was nothing to say; there it was, the first creature from another world. We might be going out into space in a few years — farther, that is, than the Moon, which we had reached in 1969, or Mars on which we had landed in 1976 — but for now, as far as we knew, the Universe was wide and without end, and out there we would find unbelievable creatures to rival any imagining. But this was the first.
We stared up at it. The being was thirteen feet tall.
Portales was whispering something to Karl Leus from Caltech. I snorted to myself at the way he never gave up; for sheer guff and grab I had to hand it to him. He was a pusher all right. Leus wasn’t impressed. It was apparent he wasn’t interested in what Portales had to say, but he had been a Nobel Prize winner in ‘63 and he felt obligated to be polite to even obnoxious pushers like my assistant.
The Army man — whatever his name was — was standing on a platform near the high, huge glass case in which the creature stood, unmoving, but watching us.
They had put food of all sorts through a feeder slot, but it was apparent the creature would not touch it. It merely stared down, silent as though amused, and unmoving as though uncaring.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen, may I have your attention!” the Army man caroled at us. A slow silence, indicative of our disrespect for him and his security measures that had caused us such grief get
ting into this meeting, fell through the groups of men and women at the foot of the case.
“We have called you here — ” pompous ass with his we, as if he were the government incarnate, “to try and solve the mystery of who this being is, and what he has come to Earth to find out. We detect in this creature a great menace to — ” and he went on and on, bleating and parodying all the previous scare warnings we had had about every nation on Earth. He could not have realized how we scoffed at him, and wanted to hoot him off the platform. This creature was no menace. Had we not captured him, her, it — the being would have burnt to a cinder like its fellows, falling into our atmosphere.
So we listened to him to the end. Then we moved in closer and stared at the creature. It opened its beak in what was uncommonly like a smile, and I felt a shiver run through me. The sort of shiver I get when I hear deeply emotional music, or the sort of shiver I get when making love. It was a basic trembling in the fibers of my body. I can’t explain it, but it was a prelude to something. I paused in my thinking, just ceased my existence if Cogito Ergo Sum is the true test of existence. I stopped thinking and allowed myself to sniff of that strangeness; to savor the odor of space and faraway worlds, and one world in particular.
A world where the winds are so strong, the inhabitants have hooks on their feet, which they dig into the firm green soil to maintain their footing. A world where colors riot among the foliage one season, and the next — are the pale white of a maggot’s flesh. A world where the triple moons swim through azure skies, and sing in their passage, playing on a lute of invisible strings, the seas and the deserts as accompanists. A world of wonder, older than Man and older than the memory of the Forever.
I realized abruptly, as my mind began to function once more, that I had been listening to the creature. Ithk was the creature’s — name? — denomination? — gender? — something. It was one of five hundred hundred–thousand like itself, who had come to the system of Sol.
Come? No, perhaps that was the wrong word. They had been . . .