Drs. Kerls, Lorenzo, and Mough sprang to their feet and their heads met. The result was a loud thunk and cries of pain as they reeled back clutching their heads.
The alarm attached to the thingamajig whooped, and a bright orange light flashed.
"Oh, my God!" Kerls screamed. "It's happened!"
"What? What?" van Skant and Desdemona cried. Desdemona had been behaving rather woodenly lately, but she was aroused now.
Dr. Kerls, half-fainting, grabbed Mough.
A green thread was streaking through the mud-brown liquid in the pipes on the thingamajig.
Dr. Mough felt so sorry for his colleague, he did not hit him for having put his hands on him.
Dr. Legzenbreins raced out of the virus section, leaving the door open.
"What is it? What is it?"
Dr. Mough said, "It's the biggest..."
Boom!
Clouds of brown vapor and sprays of green liquid filled the laboratory.
By the time the scientists and Desdemona got back onto their feet, they could see clearly. The clouds were gone, revealing a wrecked laboratory and ruptured walls behind which had been the virus section and the zoological room.
"The green doesn't count," Kerls mumbled. "I had my fingers crossed when we swore to abide by the decision of the thingamajig."
"You'll marry Desdemona or else," Dr. Mough said.
"Or else what?" Kerls squeaked.
"Or else this!" Mough said, and he broke a beaker of yellow liquid over Kerls's head and then rammed the flaming end of a Bunsen burner against Kerls's rear when Kerls turned away from him.
Desdemona spat out green liquid.
"Gee, I feel funny," she muttered. She walked out of the laboratory as if she were made of wood.
"Think she's all right?" van Skant said. "That virus got blown all over the place, and God knows what the chemicals in the thingamajig will do."
"Won't hurt nothing," Mough said. "I'll stake my reputation on that."
"We're lost!" van Skant said, and he staggered out of the room.
Desdemona wandered around, singing, until she found a vacant lot, one in which the good earth was uncovered. And there she stood motionless, arms extended to the sides, while roots, still half-flesh, sprouted and drove into the ground through her shoes.
The fourth day, she put out buds.
The sixth day, a pigeon spotted her and landed to build a nest.
By then, hundreds of thousands of Southern Californians were undergoing similar metamorphoses.
The polluters were changing into something which could not pollute and which converted carbon dioxide into the much-needed oxygen. Serendipitous had found the ideal solution.
Only one was left unmetamorphosed. She had been wearing a protective suit at the time of the explosion and had not taken it off until she was certain that the danger was over.
She was the only human being left in the world.
The doorbell rang.
She got up and out of bed, walked through the house, and opened the front door.
Three man-sized trees stood on the porch.
"Kerls, Lorenzo, and Mough!" Dr. Legzenbreins cried.
Somehow, they had dragged up their roots and tracked her down. Love conquers all.
They tried to get through the door at the same time. Even if they had still been human beings, they would have gotten stuck. But with their extended arms -- branches -- they could never make it through alone.
Dr. Legzenbreins finally led them around to the backyard, where they took root with a shudder of relief. She went back to bed without closing the window, which was a mistake. She awoke with two branches caressing what she considered to be intimate places.
The other trees were hitting their branches against the one that had hold of her.
She reached up and plucked some of Mough's fruits -- she thought it was Mough -- and the tree quivered. Then the branches drooped and relaxed their hold.
The others continued to beat him with their branches.
But the next day all three were as rigid and motionless as trees should be, and their skin had become completely bark.
Spring came. Something popped deep within Dr. Legzenbreins.
She wished that she had not eaten Mough's fruit.
The Last Rise of Nick Adams
This story has a curious history, but then, don't they all?
A young man named Brad Lang, author of some very good private-eye novels, decided to start a magazine, Popular Culture, which would be devoted to just what the title implied. He got hold of me and asked me if I'd write a short story for him. It so happened that I had one on hand, a tale which Ed Ferman of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction had not liked. So I rewrote it and sent it out with the same title and byline I'd sent to Ferman. This was "The Impotency of Bad Karma" by Cordwainer Bird.
The explanation of title and byline may be a little complicated, but bear with me. Cordwainer Bird is the name Harlan Ellison puts on the credits of a movie he's written when he feels that the producer or director or whoever has rewritten his script and ruined it. Harlan insists on a clause in his contracts which permits him to do this.
Now, as you may or may not know, I've written a number of short stories and two novels under bylines which are the names of characters in fiction who are writers. Examples: Kilgore Trout, John H. Watson, M.D., Paul Chapin (a writer in a Nero Wolfe novel), David Copperfield, Leo Queequeg Tincrowdor (one of my own fictional authors), Lord Greystoke (surely you know who he is), and some others. I wanted to write a story by Cordwainer Bird, but the trouble with that was that he was not a fictional author. So, to remedy this, I first put Bird in the genealogy in the appendix to my biography of the famous pulp-era hero, Doc Savage. Then I made Bird a character in a story titled "The Doge Whose Barque Was Worse Than His Bight." Having established that Bird was a character in fiction who was also a writer, I then wrote a story by Bird.
All this was done with Harlan's permission, of course.
At the time, though, I didn't know that Harlan had long before written some stories under the Bird byline.
"The Impotency of Bad Karma" (Harlan's suggestion for a title) appeared in the first and, alas!, last issue of Popular Culture. It was interesting, even stimulating, but Brad Lang couldn't get the financing needed to continue it. It also happened that Barry Malzberg had an article, "What Happened to Science Fiction?", in that issue. He read the story by "Bird" and didn't care for the parody of himself (as Michael B. Hopsmount). This, despite the fact that he's parodied others. I only parody those writers whose works I like, so, in a sense, the character of Hopsmount was my tribute to Malzberg.
Sometime later, Roy Torgesson asked me for a story. I explained about "The Impotency of Bad Karma" and the Bird byline and the extremely limited circulation of Popular Culture. Roy said he'd take it, and I sat down and rewrote the story again, including removing Hopsmount, and it appeared as "The Last Rise of Nick Adams" in Chrysalis 2.
The genesis of the original idea for the story, the basic concept, came one day while I was considering the inflating or deflating effects of good or bad reviews of my works, of good or bad royalty reports, and so on. This story exaggerates the effects, though not very much.
Readers (not very many) have asked me if the Nick Adams in my story could be the son of Hemingway's Nick Adams. I'm not just now in a position to confirm or deny that.
Nick Adams, Jr., science-fiction author, and his wife were having the same old argument.
"If you really loved me, you wouldn't be having so much trouble with it."
"There are many words for it," Nick said. "If you didn't have a dirty mind, you'd use them. Anyway, there are plenty of times when you can't complain about it."
"Yeah! About once every other month I can't!"
Ashlar was a tall scrawny ex-blonde who had been beautiful until the age of thirty-seven-and-a-half. Now she was fifty. A hard fifty, Nick thought. And here am I, a soft fifty.
"It does have a s
ort of sine-wave action," he said. "I mean, if you drew a graph..."
"So now it's dependent on weather conditions. What're we supposed to do, consult the barometer when we make love? Why don't you make a graph of its rises and falls? Of course, you'd have to have some rises first..."
"I got to go to work," he said. "I'm months behind..."
"I'll say you are, though I don't mean in your writing! All right, hide behind the typewriter! Bang your keys; don't bang me!"
He rose from the chair and dutifully kissed her on her forehead. It was as cold and hard as a tombstone, incised with wrinkles that read Here Lies Love. R.I.P. She snarled silently. Shrugging, he walked up the steps toward his office. By the time he reached the third floor, he was sweating as if he were a rape suspect in a police lineup. His panting filled the house.
Fifty, out of breath, and low on virility. Still, it wasn't really his fault. She was such a cold bitch. Take last night, for instance. Ashlar's eyes had started rolling, and her face was falling apart underneath the makeup. He had said, "Did you feel something move, little rabbit?" (He was crazy about Hemingway.) And she had said, "Something's going to move. Get off. I got to go to the toilet."
Once it had all been good and true, and he had felt the universe move all the way to the Pole Star. Now he felt as if the hair had fallen off his chest.
He sat down before the typewriter and stroked the keys, the smooth and cool keys, and he pressed a few to tune up his fingers and warm up the writing spirit. He could feel the inspiration deep down within, shadow-boxing, rope-skipping, jogging, sweating, pores open, heart beating hard and true, ready to climb into the ring.
The only trouble was, the bell rang, and he couldn't even get out of his corner. He was stuck on the first word. The. The... what?
If only he could see some pattern in his sexual behavior. Maybe the silly bitch's sarcastic remark about making a graph wasn't so stupid. Maybe...
A bell rang, and he sprang up, shuffling, his left shoulder up, arm extended... what was he doing? That was the front doorbell, and it was probably announcing the delivery of the mail. Nick gave the mailman ten dollars a month to ring the doorbell. This was illegal, but who was going to know? Nick could not endure the idea that a hot check was cooling off in the mailbox.
He hurried downstairs, passing Ashlar, who wasn't going to get off her ass and bring the mail to him. Not her.
Since this was the first of the month, there were ten bills. But there was also a pile of fan mail and a letter from his agent.
Ah! His agent had sent a check, the initial advance on a new contract. Two thousand dollars. Minus his agent's ten percent commission. Minus fifty dollars for overseas market mailings. Minus twenty-five for the long-distance call his agent had made to him last month. Minus a thousand for the loan from his agent. Minus fifty for the interest on the loan. Minus ten dollars accounting charge.
Only six hundred and sixty-five dollars remained, but it was a feast after last month's famine. By the time he'd finished reading the fan letters, all raving about the goodness and truth of his works, he felt as if he was connected to a gas station air pump.
Suddenly, he knew that there was a pattern to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire he carried between his legs. In no way, however, was he going to take the edge off his horniness by explaining the revelation to Ashlar just now. He dropped his mail and his pants, and he hurried to the kitchen. Ashlar was bent over, putting dishes in the washer.
He flipped up her skirt, yanked down her panties, and said, "The dishes can wait, but it can't."
It would all have been good and true and the earth might have moved if Ashlar hadn't gotten her head caught between the wire racks of the washer.
"You're getting fat again, aren't you?" Ashlar said. "That's some spare tire you got. And you missed a patch on your cheek when you shaved. Listen, I know this isn't time to talk about it, but my mother... what's the matter? Why are you stopping?"
Nick snarled and he said, "If you need an explanation, you're an imbecile. I'm pulling out like a train that stopped at the wrong station. I'm going back to my typewriter. A woman will always screw you up, but a typewriter's a typewriter, true and trustworthy, and it doesn't talk to you when you're making love to it."
Two minutes later, while Ashlar beat on the door with her fists and yelled at him, the typewriter keys jammed and he couldn't get them unstuck.
You couldn't even put faith in a simple machine. You could not trust anything. Everything that was supposed to be clean and good and true went to hell in this universe. Still, you had to stick with it, be a man with conejos. Or was it cojones? Never mind. Just tell yourself, "Tough shit," and "My head is bloody but unbowed. You have to die but you don't have to say Uncle."
That was fine, but the keys were still stuck, and Ashlar wouldn't quit beating on the door and screaming.
He got up, cursing and yanked the door open. Ashlar fell sobbing into his arms.
"I'm sorry, sorry, sorry! What a bitch I am! Here's the whole earth about ready to move all the way down to its core, and I pick on you!"
"Yes, you're truly a bitch," he said. "But I forgive you because I love you and you love me and no matter what happens we have something that is good. However. . ."
He wasn't going to say anything about his discovery of the pattern. Not now. He'd test his theory later.
An hour afterward, he said, panting, "Listen, Ashlar, let's take a vacation. We'll go to the World Science-Fiction Convention in Las Vegas. We'll have fun, and in between parties and shooting craps, we'll make love. The good true feeling will come back while we're there."
Or should he have said the true good feeling? What the hell was the correct order of adjectives in a phrase like that?
It didn't matter. What did was that Ashlar decided to go to the convention and didn't even complain that she had nothing to wear. Moreover, his theory had worked out. Up to a point, anyway, and that wasn't really his fault. The fans crowded around him, begging for his autograph, and he heard never an unkind word. As if this wasn't heady enough, not to mention the stimulation of his male hormones, three of the greatest science-fiction authors in the world invited him to dinner and paid him many compliments over the bourbons and steaks.
The first, Zeke Vermouth, Ph.D., the wealthiest writer in the field, didn't mention that they were going Dutch until after the meal was eaten. Even this didn't lessen Nick's pleasures. And then, glory of glories, Robin Hindbind, the dean of science- fiction authors, had him in for a private supper. Nick was as happy as a man with a free lifetime pass to a massage parlor. It was fabulous to sit in the suite, which was as spacious as Nick's house, and eat with the creator of such classics as Water Brother Among the Bathless, I Will Boll No Weevil and the autobiographical Time Enough For F***ing, subtitled Why Everybody Worships Me.
Then, wonder of wonders, the grand old man, Preston de Tove himself, asked Nick to a very select party. De Tove was probably Nick's greatest hero, the man who had rocked the science-fiction world in the 40s with his smashing Spam! and The World of Zilch A.
De Tove, however, hadn't done much writing for thirty years. He'd been too busy practicing a science of mental health originated by another classic author, old
B.M. Kachall himself. This was M.P. (Mnemonic Peristalsis) Therapy, a psychic discipline which claimed to enable a person to attain through its techniques an I.Q. of 500, perfect recall, Superman's or Wonder Woman's body, and immortality. In essence, these techniques consisted in keeping your bowels one hundred percent open. To do this, though, you had to work back along your memory track until you encountered in all details, visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory, especially olfactory, your first bowel movement. This was called the P.U. or Primal Urge.
Kachall had promised his disciples that all goals could be reached within a year through M.P. Therapy. However, de Tove, like the majority of Kachall's followers, was, three decades later, still taking laxatives as a physical aid to the mental techniques. He had not lost fai
th, even if he did spend most of his time during the party in the bathroom.
De Tove had refused to go along with Kachall's S.P.L. Religion, a metaphysical extension of M.P. Therapy. Perhaps this was because de Tove had to wear a diaper at all times, and attendees at the S.P.L. services were forbidden to wear anything. In any event, the religion required that the worshipper send his C.E. (Colonic Ego) back to the first movement of the universe, the Big Bang. If the worshipper survived that, he was certified to be an E.E. (End End), one who'd attained the Supreme Purgative Level. This meant that the E.E. radiated such a powerful aura that nobody would dare to mess around with him. Or even get near him for that matter.
Aside from having had to sit by an open window throughout the party, Nick was ecstatic. Nothing better could happen now. But he was wrong. The next day, two Englishmen, G.C. Alldrab and William Rubboys, invited him to a party for avantgarde writers. This twain had been lucky enough to be highly esteemed by some important mainstream critics and so now refused to be classified as mere s-f authors. Nevertheless, when the convention committee offered to pay their airfare, hotel expenses, and booze if they'd be guests, they consented to associate, for three days at least, with the debased category.
Alldrab was chiefly famous for stories in which depressed, impotent, passive, and incompetent antiheroes passed through catastrophic landscapes over which floated various parts, usually sexual, of famous people. He was also hung up on traffic accidents, a symbol to him of the rottenness of Western civilization, especially the United States. He sneered at plots and storylines.
And so did his colleague. Rubboys was famous for both the unique content and technique of his fiction. It drew mostly on his experiences as a drug addict and peregrinating homosexual. Otherwise, he was a nice guy and not nearly as snobbish as Alldrab, though some were unkind enough to say that his camaraderie with young male fans wasn't entirely due to his democratic leanings.
Lately, he'd been getting a lot of flak from feminist critics, who loathed his vicious attitude towards all women, though he claimed it was purely literary. They couldn't be blamed. Try though they might to ignore his bias because of his high reputation as a writer, they'd gotten fed up with his numerous references to females as cunts, gashes, twats, slits, and hairy holes.