A Treasury of Great Science Fiction 1 Read online

  Many of them were still obscure to me; others I had learnt something about. Offenses, for instance. That was because the occurrence of an Offense was sometimes quite an impressive occasion. Usually the first sign that one had happened was that my father came into the house in a bad temper. Then, in the evening, he would call us all together, including everyone who worked on the farm. We would all kneel while he proclaimed our repentance and led prayers for forgiveness. The next morning we would all be up before daylight, and gather in the yard. As the sun rose we would sing a hymn while my father ceremonially slaughtered the two-headed calf, fourlegged chicken, or whatever other kind of Offense it happened to be. Sometimes it would be a much queerer thing than those. The most exciting time I remember was when a goose proudly led her brood into the yard one day. She must somehow have reared them in the woods, for they were already the size of hens. Not only were they web-winged instead of feathered, but they also had exceedingly sharp beaks and vicious tempers. There was a very active scene in the yard before a much-pecked and scratched company assembled to ask a blessing on their liquidation.

  But Offenses were not limited to the livestock. Sometimes it would be some stalks of corn, or some vegetables, that my father produced and cast on the kitchen table in anger and shame. If it was merely a matter of a few rows of vegetables, they just came out and were destroyed. But if a whole field had gone wrong we would wait for good weather, and then set fire to it, singing hymns while it burnt. I used to find that a very fine sight.

  It was because my father was a careful and pious man with a keen eye for an Offense that we used to have more slaughterings and burnings than anyone else. Any suggestion that we were more afflicted with Offenses than other people hurt and angered him. He had no wish at all to throw good money away, he pointed out. If our neighbors were as conscientious as ourselves, he had no doubt that their liquidations would far outnumber ours; unfortunately there were certain persons with elastic principles.

  So I learned quite early to know what Offenses were. They were things which did not look right—that is to say, did not look like their parents, or parent-plants. Usually there was only some small thing wrong—though sometimes a thing might have gone altogether wrong, and be very queer indeed.

  But however much or little was wrong it was on Offense, and if it happened among people it was a Blasphemy—at least, that was the technical term though commonly both kinds were called Deviations.

  Nevertheless, the question of Offenses was not always as simple as one might think. When there was disagreement the district’s Inspector would be sent for. He would examine the dubious creature or plant carefully, and more often than not he would decide it was an Offense—but sometimes he would proclaim it simply a Cross. In that case it was usually allowed to survive although nobody thought much of Crosses. My father, however, seldom called in the Inspector, he preferred to be on the safe side and liquidate anything doubtful. There were people who disapproved of his meticulousness, saying that the local Deviation-rate, which had shown a steady over-all improvement and now stood at half what it had been in my grandfather’s time, would have been better still but for my father. Nevertheless, the Waknuk district had a great name for Purity.

  Ours was no longer a frontier region. Hard work and sacrifice had produced a stability of stock and crops which could be envied even by some communities to the east of us. You could now go some thirty miles to the south or southwest before you came to Wild Country—that is to say parts where the chance of breeding true was less than fifty per cent. After that, everything grew more erratic across a belt which was ten miles wide in some places and up to twenty in others, until you came to the mysterious Fringes where nothing was dependable, and where, to quote my father, “the Devil struts his wide estates, and the laws of God are mocked.” Fringes country, too, was said to be variable in depth, and beyond it lay the Badlands about which nobody knew anything. Usually anybody who went into the Badlands died there, and the one or two men who had come out of them did not last long.

  It was not the Badlands, but the Fringes that gave us trouble from time to time. The people of the Fringes—at least, one calls them people, because although they were really Deviations they often looked quite like ordinary human people, if nothing had gone too much wrong with them—these people, then, had very little where they lived in their border country, so they came out into civilized parts to steal grain and livestock and clothes and tools and weapons, too, if they could; and sometimes they carried off children.

  Occasional small raids used to happen two or three times a year, and nobody took much notice of them as a rule—except the people who got raided, of course. Usually they had time to get away and lost only their stock. Then everybody would contribute a little in kind, or in money, to help them set up again. But as time went on and the frontier was pushed back there were more Fringes people trying to live on less country. Some years they got very hungry, and after a time it was no longer just a matter of a dozen or so making a quick raid and then running back into Fringes country; they came instead in large, organized bands and did a lot of damage.

  In my father’s childhood mothers used to quieten and awe troublesome infants by threatening, “Be good now. Or I’ll fetch Old Maggie from the Fringes to you. She’s got four eyes to watch you with, and four ears to hear you with, and four arms to smack you with. So you be careful.” Or Hairy Jack was another ominous figure who might be called in. “. . . and he’ll take you off to his cave in the Fringes where all his family lives. They’re all hairy, too, with long tails; and they eat a little boy each for breakfast every morning, and a little girl each for supper every evening.” Nowadays, however, it was not only small children who lived in nervous awareness of the Fringes people not so far away. Their existence had become a dangerous nuisance and their depredations the cause of many representations to the government in Rigo.

  For all the good the petitions did, they might never have been sent. Indeed, with no one able to tell, over a stretch of five or six hundred miles, where the next attack would come, it is difficult to see what practical help could have been given. What the government did do, from its comfortable situation far, far to the east, was to express sympathy in encouraging phrases, and suggest the formation of a local militia—a suggestion which, as all able-bodied males had as a matter of course been members of a kind of unofficial militia since frontier days, was felt to amount to disregard of the situation.

  As far as the Waknuk district was concerned the threat from the Fringes was more of a nuisance than a menace. The deepest raid had come no nearer than ten miles, but every now and then there were emergencies, and seemingly more every year, which called the men away, and brought all the farm work to a stop. The interruptions were expensive and wasteful; moreover, they always brought anxiety if the trouble was near our sector: nobody could be sure that they might not come further one time . . .

  Mostly, however, we led a comfortable, settled, industrious existence. Our household was extensive. There were my father and mother, my two sisters, and my Uncle Axel to make the family, but also there were the kitchen girls and dairymaids, some of whom were married to the farm men, and their children, and, of course, the men themselves, so when we were all gathered for the meal at the end of the day’s work there were over twenty of us; and when we assembled for prayers there were still more because the men from the adjoining cottages came in with their wives and children.

  Uncle Axel was not a real relative. He had married one of my mother’s sisters, Elizabeth. He was a sailor then, and she had gone east with him and died in Rigo while he was on the voyage that had left him a cripple. He was a useful all-around man, though slow in getting about because of his leg, so my father let him live with us. He was also my best friend.

  My mother came of a family of five girls and two boys. Four of the girls were full sisters; the youngest girl and the two boys were half-sister and half-brothers to the rest. Hannah, the eldest, had been sent away by her husband,
and nobody had heard of her since. Emily, my mother, was next in age. Then came Harriet, who was married to a man with a big farm at Kentak, almost fifteen miles away. Then Elizabeth, who had married Uncle Axel. Where my half-aunt Lilian and my half-uncle Thomas were I did not know, but my half-uncle Angus Morton owned the farm next to us, and a mile or more of our boundaries ran together, which annoyed my father, who could scarcely agree with half-uncle Angus about anything. His daughter, Rosalind, was, of course, my cousin.

  Although Waknuk itself was the biggest farm in the district, most of them were organized along the same lines, and all of them growing larger, for with the improving stability-rate there was the incentive to extend; every year felling of trees and clearing went on to make new fields. The woods and spurs of forest were being nibbled away until the countryside was beginning to look like the old, long-cultivated land in the east.

  It was said that nowadays even people in Rigo knew where Waknuk was without looking it up on the map.

  I lived, in fact, on the most prosperous farm in a prospering district. At the age of ten, however, I had little appreciation of that. My impression was of an uncomfortably industrious place where there always seemed to be more jobs than people, unless one was careful, so on this particular evening I contrived to lie low until routine sounds told me that it was near enough to the mealtime for me to show myself safely.

  As I wandered into the yard I encountered Janet, bringing in a big jug of milk from the dairy. She looked at me suspiciously.

  “And where’ve you been?” she inquired. “Your father was wanting you to give the pony some exercise.”

  I was ready for that. “Fishing,” I told her, unblushingly, “Down below the mill.”

  I hung about, watching the horses being unharnessed and turned out. Presently the bell on the gable-end tolled a couple of times. Doors opened, and people came into the yard, making for the kitchen. I went along with them. The warning: Watch Thou for the Mutant! faced me as I went in, but it was much too familiar to stir a thought. What interested me exclusively at the moment was the smell of food.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I usually went over to see Sophie once or twice a week after that. What schooling we had—which was a matter of half a dozen children being taught to read and write and do some sums by one or another of several old women—took place in the mornings. It was not difficult at the midday meal to slip away from the table early and disappear until everyone would think someone else had found a job for me, but I felt it would be unwise to do that too often, and made a point of letting someone find work for me two or three afternoons a week.

  Very often I did not need to go all the way to Sophie’s home to find her. Sometimes I’d hear her call, but see no sign of her until she came pushing out of the bushes, or popping up from behind a tuft of grass.

  When her ankle was quite recovered she was able to show me the favorite comers of her territory. Most often we went to the stream. She liked to watch the fish in the pools there. In order not to disturb them we’d crawl to the bank and push our heads over very slowly and carefully. There were some queer things to be seen sometimes.

  One day we were watching a fish with a dark line on its back that broke into speckles on its sides. It hung suspended, facing upstream, opening its mouth in a leisurely way now and then to gulp morsels that were washed toward it. Sophie nudged me. I followed her line of sight, and saw a larger fish, lurking beneath an overhanging bush like a long shadow. It was watching the midstream fish attentively, and for all its present lack of motion it looked tense and ready to pounce, but beneath and behind it was something else again. A creature on long, stilty legs with sharp-looking claws wide, and reaching forward. Its tail was curled under it and fanning very gently as it crept closer and closer to the intent larger fish.

  We watched, fascinated. The drama was painfully prolonged. Still the larger fish awaited the perfect moment, while the other creature inched delicately nearer to it.

  Suddenly Sophie shouted “No!” and threw a stone. When the ripples cleared the tableau had vanished.

  “What did you do that for?” I said. I had wanted to see how it would work out.

  “The horrible thing was going to get him. They nearly always do.”

  “Are there a lot of them in there?” I asked, looking down into the water.

  “Oh, yes. My father catches them sometimes. They’re nice to eat, although they’re horrible.”

  “It looked like an Offense,” I said. “You ought to bum Offenses, not eat them.”

  “Why?”

  I was not sure about that, but I knew it was the proper thing to do. I told her that we always did it at home.

  “But that’s silly if they’re good to eat,” she decided.

  It was, I explained, a matter of principle. I did not know quite what that meant, either, but I was sure it was what my father would have said in the circumstances.

  “Oh,” said Sophie, vaguely, but she looked a little impressed, all the same.

  One day I took her over our side of the big bank to see the steam-engine. There wasn’t another steam-engine within a hundred miles, and we were very proud of it. Corky, who looked after it, was not about, but the doors at the end of its shed were open, letting out the sound of a rhythmic groaning, creaking, and puffing. We ventured onto the threshold and peered into the gloom inside. It was fascinating to watch the big timbers moving up and down with wheezing noises while up in the shadows of the roof a huge crossbeam rocked slowly backward and forward, with a pause at the end of each tilt as though it were summoning up energy for the next effort. Fascinating—but, after a time, monotonous.

  Ten minutes of it were enough, and we withdrew to climb to the top of the woodpile beside the shed. We sat there with the whole heap quivering beneath us as the engine chugged ponderously on.

  “My Uncle Axel says the Old People must have had much better engines than this,” I told her.

  “My father says that if one-quarter of the things they say about the Old People are true, they must have been magicians, not real people, at all,” Sophie countered.

  “But they were wonderful,” I insisted.

  “Too wonderful to be true, he says,” she told me.

  “Doesn’t he think they were able to fly, like people say?” I asked.

  “No. That’s silly. If they could’ve, we’d be able to.”

  “But there are lots of things they could do that we are learning to do again,” I protested.

  “Not flying,” she shook her head. “Things can either fly, or they can’t; and we can’t,” she said.

  I thought of telling her about my dream of the city and the things flying over it, but after all, a dream isn’t much evidence of anything, so I let it pass. Presently we climbed down, leaving the engine to its panting and creaking and made our way over to her home.

  John Wender, her father, was back from one of his trips. A sound of hammering came from the outside shed where he was stretching skins on frames, and the whole place smelled of his operations. Sophie rushed to him and flung her arms round his neck. He straightened up, holding her against him with one arm.

  “Hullo, Chicky,” he said.

  He greeted me more gravely. We had an unspoken understanding that we were on a man-to-man basis. It had not always been like that. When he first saw me he had looked at me in a way that had scared me and made me afraid to speak in his presence. Gradually, however, that had changed. We became friends. He showed me and told me a lot of interesting things—all the same I would look up sometimes to find him watching me uneasily.

  And no wonder. Only some years later could I appreciate how badly troubled he must have been when he came home to find Sophie had sprained her ankle, and that it had been David Strorm, the son of Joseph Strorm, of all people, who had seen her foot. He must, I think, have been greatly tempted by the thought that a dead boy could break no promise. It would have been understandable. Perhaps Mrs. Wender saved me.

  But I think he wo
uld have been reassured had he known of an incident at my home about a month after I met Sophie.

  I had run a splinter into my hand and when I pulled it out it bled a lot. I went to the kitchen with it only to find everybody too busy getting supper to be bothered with me, so I rummaged a strip out of the rag-drawer for myself. I tried clumsily for a minute or two to tie it, then my mother noticed. She made tchk-tchk noises of disapproval and insisted on it being washed. Then she wound the strip on neatly, grumbling that of course I must go and do it just when she was busy. I said I was sorry, and added:

  “I could have managed it all right by myself if I’d had another hand.”

  My voice must have carried, for silence fell on the whole room like a clap.

  My mother froze. I looked around the room at the sudden quiet. Mary, standing with a pie in her hands, two of the four men waiting for their meal, my father about to take his seat at the head of the table, and the others; they were all staring at me. I caught my father’s expression just as it was turning from amazement to anger. Alarmed, but uncomprehending, I watched his mouth tighten, his jaw come forward, his brows press together over his still-incredulous eyes. He demanded: “What was that you said, boy?”

  I knew the tone. I tried to think in a desperate hurry how I had offended this time. I stumbled and stuttered.

  “I—I s-said I couldn’t manage to tie this for myself,” I told him.

  His eyes had become less incredulous, more accusing. “And you wished you had a third hand!”

  “No, father. I only said if I had another hand—”

  “—you would be able to tie it. If that was not a wish,