The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II (7 page)

Larkin noticed with wry admiration how carefully Reddington had slipped in that bit about spare time, without seeming to be making an explanation. He thought wearily to himself, I hope that I
don’t have to do any talking myself. I’ll have to do a lot of listening before I can chance any talking.

In a few moments Reddington put down the phone and came back. He had on his hat and coat.

“Had to answer a few,” he said briefly, “make it seem natural. But you better get dressed.”

“Dressed? Why?”

“Have you forgotten?” Reddington smiled patiently. “You’re due at the White House. The Secret Service is already tearing the town apart looking for you. We were supposed
to alert them. Oh, by the saints, I hope that wasn’t too bad a slip.”

He pursed his mouth worriedly while Larkin, still dazed, got into his coat. It was beginning now. It had already begun. He was tired but it did not matter. That he was tired would probably never
matter again. He took a deep breath. Like Reddington, he straightened his shoulders.

The Secret Service picked them up halfway across town. That they knew where he was, who he was, amazed him and worried Reddington. They went through the gates of the White House and drove up
before the door. It was opened for him as he put out his hand, he stepped back in a reflex action, from the sudden blinding flares of the photographers’ flashbulbs. Reddington behind him took
him firmly by the arm. Larkin went with him gratefully, unable to see, unable to hear anything but the roar of the crowd from behind the gates and the shouted questions of the reporters.

Inside the great front doors it was suddenly peaceful again, very quiet and pleasantly dark. He took off his hat instinctively. Luckily he had been here before, he recognized the lovely hall and
felt not awed but at home. He was introduced quickly to several people whose names made no impression on him. A woman smiled. He made an effort to smile back. Reddington took him by the arm again
and led him away. There were people all around him, but they were quiet and hung back. He saw the respect on their faces. It sobered him, quickened his mind.

“The President’s in the Lincoln Room,” Reddington whispered. “He wants to see you. How do you feel?”

“All right.”

“Listen.”

“Yes.”

“You’ll be fine. You’re doing beautifully. Keep just that look on your face.”

“I’m not trying to keep it there.”

“You aren’t?” Reddington looked at him. “Good. Very good.” He paused and looked again at Larkin. Then he smiled.

“It’s done it. I thought it would but I wasn’t sure. But it does it every time. A man comes in here, no matter what he was before, no matter what he is when he goes out, but he
feels it. Don’t you feel it?”

“Yes. It’s like – ”

“What?”

“It’s like . . . when you’re in here . . . you’re
responsible
.”

Reddington said nothing. But Larkin felt a warm pressure on his arm.

They paused at the door of the Lincoln Room. Two Secret Service men, standing by the door, opened it respectfully. They went on in, leaving the others outside.

Larkin looked across the room to the great, immortal bed. He felt suddenly very small, very tender. He crossed the soft carpet and looked down at the old man.

“Hi,” the old man said. Larkin was startled, but he looked down at the broad weakly smiling face, saw the famous white hair and the still-twinkling eyes, and found himself smiling in
return.

“Mr. President,” Larkin said.

“I hear your name is Larkin.” The old man’s voice was surprisingly strong, but as he spoke now Larkin could see that the left side of his face was paralyzed. “Good name
for a president. Indicates a certain sense of humor. Need a sense of humor. Reddington, how’d it go?”

“Good as can be expected, sir.” He glanced briefly at Larkin. “The President knows. Wouldn’t have done it without his okay. Now that I think of it, it was probably he who
put the Secret Service on us.”

“You’re doggone right,” the old man said. “They may bother the by-jingo out of you, but those boys are necessary. And also, if I hadn’t let them know we knew Larkin
was material – ” He stopped abruptly and closed his eyes, took a deep breath. After a moment he said: “Mr. Larkin?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I have one or two comments. You mind?”

“Of course not, sir.”

“I couldn’t solve it. I just . . . didn’t have time. There were so many other things to do.” He stopped and again closed his eyes. “But it will be up to you, son.
The presidency . . . must be preserved. What they’ll start telling you now is that there’s only one way out, let SAM handle it. Reddington, too,” the old man opened his eyes and
gazed sadly at Reddington, “he’ll tell you the same thing, but don’t you believe it.

“Sure, SAM knows all the answers. Ask him a question on anything, on levels of parity tax rates, on anything. And right quick SAM will compute you out an answer. So that’s what
they’ll try to do, they’ll tell you to take it easy and let SAM do it.

“Well, all right, up to a certain point. But, Mr. Larkin, understand this. SAM is like a book. Like a book, he knows the answers.
But only those answers we’ve already found
out
. We gave SAM those answers. A machine is not creative, neither is a book. Both are only the product of creative minds. Sure, SAM could hold the country together. But growth, man,
there’d be no more growth! No new ideas, new solutions, change, progress, development! And America
must
grow, must progress – ”

He stopped, exhausted. Reddington bowed his head. Larkin remained idly calm. He felt a remarkable clarity in his head.

“But, Mr. President,” he said slowly, “if the office is too much for one man, then all we can do is cut down on his powers – ”

“Ah,” the old man said faintly, “there’s the rub. Cut down on what? If I sign a tax bill, I must know enough about taxes to be certain that the bill is the right one. If
I endorse a police action, I must be certain that the strategy involved is militarily sound. If I consider farm prices . . . you see, you see, what will you cut? The office is responsible for its
acts. It must remain responsible. You cannot take just someone else’s word for things like that, you must make your own decisions. Already we sign things we know nothing about, bills for
this, bills for that, on somebody’s word.”

“What do you suggest?”

The old man cocked an eye toward Larkin, smiled once more with half his mouth, anciently worn, only hours from death, an old, old man with his work not done, never to be done.

“Son, come here. Take my hand. Can’t lift it myself.”

Larkin came forward, knelt by the side of the bed. He took the cold hand, now gaunt and almost translucent, and held it gently.

“Mr. Larkin,” the President said. “God be with you, boy. Do what you can. Delegate authority. Maybe cut the term in half. But keep us human, please, keep us growing, keep us
alive.” His voice faltered, his eyes closed. “I’m very tired. God be with you.”

Larkin laid the hand gently on the bed cover. He stood for a long moment looking down. Then he turned with Reddington and left the room.

Outside, he waited until they were past the Secret Service men and then turned to Reddington.

“Your plans for SAM. What do you think now?”

Reddington winced.

“I couldn’t see any way out.”

“But what about now? I have to know.”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know. But . . . let me tell you something.”

“Yes.”

“Whatever I say to you from now on is only advice. You don’t have to take it. Because understand this: however you came in here tonight, you’re going out the President. You
were elected. Not by the people maybe, not even by SAM. But you’re President by the grace of God and that’s enough for me. From this moment on you’ll be President to everybody in
the world. We’ve all agreed. Never think that you’re only a fraud, because you aren’t. You heard what the President said. You take it from here.”

Larkin looked at him for a long while. Then he nodded once, briefly.

“All right,” he said.

“One more thing.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve got to say this. Tonight, this afternoon, I didn’t really know what I was doing to you. I thought . . . well . . . the crisis came. But you had no time to think. That
wasn’t right. A man shouldn’t be pushed into a thing like this without time to think. The old man just taught me something about making your own decisions. I should have let you make
yours.”

“It’s all right.”

“No, it isn’t. You remember him in there. Well. That’s you four years from tonight. If you live that long.”

Now it was Larkin who reached out and patted Reddington on the shoulder.

“That’s all right, too,” he said.

Reddington said nothing. When he spoke again, Larkin realized he was moved.

“We have the greatest luck, this country,” he said tightly. “At all the worst times we always seem to find all the best people.”

“Well,” Larkin said hurriedly, “we’d better get to work. There’s a speech due in the morning. And the problem of SAM. And . . . oh, I’ve got to be sworn
in.”

He turned and went off down the hall. Reddington paused a moment before following him. He was thinking that he could be watching the last human President the United States would ever have. But
– once more he straightened his shoulders.

“Yes, sir,” he said softly, “Mr. President.”

Charles Harness (1915– ) wrote one highly regarded SF novel in the 1950s,
Flight into Yesterday (The Paradox Men
, 1953). Damon Knight, in a
famous review essay, said, “Harness told me in 1950 that he had spent two years writing the story, and had put into it every fictional idea that occurred to him during the time. He must have
studied his model [van Vogt] with painstaking care.” But Knight’s point is that Harness surpasses van Vogt in SF: “All this, packed even more tightly than the original,
symmetrically arranged, the loose ends tucked in, and every outrageous twist of the plot fully justified both in science and in logic.” Brian W. Aldiss is also partisan to it: “This
novel may be considered as the climax to the billion year spree . . . I call it Wide Screen Baroque . . . Harness’s novel has a zing of its own, like whiskey and champagne, the drink of the
Nepalese sultans.”

After such praise, it is difficult to understand why Harness has suffered such comparative neglect, except that his career as a patent attorney allowed him only occasional
time to write. His second novel,
The Ring of Ritornel
, was not published until 1968, and this third,
Wolfhead
, in 1978. Seven more novels followed between 1980 and 1991, altogether a
significant body of genre work. Most of his short fiction has never been collected.

His only collection,
The Rose
(1966), was an obscure paperback original, containing the title novella and two other fine stories. Michael Moorcock, though, in an essay
about “The Rose,” calls it Harness’s “greatest novel,” and says, “although most of Harness’s work is written in the magazine style of the time and at first
glance appears to have only the appeal of colorful escapism, reminiscent of A. E. van Vogt or James Blish of the same period, it contains nuances and throw away ideas that show a serious (never
earnest) mind operating at a much deeper and broader level than its contemporaries.”

Moorcock goes on to say, “‘The Rose’ [is] crammed with delightful notions – what some SF readers call ‘ideas’ – but these are
essentially icing on the cake of Harness’s fiction. [His] stories are what too little science fiction is – true stories of ideas, coming to grips with the big abstract problems of human
existence and attempting to throw fresh, philosophical light on them.”

“The Rose” was first published in a British SF magazine in 1953, at a time when not a hundred copies of such a publication were seen in the U.S., and not reprinted
in America until 1966, long after the dust had settled from
Flight into Yesterday
. Except for the few new readers caught by the sixties paperbacks, the story, which deserves a place on the
shelf next to the works of Cordwainer Smith, fell into obscurity. Here it is again, at last, one of the finest examples of “Grand Opera” science fiction.

Her ballet slippers made a soft slapping sound, moody, mournful, as Anna van Tuyl stepped into the annex of her psychiatrical consulting room and walked toward the tall
mirror.

Within seconds she would know whether she was ugly.

As she had done half a thousand times in the past two years, the young woman faced the great glass squarely, brought her arms up gracefully and rose upon her tip-toes. And there resemblance to
past hours ceased. She did not proceed to an uneasy study of her face and figure. She could not. For her eyes, as though acting with a wisdom and volition of their own, had closed tightly.

Anna van Tuyl was too much the professional psychiatrist not to recognize that her subconscious mind had shrieked its warning. Eyes still shut, and breathing in great gasps, she dropped from her
toes as if to turn and leap away. Then gradually she straightened. She must force herself to go through with it. She might not be able to bring herself here, in this mood of candid receptiveness,
twice in one lifetime. It must be now.

She trembled in brief, silent premonition, then quietly raised her eyelids.

Sombre eyes looked out at her, a little darker than yesterday: pools ploughed around by furrows that today gouged a little deeper – the result of months of squinting up from the position
into which her spinal deformity had thrust her neck and shoulders. The pale lips were pressed together just a little tighter in their defence against unpredictable pain. The cheeks seemed bloodless
having been bleached finally and completely by the Unfinished Dream that haunted her sleep, wherein a nightingale fluttered about a white rose.

As if in brooding confirmation, she brought up simultaneously the pearl-translucent fingers of both hands to the upper borders of her forehead, and there pushed back the incongruous masses of
newly-grey hair from two tumorous bulges – like incipient horns. As she did this she made a quarter turn, exposing to the mirror the humped grotesquerie of her back.