The Metallic Muse (23 page)

“Cut the nonsense,” the captain snapped. “What happened to the Cherbilius?”

“He can’t remember,” the mate said. “He’d better remember. How come you’re the only one that made the lifeboat, fellow?” Effro did not answer.

“How’d you get here?” the captain persisted.

“I was reborn here,” Effro said. “The time before rebirth has no meaning.”

“Try that line on the Board of Inquiry, and it’ll masticate you into very small pieces. There’s been a major space disaster, and you’d better be prepared to cooperate fully.”

Effro gazed up at him. “May I have your blessing, Excellency?”

“Couldn’t you get anything at all out of him?” the captain asked the mate.

“Just some Bible quotations. He doesn’t seem to have any trouble remembering them.”

“The word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path,” Effro murmured.

“I see what you mean,” the captain said. “Well, it’s not our problem. Take him on board and assign someone to keep an eye on him. We’ll leave as soon as the lifeboat is secured.”

The crewmen jerked Effro to his feet and hustled him up the ramp. He did not resist, but he waved the Bible protestingly.

“We’d better report this to the Interstellar Safety Commission,” the mate said. “Putting all those Bibles in the emergency space stations maybe wasn’t such a good idea.”

“Sure,” the captain said. “And while we’re at it we can send a report to the Society of St. Brock. Their most recent convert just stole one.”

The predicant did not emerge from hiding until the ship was a fading spark on the rim of the star-flecked sky. He stood watching it until it disappeared.

They were disturbed because the purified one’s knowledge of his sinful past had been obliterated; but that was the way of rebirth. Cast away from you all your transgressions and make you a new heart and a new spirit.

The predicant was loath to see him leave, for the purified one had been an apt and willing student; but it was God’s will, he told himself humbly. The success of the purification had so suffused him with pride that he had been perilously close to sin himself. When pride cometh, then cometh shame; but with the lowly is wisdom.

And he had been neglecting his duties to his flock.

He went first to a maintenance shed. He plugged himself in at a power outlet, and while his charge was being topped off he administered a squirt of lubricant to his corroded left arm.

Then, after humbly crossing himself, he powered his way toward the machine shop, where three cleaning robots were waiting to confess.

page 176

The Botticelli Horror

(Introduction)

From my agent, in a letter dated September 10, 1959:

“Little deal coming up for you: you’re going to write a novelet called I think The Botticelli Horror for … Fantastic, 10 to 15,000 words, preferably close to 15,000.

“They’ve got the cover already, and I will send you a stat of it as soon as [they] get it to me; shows a gal busting out of a shell or something. There should be some scene in the story which more or less ties up with that, but they are not at all rigid and a vague suggestion is enough. This will be for Fantastic, so a touch of horror and fantasy is effective; science fiction is not ruled out, though; the mag is flexible.

“This will be for an issue dated March, so you have till November to turn it in.”

Readers may be surprised to learn that the illustration can be drawn or painted before the story it illustrates is written or even thought of, just as music lovers have been surprised to learn that songs frequently have words written for music rather than vice versa. Laws relating, to priority in artistic collaboration would be exceedingly, difficult to enforce, if only because the workings of sucessful collaboration, like those of successful marriages, are rarely made known to outsiders.

Occasionally someone lets slip a hint: Lord Dunsany describing his relationship with artist Sidney H. Sime; (“I found Mr. Sime one day, in his strange house in Worplesdon, complaining that editors did not offer him very suitable subjects for illustrations; so I said, ‘Why not do any pictures you like, and I will write stories explaining them?’ Mr. Sime fortunately agreed; and so, reversing the order of story and illustration which we, had followed hitherto, we set about putting together The Book of Wonder …”)* Or this introduction to The Botticelli Horror.

With the Science Fiction magazines, it has been a common practice with some editors to buy a cover painting and then commission an author to write a story illustrating it. Why is it done? I would seem to be a confirmation of two assumptions widely held by authors: 1) Given a choice between a good story and a good cover painting, most editors would snatch at the painting. 2) Many artists illustrate stories under the slight handicap of not being able to read them, whereas any author who is not blind is capable of looking at pictures. (I vividly recall an early experience of my own: a story plot turned upon the villain’s lefthandedness, and the illustrator drew him wielding a knife with his right hand.)

I thought this commission an interesting challenge. My mind fixed upon that line, “a gal busting out of a shell,” and for reasons now irretrievably lost this made me think of the “Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells,” from Moussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. (The fact that this composition is an interesting example of music being illustrated before it was written was coincidental.) From there a quantum jump or two took me to a setting in the Gobi Desert, where a party of paleontologists had just discovered a vast horde of enormous petrified dinosaur eggs. Horror struck immediately—members of the expedition began to vanish, and when, in the course of scientific investigation, a scientist cut into a petrified egg, he found there one of the missing paleontologists.

I sent this notion along to my agent and set about working out a few pertinent details, such as whether the newly discovered missing person was alive, dead, or petrified, and how he got into the egg and why. I regret to say that I never solved any of these problems; the answers might possibly have been interesting.

Letter from my agent dated September 16, 1959:

“Nup, try again; here’s your stat. No egg.

“But don’t let it throw you. Remember it’s a Biggish kind of story they want, your typical work: that’s the main thing. Fitting in the pic is incidental and not to be regarded as literal; it doesn’t have to involve a main scene; it doesn’t have to match exactly. Any liberties you take are okay.”

Quoted in At the Edge of the World, copyright © 1970 by Carter (Ballantine Books), p. 157.

It would be nice to be able to state that the moment if saw the photostat I was instantly reminded of Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus,” a painting with which I was familiar, and the plot of the story fell into place like the pieces of a magical, self-completing jigsaw puzzle. Alas, I fumbled with an unyielding plot for several days before it suddenly occurred to me that “Botticelli” was not a name that the artist or editor had made up. Then the plot fell into place.

Whence the idea? If I ever knew, I’ve forgotten. This was ten years before MQF’s mobile quarantine facilities for returning Lunar astronauts, and the best-selling novel Andromeda Strain, but I’d be much surprised to learn that I originated anything. H. G. Wells, the old master originator, was probably first. In his The War of the Worlds the Martians are killed by Earth’s bacteria, an Andromeda Strain in reverse.

Letter from my agent dated November 15, 1959:

“Just to say thanks much for the Botticelli Horror. Reads damn fine, and it’s full of bright new notions.”

One further note: The Venus referred to in this story no longer exists.

For many years it was a scientific possibility, even probability, and scientific possibilities and probabilities are Science Fictional realities. Until the 1920s the concept of Venus as a world of enormous swamps and large, shallow, island-dotted lakes contended with one in which the entire planet was covered with water. Both visions were sandbagged scientifically in the third decade of this century by a new theory that made Venus a dry world torn by dust storms. When first advanced this ranked as merely one more speculation—no one really knew what Venus was like—and most authors found that the earlier theories provided better settings for stories, especially for the one that produced a Venus resembling the Carboniferous Period on Earth: the enormous swamps, the lush, fantastically exotic vegetation, the monstrous and amphibious animal life. This stubborn persistence on the part of Science Fiction writers was vindicated in the mid-1950s when a re-evaluation of reflection and polarization studies, along with new temperature measurements, restored the concept of an extremely wet Venus.

The restoration was, alas, short-lived. First radio measurements and then the Venus probe Mariner II (launched August 27, 1962) settled the notion of a wet Venus forever. We now know that the surface is rough and dry, with pressure twenty times that of our atmosphere and a surface temperature much too hot for any life known to man (it would melt zinc). Gone is the ocean planet of C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra. Gone is the sea monster of Roger Zelanzny’s prize-winning story “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth.” Gone is Botticelli Horror. Sometimes it’s more fun not to know!

page 180

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Botticelli Horror

Even from a thousand feet the town looked frightened.

It lay tense under the shimmering heat of midafternoon a town of museum piece houses with smoke-blackened roofs that crowded closely upon one another, and of tree lined streets that neatly sliced it into squares. It was a town out of a history book—the kind of town some people thought no longer existed.

But hundreds of such towns survived, and John Allen encountered them often, hidden away in remote valleys or rising up unexpectedly amidst rolling farm lands, like the town of Gwinn Center, Kansas. They were, all of them, much alike that even their differences seemed similar.

Gwinn Center had other differences.

The streets were deserted. The clumsy ground vehicles that crept along the twisting black ribbon of roadway miles beyond the town were headed south, running away. Stretched across the rich green of the cultivated fields was a wavering line of dots. As Allen slanted his plane downward the dots enlarged and became men who edged forward doggedly, holding weapons at the ready.

The town was not completely abandoned. As Allen circled to pick out a landing place he saw a man dart from one of the commercial buildings, run at top speed along the center of a street, and with a final, furtive glance over his shoulder, disappear into a house. None of this surprised Allen. The message that had been plunked on his desk at Terran Customs an hour and a half before was explanation enough. The lurking atmosphere of terror, the fleeing townspeople, the grim line of armed men—Allen had expected all of that.

It was the tents that puzzled him.

They formed a square in a meadow near the edge of town, a miniature village of flapping brown and green canvas surrounding an amazing clutter of weirdly shaped contraptions of uncertain function and unknown purpose. Allen’s message didn’t account for the tents.

He circled again, spotted the white numbers of a police plane that was parked on one of the town’s wider streets. A small group of men stood nearby in the shadow of a building. Allen completed his turn and pointed the plane downward.

Dr. Ralph Hilks lifted his nose from the scientific journal that had claimed his entire attention from the moment of their takeoff and peered down curiously. “Is this the place? Where is everyone?”

“Hiding, probably,” Allen said. “Those that haven’t already left.”

“What are the tents?”

“I haven’t any idea.”

Hilks grunted. “Looks as if we’ve been handed a hot one,” he said and returned to his reading.

Allen concentrated on the landing. They floated straight down and came to rest beside the police plane with a gentle thud.

Hilks closed his journal a second time. “Nice,” he observed,

Allen cut the motor. “Thanks,” he said dryly. “It has the new-type shocks.”

They climbed out. The little group of men—there were four of them—had turned to watch them land. Not caring to waste time on formalities, Allen went to meet them.

“Allen is my name,” he said. “Chief Customs Investigator. And this—” He paused until the pudgy, slow-moving scientist had caught up with him. “This is Dr. Hilks, our scientific consultant.”

The men squared away for introductions. The tall one was Fred Corning, State Commissioner of Police. The young man in uniform was his aide, a Sergeant Darrow. A sturdy, deeply tanned individual with alert eyes and slow speech was Sheriff Townsend. The fourth man, old, wispy, with startling white, unruly hair and eyeglasses that could have been lifted from a museum, was Dr. Anderson, a medical doctor. All four of them were grim, and the horror that gripped the town had not left them unmarked, but at least they weren’t frightened.

“You didn’t waste any time getting here,” the commissioner said. “We’re glad of that.”

“No,” Allen said. “Let’s not waste time now.”

“I suppose you want to see the—ah—remains?”

“That’s as good a place to start as any.”

“This way,” the commissioner said.

They moved off along the center of the street.

The house was one of a row of houses at the edge of town. It was small and tidy-looking, a white building with red shutters and window boxes full of flowers. Th splashes of color should have given it a cheerful appearance, but in that town, on that day, nothing appeared cheerful.

The yard at the rear of the house was enclosed by a shoulder-high picket fence. They paused while the commissioner fussed with the fastener on the gate, and Dr. Hilks stood gaping at the row of houses.

The commissioner swung the gate open and turned to look at him. “See anything?”

“Chimneys!” Hilks said. “Every one of these dratted buildings has its own chimney. Think of it—a couple of hundred heating plants, and the town isn’t large enough for one to function efficiently. The waste must be—”