A Galaxy Of Strangers Read online

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  AND MADLY TEACH

  THE DOUBLE-EDGED ROPE

  EYE FOR AN EYE

  FIRST LOVE

  WHO’S ON FIRST?

  ROUND TRIP TO ESIDARAP

  NO BIZ LIKE SHOW BIZ

  WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT!

  A GALAXY OF STRANGERS

  LLOYD BIGGLE, JR.

  Doubleday & Company, Inc.

  Garden City, New York

  1976

  All of the characters in the book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  * * *

  Copyright © 1976 by Lloyd Biggie, Jr.

  All Rights Reserved Printed in the United States of America First Edition

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Biggie, Lloyd, 1923-A galaxy of strangers.

  i. Science fiction, American. I. Title.

  PZ4.B593Gal [PS3552.I43] 8i3’.5‘4 ISBN 0-385-12246-2

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 76-2992

  For The Workshoppers

  Kathy Albaugh Peter Hubbard Ted Reynolds

  Sally A. Sellers Lawrence Tucker

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  And Madly Teach: first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1966. Included in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, Sixteenth Series, edited by Edward L. Ferman (Doubleday & Company, 1967). Copyright © 1966 by Mercury Press, Inc.

  The Double-Edged Rope: first published in Analog, June 1967. Copyright © 1967 by the Conde Nast Publications, Inc.

  Eye for an Eye: first published in The Far Side of Time, a Science Fiction Anthology edited by Roger Elwood (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1974). Copyright © 1974 by Roger Elwood.

  First Love: first published in Amazing Science Fiction Stories, September 1959. Copyright © 1959 by Ziff-Davis Publishing Company.

  Who’s on First?: first published in If Worlds of Science Fiction, August 1958. Included in The Third Fireside Book of Baseball, edited by Charles Einstein (Simon and Schuster, 1968). Copyright 1958 by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc.

  Round Trip to Esidarap: first published in If Worlds of Science Fiction, November 1960, as Esidarap ot pirt Dnuor. Included in Out of This World 3, An Anthology of Science Fiction edited by Annabel Williams Ellis and Mably Owen (Blackie & Son Ltd., 1962). Copyright i960 by Digest Productions Corporation.

  No Biz like Show Biz: first published in Analog, May 1974. Copyright © 1974 by the Conde Nast Publications, Inc.

  What Hath God Wrought!: first published in Strange Gods, edited by Roger Elwood (Pocket Books, 1974). Copyright © 1974 by Roger Elwood.

  Introduction

  DOOMSDAY, ANYONE?

  As long ago as the 1930s, Bernard DeVoto was grumbling about science fiction stories “which deal with both the World and the Universe of Tomorrow and … take no great pleasure in either.” “Prognosticators of doom” is one of the milder captions applied to those of us who have the temerity to set our stories in the future. Our defenders—outside the boundaries of science fiction—have been few, and the kindest excuse they’ve been able to offer for what even they consider our excessive morbidity has been to point out diffidently that, well, a future where everything is sweetness and light and milk and honey would make for rather insipid stories, wouldn’t it?

  To any impartial arbiter, the looming catastrophes to which science fiction condemns an ill-starred humanity must seem grossly overdone. A cross section of science fiction concerned with tomorrow and the year or two after would offer horrific subject matter dealing with crime in the streets; with cities so unsafe after dark that one walks a dog or strolls to the neighborhood drugstore at the risk of one’s life; with a tragic disparity of wealth; with the failure of our educational system; with the diminution of personal liberties; with our esteemed democratic processes perverted by unscrupulous or corrupt politicians; with an advertising industry blatantly and dishonestly attempting to manipulate human values; with Earth’s beauty and bounty laid waste by the greed of large corporations; with the very air we breathe imperiled by pollution; with life prolonged meaninglessly if not tragically by medical science; with the elderly in dire want, their savings and pensions eroded by inflation, living on into old, old age in stark misery; with automated factories pouring out luxury goods that huge numbers of citizens can’t buy because they’re unemployed; with the decline of the work ethic and the appeasement of the idle masses with prime-time gladiator shows; with craftsmanship so deteriorated that nothing can be purchased with any assurance that it will function; with repair services blunderingly incompetent and exorbitantly expensive—this is no more than the beginning of a list.

  It does indeed sound like a morbid prognostication of doom. Unfortunately, it is not. Neither is it science fiction. This is the present, as delineated by your daily newspaper.

  More than one science fiction writer has said this: “We are not predicting; we are writing to keep these things from happening.” Obviously we have failed. Today we are living yesterday’s science fiction —its glowing predictions of technological marvels and its gloomy prognostications of social catastrophe. Both have come true.

  Consider these few examples:

  • The failure of our educational system. When I was a high school student in Waterloo, Iowa, more years ago than either I or my classmates care to count, a teacher startled my social studies class with the question, “Do we graduate morons from East High?” The answer was yes—but at that time the moron was considered the exceptional case. Today’s schools must cope with another dimension of moronism, the functional moron whose retardation is educational rather than mental. As a result, the moron with a high school or even a college diploma is not uncommon. Tomorrow he will be in the majority. U. S. Office of Education statistics: Twenty per cent of adult Americans are so sketchily educated that they are unable to cope with such routine activities as shopping or getting a driver’s license. Another thirty-four per cent barely gets by. This adds up to more than half, and the deficiency trend is upward, at an alarming rate. Achievement tests given regularly throughout our school systems continue to show this deterioration at every age level. The future described in C. M. Kornbluth’s The Marching Morons is not yet upon us, but we are advancing toward it at an accelerating pace.

  Are educators to blame for the decline? They have the onerous task of educating our first television generation—the generation of children raised on TV from babyhood—as well as coping with extremely difficult and changing social conditions. High school teachers tell me that their students will not do homework—“When they walk out the door, that’s it!” Discipline among our young people has so deteriorated that too frequently teachers’ lives are in danger in their own classrooms—yesterday’s prognostication of doom; today’s reality. Many students have jobs, feel affluent, and regard the time spent in school as wasted.

  As evidence of how reading and writing skills have deteriorated, one teacher of high school literature told me that stories formerly assigned for reading at home or during study periods now must be read aloud to the students. The story, And Madly Teach was first written in 1957. The resultant of the educational system it describes is already with us; the cause may follow.

  • Our esteemed democratic processes perverted. The entire, reeking, convoluted mess that we now label Watergate is sheer science fiction. A standard science fictional technique consists of taking certain trends and projecting them into the future, in effect saying, “If this goes on, here is what might happen.” For example, if population growth continues at the present rate, this is what life on Earth might be like in the year 2076. Notice the “if” and the “might.” These are
not predictions. By focusing public attention on genuine dangers, we wistfully hope to make our minute contribution toward preventing the catastrophes we describe.

  All of the various trends of Watergate—corruption in campaign management and contributions, abuses of governmental power, the permissible lie in politics, bribery, influence peddling, and so on—all of these things had been increasingly present in our government for years, and it would have been possible, say, in 1970, for a science fiction writer to put them together and project them to describe a fictitious Watergate happening about the year 2020. But in 1970 it would have been extremely difficult to make this fictitious Watergate convincing, and the result probably would have been a rather inept science fiction novel.

  Then chance brought together the right men at the right time, or the wrong men at the wrong time, and what occurred was nothing less than a mutation in morality and ethics at the highest level of our government. The unbelievable science fiction tale of the future suddenly became a terrifying true adventure of the present.

  • In 1975, the state of Michigan added a new dimension to its state lottery: the instant winner. You rub your ticket with a coin and read off your winnings (if any). With the smaller prizes, a winning ticket can be cashed at once, with the merchant who sold it.

  The instant-winner lottery already has spawned a new psychosis: lottery addiction. Recently I watched an elderly couple eagerly buy five tickets. Without leaving the counter they rubbed the numbers into view and found they’d beaten the odds by having two two-dollar prizes. They cashed the tickets and used the money to buy four more

  tickets, which won them another two dollars. They bought two more tickets, both of them non-winners, and sadly went their way—having had five minutes of entertainment that cost them a mere dollar a minute. A recent newspaper story described the experience of a man who went that same route—but with five hundred dollars, not five dollars—and the current jokes about parlaying a two-hundred-dollar paycheck into three hundred worthless lottery tickets merely underscore the close relationship between comedy and tragedy.

  There is hoopla enough with a state lottery, including million-dollar winners, but eventually it dawns on most people that their chances of winning anything substantial are dim indeed. (State lotteries are in fact ripoffs in the form of voluntary taxation—one can get better gambling odds at Vegas.) More hoopla is required to re-stimulate interest—a new kind of prize, or, as with Michigan’s instant winning tickets, a new kind of game. When the National Lottery finally arrives—and don’t think our national legislators will ignore forever the enormous profits to state treasuries produced by the local lotteries—there will be a veritable end all hoopla. People will be gambling for a zillion, or the moon, or a brief reign as God. You read it here first.

  Down through the centuries, few human activities have been more universally condemned than gambling, for sound reasons. Now governments are following the lead of churches not merely in condoning gambling but also in encouraging it—as long as they can turn a profit on it. And if a government promotes gambling for its own profit, what won’t it do for profit?

  I remember a discussion of D. H. Lawrence in a college lit class, when a student said to the professor, “He was such a nice little old man—how could he have such thoughts?”

  Science fiction writers, too, number many eminently respectable-even nice—individuals in their ranks. Where do they get those horrific thoughts that make them prognosticators of doom?

  Arthur C. Clarke once remarked that most other literature isn’t concerned with reality. Look around you. Science fiction authors are realists.

  Ypsilanti, Michigan December 1975

  AND MADLY TEACH

  Miss Mildred Boltz clasped her hands and exclaimed, “What a lovely school!”

  It shimmered delightfully in the bright morning sunlight, a pale, delicate blue-white oasis of color that lay gemlike amidst the nondescript towers and domes and spires of the sprawling metropolitan complex.

  But even as she spoke, she qualified her opinion. The building’s form was boxlike, utilitarian, ugly. Only its color made it beautiful.

  The aircab driver had been muttering to himself because he’d drifted into a wrong lane and missed his turn. He looked at her quickly. “I beg your pardon?”

  “The school,” Miss Boltz said. “It has a lovely color.”

  They threaded their way through an interchange, circled, and maneuvered into the proper lane. Then the driver turned to her again. “I’ve heard of schools. They used to have some out West. But that isn’t a school.”

  Miss Boltz met his serious gaze confusedly and hoped she wasn’t blushing. It wasn’t proper for a woman of her age to blush. She said, “I must have misunderstood you. I thought that was—”

  “Yes, ma’am. That’s the address you gave me.”

  “Then—of course it’s a school! I’m a teacher. I’m going to teach there.”

  He shook his head. “No, ma’am. We don’t have any schools.”

  The descent was so unsettlingly abrupt that Miss Boltz had to swallow her protests and clutch at her safety belt. Then they were in the ground-level parking area, and he had the door open. She stepped out with the dignity demanded of a middle-aged schoolteacher, paid him, and turned toward the building. She would have liked to investigate this queer notion of his about schools, but she didn’t want to be late for her appointment. And anyway—the ideal If it wasn’t a school, what was it?

  In the maze of lettered and double-lettered corridors, each turning she took seemed to be the wrong one. She was breathing heavily and fighting off a mild seizure of panic when she finally reached her destination. A receptionist took her name and said severely, “Mr. Wilbings is expecting you. Go right in.”

  The office door bore a bristling label: Roger A. Wilbings. Deputy Superintendent of Education (Secondary). Northeastern United States School District, Private. Miss Boltz hesitated, and the receptionist said again, “Go right in.”

  “Thank you,” Miss Boltz said. With fumbling fingers, she managed to open the door.

  The gentleman behind the desk at the distant center of the room seemed to have adopted a fiercely blank expression for her. She moved forward timorously, and the expression resolved itself into the hair-framed oval of a bald head. She blinked her eyes, wishing she’d worn her contact lenses. Mr. Wilbings’s attention was fixed upon the papers that littered the top of his desk, and he indicated a chair for her without bothering to look up. She approached the desk tightrope-fashion and seated herself.

  “One moment, please,” he said.

  She ordered herself to relax. She was not a recent college graduate, hoping desperately for a first job. She had a contract and twenty-five years of tenure, and she was merely reporting for reassignment.

  Her nerves disregarded the order.

  Mr. Wilbings gathered up his papers, tapped them together, and returned them to a folder. “Miss—ah—Boltz,” he said. His curiously affected appearance fascinated her. He was wearing spectacles, a contrivance that she hadn’t seen for years; and he had a trim little patch of hair on his upper lip, the like of which she had never seen outside of films and theatricals. He held his head thrust forward and tilted back, and he sighted at her distastefully along the high arc of his nose.

  He nodded suddenly and turned back to his desk. “I’ve gone through your file, Miss—ah—Boltz.” He pushed the folder aside impatiently. “My recommendation is that you retire. My secretary will give you the necessary papers to fill out. Good morning.”

  The suddenness of the attack startled her out of her nervousness. She said calmly, “I appreciate your interest, Mr. Wilbings, but I have no intention of retiring. Now—about my new assignment.”

  “My dear Miss Boltz!” He had decided to be nice to her. His expression altered perceptibly and hovered midway between a smile and a sneer. “It is your own welfare that concerns me. I understand that your retirement might occasion some financial sacrifice, and under th
e circumstances I feel that we could obtain an appropriate adjustment in your pension. It would leave you secure and free to do what you like, and I can assure you that you are not—” He paused and tapped his desk with one finger, “—not suited for teaching. Painful as the idea may be for you, it is the blunt truth, and the sooner you realize that—”

  For one helpless moment she could not control her laughter. He broke off angrily and stared at her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, dabbing at her eyes. “I’ve been a teacher for twenty-five years—a good teacher, as you know if you’ve checked over my efficiency reports. Teaching is my whole life, and I love it, and it’s a little late to be telling me that I’m not suited for it.”

  “Teaching is a young people’s profession, and you are nearly fifty. And then—we must consider your health.”

  “Which is perfectly good,” she said. “Of course I had cancer of the lung. It’s common on Mars. It’s caused by the dust, you know, and it’s easily cured.”

  “You had it four times, according to your records.”

  “I had it four times, and I was cured four times. I returned to Earth only because the doctors felt that I was unusually susceptible to Martian cancer.”

  “Teaching on Mars—” He gestured disdainfully. “You’ve never taught anywhere else, and at the time you were in training your college was specializing in training teachers for Mars. There’s been a revolution in education, Miss Boltz, and it has completely passed you by.” He tapped his desk again, sternly. “You are not suited for teaching. Certainly not in this district.”

  She said stubbornly, “Will you honor my contract, or do I have to resort to legal action?”

  He shrugged and picked up her file. “Written and spoken English. Tenth grade. I assume you think you can handle that.”