World's Best Science Fiction - First Series 1965 Read online

  WORLD’S BEST SCIENCE FICTION: 1965

  Edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr

  GREEN PLACE by Tom Purdom

  MEN OF GOOD WILL by Ben Bova and Myron R. Lewis

  BILL FOR DELIVERY by Christopher Anvil

  FOUR BRANDS OF IMPOSSIBLE by Norman Kagan

  A NICHE IN TIME by William F. Temple

  SEA WRACK by Edward Jesby

  FOR EVERY ACTION by C. C. MacApp

  VAMPIRES LTD. by Josef Nesvadba

  THE LAST LONELY MAN by John Brunner

  THE STAR PARTY by Robert Lory

  THE WEATHER IN THE UNDERWORLD by Colin Free

  OH, TO BE A BLOBEL! by Philip K. Dick

  THE UNREMEMBERED by Edward Mackin

  WHAT HAPPENED TO SERGEANT MASURO? by Harry Mulisch

  NOW IS FOREVER by Thomas M. Disch

  THE COMPETITORS by Jack B. Lawson

  WHEN THE CHANGE-WINDS BLOW by Fritz Leiber

  INTRODUCTION

  BY DONALD A. WOLLHEIM AND TERRY CARR

  This is the first of an annual series of anthologies of the best science fiction short stories and novelettes published during each year. As the title World’s Best Science Fiction indicates, the stories have been chosen not just from the regular s-f magazines published in the United States, but from publications from all corners of the world.

  Our determination to seek out the best s-f from foreign markets stems from an awareness that science fiction is not, after all, an entertainment form indigenous to the United States. The two men who did the most to explore and demonstrate the possibilities of science fiction as a popular and worthwhile field of writing were Jules Verne and H. G. Wells —a Frenchman and an Englishman, respectively. And they were by no means the originators of the form—such earlier s-f writers as Lucian of Samosata, Cyrano de Bergerac, Mary Shelley and Plato never even managed to obtain naturalization papers from this country.

  To be sure, science fiction has enjoyed far more popularity in the United States than anywhere else. By far the greatest amount of s-f published has come from the U.S., and by and large the most advanced thinking in the field has been done by writers living in the fifty states. This is a result of the fact that science fiction caught on as a popular fiction form here in the early part of this century, and since 1926, when Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories, there has always been at least one magazine specializing in the field, and sometimes twenty or more of them at once. The average over the nearly four decades has been about eight or ten magazines—a sufficiently thriving market to allow writers to establish continuity and cross-fertilization of ideas and techniques, with the inevitable evolution in both over the years.

  Other countries have had their own science fiction magazines, of course, but none of them have enjoyed the continuous development possible in the U.S., because there have been long dry spells when s-f magazines were not being published. Even in England, where short-lived s-f magazines like Scoops and Tales of Wonder were attempted as long ago as the 1930’s, it wasn’t until after World War II that the magazine New Worlds began a publication schedule which has continued without drastic interruption to the present, making possible the development of such excellent British writers as Arthur C. Clarke, John Wyndham, Brian Aldiss, John Brunner and many more.

  Other countries have been less fortunate in their science fiction outlets, and have had to rely for the most part on magazines composed wholly or in part of material reprinted from the U.S. magazines—a situation which has inhibited the development of s-f writers in these countries. An Italian writer, for instance, interested in science fiction but having no markets in his country for such stories (as was the case there until comparatively recently) was unable to devote a great deal of his professional time to the field, with the result that he lacked the practice at s-f writing which U.S. writers could afford. In addition there was the fact that, lacking a home-grown tradition of science fiction, the Italian (or Hungarian, or Japanese, or Spanish) writer had to start all over again where we began in 1926, with the result that stories from other countries have often seemed rather old-fashioned to U.S. readers.

  In the Soviet Union, science fiction was encouraged from the 1920’s, but only as a form of juvenile fiction intended to be inspirational and educational in nature. As an influence in adult reading it is only recently that fantasy projections have been slowly and sparsely appearing in the Russian literary world. Because of this, what has appeared has lagged far behind us in sophistication and techniques. Interestingly enough, Poland, Czechoslovakia and (not surprisingly) East Germany have turned up s-f novelists of even more promising talent than those of their Soviet mentors.

  Nonetheless, the Russians are now in the adult s-f field, as are a constantly increasing number of countries throughout the world, and each nation is contributing its own viewpoint to the genre. It’s a healthy state of affairs, and likely to improve more and more as practiced science fiction writers develop in these countries—as they did so gratifyingly in England after World War II. And the more voices which can be heard in the field, the more fresh viewpoints we can get (whether we agree with them or not), then the more informed and enlightened we are likely to be about the human, and nonhuman, condition . . . now, and tomorrow.

  Already the foreign writers are making interesting contributions to the field, and of the seventeen stories we’ve chosen as the best of 1964, almost a third of them first appeared outside this country. Quite unsurprisingly, two of the stories are from the English magazine New Worlds, which (with its companion magazine Science Fantasy) is well known as a prime source of imaginative and accomplished science fiction. Messrs. Brunner and Mackin—the former a writer with a well-established reputation both in England and the United States, the latter having published only in England so far— both deal with a theme which has shown up frequently in English “mainstream” fiction of the past decade, from John Osborne to Colin Wilson to Keith Waterhouse: the alienation of the individual from society, from friends, and from himself. Brunner and Mackin consider the theme in science fiction terms, but their treatment is no less human and emotional for that.

  Dr. Josef Nesvadba, a Czechoslovakian, is 38 years old and a psychiatrist by profession. He is one of the major names in science fiction in Eastern Europe, and the story reprinted here was the title story of his first collection, published in Czechoslovakia by Artia Pocket Books. Vampires Ltd. is a disturbing story—not because it’s about black horrors flapping across the moon, which it isn’t, but because it’s about a much more real evil and therefore a more terrible one.

  Harry Mulisch, whose What Happened to Sergeant Masuro? is both intriguing and unsettling, is 35 years old and has already published eight books ranging from novels and short stories to plays and autobiographical essays. He has been described by the Netherlands Book News as “a Colin Wilson of Dutch literature, steeped in religion (conventional and occult), history (and ‘anti-history’), and the philosophy of science (or reverse the nouns), with a vast Freudian computer-mind of memories and fantasies ...” A significant portion of his fiction lies within the field of fantasy and science fiction, a form to which he brings a vigorous individuality.

  Colin Free is among the best-known writers in Australia. Born in 1925, he has worked in the field of advertising but now writes full-time, primarily for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, which has presented over a hundred of his plays and documentaries. He lives near the Blue Mountains, inland from Sydney, with an art teacher who
is his wife and a four-year-old girl who is his daughter. Most of his stories are concerned with the freedom of the individual in society —as is his story here, The Weather in The Underworld.

  Of the writers reprinted here from U.S. magazines, most readers will already be familiar with Fritz Leiber, who brings his distinctive poetic magic to a science fiction theme in When The Change-Winds Blow; with Philip K. Dick, whose imagination and sense of humor are as unpredictable as ever in Oh, To Be A Blobel!; with William F. Temple, who pulls a tour de force out of a time machine in A Niche In Time; and with the irrepressible humor of Christopher Anvil, as displayed in Bill For Delivery. Writers like Tom Purdom, C. C. MacApp and Ben Bova are comparatively new but have already gained followings through frequent appearances in the s-f magazines (Bova with a long string of speculative science articles as well as his fiction writing).

  But in addition to the work of established writers, it’s always a pleasure to present good work by newcomers. The science fiction magazine field in 1964 was an expanding one, with new magazines in the field and older magazines moving to more frequent publishing schedules. If the expansion is to be a healthy one, we must have good new writers to help fill the space, so it was gratifying to see so many new bylines on excellent stories. Some of these writers, like Thomas M. Disch and Norman Kagan, have already made second, third and even tenth sales and are on their way to becoming top names in the field. We’re sure the other new writers represented here also have more to tell us of the future, the real and the unreal, the comic and the cosmic, and the sheer adventure of being human today and tomorrow.

  A final word: We’ve researched the world’s s-f publications to the best of our ability, but we realize it’s probable that many stories published in obscure places and obscure magazines will elude our attention. We will welcome suggestions from readers who may encounter such tales for consideration for inclusion in the next compilation of the World’s Best Science Fiction.

  —The Editors

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  * * * *

  GREENPLACE

  BY TOM PURDOM

  On the outskirts of Greenplace, Nicholson seated himself in the wheel chair and took the drug injector out of his shirt pocket. Rolling up his sleeve, he uncovered the lower half of his biceps. For a moment the injector trembled above his flesh.

  He put the injector down. Twisting around in the chair, he looked up at the sec standing behind him.

  “Will you help me if I get into a fight?”

  “I don’t get paid to fight,” the sec said.

  “I thought you might do it for pleasure.”

  “I work for money.”

  Fear was a tingling nausea in his chest and stomach. A yes answer from a big, hulking man like the sec would have made him feel a lot better. From the look of him, he had thought the sec might enjoy a fight. The big man’s face seemed to be set in a scowl of permanent disgust with a world which made such trivial use of muscles. Ever since the invention of the voicetyper, which had made the old trade of stenographer-typist obsolete, sees had been the lowest class of unskilled labor, status symbols hired on a temporary basis merely to carry their employer’s files and dictating equipment. He turned around in the chair. Across the street the late afternoon sun fell on the lawns and houses of Greenplace. Children were yelling and he could smell the grass. What was pain like? He couldn’t remember. He had been forced to endure it only once in his life, twenty-four years ago when he had been twelve and the doctors had given his left eye a new set of muscles. Could he take it? Would he beg them for mercy?

  “Don’t think they don’t know you made that last survey,” Bob Dazella had told him. “Never underestimate the Boyd organization. Every time a lawn gets moved in that district, it goes in their computer. You’d better go armed. Believe me, you go into Greenplace unarmed and you may come out a cripple.”

  Glued to the middle finger of his left hand was a scrambler, a finger length tube which fired a tight beam of light and sound in a pattern designed to disrupt the human nervous system. In his lower left shirt pocket he had a pair of bombs loaded with psycho-active gas and in the bottom of the wheel chair he had installed a scent generator and a sound generator. He didn’t know what the two generators could do for him if he got into trouble, but they had been the only other portable weapons he could think of. He didn’t think anything could help him very much. MST—melasynchrotrinad —had one bad side effect. It disrupted coordination. Once the drug hit his nervous system he would be a helpless lump of flesh for the next four hours.

  Again the injector trembled above his biceps. He shook his head disgustedly. He pressed the release and two cc’s of red liquid shot into his arm. Behind him the sec stiffened. He put the injector back in his pocket.

  It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon in late summer. He was sitting in the shade of a tall apartment tower, the last one for several miles. In front of him Greenplace looked comfortable and pleasant. Lawn mowers hummed across the grass while their owners watched them with sleepy eyes. On every lawn there was at least one person sprawling in the sun. Greenplace had been built in the early 1970’s and it was typical of its period. Every block had fewer than fifteen houses and every house had a lawn and a back yard.

  He sat tensely in the chair. He could feel the chemistry of his fear mingling with the disturbing chemistry of the drug. He felt like a pygmy with a wooden harpoon waiting to go out and do battle with one of the giant creatures that swam in the oceans of Jupiter. Congressman Martin Boyd was probably the most powerful man in the United States. He had been the undisputed boss of the Eighth Congressional District since 1952. Now that medical science had conquered death, or had at least given most people an indefinite life span, his organization might very well control the district forever. In addition to his forty-eight years seniority, Boyd had accumulated wealth, a first-rate psych staff, and control of the House Rules Committee and the Sub-Committee on Culture and Recreation. Modern psych techniques were so powerful, politicians and social scientists unanimously considered Boyd unbeatable.

  His head rolled to one side. He scanned the clouds and the blue sky and he estimated the wind velocity and what kind of weather they were having in Nigeria, where his wife was on a weekend shopping trip. His hand suddenly appeared between his eyes and the clouds. He tried to return it to the arm of the chair and instead slapped the bare skin below his shorts hard enough to sting.

  He tried to lower his head and look at Greenplace. He found himself looking at the apartment tower on his right. He noted the number of floors and the number of windows per floor and developed a highly original theory about the effects of high rise apartment living, combined with current toilet training procedures, on the Oedipus complex of classic Freudian psychology. Before he could take his eyes off the tower, his drug accelerated brain composed a witty paragraph about the theory for his popular column in Current Psychology.

  “Let’s . . . g . . . g . . . ooo . . .” His tongue and lips felt normal but his ears told him his coordination was already degenerating.

  The sec pushed him forward. His head was swaying from side to side. He tried holding it steady and failed. The landscape swung across his vision.

  MST was the most powerful psychic energizer on the market. It multiplied the powers of observation and the rate and quality of thought by a factor somewhere between three and seven. The user observed data he would never have observed in his normal condition, and his mind invented and discarded hypotheses at a dizzying rate. The drug was only eight years old but it had already been responsible for several breakthroughs in the sciences. Thanks to four brilliant insights by drugged experimenters, his own field of psycho-therapy had leapfrogged several decades. The black arts of social manipulation had also advanced.

  He heard the wheels of the chair rumble on the street and he calculated how much heat they were generating and formulated two contradictory hypotheses about what the motion of all the wheeled vehicles on Earth was doing to the annual temperature an
d rainfall of the northeastern United States. Smoothly, without breaking his stride, the sec rolled him off the street onto the sidewalk.

  On the first lawn two boys mounted on electric rhinos were engaging in a duel with stunner swords. A heavy man in dirty shorts and an unbuttoned shirt looked away from the combat and glanced at the wheel chair and its occupant. His eyes narrowed. His face hardened and he stuck a cigar butt in his mouth, and then Nicholson’s head rolled again and he saw the people watching him from the other side of the street Several people had actually gotten out of their lounging chairs and stood up. All the way down the block, every eye over twelve years old was looking at him.

  He had seen the same kind of hostile looks last month when he had surveyed a neighborhood near here on a weekday morning. Fear of strangers and mind probers seemed to be part of the conditioning the Boyd organization imposed on the district. A big organization didn’t have to psych the voters by riding around openly drugged. Boyd’s psychers could use more subtle methods: surveyors disguised as salesmen and maintenance men; community carnivals at which the booths and amusements were concealed psych tests; even, when necessary, arresting people and releasing them with many apologies and no memory they had been psyched during their detention.

  Nicholson’s organization consisted of five men and at present he was the only trained psych man in the group. An MST survey was the only way a small organization could learn enough about the voters to fight a strong campaign.