Harlan Ellison - Approaching Oblivion

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APPROACHING OBLIVION
Road Signs
On the
Treadmill
Toward Tomorrow
Eleven Uncollected Stories by HARLAN ELLISON
Foreward by Michael Crichton
Copyright © by Harlan Ellison
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I didn’t do it alone. Others helped. Some in tiny ways they won’t even remember. Others with
encouragement, assistance, research and love. They will remember. Robert Silverberg, Jack Dann, Vicky
Schochet, Stephanie Bernstein, Steve Herbst, Andrea Hart, Ben Bova, Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm, Joe
Haldeman, Ed Bryant, Jim Sutherland, Sam Walker, Helen D’Allesandro Hecht, Leo & Diane Dillon, Lynn
Lehrhaupt, Art Frankel, Jim Wnoroski, Ed Ferman, Toby Roxburgh, Tim Seldes and Mike Seidman. And
Leslie Kay Swigart, because I forgot to acknowledge her help with Again, Dangerous Visions. And, of
course, as always, Bob Mills, and Marty Shapiro, who are due for sainthood momentarily. Gypsy da Silva
copy edited this book in its manuscript stage with grace and insight and an attention to the primacy of the
writer’s creation that is rare as black diamonds in the publishing industry; and I love her shamelessly for it.
Special thanks are due Lynda Mitchell, but that’s none of your business.
To the memory of
WALTER FULTZ,
the first editor to buy a book
from me; a good man, a fine editor,
a friend…
Who approached oblivion,
passed through it, and is gone,
for what reasons I do not know…
Though I saw him seldom,
I miss him greatly…
With luck, he’s found peace
at last.
CONTENTS
APPROACHING ELLISON
REAPING THE WHIRL WIND
1 KNOX
2 COLD FRIEND
3 KISS OF FIRE
4 PAULIE CHARMED THE SLEEPING WOMAN
5 I'M LOOKING FOR KADAK
ELLISON'S GRAMMATICAL GUIDE AND GLOSSARY FOR THE GOYIM
6 SILENT IN GEHENNA
7 EROTOPHOBIA
8 ONE LIFE, FURNISHED IN EARLY POVERTY
9 ECOWARENESS
10 CATMAN
11 HINDSIGHT: 480 SECONDS
Foreword by MICHAEL CRICHTON
APPROACHING
ELLISON
Soon after I came to Los Angeles in 1970, I was called by a producer who offered me a job writing a
science fiction screenplay. I was tied up with a book at the time; the producer asked me if I could suggest
another writer for the project. I suggested Harlan Ellison.
There was a long, chilly silence at the other end of the phone. Finally the producer cleared his
throat and said, “Do you, ah, know Harlan Ellison?”
No, I said, I didn't. I knew him only through his work. I had read some of his stories, and seen
some of his television scripts.
“Umm,” the producer said. “Well, let me tell you something-” and he launched into a short,
energetic, and wholly unprintable description of his feelings on the subject of Harlan Ellison. The outburst
ended as abruptly as it began, and he got off the phone leaving me completely mystified. I could only
assume that Ellison and this producer had had some acrimonious dealings in the past. But that is hardly a
rare event in Hollywood, and I thought no more about it.
As time went on, I ran into many people who had had acrimonious dealings with Harlan Ellison.
There was an odd sameness about the way all these people talked. “He's very inventive, very enthusiastic,
very talented,” they would begin, “but-” and then they'd launch into a long and heated harangue, cataloging
what they regarded as the innumerable abuses they had suffered at his hands. I was told that Ellison was a
perfectionist; that he cared too much about his work; that he fought for his ideas; that he was demanding
and quick to pull his name from any project which did not go as he intended-always substituting the
sarcastic pseudonym, “Cordwainer Bird.”
None of this elicited much sympathy from me. I saw nothing wrong with caring about your work
and fighting for your ideas. I had been doing the same thing, and for my trouble I had been fired by
Universal and then sued by that company. So I was in the position of admiring Ellison more with every
new complaint I heard about him.
The people who spoke so bitterly about Harlan Ellison all mentioned something else, too. At the
end of their diatribes, they would pause to catch their breath and then conclude with. “ And besides, did
you see what Gay Talese said about him?.
Gay Talese had written an Esquire piece called “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” which reported an
encounter between Ellison and the singer. Ellison comes off as disrespectful, witty, and refusing to be
bullied. It is hardly the portrait of a blackguard and cur. which his critics felt it to be.
In the end, I suppose what impressed me most about these Ellison stories was the strength of
feeling with which they were told. The facts-so far as they could be determined-were never very
remarkable, but the emotional content was always fierce and highly charged. Somehow. Ellison had really
gotten to them, and they would never forget it.
Some time later, this same Harlan Ellison began to attack me in print. His argument was that I
wasn’t writing good science fiction. which was fine by me-I didn't think I was writing science fiction at all-
but it was irritating to be placed in an unwanted category and then told I didn’t fit it well. I was back at
Universal by then, and one day I was complaining about his attacks on me when a secretary looked up and
said, “Do you, ah, know Harlan Ellison?”
No, I said, I didn't.
“Well,” she said, “I used to be his secretary and I know him very well. Would you like to meet
him?”
Harlan Ellison lives in the Los Angeles foothills, in a perfectly ordinary-appearing house, in a
quiet suburban neighborhood. The inside of the house is as remarkable as the exterior is mundane; Ellison
himself seems to take a certain pleasure in the unobtrusive outward appearance he presents to the
community.
Inside, the feeling is sensual, almost sybaritic, with a quality of tension that comes from a barely
controlled chaos. There are books everywhere, thousands of books, lining walls, tucked above doorways,
filling closets, threatening to spill out and consume the living space. There are bizarre juxtapositions at
every turn: signed Wunderlich prints, Soleri notebooks, sculpture from Mozambique, psychedelic book art
set side by side in confusing profusion. It takes enormous energy to hold all this together, and Ellison
himself appears to have boundless energy. He moves restlessly, talks non-stop, jumping from books to
television to politics to sex to movies, taking up each new subject with considerable humor and aggressive
enthusiasm.
He is not an easy man. His opinions are strongly held and his feelings strongly felt; he is not
tolerant of compromise where it affects his life and his work. In someone else, this obstinacy might appear
petty or fanatical, but in Harlan it is natural and attractive. It is simply the way he is.
Most strikingly, he is a genuine original, one-of-a-kind, difficult to categorize and unwilling to
make it any easier. He demands to be taken on his own terms, and that aspect of his personality and his
work is, I suspect, what has engaged both his critics and his large and passionately loyal following. He
seems to be a kind of energy focus and no one who brushes against him comes away with an indifferent
response. His advocates are every bit as vehement as his critics. Other writers have readers; Ellison has fans
who will get into fistfights with anyone who says a word against him.
He doesn't write like anybody else. The same paradoxes and odd juxtapositions which appear in
his house and in his casual speech, are present in all of his writing. What emerges is a surprising, eclectic,
almost protean series of visions, often disturbing, always strongly felt.
In the end, these strong feelings drive Hollywood producers crazy but make extraordinary stories.
After a long hiatus, there are eleven here, in top Ellison form-uncompromising, individual, and exactly as
he wants them to be.
Hollywood
29 January 74
Introduction by HARLAN ELLISON
REAPING
THE
WHIRL WIND
If it hadn't been for my getting beaten up daily on the playground of Lathrop Grade School in
Painesville, Ohio-this book would not be what it is. It might be a book with my stories in it, but it wouldn't
be this book, and it wouldn't be as painful a book for me as it is.
You've noticed, of course. Everyone finally realizes it as an inescapable truth. Nothing we do as
adults is wholly based on our adult reactions; it's always-to greater or lesser degree depending on how deep
go our roots to the past-an echo of our childhoods. Your politics are either mirror images of your parents'
politics when you were a kid, or they're rebellions against those politics. Somewhere in the physical
makeup of the love-partners who turn you on are vague shadows of the high school cheerleader or
basketball center who made your little heart go pitty-pat when you were dashing past puberty. If you were
accepted and admired by your teenage peer group, you don't have the same gut-wrenching fears about
going to parties where you don't know anyone as someone who was an outsider. If you had religion
pounded into your head when you were young, chances are pretty good even if you've renounced formal
church ties, you still carry the guilts and fears around in your gut. Or maybe you've come full-circle and
have become a Jesus Person, if you've been disillusioned enough by the world.
No one escapes.
Our childhoods are sowing the wind, our adulthoods are reaping the whirlwind.
As true of me as you. No better, no nobler, no stronger, no freer of the past. Just like you.
In Painesville, I was a card-carrying outcast. “Come on, Harlan!” the kids would yell across
Harmon Drive. “Come on, let's play at Leon's!” And like a sap, I'd clamber up from between the huge roots
of the maple tree in our front yard, drop my copy of Lorna Doone or Lord Jim (or whatever other alternate
universe I'd fled to because I hated the one I was in) and run after the gang of kids streaking for Leon
Miller's house. I was a little kid, smaller than any other kid my age, and I couldn't run nearly as fast. That
was always part of their equation, of course. And just as I'd reach the front steps, they'd all dash inside
Leon's house, slam and latch the screen door, bang shut the front door with its big glass panes and crowd
behind the front window, sticking their tongues out at me and laughing. How I longed to enter that cool and
dim front room where they would soon be playing Chinese Checkers and Pick-Up-Sticks.
Instead, their rejection always drove me to fury.I would slam my hands against the wooden frames
of the screen windows and kick the glider on the front porch, always being careful not to tear the screens or
damage the glider for fear of the wrath of Leon's grandmother. Then, when they tired of baiting me, and
retreated into the dimness beyond to play, I would return to my book, where I could be brave and loved and
capable of dueling Athos, Porthos and Aramis all in one afternoon.
On the schoolyard at Lathrop, I fared considerably worse than D' Artagnan. There I was the
accepted punching bag of bullies-in-training, whose names appear every now and then in my stories as
characters who come to ugly ends.
I won't go into the reasons; they're all thirty years out-of-date and relevance. Suffice it that a gang
of them would pound me into the dirt. And with a pre-Cool Hand Luke persistence, I would pull myself up
and jump one of them, bury my teeth in his wrist and wrestle him to the ground. The others would kick me
till I let loose. Up again, more slowly a second time, with a wild roundhouse at a thick, stupid face.
Sometimes I'd connect and savor the eloquent vocabulary of a bloody nose. But they'd converge and plant
me again. And it would go that way till I was unconscious or until Miss O'Hara from the third grade would
dash out to scatter them.
But it wasn't the beatings that most dismayed me. It was having to go home after school with my
clothes ripped and bloodied beyond repair. You see, I was grade school age only a few years after the
Depression, and my family was anything but wealthy. We weren't destitute, far from it; but things were as
tight for us as for most families in the Midwest at that time, and my parents could not afford new clothes all
the time.
When I walked home from school, I would take the longest way around, often going to sit in the
woods on the corner of Mentor Avenue and Lincoln Drive till it grew dark. I was ashamed and filled with
guilt. And when, at last, I could stay away no longer, I'd go home and my Mother-who was a kind woman
suffering with a troublesome child-would see me, she would cry and clean me up with mercurochrome and
Band-Aids, and she would say (not every time, but even once was enough to make an indelible
impression), “What did you say to get them mad?”
How could I tell her it was not only that I was a smart aleck? How could I tell her it was because I
was a Jew and they had been taught Jews were something loathsome? How could I tell her it was easier for
me to carry a broken nose and bruises than for me to act cowardly and deny that I was a Jew? The few
times she had heard their anti-Semitic remarks, she had gone to school, and that had only made it worse. So
I let her think I had started it. And swallowed the guilt. And built a reaction to bearing the blame that grew
as I grew.
Now, as an adult, my reaction to being blamed for something I did not do is almost pathological.
Now, as an adult, I don't give a damn if I do tear the screens or damage the glider. I can think of
nothing more horrible than what is done to Joseph K. in Kafka's The Trial.
Which brings me to why this book exists, and why it is the book it is. Preceding was preamble.
In 1971 the publishers of this book, Walker & Company, published my collection of
collaborations with other sf writers, Partners in Wonder. It was a lovely book but because of the ineptitude
of Walker's then-art director, it was a book hideously overpriced. It seemed certain Walker & Company
would lose a potload.
On the day the first copies came back from the bindery, I happened to be on a business trip to New
York. My editor at Walker at that time was Helen D' Alessandro, a charming and talented woman who had
tried to watchdog the Partners in Wonder project, who had been hamstrung by excesses and inefficiencies
during the production stages. Helen called me first in Los Angeles, to advise me the books were in, and
finding out I was in New York, tracked me down and invited me to come in to the Walker offices. She
knew all too well the horrors that had served as midwives to the birth of that book: galleys set by computer
so badly that I had had to spend nine full days correcting them...insane typography that had jumped the cost
of the book from a reasonable $5.95 to an impossible $8.95...layout so berserk that it killed a certain reprint
sale to the SF Book Club. She wanted me to see the book first.
I arrived at the offices of Walker & Company and Helen came out to the reception area to take me
back to her office. When she came into the reception foyer, I was standing with a copy of Partners in
Wonder in my hands. The woman on the switchboard had removed a copy from the carton when it had
been delivered and had put it out on one of the display shelves as a gesture of kindness to an author she
knew was soon to arrive. Helen's smile faded as she saw me standing there forlornly, leafing through a
book twice the size and twice the price it might have been.
I looked up and saw her. She tried to smile again, but it wouldn't come. “Oh,” was all she said.
In silence, we walked back to her office.
At that time, Helen shared editorial space with Lois Cole.
Lois Cole is one of the finest editors, one of the kindest persons, one of the most intelligent and
charming people I have ever known. She was Margaret Mitchell's editor on Gone With the Wind and it was
she, in part, who convinced Margaret Mitchell to change the title of that book from Mules in Horses'
Harness to Gone With the Wind. She is a woman of uncommon perception and empathy.
She smiled up at me as I entered the tiny office, cleared a stack of manuscripts from a chair, and
said, “I'm sorry, Harlan.”
It was not the happiest day of my life.
We commiserated for a while, and I hung around the office doing some publicity work for the
book with Henry Durkin. As five o'clock approached, I walked through the crowded passageway of the
editorial offices to gather my coat and attaché case, when I heard someone call my name. I looked up and
saw Sam Walker.
The president of Walker & Company is Samuel S. Walker, Jr. He is a tall, elegant man with fine
manners, soft voice and too much gentlemanliness to ever permit him to become the sort of rapacious
publisher who winds up with a corporate octopus like, for instance, Doubleday. We had never exchanged
many words.
He motioned me to join him in his office, and when I'd entered, he closed the door and turned to
me. His expression was sober and concerned. “I want you to know,” he said, very gently, “that I know you
aren't responsible for what has happened on this book. It's too common a practice in this business to blame
a writer for what's gone wrong on the production end of a project. I want you to know that I'm aware we'll
lose money on this book, but the fault does not lie with you. And I'd consider it a privilege to publish you
again, if you'll trust us a second time.”
He did not say: What did you do to get them mad?
He did not ask me why my clothes were ripped and my nose bloody and one shoe gone. He said he
knew I was innocent of all wrongdoing.
It was a ten year old child getting an apology from an adult; the state bringing in “no true bill” and
dismissing all charges; the hospital calling to say they'd mixed up the biopsy reports and someone else was
dying of cancer; a page one retraction. It was one of the kindest, most sensitive things anyone had ever
done for me, and it had occurred in an industry not overly burdened with thoughtfulness and kindness.
Sam Walker could not possibly have known what his words meant to me, nor with what echoes of
my childhood they reverberated.
But because of those three minutes of concern, I wrote this book, and Sam Walker has published
it. So if it pleasures you... the thanks go as much to Sam as to me.
Originally, this was to have been a collection of already-published stories from several out-of-print
books I'd written years ago. Larded in with the reprints were to have been three or four new stories. But as
time progressed, I grew more and more disquieted with the idea of such a collection. In 1971, Macmillan
published Alone Against Tomorrow, a collection of my stories that spanned the years from 1956 to 1969;
though the pivot of all the stories in that collection was the theme of alienation, the book was also intended
as a small, narrow retrospective of my work.
But a peculiar thing happened. It was one of the rare occasions on which I did not overblow my
reputation, one of the few times my ego did not swell out of proportion to my worth. I had not gauged the
popularity my stories had achieved in the three years preceding the publication of Alone Against
Tomorrow, and was alternately delighted and dismayed by the letters I received praising the book but
denouncing me for gathering together under a fresh title a group of much-reprinted stories.
It decided me without doubt that never again could I permit a supposed “new” collection to
contain stories available in my other collections.
Approaching Oblivion was originally intended to gather together stories from out-of-print
collections like A Touch of Infinity, Ellison Wonderland and Gentleman Junkie, with one or two stories
available only in anthologies done by other editors.
The contracts were signed in November of 1970 and the book-which should have been no trouble
to assemble-was supposed to be in Helen D' Alessandro's hands no later than six months thereafter. But the
letters were starting to come in on Alone Against Tomorrow, and I began to procrastinate. Months, then
years, went by, with polite notes of inquiry from Walker & Company. First, from Helen and then, when she
departed the playing fields of literature to marry the brilliant poet, teacher and writer Anthony Hecht, from
Lois, from the ineffable and indefatigable Hans Stefan Santesson, from Tim Seldes, from Henry Durkin,
from Dedna Bryfonski who was my editor after Lois became swamped with other projects, and finally
(though I may have missed a baton-passer or two in the whirl of personnel at Walker), from Ms. Evy Herr,
my current shoulderer of anguish.
It is now four years after the original contracting for Approaching Oblivion. And the book is
finished. It contains no stories ever included in my collections...though some of them have appeared in
anthologies elsewhere. But that doesn't count. This book has my name on it. It is the product of my labors
since 1970, with few exceptions. (If you're curious as to when a particular story was written, I've included
the date of original emergence and the location[sJ in which I wrote it, at the end of each piece.) So if I get
letters complaining that these new stories are familiar, it's got to be from righteous Ellison buffs who buy
every obscure magazine published, because these stories come from sources as diversified as Penthouse
magazine, Crawdaddy, Galaxy and the August 1962 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
One of the stories has never been published, though it's supposed to be included in a massive art/text
history of the Sixties as interpreted through comics, to be edited by The National Lampoon's Michel
Choquette. (If Michel ever gets the book finished, don't miss the splendiferous drawings done by Leo &
Diane Dillon -who did the cover of the book you now hold-to accompany the text. I'm talking about
“Ecowareness,” incidentally.)
I'm glad I waited and let the contents of the book change. For several reasons. First, because most
of the collections from which I'd have cannibalized stories are now coming back into print. Several
paperback houses will be releasing almost all of my older titles in the next few years, thus hopefully ending
the plaintive cries I hear at college lecture appearances, from my readers (each one with impeccable taste)
who wail they cannot find my books on the newsstands.
Second, because now Sam and Evy (and Lois and Helen and all the other good people who were
so incredibly patient) have a new book, instead of a Frankenstein creation cobbled-up from spare parts and
dusty remnants.
And third, because the Harlan Ellison who signed those contracts in 1970 is not the same Harlan
Ellison who writes these words today, in September of 1974.
Which brings me full circle to the schoolyard of Lathrop, and reaping the whirlwind.
In 1970, when I conceived the theme of this book-cautionary tales that would warn “this is what
may happen if we keep going the way we're going”-I had just emerged from a decade of civil unrest and
revolution. I was far from alone in passing through that terrible time. My friends, my country, my world
had also gone through it. I believed in certain things, and I had gut-hatreds I thought would never cool. I
had been in riots against the Viet Nam war that had netted me time in jail and broken bones; I had been on
civil rights marches and demonstrations that showed me the depths of inhumanity and craziness to which
normal human beings could sink; I had lost many friends to dope and death; I had gone through an
intellectual inferno that burned me out so I could not write for nearly a year and a half...and I was tired.
In Alone Against Tomorrow, I had included as a dedication for a book of stories about alienation,
these words:
This book is dedicated to
the memory of
EVELYN DEL REY,
a dear friend, for laughter
and for caring...
And to the memories of:
ALLISON KRAUSE
JEFFREY GLEN MILLER
WILLIAM K. SCHROEDER
SANDRA LEE SHEUER
four Kent State University
students senselessly murdered
in their society's final act of
alienation.
The list is incomplete.
There are many others.
There will be more.
And among the letters I received on that book, was this one, reproduced exactly as I received it:
[June 10, 1971; 1554 Columbia Drive; Decatur, Georgia 30032. Dear Mr. Ellison, In your dedication of Alone Against Tomorrow,
you mention the “four Kent State University students senselessly murdered…”. Please be informed that these hooligans were
Communist-led radical revolutionaries and anarchists, and deserved to be shot, whether by a firing squad or by the National Guard.
Your remarks ruined an otherwise good book. Nevertheless, I am happy for the opportunity to correct your thinking. Sincerely yours,
James R. Chambers.]
I receive a lot of mail these days. Time prevents my answering very much of it-if I did, I'd have no time for
writing the stories that prompt the mail in the first place. Some of the mail is pure, hardcore nutso. I
roundfile it and forget it. More of it is reasoned, entertaining, supportive or chiding in a rational tone, and I
read it and consider what's been said and usually reply with a form letter I've had to devise simply as a
matter of survival.
Occasionally I get a letter that gives me pause. Mr. Chambers's letter was one of those. If I didn't
know purely on instinct that he was running off jingo phrases that he'd swallowed whole, if I didn't know
he was wrong purely on gut instinct or by my association with student movements for ten and more years,
the reopening of the Kent State Massacre case by the Attorney General would convince me. So it's too easy
merely to disregard a letter like that, and say, “What an asshole.” But consider the letter. It isn't illiterate, it
isn't rancorous, it isn't redneck or written on toilet paper. It is a simple, polite, straightforward attempt to
straighten out what the correspondent takes to be incorrect thinking on my part. One cannot dismiss this
kind of letter. It is from an ordinary human being, speaking about extraordinary events, and genuinely
believing what he writes. Chambers really does believe those poor, innocent kids were Communist tools
who deserved to die.
Now that scares the piss out of me.
That is approaching oblivion. It is reaping the whirlwind of half a decade of Nixon/ Agnew
brainwashing and paranoia. It is a perfectly apocryphal example of the reconditeness to which The
Common Man in our time clings with suicidal ferocity. I won't go into my little dance about the
loathsomeness of The Common Man, nor even flay again the body of stupidity to which “commonness”
speaks. I'll merely point out that the Ellison who believed in the revolutionary Movement of the young and
the frustrated and the angry in the Sixties, is not the Ellison of the Seventies who has seen students sink
back into a charming Fifties apathy (with a simultaneous totemization of the banalities and mannerisms of
those McCarthy Witch-Hunt Fifties), who has listened long and hard to the Chambers letter and hears in it a
tone wholly in tune with the voice of the turtle heard in the land, who-when the defenses are down in the
tiny hours after The Late Late Show--laments for all the martyrs who packed it in, in the name of “change,”
only to turn around a mere five years later and see the status returned to quo.
No, it is an Ellison closer to that scabby kid in Lathrop's dust who confronts you now. When I
signed the contract for this book, I was prepared to ring out clarion calls about keeping the heat on The
Establishment, making a better condition of life for everyone. But it's four years later and Vacca's The
Coming Dark Age has been published which, if you haven't read it, you should go out at once and get it,
and it plays the final notes of the death rigadoon for Society As We Know It...so why should I bother.
We are clearly on a slide-trough to destruction.
Watergate, the energy crisis, apartheid, holy wars, venality, vigilantism, apathy, corruption,
fanaticism, racism, the deification of stupidity...none of these would be so terrifyingly prophetic of our rush
to the grave were it not for the capabilities we possess to do ourselves in so efficiently and swiftly. The
great lizards owned the planet for something like 130,000,000 years, but they didn't have slant-well drilling,
pesticides, pollution, fast breeders, defoliants, demagogues, thermonuclear warheads, nonbiodegradable
plastics, The Pentagon, The Kremlin, The General Staff of the Peoples' Army, Ronald Reagan, Richard
Nixon and the FBI.
Poor lizards. What joys they missed. Had they not been so culturally deprived, they might have
sunk into the swamps in a mere three thousand years.
If it sounds as though I still care, disabuse yourself of the idea. I've done too many college
lectures. I've seen too many classrooms filled with the no-neck children of parents whose motivation in life
was, “My kid's gonna have the education I dint have.” I've seen too many of those kids nodding off
between Chaucer and Suckling, and I have grown disenchanted. You've let it ride too long, troops. You've
frittered and fiddled and enshrined the hypocrites and slaughtered the dreamers, and now you can only get
five gallons in your gas tank.
And if I've learned a lesson from that terrible time of fire and blood, it is that most reformers in the
pure sense are clowns, shouting into the wind, blaming their own guilts and making no ripple whatever. For
every Gandhi or Nader or Bertrand Russell or Thoreau, there are a hundred thousand Nixons to stifle
freedom of expression, joy of living and preservation of the past. (My self-disillusionment in this area
shows itself in the story “Silent in Gehenna,” included in this collection.)
As for the future, well, I'm brought in mind of a quote by Albert Camus:
“Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.”
And the present is being ripped-off and screwed-over by the omnipresent philosophy of I'm all
right, Jack, which is a working-class Englishman's term for screw you, baby, I've got mine. It's your future,
and you don't seem to give a royal damn what happens to it.
So the Ellison who writes this is a little more calloused and tougher than the one who went to
Selma with King in March of 1965, less hopeful and prone to sweeping gardyloos. The Ellison sitting here
now is an older version of the kid from Painesville who stopped trying to buck the tide of bigotry and
stupidity and merely cut out to find the rest of the world.
Had I done this book in 1970, as originally planned, you'd find in this space a clarion call to
revolution, a resounding challenge to the future. But it's four years later, Nixon time, and I've seen you
sitting on your asses mumbling about impeachment. I've gone through ten years waiting for you to
recognize how evil the war in the Nam was. I've watched you loaf and lumber through college and business
and middle-class complacency, pursuing the twin goals of “happiness” and “security.”
What fools you are. Happy, secure corpses you 'll be.
You're approaching oblivion, and you know it, and you won't do a thing to save yourselves.
As for me and you in this literary liaison, well, I've paid my dues. Now I'm going to merely sit
here on the side and laugh my ass off at how you sink into the quagmire like the triceratops. I'm going to
laugh and jeer and wiggle my ears at your death throes. And how will I do that? By writing my stories.
That's how I get my fix. You can OD on religion or dope or war or toadburgers, for all I care. I'm over here,
watching you, and giggling, and saying, “This is what tomorrow looks like, dummy.”
And if you hear me sobbing once in a while, it's only because you've killed me, too, you fuckers.
I’m stuck on this spinning place with you, and I don’t want to go, and you've killed me, and I
resent it, and the best I can do is tell my little tomorrow stories and keep laughing as the whirlwind whips
the dirt in the playground at Lathrop grade school into an ominous dust-devil.
Harlan Ellison
Los Angeles
September 1974
1 KNOX
In Germany they first came for the Communists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a
Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then
they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then
they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came
for me-and by that time no one was left to speak up.
-PASTOR MARTIN NIEMÖLLER
They flushed the niggers from underground bunkers, out near the perimeter, and Charlie Knox
killed his because he thought the boogie was going for a gun. As it turned out, he wasn't: but Knox didn't
know that when he let fly.
Earlier that day Knox had gone to a fitness session and the ward Captain had reprimanded him for
haste in firing. “These aren't shootouts, Knox. The idea is to level the weapon and point it in the right
direction, not blow off your own leg. Now take it again. Another hour on the range, Saturday.”
Even earlier that day, Knox had had lunch with his wife; he had done the cooking himself, and
they had discussed how difficult it had become to get fresh vegetables, particularly carrots, since the new
emergency measures had been put into effect. “But it's necessary,” Brenda had said. “At least until the
President can get things under control again.” Knox had said something about radicals and Brenda had said,
you can say that again.
And at the start of that day, Knox had found sealed instructions from the Patriotism Party in his
readout tray at work. He slit open the red, white and blue plastic packet and saw he was scheduled for an
operation that night.
Now they came up out of the ground like potato bugs, black and fat from living off starches, and
clouds of infiltration gas billowed out after them. Knox's flushing team waited with truncheons raised,
catching the first two across the skulls with beautiful back swings. They dropped, half in and half out of the
hole, and the flushers grabbed them by their collars. They pulled them out fast and slung them across the
grass so those who followed wouldn't find the passage blocked.
They hadn't counted on more than a couple of exit holes. Suddenly the ground started to erupt
spooks and they were jumping up and out all around the team. The flushers let their truncheons hang by the
lanyards and went to more effective weaponry. Knox saw Ernie Buscher unship his scattergun and blow
two of the jigs to pieces as they scrambled out of the ground. Pieces of nigger meat went east in a spray.
That was the moment when an owl hooted in a tree off to Knox's right, and he turned his head to
look. “Behind you, Charlie!” Knox heard Ted Beckwith's warning. He turned back from the owl sound and
right behind him the turf had popped open and there was a dinge crawling out like an earthworm. There
wasn't enough moon to see what he looked like, but Knox took a swing with his truncheon and missed.
“Stop!” he yelled, but the jig went right on getting to his feet and blundering away. “I said: stop, nigguh!”
And the boogie half-turned, and in the dim light Knox thought he was reaching inside his jumper
jacket for a gun. Knox reacted with twice his best drill speed, had the banger off its Velcro pad and
working before the shine could pull his hand out of his clothes. The spook's head opened up like a piece of
overripe fruit and Knox was startled to see the stuff inside sparkled in the night. Then it went all over the
place.
“Oh my God,” Knox said. He heard his voice as though it had come from someone standing very
close beside him; but it had been himself.
He heard the words repeating themselves, fading away, dimmer and dimmer, a canyon echo
disappearing in his mind.
There was firing going on all around him now. The bright golden flashes of scatterguns and
bangers lighting up the clearing and reflecting off the perimeter. Then suddenly there was the shrill whistle
of the ward Captain's warning, three shorts and a long, and the blasting became more sporadic, then finally
stopped.
“All right, you men! That's enough! No one authorized--this! Now knock it off, right this minute.
We'll take these people in.”
Knox realized he was standing where he had been standing for a long time. Ted Beckwith came to
him and said, “You okay, Charlie?”
After a few moments Knox turned his head to stare into Beckwith's really handsome face, and he
heard that self that was himself saying, “My God, he just split open...”
Charlie Knox is. A man.
Who.
Stands 1.9 meters, weighs 191 pounds, has brown wavy hair cut short, squints slightly out of
brown eyes, wears a mustache that is thick and brown and is kept neatly trimmed but not obsessively so,
works out with 50 lb. barbells twice a day for ten minutes each session, drinks milk when he can get it and
nothing but water when he can't, has had whooping cough, measles, mumps, chicken pox and twice broken
his left forearm but otherwise is healthy.
He is thirty years old, does not like rings or other jewelry, has been married to Brenda for nine
years, has two children (Rebecca, 8 and Ben, 7), never wears a hat, likes cold weather, shuffles his feet
through the fallen leaves when he walks, has perfect pitch when he sings, likes to whistle, has never read a
book all the way through, joined the Party two years ago at the compulsory outside age limit, has a
diamond-shaped birthmark on his right thigh, and never learned to swim.
There are many things about the past Knox cannot remember. If. He ever knew them.
“Charlie?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you love me as much today as you did when we were married?”
“Sure.”
“As much as, or more than?”
“Same.”
“Not even a little less or more?”
“Nope. Exactly the same.”
“How can that be?”
“I don't like changing a good thing.”
“Oh, you.”
Then there was silence for a few minutes.
摘要：

APPROACHINGOBLIVIONRoadSignsOntheTreadmillTowardTomorrowElevenUncollectedStoriesbyHARLANELLISONForewardbyMichaelCrichtonCopyright©byHarlanEllisonACKNOWLEDGMENTSIdidn’tdoitalone.Othershelped.Someintinywaystheywon’tevenremember.Otherswithencouragement,assistance,researchandlove.Theywillremember.Robert...

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