Edward L. Ferman - Best From F&SF, 23rd Edition

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The Best from

Fantasy & Science Fiction #23

edited by Edward Ferman

The editor hereby makes grateful acknowledgment to the following authors and authors’ representatives for giving

permission to reprint the material in this volume:

Damon Knight for "I See You"

Virginia Kidd for "The Detweiler Boy" by Tom Reamy

Curtis Brown Ltd. for "Zorphwar!" by Stan Dryer and "Brother Hart" by Jane Yolen

Edward Bryant for "Stone"

Scott Meredith Uterary Agency for "Nina" by Robert Bloch

Joanna Russ for "In Defense of Criticism"

Isaac Asimov for "Clone, Clone of My Own"

John Varley for "In the Hall of the Martian Kings"

Steven Utley for "Upstart"

Lee Killough for "A House Divided"

Thomas M. Disch for "The Man Who Had No Idea"

Robert F. Young for "Project Hi-Rise"

Samuel R. Delany for "Prismatica"

AH rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, except for the inclusion of

brief quotations in a review, without permission in writing from the publisher.

All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

An Ace Book by Arrangement with Doubleday, Inc.

First Ace printing: November 1981 Published Simultaneously in Canada

2468097531 Manufactured in the United States of America

Dedication

For my mother

CONTENTS

I See You by Damon Knight

From Competition 13: Excerpts from myopic early sf novels

The Detweiler Boy by Tom Reamy

Books: In Defense of Criticism by Joanna Russ

Zorphwar! by Stan Dryer

From Competition 14: SF "What's the question" jokes

Stone by Edward Bryant

From Competition 15; Retranslated SF titles

Nina by Robert Block

Science: Clone, Clone of My Own by Isaac Asimov

In the Hall of the Martian Kings by John Varley

From Competition 18: Transposed SF titles

Upstart by Steven Utley

A House Divided by Lee Killough

From Competition 19: SF limericks

Brother Hart by Jane Yolen

Films: Multiples by Baird Searles

The Man Who Had No Idea by Thomas M. Disch

Project Hi-Rise by Robert F. Young

Prismatica by Samuel R. Delany

INTRODUCTION

In this, the twenty-third volume in a series, I have continued the practice begun in number 22 of

including non-fiction material from F&SF's regular departments. The aim is to provide readers of these

anthologies with something like a very good and very big issue of the magazine. Thus we offer a

fascinating article by Joanna Russ on the pain of reviewing sf books, Baird Searles on "multiples" in sf

films, Isaac Asimov on cloning, and a sampling from our competitions.

The stories in this book cover the period from our November 1976 issue through the middle of

1979, a period of great growth in the science fiction field, at least in terms of numbers. If you're the sort

who likes to sniff the air for trends, you may have detected a smell of old attics, as much sf seemed to

swing back to traditional, even old-fashioned themes and forms. Compare 2001 to Star Wars.

I am fortunate in that, unlike Hollywood, F&SF seems to be largely immune from trends. The

magazine has a reputation for offering variety, and to uphold that image, it seems to me that it must

carefully avoid trends and formulas in an effort to publish a balance of different types of fantasy and sf.

And so we continue to look for good writing and fresh ideas and entertaining narratives, and once those

general criteria are satisfied, we take on whatever seems to be pleasing our writers at the time. That's the

best way I know of pleasing our leaders.

—Edward L. Ferman

"I See You" is the first new Damon Knight story in many yean; it was the feature story in

FASF's special Damon Knight issue (November 1976). As might be expected, it is a totally fresh

piece of work and it shines with quality. Damon says of it: "You may think it is a short story, but it

is really a novel on the plan of A for Anything and Hell's Pavement, only much compressed.

I See You

DAMON KNIGHT

You are five, hiding in a place only you know. You are covered with bark dust, scratched by twigs,

sweaty and hot. A wind sighs in the aspen leaves. A faint steady hiss comes from the viewer you hold in

your hands; then a voice: "Lone, I see you—under the bam, eating an apple!" A silence. "Lone, come on

out, I see you." Another voice. "That's right, she's in there." After a moment, sulkily: "Oh, okay."

You squirm around, raising the viewer to aim it down the hill. As you turn the knob with your thumb,

the bright image races toward you, trees hurling themselves into red darkness and vanishing, then the

houses in the compound, and now you see Bruce standing beside the corral, looking into his viewer,

slowly turning. His back is to you; you know you are safe, and you sit up. A jay passes with a whir of

wings, settles on a branch. With your own eyes now you can see Bruce, only a dot of blue beyond the

gray shake walls of the houses. In the viewer, he is turning toward you, and you duck again. Another

voice: "Children, come in and get washed for dinner now."

"Aw, Aunt Ellie!"

"Mom, we're playing hide and seek. Can't we just stay fifteen minutes more?"

"Please, Aunt Ellie!"

"No, come on in now—you'll have plenty of time after dinner."

And Brace: "Aw, okay. All cut's in free." And once more they have not found you; your secret place

is yours alone.

Call him Smith. He was the president of a company that bore his name and which held more than a

hundred patents in the scientific instrument field. He was sixty, a widower. His only daughter and her

husband had been killed in a plane crash in 1978. He had a partner who handled the business operations

now; Smith spent most of his time in his own lab. In the spring of 1990 he was working on an

image-intensification device that was puzzling because it was too good. He had it on his bench now,

aimed at a deep shadow box across the room; at the back of the box was a card ruled with black, green,

red and blue lines. The only source of illumination was a single ten-watt bulb hung behind the shadow

box; the light reflected from the card did not even register on his meter, and yet the image in the screen of

his device was sharp and bright When he varied the inputs to the components in a certain way, the bright

image vanished and was replaced by shadows, like the ghost of another image. He had monitored every

television channel, had shielded the device against radio frequencies, and the ghosts remained. Increasing

the illumination did not make them clearer. They were vaguely rectilinear shapes without any coherent

pattern. Occasionally a moving blur traveled slowly across them.

Smith made a disgusted sound. He opened the clamps that held the device and picked it up, reaching

for the power switch with his other hand. He never touched it. As he moved the device, the ghost images

had shifted; they were dancing now with the faint movements of his hand. Smith stared at them without

breathing for a moment. Holding the cord, he turned slowly. The ghost images whirled, vanished,

reappeared. He turned the other way; they whirled back.

Smith set the device down on the bench with care. His hands were shaking. He had had the thing

clamped down on the bench all the time until now. "Christ almighty, how dumb can one man get?" he

asked the empty room.

You are six, almost seven, and you are being allowed to use the big viewer for the first time. You are

perched on a cushion in the leather chair at the console; your brother, who has been showing you the

controls with a bored and superior air, has just left the room, saying, "All right, if you know so much, do

it yourself."

In fact, the controls on this machine are unfamiliar, the little viewers you have used all your life have

only one knob, for nearer or farther—to move up/down, or left/right, you just point the viewer where you

want to see. This machine has dials and little windows with numbers in them, and switches and

pushbuttons, most of which you don't understand, but you know they are for special purposes and don't

matter. The main control is a metal rod, right in front of you, with a gray plastic knob on the top. The

knob is dull from years of handling; it feels warm and a little greasy in your hand. The console has a funny

electric smell, but the big screen, taller than you are, is silent and dark. You can feel your heart beating

against your breastbone. You grip the knob harder, push it forward just a little. The screen lights, and you

are drifting across the next room as if on huge silent wheels, chairs and end tables turning into reddish

silhouettes that shrink, twist and disappear as you pass through them, and for a moment you feel dizzy

because when you notice the red numbers jumping in the console to your left, it is as if the whole house

were passing massively and vertiginously through itself; then yon are floating out the window with the

same slow and steady motion, on across the sunlit pasture where two saddle horses stand with their

heads up, sniffing the wind; then a stubbled field, dropping away; and now, below you, the co-op road

shines like a silver-gray stream. Yon press the knob down to get closer, and drop with a giddy swoop;

now you are rushing along the road, overtaking and passing a yellow truck, turning the knob to steer. At

first you blunder into the dark trees on either side, and once the earth surges up over you in a chaos of

writhing red shapes, but now you are learning, and you soar down past the crossroads, up the farther hill,

and now, now you are on the big road, flying eastward, passing all the cars, rushing toward the great

world where you long to be.

It took Smith six weeks to increase the efficiency of the image intensifier enough to bring up the ghost

pictures clearly. When he succeeded, the image on the screen was instantly recognizable. It was a view

of Jack McCranie's office; the picture was still dim, but sharp enough that Smith could see the expression

on Jack's face. He was leaning back in his chair, hands behind his head. Beside him stood Peg Spatola in

a purple dress, with her hand on an open folder. She was talking, and McCranie was listening. That was

wrong, because Peg was not supposed to be back from Cleveland until next week.

Smith reached for the phone and punched McCranie's number.

"Yes, Tom?"

"Jack, is Peg in there?"

"Why, no-she's in Cleveland, Tom."

"Oh, yes."

McCranie sounded puzzled. "Is anything the matter?" In the screen, he had swiveled his chair and

was talking to Peg, gesturing with short, choppy motions of his arm.

"No, nothing," said Smith. "That's all right, Jack, thank you." He broke the connection. After a

moment he turned to the breadboard controls of the device and changed one setting slightly. In the

screen, Peg turned and walked backward out of the office. When he turned the knob the other way, she

repeated these actions in reverse. Smith tinkered with the other controls until he got a view of the

calendar on Jack's desk. It was Friday, June 15—last week.

Smith locked up the device and all his notes, went home and spent the rest of the day thinking.

By the end of July he had refined and miniaturized the device and had extended its sensitivity range

into the infrared. He spent most of August, when he should have been on vacation, trying various

methods of detecting sound through the device. By focusing on the interior of a speaker's larynx and

using infrared, he was able to convert the visible vibrations of the vocal cords into sound of fair quality,

but that did not satisfy him. He worked for a while on vibrations picked up from panes of glass in

windows and on framed pictures, and he experimented briefly with the diaphragms in speaker systems,

intercoms and telephones. He kept on into October without stopping and finally achieved a system that

would give tinny but recognizable sound from any vibrating surface—a wall, a floor, even the speaker's

own cheek or forehead.

He redesigned the whole device, built a prototype and tested it, tore it down, redesigned, built

another. It was Christmas before he was done. Once more he locked up the device and all his plans,

drawings and notes.

At home he spent the holidays experimenting with commercial adhesives in various strengths. He

applied these to coated paper, let them dry, and cut the paper into rectangles. He numbered these

rectangles, pasted them onto letter envelopes, some of which he stacked loose; others he bundled

together and secured with rubber bands. He opened the stacks and bundles and examined them at

regular intervals. Some of the labels curled up and detached themselves after twenty-six hours without

leaving any conspicuous trace. He made up another batch of these, typed his home address on six of

them. On each of six envelopes he typed his office address, then covered it with one of the labels. He

stamped the envelopes and dropped them into a mailbox. All six, minus their labels, were delivered to the

office three days later.

Just after New Year's, he told his partner that he wanted to sell out and retire. They discussed it in

general terms.

Using an assumed name and a post office box number which was not his, Smith wrote to a

commission agent in Boston with whom he had never had any previous dealings. He mailed the letter,

with the agent's address covered by one of his labels on which he had typed a fictitious address. The

label detached itself in transit; the letter was delivered. When the agent replied, Smith was watching and

read the letter as a secretary typed it. The agent followed his instruction to mail his reply in an envelope

without return address. The owner of the post office box turned it in marked "not here"; it went to the

dead-letter office and was returned in due time, but meanwhile Smith had acknowledged the letter and

had mailed, in the same way, a huge amount of cash. In subsequent letters he instructed the agent to take

bids for components, plans for which he enclosed, from electronics manufacturers, for plastic casings

from another, and for assembly and shipping from still another company. Through a second commission

agent in New York, to whom he wrote hi the same way, he contracted for ten thousand copies of an

instruction booklet in four colors.

Late in February he bought a house and an electronics dealership in a small town in the Adirondacks.

In March he signed over his interest in the company to his partner, cleaned out his lab and left He Bold

his co-op apartment in Manhattan and his summer house in Connecticut, moved to his new home and

became anonymous.

You are thirteen, chasing a fox with the big kids for the first time. They have put you in the north field,

the worst place, but you know better than to leave it

"He's in the glen."

"I see him; he's in the brook, going upstream."

You turn the viewer, racing forward through dappled shade, a brilliance of leaves: there is the glen,

and now you see the fox, trotting through the shallows, blossoms of bright water at its feet.

"Ken and Nell, you come down ahead of him by the springhouse. Wanda, you and Tim and Jean

stay where you are. Everybody else come upstream, but stay back till I tell you."

That's Leigh, the oldest. You turn the viewer, catch a glimpse of Bobby running downhill through the

woods, his long hair flying. Then back to the glen: the fox is gone.

"He's heading up past the corncrib!"

"Okay, keep spread out on both sides, everybody. Jim, can you and Edie head him off before he

gets to the woods?"

"Well try. There he is!"

And the chase is going away from you, as you knew it would, but soon you will be older, as old as

Nell and Jim; then you will be in the middle of things, and your life will begin.

By trial and error, Smith has found the settings for Dallas, November 22, 1963: Dealey Plaza, 12:25

P.M. He sees the Presidential motorcade making the turn onto Elm Street. Kennedy slumps forward,

raising his hands to his throat. Smith presses a button to hold the moment in tune. He scans behind the

motorcade, finds the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building, finds the window. There is no one

behind the barricade of cartons; the room is empty. He scans the nearby rooms, finds nothing. He tries

the floor below. At an open window a man kneels, holding a high-powered rifle. Smith photographs him.

He returns to the motorcade, watches as the second shot strikes the President. He freezes time again,

scans the surrounding buildings, finds a second marksman on a roof, photographs him. Back to the

motorcade. A third and fourth shot, the last blowing off the side of the President's head. Smith freezes the

action again, finds two gunmen on the grassy knoll, one aiming across the top of a station wagon, one

kneeling in the shrubbery. He photographs them. He turns off the power,, sits for a moment, then goes to

the washroom, kneels beside the toilet and vomits.

The viewer is your babysitter, your television, your telephone (the telephone lines are still up, but they

are used only as signaling devices; when yon know that somebody wants to talk to you, you focus your

viewer on him), your library, your school. Before puberty you watch other people having sex, but even

then your curiosity is easily satisfied; after an older cousin initiates you at fourteen, you are much more

interested in doing it yourself. The co-op teacher monitors your studies, sometimes makes suggestions,

but more and more, as you grow older, leaves you to your own devices. You are intensely interested in

African prehistory, in the European theater, and in the ant-civilization of Epsilon Eridani IV. Soon you will

have to choose.

New York Harbor, November 4, 1872—a cold, blustery day. A two-masted ship rides at anchor;

on her stern is lettered: Mary Celeste. Smith advances the time control. A flicker of darkness, light again,

and the ship is gone. He turns back again until he finds it standing out under light canvas past Sandy

Hook. Manipulating time and space controls at once, be follows it eastward through a nickering of storm

and sun—loses it, finds it again, counting days as he goes. The farther eastward, the more he has to tilt

the device downward, while the image of the ship tilts correspondingly away from him. Because of the

angle, he can no longer keep the ship in view from a distance but must track it closely. November 21 and

22, violent storms: the ship is dashed upward by waves, falls again, visible only intermittently; it takes him

five hours to pass through two days of real time. The 23rd is calmer, but on the 24th another storm blows

up. Smith rubs his eyes, loses the ship, finds it again after a ten-minute search.

The gale blows itself out on the morning of the 26th. The sun is bright, the sea almost dead calm.

Smith is able to catch glimpses of figures on deck, tilted above dark cross-sections of the hull. A sailor is

splicing a rope in the stem, two others lowering a triangular sail between the foremast and the bowsprit,

and a fourth is at the helm. A little group stands leaning on the starboard rail; one of them is a woman.

The next glimpse is that of a running figure who advances into the screen and disappears. Now the men

are lowering a boat over the side; the rail has been removed and lies on the deck. The men drop into the

boat and row away. He hears them shouting to each other but cannot make out the words.

Smith turns to the ship again: the deck is empty. He dips below to look at the hold, filled with casks,

then the cabin, then the forecastle.

There is no sign of anything wrong—no explosion, no fire, no trace of violence. When he looks up

again, he sees the sails flapping, then bellying out full. The sea is rising. He looks for the boat, but now

too much tune has passed and he cannot find it. He returns to the ship and now reverses the time control,

tracks it backward until the men are again in then- places on deck. He looks again at the group standing

at the rail; now he sees that the woman has a child hi her arms. The child struggles, drops over the rail.

Smith hears the woman shriek. In a moment she too is over the rail and falling into the sea.

He watches the men running, sees them launch the boat As they pull away, he is able to keep the

focus near enough to see and hear them. One calls, "My God, who's at the helm?" Another, a bearded

man with a face gone tallow-pale, replies, "Never mind—row!" They are staring down into the sea. After

a moment one looks up, then another. The Mary Celeste, with three of the four sails on her foremast set,

is gliding away, slowly, now faster; now she is gone.

Smith does not run through the scene again to watch the child and her mother drown, but others do.

The production model was ready for shipping hi September. It was a simplified version of the

prototype, with only two controls, one for space, one for time. The range of the device was limited to

one thousand miles. Nowhere on the casing of the device or in the instruction booklet was a patent

number or a pending patent mentioned. Smith had called the device Ozo, perhaps because he thought it

sounded vaguely Japanese. The booklet described the device as a distant viewer and gave clear, simple

instructions for its use. One sentence read cryptically: "Keep Time Control set at zero." It was like "Wet

Paint-Do Not Touch."

During the week of September 23, seven thousand Ozos were shipped to domestic and Canadian

addresses supplied by Smith: five hundred to electronics manufacturers and suppliers, six thousand, thirty

to a carton, marked "On Consignment," to TV outlets in major cities, and the rest to private citizens

chosen at random. The instruction booklets were in sealed envelopes packed with each device. Three

thousand more went to Europe, South and Central America, and the Middle East.

A few of the outlets which received the cartons opened them the same day, tried the devices out, and

put them on sale at prices ranging from $49.95 to $125. By the following day the word was beginning to

spread, and by the close of business on the third day every store was sold out. Most people who got

them, either through the mail or by purchase, used them to spy on their neighbors and on people in hotels.

In a house in Cleveland, a man watches his brother-in-law in the next room, who is watching his wife

getting out of a taxi. She goes into the lobby of an apartment building. The husband watches as she gets

into the elevator, rides to the fourth floor. She rings the bell beside the door marked 410. The door

opens; a dark-haired man takes her in his arms; they kiss.

The brother-in-law meets him in the hall. "Don't do it, Charlie."

"Get out of my way."

"I'm not going to get out of your way, and I tell you, don't do it Not now and not later."

"Why the hell shouldn't I?”

"Because if you do I'll kill you. If you want a divorce, OK, get a divorce. But don't lay a hand on her

or I'll find you the farthest place you can go."

Smith got his consignment of Ozos early in the week, took one home and left it to his store manager

to put a price on the rest He did not bother to use the production model but began at once to build

another prototype. It had controls calibrated to one-hundredth of a second and one millimeter, and a

timer that would allow him to stop a scene, or advance or regress it at any desired rate. He ordered

some clockwork from an astronomical supply house.

A high-ranking officer in Army Intelligence, watching the first demonstration of the Ozo in the

Pentagon, exclaimed, "My God, with this we could dismantle half the establishment—all we've got to do

is launch interceptors when we see them push the button."

"It's a good thing Senator Burkhart can't hear you say that" said another officer. But by the next

afternoon everybody had heard it.

A Baptist minister in Louisville led the first mob against an Ozo assembly plant. A month later, while

civil and criminal suits against all the rioters were still pending, tapes showing each one of them in

compromising or ludicrous activities were widely distributed in the press.

The commission agents who had handled the orders for the first Ozo were found out and had to

leave town. Factories were fire-bombed, but others took their place.

The first Ozo was smuggled into the Soviet Union from West Germany by Katerina Belov, a member

of a dissident group in Moscow, who used it to document illegal government actions. The device was

seized on December 13 by the KGB; Belov and two other members of the group were arrested,

imprisoned and tortured. By that time over forty other Ozos were in the hands of dissidents.

You are watching an old movie, Bob and Ted and Carol and Alice. The humor seems infantile and

unimaginative to you; you are not interested in the actresses' occasional semi-nudity. What strikes you as

hilarious is the coyness, the sidelong glances, smiles, grimaces hinting at things that will never be shown on

the screen. You realize that these people have never seen anyone but their most intimate friends without

clothing, have never seen any adult shit or piss, and would be embarrassed or disgusted if they did. Why

did children say "pee-pee" and "poo-poo," and then giggle? Yon have read scholarly books about taboos

on "bodily functions,'' but why was shitting worse than sneezing?

Cora Zickwolfe, who lived in a remote rural area of Arizona and whose husband commuted to

Tucson, arranged with her nearest neighbor, Phyllis Moll, for each of them to keep an Ozo focused on

the bulletin board in the other's kitchen. On the bulletin board was a note that said "OK." If there was any

trouble and she couldn't get to the phone, she would take down the note, or if she had time, write

another.

In April 1992, about the time her husband usually got home, an intruder broke into the house and

seized Mrs. Zickwolfe before she had time to get to the bulletin board. He dragged her into the bedroom

and forced her to disrobe. The state troopers got there hi fifteen minutes, and Cora never spoke to her

friend Phyllis again.

Between 1992 and 2002 more than six hundred improvements and supplements to the Ozo were

recorded. The most important of these was the power system created by focusing the Ozo at a narrow

aperture on the interior of the Sun. Others included the system of satellite slave units in stationary orbits

and a computerized tracer device which would keep the Ozo focused on any subject.

Using the tracer, an entomologist in Mexico City is following the ancestral line of a honey bee. The

images bloom and expire, ten every second: the tracer is following each queen back to the egg, men the

egg to the queen that laid it, then that queen to the egg. Tens of thousands of generations have passed; in

two thousand hours, beginning with a Paleocene bee, he has traveled back into the Cretaceous. He stops

at intervals to follow the bee in real time, then accelerates again. The hive is growing smaller, more

primitive. Now it is only a cluster of round cells, and the bee is different, more like a wasp. His year's

labor is coming to fruition. He watches, forgetting to eat, almost to breathe.

In your mother's study after she dies, you find an elaborate chart of her ancestors and your father's.

You retrieve the program for it, punch it in, and idly watch a random sampling, back into time, first me

female line, then the male ... a teacher of biology in Boston, a suffragette, a corn merchant, a singer, a

Dutch fanner in New York, a British sailor, a German musician. Their faces glow in the screen,

bright-eyed, cheeks flushed with life. Someday you too will be only a aeries of images in a screen.

Smith is watching the planet Mars. The clockwork which turns the Ozo to follow the planet, even

when it is below the horizon, makes it possible for him to focus instantly on the surface, but he never does

this. He takes up his position hundreds of thousands of miles away, then slowly approaches, in order to

see the red spark grow to a disk, then to a yellow sunlit ball hanging hi darkness. Now he can make out

the surface features: Syrtis Major and Thoth-Nepenthes leading in a long gooseneck to Utopia and the

frostcap.

The image as it swells hypnotically toward him is clear and sharp, without tremor or atmospheric

distortion. It is summer in the northern hemisphere: Utopia is wide and dark. The planet fills the screen,

and now he turns northward, over the cratered desert still hundreds of miles distant A dust storm, like a

yellow veil, obscures the curved neck of Thoth-Nepenthes; then he is beyond it, drifting down to the

edge of the frostcap. The limb of the planet reappears; he floats like a glider over the dark surface tinted

with rose and violet-gray; now he can see its nubbly texture; now he can make out individual plants. He is

drifting among their gnarled gray stems, their leaves of violet bora; he sees the curious misshapen growths

that may be air bladders or some grotesque analogue of blossoms. Now, at the edge of the screen,

something black and spindling leaps. He follows it instantly, finds it, brings it hugely magnified into the

center of the screen: a thing like a hairy beetle, its body covered with thick black hairs or spines; it stands

on six jointed legs, waving its antennae, its mouth parts busy. And its four bright eyes stare into his,

across forty million miles.

Smith's hair got whiter and thinner. Before the 1992 Crash, he made heavy contributions to the

International Red Cross and to volunteer organizations in Europe, Asia and Africa. He got drunk

periodically, but always alone. From 1993 to 1996 he stopped reading the newspapers.

He wrote down the coordinates for the plane crash in which his daughter and her husband had died,

but never used them.

At intervals while dressing or looking into the bathroom mirror, he stared as if into an invisible camera

and raised one finger. In his last years he wrote some poems.

We know his name. Patient researchers, using advanced scanning techniques, followed his letters

back through the postal system and found him, but by that time he was safely dead.

The whole world has been at peace for more than a generation. Crime is almost unheard of. Free

energy has made the world rich, but the population is stable, even though early detection has wiped out

most diseases. Everyone can do whatever he likes, providing his neighbors would not disapprove, and

after all, their views are the same as his own.

Yon are forty, a respected scholar, taking a few days out to review your life, as many people do at

your age. You have watched your mother and father coupling on the night they conceived you, watched

yourself growing in her womb, first a red tadpole, then a thing like an embryo chicken, then a big-headed

baby kicking and squirming. You have seen yourself delivered, seen the first moment when your

bloody head broke into the light. You have seen yourself staggering about the nursery in rompers,

clutching a yellow plastic duck. Now you are watching yourself hiding behind the fallen tree on the hill,

and you realize that there are no secret places. And beyond you in the ghostly future you know that

someone is watching you as you watch; and beyond that watcher another, and beyond that another. . . .

Forever.

from Competition 13:

Excerpts from myopic early SF or Utopian novels

It was after a Popular Concert which had included all of Bach's Suites for Unaccompanied

Violoncello that I ventured to remonstrate with my Mentor.

"Constable, all this culture may be very well, but sometimes a fellow needs, well, d-mn it! What do

ordinary people nowadays do for amusement?"

He frowned slightly. "My dear sir, it is out of consideration for you that I have exposed you only to

our lighter forms of entertainment. I presume you are referring to something in the nature of a Music Hall,

or Vaudeville. I assure you that, since the advent of Universal Education, even the popular taste has

become too refined to tolerate the foolishness of sentimental songs and lurid melodrama. Also, please do

not use again the expression you have just uttered. I mean the one beginning with the letter D. Our

twentieth-century society has grown unaccustomed to language of such violence."

—David T. J. Doughan

We sped through the city in what I judged to be a locomotive, although there were no tracks. "What

new wonder shall I see?" I mused, for many were the sights shown me already. My guide, an illustrious

professor, halted the machine.

"In this mill, fine white flour is made. All unwholesome parts of the grain are removed and certain

substances poisonous to insects and rodents are introduced." I followed in as he continued: "Only women

are employed here, though they don't stay long."

"Why not?" I shouted over the din, my eye caught by a certain face.

He replied, "They quickly become deaf and so have no need to speak. Indeed, few work more than

a year. They are prized as wives, for they never nag their husbands."

I looked at the girl, an exact double of my lost love. Beautiful and quiet. What more could a man ask!

—Janet E. Pearson

Tom Reamy wrote four stories for F&SF: “Twilla," "Insects in Amber," "San Diego LJghtfoot

Sue" (a Nebula award winner), and the gripping story you are about to read. He also wrote a

novel, Blind Voices. In 1978 he died at the age of forty-two, as he was reaching his peak as a

storyteller of unusual freshness and power.

The Detweiler Boy

TOM REAMY

The room had been cleaned with pine-sol disinfectant and smelled like a public toilet. Harry Spinner

was on the floor behind the bed, scrunched down between it and the wall. The almost colorless chenille

bedspread had been pulled askew exposing part of the clean, but dingy, sheet. All I could see of Harry

was one leg poking over the edge of the bed. He wasn't wearing a shoe, only a faded brown-and-tan

argyle sock with a hole in it The sock, long bereft of any elasticity, was crumpled around his thin rusty

ankle.

I closed the door quietly behind me and walked around the end of the bed so I could see all of him.

He was huddled on his back with his elbows propped up by the wall and the bed. His throat had been

cut. The blood hadn't spread very far. Most of it had been soaked up by the threadbare carpet under the

bed. I looked around the grubby little room but didn't find anything. There were no signs of a struggle, no

signs of forced entry—but then, my BankAmericard hadn't left any signs either. The window was open,

letting in the muffled roar of traffic on the Boulevard. I stuck my head out and looked, but it was three

stories straight down to the neon-lit marquee of the movie house.

It had been nearly two hours since Harry called me. "Bertram, my boy, I've run across something

very peculiar. I don't really know what to make of it."

I had put away the report I was writing on Lucas McGowan's hyperactive wife. (She had a definite

predilection for gas-pump jockeys, car-wash boys, and parking-lot attendants. I guess it had something

to do with the Age of the Automobile.) I propped my feet on my desk and leaned back until the old

swivel chair groaned a protest

"What did you find this time, Harry? A nest of international spies or an invasion from Mars?" I guess

Harry Spinner wasn't much use to anyone, not even himself, but I liked him. He'd helped me in a couple

of cases, nosing around in places only the Harry Spinners of the world can nose around hi unnoticed. I

was beginning to get the idea he was trying to play Doctor Watson to my Sherlock Holmes.

"Don't tease me, Bertram. There's a boy here in the hotel. I saw something I don't think he wanted

me to see. It's extremely odd."

Harry was also the only person in the world, except my mother, who called me Bertram. "What did

you see?"

"I'd rather not talk about it over the phone. Can you come over?"

Harry saw too many old private-eye movies on the late show. "It'll be a while. I've got a client

coming in hi a few minutes to pick up the poop on his wandering wife."

"Bertram, you shouldn't waste your rime and talent on divorce cases."

"It pays the bills, Harry. Besides, there aren't enough Maltese falcons to go around."

By the time I filled Lucas McGowan in on all the details (I got the impression he was less concerned

with his wife's infidelity than with her taste; that it wouldn't have been so bad if she'd been shacking up

with movie stars or international playboys), collected my fee, and grabbed a Thursday special at Colonel

Sanders, almost two hours had passed. Harry hadn't answered my knock, and so I let myself in with a

credit card.

Birdie Pawlowicz was a fat, slovenly old broad somewhere between forty and two hundred. She was

blind in her right eye and wore a black felt patch over it. She claimed she had lost the eye in a fight with a

Creole whore over a riverboat gambler. I believed her. She ran the Brewster Hotel the way Florence

Nightingale must have run that stinking army hospital in the Crimea. Her tenants were the losers habitating

that rotting section of the Boulevard east of the Hollywood Freeway. She bossed them, cursed them,

loved them, and took care of them. And they loved her back. (Once, a couple of years ago, a young

black buck thought an old fat lady with one eye would be easy pickings. The cops found him three days

later, two blocks away, under some rubbish in an alley where he'd hidden. He had a broken arm, two

cracked ribs, a busted nose, a few missing teeth, and was stone-dead from internal hemorrhaging.)

The Brewster ran heavily in the red, but Birdie didn't mind. She had quite a bit of property in

Westwood which ran very, very heavily in the black. She gave me an obscene leer as I approached the

desk, but her good eye twinkled.

"Hello, lover!" she brayed hi a voice like a cracked boiler. 'I've lowered my price to a quarter. Are

you interested?" She saw my face and her expression shifted from lewd to wary. "What's wrong, Bert?"

"Harry Spinner. You'd better get the cops, Birdie. Somebody killed him."

She looked at me, not saying anything, her face slowly collapsing into an infinitely weary resignation.

Then she turned and telephoned the police.

Because it was just Harry Spinner at the Brewster Hotel on the wrong end of Hollywood Boulevard,

the cops took over half an hour to get there. While we waited I told Birdie everything I knew, about the

phone call and what I'd found.

"He must have been talking about the Detweiler boy," she said, frowning. "Harry's been kinda

friendly with him, felt sorry for him, I guess."

"What's his room? I'd like to talk to him."

"He checked out"

"When?"

"Just before you came down."

"Damn!"

She bit her lip. "I don't think the Detweiler boy killed him."

"Why?"

"I just don't think he could. He's such a gentle boy."

"Oh, Birdie," I groaned, "you know there's no such thing as a killer type. Almost anyone will loll with

a good enough reason."

"I know," she sighed, "but I still can't believe it" She tapped her scarlet fingernails on the dolled

Formica desk top. "How long had Harry been dead?"

He had phoned me about ten after five. I had found the body at seven. "Awhile," I said. "The blood

was mostly dry."

"Before six-thirty?"

"Probably."

She sighed again, but this time with relief. "The Detweiler boy was down here with me until six-thirty.

He'd been here since about four-fifteen. We were playing gin. He was having one of his spells and

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V2.5–Fixedformatting,brokenparagraphs,garbledtext;byperagwinnUnresolvedtextenclosedinbrackets[]TheBestfromFantasy&ScienceFiction#23editedbyEdwardFermanCopyright©1976,1977,1978,1979,1980byMercuryPress,Inc.Theeditorherebymakesgratefulacknowledgmenttothefollowingauthorsandauthors’representativesforgivi...

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