Ellison, Harlan - With Others Partners in Wonder

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DOUBLE TROUBLE

Harlan Ellison (whom The New Yorker calls “a nonstop controversialist who comes on like an angry Woody

Allen”) is a very special kind of writer. If this is your first encounter with him, defend yourself from attacks

on your world-view. Because he is the only one who can write Harlan Ellison Stories. His friends,

outstanding fantasists like the legendary Theodore Sturgeon, Hugo/Nebula winner Roger Zelazny, A.E. Van

Vogt (whose fame in France rivals that of Steinbeck’s), “Psycho” author Robert Bloch, Edgar-winning

novelist Henry Slesar and the swashbuckling writer/adventurer Robert Sheckley, are also special. What they

do, no one else can do. But can they work together on the same story? What happens when Ellison mixes

with the antic Avram Davidson? What comes out when talents as clearly different as Ellison and Van Vogt

write together? How do you categorize the hybrid produced by the coolly scientific Ben Bova and the

irrationally visceral Ellison (in a story whose plagiarization by ABCTV and Paramount Studios won a

Federal District Court judgment for the authors in the amount of $337,000)? And how well do two

dominating personalities such as Silverberg’s and Ellison’s get along in the same storyline? This book will tell

you!

HARLAN ELLISON

PARTNERS IN WONDER

IN COLLABORATION WITH

Robert Bloch

Ben Bova

Algis Budrys

Avram Davidson

Samuel R. Delany

Joe L. Hensley

Keith Laumer

William Rotsler

Robert Sheckley

Robert Silverberg

Henry Slesar

Theodore Sturgeon

A.E. Van Vogt

Roger Zelazny

and unassisted

this book is dedicated--with a little help from our friends--to

JUDY-LYNN DEL REY

For kindnesses remembered

CONTENTS

I See a Man Sitting on a Chair, and the Chair Is Biting His Leg

Brillo

A Toy for Juliette

The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World

Up Christopher to Madness

Runesmith

Rodney Parish for Hire

The Kong Papers

The Human Operators

Survivor #1

The Power of the Nail

Wonderbird

The Song the Zombie Sang

Street Scene

Come to Me Not in Winter's White

SONS

JANUS

INTRODUCTION

These are stories I have written with other writers. Collaborations, they’re called. They are the

products of two minds working together, sometimes in complete harmony, more often in opposition. The

former, because the ideas were so right they needed no conflict to produce a coherent whole; the latter,

because writers are perverse creatures who enjoy tormenting one another. And also, conscious opposition

on the part of one of the collaborators, to the direction a story is taking naturally, may produce a stress that

bends it unexpectedly in a to ally unpredictable way. And from that can come a toad prince or a toad,

depending on whether or not both writers know how to handle a fable run amuck.

The beloved Lester del Rey--one of my early mentors in the craft of professional lying-told me

once : never write a story with someone, that you can do as well by yourself. Well, I believe that. I tried

writing a novel with Avram Davidson once, titled “Don’t Speak of Rope,” Ech. One of the most horrible

experiences in a universe filled with death camps, hardhats, campus massacres and the human gamut that

runs from Spiro to Manson; somewhere in a file drawer languish ten thousand words of that novel, unended,

unlamented, unfortunate. So I do, I really do, agree with Lester.

Even so, life can occasionally become dull and predictable, and so, to spice it slightly, those of us

with a flair for danger and high adventure take guided tours through the heart of Mt. Vesuvius, stalk the

blood-sucking vampire bat through the swamps and fens of Bosnia and/or Herzogovina, join peace rallies,

date beautiful models and, when all else fails, collaborate on fictions with other writers. I grant you the

picture of world-weariness and jaded appetite I paint, the desperation of ennui that drives men to such

hideous extremes as collaboration, is an ugly one. But I feel you must know what horrors and pitfalls lie

behind this seemingly uncomplicated act. Ask Avram. Ech.

But the reward of successful collaboration is a thing that cannot be produced by either of the

parties working alone. It is akin to the benefits of sex with a partner, as opposed to masturbation. The latter

is fun, but you show me anyone who has gotten a baby from playing with him or herself, and I’ll show you

an ugly baby, with just a whole bunch of knuckles.

And so, risking the hisses and catcalls of overly critical readers and critics who will call these joint

efforts (if you’ll pardon my carrying on the allusion from the preceding paragraph) merely gimmicky

constructs, over the past many years I have yoked myself to fourteen other writers, and from these literary

miscegenations have come the fictions before you.

My relationships with all of these men have been substantially more than what might be termed

mere acquaintanceship. All of them are my friends, but not all of them like me. Nor do I like all of them.

Many of them have done me favors I would be hard-pressed to repay in full or in kind. Others have messed

me over hideously. From time to time I have been in serious disagreement with one or another of them.

Between one of them and myself there was a shadow for many years. Between myself and another is

something very much like the love of one brother for another. One saved my life, literally. I thought another

had ruined it. One made me terribly proud of him, and then sold out, thereby destroying all my illusions

about him. Two of them managed to alter the course and texture of my life. From one I learned much

about the nature of love, from another the nature of hate. With one I dreamed odd dreams, and with

another I learned people can only act as people, not as gods. One demonstrated there can be nobility even in

failure, and another showed me how badly success can be handled.

Millions of words of conversation in the past nineteen years have passed between me and these

fourteen men. Advice, shoptalk, problems, respect and denunciation. That is the nature of friendship.

But without these men, I would never have come to write the solo stories on which my

reputation--however great or small it may be--is based. Without all the words they have given the world on

their own, some larger part of the joy of having been a part of speculative fiction would never have been.

Bloch and his psychos and the Ripper; Bova’s clear view of the importance of space travel; Budrys and the

Gus nobody bothers; Davidson and his sentient coathangers; Delany and frelking; Hensley and his son,

Randy; Laumer and Retief; Rotsler and a stack of cartoons only slightly smaller than Everest; Sheckley and

all his dimensions of wonder; Silverberg and thorns; Slesar and the greatest short-story ever written;

Sturgeon and...well, everything; Van Vogt and weapon shops and Jommy Cross and the cortical thalamic

pause; Zelazny and he who shapes.

All of them are masters, each of them writes only as he can write, and no two can ever be confused

in the minds of students of masterful sf. These are the extra special meanings for me of these

superimportant people:

Laumer is strength, and Davidson is erudition, and Budrys is empathy, and Delany is youthful

commitment, and Sheckley is outrageous madness, and Sturgeon is both dazzlement and love, and Bova is

the rationality of reality, Silverberg is craft, Van Vogt is complex conceptualization. Rotsler is irreverence,

Hensley is gentleness, Zelazny is poetic intricacy, Bloch is coming to grips with terror, and Slesar is courage

and pride and dignity.

I have learned these things from these men. So it is not merely by chance that we came together

finally to write. It is heady company and only a fool or an amateur would consider working with them

without a full realization of how good one must be to share the same story with each of them.

The individual introductions to the stories will tell you how the pieces came to be written, the

method of collaboration, any sidelights or anecdotes that informed them, any mishaps or contretemps

encountered in their making, their history and their success or failure as works of art, in my estimation.

(Understand: just because a story reaches print, or even sees repeated anthologization, does not mean that

we, the authors, are totally delighted with the outcome. Some of these stories fail in some of the areas

where we considered it important to succeed. Some started out as one thing, and wound up as quite

another, thereby dampening our pleasure. But in rehashing the histories of these stories with the men who

were one half their origin, I have not found one who regretted the experiment. That says some. thing; what,

I’m not certain.)

It sounds like hype to point out that this is the first book of its kind ever published; in that one

way it is the most original book of stories ever published, and in the same way it is a monstrous literary

joke. Throughout, however, it is for me a delight. You cannot know what a joy it is, what a prideful thing it

is, what a satisfying thing it is, to have my name linked with these men.

I have a few regrets. I’ll name them. Norman Spinrad, Isaac Asimov, Michael Moorcock and Philip

Jose Farmer. I wanted to write stories with all of them, and somehow, through no real fault of anyone, they

just didn’t get written. I’m sorry about that. They’ll more than likely never get written now. And I think it a

bad thing that there is no Ellison/female collaboration here. What a strange mindfuck it would be to read a

story on which I’d worked with, say, Kate Welhelm or Ursula Le Guin or Joanna Russ. Yeah, I lament that.

And the lamentations are all that remain, because now having written the collaborative thing out

of my system--it was a thing to do, you see--I doubt very much that I’ll do it again. Oh, there may be one or

two little stories that chance ordains will be written in company with another, but a project like this? No,

not again.

I think I speak for my collaborators when I say that we hope this book lightens your burdens,

brings an occasional smile to your lips, puts a twinkle in your eyes, a shiver down your spine, an idea or two

in your heads, and when you close the book finally, you will feel that our time--and yours--was not illspent.

For all of them, I say, thank you for dropping in on our little session, and for myself I say, thank

you for letting me coat-tail your talents; thank you gentlemen, one and all.

HARLAN ELLISON

Los Angeles

Robert Sheckley and Harlan Ellison

I SEE A MAN SITTING ON

A CHAIR,

AND THE CHAIR IS

BITING HIS LEG

INTRODUCTION

What better to lure you into these unholy partnerships than a righteous tumble down a rabbit hole?

Sheckley for openers. Alone, by himself, unaided, he is certainly deranged. In company with your humble

ellisonian guide. he runs thoroughly amuck.

He came out to visit me in H*O*L *L*Y*W*O*O*D on some nefarious fiddlefoot journey--one of

the many wanderings that constitute Sheck’s only discernible vice--and one late afternoon we wound up in

my Camaro, whipping and skinning across Mulholland’s snake, the rear seat filled With a gaggle of teen-aged

gigglers I was ferrying somewhere for some now-forgotten reason.

It was impossible to talk to them; even Mary, my close friend in Women’s Lib, would not object to

my calling these girls, girls: not women. They were just-God forgive me-pretty meat. And I had to take

them somewhere, so I was doing it, and Sheck was in the front bucket next to me, and to pass the time, we

started rapping a story plot. Not seriously, you understand, just one of those lunatic conversations into

which one falls with Bob as a matter of course: if we could sweep the beach clean with brooms, how many

years would it take; if trolley cars had wings, would elephants have overhead runners; is Amelia Earhart

living in sin in Guatemala with Ambrose Bierce and Judge Crater; why do women put the toilet paper in

the wall roller backward; if you could shrink people down to the size of walnuts, could you’ solve the

population explosion by building and stocking a city the size of New York in Disneyland, right?

None of the conversations ever mean a damn thing. They are just crazy raps between Sheck and

whomever he happens to have snagged.

But this time, for some inexplicable reason, by the time we had driven all the way across

Mulholland, down Laurel Canyon, and were emerging on Sunset Boulevard, we had worked out a fairly

complex, thoroughly mad story line.

“Tell me, Bob,” I said, from behind the wheel, in my best W. C. Fields voice, “what do you see as a

title for this masterpiece?”

“I see a man sitting on a chair, and the chair is biting his leg,” he replied, thinking himself too cute

for words.

“Then that’ll be the title,” I said, calling his bluff. And it was. And it is.

No one was more shocked than Sheck. For no matter how crazy a writer gets, there is always

another writer just a little crazier.

After performing various hideous obscenities on the nubile persons of the backseat gigglers, I

dropped the young ladies off, joined Bob in a hearty lunch at the Old World, and we dashed back to my

house in the hills to start the story.

Sheck began the writing. His first assault runs from the opening sentence to the description of the

TexasTower, ending with the paragraph whose last phrase is, “it was a marvel.” I took over then, and wrote

to the time-break after Pareti and Peggy Flinn have had sex and Pareti goes to sleep. We alternated sections

from that point on.

But! Aha! You think it was that easy, that we just whipped on through, alternating sections? No.

After we had finished the first draft, at a total wordage that now escapes me, I went back and did a full

rewrite. And then Sheck went over my rewrite and did a final polish, so that the version you now have

before you is inextricably interwoven with both of us in each other’s sections. For instance, in the fourth

paragraph, the Eskimo-slit glasses are mine, but the Indians of Patzcuaro are his.

We wrote for forty-eight hours straight, napping fitfully while the other wrote. Ladies of my

acquaintance appeared from time to time and cooked us food and sulked at the growing rudeness of our

manner as our nerves frayed and the story grew. Finally, it was done. I did a retype of the manuscript, adding

a fillip here and an Ausable Chasm there.

When it was done, we both collapsed and let someone else mail it out to Ed Ferman at the

Magazine of Fantasy &; Science Fiction, and we slept round-the-clock.

In collaborating, unless there is a specific reason for the styles to be identifiably different, I try to

adapt my writing to the manner of my co-author. In the case of Sheckley, it meant I had to start thinking

like a brain damage case. Consequently, I make no brief for the logic or sanity of this story. Further,

deponent saith not.

I See a Man Sitting on a Chair, and the Chair Is Biting His Leg

Behind him lay the gray Azores, behind the Gates of Hercules; the sky above, the goo below.

“Screwin’ goo! Screwin’ goo!” Pareti yelled at the fading afternoon sunlight. It came up garbled,

around the stump of cigar, and it lacked the vigor Pareti usually brought to the curse, because it was nearly

shift’s end, and he was exhausted. The first time he had yelled it had been three years before, when he had

signed up to work in the goo fields as a harvester. He had yelled it when he’d first seen the mucous gray

plankton mutation spotting this area of the Atlantic. Like leprosy on the cool blue body of the sea.

“Screwin’ goo,” he murmured. It was ritual now. It kept him company in the punt. Just him, alone

there: Joe Pareti and his dying voice. And the ghostly gray-white goo.

He caught the moving flash of grayout of the corner of his eye, light reflecting in the Eskimo-slit

glasses. He wheeled the punt around expertly. The goo was extruding again. A grayish-pale tentacle rose

above the ocean’s surface; it looked like an elephant’s trunk. Skimming smoothly toward it, Pareti

unconsciously gauged his distance: five feet from it, right arm tensed, out comes the net--the strange net on

its pole, that resembled nothing so much as the butterfly nets used by the Indians of Patzcuaro--and with a

side-arm softball pitch of a motion he scooped it up, writhing.

The goo wriggled and twisted, flailed at the meshes, sucked toothlessly up the aluminum handle.

Pareti estimated the chunk at five pounds, even as he brought it inboard and dumped it into the lazarette. It

was heavy for so small a fragment.

As the goo fell toward it, the lazarette dilated and compressed air shut the lid down with a sucking

sound on the tentacle. Then the iris closed over the lid.

The goo had touched him on the glove. Pareti decided it was too much trouble to disinfect

immediately. He swiped absently at his thinning sun-bleached hair, falling over his eyes, and wheeled the

punt around again.

He was about two miles from the TexasTower.

He was fifty miles out into the Atlantic.

He was off the coast of Hatteras, in Diamond Shoals.

He was at 35° latitude, 75° west longitude.

He was well into the goo fields.

He was exhausted. Shift’s end.

Screwin’ goo.

He began working his way back.

The sea was flat, and a long, steady swell rolled back toward the TexasTower. There was no wind,

and the sun shone hard and diamond as it had ever since the Third World War, brighter than it had ever

shone before. It was almost perfect harvesting weather, at five hundred and thirty dollars a shift.

Off to his left a ten-square-yard film of goo lay like a delicate tracery of gray, almost invisible

against the ocean. He altered course and expertly collected it. It offered no fight at all. Stretched too thin.

He continued toward the TexasTower, gathering goo as he skimmed. He rarely encountered the

same shape twice. The largest chunk he collected was disguised as a cyprus stump. (Stupid goo, he thought,

who ever saw a cyprus stump growing fifty miles out?) The smallest was a copy of a baby seal. Cadaverously

gray and eyeless. Pareti gathered each piece quickly, without hesitation: he had an uncanny aptitude for

recognizing goo in any of its shapes, and a flawless harvesting technique that was infinitely more refined and

eloquent than the methods used by the Company-trained harvesters. He was the dancer with natural

rhythm, the painter who had never taken a lesson, the instinctive tracker. It had been the impetus that had

led him here to the goo fields when he had graduated Summa Cum from the Multiversity, rather than into

industry or one of the cattle-prod think-factories. Everything he had learned, all the education he had

gotten; of what use was it in a clogged choking jamcrowded world of twenty-seven billion overcrowded

people, all scrabbing for the most demeaning jobs? Anyone could get an education, a few less got their

degrees, even less got their gold seals, and a handful--like Joe Pareti--came out the other end of the

Multiversity slide-trough with a degree, a doctorate, a gold seal and the double--a rating. And none of it was

worth his natural instinct for goo harvesting.

At the speed he harvested, he could earn more than a projects engineer.

After twelve hours of shift, out on the glare-frosted sea, even that satisfaction was dulled by

exhaustion. He only wanted to hit the bunk in his stateroom. And sleep. And sleep. He threw the soggy

cigar stub into the sea.

The structure loomed up before him. It was traditionally called a TexasTower, yet it bore no

resemblance to the original offshore drilling rigs of pre-Third War America. It looked, instead, like an

articulated coral reef or the skeleton of some inconceivable aluminum whale.

The TexasTower was a problem in definition. It could be moved, therefore it was a ship: it could

be fastened irrevocably to the ocean bottom, therefore it was an island. Above the surface there was a cat’s

cradle network of pipes : feeder tubes into which the goo was fed by the harvesters (as Pareti now fed his

load, hooking the lazarette’s collapsible tube nozzle onto the monel metal hardware of the TexasTower’s

feeder tube, feeling the tube pulse as the pneumatic suction was applied, sucking the goo out of the punt’s

storage bins), pipe racks to moor the punts, more pipes to support the radar mast.

There was a pair of cylindrical pipes that gaped open like howitzers. The entry ports. Below the

waterline, like an iceberg, the TexasTower spread and extended itself, with collapsible sections that could

be extended or folded away as depth and necessity demanded. Here in Diamond Shoals, several dozen of the

lowest levels had been folded inoperative.

It was shapeless, ungainly, slow-moving, impossible to sink in a hurricane, more ponderous than a

galleon. As a ship, it was unquestionably the worst design in nautical history; but as a factory, it was a

marvel.

Pareti climbed out of the mooring complex, carrying his net-pole, and entered the nearest entry

port. He went through the decontamination and storage locks, and was puffed inside the TexasTower

proper. Swinging down the winding aluminum staircase, he heard voices rising from below. It was Mercier,

about to go on-shift, and Peggy Flinn, who had been on sick call for the last three days with her period. The

two harvesters were arguing.

“They’re processing it out at fifty-six dollars a ton,” Peggy was saying, her voice rising. Apparently

they had been at it for some time. They were discussing harvester bonuses.

“Before or after it fragments?” Mercier demanded.

“Now you know damn well that’s after-frag weight,” she snapped back. “Which means every ton

we snag out here gets tanked through and comes up somewhere around forty or forty-one tons after

radiation. We’re getting bonus money on Tower weight, not frag weight!”

Pareti had heard it a million times before in his three years on the goo fields. The goo was sent back

to the cracking and radiation plants when the bins were full. Subjected to the various patented techniques

of the master processing companies the goo multiplied itself molecule for molecule, fragmented, grew,

expanded, swelled, and yielded forty times its own original weight of goo. Which was then “killed” and

reprocessed as the basic artificial foodstuff of a population diet long-since a stranger to steaks and eggs and

carrots and coffee. The Third War had been a terrible tragedy in that it had killed off enormous quantities

of everything except people.

The goo was ground up, reprocessed, purified, vitamin-supplemented, colored, scented, accented,

individually packaged under a host of brand names--VitaGram; Savor; Deelish; Gratifood; Sweetmeat;

Quench-Caffé; Family Treatall--and marketed to twenty-seven billion open and waiting mouths. Merely add

thrice-reprocessed water and serve.

The harvesters were literally keeping the world alive.

And even at five hundred and thirty dollars per shift, some of them felt they were being underpaid.

Pared clanked down the last few steps and the two arguing harvesters looked up at him. “Hi, Joe.”

Mercier said. Peggy smiled.

“Long shift?” she asked archly.

“Long enough. I’m whacked out.”

She stood a little straighter. “Completely?”

Pareti rubbed at his eyes. They felt grainy; he had been getting more dust in them than usual. “I

thought it was that-time-of-the-month for you?”

“Aw gone,” she grinned, spreading her hands like a little girl whose measles have vanished.

“Yeah, that’d be nice,” Pareti accepted her service, “if you’ll throw in a back rub.”

“And I’ll crack your spine.”

Mercier chuckled and moved toward the staircase. “See you later,” he said over his shoulder.

Pareti and Peggy Flinn went down through sections to his stateroom. Living in an encapsulated

environment for upwards of six months at a stretch, the harvesters had evolved their own social

relationships. Women who were touchy about their sexual liaisons did not last long on the TexasTowers.

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摘要：

DOUBLETROUBLEHarlanEllison(whomTheNewYorkercalls“anonstopcontroversialistwhocomesonlikeanangryWoodyAllen”)isaveryspecialkindofwriter.Ifthisisyourfirstencounterwithhim,defendyourselffromattacksonyourworld-view.BecauseheistheonlyonewhocanwriteHarlanEllisonStories.Hisfriends,outstandingfantasistsliketh...

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