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Oannes, From the Flood by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Oannes, From the Flood by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Avatars Inc., 2020) opens with the narrator searching what appears to be an underwater archaeological site using an “avatar” (robotic technology that makes him feel like he is there):

Opening my lids and a great stone paw is reaching for me. From the Avatar’s vantage point it’s about to claw my eyes out. Cue yelp of primeval fear from a professional archaeologist who should know better.
But the Faculty rushed the training, didn’t have many people they could call on, short notice. I never signed up for this kind of technology when I was studying.
Jetting backwards I ram the insanely expensive piece of kit into the wall, and a fresh curtain of clouding dust filters down from the ruin above.
I freeze, because it’s a toss-up whether the flood water is bringing this place down or actually holding it up. No great slide of masonry descends to bury my remote self or those of my fellow researchers.
Researchers.
Tomb raiders.
Thieves. Call it what it is, we are nothing but thieves. But our cause is just, I swear to God. We steal from the past that we may gift to the future.

The narrator and the rest of his team are attempting to recover Sumerian relics (tablets about Oannes, a man or mythical water creature, and an earlier flood), and it soon becomes apparent that this isn’t an archaeological site in the Middle East but a rich collector’s house in a recently flooded future-Louisiana.
Eventually, despite the potentially imminent collapse of the building (spoiler), the narrator finds the tablets he is looking for—and a man and two children who have been trapped in an air pocket by the rising waters. As the team rescue the tablets the building starts to collapse, and the narrator uses the avatar to signal the family to leave the building. Initially they do not respond, so he holds out its arms and uses his broken English to implore them to come:

[Who] knows if I have time? But I will be true to Oannes. I will bring wisdom from the flood, but also I will bring life.

This story has an intriguing idea (rescuing relics from museums and private collections in a climate-changed world), but the storyline is too simple and the dramatic ending feels tacked on (I also had my doubts about how long the family’s oxygen would have lasted in the air pocket).
**+ (Average to Good). 3,850 words. Story link.

Red_Bati by Dilman Dila

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Red_Bati by Dilman Dila1 (Dominion, 2020) opens in a spaceship hold (although that is not immediately obvious, see below) with Red_Bati (originally a robot dog built as a kid’s toy) running out of power and realising that, if it does not get a recharge, it will die. As Red starts hacking the nearby bot and ship systems in an effort to get what it wants, we learn that it was upgraded to look after an old woman called Granny. After her death Red then hid its high level of sentience as it was converted into a mining robot. The loss of one of Red’s mining arms while he was working in that role is how it has come to be in the spaceship’s hold.
Eventually, and I am compressing a lot of the story here (spoiler), Red takes control of the ship and heads out to the asteroid belt to build more of its own kind.
This is a slickly enough told story, with the exception of the confusing (and irrelevant in terms of story setup) first page. The opening paragraph:

Red_Bati’s battery beeped. Granny flickered, and the forest around her vanished. She sighed in exaggerated disappointment. He never understood why she called it a forest, for it was just two rows of trees marking the boundary of her farm. When she was alive, she had walked in it every sunny day, listening to her feet crunching dead twigs, to her clothes rustling against the undergrowth, to the music of crickets, feeling the dampness and the bugs, sniffing at the rotten vegetation, which she thought smelled better than the flowers that Akili her grandson had planted around her house. Now, she liked to relive that experience. With his battery going down, he could not keep up a real life projection and, for the first time, she became transparent, like the blue ghost in the painting that had dominated a wall of her living room. Akili’s mother had drawn it to illustrate one of their favorite stories.

Who is “He” at the beginning of the second sentence? I thought this was referring to a third person, not Red_Bati, and the reason I thought this was because a “he” doesn’t normally have batteries. More generally, the point of view/subject matter bounces around like a ping-pong ball in the first few sentences: Red_Balti, Granny, She, He, She, She, He, Akili’s mother (!).
Furthermore, the whole first page is little more than backstory waffle like the above, and our intitial introduction (apart from the security cameras) to Red_Bati’s environment is a reference to ice floating about like a “predator shark”, something that further confused me.
The story would have benefited from a revised beginning that started with this paragraph:

The half-empty storage room looked like a silver blue honeycomb. They had dumped [Red-Bati] in it after the accident ripped off his forearm. The Captain had evaluated his efficiency and, seeing it down to 80%, tagged him DISABLED. They could not fix his arm on the ship, so they shut him down and dumped him in storage until he got back to Earth. Entombed alive. Left to die a cold death.

From this we would quickly have got Where, Who, What, Why, and realised that there was a sense of peril. You get none of that from the original. Then, after this opening, Red_Bati could have projected Granny for company, and you could then have fed in exchanges with her that outlined his predicament and gave snippets of his backstory.
Ultimately, this is a bit dull for the same reason that a lot of cyberpunk stories are, i.e. they are a series of hacking events that are rarely emotionally engaging or entertaining. It is also uncomplicated, and there is little sense of risk or peril.
** (Average). 4,450 words. Story link.

1. Dilman Dila has an interesting biography.

Gamma by Oskar Källner

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Gamma by Oskar Källner, translated by Gordon James Jones (Clarkesworld #188, May 2022)1 opens with two interstellar beings, spawn of earlier civilizations who now live in the “quantum foam” of the universe, meeting at a black hole. There, Gamma, and another of the “Collective”, Kthelk’tha, absorb energy by flying through its Hawking radiation. We subsequently learn more about them and the universe’s recent history:

When the stars had begun to fade, none of the contemporary civilizations were bothered. There would be thousands of millions of years before dark energy ultimately tore the galaxies apart, before the hydrogen ran out and the residual heat dissipated. And of course, they were right. Not the slightest trace of their civilizations remained when the end came. The races that were unfortunate enough to be born in the twilight era tried desperately to find ways to slow down the cosmic expansion, to invert the dark energy and make the universe contract. They were doomed to fail.
Others tried to accumulate enough matter to build new suns. Some such projects met with success. Controlled wormholes stripped nearby galaxies and interstellar space, and enough elementary building blocks were amassed to construct yellow, fusion-driven suns. Dyson spheres as big as solar systems were built around each new star, to harness all its energy. Thereby, they created the conditions necessary to prolong life for a few billion years more. Yet eventually even those stars burned out, the Dyson spheres fell apart, and the last remaining stardust was consumed by supermassive black holes. The universe entered the era of darkness.  p. 97

Some time after this encounter they fall out and separate, and then Gamma learns of a war started by a Collective faction called the Light Connexion. Gamma subsequently finds Kthelk’tha and sees she has been infected by a virus. Gamma destroys the virus and revives Kthelk’tha, and they decide to head into deep space as there will only be ongoing war at the black hole.
Out in the depths of the dying universe they begin to run low on energy and become dormant, but later wake when they find a Dyson sphere with an anti-matter generator that still has fuel. They explore the sphere and we learn about the builders.
The story ends (spoiler) with Gamma and Kthelk’tha having children (even though their progeny will only have limited life-spans). Then they discover that the builders of the Dyson sphere had developed an Omega device that can change the structure of the universe, alterations that would make it contract and cause suns to be formed. However, to do this, one of them will have to spread themselves throughout the universe and activate the device. Gamma realises that whoever does this will die but, despite Kthelk’tha’s protestations, she sacrifices herself anyway:

Then she plunged into a subdimensional barrier, and her fingers touched the outer boundary of the universe. With the last of her strength, she activated the inversion protocol and several of the universe’s constants were rewritten. The universe slowed down. She could feel it. It would soon begin to contract. New stars. New life. New possibilities.
Her body dissolved and spread as virtual particles throughout the universe. Through them vibrated a final thought:
It is finished.

A suitably cosmic ending. This tale probably resembles other cosmic tales that have appeared in the field over the decades, but it is well enough done, and a change from some of the usual subject matter you find nowadays.
*** (Good). 7,200 words. Story link.

1. This was originally published in Swedish in Efter slutet, Catahya, 2017.

Child’s Play by William Tenn

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Child’s Play by William Tenn (Astounding, March 1947) opens in Mimsy Were the Borogoves territory when a struggling lawyer called Sam Weber accidentally gets a Christmas present from the future. When Weber finally manages to open the package (it eventually responds to his voice commands), he finds that it is a children’s “Bild-a-Man” kit:

Bild-a-Man Set 3. This set is intended solely for the use of children between the ages of eleven and thirteen. The equipment, much more advanced than Bild-a-Man Sets 1 and 2, will enable the child of this age group to build and assemble complete adult humans in perfect working order. The retarded child may also construct the babies and mannikins of the earlier kits. Two disassembleators are provided so that the set can be used again and again with profit. As with Sets 1 and 2, the aid of a census keeper in all disassembling is advised. Refills and additional parts may be acquired from The Bild-a-Man Company, 928 Diagonal Level, Glunt City, Ohio. Remember—only with a Bild-a-Man can you build a man.

After this the story switches to the law office where Weber works, where we find out that Weber has a crush on Tina, the office secretary, but so has the more successful Lew Knight. We also see Tina tell Weber that a strange-looking old man has been enquiring about him.
The rest of the story runs along the twin tracks of (a) Weber experimenting with the Bild-a-man set (he creates various malformed creatures which he eventually disassembles, and then a copy of a baby he is minding for the parents—which he eventually drops off at an orphanage); and (b) Weber watching as Tina goes out with Lew and eventually gets engaged. This latter event makes Weber decide to create a copy of Tina (who he convinces to scan herself in the office on the pretence of getting a wedding present for her), but he then makes a copy of himself first to make sure he has perfected the method.
The climactic scene (spoiler) sees the duplicate Weber wake up and destroy the dissassembleator. There is then some back and forth between the pair just before the strange old man arrives at Weber’s flat (Weber’s landlady mentioned earlier that the strange old man has been looking for him). The man reveals that he is the census keeper for the twenty ninth oblong, and explains why he took so long to arrive at Weber’s flat even though he knew that Weber had accidentally been sent the Bild-a-Man kit from the future (procedures, etc.).
The old man then scans the two Webers and decides the most coherent personality (the Bild-a-Man kit is supposed to produce neurotic, unstable individuals) is the duplicate Weber and proceeds to disassemble the original.
This piece rather feels like a run-of-the-mill Henry Kuttner story with a standard ironic ending1—but, although it is competently executed, the office relationships rather date the piece, it tends to plod along, and it doesn’t have the sense of wonder of Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore’s Mimsy Were the Borogoves, or the darkness of Cyril Kornbluth’s The Little Black Bag.2
*** (Good). 10,550 words. Story link.

1. Coincidentally, I later found this passage in Josh Lukin’s interview of Willian Tenn, A Jew’s-Eye View of the Universe, reprinted in Dancing Naked: The Unexpurgated William Tenn by William Tenn, 2004:

WT: And then I went to sea as a purser on a cargo ship. A purser is a staff officer, head of administrative matters on board a ship. And the reason I went to sea was that I was still living at home at the time, and I had to write on the train going to and from my job. So I found out that on a cargo ship, when the ship is at sea, the radio operator is very busy, and he has nothing to do when the ship is in port, so he takes off The purser, on the other hand, is very busy when the ship is in port, but has litde to do while the ship is at sea. So I figured I would make enough money to support my family and have time to write. And while at sea, I wrote “Child’s Play,” which was my second published story, and of which I was for a long time reasonably proud. I’m not ashamed of it now, but it’s a story by a juvenile: I’m not as proud of it as I was at one time. But it was a tremendous success.
JL: It’s been dramatized for radio at least twice…
WT: Oh yes, for radio, for television—it was anthologized about fifty times, at one point more than almost any other story, all over the world. Clifton Fadiman wrote a nice mention of it for The New Yorker.
JL: I see Kuttner’s influence…
WT: At a given point, I became aware that I was writing what I thought was a Lewis Padgett story. This story is, in a sense, a “Mimsy Were the Borogoves.” I began feeling that I was writing a story that Padgett would have written, and since I loved Padgett, I now had the pleasure of finding out what was going to happen next! It was definitely a Kuttner story. I didn’t know then of Henry Kuttner: I knew Lewis Padgett. I didn’t know that Lewis Padgett was Kuttner or C.L. Moore or anything of those people.
That sold very well. All kinds of New York science-fiction magazine editors wanted stories by me. Ted Sturgeon became my agent. I had met him before the war, in a cafeteria in 1939 on 57th Street. He was the first professional writer I met. He had just been beached: he was a sailor at the time. He had sold two stories to Campbell: one to Unknown, “A God in a Garden,” and one to Astounding, “Ether Breather.” I got to know him, and he was the only professional writer I knew for a long time. I looked him up after I came out of the Army and he came back from the tropics. I’d read his work in the meantime. And when I wrote “Child’s Play,” he told me that he was then functioning as an agent for Damon Knight, Jim Blish, Judy Merril, Chandler Davis, and a whole bunch of other people. He was a very good agent. So he became my agent and helped me get published in all sorts of magazines: Campbell’s Astounding, of course, as well as those of lesser stature.  pp. 258-259

2. According to Robert Silverberg’s introduction to The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, this story was supposed to be included in that volume but the rights could not be obtained. I think it would have been shown up by the Kuttner & Moore and Kornbluth stories mentioned above and, apart from that, it would have been the third story in the book using the same basic gimmick.

Grandpa by James H. Schmitz

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Grandpa by James H. Schmitz (Astounding, February 1955) opens with a fifteen-year-old called Cord anesthetising and examining bugs on an alien planet called Sutang. He is then interrupted by Grayan, an older female friend who warns him that, if he doesn’t start behaving in accordance with the colony’s rules and expectations, he is likely to be sent off-planet.
After this YA setup to the story, the next part sees Cord, Grayan, Nirmond (the regent of the planet), and a young woman called Dane (head of the visiting Colonial Team) set off on a tour of the Bay Farms. To travel there they use one of the planetary life-forms:

Three rafts lay moored just offshore in the marshy cove, at the edge of which Nirmond had stopped the treadcar. They looked somewhat like exceptionally broad-brimmed, well-worn sugarloaf hats floating out there, green and leathery. Or like lily pads twenty-five feet across, with the upper section of a big, gray green pineapple growing from the center of each. Plant animals of some sort. Sutang was too new to have had its phyla sorted out into anything remotely like an orderly classification. The rafts were a local oddity which had been investigated and could be regarded as harmless and moderately useful. Their usefulness lay in the fact that they were employed as a rather slow means of transportation about the shallow, swampy waters of the Yoger Bay. That was as far as the team’s interest in them went at present.

They then go looking for “Grandpa”, a bigger raft they’d rather use but, when they eventually find it, Cord sees that it has moved from where he last left it. They also find that Grandpa’s head (a cone shaped protuberance in the middle of the raft) now has red buds on the top, and has also sprouted vines. Cord attempts to warn the others about using the raft as they have never seen this phenomenon before, but he is fobbed off.
The rest of the story sees an uneventful passage until they pass a group of yellowheads (“vaguely froggy things, man-sized and better”) clinging to tall reeds when, uncharacteristically, one of them slips down into the water and swims underneath Grandpa. Shortly after this event they lose control of the raft (it won’t respond to the heat from their guns) and then there is a convulsion that sees all of them except Cord trapped by the vines. Cord is subsequently forced, after a brief conversation with Dane, to relieve their pain by using his gun’s anaesthetic darts.
The rest of the story sees Grandpa travel far out to sea while Cord observes the creature’s behaviour. Eventually (spoiler) Cord manages to distract Grandpa (it has been swiping at various forms of life that pass before feeding on the smaller ones), and he jumps into the sea ahead. Cord then swims underneath the creature and manages to access a hollow space inside the central cone: there he finds the yellowhead symbiotically attached to Grandpa.
After fighting and killing the yellowhead, Cord slips back into the water and emerges to the rear of a now stationary raft. When he gets on board again it responds to his heat gun and the raft heads towards the shore.
For most of its length this reads like a rather dull YA biology puzzle, but it improves with an exciting climax. I’d note, however, that there is little indication of what Cord is about to do before he goes into the water (I can’t remember any description of him thinking about the yellowhead, or what he plans to do). This is rather too straightforward a piece, I think (especially for its length).
** (Average). 9,050 words. Story link.

The Seafarer by Ritchie Smith and Thomas Penman

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Seafarer by Ritchie Smith and Thomas Penman (New Writings in SF #26, 1976)1 opens with Karangetti and Ana sailing to an island. The beginning is typical of the story’s descriptive prose:

Putting out from Grey Havens in the early morning rain, after Karangetti and a smiling canvas-crawler acquaintance of his had raised up the swelling orange sail, he had steered his sea-craft to the south and east, then she had begun to flee before the wind. Time passed. And while they were eating the bread and cheese and the ripe, tangy citrus fruits that Ana had prepared, and mockingly raising toasts in the vitriolic spirit Richard poured from a wickerworked bottle, they found the softer hues of afternoon all around them: somewhere, their Goldberry had ran out from the later brightness of morning.
About this time a ship appeared out of the distance; he recognized her, a bluff ungainly paddle-cruiser on picket duties off the coastal waters of Mancontinent, all military camouflage greyness and raw, unnatural straight lines, with a single stack trailing a white scarf of smoke; fore and aft were rocket-launcher bundles and light steam cannon. She had hooted twice, three times, as she crossed their course; tiny figures of men waved back at them. Then, she was past, and receding, and soon there were again only the sun and some ghosts of cloud hanging in the vast blueness of the sky, and the darker, mirroring blueness of the sea, with somewhere a horizon sandwiched between.  p. 165

They arrive at an island where there is a dilapidated house that is familiar to Karangetti, and we get a hint that Ana has been sent on a mission to seduce him, and then . . . well, nothing much happens for the next twenty pages or so. They look at the flowers in the garden; we get hints about Earth and Exile; they make love; they look at the ruined cottage; there is more canoodling, and music, etc. etc.
In between all of the above, Karangetti generally moons about like a Romantic poet, and the writers of the story take the opportunity to give us the benefit of (I assume) their English Lit. degrees—we get quotes from William Wordsworth, Blake, the Corpus Christi Carol, and mentions of Huxley’s Doors of Perception, Tolstoy, etc. (and in the background there is a musical soundtrack of Maple Leaf Rag, Clair de Lune, Moonlight Sonata, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, etc.). At times it feels like the occupants of Pseuds Corner2 having a day out on an alien planet.
Finally, at the end of the story, Karangetti shows Ana several graves, one of whom was his lover Margueritte:

‘As to what happened here, I will tell you.’ There, on the hill-top, with the wind freshening and the sun sinking, dying and bathing the sky with its blood, Karangetti swept horizons with his grandiose hands.
‘There, to the north, lies Mancontinent. There, far over in the south and east, is where the Loct came down…
‘It was a day in October, iron-skied, lightly raining. I was called away from our few weather eyes and installations and such on this place, to Beachead, which was then still a base rather than a city. Marguerite was alone in our house. It had happened before but she told me she didn’t mind . . . Anyway—the Loct had been quiet for a year or two, but they chose that day to make an exploratory raid.’  p. 189

Can you have “grandiose hands”? No matter: although I like the initial descriptive passages, the rest of this has far, far too many words, and virtually nothing in the way of a story.
* (Mediocre). 7,550 words. Story link.

1. I was a bit disappointed with this story as I originally rated it (and the other two works* they published in New Writings in SF) as good.
* The other two stories were The Banks of the Nile (NWISF #28) and Amsterdam (NWISF #30, by Smith alone).

2. The wiki for Pseud’s Corner.

The Cinderella Machine by Michael G. Coney

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Cinderella Machine by Michael G. Coney (F&SF, August 1976) is set in his “Peninsula” series, and opens with Joe Sagar on Flambuoyant, the hydrofoil of the former 3-V star Carioca Jones. Sagar is thinking of a girl he once knew and loved called Joanne, an ex-prisoner who seems to have made a particular sacrifice in this dark future world of prisoner bondage and organ transplants:

I’d been reminded of Joanne by the sight of Carioca’s hands, white and smooth beside mine as they gripped the rail. Recently she had taken to wearing long gloves, but today the skin was bare, and I could see the thin pale lines around her wrists—the only physical reminder of the grafts.  p. 112

The rest of the beginning of the story is equally busy, and sees mention of a forthcoming 3-V film festival, The Carioca Jones Revival Season, a protest march by The Foes of Bondage to the State Pen demanding that the organ pool be disbanded (which, paradoxically given the above, will also feature Jones), and Jones’ order from Sagar of a pair of long gloves made from slitheskin (an emotion-sensitive material).
We are also introduced to Carioca Jones’ pet:

The afternoon had turned to chill early evening as we made our way towards Carioca’s mooring at Deep Cove. I helped her onto the landing stage and dutifully returned to the boat for the unwieldy Nag, her moray eel. Nag is a normally comatose beast and very little trouble—a welcome change from the unpredictable, defunct [land-shark] Wilberforce. I placed the fish on the landing stage, and he undulated slowly after Carioca like an evil black snake, the oxygenator pulsing near his gills. He wore a jeweled collar; Carioca always dresses her pets well.  p. 114

The next part of the story is equally busy, and sees an official from the State Pen ask Sagar for his help in stopping the march by the Foes of Bondage. Sagar tells him he is unable to help. Then, when Sagar later goes out to visit Jones, he is introduced to douglas sutherland, an ex-con with metal hands. It materialises that sutherland was a bonded man who received a reduced sentence after his freeman (owner, essentially) took his hands after the freeman had a farming accident. Sagar also learns that Sutherland was previously a surgeon, but now operates a sculptograph, a device that rejuvenates skin, and that he will be treating Jones before her appearance at the Revival to make her more youthful looking.
When prompted by Jones to demonstrate the machine to Sagar, sutherland gets rid of Nag the eel—the creature has been pestering sutherland and he obviously detests it—and he puts a lump of raw fish in the sculptograph. Sutherland then removes a wart on Sagar’s hand, leaving the treated part blemish free and less aged. He tells Sagar that the rejuvination effect should last for around three days, and adds that, to achieve a permanent change, he would need to use human meat. . . . Three days later, the skin starts sloughing off of Sagar’s hand in a most unsightly manner, but the wart does not reappear.
There are (spoiler) another few pieces put in place before the story’s mousetrap ending, and these involve (a) Sagar going to a sling gliding competition1 and picking up a young woman who he takes for a drive and later starts kissing—only to find out that she is, of course, the much younger Carioca Jones (this part of the story does not really convince); (b) the State Pen official giving Jones human flesh from the organ pool to get the Foes of Bondage march cancelled; and (c) sutherland seeing the scars on Carioca Jones’ wrists just before he treats her backstage at the Revival . . . .
The climax of the story sees Sagar discover how the State Pen official managed to get the march cancelled shortly before he hears screaming from backstage. Then Jones appears:

The curtains slashed down the center, and a creature appeared, blinking at the light, her screams dying to whimpers as the brightness hit her and illuminated her old, old face, her leathery wrinkled skin, her vulture’s neck of empty pouched flesh. . . .
She stood slightly crouched, her fingers crooked before her; but there was nothing aggressive in her stance—it was more as though she was backing away from an attack.
She wore a plain black dress which accentuated the pallor of her legs, her arms, her face. She was Death incarnate; it seemed impossible that a creature so old, so ugly, should possess the gift of life. Slowly she raised her hands until they shadowed her face and the spotlight picked out the white graft scars on her wrists. She gripped the folds of the curtain above her head while a trickle of spittle glistened at the corner of her slack lips, and the most terrible thing was her breasts, high and pale and full and youthful, voluptuous, as they rose from under her dress when she arched her back as though in terminal agony.
For an instant she stood rigid; in the dazzling light she couldn’t have seen us, and it was just possible she was not aware of her audience, or even of her whereabouts. Her single final scream died away into a croak, and she sagged; her arms dropped to her sides; her ancient eyes grew slitted and cunning as she glanced quickly from side to side, seized the curtain and whirled it about her like a cloak. We heard the echo of a cackle of laughter. The folds fell back into place, the stage was empty. She was gone.  pp. 128-129

Wonderfully over the top.
Sagar goes looking for Jones and finds she has tried to commit suicide (she thinks that sutherland has used the human flesh she provided and that the changes will be permanent), but then, as Sagar phones for an ambulance, he finds Nag’s empty collar and no sign of the land-eel. . . .
This is a highly entertaining piece with a brilliantly twisty plot and characters that are, to a greater or lesser extent, wonderfully flawed: Jones is obviously a narcissistic and amoral villain, and Sagar is no angel either (even if he does model “normal” most of the time).
**** (Very good). 8,400 words. Story link.

1. The sling-glider launch mechanism in Coney’s “Peninsula” stories always confused me a little, but this piece has a good description:

Presdee’s turn came. I watched the spray trailing silver from the distant hydrofoil as it raced for the Fulcrum post; some distance behind followed the figure of Presdee on waterskis, the dartlike glider harnessed to his back. As the speed increased, Presdee rose into the air, kicked off the skis and tucked his legs back into the narrow fuselage. I could just make out the thin thread of the rigid Whip connecting him to the speeding boat. He angled away, gaining height as the boat slowed momentarily and veered to bring him on a parallel course. The Whip was locked into position, now projecting at right angles to the boat, rising stiffly about thirty degrees into the sky where Presdee soared. Then the Eye on the other side of the boat engaged with the Hook of the Fulcrum post and snapped the hydrofoil into a tight turn at full speed.
The flailing Whip accelerated Presdee to a speed which couldn’t have been far short of three hundred miles per hour; he touched his release button and hurtled across the sky, heading northwards up the Strait. p. 121

One of the stories in this series is titled The Hook, the Eye, and the Whip (Galaxy, March 1974). There is an ISFDB list for the series, and I would add that I am at a loss as to why none of these “Peninsula” stories (bar one atypical piece) ever made it into the “Year’s Bests”.

The Gioconda Caper by Bob Shaw

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Gioconda Caper by Bob Shaw (Cosmic Kaleidoscope, 1976) opens like a hardboiled detective story, but quickly becomes something else:

It was a Thursday morning in January—stale and dank as last night’s cigar butts—and my office phone hadn’t rung all week. I was slumped at the desk, waiting out a tequila hangover, when this tall, creamy blonde walked in. The way she was dressed whispered of money, and what was inside the dress hinted at my other hobby—but I was feeling too lousy to take much notice.
She set a flat parcel on my desk and said, “Are you Phil Dexter, the private psi?”
I tipped back my hat and gave her a bleak smile. “What does it say on my office door, baby?”
Her smile was equally cool. “It says Glossop’s Surgical Corset Company.”
“I’ll kill that signwriter,” I gritted. “He promised to be here this week for sure. Two months I’ve been in this office, and. . .”
“Mr. Dexter, do you mind if we set your problems on one side and discuss mine?” She began untying the string on the parcel.

The woman, Caroline Colvin, then unwarps the parcel and shows him a very good copy of the Mona Lisa—but the hands seem in a slightly different position and, when Dexter touches it, he gets an impression of great age, hilly landscapes, and a bearded man standing in front of a carousel-like contraption. Dexter rapidly comes to the conclusion that the painting is by Da Vinci himself.
Dexter then learns that Colvin inherited the painting from her father, who had visited Italy the previous spring. When he touches the painting again, he senses that her father recently travelled to Milan—the pair are soon catching the noon sub-orbital to the city.
Once they arrive in the city, it isn’t long before Dexter’s psi abilities enable him to track down a man called Crazy Julio, something Dexter manages with the help of a highly dodgy waiter called Mario (who, when he isn’t trying to buy Colvin from Dexter for the white slave trade, is gouging Dexter for money and rewinding the speedometer on the car he has borrowed from his mother).
The last part of the story sees Dexter and Colvin drive the last two miles to Crazy Julio’s without Mario as Dexter doesn’t want the waiter to get wind of the Mona Lisa, or the potential money involved (Dexter comments to Colvin, “If that poor boy isn’t in the Mafia, it’s because they gave him a dishonorable discharge.”).
When the two of them finally arrive at Julio’s farmhouse he greets them with a shotgun, but Dexter soon overcomes his resistance:

“Come on, Julio.” I got out of the car and loomed over him. “Where is the cave?”
Julio’s jaw sagged. “How you know about the cave?”
“I have ways of knowing things.” I used quite a lot of echo chamber in the voice, aware that peasants tend to be afraid of espers.
Julio looked up at me with worried eyes. “I get it,” he said in a low voice. “You are pissy.”
“P-S-I is pronounced like ‘sigh,’ ” I gritted. “Try to remember that, will you? Now, where’s that cave?”

In the cave (spoiler) Dexter and Colvin discover that they are another fifty or sixty Mona Lisa paintings loaded on a merry-go-round-like device with a viewing lens attached. Dexter realises that it must be some sort of animation device, and gets Julio to turn the crankshaft while he watches:

On top of everything else that had transpired, I was about to have the privilege of actually viewing Leonardo’s supreme masterpiece brought to magical life, to commune with his mind in a manner that nobody would have thought possible, to see his sublime artistry translated into movement. Perhaps I was even to learn the secret of the Gioconda smile.
Filled with reverence, I put my eyes to the viewing holes and saw the Mona Lisa miraculously moving, miraculously alive. She raised her hands to the neckline of her dress and pulled it down to expose her ample left breast. She gave her shoulder a twitch, and the breast performed the classiest circular swing I had seen since the last night I witnessed Fabulous Fifi Lafleur windmilling her tassels in Schwartz’s burlesque hall. She then drew her dress back up to its former position of modesty and demurely crossed one hand over the other, smiling a little.
“Oh, God,” I whispered. “Oh, God, God, God, God!”

The last scene has the complication of Mario turning up at the cave and getting the drop on them. Initially he is only interested in the immense wealth that will be his but, after viewing the animation, burns the paintings and mechanism out of an upwelling of national pride.
An amusing story with a clever (and certainly different!) central gimmick.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 7,650 words. Story link.

Quit Zoomin’ Those Hands Through the Air by Jack Finney

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Quit Zoomin’ Those Hands Through the Air by Jack Finney (Collier’s, 4th August 1951) is an amusing piece that opens with the narrator, an American Civil War veteran, telling his grandson to “quit zoomin’ your hands through the air, boy”. He tells his grandson that that he knew he would be a good pilot. The narrator then goes on to explain why, beginning his story in 1864 with him and a Union major riding past the White House.
During their journey the Major explains he used to be a Harvard professor, and shows the narrator a device in a box he is carrying:

“Know what this is, boy?”
“Nosir.”1
“It’s my own invention based on my own theories, nobody else’s. They think I’m a crackpot up at the School, but I think it’ll work. Win the war, boy.” He moved a little lever inside the box. “Don’t want to send us too far ahead, son, or technical progress will be beyond us. Say, 85 years from now, approximately; think that ought to be about right?”
“Yessir.”
“All right.” The Major jammed his thumb down on a little button in the box; it made a humming sound that kept rising higher and higher till my ears began to hurt; then he lifted his hand. “Well,” he said, smiling and nodding, the little pointy beard going up and down, “it is now some 80-odd years later.” He nodded at the White House. “Glad to see it’s still standing.”

They continue on to the Smithsonian museum and, after gaining access by time travelling around the walls, the Major decides they will take the Kittyhawk back in time to help them win the battle at Richmond. The narrator is sent back to 1864 for petrol while the major moves the Kittyhawk out of the museum.
The Major then explains to the narrator how to control the craft, and they hook it up to the horses. The Kittyhawk is soon airborne:

The road was bright in the moonlight, and we tore along over it when it went straight, cut across bends when it curved, flying it must have been close to forty miles an hour. The wind streamed back cold, and I pulled out the white knit muffler my grandma gave me and looped it around my throat. One end streamed back, flapping and waving in the wind. I thought my forage cap might blow off, so I reversed it on my head, the peak at the back, and I felt that now I looked the way a flying-machine driver ought to, and wished the girls back home could have seen me.

They land back at base and, after the narrator arranges to purchase a jug of whisky, which he puts in the aircraft beside the petrol, they go to see General Grant:

“Sir,” said the Major, “we have a flying machine and propose, with your permission, to use it against the rebs.”
“Well,” said the General, leaning back on the hind legs of his chair, “you’ve come in the nick of time. Lee’s men are massed at Cold Harbor, and I’ve been sitting here all night dri— thinking. They’ve got to be crushed before—A flying machine, did you say?”
“Yessir,” said the Major.
“H’mm,” said the General. “Where’d you get it?”
“Well, sir, that’s a long story.”
“I’ll bet it is,” said the General. He picked up a stub of cigar from the table beside him and chewed it thoughtfully. “If I hadn’t been thinking hard and steadily all night, I wouldn’t believe a word of this.”

The Major proposes that they fill the aircraft with grenades and drop them on rebel headquarters but Grant vetoes the plan (“Air power isn’t enough, son”) and tells them what he wants:

“I want you to go up with a map. Locate Lee’s positions. Mark them on the map and return. Do that, Major, and tomorrow, June 3, after the Battle of Cold Harbor, I’ll personally pin silver leaves on your straps. Because I’m going to take Richmond like –well I don’t know what. As for you, son”—he glanced at my stripe—“you’ll make corporal. Might even design new badges for you; pair of wings on the chest or something like that.”
“Yessir,” I said.
“Where’s the machine?” said the General. “Believe I’ll walk down and look at it. Lead the way.” The Major and me saluted, turned and walked out, and the General said, “Go ahead; I’ll catch up.”
At the field the General caught up, shoving something into his hip pocket—a handkerchief, maybe. “Here’s your map,” he said, and he handed a folded paper to the Major.
The Major took it, saluted and said, “For the Union, sir! For the cause of—”
“Save the speeches,” said the General, “till you’re running for office.”

After the narrator fills the tank they drop over the cliff edge and get airborne. The next part of the story tells of their reconnaissance of the rebel lines, a task complicated by the fact that the Kittyhawk seems to have become “high-spirited”, leading the narrator to complete some wild, aerobatic manoeuvres to keep control.
After they complete their task (during which the narrator finds his whiskey has been stolen), they land back at camp and pass on the map. Then they return the Kittyhawk to the future-Smithsonian so they “don’t break the space-time continuum”.
The next day (spoiler) the Union troops attack and are routed. The Major and the narrator disguise themselves and slip away.
Years later, the narrator sees Grant when there is public reception at the White House on New Year’s Day. When (by now, President) Grant recognises the narrator, he tells him to wait in a room. Later on they discuss the incident and what went wrong:

So I told him; I’d figured it out long since, of course. I told him how the flying machine went crazy, looping till we could hardly see straight, so that we flew north again and mapped our own lines.
“I found that out,” said the General, “immediately after ordering the attack.”
Then I told him about the sentry who’d sold me the whisky, and how I thought he’d stolen it back again, when he hadn’t.
The General nodded. “Poured that whisky into the machine, didn’t you? Mistook it for a jug of gasoline.”
“Yessir,” I said.
He nodded again. “Naturally the flying machine went crazy. That was my own private brand of whisky, the same whisky Lincoln spoke of so highly. That damned sentry of mine was stealing it all through the war.”2

Grant then adds that he and Lee discussed air power after the surrender at Appomattox, and he discovered that Lee was opposed to it as well. Both men agreed to keep quiet about the Kittyhawk incident (“As Billy Sherman said, war is hell, and there’s no sense starting people thinking up ways to make it worse”).
This is a delightful piece, and an excellent example of the style and wit that Anthony Boucher and Mick McComas (the editors of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, who reprinted the piece in their December 1952 issue) were attempting to import into the genre at the beginning of that decade. To me, this is an archetypal F&SF story.
**** (Very Good). 6,250 words. Story link.

1. I’m pretty sure that the only two lines of dialogue the narrator has (after the introduction) are “Nosir” and “Yessir”.

2. Those keen on alcohol-related SF tales of the Civil War should also check out James Thurber’s If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox. Story link.

I’m Scared by Jack Finney

Posted on by Paul Fraser

I’m Scared by Jack Finney (Collier’s, 15th September 1951) opens with the narrator listening to the radio and hearing a snatch of an old program before the normal one resumes. Soon he learns of other temporal anomalies from his friends and colleagues:

A man on Long Island received a telephone call from his sister in New York one Friday evening. She insists that she did not make this call until the following Monday, three days later. At the Forty-fifth Street branch of the Chase National Bank, I was shown a check deposited the day before it was written. A letter was delivered on East Sixty-Eighth Street in New York City, just seventeen minutes after it was dropped into a mailbox on the main street of Green River, Wyoming.

There are several cases that are described in some detail: a woman is continually pestered by a stray dog—but, when she later gets a puppy, it grows up to be the same animal (and then one day disappears); a man takes several time delay photographs of himself and his family—in the last exposure a woman other than his wife is standing beside him; a revolver is found by the police the night before a gun with the same ballistics is used in a murder; a contemporary car accident victim is found to be a missing person from 1876.
After a little too much of this kind of thing, the narrator floats the idea that, because people are rebelling against the present and have an increasing longing for the past, “man is disturbing the clock of time” and causing it to become tangled. The narrator finally addresses this discontent with a homily about the fact that we have the ability to provide a decent life for everyone—so why don’t we?
This story is never really more than a notion (albeit an interestingly described one), and the ending doesn’t really follow the logic of the narrator’s theory—if people were longing for the past, you would think they would be going back there, not getting knocked down and killed in their future.
** (Average). 5,300 words. Story link.