Category: Bob Shaw

Light of Other Days by Bob Shaw

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Light of Other Days by Bob Shaw (Analog, August 1966) begins with Garland and his pregnant wife, Selina, driving in the West of Scotland when they see a sign: “SLOW GLASS—Quality High, Prices Low”. Garland stops to inquire, much to the irritation of his wife (she is pregnant, neither of them are pleased about the matter, and it is causing significant friction between them).
After the couple go up the path to find the owner, they come to a cottage where they see the proprietor of the slow glass farm, Hagan, sitting on a wall. They also see, through the cottage window, a young woman holding a small boy. Hagan doesn’t invite the pair inside, but instead brings out a blanket so they can sit on the wall beside him.
Hagan then talks to them about the slow glass he has for sale—10 year in-phase material which has a view of the spectacular landscape in front of them, and which costs £200 for a four foot window. Garland is impressed by the 10 year specification, but the price is not as cheap as he hoped. Meanwhile, his wife Selina is shocked at the cost:

“You don’t understand, darling,” I said, already determined to buy.
“This glass will last ten years and it’s in phase.”
“Doesn’t that only mean it keeps time?”
Hagan smiled at her again, realizing he had no further necessity to bother with me. “Only, you say! Pardon me, Mrs. Garland, but you don’t seem to appreciate the miracle, the genuine honest-to-goodness miracle, of engineering precision needed to produce a piece of glass in phase. When I say the glass is ten years thick it means it takes light ten years to pass through it.”

When Hagan’s explanation about the time delaying properties of slow glass suddenly tails off, Garland looks away from the view he is buying and sees that Hagan is looking at the young woman and child, who have once again appeared in the window but seem to be paying no attention to what is going on outside.
After a few more clues are dropped (spoiler), the story resolves when Hagan goes to get a pane of slow glass for the couple. Selina takes the rug back into the cottage and—before Garland can stop her from going in—they discover the inside of the cottage is “damp, stinking, and utterly deserted”. There is no woman or child there, and the couple realise they have been looking at a pane of slow glass. When Hagan returns he sees what has happened and, before the couple go, tells them that his wife and child were killed by a hit and run driver on the Oban road. . . .
I think that this story would be better without its final line (“He was looking at the house, but I was unable to tell if there was anyone at the window”) but this is a very minor quibble about what is an excellent piece, a deserved classic, and something that should have been that year’s Hugo & Nebula winner (it lost against Larry Niven’s Neutron Star in the Hugo ballot, and Richard Wilson’s The Secret Place in the Nebula one).
***** (Excellent). 3,150 words. Story link.

1. The rest of the stories in the “Slow Glass” series are listed at ISFDB.

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.

Dream Fighter by Bob Shaw

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Dream Fighter by Bob Shaw (F&SF, February 1977) takes place after the “Dust-Up” (which appears to have been a limited nuclear war), and starts with Victor Rowan and his wife Jane checking into a dilapidated hotel. Rowan is a dream fighter, a mutant who can project images, and we get an early demonstration of his abilities when the couple decide to take their disagreement about the quality of their accommodation out of the hotel corridor and into their room:

“Do you mind if we continue the conversation inside? If we’re paying for the room, we might as well make use of it.”
Jane nodded, turned the key in the lock and pushed the door open.
Just beyond it, in the shabby dimness of the room, stood a grinning, scaly horror — part man, part dragon — which raised a clawed hand in menace. Jane drew breath sharply, but stood her ground.
“Victor,” she said. “Victor!”
“I’m sorry,” Rowan mumbled. He closed his mind, painfully, and the creature vanished into nothingness.  p. 65

We then learn that Rowan is due to compete in a dream fighter competition that evening and, in the rest of this section, we also find out that (a) his ability is due to a small walnut shaped mutation on the top of his head, (b) he has lost twelve fights in a row, and (c) Grumman, his next opponent, is very good.
There is also a scene where Rowan’s agent, Sammy Kling, meets with Tuck Raphael, who manages Grumman. Raphael has big plans for Grumman (who Kling quickly identifies as a psychopath) and bribes Kling to get Rowan to “accept defeat gracefully.” Kling takes the money but does not tell Rowan, who he figures will lose the fight anyway.
The climactic scene opens with Rowan meeting Grumman at the stadium for the first time:

A strongly built man he recognized as Grumman emerged from another corridor and reached the foot of the ramp at the same time. Rowan was instantly aware of his opponent’s chilling psychic aura, but he went through it, like a swimmer breasting an icy tide, and held out his hand.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” he said.
Grumman looked down at the outstretched hand and conjured a piece of brown, smoking filth into it. The image was too close to Rowan’s sphere of influence to last for more than a fraction of a second before he blanked it out of existence, but the accompanying mental shockwave had the force of a physical blow.  p. 70

Just before the fight begins, Rowan gets another taste of things to come:

At the head of the ramp, one on each side, were two low circular bases. Grumman went to the one on the left. Rowan turned right and was still a couple of paces from his base when there was an abrupt silence, followed by the sound of a woman screaming. He spun and found himself facing a thirty-foot high demon.
A red light began flashing in the judges’ kiosk, to indicate that Grumman had made a foul play by leading off before the signal.
Rowan’s senses were swamped by the reality of the beast towering over him. He had seen many monsters during his career, beings designed to inspire fear and thus weakness, but this one was in a class of its own. Its face was a compound of things human and things animal, and of things the earth had never seen. Its body was grotesquely deformed, yet true to alien symmetries — black, powerful, matted with hair in some places, glistening naked in others. And above all, the demon was obscene, massively sexual, with an overpowering realization of detail which had the intended effect of cowing the beholder’s mind. Rowan was closest to the apparition, and he took the full projected force of it.  p. 71

The fight initially goes as expected, with Rowan taking a psychic beating as his images are overpowered. Later in the contest however (spoiler), Rowan manages to recover when Grumman is briefly distracted:

[Rowan] summoned up an old friend — one who had settled many issues for him in the past.
Valerius was a professional soldier, a scarred and weather-beaten veteran who had served with three different legions in Syria, Gaul and Britain. He had withstood rain, snow and desert heat with equal stoicism, and he had slain the varied enemies of Rome with impartial efficiency, regardless of whether they wore silks or skins, regardless of which gods those enemies believed to be giving them protection. He was a stolid, unimaginative man — as plain, functional and uncompromising as the short sword he carried — and in all his years of service he had never encountered a creature which could survive having an iron blade driven through its guts. And, as Valerius saw things, this meant that no such creature existed.
Rowan — knowing by heart every detail, every rivet and thong of the legionary’s equipment and armor — snapped him into existence in microseconds. He was much smaller than the demon, a sign that Rowan’s strength was nearly spent, but his sword was sharp, and he struck with economical swiftness. The blade went deep into the demon’s protruding belly, and puslike fluids gouted. Rowan heard Grumman grunt with pain and surprise, and he guessed at once that the younger man had never experienced neuro-shock before.
This is what it’s like, he thought savagely, directing onto the demon a flurry of hacking blows which transmitted their fury to its creator, convulsing him with sympathetic shock.  p. 73

Rowan wins the fight but, of course, he is later accosted in the street by Raphael’s thugs, and revenge taken when they cut off his “walnut,” which robs him of his powers. After the spade strikes down, there is a great line:

And, in that ultimate pang of agony, Rowan was born into the world of normal men.  p. 74

The story should probably have stopped there but it continues on for another few paragraphs as Rowan returns to his concerned wife, and asks her whether she wants to hear “the bad news, or the good news.”
When I first read this is 1977 I thought it was excellent, partly because of the 1950s post-nuclear holocaust feel of the story, partly because I didn’t see the end coming, and partly because of the great line above. This time around I didn’t find it quite so good, probably because I knew what was coming, and I could also see one or two areas where it could be slightly improved (see my comment about the ending above). One other thing that tripped me up a little—and this isn’t the story’s fault—is that I remembered a great scene that isn’t in this story but another one!1
Still, this is a pretty good piece, and I’d probably have it in my ‘Best Of’ for 1977.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 4200 words.

1. I think that other story is Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by James Quinn (F&SF, December 1977).