Tag: novelette

Tunnels by Eleanor Arnason

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Tunnels by Eleanor Arnason (Asimov’s SF, May-June 2020) is the sixth of the author’s ‘Lydia Duluth’ stories to appear. This one finds her in Innovation City, an island on the planet Grit, and she is there, as usual, on a work assignment for her employer, the holoplay production company Stellar Harvest. Most of the first part of the story is a mixture of background material (including a previous run-in she had with the owners of the island, a genemod company called BioInnovation), a description of the local silicon and carbon based lifeforms, and travelogue.
The story finally gets going when she meets an actor’s agent for tea to discuss a production in progress on Grit. Before this, however, Duluth feels like she is coming down with a cold and, after the meal, she feels worse. Not only does it feel like she has caught the flu, she also has a compunction to go down into the railway system tunnels under the city. Her inbuilt AI, which hasn’t said a lot until this point, tells her to phone for help, but she can’t remember how. Then she sees a “Gotcha” on the inside of her eyelids, and realises she has been infected with a hacked flu virus.
The second part of the story sees Duluth wake to find herself in a dark tunnel, with her AI silent. She starts walking and eventually finds a lit water fountain where, a little bit later, an alien Goxhat turns up:

[She] saw something by the drinking fountain, her size, but lower to the floor. The way it moved was distinctive. She came closer. The creature had an oval body that rested on four legs, and four arms, two on each side of the oval body. One arm in each pair ended in a formidable-looking pincher. The other ended in a cluster of tentacles. The creature was holding a cup in one of its tentacle-hands and dipping it into the fountain. There was no head. Instead, its brain was housed in a bulge atop its body. There ought to be four eyes in the bulge, though Lydia couldn’t see them. The Goxhat was facing away from her.
“Hello,” she said in humanish.
The alien spun. The four blue eyes glared. “Dangerous!” it cried in humanish. “Beware!” It waved the cup, spilling water. “Fierce! Fierce!”
“I’m not a threat,” Lydia said, trying to sound reasonable and unafraid. As far as she knew, the Goxhat were never dangerous to members of other species, but this one looked agitated and poorly groomed. The black hair that covered its body was spiky in some places and matted in others. What the heck was this guy doing here in this condition, and where was the rest of it?
“Where are your other bodies?” Lydia asked.
The Goxhat screamed and ran into the darkness.
Well, that had certainly been the wrong question to ask.  p. 21

Eventually, Duluth manages to talk to the creature and discovers that it knows other humans in the tunnels, and she manages to convince it to take her to them. She later meets three others that have been trapped underground for years because they too caught the hacked flu virus, and one of the side effects is that trying to climb up any of the stairways incapacitates them. Duluth also learns that the tunnels aren’t actually in use, but are a result of a BioInnovation genmod product that has run wild and spread under the planet.
Further adventures follow, beginning with the four of them (and the Goxhat) going to a vagrants camp (this other group of humans aren’t infected, but refuse to help those who are because they variously use them for stories, provided by Genghis the professor, and sex, from Tope the courtesan, etc.). This encounter is rather irrelevant to the story because when Lydia later talks to the Goxhat and asks it its name, it hoots three times, and adds that no-one has ever asked, before offering to lead her to the surface. However, the meeting provides an amusing after dinner episode where (a) Duluth is quizzed by the tunnel dwellers about a holo star she knows and (b) Genghis’s story about Thor losing his hammer is subject to a relentless analysis of the character’s attitudes and behaviour (“You can’t be killing people, even if they’re giants. It’s illegal.” “And wrong,” etc.).
The last section (spoiler)—where Duluth and Three Hoots reach the surface, steal a boat and escape to the mainland, and then BioIn and Stellar Harvest (Duluth’s employers) security get involved—is routine stuff and not as engaging as the previous part (even with Three Hoots’ revelation about how its other bodies died after they discovered financial irregularities in BioIn’s accounts). The story also feels longer than it needs to be (it is just short of novella length).
Overall an entertaining and amusing, if minor, piece.
*** (Good). 17,400 words.

All Under Heaven by John Brunner

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All Under Heaven by John Brunner (Asimov’s SF, mid-December 1995) begins with a young man called Chodeng watch a military procession arrive in a Chinese town as he helps his uncle mend the temple roof. When his uncle catches Chodeng looking at the scribe sat among the visitors, he chastises him for daydreaming. Later that evening though, as they all gather for a meal, Chodeng is the one who translates for the visitors (who speak a different dialect). During this Chodeng and the villagers learn from General Kao-Li and his scribe, Bi-tso, that they are headed towards the next village to look for meteorites. Chodeng is ordered to go with them.
When they arrive at Gan Han (meaning “not enough water”) after an arduous journey through the hills, they are surprised at to find a verdant oasis, with rice-filled paddies, frogs and ducks. Chodeng is dispatched to speak to one of the young women in the paddy fields, and he quickly finds that (a) they speak the same language as the visitors (they were banished to this area by a previous emperor) and (b) the village bloomed into this paradise after the arrival of the meteorites. Then matters take an even stranger turn when the rest of the locals turn up:

Can this be how a dragon looks? The question sprang unbidden to Chodeng’s lips, but Bi-tso spoke before he had time to utter it.
“A phoenix? Are there still phoenixes in our decadent age?”
Mention of such a legendary, powerful creature dismayed their escorts. They exchanged glances eloquent of apprehension, only to be distracted a second later as the pack animals caught—what? The scent, perhaps, of what was approaching. Or maybe they saw it, or detected strange vibrations in the air, or registered its approach by some sense too fine for coarse humanity. At all events it frightened them, and for the next few minutes the men had all they could do to prevent the beasts from shucking their loads and bolting.
[. . .]
A phoenix, was it? Well, if a scholar so identified it. . . . On first seeing it he had at once felt a dragon to be more likely. Yet—
Yet was he seeing it at all? Seeing it in the customary sense of the term? Somehow he felt not. Somehow he felt, when he tried to stare directly at it and focus its image, to get rid of the shiny hazy blur that seemed like a concentration of the strange luminosity he had already detected in the local air, what he had mentally compared to the nimbus round figures in religious paintings, that the—the creature wasn’t there to be seen. Not there there. Nearby. In a perceptible location. But not there in the sense that one might walk, on his own sore human feet, to where it was. One couldn’t judge how tall, how wide, how deep from front
to back…. In fact, apart from the bare fact of its existence, one could describe it in no terms whatsoever.  p. 91-92

It soon becomes apparent that the creature is an alien when it starts mind to mind communication with Chodeng. During a long conversation he finds out that it arrived with the meteorites (the remaining parts of its spaceship) and compelled the villagers to help it, later rewarding them with improved living conditions. After some more chat it disappears—but Chodeng senses it is still there. Then the head man invites the visitors to eat and rest.
The back half of the story sees Chodeng slip away with the girl he saw earlier, Tai Ping, during dinner—at which point the alien starts mentally communicating with him, stating that it needs his help to organise the collection of the scattered parts of its ship. The alien offers him the girl’s sexual favours in return, but when Chodeng approaches Tai Ping he realises that the alien is controlling her, and he refuses. He then tells the alien that they will help it retrieve the various parts of its ship in the morning. After the alien leaves the girl’s father arrives and thanks Chodeng for sparing his daughter.
The final act (spoiler) sees the visitors and locals arrive at the meteorite/crash site. The alien starts talking to Chodeng, who relays its messages to the General and Bi-tso, and they hear of its extra-terrestrial origins and how, after Chodeng’s actions the night before, it realises that it has underestimated humanity’s potential to be civilized. The alien then reveals its physical body to the humans (as opposed to the projection they all saw before), at which point the General tells the soldiers to kill it for its various breaches of Imperial law (forced labour, etc.), After it dies, and they all turn back towards the village, they see the barren scene and realise that the greenery and water was an illusion.
This has some good local colour and characterisation, but the stranded alien plot isn’t particularly original, and the flip-flops at the end (the alien’s change of heart, the General’s execution order) make the story too busy and too contrived.
** (Average). 11,450 words.

Lifeboat on a Burning Sea by Bruce Holland Rogers

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Lifeboat on a Burning Sea by Bruce Holland Rogers (F&SF, October-November 1995) begins with the narrator/scientist, Elliot Maas, and his two business partners (Bierley, the PR man, and Richardson, the other scientist) at a press conference. They tell the press that have created a “multi-cameral multi-phasic analog information processor”, or what they prefer to call a TOS (“The Other Side”), a device which can store a machine consciousness and which they hope will eventually enable humans to cheat death.
Shortly after this, Bierley dies, and their funding vanishes, so Maas and Richardson use the TOS to build a copy of him:

“Bierley, regrettably, is dead,” said Bierley’s image. He was responding to the first question after his prepared statement. “There’s no bringing him back, and I regret that.” Warm smile.
The press corps laughed uncertainly.
“But you’re his memories?” asked a reporter.
“Not in the sense that you mean it,” Bierley said. “Nobody dumped Bierley’s mind into a machine. We can’t do that.” Dramatic pause. “Yet.”
Smile. “What I am is a personality construct of other people’s memories. Over one hundred of Bierley’s closest associates were interviewed by TOS. Their impressions of Bierley, specific examples of things he had said and done, along with digital recordings of the man in action, were processed to create me. I may not be Jackson Bierley as he saw himself, but I’m Jackson Bierley as he was seen by others.  p. 23-24

After the press conference there is a long conversation between Maas and Richardson, where they discuss possible uses of constructs like Bierley (bringing back dead actors and singers, etc.) before the conversation touches on other (and odder) matters: Richardson starts talking about Shiva and reincarnation, and suggests building a simulacrum of Maas to help work on the project.
Shortly after this Richardson is apparently killed in a terrorist attack on the underground (the story is set in a world where there are constant terrorist bombings1) so, of course, a Richardson construct is created with the help of the Bierley one.
After this the story becomes ever more existential: the Richardson construct talks to Maas (whose obsession with cheating his own death is a thread that runs through the story):

Irritatingly, TOS started to suffer again from hurricanes. Those chaos storms in the information flow started to shut down the Richardson construct around one in the morning, regularly.
“It’s like you’re too much contradiction for TOS to handle,” [Maas] told the construct late one night. “A scientist and a mystic.”
“No mystic,” Richardson said. “I’m more scientist than you are, Maas. You’re in a contest with the universe. You want to beat it. If someone gave you the fountain of youth, guaranteed to keep you alive forever with the proviso that you’d never understand how it worked, you’d jump at the chance. Science is a means to you. You want results. You’re a mere technologist.”
“I have a focus. You could never keep yourself on track.”
“You have an obsession,” the construct countered. “You’re right that I can never resist the temptation of the more interesting questions. But that’s what matters to me. What does all of this—” He swept his hand wide to encompass the universe with his gesture, and his hand came to rest on his own chest. “What does it all mean? That’s my question, Maas. I never stop asking it.”
“You sound like him. Sometimes I forget what you are.”  p. 34

Maas then starts to have suspicions about what is causing the information storms, and tricks the machine to make it think he has left the building. He hides beside the Richardson TOS, and then later that night (spoiler) the real Richardson (who has faked his own death—even to the point his wife is fooled) visits his own construct. When Maas challenges Richardson, it sounds as if he has had some sort of breakdown, and keeps saying he is dead and is going to start another life. This baffling exchange pretty much ends the story, and is followed by a repeat of the opening image, a dream Maas has of a man in a lifeboat watching a ship on fire with trapped sailors (him surviving death while the rest of humanity doesn’t, I suppose).
For the first half or so the story is reasonably interesting, but towards the end it takes a deep dive into its own navel. I have no idea what point the story is trying to make and am baffled as to how it won a Nebula award.
** (Average). 10,100 words.

1. The Oklahoma bombing that is described took place in April 1995; there is a Wikipedia page about the event.

The Billiard Ball by Isaac Asimov

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The Billiard Ball by Isaac Asimov (If, March 1967) begins with the narrator describing two chalk-and-cheese scientists: Priss, who is slow-thinking but (two Nobel Prizes) brilliant, and Bloom, whose genius is the practical inventions he creates from Priss’s theories. When Priss then publishes his Two Field Theory (an alternative to a Unified Field Theory) the narrator interviews him and we learn that (a) Priss is jealous of Bloom’s money, (b) their intense rivalry can be seen in their regular billiard games, and (c) Priss’s Two Field Theory suggests that anti-gravity is possible (we get an extended lecture from Priss to the narrator about gravity/mass in the universe being analogous to depressions in a rubber sheet). The interview ends with Priss disparaging Bloom’s chances of creating an anti-gravity machine.
The next part of the story sees the narrator interview Bloom, who seems to be struggling to exploit Priss’s theory. Bloom seems particularly irritated by his failure after Priss’s comments.
The story then concludes a year later, when Priss is invited, along with the Press, to a demonstration of Bloom’s anti-gravity device:

One thing was new, however, and it staggered everybody, drawing much more attention than anything else in the room. It was a billiard table, resting under one pole of the magnet. Beneath it was the companion pole. A round hole about a foot across was stamped out of the very center of the table; and it was obvious that the zero-gravity field, if it was to be produced, would be produced through that hole in the center of the billiard table.
It was as though the whole demonstration had been designed, surrealist-fashion, to point up the victory of Bloom over Priss. This was to be another version of their everlasting billiards competition, and Bloom was going to win.
I don’t know if the other newsmen took matters in that fashion, but I think Priss did. I turned to look at him and saw that he was still holding the drink that had been forced into his hand. He rarely drank, I knew, but now he lifted the glass to his lips and emptied it in two swallows. He stared at that billiard ball, and I needed no gift of ESP to realize that he took it as a deliberate snap of fingers under his nose.  p. 105 (World’s Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)

After an introduction where Bloom gently mocks Priss, the device is turned on (an ultraviolet column of light appears above the hole), and Bloom invites Priss to pot a ball to demonstrate the device. Priss does so, and the ball shoots through Bloom at high speed, killing him.
The remainder of the story describes the theoretical explanation of what happened (massless objects travel at the speed of light), and the narrator concludes by suggesting that, for once, Priss quickly realised how the device worked and deliberately used its effect to kill Bloom.
The main problem with this story is that, given the made-up science and the contrived events, the reader is just along for the ride. Apart from that failing it’s an engaging enough story about academic rivalry.
** (Average). 4240 words. 7,500 words.

See Me Not by Richard Wilson

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See Me Not by Richard Wilson (SF Impulse #12, February 1967) begins with the narrator, Avery, waking up and discovering he is invisible:

He lay on his back for a few minutes, looking at the ceiling. There was something different about the way it looked. No, it wasn’t the ceiling that was different, but his view of it. A perfectly clear, unobstructed view. Then he realized that what was missing was the fuzzy, unfocused tip of nose which had always been there, just below the line of vision, and which became a definite object only when he closed one eye.
Avery closed one eye. No nose. His hand came up in alarm and felt the nose. It was there, all right. That is, he could feel it. But he couldn’t see the fingers or the hand.  p. 9 (World’s Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)

The next seven pages describe his attempts to avoid his wife (who has just sent the kids off to school), but she eventually corners him in the shower. After she gets over her initial shock at his condition she calls Dr Mike.
This introductory section rather exemplifies the story’s main problem, which is that it is done at too great a length (and its mostly inconsequential light comedy produces few real laughs). That said there are one or two neat bits in this sequence—the inability to see his nose, his wife wanting to join him in the shower (more risqué than normal for genre SF of the time), and the fact he looks like a ghost when she sees his invisible body with water vapour coming off it). Slim pickings for seven pages though.
The next part of the story sees Dr Mike arrive, and some doctor-patient banter between him and Avery. Then Avery’s son turns up (more chatter), followed by his daughter (she faints). Then, when the family are having dinner that evening, they see what is happening to the food Avery is eating and he is forced to dress (apparently he has been wandering around naked because he is invisible). We are now twenty pages into the story.
The second half of this sees: Avery visible again the next morning; a disastrous trip out for breakfast where he becomes invisible again; crowds and the media following them home and waiting outside; an ill-judged attempt by Avery to go out and torment the crowd (which sees him caught before the police arrive to free him); the arrival of a specialist from a drug company called Lindhof, who manages to make part of Avery visible; and then a (baffling) argument between Avery and Dr Mike about the former’s refusal to see the specialist again. This all ends with his wife going to Lindhof—and when she returns she is invisible too. Avery changes his mind (and it later materialises that his invisibility was caused by the Lindhof-made pills he took the day before becoming invisible).
This story reminded me of one of those corny 1940’s movies or 1950’s sitcoms and, even though it is breezily told, it’s based on dumb science and is hugely bloated, mostly with endless and sometimes pointless conversations (the argument between Avery and Mike). If this was edited down to about three quarters of its length there might be a half-decent story here, but I got quite irritated with its flabbiness on the way through. More patient readers may have better luck.
* (Mediocre). 13,850 words.

Eye for Iniquity by T. L. Sherred

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Eye for Iniquity by T. L. Sherred (Beyond, July 1953) opens with a man called McNally showing his wife that he can produce a perfect copy of a ten dollar bill from an original. They use it to buy food, and then later on he creates another to buy parts for their car. After this the couple sit down to discuss whether there are any relatives of his with similar powers, but the conversation is inconclusive. They go on to talk about how they can use his new found ability to escape their straightened circumstances.
The next morning McNally gives up his job:

The next morning I was up before the kids, which, for me, is exceptional. The first thing I did after breakfast was to call up my boss and tell him what he could do with his job. An hour after that his boss called me up and hinted that all would be forgiven if I reported for work on the afternoon shift as usual. I hinted right back for a raise and waited until he agreed. Then I told him what he could do with his job.  p. 202 (The Dark Mind, edited by Damon Knight, 1965)

After creating a pile of money the couple then go on a spending spree, something that continues until McNally sees a counterfeit warning notice in a bar. He is considerably more cautious thereafter, and starts duplicating different notes of various denominations. The family’s prosperity continues to grow however, and this eventually leads to a new house and the good life.
The second half of the story sees a neighbour, who is in the IRS, tip off McNally that he is being investigated and that it would be better to go and see the IRS before they visit him. McNally does so, and tells the agent interviewing him that he has no income, as well as generally mouthing off. For the next year or so the IRS leave him in peace, but it doesn’t last, and during a later interview he is accused of being a bookie. When they say he can’t be “getting money out of thin air” he pulls out a wad of identical notes and tells them that if they want to know where he gets them from they should come to his house the next day.
When FBI and Secret Service agents turn up at McNally’s house the following morning he demonstrates his ability to them, and eventually their boss comes into the house. He then manages (spoiler) to fool them into thinking they can all duplicate money too (when they are willing the duplicates into existence so is McNally). When McNally suggests that the power isn’t in him but in the old coffee table the money is sitting on, they destroy it and leave. The narrator moves on to duplicating rare books, coins, cars, etc.
This piece has a neat central gimmick, and an entertaining story which is told by a larger than life/smart-aleck narrator. If I have a slight criticism it is that the coffee table misdirection in the final scene is slightly confusing, although I figured it out by the story’s end.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 9,750 words.

It by Theodore Sturgeon

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It by Theodore Sturgeon (Unknown, August 1940) starts with a creature that was “never born” coming into existence in the forest:

It crawled out of the darkness and hot damp mold into the cool of the morning. It was huge. It was lumped and crusted with its own hateful substances, and pieces of it dropped off as it went its way, dropped off and lay writhing, and stilled, and sank putrescent into the forest loam.
It had no mercy, no laughter, no beauty. It had strength and great intelligence. And—perhaps it could not be destroyed. It crawled out of its mound in the wood and lay pulsing in the sunlight for a long moment. Patches of it shone wetly in the golden glow, parts of it were nubbled and flaked. And whose dead bones had given it the form of a man?  p. 144

Later the beast encounters a dog called Kimbo, which it fights and kills. Then, when the dog does not return to its owner, we are introduced to two farmers, Alton and his brother Casey. When Alton goes off to look for the dog the brothers fall out about the chores that have to been done on the farm, an argument that is continued later between Cory and his wife Clissa. Later on that night, after Cory has given up on the outstanding chores, he goes out into the wood to find his brother, and they end up having an even more serious argument. During this, Cory unknowingly stands on part of the creature, which is lying quiescent in the dark.
Matters become more complicated the next day when Cory hears multiple gunshots in the forest. He gets his shotgun and manages to pellet a stranger in the wood, who binds up his hand and leaves the area while thinking about a man he is looking for called Roger Pike. At the same time that this is happening, Cory’s young daughter Babe (who we have been introduced to earlier) also goes into the forest looking for her uncle Alton.
This fast paced and tightly plotted story eventually comes to a head (spoiler) with Cory finding Alton’s body, which has been torn apart, and Babe in a cave with the briefcase and papers the stranger dropped (the man he was looking for carries a substantial reward). Then the creature approaches the mouth of the cave . . . .
In the climactic scene, Babe rushes through the thing’s legs and, when it pursues her, she throws a stone and hits the creature. It trips, and topples over into the stream . . . to be washed away by the flowing water. The skeleton that remains is that of the missing man, Roger Pike, and the family get the reward.
This is a very good piece—it’s tightly plotted, has a number of well-drawn characters, and has a neat, if ultimately bittersweet, ending. I’d also add that Sturgeon’s prose style is much clearer and easier to read than other writers from this period (as was Heinlein’s and de Camp’s) and the well done multiple point of view technique (which includes that of the young girl Babe) is probably original for the time as well.
**** (Very Good). 9,950 words.

Luminous by Greg Egan

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Luminous by Greg Egan (Asimov’s SF, September 1995) gets off to a pretty good start with the story’s narrator waking to find himself handcuffed, and with a woman slicing into his biceps to get a data storage device. He tells her it is a “necrotrap,” and that the data will be destroyed if it is removed from his body—so she pauses and gets on the phone to order medical equipment which will fool the device. During this, he manages to spray her with his poisoned blood and, after she starts vomiting uncontrollably, eventually agrees to free him to get the antidote. As he departs he tells her there isn’t one, but that she’ll recover in twelve hours or so.
The next part of the story is something of a gear change, a flashback to a conversation between the narrator and a female student called Allison during a philosophy of mathematics course years earlier. This introduces the story’s gimmick, which is, if I’m not oversimplifying (note to self, write up Egan’s stories more promptly), that arithmetic may have different rules in other parts of the universe and this will fundamentally affect the nature of reality there.
The story then skips forward to the present, and we find the narrator is in China to meet Allison, who has arranged for them to have time on a supercomputer called Luminous to investigate this alternative arithmetic. We also get more math theory, and learn that (a) the other arithmetic system can theoretically be extended into our reality and (b) that this can be used for commercial advantage (there is a company called Industrial Algebra who are pursuing the pair to obtain their discovery so they can use it for financial gain—IA were behind the earlier biohacking attempt on the narrator).
The main part of the story occurs after they meet a Chinese professor and are taken to his laboratory:

Luminous was, literally, a computer made of light. It came into existence when a vacuum chamber, a cube five meters wide, was filled with an elaborate standing wave created by three vast arrays of high-powered lasers. A coherent electron beam was fed into the chamber—and just as a finely machined grating built of solid matter could diffract a beam of light, a sufficiently ordered (and sufficiently intense) configuration of light could diffract a beam of matter.
The electrons were redirected from layer to layer of the light cube, recombining and interfering at each stage, every change in their phase and intensity performing an appropriate computation—and the whole system could be reconfigured, nanosecond by nanosecond, into complex new “hardware” optimized for the calculations at hand. The auxiliary supercomputers controlling the laser arrays could design, and then instantly build, the perfect machine of light to carry out each particular stage of any program.

They then use their allotted half-hour to get the computer to map the extent of the “far side” and then discuss whether to contain it (so it can never be extended into out reality) or destroy it. Time constraints mean they chose the latter but (spoiler) the alternative mathematical reality begins to fight back . . .
There are several pages of back and forth in the struggle that ensues between the Luminous program and the alternative math, but they can’t contain the latter and eventually a spike of its reality reaches the lab they are in:

It hit me with a jolt of clarity more intense than anything I’d felt since childhood. It was like reliving the moment when the whole concept of numbers had finally snapped into place—but with an adult’s understanding of everything it opened up, everything it implied. It was a lightning-bolt revelation—but there was no taint of mystical confusion: no opiate haze of euphoria, no pseudo-sexual rush. In the clean-lined logic of the simplest concepts, I saw and understood exactly how the world worked—
—except that it was all wrong, it was all false, it was all impossible.
Quicksand.
Assailed by vertigo, I swept my gaze around the room—counting frantically: Six work stations. Two people. Six chairs. I grouped the work stations: three sets of two, two sets of three. One and five, two and four; four and two, five and one.
I weaved a dozen cross-checks for consistency—for sanity . . . but everything added up. They hadn’t stolen the old arithmetic; they’d merely blasted the new one into my head, on top of it.
Whoever had resisted our assault with Luminous had reached down with the spike and rewritten our neural metamathematics—the arithmetic that underlay our own reasoning about arithmetic—enough to let us glimpse what we’d been trying to destroy.

After this the narrator and Allison stop their attack, and the spike retreats. Then Allison realises that they can execute a program that will stop anyone using this other reality but which will not affect it. All ends well.
This is all a bit of a mixed bag—the good parts are very good (the opening, the computer battle with the alt maths, etc.) but unfortunately is stitched together with pages of dry math lectures and wild hand-wavium.
*** (Good). 13,000 words.

Trouble with Water by Horace L. Gold

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Trouble with Water by Horace L. Gold (Unknown, March 1939) opens with a hen-pecked husband (his wife is constantly nagging him about their unattractive daughter’s dowry) fishing on a lake when he makes an unusual catch:

He pulled in a long, pointed, brimless green hat.
For a moment he glared at it. His mouth hardened. Then, viciously, he yanked the hat off the hook, threw it on the floor and trampled on it. He rubbed his hands together in anguish.
“All day I fish,” he wailed, “two dollars for train fare, a dollar for a boat, a quarter for bait, a new rod I got to buy—and a five-dollar-mortgage charity has got on me. For what? For you, you hat, you!”
Out in the water an extremely civil voice asked politely: “May I have my hat, please?”
Greenberg glowered up. He saw a little man come swimming vigorously through the water toward him; small arms crossed with enormous dignity, vast ears on a pointed face propelling him quite rapidly and efficiently. With serious determination he drove through the water, and, at the starboard rail, his amazing ears kept him stationary while he looked gravely at Greenberg.  pp. 68-69 (The Dark Mind, edited by Damon Knight, 1965)

The little man explains, when Greenberg makes fun of his ears, that he is a water gnome and uses them to swim. There is further back and forth between the two (mostly about the gnome’s fish-keeping, rainfall, and other water related responsibilities) before Greenberg loses his temper and tears the gnome’s hat to pieces. The gnome retaliates by telling Greenberg that, given his poor attitude, “water and those who live in it will keep away from you.”
The rest of the story flows from this curse, and later sees Greenberg flood his bathroom when he jumps in a bath and the water jumps out, embarrass himself in front of a potential future son-in-law (he can’t shave for the occasion, and chases his soup out of the bowl onto the table), and have to drink beer instead of water.
After further domestic complications the story resolves when Greenberg talks to a (presumably Irish) cop called Mike, who thinks he may have solution. The final scene (spoiler) has the pair on the lake dropping huge rocks into the water (to get the gnome’s attention) and then presenting him with a sugar cube wrapped in cellophane in exchange for the removal of the curse.
This is a pleasant and logically worked out fantasy story, but it doesn’t feel like the classic it is supposed to be (part of that may be because of the character’s attitude and the piece’s dated domestic circumstances, and the fact that it feels a little padded).
*** (Good). 7,850 words.

Mistake Inside by James Blish

Posted on by Paul Fraser Leave a Comment on Mistake Inside by James Blish

Mistake Inside by James Blish (Startling Stories, March 1948) opens with an astronomer called Tracey, who is about to confront a cheating wife (he is in the process of breaking down a door, gun in hand), suddenly finding himself in another time, possibly Elizabethan England. However, two bystanders identify Tracey as a “transportee” and tell him that he has arrived in the “Outside”, a country ruled during the Fall season by a man called Yeto. Tracey is advised by the two to find a thaumaturgist if he wants to get back to his own world.
The next part of the story sees Tracey wandering around the anachronistic town on his search (during which he is warned that Yeto is arresting transportees), before eventually coming upon a parade. There he sees Yeto (who looks identical to man whose door he was about to break down) sitting beside his wife.
After this event a wizard tells Tracey that to “pivot” back to his own world (the “Inside”) he will needs to find two avatars. One of these is a cat that features earlier on in the story and the other is a man in a top-hat. The latter’s half-visible shade turns up at the foot of Tracey’s bed the next morning, whereupon he tells Tracey that (spoiler) he is in Purgatory, and will need to work out what his failings are or he will end up permanently damned.
The last section of the story sees Tracey find a dog for a boy and, in return, he is given a divining rod which leads him on a chase through the town. Eventually he finds a pair of glass spheres (the avatars, I presume), and is returned to his own world where he crashes through the door to find his wife in the non-carnal company of an astrologer.
If this sounds like a particularly badly written synopsis, it is partly because this story reads like it was made up as the writer went along, and minimally revised. I really should read it again. Notwithstanding this it’s a passable enough Unknown-type tale if you don’t expect the plot to make much sense.
** (Average). 7,750 words.