Tag: 3*

What of the Night by Manly Wade Wellman

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What of the Night by Manly Wade Wellman (F&SF, March 1980) opens with a man called Parr taking shelter in a disused Southern Highlands house when his car breaks down. After he eats he falls asleep on the dank and dirty sofa.
When he wakes he sees a glow of light, and a young woman called Tolie asks if he is alright. Parr is instantly smitten by her, and then he notices that the surroundings are clean and in good order. Tolie introduces Parr to the owner of the house, Mr Addis, and another man called Fenton. The latter serves them all a thimbleful of drink (they toast “unity and Sitrael”), and then Parr is invited to see Addis’s room. There, Parr sees Addis has books on magic (one is by John Dee, “the Queen’s Sorceror”) and also has a pentacle painted on his desk, “to help his work”.
After this the pair return to the living room for a second round of drinks and toasts, and then Parr visits Tolie and Fenton’s rooms. When Parr is in the latter’s room, he realises that Fenton is in love with Tolie and jealous of him.
During this experience Parr asks twice if he is dreaming, and also learns that the occupants of the house do not know what he means by “Korea” and “telephone”. He eventually asks them if they are haunting the house: Addis partially dodges the question and suggests they have their fifth drink. As they prepare to do so, Fenton declares his feelings for Tolie and knocks the drink out of Parr’s hands: he tells Parr if he has the fifth drink he will be trapped here. Parr flees.
Some time later Parr stumbles into to a local town, where he learns that the house has been deserted for ninety years. He also learns of Addis’s strange habits and death, and the deaths of Tolie and Fenton when they stayed overnight at the house.
Most haunted house tales would stop there, but there is an effective coda in this story where the local preacher takes Parr back to the house to recover his car (no-one else from the town will take him). When they go inside the gloomy house Parr asks the preacher to perform an exorcism. The preacher says that isn’t a ritual he knows, but he conducts a baptism, a communion (both for Parr), and then the rites for the dead: each of these acts unburdens and lightens the house:

Finally they both stood and Preacher Ricks repeated the service for the burial of the dead. The gloom seemed to thicken itself around them. But at last the hushed voice came to, “Come, ye blessed children of my Father, receive the kingdom prepared for you.” Then light suddenly stole into the room. Parr, looking sidelong at the open door, saw sunshine in the yard that had been so shadowed.
Preacher Ricks cleared his throat. “Do you think it looks sort of different in here?” he asked Parr. “Like as if it had somehow cleared up?”
“In here and outside both,” replied Parr. “Maybe you’ve truly put those spirits to rest.”
“Let’s devoutly hope so.”
They walked out. No haze, no shadows.
“Bring your car along behind mine, back to Sky Notch,” said Preacher Ricks. “We’ll see if some kind soul there won’t let us have some breakfast.”  p. 64

A quietly effective and atmospheric piece.
*** (Good). 5,100 words.

The Last Truth by AnaMaria Curtis

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The Last Truth by AnaMaria Curtis1 (Tor.com, 22nd February 2022) opens with Eri, a lockbreaker, opening a chest on a ship so it can be plundered later on:

The lock on the next chest glows red when she approaches it. It’s a standard truth-lock, spelled by Mr. Gilsen’s lockmaster to recognize its true owner. He’s a wealthy passenger unlucky enough to have hired Mareck’s whole ship for his travel, and he’ll be the last person Eri has to steal from.
“Open,” she says.
“I require a truth.”
“I am your rightful owner.” It never works on the locks she deals with, since it’s a lie, but she’s supposed to try, to test for weaknesses. This lock remains a stubborn red.
“I require a truth,” it repeats.
Eri reaches for her tiered truths and plucks out the one that seems least painful to lose. “The ship that brought me from Ekitri to Sild was overcrowded, and my bunkmate elbowed me in her sleep and bruised my jaw one night. It hurt to speak for weeks. I learned to make myself understood without speaking; this is why Mareck picked me to be a lockbreaker.”
The lock glows a soft, welcoming yellow. The ache in Eri’s chest deepens a bit. She wonders what she just gave up. It’s a tricky business, opening truth-locks. Only truths a lockbreaker has told nobody else can open a lock. As soon as a truth is spoken aloud to the lock, it disappears, unusable—and the memory that sparked it goes too.2

After the story’s gimmick has been laid out (Eri can burgle these locked chests at the cost of her memories) she realises that there is someone watching her. That person is a musician called Aena who, after they talk, convinces Eri to open a chest that contains sheet music that she wants to see before a forthcoming test of her musical skills. Eri, who is cautious of the musician (music is a potent and semi-magical force in this world), agrees, and a relationship is formed when Eri recovers a lost memory when later listening to Aena sing.
When Aena then asks Eri to get her violin the two become even more deeply entwined, and they then agree to run away together when they get onshore (Eri hopes that, with Aena’s music, she may be able to eventually recover all her lost memories).
Complications develop in the last part of the story (spoiler) when Eri encounters a particularly strong lock that the captain of the ship insists she open to gain her freedom. However, doing this will require the remainder of Eri’s memories, so she leaves herself a note saying to steal the violin and then contact Aena—and wonders if she will be able to understand her own instructions . . . .
Eri succeeds in an engrossing last section, and the last paragraph is suitably uplifting:

The woman bends down to take the violin from Eri’s hands and presses a soft kiss to Eri’s temple as she straightens up.
“We don’t have much time,” she says, opening the case, making sure the soundproofed door is sealed, “but what we have, I will give you.”
She puts the violin to her chin and begins to play.

The story’s gimmick of telling truths (sacrificing memories) to open locks is, to be honest, not the most convincing, but it is the only major credulity-stretcher in the story, and the rest of it is well told and plotted. If you like the sort of fiction that appears in Beneath Ceaseless Skies magazine, you’ll like this.
*** (Good). 5,350 words. Story link.

1. This story won the “LeVar Burton Reads writing contest, as co-presented by FIYAH Literary Magazine and Tor.com!”

2. This passage is where the story should start—there are a couple of unnecessary and/or confusing paragraphs before this (the first should have been moved further into the story and the second deleted).

Aurora by Michael Cassutt

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Aurora by Michael Cassutt (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2022) begins with Vera Vorobyova, the seventy-nine-year-old retired director of a Russian “science institute” north of the Arctic Circle, summoned to a meeting at her old workplace. When she gets there she is met by the new director, Nikitin, a “networked” individual who has implants that connect him to his colleagues. Nikitin tells Vorobyova that a returning spaceship is in trouble and doesn’t have the fuel to avoid an asteroid on its route. He then asks about Search, a mothballed energy beam weapon used once over two decades ago when she was the director (and which created a new crater on the Moon).
The rest of the story sees Vorobyova help them get Search operational to fire at the asteroid, an experience which sees her pendulum from providing essential information (she initially finds hardcopy manuals in the basement when she learns the digital archives have been deleted) to being completely ignored. During the latter periods she goes back to her flat, drinks heavily, and thinks about the past:

She was [. . .] unhappy, questioning everything from her constant drinking and lack of goals to every decision she had made since the age of twenty-nine, including her turn away from research to administration, then every financial and personnel choice she had made on her path to the directorship—and as director.
She had not applied to work at Aurora. She was busy at the Institute for Applied Physics in the capital and expected to spend her entire career there. She had only heard of Aurora because its northern sky surveys had appeared in some popular science publication.
[. . .]
Other than a single visit for her mother’s funeral, she had not returned to the capital, [and] aside from two fleeting, furtive affairs, Vera had made no deep personal connections in forty years.  pp. 107-108

Vorobyova is, however, more proactive than this sad-sack description might suggest and, after some more back and forth (she later provides a firing code), Vorobyova realises, when she looks at photographs of the asteroids flat surface (spoiler), that it may reflect back enough of Search’s electromagnetic energy to affect Nikitin and the other networked humans. With the clock ticking down she then struggles to contact him or get into the facility.
The story eventually ends with her and Nikitin firing the device after the others are evacuated, and saving the ship. The reflected energy mostly lands elsewhere, and Nikitin’s companions are affected but they can be repaired. Nikitin then tells Vorobyova that there is now no longer an age limit on the process so she can be networked too.
The best parts of this story for me were the setting, Vorobyova’s alcoholic melancholy, and the initial part of the plot. The latter part of the story, where the suspense increases, seemed a little formulaic; I also didn’t entirely buy the science (the Earth would have moved in space during the time between firing and the reflection); finally, the revelation that Vorobyova can be networked and lead a different life is a twist too far. Still, it’s not a bad read for the most part, especially if you have a penchant (as I do) for gloomy Russian novels.
*** (Good). 11,750 words.

River of Stars, Bridge of Shadows by A. A. Attanasio

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River of Stars, Bridge of Shadows by A. A. Attanasio (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2022) opens with Deri coming out of cleardrift (deepsleep) when her starship’s gravity kernel fails and drops it out of paralux (FTL) near a neutron star. Initially she is greeted by a white snake, her zobot (robotic) valet, which tells her that they are in a decaying orbit and have thirty minutes left before they perish.
Deri soon meets another two characters in the stateroom: Jyla, a woman whose exotic past will later be revealed, and Ristin Taj, an omen coder. All of this (and indeed, the whole story), is told through baroque, high bit-rate prose:

“I know your name because we are the sole anthropes on this flight, child.” Reflecting the tumultuous blaze behind Deri, Jyla’s large eyes glittered like geodes.
“My escort identified you, and we induced your dialect before departure.” She gestured to a petite, impossibly narrow person, nearly invisible in the dark. “Ristin Taj.”
The diminutive character glided into the tremulous blue pall from the magnetar.
Raiment of maroon psylk draping the slight figure undulated, intelligently reading the environment. With swift accuracy, the fabric contoured itself against the body heat around Deri, elongating and widening the slender psylk form to precisely mimic the girl’s stolid physique. The featureless head, a small gold sphere, rose to Deri’s height.
She gawked at the perfect reflection of her freckled nose and startled gray eyes.
Enclosing the gold orb, a life-size holographic replica of Deri from the neck up materialized. The transparent image, lacking a reflection’s reversed symmetry, looked odd to the girl even as she recognized that hay-nest of tousled hair, those skimpy eyebrows, thin lips and thick jaw—her familiar and imperfect features, so unlike the symmetrical faces she had seen on Ygg.
“Ristin is an omen-coder,” Jyla announced. She cupped her ear against the cluttering of the tormented starsteed and drew attention to the sibilance seeping from the head of mirroring gold. “Listen.”
Deri heard mosquito whisperings.
“They are reading your changes. They will know all your probable futures.”  p. 63

We then learn more about Del’s backstory, and her romantic disappointments, before discovering that Jyla is an Imperator, a human being from Earth who is sixteen thousand years old. The valet suggests that Jyla’s compartmentalised memories may hold the key to their survival.
Various other events fill up the story’s length (spoiler): Deri is taken out of her body by Ristin and put with the plasmantics (the other “human” passengers on the ship are discorporate beings of sentient plasma); Jyla and Restin go to see the (unconscious) pilot, and discover that there is fault in a compressor outside the ship; Jyla says she will fix it, but Ristin objects to her her plan. As they quarrel, Deri, released by the plasmantic, arrives; Deri then goes outside the ship and, although mostly shielded from the neutron star flux by her own and the other valets, fixes the problem but apparently dies.
The last section sees Deri awaken to find that it was actually a five-space projection of Ristin that went outside to fix the compressor and not her, but Ristin isn’t dead either (the omen-coder does die, but far enough away from the neutron star to be, I think, resurrected).
To be honest, I’m not sure the plot of this amounts to much (and it isn’t helped by the “I woke up and it was all a dream” ending), but the attraction of this for most will be the dazzle and glamour, all of which is enjoyable enough if you don’t weary of the constant flow of information and complex prose.
*** (Good). 11,500 words.

Callme and Mink by Brenda Cooper

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Callme and Mink by Brenda Cooper (Clarkesworld, October 2020) starts with Julie killing a chicken and feeding her two dogs, Callme and Mink. After this she gets ready to take the dogs out, and we get an early indication that matters are more complicated (or futuristic) than they first seem when “she [closes the] clothing over her joints to keep the sand out.” Then, when she drops down on all fours, and runs alongside the dogs, it becomes apparent that Julie is a robot.
Once she gets to town (they pass a couple of lesser utility robots on the way) Julie talks to a man called Jack, who tells her he has a family wanting to adopt one of her dogs. Later, after Julie and the dogs go home, the family—a woman, her son, and an adopted daughter (who has the Wasting Disease)—turn up. They talk, and the family decide to stay so Julie can teach them how to look after Mink. During this period the impression of a post-collapse situation becomes more stark:

Julie watched them all settle into bed and then took her place by the door, sorting through the synapses in her head. Five of ten evaluation flags had flipped to green. If two more flipped, she would watch the family walk away. It was likely.
She didn’t like the direction they were going. If a human reaches a different conclusion than you do, find another opinion.
[. . .]
No matter which direction they went, the girl would not survive. The woman and the boy might, and if so, Mink would love them and protect them. She slapped her thigh softly, signaling Callme to her, and then dropped to all fours, leading the border collie outside.
The night air smelled of sea salt and overripe apples from a tree in the backyard of an empty house. No threats. Her eyes showed the heat of squirrels and rabbits, of a solitary and slow cat, and of birds roosting in the darkness. She and Callme walked side by side, slow, circling the block. Julie’s head ran through the routines of snipping what she didn’t need, what no one needed. She caught herself with an image of Mink [. . .] as a puppy, two days after she found him. He looked round and soft and vulnerable. Maybe ten weeks old. The little sharp baby teeth had just been pushed free by his adult teeth, and his smile was still slightly lopsided. Do not become attached to more than one animal. Dogs are to help human hearts.
What a strange phrase to be in her programming.

The rest of the story shows Julie training the family to look after Mink—this seems to be what Julie does, rear and train guard dogs for humans—but her responses to the people she meets throughout the story show her as ambivalent at best, and possibly entirely dispassionate. That said, Julie tries to convince the family not to go South, a region she knows is unsafe. She is not successful, however, and they eventually leave.
This is a pretty good read, a slow burn with a good setting, and I liked seeing the way Julie thinks. I would have rated it higher but it peters out somewhat at the end. Hopefully the first of a series.
*** (Good). 4,300 words. Story link.

The Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury

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The Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury (The Golden Apples of the Sun, 19531) is one of his prose poem stories, I suppose you would call them—tales where there is no particular story, but where a vivid, poetic image is developed. Here, that image is fire and ice:

“Temperature?”
“One thousand degrees Fahrenheit!”
The captain stared from the huge, dark-lensed port, and there indeed was the sun, and to go to that sun and touch it and steal part of it for ever away was his quiet and single idea. In this ship were combined the coolly delicate and the coldly practical.
Through corridors of ice and milk-frost, ammoniated winter and storming snowflakes blew. Any spark from that vast hearth burning out there beyond the callous hull of this ship—any small fire-breath that might seep through—would find winter slumbering here, like all the coldest hours of February.

As the temperature rapidly increases, a crewman falls to the floor dead (a faulty space-suit). There is more drama:

Their icicle was melting.
The captain jerked his head to look at the ceiling. As if a motion-picture projector had jammed a single clear memory-frame in his head, he found his mind focused ridiculously on a scene whipped out of childhood.
On spring mornings as a boy, he had leaned from his bedroom window into the snow-smelling air to see the sun sparkle on the last icicle of winter. A dripping of white wine, the blood of cool but warming April, fell from that clear crystal blade. Minute by minute, December’s weapon grew less dangerous. And then at last the icicle fell with the sound of a single chime to the gravelled walk below.
“Auxiliary pump’s broken, sir. Refrigeration. We’re losing our ice!”

After they resolve this problem they eventually begin their mission, which is to extend a cup out of the spaceship to gather a sample of the Sun:

And here is our cup of energy, fire, vibration, call it what you will, that may well power our cities and sail our ships and light our libraries and tan our children and bake our daily breads and simmer the knowledge of our universe for us for a thousand years until it is well done. Here, from this cup, all good men of science and religion, drink! Warm yourselves against the night of ignorance, the long snows of superstition, the cold winds of disbelief, and from the great fear of darkness in each man. So we stretch out our hand with the beggar’s cup . . .

Insert smart comment about the relative ease of solar panels here.
One of Bradbury’s better efforts at this kind of thing.
*** (Good). 2,350 words.

1. The The Golden Apples of the Sun collection was first published in March 1953. The first magazine appearances were in Planet Stories, November 1953, and Argosy, July 1955 (the UK pocketbook magazine, not the US pulp).

A Mastery of German by Marian Denise Moore

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A Mastery of German by Marian Denise Moore (Dominion, Volume One, 2020) opens with a woman called Candace being appointed as the project leader of an R&D project called Engram. Her boss tells her to either “kill it or bring it to a conclusion”.
The next part of the story sees Candace learn, from both Helene, the previous project leader, and Dr Walker, the team leader, that the project is about genetic memory:

[Dr Walker] hummed thoughtfully, leaned back in his chair and asked, “What do you want to know about Engram?”
“All I know is that it is some type of research on memory enhancement or memory retrieval. I looked online but the closest that I could find were some studies done around 2010. Some researchers taught rats how to run a maze and then found that their descendants were able to run the same maze without training.”
“Did you find anything else?”
I grimaced. “Five years later, some researchers were saying that the experience of American slavery was passed on to the descendants of the enslaved via the same process.”
“Yes,” Dr. Walker said. “That’s one of the few follow-ups to the research at Emory University.”

The rest of the story develops this idea further and (spoiler), when Walker realises that Candace is now his boss (something that she didn’t reveal in their first meeting) he gives her a much more detailed explanation about the project, starting first with parental genetics—haplogroups—and then revealing that his project has made it possible for people to share their memories with those in similar groups. So Candace would be able to share her German language ability with anyone in her (for example) L1b group. Of course, the wider reveal is that the human race is a descendant of one person, L0, so there is the possibility that, with further development, people could share their memories with everyone, and possibly access their ancestors’ memories too.
Wrapped around this plot thread is a lot of characterisation-related material that nicely balances the above (e.g. Candace talks on a couple of occasions with her widowed father, who is doing family tree research but is struggling to track down their black ancestors because of societal conditions at the time, etc.)
Unfortunately, though, all of this just peters out: at the start of the story there is brief section about one of the project’s janitors who is imprinted with Candace’s German skills but, in another short passage at the end of the story, he just wanders off. So the piece ends with the development of a major technological invention that will have profound societal implications, but there is no account of any of the subsequent changes that result. It all feels like we have been served up the opening chapters of a longer novel. Still, it’s probably a worthwhile piece for all that.
*** (Good). 8,400 words.

You and Whose Army? by Greg Egan

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You and Whose Army? by Greg Egan (Clarkesworld, October 2020) gets off to a fairly leisurely start with Rufus meeting a woman who knows Linus, his brother: it materialises that Rufus and Linus share memories, and that he has disappeared. We also learn, later on in the story, that there are four brothers (the others are Caius and Silus), and that they were originally part of a cult that biologically modified them as a part of an attempted hive-mind project that was later shut down by the authorities (we find most of this out when Rufus consults a PI called Leong about his brother’s disappearance):

Leong paused expectantly, giving him a chance to explain what he meant, but when he remained silent she tried prompting him. “You live in Adelaide, right? So do you meet up in person regularly?”
“Not in person.” Rufus clenched his fists and inhaled slowly. “We have neural links. All four of us. We share each other’s memories. They took us off the boat when we were eight.”
Leong was clearly thrown for a moment, but she retained a professional demeanor. Rufus guessed she was in her early forties, so mid-twenties when the story broke. Unless she’d been living in a cult of her own, she’d know exactly what he was talking about.
“You were born on the Physalia?”
“That’s right.” Rufus had to give her full marks for not only recalling the name, but pronouncing it correctly.
“And you and Linus are quadruplets?”
“Yes. The others are overseas, studying.” No idiotic blather confusing them with “clones.” Rufus’s experience had set the bar low, but he felt entitled to a small celebration at every sensible word that came out of her mouth.
“Forgive me if I’m not clear on exactly how this works,” Leong said. “When you say you share each other’s memories . . . ?”
“We wake up recalling what the other three did,” Rufus replied. “When we sleep, as well as consolidating our own experience into long-term memory, we receive enough data to do the same with the others’. We remember being them, as well as ourselves.

The rest of this piece is, essentially, a missing person story. When Leong produces a picture of Linus leaving Sydney airport the brothers don’t have the money to fund a worldwide search, so they create a social media app that scans submitted photographs for evidence of their brother in the background. Eventually (spoiler), they track him down to a college in France where he has won a scholarship. Further investigation reveals that Linus is being sponsored by an aging billionaire called Guinard (who may have part-funded the Physalia project).
Caius flies to France to question Linus (the point of view moves through all the four brothers during the story), and discovers that Guinard is sharing his memories with Linus and grooming him to become his successor (this is portrayed as a form of immortality for Guinard).
Events then see the three brothers attempting to kidnap Linus when they can’t convince him to spend some time on his own, unconnected to either them or Guinard—so Linus can learn to be himself, neither in their shadow, as he complains, nor as a receptacle for Guinard.
The kidnapping attempt fails when it is stopped by Guinard’s security, and the story ends with Linus thinking to himself that he doesn’t intend to be a receptacle for Guinard, only his protégé, and that he cannot reveal this deception to his brothers until the billionaire dies.
This is pretty good in parts—there is commentary about personhood, and some dry humour—and it is generally interesting, but the ending doesn’t really convince, and a lot of the story is taken up with inter-brother relationship tensions. Although this is a solid story, it struck me as Egan on cruise-control.
*** (Good). 13,050 words. Story link.

The Roots of our Memories by Joel Armstrong

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The Roots of our Memories by Joel Armstrong (Asimov’s Science Fiction, January-February 2022) takes place in a strange graveyard of the future, where the memories of the dead can be accessed:

That morning I’m overseeing a burial. It’s going to be a scorcher, another record year, the meteorologists keep saying. For now a moist warmth hangs from the hemlock trees, the sky a foggy, rainless gray. I meet the cranial arborist at the open grave, where he’s exposed the roots and fungal mycelia needed to wire the body into the cemetery network. The things done to the body aren’t for the family to see, so we’re the only two present as we remove the corpse from the portable cryofridge and place it in the steel casket. Liam performs most of our corporeal insertions, and I’ve gotten to know him well over the years. I can never decide if it’s sacrilegious or fitting that we end up talking about family while he treats the roots with chemical binder and makes the incisions to thread the mycelia into the body’s brain stem and arteries. He asks how my daughter likes second grade; I ask if his wife’s finally found a new job. Liam injects probiotic and anticoagulant cocktails to encourage clean sap circulation, and then we seal the casket. He’ll return in a few days to make sure the insertion takes, but after that most corpses only need a yearly checkup.  p. 82

Into the narrator’s world comes Pamela, a young woman who initially wants to search her father’s memories but, when she is told they are embargoed for a year after death, decides instead to ask for access to her grandmother’s.
The rest of the story is a slow burn which sees Pamela, to the surprise of the archivist, repeatedly return to use the computers to access her grandmother’s memories. During these visits she is very tight-lipped about what she is learning, but nevertheless develops a growing friendship with the narrator and the regular researchers. We also learn about climate change effects which have caused an insect infestation threat to the hemlock trees that power the network (and if the trees die, her father’s memories will be lost).
At the end of the tale Pamela is more forthcoming with the narrator, and she tells him about her grandmother and the old woman’s attitude to life. There is no big reveal here, but it’s an engagingly strange and quietly effective piece.
*** (Good). 4,600 words.

Christmas on Mars by William Morrison

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Christmas on Mars by William Morrison (Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1941) is an early piece1 by the author of the reasonably well-known Country Doctor (Star Science Fiction Stories, 1953).2 This one perhaps gets off to a more realistic and gritty start than other works of the period with Kel, the leader of a group of four ragged youths, sharpening his knife for an impending robbery:

“I ain’t gonna cut nobody up,” Kel grunted. “Not if they come across, I ain’t. But if they’re wise guys”—his arm flashed out suddenly and the jovite blade glittered in the air—“I’ll slash ’em to pieces. That’s what I’ll do. That’s what my old man would have done.”
They were silent, impressed by the mention of Kel’s father. Buck Henry was the first to recover.
“Hey, fellows,” he piped, “you know what night this is? Just before Christmas. It’s a holiday.”
Monk, proud of his changing voice, growled: “You’re nuts. Christmas comes in winter. This is right in the middle of summer.”
“Are you a dope!” Skinny put in. “Everybody knows the seasons on Earth ain’t the same as here. It’s winter on Earth, or at least on one hemisphere—eastern or western, I forget which. That’s what counts.”
“They say a big, fat guy called Santa Claus,” Buck Henry offered uncertainly, “gets all dressed up in a red suit and comes around handing out presents.”  p. 84

After Kel ridicules Buck for offering up this children’s tale, the group prepare to rob the next passerby—but that turns out to be the local cop, who suggests they go to the Martin Rescue Home for a free meal, but that they should move along in any event. Later, they hear the sound of whistling, and the four leap out to rob the man they have heard—who quickly disarms and restrains them, and reveals himself to be Michael Diston of the Interplanetary Police. He tells them that he sees no point in handing them over to the local police, but that he can’t set them free to rob someone else—so he asks the group if they would like to go for a meal and to see Santa Claus:

“Save that stuff,” Kel growled. “We ain’t babies.”
“Yeah,” said Skinny. “A guy gets dressed up in red, puts a pillow next to his stomach and makes believe he came down a chimbley. You can’t kid us.”
“I wouldn’t dream of trying,” the man drawled, “but it’ll be some swell dinner.”
He couldn’t lose them after that.  p. 87

Dilston takes them back to his mother’s house where, after they get cleaned up, they wolf down Christmas dinner. During the meal we learn about the kids’ troubled domestic situations—mostly parental sickness, addiction or absence, but we also get confirmation of earlier comments that Kel’s father is the Black Pirate. Afterwards, the kids are invited to go through to the living room, where they find a Xmas tree that wasn’t there previously. Then they see it is snowing outside (impossible on Mars) and someone starts coming down the chimney. Santa appears, and gives each of the four kids a present that particularly suits them. Then, exhausted, they go to bed.
Afterwards (spoiler) Dilston tells his mother that Santa was really the unused robot butler he got for her some time previously, the snow was from a machine on the roof that he installed last year and, finally, the presents were originally intended for the neighbourhood kids, but he discovered what would suit each of the four as he listened to them over dinner. Dilston then asks his mother to sort out the kids and their dysfunctional families (Dilston has to return to work the next day).
The story finishes with Dilston listening to a news report where he is mentioned as the one who has just finished hunting down the remanants of the Black Pirate’s gang, and who also killed the Black Pirate—Kel’s father—in hand-to-hand combat several years earlier.
This is better than a lot of stories from the period—gritty start, sentimental Xmas section, and a bittersweet ending which offsets what has come before. I thought it much better than the recent Asimov Christmas story I recently read.
*** (Good). 6,200 words. Story link.

1. This was the author’s seventh SF story from his first year of publishing.

2. I reviewed Country Doctor here.