Tag: 1954

The Answer by Fredric Brown

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Answer by Fredric Brown (Angels and Spaceships, 1954) opens with a scientist called Dwar Ev completing a connection and then moving towards a switch:

The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe—ninety-six billion planets—into the supercircuit that would connect them all into one super-calculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.  p. 36

Ev then asks the super-computer if there is a God, and it replies (spoiler), “Yes, now there is a God”. Then, when Ev rushes towards the switch to turn the computer off, it zaps him with a lightning bolt.
This is one of these squibs (it is less than a page long) that you find (a) pretty neat when you are twelve, but (b) a not very good gimmick story when older. The real sense of wonder here lies in the idea of ninety-six billion inhabited and interconnected planets.
* (Mediocre). 250 words. Story link.

Christmas Trombone by Raymond E. Banks

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Christmas Trombone by Raymond E. Banks (F&SF, January 1954) is set in a future world where Venusian creatures called “singing cones” can curate and produce “wafer thin discs of Venusian heavy water” which store perfect musical recordings. The story’s main character, Shorty, is an ex-musician who was put out of work by the cones, and the tale begins with him grabbing his trombone from the cupboard and going down to the church on Christmas Eve. On his way there, the chief of police, who has previously warned Shorty about playing in public (“disturbing the peace” in this new musical world), confiscates the instrument.
Shorty continues on to the church to exchange gifts with the clergyman, Dr Blaine, who asks if he will be coming to the service. Shorty tells him no, as Blaine has a singing cone to provide music:

Dr. Blaine took him by the arm and led him into the nave.
Across from them rested the only true singing cone in Blessington. It was almost eight feet high, a tapering mound of pure whiteness, just as it had been on Venus. It “lived” on sound, not talking voices, not explosions or discords. It “lived” on music adding every sweet sound it heard to its repertoire until all its water was solidified and it could no longer hear and remember.
[. . .]
“Here,” said Dr. Blaine, “I’ve got all the great artists who ever recorded Christmas music, Shorty. The best voices, the best arrangements.”
“I know.”
“People need the solemn pageantry of the greatest church music to find the Christmas spirit in these commercial times.”
“Yeah.”
“This cone was a foot-high mound on Venus the night Christ was born in Bethlehem, Shorty. It’s been on earth now for twenty years, adding only the purest and best church music to its being.”
“It’s only been in Blessington five years,” said Shorty, “while I been here 45, man, boy and molecule.”
Dr. Blaine sighed. “Nobody wants the old choir and organ anymore, Shorty. When the cone plays we go back along the centuries to Bethlehem, we watch the miracles beside the Red Sea, we are in the room where the Last Supper was served and we walk with Christ up that final hill—”
“A couple of times I got ’em pretty excited with that old organ you got stashed in the basement.”
“Then play for the cone, Shorty,” said Dr. Blaine. “Play for the cone and make it hear and remember your notes alone with the world’s best musicians.”  pp. 120-121

Shorty doesn’t engage, and tells Blaine his air car needs a new rotor blade (Shorty now works as a mechanic).
The next part of the story sees Shorty arguing with his wife Edith, who tells him he needs to move on, and stop being so bitter about the fact that he has been replaced by the cones. Shorty angrily leaves the apartment and goes to the police station where, after some chit-chat with the desk cop, he slugs him and retrieves his trombone.
The last scene (spoiler) sees Shorty go up a hill near the town and play his trombone, a few notes of Joy to the World. Then he hears the cone at the church play a few of his notes back to him. Shorty starts playing Silent Night:

The cone was silent, listening. He could feel its presence in the background. A moment before it had been scouring out the valley with its sound. Now it was comparing his notes with all the wonderful music stored in its memory.
Softly, you son-of-a-bitch, he told himself. This is final. Shorty, by God, now we’ve got to do the thing!
For 45 seconds he reached the great plane of art that he’d been trying to reach all his life. For 45 seconds he made music that no human or nonhuman agency had ever made before or would ever make again. It was one of those moments. It was clear and clean, human but not gooey. It was one tiny notch more than satisfactory.  pp. 124-125

After Shorty has finished and listens to the cone playing his music back to him, he realises that, after comparing his performance to everything it has stored, the cone has changed nothing (“In Bethlehem, on Venus and beyond to outer space it was a thing of perfect uniqueness.”)
Shorty, finally at peace with himself, throws his horn away.
The story’s cone gimmick is a little artificial (and confusing to begin with) but the last scene is very good, and the story’s arc of a troubled soul finding solace works well in this Christmas tale. One for the ‘Best of the Year’ lists, perhaps.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 3,900 words. Story link.

c/o Mr. Makepeace by Peter Phillips

Posted on by Paul Fraser

c/o Mr. Makepeace by Peter Phillips (F&SF, February 1954) opens with a Captain Makepeace receiving a letter addressed to an E. Grabcheek, Esq. at his address—but no one of that name lives there. When Makepeace tries to return the letter the postman refuses, and says he has delivered other such letters previously.
Makepeace later attempts to send the letters back to the Post Office, and then the Postmaster General, only to have them returned. Eventually he decides to open one of two letters delivered and finds a sheet of blank paper inside. After he angrily tears it up he goes to get the other letter, only to find it has disappeared. Then, when he goes back to dispose of the one he has torn up, he finds that has gone too.
Up until this point the story has an intriguing fantasy set-up, but it slowly turns into more of a psychological piece. This begins when we see a worried Makepeace at a nearby public house, where his mind starts wandering, and we pick up hints of an altercation with his father years before. Then we learn of Makepeace’s mental problems after a shell burst near him during the war, and of his eventual medical pension.
This psychological darkness becomes considerably more pronounced when he waits for the postman one morning and rushes out into the garden when he sees him:

He waited until the postman was about to open his front garden gate, then hurried to meet him.

E. Grabcheek, Esq.,
c/o Tristram Makepeace,
36, Acacia Avenue.

Makepeace was aware of the cold morning air, the gravel underfoot, a blackbird singing from the laurel bushes, milk bottles clinking together somewhere nearby, the postman’s stupid unshaven face; and, faintly, from a neighboring house, “This is the B.B.C. Home Service. Here is the eight o’clock news. . . .”
“Found out who he is yet?” asked the postman.
“No.”
Tristram Makepeace turned back along the path towards his house. It was waiting for him. The door into the everdusty hallway was open. It was the mouth of the house, and it was open.
The eyes of the house, asymmetrical windows, were blazing, yellow and hungry in the early sun.
He wanted to run after the postman and talk with him; or go up the road to the milkman and ask him about his wife and children, talking and talking to reassert this life and his living of it.
But they would think he was mad; and he was not mad. The cold began to strike through his thin slippers and dressing gown, so he walked slowly back up the gravel pathway into the mouth of the house, and closed the door behind him.
He opened the envelope, took out the blank sheet, tore it through. The equal halves fluttered to the floor. He tried to keep his brain as blank as the sheet of paper. It would be nice, came the sudden thought, if he could take his brain out and wash it blank and white and clean under clear running water.
A dark, itching foulness compounded of a million uninvited pictures was trying to force its way into his mind . . . strike your god, your father, see him stand surprised with the red marks of your fingers on his cheek . . . and your lovely virgin mother. . . .  pp. 105-106 (The Dark Mind, edited by Damon Knight, 1965)

The steady stream of letters (spoiler) eventually leads to Makepeace’s breakdown and his admission to an asylum, where he is diagnosed as schizophrenic. He spends his time writing to Grabcheek and eventually, one day, receives a letter to Grabcheek c/o him at the asylum. The doctors can’t work out how Makepeace managed to post the letter to himself, but one doctor posits that his dissociated personality has an “objective existence”. Later on, however, when no-one is around, the letter floats into mid-air and disappears. Someone laughs.
This is an interesting character piece—the account of Makepeace’s psychological breakdown and his troubled past are pretty well done—but it’s not a particularly satisfactory fantasy story (even given the hints that the dead father may be revenging himself on the son). Phillips only wrote another three stories after this one—I wonder if he was beginning to find SF or fantasy too limiting.
** (Average). 3,650 words.