Tag: Playboy

The Short-Short Story of Mankind by John Steinbeck

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Short-Short Story of Mankind by John Steinbeck (Lilliput, November 1955)1 opens with two cavemen moaning about the youth of the day, problems with the neighbouring tribe, etc.:

Joe came into the cave all scratched up and some hunks of hair torn out and he flopped down on the wet ground and bled—Old William was arguing away with Old Bert who was his brother and also his son, if you look at it one way.
[. . .]
‘Where’s Al?’ one of them asked and the other said, ‘You forgot to roll the rock in front of the door.’
Joe didn’t even look up and the two old men agreed that kids were going to the devil. ‘I tell you it was different in my day,’ Old William said. ‘They had some respect for their elders or they got what for.’
After a while Joe stopped bleeding and he caked some mud on his cuts. ‘Al’s gone,’ he said.
Old Bert asked brightly, ‘Sabre tooth?’
‘No, it’s that new bunch that moved into the copse down the draw. They ate Al.’
‘Savages,’ said Old William. ‘Still live in trees. They aren’t civilized. We don’t hardly ever eat people.’
Joe said, ‘We got hardly anybody to eat except relatives and we’re getting low on relatives.’
Those foreigners!’ said Old Bert.
‘Al and I dug a pit,’ said Joe. ‘We caught a horse and those tree people came along and ate our horse. When we complained, they ate Al.’

The rest of this rambling non-sf story charts, in a similar tone, the progress of humanity from cavemen to hunter gatherers to farmers to citizens of larger states. The effects of religion and technology and military force are also considered. The concluding observation is that people nowadays are not stupider than cavemen, but exactly as stupid as cavemen. This strikes me as overly simplistic, and it is not an observation I would agree with. I doubt that even cavemen were as stupid as they are portrayed here.2
I’ve read quite a lot of Steinbeck and would count The Grapes of Wrath among my favourite top ten books, but this is pretty weak stuff.
* (Mediocre). 2,200 words. Story link.

1. This story was reprinted in Playboy (April, 1957) using the title above. The original Lilliput publication was titled We Are Holding Our Own.

2. One of my Facebook group referred to this story as “The Cranky View of Human History”.

The Store of the Worlds by Robert Sheckley

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Store of the Worlds by Robert Sheckley (Playboy, September 1959)1 opens with Mr Wayne passing a pile of rubble and coming to a tumbledown building at the end, The Store of the Worlds. Inside, Wayne meets the proprietor, Mr Tompkins, who can supposedly transport people (by means of the rusty hypodermic needle on the table, and “certain gadgets” in the back of the store) to the world of their deepest desires. Tomkins gives a “Many Worlds” explanation to Wayne:

“What happens then?” Mr. Wayne asked.
“Your mind, liberated from its body, is able to choose from the countless probability worlds which the earth casts off in every second of its existence.”
Grinning now, Tompkins sat up in his rocking chair and began to show signs of enthusiasm.
“Yes, my friend, though you might not have suspected it, from the moment this battered earth was born out of the sun’s fiery womb, it cast off its alternate-probability worlds. Worlds without end, emanating from events large and small; every Alexander and every amoeba creating worlds, just as ripples will spread in a pond no matter how big or how small the stone you throw. Doesn’t every object cast a shadow? Well, my friend, the earth itself is four-dimensional; therefore it casts three-dimensional shadows, solid reflections of itself, through every moment of its being. Millions, billions of earths! An infinity of earths! And your mind, liberated by me, will be able to select any of these worlds and live upon it for a while.”

The rest of this lengthy but absorbing setup goes on to cover the cost of the service, which is very high, and the health implications (a year in the world of desire costs ten years of the traveller’s life as there is a strain on the nervous system). Then, when Wayne asks if the transition can be made permanent, Tompkins says he is researching that possibility using the money he gets from selling the service.
Wayne eventually tells Tompkins that he needs to give it some thought, and the story cuts to his journey home to Long Island. There we see that Wayne has a wife called Janet, a son called Tommy, and a comfortable middle-class existence. Over the following days, and against the background of his work on Wall Street and a sailing trip with his son Tommy, Wayne thinks about Mr Tompkins, The Store of the Worlds, and the sort of world he might desire.
The final scene of the story cuts back to the store, where Wayne is waking up. Tompkins asks him if he is okay and whether or not he wants a refund. Wayne replies that the experience was quite satisfactory but, when Tompkins probes further, Wayne will only say that his world of desire was in the recent past.
The story closes with Wayne paying Tompkins for the trip with “a pair of army boots, a knife, two coils of copper wire, and three small cans of corned beef” before he leaves the store:

[Wayne] hurried down to the end of the lane of gray rubble. Beyond it, as far as he could see, lay flat fields of rubble, brown and gray and black. Those fields, stretching to every horizon, were made of the twisted corpses of buildings, the shattered remnants of trees and the fine white ash that once was human flesh and bone.

We realise that Wayne’s comfortable, unexceptional middle-class life with his wife and son was the world he desired, and that he is actually the survivor of a nuclear war. The few remaining paragraphs of the story hint at what this entails, and ends with Wayne resolving to get back to his shelter before the rats come out and he misses his potato ration.
The story’s ending is a gut punch, even if you guess what is coming before you get to the reveal (I figured out where it was going just before Wayne handed over the payment2).
A very good—and well-constructed—story,3 and one that makes you reflect that there are much worse options than living in modern day Western society, for all its failings.
**** (Very Good). 2,400 words. Story link.

1. This story was first published under the title The World of Heart’s Desire.

2. There are several clues before the reveal: the rubble strewn street, the dilapidated building, the rusty hypodermic, and the year Wayne spends thinking about whether or not to take the trip (the experience is described as a year long in the setup).

3. I’d definitely put this in a Best of Robert Sheckley collection, along with Specialist and Pilgrimage to Earth.

No Fire Burns by Avram Davidson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

No Fire Burns by Avram Davidson (Playboy, July 1959) opens with a Mr Melchior and his personnel manager, Mr Taylor, driving to lunch with a psychologist, Dr Colles. Melchior tells Colles about an otherwise normal man who murdered a rival just to secure a promotion, and goes on to ask Colles to produce a test that will weed out such individuals from his company.
Inserted into this strand of the narrative is a section about an employee of Melichor’s called Joe Clock, who has borrowed money from a workmate but, as we see, has no intention of paying it back. Joe later completes the psychological screening test that Colles develops:

There are lots worse crimes than murder. Probably . . . Sure. Lots worse. The average person will do anything for money. Absolutely right they would. Why not, if you can get away with it? Sure. And the same way, that’s why you got to watch out for yourself.
There are worse things than losing your home. What? Catching leprosy?
And then the way to answer the question changed. Now you had to pick out an answer. Like, Most people who hit someone with their car at night would (a) report to the police first (b) give first aid (c) make a getaway if possible. Well, any damn fool would know it was the last. In fact, anyone but a damn fool would do just that. That’s what he did that time. (c)
Now, a dope like Aberdeen: he’d probably stop his car. Stick his nose in someone else’s tough luck. Anybody stupid enough to lend his rent money—  p. 38-39 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)

The story develops further (spoiler) when Colles notices, having completed the work some weeks before, problematic mentions of Melchior and his ex-employees in the newspapers. He then discovers that nearly all the company men shown by the test to have psychopathic tendencies are still employed.
Colles confronts Melchior with this information—and then asks to work for him (there are a couple of earlier hints in the story that Colles is fairly amoral). The story finishes with a biter-bit ending where the personnel manager Taylor (another one of the story’s many psychopaths) has Melchior and Colles shot by Joe Clock and another man.
This is well enough told, and interesting enough, but the idea is barely credible. And some will see where the plot is going, or be unsurprised when they get there.
** (Average). 6,350 words.