Blank!
Pointdexter screamed. "The Earth moved. We forgot that. In twenty-two hours, it moved thousands of miles through space, traveling around the sun. "
"No," said Barron faintly, "I didn't forget that. The machine is designed to follow the time path of Earth wherever that leads. Besides, even if Earth moved, where is the sun? Where are the stars?"
Barron went back to the controls. Nothing budged. Nothing worked. The door would no longer slide shut.
Blank!
Pointdexter found it getting difficult to breathe, difficult to move. With effort he said, "What's wrong, then?"
Barron moved slowly toward the center of the machine. He said painfully, "The particles of time. I think we happened to stall. . . between two. . . particles. "
Pointdexter tried to clench a fist but couldn't. "Don't understand. "
"Like an elevator. Like an elevator. " He could no longer sound the words, but only move his lips to shape them. "Like an elevator, after all. . . stuck between the floors. "
Pointdexter could not even move his lips. He thought: Nothing can proceed in nontime. All motion is suspended, all consciousness, all everything. There was an inertia about themselves that had carried them along in time for a minute or so, like a body leaning forward when an automobile comes to a sudden halt-but it was dying fast.
The light within the machine dimmed and went out. Sensation and awareness chilled into nothing.
One last thought, one final, feeble, mental sigh: Hubris, ate!
Then thought stopped, too.
Stasis! Nothing! For all eternity, where even eternity was meaningless, there would only be-blank!
***
All three Blanks were published in the June 1957 issue of Infinity and the idea of the gimmick, I suppose, was to let the reader compare them and note how three different imaginations took off from a single, nondescript title.
Perhaps you wish you could have all three stories here, so that you could make the comparison yourself. Well, you can't.
In the first place, I'd have to get permissions from Randall and from Harlan and I don't want to have to go through that, In the second place, you underestimate my self-centered nature. I don't want their stories included with mine!
Then, too, I must explain that I always dismantle magazines with my stories in them, because I just can't manage to keep intact those magazines containing my stories. There are too many magazines and not enough room. I take out my own particular stories and bind them into volumes for future reference (as in the preparation of this book). Actually, I am running out of room for the volumes.
Anyway, when it came to dismantling the June 1957 Infinity I abstracted only BLANK! and discarded Blank? and Blank.
Or, perhaps, you don't underestimate my self-centered nature and expect me as a matter of course, to do that sort of thing.
Back in the middle 1950s, when some of the less affluent science fiction magazines (not that any of them were really affluent) asked me for a story, it was my practice to request the rates that Astounding and Galaxy paid if any magazine expected a story written especially for them. They would do so, quite confident that if I said a story was written especially for them, it was, and that it had not been slipped out of the bottom of the barrel. (There are times when having a reputation as being too dumb to be crooked comes in handy. )
The corollary of that, of course, is that if a story of mine is ever rejected by Editor A, it is incumbent upon me to tell this to Editor B when I offer it anew. In the first place, a rejection of a story with my name on it must give rise to thoughts such as "Wow! This story must be a stinker!" and it's only fair to give the second editor a chance to agree. Secondly, even if the second editor accepts the story he need not feel called upon to pay me more than his own standard fees. It meant an occasional loss of a few dollars but it made me more comfortable inside my wizened little soul.
Anyway, DOES A BEE CARE? was written in October 1956, after I had discussed it with Robert P. Mills, of Fantasy and Science Fiction, who had taken over the editorship of a new sister magazine of F amp; SF, which was to be called Venture Science Fiction.
I guess the execution fell short of the promise, because Mills rejected it and it was deemed unworthy both for Venture and for F amp; SF. So I passed it on to If: Worlds of Science Fiction with the word of the rejection and I got less than top rates for it. It appeared in the June 1957 issue.
Now the sad part is that I can never tell what there is about a story that makes the difference between acceptance and rejection, or which editor, the rejecting one or the accepting one, is correct. That's why I'm not an editor and never intend to be.
But you can judge for yourself.