Something Wild is Loose © 2008 by Agberg, Ltd. All rights reserved.
Interior design © 2008 by Desert Isle Design, LLC. All rights reserved.
First Edition
978-1-59606-143-9
Subterranean Press
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Something Wild is Loose” first appeared in The Many Worlds of Science Fiction, October 1971, edited by Ben Bova.
“In Entropy’s Jaws” first appeared in Infinity Two, 1971, edited by Robert Hoskins.
“The Reality Trip” first appeared in Worlds of If, May-June 1970.
“Going” first appeared in Four Futures, October 1971, edited by Robert Silverberg.
“Caliban” first appeared in Infinity Three, 1972, edited by Robert Hoskins.
“Good News from the Vatican” first appeared in Universe 1, 1971, edited by Terry Carr.
“Thomas the Proclaimer” first appeared in The Day the Sun Stood Still, May 1972.
“When We Went to See the End of the World” first appeared in Universe 2, 1972, edited by Terry Carr.
“Push No More” first appeared in Strange Bedfellows, November 1972, edited by Thomas N. Scortia.
“The Wind and the Rain” first appeared in Saving Worlds, July 1973, edited by Roger Elwood and Virginia Kidd.
“Some Notes on the Predynastic Epoch” first appeared in Bad Moon Rising, April 1973, edited by Thomas M. Disch.
“The Feast of St. Dionysus” first appeared in An Exaltation of Stars, June 1973, edited by Terry Carr.
“What We Learned from This Morning’s Newspaper” first appeared in Infinity Four, November 1972, edited by Robert Hoskins.
“The Mutant Season” first appeared in Androids, Time Machines, and Blue Giraffes, August 1973, edited by Roger Elwood and Vic Ghidalia.
“Caught in the Organ Draft” first appeared in And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire and Other Science Fiction Stories, December 1972, edited by Roger Elwood.
“Many Mansions” first appeared in Universe Three, October 1973, edited by Terry Carr.
Copyright © 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973 by Agberg, Ltd.
Introductory matter copyright © 2008 by Agberg, Ltd.
Illustrations are reproduced from source text of first publication or as from indicated above.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Something Wild is Loose
In Entropy’s Jaws
The Reality Trip
Going
Caliban
Good News from the Vatican
Thomas the Proclaimer
When We Went to See the End of the World
Push No More
The Wind and the Rain
Some Notes on the Predynastic Epoch
The Feast of St. Dionysus
What We Learned from This Morning’s Newspaper
The Mutant Season
Caught in the Organ Draft
Many Mansions
For Ben Bova
Bob Hoskins
Ejler Jakobsson
Terry Carr
Roger Elwood
Tom Disch
INTRODUCTION
The title that I’ve chosen for this third volume of my Collected Stories is not just the title of one of the stories in the book; it is indicative of the state of the world, and of the author of these stories, during the years (1969-72) when they were written.
Science fiction is supposed to be about the future, but in fact it has always been deeply rooted in the present, and its nature changes as our perception of the present-day world changes. For example, the science fiction of the dark, gloomy, hopeless 1930’s tended to be bright, optimistic stuff, looking forward to a happy world in which technology would lead us out of the economic morass of the Great Depression. The science fiction of the 1940’s, when the world was riven by war, was generally built around simple melodramatic conflicts between good and evil, which was the way we were encouraged to perceive that war. In the 1950’s, when a period of relative tranquility held sway most of the time and we managed even to keep the fear of atomic doom well under control, a kind of slick, suburban s-f evolved, smoothly written and published in shiny-looking magazines. It dealt with such matters as what it was like to be the hostess at a cocktail party for aliens, and how to program your household robot to serve low-calorie meals.
Then came the 1960’s, when that serene suburban world fell apart, and the 1970’s, when we were left with the task of putting the lopsided pieces back together. During that crazy time—which began, I think, with the bullet that took John F. Kennedy’s life in Dallas in 1963 and needed twenty years to play through to its end—science fiction and fantasy reached unparalleled prosperity in the United States and most other Western industrial nations. That should not be very surprising. When the world turns incomprehensible, it makes sense to look for answers from some other world. In former times it was sufficient to look no farther than the Church: God was there, emanating love and security, offering the hope of passing onward from this vale of tears to the true life beyond. One of the difficulties of modern life is that most of us have lost the option of using religious faith as a consolation. It may be that science fiction has evolved into a sort of substitute: a body of texts offering an examination of absolute values and the hypothetical construction of alternative modes of living.
But, as I have already observed, the science fiction of the moment is always rooted in the moment. As the traditional values of American society and much of Western Europe crumbled in the late 1960’s, the science fiction written at that time reflected the dislocations and fragmentations that our society was experiencing. New writers, armed with dazzling new techniques, took up the materials of s-f and did strange new things with it. Older writers, formerly content to produce the safe and simple stuff of previous decades, were reborn with sudden experimental zeal. It was a wild and adventurous time, when we were all improvising our way of life from day to day or even from hour to hour, and the science fiction of that period certainly shows it.
The stories in this volume were written in those troubled times when there was no longer any safe zone in the world—the years from 1969 to 1972. People wore strange clothes and strange hair, doped themselves with strange drugs, read and wrote strange things. These manifestations of the times—beginning now to seem quaint to us oldsters, and almost unreal to those young adults of today who hadn’t yet been born when we were living through that bizarre era—were symptoms, naturally, of deeper malaise and confusion. I have pegged the onset of that time of troubles to the moment of the Kennedy assassination not because Kennedy himself was a peerless leader—he had his personal flaws, as we now know all too well, and at the time of his death he was finding it almost impossible to win support in Washington for his political agenda—but because he was a perfect symbol of energy and youth and the promise of the future. When he was stuck down, it seemed to me and a great many others that this shining promise had been forfeited and that the commonwealth itself had been ripped apart. And so it was. I think we would probably have had the troubles that followed even if Kennedy had lived, just as we would have had World War One eventually even if the Archduke Franz Ferdinand had not been assassinated at Sarajevo; but in each case the murder proved to be an historical catalyst.
After Kennedy came new and more foolish leaders who mired us in a dismal and hopeless war against which the nation’s young rebelled, and
everything fell into chaos. Two consecutive presidents were overthrown and driven from office, the result of popular outcry against their philosophies and methods. On all levels of society, desperate new styles of behavior reflected the desperation within. We slid into a widespread and catastrophic societal breakdown and it was years before the necessary repairs were made. The upheaval that we call, in historical shorthand, “the Sixties” brought us into blunt confrontation with the future, and what we saw—energy crises, uncontrollable inflation, free-floating terrorism, the threat of atomic destruction from, perhaps, some randomly self-appointed enemy—frightened us into becoming a nation of science-fiction fans, seeking for answers in the literature of tomorrow.
Things are a little quieter now, though no less perilous. Instead of the Soviet Union to worry about, we have radical Islam. Inflation seems to have subsided, but global temperatures are rising and the long-term environmental prognosis looks strikingly ungood. The fear of a worldwide population explosion that obsessed us back then has been replaced by something more complex, the fear of a Third World population explosion while First World countries shrink from generation to generation. The plague of AIDS has entered the world. Interesting computer viruses propagate among us daily, sowing chaos. Et cetera, et cetera. Curiously, we no longer turn to science fiction for answers to these problems. The disturbing, fragmented s-f of the Sixties is all but forgotten, supplanted by the bland, comforting, predictable fantasy novels of recent times, in which benevolent wizards hold out the hope that the Staff of Power will ultimately return to the hands of the High King and all will be made right in the world.
The stories in this book are, by and large, not like that. The world that they sprang from was the troubled, bewildering, dangerous, and very exciting world of those weird years when the barriers were down and the future was rushing into the present with the force of a river unleashed. But of course I think these stories speak to our times, too, and that most of them will remain valid as we go staggering onward through the brave new world of the twenty-first century. I am not one of those who believes that all is lost and the end is nigh. Like William Faulkner, I do think we will somehow endure and prevail against increasingly stiff odds.
A great many strange and dizzying things happen to the characters in these sixteen stories, and in the fourteen stories of the 1972-73 volume that will follow. The reader who makes the journey from beginning to end of all thirty stories will be taken on many a curious trip, that I promise—as was their author during the years when they were being written.
Robert Silverberg
SOMETHING WILD IS LOOSE
By the late months of 1969 I had shaken off most of the fatigue that the various stresses of the fire that wrecked my house in New York City in February, 1968 had caused, and was hitting my full stride as a writer—pouring forth novel after novel, Downward to the Earth and Tower of Glass and Son of Man all in 1969, The World Inside and A Time of Changes and The Second Trip in 1970 (along with a huge non-fiction work exploring the origins of the Prester John myth.) My production of short stories diminished drastically as I concentrated on these demanding books.
But I could be cajoled to do one occasionally. My friend Ben Bova had joined the swiftly growing roster of original-anthology editors with a book that was to be called The Many Worlds of Science Fiction, and he insisted that my presence on the contents page was obligatory. Well, so be it: in the final weeks of 1969, just after coming up out of the psychedelic frenzies of Son of Man, I wrote the relatively conservative (for that era) “Something Wild is Loose” for Ben’s anthology. I’ve been waiting ever since for someone to make a movie out of it.
——————
The Vsiir got aboard the Earthbound ship by accident. It had absolutely no plans for taking a holiday on a wet, grimy planet like Earth. But it was in its metamorphic phase, undergoing the period of undisciplined change that began as winter came on, and it had shifted so far upspectrum that Earthborn eyes couldn’t see it. Oh, a really skilled observer might notice a slippery little purple flicker once in a while, a kind of snore, as the Vsiir momentarily dropped down out of the ultraviolet; but he’d have to know where to look, and when.
The crewman who was responsible for putting the Vsiir on the ship never even considered the possibility that there might be something invisible sleeping atop one of the crates of cargo being hoisted into the ship’s hold. He simply went down the row, slapping a floater node on each crate, and sending it gliding up the gravity well toward the open hatch. The fifth crate to go inside was the one on which the Vsiir had decided to take its nap. The spaceman didn’t know that he had inadvertently given an alien organism a free ride to Earth. The Vsiir didn’t know it, either, until the hatch was scaled and an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere began to hiss from the vents. The Vsiir did not happen to breathe those gases, but, because it was in its time of metamorphosis, it was able to adapt itself quickly and nicely to the sour, prickly vapors seeping into its metabolic cells. The next step was to fashion a set of full-spectrum scanners and learn something about its surroundings. Within a few minutes, the Vsiir was aware—
—that it was in a large, dark place that held a great many boxes containing various mineral and vegetable products of its world, mainly branches of the greenfire tree but also some other things of no comprehensible value to a Vsiir—
—that a double wall of curved metal enclosed this place—
—that just beyond this wall was a null-atmosphere zone, such as is found between one planet and another—
—that this entire closed system was undergoing acceleration—
—that this therefore was a spaceship, heading rapidly away from the world of Vsiirs and in fact already some ten planetary diameters distant, with the gap growing alarmingly moment by moment—
—that it would be impossible, even for a Vsiir in metamorphosis, to escape from the spaceship at this point—
—and that, unless it could persuade the crew of the ship to halt and go back, it would be compelled to undertake a long and dreary voyage to a strange and probably loathsome world, where life would at best be highly inconvenient, and might present great dangers. It would find itself cut off painfully from the rhythm of its own civilization. It would miss the Festival of Changing. It would miss the Holy Eclipse. It would not be able to take part in next spring’s Rising of the Sea. It would suffer in a thousand ways.
There were six human beings aboard the ship. Extending its perceptors, the Vsiir tried to reach their minds. Though humans had been coming to its planet for many years, it had never bothered making contact with them before; but it had never been in this much trouble before, either. It sent a foggy tendril of thought roving the corridors, looking for traces of human intelligence. Here? A glow of electrical activity within a sphere of bone: a mind, a mind! A busy mind. But surrounded by a wall, apparently; the Vsiir rammed up against it and was thrust back. That was startling and disturbing. What kind of beings were these, whose minds were closed to ordinary contact?
The Vsiir went on, hunting through the ship. Another mind: again closed. Another. And another. The Vsiir felt panic rising. Its mantle fluttered; its energy radiations dropped far down into the visible spectrum, then shot nervously toward much shorter waves. Even its physical form experienced a series of quick involuntary metamorphoses, to the Vsiir’s intense embarrassment. It did not get control of its body until it had passed from spherical to cubical to chaotic, and had become a gridwork of fibrous threads held together only by a pulsing strand of ego. Fiercely, it forced itself back to the spherical form and resumed its search of the ship, dismally realizing that by this time its native world was half a stellar unit away. It was without hope now, but it continued to probe the minds of the crew, if only for the sake of thoroughness. Even if it made contact, though, how could it communicate the nature of its plight, and even if it communicated, why would the humans be disposed to help it? Yet it went on through the ship. And—
Here: an open mind. No
wall at all. A miracle! The Vsiir rushed into close contact, overcome with joy and surprise, pouring out its predicament. —Please listen. Unfortunate nonhuman organism accidentally transported into this vessel during loading of cargo. Metabolically and psychologically unsuited for prolonged life on Earth. Begs pardon for inconvenience; wishes prompt return to home planet left recently, regrets disturbance in shipping schedule, but hopes that this large favor will not prove impossible to grant. Do you comprehend my sending? Unfortunate nonhuman organism accidentally transported—
Lieutenant Falkirk had drawn the first sleep shift after float-off. It was only fair; Falkirk had knocked himself out processing the cargo during the loading stage, slapping the floater nodes on every crate and feeding the transit manifests to the computer. Now that the ship was spaceborne, he could grab some rest while the other crew men were handling the float-off chores. So he settled down for six hours in the cradle as soon as they were on their way. Below him, the ship’s six gravity drinkers spun on their axes, gobbling inertia and pushing up the acceleration, and the ship floated Earthward at a velocity that would reach the galactic level before Falkirk woke. He drifted into drowsiness. A good trip: enough greenfire bark in the hold to see Earth through a dozen fits of the molecule plague, and plenty of other potential medicinals besides, along with a load of interesting mineral samples, and—Falkirk slept. For half an hour he enjoyed sweet slumber, his mind disengaged, his body loose.
Until a dark dream bubbled through his skull.
Deep purple sunlight, hot and somber. Something slippery tickling the edges of his brain. He lies on a broad white slab in a scorched desert. Unable to move. Getting harder to breathe. The gravity—a terrible pull, bending and breaking him, ripping his bones apart. Hooded figures moving around him, pointing, laughing, exchanging blurred comments in an unknown language. His skin melting and taking on a new texture: porcupine quills sprouting inside his flesh and forcing their way upward, poking out through every pore. Points of fire all over him. A thin scarlet hand, withered fingers like crab claws, hovering in front of his face. Scratching. Scratching. Scratching. His blood running among the quills, thick and sluggish. He shivers, struggling to sit up—lifts a hand, leaving pieces of quivering flesh stuck to the slab—sits up—