Lost book by Jules Verne..."Paris in the Twentieth Century"

Steven Silvers...

Before he wrote Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth or Around the World in Eighty Days, Jules Verne wrote a short novel about Michel Dufrenoy living in Paris in the Twentieth Century. This novel was written in 1863, the same year that saw his first novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon published. Long believed lost, the manuscript for Paris in the Twentieth Century was discovered when Verne's great grandson opened a safe which had belonged to the French author. When Verne had first submitted the manuscript to his publisher, he was told that his vision of Paris in 1960 was too dismal and no one would believe the incredible suggestions he was making.

In point of fact, several of Verne's "predictions" wound up coming true. He extrapolated fax machines, elevated trains and automobiles among other technological marvels. Perhaps even more interesting are his predictions that reading would decline and authors in the 1960s would eschew form for style, creating books which no one read, perhaps not even the author.

His world of the future is, in point of fact, the raison d'etre of the novel. Paris in the Twentieth Century is sadly lacking in plot as it follows our hapless hero around a Paris which recalls to the modern reader the Londons of Orwell's 1984 or Gilliam's Brazil. Awarded a Poetry Prize from the factory-like Academic Credit Union, Dufrenoy, an artistic dreamer, must go to work at his cousin's bank, where he is ineptly set to use a computer-like device. His inability to master the keystrokes causes him to be moved to another position where he meets another dreamer, the musician Quinsonnas, who introduces Dufrenoy to a small enclave of other Bohemian dreamers who have little place in the industrial/capitalist society which rules Paris.

Dufrenoy also finally has a chance meeting with his Uncle Huegenin, another dreamer, like Dufrenoy or Dufrenoy's father, the last great composer. Despite the wishes of his Uncle Stanislas Boutardin, who is looking after Dufrenoy's best interests, Dufrenoy strikes up a friendship with the uncle who is more closely akin to his own soul.

Written in Verne's style, the book is interesting, although, as he often did, Verne halts his (almost non-existent) plot to unload information on his reader. Each time a character is introduced, Verne explains the character's background and relationship to Dufrenoy, whether it is Stanislas Boutardin (1 1/2 pages of description) or Dufrenoy's professor's daughter Lucy (1/2 page). Yet for all that Verne describes these characters, the most interesting and realistic is Michel Dufrenoy, himself.

Dufrenoy is a stranger in his own land. Merely sixteen when he receives his Prize in Poetry from the Academic Credit Union, Dufrenoy is given a job for which is is totally unprepared. His desire to rebel against the strict regimen of the Casmodage and Co. Banking House is stifled by Paris's lack of any artistic outlet. His only way out is to allow his own inability to perform his job show itself, leaving himself without a position. Dufrenoy's understanding of Paris is nurtured by Boutardin, who desires Dufrenoy to become a part of Paris-as-it-is, and Huegenin & Quinsonnas, who try to help liberate Dufrenoy's artistic soul.

Recently, Evelyn Leeper commented that the idea of Jules Verne being eligible for a Hugo was an interesting thought. Paris in the Twentieth Century is certainly as good as several of the recent books which have won that honor. In light of last year's Hugo Winner, the Cyberpunk/Steampunk The Diamond Age, Jules Verne is the epitome of Steampunk. Looking over a list of 1996 books I own, Jules Verne's novel can definitely hold its own with some of the best.

James Schullenburg...

If anyone has a doubt about Jules Verne's writing power, they should be advised to read Paris in the Twentieth Century immediately. The narrative flows smoothly, this strange Paris is evoked effortlessly, and the ending left me gasping in awe and envy. The book's package is simply gorgeous (artwork by Marc Burkhardt, design by Andy Carpenter), and the margins and print size nearly disguise how short the book is in reality. The blurbs on the dustjacket try and sell the book on its predictive powers, and while, yes, Verne does predict many of our technological advances, that is not the heart of the book. What is? A stinging critique of capitalism, and of the mechanistic worldview underlying progress, all delivered in the form of a strong story.

Paris in the Twentieth Century tells the story of Michel Dufrénoy, a young man who simply does not fit in. He wins a prize for Latin Composition and is roundly booed. He wants to be a writer in a world where writing (as Verne knows it) is dead. He gets a job in a bank, which doesn't last long. When moved on to another job in the bank, he meets Quinsonnas, a pianist who has given up on the old ways and wants to amaze the age. They become friends. Michel also meets his uncle, Huguenin, an eccentric old man with many old style books. At Huguenin's place, he meets Lucy, the daughter of Professor Richelot. Michel falls in love with Lucy, which, indirectly, causes him to lose him job at the bank. He takes up work at le Grand Entrepôt Dramatique (Great Dramatic Warehouse -- think of a nationalized Hollywood), but he is soon disillusioned and decides to venture out on his own as a writer. The ending follows inevitably from there.

We do not really sympathize with Michel Dufrénoy -- more often we condescend to him. He's a dreamy youth, timid at the wrong times (in love and in life), and quite naïve. So in some ways, he's the pawn that Verne sends out to get crushed by a heartless society. But we can understand his dreams, and his fate is still heartwrenching. The other characters are sketched quickly, and Lucy especially is a cipher, put in for plot reasons.

Is Paris in the Twentieth Century as prescient as the blurbs would have us believe? Yes, Verne predicts automobiles, the subway, convenience stores, fax machines, the electric chair, and so on. I can make a far larger list of things that he gets dead wrong -- Quinsonnas' job in the bank struck me as silly -- but the percentage of correct predictions is indeed higher than most science fiction novels. However, I would submit that this is irrelevant, and mostly just a way to fill up the dustjacket description with nice copy. Like this quotation from the inner front: "This astonishing book is comparable to Brave New World and 1984 in its chilling, dystopian view of a future world, and although it predates both novels by at least seventy years, its predictions are much closer to the truth." Big deal. The only reason any of these three books can be discussed together is the force of moral outrage shared by each, the desire to get people motivated to fight the system.

In fact, Verne's predictions, perhaps inevitably, are stuck firmly in his cultural biases. He makes quite a number of excellent projections as to where art (music, literature, painting) will go, and have indeed gone, but he writes them in order to horrify his audience. The irony is intensified when you consider that Verne's editor rejected the book as too unrealistic and pessimistic. For example, Verne mentions several times how dreadful a composer Wagner is, and then extrapolates into the twentieth century. Quinsonnas' piece, "After Thilorier -- A Grand Fantasy on the Liquefaction of Carbonic Acid," actually sounds far more interesting than anything Verne holds up as the idealized time before "sounds gradually gave way to noises whose musical value was no longer appreciable" (96). I also thought that the list of poem titles that Verne wants us to laugh at, and to think along with Michel that "[not] even this tiny amount of art had escaped the pernicious influence of the age" (42) were fascinating and filled with potential. Electric Harmonies could be a book of poetry by Ray Bradbury, Meditations on Oxygen could be about leaving Earth, Decarbonated Odes maybe a schlocky attack on advertising (these three titles are from page 41). Instead, Verne wants to slot music and literature into his general critique of the twentieth century -- it almost works too, except that what he considers a travesty is in fact a kind of flourishing. He needs the repressive society to get his tragic ending, but a more accurate prediction, if that is how we are going to start rating books, would be to have art thriving, subverting/celebrating its context.

Despite a few internal contradictions, and the misleading hype of the publisher, Paris in the Twentieth Century is indeed an important and excellent book. This book stretches Jules Verne's repertory and reputation, and most science fiction authors today could only dream of their books aging 130 years this well. What will Paris look like in the twenty-first century? Maybe there's another Verne manuscript lost somewhere. 

SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, XXII:1 #65 (March 1995): 35-46 by  Arthur B. Evans

Paris in the Twentieth Century [Wikipedia]

Paris in the Twentieth Century: Jules Verne, The Lost Novel Paperback

by Jules Verne (Author) and Richard Howard

ISBN-10: 034542039X
ISBN-13: 978-0345420398

From Publishers Weekly...

In 1863, Jules Verne was a young writer with one published novel under his belt and a new multibook contract with a prominent French publisher in hand. The publisher, however, rejected Verne's second manuscript, opting to bring out his Journey to the Center of the Earth instead. That manuscript apparently disappeared into a drawer, not to see the light of day again until it was rediscovered and published in 1994. Now it has been rendered into English by the eminent poet and translator Richard Howard. Verne's early books tend to feature adventure plots and a positive attitude towards technology. This novel, however, shows Verne in a darker, frankly dystopian mood. His mid-20th century Paris is an enormously wealthy society, a place of technological wonders, but, like Huxley's Brave New World, it is also a society without meaningful art. Engineering and banking are the prime industries of this civilization and, as the book's protagonist discovers, not even the most talented poet can find a place for himself unless he's willing to produce odes to blast furnaces or locomotives. While the narrative contains many startling predictions among them fax machines, electronic calculators, automobiles and elaborate subway systems there is little here in the way of either plot or character development. It's clear, in fact, that in opting for Journey to the Center of the Earth, Verne's publisher chose the better book.

From Library Journal...

Verne is well known as an early science fiction writer; this novel, which was lost for 125 years, is remarkably prescient in its predictions about the technology that is omnipresent now. Set in the 1960s, though written a century earlier, the novel depicts Michel Dufrenoy as a poet and humanities scholar at sea in a crass commercial world that has strong overtones of Soviet realism. He befriends a young musician with whom he works; reconnects with his long-lost uncle, a literature professor; and even falls in love with the professor's granddaughter. But despite the kindnesses of his friends, Michel fails to succeed with the technological culture around him. Notable are the predictions about the subway, electric lights, and electronic music. A curiosity; recommended for public and academic libraries.

CBS Radio Mystery Theater presents "Murder on the Space Shuttle"

The CBS Radio Mystery Theater presents Jacques Futrell's "Murder on the Space Shuttle" dramatized by Lewis, G. Frederick and staring Velia Greay, Gordon Heath, Paul Hecht, and Gilbert Mack. Episode #1169 first aired on March 9th, 1981.

"Murder on the Space Shuttle"

Internet Archive...

The CBS Radio Mystery Theater (or CBSRMT) was an ambitious and sustained attempt in the 1970s to revive the great drama of old-time radio. Created by Himan Brown (who had by then become a radio legend due to his work on Inner Sanctum Mysteries The Adventures of Nero Wolfe and other shows dating back to the 1930s), it aired on affiliate stations across the CBS Radio network. The series began its long run January 6, 1974; the final episode ran December 31, 1982.

The show was broadcast nightly and ran for one hour, including news and commercials. Typically, a week consisted of three to four new episodes, with the remainder of the week filled out with reruns. There were 1,399 original episodes broadcast.

CBS Radio Mystery Theater [Wikipedia]

Complete series

"Suspense"...OTR offering--"Donovan's Brain"

Another Halloween offering from Old Time Radio's Suspense when your mind's eye was paramount. Here is a radio adaptation of Curt Siodmak's 1942 science fiction novel Donovan's Brain staring Orson Welles.

Wikipedia...

The novel is written in the form of diary entries by Dr. Patrick Cory, a middle-aged physician whose experiments at keeping a brain alive are subsidized by Cory's wealthy wife. Under investigation for tax evasion and criminal financial activities, millionaire megalomaniac W.H. Donovan crashes his private plane in the desert near the home of Dr. Cory. The physician is unable to save Donovan's life, but removes his brain on the chance that it might survive, placing the gray matter in an electrically charged, oxygenated saline solution within a glass tank. The brainwaves indicate that thought—and life—continue. Cory makes several futile attempts to communicate with it. Finally, one night Cory receives unconscious commands, jotting down a list of names in a handwriting not his own—it is Donovan's. Cory successfully attempts telepathic contact with Donovan's brain, much to the concern of Cory's occasional assistant, Dr. Schratt, an elderly alcoholic.

Gradually, the malignant intelligence takes over Cory's personality, leaving him in an amnesiac fugue state when he awakes. The brain uses Cory to do his bidding, signing checks in Donovan's name, and continuing the magnate's illicit financial schemes. Cory becomes increasingly like the paranoid Donovan himself, his physique and manner morphing into the limping image of the departed criminal. Donovan's bidding culminates in an attempt to have Cory kill a young girl who stands in the way of his plans. Realizing he will soon have no control over his own body and mind, Cory devises a plan to destroy the brain during its quiescent period. Cory resists the brain's hypnotic power by repeating the rhyme "He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts." With Dr. Schratt's help, he destroys the housing tank with an ax and leaves the brain of Donovan to die, thus ending his reign of madness.

Part 1

Part 2

Deceased--Frederik Pohl

Frederik Pohl
November 26th, 1919 to September 2nd, 2013

You can’t really predict the future. All you can do is invent it. You can do things that may have an effect on what the future will be, but you can’t say which is going to happen unless you know who’s inventing things and who’s making things happen. We would not have landed a man on the moon in 1969 if John Kennedy hadn’t decided to do it. It’s because he invented that event that it took place. It probably would’ve happened sooner or later under some other circumstances, but that’s why it happened. Same with atomic energy. So you can see how future events take place but what you can’t do is know who’s going to do something that will change it. You can’t really say what’s going to happen, but you can show a spectrum of possibilities.--Frederik Pohl

"Frederik Pohl, grandmaster of science fiction, dies aged 93"

Prolific writer whom Kingsley Amis dubbed 'the most consistently able writer science fiction, in its modern form, has yet produced'

by

David Barnettt

September 3rd, 2013

theguardian.com

Frederik Pohl, one of the few writers who was truly deserving of the overused epithet "grandmaster of science fiction", has died aged 93.

His granddaughter Emily Pohl-Weary broke the news last night when she tweeted, "Rest in peace to my beloved grandfather Frederik Pohl, who showed me by example how to be an author. 1919-2013."

From his first published work in 1937, a poem entitled "Elegy to a Dead Satellite: Luna", printed in Amazing Stories magazine under the pseudonymous byline Elton Andrews, Pohl turned out an astonishingly huge body of work.

He will perhaps be best remembered for his 1977 novel Gateway, which won the Hugo Award the following year. A multilayered novel describing a space-station in a hollowed-out asteroid, built by a long-gone alien race who had left behind hundreds of space ships which humanity was learning to operate through trial and error, the novel also scooped the Locus, Nebula and John W Campbell awards and is considered a major milestone in SF writing today.

In his book on science fiction, New Maps of Hell, Kingsley Amis called Pohl "the most consistently able writer science fiction, in its modern form, has yet produced".

Even in his advanced years, Pohl embraced the internet and was an inveterate blogger, posting his latest missive just days ago – a piece on poverty in which he wrote, "Everyone knows that the principal thing lacking in the poor is the same all over the world. Its name is Money."

In his 1978 book The Way the Future Was, Pohl, who grew up in Brooklyn, New York, explained how he joined the Young Communist League in 1936 because it was pro-union and anti-Hitler, Mussolini and racism.

He served with the US Army in the second world war and was stationed in Italy with the 456th Bombardment Group. Since 1940, Pohl was married no fewer than five times.

Following news of his death, writers and fans took to the social networks to tweet their tributes to the writer.

British SF author Ian McDonald tweeted: "Saddened to hear of the death of Fred Pohl... everyone seems to have met him which in my book is a Good Thing."

San Francisco-based writer Rudy Rucker said: "Fred Pohl was one of the wittiest SF writers ever."

Fantasy author Raymond E Feist said on Twitter: "RIP Fred Pohl. A truly gifted, legendary storyteller, who taught me a lot about the business as well as the craft."

The general mood was summed up by fan Debra Kay, who tweeted simply: "R.I.P. Frederik Pohl. Thanks for the stories."

Frederik Pohl was one of those writers with a social conscience who achieved truly legendary status in his lifetime. A quote of his trotted out in the hours after his death can perhaps be read two ways: one as a desire to entertain, another as a rallying call for humanity to create a better world. "You can't really predict the future. All you can do is invent it."

"Frederik Pohl, Worldly-Wise Master of Science Fiction, Dies at 93"

by

Gerald Jonas

September 3rd, 2013

The New York Times

Frederik Pohl, whose passion for science fiction while growing up in Brooklyn led to a distinguished career as one of its most literate and politically sophisticated practitioners, though one who was skeptical about attempts to perfect society through scientific means, died on Monday at a hospital near his home in Palatine, Ill. He was 93.

His agent, Mitchell Waters, who confirmed the death, said Mr. Pohl was taken to the hospital in acute respiratory distress. Palatine is northwest of Chicago. Mr. Pohl was involved in publishing science fiction since he was a teenager, when he served as a literary agent for his science fiction-writing young friends. He went on to edit magazines and books before finding renown as a writer, often with collaborators.

Perhaps the most famous of his anti-utopian novels was “The Space Merchants,” a prescient satire that Mr. Pohl wrote in the early 1950s with Cyril M. Kornbluth. More than a decade before the surgeon general’s report on smoking and health, the authors imagined a future dominated by advertising executives, who compete to hook consumers on interlocking chains of addictive products. One such chain is started by a few mouthfuls of Crunchies.

“The Crunchies kicked off withdrawal symptoms that could be quelled only by another two squirts of Popsie from the fountain,” the authors wrote. “And Popsie kicked off withdrawal symptoms that could only be quelled by smoking Starr Cigarettes, which made you hungry for Crunchies.”

“The Space Merchants” has been translated into more than 25 languages and has sold millions of copies worldwide.

Mr. Pohl’s grasp of science was impressive; although entirely self-taught, he was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1982. He was also in demand as a so-called futurist, speaking to business executives and other audiences about the shape of things to come in a science-dominated future — and about the unreliability of even short-range predictions.

His view of a high-tech tomorrow was always darkened by doubts about the social consequences of scientific advances. In his grim 1979 novel “Jem: The Making of a Utopia,” high-minded colonists to a distant planet end up making the same mistakes that have already doomed civilization on Earth. The novel won a National Book Award (then known as the American Book Award) in 1980, the only year either award had a science fiction category.

Mr. Pohl was born in New York City on Nov. 26, 1919, and spent most of his childhood in Brooklyn. An early reader, he developed a taste for the science fiction magazines of the day, known as pulps for their poor-quality paper. His love of books encompassed everything from Tolstoy to the French Symbolists, but did not carry over to formal education; he dropped out of high school at 17 — “as soon as it was legal,” he said.

With a handful of like-minded young men, including Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Damon Knight and Mr. Kornbluth, Mr. Pohl threw himself into the burgeoning phenomenon of science fiction fandom. In 1936 he and a dozen other enthusiasts gathered in the back room of a bar in Philadelphia for what many regard as the world’s first science fiction “convention.”

Mr. Pohl’s ambition, like that of his friends, was to be a professional writer. Toward this end he became a literary agent and an editor, both before his 20th birthday. As an agent he represented the work of his friends to the established science fiction magazines; he also published many of their stories, and some of his own, in two new pulp magazines, Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories, which he edited from 1940 through the summer of 1941.

After serving as an Army weatherman in Italy during World War II, he wrote advertising copy for a mail order publisher. Then he became a literary agent again. In the late 1940s science fiction was becoming respectable, and Mr. Pohl helped connect science fiction writers to mainstream publishers; he sold Mr. Asimov’s first novel, “Pebble in the Sky” (1950), to Doubleday. At the same time, he was writing prolifically, often in collaboration with Mr. Kornbluth. “The Space Merchants” was the most successful of the 11 books they wrote together.

In 1960 the British novelist Kingsley Amis hailed Mr. Pohl as science fiction’s “most consistently able writer.” The next year Mr. Pohl began editing two magazines: Galaxy, the monthly that had serialized “The Space Merchants,” and If, in which he introduced a number of important new writers, including Larry Niven and Alexei Panshin. Under his leadership If won the Hugo — an award voted by science fiction fans — for best magazine in 1966, 1967 and 1968.

After 1969, Mr. Pohl devoted most of his energies to writing. Yet he also found time to serve as science fiction editor at Bantam Books in the mid-’70s. It was a period of creative turmoil in science fiction, when a group of writers known as the New Wave sought to elevate genre writing by emphasizing literary style and character development. At Mr. Pohl’s urging, Bantam published two of the most important science fiction books of the era: “The Female Man,” by Joanna Russ, a feminist novel in which the war between the sexes is fought with real bullets; and “Dhalgren,” by Samuel R. Delany, a vast experimental work that owed as much to James Joyce as to H. G. Wells. Despite initial resistance from the Bantam sales force, “Dhalgren” went on to sell more than a million copies.

The ’70s also saw the blossoming of Mr. Pohl’s own writing career. In 1976 he won his first Nebula Award (given by the Science Fiction Writers of America) for “Man Plus,” about an astronaut whose body is surgically altered for life on Mars. He won another Nebula in 1977 (and a Hugo in 1978) for “Gateway,” which he considered his best novel. It told the story of a man who gains a fortune but loses the love of his life on a “prospecting” expedition aboard an alien spaceship — one of many left behind by the mysterious Heechee, who have taken refuge from even more mysterious aliens inside a black hole. Its most memorable character was a robot psychiatrist who tries to help the hero come to terms with his survivor guilt. Mr. Pohl wrote four more novels and a book of short stories in the Heechee saga.

All told, he published more than 65 novels and some 30 short-story collections, as well as nonfiction works. Nearly half his novels were collaborations with friends and colleagues like Mr. Kornbluth, Mr. Asimov, Lester del Rey and Jack Williamson. His last collaboration was with Arthur C. Clarke: the novel “The Last Theorem” (2008). Mr. Pohl won his last Hugo in 2010 in the “best fan writer” category for his blog “The Way the Future Blogs.”

A flirtation with the Young Communist League as a teenager left Mr. Pohl suspicious of grand schemes of social engineering. Yet he believed in the possibility of self improvement: “I am a sort of preacher,” he said in a 1980 interview. “I like to talk to people and get them to change their views when I think their views are wrong.”

“Why else,” he added, “would anyone write a book?”

Mr. Pohl was married five times and had four children; his third wife was the noted science fiction writer and editor Judith Merril. Information on survivors was not immediately available.

Mr. Pohl was a tireless researcher. In 2000 he published “Chasing Science: Science as a Spectator Sport,” which recounted his travels to learn about science firsthand, including visiting a neutrino detector in an abandoned gold mine in South Dakota and Star City, near Moscow, where Russian cosmonauts live and train.

When he did make a scientific mistake, he felt compelled to correct it. In the final novel in the Heechee saga, “The Boy Who Would Live Forever” (2004), he apologized to readers for his original decision to have the aliens hide in a black hole. While this had seemed an acceptable plot device back in the 1970s, when black holes were “quite a novelty,” he wrote, scientists in the 21st century no longer believe that “organized matter of any kind” can exist inside a black hole. Accordingly, he asked his readers to treat this central element in the galaxy-spanning saga as mere fantasy.

Frederik Pohl [Wikipedia]


X Minus One's "Tunnel Under the World"...old time radio offering #4

Omni Magazine will be back soon

"Omni Magazine is coming back to life!"

by

Charlie Jane Ande

August 8th, 2013

io9

Omni Magazine influenced a generation of science fiction-fans and scientists, and it had a huge role in inspiring io9. So it's amazing news that investor Jeremy Frommer is bringing the magazine back to life online, with science writer Claire Evans as the new editor.

According to the Verge, Evans stumbled into editing the new Omni by accident:

The chain of events began in April, when she wrote an effusive piece on Omni for Motherboard. A few weeks later, her editor approached her about investigating the recently resurfaced Omni archives. "As I was interviewing my current employer, Jeremy Frommer, about the collection, he essentially just offered me the job," she says. "That was a little bit over a month ago."

It sounds as though Omni will be updated weekly, and will include fiction by original Omni contributors like Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling alongside science writing. Can't wait!

Omni Magazine [Wikipedia]
 

Omni Magazine Collection [to date...196 items]

Deceased--Jack Vance

Jack Vance
August 28th, 1916 to May 26th, 2013

"Jack Vance, Novelist of the Fantastical, Is Dead at 96"

by

Bruce Weber

June 2nd, 2013

The New York Times

Jack Vance, who in dozens of fantastical novels created alternative worlds, past and present, imagining their alien societies in evocative detail, died on May 26 at his home in Oakland, Calif. He was 96.

The death was confirmed by his son, John H. Vance 2d.

Mr. Vance, whose career spanned six decades and some 60 books, was often called a science fiction writer, a label he disdained. He was certainly a genre writer, though without a consistent genre; he won an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America and was named a grand master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

A fantasist for certain, he occasionally dabbled in mysteries, but his main concern was the way people behave and the social, political and personal forces that motivate them. He thought of himself as “a speculative anthropologist,” his son said, interested in human beings and their foibles and their ability — or inability — to adapt to strained and bizarre situations.

Those situations were often worlds away from our own, set in places like the Gaean Reach, a collection of distant planets, each with its own history and culture. Mr. Vance wrote clusters of books. The Dying Earth series included four books set far in the future, when “the sun is feeble and red” and “in the place of the old peoples a few thousand strange souls live.”

His Demon Princes series consists of five novels in which the protagonist, Kirth Gersen, seeks revenge against the five villains, one per book, who destroyed his childhood home, a peaceful space colony. His Lyonesse trilogy is set during the Middle Ages in the Elder Isles, a fictional archipelago where daily life is animated by political rivalries and the spells of witches and magicians. His Cadwal Chronicles deal with issues of environmental protection and a rigidly stratified society.

Suitable for his often otherworldly settings, Mr. Vance wrote a stylized, attention-getting prose, not baroque exactly but not lacking in ornamentation or eccentric music, and full of vivid, sometimes lurid imagery.

“The Mek, standing as if a specimen in a museum case, was a manlike creature, native, in his original version, to a planet of Etamin,” he wrote in one of his best-known books, “The Last Castle,” describing a representative of a species that has just enacted a violent uprising. “His tough rusty-bronze hide glistened metallically as if oiled or waxed; the spines thrusting back from scalp and neck shone like gold, and indeed were coated with a conductive, copper-coated film. His sense organs were gathered in clusters at the site of a man’s ears; his visage — it was often a shock, walking the lower corridors, to come suddenly upon a Mek — was corrugated muscle, not dissimilar to the look of an uncovered human brain.”

Never a mega-seller, Mr. Vance nonetheless had fiercely loyal fans, some of whom, in the 1990s, put together the Vance Integral Edition, a 45-volume set of his complete works, and created Totality, a Web site where it is possible to search the entire oeuvre for frequently used words and phrases. Among his admirers were Ursula K. LeGuin and Michael Chabon.

“The engineer in him is always on view,” Mr. Chabon said of Mr. Vance in an interview in The New York Times Magazine in 2009. “They’re always adventure stories, too, but they’re also problem-solving puzzles. He sets up these what-ifs, like a syllogism. He has that logic-love like Poe, the Yankee engineering spirit, married to erudite love of pomp and pageantry. And he has an amazing ear and writes a beautiful sentence.”

John Holbrook Vance was born in San Francisco on Aug. 28, 1916. (He used his full given name, as well as pseudonyms, on some of his books.) His father, Charles, was rarely present, and he was raised largely by his mother, Edith, mostly on a ranch in Oakley, Calif., between San Francisco and Sacramento.

He held numerous odd jobs — bellhop, fruit picker, construction worker — before entering the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied mining engineering, physics and eventually journalism, though he never graduated. Weak eyes kept him out of the military, but he memorized an eye chart to get into the merchant marine during World War II. He wrote his first stories, published in 1946, at sea. By the 1980s he had lost his sight.

Mr. Vance’s wife, the former Norma Genevieve Ingold, became his work partner as well, typing his longhand drafts and editing along the way. They traveled a great deal — to Europe, Africa, Australia — and Mr. Vance supported them as a carpenter before he turned to writing full time in the early 1970s. She died in 2008. In addition to his son, Mr. Vance is survived by a sister, Patricia Frumenti, and three grandchildren.

His son described him as an approachable, gregarious and unpretentious man “who did an enormous amount of simple physical labor” in his life and was modest about his work.

“I wrote to make money, not for any other purpose,” Mr. Vance said of himself in an interview last year with Locus online, the Web site of a science fiction and fantasy magazine. “I just wrote the stuff because I was pretty good at it, and I wrote as fast as I could. I don’t glorify my writing at all. For some reason I have the knack. I can’t take any credit for it, any more than you can take credit for being a beautiful girl.” 
 
Jack Vance [Wikipedia]

Jack Vance home page 

A sample...

"Green Magic" was first published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1963.

Green Magic

by

Jack Vance

Howard Fair, looking over the relics of his great-uncle Gerald McIntyre, found a large ledger entitled:

WORKBOOK & JOURNAL

Open at Peril!

Fair read the journal with interest, although his own work went far beyond ideas treated only gingerly by Gerald McIntyre.

"The existence of disciplines concentric to the elementary magics must now be admitted without further controversy," wrote McIntyre. "Guided by a set of analogies from the white and black magics (to be detailed in due course), I have delineated the basic extension of purple magic, as well as its corollary, Dynamic Nomism."

Fair read on, remarking the careful charts, the projections and expansions, the transpolations and transformations by which Gerald McIntyre had conceived his systemology. So swiftly had the technical arts advanced that McIntyre's expositions, highly controversial sixty years before, now seemed pedantic and overly rigorous.

"Whereas benign creatures: angels, white sprites, merrihews, sandestins--are typical of the white cycle; whereas demons, magners, trolls and warlocks are evinced by black magic; so do the purple and green cycles sponsor their own particulars, but these are neither good nor evil, bearing, rather, the same relation to the black and white provinces that these latter do to our own basic realm."

Fair reread the passage. The "green cycle"? Had Gerald McIntyre wandered into regions overlooked by modern workers?

He reviewed the journal in the light of this suspicion, and discovered additional hints and references. Especially provocative was a bit of scribbled marginalia: "More concerning my latest researches I may not state, having been promised an infinite reward for this forbearance."

The passage was dated a day before Gerald McIntyre's death, which had occurred on March 21, 1898, the first day of spring. McIntyre had enjoyed very little of his "infinite reward," whatever had been its nature... Fair returned to a consideration of the journal, which, in a sentence or two, had opened a chink on an entire new panorama. McIntyre provided no further illumination, and Fair set out to make a fuller investigation.

His first steps were routine. He performed two divinations, searched the standard indexes, concordances, handbooks and formularies, evoked a demon whom he had previously found knowledgeable: all without success. He found no direct reference to cycles beyond the purple; the demon refused even to speculate.

Fair was by no means discouraged; if anything, the intensity of his interest increased. He reread the journal, with particular care to the justification for purple magic, reasoning that McIntyre, groping for a lore beyond the purple, might well have used the methods which had yielded results before. Applying stains and ultraviolet light to the pages, Fair made legible a number of notes McIntyre had jotted down, then erased.

Fair was immensely stimulated. The notes assured him that he was on the right track, and further indicated a number of blind alleys which Fair profited by avoiding. He applied himself so successfully that before the week was out he had evoked a sprite of the green cycle.

It appeared in the semblance of a man with green glass eyes and a thatch of young eucalyptus leaves in the place of hair. It greeted Fair with cool courtesy, would not seat itself, and ignored Fair's proffer of coffee.

After wandering around the apartment inspecting Fair's books and curios with an air of negligent amusement, it agreed to respond to Fair's questions.

Fair asked permission to use his tape-recorder, which the sprite allowed, and Fair set the apparatus in motion. (When subsequently he replayed the interview, no sound could be heard.)

"What realms of magic lie beyond the green?" asked Fair.

"I can't give you an exact answer," replied the sprite, "because I don't know. There are at least two more, corresponding to the colors we call rawn and pallow, and very likely others."

Fair arranged the microphone where it would more directly intercept the voice of the sprite.

"What," he asked, "is the green cycle like? What is its physical semblance?"

The sprite paused to consider. Glistening mother-of-pearl films wandered across its face, reflecting the tinge of its thoughts. "I'm rather severely restricted by your use of the word 'physical'. And 'semblance' involves a subjective interpretation, which changes with the rise and fall of the seconds."

"By all means," Fair said hastily, "describe it in your own words."

"Well, we have four different regions, two of which floresce from the basic skeleton of the universe, and so subsede the others. The first of these is compressed and isthiated, but is notable for its wide pools of mottle which we use sometimes for deranging stations. We've transplanted club-mosses from Earth's Devonian and a few ice-fires from Perdition. They climb among the rods which we call devil-hair--" he went on for several minutes but the meaning almost entirely escaped Fair. And it seemed as if the question by which he had hoped to break the ice might run away with the entire interview. He introduced another idea.

" 'Can we freely manipulate the physical extensions of Earth?' " The sprite seemed amused. "You refer, so I assume, to the various aspects of space, time, mass, energy, life, thought and recollection."

"Exactly."

The sprite raised its green corn-silk eyebrows. "I might as sensibly ask: can you break an egg by striking it with a club? The response is on a similar level of seriousness."

Fair had expected a certain amount of condescension and impatience, and was not abashed. "How may I learn these techniques?"

"In the usual manner: through diligent study."

"Ah, indeed--but where could I study? Who would teach me?"

The sprite made an easy gesture, and whorls of green smoke trailed from his fingers to spin through the air. "I could arrange the matter, but since I bear you no particular animosity, I'll do nothing of the sort. And now, I must be gone."

"Where do you go?" Fair asked in wonder and longing. "May I go with you?"

The sprite, swirling a drape of bright green dust over its shoulders, shook his head. "You would be less than comfortable."

"Other men have explored the worlds of magic!"

"True: your uncle Gerald McIntyre, for instance."

"My uncle Gerald learned green magic?"

"To the limit of his capabilities. He found no pleasure in his learning. You would do well to profit by his experience and modify your ambitions." The sprite turned and walked away.

Fair watched it depart. The sprite receded in space and dimension, but never reached the wall of Fair's room. At a distance which might have been fifty yards, the sprite glanced back, as if to make sure that Fair was not following, then stepped off at another angle and disappeared.

Fair's first impulse was to take heed and limit his explorations. He was an adept in white magic, and had mastered the black art--occasionally he evoked a demon to liven a social gathering which otherwise threatened to become dull--but he had by no means illuminated every mystery of purple magic, which is the realm of Incarnate Symbols.

Howard Fair might have turned away from the green cycle except for three factors.

First was his physical appearance. He stood rather under medium height, with a swarthy face, sparse black hair, a gnarled nose, a small heavy mouth. He felt no great sensitivity about his appearance, but realized that it might be improved. In his mind's eye he pictured the personified ideal of himself: he was taller by six inches, his nose thin and keen, his skin cleared of its muddy undertone. A striking figure, but still recognizable as Howard Fair. He wanted the love of women, but he wanted it without the interposition of his craft. Many times he had brought beautiful girls to his bed, lips wet and eyes shining; but purple magic had seduced them rather than Howard Fair, and he took limited satisfaction in such conquests.

Here was the first factor which drew Howard Fair back to the green lore; the second was his yearning for extended, perhaps eternal, life; the third was simple thirst for knowledge.

The fact of Gerald McIntyre's death, or dissolution, or Disappearance--whatever had happened to him--was naturally a matter of concern. If he had won to a goal so precious, why had he died so quickly? Was the "infinite reward" so miraculous, so exquisite, that the mind failed under its possession? (If such was the case, the reward was hardly a reward.)

Fair could not restrain himself, and by degrees returned to a study of green magic. Rather than again invoke the sprite whose air of indulgent contempt he had found exasperating, he decided to seek knowledge by an indirect method, employing the most advanced concepts of technical and cabalistic science.

He obtained a portable television transmitter which he loaded into his panel truck along with a receiver. On a Monday night in early May, he drove to an abandoned graveyard far out in the wooded hills, and there, by the light of a waning moon, he buried the television camera in graveyard clay until only the lens protruded from the soil.

With a sharp alder twig he scratched on the ground a monstrous outline. The television lens served for one eye, a beer bottle pushed neck-first into the soil the other.

During the middle hours, while the moon died behind wisps of pale cloud, he carved a word on the dark forehead; then recited the activating incantation.

The ground rumbled and moaned, the golem heaved up to blot out the stars.

The glass eyes stared down at Fair, secure in his pentagon.

"Speak!" called out Fair. "Enteresthes, Akmai Adonai Bidemgir! Elohim, pa rahulli! Enteresthes, HVOI! Speak!"

"Return me to earth, return my clay to the quiet clay from whence you roused me."

"First you must serve."

The golem stumbled forward to crush Fair, but was halted by the pang of protective magic.

"Serve you I will, if serve you I must."

Fair stepped boldly forth from the pentagon, strung forty yards of green ribbon down the road in the shape of a narrow V. "Go forth into the realm of green magic," he told the monster. "The ribbons reach forty miles; walk to the end, turn about, return, and then fall back, return to the earth from which you rose."

The golem turned, shuffled into the V of green ribbon, shaking off clods of mold, jarring the ground with its ponderous tread.

Fair watched the squat shape dwindle, recede, yet never reach the angle of the magic V. He returned to his panel truck, tuned the television receiver to the golem's eye, and surveyed the fantastic vistas of the green realm.

Two elementals of the green realm met on a spun-silver landscape. They were Jaadian and Misthemar, and they fell to discussing the earthen monster which had stalked forty miles through the region known as Cil; which then, turning in its tracks, had retraced its steps, gradually increasing its pace until at the end it moved in a shambling rush, leaving a trail of clods on the fragile moth-wing mosaics.

"Events, events, events," Misthemar fretted, "they crowd the chute of time till the bounds bulge. Or then again, the course is as lean and spare as a stretched tendon... But in regard to this incursion..." He paused for a period of reflection, and silver clouds moved over his head and under his feet.

Jaadian remarked, "You are aware that I conversed with Howard Fair; he is so obsessed to escape the squalor of his world that he acts with recklessness."

"The man Gerald McIntyre was his uncle," mused Misthemar. "McIntyre besought, we yielded; as perhaps now we must yield to Howard Fair."

Jaadian uneasily opened his hand, shook off a spray of emerald fire. "Events press, both in and out. I find myself unable to act in this regard."

"I likewise do not care to be the agent of tragedy."

A Meaning came fluttering up from below: "A disturbance among the spiral towers! A caterpillar of glass and metal has come clanking; it has thrust electric eyes into the Portinone and broke open the Egg of Innocence. Howard Fair is the fault."

Jaadian and Misthemar consulted each other with wry disinclination. "Very well, both of us will go; such a duty needs two souls in support."

They impinged upon Earth and found Howard Fair in a wall booth at a cocktail bar. He looked up at the two strangers and one of them asked, "May we join you?"

Fair examined the two men. Both wore conservative suits and carried cashmere topcoats over their arms. Fair noticed that the left thumb-nail of each man glistened green.

Fair rose politely to his feet. "Will you sit down?"

The green sprites hung up their overcoats and slid into the booth. Fair looked from one to the other. He addressed Jaadian. "Aren't you he whom I interviewed several weeks ago?"

Jaadian assented. "You have not accepted my advice."

Fair shrugged. "You asked me to remain ignorant, to accept my stupidity and ineptitude."

"And why should you not?" asked Jaadian gently. "You are a primitive in a primitive realm; nevertheless not one man in a thousand can match your achievements."

Fair agreed, smiling faintly. "But knowledge creates a craving for further knowledge. Where is the harm in knowledge?"

Misthemar, the more mercurial of the sprites, spoke angrily. "Where is the harm? Consider your earthen monster! It befouled forty miles of delicacy, the record of ten million years. Consider your caterpillar! It trampled our pillars of carved milk, our dreaming towers, damaged the nerve-skeins which extrude and waft us our Meanings."

"I'm dreadfully sorry," said Fair. "I meant no destruction."

The sprites nodded. "But your apology conveys no guarantee of restraint."

Fair toyed with his glass. A waiter approached the table, addressed the two sprites. "Something for you two gentlemen?"

Jaadian ordered a glass of charged water, as did Misthemar. Fair called for another highball.

"What do you hope to gain from this activity?" inquired Misthemar. "Destructive forays teach you nothing!"

Fair agreed. "I have learned little. But I have seen miraculous sights. I am more than ever anxious to learn."

The green sprites glumly watched the bubbles rising in their glasses. Jaadian at last drew a deep sigh. "Perhaps we can obviate toil on your part and disturbance on ours. Explicitly, what gains or advantages do you hope to derive from green magic?"

Fair, smiling, leaned back into the red imitation-leather cushions. "I want many things. Extended life--mobility in time--comprehensive memory--augmented perception, with vision across the whole spectrum. I want physical charm and magnetism, the semblance of youth, muscular endurance... Then there are qualities more or less speculative, such as--"

Jaadian interrupted. "These qualities and characteristics we will confer upon you. In return you will undertake never again to disturb the green realm. You will evade centuries of toil; we will be spared the nuisance of your presence, and the inevitable tragedy."

"Tragedy?" inquired Fair in wonder. "Why tragedy?"

Jaadian spoke in a deep reverberating voice. "You are a man of Earth. Your goals are not our goals. Green magic makes you aware of our goals."

Fair thoughtfully sipped his highball. "I can't see that this is a disadvantage. I am willing to submit to the discipline of instruction. Surely a knowledge of green magic will not change me into a different entity?"

"No. And this is the basic tragedy!"

Misthemar spoke in exasperation. "We are forbidden to harm lesser creatures, and so you are fortunate; for to dissolve you into air would end all the annoyance."

Fair laughed. "I apologize again for making such a nuisance of myself. But surely you understand how important this is to me?"

Jaadian asked hopefully, "Then you agree to our offer?"

Fair shook his head. "How could I live, forever young, capable of extended learning, but limited to knowledge which I already see bounds to? I would be bored, restless, miserable."

"That well may be," said Jaadian. "But not so bored, restless and miserable as if you were learned in green magic."

Fair drew himself erect. "I must learn green magic. It is an opportunity which only a person both torpid and stupid could refuse."

Jaadian sighed. "In your place I would make the same response." The sprites rose to their feet. "Come then, we will teach you."

"Don't say we didn't warn you," said Misthemar.

Time passed. Sunset waned and twilight darkened. A man walked up the stairs, entered Howard Fair's apartment. He was tall, unobtrusively muscular. His face was sensitive, keen, humorous; his left thumb-nail glistened green.

Time is a function of vital processes. The people of Earth had perceived the motion of their clocks. On this understanding, two hours had elapsed since Howard Fair had followed the green sprites from the bar.

Howard Fair had perceived other criteria. For him the interval had been seven hundred years, during which he had lived in the green realm, learning to the utmost capacity of his brain.

He had occupied two years training his senses to the new conditions. Gradually he learned to walk in the six basic three-dimensional directions, and accustomed himself to the fourth-dimensional short-cuts. By easy stages the blinds over his eyes were removed, so that the dazzling over-human intricacy of the landscape never completely confounded him.

Another year was spent training him to the use of a code language--an intermediate step between the vocalizations of Earth and the meaning patterns of the green realm, where a hundred symbol-flakes (each a flitting spot of delicate iridescence) might be displayed in a single swirl of import. During this time Howard Fair's eyes and brain were altered, to allow him the use of the many new colors, without which the meaning-flakes could not be recognized.

These were preliminary steps. For forty years he studied the flakes, of which there were almost a million. Another forty years was given to elementary permutations and shifts, and another forty to parallels, attenuation, diminishments and extensions; and during this time he was introduced to flake patterns, and certain of the more obvious displays.

Now he was able to study without recourse to the code language, and his progress became more marked. Another twenty years found him able to recognize more complicated Meanings, and he was introduced to a more varied program. He floated over the field of moth-wing mosaics, which still showed the footprints of the golem. He sweated in embarrassment, the extent of his wicked willfulness now clear to him.

So passed the years. Howard Fair learned as much green magic as his brain could encompass.

He explored much of the green realm, finding so much beauty that he feared his brain might burst. He tasted, he heard, he felt, he sensed, and each one of his senses was a hundred times more discriminating than before. Nourishment came in a thousand different forms: from pink eggs which burst into a hot sweet gas, suffusing his entire body; from passing through a rain of stinging metal crystals; from simple contemplation of the proper symbol.

Homesickness for Earth waxed and waned. Sometimes it was insupportable and he was ready to forsake all he had learned and abandon his hopes for the future. At other times the magnificence of the green realm permeated him, and the thought of departure seemed like the threat of death itself.

By stages so gradual he never realized them he learned green magic.

But the new faculty gave him no pride: between his crude ineptitudes and the poetic elegance of the sprites remained a tremendous gap, and he felt his innate inferiority much more keenly than he ever had in his old state. Worse, his most earnest efforts failed to improve his technique, and sometimes, observing the singing joy of an improvised manifestation by one of the sprites, and contrasting it to his own labored constructions, he felt futility and shame.

The longer he remained in the green realm, the stronger grew the sense of his own maladroitness, and he began to long for the easy environment of Earth, where each of his acts would not shout aloud of vulgarity and crassness. At times he would watch the sprites (in the gossamer forms natural to them) at play among the pearl-petals, or twining like quick flashes of music through the forest of pink spirals. The contrast between their verve and his brutish fumbling could not be borne and he would turn away. His self-respect dwindled with each passing hour, and instead of pride in his learning, he felt a sullen ache for what he was not and could never become. The first few hundred years he worked with the enthusiasm of ignorance, for the next few he was buoyed by hope. During the last part of his time, only dogged obstinacy kept him plodding through what now he knew for infantile exercises.

In one terrible bittersweet spasm, he gave up. He found Jaadian weaving tinkling fragments of various magics into a warp of shining long splines. With grave courtesy, Jaadian gave Fair his attention, and Fair laboriously set forth his meaning.

Jaadian returned a message. "I recognize your discomfort, and extend my sympathy. It is best that you now return to your native home."

He put aside his weaving and conveyed Fair down through the requisite vortices. Along the way they passed Misthemar. No flicker of meaning was expressed or exchanged, but Howard Fair thought to feel a tinge of faintly malicious amusement.

Howard Fair sat in his apartment. His perceptions, augmented and sharpened by his sojourn in the green realm, took note of the surroundings. Only two hours before, by the clocks of Earth, he had found them both restful and stimulating; now they were neither. His books: superstition, spuriousness, earnest nonsense. His private journals and workbooks: a pathetic scrawl of infantilisms. Gravity tugged at his feet, held him rigid. The shoddy construction of the house, which heretofore he never had noticed, oppressed him. Everywhere he looked he saw slipshod disorder, primitive filth. The thought of the food he must now eat revolted him.

He went out on his little balcony which overlooked the street. The air was impregnated with organic smells. Across the street he could look into windows where his fellow humans lived in stupid squalor.

Fair smiled sadly. He had tried to prepare himself for these reactions, but now was surprised by their intensity. He returned into his apartment. He must accustom himself to the old environment. And after all there were compensations. The most desirable commodities of the world were now his to enjoy.

Howard Fair plunged into the enjoyment of these pleasures. He forced himself to drink quantities of expensive wines, brandies, liqueurs, even though they offended his palate. Hunger overcame his nausea, he forced himself to the consumption of what he thought of as fried animal tissue, the hypertrophied sexual organs of plants. He experimented with erotic sensations, but found that beautiful women no longer seemed different from the plain ones, and that he could barely steel himself to the untidy contacts. He bought libraries of erudite books, glanced through them with contempt. He tried to amuse himself with his old magics; they seemed ridiculous.

He forced himself to enjoy these pleasures for a month; then he fled the city and established a crystal bubble on a crag in the Andes. To nourish himself, he contrived a thick liquid, which, while by no means as exhilarating as the substances of the green realm, was innocent of organic contamination.

After a certain degree of improvisation and make-shift, he arranged his life to its minimum discomfort. The view was one of austere grandeur; not even the condors came to disturb him. He sat back to ponder the chain of events which had started with his discovery of Gerald McIntyre's workbook. He frowned. Gerald McIntyre? He jumped to his feet, looked far over the crags.

He found Gerald McIntyre at a wayside service station in the heart of the South Dakota prairie. McIntyre was sitting in an old wooden chair, tilted back against the peeling yellow paint of the service station, a straw hat shading his eyes from the sun.

He was a magnetically handsome man, blond of hair, brown of skin, with blue eyes whose gaze stung like the touch of icicles. His left thumb-nail glistened green.

Fair greeted him casually; the two men surveyed each other with wry curiosity.

"I see you have adapted yourself." said Howard Fair.

McIntyre shrugged. "As well as possible. I try to maintain a balance between solitude and the pressure of humanity." He looked into the bright blue sky where crows flapped and called. "For many years I lived in isolation. I began to detest the sound of my own breathing."

Along the highway came a glittering automobile, rococo as a hybrid goldfish. With the perceptions now available to them, Fair and McIntyre could see the driver to be red-faced and truculent, his companion a peevish woman in expensive clothes.

"There are other advantages to residence here," said McIntyre. "For instance, I am able to enrich the lives of passersby with trifles of novel adventure." He made a small gesture; two dozen crows swooped down and flew beside the automobile. They settled on the fenders, strutted back and forth along the hood, fouled the windshield.

The automobile squealed to a halt, the driver jumped out, put the birds to flight. He threw an ineffectual rock, waved his arms in outrage, returned to his car, proceeded.

"A paltry affair," said McIntyre with a sigh. "The truth of the matter is that I am bored." He pursed his mouth and blew forth three bright puffs of smoke: first red, then yellow, then blazing blue. "I have arrived at the estate of foolishness, as you can see."

Fair surveyed his great-uncle with a trace of uneasiness. McIntyre laughed. "No more pranks. I predict, however, that you will presently share my malaise."

"I share it already," said Fair. "Sometimes I wish I could abandon all my magic and return to my former innocence."

"I have toyed with the idea," McIntyre replied thoughtfully. "In fact I have made all the necessary arrangements. It is really a simple matter." He led Fair to a small room behind the station. Although the door was open, the interior showed a thick darkness.

McIntyre, standing well back, surveyed the darkness with a quizzical curl to his lip. "You need only enter. All your magic, all your recollections of the green realm will depart. You will be no wiser than the next man you meet. And with your knowledge will go your boredom, your melancholy, your dissatisfaction."

Fair contemplated the dark doorway. A single step would resolve his discomfort.

He glanced at McIntyre; the two surveyed each other with sardonic amusement. They returned to the front of the building.

"Sometimes I stand by the door and look into the darkness," said McIntyre. "Then I am reminded how dearly I cherish my boredom, and what a precious commodity is so much misery."

Fair made himself ready for departure. "I thank you for this new wisdom, which a hundred more years in the green realm would not have taught me. And now, for a time, at least, I go back to my crag in the Andes."

McIntyre tilted his chair against the wall of the service station. "And I, for a time, at least, will wait for the next passerby."

"Good-bye, then, Uncle Gerald."

"Good-bye, Howard."

Survival in desperate circumstances...Fritz Leiber's "A Pail of Air"

Wikipedia...

"A Pail of Air" is a science fiction short story by Fritz Leiber which appeared in the December 1951 issue of Galaxy Magazine and was dramatized on the radio show X Minus One in March 1956.

Plot...

The story is narrated by a ten-year-old boy living on Earth after it has been torn away from the Sun by a passing "dark star". The loss of solar heating has caused the Earth's atmosphere to freeze into thick layers of "snow". The boy's father had worked with a group of other scientists to construct a large shelter, but the earthquakes accompanying the disaster had destroyed it and killed the others. He managed to construct a smaller, makeshift shelter called the "Nest" for his family, where they maintain a breathable atmosphere by periodically retrieving pails of frozen oxygen to thaw over a fire. They have survived in this way for a number of years.

At the end, they are found by a search party from a large group of survivors at Los Alamos, where they are using nuclear power to provide heat and have begun using rockets to search for other survivors (radio being ineffective at long range without an ionosphere). They reveal that other groups of humans have survived at Argonne, Brookhaven, and Harwell nuclear research facilities as well as in Tanna Tuva, and that plans are being made to establish uranium mining colonies at Great Slave Lake or in the Congo region.

The age of the narrator is not revealed until the last sentence, providing a twist.

Audio presentation... 

"A Pail of Air"
X Minus One

"A Pail of Air"

by

Fritz Leiber

Pa had sent me out to get an extra pail of air. I'd just about scooped it full and most of the warmth had leaked from my fingers when I saw the thing.

You know, at first I thought it was a young lady. Yes, a beautiful young lady's face all glowing in the dark and looking at me from the fifth floor of the opposite apartment, which hereabouts is the floor just above the white blanket of frozen air. I'd never seen a live young lady before, except in the old magazines—Sis is just a kid and Ma is pretty sick and miserable—and it gave me such a start that I dropped the pail. Who wouldn't, knowing everyone on Earth was dead except Pa and Ma and Sis and you?

Even at that, I don't suppose I should have been surprised. We all see things now and then. Ma has some pretty bad ones, to judge from the way she bugs her eyes at nothing and just screams and screams and huddles back against the blankets hanging around the Nest. Pa says it is natural we should react like that sometimes.

When I'd recovered the pail and could look again at the opposite apartment, I got an idea of what Ma might be feeling at those times, for I saw it wasn't a young lady at all but simply a light—a tiny light that moved stealthily from window to window, just as if one of the cruel little stars had come down out of the airless sky to investigate why the Earth had gone away from the Sun, and maybe to hunt down something to torment or terrify, now that the Earth didn't have the Sun's protection.

I tell you, the thought of it gave me the creeps. I just stood there shaking, and almost froze my feet and did frost my helmet so solid on the inside that I couldn't have seen the light even if it had come out of one of the windows to get me. Then I had the wit to go back inside.

Pretty soon I was feeling my familiar way through the thirty or so blankets and rugs Pa has got hung around to slow down the escape of air from the Nest, and I wasn't quite so scared. I began to hear the tick-ticking of the clocks in the Nest and knew I was getting back into air, because there's no sound outside in the vacuum, of course. But my mind was still crawly and uneasy as I pushed through the last blankets—Pa's got them faced with aluminum foil to hold in the heat—and came into the Nest.

* * *

Let me tell you about the Nest. It's low and snug, just room for the four of us and our things. The floor is covered with thick woolly rugs. Three of the sides are blankets, and the blankets roofing it touch Pa's head. He tells me it's inside a much bigger room, but I've never seen the real walls or ceiling.

Against one of the blankets is a big set of shelves, with tools and books and other stuff, and on top of it a whole row of clocks. Pa's very fussy about keeping them wound. He says we must never forget time, and without a sun or moon, that would be easy to do.

The fourth wall has blankets all over except around the fireplace, in which there is a fire that must never go out. It keeps us from freezing and does a lot more besides. One of us must always watch it. Some of the clocks are alarm and we can use them to remind us. In the early days there was only Ma to take turns with Pa—I think of that when she gets difficult—but now there's me to help, and Sis too.

It's Pa who is the chief guardian of the fire, though. I always think of him that way: a tall man sitting cross-legged, frowning anxiously at the fire, his lined face golden in its light, and every so often carefully placing on it a piece of coal from the big heap beside it. Pa tells me there used to be guardians of the fire sometimes in the very old days—vestal virgins, he calls them—although there was unfrozen air all around then and you didn't really need one.

He was sitting just that way now, though he got up quick to take the pail from me and bawl me out for loitering—he'd spotted my frozen helmet right off. That roused Ma and she joined in picking on me. She's always trying to get the load off her feelings, Pa explains. Sis let off a couple of silly squeals too.

Pa handled the pail of air in a twist of cloth. Now that it was inside the Nest, you could really feel its coldness. It just seemed to suck the heat out of everything. Even the flames cringed away from it as Pa put it down close by the fire.

Yet it's that glimmery white stuff in the pail that keeps us alive. It slowly melts and vanishes and refreshes the Nest and feeds the fire. The blankets keep it from escaping too fast. Pa'd like to seal the whole place, but he can't—building's too earthquake-twisted, and besides he has to leave the chimney open for smoke.

Pa says air is tiny molecules that fly away like a flash if there isn't something to stop them. We have to watch sharp not to let the air run low. Pa always keeps a big reserve supply of it in buckets behind the first blankets, along with extra coal and cans of food and other things, such as pails of snow to melt for water. We have to go way down to the bottom floor for that stuff, which is a mean trip, and get it through a door to outside.

You see, when the Earth got cold, all the water in the air froze first and made a blanket ten feet thick or so everywhere, and then down on top of that dropped the crystals of frozen air, making another white blanket sixty or seventy feet thick maybe.

Of course, all the parts of the air didn't freeze and snow down at the same time.

First to drop out was the carbon dioxide—when you're shoveling for water, you have to make sure you don't go too high and get any of that stuff mixed in, for it would put you to sleep, maybe for good, and make the fire go out. Next there's the nitrogen, which doesn't count one way or the other, though it's the biggest part of the blanket. On top of that and easy to get at, which is lucky for us, there's the oxygen that keeps us alive. Pa says we live better than kings ever did, breathing pure oxygen, but we're used to it and don't notice. Finally, at the very top, there's a slick of liquid helium, which is funny stuff. All of these gases in neat separate layers. Like a pussy caffay, Pa laughingly says, whatever that is.

* * *

I was busting to tell them all about what I'd seen, and so as soon as I'd ducked out of my helmet and while I was still climbing out of my suit, I cut loose. Right away Ma got nervous and began making eyes at the entry-slit in the blankets and wringing her hands together—the hand where she'd lost three fingers from frostbite inside the good one, as usual. I could tell that Pa was annoyed at me scaring her and wanted to explain it all away quickly, yet could see I wasn't fooling.

"And you watched this light for some time, son?" he asked when I finished.

I hadn't said anything about first thinking it was a young lady's face. Somehow that part embarrassed me.

"Long enough for it to pass five windows and go to the next floor."

"And it didn't look like stray electricity or crawling liquid or starlight focused by a growing crystal, or anything like that?"

He wasn't just making up those ideas. Odd things happen in a world that's about as cold as can be, and just when you think matter would be frozen dead, it takes on a strange new life. A slimy stuff comes crawling toward the Nest, just like an animal snuffing for heat—that's the liquid helium. And once, when I was little, a bolt of lightning—not even Pa could figure where it came from—hit the nearby steeple and crawled up and down it for weeks, until the glow finally died.

"Not like anything I ever saw," I told him.

He stood for a moment frowning. Then, "I'll go out with you, and you show it to me," he said.

Ma raised a howl at the idea of being left alone, and Sis joined in, too, but Pa quieted them. We started climbing into our outside clothes—mine had been warming by the fire. Pa made them. They have plastic headpieces that were once big double-duty transparent food cans, but they keep heat and air in and can replace the air for a little while, long enough for our trips for water and coal and food and so on.

Ma started moaning again, "I've always known there was something outside there, waiting to get us. I've felt it for years—-something that's part of the cold and hates all warmth and wants to destroy the Nest. It's been watching us all this time, and now it's coming after us. It'll get you and then come for me. Don't go, Harry!"

Pa had everything on but his helmet. He knelt by the fireplace and reached in and shook the long metal rod that goes up the chimney and knocks off the ice that keeps trying to clog it. Once a week he goes up on the roof to check if it's working all right. That's our worst trip and Pa won't let me make it alone.

"Sis," Pa said quietly, "come watch the fire. Keep an eye on the air, too. If it gets low or doesn't seem to be boiling fast enough, fetch another bucket from behind the blanket. But mind your hands. Use the cloth to pick up the bucket."

Sis quit helping Ma be frightened and came over and did as she was told. Ma quieted down pretty suddenly, though her eyes were still kind of wild as she watched Pa fix on his helmet tight and pick up a pail and the two of us go out.

* * *

Pa led the way and I took hold of his belt. It's a funny thing, I'm not afraid to go by myself, but when Pa's along I always want to hold on to him. Habit, I guess, and then there's no denying that this time I was a bit scared.

You see, it's this way. We know that everything is dead out there. Pa heard the last radio voices fade away years ago, and had seen some of the last folks die who weren't as lucky or well-protected as us. So we knew that if there was something groping around out there, it couldn't be anything human or friendly.

Besides that, there's a feeling that comes with it always being night, cold night. Pa says there used to be some of that feeling even in the old days, but then every morning the Sun would come and chase it away. I have to take his word for that, not ever remembering the Sun as being anything more than a big star. You see, I hadn't been born when the dark star snatched us away from the Sun, and by now it's dragged us out beyond the orbit of the planet Pluto, Pa says, and taking us farther out all the time.

I found myself wondering whether there mightn't be something on the dark star that wanted us, and if that was why it had captured the Earth. Just then we came to the end of the corridor and I followed Pa out on the balcony.

I don't know what the city looked like in the old days, but now it's beautiful. The starlight lets you see pretty well—there's quite a bit of light in those steady points speckling the blackness above. (Pa says the stars used to twinkle once, but that was because there was air.) We are on a hill and the shimmery plain drops away from us and then flattens out, cut up into neat squares by the troughs that used to be streets. I sometimes make my mashed potatoes look like it, before I pour on the gravy.

Some taller buildings push up out of the feathery plain, topped by rounded caps of air crystals, like the fur hood Ma wears, only whiter. On those buildings you can see the darker squares of windows, underlined by white dashes of air crystals. Some of them are on a slant, for many of the buildings are pretty badly twisted by the quakes and all the rest that happened when the dark star captured the Earth.

Here and there a few icicles hang, water icicles from the first days of the cold, other icicles of frozen air that melted on the roofs and dripped and froze again. Sometimes one of those icicles will catch the light of a star and send it to you so brightly you think the star has swooped into the city. That was one of the things Pa had been thinking of when I told him about the light, but I had thought of it myself first and known it wasn't so.

He touched his helmet to mine so we could talk easier and he asked me to point out the windows to him. But there wasn't any light moving around inside them now, or anywhere else. To my surprise, Pa didn't bawl me out and tell me I'd been seeing things. He looked all around quite a while after filling his pail, and just as we were going inside he whipped around without warning, as if to take some peeping thing off guard.

I could feel it, too. The old peace was gone. There was something lurking out there, watching, waiting, getting ready.

Inside, he said to me, touching helmets, "If you see something like that again, son, don't tell the others. Your Ma's sort of nervous these days and we owe her all the feeling of safety we can give her. Once—it was when your sister was born—I was ready to give up and die, but your Mother kept me trying. Another time she kept the fire going a whole week all by herself when I was sick. Nursed me and took care of the two of you, too.

"You know that game we sometimes play, sitting in a square in the Nest, tossing a ball around? Courage is like a ball, son. A person can hold it only so long, and then he's got to toss it to someone else. When it's tossed your way, you've got to catch it and hold it tight—and hope there'll be someone else to toss it to when you get tired of being brave."

His talking to me that way made me feel grown-up and good. But it didn't wipe away the thing outside from the back of my mind—or the fact that Pa took it seriously.

* * *

It's hard to hide your feelings about such a thing. When we got back in the Nest and took off our outside clothes, Pa laughed about it all and told them it was nothing and kidded me for having such an imagination, but his words fell flat. He didn't convince Ma and Sis any more than he did me. It looked for a minute like we were all fumbling the courage-ball. Something had to be done, and almost before I knew what I was going to say, I heard myself asking Pa to tell us about the old days, and how it all happened.

He sometimes doesn't mind telling that story, and Sis and I sure like to listen to it, and he got my idea. So we were all settled around the fire in a wink, and Ma pushed up some cans to thaw for supper, and Pa began. Before he did, though, I noticed him casually get a hammer from the shelf and lay it down beside him.

It was the same old story as always—I think I could recite the main thread of it in my sleep—though Pa always puts in a new detail or two and keeps improving it in spots.

He told us how the Earth had been swinging around the Sun ever so steady and warm, and the people on it fixing to make money and wars and have a good time and get power and treat each other right or wrong, when without warning there comes charging out of space this dead star, this burned out sun, and upsets everything.

You know, I find it hard to believe in the way those people felt, any more than I can believe in the swarming number of them. Imagine people getting ready for the horrible sort of war they were cooking up. Wanting it even, or at least wishing it were over so as to end their nervousness. As if all folks didn't have to hang together and pool every bit of warmth just to keep alive. And how can they have hoped to end danger, any more than we can hope to end the cold?

Sometimes I think Pa exaggerates and makes things out too black. He's cross with us once in a while and was probably cross with all those folks. Still, some of the things I read in the old magazines sound pretty wild. He may be right.

* * *

The dark star, as Pa went on telling it, rushed in pretty fast and there wasn't much time to get ready. At the beginning they tried to keep it a secret from most people, but then the truth came out, what with the earthquakes and floods—imagine, oceans of unfrozen water!—and people seeing stars blotted out by something on a clear night. First off they thought it would hit the Sun, and then they thought it would hit the Earth. There was even the start of a rush to get to a place called China, because people thought the star would hit on the other side. But then they found it wasn't going to hit either side, but was going to come very close to the Earth.

Most of the other planets were on the other side of the Sun and didn't get involved. The Sun and the newcomer fought over the Earth for a little while—pulling it this way and that, like two dogs growling over a bone, Pa described it this time—and then the newcomer won and carried us off. The Sun got a consolation prize, though. At the last minute he managed to hold on to the Moon.

That was the time of the monster earthquakes and floods, twenty times worse than anything before. It was also the time of the Big Jerk, as Pa calls it, when all Earth got yanked suddenly, just as Pa has done to me once or twice, grabbing me by the collar to do it, when I've been sitting too far from the fire.

You see, the dark star was going through space faster than the Sun, and in the opposite direction, and it had to wrench the world considerably in order to take it away.

The Big Jerk didn't last long. It was over as soon as the Earth was settled down in its new orbit around the dark star. But it was pretty terrible while it lasted. Pa says that all sorts of cliffs and buildings toppled, oceans slopped over, swamps and sandy deserts gave great sliding surges that buried nearby lands. Earth was almost jerked out of its atmosphere blanket and the air got so thin in spots that people keeled over and fainted—though of course, at the same time, they were getting knocked down by the Big Jerk and maybe their bones broke or skulls cracked.

We've often asked Pa how people acted during that time, whether they were scared or brave or crazy or stunned, or all four, but he's sort of leery of the subject, and he was again tonight. He says he was mostly too busy to notice.

You see, Pa and some scientist friends of his had figured out part of what was going to happen—they'd known we'd get captured and our air would freeze—and they'd been working like mad to fix up a place with airtight walls and doors, and insulation against the cold, and big supplies of food and fuel and water and bottled air. But the place got smashed in the last earthquakes and all Pa's friends were killed then and in the Big Jerk. So he had to start over and throw the Nest together quick without any advantages, just using any stuff he could lay his hands on.

I guess he's telling pretty much the truth when he says he didn't have any time to keep an eye on how other folks behaved, either then or in the Big Freeze that followed—followed very quick, you know, both because the dark star was pulling us away very fast and because Earth's rotation had been slowed in the tug-of-war, so that the nights were ten old nights long.

Still, I've got an idea of some of the things that happened from the frozen folk I've seen, a few of them in other rooms in our building, others clustered around the furnaces in the basements where we go for coal.

In one of the rooms, an old man sits stiff in a chair, with an arm and a leg in splints. In another, a man and a woman are huddled together in a bed with heaps of covers over them. You can just see their heads peeking out, close together. And in another a beautiful young lady is sitting with a pile of wraps huddled around her, looking hopefully toward the door, as if waiting for someone who never came back with warmth and food. They're all still and stiff as statues, of course, but just like life.

Pa showed them to me once in quick winks of his flashlight, when he still had a fair supply of batteries and could afford to waste a little light. They scared me pretty bad and made my heart pound, especially the young lady.

* * *

Now, with Pa telling his story for the umpteenth time to take our minds off another scare, I got to thinking of the frozen folk again. All of a sudden I got an idea that scared me worse than anything yet. You see, I'd just remembered the face I'd thought I'd seen in the window. I'd forgotten about that on account of trying to hide it from the others.

What, I asked myself, if the frozen folk were coming to life? What if they were like the liquid helium that got a new lease on life and started crawling toward the heat just when you thought its molecules ought to freeze solid forever? Or like the electricity that moves endlessly when it's just about as cold as that? What if the ever-growing cold, with the temperature creeping down the last few degrees to the last zero, had mysteriously wakened the frozen folk to life—not warm-blooded life, but something icy and horrible?

That was a worse idea than the one about something coming down from the dark star to get us.

Or maybe, I thought, both ideas might be true. Something coming down from the dark star and making the frozen folk move, using them to do its work. That would fit with both things I'd seen—the beautiful young lady and the moving, starlike light.

The frozen folk with minds from the dark star behind their unwinking eyes, creeping, crawling, snuffing their way, following the heat to the Nest.

I tell you, that thought gave me a very bad turn and I wanted very badly to tell the others my fears, but I remembered what Pa had said and clenched my teeth and didn't speak.

We were all sitting very still. Even the fire was burning silently. There was just the sound of Pa's voice and the clocks.

And then, from beyond the blankets, I thought I heard a tiny noise. My skin tightened all over me.

Pa was telling about the early years in the Nest and had come to the place where he philosophizes.

"So I asked myself then," he said, "what's the use of going on? What's the use of dragging it out for a few years? Why prolong a doomed existence of hard work and cold and loneliness? The human race is done. The Earth is done. Why not give up, I asked myself—and all of a sudden I got the answer."

Again I heard the noise, louder this time, a kind of uncertain, shuffling tread, coming closer. I couldn't breathe.

"Life's always been a business of working hard and fighting the cold," Pa was saying. "The earth's always been a lonely place, millions of miles from the next planet. And no matter how long the human race might have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don't matter. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture, like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers—you've seen pictures of those, but I can't describe how they feel—or the fire's glow. It makes everything else worth while. And that's as true for the last man as the first."

And still the steps kept shuffling closer. It seemed to me that the inmost blanket trembled and bulged a little. Just as if they were burned into my imagination, I kept seeing those peering, frozen eyes.

"So right then and there," Pa went on, and now I could tell that he heard the steps, too, and was talking loud so we maybe wouldn't hear them, "right then and there I told myself that I was going on as if we had all eternity ahead of us. I'd have children and teach them all I could. I'd get them to read books. I'd plan for the future, try to enlarge and seal the Nest. I'd do what I could to keep everything beautiful and growing. I'd keep alive my feeling of wonder even at the cold and the dark and the distant stars."

But then the blanket actually did move and lift. And there was a bright light somewhere behind it. Pa's voice stopped and his eyes turned to the widening slit and his hand went out until it touched and gripped the handle of the hammer beside him.

* * *

In through the blanket stepped the beautiful young lady. She stood there looking at us the strangest way, and she carried something bright and unwinking in her hand. And two other faces peered over her shoulders—men's faces, white and staring.

Well, my heart couldn't have been stopped for more than four or five beats before I realized she was wearing a suit and helmet like Pa's homemade ones, only fancier, and that the men were, too—and that the frozen folk certainly wouldn't be wearing those. Also, I noticed that the bright thing in her hand was just a kind of flashlight.

The silence kept on while I swallowed hard a couple of times, and after that there was all sorts of jabbering and commotion.

They were simply people, you see. We hadn't been the only ones to survive; we'd just thought so, for natural enough reasons. These three people had survived, and quite a few others with them. And when we found out how they'd survived, Pa let out the biggest whoop of joy.

They were from Los Alamos and they were getting their heat and power from atomic energy. Just using the uranium and plutonium intended for bombs, they had enough to go on for thousands of years. They had a regular little airtight city, with airlocks and all. They even generated electric light and grew plants and animals by it. (At this Pa let out a second whoop, waking Ma from her faint.)

But if we were flabbergasted at them, they were double--flabbergasted at us.

One of the men kept saying, "But it's impossible, I tell you. You can't maintain an air supply without hermetic sealing. It's simply impossible."

That was after he had got his helmet off and was using our air. Meanwhile, the young lady kept looking around at us as if we were saints, and telling us we'd done something amazing, and suddenly she broke down and cried.

They'd been scouting around for survivors, but they never expected to find any in a place like this. They had rocket ships at Los Alamos and plenty of chemical fuels. As for liquid oxygen, all you had to do was go out and shovel the air blanket at the top level. So after they'd got things going smoothly at Los Alamos, which had taken years, they'd decided to make some trips to likely places where there might be other survivors. No good trying long-distance radio signals, of course, since there was no atmosphere to carry them around the curve of the Earth.

Well, they'd found other colonies at Argonne and Brookhaven and way around the world at Harwell and Tanna Tuva. And now they'd been giving our city a look, not really expecting to find anything. But they had an instrument that noticed the faintest heat waves and it had told them there was something warm down here, so they'd landed to investigate. Of course we hadn't heard them land, since there was no air to carry the sound, and they'd had to investigate around quite a while before finding us. Their instruments had given them a wrong steer and they'd wasted some time in the building across the street.

* * *

By now, all five adults were talking like sixty. Pa was demonstrating to the men how he worked the fire and got rid of the ice in the chimney and all that. Ma had perked up wonderfully and was showing the young lady her cooking and sewing stuff, and even asking about how the women dressed at Los Alamos. The strangers marveled at everything and praised it to the skies. I could tell from the way they wrinkled their noses that they found the Nest a bit smelly, but they never mentioned that at all and just asked bushels of questions.

In fact, there was so much talking and excitement that Pa forgot about things, and it wasn't until they were all getting groggy that he looked and found the air had all boiled away in the pail. He got another bucket of air quick from behind the blankets. Of course that started them all laughing and jabbering again. The newcomers even got a little drunk. They weren't used to so much oxygen.

Funny thing, though—I didn't do much talking at all and Sis hung on to Ma all the time and hid her face when anybody looked at her. I felt pretty uncomfortable and disturbed myself, even about the young lady. Glimpsing her outside there, I'd had all sorts of mushy thoughts, but now I was just embarrassed and scared of her, even though she tried to be nice as anything to me.

I sort of wished they'd all quit crowding the Nest and let us be alone and get our feelings straightened out.

And when the newcomers began to talk about our all going to Los Alamos, as if that were taken for granted, I could see that something of the same feeling struck Pa and Ma, too. Pa got very silent all of a sudden and Ma kept telling the young lady, "But I wouldn't know how to act there and I haven't any clothes."

The strangers were puzzled like anything at first, but then they got the idea. As Pa kept saying, "It just doesn't seem right to let this fire go out."

* * *

Well, the strangers are gone, but they're coming back. It hasn't been decided yet just what will happen. Maybe the Nest will be kept up as what one of the strangers called a "survival school." Or maybe we will join the pioneers who are going to try to establish a new colony at the uranium mines at Great Slave Lake or in the Congo.

Of course, now that the strangers are gone, I've been thinking a lot about Los Alamos and those other tremendous colonies. I have a hankering to see them for myself.

You ask me, Pa wants to see them, too. He's been getting pretty thoughtful, watching Ma and Sis perk up.

"It's different, now that we know others are alive," he explains to me. "Your mother doesn't feel so hopeless any more. Neither do I, for that matter, not having to carry the whole responsibility for keeping the human race going, so to speak. It scares a person."

I looked around at the blanket walls and the fire and the pails of air boiling away and Ma and Sis sleeping in the warmth and the flickering light.

"It's not going to be easy to leave the Nest," I said, wanting to cry, kind of. "It's so small and there's just the four of us. I get scared at the idea of big places and a lot of strangers."

He nodded and put another piece of coal on the fire. Then he looked at the little pile and grinned suddenly and put a couple of handfuls on, just as if it was one of our birthdays or Christmas.

"You'll quickly get over that feeling, son," he said. "The trouble with the world was that it kept getting smaller and smaller, till it ended with just the Nest. Now it'll be good to have a real huge world again, the way it was in the beginning."

I guess he's right. You think the beautiful young lady will wait for me till I grow up? I'll be twenty in only ten years.

Fritz Leiber [Wikipedia]