Ascents of Wonder, page 1
“I AM SEVENTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD. I
WAS BORN ON MERCURY, THE HELIOS
ENCLAVE. SINCE I WAS TWELVE, I’VE
DEVOTED MYSELF TO EXPERIENCING
EVERYTHING THE HUMAN ORGANISM
CAN EXPERIENCE AND STILL SURVIVE.
DRUGS: I TRIED THEM ALL SEX: WITH
THREE; FOUR PARTNERS; SEVEN
PARTNERS; THREE HUNDRED PARTNERS.
ALL-WEEK ORGIES. MEN, WOMEN, GIRLS, BOYS, INFANTS, ELEPHANTS, PYTHONS, CORPSES. I’VE CHANGED SEX
SO MANY TIMES I’M NOT SURE IF I
GREW UP AS A MALE OR FEMALE. I
KILLED A MAN. I GOT AWAY WITH IT.
I KILLED A WOMAN, AND GOT AWAY
AGAIN. I GOT CAUGHT THE THIRD
TIME AND SPENT SEVEN YEARS IN
REHABILITATION. I’VE TRAVELED, TO
THE BELT, TO LUNA, TO SATURN, URANUS, NEPTUNE, PLUTO AND
BEYOND WITH A HOLEHUNTER. I’VE
TRIED SURGERY, WEIRD NEW ORGANS
AND SEX SYSTEMS, EXTRA LIMBS. NOW
I WANT SOMETHING NEW . ..”
This is Parameter, one of the fascinating creatures you are about to meet and never forget in—
Ascents of Wonder
Also by David Gerrold and available in Popular Library editions:
THE MAN WHO FOLDED HIMSELF
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ASCENTS OF WONDER
EDITED BY
DAVID GERROLD
Stephen Goldin, associate editor
POPULAR LIBRARY • NEW YORK
Published by Popular Library, CBS Publications, CBS Consumer Publishing, a Division of CBS Inc.
December, 1977
Copyright © 1977 by David Gerrold
ISBN: 0-445-04128-5
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
All Rights Reserved
For
Linda Wright,
the college graduate,
with love.
Introduction
Science fiction stories should do two things: They should entertain, and they should tell you something new. If they entertain, they are fun, and that is justification enough for most of them—stories like that are characterized as sci-fi.* They’re the present-day inheritors of the pulp tradition; science fiction began as pulp fiction, a literature of escape, but it has grown into something more.
But if sci-fi stories are merely for fun, but they are also a necessary introduction to the larger world of science fiction beyond. For one thing, they help establish a basic vocabularly of techniques and technologies, ideas and imageries. When a story moves beyond mere entertainment, when it also tickles and stretches your imagination, when it expands your horizon, and enlarges your map of the territory, it is because it has told you something new. It has evoked your sense of wonder.
And that is the true purpose of science fiction—not just to be fun, but to make you wonder. That’s what this book and these stories are about. Some are just for fun, and some are to make you wonder.
David Gerrold
* Hard-core aficionadoes resent this term; I’m merely resigned to it.
Tom Sawyer’s Sub-Orbital Escapade
by Lisa Tuttie and Steven Utley
It wasn’t much time at all after we’d gotten back from that balloon ride to Africa that Tom and me and Jim built the moonship out on Jackson Island. You might think we’d have had our fill of adventures, and me and Jim was pretty content with staying home, but that Tom Sawyer was always spoiling for going somers else and finding new adventures and looking at new things and giving folks hereabouts reasons to bow down to him and think of him as something pretty grand.
One afternoon Tom and me and Jim was setting out on the island, fishing and lazing in the sun and feeling good not to have somebody squawking at us to get to work or go to school or take a bath. But Tom warn’t so content as us, it didn’t seem, for he kept on staring off at nothing and frowning to show how deep he was thinking. It finally got to the point where I couldn’t stand it, him just staring and frowning and thinking like that, so I ask him what’s the matter; and Tom says, “Huck, I reckon we’ve seen and done just about all there is to be seen and done in the whole world. It’s like there’s no mysteries left for us to discover anymore.”
Jim, he allowed as Tom might be right and that it was something to be grateful for, us having seen and done so much in such a little while. But I could see Tom was just saying such things on account of building up to something real spectacular and wanting to dramatize it. Tom and me’d been pirates and robbers and spies and most everything else, it’s true, and we’d been to Africa, too, which made us heroes, even Jim, who was a nigger and didn’t ordinarily amount to much in the eyes of white folks. But I might of knowed that nothing couldn’t ever be enough for Tom Sawyer. He always had to be doing something grander and finer than other folks would dream of, and he couldn’t never be content with just ordinary things. I guess there is maybe a lesson there, but as I steer clear of lessons and leave them to other folks, I won’t say no more about it.
“You know,” Tom goes on, still real thoughtful, “there’s just about only one place left for us to go, and that’s the moon.”
Well, I just set there, not knowing if I heard him right and not knowing if I should laugh or act serious, I thought maybe the sun had tetched Tom’s head, or maybe he meant something I didn’t understand. But finally I said, “Why, Tom Sawyer, that’s the craziest thing I ever heard you say. Why would we go to the moon?”
“We’d just go there,” said Tom, and now he’s coming on to squirming with excitement. “For the adventure of it, Huck.”
“Go there?” I snort. “Go there? Why, Tom, you can see with your own eyes that the moon ain’t nothing at all but a … well, I don’t rightly know what it is, but it ain’t some place like Africa or Illinois that a body can just go to!”
“Huck,” said Tom, “use your head. Remember how when we were up in the balloon we saw a herd of camels below us and you thought it was spiders?”
“They sure looked like spiders.”
“But they wam’t, they were camels. And from high up in the air they looked tiny, just like the moon is so far away it looks small when it’s really big—bigger’n the whole United States!”
Jim hung his mouth open in astonishment at that, but I saw where Tom was wrong and said, “I got to admit you was right about them camels, but don’t you recollect what the moon looked like when we was up so high? Why, it didn’t look no different from up there than it does from here on the ground. It goes to prove.”
“Huck, you got him dere!” Jim cried in delight. “You sure has! He cain’t say you wrong now—ain’t you de Sharpes’ boy!”
I did feel kinder pleased with myself for remembering. Tom Sawyer is hard to out-argue, but I figgered I had done it.
But Tom wouldn’t give up. That ain’t his way. Instead, he kept on and on about how the moon was much higher and much farther away than we’d ever gone in that balloon, and that the mile or so we’d gone off the ground didn’t hardly matter at all, the moon was so far away. Jim and I kinder grinned at each other, trying not to let Tom see us. You got to admire the way Tom never admits he’s licked but just keeps on coming up with wilder and wilder stories. Finally, when he realized we warn’t believing him, he said, “I guess we’ll just have to go up there and walk around on the moon before you two shads’ll believe me.”
“I reckon so, Tom,” I told him. “You got a powerful balloon stashed away to get us there?”
Tom starts to looking thoughtful again. “No balloon’d take us that high,” he said. “This time, we’ll have to build us a moonship.” Well, Tom he got carried away with telling us what a moonship was and how it could be made and what it would do, and he made it sound so good that me and Jim (list had to agree to go along with it. Besides, there warn’t nothing else we had to do just then that we couldn’t of done later. I figeered that after Tom found out how wrong he was about the moon, we could use the moonship to go to the Empire of China and to India, which are some powerful interesting places, I’ve heard, and bound to be as exciting as Africa was. And Jim. he had taken a liking to flying after all that time in the balloon and was bound to see it through with us.
We started collecting cans and old nails and such things from behind stores, and had to run like the dickens a couple of times when somebody hollered at us. It warn’t stealing, though, because nobody was using those things or could of said who owned them. It warn’t no more stealing than fishing catfish is.
Some places people had things they didn’t mind getting rid of. Judge Thatcher’s wife throwed out a spinning wheel that was broke and no good, and we got to it before the ragman did because Tom said we needed it. And Tom’s Aunt Polly herself gave us a bunch of twine and some old boards and a couple of barrels and said she hoped we was up to some good this time, and not more of our mischief. Tom didn’t tell her about the moonship, because he knowed how much she worried and cried over him and pr
We ferried everything out to Jackson Island on a raft and set it up and, pretty soon, had fixed up a mighty fine water-powered wheel that’d push most anything most anywheres you wanted it pushed to, Tom called it a secondary injun and said it was the most important part of the moonship. There was a primary injun, too, that Tom fixed up out of some springs and that old busted spinning wheel. The primary injun made the secondary injun go.
Tom did all the figgering, so it was me and Jim that actually toted and hammered and lifted and tied all that stuff together into a dandy moonship while Tom sat with his back against a stump and told us where to put things and did ciphers on a piece of paper and said change that board, there, for another one which looked just the same but which he said would hold up better once we got to speeding through space.
We planned to take off on the second night of the full moon, because with all that light and the whole moon to aim at, it didn’t seem as we could miss. Tom decided that the moonship should be tried out the night before we left, but we went ahead and got together everything we’d need on the trip. Tom he hooked some doughnuts and apples from Aunt Polly’s kitchen, and me and Jim spent a whole day fishing on the island and had a nice batch of catfish to show for it. So we was all stocked up in case we had trouble finding something to eat up there on the moon. We didn’t plan on staying for no more than a couple of hours or so, not wanting to be stuck up there when the moon went down, but we wam’t taking no chances on going hungry if we did get stuck. By all this time, me and Jim was beginning to really wonder if maybe Tom was right about the moon being a reglar place that you could walk around on, just like Missouri only maybe not so big, and without any people. So we took along a little U.S. flag that Tom’s brother Sid had got on the Fourth of July, because if we truly was the first people to set foot on the moon we figgered we ought to claim it for the govment.
And I also brought pipe and tobacker, of course, and some fishing line and a knife and other useful things.
We had the moonship set up in the middle of Jackson Island with trees all around and the little wings just barely clearing the branches on the sides. On the first night of the full moon, we was all set to test it out. Tom came out on the raft about eleven o’clock. Jim and me had been on the island all day long and had everything buckled down real good. So I set on the bank and smoked while I waited for Tom to show, and Jim did some witchy spells he figgered would help, calculating and mumbling about conjunctions and angels of trajectory and I don’t know what all, and drawing pitchers in the dirt with a stick. The pitchers didn’t make no sense to me, being just a lot of circles and lines. But Jim’s spells sure sounded potent. He said they was necessary because the witch-woman who taught them to him allowed as folks didn’t go to the moon just every night, it being a power of trouble to get everything right and just so, I took this to mean that maybe somebody had been up there at least once already, but I didn’t say nothing to Tom about it when he got to the island. I figgered it was likely Tom wouldn’t’a wanted to go to the moon in the first place if he knowed somebody else had already done it. As for me, I had gotten kinder interested in seeing what the world looked like from that high up.
Well, we finally piled into the moonship and got all set to test the thing, and then Jim started to have his doubts all of a sudden. He’d been afire to sneak a look at the pearly gates before his appointed time, but setting there in that moonship got to him. It was like he suddenly realized that he would really and truly be going all that way to the moon on the following night.
“Huck,” Jim said, “I doan know if I kin go through wid it.”
“But it’s going to be such a grand adventure!” burst out Tom. “Better’n Africa, Jim! You remember how much fun Africa was, don’t you?”
“Oh, I ’members, all right, Tom, but Africa’s a reglar place. My people come from dat place, en you know God made it fo’ man to live on. But dat moon, Tom—God made de moon to give light en not fo’ some upstarts like us to go trompin’ roun’ on. Mebbe we should jes’ go home to bed.”
“Don’t you worry none, Jim,” I said. “Some folks says if God had of wanted us to fly, he’d’a give us wings, but we flew in that balloon, didn’t we?”
Jim nodded cautiously.
“Well, then, there you are! The moon’ll be a heap of fun!” By now I was really bound to get fo the moon, so I got to pedaling and warming up the primary injun. Tom started to pedal, too, but Jim just went on setting there, wide-eyed and shaking his head.
“Come on, Jim,” I begged him. “Help us pedal.”
“Oh, Huck, I jes’ doan know, I jes’ doan know.” “Shucks, Jim,” Tom panted, “you can’t let us down now. You ain’t scared or anything, are you?”
“I ain’t never let you boys down, en you know it. And’s for bein’ scared, I reckon anybody in a right mind should be, jes’ a little. What if somethin’ goes wrong wid dis moonship?”
“But that’s why we’re going to test it first,” Tom said, exasperated. “So we’ll know everything works right when we do take off for the moon.”
That seemed to make sense to Jim, so he shrugged and put his heart into it and helped us pedal, and soon we was all three puffing and snorting away. But that blamed moonship didn’t do more than shake and groan a little.
“It’ll take some more of your conjurin’, Jim,” I cried, and Jim he cuts off pedaling, and me and Tom was mighty glad for the rest. Jim let on to chanting and howling something fierce, and suddenly that secondary injun made a noise like a paddle-wheeler’s boiler blowing up, and that moonship just up and gave a shudder and a leap. We was all throwed all together and jumbled up on the floor. T was on the top of the pile and Tom was on the bottom, with Jim in the middle somers, but it still felt like someone was sitting on me and trying to squash my chest, the way you do a tick.
The pressure finally let off after a while. We sorted ourselves out and peeked out of the little bitty window I’d hammered out and Tom’d covered with some oilcloth he found somers. The view was kinder blurry on account of the quality of the oilcloth, but there warn’t much to see anyways, just lots of black, and the stars, which looked like they did from the ground, and that big old moon way on up ahead of us. The moonship was pointed right at it, and it occurred to me then that we might go on all the way without really having much say in the matter. But presently the moon started to swing away from us. We could see we was going to fall back to earth and end up where in the blazes nobody could say.
“Jim! Jim!” I yelled. “Something’s wrong. Do another spell!”
But Jim, he had seen the moon swing away from us, too, and he was terrified. He started to crying and carrying on and promising the good Lord that he never really meant to sneak that look at the pearly gates before his appointed time and wouldn’t never again get involved in no heathen foolishness such as this if only he could get back down to the ground safe and in one piece. I can’t say as I much blame Jim for all that. We were getting back down to the ground, all right, but the ground was coming up at us something frightful, so the part about ending up safe and in one piece didn’t strike me as likely. T took another look out through the window and saw the outside of the moonship throwing off sparks. I could see them trailing out behind us like we was some kind of comet. Tom and me just sank back to the floor and looked at each other mighty sickly.
“Can’t we stop her?” I yells across to him.
Tom looks real thoughtful for a second. “I bet we forgot to put in something to stop her with.”
Mainly because I was scared and didn’t know what else to do, I started to pedal again and was astonished when the moonship leveled off kinder lurchy.
