Pahlevsky leaned his chair onto its two rear legs. "There must be a better way to work out differences than this."
"Well, we could agree to try it by using live witnesses, the way they did in the dark ages."
Pahlevsky laughed with him. "Sure, sure. Or by combat. I could take you...well, with a broadsword."
"Yeah, probably; but how about under demerol?"
"Oh no," Pahlevsky said. "Sleep too soon."
"All right, we"ve got some facts to be hallucinated. Let"s go. What"s your poison?"
"Let"s let the Court choose."
They punched the little console on the counsel table, and got back a standby judge"s rap. Taking care to do it simultaneously, each punched his preference of a trial drug into the box, and at once the binding readout came: LSD 3.
"d.a.m.n," said Craven. "That"s the second time this week. I"ll be psychologically addicted to this dishwater pretty soon. Trade needles, Polly?"
"h.e.l.l no," Pahlevsky replied. "Bottles."
Silently they traded vials and each loaded a tiny syringe. They made the injections at the same time, and then busied themselves with the headpiece, in which their dreams would be projected. As the walls of the cube began to swim, each opened the fitting in his left wrist and attached the tube from the blood mixer. With a sigh, Craven lay back on the couch and made himself comfortable.
At once, a parade of voluptuous beauties began to sway through his forebrain. "How can Hansl do it?" he thought. "There must be something more to his life away from the courthouse than these girls. It"s always girls." As his mild disapproval turned the colors of the girls muddy, Pahlevsky"s reaction made them softer, rounder, more enticing. Craven began to project thin girls at his opponent, and in a moment, Pahlevsky"s girls had grown so fat and Craven"s so thin that they turned into rows of binary digits. For a moment, the marching o"s and I"s were meaningless. Then Corky realized they were repeating, in Morse, "Queerqueerqueerqueerqueer..."
He snorted. That deep muscular contraction was reflected in the fragmentation of the digital figures, and the hemisphere of projection turned dark. It remained dark for a long time, surging with black on blackness, ignorant and irrelevant.
Craven half-dozed, turning over in the back of his head the industrial matrix of the quarrel. A poisonous effluent from an automatized factory seeped into a stream. The stream was muddy, algae-grown. He contracted his cortex, and the stream became clear and sparkling. Fish leaped over its surface, and it ran faster over the clean stone bottom.
Just as it was fixing on the projector"s inner surface, a great billowing cloud of dirty water engulfed him, and with a shock, he realized he was surrounded by Hansl Pahlevsky"s projection of the stream. Foul, ruined, dead, the stagnant water oozed as thick as oil into his ears and mouth. Just as it was rising to his nostrils, Craven reached back into his mind for the lovely creek he had dreamed; but it wouldn"t come back into being. With a shrug of his cerebrum, he gave up on the idyllic and began to modify the picture in front of him toward reality. At least the sun could be shining. At least the water needn"t stink. It supported a few carp and some turtles and, there! yes, a catfish. An older turtle appeared, sunning himself on a rock. All right, not a rock. An oil drum; but that turtle was twenty years old, at least. This wasn"t dead water.
A bloated alligator gar floated belly up with agonizing slowness down the stream. Corky speeded up the current, and by a supreme effort of will, simultaneously turned the gar over, sent it swimming off, and supplied a grinning youth in ragged blue jeans who threw rocks at the gar as long as it was visible.
In another instant, the child had become a textbook cretin. His lower jaw vanished. Spittle drooled from his upper lip. He opened his fly and urinated clumsily into the stinking water.
Cravan left the child growing more apelike by the instant, and widened the focus of the dream. As the whole scene appeared, the source of the water"s foulness came into the foreground. A leaping, bubbling stream of phenol with a steaming ribbon of spent sulphuric acid flowed out of a drain that plainly projected from a grim concrete box. There was no identification on the front of the building, but just over the drain, a flashing neon sign said, "Fairlawn Chemicals, Inc."
Cravan could feel Pahlevsky twitch physically in objection to that picture. The stones began to flow and the drain became smaller. In a sort of mental judo for which he was fast gaining a reputation in the legal community, Corky let the drain shrink to the size of a garden hose, then multiplied it in the time it took a neurone to discharge. There were ten hoses draining phenol into the creek; then there were twenty. When he had a hundred pipes pouring filth into the desperate water, he blinked his eyes and spoke to Judith Hlavcek. "Just a minute longer. I"ve got him on the run now."
Unfortunately, she appeared almost immediately in the foreground of the projector, tossing beer cans and the garbage of a picnic into the stream.
Craven felt himself jerking and sunfishing on his couch. "d.a.m.n, d.a.m.n," he thought, "you can"t look off a minute." He half-sat up, felt Judith"s cool fingers press him back on the couch, saw her blow a kiss from the projector, and disappear around the corner of the factory, heels twinkling and hair fluttering. He bore down on quick cuts from the stream as it had been, with birds flying and bees buzzing, to the immense drain bubbling with the grape-soda red of phenol and the stream as Pahlevsky"s clients had made it, a turgid, ugly, running sore in the land, where the only buzzes were the flies and a few hardy mosquitoes.
Although the picture wavered and shook, it held; held; held. Exultation surged in Craven, and with that momentary relaxing, there suddenly appeared a noxious herd of little people, throwing excrement and garbage into the water. For a moment, he was bemused, then he had to laugh. Catching, with devilish wit, the att.i.tudes and mannerisms of Craven"s clients, Pahlevsky had reduced them in size to fit his opinion of their moral stature, and multiplied them into a mad band of gerbils, tearing and tossing newspaper until the pond beside which they were running had been turned into a sodden, pulpy marsh. Upstream, the drain flowed water as clear as gin, sparkling and plopping into the mess Craven"s clients had created.
But the picture had the fragility of satire. It wavered and shattered as the two lawyers laughed. Craven"s chuckles continued to distort the projection even as he pushed it back to his stated position. He dreamingly laid on the color of the effluent as he solidified Pahlevsky"s factory and its fetid drain. For a moment, he enlarged the focus, so a mile or more of the stream could be seen, because he had a subtle feeling of wrongness just out of his vision.
Sure enough, when Craven lengthened the focus, it became apparent that Pahlevsky had been at work on the peripheral aspects of the picture. The stream was not moving, and from the slope of the land, it was clear that it had never been a free flowing creek. The water was stagnant, and the effluent from the works disappeared silently into an already dead stream that hardly moved. Downriver, the really nasty character of the open sewer was reinforced by a row of privies that hung at crazy angles over the water. Craven"s chief client, an expression of contentment on his face, was just emerging from an unpainted outhouse, zipping up his pants.
Corky shifted the view up so the grade of the hill showed that the flatness through which Pahlevsky looped the creek was an illusion, that there was really a fall sufficient to make the stream flow gently, and as the brow of the hill appeared, the home of Craven"s client came in view. It was a magnificent mansion, in the new concrete castle style so favored by Houston architects, and had obviously cost a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Since this projection was Craven"s reprise of a factual news photograph, the house had the grainy, dot-by-dot look of a halftone; but its size and ostentation made the rickety outhouse a transparent fraud, and it vanished, along with its neighbors.
They were replaced by a smudged plumbing diagram. Pahlevsky brought up the engineer"s identification number in the lower right-hand corner, and Corky saw they were looking at the actual map of the sewers adjacent to the polluted stream. Arrows of light began to dart in and out of the diagram, pointing leaks, surface traps, inefficient sewage treatment plants, and other points from which flowage of pollutants into the stream occurred.
Despite every effort of will Craven could make, his own map of the same section of the city"s sewerage instantly flashed over Pahlevsky"s. There was a ninety percent congruence between the two, and the projector screen flashed gold as an overlay of transparent letters from the computer monitoring the trial read out, "Stipulated." It was the first break in the surge of contention and a.s.sertion, and from that moment on would be a steady buoy around which the dreams of counsel, swirl how they might, must still flow.
Craven"s back arched in a reflex he could not control, as he fought to wrest the projection back to the chemical plant. He rolled onto his side, drew up his knees and wrapped his arms around them, a.s.suming the posture in which, from childhood, he had experienced the most vivid dreams in his real life. Pouring with sweat, he felt his eyeb.a.l.l.s flicking back and forth and knew his brain was gathering itself for a powerful move in the legal struggle.
Another minute pa.s.sed before his rapid eye movement became effective, and then he irresistibly peeled back the stone wall of the plant, accomplishing by imaginative force what he had been denied in pretrial preparation, a view of the actual workings of the inside. The ruling of the ancillary judge before whom the motion had been heard was that the plant contained trade secrets, unpatentable but valuable, which could not be revealed by inspection without working a damage on the chemical company greater than the inconvenience of hampering Craven"s trial preparation.
After that motion had been acted upon, Craven had managed to locate a still operator discharged two years before by Pahlevsky"s corporation, who disgorged a good deal of information. Since he was not a party to the suit, however, Corky had to take it all in verbally. A witness could not be submitted to the drugs without his consent, and the operator had been a Jehovah"s Witness, with all that sect"s ineradicable bias against drugs and mind alteration.
Necessarily, then, the projection Craven could achieve of the internal structure of the plant was gray, black in some areas where information was void, distorted, and shot with the wavering light of incompletion. He was still able to zero in on the ma.s.sive exchanger which completed the essential operation of the plant and flowed off phenol as a by-product. From the point at which this occurred, Corky projected a simple drain without even a trap for tools and solid waste, and with its outflow directly above the surface of the stream. At that point, real information took over, and the knife edge clarity of the projection made Craven feel that he could afford to gamble on sucking new information out of Pahlevsky"s mind. Eyes zipping from one side of his closed lids to the other, Craven froze the picture of the emerging drain and made the cortical squeeze that called forth the corresponding picture from Pahlevsky"s brain. Even as the golden glow faded, leaving the overprint, "Stipulated," visible, Craven convulsed himself, feeling the net of his whole nervous system contract around the mental suction with which he reached for Pahlevsky"s picture of the inside of the plant. With wrenching suddenness, it flowed onto the screen.
The lawyer realized the proportions he had projected were wrong, because his informant had not told him of a great, hulking complex of instrumentation and piping which occupied fully one third of the floor s.p.a.ce. He writhed in a sine wave which terminated in a frightening click at the lumbosacral junction of his spine, absorbing the ma.s.s of stills and connections to make the pictures congruent, and was rewarded with a flash of gold and the stipulation overprint that meant he could move on to try to extract agreement from Pahlevsky on the nature of the operation.
The mind bruises and strains of making the three congruences caused both the lawyers to lie inert on their couches, flaccid puddles of flesh, while their brains drew on the web of nerves and its meaty envelope for the energy with which to go on. Inside the projector, Pahlevsky appeared, crouched on his knees, eyes covered with his hands. It was the only respite from the drugdreams: refusal to see.
For a little while, the projector flowed with neutral colors, clouds, and undifferentiated flashes from random energy acc.u.mulations along the two neuronic nets. In a slow, rhythmic repet.i.tion of patterns of energy flashes, Judith Hlavcek"s face took shape, lips in Cupid"s bow, eyes full forward and wide, just the way she always looked before a kiss.
Craven felt her hand on his chest, her other hand raising the hood part way. She bent gently close to him. "Polly"s on his a.s.s. Leave him snoring for a minute. You need a breather yourself."
She sat on her heels beside his couch, ma.s.saging his cheeks. They were suffused with blood, as always when the brain was sucking every resource of the body into the dream struggle. "Listen, I"m moving Sunday, remember? Can you borrow that pickup and be there by seven? I"ll give you breakfast."
With the one eye still under the hood, he saw himself sliding from a double bed into a snug bedroom where Judy, diaphanous clad, beckoned in the doorway with a skillet holding two perfectly fried eggs. "All right. I can"t talk now. We"re right at the major node of this hearing. I"ll win it or lose it in the next dream."
Smiling, he slid back under the headset and began modifying the neurone flashes into a Morse "V"..."Victory, Victory, Victory," he flashed, and then suddenly brought himself up into view, right hand raised with two fingers in the Peace sign. His reply was a Peter Max colored representation of the chemical plant, somehow wearing Hans Pahlevsky"s face and body att.i.tude. From every orifice of the factory-Pahlevsky incense poured, and the lawyer unzipped his chest to reveal a shining stainless steel precipitation tower and a circle of stainless tanks. It became clear that the tower was integral to the production process and the tanks were storing an effluent which had been made marginally profitable by increasing the volume of operations. A schematic diagram imposed itself, and it was apparent that the water used in the process was mostly recycled. What little waste there was ran off from a small drain which was enlarged so Craven could see the monitoring gauges that tested it. The water was certainly not crystal clear, but neither did it smoke and steam like Saruman"s sewer.
Corky produced an overlay, "When?"
Suddenly he heard the music which Pahlevsky was quietly piping in behind this idyllic scene. It was the old prophetic song, "In the Year 2525." Craven"s repulsion at this effectively indefinite postponement of anti-pollution equipment was so total that he actually spoke, and earned a reprimand from the judge upstairs, which slowly silhouetted itself in the projector. " "s.h.i.t no!" is not a legal objection. Objections must be projected, not spoken."
He nearly sat up, but another gross breach of courtroom etiquette after the first might prejudice his clients completely out of the case. With an effort, he lay rigidly outspread on his couch and projected the current year"s anthem, "Now! Wow! The Word Is Now!" Corky did not subscribe to the religious att.i.tude embodied in the song, but the lyric fitted his legal position.
He could hear Pahlevsky squirming on the other couch, and there erupted on the projector"s curved inner face a mad collage of the great and near-great figures of American Industrial History. Their boots crunched forests, their mouths engulfed rivers, and their nostrils drank the air in storm-sized ma.s.ses; but on their shoulders and backs rose a dizzying, growing pyramid of consumers, from whose throats burst a paean of praise. Every second a vote was conducted on the life of a valley, the color of a river, or the smell of somebody"s air, and production always won. Somehow, though the face of the land changed, the growing hordes following after the industrialists were accommodated. The glow that surrounded all this grew ever brighter, and out in front strode Uncle Sam, his snowy whiskers spread to the breeze, a smile of common sense and compa.s.sion illuminating his apple cheeks and twinkling eyes.
Craven contented himself with one comment. In the upper left corner of the picture he brought up Chairman Pao, not quite concealing a smile with his hand as he contemplated America burying itself in its own garbage. By a convulsive contraction of his neural net, Corky cleared the projector and wiped its color to a neutral gray. Carefully, but powerfully, he called up the congruences already of record. He had to admit the public sewer leakage, but it was minimal beside the consequences of the un-trapped, unfiltered drain running the effluent from the complex of stills and cracking towers which Craven had pried out of Pahlevsky"s brain. Relentlessly, he bore down on that total picture, calling up portions of it to repeat for emphasis, until Pahlevsky resignedly began to overprint, "So? So? So? So?"
Craven left the projector dripping with phenol and began to gather a picture of an undefiled stream, neither poisoned nor heated beyond the tolerance of fish, when he saw Pahlevsky erecting a projection of a plant improved by way of a large settling pond next to it. The effluent was flowing into the sludge pit, and the water which trickled through a small spillway into the natural stream was almost clear. Question marks hovered in a ribbon over the picture.
Brutally, Craven toppled a child into the settling pond. Even as its screams gurgled away, a high plank fence went up, painted so as to make it a work of art. Without hesitation, Corky sent resolute neighborhood children swarming over the fence and into the pool. Some staggered out blinded, some floated mutely on the surface, some were only scarred and frightened, but none climbed whole back over the fence. With sickening rapidity, the attorney played the record of an actual occurrence the year before, when a child had slid into the water a few meters downstream from the offensive drain. The little girl"s accusing face filled the screen, filth streaming from her hair, one eye gleaming white with its destroyed sight.
Pahlevsky failed to overcome that image with the stacks of greenbacks he piled up to indicate the amount the company had paid, for Craven spread the picture in time to show that the money had been ordered to be paid only after a bitter trial...and a query to the computer upstairs indicated that the half-blinded child"s case was still on appeal.
Now the lawyer gathered himself for a major clash. Deep in his central nervous system, primitive responses came slowly to the boil. On the projector screen, he played a diversion, the last annual meeting of the Sierra Club in Houston, at which a venerable white-haired conservationist talked with affection of that portion of the Big Thicket which had been saved from destruction. At one point in his speech, the old man lowered a screen and turning back to the auditorium, called for, "The first slide, please."
With total concentration, Craven projected on that screen a report he knew existed, but to which he had been denied access. It was a one-page outline of a low-profit marketing plan for the liquid effluent from the plant. The key, he knew, was that a plastics plant ten blocks away could utilize, almost unconverted, what Pahlevsky"s people were throwing away. A pipeline would be needed for the most economical transportation of the material, and some filtering would have to be done before the slurry went into the line. The typewritten lines flowed and jumped in half-guessed projection.
Pahlevsky resisted with desperate concentration. Repeatedly a gray cloak blurred the report, skeleton-printing it with the cabalistic words, "Management Decision." Sometimes it read, "Management Responsibility."
Craven understood the point. Adding an automatic takeoff cycle to a production plan doesn"t mean that it becomes economically functional. Somebody has to worry about it, somebody has to market the product, somebody has to collect for its sales, and somebody has to explain to stockholders why it doesn"t fit the overall graph of their corporation"s profits. But the cost of doing something right is never a legal defense to the necessity of doing it, unless the cost is economically destructive...and not then, if society wills that it be done. Craven kept the clamp on, and was rewarded at last with the emerging picture of the actual report which he was pulling, molecule by molecule, out of the RNA banks of Pahlevsky"s brain.
There was a blinding flash of white, and when Craven could see again, Pahlevsky lay before him, naked, legs spread, s.c.r.o.t.u.m open to a kick. The lawyer reeled; he was facing the cla.s.sic posture of defenselessness. As the wolf defeated exposes his throat to trigger the act of mercy from a stronger wolf, Pahlevsky was exposing himself to the most punishing blow a man can absorb. He had stripped the last facade of mere objective reality from the trial, and flung on the screen the psychological crux at which the two attorneys had arrived. Craven, as a man, could not deliver the kick...not knowingly; but to be a professional means to do things no layman can. Craven blinked his eyes and popped his cerebral hemispheres. When he looked again, instead of Hans Pahlevsky, Judith Hlavcek lay in the same posture. From her, it did not invite a kick.
Stumbling in the effort to peel off his jockey shorts, Craven flung himself on the woman. He was rewarded with a long scream of agony from Pahlevsky, and a great golden flash which printed on the report in see-through letters, "Defendant will install filters and organize transport, making the best contract it can with Nallard Plastics or other buyer of its effluent. After today, defendant"s drain is not to be used for any runoff more polluted than rainwater. Counsel will present appropriate order."
Jerking the hood from his head, Craven sat up. With trembling hands, he unscrewed the blood mixer from his wrist fitting. Still groggy with effort, he stumbled to the toilet and basin in the corner. After relieving himself, he splashed water on his face. As usual, both shoes had been kicked off in the course of the hearing. Every st.i.tch of his clothing was soaked with a sour sweat. The last person he wanted to face was Judith Hlavcek when she came in the door. "Don"t, don"t," he said, as her arms slid around him. "You don"t know." He suddenly remembered the ghastly maneuver at the end of the trial, and stiffened.
"I know. I know. Whatever it is, I know it. Don"t worry, funny man." She kissed his ear and slid out the door as Pahlevsky staggered off the couch, hand over mouth.
After throwing up, Pahlevsky accepted a wetted towel from Craven, and said, "You won. won. You You draw the order." He lurched to his feet and picked up his grief case from the counsel table. "Next week we"re in that three-cornered fight with Charley Kroger. Back to back?" draw the order." He lurched to his feet and picked up his grief case from the counsel table. "Next week we"re in that three-cornered fight with Charley Kroger. Back to back?"
"d.a.m.n right. You hold him and I"ll hit him."
"We"ll tear both his arms off. So long." Pahlevsky dragged his soggy neckcloth into a presentable knot and went out the door of the hearing cube.
The victorious lawyer lingered for a moment, casting his mind back with mingled shame and pleasure to the memory of Judith Hlavcek on the ground. With a start, he realized that Pahlevsky had projected himself on a bed of oyster sh.e.l.ls. Craven shuddered at the thought of the sharp sh.e.l.ls digging into Judy"s back, put his hat on his head, and went out in the hall. Judith Hlavcek was pa.s.sing by. Her face gave him a smile that managed to be both inviting and defiant. "Counsellor," he said. "How do. Who you been clawing up?"
"Just a routine bucket of blood today. And you?" She twisted her beads.
"Hansl Pahlevsky and I had it. Real rugged little dreamer, that one."
"You won. I can tell. You always talk sweet about lawyers you"ve defeated."
He stood stock still. She had observed him closely enough to read factual truth from his verbal smokescreens! "Oh-oh yes. Justice triumphed."
They smiled together at the old chestnut. He grimaced with effort, swallowed, and said, "I like you in that suit."
"Thank you." She looked at him with a level stare. Obviously, she was replying to the idea, rather than the statement, for her costume was just another version of the working clothes she wore every day. Serviceability, rather than looks, is required of trial lawyers" clothes. "Will I see you tomorrow, or do you have a day off?"
"Oh, no rest for the weary. I"ll be here... see you then."
"See you."
He took the elevator to the clerk"s floor to dictate the order in Hazlitt. When Craven left the front door of the old courthouse, pa.s.sing by the bible open in its gla.s.s-topped stele, he saw her at the corner, under the live-oak trees. Prudently, as becomes a counsellor at law, she held a folded newspaper above her head to foil the pigeons who were settling to roost in the branches. In the mellow afternoon light, the skin of her b.u.t.tocks rolled and tumbled under the glistening column of her back.
With sudden resolve, Corky cried, "Hey Jude! Wait up!" Hat straight on his head, shoes in his left hand, clothes draped over his right arm, he began to run after her.
Afterword.
A story has an independent life of its own, like a statue or a painting. It may "mean" something different, something more or less than its writer intended or expected. That is why I do not explain my stories. If they are ambiguous or polemic, that may or may not be what I had in mind. I keep all the drafts, and if it ever really becomes important (an event I find both amusing and impossible to conceive), someone can squeeze a Ph.D. dissertation out of the contradictory versions the stories went through on their way to sale. Writing is a craft to me, and craftsmen customarily enjoy what they do. I don"t suffer when I write. Producing briefs and pleadings, of which I have written ten billion words, give or take a million, has freed me of inhibitions. I know perfectly well that if an idea exists, it can be expressed.
I am deeply interested in the drug culture: not just marijuana smokers, acid droppers and speed freaks, but what might be called the emanc.i.p.ated middle cla.s.s, who save up their highs and lows by using meprobomates, bromides, nonnarcotic sleeping tablets, and even aspirin (in sufficient quant.i.ties, a pretty good tranquilizer) only to find that they can"t recover the euphoria on weekends or on vacations, neither with psychic energizers nor with alcohol. Alcohol was the forbidden goody of my generation, and I have mystical feelings about the stuff. I don"t see much evidence that other drugs are any more finally finally liberating than Scotch, Tequila, or Sneaky Pete, a party punch we used to make at the U of T by soaking orange peels and raisins in grain alcohol for two days before the festivities; but nothing can pervade our general culture with fear and longing as drugs do today without having something to teach us. I"m not through writing about either drugs or the law. liberating than Scotch, Tequila, or Sneaky Pete, a party punch we used to make at the U of T by soaking orange peels and raisins in grain alcohol for two days before the festivities; but nothing can pervade our general culture with fear and longing as drugs do today without having something to teach us. I"m not through writing about either drugs or the law.
Introduction to MONITORED DREAMS AND STRATEGIC CREMATIONS.
Rules have been broken for Bernard Wolfe, and frankly, screw the rules. Talk about coups! Can you dig that this book contains twenty-four thousand, eight hundred words of brand-new, never-before-published, never-seen-by-the-eyes-of-mortal-men fiction by Bernard Wolfe, one of the incredible legends-in-his-own-time of Our Times? Can you perceive the magic of that? If you can"t, cup your hand around your ear and listen to the West, and you"ll hear me going hallooooo among the Sequoias.
I wanted Wolfe in Dangerous Visions Dangerous Visions and it just didn"t work out. But when I knew there would be a second volume, I a.s.saulted his privacy and badgered and cajoled, and stole these two remarkable stories-"The Bisquit Position" and "The Girl With Rapid Eye-Movements"-away from and it just didn"t work out. But when I knew there would be a second volume, I a.s.saulted his privacy and badgered and cajoled, and stole these two remarkable stories-"The Bisquit Position" and "The Girl With Rapid Eye-Movements"-away from Playboy Playboy and other flush periodicals that pay Wolfe three grand per story, and they are here because they were so ordained for publication by a Gracious G.o.d who takes time off from being (as Mark Twain called him) "a malign thug" every once in a million years. and other flush periodicals that pay Wolfe three grand per story, and they are here because they were so ordained for publication by a Gracious G.o.d who takes time off from being (as Mark Twain called him) "a malign thug" every once in a million years.
Bernard Wolfe edged briefly into the sf field back in 1951 with his Galaxy Galaxy novelette, "Self Portrait," and with rare good sense (like Vonnegut, years later) scampered for dear life and a reputation in "the Mainstream." novelette, "Self Portrait," and with rare good sense (like Vonnegut, years later) scampered for dear life and a reputation in "the Mainstream."
Yet despite Bernie"s fleetness of foot, the rapid eye-movements of perceptive readers caught the slamming of the door and, having been dazzled by "Self Portrait," they began asking, "Who the h.e.l.l was that? that?" They found out in 1952 when Bernie"s first novel, Limbo Limbo, was published by Random House; and for the first time insular fans who had had to put up with dilettantes like Herman Wouk sliding into the genre to proffer insipid semi-sf works like The Lomokome Papers The Lomokome Papersi, had a mainstreamer they could revere. Preceding by almost twenty years "straight writers" like Hersey, Drury, Ira Levin, Fowles, Knebel, Burd.i.c.k, Henry Sutton, Michael Crichton and a host of others who"ve found riches in the sf/fantasy idiom, Bernard Wolfe had written a stunning, long novel of a future society in purest sf terms, so filled with original ideas and the wonders of extrapolation that not even the most sn.o.bbish sf fan could put it down.
They did not know that six years earlier, in 1946, Bernard Wolfe had done a brilliant "autobiography" with jazz great Mezz Mezzrow, called Really the Blues Really the Blues. Nor did they suspect that in the years to come he would write the definitive novel about Broadway after dark, The Late Risers The Late Risers, or a stylistically fresh and intellectually demanding novel about the a.s.sa.s.sination of Trotsky in Mexico, The Great Prince Died The Great Prince Died, or that he would become one of the finest pract.i.tioners of the long short story with his collections Come On Out, Daddy Come On Out, Daddy and and Move Up, Dress Up, Drink Up, Burn Up Move Up, Dress Up, Drink Up, Burn Up. All they knew was that he had written one novel and one novelette in their little arena, and he was sensational.
In point of fact, the things science fiction fans never knew about Bernard Wolfe would fill several volumes, considerably more interesting than many sf novels. Of all the wild and memorable human beings who"ve written sf, Bernard Wolfe is surely one of the most incredible. Every writer worth his pencil case can slap on the dust wrapper of a book that he"s been "a short order cook, cab driver, tuna fisherman, day laborer, amateur photographer, horse trainer, dynamometer operator" or any one of a thousand other nitwit jobs that indicate the writer couldn"t hold a position very long.
But how many writers can boast that they were personal bodyguards for Leon Trotsky prior to his a.s.sa.s.sination (or prove how good they were at at the job by the fact that it wasn"t till they the job by the fact that it wasn"t till they left left the position that the killing took place)? How many have been Night City Editor of Paramount Newsreels? How many have been war correspondents for the position that the killing took place)? How many have been Night City Editor of Paramount Newsreels? How many have been war correspondents for Popular Science Popular Science and Fawcett Publications, specializing in technical and scientific reporting? How many have been editor of and Fawcett Publications, specializing in technical and scientific reporting? How many have been editor of Mechanix Ill.u.s.trated Mechanix Ill.u.s.trated? How many have appeared in The American Mercury, Commentary, Les Temps Modernes The American Mercury, Commentary, Les Temps Modernes (the French Existentialist journal), (the French Existentialist journal), Pageant, True Pageant, True and, with such alarming regularity, and, with such alarming regularity, Playboy? Playboy? How many have worked in collaboration with Tony Curtis and Hugh Hefner on a film tided Playboy (and finally, after months of ha.s.seling and tsuriss, thrown it up as a bad idea, conceived by madmen, programmed to self-destruct, impossible to bring to rational fruition)? How many were actually Billy Rose"s ghostwriter for that famous Broadway gossip column? How many writers faced the Depression by learning to write and composing (at one point with an a.s.sist from Henry Miller) eleven p.o.r.nographic novels in eleven months? How many have ever had the How many have worked in collaboration with Tony Curtis and Hugh Hefner on a film tided Playboy (and finally, after months of ha.s.seling and tsuriss, thrown it up as a bad idea, conceived by madmen, programmed to self-destruct, impossible to bring to rational fruition)? How many were actually Billy Rose"s ghostwriter for that famous Broadway gossip column? How many writers faced the Depression by learning to write and composing (at one point with an a.s.sist from Henry Miller) eleven p.o.r.nographic novels in eleven months? How many have ever had the San Francisco Chronicle San Francisco Chronicle hysterically grope for a pigeonhole to their style and finally come up with, "...Wolfe writes in a mixture of the styles of Joyce and Runyon..."? hysterically grope for a pigeonhole to their style and finally come up with, "...Wolfe writes in a mixture of the styles of Joyce and Runyon..."?
What I"m trying to encapsulate with these mere words is the absolute, utter charismatic hipness hipness of Bernie Wolfe, a man who knows more about everything there is to know about than any other writer I"ve ever met. What I"m trying to say is that his presence in this book elevates it x number of notches, even as his presence at a dinner party elevates the scene to the level of a special occasion. of Bernie Wolfe, a man who knows more about everything there is to know about than any other writer I"ve ever met. What I"m trying to say is that his presence in this book elevates it x number of notches, even as his presence at a dinner party elevates the scene to the level of a special occasion.
Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Bernard Wolfe graduated from Yale in 1935 with a B.A. in Psychology and after a year in Yale"s graduate school with an eye toward becoming a psychoa.n.a.lyst, cut out and (not necessarily in this order) acted as liaison man between the Trotsky household and the commission set up by John Dewey and others to investigate the Moscow Trials, spent two years in the Merchant Marine, taught at Bryn Mawr, learned to play a vicious game of tennis, did some time in Cuba where he picked up a taste for thick (he says graceful), nasty-smelling (he says delicious), evil-looking (he says exquisite) cigars, which he can no longer obtain, due to the embargo. (This does not prevent him from constantly impaling his face with subst.i.tutes, equally as offensive to onlookers.) Today he lives and works in the Santa Monica Mountains, overlooking West Hollywood. He lectures at UCLA, writes fiction (his latest project, Working-tided Go to the People Go to the People, is a 1700 page novel based on/focused on the Delano grape workers and their heroic huelga huelga).
What he has to say for himself he says with uncommon cleverness in the Afterword to these two stories.
And with two stories in a book that was conceived to contain no more than one one offering by any single writer, Wolfe broke the rules, and thereby allowed the rules to be broken for the offering by any single writer, Wolfe broke the rules, and thereby allowed the rules to be broken for the other other Wolfe (Gene, that is; sorry Thomas, sorry, Tom) and for James Sallis. But with stories as good as these, d.a.m.n the rules. Wolfe (Gene, that is; sorry Thomas, sorry, Tom) and for James Sallis. But with stories as good as these, d.a.m.n the rules.
For those purists who will say I"ve stretched the concept "dangerous visions" to include these Wolfepics, contending they aren"t strictly-by the rules-sf...well...
d.a.m.n the rules, here"s Bernie Wolfe!
MONITORED DREAMS AND STRATEGIC CREMATIONS.
Bernard Wolfe .
1:Bisquit Position Napalm aside, he took to the idea of a month in California: he could rent a house. In a valley the size of Tom Thumb"s nostril, east of Coldwater, close to Mulholland, he found a good enough cottage, redwood ceilings, rock-coped pool, sauna, terraced hillside. Place for the nerves to go loose. After a day of interviews and setting up sequences with the camera crew he could swim, take softening steam, get in a terrycloth robe to barbeque an aged T-bone or oversize lamb chops in the patio, on the hibachi. He was in holiday mood. It was a holiday when he could stay clear of restaurants and hotels, and nearby shooting wars.
Then this night he turned into his rippled tarmac lane to find the cul-de-sac overrun. Cars crowded the street on both sides to the turnabout. Attendants in red jackets, the usual college students, flashed up and down, playing musical chairs with the cars, musical cars. Hard-rock guitars jigged the air: the valley"s bowl was a loudspeaker. Burble of energized voices.
There was one property of estate grandness around here, a gabled English Country structure seen in patches through stands of white birch, looking over lawns, bal.u.s.traded walks, tennis courts. This place, no big thing by Beverly Hills standards but notable on an unshowy street, was diagonally across from Blake"s; the party going on there was well-attended by somebodies. An indicative number of the cars b.u.mper to b.u.mper along the road were Cads, Lincolns, Rollses, Bentleys.
Taking the steps to his hillside perch, not especially interested in the thought he was entertaining about the fourth estate"s dearth of estates, Blake was having nonadhesive feelings about coming home to the buzzing insides of a verdant loudspeaker. He felt invaded. But the invasion was so spilling, so area-wide, it sucked up his own house and head, recruiting him into the commotion, adding him to the guest list.
The sense of simultaneous violation and almost welcome suction got stronger when he reached the porch and found a woman sitting there in one of the wicker chairs. She was in a floor-length velvet gown of royal purple rifted up both sides to the upper thighs. Her face had a tennis pleasantness, her tall body was thin, not bony, so thin in the bone as to require only token fleshing to soften the skeleton"s edges. This was his first impression, that she was fine of face, under a fat spiral of red-blond hair, over an elongated body whose memorable dimension was the vertical. The mesh-held thigh exposed in one of the gown"s slits looked lank enough to be circled by two unexerting hands but worth a taking hold. Her green eyes were prowlers, dodged to both sides even as they looked with green insistence at and over you. She could not be much past 30.
"h.e.l.lo, I"m trespa.s.sing," she said. Her voice, pitched low, had reverberances which lengthened the words. Was somewhat fogged aside from that.
"Long as you don"t lie. I hate a trespa.s.ser who says he"s a telephone lineman."
"I"ll line all your phones, with zebra skin, if you let me stay a minute."