My head was hurting. I wanted that portapak very badly.
“Who has the most hours on a 707?” Pinky did, so I sent her to the cabin, along with Dave, who could do the pilot's voice for air traffic control. You have to have a believable record in the flight recorder, too. They trailed two long tubes from the portapak, and the rest of us hooked in up close. We stood there, each of us smoking a fistful of cigarettes, wanting to finish them but hoping there wouldn't be time. The gate had vanished as soon as we tossed our clothes and the flight crew through.
But we didn't worry long. There's other nice things about Snatching, but nothing to compare with the rush of plugging into a portapak. The wake-up transfusion is nothing but fresh blood, rich in oxygen and sugars. What we were getting now was an insane brew of concentrated adrenaline, supersaturated hemoglobin, methedrine, white lighting, TNT, and Kickapoo joyjuice. It was like a firecracker in your heart; a boot in the box that rattled your sox.
“I'm growing hair on my chest,” Cristabel said solemnly. Everyone giggled.
“Would someone hand me my eyeballs?”
“The blue ones, or the red ones?”
“I think my ass just fell off.”
We'd heard them all before, but we howled anyway. We were strong,
strong,
and for one golden moment we had no worries. Everything was hilarious. I could have torn sheet metal with my eyelashes.
But you get hyper on that mix. When the gate didn't show, and didn't show, and
didn't sweetjeez show
we all started milling. This bird wasn't going to fly all that much longer.
Then it did show, and we turned on. The first of the wimps came through, dressed in the clothes taken from a passenger it had been picked to resemble.
“Two thirty-five elapsed upside time,” Cristabel announced.
“Je-zuz.”
It is a deadening routine. You grab the harness around the wimp's shoulders and drag it along the aisle, after consulting the seat number painted on its forehead. The paint would last three minutes. You seat it, strap it in, break open the harness and carry it back to toss through the gate as you grab the next one. You have to take it for granted they've done the work right on the other side: fillings in the teeth, fingerprints, the right match in height and weight and hair color. Most of those things don't matter much, especially on Flight 128 which was a crash-and-burn. There would be bits and pieces, and burned to a crisp at that. But you can't take chances. Those rescue workers are pretty thorough on the parts they
do
find; the dental work and fingerprints especially are important.
I hate wimps. I really hate 'em. Every time I grab the harness of one of them, if it's a child, I wonder if it's Alice.
Are you my kid, you vegetable, you slug, you slimy worm?
I joined the Snatchers right after the brain bugs ate the life out of my baby's head. I couldn't stand to think she was the last generation, that the last humans there would ever be would live with nothing in their heads, medically dead by standards that prevailed even in 1979, with computers working their muscles to keep them in tone. You grow up, reach puberty still fertileâone in a thousandârush to get pregnant in your first heat. Then you find out your mom or pop passed on a chronic disease bound right into the genes, and none of your kids will be immune. I
knew
about the paraleprosy; I grew up with my toes rotting away. But this was too much. What do you do?
Only one in ten of the wimps had a customized face. It takes time and a lot of skill to build a new face that will stand up to a doctor's autopsy. The rest came pre-mutilated. We've got millions of them; it's not hard to find a good match in the body. Most of them would stay breathing, too dumb to stop, until they went in with the plane.
The plane jerked, hard. I glanced at my watch. Five minutes to impact. We should have time. I was on my last wimp. I could hear Dave frantically calling the ground. A bomb came through the gate, and I tossed it into the cockpit. Pinky turned on the pressure sensor on the bomb and came running out, followed by Dave. Liza was already through. I grabbed the limp dolls in stewardess costume and tossed them to the floor. The engine fell off and a piece of it came through the cabin. We started to depressurize. The bomb blew away part of the cockpit (the ground crash crew would read itâwe hopedâthat part of the engine came through and killed the crew: no more words from the pilot on the flight recorder) and we turned, slowly, left and down. I was lifted toward the hole in the side of the plane, but I managed to hold onto a seat. Cristabel wasn't so lucky. She was blown backwards.
We started to rise slightly, losing speed. Suddenly it was uphill from where Cristabel was lying in the aisle. Blood oozed from her temple. I glanced back; everyone was gone, and three pink-suited wimps were piled on the floor. The plane began to stall, to nose down, and my feet left the floor.
“Come on, Bel!” I screamed. That gate was only three feet away from me, but I began pulling myself along to where she floated. The plane bumped, and she hit the floor. Incredibly, it seemed to wake her up. She started to swim toward me, and I grabbed her hand as the floor came up to slam us again. We crawled as the plane went through its final death agony, and we came to the door. The gate was gone.
There wasn't anything to say. We were going in. It's hard enough to keep the gate in place on a plane that's moving in a straight line. When a bird gets to corkscrewing and coming apart, the math is fearsome. So I've been told.
I embraced Cristabel and held her bloodied head. She was groggy, but managed to smile and shrug. You take what you get. I hurried into the restroom and got both of us down on the floor. Back to the forward bulkhead, Cristabel between my legs, back to front. Just like in training. We pressed our feet against the other wall. I hugged her tightly and cried on her shoulder.
And it was there. A green glow to my left. I threw myself toward it, dragging Cristabel, keeping low as two wimps were thrown headfirst through the gate above our heads. Hands grabbed and pulled us through. I clawed my way a good five yards along the floor. You can leave a leg on the other side and I didn't have one to spare.
I sat up as they were carrying Cristabel to Medical. I patted her arm as she went by on the stretcher, but she was passed out. I wouldn't have minded passing out myself.
For a while, you can't believe it all really happened. Sometimes it turns out it
didn't
happen. You come back and find out all the goats in the holding pen have softly and suddenly vanished away because the continuum won't tolerate the changes and paradoxes you've put into it. The people you've worked so hard to rescue are spread like tomato surprise all over some goddam hillside in Carolina and all you've got left is a bunch of ruined wimps and an exhausted Snatch Team. But not this time. I could see the goats milling around in the holding pen, naked and more bewildered than ever. And just starting to be
really
afraid.
Elfreda touched me as I passed her. She nodded, which meant well-done in her limited repertoire of gestures. I shrugged, wondering if I cared, but the surplus adrenaline was still in my veins and I found myself grinning at her. I nodded back.
Gene was standing by the holding pen. I went to him, hugged him. I felt the juices start to flow.
Damn it, let's squander a little ration and have us a good time.
Someone was beating on the sterile glass wall of the pen. She shouted, mouthing angry words at us.
Why? What have you done to us?
It was Mary Sondergard. She implored her bald, one-legged twin to make her understand. She thought she had problems. God, was she pretty. I hated her guts.
Gene pulled me away from the wall. My hands hurt, and I'd broken off all my fake nails without scratching the glass. She was sitting on the floor now, sobbing. I heard the voice of the briefing officer on the outside speaker.
“. . . Centauri Three is hospitable, with an Earth-like climate. By that, I mean
your
Earth, not what it has become. You'll see more of that later. The trip will take five years, shiptime. Upon landfall, you will be entitled to one horse, a plow, three axes, two hundred kilos of seed grain . . .”
I leaned against Gene's shoulder. At their lowest ebb, this very moment, they were so much better than us. I had maybe ten years, half of that as a basket case. They are our best, our very brightest hope. Everything is up to them.
“. . . that no one will be forced to go. We wish to point out again, not for the last time, that you would all be dead without our intervention. There are things you should know, however. You cannot breathe our air. If you remain on Earth, you can never leave this building. We are not like you. We are the result of a genetic winnowing, a mutation process. We are the survivors, but our enemies have evolved along with us. They are winning. You, however, are immune to the diseases that afflict us . . .”
I winced and turned away.
“. . . the other hand, if you emigrate you will be given a chance at a new life. It won't be easy, but as Americans you should be proud of your pioneer heritage. Your ancestors survived, and so will you. It can be a rewarding experience, and I urge you . . .”
Sure. Gene and I looked at each other and laughed.
Listen to this, folks. Five percent of you will suffer nervous breakdowns in the next few days, and never leave. About the same number will commit suicide, here and on the way. When you get there, sixty to seventy percent will die in the first three years. You will die in childbirth, be eaten by animals, bury two out of three of your babies, starve slowly when the rains don't come. If you live, it will be to break your back behind a plow, sun-up to dusk. New Earth is Heaven, folks!
God, how I wish I could go with them.
INTRODUCTION TO
“The Persistence of Vision”
The next three stories have very little in common. Only two things that I can think of, actually. For one, all three were given one or both of the two major science fiction awards: the Hugo, given out annually at the World Science Fiction Convention and voted on by the convention membershipâthe readers themselvesâor the Nebula, awarded by the Science Fiction Writers of Americaâthe professionals.
Awards are something people seem to like, judging from how many fields of human endeavor give them out. Getting awards is gratifying, unless you are a curmudgeon on the scale of George C. Scott or Marlon Brando. But they are right, you know. Humphrey Bogart pointed out that it was ridiculous to compare performances in different roles. Some are hard, some are easy, some don't require much acting at all, which is good, because many Hollywood stars can't really “act” much. Friends vote for friends. People spend money campaigning for votes.
Bogey suggested that all actors perform in the same vehicle, like
Hamlet,
and then let the matter be decided by a panel of judges. Makes sense to me.
I said the stories had two things in common. The other is something I've begun to call “The P Factor.” All of my Hugo and Nebula stories begin with the letter P.
Means nothing, of course. But I can't help wondering, especially when you add in the fact that the closest any of my other works ever came to winning the Hugo was “The Phantom of Kansas,” which I'm told lost the award because I happened to have two stories on the final ballot that year. (Of course, the story that won was pretty good, too.) (
Very
good; it was “The Bicentennial Man,” by Isaac Asimov.)
Shortly after I got started writing short stories Thomas M. Disch wrote an editorial somewhere (I can't recall which magazine it was in) about what he called “The Labor Day Group.” This was a bunch of writers, not an actual conspiracy but just those of us whose careers started in the seventiesâVonda McIntyre was in it, and Spider Robinson, and myself and half a dozen others. His thesis was that we always had the Hugo Award in our minds when we set out to write a story. He accused us of more or less “pandering” to the Hugo voters, which is, admittedly, a rather small
proportion of the mass of science fiction readers, the ones who pay the money to join the World Science Fiction Convention in any particular year and thus are eligible to vote on the Hugo Awards. The Worldcon is held in a different city every year, and nowadays has grown to five thousand attendees or more. It is held on the Labor Day weekend. Thus, Disch's term came from the fact that we came out of organized fandom, that we could all be found together on Labor Day because we'd never miss a Worldcon. There we presumably exchanged tips on just what the Hugo voters wanted in an SF story. Not too stylistically challenging, uplifting rather than depressing, concerned more with a positive outlook on life rather than existential angst. That sort of thing.
First, let me say that at the time of the editorial I had never been to a Worldcon. To this day I've only been to two of them.
And second, since it's considered bad taste to campaign for a Hugo, and since nobody I know has the budget to flood the airwaves with promos like we saw last year for
Chicago
and I'm seeing right now for
Cold Mountain,
the only way I know of to pander to Hugo voters is to write a good story. I'll admit, when I finish one I picture myself standing up on a podium somewhere accepting that silver rocketship . . . but I've never had that thought beforehand, or while writing.
Sorry. Just had to get that off my chest. And like I said, awards are meaningless in the end. Who needs them?
Now I have to get back to work on my next novel, which will be a sequel to my recent book
Red Thunder.
I've decided I'll have a color on the title, like John D. Mac-Donald did with the Travis McGee books. Right now I'm divided. How about
Purple Thunder
?
Pink Thunder
?