Virtual Unrealities, The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester (2 page)

In the wake
The Demolished Man
came a steady series of shorter works, all of them brilliant on a smaller scale: “Hobson’s Choice” (
Fantasy and Science Fiction
, August 1952), “Time is the Traitor” (
Fantasy and Science Fiction
, September 1953), “Disappearing Act” (
Star Science Fiction #2
, 1953), “5,271,009” (
Fantasy & Science Fiction
, March 1954), and the most spectacular one of all, “Fondly Fahrenheit” (
Fantasy & Science Fiction
, August 1954), a bravura demonstration of literary technique about which an entire textbook could be written.

Despite the wildly enthusiastic response these stories engendered, science fiction never became anything other than a hobby for Alfred Bester: perhaps for the best, for it is hard to see how anyone could have kept up this level of imaginative fertility on a day-by-day basis. His stories, every one a dazzler, appeared every year or two in
Fantasy and Science Fiction
, and his second novel, the awesome
The Stars My Destination
, proved to be a fitting companion to
The Demolished Man
when it appeared in
Galaxy
in 1956. But he was spending most of his time overseas now, doing travel articles for
Holiday
magazine and such other slick publications of the time as
McCall’s
and
Show
. In the final two decades of his life—he died in 1987 at the age of 73—his work in science fiction was sporadic at best. He did write several late novels and a handful of short stories, and the unmistakable Bester touch is evident in all of them, though they fall short of the formidable achievement of his finest work.

How
formidable, actually, was that achievement?

Alfred Bester’s two great novels must rank in almost everyone’s top-ten list of science fiction’s all-time peaks. And his body of short stories puts him, I think, among the two or three finest writers of short science fiction who ever lived. It has been a delight to experience those stories once again in the course of assembling this collection; and if you will be encountering them for the first time as you read this book, I envy you the pleasure.

T
his one
wasn’t
the last
war
or a war to
end war. They called it the War for the American Dream. General Carpenter struck that note and sounded it constantly
.

There are fighting generals (vital to an army)
,
political generals (vital to an administration)
,
and public relations generals (vital to a war). General Carpenter was a master of public relations. Forthright and Four-Square, he had ideals as high and as understandable as the mottoes on money. In the mind of America he
was
the army, the administration, the nation
’
s shield and sword and stout right arm
.
His
ideal was the American Dream.

“We are not fighting for money, for power, or for world domination,” General Carpenter announced at the Press Association dinner.

“We are fighting solely for
the American Dream,” he said to the 162nd Congress.

“
Our aim is not aggression or the reduction of nations
to
slavery,” he said at the West Point Annual Officers’ Dinner.

“We are fighting for the Meaning of Civilization,” he told the San Francis’co Pioneers’ Club.

“We are struggling for the Ideal of Civilization; for Culture, for poetry, for the Only Things Worth Preserving,” he said at the Chicago Wheat Pit Festival.

“This is a war for survival,” he said. “We are not fighting for our
selves, but for our Dreams; for the Better Things in Life which must not disappear from the face of the earth.”

America fought. General Carpenter asked for one
hundred million men. The army was given one hundred million men. Genera
l
Carpenter asked for ten thousand
V
-
Bombs
.
Ten thousand U-Bombs were delivered and dropped
.
The enemy also dropped
ten
thousand U
-
Bombs and destroyed most of America’s cities
.

“We must dig in against the hordes of barbarism,” General Carpenter said. “Give me a thousand engineers
.”

One thousand engineers were forthcoming and a hundred cities were dug and hollowed out beneath the rubble.

“Give me five hundred sanitation experts, eight hundred traffic managers, two hundred air
-
conditioning experts, one hundred
city
managers, one thousand communication chiefs, seven hundred personnel experts …”

The
list
of General Carpenter’s demand for technical experts was endless. America did not know how
to
supply them.

“We must become a nation of experts,” General Carpenter informed the National Association of American Universities. “Every man and woman must be a specific tool for a specific job, hardened and sharpened by your training and education to win the fight for the American Dream
.
”

“Our Dream,” General Carpenter said at the Wall Street Bond Drive Breakfast, “is at one with the Greeks of Athens, with the noble Romans of … er …
Rome.
It
is a dream of the Better Things of
Life.
Of Music and Art and Poetry and Culture
.
Money is only a weapon
to
be
used
in the fight for this dream. Ambition is only a
ladder
to
climb
to
this dream. Ability is only a tool
to
shape this dream.”

Wall Street applauded. General Carpenter asked for one hundred and fifty billion dollars, fifteen hundred dedicated dollar-a-year men, three thousand experts in mineralogy, petrology, mass production, chemical warfare, and air-traffic time study. They were delivered. The country was in high gear. General Carpenter had only to press a button and an expert would be delivered.

In March of
A
.
D
. 2112 the war came to a climax and the American Dream was resolved, not on any one of the seven fronts where millions of men were locked in bitter combat, not in any of the staff headquarters or any of the capitals of the warring nations, not in any of the production centers spewing forth arms and supplies, but in Ward T of the United States Army Hospital buried three hundred feet below what had once been St. Albans, New York.

Ward T was something of a mystery at St. Albans. Like all army hospitals, St. Albans was organized with specific wards reserved for specific injuries. Right-arm amputees were gathered in one ward; left-arm amputees in another. Radiation burns, head injuries, eviscerations, secondary gamma poisonings, and so on were each assigned their specific location in the hospital organization. The Army Medical Corps had established nineteen classes of combat injury which included every possible kind of damage to brain and tissue. These used up letters A to S. What, then, was in Ward T?

No one knew. The doors were double-locked. No visitors were permitted to enter. No patients were permitted to leave. Physicians were seen to arrive and depart. Their perplexed expressions stimulated the wildest speculations but revealed nothing. The nurses who ministered to Ward T were questioned eagerly but they were closed-mouthed.

There were dribs and drabs of information, unsatisfying and self-contradictory. A charwoman asserted that she had been in to clean up and there had been no one in the ward. Absolutely no one. Just two dozen beds and nothing else. Had the beds been slept in? Yes. They were rumpled, some of them. Were there signs of the ward being in use? Oh yes. Personal things on the tables and so on. But dusty, kind of. Like they hadn’t been used in a long time.

Public opinion decided it was a ghost ward. For spooks only.

But a night orderly reported passing the locked ward and hearing singing from within. What kind of singing? Foreign language, like. What language? The orderly couldn’t say. Some of the words sounded like … well, like: Cow dee on us eager tour …

Public opinion started to run a fever and decided it was an alien ward. For spies only.

St. Albans enlisted the help of the kitchen staff and checked the food trays. Twenty-four trays went into Ward T three times a day. Twenty-four came out. Sometimes the returning trays were emptied. Most times they were untouched.

Public opinion started to run a fever and decided it was a racket. It was an informal club of goldbricks and staff grafters who caroused within. Cow dee on us eager tour indeed!

For gossip, a hospital can put a small town sewing circle to shame with ease, but sick people are easily goaded into passion by trivia. It took just three months for idle speculation to turn into downright fury. In January, 2112, St. Albans was a sound, well-run hospital. By March, 2112, St. Albans was in a ferment, and the psychological unrest found its way into the official records. The percentage of recoveries fell off. Malingering set in. Petty infractions increased. Mutinies flared. There was a staff shake-up. It did no good. Ward T was inciting the patients to riot. There was another shake-up, and another, and still the unrest fumed.

The news finally reached General Carpenter’s desk through official channels.

“In our fight for the American Dream,” he said, “we must not ignore those who have already given of themselves. Send me a Hospital Administration expert.”

The expert was delivered. He could do nothing to heal St. Albans. General Carpenter read the reports and fired him.

“Pity,” said General Carpenter, “is the first ingredient of civilization. Send me a Surgeon General.”

A Surgeon General was delivered. He could not break the fury of St. Albans, and General Carpenter broke him. But by this time Ward T was being mentioned in the dispatches.

“Send me,” General Carpenter said, “the expert in charge of Ward T.”

St. Albans sent a doctor, Captain Edsel Dimmock. He was a stout young man, already bald, only three years out of medical school, but with a fine record as an expert in psychotherapy. General Carpenter liked experts. He liked Dimmock. Dimmock adored the general as the spokesman for a culture which he had been too specially trained to seek up to now, but which he hoped to enjoy after the war was won.

“Now look here, Dimmock,” General Carpenter began. “We’re all of us tools, today—hardened and sharpened to do a specific job. You know our motto: a job for everyone and everyone on the job. Somebody’s not on the job at Ward T and we’ve got to kick him out. Now, in the first place what the hell is Ward T?”

Dimmock stuttered and fumbled. Finally he explained that it was a special ward set up for special combat cases. Shock cases.

“Then you do have patients in the ward?”

“Yes, sir. Ten women and fourteen men.”

Carpenter brandished a sheaf of reports. “Says here the St. Albans patients claim nobody’s in Ward T.”

Dimmock was shocked. That was untrue, he assured the general.

“All right, Dimmock. So you’ve got your twenty-four crocks in there. Their job’s to get well. Your job’s to cure them. What the hell’s upsetting the hospital about that?”

“W-well, sir. Perhaps it’s because we keep them locked up.”

“You keep Ward T locked?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why?”

“To keep the patients in, General Carpenter.”

“Keep ’em in? What d’you mean? Are they trying to get out? They violent, or something?”

“No, sir. Not violent.”

“Dimmock, I don’t like your attitude. You’re acting damned sneaky and evasive. And I’ll tell you something else I don’t like. That T classification. I checked with a Filing Expert from the Medical Corps and there is no T classification. What the hell are you up to at St. Albans?”

“W-well, sir … We invented the T classification. It … They … They’re rather special cases, sir. We don’t know what to do about them or how to handle them. W-we’ve been trying to keep it quiet until we’ve worked out a modus operandi, but it’s brand-new, General Carpenter. Brand-new!” Here the expert in Dimmock triumphed over discipline. “It’s sensational. It’ll make medical history, by God! It’s the biggest damned thing ever.”

“What is it, Dimmock? Be specific.”

“Well, sir, they’re shock cases. Blanked out. Almost catatonic. Very little respiration. Slow pulse. No response.”

“I’ve seen thousands of shock cases like that,” Carpenter grunted. “What’s so unusual?”

“Yes, sir, so far it sounds like the standard Q or R classification. But here’s something unusual. They don’t eat and they don’t sleep.”

“Never?”

“Some of them never.”

“Then why don’t they die?”

“We don’t know. The metabolism cycle’s broken, but only on the anabolism side. Catabolism continues. In other words, sir, they’re eliminating waste products, but they’re not taking anything in. They’re eliminating fatigue poisons and rebuilding worn tissue, but without food and sleep. God knows how. It’s fantastic.”