Erotic launge
First you could see an underwater band of silver, close to the dropoff near the bank. Then the first edges of the big sweeping fins broke the surface, then the broad rear bumper, then the rich curves of the strawberry paint. Where it wasnt clotted with wet weed or stained with mud, the paint glowed rich and new and brilliant. There was a slow sound from the kids, a sigh, a murmur, a shifting. The range of potential products was immense. Oh, the consequences of our past actions! Its a ritual that turns animals into humans, the devil said. There are certain ordeals to eliminate the animals. If you’re really men you’ll be all right.” The FDA has become supercautious: DMSO—dimethyl sulfoxide —is still not released for any but experimental use. Many ordinary citizens have become wildly experimental (Here, try my pills!). The laws governing narcotics are hopelessly confused, and apparently as hopeless to enforce. Let me make it clear. Here is twenty feet of white water. You must lay three tree trunks across it, supporting them on balks of rotten wood, one on each bank, sticking out of the mud, and two in mid-current. At any moment there will come a wind strong enough to blow you off the earth and a downpour of rain to swell the stream. You have three-quarters of an hour, a bit of rope, and nobody to work with you on the other side but an old cripple and a girl. Level 77 J. G. Ballard, one of the young British writers whose work has been much too little seen in this country, here provides an example of this sort of emotional intensification performed on a (literal) future stage-set of the past.* * * * Long as you say nothing about what were fixing to do, Lazeer said. Just be back by eight-thirty this evening.”* * * * What if I did? Nervousness had replaced wariness; tiny pustules of sweat dotted Pitmans forehead now. What are you getting at? What’s the idea of all these questions?” Mr. Clarke said,As I understand it then, if a man is way ahead, he cannot obtain a patent because he cannot carry out the invention. Then, at the time heis able to carry out the invention, it is too late to obtain a patent. The second problem consisted of finding a method of jamming those minds at a distance, stunning them so that the subject personnel fell into tears, confusion, or insanity. The Cinemagicians "Then I better get started." I leaned back out the door. "Dont disturb me." Sixty-five was a sort of comeback year for robopsychology. There were three other stories that missed inclusion here by the thinnest of margins: Robert L. Fishs Sonny inF&SF, and another of Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker stories, “What T and I Did” fromIf, and Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Nail and the Oracle” inPlayboy. Goulart himself did another which tempted me:“Badinage” in Bill Nolan’s anthologyThe Pseudo-People—a very funny story, much more typical of Goulart’s usual vein than “Terminal.” The satisfactions of pushing other life-forms around? We could do it. But wasnt it a pretty childish sort of satisfaction? Nobody knew where the goonie came from, there was no evolutionary chain to account for him here on Libo; and the pal tree on which he depended was unlike any other kind of tree on Libo. Those were important reasons for thinking I was right. Had the goonie once conquered the universe, too? Had it, too, found it good to push other life-forms around? Had it grown up with the universe, out of its childish satisfactions, and run up against the basic question: Is there really anything beyond survival, itself, and if so, what? Had it found an answer, an answer so magnificent that it simply didn’t matter that man worked it, slaughtered it, as long as he multiplied it? "I have lost my land," Clarence Little-Saddle moaned. "It was the land of my father Clarence Big-Saddle, and I meant it to be the land of my son Clarence Bare-back. It looked so narrow that people did not notice how wide it was, and people did not try to enter it. Now I have lost it.".
