Red yell misty
She leaned against Ben.The beach always makes you tired, she said. “I remember that from before too. Ill be able to sleep tonight.” Arison! called his wife from the boat. Their son, aged five, was puttering at the warm surface of the lake with his fists over the gunwale. Hadolarisóndamo was painting on the little island, quick lines and sweeps across the easeled canvas, a pattern of light and shade bursting out of the swamp trees over a little bay. Arison! I cant get this thing to start. Could you swim over and try?” Jessie, who took a commercial course, got a job as her brother-in-laws secretary; Janet went East to study archaeology. After V-J Day, price-controls went off; the Maxills made more and more money. Ash stopped planting corn on the old farm. Part of the acreage he put into a new orchard, on the rest he sowed a hybrid grass of his own breeding which yielded a grainhigher in protein than wheat. Young Ash was a joy; yet after seven years he remained an only child. Why? she asked. It has to get into the papers. Weve got to move into the cultural field. It’s a matter of prestige—very important. Culture! That should be our next conquest. We must bring culture to the masses. What the Syndicate should do right now is build a culture center in Hoboken. Or suppose it wasnt that way at all? Suppose the peril to Ash wasn’t the apelike human greed for information but the tigerish human fear and hate of the stranger? Arrest for illegal entry or whatever they wanted to call it, speeches in Congress, uproar in newspapers and over the air. Spy, saboteur, alien agent.(How do we know what he’s done to what he grows? Maybe anybody who eats it will go crazy or not be able to have babies.) There were no means of deporting Ash; this didn’t mean he couldn’t be gotten rid of by those terrified of an invasion of which he was the forerunner. Trials, legal condemnation, protective custody, lynchers... When possible. Usually, of course, they die in line of duty. I had trouble getting to sleep that night-the davenport is much too short for me-and it was around two forty-five before I finally sank into a kind of exhausted and broken-backed coma. Breakfast next morning, you can believe me, was a glum affair at the town home of Mr. and Mrs. Alfred E. Pullen, devoted couple. And Mrs. Egan having slipped a buckle, to plan to murder her perceived rival in cold blood. Pallas showed up one Wednesday morning bleeding about the cheek. She now had enough of all Americans and was returning to Greece immediately via— so help me — the Far East where she hoped to gain some peace of mind through an examination of their religions. I was to give her passage. And, oddly, she now used Elvas nasty remark, exactly. If fungi is my jugular, Greece was hers. I called her a name and was immediately sorry; I believe in integration. Thats Italian, she said, and stuck out her tongue. What a beauty, crying, bleeding, her clothes torn and her tongue sticking out. My last young girl. I had to give her her freedom, but not before talking to Dr. Mannfried. "I don't know what you're talking about," he said, licking hislips. He was a big bastard, like lots of them are with the knife. They look like butchers but can thread a needle with their thumbs. "I hardly know your wife," he said, "but I'll say this for her — I admire your taste, she's delicious." Gus Burgade and his deckhand. Youll find them both in Burgade’s cabin. I could stop, I guess. Just throw the switch and quit; take up chess, or travel. But theres a fascination to it. It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever been involved in—Shakespeare, Aristophanes, new works of real importance coming out of infinity, out of nowhere. I like being a famous writer. So I go on reading, day after day. The Ox said of her,She is a well-developed girl. In the old days she would marry well and have ten strong sons. There was a disturbance in the courthouse one day. The place seemed to be invaded in force, but actually there were but one man, one woman, and five children. "Im Robert Rampart," said the man, "and we want the Land Office." We used to always go out on Saturdays, she said, and she put a bowl of oatmeal at the side of the table in front of a youth chair. "The prize couldnt be money." "You wont be able to come onto the land itself, though," the man said. "I followed you," she said quickly. "I couldnt help noticing I wasnt the only one." The next story is also a war story, but a very different war, in a radically different time—and Time is the key word, not just for Travellers Rest, but for a good deal of the s-f you will be reading in the next few years. I am not talking about time-travel, or time-paradox, or parallel-universes-in-time,- these are tried and true devices of s-f, used to establish a sufficiently remote, yet credible, cultural context. The stories I am talking about are not manipulating time in order to look at some other aspect of human experience— they are trying to look at the nature of Time itself, or at least at the nature of the human experience of the phenomenon we call “Time.” In what way?.
