To the Dark Star: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Two Read online

  Subterranean Press 2007

  To the Dark Star © 2007 by Agberg, Ltd. All rights reserved.

  Electronic Edition

  978-1-59606-386-0

  Subterranean Press

  PO Box 190106

  Burton, MI 48519

  www.subterraneanpress.com

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “To See the Invisible Man” first appeared in Worlds of Tomorrow.

  “The Fangs of the Trees,” “Ishmael in Love,” “Sundance,” and “After the Myths Went Home” first appeared in Fantasy and Science Fiction.

  “The Pain Peddlers,”, “Neighbor,” “The Sixth Palace,” “Hawksbill Station,” and “Going Down Smooth” first appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction.

  “Flies” first appeared in Dangerous Visions.

  “Halfway House,” “Bride 91,” and “The Reality Trip” first appeared in If.

  “Passengers” first appeared in Orbit.

  “Ringing the Changes” first appeared in Alchemy and Academe.

  “To the Dark Star” first appeared in The Farthest Reaches.

  “We Know Who We Are” first appeared in Amazing Stories.

  “The Pleasure of Their Company” first appeared in Infinity One.

  “How It Was When the Past Went Away” first appeared in Three For Tomorrow.

  “A Happy Day in 2381” and “(Now + n, Now – n)” first appeared in Nova.

  Copyright © 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, by Agberg, Ltd.

  Introductory matter copyright © 2007 by Agberg, Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  To See The Invisible Man

  The Pain Peddlers

  Neighbor

  The Sixth Palace

  Flies

  Halfway House

  To The Dark Star

  Hawksbill Station

  Passengers

  Bride 91

  Going Down Smooth

  The Fangs of the Trees

  Ishmael in Love

  Ringing the Changes

  Sundance

  How It Was When the Past Went Away

  A Happy Day in 2381

  (Now + n, Now – n)

  After the Myths Went Home

  The Pleasure of Their Company

  We Know Who We Are

  For Harlan Ellison

  Joseph Elder

  Damon Knight

  Edward L. Ferman

  Anne McCaffrey

  Harry Harrison

  Bob Hoskins

  Ted White

  and—with particular affection—the cantankerous Fred Pohl

  INTRODUCTION

  A considerable jump in time marks the break here between the first volume of this series, To Be Continued, and this one. To Be Continued covers my short-story work between 1953 and 1958; and the attentive reader of the introductions to the stories in that volume will very likely have noticed that my primary (though not only) concern as a writer in the 1950’s was to earn money. In 1958, my fourth year as a full-time writer, making money by writing began to be very difficult to do, if your specialty happened to be science fiction. Midway through that year the American News Company, the vast, omnipotent, and (I think) mob-controlled distribution company that was responsible for getting most of the nation’s fiction magazines to the newsstands, abruptly went belly-up as a result of some miscarried financial manipulation, and its collapse brought down dozens of small publishers who depended on advance payments from American News to stay afloat. Among them were most of the science fiction magazines to which I was a regular contributor.

  The best ones—John Campbell’s Astounding, Horace Gold’s Galaxy, Tony Boucher’s Fantasy and Science Fiction—were able to survive the debacle. But most of my mainstays, the ones that cheerfully bought all the copy I could provide at a cent or two a word, went under right away or else entered a stage of obvious terminal decline. Larry Shaw’s Infinity and its companion Science Fiction Adventures disappeared, W.W. Scott’s Super Science (for which I wrote 36 of the l20 stories it published in four years) did likewise, Bob Lowndes’ Future and Science Fiction Stories began to totter toward their doom, and so forth. I was still free to take my chances with the demanding Boucher, Campbell, and Gold, of course, but the salvage markets that I depended on to accept the stories which those three editors rejected were no longer there, and with the same number of writers competing for space in ever fewer magazines I was faced with the prospect of writing material that would find no publisher whatever. So by late 1958 I began to disappear from science fiction myself—the first of several such withdrawals from the field that I would stage.

  I was accustomed by then to a pretty good standard of living, and so, fast on my feet as ever, I found a bunch of new markets outside the s-f world for whom I wrote just about anything and everything. My ledger shows something called “Stalin’s Slave Barracks” for a magazine called Sir in March, 1959, “Cures for Sleepless Nights” in the January, 1960 issue of Living For Young Homemakers, “Wolf Children of India” written for Exotic Adventures in May, 1959, and so on and on in a really astonishing fashion, reams of stuff that I have completely forgotten doing. And when Bill Hamling, the former publisher of several science-fiction magazines to which I had contributed dozens of stories, started a new line of mildly erotic paperbacks, I became part of his staff of regulars, cranking out two or three and sometimes four novels a month for him, cheerfully formulaic books with names like Love Addict, Summertime Affair, and Lust Goddess that are collector’s items today. Just to demonstrate my versatility I opened up yet another line of books of an utterly different and much more respectable kind—non-fiction books on archaeological subjects, beginning with Lost Cities and Vanished Civilizations in 1962 and going on to such items as Empires in the Dust, Sunken History, and Man Before Adam. Oh, yes, I was a busy boy.

  I did continue to appear regularly in the s-f magazines all through 1959, but mostly with stories that I had written the previous year, or even earlier. 1960 saw just four short s-f stories of mine published—what would have been a week’s work a couple of years before—and the little novel for young readers, Lost Race of Mars, which proved very popular and remained in print for decades. In 1961 I wrote just one s-f story, and expanded an old magazine novella into a hardcover book for a lending-library publisher. In 1962, a year when I needed to maximize my income because I had taken it upon myself to buy a huge, expensive house in the Riverdale section of New York, a house that had once been the residence of the famed Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, no s-f short stories of mine appeared, just the novel The Seed of Earth, another expansion, based on a story from 1957. You would blink your eyes in astonishment if I told you how little that twenty-room house cost, because it is a very small sum indeed in modern-day money, but I assure you it was a gigantic amount in its own pre-inflation era when a dollar was a DOLLAR, and writing science fiction for the shrunken market of 1962 was too risky a proposition now that I was a homeowner with all the exciting new expenses that that involved.

  But the veteran writer and editor Frederik Pohl, with whom I had struck up a friendship in my earliest days as a writer, had taken over the editorship of Galaxy and its companion magazine If from the ailing Horace Gold in June of 1961, and he lured me back into the field which was still, after all, more important to me than any other. Fred had long been vexed with me for my willingness to churn out all that lucrative junk, and he believed (rightly, as time would prove) that a top-rank science-fiction writer was hidden behind the pyramid of literary garbage that I h
ad cheerfully been producing over the past few years. So he made me an offer shrewdly calculated to appeal to my risk-abhorring nature. He agreed to buy any story I cared to send him—a guaranteed sale—provided I undertook to write it with all my heart, no quick-buck hackwork. If he wanted revisions, I would pledge to do one rewrite for him, after which he would be bound to buy the story without asking anything more of me. If I turned in a story he didn’t like, he would buy it anyway, but that would be the end of the deal. I was, of course, to say nothing about these terms to any of my fellow writers, and I kept the secret until long after Fred had left the magazine.

  It was an irresistible deal, as he damned well knew. I would get three cents a word—the top rate at the time—without the slightest risk, and without any necessity whatever to slant my work to meet the imagined prejudices of some dictatorial editor. All I had to do was write what I believed to be good science fiction, and Fred would buy it. I had never had an arrangement like that with a first-class s-f magazine before, and I lost no time in writing “To See the Invisible Man,” the first of what would be a great many stories for Fred Pohl’s Galaxy. One thing led to another, and before long, spurred by my new arrangement with Pohl, I found myself regularly writing science fiction again, although never with the lunatic prolificity that marked my earliest years in the field.

  Robert Silverberg

  To See the Invisible Man

  This story, written in June of 1962, marks the beginning of my real career as a science-fiction writer, I think. The 1953-58 stories collected in To Be Continued, the first of this series of volumes, are respectable professional work, some better than others but all of them at least minimally acceptable—but most of them could have been written by just about anyone. Aside from a few particularly ambitious items, they were designed to slip unobtrusively into the magazines of their time, efficiently providing me with regular paychecks. But now, by freeing me from the need to calculate my way around the risk of rejection, Fred Pohl allowed—indeed, required—me to reach as deep into my literary resources as I was capable of doing. I knew that unless I gave him my very best, the wonderful guaranteed-sale deal I had with him would vanish as quickly as it had appeared. Therefore I would reach deeper and deeper, in the years ahead, until I had moved so far away from my youthful career as a hack writer that latecomers would find it hard to believe that I had been emotionally capable of writing all that junk, let alone willing to do it. In “To See the Invisible Man” the distinctive Silverberg fictional voice is on display for just about the first time.

  (The voice of another and greater writer can be heard in the background, though. I found the idea for my story in the opening paragraph of Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Babylon Lottery,” where he says, “Like all men in Babylon I have been a proconsul; like all, a slave….During one lunar year, I have been declared invisible; I shrieked and was not heard, I stole my bread and was not decapitated.” Borges chose to do no more with the theme of statutory invisibility in that story—it was, for him, nothing more than an embellishment in a story about something else entirely. So I fell upon the notion and developed it to explore its practical implications, thus doing the job Borges had left undone.)

  Oddly, the story didn’t appear in Galaxy despite my arrangement with Fred. Soon after taking over the editorial post he created a new magazine, Worlds of Tomorrow, and shifted some stories out of the Galaxy inventory to fill its first issue, dated April, 1963. “To See the Invisible Man” was among them. To those readers who quite rightly thought of me as a heartless manufacturer of mass-produced fiction, the story was something of a revelation—and there would be more such surprises to come.

  Many years later, by the way, it was adapted for television’s Twilight Zone program, with a superb screenplay by Steve Barnes.

  ~

  And then they found me guilty, and then they pronounced me invisible, for a span of one year beginning on the eleventh of May in the year of Grace 2104, and they took me to a dark room beneath the courthouse to affix the mark to my forehead before turning me loose.

  Two municipally paid ruffians did the job. One flung me into a chair and the other lifted the brand.

  “This won’t hurt a bit,” the slab-jawed ape said, and thrust the brand against my forehead, and there was a moment of coolness, and that was all.

  “What happens now?” I asked.

  But there was no answer, and they turned away from me and left the room without a word. The door remained open. I was free to leave, or to stay and rot, as I chose. No one would speak to me, or look at me more than once, long enough to see the sign on my forehead. I was invisible. You must understand that my invisibility was strictly metaphorical. I still had corporeal solidity. People could see me—but they would not see me.

  An absurd punishment? Perhaps. But then, the crime was absurd too. The crime of coldness. Refusal to unburden myself for my fellow man. I was a four-time offender. The penalty for that was a year’s invisibility. The complaint had been duly sworn, the trial held, the brand duly affixed.

  I was invisible.

  I went out, out into the world of warmth.

  They had already had the afternoon rain. The streets of the city were drying, and there was the smell of growth in the Hanging Gardens. Men and women went about their business. I walked among them, but they took no notice of me.

  The penalty for speaking to an invisible man is invisibility, a month to a year or more, depending on the seriousness of the offense. On this the whole concept depends. I wondered how rigidly the rule was observed.

  I soon found out.

  I stepped into a liftshaft and let myself be spiraled up toward the nearest of the Hanging Gardens. It was Eleven, the cactus garden, and those gnarled, bizarre shapes suited my mood. I emerged on the landing stage and advancedtoward the admissions counter to buy my token. A pasty-faced, empty-eyed woman sat back of the counter.

  I laid down my coin. Something like fright entered her eyes, quickly faded.

  “One admission,” I said.

  No answer. People were queuing up behind me. I repeated my demand. The woman looked up helplessly, then stared over my left shoulder. A hand extended itself, another coin was placed down. She took it, and handed the man his token. He dropped it in the slot and went in.

  “Let me have a token,” I said crisply.

  Others were jostling me out of the way. Not a word of apology. I began to sense some of the meaning of my invisibility. They were literally treating me as though they could not see me.

  There are countervailing advantages. I walked around behind the counter and helped myself to a token without paying for it. Since I was invisible, I could not be stopped. I thrust the token in the slot and entered the garden.

  But the cacti bored me. An inexpressible malaise slipped over me, and I felt no desire to stay. On my way out I pressed my finger against a jutting thorn and drew blood. The cactus, at least, still recognized my existence. But only to draw blood.

  I returned to my apartment. My books awaited me, but I felt no interest in them. I sprawled out on my narrow bed and activated the energizer to combat the strange lassitude that was afflicting me. I thought about my invisibility.

  It would not be such a hardship, I told myself. I had never depended overly on other human beings. Indeed, had I not been sentenced in the first place for my coldness toward my fellow creatures? So what need did I have of them now? Let them ignore me!

  It would be restful. I had a year’s respite from work, after all. Invisible men did not work. How could they? Who would go to an invisible doctor for a consultation, or hire an invisible lawyer to represent him, or give a document to an invisible clerk to file? No work, then. No income, of course, either. But landlords did not take rent from invisible men. Invisible men went where they pleased, at no cost. I had just demonstrated that at the Hanging Gardens.

  Invisibility would be a great joke on society, I felt. They had sentenced me to nothing more dreadful than a year’s rest cure. I was
certain I would enjoy it.

  But there were certain practical disadvantages. On the first night of my invisibility I went to the city’s finest restaurant. I would order their most lavish dishes, a hundred-unit meal, and then conveniently vanish at the presentation of the bill.

  My thinking was muddy. I never got seated. I stood in the entrance half an hour, bypassed again and again by a maitre d’hotel who had clearly been through all this many times before: Walking to a seat, I realized, would gain me nothing. No waiter would take my order.

  I could go into the kitchen. I could help myself to anything I pleased. I could disrupt the workings of the restaurant. But I decided against it. Society had its ways of protecting itself against the invisible ones. There could be no direct retaliation, of course, no intentional defense. But who could say no to a chef’s claim that he had seen no one in the way when he hurled a pot of scalding water toward the wall? Invisibility was invisibility, a two-edged sword.

  I left the restaurant.

  I ate at an automated restaurant nearby. Then I took an autocab home. Machines, like cacti, did not discriminate against my sort. I sensed that they would make poor companions for a year, though.

  I slept poorly.

  The second day of my invisibility was a day of further testing and discovery.

  I went for a long walk, careful to stay on the pedestrian paths. I had heard all about the boys who enjoy running down those who carry the mark of invisibility on their foreheads. Again, there is no recourse, no punishment for them. My condition has its little hazards by intention.

  I walked the streets, seeing how the throngs parted for me. I cut through them like a microtome passing between cells. They were well trained. At midday I saw my first fellow Invisible. He was a tall man of middle years, stocky and dignified, bearing the mark of shame on a domelike forehead. His eyes met mine only for a moment. Then he passed on. An invisible man, naturally, cannot see another of his kind.