Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II (103 page)

It had been an incredible experience, an amazing performance by a whole society. But it had been in preparation for at least a full generation. Every one of the Aaron People had known exactly what to do.

He would never have believed what the Outside looked like—even after all that Rachel and the others had told him—until he had stood on the roof in the screaming sunlight and seen what it meant to have no ceiling at all, to be unable to observe a wall anywhere. At first, he had fought the terror—rising in his throat like a flood of vomit—simply to preserve his standing in the eyes of his section; but as he heard the whimpers behind him and realized that there were no sturdy explorers among his followers, only homebound artisans and their families, he had forgotten his own panic and gone among them, cheering and chiding and making suggestions. "Then don't look up if it's so upsetting." "Take care of your wife, you—she's fainted." "When you feel you just can't take it anymore, try kneeling and putting your hands on the floor of the roof. It's there, and it's solid."

Still, that first day had been pretty bad. The nights were better: there wasn't nearly as much open space to be seen. They traveled across the roof mostly at night, partly because they found it easier and partly because the Monsters seemed to dislike the night and were rarely abroad in it.

Now, they were embarking at night, climbing wearily up a ramp which led to a hold in which cargo was stacked. They were hurrying too: according to the records kept by the Aaron's planning staff, the ship was due to leave very shortly.

Out of the corner of his eye, as he crossed out the names which their owners announced, he could see his wife, Rachel Esthersdaughter, a dozen or so paces up the ramp from him. She and ten other members of the Female Society were manipulating the unfolded sections of their neutralizers over the writhing orange ropes which lay across the ramp at regular intervals. These orange ropes were the reason that the Monsters felt so secure about leaving their cargo hold open and the ramp down. Unlike the green ropes back in the Cages of Sin, the orange ropes repelled protoplasm violently. It was impossible for a man to approach them in any way without being knocked flat on his back, at the least. Sometimes, they had killed those who got too close. But now the orange ropes wriggled and were harmless.

Eric remembered a comment he had heard at a section leaders' meeting the night before. "The Monsters develop their penetrating spray, and we develop our neutralizer. Everybody makes a breakthrough. Fair's fair."

Roy came up the ramp, waving his hand to indicate that the last of the section had preceded him. Eric checked his list: yes, every name was crossed out, every name but Rachel's. He put the slate under his arm and followed the Runner. Behind him, the leader of Section 16 took his place on the ramp and propped up a slate full of uncrossed names.

As he passed Rachel, Eric lingered for a moment and stroked her arm tenderly. "You look so tired, darling," he said. "Haven't you done enough on this job? You're pregnant."

Holding her neutralizer in place, she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. "There are five other pregnant women on this ramp, Eric, or hadn't you noticed? I'm on my last shift. I'll be joining you in the ship very soon."

At the entrance to the hold, where the crowd was still sorting itself out, a young man wearing the brassard of an expeditionary policeman had a message for him. "You're to join the Aaron up ahead. He's with the men assigned to cutting a hole in the wall. I'll take over your section."

Eric gave him his slate. "When my wife comes, please send her directly to me," he asked. Then he signaled Roy to follow and walked along the path indicated by men stationed every thirty or forty paces. Around them, on every side, were great containers piled up to the ceiling. The place was brightly lit, as he now expected Monster territory to be. Monsters left the lights on while they slept.

He arrived at the wall just as the sweating men finally pulled the slab they had cut out away and to one side. A great mob of people had been watching anxiously. It was getting close to dawn, and everyone knew it.

The Aaron was sweating, too. His eyes were red-rimmed. He looked as if he had just about passed the point of complete exhaustion. "Eric," he said, "this is where we need you most. There are no maps from this point on. In there," he pointed at the hole, "only an Eye can lead us."

Eric nodded, adjusted his forehead glow lamp and stepped through the hole.

He looked about him. Yes, the usual tunnels and corridors. It would have been most unpleasant if the Monsters had not employed their basic insulating material in the walls of their spaceships. Here men could live as they were accustomed to live.

Calling back through the hole, he reported the information to the Aaron. A huge sigh of relief went up from the crowd outside. "Good enough," the Aaron said. "Go on ahead—you know what you have to find. We'll be enlarging the hole."

Eric started off. Roy the Runner came through the hole after him, then a series of the youngest, most agile warriors. They formed a single line, constantly enlarging itself from the hole.

He did know what he had to find, but, as he looked for it, past unfamiliar tunnels and completely unknown intersections, he was troubled by an odd factor he had great difficulty in pinning down. Then, as he came around a curve, and into a larger burrow just big enough to provide a temporary though extremely tight meeting place for all of the Aaron People, he understood what was bothering him. The odor—or rather, the absence of one.

These burrows were virgin. Men had never lived and died within them.

"Good enough," he said. "We can camp here until the take-off." And he posted sentries. No need really, but discipline was discipline.

Roy carried the message back swiftly. In a little while, people began to arrive: first expeditionary policemen, who set off areas for each section, then the sections themselves. Rachel came in with Section 15; by that time, the place was getting pretty crowded. The last one in was the Aaron—two husky policemen carried him on their shoulders and had to push hard to make their way through.

They could all hear a distant thumping by then. The Monsters were moving about and working on the machinery.

The Aaron put a megaphone to his lips. "Now hear me, my people!" he called out in a tired, cracked voice. "We have accomplished our Plan. We are all safely inside the burrows of a spaceship which is about to depart for the stars. We have plenty of food and water and can stay out of sight until long after the take-off."

He paused, took a deep breath before going on. "This is a cargo ship, my people. It will make many stops, on many worlds. At each stop, one or more sections will leave the ship and stay in hiding on the planet until their numbers have increased substantially. After all, anywhere that Monsters can live, humans can. Anywhere the Monsters have a settlement, men will thrive. Anything the Monsters provide for themselves, we can probably use. We have learned this on Earth—and we have learned it thoroughly."

The floor began vibrating as the motors went on. They felt the ship shake and start to move.

The Aaron lifted his arms above his head. People everywhere fell to their knees. "The universe!" the Aaron cried ecstatically. "My people,
henceforth the universe is ours!
"

—|—

When the ship had stopped accelerating and they could move about freely, Eric and the other section leaders collected their groups and led them to adjoining burrows. Men paced off the areas that their families would occupy. Women began preparing food. And children ran about and played.

It was wonderful the way the children adjusted to the acceleration and the strange, new burrows. Everyone who watched them at their games agreed that they made the place feel like home.

Originally, this novel was no more than an outline, one of several requested in the early 1960s by a publisher who had read and liked my short stories and novelettes. The publisher had asked "for a couple of outlines," so I submitted proposals for two novels I very much wanted to write. At the last moment, to give the impression that I was a red-hot, eight-cylinder writer, I added a third, pretty much made up as I typed.

Perhaps inevitably, this was the one,
Of Men and Monsters
, that knocked out the publisher. The other two outlines were dismissed outright as much too complex, and even uninteresting, but
Of Men and Monsters
—wow!, bingo!, "yes, we do
want
that one."

I reacted with dismay, for something much like that had happened to me many times before. Most editors had not been impressed by proposals and outlines for work I badly wanted to do, even though they almost always had purchased the completed pieces—which, of course, I had had to write on spec.

But this time... The rejection of the other two outlines had been so emphatic, and the ardor with which
Of Men and Monsters
was embraced had been so vigorous, that there was no question as to the only book the publisher would now buy.

I responded as I usually did to such crises: I went into block. (I used to tell my writing classes at Penn State that I was convinced that Shakespeare was only the tenth best writer of his time: the other nine were all suffering from writer's block.) The outline was esthetically meaningless to me: It was a tale of Earth conquered by aliens and regained by humanity—it was essentially a dramatization and fulfillment of the cheap "ancestor science" of the later novel.

I pried and poked at the outline and could not get much past a fairly good opening sentence: "Mankind consisted of 128 people." Eventually, in one of my periodic rereadings of Swift, I came across the quotation from the voyage to Brobdingnab that I later used; it gave me enough to name and complete the first part—
Priests for Their Learning
—as well as titles for the other two parts.

Something like the picaresque occurred to me as a possible form, a complicated journey with rogues, or at least with incompetents. And the journey could be a maturing process, too, of course: we watch the boy become a man.

But I still had no novel, at least none with a
point
.

Various things happened. I sold the completed first part to Fred Pohl, the new editor of
Galaxy
. The money from the sale was terribly needed just then, but I still had to go out and get a high-paying job in advertising. Then what was to be the original publisher shrugged out of science fiction and, of course, my unfinished novel. I began writing good nonfiction, and found that I very much enjoyed doing it. I left advertising. I had done well enough to make it to the level of account executive, but I found advertising as well as the man who as my boss personified it far too fantastic to be believable to a mere science-fiction writer. And I tried to go back to the book.

But my phone rang constantly, pulling me from the typewriter (this was before the day of the inexpensive answering machine), and my callers all had bright ideas that took hours to detail or personal crises that were terribly complex and interminable. My wife, Fruma, who was now working as an editor at Harper and Row, pointed out that I picked up friends far too easily, among them cab drivers who had driven me for ten blocks, vacuum-cleaner salesmen who had made me feel guilty because we had no rugs for them to demonstrate on, and female solicitors for good-cause petitions who fell in love with me when I told them I couldn't sign because I was in favor only of very bad things. One evening, when my supper got cold because the phone rang each and every time as soon as I had hung up on the previous caller, she shook her head at me and noted, "You've done it, Phil. You've essentially used up New York City as a place to live."

I denied it. I felt there must be a way for a fellow even as chummy as I to go on writing and living in Manhattan. I decided to get an office, or a writer's equivalent of one.

There was an ad for an unfurnished room—toilet in the hall—above a low-grade men's clothing store on Sixth Avenue that was only three blocks away from the New York Public Library building. The rent (remember please, we're talking about the 1960s) was twenty-eight dollars a month.

For five dollars more a month, they said I could use their phone for local calls. I thanked them, but no. Absolutely no phone.

Fruma and I dragged a cot, a chair and a typewriter table up the stairs and into the room. We learned that the clothing store ended its day at 6:30 PM and put up a metal gate, unlockable only from the outside, in front of the store. There was no back entrance. We both decided that made the place ideal for me.

"All you have to do," Fruma told me, "is to remember to bring up some food at six o'clock before you get locked in. And absolutely not to make friends with any of the clerks in the store or the traffic cop at the corner. And write. And write. And write."

"You can visit me," I reminded her. "The one window in the room looks down into the street. Even after the gate closes, I can yell at you from upstairs."

"You write," she said. "You write that novel."

All well and good, I thought, as I lay on the cot nights, counting the multitudes of yellow plaster cracks in the ceiling. But still, still, what was the point of that novel that I was supposed to be doing nothing but writing? What was it that I cared about saying that the novel would say? Or, to put it another way, what was it about myself or my society that I wanted to investigate, using the novel as an excuse? It had been years since I had tried so hard to pursue affluence by becoming a literary hack, only to discover, as I have noted elsewhere in this volume, that I just did not have the vitally necessary talent of hackhood. I had learned that I couldn't keep writing unless what I wrote had some important meaning, at least for me.

All right, so the boy becomes a man. How? Well, for one thing, he ought to have a substantial and important sexual experience. With whom, with what kind of person? I brooded on that, night after lonely night, until, one afternoon, I broke and went home to Fruma, just—I explained to myself—to have a shower.