The Collection (3 page)

The result was
The Office,
a semiautobiographical
account of his own experiences in the twenties. But such was his honesty that
he succeeded only too well—and in succeeding, failed. Because the way it is, or
was,
for Fred in the twenties, proved humdrum and pedestrian in the
telling. Minus murder and mayhem,
sans
piled-up plot complications, and
lacking rapid-fire repartee, this day-by-day account of real people in an
ordinary office setting seemed dull to readers who expected a typical Fredric
Brown entertainment.

He never repeated the venture. Instead he returned to the
mixture as before—but what a rich and variegated mixture it was! The burgeoning
men
^'
s magazine market offered outlets for his talent, and new
freedom of expression. Sexual taboos were giving way, and while Fred eschewed
vulgarity, he found welcome opportunity to base his fantasies and science-fictional
efforts on once-forbidden themes. He gave free rein to his wealth of wit, and
discovered a new story-form in the "short-short."

In that connection,
aficionados
may be interested in
a 1960 Warner Bros. recording,
Introspection IV,
in which a narrator
named Johnny Gunn, accompanied by the background musical effects of Don Ralke,
reads a series of short tales. Five of these—"Sentry,"
^"
Blood,
^"
"Imagine," "Voodoo," and "Pattern"—are the work
of Fredric Brown at his whimsical best.

Moving to the West Coast in the early sixties, Fred and Beth
established residence in the San Fernando Valley. I had already arrived on the
scene and we again saw a great deal of one another.

For a time Fred tried his hand at films and television. Way
back in the forties a producer had purchased a story from him in order to use
its ending for a motion picture called
Crack-Up,
starring Pat O
^'
Brien.
Again, in the fifties, his mystery novel,
The Screaming Mimi,
was
filmed. A number of his stories had been adapted for radio and later for
various television anthology shows. It was only natural that he would attempt
to do some adaptations or originals on his own. And, Hollywood being what it
was—and, alas, is—it was only natural that his efforts met with little
acceptance. Producers didn
^'
t understand Fred. Their definition of a
"pro" was a hack who could and would write anything to order. But
Fred, genuine
^"
pro
^"
that he was, wanted to
write Fredric Brown stories.

Again, he reverted to print. And Hollywood's undoubted loss was
our gain, for he continued to turn out a series of unique, highly
individualistic tales; stories which established him in the
genre.
If he
^'
d
never written anything except
^"
Puppet Show,
^"
we
^'
d
have reason to be grateful for Fredric Brown
^'
s contribution to
science fiction, but there were many others. You
^'
ll find some of
them in the following pages, and if you happen to be discovering them for the
first time, I think you'll share the general gratitude for his efforts.

And it is in his stories that Fred
^'
s fame
endures. He was never, to my knowledge, attendant at a science-fiction convention;
he was not a trophy collector or a publicity seeker, and a surprisingly large
number of fans and fellow professionals knew only the name, not the person who
bore it. But as readers, they came to appreciate the qualities which so
distinguished his best work—the sardonic humor, the irony which at times brings
to mind Ambrose Bierce. And yet there was a leavening element of playfulness
which adds an extra dimension to his most savage satire or scaring cynicism.
Add to this his gift for the realistic rendering of dialogue and accurate
observation of character traits and the result is as impressive as it is
entertaining.

There
^'
s not much more to tell. Fred
^'
s
respiratory problems increased, forcing a move to Tucson in the midsixties. And
it was there, on March 11, 1972, that he died.

Those of us who were privileged to know him, mourn his
passing. But those who were privileged to read his work remain eternally
grateful for what he gave them.

A sampling of that work has been gathered here. There
^'
s
more, much more, and I urge you to seek it out. For into it he poured a
lifetime of effort and experience, wit and wisdom and whimsy, honesty and
make-believe, joy and despair—all of the qualities which mark the measure of a
man, and which make his writing truly, and aptly,
The Best.

Robert Bloch

The
Science Fiction Stories

Carson opened his eyes, and found himself looking upwards
into a flickering blue dimness.

It was hot, and he was lying on sand, and a rock embedded in
the sand was hurting his back. He rolled over to his side, off the rock, and
then pushed himself up to a sitting position.

‘I’m crazy,’ he thought. ‘Crazy — or dead — or something.’
The sand was blue, bright blue. And there wasn’t any such thing as bright blue
sand on Earth or any of the planets. Blue sand under a blue dome that wasn’t
the sky nor yet a room, but a circumscribed area — somehow he knew it was
circumscribed and finite even though he couldn’t see to the top of it.

He picked up some of the sand in his hand and let it run
through his fingers. It trickled down on to his bare leg.
Bare?

He was stark naked, and already his body was dripping
perspiration from the enervating heat, coated blue with sand wherever sand had
touched it. Elsewhere his body was white.

He thought: then this sand is really blue. If it seemed blue
only because of the blue light, then I’d be blue also. But I’m white, so the
sand
is
blue.
Blue sand:
there isn’t any blue sand. There isn’t
any place like this place I’m in.

Sweat was running down in his eyes. It was hot, hotter than
hell. Only hell — the hell of the ancients — was supposed to be red and not
blue.

But if this place wasn’t hell, what was it? Only Mercury,
among the planets, had heat like this and this wasn’t Mercury. And Mercury was
some four billion miles from ... From?

It came back to him then, where he’d been: in the little
one-man scouter, outside the orbit of Pluto, scouting a scant million miles to
one side of the Earth Armada drawn up in battle array there to intercept the
Outsiders.

That sudden strident ringing of the alarm bell when the
rival scouter —the Outsider ship — had come within range of his detectors!

No one knew who the Outsiders were, what they looked like,
or from what far galaxy they came, other than that it was in the general
direction of the Pleiades.

First, there had been sporadic raids on Earth colonies and
outposts; isolated battles between Earth patrols and small groups of Outsider
spaceships; battles sometimes won and sometimes lost, but never resulting in
the capture of an alien vessel. Nor had any member of a raided colony ever
survived to describe the Outsiders who had left the ships, if indeed they had
left them.

Not too serious a menace, at first, for the raids had not
been numerous or destructive. And individually, the ships had proved slightly
inferior in armament to the best of Earth’s fighters, although somewhat
superior in speed and maneuverability. A sufficient edge in speed, in fact, to
give the Outsiders their choice of running or fighting, unless surrounded.

Nevertheless, Earth had prepared for serious trouble,
building the mightiest armada of all time. It had been waiting now, that
armada, for a long time. Now the showdown was coming.

Scouts twenty billion miles out had detected the approach of
a mighty fleet of the Outsiders. Those scouts had never come back, but their
radiotronic messages had. And now Earth’s armada, all ten thousand ships and
half-million fighting spacemen, was out there, outside Pluto’s orbit, waiting
to intercept and battle to the death.

And an even battle it was going to be, judging by the
advance reports of the men of the far picket line who had given their lives to
report —before they had died — on the size and strength of the alien fleet.

Anybody’s battle, with the mastery of the solar system
hanging in the balance, on an even chance. A last and
only
chance, for
Earth and all her colonies lay at the utter mercy of the Outsiders if they ran
that gauntlet —Oh yes. Bob Carson remembered now. He remembered that strident
bell and his leap for the control panel. His frenzied fumbling as he strapped
himself into the seat. The dot in the visiplate that grew larger. The dryness
of his mouth. The awful knowledge that this was
it
for him, at least,
although the main fleets were still out of range of one another.

This, his first taste of battle! Within three seconds or
less he’d be victorious, or a charred cinder. One hit completely took care of a
lightly armed and armoured one-man craft like a scouter.

Frantically — as his lips shaped the word ‘One’ — he worked
at the controls to keep that growing dot centred on the crossed spiderwebs of
the visiplate. His hands doing that, while his right foot hovered over the
pedal that would fire the bolt. The single bolt of concentrated hell that had
to hit — or else. There wouldn’t be time for any second shot.

‘Two.’ He didn’t know he’d said that, either. The dot in the
visiplate wasn’t a dot now. Only a few thousand miles away, it showed up in the
magnification of the plate as though it were only a few hundred yards off. It
was a fast little scouter, about the size of his.

An alien ship, all right!

‘Thr —‘ His foot touched the bolt-release pedal.

And then the Outsider had swerved suddenly and was off the
crosshairs. Carson punched keys frantically, to follow.

For a tenth of a second, it was out of the visiplate
entirely, and then as the nose of his scouter swung after it, he saw it again,
diving straight towards the ground.

The ground?

It was an optical illusion of some sort. It
had
to
be: that planet — or whatever it was — that now covered the visiplate couldn’t
be there. Couldn’t possibly! There
wasn’t
any planet nearer than Neptune
three billion miles away — with Pluto on the opposite side of the distant
pinpoint sun.

His detectors!
They
hadn’t shown any object of
planetary dimensions, even of asteroid dimensions, and still didn’t.

It couldn’t be there, that whatever-it-was he was diving
into, only a few hundred miles below him.

In his sudden anxiety to keep from crashing, he forgot the
Outsider ship. He fired the front breaking rockets, and even as the sudden
change of speed slammed him forward against the seat straps, fired full right
for an emergency turn. Pushed them down and
held
them down, knowing that
he needed everything the ship had to keep from crashing and that a turn that
sudden would black him out for a moment.

It did black him out.

And that was all. Now he was sitting in hot blue sand, stark
naked but otherwise unhurt. No sign of his spaceship and — for that matter — no
sign of
space.
That curve overhead wasn’t a sky, whatever else it was.

He scrambled to his feet.

Gravity seemed a little more than Earth-normal. Not much
more.

Flat sand stretching away, a few scrawny bushes in clumps
here and there. The bushes were blue, too, but in varying shades, some lighter
than the blue of the sand, some darker.

Out from under the nearest bush ran a little thing that was
like a lizard, except that it had more than four legs. It was blue, too. Bright
blue. It saw him and ran back again under the bush.

He looked up again, trying to decide what was overhead. It
wasn’t exactly a roof, but it was dome-shaped. It flickered and was hard to
look at. But definitely, it curved down to the ground, to the blue sand, all
around him.

He wasn’t far from being under the centre of the dome. At a
guess, it was a hundred yards to the nearest wall, if it was a wall. It was as
though a blue hemisphere of
something
about two hundred and fifty yards
in circumference was inverted over the flat expanse of the sand.

And everything blue, except one object. Over near a far
curving wall there was a red object. Roughly spherical, it seemed to be about a
yard in diameter. Too far for him to see clearly through the flickering
blueness.