FANTASY and SCIENCE FICTION Myself and the Bearded Nian Re Suit, As If Encouraging Me
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THE MAGAZINE OF fontosv ·AN·o Science Fiction Including Venture Science Fiction The Illuminated Man (novelet) J• G. BALLARD 5 Three Times Around JANE ROBERTS 32 You Have To Stay Inside CALVIN W. DEMMON 37 No Place Like Where RO~ERT M. GREEN, JR. 38 The Building of a Protein THEODORE L. THOMAS 49 ~ Invasion (verse) CHRISTOPHER CORSON 50 A Red Heart and Blue Roses MILDRED CLINGERMAN 51 Books A VRAM DAVIDSON 67 Sea Wrack (short novelet) EDWARD JESBY 72 Mar-ti-an ROBERT LORY 89 Science: Ghost Lines in the Sky ISAAC ASIMOV 93 Touchstone TERRY CARR 103 The New Encyclopaedist STEPHEN BECKER q5 Cantabile JON DECLES 117 Editorial 4 Letters 127 F&SP Marketplace 129 Cover by Ed Emsh (illustrating "The Illuminated Man") Joseph fV. Ferma11, PUBLISHER Avram Davidson, EXECUTIVE EDITOll [saac Asimov, SCIENCE EDITOR Edward L. Ferman, ~IANAGDIG EDITOR Ted White, ASSISTANT EDITOR The Magazine of Far~tasy a"d Science Fiction, Volume 26, No. 5, JVI!ole No. 156, May 1964. Published monthly by Mermry Press, b1c., at 40¢ a copy. Annual subscription $4.50; $5.00 in Canada a"d the Pan American Union; $5.50 in all other countries. Publi· cation office, 10 Ferry Street, Concord, N. H. Editorial and general mail should be sent to 341 East 53rd St., New York, N. Y. 10022. Second Class postage paid at Concord, N. H. Printed in U.S.A. © 1964 by Mercury Press, I11c. All rights, including translations into other languages, reserved. Submissions must be accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes; the Publisher assumes no responsibility for retum of unsolicited manuscripts. EDITORIAL The former Kindly Editor once said, rather wist fully, to the subsequent Cruelly Editor, "What I would like . • I think . I would like a story about a mile-long spaceship . it goes into the Coal Sack ... and it comes out dirty . ." So would we. Whatever became of them? Are they all going to other magazines? Aren't they even being written? If not, why not? Is it really because rocket ships, even if they aren't yet a mile long, are now Reality? and, hence, assumed to be no longer subjects for Romance? Do SF writers, actual and potential, suffer from an inferiority complex or a sibling rivalry in comparing themselves to Colonel John Glenn? Or has SF leapfrogged the space ship-and not yet landed on the other side of it? Questions, ques tions . On one of Captain Cook's voyages he put into the re mote island of Ontong Java, and there he found a vessel of the Royal Navy which had gone aground fifteen years earlier. The officers had all died or gone mad, and the few remaining crewmen, headed by an ancient Gunner's Mate, shed tears into their long white beards at the thought that Captain Cook would now and at last take them back Home. But he had different ideas. "No, no, my men," he said, briskly. "You are guarding His Majesty's ship, and must remain here till properly relieved by the Admiralty!" \Ve told this to Horace Gold, and his comment, equally briskly, was, "Well, he got his, didn't he?" He did, indeed ... Are we, per haps, in a similar position? Are we urging others to continue to guard property (vessels, themes) gone aground and no longer ser vicable? And, if so, will it be our fate to be clubbed and devoured by speakers of the strange language whom we have ye t to encounter? One wonders. -AVRAM D AVIDSON 4 Sounds, seas, jewels, deserts, flowers, cry.stals . these are things which ]. G. Ballard in a very short time has nuule distinctively and peculiarly his-and distinctively and peculiarly beautiful as see, for instance, his THE GARDEN OF TIME (F & SF, Feb. 1962) and NOW WAKES THE SEA (May 1963). He has broken down the walls which Literature, no less than Nature, had seemed to erect between seemingly disparate elements, and from this breech has emerged his own strange beauty. Mr. Ballard is in his early thirties, was born in Shanghai (and interned there during the War), read medicine at Cambridge, has been a copy writer and an RAF pilot. He says, "The biggest development of the immediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth, and it is inner space, not outer, that needs to be ex plored."-And concludes: "The only truly alien planet is Earth." THE ILLUMINATED MAN by J. G. Ballard By day fantastic birds flew through the petri fied forest, and jewelled alligators glittered like heraldic salamanders on the banks of the crys talline rivers. By night the illuminated man raced among the trees, his arms like golden cartwheels, his head like a spectral crown . • • • DURING THE LAST YEAR, SINCE three focal areas in Florida, Bye the news of what is now variously lorussia and Madagascar that I known as the Hubble Effect, the feel it necessary to preface my own Rostov-Lysenko Syndrome and the account of the phenomenon with LePage Amplification Synchrono the assurance that it is entirely clasmiquc first gained world-wide based upon first-hand experience. attention, there have been so All the events I describe were wit many conflicting reports from the nessed by myself during the re- 5 6 FAI'TASY Al'D SCIESCE FICTION cent, almost tragic visit to the momentous events in Florida with Florida Everglades arranged by the a shrug, confident that some United States government for the means will be found to avert the scientific attaches in Washington. crisis when it comes. The only facts I was not able to And yet it now seems obvious verify are the details of Charles that the real crisis is long past. Foster Marquand's life which I Tucked away on a back page of obtained from Captain Shelley, the the same New York Times is a late chief of police at l\faynard, short report of the sighting of an and although he was a biassed and other 'double galaxy' by observers untrustworthv witness I feel that at the Hubble Institute on Mount in this single case he was almost Palomar. The news is summarised certainly accurate. in less than a dozen lines and How much longer remains be without comment, although the fore all of us, wherever we are, be implication is inescapable that yet come expert authorities upon the another focal area has been set up exact nature of the Hubble Effect somewhere on the earth's surface, is still open to conjecture. As I perhaps in the temple-filled jun write, here within the safety and gles of Cambodia or the haunted peace of the garden of the British amber forests of the Chilean high Embassy at Puerto Rico, I see a re land. But it is only a year since port in today's New York Times the Mount Palomar astronomers that the whole of the Florida penin identified the first double galaxy sula, with the exception of a sin in the constellation Andromeda, gle highway to Tampa, has been the great oblate diadem that is closed and that to date some three probably the most beautiful object million of the state's inhabitants in the universe, the island galaxy have been resettled in other parts M31. of the United States. But apart Although these sightings by now from the estimated losses in real es seem commonplace, and at least tate values and hotel revenues half a dozen 'double constellations' ("Oh, Miami," I cannot help say can be picked from the night sky ing to myself, "you city of a thou on any evening of the week, four sand cathedrals to the rainbow months ago when the party of sci sun") the news of this extraordi entific attaches landed at Miami nary human migration seems to Airport on a conducted tour of have prompted little comment. the stricken area there was still Such is mankind's innate opti widespread ignorance of what the mism, our conviction that we can Hubble Effect (as the phenome survive any deluge or cataclysm, non had been christened in the that we unconsciously dismiss the \Vestern Hemisphere. and the THE ILLUMINATED MAN 7 English-speaking world) actually hinterland of the island-was involved. Apart from a handful of about 1 50 miles from the nearest forestry workers and biologists road-head and totally inaccessible, from the U.S. Department of Agri while the Soviet authorities had culture, few qualified observers clamped a security cordon as tight had witnessed the phenomenon as Los Alamos's around their own and there were implausible stories affected area in the Pripet Marshes in the newspapers of the forest of Byelorussia, where a legion of 'crystallising' and everything 'turn scientific workers under the leader ing into coloured glass.' ship of the metabiologist Lysenko One unfortunate consequence (all, incidentally, chasing a com of the Hubble Effect is that it is plete red herring) was analysing virtually impossible to photograph every facet of the inexplicable anything transformed by it. As any phenomenon. reader of scientific journals knows, Before any political capital glassware is extremely difficult to could be made from this campaign, reproduce, and even ·blocks of the the Department of Agriculture in highest screen on the best quality Washington announced that all art papers-let alone the coarse facilities for inspection would be blocks used on newsprint-have gladly provided, and the invita failed to reproduce the brilliant tion to the scientific attaches pro multi-facetted lattices of the Hub ceeded as part of the programme ble EffeCt, with their myriads of of technical missions and tours.