"Late" by A. Bertram Chandler (1955)
"Late" is well-written and seems quite sober, but turns out to be a joke story with an unexpectedly unscientific ending. I think I can mildly recommend it.
Jelks is a British scientist, a man very thorough and very calm, but also very slow. Everybody jokes to him, and of him, that he will be late for his own funeral, and we hear this phrase multiple times over the course of the story.
"Late" takes place in a Cold War world in which the United Kingdom has its own independent space program. Thanks to his stolid reliability and thoroughness, Jelks is selected for the job of staying alone in an orbiting rocket for months, conducting experiments and taking readings. Many men would crack up all alone in a tin can for such a long period, but those in authority feel they can rely on the steady and unexcitable Jelks.
After a few weeks up there, Jelks sees some kind of cataclysm take place on the Earth below; he is familiar with all the types of nuclear weapons and all the various weather phenomena, and the character of what he sees baffles him, as the disaster is unlike what he would expect from any weapon or meteorological event. He pilots his rocket back to Earth, back to England. There are no people around. He makes his way to a village church and the opened and empty graves indicate that he missed the resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgement.
All the dead pan and believable hard science stuff that occupies 90% of the story, about the way the rockets and space suits operate and so forth, made the Christian resolution of "Late" a surprise, though Chandler does foreshadow the ending with the repeated intoning of the "late for his own funeral" joke and by having Jelk scoff at some prophet mentioned in the newspaper who wins notoriety by claiming the end of the world is nigh.
This unusual story first appeared in Science Fantasy and, besides here in SF: Authors' Choice 2, it has only been reprinted in the Australian anthology Beyond Tomorrow, which was published to coincide with the World Science Fiction Convention of 1975, held in Melbourne. In his afterward to the story here in Harrison's anthology, Chandler says that his first choice for inclusion in this book was his story "Giant Killer," but that one was too long, and talks about the circumstances under which he wrote "Late" and a little about his move from Britain to Australia.
"Proof" by Hal Clement
"Proof" is Clement's first published story, and, in his foreword to it here in SF: Authors' Choice 2, he talks about how he first got into SF, about how he is a stickler for scientific accuracy in SF, and a little about John W. Campbell, Jr. and Jack Williamson and their influence on his early career.
"Proof" is a serious hardcore hard SF story, full of phrases like "...the viscosity of a gas does increase directly as the square root of its temperature..." and "We found that electromagnetic radiations of wavelengths in the octave above H-alpha would penetrate the interference...." Our main characters are two adventurous types, one a native of the Sun, the other a native of the star Sirius. These two people are elite members of civilizations that evolved inside stars, beings whose bodies consist of magnetic fields and neutrons and whose "food" is neutronium. They are aboard a ship travelling from the outer regions of the Sun towards the solar core--Solarians live in cities suspended in the outer regions of Sol, but need more neutronium than is available out there, and so send ships down to the core to collect this essential element. The reason the Solarians reside far from their food supply is that the inner regions of the Sun are inhabited by monsters, dangerous beasts the ship's crew will likely have to fight to secure the neutronium the cities need.
The actual plot of the story does not involve the monsters or the collection of neutronium. The Sirian visitor is a scientist who has a theory that, if artificially compressed, elements like iron and carbon that in a star are in an ionized plasma form might take on a solid form. This theoretical phenomena is difficult for the Solarians and Sirians to visualize, and their senses are ill-equipped to detect such solid matter should they encounter it. At least that is what I think the Sirian is saying; in my youth, when I should have been memorizing the Periodic Table of Elements and chemical formulas, I was clogging my brain with dialogue from The Flintstones and how many hit dice First Edition AD&D monsters have, so this material is a challenge for me.
Our Solarian character, the captain of the sun diving ship, upon hearing this theory, describes a tragic and mysterious event he witnessed while commanding a ship on a journey between stars another interstellar craft that was accompanying his own collided with some kind of invisible object and was destroyed--perhaps it was a specimen of the solid iron, silicon, carbon, etc., the Sirian is theorizing? Clement breaks free from the setting of the Solarian sun diving ship to describe the spectacular crash and cataclysmic explosion of the Solarian interstellar ship in a remote area of Earth from the point of view of a human being. Then comes the little joke at the end of the story--the Sirian scientist doesn't think solid iron and carbon could exist in the natural world and accuses the Solarian of making the story up.
"Proof" is a good example of a science fiction story that is really about science and not just an adventure or detective story or political satire set in space or the future. Clement concocts an alternate, speculative, milieu that is very strange but is actually based on the hard sciences and stretches your brain in the way that surreal or psychedelic settings that make zero sense fail to. Even though there is a minimum of sex and violence, and little plot or character, "Proof" still manages to be entertaining--the setting alone is enough for you to chew on. So, thumbs up for "Proof."
Since its debut in Campbell's Astounding, "Proof" has been reprinted in numerous anthologies, including several edited by Isaac Asimov and/or Martin H. Greenberg, as well as the Clement collection Music of Many Spheres.
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| The cover of Music of Many Spheres is illustrated by a painting by Clement himself |
The character of which Gold is so proud is the unhappily married Livy, a not-very-attractive thirty-something whose husband is Mark Random, a "pudgy" sales manager who wears glasses and a neatnik who is the picture of dull sangfroid; Livy tries to get a rise out of him by loudly kicking her shoes around and scuffing up the walls but Mark just ignores these provocations. Gold makes it clear that Livy's unhappiness is largely due to Mark's inability to have sex or lack of sexual interest in her.
One night Livy is undressing for bed and feels lustful eyes staring at her. Of course, those eyes are not Mark's--he has his back to her. When Livy closes her eyes she can "see" the "man" who is ogling her, muscular hunk of a space alien with blue feathers and pointy ears. The invisible alien puts the moves on Livy--during the day she can feel this creature kissing her as she does the housework. The bird man cannot speak to her--his race and ours hear on different frequencies or something--but Livy is thrilled by the sexual attention.
Livy's strange behavior leads Mark to call a friend for help. Ben is another successful professional who is overweight and unattractive, a guy who has read lots of books on business psychology. The presence of Ben allows Livy a chance to insult Mark--as she lists off her husband's faults and calls him names, Ben encourages her, telling Mark that it is healthy psychologically for Livy to get this stuff off her chest and, besides, she doesn't mean it.
Of course, she does mean it. Livy's relationship with the bird man only she can see, and only when she closes her eyes, progresses and she gets pregnant. Ben figures that she is having an affair and is so guilty over it that her brain is hiding the truth from her by giving her this bird man delusion, and urges Mark to have his wife admitted to an institution. Livy runs away, but sneaks back to watch the collapse of Ben and Mark's friendship when the invisible bird man hits Mark and Mark blames Ben for the attack.
Livy and the bird man have an invisible baby. Livy gets a job with a private detective agency; the bird man, being invisible, can gather all kinds of information with ease that Livy tells her employer she has collected. (Livy and the alien communicate by typing--he has learned English.)
"Love in the Dark" is an acceptable filler joke story about sex that isn't funny or sexy. It feels kind of mean-spirited, with its contempt for fat people and its apparent glee in the punishment meted out to Mark and Ben, who don't really seem villainous, just boring and sexually dysfunctional, but maybe we are supposed to feel they deserve punishment because they are business people and not scientists or artists or communist revolutionaries or whatever sort of people Gold himself admires? "Love in the Dark" is a sort of forgettable routine thing, so it is a little odd that Gold took the opportunity provided by SF: Authors' Choice 2 of this book to make a big deal out of it.
"Love in the Dark" is included in at least three Gold collections as well as some anthologies, including Fred Pohl's Beyond the End of Time, the cover illo of which manages to cram in a multitude of our favorite things: a hunk, a babe, poison gas, a saucer, a space man, and an urban apocalypse, and Basil Davenport's Invisible Men, which has a characteristically awesome Richard Powers cover.
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| The 1966 printing of Invisible Men above has the lens on the right side of the illo blacked out, but that lens on the 1960 edition shows a woman's nude torso, a reminder that the master of abstract art Richard Powers can also produce very fine renderings of the human form |
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