The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 2

“I’m sorry for you,” said Smith in a monotone. “If you try to tell this story back on Earth, I’m sorry for you.”

“I have no illusions,” muttered Chouns, “yet—what can I do but try to warn Earth. You see what they do to animals.”

“They make slaves of them, according to you.”

“Worse than that. Either the tailed creatures or the snake-things, or both, must have been civilized enough to have developed space travel once; otherwise the plants couldn’t be on both planets. But once the plants developed psionic powers (a mutant strain, perhaps), that came to an end. Animals at the atomic stage are dangerous. So they were made to forget; they were reduced to what they are. —Damn it, Smith, those plants are the most dangerous things in the universe. Earth must be informed about them, because some other Earthmen may be entering that cluster.”

Smith laughed. “You know, you’re completely off base. If those plants really had us under control, why would they let us get away to warn the others?”

Chouns paused. “I don’t know.”

Smith’s good humor was restored. He said, “For a minute you had me going, I don’t mind telling you.”

Chouns rubbed his skull violently. Why were they let go? And for that matter, why did he feel this horrible urgency to warn Earth about a matter with which Earthmen would not come into contact for millennia perhaps?

He thought desperately and something came glimmering. He fumbled for it, but it drifted away. For a moment he thought desperately that it was as though the thought had been pushed away; but then that feeling, too, left.

He knew only that the ship had to remain at full thrust, that they had to hurry.

* * * *

So, after uncounted years, the proper conditions had come about again. The protospores from two planetary strains of the mother plant met and mingled, sifting together into the clothes and hair and ship of the new animals. Almost at once the hybrid spores formed; the hybrid spores that alone had all the capacity and potentiality of adapting themselves to a new planet.

The spores waited quietly, now, on the ship which, with the last impulse of the mother plant upon the minds of the creatures aboard, was hurtling them at top thrust toward a new and ripe world where free-moving creatures would tend their needs.

The spores waited with the patience of the plant (the all-conquering patience no animal can ever know) for their arrival on a new world—each, in its own tiny way, an explorer—

ALL ABOUT “THE THING” (A PARODY IN VERSE) by Randall Garrett

... speaking of monsters, Hollywood horrors, and alien intelligences...

The monster here belongs to John W. Campbell, Jr., editor of Astounding Science Fiction—a little horror he created back in 1938 in his alter ego of Don A. Stuart in a novelette entitled “Who Goes There?”

Some ten or twelve years later, Hollywood heard that science-fiction was a coming thing. “Who Goes There?” was one of the first stories sold to the movies in the early “boom,” and after a publicity campaign to end all, THE THING stalked through the moving picture palaces of the country in a positive horror of a picture.

Randall Garrett, as alien an intelligence as I have known, apparently felt that the record needed setting straight, so he wrote the story all over again (in simplified form, designed for reading by creature-movie fans).

* * * *

Here’s a tale of chilling horror
For the sort of guy who more or
Less thinks being an explorer
Is the kind of life for him.
If he finds his life a bore, he
Ought to read this gory story,
For he’ll find exploratory
Work is really rather grim.
For the story starts by stating
That some guys investigating
The Antarctic are debating
On exactly what to do
With a monster they’ve found frozen
Near the campsite they have chosen,
And the quarrel grows and grows, un-
Til they’re in an awful stew.
There’s a guy named Blair who wants to r-
Eally check up on this monster
And dissect it. To his conster-
Nation, everyone’s in doubt
So, of course, he starts in pleading,
And the rest of them start heeding
All his statements, and conceding
That the Thing should be thawed out.
So they let this Thing of evil
Start to melt from its primeval
Sheath of ice; they don’t perceive a l-
Ot of trouble will ensue.
When the Thing is thawed, it neatly
Comes to life, and, smiling sweetly,
It absorbs some men completely,
Changing them to monsters, too!
Now we reach the story’s nub, ill
Uminating all the trouble:
Each new monster is a double
For the men they each replace.
Since it seems a man’s own mother
Couldn’t tell one from the other,
These guys all watch one another,
Each with fear upon his face.
And so then the men are tested
To see who has been digested,
And who’s been left unmolested.
But the test don’t work! It’s hexed!
So each man just sits there, shrinking
From the others, madly thinking,
As he watches with unblinking
Gaze, and wonders—Who Goes Next?
Now, they’ve found that executing
Monsters can’t be done by shooting;
They require electrocuting,
Or cremation with a torch.
When they find these Things, they grab ‘em;
They don’t try to shoot or stab ‘em;
With high-voltage wires, they jab ‘em
‘Til their flesh begins to scorch.
So the entire expedition
Eye each other with suspicion,
For they’re in a bad position,
And there’s no denying that!
Now, to clear this awful scramble,
The ingenious Mr. Campbell,
Suddenly, without preamble,
Pulls a rabbit from the hat.
Here’s the way they solve the muddle:
They discover that a puddle
Of a pseudo-human’s blood’ll
Be a little monster, too!
With this test for separating
Men from monsters, without waiting,
They start right in liquidating
All the monsters in the crew.
Thus, the story is completed,
And the awful Thing’s defeated,
But he still was badly treated;
It’s a shame, it seems to me.
Frozen since the glaciation,
This poor Thing’s extermination
Is as sad as the cremation
Of the hapless Sam McGee.

PUT THEM ALL TOGETHER, THEY SPELL MONSTER by Ray Russell

In 1948-49, book publishers discovered science-fiction; in 1950-51, Hollywood confirmed the Great Discovery; in the fall of ‘52, in the company of a couple of hundred others, like myself, who had wangled press invitations to a special preview of “Destination Moon” at the Hayden Planetarium, I sat crick-necked and happy, gazing upward at the film projected on the planetarium dome, experiencing the fulfillment of a group dream. We actually saw space travel. And we also saw the emergence of what had been an esoteric— even crackpot—interest into the broad field of mass entertainment.