SFSS https://sfss.space/ Science fiction short stories Mon, 05 Oct 2026 21:29:34 +0000 https://i.snap.as/p9Kx0A10.jpg SFSS https://sfss.space/ Knock (1948) – Fredric Brown https://sfss.space/knock-1948-fredric-brown?pk_campaign=rss-feed <![CDATA[An opened door. There is a sweet little horror story that is only two sentences long: “The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…” !--more-- Two sentences and an ellipsis of three dots. The horror, of course, isn’t in the two sentences at all; it’s in the ellipsis, the implication: what knocked at the door? Faced with the unknown, the human mind supplies something vaguely horrible. But it wasn’t horrible, really. The last man on Earth – or in the universe, for that matter – sat alone in a room. It was a rather peculiar room. He’d just noticed how peculiar it was and he’d been studying out the reason for its peculiarity. His conclusions didn’t horrify him, but it annoyed him. Walter Phelan, who had been associate professor of anthropology at Nathan University up until the time two days ago when Nathan University had ceased to exist, was not a man who horrifled easily. Not that Walter Phelan was a heroic figure, by any wild stretch of the imagination. He was slight of stature and mild of disposition. He wasn’t much to look at, and he knew it. Not that his appearance worried him now. Right now, in fact, there wasn’t much feeling in him. Abstractedly, he knew that two days ago, within the space of an hour, the human race had been destroyed, except for him and, somewhere, a woman – one woman. And that was a fact which didn’t concern Walter Phelan in the slightest degree. He’d probably never see her and didn’t care too much if he didn’t. Women just hadn’t been a factor in Walter’s life since Martha had died a year and a half ago. Not that Martha hadn’t been a good wife – albeit a bit on the bossy side. Yes, he’d loved Martha,in a deep, quiet way. He was only forty now, and he’d been only thirty-eight when Martha had died, but – well – he just hadn’t thought about women since then. His life had been his books, the ones he read and the ones he wrote. Now there wasn’t any point in writing books, but he had the rest of his life to spend in reading them. True, company would be nice, but he’d get along without it. Maybe after a while, he’d get so he’d enjoy the occasional company of one of the Zan, although that was a bit difficult to imagine. Their thinking was so alien to his that there seemed no common ground for discussion, intelligent though they were, in a way. An ant is intelligent, in a way, but no man ever established communication with an ant. He thought of the Zan, somehow, as super-ants, although they didn’t look like ants, and he had a hunch that the Zan regarded the human race as the human race had regarded ordinary ants. Certainly what they’d done to Earth had been what men did to ant hills – and it had been done much more efficiently. ---- But they had given him plenty of books. They’d been nice about that, as soon as he had told them what he wanted, and he had told them that the moment he had learned that he was destined to spend the rest of his life alone in this room. The rest of his life, or as the Zan had quaintly expressed it, forev-er. Even a brilliant mind – and the Zan obviously had brilliant minds – has its idiosyncracies. The Zan had learned to speak Terrestrial English in a manner of hours but they persisted in separating syllables. But we disgress. There was a knock on the door. You’ve got it all now, except the three dots, the ellipsis, and I’m going to fill that in and show you that it wasn’t horrible at all. Walter Phelan called out, “Come in,” and the door opened. It was of course, only a Zan. It looked exactly like the other Zan; if there was any way of telling one of them from another, Walter hadn’t found it. It was about four feet tall and it looked like nothing on earth – nothing, that is, that had been on Earth until the Zan came there. Walter said, “Hello, George.” When he’d learned that none of them had names he decided to call them all George, and the Zan didn’t seem to mind. This one said, “Hel-lo, Wal-ter.” That was ritual; the knock on the door and the greetings. Walter waited. “Point one,” said the Zan “You will please hence-forth sit with your chair turned the other way.” Walter said, “I thought so, George. That plain wall is transparent from the other side, isn’t it?” “It is trans-par-ent.” “Just what I thought. I’m in a zoo Right?” “That is right.” Walter sighed. “I knew it. That plain, blank wall, without a single piece of furniture against it. And made of something different from the other walls. If I persist in sitting with my back to it, what then? You will kill me? – I ask hopefully.” “We will take a-way your books.” “You’ve got me there George. All right I’ll face the other way when I sit and read. How many other animals besides me are in this zoo of yours?” “Two hun-dred and six-teen.” Walter shook his head. “Not complete, George. Even a bush league zoo can beat that – could beat that, I mean, if there were any bush league zoos left. Did you just pick at random?” “Ran-dom sam-ples yes. All spe-cies would have been too man-y. Male and female each of one hun-dred and eight kinds,” “What do you feed them? The carnivorous ones, I mean.” “We make food Syn-thet-ic.” “Smart,” said Walter. “And the flora? You got a collection of that, too?” “Flo-ra was not hurt by vi-bra-tions. It is all still growing.” “Nice for the flora,” said Walter. “You weren’t as hard on it, then, as you were on the fauna, Well, George, you started out with ‘point one.’ I deduced there is a point two kicking around somewhere. What is it?” “Some-thing we do not un-der-stand. Two of the oth-er a-nimals sleep and do not wake? They are cold.” “It happens in the best regulated zoos, George,” Walter Phelan said. “Probably not a thing wrong with them except that they’re dead.” “Dead? That means stopped. But nothing stopped them. Each was a-lone.” Walter stared at the Zan. “Do you mean, George, you don’t know what natural death is?” “Death is when a be-ing is killed, stopped from liv-ing.” Walter Phelan blinked. “How old are you, George?” he asked. “Six-teen-you would not know the word. Your pla-net went a-round your sun a-bout sev-en thou-sand times, I am still young.” Walter whistled softly. “A babe in arms,” he said. He thought hard a moment. “Look, George,” he said, “you’ve got something to learn about this planet you’re on. There’s a guy here who doesn’t hang around where you come from. An old man with a beard and a scythe and an hour-glass. Your vibrations didn’t kill him.” “What is he?” “Call him the Grim Reaper, George. Old Man Death. Our people and animals live until somebody – Old Man Death – stops them ticking.” “He stopped the two crea-tures? He will stop more?” ---- Walter opened his mouth to answer, and then closed it again. Something in the Zan’s voice indicated that there would be a worried frown on his face, if he had had a face recognizable as such. “How about taking me to these animals who won’t wake up?” Walter asked. “Is that against the rules?” “Come,” said the Zan. That had been the afternoon of the second day. It was the next morning that the Zan came back, several of them. They began to move Walter Phelan’s books and furniture. When they’d finished that, they moved him. He found himself in a much larger room a hundred yards away. He sat and waited and this time, too, when there was a knock on the door, he knew what was coming and politely stood up. A Zan opened the door and stood aside. A woman entered. Walter bowed slightly, “Walter Phelan,” he said, “in case George didn’t tell you my name. George tries to be polite, but he doesn’t know all of our ways.” The woman seemed calm; he was glad to notice that. She said, “My name is Grace Evans, Mr. Phelan. What’s this all about? Why did they bring me here?” Walter was studying her as she talked. She was tall, fully as tall as he, and well-proportioned. She looked to be somewhere in her early thirties, about the age Martha had been. She had the same calm confidence about her that he’d always liked about Martha, even though it had contrasted with his own easy-going informality. In fact, he thought she looked quite a bit like Martha. “I think I know why they brought you here but let’s go back a bit,” he said. “Do you know just what has happened otherwise?” “You mean that they’ve – killed everyone?” “Yes. Please sit down. You know how they accomplished it?” She sank into a comfortable chair nearby. “No,” she said, “I don’t know just how. Not that it matters does it?” “Not a lot. But here’s the story – what I know of it from getting one of them to talk, and from piecing things together. There isn’t a great number of them – here, anyway. I don’t know how numerous a race they are where they came from and I don’t know where that is, but I’d guess it’s outside the Solar System. You’ve seen the space ship they came in?” “Yes. It’s as big as a mountain.” “Almost. Well it has equipment for emitting some sort of a vibration – they call it that, in our language, but I imagine it’s more like a radio wave than a sound vibration – that destroys all animal life. It – the ship itself – is insulated against the vibration. I don’t know whether its range is big enough to kill off the whole planet at once, or whether they flew in circles around the earth, sending out the vibratory waves. But it killed everybody and everything instantly and, I hope, painlessly. The only reason we, and the other two-hundred odd animals in this zoo, weren’t killed was because we were inside the ship. We’d been picked up as specimens. You do know this is a zoo, don’t you?” “I – I suspected it.” “The front walls are transparent from the outside. The Zan were pretty clever at fixing up the inside of each cubicle to match the natural habitat of the creature it contains. These cubicles, such as the one we’re in, are of plastic, and they’ve got a machine that makes one in about ten minutes, If Earth had had a machine and a process like that, there wouldn’t have been any housing shortage. Well, there isn’t any housing shortage now, anyway. And I imagine that the human race – specifically you and I – can stop worrying about the A-bomb and the next war. The Zan certainly solved a lot of problems for us.” Grace Evans smiled faintly. “Another case where the operation was successful, but the patient died. Things were in an awful mess. Do you remember being captured? I don’t. I went to sleep one night and woke up in a cage on the space ship.” “I don’t remember either,” Walter said. “My hunch is that they used the vibratory waves at low intensity first, just enough to knock us all out. Then they cruised around, picking up samples more or less at random for their zoo. After they had as many as they wanted, or as many as they had space in the ship to hold, they turned on the juice all the way. And that was that. It wasn’t until yesterday they knew they’d made a mistake and had underestimated us. They thought we were immortal, as they are.” “That we were – what?” “They can be killed but they don’t know what natural death is. They didn’t anyway, until yesterday. Two of us died yesterday.” “Two of – Oh!” “Yes, two of us animals in their zoo. One was a snake and one was a duck. Two species gone irrevocably. And by the Zan’s way of figuring time, the remaining member of each species is going to live only a few minutes, anyway. They figured they had permanent specimens. “You mean they didn’t realize what short-lived creatures we are?” “That’s right,” Walter said. “One of them is young at seven thousand years, he told me. They’re bi-sexual themselves, incidentally, but they probably breed once every ten thousand years or thereabouts. When they learned yesterday how ridiculously short a life expectancy we terrestrial animals have, they were probably shocked to the core – if they have cores. At any rate they decided to reorganize their zoo – two by two instead of one by one. They figure we’ll last longer collectively if not individually.” “Oh!” Grace Evans stood up and there was a taint flush on her face. “If you think – If they think -” She turned toward the door. “It’ll be locked,” Walter Phelan said calmly “But don’t worry. Maybe they think, but I don’t think. You needn’t even tell me you wouldn’t have me if I was the last man on Earth; it would be corny under the circumstances.” “But are they going to keep us locked up together in this one little room?” “It isn’t so little; we’ll get by. I can sleep quite comfortably in one of these overstuffed chairs. And don’t think I don’t agree with you perfectly, my dear. All personal considerations aside, the least favor we can do the human race is to let it end with us and not he perpetuated for exhibition in a zoo.” She said “Thank you,” almost inaudibly, and the flush receded from her checks. There was anger in her eyes, but Walter knew that is wasn’t anger at him. With her eyes sparkling like that, she looked a lot like Martha, he thought. He smiled at her and said, “Otherwise -‘ She started out of her chair, and for an instant he thought she was going to come over and slap him. Then she sank back wearily. “If you were a man, you’d be thinking of some way to – They can be killed, you said?” Her voice was bitter. “The Zan? Oh, certainly. I’ve been studying them. They look horribly different from us, but I think they have about the same metabolism we have, the same type of circulatory system, and probably the same type of digestive system. I think that anything that would kill one of us would kill one of them.” “But you said -” “Oh, there are differences, of course. Whatever factor it is in man that ages him, they don’t have. Or else they have some gland that man doesn’t have, something that renews cells.” ---- She had forgotten her anger now. She leaned forward eagerly. She said, “I think that’s right. And I don’t think they feel pain.” “I was hoping that. But what makes you think so, my dear?” “I stretched a piece of wire that I found in the desk of my cubicle across the door so my Zan would fall over it. He did, and the wire cut his leg.” “Did he bleed red?” “Yes but it didn’t seem to annoy him. He didn’t get mad about it; didn’t even mention it. When he came back the next time, a few hours later, the cut was gone. Well, almost gone. I could see just enough of a trace of it to be sure it was the same Zan.” Walter Phelan nodded slowly. “He wouldn’t get angry, of course,” he said. “They’re emotionless. Maybe, if we killed one, they wouldn’t even punish us. But it wouldn’t do any good. They’d just give us our food through a trap door and treat us as men would have treated a zoo animal that had killed a keeper. They’d just see that he didn’t have a crack at any more keepers. “How many of them are there?” she asked. “About two hundred, I think, in this particular space ship. But undoubtedly there are many more where they came from. I have a hunch this is just an advance guard, sent to clear off this planet and make it safe for Zan occupancy,” “They did a good -” ---- There was a knock at the door, and Walter Phelan called out, “Come in.” A Zan stood in the doorway. “Hello George,” said Walter. “Hel-lo Wal-ter,” said the Zan. It may or may not have been the same Zan, but it was always the same ritual. “What’s on your mind?” Walter asked. “An-oth-er crea-ture sleeps and will not wake. A small fur-ry one called a wea-sel.” Walter shrugged. “It happens, George. Old Man Death. I told you about him.” “And worse. A Zan has died. This morning.” “Is that worse?” Walter looked at him blandly. “Well, George, you’ll have to get used to it, if you’re going to stay around here.” The Zan said nothing. It stood there. Finally Walter said, “Well?” “A-bout wea-sel. You ad-vise same?” Walter shrugged again. “Probably won’t do any good. But sure, why not?” The Zan left. Walter could hear his footsteps dying away outside. He grinned. “It might work, Martha,” he said. “Mar – My name is Grace, Mr Phelan. What might work?” “My name is Walter, Grace. You might as well get used to it. You know, Grace, you do remind me a lot of Martha. She was my wife. She died a couple of years ago.” “I’m sorry,” said Grace “But what might work? What were you talking about to the Zan?” “We’ll know tomorrow,” Walter said. And she couldn’t get another word out of him. That was the fourth day of the stay of the Zan. The next was the last. It was nearly noon when one of the Zan came. After the ritual, he stood in the doorway, looking more alien than ever. It would be interesting to describe him for you, but there aren’t words. He said, “We go. Our coun-cil met and de-cid-ed,” “Another of you died?” “Last night This is pla-net of death.” Walter nodded. “You did your share. You’re leaving two hundred and thirteen creatures alive, out of quite a few billion. Don’t hurry back.” “Is there an-y-thing we can do?” “Yes. You can hurry. And you can leave our door unlocked, but not the others. We’ll take care of the others.” Something clicked on the door; the Zan left. Grace Evans was standing, her eyes shining. She asked, “What -? How -?” “Wait,” cautioned Walter. “Let’s hear them blast off. It’s a sound I want to remember.” The sound came within minutes, and Walter Phelan, realizing how rigidly he’d been holding himself, relaxed in his chair. “There was a snake in the Garden of Eden, too, Grace, and it got us in trouble,” he said musingly. “But this one made up for it. I mean the mate of the snake that died day before yesterday. It was a rattlesnake.” “You mean it killed the two Zan who died? But -” Walter nodded, “They were babes in the woods here. When they took me to look at the first creatures who ‘were asleep and wouldn’t wake up,’ and I saw that one of them was a rattler, I had an idea, Grace. Just maybe, I thought, poison creatures were a development peculiar to Earth and the Zan wouldn’t know about them. And, too, maybe their metabolism was enough like ours so that the poison would kill them. Anyway, I had nothing to lose trying. And both maybes turned out to be right.” “How did you get the snake to -” Walter Phelan grinned. He said, “I told them what affection was. They didn’t know. They were interested, I found, in preserving the remaining one of each species as long as possible, to study the picture and record it before it died. I told them it would die immediately because of the loss of its mate, unless it had affection and petting – constantly. I showed them how with the duck. Luckily it was a tame one, and I held it against my chest and petted it a while to show them. Then I let them take over with it – and the rattlesnake.” ---- He stood up and stretched, and then sat down again more comfortably. “Well, we’ve got a world to plan,” he said. “We’ll have to let the animals out of the ark, and that will take some thinking and deciding. The herbivorous wild ones we can let go right away. The domestic ones, we’ll do better to keep and take charge of; we’ll need them. But the carnovora – Well, we’ll have to decide. But I’m afraid it’s got to be thumbs down.” He looked at her. “And the human race. We’ve got to make a decision about that. A pretty important one.” Her face was getting a little pink again, as it had yesterday; she sat rigidly in her chair. “No!” she said. He didn’t seem to have heard her. “It’s been a nice race, even if nobody won it,” he said. “It’ll be starting over again now, and it may go backward for a while until it gets its breath, but we can gather books for it and keep most of its knowledge intact, the important things anyway. We can -” He broke off as she got up and started for the door. Just the way his Martha would have acted, he thought, back in the days when he was courting her, before they were married. He said, “Think it over, my dear, and take your time. But come back.” The door slammed. He sat waiting, thinking out all the things there were to do, once he started, but was no hurry to start them; and after a while he heard her hesitant footsteps coming back. He smiled a little. See? It wasn’t horrible, really. The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door… brown Image: Dietmar Rabich (CC BY-SA 4.0)]]> An opened door.

There is a sweet little horror story that is only two sentences long:

“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…”

Two sentences and an ellipsis of three dots. The horror, of course, isn’t in the two sentences at all; it’s in the ellipsis, the implication: what knocked at the door? Faced with the unknown, the human mind supplies something vaguely horrible.

But it wasn’t horrible, really.

The last man on Earth – or in the universe, for that matter – sat alone in a room. It was a rather peculiar room. He’d just noticed how peculiar it was and he’d been studying out the reason for its peculiarity. His conclusions didn’t horrify him, but it annoyed him.

Walter Phelan, who had been associate professor of anthropology at Nathan University up until the time two days ago when Nathan University had ceased to exist, was not a man who horrifled easily. Not that Walter Phelan was a heroic figure, by any wild stretch of the imagination. He was slight of stature and mild of disposition. He wasn’t much to look at, and he knew it.

Not that his appearance worried him now. Right now, in fact, there wasn’t much feeling in him. Abstractedly, he knew that two days ago, within the space of an hour, the human race had been destroyed, except for him and, somewhere, a woman – one woman. And that was a fact which didn’t concern Walter Phelan in the slightest degree. He’d probably never see her and didn’t care too much if he didn’t.

Women just hadn’t been a factor in Walter’s life since Martha had died a year and a half ago. Not that Martha hadn’t been a good wife – albeit a bit on the bossy side. Yes, he’d loved Martha,in a deep, quiet way. He was only forty now, and he’d been only thirty-eight when Martha had died, but – well – he just hadn’t thought about women since then. His life had been his books, the ones he read and the ones he wrote. Now there wasn’t any point in writing books, but he had the rest of his life to spend in reading them.

True, company would be nice, but he’d get along without it. Maybe after a while, he’d get so he’d enjoy the occasional company of one of the Zan, although that was a bit difficult to imagine. Their thinking was so alien to his that there seemed no common ground for discussion, intelligent though they were, in a way.

An ant is intelligent, in a way, but no man ever established communication with an ant. He thought of the Zan, somehow, as super-ants, although they didn’t look like ants, and he had a hunch that the Zan regarded the human race as the human race had regarded ordinary ants. Certainly what they’d done to Earth had been what men did to ant hills – and it had been done much more efficiently.

But they had given him plenty of books. They’d been nice about that, as soon as he had told them what he wanted, and he had told them that the moment he had learned that he was destined to spend the rest of his life alone in this room. The rest of his life, or as the Zan had quaintly expressed it, forev-er. Even a brilliant mind – and the Zan obviously had brilliant minds – has its idiosyncracies. The Zan had learned to speak Terrestrial English in a manner of hours but they persisted in separating syllables. But we disgress.

There was a knock on the door.

You’ve got it all now, except the three dots, the ellipsis, and I’m going to fill that in and show you that it wasn’t horrible at all.

Walter Phelan called out, “Come in,” and the door opened. It was of course, only a Zan. It looked exactly like the other Zan; if there was any way of telling one of them from another, Walter hadn’t found it. It was about four feet tall and it looked like nothing on earth – nothing, that is, that had been on Earth until the Zan came there.

Walter said, “Hello, George.” When he’d learned that none of them had names he decided to call them all George, and the Zan didn’t seem to mind.

This one said, “Hel-lo, Wal-ter.” That was ritual; the knock on the door and the greetings. Walter waited.

“Point one,” said the Zan “You will please hence-forth sit with your chair turned the other way.”

Walter said, “I thought so, George. That plain wall is transparent from the other side, isn’t it?”

“It is trans-par-ent.”

“Just what I thought. I’m in a zoo Right?”

“That is right.”

Walter sighed. “I knew it. That plain, blank wall, without a single piece of furniture against it. And made of something different from the other walls. If I persist in sitting with my back to it, what then? You will kill me? – I ask hopefully.”

“We will take a-way your books.”

“You’ve got me there George. All right I’ll face the other way when I sit and read. How many other animals besides me are in this zoo of yours?”

“Two hun-dred and six-teen.”

Walter shook his head. “Not complete, George. Even a bush league zoo can beat that – could beat that, I mean, if there were any bush league zoos left. Did you just pick at random?”

“Ran-dom sam-ples yes. All spe-cies would have been too man-y. Male and female each of one hun-dred and eight kinds,”

“What do you feed them? The carnivorous ones, I mean.”

“We make food Syn-thet-ic.”

“Smart,” said Walter. “And the flora? You got a collection of that, too?”

“Flo-ra was not hurt by vi-bra-tions. It is all still growing.”

“Nice for the flora,” said Walter. “You weren’t as hard on it, then, as you were on the fauna, Well, George, you started out with ‘point one.’ I deduced there is a point two kicking around somewhere. What is it?”

“Some-thing we do not un-der-stand. Two of the oth-er a-nimals sleep and do not wake? They are cold.”

“It happens in the best regulated zoos, George,” Walter Phelan said. “Probably not a thing wrong with them except that they’re dead.”

“Dead? That means stopped. But nothing stopped them. Each was a-lone.”

Walter stared at the Zan. “Do you mean, George, you don’t know what natural death is?”

“Death is when a be-ing is killed, stopped from liv-ing.”

Walter Phelan blinked. “How old are you, George?” he asked.

“Six-teen-you would not know the word. Your pla-net went a-round your sun a-bout sev-en thou-sand times, I am still young.”

Walter whistled softly. “A babe in arms,” he said. He thought hard a moment. “Look, George,” he said, “you’ve got something to learn about this planet you’re on. There’s a guy here who doesn’t hang around where you come from. An old man with a beard and a scythe and an hour-glass. Your vibrations didn’t kill him.”

“What is he?”

“Call him the Grim Reaper, George. Old Man Death. Our people and animals live until somebody – Old Man Death – stops them ticking.”

“He stopped the two crea-tures? He will stop more?”

Walter opened his mouth to answer, and then closed it again. Something in the Zan’s voice indicated that there would be a worried frown on his face, if he had had a face recognizable as such.

“How about taking me to these animals who won’t wake up?” Walter asked. “Is that against the rules?”

“Come,” said the Zan.

That had been the afternoon of the second day. It was the next morning that the Zan came back, several of them. They began to move Walter Phelan’s books and furniture. When they’d finished that, they moved him. He found himself in a much larger room a hundred yards away.

He sat and waited and this time, too, when there was a knock on the door, he knew what was coming and politely stood up. A Zan opened the door and stood aside. A woman entered.

Walter bowed slightly, “Walter Phelan,” he said, “in case George didn’t tell you my name. George tries to be polite, but he doesn’t know all of our ways.”

The woman seemed calm; he was glad to notice that. She said, “My name is Grace Evans, Mr. Phelan. What’s this all about? Why did they bring me here?”

Walter was studying her as she talked. She was tall, fully as tall as he, and well-proportioned. She looked to be somewhere in her early thirties, about the age Martha had been. She had the same calm confidence about her that he’d always liked about Martha, even though it had contrasted with his own easy-going informality. In fact, he thought she looked quite a bit like Martha.

“I think I know why they brought you here but let’s go back a bit,” he said. “Do you know just what has happened otherwise?”

“You mean that they’ve – killed everyone?”

“Yes. Please sit down. You know how they accomplished it?” She sank into a comfortable chair nearby. “No,” she said, “I don’t know just how. Not that it matters does it?”

“Not a lot. But here’s the story – what I know of it from getting one of them to talk, and from piecing things together. There isn’t a great number of them – here, anyway. I don’t know how numerous a race they are where they came from and I don’t know where that is, but I’d guess it’s outside the Solar System. You’ve seen the space ship they came in?”

“Yes. It’s as big as a mountain.”

“Almost. Well it has equipment for emitting some sort of a vibration – they call it that, in our language, but I imagine it’s more like a radio wave than a sound vibration – that destroys all animal life. It – the ship itself – is insulated against the vibration. I don’t know whether its range is big enough to kill off the whole planet at once, or whether they flew in circles around the earth, sending out the vibratory waves. But it killed everybody and everything instantly and, I hope, painlessly. The only reason we, and the other two-hundred odd animals in this zoo, weren’t killed was because we were inside the ship. We’d been picked up as specimens. You do know this is a zoo, don’t you?”

“I – I suspected it.”

“The front walls are transparent from the outside. The Zan were pretty clever at fixing up the inside of each cubicle to match the natural habitat of the creature it contains. These cubicles, such as the one we’re in, are of plastic, and they’ve got a machine that makes one in about ten minutes, If Earth had had a machine and a process like that, there wouldn’t have been any housing shortage. Well, there isn’t any housing shortage now, anyway. And I imagine that the human race – specifically you and I – can stop worrying about the A-bomb and the next war. The Zan certainly solved a lot of problems for us.”

Grace Evans smiled faintly. “Another case where the operation was successful, but the patient died. Things were in an awful mess. Do you remember being captured? I don’t. I went to sleep one night and woke up in a cage on the space ship.”

“I don’t remember either,” Walter said. “My hunch is that they used the vibratory waves at low intensity first, just enough to knock us all out. Then they cruised around, picking up samples more or less at random for their zoo. After they had as many as they wanted, or as many as they had space in the ship to hold, they turned on the juice all the way. And that was that. It wasn’t until yesterday they knew they’d made a mistake and had underestimated us. They thought we were immortal, as they are.”

“That we were – what?”

“They can be killed but they don’t know what natural death is. They didn’t anyway, until yesterday. Two of us died yesterday.”

“Two of – Oh!”

“Yes, two of us animals in their zoo. One was a snake and one was a duck. Two species gone irrevocably. And by the Zan’s way of figuring time, the remaining member of each species is going to live only a few minutes, anyway. They figured they had permanent specimens.

“You mean they didn’t realize what short-lived creatures we are?”

“That’s right,” Walter said. “One of them is young at seven thousand years, he told me. They’re bi-sexual themselves, incidentally, but they probably breed once every ten thousand years or thereabouts. When they learned yesterday how ridiculously short a life expectancy we terrestrial animals have, they were probably shocked to the core – if they have cores.

At any rate they decided to reorganize their zoo – two by two instead of one by one. They figure we’ll last longer collectively if not individually.”

“Oh!” Grace Evans stood up and there was a taint flush on her face. “If you think – If they think -” She turned toward the door.

“It’ll be locked,” Walter Phelan said calmly “But don’t worry. Maybe they think, but I don’t think. You needn’t even tell me you wouldn’t have me if I was the last man on Earth; it would be corny under the circumstances.”

“But are they going to keep us locked up together in this one little room?”

“It isn’t so little; we’ll get by. I can sleep quite comfortably in one of these overstuffed chairs. And don’t think I don’t agree with you perfectly, my dear. All personal considerations aside, the least favor we can do the human race is to let it end with us and not he perpetuated for exhibition in a zoo.”

She said “Thank you,” almost inaudibly, and the flush receded from her checks. There was anger in her eyes, but Walter knew that is wasn’t anger at him. With her eyes sparkling like that, she looked a lot like Martha, he thought.

He smiled at her and said, “Otherwise -‘

She started out of her chair, and for an instant he thought she was going to come over and slap him. Then she sank back wearily. “If you were a man, you’d be thinking of some way to – They can be killed, you said?” Her voice was bitter.

“The Zan? Oh, certainly. I’ve been studying them. They look horribly different from us, but I think they have about the same metabolism we have, the same type of circulatory system, and probably the same type of digestive system. I think that anything that would kill one of us would kill one of them.”

“But you said -”

“Oh, there are differences, of course. Whatever factor it is in man that ages him, they don’t have. Or else they have some gland that man doesn’t have, something that renews cells.”

She had forgotten her anger now. She leaned forward eagerly. She said, “I think that’s right. And I don’t think they feel pain.”

“I was hoping that. But what makes you think so, my dear?”

“I stretched a piece of wire that I found in the desk of my cubicle across the door so my Zan would fall over it. He did, and the wire cut his leg.”

“Did he bleed red?”

“Yes but it didn’t seem to annoy him. He didn’t get mad about it; didn’t even mention it. When he came back the next time, a few hours later, the cut was gone. Well, almost gone. I could see just enough of a trace of it to be sure it was the same Zan.”

Walter Phelan nodded slowly.

“He wouldn’t get angry, of course,” he said. “They’re emotionless. Maybe, if we killed one, they wouldn’t even punish us. But it wouldn’t do any good. They’d just give us our food through a trap door and treat us as men would have treated a zoo animal that had killed a keeper. They’d just see that he didn’t have a crack at any more keepers.

“How many of them are there?” she asked.

“About two hundred, I think, in this particular space ship. But undoubtedly there are many more where they came from. I have a hunch this is just an advance guard, sent to clear off this planet and make it safe for Zan occupancy,”

“They did a good -”

There was a knock at the door, and Walter Phelan called out, “Come in.”

A Zan stood in the doorway.

“Hello George,” said Walter.

“Hel-lo Wal-ter,” said the Zan.

It may or may not have been the same Zan, but it was always the same ritual.

“What’s on your mind?” Walter asked.

“An-oth-er crea-ture sleeps and will not wake. A small fur-ry one called a wea-sel.”

Walter shrugged.

“It happens, George. Old Man Death. I told you about him.”

“And worse. A Zan has died. This morning.”

“Is that worse?” Walter looked at him blandly. “Well, George, you’ll have to get used to it, if you’re going to stay around here.”

The Zan said nothing. It stood there.

Finally Walter said, “Well?”

“A-bout wea-sel. You ad-vise same?”

Walter shrugged again. “Probably won’t do any good. But sure, why not?”

The Zan left.

Walter could hear his footsteps dying away outside. He grinned. “It might work, Martha,” he said.

“Mar – My name is Grace, Mr Phelan. What might work?”

“My name is Walter, Grace. You might as well get used to it. You know, Grace, you do remind me a lot of Martha. She was my wife. She died a couple of years ago.”

“I’m sorry,” said Grace “But what might work? What were you talking about to the Zan?”

“We’ll know tomorrow,” Walter said. And she couldn’t get another word out of him.

That was the fourth day of the stay of the Zan.

The next was the last.

It was nearly noon when one of the Zan came. After the ritual, he stood in the doorway, looking more alien than ever. It would be interesting to describe him for you, but there aren’t words.

He said, “We go. Our coun-cil met and de-cid-ed,”

“Another of you died?”

“Last night This is pla-net of death.”

Walter nodded. “You did your share. You’re leaving two hundred and thirteen creatures alive, out of quite a few billion. Don’t hurry back.”

“Is there an-y-thing we can do?”

“Yes. You can hurry. And you can leave our door unlocked, but not the others. We’ll take care of the others.”

Something clicked on the door; the Zan left.

Grace Evans was standing, her eyes shining.

She asked, “What –? How –?”

“Wait,” cautioned Walter. “Let’s hear them blast off. It’s a sound I want to remember.”

The sound came within minutes, and Walter Phelan, realizing how rigidly he’d been holding himself, relaxed in his chair.

“There was a snake in the Garden of Eden, too, Grace, and it got us in trouble,” he said musingly. “But this one made up for it. I mean the mate of the snake that died day before yesterday. It was a rattlesnake.”

“You mean it killed the two Zan who died? But -”

Walter nodded, “They were babes in the woods here. When they took me to look at the first creatures who ‘were asleep and wouldn’t wake up,’ and I saw that one of them was a rattler, I had an idea, Grace. Just maybe, I thought, poison creatures were a development peculiar to Earth and the Zan wouldn’t know about them. And, too, maybe their metabolism was enough like ours so that the poison would kill them. Anyway, I had nothing to lose trying. And both maybes turned out to be right.”

“How did you get the snake to -”

Walter Phelan grinned. He said, “I told them what affection was. They didn’t know. They were interested, I found, in preserving the remaining one of each species as long as possible, to study the picture and record it before it died. I told them it would die immediately because of the loss of its mate, unless it had affection and petting – constantly. I showed them how with the duck. Luckily it was a tame one, and I held it against my chest and petted it a while to show them. Then I let them take over with it – and the rattlesnake.”

He stood up and stretched, and then sat down again more comfortably.

“Well, we’ve got a world to plan,” he said. “We’ll have to let the animals out of the ark, and that will take some thinking and deciding. The herbivorous wild ones we can let go right away. The domestic ones, we’ll do better to keep and take charge of; we’ll need them. But the carnovora – Well, we’ll have to decide. But I’m afraid it’s got to be thumbs down.”

He looked at her. “And the human race. We’ve got to make a decision about that. A pretty important one.”

Her face was getting a little pink again, as it had yesterday; she sat rigidly in her chair.

“No!” she said.

He didn’t seem to have heard her. “It’s been a nice race, even if nobody won it,” he said. “It’ll be starting over again now, and it may go backward for a while until it gets its breath, but we can gather books for it and keep most of its knowledge intact, the important things anyway. We can -”

He broke off as she got up and started for the door. Just the way his Martha would have acted, he thought, back in the days when he was courting her, before they were married.

He said, “Think it over, my dear, and take your time. But come back.”

The door slammed. He sat waiting, thinking out all the things there were to do, once he started, but was no hurry to start them; and after a while he heard her hesitant footsteps coming back.

He smiled a little. See? It wasn’t horrible, really.

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…

#brown

Image: Dietmar Rabich (CC BY-SA 4.0)

]]> https://sfss.space/knock-1948-fredric-brown Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:16:05 +0000 Science Fiction For Telepaths (1977) - E. Michael Blake https://sfss.space/science-fiction-for-telepaths-1977-michael-blake?pk_campaign=rss-feed <![CDATA[ The shortest sci-fi story ever. !--more-- ---- Well, you know what I mean.]]>

The shortest sci-fi story ever.

1

  1. Well, you know what I mean.
]]> https://sfss.space/science-fiction-for-telepaths-1977-michael-blake Fri, 25 Sep 2026 20:16:55 +0000 A Pail of Air (1951) - Fritz Leiber https://sfss.space/a-pail-of-air-1951-fritz-leiber?pk_campaign=rss-feed <![CDATA[A fireplace When a dark star pulls Earth away from the Sun, one isolated family struggles to survive in a frozen world. A Pail of Air is a gripping story packed with ideas that deals with a lot of themes, among them family, resilience, and hope. !--more-- Pa had sent me out to get an extra pail of air. I'd just about scooped it full and most of the warmth had leaked from my fingers when I saw the thing. You know, at first I thought it was a young lady. Yes, a beautiful young lady's face all glowing in the dark and looking at me from the fifth floor of the opposite apartment, which hereabouts is the floor just above the white blanket of frozen air. I'd never seen a live young lady before, except in the old magazines—Sis is just a kid and Ma is pretty sick and miserable—and it gave me such a start that I dropped the pail. Who wouldn't, knowing everyone on Earth was dead except Pa and Ma and Sis and you? ---- Even at that, I don't suppose I should have been surprised. We all see things now and then. Ma has some pretty bad ones, to judge from the way she bugs her eyes at nothing and just screams and screams and huddles back against the blankets hanging around the Nest. Pa says it is natural we should react like that sometimes. When I'd recovered the pail and could look again at the opposite apartment, I got an idea of what Ma might be feeling at those times, for I saw it wasn't a young lady at all but simply a light—a tiny light that moved stealthily from window to window, just as if one of the cruel little stars had come down out of the airless sky to investigate why the Earth had gone away from the Sun, and maybe to hunt down something to torment or terrify, now that the Earth didn't have the Sun's protection. I tell you, the thought of it gave me the creeps. I just stood there shaking, and almost froze my feet and did frost my helmet so solid on the inside that I couldn't have seen the light even if it had come out of one of the windows to get me. Then I had the wit to go back inside. Pretty soon I was feeling my familiar way through the thirty or so blankets and rugs Pa has got hung around to slow down the escape of air from the Nest, and I wasn't quite so scared. I began to hear the tick-ticking of the clocks in the Nest and knew I was getting back into air, because there's no sound outside in the vacuum, of course. But my mind was still crawly and uneasy as I pushed through the last blankets—Pa's got them faced with aluminum foil to hold in the heat—and came into the Nest. ----- Let me tell you about the Nest. It's low and snug, just room for the four of us and our things. The floor is covered with thick woolly rugs. Three of the sides are blankets, and the blankets roofing it touch Pa's head. He tells me it's inside a much bigger room, but I've never seen the real walls or ceiling. Against one of the blanket-walls is a big set of shelves, with tools and books and other stuff, and on top of it a whole row of clocks. Pa's very fussy about keeping them wound. He says we must never forget time, and without a sun or moon, that would be easy to do. The fourth wall has blankets all over except around the fireplace, in which there is a fire that must never go out. It keeps us from freezing and does a lot more besides. One of us must always watch it. Some of the clocks are alarm and we can use them to remind us. In the early days there was only Ma to take turns with Pa—I think of that when she gets difficult—but now there's me to help, and Sis too. It's Pa who is the chief guardian of the fire, though. I always think of him that way: a tall man sitting cross-legged, frowning anxiously at the fire, his lined face golden in its light, and every so often carefully placing on it a piece of coal from the big heap beside it. Pa tells me there used to be guardians of the fire sometimes in the very old days—vestal virgins, he calls them—although there was unfrozen air all around then and you didn't really need one. He was sitting just that way now, though he got up quick to take the pail from me and bawl me out for loitering—he'd spotted my frozen helmet right off. That roused Ma and she joined in picking on me. She's always trying to get the load off her feelings, Pa explains. He shut her up pretty fast. Sis let off a couple of silly squeals too. Pa handled the pail of air in a twist of cloth. Now that it was inside the Nest, you could really feel its coldness. It just seemed to suck the heat out of everything. Even the flames cringed away from it as Pa put it down close by the fire. Yet it's that glimmery white stuff in the pail that keeps us alive. It slowly melts and vanishes and refreshes the Nest and feeds the fire. The blankets keep it from escaping too fast. Pa'd like to seal the whole place, but he can't—building's too earthquake-twisted, and besides he has to leave the chimney open for smoke. Pa says air is tiny molecules that fly away like a flash if there isn't something to stop them. We have to watch sharp not to let the air run low. Pa always keeps a big reserve supply of it in buckets behind the first blankets, along with extra coal and cans of food and other things, such as pails of snow to melt for water. We have to go way down to the bottom floor for that stuff, which is a mean trip, and get it through a door to outside. You see, when the Earth got cold, all the water in the air froze first and made a blanket ten feet thick or so everywhere, and then down on top of that dropped the crystals of frozen air, making another white blanket sixty or seventy feet thick maybe. Of course, all the parts of the air didn't freeze and snow down at the same time. First to drop out was the carbon dioxide—when you're shoveling for water, you have to make sure you don't go too high and get any of that stuff mixed in, for it would put you to sleep, maybe for good, and make the fire go out. Next there's the nitrogen, which doesn't count one way or the other, though it's the biggest part of the blanket. On top of that and easy to get at, which is lucky for us, there's the oxygen that keeps us alive. Pa says we live better than kings ever did, breathing pure oxygen, but we're used to it and don't notice. Finally, at the very top, there's a slick of liquid helium, which is funny stuff. All of these gases in neat separate layers. Like a pussy caffay, Pa laughingly says, whatever that is. ---- I was busting to tell them all about what I'd seen, and so as soon as I'd ducked out of my helmet and while I was still climbing out of my suit, I cut loose. Right away Ma got nervous and began making eyes at the entry-slit in the blankets and wringing her hands together—the hand where she'd lost three fingers from frostbite inside the good one, as usual. I could tell that Pa was annoyed at me scaring her and wanted to explain it all away quickly, yet could see I wasn't fooling. "And you watched this light for some time, son?" he asked when I finished. I hadn't said anything about first thinking it was a young lady's face. Somehow that part embarrassed me. "Long enough for it to pass five windows and go to the next floor." "And it didn't look like stray electricity or crawling liquid or starlight focused by a growing crystal, or anything like that?" He wasn't just making up those ideas. Odd things happen in a world that's about as cold as can be, and just when you think matter would be frozen dead, it takes on a strange new life. A slimy stuff comes crawling toward the Nest, just like an animal snuffing for heat—that's the liquid helium. And once, when I was little, a bolt of lightning—not even Pa could figure where it came from—hit the nearby steeple and crawled up and down it for weeks, until the glow finally died. "Not like anything I ever saw," I told him. He stood for a moment frowning. Then, "I'll go out with you, and you show it to me," he said. Ma raised a howl at the idea of being left alone, and Sis joined in, too, but Pa quieted them. We started climbing into our outside clothes—mine had been warming by the fire. Pa made them. They have plastic headpieces that were once big double-duty transparent food cans, but they keep heat and air in and can replace the air for a little while, long enough for our trips for water and coal and food and so on. Ma started moaning again, "I've always known there was something outside there, waiting to get us. I've felt it for years—something that's part of the cold and hates all warmth and wants to destroy the Nest. It's been watching us all this time, and now it's coming after us. It'll get you and then come for me. Don't go, Harry!" Pa had everything on but his helmet. He knelt by the fireplace and reached in and shook the long metal rod that goes up the chimney and knocks off the ice that keeps trying to clog it. Once a week he goes up on the roof to check if it's working all right. That's our worst trip and Pa won't let me make it alone. "Sis," Pa said quietly, "come watch the fire. Keep an eye on the air, too. If it gets low or doesn't seem to be boiling fast enough, fetch another bucket from behind the blanket. But mind your hands. Use the cloth to pick up the bucket." Sis quit helping Ma be frightened and came over and did as she was told. Ma quieted down pretty suddenly, though her eyes were still kind of wild as she watched Pa fix on his helmet tight and pick up a pail and the two of us go out. ---- Pa led the way and I took hold of his belt. It's a funny thing, I'm not afraid to go by myself, but when Pa's along I always want to hold on to him. Habit, I guess, and then there's no denying that this time I was a bit scared. You see, it's this way. We know that everything is dead out there. Pa heard the last radio voices fade away years ago, and had seen some of the last folks die who weren't as lucky or well-protected as us. So we knew that if there was something groping around out there, it couldn't be anything human or friendly. Besides that, there's a feeling that comes with it always being night, cold night. Pa says there used to be some of that feeling even in the old days, but then every morning the Sun would come and chase it away. I have to take his word for that, not ever remembering the Sun as being anything more than a big star. You see, I hadn't been born when the dark star snatched us away from the Sun, and by now it's dragged us out beyond the orbit of the planet Pluto, Pa says, and taking us farther out all the time. I found myself wondering whether there mightn't be something on the dark star that wanted us, and if that was why it had captured the Earth. Just then we came to the end of the corridor and I followed Pa out on the balcony. I don't know what the city looked like in the old days, but now it's beautiful. The starlight lets you see it pretty well—there's quite a bit of light in those steady points speckling the blackness above. (Pa says the stars used to twinkle once, but that was because there was air.) We are on a hill and the shimmery plain drops away from us and then flattens out, cut up into neat squares by the troughs that used to be streets. I sometimes make my mashed potatoes look like it, before I pour on the gravy. Some taller buildings push up out of the feathery plain, topped by rounded caps of air crystals, like the fur hood Ma wears, only whiter. On those buildings you can see the darker squares of windows, underlined by white dashes of air crystals. Some of them are on a slant, for many of the buildings are pretty badly twisted by the quakes and all the rest that happened when the dark star captured the Earth. Here and there a few icicles hang, water icicles from the first days of the cold, other icicles of frozen air that melted on the roofs and dripped and froze again. Sometimes one of those icicles will catch the light of a star and send it to you so brightly you think the star has swooped into the city. That was one of the things Pa had been thinking of when I told him about the light, but I had thought of it myself first and known it wasn't so. He touched his helmet to mine so we could talk easier and he asked me to point out the windows to him. But there wasn't any light moving around inside them now, or anywhere else. To my surprise, Pa didn't bawl me out and tell me I'd been seeing things. He looked all around quite a while after filling his pail, and just as we were going inside he whipped around without warning, as if to take some peeping thing off guard. I could feel it, too. The old peace was gone. There was something lurking out there, watching, waiting, getting ready. Inside, he said to me, touching helmets, "If you see something like that again, son, don't tell the others. Your Ma's sort of nervous these days and we owe her all the feeling of safety we can give her. Once—it was when your sister was born—I was ready to give up and die, but your Mother kept me trying. Another time she kept the fire going a whole week all by herself when I was sick. Nursed me and took care of the two of you, too." ---- "You know that game we sometimes play, sitting in a square in the Nest, tossing a ball around? Courage is like a ball, son. A person can hold it only so long, and then he's got to toss it to someone else. When it's tossed your way, you've got to catch it and hold it tight—and hope there'll be someone else to toss it to when you get tired of being brave." His talking to me that way made me feel grown-up and good. But it didn't wipe away the thing outside from the back of my mind—or the fact that Pa took it seriously. ---- It's hard to hide your feelings about such a thing. When we got back in the Nest and took off our outside clothes, Pa laughed about it all and told them it was nothing and kidded me for having such an imagination, but his words fell flat. He didn't convince Ma and Sis any more than he did me. It looked for a minute like we were all fumbling the courage-ball. Something had to be done, and almost before I knew what I was going to say, I heard myself asking Pa to tell us about the old days, and how it all happened. He sometimes doesn't mind telling that story, and Sis and I sure like to listen to it, and he got my idea. So we were all settled around the fire in a wink, and Ma pushed up some cans to thaw for supper, and Pa began. Before he did, though, I noticed him casually get a hammer from the shelf and lay it down beside him. It was the same old story as always—I think I could recite the main thread of it in my sleep—though Pa always puts in a new detail or two and keeps improving it in spots. He told us how the Earth had been swinging around the Sun ever so steady and warm, and the people on it fixing to make money and wars and have a good time and get power and treat each other right or wrong, when without warning there comes charging out of space this dead star, this burned out sun, and upsets everything. You know, I find it hard to believe in the way those people felt, any more than I can believe in the swarming number of them. Imagine people getting ready for the horrible sort of war they were cooking up. Wanting it even, or at least wishing it were over so as to end their nervousness. As if all folks didn't have to hang together and pool every bit of warmth just to keep alive. And how can they have hoped to end danger, any more than we can hope to end the cold? Sometimes I think Pa exaggerates and makes things out too black. He's cross with us once in a while and was probably cross with all those folks. Still, some of the things I read in the old magazines sound pretty wild. He may be right. ----- The dark star, as Pa went on telling it, rushed in pretty fast and there wasn't much time to get ready. At the beginning they tried to keep it a secret from most people, but then the truth came out, what with the earthquakes and floods—imagine, oceans of unfrozen water!—and people seeing stars blotted out by something on a clear night. First off they thought it would hit the Sun, and then they thought it would hit the Earth. There was even the start of a rush to get to a place called China, because people thought the star would hit on the other side. But then they found it wasn't going to hit either side, but was going to come very close to the Earth. Most of the other planets were on the other side of the Sun and didn't get involved. The Sun and the newcomer fought over the Earth for a little while—pulling it this way and that, like two dogs growling over a bone, Pa described it this time—and then the newcomer won and carried us off. The Sun got a consolation prize, though. At the last minute he managed to hold on to the Moon. That was the time of the monster earthquakes and floods, twenty times worse than anything before. It was also the time of the Big Jerk, as Pa calls it, when all Earth got yanked suddenly, just as Pa has done to me once or twice, grabbing me by the collar to do it, when I've been sitting too far from the fire. ---- You see, the dark star was going through space faster than the Sun, and in the opposite direction, and it had to wrench the world considerably in order to take it away. The Big Jerk didn't last long. It was over as soon as the Earth was settled down in its new orbit around the dark star. But it was pretty terrible while it lasted. Pa says that all sorts of cliffs and buildings toppled, oceans slopped over, swamps and sandy deserts gave great sliding surges that buried nearby lands. Earth was almost jerked out of its atmosphere blanket and the air got so thin in spots that people keeled over and fainted—though of course, at the same time, they were getting knocked down by the Big Jerk and maybe their bones broke or skulls cracked. We've often asked Pa how people acted during that time, whether they were scared or brave or crazy or stunned, or all four, but he's sort of leery of the subject, and he was again tonight. He says he was mostly too busy to notice. You see, Pa and some scientist friends of his had figured out part of what was going to happen—they'd known we'd get captured and our air would freeze—and they'd been working like mad to fix up a place with airtight walls and doors, and insulation against the cold, and big supplies of food and fuel and water and bottled air. But the place got smashed in the last earthquakes and all Pa's friends were killed then and in the Big Jerk. So he had to start over and throw the Nest together quick without any advantages, just using any stuff he could lay his hands on. I guess he's telling pretty much the truth when he says he didn't have any time to keep an eye on how other folks behaved, either then or in the Big Freeze that followed—followed very quick, you know, both because the dark star was pulling us away very fast and because Earth's rotation had been slowed in the tug-of-war, so that the nights were ten old nights long. Still, I've got an idea of some of the things that happened from the frozen folk I've seen, a few of them in other rooms in our building, others clustered around the furnaces in the basements where we go for coal. In one of the rooms, an old man sits stiff in a chair, with an arm and a leg in splints. In another, a man and woman are huddled together in a bed with heaps of covers over them. You can just see their heads peeking out, close together. And in another a beautiful young lady is sitting with a pile of wraps huddled around her, looking hopefully toward the door, as if waiting for someone who never came back with warmth and food. They're all still and stiff as statues, of course, but just like life. Pa showed them to me once in quick winks of his flashlight, when he still had a fair supply of batteries and could afford to waste a little light. They scared me pretty bad and made my heart pound, especially the young lady. ---- Now, with Pa telling his story for the umpteenth time to take our minds off another scare, I got to thinking of the frozen folk again. All of a sudden I got an idea that scared me worse than anything yet. You see, I'd just remembered the face I'd thought I'd seen in the window. I'd forgotten about that on account of trying to hide it from the others. What, I asked myself, if the frozen folk were coming to life? What if they were like the liquid helium that got a new lease on life and started crawling toward the heat just when you thought its molecules ought to freeze solid forever? Or like the electricity that moves endlessly when it's just about as cold as that? What if the ever-growing cold, with the temperature creeping down the last few degrees to the last zero, had mysteriously wakened the frozen folk to life—not warm-blooded life, but something icy and horrible? That was a worse idea than the one about something coming down from the dark star to get us. Or maybe, I thought, both ideas might be true. Something coming down from the dark star and making the frozen folk move, using them to do its work. That would fit with both things I'd seen—the beautiful young lady and the moving, starlike light. The frozen folk with minds from the dark star behind their unwinking eyes, creeping, crawling, snuffing their way, following the heat to the Nest. I tell you, that thought gave me a very bad turn and I wanted very badly to tell the others my fears, but I remembered what Pa had said and clenched my teeth and didn't speak. We were all sitting very still. Even the fire was burning silently. There was just the sound of Pa's voice and the clocks. And then, from beyond the blankets, I thought I heard a tiny noise. My skin tightened all over me. Pa was telling about the early years in the Nest and had come to the place where he philosophizes. "So I asked myself then," he said, "what's the use of going on? What's the use of dragging it out for a few years? Why prolong a doomed existence of hard work and cold and loneliness? The human race is done. The Earth is done. Why not give up, I asked myself—and all of a sudden I got the answer." Again I heard the noise, louder this time, a kind of uncertain, shuffling tread, coming closer. I couldn't breathe. "Life's always been a business of working hard and fighting the cold," Pa was saying. "The earth's always been a lonely place, millions of miles from the next planet. And no matter how long the human race might have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don't matter. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture, like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers—you've seen pictures of those, but I can't describe how they feel—or the fire's glow. It makes everything else worth while. And that's as true for the last man as the first." And still the steps kept shuffling closer. It seemed to me that the inmost blanket trembled and bulged a little. Just as if they were burned into my imagination, I kept seeing those peering, frozen eyes. "So right then and there," Pa went on, and now I could tell that he heard the steps, too, and was talking loud so we maybe wouldn't hear them, "right then and there I told myself that I was going on as if we had all eternity ahead of us. I'd have children and teach them all I could. I'd get them to read books. I'd plan for the future, try to enlarge and seal the Nest. I'd do what I could to keep everything beautiful and growing. I'd keep alive my feeling of wonder even at the cold and the dark and the distant stars." But then the blanket actually did move and lift. And there was a bright light somewhere behind it. Pa's voice stopped and his eyes turned to the widening slit and his hand went out until it touched and gripped the handle of the hammer beside him. ---- In through the blanket stepped the beautiful young lady. She stood there looking at us the strangest way, and she carried something bright and unwinking in her hand. And two other faces peered over her shoulders—men's faces, white and staring. Well, my heart couldn't have been stopped for more than four or five beats before I realized she was wearing a suit and helmet like Pa's homemade ones, only fancier, and that the men were, too—and that the frozen folk certainly wouldn't be wearing those. Also, I noticed that the bright thing in her hand was just a kind of flashlight. The silence kept on while I swallowed hard a couple of times, and after that there was all sorts of jabbering and commotion. They were simply people, you see. We hadn't been the only ones to survive; we'd just thought so, for natural enough reasons. These three people had survived, and quite a few others with them. And when we found out how they'd survived, Pa let out the biggest whoop of joy. They were from Los Alamos and they were getting their heat and power from atomic energy. Just using the uranium and plutonium intended for bombs, they had enough to go on for thousands of years. They had a regular little airtight city, with air-locks and all. They even generated electric light and grew plants and animals by it. (At this Pa let out a second whoop, waking Ma from her faint.) But if we were flabbergasted at them, they were double-flabbergasted at us. One of the men kept saying, "But it's impossible, I tell you. You can't maintain an air supply without hermetic sealing. It's simply impossible." That was after he had got his helmet off and was using our air. Meanwhile, the young lady kept looking around at us as if we were saints, and telling us we'd done something amazing, and suddenly she broke down and cried. They'd been scouting around for survivors, but they never expected to find any in a place like this. They had rocket ships at Los Alamos and plenty of chemical fuel. As for liquid oxygen, all you had to do was go out and shovel the air blanket at the top level. So after they'd got things going smoothly at Los Alamos, which had taken years, they'd decided to make some trips to likely places where there might be other survivors. No good trying long-distance radio signals, of course, since there was no atmosphere to carry them around the curve of the Earth. Well, they'd found other colonies at Argonne and Brookhaven and way around the world at Harwell and Tanna Tuva. And now they'd been giving our city a look, not really expecting to find anything. But they had an instrument that noticed the faintest heat waves and it had told them there was something warm down here, so they'd landed to investigate. Of course we hadn't heard them land, since there was no air to carry the sound, and they'd had to investigate around quite a while before finding us. Their instruments had given them a wrong steer and they'd wasted some time in the building across the street. ---- By now, all five adults were talking like sixty. Pa was demonstrating to the men how he worked the fire and got rid of the ice in the chimney and all that. Ma had perked up wonderfully and was showing the young lady her cooking and sewing stuff, and even asking about how the women dressed at Los Alamos. The strangers marveled at everything and praised it to the skies. I could tell from the way they wrinkled their noses that they found the Nest a bit smelly, but they never mentioned that at all and just asked bushels of questions. In fact, there was so much talking and excitement that Pa forgot about things, and it wasn't until they were all getting groggy that he looked and found the air had all boiled away in the pail. He got another bucket of air quick from behind the blankets. Of course that started them all laughing and jabbering again. The newcomers even got a little drunk. They weren't used to so much oxygen. Funny thing, though—I didn't do much talking at all and Sis hung on to Ma all the time and hid her face when anybody looked at her. I felt pretty uncomfortable and disturbed myself, even about the young lady. Glimpsing her outside there, I'd had all sorts of mushy thoughts, but now I was just embarrassed and scared of her, even though she tried to be nice as anything to me. I sort of wished they'd all quit crowding the Nest and let us be alone and get our feelings straightened out. And when the newcomers began to talk about our all going to Los Alamos, as if that were taken for granted, I could see that something of the same feeling struck Pa and Ma, too. Pa got very silent all of a sudden and Ma kept telling the young lady, "But I wouldn't know how to act there and I haven't any clothes." The strangers were puzzled like anything at first, but then they got the idea. As Pa kept saying, "It just doesn't seem right to let this fire go out." ---- Well, the strangers are gone, but they're coming back. It hasn't been decided yet just what will happen. Maybe the Nest will be kept up as what one of the strangers called a "survival school." Or maybe we will join the pioneers who are going to try to establish a new colony at the uranium mines at Great Slave Lake or in the Congo. Of course, now that the strangers are gone, I've been thinking a lot about Los Alamos and those other tremendous colonies. I have a hankering to see them for myself. You ask me, Pa wants to see them, too. He's been getting pretty thoughtful, watching Ma and Sis perk up. "It's different, now that we know others are alive," he explains to me. "Your mother doesn't feel so hopeless any more. Neither do I, for that matter, not having to carry the whole responsibility for keeping the human race going, so to speak. It scares a person." I looked around at the blanket walls and the fire and the pails of air boiling away and Ma and Sis sleeping in the warmth and the flickering light. "It's not going to be easy to leave the Nest," I said, wanting to cry, kind of. "It's so small and there's just the four of us. I get scared at the idea of big places and a lot of strangers." He nodded and put another piece of coal on the fire. Then he looked at the little pile and grinned suddenly and put a couple of handfuls on, just as if it was one of our birthdays or Christmas. "You'll quickly get over that feeling son," he said. "The trouble with the world was that it kept getting smaller and smaller, till it ended with just the Nest. Now it'll be good to have a real huge world again, the way it was in the beginning." I guess he's right. You think the beautiful young lady will wait for me till I grow up? I'll be twenty in only ten years. leiber Image: Fireplace by Vyacheslav Argenberg (CC BY-SA 4.0)]]> A fireplace

When a dark star pulls Earth away from the Sun, one isolated family struggles to survive in a frozen world. A Pail of Air is a gripping story packed with ideas that deals with a lot of themes, among them family, resilience, and hope.

Pa had sent me out to get an extra pail of air. I'd just about scooped it full and most of the warmth had leaked from my fingers when I saw the thing.

You know, at first I thought it was a young lady. Yes, a beautiful young lady's face all glowing in the dark and looking at me from the fifth floor of the opposite apartment, which hereabouts is the floor just above the white blanket of frozen air. I'd never seen a live young lady before, except in the old magazines—Sis is just a kid and Ma is pretty sick and miserable—and it gave me such a start that I dropped the pail. Who wouldn't, knowing everyone on Earth was dead except Pa and Ma and Sis and you?

Even at that, I don't suppose I should have been surprised. We all see things now and then. Ma has some pretty bad ones, to judge from the way she bugs her eyes at nothing and just screams and screams and huddles back against the blankets hanging around the Nest. Pa says it is natural we should react like that sometimes.

When I'd recovered the pail and could look again at the opposite apartment, I got an idea of what Ma might be feeling at those times, for I saw it wasn't a young lady at all but simply a light—a tiny light that moved stealthily from window to window, just as if one of the cruel little stars had come down out of the airless sky to investigate why the Earth had gone away from the Sun, and maybe to hunt down something to torment or terrify, now that the Earth didn't have the Sun's protection.

I tell you, the thought of it gave me the creeps. I just stood there shaking, and almost froze my feet and did frost my helmet so solid on the inside that I couldn't have seen the light even if it had come out of one of the windows to get me. Then I had the wit to go back inside.

Pretty soon I was feeling my familiar way through the thirty or so blankets and rugs Pa has got hung around to slow down the escape of air from the Nest, and I wasn't quite so scared. I began to hear the tick-ticking of the clocks in the Nest and knew I was getting back into air, because there's no sound outside in the vacuum, of course. But my mind was still crawly and uneasy as I pushed through the last blankets—Pa's got them faced with aluminum foil to hold in the heat—and came into the Nest.

Let me tell you about the Nest. It's low and snug, just room for the four of us and our things. The floor is covered with thick woolly rugs. Three of the sides are blankets, and the blankets roofing it touch Pa's head. He tells me it's inside a much bigger room, but I've never seen the real walls or ceiling.

Against one of the blanket-walls is a big set of shelves, with tools and books and other stuff, and on top of it a whole row of clocks. Pa's very fussy about keeping them wound. He says we must never forget time, and without a sun or moon, that would be easy to do.

The fourth wall has blankets all over except around the fireplace, in which there is a fire that must never go out. It keeps us from freezing and does a lot more besides. One of us must always watch it. Some of the clocks are alarm and we can use them to remind us. In the early days there was only Ma to take turns with Pa—I think of that when she gets difficult—but now there's me to help, and Sis too.

It's Pa who is the chief guardian of the fire, though. I always think of him that way: a tall man sitting cross-legged, frowning anxiously at the fire, his lined face golden in its light, and every so often carefully placing on it a piece of coal from the big heap beside it. Pa tells me there used to be guardians of the fire sometimes in the very old days—vestal virgins, he calls them—although there was unfrozen air all around then and you didn't really need one.

He was sitting just that way now, though he got up quick to take the pail from me and bawl me out for loitering—he'd spotted my frozen helmet right off. That roused Ma and she joined in picking on me. She's always trying to get the load off her feelings, Pa explains. He shut her up pretty fast. Sis let off a couple of silly squeals too.

Pa handled the pail of air in a twist of cloth. Now that it was inside the Nest, you could really feel its coldness. It just seemed to suck the heat out of everything. Even the flames cringed away from it as Pa put it down close by the fire.

Yet it's that glimmery white stuff in the pail that keeps us alive. It slowly melts and vanishes and refreshes the Nest and feeds the fire. The blankets keep it from escaping too fast. Pa'd like to seal the whole place, but he can't—building's too earthquake-twisted, and besides he has to leave the chimney open for smoke.

Pa says air is tiny molecules that fly away like a flash if there isn't something to stop them. We have to watch sharp not to let the air run low. Pa always keeps a big reserve supply of it in buckets behind the first blankets, along with extra coal and cans of food and other things, such as pails of snow to melt for water. We have to go way down to the bottom floor for that stuff, which is a mean trip, and get it through a door to outside.

You see, when the Earth got cold, all the water in the air froze first and made a blanket ten feet thick or so everywhere, and then down on top of that dropped the crystals of frozen air, making another white blanket sixty or seventy feet thick maybe.

Of course, all the parts of the air didn't freeze and snow down at the same time.

First to drop out was the carbon dioxide—when you're shoveling for water, you have to make sure you don't go too high and get any of that stuff mixed in, for it would put you to sleep, maybe for good, and make the fire go out. Next there's the nitrogen, which doesn't count one way or the other, though it's the biggest part of the blanket. On top of that and easy to get at, which is lucky for us, there's the oxygen that keeps us alive. Pa says we live better than kings ever did, breathing pure oxygen, but we're used to it and don't notice. Finally, at the very top, there's a slick of liquid helium, which is funny stuff. All of these gases in neat separate layers. Like a pussy caffay, Pa laughingly says, whatever that is.

I was busting to tell them all about what I'd seen, and so as soon as I'd ducked out of my helmet and while I was still climbing out of my suit, I cut loose. Right away Ma got nervous and began making eyes at the entry-slit in the blankets and wringing her hands together—the hand where she'd lost three fingers from frostbite inside the good one, as usual. I could tell that Pa was annoyed at me scaring her and wanted to explain it all away quickly, yet could see I wasn't fooling.

“And you watched this light for some time, son?” he asked when I finished.

I hadn't said anything about first thinking it was a young lady's face. Somehow that part embarrassed me.

“Long enough for it to pass five windows and go to the next floor.”

“And it didn't look like stray electricity or crawling liquid or starlight focused by a growing crystal, or anything like that?”

He wasn't just making up those ideas. Odd things happen in a world that's about as cold as can be, and just when you think matter would be frozen dead, it takes on a strange new life. A slimy stuff comes crawling toward the Nest, just like an animal snuffing for heat—that's the liquid helium. And once, when I was little, a bolt of lightning—not even Pa could figure where it came from—hit the nearby steeple and crawled up and down it for weeks, until the glow finally died.

“Not like anything I ever saw,” I told him.

He stood for a moment frowning. Then, “I'll go out with you, and you show it to me,” he said.

Ma raised a howl at the idea of being left alone, and Sis joined in, too, but Pa quieted them. We started climbing into our outside clothes—mine had been warming by the fire. Pa made them. They have plastic headpieces that were once big double-duty transparent food cans, but they keep heat and air in and can replace the air for a little while, long enough for our trips for water and coal and food and so on.

Ma started moaning again, “I've always known there was something outside there, waiting to get us. I've felt it for years—something that's part of the cold and hates all warmth and wants to destroy the Nest. It's been watching us all this time, and now it's coming after us. It'll get you and then come for me. Don't go, Harry!”

Pa had everything on but his helmet. He knelt by the fireplace and reached in and shook the long metal rod that goes up the chimney and knocks off the ice that keeps trying to clog it. Once a week he goes up on the roof to check if it's working all right. That's our worst trip and Pa won't let me make it alone.

“Sis,” Pa said quietly, “come watch the fire. Keep an eye on the air, too. If it gets low or doesn't seem to be boiling fast enough, fetch another bucket from behind the blanket. But mind your hands. Use the cloth to pick up the bucket.”

Sis quit helping Ma be frightened and came over and did as she was told. Ma quieted down pretty suddenly, though her eyes were still kind of wild as she watched Pa fix on his helmet tight and pick up a pail and the two of us go out.

Pa led the way and I took hold of his belt. It's a funny thing, I'm not afraid to go by myself, but when Pa's along I always want to hold on to him. Habit, I guess, and then there's no denying that this time I was a bit scared.

You see, it's this way. We know that everything is dead out there. Pa heard the last radio voices fade away years ago, and had seen some of the last folks die who weren't as lucky or well-protected as us. So we knew that if there was something groping around out there, it couldn't be anything human or friendly.

Besides that, there's a feeling that comes with it always being night, cold night. Pa says there used to be some of that feeling even in the old days, but then every morning the Sun would come and chase it away. I have to take his word for that, not ever remembering the Sun as being anything more than a big star. You see, I hadn't been born when the dark star snatched us away from the Sun, and by now it's dragged us out beyond the orbit of the planet Pluto, Pa says, and taking us farther out all the time.

I found myself wondering whether there mightn't be something on the dark star that wanted us, and if that was why it had captured the Earth. Just then we came to the end of the corridor and I followed Pa out on the balcony.

I don't know what the city looked like in the old days, but now it's beautiful. The starlight lets you see it pretty well—there's quite a bit of light in those steady points speckling the blackness above. (Pa says the stars used to twinkle once, but that was because there was air.) We are on a hill and the shimmery plain drops away from us and then flattens out, cut up into neat squares by the troughs that used to be streets. I sometimes make my mashed potatoes look like it, before I pour on the gravy.

Some taller buildings push up out of the feathery plain, topped by rounded caps of air crystals, like the fur hood Ma wears, only whiter. On those buildings you can see the darker squares of windows, underlined by white dashes of air crystals. Some of them are on a slant, for many of the buildings are pretty badly twisted by the quakes and all the rest that happened when the dark star captured the Earth.

Here and there a few icicles hang, water icicles from the first days of the cold, other icicles of frozen air that melted on the roofs and dripped and froze again. Sometimes one of those icicles will catch the light of a star and send it to you so brightly you think the star has swooped into the city. That was one of the things Pa had been thinking of when I told him about the light, but I had thought of it myself first and known it wasn't so.

He touched his helmet to mine so we could talk easier and he asked me to point out the windows to him. But there wasn't any light moving around inside them now, or anywhere else. To my surprise, Pa didn't bawl me out and tell me I'd been seeing things. He looked all around quite a while after filling his pail, and just as we were going inside he whipped around without warning, as if to take some peeping thing off guard.

I could feel it, too. The old peace was gone. There was something lurking out there, watching, waiting, getting ready.

Inside, he said to me, touching helmets, “If you see something like that again, son, don't tell the others. Your Ma's sort of nervous these days and we owe her all the feeling of safety we can give her. Once—it was when your sister was born—I was ready to give up and die, but your Mother kept me trying. Another time she kept the fire going a whole week all by herself when I was sick. Nursed me and took care of the two of you, too.”

“You know that game we sometimes play, sitting in a square in the Nest, tossing a ball around? Courage is like a ball, son. A person can hold it only so long, and then he's got to toss it to someone else. When it's tossed your way, you've got to catch it and hold it tight—and hope there'll be someone else to toss it to when you get tired of being brave.”

His talking to me that way made me feel grown-up and good. But it didn't wipe away the thing outside from the back of my mind—or the fact that Pa took it seriously.

It's hard to hide your feelings about such a thing. When we got back in the Nest and took off our outside clothes, Pa laughed about it all and told them it was nothing and kidded me for having such an imagination, but his words fell flat. He didn't convince Ma and Sis any more than he did me. It looked for a minute like we were all fumbling the courage-ball. Something had to be done, and almost before I knew what I was going to say, I heard myself asking Pa to tell us about the old days, and how it all happened.

He sometimes doesn't mind telling that story, and Sis and I sure like to listen to it, and he got my idea. So we were all settled around the fire in a wink, and Ma pushed up some cans to thaw for supper, and Pa began. Before he did, though, I noticed him casually get a hammer from the shelf and lay it down beside him.

It was the same old story as always—I think I could recite the main thread of it in my sleep—though Pa always puts in a new detail or two and keeps improving it in spots.

He told us how the Earth had been swinging around the Sun ever so steady and warm, and the people on it fixing to make money and wars and have a good time and get power and treat each other right or wrong, when without warning there comes charging out of space this dead star, this burned out sun, and upsets everything.

You know, I find it hard to believe in the way those people felt, any more than I can believe in the swarming number of them. Imagine people getting ready for the horrible sort of war they were cooking up. Wanting it even, or at least wishing it were over so as to end their nervousness. As if all folks didn't have to hang together and pool every bit of warmth just to keep alive. And how can they have hoped to end danger, any more than we can hope to end the cold?

Sometimes I think Pa exaggerates and makes things out too black. He's cross with us once in a while and was probably cross with all those folks. Still, some of the things I read in the old magazines sound pretty wild. He may be right.

The dark star, as Pa went on telling it, rushed in pretty fast and there wasn't much time to get ready. At the beginning they tried to keep it a secret from most people, but then the truth came out, what with the earthquakes and floods—imagine, oceans of unfrozen water!—and people seeing stars blotted out by something on a clear night. First off they thought it would hit the Sun, and then they thought it would hit the Earth. There was even the start of a rush to get to a place called China, because people thought the star would hit on the other side. But then they found it wasn't going to hit either side, but was going to come very close to the Earth.

Most of the other planets were on the other side of the Sun and didn't get involved. The Sun and the newcomer fought over the Earth for a little while—pulling it this way and that, like two dogs growling over a bone, Pa described it this time—and then the newcomer won and carried us off. The Sun got a consolation prize, though. At the last minute he managed to hold on to the Moon.

That was the time of the monster earthquakes and floods, twenty times worse than anything before. It was also the time of the Big Jerk, as Pa calls it, when all Earth got yanked suddenly, just as Pa has done to me once or twice, grabbing me by the collar to do it, when I've been sitting too far from the fire.

You see, the dark star was going through space faster than the Sun, and in the opposite direction, and it had to wrench the world considerably in order to take it away.

The Big Jerk didn't last long. It was over as soon as the Earth was settled down in its new orbit around the dark star. But it was pretty terrible while it lasted. Pa says that all sorts of cliffs and buildings toppled, oceans slopped over, swamps and sandy deserts gave great sliding surges that buried nearby lands. Earth was almost jerked out of its atmosphere blanket and the air got so thin in spots that people keeled over and fainted—though of course, at the same time, they were getting knocked down by the Big Jerk and maybe their bones broke or skulls cracked.

We've often asked Pa how people acted during that time, whether they were scared or brave or crazy or stunned, or all four, but he's sort of leery of the subject, and he was again tonight. He says he was mostly too busy to notice.

You see, Pa and some scientist friends of his had figured out part of what was going to happen—they'd known we'd get captured and our air would freeze—and they'd been working like mad to fix up a place with airtight walls and doors, and insulation against the cold, and big supplies of food and fuel and water and bottled air. But the place got smashed in the last earthquakes and all Pa's friends were killed then and in the Big Jerk. So he had to start over and throw the Nest together quick without any advantages, just using any stuff he could lay his hands on.

I guess he's telling pretty much the truth when he says he didn't have any time to keep an eye on how other folks behaved, either then or in the Big Freeze that followed—followed very quick, you know, both because the dark star was pulling us away very fast and because Earth's rotation had been slowed in the tug-of-war, so that the nights were ten old nights long.

Still, I've got an idea of some of the things that happened from the frozen folk I've seen, a few of them in other rooms in our building, others clustered around the furnaces in the basements where we go for coal.

In one of the rooms, an old man sits stiff in a chair, with an arm and a leg in splints. In another, a man and woman are huddled together in a bed with heaps of covers over them. You can just see their heads peeking out, close together. And in another a beautiful young lady is sitting with a pile of wraps huddled around her, looking hopefully toward the door, as if waiting for someone who never came back with warmth and food. They're all still and stiff as statues, of course, but just like life.

Pa showed them to me once in quick winks of his flashlight, when he still had a fair supply of batteries and could afford to waste a little light. They scared me pretty bad and made my heart pound, especially the young lady.

Now, with Pa telling his story for the umpteenth time to take our minds off another scare, I got to thinking of the frozen folk again. All of a sudden I got an idea that scared me worse than anything yet. You see, I'd just remembered the face I'd thought I'd seen in the window. I'd forgotten about that on account of trying to hide it from the others.

What, I asked myself, if the frozen folk were coming to life? What if they were like the liquid helium that got a new lease on life and started crawling toward the heat just when you thought its molecules ought to freeze solid forever? Or like the electricity that moves endlessly when it's just about as cold as that? What if the ever-growing cold, with the temperature creeping down the last few degrees to the last zero, had mysteriously wakened the frozen folk to life—not warm-blooded life, but something icy and horrible?

That was a worse idea than the one about something coming down from the dark star to get us.

Or maybe, I thought, both ideas might be true. Something coming down from the dark star and making the frozen folk move, using them to do its work. That would fit with both things I'd seen—the beautiful young lady and the moving, starlike light.

The frozen folk with minds from the dark star behind their unwinking eyes, creeping, crawling, snuffing their way, following the heat to the Nest.

I tell you, that thought gave me a very bad turn and I wanted very badly to tell the others my fears, but I remembered what Pa had said and clenched my teeth and didn't speak.

We were all sitting very still. Even the fire was burning silently. There was just the sound of Pa's voice and the clocks.

And then, from beyond the blankets, I thought I heard a tiny noise. My skin tightened all over me.

Pa was telling about the early years in the Nest and had come to the place where he philosophizes.

“So I asked myself then,” he said, “what's the use of going on? What's the use of dragging it out for a few years? Why prolong a doomed existence of hard work and cold and loneliness? The human race is done. The Earth is done. Why not give up, I asked myself—and all of a sudden I got the answer.”

Again I heard the noise, louder this time, a kind of uncertain, shuffling tread, coming closer. I couldn't breathe.

“Life's always been a business of working hard and fighting the cold,” Pa was saying. “The earth's always been a lonely place, millions of miles from the next planet. And no matter how long the human race might have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don't matter. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture, like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers—you've seen pictures of those, but I can't describe how they feel—or the fire's glow. It makes everything else worth while. And that's as true for the last man as the first.”

And still the steps kept shuffling closer. It seemed to me that the inmost blanket trembled and bulged a little. Just as if they were burned into my imagination, I kept seeing those peering, frozen eyes.

“So right then and there,” Pa went on, and now I could tell that he heard the steps, too, and was talking loud so we maybe wouldn't hear them, “right then and there I told myself that I was going on as if we had all eternity ahead of us. I'd have children and teach them all I could. I'd get them to read books. I'd plan for the future, try to enlarge and seal the Nest. I'd do what I could to keep everything beautiful and growing. I'd keep alive my feeling of wonder even at the cold and the dark and the distant stars.”

But then the blanket actually did move and lift. And there was a bright light somewhere behind it. Pa's voice stopped and his eyes turned to the widening slit and his hand went out until it touched and gripped the handle of the hammer beside him.

In through the blanket stepped the beautiful young lady. She stood there looking at us the strangest way, and she carried something bright and unwinking in her hand. And two other faces peered over her shoulders—men's faces, white and staring.

Well, my heart couldn't have been stopped for more than four or five beats before I realized she was wearing a suit and helmet like Pa's homemade ones, only fancier, and that the men were, too—and that the frozen folk certainly wouldn't be wearing those. Also, I noticed that the bright thing in her hand was just a kind of flashlight.

The silence kept on while I swallowed hard a couple of times, and after that there was all sorts of jabbering and commotion.

They were simply people, you see. We hadn't been the only ones to survive; we'd just thought so, for natural enough reasons. These three people had survived, and quite a few others with them. And when we found out how they'd survived, Pa let out the biggest whoop of joy.

They were from Los Alamos and they were getting their heat and power from atomic energy. Just using the uranium and plutonium intended for bombs, they had enough to go on for thousands of years. They had a regular little airtight city, with air-locks and all. They even generated electric light and grew plants and animals by it. (At this Pa let out a second whoop, waking Ma from her faint.)

But if we were flabbergasted at them, they were double-flabbergasted at us.

One of the men kept saying, “But it's impossible, I tell you. You can't maintain an air supply without hermetic sealing. It's simply impossible.”

That was after he had got his helmet off and was using our air. Meanwhile, the young lady kept looking around at us as if we were saints, and telling us we'd done something amazing, and suddenly she broke down and cried.

They'd been scouting around for survivors, but they never expected to find any in a place like this. They had rocket ships at Los Alamos and plenty of chemical fuel. As for liquid oxygen, all you had to do was go out and shovel the air blanket at the top level. So after they'd got things going smoothly at Los Alamos, which had taken years, they'd decided to make some trips to likely places where there might be other survivors. No good trying long-distance radio signals, of course, since there was no atmosphere to carry them around the curve of the Earth.

Well, they'd found other colonies at Argonne and Brookhaven and way around the world at Harwell and Tanna Tuva. And now they'd been giving our city a look, not really expecting to find anything. But they had an instrument that noticed the faintest heat waves and it had told them there was something warm down here, so they'd landed to investigate. Of course we hadn't heard them land, since there was no air to carry the sound, and they'd had to investigate around quite a while before finding us. Their instruments had given them a wrong steer and they'd wasted some time in the building across the street.

By now, all five adults were talking like sixty. Pa was demonstrating to the men how he worked the fire and got rid of the ice in the chimney and all that. Ma had perked up wonderfully and was showing the young lady her cooking and sewing stuff, and even asking about how the women dressed at Los Alamos. The strangers marveled at everything and praised it to the skies. I could tell from the way they wrinkled their noses that they found the Nest a bit smelly, but they never mentioned that at all and just asked bushels of questions.

In fact, there was so much talking and excitement that Pa forgot about things, and it wasn't until they were all getting groggy that he looked and found the air had all boiled away in the pail. He got another bucket of air quick from behind the blankets. Of course that started them all laughing and jabbering again. The newcomers even got a little drunk. They weren't used to so much oxygen.

Funny thing, though—I didn't do much talking at all and Sis hung on to Ma all the time and hid her face when anybody looked at her. I felt pretty uncomfortable and disturbed myself, even about the young lady. Glimpsing her outside there, I'd had all sorts of mushy thoughts, but now I was just embarrassed and scared of her, even though she tried to be nice as anything to me.

I sort of wished they'd all quit crowding the Nest and let us be alone and get our feelings straightened out.

And when the newcomers began to talk about our all going to Los Alamos, as if that were taken for granted, I could see that something of the same feeling struck Pa and Ma, too. Pa got very silent all of a sudden and Ma kept telling the young lady, “But I wouldn't know how to act there and I haven't any clothes.”

The strangers were puzzled like anything at first, but then they got the idea. As Pa kept saying, “It just doesn't seem right to let this fire go out.”

Well, the strangers are gone, but they're coming back. It hasn't been decided yet just what will happen. Maybe the Nest will be kept up as what one of the strangers called a “survival school.” Or maybe we will join the pioneers who are going to try to establish a new colony at the uranium mines at Great Slave Lake or in the Congo.

Of course, now that the strangers are gone, I've been thinking a lot about Los Alamos and those other tremendous colonies. I have a hankering to see them for myself.

You ask me, Pa wants to see them, too. He's been getting pretty thoughtful, watching Ma and Sis perk up.

“It's different, now that we know others are alive,” he explains to me. “Your mother doesn't feel so hopeless any more. Neither do I, for that matter, not having to carry the whole responsibility for keeping the human race going, so to speak. It scares a person.”

I looked around at the blanket walls and the fire and the pails of air boiling away and Ma and Sis sleeping in the warmth and the flickering light.

“It's not going to be easy to leave the Nest,” I said, wanting to cry, kind of. “It's so small and there's just the four of us. I get scared at the idea of big places and a lot of strangers.”

He nodded and put another piece of coal on the fire. Then he looked at the little pile and grinned suddenly and put a couple of handfuls on, just as if it was one of our birthdays or Christmas.

“You'll quickly get over that feeling son,” he said. “The trouble with the world was that it kept getting smaller and smaller, till it ended with just the Nest. Now it'll be good to have a real huge world again, the way it was in the beginning.”

I guess he's right. You think the beautiful young lady will wait for me till I grow up? I'll be twenty in only ten years.

#leiber

Image: Fireplace by Vyacheslav Argenberg (CC BY-SA 4.0)

]]> https://sfss.space/a-pail-of-air-1951-fritz-leiber Thu, 24 Sep 2026 23:53:27 +0000 Answer (1954) - Fredric Brown https://sfss.space/answer-1954-fredric-brown?pk_campaign=rss-feed <![CDATA[White shadows walking on black blocks. A very very short read. I don't share Brown's pessimism about AI, but this story dates back to 1954 (!) and is a fun read. !--more-- Dwan Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the subether bore throughout the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing. He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe -- ninety-six billion planets -- into the supercircuit that would connect them all into one supercalculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies. Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then after a moment's silence he said, "Now, Dwar Ev." Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel. Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. "The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn." "Thank you," said Dwar Reyn. "It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer." He turned to face the machine. "Is there a God?" The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay. "Yes, now there is a God." Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch. A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut. brown Drawing: Julia Royer (copyright 2026)]]> White shadows walking on black blocks.

A very very short read. I don't share Brown's pessimism about AI, but this story dates back to 1954 (!) and is a fun read.

Dwan Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the subether bore throughout the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing.

He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe — ninety-six billion planets — into the supercircuit that would connect them all into one supercalculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.

Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then after a moment's silence he said, “Now, Dwar Ev.”

Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel.

Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. “The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn.”

“Thank you,” said Dwar Reyn. “It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer.”

He turned to face the machine. “Is there a God?”

The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay.

“Yes, now there is a God.”

Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.

A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.

#brown

Drawing: Julia Royer (copyright 2026)

]]> https://sfss.space/answer-1954-fredric-brown Thu, 13 Aug 2026 14:48:17 +0000 On Cozy Sci-fi and Walking https://sfss.space/on-cosy-sci-fi-and-walking-3brw?pk_campaign=rss-feed <![CDATA[Two houses and red trees. !--more-- I recently started reading Becky Chambers, one of the leading voices of cozy sci-fi. As she neatly puts it: Cozy science-fiction can be very simply summed up as stories that tell you that the future can be good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILUTQEH3xzc Although I love dystopias, I believe cozy sci-fi has its place. Endless pessimism simply isn't healthy. I've come to realize that, over the past few months, I had begun to cultivate the same kind of mindset through something very simple: walking. More recently, I read Way Station) by Clifford #Simak. Amazing novel! And it's packed full of cozy sci-fi tropes: optimism, quietness, slowness, a sense of wonder, and meaningful connections. One detail in particular caught my attention. Enoch Wallace, the protagonist, takes daily walks. Walking mattered to him. Lately, it has come to matter to me as well. Three months ago, I started walking just 30 minutes a day to move a bit more. Since then, I’ve gradually increased the distance to 15,000–20,000 steps a day, split into two sessions. It has done me a world of good. In many ways, walking is a deeply "cozy" activity. It slows things down. It creates space for the mind to wander, lessens anxiety, boosts mood for hours and sometimes the entire day... I could keep going for a while. As the saying goes, motion is lotion. But to sum it up, it's a kind of healthy mental bubble. As Simak writes: He walked as if he had all the time there was. And to quote the American philosopher Thoreau: An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day. Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow. I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least — and it is commonly more than that — sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements. If you decide to pick up the habit, I recommend you start small and listen to your body. Don't overdo it at first, and gradually increase. Overtraining is a real thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBN86y30Ufc To bring things full circle: if you want to delve into cozy sci-fi yourself, I highly recommend Becky Chambers' Monk & Robot novellas duology (but most of her other books fill the bill). Here's the wiki page for the first one. I also recommend the aforementioned novel Way Station. Together, these three make a solid starter pack. thoughts Image: Julia Royer (copyright 2026)]]> Two houses and red trees.

I recently started reading Becky Chambers, one of the leading voices of cozy sci-fi. As she neatly puts it:

Cozy science-fiction can be very simply summed up as stories that tell you that the future can be good.

Although I love dystopias, I believe cozy sci-fi has its place. Endless pessimism simply isn't healthy.

I've come to realize that, over the past few months, I had begun to cultivate the same kind of mindset through something very simple: walking.

More recently, I read Way Station by Clifford #Simak. Amazing novel! And it's packed full of cozy sci-fi tropes: optimism, quietness, slowness, a sense of wonder, and meaningful connections.

One detail in particular caught my attention. Enoch Wallace, the protagonist, takes daily walks. Walking mattered to him. Lately, it has come to matter to me as well.

Three months ago, I started walking just 30 minutes a day to move a bit more. Since then, I’ve gradually increased the distance to 15,000–20,000 steps a day, split into two sessions.

It has done me a world of good. In many ways, walking is a deeply “cozy” activity. It slows things down. It creates space for the mind to wander, lessens anxiety, boosts mood for hours and sometimes the entire day... I could keep going for a while. As the saying goes, motion is lotion. But to sum it up, it's a kind of healthy mental bubble. As Simak writes:

He walked as if he had all the time there was.

And to quote the American philosopher Thoreau:

An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

_

Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.

_

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least — and it is commonly more than that — sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.

If you decide to pick up the habit, I recommend you start small and listen to your body. Don't overdo it at first, and gradually increase. Overtraining is a real thing.

To bring things full circle: if you want to delve into cozy sci-fi yourself, I highly recommend Becky Chambers' Monk & Robot novellas duology (but most of her other books fill the bill). Here's the wiki page for the first one. I also recommend the aforementioned novel Way Station. Together, these three make a solid starter pack.

#thoughts

Image: Julia Royer (copyright 2026)

]]> https://sfss.space/on-cosy-sci-fi-and-walking-3brw Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:46:18 +0000 To the Sun (1931) - Clark Ashton Smith https://sfss.space/to-the-sun-1931-clark-ashton-smith?pk_campaign=rss-feed <![CDATA[ I'd call that cosmic poetry. Saturne !--more-- Thy light is an eminence unto thee And thou art upheld by the pillars of thy strength. Thy power is a foundation for the worlds: They are builded thereon as upon a lofty rock Whereto no enemy hath access. Thou puttest forth thy rays, and they hold the sky As in the hollow of an immense hand. Thou erectest thy light as four walls And a roof with many beams and pillars. Thy flame is a stronghold based as a mountain: Its bastions are tall, and firm like stone. The worlds are bound with the ropes of thy will, Like steeds are they stayed and constrained By the reins of invisible lightnings. With bands that are stouter than iron manifold, And stronger than the cords of the gulfs, Thou withholdest them from the brink Of outward and perilous deeps, Lest they perish in the desolations of the night, Or be stricken of strange suns; Lest they be caught in the pitfalls of the abyss, Or fall into the furnace of Arcturus. Thy law is as a shore unto them, And they are restrained thereby as the sea. Thou art food and drink to the worlds: Yea, by the sustenance are they sustained, That they falter not upon the road of space Whose goal is Hercules. When thy pillars of force are withdrawn, And the walls of thy light fall inward, And thy head is covered with the Shadow, The worlds shall wander as men bewildered In the wasteness void of life and barren. Athirst and unfed shall they be When the springs of thy strength are dust And thy fields of light are black with dearth. They shall perish from the ways That thou showest no longer, And emptiness shall close above them. Image: Clement Lindley Wragge - read more about him here.]]>

I'd call that cosmic poetry.

Saturne

Thy light is an eminence unto thee

And thou art upheld by the pillars of thy strength.

Thy power is a foundation for the worlds:

They are builded thereon as upon a lofty rock

Whereto no enemy hath access.

Thou puttest forth thy rays, and they hold the sky

As in the hollow of an immense hand.

Thou erectest thy light as four walls

And a roof with many beams and pillars.

Thy flame is a stronghold based as a mountain:

Its bastions are tall, and firm like stone.

The worlds are bound with the ropes of thy will,

Like steeds are they stayed and constrained

By the reins of invisible lightnings.

With bands that are stouter than iron manifold,

And stronger than the cords of the gulfs,

Thou withholdest them from the brink

Of outward and perilous deeps,

Lest they perish in the desolations of the night,

Or be stricken of strange suns;

Lest they be caught in the pitfalls of the abyss,

Or fall into the furnace of Arcturus.

Thy law is as a shore unto them,

And they are restrained thereby as the sea.

Thou art food and drink to the worlds:

Yea, by the sustenance are they sustained,

That they falter not upon the road of space

Whose goal is Hercules.

When thy pillars of force are withdrawn,

And the walls of thy light fall inward,

And thy head is covered with the Shadow,

The worlds shall wander as men bewildered

In the wasteness void of life and barren.

Athirst and unfed shall they be

When the springs of thy strength are dust

And thy fields of light are black with dearth.

They shall perish from the ways

That thou showest no longer,

And emptiness shall close above them.

Image: Clement Lindley Wragge – read more about him here.

]]> https://sfss.space/to-the-sun-1931-clark-ashton-smith Fri, 15 May 2026 19:03:22 +0000 Something Else https://sfss.space/something-else?pk_campaign=rss-feed <![CDATA[A multicolored being. In 2027 (I think), I’ll publish my autobiography, in English (I’m French but surprisingly, when it comes to writing, I often feel more comfortable in English - and also I might sell more copies if the book is in English...). !--more-- My life is kind of a multiverse, and I've lived and experienced pretty much uncommon stuff, so if you're curious you will enjoy it. Here's the beginning of the book: Preamble I’m gonna tell my story here, piece by piece, category by category. Bit by bit, my autobiography. Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, as the preamble to his own: I am embarking on an enterprise which has no precedent, and whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I want to show my fellow men a man in all the truth of nature; and this man shall be myself. Myself alone. I know my own heart and understand men. I am made unlike anyone I have ever met; I dare believe I am unlike anyone alive. I ain’t Rousseau, and I got zero desire to be Rousseau. Quite the opposite, actually. When I meet somebody for the first time, I see them as a whole different being. It’s through talking that bridges get built and common ground starts showing up. That’s the cool part, if you ask me. I want that when you read me, it feels like you’re chopping it up with me, and somehow catching bits of yourself in me too. --- Stay tuned: I’ll write about it on SFSS when it’s out. ---- Drawing: Julia Royer (copyright 2026)]]> A multicolored being.

In 2027 (I think), I’ll publish my autobiography, in English (I’m French but surprisingly, when it comes to writing, I often feel more comfortable in English – and also I might sell more copies if the book is in English...).

My life is kind of a multiverse, and I've lived and experienced pretty much uncommon stuff, so if you're curious you will enjoy it.

Here's the beginning of the book:

Preamble

I’m gonna tell my story here, piece by piece, category by category. Bit by bit, my autobiography.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, as the preamble to his own:

I am embarking on an enterprise which has no precedent, and whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I want to show my fellow men a man in all the truth of nature; and this man shall be myself. Myself alone. I know my own heart and understand men. I am made unlike anyone I have ever met; I dare believe I am unlike anyone alive.

I ain’t Rousseau, and I got zero desire to be Rousseau. Quite the opposite, actually. When I meet somebody for the first time, I see them as a whole different being. It’s through talking that bridges get built and common ground starts showing up. That’s the cool part, if you ask me. I want that when you read me, it feels like you’re chopping it up with me, and somehow catching bits of yourself in me too.

—–> Stay tuned: I’ll write about it on SFSS when it’s out.

Drawing: Julia Royer (copyright 2026)

]]> https://sfss.space/something-else Thu, 14 May 2026 13:50:55 +0000 Off-topic: A Side Project https://sfss.space/off-topic-a-side-project?pk_campaign=rss-feed <![CDATA[ The strange and fascinating world of early 20th-century French Catholic writers. !--more-- A while back, I started working on a second blog dedicated to French Catholic writers from the early 20th century, many of whom all knew each other in one way or another. I’m lucky enough to own a large collection of books published during that era, including several remarkable works that were printed only once in a few dozen copies. I also have plenty of books of correspondence (the WhatsApp of the early 20th century). Much of what I plan to publish is extremely scarce online or IRL. My goal is to paint a clear portrait of it all, including the relationships and the writings. If you own rare texts from that period or simply want to get in touch, feel free: span class="blockspam" aria-hidden="true"PLEASE GO AWAY!/spansfss_spacefrontier7@!-- hfkfjfjfkjgjjfjjjgdjbqjjbnfdnjfjjfdbnjfbjdfj --proton.me/p]]>

The strange and fascinating world of early 20th-century French Catholic writers.

A while back, I started working on a second blog dedicated to French Catholic writers from the early 20th century, many of whom all knew each other in one way or another.

I’m lucky enough to own a large collection of books published during that era, including several remarkable works that were printed only once in a few dozen copies.

I also have plenty of books of correspondence (the WhatsApp of the early 20th century).

Much of what I plan to publish is extremely scarce online or IRL.

My goal is to paint a clear portrait of it all, including the relationships and the writings.

If you own rare texts from that period or simply want to get in touch, feel free:

PLEASE GO AWAY!sfss_spacefrontier7@proton.me

]]> https://sfss.space/off-topic-a-side-project Mon, 11 May 2026 18:20:34 +0000 What's next? https://sfss.space/whats-next?pk_campaign=rss-feed <![CDATA[Sei - Ifeoluwase Taiwo (2026) Probably looking further. !--more-- Tons of great authors are Americans, but man, America isn't the only country. Don't misunderstand me though, as a Frog I love the US of A. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LasrD6SZkZk I've discovered some amazing Nigerian authors, which is awesome. But what about Ukrainians or South-East Asians? I'm dying to know. As always, don't hesitate to contact me, whether you live in Ankara, Dallas or Phnom Penh. Anywhere there is a burgeoning SF scene. My email is in the "About" section. And I'll inquire by myself anyway. Any other suggestion welcome. I was no longer exploring the internet; I merely existed on it. My time online was dominated by consumption – reading, watching, scrolling – but the thrill of discovery was gone. I was constantly absorbing content, but it felt hollow, unsatisfying - Joan Westenberg -- When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow and exclude people. So create - Why the Lucky Stiff thoughts Drawing: Sei - Ifeoluwase Taiwo (2026) (Instagram)]]> Sei - Ifeoluwase Taiwo (2026)

Probably looking further.

Tons of great authors are Americans, but man, America isn't the only country. Don't misunderstand me though, as a Frog I love the US of A.

I've discovered some amazing Nigerian authors, which is awesome. But what about Ukrainians or South-East Asians? I'm dying to know. As always, don't hesitate to contact me, whether you live in Ankara, Dallas or Phnom Penh. Anywhere there is a burgeoning SF scene. My email is in the “About” section. And I'll inquire by myself anyway.

Any other suggestion welcome.

I was no longer exploring the internet; I merely existed on it. My time online was dominated by consumption – reading, watching, scrolling – but the thrill of discovery was gone. I was constantly absorbing content, but it felt hollow, unsatisfying – Joan Westenberg

—

When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow and exclude people. So create – Why the Lucky Stiff

#thoughts

Drawing: Sei – Ifeoluwase Taiwo (2026) (Instagram)

]]> https://sfss.space/whats-next Sun, 10 May 2026 13:35:18 +0000 Everest (1953) - Asimov https://sfss.space/everest-1953-asimov?pk_campaign=rss-feed <![CDATA[Mount Everest A very short story on humility, among other things. -- Perhaps you’ve read how Everest has now been climbed? But have you heard of Planetary Survey? Here’s the real truth about it. Everest has been climbed twice. !--more-- In 1952 they were about ready to give up trying to climb Mt. Everest. It was the photographs that kept them going. As photographs go, they weren’t much; fuzzy, streaked and with just dark blobs against the white to be interested in. But those dark blobs were living creatures. The men swore to it. I said, “What the hell, they’ve been talking about creatures skidding along the Everest glaciers for forty years. It’s about time we did something about it.” Jimmy Robbons (pardon me, James Abram Robbons) was the one who pushed me into that position. He was always nuts on mountain climbing, you see. He was the one who knew all about how the Tibetans wouldn’t gonear Everest because it was the mountain of the gods, he could quote me every mysterious manlike footprint ever reported in the ice 25,000 feet up, he knew by heart every tall story about the spindly whitecreatures, speeding along the crags just over the last heart-breaking camp which the climbers had managed to establish. It’s good to have one enthusiastic creature of the sort at Planetary Survey headquarters. The last photographs put bite into his words, though. After all, you might just barely think they were men. Jimmy said, “Look, boss, the point isn’t that they’re there, the point is that they move fast. Look at that figure. It’s blurred.” “The camera might have moved.” “The crag here is sharp enough. And the men swear it was running. Imagine the metabolism it must have to run at that oxygen pressure. Look, boss, would you have believed in deep-sea fish if you’d never heard of them? You have fish which are looking for new niches in environment which they can exploit, so they go deeper and deeper into the abyss until one day they find they can’t return. They’ve adapted so thoroughly they can live only under tons of pressure.” “Well-” “Damn it, can’t you reverse the picture? Creatures can be forced up a mountain can’t they? They can learn to stick it out in thinner air and colder temperatures. They can live on moss or on occasional birds, just as the deep-sea fish in the last analysis live on the upper fauna that slowly go filtering down. Then, someday, they find they can’t go down again. I don’t even say they’re men. They can be chamois or mountain goats or badgers or anything.” I said stubbornly, “The witnesses said they were vaguely manlike, and the reported footprints are certainly manlike.” “Or bearlike,” said Jimmy. “You can’t tell.” So that’s when I said, “It’s about time we did something about it.” Jimmy shrugged and said, “They’ve been trying to climb Mt. Everest for forty years.” And he shook his head. “For gossake,” I said. “All you mountain climbers are nuts. That’s for sure. You’re not interested in getting to the top. You’re just interested in getting to the top in a certain way. It’s about time we stopped fooling around with picks, ropes, camps and all the paraphernalia of the Gentlemen’s Club that sends suckers up the slopes every five years or so.” “What are you getting at?” “They invented the airplane in 1903, you know?” “You mean fly over Mt. Everest!” He said it the way an English lord would say “Shoot a fox!” or an angler would say, “Use worms!” “Yes,” I said, “fly over Mt. Everest and let someone down on the top. Why not?” “He won’t live long. The fellow you let down, I mean.” “Why not?” I asked again. “You drop supplies and oxygen tanks, and the fellow wears a spacesuit. Naturally.” It took time to get the Air Force to listen and to agree to send a plane and by that time Jimmy Robbons had swivelled his mind to the point where he volunteered to be the one to land on Everest’s peak. “After all,” he said in half a whisper, “I’d be the first man ever to stand there.” ---- That’s the beginning of the story. The story itself can be told very simply, and in far fewer words. The plane waited two weeks during the best part of the year (as far as Everest was concerned, that is) for a siege of only moderately nasty flying weather, then took off. They made it. The pilot reported by radio to a listening group exactly what the top of Mt. Everest looked like when seen from above and then he described exactly how Jimmy Robbons looked as his parachute got smaller and smaller. Then another blizzard broke and the plane barely made it back to base and it was another two weeks before the weather was bearable again. And all that time Jimmy was on the roof of the world by himself and I hated myself for a murderer. The plane went back up two weeks later to see if they could spot his body. I don’t know what good it would have done if they had, but that’s the human race for you. How many dead in the last war? Who can count that high? But money or anything else is no object to the saving of one life, or even the recovering of one body. They didn’t find his body, but they did find a smoke signal; curling up in the thin air and whipping away in the gusts. They let down a grapple and Jimmy came up, still in his spacesuit, looking like hell, but definitely alive. ---- The p.s. to the story involves my visit to the hospital last week to see him. He was recovering very slowly. The doctors said shock, they said exhaustion, but Jimmy’s eyes said a lot more. I said. “How about it, Jimmy, you haven’t talked to the reporters, you haven’t talked to the government. All right. How about talking to me?” “I’ve got nothing to say,” he whispered. “Sure you have,” I said. “You lived on top of Mt. Everest during a two-week blizzard. You didn’t do that by yourself, not with all the supplies we dumped along with you. Who helped you, Jimmie boy?” I guess he knew there was no use trying to bluff. Or maybe he was anxious to get it off his mind. He said, “They’re intelligent, boss. They compressed air for me. They set up a little power pack to keep me warm. They set up the smoke signal when they spotted the airplane coming back.” “I see.” I didn’t want to rush him. “It’s like we thought. They’re adapted to Everest life. They can’t come down the slopes.” “No, they can’t. And we can’t go up the slopes. Even if the weather didn’t stop us, they would!” “They sound like kindly creatures, so why should they object? They helped you.” “They have nothing against us. They spoke to me, you know. Telepathy.” I frowned. “Well, then.” “But they don’t intend to be interfered with. They’re watching us, boss. They’ve got to. We’ve got atomic power. We’re about to have rocket ships. They’re worried about us. And Everest is the only place they can watch us from!” I frowned deeper. He was sweating and his hands were shaking. I said, “Easy, boy. Take it easy. What on Earth are these creatures?” And he said, “What do you suppose would be so adapted to thin air and subzero cold that Everest would be the only livable place on Earth to them? That’s the whole point. They’re nothing at all on Earth. They’re Martians.” And that’s it. asimov Image: Tibet - Mount Everest by Göran Höglund (Kartläsarn) is licensed under CC BY 2.0]]> Mount Everest

A very short story on humility, among other things. — Perhaps you’ve read how Everest has now been climbed? But have you heard of Planetary Survey? Here’s the real truth about it. Everest has been climbed twice.

In 1952 they were about ready to give up trying to climb Mt. Everest. It was the photographs that kept them going.

As photographs go, they weren’t much; fuzzy, streaked and with just dark blobs against the white to be interested in. But those dark blobs were living creatures. The men swore to it.

I said, “What the hell, they’ve been talking about creatures skidding along the Everest glaciers for forty years. It’s about time we did something about it.”

Jimmy Robbons (pardon me, James Abram Robbons) was the one who pushed me into that position. He was always nuts on mountain climbing, you see. He was the one who knew all about how the Tibetans wouldn’t gonear Everest because it was the mountain of the gods, he could quote me every mysterious manlike footprint ever reported in the ice 25,000 feet up, he knew by heart every tall story about the spindly whitecreatures, speeding along the crags just over the last heart-breaking camp which the climbers had managed to establish.

It’s good to have one enthusiastic creature of the sort at Planetary Survey headquarters.

The last photographs put bite into his words, though. After all, you might just barely think they were men.

Jimmy said, “Look, boss, the point isn’t that they’re there, the point is that they move fast. Look at that figure. It’s blurred.”

“The camera might have moved.”

“The crag here is sharp enough. And the men swear it was running. Imagine the metabolism it must have to run at that oxygen pressure. Look, boss, would you have believed in deep-sea fish if you’d never heard of them? You have fish which are looking for new niches in environment which they can exploit, so they go deeper and deeper into the abyss until one day they find they can’t return. They’ve adapted so thoroughly they can live only under tons of pressure.”

“Well-”

“Damn it, can’t you reverse the picture? Creatures can be forced up a mountain can’t they? They can learn to stick it out in thinner air and colder temperatures. They can live on moss or on occasional birds, just as the deep-sea fish in the last analysis live on the upper fauna that slowly go filtering down. Then, someday, they find they can’t go down again. I don’t even say they’re men. They can be chamois or mountain goats or badgers or anything.”

I said stubbornly, “The witnesses said they were vaguely manlike, and the reported footprints are certainly manlike.”

“Or bearlike,” said Jimmy. “You can’t tell.”

So that’s when I said, “It’s about time we did something about it.”

Jimmy shrugged and said, “They’ve been trying to climb Mt. Everest for forty years.” And he shook his head.

“For gossake,” I said. “All you mountain climbers are nuts. That’s for sure. You’re not interested in getting to the top. You’re just interested in getting to the top in a certain way. It’s about time we stopped fooling around with picks, ropes, camps and all the paraphernalia of the Gentlemen’s Club that sends suckers up the slopes every five years or so.”

“What are you getting at?”

“They invented the airplane in 1903, you know?”

“You mean fly over Mt. Everest!” He said it the way an English lord would say “Shoot a fox!” or an angler would say, “Use worms!”

“Yes,” I said, “fly over Mt. Everest and let someone down on the top. Why not?”

“He won’t live long. The fellow you let down, I mean.”

“Why not?” I asked again. “You drop supplies and oxygen tanks, and the fellow wears a spacesuit. Naturally.”

It took time to get the Air Force to listen and to agree to send a plane and by that time Jimmy Robbons had swivelled his mind to the point where he volunteered to be the one to land on Everest’s peak. “After all,” he said in half a whisper, “I’d be the first man ever to stand there.”

That’s the beginning of the story. The story itself can be told very simply, and in far fewer words.

The plane waited two weeks during the best part of the year (as far as Everest was concerned, that is) for a siege of only moderately nasty flying weather, then took off.

They made it. The pilot reported by radio to a listening group exactly what the top of Mt. Everest looked like when seen from above and then he described exactly how Jimmy Robbons looked as his parachute got smaller and smaller.

Then another blizzard broke and the plane barely made it back to base and it was another two weeks before the weather was bearable again.

And all that time Jimmy was on the roof of the world by himself and I hated myself for a murderer.

The plane went back up two weeks later to see if they could spot his body. I don’t know what good it would have done if they had, but that’s the human race for you. How many dead in the last war? Who can count that high? But money or anything else is no object to the saving of one life, or even the recovering of one body.

They didn’t find his body, but they did find a smoke signal; curling up in the thin air and whipping away in the gusts. They let down a grapple and Jimmy came up, still in his spacesuit, looking like hell, but definitely alive.

The p.s. to the story involves my visit to the hospital last week to see him. He was recovering very slowly. The doctors said shock, they said exhaustion, but Jimmy’s eyes said a lot more.

I said. “How about it, Jimmy, you haven’t talked to the reporters, you haven’t talked to the government. All right. How about talking to me?”

“I’ve got nothing to say,” he whispered.

“Sure you have,” I said. “You lived on top of Mt. Everest during a two-week blizzard. You didn’t do that by yourself, not with all the supplies we dumped along with you. Who helped you, Jimmie boy?”

I guess he knew there was no use trying to bluff. Or maybe he was anxious to get it off his mind. He said, “They’re intelligent, boss. They compressed air for me. They set up a little power pack to keep me warm. They set up the smoke signal when they spotted the airplane coming back.”

“I see.” I didn’t want to rush him. “It’s like we thought. They’re adapted to Everest life. They can’t come down the slopes.”

“No, they can’t. And we can’t go up the slopes. Even if the weather didn’t stop us, they would!”

“They sound like kindly creatures, so why should they object? They helped you.”

“They have nothing against us. They spoke to me, you know. Telepathy.”

I frowned. “Well, then.”

“But they don’t intend to be interfered with. They’re watching us, boss. They’ve got to. We’ve got atomic power. We’re about to have rocket ships. They’re worried about us. And Everest is the only place they can watch us from!”

I frowned deeper. He was sweating and his hands were shaking.

I said, “Easy, boy. Take it easy. What on Earth are these creatures?”

And he said, “What do you suppose would be so adapted to thin air and subzero cold that Everest would be the only livable place on Earth to them? That’s the whole point. They’re nothing at all on Earth. They’re Martians.”

And that’s it.

#asimov

Image: Tibet – Mount Everest by Göran Höglund (Kartläsarn) is licensed under CC BY 2.0

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