Venus on the Half-Shell (30 page)

Simon blushed. Gviirl snickered. Bingo broke into huge laughter and slapped his front thighs. The laughter became a wheezing and a choking, and Gviirl had to slap him on his back and pour some beer down his throat.

Bingo wiped away the tears and said, “I was only kidding, son. The truth was, we were called back before I could build any bases there. The reason for that is this. We built the giant computer and had been feeding all the data needed into it. It took a couple of billion years to do this and for the computer to digest the data. Then it began feeding out the answers. There wasn’t any reason for us to continue surveying after that. All we had to do was to ask the computer and it would tell us what we’d find before we studied a place. So all the Clerun-Gowph packed up and went home.”

“I don’t understand,” Simon said.

“Well, it’s this way, son. I’ve known for three billion years that a repulsive-looking but pathetic banjo-playing biped named Simon Wagstaff would appear before me exactly at 10:32
A.M.
, April 1, 8,120,006,000
A.C.
, Earth chronology.
A.C.
means After Creation. The biped would ask me some questions, and I’d give him the answers.”

“How could you know that?” Simon said.

“It’s no big deal,” Bingo said. “Once the universe is set up in a particular structure, everything from then on proceeds predictably. It’s like rolling a bowling ball down the return trough.”

“I think I will sit down,” Simon said. “I’ll need a pillow, too, though. Thank you, Gviirl. But, Your Ancientship, what about Chance?”

“No such thing. What seems Chance is merely ignorance on the part of the beholder. If he knew enough, he’d see that things could not have happened otherwise.”

“But I still don’t understand,” Simon said.

“You’re a little slow on the mental trigger, son,” Bingo said. “Here, have another beer. You look pale. I told you that, until the computer started working, we proceeded like everybody else. Blind with ignorance. But once the predictions started coming in, we knew not only all that had happened but what would happen. I could tell you the exact moment I’m going to die. But I won’t because I don’t know it myself. I prefer to remain ignorant. It’s no fun knowing everything. Old It found that out Itself.”

“Could I have another beer?” Simon said.

“Sure. That’s the ticket. Drink.”

“What about It?” Simon said. “Where did It come from?”

“That’s data that’s not in the computer,” Bingo said. He was silent for a long time and presently his eyelids drooped and he was snoring. Gviirl coughed loudly for a minute, and the eyelids opened. Simon stared up at huge red-veined eyes.

“Where was I? Oh, yes. It may have told me where It came from, what It was doing before It created the universe. But that was a long time ago, and I don’t remember now. That is, if It did indeed say a word about it.

“Anyway, what’s the difference? Knowing that won’t affect what’s going to happen to me, and that’s the only thing I really care about.”

“Damn it then,” Simon said, shaking with despair and indignation, “what will happen to you?”

“Oh, I’ll die, and my embalmed body will be put on display for a few million years. And then it’ll crumble. That will be that. Finis for yours truly. There is no such thing as an afterlife. That I know. That is one thing I remember It telling me.”

He paused and said, “I think.”

“But why, then, did It create us!” Simon cried.

“Look at the universe. Obviously, it was made by a scientist, otherwise it wouldn’t be subject to scientific analysis. Our universe, and all the others It has created, are scientific experiments: It is omniscient. But just to make things interesting, It, being omnipotent, blanked out parts of Its mind. Thus, It won’t know what’s going to happen.

“That’s why, I think, It did not come back after lunch. It erased even the memory of Its creation, and so It didn’t even know It was due back for an important meeting with me. I heard reports that It was seen rolling around town acting somewhat confused. It alone knows where It is now, and perhaps not even It knows. Maybe. Anyway, in whatever universe It is, when this universe collapses into a big ball of fiery energy, It’ll probably drop around and see how things worked out.”

Simon rose from the chair and cried, “But why? Why? Why? Didn’t It know what agony and sorrow It would cause sextillions upon sextillions of living beings to suffer? All for nothing?”

“Yes,” Bingo said.

“But why?” Simon Wagstaff shouted. “Why? Why? Why?”

Old Bingo drank a glass of beer, belched, and spoke.

“Why not?”

Editor’s note:
In the November 1976 issue of
Fantasy and Science Fiction,
it was announced that a group in Portland, Oregon, called The Bellener Street Irregulars were going to publish something called
The Bellener Street Journal.
The journal was to be dedicated to the study of the canine detective, Ralph von Wau Wau.
The Bellener Street Journal
never even saw a first issue, however, due to inexplicable complications within the group.

The following biographical sketch of Jonathan Swift Somers III was written for the journal, and was to be published along with a lost story by Dr. Johann H. Weisstein and a story by Jonathan Swift Somers III entitled, “Jinx.”

Petersburg is a small town in the mid-Illinois county of Menard. It lies in hilly country near the Sangamon River on state route 97. Not far away is New Salem, the reconstructed pioneer village where Abraham Lincoln worked for a while as a postmaster, surveyor and storekeeper. The state capital of Springfield is southeast, a half-hour’s drive or less if traffic is light.

A hilltop cemetery holds two famous people, Anne Rutledge and Edgar Lee Masters. The former (1816-1835) is known only because of the legend, now proven false, that she was Lincoln’s first love, tragically dying before she could marry him. “Bloom forever, O Republic, From the dust of my bosom!”

These words are from the epitaph which Masters wrote for her and are inscribed on her gravestone. Unfortunately, the man who chiseled the epitaph made a typo, driving Masters into a rage. We authors, who have suffered from so many typos, can sympathize with him. However, we have the advantage that we can make sure that reissues contain corrections. There will be no later editions in stone of Anne Rutledge’s epitaph.

Masters (1869-1950) was a poet, novelist and literary critic, known chiefly for his
Spoon River Anthology.
There is a Spoon River area but no town of that name. Masters chose that name to represent an amalgamation of the actual towns of Lewistown and Petersburg, where he spent most of his childhood and early adulthood. Lewistown, also on route 97, is about forty miles from Petersburg but separated by the Illinois River.

The free verse epitaphs of Masters’ best-known work were modeled after
The Greek Anthology
but based on people he’d known. These told the truth behind the flattering or laconic statements on the tombs and gravestones. The departed spoke of their lives as they had really been. Some were happy, productive, even creative and heroic. But most recite chronicles of hypocrisy, misery, misunderstanding, failed dreams, greed, narrow-mindedness, egotism, persecution, madness, connivance, cowardice, stupidity, injustice, sorrow, folly and murder.

In other words, the Spoon River citizens were just like big-city residents.

Among the graves in the cemetery of Petersburg are those of Judge Somers and his son, Jonathan Swift Somers II. Neither has any marker, though the grandson has made arrangements to erect stones above both. Masters has the judge complain that he was a famous Illinois jurist, yet he lies unhonored in his grave while the town drunkard, who is buried by his side, has a large monument. Masters does not explain how this came about.

According to Somers III, his grandson, the judge and his wife were not on the best of terms during the ten years preceding the old man’s death. Somers’ grandmother would give no details, but others provided the information that it was because of an indiscretion committed by the judge in a cathouse in Peoria. (This city is mentioned now and then in the
Spoon River Anthology.)

The judge’s son, Somers II, sided with his father. This caused the mother to forbid her son to enter her house. In 1910 the judge died, and the following year the son and his wife were drowned in the Sangamon during a picnic outing. The widow refused to pay for monuments for either, insisting that she did not have the funds. Her son’s wife was buried in a family plot near New Goshen, Indiana. That Samantha Tincrowdor Somers preferred not to lie with her husband indicates that she also had strong differences with him.

Jonathan Swift Somers III was born in this unhappy atmosphere on January 6, 1910. This is also Sherlock Holmes’ birthdate, which Somers celebrates annually by sending a telegram of congratulations to a certain residence on Baker Street, London.

The forty-three-year-old grandmother took the year-old infant into her house. Though the gravestone incident seems to characterize her as vindictive, she was a very kind and probably too indulgent grandmother to the young Jonathan. Until the age of ten, he had a happy childhood. Even though the Somers’ house was a large gloomy mid-Victorian structure, it was brightened for him by his grandmother and the books he found in the library. A precocious reader, he went through all the lighter volumes before he was eleven. The judge’s philosophical books, Fichte, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, et al, would be mastered by the time he was eighteen.

Despite his intense interest in books, Jonathan played as hard as any youngster. With his schoolmates he roamed the woody hills and swam and fished in the Sangamon. He gave promises of being a notable athlete, beating all his peers in the dashes and the broad jump. Among his many pets were a raven, a raccoon, a fox and a bullsnake.

Then infantile paralysis felled him. Treatment was primitive in those days, but a young physician, son of the Doctor Hill whose epitaph is in the
Anthology,
got him through. Jonathan came back out of the valley of the shadow, only to find that he would be paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life. This knowledge resulted in another paralysis, a mental freezing. His grandmother despaired of his mind for a while, fearing that he had retreated so far into himself he would never come back out. Jonathan himself now recalls little of this period. Apparently, it was so traumatic that even today his conscious mind refuses to touch it.

“It was as if I were embedded in a crystal ball. I could see others around me, but I could not hear or touch them. And the crystal magnified and distorted their faces and figures. I was a human fly in amber, stuck in time, preserved from decay but isolated forever from the main flow of life.”

Amanda Knapp Somers, his grandmother, would not admit that he would never walk again. She told him that he only needed faith in God to overcome his “disability.” That was the one word she used when referring to his paralysis. Disability. She avoided mentioning his legs; they, too, were disabilities.

Amanda Somers had been raised in the Episcopalian sect. She came from an old Virginia family whose fortune had been ruined by the Civil War. Her father had brought his family out to this area shortly after Appomattox. He had intended to stay only a short while with his younger brother, who had settled near Petersburg before the war. Then he meant to push on west, to homestead in northern California. However, he had sickened and died in his brother’s house, leaving a wife, two daughters and a son. The wife died a year later of cholera. The surviving children were adopted by their uncle.

Amanda came into frequent contact with the fundamentalist Baptists and Methodists of this rural community. Though she never formally renounced her membership in the Episcopalian church, she began attending revival meetings. After marrying Jonathan Swift Somers I, she stopped this, since the “respectable” people in Petersburg did not go to such functions. Now, however, with her husband dead and her grandson crippled, she went to every revival and faith healer that came along. She insisted on taking young Jonathan with her, undoubtedly hoping that he would suddenly be “saved,” that a miracle would occur, that he would stand up and walk.

This went on for two years. The child objected strongly to these procedures. The tense emotional atmosphere and the sense of guilt at not being “saved” wore him out. Moreover, he hated being the center of attention at these meetings, and he always felt that he let everybody down when he failed to be “cured.” Somehow, it was his fault, not the faith healer’s, that he could not rid himself of his paralysis.

During this troubling time, several things saved young Jonathan’s reason. One was his ability to get away from the world into his books. The library was large, since it included both his grandfather’s and father’s books. Much of this was too advanced even for his precocity, but there were plenty of adventure and mystery volumes, and even fantasy was not lacking. Moreover, though his grandmother had some narrow-minded ideas about religion, she made no effort to supervise his reading. She gave him freedom in ordering books, and as a result Jonathan had a larger and more varied collection than the Petersburg library.

At this time he came across John Carter of Mars, Tarzan of the Apes, Professor Challenger and Sherlock Holmes. In a short time he had ordered and read all of the works of Burroughs and Doyle. A copy of
Before Adam
led him to Jack London. This writer, in turn, introduced him to something besides fascinating tales of adventure in the frozen north or the hot south seas. He gave young Jonathan his first look into the depths of social and political injustice, into the miseries of “the people of the abyss.”

It was not enough for him to read about far-off exciting places. Unable immediately to get the sequel to
The Gods of Mars,
he wrote his own. This was titled
Dejah Thoris of Barsoom
and was one hundred pages, or about 20,000 words, quite an accomplishment for an eleven-year-old. On reading Burroughs’ sequel,
The Warlord of Mars,
Jonathan decided that he had been out-classed. Years later, however, he used an idea in his story as the basis for
The Ivory Gates of Barsoom,
his first published novel. This was his first John Clayter story. Clayter is, of course, a name composed of the first syllable of Tarzan’s English surname (Clayton) and the last syllable of John Carter’s surname. At the time of this novel, the spaceman John Clayter has not lost his limbs.