Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II by William Tenn
Authors: William Tenn
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Berlin, with the Russians smashing their way to where he lay hidden? If a subordinate had come to him and told him of the development of a weapon that could vaporize the oncoming Russian armies but might also just possibly destroy the entire world, what do you think he would have said?"
Lester rebutted immediately with a previously unheard-of biography of Hitler that practically said in so many words Der Führer would have done no such thing. He added concurring opinions by two French lieutenant generals my extensive reading had failed to mention, and wound up by quoting a former associate head of the atomic energy program whose name and title I knew he had just made up out of the thinnest of air.
At this point I'm afraid I began yelling. Lester yelled back. We continued at a very high pitch until the frequently drunken woman who was the building's resident landlady was attracted by the uproar and walked in through the open doorway to ask us if we possibly had any part of a quart of Scotch that she could borrow.
I left, still yelling over my shoulder. And the moment I opened the door of my apartment and began walking up that long entrance hall, what the French call l'esprit d'escalier ( l'esprit du vestibule? ) came upon me and I thought of what I might have said. And, as I did, I looked about me and realized just how I might dramatize all that I could have and should have said.
Then I went into the apartment proper and sat down at my Remington typewriter and wrote out the dramatization. Because after all, an argument is an argument, but I needed the money to pay the landlady my overdue rent.
Written 1950——Published 1951
THE HOUSE DUTIFUL
To—to be... an unformable, lonely thought groped blindly for a potential fact... need, a need... it was—something... it was—needed... it was needed? Consciousness!
A living creature came with the pride of ownership, the triggering wistfulness for it. Unlike its first darling, this creature had notions that were bizarre and primitive, conceptually agonizing. Painful, painful, painful they were to organize into. But it had purpose again—and, more, it had desire—
Thoughtlessly, lovingly, the immense thing began to flow to the fixed-upon place, twitching awkward experimental shapes upward as it went.
—|—
The back-country Canadian road was obscure even for the biting concentration of the deluxe Caterpillar runabout. Metal treads apologized shrilly as they hit a rock that was too large and too snugly embedded in the mud. The bright yellow car canted steeply to the right and came down level again with a murky splash.
"And I was so happy in the dairy," Esther Sakarian moaned in histrionic recollection as she dug her unpainted, thoroughly trimmed fingernails into the lavender upholstery of the front seat. "I had my own quiet little lab, my neatly labeled samples of milk and cheese from the day's production; at night I could walk home on cement sidewalks or drop into a dry, air-conditioned restaurant or movie. But Philadelphia wasn't good enough for me! No, I had to—"
"Bad storms last night, smooth riding, usually," Paul Marquis muttered on her left. He grimaced his glasses back into correct nose position and concentrated on the difficult visual task of separating possible road from possible marsh.
"I had to come up to the Great Bear Lake where every prospector sneezes and all the men are vile. Adventure I wanted—hah! Well, here I am, using up the last of my girlhood. I spend my days purifying water for a bunch of whisky-soaked nuclear physicists. Every night I ask God: Is this by you adventure?"
Marquis sloughed the runabout around a dwarfed red spruce that grew belligerently in the middle of the damp highway. "Should be there in a minute or two, Es. Forty of the sweetest acres that anybody ever talked the Canadian government into selling. And a little bumpy hill just off the road that's a natural foundation for the Cape Cod cottage Caroline's always talking
Lester rebutted immediately with a previously unheard-of biography of Hitler that practically said in so many words Der Führer would have done no such thing. He added concurring opinions by two French lieutenant generals my extensive reading had failed to mention, and wound up by quoting a former associate head of the atomic energy program whose name and title I knew he had just made up out of the thinnest of air.
At this point I'm afraid I began yelling. Lester yelled back. We continued at a very high pitch until the frequently drunken woman who was the building's resident landlady was attracted by the uproar and walked in through the open doorway to ask us if we possibly had any part of a quart of Scotch that she could borrow.
I left, still yelling over my shoulder. And the moment I opened the door of my apartment and began walking up that long entrance hall, what the French call l'esprit d'escalier ( l'esprit du vestibule? ) came upon me and I thought of what I might have said. And, as I did, I looked about me and realized just how I might dramatize all that I could have and should have said.
Then I went into the apartment proper and sat down at my Remington typewriter and wrote out the dramatization. Because after all, an argument is an argument, but I needed the money to pay the landlady my overdue rent.
Written 1950——Published 1951
THE HOUSE DUTIFUL
To—to be... an unformable, lonely thought groped blindly for a potential fact... need, a need... it was—something... it was—needed... it was needed? Consciousness!
A living creature came with the pride of ownership, the triggering wistfulness for it. Unlike its first darling, this creature had notions that were bizarre and primitive, conceptually agonizing. Painful, painful, painful they were to organize into. But it had purpose again—and, more, it had desire—
Thoughtlessly, lovingly, the immense thing began to flow to the fixed-upon place, twitching awkward experimental shapes upward as it went.
—|—
The back-country Canadian road was obscure even for the biting concentration of the deluxe Caterpillar runabout. Metal treads apologized shrilly as they hit a rock that was too large and too snugly embedded in the mud. The bright yellow car canted steeply to the right and came down level again with a murky splash.
"And I was so happy in the dairy," Esther Sakarian moaned in histrionic recollection as she dug her unpainted, thoroughly trimmed fingernails into the lavender upholstery of the front seat. "I had my own quiet little lab, my neatly labeled samples of milk and cheese from the day's production; at night I could walk home on cement sidewalks or drop into a dry, air-conditioned restaurant or movie. But Philadelphia wasn't good enough for me! No, I had to—"
"Bad storms last night, smooth riding, usually," Paul Marquis muttered on her left. He grimaced his glasses back into correct nose position and concentrated on the difficult visual task of separating possible road from possible marsh.
"I had to come up to the Great Bear Lake where every prospector sneezes and all the men are vile. Adventure I wanted—hah! Well, here I am, using up the last of my girlhood. I spend my days purifying water for a bunch of whisky-soaked nuclear physicists. Every night I ask God: Is this by you adventure?"
Marquis sloughed the runabout around a dwarfed red spruce that grew belligerently in the middle of the damp highway. "Should be there in a minute or two, Es. Forty of the sweetest acres that anybody ever talked the Canadian government into selling. And a little bumpy hill just off the road that's a natural foundation for the Cape Cod cottage Caroline's always talking
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