Nebula Awards Showcase 2010 (28 page)

A minute later when I slow down to examine house numbers, he says, “This is crazy. She might not even be home. She was a long time ago. She won’t even remember me. What’s the point? What are you going to do, make a scene, pick a fight with her?”

I continue to ignore him. At her house I pull into the driveway and get out holding the book. He is close behind me all the way. If she isn’t home, I’ll sit in the car and read and wait for her, I think grimly, but she answers the doorbell. A small boy on a tricycle is by her side, and she is fifteen pounds overweight.

“Sheila?”

She gasps, recognizing me, and her face pales. “What do you want?” she whispers.

“I’m cleaning out the house and I came across this. I was in the neighborhood and decided to drop it off.” I hand the book to her.

“Wow! She’s turned into a tub,” Harry says at my side. Sheila doesn’t even glance in his direction.

In the car again, I say, “One down, eleven to go.” Harry lets out a ghostly type of moan, and tries to grasp my purse. He’s in the passenger seat with my purse on the same seat, where his crotch would be if he had any substance; he is looking at the purse cross-eyed as he makes a quick snatching grab, draws his hand back and tries with the other one. I start to drive.

Back at home, I make myself an omelette and salad and he practices. “It’s like having a muscle that you can’t find exactly,” he says. “Like wriggling your ears. I’ll get it,” he adds confidently. I’m very afraid that he will.

I plot out the following day, using a map, listing the women in the order of proximity, the closest ones on to the most distant. I had all day Saturday, when they might be home, and if not, then Sunday, on into the next week or however long it would take. I would track them down at their offices or schools or wherever they spent their time and see each one, give each one the opportunity to see Harry and, I hope, claim him.

And if none of them claims him? No answer follows the question.

 

I don’t bother with an excuse again. When Hilary Winstead comes to the door, I say, “I’m Lori Thurman. I was cleaning out Harry’s office and I came across your pictures. I burned them. I just wanted you to know.”

Behind me Harry says, “She makes a mean martini.”

Hilary Winstead stares at me, moistens her lips, and then slams the door.

Bette Hackman is tall and willowy, very beautiful. Harry sighs when she says, “What do you mean? I paid for those pictures. He swore that was all he had. That bastard!”

On southeast Burnside I detour a few blocks and park at the cemetery. A few people are around, none paying any attention to us as I walk to the new grave of Harry Thurman.

“That’s where you planted me?”

“That’s where you belong. Get in there and go back to sleep.”

He shudders and drifts backward. “You’re out of your mind.”

I guess I am. What I was hoping was that a guy with a long beard and a staff, or a cherub, or even a beautiful woman would cry out, “Harry! We’ve been looking everywhere for you. Come along now.” We return to the car and I drive on.

No one answers the doorbell at Wanda Sorenson’s house.

Diane Shuster says, “I could care less.”

“Shrewd, but nearly illiterate,” Harry comments. “Great ass, though.”

I am ready to give it up. No one sees him, or notices a cold breeze, or anything else out of the ordinary.

Then he says, “How it goes is they’d call for help with the new computer, or new software, and I’d go in and find things screwed up royally. So I’d fool around and get things working, and accidentally log on to a porn site, something like that, and then . . . One thing leads to another.”

I grit my teeth and look at the next name: Sonia Welch. He nods when I turn onto River Drive. “Ah, wait until you see that house! Gorgeous place! Sonia broke it off before I was ready, actually. Afraid her old man would find out.”

He sounds regretful when he says, “That was part of it, of course, the fear of discovery, a mad husband with a gun, something like that. A little added spice.”

My lips are clamped so hard they hurt. I am determined to ignore him until he is so bored he’ll find a way to go somewhere else. He’ll find someone who knows the rules.

“That’s it,” Harry says, pointing to a tall gray house nearly hidden behind shrubbery. It is beautiful, with bay windows, stained-glass panels, professional landscaping . . . A heavyset man in shorts, holding a can of varnish, is touching up a motorboat in the driveway.

“Hello,” I say, getting out of the car. “I’m looking for Sonia. Is she home?”

The man looks me over as if I am up for auction.

“The husband. He’s a shrink,” Harry says. “Would you tell him your innermost secrets?”

I have to admit, although silently, that I would not. His eyes are as cold and fathomless as black ice.

“She’s back on the terrace,” Welch says. “Go on around.” He motions toward a walkway and returns to his boat repair.

I walk under a lattice covered with roses in bloom. The fragrance is intoxicating. I see the woman before I step onto the terrace; she is dozing apparently, with a magazine over her face against the late afternoon sun.

“Sonia?” I say.

With a languid motion she moves the magazine and looks around over her shoulder. Then she jumps up and jams both hands over her mouth, staring wide-eyed, not at me, but at my side, at Harry.

“No,” she cries then, and begins to back up, nearly falls over the chaise behind her, catches her balance, and continues to back up around a glass-topped table, staring, paler than death.

“I didn’t mean to, Harry,” she whispers. “It was an accident. Don’t come closer. Stay back! Please, don’t come closer!”

Harry is flickering wildly, moving toward her like a cloud fired with lightning. Then he goes out. Sonia keeps backing up.

“Harry, stay away! I had to do it. I told you he was suspicious! I told you to stay away! I had to do it! You should have stayed away! Don’t touch me! Oh, God, don’t touch me!”

I don’t think she even saw me. I turn and retrace my steps under the roses and out to the car.

“Wasn’t she there?” Welch asks, looking up.

“I think she’s sleeping. I didn’t want to disturb her. I just wanted to thank her for a favor she did me. It isn’t important.”

I knew there were rules, I tell myself, driving away. There are always rules.

I
t all started with a chance remark, one of those life-changing comments that you read about all the time, but don’t ever think will happen to you.

It was January 1970, in the middle of my first year at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. I had been hired in 1969 fresh out of graduate school and taught my first class that summer. UWGB had just opened as the experimental and innovative campus of the University of Wisconsin and it featured a lot of team teaching and specialized courses.

One of those courses was on “Futurism,” a movement given a great boost by the publication of Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s
Future Shock
in 1968. It was a January interim four-week, team-taught course and one of the instructors was Professor Patricia Warrick, with whom I shared a small office. Pat later wrote what is still one of the best books on the work of Philip K. Dick,
Mind in Motion
(1987), and served as a president of the Science Fiction Research Association.

She asked me to give a lecture on “The Future of Politics,” which I did. On the way out the door I noticed that the students had copies of Dick Allen’s
Science Fiction: The Future
on their desks, one of the first, if not the first, science fiction anthology designed for classroom use. I immediately bragged that I had read everything ever written about science fiction and that I would be happy to come back the following week and talk about SF. I really didn’t think it was bragging, because in January 1970, science fiction still hadn’t really arrived as a reputable subject for study—I owned and had read books by Damon Knight, James Blish, Sam Moskowitz, and a few others—they were all I could find up until that time.

So I came back the next week with some favorite books, and talked to the class about what I knew of the history of then modern science fiction. And going out the door, Pat turns to me and asks, “Have you ever thought about combining your interest in political science with your interest in science fiction?” And a lightbulb went on that resulted in our putting together a proposal for what became
Political Science Fiction: An Introductory Reader
, which we eventually sold to Prentice-Hall. The idea was to assemble a book of stories that used science fiction to illustrate principles in political science and to parallel as closely as possible the structure of basic introduction to political science textbooks.

One of my responsibilities was to clear the permissions, a process I knew little about. I did know enough to understand that you had to pay people to reprint their stories and I set about finding addresses. This was a fateful endeavor. I wanted to use two stories by Isaac Asimov: “Evidence,” in which one candidate for political office claims that his opponent is really a robot, and “Franchise,” which examines voting in the future.

I found an address for Isaac and wrote him a letter asking his permission and offering him (I think) $150 per story for nonexclusive volume rights. Within what seemed like a few minutes he wrote back to me, and here I’m paraphrasing very closely:

“Whatsoever” sounded pretty serious, but I had several anthologies edited by that Martin Greenberg and I knew that Gnome Press was one of the specialty publishers that started up after World War II to publish the stories and serialized novels that the “regular” publishing houses were not interested in.

I also knew that Gnome Press was the original publisher of Isaac’s
Foundation Trilogy
and his
I, Robot
collection. What I didn’t know at the time was that that Martin Greenberg was, shall we say, “financially challenged,” and that Isaac did not see any income from the Gnome Press editions of his most famous works. Doubleday eventually retrieved the rights for him and published the books to enormous success.

I still don’t understand what possessed me, but I wrote Dr. Asimov the following (again closely paraphrased) letter:

After more silly but accurate detail, I signed the letter over my typed name

I quickly got a letter back from Isaac with the greeting, “Dear Marty the Other,” and granting me permission to reprint the two stories.

Political Science Fiction
didn’t do all that well, but Pat and I, and then I with others, continued to do many more textbook anthologies, all of which contained stories by Isaac which involved permission requests from me to him that ended with “Marty the Other” and responses from him that started “Dear Marty the Other.” The whole thing was a tremendous icebreaker and made what followed possible.

Later in 1978, it dawned on me to see if I could persuade Isaac to coedit an anthology, and I suggested what would become
100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories
to him because he had edited the excellent
Fifty Short Science Fiction Tales
with the late Groff Conklin, and because I knew he loved the short-short form, with its punch or pun endings. I said we could double the number and not repeat any stories and he loved the idea. We enjoyed working together so much that we edited other anthologies, and the next time I was in New York visiting family he invited me to dinner. Isaac, Janet, and I went to Shun Lee near his penthouse apartment and had a wonderful time.

This began a friendship that became so deep that we talked virtually every night for the last twelve years of his life.

Isaac opened doors for me that made my career in trade publishing possible, and was the best friend a man could have. At the urging of Lester del Rey, I used Martin Harry Greenberg on my books to differentiate myself from the other guy, whom I finally met at the Baltimore Worldcon in 1998.

These first two permission requests have led to our clearing over twenty-one thousand permissions for our books and novels—and I owe it all to a chance remark and to parents who named me Martin and not Marvin or Melvin.