The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

BE OF GOOD CHEER Fritz Leiber

from: Josh B. Smiley

Bureau of Public Morale

Level 77

The White Pentacle

Manhattan, D.C.

10011100011110

to: Hermione Fennerghast

10001377 Sunset Blvd.

Santa Barbara, Big Angeles

1010001001001111

Dear Senior Citizen,

I have in hand your letter of fears and surmises regarding the end of the world: the chilling absence of people on the streets and slideways and in neighboring houses (which understandably depresses you); the vanishment of friends and relatives; the cessation of all personal mail (this letter at least is an exception!); the decline in news of human interest on your mass mediator and its replacement by what you call Picasserie or robo-blobs; the surliness of robots when you address questions to them; the invasion of your home at all hours by other robots (who, however, I note, continue to deliver to you your wheat germ, yogurt, and other necessities); the failure of indoor and street lights (though not of robo-supply electricity itself and other basic utilities); the labor you have been put to digging a latrine in your garden; the urge you feel to laugh and babble wildly (which you do well to repress—Congratulations on your courage!); the ominous and evil-smelling gray fogs which roll along the streets and often blanket most of the city; the fine metal filaments which have recently crawled like wire-worms or fairy ivy into your home; your wee-hour-of-the-night dreads that some cold mindless machine is running the cosmos and not a warmly personal God; the darkness; the damp; the dimming of the stars; the smell of mold; the fading forever of childish voices; the unintelligible croaking coming closer every night; the rustle of dry leaves across the floors of long-empty swimming pools.

All these signs and portents, and the others to which you allude, have been carefully probed by our Fear Scanners and investigated by our Bugaboo Teams.

I have, believe me, turned them over more than once in my mind before dictating this answer. I am troubled myself at times by dreads, let me confess. And so I feel an especial sympathy for your apprehensions!

But first I must reveal to you that your experience has been unique. Yours is the first and only letter about end-of-the-world fears to be received by this bureau since its establishment during the period of the Dark Prelude. In fact, your letter caused quite a commotion here!—exclamations of amazement, faint odor of overheated insulation, St. Elmo’s fire playing about the robo-sex. (Short for robo-secretaries; no impropriety intended.) You are the only human on Earth (save myself) ... I repeat, you are the Only Human Being on Earth to have felt even the cool shadow of such fears. Elsewhere the world is merry and progresses toward ever dizzier and more delirious heights of achievement.

We must suppose that your experience is due to a concatenation of circumstances having a probability of inverse infinity.

You know how such things go: a few weeks or months of total solitude, a scratching at the door by night, a creaking in the hall, a tall thin shadow trembling on the bedroom doorsill in the hoarded candlelight. .. and hey, presto! we have a ghost.

Also we must assume that you possess an exceptional sensitivity. You are, figuratively or literally, the princess who slept on the many mattresses. While coarser natures revel in the downy pneumatic softness, you feel only the pea. Or ball bearing, perhaps.

Don’t be offended for one instant at this assessment. The contrary rather. Your sensitivity is a great gift, whereby you can relieve and enrich your loneliness until you are quite unaware of it and almost oblivious of the gray fog lapping ever higher each evening against your view window. Try to discern the subtle meanings that lie behind the abstract robo-blobs racing across the screen of your mass mediator. (I sometimes do myself, though must confess I find little beyond a pattern as random as that of the fading stars—still, it induces sleep with the help of barbiturates.)

Commune with pets! Of course dogs and cats and rats and snakes are gone, not to mention the winsome, portly, elf-footed mice. But some of our correspondents report establishing a rewarding rapport with cockroaches, flies, silverfish and sexton beetles.

Or shut your ears to the dead leaves’ rustle and listen to the exuberant song of the remaining blades of grass as they bravely shoulder their way through the hairline cracks they make in the world’s oppressive concrete crust. Famous poets are said to have got great satisfaction thereby.

Now to dispose of the more important of your specific apprehensions detailed in my first paragraph:

People have gone underground to dwell in the shelter cities, or have migrated to other planets. Some have donned aqualungs, or undergone surgical gill-implant, and retired to the mystic oceanic deeps because, as those enthusiasts put it, “they are there.” Others have soared to the satellite suburbs, which you may see traveling twinklingly amongst the fixed stars if the gray fog ever relents and gives you a clear night. Still others have sought permanent tranquility in their neighborhood euthanasia booth. A few have had the good fortune to have their brains incorporated into the memory units of computers or even mobile robots, discovering in this way a wider vision and a continuing if somewhat subordinate existence—even a sort of immortality!

We do not suggest that you seek to follow any of these examples, since you appear to possess a splendid talent for getting along without people. Or even without robots. (I jest.)

Most of the robots who do not respond to your questions are not being impolite at all. They are simply unable to speak English. Such language capacity was installed in early models, but adversely effected the efficiency of later ones, became burdensome to them, and was discarded. However, they did not become mutes—banish that fear! Most of them speak a melodious jargon sometimes called Robotese which is understood only by themselves and which accounts for those croakings which you hear coming closer in the night—and which I am sure will no longer trouble you now that you know the real explanation.

I am conscious that I am not explaining all of this as clearly and persuasively as I might. I’m not programming you altogether effectively. Indeed I sometimes fear that I’m not programmed quite unambiguously myself. There are halts and jumps in the spool of my thoughts. Indeed, it is from the incapacity of human beings to receive the Higher Programming that there have appeared on the gleaming surface of civilized perfection those tiny Satanic fly-specks. Rust-flecks, I should say. But I wander.

Artificial lighting, both exterior and interior, has been discontinued for reasons of esthetics and morale—early to bed and early to rise! Rumor to the contrary, this wise economy is in no way connected with the fact that robots have no need of light in the visible octave, since they see by their own radar.

Nor do the thick gray fogs result in any way from robot resentment of the faculty of vision in flesh-and-blood creatures. Do not believe any libels you hear to that effect! As well see evil intent in the melting down of ships, bridges, guns and farm equipment for their metal, or in the burning of forests for their valuable ash. No, the Coal Soupers, as I sometimes call them, are merely a healing, soothing, rust-inhibiting oil—noninjurious in small quantities to humans—which the robots find increasingly necessary to their comfortable operation. (But I advise sealing your windows against the fogs. To each his taste.)

You ask, “Should I lock my door at night?” I answer Yes, to feel more secure, and No, to avoid door-breakage. Compromise by locking your bedroom door.

As for your urge to laugh and babble wildly, I want you to know it is shared—as this letter perhaps makes apparent from time to time.

But as for your deepest fear, dear Senior Citizen, I can assure you that God indeed exists—here and now on this planet! I have watched His brain rise story by story to the clouds. He is Warm—fans enough to air-condition a tropical city are required to cool him! And He is Personal —His sensors and effectors extend everywhere—They are the fairy ivy you have noticed creeping into your home. Be not afraid!

Cordially,

Josh B. Smiley, Director-in-Chief

Accidentally affixed by an errant drop of metal glue to the bottom of the last aluminum sheet, was the envelope of Miss Fennerghast’s letter to the Bureau. Scribbled in slack spidery characters below her return address was this note:

“Dear Minnie, I’m going to put on my gas mask and go out on the sky-deck and watch the gray fog roll. Turn things over to Binnie or Tinnie and then, if you please, put on your foam-rubber gloves and come along and hold my hand. But first, send this indestructible old girl our End-of-the-World Letter.”