of explosives and blows up the remaining Meks and their ship. It occurs to the now much reduced Terran crew that they have paid a pretty big price in deceased working stiffs to keep this man alive; just what’s in this information capsule worth getting excited about? So they put it in the information capsule reader. It’s the secret of immortality. Sands is quite chuffed. He ought to get a pile for it from the government.
Back on Earth, he wakes naked in a gravityless metal sphere, and learns that the government doesn’t really need the secret of immortality. They’ve had it for 900 years and suppressed it because of its adverse effects on human evolution. Only a few can be trusted with immortality, and they join Earth Intelligence and are sterilized. That happened to his lost Laura; Sands, too, accepts the treatment. Then they tell him that Laura was extensively modified and sent to Mek to become...the agent who gave him the capsule with the secret of immortality, and was shot down in front of him. Fade to black. (“Consciousness went.”)
Now wait a minute. Why did this secret agent disguised as an extraterrestrial summon the person she must have known was her old boyfriend to hand him a useless and superfluous secret to carry on a perilous journey back to an Earth government that already has it and is trying to suppress it? Ring Lardner had a line for it: “‘Shut up,’ he explained.”
There is a recursive motif in this story too. When Sands goes to meet the mistress of disguise, the password is “Null-A” and she answers “Korzybski.” Later on, one of the characters utters the epithet “Great Ghu.” Could the whole thing be a spoof? If so, it’s beyond poker-faced.
The lead novelette in 14 is a horse of a more florid color, “Sheamus” by Martin Jordan. Sheamus lives by himself, except for his ferret, and for all he knows he is the last human surviving. Michael Doonan, who reared him, has disappeared. A Martian describes the ridiculous catastrophe that has befallen the world:
“It’s certain,” Dardanus was saying, “that the cobalt bomb, so incontinently exploded twenty-five years ago in the Pacific Ocean, robbed the planet of its atmosphere for at least thirty minutes. There’s no need for me to recall the causes—superheating of the ionosphere, followed by elevation of the heavier atoms and a partial band of vacuum encircling the globe. It’s possible that at least half the molecules existing at that time reached escape velocity and were lost into outer space....”
Sheamus is an Irishman. We know this because the author tells us and also because Sheamus talks like this:
“Now it’s a woman entire, all white and warm where a man seeks, and enough love in her, would make you sing for all with the taste of one only hour. And so fixed on a man’s comfort, with the table’s ribs boned white by the scrubbing and pots ashine better than beacons. Fine and busy she is, greeting a man with lips so clinging and red, you’d think she’d lain all day idle with wishing, yet there’s a stew on the hob to twitch the stone nose of the Bellacragh itself.”
Sheamus has never actually met a woman, though he has made a clay figure of one (portrayed on Quinn’s cover), which is the only audience for the quoted remarks. Shortly he meets the Martians, who have set up shop on Earth. But these Martians originated on Earth, and have been transformed over 200 years by the thin Martian atmosphere (in Lamarckian fashion, but let’s call it genetic engineering) into a three-gendered species. There are males, females who are really neuter, and Vivippies—short for viviparous—who are sexy but usually dumb. Reproduction is mostly by decanting. Nonetheless males and neuter females continue to marry, for professional reasons. In other futuristic developments, the Martians subsist on food pills, though they chase them with roughage.
When the Martians find Sheamus, a female anthropologist—a Vivippy but of Neuter status, it says—goes to check him out. She travels in a personal conveyance called an Immuny (for Immunity Suit) but is forced to abandon it when Sheamus tosses his ferret inside. Hence she is exposed to Earth’s air, which contains a substance called Aphrophon that tends to restore conventional sexuality, and of course she finds Sheamus the answer to her newly constituted maiden’s prayers. A subplot has them outwitting the Martians’ robot chaperones.
Shortly thereafter, cruising around the local islands, they find Michael Doonan, who never intended to abandon Sheamus but got marooned. The reason Sheamus talks like a stage Irishman is that he was taught by one: Doonan is a former actor who mitigated his forced post-catastrophe retirement by child-rearing according to Synge and Yeats. “You’re the last Irishman,” he tells Sheamus. “And I made you.” And a bit later: “The last Irishman? Maybe the first. Maybe you never really existed before outside dreams.” This prematurely postmodern motif is not elaborated. The Martian female and Sheamus are eventually captured and brought back to the Martians’ dome, where they promote a rebellion and a hole in the dome that exposes the Martians to Earth’s air and leads to a jailbreak of Vivippies. At story’s end, the latter are preparing to scour the Earth for more surviving Earthmen, whom they deem fitter company than the etiolated Martian men.
To what extent this confection was meant as a serious and responsible deployment of genre materials (oh, stop), and to what extent a lampoon—and of exactly what—is impossible to tell. One suspects some lurking agenda related to Irish literary and cultural issues; one might think of Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth, but, one hopes, not for very long. Or maybe he’s just having on the whole of SF. ”Sheamus” is expanded—considerably, by three or four times—from a story in the UK Argosy (January 1954), titled “Sheamus and the Immuny” and labeled that month’s “Science Fiction Choice.” That version is quite rudimentary, starting with the arrival of the Immuny and mainly concerned with the struggle to escape the robot chaperones, with no sign of Michael Doonan or the loftier themes of identity and the like. It is the first of several Jordan appearances in that magazine; he had one other story in Science Fantasy, discussed earlier, and several in Authentic Science Fiction, but was gone from the field after 1955.
The lead story in 15, John Brunner’s “The Talisman,” rolls along very pleasantly, slicker and more assured than either “Sheamus” or “In a Misty Light,” as long as you don’t stop to notice that it doesn’t make any more sense than they do. Sinclair, a struggling professional artist getting by on book jackets and the like, finds a strange-looking egg-shaped piece of bric-a-brac in a junk shop, takes it home, discovers his artist’s block is gone and his book jacket is turning into a masterpiece. He invites Shirley, an art critic he knows, to come look, and she’s deeply impressed. That night he finds a dead man with a terrified expression in his flat, and the talisman gone. By morning he can’t remember what happened (though he is sure something did), but the art critic’s card reminds him.
He calls the police and asks for the inspector who came the previous night. They’ve never heard of Inspector Forster or of Sinclair. Sinclair calls Shirley, who assures him he isn’t crazy. A policeman arrives with a message from Inspector Forster and is puzzled at the account of Sinclair’s call. Shirley recalls the poet Christopher Bacon, first promising, then a genius, and whose work suggests he had the talisman for a while. Might the dead man and the missing talisman imply there were two intruders, one of them frightened to death? Sinclair finds that even without the talisman his artistic gift is still enhanced. He’s painting “alien dream-pictures”; Shirley sees that he has also painted a portrait of Christopher Bacon, whom he’s never met but dreams about.
Off they go see Bacon, who is now in a mental institution, writing things that no one can understand—but they can easily communicate with him. He had the talisman for a year, was thoroughly genius-ified, but can’t convey what he perceives. Sinclair tells him he should stop trying to recapture what he had with the talisman; the talisman has changed him and he can resume being a genius in real time. (Unfortunately Shirley only touched it briefly so she has to stay second-rate.) Exeunt omnes, wondering where and with whom the talisman is now.
Here’s the problem: half the story (the disappearance of the talisman, the dead man, Sinclair’s disappearing-then-returning
