“Mr. Barone!” I shouted. “That will be enough!”
“Not yet, professor!”
He waved and clutched as if catching a butterfly. When he opened his hands, a swarm of bats flew out, careening wildly about the lecture hall. Coeds screamed and dove under their chairs.
Barone had to be stopped. I took a deep breath and shouted, “Stop!”
The room hushed suddenly; everyone froze. Only the whispering flight of the bats and the naked girl’s whimpering broke the heavy silence. All eyes were on me, even Barone’s. This had to be good.
I pointed at the lectern and brought it down gently. A quick gesture returned the girl’s clothes.
I clasped my hands together and concentrated. I opened them and released the falcons. They swept the air clean of bats and returned to my hand, obediently vanishing.
The class was a single open mouth. It was time to break the tension.
“Are there any other questions?”
The students shook their heads numbly. Only Barone remained motionless.
“Very well. Read page three through seventeen for next time. Do all problems on page seventeen. That will be all for today.”
The class filed out quietly. Barone, the last to leave, hesitated by the rear doors of the lecture hall. He turned and looked back. We studied each other for several seconds. Then, as if making a decision, he nodded grimly. He flashed me a smile and walked out humming.
I let out my breath and gathered my notes. As I left the lecture hall, I glanced at my watch. 11:30.
Maybe I can catch the 1:15 bus.
ESP stories, which had (comparatively) disappeared from the magazines for two or three years—perhaps in reaction against the played-out “psionics,” or mechanized-ESP, fad of the preceding years—seem to be edging back in again. One of the most promising of 1965’s first novels was Phyllis Gotlieb’s Sunburst (Gold Medal), a thoughtful and effective book about a group of mutation-affected children in a midwestern town. And a bright new first story in If, “Simon Says,” by Lawrence S. Todd, is pure—if funny— psionics.
But most of the new stories are a bit different: more exploratory than assertive, more concerned with the familiar individual borderline possibilities than with the superman problems implicit in the sudden emergence of clearly delineated “powers,” they tend to avoid the tags (ESP, psi, telepathy, telekinesis, etc.) as well as the specific patterns of perception defined by the old labels. John Phillifent’s “Finnegan’s Knack” (Analog) is about a “hunchy” man. Hal Moore’s extraordinary first story, “Sea Bright” (to be included in the F&SF “Best”), contains a child who might be a sister to Alistair Bevan’s “Susan” (coming up next), from the British magazine Science fantasy.
Last year I reported here that Ted Cornell, longtime editor of New Worlds and Science Fantasy, had retired from the job. The magazines were taken over by the publishers of Compact Books (Roberts & Vinter, London); Michael Moorcock became editor of New Worlds, and Science Fantasy came under the editorship of a man every bit as romantic and rococo as his name: Kyril Bonfiglioli.
Bon (or Bonfig, to his more energetic friends) lives in a Victorian mansion in Oxford, furnished largely with objets d’art en route from their former homes to his art gallery and curio shop. (When I was there, much of the furnishing consisted of—or was hidden by— endless glass cases of stuffed birds—large ones.) Proprietor of a flourishing Oxford bookshop, as well as the Bonfiglioli Art Gallery, Bon is a lecturer on medieval art for the University, an occasional writer, dilettante of all the arts, and way-back science-fiction fan. A Balliol College man with an incredible—but oddly pleasant— toff accent, he drives a Rolls, complete with automatic record player.
In a year and a half of Bon’s erratic but intense guidance the magazine has changed its character to the point where it has now also changed its name: As of March, 1966, it became Impulse. In the less than two years between the changes, at least a dozen writers worthy of notice made their debut in its pages. Four of them are represented in this Annual; also notable in 1965 were Ernest Hill (particularly “Joik”), Roger Jones (“The Island,” a first story), Pamela Adams, Patricia Hocknell, Pippin Graham, and B. N. Ball.
Keith Roberts, Bonfiglioli’s big discovery the previous year (and probably the most notable of all the very new British writers, so far), is now assistant editor of Impulse.
All I know about Alistair Bevan is that he is a young man in his early thirties, and a “professional and commercial artist by trade”— which makes it seem somehow unfair that he should also have written four stories I considered at least briefly for inclusion here—one of which, “The Madman,” almost edged “Susan” out.
SUSAN
ALISTAIR BEVAN
Summer and winter the chemmy lab had a smell all its own, a sharp half-sweet nuance like the scent of dust magnified many times. It came from the storage shelves to the left of the door where bottles of chemicals stood in rows on shelves of dark orange wood. Here were sulphates and thiosulphates, oxides and hydroxides, phosphorus coiled like Devil’s spaghetti in its thick oil, shining miniature slagheaps of iodine. There were other things too, a microscope on loan from Biology next door, a balance, its brasswork shining butter-yellow from its protective case; and a crystal of CuSO4, meridian-bright in its tall vat. The jar in which the crystal hung stood on top of the highest shelf and seemed in itself to be a focus of light; reflections burned deep inside it like elongated turquoise suns.
Susan moved her unusual eyes from the shelves of chemicals, back to Mrs. Williams. The science mistress droned on softly, voice pitched just loud enough to carry to the farthest corners of the lab. From time to time chalk rasped on the board, the lines of symbols grew, white dust fell silently to thicken the drifts along the bottom of the varnished frame. This was the last period of the day and the lights were burning, pooling the floor with yellow, defining the edges of the benches with long waxy reflections, striking spindle-shaped gleams from the rims of beakers and flasks. Through the windows the sky was deepening toward four o’clock blue. Little noises came from the thirty girls; the rasp of a stool leg, the scuff of a foot, an occasional cough. The class was very slightly restless. Autumn term would finish in just under a fortnight; eight whole schooldays and a bit before breaking-up and all the concert-making, report-sealing, desk-tidying excitement still to come. Christmas was already in the air.
The benches ran round three sides of the lab. To the right were more shelves with masses of glassware, testtubes, gas jars, troughs, great seldom-used retorts. In the corner behind was the fume cupboard, bulky and forbidding with its tall newel posts, in the middle of the room the dais and the long blackboards. Susan sat halfway down the center bench, elbows resting on the dark wood, knees together, steepled fingers just touching her top lip. She let her eyes wander again from the face of the mistress to the batswing burner on the bench in front of her. The little flame danced in a deepening web of shadow, its base invisible, its yellow horns quivering and ducking and never quite repeating the same shape twice. Its other less-used name was butterfly burner, and like the Olympic torch it was a symbol, lit at the beginning of a lesson, never extinguished until the end. The flame hovered at the tip of the slim pipe like the bleeder of a tiny furnace where ideas, perhaps, were burned.