His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction

He warned me outside the patient's room that I'd better keep my mouth shut the least little thing could send her off into one of her spasms. We went in.

The woman was knitting, her eye on a soapie screen. She turned to us—

not bad looking—and said to Caldicott: "Darling—you're …back!" Just like that. Then she registered alarm, apprehension and curiosity and said, batting her eyes at me: "But—won't you …introduce me?"

It was hard to keep from looking around for the mike and the console.

I've played and seen that situation a thousand times and now I was meeting it in real life!

"This is my associate," said Caldicott ambiguously. He snapped off the soapie just as Vera Venable, the Alienist's niece, was pleading with Professor Sykes not to fire her uncle from the clinic staff.

"Turn it on!" she screamed. "You've left poor Vera hanging in the ether!

Call her back! Don't leave her out there!"

Caldicott resignedly turned the soapie back on, and the woman said, arching her brows: "Why—thank you, darling! That was …very sweet!"

Running the last two words together and simultaneously lowering her eyes with a shy little smile. The line was another oldie, used several times a day to cover everything from passing an ashtray to a diamond ring.

We left and went to the hospital refectory.

The refectory soapie screen was on, of course, and I was alarmed to find I was alarmed at the number of people who were watching it. Caldicott read my expression, and gave a sour grin.

"She's the first," he said simply.

"Go to Dachau! I don't believe it!"

"You will soon. I tell you, she's the first. There are going to be more—

and more—and more."

"Consider: as long ago as the twentieth century there were housewives who never differentiated between real persons and the audio-performers whom they listened to daily. They worried with them, laughed with them, discussed them as though they were absent neighbors. With the slow development of the additional circuits—video, oleo, full-color and tactile for those who like it—the effect was magnified. With the Krebski Formula of the last century, which related the numerical quantities of music to the numerical quantities of the electroencephalogram curves produced by the music, the effect was perfected.

"The housewife of today, frankly, has a soft touch. She dusts, washes dishes, waxes floors and so on by tapping buttons. With her spare time she watches the soapie screen, and she has a lot of spare time. I've drawn a graph—"

He took out a sheet of paper and smoothed it carefully. I don't pretend to understand such things; I'm a consolist, not a tube-jockey, and I told him so.

"But look," he urged. "Here's the abscissa meaning log-log of number of Caldicott Syndrome cases at one time'—"

"Caldicott Syndrome?"

"That's what I call it," he said modestly. "And this red circle indicates where we stand on the time-axis now. You see the rise—"

I finally looked and laughed at what I saw. "You really think," I said,

"that the saturation point's been reached?"

"I predicted it a year ago," he said solemnly. "I was actually waiting for the case you just saw to turn up. I believe that there will be five hundred cases tomorrow, two thousand cases the next day, and so on.

Pfannkuchen's studies in mass hysteria—"

I got up. "If you're right," I said, "I'll be the first man to run out and join the wild-men in the Utah Reserve. But, Caldicott, I think you're all wet.

That woman upstairs is weak-minded and that's all there is to it. I work with the soapies; I can't believe that any normal person, like my wife, say, could be knocked off the trolley by them. I've got to go now; I'll be seeing you around."

I left and took a flit for Linden, where I live. Pfannkuchen's studies in mass hysteria, my eye!

But my wife met me at the door and said, with surprise, delight and apprehension: "Darling—you're …back!"

Would you pass me some more of that beef stuff?

The Goodly Creatures

[F&SF December, 1952]

How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is!
O brave new world,
That has such people in 't!

Miranda in The Tempest

FARWELL suddenly realized that his fingers had been trembling all morning, with a hair-fine vibration that he couldn't control. He looked at them in amazement and rested them on the keys of his typewriter.

The tremor stopped and Farwell told himself to ignore it; then it would go away. The copy in the typewriter said: Kumfyseets—and in the upper left-hand corner and under it:—hailed by veteran spacemen as the greatest advance in personal comfort and safety on the spaceways since—