The 41st Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack by P. Schuyler Miller

Author:P. Schuyler Miller [Miller, P. Schuyler]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: megapack;science fiction;fantasy;short stories;classic
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2018-03-11T21:00:00+00:00

AS NEVER WAS

Originally published in Astounding, January 1944.

Have you ever dreamed of murder?

Have you ever set your elbows on the desk and let your head slump down on your hands, and closed your eyes, and dreamed of how it would feel to drive a knife up to the hilt in a scrawny, wrinkled throat, and twist it until the thin old blood begins to slime your fingers and drip from your wrist—until the piercing old eyes roll back and close, and the skinny old legs crumple and sag? Have you felt the blood pounding in your own temples, and savage satisfaction swarming up in you as you stare down on the hideous, sprawling thing you have destroyed?

And then have you opened your eyes and looked down at the mass of scribbled papers, and the meticulously drawn sectional charts, and the trait tables and correlation diagrams and all the other dead, dry details that make up your life’s work? And picked up your pen and started making more scribbles on the papers and more checks on the charts and more little colored dots on the scattergrams, just as you’ve been doing three days out of every five since you were old enough to start the career for which you’d been tested and picked and trained?

Maybe I should go to a clinic and let the psychotherapists feed vitamins to my personality. Maybe I should go to a religious center and let the licensed clergy try to put this fear of Humanity into my reputed soul. Maybe I should go to a pleasure palace and let them mix me up an emotional hooker to jar the megrims out of my disposition, or go down and apply for a permit to wed and set about begetting another generation of archeologists who will grow up to be just as tired and bored and murderous as their illustrious father.

Night after night and day after day I dream of what might have happened that day in the laboratory if I had picked up the knife and slit the gullet of the man who had just injected the time-steam concept into the quietly maturing science of human archeology. If I could have seen ahead—If I could have guessed what would happen to all the romantic visions he had worked so hard to inspire in me—Why should I dream? I was a child then; I had no way of looking ahead; the knife was just another knife. And I think if he had known—if he had been able to see ahead and watch the science to which he had devoted his every waking moment for a long lifetime degenerate into a variety of three-dimensional bookkeeping—he’d have cut his own heart out and offered it to me in apology.

He was a great old man. He was my grandfather.

You’ve seen the knife. Everyone has, I guess. I was the first, after him, ever to see it, and I was about ten years old. I was sitting in a chair in his laboratory, waiting for him to come back.

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