The Best Science Fiction Stories of The Year: Third Annual Collection by Lester del Rey (Ed.)

Author:Lester del Rey (Ed.) [Rey, Lester del]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci-Fi Anthology
Publisher: Ace Books
Published: 2016-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

3

This dubious contrivance, all shiny and silver and with two whole piston engines—to keep us going forward so we wouldn’t fall down—flew us to La-Guardia Field outside New York City. The field, like the aeroplane, was sleek and shiny and new and modem. Everything was modern—it was in the air. The modern taxi drove us to the modern city with its modem skyscrapers muraled with the most modem art. The year was 1938 and nothing could go wrong.

We checked into the Plaza and took a tenth-floor suite overlooking Central Park. It was evening and the park lights, glowing over the paths, roads, fields, rocks, ponds, streams, lakes and other structured wildnesses, turned it into a rectangular fairyland. The skyline surrounding the park was civilization surrounding and oppressing imagination, keeping it behind high walls and ordering its ways. This is known as interpretive sightseeing.

Diana had a lot of things she wanted to do. She wanted to see a play and a movie and a zoo and an ocean liner and a war and a soap opera and a rocket leaving for the moon.

“Everything but the rocket,” I told her. “Your timing’s off by about thirty years. They haven’t even designed the machines to build the machines to build the rocket yet”

We compromised on a visit to the top of the Empire State Building, the closest thing to a trip to the moon that 1938 New York could provide.

“This is all real, isn’t it?” Diana asked as we wandered around the guard rail, peering at Bronx tenements and Jersey slums.

“In a sense,” I said.

“I mean the buildings are buildings, not sets, and the streets are streets and the river is a river and the ships are ships.”

“And the people are people,” I agreed. “The original had eight million, I believe. One of the three largest cities of the time. That’s a lot of people to stuff into a small area and move around by automobile and subway.”

She nodded. “How many people are here now— residents, I mean?”

“I don’t know,” I told her. “I doubt if they have the full original millions.”

“Still,” she said seriously, “it would be fair to say that there are a great many.”

“That would be fair,” I agreed.

“Why are they here?”

“It’s getting chilly,” I said, buttoning the two top buttons on my coat. “Let’s go eat dinner.”

“How can we justify bilking so many people out of their lives—out of whatever value their lives might have—by making them live in an artificial past?”

“How do their lives have any less value here than in realtime?” I asked in my best Socratic manner. “Suppose you were an inventor,” Diana hypothesized. “How would you feel to discover that you had reinvented the wheel, or the typer; or the bloaterjet?” “I’d never know it was a reinvention,” I said.

“But it would be. And you would have been cheated out of whatever good and new and beautiful you could have invented in realtime.”

“I doubt Anno Domini encourages invention,” I said.

“Worse! Where shall we eat dinner?”

We took a Domino Cab to where Glenn Miller and

his band were providing the dinner music.

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