Ellison Wonderland

Karl Leus leaped from the thirty-second story of a building in Washington that evening. Nine others died that day. And though I was not ready for that, there was a deadness in me. A feeling of waste and futility and hopelessness. I went back to the Observatory, and tried to drive the memory of what Ithk had said from my mind and my soul. If I had been as deeply perceptive as Leus or any of the other nine, I might have gone immediately. But I am not in their category. They realized the full depth of what it had said, and so perceiving, they had taken their lives. I can understand their doing it.

Portales came to me when he heard about it.

“They just—just killed themselves!” he babbled. I was sick of his petty annoyances. Sick of them, and not even interested any longer in fighting him.

“Yes, they killed themselves,” I answered wearily, staring at the flaming, burning sky from the Observatory catwalk. It always seemed to be night now. Always night—with light.

“But why? Why would they do it?”

I spoke to hear my thoughts. For I knew what was coming. “Because of what the creature said.”

“What it said?”

“What it told us, and what it did not tell us.”

“It spoke to you?”

“To some of us. To Leus and the nine and others. I heard it.”

“But why didn’t I hear it? I was right there!”

I shrugged. He had not heard, that was all.

“Well, what did it say? Tell me,” he demanded.

I turned to him, and looked at him. Would it affect him? No, I rather thought not. And that was good. Good for him, and good for others like him. For without them, Man would cease to exist. I told him.

“The lemmings,” I said. “You know the lemmings. For no reason, for some deep instinctual surging, they follow each other, and periodically throw themselves off the cliffs. They follow one another down to destruction. A racial trait. It was that way with the creature and his people. They came across the mega-galaxies to kill themselves here. To commit mass suicide in our solar system. To burn up in the atmosphere of Mars and Mercury and Venus and Earth, and to die, that’s all. Just to die.”

His face was stunned. I could see he comprehended that. But what did it matter? That was not what had made Leus and the nine kill themselves, that was not what filled me with such a feeling of frustration. The drive of one race was not the drive of another.

“But—but—I don’t underst—”

I cut him off.

“That was what Ithk said.”

“But why did they come here to die?” he asked, confused. “Why here and not some other solar system or galaxy?”

That was what Ithk had said. That was what we had wondered in our minds—damn us for asking—and in its simple way, Ithk had answered.

“Because, “ I explained slowly, softly, “this is the end of the Universe.”

His face did not register comprehension. I could see it was a concept he could not grasp. That the solar system, Earth’s system, the backyard of Earth to be precise, was the end of the Universe. Like the fiat world over which Columbus would have sailed, into nothingness. This was the end of it all. Out there, in the other direction, lay a known Universe, with an end to it…but they—Ithk’s people—ruled it. It was theirs, and would always be theirs. For they had racial memory burnt into each embryo child born to their race, so they would never stagnate. After every lemming race, a new generation was born, that would live for thousands of years, and advance. They would go on till they came here to flame out in our atmosphere. But they would rule what they had while they had it.

So to us, to the driving, unquenchably curious, seeking and roaming Earthman, whose life was tied up with wanting to know, needing to know, there was nothing left. Ashes. The dust of our own system. And after that, nothing.

We were at a dead end. There could be no wandering among the stars. It was not that we couldn’t go. We could. But we would be tolerated. It was their Universe, and this, our Earth, was the dead end.

Ithk had not known what it was doing when it said that to us. It had meant no evil, but it had doomed some of us. Those of us who dreamed. Those of us who wanted more than what Portales wanted.

I turned away from him and looked up.

The sky was burning.

I held very tightly to the bottle of sleeping tablets in my pocket. So much light up there.

Mealtime

Bluntly put, the following story has truly been used. I am always astounded at writers who sell and re- sell and re-re- sell their stories or books, wringing every last possible penny from them. But in the case of the following epic, I can truly say I take backseat to no man. The idea occurred to me in my first days at Ohio State University, back in the early Fifties. I wrote it and it was published in the Ohio State Sundial, the humor magazine I later edited. When I got to New York in 1956, I submitted the idea as story-continuity to EC Publications, now the producers of Mad magazine, then the producers of such goodies as Weird Science-Fantasy comics, in which this story appeared as “Upheaval.” Between these two appearances, however, the story showed up in the amateur science fiction magazine I published, Dimensions. In that incarnation it was called “Green Odyssey.” Eventually, I wrote it as a full short story and it appeared in Bill Hamling’s short-lived Space Travel Magazine. No two of these setting-downs were alike, incidentally. Then the radio performance rights were purchased by an outfit that was planning to revive Dimension X for Sunday listening on the Mutual Broadcasting System. It never got off the ground, but I had been