Ellison Wonderland

“I’ll run through it, from the top: I give you the ability to keep eating, as long as you live, and if they don’t gas you, then you get immortality on top of it. In exchange for which all I take is your imagination.”

“Where’s the pen to sign the paper?” Hirt asked, now anxious.

“Paper, pen? Oh, man, all them modern fantasy writers been corrupting the legend again. We do it in blood; good old legal tender. No contract, just a mix of the haemoglobin, tom.”

Hirt was surprised.

“What type are you, man, so I’ll know if I have to ring in a notary with all-purpose corpuscles? CP A, Corpuscle Public Accountant.”

Hirt tried to remember, then said, “I’m type ‘O’.”

“Nutsville,” Skidoop caroled, and bit a hole in his wrist. The blood began spurting. He offered a finger to Hirt, and the condemned man used the sharp fingernail to start a scratch on his own forearm. They mixed. “Done!” Skidoop chortled, grabbed the imagination in both hands, wrenched it loose, and split the scene. Maxim Hirt sat on the bunk, and knew an would be well. He had it knocked.

Which was true. Because when they brought him his meal, he ate and ate and ate and ate.

And did not stop eating; so they commuted his sentence to life, because you can’t strap a man in the gas chamber who hasn’t finished his last meal.

Which would not have been such a bad way to finish out a life, sitting there eating an day and night, except that when Skidoop took Hirt’s imagination, he took Hirt’s ability to think of anything else but baked beans to eat. So the last meal consisted of baked beans, plate by plate by plate by…

Obviously, it was a deal from the bottom.

In many ways, it was a fate worse than death.

The Wind Beyond the Mountains

Since I was thirteen, to greater or lesser degree, I have been a rootless person. Oh, there have been homes and residences and all the trappings of being settled, but aside from my days in New York, which always seem to me to be the best days, I’ve wandered. Up and down and back across the United States, wherever the vagaries of life have carried me with my writing, military service, marriage, job opportunities or just plain chance. And from these peregrinations has come the belief that not only is home where the heart is, but the heart is undeniably where the home is. I was also prompted by this obscure notion, to write

The Wind Beyond the Mountains

It is down in the Book of the Ancestors with truth. The Ruskind know but one home. Ruska is home, for home shall be where the heart is. The stars are not for the Ruskind, for they know, too, that the heart is where the home is.

Wummel saw the shining thing come down. He watched it from the stand of gnarl-bushes as the pointed thing flamed across the sky, streaking toward the red sun. It flashed brightly above the land, and disappeared quickly. Wummel found himself shaking.

His pointed face quivered, and his split tongue slipped in and out of his mouth nervously. It had not been a bird, that was obvious. Nor a beast of the land. Whatever it had been, it stirred a strange sensation in him.

As though he were seeing a long-missing brother returning from across the mountain passes, coming home finally, after a long, long absence. But that could not be: this metal thing he had never seen before. Yet he could not shake the feeling.

Wummel, for the first time in a life filled with fears, was terribly frightened.

He crouched down, his triply-jointed legs crossing under him. He crouched down to watch the sky. If the flaming thing was to make another appearance, he would be there when it did.

He had not long to wait. The sun had slipped across the pale blotch of grey sky, when the thing appeared again. The thing dipped as it approached The Forest, and banked down toward the rising yellow-feathertops of the trees. In a few moments Wummel saw the falling thing point its sharp beak into the trees, and disappear through the foliage.

A muted roaring came to Wummel’s horn-bell ears, and a ropey pillar of angry smoke twisted up into the late afternoon sky.

The roaring grew in violence, then suddenly ceased. The semi-silence of The Forest dropped down again, as though it had never been shattered.

The swip-swip-swip of the forest crickets resumed. The cough and growl of the land beasts took up where it had died. A yellow-striped prowl-cat slipped through the trees at the edge of the clearing. The wind whistled softly in among the yellow feather-leaves, and The Forest looked as it had always looked.

Only Wummel, of all the Ruskind, knew the thing had come, knew The Forest was not as it had always been.

And he turned immediately, scuttling off on digger fingers and triple—jointed legs, to tell the Ruskind. He might have sent the message by thought to the One, who would have told the Ruskind, but—somehow—this message had to be delivered personally. He disappeared through the undergrowth.

In The Forest, there was movement from the thing that had ceased to flame.

“Sellers, dispatch your crew into that section of the forest over there. See if you can find anything of the creatures who built that village.

“Galen, I’d like you to take the flit—be careful now—and check if those mountains we saw are inhabited. Let’s make this a thorough one, boys. It’s the last one before home.”

He fitted the picture of a spaceman. Tall, bronzed from many suns; wide and blocky hands, altogether able hands that commanded with ease.

Eyes blue as the seas over which he had flown, a mouth that spoke sharply, but bore no grudge. A man with lines of character in his face; not a blank mold of a face that smiled and made sounds, but a face that had been the home of sadness and hard times. A man who had grown tired but never beaten, searching for an ideal.

“This survey has to be really good, Charlie,” the Captain said to his First. “There’s talk back home about too much for appropriations for the Mapping Command. They may swallow us into the mercantile guild