Revelations Read online

  REVELATIONS

  Barry N. Malzberg

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

  Welcome to the SF Gateway.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Preface

  Prologue

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Chapter XXXIV

  Chapter XXXV

  Chapter XXXVI

  Chapter XXXVII

  Chapter XXXVIII

  Chapter XXXIX

  Chapter XL

  Chapter XLI

  Chapter XLII

  Chapter XLIII

  Chapter XLIV

  Chapter XLV

  Chapter XLVI

  Website

  Also by Barry N. Malzberg

  Dedication

  Author Bio

  Copyright

  Drowning beneath ice, I see

  Possibility; just

  Breathing would keep me:

  I’d melt it, have my breath.

  I lack

  That animal eye that sees

  Everything, blinks,

  And then opens the camera in sunlight.

  Lovers

  Skate out my face. Effortless

  That scribbling in the close cold; whole

  Bahamas of the blood beneath their coats.

  Trim Bissell: Inside, 1968

  PROLOGUE

  Revelations is a new concept in the media.

  Revelations is a stunning look into ourselves.

  Through the refinement of the interview-format, brought to a new level through the brilliance of its intensity, Americans of all walks of life, great and small, powerful and oppressed, will expose themselves through a series of searing insights, to their utmost depths.

  Revelations, produced and administered by the distinguished Marvin L. Martin, will be the most exciting program of this or any season. We urge you to consult your commitments and time schedules NOW and then communicate with us through the special letterhead number personalized to handle your own account. Time slots in thirty-second, one-minute and two-minute intervals are all available but they are GOING FAST.

  This will be the show of the eighties.

  I

  Gentlemen:

  I write to you at this time in this way, not in any real hope that you will be able to use me on your program but because, finally, there is nowhere left to turn. And did not Marvin Martin himself, at the conclusion of the program not three weeks ago, tell us that “Revelations” was a Court of Last Resort for the American People?

  “Revelations” is the only remaining hope, the only outlet now through which I might be able to tell my story … the only agency to which I can turn with at least the hope of a hearing.

  Let me begin by apologizing for my use of the language which is still sometimes awkward. I come from a technical background and finished only the required courses in college English having, until very recently, no respect for self-expression. Engineers had special courses in English open to them which were largely remedial. I see now how misdirected my life was and have been trying hard to improve my writing for several months but there are still occasional lapses in which I seem illiterate and most of the time I can only strive for a dull, facile style which makes me sound as if I were spelling out the basis for a Manual of Tools. Inside I am eloquent; I ask you to peer through this clumsiness of syntax to see the man within, impaled upon the cross of his need like a butterfly upon a painful nail.

  Let me begin by introducing myself. My name is Walter Monaghan and will make no impression upon you, sadly, although it is a matter of public record that I was the twenty-ninth man on the moon. I was a member of the historic Fifteenth Expedition which in those days received a good deal of coverage from the press even though that coverage, alas, was not what it had been in the happy sixties when the gleaming faces of moon-bound astronauts would leer from newspapers for days and weeks, their wives and noxious children being the subject of many sidebar stories. Those wives! those children! Never has the case been better made for adultery, promiscuity, divorce and flight than by them although the wives never had the chance, of course, to tell Their Side of the Story.

  How loathsome the space program had already become to America by the time of the Fifteenth Expedition! I keep a complete file of all coverage granted us and it was easy to see that by that time the media could barely suppress their revulsion. Now things have become even more terrible; I feel a certain hesitancy in even listing my credentials, I apologize for the program and for myself, gentlemen … but it was the assumption that failed and not the men. The men were trapped within it just as I am trapped within the cave of my very poor writing style. They deserve better. Every one of us deserves better, gentlemen; please remember that. Even Marvin Martin concedes, at the end of every program, that the acts revealed are less terrible than the symptoms. Am I right? Do I understand? Do I glean, so to speak, the message of your program?

  Biographical details. I must stick to the point; the mind wanders and wavers, the mind is not what it used to be, I have a continual impulse to scream behind this sun-bronzed face. Until my recent discharge (involuntary) from the program, I had spent seven years (seven years!) in the employ of the space agency, moving from the moon to a desk job, making way for younger men, worked my way into one of those pointless
liaison jobs which were created for ex-astronauts who got caught in the depression and had nowhere to go but whose continual employment on space flights would have sent senescence speeding out into the dark at seven tottering miles per second. The space agency, one of the most truly monstrous organizations ever enacted by the mad heart of man, does take care of its own. Up to a point. This is not an agency which is truly disloyal and my case against it does not fall on those grounds. I am not a petty complainer.

  (Sometime later, at an interview perhaps, I look forward to telling you what became of the thirtieth man on the moon. Also the thirty-fourth and the forty-ninth, to say nothing of the twenty-first. You will be surprised; these details will alter your entire perspective. Embittered I may be but you should hear some of the other case histories.)

  Eventually—what span of time, what implication this covers!—problems within the agency forced what is referred to as my “discharge.” I had learned a great deal; sitting at a desk unlike parading to the moon gives a man a chance to think and it is possible that I Knew Too Much. Some hint of foreknowledge, a pellet of inference exploded deep within the agency’s bureaucracy and I was fired.

  Fired! Think of this: it was no ordinary discharge; I was let go with a recommendation so subtly unfavorable that I have been unable to obtain civilian employment of almost any sort (I exclude the occupation of short order cook or memo typist) and am now languishing on the very last of the minimal savings I was able to accumulate during my time in the agency. I calculate food expenses; argue with the landlord of these furnished rooms for small concessions in rent, burn papers in the fireplace to hold down heating expenses. (The landlord provides none.) This is not a respectable kind of life for a thirty-three year old ex-astronaut; fortunately, my wife, who abandoned me without forwarding address, has made no demands for severance. My wife, although a nice person in many ways, never contributed to the household economically although the contraception she insisted upon using was so stunningly effective that I can only now bless her. Despite the battery of equipment she would take to the bed, making it look sometimes like a small trench during close combat. As you see, I am not unappreciative of her.

  I am a tortured man. Monaghan is a tortured man. My prose, elevated and depressed by turns, perceptive and imperceptive, obsessed and detached, a jumble of the highest rhetoric and the low, is good indication of this state. So is my typing which I can see is rather bizarre even for this old machine. I am haunted now all of the time by dim thrashings within the reservoirs of guilt; now my conscience itself, sighing familiarly, begs to tell all. “Tell all, Monaghan, let the poisons out!” my conscience (an old enemy) shrieks and I am willing, I am willing. The corruption of the agency; its madness and the things that it forces people to do must be known by “the public.” When “the public” finally understands this there will be an explosion and scandal utterly unlike any other in the history of this unhappy country. I have staggered into an uneasy populism, as you see (I believe in The People, their common sense, their shrewd, suspicious wisdom); also, I do not believe that this can go on forever. The agency cannot get away with it.

  (The secret of the agency has not been revealed to date—I hasten to answer your inevitable question—because those who know it either profit by that knowledge or like myself until recently are incapable of speech.)

  A brief and embarrassed admission. In recent weeks I have tried to interest some of the following in my story: publishers, lawyers, agents, weekly newsmagazines, veteran’s groups and the Joint Commission on Human Rights. Only form responses or silence have ensued. Maybe I am thinking of fear or bureaucratic indifference; perhaps it is my rather lunatic style which discourages credibility. Whatever the reason, I have been treated in cavalier fashion. It is difficult to retain one’s faith in the face of such abuse. Nevertheless I will not yield. No man who has trodden the surface of the moon (which has the aspect of nothing more sensational than an untended sandbox) can discourage easily.

  I WILL NOT YIELD. (I capitalize this, not knowing how to make italics on typescript.) I feel that it is my mission to tell the truth, a mission which contains a faint spark of the divine. (But I am no religious fanatic; only a man who has been trapped in lies for seven years. This explains my mad sense of earnestness like a confidant on the subway dipping his hand into your pocket for a coin while the other, with flourishes, details the Story Of His Life.)

  I appeal. I appeal to your program. I appeal to “Revelations.” Within the context of your format I will tell the Full Story of the agency subject to any limitations which you would care to impose. This must be divulged. The agency must be exposed. As one who is aware however of your format—

  As one who is aware of your format (I watch much television in these ancient rooms; my wife’s last gift to me upon her abandonment was this old color set whose benefcient rays doubtless strike cancer into my very bones as I sit poised before it, tuning into America) I realize that this material may not be quite proper for your program which instead seeks admissions of a somewhat more personal nature.

  So I make the following proposal: I will comply with your format. If I am given the chance, one chance, to put my facts before The People I would have no objection to discussing my: a) sex life or b) personal habits or c) intimate details of my marriage or d) certain sex perversities of my youth (so obscure that not even the agency’s security check turned them up, so private that not even my hands remember them) as long as these areas of discussion do not preclude my imparting that basic information I want to give. Which is about the agency and what they have done to people. That information is of greatest significance but I am willing to wrap it in a blanket of personal disaster and shame.

  Naturally I am willing to accept full responsibility for any and all of my disclosures and I will sign any waivers that will please in order to release you from potential damages and to keep your legal department happy. (I figure you must have an enormous legal department.)

  May I be given then the chance to talk with one of your staff? (You must have a very large staff.) I know that I can prove to his satisfaction and to yours that I am serious and that what I have to say is of the most crucial importance. Perhaps this letter is hopeless, perhaps I am once again writing only to myself. Perhaps it will be discarded along with the tens of other such letters you receive every day. But I retain the belief—

  —Well, I retain the belief that our institutions are not completely hopeless and that they can be changed, that the individual voice has not yet been squeezed out forever. I contemplate drastic actions if I am not heard—there is no paralysis of will HERE, gentlemen!—but will give the principles of Vox Populi One Last Chance.

  II

  To Hurwitz: Well, it does check out. Someone with this name, anyway, was on the moon a few years ago. We checked out the clips. Taciturn, low-profile, the sidebar stories began referring to him as “the silent astronaut” (for silent read dull). Amazing how all this goes out of mind. It all reeks of a gentler time. Whatever happened to the moon? Now manned space stations are the ticket.

  His wife: pretty woman (at least in the photos), distracted manner, had her hands in her hair a lot. “Walter always wanted to go to the furthest spaces; now he has his dream.” Standard wifely crap. Maybe she blew under all the pressure. Couldn’t blame her.

  I don’t think that there’s anything here. Pretty routine stuff and despite Monaghan’s bravura assurances, no one I know seems to give a shit about the space program any more. Manned space stations? Only to watch China. But the personal habits and recriminations of these monkeys just can’t be packaged in today’s market. Too little personality. Old archaic symptoms of repression and authoritarianism and how are you going to sell that these days? Could repression be the coming thing?

  On the other hand, there is a certain wistful note of appeal which caught the reader. The reader is only twenty-three years old (twenty-three! do you remember when we were twenty-three?) and takes her job seriously. Also she takes me
seriously and has large breasts. I do the best I can. In the office, however, I am all business.

  Perhaps jaded types you know would have the wrong slant on this. Maybe there is something here although you’d have to approach it from cross-angles. Maybe you could sell him as an anti-astronautics astronaut although this stuff too has been done.

  Do you want us to pursue it?

  III

  Fuck it. I’ve got enough creeps already.

  IV

  I’ve been in the business too long. That is all it is; I’ve been in the business too long and I can no longer force myself to believe any of this. In different circumstances I could resign and look for something respectable but it is too late, Hurwitz is forty-two years old, Hurwitz is declining, these sieges of resolve come further and further apart now and feel only like the last twitches of the damned. Hurwitz is confident: querulousness has been banished by Hurwitz. I know what I was, what I am, what I will become, what waits for me. The only salvation is in that recognition. Remember that.

  There are limits to this situation. I see that now. It has been overspent, squeezed dry and one cannot, even a Hurwitz, eternally produce. There must be an end to all of this; there is a law like gold which glints from the center of anything like this and that law is: three years. With luck, with a shakeup at the fringes maybe four, but never five. Never. You can ride the wind only so far before it dashes you to emptiness. How philosophical Hurwitz has become! How metaphysical! Would this cosmic resignation have been dreamed when it all began?

  I can’t get out.

  They won’t let me out; I won’t let myself out. Not any more. That was two years ago, the trying. I learned then where I stood in this business, what Revelations had made me. There is a fine moral overcast to this business which comes into play when you deal with your competition. Your competition is, perhaps, to be judged more harshly than necessary. Maybe not. Maybe the people I begged for a job two years ago felt that Hurwitz was better than Revelations; that he had lowered himself, that he must now pay the penalty.