THE OTHER SIDE
WALTER KUBILIUS
(Selected from The Best Science Fiction Stories, 1956)
JIM CARRINGTON splashed in the waters of Hillsboro's only river, only a few feet away from the Wall, and taunted his playmates. None of them could swim, and once when he tried to push Jack Baker into the river his only response was violent fear.
"Fraidy cats!" Jim yelled. He saw a speckled trout swim by and then dove down for it. He bruised himself on the rocks in the river and as he scrambled upward the palm of his hand struck the bottom of the Wall. The palm of his hand struck the bottom of the Wall! It was no more than an inch thick and if he had wanted to he could have swum right under it, and into the forbidden Outside.
"You know we're not supposed to be near the Wall," Baker said, "the radiation is liable to kill us."
"Nuts," Jim said, scrambling up the grassy bank, "If there was any radiation ... oh, forget it." He was about to say that if there was any actual atomic radiation outside the water would be poisonous and the fish would be contaminated and deadly. Yet he had been drinking that water and eating the fish as long as he could remember. There was no poison, even though they came from the forbidden Outside. Ergo, the schoolbooks were all wrong.
He dressed quickly, picked up his textbooks and raced the boys back to Hillsboro. Pop was at the tractor wheel as usual, his farmer's eye upon that sun which looked like a burning piece of paper plastered against the Wall. The sun was 93,000,000 miles away, so the books said, but to Jim it still looked as if it were a part of the Wall.
"Have a good time?" Pop asked. He always asked the same question in the same way, just as Mom always had their meals ready in the same way. "Oh, it was all right," Jim said, "but I sure hope that Baker would break his neck. He gives me a pain."
He put his books in the barn and then did some of the farm chores, feeding the pigs, chickens, cows, and horses. "Pop," he asked when his father came back, from the field, "why do you keep the horses since you never use them? You might as well sell them."
Pop thought for a moment. "Don't rightly know," he said, "We farmers always have horses. Do they bother you?"
"No, pop."
* * * *
Old Doc Barnes, Hillboro's one and only practitioner, visited the farm on the following night and put Jim through another one of his rigorous examinations. He listened to Jim's heart I took samples of his blood and sweat and examined them under a portable microscope and then made notations in a large black book that had Jim's name on the front cover.
"Perfect health," Doc Barnes said as he unstrapped the pressure belt and started packing his instruments back into the three bags he brought with him. "As sound as Robinson's election program, and nothing wrong with you that fried steak and mashed potatoes can't cure."
Jim dressed. "Why do you examine me so often?" he asked.
Doc Barnes looked surprised. "Why, son, we've got socialized medicine now that Robinson's elected. It's the law, you know. Didn't you learn it in school?"
"Yes, I know," Jim said, "but why is it you never examine Pop? He's a citizen, too. Yet you only worry about me."
There was a flicker of doubt in the doctor's eyes and then the same, kind, cheerful voice. "Why, of course I do! You're simply not around when I examine your father and mother. In fact, I'm glad you reminded me so I can give them a good physical check-up. We need it every month, you know."
"Sure," Jim said. When the Doc went to Pop's bedroom an idea flashed through the boy's mind. In a sense it was spying, but the suspicion that something was wrong in Doc Barnes' hearty friendliness had long bothered Jim. It was nothing that he could identify. Was there something wrong with Jim that made the doctor so concerned with him? He spent two or three hours on Jim's monthly examination. At most he could examine five people a day, or a hundred and fifty a month. A hundred and fifty a month! There were about 10,000 people in Hillsboro and Doc Barnes was the only doctor he had ever heard of.
He went quietly upstairs to the attic and pushed back a bookcase covering a wide crack in the floor. By bending down he could see through to the floor beneath and hear the conversation.
"The boy has asked why I do not examine you," Doc Barnes was saying, his voice flat and monotonous. "We will stay here for a while to satisfy him."
Then they remained sitting like stone statues in immovable chairs--Mom, Pop, and Doc Barnes.
Jim crept silently down the stairs to the porch and waited patiently until Doc Barnes left the house.
"Did you examine the folks?" Jim asked.
"I sure did," Doc Barnes said, "Gave 'em the most thorough examination I ever gave anybody. You can rest assured, son, there's not a thing wrong with them." He patted Jim on the shoulders and then went back to his car and rode in to town. Jim watched him go before going into the parlor. Doc Barnes did not stop at a single other farmhouse on the road.
* * * *
"Here's today's paper, son," Pop said, giving him the copy of the Hillsboro Daily Chronicle. There was no world news on this January 15, 1993, and President Robinson and Vice President Koshbino spent the day giving tedious reports on the economic recovery program. It was the local news which hit Jim like a brick thrown into his face. Jack Baker was dead. He had fallen from a tree and broken his neck. Jim felt sick.
"Sold the horses today," Pop said, "Made a good profit on them."
"That's swell," Jim said, the words like sawdust in his mouth. His head was whirling. His eyes could no longer focus on the words of the newspaper and the vague suspicion he had long been feeling approached one more step towards final understanding. He knew Jack Baker who never swam and, what was much more important, never climbed trees, and the knowledge that he had wished for his death made him feel like a murderer. Like some rumbling out of a whirling void, he heard his father's voice, "How are you getting on at school?"
"I hate it," Jim said, the tension in him breaking out and the accumulation of many doubts making themselves heard, "It's the other boys. I--I can't explain it. They either know too much, or not enough. I think I could learn more by myself in the library."
As soon as the anger broke, it flurried and died and soon the incident was forgotten. He did the chores around the farm and spent his free time swimming in the River at a spot where the banks widened near the Wall. He did not dive near the Wall, nor attempt to pass under it to the Outside where poisoned fumes and deadly gases scorched the ground and made one breath of air a sentence of death. Yet the water was clear and good.
A few days later Pop gave him a letter from the Board of Education for Hillsboro. It was a brief announcement declaring that because of increased tax contributions to the nation's recovery program, Hillsboro had to reduce its appropriations for education. The school was hereby closed, and those students who wished could secure adult privileges at the Public Library where Miss Wilson would be glad to confer with them.
It was the sort of privilege that Jim had long dreamed of. His hungry eyes had often feasted upon the long galleries of bookshelves, all lined with thick layers of dust as if the knowledge of all the Earth had been stored here and forgotten. In their pages he would find the answers to Baker's death, the dishonesty of Doc Barnes, and perhaps even the mystery of the Wall and what was really outside.
Miss Wilson, head librarian for the adult division, was a thin, white-faced woman with the same kind of blank smile that Doc Barnes wore. She perched on a high stool beside her desk at the entrance. "What would you like to read?" she asked, "I have here a very good book on natural history which you might like, or would you prefer some adult fiction? Here is a splendid?"
"If it's all right, I'd like to just look around for myself."
"?novel about farm life and how a young man developed a process that doubled his agricultural yield."
"May I go in?" Jim asked, exasperated by the long lecture which droned from Miss Wilson's lips. She stopped suddenly, looked blankly at him as if listening to someone, and then smiled.
"Of course. You can take out any books that you like. Do you know how to use the catalogue?"
"Yes, yes." Jim said, hurriedly moving into the deserted library. The long rows of book stacks stretched almost endlessly through the huge vaulted chamber. Jim's nose twitched at the pleasant musty odor of age that clung about the cloth and leather-bound volumes. He studied some of the titles, pulled the books from the shelves and with a gusty breath blew off the layer of dust upon the fore-edge and flicked through the pages. The books of fiction, which occupied more than half the shelves, did not interest him. He wandered through the sections on science and particularly through the 800s where the history books were. Unlike the fiction books that were practically untouched, there were huge empty spaces in the shelves, bright exposed metal gleaming where numbers of books had been suddenly removed.
On some of the books there were curious scratches upon the dusty covers, as if oddly shaped hands had picked them up and then decided to put them back upon the shelves.
"Perhaps," Jim said, "the books about the Wall are classified separately."
He went to the rows of catalogue drawers in the center of the library and pulled out the one labelled Wa-Wun. There were no books on the subject of the Wall nor any carrying information about it. There were several that carried the word "Outside" in them, but none of the books dealt with what Hillsboro meant when "Outside" was mentioned. He thought there might be some other term for "Wall" that he had not heard, and he began to look through the listings of "Screen," "Ceiling," "Barrier," "Barricade," and everything he could think of or find in the dictionaries. The catalogue seemed to be thorough, even though quite a number of the index cards had been ripped out, as he could tell by the scraps of paper remaining, but there was nothing about the Wall in any of them.
Dismayed, he tried to be satisfied with a few history books and brought them to Miss Wilson for recording.
She glanced at the titles, smiled brightly, and stamped the due dates on his card. "Find everything you want?" she asked.
"No," he said, somewhat angry as he slipped the books under his arm, "I couldn't find anything about the Wall."
Her smile faded. "The Wall?"
"Yes," he exclaimed, irritated at what was clearly some sort of effort to hide the truth from him, "The Wall, Ceiling, Dome, whatever you want to call it, that's all around Hillsboro. Why doesn't anyone ever mention it? I wouldn't have even known it was there if I didn't go swimming near it. There's not a single book about it in the whole library."
Miss Wilson regained her composure. "Of course there is," she said very sweetly as if talking to an unreasonable child, "Have you tried the catalogue?"
"Yes, and there's no card for it."
"You must be mistaken," she said. "I'll help you look for it when you return next week."
"Sure," Jim said, certain that some sort of excuse would be found. He sensed the existence of a strange conspiracy. What was there to hide?
* * * *
"Pop," he asked after the evening chores were done and they were seated on the porch, listening to the crickets and watching the clouds roll by the face of the moon, "Just what is the Wall?"
Pop put down his paper and looked speculatively off toward the horizon where the translucent Wall dug into the earth just beyond that line of hills. "It's been there long before you was born," he said, "Sort of a defense against the Outside, if I remember rightly."
"What's Outside?" Jim asked quietly.
Pop picked up his paper and started reading to show that he didn't feel like talking much. "Heck, everybody knows that. Poison gas and gamma radiations and stuff like that. It'd kill everybody if it got in."
Jim thought of the clean fresh water and the healthy fish that flowed from under the Wall. He wanted to ask Pop but the newspaper was now a barrier between them.
There was not enough light to read by so Jim looked out across the fields and up to the inverted Dome through which the stars could be seen. There seemed to be peace and contentment outside and not the death and horror his father hinted at. When Pop left the porch Jim took his place under the lamp and read through the history books. Most of them were very old, dating back to 1970. Since there was no mention of the Wall in them or the atomic wars which made the Wall necessary, Jim concluded that the Wall was built between 1970 and '75, when he was born.
Jim picked up the next book, "History of the United Nations," published in 1992. It was only one year old yet had the strange appearance of great age, the pages stained and crinkly. He looked closely at the title page and read the small print that made his heart pound. "Ninth edition," the tiny letters said, "Revised and corrected by the author, January 2039?"
It's a misprint, Jim reasoned, for this is only 1993. Nevertheless he turned hastily towards the back pages and began reading:
* * * *
"F. M. Robinson, during whose presidential administration the United Nations secured a lasting peace, died in a rocket crash in 2001. Koshbino served as president until the expiration of his term in 2002, and the election of Ghafa Benjamin occurred the following year.
"During Ghafa's administration the Planet Commission continued its efforts to build a successful extra-galactic vessel but these were without success until 2038.
"The gradual elimination of farming communities, begun during Robinson's term as president, continued under the new administration. The artificial manufacture of food by reprocessing industrial waste had revolutionized social customs, particularly in the frequent distressing economic dislocations?"
* * * *
Jim Carrington put the book aside, bewildered by the massive history of great events which were yet to occur. President Robinson was alive, for he had seen his calm, dignified face on the television screen many times. As for the artificial manufacture of food supposedly convulsing the nation's economy, there was not the slightest evidence of it in Hillsboro. Pop plowed the field with his tractor and the wheat, oats, and rye were delivered to town where they were stored in warehouses, presumably for shipment to other Wall-surrounded cities. If food could be manufactured, there was no point in growing it here. If it could not be manufactured then the history book was some sort of fraud.
He hurriedly skimmed through the pages searching for some reasonable explanation. The more he read, the more confused he became. There was no mention of any worldwide atomic conflagration in 1970 and not the slightest indication anywhere that Wall-enclosed cities existed or were ever considered.
THE OTHER SIDE
WALTER KUBILIUS
(Selected from The Best Science Fiction Stories, 1956)
JIM CARRINGTON splashed in the waters of Hillsboro's only river, only a few feet away from the Wall, and taunted his playmates. None of them could swim, and once when he tried to push Jack Baker into the river his only response was violent fear.
"Fraidy cats!" Jim yelled. He saw a speckled trout swim by and then dove down for it. He bruised himself on the rocks in the river and as he scrambled upward the palm of his hand struck the bottom of the Wall. The palm of his hand struck the bottom of the Wall! It was no more than an inch thick and if he had wanted to he could have swum right under it, and into the forbidden Outside.
"You know we're not supposed to be near the Wall," Baker said, "the radiation is liable to kill us."
"Nuts," Jim said, scrambling up the grassy bank, "If there was any radiation ... oh, forget it." He was about to say that if there was any actual atomic radiation outside the water would be poisonous and the fish would be contaminated and deadly. Yet he had been drinking that water and eating the fish as long as he could remember. There was no poison, even though they came from the forbidden Outside. Ergo, the schoolbooks were all wrong.
He dressed quickly, picked up his textbooks and raced the boys back to Hillsboro. Pop was at the tractor wheel as usual, his farmer's eye upon that sun which looked like a burning piece of paper plastered against the Wall. The sun was 93,000,000 miles away, so the books said, but to Jim it still looked as if it were a part of the Wall.
"Have a good time?" Pop asked. He always asked the same question in the same way, just as Mom always had their meals ready in the same way. "Oh, it was all right," Jim said, "but I sure hope that Baker would break his neck. He gives me a pain."
He put his books in the barn and then did some of the farm chores, feeding the pigs, chickens, cows, and horses. "Pop," he asked when his father came back, from the field, "why do you keep the horses since you never use them? You might as well sell them."
Pop thought for a moment. "Don't rightly know," he said, "We farmers always have horses. Do they bother you?"
"No, pop."
* * * *
Old Doc Barnes, Hillboro's one and only practitioner, visited the farm on the following night and put Jim through another one of his rigorous examinations. He listened to Jim's heart I took samples of his blood and sweat and examined them under a portable microscope and then made notations in a large black book that had Jim's name on the front cover.
"Perfect health," Doc Barnes said as he unstrapped the pressure belt and started packing his instruments back into the three bags he brought with him. "As sound as Robinson's election program, and nothing wrong with you that fried steak and mashed potatoes can't cure."
Jim dressed. "Why do you examine me so often?" he asked.
Doc Barnes looked surprised. "Why, son, we've got socialized medicine now that Robinson's elected. It's the law, you know. Didn't you learn it in school?"
"Yes, I know," Jim said, "but why is it you never examine Pop? He's a citizen, too. Yet you only worry about me."
There was a flicker of doubt in the doctor's eyes and then the same, kind, cheerful voice. "Why, of course I do! You're simply not around when I examine your father and mother. In fact, I'm glad you reminded me so I can give them a good physical check-up. We need it every month, you know."
"Sure," Jim said. When the Doc went to Pop's bedroom an idea flashed through the boy's mind. In a sense it was spying, but the suspicion that something was wrong in Doc Barnes' hearty friendliness had long bothered Jim. It was nothing that he could identify. Was there something wrong with Jim that made the doctor so concerned with him? He spent two or three hours on Jim's monthly examination. At most he could examine five people a day, or a hundred and fifty a month. A hundred and fifty a month! There were about 10,000 people in Hillsboro and Doc Barnes was the only doctor he had ever heard of.
He went quietly upstairs to the attic and pushed back a bookcase covering a wide crack in the floor. By bending down he could see through to the floor beneath and hear the conversation.
"The boy has asked why I do not examine you," Doc Barnes was saying, his voice flat and monotonous. "We will stay here for a while to satisfy him."
Then they remained sitting like stone statues in immovable chairs--Mom, Pop, and Doc Barnes.
Jim crept silently down the stairs to the porch and waited patiently until Doc Barnes left the house.
"Did you examine the folks?" Jim asked.
"I sure did," Doc Barnes said, "Gave 'em the most thorough examination I ever gave anybody. You can rest assured, son, there's not a thing wrong with them." He patted Jim on the shoulders and then went back to his car and rode in to town. Jim watched him go before going into the parlor. Doc Barnes did not stop at a single other farmhouse on the road.
* * * *
"Here's today's paper, son," Pop said, giving him the copy of the Hillsboro Daily Chronicle. There was no world news on this January 15, 1993, and President Robinson and Vice President Koshbino spent the day giving tedious reports on the economic recovery program. It was the local news which hit Jim like a brick thrown into his face. Jack Baker was dead. He had fallen from a tree and broken his neck. Jim felt sick.
"Sold the horses today," Pop said, "Made a good profit on them."
"That's swell," Jim said, the words like sawdust in his mouth. His head was whirling. His eyes could no longer focus on the words of the newspaper and the vague suspicion he had long been feeling approached one more step towards final understanding. He knew Jack Baker who never swam and, what was much more important, never climbed trees, and the knowledge that he had wished for his death made him feel like a murderer. Like some rumbling out of a whirling void, he heard his father's voice, "How are you getting on at school?"
"I hate it," Jim said, the tension in him breaking out and the accumulation of many doubts making themselves heard, "It's the other boys. I--I can't explain it. They either know too much, or not enough. I think I could learn more by myself in the library."
As soon as the anger broke, it flurried and died and soon the incident was forgotten. He did the chores around the farm and spent his free time swimming in the River at a spot where the banks widened near the Wall. He did not dive near the Wall, nor attempt to pass under it to the Outside where poisoned fumes and deadly gases scorched the ground and made one breath of air a sentence of death. Yet the water was clear and good.
A few days later Pop gave him a letter from the Board of Education for Hillsboro. It was a brief announcement declaring that because of increased tax contributions to the nation's recovery program, Hillsboro had to reduce its appropriations for education. The school was hereby closed, and those students who wished could secure adult privileges at the Public Library where Miss Wilson would be glad to confer with them.
It was the sort of privilege that Jim had long dreamed of. His hungry eyes had often feasted upon the long galleries of bookshelves, all lined with thick layers of dust as if the knowledge of all the Earth had been stored here and forgotten. In their pages he would find the answers to Baker's death, the dishonesty of Doc Barnes, and perhaps even the mystery of the Wall and what was really outside.
Miss Wilson, head librarian for the adult division, was a thin, white-faced woman with the same kind of blank smile that Doc Barnes wore. She perched on a high stool beside her desk at the entrance. "What would you like to read?" she asked, "I have here a very good book on natural history which you might like, or would you prefer some adult fiction? Here is a splendid?"
"If it's all right, I'd like to just look around for myself."
"?novel about farm life and how a young man developed a process that doubled his agricultural yield."
"May I go in?" Jim asked, exasperated by the long lecture which droned from Miss Wilson's lips. She stopped suddenly, looked blankly at him as if listening to someone, and then smiled.
"Of course. You can take out any books that you like. Do you know how to use the catalogue?"
"Yes, yes." Jim said, hurriedly moving into the deserted library. The long rows of book stacks stretched almost endlessly through the huge vaulted chamber. Jim's nose twitched at the pleasant musty odor of age that clung about the cloth and leather-bound volumes. He studied some of the titles, pulled the books from the shelves and with a gusty breath blew off the layer of dust upon the fore-edge and flicked through the pages. The books of fiction, which occupied more than half the shelves, did not interest him. He wandered through the sections on science and particularly through the 800s where the history books were. Unlike the fiction books that were practically untouched, there were huge empty spaces in the shelves, bright exposed metal gleaming where numbers of books had been suddenly removed.
On some of the books there were curious scratches upon the dusty covers, as if oddly shaped hands had picked them up and then decided to put them back upon the shelves.
"Perhaps," Jim said, "the books about the Wall are classified separately."
He went to the rows of catalogue drawers in the center of the library and pulled out the one labelled Wa-Wun. There were no books on the subject of the Wall nor any carrying information about it. There were several that carried the word "Outside" in them, but none of the books dealt with what Hillsboro meant when "Outside" was mentioned. He thought there might be some other term for "Wall" that he had not heard, and he began to look through the listings of "Screen," "Ceiling," "Barrier," "Barricade," and everything he could think of or find in the dictionaries. The catalogue seemed to be thorough, even though quite a number of the index cards had been ripped out, as he could tell by the scraps of paper remaining, but there was nothing about the Wall in any of them.
Dismayed, he tried to be satisfied with a few history books and brought them to Miss Wilson for recording.
She glanced at the titles, smiled brightly, and stamped the due dates on his card. "Find everything you want?" she asked.
"No," he said, somewhat angry as he slipped the books under his arm, "I couldn't find anything about the Wall."
Her smile faded. "The Wall?"
"Yes," he exclaimed, irritated at what was clearly some sort of effort to hide the truth from him, "The Wall, Ceiling, Dome, whatever you want to call it, that's all around Hillsboro. Why doesn't anyone ever mention it? I wouldn't have even known it was there if I didn't go swimming near it. There's not a single book about it in the whole library."
Miss Wilson regained her composure. "Of course there is," she said very sweetly as if talking to an unreasonable child, "Have you tried the catalogue?"
"Yes, and there's no card for it."
"You must be mistaken," she said. "I'll help you look for it when you return next week."
"Sure," Jim said, certain that some sort of excuse would be found. He sensed the existence of a strange conspiracy. What was there to hide?
* * * *
"Pop," he asked after the evening chores were done and they were seated on the porch, listening to the crickets and watching the clouds roll by the face of the moon, "Just what is the Wall?"
Pop put down his paper and looked speculatively off toward the horizon where the translucent Wall dug into the earth just beyond that line of hills. "It's been there long before you was born," he said, "Sort of a defense against the Outside, if I remember rightly."
"What's Outside?" Jim asked quietly.
Pop picked up his paper and started reading to show that he didn't feel like talking much. "Heck, everybody knows that. Poison gas and gamma radiations and stuff like that. It'd kill everybody if it got in."
Jim thought of the clean fresh water and the healthy fish that flowed from under the Wall. He wanted to ask Pop but the newspaper was now a barrier between them.
There was not enough light to read by so Jim looked out across the fields and up to the inverted Dome through which the stars could be seen. There seemed to be peace and contentment outside and not the death and horror his father hinted at. When Pop left the porch Jim took his place under the lamp and read through the history books. Most of them were very old, dating back to 1970. Since there was no mention of the Wall in them or the atomic wars which made the Wall necessary, Jim concluded that the Wall was built between 1970 and '75, when he was born.
Jim picked up the next book, "History of the United Nations," published in 1992. It was only one year old yet had the strange appearance of great age, the pages stained and crinkly. He looked closely at the title page and read the small print that made his heart pound. "Ninth edition," the tiny letters said, "Revised and corrected by the author, January 2039?"
It's a misprint, Jim reasoned, for this is only 1993. Nevertheless he turned hastily towards the back pages and began reading:
* * * *
"F. M. Robinson, during whose presidential administration the United Nations secured a lasting peace, died in a rocket crash in 2001. Koshbino served as president until the expiration of his term in 2002, and the election of Ghafa Benjamin occurred the following year.
"During Ghafa's administration the Planet Commission continued its efforts to build a successful extra-galactic vessel but these were without success until 2038.
"The gradual elimination of farming communities, begun during Robinson's term as president, continued under the new administration. The artificial manufacture of food by reprocessing industrial waste had revolutionized social customs, particularly in the frequent distressing economic dislocations?"
* * * *
Jim Carrington put the book aside, bewildered by the massive history of great events which were yet to occur. President Robinson was alive, for he had seen his calm, dignified face on the television screen many times. As for the artificial manufacture of food supposedly convulsing the nation's economy, there was not the slightest evidence of it in Hillsboro. Pop plowed the field with his tractor and the wheat, oats, and rye were delivered to town where they were stored in warehouses, presumably for shipment to other Wall-surrounded cities. If food could be manufactured, there was no point in growing it here. If it could not be manufactured then the history book was some sort of fraud.
He hurriedly skimmed through the pages searching for some reasonable explanation. The more he read, the more confused he became. There was no mention of any worldwide atomic conflagration in 1970 and not the slightest indication anywhere that Wall-enclosed cities existed or were ever considered.
)
