The Best of Sci-Fi-5

MULTUM IN PARVO by Jack Sharkey from Gent

Once upon a time, little children used to frighten naughty parents at bedtime with a radio program known as “The Shadow.” And out of those dim and dear days comes Bruce Elliott, who used to write the show—before he turned to comic books, mysteries, science fiction, magic, and heaven-knows-how-much-else, only to wind up respectably editing a happily not-too-respectable magazine duo.

For satire, fantasy, wit with spice, and all around fun, Gent and The Dude are giving some stiff competition these days to a magazine which will not be referred to here as Playboy. These excerpts from a still running series of historical frictions (Return of Parvo, Parvo Rides Again, etc.) by Jack Sharkey have been selected as those most appropriate to a family science-fantasy anthology.

The first robot was constructed by Max Roe and Harold Bott, in the year 1653, for exhibition at the World’s Fair at Istanbul (not Constantinople). It was a rather rough construction, consisting mainly of a tin hand to hold cards and a glass eye for viewing them. It had one function: to play poker. Max and Harold taught it everything they knew, taking great pains to root out a distressing habit it had of trying to fill inside straights, and soon it was a better player than either of them. It had a painted mouth which never changed expression, which came in handy when it was only bluffing.

Anyhow, they lugged it down to Istanbul (not Constantinople) for the Fair, and proceeded to set it up in the tent near the center of the exposition. After completing the job, they stepped around the corner to the brewer’s exhibit to sample the wares on display there, and to clean out the little reed pipe which they used to signal the robot to begin its play (alcohol was the perfect cleanser for it). [Hence the phrase, “To wet one’s whistle.”]

While they were gone, however, the paraphernalia of the next tent (that of Omar, the Trussmocker), was delivered to theirs by mistake, and when they returned they were horrified to discover that their robot was laden with barbells and other weights of enormous tonnage.

“Max!” gasped Harold, “we can’t lift up the lid to get at the starting switch!”

“Heavens,” Max groaned, “you’re right!”

“Say,” said a man in the crowd which had come to see the robot, “ain’t that thing gonna play poker for us?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Max, indicating the weighted-down lid. “We can’t get at the starting switch.”

“Can’t you do it by strength alone?” asked the man.

“Nope,” said Harold, sadly. “It’s going to take jacks or better to open.”

As most people know, the first man to fly was called Icarus, who should have had more sense. He and his father escaped from jail on an island (men of Alcatraz take note) by the expedient of attaching feathers to their arms with beeswax (it sounds reckless, I know, but this was before cellophane tape), and flapped away into the skies.

Well, everything was going fine till Icarus, who was a little dopey, decided to take a look at the sun, up close. Naturally, the beeswax began to melt and dribble away, and he began to lose his feathers.

“Say, son,” his father observed, flapping down where it was cooler, “your topside is dripping. You’d better flip over on your back and come lower, so’s the wax’ll get hard again.”

But Icarus said no, and flew still higher, till the wax began running like water, the feathers fluttered away and Icarus plunged down toward the ocean, his right “wing” completely gone.

“Son,” said his father, “are you falling?”

Icarus replied, “It’s a matter of a pinion, Dad.”

“If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, son,” said his father as Icarus vanished into the sea, “Loop before you leak!”

Moral: He who levitates is washed.

This habit was begun in 1357 by a group of five men who felt that they weren’t getting enough out of their diet, which consisted mainly of turnips.

“Say, men,” said the eldest, named George, “we’re just missing something in our nutrition. How about we go and terrorize the countryside and maybe get us something we can really sink our teeth into?”

The others thought this a fine idea, and soon the near-by villages were getting it in the neck.

“My people,” said the Mayor of the largest village, “it’s about time we stop this leeching. That gang’s been putting the bite on us long enough.”

“So okay, so what do we do?” asked the villagers.

“We go out to the mausoleum where they sleep all day, and we try and touch their hearts by pointing out what we have at stake,” he said.

“We’ll hammer the point home,” the villagers agreed.

So they took five sharpened sticks and went out to where the five men were sleeping. Gus, the blacksmith, had brought his hammer and proceeded to open the first of the five coffins and nailed the vampire before he could fly.

“Hurry, Gus,” said the Mayor, “the other four are going batty.”

But Gus came up to him empty-handed. “I’m sorry, Your Honor,” he said, “but I got carried away and used up all five stakes on that first guy.”

“Idiot,” said the Mayor, “look what you’ve done! The other four have flipped their lids and flown the crypt!”

“It’s all my fault,” said Gus, “for putting all my pegs in one casket.”

This was discovered in 1944 by two scientists who were working in their lab on something else entirely. Sam, the younger man, came up to Ted, the older man, and said, “Say, Ted, how you getting on with that circular radio-wave of yours?”

“Not so good, Sam,” said Ted, showing him a diagram. “I’ve devised this thing to carry a magnetic current in a circle, but that’s all the farther I am. I call it a cyclotron.”

“What?” said Sam, abused. “Ten years we’ve been working on this project, and all you have is this diagram? Why, it’s nothing but a circle, a plain old cipher.”

“I never took up drafting,” Ted admitted sadly. “Anyhow, that’s the shape it should be.”

“Years of work, and you draw a cipher,” Sam muttered. “I’ll show you what I think of this diagram!”

And with that, he rolled the blueprint into a cylinder and ran it through the pencil-sharpener, leaving the scraps on the floor.

Immediately an angry crowd of janitors gathered, all of them telling the two scientists what they thought of that litter.

Instantly the building vanished in a white-hot blast, followed by a mushroom-shaped cloud.

And to this day, that’s what happens when you get a critical mass at a ground zero.

For the last item, I was going to give the history of Fallout. I had to save it for last because— Well, look for yourself…

That covers everything, doesn’t it?