We were packrats by habit. Kyu had a fork he had held back one day when they had given him two by accident. I had a length of copper wire I had saved for years. It had held the shipping tag on the bottom of my bed. One day, musty years earlier, I had found it while crawling under the bed to see if a dip in the mattress could be corrected.
He almost got electrocuted doing it, but he managed to blow the fuses, all the current being soaked up by the old bed no one was using—no one living, anyhow—the bed wired to the fork that was stuck in the socket. The night light winked out when the fuses blew.
We all worked together to break down the door. The healthy ones put their backs to it, the invalids cheered them on.
We never counted on the replacement robots who stood essential duties while the main crew recharged. Maybe, in the deepest parts of our minds, we knew it. But there was Libby on the bed and strong Gabe to follow. We easily brushed any such thoughts aside.
Gabe died quickly, I think. At least, that is what I like to think. He went down under the flames from a robo-pistol, charred, smoking. The rest fought madly. I broke my leg and was out of most of the action. Now there are eleven beds vacant, and I am in the twelfth. The darkness is close around and there is nothing to say and no one to say it to.
I think now only to write. I think about Gabe tumbling the clumsy robots; I think about Libby, about Gabe holding him there on the bed as a mother with her babe. And I write. Gabe once told me that someone as old as I forgets most recent events first. I must not forget.
The vacant beds will be filled again, and my story is a good one, better even than those of the Englishman.
A SEASON FOR FREEDOM
Of all the editors I have worked with, Frederik Pohl had the oddest way of buying my stories. When he was editor at Galaxy and Worlds of SF, he bought some 40,000 words of my stories over a two-year period, all of which I was forced to rewrite to please him. The rewriting didn’t bother me, for I had found that editors were usually correct and I was usually mistaken at that early point in my career when I was learning from each page written. But Fred would never come out and plainly ask for a rewrite. He would send the story back with a pleasant note pointing out what was wrong with the piece. Then he would end the note with “. . . the story would probably please some editor in this new form.” Or from another rejection: . . . would shape it up well enough, perhaps, to please John Campbell for Analog.” Each time, I rewrote using his suggestions and sent the story back to him, and each time he bought it. It almost seemed as if he considered asking for a rewrite like offering to sell you French postcards, and we always had to whisper the arrangements. But, finally, Fred bought this story straight off for Galaxy. No rewrites! It is the only story from those magazines in this collection, for all the others have seen print in book form elsewhere—thus easily repaying me for the rewriting. Thanks, Fred. One other thing. Now and again, a reader will accuse me of using too much violence in some of my stories. Rest assured, I am no violence junkie. Only an immature nation makes war, and only an immature man has to “prove” his worth with a fist or a gun. When you read “A Season for Freedom,” don’t look only at the violence and wrinkle your nose; violence is a way of life with our nation, and what I wanted to say was: “If we don’t do something about it soon, look what war is going to do to all of our minds. . . .”
the theater was a thunder-lizard’s maw gorged with people, the seats jutting in rows of imitation teeth, casting black shadows in the flush of yellow half-light. The screen pulsed with colors, its rectangular orb awash with delusions. The two-dimensional inhabitants of that false, flat reality moved into view before a pounding blue-white surf behind the black and yellow and crimson credits that crawled like well-trained insects up the broad screen, always in perfect time with the tinny music.