First appeared in Galaxy, printed and reprinted by Horace L. Gold
in one of his magazine’s retrospective
anthologies. Also reprinted in major retrospectives by Frederik Pohl, Martin H.
Greenberg, and Isaac Asimov.
Summary:
Freeman sells machines that create a realistic horror-house
experience. He tries to sell his wares to Dickson-Hawes. Freeman has a creature
that lives deep in a well and an unusual highway, hid behind padlocked doors,
that looks normal until a black car speeds after another, caroming off the
other until it’s forced off the road.
Commentary with Spoilers:
Arms from the black stretch out and reach into the other,
ripping the arm off its victim. Freeman had made a big deal about Dickson-Hawes
not yelling. He doesn’t and they manage to escape. However, the Voom, the
driver of the black car, drives through the wall invading the presumed safety
of the room, nabbing Dickson-Hawes. Freeman is disappointed that all of his
buyers had been killed. He decides to sell his horror house ideas to the Voom.
It’s hard to say whether this complex tale was fully thought
out. Freeman has created creatures and even Earth-like worlds with the help of
unnamed higher beings—creatures that exhibit life-like qualities. He says—of
course, he may be lying—that these creatures aren’t real, and that those who
die aren’t real. Are they machines? Yet he treats them as if they had some sort
of natural drive, requiring Dickson-Hawes to be quiet, which he does, but for
some reason the Voom still want to kill him. Why him and not Freeman? The text
doesn’t say.
Despite their lack of reality (true? untrue?), Freeman decides he has exhausted
all human buyers in a haunted house and decides to go to the Voom. Are the Voom
stand-ins for humanity? They are violent, seemingly nonsensically. This is
something beyond road rage. Yet do they also desire to be frightened by a
horror house? Perhaps they deserve it. But did these horror house buyers
deserve their fate, for simply wanting to give to humanity safe thrills, to
approach impending death without dying? Perhaps we are all fools, courting death,
standing so close to the guard rail that keeps us from tumbling off the Empire
State Building.
The misspelling, as seen in the title, is effective
when it first appears in the story since it suggests a childlike mind that is nonetheless
interested in the macabre. Can a childlike mind safely create a horror house?
But it may also suggest either under-education or a different society from a
different universe where spellings have altered.
Put this in the maybe column for St. Clair classics. We
readers do need to assume that writers meant to do what they do. You also have
to admire how much she can cram into a short story that other writers would be
hard-pressed to sneak into a novelette. This one does, like “Rocket to Limbo”,
beg for a sequel as this ends just as it became most intriguing.
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