The Avenger. Damon Knight
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Copyright © 2020 by Wildside Press LLC.
“Introduction: Damon Knight” © 2020 by Wildside Press LLC.
“The Avenger” was originally published in Planet Stories Spring, 1944 issue, under the pseudonym “Stuart Fleming.”
Published by Wildside Press LLC.
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INTRODUCTION: DAMON KNIGHT
Damon Francis Knight 1922–2002) was an American science fiction author, editor and critic. He is the author of “To Serve Man,” a 1950 short story adapted for the original TV series The Twilight Zone. (“To Serve Man” even won a Retro Hugo.) He was born in Baker, Oregon in 1922, and grew up in Hood River, Oregon. He entered science-fiction fandom at the age of eleven and published two issues of a fanzine entitled Snide.
Knight’s first professional sale was a cartoon to a science-fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. His first story sale, “The Itching Hour,” appeared in the Summer 1940 number of Futuria Fantasia (edited and published by fellow fan Ray Bradbury, who also went on to great things.) “Resilience” followed in the February 1941 number of Stirring Science Stories, edited by Donald Wollheim. Unfortunately, an editorial error made the story’s ending incomprehensible. Ultimately the correct text was reprinted in a 1978 magazine—it ran just four pages, with a two-page introduction by Knight.
At the time of his first story sale, Knight was living in New York city and was a member of the Futurians. One of his short stories describes paranormal disruption of a science fiction fan group, and contains cameo appearances of various science fiction figures under thinly-disguised names (writer H. Beam Piper is identified as “H. Dreyne Fifer.”)
Although he published a number of well-received novels, Knight’s forte was the short story; he is widely acknowledged as having been a master of the form. But he made an even greater impact as a critic. Algis Budrys wrote that Knight and William Atheling Jr. (James Blish under a pseudonym) had “transformed the reviewer’s trade in the field,” in Knight’s case “without the guidance of his own prior example.” The term “idiot plot,” referring to a story that only functions because almost everyone in it is an idiot, became well-known through Knight’s frequent use of it in his reviews, though he believed the term was probably invented by Blish. Knight’s only non-Retro-Hugo Award was for “Best Reviewer” in 1956. Some of his best reviews—which are often essays—were collected in In Search of Wonder. He ceased reviewing when The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction refused to publish a review.
Knight was the founder of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA, now the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America), cofounder of the National Fantasy Fan Federation (N3F), cofounder of the Milford Writer’s Workshop, and cofounder of the Clarion Writers Workshop. The SFWA officers and past presidents named Knight its 13th Grand Master in 1994 (presented 1995). He also edited the long-running Orbit anthology series. After his death, the associated award was renamed the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award in his honor. The Science Fiction Hall of Fame inducted him in 2003.
Knight was a long-time resident of Eugene, Oregon, with his second wife, author Kate Wilhelm. His papers are held in the University of Oregon Special Collections and University Archive.
He was one of the few major science fiction writers active when I was writing that I never met—though we did exchange a few emails over the years. We were on different coasts and our orbits just never managed to intersect—much to my disappointment.
—John Betancourt
Cabin John, MD
THE AVENGER
Peter Karson was dead. He had been dead for some time now, but the dark blood was still oozing from the crushed ruin of his face, trickling down into his sodden sleeve, and falling, drop by slow drop, from his fingertips. His head was tilted over the back of the chair at a queer, unnatural angle, so that the light made deep pools of shadow where his eyes had been.
There was no sound in the room except for the small splashing the blood made as it dropped into the sticky pool on the floor. The great banks of machinery around the walls were silent. I knew that they would never come to life again.
I rose and walked over to the window. Outside, the stars were as before: tiny, myriad points of light, infinitely far away. They had not changed, and yet they were suddenly no longer friendly. They were cold and alien. It was I who had changed: something inside me was dead, like the machinery, and like Peter.
It was a kind of indefinable emptiness. I do not think it was what Peter called an emotion; and yet it had nothing to do with logic, either. It was just an emptiness—a void that could not be filled by eating or drinking.
It was not a longing. I had no desire that things should be otherwise than they were. I did not even wish that Peter were not dead, for reason had told me that he had to die. That was the end of it.
But the void was still there, unexplainable and impossible to ignore. For the first time in all my life I had found a problem that I could not solve. Strange, disturbing sensations stirred and whispered within me, nagging, gnawing. And suddenly—something moved on the skin of my cheek. I raised a hand to it, slowly.
A tear was trickling down my cheek.
* * * *
Young Peter Karson put the last black-print down and sighed with satisfaction. His dream was perfect; the Citadel was complete, every minutest detail provided for—on paper. In two weeks they would be laying the core, and then the metal giant itself would begin to grow, glittering, pulsing with each increment of power, until at last it lay finished, a living thing.
Then there would remain only the task of blasting the great, shining ship out into the carefully-calculated orbit that would be its home. In his mind’s eye he could see it, slowly wheeling, like a second satellite, about the Earth; endlessly gathering knowledge into its insatiable mechanisms. He could see, too, the level on level of laboratories and storerooms that filled its interlocking segments; the meteor deflectors, the air renewal system, the mighty engines at the stern—all the children of his brain.
Out there, away from the muffling, distorting, damnable blanket of atmosphere, away from Earth’s inexorable gravitational pull, would be a laboratory such as man had never seen. The ship would be filled with the sounds of busy men and women, wresting secrets from the reluctant ether. A new chemistry, a new physics; perhaps even a new biochemistry.
A discordant note suddenly entered his fantasy. He looked up, conscious of the walls of his office again, but could see nothing unusual. Still, that thin, dark whisper of dread was at the back of his mind. Slowly, as if reluctantly compelled, he turned around to face the window at his back.
There, outside the window, fifty stories up, a face was staring impassively in at him. That was the first impression he got; just a face, staring. Then he saw, with a queer, icy chill, that the face was blood-red and subtly inhuman. It tapered off into a formless, shriveled body.
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