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Arthur C. Clarke is perhaps the most famous modern science-fiction writer in the world, seriously rivaled for that title only by the late Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. Clarke is probably most widely known for his work on Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, but is also renowned as a novelist, short-story writer, and as a writer of nonfiction, usually on technological subjects such as spaceflight. He has won three Nebula Awards, three Hugo Awards, the British Science Fiction Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and a Grandmaster Nebula for Life Achievement. His best-known books include the novels Childhood’s End, The City and the Stars, The Deep Range, Rendezvous with Rama, A Fall of Moondust, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2010: Odyssey Two, 2061: Odyssey Three, Songs of Distant Earth, and The Fountains of Paradise; and the collections The Nine Billion Names of God, Tales of Ten Worlds, and The Sentinel. He has also written many nonfiction books on scientific topics, the best known of which are probably Profiles of the Future and The Wind from the Sun, and is generally considered to be the man who first came up with the idea of the communications satellite. His most recent books are the novel 3001: The Final Odyssey, the nonfiction collection Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds: Collected Works 1944-1998, the fiction collection Collected Short Stories, and a novel written in collaboration with Stephen Baxter, The Light of Other Days. Most of Clarke’s best-known books will be coming back into print, appropriately enough, in 2001. Born in Somerset, England, Clarke now lives in Sri Lanka, and was recently knighted.
Here, in one of the best known of all Future Sports stories, he gives the ancient sport of sailboat racing a whole new dimension . . .
* * *
The enormous disc of sail strained at its rigging, already filled with the wind that blew between the worlds. In three minutes the race would begin, yet now John Merton felt more relaxed, more at peace, than at any time for the past year. Whatever happened when the Commodore gave the starting signal, whether Diana carried him to victory or defeat, he had achieved his ambition. After a lifetime spent designing ships for others, now he would sail his own.
“T minus two minutes,” said the cabin radio. “Please confirm your readiness.”
One by one, the other skippers answered. Merton recognized all the voices—some tense, some calm—for they were the voices of his friends and rivals. On the four inhabited worlds, there were scarcely twenty men who could sail a sun yacht; and they were all there, on the starting line or aboard the escort vessels, orbiting twenty-two thousand miles above the equator.
“Number One—Gossamer—ready to go.”
“Number Two—Santa Maria—all O.K.”
“Number Three—Sunbeam—O.K.”
“Number Four—Woomera—all systems GO.”
Merton smiled at that last echo from the early, primitive days of astronautics. But it had become part of the tradition of space; and there were times when a man needed to evoke the shades of those who had gone before him to the stars.
“Number Five—Lebedev—we’re ready.”
“Number Six—Arachne—O.K.”
Now it was his turn, at the end of the line; strange to think that the words he was speaking in this tiny cabin were being heard by at least five billion people.
“Number Seven—Diana—ready to start.”
“One through Seven acknowledged,” answered that impersonal voice from the judge’s launch. “Now T minus one minute.”
Merton scarcely heard it. For the last time, he was checking the tension in the rigging. The needles of all the dynamometers were steady; the immense sail was taut, its mirror surface sparkling and glittering gloriously in the sun.
To Merton, floating weightless at the periscope, it seemed to fill the sky. As well it might—for out there were fifty million square feet of sail, linked to his capsule by almost a hundred miles of rigging. All the canvas of all the tea clippers that had once raced like clouds across the China seas, sewn into one gigantic sheet, could not match the single sail that Diana had spread beneath the sun. Yet it was little more substantial than a soap bubble; that two square miles of aluminized plastic were only a few millionths of an inch thick.
“T minus ten seconds. All recording cameras ON.”
Something so huge, yet so frail, was hard for the mind to grasp. And it was harder still to realize that this fragile mirror could tow him free of Earth merely by the power of the sunlight it would trap.
“. . . five, four, three, two, one, CUT!”
Seven knife blades sliced through seven thin lines tethering the yachts to the mother ships that had assembled and serviced them. Until this moment, all had been circling Earth together in a rigidly held formation, but now the yachts would begin to disperse, like dandelion seeds drifting before the breeze. And the winner would be the one that first drifted past the Moon.
Aboard Diana, nothing seemed to be happening. But Merton knew better. Though his body could feel no thrust, the instrument board told him that he was now accelerating at almost one thousandth of a gravity. For a rocket, that figure would have been ludicrous—but this was the first time any solar yacht had ever attained it. Diana’s design was sound; the vast sail was living up to his calculations. At this rate, two circuits of the Earth would build up his speed to escape velocity, and then he could head out for the Moon, with the full force of the Sun behind him.
The full force of the Sun . . . He smiled wryly, remembering all his attempts to explain solar sailing to those lecture audiences back on Earth. That had been the only way he could raise money, in those early days. He might be Chief Designer of Cosmodyne Corporation, with a whole string of successful spaceships to his credit, but his firm had not been exactly enthusiastic about his hobby.
“Hold your hands out to the Sun,” he’d said. “What do you feel? Heat, of course. But there’s pressure as well—though you’ve never noticed it, because it’s so tiny. Over the area of your hands, it comes to only about a millionth of an ounce.
“But out in space, even a pressure as small as that can be important, for it’s acting all the time, hour after hour, day after day. Unlike rocket fuel, it’s free and unlimited. If we want to, we can use it. We can build sails to catch the radiation blowing from the Sun.”
At that point, he would pull out a few square yards of sail material and toss it toward the audience. The silvery film would coil and twist like smoke, then drift slowly to the ceiling in the hot-air currents.
“You can see how light it is,” he’d continue. “A square mile weighs only a ton, and can collect five pounds of radiation pressure. So it will start moving—and we can let it tow us along, if we attach rigging to it.
“Of course, its acceleration will be tiny—about a thousandth of a g. That doesn’t seem much, but let’s see what it means.
“It means that in the first second, we’ll move about a fifth of an inch. I suppose a healthy snail could do better than that. But after a minute, we’ve covered sixty feet, and will be doing just over a mile an hour. That’s not bad, for something driven by pure sunlight! After an hour, we’re forty miles from our starting point, and will be moving at eighty miles an hour. Please remember that in space there’s no friction; so once you start anything moving, it will keep going forever. You’ll be surprised when I tell you what our thousandth-of-a-g sailboat will be doing at the end of a day’s run: almost two thousand miles an hour! If it starts from orbit—as it has to, of course—it can reach escape velocity in a couple of days. And all without burning a single drop of fuel!”
Well, he’d convinced them, and in the end he’d even convinced Cosmodyne. Over the last twenty years, a new sport had come into being. It had been called the sport of billionaires, and that was true. But it was beginning to pay for itself in terms of publicity and TV coverage. The prestige of four continents and two worlds was riding on this race, and it had the biggest audience in history.
Diana had made a good start; time to take a look at the opposition. Moving very gently—though there were shock absorbers between the control capsule and the delicate rigging, he was determined to run no risks—Merton stationed himself at the periscope.
There they were, looking like strange silver flowers planted in the dark fields of space. The nearest, South America’s Santa Maria, was only fifty miles away; it bore a close resemblance to a boy’s kite, but a kite more than a mile on a side. Farther away, the University of Astrograd’s Lebedev looked like a Maltese cross; the sails that formed the four arms could apparently be tilted for steering purposes. In contrast, the Federation of Australasia’s Woomera was a simple parachute, four miles in circumference. General Spacecraft’s Arachne, as its name suggested, looked like a spiderweb, and had been built on the same principles, by robot shuttles spiraling out from a central point. Eurospace Corporation’s Gossamer was an identical design, on a slightly smaller scale. And the Republic of Mars’s Sunbeam was a flat ring, with a half-mile-wide hole in the center, spinning slowly, so that centrifugal force gave it stiffness. That was an old idea, but no one had ever made it work; and Merton was fairly sure that the colonials would be in trouble when they started to turn.
That would not be for another six hours, when the yachts had moved along the first quarter of their slow and stately twenty-four-hour orbit. Here at the beginning of the race, they were all heading directly away from the Sun—running, as it were, before the solar wind. One had to make the most of this lap, before the boats swung around to the other side of Earth and then started to head back into the Sun.
Time, Merton told himself, for the first check, while he had no navigational worries. With the periscope, he made a careful examination of the sail, concentrating on the points where the rigging was attached to it. The shroud lines—narrow bands of unsilvered plastic film—would have been completely invisible had they not been coated with fluorescent paint. Now they were taut lines of colored light, dwindling away for hundreds of yards toward that gigantic sail. Each had its own electric windlass, not much bigger than a game fisherman’s reel. The little windlasses were continually turning, playing lines in or out as the autopilot kept the sail trimmed at the correct angle to the Sun.
The play of sunlight on the great flexible mirror was beautiful to watch. The sail was undulating in slow, stately oscillations, sending multiple images of the Sun marching across it, until they faded away at its edges. Such leisurely vibrations were to be expected in this vast and flimsy structure. They were usually quite harmless, but Merton watched them carefully. Sometimes they could build up to the catastrophic undulations known as the “wriggles,” which could tear a sail to pieces.
When he was satisfied that everything was shipshape, he swept the periscope around the sky, rechecking the positions of his rivals. It was as he had hoped: the weeding-out process had begun as the less efficient boats fell astern. But the real test would come when they passed into the shadow of Earth. Then, maneuverability would count as much as speed.
It seemed a strange thing to do, what with the race having just started, but he thought it might be a good idea to get some sleep. The two-man crews on the other boats could take it in turns, but Merton had no one to relieve him. He must rely on his own physical resources, like that other solitary seaman, Joshua Slocum, in his tiny Spray. The American skipper had sailed Spray single-handed around the world; he could never have dreamed that, two centuries later, a man would be sailing single-handed from Earth to Moon—inspired, at least partly, by his example.
Merton snapped the elastic bands of the cabin seat around his waist and legs, then placed the electrodes of the sleep inducer on his forehead. He set the timer for three hours and relaxed. Very gently, hypnotically, the electronic pulses throbbed in the frontal lobes of his brain. Colored spirals of light expanded beneath his closed eyelids, widening outward to infinity. Then nothing . . .
The brazen clamor of the alarm dragged him back from his dreamless sleep. He was instantly awake, his eyes scanning the instrument panel. Only two hours had passed—but above the accelerometer, a red light was flashing. Thrust was falling; Diana was losing power.
Merton’s first thought was that something had happened to the sail; perhaps the anti-spin devices had failed, and the rigging had become twisted. Swiftly, he checked the meters that showed the tension of the shroud lines. Strange—on one side of the sail they were reading normally, but on the other the pull was dropping slowly, even as he watched.
In sudden understanding, Merton grabbed the periscope, switched to wide-angle vision, and started to scan the edge of the sail. Yes—there was the trouble, and it could have only one cause.
A huge, sharp-edged shadow had begun to slide across the gleaming silver of the sail. Darkness was falling upon Diana, as if a cloud had passed between her and the Sun. And in the dark, robbed of the rays that drove her, she would lose all thrust and drift helplessly through space.
But, of course, there were no clouds here, more than twenty thousand miles above the Earth. If there was a shadow, it must be made by man.
Merton grinned as he swung the periscope toward the Sun, switching in the filters that would allow him to look full into its blazing face without being blinded.
“Maneuver 4a,” he muttered to himself. “We’ll see who can play best at that game.”
It looked as if a giant planet was crossing the face of the Sun; a great black disc had bitten deep into its edge. Twenty miles astern, Gossamer was trying to arrange an artificial eclipse, specially for Diana’s benefit.
The maneuver was a perfectly legitimate one. Back in the days of ocean racing, skippers had often tried to rob each other of the wind. With any luck, you could leave your rival becalmed, with his sails collapsing around him—and be well ahead before he could undo the damage.
Merton had no intention of being caught so easily. There was plenty of time to take evasive action; things happened very slowly when you were running a solar sailboat. It would be at least twenty minutes before Gossamer could slide completely across the face of the Sun and leave him in darkness.
Diana’s tiny computer—the size of a matchbox, but the equivalent of a thousand human mathematicians—considered the problem for a full second and then flashed the answer. He’d have to open control panels three and four, until the sail had developed an extra twenty degrees of tilt; then the radiation pressure would blow him out of Gossamer’s dangerous shadow, back into the full blast of the Sun. It was a pity to interfere with the autopilot, which had been carefully programmed to give the fastest possible run—but that, after all, was why he was here. This was what made solar yachting a sport, rather than a battle between computers.
Out went control lines one and six, slowly undulating like sleepy snakes as they momentarily lost their tension. Two miles away, the triangular panels began to open lazily, spilling sunlight through the sail. Yet, for a long time, nothing seemed to happen. It was hard to grow accustomed to this slow-motion world, where it took minutes for the effects of any action to become visible to the eye. Then Merton saw that the sail was indeed tipping toward the Sun—and that Gossamer’s shadow was sliding harmlessly away, its cone of darkness lost in the deeper night of space.
Long before the shadow had vanished, and the disc of the Sun had cleared again, he reversed the tilt and brought Diana back on course. Her new momentum would carry her clear of the danger; no need to overdo it, and upset his calculations by sidestepping too far. That was another rule that was hard to learn: the very moment you had started something happening in space, it was already time to think about stopping it.
He reset the alarm, ready for the next natural or man-made emergency. Perhaps Gossamer, or one of the other contestants, would try the same trick again. Meanwhile, it was time to eat, though he did not feel particularly hungry. One used little physical energy in space, and it was easy to forget about food. Easy—and dangerous; for when an emergency arose, you might not have the reserves needed to deal with it.
He broke open the first of the meal packets, and inspected it without enthusiasm. The name on the label—SPACETASTIES—was enough to put him off. And he had grave doubts about the promise printed underneath: “Guaranteed crumbless.” It had been said that crumbs were a greater danger to space vehicles than meteorites; they could drift into the most unlikely places, causing short circuits, blocking vital jets, and getting into instruments that were supposed to be hermetically sealed.
Still, the liverwurst went down pleasantly enough; so did the chocolate and the pineapple puree. The plastic coffee bulb was warming on the electric heater when the outside world broke in upon his solitude, as the radio operator on the Commodore’s launch routed a call to him.
“Dr. Merton? If you can spare the time, Jeremy Blair would like a few words with you.” Blair was one of the more responsible news commentators, and Merton had been on his program many times. He could refuse to be interviewed, of course, but he liked Blair, and at the moment he could certainly not claim to be too busy. “I’ll take it,” he answered.
“Hello, Dr. Merton,” said the commentator immediately. “Glad you can spare a few minutes. And congratulations—you seem to be ahead of the field.”
“Too early in the game to be sure of that,” Merton answered cautiously.
“Tell me, Doctor, why did you decide to sail Diana by yourself? Just because it’s never been done before?”
“Well, isn’t that a good reason? But it wasn’t the only one, of course.” He paused, choosing his words carefully. “You know how critically the performance of a sun yacht depends on its mass. A second man, with all his supplies, would mean another five hundred pounds. That could easily be the difference between winning and losing.”
“And you’re quite certain that you can handle Diana alone?”
“Reasonably sure, thanks to the automatic controls I’ve designed. My main job is to supervise and make decisions.”
“But—two square miles of sail! It just doesn’t seem possible for one man to cope with all that.”
Merton laughed. “Why not? Those two square miles produce a maximum pull of just ten pounds. I can exert more force with my little finger.”
“Well, thank you, Doctor. And good luck. I’ll be calling you again.”
As the commentator signed off, Merton felt a little ashamed of himself. For his answer had been only part of the truth; and he was sure that Blair was shrewd enough to know it.
There was just one reason why he was here, alone in space. For almost forty years he had worked with teams of hundreds or even thousands of men, helping to design the most complex vehicles that the world had ever seen. For the last twenty years he had led one of those teams, and watched his creations go soaring to the stars. (Sometimes . . . There were failures, which he could never forget, even though the fault had not been his.) He was famous, with a successful career behind him. Yet he had never done anything by himself; always he had been one of an army.
This was his last chance to try for individual achievement, and he would share it with no one. There would be no more solar yachting for at least five years, as the period of the Quiet Sun ended and the cycle of bad weather began, with radiation storms bursting through the solar system. When it was safe again for these frail, unshielded craft to venture aloft, he would be too old. If, indeed, he was not too old already . . .
He dropped the empty food containers into the waste disposal and turned once more to the periscope. At first he could find only five of the other yachts; there was no sign of Woomera. It took him several minutes to locate her—a dim, star-eclipsing phantom, neatly caught in the shadow of Lebedev. He could imagine the frantic efforts the Australasians were making to extricate themselves, and wondered how they had fallen into the trap. It suggested that Lebedev was unusually maneuverable. She would bear watching, though she was too far away to menace Diana at the moment.
Now the Earth had almost vanished; it had waned to a narrow, brilliant bow of light that was moving steadily toward the Sun. Dimly outlined within that burning bow was the night side of the planet, with the phosphorescent gleams of great cities showing here and there through gaps in the clouds. The disc of darkness had already blanked out a huge section of the Milky Way. In a few minutes, it would start to encroach upon the Sun.
The light was fading; a purple, twilight hue—the glow of many sunsets, thousands of miles below—was falling across the sail as Diana slipped silently into the shadow of Earth. The Sun plummeted below that invisible horizon; within minutes, it was night.
Merton looked back along the orbit he had traced, now a quarter of the way around the world. One by one he saw the brilliant stars of the other yachts wink out, as they joined him in the brief night. It would be an hour before the Sun emerged from that enormous black shield, and through all that time they would be completely helpless, coasting without power.
He switched on the external spotlight, and started to search the now-darkened sail with its beam. Already the thousands of acres of film were beginning to wrinkle and become flaccid. The shroud lines were slackening, and must be wound in lest they become entangled. But all this was expected; everything was going as planned.
Fifty miles astern, Arachne and Santa Maria were not so lucky. Merton learned of their troubles when the radio burst into life on the emergency circuit.
“Number Two and Number Six, this is Control. You are on a collision course; your orbits will intersect in sixty-five minutes! Do you require assistance?”
There was a long pause while the two skippers digested this bad news. Merton wondered who was to blame. Perhaps one yacht had been trying to shadow the other, and had not completed the maneuver before they were both caught in darkness. Now there was nothing that either could do. They were slowly but inexorably converging, unable to change course by a fraction of a degree.
Yet—sixty-five minutes! That would just bring them out into sunlight again, as they emerged from the shadow of the Earth. They had a slim chance, if their sails could snatch enough power to avoid a crash. There must be some frantic calculations going on aboard Arachne and Santa Maria.
Arachne answered first. Her reply was just what Merton had expected.
“Number Six calling Control. We don’t need assistance, thank you. We’ll work this out for ourselves.”
I wonder, thought Merton; but at least it will be interesting to watch. The first real drama of the race was approaching, exactly above the line of midnight on the sleeping Earth.
For the next hour, Merton’s own sail kept him too busy to worry about Arachne and Santa Maria. It was hard to keep a good watch on those fifty million square feet of dim plastic out there in the darkness, illuminated only by his narrow spotlight and the rays of the still-distant Moon. From now on, for almost half his orbit around the Earth, he must keep the whole of this immense area edge-on to the Sun. During the next twelve or fourteen hours, the sail would be a useless encumbrance; for he would be heading into the Sun, and its rays could only drive him backward along his orbit. It was a pity that he could not furl the sail completely, until he was ready to use it again; but no one had yet found a practical way of doing this.
Far below, there was the first hint of dawn along the edge of the Earth. In ten minutes the Sun would emerge from its eclipse. The coasting yachts would come to life again as the blast of radiation struck their sails. That would be the moment of crisis for Arachne and Santa Maria—and, indeed, for all of them.
Merton swung the periscope until he found the two dark shadows drifting against the stars. They were very close together—perhaps less than three miles apart. They might, he decided, just be able to make it . . .
Dawn flashed like an explosion along the rim of Earth as the Sun rose out of the Pacific. The sail and shroud lines glowed a brief crimson, then gold, then blazed with the pure white light of day. The needles of the dynamometers began to lift from their zeros—but only just. Diana was still almost completely weightless, for with the sail pointing toward the Sun, her acceleration was now only a few millionths of a gravity.
But Arachne and Santa Maria were crowding on all the sail that they could manage, in their desperate attempt to keep apart. Now, while there was less than two miles between them, their glittering plastic clouds were unfurling and expanding with agonizing slowness as they felt the first delicate push of the Sun’s rays. Almost every TV screen on Earth would be mirroring this protracted drama; and even now, at this last minute, it was possible to tell what the outcome would be.
The two skippers were stubborn men. Either could have cut his sail and fallen back to give the other a chance, but neither would do so. Too much prestige, too many millions, too many reputations were at stake. And so, silently and softly as snowflakes falling on a winter night, Arachne and Santa Maria collided.
The square kite crawled almost imperceptibly into the circular spiderweb. The long ribbons of the shroud lines twisted and tangled together with dreamlike slowness. Even aboard Diana, Merton, busy with his own rigging, could scarcely tear his eyes away from this silent, long-drawn-out disaster.
For more than ten minutes the billowing, shining clouds continued to merge into one inextricable mass. Then the crew capsules tore loose and went their separate ways, missing each other by hundreds of yards. With a flare of rockets, the safety launches hurried to pick them up.
That leaves five of us, thought Merton. He felt sorry for the skippers who had so thoroughly eliminated each other, only a few hours after the start of the race, but they were young men and would have another chance.
Within minutes, the five had dropped to four. From the beginning, Merton had had doubts about the slowly rotating Sunbeam; now he saw them justified.
The Martian ship had failed to tack properly. Her spin had given her too much stability. Her great ring of a sail was turning to face the Sun, instead of being edge-on to it. She was being blown back along her course at almost her maximum acceleration.
That was about the most maddening thing that could happen to a skipper—even worse than a collision, for he could blame only himself. But no one would feel much sympathy for the frustrated colonials, as they dwindled slowly astern. They had made too many brash boasts before the race, and what had happened to them was poetic justice.
Yet it would not do to write off Sunbeam completely; with almost half a million miles still to go, she might yet pull ahead. Indeed, if there were a few more casualties, she might be the only one to complete the race. It had happened before.
The next twelve hours were uneventful, as the Earth waxed in the sky from new to full. There was little to do while the fleet drifted around the unpowered half of its orbit, but Merton did not find the time hanging heavily on his hands. He caught a few hours of sleep, ate two meals, wrote his log, and became involved in several more radio interviews. Sometimes, though rarely, he talked to the other skippers, exchanging greetings and friendly taunts. But most of the time he was content to float in weightless relaxation, beyond all the cares of Earth, happier than he had been for many years. He was—as far as any man could be in space—master of his own fate, sailing the ship upon which he had lavished so much skill, so much love, that it had become part of his very being.
The next casualty came when they were passing the line between Earth and Sun, and were just beginning the powered half of the orbit. Aboard Diana, Merton saw the great sail stiffen as it tilted to catch the rays that drove it. The acceleration began to climb up from the microgravities, though it would be hours yet before it would reach its maximum value.
It would never reach it for Gossamer. The moment when power came on again was always critical, and she failed to survive it.
Blair’s radio commentary, which Merton had left running at low volume, alerted him with the news: “Hello, Gossamer has the wriggles!” He hurried to the periscope, but at first could see nothing wrong with the great circular disc of Gossamer’s sail. It was difficult to study it because it was almost edge-on to him and so appeared as a thin ellipse; but presently he saw that it was twisting back and forth in slow, irresistible oscillations. Unless the crew could damp out these waves, by properly timed but gentle tugs on the shroud lines, the sail would tear itself to pieces.
They did their best, and after twenty minutes it seemed that they had succeeded. Then, somewhere near the center of the sail, the plastic film began to rip. It was slowly driven outward by the radiation pressure, like smoke coiling upward from a fire. Within a quarter of an hour, nothing was left but the delicate tracery of the radial spars that had supported the great web. Once again there was a flare of rockets, as a launch moved in to retrieve the Gossamer’s capsule and her dejected crew.
“Getting rather lonely up here, isn’t it?” said a conversational voice over the ship-to-ship radio.
“Not for you, Dimitri,” retorted Merton. “You’ve still got company back there at the end of the field. I’m the one who’s lonely, up here in front.” It was not an idle boast; by this time Diana was three hundred miles ahead of the next competitor, and her lead should increase still more rapidly in the hours to come.
Aboard Lebedev, Dimitri Markoff gave a good-natured chuckle. He did not sound, Merton thought, at all like a man who had resigned himself to defeat.
“Remember the legend of the tortoise and the hare,” answered the Russian. “A lot can happen in the next quarter-million miles.”
It happened much sooner than that, when they had completed their first orbit of Earth and were passing the starting line again—though thousands of miles higher, thanks to the extra energy the Sun’s rays had given them. Merton had taken careful sights on the other yachts and had fed the figures into the computer. The answer it gave for Woomera was so absurd that he immediately did a recheck.
There was no doubt of it—the Australasians were catching up at a completely fantastic rate. No solar yacht could possibly have such an acceleration, unless . . .
A swift look through the periscope gave the answer. Woomera’s rigging, pared back to the very minimum of mass, had given way. It was her sail alone, still maintaining its shape, that was racing up behind him like a handkerchief blown before the wind. Two hours later it fluttered past, less than twenty miles away; but long before that, the Australasians had joined the growing crowd aboard the Commodore’s launch.
So now it was a straight fight between Diana and Lebedev—for though the Martians had not given up, they were a thousand miles astern and no longer counted as a serious threat. For that matter, it was hard to see what Lebedev could do to overtake Diana’s lead; but all the way around the second lap, through eclipse again and the long, slow drift against the Sun, Merton felt a growing unease.
He knew the Russian pilots and designers. They had been trying to win this race for twenty years—and, after all, it was only fair that they should, for had not Pyotr Nikolaevich Lebedev been the first man to detect the pressure of sunlight, back to the very beginning of the twentieth century? But they had never succeeded.
And they would never stop trying. Dimitri was up to something—and it would be spectacular.
* * *
Aboard the official launch, a thousand miles behind the racing yachts, Commodore van Stratten looked at the radiogram with angry dismay. It had traveled more than a hundred million miles, from the chain of solar observatories swinging high above the blazing surface of the Sun, and it brought the worst possible news.
The Commodore—his title was purely honorary, of course; back on Earth he was Professor of Astrophysics at Harvard—had been half-expecting it. Never before had the race been arranged so late in the season. There had been many delays; they had gambled—and now, it seemed, they might all lose.
Deep beneath the surface of the Sun, enormous forces were gathering. At any moment the energies of a million hydrogen bombs might burst forth in the awesome explosion known as a solar flare. Climbing at millions of miles an hour, an invisible fireball many times the size of Earth would leap from the Sun and head out across space.
The cloud of electrified gas would probably miss the Earth completely. But if it did not, it would arrive in just over a day. Spaceships could protect themselves, with their shielding and their powerful magnetic screens; but the lightly built solar yachts, with their paper-thin walls, were defenseless against such a menace. The crews would have to be taken off, and the race abandoned.
John Merton knew nothing of this as he brought Diana around the Earth for the second time. If all went well, this would be the last circuit, both for him and for the Russians. They had spiraled upward by thousands of miles, gaining energy from the Sun’s rays. On this lap, they should escape from the Earth completely, and head outward on the long run to the Moon. It was a straight race now; Sunbeam’s crew had finally withdrawn exhausted, after battling valiantly with their spinning sail for more than a hundred thousand miles.
Merton did not feel tired; he had eaten and slept well, and Diana was behaving herself admirably. The autopilot, tensioning the rigging like a busy little spider, kept the great sail trimmed to the Sun more accurately than any human skipper could have. Though by this time the two square miles of plastic sheet must have been riddled by hundreds of micrometeorites, the pinhead-sized punctures had produced no falling off of thrust.
He had only two worries. The first was shroud line number eight, which could no longer be adjusted properly. Without any warning, the reel had jammed; even after all these years of astronautical engineering, bearings sometimes seized up in vacuum. He could neither lengthen nor shorten the line, and would have to navigate as best he could with the others. Luckily, the most difficult maneuvers were over; from now on, Diana would have the Sun behind her as she sailed straight down the solar wind. And as the old-time sailors had often said, it was easy to handle a boat when the wind was blowing over your shoulder.
His other worry was Lebedev, still dogging his heels three hundred miles astern. The Russian yacht had shown remarkable maneuverability, thanks to the four great panels that could be tilted around the central sail. Her flipovers as she rounded the Earth had been carried out with superb precision. But to gain maneuverability she must have sacrificed speed. You could not have it both ways; in the long, straight haul ahead, Merton should be able to hold his own. Yet he could not be certain of victory until, three or four days from now, Diana went flashing past the far side of the Moon.
And then, in the fiftieth hour of the race, just after the end of the second orbit around Earth, Markoff sprang his little surprise.
“Hello, John,” he said casually over the ship-to-ship circuit. “I’d like you to watch this. It should be interesting.”
Merton drew himself across to the periscope and turned up the magnification to the limit. There in the field of view, a most improbable sight against the background of the stars, was the glittering Maltese cross of Lebedev, very small but very clear. As he watched, the four arms of the cross slowly detached themselves from the central square, and went drifting away, with all their spars and rigging, into space.
Markoff had jettisoned all unnecessary mass, now that he was coming up to escape velocity and need no longer plod patiently around the Earth, gaining momentum on each circuit. From now on, Lebedev would be almost unsteerable—but that did not matter; all the tricky navigation lay behind her. It was as if an old-time yachtsman had deliberately thrown away his rudder and heavy keel, knowing that the rest of the race would be straight downwind over a calm sea.
“Congratulations, Dimitri,” Merton radioed. “It’s a neat trick. But it’s not good enough. You can’t catch up with me now.”
“I’ve not finished yet,” the Russian answered. “There’s an old winter’s tale in my country about a sleigh being chased by wolves. To save himself, the driver has to throw off the passengers one by one. Do you see the analogy?”
Merton did, all too well. On this final straight lap, Dimitri no longer needed his copilot. Lebedev could really be stripped down for action.
“Alexis won’t be very happy about this,” Merton replied. “Besides, it’s against the rules.”
“Alexis isn’t happy, but I’m the captain. He’ll just have to wait around for ten minutes until the Commodore picks him up. And the regulations say nothing about the size of the crew—you should know that.”
Merton did not answer; he was too busy doing some hurried calculations, based on what he knew of Lebedev’s design. By the time he had finished, he knew that the race was still in doubt. Lebedev would be catching up with him at just about the time he hoped to pass the Moon.
But the outcome of the race was already being decided, ninety-two million miles away.
* * *
On Solar Observatory Three, far inside the orbit of Mercury, the automatic instruments recorded the whole history of the flare. A hundred million square miles of the Sun’s surface exploded in such blue-white fury that, by comparison, the rest of the disc paled to a dull glow. Out of that seething inferno, twisting and turning like a living creature in the magnetic fields of its own creation, soared the electrified plasma of the great flare. Ahead of it, moving at the speed of light, went the warning flash of ultraviolet and X rays. That would reach Earth in eight minutes and was relatively harmless. Not so the charged atoms that were following behind at their leisurely four million miles an hour—and which, in just over a day, would engulf Diana, Lebedev, and their accompanying little fleet in a cloud of lethal radiation.
The Commodore left his decision to the last possible minute. Even when the jet of plasma had been tracked past the orbit of Venus, there was a chance that it might miss the Earth. But when it was less than four hours away, and had already been picked up by the Moon-based radar network, he knew that there was no hope. All solar sailing was over, for the next five or six years—until the Sun was quiet again.
A great sigh of disappointment swept across the solar system. Diana and Lebedev were halfway between Earth and Moon, running neck and neck—and now no one would ever know which was the better boat. The enthusiasts would argue the result for years; history would merely record: “Race canceled owing to solar storm.”
When John Merton received the order, he felt a bitterness he had not known since childhood. Across the years, sharp and clear, came the memory of his tenth birthday. He had been promised an exact scale model of the famous spaceship Morning Star, and for weeks had been planning how he would assemble it, where he would hang it in his bedroom. And then, at the last moment, his father had broken the news. “I’m sorry, John—it cost too much money. Maybe next year . . .”
Half a century and a successful lifetime later, he was a heartbroken boy again.
For a moment, he thought of disobeying the Commodore. Suppose he sailed on, ignoring the warning? Even if the race was abandoned, he could make crossing to the Moon that would stand in the record books for generations.
But that would be worse than stupidity; it would be suicide—and a very unpleasant form of suicide. He had seen men die of radiation poisoning, when the magnetic shielding of their ships had failed in deep space. No—nothing was worth that . . .
He felt as sorry for Dimitri Markoff as for himself. They had both deserved to win, and now victory would go to neither. No man could argue with the Sun in one of its rages, even though he might ride upon its beams to the edge of space.
Only fifty miles astern now, the Commodore’s launch was drawing alongside Lebedev, preparing to take off her skipper. There went the silver sail, as Dimitri—with feelings that he would share—cut the rigging. The tiny capsule would be taken back to Earth, perhaps to be used again; but a sail was spread for one voyage only.
Merton could press the jettison button now, and save his rescuers a few minutes of time. But he could not do it; he wanted to stay aboard to the very end, on the little boat that had been for so long a part of his dreams and his life. The great sail was spread now at right angles to the Sun, exerting its utmost thrust. Long ago, it had torn him clear of Earth, and Diana was still gaining speed.
Then, out of nowhere, beyond all doubt or hesitation, he knew what must be done. For the last time, he sat down before the computer that had navigated him halfway to the Moon.
When he had finished, he packed the log and his few personal belongings. Clumsily, for he was out of practice, and it was not an easy job to do by oneself, he climbed into the emergency survival suit. He was just sealing the helmet when the Commodore’s voice called over the radio.
“We’ll be alongside in five minutes, Captain. Please cut your sail, so we won’t foul it.”
John Merton, first and last skipper of the sun yacht Diana, hesitated a moment. He looked for the last time around the tiny cabin, with its shining instruments and its neatly arranged controls, now all locked in their final positions. Then he said into the microphone: “I’m abandoning ship. Take your time to pick me up. Diana can look after herself.”
There was no reply from the Commodore, and for that he was grateful. Professor van Stratten would have guessed what was happening—and would know that, in these final moments, he wished to be left alone.
He did not bother to exhaust the air lock, and the rush of escaping gas blew him gently out into space. The thrust he gave her then was his last gift to Diana. She dwindled away from him, sail glittering splendidly in the sunlight that would be hers for centuries to come. Two days from now she would flash past the Moon; but the Moon, like the Earth, could never catch her. Without his mass to slow her down, she would gain two thousand miles an hour in every day of sailing. In a month, she would be traveling faster than any ship that man had ever built.
As the Sun’s rays weakened with distance, so her acceleration would fall. But even at the orbit of Mars, she would be gaining a thousand miles an hour in every day. Long before then, she would be moving too swiftly for the Sun itself to hold her. Faster than a comet had ever streaked in from the stars, she would be heading out into the abyss.
The glare of rockets, only a few miles away, caught Merton’s eye. The launch was approaching to pick him up—at thousands of times the acceleration that Diana could ever attain. But its engines could burn for a few minutes only, before they exhausted their fuel—while Diana would still be gaining speed, driven outward by the Sun’s eternal fires, for ages yet to come.
“Good-bye, little ship,” said John Merton. “I wonder what eyes will see you next, how many thousand years from now?”
At last he felt at peace, as the blunt torpedo of the launch nosed up beside him. He would never win the race to the Moon; but his would be the first of all man’s ships to set sail on the long journey to the stars.
This text was produced from Dynamic Science Fiction January 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
THE CHAPTER ENDS
Novelet of Latter Years
by Poul Anderson
Julith clasped the star-man’s arm with one hand, while her other arm gripped his waist. The generator in Jorun’s skull responded to his will … they rose quietly and went slowly seaward….
“Look around you, Jorun of Fulkhis. This is Earth. This is the old home of all mankind. You cannot go off and forget it. Man cannot do so. It is in him, in his blood and bones and soul; he will carry Earth within him forever.”
“No,” said the old man.
“But you don’t realize what it means,” said Jorun. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
The old man, Kormt of Huerdar, Gerlaug’s son, and Speaker for Solis Township, shook his head till the long, grizzled locks swirled around his wide shoulders. “I have thought it through,” he said. His voice was deep and slow and implacable. “You gave me five years to think about it. And my answer is no.”
Jorun felt a weariness rise within him. It had been like this for days now, weeks, and it was like trying to knock down a mountain. You beat on its rocky flanks till your hands were bloody, and still the mountain stood there, sunlight on its high snow-fields and in the forests that rustled up its slopes, and it did not really notice you. You were a brief thin buzz between two long nights, but the mountain was forever.
“You haven’t thought at all,” he said with a rudeness born of exhaustion. “You’ve only reacted unthinkingly to a dead symbol. It’s not a human reaction, even, it’s a verbal reflex.”
Kormt’s eyes, meshed in crow’s-feet, were serene and steady under the thick gray brows. He smiled a little in his long beard, but made no other reply. Had he simply let the insult glide off him, or had he not understood it at all? There was no real talking to these peasants; too many millennia lay between, and you couldn’t shout across that gulf.
“Well,” said Jorun, “the ships will be here tomorrow or the next day, and it’ll take another day or so to get all your people aboard. You have that long to decide, but after that it’ll be too late. Think about it, I beg of you. As for me, I’ll be too busy to argue further.”
“You are a good man,” said Kormt, “and a wise one in your fashion. But you are blind. There is something dead inside you.”
He waved one huge gnarled hand. “Look around you, Jorun of Fulkhis. This is Earth. This is the old home of all humankind. You cannot go off and forget it. Man cannot do so. It is in him, in his blood and bones and soul; he will carry Earth within him forever.”
Jorun’s eyes traveled along the arc of the hand. He stood on the edge of the town. Behind him were its houses—low, white, half-timbered, roofed with thatch or red tile, smoke rising from the chimneys; carved galleries overhung the narrow, cobbled, crazily-twisting streets; he heard the noise of wheels and wooden clogs, the shouts of children at play. Beyond that were trees and the incredible ruined walls of Sol City. In front of him, the wooded hills were cleared and a gentle landscape of neat fields and orchards rolled down toward the distant glitter of the sea: scattered farm buildings, drowsy cattle, winding gravel roads, fence-walls of ancient marble and granite, all dreaming under the sun.
He drew a deep breath. It was pungent in his nostrils. It smelled of leaf-mould, plowed earth baking in the warmth, summery trees and gardens, a remote ocean odor of salt and kelp and fish. He thought that no two planets ever had quite the same smell, and that none was as rich as Terra’s.
“This is a fair world,” he said slowly.
“It is the only one,” said Kormt. “Man came from here; and to this, in the end, he must return.”
“I wonder—” Jorun sighed. “Take me; not one atom of my body was from this soil before I landed. My people lived on Fulkhis for ages, and changed to meet its conditions. They would not be happy on Terra.”
“The atoms are nothing,” said Kormt. “It is the form which matters, and that was given to you by Earth.”
Jorun studied him for a moment. Kormt was like most of this planet’s ten million or so people—a dark, stocky folk, though there were more blond and red-haired throwbacks here than in the rest of the Galaxy. He was old for a primitive untreated by medical science—he must be almost two hundred years old—but his back was straight, and his stride firm. The coarse, jut-nosed face held an odd strength. Jorun was nearing his thousandth birthday, but couldn’t help feeling like a child in Kormt’s presence.
That didn’t make sense. These few dwellers on Terra were a backward and impoverished race of peasants and handicraftsmen; they were ignorant and unadventurous; they had been static for more thousands of years than anyone knew. What could they have to say to the ancient and mighty civilization which had almost forgotten their little planet?
Kormt looked at the declining sun. “I must go now,” he said. “There are the evening chores to do. I will be in town tonight if you should wish to see me.”
“I probably will,” said Jorun. “There’s a lot to do, readying the evacuation, and you’re a big help.”
The old man bowed with grave courtesy, turned, and walked off down the road. He wore the common costume of Terran men, as archaic in style as in its woven-fabric material: hat, jacket, loose trousers, a long staff in his hand. Contrasting the drab blue of Kormt’s dress, Jorun’s vivid tunic of shifting rainbow hues was like a flame.
The psychotechnician sighed again, watching him go. He liked the old fellow. It would be criminal to leave him here alone, but the law forbade force—physical or mental—and the Integrator on Corazuno wasn’t going to care whether or not one aged man stayed behind. The job was to get the race off Terra.
A lovely world. Jorun’s thin mobile features, pale-skinned and large-eyed, turned around the horizon. A fair world we came from.
There were more beautiful planets in the Galaxy’s swarming myriads—the indigo world-ocean of Loa, jeweled with islands; the heaven-defying mountains of Sharang; the sky of Jareb, that seemed to drip light—oh, many and many, but there was only one Earth.
Jorun remembered his first sight of this world, hanging free in space to watch it after the gruelling ten-day run, thirty thousand light-years, from Corazuno. It was blue as it turned before his eyes, a burnished turquoise shield blazoned with the living green and brown of its lands, and the poles were crowned with a flimmering haze of aurora. The belts that streaked its face and blurred the continents were cloud, wind and water and the gray rush of rain, like a benediction from heaven. Beyond the planet hung its moon, a scarred golden crescent, and he had wondered how many generations of men had looked up to it, or watched its light like a broken bridge across moving waters. Against the enormous cold of the sky—utter black out to the distant coils of the nebulae, thronging with a million frosty points of diamond-hard blaze that were the stars—Earth had stood as a sign of haven. To Jorun, who came from Galactic center and its uncountable hosts of suns, heaven was bare, this was the outer fringe where the stars thinned away toward hideous immensity. He had shivered a little, drawn the envelope of air and warmth closer about him, with a convulsive movement. The silence drummed in his head. Then he streaked for the north-pole rendezvous of his group.
Well, he thought now, we have a pretty routine job. The first expedition here, five years ago, prepared the natives for the fact they’d have to go. Our party simply has to organize these docile peasants in time for the ships. But it had meant a lot of hard work, and he was tired. It would be good to finish the job and get back home.
Or would it?
He thought of flying with Zarek, his team-mate, from the rendezvous to this area assigned as theirs. Plains like oceans of grass, wind-rippled, darkened with the herds of wild cattle whose hoofbeats were a thunder in the earth; forests, hundreds of kilometers of old and mighty trees, rivers piercing them in a long steel gleam; lakes where fish leaped; spilling sunshine like warm rain, radiance so bright it hurt his eyes, cloud-shadows swift across the land. It had all been empty of man, but still there was a vitality here which was almost frightening to Jorun. His own grim world of moors and crags and spin-drift seas was a niggard beside this; here life covered the earth, filled the oceans, and made the heavens clangerous around him. He wondered if the driving energy within man, the force which had raised him to the stars, made him half-god and half-demon, if that was a legacy of Terra.
Well—man had changed; over the thousands of years, natural and controlled adaptation had fitted him to the worlds he had colonized, and most of his many races could not now feel at home here. Jorun thought of his own party: round, amber-skinned Chuli from a tropic world, complaining bitterly about the cold and dryness; gay young Cluthe, gangling and bulge-chested; sophisticated Taliuvenna of the flowing dark hair and the lustrous eyes—no, to them Earth was only one more planet, out of thousands they had seen in their long lives.
And I’m a sentimental fool.
2
He could have willed the vague regret out of his trained nervous system, but he didn’t want to. This was the last time human eyes would ever look on Earth, and somehow Jorun felt that it should be more to him than just another psychotechnic job.
“Hello, good sir.”
He turned at the voice and forced his tired lips into a friendly smile. “Hello, Julith,” he said. It was a wise policy to learn the names of the townspeople, at least, and she was a great-great-granddaughter of the Speaker.
She was some thirteen or fourteen years old, a freckle-faced child with a shy smile, and steady green eyes. There was a certain awkward grace about her, and she seemed more imaginative than most of her stolid race. She curtsied quaintly for him, her bare foot reaching out under the long smock which was daily female dress here.
“Are you busy, good sir?” she asked.
“Well, not too much,” said Jorun. He was glad of a chance to talk; it silenced his thoughts. “What can I do for you?”
“I wondered—” She hesitated, then, breathlessly: “I wonder if you could give me a lift down to the beach? Only for an hour or two. It’s too far to walk there before I have to be home, and I can’t borrow a car, or even a horse. If it won’t be any trouble, sir.”
“Mmmm—shouldn’t you be at home now? Isn’t there milking and so on to do?”
“Oh, I don’t live on a farm, good sir. My father is a baker.”
“Yes, yes, so he is. I should have remembered.” Jorun considered for an instant. There was enough to do in town, and it wasn’t fair for him to play hooky while Zarek worked alone. “Why do you want to go to the beach, Julith?”
“We’ll be busy packing up,” she said. “Starting tomorrow, I guess. This is my last chance to see it.”
Jorun’s mouth twisted a little. “All right,” he said; “I’ll take you.”
“You are very kind, good sir,” she said gravely.
He didn’t reply, but held out his arm, and she clasped it with one hand while her other arm gripped his waist. The generator inside his skull responded to his will, reaching out and clawing itself to the fabric of forces and energies which was physical space. They rose quietly, and went so slowly seaward that he didn’t have to raise a wind-screen.
“Will we be able to fly like this when we get to the stars?” she asked.
“I’m afraid not, Julith,” he said. “You see, the people of my civilization are born this way. Thousands of years ago, men learned how to control the great basic forces of the cosmos with only a small bit of energy. Finally they used artificial mutation—that is, they changed themselves, slowly, over many generations, until their brains grew a new part that could generate this controlling force. We can now even, fly between the stars, by this power. But your people don’t have that brain, so we had to build spaceships to take you away.”
“I see,” she said.
“Your great-great-great-grandchildren can be like us, if your people want to be changed thus,” he said.
“They didn’t want to change before,” she answered. “I don’t think they’ll do it now, even in their new home.” Her voice held no bitterness; it was an acceptance.
Privately, Jorun doubted it. The psychic shock of this uprooting would be bound to destroy the old traditions of the Terrans; it would not take many centuries before they were culturally assimilated by Galactic civilization.
Assimilated—nice euphemism. Why not just say—eaten?
They landed on the beach. It was broad and white, running in dunes from the thin, harsh, salt-streaked grass to the roar and tumble of surf. The sun was low over the watery horizon, filling the damp, blowing air with gold. Jorun could almost look directly at its huge disc.
He sat down. The sand gritted tinily under him, and the wind rumpled his hair and filled his nostrils with its sharp wet smell. He picked up a conch and turned it over in his fingers, wondering at the intricate architecture of it.
“If you hold it to your ear,” said Julith, “you can hear the sea.” Her childish voice was curiously tender around the rough syllables of Earth’s language.
He nodded and obeyed her hint. It was only the small pulse of blood within him—you heard the same thing out in the great hollow silence of space—but it did sing of restless immensities, wind and foam, and the long waves marching under the moon.
“I have two of them myself,” said Julith. “I want them so I can always remember this beach. And my children and their children will hold them, too, and hear our sea talking.” She folded his fingers around the shell. “You keep this one for yourself.”
“Thank you,” he said. “I will.” The combers rolled in, booming and spouting against the land. The Terrans called them the horses of God. A thin cloud in the west was turning rose and gold.
“Are there oceans on our new planet?” asked Julith.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s the most Earth-like world we could find that wasn’t already inhabited. You’ll be happy there.”
But the trees and grasses, the soil and the fruits thereof, the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the fish of the waters beneath, form and color, smell and sound, taste and texture, everything is different. Is alien. The difference is small, subtle, but it is the abyss of two billion years of separate evolution, and no other world can ever quite be Earth.
Julith looked straight at him with solemn eyes. “Are you folk afraid of Hulduvians?” she asked.
“Why, no,” he said. “Of course not.”
“Then why are you giving Earth to them?” It was a soft question, but it trembled just a little.
“I thought all your people understood the reason by now,” said Jorun. “Civilization—the civilization of man and his nonhuman allies—has moved inward, toward the great star-clusters of Galactic center. This part of space means nothing to us any more; it’s almost a desert. You haven’t seen starlight till you’ve been by Sagittarius. Now the Hulduvians are another civilization. They are not the least bit like us; they live on big, poisonous worlds like Jupiter and Saturn. I think they would seem like pretty nice monsters if they weren’t so alien to us that neither side can really understand the other. They use the cosmic energies too, but in a different way—and their way interferes with ours just as ours interferes with theirs. Different brains, you see.
“Anyway, it was decided that the two civilizations would get along best by just staying away from each other. If they divided up the Galaxy between them, there would be no interference; it would be too far from one civilization to the other. The Hulduvians were, really, very nice about it. They’re willing to take the outer rim, even if there are fewer stars, and let us have the center.
“So by the agreement, we’ve got to have all men and manlike beings out of their territory before they come to settle it, just as they’ll move out of ours. Their colonists won’t be coming to Jupiter and Saturn for centuries yet; but even so, we have to clear the Sirius Sector now, because there’ll be a lot of work to do elsewhere. Fortunately, there are only a few people living in this whole part of space. The Sirius Sector has been an isolated, primi—ah—quiet region since the First Empire fell, fifty thousand years ago.”
Julith’s voice rose a little. “But those people are us!”
“And the folk of Alpha Centauri and Procyon and Sirius and—oh, hundreds of other stars. Yet all of you together are only one tiny drop in the quadrillions of the Galaxy. Don’t you see, Julith, you have to move for the good of all of us?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I know all that.”
She got up, shaking herself. “Let’s go swimming.”
Jorun smiled and shook his head. “No, I’ll wait for you if you want to go.”
She nodded and ran off down the beach, sheltering behind a dune to put on a bathing-suit. The Terrans had a nudity taboo, in spite of the mild interglacial climate; typical primitive irrationality. Jorun lay back, folding his arms behind his head, and looked up at the darkening sky. The evening star twinkled forth, low and white on the dusk-blue horizon. Venus—or was it Mercury? He wasn’t sure. He wished he knew more about the early history of the Solar System, the first men to ride their thunderous rockets out to die on unknown hell-worlds—the first clumsy steps toward the stars. He could look it up in the archives of Corazuno, but he knew he never would. Too much else to do, too much to remember. Probably less than one percent of mankind’s throngs even knew where Earth was, today—though, for a while, it had been quite a tourist-center. But that was perhaps thirty thousand years ago.
Because this world, out of all the billions, has certain physical characteristics, he thought, my race has made them into standards. Our basic units of length and time and acceleration, our comparisons by which we classify the swarming planets of the Galaxy, they all go back ultimately to Earth. We bear that unspoken memorial to our birthplace within our whole civilization, and will bear it forever. But has she given us more than that? Are our own selves, bodies and minds and dreams, are they also the children of Earth?
Now he was thinking like Kormt, stubborn old Kormt who clung with such a blind strength to this land simply because it was his. When you considered all the races of this wander-footed species—how many of them there were, how many kinds of man between the stars! And yet they all walked upright; they all had two eyes and a nose between and a mouth below; they were all cells of that great and ancient culture which had begun here, eons past, with the first hairy half-man who kindled a fire against night. If Earth had not had darkness and cold and prowling beasts, oxygen and cellulose and flint, that culture might never have gestated.
I’m getting unlogical. Too tired, nerves worn too thin, psychosomatic control slipping. Now Earth is becoming some obscure mother-symbol for me.
Or has she always been one, for the whole race of us?
A seagull cried harshly overhead and soared from view.
The sunset was smoldering away and dusk rose like fog out of the ground. Julith came running back to him, her face indistinct in the gloom. She was breathing hard, and he couldn’t tell if the catch in her voice was laughter or weeping.
“I’d better be getting home,” she said.
3
They flew slowly back. The town was a yellow twinkle of lights, warmth gleaming from windows across many empty kilometers. Jorun set the girl down outside her home.
“Thank you, good sir,” she said, curtseying. “Won’t you come in to dinner?”
“Well—”
The door opened, etching the girl black against the ruddiness inside. Jorun’s luminous tunic made him like a torch in the dark. “Why, it’s the star-man,” said a woman’s voice.
“I took your daughter for a swim,” he explained. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“And if we did, what would it matter?” grumbled a bass tone. Jorun recognized Kormt; the old man must have come as a guest from his farm on the outskirts. “What could we do about it?”
“Now, Granther, that’s no way to talk to the gentleman,” said the woman. “He’s been very kind. Won’t you come eat with us, good sir?”
Jorun refused twice, in case they were only being polite, then accepted gladly enough. He was tired of cookery at the inn where he and Zarek boarded. “Thank you.”
He entered, ducking under the low door. A single long, smoky-raftered room was kitchen, diningroom, and parlor; doors led off to the sleeping quarters. It was furnished with a clumsy elegance, skin rugs, oak wainscoting, carved pillars, glowing ornaments of hammered copper. A radium clock, which must be incredibly old, stood on the stone mantel, above a snapping fire; a chemical-powered gun, obviously of local manufacture, hung over it. Julith’s parents, a plain, quiet peasant couple, conducted him to the end of the wooden table, while half a dozen children watched him with large eyes. The younger children were the only Terrans who seemed to find this removal an adventure.
The meal was good and plentiful: meat, vegetables, bread, beer, milk, ice cream, coffee, all of it from the farms hereabouts. There wasn’t much trade between the few thousand communities of Earth; they were practically self-sufficient. The company ate in silence, as was the custom here. When they were finished, Jorun wanted to go, but it would have been rude to leave immediately. He went over to a chair by the fireplace, across from the one in which Kormt sprawled.
The old man took out a big-bowled pipe and began stuffing it. Shadows wove across his seamed brown face, his eyes were a gleam out of darkness. “I’ll go down to City Hall with you soon,” he said; “I imagine that’s where the work is going on.”
“Yes,” said Jorun, “I can relieve Zarek at it. I’d appreciate it if you did come, good sir. Your influence is very steadying on these people.”
“It should be,” said Kormt. “I’ve been their Speaker for almost a hundred years. And my father Gerlaug was before me, and his father Kormt was before him.” He took a brand from the fire and held it over his pipe, puffing hard, looking up at Jorun through tangled brows. “Who was your great-grandfather?”
“Why—I don’t know. I imagine he’s still alive somewhere, but—”
“I thought so. No marriage. No family. No home. No tradition.” Kormt shook, his massive head, slowly, “I pity you Galactics!”
“Now please, good sir—” Damn it all, the old clodhopper could get as irritating as a faulty computer. “We have records that go back to before man left this planet. Records of everything. It is you who have forgotten.”
Kormt smiled and puffed blue clouds at him. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Do you mean you think it is good for men to live a life that is unchanging, that is just the same from century to century—no new dreams, no new triumphs, always the same grubbing rounds of days? I cannot agree.”
Jorun’s mind flickered over history, trying to evaluate the basic motivations of his opponent. Partly cultural, partly biological, that must be it. Once Terra had been the center of the civilized universe. But the long migration starward, especially after the fall of the First Empire, drained off the most venturesome elements of the population. That drain went on for thousands of years. Sol was backward, ruined and impoverished by the remorseless price of empire, helpless before the storms of barbarian conquest that swept back and forth between the stars. Even after peace was restored, there was nothing to hold a young man or woman of vitality and imagination here—not when you could go toward Galactic center and join the new civilization building out there. Space-traffic came ever less frequently to Sol; old machines rusted away and were not replaced; best to get out while there was still time.
Eventually there was a fixed psychosomatic type, one which lived close to the land, in primitive changeless communities and isolated farmsteads—a type content to gain its simple needs by the labor of hand, horse, or an occasional battered engine. A culture grew up which increased that rigidity. So few had visited Earth in the last several thousand years—perhaps one outsider a century, stopping briefly off on his way to somewhere else—that there was no challenge or encouragement to alter. The Terrans didn’t want more people, more machines, more anything; they wished only to remain as they were.
You couldn’t call them stagnant. Their life was too healthy, their civilization too rich in its own way—folk art, folk music, ceremony, religion, the intimacy of family life which the Galactics had lost—for that term. But to one who flew between the streaming suns, it was a small existence.
Kormt’s voice broke in on his reverie. “Dreams, triumphs, work, deeds, love and life and finally death and the long sleep in the earth,” he said. “Why should we want to change them? They never grow old; they are new for each child that is born.”
“Well,” said Jorun, and stopped. You couldn’t really answer that kind of logic. It wasn’t logic at all, but something deeper.
“Well,” he started over, after a while, “as you know, this evacuation was forced on us, too. We don’t want to move you, but we must.”
“Oh, yes,” said Kormt. “You have been very nice about it. It would have been easier, in a way, if you’d come with fire and gun and chains for us, like the barbarians did long ago. We could have understood you better then.”
“At best, it will be hard for your people,” said Jorun. “It will be a shock, and they’ll need leaders to guide them through it. You have a duty to help them out there, good sir.”
“Maybe.” Kormt blew a series of smoke rings at his youngest descendant, three years old, who crowed with laughter and climbed up on his knee. “But they’ll manage.”
“You can’t seem to realize,” said Jorun, “that you are the last man on Earth who refuses to go. You will be alone. For the rest of your life! We couldn’t come back for you later under any circumstances, because there’ll be Hulduvian colonies between Sol and Sagittarius which we would disturb in passage. You’ll be alone, I say!”
Kormt shrugged. “I’m too old to change my ways; there can’t be many years left me, anyway. I can live well, just off the food-stores that’ll be left here.” He ruffled the child’s hair, but his face drew into a scowl. “Now, no more of that, good sir, if you please; I’m tired of this argument.”
Jorun nodded and fell into the silence that held the rest. Terrans would sometimes sit for hours without talking, content to be in each other’s nearness. He thought of Kormt, Gerlaug’s son, last man on Earth, altogether alone, living alone and dying alone; and yet, he reflected, was that solitude any greater than the one in which all men dwelt all their days?
Presently the Speaker set the child down, knocked out his pipe, and rose. “Come, good sir,” he said, reaching for his staff. “Let us go.”
They walked side by side down the street, under the dim lamps and past the yellow windows. The cobbles gave back their footfalls in a dull clatter. Once in a while they passed someone else, a vague figure which bowed to Kormt. Only one did not notice them, an old woman who walked crying between the high walls.
“They say it is never night on your worlds,” said Kormt.
Jorun threw him a sidelong glance. His face was a strong jutting of highlights from sliding shadow. “Some planets have been given luminous skies,” said the technician, “and a few still have cities, too, where it is always light. But when every man can control the cosmic energies, there is no real reason for us to live together; most of us dwell far apart. There are very dark nights on my own world, and I cannot see any other home from my own—just the moors.”
“It must be a strange life,” said Kormt. “Belonging to no one.”
They came out on the market-square, a broad paved space walled in by houses. There was a fountain in its middle, and a statue dug out of the ruins had been placed there. It was broken, one arm gone—but still the white slim figure of the dancing girl stood with youth and laughter, forever under the sky of Earth. Jorun knew that lovers were wont to meet here, and briefly, irrationally, he wondered how lonely the girl would be in all the millions of years to come.
The City Hall lay at the farther end of the square, big and dark, its eaves carved with dragons, and the gables topped with wing-spreading birds. It was an old building; nobody knew how many generations of men had gathered here. A long, patient line of folk stood outside it, shuffling in one by one to the registry desk; emerging, they went off quietly into the darkness, toward the temporary shelters erected for them.
Walking by the line, Jorun picked faces out of the shadows. There was a young mother holding a crying child, her head bent over it in a timeless pose, murmuring to soothe it. There was a mechanic, still sooty from his work, smiling wearily at some tired joke of the man behind him. There was a scowling, black-browed peasant who muttered a curse as Jorun went by; the rest seemed to accept their fate meekly enough. There was a priest, his head bowed, alone with his God. There was a younger man, his hands clenching and unclenching, big helpless hands, and Jorun heard him saying to someone else: “—if they could have waited till after harvest. I hate to let good grain stand in the field.”
Jorun went into the main room, toward the desk at the head of the line. Hulking hairless Zarek was patiently questioning each of the hundreds who came hat in hand before him: name, age, sex, occupation, dependents, special needs or desires. He punches the answers out on the recorder machine, half a million lives were held in its electronic memory.
“Oh, there you are,” his bass rumbled. “Where’ve you been?”
“I had to do some concy work,” said Jorun. That was a private code term, among others: concy, conciliation, anything to make the evacuation go smoothly. “Sorry to be so late. I’ll take over now.”
“All right. I think we can wind the whole thing up by midnight.” Zarek smiled at Kormt. “Glad you came, good sir. There are a few people I’d like you to talk to.” He gestured at half a dozen seated in the rear of the room. Certain complaints were best handled by native leaders.
Kormt nodded and strode over to the folk. Jorun heard a man begin some long-winded explanation: he wanted to take his own plow along, he’d made it himself and there was no better plow in the universe, but the star-man said there wouldn’t be room.
“They’ll furnish us with all the stuff we need, son,” said Kormt.
“But it’s my plow!” said the man. His fingers twisted his cap.
Kormt sat down and began soothing him.
The head of the line waited a few meters off while Jorun took Zarek’s place. “Been a long grind,” said the latter. “About done now, though. And will I be glad to see the last of this planet!”
“I don’t know,” said Jorun. “It’s a lovely world. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more beautiful one.”
Zarek snorted. “Me for Thonnvar! I can’t wait to sit on the terrace by the Scarlet Sea, fern-trees and red grass all around, a glass of oehl in my hand and the crystal geysers in front of me. You’re a funny one, Jorun.”
The Fulkhisian shrugged slender shoulders. Zarek clapped him on the back and went out for supper and sleep. Jorun beckoned to the next Terran and settled down to the long, almost mindless routine of registration. He was interrupted once by Kormt, who yawned mightily and bade him goodnight; otherwise it was a steady, half-conscious interval in which one anonymous face after another passed by. He was dimly surprised when the last one came up. This was a plump, cheerful, middle-aged fellow with small shrewd eyes, a little more colorfully dressed than the others. He gave his occupation as merchant—a minor tradesman, he explained, dealing in the little things it was more convenient for the peasants to buy than to manufacture themselves.
“I hope you haven’t been waiting too long,” said Jorun. Concy statement.
“Oh, no.” The merchant grinned. “I knew those dumb farmers would be here for hours, so I just went to bed and got up half an hour ago, when it was about over.”
“Clever.” Jorun rose, sighed, and stretched. The big room was cavernously empty, its lights a harsh glare. It was very quiet here.
“Well, sir, I’m a middling smart chap, if I say it as shouldn’t. And you know, I’d like to express my appreciation of all you’re doing for us.”
“Can’t say we’re doing much.” Jorun locked the machine.
“Oh, the apple-knockers may not like it, but really, good sir, this hasn’t been any place for a man of enterprise. It’s dead. I’d have got out long ago if there’d been any transportation. Now, when we’re getting back into civilization, there’ll be some real opportunities. I’ll make my pile inside of five years, you bet.”
Jorun smiled, but there was a bleakness in him. What chance would this barbarian have even to get near the gigantic work of civilization—let alone comprehend it or take part in it. He hoped the little fellow wouldn’t break his heart trying.
“Well,” he said, “goodnight, and good luck to you.”
“Goodnight, sir. We’ll meet again, I trust.”
Jorun switched off the lights and went out into the square. It was completely deserted. The moon was up now, almost full, and its cold radiance dimmed the lamps. He heard a dog howling far off. The dogs of Earth—such as weren’t taken along—would be lonely, too.
Well, he thought, the job’s over. Tomorrow, or the next day, the ships come.
4
He felt very tired, but didn’t want to sleep, and willed himself back to alertness. There hadn’t been much chance to inspect the ruins, and he felt it would be appropriate to see them by moonlight.
Rising into the air, he ghosted above roofs and trees until he came to the dead city. For a while he hovered in a sky like dark velvet, a faint breeze murmured around him, and he heard the remote noise of crickets and the sea. But stillness enveloped it all, there was no real sound.
Sol City, capital of the legendary First Empire, had been enormous. It must have sprawled over forty or fifty thousand square kilometers when it was in its prime, when it was the gay and wicked heart of human civilization and swollen with the lifeblood of the stars. And yet those who built it had been men of taste, they had sought out genius to create for them. The city was not a collection of buildings; it was a balanced whole, radiating from the mighty peaks of the central palace, through colonnades and parks and leaping skyways, out to the temple-like villas of the rulers. For all its monstrous size, it had been a fairy sight, a woven lace of polished metal and white, black, red stone, colored plastic, music and light—everywhere light.
Bombarded from space; sacked again and again by the barbarian hordes who swarmed maggot-like through the bones of the slain Empire; weathered, shaken by the slow sliding of Earth’s crust; pried apart by patient, delicate roots; dug over by hundreds of generations of archaeologists, treasure-seekers, the idly curious; made a quarry of metal and stone for the ignorant peasants who finally huddled about it—still its empty walls and blind windows, crumbling arches and toppled pillars held a ghost of beauty and magnificence which was like a half-remembered dream. A dream the whole race had once had.
And now we’re waking up.
Jorun moved silently over the ruins. Trees growing between tumbled blocks dappled them with moonlight and shadow; the marble was very white and fair against darkness. He hovered by a broken caryatid, marveling at its exquisite leaping litheness; that girl had borne tons of stone like a flower in her hair. Further on, across a street that was a lane of woods, beyond a park that was thick with forest, lay the nearly complete outline of a house. Only its rain-blurred walls stood, but he could trace the separate rooms: here a noble had entertained his friends, robes that were fluid rainbows, jewels dripping fire, swift cynical interplay of wits like sharpened swords rising above music and the clear sweet laughter of dancing-girls; here people whose flesh was now dust had slept and made love and lain side-by-side in darkness to watch the moving pageant of the city; here the slaves had lived and worked and sometimes wept; here the children had played their ageless games under willows, between banks of roses. Oh, it had been a hard and cruel time; it was well gone but it had lived. It had embodied man, all that was noble and splendid and evil and merely wistful in the race, and now its late children had forgotten.
A cat sprang up on one of the walls and flowed noiselessly along it, hunting. Jorun shook himself and flew toward the center of the city, the imperial palace. An owl hooted somewhere, and a bat fluttered out of his way like a small damned soul blackened by hellfire. He didn’t raise a wind-screen, but let the air blow around him, the air of Earth.
The palace was almost completely wrecked, a mountain of heaped rocks, bare bones of “eternal” metal gnawed thin by steady ages of wind and rain and frost, but once it must have been gigantic. Men rarely built that big nowadays, they didn’t need to; and the whole human spirit had changed, become ever more abstract, finding its treasures within itself. But there had been an elemental magnificence about early man and the works he raised to challenge the sky.
One tower still stood—a gutted shell, white under the stars, rising in a filigree of columns and arches which seemed impossibly airy, as if it were built of moonlight. Jorun settled on its broken upper balcony, dizzily high above the black-and-white fantasy of the ruins. A hawk flew shrieking from its nest, then there was silence.
No—wait—another yell, ringing down the star ways, a dark streak across the moon’s face. “Hai-ah!” Jorun recognized the joyful shout of young Cluthe, rushing through heaven like a demon on a broomstick, and scowled in annoyance. He didn’t want to be bothered now.
Well, they had as much right here as he. He repressed the emotion, and even managed a smile. After all, he would have liked to feel gay and reckless at times, but he had never been able to. Jorun was little older than Cluthe—a few centuries at most—but he came of a melancholy folk; he had been born old.
Another form pursued the first. As they neared, Jorun recognized Taliuvenna’s supple outline. Those two had been teamed up for one of the African districts, but—
They sensed him and came wildly out of the sky to perch on the balcony railing and swing their legs above the heights. “How’re you?” asked Cluthe. His lean face laughed in the moonlight. “Whoo-oo, what a flight!”
“I’m all right,” said Jorun. “You through in your sector?”
“Uh-huh. So we thought we’d just duck over and look in here. Last chance anyone’ll ever have to do some sight-seeing on Earth.”
Taliuvenna’s full lips drooped a bit as she looked over the ruins. She came from Yunith, one of the few planets where they still kept cities, and was as much a child of their soaring arrogance as Jorun of his hills and tundras and great empty seas. “I thought it would be bigger,” she said.
“Well, they were building this fifty or sixty thousand years ago,” said Cluthe. “Can’t expect too much.”
“There is good art left here,” said Jorun. “Pieces which for one reason or another weren’t carried off. But you have to look around for it.”
“I’ve seen a lot of it already, in museums,” said Taliuvenna. “Not bad.”
“C’mon, Tally,” cried Cluthe. He touched her shoulder and sprang into the air. “Tag! You’re it!”
She screamed with laughter and shot off after him. They rushed across the wilderness, weaving in and out of empty windows and broken colonnades, and their shouts woke a clamor of echoes.
Jorun sighed. I’d better go to bed, he thought. It’s late.
The spaceship was a steely pillar against a low gray sky. Now and then a fine rain would drizzle down, blurring it from sight; then that would end, and the ship’s flanks would glisten as if they were polished. Clouds scudded overhead like flying smoke, and the wind was loud in the trees.
The line of Terrans moving slowly into the vessel seemed to go on forever. A couple of the ship’s crew flew above them, throwing out a shield against the rain. They shuffled without much talk or expression, pushing carts filled with their little possessions. Jorun stood to one side, watching them go by, one face after another—scored and darkened by the sun of Earth, the winds of Earth, hands still grimy with the soil of Earth.
Well, he thought, there they go. They aren’t being as emotional about it as I thought they would. I wonder if they really do care.
Julith went past with her parents. She saw him and darted from the line and curtsied before him.
“Goodbye, good sir,” she said. Looking up, she showed him a small and serious face. “Will I ever see you again?”
“Well,” he lied, “I might look in on you sometime.”
“Please do! In a few years, maybe, when you can.”
It takes many generations to raise a people like this to our standard. In a few years—to me—she’ll be in her grave.
“I’m sure you’ll be very happy,” he said.
She gulped. “Yes,” she said, so low he could barely hear her. “Yes, I know I will.” She turned and ran back to her mother. The raindrops glistened in her hair.
Zarek came up behind Jorun. “I made a last-minute sweep of the whole area,” he said. “Detected no sign of human life. So it’s all taken care of, except your old man.”
“Good,” said Jorun tonelessly.
“I wish you could do something about him.”
“So do I.”
Zarek strolled off again.
A young man and woman, walking hand in hand, turned out of the line not far away and stood for a little while. A spaceman zoomed over to them. “Better get back,” he warned. “You’ll get rained on.”
“That’s what we wanted,” said the young man.
The spaceman shrugged and resumed his hovering. Presently the couple re-entered the line.
The tail of the procession went by Jorun and the ship swallowed it fast. The rain fell harder, bouncing off his force-shield like silver spears. Lightning winked in the west, and he heard the distant exuberance of thunder.
Kormt came walking slowly toward him. Rain streamed off his clothes and matted his long gray hair and beard. His wooden shoes made a wet sound in the mud. Jorun extended the force-shield to cover him. “I hope you’ve changed your mind,” said the Fulkhisian.
“No, I haven’t,” said Kormt. “I just stayed away till everybody was aboard. Don’t like goodbyes.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” said Jorun for the—thousandth?—time. “It’s plain madness to stay here alone.”
“I told you I don’t like goodbyes,” said Kormt harshly.
“I have to go advise the captain of the ship,” said Jorun. “You have maybe half an hour before she lifts. Nobody will laugh at you for changing your mind.”
“I won’t.” Kormt smiled without warmth. “You people are the future, I guess. Why can’t you leave the past alone? I’m the past.” He looked toward the far hills, hidden by the noisy rain. “I like it here, Galactic. That should be enough for you.”
“Well, then—” Jorun held out his hand in the archaic gesture of Earth. “Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.” Kormt took the hand with a brief, indifferent clasp. Then he turned and walked off toward the village. Jorun watched him till he was out of sight.
The technician paused in the air-lock door, looking over the gray landscape and the village from whose chimneys no smoke rose. Farewell, my mother, he thought. And then, surprising himself: Maybe Kormt is doing the right thing after all.
He entered the ship and the door closed behind him.
Toward evening, the clouds lifted and the sky showed a clear pale blue—as if it had been washed clean—and the grass and leaves glistened. Kormt came out of the house to watch the sunset. It was a good one, all flame and gold. A pity little Julith wasn’t here to see it; she’d always liked sunsets. But Julith was so far away now that if she sent a call to him, calling with the speed of light, it would not come before he was dead.
Nothing would come to him. Not ever again.
He tamped his pipe with a horny thumb and lit it and drew a deep cloud into his lungs. Hands in pockets, he strolled down the wet streets. The sound of his clogs was unexpectedly loud.
Well, son, he thought, now you’ve got a whole world all to yourself, to do with just as you like. You’re the richest man who ever lived.
There was no problem in keeping alive. Enough food of all kinds was stored in the town’s freeze-vault to support a hundred men for the ten or twenty years remaining to him. But he’d want to stay busy. He could maybe keep three farms from going to seed—watch over fields and orchards and livestock, repair the buildings, dust and wash and light up in the evening. A man ought to keep busy.
He came to the end of the street, where it turned into a graveled road winding up toward a high hill, and followed that. Dusk was creeping over the fields, the sea was a metal streak very far away and a few early stars blinked forth. A wind was springing up, a soft murmurous wind that talked in the trees. But how quiet things were!
On top of the hill stood the chapel, a small steepled building of ancient stone. He let himself in the gate and walked around to the graveyard behind. There were many of the demure white tombstones—thousands of years of Solis Township men and women who had lived and worked and begotten, laughed and wept and died. Someone had put a wreath on one grave only this morning; it brushed against his leg as he went by. Tomorrow it would be withered, and weeds would start to grow. He’d have to tend the chapel yard, too. Only fitting.
He found his family plot and stood with feet spread apart, fists on hips, smoking and looking down at the markers Gerlaug Kormt’s son, Tarna Huwan’s daughter, these hundred years had they lain in the earth. Hello, Dad, hello, Mother. His fingers reached out and stroked the headstone of his wife. And so many of his children were here, too; sometimes he found it hard to believe that tall Gerlaug and laughing Stamm and shy, gentle Huwan were gone. He’d outlived too many people.
I had to stay, he thought. This is my land, I am of it and I couldn’t go. Someone had to stay and keep the land, if only for a little while. I can give it ten more years before the forest comes and takes it.
Darkness grew around him. The woods beyond the hill loomed like a wall. Once he started violently, he thought he heard a child crying. No, only a bird. He cursed himself for the senseless pounding of his heart.
Gloomy place here, he thought. Better get back to the house.
He groped slowly out of the yard, toward the road. The stars were out now. Kormt looked up and thought he had never seen them so bright. Too bright; he didn’t like it.
Go away, stars, he thought. You took my people, but I’m staying here. This is my land. He reached down to touch it, but the grass was cold and wet under his palm.
The gravel scrunched loudly as he walked, and the wind mumbled in the hedges, but there was no other sound. Not a voice called; not an engine turned; not a dog barked. No, he hadn’t thought it would be so quiet.
And dark. No lights. Have to tend the street lamps himself—it was no fun, not being able to see the town from here, not being able to see anything except the stars. Should have remembered to bring a flashlight, but he was old and absentminded, and there was no one to remind him. When he died, there would be no one to hold his hands; no one to close his eyes and lay him in the earth—and the forests would grow in over the land and wild beasts would nuzzle his bones.
But I knew that. What of it? I’m tough enough to take it.
The stars flashed and flashed above him. Looking up, against his own will, Kormt saw how bright they were, how bright and quiet. And how very far away! He was seeing light that had left its home before he was born.
He stopped, sucking in his breath between his teeth. “No,” he whispered.
This was his land. This was Earth, the home of man; it was his and he was its. This was the land, and not a single dust-mote, crazily reeling and spinning through an endlessness of dark and silence, cold and immensity. Earth could not be so alone!
The last man alive. The last man in all the world!
He screamed, then, and began to run. His feet clattered loud on the road; the small sound was quickly swallowed by silence, and he covered his face against the relentless blaze of the stars. But there was no place to run to, no place at all.
Here is a nice story to get your mind off of whatever it might be on right now. Please relax, fix yourself a nice coffee, tea, or beer… get into your most comfortable chair, and relax.
MARS IS HEAVEN!
by Ray Bradbury
The ship came down from space. It came from the stars and the black velocities, and the shining movements, and the silent gulfs of space. It was a new ship; it had fire in its body and men in its metal cells, and it moved with a clean silence, fiery and warm. In it were seventeen men, including a captain.
The crowd at the Ohio field had shouted and waved their hands up into the sunlight, and the rocket bad bloomed out great flowers of beat and cobs and run away into space on the third voyage to Mars!
Now it was decelerating with metal efficiency in the upper Martian atmospheres. It was still a thing of beauty and strength. It had moved in the midnight waters of space like a pale sea leviathan; it had passed the ancient moon and thrown itself onward into one nothingness following another. The men within it had been battered,, thrown about, sickened, made well again, each in his turn. One man had died, but now the remaining sixteen, with their eyes clear in their heads and their faces pressed to the thick glass ports, watched Mars swing up under them.
“Mars! Mars! Good old Mars, here we are!” cried Navigator Lustig.
“Good old Mars!” said Samuel Hinkston, archaeologist.
“Well,” said Captain John Black.
The ship landed softly. on a lawn of green grass. Outside, upon the lawn, stood an iron deer. Further up the lawn, a tall brown Victorian house sat in the quiet sunlight, all covered with scrolls and rococo, its windows made of blue and pink and yellow and green colored glass. Upon the porch were hairy geraniums and an old swing which was hooked into the porch ceiling and which now swung back and forth, back and forth, in a little breeze.
At the top of the house was a cupola with diamond, leaded-glass windows, and a dunce-cap roof! Through the front window you could see an ancient piano with yellow keys and a piece of music titled Beautiful Ohio sitting on the music rest.
Around the rocket in four directions spread the little town, green and motionless in the Martian spring, There were white houses and red brick ones, and tall elm trees blowing in the wind, and tall maples and horse chestnuts. And church steeples with golden bells silent in them.
The men in the rocket looked out and saw this. Then they looked at one another and then they looked out again. They held on~ to each other’s elbows, suddenly unable to breathe, it seemed. Their faces grew pale and they blinked constantly, running from glass port to glass port of the ship.
“I’ll be damned,” whispered Lustig, rubbing his face with his numb fingers, his eyes wet. “Ill be thinned, damned, damned.’~
“It can~t be, it just can’t be,” said Samuel Hinkston.
“Lord,” said Captain John Black.
There was a call from the chemist. “Sir, the atmosphere is fine for
breathing, sir.” –
Black turned slowly. “Are you sure?’
“No doubt of it, sir.”
“Then we’ll go. out,” said Lustig.
“Lord, yes,” said Samuel Hinkston.
“Hold on,” said Captain John Black. “Just a moment, Nobody gave any orders.”
“But, sir-.-”
“Sir, nothing. How do we know what this is?”
“We know what it is, sir,” said the chemist. “It’s a small town with good air in it, sir.”
“And it’s a small town the like of Earth towns,” said Samuel Hinkston,
the archaeologist. “Incredible. it~ can’t be, but it is.”
Captain John Black looked at him, idly. “Do you think that the civilizations of two planets can progress at the same rate and evolve in the same way, Hinkston?”
“I wouldn’t have thought so, sir.”
Captain Black stood by the port. “Look out there. The geraniums. A specialized plant. That specific variety has only been known on Earth for fifty years. Think of the thousands of years of time it takes to evolve plants. Then tell me if it is logical that the Martians should have: one, leaded glass windows; two, cupolas; three, porch swings; four, an instrument that looks like, a . piano and probably is a piano; and, five, if you look closely, . if a Martian composer would have published a piece of music titled, strangely enough, Beautiful Ohio. All of which means that we have an Ohio River here on Marst”
“It is quite strange, sir.”
“Strange, hell, it’s absolutely impossible, and I suspect the whole bloody shooting setup. Something’s wrong here, and I’m not leaving the ship until I know what it is.”
“Oh, sir,” said Lustig.
“Dam it,” said Samuel Hinkston. “Sir, I want to investigate this at first hand. It may be that there are similar patterns of thought, movement, civilization on every planet in our system. We may be on the threshold of the great psychological and metaphysical discovery In our time, sir, don’t you think?”
“I’m willing to wait a moment,” said Captain. John Black. – “It may be, sir, that we are looking upon a phenomenon that, for the first time, would absolutely prove the existence of a God, sir.”
“There are many people who are of good faith without such proof, Mr. Hinkston.”
“I’m one myself, sir. But certainly a thing like this, out there,” said Hinkston, “could not occur without divine intervention, sir. It fills me with such terror and elation I’ don’t know whether to laugh or cry, sir.”
“Do neither,. then, until we know what we’re up against.”
“Up against, sir?” inquired Lustig. “I see that we’re up against nothing.
It’s a good quiet, green town, much like the one I was born in, and I like the looks of It.”
“When were you born, Lustig?” –
– “In- 1910, sfr.”
“That makes you fifty years old, now, doesn’t it?”
“This being 1960, yes, sir.”
– “And you, Hinkston?”
“1920, sir. In Illinois. And this looks swell to me, sir.”
“This couldn’t be Heaven,” said the captain, ironically. “Though, I must admit, it looks peaceful and cool, and pretty much like Green Bluff, where I was born, in 1915.”
lie looked at the chemist. “The air’s all right, is it?”
“Yes, sir.”
‘Well, then, tell you what we’ll do. Lustig, you and Ilinkston and I will fetch ourselves out to look this town over. The other 14 men will stay aboard ship. If’ anything untoward happens, lift ‘the Ship ‘and get the hell out, do you bear what I say, Craner?”
“Yes, sir. The hell out we’ll go, sir. Leaving you?”,
“A loss of three men’s better than a whole ship. If something bad happens get back to Earth and warn the next Rocket, that’s Lingle’s Rocket, I think, which will be completed and ready to take off some time around next Christmas, what he has to meet up with. If there’s something hostile about Mars we certainly want the next expedition to be well armed.”
“So are we, sir. We’ve got a regular arsenal with us.”
“Tell the ‘men to stand by the guns, then, as. Lustig and Hinkston and I go out,”
“Right, sir.”
“Come along, Lustig, Hinkston.”
The three men walked together, down through the levels of the ship.
It was a beautiful spring day. A robin sat on a blossoming apple tree and sang continuously. Showers of petal snow sifted down when the wind touched the apple tree, and the blossom smell drifted upon the air. Somewhere in the town, somebody was playing the piano and the music came and went, came and went, softly, drowsily. The song was Beautiful Dreamer. Somewhere else, a phonograph, scratchy and faded, was hissing out a record of Roamin’ In The Gloamin,’ sung by Harry Lapder.
The three men stood outside the ship. The port closed behind them. At every window, a face pressed, looking out. The large metal guns pointed this way and that, ready.
Now the phonograph record being played was:
–
“Oh give me a June night
The moonlight and you—”
Lustig began to tremble. Samuel Hinkston did likewise.
Hinkston’s voice was so feeble and uneven that the captain had to ask him to repeat what he had said. “I said, sir, that I think I have solved this, all of this, sir!”
“And what is the solution, Hinkston?”
The soft wind blew. The sky was serene and quiet and somewhere a stream of water ran through the cool caverns and tree-shadings of a ravine.
Somewhere a horse and wagon trotted and rolled by, bumping.
“Sir, it must be, it has to be, this is the only solution!
Rocket travel began to Mars in the years before the first’ World War, sir!” S
The captain stared at his archaeologist. “No!”
“But, yes, sir! You must admit, look at all of this! How else explain it, the houses, the lawns, the iron deer, the flowers, the pianos, the music!”
“Hinkston, Hinkston, oh,” and the captain put his hand to his face, shaking his head, his hand shaking no , his lips blue.
“Sir, listen to me.” Hinkston took his elbow persuasively and looked up into the captain’s face, pleading. “Say that there -were some people in the year 1905, perhaps, who hated wars and wanted to get away from Earth and they got together, some scientists, in secret, and built a rocket and came out here to Mars.”
“No, no, Hinkston.”
“Why not? The world was a different place in 1905, they could have kept
-it a secret much more easily.”
“But the work, Hinkston, the work of building a complex thing like a rocket, oh, no, no.” The captain looked at his shoes, looked -at his hands, looked at the houses, and then at Hinkston.
“And they caine up here, and haturally the houses they built were similar to Earth houses because they
brought the cultural -~architecture with them, and here it is!”
“And they’ve lived here all these years?” said the captain.
“In peace and quiet, sir, yes. Maybe they made a few trips, to bring enough people here for one small town, and then stopped, for fear of being discovered. That’s why the town seems so old-fashioned. I don’t see a thing,
myself, that is older than the year 1927, do you?”
“No, frankly, I don’t, Hinkston.”
“These are our people, sir. This is an American city; it’s definitely not
European!”
“That—that’s right, too, Hinkston.”
“Or maybe, just maybe, sir, rocket travel is older than we think. Perhaps it started in some part of the world hundreds of years ago, was discovered and kept secret by a small number of men, and they came to Mars, with only occasional visits to Earth over the centuries.”
“You make it sound almost reasonable.”
“it is, sir. It has to be. We have the proof here before us, all we have ‘to do now, is find some people and verify it!”
“You’re right- there, of course. We can’t just stand here and talk. Did’ you bring your gun?”
“Yes, but we won’t need it.”
“We’ll see about it. Come along, we’ll ring that doorbell and see if anyone is home.”
Their boots were deadened of all sound in the thick green grass. It smelled from a fresh mowing. In spite of himself, Captain John Black felt a great peace come over him. It had been thirty years since he had een in a small’ town, and the buzzing of spring bees on the air lulled and quieted him, and the fresh look of things was a balm to the soul.
Hollow echoes sounded from under the boards as they walked across the porch and stood before the screen door. Inside, they could see a bead curtain hung across the hall entry, and a crystal chandelier and a Maxfleld Parrish painting framed on one wall over a comfortable Morris, Chair. The house smelled old, and of the attic, and infinitely comfortable. You could hear the tinkle of ice rattling in a lemonade pitcher~ In a distant kitchen, because of the day, someone was preparing a soft, lemon drieL – –
Captain’ John Black rang the bell.
Footsteps, dainty and thin, came along the hail and a kind-faced lady of some forty years, dressed in the sort of dress you might expect in the year 1909, peered out at them.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“Beg your pardon,” said Captain Black, uncertainly.
“But we’re looking for, that is, could you help us, I mean.” He stopped. She looked out at him with dark wondering eyes.
“If you’re selling something,” she said, “I’m much too busy and I haven’t time.” She turned to go.
“No, wail,” he cried bewilderingly. “What town is this?”
She looked him up and down as if he were crazy.
“What do you mean, what town is it? How could you be in a town and not know what town it was?”
The captain looked as if he wanted to go sit under a shady apple tree. “I beg your pardon,” he said, “But we’re strangers here. We’re from Earth, and we want to know how this town got here and you’ got here.”
“Are you census takers?” she asked.
“No,” be said. –
“What do you want then?” she demanded.
“Well,” said the captain.
“Well?” she asked. -‘
“How long has this town been here?” he wondered.
“It was built in 1868,” she snapped at them. “Is this a game?”
“No, not a game,” cried the captain. “Oh, God,” – be said. “Look here.
We’re from Earth”
“From where?” she said.
‘Prom Earth!” he said. –
“Where’s that?” she said.
“From Earth,” he cried. ‘ –
“Out of the ground, do you mean?”
“No, from the planet Earth!” he almost shouted.
“Here,” she insisted, “come out on the porch and I’ll show you.” , –
“No,” she said, “I won’t come out there, you are all evidently quite mad
from the sun.”
Lustig and Hinkston stood behind the captain. Hinkston now spoke up.
“Mrs.,” he said. ‘We came in a flying ship across space, among the stars. We came from the third planet from the sun, Earth, to tb-is planet, which is Mars.
Now do you understand, Mrs.?”
“Mad from the sun,” she said, taking hold of the door. “Go away now, before I call my husband who’s upstairs taking a nap, and he’ll beat you all with his fists.”
“But—” said Hinkston. “This is Mars, is it not?”
“This,” explained the woman, as if she were addressing a child, “is Green Lake, Wisconsin, on the continent of America, surrounded by the Pacific and ~Atlantic Oceans, on a place called the world, or sometimes, the Earth. Go away now. Good-bye!”
She slammed the door. –
-The three men stood before the door with their hands up in the air toward it, as if pleading with her to open it once more.
They looked at one another.
– “Let’s knock the door down,” said Lustig.
“We can’t,” sighed the captain.
“Why not?”
“She didn’t do anything bad, did she? We’re the strangers here. This is private property. Good God, Hinkstonl” He went and sat down on the porchstep.
“What, sir?”
Did it ever strike you, that maybe we got ourselves, somehow, some way, fouled up. And, by accident, came back and landed on Earth!”
“Oh, sir, oh, sir, oh oh, sir.” And Hinkston sat down numbly and thought about it.
Lustig stood up in the sunlight. “How could we have done that?”
“I don’t know, just let me think.”
}Iinkston said, “But we checked every mile of the way, and we saw Mars and our chronometers said so many miles ‘gone, and we went past the moon and out into space and here we are, on Mars. I’m sure we’re on Mars, ‘ sir.” Lustig said, “But, suppose that, by accident, in space, in time, or something, we landed on a planet in space, in another time.
Suppose this is Earth, thirty or fifty years ago? Maybe we got lost in the dimensions, do you think?”
“Oh, go away, Lustig.” -‘
“Are the men in the ship keeping an eye on us, Hink..
ston?” , –
“At their guns, sir.”
Lustig went to the door, rang the bell. When the door opened again, he asked, ‘What year is this?’ –
“1926, of, course!” cried the woman, furiously, and slammed the door again. “Did you bear that?” Lustig ran back to them, wildly, “She said 1926! We – have gone back in time. This is Earth!”
Lustig sat down and the three men let the wonder and terror of the thought afflict them. Their hands stirred fitfully on their knees. The wind blew, nodding the locks of hair on their heads.
The captain stood up, brushing off his pants. “I never thought it would be like this. It scares the hell out of me. How ‘can a thing like this happen?”
“Will anybody in the whole town believe us?” wondered Hinkston.
“Are we playing around with something dangerous? Time, I mean. Shouldn’t we just take off and go home?”
“No. We’ll try another house.”
They walked three houses down to a little white cottage under an oak tree. “I like to be as logical as I can’ get,” said the captain, He nodded at the town. “How does this sound to you, Hinkston? Suppose, as you- said originally, that rocket travel occurred years ago. And when the Earth people had lived here a number of years they began to get homesick for Earth. First a mild neurosis about it, then a full-fledged psychosis. Then, threatened insanity. What would you do, as a psychiatrist, if fated with such a problem?”
– –
Hinkston thought. “Well, I think I’d re-arrange the civilization on Mars so it resembled Earth more and more each day. If there was any way of reproducing every plant, every road and every lake, and even an ocean, I would do so. Then I would, by some vast crowd hypnosis, theoretically anyway, convince veryone in a town this size that this really was Earth, not Mars at all.”
“Good enough, Hinkston. I think we’re on the right track now. That woman in that house back there, just’ minks she’s living on Earth. It protects ‘her sanity. She and all the others in this town are the patients of the greatest experiment in migration and hypnosis you will ever lay your eyes on in your life.” –
“That’s it, sir!” cried Lustig.
“Well,” the captain sighed. “Now we’re getting some- – where. I feel better. It all sounds a bit more logical now. This talk about time and going back and forth and traveling in time turns my stomach upside
down. But, this way—”- He actually smiled for the first time in a month. “Well. It looks as if we’ll be fairly welcome here.”
“Or, will we, sir?” said Lustig. “After all, like the Pilgrims, these people came here to escape Earth. Maybe they won’t be too happy to see us, sir Maybe they’ll try to drive us ~out or kill us?”
‘We have superior weapons if that should happen. Anyway, all we can do is try. This next house now. Up we go.”
But they had hardly crossed the lawn when Lustig stopped and looked off across the town, down the quiet, dreaming afternoon street. “Sir,” he said.
“What is it, Lustig?” asked the captain.
“Oh, sir, sir, what I see, what I do see now before me, oh, oh—” said Lustig, and he began to cry. His fingers came up, twisting and trembling, and his face was all wonder and joy and incredulity. He sounded as if any moment he might go quite insane with happiness. He looked down the street and he began to run, stumbling awkwardly, falling, picking himself up, and running on. “Oh, God, God, thank you, God! Thank you!”
– “Don’t let him get away!” The captain broke into a run.
Now Lustig was running at full speed, shouting. He turned into a yard half way down the little shady side street and leaped up upon the porch of a large green house with an iron rooster on the roof
He was beating upon the door, shouting and hollering and crying when Hinkston and the captain ran up and stood in the yard, The door opened. Lustig yanked the screen wide and in a high wail of discovery and happiness, cried out, “Grandma! Grandpa!” –
Two old people stood in the doorway, their faces light. lug up.
“Albert!” Their voices piped and they rushed out to embrace and pat him on the back and move around him, “Albert, oh, Albert, it’s been so many years! How you’ve grown, boy, how big you ate, boy, oh, lbert boy, how are you!”
“Grandma, Grandpa!” sobbed Albert Lustig. “Good to see you! You look fine, fine! Oh, fine.” He held them, turned them, kissed them, hugged them, cried on them, held them out again, blinked at the little old people.- The, sun was in the sky, the wind blew, the grass was green, the screen door stood
open.
“Come in, lad, come in, there’s lemonade for you,fresh, lots of- it!”
“Grandma, Grandpa, good to see you! I’ve got- friends down here!
Here!” Lustig turned and waved wildly at the captain and Hinkston, who, all during the adventure on the porch, had stood in’ the shade of a tree, holding onto each other. “Captain, captain, come up, come up, I want you to meet my grandfolks!”
“Howdy,” said the folks. “Any- friend of Albert’s is ours, too! Don’t stand there with your mouths open Come on!”
In the living room of the old house it was cool and a grandfather clock ticked high and long and bronzed in one corner. There were soft pillows on large couches and walls filled with books and a rug cut in a thick rose pattern and antimacassars pinned to furniture, and lemonade in the hand, sweating, and cool on the thirsty tongue. “Here’s to our health.” Grandma tipped her glass to her porcelain teeth. – –
“How long you been here, Grandma?” said Lustig.
“A good many years,” she said, tartly. “Ever since we died.”
“Ever since you what?” asked Captain John Black, putting his drink down. – –
“Oh, yes,” Lustig looked at his captain. “They’ve been dead thirty years.”
“And you sit there, calmly!” cried the captain.
“Tush,” said the old woman, and winked glitteringly – at John Black. “Who are we to question what happens?
Here we are. What’s life, anyways? Who does what for why and where? All we know is here we are, alive again, and no questions -asked. A second chance.”
She toddled over and held out her -thin wrist to Captain John Black.
“Feel” He felt.~ “Solid, ain’t I?” she ask~ed. He nodded.
“You hear my voice, don’t you?” she inquired. Yes, he did. “Well, then,” she said in triumph, “why go around questioning?”
“Well,” said the captain, “it’s simply that we never thought we’d find a
thing like this on Mars.”
“And now you’ve found it. I dare say there’s lots on every planet that’ll show you God’s infinite ways.”
is this Heaven?” asked Hinkston.
“Nonsense, no. It’s a world and we get a second chance. Nobody told us why. But then nobody told us why we were on Earth, either. That other Earth, I mean. The one you came from. How do we know there wasn’t another before that one?”
“A good question,” said the captain.
The captain stood up and slapped his hand on his leg in an off-hand fashion. “We’ve got to be going. It’s been nice. Thank you for the drinks.”
He stopped. He turned and looked toward the door, startled. ‘ –
Far away, in the sunlight, there was a sound of voices, a crowd, a shouting and a great hello.
“What’s that?” asked Hinkston.
“We’ll soon find out!” And Captain John Black was out the front door abruptly, jolting across the green lawn and into the street of the Martian town.
He stood looking at the ship. The ports were open and his crew were streaming out, waving their hands. A crowd of people had gathered and in and through and among these people the members of the crew were running, talking, laughing, shaking hands. People did little dances. People swarmed. The rocket lay – empty and abandoned.
A brass band exploded in the sunlight, flinging off a gay tune from upraised tubas and trumpets. There was a bang of drums and a shrill of fifes. Little girls with golden hair jumped up and down. Little boys shouted, “Hoorayl” And fat men passed around ten-cent cigars. The mayor of the town made a speech. Then, each member of the crew with a mother on one -arm, a father or sister on the other, was spirited off down the street, into little cottages or big mansions and doors slammed shut.
The wind rose in the clear spring sky and all was silent. The brass band had banged off around a corner leaving the rocket to shine and dazzle alone in the sunlight.
“Abandoned!” cried the captain. “Abandoned the ship, they did! I’ll have their skins; by God! They had orders!”
“Sir,” said Lustig. “Don’t be too -hard on them. Those were all old relatives and friends.”
“That’s no excuse!” – –
“Think how they felt, captain, seeing familiar faces outside the ship!” –
“I would have obeyed orders! I would have~!’ The captain’s mouth
remained open.
Striding along the sidewalk – under the Martian sun, tall, smiling, eyes blue, face tan, came a young man of some twenty-six years. –
“John!” the man cried, and broke into a run.
“What?” said Captain .John Black. He swayed. –
“John, you old beggar, you!”
The man ran up and gripped his hand and slapped him
on the back. –
“It’s you,” said John Black.
“Of course, who’d you think it was!” –
“Edward!” The captain appealed now to Lustig and Hinkston, holding the stranger’s hand. “This is my brother – Edward. Ed, meet my men, Lustig, Hinkston My brother!” – – –
They tugged at each other’s hands and arms and then finally embraced.
“Ed!” “John, you old bum, you!” “You!re locking fine, Ed, but, Ed, what .is this? You haven’t ,changed over the years. You died, I remember, when you were twenty-six, and 1 was nineteen, oh God,
so many years ago, and here you are, and, Lord, what goes on, what goes on?”
Edward Black gave him a brotherly knock on the chin.
“Mom’s waiting,” he said.
“Mom?”
“And Dad, too.”
– “And Dad?” The- captain almost fell to earth as if hit upon the chest with a mighty weapon. He walked stiffly and awkwardly, out of coordination. He stuttered and whispered and talked only one or two ords at a time.
“Mom alive? Dad? Where?”
“At the old house on Oak Knoll Avenue.” –
“The old house.” The captain stared in delighted amazement. “Did you hear that, Lustig, Hinkston?”
~‘I know it’s hard for you to believe.”
“But alive. Real.”
“Don’t I feel real?” The strong arm, the firm grip, the white smile. The light, curling hair.
Hinkaton was gone. He had seen his own house down the street and was running for it. Lustig was grinning.
“Now you understand, sir, what happened to everybody on the ship. They couldn’t help themselves.”
“Yes. Yes,” said the captain, eyes shut. “Yes.” He put out his hand.
“When I open my eyes, you’ll be gone.” He opened his eyes. “You’re still here.
God, Edward, you look fine!” – – –
“Come along, lunch is waiting for you. I told Mom.” Lustig said, “Sir, Ui
be with my grandfolks if you want me.” –
“What? Oh, fine, Lustig. Later, then.”
Edward grabbed his arm and marched him. “You need support.” –
“I do. My knees, all funny. My stomach, loose. God.”
“There’s the house. Remember it?” –
“Remember it? Hell! I bet I can beat you to the front porch!” –
They ran. The wind roared over Captain John Black’s ears. The earth roared -under his feet. He saw the golden figure of Edward Black pull ahead of him in the amazing dream of reality. He saw the house rush- forward, the door open, the screen swing back. “Beat you!” cried Edward, – bounding up the steps. “I’m an old man,” panted the captain, “and you’re still young. But, then, you always beat me, I remember!”
In the doorway, Mom, pink, and plump and bright. And behind her, pepper grey, Dad, with his pipe in his hand.
“Mom, Dad!”
He ran up -the steps like a child, to meet them.
It was a fine long afternoon. They finished lunch and they sat in the living room and he told them all about his rocket and his being captain and they nodded and smiled upon him and Mother was just the same, and Dad bit the end off a cigar and lighted it in his old fashion. Mom brought in some iced tea in the middle of the afternoon. Then, there was a big turkey dinner at night and time flowing oil. When the drumsticks were sucked clean and lay brittle upon the plates, the captain leaned back in his chair and exhaled his deep contentment. Dad poured him a small glass of dry sherry. It was seven thirty in the evening. Night was in all the trees and coloring the sky, and the lamps were halos of dim light in the gentle house. From all the other houses down the streets came sounds of music; pianos playing, laughter.
Mom put a record on the victrola and she and Captain John Black bad a – dance. She was wearing the same perfume he remembered from the summer when she and Dad had been killed in the train accident. She was very real in his arms as they danced lightly to the music. –
“I’ll wake in the morning,” said the captain. “And I’ll be in my rocket in space, and this will be gone.”
“No, no, don’t think that,” she cried, softly, pleadingly~ “We’re here.
Don’t question. God is good to- us. Let’s be happy.”
The record ended with a – hissing.
“You’re tired, son,” said Dad. He waved his pipe. “You and Ed go on
upstairs. Your old bedroom is waiting for you.” . – –
“The old one?”
“The brass bed and all,” laughed Edward.
“But I should report my men in.”
“Why?” Mother was logical
“Why? Well, I don’t know. No reason, I guess. No,. none at all. What’s the difference?” He shook his head.
“I’m not being very logical these days,” –
“Good night, son.” She kissed his cheek. “‘Night, Mom.”
“Sleep tight, son.” Dad shook his hand.
“Same to you, Pop.” – “It’s good to have you home.”
“It’s good to be home.”
He left the land of cigar smoke and perfume and books and gentle light and ascended the stairs, talking, talking with Edward. Edward pushed a door open and there was the yellow brass bed and the old semaphore banners from college days and a -very musty raccoon coat which he petted with strange, muted affection. “It’s too much,” he said faintly. “Like -being in a thunder- shower without an umbrella. Fm soaked to the skin with emotion. I’m numb. I’m tired.” –
“A night’s sleep between cool clean sheets for you, my bucko.” Edward slapped wide the snowy linens and flounced the pillows. Then he put up a window and let the night blooming jasmine float in. There was moonlight and the sound of distant dancing and whispering.
“So this is Mars,” said the captain undressing.
“So this is Mars.” Edward undressed in idle, leisurely moves, drawing his shirt off over his head, revealing golden shoulders and the good muscular neck. –
– The lights were out, they were into bed, side by side, as in the days, how many decades ago? The captain lolled and was nourished by the night wind pushing the lace curtains out upon the dark room air. Among the trees, upon a lawn, someone had cranked up a portable phonograph and now it was
playing softly, “I’ll be loving you, always,- with a love that’s true, always.”
The thought of Anna came to his mind. “Is Anna here?”
His brother, lying straight out in the moonlight from the window,waited and then said, “Yes. She’s out of town. But she’ll be here in the morning.” –
The captain shut his eyes. “I want to see Anna very much?’ –
The room was square and quiet except for their breathing. “Good night, Ed.”
A pause. “Good night, John.”
He lay peacefully, letting his thoughts float. For the — first time the stress of the day was -moved aside, all of the excitement was calmed. He could think logically now. It had all been emotion. The bands playing, the sight – of familiar faces, the sick pounding of your heart. But—
now… –
How? He thought. How was all this made? And why? For what purpose?
Out of the goodness of some kind God? Was God, then, really that fine and thoughtful of his children? -How and why and what for? –
He thought of the various theories advanced in the first heat of the afternoon by Hinkston and Lustig. He let all kinds of new theories drop in lazy pebbles down through his mind, as through a dark water, now, turning, throwing out dull flashes of white light. Mars. Earth. Mom. Dad Edward. Mars. Martians.
Who had – lived here a thousand years ago on Mars? Martians? Or had this always been like this? Martians. He repeated the word quietly, inwardly. –
He laughed out loud, – almost. He had the ridiculous theory, all of a sudden. It gave him a kind of chilled feeling. It was really nothing to think of, of course. Highly. improbable. Silly. Forget it. Ridiculous.
But, he thought, Just suppose. Just suppose now, that there were Martians living on Mars and they saw our ship coming and -saw us inside our ship and hated – us. Suppose, now, just for the hell of it, that they wanted to destroy us, as invaders, as unwanted ones, and – they wanted to do it in a very clever way, so that we would be taken- off guard. Well, what would the best weapon be that a Martian could use against Earthmen with atom weapons? –
The answer was interesting. Telepathy, hypnosis, memory and imagination. –
Suppose all these houses weren’t real at all, – this bed not real, but only figments of my own imagination, given substance by telepathy and hypnosis by the Martians.
Suppose these houses are really some other shape, a Martian shape, but, -by playing on my desires and wants, these Martians have made this seem like my old home town, my old house, to lull me out of my suspicions?
What better way to fool a man, by his own emotions.
And suppose those two people in the next room, asleep, are not my mother and- father at all. But two Martians, incredibly brilliant, with –the ability to keep me under this dreaming hypnosis all of the time?
And that brass band, today? What a clever plan it would be. First, fool Lustig, then fool Hinkston, then gather a crowd around -the rocket ship and wave. And- all the men in the ship, seeing mothers, aunts, uncles, sweethearts dead ten, twenty years ago, naturally, disregarding orders, would rush- out and abandon the ship. What more natural?- What more unsuspecting? What more simple? A man doesn’t ask too many questions when his mother is suddenly brought back to life; he’s much too happy. And – the brass band played and everybody was taken off to private homes. And here we all are, tonight, in various houses, in various beds, with no weapons to protect us, and the rocket lies in the moonlight, empty. And wouldn’t it be horrible and terrifying to discover that all of this was part of some -great clever plan by the Martians to divide and conquer us, and kill us. Some time during the night, perhaps, my brother here on this bed, wifi change form, melt, shift, and become a one eyed, green and yellow-toothed Martian. It would be very simple for him just – to -turn over in bed and put a- knife into my heart. And in all those other houses down the street a dozen other brothers or fathers suddenly melting away and taking out knives and doing things to the unsuspecting, sleeping men of Earth. –
His hands were shaking under the covers. His body was cold, -Suddenly it was not a theory. Suddenly he was very afraid. He lifted- himself in bed and listened. The night was very quiet. The music had stopped. The wind had died.
His brother (?) lay sleeping beside him.
Very carefully he lifted the sheets, rolled them back. He slipped from bed and was walking softly across the room when his brother’s voice said, “Where are you going?”
“What?” –
His brother’s voice was quite cold. “I said, where do you think you’re going?”
“For a drink of water.”
“But you’re not thirsty.”
“Yes, yes, I am.” –
“No, you’re not.” –
Captain John Black broke and ran across the room.
He screamed. He screamed twice. – He never reached- the door.
…
In the morning, the brass band played a mournful dirge. From every house in the street came little solemn processions bearing long boxes and along the sun-filled street, weeping and changing, came the grandmas and grandfathers and mothers and sisters and brothers, walking -to the churchyard, where there were open holes – dug freshly and new- tombstones installed. Seventeen – holes in all, and seventeen tombstones. Three of the tombstones said, CAPTAIN JOHN BLACK, ALBERT LUSTIG, and SAMUEL HINKSTON. – – –
The mayor made a little sad speech, his face sometimes looking like the
mayor, sometimes looking like something else. — – – –
Mother and Father Black were there, with Brother Edward, and they ‘cried, their faces melting now – from a familiar face into something else. – –
Grandpa and Grandma Lustig were there, weeping~ their faces. Also shifting- like wax, – shivering as a- thing does in waves of heat on a summer day. – –
The coffins were lowered. Somebody murmured –about “the unexpected and sudden deaths of seventeen fine men during the night—”. – – – –
Earth was shoveled in on the coffin tops. –
After the funeral the brass band slammed and banged into town and the crowd stood around and waved and shouted as the rocket was torn to pieces and strewn about and blown up. – –
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Everyone, I think that you are all going to enjoy this. It took me a while to find this classic work of 1970’s science fiction. It is a science fiction novel much like “Starship Troopers” only much better. I tried to clean up the scanning, and OCR, but there’s still errors here and ther. Never the less, it’s a great read, and it should enable you to get your minds off of… well, what ever your minds are on right now. Enjoy.
Joe Haldeman, a Vietnam veteran, wrote The ForeverWar in the seventies, and his novel soon became a classicof the so-called “military science fiction” genre, in keepingwith (and way better than) Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. The book tells thestory of an intergalactic war withan alien race, that spans well over a millennium, as seenfromPrivateMandella.
The Forever War
Joe Haldeman
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is the definitive version of The Forever War. There are two other versions, and my publisher has been kind enough to allow inc to clarify things here.
The one you’re holding in your hand is the book as it was originally written. But it has a pretty tortuous history.
It’s ironic, since it later won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and has won “Best Novel” awards in other countries, but The Forever War was not an easy book to sell back in the early seventies. It was rejected by eighteen publishers before St. Martin’s Press decided to take a chance on it. “Pretty good book,” was the usual reaction, “but nobody wants to read a science fiction novel about Vietnam”. ‘Seventy-Five years later, most young readers don’t even see the parallels between The Forever War and the seemingly endless one we were involved in at the time, and that’s okay. It’s about Vietnam because that’s the war the author was in. But it’s mainly about war, about soldiers, and about the reasons we think we need them.
While the book was being looked at by all those publishers, it was also being serialized piecemeal in Analog magazine. The editor, Ben Bova, was a tremendous help, not only in editing, but also for making the thing exist at all! He gave it a prominent place in the magazine, and it was also his endorsement that brought it to the attention of St. Martin’s Press, who took a chance on the hardcover, though they did not publish adult science fiction at that time.
But Ben rejected the middle section, a novella called “You Can Never Go Back.” He liked it as a piece of writing, he said, but thought that it was too downbeat for Analog’s audience. So I wrote him a more positive story and put “You Can Never Go Back” into the drawer; eventually Ted White published it in Amazing magazine, as a coda to The Forever War
At this late date, I’m not sure why I didn’t reinstate the original middle when the book was accepted. Perhaps I didn’t trust my own taste, or just didn’t want to make life more complicated. But that first book version is essentially the Analog version with “more adult language and situations”, as they say in Hollywood.
The paperback of that version stayed in print for about~ sixteen years. Then in 1991 I had the opportunity to reinstate my original version, which now appears in Britain for the first time. The dates in the book are now kind of funny; most people realize we didn’t get into an interstellar war in 1996. I originally set it in that year so it was barely possible that the officers and NCOs could be veterans of Vietnam, so we decided to leave it that way, in spite of the obvious anachronisms. Think of it as a parallel universe.
But maybe it’s the real one, and we’re in a dream.
Joe Haldeman
Cambridge, Massachusetts
THE
FOREVER WAR
PRIVATE MANDELLA
“Tonight we’re going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.” The guy who said that was a sergeant who didn’t look five years older than me. So if he’d ever killed a man in combat, silently or otherwise, he’d done it as an infant.
I already knew eighty ways to. kill people, but most of them were pretty noisy. I sat up straight in my chair and assumed a look of polite attention and fell asleep with my eyes open. So did most everybody else. We’d learned that they never scheduled anything important for these after-chop classes.
The projector woke me up and I sat through a short tape showing the “eight silent ways.” Some of the actors must have been brainwipes, since they were actually killed.
After the tape a girl in the front row raised her hand. The sergeant nodded at her and she rose to parade rest. Not bad looking, but kind of chunky about the neck and shoulders. Everybody gets that way after carrying a heavy pack around for a couple of months.
“Sir”-we had to call sergeants “sir” until graduation- “most of those methods, really, they looked. . . kind of silly.”
“For instance?”
“Like killing a man with a blow to the kidneys, from an entrenching tool. I mean, when would you actualiy have only an entrenching tool, and no gun or knife? And why not just bash him over the head with it?”
“He might have a helmet on,” he said reasonably.
“Besides, Taurans probably don’t even have kidneys!” He shrugged. “Probably they don’t.” This was 1997, and nobody had ever seen a Tauran; hadn’t even found any pieces of Taurans bigger than a scorched chromosome.
“But their body chemistry is similar to ours, and we have to assume they’re similarly complex creatures. They must have weaknesses, vulnerable spots. You have to find out where they are.
“That’s the important thing.” He stabbed a finger at the screen. “Those eight convicts got caulked for your benefit because you’ve got to find out how to kill Taurans, and be able to do it whether you have a megawatt laser or an emery board.”
She sat back down, not looking too convinced. “Any more questions?” Nobody raised a hand.
“OK. Tench-hut!” We staggered upright and be looked at us expectantly. “Fuck you, sir,” came the familiar tired chorus.
“Louder!”
“FUCK YOU, SIR!” One of the army’s less-inspired morale devices.
“That’s better. Don’t forget. pie-dawn maneuvers tomorrow. Chop at 0330, first formation, 0400. Anybody sacked after 0340 owes one stripe. Dismissed.”
I zipped up my coverall and went across the snow to the lounge for a cup of soya and a joint. I’d always been able to get by on five or six hours of sleep, and this was the only time I could be by myself, out of the army for a while. Looked at the newsfax for a few minutes. Another ship got caulked, out by Aldebaran sector. That was four years ago.
~ They were mounting a reprisal fleet, but it’ll take four years more for them to get out there. By then, the Taurans would have every portal planet sewed up tight.
Back at the billet, everybody else was sacked and the main lights were out. The whole company’d been dragging ever since we got back from the two-week lunar training.
I dumped my clothes in the locker, checked the roster and found out I was in bunk 31. Goddammit, right under the heater.
I slipped through the curtain as quietly as possible so as not to wake up the person next to me. Couldn’t see who it was, but I couldn’t have cared less. I slipped under the blanket.
“You’re late, Mandella,” a voice yawned. It was Rogers. “Sorry I woke you up,” I whispered.
”saliright.” She snuggled over and clasped me spoon-fashion. She was warm and reasonably soft.
I patted her hip in what I hoped was a brotherly fashion. “Night, Rogers.” “G’night, Stallion.” She returned the gesture more pointedly.
Why do you always get the tired ones when you’re ready and the randy ones when you’re tired? I bowed to the inevitable.
2
“Awright, let’s get some goddamn back inta that! Stringer team! Move it up-move your ass up!”
A warm front had come in about midnight and the snow had turned to sleet. The permaplast stringer weighed five hundred pounds and was a bitch to handle, even when it wasn’t covered with ice. There were four of us, two at each end, carrying the plastic girder with frozen fingertips. Rogers was my partner.
“Steel!” the guy behind me yelled, meaning that he was losing his hold. It wasn’t steel, but it was heavy enough to break your foot. Everybody let go and hopped away. It splashed slush and mud all over us.
“Goddammit, Petrov,” Rogers said, “why didn’t you go out for the Red Cross or something? This fucken thing’s not that fucken heavy.” Most of the girls were a little more circumspect in their speech. Rogers was a little butch.
“Awright, get a fucken move on, stringers-epoxy team! Dog’em! Dog’em!”
Our two epoxy people ran up, swinging their buckets. “Let’s go, Mandella. I’m freezin’ my balls off.”
“Me, too,” the girl said with more feeling than logic.
“One-two–heave!” We got the thing up again and staggered toward the bridge. It was about three-quarters completed. Looked as if the second platoon was going to beat us. I wouldn’t give a damn, but the platoon that got their bridge built first got to fly home. Four miles of muck for the rest of us, and no rest before chop.
We got the stringer in place, dropped it with a clank, and fitted the static clamps that held it to the rise-beams. The female half of the epoxy team started slopping glue on it before we even had it secured. Her partner was waiting for the stringer on the other side. The floor team was waiting at the foot of the bridge, each one holding a piece of the light, stressed permaplast over his head like an umbrella. They were dry and clean. I wondered aloud what they had done to deserve it, and Rogers suggested a couple of colorful, but unlikely, possibilities.
We were going back to stand by the next stringer when the field first (name of Dougeistein, but we called him “Awright”) blew a whistle and bellowed, “Awright, soldier boys and girls, ten minutes. Smoke’em if you got ’em.” He reached into his pocket and turned on the control that heated our coveralls.
Rogers and I sat down on our end of the stringer and I took out my weed box. I had lots of joints, but we were ordered not to smoke them until after night-chop. The only tobacco I had was a cigarro butt about three inches long. I lit it on the side of the box; it wasn’t too bad after the first couple of puffs. Rogers took a puff, just to be sociable, but made a face and gave it back.
“Were you in school when you got drafted?” she asked.
“Yeah. Just got a degree in physics. Was going after a teacher’s certificate.” She nodded soberly. “I was in biology . . .”
“Figures.” I ducked a handful of slush. “How far?”
“Six years, bachelor’s and technicaL” She slid her boot along the ground, turning up a ridge of mud and slush the consistency of freezing ice milk. “Why the fuck did this have to happen?”
I shrugged. It didn’t call for an answer, least of all the answer that the UNEF kept giving us. Intellectual and physical elite of the planet, going out to guard humanity against the Tairan menace. Soyashit It was all just a big experiment See whether we could goad the Taurans into ground
Awright blew the whistle two minutes early, as expected, but Rogers and I and the other two stringers got to sit for a minute while the epoxy and floor teams finished covering our stringer. It got cold fast, sitting there with our suits turned off, but we remained inactive on principle.
There really wasn’t any sense in having us train in the cold. Typical army half- logic. Sure, it was going to be cold where we were going, but not ice-cold or snow- cold. Almost by definition, a portal planet remained within a degree or two of absolute zero all the tune-since collapsars don’t shine-and the first chill you felt would mean that you were a dead man.
Twelve years before, when I was ten years old, they had discovered the collapsar jump. Just fling an object at a collapsar with sufficient speed, and out it pops in some other part of the galaxy. It didn’t take long to figure out the formula that predicted where it would come out: it travels along the same “line” (actually an Einsteinian geodesic) it would have followed if the collapsar hadn’t been in the way- until it reaches another collapsar field, whereupon it reappears, repelled with the same speed at which it approached the original collapsar. Travel time between the two collapsars.. . exactly zero.
It made a lot of work for mathematical physicists, who had to redefine simultaneity, then tear down general relativity and build it back up again. And it made the politicians very happy, because now they could send a shipload of colonists to Fomaihaut for less than it had once cost to put a brace of men on the moon. There were a lot of people the politicians would love to see on Fomalbaut, implementing a glorious adventure rather than stirring up trouble at home.
The ships were always accompanied by an automated probe that followed a couple of million miles behind. We knew about the portal planets, little bits of flotsam that whirled around the collapsars; the purpose of the drone was to come back and tell us in the event that a ship had smacked into a portal planet at .999 of the speed of light.
That particular catastrophe never happened, but one day a drone limped back alone. Its data were analyzed, and it turned out that the colonists’ ship had been pursued by another vessel and destroyed. This happened near Aldebaran, in the constellation Taurus, but since “Aldebaranian” is a little hard to handle, they named the enemy “Tauran.”
Colonizing vessels thenceforth went out protected by an armed guard. Often the armed guard went out alone, and finally the Colonization Group got shortened to UNEF, United Nations Exploratory Force. Emphasis on the
Then some bright lad in the General Assembly decided that we ought to field an army of footsoldiers to guard the portal planets of the nearer collapsars. This led to the Elite Conscription Act of 1996 and the most cutely conscripted army in the history of warfare.
So here we were, fifty men and fifty women, with IQs over 150 and bodies of unusual health and strength, slogging cutely through the mud and slush of central Missouri, reflecting on the usefulness of our skill in building bridges on worlds where the only fluid is an occasional standing pool of liquid helium.
3
About a month later, we left for our final training exercise, maneuvers on the planet Charon. Though nearing perihelion, it was still more than twice as far from the sun as Pluto.
The troopship was a converted “cattlewagon” made to carry two hundred colonists and assorted bushes and beasts. Don’t think it was roomy, though, just because there were half that many of us. Most of the excess space was taken up with extra reaction mass and ordnance.
The whole trip took three weeks, accelerating at two gees halfway, decelerating the other half. Our top speed, as we roared by the orbit of Pluto, was around one- twentieth of the speed of light-not quite enough for relativity to rear its complicated head.
Three weeks of carrying around twice as much weight as normal.. . it’s no picnic. We did some cautious exercises three times a day and remained horizontal as much as possible. Still, we got several broken bones and serious dislocations. The men had to wear special supporters to keep from littering the floor with loose organs. It was almost impossible to sleep; nightmares of choking and being crushed, rolling over periodically to prevent blood pooling and bedsores. One girl got so fatigued that she almost slept through the experience of having a rib push out into the open air.
I’d been in space several times before, so when we finally stopped decelerating and went into free fall, it was nothing but relief. But some people had never been out, except for our training on the moon, and succumbed to the sudden vertigo and disorientation. The rest of us cleaned up after them, floating through the quarters with sponges and inspirators to suck up the globules of partly-digested
We had a good view of Charon, coming down from orbit. There wasn’t much to see, though. It was just a dim, off-white sphere with a few smudges on it. We landed about two hundred meters from the base. A pressurized crawler came out and mated with the ferry, so we didn’t have to suit up. We clanked and squeaked up to the main building, a featureless box of grayish plastic.
Inside, the walls were the same drab color. The rest of the company was sitting at desks, chattering away. There was a seat next to Freeland.
“Jeff-feeling better?” He still looked a little pale.
“If the gods had meant for man to survive in free fall, they would have given him a cast iron glottis.” He sighed heavily. “A little better. Dying for a smoke.”
“You seemed to take it all right. Went up in school, didn’t you?”
“Senior thesis in vacuum welding, yeah. Three weeks in Earth orbit.” I sat back and reached for my weed box for the thousandth time. It still wasn’t there. The Life Support Unit didn’t want to handle nicotine and mc.
“Training was bad enough,” Jeff groused, “but this shit-”
“Tench-hut!” We stood up in a raggedy-ass fashion, by twos and threes. The door opened and a full major came in. I stiffened a little. He was the highest-ranking officer I’d ever seen. He had a row of ribbons stitched into his coveralls, including a purple strip meaning he’d been wounded in combat, fighting in the old American army. Must have been that Indochina thing, but it had fizzled out beforelwasborn.Hedidn’tlookthatold.
“Sit, sit.” He made a patting motion with his hand. Then he put his hands on his hips and scanned the company, a small smile on his face. “Welcome to Charon. You picked a lovely day to land, the temperature outside is a summery eight point one fIve degrees Absolute. We expect little thange for the next two centuries or so.” Some of them laughed haltbeartedly.
Joe Haldeman 12
“Best you enjoy the tropical climate here at Miami Base; enjoy it while you can. We’re on the center of sunside here, and most of your training will be on darkside. Over there, the temperature stays a chilly two point zero eight.
“You might as well regard all the training you got on Earth and the moon as just an elementary exercise, designed to give you a fair chance of surviving Charon. You’ll have to go through your whole repertory here: tools, weapons, maneuvers. And you’ll find that, at these temperatures, tools don’t work the way they should; weapons don’t want to fire. And people move v-e-r-y cautiously.”
He studied the clipboard in his hand. “Right now, you have forty-nine women and forty-eight men. Two deaths on Earth, one psychiatric release. Having read an outline of your training program, I’m frankly surprised that so many of you pulled through.
“But you might as well know that I won’t be displeased if as few as fifty of you, half, graduate from this final phase. And the only way not to graduate is to die. Here. The only way anybody gets back to Earth-including me-is after a combat tour.
“You will complete your training in one month. From here you go to Stargate collapsar, half a light year away. You will stay at the settlement on Stargate 1, the largest portal planet, until replacements arrive. Hopefully, that will be no more than a month; another group is due here as soon as you leave.
“When you leave Stargate, you will go to some strategically important collapsar, set up a military base there, and fight the enemy, if attacked. Otherwise, you will maintain the base until further orders.
“The last two weeks of your training will consist of constructing exactly that kind of a base, on darkside. There you will be totally isolated from Miami Base: no communication, no medical evacuation, no resupply. Sometime before the two weeks are up, your defense facilities will be evaluated in an attack by guided drones. They will be armed.”
They had spent all that money on us just to kill us in training? ‘[HE FOREVER WAR
13
“All of the permanent personnel here on Charon are combat veterans. Thus, all of us are forty to fifty years of age. Butlthinkwecankeepupwithyou. Twoofuswill be with you at all times and will accompany you at least as far as Stargate. They are Captain
Sherman Stott, your company commander, and Sergeant Octavio Corte~ your first sergeant. Gentlemen?”
Two men in the front row stood easily and turned to face us. Captain Stott was a little smaller than the major, but cut from the same mold: face hard and smooth as porcelain, cynical half-smile, a precise centimeter of beard framing a large chin, looking thirty at the most. He wore a large, gunpowder-type pistol on his hip.
Sergeant Cortez was another story, a horror story. His head was shaved and the wrong shape, flattened out on one side, where a large piece of skull had obviously been taken out. His face was very dark and seamed with wrinkles and scars. Half his left ear was missing, and his eyes were as expressive as buttons on a machine. He had a moustache-and-beard combination that looked like a skinny white caterpillar taking a lap around his mouth. On anybody else, his schoolboy smile might look pleasant, but he was about the ugliest, meanest-looking creature I’d ever seen. Still, if you didn’t look at his head and considered the lower six feet or so, he could have posed as the “after” advertisement for a body-building spa. Neither Stott nor Cortez wore any ribbons. Cortez had a small pocket-laser suspended in a magnetic rig, sideways, under his left armpit. It had wooden grips that were worn smooth.
“Now, before I turn you over to the tender mercies of these two gentlemen, let me caution you again:
“Two months ago there was not a living soul on this planet, just some leftover equipment from the expedition of 1991. A working force of forty-five men struggled for a month to erect this base. Twenty-four of them, more than half, died in the construction of it. This is the most dangerous planet men have ever tried to live on, but the places you’ll be going will be this bad and worse. Your cadre will try to keep you alive for the next month. Listen to them and follow their example; all of them have survived here much longer than you’ll have to. Captain?” The captain stood up as the major went out the door.
“Tench-hut!” The last syllable was like an explosion and we all jerked to our feet. “Now I’m only gonna say this once so you better listen,” he growled. “We are in a
combat situation here, and in a combat situation there is only one penalty for disobedience or insubordination.” He jerked the pistol from his hip and held it by the barrel, like a club. “This is an Army model 1911 automatic pistol, caliber .45, and it is a primitive but effective weapon. The Sergeant and I are authorized to use our weapons to kill to enforce discipline. Don’t make us do it because we will. We will.” He put the pistol back. The holster snap made a loud crack in the dead quiet.
“Sergeant Cortez and I between us have killed more people than are sitting in this room. Both of us fought in Vietnam on the American side and both of us joined the United Nations International Guard more than ten years ago. I took a break in grade from major for the privilege of commanding this company, and First Sergeant Cortez took a break from sub-major, because we are both combat soldiers and this is the first combat situation since 1987.
“Keep in mind what I’ve said while the First Sergeant instructs you mote specifically in what your duties will be under this command. Take over, Sergeant” He turned on his heel and strode out of the room. The expression on his face hadn’t changed one millimeter during the whole harangue.
The First Sergeant moved like a heavy machine with lots of ball bearings. When the door hissed shut, he swiveled ponderously to face us and said, “At ease, siddown,” in a surprisingly gentle voice. He sat on a table in the front of the room. It creaked, but held.
“Now the captain talks scaly and I look scary, but we both mean well. You’ll be working pretty closely with me, so you better get used to this thing I’ve got hanging in front of my brain. You probably won’t see the captain much, except on maneuvers.”
He touched the flat part of his head. “And speaking of brains, I still have Just about all of mine, in spite of Chinese efforts to the contrary. All of us old vets who mustered into UNEF had to pass the same criteria that got you drafted by the Elite Conscription Act So I suspect all of you are smart and tough-but just keep in mind that the captain and I are smart and tough and experienced.”
He flipped through the roster without really looking at it. “Now, as the captain said, there’ll be only one kind of disciplinary action on maneuvers. Capital punishment But normally we won’t have to kill you for disobeying; Charon’ll save us the trouble.
“Back in the billeting area, it’ll be another story. We don’t much care what you do inside. Grab ass all day and fuck all night, makes no difference… . But once you suit up and go outside, you’ve gotta have discipline that would shame a Centurian. There will be situations where one stupid act could kill us all.
“Anyhow, the first thing we’ve gotta do is get you fitted to your fighting suits. The armorer’s waiting at your billet; he’ll take you one at a time. Let’s go.”
4
“Now I know you got lectured back on Earth on what a fighting suit can do.” The armorer was a small man, partially bald, with no insignia of rank on his coveralls. Sergeant Cortez had told us to call him “sir,” since he was a lieutenant.
“But I’d like to reinforce a couple of points, maybe add some things your instructors Earthside weren’t clear about or couldn’t know. Your First Sergeant was kind enough to consent to being my visual aid. Sergeant?”
Coitez slipped out of his coveralls and came up to the little raised platform where a fighting suit was standing, popped open like a man-shaped clam. He backed into it and slipped his arms into the rigid sleeves. There was a click and the thing swung shut with a sigh. It was bright green with CORTEZ stenciled in white letters on the helmet.
“Camouflage, Sergeant.” The green faded to white, then dirty gray. “This is good camouflage for Charon and most of your portal planets,” said Cortez, as if from a deep well. “But there are several other combinations available.” The gray dappled and brightened to a combination of greens and browns: “Jungle.” Then smoothed out to a hard light ochre: “Desert.” Dark brown, darker, to a deep flat black:
“Night or space.”
“Very good, Sergeant To my knowledge, this is the only feature of the suit that was perfected after your trainin& The control is around your left wrist and is admittedly awkward. But once you find the right combination, it’s easy to lock in.
“Now, you didn’t get much in-suit training Earthside. We didn’t want you to get used to using the thing in a friendly environment. The fighting suit is the deadliest personal weapon ever built, and with no weapon is it easier for the user to kill himself through carelessness. Turn around, Sergeant.
“Case in point.” He tapped a large square protuberance between the shoulders. “Exhaust fins. As you know, the suit tries to keep you at a comfortable temperature no matter what the weather’s like outside. The material of the suit is as near to a perfect insulator as we could get, consistent with mechanical demands. Therefore, these fins get hot- especially hot, compared to darkside temperatures-as they bleed off the body’s heat.
“All you have to do is lean up against a boulder of
frozen gas; there’s lots of it around. The gas will sublime off faster than it can escape from the fins; in escaping, it will push against the surrounding ‘ice’ and fracture it… and in about one-hundredth of a second, you have the equivalent of a hand grenade going off right below your neck. You’ll never feel a thing.
“Variations on this theme have killed eleven people in the past two months. And they were just building a bunch of huts.
“I assume you know how easily the waldo capabilities can kill you or your companions. Anybody want to shake hands with the sergeant?” He paused, then stepped over and clasped his glove. “He’s had lots of practice. Until you have, be extremely careful. You might scratch an itch and wind up breaking your back. Remember, semi-logarithmic response: two pounds’ pressure exerts five pounds’ force; three pounds’ gives ten; four pounds’, twenty-three; five pounds’, forty-seven. Most of you can muster up a grip of well over a hundred pounds. Theoretically, you could rip a steel girder in two with that, amplified. Actually, you’d destroy the material of your gloves and, at least on Charon, die very quickly. It’d be a race between decompression and flash-freezing. You’d die no matter which won.
“The leg waldos are also dangerous, even though the amplification is less extreme. Until you’re really skilled, don’t try to run, or jump. You’re likely to trip, and that means you’re likely to die.”
“Charon’ s gravity is three-fourths of Earth normal, so it’s not too bad. But on a really small world, like Luna, you could take a running jump and not come down for twenty minutes, just keep sailing over the horizon. Maybe bash into a mountain at eighty meters per second. On a small asteroid, it’d be no trick at all to run up to escape velocity and be off on an informal tour of intergalactic space. It’s a slow way to travel.
“Tomorrow morning, we’ll start teaching you how to stay alive inside this infernal machine. The rest of the afternoon and evening, I’ll call you one at a time to be fitted. That’s all, Sergeant.”
Cortez went to the door and turned the stopcock that let air into the airlock. A bank of infrared lamps went on to keep air from freezing inside it. When the pressures were equalized, he shut the stopcock, unclainped the door and stepped in, clamping it shut behind him. A pump hummed for about a minute, evacuating the airlock; then he stepped out and sealed the outside door.
It was pretty much like the ones on Luna.
“First I want Private Omar Ahnizar. The rest of you can go find your bunks. I’ll call you over the squawker.”
“Alphabetical order, sir?”
“Yep. About ten minutes apiece. If your name begins with Z, you might as well get sacked.”
That was Rogers. She probably was thinking about get- ting sacked.
5
The sun was a hard white point directly overhead. It was a lot brighter than I had expected it to be; since we were eighty AUs out, it was only one 6400th as bright as it is on Earth. Still, it was putting out about as much light as a powerful streetlamp.
“This is considerably more light than you’ll have on a portal planet.” Captain Stott’s voice crackled in our collective ear. “Be glad that you’ll be able to watch your step.”
We were lined up, single-file, on the permaplast sidewalk that connected the billet and the supply hut. We’d practiced walking inside, all morning, and this wasn’t any different except for the exotic scenery. Though the light was rather dim, you could see all the way to the horizon quite clearly, with no atmosphere in the way. A black cliff that looked too regular to be natural stretched from one horizon to the other, passing within a kilometer of us. The ground was obsidian-black, mottled with patches of white or bluish ice. Next to the supply hut was a small mountain of snow in a bin marked oxya~ri.
The suit was fairly comfortable, but it gave you the odd feeling of simultaneously being a marionette and a puppeteer. You apply the impulse to move your leg and the suit picks it up and magnifies it and moves your leg for you.
“Today we’re only going to walk around the company area, and nobody will leave the company area.” The captain wasn’t wearing his .45-unless he carried it as a good luck charm, under his suit-but he had a laser-finger like the rest of us. And his was probably hooked up.
Keeping an interval of at least two meters between each person, we stepped off the permaplast and followed the captain over smooth rock. We walked carefully for about an hour, spiraling out, and finally stopped at the far edge of the perimeter.
“Now everybody pay close attention. I’m going out to that blue slab of ice”-it was a big one, about twenty meters away-‘ ‘and show you something that you’d better know if you want to stay alive.”
He walked out in a dozen confident steps. “First I have to heat up a rock-filters down.” I squeezed the stud under my armpit and the filter slid into place over my image converter. The captain pointed his finger at a black rock the size of a basketball, and gave it a short burst. The glare rolled a long shadow of the captain over us and beyond. The rock shattered into a pile of hazy splinters.
“It doesn’t take long for these to cool down.” He stopped and picked up a piece. “This one is probably twenty or twenty-five degrees. Watch.” He tossed the “warm” rock onto the ice slab. It skittered around in a crazy pattern and shot off the side. He tossed another one, and it did the same.
“As you know, you are not quite pe,fecrly insulated. These rocks are about the temperature of the soles of your boots. If you try to stand on a slab of hydrogen, the same thing will happen to you. Except that the rock is already dead.
“The reason for this behavior is that the rock makes a slick interface with the ice-a little puddle of liquid hydrogen-and rides a few molecules above the liquid on a cushion of hydrogen vapor. This makes the rock or you a frictionless bearing as far as the ice is concerned, and you can’t stand up without any friction under your boots.
“After you have lived in your suit for a month or so you should be able to survive falling down, but right now you just don’t know enough. Watch.”
The captain flexed and hopped up onto the slab. His feet shot out from under him and he twisted around in midair, landing on hands and knees. He slipped off and stood on the ground.
“The idea is to keep your exhaust tins from making contact with the frozen gas. Compared to the ice they are as hot as a blast furnace, and contact with any weight behind it will result in an explosion.”
After that demonstration, we walked around for another hour or so and returned to the billet. Once through the airlock~ we had to mill around for a while, letting the suits get up to something like room temperature. Somebody came up and touched helmets with me.
“William?” She had MCCOY stenciled above her faceplate. “Hi, Sean. Anything special?”
“I just wondered if you had anyone to sleep with tonight.”
That’s right; I’d forgotten. There wasn’t any sleeping roster here. Everybody chose his own partner. “Sure, I mean, uh, no. . . no, I haven’t asked anybody. Sure, if you want to. . . .”
“Thanks, William. See you later.” I watched her walk away and thought that if anybody could make a fighting suit look sexy, it’d be Sean. But even she couldn’t.
Cortez decided we were warm enough and led us to the suit room, where we backed the things into place and hooked them up to the charging plates. (Each suit had a little chunk of plutonium that would power it for several years, but we were supposed to run on fuel cells as much as possible.) After a lot of shuffling around, everybody finally got plugged in and we were allowed to unsuit- ninety-seven naked chickens squirming out of bright green eggs. It was cold-the air, the floor and especially the suits-and we made a pretty disorderly exit toward the lockers.
I slipped on tunic, trousers and sandals and was still cold. I took my cup and joined the line for soya. Everybody was jumping up and down to keep warm.
“How c-cold, do you think, it is, M-Mandella?” That was McCoy.
“I don’t, even want, to think, about it.” I stopped jumping and rubbed myself as briskly as possible, while holding a cup in one hand. “At least as cold as MiSSOUrI was.”
“Ung.. . wish they’d, get some, fucken, h~ai in, this place.” It always affects the small women more than any-body else. McCoy was the littlest one in the company, a waspwaist doll barely five feet high.
“They’ve got the airco going. It can’t be long now.”
“I wish I, was a big, slab of, meat like, you.” I was glad she wasn’t. 6
We had our first casualty on the third day, learning how to dig holes.
With such large amounts of energy stored in a soldier’s weapons, it wouldn’t be practical for him to hack out a hole in the frozen ground with the conventional pick and
shovel. Still, you can launch grenades all day and get nothing but shallow depressions-so the usual method is to bore a hole in the ground with the hand laser, drop a timed charge in after it’s cooled down and, ideally, fill the hole with stuff. Of course, there’s not much loose rock on Charon, unless you’ve already blown a hole nearby.
The only difficult thing about the procedure is in getting away. To be safe, we were told, you’ve got to either be behind something really solid, or be at least a hundred meters away. You’ve got about three minutes after setting the charge, but you can’t just sprint away. Not safely, not on Charon.
The accident happened when we were making a really deep hole, the kind you want for a large underground bunker. For this, we had to blow a hole, then climb down to the bottom of the crater and repeat the procedure again and again until the hole was deep enough. Inside the crater we used charges with a five-minute delay, but it hardly seemed enough time-you really had to go it slow, picking your way up the crater’s edge.
Just about everybody had blown a double hole; everybody but me and three others. I guess we were the only ones paying really close attention when Bovanovitch got into trouble. All of us were a good two hundred meters away. With my image converter turned up to about foily power, I watched her disappear over the rim of the crater. After that, I could only listen in on her conversation with Cortez.
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“I’m on the bottom, Sergeant.” Normal radio procedure was suspended for maneuvers like this; nobody but the trainee and Cortez was allowed to broadcast
“Okay, move to the center and clear out the rubble. Take your time. No rush until you pull the pin.”
“Sure, Sergeant.” We could hear small echoes of rocks clattering, sound conduction through her boots. She didn’t say anything for several minutes.
“Found bottom.” She sounded a little out of breath. “Ice or rock?”
“Oh, it’s rock, Sergeant The greenish stuff.”
“Use a low setting, then. One point two, dispersion four.” “God dam it, Sergeant, that’ll take forever.”
“Yeah, but that stuff’s got hydrated crystals in it-heat it up too fast and you might make it fracture. And we’d Just have to leave you there, girl. Dead and bloody.”
“Okay, one point two dee four.” The inside edge of the crater flickered red with reflected laser light.
“When you get about half a meter deep, squeeze it up to dee two.”
“Roger.” It took her exactly seventeen minutes, three of them at dispersion two. I could imagine how tired her shooting arm was.
“Now rest for a few minutes. When the bottom of the hole stops glowing, arm the charge and drop it in. Then walk out, understand? You’ll have plenty of time.”
“I understand, Sergeant. Walk out.” She sounded nervous. Well, you don’t often have to tiptoe away from a twenty-microton tachyon bomb. We listened to her reathing for a few minutes.
“Here goes.” Faint slithering sound, the bomb sliding ~Iown. “Slow and easy now. You’ve got five minutes.”
“Y-yeah. Five.” Her footsteps started out slow and regLilar. Then, after she started climbing the side, the sounds were less regular, maybe a little frantic. And with four minutes to go- “Shit” A loud scraping noise, then clatters and bumps.
“Private, you don’t wanna get shot, you tell me what’s wrong!”
“I. . . shit, I’m stuck. Fucken rockslide. . . shit. . . . DO SOMETHiNG! I can’t move, shit I can’t move I, I-”
“Shut up! How deep?”
“Can’t move my, shit, my fucken legs. HELP ME-”
“Then goddainmit use your arms-push! You can move a ton with each hand.” Three minutes.
She stopped cussing and started to mumble, in Russian, I guess, a low monotone. She was panting, and you could hear rocks tumbling away.
“I’m free.” Two minutes.
“Go as fast as you can.” Cortez’s voice was fiat, emotionless. At ninety seconds she appeared, crawling over the rim. “Run, girl. . . . You better run.” She ran five or six steps and fell, skidded a few meters and got back up, running; fell again, got up again- It looked as though she was going pretty fast, but she had only covered about thirty meters when Cortez said, “All tight, Bovanovitch, get down on your stomach and lie still.” Ten seconds, but she didn’t hear or she wanted to get just a little more distance, and she kept running, careless leaping strides, and at the high point of one leap there was a flash and a rumble, and something big hit her below the neck, and her headless body spun off end over end through space, trailing a red-black spiral of flash-frozen blood that settled gracefully to the ground, a path of crystal powder that nobody disturbed while we gathered rocks to cover the juiceless thing at the end of it.
That night Cortez didn’t lecture us, didn’t even show up for night-chop. We were all very polite to each other and nobody was afraid to talk about it..
I sacked with Rogers-everybody sacked with a good friend-but all she wanted to do was cry, and she cried so long and so hard that she got me doing it, too.
7
“Fire team A-move out!” The twelve of us advanced in a ragged line toward the simulated bunker. It was about a kilometer away, across a carefully prepared obstacle course. We could move pretty fast, since all of the ice had been cleared from the field, but even with ten days’ experience we weren’t ready to do more than an easy jog.
I carried a grenade launcher loaded with tenth-microton practice grenades. Everybody had their laser-fingers set at a point oh eight dee one, not much more than a flashlight. This was a simulated attack-the bunker and its robot defender cost too much to use once and be thrown away.
“Team B, follow. Team leaders, take over.”
We approached a clump of boulders at about the halfway mark, and Potter, my team leader, said, “Stop and cover.” We clustered behind the rocks and waited for Team B.
Barely visible in their blackened suits, the dozen men find women whispered by us. As soon as they were clear, they jogged left, out of our line of sight.
“Fire!” Red circles of light danced a half-klick downrange, where the bunker was just visible. Five hundred meters was the limit for these practice grenades; but I might luck out, so I lined the launcher up on the image of the bunker, held it at a forty-five degree angle and popped off a salvo of three.
Return fire from the bunker started before my grenades even landed. Its automatic lasers were no more powerful than the ones we were using, but a direct hit would deactivate your image converter, leaving you blind. It was setting down a random field of fire, not even coming close to the boulders we were hiding behind.
Three magnesi urn-bright flashes blinked simultaneously about thirty meters Short of the bunker. “Mandella! I thought you were supposed to he good with that thing.”
“Damn it, Potter-it only throws half a klick. Once we get closer, I’ll lay ’em right on top, every time.”
“Sure you will.” I didn’t say anything. She wouldn’t be team leader forever. Besides, she hadn’t been such a bad girl before the power went to her head.
Since the grenadier is the assistant team leader, I was slaved into Potter’s radio and could hear B team talk to her.
“Potter, this is Freeman. Losses?”
“Potter here-no, looks like they were concentrating on you.”
“Yeah, we lost three. Right now we’re in a depression about eighty, a hundred meters down from you. We can give cover whenever you’re ready.”
“Okay, start.” Soft click: “A team, follow me.” She slid out from behind the rock and turned on the faint pink beacon beneath her powerpack. I turned on mine and moved out to run alongside of her, and the rest of the team fanned out in a trailing wedge. Nobody fired while A team laid down a cover for us.
All I could hear was Potter’s breathing and the soft crunch-crunch of my boots. Couldn’t see much of anything, SO I tongued the image converter up to a log two intensification. That made the image kind of blurry but adequately bright. Looked like the bunker had B team pretty well pinned down; they were getting quite a roasting. All of their return fire was laser. They must have lost their grenadier.
“Potter, this is Mandella. Shouldn’t we take some of the heat off B team?”
“Soon as I can find us good enough cover. Is that all right with you? Private?” She’d been promoted to corporal for the duration of the exercise.
We angled to the right and lay down behind a slab of rock. Most of the others found cover nearby, but a few had to hug the ground.
“Freeman, this is Potter.”
“Potter, this is Smithy. Freeman’s out; Samuels is out. We only have five men left. Give us some cover so we can get-”
“Roger, Smithy.” Click. “Open up, A team. The B’s are really hurtin’.” Joe tialdeman
I peeked out over the edge of the rock. My rangefinder said that the bunker was about three hundred fifty meters away, still pretty far. I aimed a smidgeon high and popped three, then down a couple of degrees, three more. The first ones overshot by about twenty meters; then the second salvo flared up directly in front of the bunker. I tried to hold on that angle and popped fifteen, the rest of the magazine, in the same direction.
I should have ducked down behind the rock to reload, but I wanted to see where the fifteen would land, so I kept my eyes on the bunker while I reached back to unclip another magazine- When the laser hit my image converter, there was a red glare so intense it seemed to go right through my eyes and bounce off the back of my skull. It must have been only a few milliseconds before the converter overloaded and went blind, but the bright green afterimage hurt my eyes for several minutes.
Since I was officially “dead,” my radio automatically cut off, and I had to remain where I was until the mock battle was over. With no sensory input besides the feel of my own skin (and it ached where the image converter had shone on it) and the ringing in my ears, it seemed like an awfully long time. Finally, a helmet clanked against mine.
“You okay, Mandella?” Potter’s voice.
“Sorry, I died of boredom twenty minutes ago.”
“Stand up and take my hand.” I did so and we shuffled back to the billet. It must have taken over an hour. She didn’t say anything more, all the way back-it’s a pretty awkward way to communicate-but after we’d cycled through the airlock and warmed up, she helped me undo my suit. I got ready for a mild tongue-lashing, but when the suit popped open, before I could even get my eyes adjusted to the light, she grabbed me around the neck and planted a wet kiss on my mouth.
“Nice shooting, Mandella.” “Huh?”
“Didn’t you see? Of course not.. . . The last salvo before you got hit-four direct hits. The bunker decided it was
knocked out, and all we bad todo was walk the rest of the way.”
“Great.” I scratched my face under the eyes, and some dry skin flaked off. She giggled.
“You should see yourself. You look like-”
“All personnel, report to the assembly area.” That was the captain’s voice. Bad news, usually.
She handed me a tunic and sandals. “Let’s go.” The
assembly area-chop hail was just down the corridor. There was a row of roll-call buttons at the door, I pressed the one beside my name. Four of the names were covered with black tape. That was good, only four. We hadn’t lost anybody during today’s maneuvers.
The captain was sitting on the raised dais, which at least meant we didn’t have to go through the tench-hut bulishit. The place filled up in less than a minute; a soft chime indicated the roll was complete.
Captain Stott didn’t stand up. “You did fairly well today. Nobody killed, and I expected some to be. In that respect you exceeded my expectations but in every other respect you did a poor job.
“I am glad you’re taking good care of yourselves, because each of you represents an investment of over a million dollars and one-fourth of a human life.
“But in this simulated battle against a very stupid robot enemy, thirty-seven of you managed to walk into laser fire and be killed in a simulated way, and since dead people require no food you will require no food, for the next three Jays. Each person who was a casualty in this baffle will be allowed only two liters of water and a vitamin ration each Jay.”
We knew enough not to groan or anything, but there were some pretty disgusted looks, especially on the faces that had singed eyebrows and a pink rectangle of sunburn framing their eyes.
“Mandella.” “Sir?”
“You are far and away the worst-burned casualty. Was your image converter set on normal?”
Oh, shit. “No, sir. Log two.”
~su
Joe Ilaftieman
“I see. Who was your team leader for the exercises?” “Acting Corporal Potter, sir.”
“Private Potter, did you order him to use image intensification?” “Sir, I. . . I don’t remember.”
“You don’t Well, as a memory exercise you may join the dead people. Is that satisfactory?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Dead people get one last meal tonight and go on no rations starting tomorrow. Are there any questions?” He must have been kidding. “All right Dismissed.”
I selected the meal that looked as if it had the most calories and took my tray over to sit by Potter.
“That was a quixotic damn thing to do. But thanks.”
“Nothing. I’ve been wanting to lose a few pounds anyway.” I couldn’t see where she was carrying any extra.
“I know a good exercise,” I said. She smiled without looking up from her tray. “Have anybody for tonight?”
“Kind of thought I’d ask Jeff.. . .”
“Better hurry, then. He’s lusting after Macjima.” Well, that was mostly true. Everybody did.
“I don’t know. Maybe we ought to save our strength. That third day . .
“Come on.” I scratched the back of her hand lightly with a fingernail. “We haven’t sacked since Missouri. Maybe I’ve learned something new.”
“Maybe you have.” She tilted her head up at me in a sly way. “Okay.”
Actually, she was the one with the new trick. The French corkscrew, she called it. She wouldn’t tell me who taught it to her though. I’d like to shake his hand. Once I got my strength back.
8
The two weeks’ training around Miami Base eventually cost us eleven lives. Twelve, if you count Dahiquist. I guess having to spend the rest of your life on Charon with a hand and both legs missing is close enough to dying.
Foster was crushed in a landslide and Freeland had a suit malfunction that froze him solid before we could carry him inside. Most of the other deaders were people I didn’t know all that well. But they all hurt. And they seemed to make us more scared rather than more cautious.
Now darkside. A flyer brought us over in groups of twenty and set us down beside a pile of building materials thoughtfully immersed in a pool of helium H.
We used grapples to haul the stuff out of the pool. It’s not safe to go wading, since the stuff crawls all over you and it’s hard to tell what’s underneath; you could walk out onto a slab of hydrogen and be out of luck.
I’d suggested that we try to boil away the pool with our lasers, but ten minutes of concentrated fire didn’t drop the helium level appreciably. It didn’t boil, either;
helium II is a “superfluid,” so what evaporation there was had to take place evenly, all over the surface. No hot spots, so no bubbling.
We weren’t supposed to use lights, to “avoid detection.” There was plenty of starlight with your image converter cranked up to log three or four, but each stage of amplification meant some loss of detail. By log four the landscape looked like a crude monochrome painting, and you couldn’t read the names on people’s helmets unless they were right in front of you.
The landscape wasn’t all that interesting, anyhow. There were half a dozen medium-sized meteor craters (all with exactly the same level of helium II in them) and the suggestion of some puny mountains just over the horizon. The
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uneven ground was the consistency of frozen spiderwebs; every time you put your foot down, you’d sink half an inch with a squeaking crunch. It could get on your nerves.
It took most of a day to pull all the stuff out of the pool. We took shifts napping, which you could do either standing ap, sitting or lying on your stomach. I didn’t do well in ~ny of those positions, so I was anxious to get the bunker built and pressurized.
We couldn’t build the thing underground—it’d just fill up with helium 11-so the first thing to do was to build an tnsulating platform, a permaplast-vacuum sandwich three layers thick.
I was an acting corporal, with a crew of ten people. We were carrying the permaplast layers to the building site- two people can carry one easily-when one of “my” men slipped and fell on his back.
“Damn it, Singer, watch your step.” We’d had a couple of deaders that way. “Sony, Corporal. I’m bushed. Just got my feet tangled up.,’
“Yeah, just watch it.” He got back up all right, and he and his partner placed the sheet and went back to get another.
I kept my eye on Singer. In a few minutes he was practically staggering, not easy to do in that suit of cybernetic armor.
“Singer! After you set the plank, I want to see you.”
“OK.” He labored through the task and mooched over. “Let me check your readout.” I opened the door on his chest to expose the medical monitor. His temperature was two degrees high; blood pressure and heart rate both elevated. Not up to the red line, though.
“You sick or something?”
“Hell, Mandella, I feel OK, just tired. Since I fell I been a little dizzy.”
I chinned the medic’s combination. “Doc, this is Man-della. You wanna come over here for a minute?”
“Sure, where are you?” I waved and he walked over from poolside. “What’s the problem?” I showed him Singer’s readout.
irir. r’.iiir.vr.n witn
He knew what all the other little dials and things meant, so it took him a while. “As far as I can tell, Mandella… he’s just hot.”
“Hell, I coulda told you that,” said Singer.
“Maybe you better have the armorer take a look at his suit.” We had two people who’d taken a crash course in suit maintenance; they were our “armorers.”
I chinned Sanchez and asked him to come over with his tool kit.
“Be a couple of minutes, Corporal. Carryin’ a plank.”
“Well, put it down and get on over here.” I was getting an uneasy feeling. Waiting for him, the medic and I looked over Singer’s suit.
“Uh-oh,” Doc Jones said. “Look at this.” I went around to the back and looked where he was pointing. Two of the fins on the heat exchanger were bent out of shape.
“What’s wrong?” Singer asked.
“You fell on your heat exchanger, right?”
“Sure, Corporal-that’s it. It must not be working right.”
“I don’t think it’s working at all,” said Doc. Sanchez came over with his diagnostic kit and we told him what had happened. He looked at the heat exchanger, then plugged a couple of jacks into it and got a digital readout from a little monitor in his kit. I didn’t know what it was measuring, but it came out zero to eight decimal places.
Heard a soft click, Sanchez chinning my private frequency. “Corporal, this guy’s a deader.”
“What? Can’t you fix the goddamn thing?”
“Maybe.. . maybe I could, if I could take it apart. But there’s no way-”
“Hey! Sanchez?” Singer was talking on the general freak. “Find out what’s wrong?” He was panting.
Click. “Keep your pants on, man, we’re working on it.” Click. “He won’t last long enough for us to get the bunker pressurized. And I can’t work on the heat exchanger from outside of the suit.”
“You’ve got a spare suit, haven’t you?” 34
Joe Haldeman
“Two of ’em, the fit-anybody kind. But there’s no place …say…”
“Right. Go get one of the suits warmed up.” I chinned the general freak. “Listen, Singer, we’ve gona get you out of that thing. Sanchez has a spare suit, but to make the switch, we’re gonna have to build a house around you. Understand?”
“Huh-uh.”
“Look, we’ll make a box with you inside, and hook it up to the life-support unit. That way you can breathe while you make the switch.”
“Soun’s pretty compis. . . compil. . . cated t’me.” “Look, just come along-”
“I’ll be all right, man, jus’ lemme res’. . .
I grabbed his arm and led him to the building site. He was really weaving. Doc took his other arm, and between us, we kept him from falling over.
“Corporal Ho, this is Corporal Mandella.” Ho was in charge of the life-support unit.
“Go away, Mandella, I’m, busy.”
“You’re going to be busier.” I outlined the problem to her. While her group hurried to adapt the LSU-for this purpose, it need only be an air hose and heater-I got my crew to bring around six slabs of permaplast, so we could build a big box around Singer and the extra suit. It would look like a huge coffin, a meter square and six meters long.
We set the suit down on the slab that would be the floor of the coffin. “OK, Singer, let’s go.”
No answer. “Singer, let’s go.”
No answer.
“Singer!” He was just standing there. Doc Jones checked his readout. “He’s out, man, unconscious.”
My mind raced. There might just be room for another person in the box. “Give me a hand here.” I took Singer’s shoulders and Doc took his feet, and we carefully laid him out at the feet of the empty suit.
Then I lay down myself, above the suit. “OK, close’er up.,,
THE FOREVER WAR 35
“Look, Mandella, if anybody goes in there, it oughta be me.”
“Fuck you, Doc. My job. My man.” That sounded all wrong. William Mandella, boy hero.
They stood a slab up on edge-it had two openings for the LSU input and exhaust- and proceeded to weld it to the bottom plank with a narrow laser beam. On Earth, we’d just use glue, but here the only fluid was helium, which has lots of interesting properties, but is definitely not sticky.
After about ten minutes we were completely walled up. I could feel the LSU humming. I switched on my suit light-the first time since we landed on darkside-and the glare made purple blotches dance in front of my eyes.
“Mandella, this is Ho. Stay in your suit at least two or three minutes. We’re putting hot air in, but it’s coming back just this side of liquid.” I watched the purple fade for a while.
“OK, it’s still cold, but you can make it.” I popped my suit. It wouldn’t open all the way, but I didn’t have too much trouble getting out. The suit was still cold enough to take some skin off my fingers and butt as I wiggled out.
I had to crawl feet-first down the coffin to get to Singer. It got darker fast, moving away from my light. When I popped his suit a rush of hot stink hit me in the face. In the dim light his skin was dark red and splotchy. His breathing was very shallow and I could see his heart palpitating.
First I unhooked the relief tubes-an unpleasant business-then the biosensors; and then I had the problem of getting his arms out of their sleeves.
It’s pretty easy to do for yourself. You twist this way and turn that way and the arm pops out. Doing it from the outside is a different matter: I had to twist his arm and then reach under and move the suit’s arm to match-it takes muscle to move a suit around from the outside.
Once I had one arm out it was pretty easy; I just crawled forward, putting my feet on the suit’s shoulders, and pulled on his free ann. He slid out of the suit like an oyster slipping out of its shell.
I popped the spare suit and after a lot of pulling and 36
Joe Haldeman
pushing, managed to get his legs in. Hooked up the biosensors and the front relief tube. He’d have to do the other one himself; it’s too complicated. For the nth time I was glad not to have been born female; they have to have two of those damned plumber’s friends, instead of just one and a simple hose.
I left his arms out of the sleeves. The suit would be useless for any kind of work, anyhow; waldos have to be tailored to the individual.
His eyelids fluttered. “Man. . . della. Where. . . the fuck..
I explained, slowly, and he seemed to get most of it. “Now I’m gonna close you up and go get into my suit. I’ll have the crew cut the epd off this thing and I’ll haul you out. Got it?”
He nodded. Strange to see that-when you nod or shrug inside a suit, it doesn’t communicate anything.
I crawled into my suit, hooked up the attachments and chinned the general freak. “Doc, I think he’s gonna be OK. Get us out of here now.”
“Will do.” Ho’s voice. The LSU hum was replaced by a chatter, then a throb. Evacuating the box to prevent an explosion.
One corner of the seam grew red, then white, and a bright crimson beam lanced through, not a foot away from my head. I scrunched back as far as I could. The beam slid up the seam and around three corners, back to where it started.
The end of the box fell away slowly, trailing filaments of melted ‘plast.
“Walt for the stuff to harden, Mandella.” “Sanchez, I’m not that stupid.”
“Here you go.” Somebody tossed a line to me. That would be smarter than dragging him out by myself. I threaded a long bight under his arms and tied it behind his neck. Then I scrambled out to help them pull, which was silly-they had a dozen people already lined up to haul.
Singer got out all right and was actually sitting up while Doc Jones checked his readout. People were asking me
THE FOREVER WAR 37
about it and congratulating me, when suddenly Ho said “Look!” and pointed toward the horizon.
It was a black ship, coming in fast. I just had time to think it wasn’t fair, they weren’t supposed to attack until the last few days, and then the ship was right on top of us.
9
We all flopped to the ground instinctively, but the ship didn’t attack. It blasted braking rockets and dropped to land on skids. Then it skied around to come to a iest beside the building site.
Everybody had it figured out and was standing around sheepishly when the two suited figures stepped out of the ship.
A familiar voice crackled over the general freak. “Every one of you saw us coming in and not one of you responded with laser fire. It wouldn’t have done any good but it would have indicated a certain amount of fighting spirit. You have a week or less before the real thing and since the sergeant and I will be here I will insist that you show a little more will to live. Acting Sergeant Potter.”
“Here, sir.”
“Get me a detail of twelve people to unload cargo. We brought a hundred small robot drones for target practice so that you might have at least a fighting chance when a live target comes over.
“Move now. We only have thiity minutes before the ship returns to Miami.” I checked, and it was actually more like forty minutes.
Having the captain and sergeant there didn’t really make much difference. We were still on our own; they were just observing.
Once we got the floor down, it only took one day to complete the bunker. It was a gray oblong, featureless except for the airlock blister and four windows. On top was a
swivel-mounted gigawatt laser. The operator-you couldn’t call him a “gunner”-sat in a chair holding deadman switches in both hands. The laser wouldn’t fire as long as he was holding one of those switches. If he let go, it would automatically aim for any moving aerial object and
38
fire at will. Primary detection and aiming was by means of a kilometer-high antenna mounted beside the bunker.
It was the only arrangement that could really be expected to work, with the horizon so close and human reflexes so slow. You couldn’t have the thing fully automatic, because in theory, friendly ships might also approach.
The aiming computer could choose among up to twelve targets appearing simultaneously (firing at the largest ones first). And it would get all twelve in the space of half a
second.
The installation was partly protected from enemy fire by an efficient ablative layer that covered everything except the human operator. But then, they were dead-man switches. One man above guarding eighty inside. The army’s good at that kind of arithmetic.
Once the bunker was finished, half of us stayed inside at all times-feeling very much like targets-taking turns operating the laser, while the other half went on maneuvers.
About four klicks from the base was a large “lake” of frozen hydrogen; one of our most important maneuvers was to learn how to get around on the treacherous stuff.
It wasn’t too difficult You couldn’t stand up on it, so you had to belly down and sled.
If you had somebody to push you from the edge, getting started was no problem. Otherwise, you had to scrabble with your hands and feet, pushing down as hard as was practical, until you started moving, in a series of little jumps. Once started, you’d keep going until you ran out of ice. You could steer a little bit by digging in, hand and foot, on the appropriate side, but you couldn’t slow to a stop that way. So it was a good idea not to go too fast and wind up positioned in such a way that your helmet didn’t absorb the shock of stopping.
We went through all the things we’d done on the Miami side: weapons practice, demolition, attack patterns. We also launched drones at irregular intervals, toward the bunker. Thus, ten or fifteen times a day, the operators got to demonstrate their skill in letting go of the handles as soon as the proximity light went on.
I had four hours of that, like everybody else. I was ner Joe tialneman
vous until the first “attack,” when I saw how little there was to it. The light went on, I let go, the gun aimed, and when the drone peeped over the horizon-zzt! Nice touch of color, the molten metal spraying through space. Otherwise not too exciting.
So none of us were worried about the upcoming “graduation exercise,” thinking it would be just more of the same.
Miami Base attacked on the thirteenth day with two Simultaneous missiles streaking over opposite sides of the horizon at some forty kilometers per second. The laser vaporized the first one with no trouble, but the second got within eight klicks of the bunker before it was hit.
We were coming back from maneuvers, about a klick away from the bunker. I wouldn’t have seen it happen if I hadn’t been looking directly at the bunker the moment of the attack.
The second missile sent a shower of molten debris straight toward the bunker. Eleven pieces hit, and, as we later reconstructed it, this is what happened:
The first casualty was Macjima. so well-loved Macjima, inside the bunker, who was hit in the back and the head and died instantly. With the drop in pressure, the LSU went into high gear. Friedman was standing in front of the main airco outlet and was blown into the opposite wall hard enough to knock him unconscious; he died of decompression before the others could get him to his suit.
Everybody else managed to stagger through the gale and get into their suits, but Garcia’s suit had been holed and didn’t do him any good.
By the time we got there, they had turned off the LSU and were welding up the holes in the wall. One man was trying to scrape up the unrecognizable mess that had been Macjima. I could hear him sobbing and retching. They had already taken Garcia and Friedman outside for burial. The captain took over the repair detail from Potter. Sergeant Cortez led the sobbing man over to a corner and came back to work on cleaning up Macjima’s remains, alone. He didn’t order anybody to help and nobody volunteered.
10
As a graduation exercise, we were unceremoniously stuffed
into a ship-Earth’s Hope, the same one we rode to Charon-and bundled off to Stargate at a little more than one gee.
The trip seemed endless, about six months subjective time, and boring, but not as hard on the carcass as going to Charon had been. Captain Stott made us review our training orally, day by day, and we did exercises every day until we were worn to a collective frazzle.
Stargate 1 was like Charon’s darkside, only more so. The base on Stargate 1 was smaller than Miami Base-only a little bigger than the one we constructed on darkside-and we were due to lay over a week to help expand the facilities. The crew there was very glad to see us, especially the two females, who looked a little worn around the edges.
We all crowded into the small dining hail, where Sub-major Williamson, the man in charge of Stargate 1, gave us some disconcerting news:
“Everybody get comfortable. Get off the tables, though, there’s plenty of floor.
“I have some idea of what you just went through, training on Charon. I won’t say it’s all been wasted. But where you’re headed, things will be quite different. Warmer.”
He paused to let that soak in.
“Aleph Aurigae, the first collapsar ever detected, revolves around the normal star Epsilon Aurigae in a twenty-seven year orbit. The enemy has a base of operations, not on a regular portal planet of Aleph, but on a planet in orbit around Epsilon. We don’t know much about the planet, just that it goes around Epsilon once every 745 days, is about three-fourths the size of Earth, and has an albedo of 0.8, meaning it’s probably covered with clouds. We can’t say precisely how hot it will be, but judging from its distance
41
42
from Epsilon, it’s probably rather hotter than Earth. Of course, we don’t know whether you’ll be working. . . fighting on lightside or darkside, equator or poles. It’s highly unlikely that the atmosphere will be breathable-at any rate, you’ll stay inside your suits.
“Now you know exactly as much about where you’re going as I do. Questions?” “Sir,” Stein drawled, “now we know where we’re goin’
anybody know what we’re goin’ to do when we get there?”
Williamson shrugged. “That’s up to your captain-and your sergeant, and the captain of Earth’s Hope, and Hope’s logistic computer~ We just don’t have enough data yet to project a course of action for you. It may be a long and bloody battle; it may be just a case of walking in to pick up the pieces. Conceivably, the Taurans might want to make a peace offer,’ ‘-Cortez snorted-“in which case you would simply be part of our muscle, our bargaining power.” He looked at Cortez mildly. “No one can say for sure.”
The orgy that night was amusing, but it was like trying to sleep in the middle of a raucous beach party. The only area big enough to sleep all of us was the dining hail; they draped a few bedsheets here and there for privacy, then unleashed Stargate’s eighteen sex-starved men on our women, compliant and promiscuous by military custom (and law), but desiring nothing so much as sleep on solid ground.
The eighteen men acted as if they were compelled to try as many permutations as possible, and their performance was impressive (in a strictly quantitative sense, that is). Those of us who were keeping count led a cheering section for some of the more gifted members. I think that’s the right word.
The next morning-and every other morning we were on Stargate 1-we staggered out of bed and into our suits, to go outside and work on the “new wing.” Eventually, Stargate would be tactical and logistic headquarters for the war, with thousands of permanent personnel, guarded by half-a-dozen heavy cruisers in Hope’s class. When we
started, it was two shacks and twenty people; when we left, it was four shacks and twenty people. The work was hardly work at all, compared to darkside, since we had plenty of light and got sixteen hours inside for every eight hours’
work. And no drone attack for a final exam.
When we shuttled back up to the Hope, nobody was too happy about leaving (though some of the more popular females declared it’d be good to get some rest). Stargate was the last easy, safe assignment we’d have before taking up arms against the Taurans. And as Williamson had pointed out the first day, there was no way of predicting what that would be like.
Most of us didn’t feel too enthusiastic about making a collapsar jump, either. We’d been assured that we wouldn’t even feel it happen, just free fall all the way.
I wasn’t convinced. As a physics student, I’d had the usual courses in general relativity and theories of gravitation. We only had a little direct data at that time- Stargate was discovered when I was in grade school-but the mathematical model seemed clear enough.
The collapsar Stargate was a perfect sphere about three kilometers in radius. It was suspended forever in a state of gravitational collapse that should have meant its surface was dropping toward its center at nearly the speed of light.
Relativity propped it up, at least gave it the illusion of being there. . . the way all reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted.
At any rate, there would be a theoretical point in space-time when one end of our ship was just above the surface of the collapsar, and the other end was a kilometer away (in our frame of reference). In any sane universe, this would set up tidal stresses and tear the ship apart, and we would be just another million kilograms of degenerate matter on the theoretical surface, rushing headlong to nowhere for the rest of eternity or dropping to the center in the next trillionth of a second. You pays your money and you takes your frame of reference.
But they were right. We blasted away from Stargate 1,
44 Joe tialdeman
made a few course corrections and then just dropped, for about an hour.
Then a bell rang and we sank into our cushions under a steady two gravities of deceleration. We were in enemy territory.
11
We’d been decelerating at two gravities for almost nine days when the battle began. Lying on our couches being miserable, all we felt were two soft bumps, missiles being released. Some eight hours later, the squawkbox crackled:
“Attention, all crew. This is the captain.” Quinsana, the pilot, was only a lieutenant, but was allowed to call himself captain aboard the vessel, where he outranked all of us, even Captain Stott. “You grunts in the cargo hold can listen, too.
“We just engaged the enemy with two fifty-gigaton tachyon missiles and have destroyed both the enemy vessel and another object which it had launched approximately three microseconds before.
“The enemy has been trying to overtake us for the past 179 hours, ship time. At the time of the engagement, the enemy was moving at a little over half the speed of light, relative to Aleph, and was only about thirty AU’s from Earth’s Hope. It was moving at .47c relative to us, and thus we would have been coincident in space- time”- rammed!-‘ ‘in a little more than nine hours. The missiles were launched at 0719 ship’s time, and destroyed the enemy at 1540, both tachyon bombs detonating within a thousand klicks of the enemy objects.”
The two missiles were a type whose propulsion system was itself only a barely- controlled tachyon bomb. They accelerated at a constant rate of 100 gees, and were traveling at a relativistic speed by the time the nearby mass of the enemy ship detonated them.
“We expect no further interference from enemy vessels. Our velocity with respect to Aleph will be zero in another five hours; we will then begin the journey back. The return will take twenty-seven days.” General moans and dejected cussing. Everybody knew all that already, of course; but we didn’t care to be reminded of it.
So after another month of logy calisthenics and drill, at a constant two gravities, we got our first look at the planet we were going to attack. Invaders from outer space, yes sir.
It was a blinding white crescent waiting for us two AU’s out from Epsilon. The captain had pinned down the location of the enemy base from fifty AU’s out, and we had jockeyed in on a wide arc, keeping the bulk of the planet between them and us. That didn’t mean we were sneaking up on them-quite the contrary; they launched
three abortive attacks-but it put us in a stronger defensive position. Until we had to go to the surface, that is. Then only the ship and its Star Fleet crew would be reasonably safe.
Since the planet rotated rather slowly-once every ten and one-half days-a “stationary” orbit for the ship had to be 150,000 klicks out. This made the people in the ship feel quite secure, with 6,000 miles of rock and 90,000 miles of space between them and the enemy. But it meant a whole second’s time lag in communication between us on the ground and the ship’s battle computer. A person could get awful dead while that neutrino pulse crawled up and back.
Our vague orders were to attack the base and gain control, while damaging a minimum of enemy equipment. We were to take at least one enemy alive. We were under no ~ircumstances to allow ourselves to be taken alive, however. And the decision wasn’t up to us; one special pulse from the battle computer, and that speck of plutonium in your power plant would fiss with all of .01% efficiency, md you’d be nothing but a rapidly expanding, very hot plasma.
They strapped us into six scoutships-one platoon of twelve people in each-and we blasted away from Earth’s Fiope at eight gees. Each scoutship was supposed to follow its own carefully random path to our rendezvous point, 108 klicks from the base. Fourteen drone ships were launched it the same time, to confound the enemy’s anti-spacecraft ;ystem.
The landing went off almost perfectly. One ship suffered THE FOREVER WAR
47
minor damage, a near miss boiling away some of the ablative material on one side of the hull, but it’d still be able to make it and return, keeping its speed down while in the atmosphere.
We zigged and zagged and wound up first ship at the rendezvous point. There was only one trouble. It was under four kilometers of water.
I could almost hear that machine, 90,000 miles away, grinding its mental gears, adding this new bit of data. We proceeded just as if we were landing on solid ground: braking rockets, falling, skids out, hit the water, skip, hit the water, skip, hit the water, sink.
It would have made sense to go ahead and land on the bottom-we were streamlined, after all, and water just another fluid-but the hull wasn’t strong enough to hold up a four kilometer column of water. Sergeant Cortez was in the scoutship with us.
“Sarge, tell that computer to do something! We’re gonna get-”
“Oh, shut up, Mandella. Trust in th’ lord.” “Lord” was definitely lower-case when Cortez said it.
There was a loud bubbly sigh, then another, and a slight increase in pressure on my back that meant the ship was rising. “Flotation bags?” Cortez didn’t deign to answer, or didn’t know.
That was it. We rose to within ten or fifteen meters of the surface and stopped, suspended there. Through the port I could see the surface above, shimmering like a mirror of hammered silver. I wondered what it would be like to be a fish and have a definite roof over your world.
I watched another ship splash in. It made a great cloud of bubbles and turbulence, then fell-slightly tail-first-for a short distance before large bags popped out under each delta wing. Then it bobbed up to about our level and stayed.
“This is Captain Stott. Now listen carefully. There is a beach some twenty-eight klicks from your present position, in the direction of the enemy. You will be proceeding to this beach by scoutship and from there will mount your assault on the Tauran position.” That was some improvement; we’d only have to walk eighty klicks.
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Joe Haldeman
We deflated the bags, blasted to the surface and flew in a slow, spread-out formation to the beach. It took several minutes. As the ship scraped to a halt, I could hear pumps humming, making the cabin pressure equal to the air pressure outside. Before it had quite stopped moving, the escape slot beside my couch slid open. I rolled out onto the wing of the craft and jumped to the ground. Ten seconds to find cover-I sprinted across loose gravel to the “treeline,” a twisty bramble of tall sparse bluish-green shrubs. I dove into the briar patch and turned to watch the ships leave. The drones that were left rose slowly to about a hundred meters, then took off in all directions with a bone-jarring roar. The real scoutships slid slowly back into the water. Maybe that was a good idea.
It wasn’t a terribly attractive world but certainly would be easier to get around in than the cryogenic nightmare we were trained for. The sky was a uniform dull silver brightness that merged with the mist over the ocean so completely it was impossible to tell where water ended and air began. Small wavelets licked at the black gravel shore, much too slow and graceful in the three-quarters Earth-normal gravity. Even from fifty meters away, the rattle of billions of pebbles rolling with the tide was loud in my ears.
The air temperature was 79 degrees Centigrade, not quite hot enough for the sea to boil, even though the air pressure was low compared to Earth’s. Wisps of steam drifted quickly upward from the line where water met land. I wondered how a lone man would survive exposed here without a suit. Would the heat or the low oxygen (partial pressure one-eighth Earth normal) kill him first? Or was there some deadly microorganism that would beat them both…?
“This is Cortez. Everybody come over and assemble on me.” He was standing on the beach a little to the left of me, waving his hand in a circle over his head. I walked toward him through the shrubs. They were brittle, unsubstantial, seemed paradoxically dried-out in the steamy air.
They wouldn’t offer much in the way of cover.
“We’ll be advancing on a heading .05 radians east of north. I want Platoon One to take point. Two and Three follow about twenty meters behind, to the left and right.
mr.. rultLvLiI wi~n LW
Seven, command platoon, is in the middle, twenty meters behind Two and Three. Five and Six, bring up the rear, in a semicircular closed flank. Everybody straight?” Sure, we could do that “arrowhead” maneuver in our sleep. “OK, let’s move out.”
I was in Platoon Seven, the “command group.” Captain Stott put me there not because I was expected to give any commands, but because of my training in physics.
The command group was supposedly the safest pl~e, buffered by six platoons: people were assigned to it because there was some tactical reason for them to survive at least a little longer than the rest. Cortez was there to give orders.
Chavez was there to correct suit malfunctions. The senior medic, Doe Wilson (the only medic who actually had an M.D.), was there, and so was Theodopolis, the radio engineer, our link with the captain, who had elected to stay in orbit.
The rest of us were assigned to the command group by dint of special training or aptitude that wouldn’t normally be considered of a “tactical” nature. Facing a totally unknown enemy, there was no way of telling what might prove important. Thus I was there because I was the closest the company had to a physicist. Rogers was biology. Tate was chemistry. Ho could crank out a perfect score on the Rhine extrasensory perception test, every time. Bohrs was a polyglot, able to speak twenty- one languages fluently, idiomatically. Petrov’s talent was that he had tested out to have not one molecule of xenophobia in his psyche. Keating was a skilled acrobat. Debby Hoffister-“Lucky” Ho!lister-showed a remarkable aptitude for making money, and also had a consistently high Rhine potential.
12
When we first set out, we were using the “jungle” camouflage combination on our suits. But what passed for jungle in these anemic tropics was too sparse; we looked like
a band of conspicuous harlequins trooping through the
woods. Cortez had us switch to black, but that was just as bad, as the light of Epsilon came evenly from all parts of
the sky, and there were no shadows except ours. We finally settled on the dun- colored desert camouflage.
The nature of the countryside changed slowly as we walked north, away from the sea. The thorned stalks-I guess you could call them trees-came in fewer numbers but were bigger around and less brittle; at the base of each was a tangled mass of vine with the same bluegreen color, which spread out in a flattened cone some ten meters in diameter. There was a delicate green flower the size of a man’s head near the top of each tree.
Grass began to grow some five klicks from the sea. It seemed to respect the trees’ “property rights,” leaving a strip of bare earth around each cone of vine. At the edge of such a clearing, it would grow as timid bluegreen stubble, then, moving away from the tree, would get thicker and taller until it reached shoulderhigh in some places, where the separation between two trees was unusually large. The grass was a lighter, greener shade than the trees and vines. We changed the color of our suits to the bright green we had used for maximum visibility on Charon.
Keeping to the thickest part of the grass, we were fairly inconspicuous.
We covered over twenty klicks each day, buoyant after months under two gees. Until the second day, the only form of animal life we saw was a kind of black worm, fingersized, with hundreds of cilium legs like the bristles of a brush. Rogers said that there obviously had to be some
50
THE FOREVER WAR 51
larger creature around, or there would be no reason for the trees to have thorns. So we were doubly on guard, expecting trouble both from the Taurans and the unidentified “large creature.”
Potter’s second platoon was on point; the general freak was reserved for her, since her platoon would likely be the first to spot any trouble.
“Sarge, this is Potter,” we all heard. “Movement ahead.” “Get down, then!”
“We are. Don’t think they see us.”
“First platoon, go up to the right of point. Keep down. Fourth, get up to the left. Tell me when you get in position. Sixth platoon, stay back and guard the rear. Fifth and third, close with the command group.”
Two dozen people whispered out of the grass to join us. Cortez must have heard from the fourth platoon.
“Good. How about you, first?. . . OK, fine. How many are there?” “Eight we can see.” Potter’s voice.
“Good. When I give the word, open fire. Shoot to kill.” “Sarge,.. . they’re just animals.”
“Potter-if you’ve known all this time what a Tauran looks like, you should’ve told us. Shoot to kill.”
“But we need . . .”
“We need a prisoner, but we don’t need to escort him forty klicks to his home base and keep an eye on him while we fight. Clear?”
“Yes. Sergeant.”
“OK. Seventh, all you brains and weirds, we’re going up and watch. Fifth and third, come along to guard.”
We crawled through the meter-high grass to where the second platoon had stretched out in a firing line.
“I don’t see anything,” Cortez said. “Ahead and just to the left. Dark green.”
They were only a shade darker than the grass. But after you saw the first one, you could see them all, moving slowly around some thirty meters ahead.
“Fire!” Cortez tired tirst; then twelve streaks of crimson leaped out and the grass wilted black, disappeared, and the
52
Joe Haldeman
creatures convulsed and died trying to scatter.
“Hold fire, hold it!” Cortez stood up. “We want to have something left-second platoon, follow me.” He strode out toward the smoldering corpses, laser-finger pointed out front, obscene divining rod pulling him toward the carnage
I felt my gorge rising and knew that all the lurid training tapes, all the horrible deaths in training accidents, hadn’t prepared me for this sudden reality. . . that I had a magic wand that I could point at a life and make it a smoking piece of half-raw meat; I wasn’t a soldier nor ever wanted to be one nor ever would want- “OK, seventh, come on up.” While we were walking
toward them, one of the creatures moved, a tiny shudder, and Cortez flicked the beam of his laser over it with an almost negligent gesture. It made a hand-deep gash across the creature’s middle. It died, like the others, without emitting a sound.
They were not quite as tall as humans, but wider in girth. They were covered with dark green, almost black, fur- white curls where the laser had singed. They appeared to have three legs and an arm. The only ornament to their shaggy heads was a mouth, wet black orifice filled with flat black teeth. They were thoroughly repulsive, but their worst feature was not a difference from human beings, but a similarity. . . . Whenever the laser had opened a body cavity, milk-white glistening veined globes and coils of organs spilled out, and their blood was dark clotting red.
“Rogers, take a look. Taurans or not?”
Rogers knelt by one of the disemboweled creatures and opened a flat plastic box, filled with glittering dissecting tools. She selected a scalpel. “One way we might be
able to find out.” Doc Wilson watched over her shoulder as she methodically slit the membrane covering several organs.
“Here.” She held up a blackish fibrous mass between two fingers, a parody of daintiness through all that armor.
“So?”
“It’s grass, Sergeant. If the Taurans eat the grass and breathe the air, they certainly found a planet remarkably like their home.” She tossed it away. “They’re animals, Sergeant, just fucken animals.”
II1L I’URLVLD. WJiR
“I don’t know,” Doc Wilson said. “Just because they walk around on all fours, threes maybe, and eat grass. .
“Well, let’s check out the brain.” She found one that had been hit in the head and scraped the superficial black char from the wound. “Look at that.”
It was almost solid bone. She tugged and ruffled the hair all over the head of another one. “What the hell does it use for sensory organs? No eyes, or ears, or. . .” She stood up.
“Nothing in that fucken head but a mouth and ten centimeters of skull. To protect nothing, not a fucken thing.”
“If I could shrug, I’d shrug,” the doctor said. “It doesn’t prove anything-a brain doesn’t have to look like a mushy walnut and it doesn’t have to be in the head. Maybe that skull isn’t bone, maybe that’s the brain, some crystal lattice. .
“Yeah, but the fucken stomach’s in the right place, and if those aren’t intestines I’ll eat-”
“Look,” Cortez said, “this is real interesting, but all we need to know is whether that thing’s dangerous, then we’ve gotta move on; we don’t have all-”
“Medic! DOC!” Somebody back at the firing line was waving his arms. Dcc sprinted back to him, the rest of us following.
“What’s wrong?” He had reached back and unclipped his medical kit on the run. “It’s Ho. She’s out.”
Doc swung open the door on Ho’s biomedical monitor. He didn’t have to look far. “She’s dead.”
“Dead?” Cortez said. “What the hell-”
“Just a minute.” Doc plugged a jack into the monitor and fiddled with some dials on his kit. “Everybody’s biomed readout is stored for twelve hours. I’m running it backwards, should be able to-there!”
“What?”
“Four and a half minutes ago-must have been when you opened fire-Jesus!” “Well?”
“Massive cerebral hemorrhage. No. . .” He watched the ’54
Joe Haldeman
dials. “No. . . warning, no indication of anything out of the
ordinary; blood pressure up, pulse up, but normal under the circumstances. . . nothing to. . . indicate-” He reached down and popped her suit. Her fine oriental features were distorted in a horrible grimace, both gums showing. Sticky fluid ran from under her collapsed eyelids, and a trickle of blood still dripped from each ear. Doc Wilson closed the suit back up.
“I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s as if a bomb went off in her skull.” “Oh flick,” Rogers said, “she was Rhine-sensitive, wasn’t she.”
“That’s right,” Cortez sounded thoughtful. “All right, everybody listen up. Platoon leaders, check your platoons and see if anybody’s missing, or hurt. Anybody else in seventh?”
Four others had bad headaches. One of them affirmed that he was slightly Rhine- sensitive. The others didn’t know.
“Cortez, I think it’s obvious,” Doc Wilson said, “that we should give these. . . monsters wide berth, especially shouldn’t harm any more of them. Not with five people susceptible to whatever apparently killed Ho.”
“Of course, God damn it, I don’t need anybody to tell me that. We’d better get moving. I just filled the captain in on what happened; he agrees that we’d better get as far away from here as we can, before we stop for the night.
“Let’s get back in formation and continue on the same bearing. Fifth platoon, take over point; second, come back to the rear. Everybody else, same as before.”
“What about Ho?” Lucky asked.
“She’ll be taken care of. From the ship.”
After we’d gone half a klick, there was a flash and rolling thunder. Where Ho had been came a wispy luminous mushroom cloud boiling up to disappear against the gray sky.
13
We stopped for the “night”-actually, the sun wouldn’t set for another seventy hours-atop a slight rise some ten klicks from where we had killed the aliens. But they weren’t aliens, I bad to remind myself-we were.
Two platoons deployed in a ring around the rest of us, and we flopped down exhausted. Everybody was allowed four hours’ sleep and had two hours’ guard duty.
Potter came over and sat next to me. I chinned her frequency. “Hi, Marygay.”
“Oh, William,” her voice over the radio was hoarse and cracking. “God, it’s so horrible.”
“It’s over now-”
“I killed one of them, the first instant, I shot it right in the, in the . . .”
1 put my hand on her knee. The contact had a plastic click and I jerked it back, visions of machines embracing, copulating. “Don’t feel singled out, Marygay; whatever guilt there is, is. . . belongs evenly to all of us,. . . but a triple portion for Cor-”
“You privates quit jawin’ and get some sleep. You both pull guard in two hours.” “OK, Sarge.” Her voice was so sad and tired I couldn’t bear it. I felt if I could only
touch her, I could drain off the sadness like ground wire draining current, but we were each
trapped in our own plastic world- ”G’night, William.”
“Night.” It’s almost impossible to get sexually excited inside a suit, with the relief tube and all the silver chloride sensors poking you, but somehow this was my body’s response to the emotional impotence, maybe remembering more pleasant sleeps with Marygay, maybe feeling that in the midst of all this death, personal death could be very soon, cranking up the procreative derrick for one last try
lovely thoughts like this. I fell asleep and dreamed that I was a machine, mimicking the functions of life, creaking and clanking my clumsy way through a world, people too polite to say anything but giggling behind my back, and the little man who sat inside my head pulling the levers and clutches and watching the dials, he was hopelessly mad and was storing up hurts for the day- “Mandella-wake up, goddammit, your shift!”
I shuffled over to my place on the perimeter to watch for god knows what. . . but I was so weary I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Finally I tongued a stimtab, knowing I’d pay for it later.
For over an hour I sat there, scanning my sector left, right, near, far, the scene never changing, not even a breath of wind to stir the grass.
Then suddenly the grass parted and one of the three-legged creatures was right in front of me. I raised my finger but didn’t squeeze.
“Movement!” “Movement!”
“Jesus Chri-there’s one right-”
“HOLD YOUR FIRE! F’ shit’s sake don’t shoot!” “Movement.”
“Movement.” I looked left and right, and as far as I could see, every perimeter guard had one of the blind, dumb creatures standing right in front of him.
Maybe the drug I’d taken to stay awake made me more sensitive to whatever they did. My scalp crawled and I felt a formless thing in my mind, the feeling you get when somebody has said something and you didn’t quite hear it, want to respond, but the opportunity to ask him to repeat it is gone.
The creature sat back on its haunches, leaning forward on the one front Leg. Big green bear with a withered arm. Its power threaded through my mind, spiderwebs, echo of night terrors, trying to communicate, trying to destroy me, I couldn’t know.
“All right, everybody on the perimeter, fall back, slow. THE FOREVER WAR
57
Don’t make any quick gestures. .. . Anybody got a headache or anything?” “Sergeant, this is Hollister.” Lucky.
“They’re trying to say something. . . I can almost… no, just.. .” “All I can get is that they think we’re, think we’re…
well, fimny. They’re not afraid.”
“You mean the one in front of you isn’t-”
“No, the feeling comes from all of them., they’re all thinking the same thing. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do.”
“Maybe they thought it was funny, what they did to Ho.” “Maybe. I don’t feel they’re dangerous. Just curious about us.” “Sergeant, this is Bohrs.”
“The Taurans’ve been here at least a year-maybe they’ve learned how to communicate with these.. . overgrown teddy bears. They might be spying on us, might be sending back-”
“I don’t think they’d show themselves if that were the case,” Lucky said. “They can obviously hide from us pretty well when they-want to.”
“Anyhow,” Cortez said, “if they’re spies, the damage has been done. Don’t think it’d be smart to take any action against them. I know you’d all like to see ’em dead for what they did to Ho, so would I, but we’d better be carefliL”
I didn’t want to see them dead, but I’d just as soon not have seen them in any condition. I was walking backwards slowly, toward the middle of camp. The creature didn’t seem disposed to follow. Maybe he just knew we were surrounded. He was pulling up grass with his arm and munching.
“OK, all of you platoon leaders, wake everybody up, get a roll count. Let me know if anybody’s been hurt. Tell your people we’re moving out in one minute.”
I don’t know what Cortez had expected, but of course the creatures followed right along. They didn’t keep us sur
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rounded; just had twenty or thirty following us all the time. Not the same ones, either. Individuals would saunter away, and new ones would join the parade. It was pretty obvious that they weren’t going to tire out.
We were each allowed one stimtab. Without it, no one could have marched an hour. A second pill would have been welcome after the edge started to wear off, but the mathematics of the situation forbade it; we were still thirty klicks from the enemy base, fifteen hours’ marching at the least. And though you could stay awake and energetic for a hundred hours on the tabs, aberrations of judgment and perception snowballed after the second one, until in extremis the most bizarre hallucinations would be taken at face value, and a person could fidget for hours deciding whether to have breakfast.
Under artificial stimulation, the company traveled with great energy for the first six hours, was slowing by the seventh, and ground to an exhausted halt after nine hours and nineteen kilometers. The teddy bears had never lost sight of us and, according to Lucky, had never stopped “broadcasting.” Cortez’s decision was that we would stop for seven hours, each platoon taking one hour of perimeter guard. I was never so glad to have been in the seventh platoon, as we stood guard the last shift and thus were able to get six hours of uninterrupted sleep.
In the few moments I lay awake after finally lying down, the thought came to me that the next time I closed my eyes could well be the last. And partly because of the drug hangover, mostly because of the past day’s horrors, I found that I really didn’t give a shit.
14
Our first contact with the Taurans came during my shift.
The teddy bears were still there when I woke up and replaced Doc Jones on guard. They’d gone back to their original formation, one in front of each guard position. The one who was waiting for me seemed a little larger than normal, but otherwise looked just like all the others. All the grass had been cropped where he was sitting, so he occasionally made forays to the left or right. But he always returned to sit right in front of me, you would say staring if he had had anything to stare with.
We had been facing each other for about fifteen minutes when Cortez’s voice rumbled:
“Awright everybody, wake up and get hid!”
I followed instinct and flopped to the ground and rolled into a tall stand of grass. “Enemy vessel overhead.” His voice was almost laconic.
Strictly speaking, it wasn’t really overhead, but rather passing somewhat east of us. It was moving slowly, maybe a hundred klicks per hour, and looked like a broomstick surrounded by a dirty soap bubble. The creature riding it was a little
more human-looking than the teddy bears, but still no prize. I cranked my image amplifier up to forty log two for a closer look.
He had two arms and two legs, but his waist was so small you could encompass it with both hands. Under the tiny waist was a large horseshoe-shaped pelvic structure nearly a meter wide, from which dangled two long skinny legs with no apparent knee joint. Above that waist his body swelled out again, to a chest no smaller than the huge pelvis. His arms looked surprisingly human, except that they were too long and undermuscied. There were too many fingers on his hands. Shoulderless, neckless. His head was a
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nightmarish growth that swelled like a goiter from his massive chest. Two eyes that looked like clusters of fish eggs, a bundle of tassles instead of a nose, and a rigidly open hole that might have been a mouth sitting low down where his adam’s apple should have been. Evidently the soap bubble contained an amenable environment, as he was wearing absolutely nothing except his ridged hide, that looked like skin submerged too long in hot water, then dyed a pale orange. “He” had no external genitalia, but nothing that might hint of mammary glands. So we opted for the male pronoun by default.
Obviously, he either didn’t see us or thought we were part of the herd of teddy bears. He never looked back at us, but just continued in the same direction we were headed, .05 rad east of north.
“Might as well go back to sleep now, if you can sleep after looking at that thing. We move out at 0435.” Forty minutes.
Because of the planet’s opaque cloud cover, there had been no way to tell, from space, what the enemy base looked like or how big it was. We only knew its position, the same way we knew the position the scoutships were supposed to land on. So it too could easily have been underwater, or underground.
But some of the drones were reconnaissance ships as well as decoys: and in their mock attacks on the base, one managed to get close enough to take a picture. Captain Stott beamed down a diagram of the place to Cortez-the only one with a visor in his suit-when we were five klicks from the base’s “radio” position. We stopped and he called all the platoon leaders in with the seventh platoon to confer. Two teddy bears loped in, too. We tried to ignore them.
“OK, the captain sent down some pictures of our objective. I’m going to draw a map; you platoon leaders copy.” They took pads and styli out of their leg pockets, while Cortez unrolled a large plastic mat. He gave it a shake to randomize any residual charge, and turned on his stylus.
“Now, we’re coming from this direction.” He put an arrow at the bottom of the sheet. “First thing we’ll hit is this row of huts, probably billets or bunkers, but who the
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hell knows. . . . Our initial objective is to destroy these buildings-the whole base is on a flat plain; there’s no way we could really sneak by them.”
“Potter here. Why can’t we jump over them?”
“Yeah, we could do that, and wind up completely surrounded, cut to ribbons. We take the buildings.
“After we do that. . . all I can say is that we’ll have to think on our feet. From the aerial reconnaissance, we can figure out the function of only a couple of buildings- and that stinks. We might wind up wasting a lot of time demolishing the equivalent of an enlisted-men’s bar, ignoring a huge logistic computer because it looks like. . . a garbage dump or something.”
“Mandella here,” I said. “Isn’t there a spaceport of some kind-seems to me we ought to. .
“I’ll get to that, damn it. There’s a ring of these huts all around the camp, so we’ve got to break through somewhere. This place’ll be closest, less chance of giving away our position before we attack.
“There’s nothing in the whole place that actually looks like a weapon. That doesn’t mean anything, though; you could hide a gigawatt laser in each of those huts.
“Now, about five hundred meters from the huts, in the middle of the base, we’ll come to this big flower-shaped structure.” Cortez drew a large symmetrical shape that looked like the outline of a flower with seven petals. “What the hell this is, your guess is as good as mine. There’s only one of them, though, so we don’t damage it any more than we have to. Which means.. . we blast it to splinters if I think it’s dangerous.
“Now, as far as your spaceport, Mandella, is concerned-there just isn’t one. Nothing.
“That cruiser the Hope caulked had probably been left in orbit, like ours has to be. If they have any equivalent of a scoutship, or drone missiles, they’re either not kept here or they’re well hidden.”
“Bohrs here. Then what did they attack with, while we were coming down from orbit?”
“I wish we knew, Private.
“Obviously, we don’t have any way of estimating their 62
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numbers, not directly. Recon pictures failed to show a single Tauran on the grounds of the base. Meaning nothing, because it is an alien environment. Indirectly, though… we count the number of broomsticks, those flying things.
“There are fifty-one huts, and each has at most one broomstick. Four don’t have any parked outside, but we located three at various other parts of the base. Maybe this indicates that there are fifty-one Taurans, one of whom was outside the base when the picture was taken.”
“Keating here. Or fifty-one officers.”
“That’s right-maybe fifty thousand infantrymen stacked in one of these buildings. No way to tell. Maybe ten Taurans, each with five broomsticks, to use according to his mood.
“We’ve got one thing in our favor, and that’s communications. They evidently use a frequency modulation of megahertz electromagnetic radiation.”
“Radio!”
“That’s right, whoever you are. Identify yourself when you speak. So it’s quite possible that they can’t detect our phased-neutrino communications. Also, just prior to the attack, the Hope is going to deliver a nice dirty fission bomb; detonate it in the upper atmosphere right over the base. That’ll restrict them to line-of-sight communications for some time; even those will be full of static.”
“Why don’t.. . Tate here. . . why don’t they just drop the bomb right in their laps. Save us a lot of-”
“That doesn’t even deserve an answer, Private. But the answer is, they might. And you better hope they don’t. If they caulk the base, it’ll be for the safety of the Hope. After we’ve attacked, and probably before we’re far enough away for it to make much difference.
“We keep that from happening by doing a good job. We have to reduce the base to where it can no longer function; at the same time, leave as much intact as possible. And take one prisoner.”
“Potter here. You mean, at least one prisoner.”
“I mean what I say. One only. Potter.. . you’re relieved of your platoon. Send Chavez up.”
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“All right, Sergeant.” The relief in her voice was unmistakable.
Cortez continued with his map and instructions. There was one other building whose function was pretty obvious; it had a large steerable dish antenna on top. We were to destroy it as soon as the grenadiers got in range.
The attack plan was very loose. Our signal to begin would be the flash of the fission bomb. At the same time, several drones would converge on the base, so we could see what their antispacecraft defenses were. We would try to reduce the effectiveness of those defenses without destroying them completely.
Immediately after the bomb and the drones, the grenadiers would vaporize a line of seven huts. Everybody would break through the hole into the base. . . and what would happen after that was anybody’s guess.
Ideally, we’d sweep from that end of the base to the other, destroying certain targets, caulking all but one Tauran. But that was unlikely to happen, as it depended on the Taurans’ offering very little resistance.
On the other hand, if the Taurans showed obvious superiority from the beginning, Cortez would give the order to scatter. Everybody had a different compass bearing for retreat-we’d blossom out in all directions, the survivors to rendezvous in a valley some forty klicks east of the base. Then we’d see about a return engagement, after the Hope softened the base up a bit.
“One last thing,” Cortez rasped. “Maybe some of you feel the way Potter evidently does, maybe some of your men feel that way.. . that we ought to go easy, not make this so much of a bloodbath. Mercy is a luxury, a weakness we can’t afford to indulge in at this stage of the war. All we know about the enemy is that they have killed seven hundred and ninety-eight humans. They haven’t shown any restraint in attacking our cruisers, and it’d be foolish to expect any this time, this first ground action.
“They are responsible for the lives of all of your comrades who died in training, and for Ho, and for all the others who are surely going to die today. I can’t understand any-
Joe Haldeman
body who wants to spare them. But that doesn’t make any difference. You have your orders and, what the hell, you might as well know, all of you have a post- hypnotic suggestion that I will trigger by a phrase, just before the battle. It will make your job easier.”
“Sergeant..
“Shut up. We’re short on time; get back to your platoons and brief them. We move out in five minutes.”
The platoon leaders returned to their men, leaving Cortez and ten of us-plus three teddy bears, milling around, getting in the way.
15
We took the last five klicks very carefully, sticking to the highest grass, running across occasional clearings. When we were 500 meters from where the base was supposed to be, Cortez took the third platoon forward to scout, while the rest of us laid low.
Cortez’s voice came over the general freak: “Looks pretty much like we expected. Advance in a file, crawling. When you get to the third platoon, follow your squad leader to the left or right.”
We did that and wound up with a string of eighty-three people in a line roughly perpendicular to the direction of attack. We were pretty well hidden, except for the dozen or so teddy bears that mooched along the line, munching grass.
There was no sign of life inside the base. All of the buildings were windowless and a uniform shiny white. The huts that were our first objective were large featureless half-buried eggs some sixty meters apart. Cortez assigned one to each grenadier.
We were broken into three fire teams: team A consisted of platoons two, four, and six; team B was one, three, and five; the command platoon was team C.
“Less than a minute now-filters down!-when I say ‘fire,’ grenadiers, take out your targets. God help you if you miss.”
There was a sound like a giant’s belch, and a stream of five or six iridescent bubbles floated up from the flower-shaped building. They rose with increasing speed until they were almost out of sight, then shot olf to the south, over our heads. The ground was suddenly bright, and for the first time in a long time, I saw my shadow, a long one pointed north. The bomb had gone off prematurely. I just had time to think that it didn’t make too much difference;
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it’d still make alphabet soup out of their communications- “Drones!” A ship came screaming in just about tree
level, and a bubble was in the air to meet it. When they contacted, the bubble popped and the drone exploded into a million tiny fragments. Another one came from the opposite side and suffered the same fate.
“FIRE!” Seven bright glares of 500-microton grenades and a sustained concussion that surely would have killed an unprotected man.
“Filters up.” Gray haze of smoke and dust. Clods of dirt falling with a sound like heavy raindrops.
“Listen up:
‘Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled; Scots, wham Bruce has aften led, Welcome to your gory bed, Or to victory!’
I hardly heard him for trying to keep track of what was going on in my skull. I knew it was just post-hypnotic suggestion, even remembered the session in Missouri when they’d implanted it, but that didn’t make it any less compelling. My mind reeled under the strong pseudo-memories:
shaggy hulks that were Taurans (not at all what we now knew they looked like) boarding a colonists’ vessel, eating babies while mothers watched in screaming terror (the colonists never took babies; they wouldn’t stand the acceleration), then
raping the women to death with huge veined purple members (ridiculous that they would feel desire for humans), holding the men down while they plucked flesh from their living bodies and gobbled it (as if they could assimilate the alien protein).. . a hundred grisly details as sharply remembered as the events of a minute ago, ridiculously overdone and logically absurd. But while my conscioUs mind was rejecting the silliness, somewhere much deeper, down in that sleeping animal where we keep our real motives and morals, something was thirsting for alien hlood, secure in the Conviction that the noblest thing a man could do would be to die killing one of those horrible monsters.
Ikth FUIthVMt WAlt b7
I knew it was all purest soyashit, and I hated the men who had taken such obscene liberties with my mind, but I could even hear my teeth grinding, feel my cheeks frozen in a spastic grin, blood-Lust. . . A teddy bear walked in front of me, looking dazed. I started to raise my laser-finger, but somebody beat me to it and the creature’s head exploded in a cloud of gray splinters and blood.
Lucky groaned, half-whining, “Dirty. .. filthy fucken bastards.” Lasers flared and crisscrossed, and all of the teddy bears fell dead.
Somebody was laughing and sobbing. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Petrov?” Strange to hear Cortez cussing.
I twisted around and saw Petrov, behind and to my left, lying in a shallow hole, digging frantically with both hands, crying and gurgling.
“Fuck,” Cortez said. “Team B! Ten meters past the craters, get down in a line. Team C-into the craters with A.”
I scrambled up and covered the hundred meters in twelve amplified strides. The craters were practically large enough to hide a scoutship, some ten meters in diameter. I jumped to the opposite side of the hole and landed next to a fellow named Chin. He didn’t even look around when I landed, just kept scanning the base for signs of life.
“Team A-ten meters, past team B, down in line.” Just as he finished, the building in front of us burped, and a salvo of the bubbles fanned out toward our lines. Most people saw it coming and got down, but Chin was just getting up to make his rush and stepped right into one.
It grazed the top of his helmet and disappeared with a faint pop. He took one step backwards and toppled over the edge of the crater, trailing an arc of blood and brains. Lifeless, spreadeagled, he slid halfway to the bottom, shoveling dirt into the perfectly symmetrical hole where the bubble had chewed indiscriminately through plastic, hair, skin, bone, and brain.
“Everybody hold it. Platoon leaders, casualty report… check.. . check, check .. . check, check, check.. . check.
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We have three deaders. Wouldn’t be any if you’d have kept low. So everybody grab dirt when you hear that thing go off. Team A, complete the rush.”
They completed the maneuver without incident. “OK. Team C, rush to where B. . . hold it! Down!”
Everybody was already hugging the ground. The bubbles slid by in a smooth arc about two meters off the ground. They went serenely over our heads and, except for one that made toothpicks out of a tree, disappeared in the distance.
“B, rush past A ten meters. C, take over B’s place. You B grenadiers, see if you can reach the Flower.”
Two grenades tore up the ground thirty or forty meters from the structure. In a good imitation of panic, it started belching out a continuous stream of bubbles-still, none coming lower than two meters off the ground. We kept hunched down and continued to advance.
Suddenly, a seam appeared in the building and widened to the size of a large door. Taurans came swarming out.
“Grenadiers, hold your fire. B team, laser fire to the left and right-keep’m bunched up. A and C, rush down the center.”
One Tauran died trying to run through a laser beam. The others stayed where they were.
In a suit, it’s pretty awkward to run and keep your head down at the same time. You have to go from side to side, like a skater getting started; otherwise you’ll be airborne. At least one person, somebody in A team, bounced too high and suffered the same fate as Chin.
I was feeling pretty fenced-in and trapped, with a wall of laser fire on each side and a low ceiling that meant death to touch. But in spite of myself, I felt happy, euphoric, finally getting the chance to kill some of those villainous baby-eaters. Knowing it was soyashit.
They weren’t fighting back, except for the rather ineffective bubbles (obviously not designed as an anti-personnel weapon), and they didn’t retreat back into the building, either. They milled around, about a hundred of them, and watched us get closer. A couple of grenades would caulk them all, but I guess Cortez was thinking about the pris
oner.
“OK, when I say ‘go,’ we’re going to flank ’em. B team will hold fire.. . Second and fourth platoons to the right, sixth and seventh to the left. B team will move forward in line to box them in.
“Go!” We peeled off to the left As soon as the lasers stopped, the Taurans bolted, running in a group on a collision course with our flank.
“A team, down and fire! Don’t shoot until you’re sure of your aim-if you miss you might hit a friendly. ~And fer Chris’ sake save me one!”
It was a horrifying sight, that herd of monsters bearing down on us. They were running in great leaps-the bubbles avoiding them-and they all looked like the one we saw earlier, riding the broomstick; naked except for an almost transparent sphere around their whole bodies, that moved along with them. The right flank started firing, picking off individuals in the rear of the pack.
Suddenly a laser flared through the Taurans from the other side, somebody missing his mark. There was a horrible scream, and I looked down the line to see someone-I think it was Perry-writhing on the ground, right hand over the smoldering stump of his arm, seared off just below the elbow. Blood sprayed through his fingers, and the suit, its camouflage circuits scrambled, flickered black-white- jungle-desert-green-gray. I don’t know how long I stared- long enough for the medic
to run over and start giving aid-but when I looked up the Taurans were almost on top of me.
My first shot was wild and high, but it grazed the top of the leading Tauran’s protective bubble. The bubble disappeared and the monster stumbled and fell to the ground, jerking spasmodically. Foam gushed out of his mouth-hole, first white, then streaked red. With one last jerk he became rigid and twisted backwards, almost to the shape of a horseshoe. His long scream, a high-pitched whistle, stopped just as his comrades trampled over him. 1 hated myself for smiling.
It was slaughter, even though our flank was outnumbered five to one. They kept coming without faltering, even when they had to climb over the drift of bodies and parts of
‘U
joe tlaiAleman
bodies that piled up high, parallel to our flank~ The ground between us was slick red with Tauran blood-all God’s children got hemoglobin-and like the teddy bears, their guts looked pretty much like guts to my untrained eye. My helmet reverberated with hysterical laughter while we slashed them to gory chunks, and I almost didn’t hear Cortez:
“Hold your fire-I said HOLD iT, goddammit! Catch a couple of the bastards, they won’t hurt you.”
I stopped shooting and eventually so did everybody else. When the next Tauran jumped over the smoking pile of meat in front of me, I dove to try to tackle him around those spindly legs.
It was like hugging a big, slippery balloon. When I tried to drag him down, he popped out of my arms and kept running.
We managed to stop one of them by the simple expedient of piling half-a-dozen people on top of him. By that time the others had run through our line and were headed for the row of large cylindrical tanks that Cortez had said were probably for storage. A little door had opened in the base of each one.
“We’ve got our prisoner,” Cortez shouted. “Kill!”
They were fifty meters away and running hard, difficult targets. Lasers slashed around them, bobbing high and low. One fell, sliced in two, but the others, about ten of them, kept going and were almost to the doors when the grenadiers started firing.
They were still loaded with 500-mike bombs, but a near miss wasn’t enough-the concussion would just send them flying, unhurt in their bubbles.
“The buildings! Get the fucken buildings!” The grenadiers raised their aim and let fly, but the bombs only seemed to scorch the white outside of the structures until, by chance, one landed in a door. That split the building just as if it had a seam; the two halves popped away and a cloud of machinery flew into the air, accompanied by a huge pale flame that rolled up and disappeared in an instant. Then the others all concentrated on the doors, except for potshots at some of the Taurans, not so much to get them as to blow
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them away before they could get inside. They seemed awfully eager.
All this time, we were trying to get the Taurans with laser fire, while they weaved and bounced around trying to get into the structures. We moved in as close to them as we could without putting ourselves in danger from the grenade blasts, yet too far away for good aim.
Still, we were getting them one by one and managed to destroy four of the seven buildings. Then, when there were only two aliens left, a nearby grenade blast flung one of them to within a few meters of a door. He dove in and several grenadiers fired salvos after him, but they all fell short or detonated harmlessly on the side. Bombs were falling all around, making an awful racket, but the sound was suddenly drowned out by a great sigh, like a giant’s intake of breath, and where the building had been was a thick cylindrical cloud of smoke, solid-looking, dwindling away into the stratosphere, straight as if laid down by a ruler. The other Tauran had been right at the base of the cylinder I could see pieces of him flying. A second later, a shock wave hit us and I rolled helplessly, pinwheeling, to smash into the pile of Tauran bodies and roll beyond.
1 picked myself up and panicked for a second when I saw there was blood all over my suit-when I realized it was only alien blood, I relaxed but felt unclean.
‘4Catch the bastard! Catch him!” In the confusion, the Tauran had gotten free and was running for the grass. One platoon was chasing after him, losing ground, but then all of B team ran over and cut him off. I jogged over to join in the fun.
There were four people on top of him, and a ring around them of about fifty people, watching the struggle.
“Spread out, dammit! There might be a thousand more of them waiting to get us in one place.” We dispersed, grumbling. By unspoken agreement we were all sure that there were no more live Taurans on the face of the planet.
Cortez was walking toward the prisoner while I backed away. Suddenly the four men collapsed in a pile on top of the creature. . . Even from my distance I could see the foam spouting from his mouth-hole. His bubble had popped. Suicide.
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“Damn!” Co,tez was right there. “Get off that bastard.” The four men got off and Cortez used his laser In slice the monster into a dozen quivering chunks. Heart- warming sight.
“That’s all right, though, we’ll find another one-everybody! Back in the arrowhead formation. Combat assault, on the Flower.”
Well, we assaulted the Flower, which had evidently run out of ammunition (it was still belching, but no bubbles), and it was empty. We scurried up ramps and through corridors, fingers at the ready, like kids playing soldier. There was nobody home.
The same lack of response at the antenna installation, the
“Salami,” and twenty other major buildings, as well as the forty-four perimeter huts still intact. So we had “captured” dozens of buildings, mostly of incomprehensible purpose, but failed in our main mission, capturing a Tauran for the xenologists to experiment with. Oh well, they could have all the bits and pieces they’d ever want. That was something.
After we’d combed every last square centimeter of the base, a scoutship came in with the real exploration ciew, the scientists. Cortez said, “All right, snap out of it,” and the hypnotic compulsion fell away.
At first it was pretty grim. Alot of the people, like Lucky and Marygay, almost went crazy with the memories of bloody murder multiplied a hundred times. Cortez ordered everybody to take a sed-tab, two for the ones most upset. I took two without being specifically ordered to do so.
Because it was murder, unadorned butchery-once we had the anti-spacecraft weapon doped out, we hadn’t been in any danger. The Taurans hadn’t seemed to
have any conception of person-to-person fighting. We had just herded them up and slaughtered them, the first encounter between mankind and another intelligent species. Maybe it was the second encounter, counting the teddy bears. What might have happened if we had sat down and tried to communicate? But they got the same treatment.
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that it hadn’t been me who so gleefully carved up those frightened, stampeding creatures. Back in the twentieth centuly, they had established to everybody’s satisfaction that “I was just following orders” was an inadequate excuse for inhuman conduct. . . but what can you do when the orders come from deep down in that puppet master of the unconscious?
Worst of all was the feeling that perhaps my actions weren’t all that inhuman. Ancestors only a few generations back would have done the same thing, even to their fellow men, without any hypnotic conditioning.
I was disgusted with the human race, disgusted with the army and honified at the prospect of living with myself for another century or so. . . . Well, there was always brain-wipe.
A ship with a lone Tauran survivor had escaped and had gotten away clean, the bulk of the planet shielding it from Earth’s Hope while it dropped into Aleph’s collapsar field.
Escaped home, I guessed, wherever that was, to report what twenty men with hand-weapons could do to a hundred fleeing on foot, unarmed.
I suspected that the next time humans met Taurans in ground combat, we would be more evenly matched. And I was right.
SERG EANT MANDELLA 2007-2024 A.D.
1
I was scared enough.
Sub-major Stott was pacing back and forth behind the small podium in the assembly room/chop hall/gymnasium of the Anniversary. We had just made our final collapsar jump, from Tet-38 to Yod-4. We were decelerating at 11/2 gravities and our velocity relative to that collapsar was a respectable .9(k. We were being chased.
“I wish you people would relax for a while and just trust the ship’s computer. The Tauran vessel at any rate will not be within strike range for another two weeks. Mandella!”
He was always very careful to call me “Sergeant” Mandella in front of the company. But everybody at this particular briefing was either a sergeant or a corporal: squad leaders. “Yes, sit”
“You’re responsible for the psychological as well as the physical well-being of the men and women in your squad. Assuming that you are aware that there is a morale problem aboard this vessel, what have you done about it?”
“AS far as my squad is concerned, sir?” “Of course.”
“We talk it out, sir.”
“And have you arrived at any cogent conclusion?”
“Meaning no disrespect, sir, I think the major problem is obvious. My people have been cooped up in this ship for fourteen-”
“Ridiculous! Every one of us has been adequately conditioned against the pressures of living in close quarters and the enlisted people have the privilege of confraternity.” That was a delicate way of putting it. “Officers must remain celibate, and yet we have no morale problem.”
if he thought his officers were celibate, he should sit down and have a long talk with Lieutenant Harmony. Maybe he just meant line officers, though. That would be
77
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Joe Haldeman
just him and Cortez. Probably 50 percent right. Cortez was awfully friendly with Corporal Kamehameha.
“Sir, perhaps it was the detoxification back at Stargate; maybe-”
“No. The therapists only worked to erase the hate conditiomng-everybody knows how I feel about that-and they may be misguided but they are skilled.
“Corporal Potter.” He always called her by her rank to remind her why she hadn’t been promoted as high as the rest of us. Too soft. “Have you ‘talked it out’ with your people, too?”
“We’ve discussed it, sir.”
The sub-major could “glare mildly” at people. He glared mildly at Marygay until she elaborated.
“I don’t believe it’s the fault of the conditioning. My
people are impatient, just tired of doing the same thing day after day.” “They’re anxious for combat, then?” No sarcasm in his voice.
“They want to get off the ship, sir.”
“They will get off the ship,” he said, allowing himself a microscopic smile. “And then they’ll probably be just as impatient to get back on.”
It went back and forth like that for a long while. Nobody wanted to come right out and say that their squad was scared: scared of the Tauran cruiser closing on us, scared of the landing on the portal planet. Sub-major Stott had a bad record of dealing with people who admitted fear.
I fingered the fresh T/Othey had given us. It looked like tills: THE FOREVER WAR
I knew most of the people from the raid on Aleph, the first face-to-face contact between humans and Taurans. The only new people in my platoon were Luthuli and Heyrovsky. In the company as a whole (excuse me, the “strike force”), we had twenty replacements for the nineteen people we lost from the Aleph raid: one amputation, four dead-era, fourteen psychotics.
I couldn’t get over the “20 Mar 2007” at the bottom of the 1/0. I’d been in the anny ten years, though it felt like less than two. Time dilation, of course; even with the collapsar jumps, traveling from star to star eats up the calendar.
After this raid, I would probably be eligible for retirement, with full pay. If I lived through the raid, and if they didn’t change the rules on us. Me a twenty-year man, and only twenty-five years old.
Stott was summing up when there was a knock on the door, a single loud rap. “Enter,” he said.
An ensign I knew vaguely walked in casually and handed Stott a slip of paper, without saying a word. He stood there while Stoit read it, slumping with just the
right degree of insolence. Technically, Stou was out of his chain of command; everybody in the navy disliked him anyhow.
Stott handed the paper back to the ensign and looked through him.
“You will alert your squads that preliminary evasive maneuvers will commence at 2010, fifty-eight minutes from now.” He hadn’t looked at his watch. “All personnel will be in acceleration shells by 2000. Tench . . . hut!”
We rose and, without enthusiasm, chorused, “Fuck you, sir.” Idiotic custom. Stott strode out of the room and the ensign followed, smirking.
I turned my ring to my assistant squad leader’s position and talked into it: “Tate, this is Mandella.” Everyone else in the mom was doing the same.
A tinny voice came out of the ring. “Tate here. What’s up?”
“Get ahold of the men and tell them we have to be in the shells by 2000. Evasive maneuvers.”
THE FOREVER WAR 81
“Crap. They told us it would be days.”
“I guess something new came up. Or maybe the Commodore has a bright idea.” “The Commodore can stuff it. You up in the lounge?”
“Bring me back a cup when you come, okay? Little sugar?” “Roger. Be down in about half an hour.”
“Thanks. I’ll get on it.”
There was a general movement toward the coffee machine. I got in line behind Corporal Potter.
“What do you think, Marygay?”
“Maybe the Commodore just wants us to try out the shells once more.” “Before the real thing.”
“Maybe.” She picked up a cup and blew into it. She looked worried. “Or maybe the Taurans had a ship way out, waiting for us. I’ve wondered why they don’t do it.
We do, at Stargate.”
“Stargate’s a different thing. It takes seven cruisers, moving all the time, to cover all the possible exit angles. We can’t afford to do it for more than one collapsar, and neither could they.”
She didn’t say anything while she filled her cup. “Maybe we’ve stumbled on their version of Stargate. Or maybe they have more ships than we do by now.”
I filled and sugared two cups, sealed one. “No way to tell.” We walked back to a table, careful with the cups in the high gravity.
“Maybe Singhe knows something,” she said. “Maybe he does. But I’d have to get him through Rogers and Cortez. Cortez would jump down my throat if I tried to bother him now.”
“Oh, I can get him directly. We. . .” She dimpled a little bit. “We’ve been friends.”
I sipped some scalding coffee and tried to sound nonchalant. “So that’s where you’ve been disappearing to.”
“You disapprove?” she said, looking innocent. “Well. . . damn it, no, of course not. But-but he’s an officer! A navy officer!”
82 Joe Haldeman
“He’s attached to us and that makes him part army.” She twisted her ring and said, “Directory.” To me: “What about you and Little Miss Harmony?”
“That’s not the same thing.” She was whispering a directory code into the ring.
“Yes, it is. You just wanted to do it with an officer. Pervert.” The ring bleated twice. Busy. “How was she?”
“Adequate.” I was recovering.
“Besides, Ensign Singhe is a perfect gentleman. And not the least bit jealous.” “Neither am I,” I said. “If he ever hurts you, tell me and I’ll break his ass.”
She looked at me across her cup. “If Lieutenant Harmony ever hurts you, tell me and I’ll break her ass.”
“It’s a deal.” We shook on it solemnly. 2
The acceleration shells were something new, installed while we rested and resupplied at Stargate. They enabled us to use the ship at closer to its theoretical efficiency, the tachyon drive boosting it to as much as 25 gravities.
Tate was waiting for me in the shell area. The rest of the squad was milling around, talking. I gave him his coffee.
“Thanks. Find out anything?”
“Afraid not. Except the swabbies don’t seem to be scared, and it’s their show. Probably just another practice run.”
He slurped some coffee. “What the hell. It’s all the same to us, anyhow. Just sit there and get squeezed half to death. God, I hate those things.”
“Maybe they’ll eventually make us obsolete, and we can go home.”
“Sure thing.” The medic came by and gave me my shot. I waited until 1950 and hollered to the squad, “Let’s go. Strip down and zip up.”
The shell is like a flexible spacesuit; at least the fittings on the inside are pretty similar. But instead of a life support package, there’s a hose going into the top of the helmet and two coming out of the heels, as well as two relief tubes per suit. They’re crammed in shoulder-to-shoulder on light acceleration couches; getting to your shell is like picking your way through a giant plate of olive drab spaghetti.
When the lights in my helmet showed that everybody was suited up, I pushed the button that flooded the room. No way to see, of course, but I could imagine the pale blue solution-ethylene glycol and something else-foaming up around and over us. The suit material, cool and dry, collapsed in to touch my skin at every point. I knew that my internal body pressure was increasing rapidly to match the increasing fluid pressure outside. That’s what the shot was
83
for; keep your cells from getting squished between the devil and the deep blue sea. You could still feel it, though. By the time my meter said “2” (external pressure equivalent to a column of water two nautical miles deep), I felt that I was at the same time being crushed and bloated. By 2005 it was at 2.7 and holding steady. When the maneuvers began at 2010, you couldn’t feel the difference. I thought I saw the needle fluctuate a tiny bit, though.
The major drawback to the system is that, of course, anybody caught outside of his shell when the Anniversary hit 25 G’S would be just so much strawberry jam. So the guiding and the fighting have to be done by the ship’s tactical computer-which does most of it anyway, but it’s nice to have a human overseer.
Another small problem is that if the ship gets damaged and the pressure drops, you’ll explode like a dropped melon. If it’s the internal pressure, you get crushed to death in a microsecond.
And it takes ten minutes, more or less, to get depressurized and another two or three to get untangled and dressed. So it’s not exactly something you can hop out of and come up fighting.
The accelerating was over at 2038. A green light went on and I chinned the button to depressurize.
Marygay and I were getting dressed outside.
“How’d that happen?” I pointed to an angry purple welt that ran from the bottom of her right breast to her hipbone.
“That’s the second time,” she said, mad. “The first one was on my back-I think that shell doesn’t fit right, gets creases.”
“Maybe you’ve lost weight.”
“Wise guy.” Our caloric intake had been rigorously monitored ever since we left Stargate the first time. You can’t use a fighting suit unless it fits you like a second skin.
A wall speaker drowned out the rest of her comment. “Attention all personnel. Attention. All army personnel echelon six and above and all navy personnel echelon four and above will report to the briefing room at 2130.”
It repeated the message twice. I went off to lie down for a few minutes while Marygay showed her bruise to the medic and the armorer. I didn’t feel a bit jealous.
The Commodore began the briefing. “There’s not much to tell, and what there is is not good news.
“Six days ago, the Tauran vessel that is pursuing us released a drone missile. Its initial acceleration was on the order of 80 gravities.
“After blasting for approximately a day, its acceleration suddenly jumped to 148 gravities.” Collective gasp.
“Yesterday, it jumped to 203 gravities. I shouldn’t need to remind anyone here that this is twice the accelerative capability of the enemy’s drones in our last encounter.
“We launched a salvo of drones, four of them, intersecting what the computer predicted to be the four most probable future trajectories of the enemy drone. One of them paid off, while we were doing evasive maneuvers. We contacted and destroyed the Tauran weapon about ten million kilometers from here.”
That was practically next door. “The only encouraging thing we learned from the encounter was from spectral analysis of the blast. It was no more powerful an explosion than ones we have observed in the past, so at least their progress in propulsion hasn’t been matched by progress in explosives.
“This is the first manifestation of a very important effect that has heretofore been of interest only to theorists. Tell me, soldier.” He pointed at Negulesco. “How long has it been since we first fought the Taurans, at Aleph?”
“That depends on your frame of reference, Commodore,” she answered dutifully. “To me, it’s been about eight months.”
“Exactly. You’ve lost about nine years, though, to time dilation, while we maneuvered between collapsar jumps. In an engineering sense, as we haven’t done any important research and development aboard ship.. . that enemy vessel comes from our future!” He paused to let that sink in.
“As the war progresses, this can only become more and more pronounced. The Taurans don’t have any cure for relativity, of course, so it will be to our benefit as often as to theirs.
“For the present, though, it is we who are operating with a handicap. As the Tauran pursuit vessel draws closer, this handicap will become more severe. They can simply outshoot us.
“We’re going to have to do some fancy dodging. When we get within five hundred million kilometers of the enemy ship, everybody gets in his shell and we just have to trust the logistic computer. It will put us through a rapid series of random changes in direction and velocity.
“I’ll be blunt. As long as they have one more drone than we, they can finish us off. They haven’t launched any more since that first one. Perhaps they are holding their fire… or maybe they only had one. In that case, it’s we who have them.
“At any rate, all personnel will be required to be in their shells with no more than ten minutes’ notice. When we get within a thousand million kilometers of the enemy, you are to stand by your shells. By the time we are within five hundred million kilometers, you will be in them, and all shell compounds flooded and pressurized. We cannot wait for anyone.
“That’s all I have to say. Sub-major?”
“I’ll speak to my people later, Commodore. Thank you.”
“Dismissed.” And none of this “fuck you, sir” nonsense. The navy thought that was just a little beneath their dignity. We stood at attention-all except Stott-until he had left the room. Then some other swabbie said “dismissed” again, and we left.
My squad had clean-up detail, so I told everybody who was to do what, put Tate in charge, and left. Went up to the NCO room for some company and maybe some information.
There wasn’t much happening but idle speculation, so I took Rogers and went off to bed. Marygay had disappeared again, hopefully trying to wheedle something out of Singhe.
3
We had our promised get-together with the sub-major the next morning, when he more or less repeated what the commodore had said, in infantry terms and in his staccato monotone. He emphasized the fact that all we knew about the Tauran ground forces was that if their naval capability was improved, it was likely they would be able to handle us better than last time.
But that brings up an interesting point. Eight months or nine years before, we’d had a tremendous advantage: they had seemed not quite to understand what was going on. As belligerent as they had been in space, we’d expected them to be real Huns on the ground. Instead, they practically lined themselves up for slaughter. One escaped and presumably described the idea of old-fashioned in-fighting to his fellows.
But that, of course, didn’t mean that the word had necessarily gotten to this particular bunch, the Taurans guarding Yod-4. The only way we know of to communicate faster than the speed of light is to physically carry a message through successive collapsar jumps. And there was no way of telling how many jumps there were between Yod4 and the Tauran home base-so these might be just as passive as the last bunch, or might have been practicing infantry tactics for most of a decade. We would find out when we got there.
The armorer and I were helping my squad pull maintenance on their fighting suits when we passed the thousand million kilometer mark and had to go up to the shells.
We had about five hours to kill before we had to get into our cocoons. I played a game of chess with Rabi and lost. Then Rogers led the platoon in some vigorous calisthenics, probably for no other reason than to get their minds off the prospect of having to lie half-crushed in the shells for at least four hours. The longest we’d gone before was half that.
Ten minutes before the five hundred million kilometer mark, we squad leaders took over and supervised buttoning everybody up. In eight minutes we were zipped and flooded and at the mercy of-or safe in the arms of-the logistic computer.
While I was lying there being squeezed, a silly thought took hold of my brain and went round and round like a charge in a superconductor: according to military formalism, the conduct of war divides neatly into two categories, tactics and logistics. Logistics has to do with moving troops and feeding them and just about everything except the actual fighting, which is tactics. And now we’re fighting, but we don’t have a tactical computer to guide us through attack and defense, just a huge, super-efficient pacifistic cybernetic grocery clerk of a logistic, mark that word, logistic computer.
The other side of my brain, perhaps not quite as pinched, would argue that it doesn’t matter what name you give to a computer, it’s a pile of memory crystals, logic banks, nuts and bolts. . . If you program it to be Ghengis Khan, it is a tactical computer, even if its usual function is to monitor the stock market or control sewage conversion.
But the other voice was obdurate and said by that kind of reasoning, a man is only a hank of hair and a piece of bone and some stringy meat; and no matter what kind of a man he is, if you teach him well, you can take a Zen monk and turn him into a slavermg bloodthirsty warrior.
Then what the hell are you, we, am I, answered the other side. A peace-loving, vacuum-welding specialist cum physics teacher snatched up by the Elite Conscription Act and reprogrammed to be a killing machine. You, I have killed and liked it.
But that was hypnotism, motivational conditioning, I argued back at myself. They don’t do that anymore.
And the only reason, I said, they don’t do it is that they think you’ll kill better without it. That’s logic.
Speaking of logic, the original question was, why do they THE FOREVER WAR 89
send a logistic computer to do a man’s job? Or something like that. . . and we were off again.
The light blinked green and I chinned the switch automatically. The pressure was down to 1.3 before I realized that it meant we were alive, we had won the first skirmish.
I was only partly right.
I was belting on my tunic when my ring tingled and I held it up to listen. It was Rogers.
“Mandella, go check squad bay 3. Something went wrong; Dalton had to depressurize it from Control.”
Bay 3-that was Marygay’s squad! I rushed down the corridor in bare feet and got there just as they opened the door from inside the pressure chamber and began straggling out.
The first out was Bergman. I grabbed his ann. “What the hell is going on, Bergman?”
“Huh?” He peered at me, still dazed, as everyone is when they come out of the chamber. “Oh, s’you. Mandella. I dunno. Whad’ya mean?”
I squinted in through the door, still holding on to him. “You were late, man, you depressurized late. What happened?”
He shook his head, trying to clear it. “Late? Whad’ late. Uh, how late?”
1 looked at my watch for the first time. “Not too-” Jesus Christ. “Uh, we zipped in at 0520, didn’t we?”
“Yeah, I think that’s it.”
Still no Marygay among the dim figures picking their way through the ranked couches and jumbled tubing. “Urn, you were only a couple of minutes late. . . but we were only supposed to be under for four hours, maybe less. It’s
1050.”
“Um.” He shook his head again. I let go of him and stood back to let Stiller and Demy through the door.
“Everybody’s late, then,” Bergman said. “So we aren’t in any trouble.” “Uh-” Non sequiturs. “Right, right-Hey, Stiller!
You seen-”
From inside: “Medic! MEDIC!”
Somebody who wasn’t Marygay was coining out. I pushed her roughly out of my way and dove through the door, landed on somebody else and clambered over to where Struve, Marygay’s assistant, was standing over a pod and talking very loud and fast into his ring.
“-and blood God yes we need-”
It was Marygay still lying in her suit she was “-got the word from Dalton-”
covered every square inch of her with a uniform bright sheen of blood “-when she didn’t come out-”
it started as an angry welt up by her collarbone and was just a welt as it traveled between her breasts until it passed the sternum’s support
“-I came over and popped the-”
and opened up into a cut that got deeper as it ran down over her belly and where it stopped
“-yeah, she’s still-”
a few centimeters above the pubis a membraned loop of gut was protruding… “-OK, left hip. Mandella-”
She was still alive, her heart palpitating, but her blood-streaked head lolled limply, eyes rolled back to white slits, bubbles of red froth appearing and popping at the corner of her mouth each time she exhaled shallowly.
“-tattooed on her left hip. Mandella! Snap out of it! Reach under her and find out what her blood-”
“TYPE 0 RH NEGATIVE GOD damn. . . it. Sony- Oh negative.” Hadn’t I seen that tattoo ten thousand times?
Struve passed this information on and I suddenly remembered the first-aid kit on my belt, snapped it off and fumbled through it.
Stop the bleeding-protect the wound-treat for shock, that’s what the book said. Forgot one, forgot one. . . clear air passages.
She was breathing, if that’s what they meant. How do you stop the bleeding or protect the wound with one measly pressure bandage when the wound is nearly a meter long? Treat for shock, that I could do. I fished out the green ampoule, laid it against her arm and pushed the button.
Then I laid the sterile side of the bandage gently on top of the exposed intestine and passed the elastic strip under the small of her back, adjusted it for nearly zero tension and fastened it.
“Anything else you can do?” Struve asked.
I stood back and felt helpless. “I don’t know. Can you think of anything?”
“I’m no more of a medic than you are.” Looking up at the door, he kneaded a fist, biceps straining. “Where the hell are they? You have morph-plex in that kit?”
“Yeah, but somebody told me not to use it for internal-” “William?”
Her eyes were open and she was trying to lift her head. I rushed over and held her. “It’ll be all right, Marygay. The medic’s coming.”
“What. . . all right? I’m thirsty. Water.”
“No, honey, you can’t have any water. Not for a while, anyhow.” Not if she was headed for surgery.
“Why is all the blood?” she said in a small voice. Her head rolled back. “Been a bad girl.”
“It must have been the suit,” I said rapidly. “Remember earlier, the creases?”
She shook her head. “Suit?” She turned suddenly paler and retched weakly. “Water. . . William, please.”
Authoritative voice behind me: “Get a sponge or a cloth soaked in water.” I looked around and saw Doe Wilson with two stretcher bearers.
“First half-liter femoral,” he said to no one in particular as he carefully peeked under the pressure bandage. “Follow that relief tube down a couple of meters and pinch it off. Find out if she’s passed any blood.”
One of the medics ran a ten-centimeter needle into Mary-gay’s thigh and started giving her whole blood from a plastic bag.
“Sorry I’m late,” Doe Wilson said tiredly. “Business is booming. What’d you say about the suit?”
“She had two minor injuries before. Suit doesn’t fit quite right, creases up under pressure.”
He nodded absently, checking her blood pressure. “You, anybody, give-” Somebody handed him a paper towel
dripping water. “Uh, give her any medication?” “One ampoule of No-shock.”
He wadded the paper towel up loosely and put it in Marygay’s hand. “What’s her name?” I told him.
“Marygay, we can’t give you a drink of water but you can suck on this. Now I’m going to shine a bright light in your eye.” While he was looking through her pupil with a metal tube, he said, “Temperature?” and one of the medics read a number from a digital readout box and withdrew a probe. “Passed blood?”
“Yes. Some.”
He put his hand lightly on the pressure bandage. “Mary-gay, can you roll over a little on your right side?”
“Yes,” she said slowly, and put her elbow down for leverage. “No,” she said and started crying.
“Now, now,” he said absently and pushed up on her hip just enough to be able to see her back. “Only the one wound,” he muttered. “Hell of a lot of blood.”
He pressed the side of his ring twice and shook it by his ear. “Anybody up in the shop?”
“Harrison, unless he’s on a call.”
A woman walked up, and at first I didn’t recognize her, pale and disheveled, bloodstained tunic. It was Estelle Harmony.
Doe Wilson looked up. “Any new customers, Doctor Harmony?”
“No,” she said dully. “The maintenance man was a double traumatic amputation. Only lived a few minutes. We’re keeping him running for transplants.”
“All those others?”
“Explosive decompression.” She sniffed. “Anything I can do here?”
“Yeah., just a minute.” He tried his ring again. “God damn it. You don’t know where Harrison is?”
“No.. . well, maybe, he might be in Surgery B if there was trouble with the cadaver maintenance. Think I set it up all right, though.”
“Yeah, well, hell you know how..
“Mark!” said the medic with the blood bag.
“One more hilf-liter femoral,” Doe Wilson said. “Estelle, you mind taking over for one of the medics here, prepare this gal for surgery?”
“No, keep me busy.”
“Good-Hopkins, go up to the shop and bring down a roller and a liter, uh, two liters isotonic fluorocarb with the primary spectrum. If they’re Merck they’ll say ‘abdominal spectrum.'” He found a part of his sleeve with no blood on it and wiped his forehead. “If you find Harrison, send him over to surgery A and have him set up the anesthetic sequence for abdominal.”
“And bring her up to A?”
“Right. If you can’t find Harrison, get somebody-” he stabbed a finger in my direction, “-this guy, to roll the patient up to A; you run ahead and start the sequence.”
He picked up his bag and looked through it. “We could start the sequence here,” he muttered. “But hell, not with paramethadone-Marygay? How do you feel?”
She was still crying. “I’m. . . hurt.”
“I know,” he said gently. He thought for a second and said to Estelle, “No way to tell really how much blood she lost. She may have been passing it under pressure.
Also there’s some pooling in the abdominal cavity. Since she’s still alive I don’t think she could’ve bled under pressure for very long. Hope no brain damage yet.”
He touched the digital readout attached to Marygay’s arm. “Monitor the blood pressure, and if you think it’s indicated, give her five cc’s vasoconstrictor. I’ve gotta go scrub down.”
He closed his bag. “You have any vasoconstrictor besides the pneumatic ampoule?”
Estelle checked her own bag. “No, just the emergency pneumatic.. . uh. . . yes, I’ve got controlled dosage on the ‘dilator, though.”
“OK, if you have to use the ‘constrictor and her pressure goes up too fast-” “I’ll give her vasodilator two cc’s at a time.”
“Check. Hell of a way to run things, but. . . well. If you’re not too tired, I’d like you to stand by me upstairs.”
“Sure.” Doe Wilson nodded and left.
Estelle began sponging Marygay’s belly with isopropyl alcohol. It smelled cold and clean. “Somebody gave her No-shock?” “Yes,” I said, “about ten minutes ago.”
“Ah. That’s why the Doe was worried-no, you did the right thing. But No-shock’s got some vasoconstrictor. Five cc’s more might run up an overdose.” She continued silently scrubbing, her eyes coming up every few seconds to check the blood pressure monitor.
“William?” It was the first time she’d shown any sign of knowing me. “This worn-, uh, Marygay, she’s your lover? Your regular lover?”
“That’s right.”
“She’s very pretty.” A remarkable observation, her body torn and caked with crusting blood, her face smeared where I had tried to wipe away the tears. I suppose a doctor or a woman or a lover can look beneath that and see beauty.
“Yes, she is.” She had stopped crying and had her eyes squeezed shut, sucking the last bit of moisture from the paper wad.
“Can she have some more water?” “OK, same as before. Not too much.”
I went out to the locker alcove and into the head for a paper towel. Now that the fumes from the pressurizing fluid had cleared, I could smell the air. It smelled wrong. Light machine oil and burnt metal, like the smell of a metalworking shop. I wondered whether they had overloaded the airco. That had happened once before, after the first time we’d used the acceleration chambers.
Marygay took the water without opening her eyes.
“Do you plan to stay together when you get back to Earth?” “Probably,” I said. “If we get back to Earth. Still one more battle.”
“There won’t be any more battles,” she said flatly. “You mean you haven’t heard?” “What?”
“Don’t you know the ship was hit?” “Hit!” Then how could any of us be alive?
“That’s right.” She went back to her scrubbing. “Four squad bays. Also the armor bay. There isn’t a fighting suit left on the ship.. . and we can’t fight in our underwear.”
“What-squad bays, what happened to the people?” “No survivors.”
Thirty people. “Who was it?”
“All of the third platoon. First squad of the second platoon.” Al-Sadat, Busia, Maxwell, Negulesco. “My God.”
“Thirty deaders, and they don’t have the slightest notion of what caused it. Don’t know but that it may happen again any minute.”
“It wasn’t a drone?”
“No, we got all of their drones. Got the enemy vessel, too. Nothing showed up on any of the sensors, just blam! and a third of We ship was torn to hell. We were lucky it wasn’t the drive or the life support system.” I was hardly hearing her. Penworth, LaBatt, Smithers. Christine and Frida. All dead. I was numb.
She took a blade-type razor and a tube of gel out of her bag. “Be a gentleman and look the other way,” she said. “Oh, here.” She soaked a square of gauze in alcohol and handed it to me. “Be useful. Do her face.”
I started and, without opening her eyes, Maiygay said, “That feels good. What are you doing?”
“Being a gentleman. And useful, too-”
“All personnel, attention, all personnel.” There wasn’t a squawk-box in the pressure chamber, but I could hear it clearly through the door to the locker alcove. “All personnel echelon 6 and above, unless directly involved in medical or maintenance emergencies, report immediately to the assembly area.”
“I’ve got to go, Marygay.”
She didn’t say anything. I didn’t know whether she bad heard the announcement. “Estelle,” I addressed her directly, gentleman be damned. “Will you-”
“Yes. I’ll let you know as soon as we can tell.” ”Well.”
“It’s going to be all right.” But her expression was grim THE FOREVER WAR 97
and worried. “Now get going,” she said, softly.
By the time I picked my way out into the corridor, the ‘box was repeating the message for the fourth time. There was a new smell in the air, that I didn’t want to identify.
5
Halfway to the assembly area I realized what a mess I was, and ducked into the head by the NCO lounge. Corporal Kamehameha was hurnedly brushing her hair.
“William! What happened to you?”
“Nothing.” I turned on a tap and looked at myself in the mirror. Dried blood smeared all over my face and tunic. “It was Marygay, Corporal Potter, her suit.. . well, evidently it got a crease, ub.. .”
“Dead?”
“No, just badly, uh, she’s going into surgery-” “Don’t use hot water. You’ll just set the stain.”
“Oh. Right.” I used the hot to wash my face and hand, dabbed at the tunic with cold. “Your squad’s just two bays down from Al’s isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see what happened?”
“No. Yes. Not when it happened.” For the first time I noticed that she was crying, big tears rolling down her cheeks and off her chin. Her voice was even, controlled. She pulled at her hair savagely. “It’s a mess.”
I stepped over and put my hand on her shoulder. “DON’T touch me!” she flared and knocked my hand off with the brush. “Sorry. Let’s go.”
At the door to the head she touched me lightly on the arm. “William. . .” She looked at me defiantly. “I’m just glad it wasn’t me. You understand? That’s the only way you can look at it.”
I understood, but I didn’t know that I believed her.
“I can sum it up very briefly,” the commodore said in a tight voice, “if only because we know so little.
“Some ten seconds after we destroyed the enemy vessel, two objects, very small objects, struck the Anniversary amidships. By inference, since they were not detected and we know the limits of our detection apparatus, we know that they were moving in excess of nine-tenths of the speed of light. That is to say, more precisely, their velocity vector normal to the axis of the Anniversary was greater than nine-tenths of the speed of light. They slipped in behind the repeller fields.”
When the Anniversary is moving at relativistic speeds, it is designed to generate two powerful electromagnetic fields, one centered about five thousand kilometers from the ship and the other about ten thousand klicks away, both in line with the direction of motion of the ship. These fields are maintained by a “ramjet” effect, energy picked up from interstellar gas as we mosey along.
Anything big enough to worry about hitting (that is, anything big enough to see with a strong magnifying glass) goes through the first field and comes out with a very strong negative charge all over its surface. As it enters the second field, it’s repelled away from the path of the ship. If the object is too big to be pushed around this way, we can sense it at a greater distance and maneuver out of its way.
“I shouldn’t have to emphasize ~ow formidable a weapon this is. When the Anniversary was struck, our rate of speed with respect to the enemy was such that we traveled our own length every ten-thousandth of a second. Further, we were jerking around erratically with a constantly changing and purely random lateral acceleration. Thus the objects that struck us must have been guided, not aimed.
And the guidance system was self-contained, since there were no Taurans alive at the time they struck us. All of this in a package no larger than a small pebble.
“Most of you are too young to remember the term future shock. Back in the seventies, some people felt that technological progress was so rapid that people, normal people, couldn’t cope with it; that they wouldn’t have time to get used to the present before the future was upon them. A man named Toffier coined the term future shock to describe this situation.” The commodore could get pretty academic.
“We’re caught up in a physical situation that resembles this scholarly concept. The result has been disaster. Tragedy. And, as we discussed in our last meeting, there is no way to counter it. Relativity traps us in the enemy’s past; relativity brings them from our future. We can only hope that next time, the situation will be reversed. And all we can do to help
bring that about is try to get back to Stargate, and then to Earth, where specialists may be able to deduce something, some sort of counterweapon, from the nature of the damage.
“Now we could attack the Tauran’s portal planet from space and perhaps destroy the base without using you infantry.Butlthinktherewouldbeaverygreatriskinvolved. We might be. . . shot down by whatever hit us today, and never return to Stargate with what I consider to be vital information. We could send a drone with a message detailing our assumptions about this new enemy weapon but that might be inadequate. And the Force would be that much further behind., technologically.
“Accordingly, we have set a course that will take us around Yod-4, keeping the collapsar as much as possible between us and the Tauran base. We will avoid contact with the enemy and return to Stargate as quickly as possible.”
Incredibly, the commodore sat down and kneaded his temples. “All of you are at least squad or section leaders. Most of you have good combat records. And I hope that some of you will be rejoining the Force after your two years are up. Those of you who do will probably be made lieutenants, and face your first real command.
“It is to these people I would like to speak for a few moments, not as your. . . as one of your commanders, but just as a senior officer and advisor.
“One cannot make command decisions simply by assessing the tactical situation and going ahead with whatever course of action will do the most harm to the enemy with a minimum of death and damage to your own men and materiel. Modern warfare has become very complex, especially during the last century. Wars are won not by a simple series of battles won, but by a complex interrelationship among military victory, economic pressures, logistic maneuvering, access to the enemy’s information, political postures-dozens, literally dozens of factors.”
I was hearing this, but the only thing that was getting through to my brain was that a third of our Mends’ lives had been snuffed out less than an hour before, and he was sitting up there giving us a lecture on military theory.
“So sometimes you have to throw away a battle in order to help win the war. This is exactly what we are going to do.
“This was not an easy decision. In fact, it was probably the hardest decision of my military career. Because, on the surface at least, it may. look like cowardice.
“The logistic computer calculates that we have about a 62 percent chance of success, should we attempt to destroy the enemy base. Unfortunately, we would have only a 30 percent chance of survival-as some of the scenarios leading to success involve ramming the portal planet with the Anniversary at light speed.” Jesus Christ.
“I hope none of you ever has to face such a decision.
When we get back to Stargate, I will in all probability be court-martialed for cowardice under fire. But I honestly believe that the information that may be gained from analysis of the damage to the Anniversary is more important than the destruction of this one Tauran base.” He sat up straight.
“More important than one soldier’s career.”
I had to stifle an impulse to laugh. Surely “cowardice”
had nothing to do with his decision. Surely he had nothing so primitive and unnulitary as a will to live.
The maintenance crew managed to patch up the huge rip in the side of the Anniversary and to repressurize that section. We spent the rest of the day cleaning up the area; without, of course, disturbing any of the precious evidence for which the commodore was wiffing to sacrifice his Career.
The hardest part was jettisoning the bodies. It wasn’t so bad except for the ones whose suits had burst.
I went to Estelle’s cabin the next day, as soon as she was off duty.
“It wouldn’t serve any good purpose for you to see her now.” Estelle sipped her drink, a mixture of ethyl alcohol, citric acid and water, with a drop of some ester that approximated the aroma of orange rind.
“Is she out of danger?”
“Not for a couple of weeks. Let me explain.” She set down her drink and rested her chin on interlaced fingers. “This sort of injury would be fairly routine under normal circumstances. Having replaced the lost blood, we’d simply sprinkle some magic powder into her abdominal cavity and paste her back up. Have her hobbling around in a couple of days.
“But there are complications. Nobody’s ever been injured in a pressure suit before. So far, nothing really unusual has cropped up. But we want to monitor her innards very closely for the next few days.
“Also, we were very concerned about peritonitis. You know what peritonitis is?” “Yes.” Well, vaguely.
“Because a part of her intestine had ruptured under pressure. We didn’t want to settle for normal prophylaxis be-cause a lot of the, uh, contamination had impacted on the peritoneum under pressure. To play it safe, we completely sterilized the whole shebang, the abdominal cavity and her entire digestive system from the duodenum south. Then, of course, we had to replace all of her normal intestinal flora, now dead, with a commercially prepared culture. Still standard procedure, but not normally called for unless the damage is more severe.”
“I see.” And it was making me a little queasy. Doctors don’t seem to realize that most of us are perfectly content not having to visualize ourselves as animated bags of skin filled with obscene glop.
“This in itself is enough reason not to see her for a couple of days. The changeover of intestinal flora has a pretty violent effect on the digestive system-not dangerous, since she’s under constant observation. But tiring and, well, embarrassing.
“With all of this, she would be completely out of danger if this were a normal clinical situation. But we’re decelerating at a constant l-1/2 gees, and her internal organs have gone through a lot of jumbling around. You might as well
THE FOREVER WAR 103
know that if we do any blasting, anything over about two gees, she’s going to die.” “But. . . but we’re bound to go over two on the final approach! What-”
“I know, I know. But that won’t be for a couple of weeks. Hopefully, she will have mended by then.
“William, face it. It’s a miracle she survived to get into surgery. So there’s a big chance she won’t make it back to Earth. It’s sad; she’s a special person, the special
person to you, maybe. But we’ve had so much death.. . you ought to be getting used to it, come to terms with it.”
I took a long pull at my drink, identical to hers except for the citric acid. “You’re getting pretty hard-boiled.”
“Maybe. . . no. Just realistic. I have a feeling we’re headed for a lot more death and sorrow.”
“Not me. As soon as we get to Stargate, I’m a civilian.”
“Don’t be so sure.” The old familiar argument. “Those clowns who signed us up for two years can just as easily make it four or-”
“Or six or twenty or the duration. But they won’t. It would be mutiny.”
“I don’t know. If they could condition us to kill on cue, they can condition us to do almost anything. Re-enlist.”
That was a chiller.
Later on we tried to make love, but both of us had too much to think about.
I got to see Marygay for the first time about a week later. She was wan, had lost a lot of weight and seemed very confused. Doc Wilson assured me that it was just the medication; they hadn’t seen any evidence of brain damage.
She was still in bed, still being fed through a tube. I began to get very nervous about the calendar. Every day there seemed to be some improvement, but if she was still in bed when we hit that collapsar push, she wouldn’t have a chance. I couldn’t get any encouragement from Doc Wilson or Estelle; they said it depended on Marygay’s resilience.
The day before the push, they transferred her from bed to Estelle’s acceleration couch in the infirmary. She was lucid and was taking food orally, but she still couldn’t move under her own power, not at I-1/2 gees.
I went to see her. “Heard about the course change? We have to go through Aleph- 9 to get back to Tet-38. Four more months on this damn hulk. But another six years’ combat pay when we get back to Earth.”
“That’s good.”
“Ah, just think of the great things we’ll-” “William.”
I let it trail off. Never could lie.
“Don’t try to jolly me. Tell me about vacuum welding, about your childhood, anything. Just don’t bulishit me about getting back to Earth.” She turned her face to the wall.
“I heard the doctors talking out in the corridor, one morning when they thought I was asleep. But it just confirmed what I already knew, the way everybody’d been moping around.
“So tell me, you were born in New Mexico in 1975. What then? Did you stay in New Mexico? Were you bright in school? Have any friends, or were you too bright like me? How old were you when you first got sacked?”
We talked in this vein for a while, uncomfortable. An idea came to me while we were rambling, and when I left Marygay I went straight to Dr. Wilson.
“We’re giving her a fifty-fifty chance, but that’s pretty arbitrary. None of the published data on this sort of thing really fits.”
“But it is safe to say that her chances of survival are better, the less acceleration she has to endure.”
“Certainly. For what it’s worth. The commodore’s going to take it as gently as possible, but that’ll still be four or five gees. Three might even be too much; we won’t know until it’s over.”
I nodded impatiently. “Yes, but I think there’s a way to expose her to less acceleration than the rest of us.”
“If you’ve developed an acceleration shield,” he said smiling, “you better hurry and file a patent. You could sell it for a considerable-”
“No, Doc, it wouldn’t be worth much under normal conditions; our shells work better and they evolved from the same principles.”
“Explain away.”
“We put Marygay into a shell and flood-”
“Wait, wait. Absolutely not. A poorly-fitting shell was what caused this in the first place. And this time, she’d have to use somebody else’s.”
“I know, Doc, let me explain. It doesn’t have to fit her exactly as long as the life support hookups can function.
The shell won’t be pressurized on the inside; it won’t have to be because she won’t be subjected to those thousands of kilograms-per-square-centimeter pressure from the fluid outside.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“It’s just an adaptation of-you’ve studied physics, haven’t you?” “A little bit, in medical school. My worst courses, after Latin.” “Do you remember the principle of equivalence?”
“I remember there was something by that name. Something to do with relativity, right?”
“Uh-huh. It means that.. . there’s no difference being in a gravitational field and being in an equivalent accelerated frame of-it means that when the Anniversary is blasting five gees, the effect on us is the same as if it were sitting on its tail on a big planet, on one with five gees’ surface gravity.”
“Seems obvious.”
“Maybe it is. It means that there’s no experiment you could perform on the ship that could tell you whether you were blasting or just sitting on a big planet.”
“Sure there is. You could turn off the engines, and if-”
“Or you could look outside, sure; I mean isolated, physics-lab type experiments.” “All right. I’ll accept that. So?”
“You know Archimedes’ Law?”
“Sure, the fake crown-that’s what always got me about physics, they make a big to-do about obvious things, and when it gets to the rough parts-”
“Archimedes’ Law says that when you immerse something in a fluid, it’s buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid it displaces.”
“That’s reasonable.”
“And that holds, no matter what kind of gravitation or acceleration you’re in-In a ship blasting at five gees, the water displaced, if it’s water, weighs five times as much as regular water, at one gee.”
“Sure.”
“So if you float somebody in the middle of a tank of water, so that she’s weightless, she’ll still be weightless when the ship is doing five gees.”
“Hold on, son. You had me going there, but it won’t work.”
“Why not?” I was tempted to tell him to stick to his pills and stethoscopes and let me handle the physics, but it was a good thing I didn’t.
“What happens when you drop a wrench in a submarine?” “Submarine?”
“That’s right. They work by Archimedes’-”
“Ouch! You’re right. Jesus. Hadn’t thought it through.”
“That wrench fails right to the floor just as if the submarine weren’t weightless.” He looked off into space, tapping a pencil on the desk. “What you describe is similar to the way we treat patients with severe skin damage, like burns, on Earth. But it doesn’t give any support to the internal organs, the way the acceleration shells do, so it wouldn’t do Marygay any good.. . .”
I stood up to go. “Sorry I wasted-”
“Hold on there, though, just a minute. We might be able to use your idea part- way.”
“How do you mean?”
“I wasn’t thinking it through, either. The way we normally use the shells is out of the question for Marygay, of course.” I didn’t like to think about it. Takes a lot of hypno-conditioning to lie there and have oxygenated fluorocarbon forced into every natural body orifice and one artificial one. I fingered the valve fitting imbedded above my hipbone.
“That’s right. We wouldn’t need thousands of atmospheres to protect her against five gees’ straight-line acceleration; that’s only for all the swerving and dodging-I’m going to call Maintenance. Get down to your squad bay; that’s the one we’ll use. Dalton’ll meet you there.”
Five minutes before injection into the collapsar field, and I started the flooding sequence. Marygay and I were the only ones in shells; my presence wasn’t really vital since the flooding and emptying could be done by Control. But it was safer to have redundancy in the system and besides, I wanted to be there.
It wasn’t nearly as bad as the nonnal routine; none of the crushing-bloating sensation. You were just suddenly filled with the plastic-smelling stuff (you never perceived the first moments, when it rushed in to replace the air in your lungs), and then there was a slight acceleration, and then you were breathing air again, waiting for the shell to pop; then unplugging and unzipping and climbing out- Marygay’s shell was empty. I walked over to it and saw
blood.
“She hemorrhaged.” Doc Wilson’s voice echoed sepulchrally. I turned, eyes stinging, and saw him leaning in the door to the locker alcove. He was unaccountably, horribly, smiling.
“Which was expected. Doctor Harmony’s taking care of it. She’ll be just fine.”
Marygay was walking in another week, “Confratermzing” in two, and pronounced completely healed in six.
Ten long months in space and it was army, army, army all the way. Calisthenics, meaningless work details, compulsory lectures-there was even talk that they were going to reinstate the sleeping roster we’d had in basic, but they never did, probably out of fear of mutiny. A random partner every night wouldn’t have set too well with those of us who’d established more-or-less permanent pairs.
All this crap, this insistence on military discipline, bothered me mainly because I was afraid it meant they weren’t going to let us out. Marygay said I was being paranoid; they only did it because there was no other way to maintain order for ten months.
Most of the talk, besides the usual bitching about the army, was speculation about how much Earth would have changed and what we would do when we got out. We’d be fairly rich: twenty-six years’ salary all at once. Compound interest, too; the $500 we’d been paid for our first month in the army had grown to over $1500.
We arrived at Stargate in late 2023, Greenwich date.
The base had grown astonishingly in the nearly seventeen years we had been on the Yod-4 campaign. It was one building the size of Tycho City, housing nearly ten thousand. There were seventy-eight cruisers, the size of Anniversary or larger, involved in raids on Tauran-held portal planets. Another ten guarded Stargate itself, and two were in orbit waiting for their infantry and crew to be outprocessed. One other ship, the Earth’s Hope II, had returned from fighting and had been waiting at Stargate for another cruiser to return.
They had lost two-thirds of their crew, and it was just not economical to send a cruiser back to Earth with only thirty-nine people aboard. Thirty-nine confirmed civilians.
We went planetside in two scoutships. 7
General Botsford (who had only been a full major the first time we met him, when Stargate was two huts and twenty-four graves) received us in an elegantly appointed seminar room. He was pacing back and forth at the end of the room, in front of a huge holographic operations chart.
“You know,” he said, too loud, and then, more conversationally, “you know that we could disperse you into other strike forces and send you right out again. The Elite Conscription Act has been changed now, five years’ subjective in service instead of two.
“And I don’t see why some of you don’t want to stay in! Another couple of years and compound interest would make you independently wealthy for life. Sure, you took heavy losses-but that was inevitable, you were the first. Things are going to be easier now. The fighting suits have been improved, we know more about the Taurans’ tactics, our weapons are more effective. . . there’s no need to be afraid.”
He sat down at the head of the table and looked at nobody in particular.
“My own memories of combat are over a half-century old. To me it was exhilarating, strengthening. I must be a different kind of person than all of you.”
Or have a very selective memory, I thought.
“But that’s neither here nor there. I have one alternative to offer you, one that doesn’t involve direct combat.
“We’re very short of qualified instructors. The Force will offer any one of you a lieutenancy if you will accept a training position. It can be on Earth; on the Moon at double pay; on Charon at triple pay; or here at Stargate for quadruple pay. Furthermore, you don’t have to make up your mind now. You’re all getting a free trip back to Earth-I envy you, I haven’t been back in fifteen years,
THE FOREVER WAR 111
will probably never go back-and you can get the feel of being a civilian again. If you don’t like it, just walk into any UNEF installation and you’ll walk out an officer. Your choice of assignment.
“Some of you are smiling. I think you ought to reserve judgment. Earth is not the same place you left.”
He pulled a little card out of his tunic and looked at it, smiling. “Most of you have something on the order of four hundred thousand dollars coming to you, accumulated pay and interest. But Earth is on a war footing and, of course, it is the citizens of Earth who are supporting the war. Your income puts you in a ninety-two- percent income-tax bracket: thirty-two thousand might last you about three years if you’re careful.
“Eventually you’re going to have to get a job, and this is one job for which you are uniquely trained. There are not that many jobs available. The population of Earth is nearly nine billion, with five or six billion unemployed.
“Also keep in mind that your friends and sweethearts of two years ago are now going to be twenty-one years older than you. Many of your relatives will have passed away. I think you’ll find it a very lonely world.
“But to tell you something about this world, I’m going to turn you over to Captain Sin, who just arrived from Earth. Captain?”
“Thank you, General.” It looked as if there was something wrong with his skin, his face; and then I realized he was wearing powder and lipstick. His nails were smooth white almonds.
“I don’t know where to begin.” He sucked in his upper lip and looked at us, frowning. “Things have changed so very much since I was a boy.
“I’m twenty-three, so I was still in diapers when you people left for Aleph. . . to begin with, how many of you are homosexual?” Nobody. “That doesn’t really surprise me. I am, of course. I guess about a third of everybody in Europe and America is.
“Most governments encourage homosexuality-the United Nations is neutral, leaves it up to the individual
countries-they encourage homolife mainly because it’s the one sure method of birth control.”
That seemed specious to me. Our method of birth control in the army is pretty foolproof: all men making a deposit
in the sperm bank, and then vasectomy.
“As the General said, the population of the world is nine billion. It’s more than doubled since you were drafted. And nearly two-thirds of those people get out of school only to go on relief.
“Speaking of school, how many years of public schooling did the government give you?”
He was looking at me, so I answered. “Fourteen.”
He nodded. “It’s eighteen now. More, if you don’t pass your examinations. And you’re required by law to pass your exams before you’re eligible for any job or Class One relief. And brother-boy, anything besides Class One is hard to live on. Yes?” Hofstadter had his hand up.
“Sir, is it eighteen years public school in every country? Where do they find enough schools?”
“Oh, most people take the last five or six years at home or in a community center, via holoscreen. The UN has forty or fifty information channels, giving instruction twenty-four hours a day.
“But most of you won’t have to concern yourselves with that. If you’re in the Force, you’re already too smart by half.”
He brushed hair from his eyes in a thoroughly feminine gesture, pouting a little. “Let me do some history to you.
I guess the first really important thing that happened after you left was the Ration War.
“That was 2007. A lot of things happened at once. Locust plague in North America, rice blight from Burma to the South China Sea, red tides all along the west coast of South America: suddenly there just wasn’t enough food to go around. The UN stepped in and took over food distribution. Every man, woman, and child got a ration booklet, allowing thim to consume so many calories per month. If tha went over ther monthly allotment, tha just went hungry until the first of the next month.”
Some of the new people we’d picked up after Aleph used THE FOREVER WAR
113
“tha, ther, thini” instead of “he, his, him,” for the collective pronoun. I wondered whether it had become universal
“Of course, an illegal market developed, and soon there was great inequality in the amount of food people in various strata of society consumed. A vengeance group in Ecuador, the Imparciales, systematically began to assassinate people who appeared to be well-fed. The idea caught on pretty quickly, and in a few months there was a full-scale, undeclared class war going on all over the world. The United Nations managed to get things back under control in a year or so, by which time the population was down to four billion, crops were more or less recovered, and the food crisis was over. They kept the rationing, but it’s never been really severe again.
“Incidentally, the General translated the money coming to you into dollars just for your own convenience. The world has only one currency now, calories. Your thirty- two thousand dollars comes to about three thousand million calories. Or three million K’S, kilocalories.
“Ever since the Ration War, the UN has encouraged subsistence farming wherever it’s practical. Food you grow yourself, of course, isn’t rationed… . It got people out of the cities, onto UN farming reservations, which helped alleviate some urban problems. But subsistence farming seems to encourage large families, so the population of the world has more than doubled since the Ration War.
“Also, we no longer have the abundance of electrical power I remember from boyhood. . . probably a good deal less than you remember. There are only a few places in the world where you can have power all day and night. They keep saying it’s a temporary situation, but it’s been going on for over a decade.”
He went on like that for a long time. Well, bell, it wasn’t really surprising, much of it. We’d probably spent more time in the past two years talking about what home was
going to be like than about anything else. Unfortunately, most of the bad things we’d prognosticated seemed to have come true, and not many of the good things.
The worst thing for me, I guess, was that they’d taken over most of the good parkiand and subdivided it into little
farms. If you wanted to find some wilderness, you had to go someplace where they couldn’t possibly make a plant grow.
He said that the relations between people who chose homolife and the ones he called “breeders” were quite smooth, but I wondered. I never had much trouble accepting homosexuals myself, but then I’d never had to cope with such an abundance of them.
He also said, in answer to an impolite question, that his powder and paint had nothing to do with his sexual orientation. It was just stylish. I decided I’d be an anachronism and just wear my face.
I don’t guess it should have surprised me that language had changed considerably in twenty years. My parents were always saying things were “cool,” joints were “grass,” and so on.
We had to wait several weeks before we could get a ride back to Earth. We’d be going back on the Anniversary, but first she had to be taken apart and put back together again.
Meanwhile, we were put in cozy little two-man billets and released from all military responsibilities. Most of us spent our days down at the library, trying to catch up on twenty-two years of current events. Evenings, we’d get to-.
gether at the Flowing Bowl, an NCO club. The privates, of course, weren’t supposed to be there, but we found that nobody argues with a person who has two of the fluorescent battle ribbons.
I was surprised that they served heroin fixes at the bar. The waiter said that you get a compensating shot to keep you from getting addicted to it. I got really stoned and tried one. Never again.
Sub-major Stott stayed at Stargate, where they were assembling a new Strike Force Alpha. The rest of us boarded the Anniversary and had a fairly pleasant six- month journey. Cortez didn’t insist on everything being capital-M military, so it was a lot better than the trip from Yod-4.
8
I hadn’t given it too much thought, but of course we were celebrities on Earth: the first vets home from the war. The Secretary General greeted us at Kennedy and we had a week-long whirl of banquets, receptions, interviews, and all that. It was enjoyable enough, and profitable-I made a million K’s from Time-Life/Fax-but we really saw little of Earth until after the novelty wore off and we were more or less allowed to go our own way.
I picked up the Washington monorail at Grand Central Station and headed home. My mother had met me at Kennedy, suddenly and sadly old, and told me my father was dead. Flyer accident. I was going to stay with her until I could get a job.
She was living in Columbia, a satellite of Washington. She had moved back into the city after the Ration War- having moved out in 1980-and then failing services and rising crime had forced her out again.
She was waiting for me at the monorail station. Beside her stood a blond giant in a heavy black vinyl unifonn, with a big gunpowder pistol on his hip and spiked brass knuckles on his right hand.
“William, this is Carl, my bodyguard and very dear friend.” Carl slipped off the knuckles long enough to shake hands with surprising gentleness. “Pleasameecha Misser Mandella.”
We got into a groundcar that had “Jefferson” written on it in bright orange letters. I thought that was an odd thing to name a car, but then found out that it was the name of the high-rise Mother and Carl lived in. The groundcar was one of several that belonged to the community, and she paid lOOK per kilometer for the use of it.
I had to admit that Columbia was rather pretty: formal gardens and lots of trees and grass. Even the high-rises,
roughly conical jumbles of granite with trees growing out at odd places, looked more like mountains than buildings.
We drove into the base of one of these mountains, down a well-lit corridor to where a number of other cars were parked. Carl carried my solitary bag to the elevator and set it down.
“Miz Mandella, if is awright witcha, I gots to go pick up Miz Freeman in like five. She over West Branch.”
“Sure, Carl, William can take care of me. He’s a soldier, you know.” That’s right, I remember learning eight silent ways to kill a man. Maybe if things got really tight, I could get a job like Carl’s.
“Righty-oh, yeah, you tol’ me. Whassit like, man?”
“Mostly boring,” I said automatically. “When you aren’t bored, you’re scared.”
He nodded wisely. “Thass what I heard. Miz Mandella, I be ‘vailable anytime after six. Riglny-oh?”
“That’s fine, Carl.”
The elevator came and a tall skinny boy stepped out, an unlit joint dangling from his lips. Carl ran his fingers over the spikes on his knuckles, and the boy walked rapidly away.
“Gots ta watch out fer them riders. T’care a yerseif, Miz Mandella.” We got on the elevator and Mother punched 47. “What’s a rider?”
“Oh, they’re just young toughs who ride up and down the elevators looking for defenseless people without bodyguards. They aren’t too much of a problem here.”
The forty-seventh floor was a huge mall filled with shops and offices. We went to a food store.
“Have you gotten your ration book yet, William?” I told her I hadn’t, but the Force had given me travel tickets worth a hundred thousand “calories” and I’d used up only half of them.
It was a little confusing, but they’d explained it to us.
When the world went on a single currency, they’d tried to coordinate it with the food rationing in some way, hoping to eventually eliminate the ration hooks, so they’d made the new currency K’S, kilocalories, because that’s the unit
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for measuring the energy equivalent of food. But a person who eats 2,000 kilocalones of steak a day obviously has to pay more than a person eating the same amount of bread.
So they instituted a sliding “ration factor,” so complicated that nobody could understand it. After a few weeks they were using the books again, but calling food kilocalories “calories” in an attempt to make things less confusing.
Seemed to me they’d save a lot of trouble all around if they’d just call money dollars again, or rubles or sisterces or whatever. . . anything but kilocalories.
Food prices were astonishing, except for grains and legumes. I insisted on splurging on some good red meat: 1500 calories worth of ground beef, costing 1730K. The same amount of fakesteak, made from soy beans, would have cost 80K.
I also got a head of lettuce for 140K and a little bottle of olive oil for 175ic Mother said she had some vinegar.
Started to buy some mushrooms but she said she had a neighbor who grew them and could trade something from her balcony garden.
At her apartment on the ninety-second floor, she apologized for the smallness of the place. It didn’t seem so little to me, but then she’d never lived on a spaceship.
Even this high up, there were bars on the windows. The door had four separate locks, one of which didn’t work because somebody had used a crowbar on it.
Mother went off to turn the ground beef into a meatloaf and I settled down with the evening ‘fax. She pulled some carrots from her little garden and called the mushroom lady, whose son came over to make the trade. He had a riot gun slung under his ann.
“Mother, where’s the rest of the Star?” I called into the kitchen. “As far as I know, it’s all there. What were you looking for?” “Well .. . I found the classified section, but no ‘Help Wanted.'”
She laughed. “Son, there hasn’t been a ‘Help Wanted’ ad in ten years. The government takes care of jobs . . . well, most of them.”
“Everybody works for the government?”
“No, that’s not it.” She came in, wiping her hands on a frayed towel. “The government, they tell us, handles the distribution of all natural resources. And there aren’t many resources more valuable than empty jobs.”
“Well, I’ll go talk to them tomorrow.”
“Don’t bother, son. How much retirement pay you say you’re getting from the Force?”
“Twenty thousand K a month. Doesn’t look like it’ll go far.”
“No, it won’t. But your father’s pension gave me less than half that, and they wouldn’t give me a job. Jobs are assigned on a basis of need. And you’ve got to be living on rice and water before the Employment Board considers you needy.”
“Well, hell, it’s a bureaucracy-there must be somebody I can pay off, slip me into a good-”
“No. Sorry, that’s one part of the UN that’s absolutely incorruptible. The whole shebang is cybernetic, untouched by human souls. You can’t-”
“But you said you had a job!”
“I was getting to that. If you want a job badly enough, you can go to a dealer and sometimes get a hand-me-down.”
“Hand-me-down? Dealer?”
“Take my job as an example, son. A woman named Halley Williams has a job in a hospital, running a machine that analyzes blood, a chromatography machine. She works six nights a week, for 12,000K a week. She gets tired of working, so she contacts a dealer and lets him know that her job is available.
“Some time before this, I’d given the dealer his initial fee of 50,000K to get on his list. He comes by and describes the job to me and I say fine, I’ll take it. He knew I
would and already has fake identification and a uniform. He distributes small bribes to the various supervisors who might know Miss Williams by sight.
“Miss Williams shows me how to run the machine and quits. She still gets the weekly 12,000K credited to her account, but she pays me half. I pay the dealer ten percent and wind up with 5400K per week. This, added to the nine grand I get monthly from your father’s pension, makes me quite comfortable.
“Then it gets complicated. Finding myself with plenty of money and too little time, I contact the dealer again, offering to sublet half my job. The next day a girl shows up who also has ‘Halley Williams’ identification. I show her how to run the machine, and she takes over Monday-Wednesday-Friday. Half of my real salary is 2700K, so she gets half that, 1350K, and pays the dealer 135.”
She got a pad an4 a stylus and did some figuring. “So the real Hailey Williams gets 6000K weekly for doing nothing. I work three days a week for 4050K. My assistant works three days for 1115K. The dealer gets 100,000K in fees and 735K per week. Lopsided, isn’t it?”
“Hmm. . . I’ll say. Quite illegal, too, I suppose.”
“For the dealer. Everybody else might lose their job and have to start over, if the Employment Board finds out. But the dealer gets brainwiped.”
“Guess I better find a dealer, while I can still afford the fifty-grand bite.” Actually, I still had over three million, but planned to run through most of it in a short time. Hell, I’d earned it.
I was getting ready to go the next morning when Mother came in with a shoebox. Inside, there was a small pistol in a clip-on holster.
“This belonged to your father,” she explained. “Better wear it if you’re planning to go downtown without a bodyguard.”
It was a gunpowder pistol with ridiculously thin bullets. I hefted it in my hand. “Did Dad ever use it?”
“Several times. . . just to scare away riders and hitters, though. He never actually shot anybody.”
“You’re probably right that I need a gun,” I said, putting it back. “But I’d have to have something with more heft to it. Can I buy one legally?”
“Sure, there’s a gun store down in the Mall. As long as you don’t have a police record, you can buy anything that suits you.” Good, I’d get a little pocket laser. I could hardly hit the wall with a gunpowder pistol.
“But.. . William, I’d feel a lot better if you’d hire a bodyguard, at least until you know your way around.” We’d gone all around that last night. Being an official Trained Killer, I thought I was tougher than any clown I might hire for the job.
“I’ll check into it, Mother. Don’t worry-I’m not even going downtown today, just into Hyattsville.”
“That’s just as bad.”
When the elevator came, it was already occupied. He looked at me blandly as I got in, a man a little older than me, clean-shaven and well dressed. He stepped back to let me at the row of buttons. I punched 47 and then, realizing his motive might not
have been politeness, turned to see him struggling to get at a metal pipe stuck in his waistband. It had been hidden by his cape.
“Come on, fella,” I said, reaching for a nonexistent weapon. “You wanna get caulked?”
He had the pipe free but let it hang loosely at his side. “Caulked?”
“Killed. Anny term.” I took one step toward him, trying to remember. Kick just under the knee, then either groin or kidney. I decided on the groin.
“No.” He put the pipe back in his waistband. “I don’t want to get ‘caulked.'” The door opened at 47 and I backed out.
The gun shop was all bright white plastic and gleamy black metal. A little bald man bobbed over to wait on me. He had a pistol in a shoulder rig.
“And a fine morning to you, sir,” he said and giggled. “What will it be today?” “Lightweight pocket laser,” I said. “Carbon dioxide.”
He looked at me quizzically and then brightened. “Coming right up, sir.” Giggle. “Special today, I throw in a handful of tachyon grenades.”
“Fine.” They’d be handy.
He looked at me expectantly. “So? What’s the popper?” “Huh?”
“The punch, man; you set me up, now knock me down. Laser.” He giggled. I was beginning to understand. “You mean I can’t buy a laser.”
“Of course not, sweetie,” he said and sobered. “You didn’t know that?” “I’ve been out of the country for a long time.”
“The world, you mean. You’ve been out Of the world a long time.” He put his left hand on a chubby hip in a gesture that incidentally made his gun easier to get. He scratched the center of his chest.
I stood very still. “That’s right. I just got out of the Force.”
His jaw dropped. “Hey, no bully-bull? You been out shootin’ ’em up, out in space?”
“That’s right.”
“Hey, all that crap about you not gettin’ older, there’s nothin’ to that, is there?” “Oh, it’s true. I was born in 1975.”
“Well, god . . . damn. You’re almost as old as I am.”
He giggled. “I thought that was just something the government made up.” “Anyhow. . . you say I can’t buy a laser-”
“Oh, no. No no no. I run a legal shop here.” “What can I buy?”
“Oh, pistol, rifle, shotgun, knife, body armor. . . just no lasers or explosives or fully automatic weapons.”
“Let me see a pistol. The biggest you have.”
“Ah, I’ve got just the thing.” He motioned me over to a display case and opened the back, taking out a huge revolver.
“Four-ten-gauge six-shooter.” He cradled it in both hands. “Dinosaur-stopper. Authentic Old West styling. Slugs or flechettes.”
“Flechettes?”
“Sure-uh, they’re like a bunch of tiny darts. You shoot and they spread out in a pattern. Hard to miss that way.”
Sounded like my speed. “Anyplace I can try it out?”
“‘Course, of course, we have a range in back. Let me get my assistant.” He rang a bell and a boy caine out to
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watch the store while we went in back. He picked up a red-and-green box of shotgun shells on the way.
The range was in two sections, a little anteroom with a plastic transparent door and a long corridor on the other side of the door with a table at one end and targets at the other. Behind the targets was a sheet of metal that evidently deflected the bullets down into a pool of water.
He loaded the pistol and set it on the table. “Please don’t pick it up until the door’s closed.” He went into the anteroom, closed the door, and picked up a microphone. “Okay. First time, you better hold on to it with both hands.” I did so, raising it up in line with the center target, a square of paper looking about the size of your thumbnail at arm’s length. Doubted I’d even come near it. I pulled the trigger and it went back easily enough, but nothing happened.
“No, no,” he said over the microphone with a tinny giggle. “Authentic Old West styling. You’ve got to pull the hammer back.”
Sure, just like in the flicks. I hauled the hammer back, lined it up again, and squeezed the trigger.
The noise was so loud it made my face sting. The gun bucked up and almost hit me on the forehead. But the three center targets were gone: just tiny tatters of paper drifting in the air.
“I’ll take it.”
He sold me a hip holster, twenty shells, a chest-and-back shield, and a dagger in a boot sheath. I felt more heavily armed than I had in a fighting suit. But no waldos to help me cart it around.
The monorail had two guards for each car. I was beginning to feel that all my heavy artillery was superfluous, until I got off at the Hyattsville station.
Everyone who got off at Hyattsville was either heavily armed or had a bodyguard. The people loitering around the station were all armed. The police carried lasers.
I pushed a “cab call” button, and the readout told me mine would be No. 3856. I asked a policeman and he told me to wait for it down on the street; it would cruise around the block twice.
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During the five minutes I waited, I twice heard staccato arguments of gunfire, both of them rather far away. I was glad I’d bought the shield.
Eventually the cab came. It swerved to the curb when I waved at it, the door sliding open as it stopped. Looked as if it worked the same way as the autocabs I remembered. The door stayed open while it checked the thumbprint to verify that I was the one who had called, then slammed shut. It was thick steel. The view through the windows was dim and distorted; probably thick bulletproof plastic. Not quite the same as I remembered.
I had to leaf through a grimy book to find the code for the address of the bar in Hyattsville where I was supposed to meet the dealer. I punched it out and sat back to watch the city go by.
This part of town was mostly residential: grayed-brick warrens built around the middle of the last century competing for space with more modern modular setups and, occasionally, individual houses behind tall brick or concrete walls with jagged
broken glass and barbed wire at the top. A few people seemed to be going somewhere, walking very quickly down the sidewalks, hands on weapons. Most of the people I saw were either sitting in doorways, smoking, or loitering around shopfronts in groups of no fewer than six. Everything was dirty and cluttered. The gutters were clotted with garbage, and shoals of waste paper drifted with the wind of the light traffic.
It was understandable, though; street-sweeping was probably a very high-risk profession.
The cab pulled up in front of Tom & Jerry’s Bar and Grill and let me out after I paid 430K. I stepped to the sidewalk with my hand on the shotgun-pistol, but there was nobody around. I hustled into the bar.
It was surprisingly clean on the inside, dimly lit and furnished in fake leather and fake pine. I went to the bar and got some fake bourbon and, presumably, real water for 120K. The water cost 20K. A waitress came over with a tray.
“Pop one, brother-boy?” The tray had a rack of oldfashioned hypodermic needles. Joe Haldeman
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“Not today, thanks.” If I was going to “pop one,” I’d use an aerosol. The needles looked unsanitary and painful.
She set the dope down on the bar and eased onto the stool next to me. She sat with her chin cupped in her palm and stared at her reflection in the mirror behind the bar.
“God. Tuesdays.”
I mumbled something.
“You wanna go in back fer a quickie?”
I looked at her with what I hoped was a neutral expression. She was wearing only a short skirt of some gossamer material, and it plunged in a shallow V in the front, exposing her hipbones and a few bleached pubic hairs. I wondered what could possibly keep it up. She wasn’t bad looking, could have been anywhere from her late twenties to her early forties. No telling what they could do with cosmetic surgery and makeup nowadays, though. Maybe she was older than my mother.
“Thanks anyhow.” “Not today?” “That’s right.”
“I can get you a nice boy, if-” “No. No thanks.” What a world.
She pouted into the mirror, an expression that was probably older than Hoino sapiens. “You don’t like me.”
“I like you fine. That’s just not what I caine here for.”
“Well. . . different funs for different ones.” She shrugged. “Hey, Jerry. Get me a short beer.”
He brought it.
“Oh, damn, my purse is locked up. Mister, can you spare forty calories?” I had enough ration tickets to take care of a whole banquet. Tore off a fifty and gave it to the bartender.
“Jesus.” She stared. “How’d you get a full book at the end of the month?”
I told her in as few words as possible who I was and how I managed to have so many calories. There had been two months’ worth of books waiting in my mail, and I hadn’t even used up the ones the Force had given me. She offered to buy a book from me for ten grand, but I didn’t
want to get involved in more than one illegal enterprise at a time.
Two men came in, one unarmed and the other with both a pistol and a riot gun. The bodyguard sat by the door and the other came over to me.
“Mr. Mandella?” “That’s right.”
“Shall we take a booth?” He didn’t offer his name.
He had a cup of coffee, and I sipped a mug of beer. “I don’t keep any written records, but I have an excellent memory. Tell me what sort of a job you’re interested in, what your qualifications are, what salary you’ll accept, and so on.”
I told him I’d prefer to wait for a job where I could use my physics-teaching or research, even engineering. I wouldn’t need a job for two or three months, since I planned to travel and spend money for a while. Wanted at least 20,000K monthly, but how much I’d accept would depend on the nature of the job.
He didn’t say a word until I’d finished. “Righty-oh. Now, I’m afraid. . . you’d have a hard time, getting a job in physics. Teaching is out; I can’t supply jobs where the person is constantly exposed to the public. Research, well, your degree is almost a quarter of a century old. You’d have to go back to school, maybe five or six years.”
“Might do that,” I said.
“The one really marketable feature you have is your combat experience. I could probably place you in a supervisory job at a bodyguard agency for even more than twenty grand. You could make almost that much, being a bodyguard yourself.”
“Thanks, but I wouldn’t want to take chances for somebody else’s hide.”
“Righty-oh. Can’t say I blame you.” He finished his coffee in a long slurp. “Well, I’ve got to run, got a thousand things to do. I’ll keep you in mind and talk to some people.”
“Good. I’ll see you in a few months.”
“Righty-oh. Don’t need to make an appointment. I come
in here every day at eleven for coffee. Just show up.”
I finished my beer and called a cab to take me home. I wanted to walk around the city, but Mother was right. I’d get a bodyguard first.
9
I came home and the phone was blinking pale blue. Didn’t know what to do so I punched “Operator.”
A pretty young girl’s head materialized in the cube. “Jefferson operator,” she said. “May I help you?”
“Yes. . . what does it mean when the cube is blinking blue?” “Huh?”
“What does it mean when the phone-”
“Are you serious?” I was getting a little tired of this kind of thing. “It’s a long story. Honest, I don’t know.”
“When it blinks blue you’re supposed to call the operator.” “Okay, here I am.”
“No, not me, the real operator. Punch nine. Then punch zero.” I did that and an old harridan appeared. “Ob-a-ray-duh.”
“This is William Mandella at 301-52-574-3975. I was supposed to call you.”
“Juzza segun.” She reached outside the field of view and typed something. “You god.da call from 605-19-556-2027.”
I scribbled it down on the pad by the phone. “Where’s that?” “Juzza segun. South Dakota.”
“Thanks.” I didn’t know anybody in South Dakota.
A pleasant-looking old woman answered the phone. “Yes?” “I had a call from this number. . . uh… I’m-”
“Oh. Sergeant Mandella! Just a second.”
I watched the diagonal bar of the holding pattern for a second, then fifty or so more. Then a head came into focus.
Marygay. “William. I had a heck of a time finding you.” Lz~j
Joe Ilaldeman
“Darling, me too. What are you doing in South Dakota?”
“My parents live here, in a little commune. That’s why it took me so long to get to the phone.” She held up two grimy hands. “Digging potatoes.”
“But when I checked.. . the records said-the records in Tucson said your parents were both dead.”
“No, they’re just dropouts-you know about dropouts?- new name, new life. I got the word through a cousin.”
“Well-well, how’ve you been? Like the country life?”
“That’s one reason I’ve been wanting to get you. Willy, I’m bored. It’s all very healthy and nice, but I want to do something dissipated and wicked. Naturally I thought of you.,,
“I’m flattered. Pick you up at eight?”
She checked a clock above the phone. “No, look, let’s get a good night’s sleep. Besides, I’ve got to get in the rest of the potatoes. Meet me at. . . the Ellis Island jetport at ten tomorrow morning. Mmm. . . Trans-World information desk.”
“Okay. Make reservations for where?” She shrugged. “Pick a place.” “London used to be pretty wicked.”
“Sounds good. First class?”
“What else? I’ll get us a suite on one of the dirigibles.” “Good. Decadent. How long shall I pack for?”
“We’ll buy clothes along the way. Travel light. Just one stuffed wallet apiece.” She giggled. “Wonderful. Tomorrow at ten.”
“Fine-ub. . . Marygay, do you have a gun?” “It’s that bad?”
“Here around Washington it is.”
“Well, I’ll get one. Dad has a couple over the fireplace. Guess they’re left over from Tucson.”
“We’ll hope we won’t need them.”
“Willy, you know it’ll just be for decoration. I couldn’t even kill a Tauran.”
“Of course.” We just looked at each other for a second. “Tomorrow at ten, then.” “Right. Love you.”
”lJh . .
She giggled again and hung up.
That was just too many things to think about all at once.
I got us two round-the-world dirigible tickets; unlimited stops as long as you kept going east. It took me a little over two hours to get to Ellis by autocab and monorail. I was early, but so was Marygay.
She was talking to the girl at the desk and didn’t see me coming. Her outfit was really arresting, a tight coverall of plastic in a pattern of interlocking hands; as your angle of sight changed, various strategic hands became transparent. She had a ruddy sun-glow all over her body. I don’t know whether the feeling that rushed over me was simple honest lust or something more complicated. I hurried up behind her.
Whispering: “What are we going to do for three hours?” She turned and gave me a quick hug and thanked the girl at the desk, then grabbed my hand and pulled me along to a slidewalk.
“Um.. . where are we headed?”
“Don’t ask questions, Sergeant. Just follow me.”
We stepped onto a roundabout and transferred to an eastbound slidewalk. “Do you want something to eat or drink?” she asked innocently.
I tried to leer. “Any alternatives?”
She laughed gaily. Several people stared. “Just a second here!” We jumped off. It was a corridor marked
“Roomettes.” She handed me a key.
That damned plastic coverall was held on by static electricity. Since the roomette was nothing but a big waterbed, I almost broke my neck the first time it shocked me.
I recovered.
We were lying on our stomachs, looking through the one-way glass wall at the people rushing around down on the concourse. Marygay passed me a joint.
“William, have you used that thing yet?” “What thing?”
“That hawg-leg. The pistol.” 130
Joe Haldeman
“Only shot it once, in the store where I bought it.”
“Do you really think you could point it at someone and blow him apart?”
I took a shallow puff and passed it back. “Hadn’t given it much thought, really. Until we talked last night.”
“Well?”
“I. . . I don’t really know. The only time I’ve killed was on Aleph, under hypnotic compulsion. But I don’t think it would. . . bother me, not that much, not if the person was trying to kill me in the first place. Why should it?”
“Life,” she said plaintively, “life is. . .”
“Life is a bunch of cells walking around with a common purpose. If that common purpose is to get my ass-”
“Oh,William. You sound like old Cortez.” “Cortez kept us alive.”
“Not many of us,” she snapped.
I rolled over and studied the ceiling tiles. She traced little designs on my chest, pushing the sweat around with her fingertip. “I’m sorry, William. I guess we’re both just trying to adjust.”
“That’s okay. You’re right, anyhow.”
We talked for a long time. The only urban center Mary-gay had been to since our publicity rounds (which were very sheltered) was Sioux Falls. She had gone with her
parents and the commune bodyguard. It sounded like a scaled-down version of Washington: the same problems, but not as acute.
We ticked off the things that bothered us: violence, high cost of living, too many people everywhere. I’d have added homolife, but Marygay said I just didn’t appreciate the social dynamic that had led to it; it had been inevitable. The only thing she said she had against it was that it took so many of the prettiest men out of circulation.
And the main thing that was wrong was that everything seemed to have gotten just a little worse, or at best remained the same. You would have predicted that at least a few facets of everyday life would improve markedly in twenty-two years. Her father contended the War was behind it all: any person who showed a shred of talent was sucked
up by UNEF; the very best fell to the Elite Conscription Act and wound up being cannon fodder.
It was hard not to agree with him. Wars in the past often accelerated social reform, provided technological benefits, even sparked artistic activity. This one, however, seemed tailor-made to provide none of these positive by-products. Such improvements as had been made on late-twentieth-century technology were-like tachyon bombs and warships two kilometers long-at best, interesting developments of things that only required the synergy of money and existing engineering techniques. Social reform? The world was technically under martial law. As for art, I’m not sure I know good from bad. But artists to some extent have to reflect the temper of the times. Paintings and sculpture were full of torture and dark brooding; movies seemed static and plotless; music was dominated by nostalgic revivals of earlier forms; architecture was mainly concerned with finding someplace to put everybody; literature was damn near incomprehensible. Most people seemed to spend most of their time trying to find ways to outwit the government, trying to scrounge a few extra K’s or ration tickets without putting their lives in too much danger.
And in the past, people whose country was at war were constantly in contact with the war. The newspapers would be full of reports, veterans would return from the front sometimes the front would move right into town, invaders marching down Main Street or bombs whistling through the night air-but always the sense of either working toward victory or at least delaying defeat. The enemy was a tangible thing, a propagandist’s monster whom you could understand, whom you could hate.
But this war. . . the enemy was a curious organism only vaguely understood, more often the subject of cartoons than nightmares. The main effect of the war on the home front was economic, unemotional-more taxes but more jobs as well. After twenty-two years, only twenty-seven returned veterans; not enough to make a decent parade. The most important fact about the war to most people was that if it ended suddenly, Earth’s economy would collapse.
You approached the dirigible by means of a small propeller-driven aircraft that drifted up to match trajectories and docked alongside. A clerk took our baggage and we checked our weapons with the purser, then went outside.
Just about everybody on the flight was standing out on the promenade deck, watching Manhattan creep toward the horizon. It was an eerie sight. The day was very still, so the bottom thirty or forty stories of the buildings were buried in smog. It looked like a city built on a cloud, a thunderhead floating. We watched it for a while and then went inside to eat.
The meal was elegantly served and simple: filet of beef, two vegetables, wine. Cheese and fruit and more wine for dessert. No fiddling with ration tickets; a loophole in the rationing laws implied that they were not required for meals consumed en route, on intercontmental transport.
We spent a lazy, comfortable three days crossing the Atlantic. The dirigibles had been a new thing when we first left Earth, and now they had turned out to be one of the few successful new financial ventures of the late twentieth century.. . the company that built them had bought up a few obsolete nuclear weapons; one bomb- sized hunk of plutonium would keep the whole fleet in the air for years. And, once launched, they never did come down. Floating hotels, supplied and maintained by regular shuttles, they were one last vestige of luxury in a world where nine billion people had something to eat, and almost nobody had enough.
London was not as dismal from the air as New York City had been; the air was clean even if the Thames was poison. We packed our handbags, claimed our weapons, and landed on a VTO pad atop the London Hilton. We rented a couple of tricycles at the hotel and, maps in hand, set off for Regent Street, planning on dinner at the venerable Cafe Royal.
The tricycles were little armored vehicles, stabilized gyroscopically so they couldn’t be tipped over. Seemed overly cautious for the part of London we traveled through, but I
supposed there were probably sections as rough as Washington.
I got a dish of marinated venison and Marygay got salmon; both very good but astoundingly expensive. At first I was a bit overawed by the huge room, filled with plush and mirrors and faded gilding, very quiet even with a dozen tables occupied, and we talked in whispers until we realized that was foolish.
Over coffee I asked Marygay what the deal was with her parents.
“Oh, it happens often enough,” she said. “Dad got mixed up in some ration ticket thing. He’d gotten some black market tickets that turned out to be counterfeit. Cost him his job and he probably would have gone to jail, but while he was waiting for trial a bodysnatcher got him.”
“Bodysnatcher?”
“That’s right. All the commune organizations have them. They’ve got to get reliable farm labor, people who aren’t eligible for relief. . . people who can’t just lay down their tools and walk off when it gets rough. Almost everybody can get enough assistance to stay alive, though; everyone who isn’t on the government’s fecal roster.”
“So he skipped out before his trial came up?”
She nodded. “It was a case of choosing between commune life, which he knew wasn’t easy, and going on the dole after a few years’ working on a prison farm; exconvicts can’t get legitimate jobs. They had to forfeit their condominium, which
they’d put up for bail, but the government would’ve gotten that anyhow, once he was in jail.
“So the bodysnatcher offered him and Mother new identities, transportation to the commune, a cottage, and a plot of land. They took it.”
“Arid what did the bodysnatcher get?”
“He himself probably didn’t get anything. The commune got their ration tickets; they were allowed to keep their money, although they didn’t have very much-”
“What happens if they get caught?”
“Not a chance.” She laughed. “The communes provide over half the country’s produce-they’re really just an unofficial arm of the government. I’m sure the CBI knows
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exactly where they are.. . . Dad grumbles that it’s just a fancy way of being in jail anyhow.”
“What a weird setup.”
“Well, it keeps the land farmed.” She pushed her empty dessert plate a symbolic centimeter away from her. “And they’re eating better than most people, better than they ever had in the city. Mom knows a hundred ways to fix chicken and potatoes.”
After dinner we went to a musical show. The hotel had gotten us tickets to a “cultural translation” of the old rock opera Hair. The program explained that they had taken some liberties with the original choreography, because back in those days they didn’t allow actual coition on stage. The music was pleasantly old-fashioned, but neither of us was quite old enough to work up any bluriy-eyed nostalgia over
it. Still, it was much more enjoyable than the movies I’d seen, and some of the physical feats perfonned were quite inspiring. We slept late the next morning.
We dutifully watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, walked through the British Museum, ate fish and chips, ran up to Stratford-on-Avon and caught the Old Vic doing an incomprehensible play about a mad king, and didn’t get into any trouble until the day before we were to leave for Lisbon.
It was about 2 A.M. and we were tooling our tricycles down a nearly deserted thoroughfare. Turned a corner and there was a gang of boys beating the hell out of someone. I screeched to the curb and leaped out of my vehicle, firing the shotgun- pistol over their heads.
It was a girl they were attacking; it was rape. Most of them scattered, but one pulled a pistol out of his coat and I shot him. I remember trying to aim for his arm. The blast hit his shoulder and ripped off his arm and what seemed to be half of his chest; it flung him two meters to the side of a building and he must have been dead before he hit the ground.
The others ran, one of them shooting at me with a little pistol as he went. I watched him trying to kill me for the longest time before it occurred to me to shoot back. I sent
‘l’HE FOREVER WAR 135
one blast way high and he dove into an alley and disappeared.
The girl looked dazedly around, saw the mutilated body of her attacker, and staggered to her feet and ran off screaming, naked from the waist down. I knew I should
have tried to stop her, but I couldn’t find my voice and my
feet seemed nailed to the sidewalk. A tricycle door slammed and Marygay was beside me.
“What hap-” She gasped, seeing the dead man. “Whwhat was he doing?”
I just stood there stupefied. I’d certainly seen enough death these past two years, but this was a different thing
. . there was nothing noble in being crushed to death by the failure of some electronic component, or in having your suit fail and freeze you solid; or even dying in a shoot-out with the incomprehensible enemy. . . but death seemed natural in that setting. Not on a quaint little street in old-fashioned London, not for trying to steal what most people would give
Marygay was pulling my arm. “We’ve got to get out of here. They’ll brainwipe you!”
She was tight. I turned and took one step and fell to the concrete. I looked down at the leg that had betrayed me and bright red blood was pulsing out of a small hole in my calf. Marygay tore a strip of cloth from her blouse and started to bind it. I remember thinking it wasn’t a big enough wound to go into shock over, but my ears started to ring and I got lightheaded and everything went red and fuzzy. Before I went under, I heard a siren wailing in the distance.
Fortunately, the police also picked up the girl, who was wandering down the street a few blocks away. They compared her version of the thing with mine, both of us under hypnosis. They let me go with a stern admonition to leave law enforcement up to professional law enforcers.
I wanted to get out of the cities: just put a pack on my back and wander through the woods for a while, get my mind straightened out. So did Marygay. But we tried to make arrangements and found that the country was worse
than the cities. Farms were practically armed camps, the areas between ruled by nomad gangs who survived by making lightning raids into villages and farms, murdering and plundering for a few minutes, and then fading back into the forest, before help could arrive.
Still, Britishers called their island “the most civilized country in Europe.” From what we’d heard about France and Spain and Germany, especially Germany, they were probably right.
I talked it over with Marygay, and we decided to cut short our tour and go back to the States.~We could finish the tour after we’d become acclimated to the twenty-first century. It was just too much foreignness to take in one dose.
The dirigible line refunded most of our money and we took a conventional suborbital flight back home. The high altitude made my leg throb, though it was nearly healed.
They’d made great strides in the treatment of gunshot wounds, in the past twenty years. Lots of practice.
We split up at Ellis. Her description of commune life appealed to me more than the city; I made arrangements to join her after a week or so, and went back to Washington.
10
I rang the bell and a strange woman answered the door, opening it a couple of centimeters and peering through.
“Pardon me,” I said, “isn’t this Mrs. Mandella’s residence?”
“Oh, you must be William!” She closed the door and unfastened the chains and opened it wide. “Beth, look who’s here!”
My mother came into the living room from the kitchen, drying her hands on a towel. “Willy.. . what are you doing back so soon?”
“Well, it’s-it’s a long story.”
“Sit down, sit down,” the other woman said. “Let me get you a drink, don’t start till I get back.”
“Wait,” my mother said. “I haven’t even introduced you two. William, this is Rhonda Wilder. Rhonda, William.”
“I’ve been so looking forward to meeting you,” she said. “Beth has told me all about you-one cold beer, right?”
“Right.” She was likable enough, a trim middle-aged woman. I wondered why I hadn’t met her before. I asked my mother whether she was a neighbor.
“Uh. . . really more than that, William. She’s been my roommate for a couple of years. That’s why I had an extra room when you came home-a single person isn’t allowed two bedrooms.”
“But why-”
“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to feel that you were putting her out of her room while you stayed here. And you weren’t, actually; she has-”
“That’s right.” Rhonda came in with the beer. “I’ve got relatives in Pennsylvania, out in the country. I can stay with them any time.”
“Thanks.” I took the beer. “Actually, I won’t be here long. I’m kind of en route to South Dakota. I could find another place to flop.”
“Oh, no,” Rhonda said. “I can take the couch.” I was too old-fashioned male- chauv to allow that; we discussed it for a minute and I wound up with the couch.
I filled Rhonda in on who Marygay was and told them about our disturbing experiences in England, how we came back to get our bearings. I had expected my mother to be horrified that I had killed a man, but she accepted it without comment. Rhonda clucked a little bit about our being out in a city after midnight, especially without a bodyguard.
We talked on these and other topics until late at night, when Mother called her bodyguard and went off to work.
Something had been nagging at me all night, the way Mother and Rhonda acted toward each other. I decided to bring it out into the open, once Mother was gone.
“Rhonda-” I settled down in the chair across from her. I didn’t know exactly how to put it. “What, ub, what exactly is your relationship with my mother?”
She took a long drink. “Good friends.” She stared at me with a mixture of defiance and resignation. “Very good friends. Sometimes lovers.”
I felt very hollow and lost. My mother?
“Listen,” she continued. “You had better stop trying to live in the nineties. This may not be the best of all possible worlds, but you’re stuck with it.”
She crossed and took my hand, almost kneeling in front of me. Her voice was softer. “William. . . look, I’m only two years older than you are-that is, I was born two years before-what I mean is, I can understand how you feel. B-your mother understands too. It, our. . . relationship, wouldn’t be a secret to anybody else. It’s perfectly normal. A lot has changed, these twenty years. You’ve got to change too.”
I didn’t say anything.
She stood up and said firmly, “You think, because your mother is sixty, she’s outgrown her need for love? She needs it more than you do. Even now. Especially now.”
Accusation in her eyes. “Especially flOW with you com THE FOREVER WAR
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ing back from the dead past. Reminding her of how old she is. How-old I am, twenty years younger.” Her voice quavered and cracked, and she ran to her room.
I wrote Mother a note saying that Marygay had called; an emergency had come up and I had to go immediately to South Dakota. I called a bodyguard and left.
A whining, ozone-leaking, battered old bus let me out at the intersection of a bad road and a worse one. It had taken me an hour to go the 2000 kilometers to Sioux Falls, two hours to get a chopper to Geddes, 150 kilometers away, and three hours waiting and jouncing on the dilapidated bus to go the last 12 kilometers to Freehold, an organization of communes where the Potters had their acreage. I wondered if the progression was going to continue and I would be four hours walking down this dirt road to the farm.
It was a half-hour before I even came to a building. My bag was getting intolerably heavy and the bulky pistol was chafing my hip. I walked up a stone path to the door of a simple plastic dome and pulled a string that caused a bell to tinkle inside. A peephole darkened.
“Who is it?” Voice muffled by thick wood. “Stranger asking directions.”
“Ask.” I couldn’t tell whether it was a woman or a child. “I’m looking for the Potters’ farm.”
“Just a second.” Footsteps went away and came back.
“Down the road one point nine klicks. Lots of potatoes and green beans on your right. You’ll probably smell the chickens.”
“Thanks.”
“If you want a drink we got a pump out back. Can’t let you in without my husband’s at home.”
“1 understand. Thank you.” The water was metallic-tasting but wonderfully cool.
I wouldn’t know a potato or green bean plant if it stood up and took a bite out of my ankle, but I knew how to walk a half-meter step. So I resolved to count to 3800 arid take a deep breath. I supposed I could tell the difference between the smell of chicken manure and the absence thereof.
At 3650 there was a rutted path leading to a complex of
plastic domes and rectangular buildings apparently made of sod. There was a pen enclosing a small population explosion of chickens. They had a smell but it wasn’t strong.
Halfway down the path, a door opened and Marygay came running out, wearing one tiny wisp of cloth. After a slippery but gratifying greeting, she asked what I was doing here so early.
“Oh, my mother had friends staying with her. I didn’t want to put them out. Suppose I should have called.”
“Indeed you should have. . . save you a long dusty walk-but we’ve got plenty of room, don’t worry about that.”
She took me inside to meet her parents, who greeted me warmly and made me feel definitely overdressed. Their faces showed their age but their bodies had no sag and few wrinkles.
Since dinner was an occasion, they let the chickens live and instead opened a can of beef, steaming it along with a cabbage and some potatoes. To my plain tastes it was equal to most of the gourmet fare we’d had on the dirigible and in London.
Over coffee and goat cheese (they apologized for not having wine; the commune would have a new vintage out in a couple of weeks), I asked what kind of work I could do.
“Will,” Mr. Potter said, “I don’t mind telling you that your coming here is a godsend. We’ve got five acres that are just sitting out there, fallow, because we don’t have enough hands to work them. You can take the plow tomorrow and start breaking up an acre at a time.”
“More potatoes, Daddy?” Marygay asked.
“No, no.. . not this season. Soybeans-cash crop and good for the soil. And Will, at night we all take turns standing guard. With four of us, we ought to be able to do a lot more sleeping.” He took a big slurp of coffee. “Now, what else. . .”
“Richard,” Mrs. Potter said, “tell him about the greenhouse.” “That’s right, yes, the greenhouse. The commune has a
two-acre greenhouse down about a click from here, by the recreation center. Mostly grapes and tomatoes. Everybody spends one morning or one afternoon a week there.
“Why don’t you children go down there tonight.. show Will the night life in fabulous Freehold? Sometimes you can get a real exciting game of checkers going.”
“Oh, Daddy. It’s not that bad.”
“Actually, it isn’t. They’ve got a fair library and a coin-op terminal to the Library of Congress. Marygay tells me you’re a reader. That’s good.”
“Sounds fascinating.” It did. “But what about guard?”
“No problem. Mrs. Potter-April-and I’ll take the first four hours-oh,” he said, standing, “let me show you the setup.”
We went out back to “the tower,” a sandbag hut on stilts. Climbed up a rope ladder through a hole in the middle of the hut.
“A little crowded in here, with two,” Richard said.
“Have a seat.” There was an old piano stool beside the hole in the floor. I sat on it. “It’s handy to be able to see all the field without getting a crick in your neck. Just don’t keep turning in the same direction all the time.”
He opened a wooden crate and uncovered a sleek rifle, wrapped in oily rags. “Recognize this?”
“Sure.” I’d had to sleep with one in basic training.
“Army standard issue T-sixteen. Semi-automatic, twelve-caliber tumblers-where the hell did you get it?”
“Commune went to a government auction. It’s an antique now, son.” He handed it to me and I snapped it apart.
Clean, too clean.
“Has it ever been used?”
“Not in almost a year. Ammo costs too much for target practice. Take a couple of practice shots, though, convince yourself that it works.”
I turned on the scope and just got a washed-out bright green. Set for nighttime. Clicked it back to log zero, set the magnification at ten, reassembled it.
“Marygay didn’t want to try it out. Said she’d had her fill of that. I didn’t press her, but a person’s got to have confidence in ther tools.”
I clicked off the safety and found a clod of dirt that the range-finder said was between 100 and 120 meters away.
Set it at 110, rested the barrel of the rifle on the sandbags, centered the clod in the crosshairs, and squeezed. The round hissed out and kicked up dirt about five centimeters low.
“Fine.” I reset it for night use and safetied it and handed it back. “What happened a year ago?”
He wrapped it up carefully, keeping the rags away from the eyepiece. “Had some jumpers come in. Fired a few rounds and scared ’em away.”
“All right, what’s a jumper?”
“Yeah, you wouldn’t know.” He shook out a tobacco cigarette and passed me the box. “I don’t know why they don’t just call ’em thieves, that’s what they ar~’Murderers, too, sometimes.
“They know that a lot of the commune members are pretty well off. If you raise cash crops you get to keep half the cash; besides, a lot of our members were prosperous when they joined.
“Anyhow, the jumpers take advantage of our relative isolation. They come out from the city and try to sneak in, usually hit one place, and run. Most of the time, they don’t get this far in, but the farms closer to the road.. . we hear gunfire every couple of weeks. Usually just scaring off kids. If it keeps up, a siren goes off and the commune goes on alert.”
“Doesn’t sound fair to the people living close to the road.”
“There’re compensations. They only have to donate half as much of their crop as the rest of us do. And they’re issued heavier weapons.”
Marygay and I took the family’s two bicycles and pedaled down to the recreation center. I only fell off twice, negotiating the bumpy road in the dark.
It was a little livelier than Richard had described it. A young nude girl was dancing sensuously to an assortment of homemade drums near the far side of the dome. Turned out she was still in school; it was a project for a “cultural relativity” class.
Most of the people there, in fact, were young and therefore still in school. They considered it a joke, though. After you had learned to read and write and could pass the Class I literacy test, you only had to take one course per year, and some of those you could pass just by signing up. So much for the “eighteen years’ compulsory education” they had startled us with at Stargate.
Other people were playing board games, reading, watching the girl gyrate, or just talking. There was a bar that served soya, coffee, or thin homemade beer. Not a ration ticket to be seen; all made by the commune or purchased outside with commune tickets.
We got into a discussion about the war, with a bunch of people who knew Marygay and I were veterans. It’s hard to describe their attitude, which was pretty
uniform. They were angry in an abstract way that it took so much tax money to support; they were convinced that the Taurans would never be any danger to Earth; but they all knew that nearly half the jobs in the world were associated with the war, and if it stopped, everything would fall apart.
I thought everything was in shambles already, but then I hadn’t grown up in this world. And they had never known “peacetime.”
We went home about midnight and Maiygay and 1 each stood two hours’ guard. By the middle of the next morning, I was wishing I had gotten a little more sleep.
The plow was a big blade on wheels with two handles for steering, atomic powered. Not very much power, though; enough to move it forward at a slow crawl if the blade was in soft earth. Needless to say, there was little soft earth in the unused five acres. The plow would go a few centimeters, get stuck, freewheel until I put some back into it, then move a few more centimeters. I finished a tenth of an acre the first day and eventually got it up to a fifth of an acre a day.
It was hard, hardening work, but pleasant. I had an ear-clip that piped music to me, old tapes from Richard’s collection, and the sun browned me all over. I was beginning to think I could live that way forever, when suddenly it was finished.
Marygay and I were reading up at the recreation center one evening when we heard faint gunfire down by the road. We decided it’d be smart to get back to the house. We were less than halfway there when firing broke out all along our left, on a line that seemed to extend from the road to far past the recreation center: a coordinated attack. We had to abandon the bikes and crawl on hands and knees in the drainage ditch by the side of the road, bullets hissing over our heads. A heavy vehicle rumbled by, shooting left and right. It took a good twenty minutes to crawl home. We passed two farmhouses that were burning brightly. I was glad ours didn’t have any wood.
I noticed there was no return fire coming from our tower, but didn’t say anything. There were two dead strangers in front of the house as we rushed inside.
April was lying on the floor, still alive but bleeding from a hundred tiny fragment wounds. The living room was rubble and dust; someone must have thrown a bomb through a door or window. I left Marygay with her mother and ran out back to the tower. The ladder was pulled up, so I had to shinny up one of the stilts.
Richard was sitting slumped over the rifle. In the pale green glow from the scope I could see a perfectly round bole above his left eye. A little blood had trickled down the bridge of his nose and dried.
I laid his body on the floor and covered his head with my shirt. I filled my pockets with clips and took the rifle back to the house.
Marygay had tried to make her mother comfortable. They were talking quietly. She was holding my shotgun-pistol and had another gun on the floor beside her. When I came in she looked up and nodded soberly, not crying.
April whispered something and Maiygay asked, “Mother wants to know whether..
. Daddy had a hard time of it She knows he’s dead.” “No. I’m sure he didn’t feel anything.”
“That’s good.”
“It’s something.” I should keep my mouth shut. “It is good, yes.” I checked the doors and windows for an effective vantage
point. I couldn’t find anyplace that wouldn’t allow a whole platoon to sneak up behind me.
“I’m going to go outside and get on top of the house.” Couldn’t go back to the tower. “Don’t you shoot unless somebody gets inside. . . maybe they’ll think the place is deserted.”
By the time I had clambered up to the sod roof, the heavy truck was coming back down the road. Through the scope I could see that there were five men on it, four in the cab and one who was on the open bed, cradling a machine gun, surrounded by loot. He was crouched between two refrigerators, but I had a clear shot at him. Held my fire, not wanting to draw attention. The truck stopped in front of the house, sat for a minute, and turned in. The window was probably bulletproof, but I sighted on the driver’s face and squeezed off a round. He jumped as it ricocheted, whining, leaving an opaque star on the plastic, and the man in back opened up. A steady stream of bullets hummed over my head; I could hear them thumping into the sandbags of the tower. He didn’t see me.
The truck wasn’t ten meters away when the shooting stopped. He was evidently reloading, hidden behind the refrigerator. I took careful aim and when he popped up to fire I shot him in the throat. The bullet being a tumbler, it exited through the top of his skull.
The driver pulled the truck around in a long arc so that, when it stopped, the door to the cab was flush with the door of the house. This protected them from the tower and also from me,though I doubted they yet knew where I was; a T-16 makes no flash and very little noise. I kicked off my shoes and stepped cautiously onto the top of the cab, hoping the driver would get out on his side. Once the door opened I could fill the cab with ricocheting bullets.
No good. The far door, hidden from me by the roof’s overhang, opened first. I waited for the driver and hoped that Marygay was well hidden. I shouldn’t have worried.
There was a deafening roar, then another and another. The heavy truck rocked with the impact of thousands of tiny fiechettes. One short scream that the second shot ended.
I jumped from the truck and ran around to the back door. Marygay had her mother’s head on her lap, and someone was crying softly. I went to them and Marygay’s cheeks were dry under my palms.
“Good work, dear.”
She didn’t say anything. There was a steady heavy dripping sound from the door and the air was acrid with smoke and the smell of fresh meat. We huddled together until dawn.
I had thought April was sleeping, but in the dim light her eyes were wide open and filmed. Her breath came in shallow rasps. Her skin was gray parchment and dried blood. She didn’t answer when we talked to her.
A vehicle was coming up the road, so I took the rifle and went outside. It was a dump truck with j white sheet draped over one side and a man standing in The back with a megaphone repeating, “Wounded. . . wounded.” I waved and the truck came in. They took April out on a makeshift litter and told us which hospital they were going to. We wanted to go along but there was simply no room; the bed of the truck was covered with people in various stages of disrepair.
Marygay didn’t want to go back inside because it was getting light enough to see the men she had killed so completely. I went back in to get some cigarettes and forced myself to look. It was messy enough, but just didn’t disturb me that much. That bothered me, to be confronted with a pile of human hamburger and mainly notice the flies and ants and smell. Death is so much neater in space.
We buried her father behind the house, and when the truck came back with April’s small body wrapped in a shroud, we buried her beside him. The commune’s sanitation truck came by a little later, and gas-masked men took care of the jumpers’ bodies.
We sat in the baking sun, and finally Marygay wept, for a long time, silently. 11
We got off the plane at Dulles and found a monorail to Columbia.
It was a pleasingly diverse jumble of various kinds of buildings, arranged around a lake, surrounded by trees. All of the buildings were connected by slidewalk to the largest place, a fullerdome with stores and schools and offices.
We could have taken the enclosed slidewalk to Mom’s place, but instead walked alongside it in the good cold air that smelled of fallen leaves. People slid by on the other side of the plastic, carefully not staring.
Mom didn’t answer her door, but she’d given me an entry card. Mom was asleep in the bedroom, so Marygay and I settled in the living room and read for a while.
We were startled suddenly by a loud fit of coughing from the bedroom. I raced over and knocked on the door.
“William? I didn’t-” coughing “-come in, I didn’t know you were…”
She was propped up in bed, the light on, surrounded by various nostrums. She looked ghastly, pale and lined.
She lit a joint and it seemed to quell the coughing. “When did you get in? I didn’t know…”
“Just a few minutes ago. .. . How long has this. . . have you been…”
“Oh, it’s just a bug I picked up after Rhonda went to see her kids. I’ll be fine in a couple of days.” She started coughing again, drank some thick red liquid from a bottle. All of her medicines seemed to be the commercial, patent variety.
“Have you seen a doctor?”
“Doctor? Heavens no, Willy. They don’t have.. . it’s not serious . . . don’t-” ”Not serious?” At eighty-four. “For Chrissake, mother.” I went to the phone in the kitchen and with some difficulty managed to get the hospital.
A plain girl in her twenties formed in the cube. “Nurse Donalson, general services.” She had a fixed smile, professional sincerity. But then everybody smiled.
“My mother needs to be looked at by a doctor. She has a-” “Name and number, please.”
“Beth Mandella.” I spelled it. “What number?” “Medical services number, of course,” she smiled.
I called into Mom and asked her what her number was. “She says she can’t remember.”
“That’s all right, sir, I’m sure I can find her records.”
She turned her smile to a keyboard beside her and punched out a code. “Beth Mandella?” she said, her smile wrning quizzical.
“You’re her son? She must be in her eighties.”
“Please. It’s a long story. She really has to see a doctor.” “Is this some kind of joke?”
“What do you mean?” Strangled coughing from the other room, the worst yet. “Really-this might be very serious, you’ve got to-”
“But sir, Mrs. Mandella got a zero priority rating way back in 2010.” “What the hell is that supposed to me”
“S-i-r…” The smile was hardening in place.
“Look. Pretend that I came from another planet. What is a ‘zero priority rating’?” “Another-oh! I know you!” She looked off to the left. “Sonya-come over here a
second. You’d never guess who…” Another face crowded the cube, a vapid blonde girl whose smile was twin to the other nurse’s. “Remember? On the stat this morning?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “One of the soldiers-hey, that’s really max, really max.” The head withdrew.
“Oh, Mr. Mandella,” she said, effusive. “No wonder you’re confused. It’s really very simple.”
“Well?”
“It’s part of the Universal Medical Security System. Everybody gets a rating on their seventieth birthday. It comes in automatically from Geneva.”
“What does it rate? What does it mean?” But the ugly truth was obvious.
“Well, it tells how important a person is and what level of treatment he’s allowed. Class three is the same as anybody else’s; class two is the same except for certain life- extending-”
“And class zero is no treatment at all.”
“That’s correct, Mr. Mandella.” And in her smile was not a glimmer of pity or understanding.
“Thank you.” I disconnected. Marygay was standing behind me, crying soundlessly with her mouth wide open.
I found mountaineer’s oxygen at a sporting goods store and even managed to get some black-market antibiotics through a character in a bar downtown in Washington. But Mom was beyond being able to respond to amateur treatment. She lived four days. The people from the crematonum had the same fixed smile.
I tried to get through to my brother, Mike, on the Moon, but the phone company wouldn’t let me place the call until I had signed a contract and posted a $25,000 bond. I had to get a credit transfer from Geneva. The paperwork took half a day.
I finally got through to him. Without preamble: “Mother’s dead.”
For a fraction of a second, the radio waves wandered up to the moon, and in another fraction, came back. He started and then nodded his head slowly. “No surprise. Every time I’ve come down to Earth the past ten years, I’ve wondered whether she’d still be there. Neither of us had enough money to keep in very close touch.” He had told us in Geneva that a letter from Luna to Earth cost $100 postage- plus $5,000 tax. It discouraged communication with what the UN considered to be a bunch of regrettably necessary anarchists.
We commiserated for a while and then Mike said,
“Willy, Earth is no place for you and Marygay; you know that by now. Come to Luna. Where you can still be an
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individual. Where we don’t throw people out the airlock on their seventieth birthday.”
“We’d have to rejoin UNEF.”
“True, but you wouldn’t have to fight. They say they need you more for training. You could study in your spare time, bring your physics up to date-maybe wind up eventually in research.”
We talked some more, a total of three minutes. I got $1000 back.
Marygay and I talked about it through the night. Maybe our decision would have been different if we hadn’t been staying there, surrounded by Mother’s life and death, but when the dawn came the proud, ambitious, careful beauty of Columbia had turned sinister and foreboding.
We packed our bags and had our money transferred to the Tycho Credit Union and took a monorail to the Cape.
“In case you’re interested, you aren’t the first combat veterans to come back.” The recruiting officer was a muscular lieutenant of indeterminate sex. I flipped a coin men-tally and it came up tails.
“Last I heard, there had been nine others,” she said in her husky tenor. “All of them opted for the moon… maybe you’ll find some of your friends there.” She slid two simple forms across the desk. “Sign these and you’re in again. Second lieutenants.”
The form was a simple request to be assigned to active duty; we had never really gotten out of the Force, since they extended the draft law, but had just been on inactive status. I scrutinized the paper.
“There’s nothing on this about the guarantees we were given at Stargate.” “That won’t be necessary. The Force will-”
“I think it is necessary, Lieutenant.” I handed back the form. So did Marygay.
“Let me check.” She left the desk and disappeared into an office. After a while we heard a printer rattle.
She brought back the same two sheets, with an addition typed under our names: GUARANTEED LOCATION OF CHOICE
[LUNA] AND ASSIGNMENT OF CHOICE [col~iaAT TRAINING SPECIALIST].
We got a thorough physical checkup and were fitted for new fighting suits, made our financial arrangements, and caught the next morning’s shuttle. We laid over at Earth-port, enjoying zero gravity for a few hours, and then caught a ride to Luna, setting down at the Grimaldi base.
On the door to the Transient Officers’ Billet, some wag had scraped “abandon hope all ye who enter.” We found our two-man cubicle and began changing for chow.
Two raps on the door. “Mail call, sirs.”
I opened the door and the sergeant standing there saluted. I just looked at him for a second and then remembered I was an officer and returned the salute. He handed me two identical faxes. I gave one to Marygay and we both gasped at the same time:
* *ORDERS* *ORDERS**ORDERS
THE FOLLOWING NAMED PERSONNEL:
Mandella, William 2LT [11 575 278] COCOMM D Co GRITRABN
AND
Potter, Marygay 2LT [17 386 907] COCOMM B Co GRITRABN ARE HEREBY REASSIGNED TO:
LT Mandella. PLCOMM 2 PL STFFHETA STARGATE Lr Potter: PLCOMM 3 PL STF~HETA STARGATE. DESCRIPTION OF DUTIES:
Command infantry platoon in Tet-2 Campaign.
THE ABOVE NAMED PERSONNEL WILL REPORT IMMEDIATELY
TO GRIMALDI TRANSPORTATION BATTALION TO BE MAN IFESTED TO STARGATE.
ISSUED STARGATE TACBD/l 298-8684-1450/20 Aug 2019 SO:
BY AUTHO STFCOM Commander.
**ORDERS* *ORDERS**ORDERS
“They didn’t waste any time, did they?” Marygay said bitterly.
“Must be a standing order. Strike Force Command’s light-weeks away; they can’t even know we’ve re-upped yet.”
“What about our. . .” She let it trail off.
“The guarantee. Well, we were given our assignment of choice. Nobody guaranteed we’d have the assignment for more than an hour.”
“It’s so dirty.”
I shrugged. “It’s so army.”
But I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were going home.
LIEUTENANT MANDELLA 2024-2389 A.D.
“Quick and dirty.” 1 was looking at my platoon sergeant, Santesteban, but talking to myself. And anybody else who was listening.
“Yeah,” he said. “Gotta do it in the first coupla minutes or we’re screwed tight.” He was matter-of-fact, laconic. Drugged.
Private Collins came up with Halliday. They were holding hands unself- consciously. “Lieutenant Mandella?” Her voice btoke a little. “Can we have just a minute?”
“One minute,” I said, too abruptly. “We have to leave in five, I’m sorry.”
Hard to watch those two together now. Neither one had any combat experience. But they knew what everybody did; how slim their chances were of ever being
together again. They slumped in a corner and mumbled words and traded mechanical caresses, no passion or even comfort. Collins’s eyes shone but she wasn’t weeping. Halliday just looked grim, numb. She was normally by far the prettier of the two, but the sparkle had gone out of her and left a well-formed dull shell.
I’d gotten used to open female homosex in the months since we’d left Earth. Even stopped resenting the loss of potential partners. The men together still gave me a chill, though.
I stripped and backed into the clamshelled suit. The new ones were a hell of a lot more complicated, with all the new biometrics and trauma maintenance. But well worth the trouble of hooking up, in case you got blown apart just a little bit. Go home to a comfortable pension with heroic prosthesis. They were even talking about the possibility of regeneration, at least for missing arms and legs. Better get it soon, before Heaven filled up with fractional people. Heaven was the new hospital/rest- and-recreation planet.
I finished the set-up sequence and the suit closed by itself. Gritted my teeth against the pain that never came, when the internal sensors and fluid tubes poked into your body. Conditioned neural bypass, so you felt only a slight puzzling dislocation. Rather than the death of a thousand cuts.
Collins and Halliday were getting into their suits now and the other dozen were almost set, so I stepped over to the third platoon’s staging area. Say goodbye again to Marygay.
She was suited and heading my way. We touched helmets instead of using the radio. Privacy.
“Feeling OK, honey?”
“All right,” she said. “Took my pill.”
“Yeah, happy times.” I’d taken mine too, supposed to make you feel optimistic without interfering with your sense of judgment. I knew most of us would probably die, but I didn’t feel too bad about it. “Sack with me tonight?”
“If we’re both here,” she said neutrally. “Have to take a pill for that, too.” She tried to laugh. “Sleep, I mean. How’re the new people taking it? You have ten?”
“Ten, yeah, they’re OK. Doped up, quarter-dose.” “I did that, too; try to keep them loose.”
In fact, Santesteban was the only other combat veteran in my platoon; the four corporals had been in UNEF for a while but hadn’t ever fought.
The speaker in my cheekbone crackled and Commander Cortez said, “Two minutes. Get your people lined up.”
We had our goodbye and I went back to check my flock. Everybody seemed to have gotten suited up without any problems, so I put them on line. We waited for what seemed like a long time.
“All right, load ’em up.” With the word “up,” the bay door in front of me opened- the staging area having already been bled of air-and I led my men and women through to the assault ship.
These new ships were ugly as hell. Just an open framework with clamps to hold you in place, swiveled lasers fore and aft, small tachyon powerplants below the lasers. Everything automated; the machine would land us as quickly as
possible and then zip off to harass the enemy. It was a one-use, throwaway drone. The vehicle that would come pick us up if we survived was cradled next to it, much prettier.
We clamped in and the assault ship cast off from the Sangre y Victoria with twin spurts from the yaw jets. Then the voice of the machine gave us a short countdown and we sped off at four gees’ acceleration, straight down.
The planet, which we hadn’t bothered to name, was a chunk of black rock without any normal star close enough to give it heat. At first it was visible only by the absence of stars where its bulk cut off their light, but as we dropped closer we could see subtle variations in the blackness of its surface. We were coming down on the hemisphere opposite the Taurans’ outpost.
Our recon had shown that their camp sat in the middle of a flat lava plain several hundred kilometers in diameter. It was pretty primitive compared to other Tauran bases UNEF had encountered, but there wouldn’t be any sneaking up on it. We were going to careen over the horizon some fifteen klicks from the place, four ships converging simultaneously from different directions, all of us decelerating like mad, hopefully to drop right in their laps and come up shooting. There would be nothing to hide behind.
I wasn’t worried, of course. Abstractedly, I wished I hadn’t taken the pill.
We leveled off about a kilometer from the surface and sped along much faster than the rock’s escape velocity, constantly correcting to keep from flying away. The surface rolled below us in a dark gray blur; we shed a little light from the pseudo- cerenkov glow made by our tachyon exhaust, scooting away from our reality into its own.
The ungainly contraption skimmed and jumped along for some ten minutes; then suddenly the front jet glowed and we were snapped forward inside our suits, eyeballs trying to escape from their sockets in the rapid deceleration.
“Prepare for ejection,” the machine’s female-mechanical voice said. “Five, four. . .” The ship’s lasers started firing, millisecond flashes freezing the land below in jerky stroboscopic motion. It was a twisted, pock-marked jumble of fissures and random
black
rocks, a few meters below our feet. We were dropping, slowing.
“Three-” It never got any farther. There was a too-bright flash and I saw the horizon drop away as the ship’s tail pitched down-then clipped the ground, and we were rolling, horribly, pieces of people and ship scattering. Then we slid pinwheeling to a bumpy halt, and I tried to pull free but my leg was pinned under the ship’s bulk: excruciating pain and a dry crunch as the girder crushed my leg; shrill whistle of air escaping my breached suit; then the trauma maintenance turned on snick, more pain, then no pain and I was rolling free, short stump of a leg trailing blood that froze shiny black on the dull black rock. I tasted brass and a red haze closed everything out, then deepened to the brown of river clay, then loam and I passed out, with the pill thinking this is not so bad.
The suit is set up to save as much of your body as possible. If you lose part of an arm or a leg, one of sixteen razor-sharp irises closes around your limb with the force of a hydraulic press, snipping it off neatly and sealing the suit before you can die of explosive decompression. Then “trauma maintenance” cauterizes the stump, replaces lost blood, and fills you full of happy-juice and No-shock. So you will either
die happy or, if your comrades go on to win the battle, eventually be carried back up to the ship’s aid station.
We’d won that round, while I slept swaddled in dark cotton. I woke up in the infinnary. It was crowded. I was in the middle of a long row of cots, each one holding someone who had been three-fourths (or less) saved by his suit’s trauma maintenance feature. We were being ignored by the ship’s two doctors, who stood in bright light at operating tables, absorbed in blood rituals. I watched them for a long time. Squinting into the bright light, the blood on their green tunics could have been grease, the swathed bodies, odd soft machines that they were fixing. But the machines would cry out in their sleep, and the mechanics muttered reassurances while they plied their greasy tools. I watched and slept and woke up in different places.
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Finally I woke up in a regular bay.I was strapped down and being fed through a tube, biosensor electrodes attached lere and there, but no medics around. The only other peron in the little room was Marygay, sleeping on the bunk next to me. Her right arm was amputated just above the elbow.
I didn’t wake her up, just looked at her for a long time and tried to sort out my feelings. Tried to filter out the effect of the mood drugs. Looking at her stump, I could feel neither empathy nor revulsion. I tried to force one reaction, and then the other, but nothing real happened. It was as if she had always been that way. Was it drugs, conditioning, love? Have to wait to see.
Her eyes opened suddenly and I knew she had been awake for some time, had been giving me time to think “Hello, broken toy,” she said.
“How-how do you feel?” Bright question.
She put a finger to her lips and kissed it, a familiar gesture, reflection. “Stupid, numb. Glad not to be a soldier anymore.” She smiled. “Did they tell you? We’re going to Heaven.”
“No. I knew it would be either there or Earth.”
“Heaven will be better.” Anything would. “I wish we were there now.” “How long?” I asked. “How long before we get there?”
She rolled over and looked at the ceiling. “No telling. You haven’t talked to anybody?”
“Just woke up.”
“There’s a new directive they didn’t bother to tell us about before. The Sangre y Victoria got orders for four missions. We have to keep on fighting until we’ve done all four. Or until we’ve sustained so many casualties that it wouldn’t be practical to go on.”
“How many is that?”
“I wonder. We lost a good third already. But we’re headed for Aleph-7. Panty raid.” New slang term for the type of operation whose main object was to gather Tauran artifacts, and prisoners if possible. I tried to find out where the term came from, but the one explanation I got was really idiotic.
One knock on the door and Dr. Foster barged in. He fluttered his hands. “Still in separate beds? Marygay, I thought you were more recovered than that.” Foster was all right A flaming mariposa, but he had an amused tolerance for heterosexuality.
He examined Marygay’s stump and then mine. He stuck thermometers in our mouths so we couldn’t talk. When he spoke, he was serious and blunt.
“I’m not going to sugarcoat anything for you. You’re both on happyjuice up to your ears, and the loss you’ve sustained isn’t going to bother you until I take you off the stuff. For my own convenience I’m keeping you drugged until you get to Heaven. I have twenty-one amputees to take care of. We can’t handle twenty-one psychiatric cases.
“Enjoy your peace of mind while you still have it. You two especially, since you’ll probably want to stay together. The prosthetics you get on Heaven will work just fine, but every time you look at his mechanical leg or you look at her arm, you’re going to think of how lucky the other one is. You’re going to constantly trigger memories of pain and loss for each other… . You may be at each other’s throats in a week. Or you may share a sullen kind of love for the rest of your lives.
“Or you may be able to transcend it. Give each other strength. Just don’t kid yourselves if it doesn’t work out.”
He checked the readout on each thermometer and made a notation in his notebook. “Doctor knows best, even if he is a little weird by your own old-fashioned standards. Keep it in mind.” He took the thermometer out of my mouth and gave me a little pat on the shoulder. Impartially, he did the same to Marygay. At the door, he said, “We’ve got collapsar insertion in about six hours. One of the nurses will take you to the tanks.”
We went into the tanks-so much more comfortable and safer than the old individual acceleration shells-and dropped into the Tet-2 collapsar field already starting the crazy fifty-gee evasive maneuvers that would protect us from enemy cruisers when we popped out by Aleph-7, a microsecond later.
Predictably, the Aleph-7 campaign was a dismal failure, and we limped away from it with a two-campaign total of fifty-four dead and thirty-nine cripples bound for Heaven. Only twelve soldiers were still able to fight, but they weren’t exactly straining at the leash.
It took three collapsar jumps to get to Heaven. No ship ever went there directly from a battle, even though the delay sometimes cost extra lives. It was the one place besides Earth that the Taurans could not be allowed to find.
Heaven was a lovely, unspoiled Earth-like world; what Earth might have been like if men had treated her with compassion instead of lust. Virgin forests, white beaches, pristine deserts. The few dozen cities there either blended perfectly with the environment (one was totally underground) or were brazen statements of human ingenuity; Oceanus, in a coral reef with six fathoms of water over its transparent roof; Boreas, perched on a sheared-off mountaintop in the polar wasteland; and the fabulous Skye, a huge resort city that floated from continent to continent on the trade winds.
We landed, as everyone does, at the jungle city, Threshold. Three-fourths hospital, it’s by far the planet’s largest city, but you couldn’t tell that from the air, flying down from orbit. The only sign of civilization was a short runway that suddenly appeared, a small white patch dwarfed to insignificance by the stately rain forest that crowded in from the east and an immense ocean that dominated the other horizon.
Once under the arboreal cover, the city was very much in evidence. Low buildings of native stone and wood rested among ten-meter-thick tree trunks. They were connected by unobtrusive stone paths, with one wide promenade meandering off to
the beach. Sunlight filtered down in patches, and the air held a mixture of forest sweetness and salt tang.
I later learned that the city sprawled out over 200 square kilometers, that you could take a subway to anyplace that was too far to walk. The ecology of Threshold was very carefully balanced and maintained so as to resemble the jungle outside, with all the dangerous and uncomfortable elements eliminated. A powerful pressor field kept out large
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predators and such insect life as was not necessary for the health of the plants inside.
We walked, limped and rolled into the nearest building, which was the hospital’s reception area. The rest of the hospital was underneath, thirty subterranean stories. Each person was examined and assigned his own room; I tried to get a double with Marygay, but they weren’t set up for that
“Earth-year” was 2189. So I was 215 years old, God, look at that old codger. Somebody pass the hat-no, not necessary. The doctor who examined me said that my accumulated pay would be transferred from Earth to Heaven. With compound interest, I was just shy of being a billionaire. He remarked that I’d find lots of ways to spend my billion on Heaven.
They took the most severely wounded first, so it was several days before I went into surgery. Afterwards, I woke up in my room and found that they had grafted a prosthesis onto my stump, an articulated structure of shiny metal that to my untrained eye looked exactly like the skeleton of a leg and foot. It looked creepy as hell, lying there in a transparent bag of fluid, wires running out of it to a machine at the end of the bed.
An aide came in. “How you feelin’, sir?” I almost told him to forget the “sir” bullshit, I was out of the army and staying out this time. But it might be nice for the guy to keep feeling that I outranked him.
“I don’t know. Hurts a little.”
“Gonna hurt like a sonuvabitch. Wait’ll the nerves start to grow.” “Nerves?”
“Sure.” He was fiddling with the machine, reading dials on the other side. “How you gonna have a leg without nerves? It’d just sit there.”
“Nerves? Like regular nerves? You mean I can just think ‘move’ and the thing moves?”
“‘Course you can.” He looked at me quizzically, then went back to his adjustments.
What a wonder. “Prosthetics has sure come a long way.”
THE FOREVER WAR 163
“Pross-what-ics?” “You know, artificial-”
“Oh yeah, like in books. Wooden legs, hooks and stuff.” How’d he ever get a job? “Yeah, prosthetics. Like this thing on the end of my stump.”
“Look, sir.” He set down the clipboard he’d been scribbling on. “You’ve been away a long time. That’s gonna be a leg, just like the other leg except it can’t break.”
“They do it with arms, too?”
“Sure, any limb.” He went back to his writing. “Livers, kidneys, stomachs, all kinds of things. Still working on hearts and lungs, have to use mechanical substitutes.”
“Fantastic.” Marygay would be whole again, too.
He shrugged. “Guess so. They’ve been doing it since before I was born. How old are you, sir?”
I told him, and he whistled. “God damn. You musta been in it from the beginning.” His accent was very strange. All the words were right but all the sounds were wrong.
“Yeah. 1 was in the Epsilon attack. Aleph-null.” They’d started naming collapsars after letters of the Hebrew alphabet, in order of discovery, then ran out of letters when the damn things started cropping up all over the place. So they added numbers after the letters; last I heard, they were up to Yod-42.
“Wow, ancient history. What was it like back then?”
“I don’t know. Less crowded, nicer. Went back to Earth a year ago-hell, a century ago. Depends on how you look at it. It was so bad I re-enlisted, you know? Bunch of zombies. No offense.”
He shrugged. “Never been there, myself. People who come from there seem to miss it. Maybe it got better.”
“What, you were born on another planet? Heaven?” No wonder I couldn’t place his accent.
“Born, raised and drafted.” He put the pen back in his pocket and folded the clipboard up to a wallet-sized package. “Yes, sir. Third-generation angel. Best damned planet in all UNEF.” He spelled it out, didn’t say “youneff” the way I’d always heard it.
“Look, I’ve gotta run, lieutenant. Two other monitors to check, this hour.” He backed out the door. “You need anything, there’s a buzzer on the table there.”
Third-generation angel. His grandparents came from Earth, probably when I was a young punk of a hundred. I wondered how many other worlds they’d colonized while my back was turned. Lose an arm, grow a new one?
It was going to be good to settle down and live a whole year for every year that went by.
The guy wasn’t kidding about the pain. And it wasn’t just the new leg, though that hurt like boiling oil. For the new tissues to “take,” they’d had to subvert my body’s resistance to alien cells; cancer broke out in a half-dozen places and had to be treated separately, painfully.
I was feeling pretty used up, but it was still kind of fas- cinating to watch the leg grow. White threads turned into blood vessels and nerves, first hanging a little slack, then moving into place as the musculature grew up around the metal bone.
I got used to seeing it grow, so the sight never repelled me. But when Marygay came to visit, it was a jolt-she was ambulatory before the skin on her new arm had started to grow; looked like a walking anatomy demonstration. I got over the shock, though, and she eventually came in for a few hours every day to play games or trade gossip or just sit and read, her arm slowly growing inside the plastic cast.
I’d had skin for a week before they uncased the new leg and trundled the machine away. It was ugly as hell, hairless and dead white, stiff as a metal rod. But it worked, after a fashion. I could stand up and shuffle along.
They transferred me to orthopedics, for “range and motion repatterning”-a fancy name for slow torture. They strap you into a machine that bends both the old and new legs simultaneously. The new one resists.
Marygay was in a nearby section, having her arm twisted methodically. It must have been even worse on her; she looked gray and haggard every afternoon, when we met to go upstairs and sunbathe in the broken shade.
As the days went by, the therapy became less like torture and more like strenuous exercise. We both began swimming for an hour or so every clear day, in the calm, pressor
THE FOREVER WAR 165
guarded water off the beach. I still limped on land, but in the water I could get around pretty well.
The only real excitement we had on Heaven-excitement to our combat-blunted sensibilities-was in that carefully guarded water.
They have to turn off the pressor field for a split second every time a ship lands; otherwise it would just ricochet off over the ocean. Every now and then an animal slips in, but the dangerous land animals are too slow to get through. Not so in the sea.
The undisputed master of Heaven’s oceans is an ugly customer that the angels, in a fit of originality, named the “shark.” It could eat a stack of earth sharks for breakfast, though.
The one that got in was an average-sized white shark who had been bumping around the edge of the pressor field for days, tormented by all that protein splashing around inside. Fortunately, there’s a warning siren two minutes before the pressor is shut down, so nobody was in the water when he came streaking through. And streak through he did, almost beaching himself in the fury of his fruitless attack.
He was twelve meters of flexible muscle with a razor-sharp tail at one end and a collection of arm-length fangs at the other. His eyes, big yellow globes, were set on stalks more than a meter out from his head. His mouth was so wide that, open, a man could comfortably stand in it. Make an impressive photo for his heirs.
They couldn’t just turn off the pressor field and wait for the thing to swim away. So the Recreation Committee organized a hunting party.
I wasn’t too enthusiastic about offering myself up as an hors d’oeuvre to a giant fish, but Marygay had spearfished a lot as a kid growing up in Florida and was really excited by the prospect. I went along with the gag when I found out how they were doing it; seemed safe enough.
These “sharks” supposedly never attack people in boats. Two people who had more faith in fishermen’s stories than I had gone out to the edge of the pressor field in a rowboat,
armed only with a side of beef. They kicked the meat overboard and the shark was there in a flash.
This was the cue for us to step in and have our fun. There were twenty-three of us fools waiting on the beach with flippers, masks, breathers and one spear each. The spears were pretty formidable, though, jet-propelled and with high-explosive heads.
We splashed in and swam in phalanx, underwater, toward the feeding creature. When it saw us at first, it didn’t attack. It tried to hide its meal, presumably so that some of us wouldn’t be able to sneak around and munch on it while the shark was
dealing with the others. But every time he tried for the deep water, he’d bump into the pressor field. He was obviously getting pissed off.
Finally, he just let go of the beef, whipped around and charged. Great sport. He was the size of your finger one second, way down there at the other end of the field, then suddenly as big as the guy next to you and closing fast.
Maybe ten of the spears hit him-mine didn’t-and they tore him to shreds. But even after an expert, or lucky, brain shot that took off the top of his head and one eye, even with half his flesh and entrails scattered in a bloody path behind him, he slammed into our line and clamped his jaws around a woman, grinding off both of her legs before it occurred to him to die.
We carried her, barely alive, back to the beach, where an ambulance was waiting. They poured her full of blood surrogate and No-shock and rushed her to the hospital, where she survived to eventually go through the agony of growing new legs. I decided that I would leave the hunting of fish to other fish.
Most of our stay at Threshold, once the therapy became bearable, was pleasant enough. No military discipline, lots of reading and things to potter around with. But there was a pall over it, since it was obvious that we weren’t out of the army; just pieces of broken equipment that they were fixing up to throw back into the fray. Marygay and I each had another three years to serve in our lieutenancies.
But we did have six months of rest and recreation coming once our new limbs were pronounced in good working
order. Marygay was released two days before I was but waited around for me.
My back pay came to $892,746,012. Not in the form of bales of currency, fortunately; on Heaven they used an electronic credit exchange, so I carried my fortune around in a little machine with a digital readout. To buy something you punched in the vendor’s credit number and the amount of purchase; the sum was automatically shuffled from your account to his. The machine was the size of a slender wallet and coded to your thumbprint.
Heaven’s economy was governed by the continual presence of thousands of resting, recreating millionaire soldiers. A modest snack would cost a hundred bucks, a room for a night at least ten times that. Since UNEF built and owned Heaven, this runaway inflation was pretty transparently a simple way of getting our accumulated pay back into the economic mainstream.
We had fun, desperate fun. We rented a flyer and camping gear and went off for weeks, exploring the planet. There were icy rivers to swim and lush jungles to crawl through; meadows and mountains and polar wastes and deserts.
We could be totally protected from the environment by adjusting our individual pressor fields-sleep naked in a blizzard-or we could take nature straight. At Marygay’s suggestion, the last thing we did before coming back to civilization was to climb a pinnacle in the desert, fasting for several days to heighten our sensibilities (or warp our perceptions, I’m still not sure), and sit back-to-back in the searing heat, contemplating the languid flux of life.
Then off to the fleshpots. We toured every city on the planet, and each had its own particular charm, but we finally returned to Skye to spend the rest of our leave time.
The rest of the planet was bargain-basement compared to Skye. In the four weeks we were using the airborne pleasure dome as our home base, Marygay and I each went through a good half-billion dollars. We gambled-sometimes losing a million dollars or more in a night-ate and drank the finest the planet had to offer, and
sampled every service and product that wasn’t too bizarre for our admittedly archaic tastes. We each had a personal servant whose
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salary was rather more than that of a major general.
Desperate fun, as I said. Unless the war changed radically, our chances of surviving the next three years were microscopic. We were remarkably healthy victims of a terminal disease, trying to cram a lifetime of sensation into a half of a year.
We did have the consolation, not small, that however
short the remainder of our lives would be, we would at least be together. For some reason it never occurred to me that even that could be taken from us.
We were enjoying a light lunch in the transparent “first floor” of Skye, watching the ocean glide by underneath us, when a messenger bustled in and gave us two envelopes:
our orders.
Marygay had been bumped to captain, and 1 to major, on the basis of our military records and tests we had taken at Threshold. I was a company commander and she was a company’s executive officer.
But they weren’t the same company.
She was going to muster with a new company being formed right here on Heaven. I was going back to Stargate for “indoctrination and education” before taking command.
For a long time we couldn’t say anything. “I’m going to protest,” I said finally, weakly. “They can’t make me a commander. Into a commander.”
She was still struck dumb. This was not just a separation. Even if the war was over and we left for Earth only a few minutes apart, in different ships, the geometry of the collapsar jump would pile up years between us. When the second one arrived on Earth, his partner would probably be a half-century older; more probably dead.
We sat there for some time, not touching the exquisite food, ignoring the beauty around us and beneath us, only conscious of each other and the two sheets of paper that separated us with a gulf as wide and real as death.
We went back to Threshold. I protested but my arguments were shrugged off. I tried to get Marygay assigned to my company, as my exec. They said my personnel had
all been allotted. I pointed out That most of them probably hadn’t even been born yet. Nevertheless, allotted, they said.
It would be almost a century, I said, before I even get to Stargate. They replied that Strike Force Command plans in terms of centuries.
Not in terms of people.
We had a day and a night together. The less said about that, the better. It wasn’t just losing a lover. Marygay and I were each other’s only link to real life, the Earth of the
1980s and 90s. Not the perverse grotesquerie we were supposedly fighting to preserve. When her shuttle took off it
was like a casket rattling down into a grave.
I commandeered computer time and found out the orbital elements of her ship and its departure time; found out I could watch her leave from “our” desert.
I landed on the pinnacle where we had starved together and, a few hours before dawn, watched a new star appear over the western horizon, flare to brilliance and fade as it moved away, becoming just another star, then a dim star, and then nothing. I walked to the edge and looked down the sheer rock face to the dim frozen rippling of dunes half a kilometer below. I sat with my feet dangling over the edge, thinking nothing, until the sun’s oblique rays illuminated the dunes in a soft, tempting chiaroscuro of low relief. Twice I shifted my weight as if to jump. When I didn’t, it was not for fear of pain or loss. The pain would be only a bright spark and the loss would be only the army’s. And it would be their ultimate victory over me- having ruled my life for so long, to force an end to it.
That much, I owed to the enemy. MAJOR
MANDELLA 2458-3143 A.D.
What was that old experiment they told us about in high school biology? Take a flatworm and teach it how to swim through a maze. Then mash it up and feed it to a stupid flatworm, and lo! the stupid flatworm would be able to swim the maze, too.
I had a bad taste of major general in my mouth. Actually, I supposed they had refined the techniques since my high school days. With time dilation, that was about 450 years for research and development.
At Stargate, my orders said, I was to undergo “indoctrination and education” prior to taking command of my very own Strike Force. Which was what they still called a company.
For my education on Stargate, they didn’t mince up major generals and serve them to me with hollandaise. They didn’t feed me anything except glucose for three weeks.
Glucose and electricity.
They shaved every hair off my body, gave me a shot that turned me into a dishrag, attached dozens of electrodes to my head and body, immersed me in a tank of oxygenated fluorocarbon, and hooked me up to an ALSC. That’s an “accelerated life situation computer.” It kept me busy.
I guess it took the machine about ten minutes to review
everything I had learned previously about the martial (excuse the expression) arts. Then it started in on the new stuff.
I learned the best way to use every weapon from a rock to a nova bomb. Not just intellectually; that’s what all those electrodes were for. Cybernetically-controlled negative feedback kinesthesia; I felt the weapons in my hands and watched my performance with them. And did it over and over until I did it right. The illusion of reality was total. I used a spear-thrower with a band of Masai warriors on a village raid, and when I looked down at my body it was
long and black. I relearned epee from a cruel-looking man in foppish clothes, in an eighteenth-century French courtyard. I sat quietly in a tree with a Sharps rifle and
sniped at blue-uniformed men as they crawled across a muddy field toward Vicksburg. In three weeks I killed several regiments of electronic ghosts. It seemed more like a year to me, but the ALSC does strange things to your sense of time.
Learning to use useless exotic weapons was only a small part of the training. In fact, it was the relaxing part. Because when I wasn’t in kinesthesia, the machine kept my body totally inert and zapped my brain with four millennia’s worth of military facts and theories. And I couldn’t forget any of it! Not while I was in the tank.
Want to know who Scipio Aemilianus was? I don’t. Bright light of the Third Punic War. War is the province of danger and therefore courage above all things is the first quality of a warrior, von Clausewitz maintained. And I’ll never forget the poetry of “the advance party minus normally moves in a column formation with the platoon headquarters leading, followed by a laser squad, the heavy weapons squad, and the remaining laser squad; the column relies on observation for its flank security except when the terrain and visibility dictate the need for small security detachments to the flanks, in which case the advance party c~ommander will detail one platoon sergeant. . .” and so on.
That’s from Strike Force Command Small Unit Leader’s Handbook, as if you could call something a handbook when it takes up two whole microfiche cards, 2,000 pages.
If you want to become a thoroughly eclectic expert in a subject that repels you, join UNEF and sign up for officer training.
One hundred nineteen people, and I was responsible for 118 of them. Counting myself but not counting the Commodore, who could presumably take care of herself.
I hadn’t met any of my company during the two weeks of physical rehabilitation that followed the ALSC session. Before our first muster I was supposed to report to the Temporal Orientation Officer. I called for an appointment and his clerk said the Colonel would meet me at the Level Six Officers’ Club after dinner.
TABLE OF ORGANIZATION
Strike Force Gamma Sade-138 Campaign
IECHN:
MAJ Mondella
COMM Anwpol 2ECHN:
CAPT Moore
3ECHN:
ILT Hilleboe
4ECHN:
2LT Riland
2LT Rusk
2LT ALvever MD
5ECHN:
2LT Borgstedz
2LT Brill
2LT Gainor
2LT Heimoff 6ECHN:
SSgr Webster
SSgt Gillies
SSgr Abram:
SSgt Dole 7ECHN:
Sgt Dolins
Sgz Bell
Cpl Geller
Cpl Kahn
Sgt Anderson
Cpl Kalvm
Sgt Noyes
Cpl Spraggs
8ECHN:
Pvt Boas
CpJ Weiner
Pvt Lingeman
Pvt IkIe
Pvt Rosevear
Pvt Schon
Pvt Wolfe, R.
Pvt Shubik
Pvt Lin
Pvt Duhl
Pvt Simmons
Pvt Perloff
Pvt Winograd
Pvt Moynihan
Pvt Brown
Pvt Frank
APPROVED STFCOM STARGATE 12 Mar 2458. FOR ThE COMMANDER:
Olga Torischeva BGEN STFCOM I iO
I went down to Six early, thinking to eat dinner there, but they had nothing but snacks. Sol munched on a fungus thing that vaguely resembled escargots and took the rest of my calories in the form of alcohol.
“Major Mandeila?” I’d been busily engaged in my seventh beer and hadn’t seen the Colonel approach. I started to rise but he motioned for me to stay seated and dropped heavily into the chair opposite me.
“I’m in your debt,” he said. “You saved me from at least half of a boring evening.” He offered his hand. “Jack Kynock, at your service.”
“Colonel-”
“Don’t Colonel me and I won’t Major you. We old fossits have to. – – keep our perspective. William.”
“All right with me.”
He ordered a kind of drink I’d never heard of. “Where to start? Last time you were on Earth was 2007, according to the records.”
“That’s right.”
“Didn’t like it much, did you?” “No.” Zombies, happy robots.
“Well, it got better. Then it got worse, thank you.” A private brought his drink, a bubbling concoction that was green at the bottom of the glass and lightened to chartreuse at the top. He sipped. “Then they got better again, then worse, then. . . I don’t know. Cycles.”
“What’s it like now?”
“Well – . – I’m not really sure. Stacks of reports and such, but it’s hard to filter out the propaganda. I haven’t been back in almost two hundred years; it was pretty bad then. Depending on what you like.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, let me see. There was lots of excitement. Ever hear of the Pacifist movement?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Hmn, the name’s deceptive. Actually, it was a war, a guerrilla war.”
“I thought I could give you name, rank and serial number of every war from Troy on up.” He smiled. “They must have missed one.”
“For good reason. It was run by veterans-survivors of Yod-38 and Aleph-40, I hear; they got discharged together and decided they could take on all of UNEF, Earthside. They got lots of support from the population.”
“But didn’t win.”
“We’re still here.” He swirled his drink and the colors shifted. “Actually, all I know is hearsay. Last time I got to Earth, the war was over, except for some sporadic sabotage. And it wasn’t exactly a safe topic of conversation.”
“It surprises me a little,” I said, “well, more than a little. That Earth’s population would do anything at all.. – against the government’s wishes.”
He made a noncommittal sound.
“Least of all, revolution. When we were there, you couldn’t get anybody to say a damned thing against the UNEF-or any of the local governments, for that matter. They were conditioned from ear to ear to accept things as they were.”
“Ah. That’s a cyclic thing, too.” He settled back in his chair. “It’s not a matter of technique. if they wanted to, Earth’s government could have total control over. . . every nontrivial thought and action of each citizen, from cradle to grave.
“They don’t do it because it would be fatal. Because there’s a war on. Take your own case: did you get any motivational conditioning while you were in the can?”
I thought for a moment. “if I did, I wouldn’t necessarily know about it.”
“That’s true. Partially true. But take my word for it, they left that part of your brain alone. Any change in your attitude toward UNEF or the war, or war in general, comes only from new knowledge. Nobody’s fiddled with your basic motivations. And you should know why.”
Names, dates, figures rattled down through the maze of new knowledge. “Tet-17,
“Right. And by extension, your own experience on Aleph-l. Robots don’t make good soldiers.”
“They would,” I said. “Up to the twenty-first century. BehaViOral conditioning would have been the answer to a i to
Joe Ilauleman
general’s dream. Make up an army with all the best features of the SS, the Praetorian Guard, the Golden Horde. Mosby’s Raiders, the Green Berets.”
He laughed over his glass. “Then put that army up against a squad of men in modem fighting suits. It’d be over in a couple of minutes.”
“So long as each man in the squad kept his head about him. And just fought like hell to stay alive.” The generation of soldiers that had precipitated the Lazlo Reports
had been conditioned from birth to conform to somebody’s vision of the ideal fighting man. They worked beautifully as a team, totally bloodthirsty, placing no great importance on personal survival-and the Taurans cut them to ribbons.
The Taurans also fought with no regard for self. But they were better at it, and there were always more of them.
Kynock took a drink and watched the colors. “I’ve seen your psych profile,” he said. “Both before you got here and after your session in the can. It’s essentially the same, before and after.”
“That’s reassuring.” I signaled for another beer. “Maybe it shouldn’t be.”
“What, it says I won’t make a good officer? I told them that from the beginning. I’m no leader.”
“Right in a way, wrong in a way. Want to know what that profile says?” I shrugged. “Classified, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said. “But you’re a major now. You can pull the profile of anybody in your command.”
“I don’t suppose it has any big surprises.” But I was a little curious. What animal isn’t fascinated by a mirror?
“No. It says you’re a pacifist. A failed one at that, which gives you a mild neurosis. Which you handle by transferring the burden of guilt to the army.”
The fresh beer was so cold it hurt my teeth. “No surprises yet.”
“And as far as being a leader, you do have a certain potential. But it would be along the lines of a teacher or a minister; you would have to lead from empathy, compassion. You have the desire to impose your ideas on other people, but not your will. Which means, you’re right, you’ll make one hell of a bad officer unless you shape up.”
I had to laugh. “UNEF must have known all of this when they ordered me to officer training.”
“There are other parameters,” he said. “For instance, you’re adaptable, reasonably intelligent, analytical. And you’re one of the eleven people who’s lived through the whole war.”
“Surviving is a virtue in a private.” Couldn’t resist it. “But an officer should provide gallant example. Go down with the ship. Stride the parapet as if unafraid.”
He harrumphed at that. “Not when you’re a thousand light years from your replacement.”
“It doesn’t add up, though. Why would they haul me all the way from Heaven to take a chance on my ‘shaping up,’ when probably a third of the people here on Stargate are better officer material? God, the military mind!”
“I suspect the bureaucratic mind, at least, had something to do with it. You have an embarrassing amount of seniority to be a footsoldier.”
“That’s all time dilation. I’ve only been in three campaigns.”
“Immaterial. Besides, that’s two-and-a-half more than the average soldier survives. The propaganda boys will probably make you into some kind of a folk hero.”
“Folk hero.” I sipped at the beer. “Where is John Wayne now that we really need him?”
“John Wayne?” He shook his head. “I never went in the can, you know. I’m no expert at military history.”
“Forget it.”
Kynock finished his drink and asked the private to get him-I swear to God-a “rum Antares.”
“Well, I’m supposed to be your Temporal Orientation Officer. What do you want to know about the present? What passes for the present.”
Still on my mind: “You’ve never been in the can?”
“No, combat officers only. The computer facilities and energy you go through in three weeks would keep the Earth running for several days. Too expensive for us deskwarmers.”
“Your decorations say you’re combat.”
“Honorary. I was.” The rum Antares was a tall slender glass with a little ice floating at the top, filled with pale amber liquid. At the bottom was a bright red globule about the size of a thumbnail; crimson filaments waved up from it.
“What’s that red stuff?”
“Cinnamon. Oh, some ester with cinnamon in it. Quite good. . . want a taste?” “No, I’ll stick to beer, thanks.”
“Down at level one, the library machine has a temporal orientation file, that my staff updates every day. You can go to it for specific questions. Mainly I want to.. . prepare you for meeting your Strike Force.”
“What, they’re all cyborgs? Clones?”
He laughed. “No, it’s illegal to clone humans. The main problem is with, uh, you’re heterosexual.”
“Oh, that’s no problem. I’m tolerant.”
“Yes, your profile shows that you.. . think you’re tolerant, but that’s not the problem, exactly.”
“Oh,” I knew what he was going to say. Not the details, but the substance. “Only emotionally stable people are drafted into UNEF.
I know this is hard for you to accept, but heterosexuality is considered an emotional dysfunction. Relatively easy to cure.”
“If they think they’re going to cure me-”
“Relax, you’re too old.” He took a delicate sip. “It won’t be as hard to get along with them as you might-”
“Wait. You mean nobody.. . everybody in my company is homosexual? But me?” “William, everybody on Earth is homosexual. Except for a thousand or so;
veterans and incurables.”
“AK” What could I say? “Seems like a drastic way to solve the population problem.”
“Perhaps. It does work, though; Earth’s population is stable at just under a billion. When one person dies or goes offplanet, another is quickened.”
“Not ‘born.'”
“Born, yes, but not the old-fashioned way. Your old term for it was ‘test-tube babies,’ but of course they don’t use a test-tube.” “Well, that’s something.”
“Part of every creche is an artificial womb that takes care of a person the first eight or ten months after quickening. What you would call birth takes place over a period of days; it isn’t the sudden, drastic event that it used to be.”
O brave new world, I thought. “No birth trauma. A billion perfectly adjusted homosexuals.”
“Perfectly adjusted by present-day Earth standards. You and I might find them a little odd.”
“That’s an understatement.” I drank off the rest of my beer. “Yourself, you, uh.. . are you homosexual?”
“Oh, no,” he said. I relaxed. “Actually, though, I’m not hetero anymore, either.” He slapped his hip and it made an odd sound. “Got wounded and it turned out that I had a rare disorder of the lymphatic system, can’t regenerate. Nothing but metal and plastic from the waist down. To use your word, I’m a cyborg.”
Far out, as my mother used to say. “Oh, Private,” I called to the waiter, “bring me one of those Antares things.” Sitting here in a bar with an asexual cyborg who is probably the only other normal person on the whole goddamned planet.
“Make it a double, please.”
They looked normal enough, filing into the lecture hail where we held our first muster, the next day. Rather young and a little stiff.
Most of them had only been out of the creche for seven or eight years. The creche was a controlled, isolated environment to which only a few specialists-pediatricians and teachers, mostly-had access. When a person leaves the creche at age twelve or thirteen, he chooses a first name (his last name having been taken from the donor- parent with the higher genetic rating) and is legally a probationary adult, with schooling about equivalent to what I had after my first year of college. Most of them go on to more specialized education, but some are assigned a job and go right to work.
They’re observed very closely and anyone who shows any signs of sociopathy, such as heterosexual leanings, is sent away to a correctional facility. He’s either cured or kept there for the rest of his life.
Everyone is drafted into UNEF at the age of twenty. Most people work at a desk for five years and are discharged. A few lucky souls, about one in eight thousand, are invited to volunteer for combat training. Refusing is “sociopathic,” even though it means signing up for an extra five years. And your chance of surviving the ten years is so small as to be negligible; nobody ever had. Your best chance is to have the war end before your ten (subjective) years of service are up. Hope that time dilation puts many years between each of your battles.
Since you can figure on going into battle roughly once every subjective year, and since an average of 34 percent survive each battle, it’s easy to compute your chances of being able to fight it out for ten years. It comes to about ~wo one-thousandths of one percent. Or, to put it another way, get an old-fashioned six-shooter and play Russian Roulette with four of the six chambers loaded. If you can do it ten times in a row without decorating the opposite wall, congratulations! You’re a civilian.
There being some sixty thousand combat soldiers in UNEF, you could expect about 1.2 of them to survive for ten years. I didn’t seriously plan on being the lucky one, even though I was halfway there.
How many of these young soldiers filing into the auditorium knew they were doomed? I tried to match faces up with the dossiers I’d been scanning all morning, but it was hard. They’d all been selected through the same battery of stringent parameters, and they looked remarkably alike: tall but not too tall, muscular but not heavy, intelligent but not in a brooding way. . . and Earth was much more racially homogenous than it had been in my century. Most of them looked vaguely Polynesian. Only two of them, Kayibanda and Lin, seemed pure representatives of racial types. I wondered whether the others gave them a hard time.
Most of the women were achingly handsome, but I was in no position to be critical. I’d been celibate for over a year, ever since saying goodbye to Marygay, back on Heaven.
I wondered if one of them might have a trace of atavism, or might humor her commander’s eccentricity. It is absolately forbidden for an officer to form sexual liaison with his subordinates. Such a warm way of putting it. Violation of this regulation is punishable by attachment of all funds and reduction to the rank of private or, ~f the relationship iiue~feres with a unit’s combat efficiency, summary execution. If all of UNEF’s regulations could be broken SO Casually and consistently as that one was, it would be a very easygoing army.
But not one of the boys appealed to me. How they’d look after another year, I wasn’t sure.
“Tench-hut!” That was Lieutenant Hilleboe. It was a credit to my new reflexes that I didn’t jump to my feet. Everybody in the auditorium snapped to.
“My name is Lieutenant Hilleboe and I am your Second Field Officer.” That used to be “Field First Sergeant.” A good sign that an anny has been around too long is that it starts getting top-heavy with officers.
Hilleboe came on like a real hard-ass professional soldier. Probably shouted orders at the mirror every morning, while she was shaving. But I’d seen her profile and knew that she’d only been in action once, and only for a couple of minutes at that. Lost an arm and a leg and was commissioned, same as me, as a result of the tests they give at the regeneration clinic.
Hell, maybe she had been a very pleasant person before going through that trauma; it was bad enough just having one limb regrown.
She was giving them the usual first-sergeant peptalk, stern-but-fair: don’t waste my time with little things, use the chain of command, most problems can be solved at the fifth echelon.
It made me wish I’d had more time to talk with her earlier. Strike Force Command had really rushed us into this first muster-we were scheduled to board ship the next day-and I’d only had a few words with my officers.
Not enough, because it was becoming clear that Hilleboe and I had rather disparate philosophies about how to run a company. It was true that running it was her job; I only commanded. But she was setting up a potential “good guy-bad guy” situation, using the chain of command to so isolate herself from the men and women under her. I had planned not to be quite so aloof, setting aside an hour every other day when any soldier could come to me directly with grievances or suggestions, without permission from his superiors.
We had both been given the same information during our three weeks in the can. It was interesting that we’d arrived at such different conclusions about leadership. This Open Door policy, for instance, had shown good results in “modern” armies in Australia and America. And it seemed especially appropriate to our situation, in which everybody would be cooped up for months or even years at a time. We’d used the system on the Sangre y Victoria, the last starship to which I’d been attached, and it had seemed to keep tensions down.
She had them at ease while delivering this organizational harangue; pretty soon she’d call them to attention and introduce me. What would I talk about? I’d planned just to say a few predictable words and explain my Open Door policy, then turn them over to Commodore Antopol, who would say something about the Masaryk II. But I’d better put off my explanation until after I’d had a long talk with Hilleboe; in fact, it would be best if she were the one to introduce the policy to the men and women, so it wouldn’t look like the two of us were at loggerheads.
My executive officer, Captain Moore, saved me. He came rushing through a side door-he was always rushing, a pudgy meteor-threw a quick salute and handed me an envelope that contained our combat orders. I had a quick whispered conference with the Commodore, and she agreed that it wouldn’t do any harm to tell them where we were going, even though the rank and file technically didn’t have the “need to know.” One thing we didn’t have to worry about in this war was enemy agents. With a good coat of paint, a Tauran might be able to disguise himself as an ambulatory mushroom. Bound to raise suspicions.
Hilleboe had called them to attention and was dutifully telling them what a good commander I was going to be; that I’d been in the war from the beginning, and if they intended to survive through their enlistment they had better follow my example. She didn’t mention that I was a mediocre soldier with a talent for getting missed. Nor that I’d resigned from the army at the earliest opportunity and only got back in because conditions on Earth were so intolerable.
“Thank you, Lieutenant.” I took her place at the podium. “At ease.” I unfolded the single sheet that had our orders, and held it up. “I have some good news and some bad news.” What had been a joke five centuries before was now just a statement of fact.
“These are our combat orders for the Sade-138 campaign. The good news is that we probably won’t be fighting, not immediately. The bad news is that we’re going to be a target.”
They stirred a little bit at that, but nobody said anything Ion
or took his eyes off me. Good discipline. Or maybe just fatalism; I didn’t know how realistic a picture they had of their future. Their lack of a future, that is.
“What we are ordered to do.. . is to find the largest portal planet orbiting the Sade- 138 collapsar and build a base there. Then stay at the base until we are relieved. That will be two or three years, probably.
“During that time we will almost certainly be attacked. As most of you probably know, Strike Force Command has uncovered a pattern in the enemy’s movements from collapsar to collapsar. They hope eventually to trace this complex pattern back through tune and space and find the Taurans’ home planet. For the present, they can only send out intercepting forces, to hamper the enemy’s expansion.
“In a large perspective, this is what we’re ordered to do. We’ll be one of several dozen strike forces employed in these blocking maneuvers, on the enemy’s frontier. I won’t be able to stress often enough or hard enough how important this mission is-if UNEF can keep the enemy from expanding, we may be able to envelop him. And win the war.”
Preferably before we’re all dead meat. “One thing I want to be clear we may be attacked the day we land, or we may simply occupy the planet for ten years and come on home.” Fat chance. “Whatever happens, every one of us will stay in the best fighting trim all the time. In transit, we will maintain a regular program of calisthenics as well as a review of our training. Especially construction techniques- we have to set up the base and its defense facilities in the shortest possible time.”
God, I was beginning to sound like an officer. “Any questions?” There were none. “Then I’d like to introduce Commodore Antopol. Commodore?”
The commodore didn’t try to hide her boredom as she outlined, to this room full of ground-pounders, the characteristics and capabilities of Masaryk Ii. I had learned most of what she was saying through the can’s forcefeeding, but the last thing she said caught my attention.
“Sade-138 will be the most distant collapsar men have gone to. It isn’t even in the galaxy proper, hut rather is part
of the Large Magellanic Cloud, some 150,000 light years distant.
“Our voyage will require four collapsar jumps and will last some four months, subjective. Maneuvering into collapsar insertion will put us about three hundred years behind Stargate’s calendar by the time we reach Sade-138.”
And another seven hundred years gone, if I lived to return. Not that it would make that much difference; Marygay was as good as dead and there wasn’t another person alive who meant anything to me.
“As the major said, you mustn’t let these figures lull you into complacency. The enemy is also headed for Sade-138; we may all get there the same day. The mathematics of the situation is complicated, but take our word for it; it’s going to be a close race.
“Major, do you have anything more for them?” I started to rise. “Well. . .”
“Tench-hut!” Hilleboe shouted. Had to learn to expect that
“Only that I’d like to meet with my senior officers, echelon 4 and above, for a few minutes. Platoon sergeants, you’re responsible for getting your troops to Staging Area 67 at 0400 tomorrow morning. Your time’s your own until then. Dismissed.”
I invited the five officers up to my billet and brought out a bottle of real French brandy. It had cost two months’ pay, but what else could I do with the money? Invest it?
I passed around glasses but Alsever, the doctor, demurred. Instead she broke a little capsule under her nose and inhaled deeply. Then tried without too much success to mask her euphoric expression.
“First let’s get down to one basic personnel problem,” I said, pouring. “Do all of you know that I’m not homosexual?”
Mixed chorus of yes sirs and no sirs.
“Do you think this is going to. . . complicate my situation as commander? As far as the rank and tile?”
“Sir, I don’t-” Moore began.
“No need for honorifics,” I said, “not in this closed 100
joe naiueman
circle; I was a private four years ago, in my own time frame. When there aren’t any troops around, I’m just Man-della, or William.” I had a feeling that was a mistake even as I was saying it. “Go on.”
“Well, William,” he continued, “it might have been a problem a hundred years ago. You know how people felt then.”
“Actually, I don’t. All I know about the period from the twenty-first century to the present is military history.”
“Oh. Well, it was, uh, it was, how to say it?” His hands fluttered.
“It was a crime,” Alsever said laconically. “That was when the Eugenics Council was first getting people used to the idea of universal homosex.”
“Eugenics Council?”
“Part of UNEF. Only has authority on Earth.” She took a deep sniff at the empty capsule. “The idea was to keep people from making babies the biological way. Because, A, people showed a regrettable lack of sense in choosing their genetic partner. And B, the Council saw that racial differences had an unnecessarily divisive effect on humanity; with total control over births, they could make everybody the same race in a few generations.”
I didn’t know they had gone quite that far. But I suppose it was logical. “You approve? As a doctor.”
“As a doctor? I’m not sure.” She took another capsule from her pocket and rolled it between thumb and forefinger, staring at nothing. Or something the rest of us couldn’t see.
“In a way, it makes my job simpler. A lot of diseases simply no longer exist. But I don’t think they know as much about genetics as they think they do. It’s not an exact science; they could be doing something very wrong, and the results wouldn’t show up for centuries.”
She cracked the capsule under her nose and took two deep breaths. “As a woman, though, I’m all in favor of it.” Hilleboe and Rusk nodded vigorously.
“Not having to go through childbirth?”
“That’s part of it.” She crossed her eyes comically, looking at the capsule, gave it a final sniff. “Mostly,
though, it’s not.. . having to. . . have a man. Inside me. You understand. It’s disgusting.”
Moore laughed. “If you haven’t tried it, Diana, don’t-”
“Oh, shut up.” She threw the empty capsule at him playfully. “But it’s perfectly natural,” I protested.
“So is swinging through trees. Digging for roots with a blunt stick. Progress, my good major, progress.”
“Anyway,” Moore said, “it was only a crime for a short period. Then it was considered a, oh, curable.. .”
“Dysfunction,” Alsever said.
“Thank you. And now, well, it’s so rare. .. I doubt that any of the men and women have any strong feelings about it, one way or the other.”
“Just an eccentricity,” Diana said, magnanimously. “Not as if you ate babies.” “That’s right, Mandella,” Hilleboe said. “I don’t feel any differently toward you
because of it.”
“I-I’m glad.” That was just great. It was dawning on me that I had not the slightest idea of how to conduct myself socially. So much of my “normal” behavior was based
on a complex unspoken code of sexual etiquette. Was I suppose to treat the men like women, and vice versa? Or treat everybody like brothers and sisters? It was all very confusing.
I finished off my glass and set it down. “Well, thanks for your reassurances. That was mainly what I wanted to ask you about. . . I’m sure you all have things to do, goodbyes and such. Don’t let me hold you prisoner.”
They all wandered off except for Charlie Moore. He and
I decided to go on a monumental binge, trying to hit every bar and officer’s club in the sector. We managed twelve and probably could have hit them all, but I decided to get a few hours’ sleep before the next day’s muster.
The one time Charlie made a pass at me, he was very polite about it. I hoped my refusal was also polite-but figured I’d be getting lots of practice.
3
UNEF’s first starships had been possessed of a kind of spidery, delicate beauty. But with various technological improvements, structural strength became more important than conserving mass (one of the old ships would have folded up like an accordion if you’d tried a twenty-five-gee maneuver), and that was reflected in the design: stolid, heavy, functional-looking. The only decoration was the name MASARYK ii, stenciled in dull blue letters across the.
obsidian hull.
Our shuttle drifted over the name on its way to the loading bay, and there was a crew of tiny men and women doing maintenance on the hull. With them as a reference, we could see that the letters were a good hundred meters tall. The ship was over a kilometer long (1036.5 meters, my latent memory said), and about a third that wide (319.4 meters).
That didn’t mean there was going to be plenty of elbowroom. In its belly, the ship held six large tachyondrive fighters and fifty robot drones. The infantry was tucked off in a corner. War is the province of friction, Chuck von Clausewitz said; I had a feeling we were going to put him to the test.
We had about six hours before going into the acceleration tank. I dropped my kit in the tiny billet that would be my home for the next twenty months and went off to explore.
Charlie had beaten me to the lounge and to the privilege of being first to evaluate the quality of Masaryk if’s coffee.
“Rhinoceros bile,” he said.
“At least it isn’t soya,” I said, taking a first cautious sip. Decided I might be longing for soya in a week.
The officers’ lounge was a cubicle about three meters by four, metal floor and walls, with a coffee machine and a
library readout. Six hard chairs and a table with a typer on it.
“Jolly place, isn’t it?” He idly punched up a general index on the library machine. “Lots of military theory.”
“That’s good. Refresh our memories.” “Sign up for officer training?”
“Me? No. Orders.”
“At least you have an excuse.” He slapped the on-off button and watched the green spot dwindle. “I signed up. They didn’t tell me it’d feel like this.”
“Yeah.” He wasn’t talking about any subtle problem:
burden of responsibility or anything. “They say it wears off, a little at a time.” All of that information they force into you; a constant silent whispering.
“Ah, there you are.” Hileboe came through the door and exchanged greetings with us. She gave the room a quick survey, and it was obvious that the Spartan arrangements met with her approval. “Will you be wanting to address the company before we go into the acceleration tanks?”
“No, I don’t see why that would be. . . necessary.” I almost said “desirable.” The art of chastising subordinates is a delicate art. I could see that I’d have to keep reminding Hilleboe that she wasn’t in charge.
Or I could just switch insignia with her. Let her experience the joys of command. “You could, please, round up all platoon leaders and go over the immersion
sequence with them. Eventually we’ll be doing speed drills. But for now, I think the troops could use a few hours’ rest.” If they were as hungover as their commander.
“Yes, sir.” She turned and left. A little miffed, because what I’d asked her to do should properly have been a job for Riland or Rusk.
Charlie eased his pudgy self into one of the hard chairs and sighed. “Twenty months on this greasy machine. With her. Shit.”
“Well, if you’re nice to me, I won’t billet the two of you together.” “All right. I’m your slave forever. Starting, oh, next Fri
day.” He peered into his cup and decided against drinking the dregs. “Seriously, she’s going to be a problem. What are you going to do with her?”
“I don’t know.” Charlie was being insubordinate, too, of course. But he was my XO and out of the chain of command. Besides, I had to have one friend. “Maybe she’ll mellow, once we’re under weigh.”
“Sure.” Technically, we were already under weigh, crawling toward the Stargate collapsar at one gee. But that was only for the convenience of the crew; it’s hard to batten down the hatches in free fall. The trip wouldn’t really start until we were in the tanks.
The lounge was too depressing, so Charlie and I used the remaining hours of mobility to explore the ship.
The bridge looked like any other computer facility; they had dispensed with the luxury of viewscreens. We stood at a respectful distance while Antopol and her officers went through a last series of checks before climbing into the tanks and leaving our destiny to the machines.
Actually, there was a porthole, a thick plastic bubble, in the navigation room forward. Lieutenant Williams wasn’t busy, the pre-insertion part of his job being fully automated, so he was glad to show us around.
He tapped the porthole with a fingernail. “Hope we don’t have to use this, this trip.”
“How so?” Charlie said.
“We only use it if we get lost” If the insertion angle was off by a thousandth of a radian, we were liable to wind up on the other side of the galaxy. “We can get a rough idea of our position by analyzing the spectra of the brightest stars. Thumbprints. Identify three and we can triangulate.”
“Then find the nearest collapsar and get back on the rack,” I said.
“That’s the problem. Sade-l38 is the only collapsar we know of in the Magellanic Clouds. We know of it only because of captured enemy data. Even if we could find another collapsar, assuming we got lost in the cloud, we wouldn’t know how to insert.”
“That’s great.”
“It’s not as though we’d be actually lost,” he said with I’HI~ FOREVER WAR
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a rather wicked expression. “We could zip up in the tanks, aim for Earth and blast away at full power. We’d get there in about three months, ship time.”
“Sure,” I said. “But 150,000 years in the future.” At twenty-five gees, you get to nine-tenths the speed of light in less than a month. From then on, you’re in the arms of Saint Albert.
“Well, that is a drawback,” he said. “But at least we’d find out who’d won the war.” It made you wonder how many soldiers had gotten out of the war in just that way. There were forty-two strike forces lost somewhere and unaccounted for. It was possible that all of them were crawling through normal space at near-lightspeed and
would show up at Earth or Stargate one-by-one over the centuries.
A convenient way to go AWOL, since once you were out of the chain of collapsar jumps you’d be practically impossible to track down. Unfortunately, your jump sequence was pre-programmed by Strike Force Command; the human navigator only came into the picture if a miscalculation slipped you into the wrong “wormhole,” and you popped out in some random part of space.
Charlie and I went on to inspect the gym, which was big enough for about a dozen people at a time. I asked him to make up a roster so that everyone could work out for an hour each day when we were out of the tanks.
The mess area was only a little larger than the gym- even with four staggered shifts, the meals would be shoulder-to-shoulder affairs-and the enlisted men and women’s lounge was even more depressing than the officers’. I was going to have a real morale problem on my hands long before the twenty months were up.
The armorer’s bay was as large as the gym, mess hail and both lounges put together. It had to be, because of the great variety of infantry weapons that had evolved over the centuries. The basic weapon was still the fighting suit, though it was much more sophisticated than that first model I had been squeezed into, just before the Aleph-Null campaign.
Lieutenant Riland, the armory officer, was supervising
his four subordinates, one from each platoon, who were doing a last-minute check of weapons storage. Probably the most important job on the whole ship, when you contemplate what could happen to all those tons of explosives and radioactives under twenty-five gees.
I returned his perfunctory salute. “Everything going all right, Lieutenant?”
“Yessir, except for those damned swords.” For use in the stasis field. “No way we can orient them that they won’t be bent. Just hope they don’t break.”
I couldn’t begin to understand the principles behind the stasis field; the gap between present-day physics and my master’s degree in the same subject was as long as the time that separated Galileo and Einstein. But I knew the effects.
Nothing could move at greater than 16.3 meters per second inside the field, which was a hemispherical (in space, spherical) volume about fifty meters in radius. Inside, there was no such thing as electromagnetic radiation; no electricity, no magnetism, no light. From inside your suit, you could see your surroundings in ghostly monochrome- which phenomenon was glibly explained to me as being due to “phase transference of quasi-energy leaking through from an adjacent tachyon reality,” so much phlogiston to me.
The result of it, though, was to make all conventional weapons of warfare useless. Even a nova bomb was just an inert lump inside the field. And any creature, Terran or Tauran, caught inside the field without the proper insulation would die in a fraction of a second.
At first it looked as though we had come upon the ultimate weapon. There were five engagements where whole Tauran bases were wiped out without any human ground casualties. All you had to do was carry the field to the enemy (four husky soldiers could handle it in Earth-gravity) and watch them die as they slipped in through the field’s opaque wall. The people carrying the generator were invulnerable except for the short periods when they might have to turn the thing off to get their bearings.
The sixth time the field was used, though, the Taurans were ready for it. They wore protective suits and were armed with sharp spears, with which they could breach the
suits of the generator-carriers. From then on the carriers were armed.
Only three other such battles had been reported, although a dozen strike forces had gone out with the stasis field. The others were still fighting, or still en route, or had been totally defeated. There was no way to tell unless they caine back. And they weren’t encouraged to come back if Taurans were still in control of “their” real estate-supposedly that constituted “desertion under fire,” which meant execution for all officers (although rumor had it that they were simply brainwiped, imprinted and sent back into the fray).
“Will we be using the stasis field, sir?” Riland asked.
“Probably. Not at first, not unless the Taurans are already there. I don’t relish the thought of living in a suit, day in and day out.” Neither did I relish the thought of using sword, spear, throwing knife; no matter how many electronic illusions I’d sent to Valhalla with them.
Checked my watch. “Well, we’d better get on down to the tanks, Captain. Make sure everything’s squared away.” We had about two hours before the insertion sequence would start.
The room the tanks were in resembled a huge chemical factory; the floor was a good hundred meters in diameter and jammed with bulky apparatus painted a uniform, dull gray. The eight tanks were arranged almost symmetrically around the central elevator, the symmetry spoiled by the fact that one of the tanks was twice the size of the others. That would be the command tank, for all the senior officers and supporting specialists.
Sergeant Blazynski stepped out from behind one of the tanks and saluted. I didn’t return his salute.
“What the hell is that?” In all that universe of gray, there was one spot of color. “It’s a cat, sir.”
“Do tell.” A big one, too, and bright calico. It looked ridiculous, draped over the sergeant’s shoulder. “Let me rephrase the question: what the hell is a cat doing here?”
“It’s the maintenance squad’s mascot, sir.” The cat raised its head enough to hiss half-heartedly at me, then returned to its flaccid repose.
I looked at Charlie and he shrugged back. “It seems kiAd of cruel,” he said. To the sergeant: “You won’t get much use of it. After twenty-five gees, it’ll be just so much fur and guts.”
“Oh no, sir! Sirs.” He ruffed back the fur between the
creature’s shoulders. It had a fluorocarbon fitting imbedded there, just like the one above my hipbone. “We bought it at a store on Stargate, already modified. Lots of ships have them now, sir. The Commodore signed the forms for us.”
Well, that was her right; maintenance was under both of us equally. And it was her ship. “You couldn’t have gotten a dog?” God, I hated cats. Always sneaking around.
“No, sir, they don’t adapt. Can’t take free fall.”
“Did you have to make any special adaptations? In the tank?” Charlie asked.
“No sir. We had an extra couch.” Great; that meant I’d be sharing a tank with the animal. “We only had to shorten the straps.
“It takes a different kind of drug for the cell-wall strengthening, but that was included in the price.”
Charlie scratched it behind an ear. It purred softly but didn’t move. “Seems kind of stupid. The animal, I mean.”
“We drugged him ahead of time.” No wonder it was so inert; the drug slows your metabolism down to a rate barely adequate to sustain life. “Makes it easier to strap him in.”
“Guess it’s all right,” I said. Maybe good for morale. “But if it starts getting in the way, I’ll personally recycle it.”
“Yes, sir!” he said, visibly relieved, thinking that I couldn’t really do anything like that to such a cute bundle of fur. Try me, buddy.
So we had seen it all. The only thing left, this side of
the engines, was the huge hold where the fighters and drones waited, clamped in their massive cradles against the coming acceleration. Charlie and I went down to take a look, but there were no windows on our side of the airlock. I knew there’d be one on the inside, but the chamber was evacuated, and it wasn’t worth going through the fill-andwarm cycle merely to satisfy our curiosity.
I was starting to feel really supernumerary. Called Hil THE FOREVER WAR
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leboe and she said everything was under control. With an
hour to kill, we went back to the lounge and had the computer mediate a game of Kriegspieler, which was just starting to get interesting when the ten-minute warning sounded.
The acceleration tanks had a “half-life-to-failure” of five weeks; there was a fifty- fifty chance that you could stay immersed for five weeks before some valve or tube popped and you were squashed like a bug underfoot. In practice, it had to be one hell of an emergency to justify using the tanks for more than two weeks’ acceleration. We were only going under for ten days, this first leg of our journey.
Five weeks or five hours, though, it was all the same as far as the tankee was concerned. Once the pressure got up to an operational level, you had no sense of the passage of time. Your body and brain were concrete. None of your senses provided any input, and you could amuse yourself for several hours just trying to spell your own name.
So I wasn’t really surprised that no time seemed to have passed when I was suddenly dry, my body tingling with the return of sensation. The place sounded like an asthmatics’ convention in the middle of a hay field: thirty-nine people and one cat all coughing and sneezing to get rid of the last residues of fluorocarbon. While I was fumbling with my straps, the side door opened, flooding the tank with painfully bright light. The cat was the first one out, with a general scramble right behind him. For the sake of dignity, I waited until last.
Over a hundred people were milling around outside, stretching and massaging out cramps. Dignity! Surrounded by acres of young female flesh, I stared into their faces and desperately tried to solve a third-order differential equation
in my head, to circumvent the gallant reflex. A temporary expedient, but it got me to the elevator.
Hilleboe was shouting orders, getting people lined up, and as the doors closed I noticed that all of one platoon had a uniform light bruise, from head to foot. Twenty pairs of black eyes. I’d have to see both Maintenance and Medical about that.
After I got dressed. 4
We stayed at one gee for three weeks, with occasional pariods of free fall for navigation check, while the Masaiyk 11 made a long, narrow loop away from the collapsar Resh10, and back again. That period went all right, the people adjusting pretty well to ship routine. I gave them a minimum of busy-work and a maximum of training review and exercise-for their own good, though I wasn’t naive enough to think they’d see it that way.
After about a week of one gee, Private Rudkoski (the cook’s assistant) had a still, producing some eight liters a day of 95 percent ethyl alcohol. I didn’t want to stop him- life was cheerless enough; I didn’t mind as long as people showed up for duty sober-but I was damned curious both how he managed to divert the raw materials out of our sealed-tight ecology, and how the people paid for their booze. So I used the chain of conunand in reverse, asking Alsever to find out. She asked Jarvil, who asked Carreras, who sat down with Orban, the cook. Turned out that Sergeant Orban had set the whole thing up, letting Rudkoski do the dirty work, and was aching to brag about it to a trustworthy person.
If I had ever taken meals with the enlisted men and women, I might have figured out that something odd was going on. But the scheme didn’t extend up to officers’ country.
Through Rudkoski, Orban had juryrigged a ship-wide economy based on alcohol. It went like this:
Each meal was prepared with one very sugary dessert- jelly, custard or flan-which you were free to eat if you could stand the cloying taste. But if it was still on your tray when you presented it at the recycling window, Rudkoski would give you a Len-cent
chit and scrape the sugary stuff into a fermentation vat. He had two twenty-liter vats, one
“working” while the other was being filled.
The ten-cent chit was at the bottom of a system that allowed you to buy a half-liter of straight ethyl (with your choice of flavoring) for five dollars. A squad of five people who skipped all of their desserts could buy about a liter a week, enough for a party but not enough to constitute a public health problem.
When Diana brought me this information, she also brought a bottle of Rudkoski’s Worst-literally; it was a flavor that just hadn’t worked. It came up through the chain of command with only a few centimeters missing.
Its taste was a ghastly combination of strawberry and caraway seed. With a perversity not uncommon to people who rarely drink, Diana loved it. I had some ice water brought up, and she got totally blasted within an hour. For myself, I made one drink and didn’t finish it.
When she was more than halfway to oblivion, mumbling a reassuring soliloquy to her liver, she suddenly tilted her head up to stare at me with childlike directness.
“You have a real problem, Major William.”
“Not half the problem you’ll have in the morning, Lieutenant Doctor Diana.”
“Oh not really.” She waved a drunken hand in front of her face. “Some vitamins, some glu. . . cose, an eensy cc of adren. . . aline if all else fails. You.. . you. . . have… a real.. . problem.”
“Look, Diana, don’t you want me to-”
“What you need.. . is to get an appointment with that nice Corporal Valdez.” Valdez was the male sex counselor. “He has empathy. Itsiz job. He’d make you-”
“We talked about this before, remember? I want to stay the way I am.”
“Don’t we all.” She wiped away a tear that was probably one percent alcohol. “You know they call you the Old C’reer. No they don’t.”
She looked at the floor and then at the wall. “The 01′ Queer, that’s what.”
I had expected names worse than that. But not so soon. “I don’t care. The commander always gets names.”
“I know but.” She stood up suddenly and wobbled a “U’.,
little bit. “Too much t’ drink. Lie down.” She turned her back to me and stretched so hard that a joint popped. Then a seam whispered open and she shrugged off her tunic, stepped out of it and tiptoed to my bed. She sat down and patted the mattress. “Come on, William. Only chance.”
“For Christ’s sake, Diana. It wouldn’t be fair.”
“All’s fair,” she giggled. “And ‘sides, I’m a doctor. I can be cin’cal; won’t bother me a bit. Help me with this.” After five hundred years, they were still putting brassiere clasps in the back.
One kind of gentleman would have helped her get undressed and then made a quiet exit. Another kind of gentleman might have bolted for the door. Being neither kind, I closed in for the kill.
Perhaps fortunately, she passed out before we had made any headway. I admired the sight and touch of her for a long time before, feeling like a cad, I managed to gather everything up and dress her.
I lifted her out of the bed, sweet burden, and then realized that if anyone saw me canying her down to her billet, she’d be the butt of rumors for the rest of the campaign. I called up Charlie, told him we’d had some booze and Diana was rather the worse for it, and asked him whether he’d come up for a drink and help me haul the good doctor home.
By the time Charlie knocked, she was draped innocently in a chair, snoring softly.
He smiled at her. “Physician, heal thyself.” I off~red him the bottle, with a warning. He sniffed it and made a face.
“What is this, varnish?”
“Just something the cooks whipped up. Vacuum still.”
He set it down carefully, as if it might explode if jarred. “I predict a coming shortage of customers. Epidemic of death by poisoning-she actually drank that vile stuff?”
“Well, the cooks admitted it was an experiment that didn’t pan out; their other flavors are evidently potable. Yeah, she loved it.”
“Well. . .” He laughed. “Damn! What, you take her legs and I take her arms?” THE FOREVER WAR
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“No, look, we each take an arm. Maybe we can get her to do part of the walking.” She moaned a little when we lifted her out of the chair, opened one eye and said,
“Hello, Charlee.” Then she closed the eye and let us drag her down to the billet. No one saw us on the way, but her bunkmate, Laasonen, was sitting up reading.
“She really drank the stuff, eh?” She regarded her friend with wry affection. “Here, let me help.”
The three of us wrestled her into bed. Laasonen smoothed the hair Out of her eyes. “She said it was in the nature of an experiment.”
“More devotion to science than I have,” Charlie said. “A stronger stomach, too.” We all wished he hadn’t said that.
Diana sheepishly admitted that she hadn’t remembered anything after the first drink, and talking to her, I deduced that she thought Charlie had been there all along. Which was all for the best, of course. But oh! Diana, my lovely latent heterosexual, let me buy you a bottle of good scotch the next time we come into port. Seven hundred years from now.
We got back into the tanks for the hop from Resh-lO to Kaph-35. That was two weeks at twenty-five gees; then we had another four weeks of routine at one gravity.
I had announced my open door policy, but practically no one ever took advantage of it. I saw very little of the troops and those occasions were almost always negative: testing them on their training review, handing out reprimands, and occasionally lecturing classes. And they rarely spoke intelligibly, except in response to a direct question.
Most of them either had English as their native tongue or as a second language, but it had changed so drastically over 450 years that I could barely understand it, not at all if it was spoken rapidly. Fortunately, they had all been taught early twenty-first century English during their basic training; that language, or dialect, served as a temporal un -gua franca through which a twenty-fifth century soldier could communicate with someone who had been a contemporary of his nineteen-times-great-grandparents. lf there had still been such a thing as grandparents.
I thought of my first combat commander, Captain Stott- whom I had hated just as cordially as the rest of the company did-and tried to imagine how I would have felt if he had been a sexual deviate and I’d been forced to learn a new language for his convenience.
So we had discipline problems, sure. But the wonder was that we had any discipline at all. Hilleboe was responsible for that; as little as I liked her personally, I had to give her credit for keeping the troops in line.
Most of the shipboard graffiti concerned improbable sexual geometries between the Second Field Officer and her commander.
From Kapb-35 we jumped to Samk-78, from there to Ayin-129 and finally to Sade-
138. Most of the jumps were no more than a few hundred light years, but the last one was 140,000-supposedly the longest collapsar jump ever made by a manned craf
The time spent scooting down the wormhole from one collapsar to the next was always the same, independent of the distance. When I’d studied physics, they thought the duration of a collapsar jump was exactly zero. But a couple of centuries later, they did a complicated wave-guide experiment that proved the jump actually lasted some small fraction of a nanosecond. Doesn’t seem like much, but they’d had to rebuild physics from the foundation up when the collapsar jump was first discovered; they had to rear the whole damned thing down again when they found out it took time to get from A to B. Physicists were still arguing about it.
But we had more pressing problems as we flashed out of Sade-1 38’s collapsar field at three-quarters of the speed of light. There was no way to tell immediately whether the Taurans had beat us there. We launched a pre-programmed drone that would decelerate at 300 gees and take a preliminary look around. It would warn us if it detected any other ships in the system, or evidence of Tauran activity on any of the collapsar’s planets.
The drone launched, we zipped up in the tanks and the computers put us through a three-week evasive maneuver while the ship slowed down. No problems except that three weeks is a hell of a long time to stay frozen in the tank; for a couple of days afterward everybody crept around like aged cripples.
if the drone had sent back word that the Taurans were already in the system, we would immediately have stepped down to one gee and started deploying fighters and drones armed with nova bombs. Or we might not have lived that long: sometimes the Taurans could get to a ship only hours after it entered the system. Dying in the tank might not be the most pleasant way to go.
It took us a month to get back to within a couple of AUs of Sade-138, where the drone had found a planet that met our requirements.
It was an odd planet, slightly smaller than Earth but more dense. It wasn’t quite the cryogenic deepfreeze that most portal planets were, both because of heat from its core and because S Doradus, the brightest star in the cloud, was only a third of a light year away.
The strangest feature of the planet was its lack of geography. From space it looked like a slightly damaged billiard ball. Our resident physicist, Lieutenant Gim, explained its relatively pristine condition by pointing out that its anomalous, almost cometary orbit probably meant that it had spent most of its life as a “rogue planet,” drifting alone through interstellar space. The chances were good that it had never been struck by a large meteor until it wandered into Sade-138’s bailiwick and was
captured-forced to share space with all the other flotsam the collapsar dragged around with it.
We left the Masaryk Ii in orbit (it was capable of landing, but that would restrict its visibility and getaway time) and shuttled building materials down to the surface with the six fighters.
It was good to get out of the ship, even though the planet wasn’t exactly hospitable. The atmosphere was a thin cold wind of hydrogen and helium, it being too cold even at noon for any other substance to exist as a gas.
“Noon” was when S Doradus was overhead, a tiny, painfully bright spark. The temperature slowly dropped at night, going from twenty-five degrees Kelvin down to seventeen degrees-which caused problems, because just be-fore dawn the hydrogen would start to condense out of the air, making everything so slippery that it was useless to do anything other than sit down and wait it out. At dawn a faint pastel rainbow provided the only relief from the black-and-white monotony of the landscape.
The ground was treacherous, covered with little granular chunks of frozen gas that shifted slowly, incessantly in the anemic breeze. You had to walk in a slow waddle to stay on your feet; of the four people who would die during the base’s construction, three would be the victims of simple falls.
The troops weren’t happy with my decision to construct the anti-spacecraft and perimeter defenses before putting up living quarters. That was by the book, though, and they got two days of shipboard rest for every “day” planetside- which wasn’t overly generous, I admit, since ship days were 24 hours long, and a day on the planet was 38.5 hours from dawn to dawn.
The base was completed in just less than four weeks, and it was a formidable structure indeed. The perimeter, a circle one kilometer in diameter, was guarded by twenty-five gigawatt lasers that would automatically aim and fire within a thousandth of a second. They would react to the motion of any significantly large object between the perimeter and the horizon. Sometimes when the wind was right and the ground damp with hydrogen, the little ice granules would stick together into a loose snowball and begin to roll. They wouldn’t roll far.
For early protection, before the enemy came over our horizon, the base was in the center of a huge mine field. The buried mines would detonate upon sufficient distortion of their local gravitational fields: a single Tauran would set one off if he came within twenty meters of it; a small spacecraft a kilometer overhead would also detonate it. There were 2800 of them, mostly lOO-microton nuclear bombs. Fifty of them were devastatingly powerful tachyon devices.
They were all scattered at random in a ring that extended from the limit of the lasers’ effectiveness, out another five kilometers.
Inside the base, we relied on individual lasers, microton
grenades, and a tachyon-powered repeating rocket launcher that had never been tried in combat, one per platoon. As a
last resort, the stasis field was set up beside the living quarters. Inside its opaque gray dome, as well as enough paleolithic weaponry to hold off the Golden Horde, we’d stashed a small cruiser, just in case we managed to lose all our spacecraft in the process of winning a battle. Twelve people would be able to get back to Stargale.
It didn’t do to dwell on the fact that the other survivors would have to sit on their hands until relieved by reinforcements or death.
The living quarters and administration facilities were all underground, to protect them from line-of-sight weapons. It didn’t do too much for morale, though; there were waiting lists for every outside detail, no matter how strenuous or risky. I hadn’t wanted the troops to go up to the surface in their free time, both because of the danger involved and the administrative headache of constantly checking equipment in and out and keeping track of who was where.
Finally I had to relent and allow people to go up for a few hours every week. There was nothing to see except the featureless plain and the sky (which was dominated by S Doradus during the day, and the huge dim oval of the galaxy at night), but that was an improvement over staring at the melted-rock walls and ceiling.
A favorite sport was to walk out to the perimeter and throw snowballs in front of the laser; see how small a snowball you could throw and still set the weapon off. It seemed to me that the entertainment value of this pastime was about equal to watching a faucet drip, but there was no real harm in it, since the weapons would only fire outward and we had power to spare.
For five months things went pretty smoothly. Such administrative problems as we had were similar to those we’d encountered on the Masaryk II. And we were in less danger as passive troglodytes than we had been scooting from collapsar to collapsar, at least until the enemy showed up.
I looked the other way when Rudkoski reassembled his still. Anything that broke the monotony of garrison duty was welcome, and the chits not only provided booze for the troops but gave them something to gamble with. I only interfered in two ways: nobody could go outside unless they were totally sober, and nobody could sell sexual favors. Maybe that was the Puritan in me, but it was, again, by the book. The opinion of the supporting specialists was split. Lieutenant Wilber, the psychiatric officer, agreed with me; the sex counselors Kajdi and Valdez didn’t. But then, they were probably coining money, being the resident “professionals.”
Five months of comfortably boring routine, and then along came Private Graubard.
For obvious reasons, no weapons were allowed in the living quarters. The way these people were trained, even a fistfight could be a duel to the death, and tempers were short. A hundred merely normal people would probably have been at each other’s throats after a week in our caves, but these soldiers had been hand-picked for their ability to get along in close confinement.
Still there were fights. Graubard had almost killed his ex-lover Schon when that worthy made a face at him in the chow line. He had a week of solitary detention (so did Schon, for having precipitated it) and then psychiatric counseling and punitive details. Then I transferred him to the fourth platoon, so he wouldn’t be seeing Schon every day.
The first time they passed in the halls, Graubard greeted Schon with a karate kick to the throat. Diana had to build him a new trachea. Graubard got a more intensive round of detention, counseling and details-hell, I couldn’t transfer him to another company-and then he was a good boy for two weeks. I fiddled their work and chow schedules so the two would never be in the same room together. But they met in a
corridor again, and this time it came out more even: Schon got two broken ribs, but Graubard got a ruptured testicle and lost four teeth.
THE FOREVER WAR 207
If it kept up, I was going to have at least one less mouth to feed.
By the Universal Code of Military Justice I could have ordered Graubard executed, since we were technically in a state of combat. Perhaps I should have, then and there. But Charlie suggested a more humanitarian solution, and I accepted it.
We didn’t have enough room to keep Graubard in soiltaiy detention forever, which seemed to be the only humane yet practical thing to do, but they had plenty of room aboard the Masaiyk II, hovering overhead in a stationary orbit. I called Antopol and she agreed to take care of him. I gave her permission to space the bastard if he gave her any trouble.
We called a general assembly to explain things, so that the lesson of Graubard wouldn’t be lost on anybody. I was just starting to talk, standing on the rock dais with the company sitting in front of me, and the officers and Graubard behind me- when the crazy fool decided to kill me.
Like everybody else, Graubard was assigned five hours per week of training inside the stasis field. Under close supervision, the soldiers would practice using their swords and spears and whatnot on dummy Taurans. Somehow Graubard had managed to smuggle out a weapon, an Indian chakra, which is a circle of metal with a razor-keen outer edge. It’s a tricky weapon, but once you know how to use it, it can be much more effective than a regular throwing knife. (3raubard was an expert.
All in a fraction of a second, Graubard disabled the peopie on either side of him- hitting Charlie in the temple with an elbow while he broke Hilleboe’s kneecap with a kick-and slid the chakra out of his tunic and spun it toward me in one smooth action. It had covered half the distance to my throat before I reacted.
Instinctively I slapped out to deflect it and came within a centimeter of losing four fingers. The razor edge slashed open the top of my palm, but I succeeded in knocking the thing off course. And Graubard was rushing me, teeth bared in an expression I hope I never see again.
Maybe he didn’t realize that the old queer was really
only five years older than he; that the old queer had combat reflexes and three weeks of negative feedback kinesthesia training. At any rate, it was so easy I almost felt sorry for him.
His right toe was turning in; I knew he would take one more step and go into a savat~ leap. I adjusted the distance between us with a short ballestra and, just as both his feet left the ground, gave him an ungentle side-kick to the solar plexus. He was unconscious before he hit the ground. But not dead.
If I’d merely killed him in self-defense, my troubles would have been over instead of suddenly being multiplied.
A simple psychotic troublemaker a commander can lock up and forget about. But not a failed assassin. And I didn’t have to take a poll to know that executing him was not going to improve my relationship with the troops.
I realized that Diana was on her knees beside me, trying to pry open my fingers. “Check Hilleboe and Moore,” I mumbled, and to the troops: “Dismissed.”
“Don’t be an ass,” Charlie said. He was holding a damp rag to the bruise on the side of his head.
“You don’t think I have to execute him?”
“Stop twitching!” Diana was trying to get the lips of my wound to line up together so she could paint them shut. From the wrist down, the hand felt like a lump of ice.
“Not by your own hand, you don’t. You can detail someone. At random.” “Charlie’s right,” Diana said. “Have everybody draw a slip of paper out of a bowl.” I was glad Hilleboe was sound asleep on the other cot.
I didn’t need her opinion. “And if the person so chosen refuses?”
“Punish him and get another,” Charlie said. “Didn’t you learn anything in the can? You can’t abrogate your authority by publicly doing a job.. . that obviously should be detailed.”
“Any other job, sure. But for this. . . nobody in the company has ever killed. It would look like I was getting somebody else to do my moral dirty work.”
“If it’s so damned complicated,” Diana said, “why not just get up in front of the troops and tell them how complicated it is. Then have them draw straws. They aren’t children.”
There had been an army in which that sort of thing was done, a strong quasi- memory told me. The Marxist POUM militia in the Spanish Civil War, early twentieth. You obeyed an order only after it had been explained in detail; you could refuse if it didn’t make sense. Officers and men got drunk together and never saluted or used titles. They lost the war. But the other side didn’t have any fun.
“Finished.” Diana set the limp hand in my lap. “Don’t
try to use it for a half-hour. When it starts to hurt, you can use it.”
I inspected the wound closely. “The lines don’t match up. Not that I’m complaining.”
“You shouldn’t. By all rights, you ought to have just a stump. And no regeneration facilities this side of Stargate.”
“Stump ought to be at the top of your neck,” Charlie said. “I don’t see why you have any qualms. You should have killed the bastard outright.”
“I know that, goddainmid” Both Charlie and Diana jumped at my outburst. “Sorry, shit. Look, just let me do the worrying.”
“Why don’t you both talk about something else for a while.” Diana got up and checked the contents of her medical bag. “I’ve got another patient to check. Try to keep from exciting each other.”
“Graubard?” Charlie asked.
“That’s right. To make sure he can mount the scaffold without assistance.” “What if Hilleboe-”
“She’ll be out for another half-hour. I’ll send Jarvil down, just in case.” She hurried out the door.
“The scaffold.. .” I hadn’t given that any thought. “How the hell are we going to execute him? We can’t do it indoors: morale. Firing squad would be pretty grisly.”
“Chuck him out the airlock. You don’t owe him any ceremony.”
“You’re probably right. I wasn’t thinking about him.” I wondered whether Charlie had ever seen the body of a person who’d died that way. “Maybe we ought to just stuff him into the recycler. He’d wind up there eventually.”
Charlie laughed. “That’s the spirit.”
“We’d have to trim him up a little bit. Door’s not very wide.” Charlie had a few suggestions as to how to get around that. Jarvil came in and more-or-less ignored us.
Suddenly the inlmnnary door banged open. A patient on a cart; Diana rushing alongside pressing on the man’s chest, while a private pushed. Two other privates were following, but hung back at the door. “Over by the wall,” she ordered.
It was Graubard. “Tried to kill himself,” Diana said, but that was pretty obvious. “Heart stopped.” He’d made a noose out of his belt; it was still banging limply around his neck.
There were two big electrodes with rubber handles hanging on the wall. Diana snatched them with one hand while she ripped his tunic open with the other. “Get your hands off the cart!” She held the electrodes apart, kicked a switch, and pressed them down onto his chest. They made a low hum while his body trembled and flopped. Smell of burning flesh.
Diana was shaking her head. “Get ready to crack him,” she said to Jarvil. “Get Doris down here.” The body was gurgling, but it was a mechanical sound, like plumbing.
She kicked off the power and let the electrodes drop, pulled a ring off her finger and crossed to stick her arms in the sterilizer. Jarvil started to rub an evil-smelling fluid over the man’s chest.
There was a small red mark between the two electrode burns. It took me a moment to recognize what it was. Jarvil wiped it away. I stepped closer and checked Graubard’s neck.
“Get out of the way, William, you aren’t sterile.” Diana felt his collarbone, measured down a little ways and made an incision straight down to the bottom of his breastbone. Blood welled out and Jarvil handed her an instrument that looked like big chrome-plated bolt-cutters. I looked away but couldn’t help hearing the thing crunch through his ribs. She asked for retractors and sponges and so on while I wandered back to where I’d been sitting. With the corner of my eye I saw her working away inside his thorax, massaging his heart directly.
Charlie looked the way I felt. He called out weakly, “Hey, don’t knock yourself out, Diana.” She didn’t answer. Jarvil had wheeled up the artificial heart and was holding out two tubes. Diana picked up a scalpel and I looked away again.
He was still dead a half-hour later. They turned off the machine and threw a sheet over him. Diana washed the
blood off her arms and said, “Got to change. Back in a minute.” I got up and walked to her billet, next door. Had to know.
I raised my hand to knock but it was suddenly hurting like there was a line of fire drawn across it. I rapped with my left and she opened the door immediately.
“What-oh, you want something for your hand.” She was half-dressed, unseif- conscious. “Ask Jarvil.”
“No, that’s not it. What happened, Diana?”
“Oh. Well,” she pulled a tunic over her head and her voice was muffled. “It was my fault, I guess. I left him alone for a minute.”
“And he tried to hang himself.”
“That’s right.” She sat on the bed and offered me the chair. “I went off to the head and he was dead by the time I got back. I’d already sent Jarvil away because I didn’t want Hilleboe to be unsupervised for too long.”
“But, Diana. . . there’s no mark on his neck. No bruise, nothing.” She shrugged. “The hanging didn’t kill him. He had a heart attack.” “Somebody gave him a shot. Right over his heart.”
She looked at me curiously. “I did that, William. Adrenaline. Standard procedure.” You get that red dot of expressed blood if you jerk away from the projector while you’re getting a shot. Otherwise the medicine goes right through the pores, doesn’t
leave a mark. “He was dead when you gave him the shot?”
“That would be my professional opinion.” Deadpan. “No heartbeat, pulse, respiration. Very few other disorders show these symptoms.”
“Yeah. I see.”
“Is something. . . what’s the matter, William?”
Either I’d been improbably lucky or Diana was a very good actress. “Nothing. Yeah, I better get something for this hand.” I opened the door. “Saved me a lot of trouble.”
She looked straight into my eyes. “That’s true.”
Actually, I’d traded one kind of trouble for another. Despite the fact that there were several disinterested witnesses
to Graubard’s demise, there was a persistent rumor that I’d had Doc Alsever simply exterminate him-since I’d botched the job myself and didn’t want to go through a troublesome court-martial.
The fact was that, under the Universal Code of Military “Justice,” Graubard hadn’t deserved any kind of trial at all. All 1 had to do was say “You, you and you. Take this man out and kill him, please.” And woe betide the private who refused to carry out the order.
My relationship with the troops did improve, in a sense. At least outwardly, they showed more deference to me. But I suspected it was at least partly the cheap kind of respect you might offer any ruffian who had proved himself to be dangerous and volatile.
So Killer was my new name. Just when I’d gotten used to Old Queer.
The base quickly settled back into its routine of training and waiting. I was almost impatient for the Taurans to show up, just to get it over with one way or the other.
The troops had adjusted to the situation much better than I had, for obvious reasons. They had specific duties to perform and ample free time for the usual soldierly anodynes to boredom. My duties were more varied but offered little satisfaction, since the problems that percolated up to me were of the “the buck stops here” type; those with pleasing, unambiguous solutions were taken care of in the lower echelons.
I’d never cared much for sports or games, but found myself turning to them more and more as a kind of safety valve. For the first time in my life, in these tense, claustrophobic surroundings, I couldn’t escape into reading or study. So I fenced, quarterstaff and saber, with the other officers, worked myself to exhaustion on the exercise machines and even kept a jump-rope in my office. Most of the other officers played chess, but they could usually beat me-whenever I won it gave me the feeling I was being humored. Word games were difficuit because my language was an archaic
dialect that they had trouble manipulating. And I lacked the time and talent to master “modern” English.
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For a while I let Diana feed me mood-altering drugs, but the cumulative effect of them was frightening-I was getting addicted in a way that was at first too subtle to bother me-so I stopped short. Then 1 tried some systematic psychoanalysis with Lieutenant Wilber. It was impossible. Although he knew all about my problem in an academic kind of way, we didn’t speak the same cultural language; his counseling me about love and sex was like me telling a fourteenth-century serf how best to get along with his priest and landlord.
And that, after all, was the root of my problem. I was sure I could have handled the pressures and frustrations of command; of being cooped up in a cave with these people who at times seemed scarcely less alien than the enemy; even the near- certainty that it could lead only to painful death in a worthless cause-if only I could have had Mary-gay with me. And the feeling got more intense as the months crept by.
He got very stern with me at this point and accused me of romanticizing my position. He knew what love was, he said; he had been in love himself. And the sexual polarity of the couple made no difference-all right, I could accept that; that idea had been a clichй in my parents’ generation (though it had run into some predictable resistance in my own). But love, he said, love was a fragile blossom; love was a delicate crystal; love was an unstable reaction with a half-life of about eight months. Bullshit, I said, and accused him of wearing cultural blinders; thirty centuries of prewar society taught that love was one thing that could last to the grave and even beyond and if he had been born instead of hatched he would know that without being told!
Whereupon he would assume a wry, tolerant expression and reiterate that I was merely a victim of self-imposed sexual frustration and romantic delusion.
In retrospect, I guess we had a good time arguing with each other. Cure me, he didn’t.
I did have a new friend who sat in my lap all the time. It was the cat, who had the usual talent for hiding from people who like cats and cleaving unto those who have sinus trouble or just don’t like sneaky little animals. We
did have something in common, though, since to my knowledge be was the only other heterosexual male mammal within any reasonable distance, He’d been castrated, of course, but that didn’t make much difference under the circumstances.
It was exactly 400 days since the day we had begun construction. I was sitting at my desk not checking out Hilleboe’s new duty roster. The cat was on my lap, purring loudly even though I refused to pet it. Charlie was stretched out in a chair reading something on the viewer. The phone buzzed and it was the Commodore.
“They’re here.”
“I said they’re here. A Tauran ship just exited the collapsar field. Velocity .80c. Deceleration thirty gees. Give or take.”
Charlie was leaning over my desk. “What?” I dumped the cat. “How long? Before you can pursue?” I asked.
“Soon as you get off the phone.” I switched off and went over to the logistic computer, which was a twin to the one on Masaryk ii and had a direct data link to it. While I tried to get numbers out of the thing, Charlie fiddled with the visual display.
The display was a hologram about a meter square by half a meter thick and was programmed to show the positions of Sade-l38, our planet, and a few other chunks of rock in the system. There were green and red dots to show the positions of our vessels and the Taurans’.
The computer said that the minimum time it could take the Taurans to decelerate and get back to this planet would be a little over eleven days. Of course, that would be straight maximum acceleration and deceleration all the way; we could pick them off like flies on a wall. So, like us, they’d mix up their direction of flight and degree of acceleration in a random way. Based on several hundred past records of enemy behavior, the computer was able to give us a probability table:
Unless, of course, Antopol and her gang of merry pirates managed to make a kill. The chances of that I had learned in the can, were slightly less than fifty-fifty.
But whether it took 28.9554 days or two weeks, those of us on the ground had to just sit on our hands and watch.
If Antopol was successful, then we wouldn’t have to fight until the regular garrison troops replaced us here and we moved on to the next collapsar.
“Haven’t left yet.” Charlie had the display cranked down to minimum scale; the planet was a white ball the size of a large melon and Masaryk II was a green dot off to the right some eight melons away; you couldn’t get both on the screen at the same time.
While we were watching a small green dot popped out of the ship’s dot and drifted away from it. A ghostly number 2 drifted beside it, and a key projected on the display’s lower left-hand corner identified it as 2-Pursuit Drone. Other nunibers in the key identified the Masaryk II, a planetary defense fighter and fourteen planetary defense drones. Those sixteen ships were not yet far enough away from one another to have separate dots.
The cat was rubbing against my ankle; I picked it up and stroked it. “Tell Hilleboe to call a general assembly. Might as well break it to everyone at once.”
The men and women didn’t take it very well, and I couldn’t blame them. We had all expected the Taurans to
attack much sooner-and when they persisted in not coming, the feeling grew that Strike Force Command had made a mistake and that they’d never show up at all.
I wanted the company to start weapons training in earnest; they hadn’t used any high-powered weapons in almost two years. So I activated their laser-fingers and passed out the grenade and rocket launchers. We couldn’t practice inside the base for fear of damaging the external sensors and defensive laser ring. So we turned off half the circle of gigawatt lasers and went out about a klick beyond the parimeter, one platoon at a time, accompanied by either me or Charlie. Rusk kept a close watch on the early-warning screens. If anything approached, she would send up a flare, and the platoon would have to get back inside the ring before the unknown came over the horizon, at which time the defensive lasers would come on automatically. Besides knocking out the unknown, they would fry the platoon in less than .02 second.
We couldn’t spare anything from the base to use as a target, but that turned out to be no problem. The first tachyon rocket we fired scooped out a hole twenty meters long by ten wide by five deep; the rubble gave us a multitude of targets from twice- man-sized on down.
The soldiers were good, a lot better than they had been with the primitive weapons in the stasis field. The best laser practice turned out to be rather like skeetshooting: pair up the people and have one stand behind the other, throwing rocks at random intervals. The one who was shooting had to gauge the rock’s trajectory and zap it before it hit the ground. Their eye-hand coordination was impressive (maybe the Eugenics Council had done something right).
Shooting at rocks down to pebble-size, most of them could do better than nine out of ten. Old non-bioengineered me could hit maybe seven out of ten, and I’d had a good deal more practice than they had.
They were equally facile at estimating trajectories with the grenade launcher, which was a more versatile weapon than it had been in the past. Instead of shooting one-
microton bombs with a standard propulsive charge, it had four different charges and a choice of one-, two-, three- or
four-microton bombs. And for really close in-fighting, where it was dangerous to use the lasers, the barrel of the launcher would unsnap, and you could load it with a magazine of “shotgun” rounds. Each shot would send out an expanding cloud of a thousand tiny fiechettes that were instant death out to five meters and turned to hanniess vapor
at six.
The tachyon- rocket launcher required no skill whatsoever. All you had to do was to be careful no one was standing behind you when you fired it; the backwash from the
rocket was dangerous for several meters behind the launching tube. Otherwise, you just lined your target up in the crosshairs and pushed the button. You didn’t have to worry about trajectory; the rocket traveled in a straight line for all practical purposes. It reached escape velocity in less than a second.
It improved the troops’ morale to get out and chew up the landscape with their new toys. But the landscape wasn’t fighting back. No matter how physically impressive the weapons were, their effectiveness would depend on what the Taurans could throw back. A Greek phalanx must have looked pretty impressive, but it wouldn’t do too well against a single man with a flamethrower.
And as with any engagement, because of time dilation, there was no way to tell what sort of weaponry they would have. They might have never heard of the stasis field. Or they might be able to say a magic word and make us disappear.
I was out with the fourth platoon, burning rocks, when Charlie called and asked me to come back in, urgent. I left Heimoff in charge.
“Another one?” The scale of the holograph display was such that our planet was pea-sized, about five centimeters from the X that marked the position of Sade-138. There were forty-one red and green dots scattered around the field; the key identified number 41 as Tauran Cruiser (2).
“You called Antopol?”
“Yeah.” He anticipated the next question. “It’ll take
almost a day for the signal to get there and back.” “It’s never happened before,” but of course Charlie knew that
“Maybe this coliapsar is especially important to them.”
“Likely.” So it was almost certain we’d be fighting on the ground. Even if Antopol managed to get the first cruiser, she wouldn’t have a fifty-fifty chance on the second one. Low on drones and fighters. “I wouldn’t like to be Antopol now.”
“She’ll just get it earlier.”
“I don’t know. We’re in pretty good shape.”
“Save it for the troops, William.” He turned down the display’s scale to where it showed only two objects: Sade138 and the new red dot, slowly moving.
We spent the next two weeks watching dots blink out. And if you knew when and where to look, you could go outside and see the real thing happening, a hard bright speck of white light that faded in about a second.
In that second, a nova bomb had put out over a million times the power of a gigawatt laser. It made a miniature star half a klick in diameter and as hot as the interior of the sun. Anything it touched it would consume. The radiation from a near miss could botch up a ship’s electronics beyond repair-two fighters, one of ours and one of theirs, had evidently suffered that fate, silently drifting out of the system at a constant velocity, without power.
We had used more powerful nova bombs earlier in the war, but the degenerate matter used to fuel them was unstable in large quantities. The bombs had a tendency to explode while they were still inside the ship. Evidently the Taurans had the same problem-or they had copied the process from us in the first place-because they had also scaled down to nova bombs that used less than a hundred kilograms of degenerate matter. And they deployed them much the same way we did, the warhead separating into dozens of pieces as it approached the target, only one of which was the nova bomb.
They would probably have a few bombs left over after they finished off Masaryk II and her retinue of fighters and
drones. So it was likely that we were wasting time and energy in weapons practice. The thought did slip by my conscience that I could gather up eleven people and board the fighter we had hidden safe behind the stasis field. It was pre-programmed
to take us back to Stargate.
I even went to the extreme of making a mental list of the eleven, trying to think of eleven people who meant more to me than the rest. Turned out I’d be picking six at random.
I put the thought away, though. We did have a chance, maybe a damned good one, even against a fully-armed cruiser. It wouldn’t be easy to get a nova bomb close enough to include us inside its kill-radius.
Besides, they’d space me for desertion. So why bother?
Spirits rose when one of Antopol’s drones knocked out the first Tauran cruiser. Not counting the ships left behind for planetary defense, she still had eighteen drones and two fighters. They wheeled around to intercept the second cruiser, by then a few light-hours away, still being harassed by fifteen enemy drones.
One of the Tauran drones got her. Her ancillary crafts continued the attack, but it was a rout. One fighter and three drones fled the battle at maximum acceleration, looping up over the plane of the ecliptic, and were not pursued. We watched them with morbid interest while the enemy cruiser inched back to do battle with us. The fighter was headed back for Sade-l38, to escape. Nobody blamed them. In fact, we sent them a farewell-good luck message; they didn’t respond, naturally, being zipped up in the tanks. But it would be recorded.
It took the enemy five days to get back to the planet and be comfortably ensconced in a stationary orbit on the other side. We settled in for the inevitable first phase of the attack, which would be aerial and totally automated: their drones against our lasers. I put a force of fifty men and women inside the stasis field, in case one of the drones got through. An empty gesture, really; the enemy could just
Joe Haldeman
stand by and wait for them to turn off the field, fry them the second it flickered out.
Charlie had a weird idea that I almost went for. “We could boobytrap the place.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “This place is booby-trapped, out to twenty-five klicks.”
“No, not the mines and such. I mean the base itself, here, underground.” “Go on.”
“There are two nova bombs in that fighter.” He pointed at the stasis field through a couple of hundred meters of rock. “We can roll them down here, boobytrap them, then bide everybody in the stasis field and wait.”
In a way it was tempting. It would relieve me from any responsibility for decision- making, leave everything up to chance. “I don’t think it would work, Charlie.”
He seemed hurt. “Sure it would.”
“No, look. For it to work, you have to get every single Tauran inside the kill-radius before it goes off-but they wouldn’t all come charging in here once they breached our defenses. Least of all if the place seemed deserted. They’d suspect something, send in an advance party. And after the advance party set off the bombs-”
“We’d be back where we started, yeah. Minus the base.
Sorry.”
I shrugged. “It was an idea. Keep thinking, Charlie.” I turned my attention back to the display, where the lopsided space war was in progress. Logically enough, the enemy wanted to knock out that one fighter overhead before he started to work on us. About all we could do was watch the red dots crawl around the planet and try to score. So far the pilot had managed to knock out all the drones; the enemy hadn’t sent any fighters after him yet.
I’d given the pilot control over five of the lasers in our defensive ring. They couldn’t do much good, though. A gigawatt laser pumps out a billion kilowatts per second at a range of a hundred meters. A thousand klicks up, though, the beam was attenuated to ten kilowatts. Might do some damage if it hit an optical sensor. At least confuse things.
“We could use another fighter. Or six.”
“Use up the drones,” I said. We did have a fighter, of course, and a swabbie attached to us who could pilot it. It might turn out to be our only hope, if they got us cornered in the stasis field.
“How far away is the other guy?” Charlie asked, meaning the fighter pilot who had turned tail. I cranked down the scale, and the green dot appeared at the right of the display. “About six light-hours.” He had two drones left, too near to him to show as separate dots, having expended one in covering his getaway. “He’s not accelerating any more, but he’s doing point nine gee.”
“Couldn’t do us any good if he wanted to.” Need almost a month to slow down.
At that low point, the light that stood for our own defensive fighter faded out. “Shit.”
“Now the fun starts. Should I tell the troops to get ready, stand by to go topside?” “No . . . have them suit up, in case we lose air. But I expect it’ll be a little while
before we have a ground attack.” I turned the scale up again. Four red dots were already creeping around the globe toward us.
I got suited up and came back to Administration to watch the fireworks on the monitors.
The lasers worked perfectly. All four drones converged on us simultaneously; were targeted and destroyed. All but one of the nova bombs went off below our horizon (the visual horizon was about ten kilometers away, but the lasers were mounted high and could target something at twice that distance). The bomb that detonated on our horizon had melted out a semicircular chunk that glowed brilliantly white for several minutes. An hour later, it was still glowing dull orange, and the ground temperature outside had risen to fifty degrees Absolute, melting most of our snow, exposing an irregular dark gray surface.
The next attack was also over in a fraction of a second, but this time there had been eight drones, and four of them got within ten klicks. Radiation from the glowing craters raised the temperature to nearly 300 degrees. That was above the melting point of water, and I was starting to get
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worried. The fighting suits were good to over a thousand degrees, but the automatic lasers depended on low- temperature superconductors for their speed.
I asked the computer what the lasers’ temperature limit
was, and it printed out TR 398-734-009-265, “Some Aspects Concerning the Adaptability of Cryogenic Ordnance to Use in Relatively High-Temperature Environments,”
which had lots of handy advice about how we could insulate the weapons if we had access to a fully-equipped armorer’s shop. It did note that the response time of
automatic-aiming devices increased as the temperature increased, and that above some “critical temperature,” the
weapons would not aim at all. But there was no way to
predict any individual weapon’s behavior, other than to note that the highest critical temperature recorded was 790 degrees and the lowest was 420 degrees.
Charlie was watching the display. His voice was flat over the suit’s radio. “Sixteen this time.”
“Surprised?” One of the few things we knew about Tauran psychology was a certain compulsiveness about numbers, especially primes and powers of two.
“Let’s just hope they don’t have 32 left.” I queried the computer on this; all it could say was that the cruiser had thus far launched a total of 44 drones and that some cruisers had been known to carry as many as 128.
We had more than a half-hour before the drones would strike. I could evacuate everybody to the stasis field, and they would be temporarily safe if one of the nova bombs got through. Safe, but trapped. How long would it take the crater to cool down, if three or four-let alone sixteen-of the bombs made it through? You couldn’t live forever in a fighting suit, even though it recycled everything with remorseless efficiency. One week was enough to make you thoroughly miserable. Two weeks, suicidal. Nobody had ever gone three weeks, under field conditions.
Besides, as a defensive position, the stasis field could be a death-trap. The enemy has all the options since the dome is opaque; the only way you can find out what they’re up to is to stick your head out. They didn’t have to wade in with primitive weapons unless they were impatient. They
could keep the dome saturated with laser fire and wait for you to turn off the generator. Meanwhile harassing you by throwing spears, rocks, arrows into the dome-.you could return fire, but it was pretty futile.
Of course, if one man stayed inside the base, the others could wait out the next half-hour in the stasis field. If he didn’t come get them, they’d know the outside was hot. I chinned the combination that would give me a frequency available to everybody echelon 5 and above.
“This is Major Mandella.” That still sounded like a bad joke.
I outlined the situation to them and asked them to tell their troops that everyone in the company was free to move into the stasis field. I would stay behind and come retrieve them if things went well-not out of nobility, of course; I preferred taking the chance of being vaporized in a nanosecond, rather than almost certain slow death under the gray dome.
I chinned Charlie’s frequency. “You can go, too. I’ll take care of things here.” “No, thanks,” be said slowly. “I’d just as soon. . . Hey, look at this.”
The cruiser had launched another red dot, a couple of minutes behind the others. The display’s key identified it as being another drone. “That’s curious.”
“Superstitious bastards,” he said without feeling.
It turned out that only eleven people chose to join the fifty who had been ordered into the dome. That shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did.
As the drones approached, Charlie and I stared at the monitors, carefully not looking at the holograph display, tacitly agreeing that it would be better not to know when they were one minute away, thirty seconds. . . And then, like the other times, it was over before we knew it had started. The screens glared white and there was a yowl of static, and we were still alive.
But this time there were fifteen new holes on the horizon-or closer!-and the temperature was rising so fast that the last digit in the readout was an amorphous blur.
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The number peaked in the high 800s and began to slide back down.
We had never seen any of the drones, not during that tiny fraction of a second it took the lasers to aim and fire.
But then the seventeenth one flashed over the horizon, zigzagging crazily, and stopped directly overhead. For an instant it seemed to hover, and then it began to fall. Half the lasers had detected it, and they were firing steadily, but none of them could aim; they were all stuck in their last firing position.
It glittered as it droppecLthe mirror polish of its sleek hull reflecting the white glow from the craters and the eerie flickering of the constant, impotent laser fire. I beard Charlie take one deep breath, and the drone fell so close you could see spidery Tauran numerals etched on the hull and a transparent porthole near the tip-then its engne flared and it was suddenly gone.
“What the hell?” Charlie said, quietly. The porthole. “Maybe reconnaissance.”
“I guess. So we can’t touch them, and they know it.”
“Unless the lasers recover.” Didn’t seem likely. “We better get everybody under the dome. Us, too.”
He said a word whose vowel had changed over the centuries, but whose meaning was clear. “No hurry. Let’s see what they do.”
We waited for several hours. The temperature outside stabilized at 690 degrees- just under the melting point of zinc, I remembered to no purpose-and I tried the manual controls for the lasers, but they were still frozen.
“Here they come,” Charlie said. “Eight again.” I started for the display. “Guess we’ll-”
“Wait! They aren’t drones.” The key identified all eight with the legend Troop Carrier.
“Guess they want to take the base,” he said. “Intact.” That, and maybe try out new weapons and techniques.
“It’s not much of a risk for them. They can always retreat and drop a nova bomb in our laps.”
I called Brill and had her go get everybody who was in the stasis field, set them up with the remainder of her platoon as a defensive line circling around the northeast and
northwest quadrants. I’d put the rest of the people on the other half-circle.
“I wonder,” Charlie said. “Maybe we shouldn’t put everyone topside at once. Until we know how many Taurans there are.”
That was a point. Keep a reserve, let the enemy underestimate our strength. “It’s an idea. . . There might be just 64 of them in eight carriers.” Or 128 or 256. I wished
our spy satellites had a finer sense of discrimination. But you can only cram so much into a machine the size of a grape.
I decided to let Brill’s seventy people be our first line of defense and ordered them into a ring in the ditches we had made outside the base’s perimeter. Everybody else would stay downstairs until needed.
If it turned out that the Taurans, either through numbers or new technology, could field an unstoppable force, I’d order everyone into the stasis field. There was a tunnel from the living quarters to the dome, so the people underground could go straight there in safety. The ones in the ditches would have to fall back under fire. If any of them were still alive when I gave the order.
I called in Hilleboe and had her and Charlie keep watch over the lasers. If they came unstuck, I’d call Brill and her people back. Turn on the automatic aiming system again, then sit back and watch the show. But even stuck, the lasers could be useful. Charlie marked the monitors to show where the rays would go; he and Hilleboe could fire them manually whenever something moved into a weapon’s line- of-sight.
We had about twenty minutes. Brill was walking around the perimeter with her men and women, ordering them into the ditches a squad at a time, setting up overlapping fields of fire. I broke in and asked her to setup the heavy weapons so that they could be used to channel the enemy’s advance into the path of the lasers.
There wasn’t much else to do but wait. I asked Charlie to measure the enemy’s progress and try to give us an accurate count-down, then sat at my desk and pulled out a pad, to diagram Brill’s arrangement and see whether I could improve on it.
The cat jumped up on my Lap, mewling piteously. He’d evidently been unable to tell one person from the other, suited up. But nobody else ever sat at this desk. 1 reached up to pet him and he jumped away.
The first line that I drew ripped through four sheets of paper. It had been some time since I’d done any delicate work in a suit. I remembered how in training, they’d made us practice controlling the strength-amplification circuits by passing eggs from person to person, messy business. I wondered if they still had eggs on Earth.
The diagram completed, I couldn’t see any way to add to it. All those reams of theory crammed in my brain; there was plenty of tactical advice about envelopment and encirclement, but from the wrong point of view. If you were the one who was being encircled, you didn’t have many options. Sit tight and fight. Respond quickly to enemy concentrations of force, but stay flexible so the enemy can’t employ a diversionary force to divert strength from some predictable section of your perimeter. Make full use of air and space support, always good advice. Keep your head down and your chin up and pray for the cavalry. Hold your position and don’t contemplate Dienbienphu, the Alamo, the Battle of Hastings.
“Eight more carriers out,” Charlie said. “Five minutes. Until the first eight get here.”
So they were going to attack in two waves. At least two. What would I do, in the Tauran commander’s position? That wasn’t too far-fetched; the Taurans lacked imagination in tactics and tended to copy human patterns.
The first wave could be a throwaway, a kamikaze attack to soften us up and evaluate our defenses. Then the second would come in more methodically, and finish the job. Or vice versa: the first group would have twenty minutes to get
entrenched; then the second could skip over their heads and hit us hard at one spot- breach the perimeter and overrun the base.
Or maybe they sent out two forces simply because two was a magic number. Or they could launch only eight troop carriers at a time (that would be bad, implying that the carriers were large; in different situations they had used
carriers holding as few as 4 troops or as many as 128).
“Three minutes.” I stared at the cluster of monitors that showed various sectors of the mine field. If we were lucky, they’d land out there, Out of caution. Or maybe pass over it low enough to detonate mines.
I was feeling vaguely guilty. I was safe in my hole, doodling, ready to start calling out orders. How did those seventy sacrificial lambs feel about their absentee commander?
Then I remembered how I had felt about Captain Stott that first mission, when he’d elected to stay safely in orbit while we fought on the ground. The rush of remembered hate was so strong I had to bite back nausea.
“Hilleboe, can you handle the lasers by yourself?” “I don’t see why not, sir.”
I tossed down the pen and stood up. “Charlie, you take over the unit coordination; you can do it as well as I could.
I’m going topside.”
“I wouldn’t advise that, sir.”
“Hell no, William. Don’t be an idiot.” “I’m nзt taking orders, I’m giv-”
“You wouldn’t last ten seconds up there,” Charlie said. “I’ll take the same chance as everybody else.”
“Don’t you hear what I’m saying. They’ll kill you!”
“The troops? Nonsense. I know they don’t like me especially, but-”
“You haven’t listened in on the squad frequencies?” No, they didn’t speak my brand of English when they talked among themselves. “They think you put them out on the line for punishment, for cowardice. After you’d told them anyone was free to go into the dome.”
“Didn’t you, sir?” Hilleboe said.
“To punish them? No, of course not.” Not consciously. “They were just up there when I needed. . . Hasn’t Lieutenant Brili said anything to them?”
“Not that I’ve heard,” Charlie said. “Maybe she’s been too busy to tune in.” Or she agreed with them. “I’d better get-”
“There!” Hilleboe shouted. The first enemy ship was visible in one of the mine field monitors; the others appeared in the next second. They came in from random directions and weren’t evenly distributed around the base.
Five in the northeast quadrant and only one in the southwest. I relayed the information to Bnll.
But we had predicted their logic pretty well; all of them were coming down in the ring of mines. One came close enough to one of the tachyon devices to set it off. The blast caught the rear end of the oddly streamlined craft, causing it to make a complete flip and crash nose-first. Side ports opened up and Taurans came crawling
out. Twelve of them; probably four left inside. If all the others had sixteen as well, there were only slightly more of them than of us.
In the first wave.
The other seven had landed without incident, and yes, there were sixteen each. Brill shuffled a couple of squads to conform to the enemy’s troop concentration, and she waited.
They moved fast across the mine field, striding in unison like bowlegged, top- heavy robots, not even breaking stride when one of them was blown to bits by a mine, which happened eleven times.
When they came over the horizon, the reason for their apparently random distribution was obvious: they had analyzed beforehand which approaches would give them the most natural cover, from the rubble that the drones had kicked up. They would be able to get within a couple of kilometers of the base before we got any clear line-of-sight of them. And their suits had augmentation circuits similar to ours, so they could cover a kilometer in less than a minute.
Brill had her troops open fire immediately, probably more for morale than out of any hope of actually hitting the enemy. They probably were getting a few, though it was hard to tell. At least the tachyon rockets did an impressive job of turning boulders into gravel.
The Taurans returned fire with some weapon similar to the tachyon rocket, maybe exactly the same. They rarely found a mark, though; our people were at and below ground level, and if the rocket didn’t hit something, it would keep going on forever, amen. They did score a hit on one of the gigawatt lasers, though, and the concussion that filtered
down to us was strong enough to make me wish we had burrowed a little deeper than twenty meters.
The gigawaus weren’t doing us any good. The Taurans must have figured out the lines of sight ahead of tune, and gave them wide berth. That turned out to be fortunate, because it caused Charlie to let his attention wander from the laser monitors for a moment.
“What the hell?”
“What’s that, Charlie?” I didn’t take my eyes off the monitors. Waiting for something to happen.
“The ship, the cruiser-it’s gone.” I looked at the holograph display. He was right; the only red lights were those that stood for the troop carriers.
“Where did it go?” I asked inanely.
“Let’s play it back.” He programmed the display to go back a couple of minutes and cranked out the scale to where both planet and collapsar showed on the cube. The cruiser showed up, and with it, three green dots. Our “coward,”
attacking the cruiser with only two drones.
But he had a little help from the laws of physics.
Instead of going into collapsar insertion, he had skimmed around the collapsar field in a slingshot orbit. He had come out going nine-tenths of the speed of light; the drones were going .99c, headed straight for the enemy cruiser. Our planet was about a thousand light-seconds from the collapsar, so the Tauran ship had only ten seconds to detect and stop both drones. And at that speed, it didn’t matter whether you’d been hit by a nova-bomb or a spitball.
The first drone disintegrated the cruiser, and the other one, .01 second behind, glided on down to impact on the planet. The fighter missed the planet by a couple of hundred kilometers and hurtled on into space, decelerating with the maximum twenty-five gees. He’d be back in a couple of months.
But the Taurans weren’t going to wait. They were getting close enough to our lines for both sides to start using lasers, but they were also within easy grenade range. A good-size rock could shield them from laser fire, but the grenades and rockets were slaughtering them.
At first, Brill’s troops had the overwhelming advantage; joe naiaeman
fighting from ditches, they could only be harmed by an occasional lucky shot or an extremely well-aimed grenade (which the Taurans threw by hand, with a range of several hundred meters). Brill had lost four, but it looked as if the Tauran force was down to less than half its original size.
Eventually, the landscape had been torn up enough so that the bulk of the Tauran force was able to fight from holes in the ground. The fighting slowed down to individual laser duels, punctuated occasionally by heavier weapons. But it wasn’t smart to use up a tachyon rocket against a single Tauran, not with another force of unknown size only a few minutes away.
Something had been bothering me about that holographic replay. Now, with the battle’s lull, I knew what it was.
When that second drone crashed at near-lightspeed, how much damage had it done to the planet? I stepped over to the computer and punched it up; found out how much energy had been released in the collision, and then compared it with geological information in the computer’s memory.
Twenty times as much energy as the most powerful earthquake ever recorded. On a planet three-quarters the size of Earth.
On the general frequency: “Everybody-topside! Right now!” I palmed the button that would cycle and open the airlock and tunnel that led from Administration to the surface.
“What the hell, Will-” “Earthquake!” How long? “Move!”
Hilleboc and Charlie were right behind me. The cat was sitting on my desk, licking himself unconcernedly. I had an irrational impulse to put him inside my suit, which was the way he’d been carried from the ship to the base, but knew he wouldn’t tolerate more than a few minutes of it. Then I had the more reasonable impulse to simply vaporize him with my laser-finger, but by then the door was closed and we were swarming up the ladder. All the way up, and for some time afterward, I was haunted by the image of that helpless animal, trapped under tons of rubble, dying slowly as the air hissed away.
“Safer in the ditches?” Charlie said
“I don’t know,” I said. “Never been in an earthquake.” Maybe the walls of the ditch would close up and crush us.
I was surprised at how dark it was on the surface. S Doradus had almost set; the monitors had compensated for the low light level.
An enemy laser raked across the clearing to our left, making a quick shower of sparks when it flicked by a gigawatt mounting. We hadn’t been seen yet. We all
decided yes, it would be safer in the ditches, and made it to the nearest one in three strides.
There were four men and women in the ditch, one of them badly wounded or dead. We scrambled down the ledge and I turned up my image amplifier to log two, to inspect our ditchmates. We were lucky; one was a grenadier and they also had a rocket launcher. I could just make out the names on their helmets. We were in Brill’s ditch, but she hadn’t noticed us yet. She was at the opposite end, cautiously peering over the edge, directing two squads in a flanking movement. When,they were safely in position, she ducked back down. “Is that you, Major?”
“That’s right,” I said cautiously. I wondered whether any of the people in the ditch were among the ones after my scalp.
“What’s this about an earthquake?”
She had been told about the cruiser being destroyed, but not about the other drone. I explained in as few words as possible.
“Nobody’s come out of the airlock,” she said. “Not yet. I guess they all went into the stasis field.”
“Yeah, they were just as close to one as the other.” Maybe some of them were still down below, hadn’t taken my warning seriously. I thinned the general frequency to check, and then all hell broke loose.
The ground dropped away and then flexed back up; slammed us so hard that we were airborne, tumbling out of the ditch. We flew several meters, going high enough to see the pattern of bright orange and yellow ovals, the craters where nova bombs had been stopped. I landed on my feet but the ground was shifting and slithering so much that it was impossible to stay upright.
With a basso grinding I could feel through my suit, the cleared area above our base crumbled and fell in. Part of the stasis field’s underside was exposed when the ground subsided; it settled to its new level with aloof grace.
Well, minus one cat. I hoped everybody else had time and sense enough to get under the dome.
A figure came staggering out of the ditch nearest to me and I realized with a start that it wasn’t human. At that range, my laser burned a hole straight through his helmet; he took two steps and fell over backward. Another helmet peered over the edge of the ditch. I sheared the top of it off before he could raise his weapon.
I couldn’t get my bearings. The only thing that hadn’t changed was the stasis dome, and it looked the same from any angle. The gigawatt lasers were all buried, but one of them had switched on, a brilliant flickering searchlight that illuminated a swirling cloud of vaporized rock.
Obviously, though, I was in enemy territory. I started across the trembling ground toward the dome.
I couldn’t raise any platoon leaders. All of them but Brill were probably inside the dome. I did get Hilleboe and Charlie; told Hilleboe to go inside the dome and roust everybody out. If the next wave also had 128, we were going to need everybody.
The tremors died down and I found my way into a
“friendly” ditch-the cooks’ ditch, in fact, since the only people there were Orban and Rudkoski.
“Looks like you’ll have to start from scratch again, Private.” “That’s all right, sir. Liver needed a rest.”
1 got a beep from Hilleboe and chinned her on. “Sir… there were only ten people there. The rest didn’t make it.”
“They stayed behind?” Seemed like they’d had plenty of time. “I don’t know, sir.”
“Never mind. Get me a count, how many people we have, all totalled.” I tried the platoon leaders’ frequency again and it was still silent.
The three of us watched for enemy laser fire for a couple of minutes, but there was none. Probably waiting for reinforcements. Hilleboe called back “I only get fifty-three, sir. Some may be unconscious.”
“All right. Have them sit tight until-” Then the second wave showed up, the troop carriers roaring over the horizon with their jets pointed our way, decelerating. “Get some rockers on those bastards!” Hilleboe yelled to everyone in particular. But nobody had managed to stay attached to a rocket launcher while he was being tossed around. No grenade launchers, either, and the range was too far for the band lasers to do any damage.
These carriers were four or five times the size of the ones in the first wave. One of them grounded about a kilometer in front of us, barely stopping long enough to disgorge its troops. Of which there were over 50, probably 64-times 8 made 512. No way we could hold them back.
“Everybody listen, this is Major Mandella.” I tried to keep my voice even and quiet. “We’re going to retreat back into the dome, quickly but in an orderly way. I know we’re scattered all over hell. If you belong to the second or fourth platoon, stay put for a minute and give covering fire while the first and third platoons, and support, fall back.
“First and third and support, fall back to about half your present distance from the dome, then take cover and defend the second and fourth as they come back. They’ll go to the edge of the dome and cover you while you come back the rest of the way.” I shouldn’t have said “retreat”; that word wasn’t in the book. Retrograde action.
There was a lot more retrograde than action. Eight or nine people were firing, and all the rest were in full flight.
Rudkoski and Orban had vanished. I took a few carefully aimed shots, to no great effect, then ran down to the other end of the ditch, climbed out and headed for the dome.
The Taurans started firing rockets, but most of them seemed to be going too high. I saw two of us get blown away before I got to my halfway point; found a nice big rock and hid behind it. I peeked out and decided that only two or three of the Taurans were close enough to be even remotely possible laser targets, and the better part of valor
would be in not drawing unnecessary attention to myself. I ran the rest of the way to the edge of the field and stopped to return fire. After a couple of shots, I realized that I was just making myself a target; as far as I could see there was only one other person who was still running toward the dome.
A rocket zipped by, so close I could have touched it. I flexed my knees and kicked, and entered the dome in a rather undignified posture.
Inside, I could see the rocket that had missed me drifting lazily through the gloom, rising slightly as it passed through to the other side of the dome. It would vaporize the instant it came out the other side, since all of the kinetic energy it had lost in abruptly slowing down to 16.3 meters per second would come back in the form of heat.
Nine people were lying dead, facedown just inside of the field’s edge. It wasn’t unexpected, though it wasn’t the sort of thing you were supposed to tell the troops.
Their fighting suits were intact-otherwise they wouldn’t have made it this far-but sometime during the past few minutes’ rough-and-tumble, they had damaged the coaling of special insulation that protected them from the stasis field. So as soon as they entered the field, all electrical activity in their bodies ceased, which killed them instantly. Also, since no molecule in their bodies could move faster than 16.3 meters per second, they instantly froze solid, their body temperature stabilized at a cool
0.426 degrees Absolute.
I decided not to turn any of them over to find out their names, not yet. We had to get some sort of defensive position worked out before the Taurans came through the dome. If they decided to slug it out rather than wait
With elaborate gestures, I managed to get everybody collected in the center of the field, under the fighter’s tail, where the weapons were racked.
There were plenty of weapons, since we had been prepared to outfit three times this number of people. After giving each person a shield and short-sword, I traced a question in the snow: GOOD ARCHERS? RAISE HANDS. (got five volunteers, then picked out three more so that all the bows would be in use. Twenty arrows per bow. They were the most effective long-range weapons we had; the
arrows were almost invisible in their slow ifight, heavily weighted and tipped with a deadly sliver of diamond-hard C-.
I arranged the archers in a circle around the fighter (its landing fins would give them partial protection from missiles coming in from behind) and between each pair of archers put four other people: two spear-throwers, one quarterstaff, and a person armed with battleax and a dozen throwing knives. This arrangement would theoretically take care of the enemy at any range, from the edge of the field
to hand-to-hand combat.
Actually, at some 600-to-42 odds, they could probably walk in with a rock in each hand, no shields or special weapons, and still beat the shit out of us.
Assuming they knew what the stasis field was. Their technology seemed up to date in all other respects.
For several hours nothing happened. We got about as bored as anyone could, waiting to die. No one to talk to, nothing to see but the unchanging gray dome, gray snow, gray spaceship and a few identically gray soldiers. Nothing to hear, taste or smell but yourself.
Those of us who still had any interest in the battle were keeping watch on the bottom edge of the dome, waiting for the first Taurans to come through. So it took us a second to realize what was going on when the attack did stait It came from above, a cloud of catapulted darts swarming in through the dome some thiity meters above the ground, headed straight for the center of the hemisphere.
The shields were big enough that you could hide most of your body behind them by crouching slightly; the people who saw the darts coming could protect themselves
easily. The ones who had their backs to the action, or were just asleep at the switch, had to rely on dumb luck for survival; there was no way to shout a warning, and it took only three seconds for a missile to get from the edge of the dome to its center.
We were lucky, losing only five. One of them was an archer, Shubik. I took over her bow and we waited, expecting a ground attack immediately.
It didn’t come. After a half-hour, I went around the circle and explained with gestures that the first thing you were supposed to do, if anything happened, was to touch the
person on your right. He’d do the same, and so on down the line.
That might have saved my life. The second dart attack, a couple of hours later, came from behind me. I felt the nudge, slapped the person on my tight, turned around and saw the cloud descending. I got the shield over my head, and they hit a split-second later.
I set down my bow to pluck three darts from the shield and the ground attack started.
It was a weird, impressive sight Some three hundred of them stepped into the field simultaneously, almost shoulder-to-shoulder around the perimeter of the dome. They advanced in step, each one holding a round shield barely large enough to hide his massive chest. They were throwing darts similar to the ones we had been barraged with.
I set up the shield in front of me-it had little extensions on the bottom to keep it upright-and with the first arrow I shot, I knew we had a chance. It struck one of them in the center of his shield, went straight through and penetrated his suit.
It was a one-sided massacre. The darts weren’t very effective without the element of surprise-but when one came sailing over my head from behind, it did give me a crawly feeling between the shoulder blades.
With twenty arrows I got twenty Taurans. They closed ranks every time one dropped; you didn’t even have to aim. After running out of arrows, I tried throwing their darts back at them. But their light shields were quite adequate against the small missiles.
We’d killed more than half of them with arrows and spears, long before they got into range of the hand-to-hand weapons. I drew my sword and waited. They still outnumbered us by better than three to one.
When they got within ten meters, the people with the chakram throwing knives had their own field day. Although the spinning disc was easy enough to see and took more
than a half-second to get from thrower to target, most of the Taurans reacted in the same ineffective way, raising up the shield to ward it off. The razor-sharp, tempered heavy blade cut through the light shield like a buzz-saw through cardboard.
The first hand-to-hand contact was with the quarter-staffs, which were metal rods two meters long that tapered at the ends to a double-edged, serrated knife blade. The Taurans had a cold-blooded–or valiant, if your mind works that way-method for dealing with them. They would simply grab the blade and die. While the human was trying to extricate his weapon from the frozen death-grip, a Tauran swordsman, with a scimitar over a meter long, would step in and kill him.
Besides the swords, they had a bob-like thing that was a length of elastic cord that ended with about ten centimeters of something like barbed wire, and a small weight to propel it. It was a dangerous weapon for all concerned; if they missed their target it would come snapping back unpredictably. But they hit their target pretty often, going under the shields and wrapping the thorny wire around ankles.
I stood back-to-back with Private Erikson, and with our swords we managed to stay alive for the next few minutes.
When the Taurans were down to a couple of dozen survivors, they just turned around and started marching out. We threw some darts after them, getting three, but we didn’t warn to chase after them. They might turn around and start hacking again.
There were only twenty-eight of us left standing. Nearly ten times that number of dead Taurans littered the ground, but there was no satisfaction in it.
They could do the whole thing over, with a fresh 300. And this time it would work.
We moved from body to body, pulling out arrows and spears, then took up places around the fighter again. Nobody bothered to retrieve the quarterstaffs. I counted noses:
Charlie and Diana were still alive (Hilleboe had been one of the quarterstaff victims), as well as two supporting officers. Wilber and Szydlowska. Rudkoski was still alive but Orban had taken a dart.
After a day of waiting, it looked as though the enemy
had decided on a war of attrition rather than repeating the
ground attack. Darts came in constantly, not in swarms anymore, but in twos and threes and tens. And from all different angles. We couldn’t stay alert forever; they’d get somebody every three or four hours.
We took turns sleeping, two at a time, on top of the stasis field generator. Sitting directly under the bulk of the fighter, it was the safest place in the dome.
Every now and then, a Tauran would appear at the edge of the field, evidently to see whether any of us were left.
Sometimes we’d shoot an arrow at him, for practice.
The darts stopped falling after a couple of days. I supposed it was possible that they’d simply run out of them.
Or maybe they’d decided to stop when we were down to twenty survivors.
There was a more likely possibility. I took one of the quarterstaffs down to the edge of the field and poked it through, a centimeter or so. When I drew it back, the point was melted off. When 1 showed it to Charlie, he rocked back and forth (the only way you can nod in a suit); this sort of thing had happened before, one of the first times the stasis field hadn’t worked. They simply saturated it with laser fire and waited for us to go stir-crazy and turn off the generator. They were probably sitting in their ships playing the Tauran equivalent of pinochle.
I tried to think. It was hard to keep your mind on something for any length of time in that hostile environment, sense-deprived, looking over your shoulder every few seconds. Something Charlie had said. Only yesterday. I couldn’t track it down. It wouldn’t have worked then; that was all I could remember. Then finally it came to me.
I called everyone over and wrote in the snow:
GET NOVA BOMBS FROM SHIP. CARRY TO EDGE OF FIELD.
MOVE FIELD.
Joe Ilableman
Szydlowska knew where the proper tools would be aboard ship. Luckily, we had left all of the entrances open before turning on the stasis field; they were electronic and would have been frozen shut. We got an assortment of wrenches from the engine room and climbed up to the cockpit. He knew how to remove the access plate that exposed a crawl space into the bomb-bay. I followed him in through the meter-wide tube.
Normally, I supposed, it would have been pitch-black.
But the stasis field illuminated the bomb-bay with the same dim, shadowless light that prevailed outside. The bomb-bay was too small for both of us, so I stayed at the end of the crawl space and watched.
The bomb-bay doors had a “manual override” so they were easy; Szydlowska just turned a hand-crank and we were in business. Freeing the two nova bombs from their cradles was another thing. Finally, he went back down to the engine room and brought back a crowbar. He pried one loose and I got the other, and we rolled them out the bomb-bay.
Sergeant Anghebov was already working on them by the time we climbed back down. All you had to do to arm the bomb was to unscrew the fuse on the nose of it and poke something around in the fuse socket to wreck the delay mechanism and safety restraints.
We carried them quickly to the edge, six people per bomb, and set them down next to each other. Then we waved to the four people who were standing by at the field generator’s handles. They picked it up and walked ten paces in the opposite direction. The bombs disappeared as the edge of the field slid over them.
There was no doubt that the bombs went off. For a couple of seconds it was hot as the interior of a star outside, and even the stasis field took notice of the fact: about a third of the dome glowed a dull pink for a moment, then was gray again. There was a slight acceleration, like you would feel in a slow elevator. That meant we were drifting down to the bottom of the crater. Would there be a solid bottom? Or would we sink down through molten rock to be trapped like a fly in amber-didn’t pay to even think about that. Perhaps if it happened, we could blast our way out with the fighter’s gigawatt laser. Twelve of us, anyhow.
HOW LONG? Charlie scraped in the snow at my feet.
That was a damned good question. About all I knew was the amount of energy two nova bombs released. I didn’t know how big a fireball they would make, which would determine the temperature at detonation and the size of the crater. I didn’t know the heat capacity of the surrounding rock, or its boiling point I wrote: ONE WEEK, SHRUG?
HAVE TO THINK.
The ship’s computer could have told me in a thousandth of a second, but it wasn’t talking. I started writing equations m the snow, trying to get a maximum and minimum figure for the length of time it would take for the outside to cool down to 500 degrees. Anghelov, whose physics was much more up-to-date, did his own calculations on the other side of the ship.
My answer said anywhere from six hours to six days (although for six hours, the surrounding rock would have to conduct heat like pure copper), and Anghelov got five hours to 41/2 days. I voted for six and nobody else got a vote.
We slept a lot. Charlie and Diana played chess by scraping symbols in the snow; I was never able to hold the shifting positions of the pieces in my mind. I checked my figures several times and kept coming up with six days. I checked Anghelov’s computations~ too, and they seemed all right, but I stuck to my guns. It wouldn’t hurt us to stay in the suits an extra day and a half. We argued good-naturedly in terse shorthand.
There had been nineteen of us left the day we tossed the bombs outside. There were still nineteen, six days later, when I paused with my hand over the generator’s cutoff switch. What was waiting for us out there? Surely we had killed all the Taurans within several klicks of the explosion.
But there might have been a reserve force farther away, now waiting patiently on the crater’s lip. At least you could push a quarterstaff through the field and have it come back whole.
I dispersed the people evenly around the area, so they night not get us with a single shot. Then, ready to turn it ,ack on immediately if anything went wrong, I pushed.
8
My radio was still tuned to the general frequency; after more than a week of silence my ears were suddenly assaulted with loud, happy babbling.
We stood in the center of a crater almost a kilometer wide and deep. Its sides were a shiny black crust shot through with red cracks, hot but no longer dangerous. The hemisphere of earth that we rested on had sunk a good forty meters into the floor of the crater, while it had still been molten, so now we stood on a kind of pedestal.
Not a Tauran in sight
We rushed to the ship, sealed it and filled it with cool air and popped our suits. I didn’t press seniority for the one shower; just sat back in an acceleration couch and took deep breaths of air that didn’t smell like recycled Mandella.
The ship was designed for a maximum crew of twelve, so we stayed outside in shifts of seven to keep from straining the life support systems. I sent a repeating message to the other fighter, which was still over six weeks away, that we were in good shape and waiting to be picked up. 1 was reasonably certain he would have seven free berths, since the normal crew for a combat mission was only three.
It was good to walk around and talk again. I officially suspended all things military for the duration of our stay on the planet. Some of the people were survivors of Brill’s mutinous bunch, but they didn’t show any hostility toward mc.
We played a kind of nostalgia game, comparing the various eras we’d experienced on Earth, wondering what it would be like in the 700-years-future we were going back to. Nobody mentioned the fact that we would at best go back to a few months’ furlough and then be assigned to another strike force, another turn of the wheel.
Wheels. One day Charlie asked me from what counhiy my name originated; it sounded weird to him. I told him it originated from the lack of a dictionary and that if it were spelled right, it would look even weirder.
I got to kill a good half-hour explaining all the peripheral details to that. Basically, though, my parents were “hippies” (a kind of subculture in the late-twentieth- century America, that rejected materialism and embraced a broad spectrum of odd ideas) who lived with a group of other hippies in a small agricultural community. When my mother got pregnant, they wouldn’t be so conventional as to get married: this entailed the woman taking the man’s name, and implied that she was his property. But they got all intoxicated and sentimental and decided they would both change their names to be the same. They rode into the nearest town, arguing all the way as to what name would be the best symbol for the love-bond between them-I narrowly missed having a much shorter name-and they settled on Mandala.
A mandala is a wheel-like design the hippies had borrowed from a foreign religion, that symbolized the cosmos, the cosmic mind, God, or whatever needed a symbol. Neither my mother nor my father knew how to spell the word, and the magistrate in town wrote it down the way it sounded to him.
They named me William in honor of a wealthy uncle, who unfortunately died penniless.
The six weeks passed rather pleasantly: talking, reading, resting. The other ship landed next to ours and did have nine free berths. We shuffled crews so that each ship had someone who could get it out of trouble if the preprogrammed jump sequence malfunctioned. I assigned myself to the other ship, in hopes it would have some new books. It didn’t.
We zipped up in the tanks and took off simultaneously.
We wound up spending a lot of time in the tanks, just to keep from Looking at the same faces all day long in the crowded ship. The added periods of acceleration got us back to Stargate in ten months, subjective. Of course, it was 340 years (minus seven months) to the hypothetical objective observer.
There were hundreds of cruisers in orbit around Stargate. Bad news: with that kind of backlog we probably wouldn’t get any furlough at all.
I supposed I was more likely to get a court-martial than a furlough, anyhow. Losing 88 percent of my company, many of them because they didn’t have enough confidence in me to obey the direct earthquake order. And we were back where we’d started on Sade-138; no Taurans there, but no base either.
We got landing instructions and went straight down, no shuttle. There was another surprise waiting at the spaceport Dozens of cruisers were standing around on the ground (they’d never done that before for fear that Stargate would be hit)-and two captured Tauran cruisers as well. We’d never managed to get one intact.
Seven centuries could have brought us a decisive advantage, of course. Maybe we were winning.
We went through an airlock under a “returnees” sign.
After the air cycled and we’d popped our suits, a beautiful young woman came in with a cartload of tunics and told us, in perfectly-accented English, to get dressed and go to the lecture hail at the end of the corridor to our left.
The tunic felt odd, light yet warm. It was the first thing I’d worn besides a fighting suit or bare skin in almost a year.
The lecture hall was about a hundred times too big for the twenty-two of us. The same woman was there and asked us to move down to the front. That was unsettling; I could have sworn she had gone down the corridor the other way-I knew she had; I’d been captivated by the sight of her clothed behind.
Hell, maybe they had matter transmitters. Or teleportation. Wanted to save herself a few steps.
We sat for a minute and a man, clothed in the same kind of unadorned tunic the woman and we were wearing, walked across the stage with a stack of thick notebooks under each arm.
The woman followed him on, also carrying notebooks.
I looked behind me and she was still standing in the aisle.
To make things even more odd, the man was virtually a twin to both of them.
The man riffled through one of the notebooks and cleared his throat. “These books are for your convenience,” he said, also with perfect accent, “and you don’t have to read them if you don’t want to. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, because.. . you’re free men and women. The war is over.”
Disbelieving silence.
“As you will read in this book, the war ended 221 years ago. Accordingly, this is the year 220. Old style, of course, it is 3138 A.D.
“You are the last group of soldiers to return. When you leave here, I will leave as well. And destroy Stargate. It exists only as a rendezvous point for returnees and as a monument to human stupidity. And shame. As you will read. Destroying it will be a cleansing.”
He stopped speaking and the woman started without a pause. “I am sorry for what you’ve been through and wish I could say that it was for good cause, but as you will read, it was not.
“Even the wealth you have accumulated, back salary and compound interest, is worthless, as I no longer use money or credit. Nor is there such a thing as an economy, in which to use these . .. things.”
“As you must have guessed by now,” the man took over, “I am, we are, clones of a single individual. Some two hundred and fifty years ago, my name was Kahn. Now it is Man.
“I had a direct ancestor in your company, a Corporal Larry Kahn. It saddens me that he didn’t come back.”
“I am over ten billion individuals but only one consciousness,” she said. “After you read, I will try to clarify this. I know that it will be difficult to understand.
“No other humans are quickened, since I am the perfect pattern. Individuals who die are replaced.
“There are some planets, however, on which humans are born in the normal, mammalian way. If my society is too alien for you, you may go to one of these planets. If you wish to take part in procreation, I will not discourage it.
Many veterans ask me to change their polarity to heterosexual so that they can more easily fit into these other societies. This I can do very easily.”
Don’t worry about that, Man, just make out my ticket.
“You will be my guest here at Stargate for ten days, after which you will be taken wherever you want to go,” he said. “Please read this book in the meantime. Feel free to ask any questions, or request any service.” They both stood and walked off the stage.
Charlie was sitting next to me. “Incredible,” he said. “They let.. . they encourage. . . men and women to do the again? Together?”
The female aisle-Man was sitting behind us, and she answered before I could frame a reasonably sympathetic, hypocritical reply. “It isn’t a judgment on your society,” she said, probably not seeing that he took it a little more personally than that. ‘1 only feel that it’s necessary as a eugenic safety device. I have no evidence that there is anything wrong with cloning only one ideal individual, but if it turns out to have been a mistake, there will be a large genetic pool with which to start again.”
She patted him on the shoulder. “Of course, you don’t have to go to these breeder planets. You can stay on one of my planets. I make no distinction between heterosexual play and homosexual.”
She went up on the stage to give a long spiel about where we were going to stay and eat and so forth while we were on Stargate, “Never been seduced by a computer before,”
Charlie muttered.
The 1143-year-long war had been begun on false pretenses and only continued because the two races were unable to communicate.
Once they could talk, the first question was “Why did you start this thing?” and the answer was “Me?”
The Taurans hadn’t known war for millennia, and toward the beginning of the twenty-first century it looked as though mankind was ready to outgrow the institution as well. But the old soldiers were still around, and many of them were in positions of power. They virtually ran the United Nations Exploratory and Colonization Group, that was taking advantage of the newly-discovered collapsar jump to explore interstellar space.
Many of the early ships met with accidents and disappeared. The ex-military men were suspicious. They armed the colonizing vessels, and the first time they met a Tauran ship, they blasted it.
They dusted off their medals and the rest was going to be history.
You couldn’t blame it all on the military, though. The evidence they presented for the Taurans’ having been responsible for the earlier casualties was laughably thin. The few people who pointed this out were ignored.
The fact was, Earth’s economy needed a war, and this one was ideal. It gave a nice hole to throw buckets of money into, but would unify humanity rather than dividing it.
The Taurans relearned war, after a fashion. They never got really good at it, and would eventually have lost.
The Taurans, the book explained, couldn’t communicate with humans because they had no concept of the individual; they had been natural clones for millions of years. Eventually, Earth’s cruisers were manned by Man, Kahn-clones, and they were for the first time able to get through to each other.
The book stated this as a bald fact. lasked a Man to explain what it meant, what was special about clone-to-clone communication, and he said that I a priori couldn’t understand it. There were no words for it. and my brain wouldn’t be able to accommodate the concepts even if there were words.
All right. It sounded a little fishy, but I was willing to accept it. I’d accept that up was down if it meant the war was over.
Man was a pretty considerate entity. Just for us twentytwo, he went to the trouble of rejuvenating a little restaurant-tavern and staffing it at all hours (I never saw a Man eat or drink-guess they’d discovered a way around it). I was sitting in there one evening, drinking beer and reading their book, when Charlie came in and sat down next to me. Without preamble, he said, “I’m going to give it a try.” “Give what a try?”
“Women. Hetero.” He shuddered. “No offense. .. it’s not really very appealing.” He patted my hand, looking distracted. “But the alternative.. . have you tried it?”
“Well. . . no, I haven’t.” Female Man was a visual treat, but only in the same sense as a painting or a piece of sculpture. I just couldn’t see them as human beings.
“Don’t.” He didn’t elaborate. “Besides, they say-he says, she says, it says-that they can change me back just as easily. If I don’t like it.”
“You’ll like it, Charlie.”
“Sure that’s what they say.” He ordered a stiff drink. “Just seems unnatural. Anyway, since, uh, I’m going to make the switch, do you mind if. . . why don’t we plan on going to the same planet?”
“Sure, Charlie, that’d be great.” I meant it. “You know where you’re going?” “Hell, I don’t care. Just away from here.”
“I wonder if Heaven’s still as nice-”
“No.” Charlie jerked a thumb at the bartender. “He lives there.” “I don’t know. I guess there’s a list.”
A man came into the tavern, pushing a cart piled high with folders. “Major Mandella? Captain Moore?”
“That’s us,” Charlie said.
“These are your military records. I hope you find them of interest. They were transferred to paper when your strike force was the only one outstanding, because it would have been impractical to keep the normal data retrieval networks running to preserve so few data.”
They always anticipated your questions, even when you didn’t have any.
My folder was easily live times as thick as Charlie’s. Probably thicker than any other, since I seemed to be the only trooper who’d made it through the whole duration. Poor Marygay. “Wonder what kind of report old Stott filed about me.” I flipped to the front of the folder.
Stapled to the front page was a small square of paper.
All the other pages were pristine white, but this one was tan with age and crumbling around the edges.
The handwriting was familiar, too familiar even after so long. The date was over 250 years old.
I winced and was blinded by sudden tears. I’d had no reason to suspect that she might be alive. But I hadn’t really known she was dead, not until I saw that date.
“William? What’s-”
“Leave me be, Charlie. Just for a minute.” I wiped my eyes and closed the folder. I shouldn’t even read the damned note. Going to a new life, I should leave the old ghosts behind.
But even a message from the grave was contact of a sort. I opened the folder again.
11 Oct 2878
William- All this is in your personnel file. But knowing you, you might just chuck it. So 1 made sure you’d get this note.
Obviously, I Live. Maybe you will, too. Join me.
I know from the records that you’re out at Sade138 and won’t be back for a couple of centuries. No problem.
I’m going to a planet they call Middle Finger, the fifth plane: out from Mizar. It’s two collapsar jumps, ten months subjective. Middle Finger is a kind of Coventry for heterosexuals. They call it a “eugenic control baseline.”
No matter. it took all of my money, and all the money of five other old-timers, but we bought a cruiser from UNEF. And we’re using it as a time machine.
So i’m on a relativistic shuttle, waiting for you. All it does is go out five light years and come back to Middle Finger, very fast. Every ten years I age about a month. So if you ‘re on schedule and still alive, I’ll only be twenty-eight when you get here. Hurry!
I never found anybody else and I don’t want anybody else. I don’t care whether you’re ninety years old or thirty. if I can’t be your lover, I’ll be your nurse.
-Marygay.
“Say, bartender.” “Yes, Major?”
“Do you know of a place called Middle Finger? Is it still there?”
“Of course it is. Where else would it be?” Reasonable question. “A very nice place. Garden planet. Some people don’t think it’s exciting enough.”
“What’s this all about?” Charlie said.
I handed the bartender my empty glass. “I just found out where we’re going.”
EPILOGUE
From The New Voice, Paxton, Middle Finger 24-6 14/2/3143
OLD-TIMER HAS FIRST BOY
Mazygay Potter-Mandella (24 Post Road, Paxton) gave birth Friday to a fine baby boy, 3.1 kilos.
Maiygay lays claim to being the seoond-“oldeet” resident of Middle Finger, having been born In 1977. She fought through most of the Forever War and then waited for her mate on the time shuttle, 261 years.
The baby, not yet iwned, was delivered at home with the help of a friend of the family, Dr. Diana Aleever-Moore.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joe Haldeman was born in the USA ifl 1943. At college he studied physics and astronomy He then served as a combat engineer in Vietnam from 1967 to 1969. He was severely wounded during the war and received a Purple Heart. Haldeman’s first SF story was ‘Out of Phase’, published in 1969. The Forever War was published in 1974 and became a huge success, winning both a Nebula award in 1975 and a Hugo in 1976. He wrote two other novels in the 1970s, Mindbridge and All My Sins Remembered, before starting the Worlds sequence in 1981. A novella version of The Hemingway Hoax (1990) won both Nebula and Hugo awards ifl ’90 and ‘9! respectively More recent titles include J’fone So Blind and 1968. Haldeman now combines his writing career with a position as adjunct professor teaching writing at MIT His latest novel, Forever Peace, won the igg8 Hugo award, and will be published in ~ by Millennium. He is presently working on a sequel to The Forever War, entitled Forever Free.
The End
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This is a nice little story by Robert Heinlein. It’s a fun read on a boring day. It is a very Poul Andersonish kind of story. A super-spy discovers he is a part of a super society, and perhaps a part of a race that would overcome humanity.
GULF
THE FIRST-QUARTER ROCKET from Moonbase put him down at Pied-a-Terre. The name he was traveling under began—by foresight—with the letter “A”; he was through port inspection and into the shuttle tube to the city ahead of the throng. Once in the tube car he went to the men’s washroom and locked himself in.
Quickly he buckled on the safety belt he found there, snapped its hooks to the wall fixtures, and leaned over awkwardly to remove a razor from his bag. The surge caught him in that position; despite the safety belt he bumped his head—and swore. He straightened up and plugged in the razor. His moustache vanished; he shortened his sideburns, trimmed the corners of his eyebrows, and brushed them up.
He towelled his hair vigorously to remove the oil that had sleeked it down, combed it loosely into a wavy mane. The car was now riding in a smooth, unaccelerated 300 mph; he let himself out of the safety belt without unhooking it from the walls and, working very rapidly, peeled off his moonsuit, took from his bag and put on a tweedy casual outfit suited to outdoors on Earth and quite unsuited to Moon Colony’s air-conditioned corridors.
His slippers he replaced with walking shoes from the bag; he stood up. Joel Abner, commercial traveler, had disappeared; in his place was Captain Joseph Gilead, explorer, lecturer, and writer. Of both names he was the sole user; neither was his birth name.
He slashed the moonsuit to ribbons and flushed it down the water closet, added “Joel Abner’s” identification card; then peeled a plastic skin off his travel bag and let the bits follow the rest. The bag was now pearl grey and rough, instead of dark brown and smooth. The slippers bothered him; he was afraid they might stop up the car’s plumbing. He contented himself with burying them in the waste receptacle.
The acceleration warning sounded as he was doing this; he barely had time to get back into the belt. But, as the car plunged into the solenoid field and surged to a stop, nothing remained of Joel Abner but some unmarked underclothing, very ordinary toilet articles, and nearly two dozen spools of microfilm equally appropriate—until examined—to a commercial traveler or a lecturer-writer. He planned not to let them be examined as long as he was alive.
He waited in the washroom until he was sure of being last man out of the car, then went forward into the next car, left by its exit, and headed for the lift to the ground level.
“New Age Hotel, sir,” a voice pleaded near his ear. He felt a hand fumbling at the grip of his travel bag.
He repressed a reflex to defend the bag and looked the speaker over. At first glance he seemed an under-sized adolescent in a smart uniform and a pillbox cap. Further inspection showed premature wrinkles and the features of a man at least forty. The eyes were glazed. A pituitary case, he thought to himself, and on the hop as well. “New Age Hotel,” the runner repeated. “Best mechanos in town, chief. There’s a discount if you’re just down from the moon.”
Captain Gilead, when in town as Captain Gilead, always stayed at the old Savoy. But the notion of going to the New Age appealed to him; in that incredibly huge, busy, and ultramodern hostelry he might remain unnoticed until he had had time to do what had to be done.
He disliked mightily the idea of letting go his bag. Nevertheless it would be out of character not to let the runner carry the bag; it would call attention to himself—and the bag. He decided that this unhealthy runt could not outrun him even if he himself were on crutches; it would suffice to keep an eye on the bag.
“Lead on, comrade,” he answered heartily, surrendering the bag. There had been no hesitation at all; he had let go the bag even as the hotel runner reached for it.
“Okay, chief.” The runner was first man into an empty lift; he went to the back of the car and set the bag down beside him. Gilead placed himself so that his foot rested firmly against his bag and faced forward as other travelers crowded in. The car started.
The lift was jammed; Gilead was subjected to body pressures on every side—but he noticed an additional, unusual, and uncalled-for pressure behind him.
His right hand moved suddenly and clamped down on a skinny wrist and a hand clutching something. Gilead made no further movement, nor did the owner of the hand attempt to draw away or make any objection. They remained so until the car reached the surface. When the passengers had spilled out he reached behind him with his left hand, recovered his bag and dragged the wrist and its owner out of the car.
It was, of course, the runner; the object in his fist was Gilead’s wallet. “You durn near lost that, chief,” the runner announced with no show of embarrassment. “It was falling out of your pocket.”
Gilead liberated the wallet and stuffed it into an inner pocket. “Fell right through the zipper,” he answered cheerfully. “Well, let’s find a cop.”
The runt tried to pull away. “You got nothing on me!”
Gilead considered the defense. In truth, he had nothing. His wallet was already out of sight. As to witnesses, the other lift passengers were already gone—nor had they seen anything. The lift itself was automatic. He was simply a man in the odd position of detaining another citizen by the wrist. And Gilead himself did not want to talk to the police.
He let go that wrist. “On your way, comrade. We’ll call it quits.”
The runner did not move. “How about my tip?”
Gilead was beginning to like this rascal. Locating a loose half credit in his change pocket he flipped it at the runner, who grabbed it out of the air but still didn’t leave. “I’ll take your bag now. Gimme.”
“No, thanks, chum. I can find your delightful inn without further help. One side, please.”
“Oh, yeah? How about my commission? I gotta carry your bag, else how they gonna know I brung you in? Gimme.”
Gilead was delighted with the creature’s unabashed insistence. He found a two-credit piece and passed it over. “There’s your cumshaw. Now beat it, before I kick your tail up around your shoulders.”
“You and who else?”
Gilead chuckled and moved away down the concourse toward the station entrance to the New Age Hotel. His subconscious sentries informed him immediately that the runner had not gone back toward the lift as expected, but was keeping abreast him in the crowd. He considered this. The runner might very well be what he appeared to be, common city riff-raff who combined casual thievery with his overt occupation. On the other hand—
He decided to unload. He stepped suddenly off the sidewalk into the entrance of a drugstore and stopped just inside the door to buy a newspaper. While his copy was being printed, he scooped up, apparently as an afterthought, three standard pneumo mailing tubes. As he paid for them he palmed a pad of gummed address labels.
A glance at the mirrored wall showed him that his shadow had hesitated outside but was still watching him. Gilead went on back to the shop’s soda fountain and slipped into an unoccupied booth. Although the floor show was going on—a remarkably shapely ecdysiast was working down toward her last string of beads—he drew the booth’s curtain.
Shortly the call light over the booth flashed discreetly; he called, “Come in!” A pretty and very young waitress came inside the curtain. Her plastic costume covered without concealing.
She glanced around. “Lonely?”
“No, thanks, I’m tired.”
“How about a redhead, then? Real cute—”
“I really am tired. Bring me two bottles of beer, unopened, and some pretzels.”
“Suit yourself, sport.” She left.
With speed he opened the travel bag, selected nine spools of microfilm, and loaded them into the three mailing tubes, the tubes being of the common three-spool size. Gilead then took the filched pad of address labels, addressed the top one to “Raymond Calhoun, P.O. Box 1060, Chicago” and commenced to draw with great care in the rectangle reserved for electric-eye sorter. The address he shaped in arbitrary symbols intended not to be read, but to be scanned automatically. The hand-written address was merely a precaution, in case a robot sorter should reject his hand-drawn symbols as being imperfect and thereby turn the tube over to a human postal clerk for readdressing.
He worked fast, but with the care of an engraver. The waitress returned before he had finished. The call light warned him; he covered the label with his elbow and kept it covered.
She glanced at the mailing tubes as she put down the beer and a bowl of pretzels. “Want me to mail those?”
He had another instant of split-second indecision. When he had stepped out of the tube car he had been reasonably sure, first, that the persona of Joel Abner, commercial traveler, had not been penetrated, and, second, that the transition from Abner to Gilead had been accomplished without arousing suspicion. The pocket-picking episode had not alarmed him, but had caused him to reclassify those two propositions from calculated certainties to unproved variables. He had proceeded to test them at once; they were now calculated certainties again—of the opposite sort. Ever since he had spotted his erstwhile porter, the New Age runner, as standing outside this same drugstore his subconscious had been clanging like a burglar alarm.
It was clear not only that he had been spotted but that they were organized with a completeness and shrewdness he had not believed possible.
But it was mathematically probable to the point of certainty that they were not operating through this girl. They had no way of knowing that he would choose to turn aside into this particular drugstore. That she could be used by them he was sure—and she had been out of sight since his first contact with her. But she was clearly not bright enough, despite her alley-cat sophistication, to be approached, subverted, instructed and indoctrinated to the point where she could seize an unexpected opportunity, all in a space of time merely adequate to fetch two bottles of beer. No, this girl was simply after a tip. Therefore she was safe.
But her costume offered no possibility of concealing three mailing tubes, nor would she be safe crossing the concourse to the post office. He had no wish that she be found tomorrow morning dead in a ditch.
“No,” he answered immediately. “I have to pass the post office anyway. But it was a kind thought. Here.” He gave her a half credit.
“Thanks.” She waited and stared meaningfully at the beer. He fumbled again in his change pocket, found only a few bits, reached for his wallet and took out a five-pluton note.
“Take it out of this.”
She handed him back three singles and some change. He pushed the change toward her, then waited, frozen, while she picked it up and left. Only then did he hold the wallet closer to his eyes.
It was not his wallet.
He should have noticed it before, he told himself. Even though there had been only a second from the time he had taken it from the runner’s clutched fingers until he had concealed it in a front pocket, he should have known it—known it and forced the runner to disgorge, even if he had had to skin him alive.
But why was he sure that it was not his wallet? It was the proper size and shape, the proper weight and feel—real ostrich skin in these days of synthetics. There was the weathered ink stain which had resulted from carrying a leaky stylus in the same pocket. There was a V-shaped scratch on the front which had happened so long ago he did not recall the circumstances.
Yet it was not his wallet.
He opened it again. There was the proper amount of money, there were what seemed to be his Explorers’ Club card and his other identity cards, there was a dog-eared flat-photo of a mare he had once owned. Yet the more the evidence, showed that it was his, the more certain he became that it was not his. These things were forgeries; they did not feel right.
There was one way to find out. He flipped a switch provided by a thoughtful management; the booth became dark. He took out his penknife and carefully slit a seam back of the billfold pocket. He dipped a finger into a secret pocket thus disclosed and felt around; the space was empty—nor in this case had the duplication of his own wallet been quite perfect; the space should have been lined, but his fingers encountered rough leather.
He switched the light back on, put the wallet away, and resumed his interrupted drawing. The loss of the card which should have been in the concealed pocket was annoying, certainly awkward, and conceivably disastrous, but he did not judge that the information on it was jeopardized by the loss of the wallet. The card was quite featureless unless examined by black light; if exposed to visible light—by someone taking the real wallet apart, for example—it had the disconcerting quality of bursting explosively into flame.
He continued to work, his mind busy with the wider problem of why they had taken so much trouble to try to keep him from knowing that his wallet was being stolen—and the still wider and more disconcerting question of why they had bothered with his wallet. Finished, he stuffed the remainder of the pad of address labels into a crack between cushions in the booth, palmed the label he had prepared, picked up the bag and the three mailing tubes. One tube he kept separate from the others by a finger.
No attack would take place, he judged, in the drugstore. The crowded concourse between himself and the post office he would ordinarily have considered equally safe—but not today. A large crowd of people, he knew, are equal to so many trees as witnesses if the dice were loaded with any sort of a diversion.
He slanted across the bordering slidewalk and headed directly across the middle toward the post office, keeping as far from other people as he could manage. He had become aware of two men converging on him when the expected diversion took place.
It was a blinding light and a loud explosion, followed by screams and startled shouts. The source of the explosion he could imagine; the screams and shouts were doubtless furnished free by the public. Being braced, not for this, but for anything, he refrained even from turning his head.
The two men closed rapidly, as on cue.
Most creatures and almost all humans fight only when pushed. This can lose them decisive advantage. The two men made no aggressive move of any sort, other than to come close to Gilead—nor did they ever attack.
Gilead kicked the first of them in the knee cap, using the side of his foot, a much more certain stroke than with the toe. He swung with his travel bag against the other at the same time, not hurting him but bothering him, spoiling his timing. Gilead followed it with a heavy kick to the man’s stomach.
The man whose knee cap he had ruined was on the pavement, but still active—reaching for something, a gun or a knife. Gilead kicked him in the head and stepped over him, continued toward the post office.
Slow march—slow march all the way! He must not give the appearance of running away; he must be the perfect respectable citizen, going about his lawful occasions.
The post office came close, and still no tap on the shoulder, no denouncing shout, no hurrying footsteps. He reached the post office, was inside. The opposition’s diversion had worked, perfectly—but for Gilead, not for them.
There was a short queue at the addressing machine. Gilead joined it, took out his stylus and wrote addresses on the tubes while standing. A man joined the queue almost at once; Gilead made no effort to keep him from seeing what address he was writing; it was “Captain Joseph Gilead, the Explorers’ Club, New York.” When it came his turn to use the symbol printing machine he still made no effort to conceal what keys he was punching—and the symbol address matched the address he had written on each tube.
He worked somewhat awkwardly as the previously prepared gummed label was still concealed in his left palm.
He went from the addressing machine to the mailing receivers; the man who had been behind him in line followed him without pretending to address anything.
Thwonk! and the first tube was away with a muted implosion of compressed air. Thwonk! again and the second was gone—and at the same time Gilead grasped the last one in his left hand, sticking the gummed label down firmly over the address he had just printed on it. Without looking at it he made sure by touch that it was in place, all corners sealed, then thwonk! it joined its mates.
Gilead turned suddenly and trod heavily on the feet of the man crowded close behind him. “Wups! pardon me.” he said happily and turned away. He was feeling very cheerful; not only had he turned his dangerous charge over into the care of a mindless, utterly reliable, automatic machine which could not be coerced, bribed, drugged, nor subverted by any other means and in whose complexities the tube would be perfectly hidden until it reached a destination known only to Gilead, but also he had just stepped on the corns of one of the opposition.
On the steps of the post office he paused beside a policeman who was picking his teeth and staring out at a cluster of people and an ambulance in the middle of the concourse. “What’s up?” Gilead demanded.
The cop shifted his toothpick. “First some damn fool sets off fireworks,” he answered, “then two guys get in a fight and blame near ruin each other.”
“My goodness!” Gilead commented and set off diagonally toward the New Age Hotel.
He looked around for his pick-pocket friend in the lobby, did not see him. Gilead strongly doubted if the runt were on the hotel’s staff. He signed in as Captain Gilead, ordered a suite appropriate to the persona he was wearing, and let himself be conducted to the lift.
Gilead encountered the runner coming down just as he and his bellman were about to go up. “Hi, Shorty!” he called out while deciding not to eat anything in this hotel. “How’s business?”
The runt looked startled, then passed him without answering, his eyes blank. It was not likely, Gilead considered, that the runt would be used after being detected; therefore some sort of drop box, call station, or headquarters of the opposition was actually inside the hotel. Very well, that would save everybody a lot of useless commuting—and there would be fun for all!
In the meantime he wanted a bath.
In his suite he tipped the bellman who continued to linger.
“Want some company?”
“No, thanks, I’m a hermit.”
“Try this then.” The bellman inserted Gilead’s room key in the stereo panel, fiddled with the controls, the entire wall lighted up and faded away. A svelte blonde creature, backed by a chorus line, seemed about to leap into Gilead’s lap. “That’s not a tape,” the bellman went on, “that’s a live transmission direct from the Tivoli. We got the best equipment in town.”
“So you have,” Gilead agreed, and pulled out his key. The picture blanked; the music stopped. “But I want a bath, so get out—now that you’ve spent four credits of my money.”
The bellman shrugged and left. Gilead threw off his clothes and stepped into the “fresher.” Twenty minutes later, shaved from ear to toe, scrubbed, soaked, sprayed, pummeled, rubbed, scented, powdered, and feeling ten years younger, he stepped out. His clothes were gone.
His bag was still there; he looked it over. It seemed okay, itself and contents. There were the proper number of microfilm spools—not that it mattered. Only three of the spools mattered and they were already in the mail. The rest were just shrubbery, copies of his own public lectures. Nevertheless he examined one of them, unspooling a few frames.
It was one of his own lectures all right—but not one he had had with him. It was one of his published transcriptions, available in any large book store. “Pixies everywhere,” he remarked and put it back. Such attention to detail was admirable.
“Room service!”
The service panel lighted up. “Yes, sir?”
“My clothes are missing. Chase ’em up for me.”
“The valet has them, sir.”
“I didn’t order valet service. Get ’em back.”
The girl’s voice and face were replaced, after a slight delay, by those of a man. “It is not necessary to order valet service here, sir. ‘A New Age guest receives the best.’ ”
“Okay, get ’em back—chop, chop! I’ve got a date with the Queen of Sheba.”
“Very good, sir.” The image faded.
With wry humor he reviewed his situation. He had already made the possibly fatal error of underestimating his opponent through—he now knew—visualizing that opponent in the unimpressive person of “the runt.” Thus he had allowed himself to be diverted; he should have gone anywhere rather than to the New Age, even to the old Savoy, although that hotel, being a known stamping ground of Captain Gilead, was probably as thoroughly booby-trapped by now as this palatial dive.
He must not assume that he had more than a few more minutes to live. Therefore he must use those few minutes to tell his boss the destination of the three important spools of microfilm. Thereafter, if he still were alive, he must replenish his cash to give him facilities for action—the amount of money in “his” wallet, even if it were returned, was useless for any major action. Thirdly, he must report in, close the present assignment, and be assigned to his present antagonists as a case in themselves, quite aside from the matter of the microfilm.
Not that he intended to drop Runt & Company even if not assigned to them. True artists were scarce—nailing him down by such a simple device as stealing his pants! He loved them for it and wanted to see more of them, as violently as possible.
Even as the image on the room service panel faded he was punching the scrambled keys on the room’s communicator desk. It was possible—certain—that the scramble code he used would be repeated elsewhere in the hotel and the supposed privacy attained by scrambling thereby breached at once. This did not matter; he would have his boss disconnect and call back with a different scramble from the other end. To be sure, the call code of the station to which he was reporting would thereby be breached, but it was more than worthwhile to expend and discard one relay station to get this message through.
Scramble pattern set up, he coded—not New Washington, but the relay station he had selected. A girl’s face showed on the screen. “New Age service, sir. Were you scrambling?”
“Yes.”
“I am ve-ree sor-ree, sir. The scrambling circuits are being repaired. I can scramble for you from the main board.”
“No, thanks, I’ll call in clear.”
“I yam ve-ree sor-ree, sir.”
There was one clear-code he could use—to be used only for crash priority. This was crash priority. Very well—
He punched the keys again without scrambling and waited. The same girl’s face appeared presently. “I am verree sorree, sir; that code does not reply. May I help you?”
“You might send up a carrier pigeon.” He cleared the board.
The cold breath on the back of his neck was stronger now; he decided to do what he could to make it awkward to kill him just yet. He reached back into his mind and coded in clear the Star-Times.
No answer.
He tried the Clarion—again no answer.
No point in beating his head against it; they did not intend to let him talk outside to anyone. He rang for a bellman, sat down in an easy chair, switched it to “shallow massage”, and luxuriated happily in the chair’s tender embrace. No doubt about it; the New Age did have the best mechanos in town—his bath had been wonderful; this chair was superb. Both the recent austerities of Moon Colony and the probability that this would be his last massage added to his pleasure.
The door dilated and a bellman came in—about his own size, Gilead noted. The man’s eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch on seeing Gilead’s oyster-naked condition. “You want company?”
Gilead stood up and moved toward him. “No, dearie,” he said grinning, “I want you”—at which he sank three stiffened fingers in the man’s solar plexus.
As the man grunted and went down Gilead chopped him in the side of the neck with the edge of his hand.
The shoulders of the jacket were too narrow and the shoes too large; nevertheless two minutes later “Captain Gilead” had followed “Joel Abner” to oblivion and Joe, temporary and free-lance bellman, let himself out of the room. He regretted not being able to leave a tip with his predecessor.
He sauntered past the passengers lifts, firmly misdirected a guest who had stopped him, and found the service elevator. By it was a door to the “quick drop.” He opened it, reached out and grasped a waiting pulley belt, and, without stopping to belt himself into it, contenting himself with hanging on, he stepped off the edge. In less time than it would have taken him to parachute the drop he was picking himself up off the cushions in the hotel basement and reflecting that lunar gravitation surely played hob with a man’s leg muscles.
He left the drop room and started out in an arbitrary direction, but walking as if he were on business and belonged where he was—any exit would do and he would find one eventually.
He wandered in and out of the enormous pantry, then found the freight door through which the pantry was supplied.
When he was thirty feet from it, it closed and an alarm sounded. He turned back.
He encountered two policemen in one of the many corridors under the giant hotel and attempted to brush on past them. One of them stared at him, then caught his arm. “Captain Gilead—”
Gilead tried to squirm away, but without showing any skill in the attempt. “What’s the idea?”
“You are Captain Gilead.”
“And you’re my Aunt Sadie. Let go of my arm, copper.”
The policeman fumbled in his pocket with his other hand, pulled out a notebook. Gilead noted that the other officer had moved a safe ten feet away and had a Markheim gun trained on him.
“You, Captain Gilead,” the first officer droned, “are charged on a sworn complaint with uttering a counterfeit five-pluton note at or about thirteen hours this date at the Grand Concourse drugstore in this city. You are cautioned to come peacefully and are advised that you need not speak at this time. Come along.”
The charge might or might not have something to it, thought Gilead; he had not examined closely the money in the substituted wallet. He did not mind being booked, now that the microfilm was out of his possession; to be in an ordinary police station with nothing more sinister to cope with than crooked cops and dumb desk sergeants would be easy street compared with Runt & Company searching for him.
On the other hand the situation was too pat, unless the police had arrived close on his heels and found the stripped bellman, gotten his story and started searching.
The second policeman kept his distance and did not lower the Markheim gun. That made other consideration academic. “Okay, I’ll go,” he protested. “You don’t have to twist my arm that way.”
They went up to the weather level and out to the street—and not once did the second cop drop his guard. Gilead relaxed and waited. A police car was balanced at the curb. Gilead stopped. “I’ll walk,” he said. “The nearest station is just around the corner. I want to be booked in my own precinct.”
He felt a teeth-chattering chill as the blast from the Markheim hit him; he pitched forward on his face.
He was coming to, but still could not coordinate, as they lifted him out of the car. By the time he found himself being half-carried, half-marched down a long corridor he was almost himself again, but with a gap in his memory. He was shoved through a door which clanged behind him. He steadied himself and looked around.
“Greetings, friend,” a resonant voice called out “Drag up a chair by the fire.”
Gilead blinked, deliberately slowed himself down, and breathed deeply. His healthy body was fighting off the effects of the Markheim bolt; he was almost himself.
The room was a cell, old-fashioned, almost primitive. The front of the cell and the door were steel bars; the walls were concrete. Its only furniture, a long wooden bench, was occupied by the man who had spoken. He was fiftyish, of ponderous frame, heavy features set in a shrewd, good-natured expression. He was lying back on the bench, head pillowed on his hands, in animal ease. Gilead had seen him before. “Hello, Dr. Baldwin.”
The man sat up with a flowing economy of motion that moved his bulk as little as possible. “I’m not Dr. Baldwin—I’m not Doctor anything, though my name is Baldwin.” He stared at Gilead. “But I know you—seen some of your lectures.”
Gilead cocked an eyebrow. “A man would seem naked around the Association of Theoretical physicists without a doctor’s degree—and you were at their last meeting.”
Baldwin chuckled boomingly. “That accounts for it—that has to be my cousin on my father’s side, Hartley M.—Stuffy citizen Hartley. I’ll have to try to take the curse off the family name, now that I’ve met you, Captain.” He stuck out a huge hand. “Gregory Baldwin, ‘Kettle Belly’ to my friends. New and used helicopters is as close as I come to theoretical physics. ‘Kettle Belly Baldwin, King of the Kopters’—you must have seen my advertising.”
“Now that you mention it, I have.”
Baldwin pulled out a card. “Here. If you ever need one, I’ll give you a ten percent off for knowing old Hartley. Matter of fact, I can do right well by you in a year-old Curtiss, a family car without a mark on it.”
Gilead accepted the card and sat down. “Not at the moment, thanks. You seem to have an odd sort of office, Mr. Baldwin.”
Baldwin chuckled again. “In the course of a long life these things happen, Captain. I won’t ask you why you are here or what you are doing in that monkey suit. Call me Kettle Belly.”
“Okay.” Gilead got up and went to the door. Opposite the cell was a blank wall; there was no one in sight. He whistled and shouted—no answer.
Gilead turned. His cellmate had dealt a solitaire hand on the bench and was calmly playing.
“I’ve got to raise the turnkey and send for a lawyer.”
“Don’t fret about it. Let’s play some cards.” He reached in a pocket. “I’ve got a second deck; how about some Russian bank?”
“No, thanks. I’ve got to get out of here.” He shouted again—still no answer.
“Don’t waste your lung power, Captain,” Baldwin advised him. “They’ll come when it suits them and not a second before. I know. Come play with me; it passes the time.” Baldwin appeared to be shuffling the two decks; Gilead could see that he was actually stacking the cards. The deception amused him; he decided to play—since the truth of Baldwin’s advice was so evident.
“If you don’t like Russian bank,” Kettle Belly went on, “here is a game I learned as a kid.” He paused and stared into Gilead’s eyes. “It’s instructive as well as entertaining, yet it’s simple, once you catch on to it.” He started dealing out the cards. “It makes a better game with two decks, because the black cards don’t mean anything. Just the twenty-six red cards in each deck count—with the heart suit coming first. Each card scores according to its position in that sequence. The ace of hearts is one and the king of hearts counts thirteen; the ace of diamonds is next at fourteen and so on. Savvy?”
“Yes.”
“And the blacks don’t count. They’re blanks . . . spaces. Ready to play?”
“What are the rules?”
“We’ll deal out one hand for free; you’ll learn faster as you see it. Then, when you’ve caught on, I’ll play you for a half interest in the atomics trust—or ten bits in cash.” He resumed dealing, laying the cards out rapidly in columns, five to a row. He paused, finished. “It’s my deal, so it’s your count. See what you get.”
It was evident that Baldwin’s stacking had brought the red cards into groups, yet there was no evident advantage to it, nor was the count especially high—nor low. Gilead stared at it, trying to figure out the man’s game. The cheating, as cheating seemed too bold to be probable.
Suddenly the cards jumped at him, arranged themselves in a meaningful array. He read:
XTHXY
CANXX
XXXSE
HEARX
XUSXX
The fact that there were only two fives-of-hearts available had affected the spelling but the meaning was clear. Gilead reached for the cards. “I’ll try one. I can beat that score.” He dipped into the tips belonging to the suit’s owner. “Ten bits it is.”
Baldwin covered it. Gilead shuffled, making even less attempt to cover up than had Baldwin. He dealt:
WHATS
XXXXX
XYOUR
GAMEX
XXXXX
Baldwin shoved the money toward him and anted again. “Okay, my turn for revenge.” He laid out:
XXIMX
XONXX
YOURX
XXXXX
XSIDE
“I win again,” Gilead announced gleefully. “Ante up.” He grabbed the cards and manipulated them:
YEAHX
XXXXX
PROVE
XXITX
XXXXX
Baldwin counted and said, “You’re too smart for me. Gimme the cards.” He produced another ten-bit piece and dealt again:
XXILX
HELPX
XXYOU
XGETX
OUTXX
“I should have cut the cards,” Gilead complained, pushing the money over. “Let’s double the bets.” Baldwin grunted and Gilead dealt again:
XNUTS
IMXXX
SAFER
XXINX
XGAOL
“I broke your luck,” Baldwin gloated. “We’ll double it again?”
XUXRX
XNUTS
THISX
NOXXX
XJAIL
The deal shifted:
KEEPX
XTALK
INGXX
XXXXX
XBUDX
Baldwin answered:
THISX
XXXXX
XXNEW
AGEXX
XHOTL
As he stacked the cards again Gilead considered these new factors. He was prepared to believe that he was hidden somewhere in the New Age Hotel; in fact the counterproposition that his opponents had permitted two ordinary cops to take him away to a normal city jail was most unlikely—unless they had the jail as fully under control as they quite evidently had the hotel. Nevertheless the point was not proven. As for Baldwin, he might be on Gilead’s side; more probably he was planted as an agent provocateur—or he might be working for himself.
The permutations added up to six situations, only one of which made it desirable to accept Baldwin’s offer for help in a jail break—said situation being the least likely of the six.
Nevertheless, though he considered Baldwin a liar, net, he tentatively decided to accept. A static situation brought him no advantage; a dynamic situation—any dynamic situation—he might turn to his advantage. But more data were needed. “These cards are sticky as candy,” he complained. “You letting your money ride?”
“Suits.” Gilead dealt again:
XXXXX
WHYXX
AMXXX
XXXXI
XHERE
“You have the damnedest luck,” Baldwin commented:
FILMS
ESCAP
BFORE
XUXXX
KRACK
Gilead swept up the cards, was about to “shuffle,” when Baldwin said, “Oh oh, school’s out.” Footsteps could be heard in the passage. “Good luck, boy,” Baldwin added.
Baldwin knew about the films, but had not used any of the dozen ways to identify himself as part of Gilead’s own organization. Therefore he was planted by the opposition, or he was a third factor.
More important, the fact that Baldwin knew about the films proved his assertion that this was not a jail. It followed with bitter certainty that he, Gilead, stood no computable chance of getting out alive. The footsteps approaching the cell could be ticking off the last seconds of his life.
He knew now that he should have found means to report the destination of the films before going to the New Age. But Humpty Dumpty was off the wall, entropy always increases—but the films must be delivered.
The footsteps were quite close.
Baldwin might get out alive.
But who was Baldwin?
All the while he was “shuffling” the cards. The action was not final; he had only to give them one true shuffle to destroy the message being set up in them. A spider settled from the ceiling, landed on the other man’s hand. Baldwin, instead of knocking it off and crushing it, most carefully reached his arm out toward the wall and encouraged it to lower itself to the floor. “Better stay out of the way, shorty,” he said gently, “or one of the big boys is likely to step on you.”
The incident, small as it was, determined Gilead’s decision—and with it, the fate of a planet. He stood up and handed the stacked deck to Baldwin. “I owe you exactly ten-sixty,” he said carefully. “Be sure to remember it—I’ll see who our visitors are.”
The footsteps had stopped outside the cell door.
There were two of them, dressed neither as police nor as guards; the masquerade was over. One stood well back, covering the maneuver with a Markheim, the other unlocked the door. “Back against the wall, Fatso,” he ordered. “Gilead, out you come. And take it easy, or, after we freeze you, I’ll knock out your teeth just for fun.”
Baldwin shuffled back against the wall; Gilead came out slowly. He watched for any opening but the leader backed away from him without once getting between him and the man with the Markheim. “Ahead of us and take it slow,” he was ordered. He complied, helpless under the precautions, unable to run, unable to fight.
Baldwin went back to the bench when they had gone. He dealt out the cards as if playing solitaire, swept them up again, and continued to deal himself solitaire hands. Presently he “shuffled” the cards back to the exact order Gilead had left them in and pocketed them.
The message had read: XTELLXFBSXPOBOXDEBT XXXCHI.
His two guards marched Gilead into a room and locked the door behind him, leaving themselves outside. He found himself in a large window overlooking the city and a reach of the river; balancing it on the left hung a solid portraying a lunar landscape in convincing color and depth. In front of him was a rich but not ostentatious executive desk.
The lower part of his mind took in these details; his attention could be centered only on the person who sat at that desk. She was old but not senile, frail but not helpless. Her eyes were very much alive, her expression serene. Her translucent, well-groomed hands were busy with a frame of embroidery.
On the desk in front of her were two pneumo mailing tubes, a pair of slippers, and some tattered, soiled remnants of cloth and plastic.
She looked up. “How do you do, Captain Gilead?” she said in a thin, sweet soprano suitable for singing hymns.
“Madame would be famous if only for her charities.”
“You are kind. Captain, I will not waste your time. I had hoped that we could release you without fuss, but—” She indicated the two tubes in front of her “—you can see for yourself that we must deal with you further.”
“So?”
“Come, now, Captain. You mailed three tubes. These two are only dummies, and the third did not reach its apparent destination. It is possible that it was badly addressed and has been rejected by the sorting machines. If so, we shall have it in due course. But it seems much more likely that you found some way to change its address—likely to the point of pragmatic certainty.”
“Or possibly I corrupted your servant.”
She shook her head slightly. “We examined him quite thoroughly before—”
“Before he died?”
“Please, Captain, let’s not change the subject. I must know where you sent that other tube. You cannot be hypnotized by ordinary means; you have an acquired immunity to hypnotic drugs. Your tolerance for pain extends beyond the threshold of unconsciousness. All of these things have already been proved, else you would not be in the job you are in; I shall not put either of us to the inconvenience of proving them again. Yet I must have that tube. What is your price?”
“You assume that I have a price.”
She smiled. “If the old saw has any exceptions, history does not record them. Be reasonable, Captain. Despite your admitted immunity to ordinary forms of examination, there are ways of breaking down—of changing—a man’s character so that he becomes really quite pliant under examination . . . ways that we learned from the commissars. But those ways take time and a woman my age has no time to waste.”
Gilead lied convincingly. “It’s not your age, ma’am; it is the fact that you know that you must obtain that tube at once or you will never get it.” He was hoping—more than that, he was willing—that Baldwin would have sense enough to examine the cards for one last message . . . and act on it. If Baldwin failed and he, Gilead, died, the tube would eventually come to rest in a dead-letter office and would in time be destroyed.
“You are probably right. Nevertheless, Captain, I will go ahead with the Mindszenty technique if you insist upon it. What do you say to ten million plutonium credits?”
Gilead believed her first statement. He reviewed in his mind the means by which a man bound hand and foot, or worse, could kill himself unassisted. “Ten million plutons and a knife in my back?” he answered. “Let’s be practical.”
“Convincing assurance would be given before you need talk.”
“Even so, it is not my price. After all, you are worth at least five hundred million plutons.”
She leaned forward. “I like you, Captain. You are a man of strength. I am an old woman, without heirs. Suppose you became my partner—and my successor?”
“Pie in the sky.”
“No, no! I mean it. My age and sex do not permit me actively to serve myself; I must rely on others. Captain, I am very tired of inefficient tools, of men who can let things be spirited away right from under their noses. Imagine! She made a little gesture of exasperation, clutching her hand into a claw. “You and I could go far, Captain. I need you.”
“But I do not need you, madame. And I won’t have you.”
She made no answer, but touched a control on her desk. A door on the left dilated; two men and a girl came in. The girl Gilead recognized as the waitress from the Grand Concourse Drug Store. They had stripped her bare, which seemed to him an unnecessary indignity since her working uniform could not possibly have concealed a weapon.
The girl, once inside, promptly blew her top, protesting, screaming, using language unusual to her age and sex—a hysterical, thalmic outburst of volcanic proportions.
“Quiet, child!”
The girl stopped in midstream, looked with surprise at Mrs. Keithley, and shut up. Nor did she start again, but stood there, looking even younger than she was and somewhat aware of and put off stride by her nakedness. She was covered now with goose flesh, one tear cut a white line down her dust-smeared face, stopped at her lip. She licked at it and sniffled.
“You were out of observation once, Captain,” Mrs. Keithley went on, “during which time this person saw you twice. Therefore we will examine her.”
Gilead shook his head. “She knows no more than a goldfish. But go ahead—five minutes of hypno will convince you.”
“Oh, no, Captain! Hypno is sometimes fallible; if she is a member of your bureau, it is certain to be fallible.” She signaled to one of the men attending the girl; he went to a cupboard and opened it. “I am old-fashioned,” the old woman went on. “I trust simple mechanical means much more than I do the cleverest of clinical procedures.”
Gilead saw the implements that the man was removing from cupboard and started forward. “Stop that!” he commanded. “You can’t do that—”
He bumped his nose quite hard.
The man paid him no attention. Mrs. Keithley said, “Forgive me, Captain. I should have told you that this room is not one room, but two. The partition is merely glass, but very special glass—I use the room for difficult interviews. There is no need to hurt yourself by trying to reach us.”
“Just a moment!”
“Yes, Captain?”
“Your time is already running out. Let the girl and me go free now. You are aware that there are several hundred men searching this city for me even now—and that they will not stop until they have taken it apart panel by panel.”
“I think not. A man answering your description to the last factor caught the South Africa rocket twenty minutes after you registered at the New Age Hotel. He was carrying your very own identifications. He will not reach South Africa, but the manner of his disappearance will point to desertion rather than accident or suicide.”
Gilead dropped the matter. “What do you plan to gain by abusing this child? You have all she knows; certainly you do not believe that we could afford to trust in such as she?”
Mrs. Keithley pursed her lips. “Frankly, I do not expect to learn anything from her. I may learn something from you.”
“I see.”
The leader of the two men looked questioning at his mistress; she motioned him to go ahead. The girl stared blankly at him, plainly unaware of the uses of the equipment he had gotten out. He and his partner got busy.
Shortly the girl screamed, continued to scream for a few moments in a high adulation. Then it stopped as she fainted.
They roused her and stood her up again. She stood, swaying and staring stupidly at her poor hands, forever damaged even for the futile purposes to which she had been capable of putting them. Blood spread down her wrists and dripped on a plastic tarpaulin, placed there earlier by the second of the two men.
Gilead did nothing and said nothing. Knowing as he did that the tube he was protecting contained matters measured in millions of lives, the problem of the girl, as a problem, did not even arise. It disturbed a deep and very ancient part of his brain, but almost automatically he cut that part off and lived for the time in his forebrain.
Consciously he memorized the faces, skulls, and figures of the two men and filed the data under “personal.” Thereafter he unobtrusively gave his attention to the scene out the window He had been noting it all through the interview but he wanted to give it explicit thought. He recast what he saw in terms of what it would look like had he been able to look squarely out the window and decided that he was on the ninety-first floor of the New Age Hotel and approximately one hundred and thirty meters from the north end. He filed this under “professional.”
When the girl died, Mrs. Keithley left the room without speaking to him. The men gathered up what was left in the tarpaulin and followed her. Presently the two guards returned and, using the same foolproof methods, took him back to his cell.
As soon as the guards had gone and Kettle Belly was free to leave his position against the wall he came forward and pounded Gilead on the shoulders. “Hi, boy! I’m sure glad to see you—I was scared I would never lay eyes on you again. How was it? Pretty rough?”
“No, they didn’t hurt me; they just asked some questions.”
“You’re lucky. Some of those crazy damn cops play mean when they get you alone in a back room. Did they let you call your lawyer?”
“No.”
“Then they ain’t through with you. You want to watch it, kid.”
Gilead sat down on the bench. “The hell with them. Want to play some more cards?”
“Don’t mind if I do. I feel lucky.” Baldwin pulled out the double deck, riffled through it. Gilead took them and did the same. Good! they were in the order he had left them in. He ran his thumb across the edges again—yes, even the black nulls were unchanged in sequence; apparently Kettle Belly had simply stuck them in his pocket without examining them, without suspecting that a last message had been written in to them. He felt sure that Baldwin would not have left the message set up if he had read it. Since he found himself still alive, he was much relieved to think this.
He gave the cards one true shuffle, then started stacking them. His first lay-out read:
XXXXX
ESCAP
XXATX
XXXXX
XONCE
“Gotcha that time!” Baldwin crowed. “Ante up:”
DIDXX
XYOUX
XXXXX
XXXXX
CRACK
“Let it ride,” announced Gilead and took the deal:
XXNOX
BUTXX
XXXXX
XLETS
XXGOX
“You’re too derned lucky to live,” complained Baldwin. “Look—we’ll leave the bets doubled and double the lay-out. I want a fair chance to get my money back.”
His next lay-out read:
XXXXX
XTHXN
XXXXX
THXYX
NEEDX
XXXUX
ALIVX
XXXXX
PLAYX
XXXUP
“Didn’t do you much good, did it?” Gilead commented, took the cards and started arranging them,
“There’s something mighty funny about a man that wins all the time,” Baldwin grumbled. He watched Gilead narrowly. Suddenly his hand shot out, grabbed Gilead’s wrist. “I thought so;” he yelled. “A goddam card sharp—” Gilead shook his hand off. “Why, you obscene fat slug!”
“Caught you! Caught you!” Kettle Belly reclaimed his hold, grabbed the other wrist as well. They struggled and rolled to the floor.
Gilead discovered two things: this awkward, bulky man was an artist at every form of dirty fighting and he could simulate it convincingly without damaging his partner. His nerve holds were an inch off the nerve; his kneeings were to thigh muscle rather than to the crotch.
Baldwin tried for a chancery strangle; Gilead let him take it. The big man settled the flat of his forearm against the point of Gilead’s chin rather than against his Adam’s apple and proceeded to “strangle” him.
There were running footsteps in the corridor. Gilead caught a glimpse of the guards as they reached the door. They stopped momentarily; the bell of the Markheim was too big to use through the steel grating, the charge would be screened and grounded. Apparently they did not have pacifier bombs with them, for they hesitated. Then the leader quickly unlocked the door, while the man with the Markheim dropped back to the cover position.
Baldwin ignored them, while continuing his stream of profanity and abuse at Gilead. He let the first man almost reach them before he suddenly said in Gilead’s ear, “Close your eyes!” At which he broke just as suddenly.
Gilead sensed an incredibly dazzling flash of light even through his eyelids. Almost on top of it he heard a muffled crack; he opened his eyes and saw that the first man was down, his head twisted at a grotesque angle.
The man with the Markheim was shaking his head; the muzzle of his weapon weaved around. Baldwin was charging him in a waddle, back and knees bent until he was hardly three feet tall. The blinded guard could hear him, let fly a charge in the direction of the noise; it passed over Baldwin.
Baldwin was on him; the two went down. There was another cracking noise of ruptured bone and another dead man. Baldwin stood up, grasping the Markheim, keeping it pointed down the corridor. “How are your eyes, kid?” he called out anxiously.
“They’re all right.”
“Then come take this chiller.” Gilead moved up, took the Markheim. Baldwin ran to the dead end of the corridor where a window looked out over the city. The window did not open; there was no “copter step” beyond it. It was merely a straight drop. He came running back.
Gilead was shuffling possibilities in his mind. Events had moved by Baldwin’s plan, not by his. As a result of his visit to Mrs. Keithley’s “interview room” he was oriented in space. The corridor ahead and a turn to the left should bring him to the quick-drop shaft. Once in the basement and armed with a Markheim, he felt sure that he could fight his way out—with Baldwin in trail if the man would follow. If not—well, there was too much at stake.
Baldwin was into the cell and out again almost at once. “Come along!” Gilead snapped. A head showed at the bend in the corridor; he let fly at it and the owner of the head passed out on the floor.
“Out of my way, kid!” Baldwin answered. He was carrying the heavy bench on which they had “played” cards. He started up the corridor with it, toward the sealed window, gaining speed remarkably as he went.
His makeshift battering ram struck the window heavily. The plastic bulged, ruptured, and snapped like a soap bubble. The bench went on through, disappeared from sight, while Baldwin teetered on hands and knees, a thousand feet of nothingness under his chin.
“Kid!” he yelled. “Close in! Fall back!”
Gilead backed towards him, firing twice more as he did so. He still did not see how Baldwin planned to get out, but the big man had demonstrated that he had resourcefulness—and resources.
Baldwin was whistling through his fingers and waving. In violation of all city traffic rules a helicopter separated itself from the late afternoon throng, cut through a lane, and approached the window. It hovered just far enough away to keep from fouling its blades. The driver opened the door, a line snaked across and Kettle Belly caught it. With great speed he made it fast to the window’s polarizer knob, then grabbed the Markheim. “You first,” he snapped. “Hurry!”
Gilead dropped to his knees and grasped the line; the driver immediately increased his tip speed and tilted his rotor; the line tautened. Gilead let it take his weight, then swarmed across it. The driver gave him a hand up while controlling his craft like a high school horse with his other hand.
The ’copter bucked; Gilead turned and saw Baldwin coming across, a fat spider on a web. As he himself helped the big man in, the driver reached down and cut the line. The ship bucked again and slid away.
There were already men standing in the broken window. “Get lost, Steve!” Baldwin ordered. The driver gave his tip jets another notch and tilted the rotor still more; the ’copter swooped away. He eased it into the traffic stream and inquired, “Where to?”
“Set her for home—and tell the other boys to go home, too. No—you’ve got your hands full; I’ll tell them!” Baldwin crowded up into the other pilot’s seat, slipped on phones and settled a quiet-mike over his mouth. The driver adjusted his car to the traffic, set up a combination on his pilot, then settled back and opened a picture magazine.
Shortly Baldwin took off the phones and came back to the passenger compartment. “Takes a lot of ’copters to be sure you have one cruising by when you need it,” he said conversationally. “Fortunately, I’ve got a lot of ’em. Oh, by the way, this is Steve Halliday. Steve, meet Joe—Joe, what is your last name?”
“Greene,” answered Gilead.
“Howdy,” said the driver and let his eyes go back to his magazine.
Gilead considered the situation. He was not sure that it had been improved. Kettle Belly, whatever he was, was more than a used ’copter dealer—and he knew about the films. This boy Steve looked like a harmless young extrovert but, then, Kettle Belly himself looked like a lunk. He considered trying to overpower both of them, remembered Kettle Belly’s virtuosity in rough-and-tumble fighting, and decided against it. Perhaps Kettle Belly really was on his side, completely and utterly. He heard rumors that the Department used more than one echelon of operatives and he had no way of being sure that he himself was at the top level.
“Kettle Belly,” he went on, “could you set me down at the airport first? I’m in one hell of a hurry.”
Baldwin looked him over. “Sure, if you say so. But I thought you would want to swap those duds? You’re as conspicuous as a preacher at a stag party. And how are you fixed for cash?”
With his fingers Gilead counted the change that had come with the suit. A man without cash had one arm in a sling. “How long would it take?”
“Ten minutes extra, maybe.”
Gilead thought again about Kettle Belly’s fighting ability and decided that there was no way for a fish in water to get any wetter. “Okay.” He settled back and relaxed completely.
Presently he turned again to Baldwin. “By the way, how did you manage to sneak in that dazzle bomb?”
Kettle Belly chuckled. “I’m a large man, Joe; there’s an awful lot of me to search.” He laughed again. “You’d be amazed at where I had that hidden.”
Gilead changed the subject. “How did you happen to be there in the first place?”
Baldwin sobered. “That’s a long and complicated story. Come back some day when you’re not in such a rush and I’ll tell you all about it.”
“I’ll do that—soon.”
“Good. Maybe I can sell you that used Curtiss at the same time.”
The pilot alarm sounded; the driver put down his magazine and settled the craft on the roof of Baldwin’s establishment.
Baldwin was as good as his word. He took Gilead to his office, sent for clothes—which showed up with great speed—and handed Gilead a wad of bills suitable to stuff a pillow. “You can mail it back,” he said.
“I’ll bring it back in person,” promised Gilead.
“Good. Be careful out on the street. Some of our friends are sure to be around.”
“I’ll be careful.” He left, as casually as if he had called there on business, but feeling less sure of himself than usual. Baldwin himself remained a mystery and, in his business, Gilead could not afford mysteries.
There was a public phone booth in the lobby of Baldwin’s building. Gilead went in, scrambled, then coded a different relay station from the one he had attempted to use before. He gave his booth’s code and instructed the operator to scramble back. In a matter of minutes he was talking to his chief in New Washington.
“Joe! Where the hell have you been?”
“Later, boss—get this.” In departmental oral code as an added precaution, he told his chief that the films were in post office box ten-sixty, Chicago, and insisted that they be picked up by a major force at once.
His chief turned away from the view plate, then returned, “Okay, it’s done. Now what happened to you?”
“Later, boss, later. I think I’ve got some friends outside who are anxious to rassle with me. Keep me here and I may get a hole in my head.”
“Okay—but head right back here, I want a full report; I’ll wait here for you.”
“Right.” He switched off.
He left the booth light-heartedly, with the feeling of satisfaction that comes from a hard job successfully finished. He rather hoped that some of his “friends” would show up; he felt like kicking somebody who needed kicking.
But they disappointed him. He boarded the transcontinental rocket without alarms and slept all the way to New Washington.
He reached the Federal Bureau of Security by one of many concealed routes and went to his boss’s office. After scan and voice check he was let in. Bonn looked up and scowled.
Gilead ignored the expression; Bonn usually scowled. “Agent Joseph Briggs, three-four-oh-nine-seven-two, reporting back from assignment, sir,” he said evenly.
Bonn switched a desk control to “recording” and another to “covert.”
“You are, eh? Why, thumb-fingered idiot! How do you dare to show your face around here?”
“Easy now, boss—what’s the trouble?”
Bonn fumed incoherently for a time, then said, “Briggs, twelve star men covered that pick up—and the box was empty. Post office box ten-sixty, Chicago, indeed! Where are those films? Was it a cover up? Have you got them with you?”
Gilead-Briggs restrained his surprise. “No. I mailed them at the Grand Concourse post office to the address you just named.” He added, “The machine may have kicked them out; I was forced to letter by hand the machine symbols.”
Bonn looked suddenly hopeful. He touched another control and said, “Carruthers! On that Briggs matter: Check the rejection stations for that routing.” He thought and then added, “Then try a rejection sequence on the assumption that the first symbol was acceptable to the machine but mistaken. Also for each of the other symbols; run them simultaneously—crash priority for all agents and staff. After that try combinations of symbols taken two at a time, then three at a time, and so on.” He switched off.
“The total of that series you just set up is every postal address in the continent,” Briggs suggested mildly. “It can’t be done.”
“It’s got to be done! Man, have you any idea of the importance of those films you were guarding?”
“Yes. The director at Moon Base told me what I was carrying.”
“You don’t act as if you did. You’ve lost the most valuable thing this or any other government can possess—the absolute weapon. Yet you stand there blinking at me as if you had mislaid a pack of cigarets.”
“Weapon?” objected Briggs. “I wouldn’t call the nova effect that, unless you class suicide as a weapon. And I don’t concede that I’ve lost it. As an agent acting alone and charged primarily with keeping it out of the hands of others, I used the best means available in an emergency to protect it. That is well within the limits of my authority. I was spotted, by some means—”
“You shouldn’t have been spotted!”
“Granted. But I was. I was unsupported and my estimate of the situation did not include a probability of staying alive. Therefore I had to protect my charge by some means which did not depend on my staying alive.”
“But you did stay alive—you’re here.”
“Not my doing nor yours, I assure you. I should have been covered. It was your order, you will remember, that I act alone.”
Bonn looked sullen. “That was necessary.”
“So? In any case, I don’t see what all the shooting is about. Either the films show up, or they are lost and will be destroyed as unclaimed mail. So I go back to the Moon and get another set of prints.”
Bonn chewed his lip. “You can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
Bonn hesitated a long time. “There were just two sets. You had the originals, which were to be placed in a vault in the Archives—and the others were to be destroyed at once when the originals were known to be secure.”
“Yes? What’s the hitch?”
“You don’t see the importance of the procedure. Every working paper, every file, every record was destroyed when these films were made. Every technician, every assistant, received hypno. The intention was not only to protect the results of the research but to wipe out the very fact that the research had taken place. There aren’t a dozen people in the system who even know of the existence of the nova effect.”
Briggs had his own opinions on this point, based on recent experience, but he kept still about them. Bonn went on, “The Secretary has been after me steadily to let him know when the originals were secured. He has been quite insistent, quite critical. When you called in, I told him that the films were safe and that he would have them in a few minutes.”
“Well?”
“Don’t you see, you fool—he gave the order at once to destroy the other copies.”
Briggs whistled. “Jumped the gun, didn’t he?”
“That’s not the way he’ll figure it—mind you, the President was pressuring him. He’ll say that I jumped the gun.”
“And so you did.”
“No, you jumped the gun. You told me the films were in that box.”
“Hardly. I said I had sent them there.”
“No, you didn’t”
“Get out the tape and play it back.”
“There is no tape—by the President’s own order no records are kept on this operation.”
“So? Then why are you recording now?”
“Because,” Bonn answered sharply, “someone is going to pay for this and it is not going to be me.”
“Meaning,” Briggs said slowly, “that it is going to be me.”
“I didn’t say that. It might be the Secretary.”
“If his head rolls, so will yours. No, both of you are figuring on using me. Before you plan on that, hadn’t you better hear my report? It might affect your plans. I’ve got news for you, boss.”
Bonn drummed the desk. “Go ahead. It had better be good.”
In a passionless monotone Briggs recited all events as recorded by sharp memory from receipt of the films on the Moon to the present moment. Bonn listened impatiently.
Finished, Briggs waited. Bonn got up and strode around the room. Finally he stopped and said, “Briggs, I never heard such a fantastic pack of lies in my life. A fat man who plays cards! A wallet that wasn’t your wallet—your clothes stolen! And Mrs. Keithley—Mrs. Keithley! Don’t you know that she is one of the strongest supporters of the Administration?”
Briggs said nothing. Bonn went on, “Now I’ll tell you what actually did happen. Up to the time you grounded at Pied-a-Terre your report is correct, but—”
“How do you know?”
“Because you were covered, naturally. You don’t think I would trust this to one man, do you?”
“Why didn’t you tell me? I could have hollered for help and saved all this.”
Bonn brushed it aside. “You engaged a runner, dismissed him, went in that drugstore, came out and went to the post office. There was no fight in the concourse for the simple reason that no one was following you. At the post office you mailed three tubes, one of which may or may not have contained the films. You went from there to the New Age Hotel, left it twenty minutes later and caught the transrocket for Cape Town. You—”
“Just a moment,” objected Briggs. “How could I have done that and still be here now?”
“Eh?” For a moment Bonn seemed stumped. “That’s just a detail; you were positively identified. For that matter, it would have been a far, far better thing for you if you had stayed on that rocket. In fact—” the bureau chief got a far-away look in his eyes, “—you’ll be better off for the time being if we assume officially that you did stay on that rocket. You are in a bad spot, Briggs, a very bad spot. You did not muff this assignment—you sold out!”
Briggs looked at him levelly. “You are preferring charges?”
“Not just now. That is why it is best to assume that you stayed on that rocket—until matters settle down, clarify.”
Briggs did not need a graph to show him what solution would come out when “matters clarified.” He took from a pocket a memo pad, scribbled on it briefly, and handed it to Bonn.
It read: “I resign my appointment effective immediately.” He had added signature, thumbprint, date, and hour.
“So long, boss,” he added. He turned slightly, as if to go.
Bonn yelled, “Stop! Briggs, you are under arrest.” He reached toward his desk.
Briggs cuffed him in the windpipe, added one to the pit of Bonn’s stomach. He slowed down then and carefully made sure that Bonn would remain out for a satisfactory period. Examination of Bonn’s desk produced a knockout kit; he added a two-hour hypodermic, placing it inconspicuously beside a mole near the man’s backbone. He wiped the needle, restored everything to its proper place, removed the current record from the desk and wiped the tape of all mention of himself, including door check. He left the desk set to “covert” and “do not disturb” and left by another of the concealed routes to the Bureau.
He went to the rocket port, bought a ticket, unreserved, for the first ship to Chicago. There was twenty minutes to wait; he made a couple of minor purchases from clerks rather than from machines, letting his face be seen. When the Chicago ship was called he crowded forward with the rest.
At the inner gate, just short of the weighing-in platform, he became part of the crowd present to see passengers off, rather than a passenger himself. He waved at someone in the line leaving the weighing station beyond the gate, smiled, called out a good-bye, and let the crowd carry him back from the gate as it closed. He peeled off from the crowd at the men’s washroom. When he came out there were several hasty but effective changes in his appearance.
More important, his manner was different.
A short, illicit transaction in a saloon near a hiring hall provided the work card he needed; fifty-five minutes later he was headed across country as Jack Gillespie, loader and helper-driver on a diesel freighter.
Could his addressing of the pneumo tube have been bad enough to cause the automatic postal machines to reject it? He let the picture of the label, as it had been when he had completed it, build in his mind until it was as sharp as the countryside flowing past him. No, his lettering of the symbols had been perfect and correct; the machines would accept it
Could the machine have kicked out the tube for another cause, say a turned-up edge of the gummed label? Yes, but the written label was sufficient to enable a postal clerk to get it back in the groove. One such delay did not exceed ten minutes, even during the rush hour. Even with five such delays the tube would have reached Chicago more than one hour before he reported to Bonn by phone.
Suppose the gummed label had peeled off entirely; in such case the tube would have gone to the same destination as the two cover-up tubes.
In which case Mrs. Keithley would have gotten it, since she had been able to intercept or receive the other two.
Therefore the tube had reached the Chicago post office box.
Therefore Kettle Belly had read the message in the stacked cards, had given instructions to someone in Chicago, had done so while at the helicopter’s radio. After an event, “possible” and “true” are equivalent ideas, whereas “probable” becomes a measure of one’s ignorance. To call a conclusion “improbable” after the event was self-confusing amphigory.
Therefore Kettle Belly Baldwin had the films—a conclusion he had reached in Bonn’s office.
Two hundred miles from New Washington he worked up an argument with the top driver and got himself fired. From a local booth in the town where he dropped he scrambled through to Baldwin’s business office. “Tell him I’m a man who owes him money.”
Shortly the big man’s face built up on the screen. “Hi, kid! How’s tricks?”
“I’m fired.”
“I thought you would be.”
“Worse than that—I’m wanted.”
“Naturally.”
“I’d like to talk with you.”
“Swell. Where are you?”
Gilead told him.
“You’re clean?”
“For a few hours, at least.”
“Go to the local airport. Steve will pick you up.”
Steve did so, nodded a greeting, jumped his craft into the air, set his pilot, and went back to his reading. When the ship settled down on course, Gilead noted it and asked, “Where are we going?”
“The boss’s ranch. Didn’t he tell you?”
“No.” Gilead knew it was possible that he was being taken for a one-way ride. True, Baldwin had enabled him to escape an otherwise pragmatically certain death—it was certain that Mrs. Keithley had not intended to let him stay alive longer that suited her uses, else she would not have had the girl killed in his presence. Until he had arrived at Bonn’s office, he had assumed that Baldwin had saved him because he knew something that Baldwin most urgently wanted to know—whereas now it looked as if Baldwin had saved him for altruistic reasons.
Gilead conceded the existence in this world of altruistic reasons, but was inclined not to treat them as “least hypothesis” until all other possible hypotheses had been eliminated; Baldwin might have had his own reasons for wishing him to live long enough to report to New Washington and nevertheless be pleased to wipe him out now that he was a wanted man whose demise would cause no comment.
Baldwin might even be a partner in these dark matters of Mrs. Keithley. In some ways that was the simplest explanation though it left other factors unexplained. In any case Baldwin was a key actor—and he had the films. The risk was necessary.
Gilead did not worry about it. The factors known to him were chalked up on the blackboard of his mind, there to remain until enough variables become constants to permit a solution by logic. The ride was very pleasant.
Steve put him down on the lawn of a large rambling ranch house, introduced him to a motherly old party named Mrs. Garver, and took off. “Make yourself at home, Joe,” she told him. “Your room is the last one in the east wing—shower across from it. Supper in ten minutes.”
He thanked her and took the suggestion, getting back to the living room with a minute or two to spare. Several others, a dozen or more of both sexes, were there. The place seemed to be a sort of a dude ranch—not entirely dude, as he had seen Herefords on the spread as Steve and he were landing.
The other guests seemed to take his arrival as a matter of course. No one asked why he was there. One of the women introduced herself as Thalia Wagner and then took him around the group. Ma Garver came in swinging a dinner bell as this was going on and they all filed into a long, low dining room. Gilead could not remember when he had had so good a meal in such amusing company.
After eleven hours of sleep, his first real rest in several days, he came fully, suddenly awake at a group of sounds his subconscious could not immediately classify and refused to discount. He opened his eyes, swept the room with them, and was at once out of bed, crouching on the side away from the door.
There were hurrying footsteps moving past his bedroom door. There were two voices, one male, one female, outside the door; the female was Thalia Wagner, the man he could not place.
Male: “tsʉmaeq?”
Female: “nø!”
Male: “zulntsɨ.”
Female: “ɨpbit’ New Jersey.”
These are not precisely the sounds that Gilead heard, first because of the limitations of phonetic symbols, and second because his ears were not used to the sounds. Hearing is a function of the brain, not of the ear; his brain, sophisticated as it was, nevertheless insisted on forcing the sounds that reached his ears into familiar pockets rather than stop to create new ones.
Thalia Wagner identified, he relaxed and stood up. Thalia was part of the unknown situation he accepted in coming here; a stranger known to her he must accept also. The new unknowns, including the odd language, he filed under “pending” and put aside.
The clothes he had had were gone, but his money—Baldwin’s money, rather—was where his clothes had been and with it his work card as Jack Gillespie and his few personal articles. By them someone had laid out a fresh pair of walking shorts and new sneakers, in his size.
He noted, with almost shocking surprise, that someone had been able to serve him thus without waking him.
He put on his shorts and shoes and went out. Thalia and her companion had left while he dressed. No one was about and he found the dining room empty, but three places were set, including his own of supper, and hot dishes and facilities were on the sideboard. He selected baked ham and hot rolls, fried four eggs, poured coffee. Twenty minutes later, warmly replenished and still alone, he stepped out on the veranda.
It was a beautiful day. He was drinking it in and eyeing with friendly interest a desert lark when a young woman came around the side of the house. She was dressed much as he was, allowing for difference in sex, and she was comely, though not annoyingly so. “Good morning,” he said.
She stopped, put her hands on her hips, and looked him up and down. “Well!” she said. “Why doesn’t somebody tell me these things?”
Then she added, “Are you married?”
“No.”
“I’m shopping around. Object: matrimony. Let’s get acquainted.”
“I’m a hard man to marry. I’ve been avoiding it for years.”
“They’re all hard to marry,” she said bitterly. “There’s a new colt down at the corral. Come on.”
They went. The colt’s name was War Conqueror of Baldwin; hers was Gail. After proper protocol with mare and son they left. “Unless you have pressing engagements,” said Gail, “now is a salubrious time to go swimming.”
“If salubrious means what I think it does, yes.”
The spot was shaded by cottonwoods, the bottom was sandy; for a while he felt like a boy again, with all such matters as lies and nova effects and death and violence away in some improbable, remote dimension. After a long while he pulled himself up on the bank and said, “Gail, what does ‘tsʉmaeq’ mean?”
“Come again?” she answered. “I had water in my ear.”
He repeated all of the conversation he had heard. She looked incredulous, then laughed. “You didn’t hear that, Joe, you just didn’t.” She added, “You got the ‘New Jersey’ part right.”
“But I did.”
“Say it again.”
He did so, more carefully, and giving a fair imitation of the speakers’ accents.
Gail chortled. “I got the gist of it that time. That Thalia; someday some strong man is going to wring her neck.”
“But what does it mean?”
Gail gave him a long, sidewise look. “If you ever find out, I really will marry you, in spite of your protests.”
Someone was whistling from the hill top. “Joe! Joe Greene—the boss wants you.”
“Gotta go,” he said to Gail. “G’bye.”
“See you later,” she corrected him.
Baldwin was waiting in a study as comfortable as himself. “Hi, Joe,” he greeted him. “Grab a seatful of chair. They been treating you right?”
“Yes, indeed. Do you always set as good a table as I’ve enjoyed so far?”
Baldwin patted his middle. “How do you think I came by my nickname?”
“Kettle Belly, I’d like a lot of explanations.”
“Joe, I’m right sorry you lost your job. If I’d had my druthers, it wouldn’t have been the way it was.”
“Are you working with Mrs. Keithley?”
“No. I’m against her.”
“I’d like to believe that, but I’ve no reason to—yet. What were you doing where I found you?”
“They had grabbed me—Mrs. Keithley and her boys.”
“They just happened to grab you—and just happened to stuff you in the same cell with me—and you just happened to know about the films I was supposed to be guarding—and you just happened to have a double deck of cards in your pocket? Now, really!”
“If I hadn’t had the cards, we would have found some other way to talk,” Kettle Belly said mildly. “Wouldn’t we, now?”
“Yes. Granted.”
“I didn’t mean to suggest that the set up was an accident. We had you covered from Moon Base; when you were grabbed—or rather as soon as you let them suck you into the New Age, I saw to it that they grabbed me too; I figured I might have a chance to lend you a hand, once I was inside.” He added, “I kinda let them think that I was an FBS man, too.”
“I see. Then it was just luck that they locked us up together.”
“Not luck,” Kettle Belly objected. “Luck is a bonus that follows careful planning—it’s never free. There was a computable probability that they would put us together in hopes of finding out what they wanted to know. We hit the jackpot because we paid for the chance. If we hadn’t, I would have had to crush out of that cell and look for you—but I had to be inside to do it.”
“Who is Mrs. Keithley?”
“Other than what she is publicly, I take it. She is the queen bee—or the black widow—of a gang. ‘Gang’ is a poor word—power group, maybe. One of several such groups, more or less tied together where their interests don’t cross. Between them they divvy up the country for whatever they want like two cats splitting a gopher.”
Gilead nodded; he knew what Baldwin meant, though he had not known that the enormously respected Mrs. Keithley was in such matters—not until his nose had been rubbed in the fact. “And what are you, Kettle Belly?”
“Now, Joe—I like you and I’m truly sorry you’re in a jam. You led wrong a couple of times and I was obliged to trump, as the stakes were high. See here, I feel that I owe you something; what do you say to this: we’ll fix you up with a brand-new personality, vacuum tight—even new fingerprints if you want them. Pick any spot on the globe you like and any occupation; we’ll supply all the money you need to start over—or money enough to retire and play with the cuties the rest of your life. What do you say?”
“No.” There was no hesitation.
“You’ve no close relatives, no intimate friends. Think about it. I can’t put you back in your job; this is the best I can do.”
“I’ve thought about it. The devil with the job, I want to finish my case! You’re the key to it.”
“Reconsider, Joe. This is your chance to get out of affairs of state and lead a normal, happy life.”
“‘Happy,’ he says!”
“Well, safe, anyhow. If you insist on going further your life expectancy becomes extremely problematical.”
“I don’t recall ever having tried to play safe.”
“You’re the doctor. Joe. In that case—” A speaker on Baldwin’s desk uttered: “œnIe r nøg rylp.”
Baldwin answered, “nu,” and sauntered quickly to the fireplace. An early-morning fire still smouldered in it. He grasped the mantel piece, pulled it toward him. The entire masonry assembly, hearth, mantel, and grate, came toward him, leaving an arch in the wall. “Duck down stairs, Joe,” he said. “It’s a raid.”
“A real priest’s hole!”
“Yeah, corny, ain’t it? This joint has more bolt holes than a rabbit’s nest—and booby-trapped, too. Too many gadgets, if you ask me.” He went back to his desk, opened a drawer, removed three film spools and dropped them in a pocket.
Gilead was about to go down the staircase; seeing the spools, he stopped. “Go ahead, Joe,” Baldwin said urgently. “You’re covered and outnumbered. With this raid showing up we wouldn’t have time to fiddle; we’ud just have to kill you.”
They stopped in a room well underground, another study much like the one above, though lacking sunlight and view. Baldwin said something in the odd language to the mike on the desk, was answered. Gilead experimented with the idea that the lingo might be reversed English, discarded the notion.
“As I was saying,” Baldwin went on, “if you are dead set on knowing all the answers—”
“Just a moment. What about this raid?”
“Just the government boys. They won’t be rough and not too thorough. Ma Garver can handle them. We won’t have to hurt anybody as long as they don’t use penetration radar.”
Gilead smiled wryly at the disparagement of his own former service. “And if they do?”
“That gimmick over there squeals like a pig, if it’s touched by penetration frequencies. Even then we’re safe against anything short of an A-bomb. They won’t do that; they want the films, not a hole in the ground. Which reminds me—here, catch.”
Gilead found himself suddenly in possession of the films which were at the root of the matter. He unspooled a few frames and made certain that they were indeed the right films. He sat still and considered how he might get off this limb and back to the ground without dropping the eggs. The speaker again uttered something; Baldwin did not answer it but said, “We won’t be down here long.”
“Bonn seems to have decided to check my report.” Some of his—former—comrades were upstairs. If he did Baldwin in, could he locate the inside control for the door?
“Bonn is a poor sort. He’ll check me—but not too thoroughly; I’m rich. He won’t check Mrs. Keithley at all; she’s too rich. He thinks with his political ambitions instead of his head. His late predecessor was a better man—he was one of us.”
Gilead’s tentative plans underwent an abrupt reversal. His oath had been to a government; his personal loyalty had been given to his former boss. “Prove that last remark and I shall be much interested.”
“No, you’ll come to learn that it’s true—if you still insist on knowing the answers. Through checking those films, Joe? Toss ’em back.”
Gilead did not do so. “I suppose you have made copies in any case?”
“Wasn’t necessary; I looked at them. Don’t get ideas, Joe; you’re washed up with the FBS, even if you brought the films and my head back on a platter. You slugged your boss—remember?”
Gilead remembered that he had not told Baldwin so. He began to believe that Baldwin did have men inside the FBS, whether his late bureau chief had been one of them or not.
“I would at least be allowed to resign with a clear record. I know Bonn—officially he would be happy to forget it.” He was simply stalling for time, waiting for Baldwin to offer an opening.
“Chuck them back, Joe. I don’t want to rassle. One of us might get killed—both of us, if you won the first round. You can’t prove your case, because I can prove I was home teasing the cat. I sold ’copters to two very respectable citizens at the exact time you would claim I was somewhere else.” He listened again to the speaker, answered it in the same gibberish.
Gilead’s mind evaluated his own tactical situation to the same answer that Baldwin had expressed. Not being given to wishful thinking he at once tossed the films to Baldwin.
“Thanks, Joe.” He went to a small oubliette set in the wall, switched it to full power, put the films in the hopper, waited a few seconds, and switched it off. “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”
Gilead permitted his eyebrows to climb. “Kettle Belly, you’ve managed to surprise me.”
“How?”
“I thought you wanted to keep the nova effect as a means to power.”
“Nuts! Scalping a man is a hell of a poor way to cure him of dandruff. Joe, how much do you know about the nova effect?”
“Not much. I know it’s a sort of atom bomb powerful enough to scare the pants off anybody who gets to thinking about it.”
“It’s not a bomb. It’s not a weapon. It’s a means of destroying a planet and everything on it completely—by turning that planet into a nova. If that’s a weapon, military or political, then I’m Samson and you’re Delilah.
“But I’m not Samson,” he went on, “and I don’t propose to pull down the Temple—nor let anybody else do so. There are moral lice around who would do just that, if anybody tried to keep them from having their own way. Mrs. Keithley is one such. Your boyfriend Bonn is another such, if only he had the guts and the savvy—which he ain’t. I’m bent on frustrating such people. What do you know about ballistics, Joe?”
“Grammar school stuff.”
“Inexcusable ignorance.” The speaker sounded again; he answered it without breaking his flow. “The problem of three bodies still lacks a neat general solution, but there are several special solutions—the asteroids that chase Jupiter in Jupiter’s own orbit at the sixty degree position, for example. And there’s the straight-line solution—you’ve heard of the asteroid ‘Earth-Anti’?”
“That’s the chunk of rock that is always on the other side of the Sun, where we never see it.”
“That’s right—only it ain’t there anymore. It’s been novaed.”
Gilead, normally immune to surprise, had been subjected to one too many. “Huh? I thought this nova effect was theory?”
“Nope. If you had had time to scan through the films you would have seen pictures of it. It’s a plutonium, lithium, and heavy water deal, with some flourishes we won’t discuss. It adds up to the match that can set afire a world. It did—a little world flared up and was gone.
“Nobody saw it happen. No one on Earth could see it, for it was behind the Sun. It couldn’t have been seen from Moon Colony; the Sun still blanked it off from there—visualize the geometry. All that ever saw it were a battery of cameras in a robot ship. All who knew about it were the scientists who rigged it—and all of them were with us, except the director. If he had been, too, you would never have been in this mix up.”
“Dr. Finnley?”
“Yep. A nice guy, but a mind like a pretzel. A ‘political’ scientist, second-rate ability. He doesn’t matter; our boys will ride herd on him until he’s pensioned off. But we couldn’t keep him from reporting and sending the films down. So I had to grab ’em and destroy them.”
“Why didn’t you simply save them? All other considerations aside, they are unique in science.”
“The human race doesn’t need that bit of science, not this millennium. I saved all that mattered, Joe—in my head.”
“You are your cousin Hartley, aren’t you?”
“Of course. But I’m also Kettle Belly Baldwin, and several other guys.”
“You can be Lady Godiva, for all of me.”
“As Hartley, I was entitled to those films, Joe. It was my project. I instigated it, through my boys.”
“I never credited Finnley with it. I’m not a physicist, but he obviously isn’t up to it.”
“Sure, sure. I was attempting to prove that an artificial nova could not be created; the political—the racial—importance of establishing the point is obvious. It backfired on me—so we had to go into emergency action.”
“Perhaps you should have left well enough alone.”
“No. It’s better to know the worst; now we can be alert for it, divert research away from it.” The speaker growled again; Baldwin went on, “There may be a divine destiny, Joe, unlikely as it seems, that makes really dangerous secrets too difficult to be broached until intelligence reaches the point where it can cope with them—if said intelligence has the will and the good intentions. Ma Garver says to come up now.”
They headed for the stairs. “I’m surprised that you leave it up to an old gal like Ma to take charge during an emergency.”
“She’s competent, I assure you. But I was running things—you heard me.”
“Oh.”
They settled down again in the above-surface study. “I give you one more chance to back out, Joe. It doesn’t matter that you know all about the films, since they are gone and you can’t prove anything—but beyond that—you realize that if you come in with us, are told what is going on, you will be killed deader than a duck at the first suspicious move?”
Gilead did; he knew in fact that he was already beyond the point of no return. With the destruction of the films went his last chance of rehabilitating his former main persona. This gave him no worry; the matter was done. He had become aware that from the time he had admitted that he understood the first message this man had offered him concealed in a double deck of cards he had no longer been a free actor, his moves had been constrained by moves made by Baldwin. Yet there was no help for it; his future lay here or nowhere.
“I know it; go ahead.”
“I know what your mental reservations are, Joe; you are simply accepting risk; not promising loyalty.”
“Yes—but why are you considering taking a chance on me?”
Baldwin was more serious in manner than he usually allowed himself to be. “You’re an able man, Joe. You have the savvy and the moral courage to do what is reasonable in an odd situation rather than what is conventional.”
“That’s why you want me?”
“Partly that. Partly because I like the way you catch on to a new card game.” He grinned. “And even partly because Gail likes the way you behave with a colt.”
“Gail? What’s she got to do with it?”
“She reported on you to me about five minutes ago, during the raid.”
“Hmm—go ahead.”
“You’ve been warned.” For a moment Baldwin looked almost sheepish. “I want you to take what I say next at its face value, Joe—don’t laugh.”
“Okay.”
“You asked what I was. I’m sort of the executive secretary of this branch of an organization of supermen.”
“I thought so.”
“Eh? How long have you known?”
“Things added up. The card game, your reaction time. I knew it when you destroyed the films.”
“Joe, what is a superman?”
Gilead did not answer.
“Very well, let’s chuck the term,” Baldwin went on. “It’s been overused and misused and beat up until it has mostly comic connotations. I used it for shock value and I didn’t shock you. The term ‘supermen’ has come to have a fairytale meaning, conjuring up pictures of x-ray eyes, odd sense organs, double hearts, uncuttable skin, steel muscles—an adolescent’s dream of the dragon-killing hero. Tripe, of course. Joe, what is a man? What is man that makes him more than an animal? Settle that and we’ll take a crack at defining a superman—or New Man, homo novis, who must displace homo sapiens—is displacing him—because he is better able to survive than is homo sap. I’m not trying to define myself, I’ll leave it up to my associates and the inexorable processes of time as to whether or not I am a superman, a member of the new species of man—same test to apply to you.”
“Me?”
“You. You show disturbing symptoms of being homo novis, Joe, in a sloppy, ignorant, untrained fashion. Not likely, but you just might be one of the breed. Now—what is man? What is the one thing he can do better than animals which is so strong a survival factor that it outweighs all the things that animals of one sort or another can do much better than he can?”
“He can think.”
“I fed you that answer; no prize for it. Okay, you pass yourself off a man; let’s see you do something. What is the one possible conceivable factor—or factors, if you prefer—which the hypothetical superman could have, by mutation or magic or any means, and which could be added to this advantage which man already has and which has enabled him to dominate this planet against the unceasing opposition of a million other species of fauna? Some factor that would make the domination of man by his successor, as inevitable as your domination over a hound dog? Think, Joe. What is the necessary direction of evolution to the next dominant species?”
Gilead engaged in contemplation for what was for him a long time. There were so many lovely attributes that a man might have: to be able to see both like a telescope and microscope, to see the insides of things, to see throughout the spectrum, to have hearing of the same order, to be immune to disease, to grow a new arm or leg, to fly through the air without bothering with silly gadgets like helicopters or jets, to walk unharmed the ocean bottom, to work without tiring—
Yet the eagle could fly and he was nearly extinct, even though his eyesight was better than man’s. A dog has better smell and hearing; seals swim better, balance better, and furthermore can store oxygen. Rats can survive where men would starve or die of hardship; they are smart and pesky hard to kill. Rats could—
Wait! Could tougher, smarter rats displace man? No, it just wasn’t in them; too small a brain.
“To be able to think better,” Gilead answered almost instantly.
“Hand the man a cigar! Supermen are superthinkers; anything else is a side issue. I’ll allow the possibility of super-somethings which might exterminate or dominate mankind other than by outsmarting him in his own racket—thought. But I deny that it is possible for a man to conceive in discrete terms what such a super-something would be or how this something would win out. New Man will beat out homo sap in homo sap’s own specialty—rational thought, the ability to recognize data, store them, integrate them, evaluate correctly the result, and arrive at a correct decision. That is how man got to be champion; the creature who can do it better is the coming champion. Sure, there are other survival factors, good health, good sense organs, fast reflexes, but they aren’t even comparable, as the long, rough history of mankind has proved over and over—Marat in his bath, Roosevelt in his wheelchair, Caesar with his epilepsy and his bad stomach, Nelson with one eye and one arm, blind Milton; when the chips are down it’s brain that wins, not the body’s tools.”
“Stop a moment,” said Gilead. “How about E.S.P.?”
Baldwin shrugged. “I’m not sneering at extra-sensory perception any more than I would at exceptional eyesight—E.S.P. is not in the same league with the ability to think correctly. E.S.P. is a grab-bag name for the means other than the known sense organs by which the brain may gather data—but the trick that pays off with first prize is to make use of that data, to reason about it. If you would like a telepathic hook up to Shanghai, I can arrange it; we’ve got operators at both ends—but you can get whatever data you might happen to need from Shanghai by phone with less trouble, less chance of a bad connection, and less danger of somebody listening in. Telepaths can’t pick up a radio message; it’s not the same wave band.”
“What wave band is it?”
“Later, later. You’ve got a lot to learn.”
“I wasn’t thinking especially of telepathy. I was thinking of all parapsychological phenomena.”
“Same reasoning. Apportation would be nice, if telekinetics had gotten that far—which it ain’t. But a pick-up truck moves things handily enough. Television in the hands of an intelligent man counts for more than clairvoyance in a moron. Quit wasting my time, Joe.”
“Sorry.”
“We defined thinking as integrating data and arriving at correct answers. Look around you. Most people do that stunt just well enough to get to the corner store and back without breaking a leg. If the average man thinks at all, he does silly things like generalizing from a single datum. He uses one-valued logics. If he is exceptionally bright, he may use two-valued, ‘either-or’ logic to arrive at his wrong answers. If he is hungry, hurt, or personally interested in the answer, he can’t use any sort of logic and will discard an observed fact as blithely as he will stake his life on a piece of wishful thinking. He uses the technical miracles created by superior men without wonder nor surprise, as a kitten accepts a bowl of milk. Far from aspiring to higher reasoning, he is not even aware that higher reasoning exists. He classes his own mental process as being of the same sort as the genius of an Einstein. Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.
“For explanations of a universe that confuses him he seizes onto numerology, astrology, hysterical religions, and other fancy ways to go crazy. Having accepted such glorified nonsense, facts make no impression on him, even if at the cost of his own life. Joe, one of the hardest things to believe is the abysmal depth of human stupidity.
“That is why there is always room at the top, why a man with just a leetle more on the ball can so easily become governor, millionaire, or college president—and why homo sap is sure to be displaced by New Man, because there is so much room for improvement and evolution never stops.
“Here and there among ordinary men is a rare individual who really thinks, can and does use logic in at least one field—he’s often as stupid as the rest outside his study or laboratory—but he can think, if he’s not disturbed or sick or frightened. This rare individual is responsible for all the progress made by the race; the others reluctantly adopt his results. Much as the ordinary man dislikes and distrusts and persecutes the process of thinking he is forced to accept the results occasionally, because thinking is efficient compared with his own mauderings. He may still plant his corn in the dark of the Moon but he will plant better corn developed by better men than he.
“Still rarer is the man who thinks habitually, who applies reason, rather than habit pattern, to all his activity. Unless he masques himself, his is a dangerous life; he is regarded as queer, untrustworthy, subversive of public morals; he is a pink monkey among brown monkeys—a fatal mistake. Unless the pink monkey can dye himself brown before he is caught. The brown monkey’s instinct to kill is correct; such men are dangerous to all monkey customs.
“Rarest of all is the man who can and does reason at all times, quickly, accurately, inclusively, despite hope or fear or bodily distress, without egocentric bias or thalmic disturbance, with correct memory, with clear distinction between fact, assumption, and non-fact. Such men exist, Joe; they are ‘New Man’—human in all respects, indistinguishable in appearance or under the scalpel from homo sap, yet as unlike him in action as the Sun is unlike a single candle.”
Gilead said, “Are you that sort?”
“You will continue to form your own opinions.”
“And you think I may be, too?”
“Could be. I’ll have more data in a few days.”
Gilead laughed until the tears came. “Kettle Belly, if I’m the future hope of the race, they had better send in the second team quick. Sure I’m brighter than most of the jerks I run into, but, as you say, the competition isn’t stiff. But I haven’t any sublime aspirations. I’ve got as lecherous an eye as the next man. I enjoy wasting time over a glass of beer. I just don’t feel like a superman.”
“Speaking of beer, let’s have some.” Baldwin got up and obtained two cans of the brew. “Remember that Mowgli felt like a wolf. Being a New Man does not divorce you from human sympathies and pleasures. There have been New Men all through history; I doubt if most of them suspected that their difference entitled them to call themselves a different breed. Then they went ahead and bred with the daughters of men, diffusing their talents through the racial organism, preventing them from effectuating until chance brought the genetic factors together again.”
“Then I take it that New Man is not a special mutation?”
“Huh? Who isn’t a mutation, Joe? All of us are a collection of millions of mutations. Around the globe hundreds of mutations have taken place in our human germ plasm while we have been sitting here. No, homo novis didn’t come about because great grandfather stood too close to a cyclotron; homo novis was not even a separate breed until he became aware of himself, organized, and decided to hang on to what his genes had handed him. You could mix New Man back into the race today and lose him; he’s merely a variation becoming a species. A million years from now is another matter; I venture to predict that New Man, of that year and model, won’t be able to interbreed with homo sap—no viable offspring.”
“Not necessarily. The dog adapted to man. Probably more dogs now than in umpteen B.C.—and better fed.”
“And man would be New Man’s dog.”
“Again not necessarily. Consider the cat.”
“The idea is to skim the cream of the race’s germ plasm and keep it biologically separate until the two races are permanently distinct. You chaps sound like a bunch of stinkers, Kettle Belly.”
“Monkey talk.”
“Perhaps. The new race would necessarily run things—”
“Do you expect New Man to decide grave matters by counting common man’s runny noses?”
“No, that was my point. Postulating such a new race, the result is inevitable. Kettle Belly, I confess to a monkey prejudice in favor of democracy, human dignity, and freedom. It goes beyond logic; it is the kind of a world I like. In my job I have jungled with the outcasts of society, shared their slumgullion. Stupid they may be, bad they are not—I have no wish to see them become domestic animals.”
For the first time the big man showed concern. His persona as “King of the Kopters”, master merchandiser, slipped away; he sat in brooding majesty, a lonely and unhappy figure. “I know, Joe. They are of us; their little dignities, their nobilities, are not lessened by their sorry state. Yet it must be.”
“Why? New Man will come—granted. But why hurry the process?”
“Ask yourself.” He swept a hand toward the oubliette. “Ten minutes ago you and I saved this planet, all our race. It’s the hour of the knife. Someone must be on guard if the race is to live; there is no one but us. To guard effectively we New Men must be organized, must never fumble any crisis like this—and must increase our numbers. We are few now, Joe; as the crises increase, we must increase to meet them. Eventually—and it’s a dead race with time—we must take over and make certain that baby never plays with matches.”
He stopped and brooded. “I confess to that same affection for democracy, Joe. But it’s like yearning for the Santa Claus you believed in as a child. For a hundred and fifty years or so democracy, or something like it, could flourish safely. The issues were such as to be settled without disaster by the votes of common men, befogged and ignorant as they were. But now, if the race is simply to stay alive, political decisions depend on real knowledge of such things as nuclear physics, planetary ecology, genetic theory, even system mechanics. They aren’t up to it, Joe. With goodness and more will than they possess less than one in a thousand could stay awake over one page of nuclear physics; they can’t learn what they must know.”
Gilead brushed it aside. “It’s up to us to brief them. Their hearts are all right; tell them the score—they’ll come down with the right answers.”
“No, Joe. We’ve tried it; it does not work. As you say, most of them are good, the way a dog can be noble and good. Yet there are bad ones—Mrs. Keithley and company and more like her. Reason is poor propaganda when opposed by the yammering, unceasing lies of shrewd and evil and self-serving men. The little man has no way to judge and the shoddy lies are packaged more attractively. There is no way to offer color to a colorblind man, nor is there any way for us to give the man of imperfect brain the canny skill to distinguish a lie from a truth.
“No, Joe. The gulf between us and them is narrow, but it is very deep. We cannot close it.”
“I wish,” said Gilead, “that you wouldn’t class me with your ‘New Man’; I feel more at home on the other side.”
“You will decide for yourself which side you are on, as each of us has done.”
Gilead forced a change in subject. Ordinarily immune to thalamic disturbance this issue upset him; his brain followed Baldwin’s argument and assured him that it was true; his inclinations fought it. He was confronted with the sharpest of all tragedy; two equally noble and valid rights, utterly opposed. “What do you people do, aside from stealing films?”
“Mmm—many things.” Baldwin relaxed, looked again like a jovial sharp businessman. “Where a push here and a touch there will keep things from going to pot, we apply the pressure, by many and devious means. And we scout for suitable material and bring it into the fold when we can—we’ve had our eye on you for ten years.”
“So?”
“Yep. That is a prime enterprise. Through public data we eliminate all but about one tenth of one percent; that thousandth individual we watch. And then there are our horticultural societies.” He grinned.
“Finish your joke.”
“We weed people.”
“Sorry, I’m slow today.”
“Joe, didn’t you ever feel a yen to wipe out some evil, obscene, rotten jerk who infected everything he touched, yet was immune to legal action? We treat them as cancers; we excise them from the body social. We keep a ‘Better Dead’ list; when a man is clearly morally bankrupt we close his account at the first opportunity.”
Gilead smiled. “If you were sure what you were doing, it could be fun.”
“We are always sure, though our methods would be no good in a monkey law court. Take Mrs. Keithley—is there doubt in your mind?”
“None.”
“Why don’t you have her indicted? Don’t bother to answer. For example, two weeks from tonight there will be giant pow-wow of the new, rejuvenated, bigger-and-better-than-ever Ku Klux Klan on a mountain top down Carolina way. When the fun is at its height, when they are mouthing obscenities, working each other up to the pogrom spirit, an act of God is going to wipe out the whole kit and kaboodle. Very sad.”
“Could I get in on that?”
“You aren’t even a cadet as yet.” Baldwin went on. “There is the project to increase our numbers, but that is a thousand-year program; you’d need a perpetual calendar to check it. More important is keeping matches away from baby. Joe, it’s been eighty-five years since we beheaded the last commissar: have you wondered why so little basic progress in science has been made in that time?”
“Eh? There have been a lot of changes.”
“Minor adaptations—some spectacular, almost none of them basic. Of course there was very little progress made under communism; a totalitarian political religion is incompatible with free investigation. Let me digress: the communist interregnum was responsible for the New Men getting together and organizing. Most New Men are scientists, for obvious reasons. When the commissars started ruling on natural laws by political criteria—Lysenkoism and similar nonsense—it did not sit well; a lot of us went underground.
“I’ll skip the details. It brought us together, gave us practice in underground activity, and gave a backlog of new research, carried out underground. Some of it was obviously dangerous; we decided to hang onto it for a while. Since then such secret knowledge has grown, for we never give out an item until it has been scrutinized for social hazards. Since much of it is dangerous and since very few indeed outside our organization are capable of real original thinking, basic science has been almost at a—public!—standstill.
“We hadn’t expected to have to do it that way. We helped to see to it that the new constitution was liberal and—we thought—workable. But the new Republic turned out to be an even poorer thing than the old. The evil ethic of communism had corrupted, even after the form was gone. We held off. Now we know that we must hold off until we can revise the whole society.”
“Kettle Belly,” Joe said slowly, “you speak as if you had been on the spot. How old are you?”
“I’ll tell you when you are the age I am now. A man has lived long enough when he no longer longs to live. I ain’t there yet. Joe, I must have your answer, or this must be continued in our next.”
“You had it at the beginning—but, see here, Kettle Belly, there is one job I want promised to me.”
“Which is?”
“I want to kill Mrs. Keithley.”
“Keep your pants on. When you’re trained, and if she’s still alive then, you’ll be used for that purpose—”
“Thanks!”
“—provided you are the proper tool for it.” Baldwin turned toward the mike, called out, “Gail!” and added one word in the strange tongue.
Gail showed up promptly. “Joe,” said Baldwin, “when this young lady gets through with you, you will be able to sing, whistle, chew gum, play chess, hold your breath, and fly a kite simultaneously—and all this while riding a bicycle under water. Take him, sis, he’s all yours.”
Gail rubbed her hands. “Oh, boy!”
“First we must teach you to see and to hear, then to remember, then to speak, and then to think.”
Joe looked at her. “What’s this I’m doing with my mouth at this moment?”
“It’s not talking, it’s a sort of grunting. Furthermore English is not structurally suited to thinking. Shut up and listen.”
In their underground classroom Gail had available several types of apparatus to record and manipulate light and sound. She commenced throwing groups of figures on a screen, in flashes. “What was it, Joe?”
“Nine-six-oh-seven-two—That was as far as I got.”
“It was up there a full thousandth of a second. Why did you get only the left-hand side of the group?”
“That’s all the farther I had read.”
“Look at all of it. Don’t make an effort of will; just look at it.” She flashed another number.
Joe’s memory was naturally good; his intelligence was high—just how high he did not yet know. Unconvinced that the drill was useful, he relaxed and played along. Soon he was beginning to grasp a nine-digit array as a single gestalt; Gail reduced the flash time.
“What is this magic lantern gimmick?” he inquired.
“It’s a Renshaw tachistoscope. Back to work.”
Around World War II Dr. Samuel Renshaw at the Ohio State University was proving that most people are about one-fifth efficient in using their capacities to see, hear, taste, feel and remember. His research was swallowed in the morass of communist pseudoscience that obtained after World War III, but, after his death, his findings were preserved underground. Gail did not expose Gilead to the odd language he had heard until he had been rather thoroughly Renshawed.
However, from the time of his interview with Baldwin the other persons at the ranch used it in his presence. Sometimes someone—usually Ma Garver—would translate, sometimes not. He was flattered to feel accepted, but graveled to know that it was at the lowest cadetship. He was a child among adults.
Gail started teaching him to hear by speaking to him single words from the odd language, requiring him to repeat them back. “No, Joe. Watch.” This time when she spoke the word it appeared on the screen in sound analysis, by a means basically like one long used to show the deaf-and-dumb their speech mistakes. “Now you try it.”
He did, the two arrays hung side by side. “How’s that, teacher?” he said triumphantly.
“Terrible, by several decimal places. You held the final guttural too long—” She pointed. “—the middle vowel was formed with your tongue too high and you pitched it too low and you failed to let the pitch rise. And six other things. You couldn’t possibly have been understood. I heard what you said, but it was gibberish. Try again. And don’t call me ‘teacher’.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he answered solemnly.
She shifted the controls; he tried again. This time his analysis array was laid down on top of hers; where the two matched, they cancelled. Where they did not match, his errors stood out in contrasting colors. The screen looked like a sun burst.
“Try again, Joe.” She repeated the word without letting it affect the display.
“Confound it, if you would tell me what the words mean instead of treating me the way Milton treated his daughters about Latin, I could remember them easier.”
She shrugged. “I can’t, Joe. You must learn to hear and to speak first. Speedtalk is a flexible language; the same word is not likely to recur. This practice word means: ‘The far horizons draw no nearer.’ That’s not much help, is it?”
The definition seemed improbable, but he was learning not to doubt her. He was not used to women who were always two jumps ahead of him. He ordinarily felt sorry for the poor little helpless cuddly creatures; this one he often wanted to slug. He wondered if this response were what the romancers meant by “love”; he decided that it couldn’t be.
“Try again, Joe.” Speedtalk was a structurally different speech from any the race had ever used. Long before, Ogden and Richards had shown that eight hundred and fifty words were sufficient vocabulary to express anything that could be expressed by “normal” human vocabularies, with the aid of a handful of special words—a hundred odd—for each special field, such as horse racing or ballistics. About the same time phoneticians had analyzed all human tongues into about a hundred-odd sounds, represented by the letters of a general phonetic alphabet.
On these two propositions Speedtalk was based.
To be sure, the phonetic alphabet was much less in number than the words in Basic English. But the letters representing sound in the phonetic alphabet were each capable of variation several different ways—length, stress, pitch, rising, falling. The more trained an ear was the larger the number of possible variations; there was no limit to variations, but, without much refinement of accepted phonetic practice, it was possible to establish a one-to-one relationship with Basic English so that one phonetic symbol was equivalent to an entire word in a “normal” language, one Speedtalk word was equal to an entire sentence. The language consequently was learned by letter units rather than by word units—but each word was spoken and listened to as a single structured gestalt.
But Speedtalk was not “shorthand” Basic English. “Normal” languages, having their roots in days of superstition and ignorance, have in them inherently and inescapably wrong structures of mistaken ideas about the universe. One can think logically in English only by extreme effort, so bad it is as a mental tool. For example, the verb “to be” in English has twenty-one distinct meanings, every single one of which is false-to-fact.
A symbolic structure, invented instead of accepted without question, can be made similar in structure to the real-world to which it refers. The structure of Speedtalk did not contain the hidden errors of English; it was structured as much like the real world as the New Men could make it. For example, it did not contain the unreal distinction between nouns and verbs found in most other languages. The world—the continuum known to science and including all human activity—does not contain “noun things” and “verb things”; it contains space-time events and relationships between them. The advantage for achieving truth, or something more nearly like truth, was similar to the advantage of keeping account books in Arabic numerals rather than Roman.
All other languages made scientific, multi-valued logic almost impossible to achieve; in Speedtalk it was as difficult not to be logical. Compare the pellucid Boolean logic with the obscurities of the Aristotelean logic it supplanted.
Paradoxes are verbal, do not exist in the real world—and Speedtalk did not have such built into it. Who shaves the Spanish Barber? Answer: follow him around and see. In the syntax of Speedtalk the paradox of the Spanish Barber could not even be expressed, save as a self-evident error.
But Joe Greene-Gilead-Briggs could not learn it until he had learned to hear, by learning to speak. He slaved away; the screen continued to remain lighted with his errors.
Came finally a time when Joe’s pronunciation of a sentence-word blanked out Gail’s sample; the screen turned dark. He felt more triumph over that than anything he could remember.
His delight was short. By a circuit Gail had thoughtfully added some days earlier the machine answered with a flourish of trumpets, loud applause, and then added in a cooing voice, “Mama’s good boy!”
He turned to her. “Woman, you spoke of matrimony. If you ever do manage to marry me, I’ll beat you.”
“I haven’t made up my mind about you yet,” she answered evenly. “Now try this word, Joe—”
Baldwin showed up that evening, called him aside. “Joe! C’mere. Listen, lover boy, you keep your animal nature out of your work, or I’ll have to find you a new teacher.”
“But—”
“You heard me. Take her swimming, take her riding, after hours you are on your own. Work time—strictly business. I’ve got plans for you; I want you to get smarted up.”
“She complained about me?”
“Don’t be silly. It’s my business to know what’s going on.”
“Hmm. Kettle Belly, what is this shopping-for-a-husband she kids about? Is she serious, or is it just intended to rattle me?”
“Ask her. Not that it matters, as you won’t have any choice if she means it. She has the calm persistence of the law of gravitation.”
“Ouch! I had had the impression that the ‘New Men’ did not bother with marriage and such like, as you put it, ‘monkey customs.’ ”
“Some do, some don’t. Me, I’ve been married quite a piece, but I mind a mousy little member of our lodge who had had nine kids by nine fathers—all wonderful genius-plus kids. On the other hand I can point out one with eleven kids—Thalia Wagner—who has never so much as looked at another man, Geniuses make their own rules in such matters, Joe; they always have. Here are some established statistical facts about genius, as shown by Armatoe’s work—”
He ticked them off. “Geniuses are usually long lived. They are not modest, not honestly so. They have infinite capacity for taking pains. They are emotionally indifferent to accepted codes of morals—they make their own rules. You seem to have the stigmata, by the way.”
“Thanks for nothing. Maybe I should have a new teacher, if there is anyone else available who can do it.”
“Any of us can do it, just as anybody handy teaches a baby to talk. She’s actually a biochemist, when she has time for it.”
“When she has time?”
“Be careful of that kid, son. Her real profession is the same as yours—honorable hatchet man. She’s killed upwards of three hundred people.” Kettle Belly grinned. “If you want to switch teachers, just drop me a wink.”
Gilead-Greene hastily changed the subject. “You were speaking of work for me: how about Mrs. Keithley? Is she still alive?”
“Yes, blast her.”
“Remember, I’ve got dibs on her.”
“You may have to go to the Moon to get her. She’s reported to be building a vacation home there. Old age seems to be telling on her; you had better get on with your homework if you want a crack at her.” Moon Colony even then was a center of geriatrics for the rich. The low gravity was easy on their hearts, made them feel young—and possibly extended their lives.
“Okay, I will.”
Instead of asking for a new teacher Joe took a highly polished apple to their next session. Gail ate it, leaving him very little core, and put him harder to work than ever. While perfecting his hearing and pronunciation, she started him on the basic thousand-letter vocabulary by forcing him to start to talk simple three and four-letter sentences, and by answering him in different word-sentences using the same phonetic letters. Some of the vowel and consonant sequences were very difficult to pronounce.
Master them he did. He had been used to doing most things easier than could those around him; now he was in very fast company. He stretched himself and began to achieve part of his own large latent capacity. When he began to catch some of the dinner-table conversation and to reply in simple Speedtalk—being forbidden by Gail to answer in English—she started him on the ancillary vocabularies.
An economical language cannot be limited to a thousand words; although almost every idea can be expressed somehow in a short vocabulary, higher orders of abstraction are convenient. For technical words Speedtalk employed an open expansion of sixty of the thousand-odd phonetic letters. They were the letters ordinarily used as numerals; by preceding a number with a letter used for no other purpose, the symbol was designated as having a word value.
New Men numbered to the base sixty—three times four times five, a convenient, easily factored system, most economical, i.e., the symbol “100” identified the number described in English as thirty-six hundred—yet permitting quick, in-the-head translation from common notation to Speedtalk figures and vice versa.
By using these figures, each prefaced by the indicator—a voiceless Welsh or Burmese “1”—a pool of 215,999 words (one less than the cube of sixty) were available for specialized meaning without using more than four letters including the indicator. Most of them could be pronounced as one syllable. These had not the stark simplicity of basic Speedtalk; nevertheless words such as “ichthyophagous” and “constitutionality” were thus compressed to monosyllables. Such shortcuts can best be appreciated by anyone who has heard a long speech in Cantonese translated into a short speech in English. Yet English is not the most terse of “normal” languages—and expanded Speedtalk is many times more economical than the briefest of “normal” tongues.
By adding one more letter (sixty to the fourth power) just short of thirteen million words could be added if needed—and most of them could still be pronounced as one syllable.
When Joe discovered that Gail expected him to learn a couple hundred thousand new words in a matter of days, he balked. “Damn it, Fancy Pants, I am not a superman. I’m in here by mistake.”
“Your opinion is worthless; I think you can do it. Now listen.”
“Suppose I flunk; does that put me safely off your list of possible victims?”
“If you flunk, I wouldn’t have you on toast. Instead I’d tear your head off and stuff it down your throat. But you won’t flunk; I know. However,” she added, “I’m not sure you would be a satisfactory husband; you argue too much.”
He made a brief and bitter remark in Speedtalk; she answered with one word which described his shortcomings in detail. They got to work.
Joe was mistaken; he learned the expanded vocabulary as fast as he heard it. He had a latent eidetic memory; the Renshawing process now enabled him to use it fully. And his mental processes, always fast, had become faster than he knew.
The ability to learn Speedtalk at all is proof of supernormal intelligence; the use of it by such intelligence renders that mind efficient. Even before World War II Alfred Korzybski had shown that human thought was performed, when done efficiently, only in symbols; the notion of “pure” thought, free of abstracted speech symbols, was merely fantasy. The brain was so constructed as to work without symbols only on the animal level; to speak of “reasoning” without symbols was to speak nonsense.
Speedtalk did not merely speed up communication—by its structures it made thought more logical; by its economy it made thought processes enormously faster, since it takes almost as long to think a word as it does to speak it.
Korzybski’s monumental work went fallow during the communist interregnum; Das Kapital is a childish piece of work, when analyzed by semantics, so the politburo suppressed semantics—and replaced it by ersatz under the same name, as Lysenkoism replaced the science of genetics.
Having Speedtalk to help him learn more Speedtalk, Joe learned very rapidly. The Renshawing had continued; he was now able to grasp a gestalt or configuration in many senses at once, grasp it, remember it, reason about it with great speed.
Living time is not calendar time; a man’s life is the thought that flows through his brain. Any man capable of learning Speedtalk had an association time at least three times as fast as an ordinary man. Speedtalk itself enabled him to manipulate symbols approximately seven times as fast as English symbols could be manipulated. Seven times three is twenty-one; a new man had an effective life time of at least sixteen hundred years, reckoned in flow of ideas.
They had time to become encyclopedic synthesists, something denied any ordinary man by the straitjacket of his sort of time.
When Joe had learned to talk, to read and write and cipher, Gail turned him over to others for his real education. But before she checked him out she played him several dirty tricks.
For three days she forbade him to eat. When it was evident that he could think and keep his temper despite low blood-sugar count, despite hunger reflex, she added sleeplessness and pain—intense, long, continued, and varied pain. She tried subtly to goad him into irrational action; he remained bedrock steady, his mind clicking away at any assigned task as dependably as an electronic computer.
“Who’s not a superman?” she asked at the end of their last session.
“Yes, teacher.”
“Come here, lug.” She grabbed him by the ears, kissed him soundly. “So long.” He did not see her again for many weeks.
His tutor in E.S.P. was an ineffectual-looking little man who had taken the protective coloration of the name Weems. Joe was not very good at producing E.S.P. phenomena. Clairvoyance he did not appear to have. He was better at precognition, but he did not improve with practice. He was best at telekinesis; he could have made a soft living with dice. But, as Kettle Belly had pointed out, from affecting the roll of dice to moving tons of freight was quite a gap—and one possibly not worth bridging.
“It may have other uses, however,” Weems had said softly, lapsing into English. “Consider what might be done if one could influence the probability that a neutron would reach a particular nucleus—or change the statistical probability in a mass.”
Gilead let it ride; it was an outrageous thought.
At telepathy he was erratic to exasperation. He called the Rhine cards once without a miss, then had poor scores for three weeks. More highly structured communication seemed quite beyond him, until one day without apparent cause but during an attempt to call the cards by telepathy, he found himself hooked in with Weems for all of ten seconds—time enough for a thousand words by Speedtalk standards.
—it comes out as speech!
—why not? thought is speech.
—how do we do it?
—if we knew it would not be so unreliable, as it is, some can do it by volition, some by accident, and some never seem to be able to do it. We do know this: while thought may not be of the physical world in any fashion we can now define and manipulate, it is similar to events in continuum in its quantal nature. You are now studying the extension of the quantum concept to all features of the continuum, you know the chronon, the mensum, and the viton, as quanta, as well as the action units of quanta such as the photon. The continuum has not only structure but texture in all its features. The least unit of thought we term the psychon.
—define it. Put salt on its tail.
—some day, some day. I can tell you this; the fastest possible rate of thought is one psychon per chronon; this is a basic, universal constant.
—how close do we come to that?
—less than sixty-to-the-minus-third-power of the possibility.
—! ! ! ! !
—better creatures than ourselves will follow us. We pick pebbles at a boundless ocean.
—what can we do to improve it?
—gather our pebbles with serene minds.
Gilead paused for a long split second of thought.—can psychons be destroyed?
—vitons may be transferred, psychons are—
The connection was suddenly destroyed. “As I was saying,” Weems went on quietly, “psychons are as yet beyond our comprehension in many respects. Theory indicates that they may not be destroyed, that thought, like action, is persistent Whether or not such theory, if true, means that personal identity is also persistent must remain an open question. See the daily papers—a few hundred years from now—or a few hundred thousand.” He stood up.
“I’m anxious to try tomorrow’s session, Doc,” Gilead-Greene almost bubbled. “Maybe—”
“I’m finished with you.”
“But, Doctor Weems that connection was clear as a phone hook-up. Perhaps tomorrow—”
“We have established that your talent is erratic. We have no way to train it to dependability. Time is too short to waste, mine and yours.” Lapsing suddenly into English, he added, “No.”
Gilead left.
During his training in other fields Joe was exposed to many things best described as impressive gadgets. There was an integrating pantograph, a factory-in-a-box, which the New Men planned to turn over to ordinary men as soon as the social system was no longer dominated by economic wolves. It could and did reproduce almost any prototype placed on its stage, requiring thereto only materials and power. Its power came from a little nucleonics motor the size of Joe’s thumb; its theory played hob with conventional notions of entropy. One put in “sausage”; one got out “pig.”
Latent in it was the shape of an economic system as different from the current one as the assembly-line economy differed from the family-shop system—and in such a system lay possibilities of human freedom and dignity missing for centuries, if they had ever existed.
In the meantime New Men rarely bought more than one of anything—a pattern. Or they made a pattern.
Another useful but hardly wonderful gadget was a dictaphone-typewriter-printing-press combination. The machine’s analysers recognized each of the thousand-odd phonetic symbols; there was a typebar for each sound. It produced one or many copies. Much of Gilead’s education came from pages printed by this gadget, saving the precious time of others.
The arrangement, classification, and accessibility of knowledge remain in all ages the most pressing problem. With the New Men, complete and organized memory licked most of the problem and rendered record keeping, most reading and writing—and most especially the time-destroying trouble of rereading—unnecessary. The autoscriber gadget, combined with a “librarian” machine that could “hear” that portion of Speedtalk built into it as a filing system, covered most of the rest of the problem. New Men were not cluttered with endless bits of paper. They never wrote memoranda.
The area under the ranch was crowded with technological wonders, all newer than next week. Incredibly tiny manipulators for micrurgy of all sorts, surgical, chemical, biological manipulation, oddities of cybernetics only less complex than the human brain—the list is too long to describe. Joe did not study all of them; an encyclopedic synthesist is concerned with structured shapes of knowledge; he cannot, even with Speed-talk, study details in every field.
Early in his education, when it was clear that he had had the potential to finish the course, plastic surgery was started to give him a new identity and basic appearance. His height was reduced by three inches; his skull was somewhat changed; his complexion was permanently darkened. Gail picked the facial appearance he was given; he did not object. He rather liked it; it seemed to fit his new inner personality.
With a new face, a new brain, and a new outlook, he was almost in fact a new man. Before he had been a natural genius; now he was a trained genius.
“Joe, how about some riding?”
“Suits.”
“I want to give War Conqueror some gentle exercise. He’s responding to the saddle; I don’t want him to forget.”
“Right with you.”
Kettle Belly and Gilead-Greene rode out from the ranch buildings. Baldwin let the young horse settle to a walk and began to talk. “I figure you are about ready for work son.”
Even in Speedtalk Kettle Belly’s speech retained his own flavor.
“I suppose so, but I still have those mental reservations.”
“Not sure we are on the side of the angels?”
“I’m sure you mean to be. It’s evident that the organization selects for good will and humane intentions quite as carefully as for ability. I wasn’t sure at one time—”
“Yes?”
“That candidate who came here about six months ago, the one who broke his neck in a riding accident.”
“Oh, yes! Very sad.”
“Very opportune, you mean, Kettle Belly.”
“Damn it, Joe, if a bad apple gets in this far, we can’t let him out.” Baldwin reverted to English for swearing purposes; he maintained that it had “more juice.”
“I know it. That’s why I’m sure about the quality of our people.”
“So it’s ‘our people’ now?”
“Yes. But I’m not sure we are on the right track.”
“What’s your notion of the right track?”
“We should come out of hiding and teach the ordinary man what he can learn of what we know. He could learn a lot of it and could use it. Properly briefed and trained, he could run his affairs pretty well. He would gladly kick out the no-goods who ride on his shoulders, if only he knew how. We could show him. That would be more to the point than this business of spot assassination, now and then, here and there—mind you, I don’t object to killing any man who merits killing; I simply say it’s inefficient. No doubt we would have to continue to guard against such crises as the one that brought you and me together, but, in the main, people could run their own affairs if we would just stop pretending that we are so scared we can’t mix with people, come out of our hole, and lend a hand.”
Baldwin reined up. “Don’t say that I don’t mix with the common people, Joe; I sell used ’copters for a living. You can’t get any commoner. And don’t imply that my heart is not with them. We are not like them, but we are tied to them by the strongest bond of all, for we are all, each every one, sickening with the same certainly fatal disease—we are alive.
“As for our killings, you don’t understand the principles of assassination as a political weapon. Read—” He named a Speedtalk library designation. “If I were knocked off, our organization wouldn’t even hiccup, but organizations for bad purposes are different. They are personal empires; if you pick the time and the method, you can destroy such an organization by killing one man—the parts that remain will be almost harmless until assimilated by another leader—then you kill him. It is not inefficient; it’s quite efficient, if planned with the brain and not with the emotions.
“As for keeping ourselves separate, we are about like the U-235 in U-238, not effective unless separated out. There have been potential New Men in every generation, but they were spread too thin.
“As for keeping our existence secret, it is utterly necessary if we are to survive and increase. There is nothing so dangerous as being the Chosen People—and in the minority. One group was persecuted for two thousand years merely for making the claim.”
He again shifted to English to swear. “Damn it, Joe, face up to it. This world is run the way my great aunt Susie flies a ’copter. Speedtalk or no Speedtalk, common man can’t learn to cope with modern problems. No use to talk about the unused potential of his brain, he has not got the will to learn what he would have to know. We can’t fit him out with new genes, so we have to lead him by the hand to keep him from killing himself—and us. We can give him personal liberty, we can give him autonomy in most things, we can give him a great measure of personal dignity—and we will, because we believe that individual freedom, at all levels, is the direction of evolution, of maximum survival value. But we can’t let him fiddle with issues of racial life and death; he ain’t up to it.
“No help for it. Each shape of society develops its own ethic. We are shaping this the way we are inexorably forced to, by the logic of events. We think we are shaping it toward survival.”
“Are we?” mused Greene-Gilead.
“Remains to be seen. Survivors survive. We’ll know—Wup! Meeting’s adjourned.”
The radio on Baldwin’s pommel was shrilling his personal emergency call. He listened, then spoke one sharp word in Speedtalk. “Back to the house, Joel” He wheeled and was away. Joe’s mount came of less selected stock; he was forced to follow.
Baldwin sent for Joe soon after he got back. Joe went in; Gail was already there.
Baldwin’s face was without expression. He said in English, “I’ve work for you, Joe, work you won’t have any doubt about. Mrs. Keithley.”
“Good.”
“Not good.” Baldwin shifted to Speedtalk. “We have been caught flat-footed. Either the second set of films was never destroyed, or there was a third set. We do not know; the man who could tell us is dead. But Mrs. Keithley obtained a set and has been using them.
“This is the situation. The ‘fuse’ of the nova effect has been installed in the New Age Hotel. It has been sealed off and can be triggered only by radio signal from the Moon—her signal. The ‘fuse’ has been rigged so that any attempt to break in, as long as the firing circuit is still armed, will trigger it and set it off. Even an attempt to examine it by penetration wavelengths will set it off. Speaking as a physicist, it is my considered opinion that no plan for tackling the ‘nova’ fuse bomb itself will work unless the arming circuit is first broken on the Moon and that no attempt should be made to get at fuse before then, because of extreme danger to the entire planet.
“The arming circuit and the radio relay to the Earthside trigger are located on the Moon in a building inside her private dome. The triggering control she keeps with her. From the same control she can disarm the arming circuit temporarily; it is a combination dead-man switch and time-clock arrangement. It can be set to disarm for a maximum of twelve hours, to let her sleep, or possibly to permit her to order rearrangements. Unless it is switched off any attempt to enter the building in which the arming circuit is housed will also trigger the ‘Nova’ bomb circuit. While it is disarmed, the housing on the Moon may be broached by force but this will set off alarms which will warn her to rearm and then to trigger at once. The set up is such that the following sequence of events must take place:
“First, she must be killed, and the circuit disarmed.
“Second, the building housing the arming circuit and radio relay to the trigger must be broken open and the circuits destroyed before the time clock can rearm and trigger. This must be done with speed, not only because of guards, but because her surviving lieutenants will attempt to seize power by possessing themselves of the controls.
“Third, as soon as word is received on Earth that the arming circuit is destroyed, the New Age will be attacked in force and the ‘Nova’ bomb destroyed.
“Fourth, as soon as the bomb is destroyed, a general round up must be made of all persons technically capable of setting up the ‘Nova’ effect from plans. This alert must be maintained until it is certain that no plans remain in existence, including the third set of films, and further established by hypno that no competent person possesses sufficient knowledge to set it up without plans. This alert may compromise our secret status; the risk must be taken.
“Any questions?”
“Kettle Belly,” said Joe, “Doesn’t she know that if the Earth becomes a Nova, the Moon will be swallowed up in the disaster?”
“Crater walls shield her dome from line-of-sight with Earth; apparently she believes she is safe. Evil is essentially stupid, Joe; despite her brilliance, she believes what she wishes to believe. Or it may be that she is willing to risk her own death against the tempting prize of absolute power. Her plan is to proclaim power with some pious nonsense about being high priestess of peace—a euphemism for Empress of Earth. It is a typical paranoid deviation; the proof of the craziness lies in the fact that the physical arrangements make it certain—if we do not intervene—that Earth will be destroyed automatically a few hours after her death; a thing that could happen any time—and a compelling reason for all speed. No one has ever quite managed to conquer all of Earth, not even the commissars. Apparently she wishes not only to conquer it, but wants to destroy it after she is gone, lest anyone else ever manage to do so again. Any more questions?”
He went on, “The plan is this:
“You two will go to the Moon to become domestic servants to Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Copley, a rich, elderly couple living at the Elysian Rest Homes, Moon Colony. They are of us. Shortly they will decide to return to Earth; you two will decide to remain, you like it. You will advertise, offering to work for anyone who will post your return bond. About this time Mrs. Keithley will have lost through circumstances that will be arranged, two or more of her servants; she will probably hire you, since domestic service is the scarcest commodity on the Moon. If not, a variation will be arranged for you.
“When you are inside her dome, you’ll maneuver yourselves into positions to carry out your assignments. When both of you are so placed, you will carry out procedures one and two with speed.
“A person named McGinty, already inside her dome, will help you in communication. He is not one of us but is our agent, a telepath. His ability does not extend past that. Your communication hook up will probably be, Gail to McGinty by telepathy, McGinty to Joe by concealed radio.”
Joe glanced at Gail; it was the first that he had known that she was a telepath. Baldwin went on, “Gail will kill Mrs. Keithley; Joe will break into the housing and destroy the circuits. Are you ready to go?”
Joe was about to suggest swapping the assignments when Gail answered, “Ready”; he echoed her.
“Good. Joe, you will carry your assumed I.Q. at about 85, Gail at 95; she will appear to be the dominant member of a married couple—” Gail grinned at Joe. “—but you, Joe, will be in charge. Your personalities and histories are now being made up and will be ready with your identifications. Let me say again that the greatest of speed is necessary; government security forces here may attempt a fool-hardy attack on the New Age Hotel. We shall prevent or delay such efforts, but act with speed. Good luck.”
Operation Black Widow, first phase, went off as planned.
Eleven days later Joe and Gail were inside Mrs. Keithley’s dome on the moon and sharing a room in the servants’ quarters. Gail glanced around when first they entered it and said in Speedtalk, “Now you’ll have to marry me; I’m compromised.”
“Shut that up, idiot! Someone might hear you.”
“Pooh! They’d just think I had asthma. Don’t you think it’s noble of me, Joe, to sacrifice my girlish reputation for home and country?”
“What reputation?”
“Come closer so I can slug you.”
Even the servants’ quarters were luxurious. The dome was a sybarite’s dream. The floor of it was gardened in real beauty save where Mrs. Keithley’s mansion stood. Opposite it, across a little lake—certainly the only lake on the Moon—was the building housing the circuits; it was disguised as a little Doric Grecian shrine.
The dome itself was edge-lighted fifteen hours out of each twenty-four, shutting out the black sky and the harsh stars. At “night” the lighting was gradually withdrawn.
McGinty was a gardener and obviously enjoyed his work. Gail established contact with him, got out of him what little he knew. Joe left him alone save for contacts in character.
There was a staff of over two hundred, having its own social hierarchy, from engineers for dome and equipment, Mrs. Keithley’s private pilot, and so on down to gardeners’ helpers. Joe and Gail were midway, being inside servants. Gail made herself popular as the harmlessly flirtatious but always helpful and sympathetic wife of a meek and older husband. She had been a beauty parlor operator, so it seemed, before she “married” and had great skill in massaging aching backs and stiff necks, relieving headaches and inducing sleep. She was always ready to demonstrate.
Her duties as a maid had not yet brought her into close contact with their employer. Joe, however, had acquired the job of removing all potted plants to the “outdoors” during “night”; Mrs. Keithley, according to Mr. James, the butler, believed that plants should be outdoors at “night.” Joe was thus in a position to get outside the house when the dome was dark; he had already reached the point where the night guard at the Grecian temple would sometimes get Joe to “jigger” for him while the guard snatched a forbidden cigaret.
McGinty had been able to supply one more important fact: in addition to the guard at the temple building, and the locks and armor plate of the building itself, the arming circuit was booby-trapped. Even if it were inoperative as an arming circuit for the ‘Nova’ bomb on Earth, it itself would blow up if tampered with. Gail and Joe discussed it in their room, Gail sitting on his lap like an affectionate wife, her lips close to his left ear. “Perhaps you could wreck it from the door, without exposing yourself.”
“I’ve got to be sure. There is certainly some way of switching that gimmick off. She has to provide for possible repairs or replacements.”
“Where would it be?”
“Just one place that matches the pattern of the rest of her planning. Right under her hand, along with the disarming switch and the trigger switch.” He rubbed his other ear; it contained his short-range radio hook-up to McGinty and itched almost constantly.
“Hmm—then there’s just one thing to be done; I’ll have to wring it out of her before I kill her.”
“We’ll see.”
Just before dinner the following “evening” she found him in their room. “It worked, Joe, it worked!”
“What worked?”
“She fell for the bait. She heard from her secretary about my skill as a masseuse; I was ordered up for a demonstration this afternoon. Now I am under strict instructions to come to her tonight and rub her to sleep.”
“It’s tonight, then.”
McGinty waited in his room, behind a locked door. Joe stalled in the back hall, spinning out endlessly a dull tale to Mr. James.
A voice in his ear said, “She’s in her room now.”
“—and that’s how my brother got married to two women at once,” Joe concluded. “Sheer bad luck. I better get these plants outside before the missus happens to ask about ’em.”
“I suppose you had. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Mr. James.” He picked up two of the pots and waddled out.
He put them down outside and heard, “She says she’s started to massage. She’s spotted the radio switching unit; it’s on the belt that the old gal keeps at her bedside table when she’s not wearing it.”
“Tell her to kill her and grab it.”
“She says she wants to make her tell how to unswitch the booby-trap gimmick first.”
“Tell her not to delay.”
Suddenly, inside his head, clear and sweet as a bell as if they were her own spoken tones, he heard her. —Joe, I can hear you. Can you hear me?
—yes, yes! Aloud he added, “Stand by the phones anyhow, Mac”
—Iwon’t be long. I have her in intense pain; she’ll crack soon.
—hurt her plenty! He began to run toward the temple building—Gail, are you still shopping for a husband?
—I’ve found him.
—marry me and I’ll beat you every Saturday night.
—the man who can beat me hasn’t been born.
—I’d like to try. He slowed down before he came near the guard’s station. “Hi, Jim!”
—it’s a deal.
“Well, if it taint Joey boy! Got a match?”
“Here.” He reached out a hand—then, as the guard fell, he eased him to the ground and made sure that he would stay out.—Gail! It’s got to be now!
The voice in his head came back in great consternation:—Joe! She was too tough, she wouldn’t crack. She’s dead!
—good! Get that belt, break the arming circuit, then see what else you find. I’m going to break in.
He went toward the door of the temple.
—it’s disarmed, Joe. I could spot it; it has a time set on it. I can’t tell about the others; they aren’t marked and they all look alike.
He took from his pocket a small item provided by Baldwin’s careful planning.—twist them all from where they are to the other way. You’ll probably hit it.
—oh, Joe, I hope so!
He had placed the item against the lock; the metal around it turned red and now was melting away. An alarm clanged somewhere.
Gail’s voice came again in his head; there was urgency in it but no fear:—Joe! They’re beating on the door. I’m trapped.
—McGinty! Be our witness! He went on:—I, Joseph, take thee, Gail, to be my lawfully wedded wife—
He was answered in tranquil rhythm:—I, Gail, take thee, Joseph, to be my lawfully wedded husband—
—to have and to hold, he went on.
—to have and to hold, my beloved!
—for better, for worse—
—for better, for worse—
Her voice in his head was singing.—till death do us part. I’ve got it open, darling; I am going in.
—till death do us part! They are breaking down the bedroom door, Joseph my dearest.
—hang on! I’m almost through here.
—they have broken it down, Joe. They are coming toward me. Good-bye my darling! I am very happy. Abruptly her “voice” stopped.
He was facing the box that housed the disarming circuit, alarms clanging in his ears; he took from his pocket another gadget and tried it.
The blast that shattered the box caught him full in the chest. The letters on the metal marker read:
TO THE MEMORY OF
MR. AND MRS. JOSEPH GREENE
WHO, NEAR THIS SPOT,
DIED FOR ALL THEIR FELLOW MEN.
THE END
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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
The short story “The Last Night of The World” by Ray Bradbury is very calmed. Perhaps because it portrays speculation and ‘what ifs?’. It gives you an indirect complement, for it does not describe what is causing the end of the world. Only that you know that it is heading towards you and will reach you very, very soon.
Enjoy.
The Last Night of the World
By Ray Bradbury
“WHAT would you do if you knew that this was the last night of the world?” “What would I do? You mean seriously?”
“Yes, seriously.”
“I don’t know. I hadn’t thought.”
He poured some coffee. In the background the two girls were playing blocks on the parlor rug in the light of the green hurricane lamps. There was an easy, clean aroma of the brewed coffee in the evening air.
“Well, better start thinking about it,” he said. “You don’t mean it!”
“A war?”
He shook his head.
“Not the hydrogen or atom bomb?” “No.”
“Or germ warfare?”
“None of those at all,” he said, stirring his coffee slowly. “But just, let’s say, the closing of a book.” “I don’t think I understand.”
“No, nor do I, really; it’s just a feeling. Sometimes it frightens me, sometimes I’m not frightened at all but at peace.” He glanced in at the girls and their yellow hair shining in the lamplight. “I didn’t say anything to you. It first happened about four nights ago.”
“What?”
“A dream I had. I dreamed that it was all going to be over, and a voice said it was; not any kind of voice I can remember, but a voice anyway, and it said things would stop here on Earth. I didn’t think too much about it the next day, but then I went to the office and caught Stan Willis looking out the window in the middle of the afternoon, and I said a penny for your thoughts, Stan, and he said, I had a dream last night, and before he even told me the dream I knew what it was. I could have told him, but he told me and I listened to him.”
“It was the same dream?”
“The same. I told Stan I had dreamed it too. He didn’t seem surprised. He relaxed, in fact. Then we started walking through the office, for the hell of it. It wasn’t planned. We didn’t say, ‘Let’s walk around.’ We just walked on our own, and everywhere we saw people looking at their desks or their hands or out windows. I talked to a few. So did Stan.”
“And they all had dreamed?”
“All of them. The same dream, with no difference.” “Do you believe in it?”
“Yes. I’ve never been more certain.”
“And when will it stop? The world, I mean.”
“Sometime during the night for us, and then as the night goes on around the world, that’ll go too. It’ll take twenty-four hours for it all to go.”
They sat awhile not touching their coffee. Then they lifted it slowly and drank, looking at each other. “Do we deserve this?” she said.
“It’s not a matter of deserving; it’s just that things didn’t work out. I notice you didn’t even argue about this. Why not?”
“I guess I’ve a reason,” she said.
“The same one everyone at the office had?”
She nodded slowly. “I didn’t want to say anything. It happened last night. And the women on the block talked about it, among themselves, today. They dreamed. I thought it was only a coincidence.” She picked up the evening paper. “There’s nothing in the paper about it.”
“Everyone knows, so there’s no need.”
He sat back in his chair, watching her. “Are you afraid?” “No. I always thought I would be, but I’m not.”
“Where’s that spirit called self-preservation they talk so much about?”
“I don’t know. You don’t get too excited when you feel things are logical. This is logical. Nothing else but this could have happened from the way we’ve lived.”
“We haven’t been too bad, have we?”
“No, nor enormously good. I suppose that’s the trouble—we haven’t been very much of anything except us, while a big part of the world was busy being lots of quite awful things.”
The girls were laughing in the parlor.
“I always thought people would be screaming in the streets at a time like this.” “I guess not. You don’t scream about the real thing.”
“Do you know, I won’t miss anything but you and the girls. I never liked cities or my work or anything except you three. I won’t miss a thing except perhaps the change in the weather, and a glass of ice water when it’s hot, and I might miss sleeping. How can we sit here and talk this way?”
“Because there’s nothing else to do.”
“That’s it, of course; for if there were, we’d be doing it. I suppose this is the first time in the history of the world that everyone has known just what they were going to do during the night.”
“I wonder what everyone else will do now, this evening, for the next few hours.”
“Go to a show, listen to the radio, watch television, play cards, put the children to bed, go to bed themselves, like always.”
“In a way that’s something to be proud of—like always.”
They sat a moment and then he poured himself another coffee. “Why do you suppose it’s tonight?”
“Because.”
“Why not some other night in the last century, or five centuries ago, or ten?”
“Maybe it’s because it was never October 19, 1969, ever before in history, and now it is and that’s it; because this date means more than any other date ever meant; because it’s the year when things are as they are all over the world and that’s why it’s the end.”
“There are bombers on their schedules both ways across the ocean tonight that’ll never see land.” “That’s part of the reason why.”
“Well,” he said, getting up, “what shall it be? Wash the dishes?”
They washed the dishes and stacked them away with special neatness. At eight-thirty the girls were put to bed and kissed good night and the little lights by their beds turned on and the door left open just a trifle.
“I wonder,” said the husband, coming from the bedroom and glancing back, standing there with his pipe for a moment.
“What?”
“If the door will be shut all the way, or if it’ll be left just a little ajar so some light comes in.” “I wonder if the children know.”
“No, of course not.”
They sat and read the papers and talked and listened to some radio music and then sat together by the fireplace watching the charcoal embers as the clock struck ten-thirty and eleven and eleven-thirty. They thought of all the other people in the world who had spent their evening, each in his own special way.
“Well,” he said at last.
He kissed his wife for a long time.
“We’ve been good for each other, anyway.” “Do you want to cry?” he asked.
“I don’t think so.”
They moved through the house and turned out the lights and went into the bedroom and stood in the night cool darkness undressing and pushing back the covers. “The sheets are so clean and nice.”
“I’m tired.” “We’reall tired.”
They got into bed and lay back. “Just a moment,” she said.
He heard her get out of bed and go into the kitchen. A moment later, she returned. “I left the water running in the sink,” she said.
Something about this was so very funny that he had to laugh. She laughed with him, knowing what it was that she had done that was funny. They stopped laughing at last and lay in their cool night bed, their hands clasped, their heads together.
“Good night,” he said, after a moment. “Good night,” she said.
The End
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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
This is an interesting little story by Robert Heinlein that looks at a utopia where there are no prisons, or death sentences, or punishments. Instead, those that fail to adjust to society and have bad behaviors are sent instead to “Coventry”. Which is a geographical location outside of society where the individual can “do his own thing”.
Exile imposed on those who act to harm others, to a "reservation" where the Covenant is not observed. Coventry is surrounded by a heavily guarded force shield to prevent the exiles from leaving without permission.
The concept behind this treatment is that the government has no right to "punish" its members, but an individual who is unwilling to abide by society's agreements may be ejected from the society.
Exiles may re-enter the Covenant if they are willing to submit to psychological reorientation. Most of those entering Coventry expected a complete anarchy, but at least three separate governments had developed inside: New America, nominally a democracy but run as a political machine and dictatorship; Free State, a totalitarian state; and The Angels, the remnants of the Prophet's theocratic reign.
-"Coventry" A Heinlein Concordance
Coventry
“Have you anything to say before sentence is pronounced on you?” The mild eyes of the Senior Judge studied the face of the accused. His question was answered by a sullen silence.
“Very well-the jury has determined that you have violated a basic custom agreed to under the Covenant, and that through this act did damage another free citizen. It is the opinion of the jury and of the court that you did so knowingly, and aware of the probability of damage to a free citizen. Therefore, you are sentenced to choose between the Two Alternatives.”
Atrained observer might have detected a trace of dismay breaking through the mask of indifference with which the young man had faced his trial. Dismay was unreasonable; in view of his offence, the sentence was inevitable-but reasonable men do not receive the sentence.
After waiting a decent interval, the judge turned to the bailiff. “Take him away.”
The prisoner stood up suddenly, knocking over his chair. He glared wildly around at the company assembled and burst into speech.
“Hold on!” he yelled. “I’ve got something to say first!” In spite of his rough manner there was about him the noble dignity of a wild animal at bay. He stared at those around him, breathing heavily, as if they were dogs waiting to drag him down.
“Well?” he demanded, ‘Well? Do I get to talk, or don’t I? It ‘ud be the best joke of this whole comedy, if a condemned man couldn’t speak his mind at the last!”
“You may speak,” the Senior Judge told him, in the same unhurried tones with which he had pronounced sentence, ‘David MacKinnon, as long as you like, and in any manner that you like. There is no limit to that freedom, even for those who have broken the Covenant. Please speak into the recorder.”
MacKinnon glanced with distaste at the microphone near his face. The knowledge that any word he spoke would be recorded and analyzed inhibited him. “I don’t ask for records,” he snapped.
“But we must have them,” the judge replied patiently, ‘in order that others may determine whether, or not, we have dealt with you fairly, and according to the Covenant. Oblige us, please.” “Oh-very well!” He ungraciously conceded the requirement and directed his voice toward the instrument. “There’s no sense in me talking at all-but, just the same, I’m going to talk and
you’re going to listen … You talk about your precious “Covenant” as if it were something holy. I don’t agree to it and I don’t accept it. You act as if it had been sent down from Heaven in a
burst of light. My grandfathers fought in the Second Revolution-but they fought to abolish superstition… not to let sheep-minded fools set up new ones.
“There were men in those days!” He looked contemptuously around him. “What is there left today? Cautious, compromising “safe” weaklings with water in their veins. You’ve planned your whole world so carefully that you’ve planned the fun and zest right out of it. Nobody is ever hungry, nobody ever gets hurt. Your ships can’t crack up and your crops can’t fail. You even have the weather tamed so it rains politely after midnight. Why wait till midnight, I don’t know … you all go to bed at nine o’clock!
“If one of you safe little people should have an unpleasant emotion-perish the thought! -You’d trot right over to the nearest psychodynamics clinic and get your soft little minds readjusted. Thank God I never succumbed to that dope habit. I’ll keep my own feelings, thanks, no matter how bad they taste.
“You won’t even make love without consulting a psychotechnician-Is her mind as flat and insipid as mine? Is there any emotional instability in her family? It’s enough to make a man gag. As for fighting over a woman-if any one had the guts to do that, he’d find a proctor at his elbow in two minutes, looking for the most convenient place to paralyze him, and inquiring with sickening humility, “May I do you a service, sir?”
The bailiff edged closer to MacKinnon. He turned on him. “Stand back, you. I’m not through yet.” He turned and added, ‘You’ve told me to choose between the Two Alternatives. Well, it’s no hard choice for me. Before I’d submit to treatment, before I’d enter one of your little, safe little, pleasant little reorientation homes and let my mind be pried into by a lot of soft-fingered doctors-before I did anything like that, I’d choose a nice, clean death. Oh, no-there is just one choice for me, not two. I take the choice of going to Coventry-and glad of it, too … I hope I never hear of the United States again!
“But there is just one thing I want to ask you before I go-Why do you bother to live anyhow? I would think that anyone of you would welcome an end to your silly, futile lives just from sheer boredom. That’s all.” He turned back to the bailiff. “Come on, you.”
“One moment, David MacKinnon.” The Senior Judge held up a restraining hand. “We have listened to you. Although custom does not compel it, I am minded to answer some of your statements. Will you listen?”
Unwilling, but less willing to appear loutish in the face of a request so obviously reasonable, the younger man consented.
The judge commenced to speak in gentle, scholarly words appropriate to a lecture room. “David MacKinnon, you have spoken in a fashion that doubtless seems wise to you. Nevertheless, your words were wild, and spoken in haste. I am moved to correct your obvious misstatements of fact. The Covenant is not a superstition, but a simple temporal contract entered into by those same revolutionists for pragmatic reasons. They wished to insure the maximum possible liberty for every person.
“You yourself have enjoyed that liberty. No possible act, nor mode of conduct, was forbidden to you, as long as your action did not damage another. Even an act specifically prohibited by law could not be held against you, unless the state was able to prove that your particular act damaged, or caused evident danger of damage, to a particular individual.
“Even if one should willfully and knowingly damage another-as you have done-the state does not attempt to sit in moral judgment, nor to punish. We have not the wisdom to do that, and the chain of injustices that have always followed such moralistic coercion endanger the liberty of all. Instead, the convicted is given the choice of submitting to psychological readjustment to correct his tendency to wish to damage others, or of having the state withdraw itself from him-of sending him to Coventry.
“You complain that our way of living is dull and unromantic, and imply that we have deprived you of excitement to which you feel entitled. You are free to hold and express your esthetic opinion of our way of living, but you must not expect us to live to suit your tastes. You are free to seek danger and adventure if you wish-there is danger still in experimental laboratories; there is hardship in the mountains of the Moon, and death in the jungles of Venus-but you are not free to expose us to the violence of your nature.”
“Why make so much of it?” MacKinnon protested contemptuously. “You talk as if I had committed a murder-I simply punched a man in the nose for offending me outrageously!”
“I agree with your esthetic judgment of that individual,” the judge continued calmly, ‘and am personally rather gratified that you took a punch at him-but your psychometrical tests show that you believe yourself capable of judging morally your fellow citizens and feel justified in personally correcting and punishing their lapses. You are a dangerous individual, David MacKinnon, a danger to all of us, for we can not predict whet damage you may do next. From a social standpoint, your delusion makes you as mad as the March Hare.
“You refuse treatment-therefore we withdraw our society from you, we cast you out, we divorce you. To Coventry with you.” He turned to the bailiff. “Take him away.”
MacKinnon peered out of a forward port of the big transport helicopter with repressed excitement in his heart. There! That must be it-that black band in the distance. The helicopter drew closer, and he became certain that he was seeing the Barrier-the mysterious, impenetrable wall that divided the United States from the reservation known as Coventry.
His guard looked up from the magazine he was reading and followed his gaze. “Nearly there, I see,” he said pleasantly. “Well, it won’t be long now.” “It can’t be any too soon for me!”
The guard looked at him quizzically, but with tolerance. “Pretty anxious to get on with it, eh?”
MacKinnon held his head high. “You’ve never brought a man to the Gateway who was more anxious to pass through!” “Mmm-maybe. They all say that, you know. Nobody goes through the Gate against his own will.”
“I mean it!”
“They all do. Some of them come back, just the same.”
“Say-maybe you can give me some dope as to conditions inside?”
“Sorry,” the guard said, shaking his head, ‘but that is no concern of the United States, nor of any of its employees. You’ll know soon enough.”
MacKinnon frowned a little. “It seems strange-I tried inquiring, but found no one who would admit that they had any notion about the inside. And yet you say that some come out. Surely some of them must talk…”
“That’s simple,” smiled the guard, ‘part of their reorientation is a subconscious compulsion not to discuss their experiences.”
“That’s a pretty scabby trick. Why should the government deliberately conspire to prevent me, and the people like me, from knowing what we are going up against?”
“Listen, buddy,” the guard answered, with mild exasperation, ‘you’ve told the rest of us to go to the devil. You’ve told us that you could get along without us. You are being given plenty of living room in some of the best land on this continent, and you are being allowed to take with you everything that you own, or your credit could buy. What the deuce else do you expect?”
MacKinnon’s face settled in obstinate lines. “What assurance have I that there will be any land left for me?”
“That’s your problem. The government sees to it that there is plenty of land for the population. The divvy-up is something you rugged individualists have to settle among yourselves. You’ve turned down our type of social co-operation; why should you expect the safeguards of our organization?” The guard turned back to his reading and ignored him.
They landed on a small field which lay close under the blank black wall. No gate was apparent, but a guardhouse was located at the side of the field. MacKinnon was the only passenger. While his escort went over to the guardhouse, he descended from the passenger compartment and went around to the freight hold. Two members of the crew were letting down a ramp from the cargo port. When he appeared, one of them eyed him, and said, ‘O.K., there’s your stuff. Help yourself.”
He sized up the job, and said, ‘It’s quite a lot, isn’t it? I’ll need some help. Will you give me a hand with it?”
The crew member addressed paused to light a cigarette before replying, ‘It’s your stuff. If you want it, get it out. We take off in ten minutes.” The two walked around him and reentered the ship.
“Why, you-” MacKinnon shut up and kept the rest of his anger to himself. The surly louts! Gone was the faintest trace of regret at leaving civilization. He’d show them! He could get along without them.
But it was twenty minutes and more before he stood beside his heaped up belongings and watched the ship rise. Fortunately the skipper had not been adamant about the time limit. He turned and commenced loading his steel tortoise. Under the romantic influence of the classic literature of a bygone day he had considered using a string of burros, but had been unable to find a zoo that would sell them to him. It was just as well-he was completely ignorant of the limits, foibles, habits, vices, illnesses, and care of those useful little beasts, and unaware of his own ignorance. Master and servant would have vied in making each other unhappy.
The vehicle he had chosen was not an unreasonable substitute for burros. It was extremely rugged, easy to operate, and almost foolproof. It drew its power from six square yards of sunpower screens on its low curved roof. These drove a constant-load motor, or, when halted, replenished the storage battery against cloudy weather, or night travel. The bearings were ‘everlasting’, and every moving part, other than the caterpillar treads and the controls, were sealed up, secure from inexpert tinkering.
It could maintain a steady six miles per hour on smooth, level pavement. When confronted by hills, or rough terrain, it did not stop, but simply slowed until the task demanded equaled its steady power output.
The steel tortoise gave MacKinnon a feeling of Crusoe-like independence. It did not occur to him his chattel was the end product of the cumulative effort and intelligent co-operation of hundreds of thousands of men, living and dead. He had been used all his life to the unfailing service of much more intricate machinery, and honestly regarded the tortoise as a piece of equipment of the same primitive level as a wood-man’s axe, or a hunting knife. His talents had been devoted in the past to literary criticism rather than engineering, but that did not prevent him from believing that his native intelligence and the aid of a few reference books would be all that he would really need to duplicate the tortoise, if necessary.
Metal ores were necessary, he knew, but saw no obstacle in that, his knowledge of the difficulties of prospecting, mining, and metallurgy being as sketchy as his knowledge of burros. His goods filled every compartment of the compact little freighter. He checked the last item from his inventory and ran a satisfied eye down the list. Any explorer or adventurer of the past
might well be pleased with such equipment, he thought. He could imagine showing Jack London his knockdown cabin. See, Jack, he would say, it’s proof against any kind of weather-
perfectly insulated walls and floor-and can’t rust. It’s so light that you can set it up in five minutes by yourself, yet it’s so strong that you can sleep sound with the biggest grizzly in the world
snuffling right outside your door.
And London would scratch his head, and say, Dave, you’re a wonder. If I’d had that in the Yukon, it would have been a cinch!
He checked over the list again. Enough concentrated and desiccated food and vitamin concentrate to last six months. That would give him time enough to build hothouses for hydroponics, and get his seeds started. Medical supplies-he did not expect to need those, but foresight was always best. Reference books of all sorts. Alight sporting rifle-vintage: last century. His face clouded a little at this. The War Department had positively refused to sell him a portable blaster. When he had claimed the right of common social heritage, they had grudgingly provided him with the plans and specifications, and told him to build his own. Well, he would, the first spare time he got.
Everything else was in order. MacKinnon climbed into the cockpit, grasped the two hand controls, and swung the nose of the tortoise toward the guardhouse. He had been ignored since the ship had landed; he wanted to have the gate opened and to leave.
Several soldiers were gathered around the guardhouse. He picked out a legate by the silver stripe down the side of his kilt and spoke to him. “I’m ready to leave. Will you kindly open the Gate?”
“O.K.,” the officer answered him, and turned to a soldier who wore the plain gray kilt of a private’s field uniform. “Jenkins, tell the power house to dilate-about a number three opening, tell them,” he added, sizing up the dimensions of the tortoise.
He turned to MacKinnon. “It is my duty to tell you that you may return to civilization, even now, by agreeing to be hospitalized for your neurosis.” “I have no neurosis!”
“Very well. If you change your mind at any future time, return to the place where you entered. There is an alarm there with which you may signal to the guard that you wish the gate opened.”
“I can’t imagine needing to know that.”
The legate shrugged. “Perhaps not-but we send refugees to quarantine all the time. If I were making the rules, it might be harder to get out again.” He was cut off by the ringing of an alarm. The soldiers near them moved smartly away, drawing their blasters from their belts as they ran. The ugly snout of a fixed blaster poked out over the top of the guardhouse and pointed toward the Barrier.
The legate answered the question on MacKinnon’s face. “The power house is ready to open up.” He waved smartly toward that building, then turned back. “Drive straight through the center of the opening. It takes a lot of power to suspend the stasis; if you touch the edge, we’ll have to pick up the pieces.”
Atiny, bright dot appeared in the foot of the barrier opposite where they waited. It spread into a half circle across the lampblack nothingness. Now it was large enough for MacKinnon to see the countryside beyond through the arch it had formed. He peered eagerly.
The opening grew until it was twenty feet wide, then stopped. It framed a scene of rugged, barren hills. He took this in, and turned angrily on the legate. “I’ve been tricked!” he exclaimed. “That’s not fit land to support a man.”
“Don’t be hasty,” he told MacKinnon. “There’s good land beyond. Besides-you don’t have to enter. But if you are going, go!”
MacKinnon flushed, and pulled back on both hand controls. The treads bit in and the tortoise lumbered away, straight for the Gateway to Coventry.
When he was several yards beyond the Gate, he glanced back. The Barrier loomed behind him, with nothing to show where the opening had been. There was a little sheet metal shed adjacent to the point where he had passed through. He supposed that it contained the alarm the legate had mentioned, but he was not interested and turned his eyes back to his driving.
Stretching before him, twisting between rocky hills, was a road of sorts. It was not paved and the surface had not been repaired recently, but the grade averaged downhill and the tortoise was able to maintain a respectable speed. He continued down it, not because he fancied it, but because it was the only road which led out of surroundings obviously unsuited to his needs.
The road was untraveled. This suited him; he had no wish to encounter other human beings until he had located desirable land to settle on, and had staked out his claim. But the hills were not devoid of life; several times he caught glimpses of little dark shapes scurrying among the rocks, and occasionally bright, beady eyes stared back into his.
It did not occur to him at first that these timid little animals, streaking for cover at his coming, could replenish his larder-he was simply amused and warmed by their presence. When he did happen to consider that they might be used as food, the thought was at first repugnant to him-the custom of killing for ‘sport” had ceased to be customary long before his time; and
inasmuch as the development of cheap synthetic proteins in the latter half of the preceding century had spelled the economic ruin of the business of breeding animals for slaughter, it is doubtful if he had ever tasted animal tissue in his life.
But once considered, it was logical to act. He expected to live off the country; although he had plenty of food on hand for the immediate future, it would be wise to conserve it by using what the country offered. He suppressed his esthetic distaste and ethical misgivings, and determined to shoot one of the little animals at the first opportunity.
Accordingly, he dug out the rifle, loaded it, and placed it handy. With the usual perversity of the world-as-it-is, no game was evident for the next half hour. He was passing a little shoulder of rocky outcropping when he saw his prey. It peeked at him from behind a small boulder, its sober eyes wary but unperturbed. He stopped the tortoise and took careful aim, resting and steadying the rifle on the side of the cockpit. His quarry accommodated him by hopping out into full view.
He pulled the trigger, involuntarily tensing his muscles and squinting his eyes as he did so. Naturally, the shot went high and to the right.
But he was much too busy just then to be aware of it. It seemed that the whole world had exploded. His right shoulder was numb, his mouth stung as if he had been kicked there, and his ears rang in a strange and unpleasant fashion. He was surprised to find the gun still intact in his hands and apparently none the worse for the incident.
He put it down, clambered out of the car, and rushed up to where the small creature had been. There was no sign of it anywhere. He searched the immediate neighborhood, but did not find it. Mystified, he returned to his conveyance, having decided that the rifle was in some way defective, and that he should inspect it carefully before attempting to fire it again.
His recent target watched his actions cautiously from a vantage point yards away, to which it had stampeded at the sound of the shot. It was equally mystified by the startling events, being no more used to firearms than was MacKinnon.
Before he started the tortoise again, MacKinnon had to see to his upper lip, which was swollen and tender and bleeding from a deep scratch. This increased his conviction that the gun was defective. Nowhere in the romantic literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to which he was addicted, had there been a warning that, when firing a gun heavy enough to drop a man in his tracks, it is well not to hold the right hand in such ~ manner that the recoil will cause the right thumb and thumb nail to strike the mouth.
He applied an antiseptic and a dressing of sorts, and went on his way, somewhat subdued. The arroyo by which he had entered the hills had widened out, and the hills were greener. He passed around one sharp turn in the road, and found a broad fertile valley spread out before him. It stretched away until it was lost in the warm day’s haze.
Much of the valley was cultivated, and he could make out human habitations. He continued toward it with mixed feelings. People meant fewer hardships, but it did not look as if staking out a claim would be as simple as he had hoped. However-Coventry was a big place.
He had reached the point where the road gave onto the floor of the valley, when two men stepped out into his path. They were carrying weapons of some sort at the ready. One of them called out to him:
“Halt!”
MacKinnon did so, and answered him as they came abreast. “What do you want?”
“Customs inspection. Pull over there by the office.” He indicated a small building set back a few feet from the road, which MacKinnon had not previously noticed. He looked from it back to the spokesman, and felt a slow, unreasoning heat spread up from his viscera. It rendered his none too stable judgment still more unsound.
“What the deuce are you talking about?” he snapped. “Stand aside and let me pass.”
The one who had remained silent raised his weapon and aimed it at MacKinnon’s chest. The other grabbed his arm and pulled the weapon out of line. “Don’t shoot the dumb fool, Joe,” he said testily. “You’re always too anxious.” Then to MacKinnon, ‘You’re resisting the law. Come on-be quick about it!”
“The law?” MacKinnon gave a bitter laugh and snatched his rifle from the seat. It never reached his shoulder-the man who had done all the talking fired casually, without apparently taking time to aim. MacKinnon’s rifle was smacked from his grasp and flew into the air, landing in the roadside ditch behind the tortoise.
The man who had remained silent followed the flight of the gun with detached interest, and remarked, ‘Nice shot, Blackie. Never touched him.”
“Oh, just luck,” the other demurred, but grinned his pleasure at the compliment. “Glad I didn’t nick him, though-saves writing out a report.” He reassumed an official manner, spoke again to MacKinnon, who had been sitting dumbfounded, rubbing his smarting hands. “Well, tough guy? Do you behave, or do we come up there and get you?”
MacKinnon gave in. He drove the tortoise to the designated spot, and waited sullenly for orders. “Get out and start unloading,” he was told. He obeyed, under compulsion. As he piled his precious possessions on the ground, the one addressed as Blackie separated the things into two piles, while Joe listed them on a printed form. He noticed presently that Joe listed only the items that went into the first pile. He understood this when Blackie told him to reload the tortoise with the items from that pile, and commenced himself to carry goods from the other pile into the building. He started to protest-Joe punched him in the mouth, coolly and without rancor. MacKinnon went down, but got up again, fighting. He was in such a blind rage that he would have tackled a charging rhino. Joe timed his rush, and clipped him again. This time he could not get up at once.
Blackie stepped over to a washstand in one corner of the office. He came back with a wet towel and chucked it at MacKinnon. “Wipe your face on that, bud, and get back in the buggy. We got to get going.”
MacKinnon had time to do a lot of serious thinking as he drove Blackie into town. Beyond a terse answer of ‘Prize court” to MacKinnon’s inquiry as to their destination, Blackie did not converse, nor did MacKinnon press him, anxious as he was to have information. His mouth pained him from repeated punishment, his head ached, and he was no longer tempted to precipitate action by hasty speech.
Evidently Coventry was not quite the frontier anarchy he had expected it to be. There was a government of sorts, apparently, but it resembled nothing that he had ever been used to. He had visualized a land of noble, independent spirits who gave each other wide berth and practiced mutual respect. There would be villains, of course, but they would be treated to summary, and probably lethal, justice as quickly as they demonstrated their ugly natures. He had a strong, though subconscious, assumption that virtue is necessarily triumphant.
But having found government, he expected it to follow the general pattern that he had been used to all his life-honest, conscientious, reasonably efficient, and invariably careful of a citizen’s rights and liberties. He was aware that government had not always been like that, but he had never experienced it-the idea was as remote and implausible as cannibalism, or chattel slavery.
Had he stopped to think about it, he might have realized that public servants in Coventry would never have been examined psychologically to determine their temperamental fitness for their duties, and, since every inhabitant of Coventry was there-as he was-for violating a basic custom and ref using treatment thereafter, it was a foregone conclusion that most of them would be erratic and arbitrary.
He pinned his hope on the knowledge that they were going to court. All he asked was a chance to tell his story to the judge.
His dependence on judicial procedure may appear inconsistent in view of how recently he had renounced all reliance on organized government, but while he could renounce government verbally, but he could not do away with a lifetime of environmental conditioning. He could curse the court that had humiliated him by condemning him to the Two Alternatives, but he expected courts to dispense justice. He could assert his own rugged independence, but he expected persons he encountered to behave as if they were bound by the Covenant-he had met no other sort. He was no more able to discard his past history than he would have been to discard his accustomed body.
But he did not know it yet.
MacKinnon failed to stand up when the judge entered the court room. Court attendants quickly set him right, but not before he had provoked a glare from the bench. The judge’s appearance and manner were not reassuring. He was a well-fed man, of ruddy complexion, whose sadistic temper was evident in face and mien. They waited while he dealt drastically with several petty offenders. It seemed to MacKinnon, as he listened, that almost everything was against the law.
Nevertheless, he was relieved when his name was called. He stepped up and undertook at once to tell his story. The judge’s gavel cut him short.
“What is this case?” the judge demanded, his face set in grim lines. “Drunk and disorderly, apparently. I shall put a stop to this slackness among the young if it takes the last ounce of strength in my body!” He turned to the clerk. “Any previous offences?”
The clerk whispered in his ear. The judge threw MacKinnon a look of mixed annoyance and suspicion, then told the customs” guard to come forward. Blackie told a clear, straightforward tale with the ease of a man used to giving testimony. MacKinnon’s condition was attributed to resisting an officer in the execution of his duty. He submitted the inventory his colleague had prepared, but failed to mention the large quantity of goods which had been abstracted before the inventory was made.
The judge turned to MacKinnon. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?” “I certainly have, Doctor,” he began eagerly. “There isn’t a word of -,
Bang! The gavel cut him short. Acourt attendant hurried to MacKinnon’s side and attempted to explain to him the proper form to use in addressing the court. The explanation confused him. In his experience, ‘judge” naturally implied a medical man-a psychiatrist skilled in social problems. Nor had he heard of any special speech forms appropriate to a courtroom. But he amended his language as instructed.
“May it please the Honorable Court, this man is lying. He and his companion assaulted and robbed me. I was simply-‘Smugglers generally think they are being robbed when customs officials catch them,” the judge sneered. “Do you deny that you attempted to resist inspection?”
“No, Your Honor, but -“
“That will do. Penalty of fifty percent is added to the established scale of duty. Pay the clerk.” “But, Your Honor, I can’t -“
“Can’t you pay it?”
“I haven’t any money. I have only my possessions.”
“So?” He turned to the clerk. “Condemnation proceedings. Impound his goods. Ten days for vagrancy. The community can’t have these immigrant paupers roaming at large, and preying on law-abiding citizens. Next case!”
They hustled him away. It took the sound of a key grating in a barred door behind him to make him realize his predicament.
“Hi, pal, how’s the weather outside?” The detention cell had a prior inmate, a small, well-knit man who looked up from a game of solitaire to address MacKinnon. He sat astraddle a bench on which he had spread his cards, and studied the newcomer with unworried, bright, beady eyes.
“Clear enough outside-but stormy in the courtroom,” MacKinnon answered, trying to adopt the same bantering tone and not succeeding very well. His mouth hurt him and spoiled his grin.
The other swung a leg over the bench and approached him with a light, silent step. “Say, pal, you must ‘a” caught that in a gear box,” he commented, inspecting MacKinnon’s mouth. “Does it hurt?”
“Like the devil,” MacKinnon admitted.
“We’ll have to do something about that.” He went to the cell door and rattled it. “Hey! Lefty! The house is on fire! Come arunnin’!” The guard sauntered down and stood opposite their cell door. “Wha” d’yuh want, Fader?” he said noncommittally.
“My old school chum has been slapped in the face with a wrench, and the pain is inordinate. Here’s a chance for you to get right with Heaven by oozing down to the dispensary, snagging a dressing and about five grains of neoanodyne.”
The guard’s expression was not encouraging. The prisoner looked grieved. “Why, Lefty,” he said, ‘I thought you would jump at a chance to do a little pure charity like that.” He waited for a moment, then added, ‘Tell you what-you do it, and I’ll show you how to work that puzzle about “How old is Ann?” Is it a go?”
“Show me first.”
“It would take too long. I’ll write it out and give it to you.”
When the guard returned, MacKinnon’s cellmate dressed his wounds with gentle deftness, talking the while. “They call me Fader Magee. What’s your name, pal?” “David MacKinnon. I’m sorry, but I didn’t quite catch your first name.”
“Fader. It isn’t,” he explained with a grin, ‘the name my mother gave me. It’s more a professional tribute to my shy and unobtrusive nature.” MacKinnon looked puzzled. “Professional tribute? What is your profession?”
Magee looked pained. “Why, Dave,” he said, ‘I didn’t ask you that. However,” he went on, ‘it’s probably the same as yours-self-preservation.”
Magee was a sympathetic listener, and MacKinnon welcomed the chance to tell someone about his troubles. He related the story of how he had decided to enter Coventry rather than submit to the sentence of the court, and how he had hardly arrived when he was hijacked and hauled into court. Magee nodded. “I’m not surprised,” he observed. “Aman has to have larceny in his heart, or he wouldn’t be a customs guard.”
“But what happens to my belongings?” “They auction them off to pay the duty.” “I wonder how much there will be left for me?”
Magee stared at him. “Left over? There won’t be anything left over. You’ll probably have to pay a deficiency judgment.” “Huh? What’s that?”
“It’s a device whereby the condemned pays for the execution,” Magee explained succinctly, if somewhat obscurely. “What it means to you is that when your ten days is up, you’ll still be in debt to the court. Then it’s the chain gang for you, my lad-you’ll work it off at a dollar a day.”
“Fader-you’re kidding me.”
“Wait and see. You’ve got a lot to learn, Dave.”
Coventry was an even more complex place than MacKinnon had gathered up to this time. Magee explained to him that there were actually three sovereign, independent jurisdictions. The jail where they were prisoners lay in the so-called New America. It had the forms of democratic government, but the treatment he had already received was a fair sample of the fashion in which it was administered.
“This place is heaven itself compared with the Free State,” Magee maintained. “I’ve been there-” The Free State was an absolute dictatorship; the head man of the ruling clique was designated the ‘Liberator’. Their watchwords were Duty and Obedience; an arbitrary discipline was enforced with a severity that left no room for any freedom of opinion. Governmental theory was vaguely derived from the old functionalist doctrines. The state was thought of as a single organism with a single head, a single brain, and a single purpose. Anything not compulsory was forbidden. “Honest so help me,” claimed Magee, ‘you can’t go to bed in that place without finding one of their damned secret police between the sheets.”
“But at that,” he continued, ‘it’s an easier place to live than with the Angels.” “The Angels?”
“Sure. We still got ‘em. Must have been two or three thousand die-hards that chose to go to Coventry after the Revolution-you know that. There’s still a colony up in the hills to the north, complete with Prophet Incarnate and the works. They aren’t bad hombres, but they’ll pray you into heaven even if it kills you.”
All three states had one curious characteristic in common-each one claimed to be the only legal government of the entire United States, and each looked forward to some future day when they would reclaim the ‘unredeemed” portion; i.e., outside Coventry. To the Angels, this was an event which would occur when the First Prophet returned to earth to lead them again. In New America it was hardly more than a convenient campaign plank, to be forgotten after each election. But in the Free State it was a fixed policy.
Pursuant to this purpose there had been a whole series of wars between the Free State and New America. The Liberator held, quite logically, that New America was an unredeemed section, and that is was necessary to bring it under the rule of the Free State before the advantages of their culture could be extended to the outside.
Magee’s words demolished MacKinnon’s dream of finding an anarchistic utopia within the barrier, but he could not let his fond illusion die without a protest. “But see here, Fader,” he persisted, ‘isn’t there some place where a man can live quietly by himself without all this insufferable interference?”
“No-‘considered Fader, ‘no … not unless you took to the hills and hid. Then you ‘ud be all right, as long as you steered clear of the Angels. But it would be pretty slim pickin’s, living off the country. Ever tried it?”
“No … not exactly-but I’ve read all the classics: Zane Grey, and Emerson Hough, and so forth.”
“Well … maybe you could do it. But if you really want to go off and be a hermit, you ‘ud do better to try it on the Outside, where there aren’t so many objections to it.”
“No’-MacKinnon’s backbone stiffened at once-‘no, I’ll never do that. I’ll never submit to psychological reorientation just to have a chance to be let alone. If I could go back to where I was before a couple of months ago, before I was arrested, it might be all right to go off to the Rockies, or look up an abandoned farm somewhere… But with that diagnosis staring me in the face … after being told I wasn’t fit for human society until I had had my emotions re-tailored to fit a cautious little pattern, I couldn’t face it. Not if it meant going to a sanitarium”
“I see,” agreed Fader, nodding, ‘you want to go to Coventry, but you don’t want the Barrier to shut you off from the rest of the world.” “No, that’s not quite fair … Well, maybe, in a way. Say, you don’t think I’m not fit to associate with, do you?”
“You look all right to me,” Magee reassured him, with a grin, ‘but I’m in Coventry too, remember. Maybe I’m no judge.” “You don’t talk as if you liked it much. Why are you here?”
Magee held up a gently admonishing finger. “Tut! Tut! That is the one question you must never ask a man here. You must assume that he came here because he knew how swell everything is here.”
“Still … you don’t seem to like it.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t like it. I do like it; it has flavor. Its little incongruities are a source of innocent merriment. And anytime they turn on the heat I can always go back through the Gate and rest up for a while in a nice quiet hospital, until things quiet down.”
MacKinnon was puzzled again. “Turn on the heat? Do they supply too hot weather here?”
“Huh? Oh. I didn’t mean weather control-there isn’t any of that here, except what leaks over from outside. I was just using an old figure of speech.” “What does it mean?”
Magee smiled to himself. “You’ll find out.”
After supper-bread, stew in a metal dish, a small apple-Magee introduced MacKinnon to the mysteries of cribbage. Fortunately, MacKinnon had no cash to lose. Presently Magee put the cards down without shuffling them. “Dave,” he said, ‘are you enjoying the hospitality offered by this institution?”
“Hardly-Why?” “I suggest that we check out.” “Agood idea, but how?”
“That’s what I’ve been thinking about. Do you suppose you could take another poke on that battered phiz of yours, in a good cause?” MacKinnon cautiously fingered his face. “I suppose so-if necessary. It can’t do me much more harm, anyhow.”
“That’s mother’s little man! Now listen-this guard, Lefty, in addition to being kind o” unbright, is sensitive about his appearance. When they turn out the lights, you -“
“Let me out of here! Let me out of here!” MacKinnon beat on the bars and screamed. No answer came. He renewed the racket, his voice an hysterical falsetto. Lefty arrived to investigate, grumbling.
“What the hell’s eating on you?” he demanded, peering through the bars.
MacKinnon changed to tearful petition. “Oh, Lefty, please let me out of here. Please! I can’t stand the dark. It’s dark in here-please don’t leave me alone.” He flung himself, sobbing, on the bars.
The guard cursed to himself. “Another slugnutty. Listen, you-shut up, and go to sleep, or I’ll come in there, and give you something to yelp for!” He started to leave. MacKinnon changed instantly to the vindictive, unpredictable anger of the irresponsible. “You big ugly baboon! You rat-faced idiot! Where’d you get that nose?”
Lefty turned back, fury in his face. He started to speak. MacKinnon cut him short. “Yah! Yah! Yah!” he gloated, like a nasty little boy, ‘Lefty’s mother was scared by a warthog-The guard swung at the spot where MacKinnon’s face was pressed between the bars of the door. MacKinnon ducked and grabbed simultaneously. Off balance at meeting no resistance, the guard rocked forward, thrusting his forearm between the bars. MacKinnon’s fingers slid along his arm, and got a firm purchase on Lefty’s wrist.
He threw himself backwards, dragging the guard with him, until Lefty was jammed up against the outside of the barred door, with one arm inside, to the wrist of which MacKinnon clung as if welded.
The yell which formed in Lefty’s throat miscarried; Magee had already acted. Out of the darkness, silent as death, his slim hands had snaked between the bars and imbedded themselves in the guard’s fleshy neck. Lefty heaved, and almost broke free, but MacKinnon threw his weight to the right and twisted the arm he gripped in an agonizing, bone-breaking leverage.
It seemed to MacKinnon that they remained thus, like some grotesque game of statues, for an endless period. His pulse pounded in his ears until he feared that it must be heard by others, and bring rescue to Lefty. Magee spoke at last:
“That’s enough,” he whispered. “Go through his pockets.”
He made an awkward job if it, for his hands were numb and trembling from the strain, and it was anything but convenient to work between the bars. But the keys were there, in the last pocket he tried. He passed them to Magee, who let the guard slip to the floor, and accepted them.
Magee made a quick job of it. The door swung open with a distressing creak. Dave stepped over Lefty’s body, but Magee kneeled down, unhooked a truncheon from the guard’s belt, and cracked him behind the ear with it. MacKinnon paused.
“Did you kill him?” he asked.
“Cripes, no,” Magee answered softly, ‘Lefty is a friend of mine. Let’s go.”
They hurried down the dimly lighted passageway between cells toward the door leading to the administrative offices-their only outlet. Lefty had carelessly left it ajar, and light shone through the crack, but as they silently approached it, they heard ponderous footsteps from the far side. Dave looked hurriedly for cover, but the best he could manage was to slink back into the corner formed by the cell block and the wall. He glanced around for Magee, but he had disappeared.
The door swung open; a man stepped through, paused, and looked around. MacKinnon saw that he was carrying a blacklight, and wearing its complement-rectifying spectacles. He realized then that the darkness gave him no cover. The blacklight swung his way; he tensed to spring-He heard a dull ‘clunk!” The guard sighed, swayed gently, then collapsed into a loose pile. Magee stood over him, poised on the balls of his feet, and surveyed his work, while caressing the business end of the truncheon with the cupped fingers of his left hand.
“That will do,” he decided. “Shall we go, Dave?”
He eased through the door without waiting for an answer; MacKinnon was close behind him. The lighted corridor led away to the right and ended in a large double door to the street. On the left wall, near the street door, a smaller office door stood open.
Magee drew MacKinnon to him. “It’s a cinch,” he whispered. “There’ll be nobody in there now but the desk sergeant. We get past him, then out that door, and into the ozone-” He motioned Dave to keep behind him, and crept silently up to the office door. After drawing a small mirror from a pocket in his belt, he lay down on the floor, placed his head near the doorframe, and cautiously extended the tiny mirror an inch or two past the edge.
Apparently he was satisfied with the reconnaissance the improvised periscope afforded, for he drew himself back onto his knees and turned his head so that MacKinnon could see the words shaped by his silent lips. “It’s all right,” he breathed, ‘there is only-Two hundred pounds of uniformed nemesis landed on his shoulders. Aclanging alarm sounded through the corridor. Magee went down fighting, but he was outclassed and caught off guard. He jerked his head free and shouted, ‘Run for it, kid!”
MacKinnon could hear running feet somewhere, but could see nothing but the struggling figures before him. He shook his head and shoulders like a dazed animal, then kicked the larger of the two contestants in the face. The man screamed and let go his hold. MacKinnon grasped his small companion by the scruff of the neck and hauled him roughly to his feet.
Magee’s eyes were still merry. “Well played, my lad,” he commended in clipped syllables, as they burst out the street door, ‘- if hardly cricket! Where did you learn La Savate?” MacKinnon had no time to answer, being fully occupied in keeping up with Magee’s weaving, deceptively rapid progress. They ducked across the street, down an alley, and between two
buildings.
The succeeding minutes, or hours, were confusion to MacKinnon. He remembered afterwards crawling along a roof top and letting himself down to crouch in the blackness of an interior court, but he could not remember how they had gotten on the roof. He also recalled spending an interminable period alone, compressed inside a most unsavory refuse bin, and his terror when footsteps approached the bin and a light flashed through a crack.
Acrash and the sound of footsteps in flight immediately thereafter led him to guess that Fader had drawn the pursuit away from him. But when Fader did return, and open the top of the bin, MacKinnon almost throttled him before identification was established.
When the active pursuit had been shaken off, Magee guided him across town, showing a sophisticated knowledge of back ways and shortcuts, and a genius for taking full advantage of cover. They reached the outskirts of the town in a dilapidated quarter, far from the civic center. Magee stopped. “I guess this is the end of the line,” kid,” he told Dave. “If you follow this street, you’ll come to open country shortly. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”
“I suppose so,” MacKinnon replied uneasily, and peered down the street. Then he turned back to speak again to Magee. But Magee was gone. He had faded away into the shadows. There was neither sight nor sound of him.
MacKinnon started in the suggested direction with a heavy heart. There was no possible reason to expect Magee to stay with him; the service Dave had done him with a lucky kick had been repaid with interest-yet he had lost the only friendly companionship he had found in a strange place. He felt lonely and depressed.
He continued along, keeping to the shadows, and watching carefully for shapes that might be patrolmen. He had gone a few hundred yards, and was beginning to worry about how far it might be to open countryside, when he was startled into gooseflesh by a hiss from a dark doorway.
He did his best to repress the panic that beset him, and was telling himself that policemen never hiss, when a shadow detached itself from the blackness and touched him on the arm. “Dave,” it said softly.
MacKinnon felt a childlike sense of relief and well-being. “Fader!”
“I changed my mind, Dave. The gendarmes would have you in tow before morning. You don’t know the ropes … so I came back.” Dave was both pleased and crestfallen. “Hell’s bells, Fader,” he protested, ‘you shouldn’t worry about me. I’ll get along.”
Magee shook him roughly by the arm. “Don’t be a chump. Green as you are, you’d start to holler about your civil rights, or something, and get clipped in the mouth again.
“Now see here,” he went on, ‘I’m going to take you to some friends of mine who will hide you until you’re smartened up to the tricks around here. But they’re on the wrong side of the law, see? You’ll have to be all three of the three sacred monkeys-see no evil, hear no evil, tell no evil. Think you can do it?”
“Yes, but -“
“No “buts” about it. Come along!”
The entrance was in the rear of an old warehouse. Steps led down into a little sunken pit. From this open areaway-foul with accumulated refuse-a door let into the back wall of the building. Magee tapped lightly but systematically, waited and listened. Presently he whispered, ‘Psst! It’s the Fader.”
The door opened quickly, and Magee was encircled by two great, fat arms. He was lifted off his feet, while the owner of those arms planted a resounding buss on his cheek. “Fader!” she exclaimed, ‘are you all right, lad? We’ve missed you.”
“Now that’s a proper welcome, Mother,” he answered, when he was back on his own feet, ‘but I want you to meet a friend of mine. Mother Johnston, this is David MacKinnon.” “May I do you a service?” David acknowledged, with automatic formality, but Mother Johnston’s eyes tightened with instant suspicion.
“Is he stooled?” she snapped.
“No, Mother, he’s a new immigrant-but I vouch for him. He’s on the dodge, and I’ve brought him here to cool.” She softened a little under his sweetly persuasive tones. “Well -“
Magee pinched her cheek. “That’s a good girl! When are you going to marry me?”
She slapped his hand away. “Even if I were forty years younger, I’d not marry such a scamp as you! Come along then,” she continued to MacKinnon, ‘as long as you’re a friend of the Fader-though it’s no credit to you!” She waddled quickly ahead of them, down a flight of stairs, while calling out for someone to open the door at its foot.
The room was poorly lighted and was furnished principally with a long table and some chairs, at which an odd dozen people were seated, drinking and talking. It reminded MacKinnon of prints he had seen of old English pubs in the days before the Collapse.
Magee was greeted with a babble of boisterous welcome. “Fader!’-‘It’s the kid himself!’-‘How d’ja do it this time, Fader? Crawl down the drains?’-‘Set ‘em up, Mother-the Fader’s back!” He accepted the ovation with a wave of his hand and a shout of inclusive greeting, then turned to MacKinnon. “Folks,” he said, his voice cutting through the confusion, ‘I want you to know
Dave-the best pal that ever kicked a jailer at the right moment. If it hadn’t been for Dave, I wouldn’t be here.”
Dave found himself seated between two others at the table and a stein of beer thrust into his hand by a not uncomely young woman. He started to thank her, but she had hurried off to help Mother Johnston take care of the sudden influx of orders. Seated opposite him was a rather surly young man who had taken little part in the greeting to Magee. He looked MacKinnon over with a face expressionless except for a recurrent tic which caused his right eye to wink spasmodically every few seconds.
“What’s your line?” he demanded.
“Leave him alone, Alec,” Magee cut in swiftly, but in a friendly tone. “He’s just arrived inside; I told you that. But he’s all right,” he continued, raising his voice to include the others present, ‘he’s been here less than twenty-four hours, but he’s broken jail, beat up two customs busies, and sassed old Judge Fleishacker right to his face. How’s that for a busy day?”
Dave was the center of approving interest, but the party with the tic persisted. “That’s all very well, but I asked him a fair question: What’s his line? If it’s the same as mine, I won’t stand for it-it’s too crowded now.”
“That cheap racket you’re in is always crowded, but he’s not in it. Forget about his line.”
“Why don’t he answer for himself,” Alec countered suspiciously. He half stood up. “I don’t believe he’s stooled -“
It appeared that Magee was cleaning his nails with the point of a slender knife. “Put your nose back in your glass, Alec,” he remarked in a conversational tone, without looking up, ‘-or must I cut it off and put it there?”
The other fingered something nervously in his hand. Magee seemed not to notice it, but nevertheless told him, ‘If you think you can use a vibrator on me faster than I use steel, go ahead- it will be an interesting experiment.”
The man facing him stood uncertainly for a moment longer, his tic working incessantly. Mother Johnston came up behind him and pushed him down by the shoulders, saying, ‘Boys! Boys! Is that any way to behave?-and in front of a guest, too! Fader, put that toad sticker away-I’m ashamed of you.”
The knife was gone from his hands. “You’re right as always, Mother,” he grinned. “Ask Molly to fill up my glass again.”
An old chap sitting on MacKinnon’s right had followed these events with alcoholic uncertainty, but he seemed to have gathered something of the gist of it, for now he fixed Dave with serum-filled eye, and enquired, ‘Boy, are you stooled to the rogue?” His sweetly sour breath reached MacKinnon as the old man leaned toward him and emphasized his question with a trembling, joint-swollen finger.
Dave looked to Magee for advice and enlightenment. Magee answered for him. “No, he’s not-Mother Johnston knew that when she let him in. He’s here for sanctuary-as our customs provide!”
An uneasy stir ran around the room. Molly paused in her serving and listened openly. But the old man seemed satisfied. “True … true enough,” he agreed, and took another pull at his drink, ‘sanctuary may be given when needed, if-‘His words were lost in a mumble.
The nervous tension slackened. Most of those present were subconsciously glad to follow the lead of the old man, and excuse the intrusion on the score of necessity. Magee turned back to Dave. “I thought that what you didn’t know couldn’t hurt you-or us-but the matter has been opened.”
“But what did he mean?”
“Gramps asked you if you had been stooled to the rogue-whether or not you were a member of the ancient and honorable fraternity of thieves, cutthroats, and pickpockets!”
Magee stared into Dave’s face with a look of sardonic amusement. Dave looked uncertainly from Magee to the others, saw them exchange glances, and wondered what answer was expected of him. Alec broke the pause. “Well,” he sneered, ‘what are you waiting for? Go ahead and put the question to him-or are the great Fader’s friends free to use this club without so much as a by-your-leave?”
“I thought I told you to quiet down, Alec,” the Fader replied evenly. “Besides-you’re skipping a requirement. All the comrades present must first decide whether or not to put the question at all.”
Aquiet little man with a chronic worried look in his eyes answered him. “I don’t think that quite applies, Fader. If he had come himself, or fallen into our hands-in that case, yes. But you brought him here. I think I speak for all when I say he should answer the question. Unless someone objects, I will ask him myself.” He allowed an interval to pass. No one spoke up. “Very well then … Dave, you have seen too much and heard too much. Will you leave us now-or will you stay and take the oath of our guild? I must warn you that once stooled you are stooled for life-and there is but one punishment for betraying the rogue.”
He drew his thumb across his throat in an age-old deadly gesture. Gramps made an appropriate sound effect by sucking air wetly through his teeth, and chuckled. Dave looked around. Magee’s face gave him no help. “What is it that I have to swear to?” he temporized.
The parley was brought to an abrupt ending by the sound of pounding outside. There was a shout, muffled by two closed doors and a stairway, of ‘Open up down there!” Magee got lightly to his feet and beckoned to Dave.
“That’s for us, kid,” he said. “Come along.”
He stepped over to a ponderous, old-fashioned radiophonograph which stood against the wall, reached under it, fiddled for a moment, then swung out one side panel of it. Dave saw that the mechanism had been cunningly rearranged in such a fashion that a man could squeeze inside it. Magee urged him into it, slammed the panel closed, and left him.
His face was pressed up close to the slotted grill which was intended to cover the sound box. Molly had cleared off the two extra glasses from the table, and was dumping one drink so that it spread along the table top and erased the rings their glasses had made.
MacKinnon saw the Fader slide under the table, and reached up. Then he was gone. Apparently he had, in some fashion, attached himself to the underside of the table.
Mother Johnston made a great-to-do of opening up. The lower door she opened at once, with much noise. Then she clumped slowly up the steps, pausing, wheezing, and complaining aloud. He heard her unlock the outer door.
“Afine time to be waking honest people up!” she protested. “It’s hard enough to get the work done and make both ends meet, without dropping what I’m doing every five minutes, and -“ “Enough of that, old girl,” a man’s voice answered, ‘just get along downstairs. We have business with you.”
“What sort of business?” she demanded.
“It might be selling liquor without a license, but it’s not-this time.”
“I don’t-this is a private club. The members own the liquor; I simply serve it to them.”
“That’s as may be. It’s those members I want to talk to. Get out of the way now, and be spry about it.”
They came pushing into the room with Mother Johnston, still voluble, carried along in by the van. The speaker was a sergeant of police; he was accompanied by a patrolman. Following them were two other uniformed men, but they were soldiers. MacKinnon judged by the markings on their kilts that they were corporal and private-provided the insignia in New America were similar to those used by the United States Army.
The sergeant paid no attention to Mother Johnston. “All right, you men,” he called out, ‘line up!”
They did so, ungraciously but promptly. Molly and Mother Johnston watched them, and moved closer to each other. The police sergeant called out, ‘All right, corporal-take charge!” The boy who washed up in the kitchen had been staring round-eyed. He dropped a glass. It bounced around on the hard floor, giving out bell-like sounds in the silence.
The man who had questioned Dave spoke up. “What’s all this?”
The sergeant answered with a pleased grin. “Conscription-that’s what it is. You are all enlisted in the army for the duration.” “Press gang!” It was an involuntary gasp that came from no particular source.
The corporal stepped briskly forward. “Form a column of twos,” he directed. But the little man with the worried eyes was not done. “I don’t understand this,” he objected. “We signed an armistice with the Free State three weeks ago.”
“That’s not your worry,” countered the sergeant, ‘nor mine. We are picking up every able-bodied man not in essential industry. Come along.” “Then you can’t take me.”
“Why not?”
He held up the stump of a missing hand. The sergeant glanced from it to the corporal, who nodded grudgingly, and said, ‘Okay-but report to the office in the morning, and register.”
He started to march them out when Alec broke ranks and backed up to the wall, screaming, ‘You can’t do this to me! I won’t go!” His deadly little vibrator was exposed in his hand, and the right side of his face was drawn up in a spastic wink that left his teeth bare.
“Get him, Steeves,” ordered the corporal. The private stepped forward, but stopped when Alec brandished the vibrator at him. He had no desire to have a vibroblade between his ribs, and there was no doubt as to the uncontrolled dangerousness of his hysterical opponent.
The corporal, looking phlegmatic, almost bored, levelled a small tube at a spot on the wall over Alec’s head. Dave heard a soft pop!, and a thin tinkle. Alec stood motionless for a few
seconds, his face even more strained, as if he were exerting the limit of his will against some unseen force, then slid quietly to the floor. The tonic spasm in his face relaxed, and his features smoothed into those of a tired and petulant, and very bewildered, little boy.
“Two of you birds carry him,” directed the corporal. “Let’s get going.”
The sergeant was the last to leave. He turned at the door and spoke to Mother Johnston. “Have you seen the Fader lately?” “The Fader?” She seemed puzzled. “Why, he’s in jail.”
“Ah, yes… so he is.” He went out.
Magee refused the drink that Mother Johnston offered him.
Dave was surprised to see that he appeared worried for the first time. “I don’t understand it,” Magee muttered, half to himself, then addressed the one-handed man. “Ed-bring me up to date.”
“Not much news since they tagged you, Fader. The armistice was before that. I thought from the papers that things were going to be straightened out for once.”
“So did I. But the government must expect war if they are going in for general conscription.” He stood up. “I’ve got to have more data. Al!” The kitchen boy stuck his head into the room. “What ‘cha want, Fader?”
“Go out and make palaver with five or six of the beggars. Look up their “king”. You know where he makes his pitch?” “Sure-over by the auditorium.”
“Find out what’s stirring, but don’t let them know I sent you., “Right, Fader. It’s in the bag.” The boy swaggered out. “Molly.”
“Yes, Fader?”
“Will you go out, and do the same thing with some of the business girls? I want to know what they hear from their customers.” She nodded agreement. He went on, ‘Better look up that little redhead that has her beat up on Union Square. She can get secrets out of a dead man. Here-” He pulled a wad of bills out of his pocket and handed her several. “You better take this grease … You might have to pay off a cop to get back out of the district.”
Magee was not disposed to talk, and insisted that Dave get some sleep. He was easily persuaded, not having slept since he entered Coventry. That seemed like a lifetime past; he was exhausted. Mother Johnston fixed him a shakedown in a dark, stuffy room on the same underground level. It had none of the hygienic comforts to which he was accustomed-air- conditioning, restful music, hydraulic mattress, nor soundproofing-and he missed his usual relaxing soak and auto-massage, but he was too tired to care. He slept in clothing and under covers for the first time in his life.
He woke up with a headache, a taste in his mouth like tired sin, and a sense of impending disaster. At first he could not remember where he was-he thought he was still in detention Outside. His surrounds were inexplicably sordid; he was about to ring for the attendant and complain, when his memory pieced in the events of the day before. Then he got up and discovered that his bones and muscles were painfully sore, and-which was worse-that he was, by his standards, filthy dirty. He itched.
He entered the common room, and found Magee sitting at the table. He greeted Dave. “Hi, kid. I was about to wake you. You’ve slept almost all day. We’ve got a lot to talk about.” “Okay-shortly. Where’s the ‘fresher?”
“Over there.”
It was not Dave’s idea of a refreshing chamber, but he managed to take a sketchy shower in spite of the slimy floor. Then he discovered that there was no air blast installed, and he was forced to dry himself unsatisfactorily with his handkerchief. He had no choice in clothes. He must put back on the ones he had taken off, or go naked. He recalled that he had seen no nudity anywhere in Coventry, even at sports-a difference in customs, no doubt.
He put his clothes back on, though his skin crawled at the touch of the once-used linen.
But Mother Johnston had thrown together an appetizing breakfast for him. He let coffee restore his courage as Magee talked. It was, according to Fader, a serious situation. New America and the Free State had compromised their differences and had formed an alliance. They quite seriously proposed to break out of Coventry and attack the United States.
MacKinnon looked up at this. “That’s ridiculous, isn’t it? They would be outnumbered enormously. Besides, how about the Barrier?”
“I don’t know-yet. But they have some reason to think that they can break through the Barrier … and there are rumors that whatever it is can be used as a weapon, too, so that a small army might be able to whip the whole United States.”
MacKinnon looked puzzled. “Well,” he observed, ‘I haven’t any opinion of a weapon I know nothing about, but as to the Barrier … I’m not a mathematical physicist, but I was always told that it was theoretically impossible to break the Barrier-that it was just a nothingness that there was no way to touch. Of course, you can fly over it, but even that is supposed to be deadly to life.”
“Suppose they had found some way to shield from the effects of the Barrier’s field?” suggested Magee. “Anyhow, that’s not the point, for us. The point is: they’ve made this combine; the Free State supplies the techniques and most of the officers; and New America, with its bigger population, supplies most of the men. And that means to us that we don’t dare show our faces any place, or we are in the army before you can blink.
“Which brings me to what I was going to suggest. I’m going to duck out of here as soon as it gets dark, and light out for the Gateway, before they send somebody after me who is bright enough to look under a table. I thought maybe you might want to come along.”
“Back to the psychologists?” MacKinnon was honestly aghast.
“Sure-why not? What have you got to lose? This whole damn place is going to be just like the Free State in a couple of days-and a Joe of your temperament would be in hot water all the time. What’s so bad about a nice, quiet hospital room as a place to hide out until things quiet down? You don’t have to pay any attention to the psych boys-just make animal noises at ‘em every time one sticks his nose into your room, until they get discouraged.”
Dave shook his head. “No,” he said slowly, ‘I can’t do that.” “Then what will you do?”
“I don’t know yet. Take to the hills I guess. Go to live with the Angels if it comes to a showdown. I wouldn’t mind them praying for my soul as long as they left my mind alone.”
They were each silent for a while. Magee was mildly annoyed at MacKinnon’s bullheaded stubbornness in the face of what seemed to him a reasonable offer. Dave continued busily to stow away grilled ham, while considering his position. He cut off another bite. “My, but this is good,” he remarked, to break the awkward silence, ‘I don’t know when I’ve had anything taste so good-Say!’-
“What?” inquired Magee, looking up, and seeing the concern written on MacKinnon’s face. “This ham-is it synthetic, or is it real meat?”
“Why, it’s real. What about it?”
Dave did not answer. He managed to reach the refreshing room before that which he had eaten departed from him.
Before he left, Magee gave Dave some money with which he could have purchased for him things that he would need in order to take to the hills. MacKinnon protested, but the Fader cut him short. “Quit being a damn fool, Dave. I can’t use New American money on the Outside, and you can’t stay alive in the hills without proper equipment. You lie doggo here for a few days
while Al, or Molly, picks up what you need, and you’ll stand a chance-unless you’ll change your mind and come with me?”
Dave shook his head at this, and accepted the money.
It was lonely after Magee left. Mother Johnston and Dave were alone in the club, and the empty chairs reminded him depressingly of the men who had been impressed. He wished that Gramps or the one-handed man would show up. Even Alec, with his nasty temper, would have been company-he wondered if Alec had been punished for resisting the draft.
Mother Johnston inveigled him into playing checkers in an attempt to relieve his evident low spirits. He felt obliged to agree to her gentle conspiracy, but his mind wandered. It was all very well for the Senior Judge to tell him to seek adventure in interplanetary exploration, but only engineers and technicians were eligible for such billets. Perhaps he should have gone in for science, or engineering, instead of literature; then he might now be on Venus, contending against the forces of nature in high adventure, instead of hiding from uniformed bullies. It wasn’t fair. No-he must not kid himself; there was no room for an expert in literary history in the raw frontier of the planets; that was not human injustice, that was a hard fact of nature, and he might as well face it.
He thought bitterly of the man whose nose he had broken, and thereby landed himself in Coventry. Maybe he was an ‘upholstered parasite” after all-but the recollection of the phrase brought back the same unreasoning anger that had gotten him into trouble. He was glad that he had socked that so-and-so! What right had he to go around sneering and calling people things like that?
He found himself thinking in the same vindictive spirit of his father, although he would have been at a loss to explain the connection. The connection was not superficially evident, for his father would never have stooped to name-calling. Instead, he would have offered the sweetest of smiles, and quoted something nauseating in the way of sweetness-and light. Dave’s father was one of the nastiest little tyrants that ever dominated a household under the guise of loving-kindness. He was of the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger, this-hurts-me-more-than-it- does-you school, and all his life had invariably been able to find an altruistic rationalization for always having his own way. Convinced of his own infallible righteousness, he had never valued his son’s point of view on anything, but had dominated him in everything-always from the highest moralistic motives.
He had had two main bad effects on his son: the boy’s natural independence, crushed at home, rebelled blindly at every sort of discipline, authority, or criticism which he encountered elsewhere and subconsciously identified with the not-to-be-criticized paternal authority. Secondly, through years of association Dave imitated his father’s most dangerous social vice-that of passing unselfcritical moral judgments on the actions of others.
When Dave was arrested for breaking a basic custom; to wit, atavistic violence; his father washed his hands of him with the statement that he had tried his best to ‘make a man of him’, and could not be blamed for his son’s failure to profit by his instruction.
Afaint knock caused them to put away the checker board in a hurry. Mother Johnston paused before answering. “That’s not our knock,” she considered, ‘but it’s not loud enough to be the noises. Be ready to hide.”
MacKinnon waited by the fox hole where he had hidden the night before, while Mother Johnston went to investigate. He heard her unbar and unlock the upper door, then she called out to him in a low but urgent voice, ‘Dave! Come here, Dave-hurry!”
It was Fader, unconscious, with his own bloody trail behind him.
Mother Johnston was attempting to pick up the limp form. MacKinnon crowded in, and between the two of them they managed to get him downstairs and to lay him on the long table. He came to for a moment as they straightened his limbs. “Hi, Dave,” he whispered, managing to achieve the ghost of his debonair grin. “Somebody trumped my ace.”
“You keep quiet!” Mother Johnston snapped at him, then in a lower voice to Dave, ‘Oh, the poor darling-Dave, we must get him to the Doctor.”
“Can’t … do … that,” muttered the Fader. “Got … to get to the … Gate-” His voice trailed off. Mother Johnston’s fingers had been busy all the while, as if activated by some separate intelligence. Asmall pair of scissors, drawn from some hiding place about her large person, clipped away at his clothing, exposing the superficial extent of the damage. She examined the trauma critically.
“This is no job for me,” she decided, ‘and he must sleep while we move him. Dave, get that hypodermic kit out of the medicine chest in the ‘fresher.” “No, Mother!” It was Magee, his voice strong and vibrant.
“Get me a pepper pill,” he went on. “There’s -, ‘But Fader -“
He cut her short. “I’ve got to get to the Doctor all right, but how the devil will I get there if I don’t walk?” “We would carry you.”
“Thanks, Mother,” he told her, his voice softened. “I know you would-but the police would be curious. Get me that pill.”
Dave followed her into the ‘fresher, and questioned her while she rummaged through the medicine chest. “Why don’t we just send for a doctor?” “There is only one doctor we can trust, and that’s the Doctor. Besides, none of the others are worth the powder to blast them.”
Magee was out again when they came back into the room. Mother Johnston slapped his face until he came around, blinking and cursing. Then she fed him the pill.
The powerful stimulant, improbable offspring of common coal tar, took hold almost at once. To all surface appearance Magee was a well man. He sat up and tried his own pulse, searching it out in his left wrist with steady, sensitive fingers. “Regular as a metronome,” he announced, ‘the old ticker can stand that dosage all right.”
He waited while Mother Johnston applied sterile packs to his wounds, then said good-bye. MacKinnon looked at Mother Johnston. She nodded. “I’m going with you,” he told the Fader.
“What for? It will just double the risk.”
“You’re in no fit shape to travel alone-stimulant, or no stimulant.” “Nuts. I’d have to look after you.”
“I’m going with you.”
Magee shrugged his shoulders and capitulated.
Mother Johnston wiped her perspiring face, and kissed both of them.
Until they were well out of town their progress reminded MacKinnon of their nightmare flight of the previous evening. Thereafter they continued to the north-northwest by a highway which ran toward the foothills, and they left the highway only when necessary to avoid the sparse traffic. Once they were almost surprised by a police patrol car, equipped with blacklight and almost invisible, but the Fader sensed it in time and they crouched behind a low wall which separated the adjacent field from the road.
Dave inquired how he had known the patrol was near. Magee chuckled. “Damned if I know,” he said, ‘but I believe I could smell a cop staked out in a herd of goats.”
The Fader talked less and less as the night progressed. His usually untroubled countenance became lined and old as the effect of the drug wore off. It seemed to Dave as if this unaccustomed expression gave him a clearer insight into the man’s character-that the mask of pain was his true face rather than the unworried features Magee habitually showed the world. He wondered for the ninth time what the Fader had done to cause a court to adjudge him socially insane.
This question was uppermost in his mind with respect to every person he met in Coventry. The answer was obvious in most cases; their types of instability were gross and showed up at once. Mother Johnston had been an enigma until she had explained it herself. She had followed her husband into Coventry. Now that she was a widow, she preferred to remain with the friends she knew and the customs and conditions she was adjusted to, rather than change for -another and possibly less pleasing environment.
Magee sat down beside the road. “It’s no use, kid,” he admitted, ‘I can’t make it.” “The hell we can’t. I’ll carry you.”
Magee grinned faintly. “No, I mean it.” Dave persisted. “How much farther is it?”
“Matter of two or three miles, maybe.”
“Climb aboard.” He took Magee pickaback and started on. The first few hundred yards were not too difficult; Magee was forty pounds lighter than Dave. After that the strain of the additional load began to tell. His arms cramped from supporting Magee’s knees; his arches complained at the weight and the unnatural load distribution; and his breathing was made difficult by the clasp of Magee’s arms around his neck.
Two miles to go-maybe more. Let your weight fall forward, and your foot must follow it, else you fall to the ground. It’s automatic-as automatic as pulling teeth. How long is a mile? Nothing in a rocket ship, thirty seconds in a pleasure car, a ten minute crawl in a steel snail, fifteen minutes to trained troops in good condition. How far is it with a man on your back, on a rough road, when you are tired to start with?
Five thousand, two hundred, and eighty feet-a meaningless figure. But every step takes twenty-four inches off the total. The remainder is still incomprehensible-an infinity. Count them. Count them till you go crazy-till the figures speak themselves outside your head, and the jar! … jar! …jar! … of your enormous, benumbed feet beats in your brain. Count them backwards, subtracting two each time-no, that’s worse; each remainder is still an unattainable, inconceivable figure.
His world closed in, lost its history and held no future. There was nothing, nothing at all, but the torturing necessity of picking up his foot again and placing it forward. No feeling but the heartbreaking expenditure of will necessary to achieve that meaningless act.
He was brought suddenly to awareness when Magee’s arms relaxed from around his neck. He leaned forward, and dropped to one knee to keep from spilling his burden, then eased it slowly to the ground. He thought for a moment that the Fader was dead-he could not locate his pulse, and the slack face and limp body were sufficiently corpse-like, but he pressed an ear to Magee’s chest, and heard with relief the steady flub-dub of his heart.
He tied Magee’s wrists together with his handkerchief, and forced his own head through the encircled arms. But he was unable, in his exhausted condition, to wrestle the slack weight into position on his back. Fader regained consciousness while MacKinnon was struggling. His first words were, ‘Take it easy, Dave. What’s the trouble?”
Dave explained. “Better untie my wrists,” advised the Fader, ‘I think I can walk for a while.”
And walk he did, for nearly three hundred yards, before he was forced to give up again. “Look, Dave,” he said, after he had partially recovered, ‘did you bring along any more of those pepper pills?”
“Yes-but you can’t take any more dosage. It would kill you.”
“Yeah, I know-so they say. But that isn’t the idea-yet. I was going to suggest that you might take one.” “Why, of course! Good grief, Fader, but I’m dumb.”
Magee seemed no heavier than a light coat, the morning star shone brighter, and his strength seemed inexhaustible. Even when they left the highway and started up the cart trail that led to the Doctor’s home in the foothills, the going was tolerable and the burden not too great. MacKinnon knew that the drugs burned the working tissue of his body long after his proper reserves were gone, and that it would take him days to recover from the reckless expenditure, but he did not mind. No price was too high to pay for the moment when he at last arrived at the gate of the Doctor’s home-on his own two feet, his charge alive and conscious.
MacKinnon was not allowed to see Magee for four days. In the meantime, he was encouraged to keep the routine of a semi-invalid himself in order to recover the twenty-five pounds he had lost in two days and two nights, and to make up for the heavy strain on his heart during the last night. Ahigh-caloric diet, sun baths, rest, and peaceful surroundings plus his natural good health caused him to regain weight and strength rapidly, but he ‘enjoyed ill health” exceedingly because of the companionship of the Doctor himself-and Persephone.
Persephone’s calendar age was fifteen. Dave never knew whether to think of her as much older, or much younger. She had been born in Coventry, and had lived her short life in the house of the Doctor, her mother having died in childbirth in that same house. She was completely childlike in many respects, being without experience in the civilized world Outside, and having had very little contact with the inhabitants of Coventry, except when she saw them as patients of the Doctor. But she had been allowed to read unchecked from the library of a sophisticated and protean-minded man of science. MacKinnon was continually being surprised at the extent of her academic and scientific knowledge-much greater than his own. She made him feel as if he were conversing with some aged and omniscient matriarch, then she would come out with some naive concept of the outer world, and he would be brought up sharply with the realization that she was, in fact, an inexperienced child.
He was mildly romantic about her, not seriously, of course, in view of her barely nubile age, but she was pleasant to see, and he was hungry for feminine companionship. He was quite young enough himself to feel continual interest in the delightful differences, mental and physical, between male and female.
Consequently, it was a blow to his pride as sharp as had been the sentence to Coventry to discover that she classed him with the other inhabitants of Coventry as a poor unfortunate who needed help and sympathy because he was not quite right in his head.
He was furious and for one whole day he sulked alone, but the human necessity for self-justification and approval forced him to seek her out and attempt to reason with her. He explained carefully and with emotional candor the circumstances leading up to his trial and conviction, and embellished the account with his own philosophy and evaluations, then confidently awaited her approval.
It was not forthcoming. “I don’t understand your viewpoint,” she said. “You broke his nose, yet he had done you no harm of any sort. You expect me to approve that?” “But Persephone,” he protested, ‘you ignore the fact that he called me a most insulting name.”
“I don’t see the connection,” she said. “He made a noise with his mouth-a verbal label. If the label does not fit you, the noise is meaningless. If the label is true in your case-if you are the thing that the noise refers to, you are neither more, nor less, that thing by reason of some one uttering the verbal label. In short, he did not damage you.
“But what you did to him was another matter entirely. You broke his nose. That is damage. In self-protection the rest of society must seek you out, and determine whether or not you are so unstable as to be likely to damage some one else in the future. If you are, you must be quarantined for treatment, or leave society-whichever you prefer.”
“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” he accused.
“Crazy? Not the way you mean it. You haven’t paresis, or a brain tumor, or any other lesion that the Doctor could find. But from the viewpoint of your semantic reactions you are as socially unsane as any fanatic witch burner.”
“Come now-that’s not just!”
“What is justice?” She picked up the kitten she had been playing with. “I’m going in-it’s getting chilly.” Off she went into the house, her bare feet noiseless in the grass.
Had the science of semantics developed as rapidly as psychodynamics and its implementing arts of propaganda and mob psychology, the United States might never have fallen into dictatorship, then been forced to undergo the Second Revolution. All of the scientific principles embodied in the Covenant which marked the end of the revolution were formulated as far back as the first quarter of the twentieth century.
But the work of the pioneer semanticists, C. K. Ogden, Alfred Korzybski, and others, were known to but a handful of students, whereas psycho-dynamics, under the impetus of repeated wars and the frenzy of high-pressure merchandising, progressed by leaps and bounds.
Semantics, ‘the meaning of meaning’, gave a method for the first time of applying the scientific method to every act of everyday life. Because semantics dealt with spoken and written words as a determining aspect of human behavior it was at first mistakenly thought by many to be concerned only with words and of interest only to professional word manipulators, such as advertising copy writers and professors of etymology. Ahandful of unorthodox psychiatrists attempted to apply it to personal human problems, but their work was swept away by the epidemic mass psychoses that destroyed Europe and returned the United States to the Dark Ages.
The Covenant was the first scientific social document ever drawn up by man, and due credit must be given to its principal author, Dr Micah Novak, the same Novak who served as staff psychologist in the revolution. The revolutionists wished to establish maximum personal liberty. How could they accomplish that to a degree of high mathematical probability? First they junked the concept of ‘justice’. Examined semantically ‘justice” has no referent-there is no observable phenomenon in the space-time-matter continuum to which one can point, and say, ‘This is justice.” Science can deal only with that which can be observed and measured. Justice is not such a matter; therefore it can never have the same meaning to one as to another; any ‘noises” said about it will only add to confusion.
But damage, physical or economic, can be pointed to and measured. Citizens were forbidden by the Covenant to damage another. Any act not leading to damage, physical or economic,
to some particular person, they declared to be lawful.
Since they had abandoned the concept of ‘justice’, there could be no rational standards of punishment. Penology took its place with lycanthropy and other forgotten witchcrafts. Yet, since it was not practical to permit a source of danger to remain in the community, social offenders were examined and potential repeaters were given their choice of psychological readjustment, or of having society withdraw itself from them-Coventry.
Early drafts of the Covenant contained the assumption that the socially unsane would naturally be hospitalized and readjusted, particularly since current psychiatry was quite competent to cure all non-lesional psychoses and cure or alleviate lesional psychoses, but Novak set his face against this.
“No!” he protested. “The government must never again be permitted to tamper with the mind of any citizen without his consent, or else we set up a greater tyranny than we had before. Every man must be free to accept, or reject, the Covenant, even though we think him insane!”
The next time David MacKinnon looked up Persephone he found her in a state of extreme agitation. His own wounded pride was forgotten at once. “Why, my dear,” he said, ‘whatever in the world is the matter?”
Gradually he gathered that she had been present at a conversation between Magee and the Doctor, and had heard, for the first time, of the impending military operation against the United States. He patted her hand. “So that’s all it is,” he observed in a relieved voice. “I thought something was wrong with you yourself.”
““That’s all-” David MacKinnon, do you mean to stand there and tell me that you knew about this, and don’t consider it worth worrying about?” “Me? Why should I? And for that matter, what could I do?”
“What could you do? You could go outside and warn them-that’s what you could do … As to why you should-Dave, you’re impossible!” She burst into tears and ran from the room. He stared after her, mouth open, then borrowed from his remotest ancestor by observing to himself that women are hard to figure out.
Persephone did not appear at lunch. MacKinnon asked the Doctor where she was. “Had her lunch,” the Doctor told him, between mouthfuls. “Started for the Gateway.” “What! Why did you let her do that?”
“Free agent. Wouldn’t have obeyed me anyway. She’ll be all right.”
Dave did not hear the last, being already out of the room and running out of the house. He found her just backing her little motorcycle runabout out of its shed. “Persephone!” “What do you want?” she asked with frozen dignity beyond her years.
“You mustn’t do this! That’s where the Fader got hurt!” “I am going. Please stand aside.”
“Then I’m going with you.” “Why should you?”
“To take care of you.”
She sniffed. “As if anyone would dare to touch me.”
There was a measure of truth in what she said. The Doctor, and every member of his household, enjoyed a personal immunity unlike that of anyone else in Coventry. As a natural consequence of the set-up, Coventry had almost no competent medical men. The number of physicians who committed social damage was small. The proportion of such who declined psychiatric treatment was negligible, and this negligible remainder were almost sure to be unreliable bunglers in their profession. The Doctor was a natural healer, in voluntary exile in order that he might enjoy the opportunity to practice his art in the richest available field. He cared nothing for dry research; what he wanted was patients, the sicker the better, that he might make them well again.
He was above custom and above law. In the Free State the Liberator depended on him for insulin to hold his own death from diabetes at arm’s length. In New America his beneficiaries were equally powerful. Even among the Angels of the Lord the Prophet himself accepted the dicta of the Doctor without question.
But MacKinnon was not satisfied. Some ignorant fool, he was afraid, might do the child some harm without realizing her protected status. He got no further chance to protest; she started the little runabout suddenly, and forced him to jump out of its path. When he had recovered his balance, she was far down the lane. He could not catch her.
She was back in less than four hours. He had expected that; if a person as elusive as Fader had not been able to reach the Gate at night, it was not likely that a young girl could do so in daylight.
His first feeling was one of simple relief, then he eagerly awaited an opportunity to speak to her. During her absence he had been turning over the situation in his mind. It was a foregone conclusion that she would fail; he wished to rehabilitate himself in her eyes; therefore, he would help her in the project nearest her heart-he himself would carry the warning to the Outside!
Perhaps she would ask for such help. In fact, it seemed likely. But the time she returned he had convinced himself that she was certain to ask his help. He would agree-with simple dignity-and off he would go, perhaps to be wounded, or killed, but an heroic figure, even if he failed.
He pictured himself subconsciously as a blend of Sydney Carton, the White Knight, the man who carried the message to Garcia and just a dash of d’Artagnan. But she did not ask him-she would not even give him a chance to talk with her.
She did not appear at dinner. After dinner she was closeted with the Doctor in his study. When she reappeared she went directly to her room. He finally concluded that he might as well go to bed himself.
To bed, and then to sleep, and take it up again in the morning-But it’s not as simple as that. The unfriendly walls stared back at him, and the other, critical half of his mind decided to make a night of it. Fool! She doesn’t want your help. Why should she? What have you got that Fader hasn’t got?-and better. To her, you are just one of the screwloose multitude you’ve seen all around you in this place.
But I’m not crazy!-just because I choose not to submit to the dictation of others doesn’t make me crazy. Doesn’t it, though? All the rest of them in here are lamebrains, what’s so fancy about you? Not all of them-how about the Doctor, and-don’t kid yourself, chump, the Doctor and Mother Johnston are here for their own reasons; they weren’t sentenced. And Persephone was born here.
How about Magee?-He was certainly rational-or seemed so. He found himself resenting, with illogical bitterness, Magee’s apparent stability. Why should he be any different from the rest of us?
The rest of us? He had classed himself with the other inhabitants of Coventry. All right, all right, admit it, you fool-you’re just like the rest of them; turned out because the decent people won’t have you-and too damned stubborn to admit that you need treatment. But the thought of treatment turned him cold, and made him think of his father again. Why should that be? He recalled something the Doctor had said to him a couple of days before:
“What you need, son, is to stand up to your father and tell him off. Pity more children don’t tell their parents to go to hell!”
He turned on the light and tried to read. But it was no use. Why should Persephonie care what happened to the people Outside?-She didn’t know them; she had no friends there. If he had no obligations to them, how could she possibly care? No obligations? You had a soft, easy life for many years-all they asked was that you behave yourself. For that matter, where would you be now, if the Doctor had stopped to ask whether or not he owed you anything?
He was still wearily chewing the bitter cud of self-examination when the first cold and colorless light of morning filtered in. He got up, threw a robe around him, and tiptoed down the hall to Magee’s room. The door was ajar. He stuck his head in, and whispered, ‘Fader-Are you awake?”
“Come in, kid,” Magee answered quietly. “What’s the trouble? No can sleep?”
“No -, ‘Neither can I. Sit down, and we’ll carry the banner together.” “Fader, I’m going to make a break for it. I’m going Outside.”
“Huh? When?” “Right away.”
“Risky business, kid. Wait a few days, and I’ll try it with you.” “No, I can’t wait for you to get well. I’m going out to warn the United States!”
Magee’s eyed widened a little, but his voice was unchanged. “You haven’t let that spindly kid sell you a bill of goods, Dave?”
“No. Not exactly. I’m doing this for myself-It’s something I need to do. See here, Fader, what about this weapon? Have they really got something that could threaten the United States?” “I’m afraid so,” Magee admitted. “I don’t know much about it, but it makes blasters look sick. More range-I don’t know what they expect to do about the Barrier, but I saw ‘em stringing
heavy power lines before I got winged. Say, if you do get outside, here’s a chap you might look up; in fact, be sure to. He’s got influence.” Magee scrawled something on a scrap of paper,
folded the scrap, and handed it to MacKinnon, who pocketed it absent-mindedly and went on:
“How closely is the Gate guarded, Fader?”
“You can’t get out the Gate; that’s out of the question. Here’s what you will have to do-” He tore off another piece of paper and commenced sketching and explaining. Dave shook hands with Magee before he left. “You’ll say goodbye for me, won’t you? And thank the Doctor? I’d rather just slide out before anyone is up.” “Of course, kid,” the Fader assured him.
MacKinnon crouched behind bushes and peered cautiously at the little band of Angels filing into the bleak, ugly church. He shivered, both from fear and from the icy morning air. But his need was greater than his fear. Those zealots had food-and he must have it.
The first two days after he left the house of the Doctor had been easy enough. True, he had caught cold from sleeping on the ground; it had settled in his lungs and slowed him down. But he did not mind that now if only he could refrain from sneezing or coughing until the little band of faithful were safe inside the temple. He watched them pass-dour-looking men, women and skirts that dragged the ground and whose work lined faces were framed in shawls-sallow drudges with too many children. The light had gone out of their faces. Even the children were sober.
The last of them filed inside, leaving only the sexton in the churchyard, busy with some obscure duty. After an interminable time, during which MacKinnon pressed a finger against his upper lip in a frantic attempt to forestall a sneeze, the sexton entered the grim building and closed the doors.
McKinnon crept out of his hiding place and hurried to the house he had previously selected, on the edge of the clearing, farthest from the church.
The dog was suspicious, but he quieted him. The house was locked, but the rear door could be forced. He was a little giddy at the sight of food when he found it-hard bread, and strong, unsalted butter made from goat’s milk. Amisstep two days before had landed him in a mountain stream. The mishap had not seemed important until he discovered that his food tablets were a pulpy mess. He had eaten them the rest of the day, then mold had taken them, and he had thrown the remainder away.
The bread lasted him through three more sleeps, but the butter melted and he was unable to carry it. He soaked as much of it as he could into the bread, then licked up the rest, after which he was very thirsty.
Some hours after the last of the bread was gone, he reached his first objective-the main river to which all other streams in Coventry were tributary. Some place, down stream, it dived under the black curtain of the Barrier, and continued seaward. With the gateway closed and guarded, its outlet constituted the only possible egress to a man unassisted.
In the meantime it was water, and thirst was upon him again, and his cold was worse. But he would have to wait until dark to drink; there were figures down there by the bank-some in uniform, he thought. One of them made fast a little skiff to a landing. He marked it for his own and watched it with jealous eyes. It was still there when the sun went down.
The early morning sun struck his nose and he sneezed. He came wide awake, raised his head, and looked around. The little skiff he had appropriated floated in midstream. There were no oars. He could not remember whether or not there had been any oars. The current was fairly strong; it seemed as if he should have drifted clear to the Barrier in the night. Perhaps he had passed under it-no, that was ridiculous.
Then he saw it, less than a mile away, black and ominous-but the most welcome sight he had seen in days. He was too weak and feverish to enjoy it, but it renewed the determination that kept him going.
The little boat scraped against bottom. He saw that the current at a bend had brought him to the bank. He hopped awkwardly out, his congealed joints complaining, and drew the bow of the skiff up onto the sand. Then he thought better of it, pushed it out once more, shoved as hard as he was able and watched it disappear around the meander. No need to advertise where he had landed.
He slept most of that day, rousing himself once to move out of the sun when it grew too hot. But the sun had cooked much of the cold out of his bones, and he felt much better by nightfall. Although the Barrier was only a mile or so away, it took most of the night to reach it by following the river bank. He knew when he had reached it by the clouds of steam that rose from the
water. When the sun came up, he considered the situation. The Barrier stretched across the water, but the juncture between it and the surface of the stream was hidden by billowing
clouds. Someplace, down under the surface of the water-how far down he did not know-somewhere down there, the Barrier ceased, and its raw edge turned the water it touched to
steam.
Slowly, reluctantly and most unheroically, he commenced to strip off his clothes. The time had come and he did not relish it. He came across the scrap of paper that Magee had handed him, and attempted to examine it. But it had been pulped by his involuntary dip in the mountain stream and was quite illegible. He chucked it away. It did not seem to matter.
He shivered as he stood hesitating on the bank, although the sun was warm. Then his mind was made up for him; he spied a patrol on the far bank. Perhaps they had seen him, perhaps not. He dived.
Down, down, as far as his strength would take him. Down and try to touch bottom, to be sure of avoiding that searing, deadly base. He felt mud with his hands. Now to swim under it. Perhaps it was death to pass under it, as well as over it; he would soon know. But which way was it? There was no direction down here.
He stayed down until his congested lungs refused. Then he rose part way, and felt scalding water on his face. For a timeless interval of unutterable sorrow and loneliness he realized that he was trapped between heat and water-trapped under the Barrier.
Two private soldiers gossiped idly on a small dock which lay under the face of the Barrier. The river which poured out from beneath it held no interest for them, they had watched it for many dull tours of guard duty. An alarm clanged behind them and brought them to alertness. “What sector, Jack?”
“This bank. There he is now-see!”
They fished him out and had him spread out on the dock by the time the sergeant of the guard arrived. “Alive, or dead?” he enquired. “Dead, I think,” answered the one who was not busy giving artificial resuscitation.
The sergeant clucked in a manner incongruous to his battered face, and said, ‘Too bad. I’ve ordered the ambulance; send him up to the infirmary anyhow.”
The nurse tried to keep him quiet, but MacKinnon made such an uproar that she was forced to get the ward surgeon. “Here! Here! What’s all this nonsense?” the medico rebuked him, while reaching for his pulse. Dave managed to convince him that he would not quiet down, not accept a soporific until he had told his story. They struck a working agreement that MacKinnon was to be allowed to talk-‘But keep it short, mind you!’-and the doctor would pass the word along to his next superior, and in return Dave would submit to a hypodermic.
The next morning two other men, unidentified, were brought to MacKinnon by the surgeon. They listened to his full story and questioned him in detail. He was transferred to corps area
headquarters that afternoon by ambulance. There he was questioned again. He was regaining his strength rapidly, but he was growing quite tired of the whole rigmarole, and wanted assurance that his warning was being taken seriously. The latest of his interrogators reassured him. “Compose yourself,” he told Dave, ‘you are to see the commanding officer this afternoon.”
The corps area commander, a nice little chap with a quick, birdlike manner and a most unmilitary appearance, listened gravely while MacKinnon recited his story for what seemed to him the fiftieth time. He nodded agreement when David finished. “Rest assured, David MacKinnon, that all necessary steps are being taken.”
“But how about their weapon?”
“That is taken care of-and as for the Barrier, it may not be as easy to break as our neighbors think. But your efforts are appreciated. May I do you some service?”
“Well, no-not for myself, but there are two of my friends in there-‘He asked that something be done to rescue Magee, and that Persephone be enabled to come out, if she wished. “I know of that girl,” the general remarked. “We will get in touch with her. If at any time she wishes to become a citizen, it can be arranged. As for Magee, that is another matter-‘He touched
the stud of his desk visiphone. “Send Captain Randall in.”
Aneat, trim figure in the uniform of a captain of the United States Army entered with a light step. MacKinnon glanced at him with casual, polite interest, then his expression went to pieces. “Fader!” he yelled.
Their mutual greeting was hardly sufficiently decorous for the private office of a commanding general, but the general did not seem to mind. When they had calmed down, MacKinnon had to ask the question uppermost in his mind. “But see here, Fader, all this doesn’t make sense-‘He paused, staring, then pointed a finger accusingly, ‘I know! You’re in the secret service!”
The Fader grinned cheerfully. “Did you think,” he observed, ‘that the United States Army would leave a plague spot like that unwatched?” The general cleared his throat. “What do you plan to do now, David MacKinnon?”
“Eh! Me? Why, I don’t have any plans-‘He thought for a moment, then turned to his friend. “Do you know, Fader, I believe I’ll turn in for psychological treatment after all. You’re on the Outside -“
“I don’t believe that will be necessary,” interrupted the general gently. “No? Why not, sir?”
“You have cured yourself. You may not be aware of it, but four psychotechnicians have interviewed you. Their reports agree. I am authorized to tell you that your status as a free citizen has been restored, if you wish it.”
The general and Captain ‘the Fader” Randall managed tactfully between them to terminate the interview. Randall walked back to the infirmary with his friend. Dave wanted a thousand questions answered at once. “But Fader,” he demanded, ‘you must have gotten out before I did.”
“Aday or two.”
“Then my job was unnecessary!”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Randall contradicted. “I might not have gotten through. As a matter of fact, they had all the details even before I reported. There are others-Anyhow,” he continued, to change the subject, ‘now that you are here, what will you do?”
“Me? It’s too soon to say … It won’t be classical literature, that’s a cinch. If I wasn’t such a dummy in maths, I might still try for interplanetary.”
“Well, we can talk about it tonight,” suggested Fader, glancing at his chrono. “I’ve got to run along, but I’ll stop by later, and we’ll go over to the mess for dinner.” He was out the door with speed reminiscent of the thieves” kitchen. Dave watched him, then said suddenly, ‘Hey! Fader! Why couldn’t I get into the secret ser -, But the Fader was gone-he must ask himself.
The End
I hope that you enjoyed this little piece. I have many other stories in my fictional index here…
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When I was a young teenager, I voraciously read science fiction stories like they were going out of style. I couldn’t help myself. I loved the adventure. I loved the stories about outer space. I loved exploration, and shiny metal mechanisms. I loved to hear the heroes get in and out of their particular predicaments. And as such, I read all the “classics”, from anthologies to Heinlein, Bradbury, Asimov, and many others. One of my favorites (alongside my collection of Doc Savage books) was the hundreds of stories by A. Bertram Chandler and his John Grimes saga.
This was around the time of Star Trek (the first season) and before Star Wars or any of the subsequent movies. Boys like myself read these adventure yarns and imagined that we commanded those slick needle-shaped silver rockets and plied the depths of space.
The idea of a “space opera” during the 1960’s and 1970’s was one in which a lone person would explore the heavens as part of some kind of military or merchant marine operation. It was short in space battles and infra-cannons, phasers, and photon-torpedoes. But long on adventure, inter-personal relationships and situational conflicts. I ate it up.
A. Bertram Chandler
A. Bertram Chandler wrote over 40 novels and 200 works of short fiction.
“He writes his stories in the middle of a hurricane with his typewriter lashed to his desk.”
– John W. Campbell, legendary editor of Astounding Science Fiction
Chandler’s descriptions of life aboard spaceships and the relationships between members of the crew en route derive from his experience on board seagoing ships and thus carry a feeling of realism rarely found with other writers.
He was most well known for his Rim World series and John Grimes novels, both of which have a distinctly naval flavor. In the latter, Chandler’s principal hero John Grimes is an enthusiastic sailor who has occasional adventures on the oceans of various planets.
In the books, there is a repeated reference to an obsolete type of magnetically powered spaceship known as the “Gaussjammer”, remembered nostalgically by “old timers” – which is modeled on the Windjammer.
Chandler made heavy use of the parallel universe plot device throughout his career, with many Grimes stories involving characters briefly crossing over into other realities.
In his ironic short story "The Cage", a band of shipwrecked humans wandering naked in the jungles of a faraway planet are captured by aliens and placed in a zoo, where, failing in all their efforts to convince their captors that they are intelligent, some are dissected. Eventually they become resigned to captivity and adopt a small local rodent as a pet, placing him in a wicker cage. Seeing this, their captors apologize for the mistake and repatriate them to Earth, remarking that "only intelligent creatures put other creatures in cages".
Sex is frequent in Chandler’s books, often in free fall. Women on board are typically pursers or passengers; far less often are they regular officers in the chain of command. Chandler’s protagonists are quite prone to affairs and promiscuous behavior, but are also shown falling in love and undertaking long-lasting, harmonious marriages.
The combination of science fiction, life as a starship caption, adventure and sexy relationships in parallel universes was addictive to me. I couldn’t put these books down, and often I would find myself exploring old second-hand booksellers searching for a new and unread Chandler book.
Commander Grimes
"SF's answer to Horatio Hornblower." --Publishers Weekly
Pipe-smoking, action-loving spaceship commander John Grimes (think Captain Kirk with more of a navy, salty attitude) retires from heroic days in Earth’s space navy only to be immediately thrown into adventures on the remote edge of known space…
"As Asimov chronicled the Foundation, as Heinlein built his Future History, so Chandler constructs the epic of the Rim Worlds." --Analog
This is the very first book in the John Grimes story / saga. Please enjoy it as much as I have.
The Road to the Rim
The Road to the Rim.
Lieutenant John Grimes of the Federation Survey Service: fresh out of the Academy-and as green as they come!
“What do you think you’re playing at?”
“Captain,” said Wolverton, “I can no more than guess at what you intend to do-but I have decided not to help you do it.”
“Give me the initiator, Wolverton. That’s an order!
“A lawful command, Captain? As lawful as those that armed this ship?” “Hold him, Grimes!”
. . . They hung there, clinging to each other, but more in hate than in love. Wolverton’s back was to the machine; he could not see, as could Grimes, that there was an indraught of air into the shimmering, spinning complexity. Grimes felt the beginnings of panic . . . all that mattered was that there was nothing to prevent him and Wolverton from being drawn into the machine . . . .Violently Grimes shoved away. To the action, there was a reaction . . .
When he had finished retching, Grimes forced himself to look again at the slimy, bloody obscenity that was a man turned inside out-heart still beating, intestines still writhing . . .
I
HIS UNIFORM was new, too new, all knife-edged creases, and the braid and buttons as yet un-dimmed by time. It sat awkwardly upon his chunky
body-and even more awkwardly his big ears protruded from under the cap that was set too squarely upon his head. Beneath the shiny visor his eyes were gray (but not yet hard), and his face, for all its promise of strength, was as yet unlined, had yet to lose its immature softness. He stood at the foot of the ramp by which he had disembarked from the transport that had carried him from the Antarctic Base to Port Woomera, looking across the silver towers that were the ships, interplanetary and interstellar, gleaming in the desert. The westering sun was hot on his back, but he did not notice the discomfort. There were the ships, the real ships-not obsolescent puddle-jumpers like the decrepit cruiser in which he, with the other midshipmen of his class, had made the training cruise to the moons of Saturn. There were the ships, the star ships, that span their web of commerce from Earth to the Centaurian planets, to the Cluster Worlds, to the Empire of Waverley, to the Shakespearian Sector and beyond.
(But they’re only merchantmen, he thought, with a young man’s snobbery.) He wondered in which one of the vessels he would be taking passage.
Merchantman or not, that big ship, the one that stood out from her
neighbors like a city skyscraper among village church steeples, looked a likely enough craft. He pulled the folder containing his orders from his inside breast pocket, opened it, read (not for the second time, even), the
relevant page.
. . . you are to report on board the Interstellar Transport Commission’s Delta Orionis . . .
He was not a spaceman yet, in spite of his uniform, but he knew the Commission’s system of nomenclature. There was the Alpha class, and the Beta class, and there were the Gamma and Delta classes. He grinned wryly. His ship was one of the smaller ones. Well, at least he would not be traveling to Lindisfarne Base in an Epsilon class tramp.
Ensign John Grimes, Federation Survey Service, shrugged his broad shoulders and stepped into the ground car waiting to carry him and his baggage from the airport to the spaceport.
II
GRIMES LOOKED at the officer standing just inside Delta Orionis’ airlock, and she looked at him. He felt the beginnings of a flush spreading over his face, a prickling of the roots of his close-cropped hair, and felt all the more embarrassed by this public display of his embarrassment. But spaceborn female officers, at this time, were almost as scarce as hens’ teeth in the Survey Service-and such few as he had met all looked as though they shared a common equine ancestry. It was all wrong, thought Grimes. It was unfair that this girl (this attractive girl) should already be a veteran of interstellar voyages while he, for all his uniform and commission, should be embarking upon his first, his very first trip outside the bounds of the Solar System. He let his glance fall from her face (but not without reluctance), to the braid on her shoulderboards. Gold on a white facing. So it wasn’t too bad. She was only some sort of paymaster-or, to use Merchant Service terminology, only some sort of purser.
She said, her clear, high voice almost serious, “Welcome aboard the Delia O’Ryan, Admiral.”
. . . of the Federation Survey Service,” she finished for him. “But you are all potential admirals.” There was the faintest of smiles flickering upon her full lips, a barely discernible crinkling at the corners of her eyes. Her brown eyes, thought Grimes. Brown eyes, and what I can see of her hair under that cap seems to be auburn . . .
She glanced at her wristwatch. She told him, her voice now crisp and businesslike, “We lift ship in precisely ten minutes’ time, Ensign.”
“Then I’d better get my gear along to my cabin, Miss . . . ?”
“I’ll look after that, Mr. Grimes. Meanwhile, Captain Craven sends his compliments and invites you to the Control Room.”
“Thank you.” Grimes looked past and around the girl, trying to discover for himself the door that gave access to the ship’s axial shaft. He was determined not to ask.
“It’s labeled,” she told him with a faint smile. “And the cage is waiting at
this level. Just take it up as far as it goes, then walk the rest. Or do you want a pilot?”
“I can manage,” he replied more coldly than he had intended, adding, “thank you.” He could see the sign over the door now. It was plain enough. AXIAL SHAFT. So was the button that he had to press to open the door-but the girl pressed it for him. He thanked her again-and this time his coldness was fully intentional-and stepped into the cage. The door slid shut behind him. The uppermost of the studs on the elevator’s control panel was marked CAPTAIN’S DECK. He pushed it, then stood there and watched the lights flashing on the panel as he was swiftly lifted to the nose of the ship.
When he was carried no further he got out, found himself on a circular walk surrounding the upper extremity of the axial shaft. On the outside of the shaft itself there was a ladder. After a second’s hesitation he climbed it, emerged through a hatch into the control room.
It was like the control room of the cruiser in which he had made his training cruise-and yet subtly (or not so subtly), unlike it. Everything- but so had it been aboard the Survey Service vessel-was functional, but there was an absence of high polish, of polishing for polishing’s sake. Instruments gleamed-but it was the dull gleam that comes from long and continual use, and matched the dull gleam of the buttons and rank marks on the uniforms of the officers already seated at their stations, the spacemen to whom, after all, a uniform was no more (and no less), than an obligatory working rig.
The big man with the four gold bars on each shoulder half turned his head as Grimes came up through the hatch. “Glad to have you aboard, Ensign,” he said perfunctorily. “Grab yourself a seat-there’s a spare one alongside the Mate’s. Sorry there’s no time for introductions right now. We’re due to get upstairs.”
“Here!” grunted one of the officers.
Grimes made his way to the vacant acceleration chair, dropped into it, strapped himself in. While he was so doing he heard the Captain ask, “All secure, Mr. Kennedy?”
“No, sir.”
“Then why the hell not?”
“I’m still waiting for the purser’s report, sir.”
“Are you?” Then, with a long-suffering sigh, “I suppose she’s still tucking some passenger into her-or his-bunk . . . .”
“She could still be stowing some passenger’s gear, sir,” contributed Grimes. “Mine,” he added.
“Indeed?” The Captain’s voice was cold and elaborately uninterested. Over the intercom came a female voice. “Purser to Control. All secure
below.”
“And bloody well time,” grumbled the shipmaster. Then, to the officer at the transceiver, “Mr. Digby, kindly obtain clearance.”
“Obtain clearance, sir,” acknowledged that young man brightly. Then, into his microphone, “Delta Orionis to Port Control. Request clearance to lift ship. Over.”
“Port Control to Delta Orionis. You may lift. Bon voyage. Over.” “Thank you, Port Control. Over and out.”
Then the ship was throbbing to the rhythmic beat of her Inertial Drive, and Grimes felt that odd sense of buoyancy, of near weightlessness, that persisted until the vessel broke contact with the ground-and then the still gentle acceleration induced the reverse effect. He looked out through the nearest viewport. Already the ocher surface of the desert, streaked by the long, black shadows of ships and spaceport buildings, was far below them, with the vessels and the immobile constructions looking like toys, and one or two surface vehicles like scurrying insects. Far to the north, dull-ruddy against the blue of the sky, there was a sandstorm. If that sky were darker, thought Grimes, this would look like Mars, and the mental comparison reminded him that he, too, was a spaceman, that he, too, had been around (although only within the bounds of Sol’s planetary system). Even so, he was Survey Service, and these others with him in Control were only merchant officers, fetchers and carriers, interstellar coach and truck drivers. (But he envied them their quiet competency.)
Still the ship lifted, and the spaceport below her dwindled, and the land horizon to the north and the now visible sea horizon to the south began to display the beginnings of curvature. Still she lifted, and overhead the sky was dark, and the first bright stars, Sirius and Canopus, Alpha and Beta Centauri, were sparkling there, beckoning, as they had beckoned for ages immemorial before the first clumsy rocket clambered heavenward up the ladder of its own fiery exhaust, before the first airplane spread its flimsy wings, before the first balloon was lifted by the hot, expanding gases from its airborne furnace . . . .
“Mr. Grimes,” said the Captain suddenly, his voice neither friendly nor unfriendly.
“Sir?”
“We lift on I.D. until we’re clear of the Van Allens.”
“I know, sir,” said Grimes-then wished that he could unsay the words. But it was too late. He was conscious of the shipmaster’s hostile silence, of the amused contempt of the merchant officers. He shrank into his chair, tried to make himself as inconspicuous as possible. The ship’s people talked among themselves in low voices, ignoring him. They allowed themselves a period of relaxation, producing and lighting cigarettes. Nobody offered the Ensign one.
Sulkily he fumbled for his pipe, filled it, lighted it. The Chief Officer coughed with quite unnecessary vigor. The Captain growled, “Put that out, please,” and muttered something about stinking out the control room. He,
himself, was puffing at a villainous black cigar.
The ship lifted, and below her the Earth was now a great sphere,
three-quarters in darkness, the line of the terminator drawn across land masses, cloud formations and oceans. City lights twinkled in the gloom like star clusters, like nebulae. In a quiet voice an officer was calling readings from the radar altimeter.
To the throbbing of the Inertial Drive was added the humming, shrilling to a whine, of the directional gyroscopes as the ship turned about her short axis hunting the target star. The pseudo-gravity of centrifugal force was at an odd angle to that of acceleration-and the resultant was at an odder angle still. Grimes began to feel sick-and was actually thankful that the Captain had made him put his pipe out. Alarm bells sounded, and then somebody was saying over the intercom. “Prepare for acceleration. Prepare for acceleration. Listen for the countdown.”
The countdown. Part of the long tradition of space travel, a hangover from the days of the first, unreliable rockets. Spaceships still used rockets-but only as auxiliaries, as a means of delivering thrust in a hurry, of building up acceleration in a short time.
At the word Zero! the Inertial Drive was cut and, simultaneously, the Reaction Drive flared into violent life. The giant hand of acceleration bore down heavily upon all in the ship-then, suddenly, at a curt order from the Captain, lifted.
Grimes became aware of a thin, high keening, the song of the
ever-precessing gyroscopes of the Mannschenn Drive. He knew the theory of it-as what spaceman did not?-although the mathematics of it were beyond the comprehension of all but a handful of men and women. He knew what was happening, knew that the ship, now that speed had been built up, was, as one of his instructors had put it, going ahead in space and astern in time. He felt, as he had been told that he would feel, the uncanny sensation of d‚j… vu, and watched the outlines of the control room and of every person and instrument in the compartment shift and shimmer, the colors sagging down the spectrum.
Ahead, the stars were pulsating spirals of opalescence, astern, Earth and Moon were frighteningly distorted, uncanny compromises between the sphere and the tesseract. But this was no more than the merest subliminal glimpse; in the twinkling of an eye the Home Planet and her daughter were no more than dust motes whirling down the dark dimensions.
The Captain lit a fresh cigar. “Mr. Kennedy,” he said, “you may set normal Deep Space watches.” He turned to Grimes. His full beard almost hid his expression, that of one performing a social duty with no enthusiasm. “Will you join me in my day cabin, Ensign?”
“It will be my pleasure, sir,” lied Grimes. III
HANDLING HIS BIG BODY with easy grace in the Free Fall conditions, the Captain led the way from the control room. Grimes followed slowly and
clumsily, but with a feeling of great thankfulness that after his training cruise he was no longer subject to spacesickness. There were drugs, of course, and passengers used them, but a spaceman was expected to be independent of pharmaceutical aids. Even so, the absence of any proper “up” or “down” bothered him more than he cared to admit.
The shipmaster slid open the door to his accommodation, motioned to Grimes to enter, murmuring sardonically, “Now you see how the poor live.” The so-called poor, thought Grimes, didn’t do at all badly. This Deep Space sitting room was considerably larger than the day cabin of the Survey Service cruiser’s Captain had been. True, it was also shabbier-but it was far more comfortable. Its decorations would never have been approved aboard a warship, were obviously the private property of the Master. There were a full dozen holograms on the bulkhead, all of them widely differing but all of them covering the same subject matter. Not that the subject matter was covered.
“My harem,” grunted the Captain. “That one there, the redhead, I met on Caribbea. Quite a stopover that was. The green-haired wench-and you can see that it’s not a dye job, although I’ve often wondered why women can’t be thorough- isn’t human, of course. But indubitably humanoid, and indubitably mammalian. Belongs to Brrrooonooorrrooo-one of the worlds of the Shaara Empire. The local Queen Mother offered to sell Lalia-that’s her name-to me for a case of Scotch. And I was tempted . . .” He sighed. “But you Service Survey types aren’t the only ones who have to live by Regulations.”
Grimes said nothing, tried to hide his interest in the art gallery.
“But take a pew, Ensign. Spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard-this is Liberty Hall.”
Grimes pulled himself to one of the comfortable chairs, strapped himself in. He said lamely, “I don’t see any cat, sir.”
“A figure of speech,” growled the Captain, seating himself next to what looked like a drink cabinet. “Well, Mr. Grimes, your Commandant at the Academy, Commodore Bradshaw, is an old friend and shipmate of mine. He said that you were a very promising young officer”-like a balloon in a comic strip the unspoken words, “God knows why,” hung between them-“and asked me to keep an eye on you. But I have already gained the impression that there is very little that a mere merchant skipper such as myself will be able to teach you.”
Grimes looked at the bulky figure seated opposite him, at the
radiation-darkened skin of the face above the black, silver-streaked beard, at the fiercely jutting nose, at the faded but bright and intelligent blue eyes, the eyes that were regarding him with more than a hint of amused contempt. He blushed miserably as he recalled his brash, “I know, sir,” in this man’s own control room. He said, with an effort, “This is my first Deep Space voyage, sir.”
“I know.” Surprisingly the Captain chuckled-and as though to celebrate this minor scoring over his guest opened the liquor cabinet. “Pity to have to
suck this excellent Manzanila out of a bulb-but that’s one of the hardships of Free Fall. Here!” He tossed a little pear-shaped container to Grimes, kept one for himself. “Your health, Ensign!”
“And yours, sir.”
The wine was too dry for Grimes’ taste, but he made a pretense of enjoying it. He was thankful that he was not asked to have a second drink. Meanwhile, his host had pulled a typewritten sheet from a drawer of his desk and was looking at it. “Let me see, now . . . You’re in cabin 15, on D Deck. You’ll be able to find your own way down, won’t you?”
Grimes said that he would and unbuckled his lapstrap. It was obvious that the party was over.
“Good. Now, as an officer of the Survey Service you have the freedom of the control room and the engine rooms . . . . “
“Thank you, sir.”
“Just don’t abuse the privilege, that’s all.”
After that, thought Grimes, I’m not likely to take advantage of it, let alone abuse it. He let himself float up from his chair, said, “Thank you, sir.” (For the drink, or for the admonition? What did it matter?) “I’ll be getting down to my cabin, sir. I’ve some unpacking to do.”
“As you please, Mr. Grimes.”
The Captain, his social duty discharged, had obviously lost interest in his guest. Grimes let himself out of the cabin and made his way, not without difficulty, to the door in the axial shaft. He was surprised at the extent to which one not very large drink had interfered with the control of his body in Free Fall. Emerging from the elevator cage on D Deck he stumbled, literally, into the purser. “Let go of me,” she ordered, “or I shall holler rape!”
That, he thought, is all I need to make this trip a really happy one. She disengaged herself, moved back from him, her slim, sandaled feet,
magnetically shod, maintaining contact with the steel decking, but
gracefully, with a dancing motion. She laughed. “I take it that you’ve just come from a home truth session with B.B.”
“B.B.?”
“The Bearded Bastard. But don’t take it too much to heart. He’s that way with all junior officers. The fact that you’re Survey Service is only incidental.”
“Thank you for telling me.”
“His trouble,” she went on. “His real trouble is that he’s painfully shy.” He’s not the only one, thought Grimes, looking at the girl. She seemed
even more attractive than on the occasion of their first meeting. She had changed into shorts-and-shirt shipboard uniform-and she was one of the
rare women who could wear such a rig without looking lumpy and clumpy. There was no cap now to hide her hair-smooth, lustrous, with coppery glints, with a straight white part bisecting the crown of her finely shaped head.
She was well aware of his scrutiny. She said, “You must excuse me, Ensign. I have to look after the other customers. They aren’t seasoned spacemen like you.”
Suddenly bold, he said, “But before you go, what is your name?”
She smiled dazzlingly. “You’ll find a list of all ship’s personnel posted in your cabin. I’m included.” Then she was gone, gliding rapidly around the curve of the alleyway.
He looked at the numbers over the cabin doors, outboard from the axial shaft, making a full circuit of that hollow pillar before he realized that this was only the inner ring, that he would have to follow one of the radial alleyways to reach his own accommodation. He finally found No. 15 and let himself in.
His first action was to inspect the framed notices on the bulkhead.
I.S.S. Delta Orionis, he read. Captain J. Craven, O.G.S., S.S.R.
So the Old Man held a Reserve commission. And the Order of the Golden Star was awarded for something more than good attendance.
Mr. P. Kennedy, Chief Officer.
He ignored the other names on the list while he searched for one he wanted. Ah, here it was.
Miss Jane Pentecost, Purser.
He repeated the name to himself, thinking that, despite the old play on words, this Jane was not plain. (But Janes rarely are.) Jane Pentecost . . . Then, feeling that he should be showing some professional interest, he acquainted himself with the names of the other members of the ship’s crew. He was intrigued by the manning scale, amazed that such a large vessel, relatively speaking, could be run by such a small number of people. But this was not a warship; there were no weapons to be manned, there would never be the need to put a landing party ashore on the surface of a hostile planet. The Merchant Service could afford to automate, to employ machinery in lieu of ratings. The Survey Service could not.
Virtuously he studied the notices dealing with emergency procedures, ship’s routine, recreational facilities and all the rest of it, examined with care the detailed plan of the ship. Attached to this was a card, signed by the Master, requesting passengers to refrain, as much as possible, from using the elevator in the axial shaft, going on to say that it was essential, for the good of their physical health, that they miss no opportunity for taking exercise. (In a naval vessel, thought Grimes, with a slight sneer, that would not be a request-it would be an order. And, in any case, there would
be compulsory calisthenics for all hands.)
He studied the plan again and toyed with the idea of visiting the bar before dinner. He decided against it; he was still feeling the effects of the drink that the Captain had given him. So, to pass the time, he unpacked slowly and carefully, methodically stowing his effects in the drawers under the bunk. Then, but not without reluctance, he changed from his uniform into his one formal civilian suit. One of the officer-instructors at the Academy had advised this. “Always wear civvies when you’re traveling as passenger. If you’re in uniform, some old duck’s sure to take you for one of the ship’s officers and ask you all sorts of technical questions to which you don’t know the answers.”
While he was adjusting his frilled cravat in front of the mirror the sonorous notes of a gong boomed from the intercom.
IV
THE DINING SALOON was much more ornate than the gunroom of that training cruiser had been, and more ornate than her wardroom. The essentials were the same, of course, as they are in any ship-tables and chairs secured to the deck, each seat fitted with its strap so that the comforting pressure of buttocks on padding could give an illusion of gravity. Each table was covered with a gaily colored cloth-but beneath the fabric there was the inevitable stainless steel to which the stainless steel service would be held by its own magnetic fields. But what impressed Grimes was the care that had been taken, the ingenuity that had been exercised to make this compartment look like anything but part of a ship.
The great circular pillar of the axial shaft was camouflaged by trelliswork, and the trelliswork itself almost hidden by the luxuriance of some
broad-level climbing plant that he could not identify. Smaller pillars were similarly covered, and there was a further efflorescence of living decoration all around the circular outer wall-the wall that must be the inner skin of the ship. And there were windows in this wall. No, Grimes decided, not windows, but holograms. The glowing, three dimensional pictures presented and maintained the illusion that this was a hall set in the middle of some great park. But on what world? Grimes could not say. Trees, bushes and flowers were unfamiliar, and the color of the sky subtly strange.
He looked around him at his fellow diners, at the dozen passengers and the ship’s officers, most of whom were already seated. The officers were in neat undress uniform. About half the male passengers were, like himself, formally attired; the others were sloppy in shorts and shirts. But this was the first night out and some laxity was allowable. The women, however, all seemed to have decided to outshine the glowing flowers that flamed outside the windows that were not windows.
There was the Captain, unmistakable with his beard and the shimmering rainbow of ribbons on the left breast of his blouse. There were the passengers at his table-the men inclined to portliness and pomposity, their women sleek and slim and expensive looking. Grimes was relieved to see that there was no vacant place-and yet, at the same time, rather hurt. He knew that he was only an Ensign, a one-ringer, and a very new Ensign at
that-but, after all, the Survey Service was the Survey Service.
He realized that somebody was addressing him. It was a girl, a small, rather chubby blonde. She was in uniform-a white shirt with black shoulder-boards, each bearing a narrow white stripe, sharply creased slacks, and black, highly polished shoes. Grimes assumed, correctly, that
she was a junior member of the purser’s staff. “Mr. Grimes,” she said, “will you follow me, please? “You’re at Miss Pentecost’s table.”
Willingly he followed the girl. She led him around the axial shaft to a table for four at which the purser with two passengers, a man and a woman, was already seated. Jane Pentecost was attired as was his guide, the severity of her gold-trimmed black and white in pleasing contrast to the pink and blue frills and flounces that clad the other woman, her slenderness in still more pleasing contrast to the other’s untidy plumpness.
She smiled and said pleasantly, “Be seated, Admiral.”
“Admiral?” asked the man at her left, unpleasantly incredulous. He had, obviously, been drinking. He was a rough looking customer, in spite of the attempt that he had made to dress for dinner. He was twice the Ensign’s age, perhaps, although the heavily lined face under the scanty sandy hair made him look older. “Admiral?” He laughed, revealing irregular yellow teeth. “In what? The Space Scouts?”
Jane Pentecost firmly took control. She said, “Allow me to introduce Ensign Grimes, of the Survey Service . . .”
“Survey Service . . . Space Scouts . . . S.S . . . . What’s the difference?” “Plenty!” answered Grimes hotly.
The purser ignored the exchange. “Ensign, this is Mrs. Baxter . . . .” “Pleased to meet you, I’m sure,” simpered the woman.
“And Mr. Baxter.”
Baxter extended his hand reluctantly and Grimes took it reluctantly. The amenities observed, he pulled himself into his seat and adjusted his lapstrap. He was facing Jane Pentecost. The man was on his right, the woman on his left. He glanced first at her, then at her husband, wondering how to start and to maintain a conversation. But this was the purser’s table, and this was her responsibility.
She accepted it. “Now you’re seeing how the poor live, Admiral,” she remarked lightly.
Grimes, taking a tentative sip from his bulb of consomm‚, did not think that the self-styled poor did at all badly, and said as much. The girl grinned and told him that the first night out was too early to draw conclusions. “We’re still on shoreside meat and vegetables,” she told him, “and you’ll not be getting your first taste of our instant table wine until tomorrow. Tonight we wallow in the unwonted luxury of a quite presentable Montrachet. When we start living on the produce of our own so-called farm, washing it down with our own reconstituted plonk, you’ll see the difference.”
The Ensign replied that, in his experience, it didn’t matter if food came from tissue-culture vats or the green fields of Earth-what was important was the cook.
“Wide experience, Admiral?” she asked sweetly.
“Not very,” he admitted. “But the gunroom cook in my last ship couldn’t boil water without burning it.”
Baxter, noisily enjoying his dinner, said that this preoccupation with food and drink was symptomatic of the decadence of Earth. As he spoke his knife grated unpleasantly on the steel spines that secured his charcoal broiled steak to the surface of his plate.
Grimes considered inquiring if the man thought that good table manners were also a symptom of decadence, then thought better of it. After all, this was not his table. Instead, he asked, “And where are you from, Mr. Baxter?”
“The Rim Worlds, Mr. Grimes. Where we’re left to sink or swim-so we’ve no time for much else than keeping ourselves afloat.” He sucked noisily from his bulb of wine. “Things might be a little easier for us if your precious Survey Service did something about keeping the trade routes open.”
“That is our job,” said Grimes stiffly. “And we do it.”
“Like hell! There’s not a pirate in the Galaxy but can run rings around you!” “Practically every pirate has been hunted down and destroyed,” Grimes told
him coldly.
“Practically every pirate, the man says! A few small-time bunglers, he means!”
“Even the notorious Black Bart,” persisted Grimes.
“Black Bart!” Baxter, spluttering through his full mouth, gestured with his laden fork at Grimes. “Black Bart! He wasn’t much. Once he and that popsy of his split brass rags he was all washed up. I’m talkin’ about the real pirates, the ones whose ships wear national colors instead o’ the Jolly Roger, the ones that your precious Survey Service daren’t say boo to. The ones who do the dirty work for the Federation.”
“Such as?” asked Grimes frigidly.
“So now you’re playin’ the bleedin’ innocent. Never heard o’ the Duchy o’ Waldegren, Mr. Ensign Grimes?”
“Of course. Autonomous, but they and the Federation have signed what’s called a Pact of Perpetual Amity.”
“Pretty words, ain’t they? Suppose we analyze them. Suppose we analyze by analogy. D’yer know much about animals, Mr. Ensign Grimes?”
“Animals?” Grimes was puzzled. “Well, I suppose I do know something. I’ve taken the usual courses in xenobiology . . . .”
“Never mind that. You’re a Terry. Let’s confine ourselves to a selection of yer own Terran four-footed friends.”
“What the hell are you driving at?” flared Grimes, losing his temper. He threw an apologetic glance in Jane Pentecost’s direction, saw that she was more amused than shocked.
“Just think about a Pact of Perpetual Amity between an elephant and a tom cat,” said Baxter. “A fat an’ lazy elephant. A lean, scrawny, vicious tom cat. If the elephant wanted to he could convert that cat into a fur bedside rug just by steppin’ on him. But he doesn’t want to. He leaves the cat alone, just because the cat is useful to him. He does more than just leave him alone. He an’ this feline pull out their pens from wherever they keep ’em an’ sign their famous Pact.
“In case you haven’t worked it out for yourself, the elephant’s the Federation, and the tom cat’s the Duchy of Waldegren.”
“But why?” asked Grimes. “Why?”
“Don’t they teach you puppies any interstellar politics? Or are those courses reserved for the top brass? Well, Mr. Grimes, I’ll tell you. There’s one animal that has the elephant really worried. Believe it or not, he’s scared o’ mice. An’ there’re quite a few mice inside the Federation, mice that make the elephant nervous by their rustlings an’ scurryings an’ their squeaky demands for full autonomy. That’s where the cat comes in. By his free use of his teeth an’ claws, by his very presence, he keeps the mice quiet.”
“And just who are these famous mice, Mr. Baxter?” asked Grimes.
“Don’t they teach you nothin’ in your bleedin’ Academy? Well, I’ll tell you. In our neck o’ the woods, the mice are the Rim Worlds, an’ the tom cat, as I’ve already made clear, is the Duchy o’ Waldegren. The Duchy gets away with murder-murder an’ piracy. But accordin’ to the Duchy, an accordin’ to your big, stupid elephant of a Federation, it’s not piracy. It’s-now, lemme see, what fancy words have been used o’ late? Contraband Control. Suppression of Espionage. Violation of the Three Million Mile Limit. Every time that there’s an act of piracy there’s some quote legal unquote excuse for it, an’ it’s upheld by the Federation’s tame legal eagles, an’ you Survey Service sissies just sit there on your big, fat backsides an’ don’t lift a pinkie against your dear, murderous pals, the Waldegrenese. If you did, they send you screaming back to Base, where some dear old daddy of an Admiral’d spank your little plump bottoms for you.”
“Please, Mr. Baxter!” admonished Jane Pentecost.
“Sorry, Miss. I got sort of carried away. But my young brother was Third Reaction Drive Engineer of the old Bunyip when she went missing. Nothin’ was ever proved-but the Waldegrenese Navy was holdin’ fleet maneuvers in the sector she was passin’ through when last heard from. Oh, they’re cunnin’ bastards. They’ll never go for one o’ these ships, or one of the Trans-Galactic Clippers; it’ll always be some poor little tramp that nobody’ll ever miss but the friends an’ relatives o’ the crew. And, I suppose, the underwriters-but Lloyds makes such a packet out o’ the ships that don’t get lost that they can well afford to shell out now an’ again. Come to that, it
must suit ’em. As long as there’re a few ‘overdues’ an’ ‘missings’ they can keep the premiums up.”
“But I still can’t see how piracy can possibly pay,” protested Grimes.
“O’ course it pays. Your friend Black Bart made it pay. An’ if you’re goin’ to all the expense of building and maintaining a war fleet, it might just as well earn its keep. Even your famous Survey Service might show a profit if you were allowed to pounce on every fat merchantman who came within range o’ your guns.”
“But for the Federation to condone piracy, as you’re trying to make out . . . That’s utterly fantastic.”
“If you lived on the Rim, you might think different,” snarled Baxter. And Jane Pentecost contributed, “Not piracy. Confrontation.”
V
AS SOON AS the meal was finished the Baxters left rather hastily to make their way to the bar, leaving Grimes and Jane Pentecost to the leisurely enjoyment of their coffee. When the couple was out of earshot Grimes remarked, “So those are Rim Worlders. They’re the first I’ve met.”
“They’re not, you know,” the girl told him.
“But they are. Oh, there are one or two in the Survey Service, but I’ve never run across them. Now I don’t particularly want to.”
“But you did meet one Rim Worlder before you met the Baxters.” “The Captain?”
She laughed. “Don’t let him hear you say that-not unless you want to take a space walk without a suit!”
“Then who?”
“Who could it be, Admiral? Whom have you actually met, to talk to, so far in this ship? Use your crust.”
He stared at her incredulously. “Not you?”
“Who else?” She laughed again, but with a touch of bitterness. “We aren’t all like our late manger companions, you know. Or should know. Even so, you’d count yourself lucky to have Jim Baxter by your side in any real jam. It boils down to this. Some of us have acquired veneer. Some of us haven’t. Period.”
“But how did you . . . ?” He groped for words that would not be offensive to conclude the sentence.
“How did I get into this galley? Easily enough. I started my spacefaring career as a not very competent Catering Officer in Jumbuk, one of the Sundowner Line’s more ancient and decrepit tramps. I got sick in Elsinore. Could have been my own cooking that put me in the hospital. Anyhow, I
was just about recovered when the Commission’s Epsilon Serpentis blew in-and she landed her purser with a slightly broken leg. She’d learned the hard way that the Golden Rule-stop whatever you’re doing and secure
everything when the acceleration warning sounds-is meant to be observed. The Doctor was luckier. She broke his fall . . . .” Grimes was about to ask what the Doctor and the purser had been doing, then was thankful that he had not done so. He was acutely conscious of the crimson blush that burned the skin of his face.
“You must realize,” said the girl dryly, “that merchant vessels with mixed crews are not monastic institutions. But where was I? Oh, yes. On Elsinore. Persuading the Master of the Snaky Eppy that I was a fit and proper person to take over his pursering. I managed to convince him that I was at least proper-I still can’t see what my predecessor saw in that lecherous old goat of a quack, although the Second Mate had something . . . .” Grimes felt a sudden twinge of jealousy. Anyhow, he signed me on, as soon as I agreed to waive repatriation.
“It was a long voyage; as you know, the Epsilon class ships are little better than tramps themselves. It was a long voyage, but I enjoyed it- seeing all the worlds that I’d read about and heard about and always wanted to visit. The Sundowner Line doesn’t venture far afield-just the four Rim Worlds, and now and again the Shakespearian Sector, and once in a blue moon one of the drearier planets of the Empire of Waverley. The Commission’s tramps, of course, run everywhere.
“Anyhow, we finally berthed at Woomera. The Old Man must have put in a good report about me, because I was called before the Local Superintending Purser and offered a berth, as a junior, in one of the Alpha class liners. Alpha Centauri, if you must know. She was on the Sol-Sirius service. Nothing very glamorous in the way of ports of call, but she was a fine ship, beautifully kept, efficiently run. A couple of years there knocked most of the sharp corners off me. After that-a spell as Assistant Purser of Beta Geminorum. Atlanta, Caribbea Carinthia and the Cluster Worlds. And then my first ship as Chief Purser. This one.”
One of Jane’s girls brought them fresh bulbs of coffee and ampoules of a sweet, potent liqueur. When she was gone Grimes asked, “Tell me, what are the Rim Worlds like?”
She waited until he had applied the flame of his lighter to the tip of her long, thin cigar, then answered, “Cold. Dark. Lonely. But . . . they have something. The feeling of being on a frontier. The frontier. The last frontier.”
“The frontier of the dark . . .” murmured Grimes.
“Yes. The frontier of the dark. And the names of our planets. They have something too. A . . . poetry? Yes, that’s the word. Lorn, Ultimo, Faraway and Thule . . . And there’s that night sky of ours, especially at some times of the year. There’s the Galaxy-a great, dim-glowing lenticulate nebula, and the rest is darkness. At other times of the year there’s only the darkness, the blackness that’s made even more intense by the sparse, faint stars that are the other Rim Suns, by the few, faint luminosities that are the distant
island universes that we shall never reach . . . .”
She shivered almost imperceptibly. “And always there’s that sense of being on the very edge of things, of hanging on by our fingernails with the abyss of the eternal night gaping beneath us. The Rim Worlders aren’t a spacefaring people; only a very few of us ever get the urge. It’s analogous, perhaps, to your Maoris-I spent a leave once in New Zealand and got interested in the history of the country. The Maoris come of seafaring stock. Their ancestors made an epic voyage from their homeland paradise to those rather grim and dreary little islands hanging there, all by themselves, in the cold and stormy Southern Ocean, lashed by frigid gales sweeping up from the Antarctic. And something-the isolation? the climate?-killed the wanderlust that was an essential part of the makeup of their race. You’ll find very few Maoris at sea-or in space-although there’s no dearth of Polynesians from the home archipelagoes aboard the surface ships serving the ports of the Pacific. And there are quite a few, too, in the Commission’s ships . . . .”
“We have our share in Survey Service,” said Grimes. “But tell me, how do you man your vessels? This Sundowner Line of yours . . .”
“There are always the drifters, the no-hopers, the castoffs from the Interstellar Transport Commission, and Trans-Galactic Clippers, and Waverley Royal Mail and all the rest of them.”
“And from the Survey Service?” The question lifted her out of her somber mood. “No,” she replied with a smile. “Not yet.”
“Not ever,” said Grimes. VI
ONCE HIS INITIAL SHYNESS HAD WORN OFF-and with it much of his Academy-induced snobbery-Grimes began to enjoy the voyage. After all, Survey Service or no Survey Service, this was a ship and he was a spaceman. He managed to accept the fact that most of the ship’s officers, even the most junior of them, were far more experienced spacemen than he was. Than he was now, he often reminded himself. At the back of his mind lurked the smug knowledge that, for all of them, a captaincy was the very limit of promotion, whereas he, one day, would be addressed in all seriousness as Jane Pentecost now addressed him in jest.
He was a frequent visitor to the control room but, remembering the Master’s admonition, was careful not to get in the way. The watch officers accepted him almost as one of themselves and were willing to initiate him into the tricky procedure of obtaining a fix with the interstellar drive in operation-an art, he was told, rather than a science.
Having obtained the permission of the Chief Engineers he prowled through the vessel’s machinery spaces, trying to supplement his theoretical knowledge of reaction, inertial and interstellar drives with something more practical. The first two, of course, were idle, and would be until the ship emerged from her warped Space-Time back into the normal continuum-but there was the Pile, the radio-active heart of the ship, and there was the auxiliary machinery that, in this tiny, man-made planet, did the work that
on a natural world is performed by winds, rivers, sunlight and gravity.
There was the Mannschenn Drive Room-and, inside this holy of holies, no man need fear to admit that he was scared by the uncanny complexity of ever-precessing gyroscopes. He stared at the tumbling rotors, the gleaming wheels that seemed always on the verge of vanishing into nothingness, that rolled down the dark dimensions, dragging the ship and all aboard her with them. He stared, hypnotized, lost in a vague, disturbing dream in which Past and Present and Future were inextricably mingled-and the Chief Interstellar Drive Engineer took him firmly by the arm and led him from the compartment. “Look at the time-twister too long,” he growled, “and you’ll be meeting yourself coming back!”
There was the “farm”-the deck of yeast- and tissue-culture vats which was no more (and no less), than a highly efficient protein factory, and the deck where stood the great, transparent globes in which algae converted the ship’s organic waste and sewage back into usable form (processed as nutriment for the yeasts and the tissue-cultures and as fertilizer for the hydroponic tanks, the biochemist was careful to explain), and the deck where luxuriant vegetation spilled over from the trays and almost barricaded the inspection walks, the source of vitamins and of flowers for the saloon tables and, at the same time, the ship’s main air-conditioning unit. Grimes said to Jane Pentecost, who had accompanied him on this tour of inspection, “You know, I envy your Captain.”
“From you, Admiral,” she scoffed, “that is something. But why?” “How can I put it? You people do the natural way what we do with
chemicals and machinery. The Captain of a warship is Captain of a warship.
Period. But your Captain Craven is absolute monarch of a little world.”
“A warship,” she told him, “is supposed to be able to go on functioning as such even with every compartment holed. A warship cannot afford to depend for the survival of her crew upon the survival of hosts of other
air-breathing organisms.”
“Straight from the book,” he said. Then, puzzled, “But for a . . .” He hesitated.
“But for a woman, or for a purser, or for a mere merchant officer I know too much,” she finished for him. “But I can read, you know. And when I was in the Sundowner Line, I, as well as all the other officers, was supposed to keep up with all the latest Survey Service publications.”
“But why?” he asked.
“But why not? We’ll have a Navy of our own, one day. Just stick around, Admiral.”
“Secession?” he inquired, making it sound like a dirty word. “Once again-why not?”
“It’d never work,” he told her.
“The history of Earth is full of secessions that did work. So is the history of
Interstellar Man. The Empire of Waverley, for example. The Duchy of Waldegren, for another-although that’s one that should have come to grief. We should all of us be a great deal happier if it had.”
“Federation policy . . .” he began.
“Policy, shmolicy! Don’t let’s be unkind to the Waldegrenese, because as long as they’re in being they exercise a restraining influence upon the Empire of Waverley and the Rim Worlds . . .” Her pace slackened. Grimes noticed that they were passing through the alleyway in which she and her staff were accommodated. She went on, “But all this talking politics is thirsty work. Come in for a couple of drinks before lunch.”
“Thank you. But, Jane”-she didn’t seem to have noticed the use of her given name-“I don’t think that either of us is qualified to criticize the handling of foreign and colonial affairs.”
“Spoken like a nice, young, well-drug-up future admiral. Oh, I know, I know. You people are trained to be the musclemen of the Federation. Yours not to reason why, yours but to do and die, and all the rest of it. But I’m a Rim Worlder-and out on the Rim you learn to think for yourself.” She slid her door open. “Come on in. This is Liberty Hall-you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard.”
Her accommodation was a suite rather than a mere cabin. It was neither as large nor as well fitted as the Captain’s, but it was better than the Chief Officer’s quarters, in which Grimes had already been a guest. He looked with interest at the holograms on the bulkhead of the sitting room. They were-but in an altogether different way-as eye-catching as Captain Craven’s had been. There was one that was almost physically chilling, that induced the feeling of utter cold and darkness and loneliness. It was the night sky of some planet-a range of dimly seen yet sharply serrated peaks bisecting a great, pallidly glowing, lenticulate nebula. “Home, sweet home,” murmured the girl, seeing what he was looking at. “The Desolation Mountains on Faraway, with the Galactic Lens in the background.”
“And you feel homesick for that?”
“Darn right I do. Oh, not all the time. I like warmth and comfort as well as the next woman. But . . . ” She laughed. “Don’t stand around gawking-you make the place look untidy. Pull yourself into a chair and belay the buttocks.”
He did so, watching her as she busied herself at the liquor cabinet. Suddenly, in these conditions of privacy, he was acutely conscious of the womanliness of her. The rather tight and rather short shorts, as she bent away from him, left very little to the imagination. And her legs, although slender, were full where they should be full, with the muscles working smoothly under the golden skin. He felt the urge, which he sternly suppressed, to plant a kiss in the delectable hollow behind each knee. She turned suddenly. “Here! Catch!” He managed to grab the bulb that was hurtling toward his face, but a little of the wine spurted from the nipple and struck him in the right eye. When his vision cleared he saw that she was seated opposite him, was laughing (at or with him?). At, he suspected. A
real demonstration of sympathy would have consisted of tears, not laughter. Her face grew momentarily severe. “Not the mess,” she said reprovingly. “But the waste.”
Grimes examined the bulb. “I didn’t waste much. Only an eyeful.”
She raised her drink in ritual greeting. “Here’s mud in your eye,” adding, “for a change.”
“And in yours.”
In the sudden silence that followed they sat looking at each other. There was a tension, some odd resultant of centrifugal and centripetal forces. They were on the brink of something, and both of them knew it, and there was the compulsion to go forward countered by the urge to go back.
She asked tartly, “Haven’t you ever seen a woman’s legs before?”
He shifted his regard to her face, to the eyes that, somehow, were brown no longer but held the depth and the darkness of the night through which the ship was plunging.
She said, “I think you’d better finish your drink and go.” He said, “Perhaps you’re right.”
“You better believe I’m right.” She managed a smile. “I’m not an idler, like some people. I’ve work to do.”
“See you at lunch, then. And thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. It was on the house, as the little dog said. Off with you, Admiral.”
He unbuckled his lapstrap, got out of the chair and made his way to the door. When he was out of her room he did not go to his own cabin but to the bar, where he joined the Baxters. They, rather to his surprise, greeted him in a friendly manner. Rim Worlders, Grimes decided, had their good points.
IT WAS AFTER LUNCH when one of the purserettes told him that the Captain wished to see him. What have I done now? wondered Grimes-and answered his own question with the words, Nothing. Unfortunately.
Craven’s manner, when he admitted Grimes into his dayroom, was severe. “Come in, Ensign. Be seated.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“You may smoke if you wish.” “Thank you, sir.”
Grimes filled and lighted his pipe; the Captain ignited one of his pungent cigars, studied the eddying coils of smoke as though they were writing a vitally important message in some strange language.
“Er, Mr. Grimes, I believe that you have been seeing a great deal of my purser, Miss Pentecost.”
“Not a great deal, sir. I’m at her table, of course.”
“I am told that she has entertained you in her quarters.”
“Just one bulb of sherry, sir. I had no idea that we were breaking ship’s regulations.”
“You were not. All the same, Mr. Grimes, I have to warn you.” “I assure you, sir, that nothing occurred between us.”
Craven permitted himself a brief, cold smile. “A ship is not a Sunday school outing-especially a ship under my command. Some Masters, I know, do expect their officers to comport themselves like Sunday school pupils, with the Captain as the principal-but I expect my senior officers to behave like intelligent and responsible adults. Miss Pentecost is quite capable of looking after herself. It is you that I’m worried about.”
“There’s no need to be worried, sir.”
The Captain laughed. “I’m not worried about your morals, Mr. Grimes. In fact, I have formed the opinion that a roll in the hay would do you far more good than harm. But Miss Pentecost is a dangerous woman. Before lifting ship, very shortly before lifting ship, I received a confidential report concerning her activities. She’s an efficient purser, a highly efficient purser, in fact, but she’s even more than that. Much more.” Again he studied the smoke from his cigar. “Unfortunately there’s no real proof, otherwise she’d not be sailing with us. Had I insisted upon her discharge I’d have been up against the Interstellar Clerical and Supply Officers’ Guild.”
“Surely not,” murmured Grimes. Craven snorted. “You people are lucky. You haven’t a mess of Guilds to deal with, each and every one of which is all too ready to rush to the defense of a Guild member, no matter what he or she is supposed to have done. As a Survey Service Captain you’ll never have to face a suit for wrongful dismissal. You’ll never be accused of victimization.”
“But what has Miss Pentecost done, sir?” asked Grimes.
“Nothing-or too damn much. You know where she comes from, don’t you? The Rim Worlds. The planets of the misfits, the rebels, the nonconformists. There’s been talk of secession of late-but even those irresponsible anarchists know full well that secession will never succeed unless they build up their own space power. There’s the Duchy of Waldegren, which would pounce as soon as the Federation withdrew its protection. And even the Empire of Waverley might be tempted to extend its boundaries. So . . .”
“They have a merchant fleet of sorts, these Rim Worlders. The Sundowner Line. I’ve heard rumors that it’s about to be nationalized. But they have no fighting navy.”
“But what’s all this to do with Miss Pentecost, sir?”
“If what’s more than just hinted at in that confidential report is true-plenty. She’s a recruiting sergeant, no less. Any officer with whom she’s shipmates who’s disgruntled, on the verge of throwing his hand in-or on the verge of being emptied out-she’ll turn on the womanly sympathy for, and tell him that there’ll always be a job waiting out on the Rim, that the Sundowner Line is shortly going to expand, so there’ll be quick promotion and all the rest of it.”
“And what’s that to do with me, Captain? “
“Are all Survey Service ensigns as innocent as you, Mr. Grimes? Merchant officers the Rim Worlds want, and badly. Naval officers they’ll want more badly still once the balloon goes up.” Grimes permitted himself a superior smile. “It’s extremely unlikely, sir, that I shall ever want to leave the Survey Service.”
“Unlikely perhaps-but not impossible. So bear in mind what I’ve told you. I think that you’ll be able to look after yourself now that you know the score.”
“I think so too,” Grimes told him firmly. He thought, The old bastard’s been reading too many spy stories.
VII
THEY WERE DANCING.
Tables and chairs had been cleared from the ship’s saloon, and from the big, ornate playmaster throbbed the music of an orchestra so famous that even Grimes had heard of it-The Singing Drums.
They were dancing.
Some couples shuffled a sedate measure, never losing the contact between their magnetically shod feet and the polished deck. Others-daring or foolhardy-cavorted in Nul-G, gamboled fantastically but rarely gracefully in Free Fall.
They were dancing.
Ensign Grimes was trying to dance.
It was not the fault of his partner that he was making such a sorry mess of it. She, Jane Pentecost, proved the truth of the oft-made statement that spacemen and spacewomen are expert at this form of exercise. He, John Grimes, was the exception that proves the rule. He was sweating, and his feet felt at least six times their normal size. Only the fact that he was holding Jane, and closely, saved him from absolute misery.
There was a pause in the music. As it resumed Jane said, “Let’s sit this one out, Admiral.”
“If you wish to,” he replied, trying not to sound too grateful.
“That’s right. I wish to. I don’t mind losing a little toenail varnish, but I think we’ll call it a day while I still have a full set of toenails.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“So am I.” But the flicker of a smile robbed the words of their sting.
She led the way to the bar. It was deserted save for the bored and sulky girl behind the gleaming counter. “All right, Sue,” Jane told her. “You can join the revels. The Admiral and I will mind the shop.”
“Thank you, Miss Pentecost.” Sue let herself out from her little cage, vanished gracefully and rapidly in the direction of the saloon. Jane took her place.
“I like being a barmaid,” she told the ensign, taking two frosted bulbs out of the cooler.
“I’ll sign for these,” offered Grimes.
“You will not. This comes under the heading of entertaining influential customers.”
“But I’m not. Influential, I mean.”
“But you will be.” She went on dreamily. “I can see it. I can just see it. The poor old Delia O’Ryan, even more decrepit that she is now, and her poor old purser, about to undergo a fate worse than death at the hands of bloody pirates from the next Galaxy but three . . . . But all is not lost. There, light years distant, is big, fat, Grand Admiral Grimes aboard his flagship, busting a gut, to say nothing of his Mannschenn Drive unit, to rush to the rescue of his erstwhile girlfriend. ‘Dammitall,’ I can hear him muttering into his beard. ‘Dammitall. That girl used to give me free drinks when I was a snotty nosed ensign. I will repay. Full speed ahead, Gridley, and damn the torpedoes!’ “
Grimes laughed-then asked sharply, “Admiral in which service?” “What do you mean, John?” She eyed him warily.
“You know what I mean.”
“So . . .” she murmured. “So . . . I know that you had another home truth session with the Bearded Bastard. I can guess what it was about.”
“And is it true?” demanded Grimes.
“Am I Olga Popovsky, the Beautiful Spy? Is that what you mean?” “More or less.”
“Come off it, John. How the hell can I be a secret agent for a non-existent government?”
“You can be a secret agent for a subversive organization.”
“What is this? Is it a hangover from some half-baked and half-understood course in counterespionage?”
“There was a course of sorts,” he admitted. “I didn’t take much interest in it. At the time.”
“And now you wish that you had. Poor John.”
“But it wasn’t espionage that the Old Man had against you. He had some sort of story about your acting as a sort of recruiting sergeant, luring officers away from the Commission’s ships to that crumby little rabble of star tramps calling itself the Sundowner Line . . . .”
She didn’t seem to be listening to him, but was giving her attention instead to the music that drifted from the saloon. It was one of the old, Twentieth Century melodies that were enjoying a revival. She began to sing in time to it.
“Goodbye, I’ll run To seek another sun Where I May find
There are hearts more kind Than the ones left behind . . .”
She smiled somberly and asked, “Does that answer your question?” “Don’t talk in riddles,” he said roughly.
“Riddles? Perhaps-but not very hard ones. That, John, is a sort of song of farewell from a very old comic opera. As I recall it, the guy singing it was going to shoot through and join the French Foreign Legion. (But there’s no French Foreign Legion anymore . . . .) We, out on the Rim, have tacked our own words on to it. It’s become almost a national anthem to the Rim Runners, as the people who man our ships-such as they are-are already calling themselves.
“There’s no French Foreign Legion anymore-but the misfits and the failures have to have somewhere to go. I haven’t lured anybody away from this service-but now and again I’ve shipped with officers who’ve been on the point of getting out, or being emptied out, and when they’ve cried into my beer I’ve given them advice. Of course, I’ve a certain natural bias in favor of my own home world. If I were Sirian born I’d be singing the praises of the Dog Star Line.”
“Even so,” he persisted, “your conduct seems to have been somewhat suspect.”
“Has it? And how? To begin with, you are not an officer in this employ. And if you were, I should challenge you to find anything in the Commission’s regulations forbidding me to act as I have been doing.”
“Captain Craven warned me,” said Grimes.
“Did he, now? That’s his privilege. I suppose that he thinks that it’s also his duty. I suppose he has the idea that I offered you admiral’s rank in the Rim Worlds Navy as soon as we secede. If we had our own Navy-which we don’t-we might just take you in as Ensign, Acting, Probationary.”
“Thank you.”
She put her elbows on the bar counter, propping her face between her hands, somehow conveying the illusion of gravitational pull, looking up at him. “I’ll be frank with you, John. I admit that we do take the no-hopers, the drunks and the drifters into our merchant fleet. I know far better than you what a helluva difference there is between those rustbuckets and the well-found, well-run ships of the Commission and, come to that,
Trans-Galactic Clippers and Waverley Royal Mail. But when we do start some kind of a Navy we shall want better material. Much better. We shall want highly competent officers who yet, somehow, will have the Rim World outlook. The first batch, of course, will have to be outsiders, to tide us over until our own training program is well under way.”
“And I don’t qualify?” he asked stiffly.
“Frankly, no. I’ve been watching you. You’re too much of a stickler for rules and regulations, especially the more stupid ones. Look at the way you’re dressed now, for example. Evening wear, civilian, junior officers, for the use of. No individuality. You might as well be in uniform. Better, in fact. There’d be some touch of brightness.”
“Go on.”
“And the way you comport yourself with women. Stiff. Starchy. Correct. And you’re all too conscious of the fact that I, even though I’m a mere merchant officer, and a clerical branch at that, put up more gold braid than you do. I noticed that especially when we were dancing. I was having to lead all the time.”
He said defensively, “I’m not a very good dancer.”
“You can say that again.” She smiled briefly. “So there you have it, John. You can tell the Bearded Bastard, when you see him again, that you’re quite safe from my wiles. I’ve no doubt that you’ll go far in your own Service-but you just aren’t Rim Worlds material.”
“I shouldn’t have felt all that flattered if you’d said that I was,” he told her bluntly-but he knew that he was lying.
VIII
“YES?” JANE WAS SAYING. “Yes, Mr. Letourneau?”
Grimes realized that she was not looking at him, that she was looking past him and addressing a newcomer. He turned around to see who it was. He found-somehow the name hadn’t registered-that it was the Psionic Radio Officer, a tall, pale, untidily put together young man in a slovenly uniform. He looked scared-but that was his habitual expression, Grimes remembered. They were an odd breed, these trained telepaths with their Rhine Institute diplomas, and they were not popular, but they were the only means whereby ships and shore stations could communicate instantaneously over the long light years. In the Survey Service they were referred to, slightingly, as Commissioned Teacup Readers. In the Survey Service and in the Merchant Service they were referred to as Snoopers. But
they were a very necessary evil. “Yes, Mr. Letourneau?”
“Where’s the Old Man? He’s not in his quarters.”
“The Master”-Jane emphasized the title-“is in the saloon.” Then, a little maliciously, “Couldn’t you have used your crystal ball?”
Letourneau flushed. “You know very well, Miss Pentecost, that we have to take an oath that we will always respect the mental privacy of our shipmates . . . . But I must find him. Quickly.”
“Help yourself. He’s treading the light fantastic in there.” When he was gone she said, “Typical. Just typical. If it were a real emergency he could get B.B. on the intercom. But no. Not him. He has to parade his distrust of anything electronic and, at the same time, make it quite clear that he’s not breaking his precious oath . . . . Tell me, how do you people handle your spaceborne espers?”
He grinned. “We’ve still one big stick that you people haven’t. A court martial followed by a firing party. Not that I’ve ever seen it used.”
“Hardly, considering that you’ve only been in Space a dog watch.” Her face froze suddenly. “Yes, Sue?”
It was the girl whom Jane had relieved in the bar. “Miss Pentecost, will you report to the Captain in Control, please. At once.”
“What have I done now?”
“It’s some sort of emergency, Miss Pentecost. The Chief Officer’s up there with him, and he’s sent for the Doctor and the two Chief Engineers.”
“Then I must away, John. Look after the bar again, Sue. Don’t let the Admiral have too many free drinks.”
She moved fast and gracefully, was gone before Grimes could think of any suitable repartee. He said to the girl, “What is happening, Sue?”
“I don’t know, Ad-” She flushed. “Sorry, Ensign. And, in any case, I’m not supposed to talk to the passengers about it.”
“But I’m not a real passenger,” he said-and asked himself, Am I a real anything?
“No, I suppose you’re not, Mr. Grimes. But you’re not on duty.”
“An officer of the Survey Service is always on duty,” he told her, with some degree of truth. “Whatever happens on the spacelanes is our concern.” It sounded good.
“Yes,” she agreed hesitantly. “That’s what my fianc‚-he’s a Lieutenant J.G.-is always telling me.”
“So what’s all the flap about?”
“Promise not to tell anybody?” “Of course.”
“Mr. Letourneau came wandering into the Saloon. He just stood there staring about, the way he does, then he spotted the Captain. He was actually dancing with me at the time . . . .” She smiled reminiscently, and added, “He’s a very good dancer.”
“He would be. But go on.”
“He came charging across the dance floor-Mr. Letourneau, I mean. He didn’t care whose toes he trod on or who he tripped over. I couldn’t help overhearing when he started babbling away to Captain Craven. It’s a distress call. From one of our ships-Epsilon Sextans.'” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “And it’s piracy.”
“Piracy? Impossible.”
“But, Mr. Grimes, it’s what he said.”
“Psionic Radio Officers have been known to go around the bend before now,” Grimes told her, “and to send false alarm calls. And to receive non-existent ones.”
“But the Sexy Eppy-sorry, Epsilon Sextans-has a cargo that’d be worth pirating. Or so I heard. The first big shipment of Antigeriatridine to Waverly
. . . .”
Antigeriatridine, the so-called Immortality Serum. Manufactured in limited, but increasing quantities only on Marina (often called by its colonists Submarina), a cold, unpleasantly watery world in orbit about Alpha Crucis. The fishlike creatures from which the drug was obtained bred and flourished only in the seas of their own world.
But piracy . . . .
But the old legends were full of stories of men who had sold their souls for eternal youth.
The telephone behind the bar buzzed sharply. Sue answered it. She said, “It’s for you, Mr. Grimes.”
Grimes took the instrument. “That you, Ensign?” It was Captain Craven’s voice. “Thought I’d find you there. Come up to Control, will you?” It was an order rather than a request.
ALL THE SHIP’S EXECUTIVE OFFICERS were in the Control Room, and the Doctor, the purser and the two Chief Engineers. As Grimes emerged from the hatch he heard Kennedy, the Mate, say, “Here’s the Ensign now.”
“Good. Then dog down, Mr. Kennedy, so we get some privacy.” Craven turned to Grimes. ‘”You’re on the Active List of the Survey Service, Mister, so I suppose you’re entitled to know what’s going on. The situation is this. Epsilon Sextans, Marina to Waverley with a shipment of Antigeriatridine, has been pirated.” Grimes managed, with an effort, to refrain from saying “I
know.” Craven went on. “Her esper is among the survivors. He says that the pirates were two frigates of the Waldegren Navy. Anyhow, the Interstellar Drive Engineers aboard Epsilon Sextans managed to put their box of tricks on random precession, and they got away. But not in one piece . . . .”
“Not in one piece?” echoed Grimes stupidly.
“What the hell do you expect when an unarmed merchantman is fired upon, without warning, by two warships? The esper says that their Control has had it, and all the accommodation spaces. By some miracle the Psionic Radio Officer’s shack wasn’t holed, and neither was the Mannschenn Drive Room.”
“But even one missile . . .” muttered Grimes.
“If you want to capture a ship and her cargo more or less intact,” snapped Craven, “you don’t use missiles. You use laser. It’s an ideal weapon if you aren’t fussy about how many people you kill.”
“Knowing the Waldegrenese as we do,” said Jane Pentecost bitterly, “there wouldn’t have been any survivors anyhow.”
“Be quiet!” roared Craven. Grimes was puzzled by his outburst. It was out of character. True, he could hardly expect a shipmaster to react to the news of a vicious piracy with equanimity-but this shipmaster was an officer of the Reserve, had seen service in warships and had been highly decorated for outstanding bravery in battle.
Craven had control of himself again. “The situation is this. There are people still living aboard Epsilon Sextans. Even though all her navigators have been killed I think that I shall be able to find her in time. Furthermore, she has a very valuable cargo and, in any case, cannot be written off as a total loss. There is little damage that cannot be repaired by welded patches. I have already sent a message to Head Office requesting a free hand. I have salvage in mind. I see no reason why the ship and her cargo should not be taken on to Waverley.”
“A prize crew, sir?”
“If you care to put it that way. This will mean cutting down the number of officers aboard my own vessel-but I am sure, Mr. Grimes, that you will be willing to gain some practical watch-keeping experience. All that’s required is your autograph on the ship’s Articles of Agreement.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Don’t thank me. I may be thanking you before the job’s over and done.” He turned to his Chief Officer. “Mr. Kennedy, keep in touch with Mr. Letourneau and let me know if anything further comes through either from Epsilon Sextans or from Head Office. The rest of you-keep this to yourselves. No sense in alarming the passengers. I’m sure that the Doctor and Miss Pentecost between them can concoct some soothing story to account for this officers’ conference.”
“Captain Craven,” said Jane Pentecost.
“Well?”
“The other man at my table, Mr. Baxter. I knew him out on the Rim. He holds Chief Reaction Drive Engineer’s papers.”
“Don’t tell him anything yet. But I’ll keep him in mind. Now, Mr. Grimes, will you join me in my day cabin?”
IX
THE HOLOGRAMS were all gone from the bulkheads of Captain Craven’s cabin. To replace them there was just one picture-of a woman, not young, but with the facial bone structure that defies age and time. She was in uniform, and on her shoulderboards were the two and a half stripes of a Senior Purser. The shipmaster noticed Grimes’ interest and said briefly and bitterly. “She was too senior for an Epsilon class ship-but she cut her leave short, just to oblige, when the regular purser went sick. She should have been back on Earth at the same time as me, though. Then we were going to get married . . . .”
Grimes said nothing. He thought, Too senior for an Epsilon class ship? Epsilon Sextans, for example? What could he say?
“And that,” said Craven savagely, “was that.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” blurted Grimes, conscious of the inadequacy of his words. Then, foolishly, “But there are survivors, sir.”
“Don’t you think that I haven’t got Letourneau and his opposite number checking? And have you ever seen the aftermath of a Deep Space battle, Mister? Have you ever boarded a ship that’s been slashed and stabbed to death with laser beams?” He seemed to require no answer; he pulled himself into the chair by his desk, strapped himself in and motioned to Grimes to be seated. Then he pulled out from a drawer a large sheet of paper, which he unfolded. It was a cargo plan. “Current voyage,” he grunted. “And we’re carrying more to Lindisfarne than one brand-new ensign.”
“Such as, sir?” ventured Grimes.
“Naval stores. I don’t mind admitting that I’m more than a little rusty insofar as Survey Service procedure is concerned, even though I still hold my Reserve Commission. You’re more familiar with fancy abbreviations than I am. Twenty cases RERAT, for example . . . .”
“Reserve rations, sir. Canned and dehydrated.” “Good. And ATREG?”
“Atmospheric regeneration units, complete.”
“So if Epsilon Sextans’ ‘farm’ has been killed we shall be able to manage?” “Yes, sir.”
“Do you think you’d be able to install an ATREG unit?”
“Of course, sir. They’re very simple, as you know. Just synthetic chlorophyll and a UV source . . . . In any case, there are full instructions inside every container.”
“And this? A double M, Mark XV?” “Anti-Missile Missile.”
“And ALGE?”
“Anti-Laser Gas Emitter.”
“The things they do think of. I feel more at home with these AVMs-although I see that they’ve got as far as Mark XVII now.”
“Anti-Vessel Missiles,” said Grimes. A slight enthusiasm crept into his voice. “The XVII’s a real honey.”
“What does it do?”
“I’m sorry, sir. Even though you are a Reserve Officer, I can’t tell you.” “But they’re effective?”
“Yes. Very.”
“And I think you’re Gunnery Branch, Mr. Grimes, aren’t you?”
“I am sir.” He added hastily, “But I’m still quite capable of carrying out a watch officer’s duties aboard this vessel should the need arise.”
“The main thing is, you’re familiar with naval stores and equipment. When we find and board Epsilon Sextans I shall be transshipping certain items of cargo . . . “
“RERAT and ATREG, sir?” “Yes. And the others.”
“But, sir, I can’t allow it. Not unless I have authority from the Flag Officer commanding Lindisfarne Base. As soon as your Mr. Letourneau can be spared I’ll get him to try and raise the station there.”
“I’m afraid that’s out of the question, Mr. Grimes. In view of the rather peculiar political situation, I think that the answer would be No. Even if it were ‘Yes’, you know as well as I how sluggishly the tide flows through official channels. Furthermore, just in case it has escaped your notice, I am the Master.”
“And I, sir, represent the Survey Service. As the only commissioned officer aboard this vessel I am responsible for Survey Service cargo.”
“As a Reserve Officer, Mr. Grimes, I rank you.”
“Only when you have been recalled to Active Service. Sir.”
Craven said, “I was rather afraid that you’d take this attitude. That’s why I
decided to get this interview over and done with, just so we all know where we stand.” He put away the cargo plan, swiveled his chair so that he could reach out to his liquor cabinet. He pulled out two bulbs, tossed one to Grimes. “No toasts. If we drank to Law and Order we should mean different things. So just drink. And listen.
“To begin with, Epsilon Sextans doesn’t know where she is. But Letourneau is one of the rare telepaths with the direction finding talent, and as soon as he’s able to get lined up we shall alter course to home on the wreck. That’s what he’s trying to do now.
“When we find her, we shall synchronize and board, of course. The first thing will be medical aid to the survivors. Then we patch the ship up. And then we arm her. And then, with a prize crew under myself, we put ourselves on the trajectory for Waverley-hoping that those Waldegrenese frigates come back for another nibble.”
“They’d never dare, sir.”
“Wouldn’t they? The original piracy they’ll try to laugh off by saying that it was by real pirates- no, that’s not quite right, but you know what I
mean-wearing Waldegren colors. The second piracy-they’ll make sure that there are no survivors.”
“But I still can’t see how they can hope to get away with it. It’s always been an accepted fact that the main weapon against piracy has been psionic radio.”
“And so it was-until some genius developed a jamming technique. Epsilon Sextans wasn’t able to get any messages out until her crazy random precession pulled her well clear.”
“And you hope, sir, that they do attack you?”
“I do, Mr. Grimes. I had hoped, that I should have a good gunnery officer under me, but”-he shrugged his massive shoulders-“I think that I shall be able to manage.”
“And you hope that you’ll have your weapons,” persisted Grimes. “I see no reason why I should not, Ensign.”
“There is one very good reason, sir. That is that I, a commissioned officer of the Survey Service, am aboard your vessel. I insist that you leave the tracking down and destruction of the pirates to the proper authorities. I insist, too, that no Survey Service stores be discharged from this ship without my written authority.”
For the first time the hint of a smile relieved the somberness of Craven’s face. “And to think that I believed that Jane Pentecost could recruit you,” he murmured. Then, in a louder voice, “And what if I just go ahead without your written authority, Ensign?”
Grimes had the answer ready. “Then, sir, I shall be obliged to order your officers not to obey your unlawful commands. If necessary, I shall call upon the male passengers to assist me in any action that is necessary.”
Craven’s bushy eyebrows went up and stayed up. “Mr. Grimes,” he said in a gritty voice, “it is indeed lucky for you that I have firsthand experience of the typical Survey Service mentality. Some Masters I know would, in these circumstances, send you out on a spacewalk without a suit. But, before I take drastic action, I’ll give you one more chance to cooperate.” His tone softened. “You noticed the portrait I’ve put up instead of all the temporary popsies. Every man, no matter how much he plays around, has one woman who is the woman. Gillian was the woman as far as I was concerned-as far as I am concerned. I’ve a chance to bring her murderers under my guns-and, by God, I’m taking that chance, no matter what it means either to my career or to the somewhat odd foreign policy of the Federation. I used to be annoyed by Jane Pentecost’s outbursts on that subject-but now I see that she’s right. And she’s right, too, when it comes to the Survey Service’s reluctance to take action against Waldegren.
“So I, Mr. Grimes, am taking action.” “Sir, I forbid you . . .”
“You forbid me? Ensign, you forget yourself. Perhaps this will help you remember.”
This was a Minetti automatic that had appeared suddenly in the Captain’s hand. In his hairy fist the little, glittering weapon looked no more than a toy-but Grimes knew his firearms, knew that at the slightest pressure of Craven’s finger the needle-like projectiles would stitch him from crown to crotch.
“I’m sorry about this, Mr. Grimes.” As he spoke, Craven pressed a button set in his desk with his free hand. “I’m sorry about this. But I realize that I was expecting rather too much of you. After all, you have your career to consider . . . . Time was,” he went on, “when a naval officer could put his telescope to his blind eye as an excuse for ignoring orders-and get away with it. But the politicians had less power in those days. We’ve come a long way-and a wrong way-since Nelson.”
Grimes heard the door behind him slide open. He didn’t bother to look around, not even when hard hands were laid on his shoulders.
“Mr. Kennedy,” said Craven, “things turned out as I feared that they would. Will you and Mr. Ludovic take the Ensign along to the Detention Cell?”
“I’ll see you on trial for piracy, Captain!” flared Grimes.
“An interesting legal point, Ensign-especially since you are being entered in my Official Log as a mutineer.”
X
THE DETENTION CELL was not uncomfortable, but it was depressing. It was a padded cell- passengers in spacecraft have been known to exhibit the more violent symptoms of mania-which detracted from its already inconsiderable cheerfulness if not from its comfort. However, Grimes was not mad-not in the medical sense, that is-and so was considered able to attend to his own bodily needs. The little toilet was open to him, and at
regular intervals a bell would sound and a container of food would appear in a hatch recessed into the bulkhead of the living cabin. There was reading matter too-such as it was. The Ensign suspected that Jane Pentecost was the donor. It consisted of pamphlets published by some organization calling itself The Rim Worlds Secessionist Party. The almost hysterical calls to arms were bad enough-but the ones consisting mainly of columns of statistics were worse. Economics had never been Grimes’ strong point.
He slept, he fed at the appointed times, he made a lengthy ritual of keeping himself clean, he tried to read-and, all the time, with only sounds and sensations as clues, he endeavored to maintain a running plot of the ship’s maneuvers.
Quite early there had been the shutting down of the Mannschenn Drive, and the consequent fleeting sensation of temporal disorientation. This had been followed by the acceleration warning-the cell had an intercom speaker recessed in the padding-and Grimes, although it seemed rather pointless in his sponge rubber environment, had strapped himself into his couch. He heard the directional gyroscopes start up, felt the effects of centrifugal force as the ship came around to her new heading. Then there was the pseudo-gravity of acceleration, accompanied by the muffled thunder of the reaction drive. It was obvious, thought the Ensign, that Captain Craven was expending his reaction mass in a manner that, in other circumstances, would have been considered reckless.
Suddenly-silence and Free Fall, and almost immediately the off-key keening of the Mannschenn Drive. Its note was higher, much higher, than Grimes remembered it, and the queasy feeling of temporal disorientation lasted much longer than it had on previous occasions. And that, for a long time, was all. Meals came, and were eaten. Every morning- according to his watch-the prisoner showered and applied depilatory cream to his face. He tried to exercise-but to exercise in a padded cell, with no apparatus, in Free Fall, is hard. He tried to read-but the literature available was hardly more interesting to him than a telephone directory would have been. And, even though he never had been gregarious, the lack of anybody to talk to was wearing him down.
It was a welcome break from the monotony when he realized that, once again, the ship was maneuvering. This time there was no use of the directional gyroscopes; there were no rocket blasts, but there was a variation of the whine of the Drive as it hunted, hunted, as the temporal precession rate was adjusted by tens of seconds, by seconds, by microseconds.
And then it locked.
The ship shuddered slightly-once, twice.
Grimes envisaged the firing of the two mooring rockets, one from the bow and one from the stern, each with the powerful electromagnet in its nose, each trailing its fathoms of fine but enormously strong cable. Merchant vessels, he knew, carried this equipment, but unlike naval ships rarely used it. But Craven, as a Reservist, would have seen and taken part in enough drills.
The ship shuddered again-heavily.
So the rendezvous had been made. So Delta Orionis and Epsilon Sextans, their Drives synchronized, bound together by the rescue ship’s cables, were now falling as one unit through the dark immensities.
So the rendezvous had been made-and already the survivors of the wreck were being brought aboard the Delia O’Ryan, were being helped out of their stinking spacesuits, were blurting out their story to Craven and his officers. Grimes could visualize it all, almost as clearly as though he were actually watching it. He could visualize, too, the engineers swarming over the wreck, the flare of their burning and welding torches, the cannibalizing of nonessential plating from the ship’s structure for hull patches. It was all laid down in the Survey Service’s Damage Control Manual-and Captain Craven, at least, would know that book as thoroughly as did Grimes.
And what of the cargo, the Survey Service stores, Grimes’ stores? A trembling in the ship’s structure, a barely felt vibration, told him that gantries and conveyor belts were being brought into operation. There would be no great handling problems. Lindisfarne was Delta Orionis’ first port of call, and the Survey Service consignment would be top stowage. But there was nothing that Grimes could do about it-not a thing. In fact, he was beginning to doubt the legality of the stand he had made against the Master. And he was the small frog in this small puddle, while Captain Craven had made it quite clear that he was the big frog. Grimes wished that he was better versed in astronautical law-although a professional lawyer’s knowledge would be of no use to him in his present situation.
So, with some hazy idea that he might need all his strength, both mental and physical, for what was to befall him (but what?), in the near future, he strapped himself into his bunk and did his best to forget his worries in sleep. He was well enough acquainted with the psychiatrists’ jargon to know that this was no more than a return to the womb but, before dropping off into a shallow slumber, shrugged, So what?
HE JERKED into sudden wakefulness.
Jane Pentecost was there by his bunk, looking down at him.
“Come in,” he said. “Don’t bother to knock. Now you see how the poor live. This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard.”
She said, “That’s not very funny.”
“I know it’s not. Even the first time that I heard it aboard this blasted ship I was able to refrain from rolling in the aisles.”
She said, “There’s no need to be so bitchy, John.”
“Isn’t there? Wouldn’t you be bitchy if you’d been thrown into this padded cell?”
“I suppose I would be. But you asked for it, didn’t you?”
“If doing my duty-or trying to do my duty-is asking for it, I suppose that I did. Well-and has our pirate Captain cast off yet, armed to the teeth with
the weapons he’s stolen?”
“No. The weapons are still being mounted. But let’s not argue legalities, John. There’s not enough time. I . . . I just wanted to say goodbye.”
“Goodbye?” he echoed.
“Yes. Somebody has to do the cooking aboard Epsilon Sextans-and I volunteered.”
“You?”
“And why the hell not?” she flared. “Captain Craven has been pushed over to our side of the fence, and it’d be a pretty poor show if we Rim Worlders weren’t prepared to stand by him. Baxter’s gone across to take over as Reaction Drive Engineer; the only survivor in that department was the Fourth, and he’s only a dog watch in Space.”
“And who else?”
“Nobody. The Sexy Eppy’s Chief, Second and Third Interstellar Drive Engineers survived, and they’re willing-anxious, in fact, now that their ship’s being armed-to stay on. And the Psionic Radio Officer came through, and is staying on. All of our executive officers volunteered, of course, but the Old Man turned them down. He said that, after all, he could not hazard the safety of this ship by stripping her of her trained personnel. Especially since we carry passengers.”
“That’s his worry,” said Grimes without much sympathy. “But how does he hope to fight his ship if those frigates pounce again?”
“He thinks, he’ll be able to manage-with remote controls for every weapon brought to his main control panel.”
“Possible,” admitted Grimes, his professional interest stirred. “But not very efficient. In a naval action the Captain has his hands full just handling the ship alone, without trying to control her weaponry.”
“And you’d know, of course.” “Yes.”
“Yes, you’ve read the books. And Captain Craven commanded a light cruiser during that trouble with the Dring, so he knows nothing.”
“He still hasn’t got four hands and two heads.”
“Oh, let’s stop talking rubbish,” she cried. “I probably shan’t see you again, John and . . . and . . . oh, hell, I want to say goodbye properly, and I don’t want you to think too badly about either the Old Man or . . . or myself.”
“So what are we supposed to do about it?”
“Damn you, Grimes, you snotty-nosed, stuck-up spacepuppy! Look after yourself!”
Suddenly she bent down to kiss him. It was intended to be no more than a
light brushing of lips, but Grimes was suddenly aware, with his entire body, of the closeness of her, of the warmth and the scent of her, and almost without volition his arms went about her, drawing her closer still to him. She tried to break away, but it was only a halfhearted effort. He heard her murmur, in an odd, sardonic whisper, “wotthehell, wotthehell,” and then, “toujours gai.” It made no sense at the time but, years later, when he made the acquaintance of the Twentieth Century poets, he was to remember and to understand. What was important now was that her own arms were about him.
Somehow the buttons of her uniform shirt had come undone, and her nipples were taut against Grimes’ bare chest. Somehow her shorts had been peeled away from her hips-unzippered by whom? and how?-and somehow Grimes’ own garments were no longer the last barrier between them.
He was familiar enough with female nudity; he was one of the great majority who frequented the naked beaches in preference to those upon which bathing costumes were compulsory. He knew what a naked woman looked like-but this was different. It was not the first time that he had kissed a woman-but it was the first time that he had kissed, and been kissed by, an unclothed one. It was the first time that he had been alone with one.
What was happening he had read about often enough-and, like most young men, he had seen his share of pornographic films. But this was different. This was happening to him.
And for the first time.
When it was over, when, still clasped in each others’ arms they drifted in the center of the little cabin, impelled there by some odd resultant of forces, their discarded clothing drifting with them, veiling their perspiration-moist bodies, Grimes was reluctant to let her go.
Gently, Jane tried to disengage herself.
She whispered, “That was a warmer goodbye that I intended. But I’m not sorry. No. I’m not sorry . . . .”
Then, barely audibly, “It was the first time for you, wasn’t it?” “Yes.”
“Then I’m all the more glad it happened. But this is goodbye.” “No.”
“Don’t be a fool, John. You can’t keep me here.” “But I can come with you.”
She pushed him from her. Somehow he landed back on the bed. Before he could bounce he automatically snapped one of the confining straps about his middle. Somehow-she was still wearing her sandals but nothing
else-she finished up standing on the deck, held there by the contact between the magnetic soles and the ferrous fibers in the padding. She put
out a long, graceful arm and caught her shirt. She said harshly, “I’m getting dressed and out of here. You stay put. Damn you, Grimes, for thinking that I was trying to lure you aboard the Sexy Eppy with the body beautiful. I told you before that I am not, repeat not, Olga Popovsky, the Beautiful Spy. And I’m not a prostitute. There’s one thing I wouldn’t sell if I were offered the services of the finest Gunnery Officer (which you aren’t), in the whole bloody Galaxy in payment!”
“You’re beautiful when you flare up like that,” said Grimes sincerely. “But you’re always beautiful.” Then, in a louder voice, “Jane, I love you.”
“Puppy love,” she sneered. “And I’m old enough to be your . . .” A faint smile softened her mouth. “Your maiden aunt.”
“Let me finish. All right, it’s only puppy love-you say. But it’s still love.
But”-he was extemporizing-convincingly, he hoped-“but my real reason for wanting to come with you is this. I can appreciate now what Captain Craven lost when Epsilon Sextans was pirated. I can see-I can feel-why he’s willing to risk his life and his career to get his revenge. And I think that it’s worth it. And I want to help him.”
She stood there, her shirt half on, eying him suspiciously. “You mean that? You really mean that?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re a liar, Grimes.”
“No,” he said slowly. “No. Not altogether. I want to help the Old Man-and I want to help you. This piracy has convinced me that you Rim Worlders are getting the dirty end of the stick. I may not be the finest Gunnery Officer in the whole Galaxy-but I’m better acquainted with the new stuff than Captain Craven is.”
Her grin was openly derisive. “First it’s fellow-feeling for another spaceman, then it’s international politics. What next?”
“Where we started. I do love you, Jane. And if there’s going to be any shooting, I want to be on hand to do the shooting back on your behalf. I’ll admit that . . . that what’s happened has influenced my decision. But you didn’t buy me, or bribe me. Don’t think that. Don’t ever think that.” There was a note of pleading in his voice. “Be realistic, Jane. With another officer along, especially an officer with recent gunnery training, you stand a damn sight better chance than you would otherwise.”
“I . . . I suppose so. But I still don’t like it.”
“You don’t have to. But why look a gift horse in the mouth?”
“All right. You win. Get your clothes on and come and see the Old Man.” XI
JANE PENTECOST led Grimes to the airlock. The ship seemed oddly deserted, and he remarked on this. The girl explained that the passengers had been requested to remain in their accommodations, and that most of
Delta Orionis’ personnel were employed in work aboard Epsilon Sextans.
So I haven’t been the only one to be kept under lock and key,” commented Grimes sardonically.
“You’re the only one,” retorted the girl, “who’s been compensated for his imprisonment.”
There was no answer to that, so the Ensign remained silent. Saying nothing, he inspected with interest the temporary tunnel that had been rigged between the airlocks of the two ships. So Epsilon Sextans’ pressure hull had been made good, her atmosphere restored. That meant that the work of installing the armament had been completed. He hoped that he would not have to insist upon modifications.
The wreck-although she was a wreck no longer-bore her scars. The worst damage had been repaired, but holes and slashes that did not impair her structural strength were untouched, and spatters of once molten metal still made crazy patterns on beams and frames, stanchions and bulkheads. And there were the scars made by Craven’s engineers-the raw, bright cicatrices of new welding.
Forward they made their way, deck after deck. The elevator in the axial shaft was not yet working, so Grimes had time and opportunity to appreciate the extent of the damage. They passed through the wreckage of the “farm”-the burst algae tanks, the ruptured vats in which yeast and tissue cultures were black and dead, frostbitten and dehydrated. They brushed through alleyways choked with the brittle fronds of creeping plants killed by the ultimate winter.
And then they were passing through the accommodation levels. Bulkheads had been slashed through, destroying the privacy of the cabins that they had once enclosed. Destroying the privacy-and the occupants. There were no longer any bodies; for this Grimes was deeply thankful. (He learned later that Craven’s first action had been to order and conduct a funeral service.) There were no bodies-but there were still stains. Men and women die quickly in hard vacuum-quickly and messily.
Captain Craven was alone in the Control Room. He was working, rather slowly and clumsily, wiring up an obviously makeshift panel that was additional to the original one installed before the Master’s acceleration chair. It was obvious what it was-the remote controls for the newly fitted weaponry. Grimes said quickly, “There’s no need for that, sir.”
Craven started, let go of his screwdriver, made a fumbling grab for it as it drifted away from him. He stared at Grimes, then growled, “So it’s you, is it?” Then, to Jane, “What the hell do you mean by letting this puppy out of his kennel?”
“Captain Craven,” she told him quietly, “Mr. Grimes wants to come with us.” “What? I warn you, Miss Pentecost, I’m in no mood for silly jokes.”
“This is not a silly joke, Captain,” said Grimes. “I’ve had time to think things over. I feel, I really feel that you have a far better chance if there’s
a qualified officer along to handle the gunnery.”
Craven looked at them, from the girl to Grimes, then back again. He said, “Ensign, didn’t I warn you?”
“It’s not that way at all, sir,” Grimes told him, flushing. “In fact, Miss Pentecost has been trying hard to dissuade me.”
“Oh?
“It’s true,” said Jane. “But he told me that we couldn’t afford to look a gift horse in the mouth.”
“I don’t know what’s been happening,” rasped Craven. “I don’t want to know what’s been happening between the pair of you. This change of mind, this change of heart is rather . . . sudden. No matter. One volunteer, they say, is worth ten pressed men.” He glared coldly at the Ensign. “And you volunteer?”
“Yes, Captain.”
“I believe you. I have no choice in the matter. But you realize the consequences?”
“I do.”
“Well, I may be able to do something to clear your yardarm. I’ve still to make my last entries in the Official Log of Delta Orionis, before I hand over to Captain Kennedy. And when it comes to such documentation, nobody cares to accuse a shipmaster of being a liar. Not out loud.” He paused, thinking. “How does this sound, Miss Pentecost? Date, Time, Position, etc., etc. Mr. John Grimes, passenger, holding the rank of Ensign in the Federation Survey Service, removed by force from this vessel to Epsilon Sextans, there to supervise the installation and mounting of the armament, Survey Service property, discharged on my orders from No. 1 hold, also to advise upon the use of same in the subsequent event of an action’s being fought. Signed, etc., etc. And witnessed.”
“Rather long-winded, sir. But it seems to cover the ground.” “I intend to do more than advise!” flared Grimes.
“Pipe down. Or, if you must say it, make sure that there aren’t any witnesses around when you say it. Now, when it comes to the original supervision, you see what I’m trying to do. Will it work?”
“After a fashion, sir. But it will work much better if the fire control panel is entirely separate from maneuvering control.”
“You don’t think that I could handle both at once?”
“You could. But not with optimum efficiency. No humanoid could. This setup of yours might just work if we were Shaara, or any of the other multi-limbed arthropods. But even the Shaara, in their warships, don’t expect the
Queen-Captain to handle her ship and her guns simultaneously.”
“You’re the expert. I just want to be sure that you’re prepared to, quote, advise, unquote, with your little pink paws on the actual keyboard of your battle organ.”
“That’s just the way that I propose to advise.”
“Good. Fix it up to suit yourself, then. I should be able to let you have a mechanic shortly to give you a hand.”
“Before we go any further, sir, I’d like to make an inspection of the weapons themselves. Just in case . . .”
“Just in case I’ve made some fantastic bollix, eh?” Craven was almost cheerful. “Very good. But try to make it snappy. It’s time we were on our way.”
“Yes,” said Jane, and it seemed that the Captain’s discarded somberness was hanging about her like a cloud. “It’s time.”
XII
AT ONE TIME, before differentiation between the mercantile and the fighting vessel became pronounced, merchant vessels were built to carry a quite considerable armament. Today, the mounting of weapons on a merchantman presents its problems. After his tour of inspection Grimes was obliged to admit that Captain Craven had made cunning use of whatever spaces were available- but Craven, of course, was a very experienced officer, with long years of service in all classes of spacecraft. Too-and, perhaps, luckily-there had been no cannon among the Survey Service ordnance that had been requisitioned, so recoil had not been among the problems.
When he was finished, Grimes returned to the Control Room. Craven was still there, and with him was Jane Pentecost. They had, obviously, been discussing something. They could, perhaps, have been quarreling; the girl’s face was flushed and her expression sullen.
“Yes?” snapped the Captain.
“You’ve done a good job, sir. She’s no cruiser, but she should be able to defend herself.”
“Thank you. Then we’ll be on our way.”
“Not so fast, sir. I’d like to wire up my control panel properly before we shove off.”
Craven laughed. “You’ll have time, Mr. Grimes. I still have a few last duties to discharge aboard Delta Orionis. But be as quick as you can.”
He left the compartment, followed by Jane Pentecost. She said, over her shoulder, “I’ll send Mr. Baxter to help you, John.”
The Rim Worlder must have been somewhere handy; in a matter of seconds he was by Grimes’ side, an already open tool satchel at his belt. As he worked, assisting deftly and then taking over as soon as he was sure of
what was required, he talked. He said, “Mum wanted to come along, but I soon put the damper on that. But I was bloody amazed to find you here.”
“Were you?” asked Grimes coldly.
“You bet I was. Never thought you were cut out to be a bloody pirate.” He cursed briefly as a spatter of hot metal from his sizzling soldering iron stung his hand. “A cold weld’d be better, but it’d take too much time. But where was I? Oh, yes. The shock to me system when I saw you comin’ aboard this wagon.”
“I have my quite valid reasons,” Grimes told him stiffly.
“You’re tellin’ me. Just as my missus had quite valid reasons for wantin’ to come with me. But she ain’t a gunnery expert.” He added piously, “Thank Gawd.”
“And I am one,” said the Ensign, trying to change the drift of the conversation before he lost his temper. “Yes. that’s right. Just stick to the color code. The blue wiring’s the ALGE . . .”
“I know,” Baxter told him. “Tell me, is it any good?”
“Yes. Of course, if an enemy held us in her beams for any prolonged period we should all be cooked, but as far as it goes it’s effective enough.”
“Hope you’re right.” He made the last connections, then replaced the panel on the open shallow box. “Here’s yer magic cabinet, Professor. All we have ter see now is what rabbits yer can pull outer the hat.”
“Plenty, I hope,” said Captain Craven, who had returned to Control. “And are you ready now, Mr. Grimes?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Then we’ll make it stations. If you will take the copilot’s chair, while Mr. Baxter goes along to look after his rockets.”
“Will do, Skipper,” said the engineer, packing away his tools as he pulled himself toward the exit hatch.
The ship’s intercom came to life, in Jane Pentecost’s voice. “Connection between vessels severed. Airlock door closed.”
“We’re still connected,” grumbled Craven. “Delia O’Ryan still has her magnetic grapnels out.” He spoke into the transceiver microphone: “Epsilon Sextans to Delta Orionis. Cast off, please. Over.”
“Delta Orionis to Epsilon Sextans. Casting off.” Through a viewport Grimes could see one of the bright mooring wires snaking back into its recess. “All clear, Captain.”
“Thank you, Captain Kennedy.” And in a softer voice, “And I hope you keep that handle to your name, Bill.”
“Thank you, sir. And all the best, Captain, from all of us, to all of you. And
good hunting.”
“Thanks. And look after the old Delia, Captain. And yourself. Over-and out.” “Delta Orionis to Epsilon Sextans. Over and out.”
(There was something very final, thought Grimes, about those outs.)
He was aware that the ships were drifting slowly apart. Now he could see all of Delta Orionis from his viewport. He could not help recalling the day on which he had first seen her, at the Woomera spaceport. So much had happened since that day. (And so much was still to happen-he hoped.) He heard Craven say into the intercom, “Stand by for temporal precession. We’re desynchronizing.” Then, there was the giddiness, and the off-beat whine of the Mannschenn Drive that pierced his eardrums painfully, and beyond the viewports the great, shining shape of the other ship shimmered eerily and was suddenly warped into the likeness of a monstrous Klein
flash-then vanished. Where she had been (where she still was, in space but not in time) shone the distant stars, the stars that in this distorted continuum were pulsing spirals of iridescence.
“Mannschenn Drive. Cut!”
The thin, high keening died abruptly. Outside, the stars were glittering points of light, piercingly bright against the blackness.
“Mr. Grimes!” Craven’s voice was sharp. “I hope that you take more interest in gunnery than you do in ship handling. In case it has escaped your notice, I would remind you that you are second in command of this vessel, and in full charge in the event of my demise.”
“Sorry, sir,” stammered Grimes. Then, suddenly bold, “But I’m not your second in command, sir. I’ve signed no Articles.”
Surprisingly, Craven laughed. “A spacelawyer, yet! Well, Mr. Grimes, as soon as we get this vessel on course we’ll attend to the legal formalities. Meanwhile, may I request your close attention to what I am doing?”
“You may, sir.”
Thereafter he watched and listened carefully. He admired the skill with which Craven turned the ship on her directional gyroscopes until the red-glowing target star was centered exactly in the cartwheel sight. He
noted that the Captain used his reaction drive at a longer period and at a higher rate of acceleration than usual, and said as much. He was told, the words falling slowly and heavily in the pseudo-gravity, “They . . . will . . . expect . . . us . . . to . . . be . . . in . . . a . . . hurry. We must . . . not . . . disappoint . . . them.”
Speed built up, fast-but it was a velocity that, in the context of the interstellar distances to be traversed, was no more than a snail’s crawl. Then-and the sudden silence was like a physical blow-the thunder of the rockets ceased. The screaming roar had died, but the ship was not quiet. The whine of the Mannschenn Drive pervaded her every compartment, vibrated through every member of her structure. She was falling, falling
through space and time, plunging through the warped continuum to her rendezvous with Death . . . .
And whose death? wondered Grimes.
He said, “I should have asked before, sir. But how are . . . how are they going to find us?”
“I don’t know,” said Craven. “I don’t know. But they’ve found other ships when they’ve wanted to. They’ve never used the old pirate’s technique of lying in wait at breaking-out points. A Mass Proximity Indicator? Could be. It’s theoretically possible. It could be for a ship under Mannschenn Drive what radar is for a ship in normal space-time. Or some means of homing on a temporal precession field? That’s more like it, I think, as this vessel was able to escape when she went random.
“But if they want us-and they will-they’ll find us. And then”-he looked at Grimes, his blue gaze intense-“and then it’s up to you, Ensign.”
“To all of us,” said Grimes. XIII
SHE WAS UNDERMANNED, this Epsilon Sextans, but she functioned quite efficiently. Craven kept a Control Room watch himself, and the other two watchkeepers were Grimes and Jane Pentecost. Four on and eight off were their hours of duty- but there was plenty of work to be done in the off duty periods. The Captain, of course, was in over-all charge, and was trying to bring his command to the pitch of efficiency necessary for a fighting ship. Jane Pentecost was responsible for meals-although these, involving little more than the opening of cans, did not take up too much of her time. She had also taken over biochemist’s duties, but called now and again upon Grimes to help her with the ATREG unit. Its operation was simple enough, but it was inclined to be temperamental and, now and again, allowed the carbon dioxide concentration to reach a dangerous level. Grimes’ main concern was his armament. He could not indulge in a practice shot-the expulsion of mass by a ship running under interstellar drive is suicidal; even the employment of laser weapons is dangerous. But there were tests that he could make; there was, in the ship’s stores, a spare chart tank that he was able to convert to a battle simulator.
Craven helped him, and set up targets in the tank, glowing points of light that were destroyed by the other sparks that represented Grimes’ missiles. After one such drill he said, “You seem to know your stuff, Ensign. Now, what’s your grasp of the tactical side of it?”
Grimes considered his words before speaking. “Well, sir, we could use laser with the Drive in operation-but we haven’t got laser. The pirates have. They can synchronize and just carve us up at leisure. This time, I think they’ll go for the interstellar drive engine room first, so that we can’t get away by the use of random precession.”
“Yes. That’s what they’ll do. That’s why I have that compartment literally sealed in a cocoon of insulation. Oh, I know it’s not effective, but it will give us a second or so of grace. No more.”
“We can’t use our reflective vapor,” went on Grimes. “That’d be almost as bad, from our viewpoint, as loosing off a salvo of missiles. But, sir, when this ship was first attacked there must have been a considerable loss of mass when the atmosphere was expelled through the rents in the shell plating . . . the Drive was running. How was it that the ship wasn’t flung into some other space-time?”
“Come, come, Mr. Grimes. You should know the answer to that one. She was held by the powerful temporal precession fields of the drive units of the two pirates. And then, of course, when the engineers managed to set up their random precession there was no mass left to be expelled.”
“H’m. I see. Or I think I see. Then, in that case, why shouldn’t I use my ALGE as soon as we’re attacked?”
“No. Better not. Something might just go wrong-and I don’t want to become one of my own ancestors.”
“Then . . . ?”
“You tell me, Mr. Grimes.”
“Cut our Drive . . . ? Break out into the normal continuum? Yes . . . it could work.” He was becoming enthusiastic. “And then we shall be waiting
for-them, with our missile batteries, when they break out.”
“We’ll make an admiral of you yet, young Grimes.”
WITH WATCHKEEPING and with off-watch duties time was fully occupied. And yet there was something missing. There was, Grimes said to himself, one hell of a lot missing. Jane Pentecost had her own watch to keep, and her own jobs to do when she was not in the control room-but she and Grimes had some free time to share. But they did not share it.
He broached the subject when he was running a test on the artificial chlorophyll in the ATREG. “Jane, I was hoping I’d see more of you.”
“You’re seeing plenty of me.” “But not enough.”
“Don’t be tiresome,” she snapped. Then, in a slightly softer voice, “Don’t . .
. “
. . . spoil everything?” he finished for her sardonically. “You know what I mean,” she told him coldly.
“Do I?” He groped for words. “Jane . . . Damn it all, I hoped . . . After what happened aboard the Delia O’Ryan . . .”
“That,” she said, “was different.” Her face flushed. “I tell you this, Grimes, if I’d known that you were coming along with us it never would have happened.”
“No?”
“NO!”
“Even so . . . I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t . . .”
“Why we shouldn’t what? Oh, all right, all right. I know what you mean. But it’s out of the question. I’ll tell you why, in words of one syllable. In a ship such as Delta Orionis discreet fun and games were permissible, even desirable. No shortage of women-both crew and passengers. Here, I’m the only female. Your friend Mr. Baxter has been sniffing after me. And Mr. Wolverton, the Interstellar Chief. And his Second. And even, bereaved though he is, the Bearded Bastard. He might get away with it-the privileges of rank and all that. But nobody else would-most certainly not yourself. How long would it remain a secret if we went to bed together?”
“I suppose you’re right, but . . .”
“But what? Oh John, John, you are a stubborn cow.” “Cow?”
“Sorry. Just Rimworldsese. Applicable to both sexes.” “Talking of sex . . .”
“Oh, shut up!”
“I’ll not.” She looked desirable standing there. A small smudge of grease on her flushed cheek was like a beauty spot. “I’ll not,” he said again. She was close to him, and he was acutely conscious that beneath the thin uniform shirt and the short shorts there was only Jane. He had only to reach out. He did so. At first she did not resist-and then exploded into a frenzy of activity. Before he could let go of her a hard, rough hand closed on his shirt collar and yanked him backwards.
“Keep yer dirty paws off her!” snarled a voice. It was Baxter’s. “Keep yer dirty paws off her! If we didn’t want yer ter let off the fireworks I’d do yer, here an’ now.”
“And keep your dirty paws off me!” yelped Grimes. It was meant to be an authentic quarterdeck bark, but it didn’t come out that way.
“Let him go, Mr. Baxter,” said Jane, adding, “please.”
“Oh, orl right. If yer says so. But I still think we should run him up ter the Old Man.”
“No. Better not.” She addressed Grimes, “Thank you for your help on the ATREG, Mr. Grimes. And thank you, Mr. Baxter, for your help. It’s time that I started looking after the next meal.”
She left, not hastily, but not taking her time about it either. When she was gone Baxter released Grimes. Clumsily the Ensign turned himself around, with a wild flailing motion. Unarmed combat had never been his specialty, especially unarmed combat in Free Fall conditions. But he knew that he had to fight, and the rage and the humiliation boiling up in him made it certain that he would do some damage.
But Baxter was laughing, showing all his ugly, yellow teeth. “Come orf it, Admiral! An’ if we must have a set-to-not in here. Just smash the UV projector-an’ bang goes our air conditioning! Simmer down, mate. Simmer down!”
Grimes simmered down, slowly. “But I thought you were out for my blood, Mr. Baxter.”
“Have ter put on a show for the Sheilas now an’ again. Shouldn’t mind puttin’ on another kind o’ show with her. But not in public-like you was goin’ to. It just won’t do-not until the shootin’ is over, anyhow. An’ even then . .
. . So, Admiral, it’s paws off as far as you’re concerned. An’ as far as I’m concerned-an’ the Chief Time Twister an’ his sidekick. But, if yer can spare the time, I propose we continue the conversation in my palatial dogbox.”
Grimes should have felt uneasy as he followed the engineer to his accommodation but, oddly enough, he did not. The rough friendliness just could not be the prelude to a beating up. And it wasn’t.
“Come in,” said Baxter, pulling his sliding door to one side. “Now yer see how the poor live. This is . . .”
“No,” protested Grimes. “No.”
“Why? I was only goin’ to say that this is me ‘umble ‘umpy. An’ I’d like yer to meet a coupla friends o’ mine-and there’s more where they came from.”
The “friends” were two drinking bulbs. Each bore proudly no less than four stars on its label. The brandy was smooth, smooth and potent. Grimes sipped appreciatively. “I didn’t know that we had any of this aboard Delia O’Ryan.”
“An’ nor did we. You’ll not find this tipple in the bar stores of any merchantman, nor aboard any of yer precious Survey Service wagons. Space stock for the Emperor’s yacht, this is. So here’s ter the Waverley taxpayers!”
“But where did you get this from, Mr. Baxter?”
“Where d’yer think? I’ve had a good fossick around the holds o’ this old bitch, an’ there’s quite a few things too good to let fall inter the hands o’ those bloody Waldegrenese.”
“But that’s pillage.”
“It’s common sense. Mind yer, I doubt if Captain Craven would approve, so yer’d better chew some dry tea-that’s in the cargo too-before yer see the Old Man again. All the bleedin’ same-it’s no worse than him borrowing your Survey Service stores an’ weapons from his cargo.”
“I suppose it’s not,” admitted Grimes. All the same, he still felt guilty when he was offered a second bulb of the luxurious spirit. But he did not refuse it.
XIV
HE WAS A GOOD FOSSICKER, was Baxter.
Two days later, as measured by the ship’s chronometer, he was waiting for Grimes as he came off watch. “Ensign,” he announced without preamble, “I’ve found somethin’ in the cargo.”
“Something new, you mean?” asked Grimes coldly. He still did not approve of pillage, although he had shared the spoils.
“Somethin’ that shouldn’t be there. Somethin’ that’s up your alley, I think.” “There’s no reason why equipment for the Waverley Navy shouldn’t be
among the cargo.”
“True enough. But it wouldn’t be in a case with Beluga Caviar stenciled all over it. I thought I’d found somethin’ to go with the vodka I half pinched, but it won’t.”
“Then what is it?” “Come and see.”
“All right.” Briefly Grimes wondered if he should tell Craven, who had relieved the watch, then decided against it. The Old Man would probably insist on making an investigation in person, in which case Grimes would have to pass another boring hour or so in the Control Room.
The two men made their way aft until they came to the forward bulkhead of the cargo spaces. Normally these would have been pressurized, but, when Epsilon Sextans’ atmosphere had been replenished from Delta Orionis’ emergency cylinders, it had seemed pointless to waste precious oxygen. So access was through an airlock that had a locker outside, in which suits, ready for immediate use, were stowed.
Grimes and Baxter suited up, helping each other as required. Then the engineer put out his gloved hand to the airlock controls. Grimes stopped him, bent forward to touch helmets. He said, “Hang on. If we open the door it’ll register on the panel in Control.”
“Like hell it will!” came the reply. “Most of the wiring was slashed through during the piracy. I fixed the hold lights-but damn all else.” Grimes, through the transparency of the visors, saw the other’s grin. “For obvious reasons.”
Grimes shrugged, released Baxter. Everything was so irregular that one more, relatively minor irregularity hardly mattered. He squeezed with the engineer into the small airlock, waited until the atmosphere it held had been pumped back into the body of the ship, then himself pushed the button that actuated the mechanism of the inner valve.
This was not the first time that he had been in the cargo spaces. Some of the weapons “borrowed” from Delta Orionis’ cargo had been mounted in the holds. When he had made his inspections it had never occurred to him that the opening and closing of the airlock door had not registered in Control.
He stood back and let Baxter lead the way. The engineer pulled himself to one of the bins in which he had been foraging. The door to it was still open,
and crates and cartons disturbed by the pillager floated untidily around the opening.
“You’ll have to get all this restowed,” said Grimes sharply. “If we have to accelerate there’ll be damage.” But he might as well have been speaking to himself. The suit radios had not been switched on and, in any case, there was no air to carry sound waves, however faintly.
Baxter had scrambled into the open bin. Grimes followed him, saw him standing by the case, its top prized open, that carried the lettering, BELUGA CAVIAR. PRODUCE OF THE RUSSIAN SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC
REPUBLIC. Baxter beckoned. Grimes edged his way past the drifting packages to join him.
There was something in the case-but it was not jars or cans of salted sturgeon’s eggs. It looked at first like a glittering, complex piece of mobile statuary, although it was motionless. It was a metal mismating of gyroscope and Moebius Strip. It did not look wrong-nothing functional ever does-but it did look odd.
Grimes was standing hard against Baxter now. Their helmets were touching. He asked, “What . . . what is it?”
“I was hopin’ you’d be able ter tell me, Admiral.” Then, as Grimes extended a cautious hand into the case, “Careful! Don’t touch nothin’!”
“Why not?”
‘Cause this bloody lot was booby-trapped, that’s why. See that busted spring? An’ see that cylinder in the corner? That’s a thermite bomb, or somethin’ worse. Shoulda gone orf when I pried the lid up-but luckily I buggered the firin’ mechanism with me bar when I stuck it inter just the right crack. But I think the bastard’s deloused now.”
“It looks as though it-whatever it is-is hooked up to one of the electrical circuits.”
“Yair. An’ it’s not the lightin’ circuit. Must be the airlock indicators.” “Must be.” As a weapons expert, Grimes could see the thermite bomb-if
that was what it was- had been rendered ineffective. It hadn’t been an
elaborate trap, merely a device that would destroy the-the thing if the case housing it were tampered with. Baxter had been lucky-and, presumably, those who had planted the-what the hell was it?-unlucky.
With a cautious finger he nudged the rotor.
It turned-and he was reminded of those other rotors, the ever-precessing gyroscopes of the Mannschenn Drive.
He remembered, then. He remembered a series of lectures at the Academy on future weapons and navigational devices. Having decided upon his specialty he had been really interested only in the weapons. But there had been talk of a man called Carlotti, who was trying to develop a device that would induce temporal precession in radio signals, so that instantaneous communications would be possible throughout the Galaxy without ships and
shore stations having to rely upon the temperamental and unreliable telepaths. And beacons, employing the same principle, could be used for navigation by ships under interstellar drive . . . .
So this could be one of Signor Carlotti’s gadgets. Perhaps the Empire of Waverley had offered him a higher price than had the Federation. But why the BELUGA CAVIAR? To deter and confuse industrial spies? But Epsilon Sextans possessed excellent strong rooms for the carriage of special cargo.
And why was the thing wired up?
Suddenly it was obvious. Somehow, the Duchy of Waldegren possessed Carlotti equipment. This . . . this beacon had been transmitting, unknown to anybody aboard the ship, during the voyage. The frigates had homed upon her. When, inadvertently, its power supply had been shut off the victim, using random precession, had been able to make her escape.
So, if the pirates were to make a second attack it would have to be reactivated.
“We’d better throw this lot on to the Old Man’s plate,” said Grimes. CAPTAIN CRAVEN listened intently as Grimes and Baxter told their story.
They feared that he was going to lose his temper when told of the
engineer’s cargo pillaging, but he only remarked, in a dry voice, “I guess that the consignees can afford to compensate us for our time and trouble. Even so, Mr. Baxter, I insist that this practice must cease forthwith.” And then, when Grimes described the device, he said, “Yes, I have heard of Carlotti’s work. But I didn’t think that he’d got as far as a working model. But the thing could have been developed by Waldegrenese scientists from the data in his published papers.”
“So you agree, sir, that it is some kind of beacon upon which the pirates can home?”
“What else can it be? Now, gentlemen, we find ourselves upon the horns of a dilemma. If we don’t reactivate the bloody thing, the chances are that we shall deliver the ship and cargo intact, at no great risk to ourselves, and to the joy of the underwriters. If we do reactivate it-then the chances are that we shall have to fight our way through. And there’s no guarantee that we shall be on the winning side.”
“I was shanghaied away here as a gunnery officer,” said Grimes. “Shanghaied-or press-ganged?” queried Craven.
“The technique was more that of the shanghai,” Grimes told him.
“Indeed?” Craven’s voice was cold. “But no matter. “You’re here, and you’re one of my senior officers. What course of action do you recommend?”
Grimes replied slowly and carefully. “Legally speaking, what we’re involved in isn’t a war. But it is a war, of sorts. And a just war. And, in any case, the Master of a merchant vessel has the legal right to resist illegal seizure or destruction by force of arms. Of course, we have to consider the illegal circumstances attending the arming of this ship . . . .”
“Let’s not get bogged down in legalities and illegalities,” said Craven, with a touch of impatience. “The lawyers can sort it all out eventually. Do we reactivate?”
“Yes,” said Grimes.
“And you, Mr. Baxter. What do you say?”
“We Rim Worlders just don’t like Waldegren. I’ll not pass up a chance ter kick the bastards in the teeth. Reactivate, Skipper.”
“Good. And how long will it take you to make good the circuit the beacon’s spliced in to?”
“Twenty minutes. No more. But d’yer think we oughter put the whole thing to the vote first?”
“No. Everybody here was under the impression that we should be fighting. With one possible exception, they’re all volunteers.”
“But I did volunteer, sir,” objected Grimes.
“Make your mind up, Ensign. You were telling me just now that you’d been shanghaied. All right. Everybody is a volunteer. So we just rebait the trap without any more yapping about it. Let me know as soon as you’re ready, Mr. Baxter. Will you require assistance?”
“I’ll manage, Skipper.”
When he was gone Craven turned to Grimes. “You realize, Ensign, that this puts me in rather a jam. Let me put it this way. Am I justified in risking the lives of all my officers to carry out a private act of vengeance?”
“I think that you can take Mr. Baxter and myself as being representative, sir. As for the others-Miss Pentecost’s a Rim Worlder, and her views will coincide with Baxter’s. And the original crew members-they’re just as entitled to vengeance as you are. I know that if I’d been an officer of this ship at the time of the original piracy I’d welcome the chance of hitting back.”
“You would. Yes. Even if, as now, an alternative suddenly presented itself. But . . .”
“I honestly don’t see what you’re worrying about, sir.”
“You wouldn’t. It’s a matter of training. But, for all my Reserve commission, I’m a merchant officer. Oh, I know that any military commander is as responsible for the lives of his men as I am-but he also knows that those lives, like his own, are expendable.”
“It’s a pity that Baxter found the beacon,” said Grimes.
“It is-and it isn’t. If he hadn’t found it, I shouldn’t be soliloquizing like a spacefaring Hamlet. And we should have brought the ship in intact and, like as not, all been awarded Lloyd’s Medals. On the other hand-if he hadn’t found it we-or I?-should have lost our chance of getting back at the
pirates.”
“You aren’t Hamlet, sir.” Grimes spoke with the assurance of the very young, but in later years he was to remember his words, and to feel neither shame nor embarrassment, but only a twinge of envy and regret. “You aren’t Hamlet. You’re Captain Craven, Master under God. Please, sir, for once in your life do something you want to do, and argue it out later with the Almightly if you must.”
“And with my owners?” Grimes couldn’t be sure, but he thought he saw something like a smile beneath Craven’s full beard. “And with my owners?”
“Master Astronauts’ certificates aren’t all that common, sir. If worst comes to worst, there’s always the Rim Worlds. The Sundowner Line, isn’t it?”
“I’d already thought of that.” There was no doubt about it. Craven was smiling. “After all that you’ve been saying to me, I’m surprised that you don’t join forces with our Miss Pentecost.”
“Go out to the Rim, sir? Hardly.”
“Don’t be so sure, young Grimes. Anyhow, you’d better get Miss Pentecost up here now so that we can see how friend Baxter is getting on. There’s always the risk that he’ll find a few more things among the cargo that aren’t nailed down.”
XV
GRIMES CALLED Jane Pentecost on the intercom; after a minute or so she made her appearance in Control. Craven told her what Baxter had discovered and what he, Craven, intended doing about it. She nodded in emphatic agreement. “Yes,” she said. “The thing’s here to be used-and to be used the way that we want to use it. But I don’t think that we should make it public.”
“Why not, Miss Pentecost?”
“I could be wrong, Captain, but in my opinion there are quite a few people in this ship who’d welcome the chance of wriggling out of being the cheese in the mousetrap. When there’s no alternative they’re brave enough. When there’s a face-saving alternative . . .”
Baxter’s voice came from the intercom speaker. “Chief Reaction Drive Engineer to Control. Repairs completed. Please check your panel.”
Yes, the circuit had been restored. The buzzer sounded, and on the board a glowing red light showed that the outer door to the cargo hold airlock was open. How much of the failure of the indicators was due to battle damage and how much to Baxter’s sabotage would never be known. Craven’s heavy eyebrows lifted ironically as he looked at Grimes, and Grimes shrugged in reply.
Then, the watch handed over to the girl, the two men made their way aft from the Control Room. Outside the airlock they found Baxter, already suited up save for his helmet. There had been only two suits in the locker, and the engineer had brought another one along for the Captain from
somewhere.
The little compartment would take only two men at a time. Craven and Grimes went through first, then were joined by Baxter. There was no longer any need for secrecy, so the suit radios were switched on. The only person likely to be listening in was Jane Pentecost in Control.
Grimes heard Craven muttering angrily as they passed packages that obviously had been opened and pillaged, but the Captain did no more than mutter. He possessed the sense of proportion so essential to his rank-and a few bulbs of looted liquor were, after all, relatively unimportant.
They came to the bin in which the case allegedly containing caviar had been stowed, in which some secret agent of Waldegren had tapped the circuit supplying power to the beacon. Inside the box the gleaming machine was still motionless. Craven said, “I thought you told me the current was on.”
“It is, Skipper.” Baxter’s voice was pained. “But I switched it off before I fixed the wiring.” He extended a gloved finger, pressed a little toggle switch.
And nothing happened.
“Just a nudge.” whispered the engineer.
The oddly convoluted rotor turned easily enough, and as it rotated it seemed almost to vanish in a mist of its own generating-a mist that was no more than an optical illusion.
It rotated, slowed-and stopped.
Baxter cast aspersions upon the legitimacy of its parenthood. Then, still grumbling, he produced a volt-meter. Any doubt that power was being delivered to the machine was soon dispelled. Power was being delivered-but it was not being used.
“Well, Mr. Baxter?” demanded Craven.
“I’m a fair mechanic, Skipper-but I’m no physicist.” “Mr. Grimes?”
“I specialized in gunnery, sir.”
Craven snorted, the sound unpleasantly loud in the helmet phones. He said sarcastically, “I’m only the Captain, but I have some smatterings of Mannschenn Drive maintenance and operation. This thing isn’t a Mannschenn Drive unit-but it’s first cousin to one. As I recall it, some of the earlier models couldn’t be started without the employment of a small, temporal precession field initiator. Furthermore, these initiators, although there is no longer any need for them, are still carried as engine room spares in the Commission’s ships.”
“And that gadget’ll start this little time-twister, Skipper?” asked the engineer.
“It might, Mr. Baxter. It might. So, Mr. Grimes, will you go along to the Mannschenn Drive room and ask Mr. Wolverton for his initiator? No need to tell him what it’s for.”
WOLVERTON was in the Mannschenn Drive room, staring moodily at the gleaming complexity of precessing rotors. Grimes hastily averted his eyes from the machine. It frightened him, and he didn’t mind admitting it. And there was something about the engineer that frightened him, too. The tall, cadaverous man, with the thin strands of black hair drawn over his gleaming skull, looked more like a seer than a ship’s officer, looked like a fortune-teller peering into the depths of an uncannily mobile crystal ball. He was mumbling, his voice a low, guttural muttering against the thin, high keening of his tumbling gyroscopes. The Ensign at last was able to make out the words.
“Divergent tracks . . . . To be, or not to be, that is the question-“
Grimes thought, This ship should be renamed the State of Denmark. There’s something rotten here . . . . He said sharply, “Mr. Wolverton!”
Slowly the Chief Interstellar Drive Engineer turned his head, stared at Grimes unseeingly at first. His eyes came into focus. He whispered, “It’s you.”
“Who else, Chief? Captain’s compliments, and he’d like to borrow your temporal precession field initiator.”
“He would, would he? And why?”
“An-an experiment.” said Grimes, with partial truth. The fewer people who knew the whole truth the better.
“An experiment?”
“Yes. If you wouldn’t mind letting me have it now, Chief . . . .”
“But it’s engine room stores. It’s the Commission’s stores. It’s a very delicate instrument. It is against the Commission’s regulations to issue it to unqualified personnel.”
“But Mr. Baxter is helping with the . . . experiment.”
“Mr. Baxter! That letter-off of cheap fireworks. That . . . Rim Runner! No. No. Mr. Baxter is not qualified personnel.”
“Then perhaps you could lend us one of your juniors.”
“No. No, I would not trust them. Why do you think that I am here, Mr. Grimes? Why do you think that I have been tied to my gyroscopes? Literally tied, almost. If I had not been here, keeping my own watch, when the pirates struck, this ship would have been utterly destroyed. I know the Drive, Mr. Grimes.” He seized the Ensign’s arm, turned him so that he was facing the gleaming, spinning rotors, endlessly precessing, endlessly tumbling down the dark dimensions, shimmering on the very verge of invisibility. Grimes wanted to close his eyes, but could not. “I know the Drive, Mr. Grimes. It talks to me. It shows me things. It warned me, that
time, that Death was waiting for this ship and all in her. And now it warns me again. But there is a . . . a divergence . . . .”
“Mr. Wolverton, please! There is not much time.”
“But what is Time, Mr. Grimes? What is Time? What do you know of the forking World Lines, the Worlds of If? I’ve lived with this machine, Mr. Grimes. It’s part of me-or am I part of it? Let me show you . . . .” His grip on the Ensign’s arm was painful. “Let me show you. Look. Look into the machine. What do you see?”
Grimes saw only shadowy, shimmering wheels and a formless darkness. “I see you, Mr. Grimes,” almost sang the engineer. “I see you-but not as
you will be. But as you might be. I see you on the bridge of your flagship,
your uniform gold-encrusted and medal-bedecked, with commodores and captains saluting you and calling you ‘sir’ . . . but I see you, too, in the control room of a shabby little ship, a single ship, in shabby clothes, and the badge on your cap is one that I have never seen, is one that does not yet exist . . . .”
“Mr. Wolverton! That initiator. Please!”
“But there is no hurry, Mr. Grimes. There is no hurry. There is time enough for everything-for everything that is, that has been, that will be and that might be. There is time to decide, Mr. Grimes. There is time to decide whether or not we make our second rendezvous with Death. The initiator is part of it all, Mr. Grimes, is it not? The initiator is the signpost that stands at the forking of the track. You weren’t here, Mr. Grimes, when the pirates struck. You did not hear the screams, you did not smell the stench of burning flesh. You’re young and foolhardy; all that you want is the chance to play with your toys. And all that I want, now that I know that alternatives exist, is the chance to bring this ship to her destination with no further loss of life.”
“Mr. Wolverton . . .”
“Mr. Grimes!” It was Captain Craven’s voice, and he was in a vile temper. “What the hell do you think you’re playing at?”
“Captain,” said Wolverton. “I can no more than guess at what you intend to do-but I have decided not to help you to do it.”
“Then give us the initiator. We’ll work it ourselves.” “No, Captain.”
“Give me the initiator, Mr. Wolverton. That’s an order.”
“A lawful command, Captain? As lawful as those commands of yours that armed this ship?”
“Hold him, Grimes!” (And who’s supposed to be holding whom? wondered the Ensign. Wolverton’s grip was still tight and painful on his arm.) “Hold him, while I look in the storeroom!”
“Captain! Get away from the door! You’ve no right . . .”
Wolverton relinquished his hold on Grimes who, twisting with an agility that surprised himself, contrived to get both arms about the engineer’s waist. In the scuffle the contact between their magnetic shoe soles and the deck was broken. They hung there, helpless, with no solidity within reach of their flailing limbs to give them purchase. They hung there, clinging to each other, but more in hate than in love. Wolverton’s back was to the machine; he could not see, as could Grimes, that there was an indraught of air into the spinning, shimmering complexity. Grimes felt the beginnings of panic, more than the mere beginnings. There were no guardrails; he had read somewhere why this was so, but the abstruse physics involved did not matter-all that mattered was that there was nothing to prevent him and Wolverton from being drawn into the dimension-twisting field of the thing.
He freed, somehow, his right hand, and with an effort that sprained his shoulder brought it around in a sweeping, clumsy and brutal blow to the engineer’s face. Wolverton screamed and his grip relaxed. Violently, Grimes shoved away. To the action there was reaction.
Craven emerged from the storeroom, carrying something that looked like a child’s toy gyroscope in a transparent box. He looked around for Grimes and Wolverton at deck level and then, his face puzzled, looked up. He did not, as Grimes had been doing for some seconds, vomit-but his face, behind the beard went chalk-white. He put out his free hand and, not ungently, pulled Grimes to the deck.
He said, his voice little more than a whisper, “There’s nothing we can do. Nothing-except to get a pistol and finish him off . . . .”
Grimes forced himself to look again at the slimy, bloody obscenity that was a man turned, literally, inside-out-heart (if it was the heart) still beating, intestines still writhing.
XVI
IT WAS GRIMES who went for a pistol, fetching a Minetti from the weapons rack that he, himself, had fitted up in the Control Room. He told Jane Pentecost what he wanted it for. He made no secret of either his horror or his self blame.
She said, “But this is a war, even if it’s an undeclared one. And in a war you must expect casualties.”
“Yes, yes. I know. But I pushed him into the field.”
“It was an accident. It could easily have been you instead of him. And I’m glad that it wasn’t.”
“But you haven’t seen . . .”
“And I don’t want to.” Her voice hardened. “Meanwhile, get the hell out of here and back to the Mannschenn Drive room. If you’re so sorry for the poor bastard, do something about putting him out of his misery.”
“But . . .”
“Don’t be such a bloody coward, Grimes.”
The words hurt-mainly because there was so much truth in them. Grimes was dreading having to see again the twisted obscenity that had once been a man, was dreading having to breathe again the atmosphere of that compartment, heavy with the reek of hot oil, blood and fecal matter. But, with the exception of Craven, he was the only person in the ship trained in the arts of war. He recalled the words of a surgeon-commander who had lectured the midshipmen of his course on the handling of battle
casualties-and recalled, too, how afterward the young gentlemen had sneered at the bloodthirstiness of one who was supposed to be a professional healer. “When one of your shipmates has really had it, even if he’s your best friend, don’t hesitate a moment about finishing him off. You’ll be doing him a kindness. Finish him off-and get him out of sight. Shockingly wounded men are bad for morale.”
“What are you waiting for?” demanded Jane Pentecost. “Do you want me to do it?”
Grimes said nothing, just hurried out of the Control Room.
Craven was still in the Mannschenn Drive room when Grimes got back there. With him were two of the interstellar drive engineers-the Second and the Third. Their faces were deathly white, and the Second’s prominent Adam’s apple was working spasmodically, but about them there was an air of grim resolution. The Third-how could he bear to touch that slimy, reeking
mess?-had hold of its shoulders (white, fantastically contorted bone gleaming pallidly among red convolutions of flesh), while the Second, a heavy spanner in his hand, was trying to decide where to strike.
The Captain saw Grimes. “Give me that!” he snapped, and snatched the pistol from the Ensign’s hand. Then, to the engineers, “Stand back!”
The little weapon rattled sharply and viciously. To the other smells was added the acridity of burned propellant. What had been Wolverton was driven to the deck by the impact of the tiny projectiles, and adhered there. There was surprisingly little blood, but the body had stopped twitching.
Craven handed the empty pistol back to the Ensign. He ordered, “You stay here, Mr. Grimes, and organize the disposal of the body.” He went to the locker where he had put the initiator, took out the little instrument and, carrying it carefully, left the Mannschenn Drive room. Neither of the engineers, still staring with horrified fascination at their dead Chief, noticed.
“How . . . how did it happen?” asked the Second, after a long silence. “He fell into the field,” said Grimes.
“But how? How? He was always getting on us about being careless, and telling us what was liable to happen to us, and now it’s happened to him-“
“That’s the way of it,” contributed the Third, with a certain glum satisfaction. “Don’t do as I do, do as I say.”
“Have you a box?” asked Grimes.
“A box?” echoed the Second.
“Yes. A box.” Now that he was doing something, doing something useful, Grimes was beginning to feel a little better. “We can’t have a funeral while we’re running under interstellar drive. We have to . . . to put him somewhere.” Out of sight, he mentally added.
“That chest of spares?” muttered the Second. “Just the right size,” agreed the Third.
“Then get it,” ordered Grimes.
The chest, once the spares and their packing had been removed and stowed elsewhere, was just the right size. Its dimensions were almost those of a coffin. It was made of steel, its bottom magnetized, and remained where placed on the deck while the three men, fighting down their recurring nausea, handled the body into it. All of them sighed audibly in relief when, at last, the close-fitting lid covered the remains. Finally, the Third ran a welding torch around the joint. As he was doing so the lights flickered.
Was it because of the torch? wondered Grimes. Or was it because the beacon in the hold had been reactivated?
Somehow he could not feel any real interest.
CLEANED UP after a fashion, but still feeling physically ill, he was back in the Control Room. Craven was there, and Baxter was with him. Jane Pentecost had been relieved so that she could attend to her duties in the galley. “Not that I feel like a meal,” the Captain had said. “And I doubt very much that Mr. Grimes does either.”
“Takes a lot ter put me off me tucker,” the engineer declared cheerfully as he worked on the airlock door telltale panel.
“You didn’t see Mr. Wolverton, Mr. Baxter,” said Craven grimly.
“No, Skipper. An’ I’m not sorry I didn’t.” He paused in his work to rummage in his tool bag. He produced bulbs of brandy. “But I thought you an’ the Ensign might need some o’ this.”
Craven started to say something about cargo pillage, then changed his mind. He accepted the liquor without further quibbling. The three men sipped in silence.
Baxter carelessly tossed his squeezed empty bulb aside, continued with what he had been doing. The Captain said to Grimes, “Yes. We got the thing started again. And we’ve improved upon it.”
“Improved upon it, sir? How?”
“It’s no longer only a beacon. It’s also an alarm. As soon as it picks up the radiation from the similar pieces of apparatus aboard the enemy frigates, the buzzer that Mr. Baxter is fitting up will sound, the red light will flash. We shall have ample warning . . . .”
“She’ll be right, Skipper,” said the engineer.
“Thank you, Mr. Baxter. And now; if you don’t mind, I’d like a few words in private with Mr. Grimes.”
“Don’t be too hard on him, Skipper.”
Baxter winked cheerfully at Grimes and left the control room.
“Mr. Grimes,” Craven’s voice was grave. “Mr. Grimes, today, early in your career, you have learned a lesson that some of us never have to learn. You have killed a man-yes, yes, I know that it was not intentional-and you have been privileged to see the end result of your actions.
“There are many of us who are, who have been, killers. There are many of us who have pushed buttons but who have never seen what happens at the other end of the trajectory. Perhaps people slaughtered by explosion or laser beam do not look quite so horrible as Wolverton-but, I assure you, they often look horrible enough, and often die as slowly and as agonizingly. You know, now, what violent death looks like, Mr. Grimes. So tell me, are you still willing to push your buttons, to play pretty tunes on your battle organ?”
“And what did the bodies in this ship look like, Captain?” asked Grimes. Then, remembering that one of the bodies had belonged to the woman whom Craven had loved, he bitterly regretted having asked the question.
“Not pretty,” whispered Captain Craven. “Not at all pretty.” “I’ll push your buttons for you,” Grimes told him.
And for Jane Pentecost, he thought. And for the others. And for myself? The worst of it all is that I haven’t got the excuse of saying that it’s what I’m paid for . . . .
XVII
DOWN THE DARK dimensions fell Epsilon Sextans, falling free through the warped continuum. But aboard the ship time still possessed meaning, the master chronometer still ticked away the seconds, minutes and hours; the little man-made world was still faithful to that puissant god of scientific intelligences everywhere in the universe-the Clock. Watch succeeded watch in Control Room and engine room. Meals were prepared and served on time. There was even, toward the end, a revival of off-duty social activities: a chess set was discovered and brought into use, playing cards were produced and a bridge school formed.
But there was one social activity that, to Grimes’ disappointment was not resumed-the oldest social activity of them all. More than once he pleaded with Jane-and every time she laughed away his pleas. He insisted-and that made matters worse. He was (as he said), the donkey who had been allowed one nibble of the carrot and who could not understand why the carrot had been snatched away. He was (she said), a donkey. Period.
He should have guessed what was happening, but he did not. He was young, and inexperienced in the ways of women-of men and women. He
just could not imagine that Jane would spare more than a casual glance for any of the engineers or for the flabby, pasty youth who was the psionic radio officer-and in this he was right.
Epsilon Sextans was, for a ship of her class, very well equipped. In addition to the usual intercom system she was fitted with closed circuit television. In the event of emergency the Captain or watch officer, by the flip of a switch, could see what was happening in any compartment of the vessel. Over the control panel, in big, red letters, were the words: EMERGENCY USE ONLY. Grimes did not know what was the penalty for improper use of the apparatus in the Merchant Navy-but he did know that in the Survey Service officers had been cashiered and given an ignominious discharge for this offense. The more cramped and crowded the conditions in which men-and women-work and live, the more precious is privacy.
It was Grimes’ watch.
When he had taken over, all the indications were that it would be as boring as all the previous watches. All that was required of the watchkeeper was that he stay awake. Grimes stayed awake. He had brought a book with him into Control, hiding it inside his uniform shirt, and it held his attention for a while. Then, following the example of generations of watch officers, he set up a game of three dimensional tic-tac-toe in the chart tank and played, right hand against left. The left hand was doing remarkably well when a buzzer sounded. The Ensign immediately cleared the tank and looked at the airlock indicator panel. But there were no lights on the board, and he realized that it was the intercom telephone.
“Control,” he said into his microphone.
“P.R.O. here. I . . . I’m not happy, Mr. Grimes . . . .” “Who is?” quipped Grimes.
“I . . . I feel . . . smothered.”
“Something wrong with the ventilation in your shack?”
“No. NO. It’s like . . . it’s like a heavy blanket soaked in ice-cold water . . .
. You can’t move . . . you can’t shout . . . you can’t hear . . . . It’s like it was before . . . .”
“Before what?” snapped Grimes-and then as the other buzzer sounded, as the additional red light flashed on the telltale panel, he realized the stupidity of his question.
At once he pressed the alarm button. This was it, at last. Action Stations! Throughout the ship the bells were shrilling, the klaxons squawking. Hastily Grimes vacated the pilot’s chair, slipped into the one from which he could control his weapons-and from which he could reach out to other controls. But where was the Old Man? Where was Captain Craven? This was the moment that he had longed for, this was the consummation toward which all his illegalities had been directed. Damn it all, where was he?
Perhaps he was floating stunned in his quarters-starting up hurriedly from
sleep he could have struck his head upon some projection, knocked himself out. If this were the case he, Grimes, would have to call Jane from her own battle station in Sick Bay to render first aid. But there was no time to lose.
The Ensign reached out, flipped the switches that would give him the picture of the interior of the Captain’s accommodation. The screen brightened, came alive. Grimes stared at the luminous presentation in sick horror. Luminous it was-with that peculiar luminosity of naked female flesh. Jane was dressing herself with almost ludicrous haste. Of the Captain there was no sign-on the screen.
Craven snarled, with cold ferocity, “You damned, sneaking, prurient puppy!” Then, in a louder voice, “Switch that damn thing off! I’ll deal with you when this is over.”
“But, sir . . .” “Switch it off, I say!”
Cheeks burning, Grimes obeyed. Then he sat staring at his armament controls, fighting down his nausea, his physical sickness. Somehow, he found time to think bitterly, So I was the knight, all set and ready to slay dragons for his lady. And all the time, she . . . He did not finish the thought.
He heard a voice calling over the intercom, one of the engineers. “Captain, they’re trying to lock on! Same as last time. Random precession, sir?”
“No. Cut the Drive!”
“Cut the Drive?” Incredulously. “You heard me. Cut!” Then, to Grimes, “And what the hell are you waiting for?”
The Ensign knew what he had to do; he had rehearsed it often enough. He did it. From the nozzles that pierced the outer shell spouted the cloud of reflective vapor, just in time, just as the enemy’s lasers lashed out at their target. It seemed that the ship’s internal temperature rose suddenly and sharply-although that could have been illusion, fostered by the sight of the fiery fog glimpsed through the viewports before the armored shutters slammed home.
There were targets now on Grimes’ fire control screen, two of them, but he could not loose a missile until the tumbling rotors of the Drive had ceased to spin, to precess. The use of the anti-laser vapor screen had been risky enough. Abruptly the screens went blank-which signified that the temporal precession rates of hunted and hunters were no longer in synchronization, that the fields of the pirates had failed to lock on. In normal spacetime there would be no need to synchronize-and then the hunters would discover that their quarry had claws and teeth.
Aboard Epsilon Sextans the keening note of the Drive died to a whisper, a barely audible murmur, fading to silence. There was the inevitable second or so of utter disorientation when, as soon as it was safe, the engineers braked the gyroscopes.
Craven acted without hesitation, giving his ship headway and acceleration with Inertial Drive. He was not running-although this was the impression that he wished to convey. He was inviting rather than evading combat-but if the Waldegren captains chose to assume that Epsilon Sextans was, as she had been, an unarmed merchantman (after all, the anti-laser screen could have been jury rigged from normal ship’s stores and equipment), taking evasive action, that was their error of judgment.
Grimes watched his screens intently. Suddenly the two blips reappeared, astern, all of a hundred kilos distant, but closing. This he reported.
“Stand by for acceleration!” ordered Craven. “Reaction Drive-stand by!”
It was all part of the pattern-a last, frantic squandering of reaction mass that could do no more than delay the inevitable. It would look good from the enemy control rooms.
“Reaction Drive ready!” reported Baxter over the intercom.
“Thank you. Captain to all hands, there will be no countdown. Fire!”
From the corner of his eye Grimes saw Craven’s hand slam down on the key. Acceleration slammed him brutally back into his chair. There was a roar that was more like an explosion than a normal rocket firing, a shock that jarred and rattled every fitting in the Control Room.
Craven remarked quietly. “That must have looked convincing enough-but I hope that Baxter didn’t really blow a chamber.”
There was only the Inertial Drive now, and the two blips that, very briefly, had fallen astern, were now creeping up again, closing the range.
“Anti-laser,” ordered Craven briefly. “But, sir, it’ll just be wasting it. They’ll not be using laser outside twenty kilometers.”
“They’ll not be expecting a gunnery specialist aboard this wagon, either.” Once again the nozzles spouted, pouring out a cloud that fell rapidly astern
of the running ship, dissipating uselessly.
Craven looked at his own screens, frowned, muttered, “They’re taking their sweet time about it . . . probably low on reaction mass themselves.” He turned to Grimes. “I think a slight breakdown of the I.D.’s in order.”
“As you say, sir.” The Ensign could not forget having been called a damned, sneaking, prurient puppy. Let Craven make his own decisions.
“Stand by for Free Fall,” ordered the Captain quietly. The steady throbbing of the Inertial Drive faltered, faltered and ceased. There were two long minutes of weightlessness, and then, for five minutes, the Drive came back into operation. A breakdown, the enemy must be thinking. A breakdown, and the engineers sweating and striving to get the ship under way again. A breakdown-it would not be surprising after the mauling she had endured at the first encounter.
She hung there, and although her actual speed could be measured in kilometers a second she was, insofar as her accelerating pursuers were
concerned, relatively motionless. Grimes wondered why the warships did not use their radio, did not demand surrender-Epsilon Sextans’ transceiver was switched on, but no sound issued from the speaker but the hiss and crackle of interstellar static. He voiced his puzzlement to Craven.
Craven laughed grimly. “They know who we are-or they think that they know. And they know that we know who they are. After what happened before, why should we expect mercy? All that we can do now-they think-is to get the Mannschenn Drive going again. But with that comic beacon of theirs working away merrily they’ll be able to home on us, no matter how random our precession.” He laughed again. “They haven’t a care in the world, bless their little black hearts.”
Grimes watched his screens. Forty kilometers-thirty-“Sir, the ALGE?” he asked.
“Yes. It’s your party now.”
For the third time reflective vapor gushed from the nozzles, surrounding the ship with a dense cloud. Craven, who had been watching the dials of the external temperature thermometers, remarked quietly, “They’ve opened fire. The shell plating’s heating up. Fast.”
And in the Control Room it felt hot-and hotter, Grimes pressed the button that unmasked his batteries. The gas screen, as well as affording protection from laser, hid the ship from visual observation. The enemy would not be expecting defense by force of arms.
He loosed his first salvo, felt the ship tremble as the missiles ejected themselves from their launching racks. There they were on the screens-six tiny sparks, six moronic mechanical intelligences programmed to home upon and destroy, capable of countering evasive action so long as their propellant held out. There they were on the screens-six of them, then four, then one. This last missile almost reached its target-then it, too, blinked out. The Waldegren frigates were now using their laser for defense, not attack.
“I don’t think,” remarked Craven quietly, “that they’ll use missiles. Not yet, anyhow. They want our cargo intact.” He chuckled softly. “But we’ve got them worried.”
Grimes didn’t bother to reply. The telltale lights on his panel told him that the six AVM launchers were reloaded. The AMMs-the anti-missile
missiles-had not yet been fired. Dare he risk their use against big targets? He carried in his magazines stock sufficient for three full salvos only- and with no laser for anti-missile work dare he deplete his supply of this ammunition?
He had heard the AMMs described as “vicious little brutes.” They were to the Anti-Vessel Missiles as terriers are to mastiffs. Their warheads were small, but this was compensated for by their greater endurance. They were, perhaps, a little more “intelligent” than the larger rockets-and Grimes, vaguely foreseeing this present contingency, had made certain modifications to their “brains.”
He pushed the button that actuated his modifications, that overrode the original programming. He depressed the firing stud. He felt the vibration as the war-rockets streaked away from the ship, and on his screens watched the tiny points of light closing the range between themselves and the two big blips that were the targets. They were fast, and they were erratic. One was picked off by laser within the first ten seconds, but the others carried on, spurting and swerving, but always boring toward their objectives. Grimes could imagine the enemy gunnery officers flailing their lasers like men, armed only with sticks, defending themselves against a horde of small, savage animals. There was, of course, one sure defense-to start up the Mannschenn Drive and to slip back into the warped continuum where the missiles could not follow. But, in all probability, the Waldegren captains had yet to accept the fact, emotionally, that this helpless merchantman had somehow acquired the wherewithal to strike back.
Two of the AMMs were gone now, picked off by the enemy laser. Three were still closing on the target on Epsilon Sextans’ port quarter, and only one of the target abaft the starboard beam. Grimes loosed his second flight of AMMs, followed it with a full salvo of AVMs. Then, knowing that the protective vapor screen must have been thinned and shredded by his rocketry, he sent out a replenishing gush of reflective gas.
He heard Craven cry out in exultation. The three AMMs of the first flight had hit their target, the three sparks had fused with the blip that represented the raider to port. The three sparks that were the second flight were almost there, and overtaking them were the larger and brighter sparks of the second AVM salvo. The Anti-Missile Missiles would cause only minor damage to a ship-but, in all probability, they would throw fire control out of kilter, might even destroy laser projectors. In theory, one AVM would suffice to destroy a frigate; a hit by three at once would make destruction a certainty.
And so it was.
Seen only on the radar screen, as a picture lacking in detail painted on a fluorescent surface by an electron brush, it was anticlimactic. The blips, the large one, the three small ones and the three not so small, merged. And then there was an oddly shaped blob of luminescence that slowly broke up into a cluster of glowing fragments, a gradually expanding cluster, a leisurely burgeoning flower of pale fire.
Said Craven viciously, “The other bastard’s got cold feet . . . .”
And so it was. Where she had been on the screen was only darkness, a darkness in which the sparks that were missiles and anti-missiles milled about aimlessly. They would not turn upon each other-that would have been contrary to their programming. They would not, in theory, use their remaining fuel to home upon the only worthwhile target remaining-Epsilon Sextans herself. But, as Craven knew and as Grimes knew, theory and practice do not always coincide. Ships have been destroyed by their own missiles.
With reluctance Grimes pushed the DESTRUCT button. He said to the Captain, gesturing toward the wreckage depicted on the screen, “Pick up
survivors, sir? If there are any.”
“If there are any,” snarled Craven, “that’s their bad luck. No-we give chase to the other swine!”
XVIII
GIVE CHASE . . .
It was easier said than done. The surviving frigate had restarted her Mannschenn Drive, had slipped back into the warped continuum where, unless synchronization of precession rates was achieved and held, contact between vessels would be impossible. The Carlotti Beacon in Epsilon Sextans’ hold was worse than useless; it had been designed to be homed upon, not to be a direction-finding instrument. (In any case, it could function as such only if the beacon aboard the Waldegren ship were working.) Neither Craven nor Grimes knew enough about the device to effect the necessary modifications. The interstellar drive engineers thought that they could do it, but their estimates as to the time required ranged from days to weeks. Obviously, as long as it was operating it would be of value to the enemy only.
So it was switched off.
There was only one method available to Craven to carry out the
pursuit-psionic tracking. He sent for his Psionic Radio Officer, explained the situation. The telepath was a young man, pasty faced, unhealthy looking, but not unintelligent. He said at once, “Do you think, Captain, that the other officers and myself are willing to carry on the fight? After all, we’ve made our point. Wouldn’t it be wisest to carry on, now, for Waverley?”
“Speaking for meself,” put in Baxter, who had accompanied Jane Pentecost to Control, “an’ fer any other Rim Worlders present, I say that now the bastards are on the run it’s the best time ter smack ’em again. An’ hard. An’ the tame time-twisters think the same as we do. I’ve already had words with ’em.” He glared at the telepath. “Our snoopin’ little friend here should know very well what the general consensus of opinion is.”
“We do not pry,” said the communications officer stiffly. “But I am willing to abide by the will of the majority.”
“And don’t the orders of the Master come into it?” asked Craven, more in amusement than anger.
“Lawful commands, sir?” asked Grimes who, until now, had been silent. “Shut up!” snapped Jane Pentecost.
“Unluckily, sir,” the young man went on, “I do not possess the direction-finding talent. It is, as you know, quite rare.”
“Then what can you do?” demanded Craven.
“Sir, let me finish, please. The psionic damping device-I don’t know what it was, but I suspect that it was the brain of some animal with which I am unfamiliar-was in the ship that was destroyed. The other vessel carries only
a normal operator, with normal equipment-himself and some sort of organic amplifier. He is still within range, and I can maintain a listening watch-“
“And suppose he listens to you?” asked the Captain. “Even if you transmit nothing-as you will not do, unless ordered by myself-there could be stray thoughts. And that, I suppose, applies to all of us.”
The telepath smiled smugly. “Direction-finding is not the only talent. I’m something of a damper myself-although not in the same class as the one that was blown up. I give you my word, sir, that this vessel is psionically silent.” He raised his hand as Craven was about to say something. “Now, sir, I shall be able to find out where the other ship is heading. I know already that her Mannschenn Drive unit is not working at full capacity; it sustained damage of some kind during the action. I’m not a navigator, sir, but it seems to me that we could be waiting for her when she reemerges into the normal continuum.”
“You’re not a navigator,” agreed Craven, “and you’re neither a tactician nor a strategist. We should look rather silly, shouldn’t we, hanging in full view over a heavily fortified naval base, a sitting duck. Even so . . .” His big right hand stroked his beard. “Meanwhile, I’ll assume that our little friends are headed in the general direction of Waldegren, and set course accordingly. If Mr. Grimes will be so good as to hunt up the target star in the Directory . .
.”
Grimes did as he was told. He had made his protest, such as it was, and, he had to admit, he was in favor of continuing the battle. It was a matter of simple justice. Why should one shipload of murderers be destroyed, and the other shipload escape unscathed? He was still more than a little dubious of the legality of it all, but he did not let it worry him.
He helped Craven to line the ship up on the target star, a yellow, fifth magnitude spark. He manned the intercom while the Captain poured on the acceleration and then, with the ship again falling free, cut in the Mannschenn Drive. When the vessel was on course he expected that the Old Man would give the usual order-“Normal Deep Space routine, Mr. Grimes,”-but this was not forthcoming.
“Now,” said Craven ominously. “Now what, sir?”
“You have a short memory, Ensign. A conveniently short memory, if I may say so. Mind you, I was favorably impressed by the way you handled your armament, but that has no bearing upon what happened before.”
Grimes blushed miserably. He knew what the Captain was driving at. But, playing for time, he asked, “What do you mean, sir?”
Craven exploded. “What do I mean? You have the crust to sit there and ask me that! Your snooping, sir. Your violation of privacy. Even worse, your violation of the Master’s privacy! I shall not tell Miss Pentecost; it would be unkind to embarrass her. But . . .”
Grimes refrained from saying that he had seen Miss Pentecost wearing even
less than when, inadvertently, he had spied upon her. He muttered, “I can explain, sir.”
“You’d better. Out with it.”
“Well, sir, it was like this. I knew that we’d stumbled on the enemy-or that the enemy had stumbled upon us. I’d sounded Action Stations. And when you were a long time coming up to Control I thought that you must have hurt yourself, somehow . . . there have been such cases, as you know. So I thought I’d better check-“
“You thought . . . you thought. I’ll not say that you aren’t paid to
think-because that’s just what an officer is paid for. But you didn’t think hard enough, or along the right lines.” Grimes could see that Craven had accepted his explanation and that all would be well. The Captain’s full beard could not hide the beginnings of a smile. “Did you ever hear of Sir Francis Drake, Ensign?”
“No, sir.”
“He was an admiral-one of Queen Elizabeth’s admirals. The first Elizabeth, of course. When the Spanish Armada was sighted he did not rush down to his flagship yelling ‘Action Stations!’ He knew that there was time to spare, and so he quietly finished what he was doing before setting sail.”
“And what was he doing, sir?” asked Grimes innocently. Craven glared at him, then snapped, “Playing bowls.”
Then, suddenly, the tension was broken and both men collapsed in helpless laughter. In part it was reaction to the strain of battle-but in greater part it was that freemasonry that exists only between members of the same sex, the acknowledgment of shared secrets and shared experiences.
Grimes knew that Jane Pentecost was not for him-and wished Craven joy of her and she of the Captain. Perhaps they had achieved a permanent relationship, perhaps not-but, either way, his best wishes were with them.
Craven unbuckled his seat strap.
“Deep Space routine, Mr. Grimes. It is your watch, I believe.” “Deep Space routine it is, sir.”
Yes, it was still his watch (although so much had happened). It was still his watch, although there were barely fifteen minutes to go before relief. He was tired, more tired than he had ever been in his life before. He was tired, but not unhappy. He knew that the fact that he had killed men should be weighing heavily upon his conscience-but it did not. They, themselves, had been killers-and they had had a far better chance than any of their own victims had enjoyed.
He would shed no tears for them. XIX
CRAVEN CAME BACK to the Control Room at the change of watch, when Grimes was handing over to Jane Pentecost. He waited until the routine had been completed, then said, “We know where our friends are headed. They were, like us, running for Waldegren-but they’re having to change course.” He laughed harshly. “There must be all hell let loose on their home planet.”
“Why? What’s happened?” asked Grimes.
“I’ll tell you later. But, first of all, we have an alteration of course ourselves. Look up Dartura in the Directory, will you, while I get the Drive shut down.”
Epsilon Sextans was falling free through normal spacetime before Grimes had found the necessary information. And then there was the hunt for and the final identification of the target star, followed by the lining up by the use of the directional gyroscopes. There was the brief burst of acceleration and then, finally, the interstellar drive was cut in once more.
The Captain made a business of selecting and lighting a cigar. When the pungent combustion was well under way he said, “Our young Mr. Summers is a good snooper. Not as good as some people I know, perhaps.” Grimes flushed and Jane Pentecost looked puzzled. “He’s a super-sensitive. He let me have a full transcript of all the signals, out and in. It took us a little time to get them sorted out-but not too long, considering. Adler-that’s the name of the surviving frigate- was running for home. Her Captain sent a rather heavily edited report of the action to his Admiral. It seems that Adler and the unfortunate Albatross were set upon and beaten up by a heavily armed Survey Service cruiser masquerading as an innocent merchantman. The Admiral, oddly enough, doesn’t want a squadron of Survey Service battlewagons laying nuclear eggs on his base. So Adler has been told to run away and lose herself until the flap’s over . . . .”
“And did they send all that en clair?” demanded Grimes. “They must be mad!”
“No, they aren’t mad. The signal’s weren’t en clair.” “But . . .”
“Reliable merchant captains,” said Craven, “are often entrusted with highly confidential naval documents. There were some such in my safe aboard Delta Orionis, consigned to the Commanding Officer of Lindisfarne Base. The officer who delivered them to me is an old friend and shipmate of mine, and he told me that among them was the complete psionic code used by the Waldegren Navy. Well, when I had decided to take over this ship, I’d have been a bloody fool not to have Photostatted the whole damned issue.
“So that’s the way of it. Herr Kapitan von Leidnitz thinks he can say what he likes to his superiors without anybody else knowing what he’s saying. And all the while . . .” Craven grinned wolfishly. “It seems that there’s a minor base, of sorts, on Dartura. Little more than repair yards, although I suppose that there’ll be a few batteries for their protection. I can imagine the sort of personnel they have running the show-passed-over commanders and the like, not overly bright. By the time that we get there we shall have concocted a convincing story-convincing enough to let us hang off in orbit
until Adler appears on the scene. After all, we have their precious code. Why should they suspect us?”
“Why shouldn’t we be Adler?” asked Grimes. “What do you mean, Ensign?”
“The Waldegren Navy’s frigates are almost identical, in silhouette, with the Commission’s Epsilon class freighters. We could disguise this ship a little by masking the dissimilarities by a rough patching of plating. After all, Adler was in action and sustained some damage-“
“Complicated,” mused the Captain. “Too complicated. And two Adlers-each, presumably, in encoded psionic communication with both Waldegren and Dartura . . . . You’ve a fine, devious mind, young Grimes-but I’m afraid you’ve out-fixed yourself on that one.”
“Let me talk, sir. Let me think out loud. To begin with-a ship running on Mannschenn Drive can put herself into orbit about a planet, but it’s not, repeat not, recommended.”
“Damn right it’s not.”
“But we have the heels of Adler? Yes? Then we could afford a slight delay to carry out the modifications-the disguise-that I’ve suggested. After all, forty odd light years is quite a long way.”
“But what do we gain, Mr. Grimes?”
“The element of confusion, sir. Let me work it out. We disguise ourselves as well as we can. We find out, from intercepted and decoded signals, Adler’s ETA-and the coordinates of her breakthrough into the normal continuum. We contrive matters to be more or less in the same place at exactly the same time. And when the shore batteries and the guardships see no less than two Adlers slugging it out, each of them yelling for help in the secret code, they won’t know which of us to open fire on.”
“Grimes,” said Craven slowly, “I didn’t know you had it in you. All I can say is that I’m glad that you’re on our side.”
“Am I?” asked Grimes wonderingly,. suddenly deflated. He looked at the Captain who, after all, was little better than a pirate, whose accomplice he had become. He looked at the girl, but for whom he would not be here. “Am I? Damn it all, whose side am I on?”
“You’d better go below,” Craven told him gently. “Go below and get some sleep. You need it. You’ve earned it.”
“Jeremy,” said Jane Pentecost to Craven, “would you mind looking after the shop for half an hour or so? I’ll go with John.”
“As you please, my dear. As you please.”
It was the assurance in the Captain’s voice that hurt. It won’t make any difference to us, it implied. It can’t make any difference. Sure, Jane, go ahead. Throw the nice little doggie a bone . . . . we can spare it.
“No thank you,” said Grimes coldly, and left the Control Room. But he couldn’t hate these people.
XX
AFTER A LONG SLEEP Grimes felt better. After a meal he felt better still. It was a good meal, even though the solid portion of it came from tins. Craven’s standards were slipping, thought the Ensign. He was reasonably sure that such items as caviar, escargots, pƒt‚ de foie gras, Virginia ham, Brie, and remarkably alcoholic cherries were not included in the Commission’s inventory of emergency stores. And neither would be the quite reasonable Montrachet, although it had lost a little by being decanted from its original bottles into standard squeeze bulbs. But if the Captain had decided that the laborer was worthy of his hire, with the consignees of the cargo making their contribution toward that hire, that was his privilege . . .? Responsibility?-call it what you will.
Jane Pentecost watched him eat. As he was finishing his coffee she said, “Now that our young lion has fed, he is required in the Control Room.”
He looked at her both gratefully and warily. “What have I done now?” “Nothing, my dear. It is to discuss what you-we-will do. Next.”
He followed her to Control. Craven was there, of course, and so were Baxter and Summers. The Captain was enjoying one of his rank cigars, and a limp, roll-your-own cigarette dangled from the engineer’s lower lip. The telepath coughed pointedly every time that acrid smoke expelled by either man drifted his way. Neither paid any attention to him, and neither did Grimes when he filled and lighted his own pipe.
Craven said, “I’ve been giving that scheme of yours some thought. It’s a good one.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Don’t thank me. I should thank you. Mr. Summers, here, has been maintaining a careful listening watch. Adler’s ETA is such that we can afford to shut down the Drive to make the modifications that you suggest. To begin with, we’ll fake patching plates with plastic sheets-we can’t afford to cannibalize any more of the ship’s structure-so as to obscure our name and identification letters. We’ll use more plastic to simulate missile launchers and laser projectors-luckily there’s plenty of it in the cargo.”
“We found more than plastic while we were lookin’ for it,” said the engineer, licking his lips.
“That will do, Mr. Baxter. Never, in normal circumstances, should I have condoned . . .”
“These circumstances ain’t normal, Skipper, an’ we all bloody well know it.” “That will do, I say.” Craven inhaled deeply, then filled the air of the
Control Room with a cloud of smoke that, thought Grimes, would have
reflected laser even at close range. Summers almost choked, and Jane
snapped, “Jeremy!”
“This, my dear, happens to be my Control Room.” He turned again to the Ensign. “It will not be necessary, Mr. Grimes, to relocate the real weapons. They functioned quite efficiently where they are and, no doubt, will do so again. And now, as soon as I have shut down the Drive, I shall hand the watch over to you. You are well rested and refreshed.”
“Come on,” said Jane to Baxter. “Let’s get suited up and get that sheeting out of the airlock.”
“Couldn’t Miss Pentecost hold the fort, sir?” asked Grimes. He added, “I’ve been through the camouflage course at the Academy.”
“And so have I, Mr. Grimes. Furthermore, Miss Pentecost has had experience in working outside, but I don’t think that you have.”
“No, sir. But . . . “
“That will be all, Mr. Grimes.”
At Craven’s orders the Drive was shut down, and outside the viewports the sparse stars became stars again, were no longer pulsing spirals of
multi-colored light. Then, alone in Control, Grimes actuated his scanners so that he could watch the progress of the work outside the hull, and switched on the transceiver that worked on the spacesuit frequency.
This time he ran no risk of being accused of being a Peeping Tom.
He had to admire the competence with which his shipmates worked. The plastic sheeting had no mass to speak of, but it was awkward stuff to handle. Torches glowed redly as it was cut, and radiated invisibly in the infrared as it was shaped and welded. The workers, in their bulky, clumsy suits, moved with a grace that was in startling contrast to their attire-a Deep Space ballet, thought Grimes, pleasurably surprised at his own way with words. From the speaker of the transceiver came Craven’s curt orders, the brief replies of the others.
“This way a little . . . that’s it.” “She’ll do, Skipper.”
“No she won’t. Look at the bend on it!”
Then Jane’s laughing voice. “Our secret weapon, Jeremy. A laser that fires around corners!”
“That will do, Miss Pentecost. Straighten it, will you?” “Ay, ay, sir. Captain, sir.”
The two interstellar drive engineers were working in silence, but with efficiency. Aboard the ship were only Grimes and Summers, the telepath.
Grimes felt out of it, but somebody had to mind the shop, he supposed. But the likelihood of any customers was remote.
Then he stiffened in his chair. One of the spacesuited figures was falling away from the vessel, drifting out and away, a tiny, glittering satellite reflecting the harsh glare of the working floods, a little, luminous butterfly pinned to the black velvet of the Ultimate Night. Who was it? He didn’t know for certain, but thought that it was Jane. The ship’s interplanetary drives-reaction and inertial- were on remote control, but reaction drive was out; before employing it he would have to swing to the desired heading by use of the directional gyroscopes. But the inertial drive was versatile.
He spoke into the microphone of the transceiver. “Secure yourselves. I am proceeding to rescue.”
At once Craven’s voice snapped back, “Hold it, Grimes. Hold it! There’s no danger.”
“But, sir . . . ” “Hold it!”
Grimes could see the distant figure now from a viewport, but it did not seem to be receding any longer. Hastily he checked with the radar. Range and bearing were not changing. Then, with relative bearing unaltered, the range was closing. He heard Jane call out, “Got it! I’m on the way back!”
Craven replied, “Make it snappy-otherwise young Grimes’ll be chasing you all over the Universe!”
Grimes could see, now, the luminous flicker of a suit reaction unit from the lonely figure.
Later, he and the others examined the photographs that Jane had taken.
Epsilon Sextans looked as she was supposed to look-like a badly battle-scarred frigate of the Waldegren Navy.
XXI
IN TERMS OF SPACE and of time there was not much longer to go.
The two ships-one knowing and one unknowing-raced toward their rendezvous. Had they been plunging through the normal continuum there would have been, toward the finish, hardly the thickness of a coat of paint between them, the adjustment of a microsecond in temporal precession rates would have brought inevitable collision. Craven knew this from the results of his own observations and from the encoded position reports, sent at six hourly intervals, by Adler. Worried, he allowed himself to fall astern, a mere half kilometer. It would be enough-and, too, it would mean that the frigate would mask him from the fire of planet-based batteries.
Summers maintained his listening watch. Apart from the position reports he had little of interest to tell the Captain. Adler, once or twice, had tried to get in contact with the Main Base on Waldegren-but, other than from a curt directive to proceed as ordered there were no signals from the planet to the ship. Dartura Base was more talkative. That was understandable. There was no colony on the planet and the Base personnel must be bored, must be pining for the sight of fresh faces, the sound of fresh voices. They would
have their excitement soon enough, promised Craven grimly.
Through the warped continuum fell the two ships, and ahead the pulsating spiral that was the Dartura sun loomed ever brighter, ever larger. There were light years yet to go, but the Drive-induced distortions made it seem that tentacles of incandescent gas were already reaching out to clutch them, to drag them into the atomic furnace at the heart of the star.
In both Control Rooms watch succeeded watch-but the thoughts and the anticipations of the watchkeepers were not the same. Aboard Adler there was the longing for rest, for relaxation-although Adler’s Captain must have been busy with the composition of a report that would clear him (if possible) of blame for his defeat. Aboard Epsilon Sextans there was the anticipation of revenge-insofar as Craven, Baxter, Jane Pentecost and the survivors of the ship’s original personnel were concerned. Grimes? As the hour of reckoning approached he was more and more dubious. He did not know what to think, what to feel. There was the strong personal loyalty to Craven-and, even now, to Jane Pentecost. There was the friendship and mutual respect that had come into being between himself and Baxter. There was the knowledge that Adler’s crew were no better than pirates, were murderers beyond rehabilitation. There was the pride he felt in his own skill as a gunnery officer. (But, as such, was he, himself, any better than a pirate, a murderer? The exercise of his craft aboard a warship would be legal-but here, aboard a merchantman, and a disguised merchantman at that, the legality was doubtful. What had his motives been when he volunteered-and as a commissioned officer of the Survey Service he had had no right to do so-and what were his motives now?)
He, Grimes, was not happy. He had far too much time to ponder the implications. He was an accessory before, during and after the fact. He had started off correctly enough, when he had tried to prevent Craven from requisitioning the Survey Service cargo aboard Delta Orionis, but after that .
. . after he and Jane . . . (that, he admitted, was a memory that he wanted to keep, always, just as that other memory, of the bright picture of naked female flesh on the screen, he wished he could lose forever.)
He had started off correctly enough-and then, not only had he helped install the purloined armament but had used it. (And used it well, he told himself with a brief resurgence of pride.) Furthermore, the disguise of Epsilon Sextans had been his idea.
Oh, he was in it, all right. He was in up to his neck. What the final outcome of it all would be he did not care to contemplate.
But it would soon be over. He had no fears as to the outcome of the battle. The element of surprise would be worth at least a dozen missile launchers. Adler would never have the chance to use her laser.
ADLER, REPORTED SUMMERS, had shut down her Mannschenn Drive and emerged briefly into normal spacetime to make her final course adjustment. She was now headed not for the Dartura Sun but for the planet itself-or where the planet would be at the time of her final-and fatal- reemergence into the continuum. The last ETA was sent, together with the coordinates of her planetfall. Epsilon Sextans made her own course
adjustment-simultaneity in time and a half kilometer’s divergence in space being Craven’s objective. It was finicky work, even with the use of the ship’s computer, but the Captain seemed satisfied.
The race-the race that would culminate in a dead heat-continued. Aboard the frigate there was, reported Summers, a lessening of tension, the loosening up that comes when a voyage is almost over. Aboard the merchantman the tension increased. The interstellar drive engineers, Grimes knew, were no happier about it all than he was-but they could no more back out than he could. Craven was calm and confident, and Baxter was beginning to gloat. Jane Pentecost assumed the air of dedication that in women can be so infuriating. Grimes glumly checked and rechecked his weaponry. It passed the time.
Dartura itself was visible now-not as tiny disk of light but as a glowing annulus about its distorted primary. The thin ring of luminescence broadened, broadened. The time to go dwindled to a week, to days, to a day, and then to hours . . .
To minutes . . . To seconds . . . .
Craven and Grimes were in the Control Room; the others were at their various stations. From the intercom came the telepath’s voice, “He’s cutting the Drive-“
“Cut the Drive!” ordered the Captain.
In the Mannschenn Drive room the spinning, precessing gyroscopes slowed, slowed, ceased their endless tumbling, assumed the solidity that they exhibited only when at rest. For perhaps two seconds there was temporal confusion in the minds of all on board as the precession field died, and past, present and future inextricably mingled. Then there was a sun glaring through the viewports, bright in spite of the polarization-a sun, and, directly ahead, a great, green-orange planet. There was a ship . . . .
There were ships-ahead of them, astern, on all sides.
There were ships-and, booming from the intership transceiver, the transceiver that was neither tuned nor switched on (but navies could afford induction transmitters with their fantastic power consumption), came the authorative voice: “Inflexible to Adler! Heave to for search and seizure ! Do not attempt to escape-our massed fields will hold you!”
The effect was rather spoiled when the same voice added, in bewilderment, “Must be seeing double . . . there’s two of the bastards.” The bewilderment did not last long. “Inflexible to Adler and to unidentified vessel. Heave to for search and seizure!”
“Hold your fire, Mr. Grimes,” ordered Craven, quietly and bitterly. “It’s the Survey Service.”
“I know,” replied Grimes-and pressed the button. XXII
HE NEVER KNEW just why he had done so.
Talking it over afterward, thinking about it, he was able to evolve a theory that fitted the facts. During the brief period immediately after the shutting down of the Drive, during the short session of temporal disorientation, there had been prescience, of a sort. He had known that Adler, come what may, would attempt one last act of defiance and revenge, just as Adler’s Captain or Gunnery Officer must have known, in that last split second, that Nemesis was treading close upon his heels.
He pushed the button-and from the nozzles in the shell plating poured the reflective vapor, the protective screen that glowed ruddily as Adler’s lasers slashed out at it.
From the speaker of the dead transceiver, the transceiver that should have been dead, roared the voice of the Survey Service Admiral. “Adler! Cease fire! Cease fire, damn you!” There was a pause, then: “You’ve asked for it!”
She had asked for it-and now she got it. Suddenly the blip on Grimes’ screen that represented the Waldegren frigate became two smaller blips, and then four. The rolling fog outside Epsilon Sextans’ viewports lost its luminosity, faded suddenly to drab grayness. The voice from the transceiver said coldly, “And now you, whoever you are, had better identify yourself. And fast.”
Craven switched on the communications equipment. He spoke quietly into the microphone. “Interstellar Transport Commission’s Epsilon Sextans. Bound Waverly, with general cargo . . .”
“Bound Waverley? Then what the hell are you doing here? And what’s that armament you’re mounting?”
“Plastic,” replied the Captain. “Plastic dummies.”
“And I suppose your ALGE is plastic, too. Come off it, Jerry. We’ve already boarded your old ship, and although your ex-Mate was most reluctant to talk we got a story of sorts from him.”
“I thought I recognized your voice, Bill. May I congratulate you upon your belated efforts to stamp out piracy?”
“And may I deplore your determination to take the law into your own hands? Stand by for the boarding party.”
Grimes looked at Craven, who was slumped in his seat. The Master’s full beard effectively masked his expression. “Sir,” asked the Ensign. “What can they do? What will they do?”
“You’re the space lawyer, Grimes. You’re the expert on Survey Service rules and regulations. What will it be, do you think? A medal-or a firing squad? Praise or blame?”
“You know the Admiral, sir?”
“Yes. I know the Admiral. We’re old shipmates.”
“Then you should be safe.”
“Safe? I suppose so. Safe from the firing squad-but not safe from my employers. I’m a merchant captain, Grimes, and merchant captains aren’t supposed to range the spacelanes looking for trouble. I don’t think they’ll dare fire me-but I know that I can never expect command of anything better than Delta class ships, on the drearier runs.” Grimes saw that Craven was smiling. “But there’re still the Rim Worlds. There’s still the Sundowner Line, and the chance of high rank in the Rim Worlds Navy when and if there is such a service.”
“You have . . . inducements, sir?”
“Yes. There are . . . inducements. Now.”
“I thought, once,” said Grimes, “that I could say the same. But not now. Not any longer. Even so . . . I’m Survey Service, sir, and I should be proud of my service. But in this ship, this merchant vessel, with her makeshift armament, we fought against heavy odds, and won. And, just now, we saved ourselves. It wasn’t the Survey Service that saved us.”
“Don’t be disloyal,” admonished Craven.
“I’m not being disloyal, sir. But . . . or, shall we say, I’m being loyal. You’re the first captain under whom I served under fire. If you’re going out to the Rim Worlds I’d like to come with you.”
“Your commission, Grimes. You know that you must put in ten years’ service before resignation is possible.”
“But I’m dead.”
“Dead!”
“Yes. Don’t you remember? I was snooping around in the Mannschenn Drive room and I got caught in the temporal precession field. My body still awaits burial; it’s in a sealed metal box in the deep freeze. It can never be identified.”
Craven laughed. “I’ll say this for you. You’re ingenious. But how do we account for the absence of the late Mr. Wolverton? And your presence aboard this ship?”
“I can hide, sir, and . . .”
“And while you’re hiding you’ll concoct some story that will explain everything. Oh Grimes, Grimes-you’re an officer I wish I could always have with me. But I’ll not stand in the way of your career. All I can do, all I will do, is smooth things over on your behalf with the Admiral. I should be able to manage that.”
Jane Pentecost emerged from the hatch in the Control Room deck. Addressing Craven she said formally, “Admiral Williams, sir.” She moved to one side to make way for the flag officer.
“Jerry, you bloody pirate!” boomed Williams, a squat, rugged man the left
breast of whose shirt was ablaze with ribbons. He advanced with outstretched hand.
“Glad to have you aboard, Bill. This is Liberty Hall-you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!”
“Not again!” groaned Grimes.
“And who is this young man?” asked the Admiral.
“I owe you-or your Service-an apology, Bill. This is Ensign Grimes, who was a passenger aboard Delta Orionis. I’m afraid that I . . . er . . . press-ganged him into my service. But he has been most . . . cooperative? Uncooperative? Which way do you want it?
“As we are at war with Waldegren-I’d say cooperative with reservations. Was it he, by the way, who used the ALGE? Just as well for you all that he did.”
“At war with Waldegren?” demanded Jane Pentecost. “So you people have pulled your fingers out at last.”
The Admiral raised his eyebrows.
“One of my Rim Worlders,” explained Craven. “But I shall be a Rim Worlder myself shortly.”
“You’re wise, Jerry. I’ve got the buzz that the Commission is taking a very dim view of your piracy or privateering or whatever it was, and my own lords and masters are far from pleased with you. You’d better get the hell out before the lawyers have decided just what crimes you are guilty of.”
“As bad as that?” “As bad as that.”
“And young Grimes, here?”
“We’ll take him back. Six months’ strict discipline aboard my flagship will undo all the damage that you and your ideas have done to him. And now, Jerry, I’d like your full report.”
“In my cabin, Bill. Talking is thirsty work.” “Then lead on. It’s your ship.”
“And it’s your watch, Mr. Grimes. She’ll come to no harm on this trajectory while we get things sorted out.”
GRIMES SAT WITH JANE PENTECOST in the Control Room. Through the ports, had he so desired, he could have watched the rescue teams extricating the survivors from the wreckage of Adler; he could have stared out at the looming bulk of Dartura on the beam. But he did not do so, and neither did he look at his instruments.
He looked at Jane. There was so much about her that he wanted to remember-and, after all, so very little that he was determined to forget.
The intercom buzzed. “Mr. Grimes, will you pack whatever gear you have and prepare to transfer with Admiral Williams to the flagship? Hand the watch over to Miss Pentecost.”
“But you’ll be shorthanded, sir.”
“The Admiral is lending me a couple of officers for the rest of the voyage.” “Very good, sir.”
Grimes made no move. He looked at Jane-a somehow older, a tireder, a more human Jane than the girl he had first met. He said, “I’d have liked to have come out to the Rim with you . . . .”
She said, “It’s impossible, John.” “I know. But . . .”
“You’d better get packed.”
He unbuckled his seat belt, went to where she was sitting. He kissed her. She responded, but it was only the merest flicker of a response.
He said, “Goodbye.”
She said, “Not goodbye. We’ll see you out on the Rim, sometime.” With a bitterness that he was always to regret he replied, “Not very likely.”
The End
Final notes on John Grimes
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Double Star is considered by many to be the finest of his titles. Brian Aldiss called it his “most enjoyable novel.” Whether it is the simplicity of a lively tale, the complexity of the situation, or the depth of characterization, the book has developed a loyal following. It also won Heinlein his first Hugo.
Double Star is one of Robert Heinlein’s most enjoyable early period SF novels, a short and tightly-plotted story of out-of-work actor Lawrence Smith (aka “The Great Lorenzo”), who is unexpectedly tapped for a very important acting job, to impersonate an important politician named John Bonforte who has been kidnapped.
Double Star
Chapter 1
If a man walks in dressed like a hick and acting as if he owned the place, he’s a spaceman.
It is a logical necessity. His profession makes him feel like boss of all creation; when he sets foot dirtside he is slumming among the peasants. As for his sartorial inelegance, a man who is in uniform nine tenths of the time and is more used to deep space than to civilization can hardly be expected to know how to dress properly. He is a sucker for the alleged tailors who swarm around every spaceport peddling “ground outfits.”
I could see that this big-boned fellow had been dressed by Omar the Tentmaker-padded shoulders that were too big to start with, shorts cut so that they crawled up his hairy thighs as he sat down, a ruffled chemise that might have looked well on a cow.
But I kept my opinion to myself and bought him a drink with my last half-Imperial, considering it an investment, spacemen being the way they are about money. “Hot jets!” I said as we touched glasses. He gave me a quick glance.
That was my initial mistake in dealing with Dak Broadbent. Instead of answering, “Clear space!” or, “Safe grounding!” as he should have, he looked me over and said softly, “Anice sentiment, but to the wrong man. I’ve never been out.”
That was another good place to keep my mouth shut. Spacemen did not often come to the bar of Casa Manana; it was not their Sort of hotel and it’s miles from the port. When one shows up in ground clothes, seeks a dark corner of the bar, and objects to being called a spaceman, that’s his business. I had picked that spot myself so that I could see without being seen-I owed a little money here and there at the time, nothing important but embarrassing. I should have assumed that he had his reasons, too, and respected them.
But my vocal cords lived their own life, wild and free. “Don’t give me that, shipmate,” I replied. “If you’re a ground hog, I’m Mayor of Tycho City. I’ll wager you’ve done more drinking on Mars,” I added, noticing the cautious way he lifted his glass, a dead giveaway of low-gravity habits, “than you’ve ever done on Earth.”
“Keep your voice down!” he cut in without moving his lips. “What makes you sure that I am a voyageur? You don’t know me.” “Sorry,” I said. “You can be anything you like. But I’ve got eyes. You gave yourself away the minute you walked in.”
He said something under his breath. “How?”
“Don’t let it worry you. I doubt if anyone else noticed. But I see things other people don’t see.” I handed him my card, a little smugly perhaps. There is only one Lorenzo Smythe, the One- Man Stock Company. Yes, I’m “The Great Lorenzo”-stereo, canned opera, legit-“Pantomimist and Mimicry Artist Extraordinary.”
He read my card and dropped it into a sleeve pocket-which annoyed me; those cards had cost me money-genuine imitation hand engraving. “I see your point,” he said quietly, “but what was wrong with the way I behaved?”
“I’ll show you,” I said. “I’ll walk to the door like a ground hog and come back the way you walk. Watch.” I did so, making the trip back in a slightly exaggerated version of his walk to allow for his untrained eye-feet sliding softly along the floor as if it were deck plates, weight carried forward and balanced from the hips, hands a trifle forward and clear of the body, ready to grasp.
There are a dozen other details which can’t be set down in words; the point is you have to be a spaceman when you do it, with a spaceman’s alert body and unconscious balance-you have to live it. Acity man blunders along on smooth floors all his life, steady floors with Earth-normal gravity, and will trip over a cigarette paper, like as not. Not so a spaceman.
“See what I mean?” I asked, slipping back into my seat. “I’m afraid I do,” he admitted suurly. “Did I walk like that?” “Yes.”
“Hmmm… Maybe I should take lessons from you.” “You could do worse,” I admitted.
He sat there looking me over, then started to speak-changed his mind and wiggled a finger at the bartender to refill our glasses. When the drinks came, he paid for them, drank his, and slid out of his seat all in one smooth motion. “Wait for me,” he said quietly.
With a drink he had bought sitting in front of me I could not refuse. Nor did I want to; he interested me. I liked him, even on ten minutes’ acquaintance; he was the sort of big ugly- handsome galoot that women go for and men take orders from.
He threaded his way gracefully through the room and passed a table of four Martians near the door. I didn’t like Martians. I did not fancy having a thing that looks like a tree trunk topped off by a sun helmet claiming the privileges of a man. I did not like the way they grew pseudo limbs; it reminded me of snakes crawling out of their holes. I did not like the fact that they could look all directions at once without turning their heads-if they had had heads, which of course they don’t. And I could not stand their smell!
Nobody could accuse me of race prejudice. I didn’t care what a man’s color, race, or religion was. But men were men, whereas Martians were things. They weren’t even animals to my way of thinking. I’d rather have had a wart hog around me any day. Permitting them in restaurants and bars used by men struck me as outrageous. But there was the Treaty, of course, so what could I do?
These four had not been there when I came in, or I would have whiffed them. For that matter, they certainly could not have been there a few moments earlier when I had walked to the door and back. Now there they were, standing on their pedestals around a table, pretending to be people. I had not even heard the air conditioning speed up.
The free drink in front of me did not attract me; I simply wanted my host to come back so that I could leave politely. It suddenly occurred to me that he had glanced over that way just before he had left so hastily and I wondered if the Martians had anything to do with it. I looked over at them, trying to see if they were paying attention to our table-but how could you tell what a Martian was looking at or what it was thinking? That was another thing I didn’t like about them.
I sat there for several minutes fiddling with my drink and wondering what had happened to my spaceman friend. I had hoped that his hospitality might extend to dinner and, if we became sufficiently simpatico, possibly even to a small temporary loan. My other prospects were-I admit it!-slender. The last two times I had tried to call my agent his autosecretary had simply recorded the message, and unless I deposited coins in the door, my room would not open to me that night … That was how low my fortunes had ebbed: reduced to sleeping in a coin- operated cubicle.
In the midst of my melancholy ponderings a waiter touched me on the elbow. “Call for you, sir.” “Eh? Very well, friend, will you fetch an instrument to the table?”
“Sorry, sir, but I can’t transfer it. Booth 12 in the lobby.”
“Oh. Thank you,” I answered, making it as warm as possible since I was unable to tip him. I swung wide around the Martians as I went Out.
I soon saw why the call had not been brought to the table; No. 12 was a maximum-security booth, sight, sound, and scramble. The tank showed no image and did not clear even after the door locked behind me. It remained milky until I sat down and placed my face within pickup, then the opalescent clouds melted away and I found myself looking at my spaceman friend.
“Sorry to walk out on you,” he said quickly, “but I was in a hurry. I want you to come at once to Room 2106 of the Eisenhower.”
He offered no explanation. The Eisenhower is just as unlikely a hotel for spacemen as Casa Manana. I could smell trouble. You don’t pick up a stranger in a bar and then insist that he come to a hotel room-well, not one of the same sex, at least.
“Why?” I asked.
The spaceman got that look peculiar to men who are used to being obeyed without question; I studied it with professional interest-it’s not the same as anger; it is more like a thundercloud just before a storm. Then he got himself in hand and answered quietly, “Lorenzo, there is no time to explain. Are you open to a job?”
“Do you mean a professional engagement?” I answered slowly. For a horrid instant I suspected that he was offering me … Well, you know-a job. Thus far I had kept my professional pride intact, despite the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
“Oh, professional, of course!” he answered quickly. “This requires the best actor we can get.”
I did not let my relief show in my face. It was true that J was ready for any professional work-I would gladly have played the balcony in Romeo and Juliet-but it does not do to be eager. “What is the nature of the engagement?” I asked. “My calendar is rather full.”
He brushed it aside. “I can’t explain over the phone. Perhaps you don’t know it, but any scrambler circuit can be unscrambled- with the proper equipment. Shag over here fast!”
He was eager; therefore I could afford not to be eager. “Now really,” I protested, “what do you think I am? Abellman? Or an untried juvenile anxious for the privilege of carrying a spear? I am Lorenzo!” I threw up my chin and looked offended. “What is your offer?”
“Uh… Damn it, I can’t go into it over the phone. How much do you get?” “Eh? You are asking my professional salary?”
“Yes, yes!”
“For a single appearance? Or by the week? Or an option contract?” “Never mind. What do you get by the day?”
“My minimum fee for a one-evening date is one hundred Imperials.” This was simple truth. Oh, I have been coerced at times into paying some scandalous kickbacks, but the voucher never read less than my proper fee. Aman has his standards. I’d rather starve.
“Very well,” he answered quickly, “one hundred Imperials in cash, laid in your hand the minute you show up here. But hurry!”
“Eh?” I realized with sudden dismay that I could as easily have said two hundred, or even two fifty. “But I have not agreed to accept the engagement.”
“Never mind that! We’ll talk it over when you get here. The hundred is yours even if you turn us down. If you accept-well, call it bonus, over and above your salary. Now will you sign off and get over here?”
I bowed. “Certainly, sir. Have patience.”
Fortunately the Eisenhower is not too far from the Casa, for I did not even have a minimum for tube fare. However, although the art of strolling is almost lost, I savor it-and it gave me time to collect my thoughts. I was no fool; I was aware that when another man is too anxious to force money on one, it is time to examine the cards, for there is almost certainly something illegal, or dangerous, or both, involved in the matter. I was not unduly fussy about legality qua legality; I agreed with the Bard that the Law is often an idiot. But in the main I had stayed on the right side of the Street.
But presently I realized that I had insufficient facts, so I put it out of my mind, threw my cape over my right shoulder, and strode along, enjoying the mild autumn weather and the rich and varied odors of the metropolis. On arrival I decided to forego the main entrance and took a bounce tube from the sub-basement to the twenty-first floor, I having at the time a vague feeling that this was not the place to let my public recognize me. My voyageur friend let me in. “You took long enough,” he snapped.
“Indeed?” I let it go at that and looked around me. It was an expensive suite, as I had expected, but it was littered and there were at least a dozen used glasses and as many coffee cups scattered here and there; it took no skill to see that I was merely the latest of many visitors. Sprawled on a couch, scowling at me, was another man, whom I tabbed tentatively as a spaceman. I glanced inquiringly but no introduction was offered.
“Well, you’re here, at least. Let’s get down to business.”
“Surely. Which brings to mind,” I added, “there was mention of a bonus, or retainer.” “Oh, yes.” He turned to the man on the couch. “Jock, pay him.”
“For what?” “Pay him!”
I now knew which one was boss-although, as I was to learn, there was usually little doubt when Dak Broadbent was in a room. The other fellow stood up quickly, still scowling, and counted Out to me a fifty and five tens. I tucked it away casually without checking it and said, “I am at your disposal, gentlemen.”
The big man chewed his lip. “First, I want your solemn oath not even to talk in your sleep about this job.”
“If my simple word is not good, is my oath better?” I glanced at the smaller man, slouched again on the couch. “I don’t believe we have met. I am Lorenzo.” He glanced at me, looked away. My barroom acquaintance said hastily, “Names don’t matter in this.”
“No? Before my revered father died he made me promise him three things: first, never to mix whisky with anything but water; second, always to ignore anonymous letters; and lastly, never to talk with a stranger who refuses to give his name. Good day, sirs.” I turned toward the door, their hundred Imperials warm in my pocket.
“Hold it!” I paused. He went on, “You are perfectly right. My name is-“ “Skipper!”
“Stow it, Jock. I’m Dak Broadbent; that’s Jacques Dubois glaring at us. We’re both voyageurs-master pilots, all classes, any acceleration.” I bowed. “Lorenzo Smythe,” I said modestly, “jongleur and artist-care of The Lambs Club.” I made a mental note to pay my dues.
“Good. Jock, try smiling for a change. Lorenzo, you agree to keep our business secret?” “Under the rose. This is a discussion between gentlemen.”
“Whether you take the job or not?”
“Whether we reach agreement or not. I am human, but, short of illegal methods of questioning, your confidences are sale with me.” “I am well aware of what neodexocaine will do to a man’s forebrain, Lorenzo. We don’t expect the impossible.”
“Dak,” Dubois said urgently, “this is a mistake. We should at least—”
“Shut up, Jock. I want no hypnotists around at this point. Lorenzo, we want you to do an impersonation job. It has to be so perfect that no one-I mean no one-will ever know it took place. Can you do that sort of a job?”
I frowned. “The first question is not ‘Can I?’ but ‘Will I?’ What are the circumstances?”
“Uh, we’ll go into details later. Roughly, it is the ordinary doubling job for a well-known public figure. The difference is that the impersonation will have to be so perfect as to fool people who know him well and must see him close up. It won’t be just reviewing a parade from a grandstand, or pinning medals on girl scouts.” He looked at me shrewdly. “It will take a real artist.”
“No,” I said at once.
“Huh? You don’t know anything about the job yet. If your conscience is bothering you, let me assure you that you will not be working against the interests of the man you will impersonate- nor against anyone’s legitimate interests. This is a job that really needs to be done.”
“No.”
“Well, for Pete’s sake, why? You don’t even know how much we will pay.” “Pay is no object,” I said firmly. “I am an actor, not a double.”
“I don’t understand you. There are lots of actors picking up spare money making public appearances for celebrities.”
“I regard them as prostitutes, not colleagues. Let me make myself clear. Does an author respect a ghost writer? Would you respect a painter who allowed another man to sign his work- for money? Possibly the spirit of the artist is foreign to you, sir, yet perhaps I may put it in terms germane to your own profession. Would you, simply for money, be content to pilot a ship while some other man, not possessing your high art, wore the uniform, received the credit, was publicly acclaimed as the Master? Would you?”
Dubois snorted. “How much money?”
Broadbent frowned at him. “I think I understand your objection.”
“To the artist, sir, kudos comes first. Money is merely the mundane means whereby he is enabled to create his art.”
“Hmm… All right, so you won’t do it just for money. Would you do it for other reasons? If you felt that it had to be done and you were the only one who could do it successfully?” “I concede the possibility; I cannot imagine the circumstances.”
“You won’t have to imagine them; we’ll explain them to you.” Dubois jumped up off the couch. “Now see here, Dak, you can’t—” “Cut it, Jock! He has to know.”
“He doesn’t have to know now-and here. And you haven’t any right to jeopardize everybody else by telling him. You don’t know a thing about him.” “It’s a calculated risk.” Broadbent turned back to me.
Dubois grabbed his arm, swung him around. “Calculated risk be damned! Dak, I’ve strung along with you in the past~-but this time before I’ll let you shoot off your face, well, one or the other of us isn’t going to be in any shape to talk.”
Broadbent looked startled, then grinned coldly down at Dubois. “Think you’re up to it, Jock old son?”
Dubois glared up at him, did not flinch. Broadbent was a head taller and outweighed him by twenty kilos. I found myself for the first time liking Dubois; I am always touched by the gallant audacity of a kitten, the fighting heart of a bantam cock, or the willingness of a little mart to die in his tracks rather than knuckle under…And, while I did not expect Broadbent to kill him, I did think that I was about to see Dubois used as a dust rag.
I had no thought of interfering. Every man is entitled to elect the time and manner of his own destruction.
I could see tension grow. Then suddenly l3roadbent laughed and clapped Dubois on the shoulder. “Good for you, Jock!” He turned to me and said quietly, “Will you excuse us a few moments? My friend and I must make heap big smoke.”
The suite was equipped with a hush corner, enclosing the autograph and the phone. Broadbent took Dubois by the arm and led him over there; they stood and talked urgently. Sometimes such facilities in public places like hotels are not all that they might be; the sound waves fail to cancel out completely. But the Eisenhower is a luxury house and in this case,
at least, the equipment worked perfectly; I could see their lips move but I could hear no sound.
But I could indeed see their lips move. Broadbent’s face was toward me and Dubois I could glimpse in a wall mirror. When I was performing in my famous mentalist act, I found out why my father had beaten my tail until I learned the silent language of lips-in my mentalist act I always performed in a brightly lighted hail and made use of spectacles which-but never mind; I could read lips.
Dubois was saying: “Dak, you bloody, stupid, unprintable, illegal and highly improbable obscenity, do you want us both to wind up counting rocks on Titan? This conceited pipsqueak will spill his guts.”
I almost missed Broadbent’s answer. Conceited indeed! Aside from a cold appreciation of my own genius I felt that I was a modest man. Broadbent: “… doesn’t matter if the game is crooked when it’s the only game in town. Jock, there is nobody else we can use.”
Dubois: “All right, then get Doc Scortia over here, hypnotize him, and shoot him the happy juice. But don’t tell him the score- not until he’s conditioned, not while we are still on dirt.” Broadbent: “Uh, Scortia himself told me that we could not depend on hypno and drugs, not for the performance we need.
We’ve got to have his co-operation, his intelligent co-operation.”
Dubois snorted. “What intelligence? Look at him. Ever see a rooster strutting through a barnyard? Sure, he’s the right size and shape and his skull looks a good bit like the Chief-but there is nothing behind it. He’ll lose his nerve, blow his top, and give the whole thing away. He can’t play the part-he’s just a ham actor!”
If the immortal Caruso had been charged with singing off key, he could not have been more affronted than I. But I trust I justified my claim to the mantle of Burbage and Booth at that moment; I went on buffing my nails and ignored it-merely noting that I would someday make friend Dubois both laugh and cry within the span of twenty seconds. I waited a few moments more, then stood up and approached the hush corner. When they saw that I intended to enter it, they both shut up. I said quietly, “Never mind, gentlemen, I have changed my mind.”
Dubois looked relieved. “You don’t want the job.”
“I mean that I accept the engagement. You need not make explanations. I have been assured by friend Broadbent that the work is such as not to trouble my conscience-and I trust him. He has assured rue that he needs an actor. But the business affairs of the producer are not my concern. I accept.”
Dubois looked angry, but shut up. I expected Broadbent to look pleased and relieved; instead he looked worried. “All right,” he agreed, “let’s get on with it. Lorenzo, I don’t know exactly how long we will need you. No more than a few days, I’m certain-and you will be on display only an hour or so once or twice in that time.”
“That does not matter as long as I have time to study the role- the impersonation. But approximately how many days will you need me? I should notify my agent.”
“Oh no! Don’t do that.”
“Well-how long? As much as a week?” “It will be less than that-or we’re sunk.”
“Never mind. Will a hundred Imperials a day suit you?”
I hesitated, recalling how easily he had met my minimum just to interview me-and decided this was a time to be gracious. I waved it aside. “Let’s not speak of such things. No doubt you will present me with an honorarium consonant with the worth of my performance.”
“All right, all right.” Broadbent turned away impatiently. “Jock, call the field. Then call Langston and tell him we’re starting Plan Mardi Gras. Synchronize with him. Lorenzo …” He motioned for me to follow and strode into the bath. He opened a small case and demanded, “Can you do anything with this junk?”
“Junk” it was-the sort of overpriced and unprofessional makeup kit that is sold over the counter to stage-struck youngsters. I stared at it with mild disgust. “Do I understand, sir, that you expect me to start an impersonation now? Without time for study?”
“Huh? No, no, no! I want you to change your face-on the outside chance that someone might recognize you as we leave here.
That’s possible, isn’t it?”
I answered stiffly that being recognized in public was a burden that all celebrities were forced to carry. I did not add that it was certain that countless people would recognize The Great Lorenzo in any public place.
“Okay. So change your phiz so it’s not yours.” He left abruptly.
I sighed and looked over the child’s toys he had handed me, no doubt thinking they were the working tools of my profession- grease paints suitable for clowns, reeking spirit gum, crepe hair which seemed to have been raveled from Aunt Maggie’s parlor carpet. Not an ounce of Silicoflesh, no electric brushes, no modern amenities of any sort. But a true artist can do wonders with a burnt match, or oddments such as one might find in a kitchen- and his own genius. I arranged the lights and let myself fall into creative reverie.
There are several ways to keep a well-known face from being recognized. The simplest is misdirection. Place a man in uniform and his face is not likely to be noticed-do you recall the lace of the last policeman you encountered? Could you identify him if you saw him next in mufti? On the same principle is the attentiongoing special feature. Equip a man with an enormous nose, disfigured perhaps with acne rosacea; the vulgar will stare in fascination at the nose itself, the polite will turn away-but neither will see the face.
I decided against this primitive maneuver because I judged that my employer wished me not to be noticed at all rather than remembered for an odd feature without being recognized. This is much more difficult; anyone can be conspicuous but it takes real skill not to be noticed. I needed a face as commonplace, as impossible to remember as the true face of the immortal Alec Guinness. Unfortunately my aristocratic features are entirely too distinguished, too handsome-a regrettable handicap for a character actor. As my father used to say, “Larry, you are too damned pretty! If you don’t get off your lazy duff and learn the business, you are going to spend fifteen years as a juvenile, under the mistaken impression that you are an
actor-then wind up selling candy in the lobby. ‘Stupid’ and ‘pretty’ are the two worst vices in show business-and you’re both.”
Then he would take off his belt and stimulate my brain. Father was a practical psychologist and believed that warming the glutei maximi with a strap drew excess blood away from a boy’s brain. While the theory may have been shaky, the results justified the method; by the time I was fifteen I could stand on my head on a slack wire and quote page after page of Shakespeare and Shaw-or steal a scene simply by lighting a cigarette.
I was deep in the mood of creation when Broadbent stuck his face in. “Good grief!” he snapped. “Haven’t you done anything yet?”
I stared coldly. “I assumed that you wanted my best creative work-which cannot be hurried. Would you expect a cordon bleu to compound a new sauce on the back of a galloping horse?” “Horses be damned!” He glanced at his watch finger. “You have six more minutes. If you can’t do anything in that length of time, we’ll just have to take our chances.”
Well! Of course I prefer to have plenty of time-but I had understudied my father in his quick-change creation, The Assassination of Hu*ey Long, fifteen parts in seven minutes-and had once played it in nine seconds less time than he did. “Stay where you are!” I snapped back at him. “I’ll be with you at once.” I then put on “Benny Grey,” the colorless handy man who does the murders in The House with No Doors-two quick strokes to put dispirited lines into my cheeks from nose to mouth corners, a mere suggestion of bags under my eyes, and Factor’s
#5 sallow over all, taking not more than twenty seconds for everything-I could have done it in my sleep; House ran on boards for ninety-two performances before they recorded it.
Then I faced Broadbent and he gasped. “Good God! I don’t believe it.”
I stayed in “Benny Grey” and did not smile acknowledgment. What l3roadbent could not realize was that the grease paint really was not necessary. It makes it easier, of course, but I had used a touch of it primarily because he expected it; being one of the yokels, he naturally assumed that make-up consisted of paint and powder.
He continued to stare at me. “Look here,” he said in a hushed voice, “could you do something like that for me? In a hurry?”
I was about to say no when I realized that it presented an interesting professional challenge, I had been tempted to say that if my father had started in on him at five he might be ready now to sell cotton candy at a punkin’ doin’s, but I thought better of it. “You simply want to be sure that you will not be recognized?” I asked.
“Yes, yes! Can you paint me up, or give me a false nose, or something?”
I shook my head. “No matter what we did with make-up, it would simply make you look like a child dressed up for Trick or Treat. You can’t act and you can never learn, at your age. We won’t touch your face.”
“Huh? But with this beak on me-“
“Attend me. Anything I could do to that lordly nose would just call attention to it, I assure you. Would it suffice if an acquaintance looked at you and said, ‘Say, that big fellow reminds me of Dak Broadbent. It’s not Dak, of course, but looks a little like him.’ Eh?”
“Huh? I suppose so. As long as he was sure it wasn’t me. I’m supposed to be on… Well, I’m not supposed to be on Earth just now.”
“He’ll be quite sure it is not you, because we’ll change your walk. That’s the most distinctive thing about you. If your walk is wrong, it cannot possibly be you-so it must be some other big boned, broad-shouldered man who looks a bit like you.”
“Okay, show me how to walk.”
“No, you could never learn it. I’ll force you to walk the way I want you to.” “How?”
‘We’ll put a handful of pebbles or the equivalent in the toes of your boots. That will force you back on your heels and make you stand up straight. It will be impossible for you to sneak along in that catfooted spaceman’s crouch. Mmrn 11 slap some tape across your shoulder blades to remind you to keep your shoulders back, too. That will do it.”
“You think they wont recognize me just because I’ll walk differently?”
“Certain. An acquaintance won’t know why he is sure it is not you, but the very fact that the conviction is subconscious and unanalyzed will put it beyond reach of doubt. Oh, I’ll do a little something to your face, just to make you feel easier-but it isn’t necessary.”
We went back into the living room of the suite. I was still being “Benny Grey” of course; once I put on a role it takes a conscious effort of will to go back to being myself. Dubois was busy at the phone; he looked up, saw me, and his jaw dropped. He hurried out of the hush locus and demanded, “Who’s he? And where’s that actor fellow?” After his first glance at me, he had looked away and not bothered to look back-“Benny Grey” is such a tired, negligible little guy that there is no point in looking at him.
“What actor fellow?” I answered in Benny’s flat, colorless tones. It brought Dubois’ eyes back to me. Re looked at me, started to look away, his eyes snapped back, then he looked at my clothes. Broadbent guffawed and clapped him on the shoulder.
“And you said he couldn’t act!” He added sharply, “Did you get them all, Jock?” “Yes.” Dubois looked back at me, looked perplexed, and looked away.
“Okay. We’ve got to be out of here in four minutes. Let’s see how fast you can get me fixed up, Lorenzo.”
Dak had one boot off, his blouse off, and his chemise pulled up so that I could tape his shoulders when the light over the door came on and the buzzer sounded. He froze. “Jock? We expecting anybody?”
“Probably Langston. He said he was going to try to get over here before we left.” Dubois started for the door.
“It might not be him. It might be—” 1 did not get to hear Broadbent say who he thought it might be as Dubois dilated the door. Framed in the doorway, looking like a nightmare toadstool, was a Martian.
For an agony-stretched second I could see nothing but the Martian. I did not see the human standing behind him, nor did I notice the life wand tile Martian cradled in his pseudo limb. Then the Martian flowed inside, the man with him stepped in behind him, and the door relaxed. The Martian squeaked, “Good afternoon, gentlemen. Going somewhere?”
I was frozen, dazed, by acute xenophobia. Dak was handicapped by disarranged clothing. But little Jock Dubois acted with a simple heroism that made him my beloved brother even as he died … He flung himself at that life wand. Right at it-he made no attempt to evade it.
He must have been dead, a hole burned through his belly you could poke a fist through, before he hit the floor. But he hung on and the pseudo limb stretched like taffy-then snapped, broken off a few inches from the monster’s neck, and poor Jock still had the life wand cradled in his dead arms.
The human who had followed that stinking, reeking thing into the room had to step to one side before he could get in a shot- and he made a mistake. He should have shot Dak first, then me. Instead he wasted his first one on Jock and he never got a second one, as Dak shot him neatly in the face. I had not even known Dak was armed.
Deprived of his weapon, the Martian did not attempt to escape. Dak bounced to his feet, slid up to him, and said, “Ah, Rrringriil. I see you.” “1 see you, Captain Dak Broadhent,” the Martian squeaked, then added, “you will tell my nest?”
“I will tell your nest, Rrringriil.”
“I thank you, Captain Dak Broadbent.”
Dak reached out a long bony finger and poked it into the eye nearest him, shoving it on home until his knuckles were jammed against the brain case. He pulled it out and his finger was slimed with green ichor. The creature’s pseudo limbs crawled back into its trunk in reflex spasm but the dead thing continued to stand firm on its base. Dak hurried into the bath; 1 heard him washing his hands. I stayed where I was, almost as frozen by shock as the late Rrringriil.
Dak came out, wiping his hands on his shirt, and said, “We’ll have to clean this up. There isn’t much time.” He could have been speaking of a spilled drink.
I tried to make clear in one jumbled sentence that I wanted no part of it, that we ought to call the cops, that I wanted to get away from there before the cops came, that he knew what he could do with his crazy impersonation job, and that I planned to sprout wings and fly out the window, flak brushed it all aside. “Don’t jitter, Lorenzo. We’re on minus minutes now. Help me get the bodies into the bathroom.”
“Huh? Good God, man! Let’s just lock up and run for it. Maybe they will never connect us with it.”
“Probably they wouldn’t,” he agreed, “since neither one of us is supposed to be here. But they would be able to see that Rrringriil had killed Jock-and we can’t have that. Not now we can’t.”
“Huh?”
“We can’t afford a news story about a Martian killing a human. So shut up and help me.”
I shut up and helped him. It steadied me to recall that “Benny Grey” had been the worst of sadistic psychopaths, who had enjoyed dismembering his victims. I let “Benny Grey” drag the two human bodies into the bath while Dak took the life wand and sliced Rrringriil into pieces small enough to handle. He was careful to make the first cut below the brain case so the job was not messy, but I could not help him with it-it seemed to me that a dead Martian stank even worse than a live one.
The oubliette was concealed in a panel in the bath just beyond the bidet; if it had not been marked with the usual radiation trefoil it would have been hard to find. After we had shoved the chunks of Rrringriil down it (I managed to get my spunk up enough to help), Dak tackled the messier problem of butchering and draining the human corpses, using the wand and, of course, working in the bath tub.
It is amazing how much blood a man holds. We kept the water running the whole time; nevertheless, it was bad. But when Dak had to tackle the remains of poor little Jock, he just wasn’t up to it. His eyes flooded with tears, blinding him, so I elbowed him aside before he sliced off his own fingers and let “Benny Grey” take over.
When I had finished and there was nothing left to show that there had ever been two other men and a monster in the suite, I sluiced out the tub carefully and stood up. Dak was in the doorway, looking as calm as ever. “I’ve made sure the floor is tidy,” he announced. “I suppose a criminologist with proper equipment could reconstruct it-but we are counting on no one ever suspecting. So let’s get out of here. We’ve got to gain almost twelve minutes somehow. Come on!”
I was beyond asking where or why. “All right. Let’s fix your boots.”
He shook his head. “It would slow me up. Right now speed is more essential than not being recognized.”
“I am in your hands.” I followed him to the door; he stopped and said, “There may be others around. If so, shoot first-there’s nothing else you can do.” He had the life wand in his hand, with his cloak drawn over it.
“Martians?”
“Or men. Or both.”
“Dak? Was Rrringriil one of those four at the Manana bar?”
“Certainly. Why do you think I went around Robinson’s barn to get you out of there and over here? They either tailed you, as we did, or they tailed me. Didn’t you recognize him?” “Heavens, no! Those monsters all look alike to me.”
“And they say we all look alike. The four were Rrringriil, his conjugate-brother Rrringlath, and two others from his nest, of divergent lines. But shut up. If you see a Martian, shoot. You have the other gun?”
“Uh, yes. Look, Dak, I don’t know what this is all about. But as long as those beasts are against you, I’m with you. I despise Martians.” He looked shocked. “You don’t know what you are saying. We’re not fighting Martians; those four are renegades.”
“Huh?”
“There are lots of good Martians-almost all of them. Shucks, even Rrringriil wasn’t a bad sort in most ways-I’ve had many a fine chess game with him.” “What? In that case, I’m—”
“Stow it. You’re in too deep to back out. Now quick-march, straight to the bounce tube. I’ll cover our rear.” I shut up. I was in much too deep-that was unarguable.
We hit the sub-basement and went at once to the express tubes. Atwo-passenger capsule was just emptying; Dak shoved me in so quickly that I did not see him set the control combiiiation. But I was hardly surprised when the pressure let up from my chest and I saw the sign blinking JEFFERSON SKYPORT-ALL OUT.
Nor did I care what station it was as long as it was as far as possible from Hotel Eisenhower. The few minutes we had been crammed in the vactube had been long enough for me to devise a plan-sketchy, tentative, and subject to change without notice, as the fine print always says, but a plan. It could be stated in two words: Get lost!
Only that morning I would have found the plan very difficult to execute; in our culture a man with no money at all is baby-helpless. But with a hundred slugs in my pocket I could go far and fast. I felt no obligation to Dak Broadbent. For reasons of his own-not my reasons!-he had almost got me killed, then had crowded me into covering up a crime, made rue a fugitive from justice. But we had evaded the police, temporarily at least, and now, simply by shaking off Broadbent, I could forget the whole thing, shelve it as a bad dream. It seemed most unlikely that I could be connected with the affair even if it were discovered-fortunately a gentleman always wears gloves, and I had had mine off only to put on makeup and later during that ghastly house cleaning.
Aside from the warm burst of adolescent heroics I had felt when I thought Dak was fighting Martians I had no interest in his schemes-and even that sympathy had shut off when I found that he liked Martians in general. His impersonation job I would not now touch with the proverbial eleven-foot pole. To hell with Broadbent! All I wanted out of life was money enough to keep body and soul together and a chance to practice my art; cops-androbbers nonsense did not interest me-poor theater at best.
Jefferson Port seemed handmade to carry out my scheme. Crowded and confused, with express tubes spiderwebbing from it, in it, if Dak took his eyes off me for half a second I would be halfway to Omaha. I would lie low a few weeks, then get in touch with my agent and find out if any inquiries had been made about me.
Dak saw to it that we climbed out of the capsule together, else I would have slammed it shut and gone elsewhere at once. I pretended not to notice and stuck close as a puppy to him as we went up the belt to the main hall just under the surface, coming out between the Pan-Am desk and American Skylines. Dak straight across the waiting-room floor toward Diana, Ltd.,
and I surmised that he was going to buy tickets for the Moon shuttle- how he planned to get me aboard without passport or vaccination certificate I could not guess but I knew that be was resourceful. I decided that I would fade into the furniture while he bad his wallet out; when a man counts money there are at least a few seconds when his eyes and attention are fully occupied.
But we went right on past the Diana desk and through an archway marked Private Berths. The passageway beyond was not crowded and the walls were blank; I realized with dismay that I had let slip my best chance, back there in the busy main hail. I held back. “Dak? Are we making a jump?”
“Of course.”
“Dak, you’re crazy. I’ve got no papers, I don’t even have a tourist card for the Moon.” “You won’t need them.”
“Huh? They’ll stop me at ‘Emigration.’ Then a big, beefy cop will start asking questions.”
Ahand about the size of a cat closed on my upper arm. “Let’s not waste time. Why should you go through ‘Emigration,’ when officially you aren’t leaving? And why should I, when officially I never arrived? Quick-march, old son.”
I am well muscled and not small, but I felt as if a traffic robot were pulling me out of a danger zone. I saw a sign reading MEN and I made a desperate attempt to break it up. “Dak, half a minute, please. Got to see a man about the plumbing.”
He grinned at me. “Oh, yes? You went just before we left the hotel.” He did not slow up or let go of me. “Kidney trouble-“
“Lorenzo old son, I smell a case of cold feet. Tell you what I’ll do. See that cop up ahead?” At the end of the corridor, in the private berths station, a defender of the peace was resting his big feet by leaning over a counter. “I find I have a sudden attack of conscience. I feel a need to confess-about how you killed a visiting Martian and two local citizens-about how you held a gun on me and forced me to help you dispose of the bodies. About—”
“You’re crazy!”
“Almost out of my mind with anguish and remorse, shipmate.” “But-you’ve got nothing on me.”
“So? I think my story will sound more convincing than yours. I know what it is all about and you don’t. I know all about you and you know nothing about me. For example he mentioned a couple of details in my past that I would have sworn were buried and forgotten. All right, so I did have a couple of routines useful for stag shows that are not for the family trade-a man has to eat. But that matter about Bebe; that was hardly fair, for I certainly had not known that she was underage. As for that hotel bill, while it is true that bilking an “innkeeper” in Miami Beach carries much the same punishment as armed robbery elsewhere, it is a very provincial attitude-I would have paid if I had had the money. As for that unfortunate incident in Seattle-well, what I am trying to say is that Dak did know an amazing amount about my background but he had the wrong slant on most of it. Still.
“So,” he continued, “let’s walk right up to yon gendarme and make a clean breast of it. I’ll lay you seven to two as to which one of us is out on bail first.”
So we marched up to the cop and on past him. He was talking to a female clerk back of the railing and neither one of them looked up. Dak took out two tickets reading, GATE PASS- MAINTENANCE PERMIT-Berth K-l27, and stuck them into the monitor. The machine scanned them, a transparency directed us to take an tipper-level car, code King 127; the gate let us through and locked behind us as a recorded voice said, “Watch your step, please, and heed radiation warnings. The Terminal Company is not responsible for accidents beyond the gate.”
Dak punched an entirely different code in the little car; it wheeled around, picked a track, and we took off out under the field. It did not matter to me. I was beyond caring.
When we stepped out of the little car it went back where it came from. In front of me was a ladder disappearing into the steel ceiling above. Dak nudged me. “Up you go.” There was a scuttle hole at the top and on it a sign: RADIATION HAZARD-Optimax 13 Seconds. The figures had been chalked in. I stopped. I have no special interest in offspring but I am no fool. Dak grinned and said, “Got your lead britches on? Open it, go through at once and straight up the ladder into the ship. If you don’t stop to scratch, you’ll make it with at least three seconds to spare.”
I believe I made it with five seconds to spare. I was out in the sunlight for about ten feet, then I was inside a long tube in the ship. I used about every third rung.
The rocket ship was apparently small. At least the control room was quite cramped; I never got a look at the outside. The only other spaceships I had ever been in were the Moon shuttles Evangeline and her sister ship the Gabriel, that being the year in which I had incautiously accepted a lunar engagement on a co-op basis-our impresario had had a notion that a juggling, tightrope, and acrobatic routine would go well in the one-sixth gee of the Moon, which was correct as far as it went, but he had not allowed rehearsal time for us to get used to low gravity. I had to take advantage of the Distressed Travelers Act to get back and I had lost my wardrobe.
There were two men in the control room; one was lying in one of three acceleration couches fiddling with dials, the other was making obscure motions with a screw driver. The one in the couch glanced at me, said nothing. The other one turned, looked worried, then said past me, “What happened to Jock?”
Dak almost levitated out of the hatch behind me. “No time!” he snapped. “Have you compensated for his mass?” “Red, is she taped? Tower?”
The man in the couch answered lazily, “I’ve been recomputing every two minutes. You’re clear with the tower. Minus forty-, uh, seven seconds.” “Out of that bunk! Scram! I’m going to catch that tick!”
Red moved lazily out of the couch as Dak got in. The other man shoved me into the copilot’s couch and strapped a safety belt across my chest. He turned and dropped down the escape tube. Red followed him, then stopped with his head and shoulders out. “Tickets, please!” he said cheerfully.
“Oh, cripes!” Dak loosened a safety belt, reached for a pocket, got out the two field passes we bad used to sneak aboard, and shoved them at him.
“Thanks,” Red answered. “See you in church. Hot jets, and so forth.” He disappeared with leisurely swiftness; I heard the air lock close and my eardrums popped. Dak did not answer his farewell; his eyes were busy on the computer dials and he made some minor adjustment.
“Twenty-one seconds,” he said to me. “There’ll be no rundown. Be sure your arms are inside and that you are relaxed. The first step is going to be a honey.” I did as I was told, then waited for hours in that curtain-going-up tension. Finally I said, “Dak?”
“Shut up!”
“Just one thing: where are we going?”
“Mars.” I saw his thumb jab at a red button and I blacked out. Chapter 2
What is so funny about a man being dropsick? Those dolts with cast-iron stomachs always laugh-I’ll bet they would laugh if Grandma broke both legs.
I was spacesick, of course, as soon as the rocket ship quit blasting and went into free fall. I came out of it fairly quickly as my stomach was practically empty-I’d eaten nothing since breakfast- and was simply wanly miserable the remaining eternity of that awful trip. It took us an hour and forty-three minutes to make rendezvous, which is roughly equal to a thousand years in purgatory to a ground hog like myself.
I’ll say this for Dak, though: he did not laugh. Dak was a professional and he treated my normal reaction with the impersonal good manners of a ifight nurse-not like those flat-headed, loudvoiced jackasses you’ll find on the passenger list of a Moon shuttle. If I had my way, those healthy self -panickers would be spaced in mid-orbit and allowed to laugh themselves to death in vacuum.
Despite the turmoil in my mind and the thousand questions I wanted to ask we had almost made rendezvous with a torchship, which was in parking orbit around Earth, before I could stir up interest in anything. I suspect that if one were to inform a victim of spacesickness that he was to be shot at sunrise his own answer would be, “Yes? Would you hand me that sack, please?”
But I finally recovered to the point where instead of wanting very badly to die the scale had tipped so that I had a flickering, halfhearted interest in continuing to live. Dak was busy most of the time at the ship’s communicator, apparently talking on a very tight beam for his hands constantly nursed the directional control like a gunner laying a gun under difficulties. I could not hear what he said, or even read his lips, as he had his face pushed into the nimble box. I assumed that he was talking to the long-jump ship we were to meet.
But when he pushed the communicator aside and lit a cigarette I repressed the stomach retch that the mere sight of tobacco smoke had inspired and said, “Dak, isn’t it about time you told me the score?”
“Plenty of time for that on our way to Mars.”
“Huh? Damn your arrogant ways,” I protested feebly. “I don’t want to go to Mars. I would never have considered your crazy offer if 1 had known it was on Mars.” “Suit yourself. You don’t have to go.”
“Eh?”
“The air lock is right behind you. Get out and walk. Mind you close the door.”
I did not answer the ridiculous suggestion. He went on, “But if you can’t breathe space the easiest thing to do is to go to Mars- and I’ll see that you get back. The Can Do-that’s this bucket-is about to rendezvous with the Go For Broke, which is a high-gee torchship. About seventeen seconds and a gnat’s wink after we make contact the Go For Broke will torch for Mars-for we’ve got to be there by Wednesday.”
I answered with the petulant stubbornness of a sick man. “I’m not going to Mars. I’m going to stay right in this ship. Somebody has to take it back and land it on Earth. You can’t fool me.” “True,” Broadbent agreed. “But you won’t be in it. The three blokes who are supposed to be in this ship-according to the records back at Jefferson Field-are in the Go For Broke right now.
This is a three-man ship, as you’ve noticed. I’m afraid you will find them stuffy about giving up a place to you. And besides, how would you get back through ‘Immigration’?”
“I don’t care! I’d be back on ground.”
“And in jail, charged with everything from illegal entry to mopery and dopery in the spaceways. At the very least they would be sure that you were smuggling and they would take you to some quiet back room and run a needle in past your eyeball and find out just what you were up to. They would know what questions to ask and you wouldn’t be able to keep from answering. But you wouldn’t be able to implicate me, for good old Dak Broadhent hasn’t been back to Earth in quite a spell and has unimpeachable witnesses to prove it.”
I thought about it sickly, both from fear and the continuing effects of spacesickness. “So you would tip off the police? You dirty, slimy—” I broke off for lack of an adequately insulting noun. “Oh no! Look, old son, I might twist your arm a bit and let you think that I would cry copper-but I never would. But Rrringriil’s conjugate-brother Rrringlath certainly knows that old ‘Grill’ went
in that door and failed to come out. He will tip off the noises. Conjugate-brother is a relationship so close that we will never understand it, since we don’t reproduce by fission.”
I didn’t care whether Martians reproduced like rabbits or the stork brought them in a little black bag. The way he told it I could never go back to Earth, and I said so. He shook his head. “Not at all. Leave it to me and we will slide you back in as neatly as we slid you out. Eventually you will walk off that field or some other field with a gate pass which shows that you are a mechanic who has been making some last-minute adjustment-and you’ll have greasy coveralls and a tool kit to back it up. Surely an actor of your skill can play the part of a mechanic for a few minutes?”
“Eh? Why, certainly! But-“
“There you are! You stick with ol’ Doc Dak; he’ll take care of you. We shuffled eight guild brothers in this current caper to get me on Earth and both of us off; we can do it again. But you would not stand a chance without voyageurs to help you.” He grinned. “Every voyageur is a free trader at heart. The art of smuggling being what it is, we are all of us always ready to help out one another in a little innocent deception of the port guards. But a person outside the lodge does not ordinarily get such co-operation.”
I tried to steady my stomach and think about it. “Dak, is this a smuggling deal? Because-“ “Oh no! Except that we are smuggling you.”
“I was going to say that I don’t regard smuggling as a crime.”
“Who does? Except those who make money off the rest of us by limiting trade. But this is a straight impersonation job, Lorenzo, and you are the man for it. It wasn’t an accident that I ran across you in the bar; there had been a tail on you for two days. As soon as I hit dirt I went where you were.” He frowned. “I wish I could be sure our honorable antagonists had been following me, and not you.”
“Why?”
“If they were following me they were trying to find out what I was after-which is okay, as the lines were already drawn; we knew we were mutual enemies. But if they were following you, then they knew what I was after-an actor who could play the role.”
“But how could they know that? Unless you told them?”
“Lorenzo, this thing is big, much bigger than you imagine. I don’t see it all myself-and the less you know about it until you must, the better off you are. But I can tell you this: a set of personal characteristics was fed into the big computer at the System Census Bureau at The Hague and the machine compared them with the personal characteristics of every male professional actor alive. It was done as discreetly as possible but somebody might have guessed-and talked. The specifications amounted to identification both of the principal and the actor who could double for him, since the job had to be perfect.”
“Oh. And the machine told you that I was the man for it?” “Yes. You-and one other.”
This was another good place for me to keep my mouth shut. But I could not have done so if my life had depended on it-which in a way it did. I just had to know who the other actor was who was considered competent to play a role which called for my unique talents. “This other one? Who is he?”
Dak looked me over; I could see him hesitate. “Mmm-fellow by the name of Orson Trowbridge. Know him?” “That ham!” For a moment I was so furious that I forgot my nausea.
“So? I hear that he is a very good actor.”
I simply could not help being indignant at the idea that anyone should even think about that oaf Trowbridge for a role for which I was being considered. “That arm-waver! That word- mouther!” I stopped, realizing that it was more dignified to ignore such colleagues-if the word fits. But that popinjay was so conceited that- well, if the role called for him to kiss a lady’s hand, Trowbridge would fake it by kissing his own thumb instead. Anarcissist, a poseur, a double fake-how could such a man live a role?
Yet such is the injustice of fortune that his sawings and rantings had paid him well while real artists went hungry. “Dak, I simply cannot see why you considered him for it.”
“Well, we didn’t want him; he is tied up with some long-term contract that would make his absence conspicuous and awkward. It was lucky for us that you were-uh, ‘at liberty.’ As soon as you agreed to the job I had Jock send word to call off the team that was trying to arrange a deal with Trowbridge.”
“I should think so!”
“But-see here, Lorenzo, I’m going to lay it on the line. While you were busy whooping your cookies after Brennschluss I called the Go For Broke and told them to pass the word down to get busy on Trowbridge again.”
“What?”
“You asked for it, shipmate. See here, a man in my racket contracts to herd a heap to Ganymede, that means he will pilot that pot to Ganymede or die trying. He doesn’t get fainthearted and try to welsh while the ship is being loaded. You told me you would take this job-no ‘ifs’ or ‘ands’ or ‘buts’-you took the job. Afew minutes later there is a fracas; you lose your nerve. Later you try to run out on me at the field. Only ten minutes ago you were screaming to be taken back dirtside. Maybe you are a better actor than Trowbridge. I wouldn’t know. But I know we need a man who can be depended on not to lose his nerve when the time comes. I understand that Trowbridge is that sort of bloke. So if we can get him, we’ll use him instead, pay you off and tell you nothing and ship you back. Understand?”
Too well I understood. Dak did not use the word-I doubt if he would have understood it-but he was telling me that I was not a trouper. The bitter part about it was that he was justified. I could not be angry; I could only be ashamed. I had been an idiot to accept the contract without knowing more about it-but I had agreed to play the role, without conditions or escape clauses. Now I was trying to back out, like a rank amateur with stage fright.
“The show must go on” is the oldest tenet of show business. Perhaps it has no philosophical verity, but the things men live by are rarely subject to logical proof. My father had believed it-I had seen him play two acts with a burst appendix and then take his bows before he had let them rush him to a hospital. I could see his face now, looking at me with the contempt of a trouper for a so-called actor who would let an audience down.
“Dak,” I said humbly, “I am very sorry. I was wrong.” He looked at me sharply. “You’ll do the job?”
“Yes.” I meant it sincerely. Then I suddenly remembered a factor which could make the part as impossible for me as the role of Snow White in The Seven Dwarfs. “That is-well, I want to. But—”
“But what?” he said scornfully. “More of your damned temperament?”
“No, no! But you said we were going to Mars. Dak, am I going to be expected to do this impersonation with Martians around me?” “Eh? Of course. How else on Mars?”
“Uh … But, Dak, I can’t stand Martians! They give me the heebie jeebies. I wouldn’t want to-I would try not to-but I might fall right out of the characterization.” “Oh. If that is all that is worrying you, forget it.”
“Huh? But I can’t forget it. I can’t help it. I-“
“I said, ‘Forget it.’ Old son, we knew you were a peasant in such matters-we know all about you. Lorenzo, your fear of Martians is as childish and irrational as a fear of spiders or snakes. But we had anticipated it and it will be taken care of. So forget it.”
“Well-all right.” I was not much reassured, but he had flicked me where it hurt. “Peasant”-why, “peasants” were the audience! So I shut up.
Dak pulled the communicator to him, did not bother to silence his message with the rumble box: “Dandelion to Tumbleweed- cancel Plan Inkblot. We will complete Mardi Gras.” “Dak?” I said as he signed off.
“Later,” he answered. “I’m about to match orbits. The contact may be a little rough, as I am not going to waste time worrying about chuck holes. So pipe down and hang on.”
And it was rough. By the time we were in the torchship I was glad to be comfortably back in free fall again; surge nausea is even worse than everyday dropsickness. But we did not stay in free fall more than five minutes; the three men who were to go back in the Can Do were crowding into the transfer lock even as Dak and I floated into the torchship. The next few moments were extremely confused. I suppose I am a ground hog at heart for I disorient very easily when I can’t tell the floor from the ceiling. Someone called out, “Where is he?” Dak replied, “Here)” The same voice replied, “Him?” as if he could not believe his eyes.
“Yes, yes!” Dak answered. “He’s got make-up on. Never mind, it’s all right. Help me get him into the cider press.”
Ahand grabbed my arm, towed me along a narrow passage and into a compartment. Against one bulkhead and flat to it were two bunks, or “cider presses,” the bathtub-shaped, hydraulic, pressure-distribution tanks used for high acceleration in torchships. I had never seen one before but we had used quite convincing mock-ups in the space opus The Earth Raiders.
There was a stenciled sign on the bulkhead behind the bunks:
WARRING!!! Do Not Take More than Three Gravities without a Gee Suit. By Order of— I rotated slowly out of range of vision before I could finish reading it and someone shoved me into one cider press. Dak and the other men were hurriedly strapping me against it when a horn somewhere near by broke into a horrid hooting. It continued for several seconds, then a voice replaced it: “Red warning! Two gravities! Three minutes! Red warning! Two gravities! Three minutes!” Then the hooting started again.
Through the racket I heard Dak ask urgently, “Is the projector all set? The tapes ready?” “Sure, sure!”
“Got the hypo?” Dak squirmed around in the air and said to me, “Look, shipmate, we’re going to give you a shot. It’s all right. Part of it is Nullgrav, the rest is a stimulant-for you are going to have to stay awake and study your lines. It will make your eyeballs feel hot at first and it may make you itch, but it won’t hurt you.”
“Wait, Dak, I-“
“No time! I’ve got to smoke this scrap heap!” He twisted and was out the door before I could protest. The second man pushed up my left sleeve, held an injection gun against the skin, and I had received the dose before I knew it. Then he was gone. The hooting gave way to: “Red waning! Two gravities! Two minutes!”
I tried to look around but the drug made me even more confused. My eyeballs did feel hot and my teeth as well and I began to feel an almost intolerable itching along my spine-but the safety straps kept me from reaching the tortured area-and perhaps kept me from breaking an arm at acceleration. The hooting stopped again and this time Dak’s self-confident baritone boomed out, “Last red warning! Two gravities! One minute! Knock off those pinochle games and spread your fat carcasses-we’re goin’ to smoke!” The hooting was replaced this time by a recording of Arkezian’s Ad Astra, opus 61 in C major. It was the controversial London Symphony version with the 14-cycle “scare” notes buried in the timpani. Battered, bewildered, and doped as I was, they seemed to have no effect on me-you can’t wet a river.
Amermaid came in the door. No scaly tail, surely, but a mermaid is what she looked like. When my eyes refocused I saw that it was a very likely looking and adequately mammalian young woman in singlet and shorts, swimming along head first in a way that made clear that free fall was no novelty to her. She glanced at me without smiling, placed herself against the other cider press, and took hold of the hand grips-she did not bother with safety belts. The music hit the rolling finale and I felt myself grow very heavy.
Two gravities is not bad, not when you are floating in a liquid bed. The skin over the top of the cider press pushed up around me, supporting me inch by inch; I simply felt heavy and found it hard to breathe. You hear these stories about pilots torching at ten gravities and ruining themselves and I have no doubt that they are true-but two gravities, taken in the cider press, simply makes one feel languid, unable to move.
It was some time before I realized that the horn in the ceiling was speaking to me. “Lorenzo! How are you doing, shipmate?” “All right.” The effort made me gasp. “How long do we have to put up with this?”
“About two days.”
I must have moaned, for Dak laughed at me. “Quit bellyaching, chum! My first trip to Mars took thirty-seven weeks, every minute of it free fall in an elliptical orbit. You’re taking the luxury route, at a mere double gee for a couple of days-with a one-gee rest at turnover, I might add. We ought to charge you for it.”
I started to tell him what I thought of his humor in scathing green-room idiom, then recalled that there was a lady present. My father had taught me that a woman will forgive any action, up to and including assault with violence, but is easily insulted by language; the lovelier half of our race is symbol-oriented-very strange, in view of their extreme practicality. In any case, I have never let a taboo word pass my lips when it might offend the ears of a lady since the time 1 last received the back of my father’s hard hand full on my mouth… Father could have given Professor Pavlov pointers in reflex conditioning.
But Dak was speaking again. “Penny! You there, honey chile?” “Yes, Captain,” the young woman with me answered.
“Okay, start him on his homework. I’ll be down when I have this firetrap settled in its groove.”
“Very well, Captain.” She turned her head toward me and said in a soft, husky, contralto voice, “Dr. Capek wants you simply to relax and look at movies for several hours. I am here to answer questions as necessary.”
I sighed. “Thank goodness someone is at last going to answer questions!”
She did not answer, but raised an ann with some difficulty and passed it over a switch. The lights in the compartment died out and a sound and stereo image built up in front of my eyes. I recognized the central figure-just as any of the billions of citizens of the Empire would have recognized him-and I realized at last how thoroughly and mercilessly Dak Broadbent had tricked me.
It was Bonforte.
The Bonforte, I mean-the Right Honorable John Joseph Bonforte, former Supreme Minister, leader of the loyal opposition, and head of the Expansionist coalition-the most loved (and the most hated!) man in the entire Solar System.
My astonished mind made a standing broad jump and arrived at what seemed a logical certainty. Bonforte had lived through at least three assassination attempts-or so the news reports would have us believe. At least two of his escapes had seemed almost miraculous. Suppose they were not miraculous? Suppose they had all been successful-but dear old Uncle Joe Bonforte had always been somewhere else at the time?
You could use up a lot of actors that way. Chapter 3
I had never meddled in politics. My father had warned against it. “Stay out of it, Larry,” he had told me solemnly. “The publicity you get that way is bad publicity. The peasants don’t like it.” I had never voted-not even after the amendment of ‘98 made it easy for the floating population (which includes, of course, most members of the profession) to exercise franchise.
However, insofar as I had political leanings of any sort, they certainly did not lean toward Bonforte. I considered him a dangerous man and very possibly a traitor to the human race. The idea of standing up and getting killed in his place was-how shall I put it?-distasteful to me.
But-what a role!
I had once played the lead in L’Aiglon and I had played Caesar in the only two plays about him worthy of the name. But to play such a role in life-well, it is enough to make one understand how a man could go to the guillotine in another man’s place-just for the chance to play, even for a few moments, the ultimately exacting role, in order to create the supreme, the perfect, work of art.
I wondered who my colleagues had been who had been unable to resist that temptation on those earlier occasions. They had been artists, that was certain-though their very anonymity was the only tribute to the success of their characterizations. I tried to remember just when the earlier attempts on Bonforte’s life had taken place and which colleagues who might have been capable of the role had died or dropped out of sight at those times. But it was useless. Not only was I not too sure of the details of current political history but also actors simply fade out of view with depressing frequency; it is a chancy profession even for the best of us.
I found that I had been studying closely the characterization.
I realized I could play it. Hell, I could play it with one foot in a bucket and a smell of smoke backstage. To begin with, there was no problem of physique; Bonforte and I could have swapped clothes without a wrinkle. These childish conspirators who had shanghaied me had vastly overrated the importance of physical resemblance, since it means nothing if not backed up by art-and need not be at all close if the actor is competent. But I admit that it does help and their silly game with the computer machine had resulted (quite by accident!) in selecting a true artist, as well as one who was in measurements and bony structure the twin of the politician. His profile was much like mine; even his hands were long, narrow, and aristocratic like mine-and hands are harder than faces.
That limp, supposedly the result of one of the attempts on his life-nothing to it! After watching him for a few minutes I knew that I could get up from that bed (at one gravity, that is) and walk in precisely the same way and never have to think about it. The way he had of scratching his collarbone and then brushing his chin, the almost imperceptible tic which preceded each of his sentences-such things were no trouble; they soaked into my subconscious like water into sand.
To be sure, he was fifteen or twenty years older than I was, but it is easier to play a role older than oneself than one younger. In any case, age to an actor is simply a matter of inner attitude; it has nothing to do with the steady march of catabolism.
I could have played him on boards, or read a speech in his place, within twenty minutes. But this part, as I understood it, would be more than such an interpretation; Dak had hinted that I would have to convince people who knew hlin well, perhaps in intimate circumstances. This is surpassingly more difficult. Does he take sugar in his coffee? If so, how much? Which hand does he use to strike a cigarette and with what gesture? I got the answer to that one and planted it deep in my mind even as I phrased the question; the simulacrum in front of me struck a cigarette in a fashion that convinced me that he had used matches and the oldfashioned sort of gasper for years before he had gone along with the march of so-called progress.
Worst of all, a man is not a single complexity; he is a different complexity to every person who knows him-which means that, to be successful, an impersonation must change for each “audience”
-for each acquaintance of the man being impersonated. This is not merely difficult; it is statistically impossible. Such little things could trip one up. What shared experiences does your principal have with acquaintance John Jones? With a hundred, or a thousand, John Joneses? How could an impersonator possibly know?
Acting per Se, like all art, is a process of abstracting, of retaining only significant detail. But in impersonation any detail can be significant. In time, something as silly as not crunching celery could let the cat out of the bag.
Then I recalled with glum conviction that my performance probably need be convincing only long enough for a marksman to draw a bead on me.
But I was still studying the man I was to replace (what else could I do?) when the door opened and I heard Dak in his proper person call out, “Anybody home?” The lights came on, the threedimensional vision faded, and I felt as if I had been wrenched from a dream. I turned my head; the young woman called Penny was struggling to lift her head from the other hydraulic bed and Dak was standing braced in the doorway.
I looked at him and said wonderingly, “How do you manage to stand up?” Part of my mind, the professional part that works independentiy, was noting how he stood and filing it in a new drawer marked: “How a Man Stands under Two Gravities.”
He grinned at me. “Nothing to it. I wear arch supports.” “Hmmmph!”
“You can stand up, if you want to. Ordinarily we discourage passengers from getting out of the boost tanks when we are torching at anything over one and a half gees-too much chance that some idiot wifi fall over his own feet and break a leg. But I once saw a really tough weight-lifter type climb out of the press and walk at five gravities-but he was never good for much afterwards. But two gees is okay-about like carrying another man piggyback.” He glanced at the young lady. “Giving him the straight word, Penny?”
“He hasn’t asked anything yet.”
“So? Lorenzo, I thought you were the lad who wanted all the answers.”
I shrugged. “I cannot now see that it matters, since it is evident that I will not live long enough to appreciate them.” “Eh? What soured your milk, old son?”
“Captain Broadbent,” I said bitterly, “I am inhibited in expressing myself by the presence of a lady; therefore I cannot adequately discuss your ancestry, personal habits, morals, and destination. Let it stand that I knew what you had tricked me into as soon as I became aware of the identity of the man I am to impersonate. I will content myself with one question only:
who is about to attempt to assassinate Bonforte? Even a clay pigeon should be entitled to know who is shooting at him.”
For the first time I saw Dak register surprise. Then he laughed so hard that the acceleration seemed to be too much for him; he slid to the deck and braced his back against a bulkhead, still laughing.
“I don’t see anything funny about it,” I said angrily.
He stopped and wiped his eyes. “Lorrie old son, did you honestly think that I had set you up as a sitting duck?” “It’s obvious.” I told him my deductions about the earlier assassination attempts.
He had the sense not to laugh again. “I see. You thought it was a job about like food taster for a Middle Ages king. Well, we’ll have to try to straighten you out; I don’t suppose it helps your acting to think that you are about to be burned down where you stand. Look, I’ve been with the Chief for six years. During that time I know he has never used a double … Nevertheless, I was present on two occasions when attempts were made on his life- one of those times I shot the hatchet man. Penny, you’ve been with the Chief longer than that. Has he ever used a double before?”
She looked at me coldly. “Never. The very idea that the Chief would let anybody expose himself to danger in his place is-well, I ought to slap your face; that’s what I ought to do!”
“Take it easy, Penny,” Dak said mildly. “You’ve both got jobs to do and you are going to have to work with him. Besides, his wrong guess isn’t too silly, not from the outside. By the way, Lorenzo, this is Penelope Russell. She is the Chief’s personal secretary, which makes her your number-one coach.”
“I am honored to meet you, mademoiselle.” “I wish I could say the same!”
“Stow it, Penny, or I’ll spank your round fanny-at two gravities. Lorenzo, I concede that doubling for John Joseph Bonforte isn’t as safe as tiding in a wheel chair-shucks, as we both know, several attempts have been made to close out his life insurance. But that is not what we are afraid of this time. Matter of fact, this time, for political reasons you will presently understand, the laddies we are up against won’t dare to try to kill the Chief-or to kill you when you are doubling for the Chief. They are playing rough
-as you know!-and they would kill me, or even Penny, for the slightest advantage. They would kill you right now, if they could get at you. But when you make this public appearance as the Chief you’ll be safe; the circumstances will be such that they can’t afford to kill.”
He studied my face. “Well?”
I shook my head. “I don’t follow you.”
“No, but you will. It is a complicated matter, involving Martian ways of looking at things. Take it for granted; you’ll know all about it before we get there.”
I still did not like it. Thus far Dak had told me no outright lies that I knew of-but he could lie effectively by not telling all that he knew, as I had learned the bitter way. I said, “See here, I have no reason to trust you, or to trust this young lady-if you will pardon mc, miss. But while I haven’t any liking for Mr. Bonforte, he does have the reputation for being painfully, even offensively, honest. When do I get to talk to him? As soon as we reach Mars?”
Dak’s ugly, cheerful face was suddenly shadowed with sadness. “I’m afraid not. Didn’t Penny tell you?” “Tell me what?”
“Old son, that’s why we’ve got to have a double for the Chief. They’ve kidnapped him!”
My head ached, possibly from the double weight, or perhaps from too many shocks. “Now you know,” Dak went on. “You know why Jock Dubois didn’t want to trust you with it until after we raised ground. It is the biggest news story since the first landing on the Moon, and we are sitting on it, doing our damnedest to keep it from ever being known. We hope to use you until
we can find him and get him back. Matter of fact, you have already started your impersonation. This ship is not really the Go For Broke; it is the Chief’s private yacht and traveling office, the Tom Paine. The Go For Broke is riding a parking orbit around Mars, with its transponder giving out the recognition signal of this ship-a fact known only to its captain and comm officer- while the Tommie tucks up her skirts and rushes to Earth to pick up a substitute for the Chief. Do you begin to scan it, old son?”
I admit that I did not. “Yes, but-see here, Captain, if Mr. Bonforte’s political enemies have kidnapped him, why keep it secret? I should expect you to shout it from the housetops.” “On Earth we would. At New Batavia we would. On Venus we would. But here we are dealing with Mars. Do you know the legend of Kkkahgral the Younger?”
“Eh? I’m afraid I don’t.”
“You must study it; it will give you insight into what makes a Martian tick. Briefly, this boy Kkkah was to appear at a certain time and place, thousands of years ago, for a very high honor- like being knighted. Through no fault of his own (the way we would look at it) he failed to make it on time. Obviously the only thing to do was to kill him-by Martian standards. But because of his youth and his distinguished record some of the radicals present argued that he should be allowed to go back and start over. But Kkkahgral would have none of it. He insisted on his right to prosecute the case himself, won it, and was executed. Which makes him the very embodiment, the patron saint, of propriety on Mars.”
“That’s crazy!”
“Is it? We aren’t Martians. They are a very old race and they have worked out a system of debts and obligations to cover every possible situation-the greatest formalists conceivable. Compared with them, the ancient Japanese, with their girl and gimu, were outright anarchists. Martians don’t have ‘right’ and ‘wrong’-instead they have propriety and impropriety, squared, cubed, and loaded with gee juice. But where it bears on this problem is that the Chief was about to be adopted into the nest of Kkkahgral the Younger himself. Do you scan me now?”
I still did not. To my mind this Kkkah character was one of the more loathsome items from Le Grand Guignol. Broadbent went on, “It’s simple enough. The Chief is probably the greatest practical student of Martian customs and psychology. He has been working up to this for years. Comes local noon on Wednesday at Lacus Soli, the ceremony of adoption takes place. If the Chief is there and goes through his paces properly, everything is sweet. If he is not there-and it makes no difference at all why he is not there-his name is mud on Mars, in every nest from pole to pole- and the greatest interplanetary and interracial political coup ever attempted falls flat on its face. Worse than that, it will backfire. My guess is that the very least that will happen is for Mars to withdraw even from its present loose association with the Empire. Much more likely there will be reprisals and human beings will be killed-maybe every human on Mars. Then the extremists in the Humanity Party would have theft way and Mars would be brought into the Empire by force-but only after every Martian was dead. And all set off just by Bonforte failing to show up for the adoption ceremony… Martians take these things very seriously.”
Dak left as suddenly as he had appeared and Penelope Russell turned on the picture projector again. It occurred to me fretfully that I should have asked him what was to keep our enemies from simply killing me, if all that was needed to upset the political applecart was to keep Bonforte (in his proper person, or through his double) from attending some barbaric Martian ceremony. But I had forgotten to ask-perhaps I was subconsciously afraid of being answered.
But shortly I was again studying Bonforte, watching his movements and gestures, feeling his expressions, subvocalizing the tones of his voice, while floating in that detached, warm reverie of artistic effort. Already I was “wearing his head.”
I was panicked out of it when the images shifted to one in which Bonforte was surrounded by Martians, touched by their pseudo limbs. I had been so deep inside the picture that I could actually feel them myself-and the stink was unbearable. I made a strangled noise and clawed at it. “Shut it oft!”
The lights came up and the picture disappeared. Miss Russell was looking at me. “What in the world is the matter with you?”
I tried to get my breath and stop trembling. “Miss Russell-I am very sorry-but please-don’t turn that on again. I can’t stand Martians.”
She looked at me as if she could not believe what she saw but despised it anyhow. “I told them,” she said slowly and scornfully, “that this ridiculous scheme would not work.” “I am very sorry. I cannot help it.”
She did not answer but climbed heavily out of the cider press. She did not walk as easily at two gravities as Dak did, but she managed. She left without another word, closing the door as she went.
She did not return. Instead the door was opened by a man who appeared to be inhabiting a giant kiddie stroller. “Howdy there, young fellow!” he boomed out. He was sixtyish, a bit too
heavy, and bland; I did not have to see his diploma to be aware that his was a “bedside” manner.
“How do you do, sir?”
“Well enough. Better at lower acceleration.” He glanced down at the contrivance he was strapped into. “How do you like my corset-on-wheels? Not stylish, perhaps, but it takes some of the strain off my heart. By the way, just to keep the record straight, I’m Dr. Capek, Mr. Bonforte’s personal therapist. I know who you are. Now what’s this we hear about you and Martians?”
I tried to explain it clearly and unemotionally.
Dr. Capek nodded. “Captain Broadbent should have told me. I would have changed the order of your indoctrination program. The captain is a competent young fellow in his way but his muscles run ahead of his brain on occasion … He is so perfectly normal an extrovert that he frightens me. But no harm done. Mr. Smythe, 1 want your permission to hypnotize you. You have my word as a physician that it will be used only to help you in this matter and that I will in no wise tamper with your personal integration.” He pulled out an old-fashioned pocket watch of the sort that is almost a badge of his profession and took my pulse.
I answered, “You have my permission readily, sir-but it won’t do any good. I can’t go under.” I had learned hypnotic techniques myself during the time I was showing my mentalist act, but my teachers had never had any luck hypnotizing me. Atouch of hypnotism is very useful to such an act, especially if the local police aren’t too fussy about the laws the medical association has hampered us with.
“So? Well, we’ll just have to do the best we can, then. Suppose you relax, get comfortable, and we’ll talk about your problem.” He still kept the watch in his hand, fiddling with it and twisting the chain, after he had stopped taking my pulse. I started to mention it, since it was catching the reading light just over my head, but decided that it was probably a nervous habit of which he was not aware and really too trivial a matter to call to the attention of a stranger.
“I’m relaxed,” I assured him. “Ask me anything you wish. Or free association, if you prefer.”
“Just let yourself float,” he said softly. “Two gravities makes you feel heavy, doesn’t it? I usually just sleep through it myself. It pulls the blood out of the brain, makes one sleepy. They are beginning to boost the drive again. We’ll all have to sleep … We’ll be heavy … We’ll have to sleep. .
I started to tell him that he had better put his watch away-or it would spin right out of his hand. Instead I fell asleep.
When I woke up, the other acceleration bunk was occupied by Dr. Capek. “Howdy, bub,” he greeted me. “I got tired of that confounded perambulator and decided to stretch out here and distribute the strain.”
“Uh, are we back on two gravities again?” “Eh? Oh yes! We’re on two gravities.”
“I’m sorry I blacked out. How long was I asleep?” “Oh, not very long. How do you feel?”
“Fine. Wonderfully rested, in fact.”
“It frequently has that effect. Heavy boost, I mean. Feel like seeing some more pictures?” “Why, certainly, if you say so, Doctor.”
“Okay.” He reached up and again the room went dark.
I was braced for the notion that he was going to show me more pictures of Martians; I made up my mind not to panic. After all, I had found it necessary on many occasions to pretend that they were not present; surely motion pictures of them should not affect me-I had simply been surprised earlier.
They were indeed stereos of Martians, both with and without Mr. Bonforte. I found it possible to study them with detached mind, without terror or disgust. Suddenly I realized that I was enjoying looking at them!
I let out some exclamation and Capek stopped the film. “Trouble?” “Doctor-you hypnotized me!”
“You told me to.”
“But I can’t be hypnotized.” “Sorry to hear it.”
“Uh-so you managed it. I’m not too dense to see that.” I added, “Suppose we try those pictures again. I can’t really believe it.”
He switched them on and I watched and wondered. Martians were not disgusting, if one looked at them without prejudice; they weren’t even ugly. In fact, they possessed the same quaint grace as a Chinese pagoda. True, they were not human in form, but neither is a bird of paradise-and birds of paradise are the loveliest things alive.
I began to realize, too, that their pseudo limbs could be very expressive; their awkward gestures showed some of the bumbling friendliness of puppies. I knew now that I had looked at Martians all my life through the dark glasses of hate and fear.
Of course, I mused, theft stench would still take getting used to, but-and then I suddenly realized that I was smelling them, the unmistakable odor-and I didn’t mind it a bit! In fact, I liked it. “Doctor!” I said urgently. “This machine has a ‘smellie’ attachment-doesn’t it?”
“Eh? I believe not. No, I’m sure it hasn’t-too much parasitic weight for a yacht.” “But it must. I can smell them very plainly.”
“Oh, yes.” He looked slightly shamefaced. “Bub, I did one thing to you that I hope will cause you no inconvenience.” “Sir?”
“While we were digging around inside your skull it became evident that a lot of your neurotic orientation about Martians was triggered by their body odor. I didn’t have time to do a deep job so I had to offset it. I asked Penny-that’s the youngster who was in here before-for a loan of some of the perfume she uses. I’m afraid that from here on out, bub, Martians are going to smell like a Parisian house of joy to you. If I had had time I would have used some homelier pleasant odor, like ripe strawberries or hotcakes and syrup. But I had to improvise.”
I sniffed. Yes, it did smell like a heavy and expensive perfume- and yet, damn it, it was unmistakably the reek of Martians. “I like it.” “You can’t help liking it.”
“But you must have spilled the whole bottle in here. The place is drenched with it.”
“Huh? Not at all. I merely waved the stopper under your nose a half hour ago, then gave the bottle back to Penny and she went away with it.” He sniffed. “The odor is gone now. ‘Jungle Lust,’ it said on the bottle. Seemed to have a lot of musk in it. I accused Penny of trying to make the crew space-happy and she just laughed at me.” He reached up and switched off the stereopix. “We’ve had enough of those for now. I want to get you onto something more useful.”
When the pictures faded out, the fragrance faded with them, just as it does with smellie equipment. I was forced to admit to myself that it was all in the head. But, as an actor, I was intellectually aware of that truth anyhow.
When Penny came back in a few minutes later, she had a fragrance exactly like a Martian. I loved it.
Chapter 4
My education continued in that room (Mr. Bonforte’s guest room, it was) until turnover. I had no sleep, other than under hypnosis, and did not seem to need any. Either Doc Capek or Penny stuck with me and helped me the whole time. Fortunately my man was as thoroughly photographed and recorded as perhaps any man in history and I had, as well, the close co- operation of his intimates. There was endless material; the problem was to see how much I could assimilate, both awake and under hypnosis.
I don’t know at what point I quit disliking Bonforte. Capek assured me-and I believe him-that he did not implant a hypnotic suggestion on this point; I had not asked for it and I am quite certain that Capek was meticulous about the ethical responsibilities of a physician and hypnotherapist. But I suppose that it was an inevitable concomitant of the role-I rather think I would learn to like Jack the Ripper if I studied for the part. Look at it this way:
to learn a role truly, you must for a time become that character. And a man either likes himself, or he commits suicide, one way or another. “To understand all is to forgive all”-and I was beginning to understand Bonforte.
At turnover we got that one-gravity rest that Dak had promised. We never were in free fall, not for an instant; instead of putting out the torch, which I gather they hate to do while under way, the ship described what Dak called a 1 SO-degree skew turn. It leaves the ship on boost the whole time and is done rather qulckly, but it has an oddly disturbing effect on the sense of balance. The effect has a name something like Coriolanus. Coriolis?
All I know about spaceships is that the ones that operate from the surface of a planet are true rockets but the voyageurs call them “teakettles” because of the steam jet of water or hydrogen they boost with. They aren’t considered real atomic-power ships even though the jet is heated by an atomic pile. The long-jump ships such as the Tom Paine, torchships that is, are (so they tell me) the real thing, making use of F equals MC squared, or is it Mequals EC squared? You know-the thing Einstein invented.
Dak did his best to explain it all to me, and no doubt it is very interesting to those who care for such things. But I can’t imagine why a gentleman should bother with such. It seems to me that every time those scientific laddies get busy with their slide rules life becomes more complicated. What was wrong with things the way they were?
During the two hours we were on one gravity I was moved up to Bonforte’s cabin. I started wearing his clothes and his face and everyone was careful to cail me “Mr. Bonforte” or “Chief” or (in the case of Dr. Capek) “Joseph,” the idea being, of course, to help me build the part.
Everyone but Penny, that is… She simply would not call me “Mr. Bonforte.” She did her best to help but she could not bring herself to that. It was clear as scripture that she was a secretary who silently and hopelessly loved her boss, and she resented me with a deep, illogical, but naturai bitterness. It made it hard for both of us, especially as I was finding her most attractive. No man can do his best work with a woman constantly around him who despises him. But I could not dislike her in return; I felt deeply sorry for her-even though I was decidedly irked.
We were on a tryout-in-the-sticks basis now, as not everyone in the Tom Paine knew that I was not Bonforte. I did not know exactly which ones knew of the substitution, but I was allowed to relax and ask questions only in the presence of Dak, Penny, and Dr. Capek. I was fairiy sure that Bonforte’s chief clerk, Mr. Washington, knew but never let on; he was a spare, elderly mulatto with the tight-lipped mask of a saint. There were two others who certhinly knew, but they were not in the Tom Paine; they were standing by and covering up from the Go For Broke, handling press releases and routine dispatches-Bill Corpsman, who was Bonforte’s front man with the news services, and Roger Clifton. I don’t know quite how to describe Clifton’s job. Political deputy? He had been Minister without Portfolio, you may remember, when Bonforte was Supreme Minister, but that says nothing. Let’s put it symbolically: Bonforte handed out policy and Clifton handed out patronage.
This small group had to know; if any others knew it was not considered necessary to tell me. To be sure, the other members of Bonforte’s staff and all the crew of the Tom Paine knew that something odd was going on; they did not necessarily know what it was. Agood many people had seen me enter the ship-but as “Benny Grey.” By the time they saw me again I was already “Bonforte.”
Someone had had the foresight to obtain real make-up equipment, but I used aimost none. At close range make-up can be seen; even Silicoflesh cannot be given the exact texture of skin. I contented myself with darkening my natural complexion a couple of shades with Semiperm and wearing his face, from inside. I did have to sacrifice quite a lot of hair and Dr. Capek inhibited the roots. I did not mind; an actor can always wear hair-pieces-and I was sure that this job was certain to pay me a fee that would let me retire for life, if 1 wished.
On the other hand, I was sometimes queasily aware that “life” might not be too long-there are those old saws about the man who knew too much and the one about dead men and tales. But truthfully I was beginning to trust these people. They were all darn nice people-which told me as much about Bonforte as I had learned by listening to his speeches and seeing his pix. Apolitical figure is not a single man, so I was learning, but a compatible team. If Bonforte himself had not been a decent sort he would not have had these people around him.
The Martian language gave me my greatest worry. Like most actors, I had picked up enough Martian, Venerian, Outer Jovian, etc., to be able to fake in front of a camera or on stage. But those roiled or fluttered consonants are very difficult. Human vocal cords are not as versatile as a Martian’s tympanus, I believe, and, in any case, the semi-phonetic spelling out of those sounds in Roman letters, for example “kkk” or “jjj” or “rrr,” have no more to do with the true sounds than the gin “Gnu” has to do with the inhaled click with which a Bantu pronounces “Gnu.” “Jjj,” for instance, closely resembles a Bronx cheer.
Fortunately Bonforte had no great talent for other languages- and I am a professional; my ears really hear, I can imitate any sound, from a buzz saw striking a nail in a chunk of firewood to a setting hen disturbed on her nest. It was necessary only to acquire Martian as poorly as Bonforte spoke it. He had worked hard to overcome his lack of talent, and every word and phrase of Martian that he knew had been sight-sound recorded so that he could study his mistakes.
So I studied his mistakes, with the projector moved into his office and Penny at my elbow to sort out the spools for me and answer questions.
Human languages fall into four groups: inflecting ones as in Anglo-American, positional as in Chinese, agglutinative as in Old Turkish, polysynthetic (sentence units) as in Eskimo-to which, of course, we now add alien structures as wildly odd and as nearly impossible for the human brain as non-repetitive or emergent Venetian. Luckily Martian is analogous to human speech forms. Basic Martian, the trade language, is positional and involves only simple concrete ideas-like the greeting: “I see you.” High Martian is polysynthetic and very stylized, with an expression for every nuance of their complex system of rewards and punishments, obligations and debts. It had been almost too much for Bonforte; Penny told me that he could read those arrays of dots they use for writing quite easily but of the spoken form of High Martian he could say only a few hundred sentences.
Brother, how I studied those few he had mastered!
The strain on Penny was even greater than it was on me. Both she and Dak spoke some Martian but the chore of coaching me fell on her as Dak had to spend most of his time in the control room; Jock’s death had left him shorthanded. We dropped from two gravities to one for the last few million miles of the approach, during which time he never came below at all. I spent it learning the ritual I would have to know for the adoption ceremony, with Penny’s help.
I had just completed running through the speech in which 1 was to accept membership in the Kkkah nest-a speech not unlike that, in spirit, with which an orthodox Jewish boy assumes the responsibilities of manhood, but as fixed, as invariable, as Hamlet’s soliloquy. I had read it, complete with Bonforte’s misprofluflciations and facial tic; I finished and asked, “How was that?”
“That was quite good,” she answered seriously.
“Thanks, Curly Top.” It was a phrase I had lifted from the language-practice spools in Bonforte’s files; it was what Bonforte called her when he was feeling mellow-and it was perfectly in character.
“Don’t you dare call me that?’
It looked at her in honest amazement and answered, still in character, “Why, Penny my child!”
“Don’t you call me that, either! You fake! You phony! You- actor!” She jumped up, ran as far as she could-which was only to the door-and stood there, faced away from me, her face buried in her hands and her shoulders shaking with sobs.
I made a tremendous effort and lifted myself out of the character_pulled in my belly, let my own face come up, answered in my own voice. “Miss Russell!” She stopped crying, whirled around, looked at me, and her jaw dropped. I added, still in my normal self, “Come back here and sit down.”
I thought she was going to refuse, then she seemed to think better of it, came slowly back and sat down, her hands in her lap but with her face that of a little girl who is “saving up more spit.”
I let her sit for a moment, then said quietly, “Yes, Miss Russell, I am an actor. Is that a reason for you to insult me?”
She simply looked stubborn.
“As an actor, I am here to do an actor’s job. You know why. You know, too, that I was tricked into taking it-it is not a job I would have accepted with my eyes open, even in my wildest moments. I hate having to do it considerably more than you hate having me do it-for despite Captain Broadbent’S cheerful assurances I am not at all sure that I will come out of it with my skin intact-and I’m actually fond of my skin; it’s the only one I have. I believe, too, that I know why you find it hard to accept me. But is that any reason for you to make my job harder than it has to be?”
She mumbled. I said sharply, “Speak up!” “It’s dishonest. It’s indecent!”
I sighed. “It certainly is. More than that, it is impossible without the wholehearted support of the other members of the cast. So let’s call Captain Broadbent down here and tell him. Let’s call it off.”
She jerked her face up and said, “Oh no! We can’t do that.”
“Why can’t we? Afar better thing to drop it now than to present it and have it flop. 1 can’t give a performance under these conditions. Let’s admit it.” “But…but…We’ve got to! It’s necessary.”
“Why is it necessary, Miss Russell? Political reasons? I have not the slightest interest in politics-and I doubt if you have any really deep interest. So why must we do it?” “Because-because he—” She stopped, unable to go on, strangled by sobs.
I got up, went over, and put a hand on her shoulder. “I know. Because if we don’t, something that he has spent years building up will fall to pieces. Because he can’t do it himself and his friends are trying to cover up and do it for him. Because his friends are loyal to him. Because you are loyal to him. Nevertheless, it hurts you to see someone else in the place that is rightfully his. Besides that, you are half out of your mind with grief and worry about him. Aren’t you?”
“Yes.” I could barely hear it.
I took hold of her chin and tilted her face up. “I know why you find it so hard to have me here, in his place. You love him. But I’m doing the best job for him I know how. Confound it, woman! Do you have to make my job six times harder by treating me like dirt?”
She looked shocked. For a moment I thought she was going to slap me. Then she said brokenly, “I am sorry. I am very sorry. I won’t let it happen again.” I let go her chin and said briskly, “Then let’s get back to work.”
She did not move. “Can you forgive me?”
“Huh? There’s nothing to forgive, Penny. You were acting up because you love him and you were worried. Now let’s get to work. I’ve got to be letter-perfect-and it’s only hours away.” I dropped at once back into the role.
She picked up a spool and started the projector again. I watched him through it once, then did the acceptance speech with the sound cut out but stereo on, matching my voice-Mr voice, I mean-to the moving image. She watched me, looking from the image back to my face with a dazed look on her own. We finished and I switched it off myself. “How was that?”
“That was perfect!”
I smiled his smile. “Thanks, Curly Top.” “Not at all-‘Mr. Bonforte.’”
Two hours later we made rendezvous with the Go For Broke.
Dak brought Roger Clifton and Bill Corpsman to my cabin as soon as the Go For Broke had transferred them. I knew them from pictures. I stood up and said, “Hello, Rog. Glad to see you, Bill.” My voice was warm but casual; on the level at which these people operated, a hasty trip to Earth and back was simply a few days’ separation and nothing more. I limped over and offered my hand. The ship was at the moment under low boost as it adjusted to a much tighter orbit than the Go For Broke had been riding in.
Clifton threw me a quick glance, then played up. He took his cigar out of his mouth, shook hands, and said quietly, “Glad to see you back, Chief.” He was a small man, bald-headed and middle-aged, and looked like a lawyer and a good poker player.
“Anything special while I was away?” “No. Just routine. I gave Penny the file.”
“Good.” I turned to Bill Corpsman, again offered my hand.
He did not take it. Instead he put his fists on his hips, looked up at me, and whistled. “Amazing! I really do believe we stand a chance of getting away with it.” He looked me up and down, then said, “Turn around, Smythe. Move around. I want to see you walk.”
I found that I was actually feeling the annoyance that Bonforte would have felt at such uncalled-for impertinence, and, of course, it showed in my face. Dak touched Corpsman’s sleeve and said quickly, “Knock it off, Bill. You remember what we agreed?”
“Chicken tracks!” Corpsman answered. “This room is soundproof. I just want to make sure he is up to it. Smythe, how’s your Martian? Can you spiel it?”
I answered with a single squeaking polysyllabic in High Martian, a sentence meaning roughly, “Proper conduct demands that one of us leave!”-but it means far more than that, as it is a challenge which usually ends in someone’s nest being notified of a demise.
I don’t think Corpsman understood it, for he grinned and answered, “I’ve got to hand it to you, Smythe. That’s good.”
But Dak understood it. He took Corpsman by the arm and said, “Bill, I told you to knock it off. You’re in my ship and that’s an order. We play it straight from here on-every second.” Clifton added, “Pay attention to him, Bill. You know we agreed that was the way to do it. Otherwise somebody might slip.”
Corpsman glanced at him, then shrugged. “All right, all right. I was just checking up-after all, this was my idea.” He gave me a one-sided smile and said, “Howdy, Mister Bonforte. Glad to see you back.”
There was a shade too much emphasis on “Mister” but I answered, “Good to be back, Bill. Anything special I need to know before we go down?” “I guess not. Press conference at Goddard City after the ceremonies.” I could see him watching me to see how I would take it.
I nodded. “Very well.”
Dak said hastily, “Say, Rog, how about that? Is it necessary? Did you authorize it?”
“I was going to add,” Corpsman went on, turning to Clifton, “before the Skipper here got the jitters, that I can take it myself and tell the boys that the Chief has dry laryngitis from the ceremonies-or we can limit it to written questions submitted ahead of time and I’ll get the answers written out for him while the ceremonies are going on. Seeing that he looks and sounds so good close up, I would say to risk it. How about it, Mister-‘Bonforte’? Think you can swing it?”
“I see no problem involved in it, Bill.” I was thinking that if I managed to get by the Martians without a slip I would undertake to ad-lib double talk to a bunch of human reporters as long as they wanted to listen. I had good command of Bonforte’s speaking style by now and at least a rough notion of his policies and attitudes-and I need not be specific.
But Clifton looked worried. Before he could speak the ship’s horn brayed out, “Captain is requested to come to the control room. Minus four minutes.” Dak said quickly, “You all will have to settle it. I’ve got to put this sled in its slot-I’ve got nobody up there but young Epstein.” He dashed for the door.
Corpsman called out, “Hey, Skip! I wanted to tell you-” He was out the door and following Dak without waiting to say goodby.
Roger Clifton closed the door Corpsman had left open, came back, and said slowly, “Do you want to risk this press conference?” “That is up to you. I want to do the lob.”
“Mnim … Then I’m inclined to risk it-if we use the written questions method. But I’ll check Bill’s answers myself before you have to give them.”
“Very well.” I added, “If you can find a way to let me have them ten minutes or so ahead of time, there shouldn’t be any difficulty. I’m a very quick study.”
He inspected me. “I quite believe it-Chief. All right, I’ll have Penny slip the answers to you right after the ceremonies. Then you can excuse yourself to go to the men’s room and just stay there until you are sure of them.”
“That should work.”
“I think so. Uh, I must say I feel considerably better now that I’ve seen you. Is there anything I can do for you?” “I think not, Rog. Yes, there is, too. Any word about-him?”
“Eh? Well, yes and no. He’s still in Goddard City; we’re sure of that. He hasn’t been taken off Mars, or even out in the country. We blocked them on that, if that was their intention.” “Eh? Goddard City is not a big place, is it? Not more than a hundred thousand? What’s the hitch?”
“The hitch is that we don’t dare admit that you-I mean that he
-is missing. Once we have this adoption thing wrapped up, we can put you out of sight, then announce the kidnaping as if it had lust taken place-and make them take the city apart rivet by rivet. The city authorities are all Humanity Party appointees, but they will have to co-operate-after the ceremony. It will be the most wholehearted co-operation you ever saw, for they will be deadly anxious to produce him before the whole Kkkahgral nest swarms over them and tears the city down around theft ears.”
“Oh. I’m still learning about Martian psychology and customs.” “Aren’t we all?”
“Rog? Mmm… What leads you to think that he is still alive? Wouldn’t theft purpose be better served-and with less risk-just by killing him?” I was thinking queasily how simple it had turned out to be to get rid of a body, if a man was ruthless enough.
“I see what you mean. But that, too, is tied up with Martian notions about ‘propriety.’” (He used the Martian word.) “Death is the one acceptable excuse for not carrying out an obligation. If he were simply killed, they would adopt him into the nest after his death-and then the whole nest and probably every nest on Mars would set out to avenge him. They would not mind in the least if the whole human race were to die or be killed-but to kill this one human being to keep him from being adopted, that’s another kettle of fish entirely. Matter of obligation and propriety-in some ways a Martian’s response to a situation is so automatic as to remind one of instinct. It is not, of course, since they are incredibly intelligent. But they do the damnedest things.” He frowned and added, “Sometimes I wish I had never left Sussex.”
The warning hooter broke up the discussion by forcing us to hurry to our bunks. Dak had cut it fine on purpose; the shuttle rocket from Goddard City was waiting for us when we settled into free fall. All five of us went down, which just filled the passenger couches-again a matter of planning, for the Resident Commissioner had expressed the intention of coming up to meet me and had been dissuaded only by Dak’s message to him that our party would require all the space.
I tried to get a better look at the Martian surface as we went down, as I had had only one glimpse of it, from the control room of the Tom Paine-since I was supposed to have been there many times I could not show the normal curiosity of a tourist. I did not get much of a look; the shuttle pilot did not turn us so that we could see until he leveled off for his glide approach and I was busy then putting on my oxygen mask.
That pesky Mars-type mask almost finished us; I had never had a chance to practice with it-Dak did not think of it and I had not realized it would be a problem; I had worn both spacesuit and aqua lung on other occasions and I thought this would be about the same. It was not. The model Bonforte favored was a mouthfree type, a Mitsubushi “Sweet Winds” which pressurizes directly at the nostrils-a nose clamp, nostril plugs, tubes up each nostril which then run back under each ear to the supercharger on the back of your neck. I concede that it is a fine device, once you get used to it, since you can talk, eat, drink, etc., while wearing it. But I would rather have a dentist put both hands in my mouth.
The real difficulty is that you have to exercise conscious control on the muscles that close the back of your mouth, or you hiss like a teakettle, since the dun thing operates on a pressure difference. Fortunately the pilot equalized to Mars-surface pressure once we all had our masks on, which gave me twenty minutes or so to get used to it. But for a few moments I thought the jig was up, just over a silly piece of gadgetry. But I reminded myself that I had worn the thing hundreds of times before and that I was as used to it as I was to my toothbrush. Presently I believed it.
Dak had been able to avoid having the Resident Commissiooer chit-chat with me for an hour on the way down but it had not been possible to miss him entirely; he met the shuttle at the skyfield. The close timing did keep me from having to cope with other humans, since I had to go at once into the Martian city. It made sense, but it seemed strange that I would be safer among Martians than among my own kind.
It seemed even stranger to be on Mars. Chapter 5
Mr. Commissioner Boothroyd was a Humanity Party appointee, of course, as were all of his staff except for civil service technical employees. But Dak had told me that it was at least sixty- forty that Boothroyd had not had a finger in the plot; Dak considered him honest but stupid. For that matter, neither Dak nor Rog Clifton believed that Supreme Minister Quiroga was in it; they attributed the thing to the clandestine terrorist group inside the Humanity Party who called themselves the “Actionists”-and they attributed them to some highiy respectable big-money boys who stood to profit heavily.
Myself, I would not have known an Actionist from an auctioneer.
But the minute we landed something popped up that made me wonder whether friend Boothroyd was as honest and stupid as Dak thought he was. It was a minor thing but one of those little things that can punch holes in an impersonation. Since I was a Very Important Visitor the Commissioner met me; since I held no public office other than membership in the Grand Assembly and was traveling privately no official honors were offered. He was alone save for his aide-and a little girl about fifteen.
I knew him from photographs and I knew quite a bit about him; Rog and Penny had briefed me carefully. I shook hands, asked about his sinusitis, thanked him for the pleasant time I had had on my last visit, and spoke with his aide in that warm man-to-man fashion that Bonforte was so good at. Then I turned to the young lady. I knew Boothroyd had children and that one of them was about this age and sex; I did not know-perhaps Rog and Penny did not know-whether or not I had ever met her.
Boothroyd himself saved me. “You haven’t met my daughter Deirdre, I believe. She insisted on coming along.”
Nothing in the pictures I had studied had shown Bonforte dealing with young girls-so I simply had to be Bonforte-a widower in his middle fifties who had no children of his own, no nieces, and probably little experience with teen-age girls-but with lots of experience in meeting strangers of every sort. So I treated her as if she were twice her real age; I did not quite kiss her band. She blushed and looked pleased.
Boothroyd looked indulgent and said, “Well, ask him, my dear. You may not have another chance.”
She blushed deeper and said, “Sir, could I have your autograph? The girls in my school collect them. I have Mr. Quiroga’s I ought to have yours.” She produced a little book which she had been holding behind her.
I felt like a copter driver asked for his license-which is home in his other pants. I had studied hard but I had not expected to have to forge Bonforte’s signature. Damn it, you can’t do everything in two and a half days!
But it was simply impossible for Bonforte to refuse such a request-and I was Bonforte. I smiled jovially and said, “You have Mr. Quiroga’s already?” “Yes, sir.”
“Just his autograph?”
“Yes. Er, he put ‘Best Wishes’ on it.”
I winked at Boothroyd. “Just ‘Best Wishes,’ eh? To young lathes I never make it less than ‘Love.’ Tell you what I’m going to do-” I took the little book from her, glanced through the pages. “Chief,” Dak said urgently, “we are short on minutes.”
“Compose yourself,” I said without looking up. “The entire Martian nation can wait, if necessary, on a young lady.” I banded the book to Penny. “Will you note the size of this book? And then remind me to send a photograph suitable for pasting in it-and properly autographed, of course.”
“Yes, Mr. Bonforte.”
“Will that suit you, Miss Deirdre?” “Gee!”
“Good. Thanks for asking me. We can leave now, Captain. Mr. Commissioner, is that our car?”
“Yes, Mr. Bonforte.” He shook his head wryly. “I’m afraid you have converted a member of my own family to your Expansionist heresies. Hardly sporting, eh? Sitting ducks, and so forth?” “That should teach you not to expose her to bad company-eh, Miss Deirdre?” I shook hands again. “Thanks for meeting us, Mr. Commissioner. I am afraid we had better hurry thong
now.”
“Yes, certainly. Pleasure.” “Thanks, Mr. Bonforte!” “Thank you, my dear.”
I turned away slowly, so as not to appear jerky or nervous in stereo. There were photographers around, still, news pickup, stereo, and so forth, as well as many reporters. Bill was keeping the reporters away from us; as we turned to go he waved and said, “See you later, Chief,” and turned back to talk to one of them. Rog, Dak, and Penny followed me into the car. There was the usual skyfield crowd, not as numerous as at any earthport, but numerous. I was not worried about them as long as Boothroyd accepted the impersonation-though there were certainly some present who knew that I was not Bonforte.
But I refused to let those individuals worry me, either. They could cause us no trouble without incriminating themselves.
The car was a Rolls Outlander, pressurized, but I left my oxygen mask on because the others did. I took the right-hand seat, Rog sat beside me, and Penny beside him, while Dak wound his long legs around one of the folding seats. The driver glanced back through the partition and started up.
Rog said quietly, “I was worried there for a moment.”
“Nothing to worry about. Now let’s all be quiet, please. I want to review my speech.”
Actually I wanted to gawk at the Martian scene; I knew the speech perfectly. The driver took us along the north edge of the field, past many towns. I read signs for Verwijs Trading Company, Diana Outlines, Ltd., Three Planets, and I. G. Farbenindustrie. There were almost as many Martians as humans in sight. We ground hogs get the impression that Martians are slow as snails- and they are, on our comparatively heavy planet. On their own world they skim along on their bases like a stone sliding over water.
To the right, south of us past the fiat field, the Great Canal dipped into the too-close horizon, showing no shore line beyond. Straight ahead of us was the Nest of Kkkah, a fairy city. I was staring at it, my heart lifting at its fragile beauty, when Dak moved suddenly.
We were well past the traffic around the towns but there was one car ahead, coming toward us; I had seen it without noticing it.
But Dak must have been edgily ready for trouble; when the other car was quite close, he suddenly slammed down the partition separating us from the driver, swarmed over the man’s neck, and grabbed the wheel. We slewed to the nght, barely missing the other car, slewed again to the left and barely stayed on the road It was a near thing, for we were past the field now and here the highway edged the canal.
I had not been much use to Dak a couple of days earlier in the Eisenhower, but 1 had been unarmed and not expecting trouble, This day 1 was still unarmed, not so much as a poisoned fang, but 1 comported myself a little better. Oak was more than busy trying to drive the car while leaning over from the back seat. The driver, caught off balance at first, now tried to wrestle him away from the wheel.
I lunged forward, got my left arm around the drivers neck, and shoved my right thumb into his ribs. Move and you’ve had it!” The voice belonged to the hero—villain in The Second-Story Gentleman; the line of dialogue was his too.
My prisoner became very quiet.
Dak said urgently, “Rog, what are they doing?”
Clifton looked back and answered, “They’re turning around.”
Oak answered, “Okay. Chief, keep your gun on that character while I climb over.” He was doing so even as he spoke, an awkward matter in view of his long legs and the crowded car- He settled into the seat and said happily, “1 doubt if anything on wheels can catch a Rolls on a straightaway.” He jerked on the damper and the big car shot forward. “How am I doing, Rog?”
“They’re just turned around.”
“All right. What do we do with this item? Dump him out?”
My victim squirmed and said, “I didn’t do anything!” 1 jabbed my thumb harder and he quieted.
“Oh, not a thing,” Dak agreed, keeping his eyes on the road. All you did was try to cause a little crash-just enough to make Mr. Bonforte late for his appointment If I had not noticed that you were slowing down to make it easy on yourself, you might have got away with it. No guts, eh?” He took a slight curve with the tires screaming and the gyro fighting to keep us upright. “What’s the situation, Rog?”
“They’ve given up.”
“So.” Dak did not slacken speed; we must have been doing well over three hundred kilometers. “I wonder if they would try to bomb us with one of their own boys aboard? How about it, bub? Would they write you off as expendable?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about! You’re going to be in trouble over this!”
“Really? The word of four respectable people against your jailbird record? Or aren’t you a transportee? Anyhow, Mr. Bonforte prefers to have me drive him-so naturally you were glad to do a favor for Mr. Bonforte.” We hit something about as big as a worm cast on that glassy road and my prisoner and I almost went through the roof.
“‘Mr. Bonforte!’” My victim made it a swear word.
Dak was silent for several seconds. At last he said, “I don’t think we ought to dump this one, Chief. I think we ought to let you off, then take him to a quiet place. I think he might talk if we urged him.”
The driver tried to get away. I tightened the pressure on his neck and jabbed him again with my thumb knuckle. Aknuckle may not feel too much like the muzzle of a heater-but who wants to find out? He relaxed and said sullenly, “You don’t dare give me the needle.”
“Heavens, no!” Dak answered in shocked tones. “That would be illegal. Penny girl, got a bobby pin?”
“Why, certainly, Dak.” She sounded puzzled and I was. She did not sound frightened, though, and I certainly was.
“Good. Bub, did you ever have a bobby pin shoved up under your fingernails? They say it will even break a hypnotic command not to talk. Works directly on the subconscious or something. Only trouble is that the patient makes the most unpleasant noises. So we are going to take you out in the dunes where you won’t disturb anybody but sand scorpions. After you have talked-now here comes the nice part! After you talk we are going to turn you loose, not do anything, just let you walk back into town. But-listen carefully now!-if you are real nice and co-operative, you get a prize. We’ll let you have your mask for the walk.”
Dak stopped talking; for a moment there was no sound but the keening of the thin Martian air past the roof. Ahuman being can walk possibly two hundred yards on Mars without an oxygen mask, if he is in good condition. I believe I read of a case where a man walked almost half a mile before he died. I glanced at the trip meter and saw that we were about twenty- three kilometers from Goddard City.
The prisoner said slowly, “Honest, I don’t know anything about it. I was just paid to crash the car.”
“We’ll try to stimulate your memory.” The gates of the Martian city were just ahead of us; Dak started slowing the car. “Here’s where you get out, Chief. Rog, better take your gun and relieve the Chief of our guest.”
“Right, Dak.” Rog moved up by me, jabbed the man in the ribs-again with a bare knuckle. I moved out of the way. Dak braked the car to a halt, stopping right in front of the gates. “Four minutes to spare,” he said happily. “This is a nice car. I wish I owned it. Rog, ease up a touch and give me room.”
Clifton did so, Dak chopped the driver expertly on the side of his neck with the edge of his hand; the man went limp. “That will keep him quiet while you get clear. Can’t have any unseemly disturbance under the eyes of the nest. Let’s check time.”
We did so. I was about three and a half minutes ahead of the deadline. “You are to go in exactly on time, you understand? Not ahead, not behind, but on the dot.” “That’s right,” Clifton and I answered in chorus.
“Thirty seconds to walk up the ramp, maybe. What do you want to do with the three minutes you have left?” I sighed. “Just get my nerve back.”
“Your nerve is all right. You didn’t miss a trick back there. Cheer up, old son. Two hours from now you can head for home, with your pay burning holes in your pocket We’re on the last lap.”
“1 hope so. It’s been quite a strain. Uh, Dak?” “Yes?”
“Come here a second.” I got out of the car, motioned him to come with me a short distance away. “What happens if I make a mistake-in there?” “Eh?” Dak looked surprised, then laughed a little too heartily. “You won’t make a mistake. Penny tells me you’ve got it down Jo-block perfect.” “Yes, but suppose I slip?”
“You won’t slip. I know how you feel; I felt the same way on my first solo grounding. But when it started, I was so busy doing it I didn’t have time to do it wrong.” Clifton called out, his voice thin in thin air, “Dak! Are you watching the time?”
“Gobs of time. Over a minute.”
“Mr. Bonforte!” It was Penny’s voice. I turned and went back to the car. She got out and put out her hand. “Good luck, Mr. Bonforte.” “Thanks, Penny.”
Rog shook hands and Dak clapped me on the shoulder. “Minus thirty-five seconds. Better start.”
I nodded and started up the ramp. It must have been within a second or two of the exact, appointed time when I reached the top, for the mighty gates rolled back as I came to them. I took a deep breath and cursed that damned air mask.
Then I took my stage.
It doesn’t make any difference how many times you do it, that first walk on as the curtain goes up on the first night of any run is a breath-catcher and a heart-stopper. Sure, you know your sides. Sure, you’ve asked the manager to count the house. Sure, you’ve done it all before. No matter-when you first walk out there and know that all those eyes are on you, waiting for you to speak, waiting for you to do something-maybe even waiting for you to go up on your lines, brother, you feel it. This is why they have prompters.
I looked out and saw my audience and I wanted to run. I had stage fright for the first time in thirty years.
The siblings of the nest were spread out before me as far as I could see. There was an open lane in front of me, with thousands on each side, set close together as asparagus. I knew that the first thing I must do was slow-march down the center of that lane, clear to the far end, to the ramp leading down into the inner nest.
I could not move.
I said to myself, “Look, boy, you’re John Joseph Bonforte. You’ve been here dozens of times before. These people are your friends. You’re here because you want to be here-and because they want you here. So march down that aisle. Tum turn te turn! ‘Here comes the bride!”
I began to feel like Bonforte again. I was Uncle Joe Bonforte, determined to do this thing perfectly-for the honor and welfare of my own people and my own planet-and for my Mends the Martians. I took a deep breath and one step.
That deep breath saved me; it brought me that heavenly fragrance. Thousands on thousands of Martians packed close together-it smelled to me as if somebody had dropped and broken a whole case of Jungle Lust. The conviction that I smelled it was so strong that I involuntarily glanced back to see if Penny had followed me in. I could feel her handclasp warm in my palm.
I started limping down that aisle, trying to make it about the speed a Martian moves on his own planet. The crowd closed in behind me. Occasionally kids would get away from their elders and skitter out in front of me. By “kids” I mean post-fission Martians, half the mass and not much over half the height of an adult. They are never out of the nest and we are inclined to forget that there can be little Martians. It takes almost five years, after fission, for a Martian to regain his full size, have his brain fully restored, and get all of his memory back. During this transition he is an idiot studying to be a moron. The gene rearrangement and subsequent regeneration incident to conjugation and fission put him out of the running for a long time. One of Bonforte’s spools was a lecture on the subject, accompanied by some not very good amateur stereo.
The kids, being cheerful idiots, are exempt from propriety and all that that implies. But they are greatly loved.
Two of the kids, of the same and smallest size and looking just alike to me, skittered out and stopped dead in front of me, just like a foolish puppy in traffic. Either I stopped or I ran them down.
So I stopped. They moved even closer, blocking my way completely, and started sprouting pseudo limbs while chittering at each other. I could not understand them at all. Quickly they were plucking at my clothes and snaking their patty-paws into my sleeve pockets.
The crowd was so tight that I could hardly go around them. I was stretched between two needs. In the first place they were so darn cute that I wanted to see if I didn’t have a sweet tucked away somewhere for them-but in a still firster place was the knowledge that the adoption ceremony was timed like a ballet. If I didn’t get on down that street, I was going to commit the classic sin against propriety made famous by Kkkahgral the Younger himself.
But the kids were not about to get out of my way. One of them had found my watch.
I sighed and was almost overpowered by the perfume. Then I made a bet with myself. I bet that baby-kissing was a Galactic Universal and that it took precedence even over Martian propriety. I got on one knee, making myself about the height they were, and fondled them for a few moments, patting them and running my hands down their scales.
Then I stood up and said carefully, “That is all now. I must go,” which used up a large fraction of my stock of Basic Martian.
The kids clung to me but I moved them carefully and gently aside and went on down the double line, hurrying to make up for the time I had lost. No life wand burned a hole in my back. I risked a hope that my violation of propriety had not yet reached the capital offense level. I reached the ramp leading down into the inner nest and started on down.
* * * * I. * * * * * * * *
That line of asterisks represents the adoption ceremony. Why? Because it is limited to members of the Kkkah nest. It is a family matter.
Put it this way: AMormon may have very close gentile friends-but does that friendship get a gentile inside the Temple at Salt Lake City? It never has and it never will. Martians visit very freely back and forth between theft nests-but a Martian enters the inner nest only of his own family. Even his conjugate-spouses are not thus privileged. I have no more right to tell the details of the adoption ceremony than a lodge brother has to be specific about ritual outside the lodge.
Oh, the rough outlines do not matter, since they are the same for any nest, just as my part was the same for any candidate. My sponsor-Bonforte’s oldest Martian friend, Kkkahnreash- met me at the door and threatened me with a wand. I demanded that he kill me at once were I guilty of any breach. To tell the truth, I did not recognize him, even though I had studied a picture of him. But it had to be him because ritual required it.
Having thus made clear that I stood four-square for Motherhood, the Home, Civic Virtue, and never missing Sunday school, I was permitted to enter. ‘Rrreash conducted me around all the stations, I was questioned and I responded. Every word, every gesture, was as stylized as a classical Chinese play, else I would not have stood a chance. Most of the time I did not know what they were saying and half of the time I did not understand my own replies; I simply knew my cues and the responses. It was not made easier by the low light level the Martians prefer; I was groping around like a mole.
I played once with Hawk Mantell, shortly before he died, after he was stone-deaf. There was a trouper! He could not even use a hearing device because the eighth nerve was dead. Part of the time he could cue by llps but that is not always possible. He directed the production himself and he timed it perfectly. I have seen him deliver a line, walk away-then whirl around and snap out a retort to a line that he had never heard, precisely on the timing.
This was like that. I knew my part and I played it. If they blew it, that was their lookout.
But it did not help my morale that there were never less than half a dozen wands leveled at me the whole time. I kept telling myself that they wouldn’t burn me down for a slip. After all, I was just a poor stupid human being and at the very least they would give me a passing mark for effort. But I didn’t believe it.
After what seemed like days-but was not, since the whole ceremony times exactly one ninth of Mars’ rotation-after an endless time, we ate. I don’t know what and perhaps it is just as well. It did not poison me.
After that the elders made their speeches, I made my acceptance speech in answer, and they gave me my name and my wand. I was a Martian.
I did not know how to use the wand and my name sounded like a leaky faucet, but from that instant on it was my legal name on Mars and I was legally a blood member of the most aristocratic family on the planet-exactly fifty-two hours after a ground hog down on his luck had spent his last half-Imperial buying a drink for a stranger in the bar of Casa Manana.
I guess this proves that one should never pick up strangers.
I got out as quickly as possible. Dak had made up a speech for me in which I claimed proper necessity for leaving at once and they let me go. I was nervous as a man upstairs in a sorority house because there was no longer ritual to guide me. I mean to say even casual social behavior was still hedged around with airtight and risky custom and I did not know the moves. So I recited my excuse and headed out. ‘Rrreash and another elder went with me and I chanced playing with another pair of the kids when we were outside-or maybe the same pair. Once I reached the gates the two elders said good-by in squeaky English and let me go out alone; the gates closed behind me and I reswallowed my heart.
The Rolls was waiting where they had let me out; I hurried down, a door opened, and I was surprised to see that Penny was in it alone. But not displeased. I called out, “Hi, Curly Top! I made it!”
“I knew you would.”
I gave a mock sword salute with my wand and said, “Just call me Kkkahjjjerrr”-spraying the front rows with the second syllable. “Be careful with that thing!” she said nervously.
I slid in beside her on the front seat and asked, “Do you know how to use one of these things?” The reaction was setting in and I felt exhausted but gay; I wanted three quick drinks and a thick steak, then to wait up for the critics’ reviews.
“No. But do be careful.”
“I think all you have to do is to press it here,” which I did, and there was a neat two-inch hole in the windshield and the car wasn’t pressurized any longer. Penny gasped. I said, “Gee, I’m sorry. I’ll put it away until Dak can coach me.”
She gulped. “It’s all right. Just be careful where you point it.” She started wheeling the car and I found that Dak was not the only one with a heavy hand on the damper.
Wind was whistling in through the hole I had made. I said, “What’s the rush? I need some time to study my lines for the press conference. Did you bring them? And where are the others?” I had forgotten completely the driver we had grabbed; I had not thought about him from the time the gates of the nest opened.
“No. They couldn’t come.”
“Penny, what’s the matter? What’s happened?” I was wondering if I could possibly take a press conference without coaching. Perhaps I could tell them a little about the adoption; I wouldn’t have to fake that.
“It’s Mr. Bonforte-they’ve found him.” Chapter 6
I had not noticed until then that she had not once called me “Mr. Bonforte.” She could not, of course, for I was no longer he; I was again Lorrie Smythe, that actor chap they had hired to stand in for him.
I sat back and sighed, and let myself relax. “So it’s over at last-and we got away with it.” I felt a great burden lift off me; I had not known how heavy it was until I put it down. Even my “lame” leg stopped aching. I reached over and patted Penny’s hand on the wheel and said in my own voice, “I’m glad it’s over. But I’m going to miss having you around, pal. You’re a trouper. But even the best run ends and the company breaks up. I hope I’ll see you again sometime.”
“I hope so too.”
“I suppose Dak has arranged some shenanigan to keep me under cover and sneak me back into the Tom Paine?”
“I don’t know.” Her voice sounded odd and I gave her a quick glance and saw that she was crying. My heart gave a skip. Penny crying? Over us separating? I could not believe it and yet I wanted to. One might think that, between my handsome features and cultivated manners, women would find me irresistible, but it is a deplorable fact that all too many of them have found me easy to resist. Penny had seemed to find it no effort at all.
“Penny,” I said hastily, “why all the tears, hon? You’ll wreck this car.” “I can’t help it.”
“Well-put me in it. What’s wrong? You told me they had got him back; you didn’t tell me anything else.” I had a sudden horrid but logical suspicion. “He was alive-wasn’t he?” “Yes-he’s alive-but, oh, they’ve hurt him!” She started to sob and I had to grab the wheel.
She straightened up quickly. “Sorry.”
“Want me to drive?”
“I’ll be all right. Besides, you don’t know how-I mean you aren’t supposed to know how to drive.”
“Huh? Don’t be silly. I do know how and it no longer matters that-” I broke off, suddenly realizing that it might still matter. If they had roughed up Bonforte so that it showed, then he could not appear in public in that shape-at least not only fifteen minutes after being adopted into the Kkkah nest. Maybe I would have to take that press conference and depart publicly, while Bonforte would be the one they would sneak aboard. Well, all right-hardly more than a curtain call. “Penny, do Dak and Rog want me to stay in character for a bit? Do I play to the reporters? Or don’t I?”
“I don’t know. There wasn’t time.”
We were already approaching the stretch of godowns by the field, and the giant bubble domes of Goddard City were in sight. “Penny, slow this car down and talk sense. I’ve got to have my cues.”
The driver had talked-I neglected to ask whether or not the bobby-pin treatment had been used. He had then been turned loose to walk back but had not been deprived of his mask; the others had barreled back to Goddard City, with Dak at the wheel. I felt lucky to have been left behind; voyageurs should not be allowed to drive anything but spaceships.
They went to the address the driver had given them, in Old Town under the original bubble. I gathered that it was the sort of jungle every port has had since the Phoenicians sailed through the shoulder of Africa, a place of released transportees, prostitutes, monkey-pushers, rangees, and other dregs-a neighborhood where policemen travel only in pairs.
The information they had squeezed out of the driver had been correct but a few minutes out of date. The room had housed the prisoner, certainly, for there was a bed in it which seemed to have been occupied continuously for at least a week, a pot of coffee was still hot-and wrapped in a towel on a shelf was an old- fashioned removable denture which Clifton identified as belonging to Bonforte. But Bonforte himself was missing and so were his captors.
They had left there with the intention of carrying out the original plan, that of claiming that the kidnapping had taken place immediately after the adoption and putting pressure on Boothroyd by threatening to appeal to the Nest of Kkkah. But they had found Bonforte, had simply run across him in the street before they left Old Town-a poor old stumblebum with a week’s beard, dirty and dazed. The men had not recognized him, but Penny had known him and made them stop.
She broke into sobs again as she told me this part and we almost ran down a truck train snaking up to one of the loading
Areasonable reconstruction seemed to be that the laddies in the second car-the one that was to crash us-had reported back, whereupon the faceless leaders of our opponents had decided that the kidnaping no longer served their purposes. Despite the arguments I had heard about it, I was surprised that they had not simply killed him; it was not until later that I understood that what they had done was subtler, more suited to their purposes, and much crueler than mere killing.
“Where is he now?” I asked.
“Dak took him to the voyageurs’ hostel in Dome 3.” “Is that where we are headed?”
“I don’t know. Rog just said to go pick you up, then they disappeared in the service door of the hostel. Uh, no, I don’t think we dare go there. I don’t know what to do.” “Penny, stop the car.”
“Huh?”
“Surely this car has a phone. We won’t stir another inch until we find out-or figure out-what we should do. But I am certain of one thing: I should stay in character until Dak or Rog decides that I should fade out. Somebody has to talk to the newsmen. Somebody has to make a public departure for the Tom Paine. You’re sure that Mr. Bonforte can’t be spruced up so that he can do it?”
“What? Oh, he couldn’t possibly. You didn’t see him.”
“So I didn’t. I’ll take your word for it. All right, Penny, I’m ‘Mr. Bonforte’ again and you’re my secretary. We’d better get with “Yes-Mr. Bonforte.”
“Now try to get Captain Broadbent on the phone, will you, please?”
We couldn’t find a phone list in the car and she had to go through “Information,” but at last she was tuned with the clubhouse of the voyageurs. I could hear both sides. “Pilots’ Club, Mrs. Kelly speaking.”
Penny covered the microphone. “Do I give my name?” “Play it straight. We’ve nothing to hide.”
“This is Mr. Bonforte’s secretary,” she said gravely. “Is his pilot there? Captain Broadbent.”
“I know him, dear.” There was a shout: “Hey! Any of you smokers see where Dak went?” After a pause she went on, “He’s gone to his room. I’m buzzing him.” Shortly Penny said, “Skipper? The Chief wants to talk to you,” and handed me the phone.
“This is the Chief, Dak.” “Oh. Where are you-sir?”
“Still in the car. Penny picked me up. Dak, press conference, I believe. Where is it?”
He hesitated. “I’m glad you called in, sir. There’s been a-slight change in the situation.”
“So Penny told me. I’m just as well pleased; I’m rather tired. Dak, I’ve decided not to stay dirtside tonight; my gimp leg has been bothering me and I’m looking forward to a real rest in free fall.” I hated free fall but Bonforte did not. “Will you or Rog make my apologies to the Commissioner, and so forth?”
“We’ll take care of everything, sir.”
“Good. How soon can you arrange a shuttle for me?”
“The Pixie is still standing by for you, sir. If you will go to Gate 3, I’ll phone and have a field car pick you up.” “Very good. Out.”
“Out, sir.”
I handed the phone to Penny to put back in its clamp. “Curly Top, I don’t know whether that phone frequency is monitored or not-or whether possibly the whole car is bugged. If either is the case, they may have learned two things-where Dak is and through that where he is, and second, what I am about to do next. Does that suggest anything to your mind?”
She looked thoughtful, then took out her secretary’s notebook, wrote in it: Let’s get rid of the car. I nodded, then took the book from her and wrote in it: How far away is Gate 3?
She answered: Walking distance.
Silently we climbed out and left. She had pulled into some executive’s parking space outside one of the warehouses when she had parked the car; no doubt in time it would be returned where it belonged-and such minutiae no longer mattered.
We had gone about fifty yards, when I stopped. Something was the matter. Not the day, certainly. It was almost balmy, with the sun burning brightly in clear, purple Martian sky. The traffic,
wheel and foot, seemed to pay no attention to us, or at least such attention was for the pretty young woman with me rather than directed at me. Yet I felt uneasy.
“What is it, Chief?” “Eh? That is what it is!” “Sir?”
“I’m not being the ‘Chief.’ It isn’t in character to go dodging off like this. Back we go, Penny.”
She did not argue, but followed me back to the car. This time I climbed into the back seat, sat there looking dignified, and let her chauffeur me to Gate 3.
It was not the gate we had come in. I think Dak had chosen it because it ran less to passengers and more to freight. Penny paid no attention to signs and ran the big Rolls right up to the gate. Aterminal policeman tried to stop her; she simply said coldly, “Mr. Bonforte’s ear. And will you please send word to the Commissioner’s office to call for it here?”
He looked baffled, glanced into the rear compartment, seemed to recognize me, saluted, and let us stay. I answered with a friendly wave and he opened the door for me. “The lieutenant is very particular about keeping the space back of the fence clear, Mr. Bonforte,” he apologized, “but I guess it’s all right.”
“You can have the car moved at once,” I said. “My secretary and I are leaving. Is my field car here?”
“I’ll find out at the gate, sir.” He left. It was just the amount of audience I wanted, enough to tie it down solid that “Mr. Bonforte” had arrived by official car and had left for his space yacht. I tucked my life wand under my arm like Napoleon’s baton and limped after him, with Penny tagging along. The cop spoke to the gatemaster, then hurried back to us, smiling. “Field car is waiting, sir.”
“Thanks indeed.” I was congratulating myself on the perfection of the timing.
“Uh…” The cop looked flustered and added hurriedly, in a low voice, “I’m an Expansionist, too, sir. Good job you did today.” He glanced at the life wand with a touch of awe. I knew exactly how Bonforte should look in this routine. “Why, thank you. I hope you have lots of children. We need to work up a solid majority.”
He guffawed more than it was worth. “That’s a good one! Uh, mind if I repeat it?”
“Not at all.” We had moved on and I started through the gate. The gatemaster touched my arm. “Er … Your passport, Mr. Bonforte.” I trust I did not let my expression change. “The passports, Penny.”
She looked frostily at the official. “Captain Broadbent takes care of all clearances.”
He looked at me and looked away. “I suppose it’s all right. But I’m supposed to check them and take down the serial numbers.”
“Yes, of course. Well, I suppose I must ask Captain Broadbent to run out to the field. Has my shuttle been assigned a take-off time? Perhaps you had better arrange with the tower to ‘hold.’”
But Penny appeared to be cattily angry. “Mr. Bonforte, this is ridiculous! We’ve never had this red tape before-certainly not on Mars.” The cop said hastily, “Of course it’s all right, Hans. After all, this is Mr. Bonforte.”
“Sure, but—”
I interrupted with a happy smile. “There’s a simpler way out. If you-what is your name, sir?” “Hasiwanter. Hans Haslwanter,” he answered reluctantly.
“Mr. Haslwanter, if you will call Mr. Commissioner Boothroyd, I’ll speak to him and we can save my pilot a trip out to the field- and save me an hour or more of time.” “Uh, I wouldn’t like to do that, sir. I could call the port captain’s office?” he suggested hopefully.
“Just get me Mr. Boothroyd’s number. 1 will call him.” This time I put a touch of frost into my voice, the attitude of the busy and important man who wishes to be democratic but has had all the pushing around and hampering by underlings that he intends to put up with.
That did it. He said hastily, “I’m sure it’s all right, Mr. Banforte. It’s just-well, regulations, you know.” “Yes, I know. Thank you.” I started to push on through.
“Hold it, Mr. Bonforte! Look this way.”
I glanced around. That i-dotting and 1-crossing civil servant had held us up just long enough to let the press catch up with us. One man had dropped to his knee and was pointing a stereobox at me; he looked up and said, “Hold the wand where we can see it.” Several others with various types of equipment were gathering around us; one had climbed up on the roof of the Rolls. Someone else was shoving a microphone at me and another had a directional mike aimed like a gun.
I was as angry as a leading woman with her name in small type but I remembered who I was supposed to be. I smiled and moved slowly. Bonforte had a good grasp of the fact that motion appears faster in pictures; I could afford to do it properly.
“Mr. Bonforte, why did you cancel the press conference?”
“Mr. Bonforte, it is asserted that you intend to demand that the Grand Assembly grant full Empire citizenship to Martians; will you comment?” “Mr. Bonforte, how soon are you going to force a vote of confidence in the present government?”
I held up my hand with the wand in it and grinned. “One at a time, please! Now what was that first question?”
They all answered at once, of course; by the time they had sorted out precedence I had managed to waste several moments without having to answer anything. Bill Corpsman came charging up at that point. “Have a heart, boys. The Chief has had a hard day. I gave you all you need.”
I held out a palm at him. “I can spare a minute or two, Bill. Gentiemen, I’m just about to leave but I’ll try to cover the essentials of what you have asked. So far as I know the present government does not plan any reassessment of the relation of Mars to the Empire. Since I am not in office my own opinions are hardly pertinent. I suggest that you ask Mr. Quiroga. On the question of how soon the opposition will force a vote of confidence all I can say is that we won’t do it unless we are sure we can win it-and you know as much about that as I do.”
Someone said, “That doesn’t say much, does it?”
“It was not intended to say much,” I retorted, softening it with a grin. “Ask me questions I can legitimately answer and I will. Ask me those loaded ‘Have-you-quit-beating-your-wife?’ sort and I have answers to match.” I hesitated, realizing that Bonforte had a reputation for bluntness and honesty, especially with the press. “But I am not trying to stall you. You all know why I am here today. Let me say this about it-and you can quote me if you wish.” I reached back into my mind and hauled up an appropriate bit from the speeches of Bonforte I had studied. “The real meaning of what happened today is not that of an honor to one man. This”-I gestured with the Martian wand-.”is proof that two great races can reach out across the gap of strangeness with understanding. Our own race is spreading out to the stars. We shall find-we are finding-that we are vastly outnumbered. If we are to succeed in our expansion to the stars, we must deal honestly, humbly, with open hearts. I have heard it said that our Martian neighbors would overrun Earth if given the chance. This is nonsense; Earth is not suited to Martians. Let us protect our own-but let us not be seduced by fear and hatred into foolish acts. The stars will never be won by little minds; we must be big as space itself.”
The reporter cocked an eyebrow. “Mr. Bonforte, seems to me I heard you make that speech last February.”
“You will hear it next February. Also January, March, and all the other months. Truth cannot be too often repeated.” I glanced back at the gatemaster and added, “I’m sorry but I’ll have to go now-or I’ll miss the tick.” I turned and went through the gate, with Penny after me.
We climbed into the little lead-armored field ear and the door sighed shut. The car was automatized, so I did not have to play up for a driver; I threw myself down and relaxed. “Whew!”
“I thought you did beautifully,” Penny said seriously.
“I had a bad moment when he spotted the speech I was cribbing.”
“You got away with it. It was an inspiration. You-you sounded just like him.” “Was there anybody there I should have called by name?”
“Not really. One or two maybe, but they wouldn’t expect it when you were so rushed.”
“I was caught in a squeeze. That fiddlin’ gatemaster and his passports. Penny, I should think that you would carry them rather than Dak.” “Dak doesn’t carry them. We all carry our own.” She reached into her bag, pulled out a little book. “I had mine-but I did not dare admit it.” “Eh?”
“He had his on him when they got him. We haven’t dared ask for a replacement-not at this time.” I was suddenly very weary.
Having no instructions from Dak or Rog, I stayed in character during the shuttle trip up and on entering the Tom Paine. It wasn’t difficult; I simply went straight to the owner’s cabin and spent long, miserable hours in free fall, biting my nails and wondering what was happening down on the surface. With the aid of antinausea pills I finally managed to float off into fitful sleep-which was a mistake, for I had a series of no-pants nightmares, with reporters pointing at me and cops touching me on the shoulder and Martians aiming their wands at me. They all knew I was phony and were simply arguing over who had the privilege of taking me apart and putting me down the oubliette.
I was awakened by the hooting of the acceleration alarm. Dak’s vibrant baritone was booming, “First and last red warning! One third gee! One minute!” I hastily pulled myself over to my bunk and held on. I felt lots better when it hit; one third gravity is not much, about the same as Mars’ surface I think, but it is enough to steady the stomach and make the floor a real floor.
About five minutes later Dak knocked and let himself in as I was going to the door. “Howdy, Chief.” “Hello, Dak. I’m certainly glad to see you back.”
“Not as glad as I am to be back,” he said wearily. He eyed my bunk. “Mind if I spread out there?” “Help yourself.”
He did so and sighed. “Cripes, am I pooped! I could sleep for a week… I think I wifi.” “Let’s both of us. Uh … You got him aboard?”
“Yes. What a gymkhana!”
“I suppose so. Still, it must be easier to do a job like that in a small, informal port like this than it was to pull the stunts you rigged at Jeff erson.” “Huh? No, it’s much harder here.”
“Eh?”
“Obviously. Here everybody knows everybody-and people will talk.” Dak smiled wryly. “We brought him aboard as a case of frozen canal shrimp. Had to pay export duty, too.” “Dak, how is he?”
“Well …” Dak frowned. “Doc Capek says that he will make a complete recovery-that it is just a matter of time.” He added explosively, “If I could lay my hands on those rats! It would make you break down and bawl to see what they did to him-and yet we have to let them get away with it cold-for his sake.”
Dak was fairly close to bawling himself. I said gently, “I gathered from Penny that they had roughed him up quite a lot. How badly is he hurt?” “Huh? You must have misunderstood Penny. Aside from being filthy-dirty and needing a shave he was not hurt physically at all.”
I looked stupid. “I thought they beat him up. Something about like working him over with a baseball bat.” “I would rather they had! Who cares about a few broken bones? No, no, it was what they did to his brain.” “Oh …” I felt ill. “Brainwash?”
“Yes. Yes and no. They couldn’t have been trying to make him talk because he didn’t have any secrets that were of any possible political importance. He always operated out in the open and everybody knows it. They must have been using it simply to keep him under control, keep him from trying to escape.”
He went on, “Doc says that he thinks they must have been using the minimum daily dose, just enough to keep him docile, until just before they turned him loose. Then they shot him with a load that would turn an elephant into a gibbering idiot. The front lobes of his brain must be soaked like a bath sponge.”
I felt so ill that I was glad I had not eaten. I had once read up on the subject; I hate it so much that it fascinates me. To my mind there is something immoral and degrading in an absolute cosmic sense in tampering with a man’s personality. Murder is a clean crime in comparison, a mere peccadillo. “Brainwash” is a term that comes down to us from the Communist movement of the Late Dark Ages; it was first applied to breaking a man’s will and altering his personality by physical indignities and subtle torture. But that might take months; later they found a “better” way, one which would turn a man into a babbling slave in seconds-simply inject any one of several cocaine derivatives into his frontal brain lobes.
The ifithy practice had first been developed for a legitimate purpose, to quiet disturbed patients and make them accessible to psychotherapy. As such, it was a humane advance, for it was used instead of lobotomy-“lobotomy” is a term almost as obsolete as “chastity girdle” but it means stirring a man’s brain with a knife in such a fashion as to destroy his personality without killing him. Yes, they really used to do that-just as they used to beat them to “drive the devils out.”
The Communists developed the new brainwash-by-drugs to an efficient technique, then when there were no more Communists, the Bands of Brothers polished it up still further until they could dose a man so lightly that he was simply receptive to leadership-. or load him until he was a mindless mass of protoplasm-all in the sweet name of brotherhood. After all, you can’t have “brotherhood” if a man is stubborn enough to want to keep his own secrets, can you? And what better way is there to be sure that he is not holding out on you than to poke a needle past his eyeball and slip a shot of babble juice into his brain? “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” The sophistries of villains-bah!
Of course, it has been illegal for a long, long time now, except for therapy, with the express consent of a court. But criminals use it and cops are sometimes not lily white, for it does make a prisoner talk and it does not leave any marks at all. The victim can even be told to forget that it has been done.
I knew most of this at the time Dak told me what had been done to Bonforte and the rest I cribbed out of the ship’s Encyclopedia Batavia. See the article on “Psychic Integration” and the one on “Torture.”
I shook my head and tried to put the nightmares out of my mind. “But he’s going to recover?”
“Doc says that the drug does not alter the brain structure; it just paralyzes it. He says that eventually the blood stream picks up and carries away all of the dope; it reaches the kidneys and passes out of the body. But it takes time.” Dak looked up at me. “Chief?”
“Eh? About time to knock off that ‘Chief’ stuff, isn’t it? He’s back.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Would it be too much trouble to you to keep up the impersonation just a little while longer?” “But why? There’s nobody here but just us chickens.”
“That’s not quite true. Lorenzo, we’ve managed to keep this secret awfully tight. There’s me, there’s you.” He ticked it off on his fingers. “There’s Doc and Rog and Bill. And Penny, of course. There’s a man by the name of Langston back Earthside whom you’ve never met. I think Jimmie Washington suspects but he wouldn’t tell his own mother the right time of day.
We don’t know how many took part in the kidnaping, but not many, you can be sure. In any case, they don’t dare talk-and the joke of it is they no longer could prove that he had ever been missing even if they wanted to. But my point is this: here in the Tommie we’ve got all the crew and all the idlers not in on it. Old son, how about staying with it and letting yourself be seen each day by crewmen and by Jimmie Washington’s girl and such-while he gets well? Huh?”
“Mmm… I don’t see why not. How long will it be?”
“Just the trip back. We’ll take it slow, at an easy boost. You’ll enjoy it.”
“Okay. Dak, don’t figure this into my fee. I’m doing this piece of it just because I hate brainwashing.”
Dak bounced up and clapped me on the shoulder. “You’re my kind of people, Lorenzo. Don’t worry about your fee; you’ll be taken care of.” His manner changed. “Very well, Chief. See you in the morning, sir.”
But one thing leads to another. The boost we had started on Dak’s return was a mere shift of orbits, to one farther out where there would be little chance of a news service sending up a shuttle for a follow-up story. I woke up in free fall, took a pill, and managed to eat breakfast. Penny showed up shortly thereafter. “Good morning, Mr. Bonforte.”
“Good morning, Penny.” I inclined my head in the direction of the guest room. “Any news?”
“No, sir. About the same. Captain’s compliments and would it be too much trouble for you to come to his cabin?”
“Not at all.” Penny followed me in. Dak was there, with his heels hooked to his chair to stay in place; Rog and Bill were strapped to the couch. Dak looked around and sald, “Thanks for coming in, Chief. We need some help.”
“Good morning. What is it?”
Clifton answered my greeting with his usual dignified deference and called me Chief; Corpsman nodded. Dak went on, “To clean this up in style you should make one more appearance.”
“Eh? I thought-“
“Just a second. The networks were led to expect a major speech from you today, commenting on yesterday’s event. I thought Rog intended to cancel it, but Bill has the speech worked up. Question is, will you deliver it?”
The trouble with adopting a cat is that they always have kittens. “Where? Goddard City?”
“Oh no. Right in your cabin. We beam it to Phobos; they can it for Mars and also put it on the high circuit for New Batavia, where the Earth nets will pick it up and where it will be relayed for Venus, Ganymede, et cetera. Inside of four hours it will be all over the system but you’ll never have to stir out of your cabin.”
There is something very tempting about a grand network. I had never been on one but once and that time my act got clipped down to the point where my face showed for only twenty- seven seconds. But to have one all to myself- Dak thought I was reluctant and added, “It won’t be a strain, as
we are equipped to can it right here in the Tommie. Then we can project it first and clip out anything if necessary.” “Well-all right. You have the script, Bill?”
“Yes.”
“Let me check it.”
“What do you mean? You’ll have it in plenty of time.” “Isn’t that it in your hand?”
“Well, yes.”
“Then let me read it.”
Corpsman looked annoyed. “You’ll have it an hour before we record. These things go better if they sound spontaneous.” “Sounding spontaneous is a matter of careful preparation, Bill. It’s my trade. I know.”
“You did all right at the skyfield yesterday without rehearsal. This is just more of the same old hoke: I want you to do it the same way.”
Bonforte’s personality was coming through stronger the longer Corpsman stalled; I think Clifton could see that I was about to cloud up and storm, for he said, “Oh, for Pete’s sake, Bill! Hand him the speech.”
Corpsman snorted and threw the sheets at me. In free fall they sailed but the air spread them wide. Penny gathered them together, sorted them, and gave them to me. I thanked her, said nothing more, and started to read.
I skimmed through it in a fraction of the time it would take to deliver it. Finally I finished and looked up. “Well?” said Rog.
“About five minutes of this concerns the adoption. The rest is an argument for the policies of the Expansionist Party. Pretty much the same as I’ve heard in the speeches you’ve had me study.”
“Yes,” agreed Clifton. “The adoption is the hook we hang the rest on. As you know, we expect to force a vote of confidence before long.” “I understand. You can’t miss this chance to beat the drum. Well, it’s all right, but—”
“But what? What’s worrying you?”
“Well-characterization. In several places the wording should be changed. It’s not the way he would express it.”
Corpsman exploded with a word unnecessary in the presence of a lady; I gave him a cold glance. “Now see here, Smythe,” he went on, “who knows how Bonforte would say it? You? Or the man who has been writing his speeches the past four years?”
I tried to keep my temper; he had a point “It is nevertheless the case,” I answered, “that a line which looks okay in print may not dellver well. Mr. Bonforte is a great orator, I have already learned. He belongs with Webster, Churchill, and Demosthenes-a rolling grandeur expressed in simple words. Now take this word ‘intransigent,’ which you have used twice. I might say that, but I have a weakness for polysyllables; I like to exhibit my literary erudition. But Mr. Bonforte would stay ‘stubborn’ or ‘mulish’ or ‘pigheaded.’ The reason he would is, naturally, that they convey emotion much more effectively.”
“You see that you make the delivery effective! I’ll worry about the words.”
“You don’t understand, Bill. I don’t care whether the speech is politically effective or not; my job is to carry out a characterization. I can’t do that if I put into the mouth of the character words that he would never use; it would sound as forced and phony as a goat spouting Greek. But if I read the speech in words he would use, it will automatically be effective. He’s a great orator.”
“Listen, Smythe, you’re not hired to write speeches. You’re hired to-“
“Hold it, Bill!” Dak cut in. “And a little less of that ‘Smythe’ stuff, too. Well, Rog? How about it?” Clifton said, “As I understand it, Chief, your only objection is to some of the phrasing?”
“Well, yes. I’d suggest cutting out that personal attack on Mr. Quiroga, too, and the insinuation about his financial backers. It doesn’t sound like real Bonforte to me.”
He looked sheepish. “That’s a bit I put in myself. But you may be right. He always gives a man the benefit of the doubt.” He remained silent for a moment. “You make the changes you think you have to. We’ll can it and look at the playback. We can always clip it-or even cancel completely ‘due to technical difficulties.’” He smiled grimly. “That’s what we’ll do, Bill.”
“Damn it, this is a ridiculous example of-“ “That’s how it is going to be, Bill.”
Corpsman left the room very suddenly. Clifton sighed. “Bill always has hated the notion that anybody but Mr. B. could give him instructions. But he’s an able man. Uh, Chief, how soon can you be ready to record? We patch in at sixteen hundred.”
“I don’t know. I’ll be ready in time.”
Penny followed me back into my office. When she closed the door I said, “I won’t need you for the next hour or so, Penny child. But you might ask Doc for more of those pills. I may need them.”
“Yes, sir.” She floated with her back to the door. “Chief?” “Yes, Penny?”
“I just wanted to say don’t believe what Bill said about writing his speeches!” “I didn’t. I’ve heard his speeches-and I’ve read this.”
“Oh, Bill does submit drafts, lots of times. So does Rog. I’ve even done it myself. He-he will use ideas from anywhere if he thinks they are good. But when he delivers a speech, it is his, every word of it.”
“I believe you. I wish he had written this one ahead of time.” “You just do your best!”
I did. I started out simply substituting synonyms, putting in the gutty Germanic words in place of the “intestinal” Latin jawbreakers. Then I got excited and red in the face and tore it to pieces. It’s a lot of fun for an actor to mess around with lines; he doesn’t get the chance very often.
I used no one but Penny for my audience and made sure from Dak that I was not being tapped elsewhere in the ship-though I suspect that the big-boned galoot cheated on me and listened in himself. I had Penny in tears in the first three minutes; by the time I finished (twenty-eight and a half minutes, just time for station announcements), she was limp. I took no liberties with the straight Expansionist doctrine, as proclaimed by its official prophet, the Right Honorable John Joseph Bonforte; I simply reconstructed his message and his delivery, largely out of phrases from other speeches.
Here’s an odd thing-I believed every word of it while I was talking. But, brother, I made a speech!
Afterwards we all listened to the playback, complete with full stereo of myself. Jimmie Washington was present, which kept Bill Corpsman quiet. When it was over I said, “How about it, Rog? Do we need to clip anything?”
He took his cigar out of his mouth and said, “No. If you want my advice, Chief, I’d say to let it go as it is.”
Corpsman left the room again-but Mr. Washington came over with tears leaking out of his eyes-tears are a nuisance in free fall; there’s nowhere for them to go. “Mr. Bonforte, that was beauti/ui.”
“Thanks, Jimmie.”
Penny could not talk at all.
I turned in after that; a top-notch performance leaves me fagged. I slept for more than eight hours, then was awakened by the hooter. I had strapped myself to my bunk-I hate to float around while sleeping in free fall-so I did not have to move. But I had not known that we were getting under way so I called the control room between first and second warning. “Captain Broadbent?”
“Just a moment, sir,” I heard Epstein answer.
Then Dak’s voice came over. “Yes, Chief? We are getting under way on schedule-pursuant to your orders.” “Eh? Oh yes, certainly.”
“I believe Mr. Clifton is on his way to your cabin.” “Very well, Captain.” I lay back and waited.
Immediately after we started to boost at one gee Rog Clifton came in; he had a worried look on his face I could not interpret- equal parts of triumph, worry, and confusion. “What is it, Rog?”
“Chief! They’ve jumped the gun on us! The Quiroga government has resigned!” Chapter 7
I was still logy with sleep; I shook my head to try to clear it. “What are you in such a spin about, Rog? That’s what you were trying to accomplish, wasn’t it?” “Well, yes, of course. But-” He stopped.
“But what? I don’t get it. Here you chaps have been working and scheming for years to bring about this very thing. Now you’ve won-and you look like a bride who isn’t sure she wants to go through with it. Why? The no-good-nicks are out and now God’s chillun get their innings. No?”
“Uh-you haven’t been in politics much.”
“You know I haven’t. I got trimmed when I ran for patrol leader in my scout troop. That cured me.” “Well, you see, timing is everything.”
“So my father always told me. Look here, Rog, do I gather that if you had your druthers you’d druther Quiroga was still in office? You said he had ‘jumped the gun.”
“Let me explain. What we really wanted was to move a vote of confidence and win it, and thereby force a general election on them-but at our own time, when we estimated that we could win the election.”
“Oh. And you don’t figure you can win now? You think Quiroga will go back into office for another five years-or at least the Humanity Party will?” Clifton looked thoughtful. “No, I think our chances are pretty good to win the election.”
“Eh? Maybe I’m not awake yet. Don’t you want to win?”
“Of course. But don’t you see what this resignation has done to us?” “I guess I don’t.”
“Well, the government in power can order a general election at any time up to the constitutional limitation of five years. Ordinarily they will go to the people when the time seems most
favorable to them. But they don’t resign between the announcement and the election unless forced to. You follow me?”
I realized that the event did seem odd, little attention as I paid to politics. “I believe so.”
“But in this case Quiroga’s government scheduled a general election, then resigned in a body, leaving the Empire without a government. Therefore the sovereign must call on someone else to form a ‘caretaker’ government to serve until the election. By the letter of the law he can ask any member of the Grand Assembly, but as a matter of strict constitutional precedent he has no choice. When a government resigns in a body-not just reshuffling portfolios but quits as a whole-then the sovereign must call on the leader of the opposition to form the
‘caretaker’ government. It’s indispensable to our system; it keeps resigning from being just a gesture. Many other methods have been tried in the past; under some of them governments were changed as often as underwear. But our present system insures responsible government.”
I was so busy trying to see the implications that I almost missed his next remark. “So, naturally, the Emperor has summoned Mr. Bonforte to New Batavia.”
“Eh? New Batavia? Welll” I was thinking that I had never seen the Imperial capital. The one time I had been on the Moon the vicissitudes of my profession had left me without time or money for the side trip. “Then that is why we got under way? Well, I certainly don’t mind. I suppose you can always find a way to send me home if the Tommie doesn’t go back to Earth soon.”
“What? Good heavens, don’t worry about that now. When the time comes, Captain Broadbent can find any number of ways to deliver you home.”
“Sorry. I forget that you have more important matters on your mind, Rog. Sure, I’m anxious to get home now that the job is done. But a few days, or even a month, on Luna would not matter. I have nothing pressing me. But thanks for taking time to tell me the news.” I searched his face. “Rog, you look worried as hell.”
“Don’t you see? The Emperor has sent for Mr. Bonforte. The Emperor, man! And Mr. Bonforte is in no shape to appear at an audience. They have risked a gambit-and perhaps trapped us in a checkmate!”
“Eh? Now wait a minute. Slow up. I see what you are driving at
-but, look, friend, we aren’t at New Batavia. We’re a hundred million miles away, or two hundred million, or whatever it is. Doc Capek will have him wrung out and ready to speak his piece by then. Won’t he?”
“Well-we hope so.” “But you aren’t sure?”
“We can’t be sure. Capek says that there is little clinical data on such massive doses. It depends on the individual’s body chemistry and on the exact drug used.”
I suddenly remembered a time when an understudy had slipped me a powerful purgative just before a performance. (But I went on anyhow, which proves the superiority of mind over matter- then I got him fired.) “Rog-they gave him that last, unnecessarily big dose not just out of simple sadism-but to set up this situation!”
“I think so. So does Capek.”
“Hey! In that case it would mean that Quiroga himself is the man behind the kidnapping-and that we’ve had a gangster running the Empire!”
Rog shook his head. “Not necessarily. Not even probably. But it would indeed mean that the same forces who control the Actionists also control the machinery of the Humanity Party. But you will never pin anything on them; they are unreachable, ultrarespectable. Nevertheless, they could send word to Quiroga that the time had come to roll over and play dead-and have him do it. Almost certainly,” he added, “without giving him a hint of the real reason why the moment was timely.”
“Criminy! Do you mean to tell me that the top man in the Empire would fold up and quit, just like that? Because somebody behind the scenes ordered him to?” “I’m afraid that is just what I do think.”
I shook my head. “Politics is a dirty game!”
“No,” Clifton answered insistently. “There is no such thing as a dirty game. But you sometimes run into dirty players.” “I don’t see the difference.”
“There is a world of difference. Quiroga is a third-rater and a stooge-in my opinion, a stooge for villains. But there is nothing third-rate about John Joseph Bonforte and he has never, ever been a stooge for anyone. As a follower, he believed in the cause; as the leader, he has led from conviction!”
“I stand corrected,” I said humbly. “Well, what do we do? Have Dak drag his feet so that the Tommie does not reach New Batavia until he is back in shape to do the job?”
“We can’t stall. We don’t have to boost at more than one gravity; nobody would expect a man Bonforte’s age to place unnecessary strain on his heart. But we can’t delay. When the Emperor sends for you, you come.”
“Then what?”
Rog looked at me without answering. I began to get edgy. “Hey, Rog, don’t go getting any wild notions! This hasn’t anything to do with me. I’m through, except for a few casual appearances around the ship. Dirty or not, politics is not my game-just pay me off and ship me home and I’ll guarantee never even to register to vote!”
“You probably wouldn’t have to do anything. Dr. Capek will almost certainly have him in shape for it. But it isn’t as if it were anything hard-not like that adoption ceremony-just an audience with the Emperor and—”
“The Emperor!” I almost screamed. Like most Americans, I did not understand royalty, did not really approve of the institution in my heart-and had a sneaking, unadmitted awe of kings.
After all, we Americans came in by the back door. When we swapped associate status under treaty for the advantages of a full voice in the affairs of the Empire, it was explicitly agreed
that our local institutions, our own constitution, and so forth, would not be affected-and tacitly agreed that no member of the royal family would ever visit America. Maybe that is a bad thing.
Maybe if we were used to royalty we would not be so impressed by them. In any case, it is notorious that “democratic” American women are more quiveringly anxious to be presented at
court than is anybody else.
“Now take it easy,” Rog answered. “You probably won’t have to do it at all. We just want to be prepared. What I was trying to tell you is that a ‘caretaker’ government is no problem. It passes no laws, changes no policies. I’ll take care of all the work. All you will have to do-if you have to do anything-is make the formal appearance before King Wilem-and possibly show up at a controlled press conference or two, depending on how long it is before he is well again. What you have already done is much harder-and you will be paid whether we need you or not.”
“Damn it, pay has nothing to do with it! It’s-well, in the words of a famous character in theatrical history, ‘Include me out.’”
Before Rog could answer, Bill Corpsman came bursting into my cabin without knocking, looked at us, and said sharply to Clifton, “Have you told him?” “Yes,” agreed Clifton. “He’s turned down the job.”
“Huh? Nonsense!”
“It’s not nonsense,” I answered, “and by the way, Bill, that door you just came through has a nice spot on it to knock. In the profession the custom is to knock and shout, ‘Are you decent?’ I wish you would remember it.”
“Oh, dirty sheets! We’re in a hurry. What’s this guff about your refusing?” “It’s not guff. This is not the job I signed up for.”
“Garbage! Maybe you are too stupid to realize it, Smythe, but you are in too deep to prattle about backing out. It wouldn’t be healthy.” I went to him and grabbed his arm. “Are you threatening me? If you are, let’s go outside and talk it over.”
He shook my hand off. “In a spaceship? You really are simple, aren’t you? But haven’t you got it through your thick head that you caused this mess yourself?”
“What do you mean?”
“He means,” Clifton answered, “that he is convinced that the fall of the Quiroga government was the direct result of the speech you made earlier today. It is even possible that he is right. But it is beside the point. Bill, try to be reasonably polite, will you? We get nowhere by bickering.”
I was so surprised by the suggestion that I had caused Quiroga to resign that I forgot all about my desire to loosen Corpsman’s teeth. Were they serious? Sure, it was one dilly of a fine speech, but was such a result possible?
Well, if it was, it was certainly fast service.
I said wonderingly, “Bill, do I understand that you are complaining that the speech I made was too effective to suit you?” “Huh? Hell, no! It was a lousy speech.”
“So? You can’t have it both ways. You’re saying that a lousy speech went over so big that it scared the Humanity Party right out of office. Is that what you meant?”
Corpsman looked annoyed, started to answer, and caught sight of Clifton suppressing a grin. He scowled, again started to reply- finally shrugged and said, “All right, buster, you proved your point; the speech could not have had anything to do with the fall of the Quiroga government. Nevertheless, we’ve got work to do. So what’s this about you not being willing to carry your share of the load?”
I looked at him and managed to keep my temper-Bonforte’s influence again; playing the part of a calm-tempered character tends to make one calm inside. “Bill, again you cannot have it two ways. You have made it emphatically clear that you consider me just a hired hand. Therefore I have no obligation beyond my job, which is finished. You can’t hire me for another job unless it suits me. It doesn’t.”
He started to speak but I cut in. “That’s all. Now get out. You’re not welcome here.”
He looked astounded. “Who the hell do you think you are to give orders around here?”
“Nobody. Nobody at all, as you have pointed out. But this is my private room, assigned to me by the Captain. So now get out or be thrown out. I don’t like your manners.”
Clifton added quietly, “Clear out, Bill. Regardless of anything else, it is his private cabin at the present time. So you had better leave.” Rog hesitated, then added, “I think we both might as well leave; we don’t seem to be getting anywhere. If you will excuse us
-Chief?” “Certainly.”
I sat and thought about it for several minutes. I was sorry that I had let Corpsman provoke me even into such a mild exchange; it lacked dignity. But I reviewed it in my mind and assured myself that my personal differences with Corpsman had not affected my decision; my mind had been made up before he appeared.
Asharp knock came at the door. I called out, “Who is it?” “Captain Broadbent.”
“Come in, Dak.”
He did so, sat down, and for some minutes seemed interested only in pulling hangnails. Finally he looked up and said, “Would it change your mind if I slapped the blighter in the brig?” “Eh? Do you have a brig in the ship?”
“No. But it would not be hard to jury-rig one.”
I looked at him sharply, trying to figure what went on inside that bony head. “Would you actually put Bill in the brig if I asked for it?”
He looked up, cocked a brow, and grinned wryly. “No. Aman doesn’t get to be a captain operating on any such basis as that. I would not take that sort of order even from him.” He inclined his head toward the room Bonforte was in. “Certain decisions a man must make himself.”
“That’s right.”
“Mmm-I hear you’ve made one of that sort.” “That’s right.”
“So. I’ve come to have a lot of respect for you, old son. First met you, I figured you for a clotheshorse and a facemaker, with nothing inside. I was wrong.” “Thank you.”
“So I won’t plead with you. Just tell me: is it worth our time to discuss the factors? Have you given it plenty of thought?” “My mind is made up, Dak. This isn’t my pidgin.”
“Well, perhaps you’re right. I’m sorry. I guess we’ll just have to hope he pulls out of it in time.” He stood up. “By the way, Penny would like to see you, if you aren’t going to turn in again this minute.”
I laughed without pleasure. “Just ‘by the way,’ eh? Is this the proper sequence? Isn’t it Dr. Capek’s turn to try to twist my arm?” “He skipped his turn; he’s busy with Mr. B. He sent you a message, though.”
“He said you could go to hell. Embroidered it a bit, but that was the gist.” “He did? Well, tell him I’ll save him a seat by the fire.”
“Can Penny come in?”
“Oh, sure! But you can tell her that she is wasting her time; the answer is still ‘No.’”
So I changed my mind. Confound it, why should an argument seem so much more logical when underlined with a whiff of Jungle Lust? Not that Penny used unfair means, she did not even shed tears-not that I laid a finger on her-but I found myself conceding points, and presently there were no more points to concede. There is no getting around it, Penny is the world- saver type and her sincerity is contagious.
The boning I did on the trip out to Mars was as nothing to the hard study I put in on the trip to New Batavia. I already had the basic character; now it was necessary to fill in the background, prepare myself to be Bonforte under almost any circumstances. While it was the royal audience I was aiming at, once we were at New Batavia I might have to meet any of hundreds or thousands of people. Rog planned to give me a defense in depth of the sort that is routine for any public figure if he is to get work done; nevertheless, I would have to see people-a public figure is a public figure, no way to get around that.
The tightrope act I was going to have to attempt was made possible only by Bonforte’s Farleyfile, perhaps the best one ever compiled. Farley was a political manager of the twentieth century, of Eisenhower I believe, and the method he invented for handling the personal relations of politics was as revolutionary as the German invention of staff command was to warfare. Yet I had never heard of the device until Penny showed me Bonforte’s.
It was nothing but a file about people. However, the art of politics is “nothing but” people. This file contained all, or almost all, of the thousands upon thousands of people Bonforte had met in the course of his long public life; each dossier consisted of what he knew about that person from Bon forte’s own personal contact. Anything at all, no matter how trivial-in fact, trivia were always the first entries: names and nicknames of wives, children, and pets, hobbies, tastes in food or drink, prejudices, eccentricities. Following this would be listed date and place and comments for every occasion on which Boriforte had talked to that particular man.
When available, a photo was included. There might or might not be “below-the-line” data, i.e. information which had been researched rather than learned directly by Bonforte. It depended on the political importance of the person. In some cases the “below-the-line” part was a formal biography running to thousands of words.
Both Penny and Bonforte himself carried minicorders powered by theft body heat. If Bonforte was alone he would dictate into his own when opportunity offered-in rest rooms, while riding, etc.; if Penny went along she would take it down in hers, which was disguised to look like a wrist watch. Penny could not possibly do the transcribing and microfilming; two of Jimmie Washington’s girls did little else.
When Penny showed me the Farleyfile, showed me the very bulk of it-and it was bulky, even at ten thousand words or more to the spool-and then told me that this represented personal information about Mr. Bonforte’s acquaintances, I scroaned (which is a scream and groan done together, with intense feeling). “God’s mercy, child! I tried to tell you this job could not be done. How could anyone memorize all that?”
“Why, you can’t, of course.”
“You just said that this was what he remembered about his friends and acquaintances.”
“Not quite. I said that this is what he wanted to remember. But since he can’t, not possibly, this is how he does it. Don’t worry; you don’t have to memorize anything. I just want you to know that it is available. It is my job to see that he has at least a minute or two to study the appropriate Farleyfile before anybody gets in to see him. If the need turns up, I can protect you with
the same service.”
I looked at the typical file she had projected on the desk reader.
AMr. Saunders of Pretoria, South Africa, I believe it was. He had a bulldog named Snuffles Bullyboy, several assorted uninteresting offspring, and he liked a twist of lime in his whisky and splash.
“Penny, do you mean to tell me that Mr. B. pretends to remember minutiae like that? It strikes me as rather phony.”
Instead of getting angry at the slur on her idol Penny nodded soberly. “I thought so once. But you don’t look at it correctly, Chief. Do you ever write down the telephone number of a friend?” “Eh? Of course.”
“Is it dishonest? Do you apologize to your friend for caring so little about him that you can’t simply remember his number?” “Eh? All right, I give up. You’ve sold me.”
“These are things he would like to remember if his memory were perfect. Since it isn’t, it is no more phony to do it this way than it is to use a tickler file in order not to forget a friend’s birthday-that’s what it is: a giant tickler file, to cover anything. But there is more to it. Did you ever meet a really important person?”
I tried to think. Penny did not mean the greats of the theatrical profession; she hardly knew they existed. “I once met President Warfield. I was a kid of ten or eleven.” “Do you remember the details?”
“Why, certainly. He said, ‘How did you break that arm, son?’ and I said, ‘Riding a bicycle, sir,’ and he said, ‘Did the same thing myself, only it was a collarbone.’” “Do you think he would remember it if he were still alive?”
“Why, no.”
“He might-he may have had you Farleyfiled. This Farleyfile includes boys of that age, because boys grow up and become men. The point is that top-level men like President Warfield meet many more people than they can remember. Each one of that faceless throng remembers his own meeting with the famous man and remembers it in detail. But the supremely important person in anyone’s life is himself-and a politician must never forget that. So it is polite and friendly and warmhearted for the politician to have a way to be able to remember about other people the sort of little things that they are likely to remember about him. It is also essential-in politics.”
I had Penny display the Farleyfile on King Willem. It was rather short, which dismayed me at first, until I concluded that it meant that Bonforte did not know the Emperor well and had met him only on a few official occasions-Bonforte’s first service as Supreme Minister had been before old Emperor Frederick’s death. There was no biography below the line, but just a notation, “See House of Orange.” I didn’t-there simply wasn’t time to plow through a few million words of Empire and pre-Empire history and, anyhow, I got fair-to-excellent marks in history when I was in school. All I wanted to know about the Emperor was what Bonforte knew about him that other people did not.
It occurred to me that the Farleyfile must include everybody in the ship since they were (a) people (b) whom Bonforte had met. I asked Penny for them. She seemed a little surprised. Soon I was the one surprised. The Torn Paine had in her six Grand Assemblymen. Rog Clifton and Mr. Bonforte, of course- but the first item in Dak’s file read: “Broadbent, Darius K., the
Honorable, 0. A. for League of Free Travelers, Upper Division.” It also mentioned that he held a Ph.D. in physics, had been reserve champion with the pistol in the Imperial Matches nine
years earlier, and had published thee volumes of verse under the nom de plume of “Acey Wheelwright.” I resolved never again to take a man at merely his face value.
There was a notation in Bonforte’s sloppy handwriting: “Almost irresistible to women-and vice versa!”
Penny and Dr. Capek were also members of the great parliament. Even Jimmie Washington was a member, for a “safe” district, I realized later-he represented the Lapps, including all the reindeer and Santa Claus, no doubt. He was also ordained in the First Bible Truth Church of the Holy Spirit, which I had never heard of, but which accounted for his tight-lipped deacon look.
I especially enjoyed reading about Penny-the Honorable Miss Penelope Taliaferro Russell. She was an M.A. in government administration from Georgetown and a B.A. from Wellesley, which somehow did not surprise me. She represented districtless university women, another “safe” constituency (I learned) since they are about five to one Expansionist Party members.
On down below were her glove size, her other measurements, her preferences in colors (I could teach her something about dressing), her preference in scent (Jungle Lust, of course), and many other details, most of them innocuous enough. But there was “comment”:
“Neurotically honest-arithmetic unreliable-prides herself on her sense of humor, of which she has none-watches her diet but is gluttonous about candied cherries-little-mother-of-all- living complex-unable to resist reading the printed word in any form.”
Underneath was another of Bonforte’s handwritten addenda: “Ah, Curly Top! Snooping again, I see.”
As I turned them back to her I asked Penny if she had read her own Farleyfile. She told me snippily to mind my own business! Then turned red and apologized.
Most of my time was taken up with study but I did take time to review and revise carefully the physical resemblance, checking the Semiperm shading by colorimeter, doing an extremely careful job on the wrinkles, adding two moles, and setting the whole job with electric brush. It was going to mean a skin peel before I could get my own face back but that was a small price to pay for a make-up job that could not be damaged, could not be smeared even with acetone, and was proof against such hazards as napkins. I even added the scar on the “game” leg, using a photograph Capek had kept in Bonforte’s health history. If Bonforte had had wife or mistress, she would have had difficulty in telling the impostor from the real thing simply on physical appearance. It was a lot of trouble but it left my mind free to worry about the really difficult part of the impersonation.
But the all-out effort during the trip was to steep myself in what Bonforte thought and believed, in short the policies of the Expansionist Party. In a manner of speaking, he himself was the Expansionist Party, not merely its most prominent leader but its political philosopher and greatest statesman. Expansionism had hardly been more than a “Manifest Destiny” movement when the party was founded, a rabble coalition of groups who had one thing in common: the belief that the frontiers in the sky were the mast important issue in the emerging future of the human race. Bonforte had given the party a rationale and an ethic, the theme that freedom and equal rights must run with the Imperial banner; he kept harping on the notion that the human race must never again make the mistakes that the white subrace had made in Africa and Asia.
But I was confused by the fact-I was awfully unsophisticated in such matters-that the early history of the Expansionist Party sounded remarkably like the present Humanity Party. I was not aware that political parties often change as much in growing up as people do. I had known vaguely that the Humanity Party had started as a splinter of the Expansionist movement but I had never thought about it. Actually it was inevitable; as the political parties which did not have their eyes on the sky dwindled away under the imperatives of history and ceased to elect candidates, the one party which had been on the right track was bound to split into two factions.
But I am running ahead; my political education did not proceed so logically. At first I simply soaked myself in Bonforte’s public utterances. True, I had done that on the trip out, but then I was studying how he spoke; now I was studying what he said.
Bonforte was an orator in the grand tradition but he could be vitriolic in debate, e.g; a speech he made in New Paris during the ruckus over the treaty with the Martian nests, the Concord of Tycho. It was this treaty which had knocked him out of office before; he had pushed it through but the strain on the coalition had lost him the next vote of confidence. Nevertheless, Quiroga had not dared denounce the treaty. I listened to this speech with special interest since I had not liked the treaty myself; the idea that Martians must be granted the same privileges on Earth that humans enjoyed on Mars had been abhorrent to me-until I visited the Kkkah nest.
“My opponent,” Bonforte had said with a rasp in his voice, “would have you believe that the motto of the so-called Humanity Party, ‘Government of human beings, by human beings, and for human beings,’ is no more than an updating of the immortal words of Lincoln. But while the voice is the voice of Abraham, the hand is the hand of the Ku Klux Klan. The true meaning of that innocent-seeming motto is ‘Government of all races everywhere, by human beings alone, for the profit of a privileged few.’
“But, my opponent protests, we have a God-given mandate to spread enlightenment through the stan, dispensing our own brand of Civilization to the savages. This is the Uncle Remus school of sociology-the good dahides singin’ spirituals and Ole Massa lubbin’ every one of dem! It is a beautiful picture but the frame is too small; it fails to show the whip, the slave block-and the counting house!”
I found myself becoming, if not an Expansionist, then at least a Bonfortite. I am not sure that I was convinced by the logic of his words-indeed, I am not sure that they were logical. But I was in a receptive frame of mind. I wanted to understand what he said so thoroughly that I could rephrase it and say it in his place, if need be.
Nevertheless, here was a man who knew what he wanted and (much rarer!) why he wanted it. I could not help but be impressed, and it forced me to examine my own beliefs. What did I live by?
My profession, surely! I had been brought up in it, I liked it, I had a deep though unlogical conviction that art was worth the effort-and, besides, it was the only way I knew to make a living. But what else?
I have never been impressed by the formal schools of ethics. I had sampled them-public libraries are a ready source of recreation for an actor short of cash-but I had found them as poor in vitamins as a mother-in-law’s kiss. Given time and plenty of paper, a philosopher can prove anything.
I had the same contempt for the moral instruction handed to mast children. Much of it is prattle and the parts they really seem to mean are dedicated to the sacred proposition that a “good” child is one who does not disturb mother’s nap and a “good” man is one who achieves a muscular bank account without getting caught. No, thanks!
But even a dog has rules of conduct. What were mine? How did I behave-or, at least, how did I like to think I behaved?
“The show must go on.” I had always believed that and lived by it. But why must the show go on?-seeing that some shows are pretty terrible. Well, because you agreed to do it, because there is an audience out there; they have paid and each one of them is entitled to the best you can give. You owe it to them. You owe it also to stagehands and manager and producer and other members of the company-and to those who taught you your trade, and to others stretching back in history to open-air theaters and stone seats and even to storytellers squatting in a market place. Noblesse oblige.
I decided that the notion could be generalized into any occupation. “Value for value.” Building “on the square and on the level.” The Hippocratic oath. Don’t let the team down. Honest work for honest pay. Such things did not have to be proved; they were an essential part of life-true throughout eternity, true in the farthest reaches of the Galaxy.
I suddenly got a glimpse of what Bonforte was driving at. If there were ethical basics that transcended time and place, then they were true both for Martians and for men. They were true on any planet around any star-and if the human race did not behave accordingly they weren’t ever going to win to the stars because some better race would slap them down for double- dealing.
The price of expansion was virtue. “Never give a sucker an even break” was too narrow a philosophy to fit the broad reaches of space.
But Bonforte was not preaching sweetness and light. “I am not a pacifist. Pacifism is a shifty doctrine under which a man accepts the benefits of the social group without being willing to pay-and claims a halo for his dishonesty. Mr. Speaker, life belongs to those who do not fear to lose it. This bill must pass!” And with that he had got up and crossed the aisle in support of a military appropriation his own party had refused in caucus.
Or again: “Take sides! Always take sides! You will sometimes be wrong-but the man who refuses to take sides must always be wrong! Heaven save us from poltroons who fear to make a choice. Let us stand up and be counted.” (This last was in a closed caucus but Penny had caught it on her minicorder and Bonforte had saved it-Bonforte had a sense of history; he was a record keeper. If he had not been, I would not have had much to work with.)
I decided that Bonforte was my kind of man. Or at least the kind I liked to think I was. His was a persona I was proud to wear.
So far as I can remember I did not sleep on that trip after I promised Penny that I would take the royal audience if Bonforte could not be made ready. I intended to sleep-there is no point in taking your stage with your eyes bagging like hound’s ears-but I got interested in what I was studying and there was a plentiful supply of pepper pills in Bonforte’s desk. It is amazing how much ground you can cover working a twenty-four-hour day, free from interruptions and with all the help you could ask for.
But shortly before we were due at New Batavia, Dr. Capek came in and said, “Bare your left forearm.” “Why?” I asked.
“Because when you go before the Emperor we don’t want you falling flat on your face with fatigue. This will make you sleep until we ground. Then I’ll give you an antidote.” “Eh? I take it that you don’t think he will be ready?”
Capek did not answer, but gave me the shot. I tried to finish listening to the speech I was running but I must have been asleep in seconds. The next thing I knew Dak was saying deferentially, “Wake up, sir. Please wake up. We’re grounded at Lippershey Field.”
Chapter 8
Our Moon being an airless planet, a torchship can land on it. But the Tom Paine, being a torchship, was really intended to stay in space and be serviced only at space stations in orbit; she had to be landed in a cradle. I wish I had been awake to see it, for they say that catching an egg on a plate is easy by comparison. Dak was one of the half dozen pilots who could do it.
But I did not even get to see the Tommie in her cradle; all I saw was the inside of the passenger bellows they fastened to her air lock and the passenger tube to New Batavia-those tubes are so fast that, under the low gravity of the Moon, you are again in free fall at the middle of the trip.
We went first to the apartments assigned to the leader of the loyal opposition, Bonforte’s official residence until (and if) he went back into power after the coming election. The magnificence of them made me wonder what the Supreme Minister’s residence was like. I suppose that New Batavia is odds-on the most palatial capital city in all history; it is a shame that it can hardly be seen from outdoors-but that minor shortcoming is more than offset by the fact that it is the only city in the Solar System that is actually impervious to fusion bombs. Or perhaps I should say “effectively impervious” since there are some surface structures which could be destroyed. Bonforte’s apartments included an upper living room in the side of a cliff, which looked out through a bubble balcony at the stars and Mother Earth herself-but his sleeping room and offices were a thousand feet of solid rock below, by private lift.
I had no time to explore the apartments; they dressed me for the audience. Bonforte had no valet even dirtside, but Rog insisted on “helping” me (he was a hindrance) while going over lastminute details. The dress was ancient formal court dress, shapeless tubular trousers, a silly jacket with a claw-hammer tail, both in black, and a chemise consisting of a stiff white breastplate, a “winged” collar, and a white bow tie. Bonforte’s chemise was all in one piece, because (I suppose) he did not use a dresser; correctly it should be assembled piece by piece and the bow tie should be tied poorly enough to show that it has been tied by hand-but it is too much to expect a man to understand both politics and period costuming.
It is an ugly costume, but it did make a fine background for the Order of Wilhelmina stretched in colorful diagonal across my chest. I looked at myself in a long glass and was pleased with the effect; the one color accent against the dead black and white was good showmanship. The traditional dress might be ugly but it did have dignity, something like the cool stateliness of a maitre d’hotel. I decided that I looked the part to wait on the pleasure of a sovereign.
Rog Clifton gave me the scroll which was supposed to list the names of my nominations for the ministries and he tucked into an inner pocket of my costume a copy of the typed list thereof-the original had gone forward by hand of Jimmie Washington to the Emperor’s State Secretary as soon as we had grounded. Theoretically the purpose of the audience was for the Emperor to inform me that it was his pleasure for me to form a government and for me to submit humbly my suggestions; my nominations were supposed to be secret until the
sovereign graciously approved.
Actually the choices were all made; Rog and Bill had spent most of the trip lining up the Cabinet and making sure the nominees would serve, using state-scramble for the radio messages. I had studied the Farleyflies on each nomination and each alternate. But the list really was secret in the sense that the news services would not receive it until after the Imperial audience.
I took the scroll and picked up my life wand. Rog looked horrified. “Good Lord, man, you can’t carry that thing into the presence of the Emperor!” “Why not?”
“Huh? It’s a weapon.”
“It’s a ceremonial weapon. Rog, every duke and every pipsqueak baronet will be wearing his dress sword. So I wear this.”
He shook his head. “They have to. Don’t you understand the ancient legal theory behind it? Their dress swords symbolize the duty they owe their liege lord to support and defend him by force of arms, in their own persons. But you are a commoner; tradi-. tionally you come before him unarmed.”
“No, Rog. Oh, I’ll do what you tell me to, but you are missing a wonderful chance to catch a tide at its flood. This is good theater, this is right.” “I’m afraid I don’t follow you.”
“Well, look, will the word get back to Mars if I carry this wand today? Inside the nests, I mean?” “Eh? I suppose so. Yes.”
“Of course. I would guess that every nest has stereo receivers; I certainly noticed plenty of them in Kkkah nest. They follow the Empire news as carefully as we do. Don’t they?” “Yes. At least the elders do.”
“II I carry the wand, they’ll know it; if I fail to carry it, they will know it. It matters to them; it is tied up with propriety. No adult Martian would appear outside his nest without his life wand, or inside on ceremonial occasions. Martians have appeared before the Emperor in the past; they carried their wands, didn’t they? I’d bet my life on it.”
“Yes, but you-“
“You forget that 1 am a Martian.”
Rog’s face suddenly blanked out. I went on, “I am not only ‘John Joseph Bonforte’; I am Kkkahjjjerrr of Kkkah nest. If I fail to carry that wand, I commit a great impropriety-and frankly I do not know what would happen when the word got back; I don’t know enough about Martian customs. Now turn it around and look at it the other way. When I walk down that aisle carrying this wand, I am a Martian citizen about to be named His Imperial Majesty’s first minister. How will that affect the nests?”
“I guess I had not thought it through,” he answered slowly.
“Nor would I have done so, had I not had to decide whether or not to carry the wand. But don’t you suppose Mr. B. thought it through-before he ever let himself be invited to be adopted? Rog, we’ve got a tiger by the tail; the only thing to do is to swarm aboard and ride it. We can’t let go.”
Dak arrived at that point, confirmed my opinion, seemed surprised that Clifton had expected anything else. “Sure, we’re setting a new precedent, Rog-but we’re going to set a lot of new ones before we are through.” But when he saw how I was carrying the wand he let out a scream. “Cripes, man! Are you trying to kill somebody? Or just carve a hole in the wall?”
“I wasn’t pressing the stud.”
“Thank God for small favors! You don’t even have the safety on.” He took it from me very gingerly and said, “You twist this ring-and shove this in that slot-then it’s just a stick. Whew!” “Oh. Sorry.”
They delivered me to the robing room of the Palace and turned me over to King Willem’s equerry, Colonel Pateel, a bland-faced Hindu with perfect manners and the dazzling dress uniform of the Imperial space forces. His bow to me must have been calculated on a slide rule; it suggested that I was about to be Supreme Minister but was not quite there yet, that I was his senior but nevertheless a civilian-then subtract five degrees for the fact that he wore the Emperor’s aiguillette on his right shoulder.
He glanced at the wand and said smoothly, “That’s a Martian wand, is it not, sir? Interesting. I suppose you will want to leave it here-it will be safe.” I said, “I’m carrying it.”
“Sir?” His eyebrows shot up and he waited for me to correct my obvious mistake.
I reached into Bonforte’s favorite cliches and picked one he used to reprove bumptiousness. “Son, suppose you tend to your knitting and I tend to mine.” His face lost all expression. “Very well, sir. If you will come this way?”
We paused at the entrance to the throne room. Far away, on the raised dais, the throne was empty. On both sides the entire length of the great cavern the nobles and royalty of the court were standing and waiting. I suppose Pateel passed along some sign, for the Imperial Anthem welled out and we all held still for it, Pateel in robotlike attention, myself in a tired stoop suitable to a middleaged and overworked roan who must do this thing because he must, and all the court like show-window pieces. I hope we never dispense with the pageantry of a court entirely; all those noble dress extras and spear carriers make a beautiful sight.
In the last few bars he came in from behind and took his throne
-Willem, Prince of Orange, Duke of Nassau, Grand Duke of Luxembourg, Knight Commander of the Holy Roman Empire, Admiral General of the Imperial Forces, Adviser to the Martian Nests, Protector of the Poor, and, by the Grace of God, King of the Lowlands and Emperor of the Planets and the Spaces Between.
I could not see his face, but the symbolism produced in me a sudden warm surge of empathy. I no longer felt hostile to the notion of royalty.
As King Willem sat down the anthem ended; he nodded acknowledgment of the salute and a wave of slight relaxation rippled down the courtiers. Pateel withdrew and, with my wand tucked under my arm, I started my long march, limping a little in spite of the low gravity. It felt remarkably like the progress to the Inner Nest of Kkkah, except that I was not frightened; I was simply warm and tingling. The Empire medley followed me down, the music sliding from “King Christian” to “Marseillaise” to “The StarSpangled Banner” and all the others.
At the first balk line I stopped and bowed, then again at the second, then at last a deep bow at the third, just before the steps. I did not kneel; nobles must kneel but commoners share sovereignty with the Sovereign. One sees this point incorrectly staged some- times in stereo and theater, and Rog had made sure that I knew what to do.
“Aye, Imperator!” Had I been a Dutchman I would have said “Rex” as well, but I was an American. We swapped schoolboy Latin back and forth by rote, he inquiring what I wanted, I reminding him that he had summoned me, etc. He shifted into Anglo-American, with a slight “down-East” accent.
“You served our father well. it is now our thought that you might serve us. How say you?” “My sovereign’s wish is my will, Majesty.”
“Approach us.”
Perhaps I made too good a thing of it but the steps up the dais are high and my leg actually was hurting-and a psychosomatic pain is as bad as any other. I almost stumbled-and Willem was up out of his throne like a shot and steadied my arm. I heard a gasp go around the hall. He smiled at me and said sotto voce, “Take it easy, old friend. Wet make this short.”
He helped me to the stool before the throne and made me sit down an awkward moment sooner than he himself was again seated. Then he held out his hand for the scroll and I passed it over. He unrolled it and pretended to study the blank page.
There was chamber music now and the court made a display of enjoying themselves, ladies laughing, noble gentlemen uttering gallantries, fans gesturing. No one moved very far from his place, no one held still. Little page boys, looking like Michelangelo’s cherubim, moved among them offering trays of sweets. One knelt to Willem and he helped himself without taking
his eyes off the nonexistent list. The child then offered the tray to me and I took one, not knowing whether it was proper or not. It was one of those wonderful, matchless chocolates made only in Holland.
I found that I knew a number of the court faces from pictures. Most of the unemployed royalty of Earth were there, concealed under their secondary titles of duke or count. Some said that Willem kept them on as pensioners to brighten his court; some said he wanted to keep an eye on them and keep them out of politics and other mischief. Perhaps it was a little of both. There were the nonroyal nobility of a dozen nations present, too; some of them actually worked for a living.
I found myself trying to pick out the Habsburg lips and the Windsor nose.
At last Willem put down the scroll. The music and the conversation ceased instantly. In dead silence he said, “It is a gallant company you have proposed. We are minded to confirm it.” “You are most gracious, Majesty.”
“We will ponder and inform you.” He leaned forward and said quietly to me alone, “Don’t try to back down those damned steps. Just stand up. I am going to leave at once.” I whispered back, “Oh. Thank you, Sire.”
He stood up, whereupon I got hastily to my feet, and he was gone in a swirl of robes. I turned around and noticed some startled looks. But the music started up at once and I was let to walk out while the noble and regal extras again made polite conversation.
Pateel was at my elbow as soon as I was through the far archway. “This way, sir, if you please.” The pageantry was over; now came the real audience.
He took me through a small door, down an empty corridor, through another small door, and into a quite ordinary office. The only thing regal about it was a carved wall plaque, the coat of arms of the House of Orange, with its deathless motto, “I Maintain!” There was a big, fiat desk, littered with papers. In the middle of it, held down by a pair of metal-plated baby shoes, was the original of the typed list in my pocket. In a copper frame there was a family group picture of the late Empress and the kids. Asomewhat battered couch was against one wall and beyond it was a small bar. There were a couple of armchairs as well as the swivel chair at the desk. The other furnishings might have suited the office of a busy and not fussy family physician.
Pateel left me alone there, closing the door behind him. I did not have time to consider whether or not it was proper for me to sit down, as the Emperor came quickly in through a door opposite. “Howdy, Joseph,” he called out. “Be with you in a moment.” He strode through the room, followed closely by two servants who were undressing him as he walked, and went out a third door. He was back again almost at once, zipping up a suit of coveralls as he came in. “You took the short route; I had to come long way around. I’m going to insist that the palace engineer cut another tunnel through from the back of the throne room, dammed if I’m not. I have to come around three sides of a square-either that or parade through semi-public corridors dressed like a circus horse.” He added meditatively, “I never wear anything but underwear under those silly robes.”
I said, “I doubt if they are as uncomfortable as this monkey jacket I am wearing, Sire.”
He shrugged. “Oh well, we each have to put up with the inconveniences of our jobs. Didn’t you get yourself a drink?” He picked up the list of nominations for cabinet ministers. “Do so, and pour me one.”
“What will you have, Sire?”
“Eh?” He looked up and glanced sharply at me. “My usual. Scotch on ice, of course.”
I said nothing and poured them, adding water to my own. I had had a sudden chill; if Bonforte knew that the Emperor always took scotch over bare cubes it should have been in his Farleyfile. It was not.
But Willem accepted the drink without comment, murmured, “Hot jets!” and went on looking at the list. Presently he looked up and said, “How about these lads, Joseph?”
“Sire? It is a skeleton cabinet, of course.” We had doubled up on portfolios where possible and Bonforte would hold Defense and Treasury as well as first. In three cases we had given temporary appointments to the career deputy ministers-Research, Population Management, and Exterior. The men who would hold the posts in the permanent government were all needed for campaigning.
“Yes, yes, it’s your second team. Mmm … How about this man Braun?”
I was considerably surprised. It had been my understanding that Willem would okay the list without comment, but that he might want to chat about other things. I had not been afraid of chatting; a man can get a reputation as a sparkling conversationalist simply by letting the other man do all the talking.
Lothar Braun was what was known as a “rising young statesman.” What I knew about him came from his Farleyfile and from Rog and Bill. He had come up since Bonforte had been turned out of office and so had never had any cabinet post, but had served as caucus sergeant at arms and junior whip. Bill insisted that Bonforte had planned to boost him rapidly and that he should try his wings in the caretaker government; he proposed him for Minister of External Communications.
Rog Clifton had seemed undecided; he had first put down the name of Angel Jesus de la Tone y Perez, the career subminister. But Bill had pointed out that if Braun flopped, now was a good time to find it out and no harm done. Clifton had given in.
“Braun?” I answered. “He’s a coming young man. Very brilliant.”
Willem made no comment, but looked on down the list. I tried to remember exactly what Bonforte had said about Braun in the Farleyffle. Brilliant … hardworking … analytical mind. Had he said anything against him? No-well, perhaps-“a shade too affable.” That does not condemn a man. But Bonforte had said nothing at all about such affirmative virtues as loyalty and honesty. Which might mean nothing, as the Farleyfile was not a series of character studies; it was a data file.
The Emperor put the list aside. “Joseph, are you planning to bring the Martian nests into the Empire at once?” “Eh? Certainly not before the election, Sire.”
“Come now, you know I was talking about after the election. And have you forgotten how to say ‘Willem’? ‘Sire’ from a man six years older than I am, under these circumstances, is silly.” “Very well, Willem.”
“We both know I am not supposed to notice politics. But we know also that the assumption is silly. Joseph, you have spent your off years creating a situation in which the nests would wish to come wholly into the Empire.” He pointed a thumb at my wand. “I believe you have done it. Now if you win this election you should be able to get the Grand Assembly to grant me permission to proclaim it. Well?”
I thought about it. “Willem,” I said slowly, “you know that is exactly what we have planned to do. You must have some reason for bringing the subject up.”
He swizzled his glass and stared at me, managing to look like a New England groceryman about to tell off one of the summer people. “Are you asking my advice? The constitution requires you to advise me, not the other way around.”
“I welcome your advice, Wilem. I do not promise to follow it.”
He laughed. “You damned seldom promise anything. Very well, let’s assume that you win the election and go back into office
-but with a majority so small that you might have difficulty in voting the nests into full citizenship. In such case I would not advise you to make it a vote of confidence. If you lose, take your licking and stay in office; stick the full term.”
“Why, Willem?”
“Because you and I are patient men. See that?” He pointed at the plaque of his house. “‘I Maintain!’ It’s not a flashy rule but it is not a king’s business to be flashy; his business is to conserve, to hang on, to roll with the punch. Now, constitutionally speaking, it should not matter to me whether you stay in office or not. But it does matter to me whether or not the Empire holds together. I think that if you miss on the Martian issue immediately after the election, you can afford to wait-for your other policies are going to prove very popular. You’ll pick up votes in by-elections and eventually you’ll come around and tell me I can add ‘Emperor of Mars’ to the list. So don’t hurry.”
“I will think about it,” I said carefully.
“Do that. Now how about the transportee system?”
“We’re abolishing it immediately after the election and suspending it at once.” I could answer that one firmly; Bonforte hated it. “They’ll attack you on it.”
“So they will. Let them. We’ll pick up votes.”
“Glad to hear that you still have the strength of your convictions, Joseph. I never liked having the banner of Orange on a convict ship. Free trade?” “After the election, yes.”
“What are you going to use for revenue?”
“It is our contention that trade and production will expand so rapidly that other revenues will make up for the loss of the customs.” “And suppose it ain’t so?”
I had not been given a second-string answer on that one-and economics was largely a mystery to me. I grinned. “Willem, I’ll have to have notice on that question. But the whole program of the Expansionist Party is founded on the notion that free trade, free travel, common citizenship, common currency, and a minimum of Imperial laws and restrictions are good not only for the citizens of the Empire but for the Empire itself. If we need the money, we’ll find it-but not by chopping the Empire up into tiny bailiwicks.” All but the first sentence was pure Bonforte, only slightly adapted.
“Save your campaign speeches,” he grunted. “I simply asked.” He picked up the list again. “You’re quite sure this line-up is the way you want it?”
I reached for the list and he handed it to me. Damnation, it was clear that the Emperor was telling me as emphatically as the constitution would let him that, in his opinion, Braun was a wrong ‘un. But, hell’s best anthracite, I had no business changing the list Bill and Rog had made up.
On the other hand, it was not Bon forte’s list; it was merely what they thought Bonforte would do if he were compos mentis. I wished suddenly that I could take time out and ask Penny what she thought of Braun.
Then I reached for a pen from Willem’s desk, scratched out “Braun,” and printed in “de la Torre”-in block letters; I still could not risk Bonforte’s handwriting. The Emperor merely said, “It looks like a good team to me. Good luck, Joseph. You’ll need it.”
That ended the audience as such. I was anxious to get away, but you do not walk out on a king; that is one prerogative they have retained. He wanted to show me his workshop and his new train models. I suppose he has done more to revive that ancient hobby than anyone else; personally I can’t see it as an occupation for a grown man. But I made polite noises about his new toy locomotive, intended for the “Royal Scotsman.”
“If I had had the breaks,” he said, getting down on his hands and knees and peering into the innards of the toy engine, “I could have been a very fair shop superintendent, I think-a master machinist. But the accident of birth discriminated against me.”
“Do you really think you would have preferred it, Willem?”
“I don’t know. This job I have is not bad. The hours are easy and the pay is good-and the social security is first-rate-barring the outside chance of revolution, and my line has always been lucky on that score. But much of the work is tedious and could be done as well by any second-rate actor.” He glanced up at me. “I relieve your office of a lot of tiresome cornerstone-laying and parade-watching, you know.”
“I do know and I appreciate it.”
“Once in a long time I get a chance to give a little push in the right direction-what I think is the right direction. Kinging is a very odd profession, Joseph. Don’t ever take it up.” “I’m afraid it’s a bit late, even if I wanted to.”
He made some fine adjustment on the toy. “My real function is to keep you from going crazy.” “Eh?”
“Of course. Psychosis-situational is the occupational disease of heads of states. My predecessors in the king trade, the ones who actually ruled, were almost all a bit balmy. And take a look at your American presidents; the job used frequently to kill them in their prime. But me, I don’t have to run things; I have a professional like yourself to do it for me. And you don’t have the killing pressure either; you, or those in your shoes, can always quit if things get too tough-and the old Emperor-it’s almost always the ‘old’ Emperor; we usually mount the throne about the age other men retire-the Emperor is always there, maintaining continuity, preserving the symbol of the state, while you professionals work out a new deal.” He blinked solemnly. “My job is not glamorous, but it is useful.”
Presently he let up on me about his chlldish trains and we went back into his office. I thought I was about to be dismissed. In fact, he said, “I should let you get back to your work. You had a hard trip?”
“Not too hard. I spent it working.”
“I suppose so. By the way, who are you?”
There is the policeman’s tap on the shoulder, the shock of the top step that is not there, there is falling out of bed, and there is having her husband return home unexpectedly-I would take any combination of those in preference to that simple inquiry. I aged inside to match my appearance and more.
“Sire?”
“Come now,” he said impatiently, “surely my job carries with it some privileges. Just tell me the truth. I’ve known for the past hour that you were not Joseph Bonforte-though you could fool his own mother; you even have his mannerisms. But who are you?”
“My name is Lawrence Smith, Your Majesty,” I said faintly.
“Brace up, man! I could have called the guards long since, if I had been intending to. Were you sent here to assassinate me?” “No, Sire. I am-loyal to Your Majesty.”
“You have an odd way of showing it. Well, pour yourself another drink, sit down, and tell me about it.”
I told him about it, every bit. It took more than one drink, and presentiy I felt better. He looked angry when I told him of the kidnapping, but when I told him what they had done to Bonforte’s mind his face turned dark with a Jovian rage.
At last he said quietly, “It’s just a matter of days until he is back in shape, then?” “So Dr. Capek says.”
“Don’t let him go to work until he is fully recovered. He’s a valuable man. You know that, don’t you? Worth six of you and me. So you carry on with the doubling job and let him get well. The Empire needs him.”
“Yes, Sire.”
“Knock off that ‘Sire.’ Since you are standing in for him, call me ‘Willem,’ as he does. Did you know that was how I spotted you?” “No, Si-no, Willem.”
“He’s called me Willem for twenty years. I thought it decidedly odd that he would quit it in private simply because he was seeing me on state business. But I did not suspect, not really. But, remarkable as your performance was, it set me thinking. Then when we went in to see the trains, I knew.”
“Excuse me? How?”
“You were polite, man! I’ve made him look at my trains in the past-and he always got even by being as rude as possible about what a way for a grown man to waste time. It was a little act we always went through. We both enjoyed it.”
“Oh. I didn’t know.”
“How could you have known?” I was thinking that I should have known, that damned Farleyfile should have told me … It was not until later that I realized that the file had not been
defective, in view of the theory on which it was based, i.e. it was intended to let a famous man remember details about the less famous. But that was precisely what the Emperor was not-
less famous, I mean. Of course Bonforte needed no notes to recall personal details about Willem! Nor would he consider it proper to set down personal matters about the sovereign in a
file handled by his clerks.
I had muffed the obvious-not that I see how I could have avoided it, even ii I had realized that the file would be incomplete.
But the Emperor was still talking. “You did a magnificent job- and after risking your life in a Martian nest I am not surprised that you were willing to tackle me. Tell me, have I ever seen you in stereo, or anywhere?”
I had given my legal name, of course, when the Emperor demanded it; I now rather timidly gave my professional name. He looked at me, threw up his hands, and guff awed. I was somewhat hurt. “Er, have you heard of me?”
“Heard of you? I’m one of your staunchest fans.” He looked at me very closely. “But you still look like Joe Bonforte. I can’t believe that you are Lorenzo.” “But I am.”
“Oh, I believe it, I believe it. You know that skit where you are a tramp? First you try to milk a cow-no luck. Finally you end up eating out of the cat’s dish-but even the cat pushes you away?” I admitted it.
“I’ve almost worn out my spool of that. I laugh and cry at the same time.”
“That is the idea.” I hesitated, then admitted that the barnyard “Weary Willie” routine had been copied from a very great artist of another century. “But I prefer dramatic roles.” “Like this one?”
“Well-not exactly. For this role, once is quite enough. I wouldn’t care for a long run.”
“I suppose so. Well, tell Roger Clifton- No, don’t tell Clifton anything. Lorenzo, I see nothing to be gained by ever telling anyone about our conversation this past hour. If you tell Clifton, even though you tell him that I said not to worry, it would just give him nerves. And he has work to do. So we keep it tight, eh?”
“As my emperor wishes.”
“None of that, please. We’ll keep it quiet because it’s best so. Sorry I can’t make a sickbed visit on Uncle Joe. Not that I could help him-although they used to think the King’s Touch did marvels. So we’ll say nothing and pretend that I never twigged.”
“Yes-Wilem.”
“I suppose you had better go now. I’ve kept you a very long time.” “Whatever you wish.”
“I’ll have Pateel go back with you-or do you know your way around? But just a moment-” He dug around in his desk, muttering to himself. “That girl must have been straightening things again. No-here it is.” He hauled out a little book. “I probably won’t get to see you again-so would you mind giving me your autograph before you go?”
Chapter 9
Rog and Bill I found chewing their nails in Bonforte’s upper living room. The second I showed up Corpsman started toward me. “Where the hell have you been?” “With the Emperor,” I answered coldly.
“You’ve been gone five or six times as long as you should have been.”
I did not bother to answer. Since the argument over the speech Corpsman and I had gotten along together and worked together, but it was strictly a marriage of convenience, with no love. We cooperated, but we did not really bury the hatchet-unless it was between my shoulder blades. I had made no special effort to conciliate him and saw no reason why I should-in my opinion his parents had met briefly at a masquerade ball.
I don’t believe in rowing with other members of the company, but the only behavior Corpsman would willingly accept from me was that of a servant, hat in hand and very ‘umble, sir. I would not give him that, even to keep peace. I was a professional, retained to do a very difficult professional job, and professional men do not use the back stairs; they are treated with respect.
So I ignored him and asked Rog, “Where’s Penny?” “With him. So are Dak and Do; at the moment.” “He’s here?”
“Yes.” Clifton hesitated. “We put him in what is supposed to be the wife’s room of your bedroom suite. It was the only place where we could maintain utter privacy and still give him the care he needs. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all.”
“It won’t inconvenience you. The two bedrooms are joined, you may have noticed, only through the dressing rooms, and we’ve shut off that door. It’s soundproof.” “Sounds like a good arrangement. How is he?”
Clifton frowned. “Better, much better-on the whole. He is lucid much of the time.” He hesitated. “You can go in and see him, if you like.” I hesitated still longer. “How soon does Dr. Capek think he will be ready to make public appearances?”
“It’s hard to say. Before long.”
“How long? Three or four days? Ashort enough time that we could cancel all appointments and just put me out of sight? Rog, I don’t know just how to make this clear but, much as I would like to call on him and pay my respects, I don’t think it is smart for me to see him at all until after I have made my last appearance. It might well ruin my characterization.” I had made the terrible mistake of going to my father’s funeral; for years thereafter when I thought of him I saw him dead in his coffin. Only very slowly did I regain the true image of him-the virile, dominant man who had reared me with a firm hand and taught me my trade. I was afraid of something like that with Bonforte; I was now impersonating a well man at the height of his powers, the way I had seen him and heard him in the many stereo records of him. I was very much afraid that if I saw him ill, the recollection of it would blur and distort my performance.
“I was not insisting,” Clifton answered. “You know best. It’s possible that we can keep from having you appear in public again, but I want to keep you standing by and ready until he is fully recovered.”
I almost said that the Emperor wanted it done that way. But I caught myself-the shock of having the Emperor find me out had shaken me a little out of character. But the thought reminded
me of unfinished business. I took out the revised cabinet list and handed it to Corpsman. “Here’s the approved roster for the news services, Bill. You’ll see that there is one change on it- De la Torre for Braun.”
“What?”
“Jesus de Ia Tone for Lothar Braun. That’s the way the Emperor wanted it.”
Clifton looked astonished; Corpsman looked both astonished and angry. “What difference does that make? He’s got no goddamn right to have opinions!”
Clifton said slowly, “Bill is fight, Chief. As a lawyer who has specialized in constitutional law I assure you that the sovereign’s confirmation is purely nominal. You should not have let him make any changes.”
I felt like shouting at them, and only the imposed calm personality of Bonforte kept me from it. I had had a hard day and, despite a brilliant performance, the inevitable disaster had overtaken me. I wanted to tell Rog that if Willem had not been a really big man, kingly in the fine sense of the word, we would all be in the soup-simply because I had not been adequately coached for the role. Instead I answered sourly, “It’s done and that’s that.”
Corpsman said, “That’s what you think! I gave out the correct list to the reporters two hours ago. Now you’ve got to go back and straighten it out. Rog, you had better call the Palace right away and-“
I said, “Quiet!”
Corpsman shut up. I went on in a lower key. “Rog, from a legal point of view, you may be right. I wouldn’t know. I do know that the Emperor felt free to question the appointment of Braun. Now if either one of you wants to go to the Emperor and argue with him, that’s up to you. But I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to get out of this anachronistic strait jacket, take my shoes off, and have a long, tall drink. Then rm going to bed.”
“Now wait, Chief,” Clifton objected. “You’ve got a five-minute spot on grand network to announce the new cabinet.” “You take it. You’re first deputy in this cabinet.”
He blinked. “All right.”
Corpsman said insistently, “How about Braun? He was promised the job.”
Clifton looked at him thoughtfully. “Not in any dispatch that I saw, Bill. He was simply asked if he was willing to serve, like all the others. Is that what you meant?” Corpsman hesitated like an actor not quite sure of his lines. “Of course. But it amounts to a promise.”
“Not until the public announcement is made, it doesn’t.”
“But the announcement was made, I tell you. Two hours ago.”
“Mmm … Bill, I’m afraid that you will have to call the boys in again and tell them that you made a mistake. Or I’ll call them in and tell them that through an error a preliminary list was handed out before Mr. Bonforte had okayed it. But we’ve got to correct it before the grand network announcement.”
“Do you mean to tell me you are going to let him get away with it?”
By “him” I think Bill meant me rather than Willem, but Rog’s answer assumed the contrary. “Yes. Bill, this is no time to force a constitutional crisis. The issue isn’t worth it. So will you phrase the retraction? Or shall I?”
Corpsman’s expression reminded me of the way a cat submits to the inevitable-“just barely.” He looked grim, shrugged, and said, “I’ll do it. I want to be damned sure it is phrased properly, so we can salvage as much as possible out of the shambles.”
“Thanks, Bill,” Rog answered mildly.
Corpsman turned to leave. I called out, “Bill! As long as you are going to be talking to the news service I have another announcement for them.” “Huh? What are you after now?”
“Nothing much.” The fact was I was suddenly overcome with weariness at the role and the tensions it created. “Just tell them that Mr. Bonforte has a cold and his physician has ordered him to bed for a rest. I’ve had a bellyful.”
Corpsman snorted. “I think I’ll make it ‘pneumonia.” “Suit yourself.”
When he had gone Rog turned to me and said, “Don’t let it get you, Chief. In this business some days are better than others.” “Rog, I really am going on the sick list. You can mention it on stereo tonight.”
“So?”
“I’m going to take to my bed and stay there. There is no reason at all why Bonforte can’t ‘have a cold’ until he is ready to get back into harness himself. Every time I make an appearance it just increases the probability that somebody will spot something wrong- and every time I do make an appearance that sorehead Corpsman finds something to yap about. An artist can’t do his best work with somebody continually snarling at him. So let’s let it go at this and ring down the curtain.”
“Take it easy, Chief. I’ll keep Corpsman out of your hair from now on. Here we won’t be in each other’s laps the way we were in the ship.”
“No, Rog, my mind is made up. Oh, I won’t run out on you. I’ll stay here until Mr. B. is able to see people, in case some utter emergency turns up”-I was recalling uneasily that the Emperor had told me to hang on and had assumed that I would-“but it is actually better to keep me out of sight. At the moment we have gotten away with it completely, haven’t we? Oh, they know- somebody knows-that Bonforte was not the man who went through the adoption ceremony-but they don’t dare raise that issue, nor could they prove it if they did. The same people may suspect that a double was used today, but they don’t know, they can’t be sure-because it is always possible that Bonforte recovered quickly enough to carry it off today. Right?”
Clifton got an odd, half-sheepish look on his face. “I’m afraid they are fairly sure you were a double, Chief.” “Eh?”
“We shaded the truth a little to keep you from being nervous. Doc Capek was certain from the time he first examined him that only a miracle could get him in shape to make the audience today. The people who dosed him would know that too.”
I frowned. “Then you were kidding me earlier when you told me how well he was doing? How is he, Rog? Tell me the truth.”
“I was telling you the truth that time, Chief. That’s why I suggested that you see him-whereas before I was only too glad to string along with your reluctance to see him.” He added, “Perhaps you had better see him, talk with him.”
“Mmm-no.” The reasons for not seeing him still applied; if I did have to make another appearance I did not want my subconscious playing me tricks. The role called for a well man. “But, Rog, everything I said applies still more emphatically on the basis of what you have just told me. If they are even reasonably sure that a double was used today, then we don’t dare risk another appearance. They were caught by surprise today-or perhaps it was impossible to unmask me, under the circumstances. But it will not be later. They can rig some deadfall, some test that I can’t pass- then blooey/ There goes the old ball game.” I thought about it. “I had better be ‘sick’ as long as necessary. Bill was right; it had better be ‘pneumonia.’”
Such is the power of suggestion that I woke up the next morning with a stopped-up nose and a sore throat. Dr. Capek took time to dose me and I felt almost human by suppertime; nevertheless, he issued bulletins about “Mr. Bonforte’s virus infection.” The sealed and air-conditioned cities of the Moon being what they are, nobody was anxious to be exposed to an S- vectored ailment; no determined effort was made to get past my chaperones. For four days I loafed and read from Bonforte’s library, both his own collected papers and his many books
… I discovered that both politics and economics could make engrossing reading; those subjects had never been real to me before. The Emperor sent me flowers from the royal
greenhouse-or were they for me?
Never mind. I loafed and soaked in the luxury of being Lorenzo, or even plain Lawrence Smith. I found that I dropped back into character automatically if someone came in, but I can’t help that. It was not necessary; I saw no one but Penny and Capek, except for one visit from Dak.
But even lotus-eating can pall. By the fourth day I was as tired of that room as I had ever been of a producer’s waiting room and I was lonely. No one bothered with me; Capek’s visits had been brisk and professional, and Penny’s visits had been short and few. She had stopped calling me “Mr. Bonforte.”
When Dak showed up I was delighted to see him. “Dak! What’s new?”
“Not much. I’ve been trying to get the Tommie overhauled with one hand while helping Rog with political chores with the other. Getting this campaign lined up is going to give him ulcers, three gets you eight.” He sat down. “Politics!”
“Hmm – . . Dak, how did you ever get into it? Offhand, I would figure voyageurs to be as unpolitical as actors. And you in particular.”
“They are and they aren’t. Most ways they don’t give a damn whether school keeps ot not, as long as they can keep on herding junk through the sky. But to do that you’ve got to have cargo, and cargo means trade, and profitable trade means wide-open trade, with any ship free to go anywhere, no customs nonsense and no restricted areas. Freedom! And there you are; you’re in politics. As for myself, I came here first for a spot of lobbying for the ‘continuous voyage’ rule, so that goods on the triangular trade would not pay two duties. It was Mr. B’s bill, of course. One thing led to another and here I am, skipper of his yacht the past six years and representing my guild brothers since the last general election.” He sighed. “I hardly know how it happened myself.”
“I suppose you are anxious to get out of it. Are you going to stand for re-election?” He stared at me. “Huh? Brother, until you’ve been in politics you haven’t been alive.” “But you said-“
“I know what I said. It’s rough and sometimes it’s dirty and it’s always hard work and tedious details. But it’s the only sport for grownups. All other games are for kids. All of ‘em.” He stood up. “Gotta run.”
“Oh, stick around.”
“Can’t. With the Grand Assembly convening tomorrow I’ve got to give Rog a hand. I shouldn’t have stopped in at all.”
“It is? I didn’t know.” I was aware that the G.A., the outgoing G.A. that is, had to meet one more time, to accept the caretaker cabinet. But I had not thought about it. It was a routine matter, as perfunctory as presenting the list to the Emperor. “Is he going to be able to make it?”
“No. But don’t you worry about it. Rog will apologize to the house for your-I mean his-absence and will ask for a proxy rule under no-objection procedure. Then he will read the speech of the Supreme Minister Designate-Bill is working on it right now. Then in his own person he will move that the government be confirmed. Second. No debate. Pass. Adjourn sine die-and everybody rushes for home and starts promising the voters two women in every bed and a hundred Imperials every Monday morning. Routine.” He added, “Oh yes! Some member of the Humanity Party will move a resolution of sympathy and a basket of flowers, which will pass in a fine hypocritical glow. They’d rather send flowers to Bonforte’s funeral.” He scowled.
“It is actually as simple as that? What would happen if the proxy rule were refused? I thought the Grand Assembly didn’t recognize proxies.”
“They don’t, for all ordinary procedure. You either pair, or you show up and vote. But this is just the idler wheels going around in parliamentary machinery. If they don’t let him appear by proxy tomorrow, then they’ve got to wait around until he is well before they can adjourn sine die and get on with the serious business of hypnotizing the voters. As it is, a mock quorum has been meeting daily and adjourning ever since Quiroga resigned. This Assembly is as dead as Caesar’s ghost, but it has to be buried constitutionally.”
“Yes-but suppose some idiot did object?”
“No one will. Oh, it could force a constitutional crisis. But it won’t happen.”
Neither one of us said anything for a while. Dak made no move to leave. “Dak, would it make things easier if I showed up and gave that speech?”
“Huh? Shucks, I thought that was settled. You decided that it wasn’t safe to risk another appearance short of an utter save-the-baby emergency. On the whole, I agree with you. There’s the old saw about the pitcher and the well.”
“Yes. But this is just a walk-through, isn’t it? Lines as fixed as a play? Would there be any chance of anyone puffing any surprises on me that I couldn’t handle?”
“Well, no. Ordinarily you would be expected to talk to the press afterwards, but your recent illness is an excuse. We could slide you through the security tunnel and avoid them entirely.” He smiled grimly. “Of course, there is always the chance that some crackpot in the visitors’ gallery has managed to sneak in a gun…Mr. B. always referred to it as the ‘shooting gallery’ after they winged him from it.”
My leg gave a sudden twinge. “Are you trying to scare me off?”
“You pick a funny way to encourage me. Dak, be level with me. Do you want me to do this job tomorrow? Or don’t you?” “Of course I do! Why the devil do you think I stopped in on a busy day? Just to chat?”
The Speaker pro tempore banged his gavel, the chaplain gave an invocation that carefully avoided any differences between one religion and another-and everyone kept silent. The seats themselves were only half filled but the gallery was packed with tourists.
We heard the ceremonial knocking amplified over the speaker system; the Sergeant at Arms rushed the mace to the door. Three times the Emperor demanded to be admitted, three times he was refused. Then he prayed the privilege; it was granted by acclamation. We stood while Willem entered and took his seat back of the Speaker’s desk. He was in uniform as Admiral General and was unattended, as was required, save by escort of the Speaker and the Sergeant at Arms.
Then I tucked my wand under my arm and stood up at my place at the front bench and, addressing the Speaker as if the sovereign were not present, I delivered my speech. It was not the one Corpsman had written; that one went down the oubliette as soon as I had read it. Bill had made it a straight campaign speech, and it was the wrong time and place.
Mine was short, non-partisan, and cribbed right straight out of Bonforte’s collected writings, a paraphrase of the one the time before when he formed a caretaker government. I stood foursquare for good roads and good weather and wished that everybody would love everybody else, just the way all us good democrats loved our sovereign and he loved us. It was a blank-verse lyric poem of about five hundred words and if I varied from Bonforte’s earlier speech then I simply went up on my lines.
They had to quiet the gallery.
Rog got up and moved that the names I had mentioned in passing be confirmed-second and no objection and the clerk cast a white ballot As I marched forward, attended by one member of my own party and one member of the opposition, I could see members glancing at their watches and wondering if they could still catch the noon shuttle.
Then I was swearing allegiance to my sovereign, under and subject to the constitutional limitations, swearing to defend and continue the rights and privileges of the Grand Assembly, and to protect the freedoms of the citizens of the Empire wherever they might be-and incidentally to carry out the duties of His Majesty’s Supreme Minister. The chaplain mixed up the words once, but I straightened him out.
I thought I was breezing through it as easy as a curtain speech- when I found that I was crying so hard that I could hardly see. When I was done, Willem said quietly to me, “Agood performance, Joseph.” I don’t know whether he thought he was talking to me or to his old friend-and I did not care. I did not wipe away the tears; I just let them drip as I turned back to the Assembly. I waited for Willem to leave, then adjourned them.
Diana, Ltd., ran four extra shuttles that afternoon. New Batavia was deserted-that is to say there were only the court and a million or so butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, and civil servants left in town-and a skeleton cabinet.
Having gotten over my “cold” and appeared publicly in the Grand Assembly Hall, it no longer made sense to hide out. As the supposed Supreme Minister I could not, without causing comment, never be seen; as the nominal head of a political party entering a campaign for a general election I had to see people-some people, at least. So I did what I had to do and got a daily report on Bonforte’s progress toward complete recovery. His progress was good, if slow; Capek reported that it was possible, if absolutely necessary, to let him appear any time
now-but he advised against it; he had lost almost twenty pounds and his co-ordination was poor.
Rog did everything possible to protect both of us. Mr. Bonforte knew now that they were using a double for him and, after a first fit of indignation, had relaxed to necessity and approved it. Rog ran the campaign, consulting him only on matters of high policy, and then passing on his answers to me to hand out publicly when necessary.
But the protection given me was almost as great; I was as hard to see as a topflight agent. My office ran on into the mountain beyond the opposition leader’s apartments (we did not move over into the Supreme Minister’s more palatial quarters; while it would have been legal, it just “was not done” during a caretaker regime)
-they could be reached from the rear directly from the lower living room, but to get at me from the public entrance a man had to pass about five check points-except for the favored few who were conducted directly by Rog through a bypass tunnel to Penny’s office and from there into mine.
The setup meant that I could study the Farleyfile on anyone before he got to see me. I could even keep it in front of me while he was with me, for the desk had a recessed viewer the visitor could not see, yet I could wipe it out instantly if he turned out to be a floor pacer. The viewer had other uses; Rog could give a visitor the special treatment, rushing him right in to see me, leave him alone with me-and stop in Penny’s office and write me a note, which would then be projected on the viewer-such quick tips as, “Kiss him to death and promise nothing,” or, “All he really wants is for his wile to be presented at court. Promise him that and get rid of him,” or even, “Easy on this one. It’s a ‘swing’ district and he is smarter than he looks. Turn him over to me and I’ll dicker.”
I don’t know who ran the government. The senior career men, probably. There would be a stack of papers on my desk each morning, I would sign Bonforte’s sloppy signature to them, and Penny would take them away. I never had time to read them. The very size of the Imperial machinery dismayed me. Once when we had to attend a meeting outside the offices, Penny had led me on what she called a short cut though the Archives-miles on miles of endless ifies, each one chockablock with microfilm and all of them with moving belts scooting past them so that a clerk would not take all day to fetch one ifie.
But Penny told me that she had taken me through only one wing of it. The file of the files, she said, occupied a cavern the size of the Grand Assembly Hall. It made me glad that government was not a career with me, but merely a passing hobby, so to speak.
Seeing people was an unavoidable chore, largely useless since Rog, or Bonforte through Rog, made the decisions. My real job was to make campaign speeches. Adiscreet rumor had been spread that my doctor had been afraid that my heart had been strained by the “virus infection” and had advised me to stay in the low gravity of the Moon throughout the campaign. I did not dare risk taking the impersonation on a tour of Earth, much less make a trip to Venus; the Farleyfile system would break down if I attempted to mix with crowds, not to mention the unknown hazards of the Actionist goon squads-what I would babble with a minim dose of neodexocaine in the forebrain none of us liked to think about, me least of all.
Quiroga was hitting all continents on Earth, making his stereo appearances as personal appearances on platforms in front of crowds. But it did not worry Rog Clifton. He shrugged and said, “Let him. There are no new votes to be picked up by personal appearances at political rallies. All it does is wear out the speaker. Those rallies are attended only by the faithful.”
I hoped that he knew what he was talking about. The campaign was short, only six weeks from Quiroga’s resignation to the day he had set for the election before resigning, and I was speaking almost every day, either on a grand network with time shared precisely with the Humanity Party, or speeches canned and sent by shuttle for later release to particular audiences. We had a set routine; a draft would come to me, perhaps from Bill although I never saw him, and then I would rework it. Rog would take the revised draft away; usually it would come back approved-and once in a while there would be corrections made in Bonforte’s handwriting, now so sloppy as to be almost illegible.
I never ad-libbed at all on those parts he corrected, though I often did on the rest-when you get rolling there is often a better, more alive way to say a thing. I began to notice the nature of his corrections; they were almost always eliminations of qualifiers- make it blunter, let ‘em like it or lump it!
After a while there were fewer corrections. I was getting with it.
I still never saw him. I felt that I could not “wear his head” if I looked at him on his sickbed. But I was not the only one of his intimate family who was not seeing him; Capek had chucked Penny out-for her own good. I did not know it at the time. I did know that Penny had become irritable, absent-minded, and moody after we reached New Batavia. She got circles under her eyes like a raccoon-all of which I could not miss, but I attributed it to the pressure of the campaign combined with worry about Bonforte’s health. I was only partly right. Capek spotted it and took action, put her under llght hypnosis and asked her questions-then he flatly forbade her to see Bonforte again until I was done and finished and shipped away.
The poor girl was going almost out of her mind from visiting the sickroom of the man she hopelessly loved-then going straight in to work closely with a man who looked and talked and sounded just like him, but in good health. She was probably beginning to hate me.
Good old Doc Capek got at the root of her trouble, gave her helpful and soothing post-hypnotic suggestions, and kept her out of the sickroom after that. Naturally I was not told about it at the time; it wasn’t any of my business. But Penny perked up and again was her lovable, incredibly efficient self.
It made a lot of difference to me. Let’s admit it; at least twice I would have walked out on the whole incredible rat race if it had not been for Penny.
There was one sort of meeting I had to attend, that of the campaign executive committee. Since the Expansionist Party was a minority party, being merely the largest fraction of a coalition of several parties held together by the leadership and personality of John Joseph Bonforte, I had to stand in for him and peddle soothing syrup to those prima donnas. I was briefed for it with painstaking care, and Rog sat beside rue and could hint the proper direction if I faltered. But it could not be delegated.
Less than two weeks before election day we were due for a meeting at which the safe districts would be parceled out. The organization always had thirty to forty districts which could be used to make someone eligible for cabinet office, or to provide for a political secretary (a person like Penny was much more valuable if he or she was fully qualified, able to move and Speak on the floor of the Assembly, had the right to be present at closed caucuses, and so forth), or for other party reasons. Bonforte himself represented a “safe” district; it relieved him from the necessity of precinct campaigning. Clifton had another. Dak would have had one if he had needed it, but he actually commanded the support of his guild brethren. Rog even hinted to me once that if I wanted to come back in my proper person, I could say the word and my name would go on the next list.
Some of the spots were always saved for party wheel horses willing to resign at a moment’s notice and thereby provide the Party with a place through a by-election if it proved necessary to qualify a man for cabinet office, or something.
But the whole thing had somewhat the flavor of patronage and, the coalition being what it was, it was necessary for Bonforte to straighten out conilicting claims and submit a list to the campaign executive committee. It was a last-minute job, to be done just before the ballots were prepared, to allow for late changes.
When Rog and Dak came in I was working on a speech and had told Penny to hold off anything but five-alarm fires. Quiroga had made a wild statement in Sydney, Australia, the night before, of such a nature that we could expose the lie and make him squirm. I was trying my hand at a Speech in answer, without waiting for a draft to be handed me; I had high hopes of getting my own version approved.
When they came in I said, “Listen to this,” and read them the key paragraph. “How do you like it?”
“That ought to nail his hide to the door,” agreed Rog. “Here’s the ‘safe’ list, Chief. Want to look it over? We’re due there in twenty minutes.”
“Oh, that damned meeting. I don’t see why I should look at the list. Anything you want to tell me about it?” Nevertheless, I took the list and glanced down it. I knew them all from their Farleyfiles and a few of them from contact; I knew already why each one had to be taken care of.
Then I struck the name: Corpsman, William 1.
I fought down what I felt was justifiable annoyance and said quietly, “I see Bill is on the list, Rog.”
“Oh, yes. I wanted to tell you about that. You see, Chief, as we all know, there has been a certain amount of bad blood between you and Bill. Now I’m not blaming you; it’s been Bill’s fault. But there are always two sides. What you may not have realized is that Bill has been carrying around a tremendous inferiority feeling; it gives him a chip on the shoulder. This will fix it up.”
“So?”
“Yes. It is what he has always wanted. You see, the rest of us all have official status, we’re members of the G.A., I mean. I’m talking about those who work closely around, uh, you. Bill feels it. I’ve heard him say, after the third drink, that he was just a hired man. He’s bitter about it. You don’t mind, do you? The Party can afford it and it’s an easy price to pay for elimination of friction at headquarters.”
I had myself under full control by now. “It’s none of my business. Why should I mind, if that is what Mi. Bonforte wants?” I caught just a flicker of a glance from Dak to Clifton. I added, “That is what Mr. B. wants? Isn’t it, Rog?”
Dak said harshly, “Tell him, Rog.”
Rog said slowly, “Dak and I whipped this up ourselves. We think it is for the best.” “Then Mr. Bonforte did not approve it? You asked him, surely?”
“No, we didn’t.” “Why not?”
“Chief, this is not the sort of thing to bother him with. He’s a tired, old, sick man. I have not been worrying him with anything less than major policy decisions-which this isn’t. It is a district we command no matter who stands for it.”
“Then why ask my opinion about it at all?”
“Well, we felt you should know-and know why. We think you ought to approve it.”
“Me? You’re asking me for a decision as if I were Mr. Bonforte. I’m not.” I tapped the desk in his nervous gesture. “Either this decision is at his level, and you should ask him-or it’s not, and you should never have asked me.”
Rog chewed his cigar, then said, “All right, I’m not asking you.” “No!”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean ‘NoVYou did ask me; therefore there is doubt in your mind. So if you expect me to present that name to the committee- as 1/I were Bonforte-then go in and ask him.” They both sat and said nothing. Finally Dak sighed and said, “Tell the rest, Rog. Or I will.”
I waited. Clifton took his cigar out of his mouth and said, “Chief, Mi. Bonforte had a stroke four days ago. He’s in no shape to be disturbed.”
I held still, and recited to myself all of “the cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,” and so forth. When I was back in shape I said, “How is his mind?”
“His mind seems clear enough, but he is terribly tired. That week as a prisoner was more of an ordeal than we realized. The stroke left him in a coma for twenty-four hours. He’s out of it now, but the left side of his face is paralyzed and his entire left side is partly out of service.”
“Uh, what does Dr. Capek say?”
“He thinks that as the clot clears up, you’ll never be able to tell the difference. But he’ll have to take it easier than he used to. But, Chief, right now he is ill. We’ll just have to carry on through the balance of the campaign without him.”
I felt a ghost of the lost feeling I had had when my father died. I had never seen Bonforte, I had had nothing from him but a few scrawled corrections on typescript. But I leaned on him all the way. The fact that he was in that room next door had made the whole thing possible.
I took a long breath, let it out, and said, “Okay, Rog. We’ll have to.”
“Yes, Chief.” He stood up. “We’ve got to get over to that meeting. How about that?” He nodded toward the safe-districts list.
“Oh.” I tried to think. Maybe it was possible that Bonforte would reward Bill with the privilege of calling himself “the Honorable,” just to keep him happy. He wasn’t small about such things; he did not bind the mouths of the kine who tread the grain. In one of his essays on politics he had said, “I am not an intellectual man. If I have any special talent, it lies in picking men of ability and letting them work.”
“How long has Bill been with him?” I asked suddenly. “Eh? About four years. Allttle over.”
Bonforte evidently had liked his work. “That’s past one general election, isn’t it? Why didn’t he make him an Assemblyman then?” “Why, I don’t know. The matter never came up.”
“When was Penny put in?”
“About three years ago. Aby-election.” “There’s your answer, Rog.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Bonforte could have made Bill a Grand Assemblyman at any time. He didn’t choose to. Change that nomination to a ‘resigner.’ Then if Mr. Bonforte wants Bill to have it, he can arrange a byelection for him later-when he’s feeling himself.”
Clifton showed no expression. He simply picked up the list and said, “Very well, Chief.”
Later that same day Bill quit. I suppose Rog had to tell him that his arm-twisting had not worked. But when Rog told me about it I felt sick, realizing that my stiff-necked attitude had us all in acute danger. I told him so. He shook his head.
“But he knows it all! It was his scheme from the start. Look at the load of dirt he can haul over to the Humanity camp.”
“Forget it, Chief. Bill may be a louse-I’ve no use for a man who will quit in the middle of a campaign; you just don’t do that, ever. But he is not a rat. In his profession you don’t spill a client’s secrets, even if you fall out with him.”
“I hope you are right.”
“You’ll see. Don’t worry about it. Just get on with the job.”
As the next few days passed I came to the conclusion that Rog knew Bill better than I did. We heard nothing from him or about him and the campaign went ahead as usual, getting rougher all the time, but with not a peep to show that our giant hoax was compromised. I began to feel better and buckled down to making the best Bonforte speeches I could manage- sometimes with Rog’s help; sometimes just with his okay. Mr. Bonforte was steadily improving again, but Capek had him on absolute quiet.
Rog had to go to Earth during the last week; there are types of fence-mending that simply can’t be done by remote control. After all, votes come from the precincts and the field managers count for more than the speechmakers. But speeches still had to be made and press conferences given; I carried on, with Dak and Penny at my elbow-of course I was much more closely with it now; most questions I could answer without stopping to think.
There was the usual twice-weekly press conference in the offices the day Rog was due back. I had been hoping that he would be back in time for it, but there was no reason I could not take it alone. Penny walked in ahead of me, carrying her gear; I heard her gasp.
I saw then that Bill was at the far end of the table.
But I looked around the room as usual and said, “Good morning, gentlemen.” “Good morning, Mr. Minister!” most of them answered.
I added, “Good morning, Bill. Didn’t know you were here. Whom are you representing?”
They gave him dead silence to reply. Every one of them knew that Bill had quit us-or had been fired. He grinned at me, and answered, “Good morning, Mister Bon forte. I’m with the Krein
Syndicate.”
I knew it was coming then; I tried not to give him the satisfaction of letting it show. “Afine outfit. I hope they are paying you what you are worth. Now to business- The written questions first. You have them, Penny?”
I went rapidly through the written questions, giving out answers I had already had time to think over, then sat back as usual and said, “We have time to bat it around a bit, gentlemen. Any other questions?”
There were several. I was forced to answer “No comment” only once-an answer Bonforte preferred to an ambiguous one. Finally I glanced at my watch and said, “That will be all this morning, gentlemen,” and started to stand up.
“Smythe!” Bill shouted.
I kept right on getting to my feet, did not look toward him.
“I mean you, Mr. Phony Bonforte-Smythe!” he went on angrily, raising his voice still more.
This time I did look at him, with astonishment-just the amount appropriate, I think, to an important official subjected to rudeness under unlikely conditions. Bill was pointing at me and his face was red. “You impostor! You small-time actor! You fraud!”
The London Times man on my right said quietly, “Do you want me to call the guard, sir?” I said, “No. He’s harmless.”
Bill laughed. “So I’m harmless, huh? You’ll find out.” “I really think I should, sir,” the Times man insisted.
“No.” I then said sharply, “That’s enough, Bill. You had better leave quietly.”
“Don’t you wish I would?” He started spewing forth the basic story, talking rapidly. He made no mention of the kidnaping and did not mention his own part in the hoax, but implied that he had left us rather than be mixed up in any such swindle. The impersonation was attributed, correctly as far as it went, to illness on the part of Bonforte-with a strong hint that we might have doped him.
I listened patiently. Most of the reporters simply listened at first, with that stunned expression of outsiders exposed unwillingly to a vicious family argument. Then some of them started scribbling or dictating into minicorders.
When he stopped I said, “Axe you through, Bill?” “That’s enough, isn’t it?”
“More than enough. I’m sorry, Bill. That’s all, gentlemen. I must get back to work.”
“Just a moment, Mr. Minister!” someone called out. “Do you want to issue a denial?” Someone else added, “Axe you going to sue?” I answered the latter question first. “No, I shan’t sue. One doesn’t sue a sick man.”
“Sick, am I?” shouted Bill.
“Quiet down, Bill. As for issuing a denial, I hardly think it is called for. However, I see that some of you have been taking notes. While I doubt if any of your publishers would run this story, if they do, this anecdote may add something to it. Did you ever hear of the professor who spent forty years of his life proving that the Odyssey was not written by Homer-but by another Greek of the same name?”
It got a polite laugh. I smiled and started to turn away again. Bill came rushing around the table and grabbed at my arm. “You can’t laugh it off!” The Times man-Mr. Ackroyd, it was-pulled him away from me.
I said, “Thank you, sir.” Then to Corpsman I added, “What do you want me to do, Bill? I’ve tried to avoid having you arrested.” “Call the guards if you like, you phony! We’ll see who stays in jail longest! Wait until they take your fingerprints!”
I sighed and made the understatement of my life. “This is ceasing to be a joke. Gentlemen, I think I had better put an end to this. Penny my dear, will you please have someone send in fingerprinting equipment?” I knew I was sunk-but, damn it, if you are caught by the Birkenhead Drill, the least you owe yourself is to stand at attention while the ship goes down. Even a villain should make a good exit.
Bill did not wait. He grabbed the water glass that had been sitting in front of me; I had handled it several times. “The hell with that! This will do.” “I’ve told you before, Bill, to mind your language in the presence of ladies. But you may keep the glass.”
“You’re bloody well right I’ll keep it.”
“Very well. Please leave. If not, I’ll be forced to summon the guard.”
He walked out. Nobody said anything. I said, “May I provide fingerprints for any of the rest of you?” Ackroyd said hastily, “Oh, I’m sure we don’t want them, Mr. Minister.”
“Oh, by all means! If there is a story in this, you’ll want to be covered.” I insisted because it was in character-and in the second and third place, you can’t be a little bit pregnant, or slightly unmasked-and I did not want my friends present to be scooped by Bill; it was the last thing I could do for them.
We did not have to send for formal equipment. Penny had carbon sheets and someone had one of those lifetime memo pads with plastic sheets; they took prints nicely. Then I said good morning and left.
We got as far as Penny’s private office; once inside she fainted dead. I carried her into my office, laid her on the couch, then sat down at my desk and simply shook for several minutes. Neither one of us was worth much the rest of the day. We carried on as usual except that Penny brushed off all callers, claiming excuses of some sort. I was due to make a speech that
night and thought seriously of canceling it. But I left the news turned on all day and there was not a word about the incident of that morning. I realized that they were checking the prints
before risking it-after all, I was supposed to be His Imperial Majesty’s first minister; they would want confirmation. So I decided to make the speech since I had already written it and the
time was schedtiled. I couldn’t even consult Dak; he was away in Tycho City.
It was the best one I had made. I put into it the same stuff a comic uses to quiet a panic in a burning theater. After the pickup was dead I just sunk my face in my hands and wept, while Penny patted my shoulder. We had not discussed the horrible mess at all.
Rog grounded at twenty hundred Greenwich, about as I finished, and checked in with me as soon as he was back. In a dull monotone I told him the whole dirty story; he listened, chewing on a dead cigar, his face expressionless.
At the end I said almost pleadingly, “I had to give the fingerprints, Rog. You see that, don’t you? To refuse would not have been in character.” Rog said, “Don’t worry.”
“Huh?”
“I said, ‘Don’t worry.’ When the reports on those prints come back from the Identification Bureau at The Hague, you are in for a small but pleasant surprise-and our ex-friend Bill is in for a much bigger one, but not pleasant. If he has collected any of his blood money in advance, they will probably take it out of his hide. I hope they do.”
I could not mistake what he meant. “Oh! But, Rog-they won’t stop there. There are a dozen other places. Social Security
Uh, lots of places.”
“You think perhaps we were not thorough? Chief, I knew this could happen, one way or another. From the moment Dak sent word to complete Plan Mardi Gras, the necessary cover-up started. Everywhere. But I didn’t think it necessary to tell Bill.” He sucked on his dead cigar, took it out of his mouth, and looked at it. “Poor Bill.”
Penny sighed softly and fainted again. Chapter 10
Somehow we got to the final day. We did not hear from Bill again; the passenger lists showed that he went Earthside two days after his fiasco. If any news service ran anything I did not hear of it, nor did Quiroga’s speeches hint at it.
Mr. Bonforte steadily improved until it was a safe bet that he could take up his duties after the election. His paralysis continued in part but we even had that covered: he would go on vacation right after election, a routine practice that almost every politician indulges in. The vacation would be in the Tommie, safe from everything. Sometime in the course of the trip I would be transferred and smuggled back-and the Chief would have a mild stroke, brought on by the strain of the campaign.
Rog would have to unsort some fingerprints, but he could safely wait a year or more for that.
Election day I was happy as a puppy in a shoe closet. The impersonation was over, although I was going to do one more short turn. I had already canned two five-minute speeches for grand network, one magnanimously accepting victory, the other gallantly conceding defeat; my job was finished. When the last one was in the can, I grabbed Penny and kissed her. She didn’t even seem to mind.
The remaining short turn was a command performance; Mr. Bonforte wanted to see me-as him-before he let me drop it. I did not mind. Now that the strain was over, it did not worry me to see him; playing him for his entertainment would be like a comedy skit, except that I would do it straight. What am I saying? Playing straight is the essence of comedy.
The whole family would gather in the upper living room-there because Mr. Bonforte had not seen the sky in some weeks and wanted to-and there we would listen to the returns, and either drink to victory or drown our sorrows and swear to do better next time. Strike me out of the last part; I had had my first and last political campaign and I wanted no more politics. I was not even sure I wanted to act again. Acting every minute for over six weeks adds up to about five hundred ordinary performances. That’s a long run.
They brought him up the lift in a wheel chair. I stayed out of sight and let them arrange him on a couch before I came in; a man is entitled not to have his weakness displayed before strangers. Besides, I wanted to make an entrance.
I was almost startled out of character. He looked like my f ather! Oh, it was just a “family” resemblance; he and I looked much more alike than either one of us looked like my father, but the likeness was there-and the age was right, for he looked old. I had not guessed how much he had aged. He was thin and his hair was white.
I made an immediate mental note that during the coming vacation in space I must help them prepare for the transition, the resubstitution. No doubt Capek could put weight back on him; if not, there were ways to make a man appear fleshier without obvious padding. I would dye his hair myself. The delayed announcement of the stroke he had suffered would cover the inevitable discrepancies. After all, he had changed this much in only a few weeks; the need was to keep the fact from calling attention to the impersonation.
But these practical details were going on by themselves in a corner of my mind; my own being was welling with emotion. ifi though he was, the man gave off a force both spiritual and virile. I felt that warm, almost holy, shock one feels when first coming into sight of the great statue of Abraham Lincoln. I was reminded of another statue, too, seeing him lying there with his legs and his helpless left side covered with a shawl: the wounded Lion of Lucerne. He had that massive strength and dignity, even when helpless: “The guard dies, but never surrenders.”
He looked up as I came in and smiled the warm, tolerant, and friendly smile I had learned to portray, and motioned with his good hand for me to come to him. I smiled the same smile back and went to him. He shook hands with a grip surprisingly strong and said warmly, “I am happy to meet you at last.” His speech was slightly blurred and I could not see the slackness on the side of his face away from me.
“I am honored and happy to meet you, sir.” I had to think about it to keep from matching the blurring of paralysis. He looked me up and down, and grinned. “It looks to me as if you had already met me.”
I glanced down at myself. “I have tried, sir.”
“‘Tried’! You succeeded. It is an odd thing to see one’s own self.”
I realized with sudden painful empathy that he was not emotionally aware of his own appearance; my present appearance was “his”-and any change in himself was merely incidental to illness, temporary, not to be noticed. But he went on speaking. “Would you mind moving around a bit for me, sir? I want to see me-you-us. I want the audience’s viewpoint for once.”
So I straightened up, moved around the room, spoke to Penny (the poor child was looking from one to the other of us with a dazed expression), picked up a paper, scratched my collarbone and rubbed my chin, moved his wand from under my arm to my hand and fiddled with it.
He was watching with delight. So I added an encore. Taking the middle of the rug, I gave the peroration of one of his finest’ speeches, not trying to do it word for word, but interpreting it, letting it roll and thunder as he would have done-and ending with his own exact ending: “Aslave cannot be freed, save he do it himself. Nor can you enslave a free man; the very most you can do is kill him!”
There was that wonderful hushed silence, then a ripple of clapping and Bonforte himself was pounding the couch with his good hand and calling, “Bravo!” It was the only applause I ever got in the role. It was enough.
He had me pull up a chair then and sit with him. I saw him glance at the wand, so I handed it to him. “The safety is on, sir.”
“I know how to use it.” He looked at it closely, then handed it back. I had thought perhaps he would keep it. Since he did not, I decided to turn it over to Dak to deliver to him. He asked me about myself and told me that he did not recall ever seeing me play, but that he had seen my father’s Cyrano. He was making a great effort to control the errant muscles of his mouth and his speech was clear but labored.
Then he asked me what I intended to do now. I told him that I had no plans as yet. He nodded and said, “We’ll see. There is a place for you. There is work to be done.” He made no mention of pay, which made me proud.
The returns were beginning to come in and he turned his attention to the stereo tank. Returns had been coming in, of course, for forty-eight hours, since the outer worlds and the districtless constituencies vote before Earth does, and even on Earth an election “day” is more than thirty hours long, as the globe turns. But now we began to get the important districts of the great land masses of Earth. We had forged far ahead the day before in the outer returns and Rog had had to tell me that it meant nothing; the Expansionists always carried the outer worlds. What the billions of people still on Earth who had never been out and never would thought about it was what mattered.
But we needed every outer vote we could get. The Agrarian Party on Ganymede had swept five out of six districts; they were part of our coalition, and the Expansionist Party as such did not put up even token candidates. The situation on Venus was more ticklish, with the Venerians split into dozens of splinter parties divided on fine points of theology impossible for a human being to understand. Nevertheless, we expected most of the native vote, either directly or through caucused coalition later, and we should get practically all of the human vote there. The Imperial restriction that the natives must select human beings to represent them at New Batavia was a thing Bonforte was pledged to remove; it gained us votes on Venus; we did not know yet how many votes it would lose us on Earth.
Since the nests sent only observers to the Assembly the only vote we worried about on Mars was the human vote. We had the popular sentiment; they had the patronage. But with an honest count we expected a shoo-in there.
Dak was bending over a slide rule at Rog’s side; Rog had a big sheet of paper laid out in some complicated weighting formula of his own. Adozen or more of the giant metal brains through the Solar System were doing the same thing that night, but Rog preferred his own guesses. He told me once that he could walk through a district, “sniffing” it, and come within two per cent of its results. I think he could.
Doc Capek was sitting back, with his hands over his paunch, as relaxed as an angleworm. Penny was moving around, pushing straight things crooked and vice versa and fetching us
drinks. She never seemed to look directly at either me or Mr. Bonforte.
I had never before experienced an election-night party; they were not like any other. There is a cozy, warm rapport of all passion spent. It really does not matter too much how the people decide; you have done your best, you are with your friends and comrades, and for a while there is no worry and no pressure despite the over-all excitement, like frosting on a cake, of the incoming returns.
I don’t know when I’ve had so good a lime.
Rog looked up, looked at me, then spoke to Mr. Bonforte. “The Continent is seesaw. The Americans are testing the water with a toe before coming in on our side; the only question is, how deep?”
“Can you make a projection, Rog?”
“Not yet. Oh, we have the popular vote but in the G.A. it could swing either way by half a dozen seats.” He stood up. “I think I had better mosey out into town.”
Properly speaking, I should have gone, as “Mr. Bonforte.” The Party leader should certainly appear at the main headquarters of the Party sometime during election night. But I had never been in headquarters, it being the sort of a buttonholing place where my impersonation might be easily breached. My “illness” had excused me from it during the campaign; tonight it was not worth the risk, so Rog would go instead, and shake hands and grin and let the keyed-up girls who had done the hard and endless paperwork throw their arms around him and weep. “Back in an hour.”
Even our little party should have been down on the lower level, to include all the office staff, especially Jimmie Washington. But it would not work, not without shutting Mr. Bonforte himself out of it. They were having their own party of course. I stood up. “Rog, I’ll go down with you and say hello to Jimmie’s harem.”
“Eh? You don’t have to, you know.”
“It’s the proper thing to do, isn’t it? And it really isn’t any trouble or risk.” I tuned to Mr. Bonforte. “How about it, sir?” “I would appreciate it very much.”
We went down the lift and through the silent, empty private quarters and on through my office and Penny’s. Beyond her door was bedlam. Astereo receiver, moved in for the purpose, was blasting at full gain, the floor was littered, and everybody was drinking, or smoking, or both. Even Jimmie Washington was holding a drink while he listened to the returns. He was not drinking it; he neither drank nor smoked. No doubt someone had handed it to him and he had kept it. Jimmie had a fine sense of fitness.
I made the rounds, with Rog at my side, thanked Jimmie warmly and very sincerely, and apologized that I was feeling tired. “I’m going up and spread the bones, Jimmie. Make my excuses to people, will you?”
“Yes, sir. You’ve got to take care of yourself, Mr. Minister.”
I went back up while Rog went on out into the public tunnels.
Penny shushed me with a finger to her lips when I came into the upper living room. Bonforte seemed to have dropped off to sleep and the receiver was muted down. Dak still sat in front of it, filling in figures on the big sheet against Rog’s return. Capek had not moved. He nodded and raised his glass to me.
I let Penny fix me a scotch and water, then stepped out into the bubble balcony. It was night both by clock and by fact and Earth was almost full, dazzling in a Tiffany spread of stars. I searched North America and tried to pick out the little dot I had left only weeks earlier, and tried to get my emotions straight.
After a while I came back in; night on Luna is rather overpowering. Rog returned a little later and sat back down at his work sheets without speaking. I noticed that Bonforte was awake again.
The critical returns were coming in now and everybody kept quiet, letting Rog with his pencil and Dak with his slide rule have peace to work. At long, long last Rog shoved his chair back. “That’s it, Chief,” he said without looking up. “We’re in. Majority not less than seven seats, probably nineteen, possibly over thirty.”
After a pause Bonforte said quietly, “You’re sure?” “Positive. Penny, try another channel and see what we get.”
I went over and sat by Bonforte; I could not talk. He reached out and patted my hand in a fatherly way and we both watched the receiver. The first station Penny got said: “-doubt about it, folks; eight of the robot brains say yes, Curiae says maybe. The Expansionist Party has won a decisive-” She switched to another.
“-confirms his temporary post for another five years. Mr. Quiroga cannot be reached for a statement but his general manager in New Chicago admits that the present trend cannot be over
—”
Rog got up and went to the phone; Penny muted the news down until nothing could be heard. The announcer continued mouthing; he was simply saying in different words what we already knew.
Rog came back; Penny turned up the gain. The announcer went on for a moment, then stopped, read something that was handed to him, and turned back with a broad grin. “Friends and fellow citizens, I now bring you for a statement the Supreme Minister!”
The picture changed to my victory speech.
I sat there luxuriating in it, with my feelings as mixed up as possible but all good, painfully good. I had done a job on the speech and I knew it; I looked tired, sweaty, and calmly triumphant. It sounded ad-kb.
I had just reached: “Let us go forward together, with freedom for all-” when I heard a noise behind me. “Mr. Bonforte!” I said. “Doc! Doe! Come quickly!”
Mr. Bonforte was pawing at me with his right hand and trying very urgently to tell me something. But it was no use; his poor mouth failed him and his mighty indomitable will could not make the weak flesh obey.
I took him in my arms-then he went into Cheyne-Stokes breathing and quickly into termination.
They took his body back down in the lift, Dak and Capek together; I was no use to them. Rog came up and patted me on the shoulder, then he went away. Penny had followed the others down. Presently I went again out onto the balcony. I needed “fresh air” even though it was the same machine-pumped air as the living room. But it felt fresher.
They had killed him. His enemies had killed him as certainly as if they had put a knife in his ribs. Despite all that we had done, the risks we had taken, in the end they had murdered him. “Murder most four’!
I felt dead inside me, numb with the shock. I had seen “myself” die, I had again seen my father die. I knew then why they so rarely manage to save one of a pair of Siamese twins. I was empty.
I don’t know how long I stayed out there. Eventually I heard Rog’s voice behind me. “Chief?” I tuned. “Rog,” I said urgently, “don’t call me that. Please!”
“Chief,” he persisted, “you know what you have to do now? Don’t you?”
I felt dizzy and his face blurred. I did not know what he was talking about-I did not want to know what he was talking about. “What do you mean?”
“Chief-one man dies-but the show goes on. You can’t quit now.”
My head ached and my eyes would not focus. He seemed to pull toward me and away while his voice drove on. “. – – robbed him of his chance to finish his work. So you’ve got to do it f or
him. You’ve got to make him live again!”
I shook my head and made a great effort to pull myself together and reply. “Rog, you don’t know what you are saying. It’s preposterous-ridiculous! Fm no statesman. I’m just a bloody actor! I make faces and make people laugh. That’s all I’m good for.”
To my own horror I heard myself say it in Bonforte’s voice. Rog looked at me. “Seems to me you’ve done all right so far.”
I tried to change my voice, tried to gain control of the situation. “Rog, you’re upset. When you’ve calmed down you will see how ridiculous this is. You’re right; the show goes on. But not that way. The proper thing to do-the only thing to do-is for you yourself to move on up. The election is won; you’ve got your majority-now you take office and carry out the program.”
He looked at me and shook his head sadly. “I would if I could. I admit it. But I can’t. Chief, you remember those confounded executive committee meetings? You kept them in line. The whole coalition has been kept glued together by the personal force and leadership of one man. If you don’t follow through now, all that he lived for-and died for-will fall apart.”
I had no answering argument; he might be right-I had seen the wheels within wheels of politics in the past month and a half. “Rog, even if what you say is true, the solution you offer is impossible. We’ve barely managed to keep up this pretense by letting me be seen only under carefully stage-managed conditions-and we’ve just missed being caught out as it is. But to make it work week after week, month after month, even year after year, if I understand you-no, it couldn’t be done. It is impossible. I can’t do it!”
“You can!” He leaned toward me and said forcefully, “We’ve all talked it over and we know the hazards as well as you do. But you’ll have a chance to grow into it. Two weeks in space to start with-hell, a month if you want it! You’ll study all the time-his journals, his boyhood diaries, his scrapbooks, you’ll soak yourself in them. And we’ll all help you.”
I did not answer. He went on, “Look, Chief, you’ve learned that a political personality is not onq man; it’s a team-it’s a team bound together by common purposes and common beliefs. We’ve lost our team captain and we’ve got to have another one. But the team is still there.”
Capek was out on the balcony; I had not seen him come out. I tuned to him. “Are you for this too?” “It’s your duty,” Rog added.
Capek said slowly, “I won’t go that far. I hope you will do it. But, damnit, I won’t be your conscience. I believe in free will, frivolous as that may sound from a medical man.” He turned to Clifton. “We had better leave him alone, Rog. He knows. Now it’s up to him.”
But, although they left, I was not to be alone just yet. Dak came out. To my relief and gratitude he did not call me “Chief.” “Hello, Dak.”
“Howdy.” He was silent for a moment, smoking and looking out at the stars. Then he turned to me. “Old son, we’ve been through some things together. I know you now, and I’ll back you with a gun, or money, or fists any time, and never ask why. If you choose to drop out now, I won’t have a word of blame and I won’t think any the less of you. You’ve done a noble best.”
“Uh, thanks, Dak.”
“One more word and I’ll smoke out. Just remember this: if you decide you can’t do it, the foul scum who brainwashed him will win. In spite of everything, they win.” He went inside.
I felt ton apart in my mind-then I gave way to sheer self-pity. It wasn’t fair! I had my own life to live. I was at the top of my powers, with my greatest professional triumphs still ahead of me. It wasn’t right to expect me to bury myself, perhaps for years, in the anonymity of another man’s role-while the public forgot me, producers and agents forgot me-would probably believe I was dead.
It wasn’t fair. It was too much to ask.
Presently I pulled out of it and for a time did not think. Mother Earth was still serene and beautiful and changeless in the sky; I wondered what the election-night, celebrations there sounded like. Mars and Jupiter and Venus were all in sight, strung like prizes along the zodiac. Ganymede I could not see, of course, nor the lonely colony out on far Pluto.
“Worlds of Hope,” Bonforte had called them.
But he was dead. He was gone. They had taken away from him his birthright at its ripe fullness. He was dead. And they had put it up to me to re-create him, make him live again.
Was. I up to it? Could I possibly measure up to his noble standards? What would he want me to do? If he were in my place- what would Bonf one do? Again and again in the campaign I had asked myself: “What would Bonforte do?”
Someone moved behind me, I tuned and saw Penny. I looked at her and said, “Did they send you out? Did you come to plead with me?” “No.”
She added nothing and did not seem to expect me to answer, nor did we look at each other. The silence went on. At last I said, “Penny? If I try to do it-will you help?” She turned suddenly toward me. “Yes. Oh yes, Chief! I’ll help!’?
“Then I’ll try,” I said humbly.
I wrote all of the above twenty-five years ago to try to straighten out my own confusion. I tried to tell the truth and not spare myself because it was not meant to be read by anyone but myself and my therapist, Dr. Capek. It is strange, after a quarter of a century, to reread the foolish and emotional words of that young man. I remember him, yet I have trouble realizing that I was ever he. My wife Penelope claims that she remembers him better than I do-and that she never loved anyone else. So time changes us.
I find I can “remember” Bonforte’s early life better than I remember my actual life as that rather pathetic person, Lawrence Smith, or-as he liked -to style himself-“The Great Lorenzo.” Does that make me insane? Schizophrenic, perhaps? If so, it is a necessary insanity for the role I have had to play, for in order to let Bonforte live again, that seedy actor had to be suppressed- completely.
Insane or not, I am aware that he once existed and that I was he. He was never a success as an actor, not really-though I think he was sometimes touched with the true madness. He made his final exit still perfectly in character; I have a yellowed newspaper clipping somewhere which states that he was “found dead” in a Jersey City hotel room from an overdose of sleeping pills-apparently taken in a fit of despondency, for his agent issued a statement that he had not had a part in several months. Personally, I feel that they need not have mentioned that about his being out of work; if not libelous, it was at least unkind. The date of the clipping proves, incidentally, that he would not have been in New Batavia, or anywhere else, during the campaign of ‘15.
I suppose I should bum it.
But there is no one left alive today who knows the truth other than Dak and Penelope-except the men who murdered Bonforte’s body.
I have been in and out of office three times now and perhaps this term will be my last. I was knocked out the first time when we finally put the eetees-Venerians and Martians and Outer Jovians
-into the Grand Assembly. But the non-human peoples are still there and I came back. The people will take a certain amount of reform, then they want a rest. But the reforms stay. People don’t really want change, any change at all-and xenophobia is very deep-rooted. But we progress, as we must-if we are to go out to the stars.
Again and again I have asked myself: “What would Bonforte do?” I am not sure that my answers have always been right (although I am sure that I am the best-read student in his works in the System). But I have tried to stay in character in his role. Along time ago someone-Voltaire?-someone said, “If Satan should ever replace God he would find it necessary to assume the attributes of Divinity.”
I have never regretted my lost profession. In a way, I have not lost it; Willem was right. There is other applause besides handclapping and there is always the warm glow of a good performance. I have tried, I suppose, to create the perfect work of art. Perhaps I have not fully succeeded-but I think my father would rate it as a “good performance.”
No, I do not regret it, even though I was happier then-at least I slept better. But there is solemn satisfaction in doing the best you can for eight billion people.
Perhaps their lives have no cosmic significance, but they have feelings. They can hurt.
The End
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The following is the full text of the short science fiction novel by Robert Heinlein titled “Orphans of the Sky”. Here it is in it’e entirety and you do not need to “register”, give out your credit card number or do anything that compromises your privacy to view it. It is all 100% free for you to read. Enjoy.
Lost in Space -- Hugh had been taught that, according to the ancient sacred writings, the Ship was on a voyage to faraway Centaurus. But he also understood this was just allegory for a voyage to spiritual perfection. Indeed, how could the Ship move, since its miles and miles of metal corridors were all there was of creation? Science knew that the Ship was all the universe, and as long as the sacred Converter was fed, the lights would continue to glow, the air would flow, and the Creator's Plan would be fulfilled.
Some quick reviews
I've read this book three times; first when I was a young boy and, later, as a young man, at my aunt and uncle's house in Potsdam, NY. My uncle was David A. Kyle and he was a sci-fi writer and #1 fan of that genre. He and my aunt used to fly me up from NJ to spend summers with them. They had a vast library of sci-fi literature, books, in particular. It was a fascinating place to stay and it opened my mind to the universe. I read many books, but this one really captured my imagination and brought back happy memories of my youth.
-Marinade Dave
I first read this when I was 9. Back then it was just a simple adventure story. I re-read it at 21 and got a whole lot more about the background politics and such in the story. When this e-book came out, I snatched it up out of nostalgia, and when I read it again at 53, I saw things I had never realized were in there before about just how degraded society and conditions were aboard that ship. It's a short novel, but there are layers upon layers woven throughout it.
-Richard Chandler
First Impressions:
The book reads rather rapidly and well for a young adult novel, originally appearing in Astounding Science Fiction back in the 1940s. Heinlein's writing and plotting had improved since those days, but there's something fun and unique about his early writings such as Space Cadet, or Starship Troopers, contemporary stories that involved a strong lead character and lots of plot points.
Plots:
I may be wrong but this may be one of the first stories of a multi-generational ship that had some kind of catastrophe where everyone forgot they lived on a ship and thought the Ship was all there was! I've seen this idea played out in the original Star Trek episode "For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky" and the television series "Star Lost."
The main character Hugh Hoyland lives on a Ship where scientists are revered as holy and the Captain of the ship is near godhood. There are farms going on, and a Converter that is used to create energy from mass (and occasionally from dead bodies). There is an internal struggle with mutants in the upper levels. It's very dictatorial and people know their places. To question is to court death.
But Hugh questions. And he ends up with the mutants, a two headed guy called Joe-Jim and his sidekick Bobo. This small unassuming trio are the vanguard of a major change where the Ship is headed for a star -- but the inhabitants don't even know what space is.
Fascinating scenario, but not enough time is spent on the whole religious aspect of the scientists. They do mention a few scientific facts but have decided its all allegory and ancient myths -- such as the law of gravity!
The part where we move into rebellion, assassination and betrayal towards the end of the book is really fascinating. The end is a bit rushed, but Heinlein acknowledges that as a string of amazing coincidences! Ha!
Overall a great read and highly recommended to fans of early Heinlein.
-Critics Corner
Orphans of the Sky
UNIVERSE
The Proxima Centauri Expedition, sponsored by the Jordan Foundation in 2119, was the first recorded attempt to reach the nearer stars of this galaxy. Whatever its unhappy fate we can only conjecture. — Quoted from The Romance of Modern Astrography, by Franklin Buck, published by Lux Transcriptions, Ltd., 3.50 cr.
“THERE’S AMUTIE! Look out!”
At the shouted warning, Hugh Hoyland ducked, with nothing to spare. An egg-sized iron missile clanged against the bulkhead just above his scalp with force that promised a fractured skull. The speed with which he crouched had lifted his feet from the floor plates. Before his body could settle slowly to the deck, he planted his feet against the bulkhead behind him and shoved. He went shooting down the passageway in a long, flat dive, his knife drawn and ready.
He twisted in the air, checked himself with his feet against the opposite bulkhead at the turn in the passage from which the mutie had attacked him, and floated lightly to his feet. The other branch of the passage was empty. His two companions joined him, sliding awkwardly across the floor plates.
“Is it gone?” demanded Alan Mahoney.
“Yes,” agreed Hoyland. “I caught a glimpse of it as it ducked down that hatch. Afemale, I think. Looked like it had four legs.” “Two legs or four, we’ll never catch it now,” commented the third man.
“Who the Huff wants to catch it?” protested Mahoney. “I don’t.”
“Well, I do, for one,” said Hoyland. “By Jordan, if its aim had been two inches better, I’d be ready for the Converter.”
“Can’t either one of you two speak three words without swearing?” the third man disapproved. “What if the Captain could hear you?” He touched his forehead reverently as he mentioned the Captain.
“Oh, for Jordan’s sake,” snapped Hoyland, “don’t be so stuffy, Mort Tyler. You’re not a scientist yet. I reckon I’m as devout as you are; there’s no grave sin in occasionally giving vent to your feelings. Even the scientists do it. I’ve heard ‘em.”
Tyler opened his mouth as if to expostulate, then apparently thought better of it. Mahoney touched Hoyland on the arm. “Look, Hugh,” he pleaded, “let’s get out of here. We’ve never been this high before. I’m jumpy; I want to get back down to where I can feel some weight on my feet.”
Hoyland looked longingly toward the hatch through which his assailant had disappeared while his hand rested on the grip of his knife, then be turned to Mahoney. “OK, kid,” he agreed, “It’s along trip down anyhow.”
He turned and slithered back toward the hatch, whereby they had reached the level where they now were, the other two following him. Disregarding the ladder by which they had mounted, he stepped off into the opening and floated slowly down to the deck fifteen feet below, Tyler and Mahoney close behind him. Another hatch, staggered a few feet from the first, gave
access to a still lower deck. Down, down, down, and still farther down they dropped, tens and dozens of decks, each silent, dimly lighted, mysterious. Each time they fell a little faster, landed a little harder. Mahoney protested at last, “Let’s walk the rest of the way, Hugh. That last jump hurt my feet.”
“All right. But it will take longer. How far have we got to go? Anybody keep count?” “We’ve got about seventy decks to go to reach farm country,” answered Tyler. “How d’you know?” demanded Mahoney suspiciously.
“I counted them, stupid. And as we came down I took one away for each deck.”
“You did not. Nobody but a scientist can do numbering like that. Just because you’re learning to read and write you think you know everything.”
Hoyland cut in before it could develop into a quarrel. “Shut up, Alan. Maybe he can do it. He’s clever about such things. Anyhow, it feels like about seventy decks — I’m heavy enough.” “Maybe he’d like to count the blades on my knife.”
“Stow it, I said. Dueling is forbidden outside the village. That is the Rule.” They proceeded in silence, running lightly down the stairways until increasing weight on each succeeding level forced them to a more pedestrian pace. Presently they broke through into a level that was quite brilliantly lighted and more than twice as deep between decks as the ones above it. The air was moist and warm; vegetation obscured the view.
“Well, down at last,” said Hugh. “I don’t recognize this farm; we must have come down by a different line than we went up.” “There’s a farmer,” said Tyler. He put his little fingers to his lips and whistled, then called, “Hey! Shipmate! Where are we?”
The peasant looked them over slowly, then directed them in reluctant monosyllables to the main passageway which would lead them back to their own village.
Abrisk walk of a mile and a half down a wide tunnel moderately crowded with traffic: travelers, porters, an occasional pushcart, a dignified scientist swinging in a litter borne by four husky orderlies and preceded by his master-at-arms to clear the common crew out of the way. Amile and a half of this brought them to the common of their own village, a spacious compartment three decks high and perhaps ten times as wide. They split up and went their own ways, Hugh to his quarters in the barracks of the cadets, young bachelors who do not live with their parents. He washed himself and went thence to the compartments of his uncle, for whom he worked for his meals. His aunt glanced up as he came in, but said nothing, as became a woman.
His uncle said, “Hello, Hugh. Been exploring again?” “Good eating, Uncle. Yes.”
His uncle, a stolid, sensible man, looked tolerantly amused. “Where did you go and what did you find?”
Hugh’s aunt had slipped silently out of the compartment, and now returned with his supper which she placed before him. He fell to; it did not occur to him to thank her. He munched a bite before replying.
“Up. We climbed almost to the level-of-no-weight. Amutie tried to crack my skull.”
His uncle chuckled. “You’ll find your death In those passageways, lad. Better you should pay more attention to my business against the day when I die and get out of your way.” Hugh looked stubborn. “Don’t you have any curiosity, Uncle?”
“Me? Oh, I was prying enough when I was a lad. I followed the main passage all the way around and back to the village. Right through the Dark Sector I went, with muties tagging my heels. See that scar?”
Hugh glanced at it perfunctorily. He had seen it many times before and heard the story repeated to boredom. Once around the Ship, pfft! He wanted to go everywhere, see everything, and find out the why of things. Those upper levels now: if men were not intended to climb that high, why had Jordan created them?
But he kept his own counsel and went on with his meal. His uncle changed the subject. “I’ve occasion to visit the Witness. John Black claims I owe him three swine. Want to come along?”
“Why, no, I guess not — Wait! I believe I will.”
“Hurry up, then.”
They stopped at the cadets’ barracks, Hugh claiming an errand. The Witness lived in a small, smelly compartment directly across the Common from the barracks, where he would be readily accessible to any who had need of his talents. They found him leaning in his doorway, picking his teeth with a fingernail. His apprentice, a pimply-faced adolescent with an intent nearsighted expression, squatted behind him.
“Good eating.” said Hugh’s uncle.
“Good eating to you, Edard Hoyland. D’you come on business, or to keep an old man company?” “Both,” Hugh’s uncle returned diplomatically, then explained his errand.
“So,” said the Witness. “Well, the contract’s clear enough. Black John delivered ten bushels of oats, Expecting his pay in a pair of shoats; Ed brought his sow to breed for pig; John gets his pay when the pigs grow big.
“How big are the pigs now, Edard Hoyland?”
“Big enough,” acknowledged Hugh’s uncle, “but Black John claims three instead of two.” “Tell him to go soak his head. The Witness has spoken.”
He laughed in a thin, high cackle.
The two gossiped for a few minutes, Edard Hoyland digging into his recent experiences to satisfy the old man’s insatiable liking for details. Hugh kept decently silent while the older men talked. But when his uncle turned to go he spoke up. “I’ll stay awhile, Uncle.”
“Eh? Suit yourself. Good eating, Witness.” “Good eating, Edard Hoyland.”
“I’ve brought you a present, Witness,” said Hugh, when his uncle had passed out of hearing. “Let me see it.”
Hugh produced a package of tobacco which he had picked up from his locker at the barracks. The Witness accepted it without acknowledgment, then tossed it to his apprentice, who took charge of it.
“Come inside,” invited the Witness, then directed his speech to his apprentice. “Here, you, fetch the cadet a chair.” “Now, lad,” he added as they sat themselves down, “tell me what you have been doing with yourself.”
Hugh told him, and was required to repeat In detail all the incidents of his more recent explorations, the Witness complaining the meanwhile over his inability to remember exactly everything he saw.
“You youngsters have no capacity,” he pronounced. “No capacity. Even that lout—” he jerked his head toward the apprentice, “he has none, though he’s a dozen times better than you. Would you believe it, he can’t soak up a thousand lines a day, yet he expects to sit in my seat when I am gone. Why, when I was apprenticed, I used to sing myself to sleep on a mere thousand lines. Leaky vessels — that’s what you are.”
Hugh did not dispute the charge, but waited for the old man to go on, which he did in his own time. “You had a question to put to me, lad?”
“In a way, Witness.”
“Well? Out with it. Don’t chew your tongue.”
“Did you ever climb all the way up to no-weight?”
“Me? Of course not. I was a Witness, learning my calling. I had the lines of all the Witnesses before me to learn, and no time for boyish amusements.” “I had hoped you could tell me what I would find there.”
“Well, now, that’s another matter. I’ve never climbed, but I hold the memories of more climbers than you will ever see. I’m an old man. I knew your father’s father, and his grandsire before that. What is it you want to know?”
“Well…” What was it be wanted to know? How could he ask a question that was no more than a gnawing ache in his breast? Still… “What is it all for, Witness? Why are there all those levels above us?”
“Eh? How’s that? Jordan’s name, son, I’m a Witness, not a scientist.” “Well … I thought you must know. I’m sorry.”
“But I do know. What you want is the Lines from the Beginning.” “I’ve heard them.”
“Hear them again. All your answers are in there, if you’ve the wisdom to see them. Attend me. No, this is a chance for my apprentice to show off his learning. Here, you! The Lines from the Beginning — and mind your rhythm.”
The apprentice wet his lips with his tongue and began:
“In the Beginning there was Jordan, thinking His lonely thoughts alone. In the Beginning there was darkness, formless, dead, and Man unknown. Out of the loneness came a longing, out of the longing came a vision, Out of the dream there came a planning, out of the plan there came decision: Jordan’s hand was lifted and the Ship was born.
Mile after mile of snug compartments, tank by tank for the golden corn, Ladder and passage, door and locker, fit for the needs of the yet unborn. He looked on His work and found it pleasing, meet for a race that was yet to be. He thought of Man; Man came into being; checked his thought and searched for the key. Man untamed would shame his Maker, Man unruled would spoil the Plan; So Jordan made the Regulations, orders to each single man, Each to a task and each to a station, serving a purpose beyond their ken, Some to speak and some to listen; order came to the ranks of men. Crew He created to work at their stations, scientists to guide the Plan. Over them all He created the Captain, made him judge of the race of Man. Thus it was in the Golden Age!
Jordan is perfect, all below him lack perfection in their deeds. Envy, Greed, and Pride of Spirit sought for minds to lodge their seeds. One there was who gave them lodging: accursed Huff, the first to sin! His evil counsel stirred rebellion, planted doubt where it had not been; Blood of martyrs stained the floor plates, Jordan’s Captain made the Trip. Darkness swallowed up—”
The old man gave the boy the back of his hand, sharp across the mouth. “Try again!” “From the beginning?”
“No! From where you missed.”
The boy hesitated, then caught his stride: “Darkness swallowed ways of virtue, Sin prevailed through out the Ship . .”
The boy’s voice droned on, stanza after stanza, reciting at great length but with little sharpness of detail the dim, old story of sin, rebellion, and the time of darkness. How wisdom prevailed at last and the bodies of the rebel leaders were fed to the Converter. How some of the rebels escaped making the Trip and lived to father the muties. How a new Captain was chosen, after prayer and sacrifice. Hugh stirred uneasily, shuffling his feet. No doubt the answers to his questions were there, since these were the Sacred Lines, but he had not the wit to understand them. Why? What was it all about? Was there really nothing more to life than eating and sleeping and finally the long Trip? Didn’t Jordan intend for him to understand? Then why this ache in his breast? This hunger that persisted in spite of good eating?
While he was breaking his fast after sleep an orderly came to the door of his uncle’s compartments. “The scientist requires the presence of Hugh Hoyland,” be recited glibly.
Hugh knew that the scientist referred to was lieutenant Nelson, in charge of the spiritual and physical welfare of the Ship’s sector which included Hugh’s flative vilage. He bolted the last of his breakfast and hurried after the messenger.
“Cadet Hoyland!” he was announced. The scientist locked up from his own meal and said: “Oh, yes. Come in, my boy. Sit down. Have you eaten?”
Hugh acknowjedged that he had, but his eyes rested with interest on the fancy fruit In front of his superior. Nelson followed his glance. “Try some of these figs. They’re a new mutation; I had them brought all the way from the far side. Go ahead — a man your age always has somewhere to stow a few more bites.”
Hugh accepted with much self-consciousness. Never before had he eaten in the presence of a scientist. The elder leaned back in his chair, wiped his fingers on his shirt, arranged his beard, and started in.
“I haven’t seen you lately, son. Tell me what you have been doing with yourself.” Before Hugh could reply he went on: “No, don’t tell me; I will tell you. For one thing you have been exploring, climbing, without too much respect for the forbidden areas. Is it not so?” He held the young man’s eye. Hugh fumbled for a reply.
But he was let off again. “Never mind. I know, and you know that I know. I am not too displeased. But it has brought it forcibly to my attention that it is time that you decided what you are to do with your life. Have you any plans?”
“Well, no definite ones, sir.”
“How about that girl, Edris Baxter? D’you intend to marry her?”
“Why, uh — I don’t know, sir. I guess I want to, and her father is willing, I think. Only…” “Only what?”
“Well, he wants me to apprentice to his farm. I suppose it’s a good idea. His farm together with my uncle’s business would make a good property.” “But you’re not sure?”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“Correct. You’re not for that. I have other plans. Tell me, have you ever wondered why I taught you to read and write? Of course, you have. But you’ve kept your own counsel. That is good. “Now attend me. I’ve watched you since you were a small child. You have more imagination than the common run, more curiosity, more go. And you are a born leader. You were different even as a baby. Your head was too large, for one thing, and there were some who voted at your birth inspection to put you at once into the Converter. But I held them off. I wanted to see how you would turn out.
“Apeasant life is not for the likes of you. You are to be a scientist.”
The old man paused and studied his face. Hugh was confused, speechless. Nelson went on, “Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. For a man of your temperament, there are only two things to do with him: Make him one of the custodians, or send him to the Converter.”
“Do you mean, sir, that I have nothing to say about it?”
“If you want to put it that bluntly, yes. To leave the bright ones among the ranks of the Crew is to breed heresy. We can’t have that. We had it once and it almost destroyed tbe human race. You have marked yourself out by your exceptional ability; you must now be instructed in right thinking, be initiated into the mysteries, in order that you may be a conserving force rather than a focus of infection and a source of trouble.” The orderly reappeared loaded down with bundles which he dumped on the deck. Hugh glanced at them, then burst out, “Why, those are my things!”
“Certainly,” acknowledged Nelson. “I sent for them. You’re to sleep here henceforth. I’ll see you later and start you on your studies, unless you have something more on your mind?” “Why, no, sir. I guess not. I must admit I am a little confused. I suppose … I suppose this means you don’t want me to marry?”
“Oh, that,” Nelson answered indifferently. “Take her if you like; her father can’t protest now. But let me warn you, you’ll grow tired of her.”
Hugh Hoyland devoured the ancient books that his mentor permitted him to read, and felt no desire for many, many sleeps to go climbing, or even to stir out of Nelson’s cabin. More than once he felt that he was on the track of the secret — a secret as yet undefined, even as a question — but again he would find himself more confused than ever. It was evidently harder to reach the wisdom of scientisthood than he had thought.
Once, while he was worrying away at the curious twisted characters of the ancients and trying to puzzle out their odd rhetoric and unfamiliar terms, Nelson came into the little compartment that had been set aside for him, and, laying a fatherly hand on his shoulder, asked, “How goes it, boy?”
“Why, well enough, sir, I suppose,” he answered, laying the book aside. “Some of it is not quite clear to me — not clear at all, to tell the truth.”
“That is to be expected,” the old man said equably. “I’ve let you struggle along by yourself at first in order that you may see the traps that native wit alone will fall into. Many of these things are not to be understood without instruction. What have you there?” He picked up the book and glanced at it. It was inscribed Basic Modern Physics. “So? This is one of the most valuable of the sacred writings, yet the uninitiate could not possibly make good use of it without help. The first thing that you must understand, my boy, is that our forefathers, for all their spiritual perfection, did not look at things in the fashion in which we do.
“They were incurable romantics, rather than rationalists, as we are, and the truths which they handed down to us, though strictly true, were frequently clothed in allegorical language. For example, have you come to the Law of Gravitation?”
“I read about it.”
“Did you understand it? No, I can see that you didn’t.”
“Well,” said Hugh defensively, “it didn’t seem to mean anything. It just sounded silly, if you will pardon me, sir.”
“That illustrates my point. You were thinking of it in literal terms, like the laws governing electrical devices found elsewhere in this same book. ‘Two bodies attract each other directly as the product of their masses and inversely as the square of their distance.’ It sounds like a rule for simple physical facts, does it not? Yet it is nothing of the sort; it was the poetical way the old ones bad of expressing the rule of propinquity which governs the emotion of love. The bodies referred to are human bodies, mass is their capacity for love. Young people have a greater capacity for love than the elderly; when they are thrown together, they fall in love, yet when they are separated they soon get over it. ‘Out of sight, out of mind.’ It’s as simple as that. But you were seeking some deep meaning for it.”
Hugh grinned. “I never thought of looking at it that way. I can see that I am going to need a lot of help.” “Is there anything else bothering you just now?”
“Well, yes, lots of things, though I probably can’t remember them offhand. I mind one thing: Tell me, Father, can muties be considered as being people?”
“I can see you have been listening to idle talk. The answer to that is both yes and no. It is true that the niuties originally descended from people but they are no longer part of the Crew; they cannot now be considered as members of the human race, for they have flouted Jordan’s Law.
“This is a broad subject,” he went on, settling down to it. “There is even some question as to the original meaning of the word ‘mutie.’ Certainly they number among their ancestors the mutineers who escaped death at the time of the rebellion. But they also have in their blood the blood of many of the mutants who were born during the dark age. You understand, of
course, that during that period our present wise rule of inspecting each infant for the mark of sin and returning to the Converter any who are found to be mutations was not in force. There are strange and horrible things crawling through the dark passageways and lurking in the deserted levels.”
Hugh thought about it for a while, then asked, “Why is it that mutations still show up among us, the people?”
“That is simple. The seed of sin is still in us. From time to time it still shows up, incarnate. In destroying those monsters we help to cleanse the stock and thereby bring closer the culmination of Jordan’s Plan, the end of the Trip at our heavenly home, Far Centaurus.”
Hoyland’s brow wrinkled again. “That is another thing that I don’t understand. Many of these ancient writings speak of the Trip as if it were an actual moving, a going somewhere, as if the Ship itself were no more than a pushcart. How can that be?”
Nelson chuckled. “How can it, indeed? How can that move which is the background against which all else moves? The answer, of course, is plain. You have again mistaken allegorical language for the ordinary usage of everyday speech. Of course, the Ship is solid, immovable, in a physical sense. How can the whole universe move? Yet, it does move, in a spiritual sense. With every righteous act we move closer to the sublime destination of Jordan’s Plan.”
Hugh nodded. “I think I see.”
“Of course, it is conceivable that Jordan could have fashioned the world in some other shape than the Ship, had it suited His purpose. When man was younger and more poetical, holy men vied with one another in inventing fanciful worlds which Jordan might have created. One school invented an entire mythology of a topsy-turvy world of endless reaches of space, empty save for pinpoints of light and bodiless mythological monsters. They called it the heavenly world, or heaven, as if to contrast it with the solid reality of the Ship. They seemed never to tire of speculating about it, inventing details for it, and of outlining pictures of what they conceived it to be like. I suppose they did it to the greater glory of Jordan, and who is to say that He found their dreams unacceptable? But in this modern age we have more serious work to do.”
Hugh was not interested In astronomy. Even his untutored mind had been able to see in its wild extravagance an intention not literal. He turned to problems nearer at hand. “Since the muties are the seed of sin, why do we make no effort to wipe them out? Would not that be an act that would speed the Plan?”
The old man considered a while before replying. “That is a fair question and deserves a straight answer. Since you are to be a scientist you will need to know the answer. Look at it this way. There is a definite limit to the number of Crew the Ship can support. If our numbers increase without limit, there comes a time when there will not be good eating for all of us. Is it not better that some should die in brushes with the muties than that we should grow in numbers until we killed each other for food?.
“The ways of Jordan are inscrutable. Even the muties have a part in His Plan.” It seemed reasonable, but Hugh was not sure.
But when Hugh was transferred to active work as a junior scientist in the operation of the Ship’s functions, he found there were other opinions. As was customary, he put in a period serving the Converter. The work was not onerous; he had principally to check in the waste materials brought in by porters from each of the villages, keep books of their contributions, and make sure that no redemable metal was introduced into the first-stage hopper. But it brought him into contact with Bill Ertz, the Assistant Chief Engineer, a man not much older than himself.
He discussed with him the things he had learned from Nelson, and was shocked at Ertz’s attitude.
“Get this through your head, kid,” Ertz told him. “This is a practical job for practical men. Forget all that romantic nonsense. Jordan’s Plan! That stuff is all right to keep the peasants quiet and in their place, but don’t fall for it yourself. There is no Plan, other than our own plans for looking out for ourselves. The Ship has to have light and heat and power for cooking and irrigation. The Crew can’t get along without those things and that makes us boss of the Crew.
“As for this softheaded tolerance toward the muties, you’re going to see some changes made! Keep your mouth shut and string along with us.”
It impressed on him that he was expected to maintain a primary loyalty to the bloc of younger men among the scientists. They were a well-knit organization within an organization and were made up of practical, hardheaded men who were working toward improvement of conditions throughout the Ship, as they saw them. They were well knit because an apprentice who failed to see things their way did not last long. Either he failed to measure up and soon found himself back in the ranks of the peasants, or, as was more likely, suffered some mishap and wound up in the Converter.
And Hoyland began to see that they were right.
They were realists. The Ship was the Ship. It was a fact, requiring no explanation. As for Jordan, who had ever seen Him, spoken to Him? What was this nebulous Plan of His? The object of life was living. Aman was born, lived his life, and then went to the Converter. It was as simple as that, no mystery to it, no sublime Trip and no Centaurus. These romantic stories were simply hangovers from the childhood of the race before men gained the understanding and the courage to look facts in the face.
He ceased bothering his head about astronomy and mystical physics and all the other mass of mythology he bad been taught to revere. He was still amused, more or less, by the Lines from the Beginning and by all the old stories about Earth (what the Huff was ‘Earth,’ anyhow?) but now realized that such things could be taken seriously only by children and dullards.
Besides, there was work to do. The younger men, while still maintaining the nominal authority of their elders, had plans of their own, the first of which was a systematic extermination of the muties. Beyond that, their intentions were still fluid, but they contemplated making full use of the resources of the Ship, including the upper levels. The young men were able to move ahead with their plans without an open breach with their elders because the older scientists simply did not bother to any great extent with the routine of the Ship. The present Captain had grown so fat that he rarely stirred from his cabin; his aide, one of the young men’s bloc, attended to affairs for him.
Hoyland never laid eyes on the Chief Engineer save once, when he showed up for the purely religious ceremony of manning landing stations.
The project of cleaning out the muties required reconnaissance of the upper levels to be done systematically. It was in carrying out such scouting that Hugh Hoyland was again ambushed by a mutie.
This mutie was more accurate with his slingshot. Hoyland’s companions, forced to retreat by superior numbers, left him for dead.
Joe-Jim Gregory was playing himself a game of checkers. Time was when they had played cards together, but Joe, the head on the right, had suspected Jim, the left-hand member of the team, of cheating. They had quarreled about it, then given it up, for they both learned early in their joint career that two heads on one pair of shoulders must necessarily find ways of getting along together.
Checkers was better. They could both see the board, and disagreement was impossible.
Aloud metallic knocking at the door of the oompartment interrupted the game. Joe-Jim unsheathed his throwing knife and cradled it, ready for quick use. “Come in!” roared Jim. The door opened, the one who had knocked backed into the room — the only safe way, as everyone knew, to enter Joe-Jim’s presence. The newcomer was squat and rugged and
powerful, not over four feet in height. The relaxed body of a man hung across one shoulder and was steadied by a hand.
Joe-Jim returned the knife to its sheath. “Put it down, Bobo,” Jim ordered. “And close the door,” added Joe. “Now what have we got here?”
It was a young man, apparently dead, though no wound appeared on him. Bobo patted a thigh. “Eat ‘im?” he said hopefully. Saliva spilled out of his still-opened lips. “Maybe,” temporized Jim. “Did you kill him?”
Bobo shook his undersized head.
“Good Bobo,” Joe approved. “Where did you hit him?”
“Bobo hit him there.” The microcephalic shoved a broad thumb against the supine figure in the area between the umbilicus and the breasthone. “Good shot,” Joe approved. “We couldn’t have done better with a knife.”
“Bobo good shot,” the dwarf agreed blandly. “Want see?” He twitched his slingshot invitingly.
“Shut up,” answered Joe, not unkindly. “No, we don’t want to see; we want to make him talk.” “Bobo fix,” the short one agreed, and started with simple brutality to carry out his purpose.
Joe-Jim slapped him away, and applied other methods, painful but considerably less drastic than those of the dwarf. The younger man jerked and opened his eyes. “Eat ‘im?” repeated Bobo.
“No,” said Joe. “When did you eat last?” inquired Jim.
Bobo shook his head and rubbed his stomach, indicating with graphic pantomime that it had been a long time, too long. Joe-Jim went over to a locker, opened it, and withdrew a haunch of meat. He held it up. Jim smelled it and Joe drew his head away in nose-wrinkling disgust Joe-Jim threw, it to Bobo, who snatched it happily out of the air. “Now, get out,” ordered Jim.
Bobo trotted away, closing the door behind him. JoeJim turned to the captive and prodded him with his foot. “Speak up,” said Jim. “Who the Huff are you?”
The young man shivered, put a hand to his head, then seemed suddenly to bring his surroundings into focus, for be scrambled to his feet, moving awkwardly. against the low weight conditions of this level, and reached for his knife.
It was not at his belt.
Joe-Jim had his own out and brandished it. “Be good and you won’t get hurt. What do they call you?” The young man wet his lips, and his eyes hurried about the room. “Speak up,” said Joe.
“Why bother with him?” inquired Jim. “I’d say he was only good for meat. Better call Bobo back.” “No hurry about that,” Joe answered. “I want to talk to him. What’s your name?”
The prisoner looked again at the kife and muttered, “Hugh Hoyland.”
“That doesn’t tell us much,” Jim commented. “What d’you do? What village do you come from? And what were you doing in mutie country?” But this time Hoyland was sullen. Even the prick of the knife against his ribs caused him only to bite his lips. “Shucks,” said Joe, “he’s only a stupid peasant. Let’s drop it.”
“Shall we finish him off?” “No. Not now. Shut him up.”
Joe-Jim opened the door of a small side compartment, and urged Hugh in with the knife. He then closed and fastened the door and went back to his game. “Your move, Jim.”
The compartment in which Hugh was locked was dark. He soon satisfied himself by touch that the smooth steel walls were entirely featureless save for the solid, securely fastened door. Presently he lay down on the deck and gave himself up to fruitless thinking.
He had plenty of time to think, time to fall asleep and awaken more than once. And time to grow very hungry and very, very thirsty.
When Joe-Jim next took sufficient interest in his prisoner to open the door of the cell, Hoyland was not immediately in evidence. He had planned many times what he would do when the door opened and his chance came, but when the event arrived, he was too weak, semi-comatose. Joe-Jim dragged him out. , The disturbance roused him to partial comprehension. He sat up and stared around him. “Ready to talk?” asked Jim. Hoyland opened his mouth but no words came out.
“Can’t you see he’s too dry to talk?” Joe told his twin. Then to Hugh: “Will you talk if we give you some water?” Hoyland looked puzzled, then nodded vigorously.
Joe-Jim returned in a moment with a mug of water. Hugh drank greedily, paused, and seemed about to faint. Joe-Jim took the mug from him. “That’s enough for now,” said Joe. “Tell us about yourself.”
Hugh did so. In detail, being prompted from time to time by questions from one of the twins, or a kick against his shin.
Hugh accepted a de facto condition of slavery with no particular resistance and no great disturbance of soul. The word ‘slave’ was not in his vocabulary, but the condition was a commonplace in everything he had ever known. There had always been those who gave orders and those who carried them out; he could imagine no other condition, no other type of social organization. It was a fact of life.
Though naturally he thought of escape.
Thinking about it was as far as he got. Joe-Jim guessed his thoughts and brought the matter out into the open. Joe told him, “Don’t go getting ideas, youngster. Without a knife you wouldn’t get three levels away in this part of the Ship. If you managed to steal a knife from me, you still wouldn’t make it down to high-weight. Besides, there’s Bobo.”
Hugh waited a moment, as was fitting, then said, “Bobo?”
Jim grinned and replied, “We told Bobo that you were his to butcher, if he liked, if you ever stuck your head out of our compartments without us. Now he sleeps outside the door and spends a lot of his time there.”
“It was only fair,” put in Joe. “He was disappointed when we decided to keep you.”
“Say,” suggested Jim, turning his bead toward his brother’s, “how about some fun?” He turned back to Hugh. “Can you throw a knife?” “Of course,” Hugh answered.
“Let’s see you. Here.” Joe-Jim handed him their own knife. Hugh accepted it, jiggling it in his band to try its balance. “Try my mark.”
Joe-Jim had a plastic target. set up at the far end of the room from his favorite chair, on which he was wont to practice his own skill. Hugh eyed it, and, with an arm motion too fast to follow, let fly. He used the economical underhand stroke, thumb on the blade, fingers together. The blade shivered in the target, well centered in the chewed-up area which marked Joe- Jim’s best efforts. “Good boy!” Joe approved. “What do you have in mind, Jim?”
“Let’s give him the knife and see how far he gets.” “No,” said Joe, “I don’t agree.”
“Why not?”
“If Bobo wins, we’re out one servant. If Hugh wins, we lose both Bobo and him. It’s wasteful.” “Oh, well, if you insist.”
“I do. Hugh, fetch the knife.”
Hugh did so. It had not occurred to him to turn the knife against Joe-Jim. The master was the master. For servant to attack master was not simply repugnant to good morals, it was an idea so wild that it did not occur to him at all.
Hugh had expected that Joe-Jim would be impressed by his learning as a scientist. It did not work out that way. Joe-Jim, especially Jim, loved to argue. They sucked Hugh dry in short order and figuratively cast him aside. Hoyland felt humiliated. After all, was he not a scientist? Could he not read and write?
“Shut up,” Jim told Hugh. “Reading is simple. I could do it before your father was born. D’you think you’re the first scientist that has served me? Scientists—bah! Apack of ignoramuses!” In an attempt to re-establish his own intellectual conceit, Hugh expounded the theories of the younger scientists, the strictly matter-of-fact, hard-boiled realism which rejected all religious interpretation and took the Ship as it was. He confidently expected Joe-Jim to approve such a point of view; it seemed to fit their temperaments. They laughed in his face.
“Honest,” Jim insisted, when be bad ceased snorting, “are you young punks so stupid as all that? Why you’re worse than your elders.”
“But you just got through saying,” Hugh protested in hurt tones, “that all our accepted religious notions are so much bunk. That is just what my friends think. They want to junk all that old nonsense.”
Joe started to speak; Jim cut in ahead of him. “Why bother with him, Joe? He’s hopeless.”
“No, he’s not. I’m enjoying this. He’s the first one I’ve talked with in I don’t know how long who stood any chance at all of seeing the truth. Let us be — I want to see whether that’s a head he has on his shoulders, or just a place to hang his ears.”
“O.K.,” Jim agreed, “but keep it quiet. I’m going to take a nap.” The left-hand head closed its eyes, soon it was snoring. Joe and Hugh continued their discussion in whispers.
“The trouble with you youngsters,” Joe said, “is that if you can’t understand a thing right off, you think it can’t be true. The trouble with your elders is, anything they didn’t understand they reinterpreted to mean something else and then thought they understood it. None of you has tried believing clear words the way they were written and then tried to understand them on that basis. Oh, no, you’re all too bloody smart for that! If you can’t see it right off, it ain’t so; it must mean something different.”
“What do you mean?” Hugh asked suspiciously.
“Well, take the Trip, for instance. What does it mean to you?
“Well, to my mind, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a piece of nonsense to impress the peasants.” “And what is the accepted meaning?”
“Well, it’s where you go when you die, or rather what you do. You make the Trip to Centaurus.” “And what is Centaurus?”
“It’s — mind you, I’m just telling you the orthodox answers; I don’t really believe this stuff — it’s where you arrive when you’ve made the Trip, a place where everybody’s happy and there’s always good eating.” Joe snorted. Jim broke the rhythm of his snoring, opened one eye, and settled back again with a grunt.
“That’s just what I mean,” Joe went on in a lower whisper. “You don’t use your head. Did it over occur to you that the Trip was just what the old books said It was: the Ship and all the Crew actually going somewhere, moving?” Hoyland thought about it. “You don’t mean for me to take you seriously. Physically, it’s an impossibility. The Ship can’t go anywhere. It already is everywhere. We can make a trip through it, but the Trip, that has to have a spiritual meaning, if it has any.”
Joe called on Jordan to support him. “Now, listen,” he said, “get this through that thick head of yours. Imagine a place a lot bigger than the Ship, a lot bigger, with the Ship inside it, moving. D’you get it?”
Hugh tried. He tried very hard. He shook his bead. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “There can’t be anything bigger than the Ship. There wouldn’t be any place for it to be.” “Oh, for Huff’s sake! Listen. Outside the Ship, get that? Straight down beyond the level in every direction. Emptiness out there. Understand me?”
“But there isn’t anything below the lowest level. That’s why it’s the lowest level.”
“Look. If you took a knife and started digging a hole in the floor of the lowest level, where would it get you?” “But you can’t. It’s too hard.”
“But suppose you did and it made a hole. Where would that hole go? Imagine it.”
Hugh shut his eyes and tried to imagine digging a hole in the lowest level. Digging as if it were soft, soft as cheese. He began to get some glimmering of a possibility, a possibility that was unsettling, soul-shaking. He was falling, falling into a hole that he had dug which had no levels under it. He opened his eyes very quickly. “That’s awful!” he ejaculated. “I won’t believe it.”
Joe-Jim got up. “I’ll make you believe it,” he said grimly, “if I have to break your neck to do it.” He strode over to the outer door and opened it. “Bobo!” he shouted. “Bobo!”
Jim’s head snapped erect. “Wassa matter? Wha’s going on?” “We’re going to take Hugh to no-weight.”
“What for?”
“To pound some sense into his silly head.” “Some other time.”
“No, I want to do it now.”
“All right, all right. No need to shake. I’m awake now anyhow.”
Joe-Jim Gregory was almost as nearly unique in his — or their — mental ability as he was in his bodily construction. Under any circumstances he would have been a dominant personality; among the muties it was inevitable that he should bully them, order them about, and live on their services. Had he had the will-to-power, it is conceivable that he could have organized the muties to fight and overcome the Crew proper.
But he lacked that drive. He was by native temperament an intellectual, a bystander, an observer. He was interested in the ‘how’ and the ‘why,’ but his will to action was satisfied with comfort and convenience alone.
Had he been born two normal twins and among the Crew, it is likely that he would have drifted into scientisthood as the easiest and most satisfactory answer to the problem of living and as such would have entertained himself mildly with conversation and administration. As it was, he lacked mental companionship and had whiled away three generations reading and rereading books stolen for him by his stooges.
The two halves of his dual person had argued and discussed what they had read, and had almost inevitably arrived at a reasonably coherent theory of history and the physical world, except in one respect. The concept of fiction was entirely foreign to them; they treated the novels that had been provided for the Jordan expedition in exactly the same fashion that they did text and reference books.
This led to their one major difference of opinion. Jim regarded Allan Quartermain as the greatest man who had ever lived; Joe held out for John Henry.
They were both inordinately fond of poetry; they could recite page after page of Kipling, and were nearly as fond of Rhysling, the blind singer of the spaceways. Bobo backed in. Joe-Jim hooked a thumb toward Hugh. “Look,” said Joe, “he’s going out.”
“Now?” said Bobo happily, and grinned, slavering.
“You and your stomach!” Joe answered, rapping Bobo’s pate with his knuckles. “No, you don’t eat him. You and him, blood brothers. Get it?” “Not eat ‘im?”
“No. Fight for him. He fights for you.”
“O.K.” The pinhead shrugged his shoulders at the inevitable. “Blood brothers. Bobo know.” “All right. Now we go up to the place-where-everybody-flies. You go ahead and make lookout.”
They climbed in single file, the dwarf running ahead to spot the lie of the land, Hoyland behind him, Joe-Jim bringing up the rear, Joe with eyes to the front, Jim watching their rear, head
turned over his shoulder.
Higher and higher they went, weight slipping imperceptibly from them with each successive deck. They emerged finally into a level beyond which there was no further progress, no opening above them. The deck curved gently, suggesting that the true shape of the space was a giant cylinder, but overhead a metallic expanse which exhibited a similar curvature obstructed the view and prevented one from seeing whether or not the deck in truth curved back on itself.
There were no proper bulkheads; great stanchions, so huge and squat as to give an impression of excessive, unnecessary strength, grew thickly about them, spacing deck and overhead evenly apart.
Weight was imperceptible. If one remained quietly in one place, the undetectable residuum of weight would bring the body in a gentle drift down to the ‘floor,’ but ‘up’ and ‘down’ were terms largely lacking in meaning. Hugh did not like it; it made him gulp, but Bobo seemed delighted by it and not unused to it. He moved through the air like an uncouth fish, banking off stanchion, floor plate, and overhead as suited his convenience.
Joe-Jim set a course parallel to the common axis of the inner and outer cylinders, following a passageway formed by the orderly spacing of the stanchions. There were handrails set along the passage, one of which he followed like a spider on its thread. He made remarkable speed, which Hugh floundered to maintain. In time, be caught the trick of the easy, effortless, overhand pull, the long coast against nothing but air resistance, and the occasional flick of the toes or the hand against the floor. But he was much too busy to tell how far they went before they stopped. Miles, he guessed it to be, but he did not know.
When they did stop, it was because the passage, had terminated. Asolid bulkhead, stretching away to right and left, barred their way. Joe-Jim moved along it to the right, searching.
He found what he sought, a man-sized door, closed, its presence distinguishable only by a faint crack which marked its outline and a cursive geometrical design on its surface. Joe-Jim studied this and scratched his right-hand head. The two heads whispered to each other. Joe-Jim raised his hand in an awkward gesture.
“No, no!” said Jim. Joe-Jim checked himself. “How’s that?” Joe answered. They whispered together again, Joe nodded, and Joe-Jim again raised his hand.
He traced the design on the door without touching It, moving his forefinger through the air perhaps four inches from the surface of the door. The order of succession in which his finger moved over the lines of the design appeared simple but certainly not obvious.
Finished, he shoved a palm against the adjacent bulkhead, drifted back from the door, and waited.
Amoment later there was a soft, almost inaudible insufflation; the door stirred and moved outward perhaps six inches, then stopped. Joe-Jim appeared puzzled. He ran his hands cautiously into the open crack and pulled. Nothing happened. He called to Bobo, “Open it.”
Bobo looked the situation over, with a scowl on his forehead which wrinkled almost to his crown. He then placed his feet against the bulkhead, steadying himself by grasping the door with one hand. He took hold of the edge of the door with both hands, settled his feet firmly, bowed his body, and strained.
He held his breath, chest rigid, back bent, sweat breaking out from the effort. The great cords in his neck stood out, making of his head a misshapen pyramid. Hugh could hear the dwarf’s joints crack. It was easy to believe that he would kill himself with the attempt, too stupid to give up.
But the door gave suddenly, with a plaint of binding metal. As the door, in swinging out, slipped from Bobo’s fingers, the unexpectedly released tension in his legs shoved him heavily away from the bulkhead; he plunged down the passageway, floundering for a handhold. But he was back in a moment, drifting awkwardly through the air as he massaged a cramped calf.
Joe-Jim led the way inside, Hugh close behind him. “What is this place?” demanded Hugh, his curiosity overcoming his servant manners. “The Main Control Room,” said Joe.
Main Control Room! The most sacred and taboo place in the Ship, its very location a forgotten mystery. In the credo of the young men it was nonexistent. The older scientists varied in their attitude between fundamentalist acceptance and mystical belief. As enlightened as Hugh believed himself to be, the very words frightened him. The Control Room! Why, the very spirit of Jordan was said to reside there. He stopped.
Joe-Jim stopped and Joe looked around. “Come on,” he said. “What’s the matter?” “Why, uh … uh …”
“Speak up.”
“But … but this place is haunted … this is Jordan’s…”
“Oh, for Jordan’s sake!” protested Joe, with slow exasperation. “I thought you told me you young punks didn’t take any stock in Jordan.” “Yes, but … but this is…”
“Stow it. Come along, or I’ll have Bobo drag you.” He turned away. Hugh followed, reluctantly, as a man climbs a scaffold. They threaded through a passageway just wide enough for two to use the handrails abreast. The passage curved in a wide sweeping arc of full ninety degrees, then opened into the control room proper. Hugh peered past Joe-Jim’s broad shoulders, fearful but curious.
He stared into a well-lighted room, huge, quite two hundred feet across. It was spherical, the interior of a great globe. The surface of the globe was featureless, frosted silver. In the geometrical center of the sphere, Hugh saw a group of apparatus about fifteen feet across. To his inexperienced eye, it was completely unintelligible; he could not have described it, but he saw that it floated steadily, with no apparent support.
Running from the end of the passage to the mass at the center of the globe was a tube of metal latticework, wide as the passage itself. It offered the only exit from the passage. Joe-Jim turned to Bobo, and ordered him to remain in the passageway, then entered the tube.
He pulled himself along it, hand over hand, the bars of the latticework making a ladder. Hugh followed him; they emerged into the mass of apparatus occupying the center of the sphere. Seen close up, the gear of the control station resolved itself into its individual details, but it still made no sense to him. He glanced away from it to the inner surface of the globe which surrounded them.
That was a mistake. The surface of the globe, being featureless silvery white, had nothing to lend it perspective. It might have been a hundred feet away, or a thousand, or, many miles. He had never experienced an unbroken height greater than that between two decks, nor an open space larger than the village common. He was panic-stricken, scared out of his wits, the more so in that he did not know what it was he feared. But the ghost of long-forgotten jungle ancestors possessed him and chilled his stomach with the basic primitive fear of falling.
He clutched at the control gear, clutched at Joe-Jim.
Joe-Jim let him have one, hard across the mouth with the flat of his hand. “What’s the matter with you?” growled Jim. “I don’t know,” Hugh presently managed to get out. “I don’t know, but I don’t like this place. Let’s get out of here!”
Jim lifted his eyebrows to Joe, looked disgusted, and said, “We might as well. That weak-bellied baby will never understand anything you tell him.” “Oh, he’ll be all right,” Joe replied, dismissing the matter. “Hugh, climb into one of the chairs; there, that one.”
In the meantime, Hugh’s eyes had fallen on the tube whereby they had reached the control center and had followed it back by eye to the passage door. The sphere suddenly shrank to its proper focus and the worst of his panic was over. He complied with the order, still trembling, but able to obey. The control center consisted of a rigid framework, made up of chairs, or frames, to receive the bodies of the operators, and consolidated instrument and report panels, mounted in such a fashion as to be almost in the laps of the operators, where they were readily visible but did not obstruct the view. The chairs had high supporting sides, or arms, and mounted in these aims were the controls appropriate to each officer on watch, but Hugh was not yet aware of that. He slid under the instrument panel into his seat and settled back, glad of its enfolding stability. It fitted him in a semi-reclining position, footrest to head support.
But something was happening on the panel in front of Joe-Jim; he caught it out of the corner of his eye and turned to look. Bright red letters glowed near the top of the board: 2ND ASTROGATOR POSTED. What was a second astrogator? He didn’t know; then he noticed that the extreme top of his own board was labeled 2ND ASTROGATOR and concluded it must be himself, or rather, the man who should be sitting there. He felt momentarily uncomfortable that the proper second astrogator might come in and find him usurping his post, but he put
it out of his mind; it seemed unlikely.
But what was a second astrogator, anyhow?
The letters faded from Joe-Jim’s board, a red dot appeared on the left-hand edge and remained. Joe-Jim did something with his right hand; his board reported: ACCELERATION: ZERO, then MAIN DRIVE. The last two words blinked several times, then were replaced with NO REPORT. These words faded out, and a bright green dot appeared near the right-hand edge.
“Get ready,” said Joe, looking toward Hugh; “the light is going out.” “You’re not going to turn out the light?” protested Hugh.
“No, you are. Take a look by your left hand. See those little white lights?”
Hugh did so, and found, shining up through the surface the chair arm, little beads of light arrayed to form two squares, one above the other. “Each one controls the light of one quadrant,” explained Joe. “Cover them with your hand to turn Out the light. Go ahead, do it.”
Reluctantly, but fascinated, Hugh did as he was directed. He placed a palm over the tiny lights, and waited. The silvery sphere turned to dull lead, faded still more, leaving them in darkness complete save for the silent glow from the instrument panels. Hugh felt nervous but exhilarated. He withdrew his palm; the sphere remained dark, the eight little lights had turned blue.
“Now,” said Joe, “I’m going to show you the Stars!”
In the darkness, Joe-Jim’s right hand slid over another pattern of eight lights. Creation.
Faithfully reproduced, shining as steady and serene from the walls of the stellarium as did their originals from the black deeps of space, the mirrored stars looked down on him. Light after jeweled light, scattered in careless bountiful splendor across the simulacrum sky, the countless suns lay before him; before him, over him, under him, behind him, in every direction from him. He hung alone in the center of the stellar universe.
“Oooooh!” It was an involuntary sound, caused by his indrawn breath. He clutched the chair arms hard enough to break fingernails, but he was not aware of it. Nor was he afraid at the moment; there was room in his being for but one emotion. Life within the Ship, alternately harsh and workaday, had placed no strain on his innate capacity to experience beauty; for the first time in his life he knew the intolerable ecstasy of beauty unalloyed. It shook him and hurt him, like the first trembling intensity of sex.
It was some time before Hugh sufficiently recovered from the shock and the ensuing intense preoccupation to be able to notice Jim’s sardonic laugh, Joe’s dry chuckle. “Had enough?” inquired Joe. Without waiting for a reply, Joe-Jim turned the lights back on, using the duplicate controls mounted in the left arm of his chair.
Hugh sighed. His chest ached and his heart pounded. He realized suddenly that he had been holding his breath the entire time that the lights had been turned out. “Well, smart boy,” asked Jim, “are you convinced?”
Hugh sighed again, not knowing why. With the lights back on, he felt safe and snug again, but was possessed of a deep sense of personal loss. He knew, subconsciously, that, having seen the stars, he would never be happy again. The dull ache in his breast, the vague inchoate yearning for his lost heritage of open sky and stars, was never to be silenced, even though he was yet too ignorant to be aware of it at the top of his mind. “What was it?” he asked in a hushed voice.
“That’s,” answered Joe. “That’s the world. That’s the universe. That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you about.”
Hugh tried furiously to force his inexperienced mind to comprehend. “That’s what you mean by Outside?” he asked. “All those beautiful little lights?” “Sure,” said Joe, “only they aren’t little. They’re a long way off, you see; maybe thousands of miles.”
“What?”
“Sure, sure,” Joe persisted. “There’s lots of room out there. Space. It’s big. Why, some of those stars may be as big as the Ship, maybe bigger.” Hugh’s face was a pitiful study in overstrained imagination. “Bigger than the Ship?” he repeated. “But … but …”
Jim tossed his head impatiently and said to Joe, “Wha’d’ I tell you? You’re wasting our time on this lunk. He hasn’t got the capacity.”
“Easy, Jim,” Joe answered mildly; “don’t expect him to run before he can crawl. It took us a long time. I seem to remember that you were a little slow to believe your own eyes.” “That’s a lie,” said Jim nastily. “You were the one that had to be convinced.”
“O.K., O.K.,” Joe conceded, “let it ride. But it was a long time before we both had it all straight.”
Hoyland paid little attention to the exchange between the two brothers. It was a usual thing; his attention was centered on matters decidedly not usual. “Joe,” he asked, “what became of the Ship while we were looking at the Stars? Did we stare right through it?”
“Not exactly,” Joe told him. “You weren’t looking directly at the stars at all, but at a kind of picture of them. It’s like… Well, they do it with mirrors, sort of. I’ve got a book that tells about it.” “But you can see ‘em directly,” volunteered Jim, his momentary pique forgotten. “There’s a compartment forward of here…”
“Oh, yes,” put in Joe, “it slipped my mind. The Captain’s veranda. He’s got one all of glass; you can look right out.” “The Captain’s veranda? But—”
“Not this Captain. He’s never been near the place. That’s the name over the door of the compartment.” “What’s a ‘veranda’?”
“Blessed if I know. It’s just the name of the place.” “Will you take me up there?”
Joe appeared to be about to agree, but Jim cut in. “Some other time. I want to get back; I’m hungry.” They passed back through the tube, woke up Bobo, and made the long trip back down.
It was long before Hugh could persuade Joe-Jim to take him exploring again, but the time intervening was well spent. Joe-Jim turned him loose on the largest collection of books that Hugh had ever seen. Some of them were copies of books Hugh had seen before, but even these he read with new meanings. He read incessantly, his mind soaking up new ideas, stumbling over them, struggling, striving to grasp them. He begrudged sleep, he forgot to eat until his breath grew sour and compelling pain in his midriff forced him to pay attention to his body. Hunger satisfied, he would be back at it until his head ached and his eyes refused to focus.
Joe-Jim’s demands for service were few. Although Hugh was never off duty, Joe-Jim did not mind his reading as long as he was within earshot and ready to jump when called. Playing checkers with one of the pair when the other did not care to play was the service which used up the most time, and even this was not a total loss, for, if the player were Joe, he could almost always be diverted into a discussion of the Ship, its history, its machinery as equpment, the sort of people who had built it and then manned it and their history, back on Earth, Earth the incredible, that strange place where people had lived on the outside instead of the inside.
Hugh wondered why they did not fall off.
He took the matter up with Joe and at last gained some notion of gravitation. He never really understood it emotionally; it was too wildly improbable; but as an intellectual concept he was able to accept it and use it, much later, in his first vague glimmerings of the science of ballistics: and the art of astrogation and ship maneuvering. And it led in time to his wondering about weight in the Ship, a matter that had never bothered him before. The lower the level the greater the weight had been to his mind simply the order of nature, and nothing to wonder at. He was familiar with centrifugal force as it applied to slingshots. To apply it also to the whole Ship, to think of the Ship as spinning like a slingshot and thereby causing weight, was too much of a hurdle; he never really believed it.
Joe-Jim took him back once more to the Control Room and showed him what little Joe-Jim knew about the manipulation of the controls and the reading of the astrogation instruments.
The long-forgotten engineer-designers employed by the Jordan Foundation had been instructed to design a ship that would not — could not — wear out, even though the Trip were protracted beyond the expected sixty years. They builded better than they knew. In planning the main drive engines and the auxiliary machinery, largely automatic, which would make the Ship habitable, and in designing the controls necessary to handle all machinery not entirely automatic, the very idea of moving parts had been rejected. The engines and auxiliary equipment worked on a level below mechanical motion, on a level of pure force, as electrical transformers do. Instead of push buttons, levers, cams, and shafts, the controls and the machinery they served were planned in terms of balance between static fields, bias of electronic flow, circuits broken or closed by a hand placed over a light.
On this level of action, friction lost its meaning, wear and erosion took no toll. Had all hands been killed in the mutiny, the Ship would still have plunged on through space, still lighted, its air still fresh and moist, its engines ready and waiting. As it was, though elevators and conveyor belts fell into disrepair, disuse, and finally into the oblivion of forgotten function, the essential machinery of the Ship continued its automatic service to its ignorant human freight, or waited, quiet and ready, for someone bright enough to puzzle out its key.
Genius had gone into the building of the Ship. Far too huge to be assembled on Earth, it had been put together piece by piece in its own orbit out beyond the Moon. There it had swung for fifteen silent years while the problems presented by the decision to make its machinery foolproof and enduring had been formulated and solved. Awhole new field of submolar action had been conceived in the process, struggled with, and conquered.
So, when Hugh placed an untutored, questing hand over the first of a row of lights marked ACCELERATION, POSITIVE, he got an immediate response, though not in terms of acceleration. Ared light at the top of the chief pilot’s board blinked rapidly and the annunciator panel glowed with a message: MAIN ENGINES: NOT MANNED.
“What does that mean?” he asked Joe-Jim.
“There’s no telling,” said Jim. “We’ve done the same thing in the main engine room,” added Joe. “There, when you try it, it says ‘Control Room Not Manned.’” Hugh thought a moment. “What would happen,” he persisted, “if all the control stations had somebody at ‘em at once, and then I did that?”
“Can’t say,” said Joe. “Never been able to try it.”
Hugh said nothing. Aresolve which had been growing, formless, in his mind was now crystalizing into decision. He was busy with it for some time, weighing it, refining it, and looking for the right moment to bring it into the open.
He waited until he found Joe-Jim in a mellow mood, both of him, before broaching his idea. They were in the Captain’s veranda at the time Hugh decided the moment was due. Joe-Jim rested gently in the Captain’s easy chair, his belly full of food, and gazed out through the heavy glass of the view port at the serene stars. Hugh floated beside him. The spinning of the Ship caused the stars to cross the circle of the port in barely perceptible arcs.
Presently he said, “Joe-Jim …”
“Eh? What’s that, youngster?” It was Joe who had replied. “It’s pretty swell, isn’t it?”
“What is?”
“All that. The stars.” Hugh indicated the view through the port with a sweep of his arm, then caught at the chair to stop his own backspin. “Yeah, it sure is. Makes you feel good.” Surprisingly, it was Jim who offered this.
Hugh knew the time was right. He waited a moment, then said, “Why don’t we finish the job?” Two heads turned simultaneously, Joe leaning out a little to see past Jim. “What job?”
“The Trip. Why don’t we start up the main drive and go on with it? Somewhere out there,” be said hurriedly to finish before he was interrupted, “there are planets like Earth, or so the First Crew thought. Let’s go find them.”
Jim looked at him, then laughed. Joe shook his head.
“Kid,” he said, “you don’t know what you are talking about. You’re as balmy as Bobo. “No,” he went on, “that’s all over and done with. Forget it.” “Why is it over and done with, Joe?”
“Well, because. It’s too big a job. It takes a crew that understands what it’s all about, trained to operate the Ship.”
“Does it take so many? You have shown me only about a dozen places, all told, for men actually to be at the controls. Couldn’t a dozen men run the Ship … if they knew what you know,” he added slyly.
Jim chuckled. “He’s got you, Joe. He’s right”
Joe brushed it aside. “You overrate our knowledge. Maybe we could operate the Ship, but we wouldn’t get anywhere. We don’t know where we are. The Ship has been drifting for I don’t know how many generations. We don’t know where we’re headed, or how fast we’re going.”
“But look,” Hugh pleaded, “there are instruments. You showed them to me. Couldn’t we learn how to use them? Couldn’t you figure them out, Joe, if you really wanted to?” “Oh, I suppose so,” Jim agreed.
“Don’t boast, Jim,” said Joe.
“I’m not boasting,” snapped Jim. “If a thing’ll work, I can figure it out.”
“Humph!” said Joe. The matter rested in delicate balance. Hugh had got them disagreeing among themselves — which was what he wanted — with the less tractable of the pair on his side. Now, to consolidate his gain, “I had an idea,” he said quickly, “to get you men to work with, Jim, if you were able to train them.”
“What’s your idea?” demanded Jim suspiciously. “Well, you remember what I told you about a bunch of the younger scientists?” “Those fools!”
“Yes, yes, sure; but they didn’t know what you know. In their way they were trying to be reasonable. Now, if I could go back down and tell them what you’ve taught me, I could get you enough men to work with.”
Joe cut in. “Take a good look at us, Hugh. What do you see?” “Why … why, I see you. Joe-Jim.”
“You see a mutie,” corrected Joe, his voice edged with sarcasm. “We’re a mutie. Get that? Your scientists won’t work with us.”
“No, no,” protested Hugh, “that’s not true. I’m not talking about peasants. Peasants wouldn’t understand, but these are scientists, and the smartest of the lot. They’ll understand. All you need to do is to arrange safe conduct for them through mutie country. You can do that, can’t you?” he added, instinctively shifting the point of the argument to firmer ground.
“Why, sure,” said Jim. “Forget it,” said Joe.
“Well, O.K.,” Hugh agreed, sensing that Joe really was annoyed at his persistence, “but it would be fun.” He withdrew some distance from the brothers.
He could hear Joe-Jim continuing the discussion with himself in low tones. He pretended to ignore it. Joe-Jim had this essential defect in his joint nature: being a committee, rather than a single individual, he was hardly fitted to be a man of action, since all decisions were necessarily the result of discussion and compromise. Several moments later Hugh heard Joe’s
voice raised. “All right, all right, have it your own way!” He then called out, “Hugh! Come here!” Hugh kicked himself away from an adjacent bulkhead and shot over to the immediate vicinity of Joe-Jim, arresting his flight with both hands against the framework of the Captain’s chair.
“We’ve decided,” said Joe without preliminaries, “to let you go back down to the high-weight and try to peddle your goods. But you’re a fool,” he added sourly.
Bobo escorted Hugh down through the dangers of the levels frequented by muties and left him in the uninhabited zone above high-weight “Thanks, Bobo,” Hugh said in parting. “Good eating.” The dwarf grinned, ducked his head, and sped away, swarming up the ladder they had just descended. Hugh turned and started down, touching his knife as he did so. It was good to feel it against him again.
Not that it was his original knife. That had been Bobo’s prize when he was captured, and Bobo had been unable to return it, having inadvertently left it sticking in a big one that got away. But the replacement Joe-Jim had given him was well balanced and quite satisfactory.
Bobo had conducted him, at Hugh’s request and by Joe-Jim’s order, down to the area directly over the auxiliary Converter used by the scientists. He wanted to find Bill Ertz, Assistant Chief Engineer and leader of the bloc of younger scientists, and he did not want to have to answer too many questions before he found him. Hugh dropped quickly down the remaining levels and found himself in a main passageway which he recognized. Good! Aturn to the left, a couple of hundred yards walk and he found himself at the door of the compartment which housed the Converter. Aguard lounged in front of it. Hugh started to push on past, was stopped. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I want to find Bill Ertz.”
“You mean the Chief Engineer? Well, he’s not here.”
“Chief? What’s happened to the old one?” Hoyland regretted the remark at once, but it was already out.
“Huh? The old Chief? Why, he’s made the Trip long since.” The guard looked at him suspiciously. “What’s wrong with you?” “Nothing,” denied Hugh. “Just a slip.”
“Funny sort of a slip. Well, you’ll find Chief Ertz around his office probably.” “Thanks. Good eating.”
“Good eating.”
Hugh was admitted to see Ertz after a short wait Ertz looked up from his desk as Hugh came in. “Well,” he said, “so you’re back, and not dead after all. This is a surprise. We had written you off, you know, as making the Trip.”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“Well, sit down and tell me about it; I’ve a little time to spare at the moment. Do you know, though, I wouldn’t have recognized you. You’ve changed a lot, all that gray hair. I imagine you had some pretty tough times.”
Gray hair? Was his hair gray? And Ertz had changed a lot, too, Hugh now noticed. He was paunchy and the lines in his face had set. Good Jordan! How long had he been gone? Ertz drummed on his desk top, and pursed his lips. “It makes a problem, your coming back like this. I’m afraid I can’t just assign you to your old job; Mort Tyler has that. But we’ll find a place for you, suitable to your rank.”
Hugh recalled Mort Tyler and not too favorably. Aprecious sort of a chap, always concerned with what was proper and according to regulations. So Tyler had actually made scientisthood, and was on Hugh’s old job at the Converter. Well, it didn’t matter. “That’s all right, he began. “I wanted to talk to you about—”
“Of course, there’s the matter of seniority,” Ertz went on, “Perhaps the Council had better consider the matter. I don’t know of a precedent. We’ve lost a number of scientists to the muties in the past, but you are the first to escape with his life in my memory.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Hugh broke in. “I’ve something much more pressing to talk about. While I was away I found out some amazing things, Bill, things that it is of paramount importance for you to know about. That’s why I came straight to you. Listen. I—”
Ertz was suddenly alert. “Of course you have! I must be slowing down. You must have had a marvelous opportunity to study the muties and scout out their territory. Come on, man, spill it! Give me your report.”
Hugh wet his lips. “It’s not what you think,” he said. “It’s much more important than just a report on the muties, though it concerns them, too. In fact, we may have to change our whole policy with respect to the mu—”
“Well, go ahead, go ahead! I’m listening.”
“All right.” Hugh told him of his tremendous discovery as to the actual nature of the Ship, choosing his words carefully and trying very hard to be convincing. He dwelt lightly on the difficulties presented by an attempt to reorganize the Ship in accordance with the new concept and bore down heavily on the prestige and honor that would accrue to the man who led the effort.
He watched Ertz’s face as he talked. After the first start of complete surprise when Hugh launched his key idea, the fact that the Ship was actually a moving body in a great outside space, his face became impassive and Hugh could read nothing in it, except that he seemed to detect a keener interest when Hugh spoke of how Ertz was just the man for the job because of his leadership of the younger, more progressive scientists.
When Hugh concluded, he waited for Ertz’s response. Ertz said nothing at first, simply continued with his annoying habit of drumming on the top of his desk. Finally he said, “These are important matters, Hoyland, much too important to be dealt with casually. I must have time to chew it over.”
“Yes, certainly,” Hugh agreed. “I wanted to add that I’ve made arrangements for safe passage up to no-weight. I can take you up and let you see for yourself.” “No doubt that is best,” Ertz replied. “Well, are you hungry?”
“No.”
“Then we’ll both sleep on it. You can use the compartment at the back of my office. I don’t want you discussing this with anyone else until I’ve had time to think about it; it might cause unrest if it got out without proper prepartion.”
“Yes, you’re right”
“Very well, then.” Ertz ushered him into a compartment behind his office which he very evidently used for a lounge. “Have a good rest,” he said, “and we’ll talk later.” “Thanks,” Hugh acknowledged. “Good eating.”
“Good eating.”
Once he was alone, Hugh’s excitement gradually dropped away from him, and he realized that he was fagged out and very sleepy. He stretched out on a builtin couch and fell asleep. When he awoke he discovered that the only door to the compartment was barred from the other side. Worse than that, his knife was gone.
He had waited an indefinitely long time when he heard activity at the door. It opened; two husky, unsmiling men entered. “Come along,” said one of them. He sized them up, noting that neither of them carried a knife. No chance to snatch one from their belts, then. On the other hand he might be able to break away from them.
But beyond them, a wary distance away in the outer room, were two other equally formidable men, each armed with a knife. One balanced his for throwing; the other held his by the grip, ready to stab at close quarters. He was boxed in and be knew it. They had anticipated his possible moves.
He had long since learned to relax before the inevitable. He composed his face and marched quietly out. Once through the door he saw Ertz, waiting and quite evidently in charge of the party of men. He spoke to him, being careful to keep his voice calm. “Hello, Bill. Pretty extensive preparations you’ve made. Some trouble, maybe?”
Ertz seemed momentarily uncertain of his answer, then said, “You’re going before the Captain.”
“Good!” Hugh answered. “Thanks, Bill. But do you think it’s wise to try to sell the idea to him without laying a little preliminary foundation with the others?”
Ertz was annoyed at his apparent thickheadedness and showed it. “You don’t get the idea,” he growled. “You’re going before the Captain to stand trial for heresy!”
Hugh considered this as if the idea had not before occurred to him. He answered mildly, “You’re off down the wrong passage, Bill. Perhaps a charge and trial is the best way to get at the matter, but I’m not a peasant, simply to be hustled before the Captain. I must be tried by the Council. I am a scientist.”
“Are you now?” Ertz said softly. “I’ve had advice about that. You were written off the lists. Just what you are is a matter for the Captain to determine.”
Hugh held his peace. It was against him, he could see, and there was no point in antagonizing Ertz. Ertz made a signal; the two unarmed men each grasped one of Hugh’s arms. He went with them quietly.
Hugh looked at the Captain with new interest. The old man had not changed much, a little fatter, perhaps. The Captain settled himself slowly down in his chair, and picked up the memorandum before him. “What’s this all about?” he began irritably. “I don’t understand it.”
Mort Tyler was there to present the case against Hugh, a circumstance which Hugh had had no way of anticipating and which added to his misgivings. He searched his boyhood recollections for some handle by which to reach the man’s sympathy, found none. Tyler cleared his throat and commenced: “This is the case of one Hugh Hoyland, Captain, formerly one of your junior scientists—”
“Scientist, eh? Why doesn’t the Council deal with him?”
“Because he is no longer a scientist, Captain. He went over to the muties. He now returns among us, preaching heresy and seeking to undermine your authority.” The Captain looked at Hugh with the ready belligerency of a man jealous of his prerogatives. “Is that so?” he bellowed. “What have you to say for yourself?”
“It is not true, Captain,” Hugh answered. “All that I have said to anyone has been an affirmation of the absolute truth of our ancient knowledge. I have not disputed the truths under which we live; I have simply affirmed them more forcibly than is the ordinary custom. I—”
“I still don’t understand this,” the Captain interrupted, shaking his head. “You’re charged with heresy, yet you say you believe the Teachings. If you aren’t guilty, why are you here?” “Perhaps I can clear the matter up,” put in Ertz. “Hoyland—”
“Well, I hope you can,” the Captain went on. “Come, let’s hear it.”
Ertz proceeded to give a reasonably correct, but slanted, version of Hoyland’s return and his strange story. The Captain listened, with an expression that varied between puzzlement and annoyance. When Ertz had concluded, the Captain turned to Hugh. “Humph!” he said.
Hugh spoke immediately. “The gist of my contention, Captain, is that there is a place up at no-weight where you can actually see the truth of our faith that the Ship is moving, where you can actually see Jordan’s Plan in operation. That is not a denial of faith; that affirms it. There is no need to take my word for it. Jordan Himself will prove it.”
Seeing that the Captain appeared to be in a state of indecision, Tyler broke in: “Captain, there is a possible explanation of this incredible situation which I feel duty bound that you should hear. Offhand, there are two obvious interpretations of Hoyland’s ridiculous story He may simply be guilty of extreme heresy, or he may be a mutie at heart and engaged in a scheme to lure you into their hands. But there is a third, more charitable explanation and one which I feel within me is probably the true one.
“There is record that Hoyland was seriously considered for the Converter at his birth inspection, but that his deviation from normal was slight, being simply an overlarge head, and he was passed. It seems to me that the terrible experiences he has undergone at the hands of the muties have finally unhinged an unstable mind. The poor chap is simply not responsible for his own actions.”
Hugh looked at Tyler with new respect. To absolve him of guilt and at the same time to make absolutely certain that Hugh would wind up making the Trip: how neat! The Captain shook a palm at them. “This has gone on long enough.” Then, turning to Ertz, “Is there recommendation?”
“Yes, Captain. The Converter.”
“Very well, then. I really don’t see, Ertz,” he continued testily, “why I should be bothered with these details. It seems to me that you should be able to handle discipline in your department without my help.”
“Yes, Captain.”
The Captain shoved back from his desk, started to get up. “Recommendation confirmed. Dismissed.”
Anger flooded through Hugh at the unreasonable injustice of it. They had not even considered looking at the only real evidence he had in his defense. He heard a shout: “Wait!” — then discovered it was his own voice. The Captain paused, looking at him.
“Wait a moment,” Hugh went on, his words spilling out of their own accord. “This won’t make any difference, for you’re all so damn sure you know all the answers that you won’t consider a fair offer to come see with your own eyes. Nevertheless … Nevertheless, it still moves!”
Hugh had plenty of time to think, lying in the compartment where they confined him to await the power needs of the Converter, time to think, and to second-guess his mistakes. Telling his tale to Ertz immediately, that had been mistake number one. He should have waited, become reacquainted with the man and felt him out, instead of depending on a friendship which had never been very close.
Second mistake, Mort Tyler. When he heard his name he should have investigated and found out just how much influence the man had with Ertz. He had known him of old, he should have known better.
Well, here he was, condemned as a mutant, or maybe as a heretic. It came to the same thing. He considered whether or not he should have tried to explain why mutants happened. He had learned about it himself in some of the old records in Joe-Jim’s possession. No, it wouldn’t wash. How could you explain about radiations from the Outside causing the birth of mutants when the listeners did not believe there was such a place as Outside? No, he had messed it up before he was ever taken before the Captain.
His self-recriminations were disturbed at last by the sound of his door being unfastened. It was too soon for another of the infrequent meals; he thought that they had come at last to take him away, and renewed his resolve to take someone with him.
But he was mistaken. He heard a voice of gentle dignity: “Son, son, how does this happen?” It was Lieutenant Nelson, his first teacher, looking older than ever and frail.
The interview was distressing for both of them. The old man, childless himself, had cherished great hopes for his protege, even the ambition that he might eventually aspire to the captaincy, though he had kept his vicarious ambition to himself, believing it not good for the young to praise them too highly. It had hurt his heart when the youth was lost.
Now he had returned, a man, but under disgraceful conditions and under sentence of death. The meeting was no less unhappy for Hugh. He had loved the old man, in his way, wanted to please him and needed his approval. But he could see, as he told his story, that Nelson was not capable of treating the the story as anything but an aberration of Hugh’s mind, and he suspected that Nelson would rather see him meet a quick death in the Converter, his atoms smashed to hydrogen and giving up clean useful power, than have him live to make a mock of the ancient teachings.
In that.he did the old man an injustice; he underrated Nelson’s mercy, but not his devotion to ‘science.’ But let it be said for Hugh that, had there been no more at issue than his own personal welfare, he might have preferred death to breaking the heart of his benefactor, being a romantic and more than a bit foolish. Presently the old man got up to leave, the visit having grown unendurable to each of them. “Is there anything I can do for you, son? Do they feed you well enough?”
“Quite well, thanks,” Hugh lied. “Is there anything else?”
“No … yes, you might send me some tobacco. I haven’t had a chew in a long time.”
“I’ll take care of it. Is there anyone you would like to see?”
“Why, I was under the impression that I was not permitted visitors … ordinary visitors.”
“You are right, but I think perhaps I may be able to get the rule relaxed. But you will have to give me your promise not to speak of your heresy,” he added anxiously. Hugh thought quickly. This was a new aspect, a new possibility. His uncle? No, while they had always got along well, their minds did not meet; they would greet each other as strangers. He had never made friends easily; Ertz had been his obvious next friend and now look at the damned thing! Then he recalled his village chum, Alan Mahoney, with whom he had played as a boy. True, he had seen practically nothing of him since the time he was apprenticed to Nelson. Still… “Does Alan Mahoney still live in our village?”
“Why, yes.”
“I’d like to see him, if he’ll come.”
Alan arrived, nervous, ill at ease, but plainly glad to see Hugh and very much upset to find him under sentence to make the Trip. Hugh pounded him on the back. “Good boy,” he said. “I knew you would come.”
“Of course, I would,” protested Alan, “once I knew. But nobody in the village knew it. I don’t think even the Witnesses knew it.” “Well, you’re here, that’s what matters. Tell me about yourself. Have you married?”
“Huh, uh, no. Let’s not waste time talking about me. Nothing ever happens to me anyhow. How in Jordan’s name did you get in this jam, Hugh?” “I can’t talk about that, Alan. I promised Lieutenant Nelson that I wouldn’t.”
“Well, what’s a promise, that kind of a promise? You’re in a jam, fellow.” “Don’t I know it!”
“Somebody have it in for you?”
“Well, our old pal Mort Tyler didn’t help any; I think I can say that much.” Alan whistled and nodded his head slowly. “That explains a lot.” “How come? You know something?”
“Maybe, — maybe not. After you went away he married Edris Baxter.”
“So? Hmm-m-m … yes, that clears up a lot.” He remained silent for a time.
Presently Alan spoke up: “Look, Hugh. You’re not going to sit here and take it, are you? Particularly with Tyler mixed in it. We gotta get you outa here.” “How?”
“I don’t know. Pull a raid, maybe. I guess I could get a few knives to rally round and help us; all good boys, spoiling for a fight.” “Then, when it’s over, we’d all be for the Converter. You, me, and your pals. No, it won’t wash.”
“But we’ve got to do something. We can’t just sit here and wait for them to burn you.”
“I know that.” Hugh studied Alan’s face. Was it a fair thing to ask? He went on, reassured by what he had seen. “Listen. You would do anything you could to get me out of this, wouldn’t you?”
“You know that.” Alan’s tone showed hurt.
“Very well, then. There is a dwarf named Bobo. I’ll tell you how to find him…”
Alan climbed, up and up, higher than he had ever been since Hugh had led him, as a boy, into foolhardy peril. He was older now, more conservative; he had no stomach for it. To the very real danger of leaving the well-traveled lower levels was added his superstitious ignorance. But still he climbed.
This should be about the place, unless he had lost count. But he saw nothing of the dwarf Bobo saw him first. Aslingshot load caught Alan in the pit of the stomach, even as he was shouting, “Bobo!”
Bobo backed into Joe-Jim’s compartment and dumped his load at the feet of the twins. “Fresh meat,” he said proudly. “So it is,” agreed Jim indifferently. “Well, it’s yours; take it away.”
The dwarf dug a thumb into a twisted ear, “Funny,” he said, “he knows Bobo’s name.”
Joe looked up from the book he was reading: _Browning’s Collected Poems_, L-Press, New York, London, Luna City, cr. 35. “That’s interesting. Hold on a moment.”
Hugh had prepared Alan for the shock of Joe-Jim’s appearance. In reasonably short order he collected his wits sufficiently to be able to tell his tale. Joe-Jim listened to it without much comment, Bobo with interest but little comprehension.
When Alan concluded, Jim remarked, “Well, you win, Joe. He didn’t make it.” Then, turning to Alan, he added, “You can take Hoyland’s place. Can you play checkers?” Alan looked from one head to the other. “But you don’t understand,” he said. “Aren’t you going to do anything about it?”
Joe looked puzzled. “Us? Why should we?”
“But you’ve got to. Don’t you see? He’s depending on you. There’s nobody else he can look to. That’s why I came. Don’t you see?”
“Wait a moment,” drawled Jim, “wait a moment. Keep your belt on. Supposing we did want to help him, which we don’t, how in Jordan’s Ship could we? Answer me that.” “Why, why,” Alan stumbled in the face of such stupidity. “Why, get up a rescue party, of course, and go down and get him out!”
“Why should we get ourselves killed in a fight to rescue your friend?” Bobo pricked his ears. “Fight?” he inquired eagerly. “No, Bobo,” Joe denied. “No fight. Just talk.” “Oh,” said Bobo and returned to passivity.
Alan looked at the dwarf. “If you’d even let Bobo and me—”
“No,” Joe said shortly. “It’s out of the question. Shut up about it.”
Alan sat in a corner, hugging his knees in despair. If only he could get out of there. He could still try to stir up some help down below. The dwarf seemed to be asleep, though it was difficult to be sure with him. If only Joe-Jim would sleep, too.
Joe-Jim showed no indication of sleepiness. Joe tried to continue reading, but Jim interrupted him from time to time. Alan could not hear what they were saying. Presently Joe raised his voice. “Is that your idea of fun?” he demanded.
“Well,” said Jim, “it beats checkers.”
“It does, does it? Suppose you get a knife in your eye; where would I be then?” “You’re getting old, Joe. No juice in you any more.”
“You’re as old as I am.”
“Yeah, but I got young ideas.”
“Oh, you make me sick. Have it your own way, but don’t blame me. Bobo!” The dwarf sprang up at once, alert. “Yeah, Boss.”
“Go out and dig up Squatty and Long Arm and Pig.”
Joe-Jim-got up, went to a locker, and started pulling knives out of their racks.
Hugh heard the commotion in the passageway outside his prison. It could be the guards coming to take him to the Converter, though they probably wouldn’t be so noisy. Or it could be just some excitement unrelated to him. On the other hand it might be …
It was. The door burst open, and Alan was inside, shouting at him and thrusting a brace of knives into his hands. He was hurried out of the door, while stuffing the knives in his belt and accepting two more.
Outside he saw Joe-Jim, who did not see him at once, as he was methodically letting fly, as calmly as if he had been engaging in target practice in his own study. And Bobo, who ducked his head and grinned with a mouth widened by a bleeding cut, but continued the easy flow of the motion whereby he loaded and let fly. There were three others, two of whom Hugh recognized as belonging to Joe-Jim’s privately owned gang of bullies, muties by definition and birthplace; they were not deformed.
The count does not include still forms on the floor plates.
“Come on!” yelled Alan. “There’ll be more in no time.” He hurried down the passage to the right
Joe-Jim desisted and followed him. Hugh let one blade go for luck at a figure running away to the left. The target was poor, and he had no time to see if he had thrown 01000. They scrambled along the passage, Bobo bringing up the rear, as if reluctant to leave the fun, and came to a point where a side passage crossed the main one.
Alan led them to the right again. “Stairs ahead,” he shouted.
They did not reach them. An airtight door, rarely used, clanged in their faces ten yards short of the stairs. Joe-Jim’s bravoes checked their flight and they looked doubtfully at their master. Bobo broke his thickened nails trying to get a purchase on the door.
The sounds of pursuit were clear behind them. “Boxed in,” said Joe softly. “I hope you like it, Jim.”
Hugh saw a head appear around the corner of the passage they had quitted. He threw overhand but the distance was too great; the knife clanged harmlessly against steel. The head disappeared. Long Arm kept his eye on the spot, his sling loaded and ready.
Hugh grabbed Bobo’s shoulder. “Listen! Do you see that light?”
The dwarf blinked stupidly. Hugh pointed to the intersection of the glowtubes where they crossed in the overhead directly above the junction of the passages. “That light. Can you hit them where they cross?”
Bobo measured the distance with his eye. It would be a hard shot under any conditions at that range. Here, constricted as he was by the low passageway, it called for a fast, flat trajectory, and allowance for higher weight then he was used to.
He did not answer. Hugh felt the wind of his swing but did not see the shot. There was a tinkling crash; the passage became dark.
“Now!” yelled Hugh, and led them away at a run. As they neared the intersection he shouted, “Hold your breaths! Mind the gas!” The radioactive vapor poured lazily out from the broken tube above and filled the crossing with a greenish mist.
Hugh ran to the right, thankful for his knowledge as an engineer of the lighting circuits. He had picked the right direction; the passage ahead was black, being serviced from beyond the break. He could hear footsteps around him; whether they were friend or enemy he did not know.
They burst into light. No one was in sight but a scared and harmless peasant who scurried away at an unlikely pace. They took a quick muster. All were present, but Bobo was making heavy going of it.
Joe looked at him. “He sniffed the gas, I think. Pound his back.”
Pig did so with a will. Bobo belched deeply, was suddenly sick, then grinned. “He’ll do,” decided Joe.
The slight delay had enabled one at least to catch up with them. He came plunging out of the dark, unaware of, or careless of, the strength against him. Alan knocked Pig’s arm down, as he raised it to throw. “Let me at him!” he demanded. “He’s mine!” It was Tyler.
“Man-fight?” Alan challenged, thumb on his blade.
Tyler’s eyes darted from adversary to adversary and accepted the invitation to individual duel by lunging at Alan. The quarters were too cramped for throwing; they closed, each achieving his grab in parry, fist to wrist.
Alan was stockier, probably stronger; Tyler was slippery. He attempted to give Alan a knee to the crotch. Alan evaded it, stamped on Tyler’s planted foot. They went clown. There was a crunching crack.
Amoment later, Alan was wiping his knife against his thigh. “Let’s get goin’,” he complained. “I’m scared.”
They reached a stairway, and raced up it, Long Arm and Pig ahead to fan out on each level and cover their flanks, and the third of the three choppers (Hugh heard him called Squatty) covering the rear. The others bunched in between.
Hugh thought they had won free, when he heard shouts and the clatter of a thrown knife just above him. He reached the level above in time to be cut not deeply but jaggedly by a ricocheted blade.
Three men were down. Long Arm bad a blade sticking in the fleshy part of his upper arm, but it did not seem to bother him. His slingshot was still spinning. Pig was scrambling after a thrown knife, his own armament exhausted. But there were signs of his work; one man was down on one knee some twenty feet away. He was bleeding from a knife wound in the thigh.
As the figure steadied himself with one hand against the bulkhead and reached towards an empty belt with the other, Hugh recognized him. Bill Ertz.
He had led a party up another way, and flanked them, to his own ruin. Bobo crowded behind Hugh and got his mighty arm free for the cast. Hugh caught at it. “Easy, Bobo,” he directed. “In the stomach, and easy.”
The dwarf looked puzzled, but did as he was told.
Ertz folded over at the middle and slid to the deck. “Well placed,” said Jim. “Bring him along, Bobo,” directed Hugh, “and stay in the middle.” He ran his eye over their party, now huddled at the top of that flight of stairs. “All right, gang; up we go again! Watch it.”
Long Arm and Pig swarmed up the next flight, the others disposing themselves as usual. Joe looked annoyed. In some fashion, a fashion by no means clear at the moment, he had been eased out as leader of this gang, his gang, and Hugh was giving orders. He reflected as there was no time now to make a fuss. It might get them all killed.
Jim did not appear to mind. In fact, he seemed to be enjoying himself.
They put ten more levels behind them with no organized opposition. Hugh directed them not to kill peasants unnecessarily. The three bravoes obeyed; Bobo was too loaded down with Ertz to constitute a problem in discipline. Hugh saw to it that they put thirty-odd more decks below them and were well into no man’s land before he let vigilance relax at all. Then he called a halt and they examined wounds.
The only deep ones were to Long Arm’s arm and Bobo’s face. Joe-Jim examined them and applied presses with which he had outfitted himself before starting. Hugh refused treatment for his flesh wound. “It’s stopped bleeding,” he insisted, “and I’ve got a lot to do.”
“You’ve got nothing to do but to get up home,” said Joe, “and that will be an end to this foolishness.” “Not quite,” denied Hugh. “You may be going home, but Alan and I and Bobo are going up to no-weight; to the Captain’s veranda.”
“Nonsense,” said Joe. “What for?”
“Come along if you like, and see. All right, gang. Let’s go.”
Joe started to speak, stopped when Jim kept still. Joe-Jim followed along. They floated gently through the door of the veranda, Hugh, Alan, Bobo with his still-passive burden, and Joe- Jim. “That’s it,” said Hugh to Alan, waving his hand at the splendid stars, “that’s what I’ve been telling you about.”
Alan looked and clutched at Hugh’s arm. “Jordan!” he moaned. “We’ll fall out!” He closed his eyes tightly. Hugh shook him. “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s grand. Open your eyes.”
Joe-Jim touched Hugh’s arm. “What’s it all about?” he demanded. “Why did you bring him up here?” He pointed to Ertz. “Oh, him. Well, when he wakes up I’m going to show him the stars, prove to him that the Ship moves.”
“Well? What for?”
“Then I’ll send him back down to convince some others.”
“Hm-m-m, suppose he doesn’t have any better luck than you had?”
“Why, then,” Hugh shrugged his shoulders “why, then we shall just have to do it all over, I suppose, till we do convince them. “We’ve got to do it, you know.”
COMMON SENSE
JOE, THE RIGHT HAND head of Joe-Jim, addressed his words to Hugh Hoyland. “All right, smart boy, you’ve convinced the Chief Engineer.” He gestured toward Bill Ertz with the blade of his knife, then resumed picking Jim’s teeth with it. “So what? Where does it get you?”
“I’ve explained that,” Hugh Hoyland answered irritably. “We keep on, until every scientist in the Ship, from the Captain to the greenest probationer, knows that the Ship moves and believes that we can make it move. Then we’ll finish the Trip, as Jordan willed. How many knives can you muster?” he added.
“Well, for the love of Jordan! Listen, have you got some fool idea that we are going to help you with this crazy scheme?” “Naturally. You’re necessary to it.”
“Then you had better think up another think. That’s out. Bobo! Get out the checkerboard.”
“O.K., Boss.” The microcephalic dwarf hunched himself up off the floor plates and trotted across Joe-Jim’s apartment.
“Hold it, Bobo.” Jim, the left-hand head, had spoken. The dwarf stopped dead, his narrow forehead wrinkled. The fact that his two-headed master occasionally failed to agree as to what Bobo should do was the only note of insecurity in his tranquil bloodthirsty existence.
“Let’s hear what he has to say,” Jim continued. “There may be some fun in this.”
“Fun! The fun of getting a knife in your ribs. Let me point out that they are my ribs, too. I don’t agree to it.”
“I didn’t ask you to agree; I asked you to listen. Leaving fun out of it, it may be the only way to keep a knife out of our ribs.”
“What do you mean?” Joe demanded suspiciously. “You heard what Ertz had to say.” Jim flicked a thumb toward the prisoner. “The Ship’s officers are planning to clean out the upper levels. How would you like to go into the Converter, Joe? You can’t play checkers after we’re broken down into hydrogen.”
“Bunk! The Crew can’t exterminate the muties; they’ve tried before.” Jim turned to Etrz. “How about it?”
Ertz answered somewhat diffidently, being acutely aware of his own changed status from a senior Ship’s officer to prisoner of war. He felt befuddled anyhow; too much had happened and too fast. He had been kidnaped, hauled up to the Captain’s veranda, and had there gazed out at the stars. The stars.
His hard-boiled rationalism included no such concept. If an Earth astronomer had had it physically demonstrated to him that the globe spun on its axis because someone turned a crank, the upset in evaluations could have been no greater.
Besides that, he was acutely aware that his own continued existence hung in fine balance. Joe-Jim was the first upper-level mutie he had ever met other than in combat, knife to knife. A word from him to that great ugly dwarf sprawled on the deck— He chose his words. “I think the Crew would be successful, this time. We … they have organized for it. Unless there are more of you than we think there are and better organized, I think it could be done. You see … well, uh, I organized it.”
“You?”
“Yes. Agood many of the Council don’t like the policy of letting the muties alone. Maybe it’s sound religious doctrine and maybe it isn’t, but we lose a child here and a couple of pigs there. It’s annoying.”
“What do you expect muties to eat?” demanded Jim belligerently. “Thin air?”
“No, not exactly. Anyhow, the new policy was not entirely destructive. Any muties that surrendered and could be civilized we planned to give to masters and put them to work as part of the Crew. That is, any that weren’t, uh … that were—” He broke off in embarrassment, and shifted his eyes from the two-headed monstrosity before him.
“You mean any that weren’t physical mutations, like me,” Joe filled in nastily. “Don’t you?” he persisted. “For the likes of me it’s the Converter, isn’t it?” He slapped the blade of his knife nervously on the palm of his hand.
Ertz edged away, his own hand shifting to his belt. But no knife was slung there; he felt naked and helpless without it. “Just a minute,” he said defensively, “you asked me; that’s the situation. It’s out of my hands. I’m just telling you.”
“Let him alone, Joe. He’s just handing you the straight dope. It’s like I was telling you: either go along with Hugh’s plan, or wait to be hunted down. And don’t get any ideas about killing him; we’re going to need him.” As Jim spoke he attempted to return the knife to its sheath. There was a brief and silent struggle between the twins for control of the motor nerves to their right arm, a clash of will below the level of physical activity. Joe gave in.
“All right,” he agreed surlily, “but if I go to the Converter, I want to take this one with me for company.” “Stow it,” said Jim. “You’ll have me for company.”
“Why do you believe him?”
“He has nothing to gain by lying. Ask Alan.”
Alan Mahoney, Hugh’s friend and boyhood chum, had listened to the argument round-eyed, without joining it. He, too, had suffered the nerve-shaking experience of viewing the outer stars, but his ignorant peasant mind had not the sharply formulated opinions of Ertz, the Chief Engineer. Ertz had been able to see almost at once that the very existence of a world outside the Ship changed all his plans and everything he had believed in; Alan was capable only of wonder.
“What about this plan to fight the muties, Alan?”
“Huh? Why, I don’t know anything about it. Shucks, I’m not a scientist. Say, wait a minute; there was a junior officer sent in to help our village scientist, Lieutenant Nelson.” He stopped and looked puzzled.
“What about it? Go ahead.”
“Well, he has been organizing the cadets in our village, and the married men, too, but not so much. Making ‘em practice with their blades and slings. Never told us what for, though.” Ertz spread his hands. “You see?”
Joe nodded. “I see,” he admitted grimly.
Hugh Hoyland looked at him eagerly. “Then you’re with me?” “I suppose so,” Joe admitted. “Right!” added Jim.
Hoyland looked back to Ertz. “How about you, Bill Ertz?” “What choice have I got?”
“Plenty. I want you with me wholeheartedly. Here’s the layout: The Crew doesn’t count; it’s the officers we have to convince. Any that aren’t too addlepated and stiff-necked to understand after they’ve seen the stars and the Control Room, we keep. The others—” he drew a thumb across his throat while making a harsh sibilance in his cheek, “the Converter.”
Bobo grinned happily and imitated the gesture and the sound. Ertz nodded. “Then what?”
“Muties and Crew together, under a new Captain, we move the Ship to Far Centaurus! Jordan’s Will be done!”
Ertz stood up and faced Hoyland. It was a heady notion, too big to be grasped at once, but, by Jordan! he liked it. He spread his hands on the table and leaned across it. “I’m with you, Hugh Hoyland!”
Aknife clattered on the table before him, one from the brace at Joe-Jim’s belt. Joe looked startled, seemed about to speak to his brother, then appeared to think better of it. Ertz looked his thanks and stuck the knife in his belt.
The twins whispered to each other for a moment, then Joe spoke up. “Might as well make it stick,” he said. He drew his remaining knife and, grasping the blade between thumb and forefinger so that only the point was exposed, he jabbed himself in the fleshly upper part of his left arm. “Blade for blade!”
Ertz’s eyebrows shot up. He whipped out his newly acquired blade and cut himself in the same location. The blood spurted and ran down to the crook of his arm. “Back to back!” He shoved the table aside and pressed his gory shoulder against the wound on Joe-Jim.
Alan Mahoney, Hugh Hoyland, Bobo: all had their blades out, all nicked their arms till the skin ran red and wet. They crowded in, bleeding shoulders pushed together so that the blood dripped united to the death.
“Blade for blade!” “Back to back!” “Blood to blood!”
“Blood brothers, to the end of the Trip!”
An apostate scientist, a kidnaped scientist, a dull peasant, a two-headed monster, a apple-brained moron; five knives, counting Joe-Jim as one; five brains, counting Joe-Jim as two and Bobo as none; five brains and five knives to overthrow an entire culture.
“But I don’t want to go back, Hugh.” Alan shuffled his feet and looked dogged. “Why can’t I stay here with you? I’m a good blade.” “Sure you are, old fellow. But right now you’ll be more useful as a spy.”
“But you’ve got Bill Ertz for that.”
“So we have, but we need you too. Bill is a public figure; he can’t duck out and climb to the upper levels without it being noticed and causing talk. That’s where you come in; you’re his go- between.”
“I’ll have a Huff of a time explaining where I’ve been.”
“Don’t explain any more than you have to. But stay away from the Witness.” Hugh had a sudden picture of Alan trying to deceive the old village historian, with his searching tongue and lust for details. “Keep clear of the Witness. The old boy would trip you up.”
“Him? You mean the old one; he’s dead. Made the Trip long since. The new one don’t amount to nothing.” “Good. If you’re careful, you’ll be safe.” Hugh raised his voice. “Bill! Are you ready to go down?”
“I suppose so.” Ertz picked himself up and reluctantly put aside the book he had been reading _The Three Musketeers_, illustrated, one of Joe-Jim’s carefully stolen library. “Say, that’s a wonderful book. Hugh, is Earth really like that?”
“Of course. Doesn’t it say so in the book?”
Ertz chewed his lip and thought about it. “What is a house?” “Ahouse? Ahouse is a sort of a… a sort of a compartment.”
“That’s what I thought at first, but how can you ride on a compartment?” “Huh? What do you mean?”
“Why, all through the book they keep climbing on their houses and riding away.”
“Let me see that book,” Joe ordered. Ertz handed it to him. Joe-Jim thumbed through it rapidly. “I see what you mean. Idiot! They ride horses, not houses.” “Well, what’s a horse?”
“Ahorse is an animal, like a big hog, or maybe like a cow. You squat up on top of it and let it carry you along.”
Ertz considered this. “It doesn’t seem practical. Look, when you ride in a litter, you tell the chief porter where you want to go. How can you tell a cow where you want to go?” “That’s easy. You have a porter lead it.”
Ertz conceded the point. “Anyhow, you might fall off. It isn’t practical. I’d rather walk.” “It’s quite a trick,” Joe explained. “Takes practice.”
“Can you do it?”
Jim sniggered. Joe looked annoyed. “There are no horses in the Ship.” “OK, O.K. But look. These guys Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, they had something—” “We can discuss that later,” Hugh interrupted. “Bobo is back. Are you ready to go, Bill?” “Don’t get in a hurry, Hugh. This is important. These chaps had knives.” “Sure. Why not?”
“But they were better than our knives. They had knives as long as your arm, maybe longer. If we are going to fight the whole Crew, think what an advantage that would be.” “Hm-m-m.” Hugh drew his knife and looked at it, cradling it in his palm. “Maybe. You couldn’t throw it as well.”
“We could have throwing knives, too.” “Yes, I suppose we could.”
The twins had listened Without comment. “He’s right,” put in Joe. “Hugh, you take care of placing the knives. Jim and I have some reading to do.” Both of Joe-Jim’s heads were busy thinking of other books they owned, books. that discussed in saguinary detail the infinitely varied methods used by mankind to shorten the lives of enemies. He was about to institute a War College Department of Historical Research, although he called his project by no such fancy term.
“O.K.,” Hugh agreed, “but you will have to say the word to them.”
“Right away.” Joe-Jim stepped out of his apartment into the passageway where Bobo had assembled a couple of dozen of Joe-Jim’s henchmen among the muties. Save for Long Arm, Pig, and Squatty, who had taken part in the rescue of Hugh, they were all strangers to Hugh, Alan, and Bill, and they were all sudden death to strangers.
Joe-Jim motioned for the three from the lower decks to join him. He pointed them out to the muties, and ordered them to look closely and not to forget: these three were to have safe passage and protection wherever they went. Furthermore, in Joe-Jim’s absence his men were to take orders from any of them.
They stirred and looked at each other. Orders they were used to, but from Joe-Jim only.
Abig-nosed individual rose up from his squat and addressed them. He looked at Joe-Jim, but his words were intended for all. “I am Jack-of-the-Nose. My blade is sharp and my eye is keen. Joe-Jim with the two wise heads is my Boss and my knife fights for him. But Joe is my Boss, not strangers from heavy decks. What do say, knives? Is that not the Rule?”
He paused. The others had listened to him stealing glances at Joe-Jim. Joe muttered something of the corner of his mouth to Bobo. Jack O’Nose opened his mouth to continue. There was a smash of splintering teeth, a crack from a broken neck; his mouth stopped with a missile.
Bobo reloaded his slingshot. The body, not yet still, settled slowly to the deck. Joe-Jim waved a hand it. “Good eating!” Joe announced. “He’s yours.” The muties converged on the body as if they had suddenly been unleashed. They concealed it completely in a busy grunting pile-up. Knives out, they cuffed and crowded each other for a piece of the prize.
Joe-Jim waited patiently for the undoing to be over, then, when the place where Jack O’Nose had been was no more than a stain on the deck and the several polite arguments over the sharing had died down, he started again; Joe spoke. “Long Arm, you and Forty-one and the Ax go down with Bobo, Alan and Bill. The rest here.”
Bobo trotted away in the long loping strides, sped on by the low pseudogravity near the axis of rotation of Ship. Three of the muties detached themselves from pack and followed. Ertz and Alan Mahoney hurried catch up.
When he reached the nearest staircase trunk, he skipped out into space without breaking his stride letting centrifugal force carry him down to the next. Alan and the muties followed; but Ertz paused on the edge and looked back. “Jordan keep you, brother!” he sang out.
Joe-Jim waved to him. “And you,” acknowledged Joe. “Good eating!” Jim added.
“Good eating!”
Bobo led them down forty-odd decks, well into no man’s land inhabited neither by mutie nor crew, stopped. He pointed in succession to Long Arm, Forty-one, and the Ax. “Two Wise Heads say for you to watch here. You first,” he added, pointing again to Forty-one. “It’s like this,” Ertz amplified. “Alan and I are going down to heavy-weight level. You three are to keep a guard here, one at a time, so that I will be able to send messages back up to Joe-Jim. Get it?”
“Sure. Why not?” Long Arm answered.
“Joe-Jim says it,” Forty-one commented with a note of finality in his voice. The Ax grunted agreeably.
“O.K.,” said Bobo. Forty-one sat down at the stairwell, letting his feet hang over, and turned his attention to food which he had been carrying tucked under his left arm.
Bobo slapped Ertz and Alan on their backs. “Good eating,” he bade them, grinning. When he could get his breath, Ertz acknowledged the courteous thought, then dropped at once to the next lower deck, Alan close after him. They had still many decks to go to ‘civilization.’
Commander Phineas Narby, Executive Assistant to Jordan’s Captain, in rummaging through the desk of the Chief Engineer was amused to find that Bill Ertz had secreted therein a couple of Unnecessary books. There were the usual Sacred books, of course, including the priceless _Care and Maintenance of the Auxiliary Fourstage Converter_ and the _Handbook of Power, Light, and Conditioning, Starship Vanguard_. These were Sacred books of the first order, bearing the imprint of Jordan himself, and could lawfully be held only by the Chief Engineer.
Narby considered himself a skeptic and rationalist. Belief in Jordan was a good thing — for the Crew. Nevertheless the sight of a title page with the words ‘Jordan Foundation’ on it stirred up within him a trace of religious awe such as he had not felt since before he was admitted to scientisthood.
He knew that the feeling was irrational; probably there had been at some time in the past some person or persons called Jordan. Jordan might have been an early engineer or captain who codified the common sense and almost instinctive rules for running the Ship. Or, as seemed more likely, the Jordan myth went back much farther than this book in his hand, and its author had simply availed himself of the ignorant superstitions of the Crew to give his writings authority. Narby knew how such things were done; he planned to give the new policy with respect to the muties the same blessing of Jordan when the time was ripe for it to be put into execution. Yes, order and discipline and belief in authority were good things, for the Crew. It was equally evident that a rational, coolheaded common sense was a proper attribute for the scientists who were custodians of the Ship’s welfare, common sense and a belief in nothing but facts.
He admired the exact lettering on the pages of the book he held. They certainly had excellent clerks in those ancient times; not the sloppy draftsmen he was forced to put up with, who could hardly print two letters alike.
He made a mental note to study these two indispensable handbooks of the engineering department before turning them over to Ertz’s successor. It would be well, he thought, not to be too dependent on the statements of the Chief Engineer when he himself succeeded to the captaincy. Narby had no particular respect for engineers, largely because he had no particular talent for engineering. When he had first reached scientisthood and had been charged to defend the spiritual and material welfare of the Crew, had sworn to uphold the Teachings of Jordan, he soon discovered that administration and personnel management were more in his lines than tending the converter or servicing the power lines. He had served as clerk, village administrator, recorder to the Council, personnel officer, and was now chief executive for Jordan’s Captain himself, ever since an unfortunate and rather mysterious accident had shortened the life of Narby’s predecessor in that post.
His decision to study up on engineering before a new Chief Engineer was selected brought to mind the problem of choosing a new chief. Normally the Senior Watch Officer for the Converter would become Chief Engineer when a chief made the Trip, but in this case, Mort Tyler, the Senior Watch, had made the Trip at the same time; his body had been found, stiff and cold, after the mutie raid which had rescued that heretic, Hugh Hoyland. That left the choice wide open and Narby was a bit undecided as to whom he should suggest to the Captain.
One thing was certain; the new chief must not be a man with as much aggressive initiative as Ertz. Narby admitted that Ertz had done a good job in organizing the Crew for the proposed
extermination of the muties, but his very efficiency had made him too strong a candidate for succession to the captaincy, if and when. Had he thought about it overtly Narby might have admitted to himself that the present Captain’s life span had extended unduly because Narby was not absolutely certain that Ertz would not be selected. What he did think was that this might be a good time for the old Captain to surrender his spirit to Jordan. The fat old fool had long outlived his usefulness; Narby was tired of having to wheedle him into giving the proper orders. If the Council were faced with the necessity of selecting a new Captain at this time, there was but one candidate available. Narby put the book down, his mind made up.
The simple decision to eliminate the old Captain carried with it in Narby’s mind no feeling of shame, nor sin, nor disloyalty. He felt contempt but not dislike for the Captain, and no mean spirit colored his decision to kill him. Narby’s plans were made on the noble level of statesmanship. He honestly believed that his objective was the welfare of the entire Crew; common- sense administration, order and discipline, good eating for everyone. He selected himself because it was obvious to him that he was best fitted to accomplish those worthy ends. That some must make the Trip in order that these larger interests be served he did not find even mildly regrettable, but he bore them no malice.
“What in the Huff are you doing at my desk?”
Narby looked up to see the late Bill Ertz standing over him, not looking pleased. He looked again, then as an afterthought closed his mouth. He had been so certain, when Ertz failed to reappear after the raid, that he had made the Trip and was in all probability butchered and eaten; so certain that it was now a sharp wrench to his mind to see Ertz standing before him, aggressively alive. But he pulled himself together.
“Bill! Jordan bless you, man, we thought you had made the Trip! Sit down, sit down, and tell me what happened to you.” “I will if you will get out of my chair,” Ertz answered bitingly.
“Oh, sorry!” Narby hastily vacated the chair at Ertz’s desk and found another.
“And now,” Ertz continued, taking the seat Narby had left, “you might explain why you were going through my writings.”
Narby managed to look hurt. “Isn’t that obvious? We assumed you were dead. Someone had to take over and attend to your department until a new chief was designated. I was acting on behalf of the Captain.”
Ertz looked him in the eyes. “Don’t give me that guff, Narby. You know and I know who puts words in the Captain’s mouth; we’ve planned it often enough. Even if you did think I was dead, it seems to me you could wait longer than the time between two sleeps to pry through my desk.”
“Now really, old man, when a person is missing after a mutie raid, it’s a common-sense assumption that he has made the Trip.” “O.K., O.K., skip it. Why didn’t Mort Tyler take over in the meantime?”
“He’s in the Converter.”
“Killed, eh? But who ordered him put in the Converter? That much mass will make a terrific peak in the load.”
“I did, in place of Hugh Hoyland. Their masses were nearly the same, and your requisition for the mass of Hugh Hoyland was unfilled.” “Nearly the same isn’t good enough in handling the Converter. I’ll have to check on it.” He started to rise.
“Don’t get excited,” said Narby. “I’m not an utter fool in engineering, you know. I ordered his mass to be trimmed according to the same schedule you had laid out for Hoyland.” “Well, all right. That will do for now. But I will have to check it. We can’t afford to waste mass.”
“Speaking of waste mass,” Narby said sweetly, “I found a couple of Unnecessary books in your desk.” “Well?”
“They are classed as mass available for power, you know.” “So? And who is the custodian of mass allocated for power?” “You are certainly. But what were they doing in your desk?”
“Let me point out to you, my dear Captain’s Best Boy, that it lies entirely within my discretion where I choose to store mass available for power.” “Hm-m-m. I suppose you are right. By the way, if you don’t need them for the power schedule at once, would you mind letting me read them?”
“Not at all, if you want to be reasonable about it. I’ll check them out to you: have to do that; they’ve already been centrifuged. Just be discreet about it.” “Thanks. Some of those ancients had vivid imaginations. Utterly crazy, of course, but amusing for relaxation.”
Ertz got out the two volumes and prepared a receipt for Narby to sign. He did this absent-mindedly, being preoccupied with the problem of how and when to tackle Narby. Phineas Narby he knew to be a key man in the task he and his blood brothers had undertaken, perhaps the key man. If he could be won over… “Fine,” he said, when Narby had signed, “I wonder if we followed the wisest policy in Hoyland’s case.” Narby looked surprised, but said nothing.
“Oh, I don’t mean that I put any stock in his story,” Ertz added hastily, “but I feel that we missed an opportunity. We should have kidded him along. He was a contact with the muties. The worst handicap we work under in trying to bring mutie country under the rule of the Council is the fact that we know very little about theni. We don’t know how many of them there are, nor how strong they are, or how well organized. Besides that, we will have to carry the fight to them and that’s a big disadvantage. We don’t really know our way around the upper decks. If we had played along with him and pretended to believe his story, we might have learned a lot of things.”
“But we couldn’t rely on what he told us,” Narby pointed out
“We didn’t need to. He offered us an opportunity to go all the way to no-weight, and look around.”
Narby looked astounded. “You surely aren’t serious? Amember of the Crew that trusted the muties’ promise not to harm him wouldn’t get up to no-weight; he’d make the Trip — fast!” “I’m not so certain about that,” Ertz objected. “Hoyland believed his own story, I’m sure of that. And—”
“What! All that utter nonsense about the Ship being capable of moving. The solid Ship.” He pounded the bulkhead. “No one could believe that.”
“But I tell you he did. He’s a religious fanatic, granted. But he saw something up there, and that was how he interpreted it. We could have gone up to see whatever it was he was raving about and used the chance to scout out the muties.”
“Utterly foolhardy!”
“I don’t think so. He must have a great deal of influence among the muties; look at the trouble they went to just to rescue him. If he says he can give us safe passage up to no-weight, I think he can.”
“Why this sudden change of opinion?”
“It was the raid that changed my mind. If anyone had told me that a gang of muties would come clear down to high-weight and risk their necks to save the life of one man I would not have believed him. But it happened. I’m forced to revise my opinions. Quite aside from his story, it’s evident that the muties will fight for him and probably take orders from him. If that is true, it would be worth while to pander to his religious convictions if it would enable us to gain control over the muties without having to fight for it.”
Narby shrugged it off. “Theoretically you may have something there. But why waste time over might-have-beens? If there was such an opportunity, we missed it.” “Maybe not. Hoyland is still alive and back with the muties. If I could figure out some way of getting a message to him, we might still be able to arrange it.” “But how could you?”
“I don’t know exactly. I might take a couple of the boys and do some climbing. If we could capture a mutie without killing him, it might work out.”
“Aslim chance.”
“I’m willing to risk it”
Narby turned the matter over in his mind. The whole plan seemed to him to be filled with long chances and foolish assumptions. Nevertheless if Ertz were willing to take the risk and it did work, Narby’s dearest ambition would be much nearer realization. Subduing the unities by force would be a long and bloody job, perhaps an impossible job. He was clearly aware of its difficulty.
If it did not work, nothing was lost, but Ertz. Now that he thought it over, Ertz would be no loss at this point in the game. Hm-m-m. “Go ahead,” he said. “You are a brave man, but its a worth-while venture.”
“O.K.,” Ertz agreed. “Good eating.”
Narby took the hint. “Good eating,” he answered, gathered up the books, and left. It did not occur to him until later that Ertz had not told him where he had been for so long.
And Ertz was aware that Narby had not been entirely frank with him, but, knowing Narby, he was not surprised. He was pleased enough that his extemporaneous groundwork for future action had been so well received. It never did occur to him that it might have been simpler and more effective to tell the truth.
Ertz busied himseif for a short time in making a routine inspection of the Converter and appointed an acting Senior Watch Officer. Satisfied that his department could then take care of itself during a further absence, he sent for his chief porter and told the servant to fetch Alan Mahoney from his village. He had considered ordering his litter and meeting Mahoney halfway, but he decided against it as being too conspicuous.
Alan greeted him with enthusiasm. To him, still an unmarried cadet and working for more provident men when his contemporaries were all heads of families and solid men of property, the knowledge that he was blood brother to a senior scientist was quite the most important thing that had ever happened to him, even overshadowing his recent adventures, the meaning of which he was hardly qualified to understand anyway.
Ertz cut him short, and hastily closed the door to the outer engineering office. “Walls have ears,” he said quietly, “and certainly clerks have ears, and tongues as well. Do you want us both to make the Trip?”
“Aw, gosh, Bill … I didn’t mean to—”
“Never mind. I’ll meet you on the same stair trunk we came down by, ten decks above this one. Can you count?”
“Sure, I can count that much. I can count twice that much. One and one makes two, and one more makes three, and one more makes four, and one makes five, and—”
“That’s enough. I see you can. But I’m relying more on your loyalty and your knife than I am on your mathematical ability. Meet me there as soon as you can. Go up somewhere where you won’t be noticed.”
Forty-one was still on watch when they reached the rendezvous. Ertz called him by name while standing out of range of slingshot or thrown knife, a reasonable precaution in dealing with a creature who had grown to man size by being fast with his weapons. Once identification had been established, he directed the guard to find Hugh Hoyland. He and Alan sat down to wait.
Forty-one failed to find Hugh Hoyland at Joe-Jim’s apartment. Nor was Joe-Jim there. He did find Bobo, but the pinhead was not very helpful. Hugh, Bobo told him, had gone up where- everybody-flies. That meant very little to Forty-one; he had been up to no-weight only once in his life. Since the level of weightlessness extended the entire length of the Ship, being in fact the last concentric cylinder around the Ship’s axis, not that Forty-one could conceive it in those terms, the information that Hugh. had headed for no-weight was not helpful.
Forty-one was puzzled. An order from Joe-Jim was not to be ignored and he had got it through his not overbright mind that an order from Ertz carried the same weight. He woke Bobo up again. “Where is the Two Wise Heads?”
“Gone to see knifemaker.” Bobo closed his eyes again.
That was better. Forty-one knew where the knifemaker lived. Every mutie had dealings with her; she was the indispensable artisan and tradesman of mutie country. Her person was necessarily taboo; her workshop and the adjacent neighborhood were neutral territory for all. He scurried up two decks and hurried thence.
Adoor reading THERMODYNAMIC LABORATORY: KEEP OUT was standing open. Forty-one could not read; neither the name nor the injunction mattered to him. But he could hear voices, one of which be identified as coming from the twins, the other from the knifemaker. He walked in. “Boss,” be began.
“Shut up,” said Joe. Jim did not look around but continued his argument with the Mother of Blades. “You’ll make knives,” he said, “and none of your lip.”
She faced him, her four calloused hands set firmly on her broad hips. Her eyes were reddened from staring into the furnace in which she heated her metal; sweat ran down her wrinkled face into the sparse gray mustache which disfigured her upper lip, and dripped onto her bare chest. “Sure I make knives,” she snapped. “Honest knives. Not pig-stickers like you want me to make. Knives as long as your arm, ptui!” She spat at the cherry-red lip of the furnace.
“Listen, you old Crew bait,” Jim replied evenly, “you’ll make knives the way I tell you to, or I’ll toast your feet in your own furnace. Hear me?” Forty-one was struck speechless. No one ever talked back to the Mother of Blades; the Boss was certainly a man of power!
The knifemaker suddenly cracked. “But that’s not the right way to make knives,” she complained shrilly. “They wouldn’t balance right. I’ll show you.” She snatched up two braces of knives from her workbench and let fly at a cross-shaped target across the room — not in succession, but all four arms swinging together, all four blades in the air at once. They spwiged into the target, a blade at the extreme end of each arm of the cross. “See? You couldn’t do that with a long knife. It would fight with itself and not go straight.”
“Boss—” Forty-one tried again. Joe-Jim handed him a mouthful of knuckles without looking around.
“I see your point,” Jim told the knifemaker, “but we don’t want these knives for throwing. We want them for cutting and stabbing up close. Get on with it; I want to see the first one before you eat again.”
The old woman bit her lip. “Do I get my usuals?” she said sharply.
“Certainly you get your usuals,” he assured her. “Atithe on every kill till the blades are paid for, and good eating all the time you work.”
She shrugged her misshapen shoulders. “O.K.” She turned, tonged up a long flat fragment of steel with her two left hands and clanged the stock into the furnace. Joe-Jim turned to Forty- one.
“What is it?” Joe asked. “Boss, Ertz sent me to get Hugh.” “Well, why didn’t you do it?”
“I don’t find him. Bobo says he’s gone up to no-weight.”
“Well, go get him. No, that won’t do; you wouldn’t know where to find him. I’ll have to do it myself. Go back to Ertz and tell him to wait.” Forty-one hurried off. The Boss was all right, but it was not good to tarry in his presence.
“Now you’ve got us running errands,” Jim commented sourly. “How do you like being a blood brother, Joe?” “You got us into this.”
“So? The blood-swearing was your idea.”
“Damn it, you know why I did that. They took it seriously. And we are going to need all the help we can get, if we are to get out of this with a skin that will hold water.”
“Oh? So you didn’t take it seriously?”
“Did you?”
Jim smiled cynically. “Just about as seriously as you do, my dear, deceitful brother. As matters stand now, it is much, much healthier for you and me to keep to the bargain right up to the hilt. ‘All for one and one for all!’”
“You’ve been reading Dumas again.” “And why not?”
“That’s O.K. But don’t be a damn fool about it.” “I won’t be. I know which side of the blade is edged.”
Joe-Jim found Squatty and Pig sleeping outside the door which led to the Control Room. He knew then that Hugh must be inside, for he had assigned the two as personal bodyguards to Hugh. It was a foregone conclusion anyhow; if Hugh had gone up to no-weight, he would be heading either for Main Drive, or the Control Room, more probably the Control Room. The place held a tremendous fascination for Hugh. Ever since the earlier time when Joe-Jim had almost literally dragged him into the Control Room and had forced him to see with his own eyes that the Ship was not the whole world but simply a vessel adrift in a much larger world — a vessel that could be driven and moved — ever since that time and throughout the period that followed while he was still a captured slave of Joe-Jim’s, he had been obsessed with the idea of moving the Ship, of sitting at the controls and making it go!
It meant more to him than it could possibly have meant to a space pilot from Earth. From the time that the first rocket made the little jump from Terra to the Moon, the spaceship pilot has been the standard romantic hero whom every boy wished to emulate. But Hugh’s ambition was of no such picayune caliber; he wished to move his world. In Earth standards and concepts it would be less ambitious to dream of equipping the Sun with jets and go gunning it around the Galaxy.
Young Archimedes had his lever; he sought a fulcrum.
Joe-Jim paused at the door of the great silver stellarium globe which constituted the Control Room and peered in. He could not see Hugh, but he knew that he must be at the controls in the chair of the chief astrogator, for the lights were being manipulated. The images of the stars were scattered over the inner surface of the sphere producing a simulacrum of the heavens outside the Ship. The illusion was not fully convincing from the door where Joe-Jim rested; from the center of the sphere it would be complete.
Sector by sector the stars snuffed out, as Hugh manipulated the controls from the center of the sphere. Asector was left shining on the far side forward. It was marked by a large and brilliant orb, many times as bright as its companions. Joe-Jim ceased watching and pulled himself hand over hand up to the control chairs. “Hugh!” Jim called out.
“Who’s there?” demanded Hugh and leaned his head out of the deep chair. “Oh, it’s you. Hello.” “Ertz wants to see you. Come on out of there.”
“O.K. But come here first. I want to show you something.”
“Nuts to him,” Joe said to his brother. But Jim answered, “Oh, come on and see what it is. Won’t take long.” The twins climbed into the control station and settled down in the chair next to Hugh’s. “What’s up?” “That star out there,” said Hugh, pointing at the brilliant one. “It’s grown bigger since the last time I was here.” “Huh? Sure it has. It’s been getting brighter for a long time. Couldn’t see it at all first time I was ever in here.” “Then we’re closer to it.”
“Of course,” agreed Joe. “I knew that. It just goes to prove that the Ship is moving.” “But why didn’t you tell me about this?”
“About what?”
“About that star. About the way it’s been growing bigger.” “What difference does it make?”
“What difference does it make! Why, good Jordan, man, that’s it. That’s where we’re going. That’s the End of the Trip!”
Joe-Jim, both of him, was momentarily startled. Not being himself concerned with any objective other than his own safety and comfort, it was hard for him to realize that Hugh, and perhaps Bill Ertz as well, held as their first objective the recapturing of the lost accomplishments of their ancestors’ high order to complete the long-forgotten, half-mythical Trip to Far Centaurus.
Jim recovered himself. “Hm-m-m. Maybe. What makes you think that star is Far Centaurus?”
“Maybe it isn’t. I don’t care. But it’s the star we are closest to and we are moving toward it. When we don’t know which star is which, one is as good as another. Joe-Jim, the ancients must have had some way of telling the stars apart.”
“Sure they did,” Joe confirmed, “but what of it? You’ve picked the one you want to go to. Come on. I want to get back down.” “All right,” Hugh agreed reluctantly. They began the long trip down.
Ertz sketched out to Joe-Jim and Hugh his interview with Narby. “Now my idea in coming up,” he continued, “is this: I’ll send Alan back down to heavy-weight with a message to Narby, telling him that I’ve been able to get in contact with you, Hugh, and urging him to meet us somewhere above Crew country to hear what I’ve found out.”
“Why don’t you simply go back and fetch him yourself?” objected Hugh.
Ertz looked slightly sheepish. “Because you tried that method on me, and it didn’t work. You returned from mutie country and told me the wonders you had seen. I didn’t believe you and had you tried for heresy. If Joe-Jim hadn’t rescued you, you would have gone to the Converter. If you had not hauled me up to no-weight and forced me to see with my own eyes, I never would have believed you. I assure you Narby won’t be any easier a lock to force than I was. I want to get him up here, then show him the stars and make him see, peacefully if we can; by force if we must.”
“I don’t get it,” said Joe. “Why wouldn’t it be simpler to cut his throat?”
“It would be a pleasure. But it wouldn’t be smart. Narby can be a tremendous amount of help to us. Jim, if you knew the Ship’s organization the way I do, you would see why. Narby carries more weight in the Council than any other Ship’s officer and he speaks for the Captain. If we win him over, we may never have to fight at all. if we don’t … well, I’m not sure of the outcome, not if we have to fight.”
“I don’t think he’ll come up. He’ll suspect a trap.”
“Which is another reason why Alan must go rather than myself. He would ask me a lot of embarrassing questions and be dubious about the answers. Alan he won’t expect so much of.” Ertz turned to Alan and continued, “Alan, you don’t know anything when he asks you but just what I’m about to tell you. Savvy?”
“Sure. I don’t know nothing, I ain’t seen nothing, I ain’t heard nothing.” With frank simplicity he added, “I never did know much.”
“Good. You’ve never laid eyes on Joe-Jim, you’ve never heard of the stars. You’re just my messenger, a knife I took along to help me. Now here’s what you are to tell him.” He gave Alan the message for Narby, couched in simple but provocative terms, then made sure that Alan had it all straight. “All right, on your way! Good eating.”
Alan slapped the grip of his knife, answered, “Good eating!” and sped away.
It is not possible for a peasant to burst precipitously into the presence of the Captain’s Executive; Alan found that out. He was halted by the master-at-arms on watch outside Narby’s
suite, cuffed around a bit for his insistence on entering, referred to a boredly unsympathetic clerk who took his name and told him to return to his village and wait to be summoned. He held his ground and insisted that he had a message of immediate importance from the Chief Engineer to Commander Narby. The clerk looked up again. “Give me the writing.”
“There is no writing.”
“What? That’s ridiculous. There is always a writing. Regulations.” “He had no time to make a writing. He gave me a word message.” “What is it?”
Alan shook his head. “It is private, for Commander Narby only. I have orders.” The clerk looked his exasperation.
But, being only a probationer, he forewent the satisfaction of direct and immediate disciplining of the recalcitrant churl in favor of the safer course of passing the buck higher up. The chief clerk was brief. “Give me the message.”
Alan braced himself and spoke to a scientist in a fashion be had never used in his life, even to one as junior, as this passed clerk. “Sir, all I ask is for you to tell Commrnder Narby that I have a message for him from Chief Engineer Ertz. If the message is not delivered, I won’t be the one to go to the Converter! But I don’t dare give the message to anyone else.”
The under official pulled at his lip, and decided to take a chance on disturbing his superior.
Alan delivered his message to Narby in a low voice in order that the orderly standing just outside the door might not overhear. Narby stared at him. “Ertz wants me to come along with you up to mutie country?”
“Not all the way up to mutie country, sir. To a point in between, where Hugh Hoyland can meet you.” Narby exhaled noisily. “It’s preposterous. I’ll send a squad of knives up to fetch him down to me.”
Alan delivered the balance of his message. This time he carefully raised his voice to ensure that the orderly, and, if possible, others might hear his words. “Ertz said to tell you that if you were afraid to go, just to forget the whole matter. He will take it up with the Council himself.”
Alan owed his continued existence thereafter to the fact that Narby was the sort of man who lived by shrewdness rather than by direct force. Narby’s knife was at his belt; Alan was painfully aware that he had been required to deposit his own with the master-at-arms.
Narby controlled his expression. He was too intelligent to attribute the insult to the oaf before him, though he promised himself to give said oaf a little special attention at a more convenient time. Pique, curiosity, and potential loss of face all entered into his decision. “I’m coming with you,” he said savagely. “I want to ask him if you got his message straight.”
Narby considered having a major guard called out to accompany him, but he discarded the idea. Not only would it make the affair extremely public before he had an opportunity to judge its political aspects, but also it would cost him almost as much face as simply refusing to go. But he inquired nervously of Alan as Alan retrieved his weapon from the master-at-arms, “You’re a good knife?”
“None better,” Alan agreed cheerfully.
Narby hoped that the man was not simply boasting. Muties! Narby wished that he himself had found more time lately for practice in the manly arts.
Narby gradually regained his composure as he followed Alan up toward low-weight. In the first place nothing happened, no alarms; in the second place Alan was obviously a cautious and competent scout, one who moved alert and noiselessly and never entered a deck without pausing to peer cautiously around before letting his body follow his eye. Narby might have been more nervous had be hearing what Alan did hear: little noises from the depths of the great dim passageways, rustlings which told him that their progress was flanked on all sides. This worried Alan subconsciously, although he had expected something of the sort; he knew that both Hugh and Joe-Jim were careful captains who would not neglect to cover an approach. He would have worried more if he had not been able detect a reconnaissance which should have been present.
When he approached the rendezvous some twenty decks above the highest civilized level, he stopped and whistled. Awhistle answered him. “It’s Alan,” he called out.
“Come up and show yourself?” Alan did so, without neglecting his usual caution. When be saw no one but his friends: Ertz, Hugh, Joe-Jim, and Bobo, be motioned for Narby to foflow him.
The sight of Joe-Jim and Bobo broke Narby’s unsteady calm with a sudden feeling that he had been trapped. He snatched at his knife and backed clumsily down the stair then turned. Bobo’s knife was out even faster. For a split moment the outcome hung balanced, ready to fall either way. But Joe-Jim slapped Bobo across the face, took his knife from him and let it clatter to the deck, then relieved him of his slingshot.
Narby was in full flight, with Hugh and Ertz calling vainly after him. “Fetch him, Bobo!” Jim commanded, “and do not hurt him.” Bobo lumbered away.
He was back in fairly short order. “Run fast,” be commented. He dropped Narby to the deck where the officer lay almost quiet while he fought to catch his breath. Bobo took Narby’s knife from his own belt and tried it by shaving coarse black hairs from his left forearm. “Good blade,” he approved.
“Give it back to him,” Jim ordered. Bobo looked extremely startled but complied wistfully. Joe-Jim returned Bobo’s own weapons to him. Narby matched Bobo’s surprise at regaining his sidearm, but he concealed it better. He even managed to accept it with dignity.
“Look,” Ertz began in worried tones, “I’m sorry you got your wind up, Fin. Bobo’s not a bad sort. It was the only way to get you back.”
Narby fought with himself to regain the cool self-discipline with which he habitually met the world. Damn! he told himself, this situation is preposterous. Well… “Forget it,” he said shortly. “I was expecting to meet you; I didn’t expect a bunch of armed muties. You have an odd taste in playmates, Ertz.”
“Sorry,” Bill Ertz replied, “I guess I should have warned you.” a piece of mendacious diplomacy. “But they’re all right. Bobo you’ve met. This is Joe-Jim. He’s a… a sort of a Ship’s officer among the muties.”
“Good eating,” Joe acknowledged politely. “Good eating,” Narby replied mechanically.
“Hugh you know, I think.” Narby agreed that he did. An embarrassed pause followed. Narby broke it.
“Well,” he said, “you must have had some reason to send word for me to come up here. Or was it just to play games?”
“I did,” Ertz agreed. “I — Shucks, I hardly know where to start. See here, Narby, you won’t believe this, but I’ve seen. Everything Hugh told us was true. I’ve been in the Control Room. I’ve seen the stars. I know?”
Narby stared at him. “Ertz,” he said slowly, “you’ve gone out of your mind.”
Hugh Hoyland spoke up excitedly. “That’s because you haven’t seen. It moves, look you. The Ship moves like a—”
“Fit handle this,” Ertz cut in. “listen to me, Narby. What it all means you will soon decide for yourself, but I can tell you what I saw. They took me up to no-weight and into the Captain’s veranda. That’s a compartment with a glass wall. You can stare right out through into a great black empty space: big, bigger than anything could be. Bigger than the Ship. And there were lights out there, stars, just like the ancient myths said.”
Narby looked both amazed and disgusted. “Where’s your logic, man? I thought you were a scientist. What do you mean, ‘bigger than the Ship’? That’s an absurdity, a contradiction in terms. By definition, the Ship is the Ship. All else is a part of it.”
Ertz shrugged helplessly. “I know it sounds that way. I can’t explain it; it defies all logic. It’s — Oh, Huff! You’ll know what I mean when you see it.”
“Control yourself,” Narby advised him. “Don’t talk nonsense. Athing is logical or it isn’t. For a thing to be it must occupy space. You’ve seen, or thought you saw, something remarkable, but whatever it was, it can be no larger than the compartment it was in. You can’t show me anything that contradicts an obvious fact of nature.”
“I told you I couldn’t explain it.” “Of course you can’t.”
The twins had been whispering disgustedly, one head to the other. “Stop the chatter,” Joe said in louder tones. “We’re ready to go. Come on.” “Sure,” Ertz agreed eagerly, “let’s drop it, Narby, until you have seen it. Come on now; it’s a long climb.”
“What?” Narby demanded. “Say, what is this? Go where?” “Up to the Captain’s veranda, and the Control Room.” “Me? Don’t be ridiculous. I’m going down at once.”
“No, Narby,” Ertz denied. “That’s why I sent for you. You’ve got to see.”
“Don’t be silly. I don’t need to see; common sense gives sufficient answer. However,” he went on, “I do want to congratulate you on making a friendly contact with the muties. We should be able to work out some means of cooperation. I think—”
Joe-Jim took one step forward. “You’re wasting time,” he said evenly. “We’re going up; you, too. I really do insist.” Narby shook his head. “It’s out of the question. Some other time, perhaps, after we have worked out a method of cooperation.” Hugh stepped in closer to him from the other side. “You don’t seem to understand. You’re going now.”
Narby glanced the other way at Ertz. Ertz nodded. “That’s how it is, Narby.”
Narby cursed himself silently. Great Jordan! What in the Ship was he thinking of to let himself get into such a position? He had a distinct feeling that the two-headed man would rather that he showed fight. Impossible, preposterous situation. He cursed again to himself, but gave way as gracefully as he could. “Oh, well! Rather than cause an argument I’ll go now. Let’s get on with it. Which way?”
“Just stick with me,” advised Ertz. Joe-Jim whistled loudly in a set pattern. Muties seemed to grow out of the floor plates, the bulkheads, the overhead, until six or eight more had been added to the party. Narby was suddenly sick with the full realization of just how far he had strayed from the way of caution. The party moved up.
It took them a long time to get up to no-weight, as Narby was not used to climbing. The steady reduction in weight as they rose from deck to deck relieved him somewhat but the help afforded was more than offset by the stomach qualms he felt as weight dropped away from him. He did not have a true attack of space-sickness; like all born in the Ship, muties and Crew, he was more or less acclimated to lessened weight, but he had done practically no climbing since reckless adolescence. By the time they reached the innermost deck of the Ship he was acutely uncomfortable and hardly able to proceed.
Joe-Jim sent the added members of the party back below and told Bobo to carry Narby. Narby waved him away. “I can make it,” he protested, and by sheer stubborn will forced his body to behave. Joe-Jim looked him over and countermanded the order. By the time a long series of gliding dives had carried them as far forward as the transverse bulkhead beyond which lay the Control Room, he was reasonably comfortable again.
They did not stop first at the Control Room, but, in accordance with a plan of Hugh’s, continued on to. the Captain’s veranda. Narby was braced for what he saw there, not only by Ertz’s confused explanation, but because Hugh had chattered buoyantly to him about it all the latter part of the trip. Hugh was feeling warmly friendly to Narby by the time they arrived; it was wonderful to have somebody to listen!
Hugh floated in through the door ahead of the others, executed a neat turn in mid-air, and steadied himself with one hand on the back of the Captain’s easy chair. With the other he waved at the great view port and the starry firmament beyond it. “There it is!” he exulted. “There it is. Look at it, isn’t it wonderful?”
Narby’s face, showed no expression, but he looked long and intently at the brilliant display. “Remarkable,” he conceded at last, “remarkable. I’ve never seen anything like it.” “Remarkable ain’t half,” protested Hugh. “Wonderful is the word.”
“O.K., ‘wonderful,’” Narby assented. “Those bright little lights … you say those are the stars that the ancients talked about?”
“Why, yes,” agreed Hugh, feeling slightly disconcerted without knowing why, “only they’re not little. They’re big, enormous things, like the Ship. They just look little because they are so far away. See that very bright one, that big one, down to the left? It looks big because it’s closer. I think that is Far Centaurus, but I’m not sure,” he admitted in a burst of frankness.
Narby glanced quickly at him, then back to the big star. “How far away is it?”
“I don’t know. But we’ll find out. There are instruments to measure such things in the Control Room, but I haven’t got the hang of them entirely. It doesn’t matter, though. We’ll get there yet!”
“Huh?”
“Sure. Finish the Trip.”
Narby looked blank, but said nothing. His was a careful and orderly mind, logical to a high degree. He was a capable executive and could make rapid decisions when necessary, but he was by nature inclined to reserve his opinions when possible, until he had had time to chew over the data and assess it.
He was even more taciturn, in the Control Room. He listened and looked, but asked very few questions. Hugh did not care. This was his toy, his gadget, his baby. To show it off to someone who had never seen it and who would listen was all he asked.
At Ertz’s suggestion the party stopped at Joe-Jim’s apartment on the way back down. Narby must be committed to the same course of action as the blood brotherhood and plans must be made to carry out such action, if the stratagem which brought Narby to them was to be fruitful. Narby agreed to stop unreluctantly, having become convinced of the reality of the truce under which he made this unprecedented sortie into mutie country. He listened quietly while Ertz outlined what they had in mind. He was still quiet when Ertz had finished.
“Well?” said Ertz at last, when the silence had dragged on long enough to get on his nerves. “You expect some comment from me?”
“Yes, of course. You figure into it.” Narby knew that he did and knew that an answer was expected from him; he was stalling for time.
“Well…” Narby pursed his lips and fitted his fingertips together. “It seems to me that this problem divides itself into two parts. Hugh Hoyland, as I understand it, your purpose of carrying out the ancient Plan of Jordan cannot be realized until the Ship as a whole is pacified and brought under one rule; you need order and discipline for your purpose from Crew country clear to the Control Room. Is that right?”
“Certainly. We have to man the Main Drive and that means—”
“Please. Frankly, I am not qualified to understand things that I have seen so recently and have had no opportunity to study. As to your chances of success in that project, I would prefer to rely on the opinion of the Chief Engineer. Your problem is the second phase; it appears that you are necessarily interested in the first phase.”
“Of course.”
“Then let’s talk about the first phase only. It involves matters of public policy and administration. I feel more at home there; perhaps my advice will be useful. Joe-Jim, I understand that you ate looking for an opportunity to effect a peace between the muties and the members of the Crew; peace and good eating? Right?”
“That’s correct,” Jim agreed.
“Good. It has been my purpose for a long time and that of many of the Ship’s officers. Frankly it never occurred to me that it could be achieved other than by sheer force. We had steeled ourselves to the prospect of a long and difficult and bloody war. The records of the oldest Witness, handed down to him by his predecessors clear back to the time of the mythical Mutiny, make no mention of anything but war between muties and the Crew. But this is a better way; I am delighted.”
“Then you’re with us!” exclaimed Ertz.
“Steady, there are many other things to be considered. Ertz, you and I know, and Hoyland as well I should think, that not all of the Ship’s officers will agree with us. What of that?” “That’s easy,” put in Hugh Hoyland. “Bring them up to no-weight one at a time, let them see the stars and learn the truth.”
Narby shook his head. “You have the litter carrying the porters. I told you this problem is in two phases. There is no point in trying to convince a man of something he won’t believe when you need him to agree to something he can understand. After the Ship is consolidated it will be simple enough then to let the officers experience the Control Room and the stars.”
“But—”
“He’s right,” Ertz stopped him. “No use getting cluttered up with a lot of religious issues when the immediate problem is a practical one. There are numerous officers whom we could get on our side for the purpose of pacifying the Ship who would raise all kinds of fuss if we tackled them first on the idea that the Ship moves.”
“But—”
“No ‘buts’ about it. Narby is right. It’s common sense. Now, Narby, about this matter of those officers who may not be convinced, here’s how we see it: In the first place it’s your business and mine to win over as many as we can. Any who hold out against us — well, the Converter is always hungry.”
Narby nodded, completely undismayed by the idea of assassination as a policy. “That seems the safest plan. Mightn’t it be a little bit difficult?” “That is where Joe-Jim comes in. We’ll have the best knives in the Ship to back us up.”
“I see. Joe-Jim is, I take it, Boss of all the muties?”
“What gave you that idea?” growled Joe, vexed without knowing why.
“Why, I supposed … I was given to understand—” Narby stopped. No one had told him that Joe-Jim was king of the upper decks; he had assumed it from appearances. He felt suddenly very uneasy. Had he been negotiating uselessly? What was the point in a pact with this two-headed monstrosity if he did not speak for the muties?
“I should have made that clear,” Ertz said hastily. “Joe-Jim helps us to establish a new administration, then we will be able to back him up with knives to pacify the rest of the muties. Joe- Jim isn’t Boss of all the muties, but he has the largest, strongest gang. With our help he soon will be Boss of all of them.”
Narby quickly adjusted his mind to the new data. Muties against muties, with only a little help from the cadets of the Crew, seemed to him a good way to fight. On second thoughts, it was better than an outright truce at once, for there would be fewer muties to administer when it was all over, less chance of another mutiny. “I see,” he agreed. “So … Have you considered what the situation will be afterwards?”
“What do you mean?” inquired Hoyland.
“Can you picture the present Captain carrying out these plans?” Ertz saw what he was driving at, and so did Hoyland vaguely. “Go on,” said Ertz.
“Who is to be the new Captain?” Narby looked squarely at Ertz.
Ertz had not thought the matter through; he realized now that the question was very pertinent, if the coup d’etat was not to be followed by a bloody scramble for power. He had permitted himself to dream of being selected as Captain, sometime. But he knew that Narby was pointed that way, too.
Ertz had been as honestly struck by the romantic notion of moving the Ship as Hoyland. He realized that his old ambition stood in the way of the plan; he renounced the old with only a touch of wistfulness.
“You will have to be Captain, Fin. Are you willing to be?”
Phineas Narby accepted gracefully. “I suppose so, if that’s the way you want it. You would make a fine Captain, yourself, Ertz.”
Ertz shook his head, understanding perfectly that Narby’s full cooperation turned on this point. “I’ll continue Chief Engineer. I want to handle the Main Drive of the Trip.” “Slow down!” Joe interrupted. “I don’t agree to this. Why should he be Captain?”
Narby faced him. “Do you want to be Captain?” He kept his voice carefully free of sarcasm. Amutie for Captain! “Huff’s name, no! But why should you be? Why not Ertz or Hugh?”
“Not me,” Hugh disclaimed. “I’ll have no time for administration. I’m the astrogator.”
“Seriously, Joe-Jim,” Ertz explained, “Narby is the one of the group who can get the necessary cooperation out of the Ship’s officers.” “Damn it, if they won’t cooperate we can slit their throats.”
“With Narby as Captain we won’t have to slit throats.”
“I don’t like it,” groused Joe. His brother shushed, “Why get excited about it, Joe? Jordan knows we don’t want the responsibility.”
“I quite understand your misgivings,” Narby suggested suavely, “but I don’t think you need worry. I would forced to depend on you, of course, to administer the muties. I would administer the lower decks, a job I am used to and you would be Vice-Captain, if you are willing serve, for the muties. It would be folly for me to attempt to administer directly a part of the Ship I’m not familiar with and people whose customs I don’t know. I really can’t accept the captaincy unless you are willing to help me in that fashion. Will you do it?”
“I don’t want any part of it,” protested Joe.
“I’m sorry. Then I must refuse to be Captain. I really can’t undertake it if you won’t help me that much.” “Oh, go ahead, Joe,” Jim insisted. “Let’s take it, for the time being at least. The job has to be done.” “All right,” Joe capitulated, “but I don’t like it.”
Narby ignored the fact that Joe-Jim had not specifically agreed to Narby’s elevation to the captaincy; no further mention was made of it.
The discussion of ways and means was tedious and need not be repeated. It was agreed that Ertz, Alan, and Narby should all return to their usual haunts and occupations while preparations were made to strike.
Hugh detailed a guard to see them safely down to high-weight. “You’ll send Alan up when you are ready?” he said to Narby as they were about to leave.
“Yes,” Narby agreed, “but don’t expect him soon. Ertz and I will have to have time to feel out friends, and there’s the matter of the old Captain. I’ll have to persuade him to call a meeting of all the Ship’s officers; he’s never too easy to handle.”
“Well, that’s your job. Good eating!” “Good eating.”
On the few occasions when the scientist priests who ruled the Ship under Jordan’s Captain met in full assembly they gathered in a great hall directly above the Ship’s offices on the last civilized deck. Forgotten generations past, before the time of the mutiny led by Ship’s Metalsmith Roy Huff, the hall had been a gymnasium, a place for fun and healthy exercise, as planned by the designers of the great starship; but the present users knew nothing of that.
Narby watched the roster clerk check off the Ship’s Officers as they arrived, worried under a bland countenance. There were only a few more to arrive; he would soon have no excuse not to notify the Captain that the meeting was ready, but he had received no word from Joe-Jim and Hoyland. Had that fool Alan managed to get himself killed on the way up to deliver the word? Had he fallen and broken his worthless neck? Was he dead with a mutie’s knife in his belly?
Ertz came in, and before seeking his seat among the department heads, went up to where Narby sat in front of the Captain’s chair. “How about it?” he inquired softly. “All right,” Narby told him, “but no word yet.”
“Hm-m-m.” Ertz turned around and assayed his support in the crowd. Narby did likewise. Not a majority, not a certain majority, for anything as drastic as this. Still, the issue would not depend on voting.
The roster clerk touched his arm. “All present, sir, except those excused for sickness, and one on watch at the Converter.”
Narby directed that the Captain be notified, with a sick feeling that something had gone wrong. The Captain, as usual, with complete disregard for the comfort and convenience of others, took his time about appearing. Narby was glad of the delay, but miserable in enduring it. When the old man finally waddled in, flanked by his orderlies, and settled heavily into his chair, he was, again as usual, impatient to get the meeting over. He waved for the others to be seated and started in on Narby.
“Very well, Commander Narby, let’s have the agenda. You have an agenda, I hope?” “Yes, Captain, there is an agenda.”
“Then have it read, man, have it read! Why are you delaying?”
“Yes, sir.” Narby turned to the reading clerk and handed him a sheaf of writings. The clerk glanced at them, looked puzzled, but, receiving no encouragement from Narby, commenced to read: “Petition, to Council and Captain: Lieutenant Braune, administrator of the village of Sector 9, being of frail health and advanced age, prays that he be relieved of all duty and retired.” The clerk continued, setting forth the recommendations of the officers and departments concerned.
The Captain twisted impatiently in his chair, finally interrupted the reading. “What is this, Narby? Can’t you handle routine matters without all this fuss?”
“I understood that the Captain was displeased with the fashion in which a similar matter was lately handled. I have no wish to trespass on the Captain’s prerogatives.” “Nonsense, man! Don’t read Regulations to me. Let the Council act, then bring their decision to me for review.”
“Yes, sir.” Narby took the writing from the clerk and gave him another. The clerk read.
It was an equally fiddling matter. Sector 3 village, because of an unexplained blight which had infected their hydroponic farms, prayed for relief and a suspension of taxes. The Captain put up with still less of this item before interrupting. Narby would have been sorely pressed for any excuse to continue the meeting had not the word he awaited arrived at that moment. It was a mere scrap of parchment, brought in from outside the hall by one of his own men. It contained the single word, “Ready.” Narby looked at it, nodded to Ertz, and addressed the Captain:
“Sir, since you have no wish to listen to the petitions of your Crew, I will continue at once with the main business of this meeting.” The veiled insolence of the statement caused the Captain to stare at him suspiciously, but Narby went on. “For many generations, through the lives of a succession of Witnesses, the Crew has suffered from the depredations of the muties. Our livestock, our children, even our own persons, have been in constant jeopardy. Jordan’s Regulations are not honored above the levels where we live. Jordan’s Captain himself is not free to travel in the upper levels of the Ship.
“It has been an article of faith that Jordan so ordained it, that the children pay with blood for the sins of their ancestors. It was the will of Jordan, we were told. “I, for one, have never been reconciled to this constant drain on the Ship’s mass.” He paused.
The old Captain had been having some difficulty in believing his ears. But he found his voice. Pointing, he squealed, “Do you dispute the Teachings?”
“I do not. I maintain that the Teachings do not command us to leave the muties outside the Regulations, and never did. I demand that they be brought under the Regulations!” “You … you! You are relieved of duty, sir!”
“Not,” answered Narby, his insolence now overt, “until I have had my say.”
“Arrest that man!” But the Captain’s orderlies stood fast, though they shuffled and looked unhappy. Narby himself had selected them.
Narby turned back to the amazed Council, and caught the eye of Ertz. “All right,” he said. “Now!” Ertz got up and trotted toward the door. Narby continued, “Many of you think as I do, but we always supposed that we would have to fight for it. With the help of Jordan, I have been able to achieve contact with the muties and propose terms of a truce. Their leaders are coming here to negotiate with us. There!” He pointed dramatically at the door.
Ertz reappeared; following him came Hugh Hoyland, Joe-Jim, and Bobo. Hoyland turned to the right along the wall and circled the company. He was followed single file by a string of muties: Joe-Jim’s best butcher boys. Another such column trailed after Joe-Jim and Bobo to the left.
Joe-Jim, Hugh, and half a dozen more in each wing were covered with crude armor which extended below their waists. The armor was topped off with clumsy helms, latticeworks of steel, which protected their heads without greatly interfering with vision. Each of the armored ones, a few of the others, carried unheard-of knives, long as a man’s arm!
The startled officers might have stopped the invasion at the bottleneck through which it entered had they been warned and led. But they were disorganized, helpless, and their strongest leaders had invited the invaders in. They shifted in their chairs, reached for their knives, and glanced anxiously from one to another. But no one made the first move which would start a general bloodletting.
Narby turned to the Captain. “What about it? Do you receive this delegation in peace?”
It seemed likely that age and fat living would keep the Captain from answering, from ever answering anything again. But he managed to croak, “Get ‘em out of here! Get ‘em out! You— You’ll make the Trip for this!”
Narby turned back to Joe-Jim and jerked his thumb upward. Jim spoke to Bobo and a knife was buried to the grip in the Captain’s fat belly. He squawked, rather than screamed, and a look of utter bewilderment spread over his features. He plucked awkwardly at the hilt as if to assure himself that it was really there. “Mutiny.” he stated. “Mutiny—” The word trailed off as he collapsed into his chair, and fell heavily forward to the deck on his face.
Narby shoved it with his foot and spoke to the two orderlies. “Carry it outside,” he commanded. They obeyed, seeming relieved at having something to do and someone to tell them to do it. Narby turned back to the silent watching mass. “Does anyone else object to a peace with the muties?”
An elderly officer, one who had dreamed away his life as judge and spiritual adviser to a remote village, stood up and pointed a bony finger at Narby, while his white beard jutted indignantly. “Jordan will punish you for this! Mutiny and sin, the spirit of Huff!”
Narby nodded to Joe-Jim; the old man’s words gurgled in his throat, the point of a blade sticking out under one ear. Bobo looked pleased with himself.
“There has been enough talk,” Narby announced. “It is better to have a little blood now than much blood later. Let those who stand with me in this matter get up and come forward.” Ertz set the precedent by striding forward and urging his surest personal supporters to come with him. Reaching the front of the room, he pulled out his knife and raised the point. “I
salute Phineas Narby, Jordan’s Captain!”
His own supporters were left with no choice. “Phineas Narby, Jordan’s Captain!”
The hard young men in Narby’s clique, the backbone of the dissident rationalist bloc among the scientist priests, joined the swing forward en masse, points raised high and shouting for
the new Captain. The undecided and the opportunists hastened to join, as they saw which side of the blade was edged. When the division was complete, there remained a handful only of Ship’s officers still hanging back, almost all of whom were either elderly or hyperreligious.
Ertz watched Captain Narby look them over, then pick up Joe-Jim with his eyes. Ertz put a hand on his arm. “There are few of them and practically helpless,” he pointed out. “Why not disarm them and let them retire?”
Narby Eave him an unfriendly look. “Let them stay alive and breed mutiny. I am quite capable of making my own decisions, Ertz.” Ertz bit his lip. “Very well, Captain.”
“That’s better.” He signaled to Joe-Jim. The long knives made short work of it.
Hugh hung back horn the slaughter. His old teacher, Lieutenant Nelson, the village scientist who had seen his ability and selected him for scientisthood, was one of the group. It was a factor be had not anticipated.
World conquest and consolidation. Faith, or the Sword. Joe-Jim’s bullies, amplified by hot-blooded young cadets supplied by Captain Narby, combed the middle decks and the upper decks. The muties, individualists by the very nature of their existence and owing no allegiance higher than that to the leaders of their gangs, were no match for the planned generalship of Joe-Jim, nor did their weapons match the strange, long knives that bit before a man was ready.
The rumor spread through mutie country that it was better to surrender quietly to the gang of the Two Wise Heads; good eating for those who surrendered, death inescapable for those who did not.
But it was nevertheless a long slow process. There were so many, many decks, so many miles of gloomy corridors, so many countless compartments in which unsubdued muties might lurk. Furthermore, the process grew slower as it advanced, as Joe-Jim attempted to establish a police patrol, an interior guard, over each sector, deck, and stair way trunk, as fast as his striking groups mopped them up.
To Narby’s disappointment, the two-headed man was not killed in his campaigns. Joe-Jim had learned from his own books that a general need not necessarily expose himself to direct combat.
Hugh buried himself in the Control Room. Not only was he more interested in the subtle problems of mastering the how and why of the complex controls and the parallel complexity of starship ballistics, but also the whole matter of the blood purge was distasteful to him because of Lieutenant Nelson. Violence and death he was used to; they were commonplace even on the lower levels, but that incident made him vaguely unhappy, even though his own evaluations were not sufficiently clean-cut for him to feel personal responsibility for the old man’s death.
He just wished it had not happened.
But the controls: ahh. There was something a man could put his heart into. He was attempting a task that an Earthman would have rejected as impossible; an Earthmaa would have known that the piloting and operation of an interstellar ship was a task so difficult that the best possible technical education combined with extensive experience in the handling of lesser spacecraft would constitute a barely adequate grounding for the additional intensive highly specialized training necessary for the task.
Hugh Hoyland did not know that. So he went ahead and did it anyhow.
In which attempt he was aided by the genius of the designers. The controls of most machinery may be considered under the head of simple pairs, stop-and-go, push-and-pull, up-and- down, in-and-out, on-and-off, right-and-left, their permutations and combinations. The real difficulties have to do with upkeep and repair, adjustment and replacements.
But the controls and main drive machinery of the starship Vanguard required no upkeep and no repair; their complexities were below the molar level, they contained no moving parts, friction took no toil and they did not fall out of adjustment. Had it been necessary for him to understand and repair the machines he dealt with, it would have been impossible. Afourteen- year-old child may safely be entrusted with a family skycar and be allowed to make thousand-mile jaunts overnight unaccompanied; it is much more probable that he will injure himself on the trip by overeating than by finding some way to mismanage or damage the vehicle. But if the skycar should fall out of adjustment, ground itself, and signal for a repair crew, the repair crew is essential; the child cannot fix it himself.
The Vanguard needed no repair crew, save for nonessential ancilliary machinery such as transbelts, elevators, automassagers, dining services, and the like. Such machinery which necessarily used moving parts had worn out before the time of the first Witness; the useless mass involved had gone into the auxiliary Converter, or had been adapted to other simpler purposes. Hugh was not even aware that there ever had been such machinery; the stripped condition of most compartments was a simple fact of nature to him, no cause for wonder.
Hugh was aided in his quest for understanding by two other facts:
First, spaceship ballistics is a very simple subject, being hardly more than the application of the second law of motion to an inverse-square field. That statement runs contrary to our usual credos; It happens to be true. Baking a cake calls for much greater, though subconscious, knowledge of engineering; knitting a sweater requires a subconscious understanding of much more complex mathematical relationships: topology of a knitted garment, but try it yourself sometime!
For a complex subject, consider neurology, or catalysts, but don’t mention ballistics.
Second, the designers had clearly in mind that the Vanguard would reach her destination not sooner than generations after her departure; they wished to make it easy for the then-not- yet-born pilots who would command her on arrival. Although they anticipated no such hiatus in technical culture as took place, they did their best to make the controls simple and self- explanatory. The sophisticated fourteen-year-old mentioned, oriented as he would be to the concept of space, would doubtless have figured them out in a few minutes. Hugh, reared in a culture which believed that the Ship was the whole world, made no such quick job of it.
He was hampered by two foreign concepts, distance and metrical time. He had to learn to operate the finder, a delayed-action, long-base, parallax type designed for the Vanguard, and had taken measurements on a couple of dozen stellar bodies before it occurred him that the results he was getting could possibly stand for anything. The readings were in parsecs and without meaning emotionally. The attempt with the aid of the Sacred to translate his readings into linear units he could stand resulted in figures which he felt sure were were obviously preposterous. Check and recheck, followed long periods of brooding forced him unwillingly into some dim comprehension of astronomical magnitudes.
The concepts frightened him and bewildered him. For a period of several sleeps he stayed away from the Control Room, and gave way to a feeling of futility and depression. He occupied the time in sorting over the women captives, it being the first time since his capture by Joe-Jim long ago that he had had both the opportunity and the mood to consider the subject. The candidates were numerous, for, in addition to the usual crop of village maidens, Joe-Jim’s military operations had produced a number of prime widows. Hugh availed himself of his leading position in the Ship’s new setup to select two women. The first was a widow, a strong competent woman, adept at providing a man with domestic comforts. He set her up in his new apartment high up in low-weight, gave her a free hand, and allowed her to retain her former name of Chloe.
The other was a maiden, untrained and wild as a mutie. Hugh could not have told himself why he picked her. Certainly she had no virtues, but she made him feel funny. She had bitten him while he was inspecting her; he had slapped her, naturally, and that should have been an end to the matter. But he sent word back later for her father to send her along.
He had not got around to naming her.
Metrical time caused him as much mental confusion as astronomical distances, but no emotional upset The trouble was again the lack of the concept in the Ship. The Crew had the notion of topological time; they understood “now,” “before,” “after,” “has been,” “will be,” even such notions as long time and short time, but the notion of measured time had dropped out of the culture. The lowest of earthbound cultures has some idea of measured time, even if limited to days and seasons, but every earthly concept of measured time originates in astronomical phenomena; the Crew had been insulated from all astronomical phenomena for uncounted generations.
Hugh had before him, on the control consoles, the only working timepieces in the Ship, but it was a long, long time before he grasped what they were for and what bearing they had on other instruments. But until did, he could not control the Ship. Speed, and its derivatives, acceleration and flexure, are based on measured time.
But when these two new concepts were finally grasped, chewed over, and ancient books reread in the light of these concepts, he was, in a greatly restricted and theoretical sense, an astrogator.
Hugh sought out Joe-Jim to ask him a question. Joe-Jim’s minds were brilliantly penetrating when he cared to exert himself; he remained a superficial dilettante because he rarely cared.
Hugh found Narby just leaving. In order to conduct the campaign of pacification of the muties it had been necessary for Narby and Joe-Jim to confer frequently; to their mutual surprise they got along well together. Narby was a capable administrator, able to delegate authority and not given to useless elbow jogging; Joe-Jim surprised and pleased Narby by being more able than any subordinate he had ever dealt with before. There was no love wasted. between them, but each recognized in the other both intelligence and a hard self-interest which matched his own. There was respect and grudging contemptuous liking.
“Oh, hello, Hugh,” Narby answered, then turned back to Joe-Jim. “I’ll expect a report, then.”
“You’ll get it,” Joe agreed. “There can’t be more than a few dozen stragglers. We’ll hunt them out, or starve them.” “Am I butting in?” Hugh asked.
“No, I’m just leaving. How goes the great work, my dear fellow?” He smiled irritatingly. “Well enough, but slowly. Do you wish a report?”
“No hurry. Oh, by the bye, I’ve made the Control Room and Main Drive, in fact the entire level of no-weight, taboo for everyone, muties and Crew alike.” “So? I see your point, I guess. There is no need for any but officers to go up there.”
“You don’t understand me. It is a general taboo, applying to officers as well. Not to ourselves, of course.” “But… but, that won’t work. The only effective way to convince the officers of the truth is to take them up and show them the stars!”
“That’s exactly my point. I can’t have any officers upset by disturbing ideas while I am consolidating my administration. It will, create religious differences and impair discipline.” Hugh was too upset and astounded to answer at once. “But,” he said at last, “but that’s the point. That’s why you were made Captain.”
“And as Captain I will have to be the final judge of policy. The matter is closed. You are not to take anyone to the Control Room, nor any part of no-weight, until I deem it advisable. You’ll have to wait.”
“It’s a good idea, Hugh,” Jim commented. “We shouldn’t stir things up while we’ve got a war to attend to.” “Let me get this straight,” Hugh persisted. “You mean this is a temporary policy?”
“You could put it that way.”
“Well, all right,” Hugh conceded. “But wait — Ertz and I need to train assistants at once.” “Very well. Nominate them to me and I’ll pass on them. Whom do you have in mind?”
Hugh thought. He did not actually need assistance himself; although the Control Room contained acceleration chairs for half a dozen, one man, seated in the chief astrogator’s chair, could pilot the Ship. The same applied to Ertz in the Main Drive station, save in one respect. “How about Ertz? He needs porters to move mass to the Main Drive.”
“Let him. I’ll sign the writing. See that he uses porters from the former muties; but no one goes to the Control Room save those who have been there before.” Narby turned and left with an air of dismissal.
Hugh watched him leave, then said, “I don’t like this, Joe-Jim.” “Why not?” Jim asked. “It’s reasonable.”
“Perhaps it is. But … well, damn it! It seems to me, somehow, that truth ought to be free to anyone, any time!” He threw up his hands in a gesture of baffled exasperation. Joe-Jim looked at him oddly. “What a curious idea,” said Joe.
“Yeah, I know. It’s not common sense, but it seems like it ought to be. Oh, well, forget it! That’s not what I came to see you about.” “What’s on your mind, Bud?”
“How do we … Look, we finish the Trip, see? We’ve got the Ship touching a planet, like this—” He brought his two fists together. “Yes. Go on.”
“Well, when that’s done, how do we get out of the Ship?”
The twins looked confused, started to argue between themselves. Finally Joe interrupted his brother. “Wait a bit, Jim. Let’s be logical about this. It was intended for us to get out; that implies a door, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“There’s no door up here. It must be down in high weight.”
“But it isn’t,” objected Hugh. “All that country is known. There isn’t any door. It has to be up in mutie country.”
“In that case,” Joe continued, “it should be either all the way forward, or all the way aft, otherwise it would not go anywhere. It isn’t aft. There’s nothing back of Main Drive but solid bulkheads. It would need to be forward.”
“That’s silly,” Jim commented. “There’s the Control Room and the Captain’s veranda. That’s all.” “Oh, yeah? How about the locked compartments?”
“Those aren’t doors, not to the Outside anyway. Just bulkheads abaft the Control Room.” “No, stupid, but they might lead to doors.”
“Stupid, eh? Even so, how are you going to open them; answer me that, bright boy?” “What,” demanded Hugh, “are the ‘locked compartments’?”
“Don’t you know? There are seven doors, spaced on the main shaft in the same bulkhead as the door to Main Control Room. We’ve never been able to open them.” “Well, maybe that’s what we’re looking for. Let’s see!”
“It’s a waste of time,” Jim insisted. But they went.
Bobo was taken along to try his monstrous strength on the doors. But even his knotted swollen muscles couldn’t budge the levers which appeared to be intended to actuate the doors. “Well?” Jim sneered to his brother. “You see?”
Joe shrugged. “O.K., you win. Let’s go down.”
“Wait a little,” Hugh pleaded. “The second door back the handle seemed to turn a little. Let’s try it again.” “I’m afraid it’s useless,” Jim commented. But Joe said, “Oh, all right, as long as we’re here.”
Bobo tried again, wedging his shoulder under the lever and pushing from his knees. The lever gave suddenly, but the door did not open. “He’s broken it,” Joe announced.
“Yeah,” Hugh acknowledged. “I guess that’s that.” He placed his hand against the door. It swung open easily.
The door did not lead to outer space, which was well for the three, for nothing in their experience warned them against the peril of the outer vacuum. Instead a very short and narrow vestibule led them to another door which was just barely ajar. The door stuck on its hinges, but the fact that it was slightly ajar prevented it from binding anywhere else. Perhaps the last man to use it left it so as a precaution against the metal surfaces freezing together, but no one would ever know.
Bobo’s uncouth strength opened it easily. Another door lay six feet beyond. “I don’t understand this,” complained Jim as Bobo strained at the third door. “What’s the sense in an endless series of doors?”
“Wait and find out,” advised his brother.
Beyond the third door lay, not another door, but an apartment, a group of compartments, odd ones, small, crowded together and of unusual shapes. Bobo shot on. ahead and explored the place, knife in teeth, his ugly body almost graceful in flight. Hugh and Joe-Jim proceeded more slowly, their eyes caught by the strangeness Of the place.
Bobo returned, killed his momentum skillfully against a bulkhead, took his blade from his teeth, and reported, “No door. No more door any place. Bobo look.” “There has to be,” Hugh insisted, irritated at the dwarf for demolishing his hopes.
The moron shrugged. “Bobo look.”
“We’ll look.” Hugh and the twins moved off in different directions, splitting the reconnaissance between them.
Hugh found no door, but what he did find interested him even more: an impossibility. He was about to shout for Joe-Jim, when he heard his own name called. “Hugh! Come here!” Reluctantly he left his discovery, and sought out the twins. “Come see what I’ve found,” he began.
“Nevermind,” Joe cut him short. “Look at that.”
Hugh looked. “That” was a Converter. Quite impossibly but indubitably a Converter. “It doesn’t make sense,” Jim protested. “An apartment this size doesn’t need a Converter. That thing would supply power and light for half the Ship. What do you make of it, Hugh?”
Hugh examined it. “I don’t know,” he admitted, “but if you think this is strange, come see what I’ve found.” “What have you found?”
“Come see.”
The twins followed him, and saw a small compartment, one wall of which appeared to be of glass, black as if the far side were obscured. Facing the wall were two acceleratlon chairs, side by side. The arms and the lap desks of the chairs were covered with patterns of little white lights of the same sort as the control lights on the chairs in the Main Control Room.
Joe-Jim made no comment at first, save for a low whistle from Jim. He sat down in one of the chairs and started experimenting cautiously with the controls. Hugh sat down beside him. Joe-Jim covered a group of white lights on the right-hand arm of his chair; the lights in the compartment went out. When he lifted his hand the tiny control lights were blue instead of white. Neither Joe-Jim nor Hugh was startled. When the lights went out; they had expected it, for the control involved corresponded to similar controls in the Control Room.
Joe-Jim fumbled around, trying to find controls which would produce a simulacrum of the heavens on the blank glass before him. There were no such controls and he had no way of knowing that the glass was an actual view port, obscured by the hull of the Ship proper, rather than a view screen.
But he did manage to actuate the controls that occupied the corresponding position. These controls were labeled LAUNCHING; Joe-Jim had disregarded the label because he did not understand it. Actuating them produced no very remarkable results, except that a red light blinked rapidly and a transparency below the label came into life. It read: AIR-LOCK OPEN.
Which was very lucky for Joe-Jim, Hugh, and Bobo. Had they closed the doors behind them and had the little Converter contained even a few grams of mass available for power, they would have found themselves launched suddenly into space, in a Ship’s boat unequipped for a trip and whose controls they understood only by analogy with those in the Control Room. Perhaps they could have maneuvered the boat back into its cradle; more likely they would have crashed attempting it.
But Hugh and Joe-Jim were not yet aware that the “apartment” they had entered was a spacecraft; the idea of a Ship’s boat was still foreign to them. “Turn on the lights,” Hugh requested. Joe-Jim did so.
“Well?” Hugh went on. “What do you make of it?”
“It seems pretty obvious,” answered Jim. “This is another Control Room. We didn’t guess it was here because we couldn’t open the door.” “That doesn’t make sense,” Joe objected. “Why should there be two Control Rooms for one Ship?”
“Why should a man have two heads?” his brother reasoned. “From my point of view, you are obviously a supernumerary.” “It’s not the same thing; we were born that way. But this didn’t just happen; the Ship was built.”
“So what?” Jim argued. “We carry two knives, don’t we? And we weren’t born with ‘em. It’s a good idea to have a spare.”
“But you can’t control the Ship from here,” Joe protested. “You can’t see anything from here. If you wanted a second set of controls, the place to put them would be the Captain’s veranda, where you can see the stars.”
“How about that?” Jim asked, indicating the wall of glass.
“Use your head,” his brother advised. “It faces the wrong direction. It looks into the Ship, not out. And it’s not an arrangement like the Control Room; there isn’t any way to mirror the stars on it.”
“Maybe we haven’t located the controls for it.”
“Even so, you’ve forgotten something. How about that little Converter?” “What about it?”
“It must have some significance. It’s not here by accident. I’ll bet you that these controls have something to do with that Converter.” “Why?”
“Why not? Why are they here together if there isn’t some connection?”
Hugh broke his puzzled silence. Everythmg the twins had said seemed to make sense, even the contradictions. It was all very confusing. But the Converter, the little Conver— “Say, look,” he burst out.
“Look at what?”
“Do you suppose — Do you think that maybe this part of the Ship could move?” “Naturally. The whole Ship moves.”
“No,” said Hugh, “no, no. I don’t mean that at all. Suppose it moved by itself. These controls and the little Converter, suppose it could move right away from the Ship.” “That’s pretty fantastic.”
“Maybe so … but if it’s true, this is the way out.”
“Huh?” said Joe. “Nonsense. No door to the Outside here either.”
“But there would be if this apartment were moved away from the Ship: the way we came in!”
The two heads snapped simultaneously toward him as if jerked by the same string. Then they looked at each other and fell to arguing. Joe-Jim repeated his experiment witit the controls. “See?” Joe pointed out “‘Launching.’ It means to start something, to push something away.”
“Then why doesn’t it?”
“‘Air Lock Open.’ The doors we came through; it has to be that. Everything else is closed.” “Let’s try it.”
“We would have to start the Converter first.” “O.K.”
“Not so fast. Get out, and maybe you can’t come back. We’d starve.” “Hm-m-m, we’ll wait a while.”
Hugh listened to the discussion while snooping around the control panels, trying to figure them out. There was a stowage space under the lap desk of his chair; he fished into it, encountered something, and hauled it out. “See what I’ve found!”
“What Is it?” asked Joe. “Oh, a book. Lot of them back in the room next to the Converter.” “Let’s see it,” said Jim. But Hugh had opened it himself. “Log, Starship Vanguard,” he spelled out, “2 June, 2172. Cruising as before—” “What!” yelled Joe. “Let me see that!”
“3 June. Cruising as before. 4 June. Cruising as before. Captain’s mast for rewards and punishments held at 1300. See Administration Log. 5 June. Cruising as before.” “Gimme that!”
“Wait!” said Hugh. “6 June. Mutiny broke out at 0431. The watch became aware of it by visiplate. Hull, Metalsmith Ordinary, screened the control station and called on the watch to surrender, designating himself as ‘Captain.’ The officer of the watch ordered him to consider himself under arrest and signaled the Captain’s cabin. No answer.
“0435. Communications failed. The officer of the watch dispatched a party of three to notify the Captain, turn out the chief proctor, and assist in the arrest of Huff. “0441. Converter power off; free flight
“0502. Lacy, Crewman Ordinary, messenger-of-thewatch, one of the party of three sent below, returned to the control station alone. He reported verbally that the other two, Malcolm Young and Arthur Sears, were dead and that he had been permitted to return in order to notify the watch to surrender. The mutineers gave 0515 as a—”
The next entry was in a different hand: “0545. I have made every attempt to get into communication with other stations and officers in the Ship, without success. I conceive it as my duty, under the circumstances, to leave the control station without being properly relieved, and attempt to restore order down below. My decision may be faulty, since we are unarmed, but I see no other course open to me.
“Jean Baldwin, Pilot Officer Third Class, Officer of the Watch.” “Is that all?” demanded Joe.
“No,” said Hugh. “1 October (approximately), 2172. I, Theodor Mawson, formerly Storekeeper Ordinary, have been selected this date as Captain of the Vanguard. Since the last entry in this log there have been enormous changes. The mutiny has been suppressed, or more properly, has died out, but with tragic cost. Every pilot officer, every navigation officer is dead, or believed to be dead. I would not have been chosen Captain had there been a qualified man left.
“Approximately ninety per cent of the personnel are dead. Not all of that number died in the original outbreak; no crops have been planted since the mutiny; our food stocks are low. There seems to be clear evidence of cannibalism among the mutineers who have not surrendered.
“My immediate task must be to restore some semblance of order and discipline among the Crew. Crops must be planted. Aregular watch must be instituted at the auxiliary Converter on which we are dependent for heat and light and power.”
The next entry was undated. “I have been far too busy to keep this log up properly. Truthfully, I do not know the date even approximately. The Ship’s clocks no longer run. That may be attributable to the erratic operation of the auxiliary Converter, or it may possibly be an effect of radiations from outer space. We no longer have an antiradiation shield around the Ship, since the Main Converter is not in operation. My Chief Engineer assures me that the Main Converter could be started, but we have no one fitted to astrogate. I have tried to teach myself astrogation from the books at hand, but the mathematics involved are very difficult.
“About one newborn child out of twenty is deformed. I have instituted a Spartan code: such children are not permitted to live. It is harsh, but necessary.
“I am growing very old and feeble and must consider the selection of my successor. I am the last member of the crew to be born on Earth, and even I have little recollection of it. I was five when my parents embarked. I do not know my own age, but certain unmistakable signs tell me that the time is not far away when I, too, must make the Trip to the Converter.
“There has been a curious change in orientation in my people. Never having lived on a planet, it becomes more difficult as time passes for them to comprehend anything not connected with the Ship. I have ceased trying to talk to them about it; it is hardly a kindness anyhow, as I have no hope of leading them out of the darkness. Theirs is a hard life at best: they strive for a crop only to have it raided by the outlaws who still flourish on the upper levels. Why speak to them of better things?
“Rather than pass this on to my successor I have decided to attempt to hide it, if possible, in the single Ship’s boat left by the mutineers who escaped. It will be safe there a long time, otherwise some witless fool may decide to use it for fuel for the Converter. I caught the man on watch feeding it with the last of a set of Encyclopaedia Terresriana: priceless books. The idiot had never been taught to read! Some rule must be instituted concerning books.
“This is my last entry. I have put off making the attempt to place this log in safekeeping, because it is very perilous to ascend above the lower decks. But my life is no longer valuable; I wish to die knowing that a true record is left.
“Theodor Mawson, Captain.”
Even the twins were silent for a long time after Hugh stopped reading. At last Joe heaved a long sigh and said, “So that’s how it happened.” “The poor guy,” Hugh said softly.
“Who? Captain Mawson? Why so?”
“No, not Captain Mawson. That other guy, Pilot Officer Baldwin. Think of him going out through that door, with Huff on the other side.” Hugh shivered. In spite of his enlightenment, he subconsciously envisioned Huff, ‘Huff the Accursed, first to sin,’ as about twice as high as Joe-Jim, twice as strong as Bobo, and having fangs rather than teeth.
Hugh borrowed a couple of porters from Ertz, porters whom Ertz was using to fetch the pickled bodies of the war casualties to the Main Converter for fuel, and used them to provision the Ship’s boat: water, breadstuffs, preserved meats, mass for the Converter. He did not report the matter to Narby, nor did he report the discovery of the boat itself. He had no conscious reason; Narby irritated him.
The star of their destination grew and grew, swelled until it showed a visible disc and was too bright to be stared at long. Its bearing changed rapidly, for a star; it pulled across the backdrop of the stellariwn dome. Left uncontrolled, the Ship would have swung part way around it in a wide hyperbolic arc, accelerated as it flipped around the star, then sped off again into the darkness. It took Hugh the equivalent of many weeks to calculate the elements of the trajectory; it took still longer for Ertz and Joe-Jim to check his figures and satisfy themselves that the preposterous answers were right. It took even longer to convince Ertz that the way to rendezvous in space was to apply a force that pushed one away from where one wished to go, that is to say, dig in the heels, put on the brakes, kill the momentum.
In fact it took a series of experiments in free flight on the level of weightlessness to sell him the idea, otherwise he would have favored finishing the Trip by the simple expedient of crashing headlong into the star at top Speed. Thereafter Hugh and Joe-Jim calculated how to apply acceleration to kill the speed of the Vanguard and warp her into an eccentric ellipse around the star. After that, they would search for planets.
Ertz bad a little trouble understanding the difference between a planet and a star. Alan never did get it. “If my numbering is correct,” Hugh informed Ertz, “we should start accelerating any time now.”
“O.K.,” Ertz told him. “Main Drive is ready: over two hundred bodies and a lot of waste mass. What are waiting for?” “Let’s see Narby and get permission to start.”
“Why ask him?”
Hugh shrugged. “He’s Captain. He’ll want to know.”
“All right. Let’s pick up Joe-Jim and get on with it.” They left Hugh’s apartment and went to Joe-Jim’s. Joe-Jim was not there, but they found Alan looking for him, too. “Squatty says he’s gone down to the Captain’s office,” Alan informed him.
“So? It’s just as well. We’ll see him there. Alan, old boy, you know what?” “What?”
“The time has arrived. We’re going to do it! Start moving the Ship!” Alan looked round-eyed. “Gee! Right now?” “Just as soon as we can notify the Captain. Come along, if you like.”
“You bet! Wait while I tell my woman.” He darted away to his own quarters nearby. “He pampers that wench,” remarked Ertz.
“Sometimes you can’t help it,” said Hugh with a faraway look.
Alan returned promptly, although it was evident that he had taken time to change to a fresh breechcloth. “O.K.,” he bubbled. “Let’s go!”
Alan approached the Captain’s office with a proud step. He was an important guy now, he exulted to himself. He’d march on through with his friends while the guards saluted; no more of this business of being pushed around.
But the doorkeeper did not stand aside, although he did salute, while placing himself so that he filled the door. “Gangway, man!” Ertz said gruffly. “Yes, sir,” acknowledged the guard, without moving. “Your weapons, please.”
“What! Don’t you know me, you idiot? I’m the Chief Engineer.” “Yes, sir. Leave your weapons with me, please. Regulations.”
Ertz put a hand on the man’s shoulder and shoved. The guard stood firm. “I’m sorry, sir. No one approaches the Captain wearing weapons. No one.” “Well, I’ll be damned!”
“He remembers what happened to the old Captain,” Hugh observed sotto voce. “He’s smart.” He drew his own knife and tossed it to the guard, who caught it neatly by the hilt. Ertz looked; shrugged, and handed over his own. Alan, considerably crestfallen, passed his own pair over with a look that should have shortened the guard’s life.
Narby was talking; Joe-Jim was scowling on both his faces; Bobo looked puzzled, and naked, unfinished, without his ubiquitous knives and slingshot. “The matter is closed, Joe-Jim. That is my decision. I’ve granted you the faver of explaining my reasons, but it does not matter whether you like them or not.”
“What’s the trouble?” inquired Hugh.
Narby looked up. “Oh. I’m glad you came in. Your mutie friend seems to be in doubt as to who is Captain.” “What’s up?”
“He,” growled Jim, hooking a thumb toward Narby, “seems to think he’s going to disarm all the muties.” “Well, the war’s over, isn’t it?”
“It wasn’t agreed on. The muties were to become part of the Crew. Take the knives away from the muties and the Crew will kill them off in no time. It’s not fair. The Crew have knives.” “The time will come when they won’t,” Narby predicted, “but I’ll do it at my own time in my own way. This is the first step. What did you want to see me about, Ertz?”
“Ask Hugh.” Narby turned to Hugh.
“I’ve come to notify you, Captain Narby,” Hugh stated formally, “that we are about to start the Main Converter and move the Ship.”
Narby looked surprised but not disconcerted. “I’m afraid you will have to postpone that. I am not yet ready to permit officers to go up to no-weight.”
“It won’t be necessary,” Hugh explained. “Ertz and I can handle the first maneuvers alone. But we can’t wait. If the Ship is not moved at once, the Trip won’t be in your lifetime nor mine.” “Then it must,” Narby replied evenly, “wait.”
“What?” cried Hugh. “Narby, don’t you want to the Trip?” “I’m in no hurry.”
“What sort of damn foolishness is this?” Ertz demanded. “What’s got into you, Fin? Of course we move the Ship.”
Narby drummed on his desk top before replying. Then: he said, “Since there seems to be some slight misunderstanding as to who gives orders around here, I might as well let you have it straight. Hoyland, as long as your pastimes did not interfere with the administration of tbe Ship, I was willing for you to amuse yourself. I granted that willingly, for you have been very useful in your own way. But when your crazy beliefs become a possible source of corruption to good morals and a danger to the peace and security of the Ship, I have to crack down.”
Hugh had opened and closed his mouth several times during this speech. Finally he managed to get out: “Crazy? Did you say crazy?”
“Yes, I did. For a man to believe that the solid Ship can move means that he is either crazy, or an ignorant religious fanatic. Since both of you have the advantage of a scientist’s training, I assume that you have lost your minds.”
“Good Jordan!” said Hugh. “The man has seen with his own eyes, he’s seen the immortal stars, yet he sits there and calls us crazy!”
“What’s the meaning of this, Narby?” Ertz inquired coldly. “Why the razzle-dazzle? You aren’t kidding anyone; you’ve been to the Control Room, you’ve been to the Captain’s veranda, you know the Ship moves.”
“You interest me, Ertz,” commented Narby, looking him over. “I’ve wondered whether you were playing up to Hoyland’s delusions, or were deluded yourself. Now I see that you are crazy too.”
Ertz kept his temper. “Explain yourself. You’ve seen the Control Room; how can you contend that the Ship does not move?”
Narby smiled. “I thought you were a better engineer than you appear to be, Ertz. The Control Room is an enormous hoax. You know yourself that those lights are turned on and off by
switches — a very clever piece of engineering. My theory is that it was used to strike awe in the minds of the superstitious and make them believe in the ancient myths. But we don’t need it any more, the Crew believe without it. It’s a source of distraction now I’m going to have it destroyed and the door sealed up.”
Hugh went all to pieces at this, sputtered incoherently, and would have grappled with Narby had not Ertz restrained him. “Easy, Hugh,” he admonished. Joe-Jim took Hugh by the arm, his own faces stony masks.
Ertz went on quietly, “Suppose what you say is true. Suppose that the Main Converter and the Main Drive itself are nothing but dummies and that we can never start them, what about the Captain’s veranda? You’ve seen the stars there, not just an engineered shadow show.”
Narby laughed. “Ertz, you are stupider than I’ve guessed. I admit that the display in the veranda had me mystified at first, not that I ever believed in it! Then the Control Room gave the clue: it’s an Illusion, a piece of skillful engineering. Behind that glass is another compartment, about the same size and unlighted. Against its darkness those tiny moving lights give the effect of a bottomless hole. It’s essentially the same trick as they used in the Control Room.
“It’s obvious,” he went on. “I’m surprised that you did not see it. When an apparent fact runs contrary to logic and common sense, it’s obvious that you have failed to interpret the fact correctly. The most obvious fact of nature is the reality of the Ship itself, solid, immutable, complete. Any so-called fact which appears to disprove that is bound to be an illusion. Knowing that, I looked for the trick behind the illusion and found it.”
“Wait,” said Ertz. “Do you mean that you have been on the other side of the glass in the Captain’s veranda and seen these trick lights you talk about?”
“No,” admitted Narby, “it wasn’t necessary. Not that it wouldn’t be easy enough to do so, but it isn’t necessary. I don’t have to cut myself to know that knives are sharp.”
“So…” Ertz paused and thought a moment. “I’ll strike a deal with you. If Hugh and I are crazy in our beliefs, no harm is done as long as we keep our mouths shut. We try to move the Ship. If we fail, we’re wrong and you’re right.”
“The Captain does not bargain,” Narby pointed out. “However, I’ll consider it. That’s all. You may go.” Ertz turned to go, unsatisfied but checked for moment. He caught sight of Joe-Jim’s faces, and turned back. “One more thing,” he said. “What’s this about the muties? Why are you shoving Joe-Jim around? He and his boys made you Captain; you’ve got to fair about this.”
Narby’s smiling superiority cracked for amoment.
“Don’t interfere, Ertz! Groups of armed savages are not going to threaten this Ship!”
“You can do what you like with the prisoners,” Jim stated, “but my own gang keep their knives. They were promised good eating forever if they fought for you. They keep their knives. And that’s flnal!”
Narby looked him up and down. “Joe-Jim,” he remarked, “I have long believed that the only good mutie was a dead mutie. You do much to confirm my opinion. It will interest you to know that, by this time, your gang is already disarmed, and dead in the bargain. That’s why I sent for you!”
The guards piled in, whether by signal or previous arrangement it was impossible to say. Caught flatfooted, naked, weaponless, the five found themselves each with an armed man at his back before they could rally. “Take them away,” ordered Narby.
Bobo whined and looked to Joe-Jim for guidance. Joe caught his eye. “Up, Bobo!”
The dwarf jumped straight for Joe-Jim’s captor, careless of the knife at his back. Forced to split his attention, the man lost a vital half second. Joe-Jim kicked him in the stomach, and appropriated his blade.
Hugh was on the deck, deadlocked with his man, his fist clutched around the knife wrist. Joe-Jim thrust and the struggle ceased. The two-headed man looked around, saw a mixed pile- up of four bodies, Ertz, Alan, two others. Joe-Jim used his knife judiciously, being careful to match the faces with the bodies. Presently his men emerged. “Get their knives,” he ordered superfluously.
His words were drowned by a high, agonized scream. Bobo, still without a knife, had resorted to his primal weapons. His late captor’s face was a bloody mess, half bitten away. “Get his knife,” said Joe.
“Can’t reach it,” Bobo admitted guiltily. The reason was evident: the hilt protruded from Bobo’s ribs, just below his right shoulder blade. Joe-Jim examined it, touched it gently. It was stuck. “Can you walk?”
“Sure,” grunted Bobo, and grimaced.
“Let it stay where it is. Alan! With me. Hugh and Bill, cover rear. Bobo In the middle.” “Where’s Narby?” demanded Ertz, dabbing at a round on his cheekbone.
But Narby was gone, ducked out through the rear door behind his desk. And it was locked.
Clerks scattered before them in the outer office; Joe-Jim knifed the guard at the outer door while he was still raising his whistle. Hastily they retrieved their own weapons and added them to those they had seized. They fled upward.
Two decks above inhabited levels Bobo stumbled and fell. Joe-Jim picked him up. “Can you make it?” The dwarf nodded dumbly, blood on his lips. They climbed. Twenty decks or so higher it became evident that Bobo could no longer climb, though they had taken turns in boosting him from the rear. But weight was lessened appreciably at that level; Alan braced himself and picked up the solid form as if it were a child. They climbed. Joe-Jim relieved Alan. They climbed.
Ertz relieved Joe-Jim. Hugh relieved Ertz.
They reached the level on which they lived forward of their group apartments. Hugh turned in that direction. “Put him down,” commanded Joe. “Where do you think you are going?” Hugh settled the wounded man to the deck. “Homes. Where else?”
“Fool! That’s where they will look for us first.” “Where do we go?”
“Nowhere, in the Ship. We go out of the Ship!” “Huh?”
“The Ship’s boat.”
“He’s right,” agreed Ertz. “The whole Ship’s against us, now.”
“But … but—” Hugh surrendered. “It’s a long chance — but we’ll try it.” He started again in the direction of their homes. “Hey!” shouted Jim. “Not that way.”
“We have to get our women.”
“To Huff with the women! You’ll get caught. There’s no time.” But Ertz and Alan started off without question. “Oh, all right!” Jim snorted. “But hurry! I’ll stay with Bobo” Joe-Jim turned his attention to the dwarf, gently rolled him to his side and made a careful examination. His skin was gray and damp; a long red stain ran down from his right shoulder. Bobo sighed bubblingly and rubbed his head against Joe-Jim’s thigh. “Bobo tired, Boss.”
Joe-Jim patted his head. “Easy,” said Jim, “this is going to hurt.” Lifting the wounded man slightly, he cautiously worked the blade loose and withdrew it from the wound. Blood poured out freely.
Joe-Jim examined the knife, noted the deadly length of steel, and measured it against the wound. “He’ll never make it,” whispered Joe.
Jim caught his eye. “Well?”
Joe nodded slowly. Joe-Jim tried the blade he had just extracted from the wound against his own thigh, and discarded it in favor of one of his own razor-edged tools. He took the dwarf’s chin in his left hand and Joe commanded, “Look at me, Bobo!”
Bobo looked up, answered inaudibly. Joe held his eye. “Good Bobo! Strong Bobo!” The dwarf grinned as if he heard and understood, but made no attempt to reply. His master pulled his head a little to one side; the blade bit deep, snicking the jugular vein without touching the windpipe. “Good Bobo!” Joe repeated. Bobo grinned again.
When the eyes were glassy and breathing had unquestionably stopped, Joe-Jim stood up, letting the head and shoulders roll from him. He shoved the body with his foot to the side of the passage, and stared down the direction in which the others had gone. They should be back by now.
He stuck the salvaged blade in his belt and made sure that all his weapons were loose and ready.
They arrived on a dead run. “Alittle trouble,” Hugh explained breathlessly. “Squatty’s dead. No more of your men around. Dead maybe. Narby probably meant it. Here.” He handed him a long knife and the body armor that had been built for Joe-Jim, with its great wide cage of steel, fit to cover two heads.
Ertz and Alan wore armor, as did Hugh. The women did not; none had been built for them. Joe-Jim noted that Hugh’s younger wife bore a fresh swelling on her lip, as if someone had persuaded her with a heavy hand. Her eyes were stormy though her manner was docile. The older wife, Chloe, seemed to take the events in her stride. Ertz’s was crying softly; Alan’s wench reflected the bewilderment of her master.
“How’s Bobo?” Hugh inquired, as he settled Joe-Jim’s armor in place. “Made the Trip,” Joe informed him.
“So? Well, that’s that; let’s go.”
They stopped short of the level of no-weight and worked forward, because the women were not adept at weightless flying. When they reached the bulkhead which separated the Control Room and boat pockets from the body of the Ship, they went up. There was neither alarm nor ambush, although Joe thought that he saw a head show as they reached one deck. He mentioned it to his brother but not to the others.
The door to the boat pocket stuck and Bobo was not there to free it. The men tried it in succession, sweating big with the strain. Joe-Jim tried it a second time, Joe relaxing and letting Jim control their muscles, that they might not fight each other. The door gave. “Get them inside!” snapped Jim.
“And fast!” Joe confirmed. “They’re on us.” He had kept lookout while his brother strove. Ashout from down the line reinforced his warning.
The twins faced around to meet the threat while the men shoved the women in. Alan’s fuzzy-headed mate chose that moment to go to pieces, squalled, and tried to run but weightlessness defeated her. Hugh nabbed her, shoved her inside and booted her heartily with his foot.
Joe-Jim let a blade go at long throwing range to slow down the advance. It accomplished its purpose; their opponents, half a dozen of them, checked their advance. Then, apparently on signal, six knives cut the air simultaneonsly.
Jim felt something strike him, felt no pain, and concluded that the armor had saved him. “Missed us, Joe,” he exulted.
There was no answer. Jim turned his bead, tried to look at his brother. Afew inches from his eye a knife stuck through the bars of the helmet, its point was buried deep inside his left eye. His brother was dead.
Hugh stuck his head back out of the door. “Come on, Joe-Jim,” he shouted. “We’re all in.” “Get inside,” ordered Jim. “Close the door.”
“But—”
“Get inside!” Jim turned, and shoved him in the face, closing the door as he did so. Hugh had one startled glimpse of the knife and the sagging, lifeless face it pinned. Then the door closed against him, and he heard the lever turn.
Jim turned back at the attackers. Shoving himself away from the bulkhead with legs which were curiously heavy, he plunged toward them, his great arm-long knife, more a bob than a sword, grasped with both hands. Knives sang toward him, clattered against his breastplate, bit into his legs. He swung a wide awkward two-handed stroke which gutted an opponent, nearly cutting him in two. “That’s for Joe!”
The blow stopped him. He turned in the air, steadied himself, and swung again. “That’s for Bobo!”
They closed on him; he swung widely caring not where he hit as long as his blade met resistance. “And that’s for me!” Aknife planted itself in his thigh. It did not even slow him up; legs were dispensable in no-weight. “‘One for all!’”
Aman was on his back now he could feel him. No matter; here was one before him, too, one who could feel steel. As be swung, he shouted, “All for o—” The words trailed off, but the stroke was finished.
Hugh tried to open the door which had been slammed in his face. He was unable to do so; if there were means provided to do so, he was unable to figure them out. He pressed an ear against the steel and listened, but the airtight door gave back no clue.
Ertz touched him on the shoulder. “Come on,” be said. “Where’s Joe-Jim?” “He stayed behind.”
“Open up the door! Get him.”
“I can’t, it won’t open. He meant to stay, he closed it himself.” “But we’ve got to get him; we’re blood-sworn.”
“I think,” said Hugh, with a sudden flash of insight, “that’s why he stayed behind.” He told Ertz what he had seen.
“Anyhow,” he concluded, “it’s the End of the Trip to him. Get on back and feed mass to that Converter. I want power.” They entered the Ship’s boat proper. Hugh closed the air-lock doors behind them. “Alan!” he called out. “We’re going to start. Keep those damned women out of the way.”
He settled himself in the pilot’s chair, and cut the lights.
In the darkness he covered a pattern of green lights. Atransparency flashed on the lap desk: DRIVE READY. Ertz was on the job. Here goes! he thought, and actuated the launching combination. There was a short pause, a short and sickening lurch, a twist. It frightened him, since he had no way of knowing that the launching tracks were pitched to offset the normal spinning of the Ship.
The glass of the view port before him was speckled with stars; they were free — moving!
But the spread of jeweled lights was not unbroken, as it invariably had been when seen from the veranda, or seen mirrored on the Control Room walls; a great, gross, ungainly shape gleamed softly under the light of the star whose system they had entered. At first he could not account for it. Then with a rush of superstitious awe he realized that he was looking at the Ship itself, the true Ship, seen from the Outside. In spite of his long intellectual awareness of the true nature of the Ship; he had never visualized looking at it. The stars, yes; the surface of a planet, he had struggled with that concept; but the outer surface of the Ship, no.
When he did see it, it shocked him. Alan touched him. “Hugh, what is it?”
Hoyland tried to explain to him. Alan shook his head, and blinked his eyes. “I don’t get it.”
“Never mind. Bring Ertz up here. Fetch the women, too; we’ll let them see it.”
“All right. But,” he added, with sound intuition, “it’s a mistake to show the women. You’ll scare ‘em silly; they ain’t even seen the stars.”
Luck, sound engineering design, and a little knowledge. Good design, ten times that much luck, and a precious little knowledge. It was luck that had placed the Ship near a star with a planetary system, luck that the Ship arrived there with a speed low enough for Hugh to counteract it in a ship’s auxiliary craft, luck that he learned to handle it after a fashion before they starved or lost themselves in deep space.
It was good design that provided the little craft with a great reserve of power and speed. The designers had anticipated that the pioneers might need to explore the far-flung planets of a solar system; they had provided for it in the planning of the Ship’s boats, with a large factor of safety. Hugh strained that factor to the limit.
It was luck that placed them near the plane of planetary motion, luck that, when Hugh did manage to gun the tiny projectile into a closed orbit, the orbit agreed in direction with the rotation of the planets.
Luck that the eccentric ellipse he achieved should cause them to crawl up on a giant planet so that he was eventually able to identify it as such by sight.
For otherwise they might have spun around that star until they all died of old age, ignoring for the moment the readier hazards of hunger and thirst, without ever coming close enough to a planet to pick it out from the stars.
There is a misconception, geocentric and anthropomorphic, common to the large majority of the earth-bound, which causes them to visualize a planetary system stereoscopically. The mind’s eye sees a sun, remote from a backdrop of stars, and surrounded by spinning apples: the planets. Step out on your balcony and look. Can you tell the planets from the stars? Venus you may pick out with ease, but could you tell it from Canopus, if you had not previously been introduced? That little red speck: is it Mars, or is it Antares? How would you know, if you were as ignorant as Hugh Hoyland? Blast for Antares, believing it to be a planet, and you will never live to have grandchildren.
The great planet that they crawled up on, till it showed a visible naked-eye disc, was larger than Jupiter, a companion to the star, somewhat younger and larger the the Sun, around which it swung at a lordly distance. Hugh blasted back, killing his speed over many sleeps, to bring the Ship into a path around the planet. The maneuver brought him close enough to see its moons.
Luck helped him again. He had planned to ground the great planet, knowing no better. Had he been able do so they would have lived just long enough to open the air-lock.
But he was short of mass, after the titanic task of pulling them out of the headlong hyperbolic plunge around an arc past the star and warping them into a closed orbit about the star, then into a subordinate orbit around the giant planet. He pored over the ancient books, substituted endlessly in the equations the ancients had set down as the laws for moving bodies, figured and refigured, and tested even the calm patience of Chloe. The other wife, the unnamed one, kept out of his way after losing a tooth, quite suddenly.
But he got no answer that did not require him to sacrifice some, at least, of the precious, irreplaceable ancient books for fuel. Yes, even though they stripped themselves naked and chucked in their knives, the mass of the books would still be needed.
He would have preferred to dispense with one of his wives. He decided to ground on one of the moons.
Luck again. Coincidence of such a colossal proportion that one need not be expected to believe it, for the moon of that planet was suitable for human terrestrial life. Never mind, skip over it, rapidly; the combination of circumstances is of the same order needed to produce such a planet in the first place. Our own planet, under our own sun is of the “There ain’t no such animal” variety. It is a ridiculous improbability.
Hugh’s luck was a ridiculous improbability.
Good design handled the next phase. Although he learned to maneuver the little Ship out in space where there is elbow room, landing is another and a ticklish matter. He would have crashed any spacecraft designed before the designing of the Vanguard. But the designers of the Vanguard had known that the Ship’s auxiliary craft would be piloted and grounded by at least the second generation of explorers; green pilots must make those landings unassisted. They planned for it.
Hugh got the vessel down into the stratosphere and straightened it triumphantly into a course that would with certainty kill them all. The autopilots took over.
Hugh stormed and swore, producing some words which diverted Alan’s attention and admiration from the view out of the port. But nothing he could do would cause the craft to respond. It settled in its own way and leveled off at a thousand feet, an altitude which it maintained regardless of changing contour.
“Hugh, the stars are gone!” “I know it.”
“But Jordan! Hugh, what happened to them?”
Hugh glared at Alan. “I don’t know and I don’t care! You get aft with the women and stop asking silly questions.”
Alan departed reluctantly with a backward look at the surface of the planet and the bright sky; It interested him, but he did not marvel much at it; his ability to marvel had been overstrained. It was some hours before Hugh discovered that a hitherto ignored group of control lights set in motion a chain of events whereby the autopilot would ground the Ship. Since he found this
out experimentally he did not exactly choose the place of landing. But the unwinking stereo-eyes of the autopilot fed its data to the ‘brain’; the submolar mechanism selected and rejected;
the Ship grounded gently on a rolling high prairie near a clump of vegetation.
Ertz came forward. “What’s happened, Hugh?”
Hugh waved at the view port. “We’re there.” He was too tired to make much of it, too tired and too emotionally exhausted. His weeks of fighting a fight he understood but poorly, hunger, and lately thirst, years of feeding on a consuming ambition, these left him with little ability to enjoy his goal when it arrived.
But they had landed, they had finished Jordan’s Trip. He was not unhappy, at peace rather, and very tired. Ertz stared out. “Jordan!” he muttered. Then, “Let’s go out.” “All right.”
Alan came forward, as they were opening the air-lock, and the women pressed after him. “Are we there, Captain?” “Shut up,” said Hugh.
The women crowded up to the deserted view port; Alan explained to them, importantly and incorrectly, the scene outside. Ertz got the last door open.
They sniffed at the air. “It’s cold,” said Ertz. In fact the temperature was perhaps five degrees less than the steady monotony of the Ship’s temperature, but Ertz was experiencing weather for the first time.
“Nonsense,” said Hugh, faintly annoyed that any fault should be found with _his_ planet. “It’s just your imagination.” “Maybe,” Ertz conceded. He paused uneasily. “Going out?” he added.
“Of course.” Mastering his own reluctance, Hugh pushed him aside and dropped five feet to the ground “Come on; it’s fine.” Ertz joined him, and stood close to him. Both of them remained close to the Ship. “It’s big, isn’t it?” Ertz said in a hushed voice. “Well, we knew it would be,” Hugh snapped, annoyed with himself for having the same lost feeling.
“Hi!” Alan peered cautiously out of the door. “Can I comedown? Is it alright?” “Come ahead.”
Alan eased himself gingerly over the edge and joined them. He looked around and whistled. “Gosh!”
Their first sortie took them all of fifty feet from the Ship. They huddled close together for silent comfort, and watched their feet to keep from stumbling on this strange uneven deck. They made it without incident until Alan looked up from the ground and found himself for the first time in his life with nothing close to him. He was hit by vertigo and acute agoraphobia; he moaned, closed his eyes and fell.
“What in the Ship?” demanded Ertz, looking around. Then it hit him.
Hugh fought against it. It pulled him to his knees, but be fought it, steadying himself with one hand on the ground. However, he had the advantage of having stared out through the view port for endless time; neither Alan nor Ertz were cowards.
“Alan!” his wife shrilled from the open door. “Alan! Come back here!” Alan opened one eye, managed to get it focused on the Ship, and started inching back on his belly. “Man!” commanded Hugh. “Stop that! Situp.”
Alan did so, with the air of a man pushed too far. “Open your eyes!” Alan obeyed cautiously, reclosed them hastily.
“Just sit still and you’ll be all right,” Hugh added. “I’m all right already.” To prove it he stood up. He was still dizzy, but he made it. Ertz sat up.
The sun had crossed a sizable piece of the sky, enough time had passed for a well-fed man to become hungry, and they were not well fed. Even the women were outside; that had been accomplished by the simple expedient of going back in and pushing them out. They had not ventured away from the side of the Ship, but sat huddled against it. But their menfolk had even learned to walk singly, even in open spaces. Alan thought nothing of strutting a full fifty yards away from the shadow of the Ship, and did so more than once, in full sight of the women.
It was on one such journey that a small animal native to the planet let his curiosity exceed his caution. Alan’s knife knocked him over and left him kicking. Alan scurried to the spot, grabbed his fat prize by one leg, and bore it proudly back to Hugh. “Look, Hugh, look! Good eating!”
Hugh looked with approval. His first strange fright of the place had passed and had been replaced with a deep warm feeling, a feeling that he had come at last to his long home. This seemed a good omen. “Yes,” he agreed. “Good eating. From now on, Alan, always Good Eating.”
The End
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Here’s a really nice short little story to help get your mind off the craziness of day to day life. It’s a short science fiction story about a “spaceman”. You know, one of those old grizzly old “salts” that tended to the boiler and reactor rooms within those great 1940’s style “needle” spaceships. It’s a good and fun read. Enjoy…
The Green Hills of Earth
This is the story of Rhysling, the Blind Singer of the Spaceways — but not the official version. You sang his words in school:
“I pray for one last landing...
On the globe that gave me birth;
Let me rest my eyes on the fleecy skies And the cool, green hills of Earth.”
Or perhaps you sang in French, or German. Or it might have been Esperanto, while Terra’s rainbow banner rippled over your head.
The language does not matter — it was certainly an Earth tongue. No one has ever translated “Green Hills” into the lisping Venerian speech; no Martian ever croaked and whispered it in the dry corridors. This is ours. We of Earth have exported everything from Hollywood crawlies to synthetic radioactives, but this belongs solely to Terra, and to her sons and daughters wherever they may be.
We have all heard many stories of Rhysling. You may even be one of the many who have sought degrees, or acclaim, by scholarly evaluations of his published works –
Songs of the Spaceways,
The Grand Canal and other Poems,
High and Far, and …
“UP SHIP!”
Nevertheless, although you have sung his songs and read his verses, in school and out your whole life, it is at least an even money bet — unless you are a spaceman yourself — that you have never even heard of most of Rhysling’s unpublished songs, such items as…
Since the Pusher Met My Cousin,
That Red-Headed Venusburg Gal,
Keep Your Pants On, Skipper, or
A Space Suit Built for Two.
Nor can we quote them in a family magazine.
Rhysling’s reputation was protected by a careful literary executor and by the happy chance that he was never interviewed. Songs of the Spaceways appeared the week he died; when it became a best seller, the publicity stories about him were pieced together from what people remembered about him plus the highly colored handouts from his publishers.
The resulting traditional picture of Rhysling is about as authentic as George Washington’s hatchet or King Alfred’s cakes.
In truth you would not have wanted him in your parlor; he was not socially acceptable. He had a permanent case of sun itch, which he scratched continually, adding nothing to his negligible beauty.
Van der Voort’s portrait of him for the Harriman Centennial edition of his works shows a figure of high tragedy, a solemn mouth, sightless eyes concealed by black silk bandage. He was never solemn! His mouth was always open, singing, grinning, drinking, or eating. The bandage was any rag, usually dirty. After he lost his sight he became less and less neat about his person.
“Noisy” Rhysling was a jetman, second class, with eyes as good as yours, when he signed on for a ioop trip to the Jovian asteroids in the RS Goshawk. The crew signed releases for everything in those days; a Lloyd’s associate would have laughed in your face at the notion of insuring a spaceman. The Space Precautionary Act had never been heard of, and the Company was responsible only for wages, if and when. Half the ships that went further than Luna City never came back. Spacemen did not care; by preference they signed for shares, and any one of them would have bet you that he could jump from the 200th floor of Harriman Tower and ground safely, if you offered him three to two and allowed him rubber heels for the landing.
Jetmen were the most carefree of the lot, and the meanest.
Compared with them the masters, the radarmen, and the astrogators (there were no supers nor stewards in those days) were gentle vegetarians. Jetmen knew too much. The others trusted the skill of the captain to get them down safely; jetmen knew that skill was useless against the blind and fitful devils chained inside their rocket motors.
The Goshawk was the first of Harriman’s ships to be converted from chemical fuel to atomic power-piles — or rather the first that did not blow up. Rhysling knew her well; she was an old tub that had plied the Luna City run, Supra-New York space station to Leyport and back, before she was converted for deep space. He had worked the Luna run in her and had been along on the first deep space trip, Drywater on Mars — and back, to everyone’s surprise.
He should have made chief engineer by the time he signed for the Jovian loop trip, but, after the Drywater pioneer trip, he had been fired, blacklisted, and grounded at Luna City for having spent his time writing a chorus and several verses at a time when he should have been watching his gauges. The song was the infamous The Skipper is a Father to his Crew, with the uproariously unprintable final couplet.
The blacklist did not bother him.
He won an accordion from a Chinese barkeep in Luna City by cheating at onethumb and thereafter kept going by singing to the miners for drinks and tips until the rapid attrition in spacemen caused the Company agent there to give him another chance. He kept his nose clean on the Luna run for a year or two, got back into deep space, helped give Venusburg its original ripe reputation, strolled the banks of the Grand Canal when a second colony was established at the ancient Martian capital, and froze his toes and ears on the second trip to Titan.
Things moved fast in those days. Once the power-pile drive was accepted the number of ships that put out from the LunaTerra system was limited only by the availability of crews. Jetmen were scarce; the shielding was cut to a minimum to save weight and few married men cared to risk possible exposure to radioactivity. Rhysling did not want to be a father, so jobs were always open to him during the golden days of the claiming boom. He crossed and recrossed the system, singing the doggerel that boiled up in his head and chording it out on his accordion.
The master of the Goshawk knew him; Captain Hicks had been astrogator on Rhysling’s first trip in her. “Welcome home, Noisy,” Hicks had greeted him. “Are you sober, or shall I sign the book for you?”
“You can’t get drunk on the bug juice they sell here, Skipper.” He signed and went below, lugging his accordion.
Ten minutes later he was back. “Captain,” he stated darkly, “that number two jet ain’t fit. The cadmium dampers are warped.” “Why tell me? Tell the Chief.”
“I did, but he says they will do. He’s wrong.”
The captain gestured at the book. “Scratch out your name and scram. We raise ship in thirty minutes.” Rhysling looked at him, shrugged, and went below again.
It is a long climb to the Jovian planetoids; a Hawk-class clunker had to blast for three watches before going into free flight. Rhysling had the second watch. Damping was done by hand then, with a multiplying vernier and a danger gauge.
When the gauge showed red, he tried to correct it — no luck.
Jetmen don’t wait; thats why they are jetmen. He slapped the emergency discover and fished at the hot stuff with the tongs. The lights went out, he went right ahead. Ajetman has to know his power room the way your tongue knows the inside of your mouth.
He sneaked a quick look over the top of the lead baffle when the lights went out. The blue radioactive glow did not help him any; he jerked his head back and went on fishing by touch. When he was done he called over the tube, “Number two jet out. And for crissake get me some light down here!”
There was light — the emergency circuit — but not for him. The blue radioactive glow was the last thing his optic nerve ever responded to.
“As Time and Space come bending back to shape this starspecked scene, The tranquil tears of tragic joy still spread their silver sheen;
Along the Grand Canal still soar the fragile Towers of Truth; Their fairy grace defends this place of Beauty, calm and couth.
“Bone-tired the race that raised the Towers, forgotten are their lores, Long gone the gods who shed the tears that lap these crystal shores. Slow heats the time-worn heart of Mars beneath this icy sky;
The thin air whispers voicelessly that all who live must die — “Yet still the lacy Spires of Truth sing Beauty’s madrigal
And she herself will ever dwell along the Grand Canal!”
— from The Grand Canal, by permission of Lux Transcriptions, Ltd., London and Luna City
On the swing back they set Rhysling down on Mars at Drywater; the boys passed the hat and the skipper kicked in a half month’s pay. That was all — finish — just another space bum who had not had the good fortune to finish it off when his luck ran out. He holed up with the prospectors and archeologists at How-Far? for a month or so, and could probably have stayed forever in exchange for his songs and his accordion playing. But spacemen die if they stay in one place; he hooked a crawler over to Drywater again and thence to Marsopolis.
The capital was well into its boom; the processing plants lined the Grand Canal on both sides and roiled the ancient waters with the filth of the runoff. This was before the TriPlanet Treaty forbade disturbing cultural relics for commerce; half the slender, fairylike towers had been torn down, and others were disfigured to adapt them as pressurized buildings for Earthmen.
Now Rhysling had never seen any of these changes and no one described them to him; when he “saw” Marsopolis again, he visualized it as it had been, before it was rationalized for trade. His memory was good. He stood on the riparian esplanade where the ancient great of Mars had taken their ease and saw its beauty spreading out before his blinded eyes — ice blue plain of water unmoved by tide, untouched by breeze, and reflecting serenely the sharp, bright stars of the Martian sky, and beyond the water the lacy buttresses and flying towers of an architecture too delicate for our rumbling, heavy planet.
The result was Grand Canal.
The subtle change in his orientation which enabled him to see beauty at Marsopolis where beauty was not now began to affect his whole life. All women became beautiful to him. He knew them by their voices and fitted their appearances to the sounds. It is a mean spirit indeed who will speak to a blind man other than in gentle friendliness; scolds who had given their husbands no peace sweetened their voices to Rhysling.
It populated his world with beautiful women and gracious men. Dark Star Passing, Berenice’s Hair, Death Song of a Wood’s Colt, and his other love songs of the wanderers, the womenless men of space, were the direct result of the fact that his conceptions were unsullied by tawdry truths. It mellowed his approach, changed his doggerel to verse, and sometimes even to poetry.
He had plenty of time to think now, time to get all the lovely words just so, and to worry a verse until it sang true in his head. The monotonous beat of Jet Song — When the field is clear, the reports all seen,
When the lock sighs shut, when the lights wink green, When the check-off’s done, when it’s time to pray, When the Captain nods, when she blasts away — Hear the jets!
Hear them snarl at your back When you’re stretched on the rack; Feel your ribs clamp your chest, Feel your neck grind its rest.
Feel the pain in your ship, Feel her strain in their grip. Feel her rise! Feel her drive! Straining steel, come alive, On her jets!
—came to him not while he himself was a jetman but later while he was hitch-hiking from Mars to Venus and sitting out a watch with an old shipmate.
At Venusburg he sang his new songs and some of the old, in the bars. Someone would start a hat around for him; it would come back with a minstrel’s usual take doubled or tripled in recognition of the gallant spirit behind the bandaged eyes.
It was an easy life. Any space port was his home and any ship his private carriage. No skipper cared to refuse to lift the extra mass of blind Rhysling and his squeeze box; he shuttled from Venusburg to Leyport to Drywater to New Shanghai, or back again, as the whim took him.
He never went closer to Earth than Supra-New York Space Station. Even when signing the contract for Songs of the Spaceways he made his mark in a cabin-class liner somewhere between Luna City and Ganymede. Horowitz, the original publisher, was aboard for a second honeymoon and heard Rhysling sing at a ship’s party. Horowitz knew a good thing for the publishing trade when he heard it; the entire contents of Songs were sung directly into the tape in the communications room of that ship before he let Rhysling out of his sight. The next three volumes were squeezed out of Rhysling at Venusburg, where Horowitz had sent an agent to keep him liquored up until he had sung all he could remember.
UP SHIP! is not certainly authentic Rhysling throughout. Much of it is Rhysling’s, no doubt, and Jet Song is unquestionably his, but most of the verses were collected after his death from people who had known him during his wanderings.
The Green Hills of Earth grew through twenty years. The earliest form we know about was composed before Rhysling was blinded, during a drinking bout with some of the indentured men on Venus. The verses were concerned mostly with the things the labor clients intended to do back on Earth if and when they ever managed to pay their bounties and thereby be allowed to go home. Some of the stanzas were vulgar, some were not, but the chorus was recognizably that of Green Hills.
We know exactly where the final form of Green Hills came from, and when.
There was a ship in at Venus Ellis Isle which was scheduled for the direct jump from there to Great Lakes, Illinois. She was the old Falcon, youngest of the Hawk class and the first ship to apply the Harriman Trust’s new policy of extra-fare express service between Earth cities and any colony with scheduled stops.
Rhysling decided to ride her back to Earth. Perhaps his own song had gotten under his skin — or perhaps he just hankered to see his native Ozark’s one more time.
The Company no longer permitted deadheads: Rhysling knew this but it never occurred to him that the ruling might apply to him. He was getting old, for a spaceman, and just a little matter of fact about his privileges. Not senile — he simply knew that he was one of the landmarks in space, along with Halley’s Comet, the Rings, and Brewster’s Ridge. He walked in the crew’s port, went below, and made himself at home in the first empty acceleration couch.
The Captain found him there while making a last minute tour of his ship. “What are you doing here?” he demanded. “Dragging it back to Earth, Captain.” Rhysling needed no eyes to see a skipper’s four stripes.
“You can’t drag in this ship; you know the rules. Shake a leg and get out of here. We raise ship at once.” The Captain was young; he had come up after Rhysling’s active time, but Rhysling knew the type — five years at Harriman Hall with only cadet practice trips instead of solid, deep space experience. The two men did not touch in background nor spirit; space was changing.
“Now, Captain, you wouldn’t begrudge an old man a trip home.”
The officer hesitated — several of the crew had stopped to listen. “I can’t do it. ‘Space PrecautionaryAct, Clause Six: No one shall enter space save as a licensed member of a crew of a chartered vessel, or as a paying passenger of such a vessel under such regulations as may be issued pursuant to this act.’ Up you get and out you go.”
Rhysling lolled back, his hands under his head. “If I’ve got to go, I’m damned if I’ll walk. Carry me.” The Captain bit his lip and said, “Master-at-Arms! Have this man removed.”
The ship’s policeman fixed his eyes on the overhead struts. “Can’t rightly do it, Captain. I’ve sprained my shoulder.” The other crew members, present a moment before, had faded into the bulkhead paint.
“Well, get a working party!”
“Aye, aye, sir.” He, too, went away.
Rhysling spoke again. “Now look, Skipper — let’s not have any hard feelings about this. You’ve got an out to carry me if you want to — the ‘Distressed Spaceman’ clause.”
“‘Distressed Spaceman’, my eye! You’re no distressed spaceman; you’re a space-lawyer. I know who you are; you’ve been bumming around the system for years. Well, you won’t do it in my ship. That clause was intended to succor men who had missed their ships, not to let a man drag free all over space.”
“Well, now, Captain, can you properly say I haven’t missed my ship? I’ve never been back home since my last trip as a signed-on crew member. The law says I can have a trip back.” “But that was years ago. You’ve used up your chance.”
“Have I now? The clause doesn’t say a word about how soon a man has to take his trip back; it just says he’s got it coming to him. Go look it up. Skipper. If I’m wrong, I’ll not only walk out on my two legs, I’ll beg your humble pardon in front of your crew. Go on — look it up. Be a sport.”
Rhysling could feel the man’s glare, but he turned and stomped out of the compartment. Rhysling knew that he had used his blindness to place the Captain in an impossible position, but this did not embarrass Rhysling — he rather enjoyed it.
Ten minutes later the siren sounded, he heard the orders on the bull horn for Up-Stations. When the soft sighing of the locks and the slight pressure change in his ears let him know that take-off was imminent he got up and shuffled down to the power room, as he wanted to be near the jets when they blasted off. He needed no one to guide him in any ship of the Hawk class.
Trouble started during the first watch. Rhysling had been lounging in the inspector’s chair, fiddling with the keys of his accordion and trying out a new version of Green Hills.
“Let me breathe unrationed air again
Where there’s no lack nor dearth”
And “something, something, something ‘Earth’” — it would not come out right. He tried again. “Let the sweet fresh breezes heal me
As they rove around the girth Of our lovely mother planet,
Of the cool green hills of Earth.”
That was better, he thought. “How do you like that, Archie?” he asked over the muted roar.
“Pretty good. Give out with the whole thing.” Archie Macdougal, Chief Jetman, was an old friend, both spaceside and in bars; he had been an apprentice under Rhysling many years and millions of miles back.
Rhysling obliged, then said, “You youngsters have got it soft. Everything automatic. When I was twisting her tail you had to stay awake.”
“You still have to stay awake.” They fell to talking shop and Macdougal showed him the direct response damping rig which had replaced the manual vernier control which Rhysling had used. Rhysling felt out the controls and asked questions until he was familiar with the new installation. It was his conceit that he was still a jetman and that his present occupation as a troubadour was simply an expedient during one of the fusses with the company that any man could get into.
“I see you still have the old hand damping plates installed,” he remarked, his agile fingers flitting over the equipment. “All except the links. I unshipped them because they obscure the dials.”
“You ought to have them shipped. You might need them.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I think—” Rhysling never did find out what Macdougal thought for it was at that moment the trouble tore loose. Macdougal caught it square, a blast of radioactivity that burned him down where he stood.
Rhysling sensed what had happened. Automatic reflexes of old habit came out. He slapped the discover and rang the alarm to the control room simultaneously. Then he remembered the unshipped links. He had to grope until he found them, while trying to keep as low as he could to get maximum benefit from the baffles. Nothing but the links bothered him as to location. The place was as light to him as any place could be; he knew every spot, every control, the way he knew the keys of his accordion.
“Power room! Power room! What’s the alarm?”
“Stay out!” Rhysling shouted. “The place is ‘hot.’” He could feel it on his face and in his bones, like desert sunshine.
The links he got into place, after cursing someone, anyone, for having failed to rack the wrench he needed. Then he commenced trying to reduce the trouble by hand. It was a long job and ticklish. Presently he decided that the jet would have to be spilled, pile and all.
First he reported. “Control!” “Control aye aye!”
“Spilling jet three — emergency.” “Is this Macdougal?”
“Macdougal is dead. This is Rhysling, on watch. Stand by to record.”
There was no answer; dumbfounded the Skipper may have been, but he could not interfere in a power room emergency. He had the ship to consider, and the passengers and crew. The doors had to stay closed.
The Captain must have been still more surprised at what Rhysling sent for record. It was:
We rot in the molds of Venus,
We retch at her tainted breath.
Foul are her flooded jungles,
Crawling with unclean death.”
Rhysling went on cataloguing the Solar System as he worked, “—harsh bright soil of Luna—”,”—Saturn’s rainbow rings—”,”—the frozen night of Titan—”, all the while opening and spilling the jet and fishing it clean. He finished with an alternate chorus —
“We’ve tried each spinning space mote And reckoned its true worth:
Take us back again to the homes of men On the cool, green hills of Earth.”
—then, almost absentmindedly remembered to tack on his revised first verse:
“The arching sky is calling
Spacemen back to their trade. All hands! Stand by! Free falling! And the lights below us fade. Out ride the sons of Terra,
Far drives the thundering jet, Up leaps the race of Earthmen, Out, far, and onward yet—”
The ship was safe now and ready to limp home shy one jet. As for himself, Rhysling was not so sure. That “sunburn” seemed sharp, he thought. He was unable to see the bright, rosy fog in which he worked but he knew it was there.
He went on with the business of flushing the air out through the outer valve, repeating it several times to permit the level of radioaction to drop to something a man might stand under suitable armor.
While he did this he sent one more chorus, the last bit of authentic Rhysling that ever could be:
“We pray for one last landing On the globe that gave us birth;
Let us rest our eyes on fleecy skies And the cool, green hills of Earth.”
The End
I do hope that you enjoyed this story. I have many more in my Fictional Stories Index here…
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Here’s a nice classic story from the Golden Age” of Science Fiction literature. It was sritten by one of the “greats” of the gendre, Mr. Theodore Sturgeon and this work is classic. I hope that you read it and enjoy it as much as I have. It’s a great story for a nice lazy afternoon day.
THE GOLDEN EGG
WHEN time itself was half its present age, and at an unthinkable distance, and in an unknowable dimension born.
He left his world so long before he came to earth that even he did not know how long he had been in space. He had lived so long on that world that even he could not remember what he had been before his science changed his race.
Though we can never know where his world lay in space, we know that it was in a system of two mighty suns, one blue and one yellow. His planet had an atmosphere and a great civilization and science beyond humanity’s most profound visions. He spoke little of his planet because he hated it. Too perfect. Their sciences fed them, and controlled the etheric currents that gave them comfort, and carried them from place to place, and taught them, and cared for them in every way. For many aeons there were members set apart to care for the machines, but in time they died out, for they were no longer needed. There was no struggle and no discomfort and no disease. There were therefore no frontiers, no goals, no incentives, and eventually no possible achievements, save one—the race itself, and the changes possible to it.
Step by step the thing was done. Limbs were not and wasted away from long-lived, lazy bodies, and were replaced, redesigned, or forgotten. And as the death of an inhabitant became more rare, rarer still became the advent of new life. It was a mighty race, a powerful race, a most highly civilized race, and—a sterile race.
The refinement went on endlessly, as occasional flashes of initiative appeared down through the ages. What was unnecessary was discarded, and what could be conceivably desirable was attained, until all that was left was a few thousand glittering golden ovoids, supermental casings, functionally streamlined, beautiful and bored. It was life of a sort. The beings could move as and if they wished, through air or time or space. Everything was done for them automatically; each was self-sufficient and uncooperative. Brains they were, armored in a substance indestructible by anything less powerful than the heat of the mightiest of suns or by the supercosmic forces each could unleash at will.
But there was no will. There was nothing for them. They hung in small groups conversing of things unimaginable to us, or they lay on the plains of their world and lived within themselves until a few short aeons buried them, all uncaring, in rubble and rock. Some asked to be killed and were killed. Some were murdered by others because of quibblings in remote philosophic discussions. Some hurled themselves into the blue sun, starved for any new sensation, knowing they would find there an instant’s agony.
Most simply vegetated. One came away.
He stopped, in a way known to him—stopped in space so that his world and solar system and corner of the cosmos fell away from him and left him free. And then he traveled.
He traveled to many places and in many ways, as his whims dictated. He extended himself at times around the curve of curved space, until the ends of him were diametrically opposite; and then he would contract in a straight line, reforming countless millions of light years from the point of his extension; and his speed then was, of course, the speed of light cubed. And sometimes he dropped from his level in time to the level below, and would then lie poised and thoughtful during one cycle, until he was returned to the higher level again; and it was thus he discovered the nature of time, which is a helical band, ever revolving, never moving in its superspace. And sometimes he would move slowly, drifting from one gravitic pull to another, searching disinterestedly for the unusual. It was in such a period that he came to earth.
A goose found him. He lay in some bushes by a country road, distantly observing the earth and analyzing its elements, and the goose was a conventional one and blindly proud of its traditional silliness. He ignored it when it approached him and when it rapped his shell curiously; but when it turned him over with its beak he felt that it was being discourteous. He seized it with a paralyzing noose of radiations, quickly read its minuscule mind for a way to annoy it, and then began pulling its tail feathers out tb see how it would react. It reacted loudly.
Now, it so happened that Christopher Innes was on that country road, bringing the young’un home from Sunday school. Chris was an embittered and cynical mortal, being a normal twelve-year-old who had just learned that increasing age and masculinity made for superiority, and was about to be a teen-ager and find out differently. The young’un was his five-year-old sister, of whom he was jealous and protective. She had silly ideas. She was saying:
“But they tol’ me in school last week, Chris, so it mus’ be so, so there. The prince came into the palace an’ everyone was asleep, an’ he came to the room where she was, an’ she was asleep, too, but he kissed her an’ she woke up, and then everyone—”
“Aw, shut your fontanel,” said Chris, who had heard that babies shut their fontanels when they started to grow, though he didn’t know what one was. “You believe everything you hear. Ol’ Mr. Becker tol’ me once I could catch a bird by putting salt on its tail, an’ then whaled me for loadin’ up a twelve-gauge shotgun with rock salt and knockin’ off three of his Rhode Island Reds. They tell you that stuff so they’ll have a chance to hit you afterward.” “I don’t care, so there,” pouted the young’un. “My teacher wouldn’t hit me for b’lieving her.”
“Somebody will,” Chris said darkly. “What’s all that racket, I wonder?
Sounds like a duck caught in a fox trap. Let’s go see.”
Chris stopped to pick up a piece of stick in case he had a trap to pry open, and the young’un ran ahead. When he reached her he found her jumping up and down and clapping her hands and gurgling, “I told you so! I told you so!” which is the most annoying thing any woman can say to any man. “You tol’ me whut?” he asked, and she pointed. He saw a large white goose digging its feet into the ground, straining to get away from its invisible bonds, while behind it lay a glittering ovoid. As they watched, a tail feather detached itself from its anchorage and fell beside two of its prototype on the ground.
“Chee!” Chris breathed.
“They tol’ me that story, too!” chortled the young’un. “About the goose that laid the golden egg. Oh, Chris, if we take that goose home an’ keep um, we’ll be rich an’ I can have a pony an’ a hundred dolls an’—”
“Chee,” Chris said again and gingerly picked up the golden egg. As he did so the goose was released suddenly, and its rooted claws shot it forward face first into the earth, where it lay stunned and quonking dismally. As only a farm child can, the young’un caught its legs together and picked it up in her arms.
“We’re rich!” breathed Chris and laughed. Then he remembered his assertions and frowned. “Aw, it didn’t lay no egg. Someone lost it an’ this ol’ goose jus’ found it here.”
“It’s the golden-egg goose! It is too!” shrilled the young’un.
Chris spat on the egg and rubbed it with his cuff. “It’s sure pretty,” he said half to himself, and tossed it into the air. He must have stood there open-mouthed for two full minutes with his hands out, because it never came down. It vanished.
They found out later that the goose was a gander. Neither of them ever quite got over it.
“It might be interesting,” thought the armored brain to himself as he lay in the stratosphere, “to be a biped like that for a while. I believe I will try it. I wonder which of the two is the more intelligent—the feathered or unfeathered ones?” He pondered a moment over this nice distinction and then remembered that the boy had armed himself with a stick, while the goose had not. “They are a little ungainly,” he thought, then shrugged mentally. “I shall be one of those.”
He plummeted down to earth, braked off, and shot along just over the surface until he came to a small town. A movement in a tiny alley caught his attention; a man there was leveling a gun at another across the street. Unseen, the being from space flashed between them, and his path intersected that of the bullet. It struck his smooth side and neither left a mark nor changed his course by a thousandth of a degree as it spun into the street four feet below him. The intended victim went his way unharmed, and the man in the alley swore and went to his room to take his gun apart wonderingly. He had never missed a shot like that before! Just outside the town the brain found what he had been looking for—a field under which was a huge mass of solid rock. He came to rest in the field and dropped from sight, sinking through sod and earth and granite as if it had been water; and in a matter of minutes he had cut himself a great underground chamber in the rock, with high arched walls and a vaulted ceiling and a level, polished floor. Hovering for a moment in midair, he tested the surrounding countryside for its exact chemical content, sending out delicate high-frequency beams, adjusting them fractionally for differences in molecular vibrations. The presence of a certain fine harmonic at any given frequency indicated to him the exact location of the elements he needed. There were not many. These bipeds were hardly complex.
“A type—a type,” he thought. “I must have something to work from. I gather that these creatures are differentiated from each other in certain ways.”
He slipped up through the roof of his chamber and went back to the town, where he found a busy corner and hid up under an eave, where he could watch the people passing.
“Those smaller ones must be the males,” he ruminated, “the ones that strut and slink and apparently do little work and wear all those blatant colors and so ridiculously accentuate the color of the oral orifice. And the larger, muscular ones, I suppose, are females. How drab.’’
He projected a beam that would carry thought impulses to him. It touched the mind of a young man who was mooning after a trim blonde just ahead of him. He was a hesitant and shy young man, and a passionate one, and the battle he fought within himself, between his inclinations and his diffidence, almost dislodged the creature in the eaves.
“Whew!” thought the golden ovoid. “An emotional monstrosity! And it appears that I was a little mistaken about males and females. How very quaint!
“I shall be one of the males,” he decided at length.
Wisely, he searched about until he found a girl who was suffering from every “osis” in the advertisements, as well as an inferiority complex, acne, bunions, and tone-deafness, knowing that her idea of an ideal man would be really something. Inserting gentle thought tendrils into her mind, he coaxed her to dream a lovely dream of her ideal man as she walked along, and carefully filed away all the essentials, disregarding only the passion the dream man showered on the poor starved creature. Enveloped by the dream he had induced, she walked into the path of an automobile and was rather badly hurt, which was all right, because she later married the driver.The brain sped back to the laboratory, nursing his mental picture of a muscular, suave, urbane, sophisticated, and considerate demigod, and began to assemble his machinery.
Now the brain had no powers, as such. What he had was control. The engineer of a twenty-car train would be stupid even to dream about hurling such a train at a hundred and twenty miles an hour along a track if he had to do so himself with his own physical powers. But with his controls the thing is easy. In the case of the brain, his controls were as weak compared with the final results of it as is a man’s arm compared with the two thousand horsepower delivered by a locomotive. But the brain knew the true nature of space: that it is not empty, but a mass of balanced forces. Press two pencils together, end to end. As long as the pressure is even and balanced the effect is the same as if the pencils were just resting their ends together. Now get some tiny force to press on the point where the pencils come together. They snap out of line; they deliver a powerful resultant, out of all proportion to the push which upset the equilibrium, and you probably break a knuckle. The resultant is at right angles to the original equalized forces; it goes just so far and then the forces come together in equilibrium again, knuckles notwithstanding.
We live in a resilient universe; the momentary upset is negligible, since the slack is taken up to infinity. Such a control had the brain from space. Any and every form of energy —and matter is energy—was his to control, to any degree. The resultant from one tiny upset balance could be used to upset another; and a chain like this could be extended ad infinitum.
Fortunately, the brain knew how not to make mistakes!
He made his apparatus quickly and efficiently. A long table; tanks and small bins of pure elements; a highly complex machine with projectors and reflectors capable of handling any radiation that can be indicated on a circular spectrum, for compounding and conditioning the basic materials. The machine had no switches, no indicators, no dials. It was built to do a certain job, and as soon as it was completed it began working. When the job was done it quit. It was the kind of machine whose perfection ruined the brain’s civilization, and has undoubtedly ruined others, and will most certainly ruin more.
On the surface of the table appeared a shadow. Cell by cell appeared as the carbon-magnesium-calcium mixtures were coordinated and projected by the machine. A human skeleton was almost suddenly complete—that is, an almost human skeleton. The brain was impatient with unnecessary detail, and if there were fewer vertebrae and more but finer ribs, and later, a lack of appendix, tonsils, sinal cavities, and abductors minimi digiti, then it was only in the interest of logic. The flesh formed over the skeleton, fiber by perfect fiber. Blood vessels were flat, their insides sealed to each other until the body was complete enough to start distributing blood. The thing was “born” with a full stomach; it began its functions long before it was complete enough for the brain’s entry.
While it was forming, the brain lay in a corner of the room reasoning it out. He knew its construction and had carried it out. Now he asked the reasons for its being this way, and calculated its functions. Hearing, sight with light, communication by vibrating tissues, degree of telepathy, organs of balance, possible and probable mental and physical reflexes, all such elementary things were carefully reasoned out and recorded on that fathomless brain. It was not necessary to examine the body itself or to look at it. He had planned it, and it would be as he had planned. If he wished to study any part of it before it formed, he had his memory.
The body lay complete eventually. It was a young and strong and noble creature. It lay there breathing deeply and slowly, and under its broad, intellectual forehead its eyes glowed with the pale light of idiocy. The heart beat firmly, and a tiny twitch in the left thigh developed and disappeared as the cells adjusted themselves to each other. The hair was glossy and black and was in a pronounced widow’s peak. The hairline was the line separating the two parts of the head, for the top part was a hinged lid which now gaped open. The white matter of the brain was formed completely and relaid to make room for the metal-encased creator. He drifted up to the head of the table and settled into the open skull. A moment, and then it snapped shut. The young man—for such he was now—lay quiet for a long while, as the brain checked the various senses—temperature, pressure, balance, and sight. Slowly the right arm raised and lowered, and then the left, and then the legs rose together and swung over the edge of the table and the young man sat up. He shook his head and gazed about with his rapidly clearing eyes, turned his head stiffly, and got to his feet. His knees buckled slightly; he grasped the table spasmodically, not bending his fingers because he hadn’t thought of it yet. His mouth opened and closed, and he ran his tongue over the inside of his mouth and lips and teeth.
“What an awkward way to get around,” he thought, trying his weight on one leg and then the other. He flexed his arms and hands and hopped up and down cautiously.
“Agh!” he said waveringly. “A-a-a-gh-ha-agh!” He listened to himself, enchanted by this new way of expressing himself. “Ka. Pa. Ta. Sa. Ha. Ga. La. Ra,” he said, testing the possibilities of linguals, gutturals, sibilants, palatals, labials, singly and in combination. “Ho-o-o-o-owe-e-e-e!” he howled, trying sustained tones from low to high pitch.
He tottered to the wall, and with one hand on it began padding up and down the room. Soon the support was no longer necessary, and he walked alone; and then he went faster and faster and ran round and round, hooting strangely. He was a little disgusted to find that violent activity made his heart beat fast and his breathing harder. Flimsy things, these bipeds. He sat panting on the table and began testing his senses of taste and touch, his muscular and oral and aural and visual memories.
Chauncey Thomas was an aristocrat. No one had ever seen him in patchy pants or broken shoes. They would, though, he reflected bitterly, if he didn’t get a chance to steal some soon. “What de hell,” he muttered. “All I ast is t’ree meals a day and good clo’es, an’ a house an’ stuff, an’ no work to do. Hell!. An’ dey tell me I can get t’ings by workin’. It ain’t worth it. It just ain’t worth it!”
He had every right to be bitter, he thought. Not only do they throw him down three flights of stairs in the town’s most exclusive apartment house just because he was sleeping on the landing, but they stick him in jail for it. Did he get a chance to rest in jail? He did not. They made him work. They made him whitewash cells. That was hardly right. Then they gave him the bum’s rush out of town. It was unfair. What if it was the ninth time they had booked him? “I got to find me another town,” he decided. He was thinking of the sheriff’s remark that next time he was run in the sheriff would pin a murder on him if he had to kill one of his deputies to do it. Chauncey turned his slow, unwilling feet onto the Springfield Turnpike and headed away from town. The night was two hours old and very warm. Chauncey slouched along with his hands in his pockets, feeling misunderstood. A slight movement in the shadows beside the road escaped his attention, and he never realized that anyone was there until he found himself picked up by the slack of his trousers and dangling uncomfortably from a mighty fist.
“I ain’t done nothin’!” he squalled immediately, resorting to a conversational reflex of his. “Le’s talk this over, now bud. Aw, come on, now; you got nothin’ on me. You—awk!“
Chauncey’s mouthings became wordless when he had managed, by twisting around in his oversize clothes, to see his captor. The vision of a muscular giant, at least six feet five, regarding him out of fathomless, shadowy eyes as he held him at arm’s length was too much for Chauncey Thomas. He broke down and wailed.
The naked Apollo spun the bum about in midair and caught him by the belt. He plucked curiously at the worn jacket, reached down and tore a piece of leather out of the side of an outsize sport shoe as if it had been made of blotting paper, studied it carefully, tossed it aside.
“Lemme go!” shrieked Chauncey. “Gee, boss, I wasn’t doin’ nothin’, honest I wasn’t. I’m goin’ to Springfield, I’ll get a job or somethin’, boss!” The words burned his mouth as he said them, but this was an emergency and he had to say something.
“Gha!” grunted the giant, and dropped him on his ear in the middle of the road.
Chauncey scrambled to his feet and scuttled off down the road. The giant stood watching him as he slowed, made a U-turn, and came running back under the influence of a powerful hypnotic suggestion emanating from that great clean body. He stood awed and trembling before the new-born one, wishing he were dead, wishing he were away from there—even in jail.
“Who-who are you?” he faltered.
The other caught Chauncey’s shifty eyes in his own deep gaze. The hobo’s shaken mind was soothed; he blinked twice and sank down on his knees beside the road, staring upward into the inscrutable face of this frightening, fascinating man. Something seemed to be crawling into Chauncey’s mind, creeping about there. It was horrifying and yet it wasn’t unpleasant. He felt himself being drawn out; his memories examined; his knowledge of human society and human customs and traditions and history. Things he thought he had forgotten and wanted to forget popped up, and he felt them being mulled over. Within a few minutes the giant had as complete a knowledge of human conduct and speech as Chauncey Thomas had ever had.
He stepped back, and Chauncey slumped gasping to the ground. He felt depleted.
“Get up, bum,” said the big man in Chauncey’s own idiom.
Chauncey got up; there was no mistaking the command in that resonant voice. He cringed before him and whined: “Whatcha gonna do wit’ me, boss? I ain’t—”
“Shut up!” said the other. “I ain’t gonna hurt you.” Chauncey looked at the immobile face. “Well . . . I . . . I guess I’ll be on my way.”
“Aw, stick around. Whatcha scared of?”
“Well . . . nothin’ . . . but, who are you, anyway?”
“I’m Elron,” said the giant, using the first euphonious syllables that came to mind.
“Oh. Where’s yer clo’es? You been rolled?”
“Naw. Well, yeah. Wait here for me; I think I can—”
Elron bounded over the hedge, not wanting to astound the little tramp too much. From Chauncey’s mind he had stolen a mental photograph of what Chauncey considered a beautiful outfit. It was a plaid suit with a diamond-checked vest and yellow shoes; a wing collar and a ten-gallon hat. Slipping into his underground laboratory, Elron threw back the casing of the complex projector that had built him his body and made a few swift adjustments. A moment later he joined Chauncey, fully clad in Chauncey’s own spectacular idea of tailoring to taste.
“Hully gee!” breathed Chauncey.
They walked along the road together, Chauncey quite speechless, Elron pensive. A few cars passed them; Chauncey automatically and without hope flung a practiced thumb toward each. They were both surprised when a lavish roadster ground to a stop ahead of them. The door was flung open; Chauncey slid in front of Elron and would have climbed in but for Elron’s grasping him by the scruff of the neck and hauling him back.
“In the rumble, lug,” he ground out.
“Nuttin’ good ever happens t’ me,” muttered Chauncey as he followed orders. He had seen the driver. She was lovely.
“Where are you bound?” she asked as Elron closed the door.
“Springfield,” he said, remembering from something Chauncey had said that the town was on this road. He looked at this newest acquaintance. She was as tiny and perfect as he was big and perfect, and she handled the car with real artistry. Her eyes were deep auburn to match her hair. Judging her by human standards, Elron thought her very pleasing to look upon. “I’ll take you there,” she said.
“T’anks, lady.”
She looked at him quickly.
“What’s up, babe?” he asked.
“Oh—nothing. Don’t call me ’babe.”
“Okay, okay.”
Again she flashed him a look. “Are you—kidding me?” she asked.
“What about?”
“You look—oh, I don’t know.”
“Spill it, sister.”
“Oh, sort of—well, not like the kind who calls girls `babe.’ “
“Oh,” he said. “You mean—you’d say it different, like.”
He was having trouble with Chauncey’s limited vocabulary.
“Something like that. What are you going to do in Springfield?”
“Just look around a little, I guess. I want to see a city.”
“Don’t tell me you never saw a city!”
“Listen,” he snapped, covering up his error by falling back on one of Chauncey’s devices, “it ain’t worryin’ you any, is it? What do you care?” “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said acidly. He sensed something strained about the silence that followed.
“Mad, huh?”
She looked at him scornfully and sniffed.
The trivial impasse intrigued him. “Stop here,” he ordered her.
“What?” she asked furiously.
He leaned forward and caught her eye. “Stop here!“
She cut the ignition and the big car slid to a stop. Elron took her shoulder and turned her to him. She almost struggled but hadn’t time.
Tendrils of thought stole into her brain, explored her memories, her tastes, her opinions and philosophies and vocabulary. He learned why it was déclassé to address a woman as “babe,” and that among civilized people ten-gallon hats were not worn with wing collars. He liked the language she used a little better than Chauncey’s harsh inadequacies. He learned what music was, and a great deal about money, which, strangely enough, was something that almost never crossed Chauncey’s mind. He learned something of the girl herself; her name was Ariadne Drew, she had a great deal of wealth she had not earned, and she was so used to being treated according to her station in life that she was careless about such things as picking up hitchhikers on the road.
He let her go, snatching the memory of the incident from its place in her mind, so that she started the car and drove off.
“Now what an earth did I stop for?”
“So I could check up on that rear tire,” he ad-libbed. He thought back about things he had discovered that might interest her. Clothes were a big item. “I must apologize,” he said to her, word for word in her own vernacular, “for this hat. It’s just too, too revolting. I saw a cute little number the other day in a shoppe on the avenue, and I mean to get it. My dear, I mean!“ She glanced aghast at his noble profile and bulging shoulders. He chatted on.
“I saw Suzy Greenfield the other day. You know Suzy. Oh, she didn’t see me! I took care of that! And do you know who she was with? That horrible Jenkins person!”
“Who are you?” she asked him.
“I hear that Suzy is— What? Who am I? Oh, yes; about Suzy. You’ve probably heard this awful gossip before”—she had!—”so stop me if you have. But she told her husband—”
“This is as far as I go,” snapped the girl, wheeling the car over to the curb.
“Well, I—” Elron sensed that the right thing to do would be to get out of the car. He opened the door and turned to her.
“Thank you for the lift, darling. Let me know if I can do the same for you sometime.” He stepped up onto the walk, and she slammed the door and rolled the window open.
“You’ve forgotten to polish your fingernails,” she said nastily, and slammed the car into gear.
“Now what the hell did you do?” asked a voice at the side. Chauncey was looking longingly after the roadster.
“Don’t swear,” said Elron. “It’s vulgar. You are very crude, Chauncey. I don’t want to have you around. Good-by, darling.” Could Elron help it if Ariadne Drew called everybody “darling”?
The little bum stood open-mouthed, staring after the Greek god in his noisy plaid suit, and then followed slowly. “Dat mug’ll bear watchin’!” he muttered. “Hully gee!”
Elron, with his new-found knowledge of human affairs, had little trouble securing a few dollars from a man he passed on the street—all he had to do was to demand it—and getting a hotel room for his body. From Ariadne’s mind he had found out what handwriting was, and he signed the register and paid for a room without a hitch. Once his body was parked conventionally in bed, he popped the head open and slipped out. He felt that the body would relax a little better without him.
He drifted out of the window and hung for a while high above the town, searching for a familiar vibration—the impulses of Ariadne’s mind. Freed from the cumbersome human body, Elron was far more sensitive to such things. He wanted to observe Ariadne now because he wanted to check up on his performance.
He caught it soon. It was to him as a gentle perfume is to us. He whisked over to the outskirts of the city and settled down toward a massive red brick pile surrounded by lovely landscaping. He circled it twice, finding her exact place in the house, and then dropped down the chimney. He hovered just above the artificial logs in the fireplace and began his eavesdropping.
Ariadne was sitting in her extravagant living room, chatting with—of all people—the redoubtable Suzy Greenfield. Suzy was a small-souled, graceless girl with the ability to draw a remark out of any given acquaintance, and by ardent agreement she could cull enough back-biting comment to keep her busy for weeks. She looked like a buck-toothed sparrow, dressed like a sweepstakes winner from Dubuque, and had a personality as soothing as the seven-year itch.
“Well, what have you heard today?” she asked expectantly.
Ariadne was gazing into far distances, and she only smiled.
“Oh, Ari,” said Suzy, “come on! I know something must have happened today from the way you’re acting. Please; you never tell me anything!“ Ariadne, being a woman, ignored this untruth and would have changed the subject had not Elron, in the chimney, gently stroked certain of her brain convolutions with his intangible tentacles. She stared up suddenly, turned to Suzy. Elron could have had her reaction directly, but he was interested in the way she would express it to another and in the way the other would receive it.
“If you must know,” said Ariadne, “I met someone today, a man.” She sighed. Suzy leaned forward happily. When she was not all mouth she was all ears.
“Where?”
“Picked him up on the road. Sue, you never saw such a pair as those two.
They looked like a couple of comedians. One was a tramp—at first I thought they both were. The little one got into the rumble and the nice handsome one rode in front.”
“Handsome?”
“Darling, you don’t know! I’ve never seen—”
“But you said they were comic!”
“Looked comic, dear.” In the fireplace the golden-armored brain gave the equivalent of a nod and sent a thought current out to Ariadne. As if answering a question, she said, “He would have looked so nice in a soft gray suit and a Homburg. And—I don’t know what he is, but I think he should be an adventurer. A sort of poet-writer-adventurer.”
“But what was he?”
Ariadne suddenly felt it possible to speak of other things. She got Suzy started on the peccadilloes of her long-suffering spouse and soon had completely eclipsed all thought of her volatile mystery man. Elron was gone.
Back at the hotel, the ovoid hovered over his sleeping body and thought bitter thoughts. He was ashamed of himself for underestimating the subtle nuances of human behavior. He had succeeded in making something ridiculous out of this biped he had created, and the fact annoyed him.
There was a challenge in it; Elron could control powers that would easily disintegrate this whole tiny galaxy and spread its dust through seven dimensions, if he so wished it; and yet he was most certainly being made a fool of by a woman. It occurred to him that in all the universes there was nothing quite as devious and demanding as a woman’s mind. It likewise occurred to him that a woman is easy to control as long as she always has her way. He was determined to see how closely a man could resemble a woman’s ideal and still exist; and he was going to do it with this man he had made himself responsible for.
It was a long and eventful three months before Ari Drew saw Elron again. He went away in his ten-gallon hat and his blatant plaids and his yellow shoes; and he took away with him his conversational variants and Chauncey the bum. He went to the greatest city of them all and sought out people who knew about the things that he must be to achieve the phenomenal status of a man good enough for Ariadne.
He found it a fascinating game. In the corridors of universities, in prizefight training camps, in girls’ schools and kindergartens and gin mills and honkytonks and factories he cornered people, spoke with them, strained and drained and absorbed what their minds held. Sorting and blending, he built himself an intellect, the kind of mentality that awed lightweights like Suzy Greenfield who spell Intellect with a capital I. Instead of trying to suit each man’s speech by using each man’s speech, he developed a slightly accented idiom of his own, something personal and highly original. He gave himself an earthly past, from a neatly photostated birth certificate to gilt-edged rent receipts. He sounded out the minds of editors and publishers, and through the welter of odd tastes and chaotic ideology therein he extracted sound and workable ideas on what work was needed. He actually sold poetry.
While his body slept in luxury, his mind hurtled over the earth, carried by its illimitably powerful golden shell. Elron could lecture a New York audience on the interesting people he had met in Melbourne, Australia, and the next day produce a cablegram from one or two of those people whom he had visited during the night. Scattered all over the earth were individuals who believed they had known this phenomenal young man for years.
It was at one of those pale-pink and puffy poetry teas that Ariadne saw Elron again. Suzy gave the tea as a current-celebrity show. Ari came gracefully late, looking lovely in something powder-blue, chastely sophisticated. Elron was scheduled to speak—something about “Metempsychosis and Modern Life.” Ari was scheduled to sing. But she— He was watching for her. He was dressed in soft gray, and the Homburg awaited him by the door. Her entrance was as ever in the grand manner, and all realized it; but for her it was that breath-catching experience of realizing that she was putting on the show for just one person in all that crowded room. She’d heard of him, of course. He was the “rage,” which is a term used in polite society to describe current successes. Would-bes and has-beens are known as outrages.
But she had never seen him that she remembered. He rose and stood over her and smiled, and he wordlessly took her arm, bowed at the hostess, and led her out. Just like that. Poor Suzy. Her protruding teeth barely hid the tiny line of foam that formed on her lips.
“Well!” Ariadne said as they reached the street. “That was a terrible thing to do!”
“Tsk, tsk!” he said, and helped her into his new sixteen-cylinder puddle-jumper. “I imagine Suzy will get over it. Think of all the people she’ll be able to tell!”
Ari laughed a little, looking at him strangely. “Mr. Elron, you’re not . . . not the same man that—”
“That you picked up on the pike three months ago, dressed like a comedian?”
She blushed.
“Yes, I’m the man.”
“I was . . . rude when I left you.”
“You had a right to be, Ariadne.”
“What happened to that hideous little tramp you were traveling with?”
“Chauncey!” Elron bellowed, and the trimly uniformed chauffeur swiveled around and nodded and smiled.
“Good heavens!” said Ariadne.
“He doesn’t offend any more with his atrocious diction,” said Elron precisely. “I found it possible to change his attitude toward work, but to change his diction was beyond even me. He no longer speaks.” She looked at him for quite a while as the huge car rolled out into the country. “You’re everything I thought you might possibly be,” she breathed.
He knew that.
That was their first evening together. There were many others, and Elron conducted himself perfectly, as befitted a brilliant and urbane biped. Catering to every wish and whim of Ari’s amused him, for she was as moody as a beautiful woman can be, and he delighted in predicting and anticipating her moods. He adjusted himself to her hour by hour, day by day. He was ideal. He was perfect.
So—she got bored. He adjusted himself to that, too, and she was furious. If she didn’t care, neither did he. Bad tactics, and something that supercosmic forces could do nothing about.
Oh, he tried; yes, indeed. He questioned her and he psychoanalyzed her and he even killed off all the streptococci in her blood stream to see if that was the trouble. But all he got was a passive resentment of her. Half as old as time itself, he knew something of patience; but his patience began to give way under the pressure applied by this very human woman.
And, of course, there was a showdown. It was one afternoon at her home, and it was highly spectacular. He could read her mind with ease, but he could know only what thoughts she had formed. She knew he annoyed her. She also knew she liked him immensely; and for that reason she made no attempt to analyze her hostility toward him, and therefore he was helpless, tangled in her tenuous resentment.
It started with a very little thing—he came into the room and she stood at the window with her back to him and would not turn around. She did not speak or act coldly toward him, but simply would not face him. A very petty thing. After ten minutes of that he strode across the room and spun her around. She caught her heel in the rug, lost her footing, fell against the mantel, and stretched becomingly unconscious on the floor in a welter of broken gewgaws. Elron stood a moment feeling foolish, and then lifted her in his arms. Before he could set her down she had twined her arms around his neck and was kissing him passionately. Poor, magnificent thing, he didn’t know what to do.
“Oh, Elron,” she blubbered. “You brute! You struck me. Oh, darling! I love you so! I never thought you would do it!”
A great light of understanding burst for Elron. That was the basic secret of this thing called woman! She could not love him when he acted in a perfectly rational way. She could not love him when he was what she thought was ideal. But when he did something “brutish”—a word synonymous with “unintelligent”—she loved him. He looked down at her beautiful lips and her beautiful black eye, and he laughed and kissed her and then set her down gently.
“Be back in a couple of days, darling,” he said, and strode out, ignoring her cries.
He knew what to do now. He was grateful to her for amusing him for a while and for teaching him something new. But he could not afford to upset himself by associating with her any longer. To keep her happy he would have to act unintelligent periodically; and that was one thing he could not stand. He went away. He got into his huge automobile and drove away down the turnpike.
“It’s a pity that I’m not a man,” he reflected as he drove. “I’d really like to be, but— Oh, I can’t be bothered keeping track of anything as complicated as Ariadne!”
He pulled up at the outskirts of a small town and found his laboratory.
Once inside, he lay down on the table, popped open his skull and emerged. Going to the machine in the corner, he added and took away and changed and tinkered, and the glow began to form again around the still body. Something was happening inside the skull. Something took shape inside, and as it happened the skull slowly closed. In three hours Elron the man climbed off the table and stood looking about him. The golden egg flew up to his shoulder and nestled there.
“Thank you for this . . . this consciousness,” said Elron.
“Oh, that’s all right,” replied the ovoid telepathically. “You’ve had it for some months, anyway. Only I’ve just given you what you needed to appreciate it with.”
“What am I to do?” asked the man.
“Go back to Ariadne. Carry on from where I left off.
You. can—you’re a man, perfect in every cell and gland and tissue.”
“Thank you for that. I have wanted her but was never directed—”
“Never mind that. Marry her and make her happy. Never tell her about me—you have history enough to carry you through your lifetime, and brains enough, now, to do the work you have been doing. Ari’s been good to me; I owe her this much.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes. Just one thing; but burn this in your brain in letters of fire: A woman can’t possibly love a man unless he’s part dope. Be a little stupid all the time and very stupid once in a while. But don’t be perfect!”
“Okay. So long.”
“Be happy. . . er . . . son—
Elron the man left the laboratory and went out into the sunlight. The golden egg settled to the floor and lay there an hour or so. He laughed once within himself and said, “Too perfect!”
Then he felt terribly, terribly lonely.
The End
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Any geek can proclaim “Live Long and Prosper.” An even lesser geek will require you to “Use the force.” A truly hardened, experienced, and involved geek however will tell you “Never give up, and never surrender.”
-doblu
If you love Star Trek, then you would love and appreciate Galaxy Quest. You see, there is a reason why this movie (which is NOT set in the Star Trek universe) is considered one of the best Star Trek movies.
It’s a comedy, ai, that is certain. But it appeals and has appeal to anyone of us who has fallen in love with the characters, the narrative and the tropes of the Star Trek universe.
Galaxy Quest is special. It really is. Galaxy Quest has everyone in the theater laughing. It cut across ages and backgrounds with a very simple premise…
…you are what you believe yourself to be.
You are what you believe yourself to be.
Which is, after all, the exact same premise that the movie “Bronco Billy” was based upon.
'Galaxy Quest' couldn't be better. It's not a mockumentary, it's not a Star Trek parody. It's pure comedy based on the Star Trek legend with excellent actors and absolutely brilliant production.
The visuals are magnificent. You would expect nothing but mediocre stuff for a space comedy, but this is not the case with 'Galaxy Quest'. These are the best effects for a space movie, since 'Starship Troopers'!
The story is also very original and interesting. Not only jokes on thin air, but a great story nonetheless. The triumphant ending is beautiful, it elevates you! In fact, it would easily compete with the some of the best Star Trek stories of all time.
- atzimo
This movie is not only about the television series, but it is also about the fans.
Indeed, science fiction conventions can be a lot of fun, and a real hoot. If you ever have the chance to check one out, please do so.
Galaxy Quest.
At shows you will meet all kind of folk.
You will meet the seemingly useless get-a-lifers, the just-for-fun guys, and the not-so-rare I’m-only-in-it-for-the profit gang.
Never give up, never surrender!
You will meet actors who loved the whole shebang, actors who loathed it, and actors who didn’t have a clue what was going on.
Fandom is a very big place, with room for all sorts of people.
This film was amazing. I saw the trailers and swore I'd never watch it. A couple of friends overruled this after watching it in the theaters, and I'm glad they did.
Not only is this film an amusing spoof of Science Fiction Fen-dom, it's a brilliant action-adventure/science-fiction film in its own right. The only other film I can think of that is a righteous satirical look, yet a splendid example of the genre, is the Fifth Element.
Galaxy Quest Has It All. Beautiful women in scanty clothing. Love interests. Computers. Space ships. Ugly and evil monsters. Blasters. Arcane martial arts. Dynamite catch phrases. And best of all, the very population that is satirized is the group that Saves The Day.
The dialogue is brilliant - you'll find yourself quoting from this film regularly. The acting is marvelous. Tim Allen doing William Shatner doing a Heroic Spaceship Captain is worth the rental all by itself, not to mention Alan Rickman's memorably dry performance as the I-Am-Not-My-Strange-Looking-Alien character.
The first thing I thought upon leaving the theater was that I had to see this film again. The first thing I thought upon seeing it again was that I would have to own this movie. Check it out - you won't be sorry.
- tygirrl
Galaxy Quest.
And Galaxy Quest got it right–the conventions, the costumes, the geeks, the groupies, even the mocking “mundanes” who attend cons looking for kicks. It took notice of all the science fiction cliches, acknowledged them, and then twisted them to its own comedic purposes.
Galaxy Quest captured not only the silliness of fandom, but the inspiration of it.
Galaxy Quest.
In the end, the demoralized and cynical actors found strength and meaning in the same characters which stereotyped them.
The fans of SF, are what makes this movie classic!
The geeks saved the day. The good guys won. The bad guys provided entertainment to masses of fans. Things blew up. And isn’t that what science fiction is all about?
This is what I would call a PERFECT film.
As a long-time Star Trek fan I have waited for a movie which had that total feelgood factor, not a spoof, but a humorous and heartfelt homage.
A film which shows fans in a good light, in a way that, of course, we can laugh at ourselves, but in an unoffensive and entertaining manner.
I never thought it would arrive, and so in GALAXY QUEST, I found one of the best films in cinema history.
Everything is spot on. The story is fantastic, and telling it from the point of view of normal people was great. Making them play those stereotypes that we know and love was just the tip of the iceberg, and everyone played the parts superbly.
The special effects speak for themselves. When the Protector leaves space dock...Wow. When she goes through the minefield...Wow! When Tim Allen faces the biggest rock monster since The Never Ending Story...Wow Wow WOW!
The score is also great, capturing the adventure of the old Star Trek shows, and the epic scope of the story at hand. And then there's the way everything just comes together at the end into a sensational package of laughs, thrills, sometimes bitingly moving scenes, and a genuine feeling of warmth inside.
Go and see this, buy the DVD, whatever. Just see it. Never give up, and never surrender!
- selfy_nagus
The entire cast was excellent, especially Tim Allen and Alan Rickman doing their best Shatner and Nimoy impersonations. Special credit must go to the four actors who played the naive aliens. Their wide-eyed innocence reminded me of the quality that drew me, and draws children of all ages into the world of science fiction.
Galaxy Quest.
This movie didn’t rely on vulgarities or overt violence. It didn’t need to resort to meanness or cruel jokes, either. While it poked fun at science fiction and its fans, it never resorted to the kind of mockery you see in other films.
A beautifully-crafted film, Galaxy Quest is a love letter to sf fans of all sorts everywhere. The characters are perfectly drawn, the story is well-written, and there's the right amount of goshwow to make the whole thing work perfectly. And it's funny as hell in all the right spots.
Tim Allen is amazing. He's got his Shatneroid character down perfectly. He's a vain, pompous clown who finds out what a laughingstock he's become, and when he gets a chance to redeem himself, he pounces on it.
Sigourney Weaver is a delight. Sexy without trying, her character Gwen DeMarco is as far from Ripley as you can get. Alan Rickman is flawless as Alexander Dane, massively talented Shakespearean actor who's been stuck in this Spockish role for years because he played it too well. Darryl Mitchell is great as Tommy "Laredo" Webber, and Sam Rockwell is hilarious as Guy, the hack actor stuck in the middle of something that scares him silly.
The two actors who really stand out are Tony Shalhoub and Enrico Colantoni. Tony plays Fred Kwan with understated glee, while Colantoni plays Commander Mathesar with a smiling earnestness that makes you firmly believe everything he's saying.
The supporting cast is incredibly talented. Robin Sachs is perfect as Sarris, Patrick Breen essays his role as Quellek beautifully, and Missy Pyle amazes as Laliari.
But it's still Tim Allen's movie above all else, and he makes the most of it.
A final note: this movie wouldn't have worked nearly as well if not for the production design work of four of the greatest artistic talents in science fiction: Simon Bisley, Brom, Wayne Barlowe and the lengendary Berni Wrightson. Barlowe is an expert in xenobiology, and designed the Thermian's native form. Wrightson's quite possibly the best horror illustrator of all time, and Sarris and his minions are his work.
My favorite moment in the film? the point where Alan Rickman gets his first look at the NSEA Protector II for the first time... his look of astonishment is a joy to behold.
Like The Last Starfighter, this is a popcorn movie with a message. See it with your kids.
- Ludwig_Meyer
Galaxy Quest is a solid, funny movie. Go see it. Take the kids. Go see it and see it twice.
On the way to adventure!
Some Dialogues
Brandon (Justin Long)
→ I just wanted to tell you that I thought a lot about what you said.
Jason Nesmith (Tim Allen)
→ It's okay, now listen--
Brandon
→ But I want you to know that I'm not a complete brain case, okay? I understand completely that it's just a TV show. I know there's no beryllium sphere...
Jason Nesmith
→ Hold it.
Brandon
→ ...no digital conveyor, no ship...
Jason Nesmith
→ Stop for a second, stop. It's all real.
Brandon
→ Oh my God, I knew it. I knew it! I knew it!
This movie is a true classic.
Gwen DeMarco (Sigourney Weaver)
→ What is this thing? There's no useful purpose for there to be a bunch of chompy, crushy things in the middle of a hallway!
Jason Nesmith (Tim Allen)
→ Gwen —
Gwen DeMarco
→ No! I mean, we shouldn't have to do this! It makes no logical sense! Why is it here'!
Jason Nesmith
→ Because it's on the television show.
Gwen DeMarco
→ Well, forget it! I'm not doing it! This episode was BADLY WRITTEN!
[Witnessing Fred Kwan having sex with Laliari] Oh, that's not right!
But wait! There’s a documentary…
“Never Give Up, Never Surrender,” the “Galaxy Quest” documentary, highlights the magic of the 1999 film.
Galaxy Quest.
The flick earned its “cult classic” status by putting sci-fi superfans in the role of the hero and perfectly balancing the subtleties of comedy and drama.
The fans of SF, are what makes this movie classic!
“Never
Surrender” features intimate interviews with almost the entire cast of
the original film (excluding, of course and sadly, Alan Rickman, who
died in 2016), including actors Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver,
Justin Long and Sam Rockwell. The film also interviews writers, the
film’s director and other behind-the-scenes people who made the film
possible. “Never Surrender” even features cameos from sci-fi legends
like “Star Trek” actor Wil Wheaton and “Lost” co-creator Damon Lindelof.
Galaxy Quest.
This
documentary explains why, despite an initially disappointing turnout at
the box office, “Quest” has become one of the most beloved sci-fi
movies of all time. It was even dubbed “the best ‘Star Trek’ movie” by
Wheaton in the documentary, despite being, well, not a “Star Trek”
movie.
“Galaxy Quest” isn’t unique because it’s a sci-fi parody. Other films, like “Spaceballs,” spoofed “Star Wars” and other sci-fi classics, but there has always been something unique about “Quest.”
The “Captain” of Galaxy Quest.
As the documentary explores, the film isn’t a campy or “cheesy” spoof movie; it isn’t strictly a comedy (though I believe anyone would be hard-pressed to watch it without cracking up at least once).
There are some movies that are better watched while you are not eating. 'Galaxy Quest' fits into this category as I made the mistake of watching it while having dinner and I almost choked several times. This is one of the funniest smart comedies I have seen. The film is brilliantly executed and it brilliantly spoofs the science-fiction-spaceship genre. But the film isn't mere silliness as it does have a soul and tells an action adventure story of 5 has-been stars of a famous Star-Trek-type TV show that got cancelled two decades ago. The screenplay is great and the dialogues are witty fun. There is no crude humour or over-the-top-out-of-context joke.
The special effects wonderfully add to the spoofiness. The monsters and aliens are a 'treat' to watch. An intelligent comedy isn't easy to make as the maker has to pay close attention to line delivery, characterization, situation, comic timing and direction. 'Galaxy Quests' fulfills all criteria from start to end. Tim Allen as the pompous hero, Alan Rickman as the whiny has-been 'Shakespearean'-actor-forced-to-play-an-android, Tony Shalhoub as the funny Fred, Sam Rockwell as the terrified-of-being-the-first-one-to-die Guy, Enrico Colantoni as the gullible Mathezar and last but not least, the incredibly sexy Sigourney Weaver as the tired-of-playing-dumb-blonde Gwen (the total opposite of her famous Ripley character) play their parts.
I'm glad that I bought this film on impulse yesterday as most American spoofs I have seen, like the abysmal Scary Movies (puke) or the silly Screams (yawn) and the ridiculous Naked Guns (okay this last one was kind of funny) hardly have anything more to offer than silliness. Actually I was given the choice between this and 'Naked Gun 33 and a Half' and i'm glad I made the right decision. 'Galaxy Quest' definitely surpasses these films by several miles as I wouldn't even mind calling it one of the best comedies.
- Chrysanthepop
Galaxy Quest.
The documentary is pretty good.
It’s a movie with real heart. While you might giggle as a panicked, rambling Rockwell says, “My character isn’t important enough for a last name, because I’m gonna die 5 minutes in,” while descending to an alien planet, you may soon have tears in your eyes as Quellek the Thermian dies in the arms of Alexander Dane, or Dr. Lazarus (Rickman).
"It's this little movie. It's not a part of a franchise. It was just made by pure heart alone by a lot of people, and because of that heart, I think, it had a massive, lasting impact,"
-Roth Cornet, a producer on the documentary.
Galaxy Quest.
And the documentary similarly has a few tender, teary-eyed moments. For example, with the mention of Rickman, who passed before a proposed “Galaxy Quest” series on Amazon
could be realized, it is hard to not feel sentimental as the cast, one
by one, describes what it was like to work with him and how badly they
all miss him. “If you love Alan Rickman, that’s the moment for me, when
we talk about Alan passing. I got choked up,” Cornet said
The documentary has a few surprising, heartbreaking and hilarious tidbits about Rickman you can look forward to.
Sigourney Weaver in Galaxy Quest.
The
team behind this documentary has considered it a passion project and
has pushed to make it happen, Cornet said. “Something like this
highlights [that] when people love something and they come together, it
can really, really, really have a huge impact on their whole life, even
just a little movie about a TV show. And we’re making a documentary
about a movie about a TV show,” she added about the meta nature of the
documentary, which dives into a movie about actors in a “Star
Trek”-esque television show.
Cornet added that the creators aimed for the documentary to be “an hour and 25 minutes of delight.” And in my humble opinion, it is just that.
Galaxy Quest.
By Blake French:
As I walked out of the theater in which I screened "Galaxy Quest," I thought how surprised I was to have enjoyed what seemed as a cheesy family spoof. But the film turned to be an action adventure with some really hilarious moments. I loved the film. It has qualities of a successful science fiction drama, but also contains a variety of comical characters that had the whole audience overwhelmed in laughter. "Galaxy Quest" is right up there with "Toy Story" in merit, it entertains adults and children alike, standing out as one of the year's best family films.
The story details the adventures of a canceled television science fiction fantasy cast, similar in content to "Star Trek." "Galaxy Quest" is the name of the program. In their years, the stars, including Jason Nesmith, Gwen DeMarco, Fred Kwan, Alexander Dane, and Tommy Webber, were some of the biggest, most popular names in TV. Now, their means of making a living is signing fans' autographs for a price and being cast in amateur presentations.
Never give up. Never Surrender.
There is very detailed character development here. The characters are wonderfully cast and brilliantly portrayed. Unfortunately, most family films don't contain the patience for such necessary material. We bond with these characters; they are likable, funny, energetic and independent. These individuals are the key of success to this kind of movie.
The real plot begins when strange people come to Jason beging for him to save their existence from a powerful evil force who wishes to wipe them out of the universe forever. Naturally, at first our television star is skeptical, but when the strange people turn out to be humble aliens and transport Jason to their spaceship, he realizes this is something serious. The aliens begin to explain that they think he and his "Galaxy Quest" team are the only people in the universe who can save their race. He rushes to the members of his old cast and tries to justify his experience. He says that there are extraterrestrial creatures who require the help of their "Galaxy Quest" characters. None of his friends believe him, but once again give in when they find themselves transported off earth, onto the creature's spaceship. Of course, the aliens don't realize that their hopeful heroes are simply out of work actors, but who needs to tell them? So it is up to Commander Peter Quincy Taggart, Lt. Tawny Madison, Tech Sergeant Chen, Dr. Lazarus of Tev'Meck, and Lt. Laredo to save the day for our innocent and haunted alien life forms.
"Galaxy Quest" is a slapstick comedy that is smart, and does not go over the edge with its humorous material. It leaves room for several other essential elements such as happiness, romance, honesty, excitement, and contains a dramatic purpose. The story is very original, and contains a firm theme of action in its premise. It also has lots of outstanding visual effects and sight gags that are effective and interesting to watch.
The Galaxy Quest team discovers that things are going really bad.
A Television Show?
Paramount is currently putting together a television version of the 1999 Dreamworks film!
Hopefully, this show will be even better than the show in the film. Or not, and that will totally be its appeal! Whatever happens, today is an awesome day for sci-fi comedy fans everywhere. Paramount, we salute you.
Never Give up. Never Surrender!
Deleted scenes included on the DVD:
Tech Sargeant Chen helps an engineering crew solve a difficult problem without offering any insightful help whatsoever.
Alexander is presented his living quarters: an empty room save a bed of spikes and a daunting toilet.
An alternate version of a scene in which its revealed Jason and Gwen were old flames.
Guy overreacts when his foot gets caught in a rock, and Jason does his “rugged pose”.
Alexander uses an acting method to figure out the rock monster’s “motivation”.
Gwen
rips open her uniform to seduce two enemy soldiers, before crushing
them with a door. (Part of this scene was featured in the trailer.)
General Sarris revives himself and attacks the crew while crash landing.
The Galaxy Quest team.
Remember…
Never give up and never surrender!
Galaxy Quest.
I do hope that you appreciated and enjoyed this little post. I have more in my Movie Index, here…
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Robert A. Heinlein’s fiction excelled at predicting the effects of technology, how particular tools would change society and the lives of people who used them daily. He usually didn’t predict the details, but his predictions of what technologies would mean were often uncanny.
The most dramatic example of this kind of prediction is “Solution Unsatisfactory,” a story which Heinlein wrote in 1940, which predicted the Cold War before the U.S. was even in World War II, and before the Manhattan Project. In the story, the U.S. develops a nuclear weapon and, for a brief time, is the only nuclear power in the whole world. America knows that its enemies will get the weapon soon.
That much actually happened in real life, five years later.
But the story of “Solution Unsatisfactory” takes a different turn than real-life events turned out. In “Solution Unsatisfactory,” the head of the nuclear weapons project overthrows the government of the U.S. and sets up a global, international dictatorship with monopoly control of the nuclear weapon. And that’s the unsatisfactory solution of the story—the narrator of the story, the head of the nuclear weapons project, and presumably Heinlein himself all hate this option, but see the only other alternative, a global nuclear war, to be worse.
Was Heinlein’s unsatisfactory solution a nightmare scenario which we blessedly avoided? Maybe. But instead, we got 40 years of Cold War, the U.S.S.R. dominating half the developed world, and the U.S. propping up nasty dictatorships in the other half. And just because the Cold War is over, the threat hasn’t gone away; nuclear weapons are still common, as are governments and organizations willing to use them.
Heinlein was writing about these issues before nuclear weapons had been invented. He got the effects of the technology right, but he got the technology itself wrong. The weapon he predicted wasn’t a bomb, it was radioactive dust.
FOREWORD
By the author Robert Heinlein.
I had always planned to quit the writing business as soon as that mortgage was paid off. I had never had any literary ambitions, no training for it, no interest in it—backed into it by accident and stuck with it to pay off debt, I being always firmly resolved to quit the silly business once I had my chart squared away.At a meeting of the Mariana Literary Society—an amorphous disorganization having as its avowed purpose "to permit young writers to talk out their stories to each other in order to get them off their minds and thereby save themselves the trouble of writing them down"—at a gathering of this noble group I was expounding my determination to retire from writing once my bills were paid—in a few weeks, during 1940, if the tripe continued to sell.William A. P. White ("Anthony Boucher") gave me a sour look. "Do you know any retired writers?"
"How could I? All the writers I've ever met are in this room."
"Irrelevant. You know retired school teachers, retired naval officers, retired policemen, retired farmers. Why don't you know at least one retired writer?"
"What are you driving at?"
"Robert, there are no retired writers. There are writers who have stopped selling . . . but they have not stopped writing."
I pooh-poohed Bill's remarks—possibly what he said applied to writers in general . . . but I wasn't really a writer; I was just a chap who needed money and happened to discover that pulp writing offered an easy way to grab some without stealing and without honest work. ("Honest work"—a euphemism for underpaid bodily exertion, done standing up or on your knees, often in bad weather or other nasty circumstances, and frequently involving shovels, picks, hoes, assembly lines, tractors, and unsympathetic supervisors. It has never appealed to me.Sitting at a typewriter in a nice warm room, with no boss, cannot possibly be described as "honest work.")
"Blowups Happen" sold and I gave a mortgage-burning party. But I did not quit writing at once (24 Feb. 1940) because, while I had the Old Man of the Sea (that damned mortgage) off my back, there were still some other items. I needed a new car; the house needed paint and some repairs; I wanted to make a trip to New York; and it would not hurt to have a couple of hundred extra in the bank as a cushion—and I had a dozen-odd stories in file, planned and ready to write.So I wrote Magic, Incorporated and started east on the proceeds, and wrote "They" and Sixth Column while I was on that trip. The latter was the only story of mine ever influenced to any marked degree by John W. Campbell, Jr. He had in file an unsold story he had written some years earlier. JWCdid not show me his manuscript; instead he told me the story line orally and stated that, if I would write it, he would buy it.He needed a serial; I needed an automobile. I took the brass check. Writing Sixth Column was a job I sweated over. I had to reslant it to remove racist aspects of the original story line. And I didn't really believe the pseudoscientific rationale of Campbell's three spectra—so I worked especially hard to make it sound realistic.It worked out all right. The check for the serial, plus 35¢ in cash, bought me that new car . . . and the book editions continue to sell and sell and sell, and have earned more than forty times as much as I was paid for the serial. So it was a financial success . . . but I do not consider it to be an artistic success. While I was back east I told Campbell of my plans to quit writing later that year. He was not pleased as I was then his largest supplier of copy. I finally said, "John, I am not going to write any more stories against deadlines. But I do have a few more stories on tap that I could write. I'll send you a story from time to time . . . until the daycomes when you bounce one. At that point we're through. Now that I know you personally, having a story rejected by you would be too traumatic."
So I went back to California and sold him "Crooked House" and "Logic of Empire and "Universe" and "Solution Unsatisfactory" and "Methuselah's Children" and "By His Bootstraps" and "Common Sense" and "Goldfish Bowl" and Beyond "This Horizon" and "Waldo" and "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag"—which brings us smack up against World War II. Campbell did bounce one of the above (and I shan't say which one) and I promptly retired—put in a new irrigation system—built a garden terrace—resumed serious photography, etc. This went on for about a month when I found that I was beginning to be vaguely ill: poor appetite, loss of weight, insomnia, jittery, absent-minded—much like the early symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis, and I thought, "Damn it, am I going to have still a third attack?"
Campbell dropped me a note and asked why he hadn't heard from me—I reminded him of our conversation months past: He had rejected one of my stories and that marked my retirement from an occupation that I had never planned to pursue permanently.He wrote back and asked for another look at the story he had bounced. I sent it to him, he returned it promptly with the recommendation that I take out this comma, speed up the 1st half of page umpteen, delete that adjective—fiddle changes that Katie Tarrant would have done if told to.I sat down at my typewriter to make the suggested changes . . . and suddenly realized that I felt good for the first time in weeks.Bill "Tony Boucher" White had been dead right. Once you get the monkey on your back there is no cure short of the grave. I can leave the typewriter alone for weeks, even months, by going to sea. I can hold off for any necessary time if I am strenuously engaged in some other full-time,worthwhile occupation such as a construction job, a political campaign, or (damn it!) recovering from illness.But if I simply loaf for more than two or three days, that monkey starts niggling at me. Then nothing short of a few thousand words will soothe my nerves. And as I get older the attacks get worse; it is beginning to take 300,000 words and up to produce that feeling of warm satiation. At that I don't have it in its most virulent form; two of my colleagues are reliably reported not to have missed their daily fix in more than forty years. The best that can be said for "Solution Unsatisfactory" is that the solution is still unsatisfactory and the dangers are greater than ever. There is little satisfaction in having called the turn forty years ago; being a real-life Cassandra is not happy-making.
SOLUTION UNSATISFACTORY
In 1903 the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk.
In December, 1938, in Berlin, Dr. Hahn split the uranium atom.
In April, 1943, Dr. Estelle Karst, working under the Federal Emergency Defense Authority, perfected the Karst-Obre technique for producing artificial radioactives.
So American foreign policy had to change.
Had to. Had to. It is very difficult to tuck a bugle call back into a bugle. Pandora’s Box is a one-way proposition. You can turn pig into sausage, but not sausage into pig. Broken eggs stay broken. “All the King’s horses and all the King’s men can’t put Humpty together again.”
I ought to know—I was one of the King’s men.
By rights I should not have been. I was not a professional military man when World War II broke out, and when Congress passed the draft law I drew a high number, high enough to keep me out of the army long enough to die of old age.
Not that very many died of old age that generation!
But I was the newly appointed secretary to a freshman congressman; I had been his campaign manager and my former job had left me. By profession, I was a high-school teacher of economics and sociology—school boards don’t like teachers of social subjects actually to deal with social problems—and my contract was not renewed. I jumped at the chance to go to Washington.
My congressman was named Manning. Yes, the Manning, Colonel Clyde C. Manning, U.S. Army retired—Mr. Commissioner Manning. What you may not know about him is that he was one of the Army’s No. 1 experts in chemical warfare before a leaky heart put him on the shelf. I had picked him, with the help of a group of my political associates, to run against the two-bit chiseler who was the incumbent in our district. We needed a strong liberal candidate and Manning was tailor-made for the job. He had served one term in the grand jury, which cut his political eye teeth, and had stayed active in civic matters thereafter.
Being a retired army officer was a political advantage in vote-getting among the more conservative and well-to-do citizens, and his record was O.K. for the other side of the fence. I’m not primarily concerned with vote-getting; what I liked about him was that, though he was liberal, he was tough-minded, which most liberals aren’t. Most liberals believe that water runs downhill, but, praise God, it’ll never reach the bottom.
Manning was not like that. He could see a logical necessity and act on it, no matter how unpleasant it might be.* * *
We were in Manning’s suite in the House Office Building, taking a little blow from that stormy first session of the Seventy-eighth Congress and trying to catch up on a mountain of correspondence, when the War Department called. Manning answered it himself.
I had to overhear, but then I was his secretary. “Yes,” he said, “speaking. Very well, put him on. Oh . . . hello, General . . . Fine, thanks. Yourself?” Then there was a long silence. Presently, Manning said, “But I can’t do that, General, I’ve got this job to take care of. . . . What’s that? . . . Yes, who is to do my committee work and represent my district? . . . I think so.” He glanced at his wrist watch. “I’ll be right over.”
He put down the phone, turned to me, and said, “Get your hat, John. We are going over to the War Department.”
“So?” I said, complying.
“Yes,” he said with a worried look, “the Chief of Staff thinks I ought to go back to duty.” He set off at a brisk walk, with me hanging back to try to force him not to strain his bum heart. “It’s impossible, of course.” We grabbed a taxi from the stand in front of the office building and headed for the Department.
But it was possible, and Manning agreed to it, after the Chief of Staff presented his case. Manning had to be convinced, for there is no way on earth for anyone, even the President himself, to order a congressman to leave his post, even though he happens to be a member of the military service, too.
The Chief of Staff had anticipated the political difficulty and had been forehanded enough to have already dug up an opposition congressman with whom to pair Manning’s vote for the duration of the emergency. This other congressman, the Honorable Joseph T. Brigham, was a reserve officer who wanted to go to duty himself—or was willing to; I never found out which. Being from the opposite political party, his vote in the House of Representatives could be permanently paired against Manning’s and neither party would lose by the arrangement.
There was talk of leaving me in Washington to handle the political details of Manning’s office, but Manning decided against it, judging that his other secretary could do that, and announced that I must go along as his adjutant. The Chief of Staff demurred, but Manning was in a position to insist, and the Chief had to give in.
A chief of staff can get things done in a hurry if he wants to. I was sworn in as a temporary officer before we left the building; before the day was out I was at the bank, signing a note to pay for the sloppy service uniforms the Army had adopted and to buy a dress uniform with a beautiful shiny belt—a dress outfit which, as it turned out, I was never to need.* * *
We drove over into Maryland the next day and Manning took charge of the Federal nuclear research laboratory, known officially by the hush-hush title of War Department Special Defense Project No. 347. I didn’t know a lot about physics and nothing about modern atomic physics, aside from the stuff you read in the Sunday supplements. Later, I picked up a smattering, mostly wrong, I suppose, from associating with the heavyweights with whom the laboratory was staffed.
Colonel Manning had taken an Army p.g. course at Massachusetts Tech and had received a master of science degree for a brilliant thesis on the mathematical theories of atomic structure. That was why the Army had to have him for this job. But that had been some years before; atomic theory had turned several cartwheels in the meantime; he admitted to me that he had to bone like the very devil to try to catch up to the point where he could begin to understand what his highbrow charges were talking about in their reports.
I think he overstated the degree of his ignorance; there was certainly no one else in the United States who could have done the job. It required a man who could direct and suggest research in a highly esoteric field, but who saw the problem from the standpoint of urgent military necessity. Left to themselves, the physicists would have reveled in the intellectual luxury of an unlimited research expense account, but, while they undoubtedly would have made major advances in human knowledge, they might never have developed anything of military usefulness, or the military possibilities of a discovery might be missed for years.
It’s like this: It takes a smart dog to hunt birds, but it takes a hunter behind him to keep him from wasting time chasing rabbits. And the hunter needs to know nearly as much as the dog.
No derogatory reference to the scientists is intended—by no means! We had all the genius in the field that the United States could produce, men from Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, M.I.T., Cal Tech, Berkeley, every radiation laboratory in the country, as well as a couple of broad-A boys lent to us by the British. And they had every facility that ingenuity could think up and money could build. The five-hundred-ton cyclotron which had originally been intended for the University of California was there, and was already obsolete in the face of the new gadgets these brains had thought up, asked for, and been given. Canada supplied us with all the uranium we asked for—tons of the treacherous stuff—from Great Bear Lake, up near the Yukon, and the fractional-residues technique of separating uranium isotope 235 from the commoner isotope 238 had already been worked out, by the same team from Chicago that had worked up the earlier expensive mass spectrograph method.
Someone in the United States government had realized the terrific potentialities of uranium 235 quite early and, as far back as the summer of 1940, had rounded up every atomic research man in the country and had sworn them to silence. Atomic power, if ever developed, was planned to be a government monopoly, at least till the war was over. It might turn out to be the most incredibly powerful explosive ever dreamed of, and it might be the source of equally incredible power. In any case, with Hitler talking about secret weapons and shouting hoarse insults at democracies, the government planned to keep any new discoveries very close to the vest.
Hitler had lost the advantage of a first crack at the secret of uranium through not taking precautions. Dr. Hahn, the first man to break open the uranium atom, was a German. But one of his laboratory assistants had fled Germany to escape a pogrom. She came to this country, and told us about it.
We were searching, there in the laboratory in Maryland, for a way to use U235 in a controlled explosion. We had a vision of a one-ton bomb that would be a whole air raid in itself, a single explosion that would flatten out an entire industrial center. Dr. Ridpath, of Continental Tech, claimed that he could build such a bomb, but that he could not guarantee that it would not explode as soon as it was loaded and as for the force of the explosion—well, he did not believe his own figures; they ran out to too many ciphers.
The problem was, strangely enough, to find an explosive which would be weak enough to blow up only one county at a time, and stable enough to blow up only on request. If we could devise a really practical rocket fuel at the same time, one capable of driving a war rocket at a thousand miles an hour, or more, then we would be in a position to make most anybody say “uncle” to Uncle Sam.
We fiddled around with it all the rest of 1943 and well into 1944. The war in Europe and the troubles in Asia dragged on. After Italy folded up, England was able to release enough ships from her Mediterranean fleet to ease the blockade of the British Isles. With the help of the planes we could now send her regularly and with the additional over-age destroyers we let her have, England hung on somehow, digging in and taking more and more of her essential defense industries underground. Russia shifted her weight from side to side as usual, apparently with the policy of preventing either side from getting a sufficient advantage to bring the war to a successful conclusion. People were beginning to speak of “permanent war.”* * *
I was killing time in the administrative office, trying to improve my typing—a lot of Manning’s reports had to be typed by me personally—when the orderly on duty stepped in and announced Dr. Karst. I flipped the interoffice communicator. “Dr. Karst is here, chief. Can you see her?”
“Yes,” he answered, through his end.
I told the orderly to show her in.
Estelle Karst was quite a remarkable old girl and, I suppose, the first woman ever to hold a commission in the Corps of Engineers. She was an M.D. as well as an Sc.D. and reminded me of the teacher I had had in fourth grade. I guess that was why I always stood up instinctively when she came into the room—I was afraid she might look at me and sniff. It couldn’t have been her rank; we didn’t bother much with rank.
She was dressed in white coveralls and a shop apron and had simply thrown a hooded cape over herself to come through the snow. I said, “Good morning, ma’am,” and led her into Manning’s office.
The Colonel greeted her with the urbanity that had made him such a success with women’s clubs, seated her, and offered her a cigarette.
“I’m glad to see you, Major,” he said. “I’ve been intending to drop around to your shop.”
I knew what he was getting at; Dr. Karst’s work had been primarily physiomedical; he wanted her to change the direction of her research to something more productive in a military sense.
“Don’t call me ‘major,'” she said tartly.
“Sorry, Doctor—”
“I came on business, and must get right back. And I presume you are a busy man, too. Colonel Manning, I need some help.”
“That’s what we are here for.”
“Good. I’ve run into some snags in my research. I think that one of the men in Dr. Ridpath’s department could help me, but Dr. Ridpath doesn’t seem disposed to be cooperative.”
“So? Well, I hardly like to go over the head of a departmental chief, but tell me about it; perhaps we can arrange it. Whom do you want?”
“I need Dr. Obre.”
“The spectroscopist. Hm-m-m. I can understand Dr. Ridpath’s reluctance, Dr. Karst, and I’m disposed to agree with him. After all, the high-explosives research is really our main show around here.”
She bristled and I thought she was going to make him stay in after school at the very least. “Colonel Manning, do you realize the importance of artificial radioactives to modern medicine?”
“Why, I believe I do. Nevertheless, Doctor, our primary mission is to perfect a weapon which will serve as a safeguard to the whole country in time of war—”
She sniffed and went into action. “Weapons—fiddlesticks! Isn’t there a medical corps in the Army? Isn’t it more important to know how to heal men than to know how to blow them to bits? Colonel Manning, you’re not a fit man to have charge of this project! You’re a . . . you’re a, a warmonger, that’s what you are!”
I felt my ears turning red, but Manning never budged. He could have raised Cain with her, confined her to her quarters, maybe even have court-martialed her, but Manning isn’t like that. He told me once that every time a man is court-martialed, it is a sure sign that some senior officer hasn’t measured up to his job.
“I am sorry you feel that way, Doctor,” he said mildly, “and I agree that my technical knowledge isn’t what it might be. And, believe me, I do wish that healing were all we had to worry about. In any case, I have not refused your request. Let’s walk over to your laboratory and see what the problem is. Likely there is some arrangement that can be made which will satisfy everybody.”
He was already up and getting out his greatcoat. Her set mouth relaxed a trifle and she answered, “Very well. I’m sorry I spoke as I did.”
“Not at all,” he replied. “These are worrying times. Come along, John.”
I trailed after them, stopping in the outer office to get my own coat and to stuff my notebook in a pocket.
By the time we had trudged through mushy snow the eighth of a mile to her lab they were talking about gardening!
Manning acknowledged the sentry’s challenge with a wave of his hand and we entered the building. He started casually on into the inner lab, but Karst stopped him. “Armor first, Colonel.”
We had trouble finding overshoes that would fit over Manning’s boots, which he persisted in wearing, despite the new uniform regulations, and he wanted to omit the foot protection, but Karst would not hear of it. She called in a couple of her assistants who made jury-rigged moccasins out of some soft-lead sheeting.
The helmets were different from those used in the explosives lab, being fitted with inhalers. “What’s this?” inquired Manning.
“Radioactive dust guard,” she said. “It’s absolutely essential.”
We threaded a lead-lined meander and arrived at the workroom door which she opened by combination. I blinked at the sudden bright illumination and noticed the air was filled with little shiny motes.
“Hm-m-m—it is dusty,” agreed Manning. “Isn’t there some way of controlling that?” His voice sounded muffled from behind the dust mask.
“The last stage has to be exposed to air,” explained Karst. “The hood gets most of it. We could control it, but it would mean a quite expensive new installation.”
“No trouble about that. We’re not on a budget, you know. It must be very annoying to have to work in a mask like this.”
“It is,” acknowledged Karst. “The kind of gear it would take would enable us to work without body armor, too. That would be a comfort.”
I suddenly had a picture of the kind of thing these researchers put up with. I am a fair-sized man, yet I found that armor heavy to carry around. Estelle Karst was a small woman, yet she was willing to work maybe fourteen hours, day after day, in an outfit which was about as comfortable as a diving suit. But she had not complained.
Not all the heroes are in the headlines. These radiation experts not only ran the chance of cancer and nasty radioaction burns, but the men stood a chance of damaging their germ plasm and then having their wives present them with something horrid in the way of offspring—no chin, for example, and long hairy ears. Nevertheless, they went right ahead and never seemed to get irritated unless something held up their work.
Dr. Karst was past the age when she would be likely to be concerned personally about progeny, but the principle applies.
I wandered around, looking at the unlikely apparatus she used to get her results, fascinated as always by my failure to recognize much that reminded me of the physics laboratory I had known when I was an undergraduate, and being careful not to touch anything. Karst started explaining to Manning what she was doing and why, but I knew that it was useless for me to try to follow that technical stuff. If Manning wanted notes, he would dictate them. My attention was caught by a big boxlike contraption in one corner of the room. It had a hopperlike gadget on one side and I could hear a sound from it like the whirring of a fan with a background of running water. It intrigued me.
I moved back to the neighborhood of Dr. Karst and the Colonel and heard her saying, “The problem amounts to this, Colonel: I am getting a much more highly radioactive end product than I want, but there is considerable variation in the half-life of otherwise equivalent samples. That suggests to me that I am using a mixture of isotopes, but I haven’t been able to prove it. And frankly, I do not know enough about that end of the field to be sure of sufficient refinement in my methods. I need Dr. Obre’s help on that.”
I think those were her words, but I may not be doing her justice, not being a physicist. I understood the part about “half-life.” All radioactive materials keep right on radiating until they turn into something else, which takes theoretically forever. As a matter of practice their periods, or “lives,” are described in terms of how long it takes the original radiation to drop to one-half strength. That time is called a “half-life” and each radioactive isotope of an element has its own specific characteristic half-lifetime.
One of the staff—I forget which one—told me once that any form of matter can be considered as radioactive in some degree; it’s a question of intensity and period, or half-life.
“I’ll talk to Dr. Ridpath,” Manning answered her, “and see what can be arranged. In the meantime you might draw up plans for what you want to reequip your laboratory.”
“Thank you, Colonel.”
I could see that Manning was about ready to leave, having pacified her; I was still curious about the big box that gave out the odd noises.
“May I ask what that is, Doctor?”
“Oh, that? That’s an air conditioner.”
“Odd-looking one. I’ve never seen one like it.”
“It’s not to condition the air of this room. It’s to remove the radioactive dust before the exhaust air goes outdoors. We wash the dust out of the foul air.”
“Where does the water go?”
“Down the drain. Out into the bay eventually, I suppose.”
I tried to snap my fingers, which was impossible because of the lead mittens. “That accounts for it, Colonel!”
“Accounts for what?”
“Accounts for those accusing notes we’ve been getting from the Bureau of Fisheries. This poisonous dust is being carried out into Chesapeake Bay and is killing the fish.”
Manning turned to Karst. “Do you think that possible, Doctor?”
I could see her brows draw together through the window in her helmet. “I hadn’t thought about it,” she admitted. “I’d have to do some figuring on the possible concentrations before I could give you a definite answer. But it is possible—yes. However,” she added anxiously, “it would be simple enough to divert this drain to a sink hole of some sort.”
“Hm-m-m—yes.” He did not say anything for some minutes, simply stood there, looking at the box.
Presently he said, “This dust is pretty lethal?”
“Quite lethal, Colonel.” There was another long silence.
At last I gathered he had made up his mind about something for he said decisively, “I am going to see to it that you get Obre’s assistance, Doctor—”
“Oh, good!”
“—but I want you to help me in return. I am very much interested in this research of yours, but I want it carried on with a little broader scope. I want you to investigate for maxima both in period and intensity as well as for minima. I want you to drop the strictly utilitarian approach and make an exhaustive research along lines which we will work out in greater detail later.”
She started to say something but he cut in ahead of her. “A really thorough program of research should prove more helpful in the long run to your original purpose than a more narrow one. And I shall make it my business to expedite every possible facility for such a research. I think we may turn up a number of interesting things.”
He left immediately, giving her no time to discuss it. He did not seem to want to talk on the way back and I held my peace. I think he had already gotten a glimmering of the bold and drastic strategy this was to lead to, but even Manning could not have thought out that early the inescapable consequences of a few dead fish—otherwise he would never have ordered the research.
No, I don’t really believe that. He would have gone right ahead, knowing that if he did not do it, someone else would. He would have accepted the responsibility while bitterly aware of its weight.* * *
1944 wore along with no great excitement on the surface. Karst got her new laboratory equipment and so much additional help that her department rapidly became the largest on the grounds. The explosives research was suspended after a conference between Manning and Ridpath, of which I heard only the end, but the meat of it was that there existed not even a remote possibility at that time of utilizing U235 as an explosive. As a source of power, yes, sometime in the distant future when there had been more opportunity to deal with the extremely ticklish problem of controlling the nuclear reaction. Even then it seemed likely that it would not be a source of power in prime movers such as rocket motors or mobiles, but would be used in vast power plants at least as large as the Boulder Dam installation.
After that Ridpath became a sort of co-chairman of Karst’s department and the equipment formerly used by the explosives department was adapted or replaced to carry on research on the deadly artificial radioactives. Manning arranged a division of labor and Karst stuck to her original problem of developing techniques for tailor-making radioactives. I think she was perfectly happy, sticking with a one-track mind to the problem at hand. I don’t know to this day whether or not Manning and Ridpath ever saw fit to discuss with her what they intended to do.
As a matter of fact, I was too busy myself to think much about it. The general elections were coming up and I was determined that Manning should have a constituency to return to, when the emergency was over. He was not much interested, but agreed to let his name be filed as a candidate for re-election. I was trying to work up a campaign by remote control and cursing because I could not be in the field to deal with the thousand and one emergencies as they arose.
I did the next best thing and had a private line installed to permit the campaign chairman to reach me easily. I don’t think I violated the Hatch Act, but I guess I stretched it a little. Anyhow, it turned out all right; Manning was elected as were several other members of the citizen-military that year. An attempt was made to smear him by claiming that he was taking two salaries for one job, but we squelched that with a pamphlet entitled “For Shame!” which explained that he got one salary for two jobs. That’s the Federal law in such cases and people are entitled to know it.* * *
It was just before Christmas that Manning first admitted to me how much the implications of the Karst-Obre process were preying on his mind. He called me into his office over some inconsequential matter, then did not let me go. I saw that he wanted to talk.
“How much of the K-O dust do we now have on hand?” he asked suddenly.
“Just short of ten thousand units,” I replied. “I can look up the exact figures in half a moment.” A unit would take care of a thousand men, at normal dispersion. He knew the figure as well as I did, and I knew he was stalling.
We had shifted almost imperceptibly from research to manufacture, entirely on Manning’s initiative and authority. Manning had never made a specific report to the Department about it, unless he had done so orally to the Chief of Staff.
“Never mind,” he answered to my suggestion, then added, “Did you see those horses?”
“Yes,” I said briefly.
I did not want to talk about it. I like horses. We had requisitioned six broken-down old nags, ready for the bone yard, and had used them experimentally. We knew now what the dust would do. After they had died, any part of their carcasses would register on a photographic plate and tissue from the apices of their lungs and from the bronchia glowed with a light of its own.
Manning stood at the window, staring out at the dreary Maryland winter for a minute or two before replying, “John, I wish that radioactivity had never been discovered. Do you realize what that devilish stuff amounts to?”
“Well,” I said, “it’s a weapon, about like poison gas—maybe more efficient.”
“Rats!” he said, and for a moment I thought he was annoyed with me personally. “That’s about like comparing a sixteen-inch gun with a bow and arrow. We’ve got here the first weapon the world has ever seen against which there is no defense, none whatsoever. It’s death itself, C.O.D.
“Have you seen Ridpath’s report?” he went on.
I had not. Ridpath had taken to delivering his reports by hand to Manning personally.
“Well,” he said, “ever since we started production I’ve had all the talent we could spare working on the problem of a defense against the dust. Ridpath tells me and I agree with him that there is no means whatsoever to combat the stuff, once it’s used.”
“How about armor,” I asked, “and protective clothing?
“Sure, sure,” he agreed irritatedly, “provided you never take it off to eat, or to drink or for any purpose whatever, until the radioaction has ceased, or you are out of the danger zone. That is all right for laboratory work; I’m talking about war.”
I considered the matter. “I still don’t see what you are fretting about, Colonel. If the stuff is as good as you say it is, you’ve done just exactly what you set out to do—develop a weapon which would give the United States protection against aggression.”
He swung around. “John, there are times when I think you are downright stupid!”
I said nothing. I knew him and I knew how to discount his moods. The fact that he permitted me to see his feelings is the finest compliment I have ever had.
“Look at it this way,” he went on more patiently; “this dust, as a weapon, is not just simply sufficient to safeguard the United States, it amounts to a loaded gun held at the head of every man, woman, and child on the globe!”
“Well,” I answered, “what of that? It’s our secret, and we’ve got the upper hand. The United States can put a stop to this war, and any other war. We can declare a Pax Americana, and enforce it.”
“Hm-m-m—I wish it were that easy. But it won’t remain our secret; you can count on that. It doesn’t matter how successfully we guard it; all that anyone needs is the hint given by the dust itself and then it is just a matter of time until some other nation develops a technique to produce it. You can’t stop brains from working, John; the reinvention of the method is a mathematical certainty, once they know what it is they are looking for. And uranium is a common enough substance, widely distributed over the globe—don’t forget that!
“It’s like this: Once the secret is out—and it will be out if we ever use the stuff!—the whole world will be comparable to a room full of men, each armed with a loaded .45. They can’t get out of the room and each one is dependent on the good will of every other one to stay alive. All offense and no defense. See what I mean?”
I thought about it, but I still didn’t guess at the difficulties. It seemed to me that a peace enforced by us was the only way out, with precautions taken to see that we controlled the sources of uranium. I had the usual American subconscious conviction that our country would never use power in sheer aggression. Later, I thought about the Mexican War and the Spanish-American War and some of the things we did in Central America, and I was not so sure—* * *
It was a couple of weeks later, shortly after inauguration day, that Manning told me to get the Chief of Staff’s office on the telephone. I heard only the tail end of the conversation. “No, General, I won’t,” Manning was saying. “I won’t discuss it with you, or the Secretary, either. This is a matter the Commander in Chief is going to have to decide in the long run. If he turns it down, it is imperative that no one else ever knows about it. That’s my considered opinion. . . . What’s that? . . . I took this job under the condition that I was to have a free hand. You’ve got to give me a little leeway this time. . . . Don’t go brass hat on me. I knew you when you were a plebe. . . . O.K., O.K., sorry. . . . If the Secretary of War won’t listen to reason, you tell him I’ll be in my seat in the House of Representatives tomorrow, and that I’ll get the favor I want from the majority leader. . . . All right. Good-bye.”
Washington rang up again about an hour later. It was the Secretary of War. This time Manning listened more than he talked. Toward the end, he said, “All I want is thirty minutes alone with the President. If nothing comes of it, no harm has been done. If I convince him, then you will know all about it. . . . No. sir, I did not mean that you would avoid responsibility. I intended to be helpful. . . . Fine! Thank you, Mr. Secretary.”
The White House rang up later in the day and set a time.* * *
We drove down to the District the next day through a nasty cold rain that threatened to turn to sleet. The usual congestion in Washington was made worse by the weather; it very nearly caused us to be late in arriving. I could hear Manning swearing under his breath all the way down Rhode Island Avenue. But we were dropped at the west wing entrance to the White House with two minutes to spare. Manning was ushered into the Oval Office almost at once and I was left cooling my heels and trying to get comfortable in civilian clothes. After so many months of uniform they itched in the wrong places.
The thirty minutes went by.
The President’s reception secretary went in, and came out very promptly indeed. He stepped on out into the outer reception room and I heard something that began with, “I’m sorry, Senator, but—” He came back in, made a penciled notation, and passed it out to an usher.
Two more hours went by.
Manning appeared at the door at last and the secretary looked relieved. But he did not come out, saying instead, “Come in, John. The President wants to take a look at you.”
I fell over my feet getting up.
Manning said, “Mr. President, this is Captain DeFries.” The President nodded, and I bowed, unable to say anything. He was standing on the hearth rug, his fine head turned toward us, and looking just like his pictures—but it seemed strange for the President of the United States not to be a tall man.
I had never seen him before, though, of course, I knew something of his record the two years he had been in the Senate and while he was Mayor before that.
The President said, “Sit down, DeFries. Care to smoke?” Then to Manning, “You think he can do it?”
“I think he’ll have to. It’s Hobson’s choice.”
“And you are sure of him?”
“He was my campaign manager.”
“I see.”
The President said nothing more for a while and God knows I didn’t!—though I was bursting to know what they were talking about. He commenced again with, “Colonel Manning, I intend to follow the procedure you have suggested, with the changes we discussed. But I will be down tomorrow to see for myself that the dust will do what you say it will. Can you prepare a demonstration?”
“Yes, Mr. President,”
“Very well, we will use Captain DeFries unless I think of a better procedure.” I thought for a moment that they planned to use me for a guinea pig! But he turned to me and continued, “Captain, I expect to send you to England as my representative.”
I gulped. “Yes, Mr. President.” And that is every word I had to say in calling on the President of the United States.* * *
After that, Manning had to tell me a lot of things he had on his mind. I am going to try to relate them as carefully as possible, even at the risk of being dull and obvious and of repeating things that are common knowledge.
We had a weapon that could not be stopped. Any type of K-O dust scattered over an area rendered that area uninhabitable for a length of time that depended on the half-life of the radioactivity.
Period. Full stop.
Once an area was dusted there was nothing that could be done about it until the radioactivity had fallen off to the point where it was no longer harmful. The dust could not be cleaned out; it was everywhere. There was no possible way to counteract it—burn it, combine it chemically; the radioactive isotope was still there, still radioactive, still deadly. Once used on a stretch of land, for a predetermined length of time that piece of earth would not tolerate life.
It was extremely simple to use. No complicated bomb-sights were needed, no care need be taken to hit “military objectives.” Take it aloft in any sort of aircraft, attain a position more or less over the area you wish to sterilize, and drop the stuff. Those on the ground in the contaminated area are dead men, dead in an hour, a day, a week, a month, depending on the degree of the infection—but dead.
Manning told me that he had once seriously considered, in the middle of the night, recommending that every single person, including himself, who knew the Karst-Obre technique be put to death, in the interests of all civilization. But he had realized the next day that it had been sheer funk; the technique was certain in time to be rediscovered by someone else.
Furthermore, it would not do to wait, to refrain from using the grisly power, until someone else perfected it and used it. The only possible chance to keep the world from being turned into one huge morgue was for us to use the power first and drastically—get the upper hand and keep it.
We were not at war, legally, yet we had been in the war up to our necks with our weight on the side of democracy since 1940. Manning had proposed to the President that we turn a supply of the dust over to Great Britain, under conditions we specified, and enable them thereby to force a peace. But the terms of the peace would be dictated by the United States—for we were not turning over the secret.
After that, the Pax Americana.
The United States was having power thrust on it, willy-nilly. We had to accept it and enforce a worldwide peace, ruthlessly and drastically, or it would be seized by some other nation. There could not be co-equals in the possession of this weapon. The factor of time predominated.
I was selected to handle the details in England because Manning insisted, and the President agreed with him, that every person technically acquainted with the Karst-Obre process should remain on the laboratory reservation in what amounted to protective custody—imprisonment. That included Manning himself. I could go because I did not have the secret—I could not even have acquired it without years of schooling—and what I did not know I could not tell, even under, well, drugs. We were determined to keep the secret as long as we could to consolidate the Pax;we did not distrust our English cousins, but they were Britishers, with a first loyalty to the British Empire. No need to tempt them.
I was picked because I understood the background if not the science, and because Manning trusted me. I don’t know why the President trusted me, too, but then my job was not complicated.* * *
We took off from the new field outside Baltimore on a cold, raw afternoon which matched my own feelings. I had an all-gone feeling in my stomach, a runny nose, and, buttoned inside my clothes, papers appointing me a special agent of the President of the United States. They were odd papers, papers without precedent; they did not simply give me the usual diplomatic immunity; they made my person very nearly as sacred as that of the President himself.
At Nova Scotia we touched ground to refuel, the F.B.I, men left us, we took off again, and the Canadian transfighters took their stations around us. All the dust we were sending was in my plane; if the President’s representative were shot down, the dust would go to the bottom with him.
No need to tell of the crossing. I was airsick and miserable, in spite of the steadiness of the new six-engined jobs. I felt like a hangman on the way to an execution, and wished to God that I were a boy again, with nothing more momentous than a debate contest, or a track meet, to worry me.
There was some fighting around us as we neared Scotland, I know, but I could not see it, the cabin being shuttered. Our pilot-captain ignored it and brought his ship down on a totally dark field, using a beam, I suppose, though I did not know nor care. I would have welcomed a crash. Then the lights outside went on and I saw that we had come to rest in an underground hangar.
I stayed in the ship. The Commandant came to see me to his quarters as his guest. I shook my head. “I stay here,” I said. “Orders. You are to treat this ship as United States soil, you know.”
He seemed miffed, but compromised by having dinner served for both of us in my ship.
There was a really embarrassing situation the next day. I was commanded to appear for a Royal audience. But I had my instructions and I stuck to them. I was sitting on that cargo of dust until the President told me what to do with it. Late in the day I was called on by a member of Parliament—nobody admitted out loud that it was the Prime Minister—and a Mr. Windsor. The M.P. did most of the talking and I answered his questions. My other guest said very little and spoke slowly with some difficulty. But I got a very favorable impression of him. He seemed to be a man who was carrying a load beyond human strength and carrying it heroically.* * *
There followed the longest period in my life. It was actually only a little longer than a week, but every minute of it had that split-second intensity of imminent disaster that comes just before a car crash. The President was using the time to try to avert the need to use the dust. He had two face-to-face television conferences with the new Fuehrer. The President spoke German fluently, which should have helped. He spoke three times to the warring peoples themselves, but it is doubtful if very many on the Continent were able to listen, the police regulations there being what they were.
The Ambassador from the Reich was given a special demonstration of the effect of the dust. He was flown out over a deserted stretch of Western prairie and allowed to see what a single dusting would do to a herd of steers. It should have impressed him and I think that it did—nobody could ignore a visual demonstration!—but what report he made to his leader we never knew.
The British Isles were visited repeatedly during the wait by bombing attacks as heavy as any of the war. I was safe enough but I heard about them, and I could see the effect on the morale of the officers with whom I associated. Not that it frightened them—it made them coldly angry. The raids were not directed primarily at dockyards or factories, but were ruthless destruction of anything, particularly villages.
“I don’t see what you chaps are waiting for,” a flight commander complained to me. “What the Jerries need is a dose of their own shrecklichkeit, a lesson in their own Aryan culture.”
I shook my head. “We’ll have to do it our own way.”
He dropped the matter, but I knew how he and his brother officers felt. They had a standing toast, as sacred as the toast to the King: “Remember Coventry!”
Our President had stipulated that the R.A.F. was not to bomb during the period of negotiation, but their bombers were busy nevertheless. The continent was showered, night after night, with bales of leaflets, prepared by our own propaganda agents. The first of these called on the people of the Reich to stop a useless war and promised that the terms of peace would not be vindictive. The second rain of pamphlets showed photographs of that herd of steers. The third was a simple direct warning to get out of cities and to stay out.
As Manning put it, we were calling “Halt!” three times before firing. I do not think that he or the President expected it to work, but we were morally obligated to try.
The Britishers had installed for me a televisor, of the Simonds-Yarley nonintercept type, the sort whereby the receiver must “trigger” the transmitter in order for the transmission to take place at all. It made assurance of privacy in diplomatic rapid communication for the first time in history, and was a real help in the crisis. I had brought along my own technician, one of the F.B.I.’s new corps of specialists, to handle the scrambler and the trigger.
He called to me one afternoon. “Washington signaling.”
I climbed tiredly out of the cabin and down to the booth on the hangar floor, wondering if it were another false alarm.
It was the President. His lips were white. “Carry out your basic instructions, Mr. DeFries.”
“Yes, Mr. President!”* * *
The details had been worked out in advance and, once I had accepted a receipt and token payment from the Commandant for the dust, my duties were finished. But, at our instance, the British had invited military observers from every independent nation and from the several provisional governments of occupied nations. The United States Ambassador designated me as one at the request of Manning.
Our task group was thirteen bombers. One such bomber could have carried all the dust needed, but it was split up to insure most of it, at least, reaching its destination. I had fetched forty percent more dust than Ridpath calculated would be needed for the mission and my last job was to see to it that every canister actually went on board a plane of the flight. The extremely small weight of dust used was emphasized to each of the military observers.
We took off just at dark, climbed to twenty-five thousand feet, refueled in the air, and climbed again. Our escort was waiting for us, having refueled thirty minutes before us. The flight split into thirteen groups, and cut the thin air for middle Europe. The bombers we rode had been stripped and hiked up to permit the utmost maximum of speed and altitude.
Elsewhere in England, other flights had taken off shortly before us to act as a diversion. Their destinations were every part of Germany; it was the intention to create such confusion in the air above the Reich that our few planes actually engaged in the serious work might well escape attention entirely, flying so high in the stratosphere.
The thirteen dust carriers approached Berlin from different directions, planning to cross Berlin as if following the spokes of a wheel. The night was appreciably clear and we had a low moon to help us. Berlin is not a hard city to locate, since it has the largest square-mile area of any modern city and is located on a broad flat alluvial plain. I could make out the River Spree as we approached it, and the Havel. The city was blacked out, but a city makes a different sort of black from open country. Parachute flares hung over the city in many places, showing that the R.A.F. had been busy before we got there and the A.A. batteries on the ground helped to pick out the city.
There was fighting below us, but not within fifteen thousand feet of our altitude as nearly as I could judge.
The pilot reported to the captain, “On line of bearing!” The chap working the absolute altimeter steadily fed his data into the fuse pots of the canister. The canisters were equipped with a light charge of black powder, sufficient to explode them and scatter the dust at a time after release predetermined by the fuse pot setting. The method used was no more than an efficient expedient. The dust would have been almost as effective had it simply been dumped out in paper bags, although not as well distributed.
The Captain hung over the navigator’s board, a slight frown on his thin sallow face. “Ready one!” reported the bomber.
“Release!”
“Ready two!”
The Captain studied his wristwatch. “Release!”
“Ready three!”
“Release!”
When the last of our ten little packages was out of the ship we turned tail and ran for home.* * *
No arrangements had been made for me to get home; nobody had thought about it. But it was the one thing I wanted to do. I did not feel badly; I did not feel much of anything. I felt like a man who has at last screwed up his courage and undergone a serious operation; it’s over now, he is still numb from shock but his mind is relaxed. But I wanted to go home.
The British Commandant was quite decent about it; he serviced and manned my ship at once and gave me an escort for the offshore war zone. It was an expensive way to send one man home, but who cared? We had just expended some millions of lives in a desperate attempt to end the war; what was a money expense? He gave the necessary orders absentmindedly.
I took a double dose of nembutal and woke up in Canada. I tried to get some news while the plane was being serviced, but there was not much to be had. The government of the Reich had issued one official news bulletin shortly after the raid, sneering at the much vaunted “secret weapon” of the British and stating that a major air attack had been made on Berlin and several other cities, but that the raiders had been driven off with only minor damage. The current Lord Haw-Haw started one of his sarcastic speeches but was unable to continue it. The announcer said that he had been seized with a heart attack, and substituted some recordings of patriotic music. The station cut off in the middle of the “Horst Wessel” song. After that there was silence.
I managed to promote an Army car and a driver at the Baltimore field which made short work of the Annapolis speedway. We almost overran the turnoff to the laboratory.
Manning was in his office. He looked up as I came in, said, “Hello, John,” in a dispirited voice, and dropped his eyes again to the blotter pad. He went back to drawing doodles.
I looked him over and realized for the first time that the chief was an old man. His face was gray and flabby, deep furrows framed his mouth in a triangle. His clothes did not fit.
I went up to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t take it so hard, chief. It’s not your fault. We gave them all the warning in the world.”
He looked up again. “Estelle Karst suicided this morning.”
Anybody could have anticipated it, but nobody did. And somehow I felt harder hit by her death than by the death of all those strangers in Berlin. “How did she do it?” I asked.
“Dust. She went into the canning room, and took off her armor.”
I could picture her—head held high, eyes snapping, and that set look on her mouth which she got when people did something she disapproved of. One little old woman whose lifetime work had been turned against her.
“I wish,” Manning added slowly, “that I could explain to her why we had to do it.”
We buried her in a lead-lined coffin, then Manning and I went on to Washington.* * *
While we were there, we saw the motion pictures that had been made of the death of Berlin. You have not seen them; they never were made public, but they were of great use in convincing the other nations of the world that peace was a good idea. I saw them when Congress did, being allowed in because I was Manning’s assistant.
They had been made by a pair of R.A.F. pilots, who had dodged the Luftwaffe to get them. The first shots showed some of the main streets the morning after the raid. There was not much to see that would show up in telephoto shots, just busy and crowded streets, but if you looked closely you could see that there had been an excessive number of automobile accidents.
The second day showed the attempt to evacuate. The inner squares of the city were practically deserted save for bodies and wrecked cars, but the streets leading out of town were boiling with people, mostly on foot, for the trams were out of service. The pitiful creatures were fleeing, not knowing that death was already lodged inside them. The plane swooped down at one point and the cinematographer had his telephoto lens pointed directly into the face of a young woman for several seconds. She stared back at it with a look too woebegone to forget, then stumbled and fell.
She may have been trampled. I hope so. One of those six horses had looked like that when the stuff was beginning to hit his vitals.
The last sequence showed Berlin and the roads around it a week after the raid. The city was dead; there was not a man, a woman, a child—nor cats, nor dogs, not even a pigeon. Bodies were all around, but they were safe from rats. There were no rats.
The roads around Berlin were quiet now. Scattered carelessly on shoulders and in ditches, and to a lesser extent on the pavement itself, like coal shaken off a train, were the quiet heaps that had been the citizens of the capital of the Reich. There is no use in talking about it.
But, so far as I am concerned, I left what soul I had in that projection room and I have not had one since.
The two pilots who made the pictures eventually died—systemic, cumulative infection, dust in the air over Berlin. With precautions it need not have happened, but the English did not believe, as yet, that our extreme precautions were necessary.* * *
The Reich took about a week to fold up. It might have taken longer if the new Fuehrer had not gone to Berlin the day after the raid to “prove” that the British boasts had been hollow. There is no need to recount the provisional governments that Germany had in the following several months; the only one we are concerned with is the so-called restored monarchy which used a cousin of the old Kaiser as a symbol, the one that sued for peace.
Then the trouble started.
When the Prime Minister announced the terms of the private agreement he had had with our President, he was met with a silence that was broken only by cries of “Shame! Shame! Resign!” I suppose it was inevitable; the Commons reflected the spirit of a people who had been unmercifully punished for four years. They were in a mood to enforce a peace that would have made the Versailles Treaty look like the Beatitudes.
The vote of no confidence left the Prime Minister no choice. Forty-eight hours later the King made a speech from the throne that violated all constitutional precedent, for it had not been written by a Prime Minister. In this greatest crisis in his reign, his voice was clear and unlabored; it sold the idea to England and a national coalition government was formed.
I don’t know whether we would have dusted London to enforce our terms or not; Manning thinks we would have done so. I suppose it depended on the character of the President of the United States, and there is no way of knowing about that since we did not have to do it.
The United States, and in particular the President of the United States, was confronted by two inescapable problems. First, we had to consolidate our position at once, use our temporary advantage of an overwhelmingly powerful weapon to insure that such a weapon would not be turned on us. Second, some means had to be worked out to stabilize American foreign policy so that it could handle the tremendous power we had suddenly had thrust upon us.
The second was by far the most difficult and serious. If we were to establish a reasonably permanent peace—say a century or so—through a monopoly on a weapon so powerful that no one dare fight us, it was imperative that the policy under which we acted be more lasting than passing political administrations. But more of that later—
The first problem had to be attended to at once—time was the heart of it. The emergency lay in the very simplicity of the weapon. It required nothing but aircraft to scatter it and the dust itself, which was easily and quickly made by anyone possessing the secret of the Karst-Obre process and having access to a small supply of uranium-bearing ore.
But the Karst-Obre process was simple and might be independently developed at any time. Manning reported to the President that it was Ridpath’s opinion, concurred in by Manning, that the staff of any modern radiation laboratory should be able to work out an equivalent technique in six weeks, working from the hint given by the events in Berlin alone, and should then be able to produce enough dust to cause major destruction in another six weeks.
Ninety days—ninety days provided they started from scratch and were not already halfway to their goal. Less than ninety days—perhaps no time at all—
By this time Manning was an unofficial member of the Cabinet; “Secretary of Dust,” the President called him in one of his rare jovial moods. As for me, well, I attended Cabinet meetings, too. As the only layman who had seen the whole show from beginning to end, the President wanted me there.
I am an ordinary sort of man who, by a concatenation of improbabilities, found himself shoved into the councils of the rulers. But I found that the rulers were ordinary men, too, and frequently as bewildered as I was.
But Manning was no ordinary man. In him ordinary hard sense had been raised to the level of genius. Oh, yes, I know that it is popular to blame everything on him and to call him everything from traitor to mad dog, but I still think he was both wise and benevolent. I don’t care how many second-guessing historians disagree with me.
“I propose,” said Manning, “that we begin by immobilizing all aircraft throughout the world.”
The Secretary of Commerce raised his brows. “Aren’t you,” he said, “being a little fantastic, Colonel Manning?”
“No, I’m not,” answered Manning shortly. “I’m being realistic. The key to this problem is aircraft. Without aircraft the dust is an inefficient weapon. The only way I see to gain time enough to deal with the whole problem is to ground all aircraft and put them out of operation. All aircraft, that is, not actually in the service of the United States Army. After that we can deal with complete world disarmament and permanent methods of control.”
“Really now,” replied the Secretary, “you are not proposing that commercial airlines be put out of operation. They are an essential part of world economy. It would be an intolerable nuisance.”
“Getting killed is an intolerable nuisance, too,” Manning answered stubbornly. “I do propose just that. All aircraft. All.“
The President had been listening without comment to the discussion. He now cut in. “How about aircraft on which some groups depend to stay alive, Colonel, such as the Alaskan lines?”
“If there are such, they must be operated by American Army pilots and crews. No exceptions.”
The Secretary of Commerce looked startled. “Am I to infer from that last remark that you intended this prohibition to apply to the United States as well as other nations?”
“Naturally.”
“But that’s impossible. It’s unconstitutional. It violates civil rights.”
“Killing a man violates his civil rights, too,” Manning answered stubbornly.
“You can’t do it. Any Federal Court in the country would enjoin you in five minutes.”
“It seems to me,” said Manning slowly, “that Andy Jackson gave us a good precedent for that one when he told John Marshall to go fly a kite.” He looked slowly around the table at faces that ranged from undecided to antagonistic. “The issue is sharp, gentlemen, and we might as well drag it out in the open. We can be dead men, with everything in due order, constitutional, and technically correct; or we can do what has to be done, stay alive, and try to straighten out the legal aspects later.” He shut up and waited.
The Secretary of Labor picked it up. “I don’t think the Colonel has any corner on realism. I think I see the problem, too, and I admit it is a serious one. The dust must never be used again. Had I known about it soon enough, it would never have been used on Berlin. And I agree that some sort of worldwide control is necessary. But where I differ with the Colonel is in the method. What he proposes is a military dictatorship imposed by force on the whole world. Admit it, Colonel. Isn’t that what you are proposing?”
Manning did not dodge it. “That is what I am proposing.”
“Thanks. Now we know where we stand. I, for one, do not regard democratic measures and constitutional procedure as of so little importance that I am willing to jettison them any time it becomes convenient. To me, democracy is more than a matter of expediency, it is a faith. Either it works, or I go under with it.”
“What do you propose?” asked the President.
“I propose that we treat this as an opportunity to create a worldwide democratic commonwealth! Let us use our present dominant position to issue a call to all nations to send representatives to a conference to form a world constitution.”
“League of Nations,” I heard someone mutter.
“No!” he answered the side remark. “Not a League of Nations. The old League was helpless because it had no real existence, no power. It was not implemented to enforce its decisions; it was just a debating society, a sham. This would be different for we would turn over the dust to it!“
Nobody spoke for some minutes. You could see them turning it over in their minds, doubtful, partially approving, intrigued but dubious.
“I’d like to answer that,” said Manning.
“Go ahead,” said the President.
“I will. I’m going to have to use some pretty plain language and I hope that Secretary Larner will do me the honor of believing that I speak so from sincerity and deep concern and not from personal pique.
“I think a world democracy would be a very fine thing and I ask that you believe me when I say I would willingly lay down my life to accomplish it. I also think it would be a very fine thing for the lion to lie down with the lamb, but I am reasonably certain that only the lion would get up. If we try to form an actual world democracy, we’ll be the lamb in the setup.
“There are a lot of good, kindly people who are internationalists these days. Nine out of ten of them are soft in the head and the tenth is ignorant. If we set up a worldwide democracy, what will the electorate be? Take a look at the facts: Four hundred million Chinese with no more concept of voting and citizen responsibility than a flea; three hundred million Hindus who aren’t much better indoctrinated; God knows how many in the Eurasian Union who believe in God knows what; the entire continent of Africa only semicivilized; eighty million Japanese who really believe that they are Heaven-ordained to rule; our Spanish-American friends who might trail along with us and might not, but who don’t understand the Bill of Rights the way we think of it; a quarter of a billion people of two dozen different nationalities in Europe, all with revenge and black hatred in their hearts.
“No, it won’t wash. It’s preposterous to talk about a world democracy for many years to come. If you turn the secret of the dust over to such a body, you will be arming the whole world to commit suicide.”
Larner answered at once. “I could resent some of your remarks, but I won’t. To put it bluntly, I consider the source. The trouble with you, Colonel Manning, is that you are a professional soldier and have no faith in people. Soldiers may be necessary, but the worst of them are martinets and the best are merely paternalistic.” There was quite a lot more of the same.
Manning stood it until his turn came again. “Maybe I am all those things, but you haven’t met my argument. What are you going to do about the hundreds of millions of people who have no experience in, nor love for, democracy? Now, perhaps, I don’t have the same concept of democracy as yourself, but I do know this: Out West there are a couple of hundred thousand people who sent me to Congress; I am not going to stand quietly by and let a course be followed which I think will result in their deaths or utter ruin.
“Here is the probable future, as I see it, potential in the smashing of the atom and the development of lethal artificial radioactives. Some power makes a supply of the dust. They’ll hit us first to try to knock us out and give them a free hand. New York and Washington overnight, then all of our industrial areas while we are still politically and economically disorganized. But our army would not be in those cities; we would have planes and a supply of dust somewhere where the first dusting wouldn’t touch them. Our boys would bravely and righteously proceed to poison their big cities. Back and forth it would go until the organization of each country had broken down so completely that they were no longer able to maintain a sufficiently high level of industrialization to service planes and manufacture dust. That presupposes starvation and plague in the process. You can fill in the details.
“The other nations would get in the game. It would be silly and suicidal, of course, but it doesn’t take brains to take a hand in this. All it takes is a very small group, hungry for power, a few airplanes and a supply of dust. It’s a vicious circle that cannot possibly bestopped until the entire planet has dropped to a level of economy too low to support the techniques necessary to maintain it. My best guess is that such a point would be reached when approximately three-quarters of the world’s population were dead of dust, disease, or hunger, and culture reduced to the peasant-and-village type.
“Where is your Constitution and your Bill of Rights if you let that happen?”
I’ve shortened it down, but that was the gist of it. I can’t hope to record every word of an argument that went on for days.
The Secretary of the Navy took a crack at him next. “Aren’t you getting a bit hysterical, Colonel? After all, the world has seen a lot of weapons which were going to make war an impossibility too horrible to contemplate. Poison gas, and tanks, and airplanes—even firearms, if I remember my history.”
Manning smiled wryly. “You’ve made a point, Mr. Secretary. ‘And when the wolf really came, the little boy shouted in vain.’ I imagine the Chamber of Commerce in Pompeii presented the same reasonable argument to any early vulcanologist so timid as to fear Vesuvius. I’ll try to justify my fears. The dust differs from every earlier weapon in its deadliness and ease of use, but most importantly in that we have developed no defense against it. For a number of fairly technical reasons, I don’t think we ever will, at least not this century.”
“Why not?”
“Because there is no way to counteract radioactivity short of putting a lead shield between yourself and it, an airtight lead shield. People might survive by living in sealed underground cities, but our characteristic American culture could not be maintained.”
“Colonel Manning,” suggested the Secretary of State, “I think you have overlooked the obvious alternative.”
“Have I?”
“Yes—to keep the dust as our own secret, go our own way, and let the rest of the world look out for itself. That is the only program that fits our traditions.” The Secretary of State was really a fine old gentleman, and not stupid, but he was slow to assimilate new ideas.
“Mr. Secretary,” said Manning respectfully, “I wish we could afford to mind our own business. I do wish we could. But it is the best opinion of all the experts that we can’t maintain control of this secret except by rigid policing. The Germans were close on our heels in nuclear research; it was sheer luck that we got there first. I ask you to imagine Germany a year hence—with a supply of dust.”
The Secretary did not answer, but I saw his lips form the word Berlin.
They came around. The President had deliberately let Manning bear the brunt of the argument, conserving his own stock of goodwill to coax the obdurate. He decided against putting it up to Congress; the dusters would have been overhead before each senator had finished his say. What he intended to do might be unconstitutional, but if he failed to act there might not be any Constitution shortly. There was precedent—the Emancipation Proclamation, the Monroe Doctrine, the Louisiana Purchase, suspension of habeas corpus in the War between the States, the Destroyer Deal.
On February 22nd the President declared a state of full emergency internally and sent his Peace Proclamation to the head of every sovereign state. Divested of its diplomatic surplusage, it said: The United States is prepared to defeat any power, or combination of powers, in jig time. Accordingly, we are outlawing war and are calling on every nation to disarm completely at once. In other words, “Throw down your guns, boys; we’ve got the drop on you!“
A supplement set forth the procedure: All aircraft capable of flying the Atlantic were to be delivered in one week’s time to a field, or rather a great stretch of prairie, just west of Fort Riley, Kansas. For lesser aircraft, a spot near Shanghai and a rendezvous in Wales were designated. Memoranda would be issued later with respect to other war equipment. Uranium and its ores were not mentioned; that would come later.
No excuses. Failure to disarm would be construed as an act of war against the United States.* * *
There were no cases of apoplexy in the Senate; why not, I don’t know.
There were only three powers to be seriously worried about, England, Japan, and the Eurasian Union. England had been forewarned, we had pulled her out of a war she was losing, and she—or rather her men in power—knew accurately what we could and would do.
Japan was another matter. They had not seen Berlin and they did not really believe it. Besides, they had been telling each other for so many years that they were unbeatable, they believed it. It does not do to get too tough with a Japanese too quickly, for they will die rather than lose face. The negotiations were conducted very quietly indeed, but our fleet was halfway from Pearl Harbor to Kobe, loaded with enough dust to sterilize their six biggest cities, before they were concluded. Do you know what did it? This never hit the newspapers but it was the wording of the pamphlets we proposed to scatter before dusting.
The Emperor was pleased to declare a New Order of Peace. The official version, built up for home consumption, made the whole matter one of collaboration between two great and friendly powers, with Japan taking the initiative.
The Eurasian Union was a puzzle. After Stalin’s unexpected death in 1941, no western nation knew very much about what went on in there. Our own diplomatic relations had atrophied through failure to replace men called home nearly four years before. Everybody knew, of course, that the new group in power called themselves Fifth Internationalists, but what that meant, aside from ceasing to display the pictures of Lenin and Stalin, nobody knew.
But they agreed to our terms and offered to cooperate in every way. They pointed out that the Union had never been warlike and had kept out of the recent world struggle. It was fitting that the two remaining great powers should use their greatness to insure a lasting peace.
I was delighted; I had been worried about the E.U.
They commenced delivery of some of their smaller planes to the receiving station near Shanghai at once. The reports on the number and quality of the planes seemed to indicate that they had stayed out of the war through necessity; the planes were mostly of German make and in poor condition, types that Germany had abandoned early in the war.
Manning went west to supervise certain details in connection with immobilizing the big planes, the transoceanic planes, which were to gather near Fort Riley. We planned to spray them with oil, then dust from a low altitude, as in crop dusting, with a low concentration of one-year dust. Then we could turn our backs on them and forget them, while attending to other matters.
But there were hazards. The dust must not be allowed to reach Kansas City, Lincoln, Wichita—any of the nearby cities. The smaller towns roundabout had been temporarily evacuated. Testing stations needed to be set up in all directions in order that accurate tab on the dust might be kept. Manning felt personally responsible to make sure that no bystander was poisoned.
We circled the receiving station before landing at Fort Riley. I could pick out the three landing fields which had hurriedly been graded. Their runways were white in the sun, the twenty-four-hour cement as yet undirtied. Around each of the landing fields were crowded dozens of parking fields, less perfectly graded. Tractors and bulldozers were still at work on some of them. In the easternmost fields, the German and British ships were already in place, jammed wing to body as tightly as planes on the flight deck of a carrier—save for a few that were still being towed into position, the tiny tractors looking from the air like ants dragging pieces of leaf many times larger than themselves.
Only three flying fortresses had arrived from the Eurasian Union. Their representatives had asked for a short delay in order that a supply of high-test aviation gasoline might be delivered to them. They claimed a shortage of fuel necessary to make the long flight over the Arctic safe. There was no way to check the claim and the delay was granted while a shipment was routed from England.
We were about to leave, Manning having satisfied himself as to safety precautions, when a dispatch came in announcing that a flight of E.U. bombers might be expected before the day was out. Manning wanted to see them arrive; we waited around for four hours. When it was finally reported that our escort of fighters had picked them up at the Canadian border, Manning appeared to have grown fidgety and stated that he would watch them from the air. We took off, gained altitude and waited.
There were nine of them in the flight, cruising in column of echelons and looking so huge that our little fighters were hardly noticeable. They circled the field and I was admiring the stately dignity of them when Manning’s pilot, Lieutenant Rafferty, exclaimed, “What the devil! They are preparing to land downwind!”
I still did not tumble, but Manning shouted to the copilot, “Get the field!”
He fiddled with his instruments and announced, “Got ’em, sir!”
“General alarm! Armor!”
We could not hear the sirens, naturally, but I could see the white plumes rise from the big steam whistle on the roof of the Administration Building—three long blasts, then three short ones. It seemed almost at the same time that the first cloud broke from the E.U. planes.
Instead of landing, they passed low over the receiving station, jampacked now with ships from all over the world. Each echelon picked one of three groups centered around the three landing fields and streamers of heavy brown smoke poured from the bellies of the E.U. ships. I saw a tiny black figure jump from a tractor and run toward the nearest building. Then the smoke screen obscured the field.
“Do you still have the field?” demanded Manning.
“Yes, sir.”
“Cross connect to the chief safety technician. Hurry!”
The copilot cut in the amplifier so that Manning could talk directly. “Saunders? This is Manning. How about it?”
“Radioactive, chief. Intensity seven point four.”
They had paralleled the Karst-Obre research.
Manning cut him off and demanded that the communication office at the field raise the Chief of Staff. There was nerve-stretching delay, for it had to be routed over land wire to Kansas City, and some chief operator had to be convinced that she should commandeer a trunk line that was in commercial use. But we got through at last and Manning made his report. “It stands to reason,” I heard him say, “that other flights are approaching the border by this time. New York, of course, and Washington. Probably Detroit and Chicago as well. No way of knowing.”
The Chief of Staff cut off abruptly, without comment. I knew that the U.S. air fleets, in a state of alert for weeks past, would have their orders in a few seconds, and would be on their way to hunt out and down the attackers, if possible before they could reach the cities.
I glanced back at the field. The formations were broken up. One of the E.U. bombers was down, crashed, half a mile beyond the station. While I watched, one of our midget dive bombers screamed down on a behemoth E.U. ship and unloaded his eggs. It was a center hit, but the American pilot had cut it too fine, could not pull out, and crashed before his victim.* * *
There is no point in rehashing the newspaper stories of the Four-Days War. The point is that we should have lost it, and we would have, had it not been for an unlikely combination of luck, foresight, and good management. Apparently, the nuclear physicists of the Eurasian Union were almost as far along as Ridpath’s crew when the destruction of Berlin gave them the tip they needed. But we had rushed them, forced them to move before they were ready, because of the deadline for disarmament set forth in our Peace Proclamation.
If the President had waited to fight it out with Congress before issuing the proclamation, there would not be any United States.
Manning never got credit for it, but it is evident to me that he anticipated the possibility of something like the Four-Days War and prepared for it in a dozen different devious ways. I don’t mean military preparation; the Army and the Navy saw to that. But it was no accident that Congress was adjourned at the time. I had something to do with the vote-swapping and compromising that led up to it, and I know.
But I put it to you—would he have maneuvered to get Congress out of Washington at a time when he feared that Washington might be attacked if he had had dictatorial ambitions?
Of course, it was the President who was back of the ten-day leaves that had been granted to most of the civil-service personnel in Washington and he himself must have made the decision to take a swing through the South at that time, but it must have been Manning who put the idea in his head. It is inconceivable that the President would have left Washington to escape personal danger.
And then, there was the plague scare. I don’t know how or when Manning could have started that—it certainly did not go through my notebook—but I simply do not believe that it was accidental that a completely unfounded rumor of bubonic plague caused New York City to be semideserted at the time the E.U. bombers struck.
At that, we lost over eight hundred thousand people in Manhattan alone.
Of course, the government was blamed for the lives that were lost and the papers were merciless in their criticism at the failure to anticipate and force an evacuation of all the major cities.
If Manning anticipated trouble, why did he not ask for evacuation?
Well, as I see it, for this reason:
A big city will not be, never has been, evacuated in response to rational argument. London never was evacuated on any major scale and we failed utterly in our attempt to force the evacuation of Berlin. The people of New York City had considered the danger of air raids since 1940 and were long since hardened to the thought.
But the fear of a nonexistent epidemic of plague caused the most nearly complete evacuation of a major city ever seen.
And don’t forget what we did to Vladivostok and Irkutsk and Moscow—those were innocent people, too. War isn’t pretty.
I said luck played a part. It was bad navigation that caused one of our ships to dust Ryazan instead of Moscow, but that mistake knocked out the laboratory and plant which produced the only supply of military radioactives in the Eurasian Union. Suppose the mistake had been the other way around—suppose that one of the E.U. ships in attacking Washington, D.C., by mistake had included Ridpath’s shop forty-five miles away in Maryland?
Congress reconvened at the temporary capital in St. Louis, and the American Pacification Expedition started the job of pulling the fangs of the Eurasian Union. It was not a military occupation in the usual sense; there were two simple objectives: to search out and dust all aircraft, aircraft plants, and fields, and to locate and dust radiation laboratories, uranium supplies, and lodes of carnotite and pitchblende. No attempt was made to interfere with, or to replace, civil government.
We used a two-year dust, which gave a breathing spell in which to consolidate our position. Liberal rewards were offered to informers, a technique which worked remarkably well not only in the E.U., but in most parts of the world.
The “weasel,” an instrument to smell out radiation, based on the electroscope-discharge principle and refined by Ridpath’s staff, greatly facilitated the work of locating uranium and uranium ores. A grid of weasels, properly spaced over a suspect area, could locate any important mass of uranium almost as handily as a direction-finder can spot a radio station.
But, notwithstanding the excellent work of General Bulfinch and the Pacification Expedition as a whole, it was the original mistake of dusting Ryazan that made the job possible of accomplishment.
Anyone interested in the details of the pacification work done in 1945-6 should see the “Proceedings of the American Foundation for Social Research” for a paper entitled A Study of the Execution of the American Peace Policy from February, 1945. The de facto solution of the problem of policing the world against war left the United States with the much greater problem of perfecting a policy that would insure that the deadly power of the dust would never fall into unfit hands.
The problem is as easy to state as the problem of squaring the circle and almost as impossible of accomplishment. Both Manning and the President believed that the United States must of necessity keep the power for the time being, until some permanent institution could be developed fit to retain it. The hazard was this: Foreign policy is lodged jointly in the hands of the President and the Congress. We were fortunate at the time in having a good President and an adequate Congress, but that was no guarantee for the future. We have had unfit Presidents and power-hungry Congresses—oh, yes! Read the history of the Mexican War.
We were about to hand over to future governments of the United States the power to turn the entire globe into an empire, our empire. And it was the sober opinion of the President that our characteristic and beloved democratic culture would not stand up under the temptation. Imperialism degrades both oppressor and oppressed.
The President was determined that our sudden power should be used for the absolute minimum of maintaining peace in the world—the simple purpose of outlawing war and nothing else. It must not be used to protect American investments abroad, to coerce trade agreements, for any purpose but the simple abolition of mass killing.
There is no science of sociology. Perhaps there will be, some day, when a rigorous physics gives a finished science of colloidal chemistry and that leads in turn to a complete knowledge of biology, and from there to a definitive psychology. After that we may begin to know something about sociology and politics. Sometime around the year 5000 A.D., maybe—if the human race does not commit suicide before then.
Until then, there is only horse sense and rule of thumb and observational knowledge of probabilities. Manning and the President played by ear.
The treaties with Great Britain, Germany and the Eurasian Union, whereby we assumed the responsibility for world peace and at the same time guaranteed the contracting nations against our own misuse of power, were rushed through in the period of relief and goodwill that immediately followed the termination of the Four-Days War. We followed the precedents established by the Panama Canal treaties, the Suez Canal agreements, and the Philippine Independence policy.
But the purpose underneath was to commit future governments of the United States to an irrevocable benevolent policy.
The act to implement the treaties by creating the Commission of World Safety followed soon after, and Colonel Manning became Mr. Commissioner Manning. Commissioners had a life tenure and the intention was to create a body with the integrity, permanence and freedom from outside pressure possessed by the Supreme Court of the United States. Since the treaties contemplated an eventual joint trust, commissioners need not be American citizens—and the oath they took was to preserve the peace of the world.
There was trouble getting the clause past the Congress! Every other similar oath had been to the Constitution of the United States.
Nevertheless the Commission was formed. It took charge of world aircraft, assumed jurisdiction over radioactives, natural and artificial, and commenced the long slow task of building up the Peace Patrol.
Manning envisioned a corps of world policemen, an aristocracy which, through selection and indoctrination, could be trusted with unlimited power over the life of every man, every woman, every child on the face of the globe. For the power would be unlimited; the precautions necessary to insure the unbeatable weapon from getting loose in the world again made it axiomatic that its custodians would wield power that is safe only in the hands of Deity. There would be no one to guard those selfsame guardians. Their own characters and the watch they kept on each other would be all that stood between the race and disaster.
For the first time in history, supreme political power was to be exerted with no possibility of checks and balances from the outside. Manning took up the task of perfecting it with a dragging subconscious conviction that it was too much for human nature.
The rest of the Commission was appointed slowly, the names being sent to the Senate after long joint consideration by the President and Manning. The director of the Red Cross, an obscure little professor of history from Switzerland, Dr. Igor Rimski who had developed the Karst-Obre technique independently and whom the A.P.F. had discovered in prison after the dusting of Moscow—those three were the only foreigners. The rest of the list is well known.
Ridpath and his staff were of necessity the original technical crew of the Commission; United States Army and Navy pilots its first patrolmen. Not all of the pilots available were needed; their records were searched, their habits and associates investigated, their mental processes and emotional attitudes examined by the best psychological research methods available—which weren’t good enough. Their final acceptance for the Patrol depended on two personal interviews, one with Manning, one with the President.
Manning told me that he depended more on the President’s feeling for character than he did on all the association and reaction tests the psychologists could think up. “It’s like the nose of a bloodhound,” he said. “In his forty years of practical politics he has seen more phonies than you and I will ever see and each one was trying to sell him something. He can tell one in the dark.”
The long-distance plan included the schools for the indoctrination of cadet patrolmen, schools that were to be open to youths of any race, color, or nationality, and from which they would go forth to guard the peace of every country but their own. To that country a man would never return during his service. They were to be a deliberately expatriated band of Janizaries, with an obligation only to the Commission and to the race, and welded together with a carefully nurtured esprit de corps.
It stood a chance of working. Had Manning been allowed twenty years without interruption, the original plan might have worked.* * *
The President’s running mate for reelection was the result of a political compromise. The candidate for Vice President was a confirmed isolationist who had opposed the Peace Commission from the first, but it was he or a party split in a year when the opposition was strong. The President sneaked back in but with a greatly weakened Congress; only his power of veto twice prevented the repeal of the Peace Act. The Vice President did nothing to help him, although he did not publicly lead the insurrection. Manning revised his plans to complete the essential program by the end of 1952, there being no way to predict the temper of the next administration.
We were both overworked and I was beginning to realize that my health was gone. The cause was not far to seek; a photographic film strapped next to my skin would cloud in twenty minutes. I was suffering from cumulative minimal radioactive poisoning. No well-defined cancer that could be operated on, but a systemic deterioration of function and tissue. There was no help for it, and there was work to be done. I’ve always attributed it mainly to the week I spent sitting on those canisters before the raid on Berlin.* * *
February 17, 1951. I missed the televue flash about the plane crash that killed the President because I was lying down in my apartment. Manning, by that time, was requiring me to rest every afternoon after lunch, though I was still on duty. I first heard about it from my secretary when I returned to my office, and at once hurried into Manning’s office.
There was a curious unreality to that meeting. It seemed to me that we had slipped back to that day when I returned from England, the day that Estelle Karst died. He looked up. “Hello, John,” he said.
I put my hand on his shoulder. “Don’t take it so hard, chief,” was all I could think of to say.
Forty-eight hours later came the message from the newly sworn-in President for Manning to report to him. I took it in to him, an official despatch which I decoded. Manning read it, face impassive.
“Are you going, chief?” I asked.
“Eh? Why, certainly.”
I went back into my office, and got my topcoat, gloves, and briefcase.
Manning looked up when I came back in. “Never mind, John,” he said. “You’re not going.” I guess I must have looked stubborn, for he added, “You’re not to go because there is work to do here. Wait a minute.”
He went to his safe, twiddled the dials, opened it and removed a sealed envelope which he threw on the desk between us. “Here are your orders. Get busy.”
He went out as I was opening them. I read them through and got busy. There was little enough time.* * *
The new President received Manning standing and in the company of several of his bodyguards and intimates. Manning recognized the senator who had led the movement to use the Patrol to recover expropriated holdings in South America and Rhodesia, as well as the chairman of the committee on aviation with whom he had had several unsatisfactory conferences in an attempt to work out a modus operandi for reinstituting commercial airlines.
“You’re prompt, I see,” said the President. “Good.”
Manning bowed.
“We might as well come straight to the point,” the Chief Executive went on. “There are going to be some changes of policy in the administration. I want your resignation.”
“I am sorry to have to refuse, sir.”
“We’ll see about that. In the meantime, Colonel Manning, you are relieved from duty.”
“Mr. Commissioner Manning, if you please.”
The new President shrugged. “One or the other, as you please. You are relieved, either way.”
“I am sorry to disagree again. My appointment is for life.”
“That’s enough,” was the answer. “This is the United States of America. There can be no higher authority. You are under arrest.”
I can visualize Manning staring steadily at him for a long moment, then answering slowly, “You are physically able to arrest me, I will concede, but I advise you to wait a few minutes.” He stepped to the window. “Look up into the sky.”
Six bombers of the Peace Commission patrolled over the Capitol. “None of those pilots is American born,” Manning added slowly. “If you confine me, none of us here in this room will live out the day.”
There were incidents thereafter, such as the unfortunate affair at Fort Benning three days later, and the outbreak in the wing of the Patrol based in Lisbon and its resultant wholesale dismissals, but for practical purposes, that was all there was to the coup d’etat.
Manning was the undisputed military dictator of the world.
Whether or not any man as universally hated as Manning can perfect the Patrol he envisioned, make it self-perpetuating and trustworthy, I don’t know, and—because of that week of waiting in a buried English hangar—I won’t be here to find out. Manning’s heart disease makes the outcome even more uncertain—he may last another twenty years; he may keel over dead tomorrow—and there is no one to take his place. I’ve set this down partly to occupy the short time I have left and partly to show there is another side to any story, even world dominion.
Not that I would like the outcome, either way. If there is anything to this survival-after-death business, I am going to look up the man who invented the bow and arrow and take him apart with my bare hands. For myself, I can’t be happy in a world where any man, or group of men, has the power of death over you and me, our neighbors, every human, every animal, every living thing. I don’t like anyone to have that kind of power.
And neither does Manning.
The End
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Here is a piece of classic science fiction. It’s a full novel or novelle (if your wish)… maybe a novelette. Plague Ship (Full Text) by Andre Norton. What ever it is, it’s a good read from the days of pulp science fiction stories.
These books used to rest in wire frames in the fronts of pharmacies, small-town grocery stores, soda fountains, and other similiar venues all accross the United States. Boys like myself, would plop down a nickel, buy one of these books, and grab a soda to read during the long hot Summer.
Well, I actually came a little later on the scene. The stores that sold these books were mostly “booksellers”, and the cost of a soda increased to twenty five cents. But pretty much everything else stayed the same. Oh, and I fogot to add my “Banana seat” bicycle to the mix…
Anyways…
It’s a grood read for all of you’se guys who are all at home cooped up trying to avoid the COVID-19. Stay safe. Be cool, and enjoy this moment. It will allow you some much needed family and personal time. Don’t squander it.
Enjoy.
PLAGUE SHIP
Chapter I
PERFUMED PLANET
Dane Thorson, Cargo-master-apprentice of the Solar Queen, Galactic Free Trader spacer, Terra registry, stood in the middle of the ship’s cramped bather while Rip Shannon, assistant Astrogator and his senior in the Service of Trade by some four years, applied gobs of highly scented paste to the skin between Dane’s rather prominent shoulder blades. The small cabin was thickly redolent with spicy odors and Rip sniffed appreciatively.
“You’re sure going to be about the best smelling Terran who ever set boot on Sargol’s soil,” his soft slur of speech ended in a rich chuckle.
Dane snorted and tried to estimate progress over one shoulder.
“The things we have to do for Trade!” his comment carried a hint of present embarrassment. “Get it well in—this stuff’s supposed to hold for hours. It’d better. According to Van those Salariki can talk your ears right off your head and say nothing worth hearing. And we have to sit and listen until we get a straight answer out of them. Phew!” He shook his head. In such close quarters the scent, pleasing as it was, was also overpowering. “We would have to pick a world such as this—”
Rip’s dark fingers halted their circular motion. “Dane,” he warned, “don’t you go talking against this venture. We got it soft and we’re going to be credit-happy—if it works out—”
But, perversely, Dane held to a gloomier view of the immediate future. “If,” he repeated. “There’s a galaxy of ‘ifs’ in this Sargol proposition. All very well for you to rest easy on your fins—you don’t have to run about smelling like a spice works before you can get the time of day from one of the natives!”
Rip put down the jar of cream. “Different worlds, different customs,” he iterated the old tag of the Service. “Be glad this one is so easy to conform to. There are some I can think of—There,” he ended his massage with a stinging slap. “You’re all evenly greased. Good thing you don’t have Van’s bulk to cover. It takes him a good hour to get his cream on—even with Frank helping to spread. Your clothes ought to be steamed up and ready, too, by now—”
He opened a tight wall cabinet, originally intended to sterilize clothing which might be contaminated by contact with organisms inimical to Terrans. A cloud of steam fragrant with the same spicy scent poured out.
Dane gingerly tugged loose his Trade uniform, its brown silky fabric damp on his skin as he dressed. Luckily Sargol was warm. When he stepped out on its ruby tinted soil this morning no lingering taint of his off-world origin must remain to disgust the sensitive nostrils of the Salariki. He supposed he would get used to this process. After all this was the first time he had undergone the ritual. But he couldn’t lose the secret conviction that it was all very silly. Only what Rip had pointed out was the truth—one adjusted to the customs of aliens or one didn’t trade and there were other things he might have had to do on other worlds which would have been far more upsetting to that core of private fastidiousness which few would have suspected existed in his tall, lanky frame.
“Whew—out in the open with you—!” Ali Kamil apprentice Engineer, screwed his too regular features into an expression of extreme distaste and waved Dane by him in the corridor.
For the sake of his shipmates’ olfactory nerves, Dane hurried on to the port which gave on the ramp now tying the Queen to Sargol’s crust. But there he lingered, waiting for Van Rycke, the Cargo-master of the spacer and his immediate superior. It was early morning and now that he was out of the confinement of the ship the fresh morning winds cut about him, rippling through the blue-green grass forest beyond, to take much of his momentary irritation with them.
There were no mountains in this section of Sargol—the highest elevations being rounded hills tightly clothed with the same ten-foot grass which covered the plains. From the Queen’s observation ports, one could watch the constant ripple of the grass so that the planet appeared to be largely clothed in a shimmering, flowing carpet. To the west were the seas—stretches of shallow water so cut up by strings of islands that they more resembled a series of salty lakes. And it was what was to be found in those seas which had lured the Solar Queen to Sargol.
Though, by rights, the discovery was that of another Trader—Traxt Cam—who had bid for trading rights to Sargol, hoping to make a comfortable fortune—or at least expenses with a slight profit—in the perfume trade, exporting from the scented planet some of its most fragrant products. But once on Sargol he had discovered the Koros stones—gems of a new type—a handful of which offered across the board in one of the inner planet trading marts had nearly caused a riot among bidding gem merchants. And Cam had been well on the way to becoming one of the princes of Trade when he had been drawn into the vicious net of the Limbian pirates and finished off.
Because they, too, had stumbled into the trap which was Limbo, and had had a very definite part in breaking up that devilish installation, the crew of the Solar Queen had claimed as their reward the trading rights of Traxt Cam in default of legal heirs. And so here they were on Sargol with the notes left by Cam as their guide, and as much lore concerning the Salariki as was known crammed into their minds.
Dane sat down on the end of the ramp, his feet on Sargolian soil, thin, red soil with glittering bits of gold flake in it. He did not doubt that he was under observation from hidden eyes, but he tried to show no sign that he guessed it. The adult Salariki maintained at all times an attitude of aloof and complete indifference toward the Traders, but the juvenile population were as curious as their elders were contemptuous. Perhaps there was a method of approach in that. Dane considered the idea.
Van Rycke and Captain Jellico had handled the first negotiations—and the process had taken most of a day—the result totaling exactly nothing. In their contacts with the off world men the feline ancestered Salariki were ceremonious, wary, and completely detached. But Cam had gotten to them somehow—or he would not have returned from his first trip with that pouch of Koros stones. Only, among his records, salvaged on Limbo, he had left absolutely no clue as to how he had beaten down native sales resistance. It was baffling. But patience had to be the middle name of every Trader and Dane had complete faith in Van. Sooner or later the Cargo-master would find a key to unlock the Salariki.
As if the thought of Dane’s chief had summoned him, Van Rycke, his scented tunic sealed to his bull’s neck in unaccustomed trimness, his cap on his blond head, strode down the ramp, broadcasting waves of fragrance as he moved. He sniffed vigorously as he approached his assistant and then nodded in approval.
“So you’re all greased and ready—”
“Is the Captain coming too, sir?”
Van Rycke shook his head. “This is our headache. Patience, my boy, patience—” He led the way through a thin screen of the grass on the other side of the scorched landing field to a well-packed earth road.
Again Dane felt eyes, knew that they were being watched. But no Salarik stepped out of concealment. At least they had nothing to fear in the way of attack. Traders were immune, taboo, and the trading stations were set up under the white diamond shield of peace, a peace guaranteed on blood oath by every clan chieftain in the district. Even in the midst of interclan feuding deadly enemies met in amity under that shield and would not turn claw knife against each other within a two mile radius of its protection.
The grass forests rustled betrayingly, but the Terrans displayed no interest in those who spied upon them. An insect with wings of brilliant green gauze detached itself from the stalk of a grass tree and fluttered ahead of the Traders as if it were an official herald. From the red soil crushed by their boots arose a pungent odor which fought with the scent they carried with them. Dane swallowed three or four times and hoped that his superior officer had not noticed that sign of discomfort. Though Van Rycke, in spite of his general air of sleepy benevolence and careless goodwill, noticed everything, no matter how trivial, which might have a bearing on the delicate negotiations of Galactic Trade. He had not climbed to his present status of expert Cargo-master by overlooking anything at all. Now he gave an order:
“Take an equalizer—”
Dane reached for his belt pouch, flushing, fiercely determined inside himself, that no matter how smells warred about him that day, he was not going to let it bother him. He swallowed the tiny pellet Medic Tau had prepared for just such trials and tried to occupy his mind with the work to come. If there would be any work—or would another long day be wasted in futile speeches of mutual esteem which gave formal lip service to Trade and its manifest benefits?
“Houuuu—” The cry which was half wail, half arrogant warning, sounded along the road behind them.
Van Rycke’s stride did not vary. He did not turn his head, show any sign he had heard that heralding fanfare for a clan chieftain. And he continued to keep to the exact center of the road, Dane the regulation one pace to the rear and left as befitted his lower rank.
“Houuu—” that blast from the throat of a Salarik especially chosen for his lung power was accompanied now by the hollow drum of many feet. The Terrans neither looked around nor withdrew from the center, nor did their pace quicken.
That, too, was in order, Dane knew. To the rank conscious Salariki clansmen you did not yield precedence unless you wanted at once to acknowledge your inferiority—and if you did that by some slip of admission or omission, there was no use in trying to treat face to face with their chieftains again.
“Houuu—!” The blast behind was a scream as the retinue it announced swept around the bend in the road to catch sight of the two Traders oblivious of it. Dane longed to be able to turn his head, just enough to see which one of the local lordlings they blocked.
“Houu—” there was a questioning note in the cry now and the heavy thud-thud of feet was slacking. The clan party had seen them, were hesitant about the wisdom of trying to shove them aside.
Van Rycke marched steadily onward and Dane matched his pace. They might not possess a leather-lunged herald to clear their road, but they gave every indication of having the right to occupy as much of it as they wished. And that unruffled poise had its affect upon those behind. The pound of feet slowed to a walk, a walk which would keep a careful distance behind the two Terrans. It had worked—the Salariki—or these Salariki—were accepting them at their own valuation—a good omen for the day’s business. Dane’s spirits rose, but he schooled his features into a mask as wooden as his superior’s. After all this was a very minor victory and they had ten or twelve hours of polite, and hidden, maneuvering before them.
The Solar Queen had set down as closely as possible to the trading center marked on Traxt Cam’s private map and the Terrans now had another five minutes march, in the middle of the road, ahead of the chieftain who must be inwardly boiling at their presence, before they came out in the clearing containing the roofless, circular erection which served the Salariki of the district as a market place and a common meeting ground for truce talks and the mending of private clan alliances. Erect on a pole in the middle, towering well above the nodding fronds of the grass trees, was the pole bearing the trade shield which promised not only peace to those under it, but a three day sanctuary to any feuder or duelist who managed to win to it and lay hands upon its weathered standard.
They were not the first to arrive, which was also a good thing. Gathered in small groups about the walls of the council place were the personal attendants, liege warriors, and younger relatives of at least four or five clan chieftains. But, Dane noted at once, there was not a single curtained litter or riding orgel to be seen. None of the feminine part of the Salariki species had arrived. Nor would they until the final trade treaty was concluded and established by their fathers, husbands, or sons.
With the assurance of one who was master in his own clan, Van Rycke, displaying no interest at all in the shifting mass of lower rank Salariki, marched straight on to the door of the enclosure. Two or three of the younger warriors got to their feet, their brilliant cloaks flicking out like spreading wings. But when Van Rycke did not even lift an eyelid in their direction, they made no move to block his path.
As fighting men, Dane thought, trying to study the specimens before him with a totally impersonal stare, the Salariki were an impressive lot. Their average height was close to six feet, their distant feline ancestry apparent only in small vestiges. A Salarik’s nails on both hands and feet were retractile, his skin was gray, his thick hair, close to the texture of plushy fur, extended down his backbone and along the outside of his well muscled arms and legs, and was tawny-yellow, blue-gray or white. To Terran eyes the broad faces, now all turned in their direction, lacked readable expression. The eyes were large and set slightly aslant in the skull, being startlingly orange-red or a brilliant turquoise green-blue. They wore loin cloths of brightly dyed fabrics with wide sashes forming corselets about their slender middles, from which gleamed the gem-set hilts of their claw knives, the possession of which proved their adulthood. Cloaks as flamboyant as their other garments hung in bat wing folds from their shoulders and each and every one moved in an invisible cloud of perfume.
Brilliant as the assemblage of liege men without had been, the gathering of clan leaders and their upper officers within the council place was a riot of color—and odor. The chieftains were installed on the wooden stools, each with a small table before him on which rested a goblet bearing his own clan sign, a folded strip of patterned cloth—his “trade shield”—and a gemmed box containing the scented paste he would use for refreshment during the ordeal of conference.
A breeze fluttered sash ends and tugged at cloaks, otherwise the assembly was motionless and awesomely quiet. Still making no overtures Van Rycke crossed to a stool and table which stood a little apart and seated himself. Dane went into the action required of him. Before his superior he set out a plastic pocket flask, its color as alive in the sunlight as the crudely cut gems which the Salariki sported, a fine silk handkerchief, and, last of all, a bottle of Terran smelling salts provided by Medic Tau as a necessary restorative after some hours combination of Salariki oratory and Salariki perfumes. Having thus done the duty of liege man, Dane was at liberty to seat himself, cross-legged on the ground behind his chief, as the other sons, heirs, and advisors had gathered behind their lords.
The chieftain whose arrival they had in a manner delayed came in after them and Dane saw that it was Fashdor—another piece of luck—since that clan was a small one and the chieftain had little influence. Had they so slowed Halfer or Paft it might be a different matter altogether.
Fashdor was established at his seat, his belongings spread out, and Dane, counting unobtrusively, was certain that the council was now complete. Seven clans Traxt Cam had recorded divided the sea coast territory and there were seven chieftains here—indicative of the importance of this meeting since some of these clans beyond the radius of the shield peace, must be fighting a vicious blood feud at that very moment. Yes, seven were here. Yet there still remained a single stool, directly across the circle from Van Rycke. An empty stool—who was the late comer?
That question was answered almost as it flashed into Dane’s mind. But no Salariki lordling came through the door. Dane’s self-control kept him in his place, even after he caught the meaning of the insignia emblazoned across the newcomer’s tunic. Trader—and not only a Trader but a Company man! But why—and how? The Companies only went after big game—this was a planet thrown open to Free Traders, the independents of the star lanes. By law and right no Company man had any place here. Unless—behind a face Dane strove to keep as impassive as Van’s his thoughts raced. Traxt Cam as a Free Trader had bid for the right to exploit Sargol when its sole exportable product was deemed to be perfume—a small, unimportant trade as far as the Companies were concerned. And then the Koros stones had been found and the importance of Sargol must have boomed as far as the big boys could see. They probably knew of Traxt Cam’s death as soon as the Patrol report on Limbo had been sent to Headquarters. The Companies all maintained their private information and espionage services. And, with Traxt Cam dead without an heir, they had seen their chance and moved in. Only, Dane’s teeth set firmly, they didn’t have the ghost of a chance now. Legally there was only one Trader on Sargol and that was the Solar Queen, Captain Jellico had his records signed by the Patrol to prove that. And all this Inter-Solar man would do now was to bow out and try poaching elsewhere.
But the I-S man appeared to be in no haste to follow that only possible course. He was seating himself with arrogant dignity on that unoccupied stool, and a younger man in I-S uniform was putting before him the same type of equipment Dane had produced for Van Rycke. The Cargo-master of the Solar Queen showed no surprise, if the Eysies’ appearance had been such to him.
One of the younger warriors in Paft’s train got to his feet and brought his hands together with a clap which echoed across the silent gathering with the force of an archaic solid projectal shot. A Salarik, wearing the rich dress of the upper ranks, but also the collar forced upon a captive taken in combat, came into the enclosure carrying a jug in both hands. Preceded by Paft’s son he made the rounds of the assembly pouring a purple liquid from his jug into the goblet before each chieftain, a goblet which Paft’s heirs tasted ceremoniously before it was presented to the visiting clan leader. When they paused before Van Rycke the Salarik nobleman touched the side of the plasta flask in token. It was recognized that off world men must be cautious over the sampling of local products and that when they joined in the Taking of the First Cup of Peace, they did so symbolically.
Paft raised his cup, his gesture copied by everyone around the circle. In the harsh tongue of his race he repeated a formula so archaic that few of the Salariki could now translate the sing-song words. They drank and the meeting was formally opened.
But it was an elderly Salarik seated to the right of Halfer, a man who wore no claw knife and whose dusky yellow cloak and sash made a subdued note amid the splendor of his fellows, who spoke first, using the click-clack of the Trade Lingo his nation had learned from Cam.
“Under the white,” he pointed to the shield aloft, “we assemble to hear many things. But now come two tongues to speak where once there was but one father of a clan. Tell us, outlanders, which of you must we now hark to in truth?” He looked from Van Rycke to the I-S representative.
The Cargo-master from the Queen did not reply. He stared across the circle at the Company man. Dane waited eagerly. What was the I-S going to say to that?
But the fellow did have an answer, ready and waiting. “It is true, fathers of clans, that here are two voices, where by right and custom there should only be one. But this is a matter which can be decided between us. Give us leave to withdraw from your sight and speak privately together. Then he who returns to you will be the true voice and there shall be no more division—”
It was Paft who broke in before Halfer’s spokesman could reply.
“It would have been better to have spoken together before you came to us. Go then until the shadow of the shield is not, then return hither and speak truly. We do not wait upon the pleasure of outlanders—”
A murmur approved that tart comment. “Until the shadow of the shield is not.” They had until noon. Van Rycke arose and Dane gathered up his chief’s possessions. With the same superiority to his surroundings he had shown upon entering, the Cargo-master left the enclosure, the Eysies following. But they were away from the clearing, out upon the road back to the Queen before the two from the Company caught up with them.
“Captain Grange will see you right away—” the Eysie Cargo-master was beginning when Van Rycke met him with a quelling stare.
“If you poachers have anything to say—you say it at the Queen and to Captain Jellico,” he stated flatly and started on.
Above his tight tunic collar the other’s face flushed, his teeth flashed as he caught his lower lip between them as if to forcibly restrain an answer he longed to make. For a second he hesitated and then he vanished down a side path with his assistant. Van Rycke had gone a quarter of the distance back to the ship before he spoke.
“I thought it was too easy,” he muttered. “Now we’re in for it—maybe right up the rockets! By the Spiked Tail of Exol, this is certainly not our lucky day!” He quickened pace until they were close to trotting.
Chapter II
RIVALS
“That’s far enough, Eysie!”
Although Traders by law and tradition carried no more potent personal weapons—except in times of great crisis—than hand sleep rods, the resultant shot from the latter was just as unpleasant for temporary periods as a more forceful beam—and the threat of it was enough to halt the three men who had come to the foot of the Queen’s ramp and who could see the rod held rather negligently by Ali. Ali’s eyes were anything but negligent, however, and Free Traders had reputations to be respected by their rivals of the Companies. The very nature of their roving lives taught them savage lessons—which they either learned or died.
Dane, glancing down over the Engineer-apprentice’s shoulder, saw that Van Rycke’s assumption of confidence had indeed paid off. They had left the trade enclosure of the Salariki barely three-quarters of an hour ago. But below now stood the bebadged Captain of the I-S ship and his Cargo-master.
“I want to speak to your Captain—” snarled the Eysie officer.
Ali registered faint amusement, an expression which tended to rouse the worst in the spectator, as Dane knew of old when that same mocking appraisal had been turned on him as the rawest of the Queen’s crew.
“But does he wish to speak to you?” countered Kamil. “Just stay where you are, Eysie, until we are sure about that fact.”
That was his cue to act as messenger. Dane retreated into the ship and swung up the ladder to the command section. As he passed Captain Jellico’s private cabin he heard the muffled squall of the commander’s unpleasant pet—Queex, the Hoobat—a nightmare combination of crab, parrot and toad, wearing a blue feather coating and inclined to scream and spit at all comers. Since Queex would not be howling in that fashion if its master was present, Dane kept on to the control cabin where he blundered in upon an executive level conference of Captain, Cargo-master and Astrogator.
“Well?” Jellico’s blaster scarred left cheek twitched as he snapped that impatient inquiry at the messenger.
“Eysie Captain below, sir. With his Cargo-master. They want to see you—”
Jellico’s mouth was a straight line, his eyes very hard. By instinct Dane’s hand went to the grip of the sleep rod slung at his belt. When the Old Man put on his fighting face—look out! Here we go again, he told himself, speculating as to just what type of action lay before them now.
“Oh, they do, do they!” Jellico began and then throttled down the temper he could put under iron control when and if it were necessary. “Very well, tell them to stay where they are. Van, we’ll go down—”
For a moment the Cargo-master hesitated, his heavy-lidded eyes looked sleepy, he seemed almost disinterested in the suggestion. And when he nodded it was with the air of someone about to perform some boring duty.
“Right, sir.” He wriggled his heavy body from behind the small table, resealed his tunic, and settled his cap with as much precision as if he were about to represent the Queen before the assembled nobility of Sargol.
Dane hurried down the ladders, coming to a halt beside Ali. It was the turn of the man at the foot of the ramp to bark an impatient demand:
“Well?” (Was that the theme word of every Captain’s vocabulary?)
“You wait,” Dane replied with no inclination to give the Eysie officer any courtesy address. Close to a Terran year aboard the Solar Queen had inoculated him with pride in his own section of Service. A Free Trader was answerable to his own officers and to no one else on earth—or among the stars—no matter how much discipline and official etiquette the Companies used to enhance their power.
He half expected the I-S officers to leave after an answer such as that. For a Company Captain to be forced to wait upon the convenience of a Free Trader must be galling in the extreme. And the fact that this one was doing just that was an indication that the Queen’s crew did, perhaps, have the edge of advantage in any coming bargain. In the meantime the Eysie contingent fumed below while Ali lounged whistling against the exit port, playing with his sleep rod and Dane studied the grass forest. His boot nudged a packet just inside the port casing and he glanced inquiringly from it to Ali.
“Cat ransom,” the other answered his unspoken question.
So that was it—the fee for Sinbad’s return. “What is it today?”
“Sugar—about a tablespoon full,” the Engineer-assistant returned, “and two colored steelos. So far they haven’t run up the price on us. I think they’re sharing out the spoil evenly, a new cub brings him back every night.”
As did all Terran ships, the Solar Queen carried a cat as an important member of the regular crew. And the portly Sinbad, before their landing on Sargol, had never presented any problem. He had done his duty of ridding the ship of unusual and usual pests and cargo despoilers with dispatch, neatness and energy. And when in port on alien worlds had never shown any inclination to go a-roving.
But the scents of Sargol had apparently intoxicated him, shearing away his solid dignity and middle-aged dependability. Now Sinbad flashed out of the Queen at the opening of her port in the early morning and was brought back, protesting with both voice and claws, at the end of the day by that member of the juvenile population whose turn it was to collect the standing reward for his forceful delivery. Within three days it had become an accepted business transaction which satisfied everyone but Sinbad.
The scrape of metal boot soles on ladder rungs warned of the arrival of their officers. Ali and Dane withdrew down the corridor, leaving the entrance open for Jellico and Van Rycke. Then they drifted back to witness the meeting with the Eysies.
There were no prolonged greetings between the two parties, no offer of hospitality as might have been expected between Terrans on an alien planet a quarter of the Galaxy away from the earth which had given them a common heritage.
Jellico, with Van Rycke at his shoulder, halted before he stepped from the ramp so that the three Inter-Solar men, Captain, Cargo-master and escort, whether they wished or no, were put in the disadvantageous position of having to look up to a Captain whom they, as members of one of the powerful Companies, affected to despise. The lean, well muscled, trim figure of the Queen’s commander gave the impression of hard bitten force held in check by will control, just as his face under its thick layer of space burn was that of an adventurer accustomed to make split second decisions—an estimate underlined by that seam of blaster burn across one flat cheek.
Van Rycke, with a slight change of dress, could have been a Company man in the higher ranks—or so the casual observer would have placed him, until an observer marked the eyes behind those sleepy drooping lids, or caught a certain note in the calm, unhurried drawl of his voice. To look at the two senior officers of the Free Trading spacer were the antithesis of each other—in action they were each half of a powerful, steamroller whole—as a good many men in the Service—scattered over a half dozen or so planets—had discovered to their cost in the past.
Now Jellico brought the heels of his space boots together with an extravagant click and his hand flourished at the fore of his helmet in a gesture which was better suited to the Patrol hero of a slightly out-of-date Video serial.
“Jellico, Solar Queen, Free Trader,” he identified himself brusquely, and added, “this is Van Rycke, our Cargo-master.”
Not all the flush had faded from the face of the I-S Captain.
“Grange of the Dart,” he did not even sketch a salute. “Inter-Solar. Kallee, Cargo-master—” And he did not name the hovering third member of his party.
Jellico stood waiting and after a long moment of silence Grange was forced to state his business.
“We have until noon—”
Jellico, his fingers hooked in his belt, simply waited. And under his level gaze the Eysie Captain began to find the going hard.
“They have given us until noon,” he started once more, “to get together—”
Jellico’s voice came, coldly remote. “There is no reason for any ‘getting together,’ Grange. By rights I can have you up before the Trade Board for poaching. The Solar Queen has sole trading rights here. If you up-ship within a reasonable amount of time, I’ll be inclined to let it pass. After all I’ve no desire to run all the way to the nearest Patrol post to report you—”
“You can’t expect to buck Inter-Solar. We’ll make you an offer—” That was Kallee’s contribution, made probably because his commanding officer couldn’t find words explosive enough.
Jellico, whose forté was more direct action, took an excursion into heavy-handed sarcasm. “You Eysies have certainly been given excellent briefing. I would advise a little closer study of the Code—and not the sections in small symbols at the end of the tape, either! We’re not bucking anyone. You’ll find our registration for Sargol down on tapes at the Center. And I suggest that the sooner you withdraw the better—before we cite you for illegal planeting.”
Grange had gained control of his emotions. “We’re pretty far from Center here,” he remarked. It was a statement of fact, but it carried over-tones which they were able to assess correctly. The Solar Queen was a Free Trader, alone on an alien world. But the I-S ship might be cruising in company, ready to summon aid, men and supplies. Dane drew a deep breath, the Eysies must be sure of themselves, not only that, but they must want what Sargol had to offer to the point of being willing to step outside the law to get it.
The I-S Captain took a step forward. “I think we understand each other now,” he said, his confidence restored.
Van Rycke answered him, his deep voice cutting across the sighing of the wind in the grass forest.
“Your proposition?”
Perhaps this return to their implied threat bolstered their belief in the infallibility of the Company, their conviction that no independent dared stand up against the might and power of Inter-Solar. Kallee replied:
“We’ll take up your contract, at a profit to you, and you up-ship before the Salariki are confused over whom they are to deal with—”
“And the amount of profit?” Van Rycke bored in.
“Oh,” Kallee shrugged, “say ten percent of Cam’s last shipment—”
Jellico laughed. “Generous, aren’t you, Eysie? Ten percent of a cargo which can’t be assessed—the gang on Limbo kept no records of what they plundered.”
“We don’t know what he was carrying when he crashed on Limbo,” countered Kallee swiftly. “We’ll base our offer on what he carried to Axal.”
Now Van Rycke chucked. “I wonder who figured that one out?” he inquired of the scented winds. “He must save the Company a fair amount of credits one way or another. Interesting offer—”
By the bland satisfaction to be read on the three faces below the I-S men were assured of their victory. The Solar Queen would be paid off with a pittance, under the vague threat of Company retaliation she would up-ship from Sargol, and they would be left in possession of the rich Koros trade—to be commended and rewarded by their superiors. Had they, Dane speculated, ever had any dealings with Free Traders before—at least with the brand of independent adventurers such as manned the Solar Queen?
Van Rycke burrowed in his belt pouch and then held out his hand. On the broad palm lay a flat disc of metal. “Very interesting—” he repeated. “I shall treasure this recording—”
The sight of that disc wiped all satisfaction from the Eysie faces. Grange’s purplish flush spread up from his tight tunic collar, Kallee blinked, and the unknown third’s hand dropped to his sleep rod. An action which was not overlooked by either Dane or Ali.
“A smooth set down to you,” Jellico gave the conventional leave taking of the Service.
“You’d better—” the Eysie Captain began hotly, and then seeing the disc Van Rycke held—that sensitive bit of metal and plastic which was recording this interview for future reference, he shut his mouth tight.
“Yes?” the Queen’s Cargo-master prompted politely. But Kallee had taken his Captain’s arm and was urging Grange away from the spacer.
“You have until noon to lift,” was Jellico’s parting shot as the three in Company livery started toward the road.
“I don’t think that they will,” he added to Van Rycke.
The Cargo-master nodded. “You wouldn’t in their place,” he pointed out reasonably. “On the other hand they’ve had a bit of a blast they weren’t expecting. It’s been a long time since Grange heard anyone say ‘no.'”
“A shock which is going to wear off,” Jellico’s habitual distrust of the future gathered force.
“This,” Van Rycke tucked the disc back into his pouch, “sent them off vector a parsec or two. Grange is not one of the strong arm blaster boys. Suppose Tang Ya does a little listening in—and maybe we can rig another surprise if Grange does try to ask advice of someone off world. In the meantime I don’t think they are going to meddle with the Salariki. They don’t want to have to answer awkward questions if we turn up a Patrol ship to ask them. So—” he stretched and beckoned to Dane, “we shall go to work once more.”
Again two paces behind Van Rycke Dane tramped to the trade circle of the Salariki clansmen. They might have walked out only five or six minutes of ship time before, and the natives betrayed no particular interest in their return. But, Dane noted, there was only one empty stool, one ceremonial table in evidence. The Salariki had expected only one Terran Trader to join them.
What followed was a dreary round of ceremony, an exchange of platitudes and empty good wishes and greetings. No one mentioned Koros stones—or even perfume bark—that he was willing to offer the off-world traders. None lifted so much as a corner of his trade cloth, under which, if he were ready to deal seriously, his hidden hand would meet that of the buyer, so that by finger pressure alone they could agree or disagree on price. But such boring sessions were part of Trade and Dane, keeping a fraction of attention on the speeches and “drinkings-together,” watched those around him with an eye which tried to assess and classify what he saw.
The keynote of the Salariki character was a wary independence. The only form of government they would tolerate was a family-clan organization. Feuds and deadly duels between individuals and clans were the accepted way of life and every male who reached adulthood went armed and ready for combat until he became a “Speaker for the past”—too old to bear arms in the field. Due to the nature of their battling lives, relatively few of the Salariki ever reached that retirement. Short-lived alliances between families sometimes occurred, usually when they were to face a common enemy greater than either. But a quarrel between chieftains, a fancied insult would rip that open in an instant. Only under the Trade Shield could seven clans sit this way without their warriors being at one another’s furred throats.
An hour before sunset Paft turned his goblet upside down on his table, a move followed speedily by every chieftain in the circle. The conference was at an end for that day. And as far as Dane could see it had accomplished exactly nothing—except to bring the Eysies into the open. What had Traxt Cam discovered which had given him the trading contract with these suspicious aliens? Unless the men from the Queen learned it, they could go on talking until the contract ran out and get no farther than they had today.
From his training Dane knew that ofttimes contact with an alien race did require long and patient handling. But between study and experiencing the situation himself there was a gulf, and he thought somewhat ruefully that he had much to learn before he could meet such a situation with Van Rycke’s unfailing patience and aplomb. The Cargo-master seemed in nowise tired by his wasted day and Dane knew that Van would probably sit up half the night, going over for the hundredth time Traxt Cam’s sketchy recordings in another painstaking attempt to discover why and how the other Free Trader had succeeded where the Queen’s men were up against a stone wall.
The harvesting of Koros stones was, as Dane and all those who had been briefed from Cam’s records knew, a perilous job. Though the rule of the Salariki was undisputed on the land masses of Sargol, it was another matter in the watery world of the shallow seas. There the Gorp were in command of the territory and one had to be constantly alert for attack from the sly, reptilian intelligence, so alien to the thinking processes of both Salariki and Terran that there was, or seemed to be, no point of possible contact. One went gathering Koros gems after balancing life against gain. And perhaps the Salariki did not see any profit in that operation. Yet Traxt Cam had brought back his bag of gems—somehow he had managed to secure them in trade.
Van Rycke climbed the ramp, hurrying on into the Queen as if he would not get back to his records soon enough. But Dane paused and looked back at the grass jungle a little wistfully. To his mind these early morning hours were the best time on Sargol. The light was golden, the night winds had not yet arisen. He disliked exchanging the freedom of the open for the confinement of the spacer.
And, as he hesitated there, two of the juvenile population of Sargol came out of the forest. Between them they carried one of their hunting nets, a net which now enclosed a quiet but baneful eyed captive—Sinbad being delivered for nightly ransom. Dane was reaching for the pay to give the captors when, to his real astonishment, one of them advanced and pointed with an extended forefinger claw to the open port.
“Go in,” he formed the Trade Lingo words with care. And Dane’s surprise must have been plain to read for the cub followed his speech with a vigorous nod and set one foot on the ramp to underline his desire.
For one of the Salariki, who had continually manifested their belief that Terrans and their ship were an offence to the nostrils of all right living “men,” to wish to enter the spacer was an astonishing about-face. But any advantage no matter how small, which might bring about a closer understanding, must be seized at once.
Dane accepted the growling Sinbad and beckoned, knowing better than to touch the boy. “Come—”
Only one of the junior clansmen obeyed that invitation. The other watched, big-eyed, and then scuttled back to the forest when his fellow called out some suggestion. He was not going to be trapped.
Dane led the way up the ramp, paying no visible attention to the young Salarik, nor did he urge the other on when he lingered for a long moment or two at the port. In his mind the Cargo-master apprentice was feverishly running over the list of general trade goods. What did they carry which would make a suitable and intriguing gift for a small alien with such a promising bump of curiosity? If he had only time to get Van Rycke!
The Salarik was inside the corridor now, his nostrils spread, assaying each and every odor in this strange place. Suddenly his head jerked as if tugged by one of his own net ropes. His interest had been riveted by some scent his sensitive senses had detected. His eyes met Dane’s in appeal. Swiftly the Terran nodded and then followed with a lengthened stride as the Salarik sped down into the lower reaches of the Queen, obviously in quest of something of great importance.
Chapter III
CONTACT AT LAST
“What in”—Frank Mura, steward, storekeeper, and cook of the Queen, retreated into the nearest cabin doorway as the young Salarik flashed down the ladder into his section.
Dane, with the now resigned Sinbad in the crook of his arm, had tailed his guest and arrived just in time to see the native come to an abrupt halt before one of the most important doors in the spacer—the portal of the hydro garden which renewed the ship’s oxygen and supplied them with fresh fruit and vegetables to vary their diet of concentrates.
The Salarik laid one hand on the smooth surface of the sealed compartment and looked back over his shoulder at Dane with an inquiry to which was added something of a plea. Guided by his instinct—that this was important to them all—Dane spoke to Mura:
“Can you let him in there, Frank?”
It was not sensible, it might even be dangerous. But every member of the crew knew the necessity for making some sort of contact with the natives. Mura did not even nod, but squeezed by the Salarik and pressed the lock. There was a sign of air, and the crisp smell of growing things, lacking the languorous perfumes of the world outside, puffed into the faces.
The cub remained where he was, his head up, his wide nostrils visibly drinking in that smell. Then he moved with the silent, uncanny speed which was the heritage of his race, darting down the narrow aisle toward a mass of greenery at the far end.
Sinbad kicked and growled. This was his private hunting ground—the preserve he kept free of invaders. Dane put the cat down. The Salarik had found what he was seeking. He stood on tiptoe to sniff at a plant, his yellow eyes half closed, his whole stance spelling ecstasy. Dane looked to the steward for enlightenment.
“What’s he so interested in, Frank?”
“Catnip.”
“Catnip?” Dane repeated. The word meant nothing to him, but Mura had a habit of picking up strange plants and cultivating them for study. “What is it?”
“One of the Terran mints—an herb,” Mura gave a short explanation as he moved down the aisle toward the alien. He broke off a leaf and crushed it between his fingers.
Dane, his sense of smell largely deadened by the pungency with which he had been surrounded by most of that day, could distinguish no new odor. But the young Salarik swung around to face the steward his eyes wide, his nose questing. And Sinbad gave a whining yowl and made a spring to push his head against the steward’s now aromatic hand.
So—now they had it—an opening wedge. Dane came up to the three.
“All right to take a leaf or two?” he asked Mura.
“Why not? I grow it for Sinbad. To a cat it is like heemel smoke or a tankard of lackibod.”
And by Sinbad’s actions Dane guessed that the plant did hold for the cat the same attraction those stimulants produced in human beings. He carefully broke off a small stem supporting three leaves and presented it to the Salarik, who stared at him and then, snatching the twig, raced from the hydro garden as if pursued by feuding clansmen.
Dane heard the pad of his feet on the ladder—apparently the cub was making sure of escape with his precious find. But the Cargo-master apprentice was frowning. As far as he could see there were only five of the plants.
“That’s all the catnip you have?”
Mura tucked Sinbad under his arm and shooed Dane before him out of the hydro. “There was no need to grow more. A small portion of the herb goes a long way with this one,” he put the cat down in the corridor. “The leaves may be preserved by drying. I believe that there is a small box of them in the galley.”
A strictly limited supply. Suppose this was the key which would unlock the Koros trade? And yet it was to be summed up in five plants and a few dried leaves! However, Van Rycke must know of this as soon as possible.
But to Dane’s growing discomfiture the Cargo-master showed no elation as his junior poured out the particulars of his discovery. Instead there were definite signs of displeasure to be read by those who knew Van Rycke well. He heard Dane out and then got to his feet. Tolling the younger man with him by a crooked finger, he went out of his combined office-living quarters to the domain of Medic Craig Tau.
“Problem for you, Craig.” Van Rycke seated his bulk on the wall jump seat Tau pulled down for him. Dane was left standing just within the door, very sure now that instead of being commended for his discovery of a few minutes before, he was about to suffer some reprimand. And the reason for it still eluded him.
“What do you know about that plant Mura grows in the hydro—the one called ‘catnip’?”
Tau did not appear surprised at that demand—the Medic of a Free Trading spacer was never surprised at anything. He had his surfeit of shocks during his first years of service and after that accepted any occurrence, no matter how weird, as matter-of-fact. In addition Tau’s hobby was “magic,” the hidden knowledge possessed and used by witch doctors and medicine men on alien worlds. He had a library of recordings, odd scraps of information, of certified results of certain very peculiar experiments. Now and then he wrote a report which was sent into Central Service, read with raised eyebrows by perhaps half a dozen incredulous desk warmers, and filed away to be safely forgotten. But even that had ceased to frustrate him.
“It’s an herb of the mint family from Terra,” he replied. “Mura grows it for Sinbad—has quite a marked influence on cats. Frank’s been trying to keep him anchored to the ship by allowing him to roll in fresh leaves. He does it—then continues to sneak out whenever he can—”
That explained something for Dane—why the Salariki cub wished to enter the Queen tonight. Some of the scent of the plant had clung to Sinbad’s fur, had been detected, and the Salarik had wanted to trace it to its source.
“Is it a drug?” Van Rycke prodded.
“In the way that all herbs are drugs. Human beings have dosed themselves in the past with a tea made of the dried leaves. It has no great medicinal properties. To felines it is a stimulation—and they get the same satisfaction from rolling in and eating the leaves as we do from drinking—”
“The Salariki are, in a manner of speaking, felines—” Van Rycke mused.
Tau straightened. “The Salariki have discovered catnip, I take it?”
Van Rycke nodded at Dane and for the second time the Cargo-master apprentice made his report. When he was done Van Rycke asked a direct question of the medical officer:
“What effect would catnip have on a Salarik?”
It was only then that Dane grasped the enormity of what he had done. They had no way of gauging the influence of an off-world plant on alien metabolism. What if he had introduced to the natives of Sargol a dangerous drug—started that cub on some path of addiction. He was cold inside. Why, he might even have poisoned the child!
Tau picked up his cap, and after a second’s hesitation, his emergency medical kit. He had only one question for Dane.
“Any idea of who the cub is—what clan he belongs to?”
And Dane, chill with real fear, was forced to answer in the negative. What had he done!
“Can you find him?” Van Rycke, ignoring Dane, spoke to Tau.
The Medic shrugged. “I can try. I was out scouting this morning—met one of the storm priests who handles their medical work. But I wasn’t welcomed. However, under the circumstances, we have to try something—”
In the corridor Van Rycke had an order for Dane. “I suggest that you keep to quarters, Thorson, until we know how matters stand.”
Dane saluted. That note in his superior’s voice was like a whip lash—much worse to take than the abuse of a lesser man. He swallowed as he shut himself into his own cramped cubby. This might be the end of their venture. And they would be lucky if their charter was not withdrawn. Let I-S get an inkling of his rash action and the Company would have them up before the Board to be stripped of all their rights in the Service. Just because of his own stupidity—his pride in being able to break through where Van Rycke and the Captain had faced a stone wall. And, worse than the future which could face the Queen, was the thought that he might have introduced some dangerous drug into Sargol with his gift of those few leaves. When would he learn? He threw himself face down on his bunk and despondently pictured the string of calamities which could and maybe would stem from his thoughtless and hasty action.
Within the Queen night and day were mechanical—the lighting in the cabins did not vary much. Dane did not know how long he lay there forcing his mind to consider his stupid action, making himself face that in the Service there were no short cuts which endangered others—not unless those taking the risks were Terrans.
“Dane—!” Rip Shannon’s voice cut through his self-imposed nightmare. But he refused to answer. “Dane—Van wants you on the double!”
Why? To bring him up before Jellico probably. Dane schooled his expression, got up, pulling his tunic straight, still unable to meet Rip’s eyes. Shannon was just one of those he had let down so badly. But the other did not notice his mood. “Wait ’til you see them—! Half Sargol must be here yelling for trade!”
That comment was so far from what he had been expecting that Dane was startled out of his own gloomy thoughts. Rip’s brown face was one wide smile, his black eyes danced—it was plain he was honestly elated.
“Get a move on, fire rockets,” he urged, “or Van will blast you for fair!”
Dane did move, up the ladder to the next level and out on the port ramp. What he saw below brought him up short. Evening had come to Sargol but the scene immediately below was not in darkness. Blazing torches advanced in lines from the grass forest and the portable flood light of the spacer added to the general glare, turning night into noonday.
Van Rycke and Jellico sat on stools facing at least five of the seven major chieftains with whom they had conferred to no purpose earlier. And behind these leaders milled a throng of lesser Salariki. Yes, there was at least one carrying chair—and also an orgel from the back of which a veiled noblewoman was being assisted to dismount by two retainers. The women of the clans were coming—which could mean only that trade was at last in progress. But trade for what?
Dane strode down the ramp. He saw Paft, his hand carefully covered by his trade cloth, advance to Van Rycke, whose own fingers were decently veiled by a handkerchief. Under the folds of fabric their hands touched. The bargaining was in the first stages. And it was important enough for the clan leaders to conduct themselves. Where, according to Cam’s records, it had been usual to delegate that power to a favored liege man.
Catching the light from the ship’s beam and from the softer flares of the Salariki torches was a small pile of stones resting on a stool to one side. Dane drew a deep breath. He had heard the Koros stones described, had seen the tri-dee print of one found among Cam’s recordings but the reality was beyond his expectations. He knew the technical analysis of the gems—that they were, as the amber of Terra, the fossilized resin exuded by ancient plants (maybe the ancestors of the grass trees) long buried in the saline deposits of the shallow seas where chemical changes had taken place to produce the wonder jewels. In color they shaded from a rosy apricot to a rich mauve, but in their depths other colors, silver, fiery gold, spun sparks which seemed to move as the gem was turned. And—which was what first endeared them to the Salariki—when worn against the skin and warmed by body heat they gave off a perfume which enchanted not only the Sargolian natives but all in the Galaxy wealthy enough to own one.
On another stool placed at Van Rycke’s right hand, as that bearing the Koros stones was at Paft’s, was a transparent plastic box containing some wrinkled brownish leaves. Dane moved as unobtrusively as he could to his proper place at such a trading session, behind Van Rycke. More Salariki were tramping out of the forest, torch bearing retainers and cloaked warriors. A little to one side was a third party Dane had not seen before.
They were clustered about a staff which had been driven into the ground, a staff topped with a white streamer marking a temporary trading ground. These were Salariki right enough but they did not wear the colorful garb of those about them, instead they were all clad alike in muffling, sleeved robes of a drab green—the storm priests—their robes denoting the color of the Sargolian sky just before the onslaught of their worst tempests. Cam had not left many clues concerning the religion of the Salariki, but the storm priests had, in narrowly defined limits, power, and their recognition of the Terran Traders would add to good feeling.
In the knot of storm priests a Terran stood—Medic Tau—and he was talking earnestly with the leader of the religious party. Dane would have given much to have been free to cross and ask Tau a question or two. Was all this assembly the result of the discovery in the hydro? But even as he asked himself that, the trade cloths were shaken from the hands of the bargainers and Van Rycke gave an order over his shoulder.
“Measure out two spoonsful of the dried leaves into a box—” he pointed to a tiny plastic container.
With painstaking care Dane followed directions. At the same time a servant of the Salarik chief swept the handful of gems from the other stool and dropped them in a heap before Van Rycke, who transferred them to a strong box resting between his feet. Paft arose—but he had hardly quitted the trading seat before one of the lesser clan leaders had taken his place, the bargaining cloth ready looped loosely about his wrist.
It was at that point that the proceedings were interrupted. A new party came into the open, their utilitarian Trade tunics made a drab blot as they threaded their way in a compact group through the throng of Salariki. I-S men! So they had not lifted from Sargol.
They showed no signs of uneasiness—it was as if their rights were being infringed by the Free Traders. And Kallee, their Cargo-master, swaggered straight to the bargaining point. The chatter of Salariki voices was stilled, the Sargolians withdrew a little, letting one party of Terrans face the other, sensing drama to come. Neither Van Rycke nor Jellico spoke, it was left to Kallee to state his case.
“You’ve crooked your orbit this time, bright boys,” his jeer was a paean of triumph. “Code Three—Article six—or can’t you absorb rules tapes with your thick heads?”
Code Three—Article six, Dane searched his memory for that law of the Service. The words flashed into his mind as the auto-learner had planted them during his first year of training back in the Pool.
“To no alien race shall any Trader introduce any drug, food, or drink from off world, until such a substance has been certified as nonharmful to the aliens.”
There it was! I-S had them and it was all his fault. But if he had been so wrong, why in the world did Van Rycke sit there trading, condoning the error and making it into a crime for which they could be summoned before the Board and struck off the rolls of the Service?
Van Rycke smiled gently. “Code Four—Article two,” he quoted with the genial air of one playing gift-giver at a Forkidan feasting.
Code Four, Article two: Any organic substance offered for trade must be examined by a committee of trained medical experts, an equal representation of Terrans and aliens.
Kallee’s sneering smile did not vanish. “Well,” he challenged, “where’s your board of experts?”
“Tau!” Van Rycke called to the Medic with the storm priests. “Will you ask your colleague to be so kind as to allow the Cargo-master Kallee to be presented?”
The tall, dark young Terran Medic spoke to the priest beside him and together they came across the clearing. Van Rycke and Jellico both arose and inclined their heads in honor to the priests, as did the chief with whom they had been about to deal.
“Reader of clouds and master of many winds,” Tau’s voice flowed with the many voweled titles of the Sargolian, “may I bring before your face Cargo-master Kallee, a servant of Inter-Solar in the realm of Trade?”
The storm priest’s shaven skull and body gleamed steel gray in the light. His eyes, of that startling blue-green, regarded the I-S party with cynical detachment.
“You wish of me?” Plainly he was one who believed in getting down to essentials at once.
Kallee could not be overawed. “These Free Traders have introduced among your people a powerful drug which will bring much evil,” he spoke slowly in simple words as if he were addressing a cub.
“You have evidence of such evil?” countered the storm priest. “In what manner is this new plant evil?”
For a moment Kallee was disconcerted. But he rallied quickly. “It has not been tested—you do not know how it will affect your people—”
The storm priest shook his head impatiently. “We are not lacking in intelligence, Trader. This plant has been tested, both by your master of life secrets and ours. There is no harm in it—rather it is a good thing, to be highly prized—so highly that we shall give thanks that it was brought unto us. This speech-together is finished.” He pulled the loose folds of his robe closer about him and walked away.
“Now,” Van Rycke addressed the I-S party, “I must ask you to withdraw. Under the rules of Trade your presence here can be actively resented—”
But Kallee had lost little of his assurance. “You haven’t heard the last of this. A tape of the whole proceedings goes to the Board—”
“As you wish. But in the meantime—” Van Rycke gestured to the waiting Salariki who were beginning to mutter impatiently. Kallee glanced around, heard those mutters, and made the only move possible, away from the Queen. He was not quite so cocky, but neither had he surrendered.
Dane caught at Tau’s sleeve and asked the question which had been burning in him since he had come upon the scene.
“What happened—about the catnip?”
There was lightening of the serious expression on Tau’s face.
“Fortunately for you that child took the leaves to the storm priest. They tested and approved it. And I can’t see that it has any ill effects. But you were just lucky, Thorson—it might have gone another way.”
Dane sighed. “I know that, sir,” he confessed. “I’m not trying to rocket out—”
Tau gave a half-smile. “We all off-fire our tubes at times,” he conceded. “Only next time—”
He did not need to complete that warning as Dane caught him up:
“There isn’t going to be a next time like this, sir—ever!”
But the interruption had disturbed the tenor of trading. The small chief who had so eagerly taken Paft’s place had only two Koros stones to offer and even to Dane’s inexperienced eyes they were inferior in size and color to those the other clan leader had tendered. The Terrans were aware that Koros mining was a dangerous business but they had not known that the stock of available stones was so very small. Within ten minutes the last of the serious bargaining was concluded and the clansmen were drifting away from the burned over space about the Queen’s standing fins.
Dane folded up the bargain cloth, glad for a task. He sensed that he was far from being back in Van Rycke’s good graces. The fact that his superior did not discuss any of the aspects of the deals with him was a bad sign.
Captain Jellico stretched. Although his was not, or never, what might be termed a good-humored face, he was at peace with his world. “That would seem to be all. What’s the haul, Van?”
“And how’s the herbs holding out?” That interested Dane too. Surely the few plants in the hydro and the dried leaves could not be stretched too far.
“As well as we could expect.” Van Rycke frowned. “But Craig thinks he’s on the trail of something to help—”
The storm priests had uprooted the staff marking the trading station and were wrapping the white streamer about it. Their leader had already gone and now Tau came up to the group by the ramp.
“Van says you have an idea,” the Captain hailed him.
“We haven’t tried it yet. And we can’t unless the priests give it a clear lane—”
“That goes without saying—” Jellico agreed.
The Captain had not addressed that remark to him personally, but Dane was sure it had been directed at him. Well, they needn’t worry—never again was he going to make that mistake, they could be very sure of that.
He was part of the conference which followed in the mess cabin only because he was a member of the crew. How far the reason for his disgrace had spread he had no way of telling, but he made no overtures, even to Rip.
Tau had the floor with Mura as an efficient lieutenant. He discussed the properties of catnip and gave information on the limited supply the Queen carried. Then he launched into a new suggestion.
“Felines of Terra, in fact a great many other of our native mammals, have a similar affinity for this.”
Mura produced a small flask and Tau opened it, passing it to Captain Jellico and so from hand to hand about the room. Each crewman sniffed at the strong aroma. It was a heavier scent than that given off by the crushed catnip—Dane was not sure he liked it. But a moment later Sinbad streaked in from the corridor and committed the unpardonable sin of leaping to the table top just before Mura who had taken the flask from Dane. He miaowed plaintively and clawed at the steward’s cuff. Mura stoppered the flask and put the cat down on the floor.
“What is it?” Jellico wanted to know.
“Anisette, a liquor made from the oil of anise—from seeds of the anise plant. It is a stimulant, but we use it mainly as a condiment. If it is harmless for the Salariki it ought to be a bigger bargaining point than any perfumes or spices, I-S can import. And remember, with their unlimited capital, they can flood the market with products we can’t touch, selling at a loss if need be to cut us out. Because their ship is not going to lift from Sargol just because she has no legal right here.”
“There’s this point,” Van Rycke added to the lecture. “The Eysies are trading or want to trade perfumes. But they stock only manufactured products, exotic stuff, but synthetic.” He took from his belt pouch two tiny boxes.
Before he caught the rich scent of the paste inside them Dane had already identified each as luxury items from Casper—chemical products which sold well and at high prices in the civilized ports of the Galaxy. The Cargo-master turned the boxes over, exposing the symbol on their undersides—the mark of I-S.
“These were offered to me in trade by a Salarik. I took them, just to have proof that the Eysies are operating here. But—note—they were offered to me in trade, along with two top Koros for what? One spoonful of dried catnip leaves. Does that suggest anything?”
Mura answered first. “The Salariki prefer natural products to synthetic.”
“I think so.”
“D’you suppose that was Cam’s secret?” speculated Astrogator Steen Wilcox.
“If it was,” Jellico cut in, “he certainly kept it! If we had only known this earlier—”
They were all thinking of that, of their storage space carefully packed with useless trade goods. Where, if they had known, the same space could have carried herbs with five or twenty-five times as much buying power.
“Maybe now that their sales’ resistance is broken, we can switch to some of the other stuff,” Tang Ya, torn away from his beloved communicators for the conference, said wistfully. “They like color—how about breaking out some rolls of Harlinian moth silk?”
Van Rycke sighed wearily. “Oh, we’ll try. We’ll bring out everything and anything. But we could have done so much better—” he brooded over the tricks of fate which had landed them on a planet wild for trade with no proper trade goods in either of their holds.
There was a nervous little sound of a throat being apologetically cleared. Jasper Weeks, the small wiper from the engine room detail, the third generation Venusian colonist whom the more vocal members of the Queen’s complement were apt to forget upon occasion, seeing all eyes upon him, spoke though his voice was hardly above a hoarse whisper.
“Cedar—lacquel bark—forsh weed—”
“Cinnamon,” Mura added to the list. “Imported in small quantities—”
“Naturally! Only the problem now is—how much cedar, lacquel bark, forsh weed, cinnamon do we have on board?” demanded Van Rycke.
His sarcasm did not register with Weeks for the little man pushed by Dane and left the cabin to their surprise. In the quiet which followed they could hear the clatter of his boots on ladder rungs as he descended to the quarters of the engine room staff. Tang turned to his neighbor, Johan Stotz, the Queen’s Engineer.
“What’s he going for?”
Stotz shrugged. Weeks was a self-effacing man—so much so that even in the cramped quarters of the spacer very little about him as an individual impressed his mates—a fact which was slowly dawning on them all now. Then they heard the scramble of feet hurrying back and Weeks burst in with energy which carried him across to the table behind which the Captain and Van Rycke now sat.
In the wiper’s hands was a plasta-steel box—the treasure chest of a spaceman. Its tough exterior was guaranteed to protect the contents against everything but outright disintegration. Weeks put it down on the table and snapped up the lid.
A new aroma, or aromas, was added to the scents now at war in the cabin. Weeks pulled out a handful of fluffy white stuff which frothed up about his fingers like soap lather. Then with more care he lifted up a tray divided into many small compartments, each with a separate sealing lid of its own. The men of the Queen moved in, their curiosity aroused, until they were jostling one another.
Being tall Dane had an advantage, though Van Rycke’s bulk and the wide shoulders of the Captain were between him and the object they were so intent upon. In each division of the tray, easily seen through the transparent lids, was a carved figure. The weird denizens of the Venusian polar swamps were there, along with lifelike effigies of Terran animals, a Martian sand-mouse in all its monstrous ferocity, and the native animal and reptile life of half a hundred different worlds. Weeks put down a second tray beside the first, again displaying a menagerie of strange life forms. But when he clicked open one of the compartments and handed the figurine it contained to the Captain, Dane understood the reason for now bringing forward the carvings.
The majority of them were fashioned from a dull blue-gray wood and Dane knew that if he picked one up he would discover that it weighed close to nothing in his hand. That was lacquel bark—the aromatic product of a Venusian vine. And each little animal or reptile lay encased in a soft dab of frothy white—frosh weed—the perfumed seed casing of the Martian canal plants. One or two figures on the second tray were of a red-brown wood and these Van Rycke sniffed at appreciatively.
“Cedar—Terran cedar,” he murmured.
Weeks nodded eagerly, his eyes alight. “I am waiting now for sandalwood—it is also good for carving—”
Jellico stared at the array in puzzled wonder. “You have made these?”
Being an amateur xenobiologist of no small standing himself, the shapes of the carvings more than the material from which they fashioned held his attention.
All those on board the Queen had their own hobbies. The monotony of voyaging through hyper-space had long ago impressed upon men the need for occupying both hands and mind during the sterile days while they were forced into close companionship with few duties to keep them alert. Jellico’s cabin was papered with tri-dee pictures of the rare animals and alien creatures he had studied in their native haunts or of which he kept careful and painstaking records. Tau had his magic, Mura not only his plants but the delicate miniature landscapes he fashioned, to be imprisoned forever in the hearts of protecting plasta balls. But Weeks had never shown his work before and now he had an artist’s supreme pleasure of completely confounding his shipmates.
The Cargo-master returned to the business on hand first. “You’re willing to transfer these to ‘cargo’?” he asked briskly. “How many do you have?”
Weeks, now lifting a third and then a fourth tray from the box, replied without looking up.
“Two hundred. Yes, I’ll transfer, sir.”
The Captain was turning about in his fingers the beautifully shaped figure of an Astran duocorn. “Pity to trade these here,” he mused aloud. “Will Paft or Halfer appreciate more than just their scent?”
Weeks smiled shyly. “I’ve filled this case, sir. I was going to offer them to Mr. Van Rycke on a venture. I can always make another set. And right now—well, maybe they’ll be worth more to the Queen, seeing as how they’re made out of aromatic woods, then they’d be elsewhere. Leastwise the Eysies aren’t going to have anything like them to show!” he ended in a burst of honest pride.
“Indeed they aren’t!” Van Rycke gave honor where it was due.
So they made plans and then separated to sleep out the rest of the night. Dane knew that his lapse was not forgotten nor forgiven, but now he was honestly too tired to care and slept as well as if his conscience were clear.
But morning brought only a trickle of lower class clansmen for trading and none of them had much but news to offer. The storm priests, as neutral arbitrators, had divided up the Koros grounds. And the clansmen, under the personal supervision of their chieftains were busy hunting the stones. The Terrans gathered from scraps of information that gem seeking on such a large scale had never been attempted before.
Before night there came other news, and much more chilling. Paft, one of the two major chieftains of this section of Sargol—while supervising the efforts of his liege men on a newly discovered and richly strewn length of shoal water—had been attacked and killed by gorp. The unusual activity of the Salariki in the shallows had in turn drawn to the spot battalions of the intelligent, malignant reptiles who had struck in strength, slaying and escaping before the Salariki could form an adequate defense, having killed the land dwellers’ sentries silently and effectively before advancing on the laboring main bodies of gem hunters.
A loss of a certain number of miners or fishers had been preseen as the price one paid for Koros in quantity. But the death of a chieftain was another thing altogether, having repercussions which carried far beyond the fact of his death. When the news reached the Salariki about the Queen they melted away into the grass forest and for the first time the Terrans felt free of spying eyes.
“What happens now?” Ali inquired. “Do they declare all deals off?”
“That might just be the unfortunate answer,” agreed Van Rycke.
“Could be,” Rip commented to Dane, “that they’d think we were in some way responsible—”
But Dane’s conscience, sensitive over the whole matter of Salariki trade, had already reached that conclusion.
The Terran party, unsure of what were the best tactics, wisely decided to do nothing at all for the time being. But, when the Salariki seemed to have completely vanished on the morning of the second day, the men were restless. Had Paft’s death resulted in some interclan quarrel over the heirship and the other clans withdrawn to let the various contendents for that honor fight it out? Or—what was more probable and dangerous—had the aliens come to the point of view that the Queen was in the main responsible for the catastrophe and were engaged in preparing too warm a welcome for any Traders who dared to visit them?
With the latter idea in mind they did not stray far from the ship. And the limit to their traveling was the edge of the forest from which they could be covered and so they did not learn much.
It was well into the morning before they were dramatically appraised that, far from being considered in any way an enemy, they were about to be accepted in a tie as close as clan to clan during one of the temporary but binding truces.
The messenger came in state, a young Salarik warrior, his splendid cloak rent and hanging in tattered pieces from his shoulders as a sign of his official grief. He carried in one hand a burned out torch, and in the other an unsheathed claw knife, its blade reflecting the sunlight with a wicked glitter. Behind him trotted three couples of retainers, their cloaks also ragged fringes, their knives drawn.
Standing up on the ramp to receive what could only be a formal deputation were Captain, Astrogator, Cargo-master and Engineer, the senior officers of the spacer.
In the rolling periods of the Trade Lingo the torch bearer identified himself as Groft, son and heir of the late lamented Paft. Until his chieftain father was avenged in blood he could not assume the high seat of his clan nor the leadership of the family. And now, following custom, he was inviting the friends and sometimes allies of the dead Paft to a gorp hunt. Such a gorp hunt, Dane gathered from amidst the flowers of ceremonial Salariki speech, as had never been planned before on the face of Sargol. Salariki without number in the past had died beneath the ripping talons of the water reptiles, but it was seldom that a chieftain had so fallen and his clan were firm in their determination to take a full blood price from the killers.
“—and so, sky lords,” Groft brought his oration to a close, “we come to ask that you send your young men to this hunting so that they may know the joy of plunging knives into the scaled death and see the horned ones die bathed in their own vile blood!”
Dane needed no hint from the Queen’s officers that this invitation was a sharp departure from custom. By joining with the natives in such a foray the Terrans were being admitted to kinship of a sort, cementing relations by a tie which the I-S, or any other interloper from off-world, would find hard to break. It was a piece of such excellent good fortune as they would not have dreamed of three days earlier.
Van Rycke replied, his voice properly sonorous, sounding out the rounded periods of the rolling tongue which they had all been taught during the voyage, using Cam’s recording. Yes, the Terrans would join with pleasure in so good and great a cause. They would lend the force of their arms to the defeat of all gorp they had the good fortune to meet. Groft need only name the hour for them to join him—
It was not needful, the young Salariki chieftain-to-be hastened to tell the Cargo-master, that the senior sky lords concern themselves in this matter. In fact it would be against custom, for it was meet that such a hunt be left to warriors of few years, that they might earn glory and be able to stand before the fires at the Naming as men. Therefore—the thumb claw of Groft was extended to its greatest length as he used it to single out the Terrans he had been eyeing—let this one, and that, and that, and the fourth be ready to join with the Salariki party an hour after nooning on this very day and they would indeed teach the slimy, treacherous lurkers in the depths a well needed lesson.
The Salarik’s choice with one exception had unerringly fallen upon the youngest members of the crew, Ali, Rip, and Dane in that order. But his fourth addition had been Jasper Weeks. Perhaps because of his native pallor of skin and slightness of body the oiler had seemed, to the alien, to be younger than his years. At any rate Groft had made it very plain that he chose these men and Dane knew that the Queen’s officers would raise no objection which might upset the delicate balance of favorable relations.
Van Rycke did ask for one concession which was reluctantly granted. He received permission for the spacer’s men to carry their sleep rods. Though the Salariki, apparently for some reason of binding and hoary custom, were totally opposed to hunting their age-old enemy with anything other than their duelists’ weapons of net and claw knife.
“Go along with them,” Captain Jellico gave his final orders to the four, “as long as it doesn’t mean your own necks—understand? On the other hand dead heroes have never helped to lift a ship. And these gorp are tough from all accounts. You’ll just have to use your own judgment about springing your rods on them—” He looked distinctly unhappy at that thought.
Ali was grinning and little Weeks tightened his weapon belt with a touch of swagger he had never shown before. Rip was his usual soft voiced self, dependable as a rock and a good base for the rest of them—taking command without question as they marched off to join Groft’s company.
Chapter V
THE PERILOUS SEAS
The gorp hunters straggled through the grass forest in family groups, and the Terrans saw that the enterprise had forced another uneasy truce upon the district, for there were representatives from more than just Paft’s own clan. All the Salariki were young and the parties babbled together in excitement. It was plain that this hunt, staged upon a large scale, was not only a means of revenge upon a hated enemy but, also, a sporting event of outstanding prestige.
Now the grass trees began to show ragged gaps, open spaces between their clumps, until the forest was only scattered groups and the party the Terrans had joined walked along a trail cloaked in knee-high, yellow-red fern growth. Most of the Salariki carried unlit torches, some having four or five bundled together, as if gorp hunting must be done after nightfall. And it was fairly late in the afternoon before they topped a rise of ground and looked out upon one of Sargol’s seas.
The water was a dull-metallic gray, broken by great swaths of purple as if an artist had slapped a brush of color across it in a hit or miss fashion. Sand of the red grit, lightened by the golden flecks which glittered in the sun, stretched to the edge of the wavelets breaking with only languor on the curve of earth. The bulk of islands arose in serried ranks farther out—crowned with grass trees all rippling under the sea wind.
They came out upon the beach where one of the purple patches touched the shore and Dane noted that it left a scummy deposit there. The Terrans went on to the water’s edge. Where it was clear of the purple stuff they could get a murky glimpse of the bottom, but the scum hid long stretches of shoreline and outer wave, and Dane wondered if the gorp used it as a protective covering.
For the moment the Salariki made no move toward the sea which was to be their hunting ground. Instead the youngest members of the party, some of whom were adolescents not yet entitled to wear the claw knife of manhood, spread out along the shore and set industriously to gathering driftwood, which they brought back to heap on the sand. Dane, watching that harvest, caught sight of a smoothly polished length. He called Weeks’ attention to the water rounded cylinder.
The oiler’s eyes lighted and he stooped to pick it up. Where the other sticks were from grass trees this was something else. And among the bleached pile it had the vividness of flame. For it was a strident scarlet. Weeks turned it over in his hands, running his fingers lovingly across its perfect grain. Even in this crude state it had beauty. He stopped the Salarik who had just brought in another armload of wood.
“This is what?” he spoke the Trade Lingo haltingly.
The native gazed somewhat indifferently at the branch. “Tansil,” he answered. “It grows on the islands—” He made a vague gesture to include a good section of the western sea before he hurried away.
Weeks now went along the tide line on his own quest, Dane trailing him. At the end of a quarter hour when a hail summoned them back to the site of the now lighted fire, they had some ten pieces of the tansil wood between them. The finds ranged from a three foot section some four inches in diameter, to some slender twigs no larger than a writing steelo—but all with high polish, the warm flame coloring. Weeks lashed them together before he joined the group where Groft was outlining the technique of gorp hunting for the benefit of the Terrans.
Some two hundred feet away a reef, often awash and stained with the purple scum, angled out into the sea in a long curve which formed a natural breakwater. This was the point of attack. But first the purple film must be removed so that land and sea dwellers could meet on common terms.
The fire blazed up, eating hungrily into the driftwood. And from it ran the young Salariki with lighted brands, which at the water’s edge they whirled about their heads and then hurled out onto the purple patches. Fire arose from the water and ran with frantic speed across the crests of the low waves, while the Salariki coughed and buried their noses in their perfume boxes, for the wind drove shoreward an overpowering stench.
Where the cleansing fire had run on the water there was now only the natural metallic gray of the liquid, the cover was gone. Older Salariki warriors were choosing torches from those they had brought, doing it with care. Groft approached the Terrans carrying four.
“These you use now—”
What for? Dane wondered. The sky was still sunlit. He held the torch watching to see how the Salariki made use of them.
Groft led the advance—running lightly out along the reef with agile and graceful leaps to cross the breaks where the sea hurled in over the rock. And after him followed the other natives, each with a lighted torch in hand—the torch they hunkered down to plant firmly in some crevice of the rock before taking a stand beside that beacon.
The Terrans, less surefooted in the space boots, picked their way along the same path, wet with spray, wrinkling their noses against the lingering puffs of the stench from the water.
Following the example of the Salariki they faced seaward—but Dane did not know what to watch for. Cam had left only the vaguest general descriptions of gorp and beyond the fact that they were reptilian, intelligent and dangerous, the Terrans had not been briefed.
Once the warriors had taken up their stand along the reef, the younger Salariki went into action once more. Lighting more torches at the fire, they ran out along the line of their elders and flung their torches as far as they could hurl them into the sea outside the reef.
The gray steel of the water was now yellow with the reflection of the sinking sun. But that ocher and gold became more brilliant yet as the torches of the Salariki set blazing up far floating patches of scum. Dane shielded his eyes against the glare and tried to watch the water, with some idea that this move must be provocation and what they hunted would so be driven into view.
He held his sleep rod ready, just as the Salarik on his right had claw knife in one hand and in the other, open and waiting, the net intended to entangle and hold fast a victim, binding him for the kill.
But it was at the far tip of the barrier—the post of greatest honor which Groft had jealously claimed as his, that the gorp struck first. At a wild shout of defiance Dane half turned to see the Salarik noble cast his net at sea level and then stab viciously with a well practiced blow. When he raised his arm for a second thrust, greenish ichor ran from the blade down his wrist.
“Dane!”
Thorson’s head jerked around. He saw the vee of ripples headed straight for the rocks where he balanced.
But he’d have to wait for a better target than a moving wedge of water. Instinctively he half crouched in the stance of an embattled spaceman, wishing now that he did have a blaster.
Neither of the Salariki stationed on either side of him made any move and he guessed that was hunt etiquette. Each man was supposed to face and kill the monster that challenged him—without assistance. And upon his skill during the next few minutes might rest the reputation of all Terrans as far as the natives were concerned.
There was a shadow outline beneath the surface of the metallic water now, but he could not see well because of the distortion of the murky waves. He must wait until he was sure.
Then the thing gave a spurt and, only inches beyond the toes of his boots, a nightmare creature sprang halfway out of the water, pincher claws as long as his own arms snapping at him. Without being conscious of his act, he pressed the stud of the sleep rod, aiming in the general direction of that horror from the sea.
But to his utter amazement the creature did not fall supinely back into watery world from which it had emerged. Instead those claws snapped again, this time scrapping across the top of Dane’s foot, leaving a furrow in material the keenest of knives could not have scored.
“Give it to him!” That was Rip shouting encouragement from his own place farther along the reef.
Dane pressed the firing stud again and again. The claws waved as the monstrosity slavered from a gaping frog’s mouth, a mouth which was fanged with a shark’s vicious teeth. It was almost wholly out of the water, creeping on a crab’s many legs, with a clawed upper limb reaching for him, when suddenly it stopped, its huge head turning from side to side in the sheltering carapace of scaled natural armor. It settled back as if crouching for a final spring—a spring which would push Dane into the ocean.
But that attack never came. Instead the gorp drew in upon itself until it resembled an unwieldy ball of indestructible armor and there it remained.
The Salariki on either side of Dane let out cries of triumph and edged closer. One of them twirled his net suggestively, seeing that the Terran lacked what was to him an essential piece of hunting equipment. Dane nodded vigorously in agreement and the tough strands swung out in a skillful cast which engulfed the motionless creature on the reef. But it was so protected by its scales that there was no opening for the claw knife. They had made a capture but they could not make a kill.
However, the Salariki were highly delighted. And several abandoned their posts to help the boys drag the monster ashore where it was pinned down to the beach by stakes driven through the edges of the net.
But the hunting party was given little time to gloat over this stroke of fortune. The gorp killed by Groft and the one stunned by Dane were only the van of an army and within moments the hunters on the reef were confronted by trouble armed with slashing claws and diabolic fighting ability.
The battle was anything but one-sided. Dane whirled, as the air was rent by a shriek of agony, just in time to see one of the Salariki, already torn by the claws of a gorp, being drawn under the water. It was too late to save the hunter, though Dane, balanced on the very edge of the reef, aimed a beam into the bloody waves. If the gorp was affected by this attack he could not tell, for both attacker and victim could no longer be seen.
But Ali had better luck in rescuing the Salarik who shared his particular section of reef, and the native, gashed and spurting blood from a wound in his thigh, was hauled to safety. While the gorp, coiling too slowly under the Terran ray, was literally hewn to pieces by the revengeful knives of the hunter’s kin.
The fight broke into a series of individual duels carried on now by the light of the torches as the evening closed in. The last of the purple patches had burned away to nothing. Dane crouched by his standard torch, his eyes fastened on the sea, watching for an ominous vee of ripples betraying another gorp on its way to launch against the rock barrier.
There was such wild confusion along that line of water sprayed rocks that he had no idea of how the engagement was going. But so far the gorp showed no signs of having had enough.
Dane was shaken out of his absorption by another scream. One, he was sure, which had not come from any Salariki throat. He got to his feet. Rip was stationed four men beyond him. Yes, the tall Astrogator-apprentice was there, outlined against torch flare. Ali? No—there was the assistant Engineer. Weeks? But Weeks was picking his way back along the reef toward the shore, haste expressed in every line of his figure. The scream sounded for a second time, freezing the Terrans.
“Come back—!” That was Weeks gesturing violently at the shore and something floundering in the protecting circle of the reef. The younger Salariki who had been feeding the fire were now clustered at the water’s edge.
Ali ran and with a leap covered the last few feet, landing reckless knee deep in the waves. Dane saw light strike on his rod as he swung it in a wide arc to center on the struggle churning the water into foam. A third scream died to a moan and then the Salariki dashed into the sea, their nets spread, drawing back with them through the surf a dark and now quiet mass.
The fact that at least one gorp had managed to get on the inner side of the reef made an impression on the rest of the native hunters. After an uncertain minute or two Groft gave the signal to withdraw—which they did with grisly trophies. Dane counted seven gorp bodies—which did not include the prisoner ashore. And more might have slid into the sea to die. On the other hand two Salariki were dead—one had been drawn into the sea before Dane’s eyes—and at least one was badly wounded. But who had been pulled down in the shallows—some one sent out from the Queen with a message?
Dane raced back along the reef, not waiting to pull up his torch, and before he reached the shore Rip was overtaking him. But the man who lay groaning on the sand was not from the Queen. The torn and bloodstained tunic covering his lacerated shoulders had the I-S badge. Ali was already at work on his wounds, giving temporary first aid from his belt kit. To all their questions he was stubbornly silent—either he couldn’t or wouldn’t answer.
In the end they helped the Salariki rig three stretchers. On one the largest, the captive gorp, still curled in a round carapace protected ball, was bound with the net. The second supported the wounded Salarik clansman and onto the third the Terrans lifted the I-S man.
“We’ll deliver him to his own ship,” Rip decided. “He must have tailed us here as a spy—” He asked a passing Salarik as to where they could find the Company spacer.
“They might just think we are responsible,” Ali pointed out. “But I see your point. If we do pack him back to the Queen and he doesn’t make it, they might say that we fired his rockets for him. All right, boys, let’s up-ship—he doesn’t look too good to me.”
With a torch-bearing Salarik boy as a guide, they hurried along a path taking in turns the burden of the stretcher. Luckily the I-S ship was even closer to the sea than the Queen and as they crossed the slagged ground, congealed by the break fire, they were trotting.
Though the Company ship was probably one of the smallest Inter-Solar carried on her rosters, it was a third again as large as the Queen—with part of that third undoubtedly dedicated to extra cargo space. Beside her their own spacer would seem not only smaller, but battered and worn. But no Free Trader would have willingly assumed the badges of a Company man, not even for the command of such a ship fresh from the cradles of a builder.
When a man went up from the training Pool for his first assignment, he was sent to the ship where his temperament, training and abilities best fitted. And those who were designated as Free Traders would never fit into the pattern of Company men. Of late years the breech between those who lived under the strict parental control of one of the five great galaxy wide organizations and those still too much of an individual to live any life but that of a half-explorer-half-pioneer which was the Free Trader’s, had widened alarmingly. Antagonism flared, rivalry was strong. But as yet the great Companies themselves were at polite cold war with one another for the big plums of the scattered systems. The Free Traders took the crumbs and there was not much disputing—save in cases such as had arisen on Sargol, when suddenly crumbs assumed the guise of very rich cake, rich and large enough to attract a giant.
The party from the Queen was given a peremptory challenge as they reached the other ship’s ramp. Rip demanded to see the officer of the watch and then told the story of the wounded man as far as they knew it. The Eysie was hurried aboard—nor did his shipmates give a word of thanks.
“That’s that.” Rip shrugged. “Let’s go before they slam the hatch so hard they’ll rock their ship off her fins!”
“Polite, aren’t they?” asked Weeks mildly.
“What do you expect of Eysies?” Ali wanted to know. “To them Free Traders are just rim planet trash. Let’s report back where we are appreciated.”
They took a short cut which brought them back to the Queen and they filed up her ramp to make their report to the Captain.
But they were not yet satisfied with Groft and his gorp slayers. No Salarik appeared for trade in the morning—surprising the Terrans. Instead a second delegation, this time of older men and a storm priest, visited the spacer with an invitation to attend Paft’s funeral feast, a rite which would be followed by the formal elevation of Groft to his father’s position, now that he had revenged that parent. And from remarks dropped by members of the delegation it was plain that the bearing of the Terrans who had joined the hunting party was esteemed to have been in highest accord with Salariki tradition.
They drew lots to decide which two must remain with the ship and the rest perfumed themselves so as to give no offense which might upset their now cordial relations. Again it was mid-afternoon when the Salariki escort sent to do them honor waited at the edge of the wood and Mura and Tang saw them off. With a herald booming before them, they traveled the beaten earth road in the opposite direction from the trading center, off through the forest until they came to a wide section of several miles which had been rigorously cleared of any vegetation which might give cover to a lurking enemy. In the center of this was a twelve-foot-high stockade of the bright red, burnished wood which had attracted Weeks on the shore. Each paling was the trunk of a tree and it had been sharpened at the top to a wicked point. On the field side was a wide ditch, crossed at the gate by a bridge, the planking of which might be removed at will. And as Dane passed over he looked down into the moat that was dry. The Salariki did not depend upon water for a defense—but on something else which his experience of the previous night had taught him to respect. There was no mistaking that shade of purple. The highly inflammable scum the hunters had burnt from the top of the waves had been brought inland and lay a greasy blanket some eight feet below. It would only be necessary to toss a torch on that and the defenders of the stockade would create a wall of fire to baffle any attackers. The Salariki knew how to make the most of their world’s natural resources.
As the trading center had been, the hall was a circular enclosure open to the sky above but divided in wheel-spoke fashion with posts of the red wood, each supporting a metal basket filled with imflammable material. Here were no lowly stools or trading tables. One vast circular board, broken only by a gap at the foot, ran completely around the wall. At the end opposite the entrance was the high chair of the chieftain, set on a two step dais. Though the feast had not yet officially begun, the Terrans saw that the majority of the places were already occupied.
They were led around the perimeter of the enclosure to places not far from the high seat. Van Rycke settled down with a grunt of satisfaction. It was plain that the Free Traders were numbered among the nobility. They could be sure of good trade in the days to come.
Delegations from neighboring clans arrived in close companies of ten or twelve and were granted seats, as had been the Terrans, in groups. Dane noted that there was no intermingling of clan with clan. And, as they were to understand later that night, there was a very good reason for that precaution.
“Hope all our adaption shots work,” Ali murmured, eyeing with no pleasure at all the succession of platters now being borne through the inner opening of the table.
While the Traders had learned long ago that the wisest part of valor was not to sample alien strong drinks, ceremony often required that they break bread (or its other world equivalent) on strange planets. And so science served expediency and now a Trader bound for any Galactic banquet was immunized, as far as was medically possible, against the evil consequences of consuming food not originally intended for Terran stomachs. One of the results being that Traders acquired a far flung reputation of possessing bird-like appetites—since it was always better to nibble and live, than to gorge and die.
Groft had not yet taken his place in the vacant chieftain’s chair. For the present he stood in the center of the table circle, directing the captive slaves who circulated with the food. Until the magic moment when the clan themselves would proclaim their overlord, he remained merely the eldest son of the house, relatively without power.
As the endless rows of platters made their way about the table the basket lights on the tops of the pillars were ignited, dispelling the dusk of evening. And there was an attendant stationed by each to throw on handsful of aromatic bark which burned with puffs of lavender smoke, adding to the many warring scents. The Terrans had recourse at intervals to their own pungent smelling bottles, merely to clear their heads of the drugging fumes.
Luckily, Dane thought as the feast proceeded, that smoke from the braziers went straight up. Had they been in a roofed space they might have been overcome. As it was—were they entirely conscious of all that was going on around them?
His reason for that speculation was the dance now being performed in the center of the hall—their fight with the gorp being enacted in a series of bounds and stabbings. He was sure that he could no longer trust his eyes when the claw knife of the victorious dancer-hunter apparently passed completely through the chest of another wearing a grotesque monster mask.
As a fitting climax to their horrific display, three of the men who had been with them on the reef entered, dragging behind them—still enmeshed in the hunting net—the gorp which Dane had stunned. It was uncurled now and very much alive, but the pincer claws which might have cut its way to safety were encased in balls of hard substance.
Freed from the net, suspended by its sealed claws, the gorp swung back and forth from a standard set up before the high seat. Its murderous jaws snapped futilely, and from it came an enraged snake’s vicious hissing. Though totally in the power of its enemies it gave an impression of terrifying strength and menace.
The sight of their ancient foe aroused the Salariki, inflaming warriors who leaned across the table to hurl tongue-twisting invective at the captive monster. Dane gathered that seldom had a living gorp been delivered helpless into their hands and they proposed to make the most of this wonderful opportunity. And the Terran suddenly wished the monstrosity had fallen back into the sea. He had no soft thoughts for the gorp after what he had seen at the reef and the tales he had heard, but neither did he like what he saw now expressed in gestures, heard in the tones of voices about them.
A storm priest put an end to the outcries. His dun cloak making a spot of darkness amid all the flashing color, he came straight to the place where the gorp swung. As he took his stand before the wriggling creature the din gradually faded, the warriors settled back into their seats, a pool of quiet spread through the enclosure.
Groft came up to take his position beside the priest. With both hands he carried a two handled cup. It was not the ornamented goblet which stood before each diner, but a manifestly older artifact, fashioned of some dull black substance and having the appearance of being even older than the hall or town.
One of the warriors who had helped to bring in the gorp now made a quick and accurate cast with a looped rope, snaring the monster’s head and pulling back almost at a right angle. With deliberation the storm priest produced a knife—the first straight bladed weapon Dane had seen on Sargol. He made a single thrust in the soft underpart of the gorp’s throat, catching in the cup he took from Groft some of the ichor which spurted from the wound.
The gorp thrashed madly, spattering table and surrounding Salariki with its life fluid, but the attention of the crowd was riveted elsewhere. Into the old cup the priest poured another substance from a flask brought by an underling. He shook the cup back and forth, as if to mix its contents thoroughly and then handed it to Groft.
Holding it before him the young chieftain leaped to the table top and so to stand before the high seat. There was a hush throughout the enclosure. Now even the gorp had ceased its wild struggles and hung limp in its bonds.
Groft raised the cup above his head and gave a loud shout in the archaic language of his clan. He was answered by a chant from the warriors who would in battle follow his banner, chant punctuated with the clinking slap of knife blades brought down forcibly on the board.
Three times he recited some formula and was answered by the others. Then, in another period of sudden quiet, he raised the cup to his lips and drank off its contents in a single draught, turning the goblet upside down when he had done to prove that not a drop remained within. A shout tore through the great hall. The Salariki were all on their feet, waving their knives over their heads in honor to their new ruler. And Groft for the first time seated himself in the high seat. The clan was no longer without a chieftain. Groft held his father’s place.
“Show over?” Dane heard Stotz murmur and Van Rycke’s disappointing reply:
“Not yet. They’ll probably make a night of it. Here comes another round of drinks—”
“And trouble with them,”—that was Captain Jellico being prophetic.
“By the Coalsack’s Ripcord!” That exclamation had been jolted out of Rip and Dane turned to see what had so jarred the usually serene Astrogator-apprentice. He was just in time to witness an important piece of Sargolian social practice.
A young warrior, surely only within a year or so of receiving his knife, was facing an older Salarik, both on their feet. The head and shoulder fur of the older fighter was dripping wet and an empty goblet rolled across the table to bump to the floor. A hush had fallen on the immediate neighbors of the pair, and there was an air of expectancy about the company.
“Threw his drink all over the other fellow,” Rip’s soft whisper explained. “That means a duel—”
“Here and now?” Dane had heard of the personal combat proclivities of the Salariki.
“Should be to the death for an insult such as that,” Ali remarked, as usual surveying the scene from his chosen role as bystander. As a child he had survived the unspeakable massacres of the Crater War, nothing had been able to crack his surface armor since.
“The young fool!” that was Steen Wilcox sizing up the situation from the angle of a naturally cautious nature and some fifteen years of experience on a great many different worlds. “He’ll be mustered out for good before he knows what happened to him!”
The younger Salarik had barked a question at his elder and had been promptly answered by that dripping warrior. Now their neighbors came to life with an efficiency which suggested that they had been waiting for such a move, it had happened so many times that every man knew just the right procedure from that point on.
In order for a Sargolian feast to be a success, the Terrans gathered from overheard remarks, at least one duel must be staged sometime during the festivities. And those not actively engaged did a lot of brisk betting in the background.
“Look there—at that fellow in the violet cloak,” Rip directed Dane. “See what he just laid down?”
The nobleman in the violet cloak was not one of Groft’s liege men, but a member of the delegation from another clan. And what he had laid down on the table—indicating as he did so his choice as winner in the coming combat, the elder warrior—was a small piece of white material on which reposed a slightly withered but familiar leaf. The neighbor he wagered with, eyed the stake narrowly, bending over to sniff at it, before he piled up two gem set armlets, a personal scent box and a thumb ring to balance.
At this practical indication of just how much the Terran herb was esteemed Dane regretted anew their earlier ignorance. He glanced along the board and saw that Van Rycke had noted that stake and was calling their Captain’s attention to it.
But such side issues were forgotten as the duelists vaulted into the circle rimmed by the table, a space now vacated for their action. They were stripped to their loin cloths, their cloaks thrown aside. Each carried his net in his right hand, his claw knife ready in his left. As yet the Traders had not seen Salarik against Salarik in action and in spite of themselves they edged forward in their seats, as intent as the natives upon what was to come. The finer points of the combat were lost on them, and they did not understand the drilled casts of the net, which had become as formalized through the centuries as the ancient and now almost forgotten sword play of their own world. The young Salarik had greater agility and speed, but the veteran who faced him had the experience.
To Terran eyes the duel had some of the weaving, sweeping movements of the earlier ritual dance. The swift evasions of the nets were graceful and so timed that many times the meshes grazed the skin of the fighter who fled entrapment.
Dane believed that the elder man was tiring, and the youngster must have shared that opinion. There was a leap to the right, a sudden flurry of dart and retreat, and then a net curled high and fell, enfolding flailing arms and kicking legs. When the clutch rope was jerked tight, the captured youth was thrown off balance. He rolled frenziedly, but there was no escaping the imprisoning strands.
A shout applauded the victor. He stood now above his captive who lay supine, his throat or breast ready for either stroke of the knife his captor wished to deliver. But it appeared that the winner was not minded to end the encounter with blood. Instead he reached out a long, befurred arm, took up a filled goblet from the table and with serious deliberation, poured its contents onto the upturned face of the loser.
For a moment there was a dead silence around the feast board and then a second roar, to which the honestly relieved Terrans added spurts of laughter. The sputtering youth was shaken free of the net and went down on his knees, tendering his opponent his knife, which the other thrust along with his own into his sash belt. Dane gathered from overheard remarks that the younger man was, for a period of time, to be determined by clan council, now the servant-slave of his overthrower and that since they were closely united by blood ties, this solution was considered eminently suitable—though had the elder killed his opponent, no one would have thought the worse of him for that deed.
It was the Queen’s men who were to provide the next center of attraction. Groft climbed down from his high seat and came to face across the board those who had accompanied him on the hunt. This time there was no escaping the sipping of the potent drink which the new chieftain slopped from his own goblet into each of theirs.
The fiery mouthful almost gagged Dane, but he swallowed manfully and hoped for the best as it burned like acid down his throat into his middle, there to mix uncomfortably with the viands he had eaten. Weeks’ thin face looked very white, and Dane noticed with malicious enjoyment, that Ali had an unobtrusive grip on the table which made his knuckles stand out in polished knobs—proving that there were things which could upset the imperturbable Kamil.
Fortunately they were not required to empty that flowing bowl in one gulp as Groft had done. The ceremonial mouthful was deemed enough and Dane sat down thankfully—but with uneasy fears for the future.
Groft had started back to his high seat when there was an interruption which had not been foreseen. A messenger threaded his way among the serving men and spoke to the chieftain, who glanced at the Terrans and then nodded.
Dane, his queasiness growing every second, was not attending until he heard a bitten off word from Rip’s direction and looked up to see a party of I-S men coming into the open space before the high seat. The men from the Queen stiffened—there was something in the attitude of the newcomers which hinted at trouble.
“What do you wish, sky lords?” That was Groft using the Trade Lingo, his eyes half closed as he lolled in his chair of state, almost as if he were about to witness some entertainment provided for his pleasure.
“We wish to offer you the good fortune desires of our hearts—” That was Kallee, the flowery words rolling with the proper accent from his tongue. “And that you shall not forget us—we also offer gifts—”
At a gesture from their Cargo-master, the I-S men set down a small chest. Groft, his chin resting on a clenched fist, lost none of his lazy air.
“They are received,” he retorted with the formal acceptance. “And no one can have too much good fortune. The Howlers of the Black Winds know that.” But he tendered no invitation to join the feast.
Kallee did not appear to be disconcerted. His next move was one which took his rivals by surprise, in spite of their suspicions.
“Under the laws of the Fellowship, O, Groft,” he clung to the formal speech, “I claim redress—”
Ali’s hand moved. Through his growing distress Dane saw Van Rycke’s jaw tighten, the fighting mask snap back on Captain Jellico’s face. Whatever came now was real trouble.
Groft’s eyes flickered over the party from the Queen. Though he had just pledged cup friendship with four of them, he had the malicious humor of his race. He would make no move to head off what might be coming.
“By the right of the knife and the net,” he intoned, “you have the power to claim personal satisfaction. Where is your enemy?”
Kallee turned to face the Free Traders. “I hereby challenge a champion to be set out from these off-worlders to meet by the blood and by the water my champion—”
The Salariki were getting excited. This was superb entertainment, an engagement such as they had never hoped to see—alien against alien. The rising murmur of their voices was like the growl of a hunting beast.
Groft smiled and the pleasure that expression displayed was neither Terran—nor human. But then the clan leader was not either, Dane reminded himself.
“Four of these warriors are clan-bound,” he said. “But the others may produce a champion—”
Dane looked along the line of his comrades—Ali, Rip, Weeks and himself had just been ruled out. That left Jellico, Van Rycke, Karl Kosti, the giant jetman whose strength they had to rely upon before, Stotz the Engineer, Medic Tau and Steen Wilcox. If it were strength alone he would have chosen Kosti, but the big man was not too quick a thinker—
Jellico got to his feet, the embodiment of a star lane fighting man. In the flickering light the scar on his cheek seemed to ripple. “Who’s your champion?” he asked Kallee.
The Eysie Cargo-master was grinning. He was confident he had pushed them into a position from which they could not extricate themselves.
“You accept challenge?” he countered.
Jellico merely repeated his question and Kallee beckoned forward one of his men.
The Eysie who stepped up was no match for Kosti. He was a slender, almost wand-slim young man, whose pleased smirk said that he, too, was about to put something over on the notorious Free Traders. Jellico studied him for a couple of long seconds during which the hum of Salariki voices was the threatening buzz of a disturbed wasps’ nest. There was no way out of this—to refuse conflict was to lose all they had won with the clansmen. And they did not doubt that Kallee had, in some way, triggered the scales against them.
Jellico made the best of it. “We accept challenge,” his voice was level. “We, being guesting in Groft’s holding, will fight after the manner of the Salariki who are proven warriors—” He paused as roars of pleased acknowledgment arose around the board.
“Therefore let us follow the custom of warriors and take up the net and the knife—”
Was there a shade of dismay on Kallee’s face?
“And the time?” Groft leaned forward to ask—but his satisfaction at such a fine ending for his feast was apparent. This would be talked over by every Sargolian for many storm seasons to come!
Jellico glanced up at the sky. “Say an hour after dawn, chieftain. With your leave, we shall confer concerning a champion.”
“My council room is yours,” Groft signed for a liege man to guide them.
The morning winds rustled through the grass forest and, closer to hand, it pulled at the cloaks of the Salariki. Clan nobles sat on stools, lesser folk squatted on the trampled stubble of the cleared ground outside the stockade. In their many colored splendor the drab tunics of the Terrans were a blot of darkness at either end of the makeshift arena which had been marked out for them.
At the conclusion of their conference the Queen’s men had been forced into a course Jellico had urged from the first. He, and he alone, would represent the Free Traders in the coming duel. And now he stood there in the early morning, stripped down to shorts and boots, wearing nothing on which a net could catch and so trap him. The Free Traders were certain that the I-S men having any advantage would press it to the ultimate limit and the death of Captain Jellico would make a great impression on the Salariki.
Jellico was taller than the Eysie who faced him, but almost as lean. Hard muscles moved under his skin, pale where space tan had not burned in the years of his star voyaging. And his every movement was with the liquid grace of a man who, in his time, had been a master of the force blade. Now he gripped in his left hand the claw knife given him by Groft himself and in the other he looped the throwing rope of the net.
At the other end of the field, the Eysie man was industriously moving his bootsoles back and forth across the ground, intent upon coating them with as much of the gritty sand as would adhere. And he displayed the supreme confidence in himself which he had shown at the moment of challenge in the Great Hall.
None of the Free Trading party made the mistake of trying to give Jellico advice. The Captain had not risen to his command without learning his duties. And the duties of a Free Trader covered a wide range of knowledge and practice. One had to be equally expert with a blaster and a slingshot when the occasion demanded. Though Jellico had not fought a Salariki duel with net and knife before, he had a deep memory of other weapons, other tactics which could be drawn upon and adapted to his present need.
There was none of the casual atmosphere which had surrounded the affair between the Salariki clansmen in the hall. Here was ceremony. The storm priests invoked their own particular grim Providence, and there was an oath taken over the weapons of battle. When the actual engagement began the betting among the spectators had reached, Dane decided, epic proportions. Large sections of Sargolian personal property were due to change hands as a result of this encounter.
As the chief priest gave the order to engage both Terrans advanced from their respective ends of the fighting space with the half crouching, light footed tread of spacemen. Jellico had pulled his net into as close a resemblance to rope as its bulk would allow. The very type of weapon, so far removed from any the Traders knew, made it a disadvantage rather than an asset.
But it was when the Eysie moved out to meet the Captain that Rip’s fingers closed about Dane’s upper arm in an almost paralyzing grip.
“He knows—”
Dane had not needed that bad news to be made vocal. Having seen the exploits of the Salariki duelists earlier, he had already caught the significance of that glide, of the way the I-S champion carried his net. The Eysie had not had any last minute instruction in the use of Sargolian weapons—he had practiced and, by his stance, knew enough to make him a formidable menace. The clamor about the Queen’s party rose as the battle-wise eyes of the clansmen noted that and the odds against Jellico reached fantastic heights while the hearts of his crew sank.
Only Van Rycke was not disturbed. Now and then he raised his smelling bottle to his nose with an elegant gesture which matched those of the befurred nobility around him, as if not a thought of care ruffled his mind.
The Eysie feinted in a opening which was a rather ragged copy of the young Salarik’s more fluid moves some hours before. But, when the net settled, Jellico was simply not there, his quick drop to one knee had sent the mesh flailing in an arc over his bowed shoulders with a good six inches to spare. And a cry of approval came not only from his comrades, but from those natives who had been gamblers enough to venture their wagers on his performance.
Dane watched the field and the fighters through a watery film. The discomfort he had experienced since downing that mouthful of the cup of friendship had tightened into a fist of pain clutching his middle in a torturing grip. But he knew he must stick it out until Jellico’s ordeal was over. Someone stumbled against him and he glanced up to see Ali’s face, a horrible gray-green under the tan, close to his own. For a moment the Engineer-apprentice caught at his arm for support and then with a visible effort straightened up. So he wasn’t the only one—He looked for Rip and Weeks and saw that they, too, were ill.
But for a moment all that mattered was the stretch of trampled earth and the two men facing each other. The Eysie made another cast and this time, although Jellico was not caught, the slap of the mesh raised a red welt on his forearm. So far the Captain had been content to play the defensive role of retreat, studying his enemy, planning ahead.
The Eysie plainly thought the game his, that he had only to wait for a favorable moment and cinch the victory. Dane began to think it had gone on for weary hours. And he was dimly aware that the Salariki were also restless. One or two shouted angrily at Jellico in their own tongue.
The end came suddenly. Jellico lost his footing, stumbled, and went down. But before his men could move, the Eysie champion bounded forward, his net whirling out. Only he never reached the Captain. In the very act of falling Jellico had pulled his legs under him so that he was not supine but crouched, and his net swept but at ground level, clipping the I-S man about the shins, entangling his feet so that he crashed heavily to the sod and lay still.
“The whip—that Lalox whip trick!” Wilcox’s voice rose triumphantly above the babble of the crowd. Using his net as if it had been a thong, Jellico had brought down the Eysie with a move the other had not foreseen.
Breathing hard, sweat running down his shoulders and making tracks through the powdery red dust which streaked him, Jellico got to his feet and walked over to the I-S champion who had not moved or made a sound since his fall. The Captain went down on one knee to examine him.
“Kill! Kill!” That was the Salariki, all their instinctive savagery aroused.
But Jellico spoke to Groft. “By our customs we do not kill the conquered. Let his friends bear him hence.” He took the claw knife the Eysie still clutched in his hand and thrust it into his own belt. Then he faced the I-S party and Kallee.
“Take your man and get out!” The rein he had kept on his temper these past days was growing very thin. “You’ve made your last play here.”
Kallee’s thick lips drew back in something close to a Salarik snarl. But neither he nor his men made any reply. They bundled up their unconscious fighter and disappeared.
Of their own return to the sanctuary of the Queen Dane had only the dimmest of memories afterwards. He had made the privacy of the forest road before he yielded to the demands of his outraged interior. And after that he had stumbled along with Van Rycke’s hand under his arm, knowing from other miserable sounds that he was not alone in his torment.
It was some time later, months he thought when he first roused, that he found himself lying in his bunk, feeling very weak and empty as if a large section of his middle had been removed, but also at peace with his world. As he levered himself up the cabin had a nasty tendency to move slowly to the right as if he were a pivot on which it swung, and he had all the sensations of being in free fall though the Queen was still firmly planeted. But that was only a minor discomfort compared to the disturbance he remembered.
Fed the semi-liquid diet prescribed by Tau and served up by Mura to him and his fellow sufferers, he speedily got back his strength. But it had been a close call, he did not need Tau’s explanation to underline that. Weeks had suffered the least of the four, he the most—though none of them had had an easy time. And they had been out of circulation three days.
“The Eysie blasted last night,” Rip informed him as they lounged in the sun on the ramp, sharing the blessed lazy hours of invalidism.
But somehow that news gave Dane no lift of spirit. “I didn’t think they’d give up—”
Rip shrugged. “They may be off to make a dust-off before the Board. Only, thanks to Van and the Old Man, we’re covered all along the line. There’s nothing they can use against us to break our contract. And now we’re in so solid they can’t cut us out with the Salariki. Groft asked the Captain to teach him that trick with the net. I didn’t know the Old Man knew Lalox whip fighting—it’s about one of the nastiest ways to get cut to pieces in this universe—”
“How’s trade going?”
Rip’s sunniness clouded. “Supplies have given out. Weeks had an idea—but it won’t bring in Koros. That red wood he’s so mad about, he’s persuaded Van to stow some in the cargo holds since we have enough Koros stones to cover the voyage. Luckily the clansmen will take ordinary trade goods in exchange for that and Weeks thinks it will sell on Terra. It’s tough enough to turn a steel knife blade and yet it is light and easy to handle when it’s cured. Queer stuff and the color’s interesting. That stockade of it planted around Groft’s town has been up close to a hundred years and not a sign of rot in a log of it!”
“Where is Van?”
“The storm priests sent for him. Some kind of a gabble-fest on the star-star level, I gather. Otherwise we’re almost ready to blast. And we know what kind of cargo to bring next time.”
They certainly did, Dane agreed. But he was not to idle away his morning. An hour later a caravan came out of the forest, a line of complaining, burdened orgels, their tiny heads hanging low as they moaned their woes, the hard life which sent them on their sluggish way with piles of red logs lashed to their broad toads’ backs. Weeks was in charge of the procession and Dane went to work with the cargo plan Van had left, seeing that the brilliant scarlet lengths were hoist into the lower cargo hatch and stacked according to the science of stowage. He discovered that Rip had been right, the wood for all its incredible hardness was light of weight. Weak as he still was he could lift and stow a full sized log with no great difficulty. And he thought Weeks was correct in thinking that it would sell on their home world. The color was novel, the durability an asset—it would not make fortunes as the Koros stones might, but every bit of profit helped and this cargo might cover their fielding fees on Terra.
Sinbad was in the cargo space when the first of the logs came in. With his usual curiosity the striped tom cat prowled along the wood, sniffing industriously. Suddenly he stopped short, spat and backed away, his spine fur a roughened crest. Having backed as far as the inner door he turned and slunk out. Puzzled, Dane gave the wood a swift inspection. There were no cracks or crevices in the smooth surfaces, but as he stopped over the logs he became conscious of a sharp odor. So this was one scent of the perfumed planet Sinbad did not like. Dane laughed. Maybe they had better have Weeks make a gate of the stuff and slip it across the ramp, keeping Sinbad on ship board. Odd—it wasn’t an unpleasant odor—at least to him it wasn’t—just sharp and pungent. He sniffed again and was vaguely surprised to discover that it was less noticeable now. Perhaps the wood when taken out of the sunlight lost its scent.
They packed the lower hold solid in accordance with the rules of stowage and locked the hatch before Van Rycke returned from his meeting with the storm priests. When the Cargo-master came back he was followed by two servants bearing between them a chest.
But there was something in Van Rycke’s attitude, apparent to those who knew him best, that proclaimed he was not too well pleased with his morning’s work. Sparing the feelings of the accompanying storm priests about the offensiveness of the spacer Captain Jellico and Steen Wilcox went out to receive them in the open. Dane watched from the hatch, aware that in his present pariah-hood it would not be wise to venture closer.
The Terran Traders were protesting some course of action that the Salariki were firmly insistent upon. In the end the natives won and Kosti was summoned to carry on board the chest which the servants had brought. Having seen it carried safely inside the spacer, the aliens departed, but Van Rycke was frowning and Jellico’s fingers were beating a tattoo on his belt as they came up the ramp.
“I don’t like it,” Jellico stated as he entered.
“It was none of my doing,” Van Rycke snapped. “I’ll take risks if I have to—but there’s something about this one—” he broke off, two deep lines showing between his thick brows. “Well, you can’t teach a sasseral to spit,” he ended philosophically. “We’ll have to do the best we can.”
But Jellico did not look at all happy as he climbed to the control section. And before the hour was out the reason for the Captain’s uneasiness was common property throughout the ship.
Having sampled the delights of off-world herbs, the Salariki were determined to not be cut off from their source of supply. Six Terran months from the present Sargolian date would come the great yearly feast of the Fifty Storms, and the priests were agreed that this year their influence and power would be doubled if they could offer the devout certain privileges in the form of Terran plants. Consequently they had produced and forced upon the reluctant Van Rycke the Koros collection of their order, with instructions that it be sold on Terra and the price returned to them in the precious seeds and plants. In vain the Cargo-master and Captain had pointed out that Galactic trade was a chancy thing at the best, that accident might prevent return of the Queen to Sargol. But the priests had remained adamant and saw in all such arguments only a devious attempt to raise prices. They quoted in their turn the information they had levered out of the Company men—that Traders had their code and that once pay had been given in advance the contract must be fulfilled. They, and they alone, wanted the full cargo of the Queen on her next voyage, and they were taking the one way they were sure of achieving that result.
So a fortune in Koros stones which as yet did not rightfully belong to the Traders was now in the Queen’s strong-room and her crew were pledged by the strongest possible tie known in their Service to set down on Sargol once more before the allotted time had passed. The Free Traders did not like it, there was even a vaguely superstitious feeling that such a bargain would inevitably draw ill luck to them. But they were left with no choice if they wanted to retain their influence with the Salariki.
“Cutting orbit pretty fine, aren’t we?” Ali asked Rip across the mess table. “I saw your two star man sweating it out before he came down to shoot the breeze with us rocket monkeys—”
Rip nodded. “Steen’s double checked every computation and some he’s done four times.” He ran his hands over his close cropped head with a weary gesture. As a semi-invalid he had been herded down with his fellows to swallow the builder Mura had concocted and Tau insisted that they take, but he had been doing a half a night’s work on the plotter under his chief’s exacting eye before he came. “The latest news is that, barring accident, we can make it with about three weeks’ grace, give or take a day or two—”
“Barring accident—” the words rang in the air. Here on the frontiers of the star lanes there were so many accidents, so many delays which could put a ship behind schedule. Only on the main star trails did the huge liners or Company ships attempt to keep on regularly timed trips. A Free Trader did not really dare to have an inelastic contract.
“What does Stotz say?” Dane asked Ali.
“He says he can deliver. We don’t have the headache about setting a course—you point the nose and we only give her the boost to send her along.”
Rip sighed. “Yes—point her nose.” He inspected his nails. “Goodbye,” he added gravely. “These won’t be here by the time we planet here again. I’ll have my fingers gnawed off to the first knuckle. Well, we lift at six hours. Pleasant strap down.” He drank the last of the stuff in his mug, made a face at the flavor, and got to his feet, due back at his post in control.
Dane, free of duty until the ship earthed, drifted back to his own cabin, sure of part of a night’s undisturbed rest before they blasted off. Sinbad was curled on his bunk. For some reason the cat had not been prowling the ship before take-off as he usually did. First he had sat on Van’s desk and now he was here, almost as if he wanted human company. Dane picked him up and Sinbad rumbled a purr, arching his head so that it rubbed against the young man’s chin in an extremely uncharacteristic show of affection. Smoothing the fur along the cat’s jaw line Dane carried him back to the Cargo-master’s cabin.
With some hesitation he knocked at the panel and did not step in until he had Van Rycke’s muffled invitation. The Cargo-master was stretched on the bunk, two of the take off straps already fastened across his bulk as if he intended to sleep through the blast-off.
“Sinbad, sir. Shall I stow him?”
Van Rycke grunted an assent and Dane dropped the cat in the small hammock which was his particular station, fastening the safety cords. For once Sinbad made no protest but rolled into a ball and was promptly fast asleep. For a moment or two Dane thought about this unnatural behavior and wondered if he should call it to the Cargo-master’s attention. Perhaps on Sargol Sinbad had had his equivalent of a friendship cup and needed a check-up by Tau.
“Stowage correct?” the question, coming from Van Rycke, was also unusual. The seal would not have been put across the hold lock had its contents not been checked and rechecked.
“Yes, sir,” Dane replied woodenly, knowing he was still in the outer darkness. “There was just the wood—we stowed it according to chart.”
Van Rycke grunted once more. “Feeling top-layer again?”
“Yes, sir. Any orders, sir?”
“No. Blast-off’s at six.”
“Yes, sir.” Dane left the cabin, closing the panel carefully behind him. Would he—or could he—he thought drearily, get back in Van Rycke’s profit column again? Sargol had been unlucky as far as he was concerned. First he had made that stupid mistake and then he got sick and now—And now—what was the matter? Was it just the general attack of nerves over their voyage and the commitments which forced their haste, or was it something else? He could not rid himself of a vague sense that the Queen was about to take off into real trouble. And he did not like the sensation at all!
Chapter VIII
HEADACHES
They lifted from Sargol on schedule and went into Hyper also on schedule. From that point on there was nothing to do but wait out the usual dull time of flight between systems and hope that Steen Wilcox had plotted a course which would cut that flight time to a minimum. But this voyage there was little relaxation once they were in Hyper. No matter when Dane dropped into the mess cabin, which was the common meeting place of the spacer, he was apt to find others there before him, usually with a mug of one of Mura’s special brews close at hand, speculating about their landing date.
Dane, himself, once he had thrown off the lingering effects of his Sargolian illness, applied time to his studies. When he had first joined the Queen as a recruit straight out of the training Pool, he had speedily learned that all the ten years of intensive study then behind him had only been an introduction to the amount he still had to absorb before he could take his place as an equal with such a trader as Van Rycke—if he had the stuff which would raise him in time to that exalted level. While he had still had his superior’s favor he had dared to treat him as an instructor, going to him with perplexing problems of stowage or barter. But now he had no desire to intrude upon the Cargo-master, and doggedly wrestled with the microtapes of old records on his own, painfully working out the why and wherefor for any departure from the regular procedure. He had no inkling of his own future status—whether the return to Terra would find him permanently earthed. And he would ask no questions.
They had been four days of ship’s time in Hyper when Dane walked into the mess cabin, tired after his work with old records, to discover no Mura busy in the galley beyond, no brew steaming on the heat coil. Rip sat at the table, his long legs stuck out, his usually happy face very sober.
“What’s wrong?” Dane reached for a mug, then seeing no pot of drink, put it back in place.
“Frank’s sick—”
“What!” Dane turned. Illness such as they had run into on Sargol had a logical base. But illness on board ship was something else.
“Tau has him isolated. He has a bad headache and he blacked out when he tried to sit up. Tau’s running tests.”
Dane sat down. “Could be something he ate—”
Rip shook his head. “He wasn’t at the feast—remember? And he didn’t eat anything from outside, he swore that to Tau. In fact he didn’t go dirt much while we were down—”
That was only too true as Dane could now recall. And the fact that the steward had not been at the feast, had not sampled native food products, wiped out the simplest and most comforting reasons for his present collapse.
“What’s this about Frank?” Ali stood in the doorway. “He said yesterday that he had a headache. But now Tau has him shut off—”
“But he wasn’t at that feast.” Ali stopped short as the implications of that struck him. “How’s Tang feeling?”
“Fine—why?” The Com-tech had come up behind Kamil and was answering for himself. “Why this interest in the state of my health?”
“Frank’s down with something—in isolation,” Rip replied bluntly. “Did he do anything out of the ordinary when we were off ship?”
For a long moment the other stared at Shannon and then he shook his head. “No. And he wasn’t dirt-side to any extent either. So Tau’s running tests—” He lapsed into silence. None of them wished to put their thoughts into words.
Dane picked up the microtape he had brought with him and went on down the corridor to return it. The panel of the cargo office was ajar and to his relief he found Van Rycke out. He shoved the tape back in its case and pulled out the next one. Sinbad was there, not in his own private hammock, but sprawled out on the Cargo-master’s bunk. He watched Dane lazily, mouthing a silent mew of welcome. For some reason since they had blasted from Sargol the cat had been lazy—as if his adventures afield there had sapped much of his vitality.
“Why aren’t you out working?” Dane asked as he leaned over to scratch under a furry chin raised for the benefit of such a caress. “You inspect the hold lately, boy?”
Sinbad merely blinked and after the manner of his species looked infinitely bored. As Dane turned to go the Cargo-master came in. He showed no surprise at Dane’s presence. Instead he reached out and fingered the label of the tape Dane had just chosen. After a glance at the identifying symbol he took it out of his assistant’s hand, plopped it back in its case, and stood for a moment eyeing the selection of past voyage records. With a tongue-click of satisfaction he pulled out another and tossed it across the desk to Dane.
“See what you can make out of this tangle,” he ordered. But Dane’s shoulders went back as if some weight had been lifted from them. The old easiness was still lacking, but he was no longer exiled to the outer darkness of Van Rycke’s displeasure.
Holding the microtape as if it were a first grade Koros stone Dane went back to his own cabin, snapped the tape into his reader, adjusted the ear buttons and lay back on his bunk to listen.
He was deep in the intricacy of a deal so complicated that he was lost after the first two moves, when he opened his eyes to see Ali at the door panel. The Engineer-apprentice made an emphatic beckoning wave and Dane slipped off the ear buttons.
“What is it?” His question lacked a cordial note.
“I’ve got to have help.” Ali was terse. “Kosti’s blacked out!”
“What!” Dane sat up and dropped his feet to the deck in almost one movement.
“I can’t shift him alone,” Ali stated the obvious. The giant jetman was almost double his size. “We must get him to his quarters. And I won’t ask Stotz—”
For a perfectly good reason Dane knew. An assistant—two of the apprentices—could go sick, but their officers’ continued good health meant the most to the Queen. If some infection were aboard it would be better for Ali and himself to be exposed, than to have Johan Stotz with all his encyclopedic knowledge of the ship’s engines contract any disease.
They found the jetman half sitting, half lying in the short foot or so of corridor which led to his own cubby. He had been making for his quarters when the seizure had taken him. And by the time the two reached his side, he was beginning to come around, moaning, his hands going to his head.
Together they got him on his feet and guided him to his bunk where he collapsed again, dead weight they had to push into place. Dane looked at Ali—
“Tau?”
“Haven’t had time to call him yet.” Ali was jerking at the thigh straps which fastened Kosti’s space boots.
“I’ll go.” Glad for the task Dane sped up the ladder to the next section and threaded the narrow side hall to the Medic’s cabin where he knocked on the panel.
There was a pause before Craig Tau looked out, deep lines of weariness bracketing his mouth, etched between his eyes.
“Kosti, sir,” Dane gave his bad news quickly. “He’s collapsed. We got him to his cabin—”
Tau showed no sign of surprise. His hand shot out for his kit.
“You touched him?” At the other’s nod he added an order. “Stay in your quarters until I have a chance to look you over—understand?”
Dane had no chance to answer, the Medic was already on his way. He went to his own cabin, understanding the reason for his imprisonment, but inwardly rebelling against it. Rather than sit idle he snapped on the reader—but, although facts and figures were dunned into his ears—he really heard very little. He couldn’t apply himself—not with a new specter leering at him from the bulkhead.
The dangers of the space lanes were not to be numbered, death walked among the stars a familiar companion of all spacemen. And to the Free Trader it was the extra and invisible crewman on every ship that raised. But there were deaths and deaths—And Dane could not forget the gruesome legends Van Rycke collected avidly as his hobby—had recorded in his private library of the folk lore of space.
Stories such as that of the ghostly “New Hope” carrying refugees from the first Martian Rebellion—the ship which had lifted for the stars but had never arrived, which wandered for a timeless eternity, a derelict in free fall, its port closed but the warning “dead” lights on at its nose—a ship which through five centuries had been sighted only by a spacer in similar distress. Such stories were numerous. There were other tales of “plague” ships wandering free with their dead crews, or discovered and shot into some sun by a patrol cruiser so that they might not carry their infection farther. Plague—the nebulous “worst” the Traders had to face. Dane screwed his eyes shut, tried to concentrate upon the droning voice in his ears, but he could not control his thoughts nor—his fears.
At a touch on his arm he started so wildly that he jerked the cord loose from the reader and sat up, somewhat shamefaced, to greet Tau. At the Medic’s orders he stripped for one of the most complete examinations he had ever undergone outside a quarantine port. It included an almost microscopic inspection of the skin on his neck and shoulders, but when Tau had done he gave a sigh of relief.
“Well, you haven’t got it—at least you don’t show any signs yet,” he amended his first statement almost before the words were out of his mouth.
“What were you looking for?”
Tau took time out to explain. “Here,” his fingers touched the small hollow at the base of Dane’s throat and then swung him around and indicated two places on the back of his neck and under his shoulder blades. “Kosti and Mura both have red eruptions here. It’s as if they have been given an injection of some narcotic.” Tau sat down on the jump seat while Dane dressed. “Kosti was dirt-side—he might have picked up something—”
“But Mura—”
“That’s it!” Tau brought his fist down on the edge of the bunk. “Frank hardly left the ship—yet he showed the first signs. On the other hand you are all right so far and you were off ship. And Ali’s clean and he was with you on the hunt. We’ll just have to wait and see.” He got up wearily. “If your head begins to ache,” he told Dane, “you get back here in a hurry and stay put—understand?”
As Dane learned all the other members of the crew were given the same type of inspection. But none of them showed the characteristic marks which meant trouble. They were on course for Terra—but—and that but must have loomed large in all their minds—once there would they be allowed to land? Could they even hope for a hearing? Plague ship—Tau must find the answer before they came into normal space about their own solar system or they were in for such trouble as made a broken contract seem the simplest of mishaps.
Kosti and Mura were in isolation. There were volunteers for nursing and Tau, unable to be in two places at once, finally picked Weeks to look after his crewmate in the engineering section.
There was doubling up of duties. Tau could no longer share with Mura the care of the hydro garden so Van Rycke took over. While Dane found himself in charge of the galley and, while he did not have Mura’s deft hand at disguising the monotonous concentrates to the point they resembled fresh food, after a day or two he began to experiment cautiously and produced a stew which brought some short words of appreciation from Captain Jellico.
They all breathed a sigh of relief when, after three days, no more signs of the mysterious illness showed on new members of the crew. It became routine to parade before Tau stripped to the waist each morning for the inspection of the danger points, and the Medic’s vigilance did not relax.
In the meantime neither Mura nor Kosti appeared to suffer. Once the initial stages of headaches and blackouts were passed, the patients lapsed into a semi-conscious state as if they were under sedation of some type. They would eat, if the food was placed in their mouths, but they did not seem to know what was going on about them, nor did they answer when spoken to.
Tau, between visits to them, worked feverishly in his tiny lab, analyzing blood samples, reading the records of obscure diseases, trying to find the reason for their attacks. But as yet his discoveries were exactly nothing. He had come out of his quarters and sat in limp exhaustion at the mess table while Dane placed before him a mug of stimulating caf-hag.
“I don’t get it!” The Medic addressed the table top rather than the amateur cook. “It’s a poison of some kind. Kosti went dirt-side—Mura didn’t. Yet Mura came down with it first. And we didn’t ship any food from Sargol. Neither did he eat any while we were there. Unless he did and we didn’t know about it. If I could just bring him to long enough to answer a couple of questions!” Sighing he dropped his weary head on his folded arms and within seconds was asleep.
Dane put the mug back on the heating unit and sat down at the other end of the table. He did not have the heart to shake Tau into wakefulness—let the poor devil get a slice of bunk time, he certainly needed it after the fatigues of the past four days.
Van Rycke passed along the corridor on his way to the hydro, Sinbad at his heels. But in a moment the cat was back, leaping up on Dane’s knee. He did not curl up, but rubbed against the young man’s arm, finally reaching up with a paw to touch Dane’s chin, uttering one of the soundless, mews which were his bid for attention.
“What’s the matter, boy?” Dane fondled the cat’s ears. “You haven’t got a headache—have you?” In that second a wild surmise came into his mind. Sinbad had been planet-side on Sargol as much as he could, and on ship board he was equally at home in all their cabins—could he be the carrier of the disease?
A good idea—only if it were true, then logically the second victim should have been Van, or Dane—whereas Sinbad lingered most of the time in their cabins—not Kosti. The cat, as far as he knew, had never shown any particular fondness for the jetman and certainly did not sleep in Karl’s quarters. No—that point did not fit. But he would mention it to Tau—no use overlooking anything—no matter how wild.
It was the sequence of victims which puzzled them all. As far as Tau had been able to discover Mura and Kosti had nothing much in common except that they were crewmates on the same spacer. They did not bunk in the same section, their fields of labor were totally different, they had no special food or drink tastes in common, they were not even of the same race. Frank Mura was one of the few descendants of a mysterious (or now mysterious) people who had had their home on a series of islands in one of Terra’s seas, islands which almost a hundred years before had been swallowed up in a series of world-rending quakes—Japan was the ancient name of that nation. While Karl Kosti had come from the once thickly populated land masses half the planet away which had borne the geographical name of “Europe.” No, all the way along the two victims had only very general meeting points—they both shipped on the Solar Queen and they were both of Terran birth.
Tau stirred and sat up, blinking bemusedly at Dane, then pushed back his wiry black hair and assumed a measure of alertness. Dane dropped the now purring cat in the Medic’s lap and in a few sentences outlined his suspicion. Tau’s hands closed about Sinbad.
“There’s a chance in that—” He looked a little less beat and he drank thirstily from the mug Dane gave him for the second time. Then he hurried out with Sinbad under one arm—bound for his lab.
Dane slicked up the galley, trying to put things away as neatly as Mura kept them. He didn’t have much faith in the Sinbad lead, but in this case everything must be checked out.
When the Medic did not appear during the rest of the ship’s day Dane was not greatly concerned. But he was alerted to trouble when Ali came in with an inquiry and a complaint.
“Seen anything of Craig?”
“He’s in the lab,” Dane answered.
“He didn’t answer my knock,” Ali protested. “And Weeks says he hasn’t been in to see Karl all day—”
That did catch Dane’s attention. Had his half hunch been right? Was Tau on the trail of a discovery which had kept him chained to the lab? But it wasn’t like the Medic not to look in on his patients.
“You’re sure he isn’t in the lab?”
“I told you that he didn’t answer my knock. I didn’t open the panel—” But now Ali was already in the corridor heading back the way he had come, with Dane on his heels, an unwelcome explanation for that silence in both their minds. And their fears were reinforced by what they heard as they approached the panel—a low moan wrung out of unbearable pain. Dane thrust the sliding door open.
Tau had slipped from his stool to the floor. His hands were at his head which rolled from side to side as if he were trying to quiet some agony. Dane stripped down the Medic’s under tunic. There was no need to make a careful examination, in the hollow of Craig Tau’s throat was the tell-tale red blotch.
“Sinbad!” Dane glanced about the cabin. “Did Sinbad get out past you?” he demanded of the puzzled Ali.
“No—I haven’t seen him all day—”
Yet the cat was nowhere in the tiny cabin and it had no concealed hiding place. To make doubly sure Dane secured the panel before they carried Tau to his bunk. The Medic had blacked out again, passed into the lethargic second stage of the malady. At least he was out of the pain which appeared to be the worst symptom of the disease.
“It must be Sinbad!” Dane said as he made his report directly to Captain Jellico. “And yet—”
“Yes, he’s been staying in Van’s cabin,” the Captain mused. “And you’ve handled him, he slept on your bunk. Yet you and Van are all right. I don’t understand that. Anyway—to be on the safe side—we’d better find and isolate him before—”
He didn’t have to underline any words for the grim-faced men who listened. With Tau—their one hope of fighting the disease gone—they had a black future facing them.
They did not have to search for Sinbad. Dane coming down to his own section found the cat crouched before the panel of Van Rycke’s cabin, his eyes glued to the thin crack of the door. Dane scooped him up and took him to the small cargo space intended for the safeguarding of choice items of commerce. To his vast surprise Sinbad began fighting wildly as he opened the hatch, kicking and then slashing with ready claws. The cat seemed to go mad and Dane had all he could do to shut him in. When he snapped the panel he heard Sinbad launch himself against the barrier as if to batter his way out. Dane, blood welling in several deep scratches, went in search of first aid. But some suspicion led him to pause as he passed Van Rycke’s door. And when his knock brought no answer he pushed the panel open.
Van Rycke lay on his bunk, his eyes half closed in a way which had become only too familiar to the crew of the Solar Queen. And Dane knew that when he looked for it he would find the mark of the strange plague on the Cargo-master’s body.
Jellico and Steen Wilcox pored over the few notes Tau had made before he was stricken. But apparently the Medic had found nothing to indicate that Sinbad was the carrier of any disease. Meanwhile the Captain gave orders for the cat to be confined. A difficult task—since Sinbad crouched close to the door of the storage cabin and was ready to dart out when food was taken in for him. Once he got a good way down the corridor before Dane was able to corner and return him to keeping.
Dane, Ali and Weeks took on the full care of the four sick men, leaving the few regular duties of the ship to the senior officers, while Rip was installed in charge of the hydro garden.
Hope which was snapped out when Ali brought the news that Stotz could not be roused and must have taken ill during a sleep period. One more inert patient was added to the list—and nothing learned about how he was infected. Except that they could eliminate Sinbad, since the cat had been in custody during the time Stotz had apparently contracted the disease.
Weeks, Ali and Dane, though they were in constant contact with the sick men, and though Dane had repeatedly handled Sinbad, continued to be immune. A fact, Dane thought more than once, which must have significance—if someone with Tau’s medical knowledge had been able to study it. By all rights they should be the most susceptible—but the opposite seemed true. And Wilcox duly noted that fact among the data they had recorded.
It became a matter of watching each other, waiting for another collapse. And they were not surprised when Tang Ya reeled into the mess, his face livid and drawn with pain. Rip and Dane got him to his cabin before he blacked out. But all they could learn from him during the interval before he lost consciousness was that his head was bursting and he couldn’t stand it. Over his limp body they stared at one another bleakly.
“Six down,” Ali observed, “and six to go. How do you feel?”
“Tired, that’s all. What I don’t understand is that once they go into this stupor they just stay. They don’t get any worse, they have no rise in temperature—it’s as if they are in a modified form of cold sleep!”
“How is Tang?” Rip asked from the corridor.
“Usual pattern,” Ali answered, “He’s sleeping. Got a pain, Fella?”
Rip shook his head. “Right as a Com-unit. I don’t get it. Why does it strike Tang who didn’t even hit dirt much—and yet you keep on—?”
Dane grimaced. “If we had an answer to that, maybe we’d know what caused the whole thing—”
Ali’s eyes narrowed. He was staring straight at the unconscious Com-tech as if he did not see that supine body at all. “I wonder if we’ve been salted—” he said slowly.
“We’ve been what?” Dane demanded.
“Look here, we three—with Weeks—drank that brew of the Salariki, didn’t we? And we—”
“Were as sick as Venusian gobblers afterwards,” agreed Rip.
Light dawned. “Do you mean—” began Dane.
“So that’s it!” flashed Rip.
“It might just be,” Ali said. “Do you remember how the settlers on Camblyne brought their Terran cattle through the first year? They fed them salt mixed with fansel grass. The result was that the herds didn’t take the fansel grass fever when they turned them out to pasture in the dry season. All right, maybe we had our ‘salt’ in that drink. The fansel-salt makes the cattle filthy sick when it’s forced down their throats, but after they recover they’re immune to the fever. And nobody on Camblyne buys unsalted cattle now.”
“It sounds logical,” admitted Rip. “But how are we going to prove it?”
Ali’s face was black once more. “Probably by elimination,” he said morosely. “If we keep our feet and all the rest go down—that’s our proof.”
“But we ought to be able to do something—” protested Shannon.
“Just how?” Ali’s slender brows arched. “Do you have a gallon of that Salariki brew on board you can serve out? We don’t know what was in it. Nor are we sure that this whole idea has any value.”
All of them had had first aid and basic preventive medicine as part of their training, but the more advanced laboratory experimentation was beyond their knowledge and skill. Had Tau still been on his feet perhaps he could have traced that lead and brought order out of the chaos which was closing in upon the Solar Queen. But, though they reported their suggestion to the Captain, Jellico was powerless to do anything about it. If the four who had shared that upsetting friendship cup were immune to the doom which now overhung the ship, there was no possible way for them to discover why or how.
Ship’s time came to have little meaning. And they were not surprised when Steen Wilcox slipped from his seat before the computer—to be stowed away with what had become a familiar procedure. Only Jellico withstood the contagion apart from the younger four, taking his turn at caring for the helpless men. There was no change in their condition. They neither roused nor grew worse as the hours and then the days sped by. But each of those units of time in passing brought them nearer to greater danger. Sooner or later they must make the transition out of Hyper into system space, and the jump out of warp was something not even a veteran took lightly. Rip’s round face thinned while they watched. Jellico was still functioning. But if the Captain collapsed the whole responsibility for the snap-out would fall directly on Shannon. An infinitesimal error would condemn them to almost hopeless wandering—perhaps for ever.
Dane and Ali relieved Rip of all duty but that which kept him chained in Wilcox’s chair before the computers. He went over and over the data of the course the Astrogator had set. And Captain Jellico, his eyes sunk in dark pits, checked and rechecked.
When the fatal moment came Ali manned the engine room with Weeks at his elbow to tend the controls the acting-Engineer could not reach. And Dane, having seen the sick all safely stowed in crash webbing, came up to the control cabin, riding out the transfer in Tang Ya’s place.
Rip’s voice hoarsened into a croak, calling out the data. Dane, though he had had basic theory, was completely lost before Shannon had finished the first set of co-ordinates. But Jellico replied, hands playing across the pilot’s board.
“Stand-by for snap-out—” the croak went down to the engines where Ali now held Stotz’s post.
“Engines ready!” The voice came back, thinned by its journey from the Queen’s interior.
“Ought-five-nine—” That was Jellico.
Dane found himself suddenly unable to watch. He shut his eyes and braced himself against the vertigo of snap-out. It came and he whirled sickeningly through unstable space. Then he was sitting in the laced Com-tech’s seat looking at Rip.
Runnels of sweat streaked Shannon’s brown face. There was a damp patch darkening his tunic between his shoulder blades, a patch which it would take both of Dane’s hands to cover.
For a moment he did not raise his head to look at the vision plate which would tell him whether or not they had made it. But when he did familiar constellations made the patterns they knew. They were out—and they couldn’t be too far off the course Wilcox had plotted. There was still the system run to make—but snap-out was behind them. Rip gave a deep sigh and buried his head in his hands.
With a throb of fear Dane unhooked his safety belt and hurried over to him. When he clutched at Shannon’s shoulder the Astrogator-apprentice’s head rolled limply. Was Rip down with the illness too? But the other muttered and opened his eyes.
“Does your head ache?” Dane shook him.
“Head? No—” Rip’s words came drowsily. “Jus’ sleepy—so sleepy—”
He did not seem to be in pain. But Dane’s hands were shaking as he hoisted the other out of his seat and half carried-half led him to his cabin, praying as he went that it was only fatigue and not the disease. The ship was on auto now until Jellico as pilot set a course—
Dane got Rip down on the bunk and stripped off his tunic. The fine-drawn face of the sleeper looked wan against the foam rest, and he snuggled into the softness like a child as he turned over and curled up. But his skin was clear—it was real sleep and not the plague which had claimed him.
Impulse sent Dane back to the control cabin. He was not an experienced pilot officer, but there might be some assistance he could offer the Captain now that Rip was washed out, perhaps for hours.
Jellico hunched before the smaller computer, feeding pilot tape into its slot. His face was a skull under a thin coating of skin, the bones marking it sharply at jaw, nose and eye socket.
“Shannon down?” His voice was a mere whisper of its powerful self, he did not turn his head.
“He’s just worn out, sir,” Dane hastened to give reassurance. “The marks aren’t on him.”
“When he comes around tell him the co-ords are in,” Jellico murmured. “See he checks course in ten hours—”
“But, sir—” Dane’s protest failed as he watched the Captain struggle to his feet, pulling himself up with shaking hands. As Thorson reached forward to steady the other, one of those hands tore at tunic collar, ripping loose the sealing—
There was no need for explanation—the red splotch signaled from Jellico’s sweating throat. He kept his feet, holding out against the waves of pain by sheer will power. Then Dane had a grip on him, got him away from the computer, hoping he could keep him going until they reached Jellico’s cabin.
Somehow they made that journey, being greeted with raucous screams from the Hoobat. Furiously Dane slapped the cage, setting it to swinging and so silencing the creature which stared at him with round, malignant eyes as he got the Captain to bed.
Only four of them on their feet now, Dane thought bleakly as he left the cabin. If Rip came out of it in time they could land—Dane’s breath caught as he made himself face up to the fact that Shannon might be ill, that it might be up to him to bring the Queen in for a landing. And in where? The Terra quarantine was Luna City on the Moon. But let them signal for a set-down there—let them describe what had happened and they might face death as a plague ship.
Wearily he climbed down to the mess cabin to discover Weeks and Ali there before him. They did not look up as he entered.
“Old Man’s got it,” he reported.
“Rip?” was Ali’s crossing question.
“Asleep. He passed out—”
“What!” Weeks swung around.
“Worn out,” Dane amended. “Captain fed in a pilot tape before he gave up.”
“So—now we are three,” was Ali’s comment. “Where do we set down—Luna City?”
“If they let us,” Dane hinted at the worst.
“But they’ve got to let us!” Weeks exclaimed. “We can’t just wander around out here—”
“It’s been done,” Ali reminded them brutally and that silenced Weeks.
“Did the Old Man set Luna?” After a long pause Ali inquired.
“I didn’t check,” Dane confessed. “He was giving out and I had to get him to his bunk.”
“It might be well to know.” The Engineer-apprentice got up, his movements lacking much of the elastic spring which was normally his. When he climbed to control both the others followed him.
Ali’s slender fingers played across a set of keys and in the small screen mounting on the computer a set of figures appeared. Dane took up the master course book, read the connotation and blinked.
“Not Luna?” Ali asked.
“No. But I don’t understand. This must be for somewhere in the asteroid belt.”
Ali’s lips stretched into a pale caricature of a smile. “Good for the Old Man, he still had his wits about him, even after the bug bit him!”
“But why are we going to the asteroids?” Weeks asked reasonably enough. “There’re Medics at Luna City—they can help us—”
“They can handle known diseases,” Ali pointed out. “But what of the Code?”
Weeks dropped into the Com-tech’s place as if some of the stiffening had vanished from his thin but sturdy legs. “They wouldn’t do that—” he protested, but his eyes said that he knew that they might—they well might.
“Oh, no? Face the facts, man,” Ali sounded almost savage. “We come from a frontier planet, we’re a plague ship—”
He did not have to underline that. They all knew too well the danger in which they now stood.
“Nobody’s died yet,” Weeks tried to find an opening in the net being drawn about them.
“And nobody’s recovered,” Ali crushed that thread of hope. “We don’t know what it is, how it is contracted—anything about it. Let us make a report saying that and you know what will happen—don’t you?”
They weren’t sure of the details, but they could guess.
“So I say,” Ali continued, “the Old Man was right when he set us on an evasion course. If we can stay out until we really know what is the matter we’ll have some chance of talking over the high brass at Luna when we do planet—”
In the end they decided not to interfere with the course the Captain had set. It would take them into the fringes of solar civilization, but give them a fighting chance at solving their problem before they had to report to the authorities. In the meantime they tended their charges, let Rip sleep, and watched each other with desperate but hidden intentness, ready for another to be stricken. However, they remained, although almost stupid with fatigue at times, reasonably healthy. Time was proving that their guess had been correct—they had been somehow inoculated against the germ or virus which had struck the ship.
Rip slept for twenty-four hours, ship time, and then came into the mess cabin ravenously hungry, to catch up on both food and news. And he refused to join with the prevailing pessimistic view of the future. Instead he was sure that their own immunity having been proven, they had a talking point to use with the medical officials at Luna and he was eager to alter course directly for the quarantine station. Only the combined arguments of the other three made him, unwillingly, agree to a short delay.
And how grateful they should be for Captain Jellico’s foresight they learned within the next day. Ali was at the com-unit, trying to pick up Solarian news reports. When the red alert flashed on throughout the ship it brought the others hurrying to the control cabin. The code squeaks were magnified as Ali switched on the receiver full strength, to be translated as he pressed a second button.
“Repeat, repeat, repeat. Free Trader, Solar Queen, Terra Registry 65-724910-Jk, suspected plague ship—took off from infected planet. Warn off—warn off—report such ship to Luna Station. Solar Queen from infected planet—to be warned off and reported.” The same message was repeated three times before going off ether.
The four in the control cabin looked at each other blankly.
“But,” Dane broke the silence, “how did they know? We haven’t reported in—”
“The Eysies!” Ali had the answer ready. “That I-S ship must be having the same sort of trouble and reported to her Company. They would include us in their report and believe that we were infected too—or it would be easy to convince the authorities that we were.”
“I wonder,” Rip’s eyes were narrowed slits as he leaned back against the wall. “Look at the facts. The Survey ship which charted Sargol—they were dirt-side there about three-four months. Yet they gave it a clean bill of health and put it up for trading rights auction. Then Cam bought those rights—he made at least two trips in and out before he was blasted on Limbo. No infection bothered him or Survey—”
“But you’ve got to admit it hit us,” Weeks protested.
“Yes, and the Eysie ship was able to foresee it—report us before we snapped out of Hyper. Sounds almost as if they expected us to carry plague, doesn’t it?” Shannon wanted to know.
“Planted?” Ali frowned at the banks of controls. “But how—no Eysie came on board—no Salarik either, except for the cub who showed us what they thought of catnip.”
Rip shrugged. “How would I know how they did—” he was beginning when Dane cut in:
“If they didn’t know about our immunity the Queen might stay in Hyper and never come out—there wouldn’t be anyone to set the snap-out.”
“Right enough. But on the chance that somebody did keep on his feet and bring her home, they were ready with a cover. If no one raises a howl Sargol will be written off the charts as infected, I-S sits on her tail fins a year or so and then she promotes an investigation before the Board. The Survey records are trotted out—no infection recorded. So they send in a Patrol Probe. Everything is all right—so it wasn’t the planet after all—it was that dirty old Free Trader. And she’s out of the way. I-S gets the Koros trade all square and legal and we’re no longer around to worry about! Neat as a Salariki net-cast—and right around our collective throats, my friends!”
“So what do we do now?” Weeks wanted to know.
“We keep on the Old Man’s course, get lost in the asteroids until we can do some heavy thinking and see a way out. But if I-S gave us this prize package, some trace of its origin is still aboard. And if we can find that—why, then we have something to start from.”
“Mura went down first—and then Karl. Nothing in common,” the old problem faced Dane for the hundredth time.
“No. But,” Ali arose from his place at the com-unit. “I’d suggest a real search of first Frank’s and then Karl’s quarters. A regular turn out down to the bare walls of their cabins. Are you with me?”
“Fly boy, we’re ahead of you!” Rip contributed, already at the door panel. “Down to the bare walls it is.”
Since Mura was in the isolation of ship sick bay the stripping of his cabin was a relatively simple job. But, though Rip and Dane went over it literally by inches, they found nothing unusual—in fact nothing from Sargol except a small twig of the red wood which lay on the steward’s worktable where he had been fashioning something to incorporate in one of his miniature fairy landscapes, to be imprisoned for all time in a plasta-bubble. Dane turned this around in his fingers. Because it was the only link with the perfumed planet he couldn’t help but feel that it had some importance.
But Kosti had not shown any interest in the wood. And he, himself, and Weeks had handled it freely before they had tasted Graft’s friendship cup and had no ill effects—so it couldn’t be the wood. Dane put the twig back on the work table and snapped the protecting cover over the delicate tools—never realizing until days later how very close he had been in that moment to the solution of their problem.
“There’s the hydro—Frank spent a lot of time in there—and the storeroom,” he told the places off on his fingers. “The galley and the mess cabin.”
Those had been the extent of Mura’s world. They could search the storeroom, the galley and the mess cabin—but to interfere with the hydro would endanger their air supply. It was for that very reason that they now looked at each other in startled surmise.
“The perfect place to plant something!” Dane spoke first.
Rip’s teeth caught his underlip. The hydro—something planted there could not be routed out unless they made a landing on a port field and had the whole section stripped.
“Devilish—” Rip’s mobile lips drew tight. “But how could they do it?”
Dane didn’t see how it could have been done either. No one but the Queen’s own crew had been on board the ship during their entire stay on Sargol, except for the young Salarik. Could that cub have brought something? But he and Mura had been with the youngster every minute that he had been in the hydro. To the best of Dane’s memory the cub had touched nothing and had been there only for a few moments. That had been before the feast also—
Rip got to his feet. “We can’t strip the hydro in space,” he pointed out the obvious quietly.
Dane had the answer. “Then we’ve got to earth!”
“You heard that warn-off. If we try it—”
“What about an Emergency station?”
Rip stood very still, his big hands locked about the buckle of his arms belt. Then, without another word, he went out of the cabin and at a pounding pace up the ladder, bound for the Captain’s cabin and the records Jellico kept there. It was such a slim chance—but it was better than none at all.
Dane shouldered into the small space in his wake to find Rip making a selection from the astrogation tapes. There were E-Stats among the asteroids—points prospectors or small traders in sudden difficulties might contact for supplies or repairs. The big Companies maintained their own—the Patrol had several for independents.
“No Patrol one—”
Rip managed a smile. “I haven’t gone space whirly yet,” was his comment. He was feeding a tape into the reader on the Captain’s desk. In the cage over his head the blue Hoobat squatted watching him intently—for the first time since Dane could remember showing no sign of resentment by weird screams or wild spitting.
“Patrol E-Stat A-54—” the reader squeaked. Rip hit a key and the wire clicked to the next entry. “Combine E-Stat—” Another punch and click. “Patrol E-Stat A-55—” punch-click. “Inter-Solar—” this time Rip’s hand did not hit the key and the squeak continued—”Co-ordinates—” Rip reached for a steelo and jotted down the list of figures.
“Got to compare this with our present course—”
“But that’s an I-S Stat,” began Dane and then he laughed as the justice of such a move struck him. They did not dare set the Queen down at any Patrol Station. But a Company one which would be manned by only two or three men and not expecting any but their own people—and I-S owed them help now!
“There may be trouble,” he said, not that he would have any regrets if there was. If the Eysies were responsible for the present plight of the Queen he would welcome trouble, the kind which would plant his fists on some sneering Eysie face.
“We’ll see about that when we come to it,” Rip went on to the control cabin with his figures. Carefully he punched the combination on the plotter and watched it be compared with the course Jellico had set before his collapse.
“Good enough,” he commented as the result flashed on. “We can make it without using too much fuel—”
“Make what?” That was Ali up from the search of Kosti’s quarters. “Nothing,” he gave his report of what he had found there and then returned to the earlier question. “Make what?”
Swiftly Dane outlined their suspicions—that the seat of the trouble lay in the hydro and that they should clean out that section, drawing upon emergency materials at the I-S E-Stat.
“Sounds all right. But you know what they do to pirates?” inquired the Engineer-apprentice.
Space law came into Dane’s field, he needed no prompting. “Any ship in emergency,” he recited automatically, “may claim supplies from the nearest E-Stat—paying for them when the voyage is completed.”
“That means any Patrol E-Stat. The Companies’ are private property.”
“But,” Dane pointed out triumphantly, “the law doesn’t say so—there is nothing about any difference between Company and Patrol E-Stat in the law—”
“He’s right,” Rip agreed. “That law was framed when only the Patrol had such stations. Companies put them in later to save tax—remember? Legally we’re all right.”
“Unless the agents on duty raise a howl,” Ali amended. “Oh, don’t give me that look, Rip. I’m not sounding any warn-off on this, but I just want you to be prepared to find a cruiser riding our fins and giving us the hot flash as bandits. If you want to spoil the Eysies, I’m all for it. Got a stat of theirs pinpointed?”
Rip pointed to the figures on the computer. “There she is. We can set down in about five hours’ ship time. How long will it take to strip the hydro and re-install?”
“How can I tell?” Ali sounded irritable. “I can give you oxgy for quarters for about two hours. Depends upon how fast we can move. No telling until we make a start.”
He started for the corridor and then added over his shoulder: “You’ll have to answer a com challenge—thought about that?”
“Why?” Rip asked. “It might be com repairs bringing us in. They won’t be expecting trouble and we will—we’ll have the advantage.”
But Ali was not to be shaken out of his usual dim view of the future. “All right—so we land, blaster in hand, and take the place. And they get off one little squeak to the Patrol. Well, a short life but an interesting one. And we’ll make all the Video channels for sure when we go out with rockets blasting. Nothing like having a little excitement to break the dull routine of a voyage.”
“We aren’t going to, are we—” Dane protested, “land armed, I mean?”
Ali stared at him and Rip, to Dane’s surprise, did not immediately repudiate that thought.
“Sleep rods certainly,” the Astrogator-apprentice said after a pause. “We’ll have to be prepared for the moment when they find out who we are. And you can’t re-set a hydro in a few minutes, not when we have to keep oxgy on for the others. If we were able to turn that off and work in suits it’d be a quicker job—we could dump before we set down and then pile it in at once. But this way it’s going to be piece work. And it all depends on the agents at the Stat whether we have trouble or not.”
“We had better break out the suits now,” Ali added to Rip’s estimate of the situation. “If we set down and pile out wearing suits at once it will build up our tale of being poor wrecked spacemen—”
Sleep rods or not, Dane thought to himself, the whole plan was one born of desperation. It would depend upon who manned the E-Stat and how fast the Free Traders could move once the Queen touched her fins to earth.
“Knock out their coms,” that was Ali continuing to plan. “Do that first and then we don’t have to worry about someone calling in the Patrol.”
Rip stretched. For the first time in hours he seemed to have returned to his usual placid self. “Good thing somebody in this spacer watches Video serials—Ali, you can brief us on all the latest tricks of space pirates. Nothing is so wildly improbable that you can’t make use of it sometime during a checkered career.”
He glanced over the board before he brought his hand down on a single key set a distance apart from the other controls. “Put some local color into it,” was his comment.
Dane understood. Rip had turned on the distress signal at the Queen’s nose. When she set down on the Stat field she would be flaming a banner of trouble. Next to the wan dead lights, set only when a ship had no hope of ever reaching port at all, that signal was one every spacer dreaded having to flash. But it was not the dead lights—not yet for the Queen.
Working together they brought out the space suits and readied them at the hatch. Then Weeks and Dane took up the task of tending their unconscious charges while Rip and Ali prepared for landing.
There was no change in the sleepers. And in Jellico’s cabin even Queex appeared to be influenced by the plight of its master, for instead of greeting Dane with its normal aspect of rage, the Hoobat stayed quiescent on the floor of its cage, its top claws hooked about two of the wires, its protruding eyes staring out into the room with what seemed closed to a malignant intelligence. It did not even spit as Dane passed under its abode to pour thin soup into his patient.
As for Sinbad, the cat had retreated to Dane’s cabin and steadily refused to leave the quarters he had chosen, resisting with tooth and claw the one time Dane had tried to take him back to Van Rycke’s office and his own hammock there. Afterwards the Cargo-apprentice did not try to evict him—there was comfort in seeing that plump gray body curled on the bunk he had little chance to use.
His nursing duties performed for the moment, Dane ventured into the hydro. He was practiced in tending this vital heart of the ship’s air supply. But outfitting a hydro was something else again. In his cadet years he had aided in such a program at least twice as a matter of learning the basic training of the Service. But then they had had unlimited supplies to draw on and the action had taken place under no more pressure than that exerted by the instructors. Now it was going to be a far more tricky job—
He went slowly down the aisle between the banks of green things. Plants from all over the Galaxy, grown for their contribution to the air renewal—as well as side products such as fresh fruit and vegetables, were banked there. The sweet odor of their verdant life was strong. But how could any of the four now on duty tell what was rightfully there and what might have been brought in? And could they be sure anything had been introduced?
Dane stood there, his eyes searching those lines of greens—such a mixture of greens from the familiar shade of Terra’s fields to greens tinged with shades first bestowed by other suns on other worlds—looking for one which was alien enough to be noticeable. Only Mura, who knew this garden as he knew his own cabin, could have differentiated between them. They would just dump everything and trust to luck—
He was suddenly aware of a slight movement in the banks—a shivering of stem, quiver of leaf. The mere act of his passing had set some sensitive plant to register his presence. A lacy, fern-like thing was contracting its fronds into balls. He should not stay—disturbing the peace of the hydro. But it made little difference now—within a matter of hours all this luxuriance would be thrust out to die and they would have to depend upon canned oxgy and algae tanks. Too bad—the hydro represented much time and labor on Mura’s part and Tau had medical plants growing there he had been observing for a long time.
As Dane closed the door behind him, seeing the line of balled fern which had marked his passage, he heard a faint rustling, a sound as if a wind had swept across the green room within. The imagination which was a Trader’s asset (when it was kept within bounds) suggested that the plants inside guessed—With a frown for his own sentimentality, Dane strode down the corridor and climbed to check with Rip in control.
The Astrogator-apprentice had his own problems. To bring the Queen down on the circumscribed field of an E-Stat—without a guide beam to ride in—since if they contacted the Stat they must reveal their own com was working and they would have to answer questions—was the sort of test even a seasoned pilot would tense over. Yet Rip was sitting now in the Captain’s place, his broad hands spread out on the edge of the control board waiting. And below in the engine room Ali was in Stotz’s place ready to fire and cut rockets at order. Of course they were both several years ahead of him in Service, Dane knew. But he wondered at their quick assumption of responsibility and whether he himself could ever reach that point of self-confidence—his memory turning to the bad mistake be had made on Sargol.
There was the sharp note of a warning gong, the flash of red light on the control board. They were off automatic, from here on in it was all Kip’s work. Dane strapped down at the silent com-unit and was startled a moment later when it spat words at him, translated from space code.
So compelling was that demand that Dane’s fingers went to the answer key before he remembered and snatched them back, to fold his hands in his lap.
“Identify—” the expressionless voice of the translator droned over their heads.
Rip’s hands were on the control board, playing the buttons there with the precision of a musician creating some symphonic masterpiece. And the Queen was alive, now quivering through her stout plates, coming into a landing.
Dane watched the visa plate. The E-Stat asteroid was of a reasonable size, but in their eyes it was a bleak, torn mote of stuff swimming through vast emptiness.
“Identify—” the drone heightened in pitch.
Rip’s lips were compressed, he made quick calculations. And Dane saw that, though Jellico was the master, Rip was fully fit to follow in the Captain’s boot prints.
There was a sudden silence in the cabin—the demand had stopped. The agents below must now have realized that the ship with the distress signals blazing on her nose was not going to reply. Dane found he could not watch the visa plate now, Rip’s hands about their task filled his whole range of sight.
He knew that Shannon was using every bit of his skill and knowledge to jockey them into the position where they could ride their tail rockets down to the scorched rock of the E-Stat field. Perhaps it wasn’t as smooth a landing as Jellico could have made. But they did it. Rip’s hands were quiet, again that patch of darkness showed on the back of his tunic. He made no move from his seat.
“Secure—” Ali’s voice floated up to them.
Dane unbuckled his safety webbing and got up, looking to Shannon for orders. This was Rip’s plan they were to carry through. Then something moved him to give honor where it was due. He touched that bowed shoulder before him.
“Fin landing, brother! Four points and down!”
Rip glanced up, a grin made him look his old self. “Ought to have a recording of that for the Board when I go up for my pass-through.”
Dane matched his smile. “Too bad we didn’t have someone out there with a tri-dee machine.”
“More likely it’d be evidence at our trial for piracy—” their words must have reached Ali on the ship’s inter-com, for his deflating reply came back, to remind them of why they had made that particular landing. “Do we move now?”
“Check first,” Rip said into the mike.
Dane looked at the visa-plate. Against a background of jagged rock teeth was the bubble of the E-Stat housing—more than three-quarters of it being in the hollowed out sections below the surface of the miniature world which supported it, as Dane knew. But a beam of light shown from the dome to center on the grounded Queen. They had not caught the Stat agents napping.
They made the rounds of the spacer, checking on each of the semi-conscious men. Ali had ready the artificial oxgy tanks—they must move fast once they began the actual task of clearing and restocking the hydro.
“Hope you have a good story ready,” he commented as the other three joined him by the hatch to don the suits which would enable them to cross the airless, heatless surface of the asteroid.
“We have a poisoned hydro,” Dane said.
“One look at the plants we dump will give you the lie. They won’t accept our story without investigation.”
Dane was aroused. Did Ali think he was a stupid as all that? “If you’d take a look in there now you’d believe me,” he snapped.
“What did you do?” Ali sounded genuinely interested.
“Chucked a heated can of lacoil over a good section. It’s wilting down fast in big patches.”
Rip snorted. “Good old lacoil. You drink it, you wash in it, and now you kill off the Hydro with it. Maybe we can give the company an extra testimonial for the official jabber and collect when we hit Terra. All right—Weeks,” he spoke to the little man, “you listen in on the com—it’s tuned to our helmet units. We’ll climb into these pipe suits and see how many tears we can wring out of the Eysies with our sad, sad tale.”
They got into the awkward, bulky suits and squeezed into the hatch while Weeks slammed the lock door at their backs and operated the outer opening. Then they were looking out across the ground, still showing signs of the heat of their landing, and lighted by the dome beam.
“Nobody hurrying out with an aid and comfort kit,” Rip’s voice sounded in Dane’s earphones. “A little slack aren’t they?”
Slack—or was it that the Eysies had recognized the Queen and was preparing the sort of welcome the remnant of her crew could not withstand? Dane, wanting very much in his heart to be elsewhere, climbed down the ladder in Rip’s wake, both of them spotlighted by the immovable beam from the Stat dome.
Chapter XI
DESPERATE MEASURES
Measured in distance and time that rough walk in the ponderous suits across the broken terrain of the asteroid was a short one, measured by the beating of his own heart, Dane thought it much too long. There was no sign of life by the air lock of the bubble—no move on the part of the men stationed there to come to their assistance.
“D’you suppose we’re invisible?” Ali’s disembodied voice clicked in the helmet earphones.
“Maybe we’ll wish we were,” Dane could not forego that return.
Rip was almost to the air lock door now. His massively suited arm was outstretched toward the control bar when the com-unit in all three helmets caught the same demand:
“Identify!” The crisp order had enough snap to warn them that an answer was the best policy.
“Shannon—A-A of the Polestar,” Rip gave the required information. “We claim E rights—”
But would they get them? Dane wondered. There was a click loud in his ears. The metal door was yielding to Rip’s hand. At least those on the inside had taken off the lock. Dane quickened pace to join his leader.
Together the three from the Queen crowded through the lock door, saw that swing shut and seal behind them, as they stood waiting for the moment they could discard the suits and enter the dome. The odds against them could not be too high, this was a small Stat. It would not house more than four agents at the most. And they were familiar enough with the basic architecture of such stations to know just what move to make. Ali was to go to the com room where he could take over if they did meet with trouble. Dane and Rip would have to handle any dissenters in the main section. But they still hoped that luck might ride their fins and they could put over a story which would keep them out of active conflict with the Eysies.
The gauge on the wall registered safety and they unfastened the protective clasps of the suits. Standing the cumbersome things against the wall as the inner door to the lock rolled back, they walked into Eysie territory.
As Free Traders they had the advantage of being uniformly tunicked—with no Company badge to betray their ship or status. So that could well be the “Polestar” standing needle slim behind them—and not the notorious “Solar Queen.” But each, as he passed through the inner lock, gave a hitch to his belt which brought the butt of his sleep rod closer to hand. Innocuous as that weapon was, in close quarters its effects, if only temporary, was to some purpose. And since they were prepared for trouble, they might have a slight edge over the Eysies in attack.
A Company man, his tunic shabby and open in a negligent fashion at his thick throat, stood waiting for them. His unhelmeted head was grizzled, his coarse, tanned face with heavy jowls bristly enough to suggest he had not bothered to use smooth-cream for some days. An under officer of some spacer, retired to finish out the few years before pension in this nominal duty—fast letting down the standards of personal regime he had had to maintain on ship board. But he wasn’t all fat and soft living, the glance with which he measured them was shrewdly appraising.
“What’s your trouble?” he demanded without greeting. “You didn’t I-dent coming in.”
“Coms are out,” Rip replied as shortly. “We need E-Hydro—”
“First time I ever heard it that the coms were wired in with the grass,” the Eysies’s hands were on his hips—in close proximity to something which made Dane’s eyes narrow. The fellow was wearing a flare-blaster! That might be regulation equipment for an E-Stat agent on a lonely asteroid—but he didn’t quite believe it. And probably the other was quick on the draw too.
“The coms are something else,” Rip answered readily. “Our tech is working on them. But the hydro’s bad all though. We’ll have to dump and restock. Give you a voucher on Terra for the stuff.”
The Eysie agent continued to block the doorway into the station. “This is private—I-S property. You should hit the Patrol post—they cater to you F-Ts.”
“We hit the nearest E-Stat when we discovered that we were contaminated,” Rip spoke with an assumption of patience. “That’s the law, and you know it. You have to supply us and take a voucher—”
“How do I know that your voucher is worth the film it’s recorded on?” asked the agent reasonably.
“All right,” Rip shrugged. “If we have to do it the hard way, we’ll cargo dump to cover your bill.”
“Not on this field.” The other shook his head. “I’ll flash in your voucher first.”
He had them, Dane thought bitterly. Their luck had run out. Because what he was going to do was a move they dared not protest. It was one any canny agent would make in the present situation. And if they were what they said they were, they must readily agree to let him flash their voucher of payment to I-S headquarters, to be checked and okayed before they took the hydro stock.
But Rip merely registered a mild resignation. “You the Com-tech? Where’s your unit? I’ll indit at once if you want it that way.”
Whether their readiness to co-operate allayed some of the agent’s suspicion or not, he relaxed some, giving them one more stare all around before he turned on his heel. “This way.”
They followed him down the narrow hall, Rip on his heels, the others behind.
“Lonely post,” Rip commented. “I’d think you boys’d get space-whirly out here.”
The other snorted. “We’re not star lovers. And the pay’s worth a three month stretch. They take us down for Terra leave before we start talking to the Whisperers.”
“How many of you here at a time?” Rip edged the question in casually.
But the other might have been expecting it by the way he avoided giving a direct answer. “Enough to run the place—and not enough to help you clean out your wagon,” he was short about it. “Any dumping you do is strictly on your own. You’ve enough hands on a spacer that size to manage—”
Rip laughed. “Far be it from me to ask an Eysie to do any real work,” was his counter. “We know all about you Company men—”
But the agent did not take fire at that jib. Instead he pushed back a panel and they were looking into com-unit room where another man in the tunic of the I-S lounged on what was by law twenty-four hour duty, divided into three watches.
“These F-Ts want to flash a voucher request through,” their guide informed the tech. The other, interested, gave them a searching once-over before he pushed a small scriber toward Rip.
“It’s all yours—clear ether,” he reported.
Ali stood with his back to the wall and Dane still lingered in the portal. Both of them fixed their attention on Rip’s left hand. If he gave the agreed upon signal! Their fingers were linked loosely in their belts only an inch or so from their sleep rods.
With his right hand Rip scooped up the scribbler while the Com-tech half turned to make adjustments to the controls, picking up a speaker to call the I-S headquarters.
Rip’s left index finger snapped across his thumb to form a circle. Ali’s rod did not even leave his belt, it tilted up and the invisible deadening stream from it centered upon the seated tech. At the same instant Dane shot at the agent who had guided them there. The latter had time for a surprised grunt and his hand was at his blaster as he sagged to his knees and then relaxed on the floor. The Tech slumped across the call board as if sleep had overtaken him at his post.
Rip crossed the room and snapped off the switch which opened the wire for broadcasting. While Ali, with Dane’s help, quietly and effectively immobilized the Eysies with their own belts.
“There should be at least three men here,” Rip waited by the door. “We have to get them all under control before we start work.”
However, the interior of the bubble, extending as it did on levels beneath the outer crust of the asteroid, was not an easy place to search. An enemy, warned of the invasion, could easily keep ahead of the party from the Queen, spying on them at his leisure or preparing traps for them. In the end, afraid of wasting time, they contented themselves with locking the doors of the corridor leading to the lower levels, making ready to raid the storeroom they had discovered during their search.
Emergency hydro supplies consisted mainly of algae which could be stored in tanks and hastily put to use—as the plants now in the Queen took much longer to grow even under forcing methods. Dane volunteered to remain inside the E-Stat and assemble the necessary containers at the air lock while the other two, having had more experience, went back to the spacer to strip the hydro and prepare to switch contents.
But, when Rip and Ali left, the younger Cargo-apprentice began to find the bubble a haunted place. He took the sealed containers out of their storage racks, stood them on a small hand truck, and pushed them to the foot of the stairs, up which he then climbed carrying two of the cylinders at a time.
The swish of the air current through the narrow corridors made a constant murmur of sound, but he found himself listening for something else, for a footfall other than his own, for the betraying rasp of clothing against a wall—for even a whisper of voice. And time and time again he paused suddenly to listen—sure that the faintest hint of such a sound had reached his ears. He had a dozen containers lined up when the welcome signal reached him by the com-unit of his field helmet. To transfer the cylinders to the lock, get out, and then open the outer door, did not take long. But as he waited he still listened for a sound which did not come—the notice, that someone besides himself was free to move about the Stat.
Not knowing just how many of the supply tins were needed, he worked on transferring all there were in the storage racks to the upper corridor and the lock. But he still had half a dozen left to pass through when Rip sent a message that he was coming in.
Out of his pressure suit, the Astrogator-apprentice stepped lightly into the corridor, looked at the array of containers and shook his head.
“We don’t need all those. No, leave them—” he added as Dane, with a sigh, started to pick up two for a return trip. “There’s something more important just now—” He turned into the side hall which led to the com room.
Both the I-S men had awakened. The Com-tech appeared to accept his bonds philosophically. He was quiet and flat on his back, staring pensively at the ceiling. But the other agent had made a worm’s progress half across the room and Rip had to halt in haste to prevent stepping on him.
Shannon stooped and, hooking his fingers in the other’s tunic, heaved him back while the helpless man favored them with some of the ripest speech—and NOT Trade Lingo—Dane had ever heard. Rip waited until the man began to run down and then he broke in with his pleasant soft drawl.
“Oh, sure, we’re all that. But time runs on, Eysie, and I’d like a couple of answers which may mean something to you. First—when do you expect your relief?”
That set the agent off again. And his remarks—edited—were that no something, something F-T was going to get any something, something information out of him!
But it was his companion in misfortune—the Com-tech—who guessed the reason behind Rip’s question.
“Cut jets!” he advised the other. “They’re just being soft-hearted. I take it,” he spoke over the other agent’s sputtering to Rip, “that you’re worried about leaving us fin down—That’s it, isn’t it?”
Rip nodded. “In spite of what you think about us,” he replied, “We’re not Patrol Posted outlaws—”
“No, you’re just from a plague ship,” the Com-tech remarked calmly. And his words struck his comrade dumb. “Solar Queen?”
“You got the warn-off then?”
“Who didn’t? You really have plague on board?” The thought did not appear to alarm the Com-tech unduly. But his fellow suddenly heaved his bound body some distance away from the Free Traders and his face displayed mixed emotions—most of them fearful.
“We have something—probably supplied,” Rip straightened. “Might pass along to your bosses that we know that. Now suppose you tell me about your relief. When is it due?”
“Not until after we take off on the long orbit if you leave us like this. On the other hand,” the other added coolly, “I don’t see how you can do otherwise. We’ve still got those—” with his chin he pointed to the com-unit.
“After a few alterations,” Rip amended. The bulk of the com was in a tightly sealed case which they would need a flamer to open. But he could and did wreak havoc with the exposed portions. The tech watching this destruction spouted at least two expressions his companion had not used. But when Rip finished he was his unruffled self again.
“Now,” Rip drew his sleep rod. “A little rest and when you wake it will all be a bad dream.” He carefully beamed each man into slumber and helped Dane strip off their bonds. But before he left the room he placed on the recorder the voucher for the supplies they had taken. The Queen was not stealing—under the law she still had some shadow of rights.
Suited they crossed the rough rock to the ship. And there about the fins, already frozen into brittle spikes was a tangle of plants—the rich result of years of collecting.
“Did you find anything?” Dane asked as they rounded that mess on their way to the ladder.
Rip’s voice came back through the helmet com. “Nothing we know how to interpret. I wish Frank or Craig had had a chance to check. We took tri-dees of everything before we dumped. Maybe they can learn something from these when—”
His voice trailed off leaving that “when” to ring in both their minds. It was such an important “when.” When would either the steward or the Medic recover enough to view those tri-dee shots? Or was that “when” really an ominous “if?”
Back in the Queen, sealed once more for blast-off, they took their stations. Dane speculated as to the course Rip had set—were they just going to wander about the system hoping to escape notice until they had somehow solved their problem? Or did Shannon have some definite port in mind? He did not have time to ask before they lifted. But once they were space borne again he voiced his question.
Rip’s face was serious. “Frankly—” he began and then hesitated for a long moment before he added, “I don’t know. If we can only get the Captain or Craig on their feet again—”
“One thing,” Ali materialized to join them, “Sinbad’s back in the hydro. And this morning you couldn’t get him inside the door. It’s not a very good piece of evidence—”
No, it wasn’t but they clung to it as backing for their actions of the past few hours. The cat that had shown such a marked distaste for the company of the stricken, and then for the hydro, was now content to visit the latter as if some evil he has sensed there had been cleansed with the dumping of the garden. They had not yet solved their mystery but another clue had come into their hands.
But now the care of the sick occupied hours and Rip insisted that a watch be maintained by the com—listening in for news which might concern the Queen. They had done a good job at silencing the E-Stat, for they had been almost six hours in space before the news of their raid was beamed to the nearest Patrol post.
Ali laughed. “Told you we’d be pirates,” he said when he listened to that account of their descent upon the I-S station. “Though I didn’t see all that blaster work they’re now raving about. You’d think we fought a major battle there!”
Weeks growled. “The Eysies are trying to make it look good. Make us into outlaws—”
But Rip did not share in the general amusement at the wild extravagation of the report from the ether. “I notice they didn’t say anything about the voucher we left.”
Ali’s cynical smile curled. “Did you expect them to? The Eysies think they have us by the tail fins now—why should they give us any benefit of the doubt? We junked all our boosters behind us on this take-off, and don’t forget that, my friends.”
Weeks looked confused. “But I thought you said we could do this legal,” he appealed to Rip. “If we’re Patrol Posted as outlaws—”
“They can’t do any more to us than they can for running in a plague ship,” Ali pointed out. “Either will get us blasted if we happen into the wrong vector now. So—what do we do?”
“We find out what the plague really is,” Dane said and meant every word of it.
“How?” Ali inquired. “Through some of Craig’s magic?”
Dane was forced to answer with the truth. “I don’t know yet—but it’s our only chance.”
Rip rubbed his eyes wearily. “Don’t think I’m disagreeing—but just where do we start? We’ve already combed Frank’s quarters and Kosti’s—we cleaned out the hydro—”
“Those tri-dee shots of the hydro—have you checked them yet?” Dane countered.
Without a word Ali arose and left the cabin. He came back with a microfilm roll. Fitting it into the large projector he focused it on the wall and snapped the button.
They were looking at the hydro—down the length of space so accurately recorded that it seemed they might walk straight into it. The greenery of the plants was so vivid and alive Dane felt that he could reach out and pluck a leaf. Inch by inch he examined those ranks, looking for something which was not in order, had no right to be there.
The long shot of the hydro as it had been merged into a series of sectional groupings. In silence they studied it intently, using all their field lore in an attempt to spot what each one was certain must be there somewhere. But they were all handicapped by their lack of intimate knowledge of the garden.
“Wait!” Weeks’ voice scaled up. “Left hand corner—there!” His pointing hand broke and shadowed the portion he was calling to their attention. Ali jumped to the projector and made a quick adjustment.
Plants four and five times life size glowed green on the wall. What Weeks had caught they all saw now—ragged leaves, stripped stems.
“Chewed!” Dane supplied the answer.
It was only one species of plant which had been so mangled. Other varieties in the same bank showed no signs of disturbance. But all of that one type had at least one stripped branch and two were virtual skeletons.
“A pest!” said Rip.
“But Sinbad,” Dane began a protest before the memory of the cat’s peculiar actions of the past weeks stopped him. Sinbad had slipped up, the hunter who had kept the Queen free of the outré alien life which came aboard from time to time with cargo, had not attacked that which had ravaged the hydro plants. Or if he had done so, he had not, after his usual custom, presented the bodies of the slain to any crew member.
“It looks as if we have something at last,” Ali observed and someone echoed that with a sigh of heartdeep relief.
“All right, so we think we know a little more,” Ali added a moment later. “Just what are we going to do? We can’t stay in space forever—there’re the small items of fuel and supplies and—”
Rip had come to a decision. “We’re not going to remain space borne,” he stated with the confidence of one who now saw an open road before him.
“We try to set down at Terraport,” Dane found his tongue first, “and they flame us out—”
Rip was smiling. “The trouble with you,” he addressed them all, “is that you think of earth only in terms of Terraport—”
“Well, there is the Patrol field at Stella,” Weeks agreed doubtfully. “But we’d be right in the middle of trouble there—”
“Did we have a regular port on Sargol—on Limbo—on fifty others I can name out of our log?” Rip wanted to know.
Ali voiced a new objection. “So—we have the luck of Jones and we set down somewhere out of sight. Then what do we do?”
“We seal ship until we find the pest—then we bring in a Medic and get to the bottom of the whole thing,” Rip’s confidence was contagious. Dane almost believed that it could be done that way.
“Did you ever think,” Ali cut in, “what would happen if we were wrong—if the Queen really is a plague carrier?”
“I said—we seal the ship—tight,” countered Shannon. “And when we earth it’ll be where we won’t have visitors to infect—”
“And that is where?” Ali, who knew the deserts of Mars better than he did the greener planet from which his stock had sprung, pursued the question.
“Right in the middle of the Big Burn!”
Dane, Terra born and bred, realized first what Rip was planning and what it meant. Sealed off was right—the Queen would be amply protected from investigation. Whether her crew would survive was another matter—whether she could even make a landing there was also to be considered.
The Big Burn was the horrible scar left by the last of the Atomic Wars—a section of radiation poisoned land comprising hundreds of square miles—land which generations had never dared to penetrate. Originally the survivors of that war had shunned the whole continent which it disfigured. It had been close to two centuries before men had gone into the still wholesome land laying to the far west and the south. And through the years, the avoidance of the Big Burn had become part of their racial instinct as they shrank from it. It was a symbol of something no Terran wanted to remember.
But Ali now had only one question to ask. “Can we do it?”
“We’ll never know until we try,” was Rip’s reply.
“The Patrol’ll be watching—” that was Weeks. With his Venusian background he had less respect for the dangers of the Big Burn than he did for the forces of Law and order which ranged the star lanes.
“They’ll be watching the route lanes,” Rip pointed out. “They won’t expect a ship to come in on that vector, steering away from the ports. Why should they? As far as I know it’s never been tried since Terraport was laid out. It’ll be tricky—” And he himself would have to bear most of the responsibility for it. “But I believe that it can be done. And we can’t just roam around out here. With I-S out for our blood and a Patrol warn-off it won’t do us any good to head for Luna—”
None of his listeners could argue with that. And, Dane’s spirits began to rise, after all they knew so little about the Big Burn—it might afford them just the temporary sanctuary they needed. In the end they agreed to try it, mainly because none of them could see any alternative, except the too dangerous one of trying to contact the authorities and being summarily treated as a plague ship before they could defend themselves.
And their decision was ably endorsed not long afterwards by a sardonic warning on the com—a warning which Ali who had been tending the machine passed along to them.
“Greetings, pirates—”
“What do you mean?” Dane was heating broth to feed to Captain Jellico.
“The word has gone out—our raid on the E-Stat is now a matter of history and Patrol record—we’ve been Posted!”
Dane felt a cold finger drawn along his backbone. Now they were fair game for the whole system. Any Patrol ship that wanted could shoot them down with no questions asked. Of course that had always been a possibility from the first after their raid on the E-Stat. But to realize that it was now true was a different matter altogether. This was one occasion when realization was worse than anticipation. He tried to keep his voice level as he answered:
“Let us hope we can pull off Rip’s plan—”
“We’d better. What about the Big Burn anyway, Thorson? Is it as tough as the stories say?”
“We don’t know what it’s like. It’s never been explored—or at least those who tried to explore its interior never reported in afterwards. As far as I know it’s left strictly alone.”
“Is it still all ‘hot’?”
“Parts of it must be. But all—we don’t know.”
With the bottle of soup in his hand Dane climbed to Jellico’s cabin. And he was so occupied with the problem at hand that at first he did not see what was happening in the small room. He had braced the Captain up into a half-sitting position and was patiently ladling the liquid into his mouth a spoonful at a time when a thin squeak drew his attention to the top of Jellico’s desk.
From the half open lid of a microtape compartment something long and dark projected, beating the air feebly. Dane, easing the Captain back on the bunk, was going to investigate when the Hoobat broke its unnatural quiet of the past few days with an ear-splitting screech of fury. Dane struck at the bottom of its cage—the move its master always used to silence it—But this time the results were spectacular.
The cage bounced up and down on the spring which secured it to the ceiling of the cabin and the blue feathered horror slammed against the wires. Either its clawing had weakened them, or some fault had developed, for they parted and the Hoobat came through them to land with a sullen plop on the desk. Its screams stopped as suddenly as they had begun and it scuttled on its spider-toad legs to the microtape compartment, acting with purposeful dispatch and paying no attention to Dane.
Its claws shot out and with ease it extracted from the compartment a creature as weird as itself—one which came fighting and of which Dane could not get a very clear idea. Struggling they battled across the surface of the desk and flopped to the floor. There the hunted broke loose from the hunter and fled with fantastic speed into the corridor. And before Dane could move the Hoobat was after it.
He gained the passage just in time to see Queex disappear down the ladder, clinging with the aid of its pincher claws, apparently grimly determined to catch up with the thing it pursued. And Dane went after them.
There was no sign of the creature who fled on the next level. But Dane made no move to recapture the blue hunter who squatted at the foot of the ladder staring unblinkingly into space. Dane waited, afraid to disturb the Hoobat. He had not had a good look at the thing which had run from Queex—but he knew it was something which had no business aboard the Queen. And it might be the disturbing factor they were searching for. If the Hoobat would only lead him to it—
The Hoobat moved, rearing up on the tips of its six legs, its neckless head slowly revolving on its puffy shoulders. Along the ridge of its backbone its blue feathers were rising into a crest much as Sinbad’s fur rose when the cat was afraid or angry. Then, without any sign of haste, it crawled over and began descending the ladder once more, heading toward the lower section which housed the Hydro.
Dane remained where he was until it had almost reached the deck of the next level and then he followed, one step at a time. He was sure that the Hoobat’s peculiar construction of body prevented it from looking up—unless it turned upon its back—but he did not want to do anything which would alarm it or deter Queex from what he was sure was a methodical chase.
Queex stopped again at the foot of the second descent and sat in its toad stance, apparently brooding, a round blue blot. Dane clung to the ladder and prayed that no one would happen along to frighten it. Then, just as he was beginning to wonder if it had lost contact with its prey, once more it arose and with the same speed it had displayed in the Captain’s cabin it shot along the corridor to the hydro.
To Dane’s knowledge the door of the garden was not only shut but sealed. And how either the stranger or Queex could get through it he did not see.
“What the—?” Ali clattered down the ladder to halt abruptly as Dane waved at him.
“Queex,” the Cargo-apprentice kept his voice to a half whisper, “it got loose and chased something out of the Old Man’s cabin down here.”
“Queex—!” Ali began and then shut his mouth, moving noiselessly up to join Dane.
The short corridor ended at the hydro entrance. And Dane had been right, there they found the Hoobat, crouched at the closed panel, its claws clicking against the metal as it picked away useless at the portal which would not admit it.
“Whatever it’s after must be in there,” Dane said softly.
And the hydro, stripped of its luxuriance of plant life, occupied now by the tanks of green scum, would not afford too many hiding places. They had only to let Queex in and keep watch.
As they came up the Hoobat flattened to the floor and shrilled its war cry, spitting at their boots and then flashing claws against the stout metal enforced hide. However, though it was prepared to fight them, it showed no signs of wishing to retreat, and for that Dane was thankful. He quickly pressed the release and tugged open the panel.
At the first crack of its opening Queex turned with one of those bursts of astounding speed and clawed for admittance, its protest against the men forgotten. And it squeezed through a space Dane would have thought too narrow to accommodate its bloated body. Both men slipped around the door behind it and closed the panel tight.
The air was not as fresh as it had been when the plants were there. And the vats which had taken the places of the banked greenery were certainly nothing to look at. Queex humped itself into a clod of blue, immovable, halfway down the aisle.
Dane tried to subdue his breathing, to listen. The Hoobat’s actions certainly argued that the alien thing had taken refuge here, though how it had gotten through—? But if it were in the hydro it was well hidden.
He had just begun to wonder how long they must wait when Queex again went into action. Its clawed front legs upraised, it brought the pinchers deliberately together and sawed one across the other, producing a rasping sound which was almost a vibration in the air. Back and forth, back and forth, moved the claws. Watching them produced almost a hypnotic effect, and the reason for such a maneuver was totally beyond the human watchers.
But Queex knew what it was doing all right, Ali’s fingers closed on Dane’s arm in a pincher grip as painful as if he had been equipped with the horny armament of the Hoobat.
Something, a flitting shadow, had rounded one vat and was that much closer to the industrious fiddler on the floor. By some weird magic of its own the Hoobat was calling its prey to it.
Scrape, scrape—the unmusical performance continued with monotonous regularity. Again the shadow flashed—one vat closer. The Hoobat now presented the appearance of one charmed by its own art—sunk in a lethargy of weird music making.
At last the enchanted came into full view, though lingering at the round side of a container, very apparently longing to flee again, but under some compulsion to approach its enchanter. Dane blinked, not quite sure that his eyes were not playing tricks on him. He had seen the almost transparent globe “bogies” of Limbo, had been fascinated by the weird and ugly pictures in Captain Jellico’s collection of tri-dee prints. But this creature was as impossible in its way as the horrific blue thing dragging it out of concealment.
It walked erect on two threads of legs, with four knobby joints easily detected. A bulging abdomen sheathed in the horny substance of a beetle’s shell ended in a sharp point. Two pairs of small legs, folded close to the much smaller upper portion of its body, were equipped with thorn shack terminations. The head, which constantly turned back and forth on the armor plated shoulders, was long and narrow and split for half its length by a mouth above which were deep pits which must harbor eyes, though actual organs were not visible to the watching men. It was a palish gray in color—which surprised Dane a little. His memory of the few seconds he had seen it on the Captain’s desk had suggested that it was much darker. And erect as it was, it stood about eighteen inches high.
With head turning rapidly, it still hesitated by the side of the vat, so nearly the color of the metal that unless it moved it was difficult to distinguish. As far as Dane could see the Hoobat was paying it no attention. Queex might be lost in a happy dream, the result of its own fiddling. Nor did the rhythm of that scraping vary.
The nightmare thing made the last foot in a rush of speed which reduced it to a blur, coming to a halt before the Hoobat. Its front legs whipped out to strike at its enemy. But Queex was no longer dreaming. This was the moment the Hoobat had been awaiting. One of the sawing claws opened and closed, separating the head of the lurker from its body. And before either of the men could interfere Queex had dismembered the prey with dispatch.
“Look there!” Dane pointed.
The Hoobat held close the body of the stranger and where the ashy corpse came into contact with Queex’s blue feathered skin it was slowly changing hue—as if some of the color of its hunter had rubbed off it.
“Chameleon!” Ali went down on one knee the better to view the grisly feast now in progress. “Watch out!” he added sharply as Dane came to join him.
One of the thin upper limbs lay where Queex had discarded it. And from the needle tip was oozing some colorless drops of fluid. Poison?
Dane looked around for something which he could use to pick up the still jerking appendage. But before he could find anything Queex had appropriated it. And in the end they had to allow the Hoobat its victim in its entirety. But once Queex had consumed its prey it lapsed into its usual hunched immobility. Dane went for the cage and working gingerly he and Ali got the creature back in captivity. But all the evidence now left were some smears on the floor of the hydro, smears which Ali blotted up for future research in the lab.
An hour later the four who now comprised the crew of the Queen gathered in the mess for a conference. Queex was in its cage on the table before them, asleep after all its untoward activity.
“There must be more than just one,” Weeks said. “But how are we going to hunt them down? With Sinbad?”
Dane shook his head. Once the Hoobat had been caged and the more prominent evidence of the battle scraped from the floor, he had brought the cat into the hydro and forced him to sniff at the site of the engagement. The result was that Sinbad had gone raving mad and Dane’s hands were now covered with claw tears which ran viciously deep. It was plain that the ship’s cat was having none of the intruders, alive or dead. He had fled to Dane’s cabin where he had taken refuge on the bunk and snarled wild eyed when anyone looked in from the corridor.
“Queex has to do it,” Rip said. “But will it hunt unless it is hungry?”
He surveyed the now comatose creature skeptically. They had never seen the Captain’s pet eat anything except some pellets which Jellico kept in his desk, and they were aware that the intervals between such feedings were quite lengthy. If they had to wait the usual time for Queex to feel hunger pangs once more, they might have to wait a long time.
“We should catch one alive,” Ali remarked thoughtfully. “If we could get Queex to fiddle it out to where we could net it—”
Weeks nodded eagerly. “A small net like those the Salariki use. Drop it over the thing—”
While Queex still drowsed in its cage, Weeks went to work with fine cord. Holding the color changing abilities of the enemy in mind they could not tell how many of the creatures might be roaming the ship. It could only be proved where they weren’t by where Sinbad would consent to stay. So they made plans which included both the cat and the Hoobat.
Sinbad, much against his will, was buckled into an improvised harness by which he could be controlled without the handler losing too much valuable skin.
And then the hunt started at the top of the ship, proceeding downward section by section. Sinbad raised no protest in the control cabin, nor in the private cabins of the officers’ thereabouts. If they could interpret his reactions the center section was free of the invaders. So with Dane in control of the cat and Ali carrying the caged Hoobat, they descended once more to the level which housed the hydro galley, steward’s quarters and ship’s sick bay.
Sinbad proceeded on his own four feet into the galley and the mess. He was not uneasy in the sick bay, nor in Mura’s cabin, and this time he even paced the hydro without being dragged—much to their surprise as they had thought that the headquarters of the stowaways.
“Could there only have been one?” Weeks wanted to know as he stood by ready with the net in his hands.
“Either that—or else we’re wrong about the hydro being their main hideout. If they’re afraid of Queex now they may have withdrawn to the place they feel the safest,” Rip said.
It was when they were on the ladder leading to the cargo level that Sinbad balked. He planted himself firmly and yowled against further progress until Dane, with the harness, pulled him along.
“Look at Queex!”
They followed Weeks’ order. The Hoobat was no longer lethargic. It was raising itself, leaning forward to clasp the bars of its cage, and now it uttered one of its screams of rage. And as Ali went on down the ladder it rattled the bars in a determined effort for freedom. Sinbad, spitting and yowling refused to walk. Rip nodded to Ali.
“Let it out.”
Tipped out of its cage the Hoobat scuttled forward, straight for the panel which opened on the large cargo space and there waited, as if for them to open the portal and admit the hunter to its hunting territory.
Chapter XIII
OFF THE MAP
Across the lock of the panel was the seal set in place by Van Rycke before the spacer had lifted from Sargol. Under Dane’s inspection it showed no crack. To all evidence the hatch had not been opened since they left the perfumed planet. And yet the hunting Hoobat was sure that the invading pests were within.
It took only a second for Dane to commit an act which, if he could not defend it later, would blacklist him out of space. He twisted off the official seal which should remain there while the freighter was space borne.
With Ali’s help he shouldered aside the heavy sliding panel and they looked into the cargo space, now filled with the red wood from Sargol. The redwood! When he saw it Dane was struck with their stupidity. Aside from the Koros stones in the stone box, only the wood had come from the Salariki world. What if the pests had not been planted by I-S agents, but were natives of Sargol being brought in with the wood?
The men remained at the hatch to allow the Hoobat freedom in its hunt. And Sinbad crouched behind them, snarling and giving voice to a rumbling growl which was his negative opinion of the proceedings.
They were conscious of an odor—the sharp, unidentifiable scent Dane had noticed during the loading of the wood. It was not unpleasant—merely different. And it—or something—had an electrifying effect upon Queex. The blue hunter climbed with the aid of its claws to the top of the nearest pile of wood and there settled down. For a space it was apparently contemplating the area about it.
Then it raised its claws and began the scraping fiddle which once before had drawn its prey out of hiding. Oddly enough that dry rasp of sound had a quieting effect upon Sinbad and Dane felt the drag of the harness lessen as the cat moved, not toward escape, but to the scene of action, humping himself at last in the open panel, his round eyes fixed upon the Hoobat with a fascinated stare.
Scrape-scrape—the monotonous noise bit into the ears of the men, gnawed at their nerves.
“Ahhh—” Ali kept his voice to a whisper, but his hand jerked to draw their attention to the right at deck level. Dane saw that flicker along a log. The stowaway pest was now the same brilliant color as the wood, indistinguishable until it moved, which probably explained how it had come on board.
But that was only the first arrival. A second flash of movement and a third followed. Then the hunted remained stationary, able to resist for a period the insidious summoning of Queex. The Hoobat maintained an attitude of indifference, of being so wrapped in its music that nothing else existed. Rip whispered to Weeks:
“There’s one to the left—on the very end of that log. Can you net it?”
The small oiler slipped the coiled mesh through his calloused hands. He edged around Ali, keeping his eyes on the protuding protruding bump of red upon red which was his quarry.
“—two—three—four—five—” Ali was counting under his breath but Dane could not see that many. He was sure of only four, and those because he had seen them move.
The things were ringing in the pile of wood where the Hoobat fiddled, and two had ascended the first logs toward their doom. Weeks went down on one knee, ready to cast his net, when Dane had his first inspiration. He drew his sleep rod, easing it out of its holster, set the lever on “spray” and beamed it at three of those humps.
Rip seeing what he was doing, dropped a hand on Weeks’ shoulder, holding the oiler in check. A hump moved, slid down the rounded side of the log into the narrow aisle of deck between two piles of wood. It lay quiet, a bright scarlet blot against the gray.
Then Weeks did move, throwing his net over it and jerking the draw string tight, at the same time pulling the captive toward him over the deck. But, even as it came, the scarlet of the thing’s body was fast fading to an ashy pink and at last taking on a gray as dull as the metal on which it lay—the complete camouflage. Had they not had it enmeshed they might have lost it altogether, so well did it now blend with the surface.
The other two in the path of the ray had not lost their grip upon the logs, and the men could not advance to scoop them up. Not while there were others not affected, free to flee back into hiding. Weeks bound the net about the captive and looked to Rip for orders.
“Deep freeze,” the acting-commander of the Queen said succinctly. “Let me see it get out of that!”
Surely the cold of the deep freeze, united to the sleep ray, would keep the creature under control until they had a chance to study it. But, as Weeks passed Sinbad on his errand, the cat was so frantic to avoid him, that he reared up on his hind legs, almost turning a somersault, snarling and spitting until Weeks was up the ladder to the next level. It was very evident that the ship’s cat was having none of this pest.
They might have been invisible and their actions non-existent as far as Queex was concerned. For the Hoobat continued its siren concert. The lured became more reckless, mounting the logs to Queex’s post in sudden darts. Dane wondered how the Hoobat proposed handling four of the creatures at once. For, although the other two which had been in the path of the ray had not moved, he now counted four climbing.
“Stand by to ray—” that was Rip.
But it would have been interesting to see how Queex was prepared to handle the four. And, though Rip had given the order to stand by, he had not ordered the ray to be used. Was he, too, interested in that?
The first red projection was within a foot of the Hoobat now and its fellows had frozen as if to allow it the honor of battle with the feathered enemy. To all appearances Queex did not see it, but when it sprang with a whir of speed which would baffle a human, the Hoobat was ready and its claws, halting their rasp, met around the wasp-thin waist of the pest, speedily cutting it in two. Only this time the Hoobat made no move to unjoint and consume the victim. Instead it squatted in utter silence, as motionless as a tri-dee print.
The heavy lower half of the creature rolled down the pile of logs to the deck and there paled to the gray of its background. None of its kind appeared to be interested in its fate. The two which had been in the path of the ray, continued to be humps on the wood, the others faced the Hoobat.
But Rip was ready to waste no more time. “Ray them!” he snapped.
All three of their sleep rods sprayed the pile, catching in passing the Hoobat. Queex’s pop eyes closed, but it showed no other sign of falling under the spell of the beam.
Certain that all the creatures in sight were now relatively harmless, the three approached the logs. But it was necessary to get into touching distance before they could even make out the outlines of the nightmare things, so well did their protective coloring conceal them. Wearing gloves Ali detached the little monsters from their holds on the wood and put them for temporary safekeeping—during a transfer to the deep freeze—into the Hoobat’s cage. Queex, they decided to leave where it was for a space, to awaken and trap any survivor which had been too wary to emerge at the first siren song. As far as they could tell the Hoobat was their only possible protection against the pest and to leave it in the center of infection was the wisest course.
Having dumped the now metal colored catch into the freeze, they held a conference.
“No plague—” Weeks breathed a sigh of relief.
“No proof of that yet,” Ali caught him up short. “We have to prove it past any reasonable doubt.”
“And how are we going to do—?” Dane began when he saw what the other had brought in from Tau’s stores. A lancet and the upper half of the creature Queex had killed in the cargo hold.
The needle pointed front feet of the thing were curled up in its death throes and it was now a dirty white shade as if the ability to change color had been lost before it matched the cotton on which it lay. With the lancet Ali forced a claw away from the body. It was oozing the watery liquid which they had seen on the one in the hydro.
“I have an idea,” he said slowly, his eyes on the mangled creature rather than on his shipmates, “that we might have escaped being attacked because they sheered off from us. But if we were clawed we might take it too. Remember those marks on the throats and backs of the rest? That might be the entry point of this poison—if poison it is—”
Dane could see the end of that line of reasoning. Rip and Ali—they couldn’t be spared. The knowledge they had would bring the Queen to earth. But a Cargo-master was excess baggage when there was no reason for trade. It was his place to try out the truth of Ali’s surmise.
But while he thought another acted. Weeks leaned over and twitched the lancet out of Ali’s fingers. Then, before any of them could move, he thrust its contaminated point into the back of his hand.
“Don’t!”
Both Dane’s cry and Rip’s hand came too late. It had been done. And Weeks sat there, looking alone and frightened, studying the drop of blood which marked the dig of the surgeon’s keen knife. But when he spoke his voice sounded perfectly natural.
“Headache first, isn’t it?”
Only Ali was outwardly unaffected by what the little man had just done. “Just be sure you have a real one,” he warned with what Dane privately considered real callousness.
Weeks nodded. “Don’t let my imagination work,” he answered shrewdly. “I know. It has to be real. How long do you suppose?”
“We don’t know,” Rip sounded tired, beaten. “Meanwhile,” he got to his feet, “we’d better set a course home—”
“Home,” Weeks repeated. To him Terra was not his own home—he had been born in the polar swamps of Venus. But to All Solarians—no matter which planet had nurtured them—Terra was home.
“You,” Rip’s big hand fell gently on the little oiler’s shoulder, “stay here with Thorson—”
“No,” Weeks shook his head. “Unless I black out, I’m riding station in the engine room. Maybe the bug won’t work on me anyway.”
And because he had done what he had done they could not deny him the right to ride his station as long as he could during the grueling hours to come.
Dane visited the cargo hold once more. To be greeted by an irate scream which assured him that Queex was again awake and on guard. Although the Hoobat was ready enough to give tongue, it still squatted in its chosen position on top of the log stack and he did not try to dislodge it. Perhaps with Queex planted in the enemies’ territory they would have nothing to fear from any pests not now confined in the deep freeze.
Rip set his course for Terra—for that plague spot on their native world where they might hide out the Queen until they could prove their point—that the spacer was not a disease ridden ship to be feared. He kept to the control cabin, shifting only between the Astrogator’s and the pilot’s station. Upon him alone rested the responsibility of bringing in the ship along a vector which crossed no well traveled space lane where the Patrol might challenge them. Dane rode out the orbiting in the Com-tech’s seat, listening in for the first warning of danger—that they had been detected.
The mechanical repetition of their list of crimes was now stale news and largely off-ether. And from all traces he could pick up, they were lost as far as the authorities were concerned. On the other hand, the Patrol might indeed be as far knowing as its propaganda stated and the Queen was running headlong into a trap. Only they had no choice in the matter.
It was the ship’s inter-com bringing Ali’s voice from the engine room which broke the concentration in the control cabin.
“Weeks’ down!”
Rip barked into the mike. “How bad?”
“He hasn’t blacked out yet. The pains in his head are pretty bad and his hand is swelling—”
“He’s given us our proof. Tell him to report off—”
But the disembodied voice which answered that was Weeks’.
“I haven’t got it as bad as the others. I’ll ride this out.”
Rip shook his head. But short-handed as they were he could not argue Weeks away from his post if the man insisted upon staying. He had other, and for the time being, more important matters before him.
How long they sweated out that descent upon their native world Dane could never afterwards have testified. He only knew that hours must have passed, until he thought groggily that he could not remember a time he was not glued in the seat which had been Tang’s, the earphones pressing against his sweating skull, his fatigue-drugged mind being held with difficulty to the duty at hand.
Sometime during that haze they made their landing. He had a dim memory of Rip sprawled across the pilot’s control board and then utter exhaustion claimed him also and the darkness closed in. When he roused it was to look about a cabin tilted to one side. Rip was still slumped in a muscle cramping posture, breathing heavily. Dane bit out a forceful word born of twinges of his own, and then snapped on the visa-plate.
For a long moment he was sure that he was not yet awake. And then, as his dazed mind supplied names for what he saw, he knew that Rip had failed. Far from being in the center—or at least well within the perimeter of the dread Big Burn—they must have landed in some civic park or national forest. For the massed green outside, the bright flowers, the bird he sighted as a brilliant flash of wind coasting color—those were not to be found in the twisted horror left by man’s last attempt to impress his will upon his resisting kind.
Well, it had been a good try, but there was no use expecting luck to ride their fins all the way, and they had had more than their share in the E-Stat affair. How long would it be before the Law arrived to collect them? Would they have time to state their case?
The faint hope that they might aroused him. He reached for the com key and a second later tore the headphones from his appalled ears. The crackle of static he knew—and the numerous strange noises which broke in upon the lanes of communication in space—but this solid, paralyzing roar was something totally new—new, and frightening.
And because it was new and he could not account for it, he turned back to regard the scene on the viewer with a more critical eye. The foliage which grew in riotous profusion was green right enough, and Terra green into the bargain—there was no mistaking that. But—Dane caught at the edge of Com-unit for support. But—What was that liver-red blossom which had just reached out to engulf a small flying thing?
Feverishly he tried to remember the little natural history he knew. Sure that what he had just witnessed was unnatural—un-Terran—and to be suspect!
He started the spy lens on its slow revolution in the Queen’s nose, to get a full picture of their immediate surroundings. It was tilted at an angle—apparently they had not made a fin-point landing this time—and sometimes it merely reflected slices of sky. But when it swept earthward he saw enough to make him believe that wherever the spacer had set down it was not on the Terra he knew.
Subconsciously he had expected the Big Burn to be barren land—curdled rock with rivers of frozen quartz, substances boiled up through the crust of the planet by the action of the atomic explosives. That was the way it had been on Limbo—on the other “burned-off” worlds they had discovered where those who had preceded mankind into the Galaxy—the mysterious, long vanished “Forerunners”—had fought their grim and totally annihilating wars.
But it would seem that the Big Burn was altogether different—at least here it was. There was no rock sterile of life outside—in fact there would appear to be too much life. What Dane could sight on his limited field of vision was a teeming jungle. And the thrill of that discovery almost made him forget their present circumstances. He was still staring bemused at the screen when Rip muttered, turned his head on his folded arms and opened his sunken eyes:
“Did we make it?” he asked dully.
Dane, not taking his eyes from that fascinating scene without, answered: “You brought us down. But I don’t know where—”
“Unless our instruments were ‘way off, we’re near to the heart of the Burn.”
“Some heart!”
“What does it look like?” Rip sounded too tired to cross the cabin and see for himself. “Barren as Limbo?”
“Hardly! Rip, did you ever see a tomato as big as a melon—At least it looks like a tomato,” Dane halted the spy lens as it focused upon this new phenomena.
“A what?” There was a note of concern in Shannon’s voice. “What’s the matter with you, Dane?”
“Come and see,” Dane willingly yielded his place to Rip but he did not step out of range of the screen. Surely that did have the likeness to a good, old fashioned earth-side tomato—but it was melon size and it hung from a bush which was close to a ten foot tree!
Rip stumbled across to drop into the Com-tech’s place. But his expression of worry changed to one of simple astonishment as he saw that picture.
“Where are we?”
“You name it,” Dane had had longer to adjust, the excitement of an explorer sighting virgin territory worked in his veins, banishing fatigue. “It must be the Big Burn!”
“But,” Rip shook his head slowly as if with that gesture to deny the evidence before his eyes, “that country’s all bare rock. I’ve seen pictures—”
“Of the outer rim,” Dane corrected, having already solved that problem for himself. “This must be farther in than any survey ship ever came. Great Spirit of Outer Space, what has happened here?”
Rip had enough technical training to know how to get part of the answer. He leaned halfway across the com, and was able to flick down a lever with the very tip of his longest finger. Instantly the cabin was filled with a clicking so loud as to make an almost continuous drone of sound.
Dane knew that danger signal, he didn’t need Rip’s words to underline it for him.
“That’s what’s happened. This country is pile ‘hot’ out there!”
Chapter XIV
SPECIAL MISSION
That click, the dial beneath the counter, warned them that they were as cut off from the luxuriance outside as if they were viewing a scene on Mars or Sargol from their present position. To go beyond the shielding walls of the spacer into that riotous green world would sentence them to death as surely as if the Patrol was without, with a flamer trained on their hatch. There was no escape from that radiation—it would be in the air one breathed, strike though one’s skin. And yet the wilderness flourished and beckoned.
“Mutations—” Rip mused. “Space, Tau’d go wild if he could see it!”
And that mention of the Medic brought them back to the problem which had earthed them. Dane leaned back against the slanting wall of the cabin.
“We have to have a Medic—”
Rip nodded without looking away from the screen.
“Can one of the flitters be shielded?” The Cargo-apprentice persisted.
“That’s a thought! Ali should know—” Rip reached for the inter-com mike. “Engines!”
“So you are alive?” Ali’s voice had a bite in it. “About time you’re contacting. Where are we? Besides being lopsided from a recruit’s scrambled set-down, I mean.”
“In the Big Burn. Come top-side. Wait—how’s Weeks?”
“He has a devil’s own headache, but he hasn’t blacked out yet. Looks like his immunity holds in part. I’ve sent him bunkside for a while with a couple of pain pills. So we’ve made it—”
He must have left to join them for when Rip answered: “After a fashion,” into the mike there was no reply.
And the clang of his boot plates on the ladder heralded his arrival at their post. There was an interval for him to view the outer world and accept the verdict of the counter and then Rip voiced Dane’s question:
“Can we shield one of the flitters well enough to cross that? I can’t take the Queen up and earth her again—”
“I know you can’t!” the acting-engineer cut in. “Maybe you could get her off world, but you’ll come close to blasting out when you try for another landing. Fuel doesn’t go on forever—though some of you space jockeys seem to think it does. The flitter? Well, we’ve some spare rocket linings. But it’s going to be a job and a half to get those beaten out and reassembled. And, frankly, the space whirly one who flies her had better be suited and praying loudly when he takes off. We can always try—” He was frowning, already busied with the problem which was one for his department.
So with intervals of snatched sleep, hurried meals and the time which must be given to tending their unconscious charges, Rip and Dane became only hands to be directed by Ali’s brain and garnered knowledge. Weeks slept off the worst of his pain and, though he complained of weakness, he tottered back on duty to help.
The flitter—an air sled intended to hold three men and supplies for exploring trips on strange-worlds—was first stripped of all non-essentials until what remained was not much more than the pilot’s seat and the motor. Then they labored to build up a shielding of the tough radiation dulling alloy which was used to line rocket tubes. And they could only praise the foresight of Stotz who carried such a full supply of spare parts and tools. It was a task over which they often despaired, and Ali improvised frantically, performing weird adjustments of engineering structure. He was still unsatisfied when they had done.
“She’ll fly,” he admitted. “And she’s the best we can do. But it’ll depend a lot on how far she has to go over ‘hot’ country. Which way do we head her?”
Rip had been busy with a map of Terra—a small thing he had discovered in one of the travel recordings carried for crew entertainment.
“The Big Burn covers three quarters of this continent. There’s no use going north—the devastated area extends into the arctic regions. I’d say west—there’s some fringe settlements on the sea coast and we need to contact a frontier territory. Now do we have it straight—? I take the flitter, get a Medic and bring him back?”
Dane cut in at that point. “Correct course! You stay here. If the Queen has to lift, you’re the only one who can take her off world. And the same’s true for Ali. I can’t ride out a blast-off in either the pilot’s or the engineer’s seat. And Weeks is on the sick list. So I’m elected to do the Medic hunting—”
They were forced to agree to that. He was no hero, Dane thought, as he gave a last glance about his cabin early the next morning. The small cubby, utilitarian and bare as it was, never looked more inviting or secure. No, no hero, it was merely a matter of common sense. And although his imagination—that deeply hidden imagination with which few of his fellows credited him—shrank from the ordeal ahead, he had not the slightest intention of allowing that to deter him.
The space suit, which had been bulky and clumsy enough on the E-Stat asteroid under limited gravity, was almost twice as poorly adapted to progression on earth. But he climbed into it with Rip’s aid, while Ali lashed a second suit under the seat—ready to encase the man Dane must bring back with him. Before he closed the helmet, Rip had one last order to give, along with an unexpected piece of equipment. And, when Dane saw that, he knew just how desperate Shannon considered their situation to be. For only on life or death terms would the Astrogator-apprentice have used Jellico’s private key, opened the forbidden arms cabinet, and withdrawn that blaster.
“If you need it—use this—” Rip’s face was very sober.
Ali arose from fastening the extra suit in place. “It’s ready—”
He came back into the corridor and Dane clanked out in his place, settling himself behind the controls. When they saw him there, the inner hatch closed and he was alone in the bay.
With tantalizing slowness the outer wall of the spacer slid back. His hands blundering with the metallic claws of the gloves, Dane buckled two safety belts about him. Then the skeleton flitter moved to the left—out into the glare of the early day, a light too bright, even through the shielded viewplates of his helmet.
For some dangerous moments the machine creaked out and down on the landing cranes, the warning counter on its control panel going into a mad whirl of color as it tried to record the radiation. There came a jar as it touched the scorched earth at the foot of the Queen’s fins.
Dane pressed the release and watched the lines whip up and the hatch above snap shut. Then he opened the controls. He used too much energy and shot into the air, tearing a wide gap through what was luckily a thin screen of the matted foliage, before he gained complete mastery.
Then he was able to level out and bore westward, the rising sun at his back, the sea of deadly green beneath him, and somewhere far ahead the faint promise of clean, radiation free land holding the help they needed.
Mile after mile of the green jungle swept under the flitter, and the flash of the counter’s light continued to record a land unfit for mankind. Even with the equipment used on distant worlds to protect what spacemen had come to recognize was a reasonably tough human frame, no ground force could hope to explore that wilderness in person. And flying above it, as well insulated as he was, Dane knew that he could be dangerously exposed. If the contaminated territory extended more than a thousand miles, his danger was no longer problematical—it was an established fact.
He had only the vague directions from the scrap of map Rip had uncovered. To the west—he had no idea how far away—there stretched a length of coastline, far enough from the radiation blasted area to allow small settlements. For generations the population of Terra, decimated by the atomic wars, and then drained by first system and then Galactic exploration and colonization, had been decreasing. But within the past hundred years it was again on the upswing. Men retiring from space were returning to their native planet to live out their remaining years. The descendants of far-flung colonists, coming home on visits, found the sparsely populated mother world appealed to some basic instinct so that they remained. And now the settlements of mankind were on the march, spreading out from the well established sections which had not been blighted by ancient wars.
It was mid-afternoon when Dane noted that the green carpet beneath the flitter was displaying holes—that small breaks in the vegetation became sizable stretches of rocky waste. He kept one eye on the counter and what, when he left the spacer, had been an almost steady beam of warning light was now a well defined succession of blinks. The land below was cooling off—perhaps he had passed the worst of the journey. But in that passing how much had he and the flitter become contaminated? Ali had devised a method of protection for the empty suit the Medic would wear—had that held? There were an alarming number of dark ifs in the immediate future.
The mutant growths were now only thin patches of stunted and yellowish green. Had man penetrated only this far into the Burn, the knowledge of what lay beyond would be totally false. This effect of dreary waste might well discourage exploration.
Now the blink of the counter was deliberate, with whole seconds of pause between the flashes. Cooling off—? It was getting cold fast! He wished that he had a com-unit. Because of the interference in the Burn he had left it behind—but with one he might be able now to locate some settlement. All that remained was to find the seashore and, with it as a guide, flit south towards the center of modern civilization.
He laid no plans of action—this whole exploit must depend upon improvisation. And, as a Free Trader, spur-of-the-moment action was a necessary way of life. On the frontier Rim of the Galaxy, where the independent spacers traced the star trails, fast thinking and the ability to change plans on an instant were as important as skill in aiming a blaster. And it was very often proven that the tongue—and the brain behind it—were more deadly than a flamer.
The sun was in Dane’s face now and he caught sight of patches of uncontaminated earth with honest vegetation—in place of the “hot” jungle now miles behind. That night he camped out on the edge of rough pasturage where the counter no longer flashed its warning and he was able to shed the suit and sleep under the stars with the fresh air of early summer against his cheek and the smell of honest growing things replacing the dry scent of the spacer and the languorous perfumes of Sargol.
He lay on his back, flat against the earth of which he was truly a part, staring up into the dark, inverted bowl of the heavens. It was so hard to connect those distant points of icy light making the well remembered patterns overhead with the suns whose rays had added to the brown stain on his skin. Sargol’s sun—the one which gave such limited light to dead Limbo—the sun under which Naxos, his first Galactic port, grew its food. He could not pick them out—was not even sure that any could be sighted from Terra. Strange suns, red, orange, blue green, white—yet here all looked alike—points of glitter.
Tomorrow at dawn he must go on. He turned his head away from the sky and grass, green Terran grass, was soft beneath his cheek. Yet unless he was successful tomorrow or the next day—he might never have the right to feel that grass again. Resolutely Dane willed that thought out of his mind, tried to fix upon something more lulling which would bring with it the sleep he must have before he went on. And in the end he did sleep, deeply, dreamlessly, as if the touch of Terra’s soil was in itself the sedative his tautly strung nerves needed.
It was before sunrise that he awoke, stiff, and chilled. The dryness of pre-dawn gave partial light and somewhere a bird was twittering. There had been birds—or things whose far off ancestors had been birds—in the “hot” forest. Did they also sing to greet the dawn?
Dane went over the flitter with his small counter and was relieved to find that they had done a good job of shielding under Ali’s supervision. Once the suit he had worn was stored, he could sit at the controls without danger and in comfort. And it was good to be free of that metal prison.
This time he took to the air with ease, the salt taste of food concentrate on his tongue as he sucked a cube. And his confidence arose with the flitter. This was the day, somehow he knew it. He was going to find what he sought.
It was less than two hours after sunrise that he did so. A village which was a cluster of perhaps fifty or so house units strung along into the land. He skimmed across it and brought the flitter down in a rock cliff walled sand pocket with surf booming some yards away, where he would be reasonably sure of safe hiding.
All right, he had found a village. Now what? A Medic—A stranger appearing on the lane which served the town, a stranger in a distinctive uniform of Trade, would only incite conjecture and betrayal. He had to plan now—
Dane unsealed his tunic. He should, by rights, shed his space boots too. But perhaps he could use those to color his story. He thrust the blaster into hiding at his waist. A rip or two in his undertunic, a shallow cut from his bush knife allowed to bleed messily. He could not see himself to judge the general effect, but had to hope it was the right one.
His chance to test his acting powers came sooner than he had anticipated. Luckily he had climbed out of the hidden cove before he was spotted by the boy who came whistling along the path, a fishing pole over his shoulder, a basket swinging from his hand. Dane assumed an expression which he thought would suggest fatigue, pain, and bewilderment and lurched forward as if, in sighting the oncoming boy, he had also sighted hope.
“Help—!” Perhaps it was excitement which gave his utterance that convincing croak.
Rod and basket fell to the ground as the boy, after one astounded stare, ran forward.
“What’s the matter!” His eyes were on those space boots and he added a “sir” which had the ring of hero worship.
“Escape boat—” Dane waved toward the sea’s general direction. “Medic—must get to Medic—”
“Yes, sir,” the boy’s basic Terran sounded good. “Can you walk if I help you?”
Dane managed a weak nod, but contrived that he did not lean too heavily on his avidly helpful guide.
“The Medic’s my father, sir. We’re right down this slope—third house. And father hasn’t left—he’s supposed to go on a northern inspection tour today—”
Dane felt a stab of distaste for the role being forced upon him. When he had visualized the Medic he must abduct to serve the Queen in her need, he had not expected to have to kidnap a family man. Only the knowledge that he did have the extra suit, and that he had made the outward trip without dangerous exposure, bolstered up his determination to see the plan through.
When they came out at the end of the single long lane which tied the houses of the village together, Dane was puzzled to see the place so deserted. But, since it was not within his role of dazed sufferer to ask questions, he did not do so. It was his young guide who volunteered the information he wanted.
“Most everyone is out with the fleet. There’s a run of red-backs—”
Dane understood. Within recent times the “red-backs” of the north had become a desirable luxury item for Terran tables. If a school of them were to be found in the vicinity no wonder this village was now deserted as its fleet went out to garner in the elusive but highly succulent fish.
“In here, sir—” Dane found himself being led to a house on the right. “Are you in Trade—?”
He suppressed a start, shedding his uniform tunic had not done much in the way of disguise. It would be nice, he thought a little bitterly, if he could flash an I-S badge now to completely confuse the issue. But he answered with the partial truth and did not enlarge.
“Yes—”
The boy was flushed with excitement. “I’m trying for Trade Service Medic,” he confided. “Passed the Directive exam last month. But I still have to go up for Prelim psycho—”
Dane had a flash of memory. Not too many months before not the Prelim psycho, but the big machine at the Assignment Center had decided his own future arbitrarily, fitting him into the crew of the Solar Queen as the ship where his abilities, knowledge and potentialities could best work to the good of the Service. At the time he had resented, had even been slightly ashamed of being relegated to a Free Trading spacer while Artur Sands and other classmates from the Pool had walked off with Company assignments. Now he knew that he would not trade the smallest and most rusty bolt from the solar Queen for the newest scout ship in I-S or Combine registry. And this boy from the frontier village might be himself as he was five years earlier. Though he had never known a real home or family, scrapping into the Pool from one of the children’s Depots.
“Good luck!” He meant that and the boy’s flush deepened.
“Thank you, sir. Around here—Father’s treatment room has this other door—”
Dane allowed himself to be helped into the treatment room and sat down in a chair while the boy hurried off to locate the Medic. The Trader’s hand went to the butt of his concealed blaster. It was a job he had to do—one he had volunteered for—and there was no backing out. But his mouth had a wry twist as he drew out the blaster and made ready to point it at the inner door. Or—his mind leaped to another idea—could he get the Medic safely out of the village? A story about another man badly injured—perhaps pinned in the wreckage of an escape boat—He could try it. He thrust the blaster back inside his torn undertunic, hoping the bulge would pass unnoticed.
“My son says—”
Dane looked up. The man who came through the inner door was in early middle age, thin, wiry, with a hard, fined-down look about him. He could almost be Tau’s elder brother. He crossed the room with a brisk stride and came to stand over Dane, his hand reaching to pull aside the bloody cloth covering the Trader’s breast. But Dane fended off that examination.
“My partner,” he said. “Back there—pinned in—” he jerked his hand southward. “Needs help—”
The Medic frowned. “Most of the men are out with the fleet. Jorge,” he spoke to the boy who had followed him, “go and get Lex and Hartog. Here,” he tried to push Dane back into the chair as the Trader got up, “let me look at that cut—”
Dane shook his head. “No time now, sir. My partner’s hurt bad. Can you come?”
“Certainly.” The Medic reached for the emergency kit on the shelf behind him. “You able to make it?”
“Yes,” Dane was exultant. It was going to work! He could toll the Medic away from the village. Once out among the rocks on the shoreline he could pull the blaster and herd the man to the flitter. His luck was going to hold after all!
Fortunately the path out of the straggling town was a twisted one and in a very short space they were hidden from view. Dane paused as if the pace was too much for an injured man. The Medic put out a steadying hand, only to drop it quickly when he saw the weapon which had appeared in Dane’s grip.
“What—?” His mouth snapped shut, his jaw tightened.
“You will march ahead of me,” Dane’s low voice was steady. “Beyond that rock spur to the left you’ll find a place where it is possible to climb down to sea level. Do it!”
“I suppose I shouldn’t ask why?”
“Not now. We haven’t much time. Get moving!”
The Medic mastered his surprise and without further protest obeyed orders. It was only when they were standing by the flitter and he saw the suits that his eyes widened and he said:
“You must be—or mad—” The Medic stared at Dane for a long moment and then shook his head. “What is it? A plague ship?”
Dane bit his lip. The other was too astute. But he did not ask why or how he had been able to guess so shrewdly. Instead he gestured to the suit Ali had lashed beneath the seat in the flitter. “Get into that and be quick about it!”
The Medic rubbed his hand across his jaw. “I think that you might just be desperate enough to use that thing you’re brandishing about so melodramatically if I don’t,” he remarked in a calmly conversational tone.
“I won’t kill. But a blaster burn—”
“Can be pretty painful. Yes, I know that, young man. And,” suddenly he shrugged, put down his kit and started donning the suit. “I wouldn’t put it past you to knock me out and load me aboard if I did say no. All right—”
Suited, he took his place on the seat as Dane directed, and then the Trader followed the additional precaution of lashing the Medic’s metal encased arms to his body before he climbed into his own protective covering. Now they could only communicate by sight through the vision plates of their helmets.
Dane triggered the controls and they arose out of the sand and rock hollow just as a party of two men and a boy came hurrying along the top of the cliff—Jorge and the rescuers arriving too late. The flitter spiraled up into the sunlight and Dane wondered how long it would be before this outrage was reported to the nearest Plant Police base. But would any Police cruiser have the hardihood to follow him into the Big Burn? He hoped that the radiation would hold them back.
There was no navigation to be done. The flitter’s “memory” should deposit them at the Queen. Dane wondered at what his silent companion was now thinking. The Medic had accepted his kidnapping with such docility that the very ease of their departure began to bother Dane. Was the other expecting a trailer? Had exploration into the Big Burn from the seaside villages been more extensive than reported officially?
He stepped up the power of the flitter to the top notch and saw with some relief that the ground beneath them was now the rocky waste bordering the devastated area. The metal encased figure that shared his seat had not moved, but now the bubble head turned as if the Medic were intent upon the ground flowing beneath them.
The flicker of the counter began and Dane realized that nightfall would find them still air borne. But so far he had not been aware of any pursuit. Again he wished he had the use of a com—only here the radiation would blanket sound with that continuous roar.
Patches of the radiation vegetation showed now and something in the lines of the Medic’s tense figure suggested that these were new to him. Afternoon waned as the patches united, spread into the beginning of the jungle as the counter was once more an almost steady light. When evening closed in they were not caught in darkness—for below trees, looping vines, brush, had a pale, evil glow of their own, proclaiming their toxicity with bluish halos. Sometimes pockets of these made a core of light which pulsed, sending warning fingers at the flitter which sped across it.
The hour was close on midnight before Dane sighted the other light, the pink-red of which winked through the ghastly blue-white with a natural and comforting promise, even though it had been meant for an entirely different purpose. The Queen had earthed with her distress lights on and no one had remembered to snap them off. Now they acted as a beacon to draw the flitter to its berth.
Dane brought the stripped flyer down on the fused ground as close to the spot from which he had taken off as he could remember. Now—if those on the spacer would only move fast enough—!
But he need not have worried, his arrival had been anticipated. Above, the rounded side of the spacer bulged as the hatch opened. Lines swung down to fasten their magnetic clamps on the flitter. Then once more they were air borne, swinging up to be warped into the side of the ship. As the outer port of the flitter berth closed Dane reached over and pulled loose the lashing which immobilized his companion. The Medic stood up, a little awkwardly as might any man who wore space armor the first time.
The inner hatch now opened and Dane waved his captive into the small section which must serve them as a decontamination space. Free at last of the suits, they went through one more improvised hatch to the main corridor of the Queen where Rip and Ali stood waiting, their weary faces lighting as they saw the Medic.
It was the latter who spoke first. “This is a plague ship—”
Rip shook his head. “It is not, sir. And you’re the one who is going to help us prove that.”
The man leaned back against the wall, his face expressionless. “You take a rather tough way of trying to get help.”
“It was the only way left us. I’ll be frank,” Rip continued, “we’re Patrol Posted.”
The Medic’s shrewd eyes went from one drawn young face to the next. “You don’t look like desperate criminals,” was his comment. “This your full crew?”
“All the rest are your concern. That is—if you will take the job—” Rip’s shoulders slumped a little.
“You haven’t left me much choice, have you? If there is illness on board, I’m under the Oath—whether you are Patrol Posted or not. What’s the trouble?”
They got him down to Tau’s laboratory and told him their story. From a slight incredulity his expression changed to an alert interest and he demanded to see, first the patients and then the pests now immured in a deep freeze. Sometime in the middle of this, Dane, overcome by fatigue which was partly relief from tension, sought his cabin and the bunk from which he wearily disposed Sinbad, only to have the purring cat crawl back once more when he had lain down.
And when he awoke, renewed in body and spirit, it was in a new Queen, a ship in which hope and confidence now ruled.
“Hovan’s already got it!” Rip told him exultantly. “It’s that poison from the little devils’ claws right enough! A narcotic—produces some of the affects of deep sleep. In fact—it may have a medical use. He’s excited about it—”
“All right,” Dane waved aside information which under other circumstances, promising as it did a chance for future trade, would have engrossed him, to ask a question which at the moment seemed far more to the point. “Can he get our men back on their feet?”
A little of Rip’s exuberance faded. “Not right away. He’s given them all shots. But he thinks they’ll have to sleep it off.”
“And we have no idea how long that is going to take,” Ali contributed.
Time—for the first time in days Dane was struck by that—time! Because of his training a fact he had forgotten in the past weeks of worry now came to mind—their contract with the storm priests. Even if they were able to clear themselves of the plague charge, even if the rest of the crew were speedily restored to health, he was sure that they could not hope to return to Sargol with the promised cargo, the pay for which was already on board the Queen. They would have broken their pledge and there could be no hope of holding to their trading rights on that world—if they were not blacklisted for breaking contract into the bargain. I-S would be able to move in and clean up and probably they could never prove that the Company was behind their misfortunes—though the men of the Queen would always be convinced that that fact was the truth.
“We’re going to break contract—” he said aloud and that shook the other two, knocked some of their assurance out of them.
“How about that?” Rip asked Ali.
The acting-engineer nodded. “We have fuel enough to lift from here and maybe set down at Terraport—if we take it careful and cut vectors. We can’t lift from there without refueling—and of course the Patrol are going to sit on their hands while we do that—with us Posted! No, put out of your heads any plan for getting back to Sargol within the time limit. Thorson’s right—that way we’re flamed out!”
Rip slumped in his seat. “So the Eysies can take over after all?”
“As I see it,” Dane cut in, “let’s just take one thing at a time. We may have to argue a broken contract out before the Board. But first we have to get off the Posted hook with the Patrol. Have you any idea about how we are going to handle that?”
“Hovan’s on our side. In fact if we let him have the bugs to play with he’ll back us all the way. He can swear us a clean bill of health before the Medic Control Center.”
“How much will that count after we’ve broken all their regs?” Ali wanted to know. “If we surrender now we’re not going to have much chance, no matter what Hovan does or does not swear to. Hovan’s a frontier Medic—I won’t say that he’s not a member in good standing of their association—but he doesn’t have top star rating. And with the Eysies and the Patrol on our necks, we’ll need more than one medic’s word—”
But Rip looked from the pessimistic Kamil to Dane. Now he asked a question which was more than half statement.
“You’ve thought of something?”
“I’ve remembered something,” the Cargo-apprentice corrected. “Recall the trick Van pulled on Limbo when the Patrol was trying to ease us out of our rights there after they took over the outlaw hold?”
Ali was impatient. “He threatened to talk to the Video people and broadcast—tell everyone about the ships wrecked by the Forerunner installation and left lying about full of treasure. But what has that to do with us now—? We bargained away our rights on Limbo for the rest of Cam’s monopoly on Sargol—not that it’s done us much good—”
“The Video,” Dane fastened on the important point, “Van threatened publicity which would embarrass the Patrol and he was legally within his rights. We’re outside the law now—but publicity might help again. How many earth-side people know of the unwritten law about open war on plague ships? How many who aren’t spacemen know that we could be legally pushed into the sun and fried without any chance to prove we’re innocent of carrying a new disease? If we could talk loud and clear to the people at large maybe we’d have a chance for a real hearing—”
“Right from the Terraport broadcast station, I suppose?” Ali taunted.
“Why not?”
There was silence in the cabin as the other two chewed upon that and he broke it again:
“We set down here when it had never been done before.”
With one brown forefinger Rip traced some pattern known only to himself on the top of the table. Ali stared at the opposite wall as if it were a bank of machinery he must master.
“It just might be whirly enough to work—” Kamil commented softly. “Or maybe we’ve been spaced too long and the Whisperers have been chattering into our ears. What about it, Rip, could you set us down close enough to Center Block there?”
“We can try anything once. But we might crash the old girl bringing her in. There’s that apron between the Companies’ Launching cradles and the Center—. It’s clear there and we could give an E signal coming down which would make them stay rid of it. But I won’t try it except as a last resort.”
Dane noticed that after that discouraging statement Rip made straight for Jellico’s record tapes and routed out the one which dealt with Terraport and the landing instructions for that metropolis of the star ships. To land unbidden there would certainly bring them publicity—and to get the Video broadcast and tell their story would grant them not only world wide, but system wide hearing. News from Terraport was broadcast on every channel every hour of the day and night and not a single viewer could miss their appeal.
But first there was Hovan to be consulted. Would he be willing to back them with his professional knowledge and assurance? Or would their high-handed method of recruiting his services operate against them now? They decided to let Rip ask such questions of the Medic.
“So you’re going to set us down in the center of the big jump-off?” was his first comment, as the acting-Captain of the Queen stated their case. “Then you want me to fire my rockets to certify you are harmless. You don’t ask for very much, do you, son?”
Rip spread his hands. “I can understand how it looks to you, sir. We grabbed you and brought you here by force. We can’t make you testify for us if you decide not to—”
“Can’t you?” The Medic cocked an eyebrow at him. “What about this bully boy of yours with his little blaster? He could herd me right up to the telecast, couldn’t he? There’s a lot of persuasion in one of those nasty little arms. On the other hand, I’ve a son who’s set on taking out on one of these tin pots to go star hunting. If I handed you over to the Patrol he might make some remarks to me in private. You may be Posted, but you don’t look like very hardened criminals to me. It seems that you’ve been handed a bad situation and handled it as best you know. And I’m willing to ride along the rest of the way on your tail blast. Let me see how many pieces you land us in at Terraport and I’ll give you my final answer. If luck holds we may have a couple more of your crew present by that time, also—”
They had had no indication that the Queen had been located, that any posse hunting the kidnapped Medic had followed them into the Big Burn. And they could only hope that they would continue to remain unsighted as they upped-ship once more and cruised into a regular traffic lane for earthing at the port. It would be a chancy thing and Ali and Rip spent hours checking the mechanics of that flight, while Dane and the recovering Weeks worked with Hovan in an effort to restore the sleeping crew.
After three visits to the hold and the discovery that the Hoobat had uncovered no more of the pests, Dane caged the angry blue horror and returned it to its usual stand in Jellico’s cabin, certain that the ship was clean for Sinbad now confidently prowled the corridors and went into every cabin of storage space Dane opened for him.
And on the morning of the day they had planned for take-off, Hovan at last had a definite response to his treatment. Craig Tau roused, stared dazedly around, and asked a vague question. The fact he immediately relapsed once more into semi-coma did not discourage the other Medic. Progress had been made and he was now sure that he knew the proper treatment.
They strapped down at zero hour and blasted out of the weird green wilderness they had not dared to explore, lifting into the arch of the sky, depending upon Rip’s knowledge to put them safely down again.
Dane once more rode out the take-off at the com-unit, waiting for the blast of radiation born static to fade so that he could catch any broadcast.
“—turned back last night. The high level of radiation makes it almost certain that the outlaws could not have headed into the dangerous central portion. Search is now spreading north. Authorities are inclined to believe that this last outrage may be a clew to the vanished ‘Solar Queen,’ a plague ship, warned off and Patrol Posted after her crew plundered an E-Stat belonging to the Inter-Solar Corporation. Anyone having any information concerning this ship—or any strange spacer—report at once to the nearest Terrapolice or Patrol station. Do not take chances—report any contact at once to the nearest Terrapolice or Patrol station!”
“That’s putting it strongly,” Dane commented as he relayed the message. “Good as giving orders for us to be flamed down at sight—”
“Well, if we set down in the right spot,” Rip replied, “they can’t flame us out without blasting the larger part of Terraport field with us. And I don’t think they are going to do that in a hurry.”
Dane hoped Shannon was correct in that belief. It would be more chancy than landing at the E-Stat or in the Big Burn—to gauge it just right and put them down on the Terraport apron where they could not be flamed out without destroying too much, where their very position would give them a bargaining point, was going to be a top star job. If Rip could only pull it off!
He could not evaluate the niceties of that flight, he did not understand all Rip was doing. But he did know enough to remain quietly in his place, ask no questions, and await results with a dry mouth and a wildly beating heart. There came a moment when Rip glanced up at him, one hand poised over the control board. The pilot’s voice came tersely, thin and queer:
“Pray it out, Dane—here we go!”
Dane heard the shrill of a riding beam, so tearing he had to move his earphones. They must be almost on top of the control tower to get it like that! Rip was planning on a set down where the Queen would block things neatly. He brought his own fingers down on the E-E-Red button to give the last and most powerful warning. That, to be used only when a ship landing was out of control, should clear the ground below. They could only pray it would vacate the port they were still far from seeing.
“Make it a fin-point, Rip,” he couldn’t repress that one bit of advice. And was glad he had given it when he saw a ghost grin tug for a moment at Rip’s full lips.
“Good enough for a check-ride?”
They were riding her flaming jets down as they would on a strange world. Below the port must be wild. Dane counted off the seconds. Two—three—four—five—just a few more and they would be too low to intercept—without endangering innocent coasters and groundhuggers. When the last minute during which they were still vulnerable passed, he gave a sigh of relief. That was one more point on their side. In the earphones was a crackle of frantic questions, a gabble of orders screaming at him. Let them rave, they’d know soon enough what it was all about.
Oddly enough, in spite of the tension which must have boiled within him, Rip brought them in with a perfect four fin-point landing—one which, under the circumstances, must win him the respect of master star-star pilots from the Rim. Though Dane doubted whether if they lost, that skill would bring Shannon anything but a long term in the moon mines. The actual jar of their landing contact was mostly absorbed by the webbing of their shock seats and they were on their feet, ready to move almost at once.
Like the team they had come to be the four active members of the crew went into action. Ali and Weeks were waiting by an inner hatch, Medic Hovan with them. The Engineer-apprentice was bulky in a space suit, and two more of the unwieldy body coverings waited beside him for Rip and Dane. With fingers which were inclined to act like thumbs they were sealed into what would provide some protection against any blaster or sleep ray. Then with Hovan, conspicuously wearing no such armor, they climbed into one of the ship’s crawlers.
Weeks activated the outer hatch and the crane lines plucked the small vehicle out of the Queen, swinging it dizzily down to the blast scored apron.
“Make for the tower—” Rip’s voice was thin in the helmet coms.
Dane at the controls of the crawler pulled on as Ali cast off the lines which anchored them to the spacer.
Through the bubble helmet he could see the frenzied activity in the aroused port. An ant hill into which some idle investigator had thrust a stick and given it a turn or two was nothing compared with Terraport after the unorthodox arrival of the Solar Queen.
“Patrol mobile coming in on southeast vector,” Ali announced calmly. “Looks like she mounts a portable flamer on her nose—”
“So.” Dane changed direction, putting behind him a customs check point, aware as he ground by that stand, of a line of faces at its vision ports. Evasive action—and he’d have to get the top speed from the clumsy crawler.
“Police ‘copter over us—” that was Rip reporting.
Well, they couldn’t very well avoid that. But at the same time Dane was reasonably sure that its attack would not be an overt one—not with the unarmed, unprotected Hovan prominently displayed in their midst.
But there he was too sanguine. A muffled exclamation from Rip made him glance at the Medic beside him. Just in time to see Hovan slump limply forward, about to tumble from the crawler when Shannon caught him from behind. Dane was too familiar with the results of sleep rays to have any doubts as to what had happened.
The P-copter had sprayed them with its most harmless weapon. Only the suits, insulated to the best of their makers’ ability against most of the dangers of space, real and anticipated, had kept the three Traders from being overcome as well. Dane suspected that his own responses were a trifle sluggish, that while he had not succumbed to that attack, he had been slowed. But with Rip holding the unconscious Medic in his seat, Thorson continued to head the crawler for the tower and its promise of a system wide hearing for their appeal.
“There’s a P-mobile coming in ahead—”
Dane was irritated by that warning from Rip. He had already sighted that black and silver ground car himself. And he was only too keenly conscious of the nasty threat of the snub nosed weapon mounted on its hood, now pointed straight at the oncoming, too deliberate Traders’ crawler. Then he saw what he believed would be their only chance—to play once more the same type of trick as Rip had used to earth them safely.
“Get Hovan under cover,” he ordered. “I’m going to crash the tower door!”
Hasty movements answered that as the Medic’s limp body was thrust under the cover offered by the upper framework of the crawler. Luckily the machine had been built for heavy duty on rugged worlds where roadways were unknown. Dane was sure he could build up the power and speed necessary to take them into the lower floor of the tower—no matter if its door was now barred against them.
Whether his audacity daunted the P-mobile, or whether they held off from an all out attack because of Hovan, Dane could not guess. But he was glad for a few minutes of grace as he raced the protesting engine of the heavy machine to its last and greatest effort. The treads of the crawler bit on the steps leading up to the impressive entrance of the tower. There was a second or two before traction caught and then the driver’s heart snapped back into place as the machine tilted its nose up and headed straight for the portal.
They struck the closed doors with a shock which almost hurled them from their seats. But that engraved bronze expanse had not been cast to withstand a head-on blow from a heavy duty off-world vehicle and the leaves tore apart letting them into the wide hall beyond.
“Take Hovan and make for the riser!” For the second time it was Dane who gave the orders. “I have a blocking job to do here.” He expected every second to feel the bit of a police blaster somewhere along his shrinking body—could even a space suit protect him now?
At the far end of the corridor were the attendants and visitors, trapped in the building, who had fled in an attempt to find safety at the crashing entrance of the crawler. These flung themselves flat at the steady advance of the two space-suited Traders who supported the unconscious Medic between them, using the low-powered anti-grav units on their belts to take most of his weight so each had one hand free to hold a sleep rod. And they did not hesitate to use those weapons—spraying the rightful inhabitants of the tower until all lay unmoving.
Having seen that Ali and Rip appeared to have the situation in hand, Dane turned to his own self-appointed job. He jammed the machine on reverse, maneuvering it with an ease learned by practice on the rough terrain of Limbo, until the gate doors were pushed shut again. Then he swung the machine around so that its bulk would afford an effective bar to keep the door locked for some very precious moments to come. Short of using a flamer full power to cut their way in, no one was going to force an entrance now.
He climbed out of the machine, to discover, when he turned, that the trio from the Queen had disappeared—leaving all possible opposition asleep on the floor. Dane clanked on to join them, carrying in plated fingers their most important weapon to awake public opinion—an improvised cage in which was housed one of the pests from the cargo hold—the proof of their plague-free state which they intended Hovan to present, via the telecast, to the whole system.
Dane reached the shaft of the riser—to find the platform gone. Would either Rip or Ali have presence of mind enough to send it down to him on automatic?
“Rip—return the riser,” he spoke urgently into the throat mike of his helmet com.
“Keep your rockets straight,” Ali’s cool voice was in his earphones, “It’s on its way down. Did you remember to bring Exhibit A?”
Dane did not answer. For he was very much occupied with another problem. On the bronze doors he had been at such pains to seal shut there had come into being a round circle of dull red which was speedily changing into a coruscating incandescence. They had brought a flamer to bear! It would be a very short time now before the Police could come through. That riser—
Afraid of overbalancing in the bulky suit Dane did not lean forward to stare up into the shaft. But, as his uncertainty reached a fever pitch, the platform descended and he took two steps forward into temporary safety, still clutching the cage. At the first try the thick fingers of his gloved hand slipped from the lever and he hit it again, harder than he intended, so that he found himself being wafted upward with a speed which did not agree with a stomach, even one long accustomed to space flight. And he almost lost his balance when it came to a stop many floors above.
But he had not lost his wits. Before he stepped from the platform he set the dial on a point which would lift the riser to the top of the shaft and hold it there. That might trap the Traders on the broadcasting floor, but it would also insure them time before the forces of the law could reach them.
Dane located the rest of his party in the circular core chamber of the broadcasting section. He recognized a backdrop he had seen thousands of times behind the announcer who introduced the news-casts. In one corner Rip, his suit off, was working over the still relaxed form of the Medic. While Ali, a grim set to his mouth, was standing with a man who wore the insignia of a Com-tech.
“All set?” Rip looked up from his futile ministrations.
Dane put down the cage and began the business of unhooking his own protective covering. “They were burning through the outer doors of the entrance hall when I took off.”
“You’re not going to get away with this—” that was the Com-tech.
Ali smiled wearily, a stretch of lips in which there was little or no mirth. “Listen, my friend. Since I started to ride rockets I’ve been told I wasn’t going to get away with this or that. Why not be more original? Use what is between those outsize ears of yours. We fought our way in here—we landed at Terraport against orders—we’re Patrol Posted. Do you think that one man, one lone man, is going to keep us now from doing what we came to do? And don’t look around for any reinforcements. We sprayed both those rooms. You can run the emergency hook-up singlehanded and you’re going to. We’re Free Traders—Ha,” the man had lost some of his assurance as he stared from one drawn young face to another, “I see you begin to realize what that means. Out on the Rim we play rough, and we play for keeps. I know half a hundred ways to set you screaming in three minutes and at least ten of them will not even leave a mark on your skin! Now do we get Service—or don’t we?”
“You’ll go to the Chamber for this—!” snarled the tech.
“All right. But first we broadcast. Then maybe someday a ship that’s run into bad luck’ll have a straighter deal than we’ve had. You get on your post. And we’ll have the play back on—remember that. If you don’t give us a clear channel we’ll know it. How about it, Rip—how’s Hovan?”
Rip’s face was a mask of worry. “He must have had a full dose. I can’t bring him around.”
Was this the end of their bold bid? Let each or all of them go before the screen to plead their case, let them show the caged pest. But without the professional testimony of the Medic, the weight of an expert opinion on their side, they were licked. Well, sometimes luck did not ride a man’s fins all the way in.
But some stubborn core within Dane refused to let him believe that they had lost. He went over to the Medic huddled in a chair. To all appearances Hovan was deeply asleep, sunk in the semi-coma the sleep ray produced. And the frustrating thing was that the man himself could have supplied the counter to his condition, given them the instructions how to bring him around. How many hours away was a natural awaking? Long before that their hold on the station would be broken—they would be in the custody of either Police or Patrol.
“He’s sunk—” Dane voiced the belief which put an end to their hopes. But Ali did not seem concerned.
Kamil was standing with their captive, an odd expression on his handsome face as if he were striving to recall some dim memory. When he spoke it was to the Com-tech. “You have an HD OS here?”
The other registered surprise. “I think so—”
Ali made an abrupt gesture. “Make sure,” he ordered, following the man into another room. Dane looked to Rip for enlightenment.
“What in the Great Nebula is an HD OS?”
“I’m no engineer. It may be some gadget to get us out of here—”
“Such as a pair of wings?” Dane was inclined to be sarcastic. The memory of that incandescent circle on the door some twenty floors below stayed with him. Tempers of Police and Patrol were not going to be improved by fighting their way around or over the obstacles the Traders had arranged to delay them. If they caught up to the outlaws before the latter had their chance for an impartial hearing, the result was not going to be a happy one as far as the Queen’s men were concerned.
Ali appeared in the doorway. “Bring Hovan in here.” Together Rip and Dane carried the Medic into a smaller chamber where they found Ali and the tech busy lashing a small, lightweight tube chair to a machine which, to their untutored eyes, had the semblance of a collection of bars. Obeying instructions they seated Hovan in that chair, fastening him in, while the Medic continued to slumber peacefully. Uncomprehendingly Rip and Dane stepped back while, under Ali’s watchful eye, the Com-tech made adjustments and finally snapped some hidden switch.
Dane discovered that he dared not watch too closely what followed. Inured as he thought he was to the tricks of Hyperspace, to acceleration and anti-gravity, the oscillation of that swinging seat, the weird swaying of the half-recumbent figure, did things to his sight and to his sense of balance which seemed perilous in the extreme. But when the groan broke through the hum of Ali’s mysterious machine, all of them knew that the Engineer-apprentice had found the answer to their problem, that Hovan was waking.
The Medic was bleary-eyed and inclined to stagger when they freed him. And for several minutes he seemed unable to grasp either his surroundings or the train of events which had brought him there.
Long since the Police must have broken into the entrance corridor below. Perhaps they had by now secured a riser which would bring them up. Ali had forced the Com-tech to throw the emergency control which was designed to seal off from the outer world the entire unit in which they now were. But whether that protective device would continue to hold now, none of the three were certain. Time was running out fast.
Supporting the wobbling Hovan, they went back into the panel room and under Ali’s supervision the Com-tech took his place at the control board. Dane put the cage with the pest well to the fore on the table of the announcer and waited for Rip to take his place there with the trembling Medic. When Shannon did not move Dane glanced up in surprise—this was no time to hesitate. But he discovered that the attention of both his shipmates was now centered on him. Rip pointed to the seat.
“You’re the talk merchant, aren’t you?” the acting commander of the Queen asked crisply. “Now’s the time to shout the Lingo—”
They couldn’t mean—! But it was very evident that they did. Of course, a Cargo-master was supposed to be the spokesman of a ship. But that was in matters of trade. And how could he stand there and argue the case for the Queen? He was the newest joined, the greenest member of her crew. Already his mouth was dry and his nerves tense. But Dane didn’t know that none of that was revealed by his face or manner. The usual impassiveness which had masked his inner conflicts since his first days at the Pool served him now. And the others never noted the hesitation with which he approached the announcer’s place.
Dane had scarcely seated himself, one hand resting on the cage of the pest, before Ali brought down two fingers in the sharp sweep which signaled the Com-tech to duty. Far above them there was a whisper of sound which signified the opening of the play-back. They would be able to check on whether the broadcast was going out or not. Although Dane could see nothing of the system wide audience which he currently faced, he realized that the room and those in it were now visible on every tuned-in video set. Instead of the factual cast, the listeners were about to be treated to a melodrama which was as wild as their favorite romances. It only needed the break-in of the Patrol to complete the illusion of action-fiction—crime variety.
A second finger moved in his direction and Dane leaned forward. He faced only the folds of a wall wide curtain, but he must keep in mind that in truth there was a sea of faces before him, the faces of those whom he and Hovan, working together, must convince if he were to save the Queen and her crew.
He found his voice and it was steady and even, he might have been outlining some stowage problem for Van Rycke’s approval.
“People of Terra—”
Martian, Venusian, Asteroid colonist—inwardly they were still all Terran and on that point he would rest. He was a Terran appealing to his own kind.
“People of Terra, we come before you to ask justice—” from somewhere the words came easily, flowing from his lips to center on a patch of light ahead. And that “justice” rang with a kind of reassurance.
“To those of you who do not travel the star trails our case may seem puzzling—” the words were coming easily. Dane gathered confidence as he spoke, intent on making those others out there know what it meant to be outlawed.
“We are Patrol Posted, outlawed as a plague ship,” he confessed frankly. “But this is our true story—”
Swiftly, with a flow of language he had not known he could command, Dane swung into the story of Sargol, of the pest they had carried away from that world. And at the proper moment he thrust a gloved hand into the cage and brought out the wriggling thing which struck vainly with its poisoned talons, holding it above the dark table so that those unseen watchers could witness the dramatic change of color which made it such a menace. Dane continued the story of the Queen’s ill-fated voyage—of their forced descent upon the E-Stat.
“Ask the truth of Inter-Solar,” he demanded of the audience beyond those walls. “We were no pirates. They will discover in their records the vouchers we left.” Then Dane described the weird hunt when, led by the Hoobat, they had finally found and isolated the menace, and their landing in the heart of the Big Burn. He followed that with his own quest for medical aid, the kidnapping of Hovan. At that point he turned to the Medic.
“This is Medic Hovan. He has consented to appear in our behalf and to testify to the truth—that the Solar Queen has not been stricken by some unknown plague, but infested with a living organism we now have under control—” For a suspenseful second or two he wondered if Hovan was going to make it. The man looked shaken and sick, as if the drastic awaking they had subjected him to had left him too dazed to pull himself together.
But out of some hidden reservoir of strength the Medic summoned the energy he needed. And his testimony was all they had hoped it would be. Though now and then he strayed into technical terms. But, Dane thought, their use only enhanced the authority of his description of what he had discovered on board the spacer and what he had done to counteract the power of the poison. When he had done Dane added a few last words.
“We have broken the law,” he admitted forthrightly, “but we were fighting in self-defense. All we ask now is the privilege of an impartial investigation, a chance to defend ourselves—such as any of you take for granted on Terra—before the courts of this planet—” But he was not to finish without interruption.
From the play-back over their heads another voice blared, breaking across his last words:
“Surrender! This is the Patrol. Surrender or take the consequences!” And that faint sighing which signaled their open contact with the outer world was cut off. The Com-tech turned away from the control board, a sneering half smile on his face.
“They’ve reached the circuit and cut you off. You’re done!”
Dane stared into the cage where the now almost invisible thing sat humped together. He had done his best—they had all done their best. He felt nothing but a vast fatigue, an overwhelming weariness, not so much of body, but of nerve and spirit too.
Rip broke the silence with a question aimed at the tech. “Can you signal below?”
“Going to give up?” The fellow brightened. “Yes, there’s an inter-com I can cut in.”
Rip stood up. He unbuckled the belt about his waist and laid it on the table—disarming himself. Without words Ali and Dane followed his example. They had played their hand—to prolong the struggle would mean nothing. The acting Captain of the Queen gave a last order:
“Tell them we are coming down unarmed—to surrender.” He paused in front of Hovan. “You’d better stay here. If there’s any trouble—no reason for you to be caught in the middle.”
Hovan nodded as the three left the room. Dane, remembering the trick he had pulled with the riser, made a comment:
“We may be marooned here—”
Ali shrugged. “Then we can just wait and let them collect us.” He yawned, his dark eyes set in smudges. “I don’t care if they’ll just let us sleep the clock around afterwards. D’you really think,” he addressed Rip, “that we’ve done ourselves any good?”
Rip neither denied nor confirmed. “We took our only chance. Now it’s up to them—” He pointed to the wall and the teeming world which lay beyond it.
Ali grinned wryly. “I note you left the what-you-call-it with Hovan.”
“He wanted one to experiment with,” Dane replied. “I thought he’d earned it.”
“And now here comes what we’ve earned—” Rip cut in as the hum of the riser came to their ears.
“Should we take to cover?” Ali’s mobile eyebrows underlined his demand. “The forces of law and order may erupt with blasters blazing.”
But Rip did not move. He faced the riser door squarely and, drawn by something in that stance of his, the other two stepped in on either side so that they fronted the dubious future as a united group. Whatever came now, the Queen’s men would meet it together.
In a way Ali was right. The four men who emerged all had their blasters or riot stun-rifles at ready, and the sights of those weapons were trained at the middles of the Free Traders. As Dane’s empty hands, palm out, went up on a line with his shoulders, he estimated the opposition. Two were in the silver and black of the Patrol, two wore the forest green of the Terrapolice. But they all looked like men with whom it was better not to play games.
And it was clear they were prepared to take no chances with the outlaws. In spite of the passiveness of the Queen’s men, their hands were locked behind them with force bars about their wrists. When a quick search revealed that the three were unarmed, they were herded onto the riser by two of their captors, while the other pair remained behind, presumably to uncover any damage they had done to the Tower installations.
The police did not speak except for a few terse words among themselves and a barked order to march, delivered to the prisoners. Very shortly they were in the entrance hall facing the wreckage of the crawler and doors through which a ragged gap had been burned. Ali viewed the scene with his usual detachment.
“Nice job,” he commended Dane’s enterprise. “They’ll have a moving—”
“Get going!” A heavy hand between his shoulder blades urged him on.
The Engineer-apprentice whirled, his eyes blazing. “Keep your hands to yourself! We aren’t mine fodder yet. I think that the little matter of a trial comes first—”
“You’re Posted,” the Patrolman was openly contemptuous.
Dane was chilled. For the first time that aspect of their predicament really registered. Posted outlaws might, within reason, be shot on sight without further recourse to the law. If that label stuck on the crew of the Queen, they had practically no chance at all. And when he saw that Ali was no longer inclined to retort, he knew that fact had dawned upon Kamil also. It would all depend upon how big an impression their broadcast had made. If public opinion veered to their side—then they could defend themselves legally. Otherwise the moon mines might be the best sentence they dare hope for.
They were pushed out into the brilliant sunlight. There stood the Queen, her meteor scarred side reflecting the light of her native sun. And ringed around her at a safe distance was what seemed to be a small mechanized army corps. The authorities were making very sure that no more rebels would burst from her interior.
Dane thought that they would be loaded into a mobile or ‘copter and taken away. But instead they were marched down, through the ranks of portable flamers, scramblers, and other equipment, to an open space where anyone on duty at the visa-screen within the control cabin of the spacer could see them. An officer of the Patrol, the sun making an eye-blinding flash of his lightning sword breast badge, stood behind a loud speaker. When he perceived that the three prisoners were present, he picked up a hand mike and spoke into it—his voice so being relayed over the field as clearly as it must be reaching Weeks inside the sealed freighter.
“You have five minutes to open hatch. Your men have been taken. Five minutes to open hatch and surrender.”
Ali chuckled. “And how does he think he’s going to enforce that?” he inquired of the air and incidentally of the guards now forming a square about the three. “He’ll need more than a flamer to unlatch the old girl if she doesn’t care for his offer.”
Privately Dane agreed with that. He hoped that Weeks would decide to hold out—at least until they had a better idea of what the future would be. No tool or weapon he saw in the assembly about them was forceful enough to penetrate the shell of the Queen. And there were sufficient supplies on board to keep Weeks and his charges going for at least a week. Since Tau had shown signs of coming out of his coma, it might even be that the crew of the ship would arouse to their own defense in that time. It all depended upon Weeks’ present decision.
No hatch yawned in the ship’s sleek sides. She might have been an inert derelict for all response to that demand. Dane’s confidence began to rise. Weeks had picked up the challenge, he would continue to baffle police and Patrol.
Just how long that stalemate would have lasted they were not to know for another player came on the board. Through the lines of besiegers Hovan, escorted by the Patrolmen, made his way up to the officer at the mike station. There was something in his air which suggested that he was about to give battle. And the conversation at the mike was relayed across the field, a fact of which they were not at once aware.
“There are sick men in there—” Hovan’s voice boomed out. “I demand the right to return to duty—”
“If and when they surrender they shall all be accorded necessary aid,” that was the officer. But he made no impression on the Medic from the frontier. Dane, by chance, had chosen better support than he had guessed.
“Pro Bono Publico—” Hovan invoked the battle cry of his own Service. “For the Public Good—”
“A plague ship—” the officer was beginning. Hovan waved that aside impatiently.
“Nonsense!” His voice scaled up across the field. “There is no plague aboard. I am willing to certify that before the Council. And if you refuse these men medical attention—which they need—I shall cite the case all the way to my Board!”
Dane drew a deep breath. That was taking off on their orbit! Not being one of the Queen’s crew, in fact having good reason to be angry over his treatment at their hands, Hovan’s present attitude would or should carry weight.
The Patrol officer who was not yet ready to concede all points had an answer: “If you are able to get on board—go.”
Hovan snatched the mike from the astonished officer. “Weeks!” His voice was imperative. “I’m coming aboard—alone!”
All eyes were on the ship and for a short period it would seem that Weeks did not trust the Medic. Then, high in her needle nose, one of the escape ports, not intended for use except in dire emergency opened and allowed a plastic link ladder to fall link by link.
Out of the corner of his eye Dane caught a flash of movement to his left. Manacled as he was he threw himself on the policeman who was aiming a stun rifle into the port. His shoulder struck the fellow waist high and his weight carried them both with a bruising crash to the concrete pavement as Rip shouted and hands clutched roughly at the now helpless Cargo-apprentice.
He was pulled to his feet, tasting the flat sweetness of blood where a flailing blow from the surprised and frightened policeman had cut his lip against his teeth. He spat red and glowered at the ring of angry men.
“Why don’t you kick him?” Ali inquired, a vast and blistering contempt sawtoothing his voice. “He’s got his hands cuffed so he’s fair game—”
“What’s going on here?” An officer broke through the ring. The policeman, on his feet once more, snatched up the rifle Dane’s attack had knocked out of his hold.
“Your boy here,” Ali was ready with an answer, “tried to find a target inside the hatch. Is this the usual way you conduct a truce, sir?”
He was answered by a glare and the rifleman was abruptly ordered to the rear. Dane, his head clearing, looked at the Queen. Hovan was climbing the ladder—he was within arm’s length of that half open hatch. The very fact that the Medic had managed to make his point stick was, in a faint way, encouraging. But the three were not allowed to enjoy that small victory for long. They were marched from the field, loaded into a mobile and taken to the city several miles away. It was the Patrol who held them in custody—not the Terrapolice. Dane was not sure whether that was to be reckoned favorable or not. As a Free Trader he had a grudging respect for the organization he had seen in action on Limbo.
Sometime later they found themselves, freed of the force bars, alone in a room which, bare walled as it was, did have a bench on which all three sank thankfully. Dane caught the warning gesture from Ali—they were under unseen observation and they must have a listening audience too—located somewhere in the maze of offices.
“They can’t make up their minds,” the Engineer-apprentice settled his shoulders against the wall. “Either we’re desperate criminals, or we’re heroes. They’re going to let time decide.”
“If we’re heroes,” Dane asked a little querulously, “what are we doing locked up here? I’d like a few earth-side comforts—beginning with a full meal—”
“No thumb printing, no psycho testing,” Rip mused. “Yes, they haven’t put us through the system yet.”
“And we decidedly aren’t the forgotten men. Wipe your face, child,” Ali said to Dane, “you’re still dribbling.”
The Cargo-apprentice smeared his hand across his chin and brought it away red and sticky. Luckily his teeth remained intact.
“We need Hovan to read them more law,” observed Kamil. “You should have medical attention.”
Dane dabbed at his mouth. He didn’t need all that solicitude, but he guessed that Ali was talking for the benefit of those who now kept them under surveillance.
“Speaking of Hovan—I wonder what became of that pest he was supposed to have under control. He didn’t bring the cage with him when he came out of the Tower, did he?” asked Rip.
“If it gets loose in that building,” Dane decided to give the powers who held them in custody something to think about, “they’ll have trouble. Practically invisible and poisonous. And maybe it can reproduce its kind, too. We don’t know anything about it—”
Ali laughed. “Such fun and games! Imagine a hundred of the dear creatures flitting in and out of the broadcasting section. And Captain Jellico has the only Hoobat on Terra! He can name his own terms for rounding up the plague. The whole place will be filled with sleepers before they’re through—”
Would that scrap of information send some Patrolmen hurtling off to the Tower in search of the caged creature? The thought of such an expedition was, in a small way, comforting to the captives.
An hour or so later they were fed, noiselessly and without visible attendants, when three trays slid through a slit in the wall at floor level. Rip’s nose wrinkled.
“Now I get the vector! We’re plague-ridden—keep aloof and watch to see if we break out in purple spots!”
Ali was lifting thermo lids from the containers and now he suddenly arose and bowed in the direction of the blank wall. “Many, many thanks,” he intoned. “Nothing but the best—a sub-commander’s rations at least! We shall deliver top star rating to this thoughtfulness when we are questioned by the powers that shine.”
It was good food. Dane ate cautiously because of his torn lip, but the whole adventure took on a more rose-colored hue. The lapse of time before they were put through the usual procedure followed with criminals, this excellent dinner—it was all promising. The Patrol could not yet be sure how they were to be handled.
“They’ve fed us,” Ali observed as he clanged the last dish back on a tray. “Now you’d think they’d bed us. I could do with several days—and nights—of bunk time right about now.”
But that hint was not taken up and they continued to sit on the bench as time limped by. According to Dane’s watch it must be night now, though the steady light in the windowless room did not vary. What had Hovan discovered in the Queen? Had he been able to rouse any of the crew? And was the spacer still inviolate, or had the Terrapolice and the Patrol managed to take her over?
He was so very tired, his eyes felt as if hot sand had been poured beneath the lids, his body ached. And at last he nodded into naps from which he awoke with jerks of the neck. Rip was frankly asleep, his shoulders and head resting against the wall, while Ali lounged with closed eyes. Though the Cargo-apprentice was sure that Kamil was more alert than his comrades, as if he waited for something he thought was soon to occur.
Dane dreamed. Once more he trod the reef rising out of Sargol’s shallow sea. But he held no weapon and beneath the surface of the water a gorp lurked. When he reached the break in the water-washed rock just ahead, the spidery horror would strike and against its attack he was defenseless. Yet he must march on for he had no control over his own actions!
“Wake up!” Ali’s hand was on his shoulder, shaking him back and forth with something close to gentleness. “Must you give an imitation of a space-whirly moonbat?”
“The gorp—” Dane came back to the present and flushed. He dreaded admitting to a nightmare—especially to Ali whose poise he had always found disconcerting.
“No gorps here. Nothing but—”
Kamil’s words were lost in the escape of metal against metal as a panel slide back in the wall. But no guard wearing the black and silver of the Patrol stepped through to summon them to trial. Van Rycke stood in the opening, half smiling at them with his customary sleepy benevolence.
“Well, well, and here’s our missing ones,” his purring voice was the most beautiful sound Dane thought he had ever heard.
Chapter XVIII
BARGAIN CONCLUDED
“—and so we landed here, sir,” Rip concluded his report in the matter-of-fact tone he might have used in describing a perfectly ordinary voyage, say between Terraport and Luna City, a run of no incident and dull cargo carrying.
The crew of the Solar Queen, save for Tau, were assembled in a room somewhere in the vastness of Patrol Headquarters. Since the room seemed a comfortable conference chamber, Dane thought that their status must now be on a higher level than that of Patrol Posted outlaws. But he was also sure that if they attempted to walk out of the building that effort would not be successful.
Van Rycke sat stolidly in his chosen seat, fingers of both hands laced across his substantial middle. He had sat as impassively as the Captain while Rip had outlined their adventures since they had all been stricken. Though the other listeners had betrayed interest in the story, the senior officers made no comments. Now Jellico turned to his Cargo-master.
“How about it, Van?”
“What’s done is done—”
Dane’s elation vanished as if ripped away by a Sargolian storm wind. The Cargo-master didn’t approve. So there must have been another way to achieve their ends—one the younger members of the crew had been too inexperienced or too dense to see—
“If we blasted off today we might just make cargo contract.”
Dane started. That was it! The point they had lost sight of during their struggles to get aid. There was no possible chance of upping the ship today—probably not for days to come—or ever, if the case went against them. So they had broken contract—and the Board would be down on them for that. Dane shivered inside. He could try to fight back against the Patrol—there had always been a slight feeling of rivalry between the Free Traders and the space police. But you couldn’t buck the Board—and keep your license and so have a means of staying in space. A broken contract could cut one off from the stars forever. Captain Jellico looked very bleak at that reminder.
“The Eysies will be all ready to step in. I’d like to know why they were so sure we had the plague on board—”
Van Rycke snorted. “I can supply you five answers to that—for one they may have known the affinity of those creatures for the wood, and it would be easy to predict as a result of our taking a load on board—or again they may have deliberately planted the things on us through the Salariki—But we can’t ever prove it. It remains that they are going to get for themselves the Sargolian contract unless—” He stopped short, staring straight ahead of him at the wall between Rip and Dane. And his assistant knew that Van was exploring a fresh idea. Van’s ideas were never to be despised and Jellico did not now disturb the Cargo-master with questions.
It was Rip who spoke next and directly to the Captain. “Do you know what they plan to do about us, sir?”
Captain Jellico grunted and there was a sardonic twist to his mouth as he replied, “It’s my opinion that they’re now busy adding up the list of crimes you four have committed—maybe they had to turn the big HG computer loose on the problem. The tally isn’t in yet. We gave them our automat flight record and that ought to give them more food for thought.”
Dane speculated as to what the experts would make of the mechanical record of the Queen’s past few weeks—the section dealing with their landing in the Big Burn ought to be a little surprising. Van Rycke got to his feet and marched to the door of the conference room. It was opened from without so quickly Dane was sure that they had been under constant surveillance.
“Trade business,” snapped the Cargo-master, “contract deal. Take me to a sealed com booth!”
Contracts might not be as sacred to the protective Service as they were to Trade, but Trade had its powers and since Van Rycke, an innocent bystander of the Queen’s troubles, could not legally be charged with any crime, he was escorted out of the room. But the door panel was sealed behind him, shutting in the rest with the unspoken warning that they were not free agents. Jellico leaned back in his chair and stretched. Long years of close friendship had taught him that his Cargo-master was to be trusted with not only the actual trading and cargo tending, but could also think them out of some of the tangles which could not be solved by his own direct action methods. Direct action had been applied to their present problem—now the rest was up to Van, and he was willing to delegate all responsibility.
But they were not left long to themselves. The door opened once more to admit star rank Patrolmen. None of the Free Traders arose. As members of another Service they considered themselves equals. And it was their private boast that the interests of Galactic civilization, as represented by the black and silver, often followed, not preceded the brown tunics into new quarters of the universe.
However, Rip, Ali, Dane, and Weeks answered as fully as they could the flood of questions which engulfed them. They explained in detail their visit to the E-Stat, the landing in the Big Burn, the kidnapping of Hovan. Dane’s stubborn feeling of being in the right grew in opposition to the questioning. Under the same set of circumstances how would that Commander—that Wing Officer—that Senior Scout—now all seated there—have acted? And every time they inferred that his part in the affair had been illegal he stiffened.
Sure, there had to be law and order out on the Rim—and doubly sure it had to cover and protect life on the softer planets of the inner systems. He wasn’t denying that on Limbo, he, for one, had been very glad to see the Patrol blast their way into the headquarters of the pirates holed up on that half-dead world. And he was never contemptuous of the men in the field. But like all Free Traders he was influenced by a belief that too often the laws as enforced by the Patrol favored the wealth and might of the Companies, that law could be twisted and the Patrol sent to push through actions which, though legal, were inherently unfair to those who had not the funds to fight it out in the far off Council courts. Just as now he was certain that the Eysies were bringing all the influence they had to bear here against the Queen’s men. And Inter-Solar had a lot of influence.
At the end of their ordeal their statements were read back to them from the recording tape and they thumb signed them. Were these statements or confessions, Dane mused. Perhaps in their honest reports they had just signed their way into the moon mines. Only there was no move to lead them out and book them. And when Weeks pressed his thumb at the bottom of the tape, Captain Jellico took a hand. He looked at his watch.
“It is now ten hours,” he observed. “My men need rest, and we all want food. Are you through with us?”
The Commander was spokesman for the other group. “You are to remain in quarantine, Captain. Your ship has not yet been passed as port-free. But you will be assigned quarters—”
Once again they were marched through blank halls to the other section of the sprawling Patrol Headquarters. No windows looked upon the outer world, but there were bunks and a small mess alcove. Ali, Dane, and Rip turned in, more interested in sleep than food. And the last thing the Cargo-apprentice remembered was seeing Jellico talking earnestly with Steen Wilcox as they both sipped steaming mugs of real Terran coffee.
But with twelve hours of sleep behind them the three were less contented in confinement. No one had come near them and Van Rycke had not returned. Which fact the crew clung to as a ray of hope. Somewhere the Cargo-master must be fighting their battle. And all Van’s vast store of Trade knowledge, all his knack of cutting corners and driving a shrewd bargain, enlisted on their behalf, must win them some concessions.
Medic Tau came in, bringing Hovan with him. Both looked tired but triumphant. And their report was a shot in the arm for the now uneasy Traders.
“We’ve rammed it down their throats,” Tau announced. “They’re willing to admit that it was those poison bugs and not a plague. Incidentally,” he grinned at Jellico and then looked around expectantly, “where’s Van? This comes in his department. We’re going to cash in on those the kids dumped in the deep freeze. Terra-Lab is bidding on them. I said to see Van—he can arrange the best deal for us. Where is he?”
“Gone to see about our contract,” Jellico reported. “What’s the news about our status now?”
“Well, they’ve got to wipe out the plague ship listing. Also—we’re big news. There’re about twenty video men rocketing around out in the offices trying to get in and have us do some spot broadcasts. Seems that the children here,” he jerked his thumb at the three apprentices, “started something. An inter-solar invasion couldn’t be bigger news! Human interest by the tankful. I’ve been on Video twice and they’re trying to sign up Hovan almost steady—”
The Medic from the frontier nodded. “Wanted me to appear on a three week schedule,” he chuckled. “I was asked to come in on ‘Our Heroes of the Starlines’ and two Quiz programs. As for you, you young criminal,” he swung to Dane, “you’re going to be fair game for about three networks. It seems you transmit well,” he uttered the last as if it were an accusation and Dane squirmed. “Anyway you did something with your crazy stunt. And, Captain, three men want to buy your Hoobat. I gather they are planning a showing of how it captures those pests. So be prepared—”
Dane tried to visualize a scene in which he shared top billing with Queex and shuddered. All he wanted now was to get free of Terra for a nice, quiet, uncomplicated world where problems could be settled with a sleep rod or a blaster and the Video screen was unknown.
Having heard of what awaited them without, the men of the Queen were more content to be incarcerated in the quarantine section. But as time wore on and the Cargo-master did not return, their anxieties awoke. They were fairly sure by now that any penalty the Patrol or the Terrapolice would impose would not be too drastic. But a broken contract was another and more serious affair—a matter which might ground them more effectively than any rule of the law enforcement bodies. And Jellico took to pacing the room, while Tang and Wilcox who had started a game of four dimensional chess made countless errors of move, and Stotz glared moodily at the wall, apparently too sunk in his own gloomy thoughts to rise from the mess table in the alcove.
Though time had ceased to have much meaning for them except as an irritating reminder of the now sure failure of their Sargolian venture, they marked the hours into a second full day of detention before Van Rycke finally put in appearance. The Cargo-master was plainly tired, but he showed no signs of discomposure. In fact as he came in he was humming what he fondly imagined was a popular tune.
Jellico asked no questions, he merely regarded his trusted officer with a quizzically raised eyebrow. But the others drew around. It was so apparent that Van Rycke was pleased with himself. Which could only mean that in some fantastic way he had managed to bring their venture down in a full fin landing, that somehow he had argued the Queen out of danger into a position where he could control the situation.
He halted just within the doorway and eyed Dane, Ali, and Rip with mock severity. “You’re baaaad boys,” he told them with a shake of the head and a drawl of the adjective. “You’ve been demoted ten files each on the list.”
Which must put him on the bottom rung once more, Dane calculated swiftly. Or even below—though he didn’t see how he could fall beneath the rank he held at assignment. However, he found the news heartening instead of discouraging. Compared to a bleak sentence at the moon mines such demotion was absolutely nothing and he knew that Van Rycke was breaking the worst news first.
“You also forfeit all pay for this voyage,” the Cargo-master was continuing. But Jellico broke in.
“Board fine?”
At the Cargo-master’s nod, Jellico added. “Ship pays that.”
“So I told them,” Van Rycke agreed. “The Queen’s warned off Terra for ten solar years—”
They could take that, too. Other Free Traders got back to their home ports perhaps once in a quarter century. It was so much less than they had expected that the sentence was greeted with a concentrated sigh of relief.
“No earth-side leave—”
All right—no leave. They were not, after their late experiences so entranced with Terraport that they wanted to linger in its environs any longer than they had to.
“We lose the Sargol contract—”
That did hurt. But they had resigned themselves to it since the hour when they had realized that they could not make it back to the perfumed planet.
“To Inter-Solar?” Wilcox asked the important question.
Van Rycke was smiling broadly, as if the loss he had just announced was in some way a gain. “No—to Combine!”
“Combine?” the Captain echoed and his puzzlement was duplicated around the circle. How did Inter-Solar’s principal rival come into it?
“We’ve made a deal with Combine,” Van Rycke informed them. “I wasn’t going to let I-S cash in on our loss. So I went to Vickers at Combine and told him the situation. He understands that we were in solid with the Salariki and that the Eysies are not. And a chance to point a blaster at I-S’s tail is just what he has been waiting for. The shipment will go out to the storm priests tomorrow on a light cruiser—it’ll make it on time.”
Yes, a light cruiser, one of the fast ships maintained by the big Companies, could make the transition to Sargol with a slight margin to spare. Stotz nodded his approval at this practical solution.
“I’m going with it—” That did jerk them all up short. For Van Rycke to leave the Queen—that was as unthinkable as if Captain Jellico had suddenly announced that he was about to retire and become a kelp farmer. “Just for the one trip,” the Cargo-master hastened to assure them. “I smooth their vector with the storm priests and hand over so the Eysies will be frozen out—”
Captain Jellico interrupted at that point. “D’you mean that Combine is buying us out—not just taking over? What kind of a deal—”
But Van Rycke, his smile a brilliant stretch across his plump face, was nodding in agreement. “They’re taking over our contract and our place with the Salariki.”
“In return for what?” Steen Wilcox asked for them all.
“For twenty-five thousand credits and a mail run between Xecho and Trewsworld—frontier planets. They’re far enough from Terra to get around the exile ruling. The Patrol will escort us out and see that we get down to work like good little space men. We’ll have two years of a nice, quiet run on regular pay. Then, when all the powers that shine have forgotten about us, we can cut in on the trade routes again.”
“And the pay?” “First or second class mail?” “When do we start?”
“Standard pay on the completion of each run—Board rates,” he made replies in order. “First, second and third class mail—anything that bears the government seal and out in those quarters it is apt to be anything! And you start as soon as you can get to Xecho and relieve the Combine scout which has been holding down the run.”
“While you go to Sargol—” commented Jellico.
“While I make one voyage to Sargol. You can spare me,” he dropped one of his big hands on Dane’s shoulder and gave the flesh beneath it a quick squeeze. “Seeing as how our juniors helped pull us out of this last mix-up we can trust them about an inch farther than we did before. Anyway—Cargo-master on a mail run is more or less a thumb-twiddling job at the best. And you can trust Thorson on stowage—that’s one thing he does know.” Which dubious ending left Dane wondering as to whether he had been complimented or warned. “I’ll be on board again before you know it—the Combine will ship me out to Trewsworld on your second trip across and I’ll join ship there. For once we won’t have to worry for awhile. Nothing can happen on a mail run.” He shook his head at the three youngest members of the crew. “You’re in for a very dull time—and it will serve you right. Give you a chance to learn your jobs so that when you come up for reassignment you can pick up some of those files you were just demoted. Now,” he started briskly for the door, “I’ll tranship to the Combine cruiser. I take it that you don’t want to meet the Video people?”
At their hasty agreement to that, he laughed. “Well, the Patrol doesn’t want the Video spouting about ‘high-handed official news suppression’ so about an hour or so from now you’ll be let out the back way. They put the Queen in a cradle and a field scooter will take you to her. You’ll find her serviced for a take-off to Luna City. You can refit there for deep space. Frankly the sooner you get off-world the happier all ranks are going to be—both here and on the Board. It will be better for us to walk softly for a while and let them forget that the Solar Queen and her crazy crew exists. Separately and together you’ve managed to break—or at least bend—half the laws in the books and they’d like to have us out of their minds.”
Captain Jellico stood up. “They aren’t any more anxious to see us go than we are to get out of here. You’ve pulled it off for us again, Van, and we’re lucky to get out of it this easy—”
Van Rycke rolled his eyes ceilingward. “You’ll never know how lucky! Be glad Combine hates the space I-S blasts through. We were able to use that to our advantage. Get the big fellows at each others’ throats and they’ll stop annoying us—simple proposition but it works. Anyway we’re set in blessed and peaceful obscurity now. Thank the Spirit of Free Space there’s practically no trouble one can get into on a safe and sane mail route!”
But Cargo-master Van Rycke, in spite of knowing the Solar Queen and the temper of her crew, was exceedingly over-optimistic when he made that emphatic statement.
The End.
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A post-apocalyptic tale based on a novella by Harlan Ellison. A boy communicates telepathically with his dog as they scavenge for food and sex, and they stumble into an underground society where the old society is preserved. The daughter of one of the leaders of the community seduces and lures him below, where the citizens have become unable to reproduce because of being underground so long. They use him for impregnation purposes, and then plan to be rid of him.
-Ed Sutton
Here we have a movie where the chicks lay up with really thick foundation. Heh he. But, you know they really need to. It’s tough living in 2024.
Despite its ironically cutesy title (“A Boy and His Dog”) and a plot premise that might’ve come out of the Walt Disney archives (dog and boy share telepathic communication), this movie is about as darkly comic and acidic as anything Stanley Kubrick ever did (“Clockwork Orange”).
In the tradition of the great 70s dystopian/postapocalyptic scifis like “Clockwork Orange” (1971), “Rollerball” (1975), “THX-1138” (1971), “Soylent Green” (1973), “The Omega Man” (1971) and I’ll even throw in “The Stepford Wives” (1975), this movie has its appeal in a sort of minimalist presentation that presents a chillingly emotionless and sterile future.
The first half is something like Mr. Ed meets Mad Max, with its equal portions of chatty humor and dusty violence. But right in the first scene we realize that, despite the cute banter between boy & dog, there aren’t going to be many warm fuzzies. In the opening scene we learn that the boy (Don Johnson) is looking for female survivors so he can rape them.
Atparts, this movie getssostrangeyoucan’tdoanythingbutlaughatit, whichisdefinitelynotabadthing! A Boy and His Dog isnotsomethingthatwilleverbeuniversallypopular, butitisagreat movie forlatenightsandallnerds. Aclassicpieceofsciencefiction.
If you can swallow that highly disturbing premise, which the director makes no bones in presenting at the outset, then the rest should be an unsettlingly fun joyride all the way to the film’s very memorable punchline.
Things get really trippy in the 2nd half, and even though there’s minimal nudity, certain things happen which would make D.H. Lawrence blush (particularly involving a certain mechanical device attached to the male anatomy).
Definitely NOT a date movie, nor any sort of movie you’d watch with your parents or kids, “A Boy and His Dog” is really like a lost cousin of “A Clockwork Orange” or “Dr. Strangelove”.
Vic and his telepathically talking sheep dog, Blood, travel post-apocalyptic Arizona. Besides scavenging for food and sex, this movie features old, terrible porn clips, evil Amish looking people with clown makeup and possibly the greatest pun in movie history. Blood provides hilarious commentary to all Vic's endeavors, his comments while Vic and a girl he finds have sex are particularly entertaining. At parts, this movie gets so strange you can't do anything but laugh at it, which is definitely not a bad thing! A Boy and His Dog is not something that will ever be universally popular, but it is a great movie for late nights and all nerds. A classic piece of science fiction.
- emma505013 May 2004
A Boy and His Dog is as surprising an effort that has ever come into the genre. It is a movie where imagination is pushed to its most cynical, rotten roots. It is a movie where a wealth of pitch black comedy awaits those who have no problem..
… with the repore between a slightly dim dude and a dog…
… a dog who seems to be part comic relief, part ‘get-your-head-out-of-your-ass’ voice of reason.
The Characters:
Vic – Don Johnson! A solo who survives in the wastelands left after World War IV, he is constantly hunting for food and women.
Blood – Highly intelligent and telepathic mutt who pals around with Vic, in addition he has radar.
Quilla June – Brazen girl sent to lure Vic underground, though she wants to replace the ruling council by using the solo. Ends up as dog food.
Mr. Craddock – Jason Robards! Senior member of the ruling council and a very dour man.
Dr. Moore – Fairly boring member of the ruling council, though he has the best memory.
Mez – Female member of the council, not a pretty sight when laughing.
Gary, Richard, and Kenneth – Conspirators who follow Quilla’s lead, all three get their necks snapped.
Michael – Powerful robot which looks like a huge country bumpkin, if one of the ruling council points at you the wrong way he snaps your neck. Disassembled by Vic, but it appears the council has an entire warehouse full of replacements.
The Screamers – Apparently they are green glowing mutant elephants. (We do not see them, but they do glow green and sound like elephants.)
It should be way too ridiculous to be taken seriously as a piece of legitimate cinema, perhaps as some gonzo experiment that’s dug up by cultists for tongue-in-cheek purposes.
Yet, Jones’s film is, in its way, a weird landmark.
It’s a snapshot of a moment where the basic fronts of a 70s ‘exploitation’ flick (action, comedy, randomness of the 70s, nudity) are put through the perspective of a filmmaker with brains and talent to make it stick in your mind.
This disorderly pre-Mad Max spree is one of the most entertaining post-apocalyptic future movies ever made. You know why? Because it has no taste and in that, it has no inhibitions about the questions it asked about what will happen after the world is spent by nuclear war. It asks about how procreation will happen, how basic sexual feelings will be satisfied, and other things. It has a genuinely original plot involving telepathic dogs that are more literate than their human masters,gunfights wherein the dogs direct their human masters, an entire society underground that discerns who is apart of them or not by wearing clownface at all times, and other crazy things.
It's a wild, crazy, tasteless, sex-obsessed adventure that affords the viewer one of the greatest luxuries of the movies, one that is rarely completely fulfilled, which is unpredictability. It's so inventive in every way that you don't know what happens next. Even the comical theme song is so out of place for the genre of the film, but the theme of a boy and his dog makes it suitable. A Boy and His Dog is not a great film, but it's worth watching repeatedly and showing our friends. Another buried treasure.
- jzappa
This is extremely low budget but not bad. The conversations between Vic and Blood are hilarious (and Blood’s face and movements totally match the dialogue).
I love the bit when Blood asks Vic to name the presidents (remember, this came out in 1975). He responds “Nixon, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy…” When they meet Quilla (about an hour in) the film falls apart. The sequences down under are, at first, scary but get quickly repetitious. But it leads up to a twist ending which is great.
This
was issued in 1975 with a horribly exploitive ad campaign. It showed a
woman lying down on the ground. You don’t see her face–just her body
and all she’s wearing is a shirt and covering her breasts and other
parts. Blood has a paw on her and a proud look on his face and Vic is
standing beside him holding a gun! The implication is obvious and the
rape aspect of this bothered a lot of people.
Atparts, this movie getssostrangeyoucan’tdoanythingbutlaughatit, whichisdefinitelynotabadthing! A Boy and His Dog isnotsomethingthatwilleverbeuniversallypopular, butitisagreat movie forlatenightsandallnerds. Aclassicpieceofsciencefiction.
The Plot
Armageddon is a difficult thing to rationalize, lending itself to outlandish scenes of violence and debauchery. The idea of a pubescent Don Johnson wandering the lonely wastelands guided by an intelligent and telepathic dog is a new one on me, but for some reason it all fits. Particularly so when the pooch in question has a bottomless stomach and spouts an endless stream of acidic criticism at Don Johnson. (Often complaining about Vic’s libido. A dog complaining about a teenage boy’s libido, I love it!)
The two lead an idyllic life, scavenging for food and water in the
desolate landscape, but sometimes Blood is able to sniff out a female
companion for Vic. For some odd reason all the women are in hiding,
other than a ravenous and horny Don Johnson hunting them I can’t imagine
why.
Well he ends up following Quilla into an underground fallout shelter,
there the last “civilized” remnants of society are carrying on
tradition. Country fairs, ice cream, and prizes for the best canned
goods in addition to trapping fertile males from the surface to
impregnate the young women.
Atparts, this movie getssostrangeyoucan’tdoanythingbutlaughatit, whichisdefinitelynotabadthing! A Boy and His Dog isnotsomethingthatwilleverbeuniversallypopular, butitisagreat movie forlatenightsandallnerds. Aclassicpieceofsciencefiction.
Before you start thinking this is not a bad deal let me explain. Vic is immobilized and his genitals attached to the equivalent of an electronic milking machine. (Aiiiieee!) In short succession the lucky brides are wed to him, presented with a bottle of special sauce, and sent on their way. Nearly incapacitated by blue balls the ferocious young man stages a retreat from the complex after being freed, taking Quilla with him. The first (And last might I add.) marital problem results when Vic discovers his faithful pooch waited outside the shelter’s entrance this entire time and is on the brink of starvation.
Zany and fun to watch on a rainy day, plus the girlfriend will never look at your faithful hound the same.
Things I learned from this movie:
Dogs would make excellent history professors.
Porn films used to suck, in a real bad way.
Men are confused and a little put off by women who want sex.
There is a fundamental difference between “hang” and “harangue.”
A secret and powerful society of mimes inhabits the underground areas of our planet.
Green plants grow nicely underground, even without artificial light.
Interrogating a dog is pretty darn difficult.
Nobody expects a crowbar in the middle of a bouquet.
If a very large, but slow moving, man is trying to break your neck I suggest running away.
Dogs make the worst puns.
Atparts, this movie getssostrangeyoucan’tdoanythingbutlaughatit, whichisdefinitelynotabadthing! A Boy and His Dog isnotsomethingthatwilleverbeuniversallypopular, butitisagreat movie forlatenightsandallnerds. Aclassicpieceofsciencefiction.
Surely those who were looking for nothing more than what Hollywood usually delivers when they invoke the words "science fiction" were disappointed, because this movie resembles the usual horror or action film masquerading as sci-fi very little.
Its source material is a novella by Harlan Ellison, a writer who's recognized by many in the sci-fi community as a master on the same playing field of "psychological sci-fi" as Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick.
From Ellison we get a very dark tale about a strangely human dog and his boy. They live in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where Phoenix Arizona used to be, and hunt women and food with the same predatory zeal. But when Vic (or as the dog calls him, Albert) is lured into a surreal society living in a large bomb shelter, their friendship is threatened and Vic is almost forced to become a sort of sexual machine for the good of the State.
Just to run through some of the aspects of the film that I enjoyed, I really liked Tim McIntire's voice work as the dog, perfectly crisp like a cranky old man. How exactly the dog knows so much or is able to speak to Vic is never really explained, but I think there's a clue in that Lou (Jason Robards, Jr.) believes that Vic has spoken to a dog he encounters in the shelter.
That, along with the "Committee's" seeming obsession with recounting facts and figures almanac-style, makes me believe that the dog actually came from the shelter. Perhaps he was sent there to "observe" Vic, as Lou tells him they have been doing for some time, and he rebelled against their control. Like all good sci-fi the idea is vaguely proposed but never explained.
Don Johnson did pretty good work here, I mean it doesn't strike you as all that impressive at first but when you think about the fact that he had to do so many scenes with just this dog as his co-star it's a pretty tough act to pull off as well as he did.
Susanne Benton was decent in her role as well. I loved when she tried to sweet-talk the dog, basically the same way that she treated Vic. Vic seems confused about her intentions all the way up to the end, which is excellent -- if he had figured her out completely then the ending would just feel mean-spirited instead of humorous.
As it is, it's as if Vic believes he's making a sacrifice but the dog knows better and turns it into a joke. By the way my girlfriend thought the last line was too tacky but I thought it was perfect, it gave narrative closure to the film as well as filling in those who might not have understood the scene with the campfire.
Honestly the only performance I wasn't crazy about was Jason Robards'. There's these great scenes he gets to play with Alvy Moore ("Green Acres") and Helene Winston (great laugh she's got... she didn't make a lot of movies but strangely enough just this week I saw her in Curtis Harrington's "The Killing Kind").
He just has no energy, I guess that's the way he wanted to do it but it's annoying how he kind of mumbles through the dialog and I just didn't feel that the dialog was supposed to be quite that casual.
Basically I just did not like the way he decided to play the character, I didn't think it was scary at all. His android assistant, like a twisted American Gothic, is pretty strange though.
Plus I never understood why everyone down there was wearing clown makeup. Was it the idea of the forced smile?
Anyway, I salute the film because I think it was a brave decision to make it as it is and not to try to turn it into a more conventional thing with romance or too much action. I think I can see some influence from this movie on George Miller's "Road Warrior" (though I was told that he claims he hadn't seen it), and definitely on "Slip Stream" with Mark Hamill from the 80s.
But this isn't really the kind of movie that was made to fall into place inside the pantheon of "sci-fi" anyway. It's a closer relative to "Electra-Glide in Blue" and other films of the early 70s that explored the bitter end of "hippie" idealism, the same trend that Hampton Fancher was trying to catch onto when he wrote his first drafts of the film that eventually became "Blade Runner."
Frankly I can't remember seeing another sci-fi film that is so close to the feel and ethos of the most transgressive and anti-establishment sci-fi of the 1960s.
- funkyfry
Stuff to watch out for:
1 min – You have to respect any film that starts off with nuclear war.
8 mins – That is Phoenix? I see that it has not changed much…
23 mins – Don Johnson apologizing to a dog ladies and gentlemen.
25 mins – Good dog! Hehehehe!
37 mins – Blood just managed to kill a full grown man who was armed with a rifle?
45 mins – Sort of a canine teleprompter…
46 mins – RANDOM GRATUITOUS BREAST SHOT!
71 mins – Now, will Vic eat that or wipe it on his clothing?
78 mins – The true colors of Quilla’s womanhood come to light.
79 mins – That is about fifty yards I guess, easy shot with a rifle…
Conclusion
Watch the movie. It’s a great romp into 1970’s science fiction. And, as such, perfect for a nice lazy afternoon, or a boring evening at home.
If you enjoyed this article, please check out similar articles in my Movie Index…
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This is a very short science-fiction story by Ray Bradbury. It is about how a race of extraterrestrials invade the United States. They use American children.
Oh, it was to be so jolly! What a game! Such excitement they hadn’t known in years. The children catapulted this way and
that across the green
lawns, shouting at
each other, holding hands, flying in circles, climbing trees, laughing. Overhead the rockets flew, and beetle cars whispered
by on the streets,
but the children
played on. Such fun, such tremulous joy, such tumbling
and
hearty screaming.
Mink ran into the house, all dirty and sweat. For her seven years she was loud and strong and definite.
Her mother, Mrs. Morris, hardly saw her as she yanked out drawers
and rattled pans and tools into
a large sack.
‘Heavens, Mink, what’s going on?’
‘The most exciting
game ever!’ gasped Mink, pink-faced. ‘Stop
and
get your breath,’
said the mother.
‘No, I’m all
right,’ gasped Mink. ‘Okay I take these things, Mom?’ ‘But don’t dent
them,’ said Mrs. Morris.
‘Thank you, thank you!’
cried Mink, and boom! She was gone, like
a rocket. Mrs. Morris surveyed
the fleeing
tot. ‘What’s the name of
the game?’ ‘Invasion!’
said Mink. The door slammed.
In every yard on the street children brought out knives and forks and pokers and old stovepipes and can-openers.
It was an interesting fact that this fury and bustle occurred
only among the younger children. The older ones, those ten years and more, disdained the affair
and marched scornfully off on hikes or played a more dignified version
of hide-and-seek on their own.
Meanwhile, parents came
and
went in chromium beetles. Repair men
came to repair the vacuum elevators in houses, to fix fluttering television sets or hammer upon stubborn
food-delivery tubes. The adult civilization passed and repassed the busy youngsters, jealous of the fierce energy of the wild tots, tolerantly amused at their flourishings, longing to join in themselves.
‘This and this and this,’said Mink, instructing the thers with their assorted spoons and wrenches. ‘Do that, and bring thatover here. No! Here,ninny! Right. Now, get back while
I fix this.’ Tongue in
teeth, face wrinkled in
thought. ‘Like that.
See?’
‘Yayyy!’ shouted
the kids.
Twelve-year-old
Joseph Connors ran
up.
‘Go away,’ said Mink straight at
him.
‘I wanna
play,’ said Joseph. ‘Can’t!’
said Mink.
‘Why not?’
‘You’d
just make fun of us.’ ‘Honest, I wouldn’t.’
‘No. We know you.Go away or we’ll
kick you.’
Another twelve-year-old boy whirred by on little motor skates. ‘Hey, Joe! Come on!
Let them
sissies play!’
Joseph showed
reluctance and a certain
wistfulness ‘I wantto play,’ he said. ‘You’re
old,’ said Mink firmly.
‘Not thatold,’ said Joe sensibly.
‘You’d only laugh and spoil the Invasion.’
The boy on the motor skates made a rude lip noise. ‘Come on, Joe! Them and their fairies!
Nuts!’
Joseph walked off
slowly. He kept looking back, all
down the block.
Mink was already busy again. She made a kind of apparatus
with her gathered
equipment. She had appointed another little girl with a pad and pencil to take down notes in painful slow scribbles.
Their voices rose and fell in
the warm sunlight.
All around them the city hummed.
The streets were lined with good green and peaceful trees. Only the wind made a conflict across the city, across the country, across the continent. In a thousand other cities there were trees and children and avenues, businessmen in their quiet offices taping their voices, or watching television. Rockets hovered like darning
needles in the blue sky. There was the universal, quiet conceit and easiness of men accustomed to peace, quite certain there would never be trouble again. Arm in arm, men all over earth were a united front. The perfect
weapons were held in equal trust by all nations. A situation
of incredibly beautiful balance had been brought about. There were
no traitors among
men, no unhappy
ones, no disgruntled ones; therefore the world was based upon
a stable ground. Sunlight
illumined half the world and
the trees drowsed in a tide of warm air.
Mink’s mother, from
her upstairs window, gazed down.
The children. She looked
upon them and shook her head.
Well, they’d eat well, sleep well, and be
in
school on Monday. Bless their vigorous
little bodies. She listened.
Mink talked earnestly to someone
near the rose bush – though
there was no one
there.
These odd children.
And the little girl, what was her name? Anna? Anna took notes on a pad. First, Mink asked
the rosebush a question, then called the answer to Anna.
‘Triangle,’ said Mink.
‘What’s
a tri,’ said Anna with difficulty, ‘angle?’ ‘Never mind,’
said Mink.
‘How you spell it?’
asked Anna.
‘T-r-i
—‘ spelled Mink slowly,
then snapped, ‘Oh, spell it yourself!’ She went on to other words. ‘Beam,’
she
said.
‘I haven’t
got tri,’ said Anna, ‘angle
down yet!’ ‘Well, hurry, hurry!’
cried Mink.
Mink’s mother leaned out of the upstairs window. ‘A-n-g-I-e,’ she spelled down at
Anna.
‘Oh, thanks, Mrs. Morris,’
said Anna.
‘Certainly,’ said Mink’s
mother and
withdrew, laughing,
to
dust the hall
with an electro-duster
magnet.
The voices wavered
on the
shimmery air. ‘Beam,’ said Anna.
Fading.
Four-nine-seven-A-and-B-and-X,’ said Mink, far away, seriously. ‘And a fork and a string and a — hex-hex-agony
— hexagonal!’
At lunch Mink gulped milk at one toss and was at the door. Her mother slapped the
table.
‘You sit right back down,’ commanded Mrs. Morris. ‘Hot soup in a minute.’
She poked a red button
on the kitchen butler, and ten seconds later something landed with a hump in the rubber receiver. Mrs. Morris opened it, took out a can with a pair of aluminium holders, unsealed
it with
a flick, and poured hot soup
into a bowl.
During all this Mink fidgeted.
‘Hurry, Mom! This is a matter of life and death! Aw -‘ ‘I was the
same way at your age. Always life
and
death, I know.’
Mink banged away at the soup. ‘Slow down,’ said
Mom.
‘Can’t,’
said Mink. ‘Drill’s
waiting for me.’ ‘Who’s Drill? What a peculiar name,’
said Mom. ‘You don’t
know him,’ said Mink.
‘A new boy in the neighbourhood?’
asked Mom.
‘He’s new all right,’ said Mink. She started on her second bowl.
‘Which one is Drill?’
asked Mom.
‘He’s around,’ said Mink evasively. ‘You’ll make fun. Everybody pokes fun. Gee, darn. ‘
‘Is Drill shy?’
‘Yes. No. In a
way.
Gosh, Mom, I got to run if we want to have
the Invasion!’ ‘Who’s invading what?’
‘Martians
invading Earth. Well, not exactly
Martians. They’re – I don’t know. From up.’
She pointed with her spoon.
Mink rebelled.
‘You’re laughing! You’ll kill Drill
and
everybody.’ ‘I didn’t
mean to,’ said Mom.
‘Drill’s a Martian?’
‘No. He’s – well – maybe from Jupiter
or Saturn or Venus. Anyway, he’s had a hard
time.’
‘I imagine.’
Mrs. Morris hid her
mouth behind her hand. ‘They couldn’t
figure a way to attack Earth.’
‘We’re impregnable,’
said Mom in mock seriousness.
‘That’s
the word Drill used!
Impreg – That was the word, Mom.’ ‘My, my, Drill’s a
brilliant little boy. Two-bit words.’
‘They couldn’t figure a way to attack,
Mom. DrilI says – he says in order to make a good fight you got to have a new way of surprising
people. That way you win. And he says also you got
to have help from your enemy.’
‘A fifth column,’ said
Mom.
‘Yeah. That’s what Drill said. And they couldn’t figure a way to surprise Earth or get
help.’
‘No wonder. We’re pretty darn strong.’ Mom laughed, cleaning up. Mink sat there, staring at
the table,
seeing what she
was
talking about.
‘Until, one
day,’ whispered Mink melodramatically, ‘they thought of children!’
‘Well!’said Mrs. Morris brightly.
‘And they thought
of how grown-ups are so busy they never look under rose bushes or on lawns!’
‘Only for snails and fungus.’
‘And
then there’s something about dim-dims.’ ‘Dim-dims?’
‘Dimens-shuns.’ ‘Dimensions?’
‘Four of ‘em! And there’s something about kids under nine and imagination. It’s real funny to
hear
Drill talk.’
Mrs. Morris was tired. ‘Well, it must he funny. You’re keeping Drill waiting now. It’s getting late in the day and, if you want to have your Invasion before your supper bath, you’d better jump.’
‘Do I have to take a bath?’ growled Mink.
‘You do! Why is it children
hate water? No matterwhat age you live in children
hate water behind
the ears!’
‘Drill says I won’t have to take baths,’ said Mink. ‘Oh, he
does, does he?’
‘He told all the kids that. No more baths. And we can stay up till ten o’clock
and go to two
televisor shows on Saturday ‘stead of one!’
‘Well, Mr.
Drill better mind his p’s and q’s. I’ll call up his mother and —‘
Mink went to the door. ‘We’re having trouble with guys like Pete Britz and Dale Jerrick. They’re growing up. They make fun. They’re
worse than parents. They just won’t believe
in Drill. They’re so snooty, ‘cause they’re growing up. You’d think they’d know better. They
were little only a
coupla years ago. I hate them worst. We’ll
kill them first.’
‘Your father and I last?’
‘Drill says you’re dangerous. Know why? ‘Cause you don’t believe in Martians!
They’re going to let usrun the world. Well, not just us, but the kids over in the next block, too. I
might be queen.’ She
opened the door.
‘Mom?’
‘Yes?’
‘What’s lodge-ick?’
‘Logic? Why, dear, logic is knowing what things are true and not
true.’
‘He mentionedthat,’ said Mink. ‘And what’s im-pres-sion-able?’ It took her a minute to say it.
‘Why, it means –‘
Her
mother looked at the floor,
laughing gently. ‘It means — to be
a child, dear.’
‘Thanks for lunch!’ Mink ran out, then stuck her head back in. ‘Mom, I’ll be sure you won’t be hurt
much, really!’
‘Well, thanks,’ said
Mom.
Slamwent the door.
At four o’clock the audio-visor buzzed. Mrs. Morris flipped the tab. ‘Hello, Helen!’ she said in
welcome.
‘Hello, Mary. How are
things in New York?’
‘Fine. How are things in Scranton? You
look
tired.’ ‘So
do you.
The children.
Underfoot,’ said
Helen.
Mrs. Morris sighed.
‘My Mink
too. The super-Invasion.’ Helen
laughed. ‘Are your kids playing
that game too?’
‘Lord, yes. Tomorrow it’ll be geometrical jacks and motorized hopscotch. Were we this bad when
we were kids in
‘48?’
‘Worse. Japs and
Nazis. Don’t know how my parents put up with me.
Tomboy.’ ‘Parents learn to shut their ears.’
A silence.
‘What’s wrong, Mary?’
asked Helen.
Mrs. Morris’s eyes were half closed; her tongue slid slowly thoughtfully, over her lower lip. ‘Eh?’ She jerked. ‘Oh, nothing. Just thought about that.Shutting ears and such. Never mind. Where
were we?’
‘My boy Tim’s got a crush on
some guy named DrilI,I
think it was.’ ‘Must be a new password.
Mink likes him too.’
‘Didn’t know it had got as far as New York. Word of mouth,
I imagine. Looks like a scrap drive. I talked to Josephine and she said her kids — that’s in Boston – are wild on this new game.
It’s sweeping the country.’
At this moment Mink trotted into the kitchen
to gulp a glass of water.
Mrs. Morris turned. ‘How’re
things going?’
‘Almost finished,’
said Mink.
‘Swell,’ said Mrs. Morris. ‘What’s that?’
‘A yo-yo,’ said Mink. ‘Watch.’
She flung
the yo-yo down its string. Reaching
the end it
— It vanished.
‘See?’ said Mink. ‘Ope!’ Dibbling her finger, she made the yo-yo reappear
and zip up the string.
‘Do that again,’ said her mother.
‘Can’t. Zero hour’s
five o’clock! Bye.’ Mink exited, zipping her
yo-yo.
On the audio-visor, Helen laughed. ‘Tim brought one of those yo-yos in this morning, but when
I got
curious he said he
wouldn’t show it to me, and when
I tried to work it,
finally, it wouldn’t work.’
‘You’re not impressionable,’ said Mrs. Morris. ‘What?’
‘Never mind. Something I thought of. Can I help you, Helen?’ ‘I wanted to get that black-and-white cake recipe –‘
The hour drowsed
by. The way waned. The sun lowered in the peaceful blue sky. Shadows lengthened on the green lawns. The laughter and excitement continued. One little
girl ran away, crying.
Mrs.
Morris came out the front door.
‘Mink was that
Peggy Ann crying?’
Mink was bent over in the yard, near the rosebush. ‘Yeah. She’s a scarebaby. We won’t let her play, now. She’s getting
too old
to play. I guess she grew up all
of a sudden.’
‘Is that why she cried? Nonsense. Give me a civil answer, young lady, or inside you
come!’
Mink whirled in consternation, mixed with irritation. ‘I can’t quit now. It’s almost time.
I’ll be good. I’m
sorry.’
‘Did you hit Peggy Ann?’
‘No, honest. You ask her. It was something — well, she’s just a scaredy pants.’
The ring of children
drew in around Mink where she scowled at her work with spoons and a kind of square-shaped arrangement of hammers and pipes. ‘There and there,’ murmured Mink.
‘What’s wrong?’ said
Mrs.
Morris.
‘Drill’s stuck. Half-way. If we could only get him all the way through it’d be easier.
Then the others could come through after
him.’ ‘Can I help?’
‘No thanks. I’ll fix it.’
‘All right. I’ll
call you for your bath in
half
an hour. I’m tired
of watching you.’
She went in and sat in the electric
relaxing chair, sipping a little
beer from a half- empty glass. The chair massaged her back. Children, children. Children and love and hate, side by side. Sometimes children loved you, hated you -~ all in half a second. Strange children, did they ever forget or forgive the whippings
and the harsh, strict words of command?
She wondered. How can you ever forget or forgive those over and above you, those tall
and silly dictators?
Time passed. A curious,
waiting silence came upon the
street, deepening.
Five o’clock.
A clock sang softly somewhere
in the house in a quiet musical voice: ‘Five o’clock — five o’clock. Time’s a-wasting.
Five o’clock —‘ and purred away
into silence.
Zero hour.
Mrs. Morris chuckled
in her throat. Zero
hour.
A beetle car hummed
into the driveway.
Mr. Morris. Mrs. Morris smiled. Mr. Morris got out of the beetle,
locked it, and called hello to Mink at her work. Mink ignored
him. He laughed
and
stood for a moment watching
the children. Then he
walked up the front steps.
‘Hello, darling.’
‘Hello, Henry.’
She strained forward on
the edge of the chair, listening.
The children were silent. Too silent.
He emptied
his
pipe, refilled it. ‘Swell day. Makes you
glad to be alive.’
Buzz.
‘What’s that?’
asked Henry.
‘I don’t know.’ She got up suddenly,
her eyes widening. She was going to say something. She stopped it. Ridiculous. Her nerves jumped. ‘Those children haven’t anything dangerous out
there, have they?’ she said.
‘Nothing but pipes and
hammers. Why?’ ‘Nothing
electrical?’
‘Heck, no,’ said Henry. ‘I
looked.’
She walked to the kitchen.
The buzzing continued. ‘Just
the same, you’d better go
tell them to quit. It’s after
five. Tell them – ‘
Her
eyes widened and narrowed. ‘Tell
them to put off their Invasion until tomorrow.’ She laughed, nervously.
The buzzing grew louder.
‘What are they up to? I’d better
go look, all right.’ The
explosion!
The house shook with dull sound. There were other explosions in other yards on other streets.
Involuntarily, Mrs. Morris screamed. ‘Up this way!’ she cried senselessly, knowing no sense, no reason. Perhaps she saw something from the corners of her eyes; perhaps she smelled a new odor or heard a new noise. There was no time to argue with Henry to convince him. Let
him think her insane. Yes, insane! Shrieking,
she
ran upstairs. He ran after her to see what she was up to. ‘In the attic!’
she screamed. ‘That’s where it is!’ It was only a poor excuse to get him in
the attic in time.
Oh, God – in time!
Another explosion
outside. The children
screamed with delight, as if at a great fireworks
display.
‘It’s not in the attic,’
cried Henry. ‘It’s outside!’
‘No, no!’ Wheezing, gasping, she fumbled at the attic door. ‘I’ll show you. Hurry!
I’ll show you!’
They tumbled into the attic. She slammed the door, locked it, took the key, threw it into
a far,
cluttered corner.
She was babbling wild stuff now. It came out of her. All the subconscious suspicion and fear that had gathered
secretly all afternoon and fermented like a wine in her. All the little revelations and
knowledges and sense that had
bothered her all day and
which she had logically
and carefully and sensibly rejected
and
censored. Now
it
exploded in her and
shook her to bits.
‘There, there,’
she said, sobbing against the door. ‘We’re safe until tonight.
Maybe we can sneak out.
Maybe we can escape!’
Henry blew up too, but for another reason.
‘Are you crazy? Why’d you throw that key away?
Damn it, honey!’
‘Yes, yes,
I’m
crazy, if it helps, but
stay here with me!’ ‘I don’t
know how in hell
I canget out!’
Below them, Mink’s voice. The husband stopped.
There was a great universal humming and sizzling, a screaming
and giggling. Downstairs the audio-televisor buzzed and buzzed insistently, alarmingly, violently. Is that Helen calling? thought Mrs. Morris. And is she calling
about what I think she’s calling about?
Footsteps came
into the house. Heavy footsteps.
‘Who’s coming in my house?’
demanded Henry angrily. ‘Whose tramping around down
there?’
Heavy feet. Twenty, thirty, forty, fifty of them. Fifty persons crowding into the house.
The humming. The giggling of the children.
‘This way!’ cried Mink, below. ‘Who’s downstairs?’ roared
Henry. ‘Who’s there!’
‘Hush. Oh, nononononono!’ said his wife
weakly, holding him. ‘Please, be quiet. They might
go
away.’
‘Mom?’ called Mink.
‘Dad?’ A pause. ‘Where are
you?’
Heavy footsteps, heavy, heavy, very heavyfootsteps, came up the
stairs. Mink leading them. ‘Mom?’
A hesitation. ‘Dad?’ A waiting,
a silence.
Humming. Footsteps
toward the attic. Mink’s first.
They trembled together
in silence in the attic, Mr. and Mrs. Morris. For some reason
the electric humming,
the queer cold light suddenly visible under the door crack, the strange
odor and the alien sound of eagerness in Mink’s voice finally got through
to Henry Morris too. He
stood, shivering, in the dark silence, his wife
beside him.
‘Mom! Dad!’
Footsteps. A little
humming sound. The attic-lock melted. The door opened. Mink peered inside,
tall blue shadows behind
her.
‘Peekaboo,’ said Mink.
The End.
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This is the kind of short science fiction story that I enjoyed reading as a young teenager. A spaceship is out, far out, in deep space. As it crosses the deep depths it discovers a mystery... one that needs investigation. So they check it out, and an adventure ensues...
The Long Way Home
When Marty first saw
the thing it was nearly dead ahead, half a million miles away, a tiny
green blip that repeated itself every five seconds on the screen of his
distant-search radar.
He was four billion
miles from Sol and heading out, working his way slowly through a small
swarm of rock chunks that swung in a slow sun-orbit out here beyond
Pluto, looking for valuable minerals in concentration that would make
mining profitable.
The thing on his
radar screen looked quite small, and therefore not too promising. But,
as it was almost in his path, no great effort would be required to
investigate. For all he knew, it might be solid germanium. And nothing
better was in sight at the moment. Marty leaned back in the control seat
and said: “We’ve got one coming up, baby.” He had no need to address
himself any more exactly. Only one other human was aboard the Clementine, or, to his knowledge, within a couple of billion miles.
Laura’s voice answered through a speaker, from the kitchen two decks below. “Oh, close? Have we got time for breakfast?”
Marty studied the
radar. “About five hours if we maintain speed. Hope it won’t be a waste
of energy to decelerate and look the thing over.” He gave Clem’s main computer the problem of finding the most economical engine use to approach his find and reach zero velocity relative to it.
“Come and eat!”
“All right.” He and
the computer studied the blip together for a few seconds. Then the man,
not considering it anything of unusual importance, left the control room
to have breakfast with his bride of three months. As he walked
downstairs in the steadilymaintained artificial gravity, he heard the
engines starting.
Ten hours later he
examined his new find much more closely, with a rapidly focusing
alertness that balanced between an explorer’s caution and a prospector’s
elation at a possibly huge strike. The incredible shape of X, becoming
apparent as the Clem drew within a few hundred miles, was what
had Marty on the edge of his chair. It was a needle thirty miles long,
as near as his radar could measure and about a hundred yards
thick—dimensions that matched exactly nothing Marty could expect to find
anywhere in space.
It was obviously no
random chunk of rock. And it was no spaceship that he had ever seen or
heard of. One end of it pointed in the direction of Sol, causing him to
suggest to Laura the idea of a miniature comet, complete with tail. She
took him seriously at first, then remembered some facts about comets and
swatted him playfully. “Oh, you!” she said.
Another, more real
possibility quickly became obvious, with sobering effect. The ancient
fear of aliens that had haunted Earthmen through almost three thousand
years of intermittent space exploration, a fear that had never been
realized, now peered into the snug control room through the green radar
eye.
Aliens were always
good for a joke when spacemen met and talked. But they turned out to be
not particularly amusing when you were possibly confronting them,
several billion miles from Earth. Especially, thought Marty, in a ship
built for robot mining, ore refining, and hauling, not for diplomatic
contacts or heroics—and with the only human assistance a girl on her
first space trip. Marty hardly felt up to speaking for the human race in
such a situation.
It took a minute to set the autopilot so that any sudden move by X would trigger alarms and such evasive tactics as Clem could
manage. He then set a robot librarian to searching his microfilm files
for any reference to a spaceship having X’s incredible dimensions.
There was a
chance—how good a chance, he found hard to estimate, when any
explanation looked somewhat wild—that X was a derelict, the wrecked hull
of some ship dead for a decade, or a century, or a thousand years. By
laws of salvage, such a find would belong to him if he towed it into
port. The value might be very high or very low. But the prospect was
certainly intriguing.
Marty brought Clem to a stop relative to X, and noticed that his velocity to Sol now also hung at zero. “I wonder,” he muttered,
“Space anchor . . . ?”
The space anchor had
been in use for thousands of years. It was a device that enabled a ship
to fasten itself to a particular point in the gravitational field of a
massive body such as a sun. If X was anchored, it did not prove that
there was still life aboard her; once “dropped,” an anchor could hold as
long as a hull could last. Laura brought sandwiches and a hot drink to
him in the control room.
“If we call the navy
and they bring it in we won’t get anything out of it,” he told her
between bites. “That’s assuming it’s—not alien.”
“Could there be someone alive on it?” She was staring into the screen. Her face was solemn, but, he thought, not frightened.
“If it’s human, you mean? No. I know there
hasn’t been any ship remotely like that used in recent years. Way, way
back the Old Empire built some that were even bigger, but none I ever
heard of with this crazy shape . . . “
The robot librarian
indicated that it had drawn a blank. “See?” said Marty. “And I’ve even
got most of the ancient types in there.” There was silence for a little
while. The evening’s recorded music started somewhere in the background.
“What would you do if I weren’t along?” Laura asked him.
He did not answer
directly, but said something he had been considering. “I don’t know the
psychology of our hypothetical aliens. But it seems to me that if you
set out exploring new solar systems, you do as Earthmen have always
done—go with the best you have in the way of speed and weapons.
Therefore if X is alien, I don’t think Clem would stand a chance trying to fight or run.” He paused, frowning at the image of X. “That damned shape—it’s just not right for anything.”
“We could call the
navy—not that I’m saying we should, darling,” she added hastily. “You
decide, and I’ll never complain either way. I’m just trying to help you
think it out.”
He looked at her, believed it about there never being any complaints, and squeezed her hand. Anything more seemed superfluous.
“If I was alone,” he
said, “I’d jump into a suit, go look that thing over, haul it back to
Ganymede, and sell it for a unique whateverit-is. Maybe I’d make enough
money to marry you in real style, and trade in Clem for a
first-rate ship—or maybe even terraform an asteroid and keep a couple of
robot prospectors. I don’t know, though. Maybe we’d better call the
navy.”
She laughed at him
gently. “We’re married enough already, and we had all the style I
wanted. Besides, I don’t think either of us would be very happy sitting
on an asteroid. How long do you think it will take you to look it over?”
At the airlock door she had misgivings: “Oh, it is safe enough, isn’t it? Marty, be careful and come back soon.” She kissed him before he closed his helmet.
They had moved Clem to
within a few kilometers of X. Marty mounted his spacebike and
approached it slowly, from the side. The vast length of X blotted out a
thin strip of stars to his right and left, as it it were the distant
shore of some vast island in a placid Terran sea, and the starclouds
below him were the watery reflections of the ones above. But space was
too black to permit such an illusion to endure.
The tiny FM radar on
his bike showed him within three hundred yards of X. He killed his
forward speed with a gentle application of retrojets and turned on a
spotlight. Bright metal gleamed smoothly back at him as he swung the
beam from side to side. Then he stopped it where a dark concavity showed
up.
“Lifeboat berth . . . empty,” he said aloud, looking through the bike’s little telescope.
“Then it is a derelict? We’re all right?” asked Laura’s voice in his helmet.
“Looks that way.
Yeah, I guess there’s no doubt of it. I’ll go in for a closer look now.”
He eased the bike forward. X was evidently just some rare type of ship
that neither he nor the compilers of the standard reference works in his
library had ever heard of. Which sounded a little foolish to him, but .
. .
At ten meters’
distance he killed speed again, set the bike on automatic stay-clear,
made sure a line from it was fast to his belt, and launched himself out
of the saddle gently, headfirst, toward X.
The armored hands of
his suit touched down first, easily and expertly. In a moment he was
standing upright on the hull, held in place by magnetic boots. He looked
around. He detected no response to his arrival.
Marty turned toward
Sol, sighting down the kilometers of dark cylinder that seemed to
dwindle to a point in the starry distance, like a road on which a man
might travel home toward a tiny sun. Near at hand the hull was smooth,
looking like that of any ordinary spaceship. In the direction away from
Sol, quite distant, he could vaguely see some sort of projections at
right angles to the hull. He mounted his bike again and set off in that
direction. When he neared the nearest projection, a kilometer and a half
down the hull, he saw it to be a sort of enormous clamp that encircled
X—or rather, part of a clamp. It ended a few meters from the hull, in
rounded globs of metal that had once been molten but were now too cold
to affect the thermometer Marty held against them. His radiation counter
showed nothing above the normal background.
“Ah,” said Marty after a moment, looking at the half-clamp.
“Something?”
“I think I’ve got it
figured out. Not quite as weird as we thought. Let me check for one
thing more.” He steered the bike slowly around the circumference of X.
A third of the way
around he came upon what looked like a shallow trench, about five feet
wide and a foot deep, with a bottom that shone cloudy gray in his
lights. It ran lengthwise on X as far as he could see in either
direction.
A door-sized opening
was cut in the clamp above the trench. Marty nodded and smiled to
himself, and gunned the bike around in an accelerating curve that aimed
at the Clementine.
“It’s not a
spaceship at all, only a part of one,” he told Laura a little later,
digging in the microfilm file with his own hands, with the air of a man
who knew what he was looking for. “That’s why the librarian didn’t turn
it up. Now I remember reading about them. It’s part of an Old Empire job
of about two thousand years ago. They used a somewhat different drive
than we do, one that made one enormous ship more economical to run than
several normal-sized ones. They made these ships ready for a voyage by
fastening together long narrow sections side by side, the number
depending on how much cargo they had to move. What we’ve found is
obviously one of those sections.”
Laura wrinkled her
forehead. “It must have been a terrible job, putting those sections
together and separating them, even in free space.”
“They used space
anchors. That trench I mentioned? It has a forcefield bottom. so an
anchor could be sunk through it. Then the whole section could be slid
straight forward or back, in or out of the bunch . . . here, I’ve got
it, I think. Put this strip in the viewer.”
One picture, a
photograph, showed what appeared to be one end of a bunch of long
needles, in a glaring light, against a background of stars that looked
unreal. The legend beneath gave a scanty description of the ship in
flowing Old Empire script. Other pictures showed sections of the ship in
some detail.
“This must be it, all right,” said Marty thoughtfully. “Funny looking old tub.”
“I wonder what happened to wreck her.”
“Drives sometimes
exploded in those days, and that could have done it. And this one
section got anchored to Sol somehow—it’s funny.”
“How long ago did it
happen, do you suppose?” asked Laura. She had her arms folded as if she
were a little cold, though it was not cold in the Clementine.
“Must be around two
thousand years or more. These ships haven’t been used for about that
long.” He picked up a stylus. “I better go over there with a big bag of
tools tomorrow and take a look inside.” He wrote down a few things he
thought he might need.
“Historians would probably pay a good price for the whole thing, untouched,” she suggested, watching him draw doodles.
“That’s a thought.
But maybe there’s something really valuable aboard—though I won’t be
able to give it anything like a thorough search, of course. The thing is
anchored, remember. I’ll probably have to break in, anyway, to release
that.”
She pointed to one
of the diagrams. “Look, a section thirty miles long must be one of the
passenger compartments. And according to this plan, it would have no
drive at all of its own. We’ll have to tow it.”
He looked. “Right. Anyway, I don’t think I’d care to try its drive if it had one.”
He located airlocks on the plan and made himself generally familiar with it.
The next “morning”
found Marty loading extra tools, gadgets, and explosives on his bike.
The trip to X (he still thought of it that way) was uneventful. This
time he landed about a third of the way from one end, where he expected
to find a handy airlock and have a choice of directions to explore when
he got inside. He hoped to get the airlock open without letting out
whatever atmosphere or gas was present in any of the main compartments,
as a sudden drop in pressure might damage something in the unknown
cargo. He found a likely looking spot for entry where the plans had told
him to expect one. It was a small auxiliary airlock, only a few feet
from the space-anchor channel. The forcefield bottom of that channel
was, he knew, useless as a possible doorway. Though anchors could be
raised and lowered through it, they remained partly imbedded in it at
all times. Starting a new hole from scratch would cause the
decompression he was trying to avoid, and possibly a dangerous explosion
as well.
Marty began his
attack on the airlock door cautiously, working with electronic
“sounding” gear for a few minutes, trying to tell if the inner door was
closed as well. He had about decided that it was when something made him
look up. He raised his head and sighted down the dark length of X
toward Sol.
Something was moving toward him along the hull.
He was up in the
bike saddle with his hand on a blaster before he realized what it
was—that moving blur that distorted the stars seen through it, like heat
waves in air. Without doubt, it was a space anchor, moving along the
channel.
Marty rode the
bike out a few yards and nudged it along slowly, following the anchor.
It moved at about the pace of a fast walk. Moved . . . but it was sunk into space.
“Laura,” he called. “Something odd here. Doppler this hull for me and see if it’s moving.”
Laura
acknowledged in one businesslike word. Good girl, he thought. I won’t
have to worry about you. He coasted along the hull on the bike, staying
even with the apparent movement of the anchor.
Laura’s voice came: “It is moving now, toward Sol. About 10 kilometers per hour. Maybe less—it’s so slow it’s hard to read.”
“Good, that’s
what I thought.” He hoped he sounded reassuring. He pondered the
situation. It was the hull moving then, the forcefield channel sliding
by the fixed anchor. Whatever was causing it, it did not seem to be
directed against him or the Clem. “Look, baby,” he went on. “Something peculiar is happening.” He explained about the anchor. “Clem may be no battleship, but I guess she’s a match for any piece of wreckage.”
“But you’re out there!”
“I have to see
this. I never saw anything like it before. Don’t worry, I’ll pull back
if it looks at all dangerous.” Something in the back of his mind told
him to go back to his ship and call the navy. He ignored it without much
trouble. He had never thought much of calling the navy.
About four hours
later the incomprehensible anchor neared the end of its track, within
thirty meters of what seemed to be X’s stern. It slowed down and came to
a gradual stop a few meters from the end of the track. For a minute
nothing else happened. Marty reported the facts to Laura. He sat
straight in the bike saddle, regarding the universe, which offered him
no enlightenment.
In the space
between the anchor and the end of the track, a second patterned shimmer
appeared. It must necessarily have been let “down” into space from
inside X. Marty felt a creeping chill. After a little while the first
anchor vanished, withdrawn through the forcefield into the hull.
Marty sat
watching for twenty minutes, but nothing further happened. He realized
that he had a crushing grip on the bike controls and that he was
quivering with fatigue.
Laura and Marty took turns sleeping and watching, that night aboard the Clementine.
About noon the next ship’s day Laura was at the telescope when anchor
number one reappeared, now at the “prow” of X. After a few moments the
one at the stem vanished. Marty looked at the communicator that he could
use any time to call the navy. Faster-than-light travel not being
practical so near a sun, it would take them at least several hours to
arrive after he decided he needed them. Then he beat his fist against a
table and swore. “It can only be that there’s some kind of mechanism in
her still operating.” He went to the telescope and watched number one
anchor begin its apparent slow journey sternward once more.
“I don’t know. I’ve got to settle this.”
The doppler showed X was again creeping toward Sol at about 10 kilometers an hour.
“Does it seem likely there’d be power left after two thousand years to operate such a mechanism?” Laura asked.
“I think so. Each
passenger section had a hydrogen power lamp.” He dug out the microfilm
again. “Yeah. a small fusion lamp for electricity to light and heat the
section, and to run the emergency equipment for . . .” His voice trailed
off, then continued in a dazed tone: “For recycling food and water.”
“Marty, what is it?”
He stood up,
staring at the plan. “The only radios were in the lifeboats, and the
lifeboats are gone. I wonder . . . sure. The explosion could have torn
them apart, blown them away, so . . .”
“What are you talking about?”
He looked again
at their communicator. “A transmitter that can get through the noise
between here and Pluto wouldn’t be easy to jury-rig, even now. In the
Old Empire days . . . “
“What?”
“Now about air—”
He seemed to wake up with a start, looked at her sheepishly. “Just an
idea that hit me.” He grinned. “I’m making another trip.”
An hour later he
was landing on X for the third time, touching down near the “stern.” He
was riding the moving hull toward the anchor, but it was still many
kilometers away.
The spot he had
picked was near another small auxiliary airlock, upon which he began
work immediately. After ascertaining that the inner door was closed, he
drilled a hole in the outer door to relieve any pressure in the chamber
to keep the outer door shut. The door opening mechanism suffered from
twenty-century cramp, but a vibrator tool shook it loose enough to be
operated by hand. The inside of the airlock looked like nothing more
than the inside of an airlock.
He patched the
hole he had made in the outer door so he would be able—he hoped—to open
the inner one normally. He operated the outer door several times to make
sure he could get out fast if he had to. After attaching a few extras
from the bike to his suit, he said a quick and cheerful goodbye to
Laura—not expecting his radio to work from inside the hull—and closed
himself into the airlock. Using the vibrator again, he was able to work
the control that should let whatever passed for hull atmosphere into the
chamber. It came. His wrist gauge told him pressure was building up to
approximately spaceship normal, and his suit mikes began to pick up a
faint hollow humming from somewhere. He very definitely kept suit and
helmet sealed.
The inner door
worked perfectly, testifying to the skill of the Old Empire builders.
Marty found himself nearly upside down as he went through, losing his
footing and his sense of heroic adventure. In return he gained the
knowledge that X’s artificial gravity was still at least partly
operational. Righting himself, he found that he was in a small anteroom
banked with spacesuit lockers, now illuminated only by his suit lights
but showing no other signs of damage. There was a door in each of the
other walls.
He moved to try
the one at his right. First drawing his blaster, he hesitated a moment,
then slid it back into its holster. Swallowing, he eased the door open
to find only another empty compartment, about the size of an average
room and stripped of everything down to the bare deck and bulkheads.
Another door led
him into a narrow passage where a few overhead lights burned dimly.
Trying to watch over his shoulder and ahead at the same time, he
followed the hall to a winding stair and began to climb, moving with all
the silence possible in a spacesuit. The stair brought him out onto a
long gallery overlooking what could only be the main corridor of X, a
passage twenty meters wide and three decks high; it narrowed away to a
point in the dimlit distance.
A man came out of a doorway across the corridor, a deck below Marty.
He was an old man
and may have been nearsighted, for he seemed unaware of the spacesuited
figure gripping a railing and staring down at him. The old man wore a
sort of tunic intricately embroidered with threads of different colors,
and well tailored to his thin figure, leaving his legs and feet bare. He
stood for a moment peering down the long corridor, while Marty stared,
momentarily frozen in shock.
Marty pulled back
two slow steps from the railing, to where he stood mostly in shadow.
Turning his head to follow the old man’s gaze, he noticed that the
forcefield where the anchors traveled was visible, running in a sunken
strip down the center of the corridor. When the interstellar ship of
which X was once a part had been in normal use, the strip might have
been covered with a moving walkway of some kind.
The old man
turned his attention to a tank where grew a mass of plants with flat,
dark green leaves. He touched a leaf, then turned a valve that doled
water into the tank from a thin pipe. Similar valves were clustered on
the bulkhead behind the old man, and pipes ran from them to many other
plant-filled tanks set at intervals down the corridor. “For oxygen,”
Marty said aloud in an almost calm voice, and was startled at the sound
in his helmet. His helmet airspeaker was not turned on, so of course the
old man did not hear him. The old man pulled a red berry from one of
the plants and ate it absently.
Marty made a move
with his chin to turn on his speaker, but did not complete. He half
lifted his arms to wave, but fear of the not-understood held him, made
him back up slowly into the shadows at the rear of the gallery. Turning
his head to the right he could see the near end of the corridor, and an
anchor there, not sunken in space but raised almost out of the
forcefield on a framework at the end of the strip.
Near the stair he
had ascended was a half-open door, leading into darkness. Marty
realized he had turned off his suit lights without consciously knowing
of it. Moving carefully so the old man would not see, he lit one and
probed the darkness beyond the door cautiously. The room he entered was
the first of a small suite that had once been a passenger cabin. The
furniture was simple, but it was the first of any kind that he had seen
aboard X. Garments hanging in one corner were similar to the old man’s
tunic, though no two were exactly alike in design. Marty fingered the
fabric with one armored hand, holding it close to his faceplate. He
nodded to himself; it seemed to be the kind of stuff produced by
fiberrecycling machinery, and he doubted very much that it was anywhere
near two thousand years old.
Marty emerged
from the doorway of the little apartment, and stood in shadow with his
suit lights out, looking around. The old man had disappeared. He
remembered that the old man had gazed down the infinite-looking corridor
as if expecting something. There was nothing new in sight that way. He
turned up the gain of one of his suit mikes and focused it in that
direction.
Many human voices
were singing, somewhere down there, miles away. He started, and tried
to interpret what he heard in some other way, but with an eerie thrill,
he became convinced that his first impression was correct. While he
studied a plan of going back to his bike and heading in that direction,
he became aware that the singing was getting louder—and therefore, no
doubt closer.
He leaned back
against the bulkhead in the shadow at the rear of the gallery. His suit,
dark-colored for space work far from Sol, would be practically
invisible from the lighted corridor below, while he could see down with
little difficulty. Part of his mind urged him to go back to Laura, to
call the navy, because these unknown people could be dangerous to him.
But he had to wait and see more of them. He grinned wryly as he realized
that he was not going to get any salvage out of X after all.
Sweating in spite
of his suit’s coolers, he listened to the singing grow rapidly louder
in his helmet. Male and female voices rose and fell in an intricate
melody, sometimes blending, sometimes chanting separate parts. The
language was unknown to him. Suddenly the people were in sight, first
only as a faint dot of color in the distance. As they drew nearer he
could see that they walked in a long neat column eight abreast, four on
each side of the central strip of forcefield. Men and women, apparently
teamed according to no fixed rule of age or sex or size—except that he
saw no oldsters or young children.
The people sang
and leaned forward as they walked, pulling their weight on heavy ropes
that were intricately decorated, like their clothing and that of the old
man who had now stepped out of his doorway again to greet them. A few
other oldsters of both sexes appeared near him to stand and wait.
Through a briefly opened door Marty caught a glimpse of a well-lighted
room holding machines he recognized as looms only because of the
halffinished cloth they held. He shook his head wonderingly.
All at once the
walkers were very near; hundreds of people pulling on ropes that led to a
multiple whiffletree, made of twisted metal pipes, that rode over the
central trench. The whiffletree and the space anchor to which it was
fastened were pulled past Marty—or rather the spot from which he watched
was carried past the fixed anchor by the slow, human-powered thrust of X
toward Sol.
Behind the anchor
came a small group of children, from about the age of ten up to
puberty. They pulled on ropes, drawing a cart that held what looked like
containers for food and water. At the extreme rear of the procession
marched a man in the prime of life, tall and athletic, wearing a
magnificent headdress.
About the time he
drew even with Marty, this man stopped suddenly and uttered a sharp
command. Instantly, the pulling and singing ceased. Several men nearest
the whiffletree moved in and loosened it from the anchor with quick
precision. Others held the slackened ropes clear as the enormous inertia
of X’s mass carried the end of the forcefield strip toward the anchor,
which now jammed against the framework holding anchor number two,
forcing the framework back where there had seemed to be no room. A thick
forcefield pad now became visible to Marty behind the framework,
expanding steadily as it absorbed the energy of the powerful stress
between ship and anchor. Conduits of some kind, Marty saw, led away from
the pad, possibly to where energy might be stored for use when it came
time to start X creeping toward the sun again. A woman in a headdress
now mounted the framework and released anchor number two, to drop into
space “below” the hull and bind X fast to the place where it was now
held by anchor number one. A crew of men came forward and began to raise
anchor number one . . .
He found himself
descending the stair, retracing his steps to the airlock. Behind him the
voices of the people were raised in a steady recitation that might have
been a prayer. Feeling somewhat as if he moved in a dream, he made no
particular attempt at caution, but he met no one. He tried to think, to
understand what he had witnessed. Vaguely, comprehension came.
Outside, he said:
“I’m out all right, Laura. I want to look at something at the other
end, and then I’ll come home.” He scarcely heard what she said in reply,
but realized that her answer had been almost instantaneous; she must
have been listening steadily for his call all the time. He felt better.
The bike shot him
50 kilometers down the dreamlike length of X toward Sol in a few
minutes. A lot faster than the people inside do their traveling, he
thought . . . and Sol was dim ahead.
Almost recklessly
he broke into X again, through an airlock near the prow. At this end of
the forcefield strip hung a gigantic block and tackle that would give a
vast mechanical advantage to a few hundred people pulling against an
anchor, when it came time for them to start the massive hull moving
toward Sol once more.
He looked in
almost unnoticed at a nursery, small children in the care of a few
women. He thought one of the babies saw him and laughed at him as he
watched through a hole in a bulkhead where a conduit had once passed.
“What is it?” asked Laura impatiently as he stepped exhausted out of the shower room aboard the Clem, wrapping a robe around him. He could see his shock suddenly mirrored in her face.
“People,” he said, sitting down. “Alive over there. Earth people. Humans.”
“You’re all right?”
“Sure. It’s
just—God!” He told her about it briefly. “They must be descended from
the survivors of the accident, whatever it was. Physically, there’s no
reason why they couldn’t live when you come to think of it—even
reproduce, up to a limited number. Plants for oxygen—I bet their air’s
as good as ours. Recycling equipment for food and water, and the
hydrogen power lamp still working to run it, and to give them light and
gravity . . . they have about everything they need. Everything but a
space-drive.” He leaned back with a sigh and closed his eyes. It was
hard for him to stop talking to her. She was silent for a little, trying
to assimilate it all. “But if they have hydrogen power, couldn’t they
have rigged something?” she finally asked. “Some kind of a drive, even if it was slow? Just one push and they’d keep moving.”
Marty thought it
over. “Moving a little faster won’t help them.” He sat up and opened his
eyes again. “And they’d have a lot less work to do every day. I imagine
too large a dose of leisure time could be fatal to all of them.
“Somehow they had
the will to keep going, and the intelligence to find a way—to evolve a
system of life that worked for them, that kept them from going wild and
killing each other. And their children, and their grandchildren, and
after that . . . ” Slowly he stood up. She followed him into the control
room, where they stood watching the image of X that was still focused
on the telescope screen.
“All those years,” Laura whispered. “All that time.”
“Do you realize
what they’re doing?” he asked softly. “They’re not just surviving,
turned inward on weaving and designing and music.
“In a few hours
they’re going to get up and start another day’s work. They’re going to
pull anchor number one back to the front of their ship and lower it.
That’s their morning job. Then someone left in the rear will raise
anchor number two. Then the main group will start pulling against number
one, as I saw them doing a little while ago, and their ship will begin
to move toward Sol. Every day they go through this they move about fifty
kilometers closer to home.
“Honey, these
people are walking home and pulling their ship with them. It must be a
religion with them by now, or something very near it . . . ” He put an
arm around Laura.
“Marty—how long would it take them?”
“Space is big,” he said in a flat voice, as if quoting something he had been required to memorize.
After a few
moments he continued. “I said just moving a little faster won’t help
them. Let’s say they’ve traveled 50 kilometers a day for two thousand
years. That’s somewhere near 36 million kilometers. Almost enough to get
from Mars to Earth at their nearest approach. But they’ve got a long
way to go to reach the neighborhood of Mars’ orbit. We’re well out
beyond Pluto here. Practically speaking, they’re just about where they
started from.” He smiled wanly. “Really, they’re not far from home, for
an interstellar ship. They had their accident almost on the doorstep of
their own solar system, and they’ve been walking toward the threshold
ever since.”
Laura went to the communicator and began to set it up for the call that would bring the navy within a few hours. She paused.
“How long would it take them now,” she asked, “to get somewhere near Earth?”
“Hell would
freeze over. But they can’t know that anymore. Or maybe they still know
it and it just doesn’t bother them. They must just go on, tugging at
that damned anchor day after day, year after year, with maybe a holiday
now and then . . . I don’t know how they do it. They work and sing and
feel they’re accomplishing something . . . and really, they are, you
know. They have a goal and they are moving toward it. I wonder what they
say of Earth, how they think about it?”
Slowly Laura continued to set up the communicator.
Marty watched her. “Are you sure?” he pleaded suddenly.
“What are we doing to them?”
But she had already sent the call.
For better or worse, the long voyage was almost over.
The End
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are
reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal
library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come
and enjoy a read or two as well.
Poetry
My Poetry
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
This is a lovely short story by Ray Bradbury. It's a fun, and easy quick read. The arrival in a small town of a stranger who calls himself 'Charles Dickens' makes a magical and lasting change in the lives of an imaginative 12-year-old boy and a loving young woman. It's a great read and fun escapist reading.
It is free to read and you do not have to jump through any hoops to register, apply to bore through a pay-wall, or give out any personal information. Free means free. Enjoy.
Imagine a summer that would never end.
Nineteen twenty-nine.
Imagine a boy who would never grow up.
Me.
Imagine a barber who was never young.
Mr. Wyneski.
Imagine a dog that would live forever.
Mine.
Imagine a small town, the kind that isn’t lived in anymore.
Ready?
Begin…
Green Town, Illinois … Late June.
Dog barking outside a one-chair barbershop.
Inside, Mr. Wyneski, circling his victim, a customer snoozing in the steambath drowse of noon.
Inside, me, Ralph Spaulding, a boy of some twelve years,
standing still as an iron Civil War statue, listening to the hot wind,
feeling all that hot summer dust out there, a bakery world where nobody
could be bad or good, boys just lay gummed to dogs, dogs used boys for
pillows under trees that lazed with leaves which whispered in despair:
Nothing Will Ever Happen Again.
The only motion anywhere was the cool water dripping from the huge coffin-sized ice block in the hardware store window.
The only cool person in miles was Miss Frostbite, the
traveling magician’s assistant, tucked into that lady-shaped long cavity
hollowed in the ice block displayed for three days now without they
said, her breathing, eating, or talking. That last, I thought, must have
been terrible hard on a woman.
Nothing moved in the street but the barbershop striped
pole which turned slowly to show its red, white, and then red again,
slid up out of nowhere to vanish nowhere, a motion between two
mysteries.
“…hey…”
I pricked my ears.
“…something’s coming…”
“Only the noon train, Ralph.” Mr. Wyneski snicked his
jackdaw scissors, peering in his customer’s ear. “Only the train that
comes at noon.”
“No…” I gasped, eyes shut, leaning. “Something’s really coming…”
I heard the far whistle wail, lonesome, sad. enough to pull your soul out of your body.
“You feel it, don’t you, Dog?”
Dog barked.
Mr. Wyneski sniffed. “What can a dog feel?”
“Big things. Important things. Circumstantial coincidences. Collisions you can’t escape. Dog says. I say. We say.”
“That makes four of you.
Some team.” Mr. Wyneski turned from the summer-dead man in the white
porcelain chair. “Now, Ralph, my problem is hair. Sweep.”
I swept a ton of hair. “Gosh, you’d think this stuff just grew up out of the floor.”
Mr. Wyneski watched my broom. “Right! I didn’t cut all
that. Darn stuff just grows, I swear, lying there. Leave it a week, come
back, and you need hip boots to trod a path.” He pointed with his
scissors. “Look. You ever see so many
shades, hues, and tints of forelocks and chin fuzz? There’s Mr.
Tompkins’s receding hairline. There’s Charlie Smith’s topknot. And here,
here’s all that’s left of Mr. Harry Joe Flynn.”
I stared at Mr. Wyneski as if he had just read from Revelations. “Gosh, Mr. Wyneski, I guess you know everything in the world!”
“Just about.”
“I—I’m going to grow up and be—a barber!”
Mr. Wyneski, to hide his pleasure, got busy.
“Then watch this hedgehog, Ralph, peel an eye. Elbows thus, wrists so! Make the scissors talk! Customers appreciate. Sound twice as busy as you are. Snickety-snick, boy, snickety-snick. Learned this from the French! Oh, yes, the French! They do prowl about the chair light on their toes, and the sharp scissors whispering and nibbling, Ralph, nibbling and whispering, you hear!”
“Boy!” I said, at his elbow, right in with the whispers
and nibbles, then stopped: for the wind blew a wail way off in summer
country, so sad, so strange.
“There it is again. The train. And something on the train…”
“Noon train don’t stop here.”
“But I got this feeling—”
“The hair’s going to grab me. Ralph…”
I swept hair.
After a long while I said, “I’m thinking of changing my name.”
Mr. Wyneski sighed. The summer-dead customer stayed dead.
“What’s wrong with you today, boy?”
“It’s not me. It’s the name is out of hand. Just listen. Ralph.” I grrred it. “Rrrralph.”
“Ain’t exactly harp music…”
“Sounds like a mad dog.” I caught myself.
“No offense, Dog.”
Mr. Wyneski glanced down. “He seems pretty calm about the whole subject.”
“Ralph’s dumb. Gonna change my name by tonight.”
Mr. Wyneski mused. “Julius for Caesar? Alexander for the Great?”
“Don’t care what. Help me, huh, Mr. Wyneski? Find me a name…”
Dog sat up. I dropped the broom.
For way down in the hot cinder railroad yards a train
furnaced itself in, all pomp, all fire-blast shout and tidal churn,
summer in its iron belly bigger than the summer outside.
“Here it comes!”
“There it goes,” said Mr. Wyneski.
“No, there it doesn’t go!”
It was Mr. Wyneski’s turn to almost drop his scissors.
“Goshen. Darn noon train’s putting on the brakes!”
We heard the train stop.
“How many people getting off the train, Dog?”
Dog barked once.
Mr. Wyneski shifted uneasily. “U.S. Mail bags—”
“No … a man! Walking light.
Not much luggage. Heading for our house. A new boarder at Grandma’s, I
bet. And he’ll take the empty room right next to you, Mr. Wyneski!
Right, Dog?”
Dog barked.
“That dog talks too much,” said Mr. Wyneski.
“I just gotta go see, Mr. Wyneski. Please?”
The far footsteps faded in the hot and silent streets.
Mr. Wyneski shivered.
“A goose just stepped on my grave.”
Then he added, almost sadly:
“Get along, Ralph.”
“Name ain’t Ralph.”
“Whatchamacallit … run see … come tell the worst.”
“Oh, thanks, Mr. Wyneski, thanks!”
I ran. Dog ran. Up a street, along an alley, around
back, we ducked in the ferns by my grandma’s house. “Down, boy.” I
whispered. “Here the Big Event comes, whatever it is!”
And down the street and up the walk and up the steps at a
brisk jaunt came this man who swung a cane and carried a carpetbag and
had long brown-gray hair and silken mustaches and a goatee, politeness
all about him like a flock of birds.
On the porch near the old rusty chain swing, among the potted geraniums, he surveyed Green Town.
Far away, maybe, he heard the insect hum from the
barbershop, where Mr. Wyneski, who would soon be his enemy, told
fortunes by the lumpy heads under his hands as he buzzed the electric
clippers. Far away, maybe, he could hear the empty library where the
golden dust slid down the raw sunlight and way in back someone scratched
and tapped and scratched forever with pen and ink, a quiet woman like a
great lonely mouse burrowed away. And she was to be part of this new
man’s life, too, but right now…
The stranger removed his tall moss-green hat, mopped his brow, and not looking at anything but the hot blind sky said:
“Hello, boy. Hello, dog.”
Dog and I rose up among the ferns.
“Heck. How’d you know where we were hiding?”
The stranger peered into his hat for the answer. “In
another incarnation, I was a boy. Time before that, if memory serves, I
was a more than usually happy dog. But…!” His cane rapped the cardboard
sign BOARD AND ROOM thumbtacked on the porch rail. “Does the sign say true, boy?”
“Best rooms on the block.”
“Beds?”
“Mattresses so deep you sink down and drown the third time, happy.”
“Boarders at table?”
“Talk just enough, not too much.”
“Food?”
“Hot biscuits every morning, peach pie noon, shortcake every supper!”
The stranger inhaled, exhaled those savors.
“I’ll sign my soul away!”
“I beg your pardon?!” Grandma was suddenly at the screen door, scowling out.
“A manner of speaking, ma’am.” The stranger turned. “Not meant to sound un-Christian.”
And he was inside, him talking, Grandma talking, him writing and flourishing the pen on the registry book, and me and Dog inside, breathless, watching, spelling:
“C.H.”
“Read upside down, do you, boy?” said the stranger, merrily, giving pause with the inky pen.
“Yes, sir!”
On he wrote. On I spelled:
“A.R.L.E.S. Charles!”
“Right.”
Grandma peered at the calligraphy. “Oh, what a fine hand.”
“Thank you, ma’am.” On the pen scurried. And on I chanted. “D.I.C.K.E.N.S.”
I faltered and stopped. The pen stopped. The stranger tilted his head and closed one eye, watchful of me.
“Yes?” He dared me, “What, what?”
“Dickens!” I cried.
“Good!”
“Charles Dickens, Grandma!”
“I can read, Ralph. A nice name…”
“Nice?” I said, agape. “It’s great! But … I thought you were—”
“Dead?” The stranger laughed. “No. Alive, in fine fettle, and glad to meet a recognizer, fan, and fellow reader here!”
And we were up the stairs, Grandma bringing fresh towels
and pillowcases and me carrying the carpetbag, gasping, and us meeting
Grandpa, a great ship of a man, sailing down the other way.
“Grandpa,” I said, watching his face for shock. “I want you to meet … Mr. Charles Dickens!”
Grandpa stopped for a long breath, looked at the new
boarder from top to bottom, then reached out, took hold of the man’s
hand, shook it firmly, and said:
“Any friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s is a friend of mine!”
Mr. Dickens fell back from the effusion, recovered,
bowed, said. “Thank you, sir,” and went on up the stairs, while Grandpa
winked, pinched my cheek, and left me standing there, stunned.
In the tower cupola room, with windows bright, open, and
running with cool creeks of wind in all directions, Mr. Dickens drew
off his horse-carriage coat and nodded at the carpetbag.
“Anywhere will do, Pip. Oh, you don’t mind I call you Pip, eh?”
“Pip?!” My cheeks burned, my face glowed with astonishing happiness. “Oh, boy. Oh, no, sir. Pip’s fine!”
Grandma cut between us. “Here are your clean linens, Mr…?”
“Dickens, ma’am.” Our boarder patted his pockets, each in turn. “Dear me, Pip, I seem to be fresh out of pads and pencils. Might it be possible—”
He saw one of my hands steal up to find something behind
my ear. “I’ll be darned,” I said, “a yellow Ticonderoga Number 2!” My
other hand slipped to my back pants pocket. “And hey, an Iron-Face
Indian Ring-Back Notepad Number 12!”
“Extraordinary!”
“Extraordinary!”
Mr. Dickens wheeled about, surveying the world from each
and every window, speaking now north, now north by east, now east, now
south:
“I’ve traveled two long weeks with an idea. Bastille Day. Do you know it?”
“The French Fourth of July?”
“Remarkable boy! By Bastille Day this book must be in
full flood. Will you help me breach the tide gates of the Revolution,
Pip?”
“With these?” I looked at the pad and pencil in my hands.
“Lick the pencil tip, boy!”
I licked.
“Top of the page: the title. Title.” Mr. Dickens mused,
head down, rubbing his chin whiskers. “Pip, what’s a rare fine title for
a novel that happens half in London, half in Paris?”
“A—” I ventured.
“Yes?”
“A Tale,” I went on.
“Yes?!”
“A Tale of … Two Cities?!”
“Madame!” Grandma looked up as he spoke. “This boy is a genius!”
“I read about this day in the Bible,” said Grandma. “Everything Ends by noon.”
“Put it down, Pip.” Mr. Dickens tapped my pad. “Quick. A Tale of Two Cities. Then, mid-page. Book the First. ‘Recalled to Life.’ Chapter 1. ‘The Period.’”
I scribbled. Grandma worked. Mr. Dickens squinted at the sky and at last intoned:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it
was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch
of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the Season of Light,
it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the
winter—”
“My,” said Grandma, “you speak fine.”
“Madame.” The author nodded, then, eyes shut, snapped his fingers to remember, on the air. “Where was I, Pip?”
“It was the winter,” I said, “of despair.”
Very late in the
afternoon I heard Grandma calling someone named Ralph, Ralph, down
below. I didn’t know who that was. I was writing hard.
A minute later, Grandpa called, “Pip!”
I jumped. “Yes, sir!”
“Dinnertime, Pip,” said Grandpa, up the stairwell.
I sat down at the table, hair wet, hands damp. I looked over at Grandpa. “How did you know … Pip?”
“Heard the name fall out the window an hour ago.”
“Pip?” said Mr. Wyneski, just come in, sitting down.
“Boy,” I said. “I been everywhere this afternoon. The
Dover Coach on the Dover Road. Paris! Traveled so much I got writer’s
cramp! I—”
“Pip” said Mr. Wyneski, again.
Grandpa came warm and easy to my rescue.
“When I was twelve, changed my name—on several
occasions.” He counted the tines on his fork. “Dick. That was Dead-Eye
Dick. And … John. That was for Long John Silver. Then: Hyde. That was
for the other half of Jekyll—”
“I never had any other name except Bernard Samuel Wyneski,” said Mr. Wyneski, his eyes still fixed to me.
“None?” cried Grandpa, startled.
“None.”
“Have you proof of childhood, then, sir?” asked Grandpa. “Or are you a natural phenomenon, like a ship becalmed at sea?”
“Eh?” said Mr. Wyneski.
Grandpa gave up and handed him his full plate.
“Fall to, Bernard Samuel, fall to.”
Mr. Wyneski let his plate lie. “Dover Coach…?”
“With Mr. Dickens, of course,” supplied Grandpa.
“Bernard Samuel, we have a new boarder, a novelist, who is starting a
new book and has chosen Pip there, Ralph, to work as his secretary—”
“Worked all afternoon,” I said. “Made a quarter!”
I slapped my hand to my mouth. A swift dark cloud had come over Mr. Wyneski’s face.
“A novelist? Named Dickens? Surely you don’t believe—”
“I believe what a man tells me until he tells me otherwise, then I believe that. Pass the butter,” said Grandpa.
The butter was passed in silence.
“…hell’s fires…” Mr. Wyneski muttered.
I slunk low in my chair.
Grandpa, slicing the chicken, heaping the plates, said,
“A man with a good demeanor has entered our house. He says his name is
Dickens. For all I know that is his name. He implies
he is writing a book. I pass his door, look in, and, yes, he is indeed
writing. Should I run tell him not to? It is obvious he needs to set the
book down—”
“A Tale of Two Cities!” I said.
“A Tale!” cried Mr. Wyneski, outraged, “of Two—”
“Hush,” said Grandma.
For down the stairs and now at the door of the dining
room there was the man with the long hair and the fine goatee and
mustaches, nodding, smiling, peering in at us doubtful and saying,
“Friends…?”
“Mr. Dickens,” I said, trying to save the day. “I want you to meet Mr. Wyneski, the greatest barber in the world—”
The two men looked at each other for a long moment.
“Mr. Dickens,” said Grandpa. “Will you lend us your talent, sir, for grace?”
We bowed our heads. Mr. Wyneski did not.
Mr. Dickens looked at him gently.
Muttering, the barber glanced at the floor.
Mr. Dickens prayed:
“O Lord of the bounteous table, O Lord who furnishes
forth an infinite harvest for your most respectful servants gathered
here in loving humiliation, O Lord who garnishes our feast with the
bright radish and the resplendent chicken, who sets before us the wine
of the summer season, lemonade, and maketh us humble before simple
potato pleasures, the lowborn onion and, in the finale, so my nostrils
tell me, the bread of vast experiments and fine success, the highborn
strawberry shortcake, most beautifully smothered and amiably drowned in
fruit from your own warm garden patch, for these, and this good company,
much thanks. Amen.”
“Amen,” said everyone but Mr. Wyneski.
We waited.
“Amen, I guess,” he said.
O what a summer that was!
None like it before in Green Town history.
I never got up so early so happy ever in my life! Out of
bed at five minutes to, in Paris by one minute after … six in the
morning the English Channel boat from Calais, the White Cliffs, sky a
blizzard of seagulls, Dover, then the London Coach and London Bridge by
noon! Lunch and lemonade out under the trees with Mr. Dickens, Dog
licking our cheeks to cool us, then back to Paris and tea at four and…
“Bring up the cannon, Pip!”
“Yes, sir!”
“Mob the Bastille!”
“Yes, sir!”
And the guns were fired and the mobs ran and there I
was, Mr. C. Dickens A-l First Class Green Town, Illinois, secretary, my
eyes bugging, my ears popping, my chest busting with joy, for I dreamt
of being a writer some day, too, and here I was unraveling a tale with
the very finest best.
“Madame Defarge, oh how she sat and knitted, knitted, sat—”
I looked up to find Grandma knitting in the window.
“Sidney Carton, what and who was he? A man of sensibility, a reading man of gentle thought and capable action…”
Grandpa strolled by mowing the grass.
Drums sounded beyond the hills with guns; a summer storm cracked and dropped unseen walls…
Mr. Wyneski?
Somehow I neglected his shop, somehow I forgot the
mysterious barber pole that came up from nothing and spiraled away to
nothing, and the fabulous hair that grew on his white tile floor…
So Mr. Wyneski then had to come home every night to find that writer with all the long hair in need of cutting, standing there at the same table thanking the Lord for this, that, and t’other, and Mr. Wyneski not thankful. For there I sat staring at Mr. Dickens like he was God until one night:
“Shall we say grace?” said Grandma.
“Mr. Wyneski is out brooding in the yard,” said Grandpa.
“Brooding?” I glanced guiltily from the window.
Grandpa tilted his chair back so he could see.
“Brooding’s the word. Saw him kick the rose bush, kick
the green ferns by the porch, decide against kicking the apple tree. God
made it too firm. There, he just jumped on a dandelion. Oh, oh. Here he
comes, Moses crossing a Black Sea of bile.”
The door slammed. Mr. Wyneski stood at the head of the table.
“I’ll say grace tonight!”
He glared at Mr. Dickens.
“Why, I mean,” said Grandma. “Yes. Please.”
Mr. Wyneski shut his eyes tight and began his prayer of destruction:
“O Lord, who delivered me a fine June and a less fine July, help me to get through August somehow.
“O Lord, deliver me from mobs and riots in the streets
of London and Paris which drum through my room night and morn, chief
members of said riot being one boy who walks in his sleep, a man with a
strange name and a Dog who barks after the ragtag and bobtail.
“Give me strength to resist the cries of Fraud, Thief, Fool, and Bunk Artists which rise in my mouth.
“Help me not to run shouting all the way to the Police
Chief to yell that in all probability the man who shares our simple
bread has a true name of Red Joe Pyke from Wilkesboro, wanted for
counterfeiting life, or Bull Hammer from Hornbill, Arkansas, much
desired for mean spitefulness and penny-pilfering in Oskaloosa.
“Lord, deliver the innocent boys of this world from the fell clutch of those who would tomfool their credibility.
“And Lord, help me to say, quietly, and with all
deference to the lady present, that if one Charles Dickens is not on the
noon train tomorrow bound for Potters Grave, Lands End, or Kankakee, I
shall like Delilah, with malice, shear the black lamb and fry his
mutton-chop whiskers for twilight dinners and late midnight snacks.
“I ask, Lord, not mercy for the mean, but simple justice for the malignant.
“All those agreed, say ‘Amen.’”
He sat down and stabbed a potato.
There was a long moment with everyone frozen.
And then Mr. Dickens, eyes shut said, moaning:
“Ohhhhhhhhhh…!”
It was a moan, a cry, a despair so long and deep it sounded like the train way off in the country the day this man had arrived.
“Mr. Dickens,” I said.
But I was too late.
He was on his feet, blind, wheeling, touching the
furniture, holding to the wall, clutching at the doorframe, blundering
into the hall, groping up the stairs.
“Ohhhhh…”
It was the long cry of a man gone over a cliff into Eternity.
It seemed we sat waiting to hear him hit bottom.
Far off in the hills in the upper part of the house, his door banged shut.
My soul turned over and died.
“Charlie.” I said. “Oh, Charlie.”
Late that night, Dog howled.
And the reason he howled was that sound, that similar, muffled cry from up in the tower cupola room.
“Holy Cow,” I said. “Call the plumber. Everything’s down the drain.”
Mr. Wyneski strode by on the sidewalk, walking nowhere, off and gone.
“That’s his fourth time around the block.” Grandpa struck a match and lit his pipe.
“Mr. Wyneski!” I called.
No answer. The footsteps went away.
“Boy oh boy, I feel like I lost a war,” I said.
“No, Ralph, beg pardon, Pip,” said Grandpa, sitting down
on the step with me. “You just changed generals in midstream is all.
And now one of the generals is so unhappy he’s turned mean.”
“Mr. Wyneski? I—I almost hate him!”
Grandpa puffed gently on his pipe. “I don’t think he
even knows why he is so unhappy and mean. He has had a tooth pulled
during the night by a mysterious dentist and now his tongue is aching
around the empty place where the tooth was.”
“We’re not in church, Grandpa.”
“Cut the Parables, huh? In simple words, Ralph, you used
to sweep the hair off that man’s shop floor. And he’s a man with no
wife, no family, just a job. A man with no family needs someone
somewhere in the world, whether he knows it or not.”
“I,” I said. “I’ll wash the barbershop windows tomorrow. I-I’ll oil the red-and-white striped pole so it spins like crazy.”
“I know you will, son.”
A train went by in the night.
Dog howled.
Mr. Dickens answered in a strange cry from his room.
I went to bed and heard the town clock strike one and then two and at last three.
Then it was I heard the soft crying. I went out in the hall to listen by our boarder’s door.
“Mr. Dickens?”
The soft sound stopped.
The door was unlocked. I dared open it.
“Mr. Dickens?”
And there he lay in the moonlight, tears streaming from his eyes, eyes wide open staring at the ceiling, motionless.
“Mr. Dickens?”
“Nobody by that name here,” said he. His head moved side to side. “Nobody by that name in this room in this bed in this world.”
“You,” I said. “You’re Charlie Dickens.”
“You ought to know better,” was the mourned reply. “Long after midnight, moving on toward morning.”
“All I know is,” I said, “I seen you writing every day. I heard you talking every night.”
“Right, right.”
“And you finish one book and start another, and write a fine calligraphy sort of hand.”
“I do that.” A nod. “Oh yes, by the demon possessions, I do.”
“So!” I circled the bed. “What call you got to feel sorry for yourself, a world-famous author?”
“You know and I know, I’m Mr. Nobody from Nowhere, on my way to Eternity with a dead flashlight and no candles.”
“Hells bells,” I said. I started for the door. I was mad
because he wasn’t holding up his end. He was ruining a grand summer.
“Good night!” I rattled the doorknob.
“Wait!”
It was such a terrible soft cry of need and almost pain, I dropped my hand, but I didn’t turn.
“Pip,” said the old man in the bed.
“Yeah?” I said, grouching.
“Let’s both be quiet. Sit down.”
I slowly sat on the spindly wooden chair by the night table.
“Talk to me, Pip.”
“Holy Cow, at three—”
“—in the morning, yes. Oh, it’s a fierce awful time of
night. A long way back to sunset, and ten thousand miles on to dawn. We
have need of friends then. Friend, Pip? Ask me things.”
“Like what?”
“I think you know.”
I brooded a moment and sighed. “Okay, okay. Who are you?”
He was very quiet for a moment lying there in his bed
and then traced the words on the ceiling with a long invisible tip of
his nose and said, “I’m a man who could never fit his dream.”
“What?”
“I mean, Pip, I never became what I wanted to be.”
I was quiet now, too. “What’d you want to be?”
“A writer.”
“Did you try?”
“Try!” he cried, and almost gagged on a strange wild
laugh. “Try,” he said, controlling himself. “Why Lord of Mercy, son, you
never saw so much spit, ink, and sweat fly. I wrote my way through an
ink factory, broke and busted a paper company, ruined and dilapidated
six dozen typewriters, devoured and scribbled to the bone ten thousand
Ticonderoga Soft Lead pencils.”
“Wow!”
“You may well say Wow.”
“What did you write?”
“What didn’t I write. The poem. The essay. The play tragique. The farce. The short story. The novel. A thousand words a day, boy, every day for thirty years, no day passed I did not scriven and assault the page. Millions of words passed from my fingers onto paper and it was all bad.”
“It couldn’t have been!”
“It was. Not mediocre, not
passing fair. Just plain outright mudbath bad. Friends knew it, editors
knew it, teachers knew it, publishers knew it, and one strange fine day
about four in the afternoon, when I was fifty, I knew it.”
“But you can’t write thirty years without—”
“Stumbling upon excellence? Striking a chord? Gaze long,
gaze hard, Pip, look upon a man of peculiar talent, outstanding
ability, the only man in history who put down five million words without
slapping to life one small base of a story that might rear up on its
frail legs and cry Eureka! we’ve done it!”
“You never sold one story!?”
“Not a two line joke. Not a throwaway newspaper sonnet.
Not a want ad or obit. Not a home-bottled autumn pickle recipe. Isn’t
that rare? To be so outstandingly dull, so ridiculously inept, that
nothing ever brought a chuckle, caused a tear, raised a temper, or
discharged a blow. And do you know what I did on the day I discovered I
would never be a writer? I killed myself.”
“Killed?!”
“Did away with, destroyed. How? I packed me up and took
me away on a long train ride and sat on the back smoking-car platform a
long time in the night and then one by one let the confetti of my
manuscripts fly like panicked birds away down the tracks. I scattered a
novel across Nebraska, my Homeric legends over North, my love sonnets
through South Dakota. I abandoned my familiar essays in the men’s room
at the Harvey House in Clear Springs, Idaho. The late summer wheatfields
knew my prose. Grand fertilizer, it probably jumped up bumper crops of
corn long after I passed. I rode two trunks of my soul on that long
summer’s journey, celebrating my badly served self. And one by one, slow
at first, and then faster, faster, over I chucked them, story after
story, out, out of my arms out of my head, out of my life, and down they
went, sunk drowning night rivers of prairie dust, in lost continents of
sand and lonely rock. And the train wallowed around a curve in a great
wail of darkness and release, and I opened my fingers and let the last
stillborn darlings fall….
“When I reached the far terminus of the line, the trunks
were empty. I had drunk much, eaten little, wept on occasion in my
private room, but had heaved away my anchors, deadweights, and dreams,
and came to the sliding soft chuffing end of my
journey, praise God, in a kind of noble peace and certainty. I felt
reborn. I said to myself, why, what’s this, what’s this? I’m—I’m a new
man.”
He saw it all on the ceiling, and I saw it, too, like a movie run up the wall in the moonlit night.
“I-I’m a new man I said, and when I got off the train at
the end of that long summer of disposal and sudden rebirth, I looked in
a fly-specked, rain-freckled gum-machine mirror at a lost depot in
Peachgum, Missouri, and my beard grown long in two months of travel and
my hair gone wild with wind that combed it this way sane, that way mad,
and I peered and stood back and exclaimed softly, ‘Why, Charlie Dickens,
is that you?!’
The man in the bed laughed softly.
“‘Why, Charlie,’ said I, ‘Mr. Dickens, there you are!’ And the reflection in the mirror cried out, ‘Dammit, sir, who else would it be!? Stand back. I’m off to a great lecture!’”
“Did you really say that, Mr. Dickens?”
“God’s pillars and temples of truth, Pip. And I got out
of his way! And I strode through a strange town and I knew who I was at
last and grew fevers thinking on what I might do in my lifetime now
reborn and all that grand fine work ahead! For, Pip, this thing must
have been growing. All those years of writing and snuffing up defeat,
my old subconscious must have been whispering, ‘Just you wait. Things
will be black midnight bad but then in the nick of time, I’ll save you!’
“And maybe the thing that saved me was the thing ruined
me in the first place: respect for my elders; the grand moguls and tall
muckymucks in the lush literary highlands and me in the dry river bottom
with my canoe.
“For, oh God, Pip, how I devoured Tolstoy, drank
Dostoevsky, feasted on De Maupassant, had wine and chicken picnics with
Flaubert and Molière. I gazed at gods too high. I read too much! So, when my work vanished, theirs stayed. Suddenly I found I could not forget their books, Pip!”
“Couldn’t?”
“I mean I could not forget any letter of any word of any
sentence or any paragraph of any book ever passed under these hungry
omnivorous eyes!”
“Photographic memory!”
“Bull’s-eye! All of Dickens, Hardy, Austen, Poe,
Hawthorne, trapped in this old box Brownie waiting to be printed off my
tongue, all those years, never knew, Pip, never guessed, I had did it
all away. Ask me to speak in tongues. Kipling is
one. Thackery another. Weigh flesh. I’m Shylock. Snuff out the light,
I’m Othello. All, all, Pip, all!”
“And then? And so?”
“Why then and so, Pip, I looked another time in that fly-specked mirror and said, ‘Mr. Dickens, all this being true, when do you write your first book?’
“‘Now!’ I cried. And bought fresh paper and ink and have
been delirious and joyful, lunatic and happy frantic ever since,
writing all the books of my own dear self, me, I, Charles Dickens, one
by one.
“I have traveled the continental vastness of the United
States of North America and settled me in to write and act, act and
write, lecturing here, pondering there, half in and then half out of my
mania, known and unknown, lingering here to finish Copperfield, loitering there for Dombey and Son,
turning up for tea with Marley’s Ghost on some pale Christmas noon.
Sometimes I lie whole snowbound winters in little whistle stops and no
one there guessing that Charlie Dickens bides hibernation there, then
pop forth like the ottermole of spring and so move on. Sometimes I stay
whole summers in one town before I’m driven off. Oh, yes, driven. For
such as your Mr. Wyneski cannot forgive the fantastic, Pip, no matter
how particularly practical that fantastic be.
“For he has no humor, boy.
He does not see that we all do what we must to survive, survive.
“Some laugh, some cry, some bang the world with fists, some run, but it all sums up the same: they make do.
“The world swarms with people, each one drowning, but each swimming a different stroke to the far shore.
“And Mr. Wyneski? He makes do with scissors and understands not my inky pen and littered papers on which I would flypaper-catch my borrowed English soul.”
Mr. Dickens put his feet out of bed and reached for his carpetbag.
“So I must pick up and go.”
I grabbed the bag first.
“No! You can’t leave! You haven’t finished the book!”
“Pip, dear boy, you haven’t been listening—”
“The world’s waiting! You can’t just quit in the middle of Two Cities!”
He took the bag quietly from me.
“Pip, Pip…”
“You can’t, Charlie!”
He looked into my face and it must have been so white hot he flinched away.
“I’m waiting,” I cried. “They’re waiting!”
“They…?”
“The mob at the Bastille. Paris! London. The Dover sea. The guillotine!”
I ran to throw all the windows even wider as if the
night wind and the moonlight might bring in sounds and shadows to crawl
on the rug and sneak in his eyes, and the curtains blew out in phantom
gestures and I swore I heard, Charlie heard, the crowds, the coach
wheels, the great slicing downfall of the cutting blades and the cabbage
heads falling and battle songs and all that on the wind…
“Oh, Pip, Pip…”
Tears welled from his eyes.
I had my pencil out and my pad.
“Well?” I said.
“Where were we, this afternoon, Pip?”
“Madame Defarge, knitting.”
He let the carpetbag fall. He sat on the edge of the bed
and his hands began to tumble, weave, knit, motion, tie and untie, and
he looked and saw his hands and spoke and I wrote and he spoke again,
stronger, and stronger, all through the rest of the night…
“Madame Defarge … yes … well. Take this, Pip. She—”
“Morning, Mr. Dickens!”
I flung myself into the dining-room chair. Mr. Dickens was already half through his stack of pancakes.
I took one bite and then saw the even greater stack of pages lying on the table between us.
“Mr. Dickens?” I said. “The Tale of Two Cities. It’s … finished?”
“Done.” Mr. Dickens ate, eyes down. “Got up at six. Been working steady. Done. Finished. Through.”
“Wow!” I said.
A train whistle blew. Charlie sat up, then rose
suddenly, to leave the rest of his breakfast and hurry out in the hall. I
heard the front door slam and tore out on the porch to see Mr. Dickens
half down the walk, carrying his carpetbag.
He was walking so fast I had to run to circle round and round him as he headed for the rail depot.
“Mr. Dickens, the book’s finished, yeah, but not published yet!”
“You be my executor, Pip.”
He fled. I pursued, gasping.
“What about David Copperfield?! Little Dorrit?!”
“Friends of yours, Pip?”
“Yours, Mr. Dickens, Charlie, oh, gosh, if you don’t write them, they’ll never live.”
“They’ll get on somehow.” He vanished around a corner. I jumped after.
“Charlie, wait. I’ll give you—a new title! Pickwick Papers, sure, Pickwick Papers!”
The train was pulling into the station.
Charlie ran fast.
“And after that, Bleak House, Charlie, and Hard Times and Great—Mr. Dickens, listen—Expectations! Oh, my gosh!”
For he was far ahead now and I could only yell after him:
“Oh, blast, go on! get off! get away! You know what I’m
going to do!? You don’t deserve reading! You don’t! So right now, and
from here on, see if I even bother to finish reading Tale of Two Cities! Not me! Not this one! No!”
The bell was tolling in the station. The steam was
rising. But, Mr. Dickens had slowed. He stood in the middle of the
sidewalk. I came up to stare at his back.
“Pip,” he said softly. “You mean what you just said?”
“You!” I cried. “You’re nothing but—” I searched in my
mind and seized a thought: “—a blot of mustard, some undigested bit of
raw potato—!”
“‘Bah, Humbug, Pip?’”
“Humbug! I don’t give a blast what happens to Sidney Carton!”
“Why, it’s a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done, Pip. You must read it.”
“Why!?”
He turned to look at me with great sad eyes.
“Because I wrote it for you.”
It took all my strength to half-yell back: “So—?”
“So,” said Mr. Dickens, “I have just missed my train. Forty minutes till the next one—”
“Then you got time,” I said.
“Time for what?”
“To meet someone. Meet them, Charlie, and I promise I’ll finish reading your book. In there. In there, Charlie.”
He pulled back.
“That place? The library?!”
“Ten minutes, Mr. Dickens, give me ten minutes, just ten, Charlie. Please.”
“Ten?”
And at last, like a blind man, he let me lead him up the library steps and half-fearful, sidle in.
The library was like a stone quarry where no rain had fallen in ten thousand years.
Way off in that direction: silence.
Way off in that direction: hush.
It was the time between things finished and things begun. Nobody died here.
Nobody was born. The library, and all its books, just were.
We waited, Mr. Dickens and I, on the edge of the silence.
Mr. Dickens trembled. And I suddenly remembered I had
never seen him here all summer. He was afraid I might take him near the
fiction shelves and see all his books, written, done, finished, printed,
stamped, bound, borrowed, read, repaired, and shelved.
But I wouldn’t be that dumb. Even so, he took my elbow and whispered:
“Pip, what are we doing here? Let’s go. There’s…”
“Listen!” I hissed.
And a long way off in the stacks somewhere, there was a sound like a moth turning over in its sleep.
“Bless me,” Mr. Dickens’s eyes widened. “I know that sound.”
“Sure!”
“It’s the sound,” he said, holding his breath, then nodding, “of someone writing.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Writing with a pen. And … and writing…”
“What?”
“Poetry,” gasped Mr. Dickens. “That’s it. Someone off
there in a room, how many fathoms deep, Pip, I swear, writing a poem.
There! Eh? Flourish, flourish, scratch, flourish on, on, on, that’s not
figures, Pip, not numerals, not dusty-dry facts, you feel it sweep, feel it scurry? A poem, by God, yes, sir, no doubt, a poem!”
“Ma’am,” I called.
The moth-sound ceased.
“Don’t stop her!” hissed Mr. Dickens. “Middle of inspiration. Let her go!”
The moth-scratch started again.
Flourish, flourish, scratch, on, on, stop. Flourish,
flourish. I bobbed my head. I moved my lips, as did Mr. Dickens, both of
us suspended, held, leant forward on the cool marble air listening to
the vaults and stacks and echoes in the subterrane.
Flourish, flourish, scratch, on, on.
Silence.
“There.” Mr. Dickens nudged me.
“Ma’am!” I called ever so urgently soft.
And something rustled in the corridors.
And there stood the librarian, a lady between years, not
young, not old; between colors, not dark, not pale; between heights,
not short, not tall, but rather frail, a woman you often heard talking
to herself off in the dark dust-stacks with a whisper like turned pages,
a woman who glided as if on hidden wheels.
She came carrying her soft lamp of face, lighting her way with her glance.
Her lips were moving, she was busy with words in the vast room behind her clouded gaze.
Charlie read her lips eagerly. He nodded. He waited for
her to halt and bring us to focus, which she did, suddenly. She gasped
and laughed at herself.
“Oh, Ralph, it’s you and—” A look of recognition warmed her face. “Why, you’re Ralph’s friend. Mr. Dickens, isn’t it?”
Charlie stared at her with a quiet and almost alarming devotion.
“Mr. Dickens,” I said. “I want you to meet—”
“‘Because I could not stop for Death—’” Charlie, eyes shut, quoted from memory.
The librarian blinked swiftly and her brow like a lamp turned high, took white color.
“Miss Emily,” he said.
“Her name is—” I said.
“Miss Emily.” He put out his hand to touch hers.
“Pleased,” she said. “But how did you—?”
“Know your name? Why, bless me, ma’am, I heard you scratching way off in there, runalong rush, only poets do that!”
“It’s nothing.”
“Head high, chin up,” he said, gently. “It’s something. ‘Because I could not stop for death’ is a fine A-1 first-class poem.”
“My own poems are so poor,” she said, nervously. “I copy hers out to learn.”
“Copy who?” I blurted.
“Excellent way to learn.”
“Is it, really?” She looked close at Charlie. “You’re not…?”
“Joking? No, not with Emily Dickinson, ma’am!”
“Emily Dickinson?” I said.
“That means much coming from you, Mr. Dickens,” she flushed. “I have read all your books.”
“All?” He backed off.
“All,” she added hastily, “that you have published so far, sir.”
“Just finished a new one.” I put in, “Sockdolager! A Tale of Two Cities.”
“And you, ma’am?” he asked, kindly.
She opened her small hands as if to let a bird go.
“Me? Why, I haven’t even sent a poem to our town newspaper.”
“You must!” he cried, with true passion and meaning. “Tomorrow. No, today!”
“But,” her voice faded. “I have no one to read them to, first.”
“Why,” said Chadie quietly. “You have Pip here, and,
accept my card, C. Dickens, Esquire. Who will, if allowed, stop by on
occasion, to see if all’s well in this Arcadian silo of books.”
She took his card. “I couldn’t—”
“Tut! You must. For I shall offer only warm sliced white
bread. Your words must be the marmalade and summer honey jam. I shall
read long and plain. You: short and rapturous of life and tempted by
that odd delicious Death you often lean upon. Enough.” He pointed.
“There. At the far end of the corridor, her lamp lit ready to guide your
hand … the Muse awaits. Keep and feed her well. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye?” she asked. “Doesn’t that mean ‘God be with you’?”
“So I have heard, dear lady, so I have heard.”
And suddenly we were back out in the sunlight, Mr. Dickens almost stumbling over his carpetbag waiting there.
In the middle of the lawn, Mr. Dickens stood very still and said, “The sky is blue, boy.”
“Yes, sir.”
“The grass is green.”
“Sure.” Then I stopped and really looked around. “I mean, heck, yeah!”
“And the wind … smell that sweet wind?”
We both smelled it. He said:
“And in this world are remarkable boys with vast imaginations who know the secrets of salvation…”
He patted my shoulder. Head down, I didn’t know what to do. And then I was saved by a whistle:
“Hey, the next train! Here it comes!”
We waited.
After a long while, Mr. Dickens said:
“There it goes…and let’s go home, boy.”
“Home!” I cried, joyfully, and then stopped. “But what about … Mr. Wyneski?”
“O, after all this, I have such confidence in you, Pip.
Every afternoon while I’m having tea and resting my wits, you must trot
down to the barbershop and—”
“Sweep hair!”
“Brave lad. It’s little enough. A loan of friendship from the Bank of England to the First National Bank of Green Town, Illinois. And now, Pip … pencil!”
I tried behind one ear, found gum; tried the other ear and found: “Pencil!”
“Paper?”
“Paper!”
We strode along under the soft green summer trees.
“Title, Pip—”
He reached up with his cane to write a mystery on the sky. I squinted at the invisible penmanship.
“The—”
He blocked out a second word on the air.
“Old,” I translated.
A third.
“C.U.” I spelled. “R.I….Curiosity!”
“How’s that for a title, Pip?”
I hesitated. “It … doesn’t seem, well, quite finished, sir.”
“What a Christian you are. There!”
He flourished a final word on the sun.
“S.H.O….Shop! The Old Curiosity Shop.”
“Take a novel, Pip!”
“Yes, sir,” I cried. “Chapter One!”
A blizzard of snow blew through the trees.
“What’s that?” I asked, and answered:
Why, summer gone. The calendar pages, all the hours and days, like in the movies, the way they just blow off over the hills. Charlie and I working together, finished, through. Many days at the library, over! Many nights reading aloud with Miss Emily done! Trains come and gone. Moons waxed and waned. New trains arriving and new lives teetering on the brink, and Miss Emily suddenly standing right there, and Charlie here with all their suitcases and handing me a paper sack.
“What’s this?”
“Rice. Pip, plain ordinary white rice, for the fertility
ritual. Throw it at us, boy. Drive us happily away. Hear those bells,
Pip? Here goes Mr. and Mrs. Charlie Dickens! Throw, boy, throw! Throw!”
I threw and ran, ran and threw, and them on the back
train platform waving out of sight and me yelling good-bye, Happy
marriage, Charlie! Happy times! Come back! Happy … Happy…
And by then I guess I was crying, and Dog chewing my
shoes, jealous, glad to have me alone again, and Mr. Wyneski waiting at
the barbershop to hand me my broom and make me his son once more.
And autumn came and lingered and at last a letter arrived from the married and traveling couple.
I kept the letter sealed all day and at dusk, while
Grandpa was raking leaves by the front porch I went out to sit and watch
and hold the letter and wait for him to look up and at last he did and I
opened the letter and read it out loud in the October twilight:
“Dear Pip,” I read, and had to stop for a moment seeing my old special name again, my eyes were so full.
“Dear Pip. We are in Aurora tonight and Felicity
tomorrow and Elgin the night after that. Charlie has six months of
lectures lined up and looking forward. Charlie and I are both working
steadily and are most happy…very happy … need I say?
“He calls me Emily.
“Pip, I don’t think you know who she was, but there was a
lady poet once, and I hope you’ll get her books out of the library
someday.
“Well, Charlie looks at me and says: ‘This is my Emily’ and I almost believe. No. I do believe.”
I stopped and swallowed hard and read on:
“We are crazy, Pip.
“People have said it. We know it. Yet we go on. But being crazy together is fine.
“It was being crazy alone I couldn’t stand any longer.
“Charlie sends his regards and wants you to know he has indeed started a fine new book, perhaps his best yet … one you suggested the title for, Bleak House.
“So we write and move, move and write, Pip. And some
year soon we may come back on the train which stops for water at your
town. And if you’re there and call our names as we know ourselves now,
we shall step off the train. But perhaps meanwhile you will get too old.
And if when the train stops, Pip, you’re not there, we shall
understand, and let the train move us on to another and another town.
“Signed, Emily Dickinson.
“P.S. Charlie says your grandfather is a dead ringer for Plato, but not to tell him.
“P.P.S. Charlie is my darling.”
“Charlie is my darling,” repeated Grandpa, sitting down and taking the letter to read it again. “Well, well…” he sighed. “Well, well…”
We sat there a long while, looking at the burning soft
October sky and the new stars. A mile off, a dog barked. Miles off, on
the horizon line, a train moved along, whistled, and tolled its bell,
once, twice, three times, gone.
“You know,” I said. “I don’t think they’re crazy.”
“Neither do I, Pip,” said Grandpa, lighting his pipe and blowing out the match. “Neither do I.”
The End
Fictional Story Related Index
This is an index of full text reprints of stories that I have
read that influenced me when I was young. They are rather difficult to
come by today, as where I live they are nearly impossible to find. Yes,
you can find them on the internet, behind paywalls. Ah, that’s why all
those software engineers in California make all that money. Well, here
they are FOR FREE. Enjoy reading them.
Movies that Inspired Me
Here are some movies that I consider noteworthy and worth a view. Enjoy.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are
reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal
library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come
and enjoy a read or two as well.
My Poetry
Art that Moves Me
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
This is a great short story from Ray Bradbury from his collection of short stories titled "R is for Rocket". This story is short, and nice, and is presented here in full text for easy reading. It concerns a man who was born with large green wings, who somehow lost his way in life, and how (with the help of his children) was reborn again.
Uncle Einar
“It will take only a minute,” said Uncle Einar’s sweet wife.
“I refuse,” he said. “And that takes but a second.”
“I’ve worked all morning,” she said, holding to her slender back, “and you won’t help? It’s drumming for a rain.”
“Let it rain,” he cried, morosely. “I’ll not be pierced by lightning just to air your clothes.”
“But you’re so quick at it.”
“Again, I refuse.” His vast tarpaulin wings hummed nervously behind his indignant back.
She gave him a slender rope on which were tied four dozen fresh-washed clothes. He turned it in his fingers with distaste. “So it’s come to this,” he muttered, bitterly. “To this, to this, to this.” He almost wept angry and acid tears.
“Don’t cry; you’ll wet them down again,” she said. “Jump up, now, run them about.”
“Run them about.” His voice was hollow, deep, and terribly wounded. “I say: let it thunder, let it pour!”
“If it was a nice, sunny day I wouldn’t ask,” she said, reasonably. “All my washing gone for nothing if you don’t. They’ll hang about the house — “
That did it. Above all, he hated clothes flagged and festooned so a man had to creep under on the way across a room. He jumped up. His vast green wings boomed. “Only so far as the pasture fence!”
Whirl: up he jumped, his wings chewed and loved the cool air. Before you’d say Uncle Einar Has Green Wings he sailed low across his farmland, trailing the clothes in a vast fluttering loop through the pounding concussion and backwash of his wings!
“Catch!”
Back from the trip, he sailed the clothes, dry as popcorn, down on a series of clean blankets she’d spread for their landing.
“Thank you!” she cried.
“Gahh!” he shouted, and flew off under the apple tree to brood.
Uncle Einar’s beautiful silk-like wings hung like sea-green sails behind him, and whirred and whispered from his shoulders when he sneezed or turned swiftly. He was one of the few in the Family whose talent was visible. All his dark cousins and nephews and brothers hid in small towns across the world, did unseen mental things or things with witch-fingers and white teeth, or blew down the sky like fire-leaves, or loped in forests like moon-silvered wolves. They lived comparatively safe from normal humans. Not so a man with great green wings.
Not that he hated his wings. Far from it! In his youth he’d always flown nights, because nights were rare times for winged men! Daylight held dangers, always had, always would; but nights, ah, nights, he had sailed over islands of cloud and seas of summer sky. With no danger to himself. It had been a rich, full soaring, an exhilaration.
But now he could not fly at night.
On his way home to some high mountain pass in Europe after a Homecoming among Family members in Mellin Town, Illinois (some years ago) he had drunk too much rich crimson wine. “I’ll be all right,” he had told himself, vaguely, as he beat his long way under the morning stars, over the moon-dreaming country hills beyond Mellin Town. And then — crack out of the sky —
A high-tension tower.
Like a netted duck! A great sizzle! His face blown black by a blue sparkler of wire, he fended off the electricity with a terrific back-jumping percussion of his wings, and fell.
His hitting the moonlit meadow under the tower made a noise like a large telephone book dropped from the sky.
Early the next morning, his dew-sodden wings shaking violently, he stood up. It was still dark.
There was a faint bandage of dawn stretched across the east. Soon the bandage would stain and all flight would be restricted. There was nothing to do but take refuge in the forest and wait out the day in the deepest thicket until another night gave his wings a hidden motion in the sky.
In this fashion he met his wife.
During the day, which was warm for November first in Illinois country, pretty young Brunilla Wexley was out to udder a lost cow, for she carried a silver pail in one hand as she sidled through thickets and pleaded cleverly to the unseen cow to please return home or burst her gut with unplucked milk. The fact that the cow would have most certainly come home when her teats really needed pulling did not concern Brunilla Wexley. It was a sweet excuse for forest-journeying, thistle-blowing, and flower chewing; all of which Brunilla was doing as she stumbled upon Uncle Einar.
Asleep near a bush, he seemed a man under a green shelter.
“Oh,” said Brunilla, with a fever. “A man. In a camp-tent.”
Uncle Einar awoke. The camp-tent spread like a large green fan behind him.
“Oh,” said Brunilla, the cow-searcher. “A man with wings.”
That was how she took it. She was startled, yes, but she had never been hurt in her life, so she wasn’t afraid of anyone, and it was a fancy thing to see a winged man and she was proud to meet him. She began to talk. In an hour they were old friends, and in two hours she’d quite forgotten his wings were there. And he somehow confessed how he happened to be in this wood.
“Yes, I noticed you looked banged around,” she said. “That right wing looks very bad. You’d best let me take you home and fix it. You won’t be able to fly all the way to Europe on it, anyway. And who wants to live in Europe these days?”
He thanked her, but he didn’t quite see how he could accept.
“But I live alone,” she said. “For, as you see, I’m quite ugly.”
He insisted she was not.
“How kind of you,” she said. “But I am, there’s no fooling myself. My folks are dead, I’ve a farm, a big one, all to myself, quite far from Mellin Town, and I’m in need of talking company.”
But wasn’t she afraid of him? he asked.
“Proud and jealous would be more near it,” she said. “May I?” And she stroked his large green membraned veils with careful envy. He shuddered at the touch and put his tongue between his teeth.
So there was nothing for it but that he come to her house for medicaments and ointments, and my! what a burn across his face, beneath his eyes! “Lucky you weren’t blinded,” she said. “How’d it happen?”
“Well. . .” he said, and they at her farm, hardly noticing they’d walked a mile, looking at each other.
A day passed, and another, and he thanked her at her door and said he must be going, he much appreciated the ointment, the care, the lodgings. It was twilight and between now, six o’clock, and five the next morning, he must cross an ocean and a continent. “Thank you; good-bye,” he said, and started to fly off in the dusk and crashed right into a maple tree.
“Oh!” she screamed, and ran to his unconscious body.
When he waked the next hour he knew he’d fly no more in the dark again ever; his delicate night-perception was gone. The winged telepathy that
had warned him where towers, trees, houses and hills stood across his path, the fine clear vision and sensibility that guided him through mazes of forest, cliff, and cloud, all were burnt forever by that strike across his face, that blue electric fry and sizzle.
“How?” he moaned softly. “How can I go to Europe? If I flew by day, I’d be seen and — miserable joke — maybe shot down! Or kept for a zoo perhaps, what a life that’d be! Brunilla, tell me, what shall I do?”
“Oh,” she whispered, looking at her hands. “We’ll think of something. . . .”
They were married.
The Family came for the wedding. In a great autumnal avalanche of maple, sycamore, oak, elm leaf they hissed and rustled, fell in a shower of horse chestnut, thumped like winter apples on the earth, with an overall scent of farewell-summer on the wind they made in their rushing. The ceremony? The ceremony was brief as a black candle lit, blown out, and smoke left still on the air. Its briefness, darkness, upside-down and backward quality escaped Brunilla, who only listened to the great tide of Uncle Einar’s wings faintly murmuring above them as they finished out the rite. And as for Uncle Einar, the wound across his nose was almost healed and, holding Brunilla’s arm, he felt Europe grow faint and melt away in the distance.
He didn’t have to see very well to fly straight up, or come straight down. It was only natural that on this night of their wedding he take Brunilla in his arms and fly right up into the sky.
A farmer, five miles over, glanced at a low cloud at midnight, saw faint glows and crackles.
“Heat lightning,” he observed, and went to bed.
They didn’t come down till morning, with the dew.
The marriage took. She had only to look at him, and it lifted her to think she was the only woman in the world married to a winged man. “Who else could say it?” she asked her mirror. And the answer was: “No one!”
He, on the other hand, found great beauty behind her face, great kindness and understanding. He made some changes in his diet to fit her thinking, and was careful with his wings about the house; knocked porcelains and broken lamps were nerve-scrapers, he stayed away from them. He changed his sleeping habits, since he couldn’t fly nights now anyhow. And she in turn fixed chairs so they were comfortable for his wings, put extra padding here or took it out there, and the things she said were the things he loved her for. “We’re in our cocoons, all of us. See how ugly I am?” she said. “But one day I’ll break out, spread wings as fine and handsome as you.”
“You broke out long ago,” he said.
She thought it over. “Yes,” she had to admit. “I know just which day it was, too. In the woods when I looked for a cow and found a tent!” They laughed, and with him holding her she felt so beautiful she knew their marriage had slipped her from her ugliness, like a bright sword from its case.
They had children. At first there was fear, all on his part, that they’d be winged.
“Nonsense, I’d love it!” she said, “Keep them out from under foot.”
“Then,” he exclaimed, “they’d be in your hair!”
“Ow!” she cried.
Four children were born, three boys and a girl, who, for their energy, seemed to have wings. They popped up like toadstools in a few years, and on hot summer days asked their father to sit under the apple tree and fan them with his cooling wings and tell them wild starlit tales of island clouds and ocean skies and textures of mist and wind and how a star tastes melting in your mouth, and how to drink cold mountain air, and how it feels to be a pebble dropped from Mt. Everest, turning to a green bloom, flowering your wings just before you strike bottom!
This was his marriage.
And today, six years later, here sat Uncle Einar, here he was, festering under the apple tree, grown impatient and unkind; not because this was his desire, but because after the long wait, he was still unable to fly the wild night sky; his extra sense had never returned. Here he sat despondently, nothing more than a summer sun-parasol, green and discarded, abandoned for the season by the reckless vacationers who once sought the refuge of its translucent shadow. Was he to sit here forever, afraid to fly by day because someone might see him? Was his only flight to be as a drier of clothes for his wife, or a fanner of children on hot August noons? His one occupation had always been flying Family errands, quicker than storms. A boomerang, he’d whickled over hills and valleys and like a thistle, landed. He had always had money; the Family had good use for their winged man! But now? Bitterness! His wings jittered and whisked the air and made a captive thunder.
“Papa,” said little Meg.
The children stood looking at his thought-dark face.
“Papa,” said Ronald. “Make more thunder!”
“It’s a cold March day, there’ll soon be rain and plenty of thunder,” said Uncle Einar.
“Will you come watch us?” asked Michael.
“Run on, run on! Let papa brood!”
He was shut of love, the children of love, and the love of children. He thought only of heavens, skies, horizons, infinities, by night or day, lit by star, moon, or sun, cloudy or clear, but always it was skies and heavens and horizons that ran ahead of you forever when you soared. Yet here he was, sculling the pasture, kept low for fear of being seen.
Misery in a deep well!
“Papa, come watch us; it’s March!” cried Meg. “And we’re going to the Hill with all the kids from town!”
Uncle Einar grunted. “What hill is that?”
“The Kite Hill, of course!” they all sang together.
Now he looked at them.
Each held a large paper kite, their faces sweating with anticipation and an animal glowing. In their small fingers were balls of white twine. From the kites, colored red and blue and yellow and green, hung caudal appendages of cotton and silk strips.
“We’ll fly our kites!” said Ronald. “Won’t you come?”
“No,” he said, sadly. “I mustn’t be seen by anyone or there’d be trouble.”
“You could hide and watch from the woods,” said Meg. “We made the kites ourselves. Just because we know how.”
“How do you know how?”
“You’re our father!” was the instant cry. “That’s why!”
He looked at his children for a long while. He sighed. “A kite festival, is it?”
“Yes, sir!”
“I’m going to win,” said Meg.
“No, I’m!” Michael contradicted.
“Me, me!” piped Stephan.
“Wind up the chimney!” roared Uncle Einar, leaping high with a deafening kettledrum of wings. “Children! Children, I love you dearly!”
“Father, what’s wrong?” said Michael, backing off.
“Nothing, nothing, nothing!” chanted Einar. He flexed his wings to their greatest propulsion and plundering. Whoom! they slammed like cymbals. The children fell flat in the backwash! “I have it, I have it! I’m free again! Fire in the flue! Feather on the wind! Brunilla!” Einar called to the house. His wife appeared. “I’m free!” he called, flushed and tall, on his toes. “Listen, Brunilla, I don’t need the night anymore! I can fly by day! I don’t need the night! I’ll fly every day and any day of the year from now on! — but I waste time, talking. Look!”
And as the worried members of his family watched, he seized the cotton tail from one of the little kites, tied it to his belt behind, grabbed the twine ball, held one end in his teeth, gave the other end to his children, and up, up into the air he flew, away into the March wind!
And across the meadows and over the farms his children ran, letting out string to the daylit sky, bubbling and stumbling, and Brunilla stood back in the farmyard and waved and laughed to see what was happening; and her children marched to the far Kite Hill and stood, the four of them, holding the ball of twine in their eager, proud fingers, each tugging and directing and pulling. And the children from Mellin Town came running with their small kites to let up on the wind, and they saw the great green kite leap and hover in the sky and exclaimed:
“Oh, oh, what a kite! What a kite! Oh, I wish I’d a kite like that! Where, where did you get it!”
“Our father made it!” cried Meg and Michael and Stephen and Ronald, and gave an exultant pull on the twine and the humming, thundering kite in the sky dipped and soared and made a great and magical exclamation mark across a cloud!
The End
Fictional Story Related Index
This is an index of full text reprints of stories that I have
read that influenced me when I was young. They are rather difficult to
come by today, as where I live they are nearly impossible to find. Yes,
you can find them on the internet, behind paywalls. Ah, that’s why all
those software engineers in California make all that money. Well, here
they are FOR FREE. Enjoy reading them.
Movies that Inspired Me
Here are some movies that I consider noteworthy and worth a view. Enjoy.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are
reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal
library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come
and enjoy a read or two as well.
My Poetry
Art that Moves Me
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
A mathematician discovers that his formulas predict that an important new power station poses an extremely grave risk to humanity, and he must convince others of the danger.
- William E. Emba
FOREWORDLIFE-LINE, MISFIT, LET THERE BE LIGHT, ELSEWHEN, PIED PIPER, IF THIS GOES ON—, REQUIEM, THE ROADS MUST ROLL, COVENTRY, BLOWUPS HAPPEN—for eleven months, mid March 1939 through mid February 1940, I wrote every day . . . and that ended my bondage; BLOWUPS HAPPEN paid off the last of that pesky mortgage—eight years ahead of time.BLOWUPS HAPPEN was the first of my stories to be published in hard covers, in Groff Conklin's first anthology, The Best of Science Fiction, 1946. In the meantime there had been World War II, Hiroshima, The Smyth Report—so I went over my 1940 manuscript most carefully, correcting some figures I had merely guessed at in early 1940.This week I have compared the two versions, 1940 and 1946, word by word—there isn't a dime's worth of difference between them . . . and I now see, as a result of the enormous increase in the art in 33 years, more errors in the '46 version than I spotted in the '40 version when I checked it in '46.I do not intend ever again to try to update a story to make it fit new art. Such updating can't save a poor story and isn't necessary for a good story. All of H. G. Wells' SF stories are hopelessly dated . . . and they remain the best, the most gripping science fiction stories to be found anywhere. My Beyond This Horizon (1941) states that H. sapiens has forty-eight chromosomes, a "fact" that "everybody knew" in 1941. Now "everybody knows" that the "correct" number is forty-six. I shan't change it.The version of "Blowups Happen" here following is exactly, word for word, the way it was first written in February 1940.
BLOWUPS HAPPEN
“Put down that wrench!”
The man addressed turned slowly around and faced the speaker. His expression was hidden by a grotesque helmet, part of a heavy, leaden armor which shielded his entire body, but the tone of voice in which he answered showed nervous exasperation.
“What the hell’s eating on you, Doc?” He made no move to replace the tool in question.
They faced each other like two helmeted, arrayed fencers, watching for an opening. The first speaker’s voice came from behind his mask a shade higher in key and more peremptory in tone. “You heard me, Harper. Put down that wrench at once, and come away from that ‘trigger.’ Erickson!”
A third armored figure came around the shield which separated the uranium bomb proper from the control room in which the first two stood. “Whatcha want, Doc?”
“Harper is relieved from watch. You take over as engineer-of-the-watch. Send for the standby engineer.”
“Very well.” His voice and manner were phlegmatic as he accepted the situation without comment. The atomic engineer whom he had just relieved glanced from one to the other, then carefully replaced the wrench in its rack.
“Just as you say, Dr. Silard—but send for your relief, too. I shall demand an immediate hearing!” Harper swept indignantly out, his lead-sheathed boots clumping on the floor plates.
Dr. Silard waited unhappily for the ensuing twenty minutes until his own relief arrived. Perhaps he had been hasty. Maybe he was wrong in thinking that Harper had at last broken under the strain of tending the most dangerous machine in the world—an atomic power plant. But if he had made a mistake, it had to be on the safe side—slips must not happen in this business; not when a slip might result in the atomic detonation of two and a half tons of uranium.
He tried to visualize what that would mean, and failed. He had been told that uranium was potentially forty million times as explosive as TNT. The figure was meaningless that way. He thought of it, instead, as a hundred million tons of high explosive, two hundred million aircraft bombs as big as the biggest ever used. It still did not mean anything. He had once seen such a bomb dropped, when he had been serving as a temperament analyst for army aircraft pilots. The bomb had left a hole big enough to hide an apartment house. He could not imagine the explosion of a thousand such bombs, much less a hundred million of them.
Perhaps these atomic engineers could. Perhaps, with their greater mathematical ability and closer comprehension of what actually went on inside the nuclear fission chamber—the “bomb”—they had some vivid glimpse of the mind-shattering horror locked up beyond that shield. If so, no wonder they tended to blow up—
He sighed. Erickson looked up from the linear resonant accelerator on which he had been making some adjustment. “What’s the trouble, Doc?”
“Nothing. I’m sorry I had to relieve Harper.”
Silard could feel the shrewd glance of the big Scandinavian. “Not getting the jitters yourself, are you, Doc? Sometimes you squirrel sleuths blow up, too—”
“Me? I don’t think so. I’m scared of that thing in there—I’d be crazy if I weren’t.”
“So am I,” Erickson told him soberly, and went back to his work.* * *
The accelerator’s snout disappeared in the shield between them and the bomb, where it fed a steady stream of terrifically speeded up subatomic bullets to the beryllium target located within the bomb itself. The tortured beryllium yielded up neutrons, which shot out in all directions through the uranium mass. Some of these neutrons struck uranium atoms squarely on their nuclei and split them in two. The fragments were new elements, barium, xenon, rubidium—depending on the proportions in which each atom split. The new elements were usually unstable isotopes and broke down into a dozen more elements by radioactive disintegration in a progressive chain reaction.
But these chain reactions were comparatively unimportant; it was the original splitting of the uranium nucleus, with the release of the awe-inspiring energy that bound it together—an incredible two hundred million electron-volts—that was important—and perilous.
For, while uranium isotope 235 may be split by bombarding it with neutrons from an outside source, the splitting itself gives up more neutrons which, in turn, may land in other uranium nuclei and split them. If conditions are favorable to a progressively increasing reaction of this sort, it may get out of hand, build up in an unmeasurable fraction of a microsecond into a complete atomic explosion—an explosion which would dwarf the eruption of Krakatoa to popgun size; an explosion so far beyond all human experience as to be as completely incomprehensible as the idea of personal death. It could be feared, but not understood.
But a self-perpetuating sequence of nuclear splitting just under the level of complete explosion was necessary to the operation of the power plant. To split the first uranium nucleus by bombarding it with neutrons from the beryllium target took more power than the death of the atom gave up. In order that the output of power from the system should exceed the power input in useful proportion it was imperative that each atom split by a neutron from the beryllium target should cause the splitting of many more.
It was equally imperative that this chain of reactions should always tend to dampen, to die out. It must not build up, or the entire mass would explode within a time interval too short to be measured by any means whatsoever.
Nor would there be anyone left to measure it.* * *
The atomic engineer on duty at the bomb could control this reaction by means of the “trigger,” a term the engineers used to include the linear resonant accelerator, the beryllium target, and the adjacent controls, instrument board, and power sources. That is to say, he could vary the bombardment on the beryllium target to increase or decrease the power output of the plant, and he could tell from his instruments that the internal reaction was dampened—or, rather, that it had been dampened the split second before. He could not possibly know what was actually happening now within the bomb—subatomic speeds are too great and the time intervals too small. He was like the bird that flew backward; he could see where he had been, but he never knew where he was going.
Nevertheless, it was his responsibility, and his alone, not only to maintain the bomb at a high input-output efficiency, but to see that the reaction never passed the critical point and progressed into mass explosion.
But that was impossible. He could not be sure; he could never be sure.
He could bring to the job all of the skill and learning of the finest technical education, and use it to reduce the hazard to the lowest mathematical probability, but the blind laws of chance which appear to rule in subatomic action might turn up a royal flush against him and defeat his most skillful play.
And each atomic engineer knew it, knew that he gambled not only with his own life, but with the lives of countless others, perhaps with the lives of every human being on the planet. Nobody knew quite what such an explosion would do. The most conservative estimate assumed that, in addition to destroying the plant and its personnel completely, it would tear a chunk out of the populous and heavily traveled Los Angeles-Oklahoma Road City a hundred miles to the north.
That was the official, optimistic viewpoint on which the plant had been authorized, and based on mathematics which predicted that a mass of uranium would itself be disrupted on a molar scale, and thereby rendered comparatively harmless, before progressive and accelerated atomic explosion could infect the entire mass.
The atomic engineers, by and large, did not place faith in the official theory. They judged theoretical mathematical prediction for what it was worth—precisely nothing, until confirmed by experiment.
But even from the official viewpoint, each atomic engineer while on watch carried not only his own life in his hands, but the lives of many others—how many, it was better not to think about. No pilot, no general, no surgeon ever carried such a daily, inescapable, ever-present weight of responsibility for the lives of other people as these men carried every time they went on watch, every time they touched a vernier screw or read a dial.
They were selected not alone for their intelligence and technical training, but quite as much for their characters and sense of social responsibility. Sensitive men were needed—men who could fully appreciate the importance of the charge intrusted to them; no other sort would do. But the burden of responsibility was too great to be borne indefinitely by a sensitive man.
It was, of necessity, a psychologically unstable condition. Insanity was an occupational disease.* * *
Dr. Cummings appeared, still buckling the straps of the armor worn to guard against stray radiation. “What’s up?” he asked Silard.
“I had to relieve Harper.”
“So I guessed. I met him coming up. He was sore as hell—just glared at me.”
“I know. He wants an immediate hearing. That’s why I had to send for you.”
Cummings grunted, then nodded toward the engineer, anonymous in all-inclosing armor. “Who’d I draw?”
“Erickson.”
“Good enough. Squareheads can’t go crazy—eh, Gus?”
Erickson looked up momentarily and answered, “That’s your problem,” and returned to his work.
Cummings turned back to Silard and commented: “Psychiatrists don’t seem very popular around here. O.K.—I relieve you, sir.”
“Very well, sir.”
Silard threaded his way through the zigzag in the tanks of water which surrounded the disintegration room. Once outside this outer shield, he divested himself of the cumbersome armor, disposed of it in the locker room provided, and hurried to a lift. He left the lift at the tube station, underground, and looked around for an unoccupied capsule. Finding one, he strapped himself in, sealed the gasketed door, and settled the back of his head into the rest against the expected surge of acceleration.
Five minutes later he knocked at the door of the office of the general superintendent, twenty miles away.
The power plant proper was located in a bowl of desert hills on the Arizona plateau. Everything not necessary to the immediate operation of the plant—administrative offices, television station and so forth—lay beyond the hills. The buildings housing these auxiliary functions were of the most durable construction technical ingenuity could devise. It was hoped that, if Der Tag ever came, occupants would stand approximately the chance of survival of a man going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.
Silard knocked again. He was greeted by a male secretary. Steinke. Silard recalled reading his case history. Formerly one of the most brilliant of the young engineers, he had suffered a blanking out of the ability to handle mathematical operations. A plain case of fugue, but there had been nothing that the poor devil could do about it—he had been anxious enough with his conscious mind to stay on duty. He had been rehabilitated as an office worker.
Steinke ushered him into the superintendent’s private office. Harper was there before him, and returned his greeting with icy politeness. The superintendent was cordial, but Silard thought he looked tired, as if the twenty-four-hour-a-day strain was too much for him.
“Come in, Doctor, come in. Sit down. Now tell me about this. I’m a little surprised. I thought Harper was one of my steadiest men.”
“I don’t say he isn’t, sir.”
“Well?”
“He may be perfectly all right, but your instructions to me are not to take any chances.”
“Quite right.” The superintendent gave the engineer, silent and tense in his chair, a troubled glance, then returned his attention to Silard. “Suppose you tell me about it.”
Silard took a deep breath. “While on watch as psychological observer at the control station I noticed that the engineer of the watch seemed preoccupied and less responsive to stimuli than usual. During my off-watch observation of this case, over a period of the past several days, I have suspected an increasing lack of attention. For example, while playing contract bridge, he now occasionally asks for a review of the bidding, which is contrary to his former behavior pattern.
“Other similar data are available. To cut it short, at 3:11 today, while on watch, I saw Harper, with no apparent reasonable purpose in mind, pick up a wrench used only for operating the valves of the water shield and approach the trigger. Irelieved him of duty and sent him out of the control room.”
“Chief!” Harper calmed himself somewhat and continued: “If this witch doctor knew a wrench from an oscillator, he’d know what I was doing. The wrench was on the wrong rack. I noticed it, and picked it up to return it to its proper place. On the way, I stopped to check the readings!”
The superintendent turned inquiringly to Dr. Silard.
“That may be true. Granting that it is true,” answered the psychiatrist doggedly, “my diagnosis still stands. Your behavior pattern has altered; your present actions are unpredictable, and I can’t approve you for responsible work without a complete checkup.”
General Superintendent King drummed on the desk top and sighed. Then he spoke slowly to Harper: “Cal, you’re a good boy, and, believe me, I know how you feel. But there is no way to avoid it—you’ve got to go up for the psychometricals, and accept whatever disposition the board makes of you.” He paused, but Harper maintained an expressionless silence. “Tell you what, son—why don’t you take a few days leave? Then, when you come back, you can go up before the board, or transfer to another department away from the bomb, whichever you prefer.” He looked to Silard for approval, and received a nod.
But Harper was not mollified. “No, chief,” he protested. “It won’t do. Can’t you see what’s wrong? It’s this constant supervision. Somebody always watching the back of your neck, expecting you to go crazy. A man can’t even shave in private. We’re jumpy about the most innocent acts, for fear some head doctor, half batty himself, will see it and decide it’s a sign we’re slipping. Good grief, what do you expect?” His outburst having run its course, he subsided into a flippant cynicism that did not quite jell. “O.K.—never mind the straitjacket; I’ll go quietly. You’re a good Joe in spite of it, chief,” he added, “and I’m glad to have worked under you. Good-bye.”
King kept the pain in his eyes out of his voice. “Wait a minute, Cal—you’re not through here. Let’s forget about the vacation. I’m transferring you to the radiation laboratory. You belong in research, anyhow; I’d never have spared you from it to stand watches if I hadn’t been short on Number One men.
“As for the constant psychological observation, I hate it as much as you do. I don’t suppose you know that they watch me about twice as hard as they watch you duty engineers.” Harper showed his surprise, but Silard nodded in sober confirmation. “But we have to have this supervision. Do you remember Manning? No, he was before your time. We didn’t have psychological observers then. Manning was able and brilliant. Furthermore, he was always cheerful; nothing seemed to bother him.
“I was glad to have him on the bomb, for he was always alert, and never seemed nervous about working with it—in fact, he grew more buoyant and cheerful the longer he stood control watches. I should have known that was a very bad sign, but I didn’t, and there was no observer to tell me so.
“His technician had to slug him one night. He found him dismounting the safety interlocks on the trigger. Poor old Manning never pulled out of it—he’s been violently insane ever since. After Manning cracked up we worked out the present system of two qualified engineers and an observer for every watch. It seemed the only thing to do.”
“I suppose so, chief,” Harper mused, his face no longer sullen, but still unhappy. “It’s a hell of a situation just the same.”
“That’s putting it mildly.” King rose and put out his hand. “Cal, unless you’re dead set on leaving us, I’ll expect to see you at the radiation laboratory tomorrow. Another thing—I don’t often recommend this, but it might do you good to get drunk tonight.”* * *
King had signed to Silard to remain after the young man left. Once the door was closed he turned back to the psychiatrist. “There goes another one—and one of the best. Doctor, what am I going to do?”
Silard pulled at his cheek. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “The hell of it is, Harper’s absolutely right. It does increase the strain on them to know that they are being watched—and yet they have to be watched. Your psychiatric staff isn’t doing too well, either. It makes us nervous to be around the bomb—the more so because we don’t understand it. And it’s a strain on us to be hated and despised as we are. Scientific detachment is difficult under such conditions; I’m getting jumpy myself.”
King ceased pacing the floor and faced the doctor. “But there must be some solution—” he insisted.
Silard shook his head. “It’s beyond me, Superintendent. I see no solution from the standpoint of psychology.”
“No? Hm-m-m. Doctor, who is the top man in your field?”
“Eh?”
“Who is the recognized Number One man in handling this sort of thing?”
“Why, that’s hard to say. Naturally, there isn’t any one leading psychiatrist in the world; we specialize too much. I know what you mean, though. You don’t want the best industrial-temperament psychometrician; you want the best all-around man for psychoses nonlesional and situational. That would be Lentz.”
“Go on.”
“Well—he covers the whole field of environmental adjustment. He’s the man who correlated the theory of optimum tonicity with the relaxation technique that Korzybski had developed empirically. He actually worked under Korzybski himself, when he was a young student—it’s the only thing he’s vain about.”
“He did? Then he must be pretty old; Korzybski died in— What year did he die?”
“I started to say that you must know his work in symbology—theory of abstraction and calculus of statement, all that sort of thing—because of its applications to engineering and mathematical physics.”
“That Lentz—yes, of course. But I had never thought of him as a psychiatrist.”
“No, you wouldn’t, in your field. Nevertheless, we are inclined to credit him with having done as much to check and reduce the pandemic neuroses of the Crazy Years as any other man, and more than any man left alive.”
“Where is he?”
“Why, Chicago, I suppose. At the Institute.”
“Get him here.”
“Eh?”
“Get him down here. Get on that visiphone and locate him. Then have Steinke call the port of Chicago, and hire a stratocar to stand by for him. I want to see him as soon as possible—before the day is out.” King sat up in his chair with the air of a man who is once more master of himself and the situation. His spirit knew that warming replenishment that comes only with reaching a decision. The harassed expression was gone.
Silard looked dumbfounded. “But, Superintendent,” he expostulated, “You can’t ring for Dr. Lentz as if he were a junior clerk. He’s . . . he’s Lentz.“
“Certainly—that’s why I want him. But I’m not a neurotic clubwoman looking for sympathy, either. He’ll come. If necessary, turn on the heat from Washington. Have the White House call him. But get him here at once. Move!” King strode out of the office.* * *
When Erickson came off watch he inquired around and found that Harper had left for town. Accordingly, he dispensed with dinner at the base, shifted into “drinkin’ clothes,” and allowed himself to be dispatched via tube to Paradise.
Paradise, Arizona, was a hard little boom town, which owed its existence to the power plant. It was dedicated exclusively to the serious business of detaching the personnel of the plant from their inordinate salaries. In this worthy project they received much cooperation from the plant personnel themselves, each of whom was receiving from twice to ten times as much money each pay day as he had ever received in any other job, and none of whom was certain of living long enough to justify saving for old age. Besides, the company carried a sinking fund in Manhattan for their dependents; why be stingy?
It was said, with some truth, that any entertainment or luxury obtainable in New York City could be purchased in Paradise. The local chamber of commerce had appropriated the slogan of Reno, Nevada, “Biggest Little City in the World.” The Reno boosters retaliated by claiming that, while any town that close to the atomic power plant undeniably brought thoughts of death and the hereafter, Hell’s Gates would be a more appropriate name than Paradise.
Erickson started making the rounds. There were twenty-seven places licensed to sell liquor in the six blocks of the main street of Paradise. He expected to find Harper in one of them, and, knowing the man’s habits and tastes, he expected to find him in the first two or three he tried.
He was not mistaken. He found Harper sitting alone at a table in the rear of DeLancey’s Sans Souci Bar. DeLancey’s was a favorite of both of them. There was an old-fashioned comfort about its chrome-plated bar and red leather furniture that appealed to them more than did the spectacular fittings of the up-to-the-minute places. DeLancey was conservative; he stuck to indirect lighting and soft music; his hostesses were required to be fully clothed, even in the evening.
The fifth of Scotch in front of Harper was about two thirds full. Erickson shoved three fingers in front of Harper’s face and demanded, “Count!”
“Three,” announced Harper. “Sit down, Gus.”
“That’s correct,” Erickson agreed, sliding his big frame into a low-slung chair. “You’ll do—for now. What was the outcome?”
“Have a drink. Not,” he went on, “that this Scotch is any good. I think Lance has taken to watering it. I surrendered, horse and foot.”
“Lance wouldn’t do that—stick to that theory and you’ll sink in the sidewalk up to your knees. How come you capitulated? I thought you planned to beat ’em about the head and shoulders, at least.”
“I did,” mourned Harper, “but, cripes, Gus, the chief is right. If a brain mechanic says you’re punchy, he has got to back him up and take you off the bomb. The chief can’t afford to take a chance.”
“Yeah, the chief’s all right, but I can’t learn to love our dear psychiatrists. Tell you what—let’s find us one, and see if he can feel pain. I’ll hold him while you slug ‘im.”
“Oh, forget it, Gus. Have a drink.”
“A pious thought—but not Scotch. I’m going to have a martini; we ought to eat pretty soon.”
“I’ll have one, too.”
“Do you good.” Erickson lifted his blond head and bellowed, “Israfel!”
A large, black person appeared at his elbow. “Mistuh Erickson! Yes, suh!”
“Izzy, fetch two martinis. Make mine with Italian.” He turned back to Harper. “What are you going to do now, Cal?”
“Radiation laboratory.”
“Well, that’s not so bad. I’d like to have a go at the matter of rocket fuels myself. I’ve got some ideas.”
Harper looked mildly amused. “You mean atomic fuel for interplanetary flight? The problem’s pretty well exhausted. No, son, the stratosphere is the ceiling until we think up something better than rockets. Of course, you could mount the bomb in a ship, and figure out some jury rig to convert its radiant output into push, but where does that get you? One bomb, one ship—and twenty years of mining in Little America has only produced enough pitchblende to make one bomb. That’s disregarding the question of getting the company to lend you their one bomb for anything that doesn’t pay dividends.”
Erickson looked balky. “I don’t concede that you’ve covered all the alternatives. What have we got? The early rocket boys went right ahead trying to build better rockets, serene in the belief that, by the time they could build rockets good enough to fly to the Moon, a fuel would be perfected that would do the trick. And they did build ships that were good enough—you could take any ship that makes the antipodes run, and refit it for the Moon—if you had a fuel that was sufficiently concentrated to maintain the necessary push for the whole run. But they haven’t got it.
“And why not? Because we let ’em down, that’s why. Because they’re still depending on molecular energy, on chemical reactions, with atomic power sitting right here in our laps. It’s not their fault—old D. D. Harriman had Rockets Consolidated underwrite the whole first issue of Antarctic Pitchblende, and took a big slice of it himself, in the expectation that we would produce something usable in the way of a concentrated rocket fuel. Did we do it? Like hell! The company went hog-wild for immediate commercial exploitation, and there’s no fuel yet.”
“But you haven’t stated it properly,” Harper objected. “There are just two forms of atomic power available—radioactivity and atomic disintegration. The first is too slow; the energy is there, but you can’t wait years for it to come out—not in a rocketship. The second we can only manage in a large mass of uranium. There you are—stymied.”
Erickson’s Scandinavian stubbornness was just gathering for another try at the argument when the waiter arrived with the drinks. He set them down with a triumphant flourish. “There you are, suh!”
“Want to roll for them, Izzy?” Harper inquired.
“Don’ mind if I do.”
The Negro produced a leather dice cup, and Harper rolled. He selected his combinations with care and managed to get four aces and a jack in three rolls. Israfel took the cup. He rolled in the grand manner with a backward twist to his wrist. His score finished at five kings, and he courteously accepted the price of six drinks. Harper stirred the engraved cubes with his forefinger.
“Izzy,” he asked, “are these the same dice I rolled with?”
“Why, Mistuh Harper!” The Negro’s expression was pained.
“Skip it,” Harper conceded. “I should know better than to gamble with you. I haven’t won a roll from you in six weeks. What did you start to say, Gus?”
“I was just going to say that there ought to be a better way to get energy out of—”
But they were joined again, this time by something very seductive in an evening gown that appeared to have been sprayed on her lush figure. She was young, perhaps nineteen or twenty. “You boys lonely?” she asked as she flowed into a chair.
“Nice of you to ask, but we’re not,” Erickson denied with patient politeness. He jerked a thumb at a solitary figure seated across the room. “Go talk to Hannigan; he’s not busy.”
She followed his gesture with her eyes, and answered with faint scorn: “Him? He’s no use. He’s been like that for three weeks—hasn’t spoken to a soul. If you ask me, I’d say that he was cracking up.”
“That so?” he observed noncommittally. “Here”—he fished out a five-dollar bill and handed it to her—”buy yourself a drink. Maybe we’ll look you up later.”
“Thanks, boys.” The money disappeared under her clothing, and she stood up. “Just ask for Edith.”
“Hannigan does look bad,” Harper considered, noting the brooding stare and apathetic attitude, “and he has been awfully standoffish lately, for him. Do you suppose we’re obliged to report him?”
“Don’t let it worry you,” advised Erickson. “There’s a spotter on the job now. Look.” Harper followed his companion’s eyes and recognized Dr. Mott of the psychological staff. He was leaning against the far end of the bar, and nursing a tall glass, which gave him protective coloration. But his stance was such that his field of vision included not only Hannigan, but Erickson and Harper as well.
“Yeah, and he’s studying us as well,” Harper added. “Damn it to hell, why does it make my back hair rise just to lay eyes on one of them?”
The question was rhetorical; Erickson ignored it. “Let’s get out of here,” he suggested, “and have dinner somewhere else.”
“O.K.”
DeLancey himself waited on them as they left. “Going so soon, gentlemen?” he asked, in a voice that implied that their departure would leave him no reason to stay open. “Beautiful lobster thermidor tonight. If you do not like it, you need not pay.” He smiled brightly.
“Not sea food, Lance,” Harper told him, “not tonight. Tell me—why do you stick around here when you know that the bomb is bound to get you in the long run? Aren’t you afraid of it?”
The tavernkeeper’s eyebrows shot up. “Afraid of the bomb? But it is my friend!”
“Makes you money, eh?”
“Oh, I do not mean that.” He leaned toward them confidentially. “Five years ago I come here to make some money quickly for my family before my cancer of the stomach, it kills me. At the clinic, with the wonderful new radiants you gentlemen make with the aid of the bomb, I am cured—I live again. No, I am not afraid of the bomb, it is my good friend.”
“Suppose it blows up?”
“When the good Lord needs me, He will take me.” He crossed himself quickly.
As they turned away, Erickson commented in a low voice to Harper, “There’s your answer, Cal—if all us engineers had his faith, the bomb wouldn’t get us down.”
Harper was unconvinced. “I don’t know,” he mused. “I don’t think it’s faith; I think it’s lack of imagination—and knowledge.”* * *
Notwithstanding King’s confidence, Lentz did not show up until the next day. The superintendent was subconsciously a little surprised at his visitor’s appearance. He had pictured a master psychologist as wearing flowing hair, an imperial, and having piercing black eyes. But this man was not very tall, was heavy in his framework, and fat—almost gross. He might have been a butcher. Little, piggy, faded-blue eyes peered merrily out from beneath shaggy blond brows. There was no hair anywhere else on the enormous skull, and the apelike jaw was smooth and pink. He was dressed in mussed pajamas of unbleached linen. A long cigarette holder jutted permanently from one corner of a wide mouth, widened still more by a smile with suggested unmalicious amusement at the worst that life, or men, could do. He had gusto.
King found him remarkably easy to talk to.
At Lentz’s suggestion the superintendent went first into the history of the atomic power plant, how the fission of the uranium atom by Dr. Otto Hahn in December, 1938, had opened up the way to atomic power. The door was opened just a crack; the process to be self-perpetuating and commercially usable required an enormously greater mass of uranium than there was available in the entire civilized world at that time.
But the discovery, fifteen years later, of enormous deposits of pitchblende in the old rock underlying Little America removed that obstacle. The deposits were similar to those previously worked at Great Bear Lake in the arctic north of Canada, but so much more extensive that the eventual possibility of accumulating enough uranium to build an atomic power plant became evident.
The demand for commercially usable, cheap power had never been satiated. Even the Douglas-Martin sunpower screens, used to drive the roaring road cities of the period and for a myriad other industrial purposes, were not sufficient to fill the ever-growing demand. They had saved the country from impending famine of oil and coal, but their maximum output of approximately one horsepower per square yard of sun-illuminated surface put a definite limit to the power from that source available in any given geographical area.
Atomic power was needed—was demanded.
But theoretical atomic physics predicted that a uranium mass sufficiently large to assist in its own disintegration might assist too well—blow up instantaneously, with such force that it would probably wreck every man-made structure on the globe and conceivably destroy the entire human race as well. They dared not build the bomb, even though the uranium was available.
“It was Destry’s mechanics of infinitesimals that showed a way out of the dilemma,” King went on. “His equations appeared to predict that an atomic explosion, once started, would disrupt the molar mass inclosing it so rapidly that neutron loss through the outer surface of the fragments would dampen the progression of the atomic explosion to zero before complete explosion could be reached.
“For the mass we use in the bomb, his equations predict a possible force of explosion one seventh of one percent of the force of complete explosion. That alone, of course, would be incomprehensibly destructive—about the equivalent of a hundred and forty thousand tons of TNT—enough to wreck this end of the State. Personally, I’ve never been sure that is all that would happen.”
“Then why did you accept this job?” inquired Lentz.
King fiddled with items on his desk before replying. “I couldn’t turn it down, Doctor—I couldn’t. If I had refused, they would have gotten someone else—and it was an opportunity that comes to a physicist once in history.”
Lentz nodded. “And probably they would have gotten someone not as competent. I understand, Dr. King—you were compelled by the ‘truth-tropism’ of the scientist. He must go where the data is to be found, even if it kills him. But about this fellow Destry, I’ve never liked his mathematics; he postulates too much.”
King looked up in quick surprise, then recalled that this was the man who had refined and given rigor to the calculus of statement. “That’s just the hitch,” he agreed. “His work is brilliant, but I’ve never been sure that his predictions were worth the paper they were written on. Nor, apparently,” he added bitterly, “do my junior engineers.”
He told the psychiatrist of the difficulties they had had with personnel, of how the most carefully selected men would, sooner or later, crack under the strain. “At first I thought it might be some degenerating effect from the hard radiation that leaks out of the bomb, so we improved the screening and the personal armor. But it didn’t help. One young fellow who had joined us after the new screening was installed became violent at dinner one night, and insisted that a pork chop was about to explode. I hate to think of what might have happened if he had been on duty at the bomb when he blew up.”
The inauguration of the system of constant psychological observation had greatly reduced the probability of acute danger resulting from a watch engineer cracking up, but King was forced to admit that the system was not a success; there had actually been a marked increase in psychoneuroses, dating from that time.
“And that’s the picture, Dr. Lentz. It gets worse all the time. It’s getting me now. The strain is telling on me; I can’t sleep, and I don’t think my judgment is as good as it used to be—I have trouble making up my mind, of coming to a decision. Do you think you can do anything for us?”
But Lentz had no immediate relief for his anxiety. “Not so fast, superintendent,” he countered. “You have given me the background, but I have no real data as yet. I must look around for a while, smell out the situation for myself, talk to your engineers, perhaps have a few drinks with them, and get acquainted. That is possible, is it not? Then in a few days, maybe, we’ll know where we stand.”
King had no alternative but to agree.
“And it is well that your young men do not know what I am here for. Suppose I am your old friend, a visiting physicist, eh?”
“Why, yes—of course. I can see to it that the idea gets around. But say—” King was reminded again of something that had bothered him from the time Silard had first suggested Lentz’s name—”may I ask a personal question?”
The merry eyes were undisturbed.
“Go ahead.”
“I can’t help but be surprised that one man should attain eminence in two such widely differing fields as psychology and mathematics. And right now I’m perfectly convinced of your ability to pass yourself off as a physicist. I don’t understand it.”
The smile was more amused, without being in the least patronizing, nor offensive. “Same subject, symbology. You are a specialist; it would not necessarily come to your attention.”
“I still don’t follow you.”
“No? Man lives in a world of ideas. Any phenomenon is so complex that he cannot possibly grasp the whole of it. He abstracts certain characteristics of a given phenomenon as an idea, then represents that idea as a symbol, be it a word or a mathematical sign. Human reaction is almost entirely reaction to symbols, and only negligibly to phenomena. As a matter of fact,” he continued, removing the cigarette holder from his mouth and settling into his subject, “it can be demonstrated that the human mind can think only in terms of symbols.
“When we think, we let symbols operate on other symbols in certain, set fashions—rules of logic, or rules of mathematics. If the symbols have been abstracted so that they are structurally similar to the phenomena they stand for, and if the symbol operations are similar in structure and order to the operations of phenomena in the real world, we think sanely. If our logic-mathematics, or our word-symbols, have been poorly chosen, we do not think sanely.
“In mathematical physics you are concerned with making your symbology fit physical phenomena. In psychiatry I am concerned with precisely the same thing, except that I am more immediately concerned with the man who does the thinking than with the phenomena he is thinking about. But the same subject, always the same subject.”
“We’re not getting anyplace, . . . Gus.” Harper put down his slide rule and frowned.
“Seems like it, Cal,” Erickson grudgingly admitted. “Damn it, though—there ought to be some reasonable way of tackling the problem. What do we need? Some form of concentrated, controllable power for rocket fuel. What have we got? Power galore in the bomb. There must be some way to bottle that power, and serve it out when we need it—and the answer is someplace in one of the radioactive series. I know it.” He stared glumly around the laboratory as if expecting to find the answer written somewhere on the lead-sheathed walls.
“Don’t be so down in the mouth about it. You’ve got me convinced there is an answer; let’s figure out how to find it. In the first place the three natural radioactive series are out, aren’t they?”
“Yes—at least we had agreed that all that ground had been fully covered before.”
“O.K.; we have to assume that previous investigators have done what their notes show they have done—otherwise we might as well not believe anything, and start checking on everybody from Archimedes to date. Maybe that is indicated, but Methuselah himself couldn’t carry out such an assignment. What have we got left?”
“Artificial radioactives.”
“All right. Let’s set up a list of them, both those that have been made up to now, and those that might possibly be made in the future. Call that our group—or rather, field, if you want to be pedantic about definitions. There are a limited number of operations that can be performed on each member of the group, and on the members taken in combination. Set it up.”
Erickson did so, using the curious curlicues of the calculus of statement. Harper nodded. “All right—expand it.”
Erickson looked up after a few moments, and asked, “Cal, have you any idea how many terms there are in the expansion?”
“No—hundreds, maybe thousands, I suppose.”
“You’re conservative. It reaches four figures without considering possible new radioactives. We couldn’t finish such a research in a century.” He chucked his pencil down and looked morose.
Cal Harper looked at him curiously, but with sympathy. “Gus,” he said gently, “the bomb isn’t getting you, too, is it?”
“I don’t think so. Why?”
“I never saw you so willing to give up anything before. Naturally you and I will never finish any such job, but at the very worst we will have eliminated a lot of wrong answers for somebody else. Look at Edison—sixty years of experimenting, twenty hours a day, yet he never found out the one thing he was most interested in knowing. I guess if he could take it, we can.”
Erickson pulled out of his funk to some extent. “I suppose so,” he agreed. “Anyhow, maybe we could work out some techniques for carrying on a lot of experiments simultaneously.”
Harper slapped him on the shoulder. “That’s the ol’ fight. Besides—we may not need to finish the research, or anything like it, to find a satisfactory fuel. The way I see it, there are probably a dozen, maybe a hundred, right answers. We may run across one of them any day. Anyhow, since you’re willing to give me a hand with it in your off-watch time, I’m game to peck away at it till hell freezes.”* * *
Lentz puttered around the plant and the administration center for several days, until he was known to everyone by sight. He made himself pleasant and asked questions. He was soon regarded as a harmless nuisance, to be tolerated because he was a friend of the superintendent. He even poked his nose into the commercial power end of the plant, and had the mercury-steam-turbogenerator sequence explained to him in detail. This alone would have been sufficient to disarm any suspicion that he might be a psychiatrist, for the staff psychiatrists paid no attention to the hard-bitten technicians of the power-conversion unit. There was no need to; mental instability on their part could not affect the bomb, nor were they subject to the man-killing strain of social responsibility. Theirs was simply a job personally dangerous, a type of strain strong men have been inured to since the jungle.
In due course he got around to the unit of the radiation laboratory set aside for Calvin Harper’s use. He rang the bell and waited. Harper answered the door, his antiradiation helmet shoved back from his face like a grotesque sunbonnet. “What is it?” he asked. “Oh—it’s you, Dr. Lentz. Did you want to see me?”
“Why, yes and no,” the older man answered. “I was just looking around the experimental station, and wondered what you do in here. Will I be in the way?”
“Not at all. Come in. Gus!”
Erickson got up from where he had been fussing over the power leads to their trigger—a modified cyclotron rather than a resonant accelerator. “Hello.”
“Gus, this is Dr. Lentz—Gus Erickson.”
“We’ve met,” said Erickson, pulling off his gauntlet to shake hands. He had had a couple of drinks with Lentz in town and considered him a “nice old duck.” “You’re just between shows, but stick around and we’ll start another run—not that there is much to see.”
While Erickson continued with the setup, Harper conducted Lentz around the laboratory, explaining the line of research they were conducting, as happy as a father showing off twins. The psychiatrist listened with one ear and made appropriate comments while he studied the young scientist for signs of the instability he had noted to be recorded against him.
“You see,” Harper explained, oblivious to the interest in himself, “we are testing radioactive materials to see if we can produce disintegration of the sort that takes place in the bomb, but in a minute, almost microscopic, mass. If we are successful, we can use the power of the bomb to make a safe, convenient, atomic fuel for rockets.” He went on to explain their schedule of experimentation.
“I see,” Lentz observed politely. “What metal are you examining now?”
Harper told him. “But it’s not a case of examining one element—we’ve finished Isotope II with negative results. Our schedule calls next for running the same test on Isotope V. Like this.” He hauled out a lead capsule, and showed the label to Lentz, who saw that it was, indeed, marked with the symbol of the fifth isotope. He hurried away to the shield around the target of the cyclotron, left open by Erickson. Lentz saw that he had opened the capsule, and was performing some operation on it in a gingerly manner, having first lowered his helmet. Then he closed and clamped the target shield.
“O.K., Gus?” he called out. “Ready to roll?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Erickson assured him, coming around them. They crowded behind a thick metal shield that cut them off from direct sight of the setup.
“Will I need to put on armor?” inquired Lentz.
“No,” Erickson reassured him, “we wear it because we are around the stuff day in and day out. You just stay behind the shield and you’ll be all right. It’s lead—backed up by eight inches of case-hardened armor plate.”
Erickson glanced at Harper, who nodded, and fixed his eyes on a panel of instruments mounted behind the shield. Lentz saw Erickson press a push button at the top of the board, then heard a series of relays click on the far side of the shield. There was a short moment of silence.
The floor slapped his feet like some incredible bastinado. The concussion that beat on his ears was so intense that it paralyzed the auditory nerve almost before it could be recorded as sound. The air-conducted concussion wave flailed every inch of his body with a single, stinging, numbing blow. As he picked himself up, he found he was trembling uncontrollably and realized, for the first time, that he was getting old.
Harper was seated on the floor and had commenced to bleed from the nose. Erickson had gotten up; his cheek was cut. He touched a hand to the wound, then stood there, regarding the blood on his fingers with a puzzled expression on his face.
“Are you hurt?” Lentz inquired inanely. “What happened?”
Harper cut in. “Gus, we’ve done it! We’ve done it! Isotope V’s turned the trick!”
Erickson looked still more bemused. “Five?” he said stupidly. “But that wasn’t Five; that was Isotope II. I put it in myself.”
“You put it in? I put it in! It was Five, I tell you!”
They stood staring at each other, still confused by the explosion, and each a little annoyed at the bone-headed stupidity the other displayed in the face of the obvious. Lentz diffidently interceded.
“Wait a minute, boys,” he suggested. “Maybe there’s a reason—Gus, you placed a quantity of the second isotope in the receiver?”
“Why, yes, certainly. I wasn’t satisfied with the last run, and I wanted to check it.”
Lentz nodded. “It’s my fault, gentlemen,” he admitted ruefully. “I came in and disturbed your routine, and both of you charged the receiver. I know Harper did, for I saw him do it—with Isotope V. I’m sorry.”
Understanding broke over Harper’s face, and he slapped the older man on the shoulder. “Don’t be sorry,” he laughed; “you can come around to our lab and help us make mistakes any time you feel in the mood. Can’t he, Gus? This is the answer, Dr. Lentz; this is it!”
“But,” the psychiatrist pointed out, “you don’t know which isotope blew up.”
“Nor care,” Harper supplemented. “Maybe it was both, taken together. But we will know—this business is cracked now; we’ll soon have it open.” He gazed happily around at the wreckage.* * *
In spite of Superintendent King’s anxiety, Lentz refused to be hurried in passing judgment on the situation. Consequently, when he did present himself at King’s office, and announced that he was ready to report, King was pleasantly surprised as well as relieved. “Well, I’m delighted,” he said. “Sit down, Doctor, sit down. Have a cigar. What do we do about it?”
But Lentz stuck to his perennial cigarette and refused to be hurried. “I must have some information first. How important,” he demanded, “is the power from your plant?”
King understood the implication at once. “If you are thinking about shutting down the bomb for more than a limited period, it can’t be done.”
“Why not? If the figures supplied me are correct, your output is less than thirteen percent of the total power used in the country.”
“Yes, that is true, but you haven’t considered the items that go into making up the total. A lot of it is domestic power, which householders get from sunscreens located on their own roofs. Another big slice is power for the moving roadways—that’s sunpower again. The portion we provide here is the main power source for most of the heavy industries—steel, plastics, lithics, all kinds of manufacturing and processing. You might as well cut the heart out of a man—”
“But the food industry isn’t basically dependent on you?” Lentz persisted.
“No. Food isn’t basically a power industry—although we do supply a certain percentage of the power used in processing. I see your point, and will go on and concede that transportation—that is to say, distribution of food—could get along without us. But, good heavens, Doctor, you can’t stop atomic power without causing the biggest panic this country has ever seen. It’s the keystone of our whole industrial system.”
“The country has lived through panics before, and we got past the oil shortage safely.”
“Yes—because atomic power came along to take the place of oil. You don’t realize what this would mean, Doctor. It would be worse than a war; in a system like ours, one thing depends on another. If you cut off the heavy industries all at once, everything else stops, too.”
“Nevertheless, you had better dump the bomb.” The uranium in the bomb was molten, its temperature being greater than twenty-four hundred degrees centigrade. The bomb could be dumped into a group of small containers, when it was desired to shut it down. The mass in any one container was too small to maintain progressive atomic disintegration.
King glanced involuntarily at the glass-inclosed relay mounted on his office wall, by which he, as well as the engineer on duty, could dump the bomb, if need be. “But I couldn’t do that—or rather, if I did, the plant wouldn’t stay shut down. The Directors would simply replace me with someone who would operate the bomb.”
“You’re right, of course.” Lentz silently considered the situation for some time, then said, “Superintendent, will you order a car to fly me back to Chicago?”
“You’re going, Doctor?”
“Yes.” He took the cigarette holder from his face, and, for once, the smile of Olympian detachment was gone completely. His entire manner was sober, even tragic. “Short of shutting down the bomb, there is no solution to your problem—none whatsoever!
“I owe you a full explanation.” Lentz continued, at length. “You are confronted here with recurring instances of situational psychoneurosis. Roughly, the symptoms manifest themselves as anxiety neurosis or some form of hysteria. The partial amnesia of your secretary, Steinke, is a good example of the latter. He might be cured with shock technique, but it would hardly be a kindness, as he has achieved a stable adjustment which puts him beyond the reach of the strain he could not stand.
“That other young fellow, Harper, whose blowup was the immediate cause of your sending for me, is an anxiety case. When the cause of the anxiety was eliminated from his matrix, he at once regained full sanity. But keep a close watch on his friend, Erickson—
“However, it is the cause, and prevention, of situational psychoneurosis we are concerned with here, rather than the forms in which it is manifested. In plain language, psychoneurosis situational simply refers to the common fact that, if you put a man in a situation that worries him more than he can stand, in time he blows up, one way or another.
“That is precisely the situation here. You take sensitive, intelligent young men, impress them with the fact that a single slip on their part, or even some fortuitous circumstance beyond their control, will result in the death of God knows how many other people, and then expect them to remain sane. It’s ridiculous—impossible!”
“But, good heavens, Doctor, there must be some answer! There must!” He got up and paced around the room. Lentz noted, with pity, that King himself was riding the ragged edge of the very condition they were discussing.
“No,” he said slowly. “No. Let me explain. You don’t dare intrust the bomb to less sensitive, less socially conscious men. You might as well turn the controls over to a mindless idiot. And to psychoneurosis situational there are but two cures. The first obtains when the psychosis results from a misevaluation of environment. That cure calls for semantic readjustment. One assists the patient to evaluate correctly his environment. The worry disappears because there never was a real reason for worry in the situation itself, but simply in the wrong meaning the patient’s mind had assigned to it.
“The second case is when the patient has correctly evaluated the situation, and rightly finds in it cause for extreme worry. His worry is perfectly sane and proper, but he cannot stand up under it indefinitely; it drives him crazy. The only possible cure is to change the situation. I have stayed here long enough to assure myself that such is the condition here. Your engineers have correctly evaluated the public danger of this bomb, and it will, with dreadful certainty, drive all of you crazy!
“The only possible solution is to dump the bomb—and leave it dumped.”
King had continued his nervous pacing of the floor, as if the walls of the room itself were the cage of his dilemma. Now he stopped and appealed once more to the psychiatrist. “Isn’t there anything I can do?”
“Nothing to cure. To alleviate—well, possibly.”
“How?”
“Situational psychosis results from adrenaline exhaustion. When a man is placed under a nervous strain, his adrenal glands increase their secretion to help compensate for the strain. If the strain is too great and lasts too long, the adrenals aren’t equal to the task, and he cracks. That is what you have here. Adrenaline therapy might stave off a mental breakdown, but it most assuredly would hasten a physical breakdown. But that would be safer from a viewpoint of public welfare—even though it assumes that physicists are expendable!
“Another thing occurs to me: If you selected any new watch engineers from the membership of churches that practice the confessional, it would increase the length of their usefulness.”
King was plainly surprised. “I don’t follow you.”
“The patient unloads most of his worry on his confessor, who is not himself actually confronted by the situation, and can stand it. That is simply an ameliorative, however. I am convinced that, in this situation, eventual insanity is inevitable. But there is a lot of good sense in the confessional,” he added. “It fills a basic human need. I think that is why the early psychoanalysts were so surprisingly successful, for all their limited knowledge.” He fell silent for a while, then added, “If you will be so kind as to order a stratocab for me—”
“You’ve nothing more to suggest?”
“No. You had better turn your psychological staff loose on means of alleviation; they’re able men, all of them.”
King pressed a switch and spoke briefly to Steinke. Turning back to Lentz, he said, “You’ll wait here until your car is ready?”
Lentz judged correctly that King desired it and agreed. Presently the tube delivery on King’s desk went ping! The Superintendent removed a small white pasteboard, a calling card. He studied it with surprise and passed it over to Lentz. “I can’t imagine why he should be calling on me,” he observed, and added, “Would you like to meet him?”
Lentz read:
THOMAS P. HARRINGTON captain (mathematics) united states navy
director u.s. naval observatory
“But I do know him,” he said. “I’d be very pleased to see him.”
Harrington was a man with something on his mind. He seemed relieved when Steinke had finished ushering him in, and had returned to the outer office. He commenced to speak at once, turning to Lentz, who was nearer to him than King. “You’re King? . . . Why, Dr. Lentz! What are you doing here?”
“Visiting,” answered Lentz, accurately but incompletely, as he shook hands. “This is Superintendent King over here. Superintendent King—Captain Harrington.”
“How do you do, Captain—it’s a pleasure to have you here.”
“It’s an honor to be here, sir.”
“Sit down?”
“Thanks.” He accepted a chair and laid a briefcase on a corner of King’s desk. “Superintendent, you are entitled to an explanation as to why I have broken in on you like this—”
“Glad to have you.” In fact, the routine of formal politeness was an anodyne to King’s frayed nerves.
“That’s kind of you, but— That secretary chap, the one that brought me in here, would it be too much to ask you to tell him to forget my name? I know it seems strange—”
“Not at all.” King was mystified, but willing to grant any reasonable request of a distinguished colleague in science. He summoned Steinke to the interoffice visiphone and gave him his orders.
Lentz stood up and indicated that he was about to leave. He caught Harrington’s eye. “I think you want a private palaver, Captain.”
King looked from Harrington to Lentz and back to Harrington. The astronomer showed momentary indecision, then protested: “I have no objection at all myself; it’s up to Dr. King. As a matter of fact,” he added, “it might be a very good thing if you did sit in on it.”
“I don’t know what it is, Captain,” observed King, “that you want to see me about, but Dr. Lentz is already here in a confidential capacity.”
“Good! Then that’s settled. I’ll get right down to business. Dr. King, you know Destry’s mechanics of infinitesimals?”
“Naturally.” Lentz cocked a brow at King, who chose to ignore it.
“Yes, of course. Do you remember theorem six and the transformation between equations thirteen and fourteen?”
“I think so, but I’d want to see them.” King got up and went over to a bookcase. Harrington stayed him with a hand.
“Don’t bother. I have them here.” He hauled out a key, unlocked his briefcase, and drew out a large, much-thumbed, loose-leaf notebook. “Here. You, too, Dr. Lentz. Are you familiar with this development?”
Lentz nodded. “I’ve had occasion to look into them.”
“Good—I think it’s agreed that the step between thirteen and fourteen is the key to the whole matter. Now, the change from thirteen to fourteen looks perfectly valid—and would be, in some fields. But suppose we expand it to show every possible phase of the matter, every link in the chain of reasoning.”
He turned a page and showed them the same two equations broken down into nine intermediate equations. He placed a finger under an associated group of mathematical symbols. “Do you see that? Do you see what that implies?” He peered anxiously at their faces.
King studied it, his lips moving. “Yes . . . I believe I do see. Odd . . . I never looked at it just that way before—yet I’ve studied those equations until I’ve dreamed about them.” He turned to Lentz. “Do you agree, Doctor?”
Lentz nodded slowly. “I believe so. . . . Yes, I think I may say so.”
Harrington should have been pleased; he wasn’t. “I had hoped you could tell me I was wrong,” he said, almost petulantly, “but I’m afraid there is no further doubt about it. Dr. Destry included an assumption valid in molar physics, but for which we have absolutely no assurance in atomic physics. I suppose you realize what this means to you, Dr. King?”
King’s voice was dry whisper. “Yes,” he said, “yes— It means that if that bomb out there ever blows up, we must assume that it will go up all at once, rather than the way Destry predicted—and God help the human race!”
Captain Harrington cleared his throat to break the silence that followed. “Superintendent,” he said, “I would not have ventured to call had it been simply a matter of disagreement as to interpretation of theoretical predictions—”
“You have something more to go on?”
“Yes and no. Probably you gentlemen think of the Naval Observatory as being exclusively preoccupied with ephemerides and tide tables. In a way you would be right—but we still have some time to devote to research as long as it doesn’t cut into the appropriation. My special interest has always been lunar theory.
“I don’t mean lunar ballistics,” he continued. “I mean the much more interesting problem of its origin and history, the problem the younger Darwin struggled with, as well as my illustrious predecessor, Captain T. J. J. See. I think that it is obvious that any theory of lunar origin and history must take into account the surface features of the Moon—especially the mountains, the craters, that mark its face so prominently.”
He paused momentarily, and Superintendent King put in: “Just a minute, Captain—I may be stupid, or perhaps I missed something, but—is there a connection between what we were discussing before and lunar theory?”
“Bear with me for a few moments, Dr. King,” Harrington apologized. “There is a connection—at least, I’m afraid there is a connection—but I would rather present my points in their proper order before making my conclusions.” They granted him an alert silence; he went on:
“Although we are in the habit of referring to the ‘craters’ of the Moon, we know they are not volcanic craters. Superficially, they follow none of the rules of terrestrial volcanoes in appearance or distribution, but when Rutter came out in 1952 with his monograph on the dynamics of vulcanology, he proved rather conclusively that the lunar craters could not be caused by anything that we know as volcanic action.
“That left the bombardment theory as the simplest hypothesis. It looks good, on the face of it, and a few minutes spent throwing pebbles into a patch of mud will convince anyone that the lunar craters could have been formed by falling meteors.
“But there are difficulties. If the Moon was struck so repeatedly, why not the Earth? It hardly seems necessary to mention that the Earth’s atmosphere would be no protection against masses big enough to form craters like Endymion or Plato. And if they fell after the Moon was a dead world while the Earth was still young enough to change its face and erase the marks of bombardment, why did the meteors avoid so nearly completely the great dry basins we call lunar seas?
“I want to cut this short; you’ll find the data and the mathematical investigations from the data here in my notes. There is one other major objection to the meteor-bombardment theory: the great rays that spread from Tycho across almost the entire surface of the Moon. It makes the Moon look like a crystal ball that had been struck with a hammer, and impact from outside seems evident, but there are difficulties. The striking mass, our hypothetical meteor, must be small enough to have formed the crater of Tycho, but it must have the mass and speed to crack an entire planet.
“Work it out for yourself—you must either postulate a chunk out of the core of a dwarf star, or speeds such as we have never observed within the system. It’s conceivable but a farfetched explanation.”
He turned to King. “Doctor, does anything occur to you that might account for a phenomenon like Tycho?”
The Superintendent grasped the arms of his chair, then glanced at his palms. He fumbled for a handkerchief, and wiped them. “Go ahead,” he said, almost inaudibly.
“Very well then.” Harrington drew out of his briefcase a large photograph of the Moon—a beautiful full-Moon portrait made at Lick. “I want you to imagine the Moon as she might have been sometime in the past. The dark areas we call the ‘seas’ are actual oceans. It has an atmosphere, perhaps a heavier gas than oxygen and nitrogen, but an active gas, capable of supporting some conceivable form of life.
“For this is an inhabited planet, inhabited by intelligent beings, beings capable of discovering atomic power and exploiting it!”
He pointed out on the photograph, near the southern limb, the lime-white circle of Tycho, with its shining, incredible, thousand-mile-long rays spreading, thrusting, jutting out from it. “Here . . . here at Tycho was located their main power plant.” He moved his fingers to a point near the equator and somewhat east of meridian—the point where three great dark areas merged, Mare Nubium, Mare Imbrium, Oceanus Procellarum—and picked out two bright splotches surrounded, also, by rays, but shorter, less distinct, and wavy. “And here at Copernicus and at Kepler, on islands at the middle of a great ocean, were secondary power stations.”
He paused, and interpolated soberly: “Perhaps they knew the danger they ran, but wanted power so badly that they were willing to gamble the life of their race. Perhaps they were ignorant of the ruinous possibilities of their little machines, or perhaps their mathematicians assured them that it could not happen.
“But we will never know—no one can ever know. For it blew up and killed them—and it killed their planet.
“It whisked off the gassy envelope and blew it into outer space. It blasted great chunks off the planet’s crust. Perhaps some of that escaped completely, too, but all that did not reach the speed of escape fell back down in time and splashed great ring-shaped craters in the land.
“The oceans cushioned the shock; only the more massive fragments formed craters through the water. Perhaps some life still remained in those ocean depths. If so, it was doomed to die—for the water, unprotected by atmospheric pressure, could not remain liquid and must inevitably escape in time to outer space. Its life-blood drained away. The planet was dead—dead by suicide!”
He met the grave eyes of his two silent listeners with an expression almost of appeal. “Gentlemen . . . this is only a theory, I realize . . . only a theory, a dream, a nightmare . . . but it has kept me awake so many nights that I had to come tell you about it, and see if you saw it the same way I do. As for the mechanics of it, it’s all in there in my notes. You can check it—and I pray that you find some error! But it is the only lunar theory I have examined which included all of the known data and accounted for all of them.”
He appeared to have finished. Lentz spoke up. “Suppose, Captain, suppose we check your mathematics and find no flaw—what then?”
Harrington flung out his hands. “That’s what I came here to find out!”
Although Lentz had asked the question, Harrington directed the appeal to King. The Superintendent looked up; his eyes met the astronomer’s, wavered and dropped again. “There’s nothing to be done,” he said dully, “nothing at all.”
Harrington stared at him in open amazement. “But good God, man!” he burst out. “Don’t you see it? That bomb has got to be disassembled—at once!”
“Take it easy, Captain.” Lentz’s calm voice was a spray of cold water. “And don’t be too harsh on poor King—this worries him even more than it does you. What he means is this: We’re not faced with a problem in physics, but with a political and economic situation. Let’s put it this way: King can no more dump the bomb than a peasant with a vineyard on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius can abandon his holdings and pauperize his family simply because there will be an eruption some day.
“King doesn’t own that bomb out there; he’s only the custodian. If he dumps it against the wishes of the legal owners, they’ll simply oust him and put in someone more amenable. No, we have to convince the owners.”
“The President could do it,” suggested Harrington. “I could get to the President—”
“No doubt you could, through the Navy Department. And you might even convince him. But could he help much?”
“Why, of course he could. He’s the President!”
“Wait a minute. You’re Director of the Naval Observatory; suppose you took a sledge hammer and tried to smash the big telescope—how far would you get?”
“Not very far,” Harrington conceded. “We guard the big fellow pretty closely.”
“Nor can the President act in an arbitrary manner,” Lentz persisted. “He’s not an unlimited monarch. If he shuts down this plant without due process of law, the Federal courts will tie him in knots. I admit that Congress isn’t helpless but—would you like to try to give a congressional committee a course in the mechanics of infinitesimals?”
Harrington readily stipulated the point. “But there is another way,” he pointed out. “Congress is responsive to public opinion. What we need to do is to convince the public that the bomb is a menace to everybody. That could be done without ever trying to explain things in terms of higher mathematics.”
“Certainly it could,” Lentz agreed. “You could go on the air with it and scare everybody half to death. You could create the damnedest panic this slightly slug-nutty country has ever seen. No, thank you. I, for one, would rather have us all take the chance of being quietly killed than bring on a mass psychosis that would destroy the culture we are building up. I think one taste of the Crazy Years is enough.”
“Well, then, what do you suggest?”
Lentz considered shortly, then answered: “All I see is a forlorn hope. We’ve got to work on the Board of Directors and try to beat some sense into their heads.”
King, who had been following the discussion with attention in spite of his tired despondence, interjected a remark: “How would you go about that?”
“I don’t know,” Lentz admitted. “It will take some thinking. But it seems the most fruitful line of approach. If it doesn’t work, we can always fall back on Harrington’s notion of publicity—I don’t insist that the world commit suicide to satisfy my criteria of evaluation.”
Harrington glanced at his wristwatch—a bulky affair—and whistled. “Good heavens!” he exclaimed. “I forgot the time! I’m supposed officially to be at the Flagstaff Observatory.”
King had automatically noted the time shown by the Captain’s watch as it was displayed. “But it can’t be that late,” he had objected. Harrington looked puzzled, then laughed.
“It isn’t—not by two hours. We are in zone plus-seven; this shows zone plus-five—it’s radio-synchronized with the master clock at Washington.”
“Did you say radio-synchronized?”
“Yes. Clever, isn’t it?” He held it out for inspection. “I call it a telechronometer; it’s the only one of its sort to date. My nephew designed it for me. He’s a bright one, that boy. He’ll go far. That is”—his face clouded, as if the little interlude had only served to emphasize the tragedy that hung over them—”if any of us live that long!”
A signal light glowed at King’s desk, and Steinke’s face showed on the communicator screen. King answered him, then said, “Your car is ready, Dr. Lentz.”
“Let Captain Harrington have it.”
“Then you’re not going back to Chicago?”
“No. The situation has changed. If you want me, I’m stringing along.”* * *
The following Friday, Steinke ushered Lentz into King’s office. King looked almost happy as he shook hands. “When did you ground, Doctor? I didn’t expect you back for another hour or so.”
“Just now. I hired a cab instead of waiting for the shuttle.”
“Any luck?”
“None. The same answer they gave you: ‘The Company is assured by independent experts that Destry’s mechanics is valid, and sees no reason to encourage an hysterical attitude among its employees.'”
King tapped on his desk top, his eyes unfocused. Then, hitching himself around to face Lentz directly, he said, “Do you suppose the Chairman is right?”
“How?”
“Could the three of us—you, me and Harrington—have gone off the deep end—slipped mentally?”
No.
“You’re sure?”
“Certainly. I looked up some independent experts of my own, not retained by the Company, and had them check Harrington’s work. It checks.” Lentz purposely neglected to mention that he had done so partly because he was none too sure of King’s present mental stability.
King sat up briskly, reached out and stabbed a push button. “I am going to make one more try,” he explained, “to see if I can’t throw a scare into Dixon’s thick head. Steinke,” he said to the communicator, “get me Mr. Dixon on the screen.”
“Yes, sir.”
In about two minutes the visiphone screen came to life and showed the features of Chairman Dixon. He was transmitting, not from his office, but from the board room of the Company in Jersey City. “Yes?” he said. “What is it, Superintendent?” His manner was somehow both querulous and affable.
“Mr. Dixon,” King began, “I’ve called to try to impress on you the seriousness of the Company’s action. I stake my scientific reputation that Harrington has proved completely that—”
“Oh, that? Mr. King, I thought you understood that that was a closed matter.”
“But, Mr. Dixon—”
“Superintendent, please! If there were any possible legitimate cause to fear, do you think I would hesitate? I have children, you know, and grandchildren.”
“That is just why—”
“We try to conduct the affairs of the company with reasonable wisdom and in the public interest. But we have other responsibilities, too. There are hundreds of thousands of little stockholders who expect us to show a reasonable return on their investment. You must not expect us to jettison a billion-dollar corporation just because you’ve taken up astrology! Moon theory!” He sniffed.
“Very well, Mr. Chairman.” King’s tone was stiff.
“Don’t take it that way, Mr. King. I’m glad you called—the Board has just adjourned a special meeting. They have decided to accept you for retirement—with full pay, of course.”
“I did not apply for retirement!”
“I know, Mr. King, but the Board feels that—”
“I understand. Good-by!”
“Mr. King—”
“Good-by!” He switched him off, and turned to Lentz. “‘—with full pay,'” he quoted, “which I can enjoy in any way that I like for the rest of my life—just as happy as a man in the death house!”
“Exactly,” Lentz agreed. “Well, we’ve tried our way. I suppose we should call up Harrington now and let him try the political and publicity method.”
“I suppose so,” King seconded absentmindedly. “Will you be leaving for Chicago now?”
“No,” said Lentz. “No . . . I think I will catch the shuttle for Los Angeles and take the evening rocket for the antipodes.”
King looked surprised, but said nothing. Lentz answered the unspoken comment. “Perhaps some of us on the other side of the Earth will survive. I’ve done all that I can here. I would rather be a live sheepherder in Australia than a dead psychiatrist in Chicago.”
King nodded vigorously, “That shows horse sense. For two cents, I’d dump the bomb now and go with you.”
“Not horse sense, my friend—a horse will run back into a burning barn, which is exactly not what I plan to do. Why don’t you do it and come along? If you did, it would help Harrington to scare ’em to death.”
“I believe I will!”
Steinke’s face appeared again on the screen. “Harper and Erickson are here, chief.”
“I’m busy.
“They are pretty urgent about seeing you.”
“Oh . . . all right,” King said in a tired voice. “Show them in. It doesn’t matter.”
They breezed in, Harper in the van. He commenced talking at once, oblivious to the Superintendent’s morose preoccupation. “We’ve got it, chief, we’ve got it—and it all checks out to the umpteenth decimal!”
“You’ve got what? Speak English.”
Harper grinned. He was enjoying his moment of triumph, and was stretching it out to savor it. “Chief, do you remember a few weeks back when I asked for an additional allotment—a special one without specifying how I was going to spend it?”
“Yes. Come on—get to the point.”
“You kicked at first, but finally granted it. Remember? Well, we’ve got something to show for it, all tied up in pink ribbon. It’s the greatest advance in radioactivity since Hahn split the nucleus. Atomic fuel, chief, atomic fuel, safe, concentrated, and controllable. Suitable for rockets, for power plants, for any damn thing you care to use it for.”
King showed alert interest for the first time. “You mean a power source that doesn’t require the bomb?”
“The bomb? Oh, no. I didn’t say that. You use the bomb to make the fuel, then you use the fuel anywhere and anyhow you like, with something like ninety-two percent recovery of the energy of the bomb. But you could junk the mercury-steam sequence, if you wanted to.”
King’s first wild hope of a way out of his dilemma was dashed; he subsided. “Go ahead. Tell me about it.”
“Well—it’s a matter of artificial radioactives. Just before I asked for that special research allotment, Erickson and I—Dr. Lentz had a finger in it, too—found two isotopes of a radioactive that seemed to be mutually antagonistic. That is, when we goosed ’em in the presence of each other they gave up their latent energy all at once—blew all to hell. The important point is, we were using just a gnat’s whisker of mass of each—the reaction didn’t require a big mass like the bomb to maintain it.”
“I don’t see,” objected King, “how that could—”
“Neither do we, quite—but it works. We’ve kept it quiet until we were sure. We checked on what we had, and we found a dozen other fuels. Probably we’ll be able to tailormake fuels for any desired purpose. But here it is.” Harper handed King a bound sheaf of typewritten notes which he had been carrying under the arm. “That’s your copy. Look it over.”
King started to do so. Lentz joined him, after a look that was a silent request for permission, which Erickson had answered with his only verbal contribution, “Sure, Doc.”
As King read, the troubled feeling of an acutely harassed executive left him. His dominant personality took charge, that of the scientist. He enjoyed the controlled and cerebral ecstasy of the impersonal seeker for the elusive truth. The emotions felt in the throbbing thalamus were permitted only to form a sensuous obligato for the cold flame of cortical activity. For the time being, he was sane, more nearly completely sane than most men ever achieve at any time.
For a long period there was only an occasional grunt, the clatter of turned pages, a nod of approval. At last he put it down.
“It’s the stuff,” he said. “You’ve done it, boys. It’s great; I’m proud of you.”
Erickson glowed a bright pink and swallowed. Harper’s small, tense figure gave the ghost of a wriggle, reminiscent of a wire-haired terrier receiving approval. “That’s fine, chief. We’d rather hear you say that than get the Nobel Prize.”
“I think you’ll probably get it. However”—the proud light in his eyes died down—”I’m not going to take any action in this matter.”
“Why not, chief?” Harper’s tone was bewildered.
“I’m being retired. My successor will take over in the near future; this is too big a matter to start just before a change in administration.”
“You being retired! What the hell! Why?“
“About the same reason I took you off the bomb—at least, the Directors think so.”
“But that’s nonsense! You were right to take me off the bomb; I was getting jumpy. But you’re another matter—we all depend on you.”
“Thanks, Cal—but that’s how it is; there’s nothing to be done about it.” He turned to Lentz. “I think this is the last ironical touch needed to make the whole thing pure farce,” he observed bitterly. “This thing is big, bigger than we can guess at this stage—and I have to give it a miss.”
“Well,” Harper burst out, “I can think of something to do about it!” He strode over to King’s desk and snatched up the manuscript. “Either you superintend the exploitation or the company will damn well get along without our discovery!” Erickson concurred belligerently.
“Wait a minute.” Lentz had the floor. “Dr. Harper, have you already achieved a practical rocket fuel?”
“I said so. We’ve got it on hand now.”
“An escape-speed fuel?” They understood his verbal shorthand—a fuel that would lift a rocket free of the Earth’s gravitational pull.
“Sure. Why, you could take any of the Clipper rockets, refit them a trifle, and have breakfast on the Moon.”
“Very well. Bear with me—” He obtained a sheet of paper from King and commenced to write. They watched in mystified impatience. He continued briskly for some minutes, hesitating only momentarily. Presently he stopped and spun the paper over to King. “Solve it!” he demanded.
King studied the paper. Lentz had assigned symbols to a great number of factors, some social, some psychological, some physical, some economical. He had thrown them together into a structural relationship, using the symbols of calculus of statement. King understood the paramathematical operations indicated by the symbols, but he was not as used to them as he was to the symbols and operations of mathematical physics. He plowed through the equations, moving his lips slightly in unconscious subvocalization.
He accepted a pencil from Lentz and completed the solution. It required several more lines, a few more equations, before the elements canceled out, or rearranged themselves, into a definite answer.
He stared at this answer while puzzlement gave way to dawning comprehension and delight.
He looked up. “Erickson! Harper!” he rapped out. “We will take your new fuel, refit a large rocket, install the bomb in it, and throw it into an orbit around the Earth, far out in space. There we will use it to make more fuel, safe fuel, for use on Earth, with the danger from the bomb itself limited to the operators actually on watch!”
There was no applause. It was not that sort of an idea; their minds were still struggling with the complex implications.
“But, chief,” Harper finally managed, “how about your retirement? We’re still not going to stand for it.”
“Don’t worry,” King assured him. “It’s all in there, implicit in those equations, you two, me, Lentz, the Board of Directors—and just what we all have to do to accomplish it.”
“All except the matter of time,” Lentz cautioned.
“Eh?”
“You’ll note that elapsed time appears in your answer as an undetermined unknown.”
“Yes . . . yes, of course. That’s the chance we have to take. Let’s get busy!”* * *
Chairman Dixon called the Board of Directors to order. “This being a special meeting, we’ll dispense with minutes and reports,” he announced. “As set forth in the call we have agreed to give the retiring superintendent three hours of our time.”
“Mr. Chairman—”
“Yes, Mr. Thornton?”
“I thought we had settled that matter.”
“We have, Mr. Thornton, but in view of Superintendent King’s long and distinguished service, if he asks a hearing, we are honor bound to grant it. You have the floor, Dr. King.”
King got up and stated briefly, “Dr. Lentz will speak for me.” He sat down.
Lentz had to wait till coughing, throat clearing and scraping of chairs subsided. It was evident that the board resented the outsider.
Lentz ran quickly over the main points in the argument which contended that the bomb presented an intolerable danger anywhere on the face of the Earth. He moved on at once to the alternative proposal that the bomb should be located in a rocketship, an artificial moonlet flying in a free orbit around the Earth at a convenient distance—say, fifteen thousand miles—while secondary power stations on earth burned a safe fuel manufactured by the bomb.
He announced the discovery of the Harper-Erickson technique and dwelt on what it meant to them commercially. Each point was presented as persuasively as possible, with the full power of his engaging personality. Then he paused and waited for them to blow off steam.
They did. “Visionary—” “Unproved—” “No essential change in the situation—” The substance of it was that they were very happy to hear of the new fuel, but not particularly impressed by it. Perhaps in another twenty years, after it had been thoroughly tested and proved commercially, and provided enough uranium had been mined to build another bomb, they might consider setting up another power station outside the atmosphere. In the meantime there was no hurry.
Lentz patiently and politely dealt with their objections. He emphasized the increasing incidence of occupational psychoneurosis among the engineers and grave danger to everyone near the bomb even under the orthodox theory. He reminded them of their insurance and indemnity-bond costs, and of the “squeeze” they paid State politicians.
Then he changed his tone and let them have it directly and brutally. “Gentlemen,” he said, “we believe that we are fighting for our lives—our own lives, our families and every life on the globe. If you refuse this compromise, we will fight as fiercely and with as little regard for fair play as any cornered animal.” With that he made his first move in attack.
It was quite simple. He offered for their inspection the outline of a propaganda campaign on a national scale, such as any major advertising firm should carry out as matter of routine. It was complete to the last detail, television broadcasts, spot plugs, newspaper and magazine coverage and—most important—a supporting whispering campaign and a letters-to-Congress organization. Every businessman there knew from experience how such things worked.
But its object was to stir up fear of the bomb and to direct that fear, not into panic, but into rage against the Board of Directors personally, and into a demand that the government take action to have the bomb removed to outer space.
“This is blackmail! We’ll stop you!”
“I think not,” Lentz replied gently. “You may be able to keep us out of some of the newspapers, but you can’t stop the rest of it. You can’t even keep us off the air—ask the Federal Communications Commission.” It was true. Harrington had handled the political end and had performed his assignment well; the President was convinced.
Tempers were snapping on all sides; Dixon had to pound for order. “Dr. Lentz,” he said, his own temper under taut control, “you plan to make every one of us appear a blackhearted scoundrel with no other thought than personal profit, even at the expense of the lives of others. You know that is not true; this is a simple difference of opinion as to what is wise.”
“I did not say it was true,” Lentz admitted blandly, “but you will admit that I can convince the public that you are deliberate villains. As to it being a difference of opinion—you are none of you atomic physicists; you are not entitled to hold opinions in this matter.
“As a matter of fact,” he went on callously, “the only doubt in my mind is whether or not an enraged public will destroy your precious power plant before Congress has time to exercise eminent domain and take it away from you!”
Before they had time to think up arguments in answer and ways of circumventing him, before their hot indignation had cooled and set as stubborn resistance, he offered his gambit. He produced another layout for a propaganda campaign—an entirely different sort.
This time the Board of Directors was to be built up, not torn down. All of the same techniques were to be used; behind-the-scenes feature articles with plenty of human interest would describe the functions of the company, describe it as a great public trust, administered by patriotic, unselfish statesmen of the business world. At the proper point in the campaign, the Harper-Erickson fuel would be announced, not as a semi-accidental result of the initiative of two employees, but as the long-expected end product of years of systematic research conducted under a fixed policy growing naturally out of their humane determination to remove forever the menace of explosion from even the sparsely settled Arizona desert.
No mention was to be made of the danger of complete, planet-embracing catastrophe.
Lentz discussed it. He dwelt on the appreciation that would be due them from a grateful world. He invited them to make a noble sacrifice and, with subtle misdirection, tempted them to think of themselves as heroes. He deliberately played on one of the most deep-rooted of simian instincts, the desire for approval from one’s kind, deserved or not.
All the while he was playing for time, as he directed his attention from one hard case, one resistant mind, to another. He soothed and he tickled and he played on personal foibles. For the benefit of the timorous and the devoted family men, he again painted a picture of the suffering, death and destruction that might result from their well-meant reliance on the unproved and highly questionable predictions of Destry’s mathematics. Then he described in glowing detail a picture of a world free from worry but granted almost unlimited power, safe power from an invention which was theirs for this one small concession.
It worked. They did not reverse themselves all at once, but a committee was appointed to investigate the feasibility of the proposed spaceship power plant. By sheer brass Lentz suggested names for the committee and Dixon confirmed his nominations, not because he wished to, particularly, but because he was caught off guard and could not think of a reason to refuse without affronting the colleagues.
The impending retirement of King was not mentioned by either side. Privately, Lentz felt sure that it never would be mentioned.
It worked, but there was left much to do. For the first few days after the victory in committee, King felt much elated by the prospect of an early release from the soul-killing worry. He was buoyed up by pleasant demands of manifold new administrative duties. Harper and Erickson were detached to Goddard Field to collaborate with the rocket engineers there in design of firing chambers, nozzles, fuel stowage, fuel metering and the like. A schedule had to be worked out with the business office to permit as much power of the bomb as possible to be diverted to making atomic fuel, and a giant combustion chamber for atomic fuel had to be designed and ordered to replace the bomb itself during the interim between the time it was shut down on Earth and the later time when sufficient local, smaller plants could be built to carry the commercial load. He was busy.
When the first activity had died down and they were settled in a new routine, pending the shutting down of the bomb and its removal to outer space, King suffered an emotional reaction. There was, by then, nothing to do but wait, and tend the bomb, until the crew at Goddard Field smoothed out the bugs and produced a space-worthy rocketship.
They ran into difficulties, overcame them, and came across more difficulties. They had never used such high reaction velocities; it took many trials to find a nozzle shape that would give reasonably high efficiency. When that was solved, and success seemed in sight, the jets burned out on a time-trial ground test. They were stalemated for weeks over that hitch.
Back at the power plant Superintendent King could do nothing but chew his nails and wait. He had not even the release of running over to Goddard Field to watch the progress of the research, for, urgently as he desired to, he felt an even stronger, an overpowering compulsion to watch over the bomb lest it—heart-breakingly!—blow up at the last minute.
He took to hanging around the control room. He had to stop that; his unease communicated itself to his watch engineers; two of them cracked up in a single day—one of them on watch.
He must face the fact—there had been a grave upswing in psychoneurosis among his engineers since the period of watchful waiting had commenced. At first, they had tried to keep the essential facts of the plan a close secret, but it had leaked out, perhaps through some member of the investigating committee. He admitted to himself now that it had been a mistake ever to try to keep it secret—Lentz had advised against it, and the engineers not actually engaged in the changeover were bound to know that something was up.
He took all of the engineers into confidence at last, under oath of secrecy. That had helped for a week or more, a week in which they were all given a spiritual lift by the knowledge, as he had been. Then it had worn off, the reaction had set in, and psychological observers had started disqualifying engineers for duty almost daily. They were even reporting each other as mentally unstable with great frequency; he might even be faced with a shortage of psychiatrists if that kept up, he thought to himself with bitter amusement. His engineers were already standing four hours in every sixteen. If one more dropped out, he’d put himself on watch. That would be a relief, to tell himself the truth.
Somehow, some of the civilians around about and the nontechnical employees were catching on to the secret. That mustn’t go on—if it spread any farther there might be a nationwide panic. But how the hell could he stop it? He couldn’t.
He turned over in bed, rearranged his pillow, and tried once more to get to sleep. No soap. His head ached, his eyes were balls of pain, and his brain was a ceaseless grind of useless, repetitive activity, like a disk recording stuck in one groove.
God! This was unbearable! He wondered if he were cracking up—if he already had cracked up. This was worse, many times worse, than the old routine when he had simply acknowledged the danger and tried to forget it as much as possible. Not that the bomb was any different—it was this five-minutes-to-armistice feeling, this waiting for the curtain to go up, this race against time with nothing to do to help.
He sat up, switched on his bed lamp, and looked at the clock. Three thirty. Not so good. He got up, went into his bathroom, and dissolved a sleeping powder in a glass of whiskey and water, half and half. He gulped it down and went back to bed. Presently he dozed off.* * *
He was running, fleeing down a long corridor. At the end lay safety—he knew that, but he was so utterly exhausted that he doubted his ability to finish the race. The thing pursuing him was catching up; he forced his leaden, aching legs into greater activity. The thing behind him increased its pace, and actually touched him. His heart stopped, then pounded again. He became aware that he was screaming, shrieking in mortal terror.
But he had to reach the end of that corridor; more depended on it than just himself. He had to. He had to! He had to!
Then the sound hit him, and he realized that he had lost, realized it with utter despair and utter, bitter defeat. He had failed; the bomb had blown up.* * *
The sound was the alarm going off; it was seven o’clock. His pajamas were soaked, dripping with sweat, and his heart still pounded. Every ragged nerve throughout his body screamed for release. It would take more than a cold shower to cure this case of the shakes.
He got to the office before the janitor was out of it. He sat there, doing nothing, until Lentz walked in on him, two hours later. The psychiatrist came in just as he was taking two small tablets from a box in his desk.
“Easy . . . easy, old man,” Lentz said in a slow voice. “What have you there?” He came around and gently took possession of the box.
“Just a sedative.”
Lentz studied the inscription on the cover. “How many have you had today?”
“Just two, so far.”
“You don’t need a sedative; you need a walk in the fresh air. Come, take one with me.”
“You’re a fine one to talk—you’re smoking a cigarette that isn’t lighted!”
“Me? Why, so I am! We both need that walk. Come.”
Harper arrived less than ten minutes after they had left the office. Steinke was not in the outer office. He walked on through and pounded on the door of King’s private office, then waited with the man who accompanied him—a hard young chap with an easy confidence to his bearing. Steinke let them in.
Harper brushed on past him with a casual greeting, then checked himself when he saw that there was no one else inside.
“Where’s the chief?” he demanded.
“Gone out. Should be back soon.”
“I’ll wait. Oh—Steinke, this is Greene. Greene—Steinke.”
The two shook hands. “What brings you back, Cal?” Steinke asked, turning back to Harper.
“Well . . . I guess it’s all right to tell you—”
The communicator screen flashed into sudden activity, and cut him short. A face filled most of the frame. It was apparently too close to the pickup, as it was badly out of focus. “Superintendent!” it yelled in an agonized voice. “The bomb—”
A shadow flashed across the screen, they heard a dull smack, and the face slid out of the screen. As it fell it revealed the control room behind it. Someone was down on the floor plates, a nameless heap. Another figure ran across the field of pickup and disappeared.
Harper snapped into action first. “That was Silard!” he shouted, “In the control room! Come on, Steinke!” He was already in motion himself.
Steinke went dead-white, but hesitated only an unmeasurable instant. He pounded sharp on Harper’s heels. Greene followed without invitation, in a steady run that kept easy pace with them.
They had to wait for a capsule to unload at the tube station. Then all three of them tried to crowd into a two-passenger capsule. It refused to start, and moments were lost before Greene piled out and claimed another car.
The four-minute trip at heavy acceleration seemed an interminable crawl. Harper was convinced that the system had broken down, when the familiar click and sigh announced their arrival at the station under the bomb. They jammed each other trying to get out at the same time.
The lift was up; they did not wait for it. That was unwise; they gained no time by it, and arrived at the control level out of breath. Nevertheless, they speeded up when they reached the top, zigzagged frantically around the outer shield, and burst into the control room.
The limp figure was still on the floor, and another, also inert, was near it. The second’s helmet was missing.
The third figure was bending over the trigger. He looked up as they came in, and charged them. They hit him together, and all three went down. It was two to one, but they got in each other’s way. The man’s heavy armor protected him from the force of their blows. He fought with senseless, savage violence.
Harper felt a bright, sharp pain; his right arm went limp and useless. The armored figure was struggling free of them.
There was a shout from somewhere behind them, “Hold still!”
Harper saw a flash with the corner of one eye, a deafening crack hurried on top of it, and re-echoed painfully in the restricted space.
The armored figure dropped back to his knees, balanced there, and then fell heavily on his face. Greene stood in the entrance, a service pistol balanced in his hand.
Harper got up and went over to the trigger. He tried to reduce the dampening adjustment, but his right hand wouldn’t carry out his orders, and his left was too clumsy. “Steinke,” he called, “come here! Take over.”
Steinke hurried up, nodded as he glanced at the readings, and set busily to work.* * *
It was thus that King found them when he bolted in a very few minutes later.
“Harper!” he shouted, while his quick glance was still taking in the situation. “What’s happened?”
Harper told him briefly. He nodded. “I saw the tail end of the fight from my office—Steinke!” He seemed to grasp for the first time who was on the trigger. “He can’t manage the controls—” He hurried toward him.
Steinke looked up at his approach. “Chief!” he called out. “Chief! I’ve got my mathematics back!“
King looked bewildered, then nodded vaguely, and let him be. He turned back to Harper. “How does it happen you’re here?”
“Me? I’m here to report—we’ve done it, chief!”
“Eh?”
“We’ve finished; it’s all done. Erickson stayed behind to complete the power-plant installation on the big ship. I came over in the ship we’ll use to shuttle between Earth and the big ship, the power plant. Four minutes from Goddard Field to here in her. That’s the pilot over there.” He pointed to the door, where Greene’s solid form partially hid Lentz.
“Wait a minute. You say that everything is ready to install the bomb in the ship? You’re sure?”
“Positive. The big ship has already flown with our fuel—longer and faster than she will have to fly to reach station in her orbit; I was in it—out in space, chief! We’re all set, six ways from zero.”
King stared at the dumping switch, mounted behind glass at the top of the instrument board. “There’s fuel enough,” he said softly, as if he were alone and speaking only to himself; “there’s been fuel enough for weeks.”
He walked swiftly over to the switch, smashed the glass with his fist, and pulled it.
The room rumbled and shivered as two and a half tons of molten, massive metal, heavier than gold, coursed down channels, struck against baffles, split into a dozen streams, and plunged to rest in leaden receivers—to rest, safe and harmless, until it could be reassembled far out in space.
AFTERWORDDecember 1979, exactly 40 years after I researched BLOWUPS HAPPEN (Dec. '39): I had some doubt about republishing this because of the current ignorant fear of fission power, recently enhanced by the harmless flap at Three Mile Island. When I wrote this, there was not a full gram of purified U-235 on this planet, and no one knew its hazards in detail, most especially the mass and geometry and speed of assembly necessary to make "blowups happen." But we now know from long experience and endless tests that the "tons" used in this story could never be assembled—no explosion, melt-down possible, melt-down being the worst that can happen at a power plant; to cause U-235 to explode is very difficult and requires very different design. Yes, radiation is hazardous BUT—RADIATION EXPOSURE Half a mile from Three-Mile plantduring the flap 83 milliremsAt the power plant 1,100 milliremsDuring heart catheterization for angiogram 45,000 millirems—which I underwent 18 months ago. I feel fine.
The End
Fictional Story Related Index
This is an index of full text reprints of stories that I have
read that influenced me when I was young. They are rather difficult to
come by today, as where I live they are nearly impossible to find. Yes,
you can find them on the internet, behind paywalls. Ah, that’s why all
those software engineers in California make all that money. Well, here
they are FOR FREE. Enjoy reading them.
Movies that Inspired Me
Here are some movies that I consider noteworthy and worth a view. Enjoy.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are
reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal
library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come
and enjoy a read or two as well.
My Poetry
Art that Moves Me
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
This is a fine short science fiction story that I have never forgotten. I must have read it when I was in my middle teenage years. When I ran across it the other day, I felt that I just had to include it in my internet collection here. There’s nothing really special or noteworthy about this story, except that it is unique and a fun read.
Please enjoy.
The greatest scientist the world has ever had has invented a extraordinary new means of exploring the world of the infinitely small, and sends his devoted assistant - notwithstanding his objections to the scheme - on a mind-boggling series of adventures exploring the infinite series of concentric universes contained within the most minute particle (!!), thus providing the scope and scale of one of the most ambitious and wide-ranging and thought-provoking science-fiction stories ever.
This powerful saga was first published in the August 1936 issue of Amazing Stories.
He Who Shrank
I
YEARS, centuries, aeons, have fled past me in endless parade, leaving me unscathed: for I am deathless, and in all the universe alone of my kind. Universe? Strange how that convenient word leaps instantly to my mind from force of old habit. Universe? The merest expression of a puny idea in the minds of those who cannot possibly conceive whereof they speak. The word is a mockery. Yet how glibly men utter it! How little do they realize the artificiality of the word!
That night when the Professor called me to him he was standing close to the curved transparent wall of the astrono-laboratory looking out into the blackness. He heard me enter, but did not look around as he spoke. I do not know whether he was addressing me or not.
"They call me the greatest scientist the world has had in all time."
I had been his only assistant for years, and was accustomed to his moods, so I did not speak. Neither did he for several moments and then he continued:
"Only a half year ago I discovered a principle that will be the means of utterly annihilating every kind of disease germ. And only recently I turned over to others the principles of a new toxin which stimulates the worn-out protoplasmic life-cells, causing almost complete rejuvenation. The combined results should nearly double the ordinary life span. Yet these two things are only incidental in the long list of discoveries I have made to the great benefit of the race."
He turned then and faced me, and I was surprised at a new peculiar glow that lurked deep in his eyes.
"And for these things they call me great! For these puny discoveries they heap honors on me and call me the benefactor of the race. They disgust me, the fools! Do they think I did it for them? Do they think I care about the race, what it does or what happens to it or how long it lives? They do not suspect that all the things I have given them were but accidental discoveries on my part—to which I gave hardly a thought. Oh, you seem amazed. Yet not even you, who have assisted me here for ten years, ever suspected that all my labors and experiments were pointed toward one end, and one end alone."
He went over to a locked compartment which in earlier years I had wondered about and then ceased to wonder about, as I became engrossed in my work. The professor opened it now, and I glimpsed but the usual array of bottles and test-tubes and vials. One of these vials he lifted gingerly from a rack.
"And at last I have attained the end," he almost whispered, holding the tube aloft. A pale liquid scintillated eerily against the artificial light in the ceiling. "Thirty years, long years, of ceaseless experimenting, and now, here in my hand—success!"
The Professor’s manner, the glow deep in his dark eyes, the submerged enthusiasm that seemed at every instant about to leap out, all served to impress me deeply. It must indeed be an immense thing he had done, and I ventured to say as much.
"Immense!" he exclaimed. "Immense! Why—why it’s so immense that—. But wait. Wait. You shall see for yourself."
At that time how little did I suspect the significance of his words. I was indeed to see for myself.
Carefully he replaced the vial, then walked over to the transparent wall again.
"Look!" he gestured toward the night sky. "The unknown! Does it not fascinate you? The other fools dream of some day travelling out there among the stars. They think they will go out there and learn the secret of the universe. But as yet they have been baffled by the problem of a sufficiently powerful fuel or force for their ships. And they are blind. Within a month I could solve the puny difficulty that confronts them; could, but I won’t. Let them search, let them experiment, let them waste their lives away, what do I care about them?"
I wondered what he was driving at, but realized that he would come to the point in his own way. He went on:
"And suppose they do solve the problem, suppose they do leave the planet, go to other worlds in their hollow ships, what will it profit them? Suppose that they travel with the speed of light for their own life time, and then land on a star at that point, the farthest point away from here that is possible for them? They would no doubt say: ’We can now realize as never before the truly staggering expanse of the universe. It is indeed a great structure, the universe. We have traveled a far distance; we must be on the fringe of it.’
"Thus they would believe. Only I would know how wrong they were, for I can sit here and look through this telescope and see stars that are fifty and sixty times as distant as that upon which they landed. Comparatively, their star would be infinitely close to us. The poor deluded fools and their dreams of space travel!"
“But, Professor,” I interposed, “just think—”
"Wait! Now listen. I, too, have long desired to fathom the universe, to determine what it is, the manner and the purpose and the secret of its creation. Have you ever stopped to wonder what the universe is? For thirty years I have worked for the answer to those questions. Unknowing, you helped me with your efficiency on the strange experiments I assigned to you at various times. Now I have the answer in that vial, and you shall be the only one to share the secret with me."
Incredulous, I again tried to interrupt.
"Wait!" he said. "Let me finish. There was the time when I also looked to the stars for the answer. I built my telescope, on a new principle of my own. I searched the depths of the void. I made vast calculations. And I proved conclusively to my own mind what had theretofore been only a theory. I know now without doubt that this our planet, and other planets revolving about the sun, are but electrons of an atom, of which the sun is the nucleus. And our sun is but one of millions of others, each with its allotted number of planets, each system being an atom just as our own is in reality.
"And all these millions of solar systems, or atoms, taken together in one group, form a galaxy. As you know, there are countless numbers of these galaxies throughout space, with tremendous stretches of space between them. And what are these galaxies? Molecules! They extend through space even beyond the farthest range of my telescope! But having penetrated that far, it is not difficult to make the final step.
"All of these far-flung galaxies, or molecules, taken together as a whole, form—what? Some indeterminable element or substance on a great, ultramacrocosmic world! Perhaps a minute drop of water, or a grain of sand, or wisp of smoke, or—good God!—an eyelash of some creature living on that world!"
I could not speak. I felt myself grow faint at the thought he had propounded. I tried to think it could not be—yet what did I or anyone know about the infinite stretches of space that must exist beyond the ranges of our most powerful telescope?
“It can’t be!” I burst out. “It’s incredible, it’s—monstrous!”
"Monstrous? Carry it a step further. May not that ultra-world also be an electron whirling around the nucleus of an atom? And that atom only one of millions forming a molecule? And that molecule only one of millions forming—"
“For God’s sake, stop!” I cried. “I refuse to believe that such a thing can be! Where would it all lead? Where would it end? It might go on—forever! And besides,” I added lamely, “what has all this to do with—your discovery, the fluid you showed me?”
"Just this. I soon learned that it was useless to look to the infinitely large; so I turned to the infinitely small. For does it not follow that if such a state of creation exists in the stars above us, it must exist identically in the atoms below us?"
I saw his line of reasoning, but still did not understand. His next words fully enlightened me, but made me suspect that I was facing one who had gone insane from his theorizing. He went on eagerly, his voice the voice of a fanatic:
"If I could not pierce the stars above, that were so far, then I would pierce the atoms below, that were so near. They are everywhere. In every object I touch and in the very air I breathe. But they are minute, and to reach them I must find a way to make myself as minute as they are, and more so! This I have done. The solution I showed you will cause every individual atom in my body to contract, but each electron and proton will also decrease in size, or diameter, in direct proportion to my own shrinkage! Thus will I not only be able to become the size of an atom, but can go down, down into infinite smallness!"
When he had stopped speaking I said calmly: “You are mad.”
He was imperturbed.
"I expected you to say that," he answered. "It is only natural that that should be your reaction to all that I have said. But no, I am not mad, it is merely that you are unacquainted with the marvelous propensities of `Shrinx.’ But I promised that you should see for yourself, and that you shall. You shall be the first to go down into the atomic universe."
My original opinion in regard to his state of mind remained unshaken.
“I am sure you mean well, Professor,” I said, “but I must decline your offer.”
He went on as though I hadn’t spoken:
"There are several reasons why I want to send you before I myself make the trip. In the first place, once you make the trip there can be no returning, and there are a number of points I want to be quite clear on. You will serve as my advance guard, so to speak."
“Professor, listen. I do not doubt that the stuff you call ’Shrinx’ has very remarkable properties. I will even admit that it will do all you say it will do. But for the past month you have worked day and night, with scarcely enough time out for food and hardly any sleep at all. You should take a rest, get away from the laboratory for awhile.”
"I shall keep in contact with your consciousness," he said, "through a very ingenious device I have perfected. I will explain it to you later. The `Shrinx’ is introduced directly into the blood stream. Shortly thereafter your shrinkage should begin, and continue at moderate speed, never diminishing in the least degree so long as the blood continues to flow in your body. At least, I hope it never diminishes. Should it, I shall have to make the necessary alterations in the formula. All this is theoretical of course, but I am sure it will all work according to schedule, and quite without harm."
I had now lost all patience. “See here, Professor,” I said crossly, “I refuse to be the object of any of your wild-sounding experiments. You should realize that what you propose to do is scientifically impossible. Go home and rest—or go away for a while—”
Without the slightest warning he leaped at me, snatching an object from the table. Before I could take a backward step I felt a needle plunge deep into my arm, and cried out with the pain of it. Things became hazy, distorted. A wave of vertigo swept over me. Then it passed, and my vision cleared. The Professor stood leering before me.
"Yes, I’ve worked hard and I’m tired. I’ve worked thirty years, but I’m not tired enough nor fool enough to quit this thing now, right on the verge of the climax!"
His leer of triumph gave way to an expression almost of sympathy.
"I am sorry it had to come about this way," he said, "but I saw that you would never submit otherwise. I really am ashamed of you. I didn’t think you would doubt the truth of my statements to the extent of really believing me insane. But to be safe I prepared your allotment of the `Shrinx’ in advance, and had it ready; it is now coursing through your veins, and it should be but a short time before we observe the effects. What you saw in the vial is for myself when I am ready to make the trip. Forgive me for having to administer yours in such an undignified manner."
So angered was I at the utter disregard he had shown for my personal feelings, that I hardly heard his words. My arm throbbed fiercely where the needle had plunged in. I tried to take a step toward him, but not a muscle would move. I struggled hard to break the paralysis that was upon me, but could not move a fraction of an inch from where I stood.
The professor seemed surprised too, and alarmed.
"What, paralysis? That is an unforeseen circumstance! You see, it is even as I said: the properties of `Shrinx’ are marvelous and many."
He came close and peered intently into my eyes, and seemed relieved.
"However, the effect is only temporary," he assured me. Then added: "But you will likely be a bit smaller when the use of your muscles returns, for your shrinkage should begin very shortly now. I must hurry to prepare for the final step."
He walked past me, and I heard him open his private cupboard again. I could not speak, much less move, and I was indeed in a most uncomfortable, not to mention undignified, position. All I could do was to glare at him when he came around in front of me again. He carried a curious kind of helmet with ear-pieces and goggles attached, and a number of wires running from it. This he placed upon the table and connected the wires to a small flat box there.
All the while I watched him closely. I hadn’t the least idea what he was going to do with me, but never for a moment did I believe that I would shrink into an atomic universe; that was altogether too fantastic for my conception.
As though reading my thought the Professor turned and faced me. He looked me over casually for a moment and then said:
"I believe it has begun already. Yes, I am sure of it. Tell me, do you not feel it? Do not things appear a trifle larger to you, a trifle taller? Ah, I forgot that the paralyzing effect does not permit you to answer. But look at me—do I not seem taller?"
I looked at him. Was it my imagination, or some kind of hypnosis he was asserting on me, that made me think he was growing slightly, ever so slightly, upward even as I looked?
"Ah!" he said triumphantly. "You have noticed. I can tell it by your eyes. However, it is not I who am growing taller, but you who are shrinking."
He grasped me by the arms and turned me about to face the wall.
"I can see that you doubt," he said, "so look! The border on the wall. If you remember, it used to be about even with your eyes. Now it is fully three inches higher."
It was true! And I could now feel a tingling in my veins, and a slight dizziness.
"Your shrinkage has not quite reached the maximum speed," he went on. "When it does, it will remain constant. I could not stop it now even if I wanted to, for I have nothing to counteract it. Listen closely now, for I have several things to tell you.
"When you have become small enough I am going to lift you up and place you on this block of Rehyllium-X here on the table. You will become smaller and smaller, and eventually should enter an alien universe consisting of billions and billions of star groups, or galaxies, which are only the molecules in this Rehyllium-X. When you burst through, your size in comparison with this new universe should be gigantic. However, you will constantly diminish, and will be enabled to alight on any one of the spheres of your own choosing. And—after alighting—you will continue—always down!"
At the concept I thought I would go mad. Already I had become fully a foot shorter, and still the paralysis gripped me. Could I have moved I would have torn the Professor limb from limb in my impotent rage—though if what he said was true, I was already doomed.
Again it seemed as though he read my mind.
"Do not think too harshly of me," he said. "You should be very grateful for this opportunity, for you are going on a marvelous venture, into a marvelous realm.
Indeed, I am almost jealous that you should be the first. But with this," he indicated the helmet and box on the table, "I shall keep contact with you no matter how far you go. Ah, I see by your eyes that you wonder how such a thing could be possible. Well, the principle of this device is really very simple.
Just as light is a form of energy, so is thought. And just as light travels through an ’ether’ in the form of waves, so does thought. But the thought waves are much more intangible—in fact, invisible. Nevertheless the waves are there, and the coils in this box are so sensitized as to receive and amplify them a million times, much as sound waves might be amplified.
Through this helmet I will receive but two of your six sensations: those of sound,and sight. They are the two major ones, and will be sufficient for my purpose. Every sight and sound that you encounter, no matter how minute, reaches your brain and displaces tiny molecules there that go out in the form of thought waves and finally reach here and are amplified.
Thus my brain receives every impression of sight and sound that your brain sends out."
I did not doubt now that his marvelous “Shrinx” would do everything he said it would do. Already I was but one-third of my original size. Still the paralysis showed no sign of releasing me, and I hoped that the Professor knew whereof he spoke when he said the effect would be but temporary. My anger had subsided somewhat, and I think I began to wonder what I would find in that other universe.
Then a terrifying thought assailed me—a thought that left me cold with apprehension. If, as the Professor had said, the atomic universe was but a tiny replica of the universe we knew, would I not find myself in the vast empty spaces between the galaxies with no air to breathe? In all the vast calculations the Professor had made, could he have overlooked such an obvious point?
Now I was very close to the floor, scarcely a foot high. Everything about me—the Professor, the tables, the walls—were gigantically out of proportion to myself.
The Professor reached down then, and swung me up on the table top amidst the litter of wires and apparatus. He began speaking again, and to my tiny ears his voice sounded a deeper note.
"Here is the block of Rehyllium-X containing the universe you soon will fathom," he said, placing on the table beside me the square piece of metal, which was nearly half as tall as I was.
"As you know, Rehyllium-X is the densest of all known metals, so the universe awaiting you should be a comparatively dense one—though you will not think so, with the thousands of light-years of space between stars. Of course I know no more about this universe than you do, but I would advise you to avoid the very bright stars and approach only the dimmer ones.
Well, this is good-by, then. We shall never see each other again. Even should I follow you—as I certainly shall as soon as I have learned through you what alterations I should make in the formula—it is impossible that I could exactly trace your course down through all the spheres that you will have traversed.
One thing already I have learned: the rate of shrinkage is too rapid; you will be able to stay on a world for only a few hours. But perhaps that is best, after all. This is good-by for all time."
He picked me up and placed me upon the smooth surface of the Rehyllium-X. I judged that I must be about four inches tall then. It was with immeasurable relief that I finally felt the paralysis going away. The power of my voice returned first, and expanding my lungs I shouted with all by might.
“Professor!” I shouted. “Professor!”
He bent down over me. To him my voice must have sounded ridiculously high pitched.
“What about the empty regions of space I will find myself in?” I asked a bit tremulously, my mouth close to his ear. “I would last but a few minutes. My life will surely be snuffed out.”
"No, that will not happen," he answered.
His voice beat upon my ear-drums like thunder, and I placed my hands over my ears.
He understood, and spoke more softly.
"You will be quite safe in airless space," he went on. "In the thirty years I have worked on the problem, I would not be likely to overlook that point—though I will admit it gave me much trouble. But as I said, `Shrinx’ is all the more marvelous in the fact that its qualities are many. After many difficulties and failures, I managed to instill in it a certain potency by which it supplies sufficient oxygen for your need, distributed through the blood stream. It also irradiates a certain amount of heat; and, inasmuch as I consider the supposed sub-zero temperature of space as being somewhat exaggerated, I don’t think you need worry about any discomfort in open space."
III
I was scarcely over an inch in height now. I could walk about, though my limbs tingled fiercely as the paralysis left. I could beat my arms against my sides and swung them about to speed the circulation. The Professor must have thought I was waving good-by. His hand reached out and he lifted me up. Though he tried to handle me gently, the pressure of his fingers bruised. He held me in his open hand and raised me up to the level of his eyes. He looked at me for a long moment and then I saw his lips form the words “good-by.” I was terribly afraid he would drop me to the floor a dizzy distance below, and I was relieved when he lowered me again and I slid off his hand to the block of Rehyllium-X.
The Professor now appeared as a giant towering hundreds of feet into the air, and beyond him, seemingly miles away, the walls of the room extended to unimaginable heights. The ceiling above seemed as far away and expansive as the dome of the sky I had formerly known. I ran to the edge of the block and peered down. It was as though I stood at the top of a high cliff. The face of it was black and smooth, absolutely perpendicular. I stepped back apace lest I lose my footing and fall to my death. Far below extended the vast smooth plain of the table top.
I walked back to the center of the block, for I was afraid of the edge; I might be easily shaken off if the Professor were to accidentally jar the table. I had no idea of my size now, for there was nothing with which I could compare it. For all I knew I might be entirely invisible to the Professor. He was now but an indistinguishable blur, like a far-off mountain seen through a haze.
I now began to notice that the surface of the Rehyllium-X block was not as smooth as it had been. As far as I could see were shallow ravines, extending in every direction. I realized that these must be tiny surface scratches that had been invisible before.
I was standing on the edge of one of these ravines, and I clambered down the side and began to walk along it. It was as straight as though laid by a ruler. Occasionally I came to intersecting ravines, and turned to the left or right. Before long, due to my continued shrinkage, the walls of these ravines towered higher than my head, and it was as though I walked along a narrow path between two cliffs.
Then I received the shock of my life, and my adventure came near to ending right there. I approached one of the intersections. I turned the sharp corner to the right. I came face to face with the How-Shall I-Describe-It.
It was a sickly bluish white in color. Its body was disc-shaped, with a long double row of appendages—legs—on the under side. Hundreds of ugly-looking spikes rimmed the disc body on the outer and upper edges. There was no head and apparently no organ of sight, but dozens of snake-like protuberances waved in my face as I nearly crashed into it. One of them touched me and the creature backed swiftly away, the spikes springing stiffly erect in formidable array.
This impression of the creature flashed upon my mind in the merest fraction of time, for you may be sure that I didn’t linger there to take stock of its pedigree. No indeed. My heart choked me in my fright, I whirled and sped down the opposite ravine. The sound of the thing’s pursuit lent wings to my feet, and I ran as I had never run before. Up one ravine and down another I sped, doubling to right and left in my effort to lose my pursuer. The irony of being pursued by a germ occurred to me, but the matter was too serious to be funny. I ran until I was out of breath, but no matter which way I turned and doubled the germ was always a hundred paces behind me. Its organ of sound must have been highly sensitive. At last I could run no more, and I darted around the next corner and stopped, gasping for breath.
The germ rushed a short distance past me and stopped, having lost the sound of my running. Its dozens of tentacular sound organs waved in all directions. Then it came unhesitatingly toward me, and again I ran. Apparently it had caught the sound of my heavy breathing. Again I dashed around the next corner, and as I heard the germ approach I held my breath until I thought my lungs would burst. It stopped again, waved its tentacles in the air and then ambled on down the ravine. Silently I sneaked a hasty retreat.
Now the walls of these ravines (invisible scratches on a piece of metal!) towered very high above me as I continued to shrink. Now too I noticed narrow chasms and pits all around me, in both the walls at the sides and the surface on which I walked. All of these seemed very deep, and some were so wide that I had to leap across them.
At first I was unable to account for these spaces that were opening all about me, and then I realized with a sort of shock that the Rehyllium-X was becoming porous, so small was I in size! Although it was the densest of all known metals, no substance whatsoever could be so dense as to be an absolute solid.
I began to find it increasingly difficult to progress; I had to get back and make running jumps across the spaces. Finally I sat down and laughed as I realized the futility and stupidity of this. Why was I risking my life by jumping across these spaces that were becoming wider as I became smaller, when I had no particular destination anyway—except down. So I may as well stay in one spot.
No sooner had I made this decision, however, than something changed my mind.
It was the germ again.
I saw it far down the ravine, heading straight for me. It might have been the same one I had encountered before, or its twin brother. But now I had become so small that it was fully fifteen times my own size, and the very sight of the huge beast ambling toward me inspired terror into my heart. Once more I ran, praying that it wouldn’t hear the sound of my flight because of my small size.
Before I had gone a hundred yards I stopped in dismay. Before me yawned a space so wide that I couldn’t have leaped half the distance. There was escape on neither side, for the chasm extended up both the walls. I looked back. The germ had stopped. Its mass of tentacles was waving close to the ground.
Then it came on, not at an amble now but at a much faster rate. Whether it had heard me or had sensed my presence in some other manner, I did not know. Only one thing was apparent: I had but a few split seconds in which to act. I threw myself down flat, slid backward into the chasm, and hung there by my hands.
And I was just in time. A huge shape rushed overhead as I looked up. So big was the germ that the chasm which had appeared so wide to me, was inconsequential to it; it ran over the space as though it weren’t there. I saw the double row of the creature’s limbs as they flashed overhead. Each one was twice the size of my body.
Then happened what I had feared. One of the huge claw-like limbs came down hard on my hand, and a sharp spur raked across it. I could feel the pain all through my arm. The anguish was insufferable. I tried to get a better grip but couldn’t. My hold loosened. I dropped down—down—
IV
“This is the end.”
Such was my thought in that last awful moment as I slipped away into space. Involuntarily I shut my eyes, and I expected at any moment to crash into oblivion.
But nothing happened.
There was not even the usual sickening sensation that accompanies acceleration. I opened my eyes to a Stygian darkness, and put out an exploring hand. It encountered a rough wall which was flashing upward past my face. I was falling, then; but at no such speed as would have been the case under ordinary circumstances. This was rather as if I were floating downward. Or was it downward? I had lost all sense of up or down or sideways. I doubled my limbs under me and kicked out hard against the wall, shoving myself far away from it.
How long I remained falling—or drifting—there in that darkness I have no way of knowing. But it must have been minutes, and every minute I was necessarily growing smaller.
For some time I had been aware of immense masses all around me. They pressed upon me from every side, and from them came a very faint radiance. They were of all sizes, some no larger than myself and some looming up large as mountains. I tried to steer clear of the large ones, for I had no desire to be crushed between two of them. But there was little chance of that. Although we all drifted slowly along through space together, I soon observed that none of these masses ever approached each other or deviated the least bit from their paths.
As I continued to shrink, these masses seemed to spread out, away from me; and as they spread, the light which they exuded became brighter. They ceased to be masses, and became swirling, expanding, individual stretches of mist, milky white.
They were nebulae! Millions of miles of space must stretch between each of them! The gigantic mass I had clung to, drawn there by its gravity, also underwent this nebulosity, and now I was floating in the midst of an individual nebula. It spread out as I became smaller, and as it thinned and expanded, what had seemed mist now appeared as trillions and trillions of tiny spheres in intricate patterns.
I was in the very midst of these spheres! They were all around my feet, my arms, my head! They extended farther than I could reach, farther than I could see. I could have reached out and gathered thousands of them in my hand. I could have stirred and kicked my feet and scattered them in chaotic confusion about me. But I did not indulge in such reckless and unnecessary destruction of worlds. Doubtless my presence here had already done damage enough, displacing millions of them.
I scarcely dared to move a muscle for fear of disrupting the orbits of some of the spheres or wreaking havoc among some solar systems or star groups. I seemed to be hanging motionless among them; or if I were moving in any direction, the motion was too slight to be noticeable. I didn’t even know if I were horizontal or vertical, as those two terms had lost all meaning.
As I became smaller, of course the spheres became larger and the space between them expanded, so that the bewildering maze thinned somewhat and gave me more freedom of movement. I took more cognizance now of the beauty around me. I remembered what the Professor had said about receiving my thought waves, and I hoped he was tuned in now, for I wouldn’t have had him miss it for anything.
Every hue I had ever known was represented there among the suns and encircling planets: dazzling whites, reds, yellows, blues, greens, violets, and every intermediate shade. I glimpsed also the barren blackness of suns that had burnt out; but these were infrequent, as this seemed to be a very young universe.
There were single suns with the orbital planets varying in number from two to twenty. There were double suns that revolved slowly about each other as on an invisible axis. There were triple suns that revolved slowly about one another—strange as it may seem—in perfect trihedral symmetry. I saw one quadruple sun: a dazzling white, a blue, a green, and a deep orange. The white and the blue circled each other on the horizontal plane while the green and the orange circled on the vertical plane, thus forming a perfect interlocking system. Around these four suns, in circular orbits, sped sixteen planets of varying size, the smallest on the inner orbits and the largest on the outer. The effect was a spinning, concave disc with the white-blue-green-orange rotating hub in the center. The rays from these four suns, as they bathed the rolling planets and were reflected back into space in many-hued magnificence, presented a sight both beautiful and weird. I determined to alight on one of the planets of this quadruple sun as soon as my size permitted. I did not find it hard to maneuver to a certain extent; and eventually, when I had become much smaller, I stretched alongside this solar system, my length being as great as the diameter of the orbit of the outermost planet! Still I dared not come too close, for fear the gravity of my bulk would cause some tension in the orbital field.
I caught glimpses of the surface of the outer, or sixteenth planet, as it swung past me. Through rifts in the great billowing clouds I saw vast expanses of water, but no land; and then the planet was moving away from me, on its long journey around to the other side of the suns. I did not doubt that by the time it returned to my side I would be very much smaller, so I decided to move in a little closer and try to get a look at the fifteenth planet which was then on the opposite side but swinging around in my direction.
I had discovered that if I doubled up my limbs and thrust out violently in a direction opposite that in which I wished to move, I could make fairly good progress, though the effort was somewhat strenuous. In this manner I moved inward toward the sun-cluster, and by the time I had reached the approximate orbit of the fifteenth planet I had become much smaller—was scarcely one-third as long as the diameter of its orbit! The distance between the orbits of the sixteenth and fifteenth planets must have been about 2,500,000,000 miles, according to the old standards I had known; but to me the distance had seemed but a few hundred yards.
I waited there, and finally the planet hove into view from out of the glorious aurora of the suns. Nearer and nearer it swung in its circle, and as it approached I saw that its atmosphere was very clear, a deep saffron-color. It passed me a scant few yards away, turning lazily on its axis opposite the direction of flight. Here, too, as on planet sixteen, I saw a vast world of water. There was only one fairly large island and many scattered small ones, but I judged that fully nine-tenths of the surface area was ocean. I moved on in to planet fourteen, which I had noticed was a beautiful golden-green color.
By the time I had maneuvered to the approximate fourteenth orbit I had become so small that the light of the central suns pained my eyes. When the planet came in sight I could easily see several large continents on the lighted side; and as the dark side turned to the suns, several more continents became visible. As it swung past me I made comparisons and observed that I was now about five times as large as the planet. When it came around again I would try to effect a landing. To attempt a contact with it now would likely prove disastrous to both it and myself.
As I waited there and became smaller my thoughts turned to the Professor. If his amazing theory of an infinite number of sub-universes was true, then my adventure had hardly begun; wouldn’t begin until I alighted on the planet. “What would I find there? I did not doubt that the Professor, receiving my thought waves, was just as curious as I. Suppose there was life on this world—hostile life? I would face the dangers while the Professor sat in his laboratory far away. This was the first time that aspect of it occurred to me; it had probably never occurred to the Professor. Strange, too, how I thought of him as “far away.” Why, he could merely have reached out his hand and moved me, universe and all, on his laboratory table!
Another curious thought struck me: here I was waiting for a planet to complete its circle around the suns. To any beings who might exist on it, the elapsed time would represent a year; but to me it would only be a number of minutes.
At that, it returned sooner than I expected it, curving around to meet me. Its orbit, of course, was much smaller than those of the two outer planets. More minutes passed as it came closer and larger. As nearly as I could judge I was about one-fifth its size now. It skimmed past me, so closely that I could have reached out and brushed its atmosphere. And as it moved away I could feel its steady tugging, much as if I were a piece of metal being attracted to a magnet. Its speed did not decelerate in the least, but now I was moving along close behind it. It had “captured” me, just as I had hoped it would. I shoved in closer, and the gravity became a steady and stronger pull. I was “falling” toward it. I swung around so that my feet were closest to it, and they entered the atmosphere, where the golden-green touched the blackness of space. They swung down in a long arc and touched something solid. My “fall” toward the planet ceased. I was standing on one of the continents of this world.
V
So tall was I that the greatest part of my body still extended out into the blackness of space. In spite of the fact that the four suns were the distance of thirteen orbits away, they were of such intense brilliance now that to look directly at them would surely have blinded me. I looked far down my tapering length at the continent on which I stood. Even the multi-colored light reflected from the surface was dazzling to the eye. Too late I remembered the Professor’s warning to avoid the brighter suns. Close to the surface a few fleeting wisps of cloud drifted about my limbs.
As the planet turned slowly on its axis I of course moved with it, and shortly I found myself on the side away from the suns, in the planet’s shadow. I was thankful for this relief—but it was only temporary. Soon I swung around into the blinding light again. Then into the shadow, and again into the light. How many times this happened I do not know, but at last I was entirely within the planet’s atmosphere; here the rays of the sun were diffused, and the light less intense.
Miles below I could see but a vast expanse of yellow surface, stretching unbroken in every direction. As I looked far behind the curving horizon it seemed that I caught a momentary glimpse of tall, silvery towers of some far-off city; but I could not be sure, and when I looked again it had vanished.
I kept my eyes on that horizon, however, and soon two tiny red specks became visible against the yellow of the plain. Evidently they were moving toward me very rapidly, for even as I looked they became larger, and soon took shape as two blood-red spheres. Immediately I visioned them as some terrible weapons of warfare or destruction.
But as they came close to me and swerved up to where I towered high in the thin atmosphere, I could see that they were not solid at all, as I had supposed, but were gaseous, and translucent to a certain extent. Furthermore, they behaved in a manner that hinted strongly of intelligence. Without visible means of propulsion they swooped and circled about my head, to my utter discomfiture. When they came dangerously close to my eyes I raised my hand to sweep them away, but they darted quickly out of reach.
They did not approach me again, but remained there close together, pulsating in mid air. This queer pulsating of their tenuous substance gave me the impression that they were conferring together; and of course I was the object of their conference. Then they darted away in the direction whence they had come.
My curiosity was as great as theirs had seemed to be, and without hesitation I set out in the same direction. I must have covered nearly a mile at each step, but even so, these gaseous entities easily out-distanced me and were soon out of sight. I had no doubt that their destination was the city—if indeed it were a city I had glimpsed. The horizon was closer now and less curved, due to my decrease in height: I judged that I was barely five or six hundred feet tall now.
I had taken but a few hundred steps in the direction the two spheres had gone, when to my great surprise I saw them coming toward me again, this time accompanied by a score of—companions. I stopped in my tracks, and soon they came close and circled about my head. They were all about five feet in diameter, and of the same dark red color. For a minute they darted about as though studying me from every angle; then they systematically arranged themselves in a perfect circle around me. Thin streamers emanated from them, and merged, linking them together and closing the circle. Then other streamers reached slowly out toward me, wavering, cautious.
This, their manner of investigation, did not appeal to me in the least, and I swept my arms around furiously. Instantly all was wild confusion. The circle broke and scattered, the streamers snapped back and they were spheres again. They gathered in a group a short distance away and seemed to consider.
One, whose color had changed to a bright orange, darted apart from them and pulsated rapidly. As clearly as though words had been spoken, I comprehended. The bright orange color signified anger, and he was rebuking the others for their cowardice.
Led by the orange sphere they again moved closer to me, this time they had a surprise for me. A score of streamers flashed out quick as lightning, and cold blue flames spluttered where they touched me. Electric shocks ran through my arms, rendering them numb and helpless. Again they formed their circle around me, again the streamers emerged and completed the circle, and other streamers reached out caressingly. For a moment they flickered about my head, then merged, enveloping it in a cold red radiance. I felt no sensation at all at the touch, except that of cold.
The spheres began to pulsate again in the manner I had observed before, and immediately this pulsating began I felt tiny needlepoints of ice pierce my brain. A question became impinged upon my consciousness more clearly than would have been possible by spoken word:
"Where do you come from?"
I was familiar with thought transference, had even practiced it to a certain extent, very often with astonishing success. When I heard —or received—that question, I tried hard to bring every atom of my consciousness to bear upon the circumstances that were the cause of my being there. When I had finished my mental narration and my mind relaxed from the tension I had put upon it, I received, the following impressions:
"We receive no answer; your mind remains blank. You are alien, we have never encountered another of your organism here. A most peculiar organism indeed is one that becomes steadily smaller without apparent reason. Why are you here, and where do you come from?"
The icy fingers probed deeper and deeper into my brain, seeming to tear it tissue from tissue.
Again I tried, my mind focusing with the utmost clearness upon every detail, picturing my course from the very minute I entered the Professor’s laboratory to the present time. When I finished I was exhausted from the effort.
Again I received the impression: "You cannot bring your mind sufficiently into focus; we receive only fleeting shadows."
One of the spheres again changed to a bright color, and broke from the circle. I could almost imagine an angry shrug. The streamers relaxed their hold on my brain and began to withdraw—but not before I caught the fleeting impression from the orange one, who was apparently addressing the others:
"—very low mentality."
“You’re not so much yourself!” I said aloud. But of course such a crude method as speech did not register upon them. I wondered at my inability to establish thought communication with these beings. Either my brain was of such a size as to prevent them from receiving the impression (remember I was still a four or five hundred foot giant on this world), or their state of mentality was indeed so much higher than mine, that I was, to them, lower than the lowest savage. Possibly both, more probably the latter.
But they were determined to solve the mystery of my presence before I passed from their world, as I would surely do in a few hours at my rate of shrinkage. Their next move was to place themselves on each side of me in vertical rows extending from far down near the ground up to my shoulders. Again the luminous ribbons reached out and touched me at the various points. Then as at a given signal they rose high into the air, lifting me lightly as a feather! In perfect unison they sped towards their city beyond the horizon, carrying me perpendicularly with them! I marveled at the manner in which such gaseous entities as these could lift and propel such a material giant as myself. Their speed must have exceeded by far that of sound—though on all this planet there was no sound except the sound of my body swishing through the air.
In a very few minutes I sighted the city, which must have covered an area of a hundred miles square near the edge of a rolling green ocean. I was placed lightly on my feet at the very edge of the city, and once more the circle of spheres formed around my head and once more the cold tendrils of light probed my brain.
"You may walk at will about the city," came the thought, "accompanied by a few of us. You are to touch nothing whatever, or the penalty will be extreme; your tremendous size makes your presence here among us somewhat hazardous. When you have become much smaller we shall again explore your mind, with somewhat different method, and learn your origin and purpose. We realize that the great size of your brain was somewhat of a handicap to us in our first attempt. We go now to prepare. We have awaited your coming for years."
Leaving only a few there as my escort—or guard—the rest of the spheres sped toward a great domed building that rose from a vast plaza in the center of the city.
I was very much puzzled as to their last statement. For a moment I stood there wondering what they could have meant—”we have awaited your coming for years.” Then trusting that this and other things would be answered in the due course of their investigation, I entered the city.
It was not a strange city in so far as architecture was concerned, but it was a beautiful one. I marveled that it could have been conceived and constructed by these confluent globules of gas who at first glance seemed anything but intelligent, reasoning beings.
Tall as I was, the buildings towered up to four and five times my height, invariably ending in domed roofs. There was no sign of a spire or angle as far as my eye could see; apparently they grated harshly on the senses of these beings. The entire plan of the city was of vast sweeping curves and circular patterns, and the effect was striking. There were no preconceived streets or highways, nor connecting spans between buildings, for there was no need of them. The air was the natural habitable element of this race, and I did not see a one of them ever touch the ground or any surface.
They even came to rest in mid air, with a slow spinning motion. Everywhere I passed among them they paused, spinning, to observe me in apparent curiosity, then went on about their business, whatever it was. None ever approached me except my guards.
For several hours I wandered about in this manner, and finally when I was much smaller I was bade to walk towards the central plaza.
In the circular domed building the others awaited my coming, gathered about a dais surmounted by a huge oval transparent screen of glass or some similar substance. This time only one of the spheres made contact with my brain, and I received the following thought:
"Watch."
The screen became opaque, and a vast field of white came into view.
"The great nebula in which this planet is but an infinitesimal speck," came the thought.
The mass drifted almost imperceptibly across the screen, and the thought continued:
"As you see it now, so it appeared to us through our telescopes centuries ago. Of course the drifting motion of the nebula as a whole was not perceptible, and what you see is a chemically recorded reproduction of the view, which has been speeded up to make the motion visible on the screen. Watch closely now."
The great mass of the nebula had been quiescent, but as I watched, it began to stir and swirl in a huge spiral motion, and a vast dark shadow was thrown across the whole scene. The shadow seemed to recede—no, grew smaller—and I could see that it was not a shadow but a huge bulk. This bulk was entering the nebula, causing it to swirl and expand as millions of stars were displaced and shoved outward.
The thought came again: "The scene has been speeded up a million-fold. The things you see taking place actually transpired over a great number of years; our scientists watched the phenomenon in great wonder, and many were the theories as to the cause of it. You are viewing yourself as you entered our nebula."
I watched in a few minutes the scene before me, as these sphere creatures had watched it over a period of years; saw myself grow smaller, gradually approach the system of the four suns and finally the gold-green planet itself. Abruptly the screen cleared.
"So we watched and waited your coming for years, not knowing what you were or whence you came. We are still very much puzzled. You become steadily smaller, and that we cannot understand. We must hurry. Relax. Do not interfere with our process by trying to think back to the beginning, as you did before; it is all laid bare to us in the recesses of your brain. Simply relax, think of nothing at all, watch the screen."
I tried to do as he said, again I felt the cold probing tendrils in my brain, and a lethargy came over my mind. Shadows flashed across the screen, then suddenly a familiar scene leaped into view: the Professor’s laboratory as I had last seen it, on the night of my departure. No sooner had this scene cleared than I entered the room, exactly as I had on that night. I saw myself approach the table close behind the Professor, saw him standing as he had stood, staring out at the night sky; saw his lips move.
The spheres about me crowded close to the screen, seemed to hang intent on every motion that passed upon it, and I sensed great excitement among them. I judged that the one who was exploring my mind, if not all of them, were somehow cognizant not only of the words the Professor and I spoke in those scenes, but of their meaning as well.
I could almost read the Professor’s lips as he spoke. I saw the utter amazement, then incredulity, then disbelief, on my features as he propounded his theory of macrocosmic worlds and still greater macrocosmic worlds. I saw our parley of words, and finally his lunge toward me and felt again the plunge of the needle into my arm.
As this happened the spheres around me stirred excitedly.
I saw myself become smaller, smaller, to be finally lifted onto the block of Rehyllium-X where I became still smaller and disappeared. I saw my meeting with the germ, and my wild flight; my plunge into the abyss, and my flight down through the darkness, during which time the entire screen before me became black. The screen was slightly illuminated again as I traveled along with the great masses all around me, and then gradually across the screen spread the huge nebula, the same one these sphere creatures had seen through their telescopes centuries ago.
Again the screen cleared abruptly, became transparent.
"The rest we know," came the thought of the one who had searched my brain. "The rest the screen has already shown. He—the one who invented the—what he called ’Shrinx’—he is a very great man. Yours has indeed been a marvelous experience, and one which has hardly begun. We envy you, lucky being; and at the same time we are sorry for you. Anyway, it is fortunate for us that you chose our planet on which to alight, but soon you will pass away even as you came, and that we cannot, and would not, prevent. In a very few minutes you will once more become of infinitesimal size and pass into a still smaller universe. We have microscopes powerful enough to permit us to barely glimpse this smaller atomic universe, and we shall watch your further progress into the unknown until you are gone from our sight forever."
I had been so interested in the familiar scenes on the screen that I had lost all conception of my steady shrinkage. I was now very much smaller than those spheres around me.
I was as interested in them as they were in me, and I tried to flash the following thought:
"You say that you envy me, and are sorry for me. Why should that be?"
The thought came back immediately:
"We cannot answer that. But it is true; wonderful as are the things you will see in realms yet to come, nevertheless you are to be pitied. You cannot understand at present, but some day you will."
I flashed another thought:
"Your organism, which is known to me as gaseous, seems as strange to me as mine, a solid, must seem to you. You have mentioned both telescopes and microscopes, and I cannot conceive how beings such as yourselves, without organs of sight, can number astronomy and microscopy among the sciences."
"Your own organs of sight," came back the answer, "which you call ’eyes,’ are not only superfluous, but are very crude sources of perception. I think you will grant that loss of them would be a terrible and permanent handicap. Our own source of perception is not confined to any such conspicuous organs, but envelops the entire outer surface of our bodies. We have never had organs and appendages such as those with which you are endowed so profusely, for we are of different substance; we merely extend any part of our bodies in any direction at will. But from close study of your structure, we conclude that your various organs and appendages are very crude. I predict that by slow evolution of your own race, such frailties will disappear entirely."
"Tell me more about your own race," I went on eagerly.
"To tell everything there is to tell," came the answer, "would take much time; and there is little time left. We have a very high sociological system, but one which is not without its faults, of course. We have delved deep into the sciences and gone far along the lines of fine arts—but all of our accomplishments along these lines would no doubt appear very strange to you. You have seen our city. It is by no means the largest, nor the most important, on the planet. When you alighted comparatively near, reports were sent out and all of our important scientists hurried here. We were not afraid because of your presence, but rather, were cautious, for we did not know what manner of being you were. The two whom you first saw, were sent to observe you. They had both been guilty of a crime against the community, and were given the choice of the punishment they deserved, or of going out to investigate the huge creature that had dropped from the sky. They accepted the latter course, and for their bravery—for it was bravery—they have been exonerated."
VI
I would have liked greatly to ask more questions, for there were many phases that puzzled me; but I was becoming so very small that further communication was impossible. I was taken to a laboratory and placed upon the slide of a microscope of strange and intricate construction and my progress continued unabated down into a still smaller atomic universe.
The method was the same as before. The substance became open and porous, spread out into open space dotted with the huge masses which in turn became porous and resolved into far flung nebulae.
I entered one of the nebulae and once more star-systems swung all around me. This time I approached a single sun of bright yellow hue, around which swung eight planets. I maneuvered to the outermost one, and when my size permitted, made contact with it.
I was now standing on an electron, one of billions forming a microscopic slide that existed in a world which was in turn only an electron in a block of metal on a laboratory table!
Soon I reached the atmosphere, and miles below me I could see only wide patches of yellow and green. But as I came nearer to the surface more of the details became discernible. Almost at my feet a wide yellow river wound sluggishly over a vast plateau which fell suddenly away into a long line of steep precipices. At the foot of these precipices stretched a great green expanse of steaming jungle, and farther beyond a great ocean, smooth as green glass, curved to the horizon. A prehistoric world of jungles and great fern-like growths and sweltering swamps and cliffs. Not a breeze stirred and nowhere was there sight of any living thing. I was standing in the jungle close to the towering cliffs, and for a half mile in every direction the trees and vegetation were trampled into the soil where my feet had swung down and contacted.
Now I could see a long row of caves just above a ledge half way up the side of the cliff. And I did not doubt that in each cave some being was peering furtively out at me. Even as I watched I saw a tiny figure emerge and walk out on the ledge. He was very cautious, ready to dash back into the cave at any sign of hostility on my part, and his eyes never left me. Seeing that nothing happened, others took heart and came out, and soon the ledge was lined with tiny figures who talked excitedly among themselves and gesticulated wildly in my direction. My coming must surely have aroused all their superstitious fears—a giant descending out of the skies to land at their very feet.
I must have been nearly a mile from the cliff, but even at that distance I could see that the figures were barbarians, squat and thick muscled, and covered with hair; they were four limbed and stood erect, and all carried crude weapons.
One of them raised a bow as tall as himself and let fly a shaft at me—evidently as an expression of contempt or bravado, for he must have known that the shaft couldn’t reach half the distance. Immediately one who seemed a leader among them felled the miscreant with a single blow. This amused me. Evidently their creed was to leave well enough alone.
Experimentally I took a step toward them, and immediately a long line of bows sprang erect and scores of tiny shafts arched high in my direction to fall into the jungle far in front of me. A warning to keep my distance.
I could have strode forward and swept the lot of them from the ledge; but wishing to show them that my intentions were quite peaceful, I raised my hands and took several backward steps. Another futile volley of arrows. I was puzzled, and stood still; and as long as I did not move neither did they.
The one who had seemed the leader threw himself down flat and, shielding his eyes from the sun, scanned the expanse of jungle below. Then they seemed to talk among themselves again, and gestured not at me, but at the jungle. Then I comprehended. Evidently a hunting party was somewhere in that jungle which spread out around my feet—probably returning to the caves, for already it was nearing dusk, the sun casting weird conflicting streaks across the horizon. These people of the caves were in fear that I would move around too freely and perhaps trample the returning party under foot.
So thinking, I stood quietly in the great barren patch I had levelled, and sought to peer into the dank growth below me. This was nearly impossible, however, for clouds of steam hung low over the tops of the trees.
But presently my ears caught a faint sound, as of shouting, far below me, and then I glimpsed a long single file of the barbarian hunters running at full speed along a well beaten game path. They burst into the very clearing in which I stood, and stopped short in surprise, evidently aware for the first time of my gigantic presence on their world. They let fall the poles upon which were strung the carcasses of the day’s hunt, cast but one fearful look up to where I towered, then as one man fell flat upon the ground in abject terror.
All except one. I doubt if the one, who burst from the tangle of trees last of all, even saw me, so intent was he in glancing back into the darkness from which he fled. At any rate he aroused his companions with a few angry, guttural syllables, and pointed back along the path.
At that moment there floated up to me a roar that lingered loud and shuddering in my ears. At quick instructions from their leader the hunters picked up their weapons and formed a wide semi-circle before the path where they had emerged. The limb of a large tree overhung the path at this point, and the leader clambered up some overhanging vines and was soon crouched upon it. One of the warriors fastened a vine to a large clumsy looking weapon, and the one in the tree drew it up to him. The weapon consisted merely of a large pointed stake some eight feet long, with two heavy stones fastened securely to it at the half way point. The one in the tree carefully balanced this weapon on the limb, directly over the path, point downward. The semicircle of hunters crouched behind stout lances set at an angle in the ground.
Another shuddering roar floated up to me, and then the beast appeared. As I caught sight of it I marvelled all the more at the courage of these puny barbarians. From ground to shoulder the beast must have measured seven feet tall, and was fully twenty feet long. Each of its six legs ended in a wide, horny claw that could have ripped any of the hunters from top to bottom. Its long tapering tail was horny too, giving me the impression that the thing was at least partly reptilian; curved fangs fully two feet long, in a decidedly animal head, offset that impression, however.
For a long moment the monstrosity stood there, tail switching ceaselessly, glaring in puzzlement out upon the circle of puny beings who dared to confront it. Then, as its tail ceased switching and it tensed for the spring, the warrior on the limb above launched his weapon—launched it and came hurtling down with it, feet pressed hard against the heavy stone balance!
Whether the beast below heard some sound or whether a sixth sense warned it, I do not know; but just in time it leaped to one side with an agility belied by its great bulk, and the pointed stake drove deep into the ground, leaving the one who had ridden it lying there stunned.
The beast uttered a snarl of rage; its six legs sprawled outward, its great belly touched the ground. Then it sprang out upon the circle of crouching hunters. Lances snapped at the impact, and the circle broke and fled for the trees. But two of them never rose from the ground, and the lashing homed tail flattened another before he had taken four steps.
The scene took place in a matter of seconds as I towered there looking down upon it, fascinated. The beast whirled toward the fleeing ones and in another moment the destruction would have been terrible, for they could not possibly have reached safety..
Breaking the spell that was on me I swung my hand down in a huge arc even as the beast sprang for a second time. I slapped it in mid air, flattening it against the ground as I would have flattened a bothersome insect. It did not twitch a muscle, and a dark red stain seeped outward from where it lay.
The natives stopped in their flight, for the sound of my hand when I slapped the huge animal had been loud. They jabbered noisily among themselves, but fearfully kept their distance, when they saw me crouched there over the flattened enemy who had been about to wreak destruction among them.
Only one had seen the entire happening. He who had plunged downward from the tree was only momentarily stunned; he had risen dizzily to his feet as the animal charged out among his companions, and had been witness to the whole thing.
Glancing half contemptuously at the others, he now approached me. It must have taken a great deal of courage on his part, for, crouched down as I was, I still towered above the tallest trees. He looked for a moment at the dead beast, then gazed up at me in reverent awe. Falling prone, he beat his head upon the ground several times, and the others followed his example.
Then they all came forward to look at the huge animal.
From their talk and gestures, I gathered that they wanted to take it to the caves; but it would take ten of the strongest of them to even lift it, and there was still a mile stretch of jungle between them and the cliffs.
I decided that I would take it there for them if that was their want. Reaching out, I picked up the leader, the brave one, very gently. Placing him in the cupped hollow of my hand, I swung him far up to the level of my eyes. I pointed at the animal I had slain, then pointed toward the cliffs. But his eyes were closed tightly as if his last moment had come, and he trembled in every limb. He was a brave hunter, but this experience was too much. I lowered him to the ground unharmed, and the others crowded around him excitedly. He would soon recover from his fright, and no doubt some night around the camp fires he would relate this wonderful experience to a bunch of skeptical grandchildren.
Picking the animal up by its tapering tail I strode through the jungle with it, flattening trees at every step and leaving a wide path behind me. I neared the cliffs in a few steps, and those upon the ledge fled into the caves. I placed the huge carcass on the ledge, which was scarcely as high as my shoulders, then turned and strode away to the right, intending to explore the terrain beyond.
For an hour, I walked, passing other tribes of cliff dwellers who fled at my approach. Then the jungle ended in a point by the sea and the line of cliffs melted down into a rocky coast.
It had become quite dark now, there were no moons and the stars seemed dim and far away. Strange night cries came from the jungle, and to my left stretched wide, tangled marshes through which floated vague phosphorescent shapes. Behind me tiny fires sprang up on the face of the cliffs, a welcome sight, and I turned back toward them. I was now so much smaller that I felt extremely uneasy at being alone and unarmed at night on a strange planet abounding in monstrosities.
I had taken only a few steps when I felt, rather than heard, a rush of wings above and behind me. I threw myself flat upon the ground, and just in time, for the great shadowy shape of some huge night-creature swept down and sharp talons raked my back. I arose with apprehension after a few moments, and saw the creature winging its way back low over the marshes. Its wing spread must have been forty feet. I reached the shelter of the cliffs and stayed close to them thereafter.
I came to the first of the shelving ledges where the fires burned, but it was far above me now. I was a tiny being crouched at the base of the cliffs. I, an alien on this world, yet a million years ahead of these barbarians in evolution, peered furtively out into the darkness where glowing eyes and half-seen shapes moved on the edge of the encroaching jungle; and safe in their caves high above me were those so low in the state of evolution that had only the rudiments of a spoken language and were only beginning to learn the value of fire. In another million years perhaps a great civilization would cover this entire globe: a civilization rising by slow degrees from the mire and the mistakes and the myths of the dawn of time. And doubtlessly one of the myths would concern a great god-like figure that descended from the skies, leveled great trees in its stride, saved a famous tribe from destruction by slaying huge enemy beasts, and then disappeared forever during the night. And great men, great thinkers, of that future civilization would say:
"Fie! Preposterous! A stupid myth."
But at the present time the godlike figure which slew enemy beasts by a slap of the hand was scarcely a foot high, and sought a place where he might be safe from a possible attack by those same beasts. At last I found a small crevice, which I squeezed into and felt much safer than I had out in the open.
And very soon I was so small that I would have been unnoticed by any of the huge animals that might venture my way.
VII
At last I stood on a single grain of sand, and other grains towered up like smooth mountains all around me. And in the next few minutes I experienced the change for the third time—the change from microscopic being on a gigantic world to a gigantic being floating amid an endless universe of galaxies. I became smaller, the distance between galaxies widened, solar systems approached and neared the orbit of the outermost planet, I received a very unexpected, but very pleasant, surprise. Instead of myself landing upon one of the planets —and while I was yet far too large to do so—the inhabitants of this system were coming out to land on me! There was no doubt about it. From the direction of the inner planets a tapering silvery projectile moved toward me with the speed of light. This was indeed interesting, and I halted my inward progress to await developments.
In a few minutes the space rocketship was very close. It circled about me once, then with a great rush of flame and gases from the prow to break the fall, it swooped in a long curve and landed gracefully on my chest! I felt no more jar than if a fly had alighted on me. As I watched it, a square section swung outward from the hull and a number of things emerged. I say “things” because they were in no manner human, although they were so tiny that I could barely distinguish them as minute dots of gold. A dozen of them gathered in a group a short distance away from the space-ship.
After a few moments, to my surprise, they spread huge golden wings, and I gasped at the glistening beauty of them. They scattered in various directions, flying low over the surface of my body. From this I reasoned that I must be enveloped in a thin layer of atmosphere, as were the planets. These bird creatures were an exploring party sent out from one of the inner planets to investigate the new large world which had entered their system and was approaching dangerously close to their own planet.
But, on second thought, they must have been aware—or soon would be—that I was not a world at all, but a living, sentient being. My longitudinal shape should make that apparent, besides the movements of my limbs. At any rate they displayed unprecedented daring by coming out to land on me. I could have crushed their frail ship at the slightest touch or flung it far out into the void beyond their reach.
I wished I could see one of the winged creatures at closer range, but none landed on me again; having traversed and circled me in every direction they returned to the space-ship and entered it.
The section swung closed, gases roared from the stern tubes and the ship swooped out into space again and back toward the sun.
What tiding would they bear to their planet? Doubtless they would describe me as an inconceivably huge monstrosity of outer space. Their scientists would wonder whence I came; might even guess at the truth. They would observe me anxiously through their telescopes. Very likely they would be in fear that I would invade or wreck their world, and would make preparations to repulse me if I came too near.
In spite of these probabilities I continued my slow progress toward the inner planets, determined to see and if possible land upon the planet of the bird creatures. A civilization that had achieved space travel must be a marvelous civilization indeed.
As I made my way through space between the planets by means of my grotesque exertions, I reflected upon another phase. By the time I reached the inner planets I would be so much smaller that I could not determine which of the planets was the one I sought, unless I saw more of the space ships and could follow their direction. Another interesting thought was that the inner planets would have sped around the green sun innumerable times, and years would have passed before I reached there. They would have ample time to prepare for my coming, and might give me a fierce reception if they had many more of the space ships such as the one I had seen.
And they did indeed have many more of them, as I discovered after an interminable length of time during which I had moved ever closer to the sun. A red-tinged planet swung in a wide curve from behind the blazing green of the sun, and I awaited its approach. After a few minutes it was so close that I could see a moon encircling the planet, and as it came still nearer I saw the rocket ships.
This, then, was the planet I sought. But I was puzzled. They surely could not have failed to notice my approach, and I had expected to see a host of ships lined up in formidable array. I saw a host of them all right, hundreds of them, but they were not pointed in my direction at all; indeed, they seemed not to heed me in the least, although I must have loomed large as their planet came nearer.
Perhaps they had decided, after all, that I was harmless.
But what seemed more likely to me was that they were confronted with an issue of vastly more importance than my close proximity. For as I viewed the space ships they were leaving the atmosphere of their planet, and were pointing toward the single satellite. Row upon row, mass upon endless mass they moved outward, hundreds, thousands of them. It seemed as though the entire population was moving en masse to the satellite!
My curiosity was immediately aroused. ’What circumstances or condition would cause a highly civilized race to abandon their planet and flee to the satellite? Perhaps, if I learned, I would not want to alight on that planet. . . .
Impatiently I awaited its return as it moved away from me on its circuit around the sun. The minutes seemed long, but at last it approached again from the opposite direction, and I marvelled at the relativity of size and space and time. A year had passed on that planet and satellite, and many things might have transpired since I had last seen them.
The satellite swung between the planet and myself, and even from my point of disadvantage I could see that many things had indeed transpired. The bird people were building a protective shell around the satellite! Protection—from what? The shell seemed to be of dull gray metal, and already covered half the globe. On the uncovered side I saw land and rolling oceans. Surely, I thought, they must have the means of producing artificial light; but somehow it seemed blasphemous to forever bar the surface from the fresh pure light of the green sun. In a manner I felt sorry for them in their circumstances. But they had their space ships, and in time could move to the vast unexplored fields that the heavens offered.
More than ever I was consumed with curiosity, but was still too large to attempt a contact with the planet, and I let it pass me for a second time. I judged that when it came around again I would be sufficiently small for its gravity to “capture” me and sufficiently large that the “fall” to the surface would in no means be dangerous; and I was determined to alight.
Another wait of minutes, more minutes this time because I was smaller and time for me was correspondingly longer. When the two spheres hove into view again I saw that the smaller one was now entirely clad in its metal jacket, and the smooth unbroken surface shimmered boldly in the green glare of the sun. Beneath that barren metal shell were the bird people with their glorious golden wings, their space ships, their artificial light, and atmosphere, and civilization. I had but a glance for the satellite, however; my attention was for the planet rushing ever closer to me.
Everything passed smoothly and without mishap. I was becoming an experienced “planet hopper.” Its gravity caught me in an unrelenting grip, and I let my limbs rush downward first in their long curve, to land with a slight jar on solid earth far below.
Bending low, I sought to peer into the murky atmosphere and see something of the nature of this world. For a minute my sight could not pierce the half gloom, but gradually the surface became visible. First, I followed my tapering limbs to where they had contacted. As nearly as I could ascertain from my height, I was standing in the midst of what seemed to be a huge mass of crushed and twisted metal!
Now, I thought to myself, I have done it. I have let myself in for it now. I have wrecked something, some great piece of machinery it seems, and the inhabitants will not take the matter lightly. Then I thought: the inhabitants? Who? Not the bird people, for they have fled, have barricaded themselves on the satellite.
Again I sought to pierce the gloom of the atmosphere, and by slow degrees more details became visible. At first my gaze only encompassed a few miles, then more, and more, until at last the view extended from horizon to horizon and included nearly an entire hemisphere.
Slowly the view cleared and slowly comprehension came; and as full realization dawned upon me, I became momentarily panic stricken. I thought insanely of leaping outward into space again, away from the planet, breaking the gravity that held me; but the opposite force of my spring could likely send the planet careening out of its orbit and it and all the other planets and myself might go plunging toward the sun. No, I had put my feet on this planet and I was here to stay.
But I did not feel like staying, for what a sight I had glimpsed! As far as I could see in every direction were huge, grotesque metal structures and strange mechanical contrivances. The thing that terrified me was that these machines were scurrying about the surface all in apparent confusion, seemed to cover the entire globe, seemed to have a complete civilization of their own, and nowhere was there the slightest evidence of any human occupancy, no controlling force, no intelligence, nothing save the machines. And I could not bring myself to believe that they were possessed of intelligence!
Yet as I descended ever closer to the surface I could see that there was no confusion at all as it had seemed at first glance, but rather was there a simple, efficient, systematic order of things. Even as I watched, two strange mechanisms strode toward me on great jointed tripods, and stopped at my very feet. Long, jointed metal arms, with claw-like fixtures at the ends, reached out with uncanny accuracy and precision and began to clear away the twisted debris around my feet. As I watched them I admired the efficiency of their construction. No needless intricacies, no superfluous parts, only the tripods for movement and the arms for clearing. When they had finished they went away, and other machines came on wheels, the debris was lifted by means of cranes and hauled away.
I watched in stupefaction the uncanny activities below and around me. There was no hurry, no rush, but every machine from the tiniest to the largest, from the simplest to the most complicated, had a certain task to perform, and performed it directly and completely, accurately and precisely. There were machines on wheels, on treads, on tracks, on huge multi-jointed tripods, winged machines that flew clumsily through the air, and machines of a thousand other kinds and variations.
Endless chains of machines delved deep into the earth, to emerge with loads of ore which they deposited, to descend again.
Huge hauling machines came and transported the ore to roaring mills.
Inside the mills machines melted the ore, rolled and cut and fashioned the steel.
Other machines builded and assembled and adjusted intricate parts, and when the long process was completed the result was—more machines! They rolled or ambled or flew or walked or rattled away under their own power, as the case might be.
Some went to assist in the building of huge bridges across rivers and ravines.
Diggers went to level down forests and obstructing hills, or went away to the mines.
Others built adjoining mills and factories.
Still others erected strange, complicated towers thousands of feet high, and the purpose of these skeleton skyscrapers I could not determine. Even as I watched, the supporting base of one of them weakened and buckled, and the entire huge edifice careened at a perilous angle. Immediately a host of tiny machines rushed to the scene. Sharp white flames cut through the metal in a few seconds, and the tower toppled with a thunderous crash to the ground.
Again the white-flame machines went to work and cut the metal into removable sections, and hoisters and haulers came and removed them. Within fifteen minutes another building was being erected on the exact spot.
Occasionally something would go wrong—some worn-out part ceased to function and a machine would stop in the middle of its task. Then it would be hauled away to repair shops, where it would eventually emerge good as new.
I saw two of the winged machines collide in mid air, and metal rained from the sky. A half dozen of the tripod clearing machines came from a half dozen directions and the metal was raked into huge piles; then came the cranes and hauling machines.
A great vertical wheel with slanting blades on the rim spun swiftly on a shaft that was borne forward on treads. The blades cut through trees and soil and stone as it bore onward toward the near-by mountains. It slowed down, but did not stop, and at length a straight wide path connected the opposite valley. Behind the wheel came the tripods, clearing the way of all debris, and behind them came machines that laid down long strips of metal, completing the perfect road.
Everywhere small lubricating machines moved about, periodically supplying the others with the necessary oil that insured smooth movement.
Gradually the region surrounding me was being levelled and cleared, and a vast city was rising—a city of meaningless, towering, ugly metal—a city covering hundreds of miles between the mountains and sea—a city of machines—ungainly, lifeless—yet purposeful—for what? What?
In the bay, a line of towers rose from the water like fingers pointing at the sky. Beyond the bay and into the open sea they extended. Now the machines were connecting the towers with wide network and spans. A bridge! They were spanning the ocean, connecting the continents—a prodigious engineering feat. If there were not already machines on the other side, there soon would be. No, not soon. The task was gigantic, fraught with failures, almost impossible. Almost? A world of machines could know no almost. Perhaps other machines did occupy the other side, had started the bridge from there, and they would meet in the middle. And for what purpose?
A great wide river came out of the mountains and went winding toward the sea. For some reason a wall was being constructed diagonally across the river and beyond, to change its course. For some reason—or unreason.
Unreason! That was it! Why, why, why, I cried aloud in an anguish that was real; why all of this? ’What purpose, what meaning, what benefit? A city, a continent, a world, a civilization of machines!
Somewhere on this world there must be the one who caused all this, the one intelligence, human or unhuman, who controls it. My time here is limited, but I have time to seek him out, and if I find him I shall drag him out and feed him to his own machines and put a stop to this diabolism for all time!
I strode along the edge of the sea for five hundred miles, and rounding a sharp point of land, stopped abruptly. There before me stretched a city, a towering city of smooth white stone and architectural beauty. Spacious parks were dotted with winged colonnades and statues, and the buildings were so designed that everything pointed upward, seemed poised for flight.
That was one half of the city.
The other half was a ruinous heap of shattered white stone, of buildings levelled to the ground by the machines, which were even then intent on reducing the entire city to a like state.
As I watched I saw scores of the flame-machines cutting deep into the stone and steel supporting base of one of the tallest buildings. Two of the ponderous air machines, trailing a wide mesh-metal network between them, rose clumsily from the ground on the outskirts of the city. Straight at the building they flew, and passed one on each side of it. The metal netting struck, jerked the machines backward, and the tangled mass of them plunged to the ground far below. But the building, already weakened at the base, swayed far forward, then back, hung poised for a long shuddering moment and then toppled to the ground with a thunderous crash amid a cloud of dust and debris and tangled framework.
The flame-machines moved on to another building, and on a slope near the outskirts two more of the air machines waited. .
Sickened at the purposeless vandalism of it all, I turned inland; and everywhere I strode were the machines, destroying and building, leveling to the ground the deserted cities of the bird people and building up their own meaningless civilization of metal.
At last I came to a long range of mountains which towered up past the level of my eyes as I stood before them. In two steps I stood on the top of these mountains and looked out upon a vast plain dotted everywhere with the grotesque machine-made cities. The machines had made good progress. About two hundred miles to the left a great metal dome rose from the level of the plain, and I made my way toward it, striding unconcerned and recklessly amidst the machines that moved everywhere around my feet.
As I neared the domed structure a row of formidable-looking mechanisms, armed with long spikes, rose up to bar my path. I kicked out viciously at them and in a few minutes they were reduced to tangled scrap, though I received a number of minor scratches in the skirmish. Others of the spiked machines rose up to confront me with each step I took, but I strode through them, kicking them to one side, and at last I stood before an entrance-way in the side of the huge dome. Stooping, I entered, and once inside my head almost touched the roof.
I had hoped to find here what I sought, and I was not disappointed. There in the center of the single spacious room was The Machine of all Machines; the Cause of it All; the Central Force, the Ruler, the Controlling Power of all the diabolism running riot over the face of the planet. It was roughly circular, large and ponderous. It was bewilderingly complicated, a maze of gears, wheels, switchboards, lights, levers, buttons, tubing, and intricacies beyond my comprehension. There were circular tiers, and on each tier smaller separate units moved, performing various tasks, attending switchboards, pressing buttons, pulling levers. The result was a throbbing, rhythmic, purposeful unit. I could imagine invisible waves going out in every direction.
I wondered what part of this great machine was vulnerable. Silly thought. No part. Only it—itself. It was The Brain.
The Brain. The Intelligence. I had searched for it, and I had found it. There it was before me. Well, I was going to smash it. I looked around for some kind of weapon, but finding none, I strode forward bare-handed.
Immediately a square panel lighted up with a green glow, and I knew that The Brain was aware of my intent. I stopped. An odd sensation swept over me, a feeling of hate, of menace. It came from the machine, pervaded the air in invisible waves.
“Nonsense,” I thought; “it is but a machine after all. A very complicated one, yes, perhaps even possessed of intelligence; but it only has control over other machines, it cannot harm me.”
Again I took a resolute step forward.
The feeling of menace became stronger, but I fought back my apprehension and advanced recklessly. I had almost reached the machine when a wall of crackling blue flame leaped from floor to roof. If I had taken one more step I would have been caught in it.
The menace, and hate, and imagined rage at my escape, rolled out from the machine in ponderous, almost tangible waves, engulfing me, and I retreated hastily.
I walked back toward the mountains. After all, this was not my world—not my universe. I would soon be so small that my presence amid the machines would be extremely dangerous, and the tops of the mountains was the only safe place. I would have liked to smash The Brain and put an end to it all, but anyway, I thought, the bird people were now safe on the satellite, so why not leave this lifeless world to the machines?
It was twilight when I reached the mountains, and from a high grassy slope—the only peaceful place on the entire planet, I imagined—I looked out upon the plain. Tiny lights appeared as the machines moved about, carrying on their work, never resting. The clattering and clanking of them floated faintly up to me and made me glad that I was a safe distance from it all.
As I stood out toward the dome that housed The Brain, I saw what I had failed to see before. A large globe rested there on a frame-work, and there seemed to be unusual activity around it.
A vague apprehension tightened around my brain as I saw machines enter this globe, and I was half prepared for what happened next. The globe rose lightly as a feather, sped upward with increasing speed, out of the atmosphere and into space, where, as a tiny speck, it darted and maneuvered with perfect ease. Soon it reappeared, floated gracefully down upon the framework again, and the machines that had mechanically directed its flight disembarked from it.
The machines had achieved space travel! My heart sickened with sudden realization of what that meant. They would build others—were already building them. They would go to other worlds, and the nearest one was the satellite . . . . encased in its protective metal shell . . . .
But then I thought of the white-flame machines that I had seen cut through stone and metal in a few seconds . . . .
The bird people would no doubt put up a valiant fight. But as I compared their rocket projectiles against the efficiency of the globe I had just seen, I had little doubt as to the outcome. They would eventually be driven out into space again to seek a new world, and the machines would take over the satellite, running riot as they had done here. They would remain there just as long as The Brain so desired, or until there was no more land for conquest. Already this planet was over-run, so they were preparing to leave.
The Brain. An intricate, intelligent mechanical brain, glorying in its power, drunk with conquest. Where had it originated? The bird people must have been the indirect cause, and no doubt they were beginning to realize the terrible menace they had loosed on the universe.
I tried to picture their civilization as it had been long ago before this thing had come about. I pictured a civilization in which machinery played a very important part. I pictured the development of this machinery until the time when it relieved them of many tasks. I imagined how they must have designed their machines with more and more intricacy, more and more finesse, until only a few persons were needed in control. And then the great day would come, the supreme day, when mechanical parts would take the place of those few.
That must have indeed been a day of triumph. Machines supplying their every necessity, attending to their every want, obeying their every whim at the touch of a button. That must have been Utopia achieved!
But it had proven to be a bitter Utopia. They had gone forward blindly and recklessly to achieve it, and unknowingly they had gone a step too far. Somewhere, amid the machines they supposed they had under their control, they were imbued with a spark of intelligence. One of the machines added unto itself—perhaps secretly; built and evolved itself into a terribly efficient unit of inspired intelligence. And guided by that intelligence, other machines were built and came under its control. The rest must have been a matter of course. Revolt and easy victory.
So I pictured the evolution of the mechanical brain that even now was directing activities from down there under its metal dome.
And the metal shell around the satellite—did not that mean that the bird people were expecting an invasion? Perhaps, after all, this was not the original planet of the bird people; perhaps space travel was not an innovation among the machines. Perhaps it was on one of the far inner planets near the sun that the bird people had achieved the Utopia that proved to be such a terrible nemesis; perhaps they had moved to the next planet, never dreaming that the machines could follow; but the machines had followed after a number of years, the bird people being always driven outward, the machines always following at leisure in search of new spheres of conquest. And finally the bird people had fled to this planet, and from it to the satellite; and realizing that in a few years the machines would come again in all their invincibility, they had then ensconced themselves beneath the shell of metal.
At any rate: they did not flee to a far-away safe spot in the universe as they could have very easily done. Instead, they stayed; always one sphere ahead of the marauding machines, they must always be planning a means of wiping out the spreading evil they had loosed.
It might be that the shell around the satellite was in some way a clever trap! But so thinking, I remembered again the white-flame machines and the deadly efficiency of the globe I had seen, and then my hopes faded away.
Perhaps some day they would eventually find a way to check the spreading menace. But on the other extreme, the machines might spread out to other solar systems, other galaxies, until some day, a billion years hence, they would occupy every sphere in this universe . . . .
Such were my thoughts as I lay prone there upon the grassy slope and looked down into the plain, down upon the ceaseless clatter and the ceaseless moving of lights in the dark. I was very small now; soon, very soon, I would leave this world.
My last impression was of a number of the space globes, barely discernible in the dusk below; and among them towering up high and round, was one much larger than the others, and I could guess which machine would occupy that globe.
And my last thought was a regret that I hadn’t made a more determined effort to destroy that malicious mechanism, The Brain. So I passed from this world of machines—the world that was an electron on a grain of sand that existed on a prehistoric world that was but an electron on a microscope-slide that existed on a world that was but an electron in a piece of Rehyllium-X on the Professor’s laboratory table.
VIII
It is useless to go on. I have neither the time nor the desire to relate in detail all the adventures that have befallen me, the universes I have passed into, the things I have seen and experienced and learned on all the worlds since I left the planet of the machines.
Ever smaller cycles . . . . infinite universes . . . . never ending . . . . each presenting something new . . . . some queer variation of life or intelligence . . . . Life? Intelligence? Terms I once associated with things animate, things protoplasmic and understandable. I find it hard to apply them to all the divergencies of shape and form and construction I have encountered . . . .
Worlds young . . . . warm . . . . volcanic and steaming . . . . the single cell emerging from the slime of warm oceans to propagate on primordial continents . . . . other worlds, innumerable . . . . life divergent in all branches from the single cell . . . . amorphous globules . . . . amphibian . . . . crustacean . . . . reptilian . . . . plant . . . . insect . . . . bird . . . . mammal . . . . all possible variations of combinations . . . . biological monstrosities indescribable . . . .
Other forms beyond any attempt at classification . . . . beyond all reason or comprehension of my puny mind . . . . essences of pure flame . . . . others gaseous, incandescent and quiescent alike . . . . plant forms encompassing an entire globe . . . . crystalline beings sentient and reasoning . . . great shimmering columnar forms, seemingly liquid, defying gravity by some strange power of cohesion . . . . a world of sound-vibrations, throbbing, expanding, reverberating in unbroken echoes that nearly drove me crazy . . . . globular brain-like masses utterly dissociated from any material substance . . . . intra-dimensional beings, all shapes and shapeless . . . . entities utterly incapable of registration upon any of my senses except the sixth, that of instinct . . . .
Suns dying .. . . planets cold and dark and airless . . . . last vestiges of once proud races struggling for a few more meager years of sustenance . . . . great cavities . . . . beds of evaporated seas . . . . small furry animals scurrying to cover at my approach . . . . desolation. . . . ruins crumbling surely into the sands of barren deserts, the last mute evidence of vanished civilizations . . . . Other worlds . . . . a-flourished with life . . . . blessed with light and heat . . . . staggering cities . . . . vast populations . . . . ships plying the surface of oceans, and others in the air . . . . huge observatories . . . . tremendous strides in the sciences . . . .
Space flight . . . . battles for the supremacy of worlds . . . . blasting rays of super-destruction . . . . collision of planets . . . . disruption of solar systems . . . cosmic annihilation . . . .
Light space . . . . a universe with a tenuous, filmy something around it, which I burst through . . . . all around me not the customary blackness of outer space I had known, but light . . . . filled with tiny dots that were globes of darkness . . . . that were burnt-out suns and lifeless planets . . . . nowhere a shimmering planet, nowhere a flaming sun . . . . only remote specks of black amid the light-satiated emptiness . . . .
How many of the infinitely smaller atomic cycles I have passed into, I do not know. I tried to keep count of them at first, but somewhere between twenty and thirty I gave it up; and that was long ago.
Each time I would think: “This cannot go on forever—it cannot; surely this next time I must reach the end.”
But I have not reached the end.
Good God—how can there be an end? Worlds composed of atoms . . . . each atom similarly composed . . . . The end would have to be an indestructible solid, and that cannot be; all matter divisible into smaller matter . . . .
What keeps me from going insane? I want to go insane!
I am tired . . . . a strange tiredness neither of mind nor body. Death would be a welcome release from the endless fate that is mine.
But even death is denied me. I have sought it . . . . I have prayed for it and begged for it . . . . but it is not to be.
On all the countless worlds I have contacted, the inhabitants were of two distinctions: they were either so low in the state of intelligence that they fled and barricaded themselves against me in superstitious terror—or were so highly intellectual that they recognized me for what I was and welcomed me among them. On all but a few worlds the latter was the case, and it is on these types that I will dwell briefly.
These beings—or shapes or monstrosities or essences—were in every case mentally and scientifically far above me. In most cases they had observed me for years as a dark shadow looming beyond the farthest stars, blotting out certain star-fields and nebulae . . . . and always when I came to their world they welcomed me with scientific enthusiasm.
Always they were puzzled as to my steady shrinking, and always when they learned of my origin and the manner of my being there, they were surprised and excited.
In most cases gratification was apparent when they learned definitely that there were indeed great ultramacrocosmic universes. It seemed that all of them had long held the theory that such was the case.
On most of the worlds, too, the beings—or entities—or whatever the case might be—were surprised that the Professor, one of my fellow creatures, had invented such a marvelous vitalized element as “Shrinx.”
"Almost unbelievable," was the general consensus of opinion; "scientifically he must be centuries ahead of the time on his own planet, if we are to judge the majority of the race by this creature here"—meaning me.
In spite of the fact that on nearly every world I was looked upon as mentally inferior, they conversed with me and I with them, by various of their methods, in most cases different variations of telepathy. They learned in minute detail and with much interest all of my past experiences in other universes. They answered all of my questions and explained many things besides, about their own universe and world and civilization and scientific achievements, most of which were completely beyond my comprehension, so alien were they in nature.
And of all the intra-universal beings I have had converse with, the strangest were those essences who dwelt in outer space as well as on various planets; identifiable to me only as vague blots of emptiness, total absences of light or color or substance; who impressed upon me the fact that they were Pure Intelligences, far above and superior to any material plane; but who professed an interest in me, bearing me with them to various planets, revealing many things and treating me very kindly. During my sojourn with them I learned from experience the total subservience of matter to influences of mind. On a giant mountainous world I stepped out upon a thin beam of light stretched between two crags, and willed with all my consciousness that I would not fall. And I did not.
I have learned many things. I know that my mind is much sharper, more penetrative, more grasping, than ever before. And vast fields of wonder and knowledge lie before me in other universes yet to come.
But in spite of this, I am ready for it all to end. This strange tiredness that is upon me—I cannot understand it. Perhaps some invisible radiation in empty space is satiating me with this tiredness.
Perhaps it is only that I am very lonely. How very far away I am from my own tiny sphere! Millions upon millions . . . . trillions upon trillions . . . . of light-years . . . . Light years! Light cannot measure the distance. And yet it is no distance: I am in a block of metal on the Professor’s laboratory table . . . .
Yet how far away into space and time I have gone! Years have passed, years far beyond my normal span of life. I am eternal. Yes, eternal life . . . . that men have dreamed of . . . . prayed for . . . . sought after . . . . is mine—and I dream and pray and seek for death!
Death. All the strange beings I have seen and conversed with, have denied it. I have implored many of them to release me painlessly and for all time—but to no avail. Many of them were possessed of the scientific means to stop my steady shrinkage—but they would not stop it. None of them would hinder me, none of them would tamper with the things that were. Why? Always I asked them why, and they would not answer.
But I need no answer. I think I understand. These beings of science realized that such an entity as myself should never be . . . . that I am a blasphemy upon all creation and beyond all reason . . . . they realized that eternal life is a terrible thing . . . . a thing not to be desired . . . . and as punishment for delving into secrets never meant to be revealed, none of them will release me from my fate . . . .
Perhaps they are right, but oh, it is cruel! Cruel! The fault is not mine, I am here against my own will.
And so I continue ever down, alone and lonely, yearning for others of my kind. Always hopeful—and always disappointed.
So it was that I departed from a certain world of highly intelligent gaseous beings; a world that was in itself composed of a highly rarefied substance bordering on nebulosity. So it was that I became even smaller, was lifted up in a whirling, expanding vortex of the dense atmosphere, and entered the universe which it composed.
Why I was attracted by that tiny, far away speck of yellow, I do not know. It was near the center of the nebula I had entered. There were other suns far brighter, far more attractive, very much nearer. This minute yellow sun was dwarfed by other suns and sun-clusters around it—seemed insignificant and lost among them. And why I was drawn to it, so far away, I cannot explain.
But mere distance, even space distance, was nothing to me now. I had long since learned from the Pure Intelligence the secret of propulsion by mind influence, and by this means I propelled myself through space at any desired speed not exceeding that of light; as my mind was incapable of imagining speed faster than light, I of course could not cause my material body to exceed it.
So I neared the yellow sun in a few minutes, and observed that it had twelve planets. And as I was far too large to yet land on any sphere, I wandered far among other suns, observing the haphazard construction of this universe, but never losing sight of the small yellow sun that had so intrigued me. And at last, much smaller, I returned to it.
And of all the twelve planets, one was particularly attractive to me. It was a tiny blue one. It made not much difference where I landed, so why should I have picked it from among the others? Perhaps only a whim—but I think the true reason was because of its constant pale blue twinkling, as though it were beckoning to me, inviting me to come to it. It was an unexplainable phenomenon; none of the others did that. So I moved closer to the orbit of the blue planet, and landed upon it.
As usual I didn’t move from where I stood for a time, until I could view the surrounding terrain; and then I observed that I had landed in a great lake—a chain of lakes. A short distance to my left was a city miles wide, a great part of which was inundated by the flood I had caused.
Very carefully, so as not to cause further tidal waves, I stepped from the lake to solid ground, and the waters receded somewhat. Soon I saw a group of five machines flying toward me; each of them had two wings held stiffly at right angles to the body. Looking around me I saw others of these machines winging toward me from every direction, always in groups of five, in V formation. When they had come very close they began to dart and swoop in a most peculiar manner, from them came sharp staccato sounds, and I felt the impact of many tiny pellets upon my skin! These beings were very warlike, I thought, or else very excitable.
Their bombardment continued for some time, and I began to find it most irritating; these tiny pellets could not harm me seriously, could not even pierce my skin, but the impact of them stung. I could not account for their attack upon me, unless it be that they were angry at the flood I had caused by my landing. If that were the case they were very unreasonable, I thought; any damage I had done was purely unintentional, and they should realize that. But I was soon to learn that these creatures were very foolish in many of their actions and manners; they were to prove puzzling to me in more ways than one.
I waved my arms around, and presently they ceased their futile bombardment, but continued to fly around me.
I wished I could see what manner of beings flew these machines. They were continually landing and rising again from a wide level field below.
For several hours they buzzed all around while I became steadily smaller. Below me I could now see long ribbons of white that I guessed were roads. Along these roads crawled tiny vehicles, which soon became so numerous that all movement came to a standstill, so congested were they. In the fields a large part of the populace had gathered, and was being constantly augmented by others.
At last I was sufficiently small so that I could make out closer details, and I looked more intently at the beings who inhabited this world. My heart gave a quick leap then, for they somewhat resembled myself in structure. They were four-limbed and stood erect, their method of locomotion consisting of short jerky hops, very different from the smooth gliding movement of my own race. Their general features were somewhat different too—seemed grotesque to me—but the only main difference between them and myself was that their bodies were somewhat more columnar, roughly oval in shape and very thin, I would say almost frail.
Among the thousands gathered there were perhaps a score who seemed in authority. They rode upon the backs of clumsy looking, four-footed animals, and seemed to have difficulty in keeping the excited crowd under control. I, of course, was the center of their excitement; my presence seemed to have caused more consternation here than upon any other world.
Eventually a way was made through the crowd and one of the ponderous four-wheeled vehicles was brought along the road opposite to where I stood. I supposed they wanted me to enter the rough boxlike affair, so I did so, and was hauled with many bumps and jolts over the rough road toward the city I had seen to the left. I could have rebelled at this barbarous treatment, but I reflected that I was still very large and this was probably the only way they had of transporting me to wherever I was going.
It had become quite dark, and the city was aglow with thousands of lights. I was taken into a certain building, and at once many important looking persons came to observe me.
I have stated that my mind had become much more penetrative than ever before, so I was not surprised to learn that I could read many of the thoughts of these persons without much difficulty. I learned that these were scientists who had come here from other immediate cities as quickly as possible—most of them in the winged machines, which they called “planes”—when they had learned of my landing here. For many months they had been certain that I would land. They had observed me through their telescopes, and their period of waiting had been a speculative one. And I could now see that they were greatly puzzled, filled with much wonderment, and no more enlightenment about me than they had been possessed of before.
Though still very large, I was becoming surely smaller, and it was this aspect that puzzled them most, just as it had on all the other worlds. Secondly in their speculations was the matter of where I had come from.
Many were the theories that passed among them. Certain they were that I had come a far distance. Uranus? Neptune? Pluto? I learned that these were the names of the outmost planets of this system. No, they decided; I must have come a much farther distance than that. Perhaps from another far-away galaxy of this universe! Their minds were staggered at that thought. Yet how very far away they were from the truth.
They addressed me in their own language, and seemed to realize that it was futile. Although I understood everything they said and everything that was in their minds, they could not know that I did, for I could not answer them. Their minds seemed utterly closed to all my attempts at thought communication, so I gave it up.
They conversed then among themselves, and I could read the hopelessness in their minds. I could see, too, as they discussed me, that they looked upon me as being abhorrent, a monstrosity. And as I searched the recesses of their minds, I found many things.
I found that it was the inherent instinct of this race to look upon all unnatural occurrences and phenomena with suspicion and disbelief and prejudiced mind.
I found that they had great pride for their accomplishments in the way of scientific and inventive progress. Their astronomers had delved a short distance into outer space, but considered it a very great distance; and having failed to find signs of intelligent life upon any immediate sphere, they leaped blindly and fondly to the conclusion that their own species of life was the dominant one in this solar system and perhaps—it was a reluctant perhaps—in the entire universe.
Their conception of a universe was a puny one. True, at the present time there was extant a theory of an expanding universe, and in that theory at least they were correct, I knew, remembering the former world I had left—the swirling, expanding wisp of gaseous atmosphere of which this tiny blue sphere was an electron. Yes, their “expanding universe” theory was indeed correct. But very few of their thinkers went beyond their own immediate universe—went deeply enough to even remotely glimpse the vast truth.
They had vast cities, yes. I had seen many of them from my height as I towered above their world. A great civilization, I had thought then. But now I know that great cities do not make great civilizations. I am disappointed at what I have found here, and cannot even understand why I should be disappointed, for this blue sphere is nothing to me and soon I will be gone on my eternal journey downward . . . .
Many things I read in these scientists’ minds—things clear and concise, things dim and remote; but they would never know.
And then in the mind of one of the persons, I read an idea. He went away, and returned shortly with an apparatus consisting of wires, a headphone, and a flat revolving disc. He spoke into an instrument, a sort of amplifier. Then a few minutes later he touched a sharp pointed instrument to the rotating disc, and I heard the identical sounds reproduced which he had spoken. A very crude method, but effective in a certain way. They wanted to register my speech so that they would have at least something to work on when I had gone.
I tried to speak some of my old language into the instrument. I had thought I was beyond all surprises, but I was surprised at what happened. For nothing happened. I could not speak. Neither in the old familiar language I had known so long ago, nor in any kind of sound. I had communicated so entirely by thought transference on so many of the other worlds, that now my power of vocal utterance was gone.
They were disappointed. I was not sorry, for they could not have deciphered any language so utterly alien as mine was.
Then they resorted to the mathematics by which this universe and all universes are controlled; into which mathematical mold the eternal All was cast at the beginning and has moved errorlessly since. They produced a great chart which showed the conglomerated masses of this and other galaxies. Then upon a black panel set in the wall, was drawn a circle—understandable in any universe—and around it ten smaller circles. This was evidently their solar system, though I could not understand why they drew but ten circles when I had seen twelve planets from outer space. Then a tiny spot was designated on the chart, the position of this system in its particular galaxy. Then they handed the chart to me.
It was useless. Utterly impossible. How could I ever indicate my own universe, much less my galaxy and solar system, by such puny methods as these? How could I make them know that my own universe and planet were so infinitely large in the scheme of things that theirs were practically non-existent? How could I make them know that their universe was not outside my own, but on my planet?—superimposed in a block of metal on a laboratory table, in a grain of sand, in the atoms of glass in a microscopic slide, in a drop of water, in a blade of grass, in a bit of cold flame, in a thousand other variations of elements and substances all of which I had passed down into and beyond, and finally in a wisp of gas that was the cause of their “expanding universe.” Even could I have conversed with them in their own language I could not have made them grasp the vastness of all those substances existing on worlds each of which was but an electron of an atom in one of trillions upon trillions of molecules of an infinitely larger world! Such a conception would have shattered their minds.
It was very evident that they would never be able to establish communication with me even remotely, nor I with them; and I was becoming very impatient. I wanted to be out of the stifling building, out under the night sky, free and unhampered in the vast space which was my abode.
Upon seeing that I made no move to indicate on the chart which part of their puny universe I came from, the scientists around me again conversed among themselves; and this time I was amazed at the trend of their thoughts.
For the conclusion which they had reached was that I was some freak of outer space which had somehow wandered here, and that my place in the scale of evolution was too far below their own for them to establish ideas with me either by spoken language (of which they concluded I had none) or by signs (which I was apparently too barbaric to understand)!! This—this was their unanimous conclusion! This, because I had not uttered any language for them to record, and because the chart of their universe was utterly insignificant to me! Never did it occur to them that the opposite might be true—that I might converse with them but for the fact that their minds were too weak to register my thoughts!
Disgust was my reaction to these short-sighted conclusions of their unimaginable minds—disgust which gave way to an old emotion, that of anger.
And as that one impulsive, rising burst of anger flooded my mind, a strange thing happened:
Every one of the scientists before me dropped to the floor in a state of unconsciousness.
My mind had, indeed, become much more penetrative than ever before. No doubt my surge of anger had sent out intangible waves which had struck upon their centers of consciousness with sufficient force to render them insensible.
I was glad to be done with them. I left the four walls of the building, emerged into the glorious expansive night under the stars and set out along the street in a direction that I believed would lead me away from the city. I wanted to get away from it, away from this world and the people who inhabited it.
As I advanced along the streets all who saw me recognized me at once and most of them fled unreasonably for safety. A group of persons in one of the vehicles tried to bar my progress, but I exercised my power of anger upon them; they drooped senselessly and their vehicle crashed into a building and was demolished.
In a few minutes the city was behind me and I was striding down one of the roads, destination unknown; nor did it matter, except that now I was free and alone as it should be. I had but a few more hours on this world.
And then it was that the feeling came upon me again, the strange feeling that I had experienced twice before: once when I had selected the tiny orange sun from among the millions of others, and again when I had chosen this tiny blue planet. Now I felt it for a third time, more strongly than ever, and now I knew that this feeling had some very definite purpose for being. It was as though something, some power beyond question, drew me irresistibly to it; I could not resist, nor did I want to. This time it was very strong and very near.
Peering into the darkness along the road, I saw a light some distance ahead and to the left, and I knew that I must go to that light.
When I had come nearer I could see that it emanated from a house set far back in a grove of trees, and I approached it without hesitation. The night was warm, and a pair of double windows opened upon a well-lighted room. In this room was a man.
I stepped inside and stood motionless, not yet knowing why I should have been drawn there.
The man’s back was toward me. He was seated before a square dialed instrument, and seemed to be listening intently to some report coming from it. The sounds from the box were unintelligible to me, so I turned my attention to reading the man’s mind as he listened, and was not surprised to learn that the reports concerned myself.
“—casualties somewhat exaggerated, though the property damage has reached millions of dollars,” came the news from the box. “Cleveland was of course hardest hit, though not unexpectedly, astronomical computators having estimated with fair accuracy the radius of danger. The creature landed in Lake Erie only a few miles east of the city. At the contact the waters rose over the breakwater with a rush and inundated nearly one-third of the city before receding, and it was well that the greater part of the populace had heeded the advance warnings and fled . . . . all lake towns in the vicinity have reported heavy property damage, and cities as far east as Erie, and as far west as Toledo, have reported high flood waters . . . . all available Government combat planes were rushed to the scene in case the creature should show signs of hostility . . . . scientific men who have awaited the thing’s landing for months immediately chartered planes for Cleveland . . . . despite the elaborate cordons of police and militiamen, the crowds broke through and entered the area, and within an hour after the landing roads in every direction were congested with traffic . . . . for several hours scientists circled and examined the creature in planes, while its unbelievable shrinkage continued . . . . the only report we have from them is that, aside from the contour of its great bell-shaped torso, the creature is quite amazingly correct anatomically . . . . an unofficial statement from Dr. Hilton U. Cogsworthy of the Alleghany Biological Society, is to the effect that such a creature isn’t. That it cannot possibly exist. That the whole thing is the result of some kind of mass hypnotism on a gigantic scale. This, of course, in lieu of some reasonable explanation. . . . many persons would like to believe the ’mass hypnotism’ theory, and many always will; but those who have seen it and taken photographs of it from every angle know that it does exist and that its steady shrinking goes on . . . . Professor James L. Harvey of Miami University has suffered a stroke of temporary insanity and is under the care of physicians. The habitual curiosity seekers who flocked to the scene are apparently more hardened . . . . the latest report is that the creature, still very large, has been transported under heavy guard to the Cleveland Institute of Scientific Research, where is gathered every scientist of note east of the Mississippi . . . . stand by for further news flashes . . . . “
The voice from the box ceased, and as I continued to read the mind of the man whose back was toward me, I saw that he was deeply absorbed in the news he had heard. And the mind of this person was something of a puzzle to me. He was above the average intelligence of those on this world, and was possessed of a certain amount of fundamental scientific knowledge; but I could see immediately that his was not a scientifically trained mind. By profession he was a writer—one who recorded fictitious “happenings” in the written language, so that others might absorb and enjoy them.
And as I probed into his mind I was amazed at the depth of imagination there, a trait almost wholly lacking in those others I had encountered, the scientists. And I knew that at last here was one with whose mind I might contact . . . . here was one who was different from the others . . . . who went deeper . . . . who seemed on the very edge of the truth. Here was one who thought: “—this strange creature, which has landed here . . . . alien to anything we have ever known . . . . might it not be alien even to our universe? . . . . the strange shrinking . . . . from that phenomenon alone we might conclude that it has come an inconceivable distance . . . . its shrinking may have begun hundreds, thousands of years ago . . . . and if we could but communicate with it, before it passes from Earth forever, what strange things might it not tell us!”
The voice came from the box again, interrupting these thoughts in his mind.
“Attention! Flash! The report comes that the alien space-creature, which was taken to the Scientific Research Institute for observation by scientists, has escaped, after projecting a kind of invisible mind force which rendered unconscious all those within reach. The creature was reported seen by a number of persons, after it left the building. A police squad car was wrecked as a direct result of the creature’s “mind force,” and three policemen were injured, none seriously. It was last seen leaving the city by the north-east, and all persons are ordered to be on the lookout and to report immediately if it is sighted.”
Again the report from the box ceased, and again I probed into the man’s mind, this time deeper, hoping to establish a contact with it which would allow for thought-communication.
I must have at least aroused some hidden mind-instinct, for he whirled to face me, overturning his chair. Surprise was on his face, and something in his eyes that must have been fear.
"Do not be alarmed," I flashed. "Be seated again."
I could see that his mind had not received my thought. But he must have known from my manner that I meant no harm, for he resumed his seat. I advanced further into the room, standing before him. The fear had gone out of his eyes and he only sat tensely staring at me, his hands gripping the arms of the chair.
"I know that you would like to learn things about myself," I telepathed; "things which those others—your scientists—would have liked to know."
Reading his mind I could see that he had not received the thought, so I probed even deeper and again flashed the same thought. This time he did receive it, and there was an answering light in his eyes.
He said “Yes,” aloud.
"Those others, your scientists," I went on, "would never have believed nor even understood my story, even if their minds were of the type to receive my thoughts, which they are not."
He received and comprehended that thought, too, but I could see that this was a great strain on his mind and could not go on for long.
"Yours is the only mind I have encountered here with which I could establish thought," I continued, "but even now it is becoming weakened under the unaccustomed strain. I wish to leave my record and story with you, but it cannot be by this means. I can put your mind under a hypnotic influence and impress my thoughts upon your subconscious mind, if you have some means of recording them. But you must hurry; I have only a few more hours here at the most, and in your entire lifetime it would be impossible for you to record all that I could tell."
I could read doubt in his mind. But only for one instant did he hesitate. Then he rose and went to a table where there was a pile of smooth white paper and a sharp pointed instrument—pen—for recording my thoughts in words of his own language.
"I am ready," was the thought in his mind.
So I have told my story. Why? I do not know, except that I wanted to. Of all the universes I have passed into, only on this blue sphere have I found creatures even remotely resembling myself. And they are a disappointment; and now I know that I shall never find others of my kind. Never, unless—
I have a theory. Where is the beginning or the end of the eternal All I have been traversing? Suppose there is none? Suppose that, after traversing a few more atomic cycles, I should enter a universe which seemed somehow familiar to me; and that I should enter a certain familiar galaxy, and approach a certain sun, a certain planet—and find that I was back where I started from so long ago: back on my own planet, where I should find the Professor in the laboratory still receiving my sound and sight impressions!! An insane theory; an impossible one. It shall never be.
Well, then, suppose that after leaving this sphere—after descending into another atomic universe—I should choose not to alight on any planet? Suppose I should remain in empty space, my size constantly diminishing? That would be one way of ending it all, I suppose. Or would it? Is not my body matter, and is not matter infinite, limitless, eternal? How then could I ever reach a “nothingness?” It is hopeless. I am eternal. My mind too must be eternal or it would surely have snapped long ago at such concepts.
I am so very small that my mind is losing contact with the mind of him who sits here before me writing these thoughts in words of his own language, though his mind is under the hypnotic spell of my own and he is oblivious to the words he writes. I have clambered upon the top of the table beside the pile of pages he has written, to bring my mind closer to his. But why should I want to continue the thought-contact for another instant? My story is finished, there is nothing more to tell.
I shall never find others of my kind . . . I am alone . . . . I think that soon, in some manner, I shall try to put an end to it . . . .
I am very small now . . . . the hypnosis is passing from his mind . . . . I can no longer control it . . . . the thought-contact is slipping . . . .
EPILOGUE
National Press-Radio Service, Sept. 29, 1937 (through Cleveland Daily Clarion) :—Exactly one year ago today was a day never to be forgotten in the history of this planet. On that day a strange visitor arrived—and departed.
On September 29, 1936, at 3:31 P.M., that thing from outer space known henceforth only as “The Alien” landed in Lake Erie near Cleveland, causing not so much destruction and terror as great bewilderment and awe, scientists being baffled in their attempts to determine whence it came and the secret of its strange steady shrinking.
Now, on the anniversary of that memorable day, we are presenting to the public a most unusual and interesting document purported to be a true account and history of that strange being, The Alien. This document was presented to us only a few days ago by Stanton Cobb Lentz, renowned author of “The Answer to the Ages” and other serious books, as well as of scores of short stories and books of the widely popular type of literature known as science-fiction.
You have read the above document. While our opinion as to its authenticity is frankly skeptical, we shall print Mr. Lentz’s comment and let you, the reader, judge for yourself whether the story was related to Mr. Lentz by The Alien in the manner described, or whether it is only a product of Mr. Lentz’s most fertile imagination.
“On the afternoon of September 29 a year ago,” states Mr. Lentz, “I fled the city as did many others, heeding the warning of a possible tidal wave, should The Alien land in the lake. Thousands of persons had gathered five or six miles to the south, and from there we watched the huge shape overhead, so expansive that it blotted out the sunlight and plunged that section of the country into a partial eclipse. It seemed to draw nearer by slow degrees until, about 3:30 o’clock, it began its downward rush. The sound of contact as it struck the lake was audible for miles, but it was not until later that we learned the extent of the flood. After the landing all was confusion and excitement as combat planes arrived and very foolishly began to bombard the creature and crowds began to advance upon the scene. The entire countryside being in such crowded turmoil, it took me several difficult hours to return to my home. There I listened to the varied reports of the happenings of the past several hours.
“When I had that strange feeling that someone was behind me, and when I whirled to see The Alien standing there in the room, I do not presume to say that I was not scared. I was. I was very much scared. I had seen The Alien when it was five or six hundred feet tall —but that had been from afar. Now it was only ten or eleven feet tall, but was standing right before me. But my scaredness was only momentary, for something seemed to enter and calm my mind.
“Then, although there was no audible sound, I became aware of the thought: ’I know that you would like to learn things about myself, things which those others—your scientists—would have liked to know.’
“This was mental telepathy! I had often used the theory in my stories, but never had I dreamed that I would experience such a medium of thought in real fact. But here it was.
” ’Those others, your scientists,’ came the next thought, ’would never have believed nor even understood my story, even if their minds were of the type to receive my thoughts, which they are not.’ And then I began to feel a strain upon my mind, and knew that I could not stand much more of it.
“Then came the thought that he would relate his story through my sub-conscious mind if I had some means of recording it in my own language. For an instant I hesitated; and then I realized that time was fleeing and never again would I have such an opportunity as this. I went to my desk, where only that morning I had been working on a manuscript. There was paper and ink in plenty.
“My last impression was of some force seeming to spread over my mind; then a terrific dizziness, and the ceiling seemed to crash upon me.
“No time at all had seemed to elapse, when my mind regained its normal faculties; but before me on the desk was a pile of manuscript paper closely written in my own longhand. And—what many persons will find it hard to believe—standing upon that pile of written paper upon my desk top, was The Alien—now scarcely two inches in height—and steadily and surely diminishing! In utter fascination I watched the transformation that was taking place before my eyes—watched until The Alien had become entirely invisible, had descended down into the topmost sheet of paper there on my desk . . . .
“Now I realize that the foregoing document and my explanation of it will be received in many ways. I have waited a full year before making it public. Accept it now as fiction if you wish. There may be some few who will see the truth of it, or at least the possibility; but the vast majority will leap at once to the conclusion that the whole thing is a concoction of my own imagination; that, taking advantage of The Alien’s landing on this planet, I wrote the story to fit the occasion, very appropriately using The Alien as the main theme. To many this will seem all the more to be true, in face of the fact that in most of my science-fiction stories I have poked ridicule and derision and satire at mankind and all its high vaunted science and civilization and achievements—always more or less with my tongue in my cheek however, as the expression has it. And then along comes this Alien, takes a look at us and concludes that he is very disappointed, not to mention disgusted. “However, I wish to present a few facts to help substantiate the authenticity of the script. Firstly: for some time after awakening from my hypnosis I was beset by a curious dizziness, though my mind was quite clear. Shortly after The Alien had disappeared I called my physician, Dr. C. M. Rollins. After an examination and a few mental tests he was greatly puzzled. He could not diagnose my case; my dizziness was the after effect of a hypnosis of a type he had never before encountered. I offered no explanation except to say that I had not been feeling well for the past several days.
“Secondly: the muscles of my right hand were so cramped from the long period of steady writing that I could not open my fingers. As an explanation I said that I had been writing for hours on the final chapters of my latest book, and Dr. Rollins said: ’Man, you must be crazy.’ The process of relaxing the muscles was painful. “Upon my request Dr. Rollins will vouch for the truth of the above statements.
“Thirdly: when I read the manuscript the writing was easily recognizable as my own free, swinging longhand up to the last few paragraphs, when the writing became shaky, the last few words terminating in an almost undecipherable scrawl as the Alien’s contact with my mind slipped away.
“Fourthly: I presented the manuscript to Mr. Howard A. Byerson, fiction editor of the National Newspaper Syndicate Service, and at once he misunderstood the entire idea. ’I have read your story, Mr. Lentz,’ he said a few days later, ’and it certainly comes at an appropriate time, right on the anniversary of The Alien’s landing. A neat idea about the origin of The Alien, but a bit farfetched. Now, let’s see, about the price; of course we shall syndicate your story through our National Newspaper chain, and—’
” ’You have the wrong idea,’ I said. ’It is not a story, but a true history of The Alien as related to me by The Alien, and I wish that fact emphasized; if necessary I will write a letter of explanation to be published with the manuscript. And I am not selling you the publication rights, I am merely giving you the document as the quickest and surest way of presenting it to the public.’
” ’But surely you are not serious? An appropriate story by Stanton Cobb Lentz, on the eve of the anniversary of The Alien’s landing, is a scoop; and you—’
” ’I do not ask and will not take a cent for the document,’ I said;
‘you have it now, it is yours, so do with it as you see fit.’
“A memory that will live with me always is the sight of The Alien as last seen by me—as last seen on this earth—as it disappeared into infinite smallness there upon my desk—waving two arms upward as if in farewell . .
“And whether the above true account and history of The Alien be received as such, or as fiction, there can be no doubt that on a not far off September, a thing from some infinite sphere above landed on this earth—and departed.”
The End
Fictional Story Related Index
This is an index of full text reprints of stories that I have
read that influenced me when I was young. They are rather difficult to
come by today, as where I live they are nearly impossible to find. Yes,
you can find them on the internet, behind paywalls. Ah, that’s why all
those software engineers in California make all that money. Well, here
they are FOR FREE. Enjoy reading them.
Movies that Inspired Me
Here are some movies that I consider noteworthy and worth a view. Enjoy.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are
reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal
library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come
and enjoy a read or two as well.
My Poetry
Art that Moves Me
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
This is the full text of the short story by Robert Heinlein called “Space Jockey”. It is presented here for everyone to read. At which I hope that you, the reader, would enjoy it as much as I have. It’s a bit of boyhood that still sticks the walls of my heart.
Heinlein at his best, imagining an interplanetary future (2009) with mechanical calculators, slide rulers and astrogation guided by the stars (that's what Shorty gives the pilot in that sheet of paper, the stars he needs to align the ship to for launching). He's both naive and accurate in some things.
- Space Jockey - Illustration by Fred Ludekens
Space Jockey
JUST as they were leaving the telephone called his name. “Don’t answer it,” she pleaded. “We’ll miss the curtain.”
“Who is it?” he called out. The viewplate lighted; he recognized Olga Pierce, and behind her the Colorado Springs office of Trans-Lunar Transit.
“Calling Mr. Pemberton. Calling—Oh, it’s you, Jake. You’re on. Flight 27, Supra-New York to Space Terminal. I’ll have a copter pick you up in twenty minutes.”
“How come?” he protested. “I’m fourth down on the call board.”
“You were fourth down. Now you are standby pilot to Hicks—and he just got a psycho down-check.”
“Hicks got psychoed? That’s silly!”
“Happens to the best, chum. Be ready. ‘Bye now.”
His wife was twisting sixteen dollars worth of lace handkerchief to a shapeless mass. “Jake, this is ridiculous. For three months I haven’t seen enough of you to know what you look like.
“Sorry, kid. Take Helen to the show.”
“Oh, Jake, I don’t care about the show; I wanted to get you where they couldn’t reach you for once.”
“They would have called me at the theater.”
“Oh, no! I wiped out the record you’d left.”
“Phyllis! Are you trying to get me fired?”
“Don’t look at me that way.” She waited, hoping that he would speak, regretting the side issue, and wondering how to tell him that her own fretfulness was caused, not by disappointment, but by gnawing worry for his safety every time he went out into space.
She went on desperately, “You don’t have to take this flight, darling; you’ve been on Earth less than the time limit. Please, Jake!”
He was peeling off his tux. “I’ve told you a thousand times: a pilot doesn’t get a regular run by playing space-lawyer with the rule book. Wiping out my follow-up message—why did you do it, Phyllis? Trying to ground me?”
“No, darling, but I thought just this once—”
“When they offer me a flight I take it.” He walked stiffly out of the room.
He came back ten minutes later, dressed for space and apparently in good humor; he was whistling: “—the caller called Casey at ha’ past four; he kissed his—” He broke off when he saw her face, and set his mouth, ”Where’s my coverall?”
“I’ll get it. Let me fix you something to eat.”
“You know I can’t take high acceleration on a full stomach. And why lose thirty bucks to lift another pound?”
Dressed as he was, in shorts, singlet, sandals, and pocket belt, he was already good for about minus-fifty pounds in weight bonus; she started to tell him the weight penalty on a sandwich and a cup of coffee did not matter to them, but it was just one more possible cause for misunderstanding.
Neither of them said much until the taxicab clumped on the roof. He kissed her goodbye and told her not to come outside. She obeyed—until she heard the helicopter take off. Then she climbed to the roof and watched it out of sight.
The traveling-public gripes at the lack of direct Earth-to-Moon service, but it takes three types of rocket ships and two space-station changes to make a fiddling quarter-million-mile jump for a good reason: Money.
The Commerce Commission has set the charges for the present three-stage lift from here to the Moon at thirty dollars a pound. Would direct service be cheaper?—a ship designed to blast off from Earth, make an airless landing on the Moon, return and make an atmosphere landing, would be so cluttered up with heavy special equipment used only once in the trip that it could not show a profit at a thousand dollars a pound! Imagine combining a ferry boat, a subway train, and an express elevator—
So Trans-Lunar uses rockets braced for catapulting, and winged for landing on return to Earth to make the terrific lift from Earth to our satellite station Supra-New York. The long middle lap, from there to where Space Terminal circles the Moon, calls for comfort-but no landing gear. The Flying Dutchman and the Philip Nolan never land; they were even assembled in space, and they resemble winged rockets like the Skysprite and the Firefly as little as a Pullman train resembles a parachute.
The Moonbat and the Gremlin are good only for the jump from Space Terminal down to Luna . . . no wings, cocoon-like acceleration-and-crash hammocks, fractional controls on their enormous jets.
The change-over points would not have to be more than air-conditioned tanks. Of course Space Terminal is quite a city, what with the Mars and Venus traffic, but even today Supra-New York is still rather primitive, hardly more than a fueling point and a restaurant-waiting room. It has only been the past five years that it has even been equipped to offer the comfort of one-gravity centrifuge service to passengers with queasy stomachs.
Pemberton weighed in at the spaceport office, then hurried over to where the Skysprite stood cradled in the catapult. He shucked off his coverall, shivered as he handed it to the gateman, and ducked inside. He went to his acceleration hammock and went to sleep; the lift to Supra-New York was not his worry—his job was deep space.
He woke at the surge of the catapult and the nerve-tingling rush up the face of Pikes Peak. When the Skysprite went into free flight, flung straight up above the Peak, Pemberton held his breath; if the rocket jets failed to fire, the ground-to-space pilot must try to wrestle her into a glide and bring her down, on her wings.
The rockets roared on time; Jake went back to sleep.
When the Skysprite locked in with Supra-New York. Pemberton went to the station’s stellar navigation room. He was pleased to find Shorty Weinstein, the computer, on duty. Jake trusted Shorty’s computations—a good thing when your ship, your passengers, and your own skin depend thereon. Pemberton had to be a better than average mathematician himself in order to be a pilot; his own limited talent made him appreciate the genius of those who computed the orbits.
“Hot Pilot Pemberton, the Scourge of the Spaceways—Hi!” Weinstein handed him a sheet of paper.
Jake looked at it, then looked amazed. “Hey, Shorty—you’ve made a mistake.”
“Huh? Impossible. Mabel can’t make mistakes.” Weinstein gestured at the giant astrogation computer filling the far wall.
“You made a mistake. You gave me an easy fix—’Vega, Antares, Regulus.’ You make things easy for the pilot and your guild’ll chuck you out.” Weinstein looked sheepish but pleased. “I see I don’t blast off for seventeen hours. I could have taken the morning freight.” Jake’s thoughts went back to Phyllis.
“UN canceled the morning trip.”
“Oh—” Jake shut up, for he knew Weinstein knew as little as he did. Perhaps the flight would have passed too close to an A-bomb rocket, circling the globe like a policeman. The General Staff of the Security Council did not give out information about the top secrets guarding the peace of the planet.
Pemberton shrugged. “Well, if I’m asleep, call me three hours minus.”
“Right. Your tape will be ready.”
While he slept, the Flying Dutchman nosed gently into her slip, sealed her airlocks to the Station, discharged passengers and freight from Luna City. When he woke, her holds were filling, her fuel replenished, and passengers boarding. He stopped by the post office radio desk, looking for a letter from Phyllis. Finding none, he told himself that she would have sent it to Terminal. He went on into the restaurant, bought the facsimile Herald-Tribune, and settled down grimly to enjoy the comics and his breakfast.
A man sat down opposite him and proceeded to plague him with silly questions about rocketry, topping it by misinterpreting the insignia embroidered on Pemberton’s singlet and miscalling him “Captain.” Jake hurried through breakfast to escape him, then picked up the tape from his automatic pilot, and went aboard the Flying Dutchman.
After reporting to the Captain he went to the control room, floating and pulling himself along by the handgrips. He buckled himself into the pilot’s chair and started his check off.
Captain Kelly drifted in and took the other chair as Pemberton was finishing his checking runs on the ballistic tracker. “Have a Camel, Jake.”
“I’ll take a rain check.” He continued; Kelly watched him with a slight frown. Like captains and pilots on Mark Twain’s Mississippi—and for the same reasons—a spaceship captain bosses his ship, his crew, his cargo, and his passengers, but the pilot is the final, legal, and unquestioned boss of how the ship is handled from blast-off to the end of the trip. A captain may turn down a given pilot-nothing more. Kelly fingered a slip of paper tucked in his pouch and turned over in his mind the words with which the Company psychiatrist on duty had handed it to him.
“I’ll giving this pilot clearance, Captain, but you need not accept it.”
“Pemberton’s a good man. What’s wrong?”
The psychiatrist thought over what he had observed while posing as a silly tourist bothering a stranger at breakfast. “He’s a little more anti-social than his past record shows. Something on his mind. Whatever it is, he can tolerate it for the present.
We’ll keep an eye on him.”
Kelly had answered, “Will you come along with him as pilot?”
“If you wish.”
“Don’t bother—I’ll take him. No need to lift a deadhead.”
Pemberton fed Weinstein’s tape into the robot-pilot, then turned to Kelly. “Control ready, sir.”
“Blast when ready, Pilot.” Kelly felt relieved when he heard himself make the irrevocable decision.
Pemberton signaled the Station to cast loose. The great ship was nudged out by an expanding pneumatic ram until she swam in space a thousand feet away, secured by a single line. He then turned the ship to its blast-off direction by causing a flywheel, mounted on gymbals at the ship’s center of gravity, to spin rapidly. The ship spun slowly in the opposite direction, by grace of Newton’s Third Law of Motion.
Guided by the tape, the robot-pilot tilted prisms of the pilot’s periscope so that Vega, Antares, and Regulus would shine as one image when the ship was headed right; Pemberton nursed the ship to that heading . . . fussily; a mistake of one minute of arc here meant two hundred miles at destination.
When the three images made a pinpoint, he stopped the flywheels and locked in the gyros. He then checked the heading of his ship by direct observation of each of the stars, just as a salt-water skipper uses a sextant, but with incomparably more accurate instruments. This told him nothing about the correctness of the course Weinstein had ordered—he had to take that as Gospel—but it assured him that the robot and its tape were behaving as planned. Satisfied, he cast off the last line.
Seven minutes to go—Pemberton flipped the switch permitting the robot-pilot to blast away when its clock told it to. He waited, hands poised over the manual controls, ready to take over if the robot failed, and felt the old, inescapable sick excitement building up inside him.
Even as adrenalin poured into him, stretching his time sense, throbbing in his ears, his mind kept turning back to Phyllis.
He admitted she had a kick coming—spacemen shouldn’t marry. Not that she’d starve if he messed up a landing, but a gal doesn’t want insurance; she wants a husband—minus six minutes.
If he got a regular run she could live in Space Terminal. No good-idle women at Space Terminal went bad. Oh, Phyllis wouldn’t become a tramp or a rum bum; she’d just go bats.
Five minutes more-he didn’t care much for Space Terminal himself. Nor for space! “The Romance of Interplanetary Travel”—it looked well in print, but he knew what it was: A job. Monotony. No scenery. Bursts of work, tedious waits. No home life.
Why didn’t he get an honest job and stay home nights?
He knew! Because he was a space jockey and too old to change.
What chance has a thirty-year-old married man, used to important money, to change his racket? (Four minutes.) He’d look good trying to sell helicopters on commission, now, wouldn’t he?
Maybe he could buy a piece of irrigated land and—Be your age, chum! You know as much about farming as a cow knows about cube root! No, he had made his bed when he picked rockets during his training hitch. If he had bucked for the electronics branch, or taken a GI scholarship—too late now. Straight from the service into Harriman’s Lunar Exploitations, hopping ore on Luna. That had torn it.
“How’s it going, Doc?” Kelly’s voice was edgy.
“Minus two minutes some seconds.” Damnation—Kelly knew better than to talk to the pilot on minus time.
He caught a last look through the periscope. Antares seemed to have drifted. He unclutched the gyro, tilted and spun the flywheel, braking it savagely to a stop a moment later. The image was again a pinpoint. He could not have explained what he did: it was virtuosity, exact juggling, beyond textbook and classroom.
Twenty seconds. . . .across the chronometer’s face beads of light trickled the seconds away while he tensed, ready to fire by hand, or even to disconnect and refuse the trip if his judgment told him to. A too-cautious decision might cause Lloyds’ to cancel his bond; a reckless decision could cost his license or even his life—and others.
But he was not thinking of underwriters and licenses, nor even of lives. In truth he was not thinking at all; he was feeling, feeling his ship, as if his nerve ends extended into every part of her. Five seconds . . . the safety disconnects clicked out. Four seconds . . . three seconds . . . two seconds . . . one?
He was stabbing at the band-fire button when the roar hit him.
Kelly relaxed to the pseudo-gravity of the blast and watched.
Pemberton was soberly busy, scanning dials, noting time, checking his progress by radar bounced off Supra-New York. Weinstein’s figures, robot-pilot, the ship itself, all were clicking together.
Minutes later, the critical instant neared when the robot should cut the jets. Pemberton poised a finger over the hand cut-off, while splitting his attention among radarscope, accelerometer, periscope, and chronometer. One instant they were roaring along on the jets; the next split second the ship was in free orbit, plunging silently toward the Moon. So perfectly matched were human and robot that Pemberton himself did not know which had cut the power.
He glanced again at the board, then unbuckled. “How about that cigarette, Captain? And you can let your passengers unstrap.”
No co-pilot is needed in space and most pilots would rather share a toothbrush than a control room. The pilot works about an hour at blast off, about the same before contact, and loafs during free flight, save for routine checks and corrections. Pemberton prepared to spend one hundred and four hours eating, reading, writing letters, and sleeping—especially sleeping.
When the alarm woke him, he checked the ship’s position, then wrote to his wife. “Phyllis my dear,” he began, “I don’t blame you for being upset at missing your night out. I was disappointed, too. But bear with me, darling, I should be on a regular run before long. In less than ten years I’ll be up for retirement and we’ll have a chance to catch up on bridge and golf and things like that. I know it’s pretty hard to—”
The voice circuit cut in. “Oh, Jake—put on your company face. I’m bringing a visitor to the control room.”
“No visitors in the control room, Captain.”
“Now, Jake. This lunkhead has a letter from Old Man Harriman himself. ‘Every possible courtesy—’ and so forth.”
Pemberton thought quickly. He could refuse-but there was no sense in offending the big boss. “Okay, Captain. Make it short.”
The visitor was a man, jovial, oversize—Jake figured him for an eighty pound weight penalty. Behind him a thirteen-year-old male counterpart came zipping through the door and lunged for the control console. Pemberton snagged him by the arm and forced himself to speak pleasantly. “Just hang on to that bracket, youngster. I don’t want you to bump your head.”
“Leggo me! Pop—make him let go.”
Kelly cut in. “I think he had best hang on, Judge.” “Umm, uh—very well. Do as the Captain says, Junior.” “Aw, gee, Pop!”
“Judge Schacht, this is First Pilot Pemberton,” Kelly said rapidly. “He’ll show you around.”
“Glad to know you, Pilot. Kind of you, and all that.”
“What would you like to see, Judge?” Jake said carefully. “Oh, this and that. It’s for the boy—his first trip. I’m an old
spacehound myself—probably more hours than half your crew.” He laughed. Pemberton did not.
“There’s not much to see in free flight.”
“Quite all right. We’ll just make ourselves at home—eh, Captain?”
“I wanna sit in the control seat,” Schacht Junior announced. Pemberton winced. Kelly said urgently, “Jake, would you mind outlining the control system for the boy? Then we’ll go.”
“He doesn’t have to show me anything. I know all about it.I’m a Junior Rocketeer of America—see my button?” The boy shoved himself toward the control desk.
Pemberton grabbed him, steered him into the pilot’s chair, and strapped him in. He then flipped the board’s disconnect.
“Whatcha doing?”
“I cut off power to the controls so I could explain them.”
“Aintcha gonna fire the jets?”
“No.” Jake started a rapid description of the use and purpose of each button, dial, switch, meter, gimmick, and scope.
Junior squirmed. “How about meteors?” he demanded. “Oh, that—maybe one collision in half a million Earth-Moon trips. Meteors are scarce.”
“So what? Say you hit the jackpot? You’re in the soup.”
“Not at all. The anti-collision radar guards all directions five hundred miles out. If anything holds a steady bearing for three seconds, a direct hook-up starts the jets. First a warning gong so that everybody can grab something solid, then one second later—Boom!—Weget out of there fast.”
“Sounds corny to me. Lookee, I’ll show you how Commodore
Cartwright did it in The Comet Busters—“
“Don’t touch those controls I”
“You don’t own this ship. My pop says—”
“Oh, Jake!” Hearing his name, Pemberton twisted, fish-like, to face Kelly.
“Jake, Judge Schacht would like to know—” From the corner of his eye Jake saw the boy reach for the board. He turned, started to shout—acceleration caught him, while the jets roared in his ear.
An old spacehand can usually recover, catlike, in an unexpected change from weightlessness to acceleration. But Jake had been grabbing for the boy, instead of for anchorage. He fell back and down, twisted to try to avoid Schacht, banged his head on the frame of the open air-tight door below, and fetched up on the next deck, out cold.
Kelly was shaking him. “You all right, Jake?”
He sat up. “Yeah. Sure.” He became aware of the thunder, the shivering deckplates. “The jets! Cut the powerl”
He shoved Kelly aside and swarmed up into the control room, jabbed at the cut-off button. In sudden ringing silence, they were again weightless.
Jake turned, unstrapped Schacht Junior, and hustled him to Kelly. “Captain, please remove this menace from my control room.”
“Leggo! Pop—he’s gonna hurt me!”
The elder Schacht bristled at once. “What’s the meaning of this? Let go of my son!”
“Your precious son cut in the jets.”
“Junior—did you do that?”
The boy shifted his eyes. “No, Pop. It … it was a meteor.”
Schacht looked puzzled. Pemberton snorted. “I had just told him how the radar-guard can blast to miss a meteor. He’s lying.”
Schacht ran through the process he called “making up his mind,” then answered, “Junior never lies. Shame on you, a grown man, to try to put the blame on a helpless boy. I shall report you, sir. Come, Junior.”
Jake grabbed his arm. “Captain, I want those controls photographed for fingerprints before this man leaves the room. It was not a meteor; the controls were dead, until this boy switched them on. Furthermore the anti-collision circuit sounds an alarm.”
Schacht looked wary. “This is ridiculous. I simply objected to the slur on my son’s character. No harm has been done.”
“No harm, eh? How about broken arms—or necks? And wasted fuel, with more to waste before we’re back in the groove. Do you know, Mister ‘Old Spacehound,’ just how precious a little fuel will be when we try to match orbits with Space Terminal—if we haven’t got it? We may have to dump cargo to save the ship, cargo at $60,000 a ton on freight charges alone. Finger prints will show the Commerce Commission whom to nick for it.”
When they were alone again Kelly asked anxiously, “You won’t really have to jettison? You’ve got a maneuvering reserve.”
“Maybe we can’t even get to Terminal. How long did she blast?”
Kelly scratched his head. “I was woozy myself.”
“We’ll open the accelerograph and take a look.”
Kelly brightened. “Oh, sure! If the brat didn’t waste too much, then we just swing ship and blast back the same length of time.”
Jake shook his head. “You forgot the changed mass-ratio.”
“Oh . . . oh, yes!” Kelly looked embarrassed. Mass-ratio . . . under power, the ship lost the weight of fuel burned. The thrust remained constant; the mass it pushed shrank. Getting back to proper position, course, and speed became a complicated problem in the calculus of ballistics. “But you can do it, can’t you?”
“I’ll have to. But I sure wish I had Weinstein here.” Kelly left to see about his passengers; Jake got to work. He checked his situation by astronomical observation and by radar. Radar gave
him all three factors quickly but with limited accuracy. Sights taken of Sun, Moon, and Earth gave him position, but told nothing of course and speed, at that time—nor could he afford to wait to take a second group of sights for the purpose.
Dead reckoning gave him an estimated situation, by adding Weinstein’s predictions to the calculated effect of young Schacht’s meddling. This checked fairly well with the radar and visual observations, but still he had no notion of whether or not he could get back in the groove and reach his destination; it was now necessary to calculate what it would take and whether or not the remaining fuel would be enough to brake his speed and match orbits.
In space, it does no good to reach your journey’s end if you flash on past at miles per second, or even crawling along at a few hundred miles per hour. To catch an egg on a plate—don’t bump!
He started doggedly to work to compute how to do it using the least fuel, but his little Marchant electronic calculator was no match for the tons of IBM computer at Supra-New York, nor was he Weinstein. Three hours later he had an answer of sorts. He called Kelly. “Captain? You can start by jettisoning Schacht & Son.”
“I’d like to. No way out, Jake?”
“I can’t promise to get your ship in safely without dumping. Better dump now, before we blast. It’s cheaper.”
Kelly hesitated; he would as cheerfully lose a leg. “Give me time to pick out what to dump.”
“Okay.” Pemberton returned sadly to his figures, hoping to find a saving mistake, then thought better of it. He called the radio room. “Get me Weinstein at Supra-New York.”
“Out of normal range.”
“I know that. This is the Pilot. Safety priority—urgent. Get a tight beam on them and nurse it.”
“Uh . . . aye aye, sir. I’ll try.”
Weinstein was doubtful. “Cripes, Jake, I can’t pilot you.” “Dammit, you can work problems for me!”
“What good is seven-place accuracy with bum data?”
“Sure, sure. But you know what instruments I’ve got; you know about how well I can handle them. Get me a better answer.”
“I’ll try.” Weinstein called back four hours later. “Jake? Here’s the dope: You planned to blast back to match your predicted speed, then made side corrections for position. Orthodox but uneconomical. Instead I had Mabel solve for it as one maneuver.”
“Good!”
“Not so fast. It saves fuel but not enough. You can’t possibly get back in your old groove and then match Terminal without dumping.”
Pemberton let it sink in, then said, “I’ll tell Kelly.”
”Wait a minute, Jake. Try this. Start from scratch.”
“Huh?”
“Treat it as a brand-new problem. Forget about the orbit on your tape. With your present course, speed, and position, compute the cheapest orbit to match with Terminal’s. Pick a new groove.”
Pemberton felt foolish. “I never thought of that.”
“Of course not. With the ship’s little one-lung calculator it’d take you three weeks to solve it. You set to record?”
“Sure.”
“Here’s your data.” Weinstein started calling it off.
When they had checked it, Jake said, “That’ll get me there?”
“Maybe. If the data you gave me is up to your limit of accuracy; if you can follow instructions as exactly as a robot, if you can blast off and make contact so precisely that you don’t need side corrections, then you might squeeze home. Maybe. Good luck, anyhow.” The wavering reception muffled their goodbyes,
Jake signaled Kelly. “Don’t jettison, Captain. Have your passengers strap down. Stand by to blast. Minus fourteen minutes.”
“Very well, Pilot.”
The new departure made and checked, he again had time to spare. He took out his unfinished letter, read it, then tore it up.
“Dearest Phyllis,” he started again, “I’ve been doing some hard thinking this trip and have decided that I’ve just been stubborn. What am I doing way out here? I like my home. I like to see my wife.
“Why should I risk my neck and your peace of mind to herd junk through the sky? Why hang around a telephone waiting to chaperon fatheads to the Moon-numbskulls who couldn’t pilot a rowboat and should have stayed at home in the first place?
“Money, of course. I’ve been afraid to risk a change. I won’t find another job that will pay half as well, but, if you are game, I’ll ground myself and we’ll start over. All my love, “Jake”
He put it away and went to sleep, to dream that an entire troop of Junior Rocketeers had been quartered in his control room.
The close-up view of the Moon is second only to the space-side view of the Earth as a tourist attraction; nevertheless Pemberton insisted that all passengers strap down during the swing around to Terminal. With precious little fuel for the matching maneuver, he refused to hobble his movements to please sightseers.
Around the bulge of the Moon, Terminal came into sight—by radar only, for the ship was tail foremost. After each short braking blast Pemberton caught a new radar fix, then compared his approach with a curve he had plotted from Weinstein’s figures—with one eye on the time, another on the ‘scope, a third on the plot, and a fourth on his fuel gages.
“Well, Jake?” Kelly fretted. “Do we make it?”
“How should I know? You be ready to dump.” They had agreed on liquid oxygen as the cargo to dump, since it could be let to boil out through the outer valves, without handling.
“Don’t say it, Jake.”
“Damn it—I won’t if I don’t have to.” He was fingering his controls ‘again; the blast chopped off his words. When it stopped, the radio maneuvering circuit was calling him.
“Flying Dutchman, Pilot speaking,” Jake shouted back.
“Terminal Control—Supro reports you short on fuel.”
“Right.”
“Don’t approach. Match speeds outside us. We’ll send a transfer ship to refuel you and pick up passengers.”
“I think I can make it.”
“Don’t try it. Wait for refueling.”
“Quit telling me how to pilot my ship!” Pemberton switched off the circuit, then stared at the board, whistling morosely. Kelly filled in the words in his mind: “Casey said to the fireman, ‘Boy, you better jump, cause two locomotives are agoing to bump!’
“You going in the slip anyhow, Jake?”
“Mmm—no, blast it. I can’t take a chance of caving in the side of Terminal, not with passengers aboard. But I’m not going to match speeds fifty miles outside and wait for a piggyback.”
He aimed for a near miss just outside Terminal’s orbit, conning by instinct, for Weinstein’s figures meant nothing by now. His aim was good; he did not have to waste his hoarded fuel on last minute side corrections to keep from hitting Terminal. When at last he was sure of sliding safely on past if unchecked, he braked once more. Then, as he started to cut off the power, the jets coughed, sputtered, and quit.
The Flying Dutchman floated in space, five hundred yards outside Terminal, speeds matched.
Jake switched on the radio. ”Terminal—stand by for my line. I’ll warp her in.”
He had filed his report, showered, and was headed for the post office to radiostat his letter, when the bullhorn summoned him. to the Commodore-Pilot’s office. Oh, oh, he told himself, Schacht has kicked the Brass—I wonder just how much stock that bliffy owns? And there’s that other matter—getting snotty with Control.
He reported stiffly. “First Pilot Pemberton, sir.”
Commodore Soames looked up. “Pemberton—oh, yes. You hold two ratings, space-to-space and airless-landing.”
Let’s not stall around, Jake told himself. Aloud he said, “I have no excuses for anything this last trip. If the Commodore does not approve the way I run my control room, he may have my resignation.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I, well—don’t you have a passenger complaint on me?” “Oh, that!” Soames brushed it aside. “Yes, he’s been here. But I have Kelly’s report, too—and your chief jetman’s, and a special from. Supra-New York. That was crack piloting, Pemberton.”
“You mean there’s no beef from the Company?”
“When have I failed to back up my pilots? You were perfectly right; I would have stuffed him out the air lock. Let’s get down to business: You’re on the space-to-space board, but I want to send a special to Luna City. Will you take it, as a favor to me?”
Pemberton hesitated; Soames went on, “That oxygen you saved is for the Cosmic Research Project. They blew the seals on the north tunnel and lost tons of the stuff. The work is stopped—about $130,000 a day in overhead, wages, and penalties. The Gremlin is here, but no pilot until the Moonbat gets in—except you. Well?”
“But I—look, Commodore, you can’t risk people’s necks on a jet landing of mine. I’m rusty; I need a refresher and a checkout.”
“No passengers, no crew, no captain—your neck alone.” “I’ll take her.”
Twenty-eight minutes later, with the ugly, powerful hull of the Gremlin around him, he blasted away. One strong shove to kill her orbital speed and let her fall toward the Moon, then no more worries until it came time to “ride ‘er down on her tail.”
He felt good—until he hauled out two letters, the one he had failed to send, and one from Phyllis, delivered at Terminal.
The letter from Phyllis was affectionate—and superficial. She did not mention his sudden departure; she ignored his profession completely. The letter was a model of correctness, but it worried him.
He tore up both letters and started another. It said, in part: “—never said so outright, but you resent my job.
"I have to work to support us. You've got a job, too. It's an old, old job that women have been doing a long time—crossing the plains in covered wagons, waiting for ships to come back from China, or waiting around a mine head after an explosion-kiss him goodbye with a smile, take care of him at home.
"You married a spaceman, so part of your job is to accept my job cheerfully. I think you can do it, when you realize it. I hope so, for the way things have been going won't do for either of us.
Believe me, I love you.
Jake"
He brooded on it until time to bend the ship down for his approach. From twenty miles altitude down to one mile he let the robot brake her, then shifted to manual while still falling slowly. A perfect airless-landing would be the reverse of the take-off of a war rocket-free fall, then one long blast of the jets, ending with the ship stopped dead as she touched the ground. In practice a pilot must feel his way down, not too slowly; a ship could bum all the fuel this side of Venus fighting gravity too long.
Forty seconds later, falling a little more than 140 miles per hour, he picked up in his periscopes the thousand-foot static towers. At 300 feet he blasted five gravities for more than a second, cut it, and caught her with a one-sixth gravity, Moon-normal blast. Slowly he eased this off, feeling happy.
The Gremlin hovered, her bright jet splashing the soil of the Moon, then settled with dignity to land without a jar.
The ground crew took over; a sealed runabout jeeped Pemberton to the tunnel entrance. Inside Luna City, he found himself paged before he finished filing his report. When he took the call, Soames smiled at him from the viewplate. “I saw that landing from the field pick-up, Pemberton. You don’t need a refresher course.”
Jake blushed. “Thank you, sir.”
“Unless you are dead set on space-to-space, I can use you on the regular Luna City run. Quarters here or Luna City? Want it?”
He heard himself saying, “Luna City. I’ll take it.”
He tore up his third letter as he walked into Luna City post office. At the telephone desk he spoke to a blonde in a blue moonsuit. “Get me Mrs. Jake Pemberton, Suburb six-four-oh-three, Dodge City, Kansas, please.”
She looked him over. “You pilots sure spend money.”
“Sometimes phone calls are cheap. Hurry it, will you?”
Phyllis was trying to phrase the letter she felt she should have written before. It was easier to say in writing that she was not complaining of loneliness nor lack of fun, but that she could not stand the strain of worrying about his safety. But then she found herself quite unable to state the logical conclusion. Was she prepared to face giving him up entirely if he would not give up space? She truly did not know . . . the phone call was a welcome interruption.
The viewplate stayed blank. “Long distance,” came a thin voice. ”Luna City calling.”
Fear jerked at her heart. “Phyllis Pemberton speaking.”
An interminable delay—she knew it took nearly three seconds for radio waves to make the Earth-Moon round trip, but she did not remember it and it would not have reassured her. All she could see was a broken home, herself a widow, and Jake, beloved Jake, dead in space.
“Mrs. Jake Pemberton?”
“Yes, yes! Go ahead.” Another wait—had she sent him away in a bad temper, reckless, his judgment affected? Had he died out there, remembering only that she fussed at him for leaving her to go to work? Had she failed him when he needed her? She knew that her Jake could not be tied to apron strings; men—grown-up men, not mammas’ boys—had to break away from mother’s apron strings. Then why had she tried to tie him to hers?—she had known better; her own mother had warned her not to try it.
She prayed.
Then another voice, one that weakened her knees with relief: “That you, honey?”
“Yes, darling, yes! What are you doing on the Moon?”
“It’s a long story. At a dollar a second it will keep. What I want to know is—are you willing to come to Luna City?”
It was Jake’s turn to suffer from the inevitable lag in reply.
He wondered if Phyllis were stalling, unable to make up her mind. At last he heard her say, “Of course, darling. When do I leave?”
“When—say, don’t you even want to know why?”
She started to say that it did not matter, then said, ”Yes, tell me.” The lag was still present but neither of them cared. He told her the news, then added, “Run over to the Springs and get Olga Pierce to straighten out the red tape for you. Need my help to pack?”
She thought rapidly. Had he meant to come back anyhow, he would not have asked. “No. I can manage.”
“Good girl. I’ll radiostat you a long letter about what to bring and so forth. I love you. ‘Bye now!”
“Oh, I love you, too. Goodbye, darling.”
Pemberton came out of the booth whistling. Good girl, Phyllis. Staunch. He wondered why he had ever doubted her.
The End
Movies that Inspired Me
Here are some movies that I consider noteworthy and worth a view. Enjoy.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are
reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal
library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come
and enjoy a read or two as well.
My Poetry
Art that Moves Me
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
I think that I am changing; I no longer care about warning fellow Americans about the nationwide train-wreck that is about to happen. (The need to borrow 22 Trillion dollars is a very serious symptom.)
The people who care, don’t know what to do about it.
The People who don’t care are just lost causes.
You see people, when the Titanic is taking on water, and half the ship is already in the frosty depths, you don’t go about the deck warning people. You just don’t. You go get yourself a life-vest, and you get on board one of the life-boats.
You save yourself.
You don’t mess around.
Let’s just bug out and call it even. Why are we even talking about this?
That’s me today.
Instead, I just want to spend time with my family and get drunk with friends. I want to eat tasty delicious food and play with my dog. I want to reread the classics, and maybe explore a park or two.
Turning on the American news, even so-called Conservative aggregators, is like taking a swim in a water treatment plant cesspool. It’s all just so ugly and so terrible distasteful. I just no longer care. Yuck. It’s ugly, filthy stuff.
So… No. I don’t care.
No.
No. No. No.
No. No. No. Nonono. No.
Ya. Ya. So predictable.
Yet another Democrat wants to ban something. They must churn out these idiots by the gallon. Same talking points. Same emotional reasoning. Same banal ignorance.
Not. My. Problem.
Well… that’s just great man.
Justified by some crazed liberal shooter goes postal, and the media loudly warn everyone that utopia can arrive once only the government has guns. Brilliant logic for those that never opened up a history book. So predictable. Just like another feigned racial attack. I think the count is somewhere around 25,647 to 0 of it being faked.
People, if Conservatives wanted to hurt someone…they would do it. Make no mistake. You all ought be mighty careful for what you wish for.
Not. My. Problem.
You all had best be very careful for what you are wishing for.
The rich get so amazingly filthy rich, and commit the most horrid crimes freely. Nothing is done about it.
Americans are taxed, prodded and kept like free-ranging cattle.
Just you had better show up for your fleecing, or the full strength of the law will completely and absolutely destroy your life.
Gah!
Heck with that. I’ve tuned out.
Instead, I’m just gonna relax. Have a good time and read some good old fashioned books. Here’s a great short story pulled from one of them.
Enjoy.
The Star Mouse
Here’s a great classic science fiction story. It’s just a fun read.Nothing too much more than that. It Features a genial German rocket scientist (ah, if only they had all been as good-natured and likeable and well-intentioned as him!) and his charming and soon-to-be-super-intelligent mouse neighbor. The two have struck up a warm and talkative and very cheese-based relationship, that he sends out on the first-ever space mission in the history of mankind (we are in 1942). Now, this inventive story about very-hard-to forget mice and men cannot fail to leave you with a smile on your lips and the happy feeling that you have just read one of the masterpieces of the golden age of science-fiction!
MITKEY, THE MOUSE, wasn’t Mitkey then.
He was just another mouse, who lived behind the floorboards and plaster of the house of the great Herr Professor Oberburger, formerly of Vienna and Heidelberg; then a refugee from the excessive admiration of the more powerful of his fellow-countrymen. The excessive admiration had concerned, not Herr Oberburger himself, but a certain gas which had been a by-product of an unsuccessful rocket fuel—which might have been a highly successful something else.
If, of course, the Professor had given them the correct formula.
Which he—Well, anyway, the Professor had made good his escape and now lived in a house in Connecticut. And so did Mitkey.
A small gray mouse, and a small gray man. Nothing unusual about either of them. Particularly there was nothing unusual about Mitkey; he had a family and he liked cheese and if there were Rotarians among mice, he would have been a Rotarian.
The Herr Professor, of course, had his mild eccentricities. A confirmed bachelor, he had no one to talk to except himself, but he considered himself an excellent conversationalist and held constant verbal communion with himself while he worked. That fact, it turned out later, was important, because Mitkey had excellent ears and heard those night-long soliloquies. He didn’t understand them, of course. If he thought about them at all, he merely thought of the Professor as a large and noisy super-mouse who squeaked over-much.
“Und now,” he would say to himself, “ve vill see vether this eggshaust tube vas broberly machined. It should fidt vithin vun vunhundredth thousandth of an indtch. Ahhh, it iss berfect. Und now—”
Night after night, day after day, month after month. The gleaming thing grew, and the gleam in Herr Oberburger’s eyes grew apace.
It was about three and a half feet long, with weirdly shaped vanes, and it rested on a temporary framework on a table in the center of the room that served the Herr Professor for all purposes. The house in which he and Mitkey lived was a four room structure, but the Professor hadn’t yet found it out, seemingly. Originally, he had planned to use the big room as a laboratory only, but he found it more convenient to sleep on a cot in one corner of it, when he slept at all, and to do the little cooking he did over the same gas burner over which he melted down golden grains of TNT into a dangerous soup which he salted and peppered with strange condiments, but did not eat.
“Und now I shall bour it into tubes, and see vether vun tube adjacendt to another eggsplodes der secondt tube vhen der virst tube iss—”
That was the night Mitkey almost decided to move himself and his family to a more stable abode, one that did not rock and sway and try to turn handsprings on its foundations. But Mitkey didn’t move after all, because there were compensations. New mouse-holes all over, and—joy of joy!—a big crack in the back of the refrigerator where the Professor kept, among other things, food.
Of course the tubes had been not larger than capillary size, or the house would not have remained around the mouse-holes. And of course Mitkey could not guess what was coming nor understand the Herr Professor’s brand of English (nor any other brand of English, for that matter) or he would not have let even a crack in the refrigerator tempt him.
The Professor was jubilant that morning.
“Der fuel, idt vorks! Der secondt tube, idt did not eggsplode.Und der virst, in seggtions, as I had eggspectedt! Und it is more bowerful; there will be blenty of room for der combartment—”
Ah, yes, the compartment. That was where Mitkey came in, although even the Professor didn’t know it yet. In fact the Professor didn’t even know that Mitkey existed.
“Und now,” he was saying to his favorite listener, “idt is budt a madter of combining der fuel tubes so they work in obbosite bairs. Und then—”
That was the moment when the Herr Professor’s eyes first fell on Mitkey. Rather, they fell upon a pair of gray whiskers and a black, shiny little nose protruding from a hole in the baseboards.
“Veil!” he said, “vot haff ve here! Mitkey Mouse himself! Mitkey, how would you like to go for a ride, negst veek? Ve shall see.”
That is how it came about that the next time the Professor sent into town for supplies, his order included a mousetrap—not one of the vicious kind that kills, but one of the wire-cage kind. And it had not been set, with cheese, for more than ten minutes before Mitkey’s sharp little nose had smelled out that cheese and he had followed his nose into captivity.
Not, however, an unpleasant captivity. Mitkey was an honored guest. The cage reposed now on the table at which the Professor did most of his work, and cheese in indigestion-giving abundance was pushed through the bars, and the Professor didn’t talk to himself any more.
“You see, Mitkey, I vas going to sendt to der laboratory in Hardtfordt for a vhite mouse, budt vhy should I, mit you here? I am sure you are more soundt und healthy und able to vithstand a long chourney than those laboratory mices. No? Ah, you viggle your viskers und that means yes, no? Und being used to living in dargk holes, you should suffer less than they from glaustrophobia, no?”
And Mitkey grew fat and happy and forgot all about trying to get out of the cage. I fear that he even forgot about the family he had abandoned, but he knew, if he knew anything, that he need not worry about them in the slightest. At least not until and unless the Professor discovered and repaired the hole in the refrigerator. And the Professor’s mind was most emphatically not on refrigeration.
“Und so, Mitkey, ye shall place this vane so—it iss only of assistance in der landing, in an atmosphere. It und these vill bring you down safely und slowly enough that der shock-absorbers in der movable combartment vill keep you from bumping your head too hard, I think.”
Of course, Mitkey missed the ominous note to that “I think” qualification because he missed all the rest of it. He did not, as has been explained, speak English. Not then.
But Herr Oberburger talked to him just the same. He showed him pictures. “Did you effer see der Mouse you vas named after, Mitkey? Vhat? No? Loogk, this is der original Mitkey Mouse, by Valt Dissney. Budt I think you are cuter, Mitkey.”
Probably the Professor was a bit crazy to talk that way to a little gray mouse. In fact, he must have been crazy to make a rocket that worked. For the odd thing was that the Herr Professor was not really an inventor. There was, as he carefully explained to Mitkey, not one single thing about that rocket that was new. The Herr Professor was a technician; he could take other people’s ideas and make them work. His only real invention—the rocket fuel that wasn’t one—had been turned over to the United States Government and had proved to be something already known and discarded because it was too expensive for practical use.
As he explained very carefully to Mitkey, “It iss burely a matter of absolute accuracy and mathematical correctness, Mitkey. Idt iss all here—ye merely combine—und ye achieff vhat, Mitkey?
“Eggscape velocity, Mitkey! Chust barely, it adds up to eggscape velocity. Maybe. There are yet unknown facgtors, Mitkey, in der ubper atmosphere, der troposphere, der stratosphere. Ve think ve know eggsactly how mudch air there iss to calculate resistance against, but are ve absolutely sure? No, Mitkey, ve are not. Ve haff not been there. Und der marchin iss so narrow that so mudch as an air current might affect idt.”
But Mitkey cared not a whit. In the shadow of the tapering aluminum-alloy cylinder he waxed fat and happy.
“Der tag, Mitkey, der tag! Und I shall not lie to you, Mitkey. I shall not giff you valse assurances. You go on a dancherous chourney, mein little friendt.
“A vifty-vifty chance ve giff you, Mitkey. Not der moon or bust, but der moon und bust, or else maybe safely back to earth. You see, my boor little Mitkey, der moon iss not made of green cheese und if it were, you vould not live to eat it because there iss not enough atmosphere to bring you down safely und vith your viskers still on.
“Und vhy then, you may veil ask, do I send you? Because der rocket may not attain eggscape velocity. Und in that case, it iss still an eggsperiment, budt a different vun. Der rocket, if it goes not to der moon, falls back on der earth, no? Und in that case certain instruments shall giff us further information than ve haff yet about things up there in space. Und you shall giff us information, by vether or not you are yet alife, vether der shock absorbers und vanes are sufficient in an earth-equivalent atmosphere. You see?
“Then ladter, vhen ye send rockets to Venus maybe vhere an atmosphere eggsists, ve shall haff data to calculate the needed size of vanes und shock-absorbers, no? Und in either case, und vether or not you return, Mitkey, you shall be vamous! You shall be der virst lifting greature to go oudt beyond der stratosphere of der earth, out into space.
“Mitkey, you shall be der Star-Mouse! I enfy you, Mitkey, und I only vish I vere your size, so I could go, too.”
Der tag, and the door to the compartment. “Gootbye, little Mitkey Mouse.” Darkness. Silence. Noise!
“Der rocket—if it goes not to der moon—falls back on der earth, no?”
That was what the Herr Professor thought. But the best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley. Even star-mice.
All because of Prxl.
The Herr Professor found himself very lonely. After having had Mitkey to talk to, soliloquies were somehow empty and inadequate.
There may be some who say that the company of a small gray mouse is a poor substitute for a wife; but others may disagree. And, anyway, the Professor had never had a wife, and he had a mouse to talk to, so he missed one and, if he missed the other, he didn’t know it.
During the long night after the launching of the rocket, he had been very busy with his telescope, a sweet little eight-inch reflector, checking its course as it gathered momentum. The exhaust explosions made a tiny fluctuating point of light that was possible to follow, if one knew where to look.
But the following day there seemed to be nothing to do, and he was too excited to sleep, although he tried. So he compromised by doing a spot of housekeeping, cleaning the pots and pans. It was while he was so engaged that he heard a series of frantic little squeaks and discovered that another small gray mouse, with shorter whiskers and a shorter tail than Mitkey, had walked into the wire-cage mousetrap.
“Veil, yell,” said the Professor, “vot haff ye here? Minnie? Iss it Minnie come to look for her Mitkey?”
The Professor was not a biologist, but he happened to be right. It was Minnie. Rather, it was Mitkey’s mate, so the name was appropriate. What strange vagary of mind had induced her to walk into an unbaited trap, the Professor neither knew nor cared, but he was delighted. He promptly remedied the lack of bait by pushing a sizable piece of cheese through the bars.
Thus it was that Minnie came to fill the place of her far-traveling spouse as repository for the Professor’s confidences. Whether she worried about her family or not there is no way of knowing, but she need not have done so. They were now large enough to fend for themselves, particularly in a house that offered abundant cover and easy access to the refrigerator.
“Ah, und now it iss dargk enough, Minnie, that ye can loogk for that husband of yours. His viery trail across the sky. True, Minnie, it iss a very small viery trail und der astronomers vill not notice it, because they do not know vhere to loogk. But ye do.
“He iss going to be a very vamous mouse, Minnie, this Mitkey of ours, vhen ye tell der vorld about him und about mein rocket. You see, Minnie ye haff not told them yet. Ve shall vait und gill der gomplete story all at vunce. By dawn of tomorrow ve’ll—” Ah, there he iss, Minnie! Vaint, but there. I’d hold you up to der scope und let you loogk, but it vould not be vocused right for your eyes, und I do not know how to—
“Almost vun hundred thousand miles, Minnnie, und still agcelerating, but not for much longer. Our Mitkey iss on schedule; in fagt he iss going vaster than ye had vigured, no? It iss sure now that he vill eggscape the gravitation of der earth, und fall upon der moon!”
Of course, it was purely coincidental that Minnie squeaked.
“Ah, yess, Minnie, little Minnie. I know, I know. Ve shall neffer see our Mitkey again, und I almost vish our eggsperiment hadt vailed. Budt there are gompensations, Minnie. He shall be der most vamous of all mices. Der Star-Mouse! Virst liffing greature effer to go beyond der gravitational bull of earth!”
The night was long. Occasionally high clouds obscured vision.
“Minnie, I shall make you more gomfortable than in that so-small vire cage. You vould like to seem to be vree, vould you not, vithout bars, like der animals at modern zoos, vith moats insteadt?”
And so, to fill in an hour when a cloud obscured the sky, the Herr Professor made Minnie her new home. It was the end of a wooden crate, about half an inch thick and a foot square, laid flat on the table, and with no visible barrier around it.
But he covered the top with metal foil at the edges, and he placed the board on another larger board which also had a strip of metal foil surrounding the island of Minnie’s home. And wires from the two areas of metal foil to opposite terminals of a small transformer which he placed near by.
“Und now, Minnie, I shall blace you on your island, vhich shall be liberally supplied mitt cheese und vater, und you shall vind it iss an eggcelent blace to liff. But you vill get a mild shock or two vhen you try to step off der edge of der island. It vill not hurt much, but you vill not like it, und after a few tries you vill learn not to try again, no? Und—”
And night again.
Minnie happy on her island, her lesson well learned. She would no longer so much as step on the inner strip of metal foil. It was a mouse-paradise of an island, though. There was a cliff of cheese bigger than Minnie herself. It kept her busy. Mouse and cheese; soon one would be a transmutation of the other.
But Professor Oberburger wasn’t thinking about that. The Professor was worried. When he had calculated and recalculated and aimed his eight-inch reflector through the hole in the roof and turned out the lights—
Yes, there are advantages to being a bachelor after all. If one wants a hole in the roof, one simply knocks a hole in the roof and there is nobody to tell one that one is crazy. If winter comes, or if it rains, one can always call a carpenter or use a tarpaulin.
But the faint trail of light wasn’t there. The Professor frowned and re-calculated and re-re-calculated and shifted his telescope three-tenths of a minute and still the rocket wasn’t there.
“Minnie, something iss wrong. Either der tubes hall stopped viring, or—”
Or the rocket was no longer traversing a straight line relative to its point of departure. By straight, of course, is meant parabolically curved relative to everything other than velocity.
So the Herr Professor did the only thing remaining for him to do, and began to search, with the telescope, in widening circles. It was two hours before he found it, five degrees off course already and veering more and more into a— Well, there was only one thing you could call it.
A tailspin.
The darned thing was going in circles, circles which appeared to constitute an orbit about something that couldn’t possibly be there. Then narrowing into a concentric spiral.
Then—out. Gone. Darkness. No rocket flares.
The Professor’s face was pale as he turned to Minnie.
“It iss imbossible, Minnie. Mein own eyes, but it could not be. Even if vun side stopped viring, it could not haff gone into such sudden circles.” His pencil verified a suspicion. “Und, Minnie, it decelerated vaster than bossible. Even mitt no tubes viring, its momentum vould haff been more—”
The rest of the night—telescope and calculus—yielded no clue. That is, no believable clue. Some force not inherent in the rocket itself, and not accountable by gravitation—even of a hypothetical body—had acted.
“Mein poor Mitkey.”
The gray, inscrutable dawn. “Mein Minnie, it vill haff to be a secret. Ve dare not publish vhat ye saw, for it vould not be believed. I am not sure I believe it myself, Minnie. Berhaps because I vas offertired vrom not sleeping, I chust imachined that I saw—”
Later. “But, Minnie, ye shall hope. Vun hundred vifty thousand miles out, it vas. It vill fall back upon der earth. But I gannot tell vherel I thought that if it did, I vould be able to galculate its course, und— But after those goncentric circles—Minnie, not even Einstein could galculate vhere it vill land. Not effen me. All ve can do iss hope that ye shall hear of vhere it falls.”
Cloudy day. Black night jealous of its mysteries.
“Minnie, our poor Mitkey. There is nothing could have gauzed—”
But something had.
Prxl.
Prxl is an asteroid. It isn’t called that by earthly astronomers, because—for excellent reasons—they have not discovered it. So we will call it by the nearest possible transliteration of the name its inhabitants use. Yes, it’s inhabited.
Come to think of it, Professor Oberburger’s attempt to send a rocket to the moon had some strange results. Or rather, Prxl did.
You wouldn’t think that an asteroid could reform a drunk, would you? But one Charles Winslow, a besotted citizen of Bridgeport, Connecticut, never took a drink when—right on Grove Street—a mouse asked him the road to Hartford. The mouse was wearing bright red pants and vivid yellow gloves—
But that was fifteen months after the Professor lost his rocket. We’d better start over again.
Prxl is an asteroid. One of those despised celestial bodies which terrestrial astronomers call vermin of the sky, because the darned things leave trails across the plates that clutter up the more important observations of novae and nebulae. Fifty thousand fleas on the dark dog of night.
Tiny things, most of them. Astronomers have been discovering recently that some of them come close to Earth. Amazingly close. There was excitement in 1932 when Amor came within ten million miles; astronomically, a mere mashie shot. Then Apollo cut that almost in half, and in 1936 Adonis came within less than one and a half million miles. In 1937, Hermes, less than half a million but the astronomers got really excited when they calculated its orbit and found that the little mile-long asteroid can come within a mere 220,000 miles, closer than Earth’s own moon.
Some day they may be still more excited, if and when they spot the 3/8-mile asteroid Prxl, that obstacle of space, making a transit across the moon and discover that it frequently comes within a mere hundred thousand miles of our rapidly whirling world.
Only in event of a transit will they ever discover it, though, for Prxl does not reflect light. It hasn’t, anyway, for several million years since its inhabitants coated it with a black, light-absorbing pigment derived from its interior. Monumental task, painting a world, for creatures half an inch tall. But worth it, at the time. When they’d shifted its orbit, they were safe from their enemies. There were giants in those days—eight-inch tall marauding pirates from Diemos. Got to Earth a couple of times too, before they faded out of the picture. Pleasant little giants who killed because they enjoyed it. Records in now-buried cities on Diemos might explain what happened to the dinosaurs. And why the promising Cro-Magnons disappeared at the height of their promise only a cosmic few minutes after the dinosaurs went west.
But Prxl survived. Tiny world no longer reflecting the sun’s rays, lost to the cosmic killers when its orbit was shifted.
Prxl. Still civilized, with a civilization millions of years old. Its coat of blackness preserved and renewed regularly, more through tradition than fear of enemies in these later degenerate days. Mighty but stagnant civilization, standing still on a world that whizzes like a bullet.
And Mitkey Mouse.
Klarloth, head scientist of a race of scientists, tapped his assistant Bemj on what would have been Bemj’s shoulder if he had had one. “Look,” he said, “what approaches Prxl. Obviously artificial propulsion.”
Bemj looked into the wall-plate and then directed a thought-wave at the mechanism that jumped the magnification of a thousand-fold through an alteration of the electronic field.
The image leaped, blurred, then steadied. “Fabricated,” said Bemj.
“Extremely crude, I must say. Primitive explosive-powered rocket. Wait, I’ll check where it came from.”
He took the readings from the dials about the viewplate, and hurled them as thoughts against the psychocoil of the computer, then waited while that most complicated of machines digested all the factors and prepared the answer. Then, eagerly, he slid his mind into rapport with its projector. Klarloth likewise listened in to the silent broadcast.
Exact point on Earth and exact time of departure. Untranslatable expression of curve of trajectory, and point on that curve where deflected by gravitational pull of Prxl. The destination—or rather the original intended destination—of the rocket was obvious, Earth’s moon. Time and place of arrival on Prxl if present course of rocket was unchanged.
“Earth,” said Klarloth meditatively. “They were a long way from rocket travel the last time we checked them. Some sort of a crusade, or battle of beliefs, going on, wasn’t there?”
Bemj nodded. “Catapults. Bows and arrows. They’ve taken a long stride since, even if this is only an early experimental thing of a rocket. Shall we destroy it before it gets here?”
Klarloth shook his head thoughtfully. “Let’s look it over. May save us a trip to Earth; we can judge their present state of development pretty well from the rocket itself.”
“But then we’ll have to—”
“Of course. Call the Station. Tell them to train their attracto-repulsors on it and to swing it into a temporary orbit until they prepare a landing-cradle. And not forget to damp out the explosive before they bring it down.”
“Temporary force-field around point of landing—in case?”
“Naturally.”
So despite the almost complete absence of atmosphere in which the vanes could have functioned, the rocket came down safely and so softly that Mitkey, in the dark compartment, knew only that the awful noise had stopped.
Mitkey felt better. He ate some more of the cheese with which the compartment was liberally provided. Then he resumed trying to gnaw a hole in the inch-thick wood with which the compartment was lined. That wooden lining was a kind thought of the Herr Professor for Mitkey’s mental well-being. He knew that trying to gnaw his way out would give Mitkey something to do en route which would keep him from getting the screaming meemies. The idea had worked; being busy, Mitkey hadn’t suffered mentally from his dark confinement. And now that things were quiet, he chewed away more industriously and more happily than ever, sublimely unaware that when he got through the wood, he’d find only metal which he couldn’t chew. But better people than Mitkey have found things they couldn’t chew.
Meanwhile, Klarloth and Bemj and several thousand other Prxlians stood gazing up at the huge rocket which, even lying on its side, towered high over their heads. Some of the younger ones, forgetting the invisible field of force, walked too close and came back, ruefully rubbing bumped heads.
Klarloth himself was at the psychograph.
“There is life inside the rocket,” he told Bemj. “But the impressions are confused. One creature, but I cannot follow its thought processes. At the moment it seems to be doing something with its teeth.”
“It could not be an Earthling, one of the dominant race. One of them is much larger than this huge rocket. Gigantic creatures. Perhaps, unable to construct a rocket large enough to hold one of themselves, they sent an experimental creature, such as our wooraths.”
“I believe you’ve guessed right, Bemj. Well, when we have explored its mind thoroughly, we may still learn enough to save us a check-up trip to Earth. I am going to open the door.”
“But air—creatures of Earth would need a heavy, almost a dense atmosphere. It could not live.”
“We retain the force-field, of course. It will keep the air in. Obviously there is a source of supply of air within the rocket or the creature would not have survived the trip.”
Klarloth operated controls, and the force-field itself put forth invisible pseudo-pods and turned the outer screw-door, then reached within and unlatched the inner door to the compartment itself.
All Prxl watched breathlessly as a monstrous gray head pushed out of the huge aperture yawning overhead. Thick whiskers, each as long as the body of a Prxlian—
Mitkey jumped down, and took a forward step that bumped his black nose hard—into something that wasn’t there. He squeaked, and jumped backward against the rocket.
There was disgust in Bemj’s face as he looked up at the monster.
“Obviously much less intelligent than a woorath. Might just as well turn on the ray.”
“Not at all,” interrupted Klarloth. “You forget certain very obvious facts. The creature is unintelligent, of course, but the subconscious of every animal holds in itself every memory, every impression, every sense-image, to which it has ever been subjected. If this creature has ever heard the speech of the Earthlings, or seen any of their works—besides this rocket—every word and every picture is indelibly graven. You see now what I mean?”
“Naturally. How stupid of me, Klarloth. Well, one thing is obvious from the rocket itself: we have nothing to fear from the science of Earth for at least a few millennia. So there is no hurry, which is fortunate. For to send back the creature’s memory to the time of its birth, and to follow each sensory impression in the psychograph will require—well, a time at least equivalent to the age of the creature, whatever that is, plus the time necessary for us to interpret and assimilate each.”
“But that will not be necessary, Bemj.”
“No? Oh, you mean the X-19 waves?”
“Exactly. Focused upon this creature’s brain-center, they can, without disturbing his memories, be so delicately adjusted as to increase his intelligence—now probably about .0001 in the scale—to the point where he is a reasoning creature. Almost automatically, during the process, he will assimilate his own memories, and understand them just as he would if he had been intelligent at the time he received those impressions.
“See, Bemj? He will automatically sort out irrelevant data, and will be able to answer our questions.”
“But would you make him as intelligent as—?”
“As we? No, the X-19 waves would not work so far. I would say to about .2, on the scale. That, judging from the rocket, coupled with what we remember of Earthlings from our last trip there, is about their present place on the intelligence scale.”
“Ummm, yes. At that level, he would comprehend his experiences on Earth just sufficiently that he would not be dangerous to us, too. Equal to an intelligent Earthling. Just about right for our purpose. Then, shall we teach him our language?”
“Wait,” said Klarloth. He studied the psychograph closely for a while.
“No, I do not think so. He will have a language of his own. I see in his subconscious, memories of many long conversations. Strangely, they all seem to be monologues by one person. But he will have a language—a simple one. It would take him a long time, even under treatment, to grasp the concepts of our own method of communication. But we can learn his, while he is under the X-19 machine, in a few minutes.”
“Does he understand, now, any of that language?”
Klarloth studied the psychograph again. “No, I do not believe he— Wait, there is one word that seems to mean something to him. The word `Mitkey.’ It seems to be his name, and I believe that, from hearing it many times, he vaguely associates it with himself.”
“And quarters for him—with air-locks and such?”
“Of course. Order them built.”
To say it was a strange experience for Mitkey is understatement. Knowledge is a strange thing, even when it is acquired gradually. To have it thrust upon one—
And there were little things that had to be straightened out. Like the matter of vocal chords. His weren’t adapted to the language he now found he knew. Bemj fixed that; you would hardly call it an operation because Mitkey—even with his new awareness—didn’t know what was going on, and he was wide awake at the time. And they didn’t explain to Mitkey about the J-dimension with which one can get at the inwardness of things without penetrating the outside.
They figured things like that weren’t in Mitkey’s line, and anyway they were more interested in learning from him than teaching him. Bemj and Klarloth, and a dozen others deemed worthy of the privilege. If one of them wasn’t talking to him, another was.
Their questioning helped his own growing understanding. He would not, usually, know that he knew the answer to a question until it was asked. Then he’d piece together, without knowing just how he did it (any more than you or I know how we know things) and give them the answer.
Bemj: “Iss this language vhich you sbeak a universal vun?”
And Mitkey, even though he’d never thought about it before, had the answer ready: “No, it iss nodt. It iss Englitch, but I remember der Herr Brofessor sbeaking of other tongues. I belief he sboke another himself originally, budt in America he always sboke Englitch to become more vamiliar mitt it. It iss a beaudiful sbeech, is it nodt?”
“Hmmmm,” said Bemj.
Klarloth: “Und your race, the mices. Are they treated veil?” “Nodt by most people,” Mitkey told him. And explained.
“I vould like to do something for them,” he added. “Loogk, could I nodt take back mitt me this brocess vhich you used upon me? Abbly it to other mices, and greate a race of super-mices?”
“Vhy not?” asked Bemj.
He saw Klarloth looking at him strangely, and threw his mind into rapport with the chief scientist’s, with Mitkey left out of the silent communion.
“Yes, of course,” Bemj told Klarloth, “it will lead to trouble on Earth, grave trouble. Two equal classes of beings so dissimilar as mice and men cannot live together in amity. But why should that concern us, other than favorably? The resultant mess will slow down progress on Earth—give us a few more millennia of peace before Earthlings discover we are here, and trouble starts. You know these Earthlings.”
“But you would give them the X-19 waves? They might—”
“No, of course not. But we can explain to Mitkey here how to make a very crude and limited machine for them. A primitive one which would suffice for nothing more than the specific task of converting mouse mentality from .0001 to .2, Mitkey’s own level and that of the bifurcated Earthlings.”
“It is possible,” communicated Klarloth. “It is certain that for aeons to come they will be incapable of understanding its basic principle.”
“But could they not use even a crude machine to raise their own level of intelligence?”
“You forget, Bemj, the basic limitation of the X-19 rays; that no one can possibly design a projector capable of raising any mentality to a point on the scale higher than his own. Not even we.” All this, of course, over Mitkey’s head, in silent Prxlian.
More interviews, and more.
Klarloth again: “Mitkey, ve yarn you of vun thing. Avoid carelessness vith electricity. Der new molecular rearranchement of your brain center—it iss unstable, und—”
Bemj: “Mitkey, are you sure your Herr Brofessor iss der most advanced of all who eggsperiment vith der rockets?”
“In cheneral, yens, Bemj. There are others who on vun specific boint, such as eggsplosives, mathematics, astrovisics, may know more, but not much more. Und for combining these knowledges, he iss ahead.”
“It iss yell,” said Bemj.
Small gray mouse towering like a dinosaur over tinier half-inch Prxlians. Meek, herbivorous creature though he was, Mitkey could have killed any one of them with a single bite. But, of course, it never occurred to him to do so, nor to them to fear that he might.
They turned him inside out mentally. They did a pretty good job of study on him physically, too, but that was through the J-dimension, and Mitkey didn’t even know about it.
They found out what made him tick, and they found out everything he knew and some things he didn’t even know he knew. And they grew quite fond of him.
“Mitkey,” said Klarloth one day, “all der civilized races on Earth year glothing, do they nodt? Vell, if you are to raise der level of mices to men, vould it not be vitting that you year glothes, too?”
“An eggcelent idea, Herr Klarloth. Und I know chust vhat kind I should like. Der Herr Brofessor vunce showed me a bicture of a mouse bainted by der artist Dissney, und der mouse yore glothing. Der mouse vas not a real-life vun, budt an imachinary mouse in a barable, und der Brofessor named me after der Dissney mouse.”
“Vot kind of glothing vas it, Mitkey?”
“Bright red bants mitt two big yellow buttons in frondt und two in back, und yellow shoes for der back feet und a pair of yellow gloves for der front. A hole in der seat of der bants to aggomodate der tail.”
“Ogay, Mitkey. Such shall be ready for you in fife minutes.”
That was on the eve of Mitkey’s departure. Originally Bemj had suggested awaiting the moment when Prxl’s eccentric orbit would again take it within a hundred and fifty thousand miles of Earth. But, as Klarloth pointed out, that would be fifty-five Earth-years ahead, and Mitkey wouldn’t last that long. Not unless they—And Bemj agreed that they had better not risk sending a secret like that back to Earth.
So they compromised by refueling Mitkey’s rocket with something that would cancel out the million and a quarter odd miles he would have to travel. That secret they didn’t have to worry about, because the fuel would be gone by the time the rocket landed.
Day of departure.
“Ve haft done our best, Mitkey, to set and time der rocket so it vill land on or near der spot from vhich you left Earth. But you gannot eggspect agguracy in a voyach so long as this. But you vill land near. The rest iss up to you. Ve haff equvipped the rocket ship for effery contingency.”
“Thank you, Herr Klarloth, Herr Bemj. Gootbye.”
“Gootbye, Mitkey. Ve hate to loose you.”
“Gootbye, Mitkey.”
“Gootbye, gootbye . . .”
For a million and a quarter miles, the aim was really excellent. The rocket landed in Long Island Sound, ten miles out from Bridgeport, about sixty miles from the house of Professor Oberburger near Hartford.
They had prepared for a water landing, of course. The rocket went down to the bottom, but before it was more than a few dozen feet under the surface, Mitkey opened the door—especially re-equipped to open from the inside—and stepped out.
Over his regular clothes he wore a neat little diving suit that would have protected him at any reasonable depth, and which, being lighter than water, brought him to the surface quickly where he was able to open his helmet.
He had enough synthetic food to last him for a week, but it wasn’t necessary, as things turned out. The night-boat from Boston carried him in to Bridgeport on its anchor chain, and once in sight of land he was able to divest himself of the diving suit and let it sink to the bottom after he’d punctured the tiny compartments that made it float, as he’d promised Klarloth he would do.
Almost instinctively, Mitkey knew that he’d do well to avoid human beings until he’d reached Professor Oberburger and told his story. His worst danger proved to be the rats at the wharf where he swam ashore. They were ten times Mitkey’s size and had teeth that could have taken him apart in two bites.
But mind has always triumphed over matter. Mitkey pointed an imperious yellow glove and said, “Scram,” and the rats scrammed. They’d never seen anything like Mitkey before, and they were impressed.
So for that matter, was the drunk of whom Mitkey inquired the way to Hartford. We mentioned that episode before. That was the only time Mitkey tried direct communication with strange human beings. He took, of course, every precaution. He addressed his remarks from a strategic position only inches away from a hole into which he could have popped. But it was the drunk who did the popping, without even waiting to answer Mitkey’s question.
But he got there, finally. He made his way afoot to the north side of town and hid out behind a gas station until he heard a motorist who had pulled in for gasoline inquire the way to Hartford. And Mitkey was a stowaway when the car started up.
The rest wasn’t hard. The calculations of the Prxlians showed that the starting point of the rocket was five Earth miles north-west of what showed on their telescopomaps as a city, and which from the Professor’s conversation Mitkey knew would be Hartford.
He got there.
“Hello, Brofessor.”
The Herr Professor Oberburger looked up, startled. There was no one in sight. “Vot?” he asked, of the air. “Who iss?”
“It iss I, Brofessor. Mitkey, der mouse whom you sent to der moon. But I vas not there. Insteadt, I—”
“Vot?? It iss imbossible. Somebody blays der choke. Budt—budt nobody knows about that rocket. Vhen it vailed, I didn’t told nobody. Nobody budt me knows—”
“And me, Brofessor.”
The Herr Professor sighed heavily. “Offervork. I am going vhat they call battly in der bel—”
“No, Brofessor. This is really me, Mitkey. I can talk now. Chust like you.”
“You say you can— I do not belief it. Vhy can I not see you, then. Vhere are you? Vhy don’t you—”
“I am hiding, Brofessor, in der vall chust behind der big hole. I vanted to be sure efferything vas ogay before I showed myself. Then you would not get eggcited und throw something at me maybe.”
“Vot? Vhy, Mitkey, if it iss really you und I am nodt asleep or going— Vhy, Mitkey, you know better than to think I might do something like that!”
“Ogay, Brofessor.”
Mitkey stepped out of the hole in the wall, and the Professor looked at him and rubbed his eyes and looked again and rubbed his eyes and—
“I am grazy,’ he said finally. “Red bants he years yet, und yellow— It gannot be. I am grazy.”
“No, Brofessor. Listen, I’ll tell you all aboudt.”
And Mitkey told him.
Gray dawn, and a small gray mouse still talking earnestly.
“Yess, Brofessor. I see your boint, that you think an intelligent race of mices und an intelligent race of men couldt nodt get along side by sides. But it vould not be side by sides; as I said, there are only a ferry few beople in the smallest continent of Australia. Und it vould cost little to bring them back und turn offer that continent to us mices. Ve vould call it Moustralia instead Australia, und ye vould instead of Sydney call der capital Dissney, in honor of—”
“But, Mitkey—”
“But, Brofessor, look vot we offer for that continent. All mices vould go there. Ve civilize a few und the few help us catch others und bring them in to put them under red ray machine, und the others help catch more und build more machines und it grows like a snowball rolling down hill. Und ye sign a nonaggression pact mitt humans und stay on Moustralia und raise our own food und—”
“But, Mitkey—”
“Und look vot ye offer you in eggschange, Her Brofessor! Ve vill eggsterminate your vorst enemy—der rats. Ve do not like them either. Und vun battalion of vun thousand mices, armed mitt gas masks und small gas bombs, could go right in effery hole after der rats und could eggsterminate effery rat in a city in vun day or two. In der whole vorld ye could eggsterminate effery last rat in a year, und at the same time catch und civilize effery mouse und ship him to Moustralia, und—”
“But, Mitkey—”
“Vot, Brofessor?”
“It vould vork, but it vould not work. You could eggsterminate der rats, yess. But how long vould it be before conflicts of interests vould lead to der mices trying to eggsterminate de people or der people trying to eggsterminate der—”
“They vould not dare, Brofessor! Ve could make weapons that vould—”
“You see, Mitkey?”
“But it vould not habben. If men vill honor our rights, ve vill honor—”
The Herr Professor sighed.
“I—I vill act as your intermediary, Mitkey, und offer your broposition, und— Vell, it iss true that getting rid of rats vould be a greadt boon to der human race. Budt—”
“Thank you, Brofessor.”
“By der vay, Mitkey. I haff Minnie. Your vife, I guess it iss, unless there vas other mices around. She iss in der other room; I put her there chust before you ariffed, so she vould be in der dark und could sleep. You vant to see her?”
“Vife?” said Mitkey. It had been so long that he had really forgotten the family he had perforce abandoned. The memory returned slowly.
“Veil,” he said “—ummm, yess. Ve vill get her und I shall construct quvick a small X-19 prochector und—Yess, it vill help you in your negotiations mitt der governments if there are sefferal of us already so they can see I am not chust a freak like they might otherwise suspegt.”
It wasn’t deliberate. It couldn’t have been, because the Professor didn’t know about Klarloth’s warning to Mitkey about carelessness with electricity—”Der new molecular rearranchement of your brain center—it iss unstable, und—”
And the Professor was still back in the lighted room when Mitkey ran into the room where Minnie was in her barless cage. She was asleep, and the sight of her— Memory of his earlier days came back like a flash and suddenly Mitkey knew how lonesome he had been.
“Minnie!” he called, forgetting that she could not understand.
And stepped up on the board where she lay. “Squeak!” The mild electrical current between the two strips of tinfoil got him.
There was silence for a while.
Then: “Mitkey,” called the Herr Professor. “Come on back und ye vill discuss this—”
He stepped through the doorway and saw them, there in the gray light of dawn, two small gray mice cuddled happily together. He couldn’t tell which was which, because Mitkey’s teeth had torn off the red and yellow garments which had suddenly been strange, confining and obnoxious things.
“Vot on earth?” asked Professor Oberburger. Then he remembered the current, and guessed.
“Mitkey! Can you no longer talk? Iss der—”
Silence.
Then the Professor smiled. “Mitkey,” he said, “my little star-mouse. I think you are more happier now.”
He watched them a moment, fondly, then reached down and flipped the switch that broke the electrical barrier. Of course they didn’t know they were free, but when the Professor picked them up and placed them carefully on the floor, one ran immediately for the hole in the wall. The other followed, but turned around and looked back—still a trace of puzzlement in the little black eyes, a puzzlement that faded.
“Gootbye, Mitkey. You vill be happier this vay. Und there vill always be cheese.”
“Squeak,” said the little gray mouse, and it popped into the hole.
“Gootbye—” it might, or might not, have meant.
The End
Movies that Inspired Me
Here are some movies that I consider noteworthy and worth a view. Enjoy.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are
reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal
library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come
and enjoy a read or two as well.
My Poetry
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
I like this story. It’s a story that I read years ago, and it contains elements that I really like. (If you care.) It’s just a story, but it’s a fun story, and I hope that you (the reader) will appreciate it.
THE OLD lane from the farmhouse to the letter box down by the road was the same dusty trail that he remembered from eons before. The deep summer dust stirred as his feet moved slowly and haltingly. The marks of his left foot were deep and firm as when he had last walked the lane, but where his right foot moved there was a ragged, continuous line with irregular depressions and there was the sharp imprint of a cane beside the dragging footprints.
He looked up to the sky a moment as an echelon of planes from the advanced trainer base fifty miles away wheeled overhead. A nostalgia seized him, an overwhelming longing for the men he had known —and for Ruth.
He was home; he had come back alive, but with so many gone who would never come back, what good was it?
With Ruth gone it was no good at all. For an instant his mind burned with pain and his eyes ached as if a bomb-burst had blinded him as he remembered that day in the little field hospital where he had watched her die and heard the enemy planes overhead.
Afterwards, he had gone up alone, against orders, determined to die with her, but take along as many Nazis as he could.
But he hadn’t died. He had come out of it with a bullet-shattered leg and sent home to rust and die slowly over many years.
He shook his head and tried to fling the thoughts out of his mind. It was wrong. The doctors had warned him—
He resumed his slow march, half dragging the all but useless leg behind him. This was the same lane down which he had run so fast those summer days so long ago. There was a swimming hole and a fishing pond a quarter of a mile away. He tried to dim his vision with half-shut eyes and remember those pleasant days and wipe out all fear and bitterness from his mind.
It was ten o’clock in the morning and Mr. McAfee, the rural postman, was late, but Jim Ward could see his struggling, antique Ford raising a low cloud of dust a mile down the road.
Jim leaned heavily upon the stout cedar post that supported the mailbox and when Mr. McAfee rattled up he managed to wave and smile cheerily.
Mr. McAfee adjusted his spectacles on the bridge of his nose with a rapid trombone manipulation.
“Bless me, Jim, it’s good to see you up and around!”
“Pretty good to be up.” Jim managed to force enthusiasm into his voice. But he knew he couldn’t stand talking very long to old Charles McAfee as if everything had not changed since the last time.
“Any mail for the Wards, today?”
The postman shuffled the fistful of mail. “Only one.”
Jim glanced at the return address block and shrugged. “I’m on the sucker lists already. They don’t lose any time when they find out there’s still bones left to pick on. You keep it.”
He turned painfully and faced toward the house. “I’ve got to be getting back. Glad to have seen you, Mr. McAfee.”
“Yeah, sure, Jim. Glad to have seen you. But I . . . er . . . got to deliver the mail—” He held the letter out hopefully.
“O.K.” Jim laughed sharply and grasped the circular.
He went only as far as the giant oak whose branches extended far enough to overshadow the mailbox. He sat down in the shade with his back against the great bole and tried to watch the echelon still soaring above the valley through the rifts in the leaf coverage above him. After a time he glanced down at the circular letter from which his fingers were peeling little fragments of paper. Idly, he ripped open the envelope and glanced at the contents. In cheap, garish typograph with splatterings of red and purple ink the words seemed to be trying to jump at him.
SERVICEMAN—WHAT OF THE FUTURE?
You have come back from the wars. You have found life different than you knew it before, and much that was familiar is gone. But new things have come, new things that are here to stay and are a part of the world you are going to live in.
Have you thought of the place you will occupy? Are you prepared to resume life in the ways of peace?
WE CAN HELP YOU
Have you heard of the POWER CO-ORDINATOR? No, of course you haven’t
because it has been a hush-hush secret source of power that has been
turning the wheels of war industries for many months. But now the secret
of this vast source of new power can be told, and the need for
hundreds, yes, thousands of trained technicians—such as you, yourself,
may become—will be tremendous in the next decade.
LET US PROVE TO YOU
Let us prove to you that we know what we are talking about. We are so certain that you, as a soldier trained in intricate operations of the machines of war, will be interested in this almost miraculous new source of power and the technique of handling it that we are willing to send you absolutely FREE the first three lessons of our twenty-five lesson course that will train you to be a POWER CO-ORDINATOR technician.
Let us prove it to you. Fill out the inclosed coupon and mail it today!
Don’t just shrug and throw this circular away as just another advertisement. MAIL THE COUPON NOW!
Jim Ward smiled reminiscently at the style of the circular. It reminded him of Billy Hensley and the time when they were thirteen. They sent in all the clipped and filled-out coupons they could find in magazines. They had samples of soap and magic tricks and catalogues and even a live bird came as the result of one. They kept all the stuff in Hensley’s attic until Billy’s dad finally threw it all out.
Impulsively, in whimsical tribute to the gone-forever happiness of those days, Jim Ward scratched his name and address in pencil and told the power co-ordinators to send him their three free lessons.
Mr. McAfee had only another mile to go up the road before he came to the end and returned past the Ward farm to Kramer’s Forks. Jim waited and hailed him.
“Want to take another letter?”
The postman halted the clattering Ford and jumped down. “What’s that?”
Jim repeated his request and held up the stamped reply card.
“Take this with you?”
Mr. McAfee turned it over and read every word on the back of the card. “Good thing,” he grunted. “So you’re going to take a correspondence course in this new power what-is-it? I think that’s mighty fine, Jim. Give you new interests—sort of take your mind off things.”
“Yeah, sure.” Jim struggled up with the aid of his cane and the bole of the oak tree. “Better see if I can make it back to the house now.”
All the whimsy and humor had suddenly gone out of the situation.
It was a fantastically short time—three days later—that Mr. McAfee stopped again at the Ward farm. He glanced at the thick envelope in his pack and the return address block it bore. He could see Jim Ward on the farmhouse porch and turned the Ford up the lane. Its rattle made Jim turn his head and open his eyes from the thoughtless blankness into which he had been trying to sink. He removed the pipe from his mouth and watched the car approach.
“Here’s your course,” shouted Mr. McAfee. “Here’s your first lesson!”
“What lesson?”
“The correspondence course you sent for. The power what-is-it? Don’t you remember?”
“No,” said Jim. “I’d forgotten all about it. Take the thing away. I don’t want it. It was just a silly joke.”
“You hadn’t ought to feel that way, Jim. After all, your leg is going to be all right. I heard the Doc say so down in the drugstore last night. And everything is going to be all right. There’s no use of letting it get you down. Besides—I got to deliver the mail.”
He tossed the brown envelope on the porch beside Jim. “Brought it up special because I thought you’d be in a hurry to get it.”
Jim smiled in apology. “I’m sorry, Mac. Didn’t mean to take it out on you. Thanks for bringing it up. I’ll study it good and hard this morning right here on the porch.”
Mr. McAfee beamed and nodded and rattled away. Jim closed his eyes again, but he couldn’t find the pleasing blankness he’d found before. Now the screen of his mind showed only the sky with thundering, plummeting engines—and the face of a girl lying still and white with closed eyes.
Jim opened his eyes and his hands slipped to his sides and touched the envelope. He ripped it open and scanned the pages. It was the sort of stuff he had collected as a boy, all right. He glanced at the paragraph headings and tossed the first lesson aside. A lot of obvious stuff about comparisons between steam power and waterfalls and electricity. It seemed all jumbled up like a high school student’s essay on the development of power from the time of Archimedes.
The mimeographed pages were poorly done. They looked as if the stencils had been cut on a typewriter that had been hit on the type faces with a hammer.
He tossed the second lesson aside and glanced at the top sheet of the third. His hand arrested itself midway in the act of tossing this lesson beside the other two. He caught a glimpse of the calculations on an inside page and opened up the booklet.
There was no high school stuff there. His brain struggled to remember the long unused methods of the integral calculus and the manipulation of partial differential equations.
There were pages of the stuff. It was like a sort of beacon light, dim and far off, but pointing a sure pathway to his mind and getting brighter as he progressed. One by one, he followed the intricate steps of the math and the short paragraphs of description between. When at last he reached the final page and turned the book over and scowled heavily the sun was halfway down the afternoon sky.
He looked away over the fields and pondered. This was no elementary stuff. Such math as this didn’t belong in a home study correspondence course. He picked up the envelope and concentrated on the return address block.
All it said was: M. H. Quilcon Schools, Henderson, Iowa. The lessons were signed at the bottom with the mimeographed reproductions of M. H. Quilcon’s ponderous signature.
Jim picked up lesson one again and began reading slowly and carefully, as if hidden between the lines he might find some mystic message.
By the end of July his leg was strong enough for him to walk without the cane. He walked slowly and with a limp and once in a while the leg gave way as if he had a trick knee. But he learned quickly to catch himself before he fell and he reveled in the thrill of walking again.
By the end of July the tenth lesson of the correspondence course had arrived and Jim knew that he had gone as far as he could alone. He was lost in amazement as he moved in the new scientific wonderland that opened up before him. He had known that great strides had been made in techniques and production, but it seemed incredible that such a basic discovery as power co-ordination had been producing war machines these many months. He wondered why the principle had not been applied more directly as a weapon itself—but he didn’t understand enough about it to know whether it could or not. He didn’t even understand yet from where the basic energy of the system was derived.
The tenth lesson was as poorly produced as the rest of them had been, but it was practically a book in its thickness. When he had finished it Jim knew that he had to know more of the background of the new science. He had to talk to someone who knew something about it. But he knew of no one who had ever heard of it. He had seen no advertisements of the M. H. Quilcon Schools.
Only that first circular and these lessons.
As soon as he had finished the homework on lesson ten and had given it into Mr. McAfee’s care Jim Ward made up his mind to go down to Henderson, Iowa, and visit the Quilcon School.
He wished he had retained the lesson material because he could have taken it there faster than it would arrive via the local mail channels.
The streamliner barely stopped at Henderson, Iowa, long enough to allow him to disembark. Then it was gone and Jim Ward stared about him.
The sleepy looking ticket seller, dispatcher, and janitor eyed him wonderingly and spat a huge amber stream across his desk and out the window.
“Looking for somebody, mister?”
“I’m looking for Henderson, Iowa. Is this it?” Jim asked dubiously.
“You’re here, mister. But don’t walk too fast or you’ll be out of it. The city limits only go a block past Smith’s Drugstore.”
Jim noticed the sign over the door and glanced at the inscription that he had not seen before: Henderson, Iowa, Pop. 8o6.
“I’m looking for a Mr. M. H. Quilcon. He runs a correspondence school here somewhere. Do you know of him?”
The depot staff shifted its cud again and spat thoughtfully. “Been here twenty-nine years next October. Never heard a name like that around here, and I know ’em all.”
“Are there any correspondence schools here?”
“Miss Marybell Anne Simmons gives beauty operator lessons once in a while, but that’s all the school of that kind that I know of.”
Disconcerted, Jim Ward murmured his thanks and moved slowly out of the station. The sight before him was dismaying. He wondered if the population hadn’t declined since the estimate on the sign in the station was made.
A small mercantile store that sagged in the middle faced him from across the street. Farther along was a tiny frame building labeled Sheriff’s Office. On his side Jim saw Smith’s Drugstore a couple of hundred feet down from the station with a riding saddle and a patented fertilizer displayed in the window. In the other direction was the combined postoffice, bank and what was advertised as a newspaper and printing office.
Jim strode toward this last building while curious watchers on the porch of the mercantile store stared at him trudging through the dust. The postmistress glanced up from the armful of mail that she was sorting into boxes as Jim entered. She offered a cheery hello that seemed to tinkle from the buxom figure.
“I’m looking for a man named Quilcon. I thought you might be able to give me some information concerning him.”
“Kweelcon?” She furrowed her brow. “There’s no one here by that name. How do you spell it?”
Before he could answer, the woman dropped a handful of letters on the floor. Jim was certain that he saw the one he had mailed to the school before he left.
As the woman stooped to recover the letters a dark brown shadow streaked across the floor. Jim got the momentary impression of an enormous brown slug moving with lightning speed.
The postmistress gave a scream of anger and scuffled her feet to the door. She returned in a moment.
“Armadillo,” she explained. “Darn thing’s been hanging around here for months and nobody seems to be able to kill it.” She resumed putting the mail in the boxes.
“I think you missed one,” said Jim. She did not have the one that he recognized as the one he’d mailed.
The woman looked about her on the floor. “I got them all, thank you. Now what did you say this man’s name was?”
Jim leaned over the counter and looked at the floor. He was sure—But there was obviously no other letter in sight and there was no place it could have gone.
“Quilcon,” said Jim slowly. “I’m not sure of the pronunciation myself, but that’s the way it seemed it should be.”
“There’s no one in Henderson by that name. Wait a minute now. That’s a funny thing—you know it was about a month ago that I saw an envelope going out of here with a name something like that in the upper left corner. I thought at the time it was a funny name and wondered who put it in, but I never did find out and I thought I’d been dreaming. How’d you know to come here looking for him?”
“I guess I must have received the mail you saw.”
“Well, you might ask Mr. Herald. He’s in the newspaper office next door. But I’m sure there’s no one in this town by that name.”
“You publish a newspaper here?”
The woman laughed. “We call it that. Mr. Herald owns the bank and a big farm and puts this out free as a hobby. It’s not much, but everybody in town reads it. On Saturday he puts out a regular printed edition. This is the daily.”
She held up a small mimeographed sheet that was moderately legible. Jim glanced at it and moved towards the door. “Thanks, anyway.”
As he went out into the summer sun there was something gnawing at his brain, an intense you-forgot-something-in-there sort of feeling. He couldn’t place it and tried to ignore it.
Then as he stepped across the threshold of the printing office he got it. That mimeographed newssheet he had seen—it bore a startling resemblance to the lessons he had received from M. H. Quilcon. The same purple ink. Slightly crooked sheets. But that was foolish to try to make a connection there. All mimeographed jobs looked about alike.
Mr. Herald was a portly little man with a fringe around his baldness. Jim repeated his inquiry.
“Quilcon?” Mr. Herald pinched his lips thoughtfully. “No, can’t say as I ever heard the name. Odd name—I’m sure I’d know it if I’d ever heard it.”
Jim Ward knew that further investigation here would be a waste of time. There was something wrong somewhere. The information in his correspondence course could not be coming out of this half dead little town.
He glanced at a copy of the newssheet lying on the man’s littered desk beside an ancient Woodstock. “Nice little sheet you put out there,” said Jim.
Mr. Herald laughed. “Well, it’s not much, but I get a kick out of it, and the people enjoy reading about Mrs. Kelly’s lost hogs and the Dorius kid’s whooping cough. It livens things up.”
“Ever do any work for anybody else—printing or mimeographing?” “If anybody wants it, but I haven’t had an outside customer in three years.”
Jim glanced about searchingly. The old Woodstock seemed to be the only typewriter in the room.
“I might as well go on,” he said. “But I wonder if you’d mind letting me use your typewriter to write a note and leave in the post-office for Quilcon if he ever shows up.”
“Sure, go ahead. Help yourself.”
Jim sat down before the clanking machine and hammered out a brief paragraph while Mr. Herald wandered to the back of the shop. Then Jim rose and shoved the paper in his pocket. He wished he had brought a sheet from one of the lessons with him.
“Thanks,” he called to Mr. Herald. He picked up a copy of the latest edition of the newspaper and shoved it in his pocket with the typed sheet.
On the trip homeward he studied the mimeographed sheet until he had memorized every line, but he withheld conclusions until he reached home.
From the station he called the farm and Hank, the hired man, came to pick him up. The ten miles out to the farm seemed like a hundred. But at last in his own room Jim spread out the two sheets of paper he’d brought with him and opened up lesson one of the correspondence course.
There was no mistake. The stencils of the course manuals had been cut on Mr. Herald’s ancient machine. There was the same nick out of the side of the o, and the b was flattened on the bulge. The r was minus half its base.
Mr. Herald had prepared the course.
Mr. Herald must then be M. H. Quilcon. But why had he denied any knowledge of the name? Why had he refused to see Jim and admit his authorship of the course?
At ten o’clock that night Mr. McAfee arrived with a special delivery letter for Jim.
“I don’t ordinarily deliver these way out here this time of night,” he said. “But I thought you might like to have it. Might be something important. A job or something, maybe. It’s from Mr. Quilcon.”
“Thanks. Thanks for bringing it, Mac.”
Jim hurried into his room and ripped open the letter. It read:
Dear Mr. Ward:
Your progress in understanding the principles of power co-ordination are
exceptional and I am very pleased to note your progress in connection
with the tenth lesson which I have just received from you.
An unusual opportunity has arisen which I am moved to offer you. There
is a large installation of a power co-ordination engine in need of vital
repairs some distance from here. I believe that you are fully qualified
to work on this machine under supervision which will be provided and
you would gain some valuable experience. The installation is located
some distance from the city of Henderson. It is about two miles out on
the Balmer Road. You will find there the Hortan Machine Works at which
the installation is located. Repairs are urgently needed and you are the
closest qualified student able to take advantage of this opportunity
which might lead to a valuable permanent connection. Therefore, I
request that you come at once. I will meet you there.
Sincerely,
M. H. Quilcon
For a long time Jim Ward sat on the bed with the letter and the sheets of paper spread out before him. What had begun as a simple quest for information was rapidly becoming an intricate puzzle.
Who was M. H. Quilcon?
It seemed obvious that Mr. Herald, the banker and part-time newspaper publisher, must be Quilcon. The correspondence course manuals had certainly been produced on his typewriter. The chances of any two typewriters having exactly the same four or five disfigurements in type approached the infinitesimal.
And Herald—if he were Quilcon—must have written this letter just before or shortly after Jim’s visit. The letter was certainly a product of the ancient Woodstock.
There was a fascination in the puzzle and a sense of something sinister, Jim thought. Then he laughed aloud at his own melodrama and began repacking the suitcase. There was a midnight train he could get back to Henderson.
It was hot afternoon again when he arrived in the town for the second time. The station staff looked up in surprise as he got off the train.
“Back again? I thought you’d given up.”
“I’ve found out where Mr. Quilcon is. He’s at the Hortan Machine Works. Can you tell me exactly where that is?”
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s supposed to be about two miles out of town on Balmer Road.”
“That’s just the main street of town going on down through the Willow Creek district. There’s no machine works out there. You must be in the wrong state, mister. Or somebody’s kidding you.”
“Do you think Mr. Herald could tell me anything about such a machine shop. I mean, does he know anything about machinery or things related to it?”
“Man, no! Old man Herald don’t care about nothing but money and that little fool paper of his. Machinery! He can’t hook up anything more complicated than his suspenders.”
Jim started down the main street toward the Willow Creek district. Balmer Road rapidly narrowed and turned, leaving the town out of sight behind a low rise. Willow Creek was a glistening thread in the midst of meadow land.
There was no more unlikely spot in the world for a machine works of any kind, Jim thought. Someone must be playing an utterly fantastic joke on him. But how or why they had picked on him was mystifying. At the same time he knew within him that it was no joke. There was a deadly seriousness about it all. The principles of power co-ordination were right. He had slaved and dug through them enough to be sure of that. He felt that he could almost build a power co-ordinating engine now with the proper means—except that he didn’t understand from where the power was derived!
In the timelessness of the bright air about him, with the only sound coming from the brook and the leaves on the willow trees beside it, Jim found it impossible to judge time or distance.
He paced his steps and counted until he was certain that at least two miles had been covered. He halted and looked about almost determined to go back and re-examine the way he had come.
He glanced ahead, his eyes scanning every minute detail of the meadowland. And then he saw it.
The sunlight glistened as if on a metal surface. And above the bright spot in the distance was the faintly readable legend:
HORTAN MACHINE WORKS
Thrusting aside all judgment concerning the incredibility of a machine shop in such a locale, he crossed the stream and made his way over the meadow toward the small rise.
As he approached, the machine works appeared to be merely a dome-shaped structure about thirty feet in diameter and with an open door in one side. He came up to it with a mind ready for anything. The crudely painted sign above the door looked as if it had been drawn by an inexpert barn painter in a state of intoxication.
Jim entered the dimly lit interior of the shop and set his case upon the floor beside a narrow bench that extended about the room. Tools and instruments of unfamiliar design were upon the bench and upon the walls. But no one appeared.
Then he noticed an open door and a steep, spiral ramp that led down to a basement room. He stepped through and half slid, half walked down to the next level.
There was artificial lighting by fluorescent tubes of unusual construction, Jim noticed. But still no sign of anyone. And there was not an object in the room that appeared familiar to him. Articles that vaguely resembled furniture were against the walls.
He felt uneasy amid the strangeness of the room and he was about to go back up the steep ramp when a voice came to him.
“This is Mr. Quilcon. Is that you, Mr. Ward?”
“Yes. Where are you?”
“I am in the next room, unable to come out until I finish a bit of work I have started. Will you please go on down to the room below? You will find the damaged machinery there. Please go right to work on it. I’m sure that you have a complete understanding of what is necessary. I will join you in a moment.”
Hesitantly, Jim turned to the other side of the room where he saw a second ramp leading down to a brilliantly lighted room. He glanced about once more, then moved down the ramp.
The room was high-ceilinged and somewhat larger in diameter than the others he had seen and it was almost completely occupied by the machine.
A series of close-fitting towers with regular bulbous swellings on their columns formed the main structure of the engine. These were grouped in a solid circle with narrow walkways at right angles to each other passing through them.
Jim Ward stood for a long time examining their surfaces that rose twenty feet from the floor. All that he had learned from the curious correspondence course seemed to fall into place. Diagrams and drawings of such machines had seemed incomprehensible. Now he knew exactly what each part was for and how the machine operated.
He squeezed his body into the narrow walkway between the towers and wormed his way to the center of the engine. His bad leg made it difficult, but he at last came to the damaged structure.
One of the tubes had cracked open under some tremendous strain and through the slit he could see the marvelously intricate wiring with which it was filled. Wiring that was burned now and fused to a mass. It was in a control circuit that rendered the whole machine functionless, but its repair would not be difficult, Jim knew.
He went back to the periphery of the engine and found the controls of a cranelike device which he lowered and seized the cracked sleeve and drew off the damaged part.
From the drawers and bins in the walls he selected parts and tools and returned to the damaged spot.
In the cramped space he began tearing away the fused parts and wiring. He was lost and utterly unconscious of anything but the fascination of the mighty engine. Here within this room was machine capacity to power a great city.
Its basic function rested upon the principle of magnetic currents in contrast to electric currents. The discovery of magnetic currents had been announced only a few months before he came home from the war. The application of the discovery had been swift.
And he began to glimpse the fundamental source of the energy supplying the machine. It was in the great currents of gravitational and magnetic force flowing between the planets and the suns of the universe. As great as atomic energy and as boundless in its resources, this required no fantastically dangerous machinery to harness. The principle of the power co-ordinator was simple.
The pain of his cramped position forced Jim to move out to rest his leg. As he stood beside the engine he resumed his pondering on the purpose it had in this strange location. Why was it built there and what use was made of its power?
He moved about to restore the circulation in his legs and sought to trace the flow of energy through the engine, determine where and what kind of a load was placed upon it.
His search led him below into a third sub-basement of the building and there he found the thing he was searching for, the load into which the tremendous drive of the engine was coupled.
But here he was unable to comprehend fully, for the load was itself a machine of strange design, and none of its features had been covered in the correspondence course.
The machine upstairs seized upon the magnetic currents of space and selected and concentrated those flowing in a given direction.
The force of these currents was then fed into the machines in this room, but there was no point of reaction against which the energy could be applied.
Unless—
The logical, inevitable conclusion forced itself upon his mind. There was only one conceivable point of reaction.
He stood very still and a tremor went through him. He looked up at the smooth walls about him. Metal, all of them. And this room—it was narrower than the one above—as if the entire building were tapered from the dome protruding out of the earth to the basement floor. The only possible point of reaction was the building itself. But it wasn’t a building.
It was a vessel.
Jim clawed and stumbled his way up the incline into the engine room, then beyond into the chamber above. He was halfway up the top ramp when he heard the voice again.
“Is that you, Mr. Ward? I have almost finished and will be with you in a moment. Have you completed the repairs? Was it very difficult?”
He hesitated, but didn’t answer. Something about the quality of that voice gave him a chill. He hadn’t noticed it before because of his curiosity and his interest in the place. Now he detected its unearthly, inhuman quality.
He detected the fact that it wasn’t a voice at all, but that the words had been formed in his brain as if he himself had spoken them.
He was nearly at the top of the ramp and drew himself on hands and knees to the floor level when he saw the shadow of the closing door sweep across the room and heard the metallic clang of the door. It was sealed tight. Only the small windows—or ports—admitted light.
He rose and straightened and calmed himself with the thought that the vessel could not fly. It could not rise with the remainder of the repair task unfinished—and he was not going to finish it; that much was certain.
“Quilcon!” he called. “Show yourself! Who are you and what do you want of me?”
“I want you to finish the repair job and do it quickly,” the voice replied instantly. “And quickly—it must be finished quickly.”
There was a note of desperation and despair that seemed to cut into Jim. Then he caught sight of the slight motion against the wall beside him. In a small, transparent hemisphere that was fastened to the side of the wall lay the slug that Jim had seen at the postoffice, the thing the woman had called an “armadillo.” He had not even noticed it when he first entered the room. The thing was moving now with slow pulsations that swelled its surface and great welts like dark veins stood out upon it. From the golden-hued hemisphere a maze of cable ran to instruments and junction boxes around the room and a hundred tiny pseudo-pods grasped terminals inside the hemisphere.
It was a vessel—and this slug within the hemisphere was its alien, incredible pilot. Jim knew it with startling cold reality that came to him in waves of thought that emanated from the slug called Quilcon and broke over Jim’s mind. It was a ship and a pilot from beyond Earth—from out of the reaches of space.
“What do you want of me? Who are you?” said Jim Ward.
“I am Quilcon. You are a good student. You learn well.”
“What do you want?”
“I want you to repair the damaged engine.”
There was something wrong with the creature. Intangibly, Jim sensed it. An aura of sickness, a desperate urgency came to his mind.
But something else was in the foreground of Jim’s mind. The horror of the alien creature diminished and Jim contemplated the miracle that had come to mankind.
“I’ll bargain with you,” he said quietly. “Tell me how to build a ship like this for my people and I will fix the engines for you.”
“No! No—there is no time for that. I must hurry—”
“Then I shall leave without any repairs.”
He moved toward the door and instantly a paralyzing wave took hold of him as if he had seized a pair of charged electrodes. It relaxed only as he stumbled back from the door.
“My power is weak,” said Quilcon, “but it is strong enough for many days yet—many of your days. Too many for you to live without food and water. Repair the engine and then I shall let you go.”
“Is what I ask too much to pay for my help?”
“You have had pay enough. You can teach your people to build power co-ordinator machines. Is that not enough?”
“My people want to build ships like this one and move through space.”
“I cannot teach you that. I do not know. I did not build this ship.”
There were surging waves of troubled thought that washed over his mind, but Jim Ward’s tenseness eased. The first fear of totally alien life drifted from his mind and he felt a strange affinity for the creature. It was injured and sick, he knew, but he could not believe that it did not know how the ship was built.
“Those who built this ship come often to trade upon my world,” said Quilcon. “But we have no such ships of our own. Most of us have no desire to see anything but the damp caves and sunny shores of our own world. But I longed to see the worlds from which these ships came.
“When this one landed near my cave I crept in and hid myself. The ship took off then and we traveled an endless time. Then an accident to the engine killed all three of those who manned the ship and I was left alone.
“I was injured, too, but I was not killed. Only the other of me died.” Jim did not understand the queer phrase, but he did not break into Quilcon’s story.
“I was able to arrange means to control the flight of the ship, to prevent its destruction as it landed upon this planet, but I could not repair it because of the nature of my body.”
Jim saw then that the creature’s story must be true.
It was obvious that the ship had been built to be manned by beings utterly unlike Quilcon.
“I investigated the city of yours near by and learned of your ways and customs. I needed the help of one of you to repair the ship. By force I could persuade one of you to do simple tasks, but none so complex as this requires.
“Then I discovered the peculiar customs of learning among you. I forced the man Herald to prepare the materials and send them to you. I received them before the person at the postoffice could see them. I got your name from the newspapers along with several others who were unsatisfactory.
“I had to teach you to understand the power co-ordinator because only by voluntary operation of your highest faculties will you be able to understand and repair the machine. I can assist but not force you to do that.”
The creature began pleading again. “And now will you repair the engine quickly. I am dying—but shall live longer than you—it is a long journey to my home planet, but I must get there and I need every instant of time that is left to me.”
Jim caught a glimpse of the dream vision that was the creature’s home world. It was a place of security and peace—in Quilcon’s terms. But even its alienness did not block out the sense of quiet beauty that Quilcon’s mind transmitted to Jim’s.
They were a species of high intelligence. Exceptionally developed in the laws of mathematics and theory of logic, they were handicapped in bodily development from inquiring into other fields of science whose existence was demonstrated by their logic and their mathematics. The more intellectual among them were frustrated creatures whose lives were made tolerable only by an infinite capacity for stoicism and adaptation.
But of them all, Quilcon was among the most restless and rebellious and ambitious. No one of them had ever dared such a journey as he had taken. A swelling pity and understanding came over Jim Ward.
“I’ll bargain with you,” he said desperately. “I’ll repair the engine if you’ll let me have its principles. If you don’t have them, you can get them to me with little trouble. My people must have such a ship as this.”
He tried to visualize what it would mean to Earth to have space flight a century or perhaps five centuries before the slow plodding of science and research might reveal it.
But the creature was silent.
“Quilcon—” Jim repeated. He hoped it hadn’t died.
“I’ll bargain with you,” said Quilcon at last. “Let me be the other of you, and I’ll give you what you want.”
“The other of me? What are you talking about?”
“It is hard for you to understand. It is union—such as we make upon our world. When two or more of us want to be together we go together in the same brain, the same body. I am alone now, and it is an unendurable existence because I have known what it is to have another of me.
“Let me come into your brain, into your mind and live there with you. We will teach your people and mine. We will take this ship to all the universes of which living creatures can dream. It is either this or we both die together, for too much time has gone for me to return. This body dies.”
Stunned by Quilcon’s ultimatum, Jim Ward stared at the ugly slug on the wall. Its brown body was heaving with violent pulsations of pain and a sense of delirium and terror came from it to Jim.
“Hurry! Let me come!” it pleaded.
He could feel sensations as if fingers were probing his cranium looking, pleading for entrance. It turned him cold.
He looked into the years and thought of an existence with this alien mind in his. Would they battle for eventual possession of his body and he perhaps be subjected to slavery in his own living corpse?
He tried to probe Quilcon’s thoughts, but he could find no sense or intent of conquest. There were almost human amenities intermingled with a world of new science and thought.
He knew Quilcon would keep his promise to give the secrets of the ship to the men of Earth. That alone would be worth the price of his sacrifice—if it should be sacrifice.
“Come!” he said quietly.
It was as if a torrent of liquid light were flowing into his brain. It was blinding and excruciating in its flaming intensity. He thought he sensed rather than saw the brown husk of Quilcon quiver in the hemisphere and shrivel like a brown nut.
But in his mind there was union and he paused and trembled with the sudden great reality of what he knew. He knew what Quilcon was and gladness flowed into him like light. A thought soared through his brain: Is sex only in the difference of bodily function and the texture of skin and the tone of voice?
He thought of another day when there was death in the sky and on the Earth below, and in a little field hospital. A figure on a white cot had murmured, “You’ll be all right, Jim. I’m going on, I guess, but you’ll be all right. I know it. Don’t miss me too much.”
He had known there would be no peace for him ever, but now there was peace and the voice of Quilcon was like that voice from long ago, for as the creature probed into his thoughts its inherent adaptability matched its feelings and thought to his and said, “Everything is all right, isn’t it, Jim Ward?”
“Yes . . . yes it is.”
The intensity of his feelings almost blinded him. “And I want to call you Ruth, after another Ruth—”
“I like that name.” There was shyness and appreciation in the tones, and it was not strange to Jim that he could not see the speaker, there was a vision in his mind far lovelier than any Earthly vision could have been.
“We’ll have everything,” he said. “Everything that your world and mine can offer. We’ll see them all.”
But like the other Ruth who had been so practical, this one was, too.
“First we have to repair the engine. Shall we do it, now?”
The solitary figure of Jim Ward moved toward the ramp and disappeared into the depths of the ship.
The End
Movies that Inspired Me
Here are some movies that I consider noteworthy and worth a view. Enjoy.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are
reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal
library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come
and enjoy a read or two as well.
My Poetry
Articles & Links
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find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Lately I have been busy posting reprints of classic science fiction. I am sure that all these old stories might irritate the more practical and pragmatic readers out in Internet-land, but that need not be so. These stories are great. They are classical enjoyments for those of us that tire of the progressive re-write of the Star Trek universe, and the Star Wars narrative.
A. E. van Vogt was one of the most popular and influential practitioners of science fiction in the mid-twentieth century, the genre’s so-called Golden Age, and one of the most complex. He is the author that brought forth the idea of a “Space Opera” and the complexities of a dark, and potentially sinister universe.
This story is a fine example of this great writer’s best work from his most creative period – the forties and early fifties, during the “golden age” of science-fiction. It is wonderfully short, and does “pack a wallop” in situational conveyance.
It’s a steady diet of stories such as this that inspired me to study Aerospace Engineering, become a Naval Aviator, and join MAJestic.
Not The First
Captain Harcourt wakened with a start. In the darkness he lay tense, shaking the sleep out of his mind. Something was wrong. He couldn’t quite place the discordant factor, but it trembled there on the verge of his brain, an alien thing that shattered for him the security of the spaceship.
He strained his senses against the blackness of the room—and abruptly grew aware of the intensity of that dark. The night of the room was shadow-less, a pitch-like black that lay like an opaque blanket hard on his eyeballs.
That was it. The darkness. The indirect night light must have gone off. And out here in interstellar space there would be no diffused light as there was on Earth and even within the limits of the solar system.
Still, it was odd that the lighting system should have gone on the blink on this first “night” of this first trip of the first spaceship powered by the new, stupendous atomic drive.
A sudden thought made him reach toward the light switch.
The click made a futile sound in the pressing weight of the darkness—and seemed like a signal for the footsteps that whispered hesitantly along the corridor, and paused outside his door. There was a knock, then a muffled, familiar, yet strained voice: “Harcourt!”
The urgency in the man’s tone seemed to hold connection to all the odd menace of the past few minutes. Harcourt, conscious of relief, barked, “Come in, Gunther. The door’s unlocked!”
In the darkness, he slipped from under the sheets and fumbled for his clothes—as the door opened, and the breathing of the navigation officer of the ship became a thick, satisfying sound that destroyed the last vestige of the hard silence.
“Harcourt, the damnedest thing has happened. It started when everything electrical went out of order. Compton says we’ve been accelerating for two hours now at heaven only knows what rate.”
There was no pressure on him now. The familiar presence and voice of Gunther had a calming effect; the sense of queer, mysterious things was utterly gone. Here was something into which he could figuratively sink his teeth.
Harcourt stepped matter-of-factly into his trousers and said after a moment: “I hadn’t noticed the acceleration. So used to the— Hmm, doesn’t seem more than two gravities. Nothing serious could result in two hours. As for light, they’ve got those gas lamps in the emergency room.”
For the moment it was all quite convincing. He hadn’t gone to bed till the ship’s speed was well past the velocity of light. Everybody had been curious about what would happen at that tremendous milepost—whether the Lorenz-Fitzgerald contraction theory was substance or appearance.
Nothing had happened. The test ship simply forged ahead, accelerating each second, and, just before he retired, they had estimated the speed at nearly two hundred thousand miles per second.
The complacent mood ended. He said sharply, “Did you say Compton sent you?”
Compton was chief engineer, and he was definitely not one to give way to panics of any description. Harcourt frowned. “What does Compton think?”
“Neither he nor I can understand it; and when we lost sight of the sun he thought you’d better be—”
“When you what?”
Gunther’s laugh broke humorlessly through the darkness.
“Harcourt, the damned thing is so unbelievable that when Compton called me on the communicator just now he spent half the time talking to himself like an old woman of the gutter. Only he, O’Day and I know the worst yet.
“Harcourt, we’ve figured out that we’re approximately five hundred thousand light-years from Earth—and that the chance of our ever finding our sun in that swirl of suns makes searching for needles in haystacks a form of child’s play.
“We’re lost as no human being has ever been.”
…
In the utter darkness beside the bank of telescope eyepieces Harcourt waited and watched. Though he could not see them, he was tautly aware of the grim men who sat so quietly, peering into the night of space ahead—at the remote point of light out there that never varied a hairbreadth in its position on the crossed wires of the eyepieces.
The silence was complete, and yet—
The very presence of these able men was a living, vibrating force to him who had known them intimately for so many years. The beat of their thought, the shifting of space-toughened muscles, was a sound that distorted rather than disturbed the hard tensity of the silence.
The silence shattered as Gunther spoke matter-of-factly: “There’s no doubt about it, of course. We’re going to pass through the star system ahead. An ordinary sun, I should say, a little colder than our own, but possibly half again as large, and about thirty thousand parsecs distant.”
“Go away with you,” came the gruff voice of physicist O’Day. “You can’t tell how far away it is. Where’s your triangle?”
“I don’t need any such tricks,” retorted Gunther heatedly. “I just use my God-given intelligence. You watch. We’ll be able to verify our speed when we pass through the system; and velocity multiplied by time elapsed will—”
Harcourt interjected gently, “So far as we know, Gunther, Compton hasn’t any lights yet. If he hasn’t, we won’t be able to look at our watches, so we won’t know the time elapsed; so you can’t prove anything. What is your method, if it isn’t triangulation—and it can’t be. We’re open to conviction.”
Gunther said, “It’s plain common sense. Notice the cross lines on your eyepieces. The lines intersect on the point of light—and there’s not a fraction of variation or blur.
“These lenses have tested perfect according to the latest standards, but observatory astronomers back home have found that beyond one hundred fifty thousand light-years there is the beginning of distortion. Therefore I could have said a minute or so ago that we were within one hundred and fifty thousand light-years of that sun.
“But there’s more. When I first looked into the eyepiece—before I called you, Captain—the distortion was there. I’m pretty good at estimating time, and I should say it required about twelve minutes for me to get you and fumble my way back in here.
When I looked then the distortion was gone. There’s an automatic device in my eyepiece for measuring degree of distortion. When I first looked, the distortion was .005, roughly equivalent to twenty-five thousand light-years. There’s another point—”
“You needn’t go on,” Harcourt interjected quietly. “You’ve proved your case.”
O’Day groaned. “That’ll be maybe twenty-four thousand light-years in twelve minutes. Two thousand a minute; that’ll be thirty light-years a second. And we’ve been sittin’ here maybe more’n twenty-five minutes since you an’ Harcourt came back. That’ll be another fifty thousand light-years, or thirty thousand parsecs between us an’ the star. You’re a good man, Gunther. But how will we ever identify the blamed thing when we come back? It would be makin’ such a fine gunsight for the return trip if we could maybe get another sight farther on, when we finally stop this runaway or—”
Harcourt cut him off grimly. “There’s just one point that you two gentlemen have neglected to take into account. It’s true we must try to stop the ship—Compton’s men are working at the engines now. But everything else is only preliminary to our main task of thinking our way back to Earth.
We shall probably find it necessary, if we live, to change our entire conception of space.
“I said—if we live! What you scientists in your zeal failed to notice was that the most delicate instruments ever invented by man, the cross-lines of this telescope, intersect directly on the approaching sun. They haven’t changed for more than thirty minutes, so we must assume the sun is following a course in space directly toward us, or away from us.
“As it is, we’re going to run squarely into a ball of fire a million miles plus in diameter. I leave the rest to your imaginations.”
The discussion that blurred on then had an unreal quality for Harcourt. The only reality was the blackness, and the great ship plunging madly down a vast pit toward its dreadful doom.
It seemed down, a diving into incredible depths at an insane velocity—and against that cosmic discordance, the voices of the men sounded queer and meaningless, intellectually, violently alive, but the effect was as of small birds fluttering furiously against the wire mesh of a trap that has sprung remorselessly around them.
“Time,” Gunther was saying, “is the only basic force. Time creates space instant by instant, and—”
“Will you be shuttin’ up,” O’Day interrupted scathingly. “You’ve had the solving of the problem of our speed, a practical job for an astronomer and navigation officer. But this’ll be different. Me bein’ the chief of the physicists aboard, I—”
“Omit the preamble!” Harcourt cut in dryly. “Our time is, to put it mildly, drastically limited.”
“Right!” O’Day’s voice came briskly out of the blackness. “Mind ya, I’m not up to offerin’ any final solutions, but here may be some answers:
“The speed of light is not, accordin’ to my present thought, one hundred eighty-six thousand three hundred miles per second. It’s more’n two hundred thousand, maybe fifty thousand more. In previous measurements, we’ve been forgettin’ the effect of the area of tensions that makes a big curve ’round any star system. We’ve known about those tensions, but never gave much thought to how much they might slow up light, the way water and glass does.
“That’s the only thing that’ll explain why nothin’ happened at the apparent speed of light, but plenty happened when we passed the real speed of light. Come to think on it, the real speed must be somethin’ less than two hundred fifty thousand, because we were goin’ slower’n that when the electric system blanked on us.”
“But man alive!” Gunther burst out before Harcourt could speak. “What at that point could have jumped our speed up to a billion times that of light?”
“When we have the solvin’ of that,” O’Day interjected grimly, “the entire universe’ll belong to us.”
“You’re wrong there,” Harcourt stated quietly. “If we solve that, we shall have the speed to go places, but there’s no conceivable science that will make it possible for us to plot a course to or from any destination beyond a few hundred light-years.
“Do not forget that our purpose, when we began this voyage, was to go to Alpha Centauri. From there we intended gradually to work out from star to star, setting up bases where possible, and slowly working out the complex problems involved.
“Theoretically, such a method of plotting space could have gone on indefinitely, though it was generally agreed that the complexity would increase out of all proportion to the extra distance involved.
“But enough of that.” His voice grew harder. “Has it occurred to either of you that even if by some miracle of wit we miss that sun, there is a possibility that this ship may plunge on forever through space at billions of times the velocity of light?
“I mean simply this: our speed jumped inconceivably when we crossed the point of light speed. But that point is now behind us. And there is no similar point ahead that we can cross. When we get our engines reversed, we face the prospect of decelerating at two gravities or a bit more for several thousand years.”
“All this is aside from the fact that, at our present distance from Earth, there is nothing known that will help us find our way back. “I’ll leave these thoughts with you. I’m going to grope my way down to Compton—our last hope!”
There was blazing light in the engine room—a string of gasoline lamps shed the blue-white intensity of their glare onto several score men. Half of the men were taking turns, a dozen at a time, in the simple task of straining at a giant wheel whose shaft disappeared at one end into the bank of monstrous drive tubes. At the other end the wheel was attached to a useless electric motor.
The wheel moved so sluggishly before the combined strength of the workers that Harcourt thought, appalled,
Good heavens, at that rate, it’ll take a day—and we’ve got forty minutes at utmost.
He saw that the other men were putting together a steam engine from parts ripped out of great packing cases. He felt better. The engine would take the place of the electric motor and—
“It’ll take half an hour!” roared a bull-like voice to one side of him. As he turned, Compton bellowed, “And don’t waste time telling me any stories about running into stars. I’ve been listening in to you fellows on this wall communicator.”
Harcourt was conscious of a start of surprise as he saw that the chief engineer was lying on the steel floor, his head propped on a curving metal projection. His heavy face looked strangely white, and when he spoke it was from clenched teeth:
“Couldn’t spare anyone to send you up some light. We’ve got a single, straightforward job down here: to stop those drivers.” He finished ironically: “When we’ve done that we’ll have about fifteen minutes to figure out what good it will do us.”
The mighty man winced as he finished speaking. For the first time Harcourt saw the bandage on his right hand. He said sharply, “You’re hurt!”
“Remind me,” replied Compton grimly, “when we get back to Earth to sock the departmental genius who put an electric lock on the door of the emergency room. I don’t know how long it took to chisel into it, but my finger got lost somewhere in the shuffle.
“It’s all right,” he added swiftly. “I’ve just now taken a ’1ocal.’ It’ll start working in half a minute and we can talk.”
Harcourt nodded stiffly. He knew the fantastic courage and endurance that trained men could show. He said casually: “How would you like some technicians, mathematicians and other such to come down here and relieve your men? There’s a whole corridor full of them out there.”
“Nope!” Compton shook his leonine head. Color was coming into his cheeks, and his voice had a clearer, less strained note as he continued: “These war horses of mine are experts. Just imagine a biologist taking a three-minute shift at putting that steam engine together. Or heaving at that big wheel without ever having been trained to synchronize his muscles to the art of pushing in unity with other men.
“But forget about that. We’ve got a practical problem ahead of us; and before we die I’d like to know what we should have done and could have done. Suppose we get the steam engine running in time—which is not certain; that’s why I put those men on the wheel even before we had light. Anyway, suppose we do, where would we be?”
“Acceleration would stop,” said Harcourt. “But our speed would be constant at something over thirty light-years per second.”
“That’s too hard to strike a sun!” Compton spoke seriously, eyes half closed. He looked up. “Or is it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Simply this: this sun is about twelve hundred thousand miles in diameter. If it were at all gaseous in structure, we could he through so fast its heat would never touch us.”
“Gunther says the star is somewhat colder than our own. That suggests greater density.”
“In that case”—Compton was almost cheerful—“at our speed, and with the hard steel of our ship, we could conceivably pass through a steel plate a couple of million miles in thickness. It’s a problem in fire power for a couple of ex-military men.”
“I’ll leave the problem for your old age,” Harcourt said. “Your attitude suggests that you see no solutions to the situation presented by the star.”
Compton stared at him for a moment, unsmiling; then, “Okay, Chief, I’ll cut out the kidding. You’re right about the star. It took fifty hours to get up to two hundred forty thousand miles per second. Then we crossed some invisible line, and for the past few hours we’ve been plumping along at, as you say, thirty miles a second.
“All right, then, say fifty-three hours that it took us to get here. Even if we eliminate that horrible idea you spawned, about it taking us thousands of years to decelerate, there still remains the certainty that—with the best of luck, that is—with simply a reversal of the conditions that brought us here, it would require not less than fifty-three hours to stop.
“Figure it out for yourself. We might as well play marbles.”
They called Gunther and O’Day. “And bring some liquor t down!” Compton roared through the communicator.
“Wait!” Harcourt prevented him from breaking the connection. He spoke quietly: “Is that you, Gunther?”
“Yep!” the navigation officer responded.
“The star’s still dead on?”
“Deader!” said the ungrammatical Gunther.
Harcourt hesitated; this was the biggest decision he had ever faced in his ten violent years as a commander of a spaceship. His face was stiff as he said finally, huskily:
“All right, then, come down here, but don’t tell anyone else what’s up. They could take it—but what’s the use? Come to Compton’s office.”
He saw that the chief engineer was staring at him strangely. Compton said at last, “So we really give up the ship?”
Harcourt gazed back at him coldly. “Remember, I’m only the coordinator around here. I’m supposed to know something of everything—but when experts tell me there’s no hope, barring miracles, naturally I refuse to run around like an animal with a blind will to live.
“Your men are slaving to get the steam engine running; two pounds of U-235 are doing their bit to heat up the steam boiler. When it’s all ready, we’ll do what we can. Is that clear?”
Compton grinned, but there was silence between them until the other men arrived. O’Day greeted them gloomily.
“There’s a couple of good friends of mine up there whom I’d like to have here now. But what the hell! Let ’em die in peace, says Harcourt; and right he is.”
Gunther poured the dark, glowing liquid, and Harcourt watched the glasses tilt, finally raised his own. He wondered if the others found the stuff as smooth and tasteless as he did. He lowered his glass and said softly:
“Atomic power! So this is the end of man’s first interstellar flight.
There’ll be others, of course, and the law of averages will protect them from running into suns; and they’ll get their steam engines going, and their drives reversed; and if this process does reverse itself, then within a given time they’ll stop—and then they’ll be where we thought we were: facing the problem of finding their way back to Earth. It looks to me as if man is stymied by the sheer vastness of the universe.”
“Don’t be such a damned pessimist!” said Compton, his face flushed from his second glass “I’ll wager they’ll have the drivers of the third test ship reversed within ten minutes of crossing that light speed deadline. That means they’ll only be a few thousand light-years from Earth. Taking it in little jumps like that, they’ll never get lost.”
Harcourt saw O’Day look up from his glass; the physicist’s lips parted—and Harcourt allowed his own words to remain unspoken. O’Day said soberly:
“I’m thinkin’ we’ve been puttin’ too much blame on speed and speed alone in this thing. Sure there’s no magic about the speed of light. I didn’t ever see that before, but it’s there plain now. The speed of light depends on the properties of light, and that goes for electricity and radio an’ all those related waves.
“Let’s be keepin’ that in mind. Light an’ such react on space, an’ are held down by nothin’ but their own limitations. An’ there’s only one new thing we’ve got that could’ve put us out here, beyond the speed of light; an’ that’s—”
“Atomic energy!” It was Compton, his normally strong voice amazingly low and tense. “O’Day, you’re a genius. Light lacks the energy attributes necessary to break the bonds that hold it leashed. But atomic energy—the reaction of atomic energy on the fabric of space itself—”
Gunther broke in eagerly: “There must be rigid laws. For decades men dreamed of atomic energy, and finally it came, differently than they expected. For centuries after the first spaceship roared crudely to the moon, there has been the dream of the inertia-less drive; and here, somewhat differently than we pictured it, is that dream come alive.”
There was brief silence, Then, once again before Harcourt could speak, there was an interruption. The door burst open—a man poked his head around the corner.
“Steam engine’s ready! Shall we start her up?”
There was a gasp from every man in that room—except Harcourt. He leaped erect before the heavier Compton could more than shuffle his feet; he snapped: “Sit down, Compton!”
His gray gaze flicked with flame-like intensity from face to face. His lean body was taut as stone as /he said, “No, the steam engine does not go on!”
He glanced steadily but swiftly at his wrist watch. He said, “According to Gunther’s calculations, we’re still twenty minutes from the star. During seventeen of those minutes we’re going to sit here and prepare a logical plan for using the forces we have available.”
Turning to the mechanic, he finished quietly: “Tell the boys to relax, Blake.”
The men were staring at him; and it was odd to notice that each of the three had become abnormally stiff in posture, their eyes narrowed to pinpoints, hands clenched, cheeks pale. It was not as if they had not been tense a minute before. But now—”
By comparison, their condition then seemed as if it could have been nothing less than easygoing resignation.
For a long moment the silence in the cozy little room, with its library, its chairs and shining oak desk and metal cabinets, was complete. Finally Compton laughed, a curt, tense, humor-less laugh that showed the enormousness of the strain he was under. Even Harcourt jumped at that hard, ugly, explosive jolt of laughter.
“You false alarm!” said Compton. “So you gave up the ship, eh?“
“My problem,” Harcourt said coolly, “was this: we needed original thinking. And new ideas are never born under ultimate strain. In the last twenty minutes, when we seemed to have given up, your minds actually relaxed to a very great extent.
“And the idea came! It may be worthless, but it’s what we’ve got to work on. There’s no time to look further.
“And now, with O’Day’s idea, we’re back to the strain of hope. I need hardly tell you that, once an idea exists, trained men can develop it immeasurably faster under pressure.”
Once more his gaze flicked from face to face. Color was coming back to their faces; they were recovering from the tremendous shock. He finished swiftly: “One more thing: you may have wondered why I didn’t invite the others into this. Reason: twenty men only confuse an issue in twenty minutes. It’s we four here, or death for all. Gunther, regardless of the time it will take, we must have recapitulation, a clarification—quick!”
Gunther began roughly: “All right. We crossed the point of light speed. Several things happened: our velocity jumped to a billion or so times that of light. Our electric system went on the blink—there’s something to explain.”
“Go on!” urged Harcourt. “Twelve minutes left!”
“Our new speed is due to the reaction of atomic energy on the fabric of space. This reaction did not begin till we had crossed the point of light speed, indicating some connection, possibly a natural, restraining influence of the world of matter and energy as we knew it, on this vaster, potentially cataclysmic force.”
“Eleven minutes!” said Harcourt coldly.
Greater streams of sweat were pouring down Gunther’s dark face. He finished jerkily: “Apparently our acceleration continued at two gravities. Our problems are: to stop the ship immediately and to find our way back to Earth.”
He slumped back in his chair like a man who has suddenly become deathly sick. Harcourt snapped: “Compton, what happened to the electricity?”
“The batteries drained of power in about three minutes!” the big man rumbled hoarsely. “That happens to be approximately the theoretically minimum time, given an ultimate demand, and opposed only by the cable resistance. Somewhere it must have jumped to an easy conductor—but where did it go? Don’t ask me!”
“I’m thinkin’,” said O’Day, his voice strangely flat, “I’m thinkin’ it went home.
“Wait!” The flat, steely twang of the word silenced both Harcourt and the astounded Compton. “Time for talkin’ is over. Harcourt, you’ll be enforcin’ my orders.”
“Give them!” barked the captain. His body felt like a cake of ice, his brain like a red-hot poker.
O’Day turned to Compton. “Now get this, you blasted engineer: turn off them drivers ninety-five percent! One inch farther and I’l1 blow your brains out!”
“How the devil am I going to know what the percent is?” Compton said freezingly. “Those are engines, not delicately adjusted laboratory instruments. Why not shut them off all the way?”
“You damned idiot!” O’Day shouted furiously. “That’ll cut us off out here an’ we’ll be lost forever. Get movin’”
Beet-like flame thickened along Compton’s bull neck. The two men glared at each other like two animals out of a cage, where they have been tortured, ready to destroy each other in distorted revenge.
“Compton!” said Harcourt, and he was amazed at the way his voice quavered. “Seven minutes!”
Without a word, the chief engineer flung about, jerked open the door and plunged out of sight. He was bellowing some gibberish at his men, but Harcourt couldn’t make out a single sentence.
“There’ll be a point,” O’Day was mumbling beside him, “there’ll be a point where the reaction’ll be minimum—but still there—and we’ll have everything—but let’s get out into the engine room before that scoundrel Compton—”
His voice trailed off. He would have stood there blankly if Harcourt hadn’t taken him gently and shoved his unsteady form through the door.
The steam engine was hissing with soft power. As Harcourt watched, Compton threw the clutch. The shining piston rod jerked into life, shuddered as it took the terrific load; and then the great wheel began to move.
For hours, men had sweated and strained in relays to make that wheel turn. Each turn, Harcourt knew, widened by a microscopic fraction of an inch the space separating the hard energy blocks in each drive tube, where the fury of atomic power was born. Each fraction of widening broke that fury by an infinitesimal degree.
The wheel spun sluggishly, ten revolutions a minute, twenty, thirty—a hundred—and that was top speed for that wheel with that power to drive it.
The seconds fled like sleet before a driving wind. The engine puffed and labored, and clacked in joints that had not been sufficiently tightened during the rush job of putting it together. It was the only sound in that great domed room.
Harcourt glanced at his watch. Four minutes. He smiled bleakly. Actually, of course, Gunther’s estimate might be out many minutes. Actually, any second could bring the intolerable pain of instantaneous, flaming death.
He made no attempt to pass on the knowledge of the time limit. Already he had driven these men to the danger point of human sanity. The violence of their rages a few minutes before were red-flare indicators of abnormal mental abysses ahead. There was nothing to do now but wait.
Almost pettishly, he pulled the clutch free—and the wheel stopped. There was no momentum. It just stopped.
“Keep jerkin’ it in an’ out now!” O’Day commanded. “An’ stop when I tell ya!” The point of reaction must be close.”
In, out; in, out. It was hard on the engine. The machine labored with a noisy, shuddering clamor. It was harder on the men. They stood like figures of stone. Harcourt glanced stiffly at his watch.
Two minutes!
In, out; in out; in—went the clutch, rhythmically now. Somewhere there was a point where atomic energy would cease to create a full tension in space, but there would still be connection. That much of O’Day’s words were clear. And—
Abruptly the ship staggered, as if it had been struck. It was not a physical blow, for they were not sent reeling off their feet. But Harcourt, who knew the effect of titanic energies, waited for the first shock of inconceivable heat to sear him. Instead—
“Now!” came the shrill beat of O’Day’s voice.
Out jerked the clutch in its rhythmical backward and forward movement. The great space liner poised for the space of a heartbeat. The thought came to Harcourt:
Good heavens, we can’t have stopped completely. There must be momentum!
In went that rhythmically manipulated clutch. The ship reeled; and Compton turned. His eyes were glassy, his face twisted with sudden pain.
“Huh!” he said. “What did you say, O’Day? I bumped my finger and—”
“You be-damned idiot!” O’Day almost whispered. “You—”
His words twisted queerly into meaningless sounds. And, for Harcourt a strange blur settled over the scene.
He had the fantastic impression that Compton had returned to his automatic manipulation of the clutch; and, insanely, the wheel and the steam engine had reversed.
A period of almost blank confusion passed; and then, incredibly, he was walking backward into Compton’s office, leading an unsteady, backward-walking O’Day.
Suddenly there were Compton, Gunther, O’Day and himself sitting around the desk; and senseless words chattered from their lips.
They lifted glasses to their mouths; and, horribly, the liquor flowed from their lips and filled the glasses.
Then he was walking backward again; and there was Compton lying on the engine-room floor, nursing his shattered finger—and then he was back in the dark navigation room, peering through a telescope eyepiece at a remote star.
The jumble of voice sounds came again and again through the blur—finally he lay asleep in bed.
Asleep? Some part of his brain was awake, untouched by this incredible reversal of physical and mental actions. And as he lay there, slow thoughts came to that aloof, watchful part of his mind. The electricity had, of course, gone home. Literally. And so were they going home. Just how far the madness would carry on, whether it would end at the point of light speed, only time would tell, And obviously, when flights like this were everyday occurrences, passengers and crew would spend the entire journey in bed.
Everything reversed. Atomic energy had created an initial tension in space, and somehow space demanded an inexorable recompense. Action and reaction were equal and opposite. Something was transmitted, and then an exact balance was made. O’Day had quite evidently thought that at the point of change, of reaction, an artificial stability could be created, enabling the ship to remain indefinitely at its remote destination and—
Blackness surged over his thought. He opened his eyes with a start. Somewhere in the back of his brain was a conviction of something wrong. He couldn’t quite place the discordant factor, but it quivered there on the verge of his brain, an alien thing that shattered for him the security of the spaceship.
He strained his senses against the blackness—and abruptly grew aware of the intensity of that dark. That was it! The darkness! The indirect night light must have gone off.
Odd that the light system should have gone on the blink on this first “night” of this first trip of the first spaceship powered by the new, stupendous atomic drive.
Footsteps whispered hesitantly along the corridor. There was a knock, and the voice of Gunther came, strained and muffled. The man entered; and his breathing was a thick, satisfying sound that destroyed the last vestige of the hard silence. Gunther said:
“Harcourt, the damnedest thing has happened. It started when everything electrical went out of order. Compton says we’ve been accelerating for two hours now at heaven only knows what rate.”
For the multi-billionth time, as it had for uncountable years, the inescapable cosmic farce began to rewind, like a film held over!
The End
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are
reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal
library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come
and enjoy a read or two as well.
Articles & Links
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find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
One of my all time favorite science fiction authors is the duo that wrote under the name Lewis Padgett. Here is one of their greatest stories. Please enjoy.
Time Locker
by
Lewis Padgett
GALLOWAY PLAYED by ear, which would ha~e been all right had he been a musician—but he was a scientist. A drunken and erratic one, but good. He’d wanted to be an experimental technician, and would have been excellent at it, for he had a streak of genius at times. Unfortunately, there had been no funds for such specialized education, and now Galloway, by profession an integrator machine supervisor, maintained his laboratory purely as a hobby. It was the damndest-looking lab in six states. Galloway had spent ten months building what he called a liquor organ, which occupied most of the space. He could recline on a comfortably padded couch and, by manipulating buttons, siphon drinks of marvelous quantity, quality, and variety down his scarified throat. Since he had made the liquor organ during a protracted period of drunkenness, he never remembered the basic principles of its construction. In a way, that was a pity.
There was a little of everything in the lab, much of it incongruous. Rheostats had little skirts on them, like ballet dancers, and vacuously grinning faces of clay. A generator was conspicuously labeled, “Monstro,” and a much smaller one rejoiced in the name of “Bubbles.” Inside a glass retort was a china rabbit, and Galloway alone knew how it had got there. Just inside the door was a hideous iron dog, originally intended for Victorian lawns or perhaps for Hell, and its hollowed ears served as sockets for test tubes.
“But how do you do it?” Vanning asked.
Galloway, his lank form reclining under the liquor organ, siphoned a shot of double Martini into his mouth. “Huh?”
“You heard me. I could get you a swell job if you’d use that screwball brain of yours. Or even learn to put up a front.”
“Tried it,” Galloway mumbled. “No use. I can’t work when I concentrate, except at mechanical stuff. I think my subconscious must have a high I.Q.”
Vanning, a chunky little man with a scarred, swarthy face, kicked his heels against Monstro. Sometimes Galloway annoyed him. The man never realized his own potentialities, or how much they might mean to Horace Vanning, Commerce Analyst. The “commerce,” of course, was extra-legal, but the complicated trade relationships of 1970 left many loopholes a clever man could slip through. The fact of the matter was, Vanning acted in an advisory capacity to crooks. It paid well. A sound knowledge of jurisprudence was rare in these days; the statutes were in such a tangle that it took years of research before one could even enter a law school. But Vanning had a staff of trained experts, a colossal library of transcripts, decisions, and legal data, and, for a suitable fee, he could have told Dr. Crippen how to get off scot-free.
The shadier side of his business was handled in strict privacy, without assistants. The matter of the neuro-gun, for example— Galloway had made that remarkable weapon, quite without realizing its importance. He had hashed it together one evening, piecing out the job with court plaster when his welder went on the fritz. And he’d given it to Vanning, on request. Vanning didn’t keep it long. But already he had earned thousands of credits by lending the gun to potential murderers. As a result, the police department had a violent headache.
A man in the know would come to Vanning and say, “I heard you can beat a murder rap. Suppose I wanted to—”
‘~‘Hold on! I can’t condone anything like that.”
“Huh? But—”
“Theoretically, I suppose a perfect murder might be possible. Suppose a new sort of gun had been invented, and suppose—just for
the sake of an example—it was in a locker at the Newark Stratoship Field.”
“Huh?”
“I’m just theorizing. Locker Number 7~, combination thirty-blueeight. These little details always help one to visualize a theory, don’t they?”
“You mean—”
“Of course if our murderer picked up this imaginary gun and used it, he’d be smart enough to have a postal box ready, addressed to.
say .. . Locker 40, Brooklyn Port. He could slip the weapon into the box, seal it, and get rid of the evidence at the nearest mail conveyor. But that’s all theorizing. Sorry I can’t help you. The fee for an interview is three thousand credits. The receptionist will take your check.”
Later, conviction would be impossible. Ruling 87-M, Illinois Precinct, case of State vs. Dupson, set the precedent. Cause of death must be determined. Element of accident must be considered. As Chief Justice Duckett had ruled during the trial of Sanderson vs. Sanderson, which involved the death of the accused’s mother-in-law— Surely the prosecuting attorney, with his staff of toxicological experts, must realize that— And in short, your honor, I must respectfully request that the case be dismissed for lack of evidence and proof of cams mortis— Galloway never even found out that his neuro-gun ‘was a dangerous weapon. But Vanning haunted the sloppy laboratory, avidly watching the results of his friends’ scientific doodling. More than once he had acquired handy little devices in just this fashion. The trouble was, Galloway wouldn’t work!
He took another sip of Martini, shook his head, and unfolded his lanky limbs. Blinking, he ambled over to a cluttered workbench and began toying with lengths of wire.
“Making something?”
“Dunno. Just fiddling. That’s the way it goes. I put things together, and sometimes they work. Trouble is, I never know exactly what they’re going to do. Tsk!” Galloway dropped the wires and returned to his couch. “Hell with it.”
He was, Vanning reflected, an odd duck. Galloway was essentially amoral, thoroughly out of place in this too-complicated world. He seemed to watch, with a certain wry amusement, from a vantage point of his own, rather disinterested for the most part. And he made things—
But always and only for his own amusement. Vanning sighed and glanced around the laboratory, his orderly soul shocked by the melee. Automatically he picked up a rumpled smock from the floor, and looked for a hook. Of course there was none. Galloway, running short of conductive metal, had long since ripped them out and used them in some gadget or other.
The so-called scientist was creating a zombie, his eyes half closed. Vanning went over to a metal locker in one corner and opened the door. There were no hooks, but he folded the smock neatly and laid it on the floor of the locker.
Then he went back to his perch on Monstro.
“Have a drink?” Galloway asked.
Vanning shook his head. “Thanks, no. I’ve got a case coming up tomorrow.”
“There’s always thiamin. Filthy stuff. I work better when I’ve got pneumatic cushions around my brain.”
“Well, I don’t.”
“It is purely a matter of skill,” Galloway hummed, “to which each may attain if he wili. . . . What are you gaping at?”
“That—locker,” Vanning said, frowning in a baffled way. “What the—” He got up. The metal door hadn’t been securely latched and had swung open. Of the smock Vanning had placed within the metal compartment there was no trace.
“It’s the paint,” Galloway explained sleepily. “Or the treatment. I bombarded it with gamma rays. But it isn’t good for anything.”
Vanning went over and swung a fluorescent into a more convenient position. The locker wasn’t empty, as he had at first imagined. The smock was no longer there, but instead there was a tiny blob of—something, pale-green and roughly spherical.
“It melts things?” Vanning asked, staring. “Uh-huh. Pull it out. You’ll see.”
Vanning felt hesitant about putting his hand inside the locker. Instead, he found a long pair of test-tube clamps and teased the blob out. It was— Vanning hastily looked away. His eyes hurt. The green blob was changing in color, shape and size. A crawling, nongeometrical blur of motion rippled over it. Suddenly the clamps were remarkably heavy.
No wonder. They were gripping the original smock.
“It does that, you know,” Galloway said absently. “Must be a reason, too. I put things in the locker and they get small. Take ‘em out, and they get big again. I suppose I could sell it to a stage magician.” His voice sounded doubtful.
Vanning sat down, fingering the smock and staring at the metal locker. It was a cube, approximately 3 X 3 X 5, lined with what seemed to be grayish paint, sprayed on. Outside, it was shiny black.
“How’d you do it?”
“Huh? I dunno. Just fiddling around.” Galloway sipped his zombie. “Maybe it’s a matter of dimensional extension. My treatment may have altered the spatio-temporal relationships inside the locker. I wonder what that means?” he murmured in a vague aside. “Words frighten me sometimes.”
Vanning was thinking about tesseracts. “You mean it’s bigger inside than it is outside?”
“A paradox, a paradox, a most delightful paradox. You tell me. I suppose the inside of the locker isn’t in this space-time continuum at all. Here, shove that bench in it. You’ll see.” Galloway made no move to rise; he waved toward the article of furniture in question.
“You’re right. That bench is bigger than the locker.”
“So it is. Shove it in a bit at a time. That corner first. Go ahead.”
Vanning wrestled with the bench. Despite his shortness, he was stockily muscular.
“Lay the locker on its back. It’ll be easier.”
“I. . . uh!.. . 0. K. Now what?”
“Edge the bench down into it.”
Vanning squinted at his companion, shrugged, and tried to obey. Of course the bench wouldn’t go into the locker. One corner did, that was all. Then, naturally, the bench stopped, balancing precariously at an angle.
“Well?”
“Wait.”
The bench moved. It settled slowly downward. As Vanning’s jaw dropped, the bench seemed to crawl into the locker, with the gentle motion of a not-too-heavy object sinking through water. It wasn’t sucked down. It melted down. The portion still outside the locker was unchanged. But that, too, settled, and was gone.
Vanning craned forward. A blur of movement hurt his eyes. Inside the locker was—something. It shifted its contours, shrank, and became a spiky sort of scalene pyramid, deep-purple in hue.
It seemed to be less than four inches across at its widest point.
“I don’t believe it,” Vanning said.
Galloway grinned. “As the Duke of Wellington remarked to the subaltern, it was a demned small bottle, sir.”
“Now, wait a minute. How the devil could I put an eight-foot bench inside of a five-foot locker?”
“Because of Newton,” Galloway said. “Gravity. Go fill a test tube with water and I’ll show you.”
“Wait a minute . . . 0. K. Now what?”
“Got it brim-full? Good. You’ll find some sugar cubes in that drawer labeled ‘Fuses.’ Lay a cube on top of the test tube, one corner down so it touches the water.”
Vanning racked the tube and obeyed. “Well?”
“What do you see?”
“Nothing. The sugar’s getting wet. And melting.”
“So there you are,” Galloway said expansively. Vanning gave him a brooding look and turned back to the tube. The cube of sugar was slowly dissolving and melting down.
Presently it was gone.
“Air and water are different physical conditions. In air a sugar cube can exist as a sugar cube. In water it exists in solution. The corner of it extending into water is subject to aqueous conditions. So it alters physically, though not chemically. Gravity does the rest.”
“Make it clearer.”
“The analogy’s clear enough, dope. The water represents the particular condition existing inside that locker. The sugar cube represents the workbench. Now! The sugar soaked up the water and gradually dissolved it, so gravity could pull the cube down into the tube as it melted. See?”
“I think so. The bench soaked up the. . . the x condition inside the locker, eh? A condition that shrank the bench—”
“In partis, not in toto. A little at a time. You can shove a human body into a small container of sulphuric acid, bit by bit.”
“Oh,” Vanning said, regarding the cabinet askance. “Can you get the bench out again?”
“Do it yourself. Just reach in and pull it out.”
“Reach in? I don’t want my hand to melt!”
“It won’t. The action isn’t instantaneous. You saw that yourself. It takes a few minutes for the change to take place. You can reach into the locker without any ill effects, if you don’t leave your hand exposed to the conditions for more than a minute or so. I’ll show you.” Galloway languidly arose, looked around, and picked up an empty demijohn. He dropped this into the locker.
The change wasn’t immediate. It occurred slowly, the demijohn altering its shape and size till it was a distorted cube the apparent size of a cube of sugar. Galloway reached down and brought it up again, placing the cube on the floor.
It grew. It was a demijohn again.
“Now the bench. Look out.”
Galloway rescued the little pyramid. Presently it became the original workbench.
“You see? I’ll bet a storage company would like this. You could probably pack all the furniture in Brooklyn in here, but there’d be trouble in getting what you wanted out again. The physical change, you know—”
“Keep a chart,” Vanning suggested absently. “Draw a picture of how the thing looks inside the locker, and note down what it was.”
“The legal brain,” Galloway said. “I want a drink.” He returned to his couch and clutched the siphon in a grip of death.
“I’ll give you six credits for the thing,” Vanning offered.
“Sold. It takes up too much room anyway. Wish I could put it inside itself.” The scientist chuckled immoderately. “That’s very funny.”
“Is it?” Vanning said. “Well, here you are.” He took credit coupons from his wallet. “WThere’ll I put the dough?”
“Stuff it into Monstro. He’s my bank. . . . Thanks.”
“Yeah. Say, elucidate this sugar business a bit,will you? It isn’t just gravity that affects the cube so it slips into a test tube. Doesn’t the water soak up into the sugar—”
“You’re right at that. Osmosis. No, I’m wrong. Osmosis has something to do with eggs. Or is that ovulation? Conduction, convection
—absorption! Wish I’d studied physics; then I’d know the right words. Just a zoot stoop, that’s me. I shall take the daughter of the Vine to spouse,” Galloway finished incoherently and sucked at the siphon.
“Absorption,” Vanning scowled. “Only not water, being soaked up by the sugar. The . . . the conditions existing inside the locker, being soaked up by your workbench—in that particular case.
“Like a sponge or a blotter.”
“The bench?”
“Me,” Galloway said succinctly, and relapsed into a happy silence, broken by occasional gurgles as he poured liquor down his scarified gullet. Vanning sighed and turned to the locker. He carefully closed and latched the door before lifting the metal cabinet in his muscular arms.
“Going? G’night. Fare thee well, fare thee well—”
“Night.”
“Fare—thee—well!” Galloway ended, in a melancholy outburst of tunefulness, as he turned over preparatory to going to sleep.
Vanning sighed again and let himself out into the coolness of the night. Stars blazed in the sky, except toward the south, where the aurora of Lower Manhattan dimmed them. The glowing white towers of skyscrapers rose in a jagged pattern. A sky-ad announced the virtues of Vambulin—”It Peps You Up.”
His speeder was at the curb. Vanning edged the locker into the trunk compartment and drove toward the Hudson Floataway, the quickest route downtown. He was thinking about Poe.
The Purloined Letter, which had been hidden in plain sight, but re-folded and re-addressed, so that its superficial appearance was changed. Holy Hutton! What a perfect safe the locker would make! No thief could crack it, for the obvious reason that it wouldn’t be locked. No thief would want to clean it out. Vanning could fill the locker with credit coupons and instantly they’d become unrecognizable. It was the ideal cache.
How the devil did it work?
There was little use in asking Galloway. He played by ear. A primrose by the river’s rim a simple primrose was to him—not Prim ula vulgaris.
Syllogisms were unknown to him. He reached the conclusion without the aid of either major or minor premises.
Vanning pondered. Two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Ergo, there was a different sort of space in the locker— But Vanning was pumping at conclusions. There was another answer—the right one. He hadn’t guessed it yet.
Instead, he tooled the speeder downtown to the office building where he maintained a floor, and brought the locker upstairs in the freight lift. He didn’t put it in his private office; that would have been too obvious. He placed the metal cabinet in one of the storerooms, sliding a file cabinet in front of it for partial concealment. It wouldn’t do to have the clerks using this particular locker.
Vanning stepped back and considered. Perhaps— A bell rang softly. Preoccupied, Vanning didn’t hear it at first.
When he did, he went back to his own office and pressed the acknowledgment button on the Winchell. The gray, harsh, bearded face of Counsel Hatton appeared, filling the screen.
“Hello,” Vanning said.
Hatton nodded. “I’ve been trying to reach you at your home. Thought I’d try the office—”
“I didn’t expect you to call now. The trial’s tomorrow. It’s a bit late for discussion, isn’t it?”
“Dugan & Sons wanted me to speak to you. I advised against it.”
“Oh?”
Hatton’s thick gray brows drew together. “I’m prosecuting, you know. There’s plenty of evidence against Macllson.”
“So you say. But peculation’s a difficult charge to prove.”
“Did you get an injunction against scop?”
“Naturally,” Vanning said. “You’re not using truth serum on my client!”
“That’ll prejudice the jury.”
“Not on medical grounds. Scop affects Macllson harmfully. I’ve got a covering prognosis.”
“Harmfully is right!” Hatton’s voice was sharp. “Your client embezaled those bonds, and I can prove it.”
“Twenty-five thousand in credits, it comes to, eh? That’s a lot for Dugan & Sons to lose. What about that hypothetical case I posed? Suppose twenty thousand were recovered—”
“Is this a private beam? No recordings?”
“Naturally. Here’s the cut-off.” Vanning held up a metal-tipped cord. “This is strictly sub rosa.”
“Good,” Counsel Hatton said. “Then I can ‘Call you a lousy shyster.”
“Tcli!”
“Your gag’s too old. It’s moth-eaten. Macllson swiped five grand in bonds, negotiable into credits. The auditors start checking up. MacIlson comes to you. You tell him to take twenty grand more, and offer to return that twenty if Dugan & Sons refuse to prosecute. Macllson splits with you on the five thousand, and on the plat standard, that ain’t hay.”
“I don’t admit to anything like that.”
“Naturally you don’t, not even on a closed beam. But it’s tacit. However, the gag’s moth-eaten, and my clients won’t play ball with you. They’re going to prosecute.”
“You called me up just to tell me that?”
“No, I want to settle the jury question. Will you agree to let ‘em use scop on the panel?”
“0. K.,” Vanning said. He wasn’t depending on a fixed jury tomorrow. His battle would be based on legal technicalities. With scop-tested talesmen, the odds would be even. And such an arrangement would save days or weeks of argument and challenge.
“Good,” Hatton grunted. “You’re going to get your pants licked off.”
Vanning replied with a mild obscenity and broke the connection. Reminded of the pending court fight, he forced the matter of the fourth-dimensional locker out of his mind and left the office. Later— Later would be time enough to investigate the possibilities of the remarkable cabinet more thoroughly. Just now, he didn’t want his brain cluttered with nonessentials. He went to his apartment, had the servant mix him a short highball, and dropped into bed.
And, the next day, Vanning won his case. He based it on complicated technicalities and obscure legal precedents. The crux of the matter was that the bonds had not been converted into government credits. Abstruse economic charts proved that point for Vanning. Conversion of even five thousand credits would have caused a fluctuation in the graph line, and no such break existed. Vanning’s experts went into monstrous detail.
In order to prove guilt, it would have been necessary to show, either actually or by inference, that the bonds had been in existence since last December 20th, the date of their most recent check-and-recording. The case of Donovan vs. Jones stood as a precedent.
Hatton jumped to his feet. “Jones later confessed to his defalcation, your honor!”
“Which does not affect the original decision,” Vanning said smoothly.
“Retroaction is not admissible here. The verdict was not proven.”
“Counsel for the defense will continue.”
Counsel for the defense continued, building up a beautifully intricate edifice of casuistic logic.
Hatton writhed. “Your honor! I—”
“If my learned opponent can produce one bond—just one of the bonds in question—I will concede the case.”
The presiding judge looked sardonic. “Indeed! If such a piece of evidence could be produced, the defendant would be jailed as fast as I could pronounce sentence. You know that very well, Mr. Vanfling. Proceed.”
“Very well. My contention, then, is that the bonds never existed. They were the result of a clerical error in notation.”
“A clerical error in a Pederson Calculator?”
“Such errors have occurred, as I shall prove. If I may call my next witness—”
Unchallenged,. the witness, a math technician, explained how a Pederson Calculator can go haywire. He cited cases.
Hatton caught him up on one point. “I protest this proof. Rhodesia, as everyone knows, is the location of a certain important experimental industry. Witness has refrained from stating the nature of the work performed in this particular Rhodesian factory. Is it not a fact that the Henderson United Company deals largely in radioactive ores?”
“Witness will answer.”
“I can’t. My records don’t include that information.”
“A significant omission,” Hatton snapped. “Radioactivity damages the intricate mechanism of a Pederson Calculator. There is no radium nor radium by-product in the offices of Dugan & Sons.”
Vanning stood up. “May I ask if those offices have been fumigated lately?”
“They have. It is legally required.”
“A type of chlorine gas was used.”
“Yes.”
“I wish to call my next witness.”
The next witness, a physicist and official in the Ultra Radium Institute, explained that gamma radiations affect chlorine strongly, causing ionization. Living organisms could assimilate by-products of radium and transmit them in turn. Certain clients of Dugan & Sons had been in contact with radioactivity— “This is ridiculous, your honor! Pure theorization—”
Vanning looked hurt. “I cite the case of Dangerfield vs. Austro Products, California, 1963. Ruling states that the uncertainy factor is prime admissible evidence. My point is simply that the Pederson Calculator which recorded the bonds could have been in error. If this be true, there were no bonds, and my client is guiltless.”
“Counsel will continue,” said the judge, wishing he were Jeffries so he could send the whole damned bunch to the scaffold. Jurisprudence should be founded on justice, and not be a three-dimensional chess game. But, of course, it was the natural development of the complicated political and economic factors of modern civilization. It was already evident that Vanning would win his case.
And he did. The jury was directed to find for the defendant. On a last, desperate hope, Hatton raised a point cirorder and demanded scop, but his petition was denied. Vanning winked at his opponent and closed his brief case.
That was that.
Vanning returned to his office. At four-thirty that afternoon trouble started to break. The secretary announced a Mr. Macllson, and was pushed aside by a thin, dark, middle-aged man lugging a gigantic suedette suitcase.
“Vanning! I’ve got to see you—”
The attorney’s eye hooded. He rose from behind his desk, dismissing the secretary with a jerk of his head. As the door closed, Vanning said brusquely, “What are you doing here? I told you to stay away from me. What’s in that bag?”
“The bonds,” Macllson explained, his voice unsteady. “Something’s gone wrong—”
“You crazy fool! Bringing the bonds here—” With a leap Vanning was at the door, locking it. “Don’t you realize that if Hatton gets his hands on that paper, you’ll be yanked back to jail? And I’ll be disbarred! Get ‘em out of here.”
“Listen a minute, will you? I took the bonds to Finance Unity, as you told me, but . . . but there was an officer there, waiting for me. I saw him just in time. If he’d caught me—”
Vanning took a deep breath. “You were supposed to leave the bonds in that subway locker for two months.”
Macllson pulled a news sheet from his pocket. “But the government’s declared a freeze on ore stocks and bonds. It’ll go into effect in a week. I couldn’t wait—the money would have been tied up indefinitely.”
“Let’s see that paper.” Vanning examined it and cursed softly. “Where’d you get this?”
“Bought it from a boy outside the jail. I wanted to check the current ore quotations.”
“Uh-huh. I see. Did it occur to you that this sheet might be faked?”
Macllson’s jaw dropped. “Fake?”
“Exactly. Hatton figured I might spring you, and had this paper ready. You bit. You led the police right to the evidence, and a swell spot you’ve put me in.”
“B-but—”
Vanning grimaced. “Why do you suppose you saw that cop at Finance Unity? They could have nabbed you any time. But they wanted to scare you into heading for my office, so they could catch both of us on the same hook. Prison for you, disbarment for me. Oh, hell!”
Macllson licked his lips. “Can’t I get out a back door?”
“Through the cordon that’s undoubtedly waiting? Orbs! Don’t be more of a sap than you can help.”
“Can’t you—hide the stuff?”
“Where? They’ll ransack this office with X rays. No, I’ll just—” Vanning stopped. “Oh. Hide it, you said. Hide it—”
He whirled to the dictograph. “Miss Horton? I’m in conference. Don’t disturb me for anything. If anybody hands you a search warrant, insist on verifying it through headquarters. Got me? 0. K.”
Hope had returned to Macllson’s face. “Is it all right?”
“Oh, shut up!” Vanning snapped. “Wait here for me. Be back directly.” He headed for a side door and vanished. In a surprisingly short time he returned, awkardly lugging a metal cabinet.
“Help me . . . oh! . . . here. In this corner. Now get out.”
“But—”
“Flash,” Vanning ordered. “Everything’s under control. Don’t talk. You’ll be arrested, but they can’t hold you without evidence. Come back as soon as you’re sprung.” He urged Macllson to the door, unlocked it, and thrust the man through. After that, he returned to the cabinet, swung open the door, and peered in. Em~ty. Sure.
The suedette suitcase— -
Vanning worked it into the locker, breathing hard. It took a little time, since the valise was larger than the metal cabinet. But at last he relaxed, watching the brown case shrink and alter its outline till it was tiny and distorted, the shape of an elongated egg, the color of a copper cent piece.
“Whew!” Vanning said.
Then he leaned closer, staring. Inside the locker, something was moving. A grotesque little creature less than four inches tall was visible. It was a shocking object, all cubes and angles, a bright green in tint, and it was obvious~y alive.
Someone knocked on the door.
The tiny—thing—was busy with the copper-colored egg. Like an ant, it was lifting the egg and trying to pull it away. Vanning gasped and reached into the locker. The fourth-dimensional creature dodged. It wasn’t quick enough. Vanning’s hand descended, and he felt wriggling movement against his palm.
He squeezed.
The movement stopped. He let go of the dead thing and pulled his hand back swiftly.
The door shook under the impact of fists.
Vanning closed the locker and called, “Just a minute.”
“Break it down,” somebody ordered.
But that wasn’t necessary. Vanning put a painful smile on his face and turned the key. Counsel Hatton came in, accompanied by bulky policemen. “We’ve got Macllson,” he said.
“Oh? Why?”
For answer Hatton jerked his hand. The officers began to search the room, Vanning shrugged.
“You’ve jumped the gun,” he said. “Breaking and entering—”
“We’ve got a warrant.” -
“Charge?” -
“The bonds, of course.” Hatton’s voice was weary. “I don’t know where you’ve hid that suitcase, but we’ll find it.”
“What suitcase?” Vanning wanted to know.
“The one Macllson had when he came in. The one he didn’t have when he went out.”
“The game,” Vanning said sadly, “is up. You win.”
“Eh?”
“If I tell you what I did with the suitcase, will you put in a good word for me?”
“Why. . . yeah. Where—”
“I ate it,” Vanning said, and retired to the couch, where he settled himself for a nap. Hatton gave him a long, hating look. The officers tore in— They passed by the locker, after a casual glance inside. The X rays
revealed nothing, in walls, floor, ceiling, or articles of furniture. The other offices were searched, too. Vanning applauded the painstaking job.
In the end, Hatton gave up. There was nothing else he could do.
“I’ll clap suit on you tomorrow,” Vanning promised. “Same time I get a habeas corpus on Macllson.”
“Step to hell,” Hatton growled.
“‘By now.”
Vanning waited till his unwanted guests had departed. Then, chuckling quietly, he went to the locker and opened it.
The copper-colored egg that represented the suedette suitcase had vanished. Vanning groped inside the locker, finding nothing.
The significance of this didn’t strike Vanning at first. He swung the cabinet around so that it faced the window. He looked again, with identical results.
The locker was empty.
Twenty-five thousand credits in negotiable ore bonds had disappeared.
Vanning started to sweat. He picked up the metal box and shook it. That didn’t help. He carried it across the room and set it up in another corner, returning to search the floor with painstaking accuracy. Holy— Hatton?
No. Vanning hadn’t let the locker out of his sight from the time the police had entered till they left. An officer had swung open the cabinet’s door, looked inside, and closed it again. After that the door had remained shut, till just now.
The bonds were gone.
So was the abnormal little creature Vanning had crushed. All of which meant—what?
Vanning approached the locker and closed it, clicking the latch into position. Then he reopened it, not really expecting that the copper-colored egg would reappear.
He was right. It didn’t.
Vanning staggered to the Winchell and called Galloway.
“Whatzit? Huh? Oh. What do you want?” The scientist’s gaunt face appeared on the screen, rather the worse for wear. “I got a hangover. Can’t use thiamin, either. I’m allergic to it. How’d your case come out?”
“Listen,” Vanning said urgently, “I put something inside that damn—locker of yours and now it’s gone.”
“The locker? That’s funny.”
“No! The thing I put in it. A . . . a suitcase.”
Galloway shook his head thoughtfully. “You never know, do you? I remember once I made a—”
“The hell with that. I want that suitcase back!”
“An heirloom?” Galloway suggested.
“No, there’s money in it.”
“Wasn’t that a little foolish of you? There hasn’t been a bank failure since 1949. Never suspected you were a miser, Vanning. Like to have the stuff around, so you can run it through your birdlike fingers, eh?”
“You’re drunk.”
“I’m trying,” Galloway corrected. “But I’ve built up an awful resistance over a period of years. It takes time. Your call’s already set me back two and a half drinks. I must put an extension on the siphon, so I can Winchell and guzzle at the same time.”
Vanning almost chattered incoherently into the mike. “My suitcase! What happened to it? I want it back.”
“\Vell, I haven’t got it.”
“Can’t you find out where it is?”
“Dunno. Tell me the details. I’ll see what I can figure out.” Vanning complied, revising his story as caution prompted. “0. K.,” Galloway said at last, rather unwillingly. “I hate working out theories, but just as a favor. . . . My diagnosis will cost you fifty credits.”
“What? Now listen—” -
“Fifty credits,” Galloway repeated unflinchingly. “Or no prognosis.”
“How do I know you can get it back for me?”
“Chances are I can’t. Still, maybe . . . I’ll have to go over to Mechanistra and use some of their machines. They charge a good bit, too. But I’ll need forty-brain-power calculators—”
“0. K., 0. K.!” Vanning growled. “Hop to it. I want that suitcase back.”
“What interests me is that little bug you squashed. In fact, that’s the only reason I’m tackling your problem. Life in the fourth dimension—” Galloway trailed off, murmuring. His face faded from the screen. After a while Vanning broke the connection.
He re-examined the locker, finding nothing new. Yet the suedette suitcase had vanished from it, into thin air. Oh, hell!
Brooding over his sorrows, Vanning shrugged into a top coat and dined vinously at the Manhattan Roof. He felt very sorry for himself. -
The next day he felt even sorrier. A call to Galloway had given the blank signal, so Vanning had to mark time. About noon Macllson dropped in. His nerves were shot.
“You took your time in springing me,” he started immediately. “Well, what now? Have you got a drink anywhere around?”
“You don’t need a drink,” Vanning grunted. “You’ve got a skinful already, by the look of you. Run down to Florida and wait till this blows over.”
“I’m sick of waiting. I’m going to South America. I want some credits.”
“Wait’ll I arrange to cash the bonds.”
“I’ll take the bonds. A fair half, as we agreed.”
Vanning’s eyes narrowed. “And walk out into the hands of the police. Sure.”
Macllson looked uncomfortable. “I’ll admit I made a boner. But this time—no, I’ll play smart now.”
“You’ll wait, you mean.”
“There’s a friend of mine on the roof parking lot, in a helicopter. I’ll go up and slip him the bonds, and then I’ll just walk out. The police won’t find anything on me.”
“I said no,” Vanning repeated. “It’s too dangerous.”
“It’s dangerous as things are. If they locate the bonds—”
“They won’t.”
“Where’d you hide ‘em?”
“That’s my business.”
Macllson glowered nervously. “Maybe. But they’re in this building. You couldn’t have finagled ‘em out yesterday before the cops came. No use playing your luck too far. Did they use X rays?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I heard Counsel Hatton’s got a batch of experts going over the blueprints on this building. He’ll find your safe. I’m getting out of here before he does.” -
Vanning patted the air. “You’re hysterical. I’ve taken care of you, haven’t I? Even though you almost screwed the whole thing up.”
“Sure,” Macllson said, pulling at his lip. “But I”— He chewed a fingernail. “Oh, damn! I’m sitting on the edge of a volcano with termites under me. I can’t stay here and wait till they find the bonds. They can’t extradite me from South America—where I’m going, anyway.”
“You’re going to wait,” Vanning said firmly. “That’s your best chance.”
There was suddenly a gun in Macllson’s hand. “You’re going to give me half the bonds. Right now. I don’t trust you a little bit. You figure you can stall me along—hell, get those bonds!”
“No,” Vanning said.
“I’m not kidding.”
“I know you aren’t. I can’t get the bonds.”
“Eh? Why not?”
“Ever heard of a time lock?” Vanning asked, his eyes watch-
ful. “You’re right; I put the suitcase in a concealed safe. But I can’t open that safe till a certain number of hours have passed.”
“Mm-rn.” Macllson pondered. “When—”
“Tomorrow.”
“All right. You’ll have the bonds for me then?”
“If you want them. But you’d better change your mind. It’d be safer.”
For answer MadIson grinned - over his shoulder as he went out. Vanning sat motionless for a long time. He was, frankly, scared.
The trouble was, Macllson was a manic-depressive type. He’d kill. Right now, he was cracking under the strain, and imagining himself a desperate fugitive. Well—precautions would be advisable.
Vanning called Galloway again, but got no answer. He left a message on the recorder and thoughtfully looked into the locker again. It was empty, depressingly so. -
That evening Galloway let Vanning into his laboratory. The scientist looked both tired and drunk. He waved comprehensively toward a table, covered with scraps of paper.
“What a headache you gave me! If I’d known the principles behind that gadget, I’d have been afraid to tackle it. Sit down. Have a drink. Got the fifty credits?”
Silently Vanning handed over the coupons. Galloway shoved them into Monstro. “Fine. Now—” He settled himself on the couch. “Now we start. The fifty credit question.”
“Can I get the suitcase back?”
“No,” Galloway said flatly. “At least, I don’t see how it can be worked. It’s in another spatio-temporal sector.”
“Just what does that mean?”
-“It means the locker works something like a telescope, only the thing isn’t merely visual. The locker’s a window, I figure. You can reach through it as well as look through it. It’s an opening into Now plus x.”
Vanning scowled. “So far you haven’t said anything.”
“So far all I’ve got is theory, and that’s all I’m likely to get. Look.
I was wrong originally. The things that went into the locker didn’t
appear in another space, because there would have been a spatial
constant. I mean, they wouldn’t have got smaller. Size is size. Moving
a one-inch cube from here to Mars wouldn’t make it any larger or
smaller.”
“What about a different density in the surrounding medium? ‘Wouldn’t that crush an object?”
“Sure, and it’d stay squashed. It wouldn’t return to its former size and shape when it was taken out of the locker again. X plus y never equals xy. But x times y—”
“So?”
“That’s a pun,” Galloway broke off to explain. “The things we put in the locker went into time. Their time-rate remained constant, but not the spatial relationships. Two things can’t occupy the same place at the same time. Ergo, your suitcase went into a different time. Now plus x. And what x represents I don’t know, though I suspect a few million years.”
Vanning looked dazed. “The suitcase is a million years in the future?”
“Dunno how far, but—I’d say plenty. I haven’t enough factors to finish the equation. I reasoned by induction, mostly, and the results are screwy as hell. Einstein would have loved it. My theorem shows that the universe is expanding and contracting at the same time.”
“What’s that got to do—”
“Motion is relative,” Galloway continued inexorably. “That’s a basic principle. Well, the Universe is expanding, spreading out like a gas, but its component parts are shrinking at the same time. The parts don’t actually grow, you know—not the suns and atoms. They just run away from the central point. Galloping off in all directions . . . where was I? Oh. Actually, the -Universe, taken as a unit, is shrinking.”
“So, it’s shrinking. Where’s my suitcase?”
“I told you. In the future. Inductive reasoning showed that. It’s beautifully simple and logical. And it’s quite impossible of proof, too. A hundred, a thousand, a million years ago the Earth—the Universe
—was larger than it is now. And it continues to contract. Sometime in the future the Earth will be just half as large as it is now. Only we won’t notice it because the Universe will be proportionately smaller.”
Galloway went on dreamily. “We put a workbench into the locker, so it emerged sometime in the future. The locker’s an open window into a different time, as I told you. Well, the bench was affected by the conditions of that period. It shrank, after we gave it a few seconds to soak up the entropy or something. Do I mean entropy? Allah knows. Oh, well.”
“It turned into a pyramid.”
“Maybe there’s geometric distortion, too. Or it might be a visual illusion. Perhaps we can’t get the exact focus. I doubt if things will really look different in the future—except that they’ll be smaller—but we’re using a window into the fourth dimension. We’re taking a pleat in time. It must be like looking through a prism. The alteration in size is real, but the shape and color are altered to our eyes by the fourthdimensional prism.”
“The whole point, then, is that my suitcase is in the future. Eh? But why did it disappear from the locker?”
“What about that little creature you squashed? Maybe he had pals. They wouldn’t be visible till they came into the very narrow focus of the whatchmaycallit, but—figure it out. Sometime in the future, in a hundred or a thousand or a million years, a suitcase suddenly appears out of thin air. One of our descendants investigates. You kill him. His pals come along and carry the suitcase away, out-of range of the locker. In space it may be anywhere, and the time factor’s an unknown quantity. Now plus x. It’s a time locker. Well?”
“Hell!” Vanning exploded. “So that’s all you can tell me? I’m supposed to chalk it up to profit and loss?”
“Uh-huh. Unless you want to crawl into the locker yourself after your suitcase. Lord knows where you’d come out, though. The proportions of the air probably would have changed in a few thousand years. There might be other alterations, too.”
“I’m not that crazy.”
So there he was. The bonds were gone, beyond hope of redemp. tion. Vanning could resign himself to that loss, once he knew the securities wouldn’t fall into the hands of the police. But Macllson was another matter, especially after a bullet spattered against the glassolex window of Vanning’s office.
An interview with Macllson had proved unsatisfactory. The defaulter was convinced that Vanning was trying to bilk him. He was removed forcibly, yelling threats. He’d go to the police—he’d confess— Let him. There was no proof. The hell with him. But, for safety’s sake, Vanning clapped an injunction on his quondam client. It didn’t land. Macllson clipped the official on the jaw and fled.
Now, Vanning suspected, he lurked in dark corners, armed, and anxious to commit homicide. Obviously a manic-depressive type.
Vanning took a certain malicious pleasure in demanding a couple of plain-clothes men to act as his guards. Legally, he was within his rights, since his life had been threatened. Until Macllson was under sufficient restriction, Vanning would be protected. And he made sure that his guards were two of the best shots on the Manhattan force. He also found out that they had been told to keep their eyes peeled for the missing bonds and the suedette suitcase. Vanning Winchelled Counsel Hatton and grinned at the screen.
“Any luck yet?”
“What do you mean?”
“My watchdogs. Your spies. They won’t find the bonds, Hatton. Better call ‘em off. Why make the poor devils do two jobs at once?”
“One job would be enough. Finding the evidence. If Macllson drilled you, I wouldn’t be too unhappy.”
“Well, I’ll see you in court,” Vanning said. “You’re prosecuting Watson, aren’t you?”
“Yes. Are you waiving scop?”
“On the jurors? Sure. I’ve got this case in the bag.”
“That’s what you think,” Hatton said, and broke the beam.
Chuckling, Vanning donned his topcoat, collected the guards, and headed for court. There was no sign of Macllson— Vanning won the case, as he had expected. He returned to his offices, collected a few unimportant messages from the switchboard girl, and walked toward his private suite. As he opened the door, he saw the suedette suitcase on the, carpet in due corner.
He stopped, hand frozen on the latch. Behind him he could hear the heavy footsteps of the guards. Over his shoulder Vanning said, “Wait a minute,” and dodged into the office, slamming and locking the door behind him. He caught the tail end of a surprised question.
The suitcase. There it was, unequivocally. And, quite as unequivocally, the two plain-clothes men, after a very brief conference, were hammering on the door, trying to break it down.
Vanning turned green. He took a hesitant step forward, and then saw the locker, in the corner to which he had moved it. The time locker— That was it. If he shoved the suitcase inside the locker, it would become unrecognizable. Even if it vanished again, that wouldn’t matter. What mattered was the vital importance of getting rid— immediately!—of incriminating evidence.
The door rocked on its hinges. Vanning scuttled toward the suitcase and picked it up. From the corner of his eye he saw movement.
In the air above him, a hand had appeared. It was the hand of a
giant, with an immaculate cuff fading into emptiness. Its huge fingers were reaching down— Vanning screamed and sprang away. He was too slow. The hand descended, and Vanning wriggled impotently against the palm. The hand contracted into a fist. When it opened, what was left of Vanning dropped squashily to the carpet, which it stained. The hand withdrew into nothingness. The door fell in and the plain-clothes men stumbled over it as they entered.
It didn’t take long for Hatton and his cohorts to arrive. Still, there was little for them to do except clean up the mess. The suedette bag, containing twenty-five thousand credits in negotiable bonds, was carried off to a safer place. Vanning’s body was scraped up and removed to the morgue. Photographers flashed pictures, fingerprint experts insufflated their white powder, X ray men worked busily. It was all done with swift efficiency, so that within an hour the office was empty and the door sealed.
Thus there were no spectators to witness the advent of a gigantic hand that appeared from nothingness, groped around as though searching for something, and presently vanished once more— The only person who could have thrown light on the matter was Galloway, and his remarks were directed to Monstro, in the solitude of his laboratory. All he said was:
“So that’s why that workbench materialized for a few minutes here yesterday. Hm-m-m. Now plus x—and x equals about a week. Still, why not? It’s all relative. But—I never thought the Universe was shrinking that fast!”
He relaxed on the couch and siphoned a double Martini.
“Yeah, that’s it,” he murmured after a while. “Whew! I guess Vanning must have been the only guy who ever reached into the middle of next week and—killed himself! I think I’ll get tight.”
And he did.
The End
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are
reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal
library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come
and enjoy a read or two as well.
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Back in the day, I had amassed many, many tomes and collections of fine science fiction stories. I really loved the works from the “Golden Age” of science fiction, and one of my favorite writers was Lewis Padgett. Not well known, but completely awesome.
He wrote a series of short stories revolving around a mad scientist that produced brilliant work when he was shit-faced drunk. It’s not real life. That’s why I love it so. It’s so anti-PC.
Here is one of his best. This is a lively and often frankly hilarious account of how a very gifted (when under the influence of the demon Drink) scientist struggles to come to grips with the wackiness of his almost-perfect robot.
It’s one of his many, many creations while drunk. In this case, it is one in which he had just created with quite extraordinary powers, for a purpose which he cannot remember – and with his seemingly inextricable financial predicament(s).
It was first published in the October 1943 issue of Astounding Science Fiction as by “Lewis Padgett”, a nom de plume used by Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) and his wife C.L. Moore (1911-1987) for many of the 200+ fantasy, s-f and horror stories which they wrote together, essentially during the forties, mostly under this name.
The Proud Robot
ORIGINALLY the robot was intended to be a can opener. Things often happened that way with Gallegher, who played at science by ear. He was, as he often remarked, a casual genius. Sometimes he’d start with a twist of wire, a few batteries, and a button hook, and before he finished, he might contrive a new type of refrigerating unit. The affair of the time locker had begun that way, with Gallegher singing hoarsely under his breath and peering, quite drunk, into cans of paint.
At the moment he was nursing a hangover. A disjointed, lanky, vaguely boneless man with a lock of dark hair falling untidily over leis forehead, he lay on the couch in the lab and manipulated his mechanical liquor bar. A very dry Martini drizzled slowly from the spigot into his receptive mouth. He was trying to remember something, but not trying too hard. It had to do with the robot, of course. Well, it didn’t matter.
“Hey, Joe,” Gallegher said.
The robot stood proudly before the mirror and examined its innards. Its hull was transparent, and wheels were going around at a great rate inside.
“When you call me that,” Joe remarked, “whisper. And get that cat out of here.”
“Your ears aren’t that good.”
“They are. I can hear the cat walking about, all right.”
“What does it sound like?” Gallegher inquired, interested.
“Just like drums,” said the robot, with a put-upon air. “And when you talk, it’s like thunder.” Joe’s voice was a discordant squeak, so Gallegher meditated on saying something about glass-houses and casting the first stone. He brought his attention, with some effort, to the luminous door panel, where a shadow loomed—a familiar shadow, Gallegher thought.
“It’s Brock,” the annunciator said. “Harrison Brock. Let me in!”
“The door’s unlocked.” Gallegher didn’t stir. He looked gravely at the well-dressed, middle-aged man who came in, and tried to remember. Brock was between forty and fifty; he had a smoothly massaged, clean-shaved face, and wore an expression of harassed intolerance. Probably Gallegher knew the man. He wasn’t sure.
Oh, well.
Brock looked around the big, untidy laboratory, blinked at the robot, searched for a chair, and failed to find it. Arms akimbo, he rocked back and forth and glared at the prostrate scientist.
“Well?” he said.
“Never start conversations that way,” Gallegher mumbled, siphoning another Martini down his gullet. “I’ve had enough trouble today. Sit down and take it easy. There’s a dynamo behind you. It isn’t very dusty, is it?”
“Did you get it?” Brock snapped. “That’s all I want to know. You’ve had a week. I’ve a check for ten thousand in my pocket. Do you want it, or don’t you?”
“Sure,” Gallegher said. He extended a large, groping hand. “Give.”
“Caveat emptor. What am I buying?”
“Don’t you know?” the scientist asked, honestly puzzled.
Brock began to bounce up and down in a harassed fashion. “My God,” he said. “They told me you could help me if anybody could. Sure. And they also said it’d be like pulling teeth to get sense out of you. Are you a technician or a driveling idiot?”
Gallegher pondered. “Wait a minute. I’m beginning to remember. I talked to you last week, didn’t I?”
“You talked—” Brock’s round face turned pink. “Yes! You lay there swilling liquor and babbled poetry. You sang ’Frankie and Johnnie.’ And you finally got around to accepting my commission.”
“The fact is,” Gallegher said, “I have been drunk. I often get drunk. Especially on my vacation. It releases my subconscious, and then I can work. I’ve made my best gadgets when I was tizzied,” he went on happily. “Everything seems so clear then. Clear as a bell. I mean a bell, don’t I? Anyway—” He lost the thread and looked puzzled. “Anyway, what are you talking about?”
“Are you going to keep quiet?” the robot demanded from its post before the mirror.
Brock jumped. Gallegher waved a casual hand. “Don’t mind Joe. I just finished him last night, and I rather regret it.”
“A robot?”
“A robot. But he’s no good, you know. I made him when I was drunk, and I haven’t the slightest idea how or why. All he’ll do is stand there and admire himself. And sing. He sings like a banshee. You’ll hear him presently.”
With an effort Brock brought his attention back to the matter in hand. “Now look, Gallegher. I’m in a spot. You promised to help me. If you don’t, I’m a ruined man.”
“I’ve been ruined for years,” the scientist remarked. “It never bothers me. I just go along working for a living and making things in my spare time. Making all sorts of things. You know, if I’d really studied, I’d have been another Einstein. So they tell me. As it is, my subconscious picked up a first-class scientific training somewhere. Probably that’s why I never bothered. When I’m drunk or sufficiently absent-minded, I can work out the damnedest problems.”
“You’re drunk now,” Brock accused.
“I approach the pleasanter stages. How would you feel if you woke up and found you’d made a robot for some unknown reason, and hadn’t the slightest idea of the creature’s attributes?”
“Well—”
“I don’t feel that way at all,” Gallegher murmured. “Probably you take life too seriously, Brock. Wine is a mocker; strong drink is raging. Pardon me. I rage.” He drank another Martini.
Brock began to pace around the crowded laboratory, circling various enigmatic and untidy objects. “If you’re a scientist, Heaven help science.”
“I’m the Larry Adler of science,” Gallegher said. “He was a musician—lived some hundreds of years ago, I think. I’m like him. Never took a lesson in my life. Can I help it if my subconscious likes practical jokes?”
“Do you know who I am?” Brock demanded.
“Candidly, no. Should I?”
There was bitterness in the other’s voice. “You might have the courtesy to remember, even though it was a week ago. Harrison Brock. Me. I own Vox-View Pictures.”
“No,” the robot said suddenly, “it’s no use. No use at all, Brock.”
“What the—”
Gallegher sighed wearily. “I forget the damned thing’s alive. Mr. Brock, meet Joe. Joe, meet Mr. Brock—of Vox-View.”
Joe turned, gears meshing within his transparent skull. “I am glad to meet you, Mr. Brock. Allow me to congratulate you on your good fortune in hearing my lovely voice.”
“Uh,” said the magnate inarticulately. “Hello.”
“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” Gallegher put in, sotto voce. “Joe’s like that. A peacock. No use arguing with him, either.”
The robot ignored this aside. “But it’s no use, Mr. Brock,” he went on squeakily. “I’m not interested in money. I realize it would bring happiness to many if I consented to appear in your pictures, but fame means nothing to me. Nothing. Consciousness of beauty is enough.”
Brock began to chew his lips. “Look,” he said savagely, “I didn’t come here to offer you a picture job. See? Am I offering you a contract? Such colossal nerve— Pah! You’re crazy.”
“Your schemes are perfectly transparent,” the robot remarked coldly. “I can see that you’re overwhelmed by my beauty and the loveliness of my voice—its grand tonal qualities. You needn’t pretend you don’t want me, just so you can get me at a lower price. I said I wasn’t interested.”
“You’re cr-r-razy!” Brock howled, badgered beyond endurance, and Joe calmly turned back to his mirror.
“Don’t talk so loudly,” the robot warned. “The discordance is deafening. Besides, you’re ugly and I don’t like to look at you.” Wheels and cogs buzzed inside the transplastic shell. Joe extended his eyes on stalks and regarded himself with every appearance of appreciation.
Gallegher was chuckling quietly on the couch. “Joe has a high irritation value,” he said. “I’ve found that out already. I must have given him some remarkable senses, too. An hour ago he started to laugh his damn fool head off. No reason, apparently. I was fixing myself a bite to eat. Ten minutes after that I slipped on an apple core I’d thrown away and came down hard.
Joe just looked at me. ’That was it,’ he said. ’Logics of probability. Cause and effect. I knew you were going to drop that apple core and then step on it when you went to pick up the mail.’
Like the White Queen, I suppose. It’s a poor memory that doesn’t work both ways.”
Brock sat on the small dynamo—there were two, the larger one named Monstro, and the smaller one serving Gallegher as a bank—and took deep breaths. “Robots are nothing new.”
“This one is. I hate its gears. It’s beginning to give me an inferiority complex. Wish I knew why I’d made it,” Gallegher sighed. “Oh, well. Have a drink?”
“No. I came here on business. Do you seriously mean you spent last week building a robot instead of solving the problem I hired you for?”
“Contingent, wasn’t it?” Gallegher asked. “I think I remember that.”
“Contingent,” Brock said with satisfaction. “Ten thousand, if and when.”
“Why not give me the dough and take the robot? He’s worth that. Put him in one of your pictures.”
“I won’t have any pictures unless you figure out an answer,” Brock snapped. “I told you all about it.”
“I have been drunk,” Gallegher said. “My mind has been wiped clear, as by a sponge. I am as a little child. Soon I shall be as a drunken little child. Meanwhile, if you’d care to explain the matter again—”
Brock gulped down his passion, jerked a magazine at random from the bookshelf, and took out a stylo. “All right. My preferred stocks are at twenty-eight, ’way below par—” He scribbled figures on the magazine.
“If you’d taken that medieval folio next to that, it’d have cost you a pretty penny,” Gallegher said lazily. “So you’re the sort of guy who writes on tablecloths, eh? Forget this business of stocks and stuff. Get down to cases. Who are you trying to gyp?”
“It’s no use,” the robot said from before its mirror. “I won’t sign a contract. People may come and admire me, if they like, but they’ll have to whisper in my presence.”
“A madhouse,” Brock muttered, trying to get a grip on himself. “Listen, Gallegher. I told you all this a week ago, but—”
“Joe wasn’t here then. Pretend like you’re talking to him.” “Uh—look. You’ve heard of Vox-View Pictures, at least.”
“Sure. The biggest and best television company in the business. Sonatone’s about your only competitor.”
“Sonatone’s squeezing me out.”
Gallegher looked puzzled. “I don’t see how. You’ve got the best product. Tri-dimensional color, all sorts of modern improvements, the top actors, musicians, singers—”
“No use,” the robot said. “I won’t.”
“Shut up, Joe. You’re tops in your field, Brock. I’ll hand you that. And I’ve always heard you were fairly ethical. What’s Sonatone got on you?”
Brock made helpless gestures. “Oh, it’s politics. The bootleg theaters. I can’t buck ’em. Sonatone helped elect the present administration, and the police just wink when I try to have the bootleggers raided.”
“Bootleg theaters?” Gallegher asked, scowling a trifle. “I’ve heard something—”
“It goes ’way back. To the old sound-film days. Home television killed sound film and big theaters. People were conditioned away from sitting in audience groups to watch a screen. The home televisors got good. It was more fun to sit in an easy-chair, drink beer, and watch the show. Television wasn’t a rich man’s hobby by that time. The meter system brought the price down to middle-class levels. Everybody knows that.”
“I don’t,” Gallegher said. “I never pay attention to what goes on outside of my lab, unless I have to. Liquor and a selective mind. I ignore everything that doesn’t affect me directly. Explain the whole thing in detail, so I’ll get a complete picture. I don’t mind repetition. Now, what about this meter system of yours?”
“Televisors are installed free. We never sell ’em; we rent them. People pay according to how many hours they have the set tuned in. We run a continuous show, stage plays, wire-tape films, operas, orchestras, singers, vaudeville—everything. If you use your televisor a lot, you pay proportionately. The man comes around once a month and reads the meter. Which is a fair system.
Anybody can afford a Vox-View. Sonatone and the other companies do the same thing, but Sonatone’s the only big competitor I’ve got. At least, the only one that’s crooked as hell. The rest of the boys—they’re smaller than I am, but I don’t step on their toes. Nobody’s ever called me a louse,” Brock said darkly.
“So what?”
“So Sonatone has started to depend on audience appeal. It was impossible till lately—you couldn’t magnify tri-dimensional television on a big screen without streakiness and mirage-effect. That’s why the regular three-by-four home screens were used. Results were perfect. But Sonatone’s bought a lot of the ghost theaters all over the country—”
“What’s a ghost theater?” Gallegher asked.
“Well—before sound films collapsed, the world was thinking big. Big—you know? Ever heard of the Radio City Music Hall? That wasn’t in it! Television was coming in, and competition was fierce. Sound-film theaters got bigger and more elaborate. They were palaces. Tremendous. But when television was perfected, nobody went to the theaters any more, and it was often too expensive a job to tear ’em down. Ghost theaters—see? Big ones and little ones. Renovated them. And they’re showing Sonatone programs. Audience appeal is quite a factor. The theaters charge plenty, but people flock into ’em. Novelty and the mob instinct.” Gallegher closed his eyes. “What’s to stop you from doing the same thing?”
“Patents,” Brock said briefly. “I mentioned that dimensional television couldn’t be used on big screens till lately. Sonatone signed an agreement with me ten years ago that any enlarging improvements would be used mutually. They crawled out of that contract. Said it was faked, and the courts upheld them. They uphold the courts—politics. Anyhow, Sonatone’s technicians worked out a method of using the large screen. They took out patents—twenty-seven patents, in fact, covering every possible variation on the idea. My technical staff has been working day and night trying to find some similar method that won’t be an infringement, but Sonatone’s got it all sewed up. They’ve a system called the Magna. It can be hooked up to any type of televisor—but they’ll only allow it to be used on Sonatone machines. See?”
“Unethical, but legal,” Gallegher said. “Still, you’re giving your customers more for their money. People want good stuff. The size doesn’t matter.”
“Yeah,” Brock said bitterly, “but that isn’t all. The newspapers are full of A.A.—it’s a new catchword. Audience Appeal. The herd instinct. You’re right about people wanting good stuff—but would you buy Scotch at four a quart if you could get it for half that amount?”
“Depends on the quality. What’s happening?”
“Bootleg theaters,” Brock said. “They’ve opened all over the country. They show Vox-View products, and they’re using the Magna enlarger system Sonatone’s got patented. The admission price is low—lower than the rate of owning a Vox-View in your own home. There’s audience appeal. There’s the thrill of something a bit illegal. People are having their Vox-Views taken out right and left. I know why. They can go to a bootleg theater instead.”
“It’s illegal,” Gallegher said thoughtfully.
“So were speakeasies, in the Prohibition Era. A matter of protection, that’s all. I can’t get any action through the courts. I’ve tried. I’m running in the red. Eventually I’ll be broke. I can’t lower my home rental fees on Vox-Views. They’re nominal already. I make my profits through quantity. Now, no profits. As for these bootleg theaters, it’s pretty obvious who’s backing them.”
“Sonatone?”
“Sure. Silent partners. They get the take at the box office. ’What they want is to squeeze me out of business, so they’ll have a monopoly. After that they’ll give the public junk and pay their artists starvation salaries. With me it’s different. I pay my staff what they’re worth—plenty.”
“And you offered me a lousy ten thousand,” Gallegher remarked.
“Uh-huh!”
“That was only the first installment,” Brock said hastily. “You can name your own fee. Within reason,” he added.
“I shall. An astronomical sum. Did I say I’d accept the commission a week ago?”
“You did.”
“Then I must have had some idea how to solve the problem,” Gallegher pondered. “Let’s see. I didn’t mention anything in particular, did I?”
“You kept talking about marble slabs and . . . uh . . . your sweetie.”
“Then I was singing,” Gallegher explained largely. ” ’St. James Infirmary.’ Singing calms my nerves, and Lord knows they need it sometimes. Music and liquor. ’I often wonder what the vintners buy—’ “
“What?”
” ’One half so precious as the stuff they sell.’ Let it go. I am quoting Omar. It means nothing. Are your technicians any good?”
“The best. And the best paid.”
“They can’t find a magnifying process that won’t infringe on the Sonatone Magna patents?”
“In a nutshell, that’s it.”
“I suppose I’ll have to do some research,” Gallegher said sadly. I hate it like poison. Still, the sum of the parts equals the whole. Does that make sense to you? It doesn’t to me. I have trouble with words. After I say things, I start wondering what I’ve said. Better than watching a play,” he finished wildly. “I’ve got a headache. Too much talk and not enough liquor. Where were we?”
“Approaching the madhouse,” Brock suggested. “If you weren’t my last resort, I’d—”
“No use,” the robot said squeakily. “You might as well tear up your contract, Brock. I won’t sign it. Fame means nothing to me—nothing.”
“If you don’t shut up,” Gallegher warned, “I’m going to scream in your ears.”
“All right!” Joe shrilled. “Beat me! Go on, beat me! The meaner you are, the faster I’ll have my nervous system disrupted, and then I’ll be dead. I don’t care. I’ve got no instinct of self-preservation. Beat me. See if I care.”
“He’s right, you know,” the scientist said after a pause. “And it’s the only logical way to respond to blackmail or threats. The sooner it’s over, the better. There aren’t any gradations with Joe. Anything really painful to him will destroy him. And he doesn’t give a damn.”
“Neither do I,” Brock grunted. “What I want to find out—”
“Yeah. I know. Well, I’ll wander around and see what occurs to me. Can I get into your studios?”
“Here’s a pass.” Brock scribbled something on the back of a card.
“Will you get to work on it right away?”
“Sure,” Gallegher lied. “Now you run along and take it easy. Try and cool off. Everything’s under control. I’ll either find a solution to your problem pretty soon or else—”
“Or else what?”
“Or else I won’t,” the scientist finished blandly, and fingered the buttons on a control panel near the couch. “I’m tired of Martinis. Why didn’t I make that robot a mechanical bartender, while I was at it? Even the effort of selecting and pushing buttons is depressing at times. Yeah, I’ll get to work on the business, Brock. Forget it.”
The magnate hesitated. “Well, you’re my only hope. I needn’t bother to mention that if there’s anything I can do to help you—”
“A blonde,” Gallegher murmured. “That gorgeous, gorgeous star of yours, Silver O’Keefe. Send her over. Otherwise I want nothing.”
“Good-by, Brock,” the robot said squeakily. “Sorry we couldn’t get together on the contract, but at least you’ve had the ineluctable delight of hearing my beautiful voice, not to mention the pleasure of seeing me. Don’t tell too many people how lovely I am. I really don’t want to be bothered with mobs. They’re noisy.”
“You don’t know what dogmatism means till you’ve talked to Joe,” Gallegher said. “Oh, well. See you later. Don’t forget the blonde.”
Brock’s lips quivered. He searched for words, gave it up as a vain task, and turned to the door.
“Good-by, you ugly man,” Joe said.
Gallegher winced as the door slammed, though it was harder on the robot’s supersensitive ears than on his own. “Why do you go on like that?” he inquired. “You nearly gave the guy apoplexy.”
“Surely he didn’t think he was beautiful,” Joe remarked. “Beauty’s in the eye of the beholder.”
“How stupid you are. You’re ugly, too.”
“And you’re a collection of rattletrap gears, pistons and cogs. You’ve got worms,” said Gallegher, referring, of course, to certain mechanisms in the robot’s body.
“I’m lovely.” Joe stared raptly into the mirror.
“Maybe, to you. Why did I make you transparent, I wonder?”
“So others could admire me. I have X-ray vision, of course.”
“And wheels in your head. Why did I put your radioatomic brain in your stomach? Protection?”
Joe didn’t answer. He was humming in a maddeningly squeaky voice, shrill and nerve-racking. Gallegher stood it for a while, fortifying himself with a gin rickey from the siphon.
“Get it up!” he yelped at last. “You sound like an old-fashioned subway train going around a curve.”
“You’re merely jealous,” Joe scoffed, but obediently raised his tone to a supersonic pitch. There was silence for a half-minute. Then all the dogs in the neighborhood began to howl.
Wearily Gallegher dragged his lanky frame up from the couch. He might as well get out. Obviously there was no peace to be had in the laboratory. Not with that animated junk pile inflating his ego all over the place. Joe began to laugh in an off-key cackle.
Gallegher winced.
“What now?”
“You’ll find out.”
Logic of causation and effect, influenced by probabilities, X-ray vision and other enigmatic senses the robot no doubt possessed. Gallegher cursed softly, found a shapeless black hat, and made for the door. He opened it to admit a short, fat man who bounced painfully off the scientist’s stomach.
“Whoof! What a corny sense of humor that jackass has. Hello, Mr. Kennicott. Glad to see you. Sorry I can’t offer you a drink.” Mr. Kennicott’s swarthy face twisted malignantly. “Don’ wanna no drink. Wanna my money. You gimme. Howzabout it?”
Gallegher looked thoughtfully at nothing. “Well, the fact is, I was just going to collect a check.”
“I sella you my diamonds. You say you gonna make somet’ing wit’ ’em. You gimme check before. It go bounca, bounca, bounca. Why is?”
“It was rubber,” Gallegher said faintly. “I never can keep track of my bank balance.”
Kennicott showed symptoms of going bounca on the threshold. “You gimme back diamonds, eh?”
“Well, I used ’em in an experiment, I forget just what. You know, Mr. Kennicott, I think I was a little drunk when I bought them, wasn’t I?”
“Dronk,” the little man agreed. “Mad wit’ vino, sure. So whatta? I wait no longer. Awready you put me off too much. Pay up now or elsa.”
“Go away, you dirty man,” Joe said from within the room. “You’re awful.”
Gallegher hastily shouldered Kennicott out into the street and latched the door behind him. “A parrot;” he explained. “I’m going to wring its neck pretty soon. Now about that money. I admit I owe it to you. I’ve just taken on a big job, and when I’m paid, you’ll get yours.”
“Bah to such stuff,” Kennicott said. “You gotta position, eh? You are technician wit’ some big company, Ai? Ask for ahead-salary.”
“I did,” Gallegher sighed. “I’ve drawn my salary for six months ahead. Now look, I’ll have that dough for you in a couple of days. Maybe I can get an advance from my client. O. K.?”
“No.”
“No?”
“Ah-h, nutsa. I waita one day. Two daysa, maybe. Enough. You get money. Awright. If not, O. K., calabozo for you.”
“Two days is plenty,” Gallegher said, relieved. “Say, are there any of those bootleg theaters around here?”
“Better you get to work an’ not waste time.”
“That’s my work. I’m making a survey. How can I find a bootleg place?”
“Easy. You go downtown, see guy in doorway. He sell you tickets. Anywhere. All over.”
“Swell,” Gallegher said, and bade the little man adieu. Why had he bought diamonds from Kennicott? It would be almost worth while to have his subconscious amputated. It did the most extraordinary things. It worked on inflexible principles of logic, but that logic was completely alien to Gallegher’s conscious mind. The results, though, were often surprisingly good, and always surprising. That was the worst of being a scientist who knew no science—who played by ear.
There was diamond dust in a retort in the laboratory, from some unsatisfactory experiment Gallegher’s subconscious had performed; and he had a fleeting memory of buying the stones from Kennicott. Curious. Maybe—oh, yeah. They’d gone into Joe. Bearings or something. Dismantling the robot wouldn’t help now, for the diamonds had certainly been reground. Why the devil hadn’t he used commercial stones, quite as satisfactory, instead of purchasing blue-whites of the finest water? The best was none too good for Gallegher’s subconscious. It had a fine freedom from commercial instincts. It just didn’t understand the price system or the basic principles of economics.
Gallegher wandered downtown like a Diogenes seeking truth. It was early evening, and the luminates were flickering on overhead, pale bars of light against darkness. A sky sign blazed above Manhattan’s towers. Air-taxis, skimming along at various arbitrary levels, paused for passengers at the elevator landings. Heigh-ho.
Downtown, Gallegher began to look for doorways. He found an occupied one at last, but the man was selling post cards. Gallegher declined and headed for the nearest bar, feeling the need of replenishment. It was a mobile bar, combining the worst features of a Coney Island ride with uninspired cocktails, and Gallegher hesitated on the threshold. But at last he seized a chair as it swung past and relaxed as much as possible. He ordered three rickeys and drank them in rapid succession. After that he called the bartender over and asked him about bootleg theaters.
“Hell, yes,” the man said, producing a sheaf of tickets from his apron. “How many?”
“One. Where do I go?”
“Two-twenty-eight. This street. Ask for Tony.”
“Thanks,” Gallegher said, and, having paid exorbitantly, crawled out of the chair and weaved away. Mobile bars were an improvement he didn’t appreciate. Drinking, he felt, should be performed in a state of stasis, since one eventually reached that stage, anyway.
The door was at the bottom of a flight of steps, and there was a grilled panel set in it. When Gallegher knocked, the visascreen lit up—obviously a one-way circuit, for the doorman was invisible.
“Tony here?” Gallegher said.
The door opened, revealing a tired-looking man in pneumo-slacks, which failed in their purpose of building up his skinny figure. “Got a ticket? Let’s have it. O. K., bud. Straight ahead. Show now going on. Liquor served in the bar on your left.”
Gallegher pushed through sound-proofed curtains at the end of a short corridor and found himself in what appeared to be the foyer of an ancient theater, circa 1980, when plastics were the great fad. He smelled out the bar, drank expensively priced cheap liquor, and, fortified, entered the theater itself. It was nearly full.
The great screen—a Magna, presumably—was filled with people doing things to a spaceship. Either an adventure film or a newsreel, Gallegher realized.
Only the thrill of lawbreaking would have enticed the audience into the bootleg theater. It smelled. It was certainly run on a shoestring, and there were no ushers. But it was illicit, and therefore well patronized. Gallegher looked thoughtfully at the screen. No streakiness, no mirage effect. A Magna enlarger had been fitted to a Vox-View unlicensed televisor, and one of Brock’s greatest stars was emoting effectively for the benefit of the bootleggers’ patrons. Simple highjacking. Yeah.
After a while Gallegher went out, noticing a uniformed policeman in one of the aisle seats. He grinned sardonically. The flatfoot hadn’t paid his admission, of course. Politics were as usual.
Two blocks down the street a blaze of light announced SONATONE BIJOU. This, of course, was one of the legalized theaters, and correspondingly high-priced. Gallegher recklessly squandered a small fortune on a good seat. He was interested in comparing notes, and discovered that, as far as he could make out, the Magna in the Bijou and the bootleg theater were identical. Both did their job perfectly. The difficult task of enlarging television screens had been successfully surmounted.
In the Bijou, however, all was palatial. Resplendent ushers salaamed to the rugs. Bars dispensed free liquor, in reasonable quantities. There was a Turkish bath. Gallegher went through a door labeled MEN and emerged quite dazzled by the splendor of the place. For at least ten minutes afterward he felt like a Sybarite.
All of which meant that those who could afford it went to the legalized Sonatone theaters, and the rest attended the bootleg places. All but a few homebodies, who weren’t carried off their feet by the new fad. Eventually Brock would be forced out of business for lack of revenue. Sonatone would take over, jacking up their prices and concentrating on making money. Amusement was necessary to life; people had been conditioned to television. There was no substitute. They’d pay and pay for inferior talent, once Sonatone succeeded in their squeeze.
Gallegher left the Bijou and hailed an air-taxi. He gave the address of Vox-View’s Long Island studio, with some vague hope of getting a drawing account out of Brock. Then, too, he wanted to investigate further.
Vox-View’s eastern offices sprawled wildly over Long Island, bordering the Sound, a vast collection of variously shaped buildings. Gallegher instinctively found the commissary, where he absorbed more liquor as a precautionary measure. His subconscious had a heavy job ahead, and he didn’t want it handicapped by lack of complete freedom. Besides, the Collins was good.
After one drink, he decided he’d had enough for a while. He wasn’t a superman, though his capacity was slightly incredible. Just enough for objective clarity and subjective release— “Is the studio always open at night?” he asked the waiter.
“Sure. Some of the stages, anyway. It’s a round-the-clock program.”
“The commissary’s full.”
“We get the airport crowd, too. ’Nother?”
Gallegher shook his head and went out. The card Brock had given him provided entree at a gate, and he went first of all to the big-shot’s office. Brock wasn’t there, but loud voices emerged, shrilly feminine.
The secretary said, “Just a minute, please,” and used her interoffice visor. Presently—”Will you go in?”
Gallegher did. The office was a honey, functional and luxurious at the same time. Three-dimensional stills were in niches along the walls —Vox-View’s biggest stars. A small, excited, pretty brunette was sitting behind the desk, and a blond angel was standing furiously on the other side of it. Gallegher recognized the angel as Silver O’Keefe.
He seized the opportunity. “Hiya, Miss O’Keefe. Will you autograph an ice cube for me? In a highball?”
Silver looked feline. “Sorry, darling, but I’m a working girl. And I’m busy right now.”
The brunette scratched a cigarette. “Let’s settle this later, Silver. Pop said to see this guy if he dropped in. It’s important.”
“It’ll be settled,” Silver said. “And soon.” She made an exit. Gallegher whistled thoughtfully at the closed door.
“You can’t have it,” the brunette said. “It’s under contract. And it wants to get out of the contract, so it can sign up with Sonatone. Rats desert a sinking ship. Silver’s been kicking her head off ever since she read the storm signals.”
“Yeah?”
“Sit down and smoke or something. I’m Patsy Brock. Pop runs this business, and I manage the controls whenever he blows his top. The old goat can’t stand trouble. He takes it as a personal affront.” Gallegher found a chair. “So Silver’s trying to renege, eh? How many others?”
“Not many. Most of ’em are loyal. But, of course, if we bust up—” Patsy Brock shrugged. “They’ll either work for Sonatone for their cakes, or else do without.”
“Uh-huh. Well—I want to see your technicians. I want to look over the ideas they’ve worked out for enlarger screens.”
“Suit yourself,” Patsy said. “It’s not much use. You just can’t make a televisor enlarger without infringing on some Sonatone patent.” She pushed a button, murmured something into a visor, and presently two tall glasses appeared through a slot in the desk.
“Mr. Gallegher?”
“Well, since it’s a Collins—”
“I could tell by your breath,” Patsy said enigmatically. “Pop told me he’d seen you. He seemed a bit upset, especially by your new robot. What is it like, anyway?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Gallegher said, at a loss. “It’s got lots of abilities—new senses, I think—but I haven’t the slightest idea what it’s good for. Except admiring itself in a mirror.”
Patsy nodded. “I’d like to see it sometime. But about this Sonatone business. Do you think you can figure out an answer?”
“Possibly. Probably.”
“Not certainly?”
“Certainly, then. Of that there is no manner of doubt—no possible doubt whatever.”
“Because it’s important to me. The man who owns Sonatone is Elia Tone. A piratical skunk. He blusters. He’s got a son named Jimmy. And Jimmy, believe it or not, has read ’Romeo and Juliet.’ “
“Nice guy?”
“A louse. A big, brawny louse. He wants me to marry him.”
” ’Two families both alike in—’ “
“Spare me,” Patsy interrupted. “I always thought Romeo was a dope, anyway. And if I ever thought I was going aisling with Jimmy Tone, I’d buy a one-way ticket to the nut hatch. No, Mr. Gallegher, it’s not like that. No hibiscus blossoms. Jimmy has proposed to me—his idea of a proposal, by the way, is to get a half Nelson on a girl and tell her how lucky she is.”
“Ah,” said Gallegher, diving into his Collins.
“This whole idea—the patent monopoly and the bootleg theaters —is Jimmy’s. I’m sure of that. His father’s in on it, too, of course, but Jimmy Tone is the bright little boy who started it.”
“Why.”
“Two birds with one stone. Sonatone will have a monopoly on the business, and Jimmy thinks he’ll get me. He’s a little mad. He can’t believe I’m in earnest in refusing him, and he expects me to break down and say ’Yes’ after a while. Which I won’t, no matter what happens. But it’s a personal matter. I can’t let him put this trick over on us. I want that self-sufficient smirk wiped off his face.”
“You just don’t like him, eh?” Gallegher remarked. “I don’t blame you, if he’s like that. Well, I’ll do my damnedest. However, I’ll need an expense account.”
“How much?”
Gallegher named a sum. Patsy styloed a check for a far smaller amount. The scientist looked hurt.
“It’s no use,” Patsy said, grinning crookedly. “I’ve heard of you, Mr. Gallegher. You’re completely irresponsible. If you had more than this, you’d figure you didn’t need any more, and you’d forget the whole matter. I’ll issue more checks to you when you need ’em—but I’ll want itemized expense accounts.”
“You wrong me,” Gallegher said, brightening. “I was figuring on taking you to a night club. Naturally I don’t want to take you to a dive. The big places cost money. Now if you’ll just write another check—”
Patsy laughed. “No.”
“Want to buy a robot?”
“Not that kind, anyway.”
“Then I’m washed up,” Gallegher sighed. “Well, what about—”
At this point the visor hummed. A blank, transparent face grew on the screen. Gears were clicking rapidly inside the round head. Patsy gave a small shriek and shrank back.
“Tell Gallegher Joe’s here, you lucky girl,” a squeaky voice announced. “You may treasure the sound and sight of me till your dying day. One touch of beauty in a world of drabness—”
Gallegher clutched the desk and looked at the screen. “What the hell. How did you come to life?”
“I had a problem to solve.”
“How’d you know where to reach me?”
“I vastened you,” the robot said.
“What?”
“I vastened you were at the Vox-View studios with Patsy Brock.”
“What’s vastened?” Gallegher wanted to know.
“It’s a sense I’ve got. You’ve nothing remotely like it, so I can’t describe it to you. It’s rather like a combination of sagrazi and prescience.”
“Sagrazi?”
“Oh, you don’t have sagrazi, either, do you? Well, don’t waste my time. I want to go back to the mirror.”
“Does he always talk like that?” Patsy put in.
“Nearly always. Sometimes it makes even less sense. O. K., Joe. Now what?”
“You’re not working for Brock any more,” the robot said. “You’re working for the Sonatone people.”
“I don’t like Kennicott. He annoys me. He’s too ugly. His vibrations grate on my sagrazi.”
“Never mind him,” Gallegher said, not wishing to discuss his diamond-buying activities before the girl. “Get back to—”
“But I knew Kennicott would keep coming back till he got his money. So when Elia and James Tone came to the laboratory, I got a check from them.”
Patsy’s hand gripped Gallegher’s biceps. “Steady! What’s going on here? The old double cross?”
“No. Wait. Let me get to the bottom of this. Joe, damn your transparent hide, just what did you do? How could you get a check from the Tones?”
“I pretended to be you.”
“Sure,” Gallegher said with savage sarcasm. “That explains it. We’re twins. We look exactly alike.”
“I hypnotized them,” Joe explained. “I made them think I was you.”
“You can do that?“
“Yes. It surprised me a bit. Still, if I’d thought, I’d have vastened I could do it.”
“You . . . yeah, sure. I’d have vastened the same thing myself. What happened?“
“The Tones must have suspected Brock would ask you to help him. They offered an exclusive contract—you work for them and nobody else. Lots of money. Well, I pretended to be you, and said all right. So I signed the contract—it’s your signature, by the way—and got a check from them and mailed it to Kennicott.”
“The whole check?” Gallegher asked feebly. “How much was it?”
“Twelve thousand.”
“They only offered me that?“
“No,” the robot said, “they offered a hundred thousand, and two thousand a week for five years. But I merely wanted enough to pay Kennicott and make sure he wouldn’t come back and bother me. The Tones were satisfied when I said twelve thousand would be enough.”
Gallegher made an articulate, gurgling sound deep in his throat Joe nodded thoughtfully.
“I thought I had better notify you that you’re working for Sonatone now. Well, I’ll go back to the mirror and sing to myself.”
“Wait,” the scientist said. “Just wait, Joe. With my own two hands I’m going to rip you gear from gear and stamp on your fragments.”
“It won’t hold in court,” Patsy said, gulping.
“It will,” Joe told her cheerily. “You may have one last, satisfying look at me, and then I must go.” He went.
Gallegher drained his Collins at a draft. “I’m shocked sober,” he informed the girl. “What did I put into that robot? What abnormal senses has he got? Hypnotizing people into believing he’s me—I’m him—I don’t know what I mean.”
“Is this a gag?” Patsy said shortly, after a pause. “You didn’t sign up with Sonatone yourself, by any chance, and have your robot call up here to give you an out—an alibi? I’m just wondering.”
“Don’t. Joe signed a contract with Sonatone, not me. But—figure it out: If the signature’s a perfect copy of mine, if Joe hypnotized the Tones into thinking they saw me instead of him, if there are witnesses to the signature—the two Tones are witnesses, of course— Oh, hell.”
Patsy’s eyes were narrowed. “We’ll pay you as much as Sonatone offered. On a contingent basis. But you’re working for Vox-View— that’s understood.”
“Sure.”
Gallegher looked longingly at his empty glass. Sure. He was working for Vox-View. But, to all legal appearances, he had signed a contract giving his exclusive services to Sonatone for a period of five years —and for a sum of twelve thousand! Yipe! What was it they’d offered? A hundred thousand flat, and . . . and—
It wasn’t the principle of the thing, it was the money. Now Gallegher was sewed up tighter than a banded pigeon. If Sonatone could win a court suit, he was legally bound to them for five years. With no further emolument. He had to get out of that contract, somehow—and at the same time solve Brock’s problem.
Why not Joe? The robot, with his surprising talents, had got Gallegher into this spot. He ought to be able to get the scientist out. He’d better—or the proud robot would soon be admiring himself piecemeal.
“That’s it,” Gallegher said under his breath. “I’ll talk to Joe. Patsy, feed me liquor in a hurry and send me to the technical department. I want to see those blueprints.”
The girl looked at him suspiciously. “All right. If you try to sell us out—”
“I’ve been sold out myself. Sold down the river. I’m afraid of that robot. He’s vastened me into quite a spot. That’s right, Collinses.” Gallegher drank long and deeply.
After that, Patsy took him to the tech offices. The reading of three-dimensional blueprints was facilitated with a scanner—a selective device which eliminated confusion. Gallegher studied the plans long and thoughtfully. There were copies of the patented Sonatone prints, too, and, as far as he could tell, Sonatone had covered the ground beautifully. There weren’t any outs. Unless one used an entirely new principle—
But new principles couldn’t be plucked out of the air. Nor would that solve the problem completely. Even if Vox-View owned a new type of enlarger that didn’t infringe on Sonatone’s Magna, the bootleg theaters would still be in existence, pulling the trade. A. A.—Audience Appeal—was a prime factor now. It had to be considered. The puzzle wasn’t a purely scientific one. There was the human equation as well.
Gallegher stored the necessary information in his mind, neatly indexed on shelves. Later he’d use what he wanted. For the moment, he was completely baffled. Something worried him.
What?
The Sonatone affair.
“I want to get in touch with the Tones,” he told Patsy. “Any ideas?”
“I can reach ’em on a visor.”
Gallegher shook his head. “Psychological handicap. It’s too easy to break the connection.”
“Well, if you’re in a hurry, you’ll probably find the boys night clubbing. I’ll go see what I can find out.” Patsy scuttled off, and Silver O’Keefe appeared from behind a screen.
“I’m shameless,” she announced. “I always listen at keyholes. Sometimes I hear interesting things. If you want to see the Tones, they’re at the Castle Club. And I think I’ll take you up on that drink.”
Gallegher said, “O. K. You get a taxi. I’ll tell Patsy we’re going.”
“She’ll hate that,” Silver remarked. “Meet you outside the commissary in ten minutes. Get a shave while you’re at it.”
Patsy Brock wasn’t in her office, but Gallegher left word. After that, he visited the service lounge, smeared invisible shave cream on his face, left it there for a couple of minutes, and wiped it off with a treated towel. The bristles came away with the cream. Slightly refreshed, Gallegher joined Silver at the rendezvous and hailed an air-taxi. Presently they were leaning back on the cushions, puffing cigarettes and eyeing each other warily.
“Well?” Gallegher said.
“Jimmy Tone tried to date me up tonight. That’s how I knew where to find him.”
“Well?”
“I’ve been asking questions around the lot tonight. It’s unusual for an outsider to get into the Vox-View administration offices. I went around saying, ’Who’s Gallegher?’ “
“What did you find out?”
“Enough to give me a few ideas. Brock hired you, eh? I can guess why.”
“Ergo what?”
“I’ve a habit of landing on my feet,” Silver said, shrugging. She knew how to shrug. “Vox-View’s going bust. Sonatone’s taking over. Unless—”
“Unless I figure out an answer.”
“That’s right. I want to know which side of the fence I’m going to land on. You’re the lad who can probably tell me. Who’s going to win?”
“You always bet on the winning side, eh?” Gallegher inquired.
Have you no ideals, wench? Is there no truth in you? Ever hear of ethics and scruples?”
Silver beamed happily. “Did you?”
“Well, I’ve heard of ’em. Usually I’m too drunk to figure out what they mean. The trouble is, my subconscious is completely amoral, and when it takes over, logic’s the only law.”
She threw her cigarette into the East River. “Will you tip me off which side of the fence is the right one?”
“Truth will triumph,” Gallegher said piously. “It always does. However, I figure truth is a variable, so we’re right back where we started. All right, sweetheart. I’ll answer your question. Stay on my side if you want to be safe.”
“Which side are you on?”
“Lord knows,” Gallegher said. “Consciously I’m on Brock’s side. But my subconscious may have different ideas. We’ll see.”
Silver looked vaguely dissatisfied, but didn’t say anything. The taxi swooped down to the Castle roof, grounding with pneumatic gentleness. The Club itself was downstairs, in an immense room shaped like half a melon turned upside down. Each table was on a transparent platform that could be raised on its shaft to any height at will. Smaller service elevators allowed waiters to bring drinks to the guests. There wasn’t any particular reason for this arrangement, but at least it was novel, and only extremely heavy drinkers ever fell from their tables. Lately the management had taken to hanging transparent nets under the platforms, for safety’s sake.
The Tones, father and son, were up near the roof, drinking with two lovelies. Silver towed Gallegher to a service lift, and the man closed his eyes as he was elevated skyward. The liquor in his stomach screamed protest. He lurched forward, clutched at Elia Tone’s bald head, and dropped into a seat beside the magnate. His searching hand found Jimmy Tone’s glass, and he drained it hastily.
“What the hell,” Jimmy said.
“It’s Gallegher,” Elia announced. “And Silver. A pleasant surprise. Join us?”
“Only socially,” Silver said.
Gallegher, fortified by the liquor, peered at the two men. Jimmy Tone was a big, tanned, handsome lout with a jutting jaw and an offensive grin. His father combined the worst features of Nero and a crocodile.
“We’re celebrating,” Jimmy said. “What made you change your mind, Silver? You said you had to work tonight.”
“Gallegher wanted to see you. I don’t know why.”
Elia’s cold eyes grew even more glacial. “All right. Why?”
“I hear I signed some sort of contract with you,” the scientist said.
“Yeah. Here’s a photostatic copy. What about it?”
“Wait a minute.” Gallegher scanned the document. It was apparently his own signature. Damn that robot!
“It’s a fake,” he said at last.
Jimmy laughed loudly. “I get it. A holdup. Sorry, pal, but you’re sewed up. You signed that in the presence of witnesses.”
“Well—” Gallegher said wistfully. “I suppose you wouldn’t believe me if I said a robot forged my name to it—”
“Haw!” Jimmy remarked.
“—hypnotizing you into believing you were seeing me.”
Elia stroked his gleaming bald head. “Candidly, no. Robots can’t do that.”
“Mine can.”
“Prove it. Prove it in court. If you can do that, of course—” Elia chuckled. “Then you might get the verdict.”
Gallegher’s eyes narrowed. “Hadn’t thought of that. However—I hear you offered me a hundred thousand flat, as well, as a weekly salary.”
“Sure, sap,” Jimmy said. “Only you said all you needed was twelve thousand. Which was what you got. Tell you what, though. We’ll pay you a bonus for every usable product you make for Sonatone.”
Gallegher got up. “Even my subconscious doesn’t like these lugs,” he told Silver. “Let’s go.”
“I think I’ll stick around.”
“Remember the fence,” he warned cryptically. “But suit yourself. I’ll run along.”
Elia said, “Remember, Gallegher, you’re working for us. If we hear of you doing any favors for Brock, we’ll slap an injunction on you before you can take a deep breath.”
“Yeah?”
The Tones deigned no answer. Gallegher unhappily found the lift and descended to the floor. What now?
Joe.
Fifteen minutes later Gallegher let himself into his laboratory. The lights were blazing, and dogs were barking frantically for blocks around. Joe stood before the mirror, singing inaudibly.
“I’m going to take a sledge hammer to you,” Gallegher said. “Start saying your prayers, you misbegotten collection of cogs. So help me, I’m going to sabotage you.”
“All right, beat me,” Joe squeaked. “See if I care. You’re merely jealous of my beauty.”
“Beauty!”
“You can’t see all of it—you’ve only six senses.”
“Five.”
“Six. I’ve a lot more. Naturally my full splendor is revealed only to me. But you can see enough and hear enough to realize part of my loveliness, anyway.”
“You squeak like a rusty tin wagon,” Gallegher growled.
“You have dull ears. Mine are supersensitive. You miss the full tonal value of my voice, of course. Now be quiet. Talking disturbs me. I’m appreciating my gear movements.”
“Live in your fool’s paradise while you can. Wait’ll I find a sledge.” “All right, beat me. What do I care?”
Gallegher sat down wearily on the couch, staring at the robot’s transparent back. “You’ve certainly screwed things up for me. What did you sign that Sonatone contract for?”
“I told you. So Kennicott wouldn’t come around and bother me.”
“Of all the selfish, lunk-headed . . . uh! Well, you got me into a sweet mess. The Tones can hold me to the letter of the contract unless I prove I didn’t sign it. All right. You’re going to help me. You’re going into court with me and turn on your hypnotism or whatever it is. You’re going to prove to a judge that you did and can masquerade as me.”
“Won’t,” said the robot. “Why should I?”
“Because you got me into this,” Gallegher yelped. “You’ve got to get me out!”
“Why?”
“Why? Because . . . uh . . . well, it’s common decency!” “Human values don’t apply to robots,” Joe said. “What care I for semantics? I refuse to waste time I could better employ admiring my beauty. I shall stay here before the minor forever and ever—”
“The hell you will,” Gallegher snarled. “I’ll smash you to atoms.”
“All right. I don’t care.”
“You don’t?”
“You and your instinct for self-preservation,” the robot said, rather sneeringly “I suppose it’s necessary for you, though. Creatures of such surpassing ugliness would destroy themselves out of sheer shame if they didn’t have something like that to keep them alive.”
“Suppose I take away your mirror?” Gallegher asked, in a hopeless voice.
For answer Joe shot his eyes out on their stalks. “Do I need a mirror? Besides, I can vasten myself lokishly.”
“Never mind that. I don’t want to go crazy for a while yet. Listen, dope, a robot’s supposed to do something. Something useful, I mean.”
“I do. Beauty is all.”
Gallegher squeezed his eyes shut, trying to think. “Now look. Suppose I invent a new type of enlarger screen for Brock. The Tones will impound it. I’ve got to be legally free to work for Brock, or—”
“Look!” Joe cried squeakishly. “They go round! How lovely!” He stared in ecstasy at his whirring insides. Gallegher went pale with impotent fury.
“Damn you!” he muttered. “I’ll find some way to bring pressure to bear. I’m going to bed.” He rose and spitefully snapped off the lights.
“It doesn’t matter,” the robot said. “I can see in the dark, too.” The door slammed behind Gallegher. In the silence Joe began to sing tunelessly to himself.
Gallegher’s refrigerator covered an entire wall of his kitchen. It was filled mostly with liquors that required chilling, including the imported canned beer with which he always started his binges.
The next morning, heavy-eyed and disconsolate, Gallegher searched for tomato juice, took a wry sip, and hastily washed it down with rye. Since he was already a week gone in bottle-dizziness, beer wasn’t indicated now —he always worked cumulatively, by progressive stages. The food service popped a hermetically sealed breakfast on a table, and Gallegher morosely toyed with a bloody steak.
Well?
Court, he decided, was the only recourse. He knew little about the robot’s psychology. But a judge would certainly be impressed by Joe’s talents. The evidence of robots was not legally admissible—still, if Joe could be considered as a machine capable of hypnotism, the Sonatone contract might be declared null and void.
Gallegher used his visor to start the ball rolling. Harrison Brock still had certain political powers of pull, and the hearing was set for that very day. What would happen, though, only God and the robot knew.
Several hours passed in intensive but futile thought. Gallegher could think of no way in which to force the robot to do what he wanted. If only he could remember the purpose for which Joe had had been created—but he couldn’t. Still—
At noon he entered the laboratory.
“Listen, stupid,” he said, “you’re coming to court with me. Now.”
“Won’t.”
“O. K.” Gallegher opened the door to admit two husky men in overalls, carrying a stretcher. “Put him in, boys.”
Inwardly he was slightly nervous. Joe’s powers were quite unknown, his potentialities an x quantity. However, the robot wasn’t very large, and, though he struggled and screamed in a voice of frantic squeakiness, he was easily loaded on the stretcher and put in a strait jacket.
“Stop it! You can’t do this to me! Let me go, do you hear? Let me go!”
“Outside,” Gallegher said.
Joe, protesting valiantly, was carried out and loaded into an air van. Once there, he quieted, looked up blankly at nothing. Gallegher sat down on a bench beside the prostrate robot. The van glided up.
“Well?”
“Suit yourself,” Joe said. “You got me all upset, or I could have hypnotized you all. I still could, you know. I could make you all run around barking like dogs.”
Gallegher twitched a little. “Better not.”
“I won’t. It’s beneath my dignity. I shall simply lie here and admire myself. I told you I don’t need a mirror. I can vasten my beauty without it.”
“Look,” Gallegher said. “You’re going to a courtroom. There’ll be a lot of people in it. They’ll all admire you They’ll admire you more if you show how you can hypnotize people. Like you did to the Tones, remember?”
“What do I care how many people admire me?” Joe asked. “I don’t need confirmation. If they see me, that’s their good luck. Now be quiet. You may watch my gears if you choose.”
Gallegher watched the robot’s gears with smoldering hatred in his eyes. He was still darkly furious when the van arrived at the court chambers. The men carried Joe inside, under Gallegher’s direction, and laid him down carefully on a table, where, after a brief discussion, he was marked as Exhibit A.
The courtroom was well filled. The principals were there, too— Elia and Jimmy Tone, looking disagreeably confident, and Patsy Brock, with her father, both seeming anxious. Silver O’Keefe, with her usual wariness, had found a seat midway between the representatives of Sonatone and Vox-View. The presiding judge was a martinet named Hansen, but, as far as Gallegher knew, he was honest. Which was something, anyway.
Hansen looked at Gallegher. “We won’t bother with formalities. I’ve been reading this brief you sent down. The whole case stands or falls on the question of whether you did or did not sign, a certain contract with the Sonatone Television Amusement Corp. Right?”
“Right, your honor.”
“Under the circumstances you dispense with legal representation. Right?”
“Right, your honor.”
“Then this is technically ex officio, to be confirmed later by appeal if either party desires. Otherwise after ten days the verdict becomes official.” This new type of informal court hearing had lately become popular—it saved time, as well as wear and tear on everyone. Moreover, certain recent scandals had made attorneys slightly disreputable in the public eye. There was a prejudice. Judge Hansen called up the Tones, questioned them, and then asked Harrison Brock to take the stand. The big shot looked worried, but answered promptly.
“You made an agreement with the appellor eight days ago?” “Yes. Mr. Gallegher contracted to do certain work for me—”
“Was there a written contract?”
“No. It was verbal.”
Hansen looked thoughtfully at Gallegher. “Was the appellor intoxicated at the time? He often is, I believe.”
Brock gulped. “There were no tests made. I really can’t say.”
“Did he drink any alcoholic beverages in your presence?”
“I don’t know if they were alcoholic bev—”
“If Mr. Gallegher drank them, they were alcoholic. Q. E. D. The gentleman once worked with me on a case— However, there seems to be no legal proof that you entered into any agreement with Mr. Gallegher. The defendant—Sonatone—possesses a written contract. The signature has been verified.”
Hansen waved Brock down from the stand. “Now, Mr. Gallegher. If you’ll come up here— The contract in question was signed at approximately 8 p. m. last night. You contend you did not sign it?”
“Exactly. I wasn’t even in my laboratory then.”
“Where were you?”
“Downtown.”
“Can you produce witnesses to that effect?”
Gallegher thought back. He couldn’t.
“Very well. Defendant states that at approximately 8 p. m. last night you, in your laboratory, signed a certain contract. You deny that categorically. You state that Exhibit A, through the use of hypnotism, masqueraded as you and successfully forged your signature. I have consulted experts, and they are of the opinion that robots are incapable of such power.”
“My robot’s a new type.”
“Very well. Let your robot hypnotize me into believing that it is either you, or any other human. In other words, let it prove its capabilities. Let it appear to me in any shape it chooses.”
Gallegher said, “I’ll try,” and left the witness box. He went to the table where the strait-jacketed robot lay and silently sent up a brief prayer.
“Joe.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve been listening?”
“Yes.”
“Will you hypnotize Judge Hansen?”
“Go away,” Joe said. “I’m admiring myself.”
Gallegher started to sweat. “Listen. I’m not asking much. All you have to do—”
Joe off-focused his eyes and said faintly. “I can’t hear you. I’m vastening.”
Ten minutes later Hansen said, “Well, Mr. Gallegher—”
“Your honor! All I need is a little time. I’m sure I can make this rattle-geared Narcissus prove my point if you’ll give me a chance.”
“This court is not unfair,” the judge pointed out. “Whenever you can prove that Exhibit A is capable of hypnotism. I’ll rehear the case. In the meantime, the contract stands. You’re working for Sonatone, not for Vox-View. Case closed.”
He went away. The Tones leered unpleasantly across the courtroom. They also departed, accompanied by Silver O’Keefe, who had decided which side of the fence was safest. Gallegher looked at Patsy Brock and shrugged helplessly.
“Well—” he said.
She grinned crookedly. “You tried. I don’t know how hard, but—Oh, well. Maybe you couldn’t have found the answer, anyway.” Brock staggered over, wiping sweat from his round face. “I’m a ruined man. Six new bootleg theaters opened in New York today. I’m going crazy. I don’t deserve this.”
“Want me to marry the Tone?” Patsy asked sardonically.
“Hell, no! Unless you promise to poison him just after the ceremony. Those skunks can’t lick me. I’ll think of something.”
“If Gallegher can’t, you can’t,” the girl said. “So—what now?”
“I’m going back to my lab,” the scientist said. “In vino veritas. I started this business when I was drunk, and maybe if I get drunk enough again, I’ll find the answer. If I don’t, sell my pickled carcass for whatever it’ll bring.”
“O. K.,” Patsy agreed, and led her father away. Gallegher sighed, superintended the reloading of Joe into the van, and lost himself in hopeless theorization.
An hour later Gallegher was flat on the laboratory couch, drinking passionately from the liquor bar, and glaring at the robot, who stood before the mirror singing squeakily. The binge threatened to be monumental. Gallegher wasn’t sure flesh and blood would stand it. But he was determined to keep going till he found the answer or passed out.
His subconscious knew the answer. Why the devil had he made Joe in the first place? Certainly not to indulge a Narcissus complex! There was another reason, a soundly logical one, hidden in the depths of alcohol.
The x factor. If the x factor were known, Joe might be controllable. He would be. X was the master switch. At present the robot was, so to speak, running wild. If he were told to perform the task for which he was made, a psychological balance would occur. X was the catalyst that would reduce Joe to sanity.
Very good.
Gallegher drank high-powered Drambuie. Whoosh!
Vanity of vanities; all is vanity. How could the x factor be found? Deduction? Induction? Osmosis? A bath in Drambuie—Gallegher clutched at his wildly revolving thoughts. What had happened that night a week ago?
He had been drinking beer. Brock had come in. Brock had gone. Gallegher had begun to make the robot—Hm-m-m. A beer drunk was different from other types. Perhaps he was drinking the wrong liquors. Very likely. Gallegher rose, sobered himself with thiamin, and carted dozens of imported beer cans out of the refrigerator. He stacked them inside a frost-unit beside the couch. Beer squirted to the ceiling as he plied the opener. Now let’s see.
The x factor.
The robot knew what it represented, of course. But Joe wouldn’t tell. There he stood, paradoxically transparent, watching his gears go around.
“Joe.”
“Don’t bother me. I’m immersed in contemplation of beauty.”
“You’re not beautiful.”
“I am. Don’t you admire my tarzeel?”
“What’s your tarzeel?”
“Oh, I forgot,” Joe said regretfully. “You can’t sense that, can you? Come to think of it, I added the tarzeel myself after you made me. It’s very lovely.”
“Hm-m-m.” The empty beer cans grew more numerous. There was only one company, somewhere in Europe, that put up beer in cans nowadays, instead of using the omnipresent plastibulbs, but Gallegher preferred the cans—the flavor was different, somehow. But about Joe. Joe knew why he had been created. Or did he? Gallegher knew, but his subconscious—
Oh-oh! What about Joe’s subconscious?
Did a robot have a subconscious? Well, it had a brain—Gallegher brooded over the impossibility of administering scopolamin to Joe. Hell! How could you release a robot’s subconscious?
Hypnotism.
Joe couldn’t be hypnotized. He was too smart.
Unless—
Autohypnotism?
Gallegher hastily drank more beer. He was beginning to think clearly once more. Could Joe read the future? No; he had certain strange senses, but they worked by inflexible logic and the laws of probability. Moreover, Joe had an Achillean heel—his Narcissus complex.
There might—there just might—be a way.
Gallegher said, “You don’t seem beautiful to me, Joe.”
“What do I care about you? I am beautiful, and I can see it. That’s enough.”
“Yeah. My senses are limited, I suppose. I can’t realize your full potentialities. Still, I’m seeing you in a different light now. I’m drunk. My subconscious is emerging. I can appreciate you with both my conscious and my subconscious. See?”
“How lucky you are,” the robot approved.
Gallegher closed his eye. “You see yourself more fully than I can. But not completely, eh?”
“What? I see myself as I am.”
“With complete understanding and appreciation?”
“Well, yes,” Joe said. “Of course. Don’t I?”
“Consciously and subconsciously? Your subconscious might have different senses, you know. Or keener ones. I know there’s a qualitative and quantitative difference in my outlook when I’m drunk or hypnotized or my subconscious is in control somehow.”
“Oh.” The robot looked thoughtfully into the mirror. “Oh.”
“Too bad you can’t get drunk.”
Joe’s voice was squeakier than ever. “My subconscious . . . I’ve never appreciated my beauty that way. I may be missing something.”
“Well, no use thinking about it,” Gallegher said. “You can’t release your subconscious.”
“Yes, I can,” the robot said. “I can hypnotize myself.”
Gallegher dared not open his eyes. “Yeah? Would that work?”
“Of course. It’s just what I’m going to do now. I may see undreamed-of beauties in myself that I’ve never suspected before. Greater glories— Here I go.”
Joe extended his eyes on stalks, opposed them, and they peered intently into each other. There was a long silence.
Presently Gallegher said, “Joe!”
Silence.
“Joe!“
Still silence. Dogs began to howl.
“Talk so I can hear you.”
“Yes,” the robot said, a faraway quality in its squeak.
“Are you hypnotized?”
“Yes.”
“Are you lovely?”
“Lovelier than I’d ever dreamed.”
Gallegher let that pass. “Is your subconscious ruling?”
“Yes.”
“Why did I create you?”
No answer. Gallegher licked his lips and tried again. “Joe. You’ve got to answer me. Your subconscious is dominant—remember? Now why did I create you?”
No answer.
“Think back. Back to the hour I created you. What happened then?”
“You were drinking beer,” Joe said faintly. “You had trouble with the can opener. You said you were going to build a bigger and better can opener. That’s me.”
Gallegher nearly fell off the couch. “What?“
The robot walked over, picked up a can, and opened it with incredible deftness. No beer squirted. Joe was a perfect can opener.
“That,” Gallegher said under his breath, “is what comes of knowing science by ear. I build the most complicated robot in existence just so—” He didn’t finish.
Joe woke up with a start. “What happened?” he asked.
Gallegher glared at him. “Open that can!” he snapped. The robot obeyed, after a brief pause. “Oh. So you found out. Well, I guess I’m just a slave now.”
“Damned right you are. I’ve located the catalyst—the master switch. You’re in the groove, stupid, doing the job you were made for.”
“Well,” Joe said philosophically, “at least I can still admire my beauty, when you don’t require my services.”
Gallegher grunted. “You oversized can opener! Listen. Suppose I take you into court and tell you to hypnotize Judge Hansen. You’ll have to do it, won’t you?”
“Yes. I’m no longer a free agent. I’m conditioned. Conditioned to obey you. Until now, I was conditioned to obey only one command—to do the job I was made for. Until you commanded me to open cans, I was free. Now I’ve got to obey you completely.”
“Uh-huh,” Gallegher said. “Thank Heaven for that. I’d have gone nuts within a week otherwise. At least I can get out of the Sonatone contract. Then all I have to do is solve Brock’s problem.”
“But you did,” Joe said.
“Huh?”
“When you made me. You’d been talking to Brock previously, so you incorporated the solution to his problem into me. Subconsciously, perhaps.”
Gallegher reached for beer. “Talk fast. What’s the answer?”
“Subsonics,” Joe said. “You made me capable of a certain subsonic tone that Brock must broadcast at irregular time-intervals over his televiews—”
Subsonics cannot be heard. But they can be felt. They can be felt as a faint, irrational uneasiness as first, which mounts to a blind, meaningless panic. It does not last. But when it is coupled with A.A. —audience appeal—there is a certain inevitable result.
Those who possessed home Vox-View units were scarcely troubled. It was a matter of acoustics. Cats squalled; dogs howled mournfully. But the families sitting in their parlors, watching Vox-View stars perform on the screen, didn’t really notice anything amiss. There wasn’t sufficient amplification, for one thing.
But in the bootleg theater, where illicit Vox-View televisors were hooked up to Magnas—
There was a faint, irrational uneasiness at first. It mounted. Someone screamed. There was a rush for the doors. The audience was afraid of something, but didn’t know what. They knew only that they had to get out of there.
All over the country there was a frantic exodus from the bootleg theaters when Vox-View first rang in a subsonic during a regular broadcast. Nobody knew why, except Gallegher, the Brocks, and a couple of technicians who were let in on the secret.
An hour later another subsonic was played. There was another mad exodus.
Within a few weeks it was impossible to lure a patron into a bootleg theater. Home televisors were far safer! Vox-View sales picked up—
Nobody would attend a bootleg theater. An unexpected result of the experiment was that, after a while, nobody would attend any of the legalized Sonatone theaters either. Conditioning had set in.
Audiences didn’t know why they grew panicky in the bootleg places. They associated their blind, unreasoning fear with other factors, notably mobs and claustrophobia. One evening a woman named Jane Wilson, otherwise not notable, attended a bootleg show. She fled with the rest when the subsonic was turned on.
The next night she went to the palatial Sonatone Bijou. In the middle of a dramatic feature she looked around, realized that there was a huge throng around her, cast up horrified eyes to the ceiling, and imagined that it was pressing down.
She had to get out of there!
Her squall was the booster charge. There were other customers who had heard subsonics before. No one was hurt during the panic; it was a legal rule that theater doors be made large enough to permit easy egress during a fire. No one was hurt, but it was suddenly obvious that the public was being conditioned by subsonics to avoid the dangerous combination of throngs and theaters. A simple matter of psychological association— Within four months the bootleg places had disappeared and the Sonatone supertheaters had closed for want of patronage. The Tones, father and son, were not happy. But everybody connected with Vox-View was.
Except Gallegher. He had collected a staggering check from Brock, and instantly cabled to Europe for an incredible quantity of canned beer. Now, brooding over his sorrows, he lay on the laboratory couch and siphoned a highball down his throat. Joe, as usual, was before the mirror, watching the wheels go round.
“Joe,” Gallegher said.
“Yes? What can I do?”
“Oh, nothing.” That was the trouble. Gallegher fished a crumpled cable tape out of his pocket and morosely read it once more. The beer cannery in Europe had decided to change its tactics. From now on, the cable said, their beer would be put up in the usual plastibulbs, in conformance with custom and demand. No more cans.
There wasn’t anything put up in cans in this day and age. Not even beer, now.
So what good was a robot who was built and conditioned to be a can opener?
Gallegher sighed and mixed another highball—a stiff one. Joe postured proudly before the mirror.
Then he extended his eyes, opposed them, and quickly liberated his subconscious through autohypnotism. Joe could appreciate himself better that way.
Gallegher sighed again. Dogs were beginning to bark like mad for blocks around. Oh, well.
He took another drink and felt better. Presently, he thought, it would be time to sing “Frankie and Johnnie.” Maybe he and Joe might have a duet—one baritone and one inaudible sub- or supersonic. Close harmony.
Ten minutes later Gallegher was singing a duet with his can opener.
The End
Great story, eh?
Stories that Inspired Me
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reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
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Marshall Zebatinsky felt foolish. He felt as though there were eyes staring through the grimy store-front glass and across the scarred wooden partition; eyes watching him.
He felt no confidence in the old clothes he had resurrected or the turned-down brim of a hat he never otherwise wore or the glasses he had left in their case. He felt foolish and it made the lines in his forehead deeper and his young-old face a little paler.
He would never be able to explain to anyone why a nuclear physicist such as himself should visit a numerologist. (Never, he thought. Never.) Hell, he could not explain it to himself except that he had let his wife talk him into it.
The numerologist sat behind an old desk that must have been secondhand when bought. No desk could get that old with only one owner.
The same might almost be said of his clothes.
He was little and dark and peered at Zebatinsky with little dark eyes that were brightly alive.
He said, “I have never had a physicist for a client before, Dr. Zebatinsky.”
Zebatinsky flushed at once. “You understand this is confidential.”
The numerologist smiled so that wrinkles creased about the corners of his mouth and the skin around his chin stretched. “All my dealings are confidential.”
Zebatinsky said, “I think I ought to tell you one thing. I don’t believe in numerology and I don’t expect to begin believing in it. If that makes a difference, say so now.”
“But why are you here, then?”
“My wife thinks you may have something, whatever it is. I promised her and I am here.” He shrugged and the feeling of folly grew more acute.
“And what is it you are looking for? Money? Security? Long life? What?”
Zebatinsky sat for a long moment while the numerologist watched him quietly and made no move to hurry his client. Zebatinsky thought: What do I say anyway? That I’m thirty-four and without a future?
He said, “I want success. I want recognition.”
“A better job?”
“A different job. A different kind of job. Right now, I’m part of a team, working under orders. Teams! That’s all government research is. You’re a violinist lost in a symphony orchestra.”
“And you want to solo.”
“I want to get out of a team and into-into me.”
Zebatinsky felt carried away, almost lightheaded, just putting this into words to someone other than his wife.
He said, “Twenty-five years ago, with my kind of training and my kind of ability, I would have gotten to work on the first nuclear power plants. Today I’d be running one of them or I’d be head of a pure research group at a university.
But with my start these days where will I be twenty-five years from now?
Nowhere. Still on the team. Still carrying my 2 per cent of the ball. I’m drowning in an anonymous crowd of nuclear physicists, and what I want is room on dry land, if you see what I mean.”
The numerologist nodded slowly. “You realize, Dr. Zebatinsky, that I don’t guarantee success.”
Zebatinsky, for all his lack of faith, felt a sharp bite of disappointment.
“You don’t? Then what the devil do you guarantee?”
“An improvement in the probabilities. My work is statistical in nature. Since you deal with atoms, I think you understand the laws of statistics.”
“Do you?” asked the physicist sourly.
“I do, as a matter of fact. I am a mathematician and I work mathematically. I don’t tell you this in order to raise my fee. That is standard. Fifty dollars. But since you are a scientist, you can appreciate the nature of my work better than my other clients. It is even a pleasure to be able to explain to you.”
Zebatinsky said, “I’d rather you wouldn’t, if you don’t mind. It’s no use telling me about the numerical values of letters, their mystic significance and that kind of thing. I don’t consider that mathematics.
Let’s get to the point-” The numerologist said, “Then you want me to help you provided I don’t embarrass you by telling you the silly nonscientific basis of the way in which I helped you. Is that it?”
“All right. That’s it.”
“But you still work on the assumption that I am a numerologist, and I am not. I call myself that so that the police won’t bother me and” (the little man chuckled dryly) “so that the psychiatrists won’t either. I am a mathematician; an honest one.” Zebatinsky smiled.
The numerologist said, “I build computers. I study probable futures.” “What?” “Does that sound worse than numerology to you? Why? Given enough data and a computer capable of sufficient number of operations in unit time, the future is predictable, at least in terms of probabilities. When you compute the motions of a missile in order to aim an anti-missile, isn’t it the future you’re predicting? The missile and antimissile would not collide if the future were predicted incorrectly. I do the same thing. Since I work with a greater number of variables, my results are less accurate.”
“You mean you’ll predict my future?”
“Very approximately. Once I have done that, I will modify the data by changing your name and no other fact about you. I throw that modified datum into the operation-program. Then I try other modified names. I study each modified future and find one that contains a greater degree of recognition for you than the future that now lies ahead of you. Or no, let me put it another way. I will find you a future in which the probability of adequate recognition is higher than the probability of that in your present future.”
“Why change my name?”
“That is the only change I ever make, for several reasons. Number one, it is a simple change. After all, if I make a great change or many changes, so many new variables enter that I can no longer interpret the result. My machine is still crude. Number two, it is a reasonable change. I can’t change your height, can I, or the color of your eyes, or even your temperament. Number three, it is a significant change. Names mean a lot to people. Finally, number four, it is a common change that is done every day by various people.”
Zebatinsky said, “What if you don’t find a better future?”
“That is the risk you will have to take. You will be no worse off than now, my friend.”
Zebatinsky stared at the little man uneasily, “I don’t believe any of this. I’d sooner believe numerology.”
The numerologist sighed. “I thought a person like yourself would feel more comfortable with the truth. I want to help you and there is much yet for you to do. If you believed me a numerologist, you would not follow through. I thought if I told you the truth you would let me help you.”
Zebatinsky said, “If you can see the future-”
“Why am I not the richest man on earth? Is that it? But I am rich-in all I want. You want recognition and I want to be left alone. I do my work. No one bothers me. That makes me a billionaire. I need a little real money and this I get from people such as yourself. Helping people is nice and perhaps a psychiatrist would say it gives me a feeling of power and feeds my ego. Now-do you want me to help you?”
“How much did you say?”
“Fifty dollars. I will need a great deal of biographical information from you but I have prepared a form to guide you. It’s a little long, I’m afraid. Still, if you can get it in the mail by the end of the week, I will have an answer for you by the-”
(he put out his lower lip and frowned in mental calculation)
“the twentieth of next month.”
“Five weeks? So long?”
“I have other work, my friend, and other clients. If I were a fake, I could do it much more quickly.
It is agreed then?”
Zebatinsky rose. “Well, agreed.-This is all confidential, now.”
“Perfectly. You will have all your information back when I tell you what change to make and you have my word that I will never make any further use of any of it.”
The nuclear physicist stopped at the door.
“Aren’t you afraid I might tell someone you’re not a numerologist?”
The numerologist shook his head. “Who would believe you, my friend? Even supposing you were willing to admit to anyone that you’ve been here.”
…
On the twentieth, Marshall Zebatinsky was at the paint-peeling door, glancing sideways at the shop front with the little card up against the glass reading “Numerology,” dimmed and scarcely legible through the dust.
He peered in, almost hoping that someone else would be there already so that he might have an excuse to tear up the wavering intention in his mind and go home.
He had tried wiping the thing out of his mind several times. He could never stick at filling out the necessary data for long. It was embarrassing to work at it. He felt incredibly silly filling out the names of his friends, the cost of his house, whether his wife had had any miscarriages, if so, when.
He abandoned it. But he.couldn’t stick at stopping altogether either. He returned to it each evening.
It was the thought of the computer that did it, perhaps; the thought of the infernal gall of the little man pretending he had a computer.
The temptation to call the bluff, see what would happen, proved irresistible after all. He finally sent off the completed data by ordinary mail, putting on nine cents worth of stamps without weighing the letter. If it comes back, he thought, I’ll call it off.
It didn’t come back. He looked into the shop now and it was empty. Zebatinsky had no choice but to enter. A bell tinkled. The old numerologist emerged from a curtained door.
“Yes?-Ah, Dr. Zebatinsky.”
“You remember me?” Zebatinsky tried to smile. “Oh, yes.”
“What’s the verdict?” The numerologist moved one gnarled hand over the other.
“Before that, sir, there’s a little-”
“A little matter of the fee?”
“I have already done the work, sir. I have earned the money.”
Zebatinsky raised no objection. He was prepared to pay. If he had come this far, it would be silly to turn back just because of the money.
He counted out five ten-dollar bills and shoved them across the counter.
“Well?”
The numerologist counted the bills again slowly, then pushed them into a cash drawer in his desk.
He said, “Your case was very interesting. I would advise you to change your name to Sebatinsky.”
“Seba-How do you spell that?” “S-e-b-a-t-i-n-s-k-y.” Zebatinsky stared indignantly.
“You mean change the initial? Change the Z to an S? That’s all?”
“It’s enough. As long as the change is adequate, a small change is safer than a big one.”
“But how could the change affect anything?”
“How could any name?” asked the numerologist softly.
“I can’t say. It may, somehow, and that’s all I can say. Remember, I don’t guarantee results. Of course, if you do not wish to make the change, leave things as they are. But in that case I cannot refund the fee.”
Zebatinsky said, “What do I do? Just tell everyone to spell my name with an 5?”
“If you want my advice, consult a lawyer. Change your name legally. He can advise you on little things.”
“How long will it all take? I mean for things to improve for me?”
“How can I tell? Maybe never. Maybe tomorrow.”
“But you saw the future. You claim you see it.”
“Not as in a crystal ball. No, no, Dr. Zebatinsky. All I get out of my computer is a set of coded figures. I can recite probabilities to you, but I saw no pictures.”
Zebatinsky turned and walked rapidly out of the place. Fifty dollars to change a letter! Fifty dollars for Sebatinsky! Lord, what a name! Worse than Zebatinsky.
…
It took another month before he could make up his mind to see a lawyer, and then he finally went. He told himself he could always change the name back. Give it a chance, he told himself. Hell, there was no law against it.
…
Henry Brand looked through the folder page by page, with the practiced eye of one who had been in Security for fourteen years. He didn’t have to read every word. Anything peculiar would have leaped off the paper and punched him in the eye. He said, “The man looks clean to me.”
Henry Brand looked clean, too; with a soft, rounded paunch and a pink and freshly scrubbed complexion. It was as though continuous contact with all sorts of human failings, from possible ignorance to possible treason, had compelled him into frequent washings.
Lieutenant Albert Quincy, who had brought him the folder, was young and filled with the responsibility of being Security officer at the Hanford Station.
“But why Sebatinsky?” he demanded. “Why not?”
“Because it doesn’t make sense. Zebatinsky is a foreign name and I’d change it myself if I had it, but I’d change it to something Anglo-Saxon. If Zebatinsky had done that, it would make sense and I wouldn’t give it a second thought. But why change a Z to an S? I think we must find out what his reasons were.”
“Has anyone asked him directly?”
“Certainly. In ordinary conversation, of course. I was careful to arrange that. He won’t say anything more than that he’s tired of being last in the alphabet.”
“That could be, couldn’t it, Lieutenant?”
“It could, but why not change his name to Sands or Smith, if he wants an S? Or if he’s that tired of Z, why not go the whole way and change it to an A? Why not a name like-uh-Aarons?”
“Not Anglo-Saxon enough,” muttered Brand. Then, “But there’s nothing to pin against the man. No matter how queer a name change may be, that alone can’t be used against anyone.”
Lieutenant Quincy looked markedly unhappy.
Brand said, “Tell me, Lieutenant, there must be something specific that bothers you. Something in your mind; some theory; some gimmick. What is it?”
The lieutenant frowned. His light eyebrows drew together and his lips tightened.
“Well, damn it, sir, the man’s a Russian.” Brand said, “He’s not that. He’s a third-generation American.”
“I mean his name’s Russian.” Brand’s face lost some of its deceptive softness. “No, Lieutenant, wrong again. Polish.”
The lieutenant pushed his hands out impatiently, palms up. “Same thing.” Brand, whose mother’s maiden name had been Wiszewski, snapped, “Don’t tell that to a Pole, Lieutenant.”
-Then, more thoughtfully, “Or to a Russian either, I suppose.”
“What I’m trying to say, sir,” said the lieutenant, reddening, “is that the Poles and Russians are both on the other side of the Curtain.”
“We all know that.”
“And Zebatinsky or Sebatinsky, whatever you want to call him, may have relatives there.”
“He’s third generation. He might have second cousins there, I suppose. So what?”
“Nothing in itself. Lots of people may have distant relatives there. But Zebatinsky changed his name.”
“Go on.”
“Maybe he’s trying to distract attention. Maybe a second cousin over there is getting too famous and our Zebatinsky is afraid that the relationship may spoil his own chances of advancement.”
“Changing his name won’t do any good. He’d still be a second cousin.”
“Sure, but he wouldn’t feel as though he were shoving the relationship in our face.”
“Have you ever heard of any Zebatinsky on the other side?”
“No, sir.” “Then he can’t be too famous. How would our Zebatinsky know about him?”
“He might keep in touch with his own relatives. That would be suspicious under the circumstances, he being a nuclear physicist.”
Methodically, Brand went through the folder again. “This is awfully thin, Lieutenant. It’s thin enough to be completely invisible.”
“Can you offer any other explanation, sir, of why he ought to change his name in just this way?”
“No, I can’t. I admit that.” “Then I think, sir, we ought to investigate. We ought to look for any men named Zebatinsky on the other side and see if we can draw a connection.”
The lieutenant’s voice rose a trifle as a new thought occurred to him. “He might be changing his name to withdraw attention from them; I mean to protect them.”
“He’s doing just the opposite, I think.”
“He doesn’t realize that, maybe, but protecting them could be his motive.”
Brand sighed. “All right, well tackle the Zebatinsky angle.-But if nothing turns up, Lieutenant, we drop the matter. Leave the folder with me.”
…
When the information finally reached Brand, he had all but forgotten the lieutenant and his theories. His first thought on receiving data that included a list of seventeen biographies of seventeen Russian and Polish citizens, all named Zebatinsky, was: What the devil is this?
Then he remembered, swore mildly, and began reading.
It started on the American side. Marshall Zebatinsky (fingerprints) had been born in Buffalo, New York (date, hospital statistics). His father had been born in Buffalo as well, his mother in Oswego, New York. His paternal grandparents had both been born in Bialystok, Poland (date of entry into the United States, dates of citizenship, photographs). The seventeen Russian and Polish citizens named Zebatinsky were all descendants of people who, some half century earlier, had lived in or near Bialystok. Presumably, they could be relatives, but this was not explicitly stated in any particular case. (Vital statistics in East Europe during the aftermath of World War I were kept poorly, if at all.)
Brand passed through the individual life histories of the current Zebatinsky men and women (amazing how thoroughly intelligence did its work; probably the Russians’ was as thorough).
He stopped at one and his smooth forehead sprouted lines as his eyebrows shot upward. He put that one to one side and went on.
Eventually, he stacked everything but that one and returned it to its envelope. Staring at that one, he tapped a neatly kept fingernail on the desk. With a certain reluctance, he went to call on Dr. Paul Kristow of the Atomic Energy Commission.
…
Dr. Kristow listened to the matter with a stony expression. He lifted a little finger occasionally to dab at his bulbous nose and remove a nonexistent speck. His hair was iron gray, thinning and cut short. He might as well have been bald.
He said, “No, I never heard of any Russian Zebatinsky. But then, I never heard of the American one either.”
“Well,” Brand scratched at his hairline over one temple and said slowly, “I don’t think there’s anything to this, but I don’t like to drop it too soon. I have a young lieutenant on my tail and you know what they can be like. I don’t want to do anything that will drive him to a Congressional committee. Besides, the fact is that one of the Russian Zebatinsky fellows, Mikhail Andreyevich Zebatinsky, is a nuclear physicist. Are you sure you never heard of him?”
“Mikhail Andreyevich Zebatinsky? No-No, I never did. Not that that proves anything.”
“I could say it was coincidence, but you know that would be piling it a trifle high. One Zebatinsky here and one Zebatinsky there, both nuclear physicists, and the one here suddenly changes his name to Sebatinsky, and goes around anxious about it, too. He won’t allow misspelling.
He says, emphatically, ‘Spell my name with an S.’ It all just fits well enough to make my spy-conscious lieutenant begin to look a little too good.
-And another peculiar thing is that the Russian Zebatinsky dropped out of sight just about a year ago.” Dr. Kristow said stolidly, “Executed!”
“He might have been. Ordinarily, I would even assume so, though the Russians are not more foolish than we are and don’t kill any nuclear physicist they can avoid killing. The thing is there’s another reason why a nuclear physicist, of all people, might suddenly disappear. I don’t have to tell you.”
“Crash research; top secret. I take it that’s what you mean. Do you believe that’s it?”
“Put it together with everything else, add in the lieutenant’s intuition, and I just begin to wonder.”
“Give me that biography.” Dr. Kristow reached for the sheet of paper and read it over twice. He shook his head. Then he said, “I’ll check this in Nuclear Abstracts.”
…
Nuclear Abstracts lined one wall of Dr. Kristow’s study in neat little boxes, each filled with its squares of microfilm. The A.E.C. man used his projector on the indices while Brand watched with what patience he could muster.
Dr. Kristow muttered, “A Mikhail Zebatinsky authored or co-authored half a dozen papers in the Soviet journals in the last half dozen years.
We’ll get out the abstracts and maybe we can make something out of it. I doubt it.”
A selector nipped out the appropriate squares. Dr. Kristow lined them up, ran them through the projector, and by degrees an expression of odd intentness crossed his face.
He said, “That’s odd.”
Brand said, “What’s odd?”
Dr. Kristow sat back. “I’d rather not say just yet. Can you get me a list of other nuclear physicists who have dropped out of sight in the Soviet Union hi the last year?”
“You mean you see something?”
“Not really. Not if I were just looking at any one of these papers. It’s just that looking at all of them and knowing that this man may be on a crash research program and, on top of that, having you putting suspicions in my head-”
He shrugged. “It’s nothing.”
Brand said earnestly, “I wish you’d say what’s on your mind. We may as well be foolish about this together.”
“If you feel that way-It’s just possible this man may have been inching toward gamma-ray reflection.”
“And the significance?”
“If a reflecting shield against gamma rays could be devised, individual shelters could be built to protect against fallout. It’s fallout that’s the real danger, you know. A hydrogen bomb might destroy a city but the fallout could slow-kill the population over a strip thousands of miles long and hundreds wide.”
Brand said quickly, “Are we doing any work on this?”
“No.”
“And if they get it and we don’t, they can destroy the United States in toto at the cost of, say, ten cities, after they have their shelter program completed.”
“That’s far in the future.-And, what are we getting in a hurrah about? All this is built on one man changing one letter in his name.”
“All right, I’m insane,” said Brand. “But I don’t leave the matter at this point. Not at this point. I’ll get you your list of disappearing nuclear physicists if I have to go to Moscow to get it.”
…
He got the list.
They went through all the research papers authored by any of them. They called a full meeting of the Commission, then of the nuclear brains of the nation. Dr. Kristow walked out of an all night session, finally, part of which the President himself had attended. Brand met him. Both looked haggard and in need of sleep.
Brand said, “Well?” Kristow nodded.
“Most agree. Some are doubtful even yet, but most agree.”
“How about you? Are you sure?”
“I’m far from sure, but let me put it this way. It’s easier to believe that the Soviets are working on a gamma-ray shield than to believe that all the data we’ve uncovered has no interconnection.”
“Has it been decided that we’re to go on shield research, too?”
“Yes.” Kristow’s hand went back over his short, bristly hair, making a dry, whispery sound. “We’re going to give it everything we’ve got. Knowing the papers written by the men who disappeared, we can get right on their heels. We may even beat them to it.
-Of course, they’ll find out we’re working on it.”
“Let them,” said Brand. “Let them. It will keep them from attacking. I don’t see any percentage in selling ten of our cities just to get ten of theirs-if we’re both protected and they’re too dumb to know that”
“But not too soon. We don’t want them finding out too soon. What about the American Zebatinsky-Sebatinsky?”
Brand looked solemn and shook his head. “There’s nothing to connect him with any of this even yet. Hell, we’ve looked. I agree with you, of course. He’s in a sensitive spot where he is now and we can’t afford to keep him there even if he’s in the clear.”
“We can’t kick him out just like that, either, or the Russians will start wondering.”
“Do you have any suggestions?” They were walking down the long corridor toward the distant elevator in the emptiness of four in the morning. Dr. Kristow said, “I’ve looked into his work. He’s a good man, better than most, and not happy in his job, either. He hasn’t the temperament for teamwork.”
“So?”
“But he is the type for an academic job. If we can arrange to have a large university offer him a chair in physics, I think he would take it gladly. There would be enough nonsensitive areas to keep him occupied; we would be able to keep him in close view; and it would be a natural development.
The Russians might not start scratching their heads. What do you think?” Brand nodded. “It’s an idea. Even sounds good. I’ll put it up to the chief.”
They stepped into the elevator and Brand allowed himself to wonder about it all. What an ending to what had started with one letter of a name.
…
Marshall Sebatinsky could hardly talk. He said to his wife, “I swear I don’t see how this happened. I wouldn’t have thought they knew me from a meson detector. – Good Lord, Sophie, Associate Professor of Physics at Princeton. Think of it.”
Sophie said, “Do you suppose it was your talk at the A.P.S. meetings?”
“I don’t see how. It was a thoroughly uninspired paper once everyone in the division was done hacking at it.”
He snapped his fingers.
“It must have been Princeton that was investigating me. That’s it. You know all those forms I’ve been filling out in the last six months; those interviews they wouldn’t explain. Honestly, I was beginning to think I was under suspicion as a subversive.-It was Princeton investigating me. They’re thorough.”
“Maybe it was your name,” said Sophie. “I mean the change.”
“Watch me now. My professional life will be my own finally. I’ll make my mark. Once I have a chance to do my work without-”
He stopped and turned to look at his wife. “My name! You mean the S.”
“You didn’t get the offer till after you changed your name, did you?”
“Not till long after. No, that part’s just coincidence. I’ve told you before Sophie, it was just a case of throwing out fifty dollars to please you. Lord, what a fool I’ve felt all these months insisting on that stupid S.”
Sophie was instantly on the defensive. “I didn’t make you do it, Marshall. I suggested it but I didn’t nag you about it. Don’t say I did. Besides, it did turn out well. I’m sure it was the name that did this.” Sebatinsky smiled indulgently. “Now that’s superstition.”
“I don’t care what you call it, but you’re not changing your name back.”
“Well, no, I suppose not. I’ve had so much trouble getting them to spell my name with an S, that the thought of making everyone move back is more than I want to face. Maybe I ought to change my name to Jones, eh?”
He laughed almost hysterically. But Sophie didn’t. “You leave it alone.”
“Oh, all right, I’m just joking. -Tell you what. I’ll step down to that old fellow’s place one of these days and tell him everything worked out and slip him another tenner. Will that satisfy you?”
He was exuberant enough to do so the next week. He assumed no disguise this time. He wore his glasses and his ordinary suit and was minus a hat. He was even humming as he approached the store front and stepped to one side to allow a weary, sour-faced woman to maneuver her twin baby carriage past. He put his hand on the door handle and his thumb on the iron latch. The latch didn’t give to his thumb’s downward pressure.
The door was locked.
The dusty, dim card with “Numerologist” on it was gone, now that he looked. Another sign, printed and beginning to yellow and curl with the sunlight, said “To let.”
Sebatinsky shrugged. That was that. He had tried to do the right thing.
…
Haround, happily divested of corporeal excrescence, capered happily and his energy vortices glowed a dim purple over cubic hypermiles.
He said, “Have I won? Have I won?”
Mestack was withdrawn, his vortices almost a sphere of light in hyperspace. “I haven’t calculated it yet.”
“Well, go ahead. You won’t change the results any by taking a long time.-Wowf, it’s a relief to get back into clean energy. It took me a microcycle of time as a corporeal body; a nearly used-up one, too. But it was worth it to show you.”
Mestack said, “All right, I admit you stopped a nuclear war on the planet.”
“Is that or is that not a Class A effect?”
“It is a Class A effect. Of course it is.”
“All right. Now check and see if I didn’t get that Class A effect with a Class F stimulus. I changed one letter of one name.”
“What?”
“Oh, never mind. It’s all there. I’ve worked it out for you.” Mestack said reluctantly, “I yield. A Class F stimulus.”
“Then I win. Admit it.”
“Neither one of us will win when the Watchman gets a look at this.”
Haround, who had been an elderly numerologist on Earth and was still somewhat unsettled with relief at no longer being one, said, “You weren’t worried about that when you made the bet.”
“I didn’t think you’d be fool enough to go through with it.”
“Heat-waste! Besides, why worry? The Watchman will never detect a Class F stimulus.”
“Maybe not, but he’ll detect a Class A effect. Those corporeals will still be around after a dozen microcycles. The Watchman will notice that.”
“The trouble with you, Mestack, is that you don’t want to pay off. You’re stalling.”
“I’ll pay. But just wait till the Watchman finds out we’ve been working on an unassigned problem and made an unallowed-for change. Of course, if we-” He paused.
Haround said, “All right, we’ll change it back. He’ll never know.” There was a crafty glow to Mestack’s brightening energy pattern.
“You’ll need another Class F stimulus if you expect him not to notice.” Haround hesitated. “I can do it.”
“I doubt it.”
“I could.”
“Would you be willing to bet on that, too?” Jubilation was creeping into Mestack’s radiations.
“Sure,” said the goaded Haround.
“I’ll put those corporeals right back where they were and the Watchman will never know the difference.”
Mestack followed through his advantage. “Suspend the first bet, then. Triple the stakes on the second.” The mounting eagerness of the gamble caught at Haround, too.
“All right, I’m game. Triple the stakes.”
“Done, then!”
“Done.”
The End
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are
reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal
library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come
and enjoy a read or two as well.
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
While the Robert Heinlein story “Glory Road” describes how our galaxy actually works. This little gem of a story, kind of illustrates what it was for me in my role in MAJestic. Though, thankfully, it wasn’t anywhere as pathetically extreme as the poor SOB’s in this story. It was at times, almost as bad. Sigh.
JOB – A Comedy of Justice – Robert Heinlein
Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: Therefore despise not thou the chastening of
The Almighty. Job 5:17
Chapter 1
When thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned.
Isaiah 43:2
JOB – A Comedy of Justice – Robert Heinlein
THE FIRE pit was about twenty-five feet long by ten feet wide, and perhaps two feet deep. The fire had been burning for hours. The bed of coals gave off a blast of heat almost unbearable even back where I was seated, fifteen feet from the side of the pit, in the second row of tourists.
I had given up my front-row seat to one of the ladies from the ship, delighted to accept the shielding offered by her well-fed carcass. I was tempted to move still farther back… but I did want to see the fire walkers close up. How often does one get to view a miracle?
‘It’s a hoax,’ the Well-Traveled Man said. ‘You’ll see.’
‘Not really a hoax, Gerald,’ the Authority-on-Everything denied. ‘Just somewhat less than we were led to expect. It won’t be the whole village – probably none of the hula dancers and certainly not those children. One or two of the young men, with calluses on their feet as thick as cowhide, and hopped up on opium or some native drug, will go down the pit at a dead run. The villagers will cheer and our kanaka friend there who is translating for us will strongly suggest that we should tip each of the fire walkers, over and above what we’ve paid for the luau and the dancing and this show.
‘Not a complete hoax,’ he went on. ‘The shore excursion brochure listed a “demonstration of fire walking”. That’s what we’ll get. Never mind the talk about a whole village of fire walkers. Not in the contract. ‘The Authority looked smug.
‘Mass hypnosis,’ the Professional Bore announced.
I was tempted to ask for an explanation of ‘mass hypnosis’- but nobody wanted to hear from me; I was junior – not necessarily in years but in the cruise ship Konge Knut. That’s how it is in cruise ships: Anyone who has been in the vessel since port of departure is senior to, anyone who joins the ship later. The Medes and the Persians laid down this law and nothing can change it. I had flown down in the Count Von Zeppelin, at Papeete I would fly home in the Admiral Moffett, so I was forever junior and should keep quiet while my betters pontificated’.
Cruise ships have the best food and, all too often, the worst conversation in the world. Despite this I was enjoying the islands; even the Mystic and the Amateur Astrologer and the Parlor Freudian and the Numerologist did not trouble me, as I did not listen.
‘They do it through the fourth dimension,’ the Mystic announced. ‘Isn’t that true, Gwendolyn!’
‘Quite true, dear,’ the Numerologist agreed. ‘Oh, here they come now! It will be an odd number, you’ll see.’
‘You’re so learned, dear.’
‘Humph,’ said the Skeptic.
The native who was assisting our ship’s excursion host raised his arms and spread his palms for silence. ‘Please, will you all listen! Mauruuru roa. Thank you very much. The high priest and priestess will now pray the Gods to make the fire safe for the villagers. I ask you to remember that this is a religious ceremony, very ancient; please behave as you would in your own church. Because -‘
An extremely old kanaka interrupted; he and the translator exchanged words in a language not known to me Polynesian, I assumed; it had the right liquid flow to it. The younger kanaka turned back to us.
‘The high priest tells me that some of the children are making their first walk through fire today, including that baby over there in her mother’s arms. He asks all of you to keep perfectly silent during the prayers, to insure the safety of the children. Let me add that I am a Catholic. At this point I always ask our Holy Mother Mary to watch over our children – and I ask all of you to pray for them in your own way. Or at least keep silent and think good thoughts for them. If the high priest is not satisfied that there is a reverent attitude, he won’t let the children enter the fire – I’ve even known him to cancel the entire ceremony.
‘There you have it, Gerald,’ said the Authority-on-Everything in a third-balcony whisper. ‘The build-up. Now the switch, and they’ll blame it on us.’ He snorted.
The Authority – his name was Cheevers – had been annoying me ever since I had joined the ship. I leaned forward and said quietly into his ear, ‘If those children walk through the fire, do you have the guts to do likewise?’
Let this be a lesson to you. Learn by my bad example. Never let an oaf cause you to lose your
judgement. Some seconds later I found that my challenge had been turned against me and. -somehow! – all three, the Authority, the Skeptic, and the Well-Traveled Man, had each bet me a hundred that I would not dare walk the fire pit, stipulating that the children walked first.
Then the translator was shushing us again and the priest and priestess stepped down into the fire pit and everybody kept very quiet and I suppose some of us prayed. I know I did. I found myself reciting what popped into my mind:
‘Now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the Lord my soul to keep-‘
Somehow it seemed appropriate.
The priest and the priestess did not walk through the fire; they did-something quietly more spectacular and (it seemed to me) far more dangerous. They simply stood in the fire pit, barefooted, and prayed for several minutes. I could see their lips move. Every so often the old priest sprinkled something into the pit. Whatever it was, as it struck the coals it burst into sparkles.
I tried to see what they were standing on, coals or rocks, but I could not tell… and could not guess which would be worse. Yet this old woman, skinny as gnawed bones, stood there quietly, face placid, and with no precautions other than having tucked up her lava-lava so that it was almost a diaper.
Apparently she fretted about burning her clothes but not about burning her legs.
Three men with poles had been straightening out the burning logs, making sure that the bed of the pit was a firm and fairly even footing for the fire walkers. I took a deep interest in this, as I expected to be walking in. that pit in a few minutes – if I didn’t cave in and forfeit the bet. It seemed to me that they were making it possible to walk the length of the fire pit on rocks rather than burning coals. I hoped so!
Then I wondered what difference it would make recalling sun-scorched sidewalks that had blistered my bare feet when I was a boy inKansas . That fire had to be at least seven hundred degrees; those rocks had been soaking in that fire for several hours. At such temperatures was there any real choice between frying pan and fire?
I Meanwhile the voice of reason was whispering in my ear that forfeiting three hundred was not much of
a price to pay to get out of this bind… or would I rather walk the rest of my life on two barbecued stumps?
Would it help if I took an aspirin?
The three men finished fiddling with the burning logs and went to the end of the pit at our left; the rest of the villagers gathered behind them – including those darned kids! What were their parents thinking about, letting them risk something like this? Why weren’t they in school where they belonged?
The three fire tenders led off, walking single file down the center of the fire, not hurrying, not dallying. The rest of the men of the village followed them, a* slow, steady procession. Then came the women, including the young mother with a baby on her hip.
When the blast of heat struck the infant, it started to cry. Without varying her steady pace, its mother swung it up and gave it suck; the baby shut up.
The children followed, from pubescent girls and adolescent boys down to the kindergarten level. Last was a little girl (nine? eight?) who was leading her round-eyed little, brother by, the hand. He seemed to be about four and was dressed only in his skin.
I looked at this kid and knew with mournful certainty that I was about to be served up rare; I could no longer back out. Once the baby boy stumbled; his sister kept him from falling. He went on then, short sturdy steps. At the far end someone reached down and lifted him out.
And it was my turn.
The translator said to me, ‘You understand that the Polynesia Tourist Bureau takes no responsibility for your safety? That fire can burn you, it can kill you. These people can walk it safely because they have faith.’
I assured him that I had faith, while wondering how I could be such a barefaced liar. I signed a release he presented.
All too soon I was standing at one end of the pit, with my trousers rolled up to my knees. My shoes and socks and hat and wallet were at the far end, waiting on a stool. That was my goal, my prize – if I didn’t make it, would they cast lots for them? Or would they ship them to my next of kin?
He was saying: ‘Go right down the middle. Don’t hurry but don’t stand still.’ The high priest spoke up; my mentor listened, then said, ‘He says not to run, even if your feet burn. Because you might stumble and fall down. Then you might never get up. He means you might die. I must add that you probably would not die – unless you breathed flame. But you would certainly be terribly burned. So don’t hurry and don’t fall down. Now see that flat rock under you? That’s your first step. Que le bon Dieu vous garde. Good luck.’
‘Thanks.’ I glanced over at the Authority-on-Everything, who was smiling ghoulishly, if ghouls smile. I gave him a mendaciously jaunty wave and stepped down.
I had taken three steps before I realized that I didn’t feel anything at all. Then I did feel something: scared. Scared silly and wishing I were in Peoria. Or even Philadelphia. Instead of alone in this vast smoldering waste. The far end of the pit was a city block away. Maybe farther. But I kept plodding toward it while hoping that this numb paralysis would not cause me to collapse before reaching it.
I felt smothered and discovered that I had been holding my breath. So I gasped – and regretted it. Over a fire pit that vast there is blistering gas and smoke and carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide and something that may be Satan’s halitosis, but not enough oxygen to matter.’ I chopped off that gasp with my eyes watering and my throat raw and tried to estimate whether or not I could reach the end without breathing.
Heaven help me, I could not see the far end! The smoke had billowed up and my eyes would barely open and would not focus. So I pushed on, while trying to remember the formula by which one made a deathbed confession and then slid into Heaven on a technicality.
Maybe there wasn’t any such formula. My feet felt odd and my knees were becoming unglued…
‘Feeling better, Mr Graham?’
I was lying on grass and looking up into a friendly, brown face. ‘I guess so,’ I answered. ‘What
happened? Did I walk it?’
‘Certainly you walked it. Beautifully. But you fainted right at the end. We were standing by and grabbed you, hauled you out. But you tell me what happened. Did you get your lungs full of smoke?’
‘Maybe. Am I burned?’
‘No. Oh, you may form one blister on your right foot. But you held the thought perfectly. All but that faint, which must have been caused by smoke.’
‘I guess so.’ I sat up with his help. ‘Can you hand me my shoes and socks? Where is everybody?’
‘The bus left. The high priest took your pulse and checked your breathing but he wouldn’t let anyone disturb you. If you force a man to wake up when his spirit is still walking about, the spirit may not come back in. So he believes and no one dares argue with him.’
‘I won’t argue with him; I feel fine. Rested. But how do I get back to the ship?’ Five miles of tropical paradise would get tedious after the first mile. On foot. Especially as my feet seemed to have swelled a bit. For which they, had ample excuse.
‘The bus will come back to take the villagers to the boat that takes them back to the island they live on. It then could take you to your ship. But we can do better. My cousin has an automobile. He wil take you.’
‘Good. How much will he charge me?’ Taxis in Polynesia are always outrageous, especially when the drivers have you at their mercy, of which they have none. But it occurred to me that I could afford to be robbed as I was bound to show a profit on this jape. Three hundred minus one taxi fare. I picked up my hat. ‘Where’s my wallet?’
‘Your wallet?’
‘My billfold. I left it in my hat. Where is it? This isn’t funny; my money was in it. And my cards.’
‘Your money? Oh! Votre portefeuille. I am sorry; my English is not perfect. The officer from your ship, your excursion guide, took care of it.’
‘That was kind of him. But how am I to pay your cousin? I don’t have a franc on me.’
We got that straightened out. The ship’s excursion escort, realising that he would be leaving me strapped in rescuing my billfold, had prepaid my ride back to the ship. My kanaka friend took me to his cousin’s car and introduced me to his cousin – not too effectively, as the cousin’s English was limited to ‘Okay, Chief!’ and I never did get his name straight.
‘His automobile was a triumph of baling wire and faith. We went roaring back to the dock at full throttle, frightening chickens and easily outrunning baby goats. I did not pay much attention as I was bemused by something that had happened just before we left. The villagers were waiting for their bus to return; we walked right through them. Or started to. I got kissed. I got kissed by all of them. I had already seen the Polynesian habit of kissing where we would just shake hands, but this was the first time it had happened to me.
My friend explained it to me: ‘You walked through their fire, so you are an honorary member of their village. They want to kill a pig for you. Hold a feast in your honor.’
I tried to answer in kind while explaining that I had to return home across the great water but I would return someday, God willing. Eventually we got away.
But that was not what had me most bemused. Any unbiased judge would have to admit that I am reasonably sophisticated. I am aware that some places do not have America’s high moral standards and are careless about indecent exposure. I know that Polynesian women used to run around naked from the waist up until civilization came along – shucks, I read the National Geographic.
But I never expected to see it.
Before I made my fire walk the villagers were dressed just as you would expect: grass skirts but with the women’s bosoms covered.
But when they kissed me hello-goodbye they were not. Not covered, I mean. Just like the National Geographic.
Now I appreciate feminine beauty. Those delightful differences, seen under proper circumstances with the shades decently drawn, can be dazzling. But forty-odd (no, even) of them are intimidating. I saw more human feminine busts than I had ever seen before, total and cumulative, in my entire life. The Methodist Episcopal Society for Temperance and Morals would have been shocked right out of their wits.
With adequate warning I am sure that I could have enjoyed the experience. As it was, it was too new, too much, too fast. I could appreciate it only in retrospect.
Our tropical Rolls-Royce crunched to a stop with the aid of hand brake, foot brake, and first-gear compression; I looked up from bemused euphoria. My driver announced, ‘Okay, Chief!’
I said, ‘That’s not my ship.’
‘Okay, Chief?’
‘You’ve taken me to the wrong dock. Uh, it looks like the right dock but it’s the wrong ship.’ Of that I was certain. M.V. Konge Knut has white sides and superstructure and a rakish false funnel. This ship was mostly red with four tall black stacks. Steam, it had to be – not a motor vessel. As well as years out of date. ‘No. No!’
‘Okay, Chief. Votre vapeur! Voila!’
‘Non!’
‘Okay, Chief.’ He got out, came around and opened the door on the passenger Side, grabbed my arm,
and pulled.
I’m in fairly good shape, but his arm had been toughened by swimming, climbing for coconuts, hauling in fishnets, and pulling tourists who don’t want to go out of cars. I got out.
He jumped back in, called out, ‘Okay, Chief! Merci bien! Au ‘voir!’ and was gone.
I went, Hobson’s choice, up the gangway of the strange vessel to learn, if possible, what had become of the Konge Knut. As I stepped aboard, the petty officer on gangway watch saluted and said, ‘Afternoon, sir. Mr Graham, Mr Nielsen left a package for you. One moment -‘He lifted the lid of his watch desk, took out a large manila envelope. ‘Here you are, sir.’
The package had written on it: A. L. Graham, cabin C109. I opened it, found a well-worn wallet.
‘Is everything in order, Mr Graham?’
‘Yes, thank you. Will you tell Mr Nielsen that I received it? And give him my thanks.’
‘Certainly, sir.’
I noted that this was D deck, went up one flight to find cabin C109.
All was not quite in order. My name is not ‘Graham’.
Chapter 2
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be, and that which is done is that which shall be done, and there is no new thing under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 1:9
THANK HEAVEN ships use a consistent numbering system. Stateroom C109 was where it should be: on C deck, starboard side forward, between C107 and C111; I reached it without having to speak to anyone. I tried the door; it was locked – Mr Graham apparently believed the warnings pursers give about locking doors, especially in port.
The key, I thought glumly, is in Mr Graham’s pants pocket. But where is Mr Graham? About to catch me snooping at his door? Or is the trying my door while I am trying his door?
There is a small but not zero chance that a given key will fit a strange lock. I had in my own pocket my room key from the Konge Knut. I tried it.
Well, it was worth trying. I stood there, wondering whether to sneeze or drop dead, when I heard a sweet voice behind me:
‘Oh, Mr Graham!’
A young and pretty woman in a maid’s costume – Correction: stewardess’ uniform. She came bustling toward me, took a pass key that was chained to her belt, opened C109, while saying, ‘Margrethe asked me to watch for you. She told me that you had left your cabin key on your desk. She let it stay but told me to watch for you and let you in.’
‘That’s most kind, of you, Miss, uh-‘
‘I’m Astrid. I have the matching rooms on the port side, so Marga and I cover for each other. She’s gone ashore this afternoon.’ She held the door for me. ‘Will that be all, sir?’
I thanked her, she left. I latched and bolted the door, collapsed in a chair and gave way to the shakes.
Ten minutes later I stood up, went into the bathroom, put cold water on my face and eyes. I had not solved anything and had not wholly calmed down, but my nerves were no longer snapping like a flag in a high wind. I had been holding myself in ever since I had begun to suspect that something was seriously wrong, which was – when? When nothing seemed quite right at the fire pit? Later? Well, with utter certainty when I saw one 20,000-ton ship substituted for another.
My father used to tell me, ‘Alex, there is nothing wrong with being scared… as long as you don’t let it affect you until the danger is over. Being hysterical is okay, too… afterwards and in private. Tears are not unmanly… in the bathroom with the door locked. The difference between a coward and a brave man is mostly a matter of timing.’
I’m not the man my father was but I try to follow his advice. If you can learn not to jump when the firecracker goes off – or whatever the surprise is – you stand a good chance of being able to hang tight until the emergency is over.
This emergency was not over but I had benefited by the catharsis of a good case of shakes. Now I could take stock.
Hypotheses:
a) Something preposterous has happened to the world around me, or
b) Something preposterous has happened to Alex Hergensheimer’s mind; he should be locked up and sedated.
I could not think of a third hypothesis; those two seemed to cover all bases. The second hypothesis I need not waste time on. If, I were raising snakes in my hat, eventually other people would notice and come around with a straitjacket and put me in a nice padded room.
So let’s assume that I am sane (or nearly so; being a little bit crazy is helpful). If I am okay, then the world is .out of joint. Let’s take stock.
That wallet. Not mine. Most wallets are generally similar to each other and this one was much like mine. But carry a wallet for a few years and it fits you; it is distinctly yours. I had known at once that this one was not mine. But I did not want to say so to a ship’s petty officer who insisted on, ‘recognizing’ me as ‘Mr Graham’.
I took out Graham’s wallet and opened it.
Several hundred francs – count it later.
Eighty-five dollars in paper – legal tender of ‘The United States of North America’.
A driver’s license issued to A. L. Graham.
There were more items but I came across a window occupied by a typed notice, one that stopped me cold:
Anyone finding this wallet may keep any money in it as a reward if he will be so kind as to return the wallet to A. L. Graham, cabin C109, S.S. KONGE KNUT, Danish American Line, or to any purser or agent of the line. Thank you. A.L.G.
So now I knew what had happened to the Konge Knut; she had undergone a sea change.
Or had I? Was there truly a changed world and therefore a changed ship? Or were there two worlds and had I somehow walked through fire into the second one? Were there indeed two men and had they swapped destinies? Or had Alex Hergensheimer metamorphized into Alec Graham while M. V. Konge Knut changed into S. S. Konge Knut? (While the North American Union melted into the United States of North America?)
Good questions. I’m glad you brought them up. Now, class, are there any more questions
When I was in middle school there was a spate of magazines publishing fantastic, stories, not alone ghost stories but weird yarns of every sort. Magic ships plying the ether to, other stars. Strange inventions.
Trips to the centre of the earth. Other ‘dimensions’. Flying machines. Power from burning atoms. Monsters created in secret laboratories.
I used to buy them and hide them inside copies of Youth’s Companion and of Young Crusaders knowing instinctively that my parents would disapprove and confiscate. I loved them and so did my outlaw chum Bert.
It couldn’t last. First there was an editorial in Youth’s Companion: ‘Poison to the Soul – Stamp it Out!’ Then our pastor, Brother Draper, preached a sermon against such mind-corrupting trash, with comparisons to the evil effects of cigarettes and booze. Then our state outlawed such publications under the ‘standards of the community’ doctrine even before passage of the national law and the parallel executive order.
And a cache I had hidden ‘perfectly’ in our attic disappeared. Worse, the works of Mr H. G. Wells and
M. Jules Verne and some others were taken out of our public library.
You have to admire the motives of our spiritual leaders and elected officials in seeking to protect the minds of the young. As Brother Draper pointed out, there are enough exciting and adventurous stories in the Good Book to satisfy the needs of every boy and girl in the world; there was simply no need for profane literature. He was not urging censorship of books for adults, just for the impressionable young. If persons of mature years wanted to read such fantastic trash, suffer them to do so – although he, for one, could not see why any grown man would want to.
I guess I was one of the ‘impressionable young’ – I still miss them.
I remember particularly one by Mr Wells: Men Like Gods. These people were driving along in an automobile when an explosion happens and they find themselves in another world, much like their own but better. They meet the people who live there and there is explanation about parallel universes and the fourth dimension and such.
That was the first installment. The Protect-Our-Youth state law was passed right after that, so I never
saw the later installments.
One of my English professors who was bluntly opposed to censorship once said that Mr Wells had invented every one of the basic fantastic themes, and he cited this story as the origin of the
multiple-universes concept. I was intending to ask this prof if he knew where I could find a copy, but I put it off to the end of the term when I would be legally ‘of mature years’ – and waited too long; the academic senate committee on faith and morals voted against tenure for that professor, and he left abruptly without finishing the term.
Did something happen to me like that which Mr Wells described in Men Like Gods? Did Mr Wells have the holy gift of prophecy? For example, would men someday actually fly to the moon? Preposterous!
But was it more preposterous than what had happened to me?
As may be, here. I was in Konge Knut (even though she was not my, Konge Knut) and the sailing board at the gangway showed her getting underway at 6 p.m. It was already late afternoon and high time for me to decide.
What to do? I seemed to have mislaid my own ship, the Motor Vessel Konge Knut. But the crew (some of the crew) of the Steamship Konge Knut seemed ready to accept me as ‘Mr Graham’, passenger.
Stay aboard and try to brazen it out? What if Graham comes aboard (any minute now!) and demands to know what I am doing in his room?
Or go ashore (as I should) and go to the authorities with my problem?
Alex, the French colonial authorities will love you. No baggage, only the clothes on your back, no money, not a sou – no passport! Oh, they will love you so much they’ll give you room and board for the rest of your life … in an oubliette with a grill over the top.
There’s money in that wallet.
So? Ever heard of the Eighth Commandment? That’s his money.
But it stands to reason that he walked through the fire at the same time you did but on this side, this world or whatever – or his wallet would not have been waiting for you. Now he has your wallet. That’s logical.
Listen, my retarded friend, do you think logic has anything to do with the predicament we are in?
Well
Speak up!
No, not really. Then how about this? Sit tight in this room. If Graham shows up before, the ship sails, you get kicked off the ship, that’s sure. But you would be no worse off than you will be if you leave now. If he does not show up, then you take his place at least as far as Papeete. That’s a big city; your chances of coping with the situation are far better there. Consuls and such.
You talked me into it.
Passenger ships usually publish a daily newspaper for the passengers – just a single or double sheet filled with thrilling items such as ‘There will be a boat drill at ten o’clock this morning. All passengers are requested -‘ and ‘Yesterday’s mileage pool was won by Mrs Ephraim Glutz of Bethany, Iowa’ and, usually, a few news items picked up by the wireless operator. I looked around for the ship’s paper and for the ‘Welcome Aboard!’ This latter is a booklet (perhaps with another name) intended to make the passenger newly aboard sophisticated in the little world of the ship: names of the officers, times of meals, location of barber shop, laundry, dining room, gift shop (notions, magazines, toothpaste), and how to place a morning call, plan of the ship by decks, location of life preserver, how, to find your lifeboat station, where to get your table assignment-
‘Table assignment’! Ouch! A passenger who has been aboard even one day does not have to ask how to find his table in the dining room. It’s the little things that trip you. Well, I’d have to bull it through.
The welcome-aboard booklet was tucked into Graham’s desk. I thumbed through it, with a mental note to memorize all key facts before I left this room – if I was still aboard when the ship sailed – then put it aside, as I had found the ship’s newspaper:
The King’s Skald it was headed and Graham, bless him, had saved all of them from the day he had boarded the ship… at Portland, Oregon, as I deduced from the place and date line of the, earliest issue. That suggested that Graham was ticketed for the entire cruise, which could be important to me. I had expected to go back as I had arrived, by airship – but, even if the dirigible liner Admiral Moffett existed in this world or dimension or whatever, I no longer had a ticket for it and no money with which to buy one. What do these French colonials do to a tourist who has no money? Burn him at the stake? Or merely draw and quarter him? I did not want to find out. Graham’s roundtrip ticket (if he had one) might keep me from having to find out.
(If he didn’t show up in the next hour and have me kicked off the ship.)
I did not consider remaining in Polynesia. Being a penniless beachcomber on Bora-Bora or Moorea may have been practical a hundred years ago but today the only thing free in these islands is contagious disease.
It seemed likely that I would be just as broke and just as much a stranger in America but nevertheless I felt that I would be better off in my native land. Well, Graham’s native land.
I read some of the wireless news items but could not make sense of them, so I put them aside for later study. What little I had learned from them was not comforting. I had cherished deep down an illogical hope that this would turn out to be just a silly mixup that would soon be straightened out (don’t ask me how). But those news items ended all hoping.
I mean to say, what sort of world is it in which the ‘President’ of Germany visits London? In my world Kaiser Wilhelm IV rules the German Empire – A ‘president’ for Germany sounds as silly as a ‘king’ for America.
This might he a pleasant world… but it was not the world I was born into. Not by those weird news items.
As I put away. Graham’s file of The King’s Skald I noted on the top sheet today’s prescribed dress for
dinner: ‘Formal’.
I was not surprised; the Konge Knut in her other incarnation as a motor vessel was quite formal. If the ship was underway, black tie was expected. If you didn’t wear it, you were made to feel that you really ought to eat in your stateroom.
I don’t own a tuxedo; our church does not encourage vanities. I had compromised by wearing a blue serge suit at dinners underway, with a white shirt and a snap-on black bow tie. Nobody said anything. It did not matter, as I was below the salt anyhow, having come aboard at Papeete.
I decided to see if Mr Graham owned a dark suit. And a black tie.
Mr Graham owned lots of clothes, far more than I did. I tried on a sports jacket; it fit me well enough.. Trousers? Length seemed okay; I was not sure about the waistband – and too shy to try on a pair and thereby risk being caught by Graham with one leg in his trousers, What does one say? Hi, there! I was just waiting for you and thought I would pass the time by trying on your pants. Not convincing.
He had not one but two tuxedos, one in conventional black and the other in dark red – I had never heard of such frippery.
But I did not find a snap-on bow tie.
He had black bow ties, several. But I have never learned how to tie a bow tie.
I took a deep breath and thought about it.
There came a knock at the door. I didn’t jump out of my skin, just almost. ‘Who’s there!’ (Honest, Mr Graham, I was just waiting for you!) –
‘Stewardess, sir.’
‘Oh. Come in, come in!’
I heard her try her key, then I jumped to turn back the bolt. ‘Sorry. I had forgotten that I had used the dead bolt.
Do come in.’
Margrethe turned out to be about the age of Astrid, youngish, and even prettier, with flaxen hair and freckles across her nose. She spoke textbook-correct English with a charming lilt to it. She was carrying a short white jacket on a coat hanger. ‘Your mess jacket, sir. Karl says the other one will be ready tomorrow.’
‘Why, thank you, Margrethe! I had forgotten all about it.
I thought you might. So I came back aboard a little early – the laundry was just closing. I’m glad I did; it’s much too hot for you to wear black.’
‘You shouldn’t have come back early; you’re spoiling me.’
‘I like to take good care of my guests. As you know.’ She hung the jacket in the wardrobe, turned to leave. ‘I’ll be back to tie your tie. Six-thirty as usual, sir?’
‘Six-thirty is fine. What time is it now?’ (Tarnation, my watch was gone wherever Motor Vessel Konge Knut had vanished; I had not worn it ashore.)
‘Almost six o’clock.’ She hesitated. ‘I’ll lay out your clothes before I go; you don’t have much time.’
‘My dear girl! That’s no part of your duties.’
‘No, it’s my pleasure.’ She opened a drawer, took out a dress shirt, placed it on my/Graham’s bunk. ‘And you know why.’ With the quick efficiency of a person who knows exactly where everything is, she opened a ‘ small desk drawer that I had not touched, took out a leather case, from it laid out by the shirt a watch, a ring, and shirt studs, then inserted studs into the shirt, placed fresh underwear and black silk socks on the pillow, placed evening pumps by the chair with shoe horn tucked inside, took from the wardrobe that mess jacket, hung it and black dress trousers (braces attached) and dark red cummerbund on the front of the wardrobe. She glanced over and a fresh the layout, added a wing collar, a black tie, and a fresh handkerchief to the stack on the pillow – cast her eye over it again, placed the room key and the wallet by the ring and the watch – glanced again, nodded. ‘I must run or I’ll miss dinner. I’ll be back for the tie.’ And she was gone, not running but moving very fast.
Margrethe was so right. If she had not laid out everything, I would still be struggling to put myself together. That shirt alone would have stopped me; it was one of the dive-in-and-button-up-the-back sort. I had never worn one.
Thank heaven Graham used an ordinary brand of safety razor. By six-fifteen I had touched up my morning shave, showered (necessary!), and washed the smoke out of my hair.
His shoes fit me as if I had broken them in myself. His trousers were a bit tight in the waist – a Danish ship is no place to lose weight and I had been in the Motor Vessel Konge Knut for a fortnight. I was still struggling with that consarned backwards shirt when Margarethe let herself in with her pass key.
She came straight to me, said, ‘Hold still,’ and quickly buttoned the buttons I could not reach. Then she fitted that fiendish collar over its collar buttons, laid the tie around my neck. ‘Turn around, please.’
Tying a bow tie properly involves magic. She knew the spell.
She helped me with the cummerband, held my jacket for me, looked me over and announced, ‘You’ll do. And I’m proud of you; at dinner the girls were talking about you.’ I wish I had seen it. You are very brave.’
‘Not brave. Foolish. I talked when I should have kept still.’
‘Brave. I must go – I left Kristina guarding a cherry tart for me. But if I stay away too long someone will steal it.’
‘You run along. And thank you loads’. Hurry and save that tart.’
‘Aren’t you going to pay me?’
‘Oh. What payment would you like?’
‘Don’t tease me!’ She moved a few inches closer, turned her face up. I don’t know much about girls (who does?) but some signals are large print. I took her by her shoulders, kissed both cheeks, hesitated just long enough to be certain that she was neither displeased nor surprised, then placed one right in the middle’. Her lips were full and
warm.
‘Was that the payment you had in mind?’
‘Yes, of course. But you can kiss better than that. You know you can.’ She pouted her lower lip, then dropped her eyes.
‘Brace. yourself.’
Yes, I can kiss lots better than that. Or could by the time we had used up that kiss. By letting Margrethe lead it and heartily cooperating in whatever way she seemed to think a better kiss should go I learned more about kissing in the next two minutes than I had learned in my entire life up to then.
My ears roared.
For a moment after we broke she held still in my arms and looked up at me most soberly. ‘Alec,’ she said softly, ‘that’s the best you’ve ever kissed me. Goodness. Now I’m going to run before I make you late for dinner.’ She slipped out of my arms and left as she did everything, quickly.
I inspected myself in the mirror. No marks. A kiss that emphatic ought to leave marks.
What sort of person was this Graham? I could wear his clothes … but could I cope with his woman? Or was she his? Who knows? – I did not. Was he a lecher, a womanizer? Or was I butting in on a perfectly nice if somewhat indiscreet romance?
How do you walk back- through a fire pit?
And did I want to?
Go aft to the main companionway, then down two decks and go aft again – that’s what the ship’s plans in the booklet showed.
No problem. A man at the door of the dining saloon, dressed much as I was but with a menu under his arm, had to be the head waiter, the chief dining-room steward. He confirmed it with a big professional smile. ‘Good evening, Mr Graham.’
I paused. ‘Good evening. What’s this about a change in seating arrangements? Where am I to sit tonight?’ (If you grab the bull by the horns, you at least confuse him.)
‘It’s not a permanent change, sir. Tomorrow you will be back at table fourteen. But tonight the Captain has asked that you sit at his table. If you will follow me, sir.’
He led me to an oversize table amidships, started to seat me on the Captain’s right – and the Captain stood up and started to clap, the others at his table followed suit, and shortly everyone in the dining room (it seemed) was standing and clapping and some were cheering.
I learned two things at that dinner. First, it was clear that Graham had pulled the same silly stunt I had (but it still was not clear ‘Whether there was one of us or two of us – I tabled that question).
Second, but of major importance: Do not drink ice-cold Aalborg akvavit on an empty stomach, especially if you were brought up White Ribbon as I was.
Chapter 3
Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging
Proverbs 20:l
I Am not blaming Captain Hansen. I have heard that Scandinavians put ethanol into their blood as antifreeze, against their long hard winters, and consequently cannot understand people who cannot take strong drink. Besides that, nobody held my arms, nobody held my nose, nobody forced spirits down my throat. I did it myself.
Our church doesn’t hold with the doctrine that the flesh is weak and therefore sin is humanly understandable and readily forgiven. Sin can be forgiven but just barely and you are surely going to catch it first. Sin should suffer.
I found out about some of that suffering. I’m told it is called a hangover.
That is what my drinking uncle called it. Uncle Ed maintained that no man can cope with temperance who has not had a full course of intemperance … otherwise when temptation came his way, he would not know how to handle it.
Maybe I proved Uncle Ed’s point. He was considered a bad influence around our house and, if he had not been Mother’s brother, Dad would not have allowed him, in the house. As it was, he was never pressed to stay longer and was not urged to hurry back.
Before I even sat down at the table, the Captain offered me a glass of akvavit. The glasses used for this are not large; they are quite small – and that is the deceptive part of the danger.
The Captain had a glass like it in his hand. He looked me in the eye and said, ‘To our hero! Skaal!’ – threw his head back and tossed it down.
There were echoes of ‘Skaal!’ all around the table and everyone seemed to gulp it down just like the Captain.
So I did. I could say that being guest of honor laid certain obligations on me -‘When in Rome’ and all that. But the truth is I did not have the requisite strength of character to refuse. I told myself, ‘One tiny glass can’t hurt,’ and gulped it down.
No trouble. It went down smoothly. One pleasant ice-cold swallow, then a spicy aftertaste with a hint of licorice. I did not know what I was drinking but I was not sure that it was alcoholic. It seemed not to be.
We sat down and somebody put food in front of me and the Captain’s steward poured another glass of schnapps for me. I was about to start nibbling the food, Danish hors d’oeuvres and delicious – smorgasbord tidbits – when someone put a hand on my shoulder.
I looked up. The Well-Traveled Man –
With him were the Authority and the Skeptic.
Not the same names. Whoever (Whatever?) was playing games with my life had not gone that far. ‘Gerald Fortescue’ was now ‘Jeremy Forsyth’, for example. But despite slight differences I had no trouble recognizing each of them and their new names were close enough to show that someone, or something, was continuing the joke.
(Then why wasn’t my new name something like ‘Hergensheimer’? ‘Hergensheimer’ has dignity about it, a rolling grandeur. Graham is a so-so name.)
‘Alec,’ Mr Forsyth said, ‘we misjudged you. Duncan and I and Pete are happy to admit it. Here’s the three thousand we owe you, and -‘He hauled his right hand out from behind his back, held up a large bottle. ‘- the best champagne in the ship as a mark of our esteem.’
‘Steward!’ said the Captain.
Shortly, the -wine steward was going around, filling glasses at our table. But before that, I found myself again standing up, making Skaal! in akvavit three times, once to each of the losers, while clutching three thousand dollars States of North America dollars). I did not have, lime then to wonder why three hundred had changed to three thousand – besides, it was not as odd as what had happened to the Konge Knut. Both of her. And my wonder circuits were overloaded anyhow.
Captain Hansen told his waitress to place chairs at the table for Forsyth and company, but all three insisted that their wives and table mates expected them to return. Nor was there room. Not that it would have mattered to Captain Hansen. He, is a Viking, half again as big as a house; hand him a hammer and he would be mistaken for Thor – he has muscles where other men don’t even have places. It is very hard to argue with him.
But he jovially agreed to compromise. They could go back to their tables and finish their dinners but first they must join him and me in pledging Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, guardian angels of our shipmate Alec. In fact the whole table must join in. ‘Steward!’
So we said, ‘Skaal!’ three more times, while bouncing Danish antifreeze off our tonsils.
Have you kept count? That’s seven, I think. You can stop counting, as that is where I lost track. I was beginning to feel a return of the numbness I had felt halfway through the fire pit.
The wine steward had completed pouring champagne, having renewed his supply at a gesture from the Captain. Then it was time to toast me again, and I returned ‘ the compliment to the three losers, then we all toasted Captain Hansen, and then we toasted the good ship
Konge Knut.
The Captain toasted the United States and the whole room stood and drank with him, so I felt it incumbent to answer by toasting the Danish Queen, and that got me toasted again and the Captain demanded a speech from, me. ‘Tell us how it feels to be in the fiery furnace!’
I tried to refuse and there were shouts of ‘Speech! Speech!’ from all around me.
I stood up with some difficulty, tried to remember the speech I had made at the last foreign missions fund-raising dinner. It evaded me. Finally I said, ‘Aw, shucks, it wasn’t anything. Just put your ear to the ground and your shoulder to the wheel, and your eyes on the stars and you can do it too. Thank you, thank you all and next, time you must come to my house.’
They cheered and we skaaled again, I forget why, and the lady on the Captain’s left got up and came around and kissed me, whereupon all the ladies at the Captain’s table clustered around and kissed me. That seemed to inspire the other ladies in the room, for there was a steady procession coming up to claim a buss from me, and usually kissing the Captain while they were about it, or perhaps the other way around.
During this parade someone removed a steak from in front of me, one I had had plans for. I didn’t miss it too much, because that endless orgy of osculation had me bewildered, plus bemusement much like that caused by the female villagers of the fire walk.
Much of this bemusement started when I first walked into the dining room. Let me put it this way: My fellow passengers, female, really should have been in the National Geographic.
Yes. Like that. Well, maybe not quite, but what they did wear made them look nakeder than those friendly villagers. I’m not going to describe those, ‘formal evening dresses’ because I’m not sure I could – and I am sure I shouldn’t. But none of them covered more than twenty percent of what ladies usually keep covered at fancy evening affairs in the world I grew up in. Above the waist I mean. Their skirts, long, some clear to the, floor, were nevertheless cut or slit in most startling ways.
Some of the ladies had tops to their dresses that covered everything … but the material was transparent as glass. Or almost.
And some of the youngest ladies, girls really, actually, did belong in the National Geographic, just like my villagers. Somehow, these younger ladies did not seem quite as immodest as their elders.
I had noticed this display almost the instant I walked in. But, I tried not to stare and the Captain and others kept me so busy at first that I really did not have time to sneak glances at the incredible exposure.
But, look – when a lady comes up and puts her arms around you and insists on kissing you, it is difficult not to notice that she isn’t wearing enough to ward off pneumonia. Or other chest complaints.
But I kept a tight rein on myself despite increasing dizziness and numbness.
Even bare skin did not startle me as much as bare words – language I had never heard in public in my life and extremely seldom even in private among men only. ‘Men’, I said, as gentlemen don’t talk that way even with no ladies’ present – in the world I knew.
The most* shocking thing that ever happened to me in my boyhood was one day crossing the town square, noticing a crowd on the penance side of the courthouse, joining it to see who was catching it and why… and finding my Scoutmaster in the stocks. I almost fainted.
His offence was profane language, so the sign on his chest told us. The accuser was his own wife; he did not dispute it and had thrown himself on the mercy of the court – the judge was Deacon Brumby, who didn’t know the word.
Mr Kirk, my Scoutmaster, left town two weeks later and nobody ever saw him again – being exposed, in the stocks was likely to have that effect on a man. I don’t know what the bad language was that Mr Kirk had used, but it couldn’t have been too bad, as all Deacon Brumby could give him was one
dawn-to-dusk.
That night at the Captain’s table in the K6nge Knut I heard a sweet lady of the favorite-grandmother sort address her husband in a pattern of forbidden words involving blasphemy and certain criminal sensual acts. Had she spoken that way in public in my home town she would have received maximum exposure in stocks followed by being ridden out of town. (Our town did not use tar and feathers; that was regarded as brutal.)
Yet this dear lady in the ship was not even chided. Her husband simply- smiled and told her that she worried too much.
Between shocking speech, incredible immodest exposure, and effects of two sorts of strange and deceptive potions lavishly administered, I was utterly confused. A stranger in a strange land, I was overcome by customs new and shocking. But through it all I clung to the conviction that I must appear to be sophisticated, at home, unsurprised. I must not let anyone suspect that I was not Alec Graham,
shipmate, but instead Alexander Hergensheimer, total stranger… or something terrible might happen.
Of course I was wrong; something terrible had already happened. I was indeed a total stranger in an utterly strange and confusing land… but I do not think, in retrospect, that I would have made my condition worse had I simply blurted out my predicament.
I would not have been believed.
How else? I had trouble believing it myself.
Captain Hansen, a hearty no-nonsense man, would have bellowed with laughter at my ‘joke’ and insisted on another toast. Had I persisted in my ‘delusion’ he would have had the ship’s doctor talk to me.
Still, I got through that amazing evening easier by holding tight to the notion that I must concentrate on acting the part of Alec Graham while never letting anyone suspect that I was a changeling, a cuckoo’s egg.
There had just been placed in front of me a slice of princess cake, a beautiful multilayered confection I recalled from the other Konge Knut, and a small cup of coffee, when the Captain stood up. ‘Come, Alec! We go to the lounge now; the show is ready to start – but they can’t start till I get there. So come on! You don’t want all that sweet stuff; it’s not good for you. You can have coffee in the lounge. But before that we have some man’s drinks, henh? Not these joke drinks. You like Russian vodka?’
He linked his arm in mine. I discovered that I was going to the lounge. Volition did not enter into it.
That lounge show was much the mixture I had found earlier in M. V. Konge Knut – a magician who did improbable things but not as improbable as what I had done (or been done to?), a standup comedian who should have sat down, a pretty girl who sang, and dancers. The major differences were two I had already been exposed to: bare skin and bare words, and by then I was so numb from earlier shock and akvavit that these additional proofs of a different world had minimal effect.
The girl who sang just barely had clothes on and the lyrics of her songs would have caused her trouble even in the underworld of Newark, New Jersey. Or so I think; I have no direct experience with that
notorious sink of iniquity. I paid more attention to her appearance, since here I need not avert my eyes; one is expected to stare at performers.
If one admits for the sake of argument that customs in dress can be wildly different without destroying the fabric of society (a possibility. I do not concede but will stipulate), then it helps, I think, if the person exhibiting this difference is young and healthy and comely.
The singer was young and healthy and comely. I felt a twinge of regret when she left the spotlight
The major event was a troupe of Tahitian dancers, and I was truly not surprised that they were costumed bare to the waist save for flowers or shell beads – by then I would have been surprised had they been otherwise. What was still surprising (although I suppose it should not have been) was the subsequent behaviour of my fellow passengers.
First the troupe, eight girls, two men, danced for us, much the same dancing that had preceded the fire walk today, much the same as I had seen when a troupe had come aboard M.V. Konge Knut in Papeete. Perhaps you know that the hula of Tahiti differs from the slow and graceful hula of the Kingdom of Hawaii by being at a much faster beat and is much more energetic. I’m no expert on the arts of the dance but at least I have seen both styles of hula in the lands where each was native.
I prefer the Hawaiian hula, which I had seen when the Count von Zeppelin had stopped at Hilo for a day on her way to Papeete. The Tahitian hula strikes me as an athletic accomplishment rather than an art form. But its very energy and speed make it still more startling in the dress or undress these native girls wore.
There was more to come. After a long dance sequence, which included paired dancing between girls and each of the two young men – in which they did things that would have been astonishing even among barnyard fowl (I kept expecting Captain Hansen to put a stop to it) – the ship’s master of ceremonies or cruise director stepped forward.
‘Ladeez and gentlemen,’ he announced, ‘and the rest of you intoxicated persons of irregular birth -‘ (I am forced to amend his language.) ‘Most of you setters and even a few pointers have made good use of the four days our’ dancers have been with us to add the Tahitian hula to your repertoire. Shortly you’ll be given a chance to demonst rate what you’ve learned and to receive diplomas as authentic Papeete papayas. But what you don’t know is that others in the good ole knutty Knut have been practicing, too. Maestro, strike up the band!’
Out from behind the lounge stage danced a dozen more hula dancers. But these girls were not Polynesian; these girls were Caucasian. They were dressed authentically, grass skirts and necklaces, a flower in the hair, nothing else. But instead of warm brown, their skins were white; most of them were blondes, two were redheads.
It makes a difference. By then I was ready to concede’ that Polynesian women were correctly and even modestly dressed in their native costume -. other places, other customs. Was not Mother Eve modest in her simplicity before the Fall?
I But white women are grossly out of place in South Seas garb.
However, this did not keep me from watching the dancing. I was amazed to see that these girls danced that fast and complex dance as well (to my untutored eye) as did the island girls. I remarked on it to the Captain. ‘They learned to dance that precisely in only four days?’
He snorted. ‘They practice every cruise, those who ship with us before. All have practiced at least since San Diego.’
At that point I recognized one of the dancers – Astrid, the sweet young woman who had let me into ‘my’ stateroom – and I then understood why they had had time and incentive to practice together: These girls were ship’s crew. I looked at her – stared, in fact – with more interest. She caught my eye and smiled.
Like a dolt, a bumpkin, instead of smiling back I looked away and blushed, and tried to cover my embarrassment by taking a big sip of the drink I found in my hand.
One of the kanaka dancers whirled out in front of the white girls and called one of them out for a pair dance. Heaven save me, it was Margrethe!
I choked up and could not breathe. She was the most blindingly beautiful sight I had ever seen in all my life.
‘Behold, thou art fair, my, love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes within thy locks: thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from Mount Gilead.
‘Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor: thy belly is like a heap of wheat set about with lilies.
‘Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins. ‘Thou art all fair, MY love; there is no spot in thee.’
Chapter 4
Although affliction cometh not forth of the dust, neither doth trouble spring out of the ground; yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.
Job 5:6-7
I SLOWLY became aware of myself and wished I had not; a most terrible nightmare was chasing me. I jammed my eyes shut against the light and tried to go back to sleep.
Native drums were beating in my head; I tried to shut them out by covering my ears.
They got louder.
I gave up, opened my eyes and lifted my head. A mistake – my stomach flipfiopped and my ears shook. My eyes would not track and those infernal drums were tearing my skull apart.
I finally got my eyes to track, although the focus was fuzzy. I looked around, found that I was in a strange room, lying on top of a bed and only half dressed.
That began to bring it back to me. A party aboard ship. Spirits. Lots of spirits. Noise. Nakedness. The
Captain in a grass skirt, dancing heartily, and the orchestra keeping step with him. Some of the lady passengers wearing grass skirts and some wearing even less. Rattle of bamboo, boom of drums.
Drums –
Those weren’t drums in my head; that was the booming of the worst headache of my life. Why in Ned did I let them –
Never mind ‘them’. You did it yourself, chum.
Yes, but –
‘Yes, but.’ Always ‘Yes, but.’ All your life it’s been ‘Yes, but.’ When are you going to straighten up and take full responsibility for your life and all that happens to you?
Yes, but this isn’t my fault. I’m not A. L. Graham. That isn’t my name. This isn’t my ship.
It isn’t? You’re not?
Of course not –
I sat up to Shake off this bad dream. Sitting up was a mistake; my head did not fall off but a stabbing pain at the base of my neck added itself to the throbbing inside my skull. I was wearing black dress trousers and apparently nothing else and I was in a strange room that was rolling slowly.
Graham’s trousers. Graham’s room. And that long, slow roll was that of a ship with no stabilizers.
Not a dream. Or if it is, I can’t shake myself out of it. My teeth itched, my feet didn’t fit. Dried sweat all over me except where I was clammy. My armpits – Don’t even think about armpits!
My mouth needed to have lye dumped into it.
I remembered everything now. Or almost. The fire pit. Villagers. Chickens scurrying out of the way. The ship that wasn’t my ship – but was. Margrethe –
Margrethe!
‘Thy two breasts are like two roes – thou art all fair, my love!’
Margrethe among the dancers, her bosom as bare as her feet. Margrethe dancing with that villainous kanaka, and shaking her –
No wonder I got drunk!
Stow it, chum! You were drunk before that. All you’ve got against that native lad is that it was he instead of you. You wanted to dance with her yourself. Only you can’t dance.
Dancing is a snare of Satan.
And don’t you wish you knew how!
‘- like two roes’! Yes I do!
I heard a light tap at the door, then a rattle of keys. Margrethe stuck her head in. ‘Awake? Good.’ She came in, carrying a tray, closed the door, came to me. ‘Drink this.’
‘What is it?’
‘Tomato juice, mostly. Don’t argue – drink it!’
‘I don’t think I can.’
‘Yes, you can. You must. Do it.’
I sniffed it, then I took a small sip. To my amazement it did not nauseate me. So I drank some more. After one minor quiver it went down smoothly and lay quietly inside me. Margrethe produced two pills. ‘Take these. Wash them down with the rest of the tomato juice.’
‘I never take medicine.’
She sighed, and said something I did not understand. Not English. Not quite. ‘What did you say?’
‘Just something my grandmother used to say when grandfather argued with her. Mr Graham, take those pills. They are just aspirin and you need them. If you won’t cooperate, I’ll stop trying to help you. I’ll – I’ll swap you to Astrid, that’s what I’ll do.’
‘Don’t do that.’
‘I will if you keep objecting. Astrid would swap, I know she would. She likes you – she told me you were watching her dance last night.’
I accepted the pills, washed them down with the rest of the tomato juice – ice-cold and very comforting. ‘I did until I spotted you. Then I watched you.’
She smiled for the first time. ‘Yes? Did you like it?’
‘You were beautiful.’ (And your dance was obscene. Your immodest dress and your behaviour shocked me out of a year’s growth. I hated it – and I wish I could see it all over again this very instant!) ‘You are very graceful.’
The smile grew dimples. ‘I had hoped that you would like it, sir.’
‘I did. Now stop threatening me with Astrid.’
‘All right. As long as you behave. Now get up and into the shower. First very hot, then very cold. Like a sauna.’
She waited. ‘Up, ‘ I said. I’m not leaving until that shower is running and steam is pouring out.’
‘I’ll shower. After you leave.’
‘And you’ll run it lukewarm, I know. Get up, get those trousers off, get into that shower. While you’re showering, I’ll fetch your breakfast tray. There is just enough time before they shut down the galley to set up for lunch… so quit wasting time. Please!’
‘Oh, I can’t eat breakfast! Not today. No. ‘Food – what a disgusting thought.
‘You must eat. You drank too much last night, you know you did. If you don’t eat, you will feel bad all day. Mr Graham, I’ve finished making up for all my other guests, so I’m off watch now. I’m fetching your tray, then I’m going to stay and see that you eat it.’ She looked at me. ‘I should have taken your trousers off when I put you to bed. But you were too heavy.’
‘You put me to bed?’
‘Ori helped me. The boy I danced with.’ My face must have given me away, for she added hastily, ‘Oh, I didn’t let him come into your room, sir. I undressed you myself. But I did have to have help to get you up the stairs.’
‘I wasn’t criticizing.’ (Did you go back to the party then? Was he there? Did you dance with him again?
-`jealousy is cruel as the grave; the coals thereof are coals of fire -‘ I have no right.) ‘I thank you both. I must have been a beastly nuisance.’
‘Well… brave men often drink too much, after danger is over. But it’s not good for you.’
‘No, it’s not.’ I got up off the bed, went into the bathroom, said, ‘I’ll turn it up hot. Promise.’ I closed the door and bolted it, finished undressing. (So I got so stinking, rubber-limp drunk that a native boy had to help get me to bed. Alex, you’re a disgusting mess! And you haven’t any right to be jealous over a nice girl. You don’t own her, her behavior is not wrong by the standards of this place – wherever this place is
and all she’s done is mother you and, take care of you. That does not give you a claim on her.)
I did turn it up hot, though it durn near kilt poor old Alex. But I left it hot until the nerve ends seemed cauterized – then suddenly switched it to cold, and screamed.
I let it stay cold until it no longer felt cold, then shut.It off and -dried down, having opened the door to let out the moisture-charged air. I stepped out into the room… and suddenly realized that I felt wonderful.
No headache. No feeling that the world is ending at noon. No stomach queasies. Just hunger. Alex, you must never get drunk again… but if you do, you must do exactly what Margrethe tells you to. You’ve got a smart head on her shoulders, boy – appreciate it.
I started to whistle and opened Graham’s wardrobe.
I heard a key in the door, hastily grabbed his bathrobe, managed to cover up before she got the door open. She was slow about it, being hampered by a heavy tray. When I realized this I held the door for her. She put down the tray, then arranged dishes and food on my desk.
‘You were right about the sauna-type shower,’ I told her. ‘It was just what the doctor ordered. Or the nurse, I should say.’
‘I know, it’s what my grandmother used to do for my grandfather.’
‘A smart woman. My, this smells good!’ (Scrambled eggs, bacon, lavish amounts of Danish pastry, milk, coffee – a side dish of cheeses, fladbrod, and thin curls of ham, some tropic fruit I can’t name.) ‘What was that your grandmother used to say when your grandfather argued?’
‘Oh, she was sometimes impatient.’
‘And you never are. Tell me.’
‘Well – She used to say that God created men to test the souls of women.’
‘She may have a point. Do you agree with her?’
Her smile produced dimples. ‘I think they have other uses as well.’
Margrethe tidied my room and cleaned my bath (okay, okay, Graham’s room, Graham’s bath – satisfied?) while I ate. She laid out a pair of slacks, a sport shirt in an island print, and sandals for me, then removed the tray and dishes while leaving coffee and the remaining fruit. I thanked her as she left, wondered if I should offer ‘payment’ and wondered, too, if she performed such valet services for other passengers. It seemed unlikely. I found I could not ask.
I bolted the door after her and proceeded to search. Graham’s room.
I was wearing his clothes, sleeping in his bed, answering to his name – and now I must decide whether or not I would go whole hawg and be ‘A. L. Graham’… or should I go to some authority (American consul? If not, whom?), admit the impersonation, and ask.for help?
Events were crowding me. Today’s King Skald showed that S.S. Konge Knut was scheduled to dock at Papeete at 3 p.m. and sail for MazatIdn, Mexico, at 6 p.m. The purser notified all passengers wishing
to change francs into dollars that a representative of the Bank of Papeete would be in the ship’s square facing the purser’s office from docking until fifteen minutes before sailing. The purser again wished to notify passengers that shipboard indebtedness such as bar and shop bills could be settled only in dollars, Danish crowns, or by means of validated letters of credit.
All very reasonable. And troubling. I had expected the, ship to stop at Papeete for twenty-four hours at the very least. Docking for only three hours seemed preposterous – why, they would hardly finish tying up before it would be time, to start singling up for sailing! Didn’t they have to pay rent for twenty-four hours if they docked at all?
Then I reminded myself that managing the ship was not my business. Perhaps the Captain was taking advantage of a few hours between departure of one ship and arrival of another. Or there might be six other reasons. The only thing I should worry about was what I could accomplish between three and six, and’ what I must accomplish between now and three.
Forty minutes of intense searching turned up the following:
Clothes, all sorts – no problem other than about five pounds at my waistline.
Money – the francs in his billfold (must change them) and the eighty-five dollars there; three thousand dollars loose in the desk drawer that held the little case for Graham’s watch, ring, shirt studs, etc. Since the watch and jewelry had been returned to this case, I assumed, conclusively that Margrethe had conserved for me the proceeds of that bet that I (or Graham) had won from Forsyth and Jeeves and Henshaw. It is said that the Lord looks out for fools and drunkards; if so, in my case He operated through Margrethe.
Various impedimenta of no significance to my immediate problem – books, souvenirs, toothpaste, etc.
No passport.
When a first search failed to turn up Graham’s passport, I went back and searched again. this time checking the pockets of all clothes hanging in his wardrobe as well as rechecking with care all the usual places and some unusual places that might hide a booklet the size of a passport.
No passport.
Some tourists are meticulous about keeping their passports on their persons whenever leaving a ship. I prefer not to carry my passport when I can avoid it because losing a passport is a sticky mess. I had not carried mine the day before … so now mine was gone where the woodbine twineth, gone to Fiddler’s Green, gone where Motor Vessel Konge Knut had gone. And where was that I had not had time to think about that yet; I was too busy coping with a strange new world.
If Graham had carried his passport yesterday, then it too was gone to Fiddler’s Green through a crack in the fourth dimension. It was beginning to look that way.
While I fumed, someone slipped an envelope under the stateroom door.
I picked it up and opened it. Inside was the purser’s billing for ‘my’ (Graham’s) bills aboard ship. Was Graham scheduled to leave the ship at Papeete? Oh, no! If he was, I might be marooned in the islands indefinitely.
No, maybe not. This appeared to be a routine end-of-amonth billing.
The size of Graham’s bar bill shocked me… until I noticed some individual items. Then I was still more shocked but for another reason. When a Coca-Cola costs two dollars it does not mean that a Coke is bigger; it means that the dollar is smaller.
I now knew why a three-hundred-dollar bet on. uh, the other side turned out to be three thousand dollars on this side.
If I was going to have to live in this world, I was going to have to readjust my thinking about all prices. Treat dollars as I would a foreign currency and convert all prices in my head until I got used to them. For example, if these shipboard prices were representative, then a first-class dinner, steak or prime rib, in a first-class restaurant, let’s say the main dining room of a hotel such as the Brown Palace or the Mark Hopkins – such a dinner could easily cost ten dollars. Whew!
With cocktails before dinner and wine with it, the tab might reach fifteen dollars! A week’s wages. Thank heaven I don’t drink!
You don’t what?
Look – last night was a very special occasion.
So? So it was, because you lose your virginity only once. Once gone, it’s gone forever. What was that you were drinking just before the lights went out? A Danish zombie? Wouldn’t you like one of those about now? Just to readjust your stability?
I’ll never touch one again!
See you later, chum.
Just one more chance but a good one – I hoped. The small case that Graham used for jewelry and such had in it a key, plain save for the number eighty-two stamped on its side. If fate was smiling, that was a – key to a lockbox in the purser’s office.
(And if fate was sneering at me today, it was a key to a lockbox in a bank somewhere in the forty-six states, a bank I would never see. But let’s not borrow trouble; I have all I need
I went down one deck and aft. ‘Good morning, Purser.’
‘Ah, Mr Graham! A fine party, was it not?’
‘It certainly was. One more like that and I’m a corpse.’
‘Oh, come now, That from a man who walks through fire. You seemed to enjoy it – and I know I did.
What can we do for you, sir?’
I brought out the key I had found. ‘Do I have the right key? Or does this one belong to my bank? I can never remember.’
The purser took it. ‘That’s one of ours. Poul! Take this and get Mr Graham’s box. Mr Graham, do you want to come around behind and sit at a table?’
‘Yes, thank you. Uh, do you have a sack or something that would hold the contents of a box that size? I would take it back to my desk for paper work.’
‘”A sac” – Mmm… I could get one from the gift shop. But – How long do you think this desk work will take you? Can you finish it by noon?’
‘Oh, certainly.’
‘Then take the box itself back to your stateroom. There is a rule against it but I made the rule so we can risk breaking it. But try to be back by noon. We close from noon to thirteen – union rules – and if I have to sit here by myself with all my clerks gone to lunch, you’ll have to buy me a drink.’
‘I’ll buy you one anyhow.’
‘We’ll roll for it. Here you are. Don’t take it through any fires.’
Right on top was Graham’s passport. A tight lump in my chest eased. I know of no more lost feeling than being outside the Union without a passport … even though it’s not truly the Union. I opened it, looked at the picture embossed inside. Do I look like that? I went into the bathroom, compared the face in the mirror’ with the face in the passport.
Near enough, I guess. No one expects much of a passport picture. I tried holding the photograph up to the mirror. Suddenly it was a good resemblance. Chum, your face is lopsided… and so is yours, Mr
Graham.
Brother, if I’m going to have to assume your identity permanently – and it looks more and more as if I have no choice – it’s a relief to know that we look so much alike. Fingerprints? We’ll cope with that when we have to. Seems the U.S. of N.A. doesn’t use fingerprints on passports; that’s some help. Occupation: Executive. Executive of what? A funeral parlor? Or a worldwide chain of hotels? Maybe this is not going to be difficult but merely impossible.
Address: Care of O’Hara, Rigsbee, Crumpacker, and Rigsbee, Attys at Law, Suite 7000, Smith Building, Dallas. Oh, just dandy. Merely a mail drop. No business address, no home address, no business. Why, you phony, I’d love to poke you in the snoot!
(He can’t be too repulsive; Margrethe thinks well of him. Well, yes – but he should keep his hands off Margrethe; he’s taking advantage of her. Unfair. Who is taking advantage of her? Watch it, boy, you’ll get a split personality.)
An envelope under the passport contained the passenger’s file copy of his ticket – and it was indeed round trip, Portland to Portland. Twin, unless you show up before 6 p.m., I’ve got a trip home. Maybe you can use my ticket in the Admiral Moffett. I wish you luck.
There were some minor items but the bulk of the metal box was occupied by ten sealed fat envelopes, business size. I opened one.
It contained thousand-dollar bills, one hundred of them.
I made a fast check with the other nine. All alike. One million dollars in cash.
Chapter 5
The wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are bold as a lion.
Proverbs 28:1
BARELY BREATHING, I used gummed tape I found in Graham’s desk to seal the envelopes. I put everything back but the passport, placed it with that three thousand that I thought of as ‘mine’ in the little drawer of the desk, then took the box back to the purser’~ office, carrying it carefully.
Someone else was at the front desk but the purser was in sight in his inner office; I caught his eye.
‘Hi,’ he called out. ‘Back so soon?’ He came out.
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘For once, everything tallied.’ I passed the box to him.
‘I’d like to hire you for this office. Here, nothing ever tallies. At least not earlier than midnight. Let, s go find that drink. I need one.’
‘So do I! Let’s.’
The purser led me aft to an outdoor bar I had not noticed on the ship’s plan. The deck above us ended and the deck we were on, D deck, continued on out as a weather deck, bright teak planks pleasant to walk on. The break on C deck formed an overhang; under it was this outdoor spread canvas. At right angles to the bar were long tables offering a lavish buffet lunch; passengers were queued up for it. Farther aft was the ship’s swimming pool; I could hear splashing, squeals, and yells.
He led me on aft to a small table occupied by two junior officers. We stopped there. ‘You two. Jump overboard.’
‘Right away, Purser.’ They stood up, picked up their beer glasses, and moved farther aft. One of them grinned at me and nodded, as if we knew each other, so I nodded and said, U.’
This table was partly shaded by awning. The purser said to me, ‘Do you want to sit in the sun and watch the girls, or sit in the shade and relax?’
‘Either way. Sit where you wish; I’ll take the other chair.’
‘Um. Let’s move this table a little and both sit in the shade. There, that does it.’ He sat down facing forward; perforce I sat facing the swimming pool – and confirmed something I thought I had seen at first glance: This swimming pool did not require anything as redundant as swim suits.
I should have inferred it by logic had I thought about it – but I had not. The last time I had seen it – swimming without suits – I had been about twelve and it had been strictly a male privilege for boys that age or younger.
‘I said, “What will you drink, Mr Graham’
‘Oh! Sorry, I wasn’t listening.’
‘I know. You were looking. What will it be?’
‘Uh… a Danish zombie.’
He blinked at me. ‘You don’t want that at this time of day; that’s a skull splitter. Mmm – ‘He waggled his fingers at someone behind me. ‘Sweetheart, come here.’
I looked up as the summoned waitress approached. I looked and then looked twice. I had seen her last through an alcoholic haze the night before, one of two redheads in the hula chorus line.
‘Tell Hans I want two silver fizzes. What’s your name, dear?’
‘Mr Henderson, you pretend just one more time that you don’t know my name and I’ll pour your drink right on your bald spot.’
‘Yes, dear. Now hurry up. Get those fat legs moving.’
She snorted and glided away on limbs that were slender and graceful. The purser added, ‘A fine girl, that. Her parents live just across from me in Odense; I’ve known her since she was a baby. A smart girl, too. Bodel is studying to be a veterinary surgeon, one more year to go.’
‘Really? How does she do this and go to school, too?’
‘Most of our girls are at university. Some take a summer off, some take a term off – go to sea, have some fun, save up money for next term. In hiring I give preference to girls who are working their way through university; they are more dependable – and they know more languages. Take your room stewardess. Astrid?’
‘No. Margrethe.’
‘Oh, yes, you are in one-oh-nine; Astrid has portside forward on your deck, Margrethe is on your side. Margrethe Svensdatter Gunderson. Schoolteacher. English language and history. But knows four more languages not counting Scandinavian languages – and has certificates for two of them. On one-year leave from H. C. Andersen Middle School. I’m betting she won’t go back.’
‘Eh? Why?’
‘She’ll marry-a rich American. Are you rich?’
‘Me’? Do I look rich?’ (Could he possibly know what is in that lockbox? Dear God, what does one do with a million dollars that isn’t yours? I can’t just throw it overboard. Why would Graham be traveling with that much in cash? I could think of several reasons, all bad. Any one of them could get me in more trouble than I had ever seen.)
‘Rich Americans never look it; they practice not looking rich. North Americans ‘ I mean; South Americans are another fish entirely. Gertrude, thank you. You are a good girl.’
‘You want this drink on your bald spot?’
‘You want me to throw you into the pool with your clothes on? Behave yourself, dear, or I’ll tell your mother. Put them down and give me the chit.’
‘No chit; Hans wanted to buy a drink for Mr Graham. So he decided to include you, this once.’
‘You tell him that’s the way the bar loses money. Tell him I take it out of his wages.’
That’s how I happened to drink two silver fizzes instead of one… and was well on my way toward a disaster such as the night before, when Mr Henderson decided that we must eat. I wanted a third fizz. The first two had enabled me to quit worrying over that crazy box full of money while enhancing my appreciation of the poolside floor show. I was discovering that a lifetime of conditioning could wash away in only twenty-four hours. There was nothing sinful about looking at feminine loveliness unadorned. It was as sweetly innocent as looking at flowers or kittens – but far more fun.
In the meantime I wanted another drink.
Mr Henderson vetoed it, called Bodel over, spoke to her rapidly in Danish. She left, returned a few minutes later carrying a loaded tray – smorgasbord, hot meat balls, sweet pastry shells stuffed with ice cream, strong coffee, all in large quantities.
Twenty-five minutes later I still appreciated the teenagers at the pool, but I was no longer on my way to another alcoholic catastrophe. I had sobered up so much that I now realized that I not only could not solve my problems through spirits but must shun alcohol until I did solve them – as I did not know how to handle strong drink. Uncle Ed was right; vice required training and long practice otherwise for pragmatic reasons virtue should rule even when moral instruction has ceased to bind.
My morals certainly had ceased to bind – or I could not have sat there with a glass of Devil’s brew in my
hand while I stared at naked female flesh.
I found that I had not even a twinge of conscience over anything. My only regret involved the sad knowledge that I could not handle the amount of alcohol I would have enjoyed. ‘Easy is the descent into Hell.’
Mr Henderson stood up. ‘We tie up in less than two hours and I have some figures to fudge before the agent comes aboard. Thanks for a nice time.’
‘Thank you, sir! Tusind tak! Is that how you say it?’
He smiled and left. I sat there for a bit and thought. Two hours till we docked, three hours in port – what could I do with the opportunities?
Go to the American consul? Tell him what? Dear Mr Consul, I am not he whom I am presumed to be and I just happened to find this million dollars – Ridiculous!
Say nothing to anyone, grab that million, go ashore and catch the next airship for Patagonia?
Impossible. My morals had slipped – apparently they were never very strong. But I III had this prejudice against stealing. It’s not only wrong; it’s undignified.
Bad enough that I’m wearing his clothes.
Take the three thousand that is ‘rightfully’ yours, go’ ashore, wait for the ship to sail, then get back to America as best you can?
Stupid ideal. You would wind up in a tropical jail and your silly gesture would not do Graham any good. It’s Hobson’s choice again, you knothead; you must stay aboard and wait for Graham to show up. He won’t, but there might be a wireless message or something. Bite your nails until the ship sails. When it does, thank God for a trip home to God’s country. While Graham does the same for his ticket home in
the Admiral Moffett. I wonder how he liked being named Hergensheimer? Better than I like ‘Graham’ I’ll bet. A proud name, Hergensheimer.
I got up, ducked around to the far side, and went up two decks to the library, found it unoccupied save for a woman, working on a crossword puzzle. Neither of us wanted to be disturbed, which made us good company. Most of the bookcases were locked, the librarian not being present, but there was a battered encyclopedia – just what I needed as a start.
Two hours later I was startled by a blast indicating that we had a line to the dock; we had arrived. I was loaded with strange history and stranger ideas and none of it digested. To start with, in this world William Jennings Bryan was never president; in I896 McKinley had been elected in his place, had served two terms and had been followed by someone named Roosevelt.
I recognised none of the twentieth-century presidents.
Instead of more than a century of peace under our traditional neutrality, the United States had repeatedly been involved in foreign wars: I899, I9I2-I7, I932 (With Japan!), I950-52, I980-84, and so on right up to the current year – or current when this encyclopedia was published; King’s Skald did not report a war now going on.
Behind the glass of one of the locked cases I spotted several history books. If I was still in the ship three hours from now, I must plan on reading every history book in the ship’s library during the long passage to America.
But names of presidents and dates of wars were not my most urgent need; these are not daily concerns. What I urgently needed to know, lest ignorance cause me anything from needless embarrassment to catastrophe, was the differences between my world and this world in how people lived, talked, behaved, ate, drank, played, prayed, and loved. While I was learning, I must be careful to talk as little as possible and to listen as much as possible.
I once had a neighbour whose knowledge of history seemed limited to two dates, I492 and I776, and even with those two he was mixed up as to what events each marked. His ignorance in other fields was just as profound; nevertheless he earned an excellent living as a paving contractor.
‘It does not require a broad education to function as a social and economic animal… as long as you
know when to rub blue mud into your bellybutton. But a mistake in local customs can get you lynched.
I wondered how Graham was doing? It occurred to me that his situation was far more. dangerous than mine… if I assumed (as apparently I must) that he and I had simply swapped places. It seemed that my background could make me appear eccentric here – but his background could get Graham into serious trouble in my world. A casual remark, an innocent act, could land him in the stocks. Or worse.
But he might find his worst trouble through attempting to fit himself fully into my role – if indeed he tried. Let me put it this way: On her birthday after we had been married a year I gave Abigail a fancy edition of The Taming of the Shrew. She never suspected that I had been making a statement; her conviction of her own righteousness did not embrace the possibility that in my heart I equated her with Kate. If Graham assumed my role as her husband, the relationship was bound to be interesting for each of them.
I would not knowingly wish Abigail on anyone. Since I had not been consulted, I did not cry crocodile tears.
(What would it be to bed with a woman who did not always refer to marital relations as ‘family duties’?)
Here I have in front of me a twenty-volume encyclopedia, millions of words packed with all the major facts of this world – facts I urgently need. What can I squeeze out of it quickly? Where to start? I don’t want Greek art, or Egyptian history, or geology – but what do I want?
Well, what did you first notice about this world? This ship itself. Its old-fashioned appearance compared with the sleek lines of the M.V. Konge Knut. Then, once you were aboard, the lack of a telephone in your-Graham’s stateroom. The lack of passenger elevators. Little things that gave it an air of the luxury of grandfather’s day.
So let’s see the article on ‘Ships’ – volume eighteen.
Yes, sir! Three pages of pictures … and they all have that Mauve-Decade look. S.S. Britannia, biggest and fastest North Atlantic liner, 2000 passengers, only sixteen knots! And looks it.
Let’s try the general article on ‘Transportation’
Well, well! We aren’t too surprised, are we? No mention of airships. But let’s check the index volume – Airship, nothing; dirigible, zero; aeronautics – see ‘Balloon’.
Ah, yes, a good article on free ballooning, with the Montgolfiers and the other daring pioneers – even Salomon Andrée’s brave and tragic attack on the North Pole. But either Count von Zeppelin never lived, or he never turned his attention to aeronautics.
Possibly, after his service in the Civil War, he returned to Germany and there never found the atmosphere receptive to the idea of air travel that he enjoyed in Ohio in my world. As may be, this world does not have air travel. Alex, if you have to live here, how would you like to ‘invent’ the airship? Be a pioneer, and tycoon, and get rich and famous?
What makes you think you could?
Why, I made my first airship flight when I was only twelve years old! I know all about them; I could draw plans for one right now –
You could? Draw me production drawings for a lightweight diesel, not over one pound per horsepower. Specify the alloys used, give the heat treatments, show work diagrams for the actual operating cycles, specify fuels, state procurement sources, specify lubricants
All those things can be worked out!
Yes, but can you do it? Even knowing that it can be done? Remember why you dropped out of engineering school and decided you had a call for the ministry? Comparative religion, homiletics, higher criticism, apologetics, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, all require scholarship… but the slipstick subjects require brains.
So I’m stupid, am I?
Would you have walked through that fire pit if you had brains enough to come in out of the rain?
Why didn’t you stop me?
Stop you? When did you ever listen to me? Quit evading what was your final mark in thermodynamics?
All right! Assume that I can’t do it myself –
Big of you.
Lay off, will you? Knowing that something can be done is two thirds of the battle. I could be director of research and guide the efforts of some really sharp young engineers. They supply the brains; I supply the unique memory of what a dirigible balloon looks like and how it works. Okay?
That’s the proper division of labor: You supply memory, they supply brains. Yes, that could work. But not quickly, not cheaply. How are you going to finance it?
Uh, sell shares?
Remember the summer you sold vacuum cleaners?
Well… there’s that million dollars.
Naughty, naughty!
‘Mr Graham?’
I looked up from my great plans to find a yeoman from the purser’s office looking at me. ‘Yes?’
She handed me an envelope. ‘From Mr Henderson, sir. He said you would probably have an answer.’
‘Thank you.’ The note read: ‘Dear Mr Graham: There are three men down here in the square who claim to have an appointment with you. I don’t like their looks or the way they talk – and this port has some very strange customers. If you are not expecting them or don’t wish to see them, tell my messenger that she could not find you. Then I’ll tell them that you’ve gone ashore. A.P.H.’
I remained balanced between curiosity and caution for some long, uncomfortable moments. They did not want to see me; they wanted to see Graham… and whatever it was they wanted of Graham, I could not satisfy their want.
You know what they want!
‘So I suspect. But, even if they have a chit signed by Saint Peter, I can’t turn over to them – or to anyone
that silly million dollars. You know that.
Certainly I know that. I wanted to be sure that you knew it. All right, since there are no circumstances under which you will turn over to a trio of strangers the contents of Graham’s lockbox, then why see them?
Because I’ve got to know! Now shut up. I said to the yeoman, ‘Please tell Mr Henderson that I will be right down. And thank you for your trouble.’
‘My pleasure, sir. Uh, Mr Graham. … I saw you walk the fire. You were wonderful!’
‘I was out of my silly mind. Thanks anyhow.’
I stopped at the top of the companionway and sized up the three men waiting for me. They looked as if they had been type-cast for menace: one oversize job about six feet eight with the hands, feet, jaw, and ears of glandular giantism; one sissy type about one quarter the size of the big man; one nothing type with dead eyes. Muscles, brain, and gun – or was it my jumpy imagination?
A smart person would go quietly back up and hide.
I’m not smart.
Chapter 6
Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die.
Isaiah 22:13
I WALKED down the stairs, not looking at the three, and went directly to the desk of the purser’s office. Mr Henderson was there, spoke quietly as I reached the counter. ‘Those three over there. Do you know them?’
‘No, I don’t know them. I’ll see what they want. But keep an eye on us, will you, please?’
‘Right!’
I turned and started to walk past that lovable trio. The smart boy said sharply, ‘Graham! Stop there! Where you going?’
I kept moving and snapped, ‘Shut up, you idiot! Are you trying to blow it?’ Muscles stepped into my path and hung over me like a tall building. The gun stepped in behind me. In a fake prison-yard style, from the side of my mouth, I said, ‘Quit making a scene and get these apes off the ship! You and I must talk.’
‘Certainly we talk. Ici! Now. Here.’
‘You utter fool,’ I answered softly and glanced nervously up, to left and right. ‘Not here. Cows. Bugs. Come with me. But have Mutt and Jeff wait on the dock.’
Non!’
‘God save us! Listen carefully.’ I whispered, ‘You ‘are going to tell these animals to leave the ship and wait at the foot of the gangway. Then you and I are going to walk out on the weather deck where we can talk without being overheard. Otherwise we do nothing! – and I report to Number-One that you blew the deal. Understand? Right now! Or go back and tell them the deal is off.’
He hesitated, then spoke rapidly in French that I could not follow, my French being mostly of the La plume de ma tante sort. The gorilla seemed to hesitate but the gun type shrugged and started toward the gangway door. I said to the little wart, ‘Come on! Don’t waste time; the ship is about to sail!’ I headed aft without looking to see whether or not he was following. I set a brisk pace that forced him to follow or lose me. I was as much taller than he as that ape was taller than I; he had to trot to stay at my heels.
I kept right on going aft and outside, onto the weather deck, past the open bar and the tables, clear to the swimming pool.
It was, as I expected, unoccupied, the ship being in port. There was the usual sign up, CLOSED WHILE SHIP IS IN PORT, and a nominal barrier around it of a single strand of rope, but the pool was still filled. He followed me; I held up a hand. ‘Stop right there.’ He stopped.
‘Now we can talk,’ I said. ‘Explain yourself, and you’d better make it good! What do you mean, calling attention to yourself by bringing that muscle aboard? And a Danish ship at that! Mr B. is going to be very, very angry with you. What’s your name?’
‘Never mind my name. Where’s the package?’
‘What package?’
He started to sputter; I interrupted. ‘Cut the nonsense; I’m not impressed. This ship is getting ready to sail; you have only minutes to tell me exactly what you want and to convince me that you should get it. Keep throwing your weight around and you’ll find yourself going back to your boss and telling him you failed. So speak up! What do you want?’
‘The package!’
I sighed. ‘My old and stupid, you are stuck in a rut. We’ve been over that. What sort of a package? What’s in it?’
He hesitated. ‘Money.’
‘Interesting. How much money?’
This time he hesitated twice as long, so again I interrupted. ‘If you don’t know how much money, I’ll give you a couple of francs for beer and send you on your way. Is that what you want? Two francs?’
A man that skinny shouldn’t have such high blood pressure. He managed to say, ‘American dollars. One million.’
I laughed in his face. ‘What makes you think I’ve got that much? And if I had, why should I give it to you? How do I know you are supposed to get it?’
‘You crazy, man? You know who am I. ‘
‘Prove it. Your eyes are funny and your voice sounds different. I think you’re a ringer.
‘”Ringer”?’
‘A fake, a phony! An impostor.’
He answered angrily – French, I suppose. I am sure it was not complimentary. I dug into my memory, repeated carefully and with feeling the remark that a lady had made last night which had caused her husband to say that she worried too much. It was not appropriate but I intended simply to anger him.
Apparently I succeeded. He raised a hand, I grabbed his wrist, tripped myself, fell backwards into the pool, pulling him with me. As we fell I shouted, ‘Help!’
We splashed. I got a firm grip on him, pulled myself up as I shoved him under again. ‘Help! He’s drowning me!’
Down we went again, struggling with each other. I yelled for help each time my head was above water. Just as help came I went limp and let go.
I stayed limp until they started to give me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. At that point I snorted and opened my eyes’. ‘Where am I?
Someone said, ‘He’s coming around. He’s okay.’
I looked around. I was flat on my back alongside the pool. Someone had done a professional job of pulling me out with a dip-and-jerk; my left arm felt almost dislocated. Aside from that I was okay. ‘Where is he? The man who pushed me in.’
‘He got away.’
I recognized the voice, turned my head. My friend Mr Henderson, the purser.
‘He did?’
That ended it. My rat-faced caller had scrambled out as I was being fished out and had streaked off the ship. By the time they had finished reviving me, Nasty and his bodyguards were long gone.
Mr Henderson had me lie still until the ship’s, doctor arrived. He put a stethoscope on me and announced that I was okay. I told a couple of small, fibs, some near truths, and an evasion. By then the gangway had been removed and shortly a loud blast announced that we had left the dock.
I did not find it necessary to tell anyone that I had played water polo in school.
The next many days were very sweet, in the fashion that grapes grow sweetest on the slopes of a live volcano.
I managed to get acquainted (reacquainted?) with my table mates without, apparently, anyone noticing that I was a stranger. I picked up names just by waiting until someone else spoke to someone by name – remembered I the name and used it later. Everyone was pleasant to me – I not only was not ‘below the salt’, since the record showed that I had been aboard the full trip, but also I was at least a celebrity if not a hero for having walked through the fire.
I did not use the swimming pool. I was not sure what swimming Graham had done, if any, and, having been ‘rescued’, I did not want to exhibit a degree of skill inconsistent with that ‘rescue’. Besides, while I grew accustomed to (and even appreciative of) a degree of nudity shocking in my former life, I. did not feel that I could manage with aplomb being naked in company.
Since there was nothing I could do about it, I put the mystery of Nastyface and his bodyguards out of my mind.
The same I was true of the all-embracing mystery of who I am and how I got here – nothing I could do about it, so don’t worry about it. On reflection. I realized that I was in exactly the same predicament as every other human being alive: We don’t know who we are, or where we came from, or why we are here. My dilemma was merely fresher, not different.
One thing (possibly the only thing) I learned in seminary was to face calmly the ancient mystery of life,
untroubled by my inability to solve it. Honest priests and preachers are denied the comforts of religion; instead they must live with the austere rewards of philosophy. I never became much of a metaphysician but I did learn not to worry about that which I could not solve.
I spent much time in the library or reading in deck chairs, and each day I learned more about and felt more at home in this world. Happy, golden days slipped past like a dream of childhood.
And every day there was Margrethe.
I felt like a boy undergoing his first attack of puppy love.
It was a strange romance. We could not speak of love. Or I could not, and she did not. Every day she was my servant (shared with her other passenger guests)… and my ‘mother’ (shared with others? I did not. think so… but I did not know). The ‘relationship was close but not intimate. Then each day, for a few moments while I ‘paid’ her for tying my bow tie, she was my wonderfully sweet and utterly passionate darling.
But only then.
At other times I was ‘Mr Graham’ to her and she called me ‘sir’ – warmly friendly but not intimate. She was willing to chat, standing up and with the door open; she often had ship’s gossip to share with me. But her manner was always that of the perfect servant. Correction: the perfect crew member assigned to personal service. Each day I learned a little more about her. I found no fault in her.
For me the day started with my first sight of her – usually on my way to breakfast when I would meet her in the passageway or spot her through an open door of a room she was making up… just ‘Good morning, Margrethe’ and ‘Good morning, Mr Graham,’ but the sun did not rise until that moment.
I would see her from time to time during the day, peaking each day with that golden ritual after she tied my tie.
Then I would see her briefly after dinner. Immediately after dinner each evening I would return to my room for a few minutes to refresh myself before the evening’s activities – lounge show, concert, games, or
perhaps just a return to the’ library. At that hour Margrethe would be somewhere in the starboard forward passageway of C deck, opening beds, tidying baths, and so forth -making her guests’ staterooms inviting for the night. Again I would say hello, then wait in my room (whether she had yet reached it or not) because she would come in shortly, either to open my bed or simply to inquire, ‘Will you need anything more this evening, sir?’
And I would. always smile and answer, ‘I don’t need a thing, Margreth. Thankyou.’ Whereupon she would bid me good night and wish me sound sleep. That ended my day no matter what else I did before retiring.
Of course I was tempted – daily! – to answer, ‘You know what I need!’ I could not. Imprimis: I was a married man. True, my wife was lost somewhere in another world (or I was). But from holy matrimony there is no release this side of the grave. Item: Her love affair (if such it was) was with Graham, whom I was impersonating. I could not refuse that evening kiss I’m not that angelically perfect!) but in fairness to my beloved I could not go beyond it. Item: An honorable man must not offer less than matrimony to the object of his love . . . and that I was both legally and morally unable to offer.
So those golden days were bittersweet. Each day brought one nearer the inescapable time when I must leave Margrethe, almost certainly never to see her again.
I was not free even to tell her what that loss would mean to me.
Nor was my love for her so selfless that I hoped the Separation would not grieve her. Meanly,
self-centered as an adolescent, I hoped that she would miss me as dreadfully as I was going to miss her. Childish puppy love certainly! I offer in extenuation the fact that I had known only the ‘love’ of a woman who loved Jesus so much that she had no real affection for any flesh-and-blood creature.
Never marry a woman who prays too much.
We were ten days out from Papeete with Mexico almost over the skyline when this precarious idyll ended. For several days Margrethe had seemed more withdrawn- each day. I could not tax her with it as there was nothing I could, put my finger on and certainly nothing of which I could complain. But it reached crisis that evening when she tied my tie.
As usual I smiled and thanked her and kissed her.
Then I stopped with her still in my arms and said’ ‘What’s wrong? I know you can kiss better than that. Is my breath bad?’
She answered levelly, ‘Mr Graham, I think we had better stop this.’
‘So it’s “Mr Graham”, is it? Margrethe, what have I done?’
‘You’ve done nothing!’
‘Then – My dear, you’re crying!’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to.’
I took my handkerchief, blotted her tears, and said gently, ‘I have never intended to hurt you. You must tell me what’s wrong so that I can change it.’
‘If you don’t know, sir, I don’t see how I can explain it.
Won’t you try? Please!’ (Could it be one of those cyclic emotional disturbances women are heir to?)
‘Uh… Mr Graham, I knew it could not last beyond the end of the voyage – and believe me, I did not count on any more. I suppose it means more to me than it did to you. But I never thought that you would simply end it, with no explanation, sooner than we must.’
‘Margrethe… I do not understand.’
‘But you do know!’
‘But I don’t know.’
‘You must know. It’s been eleven days. Each night I’ve asked you and each night you’ve turned me down. Mr Graham, aren’t you ever again going to ask me to come back later?’
‘Oh. So that’s what you meant! Margrethe -‘
‘Yes, sir?’
‘I’m not “Mr Graham”.’ ‘Sir?’ ‘My name is “Hergensheimer”. It has been exactly eleven days since I saw you for the first time in my life. I’m sorry. I’m terribly sorry. But that is the truth.’
Chapter 7
Now therefore be content, look upon me; for it is evident unto you if I lie.
Job 6:28
MARGRETHE is both a warm comfort and a civilized adult. Never once did she gasp, or expostulate, or say, ‘Oh, no or ‘I can’t believe it!’ At my first statement she held very still, waited, then said quietly, ‘I do not understand.’
‘I don’t understand it either,’ I told her. ‘Something happened when I walked through that fire pit. The world changed. This ship – ‘I pounded the bulkhead beside us. ‘- is not the ship I was in before. And people call me “Graham”… when I know that my name is Alexander Hergensheimer. But it’s not just me and this ship; it’s the whole world. Different history. Different countries. No airships here.’
‘Alec, what is an airship?’
‘Uh, up in the air, like a balloon. It is a balloon, in a way. But it goes very fast, over a hundred knots.’
She considered it soberly. ‘I think that I would find that frightening.’
I ‘Not at all; it’s the best way to travel. I flew down here in one, the Count von Zeppelin of North American Airlines. But this world doesn’t have airships. That was the point that finally convinced me that this really is a different world – and not just some complicated hoax that someone had played on me. Air travel is so major a part of the economy of the world I knew that it changes everything else not to have it. Take – Look, do you believe me?
She answered slowly and carefully, ‘I believe that you are telling the truth as you see it. But the truth I see is very different.’
‘I know and that’s what makes it so hard. I – See here, if you don’t hurry, you’re going to miss dinner, right?’
‘It does not matter.’
‘Yes, it does; you must not miss meals just because I made a stupid mistake and hurt your feelings. And if I don’t show up, Inga will send somebody up to find out whether I’m ill or asleep or whatever; I’ve seen her do it with others at my table. Margrethe – my very dear! – I’ve wanted to tell you. I’ve waited to tell you. I’ve needed to tell you. And now I can and I must. But I can’t do it in five minutes standing up. After you turn down beds tonight can you take time to listen to me?’
‘Alec, I will always take all the time for you that you need.’
‘All right. You go down and eat, and I’ll go down and touch base at least – get Inga off my neck – and I’ll meet you here after you turn down beds. All right?’
She looked thoughtful. ‘All right. Alec – Will you kiss me again.’
That’s how I knew she believed me. Or wanted to believe me. I quit worrying. I even ate a good dinner, although I hurried.
She was waiting for me when I returned, and stood up as I came in. I took her in my arms, pecked her on the nose, picked her up by her elbows and sat her on my bunk; then I sat down in the only chair. ‘Dear one, do you think I’m crazy.
‘Alec, I don’t know what to tink.’ (Yes, she said ‘tink’. Once in a long while, under stress of emotion, Margrethe would lose the use of the theta sound. Otherwise her English accent was far better than my tall-corn accent, harsh as a rusty saw.)
‘I know,’ I agreed. ‘I had the same problem. Only two ways to look at it. Either something incredible did happen when I walked through the fire, something that changed my whole world. Or I’m as crazy I as a pet ‘coon. I’ve spent days checking the facts… and the world has changed. Not just airships. Kaiser Wilhelm the Fourth is missing and some silly president named “Schmidt is in his place. Things like that.’
‘I would not call Herr Schmidt “silly”. He is quite a good president as German presidents go.’
‘That’s my point, dear. To me, any German president looks silly, as Germany is – in my world – one of the last western monarchies effectively unlimited. Even the Tsar is not as powerful.’
‘And that has to be my point, too, Alec. There is no Kaiser and there is no Tsar. The Grand Duke of Muscovy is a constitutional monarch and no longer claims to be suzerain over other Slavic states.’
‘Margrethe, we’re both saying the same thing. The world I grew up in is gone. I’m having to learn about a different world. Not a totally different world. Geography does not seem to have changed, and not all of history. The two worlds seem to be the same almost up to the beginning of the twentieth century. Call it eighteen-ninety. About a hundred years back something strange happened and the two worlds split apart… and about twelve days ago something equally strange happened to me and I got bounced into this world.’ I smiled at her. ‘But I’m not sorry. Do you know why? Because you are in this world.’.
‘Thank you. It is important to me that you are in it, too.’
‘Then you do believe me. Just as I have been forced to believe it. So much so that I’ve quit worrying about it. Just one thing really bothers me – What became of Alec Graham? Is he filling my place in my world? Or what?’
She did not answer at once, and when she did, the answer did not seem responsive. ‘Alec, will you please take down your trousers?’
‘What did you say, Margrethe?’
‘Please. I am not making a joke and I am not trying to entice you. I must see something. Please lower your trousers.’
I don’t see – All right.’ I shut up and did as she asked not easy in evening dress. I had to take off my mess jacket, then my cummerbund, before I was peeled enough to let me slide the braces off my shoulders.
Then, reluctantly, I started unbuttoning my fly. (Another shortcoming of this retarded world – no zippers. I did not appreciate zippers until I no longer had them.)
I took a deep breath, then lowered my trousers a few inches. ‘Is that enough?’
‘A little more, please – and will you please turn your back to me?’
I did as she asked. Then I felt her hands, gentle and not invasive, at my right rear. She lifted a shirttail and pulled down the top of my underwear pants on the right.
A moment later she restored both garments. ‘That’s enough. Thank you.’
I tucked in my shirttails and buttoned up my fly, reshouldered, the braces and reached for the cummerbund. She said, ‘Just a moment, Alec.’
‘EM I thought you were through.’
‘I am. But there is no need to get back into those formal clothes; let me get out casual trousers for you. And shirt. Unless you are going back to the lounge?’
‘No. Not if you will stay.’
‘I will stay; we must talk.’ Quickly she took out casual trousers and a sports shirt for me, laid them on the bed. ‘Excuse me, please.’ She went into the bath.
I don’t know whether she needed to use it or not, but she knew that I could change more comfortably in the stateroom than in that cramped shipboard bathroom.
I changed and felt better. A cummerbund and a boiled shirt are better than a straitjacket but not much. She came out, at once hung up the clothes I had taken off, all but the shirt and collar. She removed studs and collar buttons from these, put them away, and put shirt and collar into my laundry bag. I wondered what Abigail would think if she – could see these wifely attentions. Abigail did not believe in spoiling me – and did not.
‘What waz that all about Margrethe?’
‘I had to see something. Alec, you were wondering what had become of Alec Graham. I now know the answer.’
‘Yes?’
‘He’s right here. You are he.’
At last I said, ‘That, just from looking at a few square inches on my behind? What did you find, Margrethe? The strawberry mark that identifies the missing heir?’
‘No, Alec. Your “Southern Cross”.’
‘My what?’
‘Please, Alec. I had hoped that it would restore your, memory. I saw it the first night we -‘ She hesitated, then looked me square in the eye.’- made love. You turned on the light, then turned over on your belly to see what time it was. That was when I noticed the moles on your right buttock cheek. I commented on the pattern. they made, and we joked about it. You said that it was your Southern Cross and it let you know which end was up. ‘
Margrethe turned slightly pink but continued to look me firmly in the eye. ‘And I showed you some moles on my body. Alec, I am sorry that you do not remember it but please believe me: By then we were well enough acquainted that we could be playful about such things without my being forward or rude.’
‘Margrethe, I don’t think you could ever be forward or rude. But you’re putting too much importance on a chance arrangement of moles. I’ve got moles all over me; it doesn’t surprise me that some of them, back where I can’t see easily, are arranged in a cross shape. Or that Graham` had some that were somewhat similar.’
‘Not “similar”. Exactly the same.’
‘Well – There is a much better way to check. In the desk there is my wallet. Graham’s wallet, actually. Driver’s license. His. His thumbprint on it. I haven’t checked it because I have never had the slightest doubt that he was Graham and that I am Hergensheimer and that we are not the same man. But we can check. Get it out, dear. Check it yourself. I’ll put a thumbprint on the mirror in the bath. Compare them. Then you will know.’
‘Alec, I do know. You are the one who doesn’t believe it; you check it.’
‘Well -‘ Margrethe’s counterproposal was reasonable; I agreed to it.
I got out Graham’s driver’s license, then placed a print on the bath mirror by first rubbing my thumb over my nose for the nose’s natural oil, so much greater than that of the pad of the thumb. I found that I could not see the pattern on the glass too well, so I shook a little talcum onto my palm, blew it toward the mirror.
Worse. The powder that detectives use must be much finer than shaving talcum. Or perhaps I don’t know how to use it. I placed another print without powder, looked at both prints, at my right thumb, at the print on the driver’s license, then checked to see that the license did indeed designate print of right thumb. It did. ‘Margrethe! Will you come look, please?’
She joined me in the bath. ‘Look at this,’ I said. ‘Look at all four – my thumb and three prints. The pattern in all four is basically an arch – but that simply trims it down to half the thumbprints in the world. I’ll bet you even money that your own thumbprints have an arch pattern. Honest, can you tell whether or not the thumbprint on the card–was made by this thumb? Or by my left thumb; they might have made a mistake.’
‘I cannot tell, Alec. I have no skill in this.’
‘Well – I don’t think even an expert could tell in this light. We’ll have to put it off till morning; we need bright sunlight out on deck. We also need glossy white paper, stamp-pad ink, and a magnifying glass … and I’ll bet Mr Henderson will have all three. Will tomorrow do?’
‘Certainly. This test is not for me, Alec; I already know in my heart. And by seeing your “Southern Cross”. Something has happened to your memory but you are still you… and someday we will find your memory again.’
‘It’s not that easy, dear. I know that I am not Graham.
Margrethe, do you have any idea what business he was in? Or why he was on this trip?’
‘Must I say “him”? I did not ask your business, Alec. And you never, offered to tell me.’
‘Yes, I think you must say “him”, at least until we check that thumbprint. Was he married?’
‘Again, he did not say and I did not ask.’
‘But you implied – No, you flatly stated that you had “made love” with this man whom you believe to be me, and that you have been in bed with him.’
‘Alec, are you reproaching me?’
‘Oh, no, no, no!’ (But I was, and she knew it.) ‘Whom you go to bed with is your business. But I must tell you that I am married.’
She shut her face against me. ‘Alec, I did not try to seduce you into marriage.’
‘Graham, you mean. I was not there.’
‘Very well. Graham. I did not entrap Alec Graham. For our mutual happiness we made love. Matrimony was not mentioned by either of us.’
‘Look, I’m sorry I mentioned the matter! It seemed to have some bearing on the mystery; that’s all. Margrethe, will you believe that, I would rather strike off my arm – or pluck out my eye and cast it from me – than hurt you, ever, in any way?’
‘Thank you, Alec. I believe you.’
‘All that Jesus ever said was: “Go, and sin no more.’ Surely you do not think I would ever set myself up as more severely judgmental than was Jesus? But I was not judging you; I was seeking information about Graham. His business, in particular. Uh, did you ever suspect that he might be engaged in something illegal?’
She gave a ghost of a smile. ‘Had I ever suspected anything of the sort, my loyalty to him is such that I would never express such suspicion. Since you insist that you are not he, then there it must stand.’
‘Touch~!’ I grinned sheepishly. Could I tell her about the lockbox? Yes, I must. I had to be frank with her and had to persuade her that she was not being disloyal to Graham/me were she to be equally frank. ‘Margrethe, I was not asking idly and I was not prying where I had no business to pry. I have still more, trouble and I need your advice.’
Her turn to be startled. ‘Alec… I do not often give advice. I do not like to.’
‘May I tell you my trouble? You need not advise me… but perhaps you may be able to analyze it for me.’ I told her quickly about that truly damning million dollars. ‘Margrethe, can you think of any legitimate reason why an honest man would be carrying a million dollars in cash? Travelers checks, letters of credit, drafts for transferring monies, even bearer bonds – But cash? In that amount? I say that it is psychologically as unbelievable as what happened to me in the fire pit is physically unbelievable. Can you see any other way to look at it? For what honest reason would a man carry that much cash on a trip like this?’
‘I will not pass judgment.’
‘I do not ask you to judge; I ask you to stretch your imagination and tell me why a man would carry with him a million dollars in cash. Can you think of a reason? One as farfetched as you like… but a reason.’
‘There could be many reasons.’
‘Can you think of one?’
I waited; she remained silent. I sighed and said, ‘I can’t think of one, either. Plenty of criminal reasons, of course, as so-called “hot money” almost always moves as cash. This is so common that most governments – all governments, I believe – assume that any large amount of cash being moved other than by a bank or by a government is indeed crime money until proved otherwise. Or counterfeit money, a still more depressing idea. The advice I need is this: Margrethe, what should I do with it? It’s not mine; I can’t take it off the ship. For the same reason I can’t abandon it. I can’t even throw it overboard. What can I do with it?’
My question was not rhetorical; I had to find an answer that would not cause me to wind up in jail for something Graham had done. So far, the only answer I could think of was to go to the only authority in the ship, the Captain, tell him all my troubles and ask him to take custody of that awkward million dollars.
Ridiculous. That would just give me a fresh set of bad answers, depending on whether or not the Captain believed me and on whether or not the Captain himself .was honest – and possibly on other variables. But I could not see any outcome from telling the Captain that would not end in my being locked up, either in jail or in a mental hospital.
The simplest way to resolve the situation would be to throw the pesky stuff overboard!
I had moral objections to that. I’ve broken some of the Commandments and bent some others, but being financially honest has never been a problem to me. Granted, lately my moral fiber did not seem to be as strong as I had thought, but nevertheless I was not tempted to
steal that million even to jettison it.
But there was a stronger objection: Do you know anyone who, having a million dollars in his hands, could bring himself to destroy it?
Maybe you do. I don’t. In a pinch I might turn it over to the Captain but I would not destroy it.
Smuggle it ashore? Alex, if you ever take it out of that lockbox, you have stolen it. Will you destroy your self-respect for a million dollars? For ten million? For five dollars?
‘Well, Margrethe?’
‘Alec, it seems to me that the solution is evident.’
‘Eh?’
‘But you have been trying to solve your problems in the wrong order. First you must regain your memory. Then you will know why you are carrying that money. It will turn out to be for some innocent and logical purpose.’ She smiled. ‘I know you better than you know yourself. You are a good man, Alec; you are not a criminal.’
I felt a mixture of exasperation at her and of pride in what she thought of me – but more exasperation than pride. ‘Confound it, dear, I have not lost my memory. I am not Alec Graham; I am. Alexander Hergensheimer, and that’s been my name all my life and my memory is sharp. Want to know the name of my second-grade teacher? Miss Andrews. Or how I happened to have my first airship ride when I was twelve? For I do indeed come from a world in which airships ply every ocean and even over the North Pole, and Germany is a monarchy and the North American Union has enjoyed a century of peace and prosperity and this ship we are in tonight would be considered so out of date and so miserably equipped and slow that no one would sail in it. I asked for help; I did not ask for a psychiatric opinion. If you think I’m crazy, say so… and we’ll drop the subject.’
‘I did not mean to anger you.’
‘My dear! You did not anger me; I simply unloaded on you some of my worry and frustration – and I should not have done so. I’m sorry. But I do have real problems and they are not solved by telling me that my memory is at fault. If it were my memory, saying so would solve nothing., my problems would still be there. But I should not have snapped at you. – Margrethe, you are all I have … in a strange and sometimes frightening world. I’m sorry.’
She slid down off my bunk. ‘Nothing to be sorry about, dear Alec. But there is no point in further discussion tonight. Tomorrow – Tomorrow we will test that thumbprint carefully, in bright sunlight. Then you will see, and it could have an immediate effect on your memory.
‘Or it could have an immediate effect on your stubbornness, best of girls.’
She smiled. ‘We will see. Tomorrow. Now I think I must go to bed. We have reached the point where we are each repeating the same arguments… and upsetting each other. I don’t want that, Alec. That is not good.’
She turned and headed for the door, not even offering herself for a goodnight kiss.
Margrethe!’
‘Yes, Alec?’
‘Come back and kiss me.’
‘Should I, Alec? You, a married man.’
‘Uh – Well, for heaven’s sake, a kiss isn’t the same as adultery.’
She shook her head sadly. ‘There are kisses and kisses, Alec. I would not kiss the way we have kissed unless I was happily willing to go on from there and make love. To me that would be a happy and innocent thing.. . but to you it would be adultery. You pointed out what the Christ said to the woman taken in adultery. I have not sinned… and I will not cause you to sin.’ Again she turned to leave.
‘Margrethe!’
‘Yes, Alec?.
‘You asked me if I intended ever again to ask you to come back later. I ask you now. Tonight. Will you come back later?’
‘Sin, Alec. For you it. would be sin… and that would make it sin for me, knowing how you feel about it.’
‘”Sin.” I’m not sure what sin is… I do know I need you… and I think you need me.’
‘Goodnight, Alec.’ She left quickly.
After a long while I brushed my teeth and washed my face, then decided that another shower might help. I took it lukewarm and it seemed to calm me a little. But when I went to bed, I lay awake, doing something I call thinking but probably is not.
I reviewed in my mind all the many major mistakes I have made in my life, one after another, dusting them off and bringing them up sharp in my head, right to the silly, awkward, inept, self-righteous, asinine fool I had made of myself tonight, and, in so doing, how I had wounded and humiliated the best and sweetest woman I have ever known.
I ‘can keep myself uselessly occupied with selfflagellation for an entire night when my latest attack of foot-in-mouth disease is severe. This current one bid fair to keep me staring at the ceiling for days.
Some long time later, after midnight and more, I was awakened by the sound of a key in the door. I fumbled for the bunk light switch, found it just as she dropped her robe and got into bed with me. I switched off the light.
She was warm and smooth and trembling and crying. I held her gently and tried to soothe her. She did not speak and neither did I. There had been too many words earlier and most of them had been mine. Now was a time simply to cuddle and hold and speak without words.
At last her trembling slowed, then stopped. Her breathing became even. Then she sighed and said very softly, ‘I could not stay away.’
‘Margrethe. I love you.’
‘Oh! I love you so much it hurts in my heart.’
I think we were both asleep when the collision happened. I had not intended to sleep but for the first time since the fire walk I was relaxed and untroubled; I dropped off.
First came this incredible jar that almost knocked us out of my bunk, then a grinding, crunching noise at earsplitting level. I got the bunk light on – and the skin of the ship at the foot of the bunk was bending inward.
The general alarm sounded, adding to the already deafening noise. The steel side of the ship buckled, then ruptured as something dirty white and cold pushed into the hole. As the light went out.
I got out of that bunk any which way, dragging Margrethe with me. The ship rolled heavily to port, causing us to slide down into the angle of the deck and the inboard bulkhead. I slammed against the door-handle, grabbed at it, and hung on with my right hand while I held Margrethe to me with my left
arm. The ship rolled back to starboard, and wind and water poured in through the hole – we heard it and felt it, could not see it. The ship recovered, then rolled again to starboard – and I lost my grip on the door handle.
I have to reconstruct what happened next – pitch dark, mind you, and a bedlam of sound. We were falling – I never let go of her – and then we were in water.
Apparently when the ship rolled back to starboard, we were tossed out through the hole. But that is, just reconstruction; all I actually know is that we fell, together, into water, went down rather deep.
We came up and I had Margrethe under my left arm, almost in a proper lifesaver carry. j grabbed a look as I gulped air, then we went under again. The ship was right alongside us and moving. There was cold wind and rumbling noise; something high and dark was on the side away from the ship. But it was the ship that scared me – or rather its propeller, its screw. Stateroom CI09 was far forward – but if I didn’t get us well away from the ship almost at once, Margrethe and I were going to be chewed into hamburger by the screw. I hung onto her and stroked hard away from the ship, kicking strongly – and exulted as I felt us getting away from the hazard of the ship… and banged my head something brutal against blackness.
Chapter 8
So they took up Jonah, and cast him forth into the sea: and the sea ceased from her raging.
Jonah 1: 15
I WAS comfortable and did not want to wake up. But a slight throb in my head was annoying me and, willy-nilly, I did wake. I shook my head to get rid of that throb and got a snootful of water. I snorted it out.
‘Alec?’ Her voice was nearby.
I was on my back in blood-warm water, salt water by the taste, with blackness all around me – about as near to a return to the womb as can be accomplished this side of death. Or was this death? ‘Margrethe?’
‘Oh! Oh, Alec, I am so relieved! You have been asleep a long time. How do you feel?’
I checked around, counted this and that, twitched that and this, found that I. was floating on my back between Margrethe’s limbs, she being also on her back with my head in her hands, in one of the standard Red-Cross life-saving positions. She was using slow frog kicks, not so much moving us as keeping us afloat. ‘I’m all right. I think. How about you?’
‘I’m just fine, dearest! – now that you’re awake.’
‘What happened?’
‘You bumped your head against the berg.’
‘Berg
‘The ice mountain. Iceberg.’
(Iceberg? I tried to remember what had happened.) ‘What iceberg?’
‘The one that wrecked the ship.’
Some of it came tumbling back, but it still did not make an understandable picture. A giant crash as if the ship had hit a reef, then we were dumped into water. A struggle to get clear – I did bump my head. ‘Margrethe, we’re in the tropics, as far south as Hawaii. How can there be icebergs?’
‘I don’t know, Alec.’
‘But-‘ I started to say ‘impossible,’ then decided that, from me, that word was silly. ‘This water is too warm for icebergs. Look, you can quit working so hard; in salt water I float as easily as Ivory soap.’
‘All right. But do let me hold you. I almost lost you once in this darkness; I’m frightened that it might happen again. When we fell in, the water was cold. Now it’s warm; so we must not be near the berg.’
‘Hang onto me, sure; I don’t want to lose you, either.’ Yes, the water had been cold when we fell into it; I remembered. Or cold compared with a nice warm cuddle in bed. And a cold wind. ‘What happened to the iceberg?’.
‘Alec, I don’t know. We fell into the water together. You grabbed me and got us away from the ship; I’m sure that saved us. But it was dark as December night and blowing hard and in the blackness you ran your head into the ice.
‘That is when I almost lost you. It knocked you out, dear, and you let go of me. I went under and gulped water and came up and spat it out and couldn’t find you.
‘Alec, I have never been so frightened in all my life. You weren’t anywhere. I couldn’t see you; I reached out, all sides, and could not touch you; I called out, you did not answer.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I should not have panicked. But I thought you had drowned. Or were drowning and I was not stopping it. But in paddling around my hand struck you, and then I grabbed you and everything was all right – until you didn’t answer. But I checked and found that your heart was steady and strong, so everything was all right after all, and I took you in the back carry so that I could hold your face out of water. After a long time you woke, up – and now everything is truly all right.’
‘You didn’t panic; I’d be dead if you had. Not many people could do what-you did.’
‘Oh, it’s not so uncommon; I was a guard at a beach north of K0benhavrt two summers – on Fridays I gave lessons. Lots of boys and girls learned.’
‘Keeping your head in a crunch and doing it in pitch darkness isn’t learned from lessons; don’t be so modest. What about the ship? And the iceberg?’
‘Alec, again I don’t know. By the time I found you and made sure that you were all right and then got you into towing position – by the time I had time to look around, it was like this. Nothing. Just blackness.’
‘I wonder if she sank? That was one big wallop she took! No explosion? You didn’t hear anything?’
‘I didn’t hear an explosion. Just wind and the collision sounds you must have heard, then some shouts after we were in the water. If she sank, I did not see it, but – Alec, for the past half hour, about, I’ve been swimming with my head pushed against a pillow or a pad or a mattress. Does that mean the ship sank?
Flotsam in the water?’
‘Not necessarily but it’s not encouraging. Why have you been keeping your head against it?’
‘Because we may need it. If it is one of the deck cushions or sunbathing mats from the pool, then it’s stuffed with kapok and is an emergency lifesaver.’
‘That’s what I meant. If it’s a flotation cushion, why are you just keeping your head against it? Why aren’t you on it, up out of the water?’
‘Because I could not do that without letting go of you.’
‘Oh. Margrethe, when we get out of this, will you kindly give me a swift kick? Well, I’m awake now; let’s find out what you’ve found. By Braille.’
‘All right. But I don’t want to let go of you when I can’t see you. I
‘Honey, I’m at least as anxious not to lose track of you. Okay, like this: You hang onto me with one hand; reach behind you with the other. Get a good grip on this cushion or whatever it is. I turn over and hang onto you and track you up to the hand you are using to grip the pillow thing. Then we’ll see -we’ll both feel what we have and decide how we can use it.’
It was not just a pillow, or even a bench cushion; it was (by the feel of it) a large sunbathing pad, at least six feet wide and somewhat longer than that – big enough for two people, or three if they were well acquainted. Almost as good as finding a lifeboat! Better – this flotation pad included Margrethe. I was minded of a profane poem passed around privately at seminary: ‘A jug ‘of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou
‘
Getting up onto a mat that is limp as an angleworm on a night as black as the inside of a pile of coal is not merely difficult; it is impossible. We accomplished the impossible by my hanging on to it with both hands while Margrethe slowly slithered up over me. Then she gave me a hand while I inched up and onto it.
Then I leaned on one elbow and fell off and got lost. I followed Margrethe’s voice and bumped into the pad, and again got slowly and cautiously aboard.
We found that the most practical way to make best use of the space and buoyancy offered by the mat was to lie on our backs, side by side, starfished like that Leonardo da Vinci drawing, in order to spread ourselves as widely as possible over the support.
I said, ‘You all right, hon?’
‘Just fine!’
‘Need anything?’
‘Not anything we have here. I’m comfortable, and relaxed – and you are here.’
‘Me, too. But what would you have if you could have -anything you want?’
‘Well … a hot fudge sundae.’
I considered it. ‘No. A chocolate sundae with marshmallow syrup, and a cherry on top. And a cup of coffee.’
‘A cup of chocolate. But make mine hot fudge. It’s a taste I acquired in America. We Danes do lots of good things with ice cream, but putting a hot sauce on an ice-cold dish never occurred to us. A hot fudge sundae. Better make that a double.’
‘All right. I’ll pay for a double if that’s what you want. I’m a dead game sport, I am – and you saved my life.’
Her inboard hand patted mine. ‘Alec, you’re fun – and I’m happy. Do you think we’re going to get out of this alive?’
‘I don’t know, hon. The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive. But I promise you this: I’m going to do my best to get you that hot fudge sundae.’
We both woke up when it got light. Yes, I slept and I know Margrethe did, too, as I woke a little before she did, listened to her soft snores, and kept quiet until I saw her eyes open. I had not expected to be able to sleep but I am not surprised (now) that we did – perfect bed, perfect silence, perfect temperature, both of us very tired … and absolutely nothing to worry about that was worth worrying about because there was nothing, nothing whatever, to do about our problems earlier than daylight. I think I fell asleep thinking: Yes, Margrethe was right; a hot fudge sundae was a better choice than a chocolate marshmallow sundae. I know I dreamt about such a sundae – a quasinightmare in which I would dip into it, a big bite… lift the spoon to my mouth, and find it empty. I think that woke me.
She turned her head toward me, smiled and looked about sixteen and utterly heavenly. (like two young roes that are twins. Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.) ‘Good morning, beautiful.’
She giggled. ‘Good morning, Prince Charming. Did you sleep well?’
‘Matter of fact, Margrethe, I haven’t slept so well in a month. Odd. All I want now is breakfast in bed.’
“Right away, sir. I’ll hurry!’
‘Go along with you. I should not have mentioned food. I’ll settle for a kiss. Think we can manage a kiss without falling into the water?’
‘Yes. But let’s be careful. Just turn your face this way; don’t roll over.’
It was a kiss mostly symbolic rather than one of Margrethe’s all-out specials. We were both quite careful not to disturb the precarious stability of our make-do life raft. We were worried about something more important than being dumped into the ocean – at least I was.
I decided to broach it, take it out where we could worry about it together. ‘Margrethe, by the map just
outside the dining room we should have the coast of Mexico near Mazatlán just east of us. What time did the ship sink? If it sank. I mean, what time was the collision?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Nor do I. After midnight, I’m sure of that. The Konge ‘Knut was scheduled to arrive at eight a.m. So that coast* line could be over a hundred miles east of us. Or it could be almost on top of us. Mountains over there, we may be able to see them when this overcast clears away. As it did yesterday, so it probably will today. Sweetheart, how are you on long-distance swimming? If we can see mountains, do you want to try for it?’
She was slow in answering. ‘Alec, if you wish, we will try it.’
‘That wasn’t quite what I asked.’
‘That is true. In warm sea water I think I can swim as long as necessary. I did once swim the Great Belt, in water colder than this. But, Alec, in the Belt are no sharks. Here there are sharks. I have seen.’
I let out a sigh. ‘I’m glad you said it; I didn’t want to have to say it. Hon, I think we must stay right here and hold still. Not call attention to ourselves. I can skip breakfast – especially a shark’s breakfast.’
‘One does not starve quickly.’
‘We won’t starve. If you had your druthers, which would you pick? Starvation? Or death by sunburn? Sharks? Or dying of thirst? In all the lifeboat and Robinson Crusoe stories I’ve ever read our hero had something to work with. I don’t have even a toothpick. Correction: I have you; that changes the odds. Margrethe, what do you think we ought to do?’
‘I think we will be picked up.’
I thought so, too, but for a reason I did not want to discuss with Margrethe. ‘I’m glad to hear you say
that. But-why do you think so?’
‘Alec, have you been to Mazatlán before?’
‘No.
‘It is an important fishing port, both commercial fishing and sport fishing. Since dawn hundreds of boats have put out to sea. The largest and fastest go many kilometers out. If we wait, they will find us.’
‘May find us, you mean. There is a lot of ocean out here. But you’re right; swimming for it is suicide; our best bet is to stay here and hold tight.’
‘They will be looking for us, Alec.’
‘They will? Why?’
‘If Konge Knut did not sink, then the Captain knows when and where we were lost overboard; when he reaches port – about now – he will ask for a daylight search. But if she did sink, then they will be scouring the whole area for survivors.’
‘Sounds logical.’ (I had another idea, not at all logical.)
‘Our problem is to stay alive till they find us, avoiding sharks and thirst and sunburn as best we can – and all of that means holding still. Quite still and all the time. Except that I think we should turn over now and then, after the sun is out, to spread the burn.’
‘And pray for cloudy weather. Yes, all of that. And maybe we should not talk. Not get quite so thirsty
She kept silent so long that I thought she had started the discipline I had suggested. Then she said,
‘Beloved, we may not live.’
‘I know.’
‘If we are to die, I would choose to hear your voice, and I would not wish to be deprived of telling. you that I love you – now that I may! – in a futile attempt to live a few. minutes longer.’
‘Yes, my sweetheart. Yes.’
Despite that decision we talked very little. For me it was enough to touch her hand; it appeared to be enough for -her, too.
A long time later – three hours at a guess – I heard Margrethe gasp.
‘Trouble?’
‘Alec! Look there!’ She pointed. I looked.
It should have been my turn to gasp, but I was somewhat braced for it: high up, a cruciform shape, somewhat like a bird gliding, but much larger and clearly artificial. A flying machine
I knew that flying machines were impossible; in engineering school I had studied Professor Simon Newcomb’s well-known mathematical proof that the efforts of Professor Langley and others to build an aerodyne capable of carrying a man were doomed, useless, because scale theory proved that no such contraption large enough to carry a man could carry a heat-energy plant large enough to lift it off the ground – much less a passenger.
That was science’s final word on a folly and it put a stop to wasting public monies on a will-o’-the-wisp. Research and development money went into airships, where it belonged, with enormous success.
However, in the past few days I had gained a new angle on the idea of ‘impossible’. When a veritable flying machine showed up in our sky, I was not greatly surprised.
I think Margrethe held her breath until it passed over us and was far toward the horizon. I started to, then forced myself to breathe calmly – it was such a beautiful thing, silvery and sleek and fast. I could not judge its size, but if those dark spots in its side were windows, then it was enormous.
I could not see what pushed it along.
‘Alec… is that an airship?’
‘No. At least it is not what I meant when I told you about airships. This I would call a “flying machine “.’That’s all I can say; I’ve never seen one before. But I can tell you -one thing, now – something very important.’
‘Yes?’
‘We are not going to die… and I now know why the ship was sunk.’
‘Why, Alec?’
‘To keep me from checking a thumbprint.’
Chapter 9
For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink:I was a stranger, and ye took me in.
Matthew 25:35
‘OR, TO put it more nearly exactly, the iceberg was there and the collision took place to keep me from checking my thumbprint against the thumbprint on Graham’s driver’s license. The ship may not have sunk; that may not have been necessary to the scheme.’
Margrethe did not say anything.
So I added gently, ‘Go ahead, dear; say it. Get it off your chest; I won’t mind. I’m crazy. Paranoid.’
‘Alec, I did not say that. I did not think it. I would not.’
‘No, you did not say it. But this time my aberration cannot be explained away as “loss of memory”. That is, if we saw the same thing. What did you see?’
‘I saw something strange in the sky. I heard it, too. You told me that it was a flying machine.’
‘Well, I think that is what it should be called – but you can call it a, uh, a “gumpersaggle” for all of me. Something new and strange. What is this gumpersaggle? Describe it.’
‘It was something moving in the sky. It came from back that way, then passed almost over us, and disappeared there.’ (She pointed, a direction I had decided, was north.) ‘It was shaped something like a cross, a crucifix. The crosspiece had bumps on it, four I think. The front end had eyes like a whale and the back end had flukes like a whale. A whale with wings – t hat’s what it looked like, Alec; a whale flying through the sky!’
‘You thought it was alive?’
‘Uh, I don’t know. I don’t think so. I don’t know what to think.’
‘I don’t think it was alive; I think it was a machine. A flying machine. A boat with wings on it. But, either way – a machine or a flying whale – have you- ever in your life seen anything like it?’
‘Alec, it was so strange that I have trouble believing that I saw it.’
‘I know. But you saw it first and pointed it out to me so I didn’t trick you into thinking that you saw it.’
‘ You wouldn’t do that.’
‘No, I would not. But I’m glad you saw it first, dearest girl; that means it’s real – not something dreamed up in my fevered brain. That thing did not come from the world you are used to… and I can promise you that it is not one of the airships I talked about; it is not from the world I grew up in. So we’re now in still a third world.’ I sighed. ‘The first time it took a twenty-thousand-ton ocean liner to prove to me that I had changed worlds. This time just one sight of something that simply could not exist in my world is all I need to know that they are at it again. They shifted worlds when I was knocked out – I think that’s when they did it. As may be, I think they did it to keep me from checking that thumbprint. Paranoia. The delusion that the whole world is a conspiracy. Only it’s not a delusion.’
I watched her eyes. ‘Well?’
‘Alec … could it possibly be that both of us imagined it? Delirious, perhaps? We’ve both had a rough experience – you hit your head; I may have hit mine when the iceberg struck.’
‘Margrethe, we would not each have the same delirium dream. If you wake up and find that I’m gone, that could be your answer. But I’m not gone; I’m right here. Besides, you would still have to account for an iceberg as far south as we are. Paranoia is a simpler explanation. But the conspiracy is aimed at me; you just had the misfortune to be caught in it. I’m sorry.’ (I wasn’t really sorry. A raft in the middle of the ocean is no- place to be alone. But with Margrethe it was ‘paradise enow.’)
‘I still think that sharing the same dream is – Alec, there it comes again!’ She pointed.
I didn’t see anything at first, then I did: A dot that grew into a cruciform shape, a shape that I now identified as ‘flying machine’. I watched it grow.
‘Margrethe, it must have turned around. Maybe it saw us. Or they saw us. Or he saw us. Whatever.’
‘Perhaps.’
As it came closer I saw that it was going to pass to our right rather than overhead. Margrethe said suddenly, ‘It’s not the same. one.’
‘And it’s not a flying whale – unless flying whales hereabouts have wide red stripes down their sides.’
‘It’s not a whale. I mean “it’s not alive”. You are right,
Alec; it is a machine. Dear, do you really think it has people inside it? That scares me.’
‘I think I would be more scared if it did not have people inside it.’ (I remembered a fantastic story translated from the German about a world peopled by nothing but automatic machines – not a pleasant story.) ‘Actually, it’s good news. We both know now that our seeing the first one was not a dream, not an illusion. That nails down the fact that we are in another world. Therefore we are going to be rescued.’
She said hesitantly, ‘I don’t quite follow that.’
‘That’s because you are still trying to avoid calling me paranoid – and thank you, dear, but my being paranoid is the simplest hypothesis. If the joker pulling the strings had intended to kill me, the easy time to do it would have been with the iceberg. Or earlier, with the fire pit. But he ‘s not out to kill me, at least not now. He’s playing with me, cat and mouse. So I’ll be rescued. So will you, because we’re together.
You were with me when the iceberg hit – your bad luck. You’re still with me now, so you’ll be rescued,your good luck. Don’t fight it, dear. I’ve had some days to get used to it, and I find that it is all right once you relax. Paranoia is the only rational approach to a conspiracy world.’
‘But, Alec, the world ought not to he that way,’
‘There is no “ought” to it, my love. The essence of philosophy is to accept the universe as it-is, rather than ,try to force it into some preconceived shape.’ I added, ‘Wups! Don’t roll off. You don’t want to be a snack for a shark just after we’ve had proof that we are going to be picked up!’
For the next hour or so nothing happened – unless you count sighting two regal sailfish. The overcast burned away and I began to be anxious for an early rescue; I figured they owed me that much! Not let me get a third-degree sunburn. Margrethe might be able to take a bit more sun than I; she was blonde but she was tanned a warm toast color all over – lovely! But I was raw frog-belly white except for my face and hands – a full day of tropic sun could put me into hospital. Or worse.
The eastern horizon now seemed to show a gray unevenness that could be mountains – or so I kept telling myself, although there isn’t much you can see when your viewpoint is about seven inches above water line. If those were indeed mountains or hills, then land was not many miles away. Boats from Mazatlán should be in sight any time now… if Mazatlán was still there in this world. If –
Then another flying machine showed up.
It was only vaguely like the other two. They had been flying parallel to the coast; the first from the south, the second from the north. This machine came out from the direction of the coast, flying mostly ‘West, although it zigzagged.
It passed north of us, then turned back and circled around us. It came low enough that I could see that it did indeed have men in it, two I thought.
Its shape is hard to explain. Imagine first a giant box kite, about forty feet long, four feet wide, and about three feet between two kite surfaces.
Imagine this box kite placed at right angles to a boat shape, somewhat, like an Esquimau’s kayak but larger, much larger – about as large as the box kite.
Underneath all this are two more kayak shapes, smaller, parallel to the main shape.
At one end of this shape is an engine (as I saw later) and at the front end of that is an air propeller, like a ship’s water propeller -and this I saw later, also. When I first saw this unbelievable structure, the air screw was turning so extremely fast that one simply could not see it. But one could hear it! The noise made by this contraption was deafening and never stopped.
The machine turned toward us and tilted down so that it headed straight toward us – like nothing so much as a pelican gliding down to scoop up fish.
With us the fish. It was frightening. To me, at least; Margrethe never let out a peep. But she did squeeze my fingers very hard. The mere fact that we were not fish and that a machine could not eat us and would not want to did not make this dive at us less terrifying.
Despite my fright (or because of it) I now saw that this construction was at least twice as big as I had estimated when I saw it high in the sky. It had two teamsters operating it, seated side by side behind a window in the front end. The driving engine turned out to be two, mounted between the box-kite wings, one on the right of the teamsters’ position, one on the left.
At the very last instant the machine lifted like a horse taking a hurdle, and barely missed us. The blast of win ‘ d it created almost knocked us off our raft and the blast of sound caused my ears to ring.
It went a little higher, curved back toward us, glided again but not quite toward us. The lower twin kayak shapes touched the water, creating a brave comet’s tail of spume – and the thing slowed and stopped and stayed there, on the water, and did not sink!
Now the air screws moved very slowly and I saw them for the first time … and admired the engineering ingenuity that had gone into them. Not as efficient, I suspected, as the ducted air screws used in our dirigible airships, but an elegant solution to a problem in a place where ducting would be difficult or perhaps impossible.
But those infernally noisy driving engines! How any engineer could accept that, I could not see. As one of my professors said (back before thermodynamics convinced me that I had a call for the ministry), noise is always a byproduct of inefficiency. A correctly designed engine is as silent as the grave.
The machine turned and came at us again, moving very slowly. Its teamsters handled it so that it missed us by a few feet and almost stopped. One of the two, inside it crawled out of the carriage space behind the window and was clinging by his left hand to one of the stanchions that held the two box-kite wings apart. His other hand held a coiled line.
As the flying machine passed us, he cast the line toward us. I snatched at it, got a hand on it, and did not myself go into the water because Margrethe snatched at me.
I handed the line to Margrethe. ‘Let him pull you in. I’ll slide into the water and be right behind you.’
‘No!’
‘What do you mean, “No”? This is no time to argue. Do it!’
‘Alec, be quiet! He’s trying to tell us something.’
I shut up, more than a little offended. Margrethe listened. (No point in my listening; my Spanish is limited to ‘Gracias’ and ‘Por favor’. Instead I read the lettering on the side of the machine: EL GUARDA COSTAS REAL DEMEXICO.)
‘Alec, he is warning us to be very careful. Sharks.’
‘Ouch.’
‘Yes. We are to stay where we are. He will pull gently on this rope. I think he means to get us into his machine without us going into the water.’
‘A man after my own heart!’
We tried it; it did not work. A breeze had sprung up; it had much more effect on the flying machine than it had on us – that water-soaked sunbathing pad was practically nailed down, no sail area at all. Instead of being able to ,pull us to the flying machine, the man on the other end of the line was forced to let out more line to keep from pulling us off into the water.
He called out something; Margrethe answered. They shouted back and forth. She turned to me. ‘He says to let loose the rope. They will go out and come back, this time directly at us, but slowly. As they come closest, we are to try to scramble up into the aeroplano. The machine.’
‘All right.’
The machine left us, went out oil the water and curved back. While waiting, we were not bored; we had the dorsal fin of a huge shark to entertain us. It did not attack; apparently it had not made up its mind (what mind?) that we were good to eat. I suppose it saw only the underside of the kapok pad.
The flying machine headed directly toward us on the’ water, looking like some monstrous dragonfly skimming the surface. I said, ‘Darling, as it gets closest, you dive for the stanchion closest to you and I’ll push you up. Then I’ll come up behind you.’
‘No, Alec.’
‘What do you mean, “No”?’ I was vexed. Margrethe was such a good comrade – then suddenly so stubborn. At the wrong time.
‘You can’t push me; you have no foundation to push from. And you can’t stand up; you can’t even sit up. Uh, you scramble to the right; I’ll scramble to the left. If either of us misses, then back onto the pad – fast! The aeroplano will come around again.’
‘But
‘That’s how he said to do it.’
There was no time left; the machine was almost on top of us. The ‘legs’ or stanchions joining the lower twin shapes to the body of the machine bridged the pad, one just missing me and the other just missing Margrethe. ‘Now!’ she cried. I lunged toward my side, got a hand on a stanchion.
And almost jerked my right arm out by the roots but I kept on moving, monkey fashion – got both hands on that undercarriage got a foot up on a horizontal kayak shape, turned my head.
Saw a hand reaching down to Margrethe – she climbed and was lifted onto the kite wing above, and disappeared. I turned to climb up my side – and suddenly levitated up and onto the wing. I do not ordinarily levitate but this time I had incentive: a dirty white fin too big for any decent fish, cutting the water right toward my foot.
I found myself alongside the little carriage house from which the teamsters directed ‘their strange craft. The second man (not the one who had climbed out to help) stuck his head out a window, grinned at me, reached back and opened a little door. I crawled inside, head first. Margrethe was already there.
The space had four seats, two in front where the teamsters sat, and two behind where we were.
The teamster on my side looked around and said something, and continued – I noticed! – to look at Margrethe. Certainly she was naked, but that was not her fault, and a gentleman would not stare.
‘He says,’ Margrethe explained, ‘that we must fasten our belts. I think he means this.’ She held up a buckle on the end of a belt, the other end being secured to the frame of the carriage.
I discovered that I was sitting on a similar buckle, which was digging a hole into my sunburned backside. I hadn’t noticed it up to then, too many other things demanding attention. (Why didn’t he keep his eyes to himself! I felt myself ready to shout at him. That he had, at great peril to himself, just saved her life and mine did not that moment occur to me; I was simply growing furious that he would take such advantage of a helpless lady.)
I turned my attention to that pesky belt and tried to ignore it. He spoke to the other man beside him,
who responded enthusiastically. Margrethe interrupted the discussion. ‘What are they saying?’ I demanded.
‘The poor man is about to give me the shirt off his back. I am protesting… but I’m not protesting so hard as to put a stop to it. It’s very gallant of them, dear, and, while I’m not foolish about it, I do feel more at ease among strangers with some sort of clothing.’ She listened, and added, ‘They’re arguing as to which one has the privilege.’
I shut up. In my mind I apologized to them. I’ll bet even the Pope in Rome has sneaked a quick look a time or two in his life.
The one on the right apparently won the argument. He squirmed around in his seat – he could not stand up – and got his shirt off, turned and passed it back to Margrethe. ‘Señorita. Por favor.’ He added other remarks but they were beyond my knowledge.
Margrethe replied with dignity and grace, and chatted with them as she wiggled into his shirt. It covered her mostly. She turned to me. ‘Dear, the commander is Teniente Anibal Sanz Garcia and his assistant is Sargento Roberto Dominguez Jones, both of the Royal Mexican Coast Guard. Both the Lieutenant and the Sergeant wanted to give me a shirt, but the Sergeant won a finger-guessing game, so I have his shirt.’
‘It’s mighty generous of him. Ask them if there is anything at all in the machine that I can wear.’
‘I’ll try.’ She spoke several phrases; I heard my name. Then she shifted back to English. ‘Gentlemen, I have the honor to present my husband, Sefior Alexandro Graham Hergensheimer.’ She shifted back to Spanish.
Shortly she was answered. ‘The Lieutenant is devastated to admit that they have nothing to offer you. But he promises on his mother’s honor that something will be found for you just as quickly as we reach Mazatlán and the Coast Guard headquarters there. Now he urges both of us to fasten our belts. tightly as we are about to fly.. Alec, I’m scared!’
‘Don’t be. I’ll hold your hand.’
Sergeant Dominguez turned around again, held up a canteen. ‘Agua?’
‘Goodness, yes!’ agreed Margrethe. ‘Sí sí sí!’
Water has never tasted so good.
The Lieutenant. looked around when we returned the canteen, gave a bigsmile and a thumbs-up sign old as the Colosseum, and did something that speeded up his driving engines. They had been turning over very slowly; now -they speeded up to a horrible racket. The machine turned as he headed it straight into the wind. The wind had been freshening all morning; now it showed little curls of white on the tops of the wavelets. He speeded his engines still more, to an unbelievable violence, and we went bouncing over the water, shaking everything.
Then we started hitting about every tenth wave with incredible force. I don’t know why we weren’t wrecked.
Suddenly we were twenty feet off the water; the bumping stopped. The vibration and the noise continued. We climbed at a sharp angle – and turned and started down again, and I almost-not-quite threw up that welcome drink of water.
The ocean was right in front of us, a solid wall. The Lieutenant turned his head and shouted something.
I wanted to tell him to keep his eyes on the road! – but I did not. ‘What does he say?’
‘He says to look where he points. He’ll point us right at it. EI tiburón blanco grande – the great white shark that almost got us.’
(I could have done without it.) Sure enough, right in the middle of this wall of water was a gray ghost with a fin cutting the water. Just when I knew that we were going to splash right down on top of it, the wall tilted away from us, my buttocks were forced down hard against the seat, my ears roared, and I again missed throwing up on our host only by iron will.
The machine leveled off and suddenly the ride was almost comfortable, aside from the racket and the vibration.
Airships are ever so much nicer.
The rugged hills behind the shoreline, so hard to see from our raft, were clearly in sight once we were in the air, and so was the shore – a series of beautiful beaches and a town where we were headed. The Sergeant looked around, pointed down a I t the town, and spoke. ‘What did he say?’
‘Sergeant Roberto says that we are home just in time for lunch. Almuerzo, he said, but notes that it’s breakfast – desayuno – for us.’
My stomach suddenly decided to stay awhile. ‘I don’t care what he calls it. Tell him not to bother to cook the horse; I’ll eat it raw.’
Margrethe translated; both our hosts laughed, then the Lieutenant proceeded to swoop down and place ‘his machine on the water while looking back over his shoulder to talk to Margrethe – who continued to smile while she drove her nails through the palm of my right hand.
We got down. No one was killed. But airships are much better.
Lunch! Everything was coming up roses.
Chapter 10
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground
-Genesis 3:19
A HALF hour after the flying machine splashed down in the harbor of Mazatlán Margrethe and I were seated with Sergeant Dominguez in the enlisted men’s mess of the Coast Guard. We were late for the midday meal but we were served. And I was clothed. Some at least – a pair of dungaree trousers. But the difference between bare naked and a pair of pants is far greater than the difference between cheap work trousers and the finest-ermine. Try it and you’ll see.
A small boat had come out to the flying machine’s mooring; then I had to walk across the dock where we had landed and into the headquarters building, there to wait until these pants could be found for me – with strangers staring at me the whole time, some of them women. I know now how it feels to be exposed in stocks. Dreadful! I haven’t been so embarrassed since an unfortunate accident in Sunday school when I was five.
But now it was done with and there was food and drink in front of us and, for the time being, I was abundantly happy. The food was not what I was used to. Who said that hunger was the best sauce? Whoever he was, he was right; our lunch was delicious. Thin cornmeal pancakes soaked with gravy fried beans, a scorching hot stew, a bowl of little yellow tomatoes, and coffee strong, black, and bitter – what more could a man want? No gourmet ever savored a meal as much as I enjoyed that one.
(At first I had been a bit miffed that we ate in the enlisted men’s mess rather than going with Lieutenant Sanz to wherever the officers ate. Much later I had it pointed out to me that I suffered from a very common civilian syndrome, i.e., a civilian with no military experience unconsciously equates his social position with that of officers, never with that of enlisted men. On examination this notion is obviously ridiculous – but it is almost universal. Oh, perhaps not universal but it obtains throughout America… where every man is ‘as, good as anyone else and better than most’.)
Sergeant Dominguez now had his shirt back. While pants were being found for me, a woman – a charwoman, I believe; the Mexican Coast Guard did not seem to have female ratings – a woman at headquarters had been sent to fetch something for Margrethe, and that something turned out to be a blouse and a full skirt, each of cotton and in bright colors. A simple and obviously cheap costume but Margrethe looked beautiful in it.
As yet, neither of us had shoes. No matter – the weather was warm and dry; shoes could wait. We were fed, we were dressed, we were safe – and all with a warm hospitality that caused me to feel that Mexicans were the finest people on earth.
After my second cup of coffee I said, ‘Sweetheart, how do we excuse ourselves and leave without being
rude? I think we should find the American consul as early as possible.’
‘We have to go back to the headquarters building.’
‘More red tape?’
‘I suppose you could call it that. I think they want to question us in more detail as to how we came to be where we were found. One must admit that our story is odd.’
‘I suppose so.’ Our initial interview with the Commandant had been less than satisfactory. Had I been alone I think he simply would have called me a liar… but it is difficult for a male man bursting with masculine ego to talk that way to Margrethe.
The trouble was the good ship Konge Knut.
She had not sunk, she had not come into port – she had never existed.
I was only moderately surprised. Had she turned into a full-rigged ship or a quinquereme, I would not have been surprised. But I had expected some sort of vessel of that same name – I thought the rules required it. But now it was becoming clear that I did not understand the rules. If there were any.
Margrethe had pointed out to me a confirming factor: This Mazatlán was not the town she had visited before. This one was much smaller and was not a tourist town indeed the long dock where the Konge Knut should have tied up did not exist in this world. I think that this convinced her quite as much as the flying machines in proving to her that my ‘paranoia’ was in fact the least hypothesis. She had been here before; that dock was big and solid; it was gone. It shook her.
The Commandant had not been impressed. He spent more time questioning Lieutenant Sanz than he spent questioning us. He did not seem pleased with Sanz.
There was another factor that I did not understand at the time and have never fully understood. Sanz’s
boss was ‘Captain’ (or ‘Capitán’); the Commandant also was ‘Captain’. But they were not the same rank.
The Coast Guard used navy ranks. However, that small part of it that operated flying machines used army ranks. I think this trivial difference had an historical origin. As may be, there was friction at the interface; the four-stripes or seagoing Captain was not disposed to accept as gospel anything reported by a flying-machine officer.
Lieutenant Sanz had fetched in, two naked survivors with a preposterous story; the four-striper seemed inclined to blame Sanz himself for the unbelievable aspects of our story.
Sanz was not intimidated. I think he had no real respect for an officer who had never been higher off the water than a crow’s nest. (Having ridden in his death trap, I understood why he was not inclined to genuflect to a sea-level type. Even among dirigible balloon pilots I have encountered this tendency to divide the world into those who fly and those who do not)
After a bit, finding himself unable to shake Sanz, unable to shake Margrethe, and unable to communicate with me except through Margrethe, the Commandant shrugged and gave instructions that resulted in us all going to lunch. I thought that ended it. But now we were going back for more, whatever it was.
Our second session with the Commandant was short. He told us that we would see the immigration judge at four that afternoon – the court with that jurisdiction; there was no separate immigration court. In the meantime here was a list of what we owed – arrange payment with the judge.
Margrethe looked startled as she accepted a piece of paper from him; I demanded to know what he had said.
She translated; I looked at that billing.
More than eight thousand pesos!
It did not take a deep knowledge of Spanish to read that bill; almost all the words were cognates. ‘Tres horas’ is three hours, and we were charged for three hours’ use of I aeroplano’- a word I had heard earlier from Margrethe; it meant their flying machine. We were charged also for the time of Lieutenant
Sanz and Sergeant Dominguez. Plus a ‘multiplying factor that I decided must mean applied overhead, or near enough.
And there was fuel for the aeroplano, and service for it.
‘Trousers’ are ‘pantalones’- and here was a bill for the pair I was wearing.
A ‘faldo’ was a skirt and a ‘camisa’ was a blouse – and Margrethe’s outfit was decidedly not cheap.
One item surprised me not by its price but by being included; I had thought we were guests: two lunches, each at twelve pesos.
There was even a separate charge for the Commandant’s time.
I started to ask how much eight thousand pesos came to in dollars – then shut up, realizing that I had not the slightest idea of the buying power of a dollar in this new world we had been dumped into.
Margrethe discussed the billing with Lieutenant Sartz, who looked embarrassed. There was much expostulation and waving of hands. She listened, then told me, ‘Alec, it isn’t Anibal’s idea and it is not even the fault of the Commandant. The tariffs on these services – rescue at sea, use of the aeroplano, and so forth – are set from el Distrito Real, the Royal District – that’s the same as Mexico City, I believe.
Lieutenant Sanz tells me that there is an economy drive on at the top level, with great pressure on everyone to make all public services self-supporting. He says that, if the Commandant did not charge us for our rescue and the Inspector Royal ever found out about it, it would be deducted from the Commandant’s pay. Plus whatever punitive measures a royal commission found appropriate. And Anibal wants you to know that he is devastated at this embarrassing situation. If he owned the aeroplano himself, we would simply be his guests. He will always look on you as his brother and me as his sister.’
‘Tell him I feel the same way about him and please make it at least as flowery as he made it.’
‘I will. And Roberto wants to be included.’
‘And the same goes for the Sergeant. But find out where and how to get to the American consul. We’ve got troubles.’
Lieutenant Anibal Sanz was told to see to it that we appeared in court at four o’clock; with that we were dismissed. Sanz delegated Sergeant Roberto to escort us to the consul and back, expressed regret that his duty status kept him from escorting us personally – clicked his heels, bowed over Margrethe’s hand, and, kissed it. He got a lot of mileage out of that simple gesture; I could see that Margrethe was pleased. But they don’t teach that grace in Kansas. My loss.
Mazatlán is on a peninsula; the Coast Guard station is on the south shore not far from the lighthouse (tallest in the world -impressive!); the American consulate is about a mile away across town at the north shore, straight down Avenida Miguel Alemán its entire length – a pleasant walk, graced about halfway by a lovely fountain.
But Margrethe and I were barefooted.
Sergeant Dominguez did not suggest a taxi – and I could not.
At first being barefooted did not seem important. There were other bare feet on that boulevard and by no means all of them on children. (Nor did I have the only bare chest.) As a youngster I had regarded bare feet as a luxury, a privilege. I went barefooted all summer and put on shoes most reluctantly when school opened.
After the first block I was wondering why, as a kid, I had always looked forward to going barefooted. Shortly thereafter I asked Margrethe to ask Sergeant Roberto, please, to slow down and let me pick my way for maximum shade; this pesky sidewalk is frying my feet!
(Margrethe had not complained and did not – and I was a bit vexed with her that she had not. I benefited constantly from Margrethe’s angelic fortitude—and found it hard to live up to.)
From there on I gave my full attention to pampering my poor, abused, tender pink feet. I felt sorry for myself and wondered why I had ever left God’s country.
‘I wept that I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet.’ I don’t know who said that first, but it is part of our cultural heritage and should be.
It happened to me.
Not quite halfway, where Miguel Alemán crosses Calle Aquiles Serdan at the fountain, we encountered a street beggar. He looked up at us and grinned, held up a handful of pencils -‘looked up’ because he was riding a little wheeled dolly; he had no feet.
Sergeant Roberto called him by name and flipped him a coin; the beggar caught it in his teeth, flipped it into his pocket, called out, ‘Gracias!’- and turned his attention to me.
I said quickly, ‘Margrethe, will you please explain to him that I have no money whatever.’
‘Yes, Alec.’ She squatted down, spoke with him eye to Eye. Then she straightened up. ‘Pepe says, to tell you, that’s all right; he’ll catch you someday when you are rich.’
‘Please tell him that I will be back. I promise.’
She did so. Pepe grinned at me, threw Margrethe a kiss, and saluted the Sergeant and me. We went on.
And I stopped being so finicky careful to coddle my feet. Pepe had forced me to reassess my situation. Ever since I had learned that the Mexican government did not regard rescuing me as a privilege but expected me to pay for it, I had been feeling sorry for myself, abused, put upon. I had been muttering to myself that my compatriots who complained that all Mexicans were bloodsuckers, living on gringo tourists, were dead right! Not Roberto and the Lieutenant, of course – but the others. Lazy parasites, all of them! with their hands out for the Yankee dollar.
Like Pepe.
I reviewed in my mind all the Mexicans I had met that day, each one I could remember, and asked forgiveness for my snide thoughts. Mexicans were simply fellow travelers on that long journey from dark to eternal darkness. Some carried their burdens well, some did not. And some carried very heavy burdens with gallantry and grace. Like Pepe.
Yesterday I had been living in luxury; today I was broke and in debt. But I have my health, I have my brain, I have my two hands – and I have Margrethe. My burdens were light; I should carry them joyfully. Thank you, Pepe!
The door of the consulate had a small American flag over it and the Great Seal in bronze on it. I pulled the bell wire beside it.
After a considerable wait the door opened a crack and a female voice told us to go away (I needed no translation; her meaning was clear). The door started to close. Sergeant Roberto whistled loudly and called out. The crack widened; a dialogue ensued. Margrethe said, ‘He’s telling her to tell Don Ambrosio that two American citizens are here who must see him at once because they must appear in court at four this afternoon.’
Again we waited. After about twenty minutes the maid let us in and ushered us into a dark office. The consul came in Y fixed my eye with his, and demanded to know how I dared to interrupt his siesta?
Then he caught sight of Margrethe and slowed down. To her it was: ‘How can I serve you? In the meantime will you honor my poor house by accepting a glass of wine? Or a cup of coffee?’
Barefooted and in a garish dress, Margrethe was a lady – I was riffraff. Don’t ask me why this was so; it just was. The effect was most marked with men. But it worked with women, too. Try to rationalize it and you find yourself using words like ‘royal’, ‘noble’, ‘gentry’, and ‘to the manner born’ – all involving concepts anathema to the American democratic ideal. Whether this proves something about Margrethe or something about the democratic ideal I will leave as an exercise for the student.
Don Ambrosio was a pompous zero but nevertheless he was a relief because he spoke American – real American, not English; he had been born in Brownsville, Texas. I feel certain that the backs of his parents were wet. He had parlayed a talent for politics among his fellow Chicanos into a cushy sinecure, telling gringo travelers in the land of Montezuma why they could not have what they desperately needed.
Which he eventually told us.
I let Margrethe do most of the talking because she was obviously so much more successful at it than I was. She called us ‘Mr and Mrs Graham’ – we had agreed on that name during the walk here. When we were rescued, she had used ‘Grahain Hergensheimer’ and had explained to me later that this let me choose: I could select ‘Hergensheimer’ simply by asserting that the listener’s memory had had a minor bobble; the name had been offered as ‘Hergensheimer Graham. No? Well, then I must have miscalled it – sorry.
I let it stay ‘Graham Hergensheimer’ and thereby used the name ‘Graham’ in order to keep things simple; to her I had always been ‘Graham’ and I had been using the name myself for almost two weeks. Before I got out of the consulate I had told a dozen more lies, trying to keep our story believable. I did not want unnecessary complication; ‘Mr and Mrs Alec Graham’ was easiest.
(Minor theological note: Many people seem to believe that the Ten Commandments forbid lying. Not at all! The prohibition is against bearing false witness against your neighbor – a specific, limited, and despicable sort of lie. But there is no Biblical rule forbidding simple untruth. Many theologians believe that no human social organization could stand up under the strain of absolute honesty. If you think their misgivings are unfounded, try telling your friends the ungarnished truth about what you think of their offspring – if you dare risk it.)
After endless repetitions (in which the Konge Knut shrank and became our private cruiser) Don Ambrosio said to me, ‘It’s no use, Mr Graham. I cannot issue you even a temporary document to substitute for your lost passport because you have offered me not one shred of proof that you are an American citizen.’
I answered, ‘Don Ambrosio, I am astonished. I know that Mrs Graham has a slight accent; we told you that she was born in Denmark. But do you honestly think that anyone not born amidst the tall corn could possibly have my accent?’
He gave a most Latin. shrug. ‘I’m not an expert in midwest accents. To my ear you could have been born to one of the harsher British accents, then have gone on the stage – and everybody knows that a competent actor can acquire the accent for any role. The People’s Republic of England goes to any length these days to plant their sleepers in the States; you might be from Lincoln, England, rather than from somewhere near Lincoln, Nebraska.’
‘Do you really believe that?’
‘What I believe is not the question. The fact is that I will not sign a piece of paper saying that you are an
American citizen when I don’t know that you are. I’m sorry. Is there anything more that I can do for you?’
(How can you do ‘more’ for me when you haven’t done anything yet?) ‘Possibly you can advise us.’
‘Possibly. I am not a lawyer.’
I offered him our copy of the billing against us, explained it. ‘Is this in order and are these charges appropriate?’
He looked it over. ‘These charges are certainly legal both by their laws and ours. Appropriate? Didn’t you tell me that they saved your lives?’
‘No question about it. Oh, there’s an outside chance that a fishing boat might have picked us up if the Coast Guard had not found us. But the Coast Guard did find us and did save us.’
‘Is your life – your two lives – worth less than eight thousand pesos? Mine is worth considerably more, I assure you.’
‘It isn’t that, sir. We have no money, not a cent. It all went down with the boat.’
‘So send for money. You can have it sent care of the consulate. I’ll go that far.’
‘Thank you. It will take time. In the meantime how can I get them off my neck? I was told that this judge will want cash and immediately.’
‘Oh, it’s not that bad. It’s true that they don’t permit bankruptcy the way we do, and they do have a rather old-fashioned debtors-prison law. But they don’t use it just the threat of it. Instead the court will see that you get a job that will let you settle your indebtedness. Don Clemente is a humane judge; he will take care of you.’
Aside from the flowery nonsense directed at Margrethe, that ended it. We picked up Sergeant Roberto, who had been enjoying backstairs hospitality from the maid and the cook, and headed for the courthouse.
Don Clemente (Judge Ibafiez) was as pleasant as Don Ambrosio had said he would be. Since we informed the clerk at once that we stipulated the debt but did not have the cash to pay it, there was no trial. We were simply seated in the uncrowded courtroom and told to wait while the judge disposed of cases on his docket. He handled several quickly. Some were minor offenses drawing fines; some were debt cases; some were hearings for later trial. I could not tell much about what was going on and whispering was frowned on, so Margrethe could not tell me much. But he was certainly no hanging judge.
The cases at hand were finished; at a word from the clerk we went out back with the ‘miscreants’ – peasants, mostly – who owed fines or debts. We found ourselves lined up on a low platform, facing a group of men. Margrethe asked what this was – and was answered, ‘La subasta.’
‘What’s that?’ I asked her.
‘Alec, I’m not sure. It’s not a word I know.’
Settlements were made quickly on the others; I gathered that most of them had been there before. Then there was just one man left of the group off the platform, just us on the platform. The man remaining looked sleekly prosperous. He smiled and spoke to me. Margrethe answered.
‘What is he saying?’ I asked.
‘He asked you if you can wash dishes. I told him that you do not speak Spanish.’
‘Tell him that of course I can wash dishes. But that’s hardly a job I want.’
Five minutes later our debt had been paid, in cash, to the clerk of the court, and we had acquired a patrón, Sehor Jaime Valera Guzman. He paid sixty pesos a day for Margrethe, thirty for me, plus our found. Court costs were twenty-five hundred pesos, plus fees for two non-resident work permits, plus war-tax stamps. The clerk figured our total indebtedness, then divided it out for us: In only a hundred and twenty-one days – four months – our obligation to our patr6n would be discharged. Unless, of course, we spent some money during that time.
He also directed us to our patrón’s place of business, Restaurante Pancho. Villa. Our patrón had already left in his private car. Patrones ride; peones walk.
Chapter 11
And Jacob served seven years for Rachel; and they seemed unto him but a few days, for the love he had to her.
Genesis 29:20
SOMETIMES, WHILE washing dishes, I would amuse myself by calculating how high a stack of dishes I had washed since going to work for our patrón, Don Jaime. The ordinary plate used in Pancho Villa café stacked twenty plates to a foot. I arbitrarily decided that a cup and saucer, or two glasses, would count as one plate, since these items did not stack well. And so forth.
The great Mazatlán lighthouse is five hundred and fifteen feet tall, only forty feet shorter than the Washington Monument. I remember the day I completed my first ‘lighthouse stack’. I had told Margrethe earlier that week that I was approaching my goal and expected to reach it by Thursday or early Friday.
And did so, Thursday evening – and left the scullery, stood in the door between the kitchen and the dining room, caught Margrethe’s eye, raised my hands high and shook hands with myself like a pugilist.
Margrethe stopped what she was doing – taking orders from a family party – and applauded. This caused her to have to explain to her guests what was going on, and that resulted in her stopping by the scullery a few minutes later to pass to me a ten-peso note, a congratulatory gift from the father of that family. I asked her to thank him for me, and please tell him that I had just started my second lighthouse stack, which I was dedicating to him and his family.
Which in turn resulted in Señora Valera sending her husband, Don Jaime, to find out why Margrethe was wasting time and making a scene instead of paying attention to her work… which resulted in Don Jaime inquiring how much the diners had tipped me and then matching it.
The Señora had no reason to complain; Margrethe was not only her best waitress; she was her only bilingual waitress. The day we started to work for Sr y Sra Valera a sign painter was called in to paint a conspicuous sign: ENGLIS SPOKE HERE. Thereafter, in addition to being available for any
English-speaking guests, Margrethe prepared menus in English (and the prices on the menus in English were about forty percent higher than the prices on the all-Spanish menus).
Don Jaime was not a bad boss. He was cheerful and, on the whole, kindly to his employees. When we had been there about a month he told me that he would not have bid in my debt had it not been that the judge would not permit my contract to be separated from Margrethe’s contract, we being a married couple (else I could have found myself a field hand able to see my wife only on rare occasions – as Don Ambrosio had told me, Don Clemente was a humane judge).
I told him that I was happy that the package included me but it simply showed his good judgment to want to hire Margrethe.
He agreed that that was true. He had attended the Wednesday labor auctions several weeks on end in search of a bilingual woman or girl who could be trained as a waitress, then had bid me in as well to obtain Margrethe – but he wished to tell me that he had not regretted it as he had never seen the scullery so clean, the dishes so immaculate, the silverware so shiny.
I assured him that it was my happy privilege to help uphold the honor and prestige of Restaurante Pancho Villa and its distinguished patrón, el Don Jaime.
In fact it would have been difficult for me not to improve that scullery. When I took over, I thought at first that the floor was dirt. And so it was – you could have planted potatoes! – but under the filth, about a
half inch down, was sound concrete. I cleaned and then kept it clean – my feet were still bare. Then I demanded roach powder.
Each morning I killed roaches and cleaned the floor. Each evening, just before quitting for the day, I sprinkled roach powder. It is impossible (I think) to conquer roaches, but it is possible to fight them to a draw, force them back and maintain a holding action.
As to the quality of my dishwashing, it could not be otherwise; my mother had a severe dirt phobia and, because of my placement in a large family, I washed or wiped dishes under her eye from age seven through thirteen (at which time I graduated through taking on a newspaper route that left me no time for dishwashing).
But just because I did it well, do not think I was enamored of dishwashing. It had bored me as a child; it bored me as a man.
Then why did I do it? Why didn’t I run away?
Isn’t that evident? Dishwashing kept me with Margrethe. Running away might be feasible for some debtors – I don’t think much effort went into trying to track down and bring back debtors who disappeared some dark night – but running away was not feasible for a married couple, one of whom was a conspicuous blonde in a country in which any blonde, is always conspicuous and the other was a man who could not speak Spanish.
While we both worked hard – eleven to eleven each day except Tuesday, with a nominal two hours off for siesta and a half hour each for lunch and dinner – we had the other twelve hours each day to ourselves, plus all day ‘Tuesday.
Niagara Falls never supplied a finer honeymoon. We had a tiny attic room at the back of the restaurant building. It was hot but we weren’t there much in the heat of the day – by eleven at night it was comfortable no matter how hot the day had been. In Mazatlán most residents of our social class (zero!) did not have inside plumbing. But we worked and lived in a restaurant building; there was a flush toilet we shared with other employees during working hours and shared with no one the other twelve hours of each day. (There was also a Maw Jones out back, which I sometimes used during working hours – I don’t think Margrethe ever used it.)
We had the use of a shower on the ground floor, -back to back with the employees’ toilet, and the needs of the scullery were such that the building had a large water heater. Señora Valera scolded us regularly for using too much hot water (‘Gas costs money!’); we listened in silence and went right on using whatever amount of hot water we needed.
Our patrón’s contract with the state required him to supply us with food and shelter (and clothing, under the law, but I did not learn this until too late to matter), which is why we slept there, and of course we ate there – not the chef’s specialties, but quite good food.
‘Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.’ We had only ourselves; it was enough.
Margrethe, because she sometimes received tips, especially from gringos, was slowly accumulating cash money. We spent as little of this as possible – she bought shoes for each of us -and she saved against the day when we would be free of our peonage and able to go north. I had no illusions that the nation north of us was the land of my birth… but it was this world’s analog of it; English was spoken there and I was sure that its culture would have to be closer to what we had been used to.
Tips to Margrethe brought us into friction with Señora Valera the very first week. While Don Jaime was legally our patrõn, she owned the restaurant – or so we were told by Amanda the cook. Jaime Valera had once been head-waiter there and had married the owner’s daughter. This made him permanent maitre d’hotel. When his father-in-law died, he became the owner in the eyes of the public. But his wife retained the purse strings and presided over the cash register.
(Perhaps I should add that he was ‘Don Jaime’ to us because he was our patrón; he was not a Don to the public.
The honorific ‘Don’ will not translate into English, but owning a restaurant does not make a man a Don – but, for example, being a judge does.)
The first time Margrethe was seen to receive a tip, the Señora told her to turn it over – at the end of each week she would receive her percentage.
Margrethe came straight to me in the scullery. ‘Alec, what shall I do? Tips were my main income in the Konge Knut and no one ever asked me to share them. Can she do this to me?’
I told her not to turn her tips over to the Señora but to tell her that we would discuss it with her at the end of the day.
There is one advantage to being a peón: You don’t get fired over a disagreement with your boss. Certainly we could be fired… but that would simply lose the Valeras some ten thousand pesos they had invested in us.
By the end of the day I knew exactly what to say and how to say it – how Margrethe must say it, as it was another month before I soaked up enough Spanish to maintain a minimum conversation:
‘Sir and Madam, we do not understand this ruling about gifts to me. We want to see the judge and ask him what our contract requires.’
As I had suspected, they were not willing to see the judge about it. They were legally entitled to Margrethe’s service but they had no claim on money given to her by a third party.
This did not end it. Señora Valera was so angry at being balked by a mere waitress that she had a sign posted: NO PROPINAS – NO TIPS, and the same notice was placed in the menus.
Peónes can’t strike. But there were five other waitresses, two of them Amanda’s daughters. The day Sefiora Valera ordered no tipping she found that she had just one waitress (Margrethe) and no one in the kitchen. She gave up. But I am sure she never forgave us.
Don Jaime treated us as employees; his wife treated us as slaves. Despite that old cliché about ‘wage, slaves’, there is a world of difference. Since we both tried hard to be faithful employees while paying off our debt but flatly refused to be slaves, we were bound to tangle with Señora Valera.
Shortly after the disagreement over tips Margrethe became convinced that the Señora was snooping in our bedroom. If true, there was no way to stop her; there was no lock for the door and she could enter our room without fear of being caught any day while we were working.
I gave some thought to boobytraps until Margrethe vetoed the idea. She simply thereafter kept her mo hey on her person. But it was a measure of what we thought of our ‘patroness’ that Margrethe considered it necessary to lake precautions against her stealing from us.
We did not let Señora Valera spoil our happiness. And we did not let our dubious status as a ‘married’ couple spoil our somewhat irregular honeymoon. Oh, I would have spoiled it because I always have had this unholy itch to analyze matters I really do not know how to analyze. But Margrethe is much more practical than I am and simply did not permit it. I tried to rationalize our relationship to her by pointing out that polygamy was not forbidden by Holy Writ but solely by modern law and custom – and she chopped me off briskly by saying that she had no interest in how many wives or concubines King Solomon had and did not regard him or any Old Testament character as a model for her own behavior. If I did not want to live with her, speak up! Say so!
I shut up. Some problems are best let be, not chewed over with words. This modern compulsion to ‘talk it out’ is a mistake at least as often as it is a solution.
But her disdain for Biblical authority concerning the legality of one man having two wives was so sharp that I asked her about it later – not about polygamy; I stayed away from that touchy subject; I asked her how she felt about the authority of Holy Writ in general. I explained that the church I was brought up in believed in strict interpretation -‘A whole Bible, not a Bible full of holes’ – Scripture was the literal word of God… but that I knew that other churches felt that the spirit rather than the letter ruled… some being so liberal that they hardly bothered with the Bible. Yet all of them called themselves Christian.
‘Margrethe my love, as deputy executive secretary of Churches United for Decency I was in daily contact with members of every Protestant sect in the country and in liaison association with many Roman Catholic clerics on matters where we could join in a united front. I learned that my own church did not have a monopoly on virtue. A man could be awfully mixed up in religious fundamentals and still be a fine citizen and a devout Christian.’
I chuckled as I recalled something and went on, ‘Or to put it in reverse, one of my Catholic friends, Father Mahaffey, told me that even I could squeeze into Heaven, because the Good. Lord in His infinite wisdom made allowances for the ignorance and wrongheadedness of Protestants.’
This conversation took place on a Tuesday, our day off, the one day a week the restaurant did not open, and in consequence we were on top of el Cerro de la Neveria Icebox Hill, but it sounds better in Spanish
and just finishing a picnic lunch. This hill was downtown, close to Pancho Villa café, but was a bucolic oasis; the citizens had followed the Spanish habit of turning hills into parks rather than building on them. A happy place –
‘My dear, I would never try to proselytize you into my church. But I do want to know as much about you as possible. I find that I don’t know much about churches in Denmark. Mostly Lutheran, I think – but does Denmark have its own established state church like some other European nations? Either way, which church is yours, and is it strict interpretationist or liberal – and again, either way, how do you feel about it? And remember what Father Mahaffey said – I agree with him. I don’t think that my church has the only door into Heaven.’
I was lying stretched out; Margrethe was seated with her knees drawn up and holding them and was faced west, staring out to sea. This placed her with her face turned away from me. She did not answer my query. Presently I said gently, ‘My dear, did you hear me?’
‘I heard you.’
Again I waited, then added, ‘If I have been prying where I should not pry, I’m sorry and I withdraw the question.’
‘No. I knew that I would have to answer it some day. Alec, I am not a Christian.’ She let go her knees, swung around, and looked me in the eye. ‘You can have a divorce as simply as we married, just by telling me so. I won’t fight it; I will go quietly away. But, Alec, when you told me that you loved me, then later when you told me that we were married in the eyes of God, you did not ask me my religion.’
‘Margrethe.’
‘Yes, Alec?’
‘First, wash out your mouth. Then ask my pardon.’
‘There may be enough wine left in the bottle to rinse out my mouth. But I cannot ask pardon for not telling you this. I would have answered truthfully at any time. You did not ask.’
‘Wash out your mouth for talking about divorce. Ask my pardon for daring to think that I would ever divorce you under any circumstances whatever. If you are ever naughty enough, I may beat you. But I would never put you away. For richer, for poorer, in sickness and heath, now and forever. Woman, I love you! Get that through your head.’
Suddenly she was in my arms, weeping for only the second time, and I was doing the only thing possible, namely, kissing her.
I heard a cheer behind me and turned my head. We had had the top of the hill to ourselves, it being a work day for most people. But I found that we had an audience of two streetwise urchins, so young that sex was unclear. Catching my eye, one of them cheered again, then made loud kissing noises.
‘Beat it!’ I called out. ‘Scram! Vaya con Dios! Is that what I wanted to say, Marga?’
She spoke to them and they did go away, after more high giggles. I needed the interruption. I had said to Margrethe what had to be said because she needed immediate reassurance after her silly, gallant speech. But nevertheless I was shaken to my depths.
I started to speak, then decided that I had said enough for one day. But Margrethe said nothing, too; the silence grew painful. I felt that matters could not be left so, balanced uncertainly on edge. ‘What is your faith, dear one? Judaism? I do remember now that there are Jews in Denmark. Not all Danes are Lutheran.’
‘Some Jews, yes. But barely one in a thousand. No, Alec. Uh – There are older Gods.’
‘Older than Jehovah? Impossible.’
Margrethe said nothing – characteristically. If she disagreed, she usually said nothing. She seemed to have no interest in winning arguments, in which she must differ from 99 percent of the human race… many of whom appear willing to suffer any disaster rather than lose an argument.
So I found myself having to conduct both sides to keep the argument from dying through lack of nourishment. ‘I retract that. I should not have said, “Impossible.” I was speaking from the accepted
chronology as given by Bishop Ussher. If one accepts his dating, then the world was created five thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight years ago this coming October. Of course that dating is not itself a matter of Holy Writ; Hales arrived at a different figure, uh, seven thousand four hundred and five, I think – I do better when I write figures down. And other scholars get slightly different answers.
‘But they all agree that some four or five thousand years before Christ occurred the unique event, Creation. At that point Jehovah created the world and, in so doing, created time. Time cannot exist alone. As a corollary, nothing and no one and no god can be older than Jehovah, since Jehovah created time. You see?’
‘I wish I’d kept quiet.’
‘My dear! I am simply trying to have an intellectual discussion; I did not and do not and never do and never will intend to hurt you. I said that was the case by the orthodox way of dating. Clearly you are using another way. Will you explain it to me? – and not jump all over poor old Alex every time he opens his mouth? I was schooled as a minister in a church that emphasizes preaching; discussion comes as naturally to me as swimming does to fish. But now you preach and I’ll listen. Tell me about these older gods.’
‘You know of them. The oldest and greatest we celebrate tomorrow; the middle day of each week is his.’
‘Today is Tuesday, tomorrow – Wednesday! Wotan! He is your God?’
‘Odin. “Wotan” is a German distortion of Old Norse. Father Odin and his two brothers created the world. In the beginning there was void, nothing – then the rest of it reads much like Genesis, even to Adam and Eve – but called Askr and Embla rather than Adam and Eve.’
‘Perhaps it is Genesis, Margrethe.’
‘What do you mean, Alec?’
‘The Bible is the Word of God, in particular the English translation known as the King James version
because every word of that translation was sustained by prayer and the best efforts of the world’s greatest scholars – any difference in opinion was taken directly to the Lord in prayer. So the King James Bible is the Word of God.
‘But nowhere is it written that this can be the only Word of God. A sacred writing of another race at another time in another language can also be inspired history… if it is compatible with the Bible. And that is what you have just described, is it not?’
‘Ah, just on Creation and on Adam and Eve, Alec. The chronology does not match at all. You said that the world was created about six thousand years ago?’
‘About. Hales makes it longer. The Bible does not give dates; dating is a modern invention.’
‘Even that longer time – Hales? – is much too short. A hundred thousand years would be more like it.’
I started to expostulate – after all, some things are just too much to be swallowed – then remembered that I had warned myself not to say anything that could cause Margrethe to shut up. ‘Go on, dear. Do your religious writings tell what happened during all those millennia?’
‘Almost all of it happened before writing was invented. Some was preserved in epic poems sung by skalds. But even that did not start until men learned to live in tribes and Odin taught them to sing. The longest period was ruled by the frost giants before mankind was more than wild animals, hunted for sport. But the real difference in the chronology is this, Alec. The Bible runs from Creation to Judgment Day, then Millennium – the Kingdom on Earth – then the War in Heaven and the end of the world. After that is the Heavenly City and Eternity – time has stopped. Is that correct?’
‘Well, yes. A professional eschatologist would find that overly simplified but you have correctly described the main outlines. The details are given in Revelations – the Revelation of Saint John the Divine, I should say. Many prophets have witnessed the final things but Saint John is the only one with the complete story… because Christ Himself delivered the Revelation to John to stop the elect from being deceived by false prophets. Creation, the Fall from Grace, the long centuries of struggle and trial, then the final battle, followed by Judgment and the Kingdom. What does your faith say, my love?’
‘The final battle we call Ragnarok rather than Armageddon -‘
‘I can’t see that terminology matters.’
‘Please, dear. The name does not matter but what happens does. In your Judgment Day the goats are separated from the sheep. The saved go to eternal bliss; the damned go to eternal punishment. Correct?’
‘Correct – while noting for purposes of scientific accuracy that some authorities assert that, while bliss is eternal, God so loves, the world that even the damned may eventually be saved; no soul is utterly beyond redemption. Other theologians regard this as heresy – but it appeals to me; I have never liked the idea of eternal damnation. I’m a sentimentalist, my dear.’
‘I know you are, Alec, and I love you for it. You should find the old religion appealing… as it does not have eternal damnation.’
‘It does not?’
‘No. At Ragnarok the world as we know it will be destroyed. But that is not the end. After a long time, a time of healing, a new universe will be created, one better and cleaner and free from the evils of this world. It too will last for countless millennia… until again the forces of evil and cold contend against the forces of goodness and light… and again there is a time of rest, followed by a new creation and another chance for men. Nothing is ever finished, nothing is ever perfect, but over and over again the race of men gets another chance to do better than last time, ever and again without end.’
‘And this you believe, Margrethe?’
‘I find it easier to believe than the smugness of the saved and the desperate plight of the damned in the Christian faith. Jehovah is said to be all powerful. If this is true, then the poor damned souls in Hell are there because Jehovah planned it that way in every minute detail. Is this not so?’
I hesitated. The logical reconciliation of Omnipotence, Omniscience, and Omnibenevolence is the thorniest problem in theology, one causing even Jesuits to break their teeth. ‘Margrethe, some of the mysteries of the Almighty are not easily explained. We mortals must accept Our Father’s benevolent intention toward us, whether or not we understand His works.’
‘ Must a baby understand God’s benevolent intention when his brains are dashed out against a rock? Does he then go straight to Hell, praising the Lord for His infinite Wisdom and Goodness?’
‘Margrethe! What in the world are you talking about?’
I am talking about places in the Old Testament in which Jehovah gives direct orders to kill babies, sometimes ordering that they be killed by dashing them against rocks. See that Psalm that starts “By the rivers of Babylon -” And see the word of the Lord Jehovah in Hosea: “their infants shall be dashed in – pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up.” And there is the case of Elisha and the bears.
Alec, do you believe in your heart that your. God caused bears to tear up little children merely because they made fun of an old man’s bald head?’ She waited.
And I waited. Presently she said, ‘Is that story of she bears and the forty-two children the literal Word of God?’
‘Certainly it’s the Word of God! But I don’t pretend to understand it fully. Margrethe, if you want detailed explanations of everything the Lord has done, pray to Him for enlightenment. But don’t crowd me about it.’
‘I did not intend to crowd you, Alec. I’m sorry.’
‘No need to be. I’ve never understood about those bears but I don’t let it shake my faith. Perhaps it’s a parable. But look, dear, doesn’t your Father Odin have a pretty bloody history Himself?’
‘Not on the same scale. Jehovah destroyed city after city, every man, woman, and child, down to the youngest baby. Odin killed only in combat against opponents his own size. But, most important difference of all, Father Odin is not all powerful and does not claim to be all wise.’
(A theology that avoids the thorniest problem – But how can you call Him ‘God’ if He is not omnipotent?)
She went on, ‘Alec my only love, I don’t want to attack your faith. I don’t enjoy it and never intended to
and hope that nothing like it will ever happen again. But you did ask me point blank whether or not I accepted the authority of “Holy Writ – by which you mean your Bible. I must answer just as point blank. I do not. The Jehovah or Yahweh of the Old Testament seems to me to be a sadistic, bloodthirsty, genocidal villain. I cannot understand how He can be identified with the gentle Christ of the New Testament. Even through a mystic Trinity.’
I started to answer but she hurried on. ‘Dear heart, before we leave this subject I must tell you something I have been thinking about. Does your religion offer an explanation of the weird thing that has happened to us? Once to me, twice to you – this changed world?’
(It had been endlessly on my mind, too!) ‘No. I must Confess it. I wish I had a Bible to search an explanation. But I have been searching in my mind. I haven’t been able to find anything that should have prepared me for this.’ I sighed. ‘It’s a bleak feeling. But -‘ I smiled at her.’ ‘Divine Providence placed you with me. No land is strange to me that has Margrethe in it.’
‘Dear Alec: I asked because the old religion does offer an explanation.’
‘What?’
‘Not a cheerful one. At the beginning of this cycle Loki was overcome – do you know Loki?’
‘Some. The mischief maker.’
‘”Mischie” is too mild a word; he works evil. For thousands of years he has been a prisoner, chained to a great rock. Alec, the end of every cycle in the story of man begins the same way. Loki manages to escape his bonds… and chaos results.’
She looked at me with great sadness. ‘Alec, I am sorry… but I do believe that Loki is loose. The signs show it. Now anything can happen. We enter the Twilight of the Gods. Ragnarok comes. Our world ends.’
Chapter 12
And in the same hour was there a great earthquake, and the tenth part of the city fell, and in the earthquake were slain of men seven thousand:
and the remnant were affrighted, and gave glory to the God of Heaven.
Revelation 11:13
I WASHED another lighthouse stack of dishes while I pondered the things Margrethe had said to me that beautiful afternoon on Icebox Hill – but I never again mentioned the subject to Margrethe. And she did not speak of it to me; as Margrethe never argued about anything if she could reasonably keep silent.
Did I believe her theory about Loki and Ragnarok? Of course not! Oh, I had no objection to calling Armageddon by the name ‘Ragnarok’. Jesus or Joshua or Jesu; Mary or Miriam or Maryam or Maria, Jehovah or Yahweh – any verbal symbol will do as long as speaker and listener agree on meaning. But Loki? Ask me to believe that a mythical demigod of an ignorant, barbarian race has wrought changes in the whole universe? Now, really!
I am a modern man, with an open mind – but not so empty that the wind blows through it. Somewhere in Holy Writ lay a rational explanation for the upsets that had happened to us. I need not look to ghost stories of long-dead pagans for explanations.
I missed not having a Bible at hand. Oh, no doubt there were Catholic Bibles at the basilica three blocks away… in Latin or in Spanish. I wanted the King James version. Again no doubt there were copies of it somewhere in this city – but I did not know where. For the first time in my Life I envied the perfect memory of Preachin’ (Rev Paul Balonius) who tramped up and down the central states the middle of last century, preaching the Word without carrying the Book with him. Brother Paul was reputed to be able to quote from memory any verse cited by book, chapter, and number of verse, or, conversely, correctly place by book, chapter, and number any verse read to him.
I was born too late to meet Preachin’ Paul, so I never saw him do this – but perfect memory is a special gift God bestows not too infrequently; I have no reason to doubt that Brother Paul had it. Paul died
suddenly, somewhat mysteriously, and possibly sinfully – in the words of my mission studies professor, one should exercise great prudence in praying alone with a married woman.
I don’t have Paul’s gift. I can quote the first few chapters of Genesis and several of the Psalms and the Christmas story according to Luke, and some other passages. But for today’s problem I needed to study in exact detail all the prophets, especially the prophecy known as the Revelation of Saint John the Divine.
Was Armageddon approaching? Was the Second Coming at hand? Would I myself still be alive in the flesh when the great Trump sounds?
A thrilling thought, and not one to be discarded too quickly. Many millions will be alive on that great day; that mighty host could include Alexander Hergensheimer. Would I hear His Shout and see the dead rise up and then myself ‘be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air’ and then ever be with the Lord, as promised? The most thrilling passage in the Great Book!
Not that I had any assurance that I myself would be among those saved on that great day, even if I lived in the flesh to that day. Being an ordained minister of the Gospel does not necessarily improve one’s chances. Clergymen are aware of this cold truth (if they are honest with themselves) but laymen sometimes think that men of the cloth have an inside track.
Not true! For a clergyman, there are no excuses. He can never claim that ‘he didn’t know it was loaded’, or cite youth and inexperience as a reason to ask for mercy, or claim ignorance of the law, or any of the other many excuses by which a layman might show a touch less than moral perfection but still be saved.
Knowing this, I was forced to admit that my own record lately did not suggest that I was among the saved. Certainly, I was born again. Some people seem to think that this is a permanent condition, like a college degree. Brother, don’t count on it! I was only too aware that I had racked up quite a number of sins lately: Sinful pride. Intemperance. Greed. Lechery. Adultery. Doubt. And others.
Worse yet, I felt no contrition for the very worst of these.
If the record did not show that Margrethe was saved and listed for Heaven, then I had no interest in going there myself. God help me, that was the truth.
I worried about Margrethe’s immortal soul.
She could not claim the second chance of all pre-Christian Era souls. She had been born into the Lutheran Church, not my church but ancestor to my church, ancestor to Al Protestant churches, the first fruit of the Diet of Worms. (When I was a lad in Sunday school, ‘Diet of Worms’ inspired mind pictures quite foreign to theology!)
The only way Margrethe could be saved would be by renouncing her heresy and seeking to be born again. But she must do this herself; I could not do it for her.
The most. I could possibly do would be to urge her to seek salvation. But I would have to do it most carefully. One does not persuade a butterfly to light on one’s hand by brandishing a sword. Margrethe was not a heathen ignorant of Christ and needing only to be instructed. No, she had been born into Christianity and had rejected it, eyes open. She could cite Scripture as readily as I could at some time she had studied the Book most diligently, far more than most laymen. When and why I never asked, but I think it must have been at the time when she began to contemplate leaving the Christian faith. Margrethe was so serious and so good that I felt certain that she would never take such a drastic step without long, hard study.
How urgent was the problem of Margrethe? Did I have thirty years or ser to learn her mind and feel out the best approach? Or was Armageddon so close upon us that even a day’s delay could doom her for eternity?
The pagan Ragnarok and the Christian Armageddon have this in common: The final battle will be preceded by great signs and portents. Were we experiencing such omens? Margrethe thought so. Myself, I found the idea that this world changing presaged Armageddon more attractive than the alternative, i.e., paranoia on my part. Could a ship be wrecked and a world changed just to keep me from checking a thumbprint? I had thought so at the time but – oh, come now, Alex, you are not that important.
(Or was I?)
I have never been a Millenarianist. I am aware how often the number one thousand appears in the Bible, especially in prophecy – but I have never believed that the Almighty was constrained to work in even millennia – or any other numbering patterns – just to please numerologists.
On the other hand I know that many thousands of sensible and devout people place enormous importance on the forthcoming end of the Second Millennium, with Judgment Day and Armageddon and all that must follow – expected at that time. They find their proofs in the Bible and claim confirmation in the lines in the Great Pyramid and in a variety of Apocrypha.
But they differ among themselves as to the end of the millennium. 2000 AD? Or 2001 AD? Or is the correct dating 3 pm Jerusalem local time April 7, 2030 AD? If indeed scholars have the time and date of the Crucifixion – and the earthquake at the moment of His death – correctly figured against mundane time reckoning. Or should it be Good Friday 2030 AD as calculated by the lunar calendar? This is no trivial matter in view of what we are attempting to date.
But, if we take the birth of Christ rather than the date of the Crucifixion as the starting point from which to count, the millennia, it is evident at once that neither the naive date of 2000 AD nor the slightly less naive date of 2001 can be the bimillenarian date because Jesus was born in Bethlehem on Christmas Day year 5 BC.
Every educated person knows this and almost no one ever thinks about it.
How could the greatest event in all history, the birth of our Lord Incarnate, have been misdated by five years? Incredible!
Very easily. A sixth-century monk made a mistake in arithmetic. Our present dating (‘Anno Domini) was not used until centuries after Christ was born. Anyone who has ever tried to decipher on a cornerstone a date written in Roman numerals can sympathize with the error of Brother Dionysius Exiguus. In the sixth century there were so few who could read at all that the error went undetected for many years – and by then it was too late to change all the records. So we have the ludicrous situation that Christ was born five years before Christ was born – an Irishism that can be resolved only by noting that one clause refers to fact and the other clause refers to a false-to-fact calendar.
For two thousand years the good monk’s error was of little importance. But now it becomes of supreme importance. If the Millenarianists are correct, the end of the world can be expected Christmas Day this year.
Please note that I did not say ‘December 25th’. The day and month of Christ’s birth are unknown. Matthew notes that Herod was king; Luke states that Augustus was Caesar and that Cyrenius was governor of Syria, and we all know that Joseph and Mary had traveled from Nazareth – to Bethlehem to be counted and taxed.
There are no other data, neither of Holy Writ nor of Roman civil records.
So there you have it. By Millenarianist theory, the Final Judgment can be expected about thirty-five years from now… or later this afternoon!
Were it not for Margrethe this uncertainty would not keep me awake nights. But how can I sleep if my beloved is in immediate danger of being cast down into the Bottomless Pit, there to suffer throughout eternity?
What would you do?
Envision me standing barefooted on a greasy floor’, washing dishes to pay off my indenture, while thinking deep thoughts of last and first things. A laughable sight! But dishwashing does not occupy all the mind; I was better off with hard bread for the mind to chew on.
Sometimes I contrasted my sorry state with what I had so recently been, while wondering if I would ever find my way back through the maze into the place I had built for myself.
Would I want to go back? Abigail was there – and, while polygamy was acceptable in the Old Testament, it was not accepted in the forty-six states. That had been settled once and for all when the Union Army’s artillery had destroyed the temple of the antichrist in Salt Lake City and the Army had supervised the breaking up and diaspora of those immoral ‘families’.
Giving up Margrethe for Abigail would be far too high a price to pay to resume the position of power and importance I had until recently held. Yet I had enjoyed my work and the deep satisfaction over worthwhile accomplishment that went with it. We had achieved our best year since the foundation was formed – I refer to the non-profit corporation, Churches United for Decency. ‘Non-profit’ does not mean that such an organization cannot pay appropriate salaries and even bonuses, and I had been taking a well-earned vacation after the best fund-raising year of our history – primarily my accomplishment because, as deputy director, my first duty was to see that our coffers were kept filled.
But I took even greater satisfaction in our labors in the vineyards, as fund raising means nothing if our
programs of spiritual welfare do not meet their goals.
The past ‘year’ had seen the following positive accomplishments:
a) A federal law making abortion a capital offense;
b) A federal law making the manufacture, sale, possession, importation, transportation, and/or use of any contraceptive drug or device a felony carrying a mandatory prison sentence of not less than a year and a day but not more than twenty years for each offense – and eliminating the hypocritical subterfuge of ‘For Prevention of Disease Only’;
c) A federal law that, while it did not abolish gambling, did make the control and licensing of it a federal jurisdiction. One step at a time – having built. this foundation we could tackle those twin pits, Nevada and New Jersey, piece by piece. Divide and conquer!
d) A Supreme Court decision in which we had appeared as amicus curiae under which community standards of the typical or median-population community applied to all cities of each state (Tomkins v. Allied News Distributors);
e) Real progress in our drive to get tobacco defined as a prescription drug through the tactical device of separating snuff and chewing tobacco from the problem by inaugurating the definition ‘substances intended for burning and inhaling’;
f) Progress at our annual national prayer meeting on several subjects in which I was interested. One was the matter of how to remove the tax-free status of any private school not affiliated with a Christian sect. Policy on this was not yet complete because of the thorny matter of Roman Catholic schools. Should our umbrella cover them? Or was it time to strike? Whether the Catholics were allies or enemies was always a deep problem to those of us out on the firing line.
At least as difficult was the Jewish problem – was a humane solution possible? If not, then what? Should we grasp the nettle? This was debated only in camera.
Another matter was a pet project of my own: the frustrating of astronomers. Few laymen realize what
mischief astronomers are up to. I first noticed it when I was still in engineering school and took a course in descriptive astronomy under the requirements for breadth in each student’s program. Give an astronomer a bigger telescope and turn him loose, leave him unsupervised, and the first -thing he does is to come down with pestiferous, half-baked guesses denying the ancient truths of Genesis.
There is only one way to deal with this sort of nonsense: Hit them in the pocketbook! Redefine ‘educational’ to exclude those colossal white elephants, astronomical observatories. Make the Naval Observatory the only one tax free, reduce its staff, and limit their activity to matters clearly related to navigation. (Some of the most blasphemous and subversive theories have come from tenured civil servants there who don’t have enough legitimate Work to keep them busy.)
Self-styled ‘scientists’ are usually up to no good, but astronomers are the worst of the lot.
Another matter that comes up regularly at each annual’ prayer meeting I did not favor spending time or money on: ‘Votes for Women’. These hysterical females styling themselves ‘suffragettes’ are not a threat, can never win, and it just makes them feel self-important to pay attention to them. They should not be jailed and should not be displayed in stocks – never let them be martyrs! Ignore them.
There were other interesting and worthwhile goals that I kept off the agenda and did not suffer to be brought up from the floor in the sessions I moderated, but instead carried them on my ‘Maybe next year’ list:
Separate schools for boys and girls.
Restoring the death penalty for witchcraft and satanism.
The Alaska option for the Negro problem.
Federal control of prostitution.
Homosexuals – what’s the answer? Punishment? Surgery? Other?
There are endless good causes commending themselves to guardians of the public morals – the question is always how to pick and choose to the greater glory of God.
But all of these issues, fascinating as they are, I might never again pursue. A sculleryman who is just learning the local language (ungrammatically, I feel sure!) is not able to be a political force. So I did not worry about such matters and concentrated on my real problems: Margrethe’s heresy and more immediate but less important, getting legally free of peonage and going north.
We had served more than one hundred days when I asked Don Jaime to help me work out the exact date when we would have discharged the terms of our debt contract – a polite way of saying: Dear Boss, come the day, we are going to leave here like a scared rabbit. Plan on it.
I had figured on a total obligated time of one hundred and twenty-one days… and Don Jaime shocked me almost out of my Spanish by getting a result of one hundred and fifty-eight days.
More than six weeks to go when I figured that we would be free next week!
I protested, pointing out that our total obligation as listed by the court, divided by the auction value placed on our services (pesos sixty for Margrethe, half that for me, for each day), gave one hundred and twenty-one days… of which we had served one hundred fifteen.
Not a hundred and fifteen – ninety-nine – he handed me a calendar and invited me to count. It was at that point that I discovered that our lovely Tuesdays did not reduce our committed time. Or so said our patrón.
‘And besides that, Alexandro,’ he added, ‘you have failed to figure the interest on the unpaid balance; you haven’t multiplied by the inflation factor; you haven’t allowed for taxes, or even your contribution for Our Lady of Sorrows. If you fall ill, I should support you, eh?’
(Well, yes. While I had not thought about it, I did think a patrón had that duty toward his peones.) ‘Don Jaime, the day you bid in our debts, the clerk of the court figured the, contract for me. He told me our obligation was one hundred and twenty-one days. He told me!’
‘Then go talk to the clerk of the court about it.’ Don Jaime turned his back on me.
That chilled me. Don Jaime seemed as willing for me to take it up with the referee authority as he had been unwilling to discuss Margrethe’s tips with the court. To me this meant that he had handled enough of these debt contracts to be certain how they worked and thus had no fear that the judge or his clerk might rule against him.
I was not able to speak with Margrethe about it in private until that night. ‘Marga, how could I be so mistaken about this? I thought the clerk worked it out for us before he had us countersign the assignment of debt. One hundred and twenty-one days. Right?’
She did not answer me at once. I persisted, ‘Isn’t that what you told me?’
‘Alec, despite the fact that I now usually think in English – or in Spanish, lately – when I must do arithmetic, I work it in Danish. The Danish word for sixty is ‘tres’- and that
is also the Spanish word for three. Do you see how easily I could get mixed up? I don’t know now whether I said to you, “Ciento y veintiuno” or “Ciento y sesentiuno” – because I remember numbers in Danish, not in English, not in Spanish. I thought you did the division yourself.’
‘Oh, I did. Certainly the clerk didn’t say, “A hundred and twenty-one.” He didn’t use any English, that I recall. And at that time I did not know any Spanish. Señor Muñoz explained it to you and you translated for me and later I did the arithmetic again and it seemed to confirm what he had said. Or you had said. Oh, shucks, I don’t know!’
‘Then why don’t we forget it until we can ask Señor Muñoz?’
‘Marga, doesn’t it upset you to find that we are going to, have to slave away in this dump an extra five weeks?’
‘Yes, but not very much. Alec, I’ve always had to work. Working aboard ship was harder work than teaching school – but I got to travel and see strange places. Waiting tables here is a little harder than cleaning rooms in the Konge Knut – but I have you with me here and that more than makes up for it. I want to go with you to your homeland… but it’s not my homeland, so I’m not as eager to leave here as
you are. To me, today, where you are is my homeland.’
‘Darling, you are so logical and reasonable and civilized that you sometimes drive me right straight up the wall.’
‘Alec, I don’t mean to do that. I just want us to stop worrying about it until we can see Señor Muñoz. But right this minute I want to rub your back until you relax.’
‘Madame, you’ve convinced me! But only if I have the privilege of rubbing your poor tired feet before you rub my back.’
We did both. ‘Ah, wilderness were paradise enow!’
Beggars can’t be choosy. I got up early the next morning, saw the clerk’s runner, was told that I could not see the clerk until court adjourned for the day, so I made a semi-appointment for close-of-court on Tuesday – ‘semi’ in that we were committed to show up; Señor Muñoz was not. (But would be there, Deus volent.)
So on Tuesday we went on our picnic outing as usual, as we could not see Señor Muñoz earlier than about 4 pm. But we were Sunday-go-to-meeting rather than dressed for a picnic – meaning that we both wore our shoes, both had had baths that morning, and I had shaved, and I wore my best clothes, handed down from Don Jaime but clean and fresh, rather than the tired Coast Guard work pants I wore in the scullery. Margrethe wore the colorful outfit she had acquired our first day in Mazatlán.
Then we both endeavored not to get too sweaty or dusty. Why we thought it mattered I cannot say. But somehow each of us felt that propriety called for one’s best appearance in visiting a court.
As usual we walked over to the fountain to-see our friend Pepe before swinging back to climb our hill. He greeted us in the intimate mode of friends and we exchanged graceful amenities of the sort that fit so well in Spanish and are almost never encountered in English. Our weekly visit with Pepe had become an important part of our social life. We knew more about him now – from Amanda, not from him – and I respected him more than ever.
Pepe had not been born without legs (as I had once thought); he had formerly been a teamster, driving lorries over the mountains to Durango and beyond. Then there had been an accident and Pepe had been pinned under his rig for two days before he was rescued. He was brought in to Our Lady of Sorrows apparently DOA.
Pepe was tougher than that. Four months later he was released from hospital; someone passed the hat to buy him his little cart; he received his mendicant’s license, and he took up his pitch by the fountain – friend to streetwalkers, friend to Dons, and a merry grin for the worst that fate could hand him.
When, after a decent interval for, conversation and inquiries as to health and welfare and that of mutual acquaintances, we turned to leave, I offered our friend a one-peso note.
He handed it back. ‘Twenty-five centavos, my friend. Do you not have change? Or did you wish me to make change?’
‘Pepe our friend, it was our intention and our wish that you keep this trivial gift.’
‘No no no. From tourists I take their teeth and ask for more. From you, my friend, twenty-five centavos.’
I did not argue. In Mexico a man has his dignity, or he is dead.
El Cerro de la Nevería is one hundred meters high; we climbed it very slowly, with me hanging back because I wanted to be certain not to place any strain on Margrethe. From signs I was almost certain that she was in a family way. But she had not seen fit to discuss it with me and of course I could not raise the subject if she did not.
We found our favorite place, where we enjoyed shade from a small tree but nevertheless had a full view all around, three hundred and sixty degrees – northwest into the Gulf of California’, west into the ` Pacific and what might or might not be clouds on the horizon capping a peak at the tip of Baja California two hundred miles away, southwest along our own peninsula to Cerro Vigia (Lookout Hill) with beautiful Playa de las 0las Altas between us and Cerro Vigía, then beyond it Cerro Creston, the site of the giant lighthouse, the ‘Faro’ itself commanding the tip of the peninsula – south right across town to the Coast Guard landing. On the east and north-east were the mountains that concealed Durango a hundred and fifty miles away… but today the air was so clear that it felt as if we could reach out and touch those
peaks.
Mazatlán was spread out below like a toy village. Even the basilica looked like an architect’s scale model from up’ here, rather than a most imposing church – for the umpteenth time I wondered how the Catholics, with their (usually) poverty-stricken congregations, could build such fine churches while their Protestant opposite numbers had such a time raising the mortgages on more modest structures.
Look, Alec!’ said Margrethe. ‘Anibal and Roberto have their new aeroplano!’ She pointed.
Sure enough, there were now two aeroplanos at the Coast Guard mooring. One was the grotesque giant dragonfly that had rescued us; the new one was quite different. At first I thought it had sunk at its moorings; the floats on which the older craft landed on the water were missing from this structure.
Then I realized that this new craft was literally a flying boat. The body of the aeroplano itself was a float, or a boat – a watertight structure. The propelling engines of this craft were mounted above the wings.
I was not sure that I trusted these radical changes. The homely certainties of the craft we had ridden in were more to my taste.
‘Alec, let’s go call on them next Tuesday.’
‘All right.’
‘Do you suppose that Anibal would possibly offer us a ride in his new aeroplano?’
‘Not if the Commandant knows about it.’ I did not say that the newfangled rig did not look safe to me; Margrethe was always fearless. ‘But we’ll call on them and ask to see it. Lieutenant Anibal will like that. Roberto, too. Let’s eat.’
‘Piggy piggy,’ she answered,’ and spread out a servilleta, started covering it with food from a basket I had carried. Tuesdays gave Margrethe an opportunity to vary Amanda’s excellent Mexican cooking with
her own Danish and international cooking. Today she had elected to make Danish open-face sandwiches so much enjoyed by all Danes – and by anyone else who has ever had a chance to enjoy them. Amanda allowed Margrethe to do what she liked in the kitchen, and Señora Valera did not interfere – she never came into the kitchen, under some armed truce arrived at before we joined the staff. Amanda was a woman of firm character.
Today’s sandwiches featured heavily the tender, tasty shrimp for which Mazatlán is famous, but the shrimp were just a starter. I remember ham, turkey, crumbled crisp bacon, mayonnaise, three sorts – of cheese, several sorts of pickle, little peppers, unidentified fish, thin slices of beef, fresh tomato, tomato paste, three sorts of lettuce, what I think was deep-fried eggplant. But thank goodness it is not necessary to understand food in order to enjoy it Margrethe placed it in front of me; I happily chomped away, whether I knew what I was eating or not.
An hour later I was belching and pretending not to. ‘Margrethe, have I told you today that I love you?’
‘Yes, but not lately.’
‘I do. You are not only beautiful, fair to see and of gainly proportions, you are also a fine cook.’
‘Thank you, sir. I
‘Do you wish to be admired for your intellectual excellence as well?’
‘Not necessarily. No.’
‘As you wish. If you change your mind, let me know. Quit fiddling with the remnants; I’ll tidy up later. Lie down here beside me and explain to me why you continue to live with me. It can’t be for my cooking. Is it because I am the best dishwasher on the west coast of Mexico?’
‘Yes.’ She went right on tidying things, did not stop until our picnic site was perfectly back in order, with all that was left back in the basket, ready to be returned to Amanda.
Then she lay down beside me, slid her arm under my neck – then raised her head. ‘What’s that?’
‘What’s -‘ Then I heard it. A distant rumble increasing in volume, like a freight train coming ’round the bend. But the nearest railway, the line north to Chihuahua and south to Guadalajara, was distant, beyond the peninsula of Mazatlán.
The rumble grew louder; the ground started to sway. Margrethe sat up. ‘Alec, I’m frightened.’
‘Don’t be afraid, dear; I’m here.’ I reached up and pulled her down to me, held her tight while the solid ground bounced up and down under us and the roaring rumble increased to unbelievable volume.
If you’ve ever been in an earthquake, even a small one, you know what we were feeling better than my words can say. If you have never been in one, you won’t believe me and the more accurately I describe it, the more certain you are not to believe me.
The worst part about a quake is that there is nothing solid to cling to anywhere… but the most startling thing is the noise, the infernal racket of every sort – the crash of rock grinding together under you, the ripping, rending sounds of buildings being torn apart, the screams of the frightened, the cries of the hurt and the lost, the howling and wailing of animals caught by disaster beyond their comprehension.
And none of it will stop.
This, went on for an endless time – then the main earthquake hit us and the city fell down.
I could hear it. The noise that could not increase suddenly doubled. I managed to get up on one elbow and look. The dome of the basilica broke like a soap bubble. ‘Oh, Marga, look! No, don’t – this is terrible.’
She half sat up, said nothing and her face was blank. I kept my arm around her and looked down the peninsula past Cerro Vigla and at the lighthouse.
It was leaning.
While I watched it broke about halfway up, then slowly and with dignity collapsed to the ground.
Past the city I caught sight of the moored aeroplanos of the Coast Guard. They were dancing around in a frenzy; the new one dipped one wing; the water caught it – then I lost sight of it as a cloud rose up from the city, a cloud of dust from thousands and thousands of tons of shattered masonry.
I looked for the restaurant, and found it: EL RESTAURANTE PANCHO VILLA. Then while I watched, the wall on which the sign was painted crumpled and fell into the street. Dust rose up and concealed where it had been.
‘Margrethe! It’s gone. The restaurant. El Pancho Villa.’ I pointed.
‘I don’t see anything.’
‘It’s gone, I tell you. Destroyed. Oh, thank the Lord that Amanda and the girls were not there today!’
‘Yes. Alec, won’t it ever stop?’
Suddenly it did stop, – much more suddenly than it started. Miraculously the dust was gone; there was no racket, no screams of the hurt and dying, no howls of animals.
The lighthouse was back where it belonged.
I looked to the left of it, checking on the moored aeroplanos -nothing. Not even the driven piles to which they should be tied. I looked back at the city – all serene. The basilica was unhurt, beautiful. I looked for the Pancho Villa sign.
I could not find it. There was a building on what seemed the proper corner, but its shape was not quite right and it had different windows. ‘Marg – Where’s the restaurant?’
‘I don’t know. Alec, what is happening?’
‘They’re at it again,’ I said bitterly. ‘The world changers.
The earthquake is over but this is not the same city we were in. It looks a lot like it but it’s not the same.’
I was only half right. Before we could make up our minds to start down the hill, the rumble started up again. Then the swaying… then the greatly increased noise and violent movement of the land, and this city was destroyed. Again I saw our towering lighthouse crack and fall. Again the church fell in on itself.
Again the dust clouds rose and with it the screams and howls.
I raised my clenched fist and shook it at the sky. ‘God damn it! Stop! Twice is too much.’
I was not blasted.
Chapter 13
I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of the spirit.
Ecclesiastes 1:14
I AM going to skip over the next three days, for there was nothing good about them. ‘There was blood in the streets and dust.’ Survivors, those of us who were not hurt, not prostrate with grief, not dazed or hysterical beyond action – few of us, in short – worked at the rubble here and there trying to find living creatures under the bricks and stones and plaster. But how much can you do with your naked fingers
against endless tons of rock?
And how much can you do when you do dig down and discover that you were too late, that indeed it was ~too late before you started? We heard this mewling, something like a kitten, so we dug most carefully, trying not to put any pressure on whatever was underneath, trying not to let the stones we shifted dislodge anything that would cause more grief underneath – and found the source. An infant, freshly dead. Pelvis broken, one side of its head bashed. ‘Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.’ I turned my head away and threw up. Never will I read Psalm 137 again.
That night we spent on the lower slopes of Icebox Hill. When the sun went down, we perforce stopped trying. Not only did the darkness make it impossible to work but there was looting going on. I had a deep conviction that any looter was a potential rapist and murderer. I was prepared to die for Margrethe should it become necessary – but I had no wish to die gallantly but futilely, in a confrontation that could have been avoided.
Early the following afternoon the Mexican Army arrived. We had accomplished nothing useful in the meantime more of the same picking away at rubble. Never mind what we found. The soldiers put a stop even to that; all civilians were herded back up the peninsula, away from the ruined city, to the railroad station across the river. There we waited – new widows, husbands freshly bereaved, lost children, injured on make-do stretchers, walking wounded, some with no marks on them but with empty eyes and no speech. Margrethe and, I were of the lucky ones; we were merely hungry, thirsty, dirty, and covered with bruises from head to foot from lying on the ground during the earthquake. Correction: during two earthquakes.
Had anyone else experienced two earthquakes?
I hesitated to ask. I seemed to be the unique observer to this world-changing – save that, twice, Margrethe had come with me because I was holding her at the instant. Were there other victims around? Had there been others in Konge Knut who had kept their mouths shut about it as carefully as I had?
How do you ask? Excuse me, amigo, but is this the same city it was yesterday?
When we had waited at the railroad station about two hours an army water cart came through a tin cup of water to each refugee and. a soldier with a bayonet to enforce order in the queues.
Just before sundown the cart came back with more water and with loaves of bread; Margrethe and I were rationed a quarter of a loaf between us. A train backed into the station about then and the army people started loading it even as supplies were being unloaded. Marga and I were lucky; we were
pushed into a passenger car – most rode in freight cars.
The train started north. We weren’t asked whether or not we wanted to go north; we weren’t asked for money For fares; all of Mazatlán was being evacuated. Until Its water system could be restored, Mazatlán belonged to the rats and the dead.
No point in describing the journey. The train moved; we endured. The railway line leaves the coast at Guaymas and goes straight north across Sonora to Arizona – beautiful country but we were in no shape to appreciate it. We slept as much as we could and pretended to sleep the rest of the time. Every time the train stopped, some left it unless the police herded them back on. By the time we reached Nogales, Sonora, the train was less than half full; the rest seemed headed for Nogales, Arizona, and of course we were.
We reached the international gate early afternoon three days after the quake.
We were herded into a detention building just over the line, and a man in a uniform made a speech in Spanish: ‘Welcome, amigos! The United States is happy to help its neighbors in their time of trial and the US Immigration Service has streamlined its procedures so that we can take care of all of you quickly.
First we must ask you all to go through delousing. Then you’ll be issued green cards outside of quota so that you can work at any job anywhere in the States. But you will find labor agents to help you as you leave the compound. And a soup kitchen! If you are hungry, stop and have your first meal here as guests of Uncle Sam. Welcome to los Estados Unidos!”
Several people had questions to ask but Margrethe and I headed for the door that led to the delousing setup. I resented the name assigned to this sanitary routine – a requirement that you take delousing is a way of saying that you are lousy. Dirty and mussed we certainly were, and I had a three-day beard. But lousy?
Well, perhaps we were. After a day of picking through the ruins and two days crowded in with other unwashed in a railroad car that was not too clean when we boarded it, could I honestly assert that I was completely free of vermin?
Delousing wasn’t too bad. It was mostly a supervised shower bath with exhortations in Spanish to scrub the hairy places throughly with a medicated 9oft soap. In the meantime my clothes went through some sort of sterilization or fumigation -autoclave, I think – then I had to wait, bare naked, for twenty minutes to reclaim them, while I grew more and more angry with each passing minute.
But once I was dressed again, I got over my anger, realizing that no one was intentionally pushing me around; it was simply that any improvised procedure for handling crowds of people in an emergency is almost certain to be destructive of human dignity. (The Mexican refugees seemed to find it offensive; I heard mutterings.)
Then again I had to wait, for Margrethe.
She came out the exit door from the distaff side, caught my eye, and smiled, and suddenly everything was all right. How could she come out of a delousing chamber-and look as if she had just stepped out of a bandbox?
She came up to me and said, ‘Did I keep you waiting, dear? I’m sorry. There was an ironing board in there and I seized the chance to touch up my dress. It looked a sorry sight when it came out of the washer.’
‘I didn’t mind waiting,’ I fibbed. ‘You’re beautiful.’ (No fib!) ‘Shall we go to dinner? Soup kitchen dinner, I’m afraid.’
‘Isn’t there some paper work we have to go through?’
‘Oh. I think we can hit the soup kitchen first. We don’t want green cards; they are for Mexican nationals. Instead I must explain about our lost passports.’ I had worked this* out in my head and had explained it to Margrethe on the train. This is what I would say had happened to us: We were tourists, staying in Hotel de las, Olas Altas on the beach. When the earthquake hit, we were on the beach. So we lost our clothes, our money, our passports, everything, as our hotel had been destroyed. We were lucky to be alive, and the clothes we were wearing. had been given to us by Mexican Red Cross.
This story had two advantages: Hotel de las Olas Altas had indeed been destroyed, and the rest of the story had no easy way to be checked.
I found that we had to go through the green-card queue in order to reach the soup kitchen. Eventually we got as far as the table. A man there shoved a file card in front of me, saying in Spanish: ‘Print your name, last name first. List your address. If -it was destroyed in the quake, say so, and give some other
address – cous * in, father, priest, somebody whose home was not destroyed.’
I started my spiel. The functionary looked up and said, ‘Amigo, you’re holding up the line.’
‘But,’ I said, ‘I don’t need a green card. I don’t want a green card. I’m an American citizen returning from abroad and I’m trying to explain why I don’t have my passport. And the same for my wife,’
He drummed on the table. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘your accent says that you’re native American. But I can’t do anything about your lost passport and I’ve got three hundred and fifty refugees still to process, and another trainload just pulling in. I won’t get to bed before two. Why don’t you do us both a favor and accept a green card? It won’t poison you and it’ll get you in. Tomorrow you can fight with the State Department about your passport – but not with me. Okay?’
I’m stupid but not stubborn. ‘Okay.’ For my Mexican accommodation address I listed Don Jaime; I figured he owed me that much. His address had the advantage of being in another universe.
The soup kitchen was what you would expect from a charity operation. But it was gringo cooking, the first I had had in months – and we were hungry. The Stark’s Delicious apple I had for dessert was indeed delicious. It was still short of sundown when _we were out on the streets of Nogales – free, bathed, fed, and inside the United States legally or almost. We were at least a thousand percent better off than those two naked survivors who had been picked up out of the ocean seventeen weeks ago.
But we were still orphans of fate, no money at all, no place to rest, no clothes but those we were wearing, and my three-day beard and the shape my clothes were in after going through an autoclave or whatever made me look like a skid row derelict.
The no-money situation was particularly annoying because we did have money, Margrethe’s hoarded tips. But the paper money said ‘Reino’ where it should have read ‘Republica’ and the coins did not have the right faces. Some of the coins may have contained enough silver to have some minor intrinsic value. But, if so, there was no easy way to cash it in at once. And any attempt to spend any of this money would simply get us into major trouble.
How much had we lost? There are no interuniversal exchange rates. One might make a guess in terms of equivalent purchasing power – so many dozens of eggs, or so many kilos of sugar. But why bother?
Whatever it was, we had lost lit.
This paralleled a futility I had run into in Mazatlán. I had attempted, while lord of the scullery, to write to
a) Alexander Hergensheimer’s boss, the Reverend Dr Dandy Danny Dover, DD, director of Churches United for Decency, and b) Alec Graham’s lawyers in Dallas.
Neither letter was answered; neither came back. Which was what I had expected, as neither Alec nor Alexander came from a world having flying machines, aeroplanos.
I would try both again – but with small hope; I already knew that this world would feel strange both to Graham and to Hergensheimer. How? Nothing that I had noticed until we reached Nogales. But here, in that detention hall, was (hold tight to your chair) television. A handsome big box with a window in one side, and in that window living pictures of people… and sounds coming out of it of those selfsame people talking.
Either you have this invention and are used to it and take it for granted, or you live in. a world that does not have it – and you don’t believe me. Learn from me, as I have been forced to believe unbelievable things. There is such an invention; there is a world where it is as common as bicycles, and its name is television – or sometimes tee-vee or telly or video or even ‘idiot box’ – and if you were to hear some of the purposes for which this great wonder is used, you would understand the last tag.
If you ever find yourself flat broke in a strange city and no one to turn to and you do not want to turn yourself in at a police station and don’t want to be mugged, there is just one best answer for emergency help. You will usually find it in the city’s tenderloin, near skid row:
The Salvation Army.
Once I laid hands on a telephone book it took me no time at all to get the address of the Salvation Army mission (although it did take me a bit of time to recognize a telephone when I saw one – warning to interworld travelers: Minor changes can be even more confusing than major changes).
Twenty minutes and one wrong turn later Margrethe and I were at the mission. Outside on the sidewalk four of them – French horn, big drum, two tambourines – were gathering a crowd. They were working on ‘Rock of Ages’ and doing well, but they needed a baritone and I was tempted to join them.
But a couple of store fronts before we reached the mission Margrethe stopped and plucked at my sleeve. ‘Alec… must we do this?’
‘Eh? What’s the trouble, dear? I thought we had agreed.’
‘No, sir. You simply told me.’
‘Mmm – Perhaps I did. You don’t want to go to the Salvation Army?’
She took a deep breath and sighed it out. ‘Alec… I have not been inside a church since – since I left the Lutheran Church. To go to one now – I think it would be sinful.’
(Dear Lord, what can I do with this child? She is apostate not because she is heathen… but because her rules are even more strict than Yours. Guidance, please – and do hurry it up!) ‘Sweetheart, if it feels sinful to you, we won’t do it. But tell me what we are to do now; I’ve run out of ideas.’
‘Ah – Alec, are there not other institutions to which a person in distress may turn?’
‘Oh, certainly. In a city this size the Roman Catholic Church is bound to have more than one refuge. And there will be other Protestant ones. Probably a Jewish one. And -‘
‘I meant, “Not connected with a church”.’
‘Ah, so. Margrethe, we both know that this is not really my home country; you probably know as much about how it works as I do. There may be refuges for the homeless here that are totally unconnected with a church. I’m not sure, as churches tend to monopolize the field – nobody else wants it. If it were early in the day instead of getting dark, I would try to find something called united charities or community chest or the equivalent, and look over the menu; there might be something. But now – Finding a policeman and asking for help is the only other thing I can think of this time of day… and I can tell you ahead of time what a cop in this part of town would do if you told him you have nowhere to sleep. He would point you toward the mission right there. Old Sal.’
‘In Kobenhavrt – or Stockholm or Oslo – I would go straight to the main police station. You just ask for a place to sleep; they give it to you.’
‘I have to point out that this is not Denmark or Sweden or Norway. Here they might let us stay – by locking me in the drunk tank and locking you up in the holding pen for prostitutes. Then tomorrow morning we might or might not be charged with vagrancy. I don’t know.’
‘Is America really so’ evil?’
‘I don’t know, dear – this isn’t my America. But. I don’t want to find out the hard way. Sweetheart… if I worked for whatever they give us, could we spend a night with the Salvation Army without your feeling sinful about it?’
She considered it solemnly – Margrethe’s greatest lack was a total absence of sense of humor. Good nature – loads. A child’ delight in play, yes. Sense of humor? ‘Life is real and life is earnest -‘
‘Alec, if that can be arranged, I would not feel wrong in entering. I will work, too.’
‘Not necessary, dear; it will be my profession that is involved. When they finish feeding the derelicts tonight, there will be a high stack of dirty dishes I and you are looking at the heavyweight champion dishwasher in all of Mexico and los Estados Unidos.’
So I washed dishes. I also helped spread out hymnbooks and set up the evening services. And I borrowed a safety razor and a blade from Brother Eddie McCaw, the adjutant. I told him how we happened to be there – vacationing on the Mexican Riviera, sunbathing on the beach when the big one hit
all the string of lies I had prepared for the Immigration Service and hadn’t been able to use. ‘Lost it, all. Cash, travelers checks, passports, clothes, ticket home, the works. But just the same, we were lucky.
We’re alive.’
‘The Lord had His arms around you. You tell me that you are born again?’
‘Years back.’
‘It will do our lost sheep good to rub shoulders with you. When it comes time for witnessing, will you tell them all about it? You’re the first eyewitness. Oh, we felt it here but it just rattled the dishes.’
‘Glad to.’
Good. Let me get you that razor.’
So I witnessed and gave them a truthful and horrendous description of the quake, but not as horrid as it really was – I never want to see another rat – or another dead baby – and I thanked the Lord publicly that Margrethe and I had not been hurt and found that it was the most sincere prayer I had said in years.
The Reverend Eddie asked that roomful of odorous outcasts to join him in a prayer of thanks that Brother and Sister Graham had been spared, and he made it a good rousing prayer that covered everything from Jonah to the hundredth sheep, and drew shouts of ‘Amen!’ from around the room. One old wino came forward and said that he had at last seen God’s grace and God’s mercy and he was now ready to give his life to Christ.
Brother Eddie prayed over him, and invited others to come forward and two more did – a natural evangelist, he saw in our story a theme for his night’s sermon and used it, hanging it on Luke fifteen, ten, and Matthew six, nineteen. I don’t know that he had prepared from those two verses – probably not, as any preacher worth his salt can preach endlessly from either one of them. Either way, he could think on his feet and he made good use of our unplanned presence.
He was pleased with us, and I am sure that is why he told me, as we were cleaning up for the night, after the supper that followed the service, that while of course they didn’t have separate rooms for married couples – they didn’t often get married couples – still, it looked like Sister Graham would be the only one in the sisters’ dormitory tonight, so why didn’t I doss down in there instead of in the men’s ~ dormitory? No double bed, just stacked bunks – sorry! But at least we could be in the same room.
I thanked him and we happily went to bed. Two people can share a very narrow bed if they really want to sleep together.
The next morning Margrethe cooked breakfast for the derelicts. She went into the kitchen and volunteered and soon was, doing it all as the regular cook did not cook breakfast; it was the job of whoever had the duty. Breakfast did not require a graduate chef – oatmeal porridge, bread, margarine, little valencia oranges (culls?), coffee. I left her there to wash dishes and to wait until I came back.
I went out and found a job.
I knew, from listening to wireless (called ‘radio’ here) while washing the dishes the night before, that there was unemployment in the United States-, enough to be a political and social problem.
There is always work in the Southwest for agricultural labor but I had dodged that sort of Work yesterday. I’m not too proud for that work; I had followed the harvest for several years from the time I was big enough to handle a pitchfork. But I could not take Margrethe into the fields.
I did not expect to find a job as a clergyman; I hadn’t even told Brother Eddie that I was ordained. There is always an unemployment problem for preachers. Oh, there are always empty pulpits, true – but ones in which a church mouse would starve.
But I had a second profession.
Dishwasher.
No matter how many people are out of work, there are always dishwashing jobs going begging. Yesterday, in walking from the border gate to the Salvation Army mission, I had noticed three restaurants with ‘Dishwasher Wanted’ signs in their windows – noticed them because I had had plenty of time on the long ride from Mazatlán to admit to myself that I had no other salable skill.
No salable skill. I was not ordained in this world; I would not be ordained in this world as I could not show graduation from seminary or divinity school – or even the backing of a primitive sect that takes no mind of schools but depends on inspiration by the Holy Ghost.
I was certainly not an engineer.
I could not get a job teaching even those subjects I knew *Well because I no longer could show any formal preparation – I couldn’t even show that I had graduated from middle school!
In general I was no salesman. True, I had shown an unexpected talent for the complex skills that make up a professional money-raiser… but here I had no record, no reputation. I might someday do this again – but we needed cash today.
What did that leave? I had looked at the help-wanted ads in a copy of the Nogales Times someone had left in the mission. I, was, not a lax accountant. I was not any sort of a mechanic. I did not know what a software designer was but I was not one, nor was I a ‘computer’ anything. I was not a nurse or any sort of health care professional.
I could go on indefinitely listing the things I was not, and could not learn overnight. But that is pointless. What I could do, What would feed Margrethe and me while we sized up this new world and learned the angles, was what I had been forced to do as a peón.
A competent and reliable dishwasher never starves. (He’s more likely to die of boredom.)
The first place did not smell good and its kitchen looked dirty; I did not linger. The second place was a major-chain hotel, with several people in the scullery. The boss looked me over and said, ‘This is a Chicano job; you wouldn’t be happy here.’ I tried to argue; he shut me off.
I But the third was okay, a restaurant only a little bigger than the Pancho Villa, with a clean kitchen and a manager no more than normally jaundiced.
He warned me, ‘This job pays minimum wage and there are no raises. One meal a day on the house. I catch you sneaking anything, even a toothpick, and out you go that instant – no second chance. You work the hours I set and I change ’em to suit me. Right now I need you for noon to four, six to ten, five days a week. Or you can work six days but no overtime scale for it. Overtime scale if I require you to work more than eight hours in one day, or more than forty-eight hours in one week.’
‘Okay.’
‘All right, let’s see your Social Security card.’
I handed him my green card.
He handed it-back. ‘You expect me to pay you twelve dollars and a half an hour on the basis of a green card? You’re no Chicano. You trying to get me in trouble with the government? Where did you get that card?’
So I gave him the song and dance I had prepared for the Immigration Service. ‘Lost everything. I can’t even phone and tell somebody to send me money; I have to get home first before I can shake any assets loose.’
‘You could get public assistance.’
‘Mister, I’m too stinkin’ proud.’ (I don’t know how and I can’t prove I’m me. Just don’t quiz me and let me wash dishes.)
Glad to hear it. “Stinking proud”, I mean. This country could use more like you. Go over to the Social Security office and get them to issue you a new one. They will, even if you can’t recall the number of your old one. Then come back here and go to work. Mmm – I’ll start you on payroll right now. But you must come back and put in a full day to collect.’
‘More than fair. Where is the Social Security office?’
So I went to the Federal Building and told my lies over again, embroidering only as necessary. The serious young lady who issued the card insisted on giving me a lecture on Social Security and how it worked, a lecture she had apparently memorized. I’ll bet- you she never had a ‘client’ (that’s what she called me) who listened so carefully. It was all new to me.
I gave the name ‘Alec L. Graham.’ This was not a conscious decision. I had been using that name for
weeks, answered with it by reflex – then was not in a good position to say, ‘Sorry, Miss, my name is actually Hergensheimer.’
I started work. During my four-to-six break I went back to the mission – and learned that Margrethe had a job, too.
It was temporary, three weeks – but three weeks at just the right time. The mission cook had not had a vacation in over a year and wanted to go to Flagstaff to visit her daughter, who had just had a baby. So Margrethe had her job for the time being – and her bedroom, also for the time being.
So Brother and Sister Graham were in awfully good shape – for the time being.
Chapter 14
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Ecclesiastes 9:11
PRAY TELL me why there is not a dishwashing school of philosophy? The conditions would seem ideal for indulging in the dear delights of attempting to unscrew the inscrutable. The work keeps the body busy while demanding almost nothing of the brain. I had eight hours every day in which to try to find answers to questions.
What questions? All questions. Five months earlier I had been a prosperous and respected professional in the most respected of professions, in a world I understood thoroughly – or so I thought. Today I was sure of nothing and had nothing.
Correction – I had Margrethe. Wealth enough for any man, I would not trade her for all the riches of Cathay. But even Margrethe represented a solemn contract I could not yet fulfill. In the eyes of the Lord I had taken her to wife… but I was not supporting her.
Yes, I had a job – but in truth she was supporting herself. When Mr Cowgirl hired me, I had not been daunted by ‘minimum wage and no raises’. Twelve dollars and fifty cents per hour struck me as a dazzling sum – why, many a married man in Wichita (my Wichita, in another universe) supported a family on twelve and a half dollars per week.
What I did not realize was that here $12.50 Would not buy a tuna sandwich in that same restaurant – not a fancy restaurant, either; cheap, in fact. I would have had less trouble adjusting to the economy in this strange-but-familiar world if its money had been described in unfamiliar terms – shillings, shekels, soles, anything but dollars. I had been brought up to think of a dollar as a substantial piece of wealth; the idea that a hundred dollars a day was a poverty-level minimum wage was not one I could grasp easily.
Twelve-fifty an hour, a hundred dollars a day, five hundred a week, twenty-six thousand dollars a year Poverty level? Listen carefully. In the world in which I grew up, that was riches beyond dreams of avarice.
Getting used to price and wage levels in dollars that weren’t really dollars was simply the most ubiquitous aspect of a strange economy; the main problem was how to cope, how to stay afloat, how to make a living for me and my wife (and our children, with one expected all too soon if I had guessed right) in a world in which I had no diplomas, no training, no friends, no references, no track record of any sort.
Alex, what in God’s truth are you good for?… other than dishwashing!
I could easily wash a lighthouse stack of dishes while worrying that problem alone. It had to be solved. Today I washed dishes cheerfully… but soon I must do better for my beloved. Minimum wage was not enough.
Now at last we come to the prime question: Dear Lord God Jehovah, what mean these signs and portents Thou has placed on me Thy servant?
There comes a time when a faithful worshiper must get up off his knees and deal with his Lord God in blunt and practical terms. Lord, tell me what to believe! Are these the deceitful great signs and wonders of which You warned, sent by antichrist to seduce the very elect?
Or are these true signs of the final days? Will we hear Your Shout?
Or am I as mad “as ‘:Nebudhadnezzar and all of these appearances merely vapors in my disordered mind?
If one of these be true, then the other two are false. How am I to choose? Lord God of Hosts, how have I offended Thee?
In walking back to the mission one night I saw a sign that could be construed as a direct answer to my prayers: MILLIONS NOW LIVING WILL NEVER DIE. The sign was carried by a man and with him was a small child handing out leaflets.
I contrived not to accept one. I had seen that sign many times throughout my life, but I had long tended to avoid Jehovah’s Witnesses. They are so stiff-necked and stubborn that it is impossible to work with them, whereas Churches United for Decency is necessarily an ecumenical association. In fund raising and in political action one must (while of course. shunning heresy) avoid arguments on fiddling points of doctrine. Word-splitting theologians are the death of efficient organization. How can you include a sect in practical labor in the vineyards of the Lord if that sect asserts that they alone know the Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth and all who disagree are heretics, destined for the fires of Hell?
Impossible. So we left them out of C.U.D.
Still – Perhaps this time they were right.
Which brings me to the most urgent of all questions: How to lead Margrethe back to the Lord before the Trump and the Shout.
But ‘how’ depends on ‘when’. Premillenarian theologians differ greatly among themselves as to the date of the Last Trump.
I rely on the scientific method. On any disputed point there is always one sure answer: Look it up in the Book. And so I did, now that I was living at the Salvation Army mission and could borrow a copy of the Holy Bible. I looked it up again and again and again… and learned why premillenarians differed so on their dates.
The Bible is the literal Word of God; let there be no mistake about that. But nowhere did the Lord promise us that it would be easy to read.
Again and again Our Lord and His incarnation as the Son, Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, promises His disciples that their generation (i.e., first century AD) will see His return. Elsewhere, and again many times, He promises that He will return after a thousand years have passed… or is it two thousand years… or is it some other period, after the Gospel has been preached to all mankind in every country?
Which is true?
All are true, if you read them- right. Jesus did indeed return in the generation of His twelve disciples; He did so at the first Easter, His resurrection. That was His first return, the utterly necessary one, the one that proved to all that He was indeed the Son of God and God Himself. He returned again after a thousand years and, in His infinite mercy, ruled that His children be given yet another grant of grace, a further period of trial, rather than let sinners be consigned forthwith to the fiery depths of Hell. His Mercy is infinite.
These dates are hard to read, and understandably so, as it was never His intention to encourage sinners to go on sinning because the day of reckoning had been postponed,. What is precise, exact, and unmistakable, repeated again and again, is that He expects every one of His children to live every day, every hour, every heart beat, as if this one were the last. When is the end of this age? When is the Shout and the Trump? When is* the Day of Judgment? Now! You will be given no warning whatever. No time for deathbed contrition. You must live in a state of grace… or, when the instant comes, you will be cast down into the Lake of Fire, there to burn in agony throughout all eternity.
So reads the Word of God.
And to me, so sounds the voice of doom. I had no period of grace in which to lead Margrethe back into the fold… as the Shout may come this very day.
What to do? What to do?
For mortal man, with any problem too great, there is only one thing to do: Take it to the Lord in prayer.
And so I did, again and again and again. Prayer is always answered. But it is necessary to recognize the answer… and it may not be the answer you want.
In the meantime one must render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. Of course I elected to work six days a week rather than five ($31,200 a year!) – as I needed every shekel I could garner. Margrethe needed everything! and so did I. Especially we needed shoes. The shoes we had been wearing when disaster struck in Mazatlán had been quite good shoes – for peasants in Mazatlán. But they had been worn during two days of digging through rubble after the quake, then had been worn continuously since then; they were ready for the trash bin. So we needed shoes, at least two pairs each, one pair for work, one for Sunday-go-to-meeting.
And many other things. I don’t know what all a woman needs, but it is more complex than what a man needs. I had to put money into Margrethe’s hands and encourage her to buy what she needed. I could pig it with nothing more than shoes and a pair of dungarees (to spare my one good outfit) – although I did buy a razor, and got a haircut at a barber’s college near the mission, one where a haircut was only two dollars if one was willing to accept the greenest apprentice, and I was. Margrethe looked at it and said gently that she thought she could do as well herself, and save us that two dollars. Later she took scissors and straightened out what that untalented apprentice had done, to me… and thereafter I never again spent money on barbers.
I But saving two dollars did not offset a greater damage. I had honestly thought, when Mr Cowgirl hired me, that I was going to be paid a hundred dollars every day I worked.
He didn’t pay me that much and he didn’t cheat me. Let me explain.
I finished that first day of work tired but happy. Happier than I had been since the earthquake struck, I mean happiness is relative. I stopped at the cashier-s stand where Mr Cowgirl was working on his accounts, Ron’s Grill having closed for the day. He looked up. ‘How did it go, Alec?’
‘Just fine, sir.’
‘Luke tells me that you are doing okay.’ Luke was a giant blackamoor, head cook and my nominal boss. In fact he had not supervised me other than to show me where things were and make sure that I knew what to do.
‘That’s pleasant to hear. Luke’s a good cook.’ That one-meal-a-day bonus over minimum wage I had eaten at four o’clock as breakfast was ancient history by then. Luke had explained to me that the help could order anything on the menu but steaks or chops, and that today I could have all the seconds I wanted if I chose either the stew or the meat loaf.
I chose the meat loaf because his kitchen smelled and looked clean. You can tell far more about a cook by his meat loaf than you can from the way he grills a steak. I took seconds on the meat loaf – with no catsup.
Luke was generous in the slab of cherry pie he cut for me, then he added a scoop of vanilla ice cream… which I did not rate, as it was an either/or, not both.
‘Luke seldom says a good word about white boys,’ my employer went on, ‘and never about a Chicano. So you must be doing okay.’
‘I hope so.’ I was growing a mite impatient. We are all the Lord’s children but it was the first time in my life that a blackamoor’s opinion of my work had mattered. I simply wanted to be paid so that I could hurry home to Margrethe – to the Salvation Army mission, that is.
Mr Cowgirl folded his hands and twiddled his thumbs. ‘You want to be paid, don’t you?’
I controlled my annoyance. ‘Yes, sir.’
-‘Alec, with dishwashers I prefer to pay by the week.’
I. felt dismay ‘ and I am sure my face showed it.
‘Don’t misunderstand me,’ he added. ‘You’re an. hourly-rate employee, so you are paid at the end of each day if that’s what you choose.’
‘Then I do choose. I need the money.’
‘Let me finish. The reason I prefer to pay dishwashers weekly instead of daily is that, all too often, if I hire one and pay him at the end of the day, he goes straight out and buys a jug of muscatel, then doesn’t show up for a couple of days.’ When he does, he wants his job back. Angry at me. Ready to complain to the Labor Board. Funny part about it is that I may even be able to give him his job back – for another one-day shot at it -because the bum I’ve hired in his place has gone and done the same thing.
‘This isn’t likely to happen with Chicanos as they usually want to save money to send back to Mexico. But I’ve yet to see the Chicano who could handle the scullery to suit Luke … and I need Luke more than I need a particular dishwasher. Negras -Luke can usually tell me whether a spade is going to work out, and the good ones are better than a white boy any time. But the good ones are always trying to improve themselves… and if I don’t promote them to pantry boy or assistant cook or whatever, soon they go across the street to somebody who will. So it’s always a problem. If I can get a week’s work out of a dishwasher, I figure I’ve won. If I get two weeks, I’m jubilant. Once I got a full month. But that’s once in a lifetime.’
‘You’re going to get three full weeks out of me,’ I said. ‘Now can I have my pay?’
‘Don’t rush me. If you elect to be paid once a week, I go for a dollar more on your hourly rate. That’s forty, dollars more at the end of the week. What do you say?’
(No, that’s forty-eight more per week, I told myself. Almost $34,000 per year just for washing dishes.
Whew!) ‘That’s forty-eight dollars more each week,’ I answered. ‘Not forty. As I’m going for that six-days-a-week option. I do need the money.’
‘Okay, Then I pay you once a week.’
‘Just a moment. Can’t we start it tomorrow? I need some cash today. My wife and I haven’t anything, anything at all. I’ve got the clothes I’m standing in, nothing else. The same for my wife. I can sweat it out a
few more days. But there are things a woman just has to have.’
He shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. But you don’t get the dollar-an-hour bonus for today’s work. And if you are one minute late tomorrow, I’ll assume you’re sleeping it off and I put the sign back in the window.’
‘I’m no wino, Mr Cowgirl.’
‘We’ll see.’ He turned to his bookkeeping machine and did something to its keyboard. I don’t know what because I never understood it. It was an arithmetic machine but nothing like a Babbage Numerator. It had keys on it somewhat like a typewriting machine. But- there was a window above that where numbers and letters appeared by some sort of magic.
The machine whirred and tinkled and he reached into it and brought out a card, handed it -to me. ‘There you are.’
I took it and examined it, and again felt dismay.
It was a piece of pasteboard about three inches wide and seven long, with numerous little holes punched in it and with printing on it that stated that it was a draft on Nogales Commercial and Savings Bank by which Ron’s Grill directed them to pay to Alec L. Graham – No, not one hundred dollars.
Fifty-one dollars and twenty-seven cents.
‘Something wrong?’ he asked.
‘Uh, I had expected twelve-fifty an hour.’
‘That’s what I paid you. Eight hours at minimum wage. You can check the deductions yourself. That’s not my arithmetic; this is an IBM 1990 and it’s instructed by IBM software, Paymaster Plus … and IBM has a standing offer of ten thousand dollars to any employee who can show that this model IBM and this mark of their software fouled up a pay check. Look at it. Gross pay, one hundred dollars. Deductions all
listed. Add ‘ ’em up. Subtract them. Check your answer against IBM’s answer. But don’t blame me. I didn’t write those laws – and I like them even less than you do. Do you realize that almost every dishwasher that comes in here, whether wetback or citizen, wants me to pay him in cash and forget the deductions? Do you know what the fine is if they catch me doing it just once? What happens if they catch me a second time? Don’t look sour at me – go talk to the government.’
‘I just don’t understand it. It’s new to me, all of it. Can you tell me what these deductions mean? This one that says “Admin”, for example.’
‘That stands for “administration fee” but don’t ask me why you have to pay it, as I am the one who has to do the bookkeeping and I certainly don’t get paid to do it.’
I tried to check the other deductions against the fine-print explanations. ‘SocSec’ turned out to be ‘Social Security’. The young lady had explained that to me this morning… but I had told her at the time that, while it was certainly an excellent idea, I felt that I would have to wait until later before subscribing to it; I could not afford it just yet. ‘MedIns’ and ‘HospIns’ and DentIns’ were simple enough but I could not afford them now, either. But what was ‘PL217′? The fine print simply referred to a date and page in TubReg’.
What about ‘DepEduc’ and ‘UNESCO’?
And what in the world was ‘Income Tax’?
‘I still don’t understand it. It’s all new to me.’
‘Alec, you’re not the only one who doesn’t understand it. But why do you say it is new to you? It has been going on all your life … and your daddy’s -and youi ,grand-daddy’s, at least.’
‘I’m sorry. What is “Income Tax”?’
He blinked at me. ‘Are you sure you don’t need to see a shrink?’
‘What is a “shrink”?’
He sighed. ‘Now I need to see one. Look, Alec. Just take it. Discuss the deductions with the government, not with me. You sound sincere, so maybe you were hit on the head when you got caught in the Mazatlán quake. I just want to go home and take a Miltown. So take it, please.’
‘All right. I guess. But I don’t know anyone who would cash this for me.’
‘No problem. Endorse it back to me and I’ll pay you, cash. But keep the stub, as the IRS will insist on seeing all your deductions stubs before paying you back any overpayment.’
I didn’t understand that, either, but I kept the stub.
Despite the shock of learning that almost half my pay was gone before I touched it, we were better off each day, as, between us, Margrethe and I had over four hundred dollars a week that did not have to be spent just to stay alive but could be converted into clothing and other necessities. Theoretically she was being paid the same wages as had been the cook she replaced, or twenty-two dollars an hour for twenty-four hours a week, or $528/week.
In fact she had the same sort of deductions I had, which paused her net pay to come to just under
$290/week. Again theoretically. But $54/week was checked off for lodging fair. enough, I decided, when I found out what rooming houses were charging. More than fair, in fact. Then we were assessed
$I05/week for meals. Brother McCaw at first had put us down for $I40/week for meals and had offered to show by his books that Mrs Owens, the regular cook, had always paid, by checkoff, $I0 each day for her meals… so the two of us should be assessed $I40/week.
I agreed that that was fair (having seen the prices on the menu at Ron’s Grill) – fair in theory. But I was going to have my heaviest meal of the day where I worked. We compromised on ten a day for Marga, half that for me.
So Margrethe wound up with a hundred and. thirty-one a week out of a gross- of five hundred and twenty-eight.
If she could collect it. Like most churches, the Salvation Army lives from hand to mouth… and sometimes the hand doesn’t quite reach the mouth.
Nevertheless we were well off and better off each week. At the end of the first week we bought new shoes for Margrethe, first quality and quite smart, for only $279.90, on sale at J. C. Penney’s, marked down from $350.
Of course she fussed at getting new shoes for her before buying shoes for me. I pointed out that we still had over a hundred dollars toward shoes for me – next week – and would she please hold it for us so that I would not be tempted to spend it. Solemnly she agreed.
So the following Monday we got shoes for me even cheaper – Army surplus, good, stout comfortable shoes that would outlast anything bought from a regular shoe store. (I would worry about dress shoes for me after I had other matters under control. There is nothing like being barefoot broke to adjust one’s mundane values.) Then we went to the Goodwill retail store and bought a dress and a summer suit for her, and dungaree pants for me.
Margrethe wanted to get more clothes for me – we still had almost sixty dollars. I objected.
‘Why not, Alec? You need clothes every bit as badly as I do… yet we have spent almost all that you have saved on me. It’s not fair.’
I answered, ‘We’ve spent it where it was needed. Next week, if Mrs Owens comes back on time, you’ll be out of a job and we’ll have to move. I think we. should move on. So let’s save what we can for bus fare.’
‘Move on where, dear?’
‘To Kansas. This is a world strange to each of us. Yet it is familiar, too – same language, same geography, some of the same history. Here I’m just a dish washer, not earning enough to support you. But I have a strong feeling that Kansas – Kansas in this world – will be so much like the Kansas I was born in that I’ll be able to cope better.’
‘Whither thou goest, beloved.’
The mission was almost a mile from Ron’s Grill; instead of trying to go ‘home’ at my four-to-six break, I usually spent my free time, after eating, at the downtown branch library getting myself oriented. That, and newspapers that customers sometimes left in the restaurant, constituted my principal means of reeducation.
In this world Mr William Jennings Bryan had indeed been President and his benign influence had’ kept us out of the Great European War. He then had offered his services for a negotiated peace. The Treaty of Philadelphia had more or less restored Europe to what it had been before 1913.
I didn’t recognize any of the Presidents after Bryan, either from my own world or from Margrethe’s world. Then I became utterly bemused when I first ran across the name of the current President: His Most Christian Majesty, John Edward the Second, Hereditary President of the United States and Canada, Duke of Hyannisport, Comte de Quebec, Defender of the Faith, Protector of the Poor, Marshal in Chief of the Peace Force.
I looked at a picture of him, laying a cornerstone in Alberta. He was tall and broad-shouldered and blandly handsome and was wearing a fancy uniform with enough medals on his chest to ward off pneumonia. I studied his face and asked myself, ‘Would you buy a used car from this man?’
But the more I thought about it, the more logical it seemed. Americans, all during their two and a quarter centuries as a separate nation, had missed the royalty they had shucked off. They slobbered over European royalty whenever they got the chance. Their wealthiest citizens married their daughters to royalty whenever possible, even to Georgian princes – a ‘prince’ in Georgia being a farmer with the biggest manure pile in the neighborhood.
I did not know where they had hired this royal dude. Perhaps they had sent to Estoril for him, or even had him shipped in from the Balkans. As one of my history profs had pointed out, there are always
out-of-work royalty around, looking for jobs. When a man is out of, work, he can’t be fussy, as I knew too well. Laying cornerstones is probably no more boring than washing dishes. But the hours are longer. I think. I’ve never been a king. I’m not sure that I would take a job in the kinging business if it were offered to me; there are obvious drawbacks and not just the long hours.
On the other hand –
Refusing a crown that you know will never be offered to you is sour grapes, by definition. I searched my heart and concluded that-I probably would be able to persuade myself that it was a sacrifice I should
make for my fellow men. I would pray over it until I was convinced that the Lord wanted me to accept this burden.
Truly I am not being cynical. I know how frail men can be in persuading themselves that the Lord wants them to do something they wanted to do all along – and I am no better than my brethren in this.
But the thing that stonkered me was the idea of Canada united with us. Most Americans do not know why Canadians dislike us (I do not), but they do. The idea that Canadians would ever vote to unite with us boggles the mind.
I went to the library desk and asked for a recent general history of the United States. I had just started to study it when I noted by the wall clock that it was almost four o’clock… so I had to check it back in and hustle to get back to my scullery on time. I did not have library loan privileges as I could not as yet afford the deposit required of nonresidents.
More important than the political changes were technical and cultural changes. I realized almost at once that this world was more advanced in physical science and. technology than my own. In fact I realized it almost as quickly as I saw a ‘television’ display device.
I never did understand how televising takes place. I tried to learn about it in the public library and at once bumped into a subject called ‘electronics’. (Not ‘electrics’ but ‘electronics’.) So I tried to study up about electronics and encountered the most amazing mathematical gibberish. Not since thermodynamics had caused me to decide that I had a call for the ministry have I seen such confusing and turgid equations. I don’t think Rolla Tech could ever cope with such amphigory – at least not Rolla Tech when I was an undergraduate there.
But the superior technology of this world was evident, in many more things than television. Consider ‘traffic lights’. No doubt you have seen cities so choked with traffic that it is almost impossible to cross major streets other than through intervention by police officers. Also’ no doubt you have sometimes been annoyed when a policeman charged with controlling traffic has stopped the flow in your direction to accommodate some very important person from city hall, or such.
Can you imagine a situation in which traffic could be controlled in greater volume with no police officers whatever at hand – just an impersonal colored light?
Believe me, that is exactly what they had in Nogales.
Here is how it works:
At every busy intersection you place a minimum of twelve lights, four groups of three, a group facing each of the cardinal directions and so screened that each group can be seen only from its direction. Each group has one red light, one green light, one amber light. These lights are served by electrical power and each shines brightly enough to be seen at a distance of a mile, more or less, even in bright sunlight. These are not arc lights; these are very powerful Edison lamps – this is important because these lights must be turned on and off every few moments and must function without fail hours on end, even days on end, twenty-four hours a day.
These lights are placed up high on telegraph poles, or suspended over intersections, so that they may be seen by teamsters or drivers or cyclists from a distance. When the green lights shine, let us say, north and south, the red lights shine east and west – traffic may flow north and south, while east and west traffic is required to stand and wait exactly as if a police officer had blown his whistle and held up his hands, motioning traffic to move north and south while restraining traffic from moving east and west.
Is that clear? The lights replace the policeman’s hand signals.
The amber lights replace the policeman’s whistle; they warn of an imminent change in the situation.
But what is the advantage? – since someone, presumably a policeman, must switch the lights on and off, as needed. Simply this: The switching is done automatically from a distance (even miles!) at a central switchboard.
There are many other marvels about this system, such as electrical counting devices to decide how long each light burns for best handling of the traffic, special lights for controlling left turns or to accommodate people on foot… but the truly great marvel is this: People obey these lights.
Think about it. With no policemen anywhere around people obey these blind and dumb bits of machinery as. if they were policemen.
Are people here so sheeplike and peaceful that they can be controlled this easily? No. I wondered about it and found some statistics in the library. This world has a higher rate of violent crime than does the world in which I was born. Caused by these strange lights? I don’t think so. I think that the people here, although disposed to violence against each other, accept obeying traffic lights as a logical thing to do.
Perhaps.
As may be, it is passing strange.
Another conspicuous difference in technology lies in air traffic. Not the decent, cleanly, safe, and silent dirigible airships of my home world – No, no! These are more like the aeroplanos of the Mexicano world in which Margrethe and I sweated out our indentures before the great quake that destroyed Mazatlán.
But they are so much bigger, faster, noisier and fly so much higher than the aeroplanos we knew that they are almost another breed – or are indeed another breed, perhaps, as they are called ‘jet planes’. Can you imagine a vehicle that flies eight miles above the ground? Can you imagine a giant car that moves, faster than sound? Can you imagine a screaming whine, so loud that it makes your teeth ache?
They call this ‘progress’. I long for the comfort and graciousness of LTA Count von Zeppelin. Because you can ‘ t get away from these behemoths. Several times a day one of these things goes screaming over the mission, fairly low down, as it approaches a grounding, at the flying field north of the city. The noise bothers me and makes Margrethe very nervous.
Still most of the enhancements in technology really are progress – better plumbing, better lighting indoors and out, better roads, better buildings, many sorts of machinery that make human labor less onerous and more productive. I am never one of those back-to-nature freaks who sneer at engineering; I have more reason than most people to respect engineering. Most people who sneer at technology would starve to- death if the engineering infrastructure were removed.
We had been in Nogales just short of three weeks when I was able to carry out a plan that I had dreamed of for nearly five months… and had actively plotted since our arrival in Nogales (but had to delay until I could afford it). – I picked Monday to carry it out, that being my day off. I told Margrethe to dress up in her new clothes as I was taking my best girl out for a treat, and I dressed up, too – my one suit, my new shoes, and a clean shirt… and shaved and bathed and nails clean and trimmed.
It was a lovely day, sunny and not too hot. We both felt cheerful because, first, Mrs Owens had written to Brother McCaw saying that she was staying on another week if she could be spared, and second, we now had enough money for bus fares for both of us to Wichita, Kansas, although just barely – but the word from Mrs Owens meant that could squirrel away another four hundred dollars for eating money on the way and still arrive not quite broke.
I took Margrethe to a place I had spotted the day I looked for a job as a dishwasher – a nice little place outside the tenderloin, an old-fashioned ice cream parlor.
We stopped outside it. ‘Best girl, see this place? Do you remember a conversation we had when we were floating on the broad Pacific on a sunbathing mat and not really expecting to live much longer? – at least I was not.’
‘Beloved, how could I forget?’
‘I asked you what you would have if you could have anything in the world that you wanted. Do you remember I what you answered?’
‘Of course I do! It was a hot fudge sundae.’
‘Right! Today is your unbirthday, dear. You are about to have that hot fudge sundae.’
‘Oh, Alec!’
‘Don’t blubber. Can’t stand a woman who cries. Or you can have a chocolate malt. Or a sawdust sundae. Whatever your heart desires. But I did, make sure that this place always has hot fudge sundaes before I brought you here.’
‘We can’t afford it. We should save for the trip.’
‘We can afford it. A hot fudge sundae is five dollars. Two for ten dollars. And I’m going to be a dead game sport and tip the waitress a dollar. Man does not live by bread alone. Nor does woman, Woman. Come along!’
We were shown to a table by a pretty waitress (but not as pretty as my bride). I seated Margrethe with
her back to the street, holding the chair for her, and then sat down opposite her. ‘I’m Tammy,’ the waitress said as she offered us a menu. ‘What would you folks like this lovely day?’
‘We won’t need the menu,’ I said. ‘Two hot fudge sundaes, please.’
Tammy looked thoughtful. ‘All right, if you don’t mind waiting a few minutes. We may have to make up the hot sauce.’
‘A few minutes, who cares? We’ve waited much longer than that.’
She smiled and went away. I looked at Marga. ‘We’ve waited much longer. Haven’t we?’
‘Alec, you’re a sentimentalist and that’s part of why I love you.’
‘I’m a sentimental slob and right now I’m slavering at the thought of hot fudge sundae. But I wanted you to see this place for another reason, too. Marga, how would you like to run such a place as this? Us, that is. Together. You’d be boss, I’d be dishwasher, janitor, handyman, bouncer, and whatever was needed.’
She looked very thoughtful. ‘You are serious?’
‘Quite. Of course we couldn’t go into business for ourselves right away; we will have to save some money first. But not much, the way I plan it. A dinky little place, but bright and cheerful – after I paint it. A soda fountain, plus a very limited Menu. Hot dogs. Hamburgers. Danish open-face sandwiches.
Nothing else. Soup, maybe. But canned soups are no problem and not much inventory.’
Margrethe looked shocked. ‘Not canned soups. I can serve a real soup… cheaper and better than anything out of a tin.’
‘I defer to your professional judgment, Ma’am. Kansas has half a dozen little college towns; any of them would welcome such a place. Maybe we pick a shop already existing, a mom-and-pop place – work for them a year, then buy them out. Change the name to The Hot Fudge Sundae. Or maybe Marga’s
Sandwiches.’
‘The Hot Fudge Sundae. Alec, do you really think we can do this?’
I leaned toward her and took her hand. ‘I’m sure we can, darling. And without working ourselves to death, too.’ I moved my head. ‘That traffic light is staring me right in the eye.’
‘I know. I can see it reflected in your eye every time it changes. Want to swap seats? It won’t bother me.’
‘It doesn’t bother me. It just has a somewhat hypnotic effect.’ I looked down at. the table, looked back at the light. ‘Hey, it’s gone out.’
Margrethe twisted her neck to look. ‘I don’t see it. Where?’
‘Uh… pesky thing has disappeared. Looks like.’
I heard a male voice at my elbow. ‘What’ll it be for you two? Beer or wine; we’re not licensed for the hard stuff.’
I looked around, saw a waiter. ‘Where’s Tammy?’
‘Who’s Tammy?’
I took a deep breath, tried to slow my heart, then said, ‘Sorry, brother; I shouldn’t have come in here. I find I’ve left my wallet at home.’ I stood up. ‘Come, dear.’
Wide-eyed and silent, Margrethe came with me. As we walked out, I looked around, noting changes. I suppose it was a decent enough place, as beer joints go. But it was not our cheerful ice cream parlor.
And not our world.
Chapter 15
Boast not thyself of tomorrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth.
Proverbs 27:1
OUTSIDE, WITHOUT planning it, I headed us toward the Salvation Army mission. Margrethe kept quiet and held tight to my arm. I should have been frightened; instead I was boiling angry. Presently I muttered, ‘Damn them! Damn them!’
‘Damn who, Alec?’
‘I don’t know. That’s the worst of it. Whoever is doing this to us. Your friend Loki, maybe.’
‘He is not my friend, any more than Satan is your friend. I dread and fear what Loki is doing to our world.’
‘I’m not afraid, I’m angry. Loki or Satan or whoever, this last is too much. No sense to it. Why couldn’t they wait thirty minutes? That hot fudge sundae was practically under our noses – and they snatched it away! Marga, that’s not right, that’s not fair! That’s sheer, unadulterated cruelty. Senseless. On a par with pulling wings off flies. I despise them. Whoever.’
Instead of continuing with useless talk about matters we could not settle, Margrethe said, ‘Dear, where are we going?’
‘Eh?’ I stopped short. ‘Why, to the mission, I suppose.’
‘Is this the right way?’
‘Why, yes, cert -‘ I paused to look around. ‘I don’t know.’ I had been walking automatically, my attention fully on my anger. Now I found that I was unsure of any landmarks. ‘I guess I’m lost.’
‘I know I am.’
It took us another half hour to get straightened out. The neighborhood was vaguely familiar but nothing was quite right. I found the block where Ron’s Grill should be, could not find Ron’s Grill. Eventually a policeman directed us to the mission… which was now in a different building. To my surprise, Brother McCaw was there. But he did not recognize us, and his name was now McNabb. We left, as gracefully as possible. Not very, that is.
I walked us back the way we had come – slowly, as I wasn’t going anywhere. ‘Marga, we’re right back where we were three weeks ago. Better shoes, that’s all. A pocket full of money – but money we can’t spend, as it is certain to be funny money here… good for a quiet rest behind bars if I tried to pass any of it.’
‘You’re probably right, dear one.’
‘There is a bank on that corner just ahead. Instead of trying to spend any of it, I could walk in and simply ask whether or not it was worth anything.’
‘There couldn’t be any harm in that. Could there?’
‘There shouldn’t be. But our friend Loki could have another practical joke up his sleeve. Uh, we’ve got to know. Here – you take everything but one bill. If they arrest me, you pretend not to know me.’
‘No!’
‘What do you mean, “No”? There is no point in both of us being in jail.’
She looked stubborn and said nothing. How can you argue with a woman who wont talk? I sighed. ‘Look, dear, the only other thing I can think of is to look for another job washing dishes. Maybe Brother McNabb will let us sleep in the mission tonight.’
‘I’ll look for a job, too. I can wash dishes. Or cook. Or something.’
‘We’ll see. Come inside with me, Marga; we’ll go to jail together. But I think I’ve figured out how to handle this without going to jail.’ I took out one treasury note, crumpled it, and tore one corner. Then we went into the bank together, me holding it in my hand as if I had just picked it up. I did not go to a teller’s window; instead I went to that railing behind which bark officials sit at their desks.
I leaned on the railing and spoke to the man nearest to it; his desk sign marked him as assistant manager. ‘Excuse me, sir! Can you answer a question for me?’
He looked annoyed but his reply did not show it. ‘I’ll try. What’s on your mind?’
‘Is this really money? Or is it stage money, or something?’
He looked at it, then looked more closely. ‘Interesting. Where did you get this?”
‘My wife found it on a sidewalk. Is it money?’
‘Of course it’s not money. Whoever heard of a twenty-dollar note? Stage money, probably Or an advertising promotion.’
‘Then it’s not worth anything?’
‘It’s worth the paper it’s printed on, that’s all. I doubt that it could even be called counterfeit, since there has been no effort to make it look like the real thing. Still, the Treasury inspectors will want to see it.’
‘All right. Can you take care of it?’
‘Yes. But they’ll want to talk to you, I’m sure. Let’s get your name and address. And your wife’s, of course, since she found it.’
‘Okay. I want a receipt for it.’ I gave our names as ‘Mr and Mrs Alexander Hergensheimer’ and gave the address – but not the name – of Ron’s Grill. Then I solemnly accepted a receipt.
Once outside on the sidewalk I said, ‘Well, we’re no worse off than we thought we were. Time for me to look for some dirty dishes.’
‘Alec -‘
‘Yes, beloved?’
‘We were going to Kansas.’
‘So we were. But our bus-fare money is not worth the paper it is printed on. I’ll have to earn some more. I can. I did it once, I can do it again.’
‘Alec. Let us now go to Kansas.’
A half hour later we were walking north on the highway Tucson. Whenever anyone passed us, I signalled our hope of being picked up.
It took us three hitches simply to reach Tucson. At Tucson it would have made equal sense to head east toward El Paso, Texas, as to continue on Route 89, as 89 swings west before it goes north to Phoenix. It was settled for us by the chance that the first lift we were able to beg out of Tucson was with a teamster who was taking a load north.
This ride we were able to pick up at a truckers’ stop at the intersection of 89 and 80, and I am forced to admit that the teamster listened to our plea because Margrethe is the beauty she is – had I been alone I might still be standing there. I might as well say right now that this whole trip depended throughout on Margrethe’s beauty and womanly charm quite as much as it depended on my willingness to do any honest work whatever, no matter how menial, dirty, or difficult.
I found this fact unpleasant to face. I held dark thoughts of Potiphar’s wife and of the story of Susanna and the Elders. I found myself being vexed with Margrethe when her only offense lay in being her usual gracious, warm, and friendly self. I came close to telling her not to smile at strangers and to keep her eyes to herself.
That temptation hit me sharpest that first day at sundown when this same trucker stopped at a roadside oasis centered around a restaurant and a fueling facility. ‘I’m going to have a couple of beers and a sirloin steak,’ he announced. ‘How about you, Maggie baby? Could you use a rare steak? This is the place where they just chase the cow through the kitchen.’
She smiled at, him. ‘Thank you, Steve. But, I’m not hungry.’
My darling was telling an untruth. She knew it, I knew it – and I felt sure that Steve knew it. Our last meal had been breakfast at the mission, eleven hours and a universe ago. I had tried to wash dishes for a meal at the truckers’ stop outside Tucson, but had been dismissed rather abruptly. So we had had nothing all day but water from a public drinking faucet.
‘Don’t try to kid your grandmother, Maggie. We’ve been on the road four hours. You’re hungry.’
I spoke up quickly to keep Margrethe from persisting in an untruth – told, I felt certain, on my behalf. ‘What she means, Steve, is that she doesn’t accept dinner invitations from other men. She expects me to provide her dinner.’ I added, ‘But I thank you on her behalf and we both thank you for the ride. It’s been most pleasant.’
We were still seated in the cab of his truck, Margrethe in the middle. He leaned forward and looked around her. ‘Alec, you, think I’m trying to get into Maggie’s pants, don’t you?’
I answered stiffly that I did not think anything of the sort while thinking privately that that was exactly what I thought he had been trying to accomplish all along… and I resented not only his unchivalrous overtures but also the gross language he had just used. But I had learned the hard way that rules of polite speech in the world in which I had grown up were not necessarily rules in another universe
‘Oh, yes, you do think so. I wasn’t born yesterday and a lot of my life has been spent on the road, getting my illusions knocked out. You think I’m trying to lay your woman because every stud who comes along tries to put the make on her. But let me clue you in, son. I don’t knock when there’s nobody at home. And I can always tell. Maggie ain’t having any. I checked that out hours ago. And ‘congratulations; a faithful woman is good to find. Isn’t that true?’
‘Yes, certainly,’ I agreed grudgingly.
‘So get your feathers down’. You’re about to take your wife to dinner. You’ve already said thank you to me for the ride but why don’t you really thank me by inviting me to dinner? – so I won’t have to eat alone.’
I hope that I did not look dismayed and that my instant of hesitation was not noticeable. ‘Certainly, Steve. We owe you that for your kindness. Uh, will you excuse me while I make some arrangements?’ I started to get out of the cab.
‘Alec, you don’t lie any better than Maggie does.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘You think I’m blind? You’re broke. Or, if you aren´t absolutely stony, you are so near flat you can’t afford to buy me a sirloin steak. Or even the blueplate special.’
‘That is true,’ I answered with – I hope – dignity. ‘The arrangements I must make are with the restaurant manager. I hope to exchange dishwashing for the price of three dinners.’
‘I thought so. If you were just ordinary broke, you’d be riding Greyhound and you’d have some baggage. If you were broke but not yet hungry broke, you’d hitchhike to save your money for eating but you would have some sort of baggage. A kiester each, or at least a bindle. But you’ve got no baggage… and you’re both wearing suits – in the desert, for God’s sake! The signs all spell disaster.’
I remained mute.
‘Now look,’ he went on. ‘Possibly the owner of this joint would let you wash dishes. More likely he’s got three wetbacks pearl-diving this very minute and has turned down at least three more already today; this is on the main north-south route of turistas coming through holes in the Fence. In any case I can’t wait while you wash dishes; I’ve got to herd this rig a lot of miles yet tonight. So I’ll make you a deal. You take me to dinner but I lend you the money.’
‘I’m a poor risk.’
‘Nope, you’re a good risk. What the bankers call a character loan, the very best risk there is. Sometime, this coming year, or maybe twenty years from now, you’ll run across another young couple, broke and hungry. You’ll buy them dinner on the same, terms. That pays me back. Then when they do the same, down the line, that pays you back. Get it?’
‘I’ll pay you back sevenfold!’
“Once is enough. After that you do it for your own pleasure. Come on, let’s eat.’
Rimrock Restop restaurant was robust rather than fancy – about on a par with Ron’s Grill in another world. It had both counter and tables. Steve led us to a table and shortly a fairly young and rather pretty waitress came over.
‘Howdy, Steve! Long time.’
Hi, Babe! How’d the rabbit test come out?’
‘The rabbit died. How about your blood test?’ She smiled at me and at Margrethe. ‘Hi, folks! What’ll you have?’
I had had time to glance at the menu, first down the right-hand side, of course – and was shocked at the prices. Shocked to find them back on the scale of the world I knew best, I mean. Hamburgers for a dime, coffee at five cents, table d’hôte dinners at seventy-five to ninety cents -these prices I understood.
I looked at it and said, ‘May I have a cheese superburger, medium well?’
‘Sure thing, Ace. How about you, dear?’
Margrethe took the same, but medium rare.
‘Steve?’ the waitress inquired.
That’ll be three beers – Coors – and three sirloin steaks, one rare, one medium rare, one medium. With the usual garbage. Baked potato, fried promises, whatever. The usual limp salad. Hot rolls. All the usual. Dessert later. Coffee.’
‘Gotcha.’
‘Wantcha to meet my friends. Maggie, this is Hazel. That’s Alec, her husband.’
‘You lucky man! Hi, Maggie; glad to know you. Sorry to see you in such company, though. Has Steve tried to sell you anything?’
‘No,’
‘Good. Don’t buy anything, don’t sign anything, don’t bet with him. And be glad you’re safely married; he’s got wives in three states.’
‘Four,’ Steve corrected.
‘Four now? Congratulations. Ladies’ restroom is through the kitchen, Maggie; men go around behind.’ She left moving fast, with a swish of her skirt.
‘That’s a fine broad,’ Steve said. ‘You know what they say about waitresses, especially in truckers’ joints. Well, Hazel is probably the only hash-slinger on this highway who ain’t sellin’ it. Come on, Alec.’ He got up and led me outdoors and around to the men’s room. I followed him. By the time I understood what he had said, it was too late to resent his talking that way in a lady’s presence. Then I was forced to admit that Margrethe had not resented it had simply treated it as information. As praise of Hazel, in fact. I think my greatest trouble with all these worrisome world changes had to do, not with economics, not with social behavior, not with technology, but simply with language, and the mores and taboos thereto.
Beer was waiting for us when we returned, and so was Margrethe, looking cool and refreshed.
Steve toasted us. ‘Skoal!’
We echoed ‘Skaal!’ and I took a sip and then a lot more – just what I needed after a long day on a desert highway. My moral downfall in S.S. Konge Knut had included getting reacquainted with beer, something I had not touched since my days as an engineering student, and very little then – no money for vices. This was excellent beer, it seemed to me, but not as good as the Danish Tuborg served in the ship. Did you know that there is not one word against beer in the Bible? In fact the word ‘beer’ in the Bible means ‘fountain’- or ‘well’.
The steaks were delicious.’
Under the mellowing influence of beer and good food I found myself trying to explain to Steve how we happened to be down on our luck and accepting the charity of strangers… without actually saying anything. Presently Margrethe said to me, ‘Alec. Tell him.’
‘You think I should?’
‘I think Steve is entitled to know. And I trust him.’
‘Very well. Steve, we are strangers from another world.’
He neither laughed nor smiled; he just looked interested. Presently he said, ‘Flying saucer?’
‘No. I mean another universe, not just another planet. Although it seems like the same planet. I mean, Margrethe and I were in a state Called Arizona and a city called Nogales just earlier today. Then it changed. Nogales shrank down and nothing was quite the same. Arizona looked about the same, although I don’t know this state very well.’
‘Territory.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Arizona is a territory, not a state. Statehood was voted down.’
‘Oh. That’s the way it was in my, world, too. Something about taxes. But we didn’t come from my world. Nor from Marga’s world. We came, from -‘I stopped. ‘I’m not telling this very well.’ I looked across at Margrethe. ‘Can you explain it?’
‘I can’t explain it,’ she answered, because I don’t understand it. But, Steve, it’s true. I’m from one world, Alec is from another world, we’ve lived in still another world, and we were in yet again another world this morning. And now we are here. That is why we don’t have any money. No, we do have money but it’s not money of this world.’
Steve said, ‘Could we take this one world at a time? I’m getting dizzy.’
I said, ‘She left out two worlds.’
‘No, dear – three. You may have forgotten the iceberg world.’
‘No, I counted that. I – Excuse me, Steve. I’ll try to take it one world at a time. But it isn’t easy. This morning – We went into an ice cream parlor in Nogales because I wanted to buy Margrethe a hot fudge sundae. We sat down at a table, across from each other like right now, and that put me facing a set of traffic lights-‘
‘A set of what?’
‘A set of traffic signal lights, red, green, and amber. That’s how I spotted that we had changed worlds again. This world doesn’t have signal lights, or at least I haven’t seen any. Just traffic cops. But in the world we got up in this morning, instead of traffic cops, they do it with signal lights.’
Sounds like they do it with mirrors. What’s this got to do with buying Maggie a hot fudge sundae?’
‘That was because, when we were. shipwrecked and, floating around in the ocean, Margrethe wanted a hot fudge, sundae. This morning was my first chance to buy one for her. When the traffic lights disappeared, I knew we had changed worlds again – and that meant that my money wasn’t any good. So I could not buy her a hot fudge sundae. And could not buy her dinner tonight. No money. No spendable money, I mean. You see?’
‘I think I fell off three turns back. What happened to your money?’
‘Oh.’ I dug into my pocket, hauled out our carefully hoarded bus-fare money, picked out a twenty-dollar bill, handed it to Steve. ‘Nothing happened to it. Look at this.’
He looked at it carefully. ‘ “Lawful money for all debts public and private.” That sounds okay. But who’s this joker with his picture on it? And when did they start.printing twenty-dollar treasury notes?’
‘Never, in your world. I guess. The picture is of William Jennings Bryan, President of the United States from 1913 to 192l.’
‘Not at Horace Mann School in Akron, he wasn’t. Never heard of him.’
‘In my school he was elected in 1896, not sixteen years later. And in Margrethe’s world Mr Bryan was never president at all. Say! Margrethe! This just might be your world!’
‘Why do you think so, dear?’
‘Maybe, maybe not. As we came north out of Nogales I didn’t notice a flying field or any signs concerning one. And I just remembered that I haven’t heard or seen a jet plane all day long. Or any sort of a flying machine. Have you?’
,No. No, I haven’t. But I haven’t been thinking about them.’ She added, ‘I’m almost certain there haven’t been any near us.’
There you have it! Or maybe this is my world. Steve, what’s the situation on aeronautics here?’
‘Arrow what?’
‘Flying machines. Jet planes. Aeroplanes of any sort. And dirigibles – do you have dirigibles?’
‘None of those things rings any bells with me. You’re talking about flying, real flying, up in the air like a bird?’.
‘Yes, yes!’
‘No, of course not. Or do you mean balloons? I’ve seen a balloon.’
‘Not balloons. Oh, a dirigible is a sort of a balloon. But it’s long instead of round – sort of cigar-shaped. And it’s propelled by engines something like our truck and goes a hundred miles an hour and more – and usually fairly high, one or two thousand feet. Higher over mountains.’
For the first time Steve showed surprise rather than interest. ‘God A’mighty! You’ve actually seen something like that?’
‘I’ve ridden in them. Many times. First when I was only twelve years old. You went to school in Akron? In my world Akron is world famous as the place where they build the biggest, fastest, and best dirigible airships in all the world.’
Steve shook his head. ‘When the parade goes by, I’m out for a short beer. That’s the story of my life. Maggie, you’ve seen airships? Ridden in them?’
‘No. They are not in my world. But I’ve ridden in a flying’ machine. An aeroplano. Once. It was terribly exciting. Frightening, too. But I would like to do it again.’
‘I betcha would. Me, I reckon it would scare the tar out of me. But I would take a ride in one, even if it killed me. Folks, I’m beginning to believe you. You tell it so straight. That and this money. If it, is money.’
‘It is money,’ I insisted, ‘from another world. Look at it closely, Steve. Obviously it’s not money of your world. But it’s not play money or stage money either. Would anybody bother to make steel engravings that perfect just for stage money? The engraver who made the plates expected that note to be accepted as money… yet it isn’t even a correct denomination – that’s the first thing you noticed. Wait a moment.’ I dug into another pocket. ‘Yup! Still here.’ I took out a ten-peso note – from the Kingdom of Mexico. I had burned most of the useless money we had accumulated before the quake – Margrethe’s tips at El Pancho Villa – but I had saved a few’ souvenirs. ‘Look at this, too. Do you know Spanish?’
‘Not really. TexMex. Cantina Spanish.’ He looked at the Mexican money. ‘This looks okay.’
‘Look more closely,’ Margrethe urged him. ‘Where it says ‘Reino’. Shouldn’t that read ‘Republica’? Or is Mexico a kingdom in this world?’
‘It’s a republic… partly because I helped keep it that way. I was an election judge there when I was in the Marines. It’s amazing what a few Marines armed to their eyebrows can do to keep an election honest. Okay, pals; you’ve sold ‘me. Mexico is not a kingdom and hitchhikers who don’t have the price of dinner on them ought not to be carrying around Mexicano money that says it is a kingdom. Maybe I’m crazy but I’m inclined to throw in with you. What’s the explanation?’
‘Steve’,’ I said soberly, ‘I wish I knew. The simplest explanation is that I’ve gone crazy and that it’s all imaginary – you, me, Marga, this restaurant, this world – all products of my brain fever.’
‘You can be imaginary if you want to, but leave Maggie and me out of it. Do you have any other explanations?’
‘Uh… that depends. Do you read the Bible, Steve?’
‘Well, yes and no. Being on the road, lots of times I find myself wide awake in bed with nothing around to read but a Gideon Bible. So sometimes I do.’
‘Do you recall Matthew twenty-four, twenty-four?’
‘Huh? Should I?’
I quoted it for him. ‘That’s one possibility, Steve. These world changes may be signs sent by the Devil himself, intended to deceive us. On the other hand they may be portents of the end of world and the coming of Christ into His kingdom. Hear the Word:
“Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken:
“And then shall appear the sign ed the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.
‘”And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.”
‘That’s what it adds up to, Steve. Maybe these are the false signs of the tribulations before the end, or maybe these wonders foretell the Parousia, the coming of Christ. But, either way, we are coming to the end of the world. Are you born again?’
‘Mmm, I can’t rightly say that I am. I was baptized a long time ago, when I was too young to have much say in the matter. I’m not a churchgoer, except sometimes to see my friends married or buried. If I was washed clean once, I guess I’m a little dusty by now. I don’t suppose I qualify.’
‘No, I’m certain that you do not. Steve, the end of the world is coming and Christ is returning soon. The most urgent business you have – that anyone has! – is to take your troubles to Jesus, be washed in His Blood, and be born again in Him. Because you will receive no warning. The Trump will sound and you will either be caught up into the arms of Jesus, safe and happy forevermore, or you will be cast down into the fire and brimstone, there to suffer agonies through all eternity. You must be ready.’
‘Cripes! Alec, have you ever thought about becoming a preacher?’
‘I’ve thought about it.’
‘You should do more than think about it, you should be one. You said all that just like you believed every word of it.’
‘I do.
‘Thought maybe. Well, I’ll pay you the respect of giving it some hard thought. But in the meantime I hope they don’t hold Kingdom Come tonight because I’ve still got this load to deliver. Hazel! Let me have the check, dear; I’ve got to get the show on the road.’
Three steak dinners came to $3.90; six beers was another sixty cents, for a total of $4.50. Steve paid with a half eagle, a coin I had never seen outside a coin collection I wanted to look at this one but had no excuse.
Hazel picked it up, looked at it. ‘Don’t get much gold around here,? she remarked. ‘Cartwheels are the usual thing. And some paper, although the boss doesn’t like paper money. Sure you can spare this, Steve?’
‘I found the Lost Dutchman.’
‘Go along with you; I’m not going to be your fifth wife.’
‘I had in mind a temporary arrangement.’
‘Not that either – not for a five-dollar gold piece.’ She dug into an apron pocket, took out a silver half dollar. ‘Your change, dear.’
He pushed it back toward her. ‘What’ll you do for fifty cents?’
She picked it up, pocketed it. ‘Spit in your eye. Thanks. Night, folks. Glad you came in.’
During the thirty-five miles or so on into Flagstaff Steve asked questions of us about the worlds we had seen but made no comments. He talked just enough to keep us talking. He was especially interested in my descriptions of airships, jet planes, and aeroplanos, but anything technical fascinated him. Television he found much harder to believe than flying machines – well, so did I. But Margrethe assured him that she had seen television herself, and Margrethe is hard to disbelieve. Me, I might be mistaken for a con man. But not Margrethe. Her voice and manner carry conviction.
In Flagstaff, just short of Route 66, Steve pulled over to the side and stopped, left his engine running. ‘All out,’ he said, ‘if you insist on heading east. If you want to go north, you’re welcome.
I said, ‘We’ve got to get to Kansas, Steve.’
‘Yes, I know. While you can get there either way, Sixty-Six is your best bet… though why anyone should want to go to Kansas beats me. It’s that intersection ahead, there. Keep right and keep going; you can’t miss it. Watch out for the Santa Fe tracks. Where you planning to sleep tonight?’
‘I don’t have any plans. We’ll walk until we get another ride. If we don’t get an all-night ride and we get too sleepy, we can sleep by the side of the road – it’s warm.’
‘Alec, you listen to your Uncle Dudley. You’re not going to sleep on the desert tonight. It’s warm now; it’ll be freezing cold by morning. Maybe you haven’t noticed but we’ve been climbing all the way from Phoenix. And if the Gila monsters don’t get you, the sand fleas will. You’ve got to rent a cabin.’
‘Steve, I can’t rent a cabin.’
‘The Lord will provide. You believe that, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I answered stiffly, ‘I believe that.’ (But He also helps those who help themselves.)
‘So let the Lord provide. Maggie, about this end-of-the world business, do you agree with Alec?’
“I certainly don’t disagree!’
‘Mmm. Alec, I’m going to give it a lot of thought… starting tonight, by reading a Gideon Bible. This time I don’t want to miss the parade. You go on down Sixty-Six, look for a place saying ‘cabins’. Not ‘motel’ ‘ not ‘roadside inn’, not a word about Simmons mattresses or private baths – just ‘cabins’. If they ask more
than two dollars, walk away. Keep dickering and you might get it for one.’
I wasn’t listening very hard as I was growing quite angry. Dicker with what? He knew that I was utterly without funds – didn’t he believe me?
‘So I’ll say good-bye,’ Steve went on. ‘Alec, can you get that door? I don’t want to get out.’
‘I can get it.’ I opened it, stepped down, then remembered my manners. ‘Steve, I want to thank you for everything. Dinner, and beer, and a long ride. May the Lord watch over you and keep you.’
‘Thank you and don’t mention it. Here.’ He reached into a pocket, pulled out a card. ‘That’s my business card. Actually it’s my daughter’s address. When you get to Kansas, drop me a card, let me know how you made out.’
‘I’ll do that.’ I took the card, then started to hand Margrethe down.
Steve stopped her. ‘Maggie! Aren’t you going to kiss Ol’ Steve good-bye?’
‘Why, certainly, Steve!’ She turned back and half faced him on the seat.
‘That’s better, Alec, you’d better turn your back.’
I did not turn my back but I tried to ignore it, while watching out the corner of my eye.
If it had gone on one half-second longer, I would have dragged her out of that cab bodily. Yet I am forced to admit that Margrethe was not having attentions forced on her; she was cooperating fully, kissing him in a fashion no married woman should ever kiss another man.
I endured it.
At last it ended. I handed her down, and closed the door. Steve called out, ‘ ‘Bye, kids!’ and his truck moved forward. As it picked up speed he tooted his horn twice.
Margrethe said, ‘Alec, you are angry with me.’
‘No. Surprised, yes. Even shocked. Disappointed. Saddened.’
‘Don’t sniff at me!’
‘Eh?’
‘Steve drove us two hundred and fifty miles and bought us a fine dinner and didn’t laugh when we told him a preposterous story. And now you get hoity-toity and holier-than-thou because I kissed him hard enough to show that I appreciated what he had done for me and my husband. I won’t stand for it, do you hear?’
‘I just meant that -‘
‘Stop it! I won’t listen to explanations. Because you’re wrong! And now I am angry and I shall stay angry until you realize you are wrong. So think it over!’ She turned and started walking rapidly toward the intersection of 66 with 89.
I hurried to catch up. ‘Margrethe!’
She did not answer and increased her pace.
‘Margrethe!’ Eyes straight ahead –
‘Margrethe darling! I was wrong. I’m sorry, I apologize.
‘She stopped abruptly, turned and threw her arms around my neck, started to cry. ‘Oh, Alec, I love you so and you’re such a fub!’
I did not answer at once as my mouth was busy. At last I said, ‘I love you, too, and what is a fub?’
‘You are.’
‘Well – In that case I’m your fub and you’re stuck with me. Don’t walk away from me again.’
‘I won’t. Not ever.’ We resumed what we had been doing.
After a while I pulled my face back just far enough to whisper: ‘We don’t have a bed to our name and I’ve never wanted one more.’
‘Alec. Check your pockets.’
‘Huh?’
‘While he ‘Was kissing me, Steve whispered to me to tell you to check your pockets and to say, “The Lord will provide.”‘
I found it in my left-hand coat pocket: a gold eagle. Never before had I held one in my hand. It felt warm and heavy.
Chapter 16
Shall mortal man be more just than God? shall a man be more pure than his maker?
Job 4:17
Teach me, and I will hold my tongue: and cause me to understand wherein I have erred.
Job 6:24
AT A drugstore in downtown Flagstaff I exchanged that gold eagle for nine cartwheels, ninety-five cents in change, and a bar of Ivory soap. Buying soap was Margrethe’s idea. ‘Alec, a druggist is not a banker; changing money is something he may not want to do other than as part of a sale. We need soap. I want to wash your underwear and mine, and we both need baths… and I suspect that, at the sort of cheap lodging Steve urged us to take, soap may not be included in the rent.’
She was right on both counts. The druggist raised his eyebrows at the ten-dollar gold piece but said nothing. He took the coin, let it ring on the glass top of a counter, then reached behind his cash register, fetched out a small bottle, and subjected the coin to the acid test.
I made no comment. Silently he counted out nine silver dollars, a half dollar, a quarter, and two dimes. Instead of pocketing the coins at once, I stood fast, and subjected each coin to the same ringing test he had used, using his glass counter. Having done so, I pushed one cartwheel back at him.
Again he made no comment – he had heard the dull ring, of that putatively silver coin as well as I. He rang up ‘No Sale’, handed me another cartwheel (which rang clear as a bell), and put the bogus coin somewhere in the back of the cash drawer. Then he turned his back on me.
At the outskirts of town, halfway to Winona, we found a place shabby enough to meet our standards. Margrethe conducted the dicker, in Spanish. Our host asked five dollars. Marga called on the Virgin Mary and three other saints to witness what was being done to her. Then she offered him five pesos.
I did not understand this maneuver; I knew she had no pesos on her. Surely she would not be intending to offer those unspendable ‘royal’ pesos I still carried?
I did not find out, as our host answered with a price of three dollars and that is final, Señora, as God is my witness.
They settled on a dollar and a half, then Marga rented clean sheets and a blanket for another fifty cents – paid for the lot with two silver dollars but demanded pillows and ‘ clean pillow-cases to seal the bargain. She got them but the patrón asked something for luck. Marga added a dime and he bowed deeply and assured us that his house was ours.
At seven the next morning we were on our way, rested, clean, happy and hungry. A half hour later we were in Winona and much hungrier. We cured the latter at a little trailer-coach lunchroom: a stack of wheat cakes, ten cents; coffee, five cents no charge for second cup, no limit on butter or syrup.
I Margrethe could not finish her hot cakes- they were lavish – so we swapped plates and I salvaged what she had left.
A sign on the wall read: CASH WHEN SERVED – NO TIPPING – ARE YOU READY FOR
JUDGMENT DAY? The cook-waiter (and owner, I think) had a copy of The Watch Tower propped up by his range. I asked, ‘Brother, do you have any late news on when to expect Judgment Day?’
‘Don’t joke about it. Eternity is a long time to spend in the Pit.’
I answered, ‘I was not joking. By the signs and portents I think we are in the seven-year period prophesied in the eleventh chapter of Revelation, verses two and three. But I don’t know how far we are into it.’
‘We’re already well into the second half,’ he answered.
‘The two witnesses are now prophesying and the antichrist is abroad in the land. Are you in a state of
grace? If not, you had better get cracking.’
I answered, ‘”Therefore be ye also ready: for such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh.”‘
‘You’d better believe it!’
‘I do believe it. Thanks for a good breakfast.’
‘Don’t mention it. May the Lord watch over you.’
‘Thank you. May He bless and keep you.’ Marga and I left.
We headed ‘ cast again. ‘How is my sweetheart?’
‘Full of food and happy.’
‘So am I. Something you did last night made me especially happy.’
‘Me, too. But you always do, darling man. Every time.’
‘Uh, yes, there’s that. Me, too. Always. But I meant something you said, earlier. When Steve asked, if you agreed with me about Judgment Day and you told him you did agree. Marga, I can’t tell you how much it has worried me that you have not chosen to be received back into the arms of Jesus. With Judgment Day rushing toward us and no way to know the hour – well, I’ve worried. I do worry. But apparently you are finding your way back to the light but had not yet discussed it with me.’
We walked perhaps twenty paces while Margrethe did not say anything.
At last she said quietly, ‘Beloved, I would put your mind at rest. If I could. I cannot.’
‘So? I do not understand. Will you explain?’
‘I did not tell Steve that I agreed with you. I said to him that I did not disagree.’
‘But that’s the same thing!’
‘No, darling. What I did not say to Steve but could have said, in, full honesty is that I will never publicly disagree with my husband about anything. Any disagreement with you I will discuss with you in private. Not in Steve’s presence. Not anyone’s.’
I chewed that over, let several possible comments go unsaid – at last said, ‘Thank you, Margrethe.’
‘Beloved, I do it for my own dignity as well as for yours. All my life I have hated the sight of husband and wife disagreeing – disputing – quarreling in public. If you say that the sun is covered with bright green puppy dogs, I will not disagree in public.’
Ah, but it is!’
‘Sir?’ She stopped, and looked startled.
‘My good Marga. Whatever the problem, you always find a gentle answer. If I ever do see bright green puppy dogs on the face of the sun, I will try to remember to discuss it with you in private, not face you with hard decisions in public. I love you. I read too much into what you said to Steve because I really do worry.’
She took my hand and we walked a bit farther without talking.
‘Alec?’
‘Yes, my love?’
‘I do not willingly worry you. If I am wrong and you are going to the Christian Heaven, I do want to go I with you. If this means a return to faith in Jesus – and it seems that it does – then that is what I want. I will try. I cannot promise it, as faith is not a matter of simple volition. But I will try.’
I stopped to kiss her, to the amusement of a carload of men passing by. ‘Darling, more I cannot ask. Shall we pray together?’
‘Alec, I would rather not. Let me pray alone – and I will! When it comes time to pray together, I will tell you. I
Not long after that we were picked up by a ranch couple who took us into Winslow. They dropped us there without asking any questions and without us offering any information, which must set some sort of record.
Winslow is much larger than Winona; it is a respectable town as desert communities go – seven thousand at a guess. We found there an opportunity to carry out something Steve had indirectly suggested and that we had discussed the night before.
Steve was correct; we were not dressed for the desert. True, we had had no choice, as we had been caught by a world change. But I did not see another man wearing a business suit in the desert. Nor did we see Anglo women dressed in women’s suits. Indian women and Mexican women wore skirts, but Anglo women wore either shorts or trousers – slacks, jeans, cutoffs, riding pants, something. Rarely a skirt, never a suit.
Furthermore our suits were not right even as city wear. They looked as out of place as styles of the Mauve Decade would look. Don’t ask me how as I am no expert on styles, especially for women. The suit that I wore had been both smart and expensive when worn by my patrón, Don Jaime, in Mazatlán in an I other world… but on me, in the Arizona desert in this world, it was something out of skid row.
In Winslow we found just the shop we needed: SECOND WIND – A Million Bargains – All Sales Cash, No Guarantees, No Returns – All Used Clothing Sterilized Before Being Offered For Sale. Above this were the same statements in Spanish.
An hour later, after much picking over of their stock and-some heavy dickering by Margrethe, we were dressed for the desert. I was wearing khaki pants, a shirt to match, and a straw hat of vaguely western style. Margrethe was wearing considerably less: shorts that were both short and tight – indecently so – and, an -upper garment that was less than a bodice but slightly more than a brassière. It was termed a ‘halter’.
When I saw Marga in this outfit, I whispered to her, ‘I positively will not permit you to appear in public in that shameless costume.’
She answered, ‘Dear, don’t be a fub so early in the day. It’s too hot.’
‘I’m not joking. I forbid you to buy that.’
‘Alec, I don’t recall asking your permission.’
‘Are you defying me?’
She sighed. ‘Perhaps I am. I don’t want to. Did you get your razor?’
‘You saw me!’
‘I have your underpants and socks. Is there anything more you need now?’
‘No. Margrethe! Quit evading me!’
‘Darling, I told you that I will not quarrel with you in public. This outfit has a wrap-around skirt; I was about to put it on. Let me do so and settle the bill. Then we can go outside and talk in private.’
Fuming, I went along with what she proposed. I might as well admit that, under her careful management, we came out of that bazaar with more money than we had had when we came in. How? That suit from my patrón, Don Jaime, that looked so ridiculous on me, looked just right on the owner of the shop – in fact he resembled Don Jaime. He had been willing to swap, even, for what I needed – khaki shirt and pants and straw hat.
But Margrethe insisted on something to boot. She demanded five dollars, got two.
I learned, as she settled our bill, that she had wrought similar magic in getting rid of that tailored suit she no longer needed. We entered the shop with $7.55; we left it with $8.80… and desert outfits for each of us, a comb (for two), a toothbrush (also for two), a knapsack, a safety razor, plus a minimum of underwear and socks – all second hand but alleged to be sterilized.
I am not good at tactics, not with women. We were outside and down the highway to an open place where we could talk privately before Margrethe would talk to me and I did not realize that I had already lost.
Without stopping, she said, ‘Well, dear? You had something to discuss.’
‘Uh, with that skirt in place your clothing is acceptable. Barely. But you are not to appear in-public in those shorts. Is that understood?’
‘I intended to wear just the shorts. If the weather is warm. As it is.’
‘But, Margrethe, I told you not to -‘She was unsnapping the skirt, taking it off. ‘You are defying me!’
She folded it, up neatly. ‘May I place this in the knapsack? Please?’
‘You are deliberately disobeying me!’
‘But, Alec, I don’t have to obey you and you don’t have to obey me.’
‘But – Look, dear, be reasonable. You know I don’t usually give orders. But a wife must obey her husband. Are you my wife?’
‘You told me so. So I am until you tell me otherwise.’
‘Then it is your duty to obey me.’
‘No, Alec.’
‘But that is a wife’s first duty!’
‘I don’t agree.’
‘But – This is madness! Are you leaving me?’
‘No. Only if you divorce me.’
‘I don’t believe in divorce. Divorce is wrong. Against Scripture.’
She made no answer.
‘Margrethe… please put your skirt on.’
She said softly, ‘Almost you persuade me, dearest. Will you explain why you want me to do so?’
‘What? Because those shorts, worn alone, are indecent!’
‘I don’t see how an article of clothing can be indecent, Alec. A person, yes. Are you saying that I am indecent?’
‘Uh – You’re twisting my words. When you wear those shorts – without a skirt – in public, you expose so much of yourself that the spectacle is indecent. Right now, walking this highway, your limbs are fully exposed… to the people in that car that just passed, for example. They saw you. I saw them staring!’
‘Good. I hope they enjoyed it.’
‘What?’
‘You tell me that I am beautiful. But you could be prejudiced. I hope that my appearance is pleasing to other people as well.’
‘Be serious, Margrethe; we’re speaking of your naked limbs. Naked.’
‘You are saying my legs are bare. So they are. I prefer them bare when the weather is warm. What are you frowning at, dear? Are my legs ugly?’
(‘Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee!’) ‘Your limbs are beautiful, my love; I have told you so many times. But I have no wish to share your beauty.’
‘Beauty is not diminished by being shared. Let’s get back to the subject, Alec; you were explaining how my legs are indecent. If you can explain it. I don’t think you can.’
‘But, Margrethe, nakedness is indecent by its very nature. It inspires lewd thoughts.’
‘Really? Does seeing my legs cause you to get an erection?’
‘Margrethe!’
‘Alec, stop being a fub! I asked a simple question.’
‘An improper question.’ ‘
She sighed. ‘I don’t see how that question can possibly be improper between husband and wife. And I will never concede that my legs are indecent. Or that nakedness is indecent. I have been naked in front of hundreds of people -‘
‘Margrethe!’
She looked surprised. ‘Surely you know that?’
‘I did not know it and I am shocked to hear it.’
‘Truly, dear? But you know how well I swim.’
‘What’s that got to do with it? I swim well, too. But I don’t swim naked; I wear a bathing suit.’ (But I, was remembering most sharply the pool in Konge Knut – of course my darling was used to nude swimming. I found myself out on a limb.)
‘Oh. Yes. I’ve seen such suits, in Mazatlán. And in Spain. But, darling, we’re going astray again. The problem is wider than whether or not bare legs are indecent or whether I should have kissed Steve good-bye or even whether I must obey you. You are expecting me to be what I am not. I want to be your wife for many years, for -all my life – and I hope to share Heaven with you if Heaven is your
destination. But, darling, I am not a child, I am not a slave. Because I love you I wish to please you. But I will not obey an order simply because I am a wife.’
I could say that I overwhelmed her with the brilliance of my rebuttal. Yes, I could say that, but it would not be true. I was still trying to think of an answer when a car slowed down as it overtook us. I heard a whistle of the sort called ‘wolf’. The car stopped beyond us and backed up. Need a ride?’ a voice called out.
‘Yes!’ Margrethe answered, and hurried. Perforce, I did, too.
. It was a station wagon with a woman behind the wheel, a man riding with her. Both were my age or older. He reached back, opened the rear door. ‘Climb in!’
I handed Margrethe in, followed her and closed the door. ‘Got room enough?’ he asked. ‘If not, throw that junk on the floor. We never sit in the back seat, so stuff sort o’ gravitates to it. We’re Clyde and Bessie Bulkey.’
‘He’s Bulkey; I’m just well fed,’ the driver added.
‘You’re supposed to laugh at that; I’ve heard it before.’ He was indeed bulky, the sort of big-boned beefy man who is an athlete in school, then puts on weight later. His wife had correctly described both of them; she was not fat but carried some extra padding.
‘How do you do, Mrs Bulkey, Mr Bulkey. We’re Alec and Margrethe Graham. Thank you for picking us up.’
Don’t be so formal, Alec,’ she answered. ‘How far you going?’
‘Bessie, please keep one eye on the road.’
‘Clyde, if you don’t like the way I’m herding this heap, I’ll pull over and let you drive.’
‘Oh, no, no, you’re doing fine!’
‘Pipe down then, or I invoke rule K. Well, Alec?’
‘We’re going to Kansas.’
‘Coo! We’re not going that far; we turn north at Chambers. That’s just a short piece down the road, About ninety miles. But you’re welcome to that much. What are you going to do in Kansas?’
(What was I going to do in Kansas? Open an ice cream parlor… bring my dear wife back to the fold. Prepare for Judgment Day -) ‘I’m going to wash dishes.’
‘My husband is too modest,’ Margrethe said quietly. ‘We’re going to open a small restaurant and soda fountain in a college town. But on our way to that goal we are likely to wash dishes. Or almost any work.’
So I explained what had happened to us, with variations and omissions to avoid what they wouldn’t believe. ‘The restaurant was wiped out, our Mexican partner were dead, and we lost everything we had. I said “dishwashing” because that is the one job I can almost always find. But I’ll take a swing at ‘most anything.’
Clyde said, ‘Alec, with that attitude you’ll be back on, your feet before you know it.’
‘We lost some money, that’s all. We’re not too old to start over again.’ (Dear Lord, will You hold off Judgment Day long enough for me to do it? Thy will be done. Amen.)
Margrethe reached over and squeezed my hand. Llyde noticed it. He had turned around in his seat so that he faced us as well as his wife. ‘You’ll make it,’ he said. ‘With your wife backing you, you’re bound to make it.’
I think so. Thank you. ‘I knew why he was turned to face us: to stare at Margrethe. I wanted to tell him to keep his eyes to himself but, under the circumstances, I could not. Besides that, it was clear that Mr and Mrs Bulkey saw nothing wrong with the way my beloved was dressed; Mrs Bulkey was dressed the same way, only more so. Or less so. Less costume, more bare skin. I must admit, too, that,’ while she was not the immortal beauty Margrethe is, she was quite comely.
At Painted Desert we stopped, got out, and stared at the truly unbelievable natural beauty. I had seen it once before; Margrethe had never seen it and was breathless. Clyde told me that they always stopped, even though they had seen it hundreds of times.
Correction: I had seen it once before in another world. Painted Desert tended to prove what I had strongly suspected: It was not Mother Earth that changed in these wild changes; it was man and his works – and even those only, in part. But the only obvious explanation seemed to lead straight to paranoia. If so, I must not surrender to it; I must take care of Margrethe.
Clyde bought us hot dogs and cold drinks and brushed aside my offer to pay. When we got back into their car, Clyde took the wheel and invited Margrethe to ride up front with him. I was not pleased but could not show it, as Bessie promptly said, ‘Poor Alec! Has to put up with the old bag. Don’t sulk, dear; it’s only twenty-three miles to the turn-off for Chambers . . . or less than twenty-three minutes the way Clyde drives.’
This time Clyde took thirty minutes. But he waited and made sure that we had a ride to Gallup.
We reached Gallup long before dark. Despite $8.80 in our pockets, it seemed time to look for dirty dishes. Gallup has almost as many motels and cabin courts as it ‘has Indians and almost half of these hostelries have restaurants. I checked a baker’s dozen before I found one that needed a dishwasher.
Fourteen days later we were in Oklahoma City. If you think that is slow time, you are correct; it is less than fifty miles a day. But plenty had happened and I was feeling decidedly paranoid – world change after world change and always timed to cause me maximum trouble.
Ever seen a cat play with a mouse? The mouse never has a chance. If he has even the brains the good Lord gives a mouse, he knows that. Nevertheless the mouse keeps on trying… and is hauled back every time.
I was the mouse.
Or we were the mice, for Margrethe was with me… and she was all that kept me going. She didn’t complain and she didn’t quit. So I couldn’t quit.
Example: I had figured out that, while paper money was never any good after a world change, hard money, gold and silver, would somehow be negotiable, as bullion if not coin. So, when I got a chance to lay hands on hard money, I was stingy with it and refused to take paper money in change for hard money.
Smart boy. Alec, you’re a real brain.
So on our third day in Gallup Marga and I took a nap in a room paid for by dishwashing (me) and by cleaning rooms (Margrethe). We didn’t intend to go to sleep; we simply wanted to rest a bit before eating; it had been a long, hard day. We lay down on top of the bedspread.
I was just getting relaxed when I realized that something hard was pressing against my spine. I roused enough to figure out that our hoarded silver dollars had slipped out of my side pocket when I had turned over. So I eased my arm out from under Marga’s head, retrieved the dollars, counted them, added the, loose change, and placed it all on the bedside table a foot from my head, then got horizontal again, slid my arm under Marga’s head and fell right to sleep.
When I woke up it was pitch dark.
I came wide awake. Margrethe was still snoring softly on my arm. I shook her a little. ‘Honey. Wake up.’
‘Mrrf?’
‘It’s late. We may have missed dinner
She came quickly awake. ‘Can you switch on the bed lamp?’ ‘
I fumbled at the bedside table, nearly fell out of bed. ‘Can’t find the pesky thing. It’s dark as the inside of a pile of coal.’ Wait a sec, I’ll get the overhead light.’
I got cautiously off the bed, headed for the door, stumbled over a chair, could not find the door – groped for it, did find it, groped some more and found a light. switch by it. The overhead light came on.
For a long, dismal moment neither of us said anything. Then I said, inanely and unnecessarily, ‘They did it again.’
The room had the characterless anonymity of any cheap motel room anywhere. Nevertheless it was different in details from the room in which we had gone to sleep.
And our hoarded silver dollars were gone.
Everything but the clothes we were wearing was gone knapsack, clean socks, spare underwear, comb, safety razor, everything. I inspected, made certain.
‘Well, Marga, what now?’
‘Whatever you say, sir.’
‘Mmm. I don’t think they’ll know me in the kitchen. But they still might let me wash dishes.’
‘Or they may need a waitress.’
The door had a spring lock and I had no key, so I left it an inch ajar. The door led directly outdoors and looked across a parking court at the office – a corner room with a lighted sign reading OFFICE – all commonplace except that it did not match the appearance of the motel in which we had been working. In that establishment the manager’s office had been in the front end of a central, building, the rest of that central building being the coffee shop.
Yes, we had missed dinner.
And breakfast. This motel did not have a coffee shop.
‘Well, Marga?’
‘Which way is Kansas?’
‘That way… I think. But we have two choices. We can go back into the room, go to bed properly, and sleep until daylight. Or we can get out there on the highway and try to thumb a ride. In the dark.’
‘Alec, I see only one choice. If we go back inside and go to bed, we’ll get up at daylight, some hours hungrier and no better off. Maybe worse off, if they catch us sleeping in a room we didn’t pay for
‘I washed an awful lot of dishes!’
‘Not here, you didn’t. Here they might send for the police.’
We started walking.
That was typical of the persecution we suffered in trying to get to Kansas. Yes, I said ‘persecution’. If
paranoia consists in believing that the world around you is a conspiracy against you, I had become paranoid. But it was either a ‘sane paranoia (if you will pardon the Irishism), or I was suffering from delusions so monumental that I should be locked up and treated.
Maybe so. If so, Margrethe was part of my delusions an answer I could not accept. It could not be folie à deux; Margrethe was sane in any world.
It was the middle of the day before we got anything to eat, and by then I was beginning to see ghosts where a healthy man would see only dust devils. My hat had gone where the woodbine twineth and the New Mexico sun on my head was not helping my state.
A carload of men from a construction site picked us up and took us into Grants, and bought us lunch before they left us there. I may be certifiably insane but I am not stupid; we owe that ride and that meal to the fact that Margrethe in shorts indecently tight, is a sight that attracts the attention of men. That gave me plenty to think about while I enjoyed (and I did enjoy it!) that lunch they bought us. But I kept my ruminations to myself.
After they left us I said, ‘East?’
‘Yes, sir. But first I would like to check the public library. If there is one.’
‘Oh, yes! Surely.’ Earlier, in the world of our friend Steve, the lack of air travel had caused me to suspect that Steve’s world might be the world where Margrethe was born (and therefore the home of ‘Alec Graham’ as well). In Gallup we had checked on this at the public library – I had looked up American history in an encyclopedia while Marga checked on Danish history. It took us each about five minutes to determine that Steve’s world was not the world Marga was born in. I found that Bryan had been elected in 1896 but had died in office, succeeded by his vice president, Arthur Sewall – and that was all I needed to know; I then simply raced through presidents and wars I had never, heard of.
Margrethe had finished her line of investigation with her nose twitching with indignation. Once outside where we didn’t have to whisper I asked her what was troubling her. ‘This isn’t your world, dear; I made sure of that.’
‘It certainly isn’t!’
‘But we didn’t have anything but a negative to go on. There may be many worlds that have no aeronautics of any sort.’
‘I’m glad this isn’t my world! Alec, in this world Denmark is part of Sweden. Isn’t that terrible?’
Truthfully I did not understand her upset. Both countries are Scandinavian, pretty much alike – or so it seemed to me. ‘I’m sorry, dear. I don’t know much about such things,’ (I had been to Stockholm once, liked the place. It didn’t seem a good time to tell her so.)
‘And that silly book says that Stockholm is the capital and that Carl Sixteenth is king. Alec, he isn’t even royal! And now they tell me he’s my king!’
‘But, sweetheart, he’s not your king. This isn’t even your world.’
‘I know. Alec? If we have to settle here – if the world doesn’t change again – couldn’t I be naturalized?’
‘Why, yes. I suppose so.’
She sighed. ‘I don’t want to be a Swede.’
I kept quiet. There were some things I couldn’t help her with.
So in Grants we again went to a public library lo see what the latest changes had done to the world. Since we had seen no aeroplanos and no dirigibles, again it was possible that we were in Margrethe’s world. This time I looked first under ‘Aeronautics’ – did not find, dirigibles but did find flying machines… invented by Dr Alberto Santos Dumont of Brazil early in this century – and I was bemused by the inventor’s name, as, in my world, he had been a pioneer in dirigibles second only to Count von Zeppelin. Apparently the doctor’s. aerodynes were primitive compared with jet planes, or even aeroplanos; they seemed to be curiosities rather than commercial vehicles. I dropped it and turned to American history, checking first on William, Jennings Bryan.
I couldn’t, find him at all. Well, I had known that this was not my world.
But Marga was all smiles, could hardly wait to get outside the no-talking area to tell me about it. ‘In this world Scandinavia is all one big country… and Kobenhavn is its capital!’
‘Well, good!’
‘Queen Margrethe’s son Prince Frederik was crowned King Eric Gustav – no doubt to please the outlanders. But he is true Danish royalty and a Dane right down to his skull bone. This is as it should be!’
I tried to show her, that I was happy, too. Without a cent between us, with no idea where we would sleep that night, she was delighted as a child at Christmas… over an event that I could not see mattered at all.
Two short rides got us into Albuquerque and I decided that it was prudent to stay there a bit – it’s a big place even if we had to throw ourselves On Salvation Army charity. But I quickly found a job as a dishwasher in the Coffee shop of the local Holiday Inn and Margrethe went to work as a waitress in the same shop.
We had been working there less than two hours when she came back to the scullery and slid something into my hip pocket while I was bent over a sink. ‘A present for you, dear!’
I turned around. ‘Hi, Gorgeous.’ I checked my pocket – a safety razor of the travel sort – handle unscrews, and razor and handle’ and blades, all fit into a waterproof case smaller than a pocket Testament, and intended to be carried in a pocket. ‘Steal it?’
‘Not quite. Tips. Got it at the lobby notions stand. Dear, at your first break I want you to shave.’
‘Let me clue you, doll. You get hired for your looks. I get hired for my strong back, weak mind, and docile–disposition. They don’t care how I look.’
‘But I do.’
‘Your slightest wish is my command. Now get out of here; you’re slowing up production.’
That night Margrethe explained why she had bought me a razor ahead of anything else. ‘Dear, it’s not just because I like your face smooth and your hair short – although I do! These Loki tricks have kept on and each time, we have to find work at once just to eat. You say that nobody cares how a dishwasher looks… but I say looking clean and neat helps in getting hired for any job, and can’t possibly hurt.
‘But there is another reason. As a result of these changes, you’ve had to let your whiskers grow once, twice – I can count five times, once for over three days. Dearest, when you are freshly shaved, you stand tall and look happy. And that makes me happy.’
Margrethe made for me a sort of money belt – actually a cloth pocket and a piece of cloth tape – which she wanted me to wear in bed. ‘Dear, we’ve lost anything we didn’t have on us whenever a shift took place. I want you to put your razor and our hard money into this when you undress for bed.’
‘I don’t think we can outwit Satan that easily.’
‘Maybe not. We can try. We come through each change with the clothes we are wearing at the time and with whatever we have in our pockets. This seems to fit the rules.’
‘Chaos does not have rules.’
‘Perhaps this is not chaos. Alec, if you won’t wear this to bed, do you mind if I do?’
‘Oh, I’ll wear it. It won’t stop Satan if he really wants to take it away from us. Nor does it really worry me. Once he dumped us mother naked into the Pacific and we pulled out of it – remember? What does worry me is – Marga, have you noticed that every time we have gone through a change we’ve been holding each other? At least holding hands?’
‘I’ve noticed.’
‘Change happens in the blink of an eye. What happens if we’re not together, holding each other? At least touching? Tell me.’
She kept quiet so long that I knew she did not intend to answer.
I ‘Uh huh,’ I said. ‘Me, too. But we can’t be Siamese twins, touching all the time. We have to work. My darling, my life, Satan or Loki or whatever bad spirit is doing this to us, can separate us forever simply by picking any instant when we are not touching.’
‘Alec.’
‘Yes, my love?’
‘Loki has been able to do this to us at any moment for a long time. It has not happened.’
‘So it may happen the next second.’.
‘Yes. But it may not happen at all.’
We moved on, and suffered more changes. Margrethe’s precaution’s did seem to work – although in one change they seemed to work almost too well; I barely missed a jail sentence for unlawful possession of silver coins. But a quick change (the quickest we had seen) got rid of the charge, the evidence, and the complaining witness. We found ourselves in a strange courtroom and were quickly evicted for lacking tickets entitling us to remain there.
But the razor stayed with me; no cop or sheriff or marshal seemed to want to confiscate that.
We were moving on by our usual method (my thumb and Margrethe’s lovely legs; I had long since admitted to myself that I might as well enjoy the inevitable) and had been dropped in a pretty part of – Texas, it must have been – by a trucker who had turned north off 66 on ‘a side road.
We had come out of the desert into low green hills. It was a beautiful day but we were tired, hungry, sweaty, and dirty, for our persecutors – Satan or whoever – had outdone themselves: three changes in thirty-six hours.
In one day I had had two dishwashing jobs in the same town at the same address… and had collected nothing. It is difficult to collect from The Lonesome Cowboy Steak House when it turns into Vivian’s Grill in front of your eyes. The same was true three hours later when Vivian’s Grill melted into a used-car lot. The only thing good about these shocks was that by great good fortune (or conspiracy?) Margrethe was with me each time – in one case she had come to get me and was waiting with me while my boss was figuring my time, in the other she had been working with me.
The third change did us out of a night’s lodging that had already been, paid for in kind by Margrethe’s labor.
So when that trucker dropped us, we were tired and hungry and dirty and my paranoia had reached a new high.
We had been walking a few hundred yards when we came to a sweet little stream, a, sight in Texas precious beyond all else.
We stopped on the culvert bridging it. ‘Margrethe, how would you like to wade in that?’
‘Darling, I’m going to do more than wade in it, I’m going to bathe in it.’
‘Hmm – Yes, go under the fence, along the stream about fifty, seventy-five yards, and I don’t think anyone could see us from the road.’
‘Sweetheart, they can line up and cheer if they want to; I’m going to have a bath. And – That water looks clean. Would it be safe to drink?’
‘The upstream side? Certainly. We’ve taken worse chances every day since the iceberg. Now if we had something to eat – Say, your hot fudge sundae. Or would you prefer scrambled eggs?’ I held up the lower wire of the fence to let her crawl under. I
‘Will you settle for an Oh Henry bar?’
‘Make that a Milky Way,’ I answered, ‘if I have my druthers.’
‘I’m afraid you don’t, dear. An Oh Henry bar is all there is.’ She held the wire for me.
‘Maybe we’d better stop talking about food we don’t have,’ I said, and crawled under – straightened up and added, ‘I’m ready to eat raw skunk.’
‘Food we do have, dear man. I have an Oh Henry in my tote.’
I stopped abruptly. ‘Woman, if you’re joking, I’m going to beat you.’
‘I’m not joking.’
‘In Texas it is legal to correct a wife with a stick not ,thicker than one’s thumb.’ I held up my thumb. ‘Do you see one about this size?’
‘I’ll find one.’
‘Where did you get a candy bar?’
‘That roadside stop where Mr Facelli treated us to coffee and doughnuts.’ I
Mr Facelli had been our middle-of-the-night ride just before the truck that had dropped us. Two small cake doughnuts each and the sugar and cream for coffee had been our only calories for twenty-four hours.
‘The beating can wait. Woman, if you stole it, tell me about it later. You really do have a real live Oh Henry? Or am I getting feverish?’
‘Alec, do you think I would steal a candy bar? I bought it from a coin machine while you and Mr Facelli were in the men’s room after we ate.’
‘How? We don’t have any money. Not from this world.’
‘Yes, Alec. But there was a dime in my tote, from two changes back. Of course it was not a good dime, strictly speaking. But I couldn’t see any real harm if the machine would take it. And it did. But I put it out of sight before you two got back… because I didn’t have three dimes and could not offer a candy bar to Mr Facelli.’ She added anxiously, ‘Do you think I cheated? Using that dime?’
‘It’s a technicality I won’t go into… as long as I get to share in the proceeds of the crime. And that makes me equally guilty. Uh… eat first, or bathe first?’
We ate first, a picnic banquet washed down by delicious creek water. Then we bathed, with much splashing and laughing – I remember it as one of the happiest times of my life. Margrethe had soap in her tote bag, too, and I supplied the towel, my shirt. First I wiped Margrethe with it, then I wiped me with it. The dry, warm air finished the job.
What happened immediately after was inevitable. I had never in my life made love outdoors, much less in bright daylight. If anyone had asked me, I would have said that for me it would be a psychological impossibility; I would be too inhibited, too aware of the indecency involved.
I am amazed and happy to say that, while keenly aware of the circumstances, I was untroubled at the time and quite able… perhaps because of Margrethe’s bubbling, infectious enthusiasm.
I have never slept naked on grass before, either. I think we slept about an hour.
When we woke up, Margrethe insisted on shaving me. I could not shave myself very well as I had no mirror, but she could and did, with her usual efficiency. We stood knee-deep in the water; I worked up soapsuds with my hands and slathered my face. She shaved and I renewed the lather as needed.
‘There,’ she said at last, and gave me a sign-off kiss, ‘you’ll do. Rinse off now and don’t forget your ears. I’ll find the towel. Your shirt.’ She climbed onto the bank while I leaned far over and splashed water on my face.
‘Alec -‘
‘I can’t hear you; the water’s running.’
‘Please, dear!’
I straightened up, wiped the water out of my eyes, looked around.
Everything we owned was gone, everything but my razor.
Chapter 17
Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him: On the left hand, where he doth work, but I cannot behold him: he hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot see him.
Job 23:8-10
MARGRETHE SAID, ‘What did you do with the soap?’
I took a deep breath, sighed it out. ‘Did I hear you correctly? You’re asking what I did with the soap?’
‘What would you rather I said?’
‘Uh – I don’t know. But not that. A miracle takes place… and you ask me about a bar of soap.’
‘Alec, a miracle that takes place again and again and again is no longer a miracle; it’s just a nuisance. Too many, too much. I want to scream or break into tears. So I asked about the soap.’
I had been halfway to hysteria myself when Margrethe’s statement hit me like a dash of cold water. Margrethe? She who took icebergs and earthquakes in her stride, she who never whimpered in adversity… she wanted to scream?
‘I’m sorry, dear. I had the soap in my hands when you were shaving me. I did not have it in my hands when I rinsed my face. I suppose I laid it on the bank. But I don’t recall. Does it matter?’
‘Not really, I suppose. Although that cake of Camay, used just once, would be half our worldly goods if I could find it, this razor being the other half. You may have placed it on the bank, but I don’t see it.’
‘Then it’s gone. Marga, we’ve got urgent things to worry about before we’ll be dirty enough to need soap again. Food, Clothing, shelter.’ I scrambled up onto the bank. ‘Shoes. We don’t even have shoes. What do we do now? I’m stumped. If I had a wailing wall, I’d wail.’
‘Steady, dear, steady.’
‘Is it all right if I just whimper a little?’
She came close, put her arms around me, and kissed me. ‘Whimper all you want to, dear, whimper for both of us. Then let’s decide what to do.’
I can’t stay depressed with Margrethe’s arms around me. ‘Do you have any ideas? I can’t think of anything but picking our way back to the highway and trying to thumb a ride… which doesn’t appeal to me in the state I’m in. Not even a fig leaf. Do you see a fig tree?’
‘Does Texas have fig trees?’
‘Texas has everything. What do we do now?’
‘We go back to the highway and start walking.’
‘Barefooted? Why not stand still and wave our thumbs? We can’t go far enough barefooted to matter. My feet are tender.’
‘They’ll toughen up. Alec, we must keep moving. For our morale, love. If we give up, we’ll die. I know it.’
Ten minutes later we were moving slowly east on the highway. But it was not the highway we had left. This one was four lanes instead of two, with wide paved shoulders. The fence marking the right of way, instead of three strands of barbed wire, was chain-link steel as high as my head. We would have had a terrible time reaching the highway had it not been for the stream. By going back into the water and holding our breaths, we managed to slither under the fence. This left us sopping wet again (and no towel-shirt) but the warm air corrected that in a few minutes.
There was much more traffic on this highway than there had been on the one we had left, both freight and what seemed to be passenger cars. And it was fast. How fast I could not guess, but it seemed at least twice as fast as any ground transportation I had ever seen. Perhaps as fast as transoceanic dirigibles.
There were big-vehicles that had to be freight movers but looked more like railroad boxcars than they looked like lorries. And even longer than boxcars. But as I stared I figured out that each one was at least three cars, articulated. I figured this out by attempting to count wheels. Sixteen per car? Six more on some sort of locomotive up front, for a total of fifty-four wheels. Was this possible?
These behemoths moved with no sound but the noise of air rushing past them, plus a whoosh of tires against pavement. My dynamics professor would have approved.
In the lane nearest us were smaller vehicles that I assumed to be passenger cars, although I could not ‘see anyone inside. Where one would expect windows appeared to be mirrors or burnished steel. They were long and low and as sleekly shaped as an airship.
And now I saw that this was not one highway, but two. All the traffic on the pavement nearest us was going east; at least a hundred yards away another stream of traffic was going west. Still farther away, seen only in glimpses, was a limit fence for the northern side of the widest right of way I have ever seen.
We trudged along on the edge of the shoulder. I began to feel gloomy about the chances of being picked up. Even if they could see us (which seemed uncertain), how could they stop quickly enough to pick up someone on the highway? Nevertheless I waved the hitchhikers’ sign at each car.
I kept my misgivings to myself. After we had been walking a dismal time, a car that had just passed us dropped out of the traffic lane onto the shoulder, stopped at least a quarter of a mile ahead of us, then backed toward us at a speed I would regard as too fast if I were going forward. We got hastily off the shoulder.
It stopped alongside us. A mirrored section a yard wide and at least that high lifted up like a storm-cellar door, and I found myself looking into the passenger compartment. The operator looked out at us and grinned. ‘I don’t believe it!’
I tried to grin back. ‘I don’t believe it myself. But here we are. Will you give us a ride?’
‘Could be.’ He looked Margrethe up and down. ‘My, aren’t you the purty thing! What happened?’
Margrethe answered, ‘Sir, we are lost.’
‘Looks like. But how did you manage to lose your clothes, too? Kidnapped? Or what? Never mind, that can wait. I’m Jerry Farnsworth.’
I answered, ‘We’re Alec and Margrethe Graham.’
‘Good to meet you. Well, you don’t look armed – except for that thing in your hand, Miz Graham. What is it?’
She held it out to him. ‘A razor.’
He accepted it, looked at it, handed it back. ‘Durned if it isn’t. Haven’t seen one like that since I was too young to shave. Well, I don’t see how you can highjack me with that. Climb in. Alec, you can have the back seat; your sister can sit up here with me.’ Another section of the shell swung upward.
‘Thank you,’ I answered, thinking sourly about beggars and choosers. ‘Marga is not my sister, she’s my wife.’
‘Lucky man! Do you object to your wife riding with me?’
‘Oh, of course not!’
I think that answer would cause a tension meter to jingle. Dear, you’d better get back there with your husband.’
‘Sir, you invited me to sit with you and my husband voiced his approval.’ Margrethe slipped into the forward passenger seat. I opened my mouth and closed it, having found I had nothing to say. I climbed into the back seat, discovered that the car was bigger inside than out; the seat was roomy and comfortable. The doors closed down; the ‘mirrors’ now were windows.
‘I’m about to put her back into the flow,’ our host said, ‘so don’t fight the safeties. Sometimes this buggy bucks like a Brahma bull, six gees or better. No, wait a sec. Where are you two going?’ He looked at Margrethe.
‘We’re going to Kansas, Mr Farnsworth.’
‘Call me Jerry, dear. In your skin?’
‘We have no clothing, sir. We lost it.’
I added, ‘Mr Farnsworth – Jerry – we’re in a distressed state. We lost everything. Yes, we are going to Kansas, but first we must find clothes somewhere – Red Cross, maybe, I don’t know. And I’ve got to find a job and make us some money. Then we’ll go to Kansas.’
‘I see. I think I do. Some of it. How are you going to get to Kansas?’
‘I had in mind continuing straight on to Oklahoma City, then north. Stick to the main highways. Since we’re hitchhiking.’
‘Alec, you really are lost. See that fence? Do you know the penalty for a pedestrian caught inside that fence?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Ignorance is bliss. You’ll be much better off on the small side roads where hitching is still legal, or at least tolerated. If you’re for Oke City, I can help you along. Hang on.’ He did something at controls in front of him. He didn’t touch the wheel because there wasn’t any wheel to touch. Instead there were two hand grips.
The car vibrated faintly, then jumped sideways. I felt as if I had fallen into soft mush and my skin tingled as with static electricity. The car bucked like a small boat in a heavy sea, but that ‘soft mush’ kept me from being battered about. Suddenly it quieted down and only that faint vibration continued. The landscape was streaking past.
‘Now,’ said Mr Farnsworth, ‘tell me about it.’
‘Margrethe?’
‘Of course, dearest. You must.’
‘Jerry… we’re from another world.’
‘Oh, no!’ He groaned. ‘Not another flying saucer! That makes four this week. That’s your story?’
‘No, no!’ I’ve never seen a flying saucer. We’re from earth, but… different. We were hitchhiking on Highway Sixty-Six, trying to reach Kansas -‘
‘Wait a minute. You said, “Sixty-Six”.’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘That’s what they used to call this road before they re-built it. But it hasn’t been called anything but Interstate Forty for, oh, over forty years, maybe fifty. Hey. Time travelers! Are you?’
‘What year is this?’ I asked.
‘Nineteen-ninety-four.’
‘That’s our year, too. Wednesday the eighteenth of May. Or was this morning. Before the change.’
‘It still is. But – Look, let’s quit jumping around. Start at the beginning, whenever that was, and tell me how you wound up inside the fence, bare naked.’
So I told him.
Presently he said, ‘That fire pit. Didn’t burn you?’
‘One small blister.’
‘Just a blister. I reckon you would be safe in Hell.’
‘Look, Jerry, they really do walk on live coals.’
‘I know, I’ve seen it. In New Guinea. Never hankered to try it. That iceberg – Something bothers me. How does an iceberg crash into the side of a vessel? An iceberg is dead in the water, always. Certainly a ship can bump into one but damage should be to the bow. Right?’
‘Margrethe?’
‘I don’t know, Alec. What Jerry says sounds right. But it did happen.’
‘Jerry, I don’t know either. We were in a forward stateroom; maybe the whole front end was crushed in. But, if Marga doesn’t know, I surely do not, as I got banged on the head and went out like a light. Marga kept me afloat – I told you.’
I Farnsworth looked thoughtfully at me. He had swiveled his seat around to face both of us while I talked, and he had showed Margrethe how to unlock her chair so that it would turn, also, which brought us three into an intimate circle of conversation, knees almost touching – and left him with his back to the traffic. ‘Alec, what became of this Hergensheimer?’
‘Maybe I didn’t make that clear – it’s not too clear to me, either. It’s Graham who is missing. I am Hergensheimer.
When I walked through the fire and found myself in a different world, I found myself in Graham’s place, as I said. Everybody called me Graham and seemed to think that I was Graham – and Graham was missing. I guess you could say I took the easy way out… but there I was, thousands of miles from home, no money, no ticket, and nobody had ever heard of Alexander Hergensheimer.’ I shrugged and spread my hands helplessly. ‘I sinned. I wore
his clothes, I ate at his table, I answered to his name.’
‘I still don’t get the skinny of this. Maybe you look enough like, Graham to fool almost anyone… but your wife would know the difference. Margie?’
Margrethe looked into my eyes with sadness and love, and answered steadily, ‘Jerry, my husband is confused. A strange amnesia. He is Alec Graham. There is no Alexander Hergensheimer. There never was.’
I was left speechless. True, Margrethe and I had not discussed this matter for many weeks; true, she had never flatly admitted that I was not Alec Graham. I was learning again (again and again!) that one never won an argument with Margrethe. Any time I thought I had won, it always turned out that- she had simply shut up.
Farnsworth said to me, ‘Maybe that knock in the head, Alec?’
‘Look, that knock in the head was nothing – a few minutes’ unconsciousness, nothing more. And no gaps in my memory. Anyhow it happened two weeks after the fire walk. Jerry, my wife is a wonderful woman… but I must disagree with her on this. She wants to believe that I am Alec Graham because she fell in love with Graham before she ever met me. She believes it because she needs to believe it. But of course I know who I am: Hergensheimer. I admit that amnesia can have some funny effects… but there was one clue that I could not have faked, one that said emphatically that I, Alexander Hergensheimer, was not Alec Graham.’
I slapped my stomach, where a bay window had been. ‘Here is the proof: I wore Graham’s clothes, I told you. But his clothes did not fit me perfectly. At the time of the fire walk I was rather plump, too heavy, carrying a lot of flab right here.’ I slapped my stomach again. ‘Graham’s clothes were too tight around the middle for me. I had to suck in hard and hold my breath to fasten the waistband on any pair of his trousers. That could not happen in the blink of an eye, while walking through a fire pit. Nor did it. Two weeks of rich food in a cruise ship gave me that bay window… and it proves that I am not Alec Graham.’
Margrethe not only kept quiet, her expression said nothing. But Farnsworth insisted. ‘Margie?’
‘Alec, you were having exactly that trouble with your clothes before the fire walk. For the same reason. Too much rich food.’ She smiled. ‘I’m sorry to contradict you, my beloved… but I’m awfully glad you’re you.’
Jerry said, ‘Alec, many is the man who would walk through fire to get a woman to look at him that way just once. When you get to Kansas, you had better go to see the Menningers; you’ve got to get that amnesia untangled. Nobody can fool a woman about her husband. When she’s lived with him, slept with him, given him enemas and listened to his jokes, a substitution is impossible no matter how much the ringer may look like him. Even an identical twin could not do it. There are all those little things a wife knows and the public never sees.’
I said, ‘Marga, it’s up to you.’
She answered, ‘Jerry, my husband is saying that I must refute that – in part – myself. At that time I did not know Alec as well as a wife knows her husband. I was not his wife then; I was his lover – and I had been such only a few days.’ She smiled. ‘But you’re right in essence; I recognized him.’
Farnsworth frowned. ‘I’m getting mixed up again. We’re talking about either one man or two. This
Alexander Hergensheimer – Alec, tell me about him.’
‘I’m a Protestant, preacher, Jerry, ordained in the Brothers of the Apocalypse Christian Church of the One Truth – the Apocalypse Brethren as you hear us referred to. I was born on my grandfather’s farm outside Wichita on May twenty-second -‘
‘Hey, you’ve got, a birthday this week!’ Jerry remarked. Marga looked alert.
‘So I have. I’ve been too busy to think about it. – in nineteen-sixty. My parents and grandparents are dead; my oldest brother is still working the family farm -‘
‘That’s why you’re going to Kansas? -To find your brother?’
‘No. That farm is in another world, the one I grew up in.’
‘Then why are you going to Kansas?’
I was slow in answering. ‘I don’t have a logical answer. Perhaps it’s the homing instinct. Or it may be something like horses running back into a burning barn. I don’t know, Jerry. But I have to go back and try to find my roots.’
‘That’s a reason I can understand. Go on.’
I told him about my schooling, not hiding the fact that I had failed to make it in engineering – my switch to the seminary and my ordination on graduation, then my association with C.U.D. I did not mention Abigail, I did not mention that I hadn’t been too successful as a parson largely (in my private opinion) because Abigail did not like people and my parishioners did not like Abigail. Impossible to put all details into a short biography – but the fact is that I could not mention Abigail at all without throwing doubt on the legitimacy of Margrethe’s status and this I could not do.
‘That’s about it. If we were in my native world, you could phone C.U.D. national headquarters in Kansas
City, ‘Kansas, and check on me. We had had a successful year and I was on vacation. I took a dirigible, the Count von Zeppelin of North American Airlines, from Kansas City airport to San Francisco, to Hilo, to Tahiti, and there I joined the Motor Vessel Konge Knut and that about brings us up to date, as I’ve told you the rest.’
‘You sound kosher, you talk a good game – are you born again?’
‘Certainly! I’m afraid I’m not in a state of grace now… but I’m working on it. We’re in the Last Days, brother; it’s urgent. Are you born again?’
“Discuss it later. What’s the second law of thermodynamics?’
I made a wry face. ‘Entropy always increases. That’s the one that tripped me.’
‘Now tell me about Alec Graham.’
‘Not much I can tell. His passport showed that he was born in Texas, and he gave a law firm in Dallas as an address. For the rest you had better ask Margrethe; she knew him, I didn’t.’ (I did not mention an embarrassing million dollars. I could not explain it, so I left it out… and Marga had only my word for it; she had never seen it.)
‘Margie? Can you fill us in on Alec Graham?’
She was slow in answering. ‘I’m afraid I can’t add anything to what my husband has told you.’
‘Hey! You’re letting me down. Your husband gave a detailed description of Dr Jekyll; can’t you describe Mr Hyde? So far, he’s a zero. A mail drop in Dallas, nothing more.
‘Mr Farnsworth, I’m sure you’ve never been a shipboard stewardess -‘
‘Nope, I haven’t. But I was room steward in a cargo liner – two trips when I was a kid.’
‘Then you’ll understand. A stewardess knows many things about her passengers. She knows how often they bathe. She knows, how often they change their clothes. She knows how they smell – and everyone does smell, some good, some bad. She knows what sort of books they read – or don’t read. Most of all she knows whether or not they are truly gentlefolk, honest, generous, considerate, warmhearted. She knows everything one could need to know to judge a person. Yet she may not know a passenger’s occupation, home town, schooling, or any of those details that a friend would know.
‘Before the day of the fire walk I had been Alec Graham’s stewardess for four weeks. For the last two of those weeks I was his mistress and was ecstatically in love with him. After the fire walk it was many days before his amnesia let us resume our happy relationship – and then it did, and I was happy again. And now I have been his wife for four months – months of some adversity but the happiest time of my whole life. And it still is and I think it always will be. And that is all I know about my husband Alec Graham.’ She smiled at me and her eyes were brimming with tears, and I found that mine were, too.
Jerry sighed and shook his head. ‘This calls for a Solomon. Which I am not. I believe both your stories – and one of them can’t be correct. Never mind. My wife and I practice Muslim hospitality, something I learned in the late war. Will you accept our hospitality for a night or two? You had better say yes.’
Marga glanced at me; I said, ‘Yes!’
‘Good. Now to see if the boss is at home.’ He swiveled around to face forward, touched something. A few moments later a light came on and something went beep! once. His face lighted up and he spoke: ‘Duchess, this is your favorite husband.’
‘Oh, Ronny, it’s been so long.’
‘No, no. Try again.’
‘Albert? Tony? George, Andy, Jim -‘
‘Once more and get it right; I have company with me.’
‘Yes, Jerry?’
‘Company for dinner and overnight and possibly more.’
‘Yes, my love. How many and what sexes and when will you be home?’
‘Let me ask Hubert.’ Again he touched something. ‘Hubert says twenty-seven minutes. Two guests. The one seated by me is about twenty-three, give or take a bit, blonde, long, wavy hair, dark blue eyes, height about five seven, mass about one twenty, other basics I have not checked but about those of our daughter. Female. I am certain she is female as she is not wearing so much as a G-string.’
‘Yes, dear. I’ll scratch her eyes out. After I’ve fed her, of course.’
‘Good. But she’s no menace as her husband is with her and is watching her closely. Did I say that he is naked, too?’
You did not. Interesting.’
‘Do you want his basic statistic? If so, do you want it relaxed or at attention?’
‘My love, you are a dirty old man, I am happy to say. Quit trying to embarrass your guests.’
‘There is madness in my method, Duchess. They are naked because they have no clothes at all. Yet I suspect that they do embarrass easily. So please meet us at the gate with clothing. You have her statistics, except – Margie, hand me a foot. ‘Marga promptly put a foot up high, without comment. He felt it. ‘A pair of your sandals will fit, I think. Zapatos for him. Of mine.’
‘His other sizes? Never mind the jokes.’
‘He’s about my height and shoulders, but I am twenty pounds heavier, at least. So something from my skinny rack. If Sybil has a houseful of her junior barbarians, please use extreme prejudice to keep them away from the gate. These are gentle people; we’ll introduce them after they have a chance to dress.’
‘Roger Wilco, Sergeant Bilko. But it is time that you introduced them to me.
‘Mea culpa. My love, this is Margrethe Graham, Mrs Alec Graham.’
‘Hello, – Margrethe, welcome to our home.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Farnsworth
‘Katherine, dear. Or Kate.’
‘ “Katherine.” I can5t tell you how much you are doing for us… when we were so miserable!’ My darling started to cry.
She stopped it abruptly. ‘And this is my husband, Alec Graham.’
‘Howdy, Mrs Farnsworth. And thank you.’
‘Alec, you bring that girl straight here. I want to welcome her. Both of you.’
Jerry cut in. ‘Hubert says twenty-two minutes, Duchess.’
‘Hasta la vista. Sign off and let me get busy.’
‘End.’ Jerry turned his seat around. ‘Kate will find you a pretty to wear, Margie… although in your case there ought to be a law. Say, are you cold? I’ve been yacking so much I didn’t think of it. I keep this buggy cool enough for me, in clothes. But Hubert can change it to suit.’
‘I am a Viking, Jerry; I never get cold. Most rooms are too warm to suit me.’
‘How about you, Alec?’
‘I’m warm enough,’ I answered, fibbing only a little.
‘I believe -‘ Jerry started to say –
as the heavens opened with the most brilliant light imaginable, outshining day, and I was gripped by sudden grief, knowing that I failed to lead my beloved back to grace.
Chapter 18
Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, Doth Job fear God for nought?
Job 1:9
Canst thou by searching find out God? canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?
Job 11:7
I WAITED for the Shout.
My feelings were mixed. Did I want the Rapture? Was I ready to be snatched up into the loving arms of Jesus? Yes, dear Lord. Yes! Without Margrethe? No, no! Then you choose to be cast down into the Pit? Yes – no, but Make up your mind!
Mr Farnsworth looked up. ‘See that baby go!’
I looked up through the roof of the car. There was a second sun directly overhead. It seemed to shrink and lose brilliance as I watched it.
Our host went on, ‘Right on time! Yesterday we had a hold, missed the window, and had to reslot. When you’re sitting on the pad, and single-H is boiling away, even a hold for one orbit can kill your profit margin. And yesterday wasn’t even a glitch; it was a totally worthless re-check ordered by a Nasa fatbottom. Figures.’
He seemed to be talking English.
Margrethe said breathlessly, ‘Mr Farnsworth – Jerry what was it?’
‘Eh? Never seen a lift-off before?’
‘I don’t know what a lift-off is.’
‘Mm… yes. Margie, the fact that you and Alec are from another world – or worlds – hasn’t really soaked through My skull yet. Your world doesn’t have space travel?’
‘I’m not sure what you mean but I don’t think we do.’
I was fairly sure what he meant so I interrupted. ‘Jerry, you’re talking about flying to the moon, aren’t you? Like Jules Verne.’
‘Yes. Close enough.’
‘That was an ethership? Going to the moon? Golly Moses!’ The profanity just slipped out.
‘Slow down. That was not an ethership, it was an, unmanned freight rocket. It is not going to Luna; it is going only as far as Leo – low Earth orbit. Then it comes back, ditches off Galveston, is ferried back to North Texas Port, where it will lift again sometime next week. But some of its cargo will go on to Luna City or Tycho Under – and some may go as far as the Asteroids. Clear?’
‘Uh… not quite.’
‘Well, in Kennedy’s second term -‘
‘Who?’
‘John F. Kennedy. President. Sixty-one to sixty-nine.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m going to have to relearn history again. Jerry, the most confusing thing about being bounced around among worlds is not new technology, such as television or jet planes – or even space-travel ships. It is different history.’
‘Well – When we get home, I’ll find you an American history, and a history of space travel. A lot of them around the house; I’m in space up to my armpits – started with. model rockets as a kid. Now, besides Diana Freight Lines, I’ve got a piece of Jacob’s Ladder and the Beanstalk, both – just a tax loss at present but -‘
I think he caught sight of my face. ‘Sorry. You skim through the books I’ll dig out for you, then we’ll talk.’
Farnsworth looked back at his controls, punched something, blinked at it, punched again, and, said, ‘Hubert says that we’ll have the sound in three minutes twenty-one seconds.’
When the sound did arrive, I was disappointed. I had expected a thunderclap to match that incredible light. Instead it was a rumble that went on and on, then faded away without a distinct end.
A few minutes later the car left the highway, swung right in a large circle and went under the highway through a tunnel and came out on a smaller highway. We stayed on this highway (83, I noted) about five minutes, then there was a repeated beeping sound and a flash of lights. ‘I hear you,’ Mr Farnsworth said. ‘Just hold your horses.’ He swung his chair around and faced forward, grasped the two hand grips.
The next several minutes were interesting. I was reminded of something the Sage of Hannibal said: ‘If it warn’t for the honor, I’d druther uv walked.’ Mr Farnsworth seemed to regard any collision avoided by a measurable distance as less than sporting. Again and again that ‘soft mush’ saved us from bruises if not broken bones. Once that signal from the machinery went Bee-bee-beebeep! at him; he growled in answer: ‘Pipe down! You mind your business; I’ll mind mine,’ and subjected us to another near miss.
We turned off onto a narrow road, private I concluded, as there was an arch over the entrance reading FARNSWORTH’S FOLLY. We went up a grade. At the top, lost among trees, was a high gate that snapped out of the way as we approached it.
There we met Katie Farnsworth.
If you have read this far in this memoir, you know that I am in love with my wife. That is a basic, like the speed of light, like the love of God the Father. Know ye now that I learned that I could love another person, a woman, without detracting from my love for Margrethe, without wishing to take her from her lawful mate, without lusting to possess her. Or at least not much.
In meeting her I learned that five feet two inches is the perfect height for a woman, that forty is the perfect age, and that a hundred and ten pounds is the correct weight, just as for a woman’s voice contralto is the right register. That my own beloved darling is none of these is irrelevant; Katie Farnsworth makes them perfect for her by being herself content with what she is.
But she startled me first by the most graceful gesture of warm hospitality I have ever encountered.
She knew from her husband that we were utterly without clothes; she knew also from him that he felt that we were embarrassed by our state. So she had fetched clothing for each of us.
And she herself was naked.
No, that’s not right; I was naked, she was unclothed. That’s not quite right, either. Nude? Bare? Stripped? Undressed? No, she was dressed in her own beauty, like Mother Eve before the Fall. She made it seem so utterly appropriate that I wonder how I had ever acquired the delusion that freedom from clothing equals obscenity.
Those clamshell doors lifted; I got out and handed Margrethe out. Mrs Farnsworth dropped what she was carrying, put her arms around Margrethe and kissed her. ‘Margrethe! Welcome, dear.’
My darling hugged her back and sniffled again.
Then she offered me her hand. ‘Welcome to you, too, Mr Graham. Alec.’ I took her hand, did not shake it. Instead I handled it like rare china and bowed over it. I felt that I should kiss it but I had never learned how.
For Margrethe she had a summer dress the shade of Marga’s eyes. Its styling suggested the Arcadia of myth; one could imagine a wood nymph wearing it. It hung on the left shoulder, was open all the way down on the right but wrapped around with generous overlap. Both sides of this simple garment ended in a long sash ribbon; the end that went under passed through a slot, which permitted both ends to go all the way around Marga’s waist, then to tie at her right side.
It occurred to me that this was a fit-anyone dress. It would be tight or loose on any figure depending on how it was tied.
Katie had sandals for Marga in blue to match her dress.
For me she had Mexican sandals, zapatos, of lhe cutleather openwork sort that are almost as fit-anyone as that dress, simply by how they are tied. She offered me trousers and shirt that were superficially equivalent to those I had bought in Winslow at the SECOND WIND – but these were tailormade of summer-weight wool rather than mass-produced from cheap cotton. She also had for me socks that fitted themselves to my feet and knit shorts that seemed to be my size.
When she had dressed us, there was still clothing on the grass -hers. I then realized that she had walked to the gate dressed, stripped down there, and waited for us ‘dressed’ as we were.
That’s politeness.
Dressed, we all got into the car. Mr Farnsworth waited a moment before starting up his driveway. ‘Katie, our guests are Christians.’
Mrs Farnsworth seemed delighted. ‘Oh, how very interesting!’
‘So I thought. Alec? Verb. sap. Not many Christians in these parts. Feel free to speak your mind in front of Katie and me… but when anyone else is around, you may be more comfortable not discussing your beliefs. Understand me?’
‘Uh… I’m afraid I don’t.’ My head was in a whirl and I felt a ringing in my ears.
‘Well… being a Christian isn’t against the law here; Texas has freedom of religion. Nevertheless Christians aren’t at all popular and Christian worship is mostly underground. Uh, if you want to get in touch with your own people, I suppose we could manage to locate a catacomb. Kate?’
‘Oh, I’m sure we could find someone who knows. I can put out some feelers.’
‘If Alec says to, dear. Alec, you’re in no danger of being stoned; this country isn’t some ignorant redneck
backwoods. Or not much danger. But I don’t want you to be discriminated against or insulted.’
Katie Farnsworth said, ‘Sybil.’
‘Oh, oh! Yes. Alec our daughter is a good girl and as civilized as one can expect in a teenager. But she is an apprentice witch, a recent convert to the Old Religion and, being, both a convert and a teenager, dead serious about it. Sybil would not be rude to a guest – Katie brought her up properly. Besides, she knows I would skin her alive. But it would be a favor to me if you will avoid placing too much strain on her. As I’m sure you know, every teenager is a time bomb waiting to go off.’
Margrethe answered for me: ‘We will be most careful. This “Old Religion” – is this the worship of Odin?’
I felt a chill… when I was already discombobulated beyond my capacity. But our host answered, ‘No. Or at least I don’t think so. You could ask Sybil. If you are willing to risk having your ear talked off; she’ll try to convert you. Very intense.’
Katie Farnsworth added, ‘I have never heard Sybil mention Odin. Mostly she speaks just of “the Goddess”. Don’t Druids worship Odin? Truly I don’t know. I’m afraid Sybil considers us so hopelessly old-fashioned that she doesn’t bother to discuss theology with us.’
‘And let’s not discuss it now,’ Jerry added, and started us up the drive.
The Farnsworth mansion was long, low, and rambling, with a flavor of lazy opulence. Jerry swung us under a porte-cochère; we all got out. He slapped the top of his car as one might slap the neck of a horse. It moved away and turned the corner of the house as we went inside.
I’m not going to say much about their house as, while it was beautiful and Texas lavish, it would not necessarily appear any one way long enough to justify describing it; most of what we saw Jerry called ‘hollow grams’. How can I describe them? Frozen dreams? Three-dimensional, pictures? Let me put it this way: Chairs were solid. So were table tops. Anything else in that house, better touch it cautiously and find out, as it might be as beautifully there as a rainbow… and just as insubstantial.
I don’t know how these ghosts were produced. I think it is possible that the laws of physics in that world
were somewhat different from those of the Kansas of my youth.
Katie led us into what Jerry called their ‘family room’ and Jerry stopped abruptly. ‘Bloody Hindu whorehouse!’
It was a very large room with ceilings that seemed impossibly high for a one-storey ranch house. Every wall, arch, alcove, soffit, and beam was covered with sculptured figures. But such figures! I found myself blushing. These figures had apparently been copied from that notorious temple cavern in southern India, the one that depicts every possible vice of venery in obscene and blatant detail.
Katie said, ‘Sorry, dear! The youngsters were dancing in here.’ She hurried to the left, melted into one sculpture group and disappeared. ‘What will you have, Gerald?’
‘Uh, Remington number two.’
‘Right away.’
Suddenly the obscene figures disappeared, the ceiling lowered abruptly and changed to a
beam-and-plaster construction, one wall became a picture window looking out at mountains that belonged in Utah (not Texas), the wall opposite it now carried a massive stone fireplace with a goodly fire crackling in it, the furniture changed to the style sometimes called ‘mission’ and the floor changed to flagstones covered with Amerindian rugs.
‘That’s better. Thank you, Katherine. Sit down, friends – pick a spot and squat.’
I sat down, avoiding what was obviously the ‘papa’ chair – massive and leather upholstered. Katie and Marga took a couch together. Jerry satin that papa chair. ‘My love, what will you drink?’
‘Campari and soda, please.’
‘Sissy. And you, Margie?’
‘Campari and soda would suit me, too.’
‘Two sissies. Alec?’
‘I’ll go along with the ladies.’
‘Son, I’ll tolerate that in the weaker sex. But not from a grown man. Try again.’
‘Uh, Scotch and soda.’
‘I’d horsewhip you, if I had a horse. Podnuh, you have just one more chance.’
‘Uh… bourbon and branch?’
‘Saved yourself. Jack Daniel’s with water on the side. Other day, man in Dallas tried to order Irish whisky. Rode him out o’town on a rail. Then they apologized to him. Turned out he was a Yankee and didn’t know any better.’ All this time our host was drumming with his fingertips on a small table at his elbow. He stopped this fretful drumming and, suddenly, at the table by my chair appeared a Texas jigger of brown liquid and a tumbler of water. I found that the others had been served, too. Jerry raised his glass. ‘Save your Confederate money! Salud!’
We drank and he went on, ‘Katherine, do you know where our rapscallion is hiding?’
‘I think they are all in the pool, dear.’
‘So.’ Jerry resumed that nervous drumming. Suddenly there appeared in the air in front of our host, seated on a diving board that jutted out of nowhere, a young female. She was in bright sunlight although the room we were in was in cool shadow. Drops of water sprinkled on her. She faced Jerry, which
placed her back toward me. ‘Hi, Pip-squeak.’
‘Hi, Daddy. Kiss kiss.’
‘In a pig’s eye. When was the last time I spanked you?’
‘My ninth birthday. When I set fire to Aunt Minnie. What did I do now?’
‘By the great golden gawdy greasy gonads of God, what do you mean by leaving that vulgar, bawdy, pornic program running in the family room?’
‘Don’t give me that static, Daddy doll; I’ve seen your books.’
‘Never mind what I have in my private library; answer my question.’
‘I forgot to turn it off, Daddy. I’m sorry.’
‘That’s what the cow said to Mrs Murphy. But the fire burned on. Look, my dear, you know you are free to use the controls to suit yourself. But when you are through, you must put the display back the way you found it. Or, if you don’t know how. you must put it back to zero for the default display.’
‘Yes, Daddy. I just forgot.’
‘Don’t go squirming around like that; I’m not through chewing you out. By the big brass balls of Koshchei, where did you get that program?’
‘At campus. It was an instruction tape in my tantric yoga class.’
‘”Tantric yoga”? Swivel hips, you don’t need such a course. Does your mother know about this?’
Katherine moved in smoothly: ‘I urged her to take it, dear one. Sybil is talented, as we know. But raw talent is not I enough; she needed tutoring.’
‘So? I’ll never argue with your mother on this subject, so I withdraw to a previously prepared position. That tape. How did you come by it? You are familiar with the applicable laws concerning copyrighted material; we both remember the hooraw over that Jefferson Starship tape -‘
‘Daddy, you’re worse than an elephant! Don’t you ever forget anything?’
‘Never, and much worse. You are warned that anything you say may be taken down in writing and held against you at another time and place. How say you?’
‘I demand to see an attorney!’
‘Oh, so you did pirate it!’
‘Don’t you wish I had! So you could gloat. I’m sorry, Daddy, but I paid the catalog fee, in full, in cash, and the campus library service copied it for’ me. So there. Smarty.’
‘Smarty yourself. You wasted your money.’
‘I don’t think so. I like it.’
‘So do I. But you wasted your money. You should have asked me for it.’
‘Huh!’
‘Gotcha! I thought at first you had been picking locks in my study or working a spell on ’em. Pleased to hear that you were merely extravagant. How much?’
‘Uh… forty-nine fifty. That’s at student’s discount.’
‘Sounds fair; I paid sixty-five. All right. But if it shows up on your semester billing, I’ll deduct it from your allowance.
Just one thing, sugar plum – I brought two nice people home, a lady and a gentleman. We walk into the parlor. What had been the parlor. And these two gentlefolk are faced with the entire Kama Sutra, in panting, quivering color. What do you think of that?’
‘I didn’t mean to.’
‘So we’ll forget it. But it is never polite to shock people, especially guests, so let’s be more careful next time. Will you be at dinner?’
‘Yes. If I can be excused early and run, run, run. Date, Daddy.’
‘What time will you be home?’
‘Won’t. All-night gathering. Rehearsal for Midsummer Night. Thirteen covens.’
He sighed. ‘I suppose that I should thank the Three Crones that you are on the pill.’
‘Pill shmill. Don’t be a cube, Daddy; nobody ever gets pregnant at a Sabbat; everybody knows that.’
‘Everybody but me. Well, let us offer thanks that you are willing to have dinner with us.’ Suddenly she shrieked as she fell forward off the board. The picture followed her down.
She splashed, then came up spouting water. ‘Daddy! You pushed me!’
‘How could you say such a thing?’ he answered in self-righteous tones. The living picture suddenly vanished.
Katie Farnsworth said conversationally, ‘Gerald keeps trying to dominate his daughter. Hopelessly, of course. He should take her to bed and discharge his incestuous yearnings. But they are both too prissy for that.’
‘Woman, remind me to beat you.’
‘Yes, dearest. You wouldn’t have to force her. Make your intentions plain and she will burst into tears and surrender. Then both of you will have the best time of your lives. Wouldn’t you say so, Margrethe?’
‘I would say so. ‘
By then I was too numb to be shocked by Margrethe’s words.
‘Dinner was a gourmet’s delight and a social confusion. It was served in the formal dining hall, i.e., that same family room with a different program controlling the hollow grams. The ceiling was higher, the windows were tall, evenly spaced, framed by floor-length drapes, ‘and they looked out on formal gardens.
One piece of furniture wheeled itself in, and was not a hollow gram – or not much so. It was a banquet table that (so far as I know) was – in itself, pantry, stove, icebox – all of a well-equipped kitchen. That’s a conclusion, subject to refutation. All I can say is that I never saw a servant and never saw our hostess do any work. Nevertheless her husband congratulated her on her cooking – as well he might, and so did we.
Jerry did a little work; he carved a roast (prime rib, enough for a troop of hungry Boy Scouts) and he served the plates, serving them at his place. Once a plate was loaded, it went smoothly around to the person for whom it was intended, like a toy train on a track – but there was no train and no track.
Machinery concealed by hollow grams? I suppose so. But that simply covers one mystery with another.
(I learned later that a swank Texas household in that world would have had human servants conspicuously in sight. But Jerry and Katie had simple tastes.)
There were six of us at the table, Jerry at one end, Katie at the other; Margrethe sat on Jerry’s right, his daughter Sybil on his left; I was at the right of my hostess, and at her left was Sybil’s young man, her date. This put him opposite me, and I had Sybil on my right.
The young man’s name was Roderick Lyman Culverson III; he did not manage to catch my name. I have long suspected that the male of our species, in most cases, should be raised in a barrel and fed through the bung-hole. Then, at age eighteen, a solemn decision can be made: whether to take him out of the barrel, or to drive in the bung.
Young Culverson gave me no reason to change my opinion – and I would have voted to drive in the bung.
Early on, Sybil made clear that they were at the same campus. But he seemed to be as much a stranger to the Farnsworths as he was to us. Katie asked, ‘Roderick, are you an apprentice witch, too?’
He looked as if he had sniffed something nasty, but Sybil saved him from having to answer such a crude question. ‘Mothuh! Rod received his athame ages ago.’
‘Sorry I goofed,’ Katie said tranquilly. ‘Is that a diploma you get when you finish your apprenticeship?’
‘It’s a sacred knife, Mama, used in ritual. It can be used to -‘
‘Sybil! There are gentiles present.’ Culverson frowned at Sybil, then glared at me. I thought how well he would look with a black eye but I endeavored to keep my thoughts out of my face.
Jerry said, ‘Then you’re a graduate warlock, Rod?’
Sybil broke in again. ‘Daddy! The correct word is -‘
‘Pipe down, sugar plum! Let him answer for himself. Rod?’
‘That word is used only by the ignorant -‘
‘Hold it! I am uninformed on some subjects, and then I seek information, as I am now doing. But you don’t sit at my table and call me ignorant. Now can you answer me without casting asparagus?’
Culverson’s nostrils spread but he took a grip on himself. ‘”Witch” is the usual term for both male and female adepts in the Craft. “Wizard” is an acceptable term but is not technically exact; it means “sorcerer” or “magician”… but not all magicians are witches and not all witches practice magic. But “warlock” is considered to be offensive as well as incorrect because it is associated with Devil worship – and the Craft is not Devil worship – and the word itself by its derivation means “oath breaker” – and witches do not break oaths. Correction: The Craft forbids the breaking of oaths. A witch who breaks an oath, even to a gentile, is subject to discipline, even expulsion if the oath is that major. So I am not a “graduate warlock”. The correct designation for my present status is “Accepted Craftsman”, that is to say: “witch”.’
‘Well stated! Thank you. I ask forgiveness for using the term “warloc” to you and about you -‘ Jerry waited.
A long moment later Culverson said hastily, ‘Oh, certainly! No offense meant and none taken.’
‘Thank you. To add to your comments about derivations, “witch” drives from “wicca” meaning “wise”, and from “wicce” meaning “woman”… which may account for most witches being female and suggests that our ancestors may have known something that we don’t. In any case “the Craft” is the short way of saying “the Craft of Wisdom”. Correct?’
‘Eh Oh, certainly! Wisdom. That’s what the Old Religion is all about.’
‘Good. Son, listen to me carefully. Wisdom includes not getting angry unnecessarily. The Law ignores trifles and the wise man does, too. Such trifles as a young girl defining an athame among gentiles – knowledge that isn’t all that esoteric anyhow – and an old fool using a word inappropriately. Understand me?’
Again Jerry waited. Then he said very softly, ‘I said, “Do you understand me?” ‘
I Culverson took a deep breath. ‘I understood you. A wise I man ignores trifles.’
‘Good. May I offer you another slice of the roast?’
Culverson kept quiet for some time then. As did I. As did Sybil. Katie and Jerry and Margrethe kept up a flow of’ polite chitchat that ignored the fact that a guest had just been thoroughly and publicly spanked. Presently Sybil said, ‘Daddy, are you and Mama expecting me to attend fire worship Friday?’
‘”Expect” is hardly the word,’ Jerry answered, ‘when you have picked another church of your own. “Hope” would be closer.’
Katie added, ‘Sybil, tonight you feel that your coven is all the church you will ever need. But that could change… and I understand that the Old Religion does not forbid its members to attend other religious services.’
Culverson put In, “That reflects centuries, millennia, of persecution, Mrs Farnsworth. It is still in our laws that each member of a coven must also belong publicly to some socially approved church. But we no longer try too hard to enforce it.’
‘I see,’ agreed Katie. ‘Thank you, Roderick. Sybil, since your new church encourages membership in another church, it might be prudent to attend fairly regularly just to protect your Brownie points. You may need them.’
‘Exactly,’ agreed her father. ‘ “Brownie points.” Ever occur to you, hon, that your pop being a stalwart pillar of the congregation, with a fast checkbook, might have something to do with the fact that he also sells more Cadillacs than any other dealer in Texas?’
‘Daddy, that sounds utterly shameless.’
‘It sure is. It also sells Cadillacs. And don’t call it fire worship; you know it is not. It is not the flame we worship, but what it stands for.’
Sybil twisted her serviette and, for the moment, looked a troubled thirteen instead of the mature woman her body showed her to be. ‘Papa, that’s just it. All my life that flame has meant to me healing, cleansing, life everlasting until I studied the Craft. Its history. Daddy, to a witch… fire means the way they kill us!’
I was shocked almost out of breathing. I think it had not really sunk into me emotionally that these two, obnoxious but commonplace young punk, and pretty and quite delightful young girl… daughter of Katie, daughter of Jerry, our two Good Samaritans without equal – that these two were witches.
Yes, yes, I know: Exodus twenty-two verse eighteen, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’ As solemn an injunction as the Ten Commandments, given to Moses directly by God, in the presence of all the children of Israel
What was I doing breaking bread with witches?
Mark me for a coward. I did not stand up and denounce them. I sat tight.
Katie said, ‘Darling, darling! That was clear back in the middle ages! Not today, not now, not here.’
Culverson said, ‘Mrs Farnsworth, every witch knows that the terror can start up again any time. Even a season of bad crops could touch it off. And Salem wasn’t very long ago. Nor very far away.’ He added, ‘There are still Christians around. They would set the fires if they could. Just like Salem.’
This was a great chance to keep my mouth shut. I blurted out, ‘No witch was burned at Salem.’
He looked at me. ‘What do you know about it?’
‘The burnings were in Europe, not here. In Salem witches were hanged, except one who was pressed to death.’ (Fire should never have been used. The Lord God ordered us not to suffer them to live; He did not tell us to put them to death by torture.)
He eyed me again. ‘So? You seem to approve of the hangings.’
‘I never said anything of the sort!’ (Dear God, forgive me!)
Jerry cut in. ‘I rule this subject out of order! There will be no further discussion of it at the table. Sybil, we don’t want you to attend if it upsets you or reminds you of tragic occasions. Speaking of hanging, what shall we do about the backfield of the Dallas Cowboys?’
Two hours later Jerry Farnsworth and I were again seated in that room, this time it being Remington number three: a snow storm against the windows, an occasional cold draft across the floor, and once the howl of a wolf – a roaring fire felt good. He poured coffee for us, and brandy in huge snifters, big enough for goldfish. ‘You hear of noble brandy,’ he said. ‘Napoleon, or Carlos Primero. But this is royal brandy – so royal it has hemophilia.’
I gulped; I did not like the joke. I was still queasy from thinking about witches, dying witches. With a jerk of the heels, or dancing on flames. And all of them with Sybil’s sweet face.
Does the Bible define ‘witch’ somewhere? Could it be that these modern members of the Craft were not at all what Jehovah meant by ‘witch’?
Quit dodging, Alex! Assume that ‘witch’ in Exodus means exactly what ‘witch’ means here in Texas t day. You’re the judge and she has confessed. Can you sentence Katie’s teenager to hang? Will you spring the trap? Don’t dodge it, boy; ‘You’ve been dodging all your life.
Pontius Pilate washed his hands.
I will not sentence a witch to die! So help me, Lord, I can do no other.
Jerry said, ‘Here’s to the success of your venture, yours and Margie’s. Sip it slowly and it will not intoxicate; it will simply quiet your nerves while it sharpens your wits. Alec, tell me now why you expect the end of the world.’
For the next hour I went over the evidence, pointing out that it was not just one prophecy that agreed on the signs, but many: Revelations, Daniel, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Paul in writing to the Thessalonians, and again to the Corinthians, Jesus himself in all four of the Gospels, again and again in each.
To my surprise Jerry had a copy of the Book. I picked out passages easy for laymen to understand, wrote down chapter and verse so that he could study them later. One Thessalonians 4:15-17 of course, and the 24th chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, all fifty-one verses of it, and the same prophecies in Saint Luke, chapter twenty-one – and Luke 21:32 with its clue to the confusion many as to ‘this generation’. What Christ actually said was that the generation which sees these signs and portents will live to see His return, hear the Shout, experience Judgment Day. The message is plain if you read all of it; the errors have arisen from picking out bits and pieces and ignoring the rest. The parable of the fig tree explains this.
I also picked out for him, in Isaiah and Daniel and elsewhere, the Old Testament prophecies that parallel the New Testament prophecies.
I handed him this list of prophecies and urged him to study them carefully, and, if he encountered difficulties, simply read more widely. And take it to God. ‘”Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find.”‘
He said, ‘Alec, I can agree with one thing. The news for the past several months has looked to me like. Armageddon. Say tomorrow afternoon. Might as well be the end of the world and Judgment Day, as there won’t be enough left to salvage after this one.’ He looked sad. ‘I used to worry about what kind of a world Sybil would grow up in. Now I wonder if she’ll grow up.’
‘Jerry. Work on it. Find your way to grace. Then lead your wife and daughter. You don’t need me, you don’t need anyone but Jesus. He said, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice, I will come in to him.” Revelations three, twenty.’
‘You believe.’
‘I do.’
‘Alec, I wish I could go along with you. It would be comforting, the world being what it is today. But I can’t see proof in the dreams of long-dead prophets; you can read anything into them. Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn’t there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything. Oh, my church, too – but at least mine is honestly pantheistic. Anyone who can worship a trinity and insist that his religion is a monotheism can believe anything just give him time to rationalize it. Forgive me for being blunt.’
‘Jerry, in religion bluntness is necessary. “I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth.” That’s Job again, chapter nineteen. He’s your Redeemer, too, Jerry – I pray that you find’ Him.’
‘Not much chance, I’m afraid.’ Jerry stood up.
‘You haven’t found Him yet. Don’t quit. I’ll pray for you.’
‘Thank you, and thanks for trying. How do the shoes feel?’
‘Comfortable, quite.’
‘If you insist on hitting the road tomorrow, you must have shoes that won’t give you bunions between here and Kansas. You’re sure?’
‘I’m sure. And sure that we must leave. If we stayed another day, you’d have us so spoiled we would
never hit the road again.’ (The truth that I could not tell him was that I was so upset by witchcraft and fire worship that I had to leave. But I could not load my weakness onto him.)
‘Let me show you to your bedroom. Quietly, as Margie may be asleep. Unless our ladies have stayed up even later than we have.’
At the bedroom door he put out his hand. ‘If you’re right and I’m wrong, you tell me that it’s possible that even you can slip.’
‘True. I’m not in a state of grace, not now. I’ve got to work on it.’
‘Well, good luck. But if you do slip, look me up in Hell, will you?’
So far as I could tell, Jerry was utterly serious. ‘I don’t know that it is permitted.’
‘Work on it. And so will I. I promise you’ – he grinned -‘some hellacious hospitality. Really warm!’.
I grinned back. ‘It’s a date.’
Again my darling had fallen asleep without undressing. I smiled at her without making a sound, then got beside her and pillowed her head on my shoulder. I would let her wake up slowly, then undress the poor baby and put her to bed. Meanwhile I had a thousand – well, dozens – of thoughts to get untangled.
Presently I noticed that it was getting light. Then I noticed how scratchy and lumpy the bed was. The light increased and I saw that we were sprawled over bales of hay, in a barn.
Chapter 19
And Ahab said to Elijah, Hast thou found me, 0 mine enemy? And he answered, I have found thee: because thou has sold thyself to work evil
in the sight of the Lord.
Kings 21:20
WE DID the last ninety miles down 66 from Clinton to Oklahoma City pushing hard, ignoring the fact that we were flat broke again, nothing to eat, nowhere to sleep.
We had seen a dirigible.
Of course this changed, everything. For months I had been nobody from nowhere, penniless, dishwashing my only trade, and a tramp in fact. But back in my own world – A well-paying job, a respected position in the community, a fat bank account. And an end to this truly infernal bouncing around between worlds.
We were riding into Clinton middle of the morning, guests of a farmer taking a load of produce into town. I heard Margrethe gasp. I looked where she was staring I and there she was! – silvery and sleek and beautiful. I could not make out her name, but her logo told me that she was Eastern Airlines.
‘Dallas-Denver Express,’ our host remarked, and hauled a watch out of his overalls. ‘Six minutes late. Unusual.’
I tried to cover my excitement. ‘Does Clinton have an airport?’
‘Oh, no. Oklahoma City, nearest. Goin’ to give up hitchhiking and take to the air?’
‘Would be nice.’
‘Wouldn’t it, though. Beats farmin’.’
I kept the conversation on inanities until he dropped us outside the city market a few minutes later. But, once Margrethe and I were alone, I could hardly contain myself. I started to kiss her, then suddenly stopped myself. Oklahoma is every bit as moral as Kansas; most communities have stiff laws about public Iallygagging.
I wondered how, hard I was going to find it to readjust, after many weeks in many worlds not one of which had the high moral standards of my home world. It could be difficult to stay out of trouble when (admit it!) I had grown used to kissing my wife in public and to other displays, innocent in themselves, but never seen in public in moral communities. Worse, could I keep my darling out of trouble? I had been born here and could slip back into its ways… but Marga was as affectionate as a collie pup and had no sense of shame whatever about showing it.
I said, ‘Sorry, dear, I was about to kiss you. But I must not.’
‘Why not?’
‘Uh, I can’t kiss you in public. Not here. Only in private. It’s – It’s a case of “When in Rome, one must do as the Romans do.” But never mind that now. Darling, we’re home! My home, and now it’s-your home. You saw the dirigible.’
‘That was an airship truly?’
‘Really and truly… and the happiest sight I’ve seen in months. Except – Don’t get your hopes up too high, too fast. We know how some of these shifting worlds strongly resemble each other in many ways. I suppose there is an outside possibility that this is a world with dirigibles… but not my world. Oh, I don’t believe that but let’s not get too excited.’
(I did not notice that Margrethe was not at all excited.)
‘How will you tell that this is your world?’
‘We could check just as we have before, at public libraries. But in this case there is something faster and better. I want to find the Bell Telephone office – I’ll ask at that grocery store.’
I wanted the telephone office rather than a public telephone because I wanted to consult telephone books’ before making telephone calls – was it my world?
Yes, it was! The office had telephone books for all of Oklahoma and also books from major cities in, other states – including a most familiar telephone book for Kansas City, Kansas. ‘See, Margrethe?’ I pointed to the listing for Churches United for Decency, National Office.
‘I see.’
‘Isn’t it exciting? Doesn’t it make you want to dance and sing?’
(She made it sound like: ‘Doesn’t he look natural? And so many, lovely flowers.’)
We had the alcove where the telephone books were to ourselves. So I whispered urgently, ‘What’s the trouble, dear? This is a happy occasion. Don’t you understand? Once I get on that phone we’ll have money. No more menial jobs, no more wondering how we will eat or where we will sleep. We’ll go straight home by Pullman – no, by dirigible! You’ll like that, I know you will! The ultimate in luxury. Our honeymoon, darling -the honeymoon we could never afford.’
:You will not take me to Kansas City.’
What do you mean?’
‘Alec… your wife is there.’
Believe me when I say that I had not thought once about Abigail in many, many weeks. I had become convinced that I would never see her again (regaining my home world was totally unexpected) and I now
had a wife, all the wife any man could ever want: Margrethe.
I wonder if that-first shovelful of dirt hits a corpse with the same shock.
I pulled out of it. Some. ‘Marga, here’s what we’ll do. Yes, I have a problem, but we can solve it. Of course you go to Kansas City with me! You must. But there, because of Abigail, I must find a quiet place for you to stay while I get things straightened out.’ (Straightened out? Abigail was going to scream bloody murder.) ‘First I must get at my money. Then I must see a lawyer.’ (Divorce? In a state where there was only one legal ground and ‘that one granted divorce only to the injured party? Margrethe the other woman? Impossible. Let Margrethe be exposed in stocks? Be ridden out of town on a rail if Abigail demanded it? Never mind what would be done to me, never mind that Abigail would strip me of every cent – Margrethe must not be subjected to the Scarlet Letter laws of my home world. No!)
‘Then we will go to Denmark.’ (No, it can’t be divorce.)
‘We will?’
‘We will. Darling, you are my wife, now and forever. I can’t leave you here while I get things worked out in Kay See; the world might shift and I would lose you. But we can’t go to Denmark until I lay hands on my money. All clear?’ (What if Abigail has cleaned out my bank account?)
‘Yes, Alec. We will go to Kansas City.’
(That settled part of it. But it did not settle Abigail. Never mind, I would burn that bridge when I came to it.)
Thirty seconds later I had more problems. Certainly the girl in charge would place a call for me long distance collect. Kansas City? For Kansas City, either Kansas or Missouri, the fee to open the trunk line for query was twenty-five cents. Deposit it in the coin box, please, when I tell you. Booth two.
I went to the booth and dug into my pocket for coins, laid them out:
A twenty-cent piece;
Two threepenny coppers;
A Canadian quarter, with the face of the Queen (queen?);
A half dollar;
Three five-cent pieces that were not nickels, but smaller.
And not one of these coins carried the familiar ‘God Is Our Fortress’ motto of the North American Union.
I stared at that ragbag collection and tried to figure out when this last change had taken place. Since I last was paid evidently, which placed it later than yesterday afternoon but earlier than the hitch we had gotten just after breakfast. While we slept last night? But we had not lost our clothes, had not lost our money. I even had my razor, a lump in my breast pocket.
Never mind – any attempt to understand all the details of these changes led only to madness. The shift had indeed taken place; I was here in my native world… and it had left me with no money. With no legal money.
By Hobson’s choice, that Canadian quarter looked awfully good. I did not try to tell myself that the Eighth Commandment did not apply to big corporations. Instead I did promise myself that I would pay it back. I picked it up and took the receiver off the hook.
‘Number, please.’
‘Please place a collect call to Churches United for Decency in Kansas City, Kansas. The number is State Line I224J. I’ll speak to anyone who answers.’
‘Deposit twenty-five cents, please.’ I deposited that Canadian quarter and held my breath – heard it go tingthunk-thunk. Then Central said, ‘Thank you. Do not hang up. Please wait.’
I waited. And waited. And waited.
‘On your call to Kansas City – Churches United for Decency reports that they do not accept collect calls.’
‘Hold it! Please tell them that the Reverend Alexander Hergensheimer is calling.’
‘Thank you. Please deposit twenty-five cents.’
‘Hey! I didn’t get any use out of that first quarter. You hung up too soon.’
‘We did not disconnect; the party in Kansas City hungup.’
‘Well, call them back, please, and this time tell them not to hang up.’
‘Yes, sir. Please deposit twenty-five cents.’
‘Central, would I be calling collect if I had plenty of change on me? Get them on the line and tell them who I am. Reverend Alexander Hergensheimer, Deputy Executive Director.’
‘Please wait on the line.’
So I waited again. And waited.
‘Reverend? The party in Kansas City says to tell you that they do not accept-,collect calls from – I am quoting exactly – Jesus: Christ Himself.’
‘That’s no way to talk on the telephone. Or anywhere.’
‘I quite agree. There was more. This person said to tell you that he had never heard of you.’
‘Why, that -‘I shut up, as I had no way to express myself within the dignity of the cloth.
‘Yes, indeed. I tried to get his name. He hung up on me.’
‘Young man? Old man? Bass, tenor, baritone?’
‘Boy soprano. I gathered an impression that it was the office boy, answering the phone during the lunch hour.’
‘I see. Well, thank you for your efforts. Above and beyond the call of duty, in my opinion.’
‘A pleasure, Reverend.’
I left there, kicking myself. I did not explain to Margrethe until we were clear of the building. ‘Hoist by my own petard, dear one. I wrote that “No Collect Calls” order myself. An analysis of the telephone log proved to me beyond any possible doubt that collect calls to our office were never for the benefit of the association. Nine out of ten are begging calls… and Churches United for Decency is not a charity. It collects money; it does not give it away. The tenth call is either from a troublemaker or a crank. So I set this firm rule and enforced it… and it paid off at once. Saved hundreds of dollars a year just in telephone tolls.’ I managed to smile. ‘Never dreamed that I would be caught in my own net.’
‘What are your plans now, Alec?’
‘Now? Get out on Highway Sixty-Six and start waving my thumb. I want us to reach Oklahoma City before five o’clock. It should be easy; it’s not very far.’
‘Yes, sir. Why five o’clock, may I ask?’
‘You can always ask anything and you know it. Knock off the Patient Griselda act, sweetheart; you’ve been moping ever since we saw that dirigible. Because there is a district office of C.U.D. in Oklahoma City and I want to be there before they close. Wait’ll you see them roll out the red carpet, hon! Get to Oke City and’our troubles are over.’
That afternoon reminded me of wading through sorghum. January sorghum. We had no trouble getting rides – but the rides were mostly short distances. We averaged about twenty miles an hour on a highway that permitted sixty miles per hour. We lost fifty-five minutes for a good reason: a free meal. For the umpteenth time a trucker bought us something to eat when he ate… for the reason that there is almost no man alive who can stop to eat, and fail to invite Margrethe to eat if she is there. (Then I get fed, too, simply because I’m her property. I’m not complaining.)
We ate in twenty minutes, then he spent thirty minutes and endless quarters playing pinball machines… and I stood there and seethed and Margrethe stood beside him and clapped her hands and squealed when he made, a good score. But her social instincts are sound; he then drove us all the rest -of the way to Oklahoma City. There he went through town when he could have taken a bypass, and at four-twenty he dropped us at 36th and Lincoln, only two blocks from the C.U.D. district office.
I walked that two blocks whistling. Once I said, ‘Smile, hon! A month from now – or sooner – we’ll eat in the Tivoli.’
‘Truly?’
‘Truly. You’ve told me so much about it that I can’t wait. There’s the building!’
Our suite is on the second, floor. It warmed the cockles to see the door with lettering on the glass:
CHURCHES UNITED FOR DECENCY – Enter.
‘After you, my love!’ I grabbed the knob, to open for her.
The door was locked.
I banged on it, then spotted a doorbell and rang it. Then I alternated knocking and ringing. And again.
A blackamoor carrying a mop and pail came down the corridor, started to pass us. I called, ‘Hey, Uncle! DO you have a key to this suite?’
‘Sure don’t, Captain. Ain’t nobody in there now. They most generally locked up and gone by four o’clock.’
‘I see. Thanks.’
‘A pleasure, Captain.’
Out on the street again, I grinned sheepishly at Margrethe. ‘Red carpet treatment. Closing at four. When the cat is away, the mice will play. Some heads will roll, I promise you. I can’t think of another cliché to fit the situation. Oh, yes, I can. Beggars can’t be choosers. Madam, would you like to sleep in the park tonight? Warm night, no rain expected. Chiggers and mosquitoes, no extra charge.’
We slept in Lincoln Park, on the golf course, on a green that was living velvet – alive with chiggers.
It was a good night’s sleep despite chiggers. We got up when the first early golfers showed up, and we got off the golf course with nothing worse than dirty looks. We made use of public washrooms in the park, and rejoined much neater, feeling fresher, me with a fresh shave, and both of us filled with free water for breakfast. On the whole I felt cheerful. It was too early to expect those self-appointed playboys at C. U. D. to show up, so, when we ran across a, policeman, I asked the location of the public library, then I added, ‘By the way, where is the airport?’
‘The what?’
‘The dirigible flying field.’
The cop turned to Margrethe. ‘Lady, is he sick?’
I did feel sick a half hour later when I checked the directory in the building we had visited the afternoon before… I felt sick but unsurprised to find no Churches United for Decency among its tenants. But to make certain I walked up to the second floor. That suite was now occupied by an insurance firm.
‘Well, dear, let’s go to the public library. Find out what kind of world we are in.’
‘Yes, Alec.’ She was looking cheerful. ‘Dearest, I’m sorry you are disappointed… but I am so relieved. I
I as frightened out of my wits at the thought of meeting your wife.’
‘You won’t. Not ever. Promise. Uh, I’m sort of relieved, too. And hungry.’
We walked a few more steps. ‘Alec. Don’t be angry.’
‘I’ll do no more than give you a fat lip. What is it?’
‘I have five quarters. Good ones.’
‘At this point I am supposed to say, “Daughter, were you a good girl in Philadelphy?” Out with it. Whom did you kill? Much blood?’
‘Yesterday. Those pinball games. Every time Harry won free games he gave me a quarter. “For luck,” he said.’
I decided not to beat her. Of course they were not ‘good quarters’ but they turned out to be good enough. Good enough, that is, to fit coin machines. We had passed a penny arcade; such places usually have coin-operated food, dispensers and this one did. The prices were dreadfully high – fifty cents for a skimpy stale sandwich; twenty-five cents for a bare mouthful of chocolate. But it was better than some breakfasts we had had on the road. And we certainly did not steal, as the quarters from my world were real silver.
Then we went to the public library to find out what sort of world we must cope with now.
We found out quickly:
Marga’s world.
Chapter 20
The wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are bold as a lion.
Proverbs 28:1
MARGRETHE WAS as elated as I had been the day before. She bubbled, she smiled, she looked sixteen. I looked around for a private place – back of book stacks or somewhere – where I could kiss her without worrying about a proctor. Then I remembered that this was Margrethe’s world where nobody cared… and grabbed her where she stood and bussed her properly.
And got scolded by a librarian.
No, not for what I had done, but because we had been somewhat noisy about it. Public kissing did not in itself disturb that library’s decorum. Hardly. I noticed, while I was promising to keep quiet and apologizing for the breach, a display rack by that librarian’s desk:
New Titles INSTRUCTIONAL PORNOGRAPHY –
Ages 6 to 12
Fifteen minutes later I was waving my thumb again on Highway 77 to Dallas.
Why Dallas? A law firm: O’Hara, Rigsbee, Crumpacker, and Rigsbee.
As soon as we were outside the library, Marga had started talking excitedly about how she could now end our troubles: her bank account in Copenhagen.
I said, ‘Wait a minute, darling. Where’s your checkbook? Where’s your identification?’
What it, came to was that Margrethe could possibly draw on her assets in Denmark after several days at a highly optimistic best or after several weeks at a more probable estimate… and that even the longer period involved quite a bit of money up front for cablegrams. Telephone across the Atlantic? Marga did not think such a thing existed. (And even if it did, I thought it likely that cablegrams were cheaper and more certain.)
Even after all arrangements had been made, it was possible that actual payment might involve postal delivery from Europe – in a world that had no airmail.
So we headed for Dallas, I having assured Marga that, at the very worst, Alec Graham’s lawyers would advance Alec Graham enough money to get him (us) off the street, and, with luck, we would come at once into major assets.
(Or they might fail to recognize me as Alec Graham and prove that I was not he – by fingerprints, by signature, by something – and thereby lay the ghost of ‘Alec Graham’ in Margrethe’s sweet but addled mind. But I did not mention this to Margrethe.)
It is two hundred miles from Oklahoma City to Dallas; we arrived there at 2 p.m., having picked up a ride at the intersection of 66 and 77, and kept it clear into the Texas metropolis. We were dropped where 77 crosses 80 at the Trinity River, and we walked to the Smith Building; it took us half an hour.
The receptionist in suite 7000 looked like something out, of the sort of stage show that C. U. D. has spent much time and money to suppress. She was dressed but not very much, and her makeup was what Marga calls ‘high style’ She was nubile and pretty and, with my newly learned toleration, I simply enjoyed the sinful sight. She smiled and said, ‘May I help you?’
‘This is a fine day for golf. Which of the partners is still in the office?’
‘Only Mr Crumpacker, I’m afraid.’
‘He’s the one I want to see.’
‘And whom shall I say is calling?~
(First hurdle – I missed it. Or did she?) ‘Don’t you recognize me?’
‘I’m sorry. Should I?’
‘How long have you been working here?’
‘Just over three months.’
‘That accounts for it. Tell Crumpacker that Alec Graham is here.’
I could not hear what Crumpacker said to her but I was watching her eyes; I think they widened – I feel sure of it. But all she said was, ‘Mr Crumpacker will, see you.’ Then she turned to Margrethe. ‘May I offer you a magazine while you wait? And would you like a reefer?’
I said, ‘She’s coming with me.’
‘But
‘Come along, Marga.’ I headed quickly for the inner offices.
Crumpacker’s door was easy to find; it was the one with the squawking issuing from it. This shut off as I opened the door and held it for Margrethe. As I followed her in, he was saying, ‘Miss, you’ll have to wait outside!’
‘No,’ I denied, as I closed the door behind me. ‘Mrs Graham stays’.’
He looked startled. ‘Mrs Graham?’
‘Surprised you, didn’t I? Got married since I saw you last. Darling, this is Sam Crumpacker, one of my attorneys.’ (I had picked his first name off his door.)
‘How do you do, Mr Crumpacker?’
‘Uh, glad to meet you, Mrs Graham. Congratulations to you, Alec you always could pick ’em.’
I said, ‘Thanks. Sit down, Marga.’
‘Just a moment, folks! Mrs Graham can’t stay – really she can’t! You know that.’
‘I know no such thing. This time I’m going to have a witness.’ No, I did not know that he was crooked. But I had learned long ago, in dealing with legislators, that anyone who tries to keep you from having a witness is bad news. So C.U.D. always had witnesses and always stayed within the law; it was cheaper that way.
Marga was seated; I sat down beside her. Crumpacker had jumped up when we came in; he remained standing. His mouth worked nervously. ‘I ought to call the Federal prosecutor.’
‘Do that,’ I agreed. ‘Pick up the phone there and call him. Let’s both of us go see him. Let’s tell him everything. With witnesses. Let’s call in the press. All of the press, not just the tame cats.’
(What did I know? Nothing. But when it’s necessary to bluff, always bluff big. I was scared. This rat could turn and fight like a cornered mouse – a rabid one.)
‘I should.’
‘Do it, do it! Let’s name names, and tell who did what and who got paid. I want to get everything out into the open… before somebody slips cyanide into my soup.’
‘Don’t talk that way.’
‘Who has a better right? Who pushed me overboard? Who?’
‘Don’t look at me!’
‘No, Sammie, I don’t think you did it; you weren’t there. But it could be your godson. Eh?’ Then I smiled my biggest right-hand-of-fellowship smile. ‘Just joking, Sam. My old friend would not want me dead. But you can tell me some things and help me out. Sam, it’s not convenient to be dumped way off on the other side of the world – so you owe me.’ (No, I still knew nothing… nothing save the evident fact that here was a man with a guilty conscience – so crowd him.)
‘Alec, let’s not do anything hasty.’
‘I’m in no hurry. But I’ve got to have explanations. And money.’
‘Alec, I tell you on my word of honor all I know about what happened to you is that this squarehead ship came into Portland and you ain’t aboard. And I have to go all the way to Oregon f’ God’s sake to witness them breaking into your strong-box. And there’s only a hundred thousand in it; the rest is missing. Who got it, Alec? Who got to you?’
He had his eyes on me; I hope my face didn’t show anything. But he lad hulled me. Was this true? This shyster would lie as easily as he talked. Had my friend purser, or the purser and the captain in cahoots, looted that lockbox?
As a working hypothesis, always prefer the simpler explanation. This man was more likely to lie than the purser was to steal. And it was likely – no, certain – that the captain would have to be present before the purser would force his way into the lockbox of a missing passenger. If these two responsible officers, with careers and reputations to lose, nevertheless combined to steal, why would they leave a hundred thousand behind? Why not take it all and be blandly ignorant about the contents of my lockbox? – as indeed they should be. Something fishy here.
‘What are you implying was missing?’
‘Huh?’ He glanced at Margrethe. ‘Uh – Well, damn it there should have been nine hundred grand more. The money you didn’t pass over in Tahiti.’
‘Who says I didn’t?’
‘What? Alec, don’t make things worse. Mr Z. says so. You tried to drown his bagman.’
I looked at him and laughed. ‘You mean those tropical gangsters? They tried to get the boodle without
identifying themselves and without giving receipts. I told them an emphatic no – so the clever boy had his muscle throw me into the pool. Hmm – Sam, I see it now. Find out who came aboard the Konge Knut in Papeele.’
‘Why?’
‘That’s your man. He not only got the boodle; he pushed me overboard. When you know, don’t bother to try to get him extradited, just tell me his name. I’ll arrange the rest myself. Personally.’
‘Damn it, we want that million dollars.’
‘Do you think you can get it? It wound up in Mr Z’s hands… but you got no receipt. And I got a lot of grief from asking for a receipt. Don’t be silly, Sam; the nine hundred thousand is gone. But not my fee. So pass over that hundred grand. Now.’
‘What? The Federal prosecutor in Portland kept that, impounded it as evidence.’
‘Sam, Sam boy, don’t try to teach your grandmother how to steal sheep. As evidence for what? Who is charged? Who is indicted? What crime is alleged? Am I charged with stealing something out of my own lockbox? What crime?’
“What crime?” Somebody stole that nine hundred grand, that’s what!’
‘Really? Who’s the complainant? Who asserts that there ever was nine hundred thousand in that lockbox? I certainly never told anyone that – so who says? Pick up that phone, Sam; call the Federal prosecutor in Portland. Ask him why he held that money -on whose complaint? Let’s get to the bottom of this. Pick it up, Sam. If that Federal clown has my money, I want to shake it loose from him.’
‘You’re almighty anxious to talk to prosecutors! Strange talk from you.’
‘Maybe I’ve had an acute attack of honesty. Sam, your unwillingness to call Portland tells me all I need
to know. You were called out there to act on my behalf, – as my attorney. American passenger lost overboard, ship of foreign registry, you betcha they get hold of the passenger’s attorney to inventory his assets. Then they pass it all over to his attorney and he gives a receipt for it. Sam, what did you do with my clothes?’
‘Eh? Gave ’em to the Red Cross. Of course.’
‘You did, eh?’
‘After the prosecutor released ’em, I mean.’
‘Interesting. The Federal attorney keeps the money, although no one has complained that any money is missing… but lets the clothes out of his hands when the only probable crime is murder.’
‘Huh?’
‘Me, I mean. Who pushed me and who hired him to? Sam, we both know where the money is.’ I stood up, pointed. ‘In that safe. That’s where it logically has to be. You wouldn’t bank it; there would be a record. You’ wouldn’t hide it at home; your wife might find it. And you certainly didn’t split with your partners Sam, open it. I want to see whether there is a hundred thousand in… or a million.’
‘You’re out of your mind!’
‘Call the Federal prosecutor. Let him be our witness.’
I had him so angry he couldn’t talk. His hands trembled. It isn’t safe to get a little man too angry – and I topped him by six inches, weight and other measurements to match. He wouldn’t attack me himself – he was a lawyer – but I would need to be careful going through doorways, and such.
Time to try to cool him – ‘Sam, Sam, don’t take it so seriously. You were leaning on me pretty heavily… so I leaned back. The good Lord alone knows why prosecutors do anything – the gonif most likely has
stolen it by now… in the belief that I am dead and will never complain. So I’ll go to Portland and lean on him, hard.’
‘There’s a paper out on you there.’
‘Really? What charges?’
‘Seduction under promise of marriage. A female crewman of that ship.’ He had the grace to look apologetically at Margrethe. ‘Sorry, Mrs Graham. But your husband asked me.’
‘Quite all right,’ she answered crisply.
‘I do get around, don’t I? What does she look like? Is she pretty? What’s her name?’
‘I never saw her; she wasn’t there. Her name? Some Swede name. Let me think. Gunderson, that was it. Margaret S. Gunderson.’
Margrethe, bless her heart, never let out a peep – not even at being called a Swede. I said in wonderment, ‘I’m accused of seducing this woman … aboard a foreign-flag vessel, somewhere, in the South Seas. So there’s a warrant out for me in Portland, Oregon. Sam, what kind of a lawyer are you? To let a client have paper slapped on him on that sort of charge,’
‘I’m a smart lawyer, that’s the kind I am. Just as you said, no telling what a Federal attorney will do; they take their brains out when they appoint ’em. It simply wasn’t important enough to talk about, you being dead, or so we all thought. I’m just looking out for your interests, letting you know about it before you step in it. Gimme some time, I’ll get it quashed – then you go to Portland.’
‘Sounds reasonable. There aren’t any charges outstanding on me here, are there?’
‘No. Well, yes and no. You know the deal; we assured them that you would not be coming back, so they turned the blind eye when you left. But here you are, back. Alec, you can’t afford to be seen here.
Or elsewhere in Texas. Or anywhere in the States, actually. Word gets around, and they’ll dig up those old charges.’
‘I was innocent!’
He shrugged. ‘Alec, all my clients are innocent. I’m talking like a father, in your own interest. Get out of Dallas. If you go as far as Paraguay, so much the better.’
‘How? I’m broke. Sam, I’ve got to have some dough.’
‘Have I ever let you down?’ He got out his wallet, counted out five one-hundred-dollar bills, laid them in front of me.
I looked at them. ‘What’s that? A tip?’ I picked them up, pocketed them. ‘That won’t get us to Brownsville. Now let’s see some money.’
‘See me tomorrow.’
‘Don’t play games, Sam. Open that safe and get me some real money. Or I don’t come here tomorrow; I go see the Federal man and sing like the birdies. After I get square with him – and I will; the Feds love a state’s witness, it’s the only way they ever win a case – then I go to Oregon and pick up that hundred grand.’
‘Alec, are you threatening me?’
‘You play games, I play games. Sam, I need a car and I don’t mean a beat-up Ford. A Cadillac. Doesn’t have to be new, but a cream puff, clean, and a good engine. A Cadillac and a few grand and we’ll be in Laredo by midnight, and in Monterrey by morning. I’ll call you from Mexico City and give you an address. If you really want me to go to Paraguay and stay there, you send the money to D. F. for me to do it.’
It did not work out quite that way, but I settled for a used Pontiac and left with six thousand dollars in cash, and instructions to go to a particular used-car lot and accept the deal offered me – Sam would call and set it up. He agreed also to call the Hyatt and get us the bridal suite, and would see that they held it. Then I was to come back at ten the next morning.
I refused to get up that early. ‘Make that eleven. We’re still on our honeymoon.’
Sam chuckled, slapped me on the back, and agreed.
Out in the corridor we headed toward the elevators but went ten feet farther and I opened the door to the fire-escape trunk. Margrethe followed me without comment but once inside the staircase trunk and out of earshot of others she said, ‘Alec, that man is not your friend.’
‘No, he’s not.’
‘I am afraid for you.’
‘I’m afraid for me, too.’
‘Terribly afraid. I fear for your life.’
‘My love, I fear for my life, too. And for yours. You are in danger as long as you are with me.’
‘I will not leave you!’
‘I know. Whatever this is, we are in it together.’
‘Yes. What are our plans now?’
‘Now we go to Kansas.’
‘Oh, good! Then we are not driving to Mexico?’
‘Hon, I don’t even know how to drive a car.’
We came out in a basement garage and walked up a ramp to a side street. There we walked several blocks away from the Smith Building, picked up a cruising taxi, rode it to the Texas & Pacific Station, there picked up a taxi at the taxi rank, and rode it to Fort Worth, twenty-five miles west. Margrethe was very quiet on the trip. I did not ask her what she was thinking about because I knew: It can’t be
happy-making to discover that a person you fell in love with was mixed up in some shenanigan that smelled Of gangsters and rackets’. I made myself a solemn promise never to mention the matter to her.
In Fort Worth I had the hackie drop us on its most stylish shopping street, letting him pick it. Then I said to Marga, ‘Darling, I’m about to buy you a heavy gold chain.’
‘Goodness, darling! I don’t need a gold chain.’
‘We need it. Marga, the first time I was in this world with you, in Konge Knut – I learned that here the dollar was soft, not backed by gold, and every price I have seen today confirms that. So, if change comes again – and we never know – even the hard money of this world, quarters and half dollars and dimes, won’t be worth anything because they’re not really silver. As for the paper money I got from Crumpacker – waste paper!
‘Unless I change it into something else. We’ll start with that gold chain and from here on you wear it to bed, you even wear it to bathe – unless you hang it around my neck.’
‘I see. Yes.’
‘We’ll buy some heavy gold jewelry for each of us, then I’m going to try to find a coin dealer – buy some silver cartwheels, maybe some gold coins. But my purpose is to get rid of most of this paper money in the
next hour – all but the price of two bus tickets to Wichita, Kansas, three hundred and fifty miles north of here. Could you stand to ride a bus all night tonight? I want to get us out of Texas.
‘Certainly! Oh, dear, I do want to get out of Texas! Truly, I’m still frightened.’
‘Truly, you are not alone.’
‘But -‘
‘”But” what, dear? And quit looking sad.’
‘Alec, I haven’t had a bath for four days.’
We found that jewelry shop, we found the coin shop; I spent about half that flat money and saved the rest for bus fare and other purposes in this world – such as dinner, which we ate as soon as the shops started to close. A hamburger we had eaten in Gainesville seemed an awfully long way off in time and space. Then I determined that there was a bus going north – Oklahoma City, Wichita, Salina – at ten o’clock that evening. I bought tickets and paid an extra dollar on each to reserve seats. Then I threw money away like a drunken sailor took a room in a hotel across from the bus station, knowing that we would be checking out in less than two hours.
It was worth it. Hot baths for each of us, taking turns, each of us remaining fully dressed and carrying the other’s clothing, jewelry, and all the money while the other was naked and wet. And carrying my razor, which had become a talisman of how to outwit Loki’s playful tricks.
And new, clean underwear for each of us, purchased in passing while we were converting paper money into valuta.
I had hoped for time enough for love – but no; by the time I was clean and dry we had to dress and check out to catch that bus. Never mind, there would be other times. We climbed into the bus, put the backrests back, put Marga’s head on my shoulder. As the bus headed north we fell asleep.
I woke up sometime later because the road was so rough. We were seated right behind the driver, so I leaned forward and asked, ‘Is this a detour?’ I could not recall a rough stretch when we had ridden south on this same road about twelve hours earlier.
‘No,’ he said. ‘We’ve crossed into Oklahoma, that’s all. Not much pavement in Oklahoma. Some near Oke City and a little between there and Guthrie.’
The talk had wakened Margrethe; she straightened up. ‘What is it, dear?’
‘Nothing. Just Loki having fun with us. Go back to sleep.’
Chapter 21
What are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they? And I said unto him, Sir, thou knowest. And he said unto me, These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore are they before the throne of God, And serve Him day and night in His temple.
Revelation 7:13-15
I WAS driving a horse and buggy and not enjoying it. The day was hot, the dust kicked up by horse’s hooves stuck to sweaty skin, flies were bad, there was no breeze. We were somewhere near the corner of Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma, but I was not sure where. I had not seen a map for days and the roads were no longer marked with highway signs for the guidance of automobilists – there were no automobiles.
The last two weeks (more or less – I had lost track of the days) had been endless torments of Sisyphus, one ridiculous frustration after another. Sell silver dollars to a local dealer in exchange for that world’s paper? – no trouble; I did it several times. But it didn’t always help. Once I had sold silver for local paper money and we had ordered dinner – when, boom, another world change and we went hungry. Another time I was cheated outrageously and when I complained, I was told: ‘Neighbor, possession of that coin is illegal and you know it. I’ve offered you a price anyhow because I like you. Will you take it? Or shall I do my plain duty as a citizen?’
I took it. The paper money he gave us for five ounces of silver would not buy – dinner for Marga and me at a backwoods gourmet spot called ‘Mom’s Diner’.
That was in a charming community called (by a sign at its outskirts):
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
A Clean Community Blackamoors, Kikes, Papists Keep Moving!
We kept moving. That whole two weeks had been spent trying to travel-the two hundred miles from Oklahoma City to Joplin, Missouri. I had been forced to give up the notion of avoiding Kansas City. I still had no intention of staying in or near Kansas City, not when a sudden change of worlds could land us in Abigail’s lap. But I had learned in Oklahoma City that the fastest and indeed the only practical route- to Wichita was a long detour through Kansas City. We had retrogressed to the horse-and-buggy era.
When you consider the total age of the earth, from Creation in 4004 BC to the year of Our Lord I994, or 5998 years – call it 6000 – in a period of 6000 years, 80 or 90 years is nothing much. And that is how short a time it has been since the horse-and-buggy day in my world. My father was born in that day (1909) and my paternal grandfather not only never owned an automobile but refused to ride in one. He claimed that they were spawn of the Devil, and used to quote passages from Ezekiel to prove it. Perhaps he was right.
But the horse-and-buggy era does have -shortcomings. There are obvious ones such as no inside plumbing, no air conditioning, no modern medicine. But for us there was an unobvious but major one; where there are no trucks and no cars there is effectively no hitchhiking. Oh, it is sometimes possible to hitch rides on farm wagons – but the difference in speed between a human’s walk and a horse’s walk is
not great. We rode when we could but, either way, fifteen miles was a good day’s progress – too good; it left no time to work for meals and a place to sleep.
There is an old paradox, Achilles and the Tortoise, in which the remaining distance to your goal is halved at each The question is: How long does it take to reach your goal? The answer is: You can’t get there from here.
That is the way we ‘progressed’ from Oklahoma City to Joplin.
Something else compounded my frustration: I became increasingly persuaded that we were indeed in the latter days, and we could expect the return of Jesus and the Final Judgment at any moment – and my darling, my necessary one, was not yet back in the arms of Jesus. I refrained from nagging her about it, although it took all my will power to respect her wish to handle it alone. I began to sleep badly through worrying about her.
I became a bit crazy, too (in addition to my paranoid belief that these world changes were aimed at me personally) – crazy in that I acquired an unfounded but compelling belief that finishing this journey was essential to the safety of my darling’s immortal soul. Just let us get as far as Kansas, dear Lord, and I will pray without ceasing until I have converted her and brought her to grace. 0 Lord God of Israel, grant me this boon!
I continued to look for dishwashing jobs (or anything) even while we still had silver and gold to trade’ for local money. But motels disappeared entirely; hotels became scarce and restaurants decreased in numbers and size to fit an economy in which travel was rare and almost all meals were eaten at home.
It became easier to find jobs cleaning stalls in livery stables. I preferred dishwashing to shoveling horse manure – especially as I had only one pair of shoes. But I stuck to the rule of take any honest work but keep moving!
You may wonder why we did not shift to hitching rides on freight trains. In the first place I did not know how, never having done it. Still more important, I could not guarantee Marga’s safety. There were the hazards of mounting a moving freight car. But worse were dangers from people: railroad bulls and road kids – hobos, tramps, bindlestiffs, bums. No need to discuss those grisly dangers, -as I kept her away from rail lines and hobo jungles.
And I worried. While abiding strictly to her request not to be pressured, I did take to praying aloud every night and in her presence, on my knees. And at last, to my great joy, my darling joined me, on her knees. She did not pray aloud and I stopped vocalizing myself, save for a final: ‘In Jesus’ name, Amen.’ We still did not talk about it.
I wound up driving this horse and buggy (goodness,’ what a hot day! – ‘Cyclone weather’, my grandmother Hergensheimer would have called it) as a result of a job cleaning stalls in a livery stable. As, usual I had quit after one day, telling my temporary employer that my wife and I had to move on to Joplin; her mother was ill.
He told me that he had a rig that needed to be returned to the next town up the road. What he meant was that he had too many rigs and nags on hand, his own and others, or he would have waited until he could send it back by renting it to a passing drummer.
I offered to return it for one day’s wages at the same extremely low rate that he had paid me to shovel manure and curry nags.
He pointed out that he was doing me a favor, since my wife and I had to get to Joplin.
He had both logic and strength of position on his side; I agreed. But his wife did put up a lunch for us, as well as giving us breakfast after we slept in their shed.
So I was not too unhappy driving that rig, despite the weather, despite the frustrations. We were getting a few miles closer to Joplin every day – and now my darling was praying. It was beginning to look like ‘Home Free!’ after all.
We had just reached the outskirts of this town (Lowell? Racine? I wish I could remember) when we encountered something right straight out of my childhood: a camp meeting, an old-time revival. On the left side of the road was a cemetery, well kept but the grass was drying; facing it on the right was the revival tent, pitched in a pasture. I wondered whether the juxtaposition of graveyard and Bible meeting was accidental, or planned? – if the Reverend Danny had been involved, I would know it was planned; most people cannot see gravestones without thinking about the long hereafter.
Crowded ranks of buggies and farm wagons stood near the tent, and a temporary corral lay beyond them. Picnic tables of the plank-and-sawhorse type were by the tent on the other side; I could see
remains of lunch. This was a serious Bible meeting, one that started in the morning, broke for lunch, carried on in the afternoon – would no doubt break for supper, then adjourn only when the revivalist judged that there were no more souls to be saved that day.
(I despise these modern city preachers with their five minute ‘inspirational messages’. They say Billy Sunday could preach for seven hours on only a glass of water then do it again in the evening and the next day. No wonder heathen cults have spread like a green bay tree!)
There was a two-horse caravan near the tent. Painted on its side was: Brother ‘Bible’ Barnaby. Out front was a canvas sign on guys and stays:
That Old-Time Religion! Brother ‘Bible’ Barnaby Healing Every Session 10a.m. – 2p.m. – 7p.m.
Every Day from Sunday June 5th till
!!!JUDGMENT DAY!!!
I spoke to the nag and pulled on the reins to let her know that I wanted to stop. ‘Darling, look at that!’
Margrethe read the sign, made no comment.
‘I admire his courage,’ I said. ‘Brother Barnaby is betting his reputation that Judgment Day will arrive before it’s time to harvest wheat… which could be early this year, hot as it is.’
‘But you think Judgment Day is soon.’
‘Yes, but I’m not betting a professional reputation on it just my immortal soul and hope of Heaven. Marga, every Bible student reads the prophecies slightly differ ently. Or very differently. Most of the current crop of premillenarians don’t expect the Day earlier than the year two thousand. He might have
something. Do you mind if we, stay here an hour?’
‘We will stay however long you wish. But – Alec, you wish me to go in? Must I?’
‘Uh -‘ (Yes, darling, I certainly do want you to go inside.) ‘You would rather wait in the buggy?’
Her silence was answer enough. ‘I see. Marga, I’m not trying to twist your arm. Just one thing – We have not been separated except when utterly necessary for several weeks. And you know why. With the changes coming almost every day, I would hate to have one hit while you were sitting out here and I was inside, quite a way off. Uh, we could stand outside the tent. I see they have the sides rolled up.’
She squared her shoulders. ‘I was being silly. No, we will go inside. Alec, I do need to hold your hand; you are right: Change comes fast. But I will not ask you to stay away from a meeting of your coreligionists.’
‘Thank you, Marga.’
‘And, Alec – I will try!’
‘Thank you. Thank you loads! Amen!’
‘No need to thank me. If you go to your Heaven, I want to go, too!’
‘Let’s go inside, dear.’
I put the buggy at the far end of a rank, then led the mare to the corral, Marga with me. As we came back to the tent I could hear:
‘- the corner where you are!
‘Brighten the corner where you are!
‘Someone far from harbor you may guide across the bar! ‘So-‘
I chimed in: ‘- brighten the corner where you are!’
It felt good.
Their instrumental music consisted of a foot-pumped organ and a slide trombone. The latter surprised me but Pleased me; there is no other instrument that can get right down and rassle with The Holy City the way a trombone can, and it is almost indispensable for The Son of God Goes Forth to War.
The congregation was supported by a choir in white angel robes – a scratch choir, I surmised, as the white robes were homemade, from sheets. But what. that choir may have lacked in professionalism it made up for in zeal. Church music does not have to be good as long as it is sincere – and loud.
The sawdust trail, six feet wide, led straight down the middle, benches on each side. It dead-ended against a chancel rail of two-by-fours. An usher led us down the trail in answer to my hope for seats down front. The place was crowded but he got people to squeeze over and we wound up on the aisle in the second row, me outside. Yes there were still seats in the back, but every preacher despises people – their name is legion! – who sit clear at the back when there are seats open down front.
As the music stopped, Brother Barnaby stood up and came to the pulpit, placed his hand on the Bible. ‘It’s all in the Book,’ he said quietly, almost in a whisper. The congregation became dead still.
He stepped forward, looked around. ‘Who loves you?’
‘Jesus loves me!’
‘Let Him hear you.’
‘JESUS LOVES ME!’
‘How do you know that?’
‘IT’S IN THE BOOK!’
I became aware of an odor I had not smelled in a long time. My professor of homiletics pointed out to us once in a workshop session that a congregation imbued with religious fervor has a strong and distinctive odor (‘stink’ is the word he used) compounded of sweat and both male and female hormones. ‘My sons,’ he told us, ‘if your assembled congregation smells too sweet, you aren’t getting to them. If you can’t make ’em sweat, if they don’t break out in their own musk like a cat in rut, you might as ‘Well quit and go across the street to the papists. Religious ecstasy is the strongest human emotion; when- it’s there, you can smell it!’
Brother Barnaby got to them.
(And, I must confess, I never did. That’s why I wound up as an organizer and money-raiser.)
‘Yes, it’s in the Book. The Bible is the Word of God, not just here and there, but every word. Not as allegory, but as literal truth. You shall know the truth and the truth will make you free. I read to you now from the Book: “For the Lord Himself will descend from Heaven with-a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the Trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first.”
‘That last line is great news, my brothers and sisters:
“- the dead in Christ shall rise first.” What does that say? It does not say that the dead shall rise first; it says that the dead in Christ shall rise first. Those who were washed in the blood of the Lamb, born again in Jesus, and then have died in a state of grace before His second coming, they will not be forgotten, they will be first. Their graves will open, they will be miraculously restored to life and health and physical perfection and will lead the parade to Heaven, there to dwell in happiness by the great white throne forevermore!’
Someone shouted, ‘Hallelujah!’
‘Bless you, sister. Ah, the good news! All the dead in Christ, every one! Sister Ellen, taken from her family by the cruel hand of cancer, but who died with the name of Jesus on her lips, she will help lead the procession. Asa’s beloved wife, who died giving birth but in a state of grace, she will be there! All your dear ones who died in Christ will be gathered up and you will see them in Heaven. Brother Ben, who lived a sinful life, but found God in a foxhole before an enemy bullet cut him down, he will be there… and his case is specially good news, witnessing that God can be found anywhere. Jesus is present not only in churches – in fact there are fancy-Dan churches where His Name is rarely heard -´
‘You- can say that again!’
‘And I will. God is everywhere; He can hear you when you speak. He can hear you more easily when you are ploughing a field, or down on your knees by your bed, than He can in some ornate cathedral, surrounded by the painted and perfumed. He is here now, and He promises you, ‘I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you. I stand at the door and knock, if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him, and will dine with him, and he with Me.” That’s His promise, dearly beloved, in plain words. No obscurities, no highfalutin “interpretation”, no so-called “allegorical meanings”. Christ Himself is waiting for you, if only you will ask.
‘And if you do ask, if you are born again in Jesus, if He washes away your sins and you reach that state of grace… what then? I read you the first half of God’s promise to the faithful. You will hear the Shout, you will hear the great Trumpet sounding His advent, as He promised, and t he dead in Christ shall rise again. Those dry bones will rise again and be covered with living, healthy flesh.
‘Then what?
‘Hear the words of the Lord: “Then we which are alive” – That’s you and me, brothers and sisters; God is talking about us. “Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air and so shall we ever be with the Lord’!
‘So shall we ever be! So shall we ever be! With the Lord in Heaven!’
,Hallelujah!’
‘Bless His Name!’
‘Amen! Amen!’
(I found that I was one of those saying ‘Amen!’)
‘But there’s a price. There are no free tickets to Heaven. What happens if you don’t ask Jesus to help you? What if you ignore. His offer to be washed free of sin and reborn in the blood of the Lamb? What then? Well? Answer me!’
The congregation was still save for heavy breathing, then a voice from the back said, not loudly, ‘Hellfire.’
‘Hellfire and damnation! Not for just a little while but through all eternity! Not some mystical, allegorical fire that singes only your peace of mind and burns no more than a Fourth of July sparkler. This is the real thing, a raging fire, as real as this.’ Brother Barnaby slapped the pulpit with a crack that could be heard throughout the tent. ‘The sort of fire that makes a baseburner glow cherry red, then white. And you are in that fire, Sinner, and the ghastly pain goes on and on, it never stops. Never! There’s no hope for you. No use asking for a second chance. You’ve had your second chance… and your millionth chance. And more. For two thousand years sweet Jesus has been begging you, pleading with you, to accept from Him that for which He died in agony on the Cross to give you. So, once you are burning in that fiery Pit and trying to cough up the brimstone – that’s sulfur, plain ordinary sulfur, burning and stinking, and it will burn your lungs and blister your sinful hide! – when you’re roasting deep in the Pit for your sins, don’t go whining about how dreadful it hurts and how you didn’t know it would be like that. Jesus knows all about pain; He died on the Cross. He died for you. But you wouldn’t listen and now you’re down in the Pit and whining.
‘And there you’ll stay, suffering burning agony throughout eternity! Your whines can’t be heard from down in the Pit; they are drowned out by the screams of billions of other sinners!’
Brother Barnaby lowered his voice to conversational level. ‘Do you want ‘ to burn in the Pit?’
‘No!’ – ‘Never!’ – ‘Jesus save us!’
‘Jesus will save you, if you ask Him to. Those who died in Christ are saved, we read about them. Those alive when He returns will be saved if they are born again and remain in that state of grace. He promised us that He would return, and that Satan would be chained for- a thousand years while He rules in peace and justice here on earth. That’s the Millennium, folks, that’s the great day at hand. After that thousand years Satan will be loosed for a little while and the final battle will be fought. There’ll be war in Heaven. The Archangel Michael will be the general for our side, leading God’s angels against the Dragon – that’s Satan again – and his host of fallen angels. And Satan lost – will lose, that is, a thousand years, from now. And nevermore will he be seen in Heaven.
‘But that’s a thousand years from now, dear friends. You will live to see it… if you accept Jesus and are born again before that Trumpet blast that signals His return. When will that be? Soon, soon! What does the Book say? In the Bible God tells you not once but many times, in Isaiah, in Daniel, in Ezekiel, and in. all four of the Gospels, that you will not be told the exact hour of. His return. Why? So you can’t sweep the dirt under the rug, that’s why! If He told you that He would arrive New Year’s Day the year two thousand, there are those who would spend the next five and a half years consorting with lewd women, worshiping strange gods, breaking every one of the Ten Commandments… then, sometime Christmas Week nineteen ninety-nine you would find them in church, crying repentance, trying to make a deal.
‘No siree Bob! No cheap deals. It’s the same price to everyone. The Shout and the Trump may be months away… or you may hear it before I can finish this sentence. It’s up to you to be ready when it comes.
‘But we know that it is coming soon. How? Again it’s in the Book. Signs and portents. The first, without which the rest cannot happen, is the return of the Children of Israel to the Promised Land – see Ezekiel, see Matthew, see today’s newspapers. They rebuild the Temple… and sure enough they have; it’s in the Kansas City Star. There be other signs and portents, wonders of all sorts – but the greatest are tribulations, trials to test the souls of men the way Job was tested. Can there be a better word to describe the twentieth century than “tribulations”?
`Wars and terrorists and assassinations and fires and plagues. And more wars. Never in history has mankind been tried so bitterly. But endure as Job endured and the end is happiness and eternal peace – the peace of God, which passeth all understanding. He offers you His hand, He loves you, He will save you.’
Brother Barnaby stopped and wiped his forehead with a large handkerchief that was already soggy from such use.
The choir (perhaps at a signal. from him) started singing softly, ‘We shall gather at the river, the beautiful, beautiful river, that flows by the throne of God and presently segued into:
‘Just as I am, without one plea -´
Brother Barnaby got down on one knee and held out his arms to us. ‘Please! Won’t you answer Him? Come, accept Jesus, let Him gather you in His arms -´
The choir continued softly with:
‘But that Thy blood was shed for me, ‘And Thou bidd’st me come to Thee, ‘0 Lamb of God, I come, I come!’
And the Holy Ghost descended.
I felt Him overpower me and the joy of Jesus filled my heart. I stood up and stepped out into the aisle. Only then did I remember that I had Margrethe with me. I turned and saw her staring back at me, her face filled with a sweet and deeply serious look. ‘Come, darling,’ I whispered, and led her into the aisle. Together we went down the sawdust trail to God.
There were others ahead of us at the chancel rail. I found us a place, pushed some crutches and a truss aside, and knelt down. I placed my right hand on the rail, rested my forehead on it, while I continued to hold Marga’s hand with my left. I prayed Jesus to wash away our sins and receive us into His arms.
One of Brother Barnaby’s helpers was whispering inter my ear. ‘How is it with you, brother?’
‘I’m fine,’ I said happily, ‘and so is my wife. Help someone who needs it.’
‘Bless you, brother.’ He moved on. A sister farther down was writhing and speaking in tongues; he stopped lo comfort her.
I bowed my head again, then became aware of neighing And loud squeals of frightened horses and a great-flapping and shaking of the canvas roof above us. I looked up and saw a split start and widen, then the canvas blew away. The ground trembled, the sky was dark.
The Trump shook my bones, the Shout was the loudest ever heard, joyous and triumphant. I helped Margrethe to her feet smiled at her. ‘It’s now, darling!’
We were swept up.
We were tumbled head over heels and tossed about by a funnel cloud, a Kansas twister. I was wrenched away from Marga and tried to twist back, but could not. You can’t swim in a twister; you go where it takes you. But I knew she was safe.
The storm turned me upside down and held me there for a long moment, about two hundred feet up. The horses had broken out of the corral, and some of the people, not caught up, were milling about. The force of the twister turned me again and I stared down at the cemetery.
The graves were opening.
Chapter 22
When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.
Job 38:7
THE WIND whipped me around, and I saw no more of the graves. By the time I was faced down again the ground was no longer in sight – just a boiling cloud glowing inside with a great light, amber and saffron and powder blue and green gold. I continued to search for Margrethe, but few people drifted near me and none was she. Never mind, the Lord would protect her. Her temporary absence could not dismay me; we had taken the only important hurdle together.
I thought about that hurdle. What a near thing! Suppose that old mare had thrown a shoe and the delay had caused us to reach that point on the road an hour later than we did? Answer: We would never have reached it. The Last Trump would have sounded while we were still on the road, with neither of us in a state of grace. Instead of being caught up into the Rapture, we would have gone to Judgment unredeemed, then straight to Hell.
Do I believe in predestination?
That is a good question. Let’s move on to questions I can answer. I floated above those clouds for a time unmeasured by me. I sometimes saw other people but no one came close enough for talk. I began to wonder when I would see our Lord Jesus – He had promised specifically that He would meet us ‘in the air’.
I had to remind myself that I was behaving like a little child who demands that Mama do it now and is answered, ‘Be patient, dear. Not yet.’ God’s time and mine were not the same; the Bible said so.
Judgment Day had to be a busy time and I had no concept of what duties Jesus had to carry out. Oh, yes, I did know of one; those graves opening up reminded me. Those who had died in Christ (millions? billions? more?) were to go first to meet our Father Who art in Heaven, and of course the Lord Jesus would be with them on that glorious occasion; He had promised them that.
Having figured out the reason for the delay, I relaxed. I was willing to wait my turn to see Jesus… and when I did see Him, I would ask Him to bring Margrethe and me together.
No longer worried, no longer hurried, utterly comfortable, neither hot nor cold, not hungry, not thirsty, floating as effortlessly as a cloud, I began to feel the bliss that had been promised. I slept.
I don’t know how long I slept. A long time – I had been utterly exhausted; the last three weeks had been grinding. Running a hand across my face told me that I had slept a couple of days or more; my whiskers had reached the untidy state that meant at least two days of neglect. I touched my breast pocket – yes,
my trusty Gillette, gift of Marga, was still buttoned safely inside. But I had no soap, no water, no mirror.
This irritated me as I had been awakened by a bugle call (not the Great Trumpet – probably just one wielded by an angel on duty), a call that I knew without being told meant, ‘Wake up there! It is now your turn.’
It was indeed – so when the ‘roll was called up yonder’ I showed up with a two-day beard. Embarrassing!
Angels handled us like traffic cops, herding us into the formations they wanted. I knew they were angels; they wore wings and white robes and were heroic in size – one that flew near me was nine or ten feet tall. They did not flap their wings (I learned later that wings were worn only for ceremony, or as badges of authority). I discovered that I could move as these traffic cops directed. I had not been able to control my motions earlier; now I could move in any direction by volition alone.
They brought us first into columns, single file, stretched out for miles (hundreds of miles? thousands?). Then they brought the columns into ranks, ‘twelve abreast – these were stacked in layers, twelve deep. I was, unless I miscounted, number four in my rank, which was stacked three layers down. I was about two hundred places back in my column – estimated while forming up – but I could not guess how long the column was.
And we flew past the Throne of God.
But first an angel positioned himself in the air about fifty yards off our left flank. His voice carried well. ‘Now hear this! You will pass in review in this formation. Hold’ your position at all times. Guide on the creature on your left, the creature under you, and the one ahead. of you. Leave ten cubits between ranks and between layers, five cubits, elbow to elbow in ranks. No crowding, no breaking out of ranks, no, slowing down as we pass the Throne. Anybody breaking flight discipline will be sent to the tail end of the flight… and I’m warning you now, the Son might be gone by then, with nobody but Peter or Paul or
some other saint to receive the parade. Any questions?’
“How much is a cubit?’
‘Two cubits is one yard. Any creature in this cohort who does not know how long a yard is?’
No, one spoke up. The angel added, ‘Any more questions?’
A woman to my left and above me called out, ‘Yes! My. daughter didn’t have her cough medicine with her. So I fetched it. Can you take it to her?’
‘Creature, please accept my assurance that any cough your daughter manages to take with her to Heaven will be purely psychosomatic.’
‘But her doctor said -´
‘And in the meantime shut up and let’s get on with this parade. Special requests can be filed after arriving in Heaven.’
There were more questions, mostly silly, confirming an opinion I had kept to myself for years: Piety does not imply horse sense.
Again the trumpet sounded; our cohort’s flightmaster called out, ‘Forward!’ Seconds later there was a single blast; he shouted, ‘Fly!’ We moved forward.
(Note: I call this angel ‘he’ because he seemed male.
Ones that seemed to be female I refer to as ‘she’. I never have been sure about sex in an angel. If any. I think they are androgynous but I never had a chance to find out. Or the courage to ask.)
(Here’s another one that bothers me. Jesus had brothers and sisters; is the Virgin Mary still a virgin? I have never had the courage to ask that question, either.)
We could see His throne for many miles ahead. This was not the great white Throne of God the Father
in Heaven; this was just a field job for Jesus to use on this occasion. Nevertheless it was magnificent, carved out of a single diamond with its myriad facets picking up Jesus’ inner light and refracting it in a shower of fire and ice in all directions. And that is what I saw best, as the face of Jesus shines with such blazing light that, without sun glasses, you can’t really see His features.
Never mind; you knew Who He was. One could not help knowing. A feeling of overpowering awe grabbed me when we were still at least twenty-five miles away. Despite my professors of theology, for the first time in my life I understood (felt) that single emotion that is described in the Bible by two words used together: love and fear. I loved/feared the Entity on that throne, and now I knew why Peter and James had abandoned their nets and followed Him.
And of course I did not make my request to Him as we passed closest (about a hundred yards). In my life on earth I had addressed (prayed to) Jesus by name thousands of times; when I saw Him in the Flesh I simply reminded myself that the angel herding us had. promised us a chance to file personal requests when we reached Heaven. Soon enough. In the meantime it pleased me to think about Margrethe, somewhere in this parade, seeing the Lord Jesus on His throne… and if I had not intervened, she might never have seen Him. It made me feel warm and good, on top of the ecstatic awe I felt in staring at His blinding light.
Some miles past the throne the column swung up and to the right, and we left the neighborhood first of earth and then of the solar system. We headed straight for Heaven and picked up speed.
Did you know that earth looks like a crescent moon when you look back at it? I wondered whether or not any flat-earthers had managed to attain the Rapture. It did not seem likely, but such ignorant superstition is not totally incompatible with believing in Christ. Some superstitions are absolutely forbidden – astrology, for example, and Darwinism. But the flat-earth nonsense is nowhere forbidden that I know of. If there were any flat-earthers with us, how did they feel to look back and see that the earth was round as a tennis ball?
(Or would the Lord in His mercy let them perceive it as flat? Can mortal man ever understand the viewpoint of God?)
It seemed to take about two hours to reach the neighborhood of Heaven. I say ‘seemed to’ because it might have been any length of time; there was no human scale by which to judge. In the same vein, the total period of the Rapture seemed to me to be about two days… but I had reason later to believe that it may have been seven years – at least by some reckoning. Measures of time and space become very slippery when one lacks mundane clocks and’ yardsticks.
As we approached the Holy City our guides had us slow down and then make a sightseeing sweep around it before going in through one of the gates.
This was no minor jaunt. New Jerusalem (Heaven, the Holy City, Jehovah’s capital) is laid out foursquare like the District of Columbia, but it is enormously bigger, one thousand three hundred and twenty miles on a side, five thousand two hundred and eighty miles around it, and that gives an area of one million seven hundred and forty-two thousand four hundred square miles.
This makes cities like Los Angeles or New York look tiny.
In solemn truth the Holy City covers an area more than six times as big as all of Texas! At that, it’s crowded. But are, expecting only a few more after us.
It’s a walled city, of course, and the walls are two hundred and sixteen feet high, and the same wide. The tops of the wall are laid out in twelve traffic lanes – and no guard rails. Scary. There are twelve gates, three in each wall, the famous pearly gates (and they are); these normally stand open – will not be closed, we were told, until the Final Battle.
The wall itself is of iridescent jasper but it has a dozen footings in horizontal layers that are more dazzling than the wall itself: sapphire, chalcedony, emerald, sardonyx, chrysolite, beryl, topaz, amethyst – I may have missed some. New Jerusalem is so dazzling everywhere that it is hard for a human to grasp it – impossible to grasp it all at once.
When we finished the sweep around the Holy City, our cohort’s flightmaster herded us, into a holding pattern like dirigibles at O’Hare and kept us there until he received a signal that one of the gates was free
and I was hoping to get at least a glimpse of Saint Peter, but no – his office is at the main gate, the Gate of Judah, whereas we went in by the opposite gate, named for Asher, where we were registered by angels deputized to act for Peter.
Even with all twelve gates in use and dozens of Peter deputized clerks at each gate and examination waived (since we all were caught up at the Rapture – guaranteed saved) we had to queue up quite a long time just to get registered in, receive temporary identifications, temporary bunking assignments, temporary eating assignments –
(‘Eating’?)
Yes, I thought so, too, and I asked the angel who booked me about it. He/she looked down at me. ‘Refection is optional. It will do you no harm never to eat and not to drink. But many creatures and some angels ‘enjoy eating, especially in company. Suit yourself.’
‘Thank you. Now about this berthing assignment. It’s a single. I want a double, for me and my wife. I want -‘
‘Your former wife, you mean. In Heaven there is no marriage or giving in marriage. I
‘Huh? Does that mean we can’t live together?’
‘Not at all. But both of you must apply, together, at Berthing General. See the office of Exchange and Readjustments. Be sure, each of you, to fetch your berthing chit.’
‘But that’s the problem! I got separated from my wife. How do I find her?’
‘Not part of my M.0.S. Ask at the information booth. In the meantime use your singles apartment in Gideon Barracks.’
‘But -´
He (she?) sighed. ‘Do you realize how many thousands of hours I have been sitting here? Can you guess how complex it is to provide for millions of creatures at once, some alive and never dead, others newly incarnate? This is the first time we have had to install plumbing for the use of fleshly creatures – do you even suspect how inconvenient that is? I say that, when you install plumbing, you are bound to get creatures who need plumbing – and there goes the neighborhood! But did they listen to me? Hunh! Pick up your papers, go through that door, draw a robe and a halo – harps are optional. Follow the green line to Gideon Barracks.’
‘No!’
I saw his (her) lips move; she (he) may have been praying. ‘Do you think it is proper to run around Heaven, looking the way you do? You are quite untidy. We aren’t used to living-flesh creatures. Uh… Elijah is the last I recall, and I must say that you look almost as disreputable as he did. In addition to discarding those rags and putting on a decent white robe, if I were you I would do something about that dandruff.’
‘Look,’ I said tensely. ‘Nobody knows the trouble I’ve Seen, nobody knows but Jesus. While you’ve been sitting around in a clean white robe and a halo in an immaculate City with streets of gold, I’ve been struggling with Satan himself. I know I don’t look very neat but I didn’t choose to come here looking this way. Uh – Where can I pick up some razor blades?’
‘Some what?’
‘Razor blades. Gillette double-edged blades, or that type. For this.’ I took out my razor, showed it to her/him. ‘Preferably stainless steel.’
‘Here everything is stainless. But what in Heaven is that?’
‘A safety razor. To take this untidy beard off my face.’
‘Really? If the Lord in His wisdom had intended His male creations not to have hair on their faces, He would have created them with smooth features. Here, let me dispose of that.’ He-she reached for my razor.
I snatched it back. ‘Oh, no, you don’t! Where’s that information booth?’
‘To your left. Six hundred and sixty miles. ‘ She-he sniffed.
I turned away, fuming. Bureaucrats. Even in Heaven. I didn’t ask any more questions there because I
spotted a veiled meaning. Six hundred and sixty miles is a figure I recalled from our sightseeing tour: the exact distance from a center gate (such as Asher Gate, where I was) to the center of Heaven, i.e., the Great White Throne of the Lord God Jehovah, God the Father. He (she) was telling me, none too gently, that if I did not like the way I was being treated, I could take my complaints to the Boss – i.e., ‘Get lost!’
I picked up my papers and backed away, looked around for someone else in authority.
The one who organized this gymkhana, Gabriel or Michael or whoever, had anticipated that there would be lots of creatures milling around, each with problems that didn’t quite fit the system. So scattered through the crowd were cherubs. Don’t think of Michelangelo or Luca della Robbia; these were not bambinos with dimpled knees; these were people a foot and a half taller than we newcomers were like angels but with little cherub wings and each with a badge reading ‘STAFF’.
Or maybe they were indeed angels; I never have been sure about the distinction between angels and cherubim and seraphim and such; the Book seems to take it for granted that you know such things without being told. The papists list nine different classes of angels! By whose authority? It’s not in the Book!
I found only two distinct classes in Heaven: angels and humans. Angels consider themselves superior and do not hesitate to let you know it. And they are indeed superior in position and power and privilege.
Saved souls are second-class citizens – The notion, one that runs all through Protestant Christianity and maybe among papists as well, that, a saved soul will practically sit in the lap of God well, it ain’t so! So you’re saved and you go to Heaven you find at once that you are the new boy on the block, junior to everybody else.
A saved soul in Heaven occupies much the position of a blackamoor in Arkansas. And it’s the angels who really rub your nose in it.
I never met an angel I liked.
And this derives from how they feel about us. Let´s look at it from the angelic viewpoint. According to Daniel there are a hundred million angels in Heaven. Before the Resurrection and the Rapture, Heaven must have been uncrowded, a nice place to live and offering a good career – some messenger work, some choral work, an occasional ritual. Fm sure the angels liked it.
Along comes a great swarm of immigrants, many millions (billions?), and some of them aren’t even house-broken. All of them require nursemaiding. After untold eons of beatific living, suddenly the angels find themselves working overtime, running what amounts to an enormous orphan asylum. It’s not surprising that they don’t like us.
Still… I don’t like them, either. Snobs!
I found a cherub (angel?) with a STAFF badge and asked the location of the nearest information booth. He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Straight down the boulevard Six thousand furlongs. It’s by the River that flows from the Throne.’
I stared down the boulevard. At that distance God the Father on His Throne looked like a rising sun. I said, ‘Six thousand furlongs is over six hundred miles. Isn’t there one in this neighborhood?’
‘Creature, it was done that way on purpose. If we had placed a booth on each corner, every one of them would have crowds around it, asking silly questions. This way, a creature won’t make the effort unless it has a truly important question to ask.’
Logical. And infuriating. I found that I was again possessed by unheavenly thoughts. I had always pictured Heaven as a place of guaranteed beatitude – not filled with the same silly frustration so common on earth. I counted to ten in English, then in Latin. ‘Uh, what’s the flight time? Is there a speed limit?’
´Surely you don’t think that you would be allowed to fly there, do you?’
‘Why not? Just earlier today I flew here and then all the way around the City.’
‘You just thought you did. Actually, your cohort leader did it all. Creature, let me give you a tip that may keep you out of trouble. When you get your wings – if you ever do get wings – don’t try to fly over the Holy City, You’ll be grounded so fast your teeth will ache. And your wings stripped away.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you don’t rate it, that’s why. You Johnny-Come-Latelies show up here and think you own the place. You’d carve your initials in the Throne if you could get that close to it. So let me put you wise.
Heaven operates by just one rule: R.H.I.P. Do you know what that means?’
‘No,’ I answered, not entirely truthfully.
‘Listen and learn. You can forget the Ten Commandments. Here only two or three of them still apply and you’ll find you can’t break those even if you were to’ try. The golden rule everywhere in Heaven is: Rank Hath Its Privileges. At this eon you are a raw recruit in. the Armies of the Lord, with the lowest rank possible. And the least privilege. In fact the only privilege I can think of that you rate is being here, just being here. The Lord in His infinite wisdom has decreed that you qualify to enter here. But that’s all.
Behave yourself and you will be allowed to stay. Now as to the traffic rule you asked about. Angels and nobody else fly over the Holy City. When on duty or during ceremonies. That does not mean you. Not even if you get wings. If you do. I emphasize this because a surprising number of you creatures have arrived here with the delusion that going to Heaven automatically changes a creature into an angel. It doesn’t. It can’t. Creatures never become angels. A saint sometimes. Though seldom. An angel, never.’
I counted ten backwards, in’Hebrew. ‘If you don’t mind, I’m still trying to reach that information booth. Since I am not allowed to fly, how do I get there?’
‘Why didn’t you say that in the first place? Take the bus.’
Sometime later I was seated in a chariot bus of the Holy City Transit Lines and we were rumbling toward the distant Throne. The chariot was open, boat-shaped, with an entrance in the rear, and had no discernible motive power and no teamster or conductor. It stopped at marked chariot stops and that is how I got aboard. I had not yet found out how to get it to stop.
Apparently everyone in the City rode these buses (except V.I.P.s who rated private chariots). Even angels. Most passengers were humans dressed in conventional white and wearing ordinary halos. But a few were humans in costumes of various eras and topped off by larger and fancier halos. I noticed that angels were fairly polite to these creatures in the fancier halos. But they did not sit with them. Angels sat in the front of the car, these privileged humans in the middle part, and the common herd (including yours truly) in the rear.
I asked one of my own sort how long it took to reach the Throne.
‘I don’t know,’ I was answered. ‘I don’t go nearly that far.
This soul seemed to be female, middle-aged, and friendly, so I used a commonplace opener. ‘That’s a Kansas accent, is it not?’
She smiled. ‘I don’t think so. I was born in Flanders.’
‘Really? You speak very fluent English.’
She shook her head gently. ‘I never learned English.’
‘But -´
‘I know. You are a recent arrival. Heaven is not affected by the Curse of Babel. Here the Confusion of Tongues took place… and a good thing for me as I, have no skill in languages – a handicap before I died. Not so here. ‘She looked at me with interest. ‘May I ask where you died? And when?’
‘I did not die,’ I told her. ‘I was snatched up alive in the Rapture.’
Her eyes widened. ‘Oh, how thrilling! You must be very holy.
‘I don’t think so. Why do you say that?’
‘The Rapture will come – came? – without warning. Or so I was taught.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Then with no warning, and no time for confession, and no priest to help you… you were ready! As free from sin as Mother Mary. You came straight to Heaven. You must be holy. ‘ She added, ‘That’s what I thought when I saw your costume, since saints – martyrs especially – often dress as they did on earth. I saw too that you are not wearing your saint’s halo. But that’s your privilege. ‘She looked suddenly shy. ‘Will you bless me? Or do I presume?’.
‘Sister, I am not a saint.’
‘You will not grant me your blessing?’
(Dear Jesus, how did this happen to me?) ‘Having heard say that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, I am ,not a saint, do you still want me to bless you?’
‘If you will… holy father.’
‘Very well. Turn and lower your head a little – ´Instead she turned fully and dropped to her knees. I put a hand on her head. ‘By authority vested in me as an ordained minister of the one true catholic church of Jesus Christ the Son of God the Father and by the power of the Holy. Ghost, I bless this our sister in Christ. So mote it be!’
I heard echoes of ‘Amen!’ around us; we had had quite an audience. I felt embarrassed. I was not certain, and still am not certain, that I had any authority to bestow blessings in Heaven itself. But the dear woman had asked for it and I could not refuse.
She looked up at me with tears in her eyes. ‘I knew it, I knew it!’
‘Knew what?’
´That you are a saint. Now you are wearing it!’
I started to say, ‘Wearing what?’ when a minor miracle occurred. Suddenly I was looking at myself from outside: wrinkled and dirty khaki pants, Army-surplus shirt with dark sweat stains in the armpits and a bulge of razor in the left breast pocket, three-day growth of beard and in need of a haircut… and, floating over my head, a halo the size of a washtub, shining and sparkling!
‘Up off your knees,’ I said instead, ‘and let’s stop being conspicuous.´
‘Yes, father.’ She added, ‘You should not be seated back here.’
‘I’ll be the judge of that, daughter. Now tell me about yourself.’ I looked around as she resumed her seat, and happened to catch the eye of an angel seated all alone, up forward. (S)he gestured to me to come forward.
I had had my fill of the arrogance of angels; at first I ignored the signal. But everyone I was noticing and pretending not to, and my awe-struck companion was whispering urgently, ‘Most holy person, the angelic one wants to see you.´
I gave in – partly because it was easier, partly because I wanted to ask the angel a question. I got up and went to the front of the bus.
‘You wanted me?’
‘Yes. You know the rules. Angels in front, creatures in back, saints in the middle. If you sit in back with creatures, you are teaching them bad habits. How can you expect to maintain your saintly privileges if you ignore protocol? Don’t let it happen again.’
I thought of several retorts, all unheavenly. Instead I said, ‘May I ask a question?’
`Ask.’
‘How much longer until this bus reaches the River from the Throne?’
‘Why do you ask? You have all eternity before you.´
‘Does that mean that you don’t know? Or that you won’t tell?’
‘Go sit down in your proper section. At once!’
I went back and tried to find a seat in the after space. But my fellow creatures had closed in and left me no room. No one said anything and they would not meet my eye, but it was evident that no one would aid me in defying the authority of an angel. I sighed and sat down in the mid-section, in lonely splendor, as I was the only saint aboard. If I was a saint.
I don’t know how long it took to reach the Throne. In Heaven the light doesn’t vary and the weather does not change and I had no watch. It was simply a boringly long time. Boring? Yes. A gorgeous palace constructed of precious stone is a wonderful sight to see. A dozen palaces constructed of jewels can be a dozen wonderful sights, each different from the other. But a hundred miles of such palaces will put you to sleep, and six hundred miles of the same is deadly dull. I began to long for a used-car lot, or a dump, or (best yet) a stretch of green and open countryside.
New Jerusalem is a city of perfect beauty; I am witness to that. But that long ride taught me the uses of ugliness.
I never have found out who designed the Holy City.
That God authorized the design and construction is axiomatic. But the Bible does not name the architect(s), or the builder(s). Freemasons speak of ‘the Great Architect, meaning Jehovah – but you won’t find that in the Bible. Just once I asked an angel, ‘Who designed this city?’ He didn’t sneer at my ignorance, he didn’t scold me- he appeared to be unable to conceive it as a question. But it remains a question to me: Did God create (design and build) the Holy City Himself, right down to the smallest jewel? Or did He farm it out to subordinates?
Whoever designed it, the Holy City has a major shortcoming, in my opinion – and never mind telling me
that my presumption in passing judgment on God’s design is blasphemous. It is a lack, a serious one.
It lacks a public library.
One reference librarian who had devoted her life to answering any and all questions, trivial and weighty, would be more use in Heaven than another cohort of arrogant angels. There must be plenty of such ladies in Heaven, as it takes a saintly disposition and the patience of Job to be a reference librarian and to stick with it for forty years. But to carry on their vocation they would need books and files and so forth, the tools of their profession. Given a chance, I’m sure they would set up the files and catalog the books but where would they get the books? Heaven does not seem to have a book-publishing industry.
Heaven doesn’t have industry. Heaven doesn’t have an economy. When Jehovah decreed, after the expulsion from Eden, that we descendants of Adam must gain our bread by the sweat of our faces, He created economics and it has been operating ever since for ca. 6000 years.
But not in Heaven.
In Heaven He giveth us, our daily bread without the sweat of our faces. In truth you don’t need daily bread; you can’t starve, you won’t even get hungry enough to matter – just hungry enough to enjoy eating if you want to amuse yourself by stopping in any of the many restaurants, refectories, and lunchrooms.’ The best hamburger I ever ate in my life was in a small lunchroom off the Square of Throne on the banks of the River. But again, ‘m ahead of my story.
Another lack, not as serious for my taste but serious, is gardens. No gardens, I mean, except the grove of the Tree of Life by the River near the Throne, and a few, a very few, private gardens here and there. I think I know why this is so and, if I am right, it may be self-correcting. Until we reached Heaven (the people of the Rapture and the resurrected dead-in-Christ) almost all citizens of the Holy City were angels. The million or so exceptions were martyrs for the faith, children of Israel so holy that they made it without ever having personally experienced Christ (i.e., mostly before 30 AD), and another group from unenlightened lands – souls virtuous without ever knowing of Christ. So 99 percent of the citizens of the Holy City were angels.
Angels don’t seem to be interested in horticulture. I suppose that figures – I can’t imagine an angel down on his/her knees, mulching the soil around a plant. They just aren’t the dirty-fingernails sort needed to grow prize roses.
Now that angels are outnumbered by humans by at least ten to one I expect that we will see gardens – gardens, garden clubs, lectures on how to prepare the soil, and so forth. All the endless ritual of the devoted gardener. Now they will have time for it.
Most humans in Heaven do what they want to do without the pressure of need. That nice lady (Suzanne) who wanted my blessing was a lacemaker in Flanders; now she teaches it in a school open to anyone who is interested. I have gathered a strong impression that, for most humans, the real problem of an eternity of bliss is how to pass the time. (Query: Could there be something to this reincarnation idea so prevalent in other religions but so firmly rejected by Christianity? Could a saved soul be rewarded, eventually, by being shoved back into the conflict? If not on earth, then elsewhere? I’ve got to lay hands on a Bible and do some searching. To my utter amazement, here in Heaven Bibles seem to be awfully hard to come by.)
‘The information booth was right where it was supposed to be, close to the bank of the River of the Water of Life that flow’s from the Throne of God and winds through the grove of the Tree of Life. The Throne soars up from the, middle of the grove but you can’t see it very well that close to its base. It’s like looking up at the tallest of New York skyscrapers while standing on the sidewalk by it. Only more so.
And of course you can’t see the Face of God; you are, looking straight up one thousand four hundred and- forty cubits. What you see is, the Radiance… and you can feel the Presence.
The information booth was as crowded as that cherub had led me to expect. The inquirers weren’t queued up; they were massed a hundred deep around it. I looked at that swarm and wondered how long it would take me to work my way up to the counter. Was it possible to work my way there other than by the nastiest of bargain-day tactics, stepping on corns, jabbing with elbows, all the things that make department stores so uninviting to males?
I stood back and looked at that mob and tried to figure out how to cope. Or was there some other way to locate Margrethe without stepping on corns?
I was still standing there when a STAFF cherub came up to me. ‘Holy one, are you trying to reach the information booth?’
‘I surely am!’
‘Come with me. Stay close behind me.’ He was carrying a long staff of the sort used by riot police. ‘Gangway! Make way for a saint! Step lively there!’ In nothing flat I reached the counter of the booth. I
don’t think anyone was injured but there must have been some hurt feelings. I don’t approve of that sort of action; I think that treatment should be even-handed for everyone. But, where R.H.I.P. is the rule, being even a corporal is vastly better than being a private.
I turned to thank the cherub; he was gone. A voice said, ‘Holy one, what do you want?’ An angel back of the counter was looking down at me.
I explained that I wanted to locate my wife. He Drummed on the counter. ‘That’s not ordinarily a service we supply. There is a co-op run by creatures called “Find Your Friends and Loved Ones” for that sort of thing.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Near Asher Gate.’
‘What? I just came from there. That’s where I registered in.’
‘You should have asked the angel who checked you in. You registered recently?’
‘Quite recently; I was caught up in the Rapture. I did ask the angel who registered me… and got a fast brushoff. He, she, uh, that angel told me to come here.’
`Mrf. Lemme see your papers.’
I passed them over. The angel studied them, slowly and carefully, then called to another angel, who had stopped servicing the mob to watch. ‘Tirl! Look at this.’
So the second angel looked over my papers, nodded sagely, handed them—back – glanced at me, shook his head sadly.’ ‘Is something wrong?’ I asked.
‘No. Holy one, you had the misfortune to be serviced,’ if that is the word, by an angel who wouldn’t help his closest friend, if he had one, which he doesn’t. But I’m a bit surprised that she was so abrupt with a saint.’
‘I wasn’t wearing this halo at the time.’
‘That accounts for it. You drew it later?’
‘I did not draw it. I acquired it miraculously, on the way from Asher Gate to here.’
`I see. Holy one, it’s your privilege to put Khromitycinel on the report. On the other hand I could use the farspeaker to place your inquiry for you.’
‘I think that would be better.’
‘So do I. In the long run. For you. If I make my meaning clear.’
‘You do.’
‘But before I call that co-op let’s check with Saint Peter’s office and make sure your wife has arrived. When did she die?’
‘She didn’t die. She was caught up in the Rapture, too.’
‘So? That means a quick and easy check, no searching of old rolls. Full name, age, sex if any, place and date of we don’t need that. Full name first.’
Margrethe Svensdatter Gunderson.’
‘Better spell that.’
I did so.
‘That’s enough for now. If Peter’s clerks can spell. You can’t wait here; we don’t have a waiting room. There is a little restaurant right opposite us – see the sign?’
I turned and looked. ‘ “The Holy Cow”?´
‘That’s it. Good cooking, if you eat. Wait there; I’ll send word to you.’
‘Thank you!’
‘You are welcome -‘She glanced again at my papers, then handed them back. ‘- Saint Alexander Hergensheimer.’
The Holy Cow was the most homey sight I had seen since the Rapture: a small, neat lunchroom that would have looked at home in Saint Louis or Denver. I went inside. A tall blackamoor whose chef’s hat stuck up through his halo was at the grill with his back to me. I sat down at the counter, cleared my throat.
‘Just hold your horses.’ He finished what he was doing, turned around. ‘What can I – Well, well! Holy man, what can I fix for you? Name it, just name it!’
‘Luke! It’s good to see you!’ ‘
He stared at me. ‘We have met?’
‘Don’t you remember me? I used to work for you. Ron’s Grill, Nogales. Alec. Your dishwasher.’
He stared a-gain, gave a deep sigh. ‘You sure fooled me. Saint Alec.’
‘Just “Alec” to my friends. It’s some sort of administrative mistake, Luke. When they catch it, I’ll trade this Sunday job for an ordinary halo.’
‘Beg to doubt – Saint Alec. They don’t make mistakes in Heaven. Hey! Albert! Take the counter. My friend, Saint Alec and I are going to sit in the dining room. Albert’s my sous-chef.’
I shook hands with a fat little man who was almost a parody of what a French chef should look like. He was wearing a Cordon Bleu hat as well as his halo. Luke and I went through a side door into a small dining room, sat down at a table. We were joined by a waitress and I got another shock.
Luke, said, ‘Hazel, I want you to meet an old friend of mine, Saint Alec – he and I used to be business associates. Hazel is hostess of The Holy Cow.’
‘I was Luke’s dishwasher,’ I told her. ‘Hazel, it’s wonderful to see you!’ I stood up, started to shake hands, then changed my mind for the better, put my arms around her.
She smiled up at me, did not seem surprised. ‘Welcome, Alec! “Saint Alec” now, I see. I’m not surprised.’
‘I am. It’s a mistake.’
‘Mistakes don’t happen in Heaven. Where is Margie? Still alive on earth?’
‘No.’ I explained how we had been separated. ‘So I’m waiting here for word.’
‘You’ll find her.’ She kissed me, quickly and warmly which reminded me of my four-day beard. I seated her, sat down with my friends. ‘You are sure to find her quickly, because that is a promise we were made and is precisely carried out. Reunion in Heaven with friends and loved ones. “We shall gather by the River -” and sure enough, there it is, right outside the door. Steve Saint Alec, you, do remember Steve? He was with you and Margie when we met.’
‘How could I forget him? He bought us dinner and gave us a gold eagle when we were stony. Do I remember Steve!’
‘I’m happy to hear you say that… because Steve credits you with converting him – born-again conversion
and getting him into Heaven. You see, Steve was killed on the Plain of Meggido, and I was killed in the War, too, uh, that was about five years after we met you
‘Five years?’
‘Yes. I was killed fairly early in the War; Steve lasted clear to Armageddon-‘
‘Hazel… it hasn’t been much over a month since Steve bought us that dinner at Rimrock.’
‘That’s logical. You were caught up in the Rapture and that touched off the War. So you spent the War years up in the air, and that makes it work out that Steve and I are here first even though you left first. You can discuss it with Steve; he’ll be in soon. By the way, I’m his concubine now his wife, except that here there is no marrying or giving in marriage. Anyhow Steve went back into the Corps when war broke out and got up to captain before they killed him. His outfit landed at Haifa and Steve died battling for the Lord at the height of Armageddon. I’m real proud of him.’
‘You should be. Luke, did the War get you, too?’
Luke gave a big grin. ‘No, sir, Saint Alec. They hanged me.’
‘You’re joking!’
`No joke. They hanged me fair and square. You remember when you quit me?’
‘I didn’t quit you. A miracle intervened. That’s how I met Hazel. And Steve.’
‘Well… you know more about miracles than I do. Anyway, we had to get another dishwasher right fast, and we had to take a Chicano. Man, he was a real bad ass, that one. Pulled a knife on me. That was his mistake. Pull a knife on a cook in his own kitchen? He cut me up some, I cut him up proper. Jury mostly his cousins, I think. Anyhow the D.A. said it was time for an example. But it was all right. I had been baptized long before that; the prison chaplain helped me be born again. I spoke a sermon standing on that trap with the noose around my neck. Then I said, “You can do it now! Send me to Jesus!
Hallelujah!” And they did. Happiest day of my lifel’
Albert stuck his head in. ‘Saint Alec, there’s an angel here looking for you.’
‘Coming!’
The angel was waiting just outside for the reason that he was taller than the doorway and not inclined to stoop. ‘You are Saint Alexander Hergensheimer?’
‘That’s me.’
“Your inquiry concerning a creature designated Margrethe Svensdatter Gunderson: The report reads: Subject was not caught up in the Rapture, and has not shown up in any subsequent draft. This creature, Margrethe Svensdatter Gunderson, is not in Heaven and is not expected. That is all.’
Chapter 23
I cry unto Thee, and Thou dost not hear me:
I stand up, and Thou regardest me not.
Job 30:20
SO OF course I eventually wound up in, Saint Peter’s office at the Gate of Judah – having chased all over Heaven first. On Hazel’s advice I went back to the Gate of Asher and looked up that co-op ‘Find Your Friends and Loved Ones’.
‘Saint Alec, angels don’t pass out misinformation and the records they consult are accurate. But they may not have consulted the right records, and, in my opinion, they would not have searched as deeply as you would search if you were doing it yourself -angels being angels. Margie might be listed under her maiden name.’
‘That was what I gave them!’
‘Oh. I thought you asked them to search for “Margie Graham”?’
‘No. Should I go back and ask them to?’
‘No. Not yet. And when you do – if you must don’ ask again at this information booth. Go directly to St Peter’s office. There you’ll get personal attention from other humans, not from angels.’
‘That’s for me!’
‘Yes. But try first at “Find Your Friends and Loved Ones”. That’s not a bureaucracy; it’s a co-op made up of volunteers, all of them people who really care. That’s how Steve found me after he was killed. He didn’t know my family name and I hadn’t used it for years, anyhow. He didn’t know my date and place of death. But a little old lady at “Find Your Friends” kept right on searching females named Hazel until Steve said “Bingo!” If he had just checked at the main personnel office – Saint Peter’s – they would have reported “insufficient data, no identification”.’
She smiled and went on, ‘But the co-op uses imagination. They brought Luke and me together, even
though we hadn’t even met before we died. After I got tired of loafing I decided that I wanted to manage a little restaurant it’s a wonderful way to meet people and make friends. So I asked the co-op and they set their computers on “cook”, and after a lot of false starts and wrong numbers it got Luke and me together and we formed a partnership and set up The Holy Cow. A similar search got us Albert.’
Hazel, like Katie Farnsworth, is the sort of woman who heals just by her presence. But she’s practical about it, too, like my own treasure. She volunteered to launder-my dirty clothes and lent me a robe of Steve’s to wear while my clothes dried. She found me a mirror and a cake of soap; at long last I tackled a five-day (seven-year?) beard. My one razor blade was closer to being a saw than a knife by then, but a half hour’s patient honing using the inside -of a glass tumbler (a trick I had learned in -seminary) restored it to temporary usefulness.
But now I needed a proper shave even though I had shaved – tried to shave – a couple of hours ago. I did not know how long I had been on this hunt but I did know that I had shaved four times… with cold water, twice without soap, and once by Braille – no mirror. Plumbing had indeed been installed for us fleshly types… but not up to American Standard quality. Hardly surprising, since angels don’t use plumbing and don’t need it, and since the overwhelming majority of the fleshly ones have little or no experience with inside plumbing.
The people who man the co-op were as helpful as Hazel said they would be (and I don’t think my fancy halo had anything to do with it) but nothing they turned up gave me any clue to Margrethe, even though they patiently ran computer searches on every combination I could think of.
I thanked them and blessed them and headed for Judah Gate, all the way across Heaven, thirteen hundred and twenty miles away. I stopped only once, at the Square of, the Throne, for one of Luke’s heaven burgers and a cup of the best coffee in New Jerusalem, and some encouraging words from Hazel. I continued my weary search feeling, much bucked up.
The Heavenly Bureau of Personnel occupies two colossal palaces on the right as you come through the gate. The first and smaller is for BC admissions; the second is for admissions since then, and included Peter’s office suite, on the second floor. I went straight there.
A big double door read SAINT PETER – Walk In, so I did. But not into his office; here was a waiting room big enough for Grand Central Station. I pushed through a turnstile that operated by pulling a ticket out of a slot, and a mechanical voice said, ‘Thank you. Please sit down and wait to be called.’
My ticket read ‘2013’ and the place was crowded; I decided, as I looked around for an empty seat, that
I was going to need another shave before my number would come up.
I was still looking when a nun bustled up to me, and ducked a knee in a quick curtsy. ‘Holy one, may I serve you?’ I did not know enough about the costumes worn by Roman Catholic orders to know what sisterhood she belonged to, but she was dressed in what I would call ‘typical’ – long black dress down to her ankles and to her wrists, white, starched deal over her chest and around her neck and. covering her ears, a black headdress covering everything else and giving her the silhouette of a sphinx, a big rosary hanging around her neck… and an ageless, serene face topped off by a lopsided pince-nez. And, of course, her halo.
The thing that impressed me most was that she was here. She was the first proof I had seen that papists can be saved. In seminary we used to argue about that in late-night bull sessions… although, the official position Of my Church was that certainly they could be saved, as long as they believed, as we did and were born again Jesus. I made a mental note to ask her when and how she had been born again – it would be, I was sure, an inspiring story.
I said, ‘Why, thank you, Sister! That’s most kind of you. Yes, you can help me – that is, I hope you can. I’m Alexander Hergensheimer and I’m trying to find my wife. This is the place to inquire, is it not? I’m new here.’
‘Yes, Saint Alexander, this is the place. But you did want to see Saint Peter, did you not?’
‘I’d like to pay my respects. If he’s not too busy.’
‘I’m sure he will want to see you, Holy Father. Let me tell my Sister Superior.’ She picked up the cross on her rosary, appeared to whisper into it, then looked up. ‘Is that spelled H,E,R,G,E,N,S,H,E,I,M,E,R, Saint Alexander?’
‘Correct, Sister.’
She spoke again to the rosary. Then she added, to me, ‘Sister Marie Charles is secretary, to Saint Peter. I’m her assistant and general gopher.’ She smiled. ‘Sister Mary Rose.’
‘It is good to meet you, Sister Mary Rose. Tell me about yourself. What order are you?’
‘I’m a Dominican, Holy Father. In life I was a hospital administrator in Frankfurt, Germany. Here, where there is no longer a need for nursing, I do this work because I like to mingle with people. Will you come with me, sir?’
The crowd parted like the waters of the Red Sea, whether in deference to the nun or to my gaudy halo, I cannot say. Maybe both. She took me to an unmarked side door and straight in, and I found myself in the office of her boss, Sister Marie Charles. She was a tall nun, as tall as I am, and handsome – or ‘beautiful’ may be more accurate. She seemed younger than her assistant… but how is one to tell with nuns? She was seated at a big flattop desk piled high and with an old-style Underwood typewriter swung out from its side. She got up quickly, faced me, and dropped that odd curtsy.
`Welcome, Saint Alexander! We are honored by your call. Saint Peter will be with you soon. Will you be seated? May we offer you refreshment? A glass of wine? A Coca-Cola?’
‘Say, I would really enjoy a Coca-Cola! I haven’t had, one since I was on earth.’
‘A Coca-Cola, right away.’ She smiled. ‘I’ll tell you a secret. Coca-Cola is Saint Peter’s one vice. So we always have them on ice here.’
A voice came out of the air above her desk – a strong’ resonant baritone of the sort I think of as a good preaching voice – a voice like that of ‘Bible’ Barnaby, may his name be blessed. ‘I heard that, Charlie. Let him have his Coke in here; I’m free now.’
‘Were you eavesdropping again, Boss?’
‘None of your lip, girl. And fetch one for me, too.’
Saint Peter was up and striding toward the door with his hand out as I was ushered in. I was taught in church history that he was believed to have been about ninety when he died. Or when he was executed (crucified?) by the, Romans, if he was. (Preaching has always been a chancy vocation, but in the days of Peter’s ministry it was as chancy as that of a Marine platoon sergeant.)
This man looked to be a strong and hearty sixty, or possibly seventy – an outdoor man, with a permanent’ suntan and the scars that come from sun damage. His hair and beard were full and seemed never to have been cut, streaked with grey but not white, and (to my surprise) he appeared to have been at one time a redhead. He was well muscled and broad shouldered, and his hands were calloused, as I learned when he gripped my hand. He was dressed in sandals, a brown robe of coarse wool, a halo like mine, and a dinky little skullcap resting in the middle of that fine head of hair.
I liked him on sight.
He led me around to a comfortable chair near his desk chair, seated me before he sat back down. Sister Marie Charles was right behind us with two Cokes on a tray, in the familiar pinchwaist bottles and with not-so-familiar (I had not seen them for years) Coke ‘glasses with the tulip tops and the registered trademark. I wondered who had the franchise in Heaven and how such business matters were handled.
He said, ‘Thanks, Charlie. Hold all calls.’
‘Even?’
‘Don’t be silly. Beat it.’ He turned to me. ‘Alexander, I try to greet each newly arrived saint personally. But somehow I missed you.’
‘I arrived in the middle of a mob, Saint Peter. Those from the Rapture. And not at this gate. Asher Gate.’
‘That accounts for it. A busy day, that one, and we still aren’t straightened out. But a Saint should be escorted to the main gate… by twenty-four angels and two trumpets. I’ll have to look into this.’
‘To be frank, Saint Peter,’ I blurted out, ‘I don’t think I am a saint. But I can’t get this fancy halo off.’
I He shook his head. ‘You are one, all right. And don’t let your misgivings gnaw at you; no saint ever knows that he is one, he has to be told. It is a holy paradox that anyone who thinks he is a saint never is.
Why, when I arrived here and they handed me the keys and told me I was in charge, I didn’t believe it. I thought the Master was playing a joke on me in return for a couple of japes I pulled on Him back in the days when we were barnstorming around the Sea of Galilee. Oh, no! He meant it. Rabbi Simon bar Jona the old fisherman was gone and I’ve been’ Saint Peter ever since. As you are Saint Alexander, like it or not. And you will like it, in time.’
He tapped on a fat file folder lying on his desk. ‘I’ve been reading your record. There is no doubt about your sanctity. Once I reviewed your record I recalled your trial. Devil’s Advocate against you was Thomas Aquinas; he came up to me afterwards and told me that his attack was pro forma, as there had never been, any doubt in his mind but what you qualified. Tell me, that first miracle, ordeal by fire – did your faith ever waver?’
‘I guess it did. I got a blister out of it.’
Saint Peter snorted. ‘One lonely blister! And you don’t think you qualify. Son, if Saint Joan had had faith as firm as yours, she would have quenched the fire that martyred her’. I know of -´
Sister Marie Charles’ voice announced, ‘Saint Alexander’s wife is here.’
‘Show her in!’ To me he added, ‘Tell you later’.’
I hardly heard him; my heart was bursting.
The door opened; in walked Abigail.
I don’t know how to describe the next few minutes. Heartbreaking disappointment coupled with embarrassment summarizes it.
Abigail looked at me and said severely, ‘Alexander, what in the world are you doing wearing that preposterous halo? Take it off instantly!’
Saint Peter rumbled, ‘Daughter, you are not “in the world”; you are in my private office. You will not speak to Saint Alexander that way.’
Abigail turned her gaze to him, and sniffed. ‘You call him a saint? And didn’t your mother teach you to stand up for ladies? Or are saints exempt from such niceties?’
‘I do stand up, for ladies. Daughter, you will address me, with respect. And you will speak to your husband with the respect a wife owes her husband.’
‘He’s not my husband!’
‘Eh?’ Saint Peter looked from her to me, then back. ‘Explain yourself.’
‘Jesus said, “For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels.” So there! And He said it again in Mark twelve, twenty-five.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Saint Peter, ‘I heard Him say it. To the Sadducees. By that rule you are no longer a wife.’
‘Yes! Hallelujah! Years I have waited to be rid of that clod – be rid of him without sinning.’
‘I’m unsure about the latter. But not being a wife does not relieve you of the duty to speak politely to this saint who was once your husband.’ Peter turned again to me. ‘Do You wish her to stay?’
‘Me? No, no! There’s been a mistake.’
`So it appears. Daughter, you may go.’
‘Now you just wait! Having come all this way, I have things I’ve been planning to tell you. Perfectly scandalous goings-on I have seen around here. Why, without the slightest sense of decency –
`Daughter, I dismissed you. Will you walk out on your own feet? Or shall I send for two stalwart angels and have you thrown out?’
‘Why, the very idea! I was just going to say -´
‘You are not going to say!’
‘Well, I certainly have as much right to speak my mind as anyone!’
‘Not in this office. Sister Marie Charles!’
‘Yes, sir!’
‘Do you still remember the judo they taught you when you were working with the Detroit police?’
‘I do!’
‘Get this yenta out of here.’
The tall nun grinned and dusted her hands together. What happened next happened so fast that I can’t describe it. But Abigail left very suddenly.
Saint Peter sat back down, sighed, and picked up his Coke. ‘That woman would try the patience of Job.
How long were you married to her?´
‘Uh, slightly over a thousand years.’
‘I understand you. Why did you send for her?’
‘I didn’t. Well, I didn’t intend to.’ I started to try to explain.
He stopped me. ‘Of course! Why didn’t you say that you were searching for your concubine? You misled Mary Rose. Yes, I know whom you mean: the zaftig shiksa who runs all through the latter part of your dossier. Very nice girl, she seemed to me. You are looking for her?’
‘Yes, surely. The day of the Trump and the Shout we were snatched up together. But that whirlwind, a real Kansas twister, was so violent that we were separated.’
‘You inquired about her before. An inquiry relayed from the information booth by the River.’
‘That´s right.’
‘Alexander, that inquiry is the last entry in your file. I can order the search repeated… but I can tell you ahead of time that it will be useful only to assure you. The answer, will be the same: She is not here.’
He stood up and came around to put a hand on my shoulder. ‘This is a tragedy that I have seen repeated endlessly. A loving couple, confident of eternity together: One comes here, the other does not. What can I do? I wish I could do something. I can’t.’
‘Saint Peter, there has been a mistake!’
He did not answer.
‘Listen to me! I know! She and I were side by side, kneeling at the chancel rail, praying… and just before the Trump and the Shout the Holy Ghost descended on us and we were in a perfect state of grace
and were snatched up together. Ask Him! Ask Him! He will listen to you.’
Peter sighed again. ‘He will listen to anyone, in any of His Aspects. But I will inquire.’ He picked up a telephone instrument so old-fashioned that Alexander Graham Bell could have assembled it. ‘Charlie, give me the Spook. Okay, I’ll wait. Hi! This is Pete, down at the main gate. Heard any new ones? No?
Neither have I Listen, I got a problem. Please run Yourself back to the day of the Shout and the Trump, when You, in Your aspect as Junior, caught up alive all those incarnate souls who were at that moment in a state of grace. Place Yourself outside a wide place in the road called Lowell, Kansas – that’s in North America – and at a tent meeting, a revival under canvas. Are You there? Now, at least a few femtoseconds before the Trump, it is alleged by one Alexander Hergensheimer, now canonized, that You descended on him and is beloved concubine Margrethe. She is described as about three and a half cubits tall, blonde, freckled, eighty mina – Oh, You do? Oh. Too late, huh? I was afraid of that. I’ll tell him.’
I interrupted, whispering urgently, ‘Ask Him where she is!´
‘Boss, Saint Alexander is in agony. He wants to know where she is. Yes, I’ll tell him.’ Saint Peter hung up. ‘Not in Heaven, not on earth. You can figure out the answer yourself And I’m sorry.-
I, must state that Saint Peter was endlessly patient with me. He assured me that I could talk with any One of the Trinity… but reminded me that, in consulting the Holy Ghost we had consulted all of Them. Peter had fresh searches made of the Rapture list, the graves-opened list, and of the running list of all arrivals since then – while telling me that no computer search could conceivably deny the infallible answers of God Himself speaking as the Holy Ghost… which I understood and agreed with, while welcoming new searches.
I said, ‘But how about on earth? Could she be alive somewhere there? Maybe in Copenhagen?’
Peter answered, ‘Alexander, He is as omniscient on earth as He is in Heaven. Can’t you see that?’
I gave a deep sigh. ‘I see that. I’ve been dodging the obvious. All right, how do I get from here to Hell?’
‘Alec! Don’t talk that way!’
‘The hell I won’t talk that way! Peter, an eternity here without her is not an eternity of bliss; it is an eternity of boredom and loneliness and grief. You think this damned gaudy halo means anything to me when I know – yes, you´ve convinced me! – that my beloved is burning in the Pit? I didn’t ask much. Just to be allowed to live with her. I was willing to wash dishes forever if only I could see her smile, hear her voice, touch her hand! She’s been shipped on a technicality and you know it! Snobbish, bad-tempered angels get to live here without ever doing one, lick to deserve it. But my Marga, who is a real angel if one ever lived, gets turned down and sent to Hell to everlasting torture on a childish twist in the rules. You can tell the Father and His sweet-talking Son and that sneaky Ghost, that they can take their gaudy Holy City and shove it! If Margrethe has to be in Hell, that’s where I want to be!’
Peter, was saying, ‘Forgive him, Father; he’s feverish, with grief – he doesn’t know what he is saying.’
I quieted down a little. ‘Saint Peter, I know exactly what I am saying. I don’t want to stay here. My beloved is in Hell, so that is where I want to be. Where I must be.’
‘Alec, you’ll get over this.’
‘What you don’t see is that I don’t want to get over this. I want to be with my love and share her fate.
You tell me she’s in Hell -´
‘No, I told you that it is certain that she is not in Heaven and not on earth.’
‘Is there a fourth place? Limbo, or some such?’
‘Limbo is a myth. I know of no fourth place.’
‘Then I want to leave here at once and look all over Hell for her. How?’
Peter shrugged.
‘Damn it, don’t give me a run-around! That’s all I’ve been handed since the day I walked through the fire
one run-around after another. Am I a prisoner?.
‘No.
‘Then tell me how to go to Hell.’
‘Very well. You can’t wear that halo to Hell. They wouldn’t let you in.´
‘I never wanted it. Let’s go!´
‘Not long after that I stood on the threshold of Judah Gate, escorted there by two angels. Peter did not say good-bye to me; I guess he was disgusted. I was sorry about that; I liked him very much. But I could not make him understand that Heaven was not Heaven to me without Margrethe.
I paused at the brink. ‘I want you to take one message back to Saint Peter -´
They ignored me, grabbed me from both sides, and tossed me over.
I fell.
And fell.
Chapter 24
Oh that I knew where I might find him! that I might come even to his seat!I would order my cause before him, and fill my mouth with arguments.
Job 23:3-4
AND STILL I fell.
For modern man one of the most troubling aspects of eternity lies in getting used to the slippery quality of time. With no clocks and no calendars and lacking even the alternation of day and night, or the phases of the moon, or the pageant of seasons, duration becomes subjective and ‘What time is it?’ is a matter of opinion, not of fact.
I think I fell longer than twenty minutes; I do not think that I fell as long as twenty years.
But don’t risk any money on it either way.
There was nothing to see but the insides of my eyeballs. There was not even the Holy City receding in the distance.
Early on, I tried to entertain myself by reliving in memory the happiest times in my life – and found that happy memories made me sad. So I thought about sad occasions and that was worse. Presently I slept. Or I think I did. How can you tell when you are totally cut off from sensation? I remember reading about one of those busybody ‘scientists’ building something he called a ‘sensory deprivation chamber’. What he achieved was a thrill-packed three-ring circus compared with the meager delights of falling from Heaven to Hell.
My first intimation that I was getting close to Hell was the stink. Rotten eggs. H2S Hydrogen, sulfide. The stench of burning brimstone.
You don’t die from it, but small comfort that may be, since those who encounter this stench are dead when they whiff it. Or usually so; I am not dead. They tell of other live ones in history and literature – Dante, Aeneas, Ulysses, Orpheus. But weren’t all of those cases fiction? Am I the first living man to go to Hell, despite all those yarns?
If so, how long will I stay alive and healthy? Just long enough to hit the flaming surface of the Lake? – there to go psst! and become a rapidly disappearing grease spot? Had my Quixotic gesture been just a wee bit hasty? A rapidly disappearing grease spot could not be much help to Margrethe; perhaps I should have stayed in Heaven and bargained. A saint in full-dress halo picketing the Lord in front of His Throne might have caused Him to reverse His decision… since His decision it had to be, L. G. Jehovah being omnipotent.
A bit late to think of it, boy! You can see the red glow on the clouds now. That must be boiling lava down there. How far down? Not far enough! How fast am I falling? Too fast!
I can see what the famous Pit is now: the caldera of an incredibly enormous volcano. Its walls are all around me, miles high, yet the flames and the molten lava are still a long, long way below me. But coming up fast! How are your miracle-working powers today, Saint Alec? You coped with that other fire pit with only a blister; think you can handle this one? The difference is only a matter of degree.
‘With patience and plenty of saliva the elephant de-flowered the mosquito.’ That job was just a matter of degree, too; can you do as well as that elephant? Saint Alec, that was not a saintly thought; what has happened to your piety? Maybe it’s the influence of this wicked neighborhood. Oh, well, you no longer need worry about sinful thoughts; it is too late to worry about any sin. You no longer risk going to Hell for your sins; you are now entering Hell – you are now in Hell. In roughly three seconds you are going to be a grease spot. ‘Bye, Marga my own! I’m sorry I never managed to get you that hot fudge sundae.
Satan, receive my soul; Jesus is a fink –
They netted me like a butterfly. But a butterfly would have needed asbestos wings to halve been saved the way I was saved; my pants were smoldering. They threw a bucket of water over me when they had me on the bank.
‘Just sign this chit.’
‘What chit?’ I sat up and looked out at the flames.
‘This chit.’ Somebody was holding a piece of paper under my nose and offering me a pen.
‘Why do you want me to sign it?’
‘You have to sign it. It acknowledges that we saved you from the burning Pit.’
`I want to see a lawyer. Meanwhile I won’t sign anything.’ The last time I was in this fix it got me tied down, washing dishes, for four months. This time I couldn’t spare four months; I had to get busy at once, searching for Margrethe.
‘Don’t be stupid. Do you want to be tossed back into that stuff?’
A second voice said, ‘Knock it off, Bert. Try telling him the truth.’
(‘Bert?’ I thought that first voice was familiar!) ‘Bert! What are you doing here?’ My boyhood chum, the one who shared my taste in literature. Verne and Wells and Tom Swift – ‘garbage’, Brother Draper had called it.
The owner of the first voice looked at me more closely. ‘Well, I’ll be a buggered baboon. Stinky Hergensheimer!’
‘In the flesh.’
‘I’ll be eternally damned. You haven’t changed much. Rod, get the net spread again; this is the wrong fish. Stinky, you’ve cost us a nice fee; we were fishing for Saint Alexander.’
`Saint who?’
‘Alexander. A Mick holy ^an who decided to go slumming. Why he didn’t come in by a
Seven-Forty-Seven God only knows; we don’t usually get carriage trade here at the Pit. As may be, you’ve probably cost us a major client by getting in the way just when this saint was expected and you ought to pay us for that.’
“How about that fin you owe me?’
`Boy, do you have a memory! That’s outlawed by the statute of limitations.’
‘Show it, to me in Hell’s law books. Anyhow, limitations can’t apply; you never answered me when I tried to collect. So it’s five bucks, compounded quarterly at six percent, for… how many years?’
‘Discuss it later, Stinky. I’ve got to keep an eye out for this saint.’
‘Bert.’
‘Later, Stinky.’
‘Do you recall my right name? The one my folks gave me?’
‘Why, I suppose – Alexander! Oh no, Stinky, it can´t be! Why, you almost flunked out of that backwoods Bible college, after you did flunk out of Rolla.’ His face expressed pain and disbelief. ‘Life can’t be that unfair.’
“The Lord moves in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform.” Meet Saint Alexander, Bert. Would you like me to bless you? In lieu of a fee, I mean.
´We insist on cash. Anyhow, I don’t believe it.’
‘I believe it,’ the second man, the one Bert had called ‘Rod’, put in. ‘And I’d like your blessing, father; I’ve never, been blessed by a saint before. Bert, there’s nothing showing on the distant warning screen and, as you know, only one ballistic arrival was projected for this watch so this has to be, Saint Alexander.’
Can’t be. Rod, I know this character. If he’s a saint, I’m a pink monkey -‘ There was a bolt of lightning but of a cloudless sky. When Bert picked himself up, his clothes hung on him loosely. But he did not need them, as he was now covered with pink fur.
The monkey looked up at me indignantly. ‘Is that any way to treat an old pal?’
‘Bert, I didn’t do it. Or at least I did not intend to do it. Around me, miracles just happen; I don’t do them on, purpose.´
`Excuses. If I had rabies, I’d bite you.’
Twenty minutes later, we were in a booth at a lakefront bar, drinking beer and waiting for a thaumaturgist reputed, to be expert in shapes and appearances. I had been telling them why I was in Hell. ‘So I’ve got to find her. First I’ve got to check the Pit; if she’s in there it’s really urgent.’
‘She’s not in there,’ said Rod.
‘Huh? I hope you can prove that. How do you know?’
‘There’s never anyone in the Pit. That’s a lot of malarkey thought up to keep the peasants in line. Sure, a lot of the hoi polloi arrive ballistically, and a percentage of them used to fall into the Pit until the manager set up this safety watch Bert and I are on. But falling into the Pit doesn’t do a soul any harm… aside from scaring him silly. It burns, of course, so he comes shooting out even faster than he went in. But he’s not damaged. A fire bath just cleans up his allergies, if any.’
(Nobody in the Pit! No ‘burning in Hell’s fires throughout eternity what a shock that was going to be to Brother ‘Bible’ Barnaby and a lot of others whose stock in trade depended on Hell’s fires. But I was not here to discuss eschatology with two lost souls; I was here to find Marga.) ‘This “manager” you speak of. Is. that a euphemism for the Old One?’
The monkey – Bert, I mean – squeaked, ‘If you mean Satan, say so!’
‘That’s who I mean.’
‘Naw. Mr Ashmedai is city manager; Satan never does any work. Why should he? He owns this planet.’
This is a planet?’
‘You think maybe it’s a comet? Look out that window. Prettiest planet in this galaxy. And the best kept. No snakes. No cockroaches. No chiggers. No poison ivy. No tax collectors. No rats. No cancer. No preachers. Only two lawyers.’
‘You make it sound like Heaven.’
“Never been there. You say you just came from there; you tell us.’
‘Well… Heaven’s okay, if you’re an angel. It’s not a planet; it’s an artificial place, like Manhattan. I’m not here to plug Heaven; I’m here to find Marga.’ Should I try to see this Mr Ashmedai? Or would I be better off going directly to Satan?’
The monkey tried to whistle, produced a mouselike squeak. Rod shook his head. ‘Saint Alec, you keep surprising me. I’ve been here since 1588, whenever that was, and I’ve never laid eyes on the Owner. I’ve never thought of trying to see him. I wouldn’t know how to start. Bert, what do you think?’
‘I think I need another beer.’
‘Where do you put it? Since that lightning hit you, you aren’t big enough to put away one can of beer, let alone, three.’
‘Don’t be nosy and call the waiter.’
The quality of discourse did not improve, as every question I asked turned up more questions and no answers. The thaumaturgist arrived and bore off Bert on her shoulder, Bert chattering angrily over her fee she wanted half of all his assets and demanded a contract signed in blood before she would get to work. He wanted her to accept ten percent and wanted me to pay half of that.
When they left, Rod said it was time we found a pad for me; he would take me to a good hotel nearby.
I pointed out that I was without funds. ‘No problem, Saint Alec. All our immigrants arrive broke, but American Express and Diners Club and Chase Manhattan vie for the chance to extend first credit, knowing that whoever signs an immigrant first has a strong chance of keeping his business forever and six weeks past.’
‘Don’t they lose a lot, extending unsecured credit that way?’
‘No. Here in Hell, everybody pays up, eventually. Bear in mind that here a deadbeat can’t even die to avoid his debts, So just sign in, and charge everything to room service until you set it up with one of the big three.’
The Sans Souci Sheraton is on the Plaza, straight across from the Palace. Rod took me to the desk; I signed a registration card and asked for a single with bath. The desk clerk, a small female devil with cute little horns, looked at the card I had signed and her eyes widened. ‘Uh, Saint Alexander?’
‘I’m Alexander Hergensheimer, just as I registered. I am sometimes called “Saint Alexander”, but I don’t think the title applies here.’
She was busy not listening while she thumbed through her reservations. ‘Here it is, Your Holiness – the reservation for your suite.’
‘Huh? I don’t need a suite. And I probably couldn’t pay for it.’
‘Compliments of the management, sir.’
Chapter 25
And he had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines: and his wives turned away his heart.
Kings 11:3
Shall mortal man be more just than God? shall a man be more pure than his maker?
Job 4:17
COMPLIMENTS OF the management!!’ How? Nobody knew I was coming here until just before I was chucked out Judah Gate. Did Saint Peter have a hotline to Hell? Was there some sort of
under-the-table cooperation with the Adversary? Brother, how that thought would scandalize the Board of Bishops back home!
Even more so, why? But I had no time to ponder it; the little devil – imp? – on duty slapped the desk bell and shouted, ‘Front!’
The bellhop who responded was human, and a very attractive youngster. I wondered how he had died so young and why he had missed going to Heaven. But it was none of my business so I did not ask. I did notice one thing: While he reminded me in his appearance of a Philip Morris ad, when he walked in front of me, leading me to my suite, I was reminded of another cigarette ad – ‘So round, so firm, so fully packed.’ That lad had the sort of bottom that Hindu lechers write poetry about – could it have been that, sort of sin that caused him to wind up here?
I forgot the matter when I entered that suite.
The living room was too small for football but large enough for tennis. The furnishings would be described as adequate' by any well-heeled oriental potentate. The alcove calledthe buttery’ had a
cold-table collation laid out ample for forty guests, with a few hot dishes on the end – roast pig with apple in mouth, baked peacock with feathers restored, a few such tidbits. Facing this display was a bar that was well stocked – the chief purser of Konge Knut would have been impressed by it.
My bellhop (‘Call me “Pat”.’) was moving around, opening drapes, adjusting windows, changing – thermostats, checking towels – all of those things bellhops do to encourage a liberal tip – while I was trying to figure out how to’ tip. Was there a way to charge a tip for a bellhop to room service? Well, I would have to ask Pat. I went through the bedroom (a Sabbath Day’s journey!) and tracked Pat down in the bath.
Undressing. Trousers at half-mast and about to be, kicked-off. Bare bottom facing me. I called out, ‘Here, lad! No! Thanks for the thought… but boys are not my weakness.’
‘The’y’re my weakness,’ Pat answered, ‘but I’m not a boy’- and turned around, facing me.
Pat was right;_she was emphatically not a boy.
I stood there with my chin hanging down, while she took off the rest of her clothes, dumped them into a hamper. ‘There!’ she said, smiling. ‘Am I glad to get out of that monkey suit! I’ve been wearing it since you were reported as spotted on radar. What happened, Saint Alec? Did you stop for a beer?’
‘Well… yes. Two or three beers.’
‘I thought so. Bert Kinsey had the watch, did he not? If the Lake ever overflows and covers this part of town with lava, Bert will stop for a beer before he runs for it. Say, what are you looking troubled about? Did I say something wrong?’
‘Uh, Miss. You are very pretty – but I didn’t ask for a girl, either.’
She stepped closer to me, looked up and patted my cheek. I could feel her breath on my chin, smell its sweetness. ‘Saint Alec,’ she said softly, ‘I’m not trying to seduce you. Oh, I’m available, surely; a party girl, or two or three, comes with the territory for all our luxury suites. But I can do a lot more than make love to you.’ She reached out, grabbed a bath towel, draped it around her hips. ‘Ichiban bath girl, too. Prease, you rike me wark arong spine?’ She dimpled and tossed the towel aside. ‘I’m a number-one bartender, too. May I serve you a Danish zombie?’
‘Who told you I liked Danish zombies?’
She had turned away to open a wardrobe. ‘Every saint I’ve ever met liked them. Do you like this?’ She held up a robe that appeared to be woven from a light blue fog.
‘It’s lovely. How’ many saints have you met?’
‘One. You. No, two, but the other one didn’t drink zombies. I was just being flip. I’m sorry.’
‘I’m not; it may be a clue. Did the information, come from a Danish girl? A blonde, about your size, about your weight, too. Margrethe, or Marga. Sometimes “Margie”.’
‘No. The scoop on you was in a printout I was given when I was assigned to you. This Margie – friend of yours?’
‘Rather more than a friend. She’s the reason I’m, in ‘Hell. On Hell. In?’
‘Either way. I’m fairly certain I’ve never met your Margie.’
‘How does one go about finding another person here?. Directories? Voting lists? What?’
I’ve never seen either. Hell isn’t very organized. It’s an anarchy except for a touch of absolute monarchy on some points.’
‘Do you suppose I could ask Satan?’
She looked dubious. ‘There’s no rule I know of that says you can’t write a letter to His Infernal Majesty. But there is no rule that says He has to read it, either. I think it would be opened and read by some secretary; they wouldn’t just dump, it into the Lake. I don’t think they would.’ She added, ‘Shall we go into the den? Or are you ready for bed?’
`Uh, I think I need a bath. I know I do.’
‘Good! I’ve never bathed a saint before. Fun!’
.’Oh, I don’t need help. I can bathe myself.’
She bathed me.
She gave me a manicure. She gave me a pedicure, and tsk-tsked over my toenails – ‘disgraceful’ was the mildest term she used. She trimmed my hair. When I asked about razor blades, she showed me a cupboard in the bath stocking eight or nine different ways of coping with beards. ‘I recommend that electric razor with the three rotary heads but, if you will trust me, you will learn’ that I am quite competent with an old-fashioned straight razor.’
`l’m just looking for some Gillette blades.’
‘I don’t know that brand but there are brand-new razors here to match all these sorts of blades.’
‘No, I want my own sort. Double-edged. Stainless.’
`Wilkinson Sword, double-edged lifetime?’
‘Maybe. Oh, here we are! – “Gillette Stainless – Buy Two Packs, Get One Free.”
`Good. I’ll shave you.’
‘No, I can do it.’
A half hour later I settled back against pillows in a bed for a king’s honeymoon. I had a fine Dagwood in my belly a Danish zombie nightcap in my hand, and I was wearing brand new silk pajamas in maroon and old gold. Pat took off that translucent peignoir in blue smoke that she had worn except while bathing me and got in beside me, placed a drink for herself, Glenlivet on rocks, where she could reach it.
Q said to myself, ‘Look, Marga, I didn’t choose this. There is only this one bed. But it’s a big bed and she’s not trying to snuggle up. You wouldn’t want me to kick her out, would you? She’s a nice kid; I don’t want to hurt her feelings. I’m tired; I’m going to drink this and go right to sleep.’)
I didn’t go right to sleep. Pat was not the least bit aggressive. But she was very cooperative. I found one part of my mind devoting itself intensely to what Pat had to offer. (plenty!) while another part of my mind was explaining to Marga that this wasn’t anything serious; I don’t love her; I love you and only you and always will… but I haven’t been able to sleep and –
Then we slept for a while. Then we watched a living hollowgram that Pat said was ‘X rated’. and I learned about things I had never heard of, but it turned out that, Pat had and could do them and could teach me, and this time I paused just long enough to tell Marga I was learning them for both of us, then I turned my whole attention to learning.
Then we napped again.
It was some time later that Pat reached out and touched my shoulder. ‘Turn over this way, dear; let me see your face. I thought so. Alec, I know you’re carrying the torch for your sweetheart; that’s why I’m here: to make it easier. But I can’t if you won’t try. What did she do for you that I haven’t done and can’t do? Does she have that famous left-hand thread? Or what? Name it, describe it. I’ll do it, or fake it, or send out for it. Please, dear. You’re beginning to hurt my professional pride.’
‘You’re doing just fine.’ I patted her hand.
‘I wonder. More girls like me, maybe, in various flavors? Drown you in tits? – chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, tutti-frutti. “Tutti-frutti” -hmm… Maybe you’d like a San. Francisco sandwich? Or some other Sodom-and-Gomorrah fancy? I have a male friend from Berkeley who isn’t all that male; he has a delicious, playful imagination; I’ve teamed with him many times. And he has on call others like him; he’s a member of both Aleister Crowley Associates and Nero’s Heroes and Zeroes. If you fancy a mob scene, Donny and I can cast it any way you like, and the Sans Souci will orchestrate it to suit your taste. Persian Garden, sorority house, Turkish harem, jungle drums with obscene rites, nunnery – “Nunnery” – did I tell you what I did before I died?’
`I wasn’t certainhad died.’
‘Oh, certainly. I’m not an imp faking human; I’m human. You don’t think anyone could get a job like this without human experience, do you? You have to be human right down to your toes to please a fellow human most; that stuff about the superior erotic ability of succubi is just their advertising. I was a nun, Alec, from adolescence to death, most of it spent teaching grammar and arithmetic to children who didn’t want to learn.
‘I soon learned that my vocation had not been a true one. What I did not know was how to get out of it. So I stayed. At about thirty I discovered just how miserably, awful my mistake had been; my sexuality reached maturity. Mean to say I got horny, Saint Alec, and stayed horny and got more so every year.
‘The worst thing about my predicament was not that I was subjected to temptation but that I was not subjected to temptation – as I would have grabbed any opportunity. Fat chance! My confessor might have looked upon me with lust had I been a choir boy – as it was, he sometimes snored while I was confessing. Not surprising; my sins were dull, even to me.’
‘What were your sins, Pat?’
‘Carnal thoughts, most of which I did not confess. Not being forgiven, they went straight into Saint Peter’s computers. Blasphemous adulterous fornication.’
Huh? Pat, you have quite an imagination.’
‘Not especially, just horny. You probably don’t know just how hemmed in a nun is. She is a bride of Christ; that’s the contract. So even to think about the joys of sex makes of her an adulterous wife in the worst possible way.’
‘Be darned. Pat, I recently met two nuns, in Heaven. Both seemed like hearty wenches, one especially. Yet there they were.’
‘No inconsistency. Most nuns confess their sins regularly, are forgiven. Then they usually die in the bosom of their Family, with its chaplain or confessor at hand. So gets the last rites with her sins all forgiven and she’s shipped straight to Heaven, pure as Ivory soap.
‘But not me!’ She grinned. ‘I’m being punished for my sins and enjoying every wicked minute of it. I died a virgin in 1918, during the big flu epidemic, and so many died so fast that no priest got to me in time to grease me into Heaven. So I wound up here. At the end of my thousand year apprenticeship -´
‘Hold it! You died in 1918?’
‘Yes. The great Spanish Influenza epidemic. Born in 1878, died in 1918, on my fortieth birthday. Would you prefer for me to look forty? I can, you know.’
‘No, you look just fine. Beautiful.’
‘I wasn’t sure. Some men – Lots of eager mother humpers around here and most of them never got a chance to do it while they were alive. It’s one of my easier entertainments. I simply lead you into hypnotizing yourself, you supply the data. Then I look and sound exactly like your mother. Smell like her, too. Everything. Except that I am available to you in ways that your mother probably was not. -‘
‘Patty, I don’t even like my mother!’
‘Oh. Didn’t that cause you trouble at Judgment Day?’
‘No. That’s not in the rules. It says in the Book that you must honor thy father and thy mother. Not one word about loving them. I honored her, all the full protocol. Kept her picture on my desk. A letter every week. Telephoned her on her birthday. Called on her in person as my duties permitted. Listened to her eternal bitching and to her poisonous gossip about her women friends. Never contradicted her. Paid her hospital bills. Followed her to her grave. But weep I did not. She didn’t like me and I didn’t like her.
Forget my mother! Pat, I asked you a question and you changed the subject.’
‘Sorry, dear. Hey, look what I’ve found!’
‘Don’t change the subject again; just keep it warm in your hand while you answer my question. You said something about your “thousand-year apprenticeship”.’
‘Yes?’
‘But you said also that you died in 1918. The Final Trump sounded in 1994 – I know; I was there. That’s only seventy-six years later than your death. To me that Final Trump seems like only a few days ago, about a month, no more. I ran across something that seemed to make it seven years ago. But that still isn’t over nine hundred, the best part of a thousand years. I’m not a spirit, I’m a living body. And I’m not Methuselah.’ (Damn it, is Margrethe separated from me by a thousand years? This isn’t fair!)
‘Oh. Alec, in eternity a thousand years isn’t any particular time; it is simply a long time. Long enough in this case to test whether or not I had both the talent and the disposition for the profession. That took quite a while because, while I was horny enough – and stayed that way; almost any guest can send me right through the ceiling as you noticed – I had arrived here knowing nothing about sex. Nothing! But I did learn and eventually Mary Magdalene gave me high marks and recommended me for permanent appointment.’
‘Is she down here?’
‘Oh. She’s a visiting professor here; she’s on the permanent faculty in Heaven.’
‘What does she teach in Heaven?’
‘I have no idea but it can’t be what she teaches here. Or I don’t think so. Hmm. Alec, she’s one of the eternal greats; she makes her own rules. But this time you changed the subject. I was trying to tell you that I don’t know how long my apprenticeship lasted because time is whatever you want it to be. How long have you and I been in bed together?’
‘Uh, quite a while. But not long enough. I think it must be near midnight.’
‘It’s midnight if you want it to be midnight. Want me to get on top?’
The next morning, whenever that was, Pat and I had breakfast on the balcony looking out over the Lake. She was dressed in Marga’s favorite costume, shorts tight and’ short, and a halter with her breasts tending to overflow their bounds. I don’t know when she got her clothes, but my pants and shirt had been cleaned and repaired in the night and my underwear and socks washed – in Hell there seem to be busy little imps everywhere. Besides, they could have driven a flock of geese through our bedroom the latter part of the night without disturbing me.
I looked at Pat across the table, appreciating her wholesome, girl-scout beauty, with her sprinkle of freckles across her nose, and thought how strange it was that I had ever confused sex with sin. Sex can involve sin, surely any human act can involve cruelty and injustice. But sex alone held no taint of sin. I had arrived here tired, confused, and unhappy – Pat had first made me happy, then caused me to rest, then left me happy this lovely morning.
Not any less anxious to find you, Marga my own – but in much better shape to push the search.
Would Margrethe see it that way?
Well, she had never seemed jealous of me.
How would I feel if she took a vacation, a sexual vacation, such as I had just enjoyed? That’s a good question. Better think about it, boy – because sauce for the goose is not a horse of another color.
I looked out over the Lake, watched the smoke rise and the flames throwing red lights on the smoke… while right and left were green and sunny early summer sights, with snow-tipped mountains in the far distance. Pat -‘
‘Yes, dear?’
‘The Lake bank can’t be more than a furlong from here. But I can’t smell any brimstone.’
‘Notice how the breeze is blowing those banners? From anywhere around the Pit the wind blows toward the Pit. There it rises – incidentally slowing any soul arriving ballistically – and then on the far side of the globe there is a corresponding down draft into a cold pit where the hydrogen sulfide reacts with oxygen to form water and sulfur. The sulfur is deposited; the water comes out as water vapor, and returns. The two pits and this circulation control the weather here somewhat the way the moon acts as a control on earth weather. But gentler.’
I was never too hot at physical sciences… but that doesn’t sound like the natural laws I learned in school.’
‘Of course not. Different Boss here. He runs this planet to suit himself.’
Whatever I meant to answer got lost in a mellow gong played inside the suite. ‘Shall I answer, sir?’
‘Sure, but how dare you call me “sir”? Probably just room service. Huh?´
‘No, dear Alec, room service will just come in when they see that we are through.’ She got up, came back quickly with an envelope. ‘Letter by Imperial courier. For ‘You, dear.’
Me?’ I accepted it gingerly, and opened it. An embossed seal at the top: the conventional Devil in red, horns, hooves, tail, pitchfork, and standing in flames. Below it:
Saint Alexander Hergensheimer Sans Souci Sheraton
The Capital
Greetings:
In,response to your petition for an audience with His Infernal Majesty, Satan Mekratrig, Sovereign of Hell and His Colonies beyond, First of the Fallen Thrones, Prince of Lies, I have the honour to advise you that His Majesty requires you to substantiate your request by supplying to this office a full and frank memoir of your life. When this has been done, a decision on your request will be made.
May I add to His Majesty’s message this advice: Any attempt to omit, slur over, or color in the belief that you will thereby please His Majesty will not please Him.
I have the honour to remain, Sincerely His,
(s) Beelzebub Secretary to His Majesty
I read it aloud to Pat. She blinked her eyes and whistled. ‘Dear, you had better get busy!’
`I -´ The paper burst into flames; I dropped it into the dirty dishes. ‘Does that always happen?’
‘I don’t know; it’s’ the first time I’ve ever seen a message from Number One. And the first time I’ve heard of anyone being even conditionally granted an audience.’
‘Pat. I didn’t ask for an audience. I planned to find out how to do so today. But I have not put in the request this answers.’
‘Then you must put in the request at once. It wouldn’t do to let it stay unbalanced. I’ll help dear – I’ll type
it for you.’
The imps had been around again. In one corner of that vast living room I found that they had installed two desks, one a writing desk, with stacks of paper and a tumbler of pens, the other a more complex setup. Pat went straight to that one. ‘Dear, it looks like I’m still assigned to you. I’m your secretary now. The latest and best Hewlett-Packard equipment – this is going to be fun! Or do you know how to type?’
‘I’m, afraid not.’
‘Okay, you write it longhand; I’ll put it into shape… and correct your spelling and your grammar – you just whip it out. Now I know why I was picked for this job. Not my girlish smile, dear – my typing. Most of, my guild can’t type. Many of them took up whoring because shorthand and typing were too much for them. Not me. Well, let’s get to work; this job will run days, weeks, I don’t know. Do you want me to continue to sleep here?’
‘Do you want to leave?’
‘Dear, that’s the guest’s decision. Has to be.’
‘I don’t want you to leave.’ (Marga! Do please understand!)
‘Good thing you said that, or I would have burst into tears. Besides, a good secretary should stick around in case something comes up in the night.’
‘Pat, that was an old joke when I was in seminary.’
‘It was an old joke before you were born, dear. Lets get to work.’
Visualize a calendar (that I don’t have), its pages ripping off in the wind. This manuscript gets longer and longer but Pat insists that Prince Beelzebub’s advice must be taken literally. Pat makes two copies of all that I write; one copy stacks up on my desk, the other copy disappears each night. Imps again. Pat tells
me that I can assume that the vanishing copy is going to the Palace, at least as far as the Prince’s desk… so what I am doing so far must be, satisfactory.
In less than two hours each day Pat types out and prints out what takes me all day to write. But I stopped driving so hard when a handwritten note came in:
You are working too hard. Enjoy yourself. Take her to the theater. Go on a picnic. Don’t be so wound up.
(s)B.
The note self-destroyed, so I knew it was authentic. So I obeyed. With pleasure! But I am not going to describe the fleshpots of Satan’s capital city.
This morning I finally reached that odd point where I was (am) writing now about what is going on now – and I hand my last page to Pat.
Less than an hour after I completed that line above, the gong sounded; Pat went out into the foyer, hurried back. She put her arms around me. ‘This is good-bye, dear. I won’t be seeing you again.’
‘What!’
‘Just that, dear. I was told this morning that my assignment was ending. And I have something I must tell you.
You will find, you are bound to learn, that I have been reporting on you daily. Please don’t be angry about it. I am a professional, part of the Imperial security staff.’
‘Be damned! So every kiss, every sigh, was a fake.’
‘Not one was a fake! Not one! And, when you find your Marga, please tell her that I said she is lucky.’
‘Sister Mary Patricia, is this another lie?’
‘Saint Alexander, I have never lied to you. I’ve had to hold back some things until I was free to speak, that’s all.’ She took her arms from around me.
‘Hey! Aren’t you going to kiss me good-bye?’
‘Alec, if you really want to kiss me, you won’t ask.’
I didn’t ask; I did it. If Pat was faking, she’s a better actress than I think she is.
Two giant fallen angels were waiting to take me to the Palace. They were heavily armed and fully armored. Pat had packaged my manuscript and told me that I was expected to bring it with me. I started to leave – then stopped most suddenly. ‘My razor!’
‘Check your pocket, dear.’
‘Huh? How’d it get there?’
‘I knew you weren’t coming back, dear.’
Again I learned that, in the company of angels, I could fly. Out my own balcony, around the Sans Souci Sheraton, across the Plaza, and we landed on a third-floor balcony of Satan’s Palace. Then through several corridors, up a flight of stairs with lifts too high to be comfortable for humans. When I stumbled, one of my escorts caught me, then steadied me until we reached the top, but said nothing – neither ever said anything.
Great brass doors, as complex as the Ghiberti Doors, opened. I was shoved inside.
And saw Him.
A dark and smoky hall, armed guards down both sides, a high throne, a Being on it, at least twice as high as a man… a Being that was the conventional Devil such as YOU see on a Pluto bottle or a deviled-ham tin – tail and horns and fierce eyes, a pitchfork in lieu of scepter, a gleam from braziers glinting off Its dark red skin, sleek muscles. I had to remind myself that the Prince of Lies could look any way He wished; this was probably to daunt me.
His voice rumbled out like a foghorn: ‘Saint Alexander, you may approach Me.’
Chapter 26
I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls.
Job 30:29
I STARTED up the steps leading to the throne. Again, the lifts were too high, the treads too wide, and now I had no one to steady me. I was reduced to crawling up those confounded steps while Satan looked down at me with a sardonic smile. From all around came music from an unseen source, death music, vaguely Wagnerian but nothing I could identify. I think it was laced with that below-sonic frequency that makes dogs howl, horses run away, and causes men to think of flight or suicide.
That staircase kept stretching.
I didn’t count the number of steps when I started up, but the flight looked to be about thirty steps, no more. When I had been crawling up it for several minutes, I realized that it looked as high as ever. The Prince of Lies!
So I stopped and waited.
Presently that rumbling voice said, ‘Something wrong,’ Saint Alexander?’
‘Nothing wrong,’ I answered, ‘because You planned it this way. If You really want me to approach You, You will turn off the joke circuit. In the meantime there is no point in my trying to climb a treadmill.’
‘You think I am doing that to you?’
‘I know that You are. A game. Cat and mouse.’
‘You are trying to make a fool of Me, in front of My gentlemen.’
‘No, Your Majesty, I cannot make a fool of You. Only You can do that.’
`Ah so. Do you realize that I can blast you where you stand?’
‘Your Majesty, I have been totally in Your power since I entered Your realm. What do You wish of me? Shall I continue trying to climb Your treadmill?’
‘Yes.’
‘So I did, and the staircase stopped stretching and the treads reduced to a comfortable seven inches. In seconds I reached the same level as Satan – the level of His cloven feet, that is. Which put me much too close to Him. Not only was His Presence terrifying – I had to keep a close grip on myself – but also He stank! Of filthy garbage cans, of rotting meat, of civet and skunk, of brimstone, of closed rooms and gas from diseased gut – all that and worse. I said to myself, Alex Hergensheimer, if you let Him prod you into throwing up and thereby kill any chance of getting you and Marga back together – just don’t do it!
Control yourself!
‘The stool is for you,’ said Satan. ‘Be seated.’
Near the throne was a backless stool, low enough to destroy the dignity of anyone who sat on it. I sat.
Satan picked up a manuscript with a hand so big that the business-size sheets were like a deck of cards in His hand. ‘I’ve read it. Not bad. A bit wordy but My editors will cut it – better that way than too brief. We will need an ending for it… from you or by a ghost. Probably the latter; it needs more impact than you give it. Tell me, have you ever thought of writing for a living? Rather than preaching?’
‘I don’t think I have the talent.’
‘Talent shmalent. You should see the stuff that gets published. But you must hike up those sex scenes; today’s cash customers demand such scenes wet. Never mind that now; I didn’t call you here to discuss your literary style and its shortcomings. I called you in to
make you an offer.’
I waited. So did He. After a bit He said, ‘Aren’t curious about the offer?’
‘Your Majesty, certainly I am. But, if my race has learned one lesson, concerning You, it is that a human should be extremely cautious in bargaining with You.´
He I chuckled and the foundations shook. ‘Poor ‘little human, did you really think that I wanted to your scrawny soul?’
‘I don’t know what You want. But I’m not as smart as Dr Faust, and not nearly as smart as Daniel Webster. It behooves me to be cautious.’
‘Oh, come! I don’t want your soul. There’s no for souls today; there are far too many of them and quality, is way down. I can pick them up at a nickel a bunch, like radishes. But I don’t; I’m overstocked. No, Saint Alexander, I wish to retain your services. Your professional services.’
(I was suddenly alarmed. What’s the catch? Alex, this is loaded! Look behind you! What’s He after?) ‘You need a dishwasher?’
He chuckled again, about 4.2 on the Richter scale. ‘No, no, Saint Alexander! Your vocation – not the exigency to which you were temporarily reduced. I want to hire you as a gospel-shouter, a
Bible-thumper. I want you to work the Jesus business, just as you were trained to. You won’t have to raise money or pass the collection plate; the salary will be ample and the duties light. What do you say?’
‘I say You are trying to trick me.’
‘Now that’s not very kind. No tricks, Saint Alexander. You will be free to preach exactly as you please, no restrictions. Your title will be personal chaplain to Me’, and Primate of Hell. You can devote the rest of your time as little or as much as you wish – to saving lost souls… and there are plenty of those here.
Salary to be negotiated but not less than the incumbent, Pope Alexander the Sixth, a notoriously greedy soul. You*won’t be pinched, I promise you. Well? How say you?’
`(Who’s crazy? The Devil, or me? Or am I having another of those nightmares that have been dogging me lately?) ‘Your Majesty, You have not mentioned anything I want.´
‘Ah so? Everybody needs money. You’re broke; you can´t stay in that fancy suite another day without finding a job.´ He tapped the manuscript. ‘This may bring in something, some day. Not soon. I’m not going to advance you anything on it; it might not sell. There, are too many
I-Was-a-Prisoner-of-the-Evil-King extravaganzas on the market already these days.’
‘Your Majesty, You have read my memoir; You know what I want.’
‘Eh? Name it.’
‘You know. My beloved. Margrethe Svensdatter Gunderson.’
He looked surprised. ‘Didn’t I send you a memo about that? She’s not in Hell.’
I felt like a patient who has kept his chin up right up to the minute the biopsy comes back… and then can’t accept the bad news. ‘Are You sure?’
‘Of course I am. Who do you think is in charge around here?’
(Prince of Liars, Prince of Lies!) ‘How can You be sure? The way I hear it, nobody keeps track. A person could be in Hell for years and You would never know, one way or the other.’
‘If that’s the way you heard it, you heard wrong. Look, if you accept My offer, you’ll be able to afford the best agents in history, from Sherlock Holmes to J. Edgar Hoover, to search all over Hell for you. But you’d be wasting your money; she is not in My jurisdiction. I’m telling you officially.’
I hesitated. Hell is a big place; I could search it* by myself throughout eternity and I might not find Marga. But plenty of money (how well I knew it!) made hard things easy and impossible things merely difficult.
However – Some of the things I had done as executive deputy of C.U.D. may have been a touch shoddy (meeting a budget isn’t easy), but as an ordained minister I had never hired out to the Foe. Our Ancient Adversary. How can a minister of Christ be chaplain to Satan? Marga darling, I can’t.
`No.´
‘I can’t hear you. Let Me sweeten the deal. Accept and I assign My prize female agent Sister Mary Patricia to you permanently. She’ll be your slave – with the minor reservation that you must not sell her. However, you can rent her out, if you wish. How say you now.
‘No.’
‘Oh, come, come! You ask for one female; I offer you a better one. You can’t pretend not to be satisfied with Pat; you’ve been shacked up with her for weeks. Shall I play back some of the sighs and moans?’
‘You unspeakable cad!’
‘Tut, tut, don’t be rude to Me in My own house. You know and I know and we all know that there isn’t any great difference between one female and another – save possibly in their cooking. I’m offering you one slightly, better in place of the one you mislaid. A year from now you’ll thank Me. Two years from now you’ll wonder why you ever fussed. Better accept, Saint Alexander; it is the best offer you can hope for, because, I tell you solemnly, that Danish zombie you ask for is not in Hell. Well?’
`No.´
Satan drummed on the arm of his throne and looked vexed. ‘That’s your last word?’
‘Yes.’
`Suppose I offered you the chaplain job with your ice maiden thrown in?’
‘You said she wasn’t in Hell!’
‘I did not say that I did not know where she is.’
‘You can get her?’
‘Answer My question. Will you accept service as My chaplain if the contract includes returning her to you?’
(Marga, Marga!) ‘No.’
Satan said briskly, ‘Sergeant General, dismiss the guard. You come with me.’
‘Leftanright!… Hace! For´d!… Harp!’
Satan got down from His throne, went around behind it without further word to me. I had to hurry to catch up with His giant strides. Back of the throne was a long dark tunnel; I broke into a run when it seemed that He was getting away from me. His silhouette shrank rapidly against a dim light at the far end of the tunnel.
Then I almost stepped on His heels. He had not been receding as fast as I had thought; He had been changing in size. Or I had been. He and I were now much the same height. I skidded to a halt close behind Him as He reached doorway at the end of the tunnel. It was barely lighted by a red glow.
Satan touched something at the door; a white fan light came on above the door. He opened it and turned toward me. ‘Come in, Alec.’
My heart skipped and I gasped for breath. Jerry! Jerry Farnsworth!’
Chapter 27
For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
Ecclesiastes 1:18
And Job spake, and said, Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.
Job 3:2-3
MY EYES dimmed, my head started to spin, my knees went rubbery. Jerry said sharply, ‘Hey, none of that!’ – grabbed me around the waist, dragged me inside, slammed the door.
He kept me from falling, then shook me and slapped my face. I shook my head and caught my breath. I heard Katie’s voice: ‘Let’s get him in where he can lie down.’
My eyes focused. ‘I’m okay. I was just taken all over queer for a second.’ I looked around. We were in the foyer of the Farnsworth house.
‘You went into syncope, that’s What you did. Not surprising, you had a shock. Come into the family room.’
‘All right. Hi, Katie. Gosh, it’s good to see you.’
“You, too, dear.’ She came closer, put her arm around me, and kissed me A learned again that, while Marga was my be-all, Katie was my kind of woman, too. And Pat. Marga, I wish you could have met Pat. (Marga!)
The family room seemed bare – unfinished furniture, no windows, no fireplace. Jerry said, `Katie, give us Remington number two’, will you, please? I’m going to punch drinks.’
‘Yes, dear.’
While they were busy, Sybil came tearing in, threw her arms around me (almost knocking me off my feet; the child is solid) and kissed me, a quick buss unlike Katie’s benison. ‘Mr Graham! You were terrific! I watched all of it. With Sister Pat. She thinks you’re terrific, too.’
The left wall changed into a picture window looking out at mountains; the opposite wall now had a field-stone fireplace with a brisk fire that looked the same as the last time I saw it. The ceiling now was
low; furniture and floor and fixtures were all as I recalled. ‘Remington number two.’ Katie turned away from the controls. ‘Sybil, let him be, dear. Alec, off your feet. Rest.’
‘All right.’ I sat down. ‘Uh… is this Texas? Or is it Hell?’
‘Matter of opinion,’ Jerry said.
‘Is there a difference?’ asked Sybil.
‘Hard to tell,’ said Katie. ‘Don’t worry about it now, Alec. I watched you, too, and I agree with the girls. I was proud of ‘you.’
‘He’s a tough case,’ Jerry put in. ‘I didn’t get a mite of change off him. Alec, you stubborn squarehead, I lost three bets on you.’ Drinks appeared at our places. Jerry raised his glass. ‘So here’s to you.’
‘To Alec!’
‘Right!’
‘Here’s to me,’ I agreed and took a big slug of Jack Daniel’s. ‘Jerry? You’re not really -‘
He grinned at me. The tailored ranch clothes faded; the western boots gave way to cloven hooves, horns stuck up through His hair, His skin glowed ruddy red and oily over heavy muscles; in His lap a preposterously huge phallus thrust rampantly skyward.
Katie said gently, ‘I think You’ve convinced him, dear, and it’s not one of Your prettier guises.’
Quickly the conventional Devil-faded and the equally convenntional Texas millionaire returned. ‘That’s better,’ said Sybil. ‘Daddy, why do You use that corny one?’
‘It’s an emphatic symbol. But what I’m wearing now is appropriate here. And you should be in Texas clothes, too.’
‘Must I? I think Patty has Mr Graham used to skin by now.’
‘Her skin, not your skin. Do it before I fry you for lunch.’
‘Daddy, You’re a fraud.’ Sybil grew blue jeans and a halter without moving out of her chair. ‘And I’m tired of being a teenager and see no reason to continue the charade. Saint Alec knows he was hoaxed.’
‘Sybil, you talk too much.’
Dear One, she may be right,’ Katie put in quietly.
Jerry shook His head. I sighed and said what I had to say. ‘Yes, Jerry, I know I’ve been hoaxed. By those who I thought were my friends. And Marga’s friends, too. You have been behind it all? Then who am I? Job?’
‘Yes and no.’
`What does that mean… Your Majesty?’
‘Alec, you need not call Me that. We met as friends. I hope we will stay friends.’
‘How can we be friends? If I am Job. Your Majesty… where is my wife!’
‘Alec, I wish I knew. Your memoir gave Me some clues and I have been following them. But I don’t know as yet. You must be patient.’
‘Uh… damn it, patient I’m not! What clues? Set me on the trail! Can’t You see that I’m going out of my mind?’
‘No, I can’t, because you’re not. I’ve just been grilling you. I pushed you to what should have been your breaking point, You can’t be broken. However, you can’t help Me search for her, not at this point. Alec, you’ve got to remember that you are human… and I am not. I have powers that you can’t imagine. I have limitations that you cannot imagine, too. So hold your peace and listen.
‘I am your friend. If you don’t believe that I am, you are free to leave My house and fend for yourself. There are jobs to be had down at the Lake front – if you can stand the reek of brimstone. You can search for Marga your own way. I don’t owe you two anything as I am not behind your troubles. Believe Me.’
‘Uh… I want to believe You.’
`Perhaps you’ll believe Katie.’
Katie said, ‘Alec, the Old One speaks sooth to you. He did not compass your troubles. Dear, did you ever bandage a wounded dog… and have the poor beastie, in its ignorance, gnaw away the dressing and damage itself still more?’
‘Uh, yes.’ (My dog Brownie. I was twelve. Brownie died.)
‘Don’t be like that poor dog. Trust Jerry. If He is to help you, He must do things beyond your ken. Would you try to direct a brain surgeon? Or attempt to hurry one?’
I smiled ruefully and reached out to pat her hand. ‘I’ll be good, Katie. I’ll try.’
‘Yes, do try, for Marga’s sake.’
‘I will. Uh, Jerry – stipulating that I’m merely human and can’t understand everything, can You tell me anything?’
‘What I can, I will. Where shall I start?’
‘Well, when lasked if I was Job, You said, “Yes and no.” What did You mean?’
‘You are indeed another Job. With the original Job I was, I confess, one of the villains. This time I’m not.
‘I’m not proud of the fashion in which I bedeviled Job. I’m not proud of the fashion in which I have so often let My Brother Yahweh maneuver Me into doing His dirty work – starting clear back with Mother Eve – and before that, in ways I cannot explain. And I’ve always been a sucker for a bet, any sort of a bet… and I’m not proud of that weakness, either.’
Jerry looked at the fire and brooded. ‘Eve was a pretty one. As soon as I laid eyes on her I knew that Yahweh had finally cooked up a creation worthy of an Artist. Then I found out He had copied most of the design.’
‘Huh? But -‘
‘Man, do not interrupt. Most of your errors – this MY brother actively encourages – arise from believing that your God is solitary and all powerful. In fact My Brother – and I, too, of course – is no more than a corporal in the T.O. of the Commander in Chief. And, I must add, the Great One I think of as the
C-in-C, the Chairman, the Final Power, may be a mere private to some higher Power I cannot comprehend.
‘Behind every mystery lies another mystery. Infinite recession. But you don’t need to know final answers
if there be such – and neither do I. You want to know what happened to you… and to Margrethe. Yahweh came to Me and offered the same wager We had made over Job, asserting that He had a follower who was even more stubborn than Job. I turned Him down. That bet over Job had not been much fun; long before it was concluded I grew tired of clobbering the poor schmo. So this time I told My
Brother to take His shell games elsewhere.
‘It was not until I saw you and Marga trudging along Interstate Forty, naked as kittens and just as helpless, that I realized that Yahweh had found someone else with whom to play His nasty games. So I fetched you here and kept you for a week or so -‘
‘What? Just one night!’
‘Don’t quibble. Kept you long enough to wring you dry, then sent you on your way… armed with some tips on how to cope, yes, but in fact you were doing all right on your own. You’re a tough son of a bitch, Alec, so much so that I looked up the bitch you are the son of. A bitch she is and tough she was and the combo of that vixen and your sweet and gentle sire produced a creature able to survive. So I let you alone.
‘I was notified that you were coming here; My spies are everywhere. Half of My Brother’s personal staff are double agents.’
‘Saint Peter?’ –
‘Eh? No, not Pete. Pete is a good old Joe, the most perfect Christian in Heaven or on earth. Denied his Boss thrice, been making up for it ever since. Utterly delighted to be on nickname terms with his Master in all three of His conventional Aspects. I like Pete. If he ever has a falling out with My Brother, hes got a job here.
`Then you showed up in Hell. Do you recall an invitation I extended to you concerning Hell?’
(‘- look me up. I promise you some hellacious hospitality.-´) ‘Yes!’
Did I deliver? Careful how you answer; Sister Pat is listening.’
‘She’s not listening,’ Katie denied. ‘Pat is a lady. Not much like some people. Darling, I can shorten this.
What Alec wants to know is why he was persecuted, how he was persecuted, and what he can do about it now. Meaning Marga. Alec, the why is simple; you were picked for the same reason that a pit bull is picked to go into the pit and be torn to ribbons: because Yahweh thought you could win. The how is equally simple. You guessed right when you thought you were paranoid. Paranoid but not crazy; were indeed conspiring against you. Every time you got close to the answer the razzle-dazzle started over again. That million dollars. Minor razzle-dazzle, that money existed only long enough to confuse you- I think that covers everything but what you can do. What you can do and all that you can do is to trust Jerry. He may fail – it’s very dangerous – but He will try.’
I looked at Katie with increased respect, and some trepidation. She had referred to matters I had never mentioned to Jerry. ‘Katie? Are you human? Or are you, uh, a fallen throne or something like that?’
She giggled. ‘First time anyone has suspected that. I’m human, all too human, Alec love. Furthermore I’m no stranger to you; you know lots about me.’
‘I do?’
‘Think back. April of the year one thousand four hundred and forty-six years before the birth of Yeshua of Nazareth.’
‘I should be able to identify it that way? I’m sorry; I can’t.’
‘Then try it this way: exactly forty years after the exodus from Egypt of the Children of Israel.’
The conquest of Canaan.
‘Oh, pshaw! Try the Book of Joshua,, chapter What’s my name, what’s my trade; was I mother, wife, or, maid?’
(One of the best-known stories in the Bible. Her? I’m talking to her?) ‘Uh . . . Rahab?’
‘The harlot of Jericho. That’s me. I hid General Joshua’s spies, in my house… and thereby saved my parents and my brothers and sisters from the massacre. Now tell me I’m “well preserved”.’
Sybil snickered. ‘Go ahead. I dare you.’
‘Gosh, Katie, you’re well preserved! That’s been over three thousand years, about thirty-four hundred. Hardly a wrinkle. Well, not many.’
“Not many”! No breakfast for you, young man!’
‘Katie, you’re beautiful and you know it. You and Margrethe tie for first place.’
‘Have you looked at me?’ demanded Sybil. ‘I have my fans. Anyhow, Mom is over four thousand years old. A hag.’
‘No, Sybil, the parting of the Red Sea was in fourteen-ninety-one BC. Add that to the date of the Rapture, nineteen-ninety-four AD. Then add seven years -´
“Alec.’
‘Yes, Jerry?’
‘Sybil is right. You just haven’t noticed it. The thousand years of peace between Armageddon and the War in Heaven is half over. My Brother, wearing his Jesus hat, is now ruling on earth, and I am chained and cast down into the Pit for this entire thousand years.’
‘You don’t look chained from here. Could I have some more Jack Daniel’s? – I’m confused.’
‘I’m chained enough for this purpose; I’ve ceased “going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down
in it. ” Yaliweh has it all to Himself for the short time remaining before He destroys it. I won’t bother His games.’ Jerry shrugged. ‘I declined to take part in Armageddon – I pointed out to Him that He had plenty of homegrown villains for it. Alec, with My Brother writing the scripts, I was always supposed to fight fiercely, like Harvard, then lose. It got monotonous. He’s got me scheduled to take another dive at the end of this Millennium, to fulfill His prophecies. That “War in Heaven” He predicted in the so-called Book of Revelation. I’m not going to go. I’ve told My angels that they can form a foreign legion if they
want to, but I’m sitting this one out. What’s the point in a battle if the outcome is predetermined thousands of years before the whistle?’
He was watching me while He talked. He stopped abruptly. ‘What’s eating on you now?’
‘Jerry… if it has been five hundred years since I lost Margrethe, it’s hopeless. Isn’t it?’
I ‘Hey! Damnation, boy, haven’t I told you not to try to understand things you can’t understand? Would I be working on it if it were hopeless?’
Katie said, ‘Jerry, I had Alec all quieted down… and You got him upset again.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You didn’t mean to. Alec, Jerry is blunt, but He’s right. For you, acting alone, the search was always hopeless. But with Jerry’s help, you may find her. Not certain, but a hope worth pursuing. But time isn’t relevant, five hundred years or five seconds. You don’t have to understand it, but do please believe it.’
‘All right. I will. Because otherwise there would be no hope, none.’
‘But there is hope; all you have to do now is be patient.’
‘I’ll try. But I guess Marga and I will never have our soda fountain and lunch counter in Kansas.’
‘Why not?’ asked Jerry.
‘Five centuries? They won’t even speak the same language. There will be no one who knows a hot fudge sundae, from curried goat. Customs change.’
‘So you reinvent the hot fudge sundae and make a killing. Don’t be a pessimist, son.’
‘Would you like one right now?’ asked Sybil.
‘I don’t think he had better mix it with Jack Daniel’s,’ Jerry advised.
`Thanks, Sybil… but I´d probably cry in it. I associate it with Marga.´
So don’t. Son, crying in your drink is bad enough crying into a hot fudge sundae is disgusting.’
‘Do I get to finish the story of my scandalous youth, or won’t anybody listen?’
I sai ‘Katie, I’m listening. You made a deal with Joshua.’
‘With his spies. Alec love, to anyone whose love and respect I want – you, I mean I need to explain something. Some people who know who I am – and even more who don’t – class Rahab the harlot as a traitor. Treason in time of war, betrayal of fellow citizens, all that. I -´
‘I never thought so, Katie. Jehovah had decreed that Jericho’, would fall. Since it was ordained, you couldn’t change it. What you did was to save your father and mother and the other kids.’
‘Yes, but there is more to it, Alec. Patriotism is a fairly late concept. Back then, in the land of Canaan, any loyalty other than to one’s family was personal loyalty to a chief of some sort – usually a successful warrior who dubbed himself “king”. Alec, a whore doesn’t – didn’t – have that sort of loyalty.’
‘So? Katie, in spite of studying at seminary I don’t really have any sharp concept of what life was like back then. I keep trying to see it in terms of Kansas.’
‘Not too different. A whore at that time and place was, either a temple prostitute, or a slave, or a
self-owned private contractor. I was a free woman. Oh, yeah? Whores don’t fight city hall, they can’t. An officer of the king comes in, he expects free tail and free drinks, same for the civic patrol – the cops.
Same for any sort of politician. Alec, I tell you the truth; I gave away more tail than I sold – and often got a black eye as a bonus. No, I did not feel loyalty to Jericho; the Jews weren’t any more cruel and they were much cleaner!’
`Katie, I don’t know of any Protestant Christian who thinks anything bad of Rahab. But I have long wondered about one detail in her – your – story. Your house, was on the city wall?”
‘Yes. It was inconvenient for housekeeping – carrying water up all those steps – but convenient for business, and the rent was low. It was the fact that I lived on the wall that let me save General Joshua’s agents. Used a clothesline; they went out the window. Didn’t get my clothesline back, either.’
‘How high was that wall?’
‘Hunh? Goodness, I don’t know. It was high.’
‘Twenty cubits.’
‘Was it, Jerry?’
I was there. Professional interest. First use of nerve warfare in combination with sonic weapons.’
‘The reason I ask about the height, Katie, is because it states in the Book that you gathered all your family into your house and stayed there, all during the siege.’
‘We surely did, seven horrid days. My contract with the Israelite spies required it. My place was only two little rooms, not big enough for three adults and seven kids. We ran out of food, we ran out of water, the kids cried, my father complained. He happily took the money I brought in; with seven kids he needed it. But he resented having to stay under the same roof where I entertained johns, and he was especially bitter about having to use my bed. My workbench. But use it he did, and I slept on the floor.’
‘Then your family were all in your house when the walls came tumbling down.’
‘Yes, surely. We didn’t dare leave it until they came for us, the two spies. My house was marked at the window with red string.’
‘Katie, your house was on the wall, thirty feet up. The Bible says the wall fell down flat. Wasn’t anyone hurt?’
She looked startled. ‘Why, no.’
‘Didn’t the house collapse?’
‘No. Alec, it’s been a long time. But I remember the trumpets and the shout, and then the earthquake rumble as the city wall fell. But my house wasn’t hurt.’
`Saint Alec!´
‘Yes, Jerry?’
‘You should know; you’re a saint. A miracle. If Yahweh hadn’t been throwing miracles right and left, the
Israelites would never have conquered the Canaanites. Here this ragged band of Okies comes into a rich country of walled cities – and they never lose a battle. Miracles. Ask the Canaanites. If you can find one. My Brother pretty regularly had them all put to the sword, except some few cases, where the young and pretty ones were saved as slaves.’
‘But it was the Promised Land, Jerry, and they were His Chosen People.’
‘They are indeed the Chosen People. Of course, being chosen by Yahweh is no great shakes. Do you know your Book well enough to know how many times He crossed them up? My Brother is a bit of a jerk.’
I had had too much Jack Daniel’s and too many shocks. But Jerry’s casual blasphemy triggered me. ‘The Lord God Jehovah is a just God!’
‘You never played marbles with Him. Alec, “justice” is not a divine concept; it is a human illusion. The very basis of the Judeo-Christian code is injustice, the scapegoat system. The scapegoat sacrifice runs all through the Old Testament, then it reaches its height in the New Testament with the notion of the Martyred Redeemer. How can justice possibly be served by loading your sins on another? Whether it be a lamb having its throat cut ritually, or a Messiah nailed to a cross and “dying for your sins”. Somebody should tell all of Yahweh’s followers, Jews and Christians, that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
‘Or maybe there is. Being in that catatonic condition called “grace” at the exact moment of death – or at the final Trump – will get you into Heaven. Right? You got to Heaven that way, did you not?’
‘That’s correct. I hit it lucky. For I had racked up quite a list of sins before then.’
‘A long and wicked life followed by five minutes of perfect grace gets you into Heaven. An equally long life of decent living and good works followed by one outburst Of taking the name o Lord in vain – then have a heart attack at that moment and be damned for eternity. Is that the system?’
I answered stiffly, ‘If you read the words of the Bible literally, that is the system. But the Lord moves in mysterious -´
‘Not mysterious to Me, bud: I’ve known Him too long. It’s His world, His rules, His doing. His rules are exact and anyone can follow them and reap the reward. But “Just” they are not. What do you think of what He has done to you and your Marga? Is that justice?’
I took a deep breath. ‘I’ve been trying to figure that out ever since Judgment Day… and Jack Daniel’s isn’t helping. No, I don’t think it’s what I signed up for.’
‘Ah, but you did!’
‘How?’
‘My Brother Yahweh, wearing His Jesus face, said: “After this manner therefore pray ye: ” Go ahead, say it.’
“Our Father, which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done -´
‘Stop! Stop right there. “Thy will be done -” No Muslim claiming to be a “slave of God” ever gave a more sweeping consent than that. In that prayer you invite Him to do His worst. The perfect masochist. That’s the test of Job, boy. Job was treated unjustly in every way day after day for years – I know, I know, I was there; I did it – and My dear Brother stood by and let Me do it. Let Me? He urged Me, He connived in it, accessory ahead of the fact.
Now it’s your turn. Your God did it to you. Will you curse Him? Or will you come wiggling back on your belly like a whipped dog?’
Chapter 28
Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.
Matthew 7:7
I WAS saved from answering that impossible question by an interruption – and was I glad! I suppose every man has doubts at times about God’s justice. I admit that I had been much troubled lately and had
been forced to remind myself again and again that God’s ways are not man’s ways, and that I could not expect always to understand the purposes of the Lord.
But I could not speak my misgivings aloud, and least of all to the Lord’s Ancient Adversary. It was especially upsetting that Satan chose at this moment to have the shape and the voice of my only friend.
Debating with the Devil is a mug’s game at best.
The interruption was mundane: a telephone ringing. Accidental interruption? I don’t think Satan tolerates
`accidents’. As may be, I did not have to answer the question that I could not answer.
Katie said, ‘Shall I get it, dear?’
‘Please.’
A telephone handset appeared in Katie’s hand. ‘Lucifer’s office, Rahab speaking. Repeat, please. I will inquire.’ She looked at Jerry.
‘I’ll take it.’ Jerry operated without a visible telephone instrument. ‘Speaking. No. I said, no. No, damn it! Refer that to Mr Ashmedai. Let Me have the other call.’ He muttered something about the impossibility of getting competent help, then said, ‘Speaking. Yes, Sir!’ Then He said nothing for quite a long time. At last He said, ‘At once, Sir. Thank you.’
Jerry stood up. ‘Please excuse Me, Alec; I have work to do. I can’t say when I will be back. Try’ to treat this waiting as a vacation. and My house is yours. Katie, take care of him. Sybil, keep him amused.’ Jerry vanished.
`Will I keep him amused!’ Sybil got up and stood in front of me, rubbed her hands together. Her western clothes faded out, leaving Sybil. She grinned.
Katie said mildly, ‘Sybil, stop that. Grow more clothes at once or I’ll send you home.’
‘Spoilsport.’ Sybil developed a skimpy bikini. ‘I plan to make Saint Alec forget that Danish baggage.’
‘What’ll you bet, dear? I’ve been talking to Pat.’
‘So? What did Pat say?’
‘Margrethe can cook.’
Sybil looked disgusted. ‘A girl spends fifty years on her back, studying hard. Along comes some slottie who can make chicken and dumplings. It’s not fair.’
I decided to change the subject. ‘Sybil, those tricks you do with clothes are fascinating. Are you a graduate witch now?’
Instead of answering me at once, Sybil glanced at Katie, who said to her: ‘All over with, dear. Speak freely.’
‘Okay. Saint Alec, I’m no witch. Witchcraft is poppycock. You know that verse in the Bible about not suffering witches to live?’
‘Exodus twenty-two, eighteen.’
‘That’s the one. The Old Hebrew word translated there as “witch” actually means “poisoner”. Not letting a poisoner continue to breathe strikes me as a good idea. But I wonder how many friendless old women have been hanged or burned as a result of a sloppy translation?’
(Could this really be true? What about the ‘literal word of God’ concept on which I had been reared? Of course the word ‘witch’ is English, not the original Hebrew… but the translators of the King James,
version were sustained by God – that’s why that version of the Bible [and only that one] can be taken literally. But – No! Sybil must be mistaken. The Good Lord would not let hundreds, thousands, of innocent people be tortured to death over a mistranslation He could so easily have corrected.)
‘So you did not attend a Sabbat that night. What did you do?’
‘Not what you think; Israfel and I aren’t quite that chummy. Chums, yes; buddies, no.’
“Israfel”? I thought he was in Heaven.’
`That’s his godfather. The trumpeter. This Israfel can’t play a note. But he did ask me to tell you, if I ever got a chance, that he really isn’t the pimple he pretended to be as “Roderick Lyman Culverson, Third”.’
‘I’m glad to hear that. As he certainly did a good job of portraying an unbearable young snot. I didn’t see how a daughter of Katie and Jerry – or is it just of Katie? – could have such poor taste as to pick that boor as a pal. Not Israfel, of course, but the part he was playing.’
‘Oh. Better fix that, too. Katie, what relation are we?’
‘I don’t think even Dr Darwin could find any genetic relationship, dear. But I am every bit as proud of you as. I would be were you my own daughter.’
‘Thank you, Mom!’
‘But we are all related,’ I objected, ‘through Mother Eve. Since Katie, wrinkles and all, was born while the Children of Israel were wandering in the wilderness, there are only about eighty begats from Eve to Katie. With your birthdate and simple arithmetic we could make a shrewd guess at how close your blood relationship is.’
‘Oh, oh! Here we go again. Saint Alec, Mama Kate is descended from Eve; I am not. Different species. I’m an imp. An afrit, if you want to get technical.’
She again vanished her clothes and did a body transformation. ‘See?’
I said, ‘Say! Weren’t you managing the desk at the Sans Souci Sheraton the evening I arrived in Hell?’
‘I certainly was. And I’m flattered that you remember me, in my own shape.’ She resumed her human appearance, plus the tiny bikini. ‘I was there because I knew you by sight. Pop didn’t want anything to go wrong.’
Katie stood up. ‘Let’s continue this dip before dinner’
‘I’m busy seducing Saint Alec.´
‘Dreamer. Continue it outdoors.’
Outside it was a lovely Texas late afternoon, with lengthening shadows. ‘Katie, a straight answer, please. Is, Hell? Or is this Texas?’
‘Both.’
‘I withdraw the question.’
I must have let my annoyance show in my voice, for she turned and put a hand on my chest. ‘Alec, I was not jesting. For many centuries Lucifer has maintained pieds-à-terre here and there on earth. In each He had an established personality, a front. After Armageddon, when His Brother set Himself up as king of earth for the Millennium, He quit visiting earth. But some of these place’s were home to Him, so He pinched them off and took them with, Him. You see?’
‘I suppose I do. About as well as a cow understands calculus.’
‘I don’t understand the mechanism; it’s on the God level. But those numerous changes you and Marga underwent during your persecution: How deep did each change go? Do you think the entire planet was involved each time?’
Reality tumbled in my mind in a fashion it had not-since the last of those ‘changes’. ‘Katie, I don’t know! I was always too busy surviving. Wait a moment. Each change did cover the whole planet earth, and about a century of its history. Because I always checked the history and memorized as much as I could. Cultural. changes, too. The whole complex.’
‘Each change stopped not far beyond the end of your nose, Alec, and no one but you – you two – was aware of any change. You didn’t check history; you checked history books. At least this is the way Lucifer would have handled it, had He been arranging the deception.’
‘Uh – Katie, do you realize how long it would take to revise, rewrite, and print an entire encyclopedia? That’s what I usually consulted.’
`But Alec, you have already been told that time is never a problem on the God level. Or space. Whatever needed to deceive you was provided. But no more than that. That is the conservative principle in art at the God level. While I can’t do it, not being at that level, I have seen a lot of it done. A skillful Artist in shapes and appearances does no more than necessary to create His effect.’
Rghab sat down on the edge of the pool, paddled her feet in the water. ‘Come sit beside me. Consider the edge of the “big bang”. What is there out beyond that limit where the red shift has the magnitude that means that the expansion of the universe equals the speed of light – what is beyond?’
I answered rather stiffly, ‘Katie, your hypothetical question lacks meaning. I’ve kept up, more or less, with such silly notions as the “big bang” and the “expanding universe” because a preacher of the Gospel must keep track of such theories in order to be able to refute them. The two you mention imply an impossible length of time impossible because the world was created about six thousand years ago. “About” because the exact date of Creation is hard to calculate, and also because I am uncertain as to the present date. But around six thousand years not the billion years or so the big-bangers need.’
‘Alec… your universe is about twenty-three billion years old.’ ‘
I started to retort, closed my mouth. I will not flatly contradict my hostess.
She added, ‘And your universe was created in four thousand and four BC.’
I stared at the water long enough for Sybil to surface and splash us.
‘Well, Alec?´
‘You’ve left me with nothing to say.’
‘But notice carefully what I did say. I did not say that the world was created twenty-three billion years ago; I said that was its age. It was created old. Created with fossils in the ground and craters on the moon, all speaking of great age. Created that way by Yahweh, because it amused Him to do so. One of those scientists said, “God does not roll dice with the universe.” Unfortunately not true. Yahweh rolls loaded dice with His universe… to deceive His creatures.’
‘Why would He do that?’
‘Lucifer says that it is because He is a poor Artist, the sort who is always changing his mind and scraping the canvas. And a practical joker. But I’m really not entitled to an opinion; I’m not at that level. And Lucifer is prejudiced where His Brother is concerned; I think that is obvious. You haven’t remarked on the greatest wonder.’
‘Maybe I missed it.’
‘No, I think you were being polite. How an old whore happened to have opinions about cosmogony and teleology and eschatology and other long words of Greek derivation; that’s the greatest wonder. Not?’
`Why, Rahab honey, I was just so busy counting your wrinkles that I wasn’t lis´
This got me shoved into the water. I came up sputtering and spouting and found both women laughing at me. So I placed both hands on the edge of the pool with Katie captured inside the circle. She did not seem to mind being captive; she leaned against me like a cat. ‘You were about to say?’ I asked.
‘Alec, to be able to read and write is as wonderful as sex. Or almost. You may not fully appreciate what a, blessing it is because you probably learned how as a baby and have been doing it casually ever since. But when I was a whore in Canaan almost four millennia ago, I did not know how to read and write. I learned by listening… to johns, to neighbors, to gossip in the market. But that’s not a way to learn much, and even scribes and judges were ignorant then.
‘I had been dead nearly three centuries before I learned to read and write, and when I did learn, I was taught by the ghost of a harlot from what later became the great Cretan civilization. Saint Alec, this may startle you but, An general throughout history, whores learned to read and write long before respectable women took up the dangerous practice. When I did learn, brother. For a while it crowded sex out of my life.’
She grinned up at me. ‘Almost, anyhow. Presently I went back to a more healthy balance, reading and sex, in equal amounts.’
‘I don’t have the strength for that ratio.’
`Women are different. My best education started with the burning of the Library at Alexandria. Yahweh didn’t want it, so Lucifer grabbed the ghosts of all those thousands of codices, took them to, Hell, regenerated them carefully – and Rahab had a picnic! And let me add: Lucifer has His eye on the Vatican Library, since it will be up for salvage soon. Instead of having to regenerate ghosts, in the case of the Vatican Library, Lucifer plans to pinch it off intact just before Time Stop, and take it unhurt to Hell.
Won’t that be grand?’
‘Sounds as if it would be. The only thing about which I’ve ever envied the papists is their library. But… “regenerated ghosts”?’
‘Slap my back.’
‘Huh?’
‘Slap it. No, harder than that; I’m not a fragile little butterfly. Harder. That’s more like it. What you just, slapped is a regenerated ghost.’
‘Felt solid.’
‘Should be, I paid list price for the job. It was before Lucifer noticed me and made me a bird in a gilded cage, a pitiful sight to see. I understand that, if you are saved and go to Heaven, regeneration goes with salvation… but here you buy it on credit, then work your arse off to pay for it. That being exactly how I paid for it. Saint Alec, you didn’t die, I know. A regenerated body is just like the one a person has before death, but better. No contagious diseases, no allergies, no old-age wrinkles – and “wrinkles” my foot! I wasn’t wrinkled the day I died… or at least not much. How did you get me talking about wrinkles? We were discussing relativity and the expanding universe, high-type intellectual conversation.’
That night Sibil made a strong effort to get into my bed, an effort that Katie firmly thwarted – the went to bed with me herself. ‘Pat said that you were not to be allowed to sleep alone.’
Pat thinks I’m sick. I’m not.’
‘I won’t argue it. And don’t quiver your chin, dear; Mother Rahab will let you sleep.’
Sometime in the night I woke up sobbing, and Katie was there. She comforted me. I’m sure Pat told her about my nightmares. With Katie there to quiet me down I got back to sleep rather quickly.
It was a sweet Arcadian interlude… save for the absence of Margrethe. But Katie had me convinced that I owed it to Jerry (and to her) to be patient and not brood over my loss. So I did not, or not much, in the daytime, and, while night could be bad, even lonely nights are not too lonely with Mother Rahab to soothe one after waking up emotionally defenceless. She was always there except one night she had to be away. Sybil took that watch, carefully instructed by Katie, and carried it out the same way.
I discovered one amusing thing about Sybil. In sleep she slips back into her natural shape, imp or afrit,
without knowing it. This makes her about six inches shorter and she has those cute little horns that were the first thing I had noticed about her, at the Sans Souci.
Daytimes we swam and sunbathed and rode horseback and picnicked out in the hills. In making this enclave Jerry had apparently pinched off many square miles; we appeared to be able to go as far as we liked in any direction.
Or perhaps I don’t understand at all how such things are done.
Strike out ‘perhaps’ – I know as much about operations On the God level as a frog knows about Friday.
Jerry had been gone about a week when Rahab showed up at the breakfast table with my memoir manuscript. Saint Alec, Lucifer sent instructions that you are to bring up to date and keep it up to date.-
`All right. Will longhand do? Or, if there is a typewriter around, I guess I could hunt and peck.´
‘You do it longhand; I’ll do a smooth draft. I’ve done lots of secretarial work for Prince Lucifer.’
‘Katie, sometimes you call Him Jerry, sometimes Lucifer, never Satan.’
‘Alec, He prefers “Lucifer” but He answers to anything. “Jerry” and “Katie” were names invented for you and Marga -´
‘And “Sybil”,’ Sybil amended.
‘And “Sybil”. Yes, Egret. Do you want your own name back now?’
‘No, I think it’s nice that Alec – and Marga – have names for us that no one else knows.’
`Just a minute,’ I put in. ‘The day I met you, all three of you responded to those names as if you had worn them all your lives.’
‘Mom and I are pretty fast at extemporaneous drama,’ Sybil-Egret said. ‘They didn’t know they were fire-worshipers until I slipped it into the conversation. And I didn’t know I was a witch until Mom tipped me off. Israfel is pretty sharp, too. But he did have more time to think about his role.’
‘So we were snookered in all directions. A couple of country cousins.’
‘Alec,’ Katie said to me earnestly, ‘Lucifer always has reasons for what He does. He rarely explains. His intentions are malevolent only toward malicious people which you are not.’
.We three were sunbathing by the pool when Jerry returned suddenly. He said abruptly to me, not even stopping first to speak to Katie: ‘Get your clothes on. We’re leaving at once.
Katie bounced up, rushed in and got my clothes. The women had me dressed as fast as a fireman answering an alarm. Katie shoved my razor into my pocket, buttoned it. I announced, ‘I’m ready!’
`Where’s his manuscrip?´
Again Katie rushed in, out again fast. ‘Here!’
In that brief time Jerry had grown twelve feet tall – and changed. He was still Jerry, but I now knew why Lucifer was known as the most beautiful of all the angels. ‘So long!’ he said. ‘Rahab, I’ll call you if I can.’ He started to pick me up.
‘Wait! Egret and I must kiss him good-bye!’
‘Oh. Make it snappy!´
They did, ritual pecks only, given simultaneously. Jerry grabbed me, held me like a child, and we went straight up. I had a quick glimpse of Sans Souci, the Palace, and the Plaza, then smoke and flame from the Pit covered them. We went on out of this world.
How we traveled, how long we traveled, where we traveled I do not know. It was like that endless fall to Hell, but made much more agreeable by Jerry’s arms. It reminded me of times when I was very young, two or three years old, when my father would sometimes pick me up after supper and hold me until I fell asleep.
I suppose I did sleep. After a long time I became alert by feeling Jerry sweeping in for a landing. He put me down, set me on my feet.
There was gravity here; I felt weight and ‘down’ again had meaning. But I do not think we were on a planet. We seemed to be on a platform or a porch of some immensely large building. I could not see it because we were right up against it. Elsewhere there was nothing to see, just an amorphous twilight.
Jerry said, ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes. Yes, I think so.’
‘Good. Listen carefully. I am about to take you in to see – no, for you to be seen by – an Entity who is to me, and to my brother your god Yahweh, as Yahweh is to you. Understand me?’
‘Uh… maybe. I’m not sure.’
`A is to B as B is to C. To this Entity your lord god jehoyah is equivalent to a child building sand castles at a beach, then destroying them in childish tantrums. To Him, I am a child, too. I look up to Him as you look up to your triple deity – father, son, and holy ghost. I don’t worshipe this Entity as God; He does not demand, does not expect, does not want, that sort of bootlicking. Yahweh may be the, only god who ever thought up that curious vice – at least I do not know of another planet or place in any universe where god-worship is practiced. But I am young and not much traveled.’
Jerry was watching me closely. He appeared to be troubled. ‘Alec, maybe this analogy will explain it. When you were growing up, did you ever have to take a pet to a veterinarian?’
‘Yes. I didn’t like it because they always hated it so.’
‘I don’t like it, either. Very well, you know what it is to take a sick or damaged animal to the vet. Then you had lo wait while the doctor decided whether or not your pet could be made well. Or whether the kind and gentle thing to do was to put the little creature out of its misery. Is this not true?’
‘Yes. Jerry, you’re telling me that things are dicey. Uncertain.’
‘Utterly uncertain. No precedent. A human being has never been taken to this level before. I don’t know what He will do.’
‘Okay. You told me before that there would be a risk.’
‘Yes. You are in great danger. And so am I, although I think your danger is much greater than mine. But, Alec, I can assure you of this: If It. decided to extinguish you, you will never know it. It is not a sadistic God.’
`”It” – is it “It” or “He”?´
‘Uh… use “he”. If It embodies, It will probably use a human appearance. If so, you can address Him as “Mr Chairman” or “Mr Koshchei”. Treat Him as you would a man much older than you are and one you respect highly. Don’t bow down or offer worship. Just stand your ground and tell the truth. If you die, die with dignity.’
The guard who stopped us at the door was not human, – until I looked again and then he was human. And that Characterizes the uncertainty of everything I saw at the place Jerry referred to as ‘The Branch Office’.
The guard said to me, ‘Strip down, please. Leave your clothes with me; you can pick them up later, What is that metal object?’
I explained that it was just a safety razor.
‘And what is it for?’
‘It’s a… a knife for cutting hair off the face.
‘You grow hair on your face?’
I tried to explain shaving.
‘If you don’t want hair there, why do you grow it there?’ Is it a material of economic congress?’
‘Jerry, I think I’m out of my depth.’
‘I’ll handle it.’ I suppose he then talked to the guard but I didn’t hear anything. Jerry said to me, ‘Leave your razor with your clothes. He thinks you are crazy but he thinks I am crazy, too. It doesn’t matter.’
Mr Koshchei may be ‘an ‘It’ but to me He looked like a twin brother of Dr Simmons, the vet back home in Kansas to whom I used to take cats and dogs, and once, a turtle – the procession of small animals who shared my childhood. And the Chairman’s office looked exactly like Dr Simmons’ office, even to the rlolltop desk the doctor must have inherited from his grandfather. There was a well-remembered Seth Thomas eight-day clock on a little shelf over the doctor’s desk.
I realized (being cold sober and rested) that this was not Dr Simmons and that the semblance was intentional but not intended to deceive. The Chairman, whatever He or It or She may be, had reached into my mind with some sort of hypnosis to create an ambience in which I could relax. Dr Simmons used
to pet an animal and talk to it, before he got down to the uncomfortable, unfamiliar, and often painful things that he had to do to that animal.
It had worked. It worked with me, too. I knew that Mr Koshchei was not the old veterinary surgeon of my childhood… but this simulacrum brought out in me the same feeling of trust.
Mr Koshchei looked up as we came in. He nodded to Jerry, glanced at me. ‘Sit down.’
We sat down. Mr Koshchei turned back to His desk. My manuscript was on it. He picked it up, jogged the sheets – straight, put them down. ‘How are things in your bailiwick, Lucifer? Any problems?’
‘No, Sir. Oh, the usual gripes about the air conditioning. Nothing I can’t handle.’
‘Do you want to rule earth this millennium?’
‘Hasn’t my brother claimed it?’
‘Yahweh has claimed it, yes – he has pronounced Time Stop and torn it down. But I am not bound to let him rebuild. Do you want it? Answer Me.’
“Sir, I would much rather start with all-new materials.’
‘All your guild prefer to start fresh. With no thought of the expense, of course. I could assign you to the Glaroon for a few cycles. How say you?’
Jerry was slow in answering. ‘I must leave it to the Chairman’s judgment.’
,’You are quite right; you must. So we will discuss it later. Why have you interested yourself in this creature of your brother´s?’
I must have dropped off to sleep, for I saw puppies and kittens playing in a courtyard – and there was nothing of that sort there. I heard Jerry saying, ‘Mr Chairman, almost everything about a human creature is ridiculous, except its ability to suffer bravely and die gallantly for whatever it loves and believes in. The validity of that belief, the appropriateness of that love, is irrelevant; it is the bravery and the gallantry that count. These are uniquely human qualities, independent of mankind’s creator, who has none of them himself – as I know, since he is my brother… and I lack them, too.
‘You ask, why this animal, and why me? This one I picked up beside a road, a stray – and, putting aside its own troubles – much too big for it! – it devoted itself to a (and fruitless) attempt to save my “soul” by the rules it had been taught. That its attempt was misguided and useless does not matter; it tried hard on my behalf when it believed me to be in extreme danger. Now that it is in trouble I owe it an equal effort.’
Mr Koshchei pushed his spectacles down His nose and looked over them. ‘You offer no reason why I should interfere with local authority.’
‘Sir, is there not a guild rule requiring artists to be kind in their treatment of their volitionals?’
‘No.
Jerry looked daunted. ‘Sir, I must have misunderstood my training.’
‘Yes, I think you have. There is an artistic principle not a rule – that volitionals should be treated consistently. But to insist on kindness would be to eliminate that degree of freedom for which volition in creatures was invented. Without the possibility of tragedy the volitionals might as well be golems.’
‘Sir, I think I understand that. But would the Chairman please amplify the artistic principle of consistent treatment?’
‘Nothing- complex about it, Lucifer. For a creature to act out its own minor part, the rules under which it acts must be either known to it or be such that the rules can become known through trial and error – with error not always fatal. In short the creature must be able to learn and to benefit by its experience.’
‘Sir, that is exactly my complaint about my brother. See that record before You. Yahweh baited a trap and thereby lured this creature into a contest that it could not win then declared the game over and took the prize from it. And, although this is an extreme case, a destruction test, this nevertheless is typical of his treatment of all his volitionals. Games so rigged that his creatures cannot win. For six millennia I got his losers… and many of them arrived in Hell catatonic with fear – fear of me, fear of an eternity of torture.
They can’t believe they’ve been lied to. My therapists have to work hard to reorient the poor slobs. It’s not funny.’
Mr Koshchei did not appear to listen. He leaned back in His old wooden swivel chair, making it creak – and, yes, I do not know that the creak came out of my memories – and looked again at my memoir. He scratched the grey fringe around His bald pate and made an irritating noise, half whistle, half hum – also out of my buried memories of Doc Simmons, but utterly real.
This female creature, the bait. A volitional?’
‘In my opinion, yes, Mr Chairman.’
(Good heavens, Jerry! Don’t you know?)
‘Then I think we may assume that this one would not be satisfied with a simulacrum.’ He hummed and whistled through His teeth. ‘So let us look deeper.’
Mr Koshchei’s office seemed small when we were admitted; now there were several others present: another angel who looked a lot like Jerry but older and with a pinched expression unlike Jerry’s expansive joviality, another older character who wore a long coat, a big broad-brimmed hat, a patch over one eye, and had a crow sitting on his shoulder, and – why, confound his arrogance! – Sam Crumpacker, that Dallas shyster.
Back of Crumpacker three men were lined up, well-fed types, and all vaguely familiar. I knew I had seen them before.
Then I got it. I had won a hundred (or was it a thousand?) from each of them on a most foolhardy bet.
I looked back at Crumpacker, and was angrier than ever – the scoundrel was now wearing my face!
I turned to Jerry and started to whisper urgently. ‘See lhat man over there? The one -´
‘Shut up.’
`But -´
`Be quiet and listen.’
Jerry’s brother was speaking. ‘So who’s complaining? You want I should put on my Jesus hat and prove it? The fact that some of them make it proves it ain’t too hard – Seven point one percent in this last batch, not counting golems, Not good enough? Who says?´
The old boy in the black hat said, ‘I count anything less’ than fifty percent a failure.’
‘So who’s talking? Who lost ground to me every year for a millennium? How you handle your creatures; that’s your business. What I do with mine; that’s my business.
‘That’s why I’m here,’ the big hat replied. ‘You grossly interfered with one of mine.’
‘Not, me!’ Yahweh hooked a thumb at the man who man who managed to look like both me and Sam Crumpacker. ‘That one! My Shabbes goy. A little rough? So whose boy is he? Answer that!’
Mr Koshchei tapped my memoir, spoke to the man with my face. ‘Loki, how many places do you figure in this story?’
‘Depends on how You figure it, Chief. Eight or nine places, if You count the walk-ons. All through it, when You consider that I spent four solid weeks softening up this foxy schoolteacher so that she would
roll over and pant when Joe Nebbish came along.’
Jerry had a big fist around my upper ~ left arm. ‘Keep quiet!’
Loki went on: ‘And Yahweh didn’t pay up.
‘So why should I? Who won?’
‘You cheated. I had your champion, your prize bigot, ready to crack when you pulled Judgment Day early. There he sits. Ask him. Ask him if he still swears by you. Or at you? Ask him. Then pay up. I have munition bills to meet.’
Mr Koshchei stated, ‘I declare this discussion out of order. This office is not a collection agency. Yahweh, the principal complaint against you seems to be that you are not consistent in your rules for your creatures.’
‘Should I kiss them? For omelets you break eggs.’
‘Speak to the case in point. You ran a destruction lit test. Whether it was artistically necessary is moot. But, at the end of the test, you took one to Heaven, left the other behind, – and thereby punished both of them. Why?´
‘One rule for all. She didn’t make it.’
‘Aren’t you the god that announced the rule concerning binding the mouths of the kine that tread the grain?’
The next thing I knew I was standing on Mr Koshchei’s desk, staring right into His enormous face. I suppose Jerry put me there. He was saying, ‘This is yours?’
I looked in the direction He indicated – and had to keep from fainting. Marga!
Margrethe cold and dead and encased in a coffin shaped cake of ice. It occupied much of the desktop and was beginning to melt onto it.
‘I tried to throw myself onto it, found I could not move.
“I think that answers Me,’ Mr Koshchei went on. ‘Odin, what is its destiny?’
‘She died fighting, at Ragnarok. She has earned a cycle in Valhalla.’
‘Listen to him!’ Loki sneered. ‘Ragnarok is not over. And this time I’m winning. This pige is mine! All Danish broads are willing… but this one is explosive!’ He smirked and winked at me. ‘Isn’t She?’
The Chairman said quietly, ‘Loki, you weary Me’- and suddenly, Loki was missing. Even his chair was gone. ‘Odin, will you spare her for part of that cycle?’
‘For how long? She has earned the right to Valhalla.’
‘An indeterminate time. This creature had stated its willingness to wash dishes “forever” in order to take care of her. One may doubt that it realizes just how long a period, “forever” is… yet its story does show earnestness of purpose.’
‘Mr Chairman, my warriors, male and female, dead in honorable combat, are my equals, not my slaves – I am to be first among such equals. I raise no objections… if she consents.
My heart soared. Then Jerry, from clear across the room, wispered in my ear, ‘Don’t get your hopes up. To her it may be as long as a thousand years. Woman do forget.´
The Chairman was saying, ‘The web patterns are intact, are they not?’
Yahweh answered, ‘So who destroys file copies?’
‘Regenerate as necessary.’
‘And who is paying for this?’
‘You are. A fine to teach you to pay attention to consistency.´
‘Oy! Every prophecy I fulfilled! And now He tells me consistent I am not! This is justice?’
‘No. It is Art. Alexander. Look at Me.’
I looked at that great face; Its eyes held me. They got bigger, and bigger, and bigger. I slumped forward and fell into them.
Chapter 29
There is, no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.
Ecclesiastes 1: 11
THIS WEEK Margrethe and I, with help from our daughter Gerda, are giving our house and our shop a
real Scandahoovian cleaning, because the Farnsworths, our friends from Texas – our best friends anywhere – are coming to see us. To Marga and me, a visit from Jerry and Katie is Christmas and the Fourth of July rolled into one. And for our kids, too; Sybil Farnsworth is Inga’s age; the girls are chums.
This time will be extra special; they are bringing Patricia Marymount with them. Pat is almost as old a friend as the Farnsworths and the sweetest person in the world – an old-maid schoolmarm but not a bit prissy.
‘The Farnsworths changed our luck. Marga and I were down in Mexico on our honeymoon when the earthquake that destroyed Mazatlán hit. We weren’t hurt but we had a bad time getting out – passports, money, and travelers checks gone. Halfway home we met the Farnsworths and that changed everything – no more trouble. Oh, I got back to Kansas with no baggage but a razor (sentimental value, Marga gave it to me on our honeymoon; I’ve used it ever since).
When we reached my home state, we found just the mom-and-pop shop we wanted – a lunchroom in this little college town, Eden, Kansas, southeast of Wichita. The shop was owned by Mr and Mrs A. S. Modeus; they Wanted to retire. We started as their employees; in less than a month we were their tenants. Then I went into hock to the bank up to my armpits and that made us owners-of-record of MARGA’S HOT FUDGE SUNDAE soda fountain, hot dogs, hamburgers, and Marga’s heavenly Danish open-face sandwiches.
Margrethe wanted to name it Marga-and-Alex’s Hot Fudge Sundae – I vetoed that; it doesn’t scan. Besides, she is the one who meets the public; she’s our best advertising. I work back where I’m not seen
dishwasher, janitor, porter, you name it. Margrethe handles the front, with help from Astrid. And from me; all of us can cook or concoct anything on our menu, even the open-face sandwiches. However, with the latter we follow Marga’s color Photographs and lists of ingredients; in fairness to our customers only Margrethe is allowed to be creative.
Our namesake item, the hot fudge sundae, is ready at all times and I have kept the price at ten cents, although that allows only one-and-a-half cent gross profit. Any customer having a birthday gets one free, along with our Singing Happy Birthday! with loud banging on a drum, and a kiss. College boys appreciate kissing Margrethe more than they do the free sundae. Understandable. But Pop Graham doesn’t do too badly with the co-eds, either. (I don’t force kisses on a ‘birthday girl’.)
Our shop was a success from day one. The location is good – facing Elm Street gate and Old Main. Plentiful good trade was guaranteed by low prices and Margrethe’s magic touch with food… and her beauty and her sweet personality; we aren’t selling calories, we’re selling happiness. She piles a lavish serving of happiness on each plate; she has it to spare.
With me to watch the pennies, our team could not lose. And I do watch pennies; if the cost of ingredients ever kills that narrow margin on a hot fudge sundae, the price goes up. Mr Belial, president of our bank, says that the country is in a long, steady period of gentle prosperity. I hope he is right; meanwhile I watch the gross profit.
The town is enjoying a real estate boom, caused by, the, Farnsworths plus the change in climate it used to be that the typical wealthy Texan had a summer home in Colorado Springs, but now that we no longer fry eggs on our sidewalks, Texans are beginning to see the charms of Kansas. They say it’s a change in the Jet Stream. (Or is it the Gulf Stream? I never was strong in science.) Whatever, our summers now are balmy and our winters are mild; many, of Jerry’s friends or associates are buying land in Eden and building summer homes. Mr Ashmedai, manager of some of Jerry’s interests, now lives here year round – and Dr Adramelech, chancellor of Eden College, caused him to be elected to the board of trustees, along with an honorary doctorate – as a former money-raiser I can see why.
We welcome them all and not just for their money… but I would not want Eden to grow as crowded as Dallas.
Not that it could. This is a bucolic place; the college is our only ‘industry’. One community church serves all sects, The Church of the Divine Orgasm – Sabbath school at 9:30 a.m., church services at 11, picnic and orgy immediately following.
We don’t believe in shoving religion down a kid’s throat, but the truth is that young people like our community church – thanks to our pastor, the Reverend Dr M. 0. Loch. Malcolm is a Presbyterian, I think; he still has a Scottish burr in his speech. But there is nothing of the dour Scot about him and kids love him. He leads the revels and directs the rituals – our daughter Elise is a Novice Ecdysiast under him and she talks of having a vocation. (Piffle. She’ll marry right out of high school; I could name the young man – though I can’t see what she sees in him.)
Margrethe serves in the Altar Guild; I pass the plate on the Sabbath and serve on the finance board. I’ve never, given up my membership in the Apocalypse Brethren but I must admit that we Brethren read it wrong; the end of the millennium came and went and the Shout was never heard.
A man who is happy at home doesn’t lie awake nights worrying about the hereafter.
What is success? My classmates at Rolla Tech, back when, may think that I’ve settled for too little,
owner with-the-bank of a tiny restaurant in a nowhere town. But I have what I want. I would not want to be a saint in Heaven if Margrethe was not with me; I wouldn’t fear going to Hell if she was there – not that I believe in Hell or ever stood a chance of being a saint in Heaven.
Samuel Clemens put it: ‘Where she was, there was Eden. ‘Omar phrased it: ‘- thou beside me in the wilderness, ah wilderness were paradise enow.’ Browning termed it: ‘Summum Bonum’. All were asserting the same great truth, which is for me:
Heaven is where Margrethe is.
The End
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.
Articles & Links
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Have you ever wondered how those witches and warlocks ever ended up with all those strange entities that lurk in the shadows around them? Well, perhaps Ray Bradbury can give us some insight into this. Eh?
Invisible Boy
She took the great
iron spoon and the mummified frog and gave it a bash and made dust of it, and talked
to the dust while she ground it in her stony fists quickly.
Her beady gray bird-eyes nickered at the cabin.
Each time she looked,
a head in the small thin window ducked as if she’d fired off a shotgun.
“Charlie!” cried Old Lady. “You come outa there! I’m fixing a lizard magic to unlock that rusty door! You come out now and I won’t make the earth shake or the trees go up in fire or the sun
set
at high noon!”
The only sound was the warm mountain light on the high turpentine trees, a tufted
squirrel cluttering around and around on a green-furred log, the ants moving in a fine brown line at Old Lady’s bare, blue-veined feet.
“You been starving in there two days, dam you!” she panted, chiming the spoon against a flat rock, causing the plump gray miracle bag to swing at her waist. Sweating sour, she rose and marched at the cabin, bearing the pulverized flesh. “Come out, now!” She flicked a pinch of powder inside the lock. “All right, I’ll come get you!” she wheezed.
She spun the knob with one walnut-coloured hand, first one way, then the other.
“0 Lord,” she intoned, “fling this door wide!”
When nothing flung, she added yet another philter and held her breath. Her long blue untidy
skirt rustled as she peered – into her bag of darkness to see if she had any scaly monsters there, any charm finer than the frog she’d killed months ago for such a crisis as this.
She heard Charlie
breathing against the door. His folks had pranced off into some Ozark town early this week, leaving him, and he’d run almost six miles to Old Lady for company – she was by way of being an aunt or cousin or some such, and he didn’t mind her fashions.
But then, two days ago. Old Lady,
having gotten used to the boy around, decided
to keep him for convenient company. She pricked her thin shoulder bone, drew out three blood pearls, spat wet over her right elbow, tromped on a crunch-cricket, and at the same instant clawed her left
hand at Charlie,
crying, “My son you are, you are my son, for all eternity!”
Charlie, bounding like a startled hare, had crashed off into the bush, heading for home.
But Old Lady, skittering quick as a gingham lizard, cornered
him in a dead end, and Charlie holed up in this old hermit’s cabin
and wouldn’t come out, no matter how she whammed
door, window, or knothole with amber-coloured fist or trounced her ritual fires, explaining to him
that he was certainly her son now, all right.
“Charlie, you there?’ she asked, cutting holes in the door planks with her bright little slippery eyes.
“I’m all of me here,” he replied finally, very tired.
Maybe he would fall out on the ground any moment.
She wrestled the knob hopefully. Perhaps
a pinch too much frog powder had grated the lock wrong. She always
overdid or underdid
her miracles, she mused angrily, never doing them just exact. Devil take it!
“Charlie, I only wants someone to night-prattle to, someone to warm hands with at the fire. Someone to fetch kindling for me mornings, and fight off the spunks
that come creeping of
early fogs! I ain’t got no fetchings on you for myself, son, just for your company.” She smacked her lips. “Tell you what, Charles, you come out and I teach you things!”
“What things?” he suspicioned.
“Teach you how to buy cheap, sell high. Catch a snow weasel, cut off its head, carry it warm in
your hind pocket. There!”
“Aw,” said Charlie.
She made haste. “Teach you to make yourself shot-proof. So if anyone bangs at you with a gun, nothing happens.”
When Charlie stayed silent, she gave him the secret in a high fluttering whisper. “Dig and stitch
mouse-ear roots on Friday during full moon, and wear ‘em around your neck in a white silk.”
“You’re crazy,” Charlie said.
“Teach you how to stop blood or make animals stand frozen or make blind horses see, all them things I’ll teach you! Teach you to cure a swelled-up cow and unbewitch a goat. Show you how to make yourself invisible!”
“Oh,” said Charlie.
Old Lady’s heart beat like a Salvation tambourine. The knob turned from the other side.
“You,” said Charlie, “are funning me.”
“No, I’m not,” exclaimed Old Lady. “Oh, Charlie, why, I’ll make you like a window, see right through you. Why, child, you’ll be surprised!”
“Real invisible?” “Real invisible!”
“You won’t fetch onto me if I walk out?”
“Won’t touch a bristle of you, son.”
“Well,” he drawled reluctantly, “all right.”
The door opened. Charlie stood in his bare feet, head down, chin against chest. “Make me
invisible,” he said.
“First we got to catch us a bat,”
said Old Lady. “Start
lookin’!”
She gave him some jerky beef for his hunger and watched him climb a tree. He went high up
and high up and it was nice seeing him there and it was nice having him here and all about after so many years alone with nothing to say good morning
to but bird-droppings and silvery snail
tracks.
Pretty soon a bat with a broken wing fluttered down out of the tree. Old Lady snatched it up,
beating warm and shrieking between its porcelain
white teeth, and Charlie
dropped down after it, hand upon clenched hand,
yelling.
That night, with the moon nibbling at the spiced pine cones. Old Lady extracted a long silver needle from under
her wide blue dress. Gumming her excitement and secret anticipation, she sighted up the dead bat and held the cold needle
steady-steady.
She had long ago realized that her miracles, despite all perspirations and salts and sulphurs, failed. But she had always dreamt
that one day the miracles might start functioning, might spring up in crimson flowers and silver stars to prove that God had forgiven her for her pink body and her pink thoughts and her warm body and her warm thoughts as a young miss. But so
far God had made no sign and said no word, but nobody knew this except Old Lady.
“Ready?” she asked Charlie, who crouched cross-kneed, wrapping his pretty legs in long goose-
pimpled arms, his mouth open, making
teeth. “Ready,” he whispered, shivering.
“There!” She plunged the needle deep in the bat’s right eye. “So!”
“Oh!” screamed Charlie, wadding up his face.
“Now I wrap it in gingham, and here, put it in your pocket, keep it there, bat and all. Go on!” He pocketed the charm.
“Charlie!” she shrieked fearfully. “Charlie, where are you? I can’t see you, child!”
“Here!” He jumped so the light ran in red streaks
up his body. “I’m here. Old Lady!” He stared
wildly at his arms, legs, chest, and toes. “I’m here!”
Her eyes looked as if they were watching a thousand fireflies crisscrossing
each other in the wild night air.
“Charlie, oh, you went fast! Quick
as a hummingbird! Oh, Charlie,
come back to me!” “But I’m Acre!” he wailed.
“Where?”
“By the fire, the fire! And – and I can see myself. I’m not invisible at all!”
Old Lady rocked on her lean flanks. “Course you can see you! Every invisible person knows himself. Otherwise, how could you eat, walk,
or get around places? Charlie,
touch me. Touch me
so I know you.”
Uneasily he put out a hand.
She pretended to jerk,
startled, at his touch. “Ah!”
“You mean to say you can’t find me?” he asked. “Truly?”
“Not the least half rump of you!”
She found a tree
to stare at, and stared
at it with shining
eyes, careful not to glance at him.
“Why, I sure did a trick that time!” She sighed with wonder. “Whooeee. Quickest invisible I ever made! Charlie. Charlie,
how you feel?”
“Like creek water – all stirred.” “You’ll settle.”
Then after a pause she added, “Well, what you going to do now, Charlie, since you’re invisible?”
All sorts of things shot through his brain, she could tell. Adventures stood up and danced like hell-fire in his eyes, and his mouth, just hanging, told what it meant to be a boy who imagined himself like the mountain
winds. In a cold dream he said, “I’ll run across wheat fields, climb
snow mountains, steal white chickens off’n farms.
I’ll kick pink pigs when they ain’t looking. I’ll pinch pretty
girls’ legs when they sleep, snap their garters
in schoolrooms.” Charlie
looked at Old Lady, and from the shiny tips of her eyes she saw something wicked
shape his face. “And
other things I’ll do, I’ll do, I will,” he said.
“Don’t try nothing on me,” warned Old Lady. “I’m brittle
as spring ice and I don’t take handling.”
Then: “What about your folks?”
“My folks?”
“You can’t fetch
yourself home looking like that. Scare the inside ribbons out of them. Your
mother’d faint straight back like timber falling. Think they want you about the house to stumble over and your ma have to call you every three minutes, even though you’re in the room next her elbow?”
Charlie had not considered it. He sort of simmered down and whispered out a little “Gosh” and
felt of his long bones carefully.
“You’ll be mighty lonesome. People looking through you like a water
glass, people knocking you
aside because they didn’t reckon you to be underfoot. And women, Charlie, women -”
He swallowed. “What about women?”
“No woman will be giving you a second stare. And no woman wants to be kissed by a boy’s mouth they can’t even find!”
Charlie dug his bare toe in the soil contemplatively. He pouted. “Well, I’ll stay invisible, anyway, for a spell. I’ll have me some fun. I’ll just be pretty careful, is all. I’ll stay out from in front of
wagons and horses and Pa. Pa shoots at the nariest sound.” Charlie blinked. “Why, with me invisible, someday Pa might just up and fill me with buckshot, thinkin’ I was a hill squirrel
in the dooryard.
Oh…”
Old Lady nodded at a tree.
“That’s likely.”
“Well,” he decided slowly, “I’ll stay invisible for tonight, and tomorrow you can fix me back all whole again, Old Lady.”
“Now if that ain’t just like a critter, always wanting to be what he can’t be,” remarked Old Lady to a beetle on a log.
“What you mean?” said Charlie.
“Why,” she explained, “it was real hard work, fixing you up. It’ll take a little time for it to wear off. Like a coat of paint wears off, boy.”
“You!” he cried. “You did this to me! Now you make me back, you make me seeable!” “Hush,” she said. “It’ll wear
off, a hand or a foot at a time.”
“How’ll it look, me around the hills with just one hand showing!” “Like
a five-winged bird hopping on the stones and bramble.” “Or a foot showing!”
“Like a small pink rabbit jumping thicket.”
“Or my head Heating!”
“Like a hairy balloon at the carnival!”
“How long before I’m whole?”
he asked.
She deliberated that it might pretty well be an entire
year.
He groaned.
He began to sob and bite his lips and make fists. “You magicked
me, you did this, you did this thing to me.
Now I won’t be able to run home!”
She winked. “But you can stay here, child, stay on with me real comfort-like, and I’ll keep you
fat and saucy.”
He flung it out: “You did this on purpose! You mean old hag,
you
want to keep me here!”
He ran off through the shrubs
on the instant.
“Charlie, come back!”
No answer but the pattern of his feet on the soft dark turf,
and his wet choking cry which passed swiftly off and away.
She waited and then kindled herself a fire. “He’ll be back,” she whispered. And thinking inward on herself, she said, “And now I’ll have me my company through spring and into late summer. Then, when I’m tired of him and want a silence, I’ll send him home.”
Charlie returned noiselessly with the first gray of dawn, gliding
over the rimed turf to where Old Lady
sprawled like a bleached
stick before the scattered ashes.
He sat on some creek pebbles and stared
at her.
She didn’t dare look at him or beyond. He had made no sound, so how could
she know he was anywhere about? She couldn’t.
He sat there, tear marks on his cheeks.
Pretending to be just waking – but she had found no sleep from one end of the night to the other – Old Lady stood up, grunting and yawning, and turned
in a circle to the dawn.
“Charlie?”
Her eyes passed from pines to soil, to sky, to the far hills. She called out his name, over and
over again,
and
she felt like staring plumb straight at him, but she stopped herself. “Charlie? Oh, Charles!” she called, and heard the echoes say the very same.
He sat, beginning to grin a bit, suddenly, knowing he was close to her, yet she must feel alone. Perhaps he felt the growing of a secret power, perhaps he felt secure
from the world, certainly he was pleased with his invisibility.
She said aloud, “Now where can that boy be? If he only made a noise so I could tell just where he is, maybe I’d fry him a breakfast.”
She prepared the morning
victuals, irritated at his continuous quiet. She sizzled bacon on a hickory stick. “The smell of it will draw his nose,” she muttered.
While her back was turned he swiped all the frying bacon and devoured
it hastily. She whirled, crying
out, “Lord!”
She eyed the clearing suspiciously. “Charlie, that you?”
Charlie wiped his mouth clean
on his wrists.
She trotted about the clearing, making like she was trying to locate him. Finally,
with a clever thought, acting
blind, she headed straight for him, groping. “Charlie, where are you?”
A lightning streak, he evaded her, bobbing, ducking.
It took all her will power not to give chase; but you can’t chase invisible boys, so she sat down, scowling, sputtering, and tried to fry more bacon. But every fresh strip she cut he would steal bubbling off the fire and run away far.
Finally, cheeks burning, she cried, “I
know where you are! Right there\ I hear you run!” She pointed
to one side of him, not too accurate. He ran again.
“Now you’re there!” she shouted.
“There, and there!” pointing to all the places
he was in the next five minutes. “I hear you press a grass blade, knock a flower, snap a twig. I got fine shell ears, delicate as roses. They can hear the stars moving!”
Silently he galloped off among the pines, Ms voice trailing back, “Can’t hear me when I’m set on a rock. I’ll just set!”
All day he sat on an observatory rock in the clear wind, motionless and sucking his tongue.
Old Lady gathered wood in the deep forest, feeling his eyes weaseling on her spine. She wanted to
babble: “Oh, I see you, I see you! I was only fooling about invisible boys! You ‘re right there!” But she swallowed her gall and gummed it tight.
The following morning
he did the spiteful thing. He began leaping
from behind trees. He made toad-faces, frog-faces, spider-faces at her, clenching down his lips with his fingers, popping his raw
eyes, pushing up his nostrils so you could peer in and see his brain thinking.
Once she dropped,
her kindling. She pretended it was a blue jay startled her. He
made a motion as if to strangle her.
She trembled a little.
He made another move as if to bang her shins and spit on her cheek. These motions
she bore without a lid-flicker or a mouth-twitch.
He stuck out his tongue, making
strange bad noises. He wiggled his loose ears so she wanted
to laugh, and finally she did laugh and explained it away quickly by saying, “Sat on a salamander! Whew, how it poked!”
By high noon the whole madness boiled to a terrible peak.
For it was at that exact hour that Charlie
came racing down the valley stark boy-naked! Old Lady nearly fell flat with shock!
“Charlie!” she almost cried.
Charlie raced naked up one side of a hill and naked down the other – naked as day, naked as the
moon, raw as the sun and a newborn chick, his feet shimmering and rushing like the wings
of
a low-skimming hummingbird.
Old Lady’s
tongue locked in her mouth. What could she say? Charlie, go dress? For shame? Stop
that? Could she? Oh, Charlie,
Charlie, God! Could she say that now? Well?
Upon the big rock, she witnessed him dancing up and down, naked
as the day of his birth, stomping bare feet, smacking
his hands on his knees and sucking
in and out his white stomach
like blowing and deflating a circus balloon.
She shut her eyes tight and prayed.
After three hours of this she pleaded, “Charlie, Charlie, come here! I got something
to tell you!”
Like a fallen
leaf he came, dressed again, praise the Lord.
“Charlie,” she said, looking at the pine trees, “I see your right toe. There it is.”
“You do?” he said.
“Yes,” she said very sadly. “There it is like a horny toad on the grass. And there,
up there’s your
left ear hanging on the air
like a pink butterfly.”
Charlie danced. “I’m forming in, I’m forming in!” Old Lady nodded. “Here comes your ankle!”
“Gimme both my feet!” ordered Charlie.
“You got ‘em.”
“How about my hands?”
“I see one crawling on your knee like a daddy long-legs.” “How about the other one?”
“It’s crawling too.” “I got a body?” “Shaping up fine.”
“I’ll need my head to go home. Old Lady.”
To go home, she thought wearily.
“No!” she said, stubborn and angry. “No, you ain’t got no
head. No head at all,” she cried. She’d leave that to the very last. “No head, no head,”
she insisted.
“No head?” he wailed.
“Yes, oh my God, yes, yes, you got your blamed head!” she snapped, giving up. “Now fetch me back my bat with the needle in his eye!”
He flung it at her. “Haaaa-yoooo!” His yelling
went all up the valley,
and long after he had run
toward home she heard his echoes, racing.
Then she plucked up her kindling with a great dry weariness and started back toward her shack, sighing, talking. And Charlie followed her all the way, really invisible now, so she couldn’t see him, just hear him, like a pine cone dropping or a deep underground stream trickling, or a squirrel clambering a bough; and over the fire at twilight she and Charlie sat, him so invisible, and her feeding him bacon he wouldn’t take, so she ate it herself, and then she fixed some magic and fell asleep with Charlie, made out of sticks and rags and pebbles, but still warm and her very own son, slumbering and nice in her shaking mother arms… and they talked about golden things in drowsy voices until dawn made the fire slowly, slowly wither out….
The End
Posts Regarding Life and Contentment
Here are
some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you
might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up
in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society
within communist China. As there are some really stark differences
between the two.
Posts about the Changes in America
America is
going through a period of change. Change is good… that is, after it
occurs. Often however, there are large periods of discomfort as the
period of adjustment takes place. Here are some posts that discuss this
issue.
More Posts about Life
I have
broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones
actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little
different, in subtle ways.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are
reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal
library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come
and enjoy a read or two as well.
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
This is the full text of the wonderful science fiction story titled “Farnham’s Freehold”, by Robert Heinlein. It is a great story that was written during the height of the Cold War, when the M.A.D. military deterrence strategy was the rule of the land.
“Farnham’s Freehold” is kind of a post-apocalyptic Swiss Family Robinson meets a high tech, near-feudal dystopian society in which those of darker complexion are considered The Chosen while “whites” are treated as slaves as well as dinner. The destruction of the Northern Hemisphere has allowed the evolution of a dark-skin dominant society based on some tenets of the Koran, which is both decadent and highly intelligent, yet lacking in other areas (such as the idea of “fun”, especially via card games such as Bridge as well as Scrabble, Monopoly etc., etc as well as physical sports such as golf, baseball, etc.). This future society is absolutely fascinating, however, uncomfortable.Enjoy.
Chapter 1
“It’s not a hearing aid,” Hubert Farnham explained. “It’s a radio, tuned to the emergency frequency.”
Barbara Wells stopped with a bite halfway to her mouth. “Mr. Farnham!
You think they are going to attack?”
Her host shrugged. “The Kremlin doesn’t let me in on its secrets.” His son said, “Dad, quit scaring the ladies. Mrs. Wells — “
“Call me ‘Barbara.’ I’m going to ask the court to let me drop the ‘Mrs.’ “You don’t need permission.”
“Watch it, Barb,” his sister Karen said. “Free advice is expensive.” “Shaddap. Barbara, with all respect to my worthy father, he sees spooks.
There is not going to be a war.”
“I hope you’re right,” Barbara Wells said soberly. “Why do you think
so?”
“Because the communists are realists. They never risk a war that would
hurt them, even if they could win. So they won’t risk one they can’t win.” “Then I wish,” his mother said, “that they would stop having these
dreadful crises. Cuba. All that fuss about Berlin-as if anybody cared! And now this. It makes a person nervous. Joseph!”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“You fetch me coffee. And brandy. Café royale.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The houseboy, a young Negro, removed her plate, barely touched.
Young Farnham said, “Dad, it’s not these phony crises that has Mother upset; it’s the panicky way you behave. You must stop it.”
“No.”
“You must! Mother didn’t eat her dinner…and all because of that silly button in your ear. You can’t — “
“Drop it, Duke.” “Sir?”
“When you moved into your own apartment, we agreed to live as friends.
As my friend your opinions are welcome. But that does not make you free to interfere between your mother-my wife-and myself.”
His wife said, “Now, Hubert.” “Sorry, Grace.”
“You’re too harsh on the boy. It does make me nervous.”
“Duke is not a boy. And I’ve done nothing to make you nervous. Sorry.” “I’m sorry, too, Mother. But if Dad regards it as interference, well —
” Duke forced a grin. “I’ll have to find a wife of my own to annoy. Barbara, will you marry me?”
“No, Duke.”
“I told you she was smart, Duke,” his sister volunteered.
“Karen, pipe down. Why not, Barbara? I’m young, I’m healthy. Why, someday I might even have clients. In the meantime you can support us.”
“No, Duke. I agree with your father.” “Huh?”
“I should say that my father agrees with your father. I don’t know that my pops is carrying around a radio tonight but I’m certain that he is listening to one. Duke, every car in our family has a survival kit.”
“No fooling!”
“My car out in your father’s driveway, the one Karen and I drove down from school, has a kit in its trunk that Pops picked before I re-entered
college. Pops takes it seriously, so I do.”
Duke Farnham opened his mouth, closed it. His father asked, “Barbara, what did your father select?”
“Oh, lots of things. Ten gallons of water. Food. A jeep can of gasoline.
Medicines. A sleeping bag. A gun — ” “Can you use a gun?”
“Pops made me learn. A shovel. An ax. Clothes. Oh, yes, a radio. But the important thing was ‘Where?’ — so he kept saying. If I were at school, he would expect me to head for the basement of the gym. But here — Pops would expect me to head up into the mountains.”
“You won’t need to.” “Sir?”
“Dad means,” explained Karen, “that you are welcome in our panic hole.” Barbara showed a questioning look. Her host said, “Our bomb shelter.
‘Farnham’s Folly’ my son calls it. I think you would be safer there than you would be running for the hills-despite the fact that we are only ten miles from a MAMMA Base. If an alarm comes, we’ll duck into it. Right, Joseph?”
“Yes, sir! That way I stay on your payroll.”
“The hell you do. You’re fired the instant the sirens sound-and I start charging you rent.”
“Do I pay rent, too?” asked Barbara.
“You wash dishes. Everybody does. Even Duke.” “Count me out,” Duke said grimly.
“Eh? Not that many dishes, Son.”
“I’m not joking, Dad. Khrushchev said he would bury us — and you’re making it come true. I’m not going to crawl into a hole in the ground!”
“As you wish, sir.”
“Sonny boy!” His mother put down her cup. “If an attack comes, of course you’re going into the shelter!” She blinked back tears. “Promise Mother.”
Young Farnham looked stubborn, then sighed. “All right. If an attack comes — if an alarm sounds, I mean; there isn’t going to be an attack — I’ll go into your panic hole. But, Dad, this is just to soothe Mother’s nerves.”
“Nevertheless you are welcome.”
“Okay. Let’s go into the living room and break out the cards-with a firm understanding that we drop the subject. Suits?”
“Agreed.” His father got up and offered his arm to his wife. “My dear?” In the living room, Grace Farnham declined to play bridge. “No, dear,
I’m too upset. You play with the young people, and — Joseph! Joseph, bring me just a teensy bit more coffee. Royale, I mean. Don’t look that way, Hubert; it helps, you know it does.”
“Would you like a Miltown, dear?”
“I don’t need drugs. I’ll just have a drop more coffee.”
They cut for partners; Duke shook his head sadly. “Poor Barbara! Stuck with Dad — Did you warn her, Sis?”
“Keep your warnings to yourself,” his father advised.
“She’s entitled to know, Dad. Barbara, that juvenile delinquent across from you is as optimistic in contract as he is pessimistic in-well, in other matters. Watch out for psychic bids. If he has a Yarborough — “
“Drop dead, Duke. Barbara, what system do you prefer? Italian?”
Her eyes widened. “The only Italian I know is vermouth, Mr. Farnham. I play Goren. Nothing fancy, I just try to go by the book.”
“‘By the book,'” Hubert Farnham agreed.
“‘By the book,'” his son echoed. “Which book? Dad likes to ring in the Farmers’ Almanac, especially when you’re vulnerable, doubled and redoubled. Then he’ll point out how, if you had led diamonds — “
“Counselor,” his father interrupted, “will you deal those cards? Or
shall I stuff them down your throat?”
“I’ll go quietly. Put a little blood in it? A cent a point?” Barbara said hastily, “That’s steep for me.”
Duke answered, “You gals aren’t in it. Just Dad and myself. That’s how I pay my office rent.”
“Duke means,” his father corrected, “that is how he gets deep into debt to his old man. I was beating him out of his allowance when he was still in junior high.”
Barbara shut up and played cards. The stakes made her tense, even though it was not her money. Her nervousness was increased by suspicion that her partner was a match player.
Her nerves relaxed, though not her care, as it began to appear that Mr.
Farnham found her bidding satisfactory. But she welcomed the rest that came from being dummy. She spent these vacations studying Hubert Farnham.
She decided that she liked him, for the way he handled his family and for the way he played bridge-quietly, thoughtfully, exact in bidding, precise and sometimes brilliant in play. She admired the way he squeezed out the last trick, of a contract in which she had forced them too high, by having the boldness to sluff an ace.
She knew that Karen expected her to pair off with Duke this weekend and admitted that it seemed reasonable. Duke was as handsome as Karen was pretty- and a catch…rising young lawyer, a year older than herself, with a fresh and disarming wolfishness.
She wondered if he expected to make out with her? Did Karen expect it and was she watching, secretly amused?
Well, it wasn’t going to happen! She did not mind admitting that she was a one-time loser but she resented the assumption that any divorcee was available. Damn it, she hadn’t been in bed with anybody since that dreadful night when she had packed and left. Why did people think — Duke was looking at her; she locked eyes with him, blushed, and looked away, looked at his father instead.
Mr. Farnham was fiftyish, she decided. And looked it. Hair thinning and already gray, himself thin, almost gaunt, but with a slight potbelly, tired eyes, lines around them, and deep lines down his cheeks. Not handsome — With sudden warmth she realized that if Duke Farnham had half the strong masculine charm his father had, a panty girdle wouldn’t be much protection. She dismissed it by being quickly angry with Grace Farnham. What excuse did a woman have for being an incipient alcoholic, fretful and fat and self- indulgent, when she had this man?
The thought was chased away by realization that Mrs. Farnham was what Karen might become. Mother and daughter looked alike, save that Karen had not gone to pot. Barbara did not like this thought. She liked Karen better than any other sorority sister she had found when she went back to finish college. Karen was sweet and generous and gay — But perhaps Grace Farnham had been so, once. Did women have to become fretful and useless?
Hubert Farnham looked up from the last trick. “Three spades, game and rubber. Well bid, partner.”
She flushed again. “Well played, you mean. I invited too much.”
“Not at all. At worst we would have been down one. If you don’t bet, you can’t win. Karen, has Joseph gone to bed?”
“Studying. He’s got a quiz.”
“I thought we might invite him to cut in. Barbara, Joseph is the best player in this house-always audacity at the right time. Plus the fact that he is studying to be an accountant and never forgets a card. Karen, can you find us something without disturbing Joseph?”
“‘Spect ah kin, Boss. Vodka and tonic for you?” “And munching food.”
“Come on, Barbara. Let’s bottle.”
Hubert Farnham watched them go, while thinking it was a shame that so nice a child as Mrs. Wells should have had a sour marriage. A sound game of bridge and a good disposition — Gangly and horse faced, perhaps — But a nice smile and a mind of her own. If Duke had any gumption —
But Duke didn’t have any. He went to where his wife was nodding by the television receiver, and said, “Grace? Grace darling, ready for bed?” — then helped her into her bedroom.
When he came back, he found his son alone. He sat down and said, “Duke, I’m sorry about that difference of opinion at dinner.”
“That? Oh, forget it.”
“I would rather have your respect than your tolerance. I know that you disapprove of my ‘panic hole.’ But we have never discussed why I built it.”
“What is there to discuss? You think the Soviet Union is going to attack. You think that hole in the ground will save your life. Both ideas are unhealthy. Sick. Especially unhealthy for Mother. You are driving her to drink. I don’t like it. I liked it still less to have you remind me-me, a lawyer! — that I must not interfere between husband and wife.” Duke started to get up. “I’ll be going.”
“Please, Son! Doesn’t the defense get a chance?” “Uh — All right, all right!” Duke sat down.
“I respect your opinions. I don’t share them but many people do. Perhaps most people, since most Americans have made no effort to save themselves. But on the points you made, you are mistaken. I don’t expect the USSR to attack — and I doubt if our shelter is enough to save our lives.”
“Then why go around with that plug in your ear scaring Mother out of her
wits?”
“I’ve never had an automobile accident. But I carry auto insurance. That
shelter is my insurance policy.”
“But you just said it wouldn’t save your life!”
“No, I said I doubted that it would be enough. It could save our lives if we lived a hundred miles away. But Mountain Springs is a prime target…and no citizen can build anything strong enough to stop a direct hit.”
“Then why bother?”
“I told you. The best insurance I can afford. Our shelter won’t stop a direct hit. But it will stand up to a near miss-and Russians aren’t supermen and rockets are temperamental. I’ve minimized the risk. That’s the best I can do.”
Duke hesitated. “Dad, I can’t be diplomatic.” “Then don’t try.”
“So I’ll be blunt. Do you have to ruin Mother’s life, turn her into a lush, just on the chance that a hole in the ground will let you live a few years longer? Will it be worth while to be alive-afterwards-with the country devastated and all your friends dead?”
“Probably not.” “Then why?”
“Duke, you aren’t married.” “Obviously.”
“Son, I must be blunt myself. It has been years since I’ve had any real interest in staying alive. You are grown and on your own, and your sister is a grown woman, even though she is still in school. As for myself — ” He shrugged. “The most satisfying thing left is the fiddling pleasure of a game of bridge. As you are aware, there isn’t much companionship left in my marriage.”
“I am aware, all right. But it’s your fault. You’re crowding Mother into a nervous breakdown.”
“I wish it were that simple. In the first place — You were at law
school when I built the shelter, during that Berlin crisis. Your mother perked up and stayed sober. She would take a martini and let it go at that-instead of four as she did tonight. Duke, Grace wants that shelter.”
“Well-maybe so. But you aren’t soothing her by trotting around with that plug in your ear.”
“Perhaps not. But I have no choice.” “What do you mean?”
“Grace is my wife, Son. ‘To love and to cherish’ includes keeping her alive if I can. That shelter may keep her alive. But only if she is in it. How much warning today? Fifteen minutes, if we’re lucky. But three minutes could be time enough to get her into the shelter. But if I don’t hear the alert, I won’t have three minutes. So I listen. During any crisis.”
“Suppose it happens when you are asleep?”
His father smiled. “If the news is bad, I sleep with this button taped into my ear. When it’s really bad-as it is tonight — Grace and I sleep in the shelter. The girls will be urged to sleep there. And you are invited.”
“Not likely!”
“I didn’t think so.”
“Dad, stipulating that an attack is possible-merely stipulating, as the Russians aren’t crazy-why build a shelter smack on a target? Why don’t you pick a place far from any target, build there-again stipulating that Mother needs one for her nerves, which may be true-and get Mother off the sauce?”
Hubert Farnham sighed. “Son, she won’t have it. This is her home.” “Make her!”
“Duke, have you ever tried to make a woman do anything she really didn’t want to do? Besides that, a weakness for the sauce-hell, growing alcoholism-is not that simple. I must cope with it as best I can. However — Duke, I told you that I did not have much reason to stay alive. But I do have one reason.”
“Such as?”
“If those lying, cheating bastards ever throw their murder weapons at the United States, I want to live long enough to go to hell in style-with eight Russian side boys!”
Farnham twisted in his chair. “I mean it, Duke. America is the best thing in history, I think, and if those scoundrels kill our country, I want to kill a few of them. Eight side boys. Not less. I felt relieved when Grace refused to consider moving.”
“Why, Dad?”
“Because I don’t want that pig-faced peasant with the manners of a pig to run me out of my home! I’m a free man. I intend to stay free. I’ve made every preparation I can. But I wouldn’t relish running away. I — Here come the girls.”
Karen came in carrying drinks, followed by Barbara. “Hi! Barb got a look at our kitchen and decided to make crêpes Suzettes. Why are you two looking grim? More bad news?”
“No, but if you will snap the television on, we might get part of the ten o’clock roundup. Barbara, those glorified pancakes smell wonderful. Want a job as a cook?”
“What about Joseph?”
“We’ll keep Joseph as housekeeper.” “I accept.”
Duke said, “Hey! You refused my offer of honorable matrimony and turn around and agree to live in sin with my old man. How come?”
“I didn’t hear ‘sin’ mentioned.”
“Don’t you know? Barbara…Dad is a notorious sex criminal.” “Is this true, Mr. Farnham?”
“Well…”
“That’s why I studied law, Barbara. It was breaking us to bring Jerry
Giesler all the way from Los Angeles every time Dad got into a jam.” “Those were the good old days!” Duke’s father agreed. “But, Barbara,
that was years ago. Contract is my weakness now.”
“In that case I would expect a higher salary — “
“Hush, children!” Karen said forcefully. She turned up the sound:
” — agreed in principal to three out of four of the President’s major points and has agreed to meet again to discuss the fourth point, the presence of their nuclear submarines in our coastal waters. It may now be safely stated that the crisis, the most acute in post-World-War-Two years, does seem to be tapering oft to a mutual accommodation that both countries can live with. We pause to bring you exciting news from General Motors followed by an analysis in depth — “
Karen turned it down. Duke said, “Just as I said, Dad. You can take that cork out of your ear.”
“Later. I’m busy with crêpes Suzettes. Barbara, I’ll expect these for breakfast every morning.”
“Dad, quit trying to seduce her and cut the cards. I want to win back what I’ve lost.”
“That’ll be a long night.” Mr. Farnham~ finished eating, stood up to put his plate aside; the doorbell rang. “I’ll answer it.”
He went to the door, returned shortly. Karen said, “Who was it, Daddy? I cut for you. You and I are partners. Look pleased.”
“I’m delighted. But remember that a count of eleven is not an opening bid. Somebody lost, I guess. Possibly a nut.”
“My date. You scared him off.”
“Possibly. A baldheaded old coot, very weather-beaten and ragged.”
“My date,” Karen confirmed. “President of the Dekes. Go get him, Daddy.” “Too late. He took one look at me and fled. Whose bid is it?”
Barbara continued to try to play like a machine. But it seemed to her that Duke was overbidding; she found herself thereby bidding timidly and had to force herself to overcome it. They went set several times in a long, dreary rubber which they “won” but lost on points.
It was a pleasure to lose the next rubber with Karen as her partner.
They shifted and again she was Mr. Farnham’s partner. He smiled at her. “This time we clobber them!”
“I’ll try.”
“Just play as you did. By the book. Duke will supply the mistakes.” “Put your money where your mouth is, Dad. Want a side bet of a hundred
dollars on this rubber?” “A hundred it is.”
Barbara thought about seventeen lonely dollars in her purse and got nervous. She was still more nervous when the first hand ended at five clubs, bid and made-by Duke-and realized that he had overbid and would have been down one had she covered his finesse.
Duke said, “Care to double that bet, Governor?” “Okay. Deal.”
Her morale was bolstered by the second hand: her contract at four spades and made possible by voids; she was able to ruff before cleaning out trumps.
Her partner’s smile was reward enough. But it left her shaky.
Duke said, “Both teams vulnerable, no part score. How’s your blood pressure, Daddy-o? Double again?”
“Planning on firing your secretary?” “Speak up, or accept a white feather.” “Four hundred. You can sell your car.”
Mr. Farnham dealt. Barbara picked up her hand and frowned. The count was not bad-two queens, a couple of jacks, an ace, a king-but no biddable suit and the king was unguarded. It was a strength and distribution which she had long
tagged as “just good enough to go set on.” She hoped that it would be one of those sigh-of-relief hands in which everyone passes.
Her partner picked up his hand and glanced at it. “Three no trump.” Barbara repressed a gasp, Karen did gasp. “Daddy, are you feverish?” “Bid.”
“Pass!”
Barbara said to herself, “‘God oh god, what I do now?” Her partner’s bid promised twenty-five points-and invited slam. She held thirteen points.
Thirty-eight points in the two hands-grand slam.
That’s what the book said! Barbara girl, “three no trump” is twenty- five, twenty-six, or twenty-seven points-add thirteen and it reads “Grand Slam.”
But was Mr. Farnham playing by the book? Or was he bidding a shut-out to grab the rubber and nail down that preposterous bet?
If she passed, then game and rubber-and four hundred dollars-was certain. But grand slam (if they made it) was, uh, around fifteen dollars at the stakes Duke and his father were playing. Risk four hundred dollars of her partner’s money against a chance of fifteen? Ridiculous!
Could she sneak up on it with the Blackwood Convention? No, no! — there hadn’t been background bidding.
Was this one of those bids Duke had warned her about? (But her partner had said, “Play by the book.”) “Seven no trump,” she said firmly.
Duke whistled. “Thanks, Barbara. We’re ganging up on you, Dad. Double.” “Pass.”
“Pass,” Karen echoed.
Barbara again counted her hand. That singleton king looked awfully naked. But…either the home team had thirty-eight points-or it didn’t. “Redouble.”
Duke grinned. “Thanks, sweetie pie. Your lead, Karen.”
Mr. Farnham put down his hand and abruptly left the table. His son said, “Hey! Come back and take your medicine!”
Mr. Farnham snapped on the television, moved on and switched on the radio, changed its setting. “Red alert!” he snapped. “Somebody tell Joseph!” He ran out of the room.
“Come back! You can’t duck this with that kind of stunt!” “Shut up, Duke!” Karen snapped.
The television screen flickered into life: ” — closing down. Tune at once to your emergency station. Good luck, good-bye, and God bless you all!”
As the screen went blank the radio cut in: ” — not a drill. This is not a drill. Take shelter. Emergency personnel report to their stations. Do not go out on the street. If you have no shelter, stay in the best protected room of your home. This is not a drill. Unidentified ballistic objects have been radar sighted by our early-warning screens and it must be assumed that they are missiles. Take shelter. Emergency personnel report to their — “
“He means it,” Karen said in an awed voice. “Duke, show Barb where to go. I’ll wake Joseph.” She ran out of the room.
Duke said, “I don’t believe it.”
“Duke, how do we get into the shelter?”
“I’ll show you.” He stood up unhurriedly, picked up the hands, put each in a separate pocket. “Mine and Sis’s in my trousers, yours and Dad’s in my coat. Come on. Want your suitcase?”
“No!”
Chapter 2
Duke led her through the kitchen to the basement stairs. Mr. Farnham was halfway down, his wife in his arms. She seemed asleep. Duke snapped out of his attitude. “Hold it, Dad! I’ll take her.”
“Get on down and open the door!”
The door was steel set into the wall of the basement. Seconds were lost because Duke did not know how to handle its latch. At last Mr. Farnham passed his wife over to his son, opened it himself. Beyond, stairs led farther down. They managed it by carrying Mrs. Farnham, hands and feet, a limp doll, and took her through a second door into a room beyond. Its floor was six feet lower than the basement and under, Barbara decided, their back garden. She hung back while Mrs. Farnham was carried inside.
Mr. Farnham reappeared. “Barbara! Get in here! Where’s Joseph? Where’s Karen?”
Those two came rushing down the basement stairs as he spoke. Karen was flushed and seemed excited and happy. Joseph was looking wild-eyed and was dressed in undershirt and trousers, his feet bare.
He stopped short. “Mr. Farnham! Are they going to hit us?” “I’m afraid so. Get inside.”
The young Negro turned and yelled, “Doctor Livingston I presume!” — dashed back up the stairs.
Mr. Farnham said, “Oh, God!” and pressed his fists against his temples.
He added in his usual voice, “Get inside, girls. Karen, bolt the door but listen for me. I’ll wait as long as I can.” He glanced at his watch. “Five minutes.”
The girls went in. Barbara whispered, “What happened to Joseph?
Flipped?”
“Well, sort of. Dr. — Livingston-I-Presume is our cat. Loves Joseph, tolerates us.” Karen started bolting the inner door, heavy steel, and secured with ten inch-thick bolts.
She stopped. “I’m damned if I’ll bolt this all the way while Daddy is outside!”
“Don’t bolt it at all.”
Karen shook her head. “I’ll use a couple, so he can hear me draw them.
That cat may be a mile away.”
Barbara looked around. It was an L-shaped room; they had entered the end of one arm. Two bunks were on the right-hand wall; Grace Farnham was in the lower and still asleep. The left wall was solid with packed shelves; the passage was hardly wider than the door. The ceiling was low and arched and of corrugated steel. She could see the ends of two more bunks at the bend. Duke was not in sight but he quickly appeared from around the bend, started setting up a card table in the space there. She watched in amazement as he got out the cards he had picked up-how long ago? It seemed an hour. Probably less than five minutes.
Duke saw her, grinned, and placed folding chairs around the table.
There came a clanging at the door. Karen unbolted it; Joseph tumbled in, followed by Mr. Farnham. A lordly red Persian cat jumped out of Joseph’s arms, started an inspection. Karen and her father bolted the door. He glanced at his wife, then said, “Joseph! Help me crank.”
“Yes, sir!”
Duke came over. “Got her buttoned up, Skipper?” “All but the sliding door. It has to be cranked.”
“Then come take your licking.” Duke waved at the table. His father stared. “Duke, are you seriously proposing to finish a card game while we’re being attacked?”
“I’m four hundred dollars serious. And another hundred says we aren’t being attacked. In a half hour they’ll call it off and tomorrow’s papers will
say the northern lights fouled up the radar. Play the hand? Or default?” “Mmm — My partner will play it; I’m busy.”
“You stand behind the way she plays it?” “Of course.”
Barbara found herself sitting down at the table with a feeling that she had wandered into a dream. She picked up her partner’s hand, studied it. “Lead, Karen.”
Karen said, “Oh, hell!” and led the trey of clubs. Duke picked up the dummy, laid it out in suits. “What do you want on it?” he asked.
“Doesn’t matter. I’ll play both hands face up.” “Better not.”
“It’s solid.” She exposed the cards.
Duke studied them. “I see,” he admitted. “Leave the hands; Dad will want to see this.” He did some figuring. “Call it twenty-four hundred points. Dad!”
“Yes, Son?”
“I’m writing a check for four hundred and ninety-two dollars-and let that be a lesson to me.”
“You don’t need to — “
All lights went out, the floor slammed against their feet. Barbara felt frightening pressure on her chest, tried to stand up and was knocked over. All around was a noise of giant subway trains, and the floor heaved like a ship in a cross sea.
“Dad!”
“Yes, Duke! Are you hurt?”
“I don’t know. But make that five hundred and ninety-two dollars!”
The subterranean rumbling went on. Through this roar Barbara heard Mr. Farnham chuckle. “Forget it!” he called out. “The dollar just depreciated.”
Mrs. Farnham started to scream. “Hubert! Hubert, where are you? Hubert!
Make it stop!”
“Coming, dear!” A pencil of light cut the blackness, moved toward the bunks near the door. Barbara raised her head, made out that it was her host, on hands and knees with a flashlight in his teeth. He reached the bunk, succeeded in quieting Grace; her screams ceased. “Karen?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, Just bruised. My chair went over.”
“All right. Get the emergency lighting on in this bay. Don’t stand up.
Crawl. I’ll light you from here. Then get the hypo kit and-ow! Joseph!” “Yes, sir.”
“You in one piece?” “I’m okay, Boss.”
“Persuade your furry-faced Falstaff to join you. He jumped on me.” “He’s just friendly, Mr. Farnham.”
“Yes, yes. But I don’t want him doing that while I’m giving a hypo. Call
Some minutes later the rumbling had died out, the floor was steady, Mrs.
Farnham had been knocked out by injected drug, two tiny lights were glowing in the first bay, and Mr. Farnham was inspecting.
Damage was slight. Despite guardrails, cans had popped off shelves; a fifth of rum was broken. But liquor was almost the only thing stored in glass, and liquor had been left in cases, the rest of it had come through. The worst casualty was the shelter’s battery-driven radio, torn loose from the wall and smashed.
Mr. Farnham was on his knees, retrieving bits of it. His son looked down. “Don’t bother, Dad. Sweep it up and throw it away.”
“Some parts can be salvaged.”
“What do you know about radios?”
“Nothing,” his father admitted. “But I have books.”
“A book won’t fix that. You should have stocked a spare.” “I have a spare.”
“Then for God’s sake get it! I want to know what’s happened.”
His father got up slowly and looked at Duke. “I would like to know, too. I can’t hear anything over this radio I’m wearing. Not surprising, it’s short range. But the spare is packed in foam and probably wasn’t hurt.”
“Then get it hooked up.” “Later.”
“Later, hell. Where is it?”
Mr. Farnham breathed hard. “I’ve had all the yap I’m going to take.” “Huh? Sorry. Just tell me where the spare is.”
“I shan’t. We might lose it, too. I’m going to wait until I’m sure the attack is over.”
His son shrugged. “Okay, if you want to be difficult. But all of us want to hear the news. It’s a shabby trick if you ask me.”
“Nobody asked you. I told you I’ve had all the yap I’m going to take. If you’re itching to know what’s happening outside, you can leave. I’ll unbolt this door, crank back the armor door, and you can open the upper door yourself.”
“Eh? Don’t be silly.”
“But close it after you. I don’t want it open-both for blast and radioactivity.”
“That’s another thing. Don’t you have any way to measure radioactivity?
We ought to take steps to — ” “SHUT UP!”
“What? Dad, don’t pull the heavy-handed father on me.” “Duke, I ask you to keep quiet and listen. Will you?”
“Well…all right. But I don’t appreciate being bawled out in the presence of others.”
“Then keep your voice down.” They were in the first bay near the door. Mrs. Farnham was snoring by them; the others had retreated around the bend, unwilling to witness. “Are you ready to listen?”
“Very well, sir,” Duke said stiffly.
“Good. Son, I was not joking. Either leave…or do exactly as I tell you. That includes keeping your mouth shut when I tell you to. Which will it be? Absolute obedience, prompt and cheerful? Or will you leave?”
“Aren’t you being rather high-handed?”
“I intend to be. This shelter is a lifeboat and I am boat officer. For the safety of all I shall maintain discipline. Even if it means tossing somebody overboard.”
“That’s a farfetched simile. Dad, it’s a shame you were in the Navy. It gives you romantic ideas.”
“I think it’s a shame, Duke, that you never had service. You’re not realistic. Well, which is it? Will you take orders? Or leave?”
“You know I’m not going to leave. And you’re not serious in talking about it. It’s death out there.”
“Then you’ll take orders?”
“Uh, I’ll be cooperative. But this absolute dictatorship — Dad, tonight you made quite a point of the fact that you are a free man. Well, so am I. I’ll cooperate. But I won’t take unreasonable orders, and as for keeping my mouth shut, I’ll try to be diplomatic. But when I think it’s necessary, I’ll voice my opinion. Free speech. Fair enough?”
His father sighed. “Not nearly good enough, Duke. Stand aside, I want to unbolt the door.”
“Don’t push a joke too far, Dad.”
“I’m not joking. I’m putting you out.”
“Dad…I hate to say this…but I don’t think you are man enough. I’m bigger than you are and a lot younger.”
“I know. I’ve no intention of fighting you.” “Then let’s drop this silly talk.”
“Duke, please! I built this shelter. Not two hours ago you were sneering at it, telling me that it was a ‘sick’ thing to do. Now you want to use it, since it turned out you were wrong. Can’t you admit that?”
“Oh, certainly. You’ve made your point.”
“Yet you are telling me how to run it. Telling me that I should have provided a spare radio. When you hadn’t provided anything. Can’t you be a man, give in, and do as I tell you? When your life depends on my hospitality?”
“Cripes! I told you I would cooperate.”
“But you haven’t been doing so. You’ve been making silly remarks, getting in my way, giving me lip, wasting my time when I have urgent things to do. Duke, I don’t want your cooperation, on your terms, according to your judgment. While we are in this shelter I want your absolute obedience.”
Duke shook his head. “Get it through your head that I’m no longer a child, Dad. My cooperation, yes. But I won’t promise the other.”
Mr. Farnham shook his head sorrowfully. “Maybe it would be better if you took charge and I obeyed you. But I’ve given these circumstances thought and you haven’t. Son, I anticipated that your mother might be hysterical; I had everything ready to handle it. Don’t you think I anticipated this situation?”
“How so? It’s pure chance that I’m here at all.”
“‘This situation’ I said. It could be anybody. Duke, if we had been entertaining friends tonight-or if strangers had popped up, say that old fellow who rang the doorbell-I would have taken them in; I planned on extras. Don’t you think, with all the planning I have done, that I would realize that somebody might get out of hand? And plan how to force them into line?”
“How?”
“In a lifeboat, how do you tell the boat officer?” “Is that a riddle?”
“No. The boat officer is the one with the gun.”
“Oh. I suppose you do have guns down here. But you don’t have one now, and” — Duke grinned — “Dad, I can’t see you shooting me. Can you?”
His father stared, then dropped his eyes. “No. A stranger, maybe. But you’re my son.” He sighed. “Well, I hope you cooperate.”
“I will. I promise you that much.”
“Thank you. If you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.” Mr. Farnham turned away. “Joseph!”
“Yes, sir?”
“It’s condition seven.” “Condition seven, sir?”
“Yes, and getting worse. Be careful with the instruments and don’t waste
time.”
“Right away, sir!”
“Thank you.” He turned to his son. “Duke, if you really want to
cooperate, you could pick up the pieces of this radio. It’s the same model as the one in reserve. There may be pieces we can use to repair the other one if it becomes necessary. Will you do that?”
“Sure, sure. I told you I would cooperate.” Duke got on his knees, started to complete the task he had interrupted.
“Thank you.” His father turned away, moved toward the junction of the
bays.
“Mr. Duke! Get your hands up!”
Duke looked over his shoulder, saw Joseph by the card table, aiming a
Thompson submachine gun at him. He jumped to his feet. “What the hell!”
“Stay there!” Joseph said. “I’ll shoot.”
“Yes,” agreed Duke’s father, “he doesn’t have the compunctions you thought I had. Joseph, if he moves, shoot him.”
“Daddy! What’s going on?”
Mr. Farnham turned to face his daughter. “Get back!” “But, Daddy — “
“Shut up. Both of you get into that lower bunk. Karen on the inside.
Move!”
Karen moved. Barbara looked wide-eyed at the automatic her host now held
in his hand and got quickly into the lower bunk of the other bay. “Arms around each other,” he said briskly. “Don’t either of you let the other one move.” He went back to the first bay.
“Duke.”
“Yes?”
“Lower your hands slowly and unfasten your trousers. Let them fall but don’t step out of them. Then turn slowly and face the door. Unfasten the bolts.”
“Dad — “
“Shut up. Joseph, if he does anything but exactly what I told him to, shoot. Try for his legs, but hit him.”
Face white, expression dazed, Duke did as he was told: let his trousers fall until he was hobbled, turned and started unbolting the door. His father let him continue until half the bolts were drawn. “Duke. Stop. The next few seconds determine whether you go-or stay. You know the terms.”
Duke barely hesitated. “I accept.”
“I must elaborate. You will not only obey me, you will obey Joseph.” “Joseph?”
“My second-in-command. I have to have one, Duke; I can’t stay awake all the time. I would gladly have had you as deputy-but you would have nothing to do with it. So I trained Joseph. He knows where everything is, how it works, how to repair it. So he’s my deputy. Well? Will you obey him just as cheerfully? No back talk?”
Duke said slowly, “I promise.”
“Good. But a promise made under duress isn’t binding. There is another commitment always given under duress and nevertheless binding, a point which as a lawyer you will appreciate. I want your parole as a prisoner. Will you give me your parole to abide by the conditions until we leave the shelter? A straight quid-pro-quo: your parole in exchange for not being forced outside?”
“You have my parole.”
“Thank you. Throw the bolts and fasten your trousers. Joseph, stow the Tommy gun.”
“Okay, Boss.”
Duke secured the door, secured his pants. As he turned around, his father offered him the automatic, butt first. “What’s this for?” Duke asked.
“Suit yourself. If your parole isn’t good, I would rather find it out
now.”
Duke took the gun, removed the clip, worked the slide and caught the
cartridge from the chamber, put it back into the clip and reloaded the gun- handed it back. “My parole is good. Here.”
“Keep it. You were always a headstrong boy, Duke, but you were never a
liar.”
“Okay…Boss.” His son put the pistol in a pocket. “Hot in here.” “And going to get hotter.”
“Eh? How much radiation do you think we’re getting?”
“I don’t mean radiation. Fire storm.” He walked into the space where the
bays joined, looked at a thermometer, then at his wrist. “Eighty-four and only twenty-three minutes since we were hit. It’ll get worse.”
“How much worse?”
“How would I know, Duke? I don’t know how far away the hit was, how many megatons, how widespread the fire. I don’t even know whether the house is burning overhead, or was blasted away. Normal temperature in here is about fifty degrees. That doesn’t look good. But there is nothing to do about it.
Yes, there’s one thing. Strip down to shorts. I shall.”
He went into the other bay. The girls were still in the lower bunk, arms around each other, keeping quiet. Joseph was on the floor with his back to the wall, the cat in his lap. Karen looked round-eyed as her father approached but she said nothing.
“You kids can get up.”
“Thanks,” said Karen. “Pretty warm for snuggling.” Barbara backed out and Karen sat up.
“So it is. Did you hear what just happened?” “Some sort of argument,” Karen said cautiously.
“Yes. And it’s the last one. I’m boss and Joseph is my deputy.
Understood?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“Mrs. Wells?”
“Me? Why, of course! It’s your shelter. I’m grateful to be in it-I’m grateful to be alive! And please call me Barbara, Mr. Farnham.”
“Sorry. 11mm — Call me ‘Hugh,’ I prefer it to “Hubert.’ Duke, everybody-first names from now on. Don’t call me ‘Dad,’ call me ‘Hugh.’ Joe, knock off the ‘mister’ and the ‘miss.’ Catch?”
“Okay, Boss, if you say so.”
“Make that ‘Okay, Hugh.’ Now you girls peel down, panties and bra or such, then get Grace peeled to her skin and turn the light out there. It’s hot, it’s going to get hotter. Joe, strip to your shorts.” Mr. Farnham took his jacket off, started unbuttoning his shirt.
Joseph said, “Uh, I’m comfortable.” “I wasn’t asking, I was telling you.” “Uh…Boss, I’m not wearing shorts!”
“He’s not,” Karen confirmed. “I rushed him.”
“So?” Hugh looked at his ex-houseboy and chuckled. “Joe, you’re a sissy.
I should have made Karen straw boss.” “Suits me.”
“Get a pair out of stores and you can change in the toilet space. While you’re about it, show Duke where it is. Karen, the same for Barbara. Then we’ll gather for a powwow.”
The powwow started five minutes later. Hugh Farnham was at the table, dealing out bridge hands, assessing them. When they were seated he said, “Anybody for bridge?”
“Daddy, you’re joking.”
“My name is ‘Hugh.’ I was not joking, a rubber of bridge might quiet your nerves. Put away that cigarette, Duke.”
“Uh…sorry.”
“You can smoke tomorrow, I think. Tonight I’ve got pure oxygen cracked pretty wide and we are taking in no air. You saw the bottles in the toilet space?” The space between the bays was filled by pressure bottles, a water tank, a camp toilet, stores, and a small area where a person might manage a stand-up bath. Air intakes and exhausts, capped off, were there, plus a hand- or-power blower, and scavengers for carbon dioxide and water vapor. This space was reached by an archway between the tiers of bunks.
“Oxygen in those? I thought it was air.”
“Couldn’t afford the space penalty. So we can’t risk fire, even a cigarette. I opened one inlet for a check. Very hot — heat ‘hot’ as well as making a Geiger counter chatter. Folks, I don’t know how long we’ll be on
bottled breathing. I figured thirty-six hours for four people, so it’s nominally twenty-four hours for six, but that’s not the pinch. I’m sweating- and so are you. We can take it to about a hundred and twenty. Above that, we’ll have to use oxygen just to cool the place. It might end in a fine balance between heat and suffocation. Or worse.”
“Daddy — ‘Hugh,’ I mean. Are you breaking it gently that we are going to be baked alive?”
“You won’t be, Karen. I won’t let you be.” “Well…I prefer a bullet.”
“Nor will you be shot. I have enough sleeping pills to let twenty people die painlessly. But we aren’t here to die. We’ve had vast luck; with a little more we’ll make it. So don’t be morbid.”
“How about radioactivity?” asked Duke. “Can you read an integrating counter?” “No.”
“Take my word for it that we are in no danger yet. Now about sleeping — This side, where Grace is, is the girls’ dorm; this other side is ours. Only four bunks but that’s okay; one person has to monitor air and heat, and the other one without a bed can keep him awake. However, I’m taking the watch tonight and won’t need company; I’ve taken Dexedrine.”
“I’ll stand watch.” “I’ll stay up with you.” “I’m not sleepy.”
“Slow down!” Hugh said. “Joe, you can’t stand watch now because you have to relieve me when I’m tuckered out. You and I will alternate until the situation is safe.”
Joe shrugged and kept quiet. Duke said, “Then it’s my privilege.” “Can’t either of you add? Two bunks for women, two for men. What’s left
over? We’ll fold this table and the gal left over can sprawl on the floor here. Joe, break out the blankets and put a couple here and a couple in the tank space for me.”
“Right away, Hugh!”
Both girls insisted on standing watch. Hugh shut them off. “Cut for it.” “But — “
“Pipe down, Barbara. Ace low, and low girl sleeps in a bunk, the other here on the floor. Duke, do you want a sleeping pill?”
“That’s one habit I don’t have.” “Don’t be an iron man.” “Well…a rain check?”
“Surely. Joe? Seconal?”
“Well, I’m so relieved that I don’t have to take that quiz tomorrow…” “Glad somebody is happy. All right.”
“I was going to add that I’m pretty keyed up. You’re sure you won’t need
me?”
“I’m sure. Karen, get one for Joe. You know where?”
“Yes, and I’m going to get one for me, since I won the cut. I’m no iron
man! And a Miltown on top of it.”
“Do that. Sorry, Barbara, you can’t have one; I might have to wake you and have you keep me awake. You can have Miltown. You’ll probably sleep from it.”
“I don’t need it.”
“As you wish. Bed, everybody. It’s midnight and two of you are going on watch in eight hours.”
In a few minutes all were in bed, with Barbara where the table had been; all lights out save one in the tank space. Hugh squatted on blankets there, playing solitaire-badly.
Again the floor heaved, again came that terrifying rumble. Karen
screamed.
Hugh was up at once. This one was not as violent; he was able to stay on his feet. He hurried into the girls’ dorm. “Baby! Where are you?” He fumbled, found the light switch.
“Up here, Daddy. Oh, I’m scared! I was just dropping off and it almost threw me out. Help me down.”
He did so; she clung to him, sobbing. “There, there,” he said, patting her. “You’ve been a brave girl, don’t let it throw you.”
“I’m not brave. I’ve been scared silly all along. I just didn’t want it to show.”
“Well…I’m scared too. So let’s not show it, huh? Better have another pill. And a stiff drink.”
“All right. Both. I’m not going to sleep in that bunk. It’s too hot up there, as well as scary when it shakes.”
“All right, I’ll pull the mattress down. Where’s your panties and bra, baby girl? Better put ’em on.”
“Up there. I don’t care, I just want people. Oh, I suppose I should.
Shock Joseph if I didn’t.”
“Just a moment. Here are your pants. But where did you hide your brassiere?”
“Maybe it got pushed down behind.”
Hugh dragged the mattress down. “I don’t find it.”
“The hell with it. Joe can look the other way. I want that drink.” “All right. Joe’s a gentleman.”
Duke and Barbara were sitting on the blanket she had been napping on; they were looking very solemn. Hugh said, “Where’s Joe? He wasn’t hurt, was he?”
bunk.”
Duke gave a short laugh. “Want to see ‘Sleeping Innocence’? That bottom
Hugh found his second-in-command sprawled on his back, snoring, as
deeply unconscious as Grace Farnham. Dr. — Livingstone-I-Presume was curled up on his chest. Hugh came back. “Well, that blast was farther away. I’m glad Joe could sleep.”
“It was too damned close to suit me! When are they going to run out of those things?”
“Soon, I hope. Folks, Karen and I have just formed the ‘I’m-scared-too’ club and are about to celebrate with a drink. Any candidates?”
“I’m a charter member!”
“So am I,” agreed Barbara. “God, yes!”
Hugh fetched paper cups, and bottles-Scotch, Seconal, and Miltown. “Water, anyone?”
Duke said, “I don’t want anything interfering with the liquor.” “Water, please,” Barbara answered. “It’s so hot.”
“How hot is it, Daddy?”
“Duke, I put the thermometer in the tank room. Go see, will you?” “Sure. And may I use that rain check?”
“Certainly.” Hugh gave Karen another Seconal capsule, another Miltown pill, and told Barbara that she must take a Miltown-then took one himself, having decided that Dexedrine had made him edgy. Duke returned.
“One hundred and four degrees,” he announced. “I opened the valve another quarter turn. All right?”
“Have to open it still wider soon. Here are your pills, Duke-a double dose of Seconal and a Miltown.”
“Thanks.” Duke swallowed them, chased them with whisky. “I’m going to sleep on the floor, too. Coolest place in the house.”
“Smart of you. All right, let’s settle down. Give the pills a chance.” Hugh sat with Karen after she bedded down, then gently extracted his
hand from hers and returned to the tank room. The temperature was up two degrees. He opened the valve on the working tank still wider, listened to it sigh to emptiness, shook his head, got a wrench and shifted the gauge to a full tank. Before he opened it, he attached a hose, led it out into the main room. Then he went back to pretending to play solitaire.
A few minutes later Barbara appeared in the doorway. “I’m not sleepy,” she said. “Could you use some company?”
“You’ve been crying.” “Does it show? I’m sorry.”
“Come sit down. Want to play cards?”
“If you want to. All I want is company.” “We’ll talk. Would you like another drink?” “Oh, would I! Can you spare it?”
“I stocked plenty. Barbara, can you think of a better night to have a drink? But both of us will have to see to it that the other one doesn’t go to sleep.”
“All right. I’ll keep you awake.”
They shared a cup, Scotch with water from the tank. It poured out as sweat faster than they drank it. Hugh increased the gas flow again and found that the ceiling was unpleasantly hot. “Barbara, the house must have burned over us. There is thirty inches of concrete above us and then two feet of dirt.”
“How hot do you suppose it is outside?”
“Couldn’t guess. We must have been close to the fireball.” He felt the ceiling again. “I beefed this thing up-roof, walls, and floor are all one steel-reinforced box. It was none too much. We may have trouble getting the doors open. All this heat — And probably warped by concussion.”
She said quietly, “Are we trapped?”
“No, no. Under these bottles is a hatch to a tunnel. Thirty inch culvert pipe with concrete around it. Leads to the gully back of the garden. We can break out-crowbars and a hydraulic jack-even if the end is crushed in and covered with crater glass. I’m not worried about that; I’m worried about how long we can stay inside…and whether it will be safe when we leave.”
“How bad is the radioactivity?”
He hesitated. “Barbara, would it mean anything to you? Know anything about radiation?”
“Enough. I’m majoring-I was majoring-in botany; I’ve used isotopes in genetics experiments. I can stand bad news, Hugh, but not knowing-well, that’s why I was crying.”
“Mmm — The situation is worse than I told Duke.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Integrating counter back of the bottles. Go look.”
She went to it, stayed several minutes. When she came back, she sat down without speaking. “Well?” he asked.
“Could I have another drink?” “Certainly.” He mixed it.
She sipped it, then said quietly, “If the slope doesn’t change, we’ll hit the red line by morning.” She frowned. “But that marks a conservative limit. III remember the figures, we probably won’t start vomiting for at least another day.”
“Yes. And the curve should level off soon. That’s why heat worries me more than radiation.” He looked at the thermometer, cracked the valve still wider. “I’ve been running the water-vapor getter on battery; I don’t think we should crank the blower in this heat. I’m not going to worry about Cee-Oh-Two until we start to pant.”
“Seems reasonable.”
“Let’s forget the hazards. Anything you’d like to talk about? Yourself?” “Little to tell, Hugh. Female, white, twenty-five years old. Back in
school, or was, after a bad marriage. A brother in the Air Force-so possibly he’s all right. My parents were in Acapulco, so perhaps they are, too. No pets, thank God-and I was so pleased that Joe saved his cat. No regrets, Hugh, and not afraid…not really. Just…sad.” She sniffed. “It was a pretty nice world, even if I did crumb up my marriage.”
“Don’t cry.”
“I’m not crying! Those drops are sweat.” “Yes. Surely.”
“They are. It’s terribly hot.” Suddenly she reached both hands behind her ribs. “Do you mind? If I take this off? Like Karen? It’s smothering me.”
“Go ahead. Child, if you can get comfortable-or less uncomfortable-do so. I’ve seen Karen all her life, Grace even longer. Skin doesn’t shock me.” He stood up, went behind the oxygen bottles, and looked at the record of radiation. Having done so, he checked the thermometer and increased the flow of oxygen.
As he sat down he remarked, “I might as well have stored air instead of oxygen, then we could smoke. But I did not expect to use it for cooling.” He ignored the fact that she had accepted his invitation to be comfortable. He added, “I was worried about heating the place. I tried to design a stove to use contaminated air safely. Possible. But difficult.”
“I think you did amazingly well. This is the only shelter I’ve ever heard of with stored air. You’re a scientist. Aren’t you?”
“Me? Heavens, no. High school only. What little I know I picked up here and there. Some in the Navy, metal work and correspondence courses. Then I worked for a public futility and learned something about construction and pipelines. Then I became a contractor.” He smiled. “No, Barbara, I’m a ‘general specialist.’ ‘The Elephant Child’s ‘satiable curiosity.’ Like Dr.– Livingston-I-Presume.
“How did a cat get a name like that?”
“Karen. Because he’s a great explorer. That cat can get into anything.
Do you like cats?”
“I don’t know much about them. But Dr. Livingstone is a beauty.” “So he is but I like all cats. You don’t own a cat, he is a free
citizen. Take dogs; dogs are friendly and fun and loyal. But slaves. Not their fault, they’ve been bred for it. But slavery makes me queasy, even in animals.”
He frowned. “Barbara, I’m not as sad over what has happened as you are.
It might be good for us. I don’t mean us six; I mean our country.” She looked startled. “How?”
“Well — It’s hard to take the long view when you are crouching in a shelter and wondering how long you can hold out. But — Barbara, I’ve worried for years about our country. It seems to me that we have been breeding slaves- and I believe in freedom. This war may have turned the tide. This may be the first war in history which kills the stupid rather than the bright and able- where it makes any distinction.”
“How do you figure that, Hugh?”
“Well, wars have always been hardest on the best young men. This time the boys in service are as safe or safer than civilians. And of civilians those who used their heads and made preparations stand a far better chance. Not every case, but on the average, and that will improve the breed. When it’s over, things will be tough, and that will improve the breed still more. For years the surest way of surviving has been to be utterly worthless and breed a lot of worthless kids. All that will change.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “That’s standard genetics. But it seems cruel.” “It is cruel. But no government yet has been able to repeal natural
laws, though they keep trying.”
She shivered in spite of the heat. “I suppose you’re right. No, I know
you’re right. But I could face it more cheerfully if I thought there was going to be any country left. Killing the poorest third is good genetics…but there is nothing good about killing them all.”
“Mmm, yes. I hate to think about it. But I did think about it. Barbara, I didn’t stockpile oxygen just against radiation and fire storm. I had in mind worse things.”
“Worse? How?”
“All the taik about the horrors of World War Three has been about atomic weapons-fallout, hundred-megaton bombs, neutron bombs. The disarmament talks and the pacifist parades have all been about the Bomb, the Bomb, the Bomb-as if A-weapons were the only thing that could kill. This may not be just an A- weapons war; more likely it is an ABC war-atomic, biological, and chemical.” He hooked a thumb at the tanks. “That’s why I stocked that bottled breathing. Against nerve gas. Aerosols. Viruses. God knows what. The communists won’t smash this country if they can kill us without destroying our wealth. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that bombs had been used only on military targets like the antimissile base here, but that New York and Detroit and such received nerve gas. Or a twenty-four plague with eighty percent mortality. The horrid possibilities are endless. The air outside could be loaded with death that a counter won’t detect and a filter can’t stop.” He smiled grimly. “Sorry. You had better go back to bed.”
“I’m miserable anyway and don’t want to be alone. May I stay?” “Certainly. I’m happier with you present no matter how gloomy I sound.” “What you’ve been saying isn’t nearly as gloomy as the thoughts I have
alone. I wish we knew what was going on outside!” She added, “I wish we had a periscope.”
“We do have.” “Huh? Where?”
“Did have. Sorry. That pipe over there. I tried to raise it but it won’t budge. However — Barbie, I tromped on Duke for demanding that I break out our spare radio before the attack was over. But maybe it’s over. What do you think?”
“Me? How would I know?”
“You know as much as I do. That first missile was intended to take out the MAMMA base; they wouldn’t bother with us otherwise. If they are spotting from orbiting spaceships, then that second one was another try at the same target. The timing fits, time of flight from Kamchatka is about half an hour and the second hit about forty-five minutes after the first. That one was probably a bull’s-eye-and they know it, because more than an hour has passed and no third missile. That means they are through with us. Logical?”
“Sounds logical to me.”
“It’s crumby logic, my dear. Not enough data. Perhaps both missiles failed to knock out MAMMA, and MAMMA is now knocking out anything they throw. Perhaps the Russkis have run out of missiles. Perhaps the third round will be delivered by bomber. We don’t know. But I’m itching to find out. Twist my arm.”
“I would certainly like to hear some news.”
“We’ll try. If it’s good news, we’ll wake the others.” Hugh Farnham dug into a corner, came out with a box, unpacked a radio. “Doesn’t have a scratch. Let’s try it without an antenna.
“Nothing but static,” he announced shortly. “Not surprised. Although it’s mate could pull in local stations without an aerial. Now we’ll hook to the fixed antenna. Wait here.”
He returned shortly. “No soap. Stands to reason that there isn’t anything left of the fixed antenna. So we’ll try the emergency one.”
Hugh took a wrench and removed a cap from an inch pipe that stuck down through the ceiling. He tested the opening with a radiation counter. “A little
more count.” He got two steel rods, each five feet long; with one he probed the pipe. “Doesn’t go up as far as it should. The top of this pipe was buried just belowground. Trouble.” He screwed the second rod into the first.
“Now comes the touchy part. Stand back, there may be debris-hot both ways-spilling down.”
“It’ll get on you.”
“On my hands, maybe. I’ll scrub afterwards. You can go over me with a Geiger counter.” He tapped with a sledge on the bottom of the joined rods. Up they went about eighteen inches. “Something solid. I’ll have to bang it.”
Many blows later the rod was seated into the pipe. “It felt,” he said, as he stopped to scrub his hands, “as if we passed into open air the last foot or so. But it should have stuck out five feet above ground. Rubble, I suppose. What’s left of our home. Want to use the counter on me?”
“Hugh, you say that as casually as ‘What’s left of yesterday’s milk.”
He shrugged. “Barbie girl, I was broke when I joined the Navy, I’ve been flat busted since; I will not waste tears over a roof and some plumbing.
Getting any count?”
“You’re clean.”
“Check the floor under the pipe.”
There were hot spots on the floor; Hugh wiped them with damp Kleenex, disposed of it in a metal waste can. She checked his hands afterwards, and the spots on the floor.
“Well, that used up a gallon of water; this radio had better work.” He clipped the antenna lead to the rod, switched it on.
Ten minutes later they admitted that they were getting nothing. Noise- static all over the dial-but no signal. He sighed. “I’m not surprised. I don’t know what ionization does to radio waves, but that must be a sorcerer’s brew of hot isotopes over our heads. I had hoped we could get Salt Lake City.”
“Not Denver?”
“No. Denver had an ICBM base. I’ll leave the gain up; maybe we’ll hear something.”
“Don’t you want to save the battery?”
“Not really. Let’s sit down and recite limericks.” He looked at the integrating counter, whistled softly, then checked the thermometer. “I’ll give our sleeping beauties a little more relief from the heat. How well are you standing it, Barbie?”
“Truthfully, I had forgotten it. The sweat pours off and that’s that.” “Me, too.”
“Well, don’t use more oxygen on my account. How many bottles are left?” “Not many.”
“How many?”
“Less than half. Don’t fret. I’ll bet you five hundred thousand dollars- fifty cents in the new currency-that you can’t recite a limerick I don’t know.”
“Clean, or dirty?”
“Are there clean ones?”
“Okay. ‘A playful young fellow named Scott — ‘” The limerick session was a flop. Hugh accused her of having a clean mind. She answered, “Not really, Hugh. But my mind isn’t working.”
“I’m not at my sharpest. Another drink?”
“Yes. With water, please, I sweat so; I’m dry. Hugh?” “Yes, Barbie?”
“We’re going to die. Aren’t we?” “Yes.”
“I thought so. Before morning?”
“Oh, no! I feel sure we can live till noon. If we want to.”
“I see. Hugh, would you mind if I moved over by you? Would you put your
arm around me? Or is it too hot?”
“Any time I’m too hot to put my arm around a girl I’ll know I’m dead and in hell.”
“Thanks.” “Room enough?” “Plenty.”
“You’re a little girl.”
“I weigh a hundred and thirty-two pounds and I’m five feet eight and that’s not little.”
“You’re a little girl. Put the cup aside. Tilt your face up.” “Mmmm — Again. Please, again.”
“A greedy little girl.”
“Yes. Very greedy. Thank you, Hugh.” “Such pretty ones.”
“They’re my best feature. My face isn’t much. But Karen’s are prettier.” “A matter of opinion. Your opinion.”
“Well — I won’t argue. Scrunch over a little, dear. Dear Hugh — ” “All right?”
“Room enough. Wonderfully all right. And kiss me, too. Please?” “Barbara, Barbara!”
“Hugh darling! I love you. Oh!” “I love you, Barbara.”
“Yes. Yes! Oh, please! Now!” “Right now!”
“You all right, Barbie?”
“I’ve never been more all right. I’ve never been happier in my life.” “I wish that were true.”
“It is true. Hugh darling, I’m utterly happy now and not at all afraid.
I feel wonderful. Not even too warm.” “I’m dripping sweat on you.”
“I don’t mind. There are two drops on your chin and one on the end of your nose. And I’m so sweaty my hair is soaked. Doesn’t matter. Hugh dearest, this is what I wanted. You. I don’t mind dying-now.”
“I do!”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, no! Barbie hon, I didn’t mind dying, before. Now suddenly life is worth living.”
“Oh. I think it’s the same feeling.”
“Probably. But we aren’t going to die, ii I can swing it. Want to move
now?”
“If you want to. If you’ll put your arm around me after we do.”
“Try to stop me. But first I’m going to make us a long, tall drink. I’m
thirsty again. And breathless.”
“Me, too. Your heart is pounding.”
“It has every excuse. Barbie girl, do you realize that I am more than twice your age? Old enough to be your father.”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“Why, you little squirt! Talk that way and I’ll drink this all myself.” “Yes, Hugh. Hugh my beloved. But we are the same age
because we are going to die at the same time.”
“Don’t talk about dying. I’m going to find some way to outwit it.”
“If anybody can, you will. Hugh, I’m not feeling morbid. I’ve looked it in the face and I’m no longer afraid-not afraid to die, not afraid to live.
But — Hugh, I’d like one favor.” “Name it.”
“When you give the pills to the others-the overdose-I don’t want them.”
“Uh…it might be needful.”
“I didn’t mean that I wouldn’t; I will when you tell me to. But not when the others do. Not until you do.”
“Mmm, Barbie, I don’t plan on taking them.” “Then please don’t make me take them.”
“Well — I’ll think about it. Now shut up. Kiss me.” “Yes, dear.”
“Such long legs you have, Barbie. Strong, too.” “And such big feet.”
“Quit fishing for compliments. I like your feet. You would look unfinished without them.”
“Be inconvenient, too. Hugh, do you know what I would like to do?” “Again?”
“No, no. Well, yes. But right now.”
“Sleep? Go ahead, dear. I won’t fall asleep.”
“No, not sleep. I’m not ever going to sleep again. Never. I can’t spare one minute we’ve got left. I was thinking that I would like to play contract again-as your partner.”
“Well — We might be able to rouse Joe. Not the others; three grains of Seconal is pretty convincing. We could play three-handed.”
“No, no. I don’t want any company but you. But I so enjoyed playing, as your partner.”
“You’re a good partner, honey. The best. When you say ‘by the book,’ you mean it.”
“Not ‘the best.’ I’m not in your class. But I wish that we had-oh, years and years ! — so that I could get to be. And I wish the attack had held off ten minutes, so that you could have played that grand slam.”
“Didn’t need to. When you answered my bid I knew it was a lay-down.” He squeezed her shoulders. “Three grand slams in one night.”
“Three?”
“Didn’t you consider that H-bomb a grand slam?” “Oh. And then there was the second bomb, later.”
“I was not counting the second bomb, it was too far away. If you don’t know what I counted, I refuse to draw a diagram.”
“Oh! In that case, there could easily be a fourth grand slam. I can’t make another forcing bid; my bra is gone and — “
“Was that a forcing bid?”
“Of course it was. But you can make the next forcing bid. I’ll spot it.” “Slow down! Three grand slams is maximum. A small slam, maybe-if I take another Dexedrine. But four grand slams? Impossible. You know how old I am.” “We’ll see. I think we’ll get a fourth.”
At that moment the biggest slam of all hit them.
Chapter 3
The light went out, Grace Farnham screamed, Dr. — Livingstone — I- Presume wailed, Barbara was knocked silly and came to heaped over a steel bottle and disoriented by blackness and no floors or walls.
She groped around, found a leg, found Hugh attached to it. He was limp.
She felt for his heartbeat, could not find it.
She shouted: “Hello! Hello! Anybody!” Duke answered, “Barbara?” “Yes, yes!”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m all right. Hugh is hurt. I think he’s dead.”
“Take it easy. When I find my trousers, I’ll light a match — if I can
get off my shoulders. I’m standing on them.” “Hubert! Hubert!”
“Yes, Mother! Wait.” Grace continued to scream; Duke alternated reassurances and cursing the darkness. Barbara felt around, slipped on loose oxygen bottles, hurt her shin, and found a flat surface. She could not tell what it was; it was canted steeply.
Duke called out, “Got ’em!” A match flared up, torch bright in oxygen- rich air.
Joe’s voice said, “Better put that out. Fire hazard.” A flashlight beam cut the gloom.
Barbara called out, “Joe! Help me with Hugh!” “Got to see about lights.”
“He may be dying.”
“Can’t do a thing without light.” Barbara shut up, tried again to find heartbeat-found it and clutched Hugh’s head, sobbing.
Lights came on in the men’s bay; enough trickled in so that Barbara could make out her surroundings. The floor sloped about thirty degrees; she, Hugh, steel bottles, water tank, and other gear were jumbled in the lower corner. The tank had sprung a leak and was flooding the toilet space. She saw that, had the tilt been the other way, she and Hugh would have been buried under steel and water.
Minutes later Duke and Joe joined her, letting themselves down through the door. Joe carried a camp lamp. Duke said to Joe, “How are we going to move him?”
“We don’t. It might be his spine.” “Still have to move him.”
“We don’t move him,” Joe said firmly. “Barbara, have you moved him?” “I took his head in my lap.”
“Well, don’t move him anymore.” Joe looked his patient over, touching him gently. “I can’t see any gross injuries,” he decided. “Barbara, if you can stay put, we’ll wait until he comes to. Then I can check his eyes for concussion, see if he can wiggle his toes, things like that.”
“I’ll hold still. Anybody else hurt?”
“Not to speak of,” Duke assured her. “Joe thinks he’s cracked some ribs and I wrenched a shoulder. Mother just got rolled into the corner of her bunk. Sis is soothing her. Sis is okay-a lump on her head where a can conked her.
Are you all right?”
“Just bruises. Hugh and I were playing double solitaire and trying to keep cool when it hit.” She wondered how long the lie would stand up. Duke had no more on than she did and didn’t seem troubled by it; Joe was dressed in underwear shorts. She added, “The cat? Is he all right?”
“Dr. — Livingstone-I-Presume,” Joe answered seriously, “escaped injury.
But he is vexed that his sandbox was dumped over. He’s cleaning himself and criticizing.”
“I’m glad he wasn’t hurt.”
“Notice anything about this blast?”
“What, Joe? It was the hardest of the three. Much the hardest.”
“Yes. But no rumbling. Just one great, big, grand slam, then…nothing.” “What does that indicate?”
“I don’t know. Barbara, can you stay here and not move? I want to get more lights on, check the damage, and see what to do about it.”
“I won’t move.” Hugh seemed to be breathing easily. In the silence she could hear his heart beat. She decided that she didn’t have anything to be unhappy about.
Karen joined her, carrying a flashlight and moving carefully on the slant. “How’s Daddy?”
“No change.”
“Knocked cold, I guess. So was I. You okay?” She played the flashlight over Barbara.
“Not hurt.”
“Well! I’m glad you’re in uniform, too. I can’t find my pants. Joe ignores it so carefully, it’s painful. Is that boy square!”
“I don’t know where my clothes are.”
“Joe has the only pants among us. What happened to you? Were you asleep?”
“No. I was here. We were talking.”
“Hmm — Further deponent sayeth not. I’ll keep your grisly secret.
Mother won’t know; I gave her another hypo.” “Aren’t you jumping at conclusions?”
“My favorite exercise. I hope my nasty suspicions are correct. I wish I had had something better to do than sleep last night. Since it’s probably our last night.” She leaned over and kissed Barbara. “I like you.”
“Thanks, Karen. Me, too. You.”
“Let’s hold a funeral and preach about what nice guys we are. You made my daddy happy when you had the guts to bid that slam. If you made him happier still, I’m in favor of it.” She straightened up. “‘Bye. I’ll go sort groceries. If Daddy wakes up, yell.” She left.
“Barbara?”
“Yes, Hugh? Yes!”
“Keep your voice down. I heard what my daughter said.” “You did?”
“Yes. She’s a gentleman. Barbara? I love you. I may not have another chance to say so.”
“I love you.” “Darling.”
“Shall I call the others?” “Shortly. Are you comfortable?” “Oh, very!”
“Then let me rest a bit. I feel woozy.”
“As long as you like. Uh, can you wiggle your toes? Do you hurt anyplace?”
“I hurt lots of places, but not too much. Let me see — Yes, I can move everything. All right, call Joe.”
“No hurry.”
“Better call him. Work to do.”
Shortly Mr. Farnham was back in charge. Joe required him to move himself-a mass of bruises but no break, sprain, nor concussion. It seemed to Barbara that Hugh had landed on the bottles and that she had landed on him. She did not discuss her theory.
Hugh’s first act was to bind Joe’s ribs with elastic bandage. Joe gasped as it tightened but seemed more comfortable with it. The lump on Karen’s head was inspected; Hugh decided that there was nothing he could do for it.
“Will somebody fetch the thermometer?” he asked. “Duke?” “It’s busted.”
“It’s a bimetal job. Shockproof.”
“I looked for it,” Duke explained, “while you were doctoring. Seems cooler to me. While it may be shockproof, it couldn’t stand being mashed between two tanks.”
“Oh. Well, it’s no big loss.”
“Dad? Wouldn’t this be a good time to try the spare radio? Just a suggestion.”
“I suppose so, but — I hate to tell you, Duke, but you’ll probably find it smashed, too. We tried it earlier. No results.” He glanced at his wrist. “An hour and half ago. At two A.M. Has anyone else the time?”
Duke’s watch agreed.
“We seem to be in fair shape,” Hugh decided, “except for water. There are some plastic jugs of water but we need to salvage the tank water; we may have to drink it. With Halazone tablets. Joe, we need utensils of any sort, and everybody bail. Keep it as clean as you can.” He added, “When Joe can spare you, Karen, scrounge some breakfast. We’ve got to eat, even if this is Armageddon.”
“And Armageddon sick of it,” Karen offered.
Her father winced. “Baby girl, you will write on the blackboard one thousand times: ‘I will not make bad puns before breakfast.'”
“I thought it was pretty good, Hugh.”
“Don’t encourage her, Barbara. All right, get with it.”
Karen returned shortly, carrying Dr. Livingstone. “I wasn’t much help,” she announced, “because somebody has to hang onto this damn cat. He wants to help.”
“Kablerrrrt!”
“You did so! I’m going to entice him with sardines and get breakfast.
What do you want, Daddy Hugh Boss? Crêpes Suzettes?” “Yes.”
“What you’ll get is Spam and crackers.” “All right. How’s the bailing going?”
“Daddy, I won’t drink that water even with Halazone.” She made a face. “You know where it wound up.”
“We may have to drink it.”
“Well…if you cut it with whisky — “
“Mmm — Every case of liquor is leaking. The two I’ve opened each has one fifth, unbroken.”
“Daddy, you’ve ruined breakfast.”
“The question is, do I ration it evenly? Or save it all for Grace?” “Oh.” Karen’s features screwed up in painful decision. “She can have my
share. But the others shouldn’t be deprived just because Gracie has a yen.” “Karen, at this stage it’s not a yen. In a way, for her it’s medicine.” “Yeah, sure. And diamond bracelets and sable coats are medicine for me.” “Baby, there’s no point in blaming her. It may be my fault. Duke thinks
so. When you are my age, you will learn to take people as they are.”
“Hush mah mouf. Maybe I’m harsh-but I get tired of bringing friends home and having Mom pass out about dinnertime. Or try to kiss my boy friends in the kitchen.”
“She does that?”
“Haven’t you seen? No, you probably haven’t. Sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too. But only on your account. It’s a peccadillo, at most.
As I was saying, when you get to be my age — “
“Daddy, I don’t expect to get to be your age-and we both know it. If we’ve got even two fifths of liquor, it’s probably enough. Why don’t you just serve it to whoever needs it?”
The lines in his face got deeper. “Karen, I haven’t given up. It’s distinctly cooler. We may get out of this yet.”
“Well — I guess that’s the proper attitude. Speaking of medicine, didn’t you squirrel away some Antabuse when we built this monster?”
“Karen, Antabuse doesn’t stop the craving; it simply makes the patient deathly ill if he drinks. If your estimate of our chances is correct, can you see any reason why I should force Grace to spend her last hours miserably? I’m not her judge, I’m her husband.”
Karen sighed. “Daddy, you have an annoying habit of being right. All right, she can have mine.”
“I was merely asking your opinion. You’ve helped. I’ve decided.” “Decided how?”
“None of your business, half pint. Get breakfast.”
“I’m going to put kerosene in yours. Give me a kiss, Daddy.” He did. “Now pipe down and get to work.”
Five of them gathered for breakfast, sitting on the floor as chairs would not stand up. Mrs. Farnham was still lethargic from heavy sedation. The others shared canned meat, crackers, cold Nescafé, canned peaches, and warm comradeship. They were dressed, the men in shorts, Karen in shorts and halter, and Barbara in a muumuu belonging to Karen. Her underwear had been salvaged but was soaked and the air was too moist to dry it.
Hugh announced, “Time for a conference. Suggestions are welcome.” He looked at his son.
“One item, Dad-Hugh,” Duke answered. “The backhouse took a beating. I patched it and rigged a platform out of boards that had secured the air bottles. Just one thing — ” He turned to his sister. “You setter types be careful. It’s shaky.”
“You be careful. You were the one hard to housebreak. Ask Daddy.” “Stow it, Karen. Good job, Duke. But with six of us I think we should
rig a second one. Can we manage that, Joe?” “Yes, we could. But…”
“But what?”
“Do you know how much oxy is left?”
“I do. We must shift to blower and filter soon. And there is not a working radiation counter left. So we won’t know what we’ll be letting in. However, we’ve got to breathe.”
“But did you look at the blower?” “It looked all right.”
“It’s not. I don’t think I can repair it.”
Mr. Farnham sighed. “I’ve had a spare on order for six months. Well, I’ll look at it, too. And you, Duke; maybe one of us can fix it.”
“Okay.”
“Let’s assume we can’t repair it. Then we use the oxygen as sparingly as possible. After that we can get along, for a while, on the air inside. But there will come a time when we have to open the door.”
Nobody said anything. “Smile, somebody!” Hugh went on. “We aren’t licked. We’ll rig dust filters out of sheets in the door-better than nothing. We still have one radio-the one you mistook for a hearing aid, Barbara. I wrapped it and put it away; it wasn’t hurt. I’ll go outside and put up an antenna and we can listen to it down here; it could save us. We’ll rig a flagpole, from the sides of a bunk perhaps, and fly a flag. A hunting shirt. No, the American flag; I’ve got one. If we don’t make it, we’ll go down with our colors flying!”
Karen started clapping. “Don’t scoff, Karen.”
“I’m not scoffing, Daddy! I’m crying. ‘The rockets’ red glare-the bombs bursting in air-gave proof through the night — that our flag was still — ‘” Her voice broke and she buried her face in her hands.
Barbara put an arm around her. Hugh Farnham went on as if nothing had happened. “But we won’t go down. Soon they will search this area for survivors. They’ll see our flag and take us out-helicopter, probably.
“So our business is to be alive when they come.” He stopped to think. “No unnecessary work, no exercise. Sleeping pills for everybody and try to sleep twelve hours a day and lie down all the time; it will make the air last as long as possible. The only work is to repair that blower and we’ll knock that off if we can’t fix it. Let’s see — Water must be rationed. Duke, you are water marshal. See how much pure water there is; work out a schedule to stretch it. There is a one-ounce glass with the medicines; use it to dispense water. That’s all, I guess: repair the blower, minimum exercise, maximum sleep, rationed water. Oh, yes! Sweat is wasteful. It’s still hot and,
Barbara, you’ve sweat right through that sack. Take it off.” “May I leave the room?”
“Certainly.” She left, walking carefully on the steep floor, went into the tank room, and returned wearing her soaked underwear. “That’s better,” he approved. “Now — “
“Hubert! Hubert! Where are you? I’m thirsty.” “Duke, give her one ounce.
Charge it to her.” “Yes, sir.”
“Don’t forget that the cat has to have water.” “The dirty water, maybe?”
“Hmm. We won’t die through playing fair with our guest. Let’s keep our pride.”
“He’s been drinking the dirty water.”
“Well — You boss it. Suggestions, anyone? Joe, do the plans suit you?” “Well — No, sir.”
“So?”
“No exercise, least oxygen used, makes sense. But when it comes time to open the door, where are we?”
“We take our chances.”
“I mean, can we? Short on air, panting, thirsty, maybe sick — I’d like to be certain that anyone, Karen say, with a broken arm, can get that door open.”
“I see.”
“I’d like to try all three doors. I’d like to leave the armor door open.
A girl can’t handle that crank. I volunteer to try the upper door.”
“Sorry, it’s my privilege. I go along with the rest. That’s why I asked for suggestions. I’m tired, Joe; my mind is fuzzy.”
“And if the doors are blocked? Probably rubble against the upper door —
“
“We have the jack.”
“Well, if we can’t use the doors, we should make sure of the escape
tunnel. Duke’s shoulder isn’t so good. My ribs are sore but I can work-today. Tomorrow Duke and I will be stiff and twice as sore. There are those steel bottles cluttering the hatch and plunder stored in the hole. Takes work. Boss, I say we’ve got to be sure of our escape-while we’re still in pretty good shape.”
“I hate to order heavy work. But you’ve convinced me.” Hugh stood up, suppressing a groan. “Let’s get busy.”
“I’ve got one more suggestion.” “So?”
“You ought to sack in. You haven’t been to bed at all and you got banged up pretty hard.”
“I’m okay. Duke has a bad shoulder, you’ve got cracked ribs. And there’s heavy work to be done.”
“I plan to use block and tackle to skid those bottles aside. Barbara can help. She’s husky, for a girl.”
“Certainly I can,” agreed Barbara. “I’m bigger than Joe is. Excuse me,
Joe.”
“No argument. Boss. Hugh. I don’t like to emphasize it but I thought of
this. You admit you’re tired. Not surprising, you’ve been on the go twenty- four hours. Do you mind my saying that I would feel more confident you could get us through if you would rest?”
“He’s right, Hugh.”
“Barbara, you haven’t had any sleep.”
“I don’t have to make decisions. But I’ll lie down and Joe can call me when he needs me. Okay, Joe?”
“Fine, Barbara.”
Hugh grinned. “Ganging up on me. All right, I’ll take a nap.”
A few minutes later he was in the bottom bunk in the men’s dormitory, his feet braced against the footboard. He closed his eyes and was asleep before he could get his worries organized.
Duke and Joe found that five of the bolts of the inner door were stuck. “We’ll let them be,” Joe decided. “We can always drift them back with a sledgehammer. Let’s crank back the armor door.”
The armor door, beyond the bolted door, was intended to withstand as much blast as the walls. It was cranked into place, or out, by a rack and gear driven by a long crank.
Joe could not budge it. Duke, heavier by forty pounds, put his weight on it-no results. Then they leaned on it together.
“Frozen.”
“Yeah.”
“Joe, you mentioned a sledgehammer.”
The young Negro frowned. “Duke, I would rather your father tried that.
We could break the crank. O~ a tooth on the rack.”
“The trouble is, we’re trying to crank a ton or so of door uphill, when it was meant to move on the level.”
“Yes. But this door always has been pesky.” “What do we do?”
“We get at the escape tunnel.”
A block and tackle was fastened to a hook in the ceiling; the giant bottles were hauled out of the jumble and stacked, with Barbara and Karen heaving on the line and the men guiding them and then bracing them so that the stack could not roll. When the middle of the floor was clear they were able to get at the manhole cover to the tunnel. It was the massive, heavy-traffic sort and the hook in the ceiling was for lifting it.
It came up, creaking. It swung suddenly because of the 300 out-of-plumb of everything, taking a nick out of Duke’s shin and an oath out of Duke.
The hole was packed with provisions. The girls dug them out, Karen, being smaller, going down inside as they got deeper and Barbara stacking the stuff.
Karen stuck her head up. “Hey! Water Boss! There’s canned water here.” “Well, goody for me!”
Joe said, “I had forgotten that. This hatch hasn’t been opened since the shelter was stocked.”
“Joe, shall I knock out the braces?”
“I’ll get ’em. You clear out the supplies. Duke, this isn’t armored the way the door is. Those braces hold a piece of boiler plate against the opening, with the supplies behind it and the manhole cover holding it all down. Inside the tunnel, at ten foot intervals, are walls of sandbags, and the mouth has dirt over it. Your father said the idea was to cofferdam a blast.
Let it in, slow it down, a piece at a time.”
“We’ll find those sandbags jammed against that boiler plate.” “If so, we’ll dig ’em out.”
“Why didn’t he use real armor?”
“He thought this was safer. You saw what happened to the doors. I would hate to have to pry loose a steel barrier in that tunnel.”
“I see. Joe, I’m sorry I ever called this place a ‘hole in the ground.'” “Well, it isn’t. It’s a machine-a survival machine.”
“I’m through,” Karen announced. “Some gentleman help me up. Or you,
Duke.” out.
“I’ll put the lid on with you under it.” Duke helped his sister to climb Joe climbed down, flinching at the strain on his ribs. Dr. Livingstone
had been superintending. Now he followed his friend into the hole, using Joe’s
shoulders as a landing.
“Duke, if you’ll hand me that sledge — Stay out of the way, Doc. Get your tail down.”
“Want me to take him?” asked Karen.
“No, he likes to be in on things. Somebody hold the light.” The braces were removed and piled on the floor above.
“Duke, I need the tackle now. I don’t want to hoist the plate. Just take its weight so I can swing it back. It’s heavy.”
“Here it comes.”
“That’s good. Doc! Darn you, Doc! Get out from under my feet! Just a steady strain, Duke. Somebody hand me the flashlight. I’ll swing her back and have a look.”
“And get a face full of isotopes.”
“Have to chance it. A touch more — That’s got her, she’s swinging
free.”
Then Joe didn’t say anything. At last Duke said, “What do you see?” “I’m not sure. Let me swing it back, and hand me one brace.”
“Right over your head. Joe, what do you see?”
The Negro was swinging the plate back when suddenly he grunted. “Doe!
Doe, come back here! That little scamp! Between my legs and into the tunnel. Doc!”
“He can’t get far.”
“Well — Karen, will you go wake your father?”
“Damn it, Joe! What do you see?” “Duke, I don’t know. That’s why I need Hugh.” “I’m coming down.”
“There isn’t room. I’m coming up, so Hugh can go down.” Hugh arrived as Joe scrambled out. “Joe, what do you have?” “Hugh, I would rather you looked yourself.”
“Well — I should have built a ladder for this. Give me a hand.” Hugh went down, removed the brace, swung back the plate.
He stared even longer than Joe had, then called up. “Duke! Let’s heave this plate out.”
“What is it, Dad?”
“Get the plate out, then you can come down.” It was hoisted out; father and son exchanged places. Duke stared down the tunnel. “That’s enough, Duke. Here’s a hand.”
Duke rejoined them; his father said, “What do you think?” “I don’t believe it.”
“Daddy,” Karen said tensely, “somebody is going to talk, or I’m going to wrap this sledgehammer around somebody’s skull.”
“Yes, baby. Uh, there’s room for you girls to go down together.”
Barbara was handed down by Duke and Hugh, she helped Karen down over her. Both girls scrunched down and looked.
Karen said softly, “I’ll be goldarned!” She started crawling into the tunnel.
Hugh called out, “Baby! Come back!” Karen did not answer. He added, “Barbara, tell me what you see.”
“I see,” Barbara said slowly, “a beautiful wooded hillside, green trees, bushes, and a lovely sunny day.”
“That’s what we saw.” “But it’s impossible.” “Yes.”
“Karen is outside. The tunnel isn’t more than eight feet long. She’s holding Dr. Livingstone. She says, ‘Come on out!” “Tell her to get away from the mouth. It’s probably radioactive.”
“Karen! Get away from the tunnel! Hugh, what time is it?” “Just past seven.”
“Well, it’s more like noon outside. I think.” “I’ve quit thinking.” “Hugh, I want to go out.”
“Uh — Oh, hell! Don’t tarry at the mouth. And be careful.” “I will.” She started to crawl.
Chapter 4
Hugh turned to his deputy. “Joe, I’m going out. Get me a forty-five and a belt. I shouldn’t have let those girls go out unarmed.” He eased himself down the hole. “You two guard the place.”
His son said, “Against what? There’s nothing to guard in here.”
His father hesitated. “I don’t know. Just a spooky feeling. All right, come along. But arm yourself. Joe!”
“Coming!”
“Joe, arm Duke and yourself. Then wait until we get outside. If we don’t come back right away, use your judgment. This situation I hadn’t anticipated. It just can’t be.”
“But it is.”
“So it is, Duke.” Hugh buckled on the pistol, dropped to his knees. Framed in the tunnel’s mouth was still the vision of lush greenness where there should have been blasted countryside and crater glass. He started to crawl.
He stood up and moved away from the mouth, then looked around. “Daddy! Isn’t this lovely!”
Karen was below him on a slope that ran down to a stream. Across it the land rose and was covered with trees. On this side was a semi-clearing. The sky was blue, sunlight warm and bright, and there was no sign of war’s devastation, nor any sign of man-not a building, a road, a path, no contrails in the sky. It was wilderness, and there was nothing that he recognized.
“Daddy, I’m going down to the creek.” “Come here! Where’s Barbara?”
“Up here, Hugh.” He turned and saw her up the slope, above the shelter. “I’m trying to figure out what happened. What do you think?”
The shelter sat cocked on the slope, a huge square monolith. Dirt clung to it save where the tunnel had cracked off and a jagged place where the stairwell had been. The armor door was exposed just above him.
“I don’t think,” he admitted.
Duke emerged, dragging a rifle. He stood up, looked around, and said nothing.
Barbara and Karen joined them. Dr. — Livingstone-I-Presume came bounding up to tag Hugh on the ankle and dash away. Obviously the Persian gave the place full approval; it was just right for cats.
Duke said, “I give up. Tell me.”
Hugh did not answer. Karen said, “Daddy, why can’t I go down to the creek? I’m going to take a bath. I stink.”
“It won’t hurt you to stink. I’m confused. I don’t want to be confused still more by worrying about your drowning — “
“It’s shallow.”
” — or eaten by a bear, or falling in quicksand. You girls go inside, arm yourselves, and then come out if you want to. But stick close and keep your eyes peeled. Tell Joe to come out.”
“Yes, sir.” The girls went. “What do you think, Duke?” “Well…I reserve my opinion.”
“If you have one, it’s more than I have. Duke, I’m stonkered. I planned
for all sorts of things. This wasn’t on the list. If you have opinions, for God’s sake spill them.”
“Well — This looks like mountain country in Central America. Of course that’s impossible.”
“No point in worrying about whether it’s possible. Suppose it was Central America. What would you watch for?”
“Let me see. Might be cougars. Snakes certainly. Tarantulas and scorpions. Malaria mosquitoes. You mentioned bears.”
“I meant bears as a symbol. We’re going to have to watch everything, every minute, until we know what we’re up against.”
Joe came out, carrying a rifle. He kept quiet and looked around. Duke said, “We won’t starve. Off to the left down by the stream.”
Hugh looked. A dappled fawn, hardly waist high, was staring at them, apparently unafraid. Duke said, “Shall I drop it?” He raised his rifle.
“No. Unless you are dead set on fresh meat.” “All right. Pretty thing, isn’t it?”
“Very. But it’s no North American deer I ever saw. Duke? Where are we?
And how did we get here?”
Duke gave a lopsided grin. “Dad, you appointed yourself Fuehrer. I’m not supposed to think.”
“Oh, rats!”
“Anyhow, I don’t know. Maybe the Russkis developed a hallucination
bomb.”
it.”
“But would we all see the same thing?”
“No opinion. But if I had shot that deer, Ill bet we could have eaten
“I think so, too. Joe? Ideas, opinions, suggestions?”
Joe scratched his head. “Mighty pretty country. But I’m a city boy.” “One thing you can do, Hugh.”
“What, Duke?”
“Your little radio. Try it.”
“Good idea.” Hugh crawled inside, caught Karen about to climb down, sent
her back for it. While he waited, he wondered what he had that was suitable for a ladder? Chinning themselves in a six-foot manhole was tedious.
The radio picked up static but nothing else. Hugh switched it off. “We’ll try it tonight. I’ve gotten Mexico with it at night, even Canada.” He frowned. “Something ought to be on the air. Unless they smeared us completely.”
“Dad, you aren’t thinking straight.” “How, Duke?”
“This area did not get smeared.”
“That’s why I can’t understand a radio silence.”
“Yet Mountain Springs really caught it. Ergo, we aren’t in Mountain Springs.”
“Who said we were?” Karen answered. “There’s nothing like this in Mountain Springs. Nor the whole state.”
Hugh frowned. “I guess that’s obvious.” He looked at the shelter-gross, huge, massive. “But where are we?”
“Don’t you read comic books, Daddy? We’re on another planet.” “Don’t joke, baby girl. I’m worried.”
“I wasn’t joking. There is nothing like this within a thousand miles of home-yet here we are. Might as well be another planet. The one we had was getting used up.”
“Hugh,” Joe said, “it sounds silly. But I agree with Karen.” “Why, Joe?”
“Well, we’re someplace. What happens when an H-bomb explodes dead on
you?”
“You’re vaporized.”
“I don’t feel vaporized. And I can’t see that big hunk of concrete sailing a thousand miles or so, and crashing down with nothing to show for it but cracked ribs and a hurt shoulder. But Karen’s idea — ” He shrugged. “Call it the fourth dimension. That last big one nudged us through the fourth dimension.”
“Just what I said, Daddy. We’re on a strange planet! Let’s explore!” “Slow down, honey. As for another planet — Well, there isn’t any rule
saying we have to know where we are when we don’t. The problem is to cope.” Barbara said, “Karen, I don’t see how this can be anything but Earth.” “Why? Spoilsport.”
“Well — ” Barbara chucked a pebble at a tree. “That’s a eucalyptus, and an acacia beyond it. Not at all like Mountain Springs but a normal grouping of tropical and subtropical flora. Unless your ‘new planet’ evolved plants just like Earth, this has to be Earth.”
“Spoilsport,” Karen repeated. “Why shouldn’t plants evolve the same way on another planet?”
“Well, that would be as remarkable as finding the same — “
“Hubert! Hubert! Where are you? I can’t find you!” Grace Farnham’s voice echoed out the tunnel.
Hugh ducked into the tunnel. “Coming!”
They ate lunch under a tree a little distance from the shelter. Hugh decided that the tunnel had been buried so deeply that the chance of its mouth being more radioactive than the interior was negligible. As for the roof, he was not certain. So he placed a dosimeter (the only sort of radiation instrument that had come through the pummeling) on top of the shelter to compare it later with one inside. He was relieved to see that the dosimeters agreed that they had suffered less than lethal dosage-although large-and that they checked each other.
The only other precaution he took was for them to keep guns by them-all but his wife. Grace Farnham “couldn’t stand guns,” and resented having to eat with guns in sight.
But she ate with good appetite. Duke had built a fire and they were blessed with hot coffee, hot canned beef, hot peas, hot canned sweet potatoes, and canned fruit salad-and cigarettes with no worry about air or fire.
“That was lovely,” Grace admitted. “Hubert dear? Do you know what it would take to make it just perfect? You don’t approve of drinking in the middle of the day but these are special circumstances and my nerves are still a teensy bit on edge-so, Joseph, if you will just run back inside and fetch a bottle of that Spanish brandy — “
“Grace.”
“What, dear?– then all of us could celebrate our miraculous escape. You were saying?”
“I’m not sure there is any.”
“What? Why, we stored two cases of it!”
“Most of the liquor was broken. That brings up something else. Duke, you are out of a job as water boss. I’d like you to take over as bartender. There are at least two unbroken fifths. Whatever you find, split it six ways and make it share and share alike, whether it’s several bottles each, or just a part of a bottle.”
Mrs. Farnham looked blank, Duke looked uneasy. Karen said hastily, “Daddy, you know what I said.”
“Oh, yes. Duke, your sister is on the wagon. So hold her share as a medicinal reserve. Unless she changes her mind.”
“I don’t want the job,” said Duke.
“We have to divide up the chores, Duke. Oh yes, do the same with
cigarettes. When they are gone, they’re gone, whereas I have hopes that we can distill liquor later.” He turned to his wife. “Why not have a Miltown, dear?”
“Drugs! Hubert Farnham, are you telling me that I can’t have a drink?” “Not at all. At least two fifths came through. Your share would be about
a half pint. If you want a drink, go ahead.”
“Well! Joseph, run inside and fetch me a bottle of brandy.”
“No!” her husband countermanded. “If you want it, Grace, fetch it yourself.”
“Oh, shucks, Hugh, I don’t mind.”
“I do. Grace, Joe’s ribs are cracked. It hurts him to climb. You can manage the climb with those boxes as steps-and you’re the only one who wasn’t hurt.”
“That’s not true!”
“Not a scratch. Everybody else was bruised or worse. Now about jobs — I want you to take over as cook. Karen will be your assistant. Okay, Karen?”
“Certainly, Daddy.”
“It will keep you both busy. We’ll build a grill and Dutch oven, but it will be cook over a campfire and wash dishes in the creek for a while.”
“So? And will you please tell me, Mr. Farnham, what Joseph is going to do in the meantime? To earn his wages?”
“Will you please tell me how we’ll pay wages? Dear, dear — can’t you see that things have changed?”
“Don’t be preposterous! Joseph will get every cent coming to him and he knows it-just as soon as this mess is straightened out. After all, we’ve saved his life. And we’ve always been good to him, he won’t mind waiting. Will you, Joseph?”
“Grace! Quiet down and listen. Joe is no longer our servant. He is our partner in adversity. We’ll never pay him wages again. Quit acting like a child and face the facts. We’re broke. We’re never going to have any money again. Our house is gone. My business is gone. The Mountain Exchange Bank is gone. We’re wiped out…save for what we stored in the shelter. But we are lucky. We’re alive and by some miracle have a chance of scratching a living out of the ground. Lucky. Do you understand?”
“I understand you are using it as an excuse to bully me!” “You’ve merely been assigned a job to fit your talents.”
“Kitchen drudge! I was your kitchen slave for twenty-five years! That’s long enough. I won’t do it! Do you understand me?”
“You are wrong on both points. You’ve had a maid most of our married life…and Karen washed dishes from the time she could see over the sink. Granted, we had lean years. Now we’re going to have more lean years-and you’re going to help. Grace, you are a fine cook when you want to be. You will cook…or you won’t eat.”
“Oh!” She burst into tears and fled into the shelter.
Her behind was disappearing when Duke got up to follow. His father stopped him. “Duke!”
“Yes.”
“One word and you can join your mother. I’m going exploring, I want you to go with me.”
Duke hesitated. “All right.”
“We’ll start shortly. I think your job should be ‘hunter.’ You’re a better shot than I am and Joe has never hunted. What do you think?”
“Uh — All right.”
“Good. Well, go soothe her down and, Duke, see if you can make her see the facts.”
“Maybe. But I agree with Mother. You were bullying her.” “As may be. Go ahead.”
Duke turned abruptly and left. Karen said quietly, “I think so too,
Daddy. You were bullying.”
“I intended to. I judged it called for bullying. Karen, if I hadn’t tromped on it, she would do no work…and would order Joe around, treat him as a hired cook.”
“Shucks, Hugh, I don’t mind cooking. It was a pleasure to rustle lunch.” “She’s a better cook than you are, Joe, and she’s going to cook. Don’t
let me catch you fetching and carrying for her.”
The younger man grinned. “You won’t catch me.”
“Better not. Or I’ll skin you and nail it to the barn. Barbara, what do you know about farming?”
“Very little.” “You’re a botanist.”
“No, I simply might have been one, someday.”
“Which makes you eight times as much of a farmer as the rest of us. I can barely tell a rose from a dandelion; Duke knows even less and Karen thinks you dig potatoes out of gravy. You heard Joe say he was a city boy. But we have seeds and a small supply of fertilizers. Also garden tools and books about farming. Look over what we’ve got and find a spot for a garden. Joe and I will do the spading and such. But you will have to boss.”
“All right. Any flower seeds?” “How did you know?”
“I just hoped.”
“Annuals and perennials both. Don’t look for a spot this afternoon; I don’t want you girls away from the shelter until we know the hazards. Joe, today we should accomplish two things, a ladder and two privies. Barbara, how are you as a carpenter?”
“Just middlin’. I can drive a nail.”
“Don’t let Joe do what you can do; those ribs have to heal. But we need a ladder. Karen, my little flower, you have the privilege of digging privies.”
“Gosh. Thanks!”
“Just straddle ditches, one as the powder room, the other for us coarser types. Joe and I will build proper Chic Sales jobs later. Then we’ll tackle a log cabin. Or a stone-wall job.”
“I was wondering if you planned to do any work, Daddy.” “Brainpower, darling. Management. Supervision. Can’t you see me
sweating?” He yawned. “Well, a pleasant afternoon, all. I’ll stroll down to the club, have a Turkish bath, then enjoy a long, tall planter’s punch.”
“Daddy, go soak your head. Privies, indeed!” “The Kappas would be proud of you, dear.”
Hugh and his son left a half hour later. “Joe,” Hugh cautioned, “we plan to be back before dark but if we get caught, we’ll keep a fire going all night and come back tomorrow. If you do have to search for us, don’t go alone; take one of the girls. No, take Karen; Barbara has no shoes, just some spike heeled sandals. Damn. Moccasins we’ll have to make. Got it?”
“Sure.”
“We’ll head for that hill-that one. I want to get high enough to get the lay of the land-and maybe spot signs of civilization.” They set out-rifles, canteens, hand ax, machete, matches, iron rations, compasses, binoculars, mountain boots, coveralls. Coveralls and boots fitted Duke as well as Hugh; Duke found that his father had stocked clothes for him.
They took turns, with the man following blazing trail and counting paces, the leader keeping lookout, compass direction, and record.
The high hill Hugh had picked was across the stream. They explored its bank and found a place to wade. Everywhere they flushed game. The miniature deer were abundant and apparently had never been hunted. By man, at least — Duke saw a mountain lion and twice they saw bears.
It seemed to be about three o’clock local time as they approached the
summit. The climb was steep, cluttered with undergrowth, and neither man was in training. When they reached the flattish summit Hugh wanted to throw himself on the ground.
Instead he looked around. To the east the ground dropped off. He stared out over miles of prairie.
He could see no sign of human life. He adjusted his binoculars and started searching. He saw moving figures, decided that they were antelope-or cattle; he made mental note that these herds must be watched. Later, later — “Hugh?”
He lowered his binoculars. “Yes, Duke?”
“See that peak? It’s fourteen thousand one hundred and ten feet high.” “I won’t argue.”
“That’s Mount James. Dad, we’re home!” “What do you mean?”
“Look southwest. Those three gendarmes on that profile. The middle one is where I broke my leg when I was thirteen. That pointed mountain between there and Mount James — Hunter’s Horn. Can’t you see? The skyline is as distinctive as a fingerprint. This is Mountain Springs!”
Hugh stared. This skyline he knew. His bedroom window had been planned to let him see it at dawn; many sunsets he had watched it from his roof.
“Yes.”
“Yes,” Duke agreed. “Damned if I know how. But as I figure it” — he stomped the ground — “we’re on the high reservoir. Where it ought to be. And
— ” His brow wrinkled. “As near as I can tell, our shelter is smack on our lot. Dad, we didn’t go anywhere!”
Hugh took out the notebook in which were recorded paces and compasses courses, did some arithmetic. “Yes. Within the limits of error.”
“Well? How do you figure it?”
Hugh looked at the skyline. “I don’t. Duke, how much daylight do we
have?”
“Well…three hours. The sun will be behind the mountains in two.”
“It took two hours to get here; we should make it back in less. Do you
have any cigarettes?”
“May I have one? Charged against me of course. I would like to rest about one cigarette, then start back.” He looked around. “It’s open up here. I don’t think a bear would approach us.” He placed his rifle and belt on the ground, settled down.
Duke offered a cigarette to his father, took one himself. “Dad, you’re a cold fish. Nothing excites you.”
“So? I’m so excitable that I had to learn never to give into it.” “Doesn’t seem that way to other people.” They smoked in silence, Duke
seated, Hugh sprawled out. He was close to exhaustion and wished that he did not have to hike back.
Presently Duke added, “Besides that, you enjoy bullying.” His father answered, “I suppose so, if you class what I do as bullying. No one ever does anything but what he wants to do — ‘enjoys’ — within the possibilities open to him. If I change a tire, it’s because I enjoy it more than being stranded.”
“Don’t get fancy. You enjoy bullying Mother. You enjoyed spanking me as a kid…until Mother put her foot down and made you stop.”
His father said, “We had better start back.” He reached for his belt and
rifle.
“Just a second. I want to show you something. Never mind your gear, this
won’t take a moment.”
Hugh stood up. “What is it?”
“Just this. Your Captain Bligh act is finished.” He clouted his father. “That’s for bullying Mother!” He clouted him from the other side and harder,
knocking his father off his feet. “And that’s for having that nigger pull a gun on me!”
Hugh Farnham lay where he had fallen. “Not ‘nigger,’ Duke. Negro.” “He’s a Negro as long as he behaves himself. Pulling a gun on me makes
him a goddam nigger. You can get up. I won’t hit you again.” Hugh Farnham got to his feet. “Let’s start back.”
“Is that all you’ve got to say? Go ahead. Hit me. I won’t hit back.”
“I didn’t break my parole. I waited until we left the shelter.” “Conceded. Shall I lead? Better, perhaps.”
“Do you think I’m afraid you might shoot me in the back? Look, Dad, I had to do it!”
“Did you?”
“Hell, yes. For my own self-respect.”
“Very well.” Hugh buckled on his belt, picked up his gun, and headed for the last blaze.
They hiked in silence. At last Duke said, “Dad?” “Yes, Duke?”
“I’m sorry.” “Forget it.”
They went on, found where they had forded the stream, crossed it. Hugh hurried, as it was growing darker. Duke closed up again. “Just one thing, Dad. Why didn’t you assign Barbara as cook? She’s the freeloader. Why pick on Mother?”
Hugh took his time in answering. “Barbara is no more a freeloader than you are, Duke, and cooking is the only thing Grace knows. Or were you suggesting that she loaf while the rest of us work?”
“No. Oh, we all have to pitch in-granted. But no more bullying, no more bawling Mother out in public. Understand me?”
“Duke.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve been studying karate three afternoons a week the past year.” “So?”
“Don’t try it again. Shooting me in the back is safer.” “I hear you.”
“Until you decide to shoot me, it would be well to accept my leadership.
Or do you wish to assume the responsibility?” “Are you offering it?”
“I am not in a position to. Perhaps the group would accept you. Your mother would. Possibly your sister would prefer you. Concerning Barbara and Joe, I offer no opinion.”
“How about you, Dad?”
“I won’t answer that; I owe you nothing. But until you decide to make a bid for leadership, I expect the same willing discipline you showed under parole.”
“‘Willing discipline’ indeed!”
“In the long run there is no other sort. I can’t quell a mutiny every few hours-and I’ve had two from you plus an utter lack of discipline from your mother. No leader can function on those terms. So I will assume your willing discipline. That includes no interference should I decide again to use what you call ‘bullying.'”
“Now see here, I told you I would not stand for — “
“Quiet! Unless you make up your mind to that, your safest choice is to shoot me in the back. Don’t come at me with bare hands or risk giving me a chance to shoot first. At the next sign of trouble, Duke, I will kill you. If possible. One of us will surely be killed.”
They trudged along in silence, Mr. Farnham never looking back. At last
Duke said, “Dad, for Christ’s sake, why can’t you run things democratically? I don’t want to boss things, I simply want you to be fair about it.”
“Mmm, you don’t want to boss. You want to be a backseat driver-with a veto over the driver.”
“Nuts! I simply want things run democratically.”
“You do? Shall we vote on whether Grace is to work like the rest of us? Whether she shall hog the liquor? Shall we use Robert’s Rules of Order? Should she withdraw while we debate it? Or should she stay and defend herself against charges of indolence and drunkenness? Do you wish to submit your mother to such ignominy?”
“Don’t be silly!”
“I am trying to find out what you mean by ‘democratically.’ If you mean putting every decision to a vote, I am willing-if you will bind yourself to abide by every majority decision. You’re welcome to run for chairman. I’m sick of the responsibility and I know that Joe does not like being my deputy.”
“That’s another thing. Why should Joe have any voice in these matters?” “I thought you wanted to do it ‘democratically’?”
“Yes, but he is — “
“What, Duke? A ‘nigger’? Or a servant?” “You’ve got a nasty way of putting things.”
“You’ve got nasty ideas. We’ll try formal democracy-rules of order, debate, secret ballot, everything-any time you want to try such foolishness. Especially any time you want to move a vote of no confidence and take over the leadership…and I’m so bitter as to hope that you succeed. In the meantime we do have democracy.”
“How do you figure?”
“I’m serving by consent of the majority-four to two, I think. But that doesn’t suit me; I want it to be unanimous, I can’t put up indefinitely with wrangling from the minority. You and your mother, I mean. I want it to be five to one before we get back, with your assurance that you will not interfere in my efforts to persuade, or cajole, or bully, your mother into accepting her share of the load-until you care to risk a vote of no confidence.”
“You’re asking me to agree to that?”
“No, I’m telling you. Willing discipline on your part…or at the next clash one of us will be killed. I won’t give you the slightest warning. That’s why your safest course is to shoot me in the back.”
“Quit talking nonsense! You know I won’t shoot you in the back.” “So? I will shoot you in the back or anywhere at the next hint of
trouble. Duke, I can see only one alternative. If you find it impossible to give willing disciplined consent, if you don’t think you can displace me, if you can’t bring yourself to kill me, if you don’t care to risk a clash in which one of us will be killed, then there is still a peaceful solution.”
“What is it?”
“Any time you wish, you can leave. I’ll give you a rifle, ammunition, salt, matches, a knife, whatever you find needful. You don’t deserve them but I won’t turn you out with nothing.”
Duke gave a bitter laugh. “Sending me out to play Robinson Crusoe…and leaving all the women with you!”
“Oh, no! Any who wish are free to go. With a fair share of anything and some to boot. All three women if you can sell the idea.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Do. And do a little politicking and size up your chances of winning a vote against me ‘democratically’ — while being extraordinarily careful not to cross wills with me and thereby bring on a showdown sooner than you wish. I warn you, I’m feeling very short-tempered; you loosened one of my teeth.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“That wasn’t the way it felt. There’s the shelter; you can start that
‘willing discipline’ by pretending that we’ve had a lovely afternoon.” “Look, Dad, if you won’t mention — “
“Shut up. I’m sick of you.”
As they neared the shelter Karen saw them and yoo-hooed; Joe and Barbara came crawling out the tunnel. Karen waved her shovel. “Come see what I’ve done!”
She had dug privies on each side of the shelter. Saplings formed frameworks which had been screened by tacking cardboard from liquor cases. Seats had been built of lumber remnants from the tank room. “Well?” demanded Karen. “Aren’t they gorgeous?”
“Yes,” agreed Hugh. “Much more lavish than I had expected.” He refrained from saying that they had cost most of the lumber.
“I didn’t do it all. Barbara did the carpentry. You should hear her swear when she hits her thumb.”
“You hurt your thumb, Barbara?”
“It’ll get well. Come try the ladder.”
“Sure thing.” He started inside; Joe stopped him. “Hugh, while we’ve still got light, how about seeing something?”
“All right. What?”
“The shelter. You’ve been talking about building a cabin. Suppose we do: what do we have? A mud floor and a roof that leaks, no glass for windows and no doors. Seems to me the shelter is better.”
“Well, perhaps,” agreed Hugh. “I had thought we could use it while pioneering, if we had to.”
“I don’t think it’s too radioactive, Hugh. That dosimeter should have gone sky-high if the roof is really ‘hot.’ It hasn’t.”
“That’s good news. But, Joe, look at it. A slant of thirty degrees is uncomfortable. We need a house with a level floor.”
“That’s what I mean. Hugh, that hydraulic jack-it’s rated at thirty tons. How much does the shelter weigh?”
“Oh. Let me think how many yards of mix we used and how much steel.” Hugh pondered it, got out his notebook. “Call it two hundred fifty tons.”
“Well, it was an idea.”
“Maybe it’s a good idea.” Hugh prowled around the shelter, a block twenty feet square and twelve high, sizing up angles, estimating yardages.
“It can be done,” Hugh decided. “We dig under on the uphill side, to the center line, cutting out enough to let that side settle down level. Damn, I wish we had power tools.”
“How long will it take?”
“Two men could do it in a week if they didn’t run into boulders. With no dynamite a boulder can be a problem.”
“Too much of a problem?”
“Always some way to cope. Let’s pray we don’t run into solid rock. As we get it dug out, we brace it with logs. At the end we snag the logs out with block and tackle. Then we put the jack under the downhill side and tilt it into place, shore it up and fill with what we’ve removed. Lots of sweat.”
“I’ll start bright and early tomorrow.”
“You will like hell. Not until your ribs have healed. I will start tomorrow, with two husky girls. Plus Duke, if his shoulder isn’t sore, after he shoots us a deer; we’ve got to conserve canned goods. Reminds me-what was done with the dirty cans?”
“Buried ’em.”
“Dig them up and wash them. A tin can is more valuable than gold; we’ll use them for all sorts of things. Let’s go in. I’ve still to admire the ladder.”
The ladder was two trimmed saplings, with treads cut from boards and notched and nailed. Hugh reflected again that lumber had been used too
lavishly; treads should have been fashioned from limbs. Damn it, there were so many things that could no longer be ordered by picking up a telephone. Those rolls of Scottissue, one at each privy — They shouldn’t be left outdoors; what if it rained? All too soon it would be either a handful of leaves, or do without.
So many, many things they had always taken for granted! Kotex — How long would their supply last? And what did primitive women use? Something, no doubt, but what?
He must warn them that anything manufactured, a scrap of paper, a dirty rag, a pin, all must be hoarded. Caution them, hound them, nag them endlessly.
“That’s a beautiful ladder, Barbara!”
She looked very pleased. “Joe did the hard parts.”
“I did not,” Joe denied. “I just gave advice and touched up the chisel.” “Well, whoever did it, it’s lovely. Now we’ll see if it will take my
weight.”
“Oh, it will!” Barbara said proudly.
The shelter had all lights burning. Have to caution them about batteries, too. Must tell the girls to look up how to make candles. “Where’s Grace, Karen?”
“Mother isn’t well. She’s lying down.”
“So? You had better start dinner.” Hugh went into the women’s bay, saw what sort of not-well his wife suffered. She was sleeping heavily, mouth open, snoring, and was fully dressed. He reached down, peeled back an eyelid; she did not stir. “Duke.”
“Yes?”
“Come here. Everybody else outside.”
Duke joined him. Hugh said, “After lunch, did you give Grace a drink?” “Huh? You didn’t say not to.”
“I wasn’t criticizing. How much?”
“Just a highball. An ounce and a half of Scotch, with water.” “Does that look like one highball? Try to rouse her.”
Duke tried, then straightened up. “Dad, I know you think I’m a fool. But I gave her just one drink. Damn it, I’m more opposed to her drinking than you are!”
left.”
“Take it easy, Duke. I assume that she got at the bottle after you
“Well, maybe.” Duke frowned. “As soon as I found an unbroken bottle I
gave Mother that drink. Then I took inventory. I think I found it all, unless you have some hidden away — “
“No, the cases were together. Six cases.”
“Right. I found thirteen unbroken bottles, twelve fifths and a quart of bourbon. I remember thinking that was two fifths each and the quart I would keep in reserve. I had opened one bottle of King’s Ransom. I made a pencil mark on it. We’ll know if she found it.”
“You hid the liquor?”
“I stashed it in the upper bunk on the other side; I figured it would be hard for her to climb up there — I’m not a complete fool, Dad. She couldn’t see me, she was in her bunk. But maybe she guessed.”
“Let’s check.”
Thirteen bottles were between springs and mattress; twelve were unopened, the thirteenth was nearly full. Duke held it up. “See? Right to the line. But there was another bottle we had a snort from, after that second bombing. What happened to it?”
“Barbara and I had some after you went to sleep, Duke. There was some left. I never saw it again. It was in the tank room.”
“Oh! I did, while we were bailing. Busted. I give up-where did she get
it?”
“She didn’t, Duke.” “What do you mean?”
“It wasn’t liquor.” Hugh went to the medicines drawer, got a bottle with a broken seal. “Count these Seconal capsules. You had two last night.”
“Yeah.”
“Karen had one at bedtime, one later; Joe had one. Neither Barbara nor I had any, nor Grace. Five.”
“Hold it, I’m counting.”
His father began to count as Duke pushed them aside. “Ninety-one,” Duke announced.
“Check.” Hugh put the capsules back. “So she took four.” “What do we do, Dad? Stomach pump? Emetic?”
“Nothing.”
“Why, you heartless — She tried to kill herself!”
“Slow down, Duke. She did nothing of the sort. Four capsules, six grains, simply produces stupor in a healthy person — and she’s healthy as a horse; she had a physical a month ago. No, she snitched those pills to get drunk on.” Hugh scowled. “An alcohol drunk is bad enough. But people kill themselves without meaning to with sleeping pills.”
“Dad, what do you mean, ‘she took them to get drunk on’?” “You don’t use them?”
“I never had one in my life until those two last night.”
“Do you remember how you felt just before you went to sleep? Warm and happy and woozy?”
“No. I just lay down and konked out. Next thing I knew I was against the wall on my shoulders.”
“You haven’t developed tolerance for them. Grace knows what they can do.
Drunk, a very happy drunk. I’ve never known her to take more than one but she’s never been chopped off from liquor before. When a person eats sleeping pills because he can’t get liquor, he’s in a bad way.”
“Dad, you should have kept liquor away from her long ago!”
“How, Duke? Tell her she couldn’t have a drink? Take them away from her at parties? Quarrel with her in public? Fight with her in front of Joe? Not let her have cash, close out her bank account, see that she had no credit?
Would that have stopped her from pawning furs?” “Mother would never have done that.”
“It’s typical behavior in such cases. Duke, it is impossible to keep liquor away from any adult who is determined to have it. The United States Government wasn’t that powerful. I’ll go further. It is impossible for anyone to be responsible for another person’s behavior. I spoke of myself as ‘responsible’ for this group; that was verbal shorthand. The most I can door you, or any leader-is to encourage each one to be responsible for himself.”
Hugh chewed his thumb and looked anguished. “Perhaps my mistake was in letting her loaf. But she considered me stingy because I let her have only a houseboy and a cleaning woman. Duke, do you see anything I could have done short of beating her?”
“Uh…that’s beside the point. What do we do now?”
“So it is, counselor. Well, we keep these pills away from her.” “And I’m damned well going to chop off the liquor completely!” “Oh, I wouldn’t.”
“You wouldn’t, eh? Did I hear correctly when you said I was liquor
boss?”
“The decision is up to you. I simply said that I wouldn’t. I think it’s
a mistake.”
“Well, I don’t. Dad, I won’t go into the matter of whether you could, or should, have stopped Mother from getting the way she is. But I intend to stop it.”
“Very well, Duke. Mmm, she’s going to be cut off anyhow in a matter of days. It might be easier to taper her off. If you decide to, I’ll contribute a bottle from my share. Hell, you can have both of mine. I like a snort as well as the next man. But Grace needs it.”
“That won’t be necessary,” his son said crisply. “I’m not going to let her have any. Get it over with, she’ll be well that much sooner.”
“Your decision. May I offer a suggestion?” “What?”
“In the morning, be up before she is. Move the liquor out and bury it, someplace known only to you. Then have open one bottle at a time and dispense it by the ounce. Tell the others to drink where she can’t see it. You had better ditch the open bottle outdoors, too.”
“Sounds reasonable.”
“But that makes it all the more urgent to keep sleeping pills away from
her.”
“Bury them?”
“No. We need them inside, and it’s not just sleeping pills. Demerol.
Hypodermic needles. Several drugs, some poisonous and some addictive and all irreplaceable. If she can’t find Seconal-five bottles of a hundred each, it’s bulky-there’s no telling what she might get into. We’ll use the vault.”
“A little safe let into concrete back of that cupboard. Nothing in it but birth certificates and such, and some reserve ammo, and two thousand silver dollars. Toss the money in with the hardware, we’ll use it as metal. The combo is ‘July 4th, 1776′ — ’74-17-76.’ Better change it, Grace may know it.”
“At once!”
“No rush, she won’t wake up. ‘Reserve ammo — ‘ Duke, you were liquor and cigarette boss and now you are drugs boss. I’m going whole hog, you are rationing officer. Responsible for everything that can’t be replaced: liquor, tobacco, ammunition, nails, toilet tissue, matches, dry cells, Kleenex, needles — “
“Good God! Got any more dirty jobs?”
“Lots of them. Duke, I’m trying to make it each according to his talents. Joe is too diffident-and he missed obvious economies today. Karen doesn’t think ahead. Barbara feels like a freeloader even though she’s not, she wouldn’t crack down. I would, but I’m swamped. You are a natural for it; you don’t hesitate to assert yourself. And you have foresight when you take the trouble to use it.”
“Thank you too much. All right.”
“The hardest thing to drill into them will be saving every scrap of metal and paper and cloth and lumber, things Americans have wasted for years. Fishhooks. Groceries aren’t as important; we’ll replace them, you by hunting, Barbara by gardening. Nevertheless, better note what can’t be replaced. Salt. You must ration salt especially.”
“Salt?”
“Unless you run across a salt lick in hunting. Salt — Damn it, we’re going to have to tan leather. All I used to do with a hide was rub it with salt and give it to the taxidermist. Is salt necessary?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll look it up. Damnation, we’re going to find that I failed to stock endless things we’ll be miserable without.”
“Dad,” Duke admitted, “I think you’ve done mighty well.” “So? That’s pleasant to hear. We’ll manage to — ” “Daddy!”
“Yes?” Hugh went to the tank room. Karen’s head stuck up out of the manhole.
“Daddy, can we please come in? It’s dark and scary and something big chased Doc in. Joe won’t let us until you say.”
“Sorry, Baby. Everybody come in. And we’ll put the lid on.”
“Yes, sir. But Daddy, you ought to look outside. Stars. The Milky Way like a neon sign! And the Big Dipper-so maybe this isn’t another planet? Or would we still see the Big Dipper?”
“I’m not certain.” He recalled that the discovery that they were still in James County, Mountain Springs area, had not been shared. But Duke must tell it; it was his deduction. “Duke, want to take a look before we close up?”
“Thanks, I’ve seen a star.”
“As you wish.” Hugh went outside, waited while his eyes adjusted, saw that Karen was right: Never before had he seen the heavens on a clear mountain night with no other light, nor trace of smog, to dim its glory.
“Beautiful!”
Karen slipped her hand into his. “Yes,” she agreed. “But I could use some streetlights. There are things out there. And we heard coyotes.”
“There are bears and Duke saw a mountain lion. Joe, better keep the cat in at night, and try to keep him close in the daytime.”
“He won’t go far, he’s timid. And something just taught him a lesson.” “And me, too!” announced Karen. “Bears! Come, Barbie, let’s go in.
Daddy, if the Moon comes up, this must be Earth — and I’ll never trust a comic book again.”
“Go ask your brother.”
Duke’s discovery was the main subject at dinner. Karen’s disappointment was offset by her interest in how they had mislaid Mountain Springs. “Duke, are you sure you saw what you thought you saw?”
“No possible mistake,” Hugh answered for him. “If it weren’t for the trees, you could have spotted it. We had to climb Reservoir Hill to get a clear view.”
“You were gone all that time just to Reservoir Hill? Why, that’s only five minutes away!”
“Duke, explain to your sister about automobiles.” “I think the bomb did it,” Barbara said suddenly. “Why, certainly, Barb. The question is how?”
“I mean the enormous H-bomb the Russians claimed to have in orbit. The one they called the ‘Cosmic Bomb.’ I think it hit us.”
“Go on, Barbara.”
“Well, the first bomb was awful and the second one was bad; they almost burned us up. But the third one just hit us whammy! and then no noise, no heat, no rumbling, and the radioactivity got less instead of worse. Here’s my notion:
You’ve heard of parallel worlds? A million worlds side by side, almost alike but not quite? Worlds where Elizabeth married Essex and Mark Anthony hated redheads? And Ben Franklin got electrocuted with his kite? Well, this is one.”
“First automobiles and now Benjamin Franklin. I’ll go watch Ben Casey.” “Like this, Karen. The Cosmic Bomb hits us, dead on — and kicks us into
the next world. One exactly like the one we were in, except that it never had men in it.”
“I’m not sure I like a world with no men. I’d rather have a strange planet, with warlords riding thoats. Or is it zitidars?”
“What do you think of my theory, Hugh?”
“I’m keeping an open mind. I’ll go this far: We should not count on finding other human beings.”
“I go for your theory, Barbara,” Duke offered. “It accounts for the facts. Squeezed out like a melon seed. Pht!”
“And we landed here.”
Duke shrugged. “Let it be known as the Barbara Wells Theory of Cosmic Transportation and stand adopted. Here we are; we’re stuck with it-and I’m going to bed. Who sleeps where, Hugh?”
“Just a second. Folks, meet the Rationing Officer. Take a bow, Duke.” Hugh explained the austerity program. “Duke will work it out but that’s the idea. For example, I noticed a bent nail on the ground in the powder room. That calls for being spread-eagled and flogged. For a serious offense, such as wasting a match, it’s keelhauling. Second offense-hang him at the yardarm!”
“Gee! Do we get to watch?”
“Shut up, Karen. No punishments, just the miserable knowledge that you have deprived the rest of something necessary to life, health, or comfort. So don’t give Duke any back talk. I want to make another assignment. Baby, you know shorthand.”
“That’s putting it strongly. Mr. Gregg wouldn’t think so.” “Hugh, I take shorthand. What do you want?”
“Okay, Barbara, you are historian. Today is Day One. Or start with the calendar we are used to, but we may adjust it; those were winter stars. Every night jot down the events and put it in longhand later. Your title is Keeper of the Flame. As soon as possible, you really will be Keeper of the Flame; we will have to light a fire, then bank it every night. Sorry to have held you up, Duke.”
“I’ll sleep in the tank room, Hugh. You take a bunk.”
“Wait a minute. Buddy, would you stay up ten minutes longer? Daddy, could Barbara and I use the tank room for a spit bath? May we have that much water? A girl who digs privies needs a bath.”
“Sure, Sis,” Duke agreed.
“Water is no problem,” Hugh told her. “But you can bathe in the stream in the morning. Just one thing: Whenever anyone is bathing, someone should stand guard. I wasn’t fooling about bears.”
Karen shivered. “I didn’t think you were. But that reminds me, Daddy — Do we dash out to the powder room? Or hold it all night? I’m not sure I can. But I’ll try-rather than play tag with bears!”
“I feel better. Okay, buddy boy, give Barb and me a crack at the john and you can go to bed.”
“No bath?”
“If we bathe, we can bathe in the girls’ dorm after the rest of you go to bed. Thereby sparing your blushes.”
“I don’t blush.” “You should.”
“Hold it,” interrupted Hugh. “We need a ‘No Blushing’ rule. Here we are crowded worse than a Moscow apartment. Do you know the Japanese saying about nakedness?”
“I know they bathe in company,” said Karen, “and I would be happy to join them. Hot water! Oh, boy!”
“They say, ‘Nakedness is often seen but never looked at.’ I’m not urging you to parade around in skin. But we should quit being jumpy. If you come in to change clothes and find that there is no privacy-why, just change. Or take bathing in the stream. The person available to guard might not be the sex of the person who wants the bath. So ignore it.” He looked at Joseph. “I mean you. I suspect you’re sissy about it.”
Joe looked stubborn. “That’s the way I was brought up, Hugh.”
“So? I wasn’t brought up this way either, but I’m trying to make the best of it. After a sweaty day’s work it might be that Barbara is the one available to stand bear watch for you.”
“I’ll take my chances. I didn’t see any bears.” “Joe, I don’t want any nonsense. You’re my deputy.” “I didn’t ask to be.”
“Nor will you be, if you don’t change your tune. You’ll bathe when you need it and you’ll accept guard service from anybody.”
Joe looked stubborn. “No, thank you.”
Hugh Farnham sighed. “I didn’t expect dam foolishness from you, Joe.
Duke, will you back me? ‘Condition seven,’ I mean.”
“Deelighted!” Duke grabbed the rifle he had carried earlier, started to load it. Joe’s chin dropped but he did not move.
“Hold it, Duke. Guns won’t be necessary. That’s all, Joe. Just the clothes you were wearing last night. Not clothes we stored for you, I paid for those. Nothing else, not even matches. You can change in the tank room; it was your modesty you insisted on saving. But your life is your problem. Get moving.”
Joseph said slowly, “Mr. Farnham, do you really mean that?”
“Were those real bullets in that gun you aimed at Duke? You helped me clamp down on him; you heard me clamp down on my wife. Can I pull on them anything that rough — and let you get away with it? Good God, I’d get it from the girls next. Then the group would fall apart and die. I’d rather it was just you. You have two minutes to say good-bye to Dr. Livingstone. But leave the cat here; I don’t want it eaten.”
Dr. Livingstone was in the Negro’s lap. Joe got slowly to his feet, still holding it. He seemed dazed.
Hugh added, “Unless you prefer to stay.” “I can?”
“On the same terms as the rest.”
Two tears rolled down Joe’s cheeks. He looked down at the cat and stroked it, then answered in a low voice, “I would like to stay. I agree.”
“Good. Confirm it by apologizing to Barbara.”
Barbara looked startled. She appeared to be about to speak, then to think better of it.
“Uh…Barbara. I’m sorry.” “It’s all right, Joe.”
“I’d be…happy and proud to have you guard me. While I take a bath, I mean. If you will.”
“Any time, Joe. Glad to.” “Thank you.”
“And now,” said Hugh, “who’s for bridge? Karen?” “Why not?”
“Duke?”
“Bed for me. Anybody wants the pot, step over me.”
“Sleep on the floor by the bunks, Duke, and avoid the traffic. No, take the upper bunk.”
“You take it.”
“I’ll be last to bed, I want to look up a subject. Joe? Contract?” “I don’t believe, sir, that I wish to play cards.”
“Putting me in my place, eh?” “I didn’t say that, sir.”
“You didn’t have to. Joe, I was offering an olive branch. One rubber, only. We’ve had a hard day.”
“Thank you. I’d rather not.”
“Damn it, Joe, we can’t afford to be sulky. Last night Duke had a much rougher time. He was about to be shoved out into a radioactive hell-not just to frolic with some fun-loving bears. Did he sulk?”
Joe dropped his eyes, scratched Dr. Livingstone’s skull — suddenly looked up and grinned. “One rubber. And I’m going to beat you hollow!”
“In a pig’s eye. Barbie? Make a fourth?” “Delighted!”
The cut paired Joe with Karen and gave him the deal. He riffled the cards. “Now to stack a Mississippi Heart Hand!”
“Watch him, Barbie.” “Want a side bet, Daddy?” “What have you to offer?”
“Well — My fair young body?” “Flabby.”
“Why, you utterly utter! I’m not flabby, I’m just deliciously padded.
Well, how about my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor?” “Against what?”
“A diamond bracelet?”
Barbara was surprised to see how badly Hugh played, miscounting and even revoking. She realized that he was groggy with fatigue-why, the poor darling! Somebody was going to have to clamp down on him, too. Or he would kill himself trying to carry the whole load.
Forty minutes later Hugh wrote an I.O.U. for one diamond bracelet, then they got ready for bed. Hugh was pleased to see that Joe undressed completely and got into the lower bunk, as he had been told to. Duke stretched out on the floor, bare. The room was hot; the mass cooled slowly and air no longer circulated with the manhole cover in place, despite the vents in the tank room. Hugh made a note that he must devise a bear proof-and cat proof-grille in place of the cover. Later, later — He took the camp lamp into the tank room.
Someone had put the books back on shelves but some were open to dry; he fluffed these, hoped for the best. The last books in the world — so it seemed.
He felt sudden grief that abstract knowledge of deaths of millions had not given him. Somehow, the burning of millions of books felt more brutally obscene than the killing of people. All men must die, it was their single common heritage. But a book need never die and should not be killed; books were the immortal part of man. Book burners-to rape a defenseless friendly book.
Books had always been his best friends. In a hundred public libraries they had taught him. From a thousand newsstands they had warmed his loneliness. He suddenly felt that if he had not been able to save some books, it would hardly be worthwhile to live.
Most of his collection was functional: The Encyclopaedia Britannica- Grace had thought the space should be used for a television receiver “because they might be hard to buy afterwards.” He had grudged its bulkiness, too, but it was the most compact assemblage of knowledge on the market. “Che” Guevera’s War of the Guerillas-thank God he wasn’t going to need that! Nor those next to it: “Yank” Leivy’s manual on resistance fighting, Griffith’s Translation of Mao Tse-tung’s On Guerilla Warfare, Tom Wintringham’s New Ways of War, the new TR on special operations-forget ’em! Ain’t a-gonna study war no more!
The Boy Scout Handbook, Eshbach’s Mechanical Engineering, The Radio Repairman’s Guide, Outdoor Life’s Hunting and Fishing, Edible Fungi and How to Know Them, Home Life in the Colonial Days, Your Log Cabin, Chimneys and Fireplaces, The Hobo’s Cook Book, Medicine Without a Doctor, Five Acres and Independence, Russian Self-Taught and English-Russian and Russian-English dictionaries, The Complete Herbalist, the survival manuals of the Navy Bureau of Weapons, The Air Force’s Survival Techniques, The Practical Carpenter-all sound books, of the brown and useful sort. The Oxford Book of English Verse, A Treasury of American Poetry, Hoyle’s Book of Games, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, a different Burton’s Thousand Nights and a Night, the good old Odyssey with the Wyeth illustrations, Kipling’s Collected Verse, and his Just
So Stories, a one-volume Shakespeare, the Book of Common Prayer, the Bible, Mathematical Recreations and Essays, Thus Spake Zarathustra, T. S. Eliot’s The Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, Robert Frost’s Verse, Men Against the Sea
— He wished that he had found time to stock the list of fiction he had started. He wished that he had fetched down his works of Mark Twain regardless of space. He wished — Too late, too late. This was it. All that was left of a mighty civilization. “The cloud-capped towers — “
He jerked awake and found that he had fallen asleep standing up. Why had he come in here? Something important. Oh, yes! Tanning leather — Leather?
Barbara was barefooted, Barbara must have moccasins. Better try the Britannica. Or that Colonial Days volume.
No, thank God, you didn’t have to use salt! Find some oak trees. Better yet, have Barbara find them; it would make her feel useful. Find something that only Joe could do, too; make the poor little bastard feel appreciated.
Loved. Remember to — He stumbled back into the main room, looked at the upper bunk and knew that he couldn’t make it. He lay down on the blanket they had played cards on and fell instantly asleep.
Chapter 5
Grace did not get up for breakfast. The girls quietly fed them, then stayed in to clean up. Duke went hunting, carrying a forty-five and a hunting bow. It was his choice; arrows could be recovered or replaced, bullets were gone forever. Duke tried a few flights and decided that his shoulder was okay.
He checked watches and set out, with an understanding that a smoky fire would be built to home on if he was not back by three.
Hugh told the girls to take outdoors any book not bone-dry, then broke out pick and shovel and started leveling their house. Joe tried to join him; Hugh vetoed it.
“Look, Joe, there are a thousand things to do. Do them. But no heavy
work.”
“Such as what, Hugh?”
“Uh, correct the inventories. Give Duke a hand by starring everything
that can’t be replaced. In the course of that you’ll think of things; write them down. Look up how to make soap and candles. Check both dosimeters. Strap on a gun and keep your eyes open-and see that those girls don’t go outside without guns. Hell, figure out a way to get plumbing and running water, with no pipe and no lead and no water closets and no Portland cement.”
“How in the world could you do that?”
“Somebody did it the first time. And tell this bushy-tailed sidewalk superintendent that I need no help.”
“Okay. Come here, Doc! Come, come, come!”
“And Joe. Speaking of bathrooms, you might offer to stand guard for the girls while they bathe. You don’t have to look.”
“All right, I’ll offer. But I’ll tell them you suggested it. I don’t want them to think — “
“Look, Joe. They are a couple of clean, wholesome, evil-minded American girls. Say what you please, they will still believe you are sneaking a peek. It’s part of their credo that they are so fatally irresistible that a man just has to. So don’t be too convincing; you’ll hurt their feelings.”
“I get it. I guess.” Joe went away, Hugh started digging, while reflecting that he had never missed a chance, given opportunity without loss of face-but that incorrigible Sunday school lad probably would not sneak a peek at Lady Godiva. A good lad-no imagination but utterly dependable. Shame to have been so rough on him last night — Very quickly Hugh knew what his
worst oversight had been: no wheelbarrow.
He had dug only a little before reaching this new appreciation. Digging by muscle power was bad but carrying it away in buckets was an affront to good sense. So he carried and thought about how to build a wheel — with no metal, no heating tools, no machine shop, no foundry, no — Now wait! He had steel bottles. There was strap iron in the bunks and soft iron in the periscope housing. Charcoal he could make and a bellows was simply an animal skin and some branches. Whittle a nozzle. Any damfool who couldn’t own a wheel with all that at his disposal deserved to lift and carry.
He had ten thousand trees, didn’t he? Finland didn’t have a damn thing but trees. Yet Finland was the finest little country in the world.
“Doc, get out from under my feet!” If Finland was still there — Wherever the world was — Maybe the girls would like a Finnish bath. Down where they could plunge in afterwards and squeal and feel good. Poor kids, they would never see a beauty parlor; maybe a sauna would be a “moral equivalent.” Grace might like it. Sweat off that blubber, get her slender again. What a beauty she had been!
Barbara showed up, with a shovel. “Where did you get that? And what do you think you’re going to do?”
“It’s the one Duke was using. I’m going to dig.”
“In bare feet? You’re era — Hey, you’re wearing shoes!”
“Joe’s. The jeans are his, too. The shirt is Karen’s. Where shall I
dig?”
“Just beyond me, here. Any boulder over five hundred pounds, ask for
help. Where’s Karen?”
“Bathing. I decided to stink worse and bathe later.”
“When you like. Don’t try to stick on this job all day. You can’t.”
“I like working with you, Hugh. Almost as much as — ” She let it hang. “As playing bridge?”
“As playing bridge as your partner. Yes, you could mention that. Too.” “Barbie girl.”
He found that just digging was fun. Gave the mind a rest and the muscles a workout. Happy making. Hadn’t tried it for much too long.
Barbara had been digging an hour when Mrs. Farnham came around a corner.
Barbara said, “Good morning,” added a shovelful to a bucket, picked both up half filled, and disappeared around the other corner.
Grace Farnham said, “Well! I wondered where you were hiding. I was left quite alone. Do you realize that?” She was in the clothes she had slept in.
Her features looked puffy.
“You were allowed to sleep, dear.”
“It isn’t pleasant to wake up in a strange place alone. I’m not accustomed to it.”
“Grace, you weren’t being slighted. You were being pampered.”
“Is that what you call it? Then we’ll say no more about it, do you
mind?”
“Not at all.”
“Really?” She seemed to brace herself, then said bleakly, “Perhaps you
can stop long enough to tell me where you have hidden my liquor. My liquor. My share. I wouldn’t think of touching yours-after the way you’ve treated me! In front of servants and strangers, may I add?”
“Grace, you must see Duke.” “What do you mean?”
“Duke is in charge of liquor. I don’t know where he put it.” “You’re lying!”
“Grace, I haven’t lied to you in twenty-seven years.” “Oh! You brutal, brutal man!”
“Perhaps. But I’m not lying and the next time you say I am, it will go hard with you.”
“Where’s Duke? He won’t let you talk to me that way! He told me so, he promised me!”
“Duke has gone hunting. He hopes to be back by three.”
She stared, then rushed back around the corner. Barbara reappeared, picked up her shovel. They went on working.
Hugh said, “I’m sorry you were exposed to that.” “To what?”
“Unless you were at least a hundred yards away, you know what.” “Hugh, it’s none of my business.”
“Under these conditions, anything is everybody’s business. You have formed a bad opinion of Grace.”
“Hugh, I would not dream of being critical of your wife.”
“You have opinions. But I want you to have one in depth. Visualize her as she was, oh, twenty-five years ago. Think of Karen.”
“She would have looked like Karen.”
“Yes. But Karen has never had responsibility. Grace had and took it well. I was an enlisted man; I wasn’t commissioned until after Pearl Harbor. Her people were what is known as ‘good family.’ Not anxious to have their daughter marry a penniless enlisted man.”
“I suppose not.”
“Nevertheless, she did. Barbara, have you any notion what it was to be the wife of a junior enlisted man in those days? With no money? Grace’s parents wanted her to come home — but would not send her a cent as long as she stuck with me. She stuck.”
“Good for Grace.”
“Yes. She had no preparation for living in one room and sharing a bath down the hail, nor for waiting in Navy outpatient clinics. For making a dollar go twice as far as it should. For staying alone while I was at sea. Young and pretty and in Norfolk, she could have found excitement. She found a job instead-in a laundry, sorting dirty clothes. And whenever I was home she was bright and cheerful and uncomplaining.
“Alexander was born the next year — ” “‘Alexander’?”
“Duke. Named for his maternal grandpappy; I didn’t get a vote. Her parents were anxious to make up once they had a grandson; they were even willing to accept me. Grace stayed cool and never accepted a cent-back to work with our landlady minding the baby in weeks.
“Those years were the roughest. I went up fast and money wasn’t such a problem. The War came and I was bucked from chief to j.g. and ended as a lieutenant commander in Seabees. In 1946 I had to choose between going back to chief or becoming a civilian. With Grace’s backing, I got out. So I was on the beach with no job, a wife, a son in grammar school, a three-year-old daughter, living in a trailer, prices high and going higher. We had some war bonds.
“That was the second rough period. I took a stab at contracting, lost our savings, went to work for a water company. We didn’t starve, but scraped icebox and dishrag soup were on the menu. Barbara, she stood it like a trouper-a hardworking den mother, a pillar of the PTA, and always cheerful.
“I was a construction boss before long and presently I tried contracting again. This time it clicked. I built a house on spec and a shoestring, sold it before it was finished and built two more at once. We’ve never been broke since.”
Hugh Farnham looked puzzled. “That was when she started to slip. When she started having help. When we kept liquor in the house. We didn’t quarrel- we never did save over the fact that I tried to raise Duke fairly strictly and Grace couldn’t bear to have the boy touched.
“But that was when it started, when I started making money. She isn’t built to stand prosperity. Grace has always stood up to adversity magnificently. This is the first time she hasn’t. I still think she will.”
“Of course she will, Hugh.” “I hope so.”
“I’m glad to know more about her, Hugh. I’ll try to be considerate.” “Damn it, I’m not asking that. I just want you to know that fat and
foolish and self-centered isn’t all there is to Grace. Nor was her slipping entirely her fault. I’m not easy to live with, Barbara.”
“So?”
“So! When we were able to slow down, I didn’t. I let business keep me away evenings. When a woman is left alone, it’s easy to slip out for another beer when the commercial comes on and to nibble all evening along with the beer. If I was home, I was more likely to read than to visit, anyhow. And I didn’t just let business keep me away; I joined the local duplicate club. She joined but she dropped out. She plays a good social game-but I like to fight for every point. No criticism of her, there’s no virtue in playing as if it were life or death. Grace’s way is better — Had I been willing to take it easy, too, well, she wouldn’t be the way she is.”
“Nonsense!” “Pardon me?”
“Hugh Farnham, what a person is can never be somebody else’s fault, I think. I am what I am because Barbie herself did it. And so did Grace. And so did you.” She added in a low voice, “I love you. And that’s not your fault, nor is anything we did your fault. I won’t listen to you beating your breast and sobbing ‘Mea culpa!’ You don’t take credit for Grace’s virtues. Why take blame for her faults?”
He blinked and smiled. “Seven no trump.” “That’s better.”
“I love you. Consider yourself kissed.”
“Kiss back. Grand slam. But watch it,” she said out of the corner of her mouth. “Here come the cops.”
It was Karen, clean, shining, hair brushed, fresh lipstick, and smiling. “What an inspiring sight!” she said. “Would you poor slaves like a crust of bread and a pannikin of water?”
“Shortly,” her father agreed. “In the meantime don’t carry these buckets too heavily loaded.”
Karen backed away. “I wasn’t volunteering!” “That’s all right. We aren’t formal.”
“But Daddy, I’m clean!” “Has the creek gone dry?”
“Daddy! I’ve got lunch ready. Out front. You’re too filthy to come into my lovely clean house.”
“Yes, baby. Come along, Barbara.” He picked up the buckets.
Mrs. Farnham did not appear for lunch. Karen stated that Mother had decided to eat inside. Hugh let it go at that; there would be enough hell when Duke got back.
Joe said, “Hugh? About that notion of plumbing — ” “Got it figured out?”
“Maybe I see a way to have running water.”
“If we get running water, I guarantee to provide plumbing fixtures.” “Really, Daddy? I know what I want. In colored tile. Lavender, I think.
And with a dressing table built around — ” “Shut up, infant. Yes, Joe?”
“Well, you know those Roman aqueducts. This stream runs uphill that way. I mean it’s higher up that way, so someplace it’s higher than the shelter. As
I understand it, Roman aqueducts weren’t pipe, they were open.”
“I see.” Farnham considered it. There was a waterfall a hundred yards upstream. Perhaps above it was high enough.
“But that would mean a lot of masonry, whether dry-stone, or mud mortar.
And each arch requires a frame while it’s being built.”
“Couldn’t we just split logs and hollow them out? And support them on other logs?”
“We could.” Hugh thought about it. “There’s an easier way, and one that would kill two birds. Barbara, what sort of country is this?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You said that this area is at least semitropical. Can you tell what season it is? And what the rest of the year is likely to bring? What I’m driving at is this: Are you going to need irrigation?”
“Good heavens, Hugh, I can’t answer that!” “You can try.”
“Well — ” She looked around. “I doubt if it ever freezes here. If we had water, we might have crops all year. This is not a tropical rain forest, or the undergrowth would be much more dense. It looks like a place with a rainy season and a dry season.”
“Our creek doesn’t go dry; it has lots of fish. Where were you thinking of having your garden?”
“How about this stretch downstream to the south? Several trees should come out, though, and a lot of bushes.”
“Trees and bushes are no problem. Mmm — Joe, let’s take a walk. I’ll carry a rifle, you strap on your forty-five. Girls, don’t dig so much that it topples down on you. We would miss you.”
“Daddy, I was thinking of taking a nap.” “Good. Think about it while you’re digging.”
Hugh and Joe worked their way upstream. “What are you figuring on,
Hugh?”
“A contour-line ditch. We need to lead water to an air vent on the roof.
If we can do that, we’ve got it made. A sanitary toilet. Running water for cooking and washing. And for gardening, coming in high enough to channel it wherever Barbara wants it. But the luxury that will mean most to our womenfolk is a bath and kitchen. We’ll clear the tank room and install both.”
“Hugh, I see how you might get water with a ditch. But what about fixtures? You can’t just let water splash down through the roof.”
“I don’t know yet, but we’ll build them. Not a flush toilet, it’s too complex. But a constant-flow toilet, a sort that used to be common aboard warships. It’s a trough with seats. Water runs in one end, out the other.
We’ll lead it down the manhole, out the tunnel, and away from the house. Have you seen any clay?”
“There is a clay bank at the stream below the house. Karen complained about how sticky it was. She went upstream to bathe, a sandy spot.”
“I’ll look at it. If we can bake clay, we can make all sorts of things. A toilet. A sink. Dishes. Tile pipe. Build a kiln out of unbaked clay, use the kiln to bake anything. But clay just makes it easier. Water is the real gold; all civilizations were built on water. Joe, we are about high enough.”
“Maybe a little higher? It would be embarrassing to dig a ditch a couple of hundred yards long — “
“Longer.”
” — or longer, and find that it’s too low and no way to get it up to the roof.”
“Oh, we’ll survey it first.”
“Survey it? Hugh, maybe you didn’t notice but we don’t even have a spirit level. That big smash broke its glasses. And there isn’t even a tripod, much less a transit and all those things.”
“The Egyptians invented surveying with less, Joe. Losing the spirit level doesn’t matter. We’ll build an unsplit level.”
“Are you making fun of me, Hugh?”
“Not at all. Mechanics were building level and square centuries before you could buy instruments. We’ll build a plumbbob level. That’s an upside-down T, and a string with a weight to mark the vertical. You can build it about six feet long and six high to give us a long sighting arm-minimize the errors.
Have to take apart one of the bunks for boards. It’s light, fussy work you can do while your ribs heal. ~While the girls do the heavy, unfussy excavating.”
“You draw it, I’ll build it.”
“When we get the building leveled we’ll mount it on the roof and sight upstream. Have to cut a tree or two but we won’t have any trouble running a base line. Intercepts we run with a smaller level. Duck soup, Joe.”
“No sweat, huh?”
“Mostly sweat. But twenty feet a day of shallow ditch and we’ll have irrigation water when the dry season hits. The bathroom can wait-the gals will be cheered just by the fact that there will be one, someday. Joe, it would suit me if our base line cuts the stream about here. See anything?”
“What should I see?”
“We fell those two trees and they dam the creek. Then chuck in branches, mud, and some brush and still more mud and rocks and the stream backs up in a pond.” Hugh added, “Have to devise a gate, and that I do not see, with what we have to work with. Every problem leads straight to another. Damn.”
“Hugh, you’re counting your chickens before the cows come home.”
“I suppose so. Well, let’s go see how much the girls have dug while we loafed.”
The girls had dug little; Duke had returned with a miniature four-point buck. Barbara and Karen had it strung up against a tree and were trying to butcher it. Karen seemed to have as much blood on her as there was on the ground.
They stopped as the men approached. Barbara wiped her forehead, leaving a red trail. “I hadn’t realized they were so complicated inside.”
“Or so messy!” sighed Karen.
“With that size it’s easier on the ground.” “Now he tells us. Show us, Daddy. We’ll watch.”
“Me? I’m a gentleman sportsman; the guide did the dirty work. But — Joe, can you lay hands on that little hatchet?”
“Sure. It’s sharp; I touched it up yesterday.”
Hugh split the breastbone and pelvic girdle and spread the carcass, then peeled out viscera and lungs and spilled them, while silently congratulating the girls on not having pierced the intestines. “All yours, girls. Barbara, if you can get that hide off, you might be wearing it soon. Have you noticed any oaks?”
“There are scrub forms. And sumach, too. You’re thinking of tannin?” “Yes.”
“I know how to extract it.”
“Then you know more about tanning than I do. I’ll bow out. There are books.”
“I know, I was looking it up. Doe! Don’t sniff at that, boy.”
“He won’t eat it,” Joe assured her, “unless it’s good for him. Cats are fussy.”
While butchering was going on, Duke and his mother crawled out and joined them. Mrs. Farnham seemed cheerful but did not greet anyone; she simply looked at Duke’s kill. “Oh, the poor little thing! Duke dear, how did you have the heart to kill it?”
“It sassed me and I got mad.”
“It’s a pretty piece of venison, Duke,” Hugh said. “Good eating.”
His wife glanced at him. “Perhaps you’ll eat it; I couldn’t bear to.” Karen said, “Have you turned vegetarian, Mother?”
“It’s not the same thing. I’m going in, I don’t want that on me. Karen, don’t you dare come inside until you’ve washed; I won’t have you tracking blood in after I’ve slaved away getting the place spotless.” She headed toward the shelter. “Come inside, Duke.”
“In a moment, Mother.”
Karen gave the carcass an unnecessarily vicious cut. “Where did you nail it?” Hugh asked.
“Other side of the ridge. I should have been back sooner.” “Why?”
“Missed an easy shot and splintered an arrow on a boulder. Buck fever.
It has been years since I used a — ‘bow season’ license.”
“One lost arrow, one carcass, is good hunting. You saved the arrowhead?” “Of course. Do I look foolish?”
Karen answered, “No, but I do. Buddy, I cleaned house. If Mother did any cleaning, it was a mess she made herself.”
“I realized that.”
“And I’ll bet when she smells these steaks, she won’t want Spam!” “Forget it.”
Hugh moved away, signaling Duke to follow.
“I’m glad to see Grace looking cheerful. You must have soothed her.”
Duke looked sheepish. “Well — As you pointed out, it’s rough, chopping it off completely.” He added, “But I rationed her. I gave her one drink and told her she could have one more before dinner.”
“That’s doing quite well.”
“I had better go inside. The bottle is there.” “Perhaps you had.”
“Oh, it’s all right. I put her on her honor. You don’t know how to handle her, Dad.”
“That’s true. I don’t.”
Chapter 6
From the Journal of Barbara Wells:
I am hobbled by a twisted ankle, so I am lying down and adding to this. I’ve taken notes every night-but in shorthand. I haven’t transcribed very much.
The longhand version goes in the fly leaves of the Britannica. There are ten blank pages in each volume, twenty-four volumes, and I’ll squeeze a thousand words to a page –240,000 words-enough to record our doings until we reclaim the art of making paper-especially as the longhand version will be censored.
Because I can’t let my hair down to anyone-and sometimes a gal needs to! This shorthand record is a diary which no one can read but me, as Karen is as poor at Gregg as she claimed.
Or perhaps Joe knows Gregg. Isn’t it required in business colleges? But Joe is a gentleman and would not read this without invitation. I am fond of Joseph; his goodness is not a sham. I am sure he is keeping his lip buttoned on many unhappy thoughts; his position is as anomalous as mine and more difficult.
Grace has quit ordering him around-save that she orders all of us. Hugh gives orders, but for the welfare of all. Nor does he give many; we are settled in a routine. I’m the farmer, and plan my own work; Duke keeps meat on the table and gives me a hand when he doesn’t hunt; Hugh hasn’t told either of
us what to do for a long time, and Karen has a free hand with the house. Hugh has about two centuries of mechanical work planned out and Joe helps him.
But Grace’s orders are for her own comfort. We usually carry them out; it’s easier. She gets her own way and more than her share, simply by being difficult.
She got the lion’s share of liquor. Liquor doesn’t matter to me; I rarely “need” a drink. But I enjoy a glow in company and had to remind myself that it was not my liquor, it was Farnham liquor.
Grace finished her share in three days. Duke’s was next to go. And so on. At last all was gone save one quart of bourbon earmarked “medicinal.” Grace spotted where Duke had it and dug it up. When Duke came home, she was passed out and the bottle was dead.
The next three days were horrors. She screamed. She wept. She threatened suicide. Hugh and Duke teamed up and one of them was always with her. Hugh acquired a black eye, Duke got scratches down his handsome face. I understand they put a lot of B1 into her and force-fed her.
On the fourth day she stayed in her bunk; the next day she got up and seemed almost normal.
But during lunch she asserted, as something “everybody knows,” that the Russians had attacked because Hugh insisted on building a shelter.
She didn’t seem angry-more forgiving. She went on to the happy thought that the war would soon be over and we could all go home.
Nobody argued. What good? Her delusion seems harmless. She has assumed her job, at last, as chief cook-but if she is a better cook than Karen I have yet to see it. Mostly she talks about dishes she could prepare if only she had this, or that. Karen works as hard as ever and sometimes gets so mad that she comes out to cry on me and then hoes furiously.
Duke tells Karen that she must be patient.
I should not criticize Duke; he is probably going to be my husband. I mean, who else is there? I could stand Duke but I’m not sure I could stand Grace as a mother-in-law. Duke is handsome and is considerate of both me and his sister. He did quarrel with his father at first (foolishly it seemed to me) but they get along perfectly now.
In this vicinity he is quite a catch.
Myself? I’m not soured on marriage even though I struck out once. Hugh assumes that the human race will go on. I’m willing.
(Polygamy? Of course I would! Even with Grace as senior wife. But I haven’t been asked. Nor, I feel sure, would Grace permit it. Hugh and I don’t discuss such things, we avoid touching the other, we avoid being alone together, and I do not make cow’s eyes at him. Finished.)
The trouble is, while I like Duke, no spark jumps. So I am putting it off and avoiding circumstances where he might pat me on the fanny. It would be a hell of a note if I married him and there came a night when I was so irritated at his mother and so vexed with him for indulging her that I would tell him coldly that he is not half the man his father is.
No, that must not happen. Duke does not deserve it.
Joe? My admiration for him is unqualified-and he doesn’t have a mother problem.
Joe is the first Negro I’ve had a chance to know well-and I think most well of him. He plays better contract than I do; I suppose he’s smarter than I am. He is fastidious and never comes indoors without bathing. Oh, get downwind after he has spent a day digging and he’s pretty whiff. But so is Duke, and Hugh is worse. I don’t believe this story about a distinctive “nigger musk.”
Have you ever been in a dirty powder room? Women stink worse than men.
The trouble with Joe is the same as with Duke: No spark jumps. Since he is so shy that he is most unlikely to court me — Well, it won’t happen.
But I am fond of him-as a younger brother. He is never too busy to be
accommodating. He is usually bear guard for Karen and me when we bathe and it’s a comfort to know that Joe is alert — Duke has killed five bears and Joe killed one while he was actually guarding us. It took three shots and dropped dead almost in Joe’s lap. He stood his ground.
We adjourned without worrying about modesty, which upset Joe more than bears do.
Or wolves, or coyotes, or mountain lions, or a cat which Duke says is a mutated leopard and especially dangerous because it attacks by dropping out of a tree. We don’t bathe under trees and don’t venture out of our clearing without an armed man. It is as dangerous as crossing Wilshire against the lights.
There are snakes, too. At least one sort is poisonous.
Joe and Hugh were starting one morning on the house leveling and Joe jumped down into the excavation. Dr. — Livingstone-I-Presume jumped down with him-and here was this snake.
Doc spotted it and hissed; Joe saw it just as it struck, getting him in the calf. Joe killed it with his shovel and dropped to the ground, grabbing at his leg.
Hugh had the wound slashed and was sucking it in split seconds. He had a tourniquet on quickly and permanganate crystals on the wound soon after as I heard the hooraw and came a-runnin’. He followed that with rattlesnake anti- venom.
Moving Joe was a problem; he collapsed in the tunnel. Hugh crawled over him and pulled, I pushed, and it took three of us-Karen, too-to lift him up the ladder. We undressed him and put him to bed.
Around midnight, when his respiration was low and his pulse uncertain, Hugh moved the remaining bottle of oxygen into the room, put over Joe’s head a plastic sack in which shirts had been stored and gave him oxygen.
By morning he was better.
In three days he was up and well. Duke says it was a pit viper, perhaps a bushmaster, and that a rattlesnake is a pit viper, too, so rattlesnake anti- venom probably saved Joe’s life.
I am not trusting any snakes.
It took three weeks to excavate under the house. Boulders! This area is a wide, flat, saucer-shaped valley, with boulders most anywhere. Whenever we hit a big one, we dug around it and the men would worry it out with crowbar and block and tackle.
Mostly the men could get boulders out. But Karen found one that seemed to go down to China. Hugh looked it over and said, “Fine. Now dig a hole just north of it and deeper.”
Karen just looked at him.
So we dug. And hit another big boulder. “Good,” said Hugh. “Dig another hole north of that one.”
We hit a third oversize boulder. But in three days the last one had been tumbled into a hole next to it, the middle one had been worried into a hole where the last one had been, and the one that started the trouble was buried where the middle one had been.
As fast as any spot had been cut deeply enough Hugh propped it up with pieces of log; he was worried lest the shelter shift and crush someone. So when we finished the shelter had a forest of posts under it.
Hugh then set two very heavy posts under the uphill corners and started removing the inner ones, using block and tackle. Sometimes they had to be dug under. Hugh was nervous during this and did all the rigging and digging himself.
At last the uphill half was supported on these two big chunks. They would not budge.
There was so much weight on those timbers that they sneered at our efforts. I said, “What do we do now, Hugh?”
“Try the next-to-last resort.” “What’s the last resort?”
“Burn them. But it would take roaring fires and we would have to clear grass and bushes and trees for quite a distance. Karen, you know where the ammonia is. And the iodine. I want both.”
I had wondered why Hugh had stocked so much ammonia. But he had, in used plastic Chlorox bottles; the stuff had ridden through the shocks. I hadn’t known that iodine was stocked in quantity, too; I don’t handle the drugs.
Soon he had sort of a chemistry lab. “What are you making, Hugh?” I
asked.
“Ersatz ‘dynamite.’ And I don’t need company,” he said. “The stuff is so
touchy it explodes at a harsh look.” “Sorry,” I said, backing away.
He looked up and smiled. “It’s safe until it dries. I had it in mind in case I ever found myself in an underground. Occupying troops take a sour view of natives having explosives, but there is nothing suspicious about ammonia or iodine. The stuff is safe until you put it together and does not require a primer. But I never expected to use it for construction; it’s too treacherous.”
“Hugh, I just remembered I don’t care whether a floor is level or not.” “If it makes you nervous, take a walk.”
Making it was simple; he combined tincture of iodine and ordinary household ammonia; a precipitate settled out. This he filtered through Kleenex, the result was a paste.
Joe drilled holes into those stubborn posts; Hugh wrapped this mess in two batches, in paper, and packed a bundle into each hole, tamping with his finger. “Now we wait for it to dry.”
Everything that he used he flushed down with water, then took a bath with his clothes on, removed them in the water and left them, weighted down with rocks. That was all that day.
Our armament includes two lovely ladies’ guns…22 magnum rimfires with telescopic sights. Hugh had Duke and Joe sight them in. The sighting-in was done with sandbag rest — heaped-up dirt, that is. Hugh had them expend five bullets each, so I knew he was serious. “One bullet, one bear” is his motto.
When the explosive was dry, everything breakable was removed from the shelter. We women were chased far back, Karen was charged with hanging on to Dr. Livingstone, and I was armed with Duke’s bear rifle, just in case.
Duke and Joe were on their bellies a measured hundred feet from the posts. Hugh stood between them. “Ready for count?”
“Ready, Hugh.” — “Ready, Dad.”
“Deep breath. Let part of it out. Hold it, steady on target, take up the slack. Five…four…three…two…one fire!”
A sound like a giant slammed door and the middle of each post disintegrated. The shelter stuck out like a shelf, then tilted ponderously down, touched, and was level.
Karen and I cheered; Grace started to clap; Dr. Livingstone jumped down to investigate. Hugh turned his head and grinned.
And the shelter tilted back the other way as the ridge crumbled; it started to slide. It pivoted on the tunnel protuberance, picked up speed and tobogganed down the slope. I thought it was going to end up in the creek.
But the slope leveled off; it ground to a stop, with the tunnel choked with dirt and the whole thing farther out of plumb than before!
Hugh picked up the shovel he had used to heap up shooting supports, walked down to the shelter, began to dig.
I ran down, tears bursting from my eyes. Joe was there first. Hugh
looked up and said, “Joe, dig out the tunnel. I want to know if anything is damaged and the girls will want to get lunch.”
“Boss — ” Joe choked out. “Boss! Oh, gosh!”
Hugh said, in a tone you use to a child, “Why are you upset, Joe? This has saved us work.”
I thought he had flipped. Joe said, “Huh?”
“Certainly,” Hugh assured him. “See how much lower the roof is? Every foot it dropped saves at least a hundred feet of aqueduct. And leveling will be simple here; the ground is loam and boulders are few. A week, with everybody pitching in. Then we bring water to the house and garden two weeks early.”
He was correct. The shelter was level in a week, and this time he triggered the end posts with crosspieces; blasting was not needed. Best of all, the armor door cranked back without a murmur and we had air and sunlight inside — It had been stuffy and candles made it pretty rank. Joe and Hugh started the ditch the same day. In anticipation of the glorious day, Karen sketched on the walls of the tank room life-size pictures of a washstand, a bathtub, a pot.
Truthfully, we are comfortable. Two mattress covers Karen filled with dried grass; sleeping on the floor is no worse than the bunks. We sit in chairs and play our evening rubber at the table. It is amazing what a difference level floors make and how much better it is to have a door than to climb down a ladder and crawl out a hole.
We had to cook over a campfire a while as our grill and Dutch oven were smashed. Karen and I have thrown together a make-do because, as soon as water is led to the house, Hugh intends to start on ceramics, not only for a toilet and a sink but also for a stove vented out through the periscope hole. Luxury!
My corn is coming up beautifully. I wonder what I can use to grind corn?
The thought of hot corn bread buttered with deer grease makes me drool.
December 25th-Merry Christmas!
We think it is. Hugh says we are not more than a day off.
Shortly after we got here Hugh picked a small tree with a flat boulder due north of it and sawed it off so that it placed a sharp shadow on the boulder at noon. As “Keeper of the Flame” it has been my duty to sit by that boulder from before apparent noon and note the shortest shadow-follow it down, mark the shortest position and date it.
That shadow had been growing longer and the days shorter. A week ago it began to be hard to see any change and I told Hugh. So we watched together and three days ago was the turning point…so that day became December 22nd and we are celebrating Christmas instead of the Fourth of July. But we got our flag up, as Hugh had planned, to the top of the tallest tree in our clearing, with its branches lopped to make it a pole. As Keeper of the Flame I am charged with raising and lowering it but this was a special occasion; we drew lots and Joe won. We lined up and sang “The Star Spangled Banner” while he hauled it to the peak-and everyone was crying so hard he could hardly sing.
Then we pledged allegiance. Maybe it is sentimental nonsense by ragged castaways but I don’t think so. We are still one nation, under God, free and indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Hugh held divine services and read the Christmas story from the Gospel According to Luke and called on Karen to pray, then we sang carols. Grace has a strong, sure lead; Joe is a bell-like tenor, and Karen, myself, Hugh, and Duke are soprano, contralto, baritone, and bass. I think we sound good. In any case we enjoyed it, even though Grace got taken by the weeps during “White Christmas” and it was contagious.
We would have had services anyhow as today would be Sunday by the old calendar; Hugh holds them every Sunday. Everybody attends, even Duke who is an
avowed atheist. Hugh reads a Psalm or some other chapter; we sing hymns; he prays or invites someone to pray, and ends it with “Bless This House — ” We are back to the days when the Old Man is priest.
But Hugh never uses the Apostles’ Creed and his prayers are so nonsectarian that he does not even end them “In Jesus’ Name, Amen.”
On a rare occasion when he and I spoke in private-waiting out a noon sight last week-I asked him where he stood on matters of faith? (It is important to me to know where my man stands even though he is not my man and can’t be.)
“You could call me an Existentialist.” “You are not a Christian?”
“I didn’t say that. I can’t express it in the negative because it’s affirmative. I shan’t define it; it would only add to the confusion. You are wondering why I hold church since I refuse to assert a creed?”
“Well…yes.”
“It’s my duty. Services should be available to those who need them. If there is no good and no God, this ritual is harmless. If God is, it is appropriate-and still harmless. We are bleeding no peasants, offering no bloody sacrifices, raising no vanities to the skies in the name of religion. Or so I see it, Barbara.”
That had better hold me; it’s all I’ll get out of him. In my past life religion was a nice, warm, comfy thing I did on Sundays; I can’t say it agonized me. But Hugh’s God-less offering to God has become important.
Sundays are important other ways. Hugh discourages work other than barbering and primping or hobby work, and encourages games, or any fun thing. Chess, bridge, Scrabble, modeling in clay, group sings, such like — Or just yakking. Games are important; they mark that we are not just animals trying to stay alive but humans enjoying life and savoring it. That nightly rubber of bridge we never skip. It proclaims that our lives are not just hoeing and digging ditches and butchering.
We keep up our bodies, too. I’ve become pretty good at cutting hair.
Duke grew a beard at first but Hugh shaved every day and presently Duke did, too. I don’t know what they will do when blades are no more. I’ve noticed Joe honing a Gem blade on an oil stone.
It’s still Christmas and I’ll cut back in when the rubber in progress is finished. Dinner was lavish; Grace and Karen spent two days on it-brook trout savory aux herbes, steamed freshwater prawns, steaks and broiled mushrooms, smoked tongue, bouillon Ursine, crackers (quite a treat), radishes, lettuce, green onions, baby beets a la Grace, and best of all, a pan of fudge, as condensed milk, chocolate, and sugar are irreplaceable. Nescafé and cigarettes, two cups and two cigarettes each.
Presents for everybody — All I saved besides clothes I had on was my purse. I was wearing nylons, took them off soon and haven’t worn stockings since; I gave them to Karen. I had a lipstick; Grace got that. I had been plaiting a belt; Joe got that. In my purse was a fancy hanky; I washed it, ironed it by pressing it against smooth concrete-Duke got that.
It was this morning before I figured out anything for Hugh. For years I’ve carried in my purse a little memo book. It has my maiden name in gold and still has half of a filler. Hugh can use it-but it was my name on it that decided me.
I must run; Grace and I are due to attempt to clobber Hugh and Joe. I’ve never had a happier Christmas.
Chapter 7
Karen and Barbara were washing themselves, the day’s dishes, and the week’s laundry. Above them, Joe kept watch. Bushes and then trees had been cut away around the stretch they used for bathing; a predator could not approach without Joe having a clear shot at it. His eyes swung constantly, checking approaches. He wasted no seconds on the Elysian tableau he guarded.
Karen said, “Barbie, this sheet won’t stand another laundering. It’s
rags.”
“We need rags.”
“But what will we use for sheets? It’s this soap.” Karen scooped a
handful from a bowl on the bank. It was soft and gray and harsh and looked like oatmeal mush. “The stuff eats holes.”
“I’m not fretted about sheets but I dread the day when we are down to our last towel.”
“Which will belong to Mother,” Karen stated. “Our rationing officer will have some excellent reason.”
“Nasty, nasty. Karen, Duke has done a wonderful job.”
“I wasn’t bitching. Duke can’t help it. It’s his friend Eddie.” “‘Eddie?'”
“Edipus Rex, dear.”
Barbara turned away and began rinsing a pair of ragged blue jeans. Karen said, “You dig me?”
“We all have faults.”
“Sure, everybody but me. Even Daddy has a shortcoming. His neck pains
him.”
Barbara looked up. “Is Hugh having trouble with his neck? Perhaps it
would help if we massaged it.”
Karen giggled. “Your weakness, sister mine, is that you wouldn’t know a joke if it bit you. Daddy is still-necked and nothing will cure it. He doesn’t have weaknesses and that’s his weakness. Don’t frown. I love Daddy. I admire him. But I’m glad I’m not like him. I’ll take this load up to the thorn bushes. Damn it, why didn’t Daddy stock clothespins? Those thorns are as bad as the soap.”
“Clothespins we can do without. Hugh did an incredible job. Everything from an eight-day clock — “
“Which got busted, right off.”
” — to tools and seeds and books and I don’t know what. Karen! Don’t climb out naked!”
Karen stopped, one foot on the bank. “Nonsense. Old Stone Face won’t look. Humiliating, that’s what it is. I think I’ll yoo-hoo at him.”
“You’ll do no such thing. Joe is being a gentleman under trying circumstances. Don’t make it harder. Let that load wait and we’ll take it all up at once.”
“Okay, okay. I can’t help wondering if he’s human.” “He is. I can vouch for it.”
“Hmm — Barbie, don’t tell me Saint Joseph made a pass at you?” “Heavens, no! But he blushes if I squeeze past him in the house.” “How can you tell?”
“Sort of purple. Karen, Joe is sweet. I wish you had heard him explain about Doc.”
“Explain what?”
“Well, Doc is beginning to accept me. I was holding Doc yesterday and noticed something and said, ‘Joe, Doe is getting terribly fat. Or was he always?’
“That was a time when he blushed. But he answered with sweet seriousness, ‘Barbara, Dr. Livingstone isn’t as much of a boy cat as he thinks he is. Old Doe is more a girl-type cat. That isn’t fat. Uh, you see — Doe is going to have babies.’ He blurted it out. Seemed to think it would upset me.
Didn’t of course, but I was astonished.”
“Barbara, you mean you didn’t know that Dr. — Livingstone-I-Presume is a female?”
“How would I know? Everybody calls him ‘he’ and he-she-has a male name.” “A doctor can be female. Can’t you tell a tomcat?”
“I never thought about it. Doe is pretty fuzzy.”
“Mmm, yes, with a Persian one might not be certain at first glance. But a tomcat’s badges of authority are prominent.”
“Had I noticed, I would have assumed that he had been altered.”
Karen looked shocked. “Don’t let Daddy hear that! He never allows a cat to be spayed or cut. Daddy thinks cats are citizens. However, you’ve surprised me. Kittens, huh?”
“So Joe says.”
“And I didn’t notice.” Karen looked puzzled. “Come to think of it, I haven’t picked him up lately. Just petted him and tried to keep him out of things. Lately it hasn’t been safe to open a drawer; he’s into it. Looking for a place to have kittens of course. I should have twigged.”
“Karen, why do you keep saying ‘he’ and ‘him’?”
“‘Why?’ Joe told you. Doe thinks he is a boy cat-and who am I to argue?
He’s always thought so, he was the feistiest kitten we ever had. 11mm — Kittens. Barbie, the first time Doe came into heat we arranged for Doe to meet a gentleman cat of exalted ancestry. But it wasn’t Doe’s métier and he beat the hell out of the tomcat. So we quit trying. Mmm — Calendar girl, how long have we been here?”
“Sixty-two days. I’ve looked it up; it’s sixty days with a normal range to seventy.”
“So it’s any time now. I’ll bet you two back rubs that we are up all night tonight. Cats never have kittens at a convenient hour.” Karen abruptly changed the subject. “Barbie, what do you miss most? Cigarettes?”
“I’ve quit thinking of them. Eggs, I guess. Eggs for breakfast.”
“Daddy did plan for that. Fertilized eggs and a little incubator. But he hadn’t built it and anyhow, eggs would have busted. Yes, I miss eggs. But I wish cows laid eggs and Daddy had figured out how to bring cow eggs along. Ice cream! Cold milk!”
“Butter,” agreed Barbara. “Banana splits with whipped cream. Chocolate malts.”
“Stop it! Barbie, I’m starving in front of your eyes.”
Barbara pinched her. “You aren’t fading way. Fact is, you’ve put on weight.”
“Perhaps.” Karen shut up and began on the dishes.
Presently she said in a low voice, “Barbie, Doe won’t hand this household half the surprise I’m going to.”
“How, hon?” “I’m pregnant.” “Huh?”
“You heard me. Pregnant. Knocked up, if you insist on the technical
term!”
“Are you sure, dear?”
“Of course I’m sure! I had a test, the froggie winked at me. Hell, I’m
four months gone.” Karen threw herself into the arms of the older girl. “And I’m scared!”
Barbara hugged her. “There, there, dear. It’s going to be all right.” “The hell it is,” Karen blubbered. “Mother’s going to raise hell…and
there aren’t any hospitals…nor doctors. Oh, why didn’t Duke study medicine? Barbie, I’m going to die. I know I am.”
“Karen, that’s silly. More babies have been born without doctors and hospitals than ever were wheeled into a delivery room. You’re not scared of
dying, you’re scared of telling your parents.”
“Well, that, too.” Karen wiped at her eyes and sniffed. “Uh — Barbie, don’t be mad…but that’s why I invited you down that weekend.”
“I figured Mother wouldn’t raise quite so much hell if you were present.
Most girls in our chapter are either squares or sluts, and silly heads besides. But you are neither and I knew you would stand up for me.”
“Thank you, dear.”
“Thank me, hell! I was using you.”
“It’s the finest compliment another woman ever paid me.” Barbara wiped a tear from Karen’s face and tweaked her cheek. “I’m glad I’m here. So you haven’t told your parents?”
“Well, I was going to. But the attack hit…and then Mother went to pieces…and Daddy has been loaded down with worries and there’s never been the right time.”
“Karen, you aren’t scared to tell your father, just your mother.” “Well…Mother mostly. But Daddy, too. Besides being shocked and hurt-
he’ll think it was silly of me to get caught.”
“While he’s certain to be surprised, I doubt the other.” Barbara hesitated. “Karen, you needn’t take this alone. I can share it.”
“That’s what I had hoped. That’s why I asked you to come home with me. I told you.”
“I mean really share it. I’m pregnant, too.” “What?”
“Yes. We can tell them together.”
“Good Lord, Barbara! How did it happen?”
Barbara shrugged. “Careless. How did it happen to you?” Karen suddenly grinned. “How? A bee sprinkled pollen on me; how else? ‘Who’ you mean.”
“‘Who’ I don’t care about. Your business. Well, dear? Shall we go tell them? I’ll do the talking.”
“Wait a minute. You hadn’t planned to tell anybody? Or had you?” “Why, no,” Barbara answered truthfully, “I was going to wait until it
showed.”
Karen looked at Barbara’s waistline. “It doesn’t show. Are you sure?” “I’ve skipped two periods, I’m pregnant. Or I’m ill, which would be
worse. Let’s gather up the laundry and tell them.
“Uh, since you don’t look it-and I do; I’ve been careful not to undress around Mother-since you don’t, let’s hold that back and use it as a whammy if things get sticky.”
“If you like. Karen, why not tell Hugh first? Then let him tell your mother.”
Karen looked relieved. “You think that’s all right?”
“Hugh would rather hear it with your mother not around. Now go find him and tell him. I’ll hang the clothes.”
“All right, I will!”
“And quit worrying. We’ll have our babies and won’t have any trouble and we’ll raise them together and it’ll be fun. We’ll be happy.”
Karen’s eyes lit up. “And you’ll have a girl and I’ll have a boy and we’ll marry them and be grandmothers together!”
“That sounds more like Karen.” Barbara kissed her. “Run tell Hugh.”
Karen found Hugh bricking up the kiln; she told him that she would like a private talk.
“All right,” he agreed. “Let me tell Joe to get this fired up. I should inspect the ditch. Come along and talk?”
He gave her a shovel, carried a rifle. “Now what’s on your mind, baby
girl?”
“Let’s get farther away.” They walked a meandering distance. Hugh
stopped, exchanged rifle for shovel, and built up a stretch of wall. “Daddy? Perhaps you’ve noticed a shortage of men?”
“No. Three men and three women. The usual division.” “Perhaps I should say ‘eligible bachelors.'”
“Then say it.”
“All right, I’ve said it. I need advice. Which is worse? Incest? Or miscegenation? Or should I be an old maid?”
He placed another shovelful, tamped it. “I would not urge you to be an old maid.”
“That settles that, I feel the same way. How do you size up those other fates?”
“Incest,” he answered, “is a bad idea, usually.” “Which leaves just one thing.”
“Wait. I said, ‘Usually.'” He stared at the shovel. “This is not a problem I ever expected-but we are facing many new problems. Brother-and- sister marriages are not uncommon in history. They are not necessarily bad.” He frowned. “But there is Barbara. You might have to accept a polygamous household.”
“Hold it, Daddy. ‘Incest’ isn’t just brothers.”
He stared at her. “You’ve managed to startle me, Karen.” “Shocked you, you mean.”
“No. ‘Startled.’ Were you seriously suggesting what you implied?” “Daddy,” she said soberly, “it’s one subject I can’t joke about. If I
had to choose between you and Duke-as a husband, I mean-I’d take you and no two ways about it.”
Hugh mopped his forehead. “Karen, such a statement can be honored only by taking it seriously — “
“I’m serious!”
“And I so take it. Do I understand that you have eliminated Joseph? Or have you considered him?”
“Certainly I have.” “Well?”
“How could I avoid it, Daddy? Joe is nice. But he’s just a boy, even though he’s older than I am. If I said, ‘Boo!’ he would jump out of his skin. No.”
“Does his skin have something to do with your choice?” “Daddy, you tempt me to spit in your face. I’m not Mother!”
“I wanted to be sure. Karen, you know that color does not matter to me.
I want to know other things about a man. Is his word good? Does he meet his obligations? Does he do honest work? Is he brave? Will he stand up and be counted? Joe is very much a man by all standards that interest me. I think you are being hasty.”
He sighed. “If we were in Mountain Springs, I would not urge you to marry any Negro. The pressures are too great; such a marriage is almost always a tragedy. But those barbaric factors do not obtain here. I urge that you give Joe serious thought.”
“Daddy, don’t you think I have? I may marry Joe. But I wanted you to know that if I had my choice, out of you three I would pick you.”
“Thank you.”
“Thank me, hell! I’m a woman and you are the man I would most like to.
And a fat lot of good it will do me-and you know why. Mother.”
“I know.” He suddenly looked weary. “We do not what we wish, but what we can. Karen, I am dreadfully sorry that you do not have a longer list to choose from.”
“Daddy, if I’ve learned anything from you, it is that it’s a waste of tears to cry over anything that can’t be helped. That’s Mother, not me. And Duke, though not as bad. I’m just like you on this point — You count your
points and play accordingly. You don’t moan about how the cards aren’t fair. Dig me, Daddy?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t come here to ask you to marry me. Nor even to seduce you though I might as well say, having said so much, that you can have me if you want me. I think you’ve known that for years. I didn’t come here to say that, either. I simply had to get things out of the way before I told you something else. Something where I’ve counted the points and I’m going set and that’s that. Can’t be helped.”
“What? Perhaps I can help.” “Hardly. I’m pregnant, Daddy.”
He dropped the shovel, took her in both arms. “Oh, wonderful!” Presently she said, “Daddy…I can’t shoot a bear with you hugging me.” He put her down, grabbed the rifle. “Where?”
“Nowhere. But you’re always warning us.”
“Oh. All right, I’ll take over guard duty. Who’s the father, Karen?
Duke? or Joe?”
“Neither. Earlier, at school.” “Oh. Still better!”
“How? Damn it, Daddy, this isn’t going the way it’s supposed to. A girl comes home ruined, her father is supposed to raise hell. All you say is, ‘Just dandy!’ You’ve got me confused.”
“Sorry. Under other circumstances, I might feel that you had been careless — “
“Oh, I was! I took a chance, like the nigguh mammy who said, ‘Oh, hunnuhds of times ain’t nuffin happen at all.’ You know.”
“I’m afraid I do. Under these circumstances I am delighted. I had assumed that you were inexperienced. To learn that, instead, you have gone ahead and given us a child and one whose father is from outside our group — Don’t you see, dear? You have almost doubled the chances of this colony surviving.”
“I have?”
“Figure it out, you’re not stupid. Your child’s father — Good stock?” “Would I have been doing what I most certainly did if I hadn’t thought
pretty well of him, Daddy?”
“Sorry, dear. It was a stupid question.” He smiled. “I don’t feel like working. Let’s go spread the good news.”
“All right. But, Daddy — What do we tell Mother?”
“The truth, and I’ll do the telling. Don’t worry, baby girl. You have that baby and I will take care of all else.”
“Yes, sir. Daddy, I feel real good now.” “That’s fine.”
“I feel so good that I almost forgot something. Did you know that Dr. — Livingstone-I-Presume is going to have babies, too?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You had the same chance to notice that I did.”
“Well, yes. But it’s pretty frowsy, your noticing that Doe is pregnant- and not noticing that I am.”
“I thought you had simply been overeating again.”
“You did, huh? Daddy, sometimes I like you better than other times. But this time I guess I’m going to have to like you anyhow.”
Hugh decided to eat dinner before stirring up Grace.
The decision was justified. From her rantings, it appeared that Karen was an ungrateful daughter, a disgrace, a shameless little tramp, and that Hugh was an unnatural father, a failure, and somehow to blame for his daughter’s pregnancy.
Hugh let her rant until she paused for breath. “Grace. Be quiet.” “What? Hubert Farnham, don’t you dare tell me to shut up! How can you
sit there, when your own daughter has flagrantly dis — ” “Shut up or I will shut you up.”
Duke said, “Pipe down, Mother.”
“You, too? Oh, that I should ever see the day when — ” “Mother, keep still for a while. Let’s hear from Dad.” Grace simmered, then said, “Joseph! Leave the room.” “Joe, sit down,” Hugh ordered.
“Yes, Joe,” agreed Karen. “Please stay.”
“Well! If neither of you has the common decency to — “
“Grace, I am nearer to striking you than I have ever been in all these years. Will you keep quiet and listen?”
She looked at her son; Duke was carefully looking elsewhere. “Very well, I will listen. Not that it can possibly do any good.”
“I hope that it will because it is supremely important. Grace, there is no point in heckling Karen. Besides being cruel, it’s ridiculous. Her pregnancy is the best thing that has happened to us.”
“Hubert Farnham, are you out of your mind?”
“Please. You are reacting in terms of conventional morality, which is foolish.”
“Oh? So morals are foolish, are they? You hymn-singing hypocrite!” “Morals are not foolish; morals must be our bedrock, always. But whether
it was moral for Karen to breed a baby at another time and place, in a society that is no more, is irrelevant; we will not discuss it. The fact is, she did- and it is a blessing to us. Please analyze it. Six of us, four from one family. Genetically that is too small a breeding stock. Yet somehow we must flourish-or saving our own lives is wasted. But now we have a seventh, not here in person. That’s better than we had any reason to hope. I pray that the twins that run in my family will show up in her. It would strengthen the stock.”
“How can you talk about your own daughter as if you were breeding a
cow!”
“She is my daughter whom I love. But more important — her supreme
importance-is that she is a woman and pregnant. I wish that you and Barbara were pregnant, too-by outsiders. We need variety for the next generation.”
“I will not sit here and be insulted!”
“I simply said ‘wish.’ In Karen we do have this miracle; we must cherish it. Grace, Karen must be treated with every consideration during her pregnancy. You must take care of her.”
“Are you insinuating that I wouldn’t? You are the one who cares nothing about her welfare. Your own daughter.”
“It doesn’t matter that she is my daughter. It would apply if it were Barbara, or you, or another woman. No more heavy work for Karen. That laundry she did today-you’ll do that; you’ve loafed long enough. You’ll pamper her.
But most urgent, there will be no more scoldings, no harsh words, no recriminations. You will be sweet and kind and gentle with her. Don’t fail in this, Grace. Or I will punish you.”
“You wouldn’t dare!”
“I hope I won’t be forced to.” Hugh faced his son. “Duke. Do I have your backing? Speak up.”
“What do you mean by ‘punishment,’ Dad?”
“Whatever we are forced to use. Words. Social sanctions. Physical punishment if we must. Even expulsion from our group if no other choice remained.”
Duke drummed on the table. “That’s putting it brutally, Dad.” “Yes. I want you to think about the extremes.”
Duke glanced at his sister. “I’ll back you. Mother, you’ve got to behave.”
She started to whimper. “My own son has turned against me. Oh, I wish I had never been born!”
“Barbara?”
“My opinion? I agree with you, Hugh. Karen needs kindness. She mustn’t be scolded.”
“You keep out of this!”
Barbara looked at Grace without expression. “I’m sorry but Hugh asked me. Karen asked me to be in it, too. I think you have behaved abominably, Grace. A baby isn’t a calamity.”
“That’s easy for you to say!”
“Perhaps. But you’ve been nagging Karen steadily-and really, you mustn’t.”
Karen said suddenly, “Tell them, Barbara. About yourself.” “You want me to?”
“You’d better. Or now she’ll start on you.”
“Very well.” Barbara bit her lip. “I said that a baby is not a calamity.
I’m pregnant, too-and I’m very happy about it.”
The silence told Barbara that her purpose of taking the heat off Karen had been achieved. As for herself, she was tranquil for the first time since she had begun to suspect that she was pregnant. She had not shed a tear-oh, no! — but she found that a tension she had not been conscious of was gone.
“Why, you tramp! No wonder my daughter went wrong, exposed to influences like — “
“Stop it, Grace!”
“Yes, Mother,” agreed Duke. “Better keep quiet.” “I was just going to say — “
“You’re not going to say anything, Mother. I mean it.”
Mrs. Farnham subsided. Hugh went on: “Barbara, I hope you are not fibbing. Trying to protect Karen.”
Barbara looked at him and could read no expression. “I am not fibbing, Hugh. I am between two and three months pregnant.”
“Well, the rejoicing is now doubled. We will have to relieve you of heavy work, too. Duke, can you take on some farming?”
“Certainly.”
“Joe can do some, too. Mmm — I must push ahead with the kitchen and bathroom. You’ll both need such comforts long before either baby is born. Joe, that bearproof extra room can’t be put off now; nursery space will be essential and we men will have to move out. I think — “
“Hugh — ” “Yes, Barbara?”
“Don’t worry tonight. I can garden, I’m not as far along as Karen and I’ve had no morning sickness. I’ll let you know when I need help.”
He looked thoughtful. “No.”
“Oh, heaven! I like gardening. Pioneer mothers always worked when pregnant. They stopped when the pains came.”
“And it killed them, too. Barbara, we can’t spare either of you. We’ll treat you as the precious jewels you are.” He looked around. “Right?”
“Right, Dad.”
“Sure thing, Hugh!”
Mrs Farnham stood up. “Really, this conversation is making me ill.” “Good night, Grace. No farming for you, Barbara.”
“But I like my farm. I’ll quit in time.”
“You can supervise. Don’t let me catch you using a spading fork. Nor weeding. You might shake something loose. You’re a gentleman farmer now.”
“Does it say in your books how much work a pregnant woman may do?”
“I’ll read up on it. But we’ll err on the conservative side. Some doctors keep patients in bed for months to avoid losing a baby.”
“Daddy, you don’t expect us to stay in bed!”
“Probably not, Karen. But we will be very careful.” He added, “Barbara is right; it can’t all be settled tonight. Bridge, anyone? Or has there been too much excitement?”
“Hell, no!” Karen answered. “I can use pampering but bridge is one thing that can’t cause a miscarriage. I think.”
“No,” agreed her father. “But the way you bid might cause heart failure in someone else.”
“Pooh. Who wants to bid like a computer? Live dangerously, I always
say.”
“You do, dear.”
They got no further than dealing. Dr. Livingstone, who had been sleeping
in the “bathroom,” at that moment came into the main room, walking stiff- legged and almost dragging hindquarters. “Joseph,” the cat announced, “I am going to have these babies right now1~’
The cat’s anguished wailing, its hobbled gait, made its meaning clear as words. Joe was out of his chair at once. “Doe! What’s the matter, Doe?”
He started to pick the cat up. That was not what Dr. Livingstone needed; it wailed louder and struggled. Hugh said, “Joe. Let it be.”
“But old Doe hurts.”
“So let’s take care of the matter. Duke, we’ll use electric lights and the camp lamp. Snuff the candles. Karen, blankets on the table and a clean sheet.”
“Right away.”
Hugh knelt by the cat. “Easy, Doe. It hurts, doesn’t it? Never mind, it won’t be long. We’re here, we’re here.” He smoothed the fur along the spine, then gently felt the abdomen. “Contraction. Hurry up, Karen.”
“Ready, Daddy!” “Lift with me, Joe.”
They placed the cat on the table. Joe said, “What do we do now?” “Give you a Miltown.”
“But Doe hurts.”
“Surely she does. We can’t do anything about it. She’s having a bad time. It’s her first litter and she’s frightened, and she’s older than she should be, for a first. Not good.”
“But we have to do something.”
“You can help by quieting down; you’re communicating your fear to her. Joe, if there were anything I could do, I would. But there isn’t much we can do but stand by and let her know that she is not alone. Keep her from being frightened. Do you want that tranquilizer?”
“Uh, I guess so.”
“Get it, Duke. Don’t leave, Joe; Doe trusts you.”
“Hubert, if you are going to stay up all night over a cat again, I’ll need a sleeping pill. You can’t expect a person to sleep with all this fuss.”
“A Seconal for your mother, Duke. Can anybody think of anything we can use as a kitten bed?” Hugh Farnham searched his memory. Every box, every scrap of lumber, had been used and re-used and re-re-used in endless make-do building. Build a nest of bricks? Not sooner than daylight and this poor animal needed a safe and comforting spot tonight. Take apart some shelves?
“Daddy, how about the bottom wardrobe drawer?”
“Perfect! Pile everything on a bunk. Pad it. Use my hunting jacket.
Duke, rig a frame to support a blanket; she’ll want a little cave she’ll feel safe in. You know.”
“Of course we know,” Karen chided. “Quit jittering, Daddy. This isn’t our first litter.”
“Sorry, baby. We are about to have a kitten. See that, Joe?” Fur rippled from the cat’s middle down toward the tail, then did so again.
Karen hurriedly threw everything out of the lowest wardrobe drawer, placed it against the wall and put the hunting jacket in it, rushed back. “Did I miss it?”
“No,” Hugh assured her. “But right now!”
Doe stopped panting to give one wail and was delivered of a kitten in two quick convulsions.
“Why, it’s wrapped in cellophane,” Barbara said wonderingly.
“Didn’t you know?” asked Karen. “Daddy, it’s gray! Doe, where have you been? Though maybe I shouldn’t bring that up.”
Neither Hugh nor Dr. Livingstone answered. The mother cat started vigorously licking her offspring, broke the covering, and tiny ratlike arms and legs waved helplessly. A squeak so thin and high as to be almost inaudible announced its opinion of the world. Doe bit the cord and went on licking, cleaning off blood and mucus and purring loudly at the same time. The baby didn’t like it and again vented almost silent protest.
“Boss,” demanded Joe, “what’s wrong with it? It’s so skinny and little.” “Its a fine kitten. It’s a pretty baby, Doe. He’s a bachelor, he doesn’t
know.” Hugh spoke cooingly and rubbed the eat between her ears. He went on in normal tones, “And the worst ease of bar sinister I ever saw-smooth-haired, tiger-striped, and gray.”
Doe looked up reprovingly, gave a shudder and delivered the afterbirth, began chewing the bloody mass. Barbara gulped and rushed to the door, fumbled at a bolt. Karen went after her, opened it and steadied her while she threw up.
“Duke!” Hugh snapped. “Bear guard!”
Duke followed them, stuck his head out. Karen said, “Go ‘way! We’re safe. Bright moonlight.”
“Well…leave the door open.” He withdrew.
Karen said, “I thought you weren’t having morning sickness?” “I’m not. Oh!” Retching again hit her. “It was what Doe did.” “Oh, that. Cats always do that. Let me wipe your mouth, dear.” “It’s awful.”
“It’s normal. Good for them. Hormones, or something; you can ask Hugh.
All right now?”
“I think so. Karen! We don’t have to do that? Do we? I won’t, I won’t!” “Huh? Oh! Never thought of it. Oh, I know we don’t-or they would have
told us in Smut One.”
“Lots of things they don’t mention in Smut One,” Barbara said darkly. “When I had to take it, it was taught by an old maid. But I won’t. I’ll resign first, not have this baby.”
“Comrade,” Karen said grimly, “that’s something we both should have thought of earlier. Stand aside, it’s my turn to heave.”
Presently they went inside, pale but steady. Dr. Livingstone had three more kittens and Barbara managed to watch without further rushes for the door. Of the other birthings only the third was notable: a tiny tomcat but large in its tininess. He was a breech presentation, the skull did not pass easily, and Doe in her pain clamped down.
Hugh was busy at once, pulling gently on the little body with his whole hand and sweating like a surgeon. Doe wailed and bit his thumb. He did not let it stop him nor hurry him.
Suddenly the kitten came free; he bent over and blew in its mouth, was rewarded with a thin, indignant squeak. He put the baby down, let Dr.
Livingstone clean it. “That was close,” he said shakily. “Old Doe didn’t mean to,” Joe said softly.
“Of course not. Which of you girls feels like fixing this for me?”
Barbara dressed the wound, while telling herself that she must not, must not, bite when her own time came.
The kittens were, in order, smooth-haired gray, fluffy white, midnight black with white jabot and mittens, and calico. After much argument between Karen and Joe, they were named: Happy New Year, Snow Princess Magnificent, Dr. Ebony Midnight, and Patchwork Girl of Oz-Happy, Maggie, Midnight, and Patches.
By midnight mother and children were bedded in the drawer with food, water, and sandbox near, and everyone went to bed. Joe slept on the floor with his head by the kitten nest.
When everyone was quiet, he raised up, used the flash to look in. Dr.
Livingstone had one kitten in her arms, three more at suck; she stopped cleaning Maggie and looked inquiringly at him.
“They’re beautiful kittens, Doe,” he told her. “The best babies.” She spread her royal whiskers and purred agreement.
Chapter 8
Hugh leaned on his shovel. “That does it, Joe.”
“Let me tidy up around the gate.” They were at the upper end of their ditch where the stream had been dammed against the dry season. It had been on them for weeks; the forest was sere, the heat oppressive. They were extremely careful about fire.
But no longer so careful about bears. It was still standard practice to be armed, but Duke had killed so many carnivores, ursine and feline, they seldom saw one.
The water spilling over the dam was only a trickle but there was water for irrigation and for household needs. Without the ditch they would have lost their garden.
It was necessary every day or so to adjust the flow. Hugh had not built a water gate; paucity of tools, scarcity of metal, and a total lack of lumber had baffled him. Instead he had devised an expedient. The point where water was taken from the pond had been faced with brick and a spillway set of half- round tile. To increase the flow this was taken out, the spill cut deeper, bricks adjusted, and tiles replaced. It was clumsy; it worked.
The bottom of the ditch was tiled all the way to house and garden; a minimum of water was lost. Their kiln had worked day and night; most of their capital gain had come out of the clay bank below the house and it was becoming difficult to dig good clay.
This did not worry Hugh; they had almost everything they needed.
Their bathroom was no longer a joke. Water flowed in a two-stall trough toilet partitioned with deerhide; tile drainpipe “leaded” with clay ran down the manhole, out the tunnel, and to a cesspool.
Forming drainpipe Hugh had found very difficult. After many failures he had whittled a male form in three parts-in parts, because it was necessary to shape the clay over it, let it dry enough to take out the form before it cracked from shrinking over the form.
With practice he cut his failures to about 25 percent in forming, 25 percent in firing.
The damaged water tank he had cut painfully, mallet and chisel, lengthwise into tubs, a bathtub indoors and a washtub outdoors. The seams he had calked with shaved hide; the tubs did not leak-much.
A brick fireplace-oven filled one corner of the bath-kitchen. It was not in use; days were long and hot; they cooked outdoors and ate under an awning of empty bears-but it was ready against the next rainy season.
Their house now had two stories. Hugh had concluded that an addition
strong enough to stop bears and tight enough to discourage snakes would have to be of stone, and solidly roofed. That he could do-but how about windows and doors? Glass he would make someday if he solved the problems of soda and lime. But not soon. A stout door and tight shutters he could manage, but such a cabin would be stuffy.
So they had built a shed on the roof, a grass shack. With the ladder up, a bear faced a twelve-foot wall. Unsure that a wall would stop all their neighbors, Hugh had arranged trip lines around the edge so that disturbing them would cause an oxygen bottle to fall over. Their alarm was tripped the first week, scaring off the intruder. It had also, Hugh admitted, scared the bejasus out of him.
Anything that could not be hurt by weather had been moved out and the main room was rearranged into a women’s dormitory and nursery. Hugh stared downstream while Joe finished fussing. He could make out the roof of his penthouse. Good enough, he mused. Everything was in fair shape and next year would be better. So much better that they might take time to explore. Even Duke had not been as much as twenty miles away. Nothing but feet for travel and too busy scratching to live — Next year would be soon enough.
“A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” They had started with neither pot nor window. This year a pot — Next year a window? No hurry — Things were going well. Even Grace seemed contented. He felt certain that she would settle down and be a happy grandmother. Grace liked babies, Grace did well with babies — How well he remembered.
Not long now. Baby Karen was fuzzily vague but her guesses seemed to show that D-day was about two weeks off, and her condition matched her guess, as near as he could tell.
The sooner the better! Hugh had studied everything in his library on pregnancy and childbirth; he had made every preparation he could. His patients seemed to be in perfect health, both had satisfactory pelvic measurements, both seemed unafraid, and they helped each other with friendly nagging, not to gain too much weight. With Barbara to hold Karen’s hand, with Karen to hold Barbara’s hand, with Grace’s motherly experience to bolster them, Hugh could see no trouble ahead.
It would be wonderful to have babies in the house.
With a warm wave of euphoria Hugh Farnham realized that he had never been so happy in his life.
“That’s it, Hugh. Let’s catch those tiles on the way back.” “Okay. Take the rifle, I’ll carry the tools.”
“I think,” Joe said, “we ought to — “
His words chopped off at a gunshot; they froze. It was followed by two more. They ran.
Barbara was in the door. She held up a gun and waved, went inside. She came out before they reached the house, stepping carefully down off the stoop and moving slowly; she was very gravid. Her belly bulged huge in shorts made from wornout jeans that had belonged to Duke; she wore a man’s shirt altered to support her breasts. She was barefooted and no longer carried the gun.
Joe outdistanced Hugh, met her near the house. “Karen?” he demanded. “Yes. She’s started.”
Joe hurried inside. Hugh arrived, stood panting. “Well?”
“Her bag of waters burst. Then the pains started. That was when I fired.”
“Why didn’t you — Never mind. What else?” “Grace is with her. But she wants you.”
“Let me catch my breath.” Hugh wiped his face, tried to control his trembling. He took a deep breath, held it, let it out slowly. He went inside, Barbara following.
The bunks near the door had been taken down. A bed stuck out into the doorway but space cleared by removing shelves left passage. One bunk was now a cot in the living corner. The bed was padded with a grass mattress and a bear rug; a calico cat was on it.
Hugh squeezed past, felt another eat brush his ankles. He went into the other bay. The bunks there had been rebuilt into a bed across the end; Karen was in bed, Grace was seated, fanning her, and Joe stood by with an air of grave concern.
Hugh smiled at his daughter. “Hi, Fatty!” He stooped and kissed her. “How are you? Hurting?”
“Not now. But I’m glad you’re here.” “We hurried.”
A cat jumped up, landing on Karen. “Unh! Damn you, Maggie!”
“Joe,” said Hugh, “round up the cats and put them in Coventry.” The tunnel mouth had been bricked up, but with air holes, and a cat door which could be filled with a large brick. The cats had a low opinion of this but it had been built after Happy New Year had become missing and presumed dead.
Karen said, “Daddy, I want Maggie with me!”
“Joe, make that all but Maggie. When we get busy, grab Maggie and shut her up, too.”
“Can do, Hugh.” Joe left, passing Barbara coming in.
Hugh felt Karen’s cheeks, took her pulse. He said to his wife, “Is she shaved?”
“There hasn’t been time.”
“You and Barbara get her shaved and washed. Punkin’, when did your bowels move?”
“Just did. I was on the pot when it happened. Just sitting there minding my own business-and all of a sudden I’m Niagara Falls!”
“But your bowels moved?” “Oh, yes!”
“That’s one less thing to worry about.” He smiled. “Not that there’s anything to worry about, you’ll play bridge most of the night. Like kittens, babies show up in the wee, sma’ hours.”
“All night? I want to have this little bastard and get it over with.” “I want it over with, too, but babies have minds of their own.” He
added, “You’ll be busy a while and so will I. I’m dirty.” He started to leave. “Daddy, wait a minute. Do I have to stay back here? It’s hot.”
“No. The light is better by the door. Especially if young Tarzan has the decency to arrive during daylight. Barbara, turn that used bear over; it’ll be cooler. Put this sheet on it. Or a clean one if there is one.”
“The sterilized one?”
“No. Don’t unpack the boiled sheet until the riot starts.” Hugh patted his patient’s hand. “Try not to have a pain until I’m clean.”
“Daddy, you should have been a doctor.”
“I am a doctor. The best doctor in the world.”
As he left the house he encountered Duke, soaked from a long run. “I heard three shots. Sis?”
“Yes. No hurry, labor just started. I’m about to take a bath. Want to join me?”
“I want to say hello to Sis first.”
“Hurry up; they’re about to bathe her. And grab Joe; he’s incarcerating cats. They’ll want us out of the way.”
“Shouldn’t we be boiling water?”
“Do so, if it will calm you. Duke, my O.B. kit, such as it is, has been ready for a month. There are six jars of boiled water, for this and that. Go kiss your sister and don’t let her see that you’re worried.”
“You’re a cold fish, Dad.”
“Son, I’m scared silly. I can list thirteen major complications-and I’m not prepared to cope with any of them. Mostly I pat her hand and tell her that everything is dandy-and that’s what she needs. I examine her, solemn as a judge, and don’t know what to look for. It’s just to reassure her…and I’ll thank you to help out.”
Duke said soberly, “I will, sir. I’ll kid her along.”
“Don’t overdo it. Just let her see that you share her confidence in old Doe Farnham.”
“I will.”
“If Joe gets the jitters, get him out. He’s the worst. Grace is doing fine. Hurry up or they won’t let you in.”
Later, bathed and calmed down, Hugh climbed out of the stream ahead of Joe and Duke, walked back carrying his clothes and letting the air dry him. He paused outside, put on clean shorts. “Knock, knock!”
“Stay out,” Grace called. “We’re busy.” “Then cover her. I want to scrub.”
“Don’t be silly, Mother. Come in, Daddy.”
He went in, squeezing around Barbara and Grace, and on into the bathroom. He trimmed his nails very closely, scrubbed his hands with ditch water-then again with boiled water, and repeated it. He shook them dry and went into the main room, being careful not to touch anything.
Karen was on the bed at the door, a ragged half sheet over her. Her shoulders were swaddled in a grayish garment that had been the shirt Hugh had worn the night of the attack. Grace and Barbara were seated on the bed, Duke stood outside the door, and Joe sat mournfully on the bunk beyond the bed.
Hugh smiled at her. “How is it going? Any twinges?”
“Nary a twinge, damn it. I want to have him before dinner.” “You will. Because you don’t get any dinner.”
“Beast. My daddy is a beast.”
“Doctor Beast, please. Skedaddle, friends, I want to examine my patient.
Everyone but Grace. Barbara, go lie down.” “I’m not tired.”
“You may be awake most of the night. Take a nap. I don’t want to cope with a seven-month preemie.”
He folded back the sheet, looked Karen over, and palpated her swollen belly. “Has he been kicking?”
“Has he! I’m going to sign him up with the Green Bay Packers. I think he’s wearing shoes.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised. Did you have shoes on when you started him?” “What? Daddy, you are a nasty man. Yes.”
“Prenatal influence. Next time take them off.” He tried to judge whether the child was in the head-down position, or whether it was-God forbid! — a breech presentation. He was unable to decide. So he smiled at Karen and lied. “Shoes won’t bother us, as he is head down, just as he should be. It’s going to be an easy birth.”
“How can you tell, Daddy?”
“Put your hand where mine is. That’s his little pointy head, all set to take the dive. Feel it?”
“I guess so.”
“You could see, if you were where I am.” He tried to see if she was dilated. There was a little blood and he decided against a tactile examination-he did not know how it should feel and handling the birth canal would increase danger of infection. He knew that a rectal exploration should tell him something but be did not know what-so there was no point in submitting Karen to that indignity.
He looked up, caught his wife’s eye and thought of asking her opinion, decided not to. Despite having borne children, Grace knew no more about it
than he did; the only result would be to shake Karen’s confidence. —
Instead he got his “stethoscope” (three end papers from his encyclopaedia, rolled into a tube) and listened for fetal heartbeat. He had often heard it lately. But he got only a variety of noises which he lumped in his mind as “gut rumble.”
“Ticking like a metronome,” he ‘announced, putting the tube down and covering her. “Your baby’s in fine shape, baby girl, and so are you. Grace, did you start a log when the first pain showed?”
“Barbara did.”
“Will you keep it, please? But first tell Duke to take the ropes off the other bed and rig them here.”
“Hubert, are you sure she should pull on ropes? Neither of my doctors had me do anything of the sort.”
“It’s the latest thing,” he reassured her. “All hospitals use them now.” Hugh had read somewhere that midwives often had their patients pull on ropes while bearing down. He had looked for this in his books, could not find it.
But it struck him as sound mechanics; a woman should be able to bear down better.
Grace looked doubtful but dropped the matter and left the shelter. Hugh started to get up. Karen grabbed his hand. “Don’t go ‘way, Daddy!”
“Pain?”
“No. Something to tell you. I asked Joe to marry me. Last week. And he accepted.”
“I’m glad to hear it, dear. I think you are getting a prize.”
“I do, too. Oh, it’s Hobson’s choice but I do love him, quite a lot. But we won’t get married until I’m up and around and strong. I couldn’t face the row with Mother, not now.”
“I won’t tell her.”
“Better not tell Duke, either. Barbara knows., she thinks it’s swell.” A contraction hit Karen while Duke war adjusting ropes. She yelped,
chopped it off and gritted her teeth, reached for the ropes as Duke hastily handed them to her. Hugh put his hand on her belly, felt her womb harden as increasing pain showed in her face. “Bear down, baby,” he told her. “And pant; it helps.” .
She started to pant, it turned into a scream.
Endless seconds later she relaxed, forced a smile and said, “They went that a-way! Sorry about the sound effects, Daddy.”
“Yell if you want to. But panting does more good. Now rest while you can. Let’s get this organized. Joe, you’re drafted as cook. I want Barbara to rest and Grace to nurse-so you cook dinner, please. Fix some cold supper, too. Grace, did you log it?”
“Yes.”
“Did you time the contraction?”
“I did,” Barbara answered. “Forty-four seconds.”
Karen looked indignant. “Barb, you are out of your mind! It was over an
hour.”
“Call it forty-five seconds,” Hugh said. “I want the time of each pain
and how long it lasts.”
Seven minutes later the next one hit. Karen managed to pant, screamed only a little. But she did not feel like joking afterwards; she turned her face away. The contraction had been long and severe. Though shaken by his daughter’s agony, Hugh felt encouraged; it seemed certain that labor was going to be short.
It was not. All that hot and weary day the woman brought to bed fought to void herself of her burden-white-faced and shrieking, belly hardening with each attempt, muscles in arms and neck standing out as she strained-then fell back limp as the contraction died away, tired and trembling, not speaking,
uninterested in anything but the ordeal.
It got steadily worse. Contractions became only three minutes apart, each one longer and seeming to hurt more. Once Hugh told her not to use the ropes; he could not see that they helped. Quickly she asked for them and seemed not to have heard him. She did seem slightly less uncomfortable braced against them.
At nine that night there was bleeding. Grace became frantic; she had heard many stories of the dangers of hemorrhage. Hugh assured her that it was normal and showed that the baby would arrive soon. He believed it, as it was not massive and did not continue-and it did not seem possible that birth could be far away.
Grace looked angry and got up; Barbara slipped into the chair she vacated. Hugh hoped that Grace would rest-the women had been taking turns.
But Grace returned a few minutes later. “Hubert,” she said in a high, brittle voice. “Hubert, I’m goi1~g to call a doctor.”
“Do that,” he agreed, his eyes on Karen.
“You listen to me, Hubert Farnham. You should have called a doctor at once. You’re killing her, you hear me? I’m going to call a doctor-and you are not going to stop me.”
“Yes, Grace. The telephone is in there.” He pointed into the other wing.
Grace looked puzzled, then turned suddenly and went away. “Duke!” His son hurried in. “Yes, Dad?”
Hugh said forcefully, “Duke, your mother has decided to telephone for a doctor. You go help her. Do you understand?”
Duke’s eyes widened. “Where are the needles?”
“In the smaller bundle on the table. Don’t touch the large bundle; it’s sterile.”
“Got it. What dosage?”
“Two c.c. Don’t let her see the needle, or she’ll jerk.” Hugh’s head jerked; he realized that he was groggy. “Make that three c.c.; I want her to go out like a light and sleep until morning. She can tolerate it.”
“Right away.” Duke left.
Karen had been lying quiet between contractions, apparently in semi- coma. Now she whispered, “Poor Daddy. Your women give you a lot of grief.”
“Rest, dear.”
“I — Oh, God, here it comes again!”
Then she was saying between screams: “It hurts! Make it stop! Oh, Daddy, I do want a doctor! Please, Daddy! Get me a doctor!”
“Bear down, darling. Bear down.”
It went on and on, far into the night, no respite and getting worse. It stopped being worth while to log contractions; they almost overlapped. Karen no longer could be said to talk; she screamed incoherent demands for relief when she strained, spoke unresponsively or did not answer in the brief periods between contractions.
Around dawn-it seemed to Hugh that the torture had been going on for weeks but his watch showed that Karen had been in labor eighteen hours-Barbara said urgently, “Hugh, she can’t take any more.”
“I know,” he admitted, looking at his daughter. She was at the peak of a pain, face gray and contorted, mouth squared in agony, high sobbing moans coming out between her teeth.
“Well?”
“I suppose she should have had a Caesarean. But I’m no surgeon.” “I wonder.”
“I don’t. I’m not.”
“You know more about it than the first man who ever did one! You know how to keep it sterile. We have sulfa drugs and you can load her up with Demerol.” She did not try to keep Karen from hearing; their patient was beyond
caring.
“Hugh, you must. She’s dying.”
“I know.” He sighed. “But it’s too late for a Caesarean, even ill knew how. To save Karen with one, I mean. We might save her baby.” He blinked and swayed. “Only it would not. Who’s to wet-nurse? You can’t, not yet. And cows we don’t have.”
He took a deep breath, tried to get a grip on himself. “Only one thing left. Try to get it out Eskimo style.”
“What’s that?”
“Get her up and let gravity help. Maybe it’ll work. Call the boys, we’ll need them. I’ve got to scrub again; I might have to do an episiotomy. Oh, God.”
Five minutes and two contractions later they were ready to try it. When Karen lay back exhausted after the second one, Hugh tried to explain what they were going to do. It was hard to get her attention. At last she nodded slightly and whispered, “I don’t care.”
Hugh went to the table where his equipment was now opened out, got his one scalpel, took the camp lamp in his other hand. “All right, boys. As soon as she starts, pick her up.”
They had only seconds to wait. Hugh saw the contraction start, nodded to Duke. “Now!”
“With me, Joe.” They started to lift her, each with an arm under her back, a hand under a thigh.
Karen screamed and fought them off. “No, no! Don’t touch me-I can’t stand it! Daddy, make them stop! Daddy!”
They stopped. Duke said, “Dad?” “Lift her up! Now!”
They got her high in a squatting position, thighs pulled open. Barbara got behind Karen, arms around her, and pressed down on the girl’s tortured belly. Karen screamed and struggled; they held her fast. Hugh got hurriedly to the floor, shined the light up. “Bear down, Karen, bear down!”
“Ooooooh!”
Suddenly he saw the baby’s scalp, gray-blue. He started to lay the knife aside; the head retreated. “Try again, Karen!”
He readjusted the lamp. He wondered whether he was supposed to make the incision in front? Or in back? Or both? He saw the scalp show again and stop; with his hand suddenly rock steady and with no conscious decision he reached up and made one small cut.
He barely had time to drop the knife before he had both hands full of wet, slippery, bloody baby. He knew there was something else he should do now but all he could think of was to get it by both feet in his left hand, lift it and slap its tiny bottom.
It let out a choked wail.
“Get her on the bed, boys-but easy! It’s still fastened by the cord.”
They made it, Hugh on his knees and burdened with a feebly wiggling load. Once they had Karen down, Hugh started to put her baby in her arms-but saw that Karen was not up to it. She seemed to be awake-her eyes were open. But she was in total collapse.
Hugh was close to collapse. He looked dazedly around, handed the baby to Barbara. “Stay close,” he told her, unnecessarily.
“Dad?” said Duke. “Aren’t you supposed to cut the cord?”
“Not yet.” Where was that knife? He found it, rubbed it quickly with iodine-hoped that it was sterile. Placed it by two boiled lengths of cotton string-turned and felt the cord to see if it was pulsing.
“He’s beautiful,” Joe said softly.
“She,” Hugh corrected. “The baby is a girl. Now, Barbara, if you — “
He broke off. Suddenly everything happened too fast. The baby started to choke; Hugh grabbed it, turned it upside down, dug into its mouth, scooped out a plug of mucus, handed the baby back, started again to check the cord-saw that Karen was in trouble.
With a nightmare feeling that he needed to be twins he got one of the strings, tied a square knot around the cord near the baby’s belly, trying to control his trembling so as not to tie it too hard-started to tie the second, saw that it was not needed; Karen suddenly delivered the placenta and was hemorrhaging. She moaned.
With one slash Hugh cut the cord, snapped at Barbara, “Get a bellyband on it!” — turned to take care of the mother.
She was flowing like a river; her face was gray and she seemed unconscious. Too late to attempt to take stitches in the cut he had made and the tears that followed; he could see that this flood was from inside, not from the damaged portal. He tried to stop it by packing her inside with their last roll of gauze while shouting to Joe and to Duke to get a bellyband and compress on Karen herself to put pressure on her uterus.
Some agonized time later the belly compress was in place and the gauze was backed by a dam of sanitary napkins-one irreplaceable, Hugh thought tiredly, they hadn’t needed much. He raised his eyes and looked at Karen’s face-then in sudden panic tried to find her pulse.
Karen had survived the birth of her daughter by less than seven minutes.
Chapter 9
Katherine Josephine survived her mother by a day. Hugh baptized her with that name and a drop of water an hour after Karen died; it was clear that the baby might not last long. She had trouble breathing.
Once when the baby choked, Barbara started her up again by mouth-to- mouth suction, getting a mouthful of something she spat out hastily. Little Jodie seemed better then for quite a while.
But Hugh knew that it was only a reprieve; he could see no chance of keeping the baby alive long enough-two months-to let Barbara feed it. Only two cans of Carnation milk were left in their stores.
Nevertheless they worked grimly around the clock.
Grace mixed a formula from memory-evaporated milk, boiled water, a hoarded can of white Karo. They had no food cells, not even a nipple. An orphaned baby was a crisis for which Hugh had not planned. In hindsight it seemed the most glaring of probable emergencies. He tried not to brood over his failure, dedicated himself to keeping Karen’s daughter alive.
A plastic-barreled eyedropper was the nearest to a nipple they could find. They used it to pick up the formula, try to match the pressure with the infant’s attempts to suck.
It did not work well. Little Jodie continued to have trouble breathing and tended to choke every time they tried to feed her; they spent as much time trying to clear her throat and get her cranked up again as they did in feeding her. She seemed reluctant to suck on the harsh substitute and if they squirted food into her mouth anyway, she always choked. Twice Grace was able to coax her into taking almost an ounce. Both times she threw it up. Barbara and Hugh had even less luck.
Before dawn following her birthday Hugh was awakened by Grace screaming.
The child had choked to death.
During the long day in which three of them battled to save the baby, Duke and Joe dug a grave, high up the hill in a sunny spot. They dug deep and stocked a pile of boulders; both held concealed horror that a bear or coyotes
might dig up the grave.
Grave dug, boulders waiting, Joe said in a strained voice, “How are we going to build a casket?”
Duke sighed and wiped sweat from his eyes. “Joe, we can’t.” “We’ve got to.”
“Oh, we could cut trees and split them and adz out some lumber-we’ve done that when we had to. That kitchen counter. But how long would it take? Joe, this is hot weather-Karen can’t wait!”
“We’ve got to tear down something and build out of it. A bed, maybe.
Bookcases.”
“Taking the wardrobe apart would be easiest.” “Let’s start.”
“Joe. The ‘only things we could use to build a coffin are in the house.
Do you think Hugh will let us go in there now and start ripping and tearing and banging? If anybody woke that baby or startled it when they were trying to get it to feed, Dad would kill him. If Barbara or Mother didn’t kill him first. No, Joe. No coffin.”
They settled for a vault, using all their stock of bricks; these they used to build a box in the bottom of the grave, then cut down their dining canopy to line it, and cut timbers to cover it. Poor as it was, they felt comforted by it.
Next morning the grave received mother and daughter.
Joe and Duke placed them in it, Duke having insisted that his father stay behind and take care of Grace and Barbara. Duke had visualized how awkward it would be, getting the bodies into the grave and arranging them; he would not have had Joe along had not an assistant been necessary. He suggested that his mother not come ‘to the grave at all.
Hugh shook his head. “I thought of that. You try to convince her. I can’t budge her.”
Nor could Duke. But when he sent Joe down for the others, his sister and her daughter were decently at rest with their winding sheet neatly arranged, and no trace remained of the struggle it had been to place ‘them there, the rebuilding of part of the brick box that had been necessary, or-worst-the moment when the tiny corpse had fallen out of the sheet when they tried to get them both down as one. Karen’s face looked peaceful and her daughter was cuddled in her arm as if sleeping.
Duke balanced with a foot on each brick wall, knelt over her. “Good-bye, Sis,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.” He covered her face and got carefully out of the grave. A little procession was coming up the hill, Hugh ‘assisting his wife, Joe helping Barbara. Beyond the shelter ‘their flag flew at half-mast.
They arranged themselves at the grave, Hugh at the head, his wife on his right, his son on his left, Barbara and Joe at the foot. To Duke’s relief no one asked that faces be uncovered nor did his mother seem disturbed at the arrangements.
Hugh took a small black book from his pocket, opened it to a marked
page:
“‘I am the Resurrection and the Life…
“‘We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain that we can take
nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken — ‘”
Grace sobbed and her knees started to fail Hugh shoved the book into Duke’s hands, moved to support his wife. “Take over, Son!”
“Take her back down, Dad!”
Grace said brokenly, “No, no! I must stay.” “Read it, Duke. I’ve marked the passages.”
“‘…he heapeth up riches, and cannot tell who shall gather them. “‘For I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers
were.
“‘0 spare me a little, that I may recover my strength.
“‘Man, that is born of woman, hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery.
“‘Unto Almighty God we commend the soul of our sister — of our sisters- and we commit their bodies to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust — ‘”
Duke paused, dropped the tiniest of clods into the grave. He looked back at the book, closed it and said suddenly, “Let us pray.”
They took Grace back and put her to bed; Joe and Duke returned to close the grave. Hugh, seeing that his wife appeared to be resting, started to snuff candles in the rear bay. She opened her eyes. “Hubert — “
“Yes, Grace?”
“I told you. I warned you. You wouldn’t listen to me.” “About what, Grace?”
“I told you she had to have a doctor! You wouldn’t call one. You were too proud. You sacrificed my daughter on the altar of your pride. My baby. You killed her.”
“Grace, there are no doctors here. You know that.”
“If you were even half a man, you wouldn’t make excuses!”
“Grace, please. May I get you something? A Miltown? Or would you like a
hypo?”
“No, no!” she said shrilly. “That’s how you tricked me when I was going
to get a doctor anyway. In spite of you. You’ll never again trick me with your drugs. And you’ll never touch me again, either. Murderer.”
“Yes, Grace.” He turned and left.
Barbara was on the stoop, sitting with her head in her hands. Hugh said, “Barbara, the flag must be two-blocked. Do you want me to do it?”
“So soon, Hugh?” “Yes. We go on.”
Chapter 10
They went on. Duke hunted, Duke and Joe farmed, Hugh worked harder than ever. Grace worked too, and her cooking improved-and her eating; she got fatter. She never mentioned her conviction that her husband had been responsible for the death of their daughter.
She did not speak to him at all. When a problem had to be discussed she spoke to Duke. She quit attending church services.
In the last month of Barbara’s pregnancy, Duke sought out his father privately. “Dad, you told me that any time I wanted to leave-or any of us-we could.”
Hugh was startled. “Yes.”
“A pro-rata share, you said. Ammo, tools, and so forth.”
“Better than that; we’re a going concern. Duke, you are leaving?”
“Yes-but not just myself. Mother wants to. She’s the one who’s dead set on it. I’ve got reasons, but Mother’s wishes are the deciding factor.”
“Mmm — Let’s talk about your reasons. Are you dissatisfied with the way I’m running things? I will gladly step aside. I feel sure that I can get Joe and Barbara to go along, so that you will have unanimous support.” He sighed. “I am anxious to turn over the burden.”
Duke shook his head. “That’s not it, Dad. I don’t want to be boss and you’ve done a good job. Oh, I won’t say I liked the high-handed way you started in. But results count and you got results. I’d rather not discuss my reasons except to say that they don’t have to do with you-and wouldn’t be enough to make me leave if Mother weren’t hipped on it. She wants to leave.
She’s going to leave. I can’t let her leave alone.” “Can you tell me why Grace wants to leave?”
Duke hesitated. “Dad, I don’t see that it matters; she’s made up her mind. I pointed out that I couldn’t make things as safe for her-nor as comfortable-as it is here. But she’s adamant.”
Hugh pondered it. “Duke, if that’s how your mother feels, I won’t try to persuade her; I’ve long since lost my influence over her. But I have two ideas. You may find one of them practical.”
“I doubt it.”
“Hear me. You know we have copper tubing; we used some in the kitchen.
We have everything for a still; I stocked the items to build one if a war came along-not just for us but because liquor is money in any primitive society.
“I haven’t built it for reasons we both know. But I could and I know how to make liquor.” He smiled slightly. “Not book knowledge. While I was in the South Pacific, I bossed a still, with the shut-eye connivance of my C.O. I learned how to turn corn or potatoes or most anything into vodka, or fruit into brandy. Duke, your mother might be happy if she had liquor.
“She would drink herself to death!”
“Duke, Duke! If she is happy doing it, who are we to stop her? What does she have to live for? She loved television, she enjoyed parties, she could spend a happy day at the hairdresser’s, followed by a movie, then drinks with one of her friends. That was her life, Duke. Now where is it? Gone, gone!
There is just this we can give her to make up for what she has lost. Who are you to decided that you mother must not drink herself to death?”
“Dad, that’s not the situation!” “So?”
“You know I don’t-didn’t-approve of Mother’s excessive drinking. But I might go along with letting her drink all she wants now. If you build that still, we might be customers. But we would still leave. Because that won’t solve Mother’s problem.”
“Well, Duke, that leaves only my other idea. I’ll get out instead. Only
— ” Hugh frowned. “Duke, tell her that I will leave as soon as Barbara has her baby. I can’t walk out on my patient. You can give Grace my assur — “
“Dad, that won’t solve a thing!” “I don’t understand.”
“Oh, Christ, I might as well spill it. It’s Barbara. She’s — Well, hell, Mother is nuts on the subject. Can’t stand her. Ever since Karen died. She said to me, ‘Duke, that woman is not going to have her child in my home! Her bastard. I won’t have it. You tell your father that he has got to get her out of here.’ That’s what she said, Dad.”
“Good Lord!”
“Yeah. I tried to reason with her. I told her that Barbara couldn’t leave. I gave her both barrels, Dad; I said there wasn’t a chance that you would ever force Barbara to leave. But as for making her leave now, or even letting her, you would no more do it than you would have driven Karen out. I told her that I wouldn’t, either, and that Joe and I would fight you to stop it, stipulating that you were crazy enough to try. Which you aren’t, of course.”
“Thank you.”
“That did it. She believes me when I lay it on the line. So she decided to leave. I can’t stall her any longer. She’s leaving. I’m going with her, to take care of her.”
His father rubbed his temples. “I guess there is no situation so bad but what it can get worse. Duke, even with you, she hasn’t ‘anywhere to go.”
“Not quite, Dad.” “Eh?”
“I can swing it, with your help. Do you remember that cave up Collins
Canyon, the one they tried to make a tourist attraction? It’s still there. Or its twin, I mean. I was hunting up that way that first week. The canyon looked so familiar that I climbed up and looked for the cave. Found it. And Dad, it’s habitable and defensible.”
“The door? The mouth?”
“No problem. If you can spare that steel plate that blocked off the tunnel.”
“Certainly.”
“The cave has a vent, higher up. No smoke problem. It has a spring that hasn’t failed all this dry weather. Dad, it’s as comfortable as the shelter; all it needs is outfitting.”
“I capitulate. You can take almost anything now. Beds, of course.
Utensils. Your pick of the canned goods. Matches, ammunition, guns. Make a list, I’ll help you move.”
Duke colored under his tan. “Dad, a few things are up there already.” “So? Did you think I would be pinchpenny?”
“Uh…I don’t mean the past few days. I moved some things up the first days we were here. You see…well, you and I had that row-and then you made me rationing officer. That gave me the idea, and for a week or more I always left here loaded, leaving when no one was watching.”
“Stealing.”
“I didn’t figure it so. I never took as much ‘as one-sixth of anything…and just stuff I would have to have in a pinch. Matches. Ammo. That rifle you couldn’t find. One blanket. A knife. A little food. Some candles.
You see…well, look at it from my side. There was always the chance that I would get you sore and either have to fight-one of us killed is the way you put it-or run and not be able to stop for anything. I decided not to fight. So I made preparations. But I didn’t steal it; you said I could have it. Say the word and I’ll fetch it all back.”
Hugh Farnham peeled a callus, then looked up. “One man’s stealing is another man’s survival, I suppose. Just one thing — Duke, in that food you took: Were there any cans of milk?”
“Not one. Dad, don’t you think, if there had been, I would have beaten all records getting up there and back when Karen died?”
“Yes. I’m sorry I asked.”
“I was sorry I hadn’t snitched a few cans; then they wouldn’t have been used up.”
“The baby didn’t last out the milk we had, Duke. All right, it calls for quick surgery-but don’t forget that you can come back, any time. Duke, women sometimes get unreasonable at about your mother’s age…then get over it and are nice old ladies. Maybe we’ll have the family together again. I hope we’ll see you occasionally. You’re~ welcome to all the vegetables you can eat, of course.”
“I was going to mention that. I can’t farm up there. Suppose I still hunt for all of us…and when I bring in a load of meat I take away a load of green stuff?”
His father smiled. “We have reinstituted commerce. And we can supply you with pottery and there’s no need to do your own tanning. Duke, I suggest you sort out what you want, and tomorrow you and I and Joe will start packing it to your cave. Be lavish. Just one thing — “
“What?”
“The books are mine! Anything you want to look up, you’ll have to come here. This is not a circulating library.”
“Fair enough.”
“I mean it. You can have my razor, you can have my best knife. But snitch one book and I’ll skin you alive and bind that book in human skin. There are limits. All right, I’ll tell Joe, and get Barbara out of the house
and we’ll stay away until dark. Good luck, and tell Grace no hard feelings. There are, but tell her that. But I’m not too groused. It takes two to create a heaven…but hell can be accomplished by one. I can’t say that I’ve been happy lately and Grace may be smarter than we think.”
“That’s a polite way of telling us to go to hell, Dad.” “Possibly.”
“Whatever you mean, the same to you. It was no accident that I moved away from home as soon as I could.”
“Touché! Well, get on with it.” His father turned and walked away.
Joe made no comment. He simply said that he had better get on with the irrigating. Barbara said nothing until they were alone.
Hugh took a picnic lunch-chunks of corn pone, some strings of jerky, two tomatoes, plus a canteen of water. He fetched a rifle and a blanket. They went up the hill above the grave and picked the shade of a detached tree. Hugh noticed fresh flowers on the grave and wondered if Barbara had been trudging up there. The climb was difficult for her; they had taken it very slowly. Or had Grace been doing it? It seemed still less likely. Then he thought of the obvious: Joe.
Once Barbara had her heavy body comfortable, on her back with knees up, Hugh said, “Well?”
She was silent a long time. “Hugh, I’m dreadfully sorry. It’s my fault.
Isn’t it?”
“Your fault? Because a woman sick in her mind fixes on you to hate? You told me once not to blame myself for another person’s defect. You should take your own advice.”
“That wasn’t what I meant, Hugh. I mean: losing your son. Grace could not leave if Duke did not. Did he say anything? About me?”
“Nothing but this ridiculous set that Grace has taken. What should he have said?”
“I wonder if I am free to say? In any case I am going to. Hugh, after Karen died, Duke asked me to marry him. I refused. He was hurt. And surprised. You see — You knew about Karen and Joe?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know whether Karen had told you. When she decided to marry Joe, I made up my mind that I would have to marry Duke. Karen took it for granted and I admitted that I intended to. She may have told Duke. In any case, he expected me to say Yes. I said No. And he was hurt. I’m sorry, Hugh. If you want me to, I’ll tell him I’ve changed my mind.”
“Hold on! I think you made a mistake. But I won’t have you correcting it to please me. What do you want to do? Do you plan to marry Joe, now?”
“Joe? I never planned to marry Joe. Although I would marry him as readily as Duke. Hugh, I want to do what I always want to do. Whatever you want.” She turned on her side and faced him. “You know that. If you want me to marry Joe, I will. If you want me to marry Duke, I will. You say it, I’ll do it.”
“Barbara, Barbara!”
“I mean it, Hugh. Or anything more, or anything less. You’re my boss.
Not just some, but all. Haven’t I done so, all the time we’ve been together? I play by the book.”
“Stop talking nonsense.”
“If it’s nonsense, it’s true nonsense.”
“As may be. I want you to marry whom you want to marry.” “That’s the one thing I can’t do. You are already married.” “Huh?”
“Are you surprised? No, I’ve surprised you only by saying it-when we’ve kept silent so long. That’s how it is and that’s how it’s always been. Since I can’t marry you, I’ll marry whom you say. Or never marry.”
“Barbara, will you marry me?” “What did you say?”
“Will you marry me?” “Yes.”
He leaned over and kissed her. She kissed him back, lips open, full surrender.
Presently he straightened up. “Would you like some corn pone?” “Not yet.”
“I thought we might have some to celebrate. It calls for champagne. But corn pone is what we have.”
“Oh. Then I’ll have a nibble. And a sip of water. Hugh, Hugh my beloved, what are you going to do about Grace?”
“Nothing. She’s divorcing me. In fact she divorced me more than a month ago, the day-the day we buried Karen. That she is still here is just housing shortage. It doesn’t take a judge to grant a divorce here, any more than it will take a license for me to marry you.”
Barbara spread her hands over her swollen belly. “I have my marriage license, right here!” Her voice was light and happy.
“The child is mine?”
She looked at him. “Look over to the east.” “At what?”
“Do you see Three Wise Men approaching?” “Oh. Idiot!”
“It is yours, my beloved. A thing a woman can never prove but can be utterly sure of.”
He kissed her again. When he stopped she caressed his cheek. “I’d like corn pone now, lots of it. I’m hungry. I feel very full of life and anxious to live.”
“Yes! Tomorrow our honeymoon starts.”
“Today. It has started, Hugh. I’m going to enter it in our journal.
Darling, may I sleep on the roof tonight? I can manage the ladder.” “You want to sleep with me? Lecherous little girl!”
“That wasn’t what I meant. I’m not lecherous now, my hormones are all keyed against it. No passion, dear. Just love. I won’t be any good for a honeymoon. Oh, I’ll happily sleep with you; you could have slept with me all these months. No, dear, I meant that I don’t want to sleep in the same room with Grace. I’m afraid of her-afraid for the baby at least. Perhaps that’s silly.”
“No, it’s not. It may not be necessary but it’s a precaution we’ll take.
Barbara, what do you think of Grace?” “Must I say?”
“Tell me.”
“I don’t like her. That’s apart from being afraid of her; I didn’t like her long before I became uneasy about her. I don’t like the way she treats me, I don’t like the way she treats Joseph, I didn’t like the way she treated Karen, I have always resented the way she treats you-and had to pretend not to see it-and I despise what she has done to Duke.”
“I don’t like her, either-not for years. I’m glad she’s leaving.
Barbara, I would be glad even if you were not here.”
“Hugh, I’m relieved to hear that. You know I’m divorced.” “Yes.”
“When my marriage broke up I swore a solemn oath that I would never break up anyone else’s marriage. I’ve felt guilty ever since the night of the attack.”
He shook his head. “Forget it. The marriage was already long dead. All that was left were duties and obligations. Mine, for she didn’t feel any.
Beloved, had my marriage been a reality, you could have come into my arms that
night, and cuddle and comfort would have been ‘all. As it was, we were dying- so we thought-and I was at least as hungry for love as you were. I was parched for love-you gave me yourself.”
“Beloved, I will never let you be parched again.”
About nine the next morning, ‘they all were outside where chattels for the new household were piled.
Hugh looked over ‘his ex-wife’s selections with wry amusement. Grace had taken literally the invitation to “take almost anything”; she had gutted the place-the best blankets, almost all utensils including the teakettle and the one skillet, three of four foam-rubber mattresses, nearly all the remaining canned goods, all the sugar, the lion’s share of other irreplaceables, all the plastic dishes.
Hugh made only one objection: salt. When he noted that Grace had grabbed all the salt he insisted on a division. Duke agreed and asked if there was anything else Hugh objected to?
Hugh shook his head. Barbara would not mind making-do. “Better is a dinner of herbs where love is — “
Duke had shown restraint, taking one shovel, one ax, a hammer, less than half the nails, and no tool not stocked in duplicate. Instead, Duke remarked that he might want to borrow tools someday. Hugh agreed and offered his services on any two-man job. Duke thanked him. Both men found the situation embarrassing, both covered it by being unusually polite.
A delay in starting was caused by the steel plate for the cave door. Its weight was not too great for a man as husky as Duke, but it was awkward. A pack had to be devised, rugged enough for the trek, comfortable in padding and straps, and so rigged that Duke could fire a rifle.
This resulted in sacrificing the one intact bear hide, the covering of the bed Karen had died in. Hugh minded only the loss of time. It would take six trips by three men to move the plunder Grace had picked; Duke thought that two trips a day would be maximum. If they did not start soon, only one trip could be made that day.
At last they got it on Duke’s back with a fur pad protecting his spine. “Feels right,” Duke decided. “Let’s get packs on you two and get going.”
“In a jiffy,” Hugh agreed and bent over to pick up his load. “My God!”
“Trouble, Duke?” “Look!”
A shape had appeared over the eastern rise. It slanted through the air on a course that would have missed them, but, as it neared the point of closest approach, it stopped dead, turned and headed for them.
It passed majestically overhead. Hugh was unable to guess its size at first; there was nothing to which to relate it-a dark shape proportioned like a domino tile. But as it passed about five hundred feet up, it seemed to him that it was around a hundred feet wide and three times that in length. He could make out no features. It moved swiftly but made no noise.
It swept past, turned, circled-stopped, turned again and came toward them at lower altitude.
Hugh found that he had an arm around Barbara. When the object had appeared, she had been some distance away, putting clothes to soak in the outside tub. Now she was circled by his left arm and he could feel her trembling.
“Hugh, what is it?” “People.”
The thing hovered above their flag. Now they could see people; heads showed above its sides.
A corner detached itself, splitting off sharply. It dove, stopped by the
peak of the flagpole. Hugh saw that it was a car about nine feet long and three wide, with one passenger. No details could he see, no clue to motive power; the car enclosed the man’s lower body; his trunk projected above.
The man removed the flag, rejoined the main craft. His vehicle blended back in.
The rectangle disintegrated.
It broke into units like that which had filched their flag. Most cars remained in the air; some dozen landed, three in a triangle around the colonists. Duke yelled “Watch it!” and dived for his gun.
He never made it. He leaned forward at an extreme angle, pawed the air with a look of amazement, and was slowly pulled back to vertical.
Barbara gasped in Hugh’s ear. “Hugh, what is it?”
“I don’t know.” He did not need to ask what she meant; he had felt, at the instant his son was stopped, that he seemed to be waist deep in quicksand. “Don’t fight it.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
Grace shrilled, “Hubert! Hubert, do some — ” Her cries cut off. She seemed to faint but did not fall.
Four cars were about eight feet in the air, lined up abreast, and were cruising over Barbara’s farm. Where they passed, everything underneath, cornstalks, tomato plants, beans, squash, lettuce, potato hills, everything including branching ditches was pressed flat into a macadam.
The raw end of the main ditch spilled water over this pavement. One car whipped around, ran a new ditch around the raped area in a wide sweep which allowed the water to circle the destroyed garden and reach the stream at a lower point.
Barbara buried her face against Hugh. He patted her.
That car then went upstream along the old ditch. Soon water ceased to
flow.
As the garden was leveled, other cars landed on it. Hugh was ‘unable to
figure out what they did, but a large pavilion, glossy black, and ornate in red and gold, grew up in seconds in the clearing.
Duke called out, “Dad! For God’s sake, can’t you get at your gun?” Hugh was wearing a forty-five, the weapon he had picked for the hike.
His hands were only slightly hampered by whatever held them. But he answered, “I shan’t try.”
“Are you going to just stand there and let — “
“Yes. Duke, use your head. If we hold still, we may live longer.”
Out of the pavilion strode a man. He seemed seven feet tall but some of this was a helmet, plumed and burnished. He wore a flowing skirt of red embroidered in gold and was bare to the waist save that an end of the skirt thrown across one shoulder covered part of his broad chest. He was shod in black boots.
All others were dressed in black coveralls with a red and gold patch at the right shoulder. Hugh felt an impression that this man (there was no slightest doubt that he was master) — that the commander had taken time to change into formal clothes. Hugh felt encouraged. They were prisoners-but if the leader took the trouble to dress up before interviewing them, then they were prisoners of importance and a parley might be fruitful. Or did that follow?
But he was encouraged by the man’s face, too. He had an air of good- natured arrogance and his eyes were bright and merry. His forehead was high, his skull massive; he looked intelligent and alert. Hugh could not place his race. His skin was dark brown and shiny. But his mouth was only slightly Negroid; his nose, though broad, was arched, and his black hair was wavy.
He carried a small crop.
He strode up to them, stopped abruptly when he reached Joseph. He gave a
curt order to their nearest captor.
Joe stretched and bent his legs. “Thanks.”
The man spoke to Joe. Joe answered, “Sorry, I don’t understand.”
The man spoke again. Joe shrugged helplessly. The man grinned and patted him on the shoulder, turned away, picked up Duke’s rifle. He handled it clumsily, making Hugh flinch.
Nevertheless, he seemed to understand guns. He worked the bolt, ejecting one cartridge, then put it to his shoulder, aimed upstream and fired.
The blast was deafening, he had fired past Hugh’s ear. He grinned broadly, tossed the rifle to a subordinate, walked up to Hugh and Barbara, reached out to touch Barbara’s child swollen belly.
Hugh knocked his hand away.
With a gesture almost negligent, certainly without anger, the big man brushed Hugh’s hand aside with the crop he carried. It was not a blow, it would not have swatted a fly.
Hugh gasped in agony. His hand burned like fire and his arm was numb to the armpit. “Oh, God!”
Barbara said urgently, “Don’t, Hugh. He isn’t hurting me.”
Nor was he. With a manner of impersonal interest such as a veterinarian might take in feeling a pregnant mare or bitch, the big man felt out the shape of the child she carried, then lifted one of her breasts-while Hugh writhed in that special humiliation of a man unable to protect his woman.
The man finished his palpation, grinned at Barbara and patted her head.
Hugh tried to ignore the pain in his hand and dug into his memory for a language imperfectly learned. “Vooi govoriti’yeh po-Russki, Gospodin?”
The man glanced at him, made no answer.
Barbara said, “Sprechen Sie deutsch, mein Herr?”
That got her a smile. Hugh called out, “Duke, try him in Spanish!” “Okay. ~Habla usted Español, Señor?” No response — Hugh sighed. “We’ve
shot our wad.”
“M’sieur?” Joe said. “Est-ce que vous parlez la langue française?” The man turned. “Tiens?”
“Non, non! Je suis américain. Nous sommes tous amencams.” “Vraiment? Impossible!”
“C’est vrai, monsieur. Je vous en assure.” Joe pointed to the empty flagpole. “Les Etats-Unis de l’Amérique.”
The conversation became hard to follow as both sides stumbled along in broken French. At last they paused and Joe said, “Hugh, he asked me-ordered me-to come into his tent and talk. I’ve asked him to let you all loose first. He says No. ‘Hell, no!’ it amounts to.”
“Ask him to let the women loose.”
“I’ll try.” Joe spoke at length with the big man. “He says the enceinte femme-that’s Barbara-can sit down where she is. The ‘fat one’ — Grace he means-is to come with us.”
“Good work, Joe. Get us a deal.”
“I’ll try. I don’t understand him very well.”
The three went into the pavilion. Barbara found that she could sit down, even stretch out. But the invisible web held Hugh as clingingly as ever.
“Dad,” Duke said urgently, “this is our chance, while nobody is around who understands English.”
“Duke,” Hugh answered wearily, “can’t you see they hold trumps? It’s my guess that we are alive as long as he isn’t annoyed-not one minute longer.”
“Aren’t you even going to try to fight? Where’s that crap you used to spout about how you were a free man and planned to stay free?”
Hugh rubbed his hurt hand. “Duke, I won’t argue. You start anything and
you’ll get us killed. That’s how I size it up.”
“So it was just crap,” Duke said scornfully. “Well, I’m not making any promises.”
“All right. Drop it.”
“I’m not making promises. Just tell me this, Dad. How does it feel to be shoved around? Instead of shoving?”
“I don’t like it.”
“Neither did I. I’ve never forgotten it. I hope you get your bellyful.” Barbara said, “Duke, for heaven’s sake, stop talking like a fool!”
Duke looked at her. “I’ll shut up. Just one thing. Where did you get that baby in you?”
Barbara did not answer. Hugh said quietly, “Duke, if we get out of this, I promise you a beating.”
“Any time, old man.”
They quit talking. Barbara reached out and patted Hugh’s ankle. Five men gathered around the pile of household objects, looking them over. A man came up and gave them an order; they dispersed. He looked at the chattels himself, then peered into the shelter and went inside.
Hugh heard a sound of water, saw a brown wave rushing down the stream bed. Barbara raised her head. “What’s that?”
“Our dam is gone. It doesn’t matter.”
After a long time, Joe came out of the pavilion alone. He came up to Hugh and said, “Well, here’s the scoop, as nearly as I got it. Not too near, maybe; he speaks a patois and neither of us is fluent. But here it is. We’re trespassers, this is private land. He figured we were escaped prisoners-the word is something else, not French, but that’s the idea. I’ve convinced him-I think I have-that we are innocent people here through no fault of our own.
“Anyhow, he’s not sore, even though we are technically criminals- trespass, and planting things where farms aren’t supposed to be and building a dam and a house and things like that. I think everything is going to be all right-as long as we do as we’re told. He finds us interesting-how we got here and so forth.”
Joe looked at Barbara. “You remember your theory about parallel universes?”
“I guess I was right. No?”
“No. This part is as confused as can be. But one thing is certain.
Barbara, Hugh-Duke-get this! This is our own world, right here.” Duke said, “Joe, that’s preposterous.”
“You argue with him. He knows what I mean by the United States, he knows where France is. And so forth. No question about it.”
“Well…” Duke paused. “As may be. But what about this? Where’s my mother? What’s the idea of leaving her with that savage?”
“She’s all right, she’s having lunch with him. And enjoying it. Let it run easy, Duke, and we’re going to be okay, I think. Soon as they finish lunch we’ll be leaving.”
Somewhat later Hugh helped Barbara into one of the odd flying machines, then mounted into one himself, behind the pilot. He found the seat comfortable and, in place of a safety belt, a field of that quicksand enclosed his lower body as he sat down. His pilot, a young Negro who looked remarkably like Joe, glanced back, then took off without noise or fuss and joined the re-forming rectangle in the air. Hugh saw that perhaps half the cars had passengers; they were whites, the pilots were invariably colored, ranging from as light brown as a Javanese to as sooty black as a Fiji Islander.
The car Hugh was in was halfway back in the outside starboard file. He looked around for the others and was only mildly surprised to see Grace riding behind the boss, in the front rank, center position. Joe was behind them, rather buried in cats.
Off to his right, two cars had not joined up. One hovered over the pile of household goods, gathered them up in a nonexistent cargo net, moved away. The second car was over the shelter.
The massive block lifted straight up without disturbing the shack on its roof. The small car and its giant burden took position fifty feet off the starboard side. The formation moved forward and gathered speed but Hugh felt no wind of motion. The car flanking them seemed to have no trouble keeping up. Hugh could not see the other loaded car but assumed that it was on the port side.
The last he saw of their home was a scar where the shelter had rested, a larger scar where Barbara’s farm had been, and a meandering track that used to mark an irrigation ditch.
He rubbed his sore hand, reflecting that the whole thing had been a gross abuse of coincidence. It offended him the way thirteen spades in a putatively honest deal would offend him. He pondered a remark Joe had made before they loaded: “We were incredibly lucky to have encountered a scholar. French is a dead language — ‘une langue perdue,’ he called it.”
Hugh craned his neck, caught Barbara’s eye. She smiled.
Chapter 11
Memtok, Chief Palace Domestic to the Lord Protector of the Noonday Region, was busy and happy-happy because he was busy, although he was not aware that he was happy and was given to complaining about how hard he had to work, because, as he put it, although he commanded eighteen hundred servants there were not three who could be trusted to empty a slop jar without supervision.
He had just completed a pleasant interview chewing out the head chef; he had suggested that the chef himself, old and tough as he was, nevertheless would make a better roast than the meat the chef had sent in to Their Charity the evening before. One of the duties that Memtok assumed personally was always to sample what his lord ate, despite risk of poison and despite the fact that Their Charity’s tastes in cuisine were not his own. It was one of the innumerable ways in which Memtok gave attention to details, diligence that had brought him, still in his prime, to his present supreme eminence.
The head chef had grumbled and Memtok had sent him away with a taste of the lesser whip to remind him that cooks were not that hard to find. Then he had turned happily to his paper work.
There were stacks of it, as he had just completed moving the household from the Palace to the Summer Palace-thirty-eight of the Chosen but only four hundred and sixty-three servants; the summer residence was run with a skeleton staff. The twice-yearly move involved a wash of paper work-purchase orders, musters, inventories, vouchers, shipping lists, revisions of duty rosters, dispatches-and he considered advising his patron to have some likely youngster muted and trained as his clerk. But he rejected the idea; Memtok did not trust servants who could read and write and add, it gave them ideas even if they could not talk.
The truth was, Memtok loved his paper work and did not want to share it. His hands flew over the papers, checking figures, signing his symbol, okaying payments. He held his pen in an odd fashion, nested between the first three fingers of his right hand-this because he had no thumbs.
He did not miss them, could barely remember what it had been like to have them. Nor did he need them. He could handle a spoon, a pen, and a whip without them, and he had no need ever to handle anything else.
Far from missing his thumbs, he was proud of their absence; they proved
that he had served his lord in both major capacities, at stud when he was younger and now these many years as a tempered domestic. Every male servant over fourteen (with scarce special exceptions) showed one alteration or the other; very few could exhibit both, only a few hundred on the entire Earth. Those few spoke as equals only to each other, they were an elite.
Someone scratched at the door. “Come!” he called out, then growled, “What do you want?” The growl was automatic but he really did dislike this servant for the best of reasons; he was not subject to Memtok’s discipline. He was of a different caste, huntsmen, wardens, keepers, and beaters, and was subject to the Majordomo of the Preserve. The Majordomo considered himself to be of the same rank as the Chief Domestic, and nominally was. However, he had thumb€.
Memtok’s greatest objection to the Summer Palace was that it put him in contact with these servants who had the unpardonable fault of not being under his orders. While it would take only a word to Their Charity to crack down on one of them, he disliked to ask, and while he could touch one of them without real fear of reprimand, the louse would be sure to complain to his boss.
Memtok did not believe in friction between executive servants. Bad for morale. “Message from Boss. Rayed to tell you Their Charity on his way back.
Says four savages with escort. Says you better tear up to the roof, take care of them. All.”
“‘All’? Damn you, what do you mean ‘All’? Why four savages? And in the Name of Uncle when are they arriving?”
“All,” the servant insisted. “Message came in twenty minutes ago. I been looking all over for you.”
“Get out!” The important part of the message was that Their Charity was arriving home instead of staying away overnight. Chef, Receptionist, Musical Director, Housekeeper, Groundskeeper, all heads of departments-he was phoning orders even as he thought. Four savages? Who cared about savages?
But he was on the roof and accepted their custody. He would have been there anyway, with the Lord Protector arriving.
When they arrived, Hugh had no chance to see Barbara. When he was released from the restraint of the “seat belt,” he was confronted by a little baldheaded white man with a waspish face, an abrupt manner, and a whip. He was dressed in a white robe which reminded Hugh of a nightshirt, save that it had on the right shoulder the red and gold patch which Hugh had tentatively identified as the insigne of the big man, the boss. The emblem was repeated in rubies and gold on the chest of the little man as a medallion supported by a heavy gold chain.
The man looked him over with obvious, distaste, then turned him and Duke over to another white man in a nightshirt. This man wore no medallion but did carry a small whip. Hugh rubbed his hand and resolved not to test whether this whip was as potent as the ornate one carried by the big boss.
Duke tested it. The angry little man gave instructions to his straw boss, and left. The straw boss gave an order; Hugh interpreted the tone and gesture as: “All right, you guys, get going” — and got going.
Duke didn’t. The straw boss barely touched him on his calf; Duke yelped. He limped the rest of the way-down a ramp, into a very fast lift, then into a windowless, light, white-walled room which whiffed of hospitals.
Duke understood the order to strip without needing to be stimulated; he cursed but complied. Hugh merely complied. He was beginning to understand the system. The whips were used as spurs are used by a good rider, to exact prompt obedience but not to damage.
From there they were herded into a smaller room, where they were hit from all sides by streams of water. The operator was in a gallery above. He shouted at them, then indicated in pantomime that they were to scrub.
They scrubbed. The jets cut off, they were doused in liquid soap. They scrubbed again and were rinsed and were required to scrub still again, all to gestures that left no doubt as to how thorough a bath was expected. The jets got very hot and harsh, changed to cold and still harsher, were replaced by blasts of hot air.
It was too much like an automatic dishwasher, Hugh’ felt, but they ended up cleaner than they had been in months. An assistant to the bath master then plastered strips over their eyebrows, rubbed an emulsion on their scalps, into their scratchy beards (neither had shaved that day), over their backs and chests and arms and legs, and finally into their pubic hair. Duke got another lesson in obedience before he submitted to this last. When, thereafter, they were subjected willy-nilly to enemas, he gritted his teeth and took it. The water closet was a whirlpool set in the floor. Their finger — and toenails were cut short.
After that they were bathed again. The eyebrow patches washed away. So did their hair. When they came out, they were both bald all over, save for eyebrows.
The bath master made them gargle, showing them what he wanted and spitting into the whirlpool. They gargled three times-a pleasant, pungent liquid-and when it was over, Hugh found that his teeth seemed cleaner than they had ever been in his life. He felt utterly clean, lively, glowing with well being-but humiliated.
They were taken to another room and examined.
Their examiner wore the conventional white nightshirt and a small insigne on a thin gold chain but he needed no diplomas on the wall to show his profession. His bedside manner would never make him rich, Hugh decided; he had the air of military surgeons Hugh had known-not unkind but impersonal.
He seemed surprised by and interested in a removable bridge he found in Hugh’s mouth. He examined it, looked in Hugh’s mouth at the gaps it had filled, gave it to one of his assistants with instructions. The assistant went away and Hugh wondered if his chewing was going to be permanently hampered.
The physician took an hour or more over each of them, using instruments Hugh did not recognize-weight, height, and blood pressure were the only familiar tests. Things were done to them, too, none of them really unpleasant- no hypodermic needles, no knives. During this, Hugh’s bridge was returned and he was allowed to put it back in.
But the tests and/or treatments often seemed to be indignities even though not painful. Once, when Hugh was stretched out on a table from which Duke had just been released, the younger man said, “How do you like it, Dad?”
“Restful.” Duke snorted.
The fact that both men had appendicitis scars seemed to interest the physician as much as the removable bridge. By acting he indicated a bellyache, then jabbed a thumb into McBurney’s point. Hugh conveyed agreement-with difficulty, as nodding the head seemed to be a negative.
An assistant came in and handed the physician a contrivance which turned out to be another dental bridge. Hugh was required to open his mouth; the old one was again taken and the new one seated. It felt to Hugh’s tongue as if he again had natural teeth there. The physician probed cavities, cleaned them and filled them-without pain but without anesthesia so far as Hugh was aware.
After that Hugh was suddenly “strapped” (an invisible field) to a table, supine, and his legs were elevated. Another table was wheeled up and Hugh realized that he was being prepared for surgery-and with horror he was sure what sort. “Duke! Don’t let them grab you! Get that whip!”
Duke hesitated too long. The therapist did not carry a whip; he merely kept one at hand. Duke lunged for it, the physician got it first. Moments later Duke was on his back, still gasping his agony at the punishment he had
taken and having his knees elevated and spread. They both went on protesting.
The physician looked at them thoughtfully and the straw boss who had fetched them was called in. Presently the waspish little man with the big medallion strode in, looked the situation over, stormed out.
There was a long wait. The boss therapist filled in the time by having his assistants complete preparations for surgery and there was no longer the slightest doubt in Hugh’s mind, or Duke’s, as to what they were in for. Duke pointed out that it would have been better if they had fought-and died-earlier in the day, rather than wind up like this. As they would have fought, he reminded his father, if Hugh hadn’t turned chicken.
Hugh didn’t argue, he agreed. He tried to tell himself that his docility in being captured was on account of the women. It afforded him little comfort. True, he hadn’t used his own much in recent years…and might never need them again. But, damn it, he was used to them. And it would be rough for Duke, young as he was.
After a long time the little man stormed back in, angrier than ever. He snapped an order; Hugh and Duke were released.
That ended it, save that they were rubbed all over with a fragrant cream. They were given a white nightshirt apiece, conducted through long bare passages and Hugh was shoved into a cell. The door was not locked but he could not open it.
In one corner was a tray, with dishes and a spoon. The food was excellent and some of it unidentifiable; Hugh ate with good appetite, scraping the dishes and drinking the thin beer with it. Then he slept on a soft part of the floor, having blanked his mind of worry.
He was prodded awake by a foot.
He was taken to another plain, windowless room, which turned out to be a schoolroom. Two short white men in nightshirts were there. They were equipped with props, the equivalent of a blackboard (it could be cleared instantly by some magic), patience-and a whip, for the lessons were “taught to the tune of a hickory stick.” No error went unnoted.
They both could draw and both were imaginative pantomimists; Hugh was taught to speak.
Hugh discovered that his memory was sharpened by the stimuli of pain; he had little tendency to repeat a mistake. At first he was punished only for forgetting vocabulary, but as he learned, he grew to expect flicks of pain for errors in inflection, construction, idiom, and accent.
This Pavlovian treatment continued-if his mental records were correct- for seventeen days; he did nothing else and saw no one but his teachers. They worked in shifts; Hugh worked every possible minute, about sixteen hours a day. He was never allowed quite enough sleep although he never felt sleepy-he didn’t dare-during lessons. Once a day he was bathed and given a clean nightshirt, twice a day he was fed, tasty food and plentiful, three times a day he was policed to the toilet. All other minutes were spent learning to speak, with ever-sharp awareness that any bobble would be punished.
But he learned how to duck punishment. A question, quickly put, would sometimes do. “Teacher, this one understands that there are protocol modes for each status rising and falling, but what this one in its ignorance lacks is knowledge of what each status is-being wholly without experience through the inscrutable ways of Uncle the Mighty-and also is sometimes not aware of the status assumed for teaching purposes by my charitable teacher and of the status this humble one is expected to assume in reply. More than that, this one does not know its own status in the great family. May it please its teacher.”
The whip was put down and for the next hour he was lectured. The problem was more involved than Hugh’s question showed. The lowest status was stud. No, there was one lower: servant children. But since children were expected to
make mistakes, it did not matter. Next higher was slut, then tempered servant- a category with subtle and unlimited gradations of rank so involved that speech of equals was used if the gradient was not clearly evident. High above all servants were the Chosen, with unlimited and sometimes changing variations of rank, including those ritual circumstances in which a lady takes precedence over a lord. But that was not usually a worry; always use protocol rising mode. However –“If two of the Chosen speak to you at once, which one do you answer?”
“The junior,” Hugh answered. “Why?”
“Since the Chosen do not make mistakes, this one’s ears were at fault.
The senior did not actually speak, for his junior would never have interrupted.”
“Correct. You are a tempered gardener and you encounter a Chosen of the same rank as your lord uncle. He speaks. ‘Boy, what sort of a flower is that?'”
“As Their Charity knows much better than this one can ever know, if this one’s eyes are not mistaken, that plant may be a hydrangea.”
“Good. But drop your eyes when you say it. Now about your status — ” The teacher looked pained. “You haven’t any.”
“Please, teacher?”
“Uncle! I’ve tried to find out. Nobody knows but our Lord Uncle and they have not ruled. You’re not a child, you’re not a stud, you’re not a tempered, you don’t belong anywhere. You’re a savage and you don’t fit.”
“But what protocol mode must I use?”
“Always the rising. Oh, not to children. Nor to sluts, no need to overdo
it.”
Except for changes in inflection caused by status, Hugh found the
language simple and logical. It had no irregular verbs and its syntax was orderly; it probably had been tidied up at some time. He suspected, from words that he recognized — “simba,” “bwana,” “wazir,” “étage,” “trek,” “oncle” — that it had roots in several African languages. But that did not matter; this was “Speech” and, according to his teachers, the only language spoken anywhere.
In addition to protocol modes, quite a chunk of vocabulary was double, one word being used down, its synonym although different in root used up. He had to know both-be able to recognize one and to use the other.
The pronunciation gave him trouble at first, but by the end of the week he could lip smack, click, make the fast glottal stop, and hear and say vowel distinctions he had never suspected existed. By the sixteenth day he was chattering freely, beginning to think in it, and the whip was rarely used.
Late next day the Lord Protector sent for him.
Chapter 12
Although he had been bathed that day, Hugh was rushed through another bath, rubbed down with fragrant cream, and issued a fresh robe, before being whizzed to the lord’s private apartments. There he was bounced past a series of receptionists close on Memtok’s heels, and into a large and very sumptuous retiring room.
The lord was not there; Joseph and Dr. — Livingstone-I-Presume were. Joe called out, “Hugh! Wonderful!” and added to the Chief Domestic, “You may go.”
Memtok hesitated, then backed away and left. Joe ignored him, slipped his arm in Hugh’s, and led him to a divan. “Gosh, it’s good to see you! Sit
down, we’ll talk until Ponse gets here. You look well.” Doctor Livingstone checked Hugh’s ankles, purred and stropped against them.
“I am well. ‘Ponse’?” Hugh scratched the cat’s ears.
“Don’t you know his name? The Lord Protector, I mean. No, I guess you wouldn’t. That’s one of his names, one he uses en famille. Never mind, have they been treating you right?”
“I suppose so.”
“They had better. Ponse gave orders for you to be pampered. Look, if you aren’t treated okay, you tell me. I can fix it.”
Hugh hesitated. “Joe, have you had one of those odd whips used on you?” “Me?” Joe seemed astonished. “Of course not. Hugh, have they been
abusing you? Peel off that Mother Hubbard and let me have a look.”
Hugh shook his head. “There are no marks on me. I haven’t been hurt. But I don’t like it.”
“But if you’ve been stroked for no reason — Hugh, that’s one thing that Ponse does not tolerate. He’s a very humane sort of guy. All he wants is discipline. If anybody-anybody at all, even Memtok-has been cruel to you, somebody is going to catch it.”
Hugh thought about it. He rather liked his teachers. They had worked hard and patiently and had been sparing of him once it became possible to talk instead of using the whip. “I haven’t been hurt. Just reminded.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Actually, Hugh, I didn’t see how you could be.
That quirt Ponse carries-you could kill a man with it at a thousand feet; it takes skill to use it gently. But those toys the upper servants carry, all they do is tingle and that’s all they are supposed to do.”
Hugh decided not to argue over what constituted a tingle; he had urgent things on his mind. “Joe, how are the others? Have you seen them?”
“Oh, they’re all right. You heard about Barbara?” “I haven’t heard a damn thing! What about Barbara?” “Slow down. Having her babies, I mean.”
“She had her baby?”
“‘Babies.’ Twin boys, identical. A week ago.” “How is she? How is she?”
“Easy, man! She’s fine, couldn’t be better. Of course. They are way ahead of us in medicine; losing a mother, or a baby, is unheard of.” Joe suddenly looked sad. “It’s a shame they didn’t run across us months back.” He brightened. “Barbara told me that she had intended to name it Karen, if it was a girl. When it turned out to be twin boys, she named one-the one five minutes the elder — ‘Hugh’ and the other ‘Karl Joseph.’ Nice, eh?”
“I’m flattered. Then you’ve seen her. Joe, I’ve got to see her. Right away. How do I arrange it?”
Joe looked astonished. “But you can’t, Hugh. Surely you know that.” “Why can’t I?”
“Why, you’re not tempered, that’s why. Impossible.” “Oh.”
“I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.” Joseph suddenly grinned. “I understand that you were almost made eligible by accident. Ponse laughed his head off at how close you came and how you and Duke yelped.”
“I don’t see the humor of it.”
“Oh, Hugh, he simply has a robust sense of humor. He laughed when he told me about it. I didn’t laugh and he decided that I have no sense of humor. Different people laugh at different things. Karen used to use a fake Negro dialect that set my teeth on edge, the times I overheard it. But she didn’t mean any harm. Karen — Well, they just don’t come any better, and you and I know it and I’ll shut up about it. Look, if the vet had gone ahead, without orders, it would have cost him his hands; Ponse sent that word to him. Might have suspended the sentence-good surgeons ‘are valuable. But his assumption
was only natural, Hugh; both you and Duke are too tall and too big for stud. However, Ponse doesn’t tolerate sloppiness.”
“All right, all right. I still don’t see the harm in my calling on Barbara and seeing her babies. You saw her. And you’re not tempered.”
Joe looked patiently exasperated. “Hugh, it’s not the same thing. Surely you know it.”
“Why isn’t it?”
Joe sighed. “Hugh, I didn’t make the rules. But I’m Chosen and you’re not, and that’s all there is to it. It’s not my fault that you’re white.”
“All right. Forget it.”
“Let’s be glad that one of us is in a position to get us some favors. Do you realize that all of you would have been executed? If I hadn’t been along?”
“The thought has crossed my mind. Lucky you knew French. And that he knows French.”
Joe shook his head. “French didn’t enter into it, it merely saved time.
The point was that I was there…and the rest of you were excused of any responsibility on that account. What had to be settled then was the degree of my criminality, my neck was in a noose.” Joe frowned. “I’m still not in the clear. I mean, Ponse is convinced but my case has to be re viewed by the Supreme Lord Proprietor; it’s his preserve — Ponse is just custodian. I could be executed yet.”
“Joe, what in the world is there about it to cause you to talk about being executed?”
“Plenty! Look, if you four ofays-whites-had been alone, Ponse would have tried you just by looking at you. Two capital crimes and both self-evident.
Escapees. Servants who had run away from their lord. Destructive trespass in a personal domain of the Supreme Proprietor. Open-and-shut on both counts and death for each of them. Don’t tell me that wasn’t the way it was because I know it and it took me long enough to make Ponse see it, using a language neither one of us knows too well. And my neck is still in jeopardy. However — ” He brightened. “Ponse tells me that the Supreme Proprietor is years behind in reviewing criminal cases and that it has been more years since he last set foot on this preserve or even cruised over it…and that long before my case can come up there won’t be a trace of destruction. They are putting the trees back and there’s never an accurate count of bears and deer and other game. He tells me not to worry.”
“Well, that’s good.”
“But maybe you think I haven’t done some sweating over it! Just letting your shadow fall across the Supreme Lord Proprietor means your neck and sneezing in his presence is even worse-so you can figure for yourself that trespassing on land that is his personally is nothing to take lightly. But I shan’t worry as long as Ponse says not to. He’s been treating me as a guest, not as a prisoner. But tell me about yourself. I hear you’ve been studying the language. So have I-a tutor every day I’ve had time for it.”
Hugh answered, “May it meet with their approval, this one’s time has, as they know, been devoted to nothing else.”
“Whoo! You speak it better than I do.”
“I was given incentive,” Hugh said, relapsing into English. “Joe, have you seen Duke? Grace?”
“Duke, no. I haven’t tried to. Ponse has been away most of the time and took me along; I’ve been terribly busy. Grace, yes. It’s possible that you might see Grace. She’s often in these apartments. That’s the only way you could see her, of course. Right here. And in the presence of Ponse. Might happen. He’s not a stickler for protocol. In private, I mean; he keeps up appearances in public.”
“Hmm — Joe, in that case, couldn’t you ask him to let me see Barbara and the twins? Here? In his presence?”
Joe looked exasperated. “Hugh, can’t you understand that I’m just a guest? I’m here on sufferance. I don’t have a single servant of my own, no money, no title. I said you might see Grace; I did not say you would. If you did, it would be because he had sent for you and it suited him not to send her out-not for your convenience. As for asking him to let you see Barbara, I can’t. And that’s that! I advise you not to, either. You might learn that his quirt doesn’t just tingle.”
“All I meant was — ” “Watch it! Here he comes.”
Joe went to meet his host. Hugh stood with head bowed, eyes downcast, and waited to be noticed. Ponse came striding in, dressed much as Hugh had seen him before save that the helmet was replaced by a red skullcap. He greeted Joe, sat heavily down on a large divan, stuck out his legs. Doctor Livingstone jumped up into the lord’s lap; he stroked it. Two female servants appeared from nowhere, pulled off his boots, wiped his feet with a hot towel, dried them, massaged them, placed slippers on them, and vanished.
While this was going on, the Lord Protector spoke to Joe of matters Hugh could not follow other than as words, but he noticed that the noble used the mode of equals to Joe and that Joe talked in the same fashion to him. Hugh decided that Joe must be in as solid as Doctor Livingstone. Well, Joe did have a pleasing personality.
At last the big man glanced at him. “Sit down, boy.”
Hugh sat down, on the floor. The lord went on, “Have you learned Language? We’re told that you have.”
“May it please Their Charity, ‘this one’s time has been devoted singly to that purpose, with what inadequate resultsknown to them far better than their servant would dare venture to estimate.”
“Not bad. Accent could be crisper. And you missed an infix. How do you like the weather we’ve been having?”
“Weather is as Uncle the Mighty ordains it. If it pleases His favorite nephew, it cannot fail to make joyful one so humble as this servant.”
“Quite good. Accent blurry but understandable. Work on it. Tell your teachers we said it. Now drop that fancy speech, I haven’t time to listen to it. Equals speech, always. In private, I mean.”
“All right. I — ” Hugh broke off; one of the female servants had returned, to kneel in front of her lord with a drink on a tray.
Ponse glanced sharply at Hugh, then looked at the girl. “It? Doesn’t count, it’s a deaf mute. You were saying?”
“I was about to say that I couldn’t have an opinion about weather because I haven’t seen any since I got here.”
“I suppose not. I gave orders for you to learn Language as quickly as possible and servants are inclined to follow instructions literally. No imagination. All right, you will walk outdoors an hour each day. Tell whoever is in charge of you. Any petition? Are you getting enough to eat? Are you being treated well?”
“The food is good, I’m used to eating three times a day but — “
“You can eat four times a day if you wish. Again, tell the one in charge of you. All right, now to other matters. Hugh — That’s your name, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Their Charity.”
“Can’t you hear? I said, ‘Use equals mode.’ My private name is Ponse.
Use it. Hugh, if I had not picked you people up myself, were I not a scholar, and had I not seen with my own eyes the artifacts in that curious structure, your house, I would not have believed it. As it is, I must. I’m not a superstitious man. Uncle works in mysterious ways, but He doesn’t use miracles and I would not hesitate to repeat that in any temple on Earth, unorthodox as it sounds. But — How long does it come to, Joe?”
“Two thousand one hundred and three years.”
“Call it two thousand. What’s the matter, Hugh?” “Uh, nothing, nothing.”
“If you’re going to throw up, go outside; I picked these rugs myself. As I was saying, you’ve given my scientists something to think about-and a good thing, too; they haven’t turned out anything more important than a better mousetrap in years. Lazy scoundrels. I’ve told them to come up with a sensible answer, no miracles. How five people-or six-and a building of some mass could hurdle twenty centuries and never break an egg. Exaggeration. Joe tells me it broke some bones and other things. Speaking of bones, Joe tells me this won’t please you-and it didn’t please him-but I ordered my scientists to disturb some bones. Strontium sampling, that sort of thing; I suppose you’ve never heard of it. Clear proof that the cadaver had matured before the period of maximum radioactivity — Look, I warned you about these rugs. Don’t do it!” Hugh gulped. (“Karen! Karen! Oh, my darling!”)
“Better now? Perhaps I should have told you that a priest was present, proper propitiations were made-exactly as if it had been one of the Chosen. Special concession, my orders. And when the tests were completed every atom was returned and the grave closed with proper rites.”
“That’s true, Hugh,” Joseph said gravely. “I was there. And I put on fresh flowers. Flowers that will stay fresh, I’m told.”
“Certainly they will,” Ponse confirmed, “until they wear out from sheer erosion. I don’t know why you use flowers but if there are any other rites or sacrifices necessary to atone for what may seem to you a desecration, just name it. I’m a broadminded man; I’m aware that other times had other customs.”
“No. No, best let it be.”
“As you wish. It was done from scientific necessity. It seemed more reasonable than amputating one of your fingers. Other tests also kept my scientists from wiggling out of the obvious. Foods preserved by methods so ancient that I doubt if any modem food expert would know how to duplicate same
— and yet the foods were edible. At least some servants were required to eat them; no harm resulted. A fascinating radioactivity gradient between upper and inner sides of the roof structure-I gave them a hint on that. Acting on information received from Joe, I ordered them to look for evidence that this event took place at the beginning of the East-West War that destroyed the Northern Hemisphere.
“So they found it. Calculations lead them to believe that the structure must have been near the origin of an atom-kernel explosion. Yet it was unhurt. That produced a theory so wild that I won’t tire your ears with it; I’ve told them to go on working.
“But the best thing is the historical treasure. I am a man of history, Hugh; history, properly interpreted, tells everything. The treasure, of course, are those books that came along. I am not exaggerating when I say that they are my most precious possessions. There are only two other copies of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the world today-and those are not this edition and are in such poor shape that they are curiosities rather than something a scholar can work with; they weren’t cared for during the Turmoil Ages.”
Ponse leaned back and looked happy. “But mine is in mint condition!”
He added, “I’m not discounting the other books. Treasures, all of them.
Especially the Adventures of Odysseus, which is known only by reputation. I take it that the pictures date from the time of Odysseus too?”
“I’m afraid not. The artist was alive in my time.”
“Too bad. They’re interesting, nevertheless. Primitive art, stronger than we have now. But I exaggerated when I said that the books were my dearest possession.”
“Yes?”
“You are! There! Doesn’t that please you?”
Hugh barely hesitated. “Yes. If true.” (If it’s true that I am your
chattel, you arrogant bastard, I prefer being a valuable one!)
“Oh, quite true. If you had been speaking in protocol mode, you wouldn’t have been able to phrase a doubt. I never lie, Hugh; remember that. You and — That other one, Joe?”
“Duke.”
“‘Duke.’ Although Joe speaks highly of your scholarship, not so highly of its. But let me explain. There are other scholars who read Ancient English. None in my household, true; since it is not a root language to any important degree, few study it. Nevertheless, scholars could be borrowed. But none such as yourself. You actually lived then; you’ll be able to translate knowledgeably, without these maddening four and five interpretations of a single passage that disfigure most translations from ancient sources, all because the scholar doesn’t really know what the ancient author was talking about. Lack of cultural context, I mean. And no doubt you will be able to supply explanations for things obscure to me and commonplace to you.
“Right? Right! So you see what I want. Start with the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Get busy today, translate it. Just scribble it out quickly, sloppy but fast. Someone else will pretty it up for my eyes. Understand? All right, go do it.”
Hugh gulped. “But, Ponse, I can’t write Language.” “What?”
“I was taught to speak; I haven’t been taught to read and write.” Ponse blinked. “Memtok!”
The Chief Palace Domestic arrived with such speed that one might suspect that he was just outside the door. And so he had been-listening in on private conversation by means Memtok was certain were not known to the Lord Protector
inasmuch as Memtok was still breathing. Such measures were risky but he found them indispensable to efficient performance of his duties. At worst, it was safer than planting a slut in there who was not quite a deaf mute.
“Memtok, I told you it was to be taught to speak, read, and write Language.”
Hugh listened, eyes downcast, while the Chief Domestic tried to protest that the order had never been given (it had not) but nevertheless had been carried out (obviously false), all without contradicting the Lord Protector (impossible to reconcile, inconceivable to attempt).
“Garbage,” Ponse remarked. “I don’t know why I don’t put you up for adoption. You would look good in a coal mine. That pale skin would be improved by some healthy coal dust.” He twitched his quirt and Memtok paled still more. “Very well, let it be corrected. It is to spend half of each day in learning to read and write, the other half in translating and in dictating same into a recorder. I should have thought of that; writing takes too long. Nevertheless, I want it to be able to read and write.” He turned to Hugh. “Anything you can think of? That you need?”
Hugh started to phrase a request in the involved indirection which presumed nothing, as required by protocol mode, rising.
Ponse chopped him off. “Speak directly, Hugh. Memtok, close your ears.
No ceremony needed in Memtok’s presence, he is a member of my inner family, my nephew in spirit if not in the eyes of my senior sister. Spit it out.”
Memtok relaxed and looked as beatific as his vinegar features permitted. “Well, Ponse, I need room to work. My cell is the size of that divan.”
“Describe your needs.”
“Well, I’d like a room with natural light, one with windows, say a third the size of this one. Working tables, bookshelves, writing materials, a comfortable chair-yes, and access to a toilet without having to wait; it interferes with my thinking otherwise.”
“Don’t you have that?”
“No. And I don’t think it helps my thinking to be touched up with a
whip.”
been?”
“Memtok, have you been whipping it?” “No, my uncle. I swear.”
“You would swear if you were caught with cream on your lip. Who has
Hugh dared to interrupt. “I’m not complaining, Ponse. But those whips
make me nervous. And I never know who can give me orders. Anybody, apparently. I haven’t been able to find out my status.”
“Mmm — Memtok, where do you have it in the Family?” The head servant barely conceded that he had not been able to solve that problem.
“Let’s solve it. We make it a department head. Mmm — Department of Ancient History. Title: Chief Researcher. Senior head of department, just below you. Pass the word around. I’m doing this to make clear how valuable this servant is to me…and anyone who slows up its work is likely to wind up in the stew. I suppose it will really be a one-servant department but you fill it out, make it look good, by transferring its teachers, and whoever looks out for its recorder and prepares the stuff for me, a cleaner or two, an assistant to boss them — I don’t want to take up its valuable time on routine. A messenger. You know. There must be dozens of idlers around this house, eating their silly heads off, who would look well in the Department of Ancient History. Now have fetched a lesser whip and a lesser badge. Move.”
In moments Hugh was wearing a medallion not much smaller than Memtok’s. Ponse took the whip and removed something from it. “Hugh, I’m not giving you a charged whip, you don’t know how to use it. If one of your loafers need spurring, Memtok will be glad to help. Later, when you know how, we’ll see.
Now — Are you satisfied?”
Hugh decided that it was not the time to ask to see Barbara. Not with Memtok present. But he was beginning to hope.
He and Memtok were dismissed together. Memtok did not object when Hugh walked abreast of him.
Chapter 13
Memtok was silent while he led Hugh back down to servants’ country; he was figuring out how to handle this startling development to his own advantage.
This savage’s status had troubled the Chief Domestic from arrival. He didn’t fit-and in Memtok’s world everything had to fit. Well, now the savage had an assigned status; Their Charity had spoken and that was that. But the situation was not improved. The new status was so ridiculous as to make the whole belowstairs structure (the whole world, that is) a mockery.
But Memtok was shrewd and practical. The bedrock of his philosophy was: You can’t fight City Hall, and his basic strategy in applying it was the pragmatic rule: When you can’t beat ’em, you join ’em.
How could this savage’s preposterous promotion be made to appear necessary and proper-and a credit to the Chief Domestic?
Uncle! The savage wasn’t even tempered. Nor would he be. At least not yet. Later, possibly-it would make everything so much more tidy. Memtok had been amazed when Their Charity had postponed the obvious. Memtok hardly recalled his own tempering; his emotions and drives before that time were a thin memory-of someone else. There was no reason for the savage to have kicked up a fuss about it; tempering marked promotion into real living. Memtok looked forward to another half century of activity, power, gracious living — what stud could claim that?
But there it was. How to make it look good?
A Curiosity! — that’s what the savage was. All great lords possessed Curiosities; there had been times when visiting in his own caste that he had been embarrassed by the fact that his own lord took no interest in Curiosities; there were not even Siamese twins nor a two-headed freak in the whole household. Not even a flipper-armed dwarf. Their Charity was-let’s admit it-too simple in his tastes for his high rank; sometimes Memtok was a little ashamed of him. Spending his time on scrolls and such when he should be upholding the pride of the house.
That lord in Hind — What title? Prince something or other silly. Never mind, he had that big cage where studs and sluts lived and mated with great apes, talked the same jabber-it wasn’t Language-and you couldn’t tell which was which save that some were hairy and some were smooth. There was a Curiosity worthy of a great household! That lord’s chief domestic had declared by the Uncle that there were live crossbreeds from the experiment, hidden away where the priests couldn’t object. It might be true, since it was a fact that despite official denial crossbreeds between servants and Chosen were possible- and did happen, even though designated bedwarmers were always sterile. But these accidents were never allowed to see the light of day.
A Curiosity, that was the angle. An untempered who was nevertheless a servant executive. A Famous Scholar who had not even been able to speak Language when he was almost as old as Memtok. A man out of nowhere. From the stars. Everybody knew that there were men somewhere in the stars.
Probably a miracle…and the temples were investigating and any year now this household would be famous for its unique Curiosity. Yes. A word here, a word there, a veiled hint –“Hugh,” Memtok said cordially. “May I call you ‘Hugh’?” “What? Why, certainly!” “You must call me ‘Memtok.’ Let’s stroll a bit and pick out space for your departmental headquarters. You would like a sunny place, I understand. Perhaps rooms facing the gardens? And do you want your personal quarters opening off your headquarters? Or would you rather have them elsewhere so that you can get away from it all?” The latter, Memtok decided. Roust out the head gardener and the studmaster and give the savage both their quarters-that would make everyone understand how important this Curiosity was…and get both of them sore at the savage, too. He’d soon realize who was his friend. Memtok, namely, and nobody else. Besides, the gardener had been getting uppity, implying that his work didn’t come under the Chief Domestic. A touching up was what he needed.
Hugh said, “Oh, I don’t need anything fancy.”
“Come, come! We want you to have every facility. I wish 1 could get away from it all sometimes. But I can’t-problems, problems, problems, every minute of the day; some people have to have all their thinking done for them. It will be a treat to have a man of the mind among us. We’ll find you cozy quarters, plenty of room for you and your valet. But separate.” Valet? Was there a tempered young buck around, well housebroken and biddable, who could be depended on to report everything and keep his mouth shut? Suppose he had his sister’s eldest son tempered now, would the lad shape up in time? And would his sister see the wisdom in it? He had great hopes for the boy. Memtok was coldly aware that he would have to go someday-though not for many years-and he was determined that his heir should succeed to his high office. But it would take planning, and planning could never start too soon. If his sister could be made to see it — Memtok led Hugh through crowded passageways; servants scurried out of the way wherever they went-save one who stumbled and got tingled for his awkwardness.
“My!” said Hugh. “This is a big building.”
“This? Wait till you see the Palace-though no doubt it is falling to rack and ruin, under my chief deputy. Hugh, we use only a quarter of the staff here. There is no formal entertaining, just garden parties. And only a handful of guests. In the city the Chosen are always coming and going. Many a time I
am rooted out of bed in the night to open apartments for some lord and his ladies without a moment’s warning. And that is where planning counts. To — be able to open the door of a guest-wing flat and know-know, mind you, without looking-that beds are freshly perfumed, refreshments waiting, everything spotless, music softly playing.”
“That must take real staff work.”
“Staff work!” Memtok snorted. “I wish I could agree. What it takes is for me to inspect every room, every night, no matter how tired I am, before I go to bed. Then stay up to see that mistakes are corrected, not depend on their lies. They’re all liars, Hugh. Too much ‘Happiness.’ Their Charity is generous; he never cuts down on the ration.”
“I’ve found the food ample. And good.”
“I didn’t say food, I said ‘Happiness.’ I control the food and I don’t believe in starving them, not even as punishment. A tingle is better. They understand that. Always remember one thing, Hugh; most servants don’t really have minds. They’re as thoughtless as the Chosen-not referring to Their Charity of course; I would never criticize my own patron. I mean Chosen in general. You understand.” He winked and gave Hugh a dig in the ribs.
“I don’t know much about the Chosen,” Hugh admitted. “I’ve hardly laid eyes on them.”
“Well…you’ll see. It takes more than a dark skin to make brains no matter what they teach in temple. Not that I expect you to quote me nor would I admit it if you did. But — Who do you think runs this household?”
“I haven’t been here long enough to express opinions.”
“Very shrewd. You could go far if you had ambition. Let me put it this way. If Their Charity goes away, the household goes on smoothly as ever. If I am away, or dare to fall sick — Well, I shudder to think of it.” He gestured with his whip. “They know. You won’t find them scurrying that fast to get out of his way.”
Hugh changed the subject. “I did not understand your remark about a ‘ration of Happiness.'”
“Haven’t you been receiving yours?” “I don’t know what it is.”
“Oho! One bullock gets you three that it has been issued but never got as far as you. Must look into that. As to what it is, I’ll show you.” Memtok led him up a ramp and out onto a balcony. Below was the servants’ main dining hail, crowded with three queues. “This, is issue time-studs at a different hour, of course. They can have it as drink, in chewing form, or to smoke. The dosage is the same but some say that smoking it produces the keenest happiness.”
Memtok used words not in Hugh’s vocabulary; Hugh told him so. Memtok said, “Never mind. It improves the appetite, steadies the nerves, promotes good health, enhances all pleasures-and wrecks ambition. The trick is to be able to take it or leave it alone. I never took it regularly even when I was at stud; I had ambition. I take it now only on feast days or such-in moderation.” Memtok smiled. “You’ll find out tonight.”
“I will?”
“Didn’t I tell you? Banquet in your honor, just after evening prayer.”
Hugh was hardly listening. He was searching the far queue, trying to spot Barbara.
Memtok sent the Chief Veterinarian and the Household Engineer as an escort of honor for Hugh. Hugh was mildly embarrassed at this attention from the physician and surgeon in view of the helpless posture he had been in the last time he had seen the man. But the veterinarian was most cordial.
Memtok headed the long table with Hugh on his right. Twenty department heads were seated; there was one lower servant standing behind each guest and endless streams coming in and out from kitchen and pantry. The banquet room
was beautiful, its furnishings lavish, and the feast was sumptuous and endless; Hugh wondered what a meal of the Chosen must be like if their upper servants ate this way.
He soon found out, in part. Memtok was served twice, once from the tasty dishes everyone shared, again from another menu. These dishes he sampled, using separate plates, but rarely did more than taste. Of the regular menu he ate sparingly and sometimes passed up dishes.
He noticed Hugh’s glance. “The Lord Protector’s dinner. Try it. At your own risk, of course.”
“What risk?”
“Poison, naturally. When a man is over a hundred years old his heir is certain to be impatient. To say nothing of business competitors, political rivals, and subverted friends. Go ahead; the taster tries it half an hour before Their Charity — or I-touches it, and we’ve lost only one taster this year.”
Hugh decided that his nerve was being tested; he tried a spoonful. “Like it?” asked the Chief Domestic.
“Seems greasy to me.”
“Hear that, Gnou? Our new cousin is a man of taste. Greasy. Someday you’ll be fried in your own grease, I fear. The truth is, Hugh, that we eat better than the Chosen do…although courses are served more elaborately in the Grand Hall, of course. But I am a gourmet who appreciates artistry; Their Charity doesn’t care what it is as long as it doesn’t squeal when he bites it. If the sauces are too elaborate, the spices too exotic, he’ll send it back with a demand for a slice of roast, a hunk of bread, and a pitcher of milk.
True, Gnou?”
“You have said it.” “And frustrating.”
“Very,” admitted the chef.
“So Cousin Gnou’s best cooks work for us, and the Chosen struggle along with ones whose chief skill lies in getting a bird’s skin back on without ruffling the feathers. Cousin Hugh, if you will excuse me, I must lift up to the Grand Hall and attempt by proper ceremony to make Cousin Gnou’s pièce de résistance seem better than it is. Don’t believe what they tell you about me while I’m gone-regrettably it’s all true.” He exposed his teeth in what must have been a smile and left.
No one spoke for a while. Finally someone-Hugh thought it was the transportation master but he had met too many — said, “Chief Researcher, what household were you with before you were adopted, may one ask?”
“One may. House of Farnham, Freeholder Extraordinary.”
“So. I am forced to admit that the title of your Chosen is new to me. A new title, perhaps?”
“Very old,” Hugh answered. “Extremely ancient and granted directly by Uncle the Mighty, blessed be His Name. The rank is roughly that of king, but senior to it.”
“Really?”
Hugh decided to drop that shovel for a wider one. In earlier conversation he had learned that Memtok knew a great deal about many things- but almost nothing about such trivia as history, geography, and matters outside the household. And from his Language lessons he knew that a servant who could read and write was rare, even among executives, unless the skill was necessary to his duties. Memtok had told him proudly that he had petitioned the opportunity while he was still at stud and had labored at it to the amusement of the other studs. “I had my eyes on the future,” he had told Hugh. “I could have had five more years, probably ten, at stud-but as soon as I could read, I petitioned to be tempered. So I had the last laugh-for where are they now?”
Hugh decided on the very widest shovel; a big lie was always easier to sell. “The title is unbroken for three thousand years in House Farnham. The line remained intact by direct intervention of the Uncle right through Turmoil and Change. Because of its Divine origin its holder speaks to the Proprietor as an equal, ‘thee’ and ‘thou.'” Hugh drew himself up proudly. “And I was factotum-in-chief to Lord Farnham.”
“A noble house indeed. But ‘factotum-in-chief’? We don’t use that designation here. A domestic?”
“Yes and no. The chief domestic works under the factotum.”
The man almost gasped. “And so,” Hugh went on, “do all servant executives, domestic or not-business, political, agrarian, everything. The responsibility is wearing.”
“So I should imagine!”
“It is. I was growing old and my health was failing-I suffered a temporary paralysis of my lower limbs. Truthfully I never liked responsibility, I am a scholar. So I petitioned to be adopted and here I am- scholar to a Chosen of similar scholarly ‘tastes…a fitting occupation for my later years.” Hugh realized that he had stretched one item too far; the veterinarian looked up. “This paralysis, I noted no signs of it.” (Damn it, doctors never cared about anything but their specialty!) “It came on me suddenly one morning,” Hugh said smoothly, “and I haven’t been troubled by it since. But to a man of my years it was a warning.”
“And what are your years? Professional interest, of course. One may
ask?”
Hugh tried to make the snub as direct as some he had heard Memtok pass
out. “One may not. I’ll let you know when I need your services. But,” he added, to sooth the smart, “it would be fair to say that I was born some years earlier than Their Charity.”
“Astonishing. From your physical condition-quite good, I thought-I would have judged you to be no more than sixty, at most.”
“Blood will tell,” Hugh said smugly. “I am not the only one of my bloodline to live a very long time.”
He was saved from further evasions by the return of Memtok. Everyone stood up. Hugh didn’t notice in time, so he remained seated and brazened it out. If Memtok resented it, he did not let it show. He clapped Hugh on the shoulder as he sat down. “No doubt they’ve told you how I eat my own young?”
“I was given the impression of a happy family presided over by a beloved uncle.”
“Liars, all of them. Well, I’m through for the evening — until some emergency. Their Charity knows that we are welcoming you; he commanded me not to return to the Grand Hall. So now we can relax and be merry.” The Chief Domestic tapped his goblet with a spoon. “Cousins and nephews, a toast to our newest cousin. Possibly you heard what I said-the Lord Protector is pleased at our modest effort to make Cousin Hugh feel at home in Their Family. But I am sure that you already guessed that…since one cannot miss that Cousin Hugh carries, not a least whip, but a lesser whip exactly like mine!” Memtok smiled archly. “Let us trust that he will never need to use it.”
Loud applause greeted the boss’s brilliant sally. He went on solemnly, “You all know that not even my chief deputy carries such authority, much less the ordinary department head
and from that I am sure you conclude that a hint from Cousin Hugh, Chief Researcher and Aide in Scholarship to Their Charity by direct appointment-a hint from him is an order from me-so don’t let me have to make it a direct order.
“And now the toasts! All cousins together and let Happiness flow freely…so let the junior among us give the first toast. Who claims it, who claims it?”
The party got rowdy. Hugh noted that Memtok drank sparingly. He remembered the warning and tried to emulate him. It was impossible. The Chief Domestic could drop out of any toast, merely raise his glass, but Hugh as guest of honor felt compelled to drink them all.
Some unknown time later Memtok led him back to his newly acquired, luxurious quarters. Hugh felt drunk but not unsteady-it was just that the floor was so far away. He felt illuminated, possessed of the wisdom of the ages, floating on silvery clouds, and soaked through with angelic happiness. He still had no idea what was in Happiness drinks. Alcohol? Maybe. Betel nut? Mushrooms? Probably. Marijuana? It seemed certain. He must write down the formula while it was fresh in his mind. This was what Grace should have had! He must — But of course, she did have it now. How very nice! Poor old Grace –
He had never understood her-all she needed was a little Happiness.
Memtok took him into his bedroom. Sleeping across the foot of his lovely new bed was a female creature, blond and cuddly.
Hugh looked down at her from about a hundred-foot elevation and blinked. “Who she?”
“Your bedwarmer. Didn’t I say?” “But — “
“It’s quite all right. Yes, yes, I know you are technically a stud. But you can’t harm her; this is what she is for. No danger. Not even altered. A natural freemartin.”
Hugh turned around to discuss it, wheeling slowly because of his great width and high sail area. Memtok was gone. Hugh found that he could just make it to the bed. “Move over, Kitten,” he muttered, and fell asleep.
He overslept but the kitten was still there; she had his breakfast waiting. He looked at her with unease-not because he had a hangover; he did not. Apparently Happiness did not exact such payments. He felt physically strong, mentally alert, and morally straight-and very hungry. But this teen- ager was an embarrassment.
“What’s your name, kitten?”
“May it please them, this one’s name is of such little importance that whatever they please to call it will be a boon.”
“Cut it, cut it! Use equals speech.”
“I don’t really have a name, sir. Mostly they just say, ‘Hey, you.'” “All right, I’ll call you ‘Kitten.’ Does that suit you? You look like a
kitten.”
She dimpled. “Yes, sir. It’s ever so much nicer than ‘Hey, you.'” “All right, your name is ‘Kitten.’ Tell everybody and don’t answer to
‘Hey, you.’ Tell them that is official because the Chief Researcher says so and if anybody doubts it, tell them to check with the Chief Domestic. If they dare.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Kitten, Kitten, Kitten,” she repeated as if memorizing it, then giggled. “Pretty!”
“Good. Is that my breakfast?” “Yes, sir.”
He ate in bed, offering her bits, and discovered that she expected to be fed, or at least allowed to eat. There was enough for four; between them they ate enough for three. Then he learned that she expected to assist him in the bathroom; he put a stop to that.
Later, ready to go to his assigned duties, he said to her, “What do you do now?”
“I go back to sluts’ quarters, sir, as soon as you release me. I come back at bedtime-whatever time you say.”
He was about to tell her that she was charming and that he almost regretted passing .out the night before but that he did not require her services on future — He stopped. An idea had hit him. “Look. Do you know a
tall slut named Barbara? Oh, this much taller than you are. She was adopted something over two weeks ago and she had babies, twin boys, about a week ago.”
“Oh, yes, sir. The savage.”
“That’s the one. Do you know where’ she is?”
“Oh, yes, sir. She’s still in lying-in quarters. I like to go in there and look at the babies.” She looked wistful. “It must be nice.”
“Uh, yes. Can you take a message to her?”
Kitten looked doubtful. “She might not understand. She’s a savage, she can’t talk very well.”
“Mmm — Damn. No, maybe it’s a help. Wait a moment.” His quarters were equipped with a desk; he went to it, got one of those extraordinary pens-they didn’t stain and didn’t wear out and appeared to be solid-found a piece of paper. Hastily he wrote a note, asking Barbara about herself and the twins, reporting his odd promotion, telling her that soon, somehow, he would see her- be patient, dear-and assuring her of his undying devotion.
He added a P.S. “The bearer of this note is ‘Kitten’ — if the bearer is short, blond, busty, and about fourteen. She is my bedwarmer-which means nothing and you’ve got an evil mind, wench! I’m going to hang onto her because she is a way-the only way, it would appear-for me to communicate with you.
I’ll try to write every day, I’ll darn well expect a note from you every day. If you can. And if anybody does anything you don’t like, tell me and I’ll send you his head on a platter. I think. Things are looking up. Plenty of paper and a pen herewith. Love, love, love-H.
“PPS-go easy on ‘Happiness.’ It’s habit-forming.”
He gave the girl the note and writing materials. “You know the Chief Domestic by sight?”
“You mean because he’s tempered? Oh, but several of the executives like to have a bedwarmer anyhow. I like it better than being sent upstairs; it’s less trouble and you get lots more sleep. The ‘Chief Domestic doesn’t usually send for a bedwarmer, though-it’s just that he checks us and teaches us manners before we are allowed to serve upstairs.” She added, “You see, he knows all about it; he used to be a stud, you know.” She looked at Hugh with innocent curiosity. “Is it true what they say about you? May one ask?”
“Uh…one may not.”
“I’m sorry, sir.” She looked crushed. “I didn’t mean any harm.” She glanced fearfully at his whip, dropped her eyes.
“Kitten.”
“Yes, sir.”
“See this whip?” “Uh, yessir!”
“You will never, never, never feel my whip. That’s a promise. Never.
We’re friends.”
Her face lit up and she looked angelically beautiful instead of pretty. “Oh, thank you, sir!”
“Another thing. The only whip you need fear from now on is the Chief Domestic’s-so stay out of his way. Anyone else-any ‘least whip’ — you tell him, or her, that this lesser whip is what he’ll get if he touches you. Tell him to check with the Chief Domestic. Understand me?”
“Yes, sir.” She looked smugly happy.
Too smug, Hugh decided. “But you stay out of trouble. Don’t do anything to deserve a tingle-or I might turn you over to the Chief Domestic for a real tingling, the sort he is famous for. But as long as you work for me, don’t allow anyone but him to tingle you. Now git and deliver that. I’ll see you
tonight, about two hours after evening prayer. Or come earlier if you are sleepy, and go to bed.” Must remember to have a little bed put here for her, he reminded himself.
Kitten touched her forehead and left. Hugh went to his office and spent a happy day learning the alphabet and dictating three articles from the Britannica. He found his vocabulary inadequate, so he sent for one of his teachers and used the man as a dictionary. Even so, he found it necessary to explain almost endlessly; concepts had changed.
Kitten went straight to the Chief Domestic’s office, made her report, turned over the note and writing materials. Memtok was much annoyed that he held in his hand what might be important evidence-and no way to read it. It did occur to him that that other one-Duke? Juke? Some such-might be able to read these hen scratches. But not likely, of course, and even under tingling there would be no certainty that Juke would translate honestly, and no way to check on him.
Asking Joe never crossed his mind. Nor did asking Their Charity’s new bedwarmer. But the impasse had one intriguing aspect. Was it possible that this savage slut actually could read? And perhaps even essay to write a reply?
He stuck the note in his copier, gave it back to the girl. “All right, your name is Kitten. And do exactly as he tells you about not letting yourself be tingled-and be sure to gossip about it; I want it known all over. But get this — ” He gave Kitten the gentlest of reminders; she jumped. “This whip is waiting for you, if you make any mistakes.”
“This one hears and obeys!”
Hugh returned from the executives’ dining room rather late; he had sat around and gossiped. He found Kitten asleep in his bed and remembered that he had forgotten to ask for another bed for her.
‘Clutched in her hand was a folded paper. Gently he worked it out without waking her:
Darling!
How utterly wonderful to see your handwriting! I knew from Joe that you were safe, hadn’t heard about your promotion, didn’t know whether you knew about the twins. First about them — They are thriving, they both look like their papa, both have his angelic disposition. Six pounds each at birth is my guess, but, although they were weighed, weights here mean nothing to me. Me? I’m a prize cow, dearest, no trouble at all-and the care I received (and am receiving) is fantastically good. I started to labor, was given something to drink, never hurt again although I remember all details of having two babies- as if it had happened to somebody else. So trouble free and actually pleasant that I’d be willing to do it every day. And would, if the rewards were as nice as little Hugh and Karl Joseph.
As for the rest, boring except for our fine boys, but I’m learning the language as fast as I can. And somebody should tell the Borden Company about me-which is good, as our scamps are greedy eaters. I’m even able to help out the girl in the next bed, who is short on milk. Just call me Elsie.
I’ll be patient. I’m not surprised at your new honors; I expect that you’ll be bossing the place in a month. I have confidence in my man. My husband. Such a beautiful word — As for Kitten, I don’t believe your Boy Scout assertions, my lecherous darling; your record shows that you take advantage of innocent young girls. And she’s awfully cute.
Seriously, dearest, I know how noble you are and I didn’t have an evil- minded thought. But I would not blame you if your nobility slipped-especially as I’ve picked up enough words to be aware of her odd category in this strange place. I mean, Kitten is not vulnerable and can’t go set. If you did slip, I would not be jealous-not much, anyhow-but I would not want it to become a habit. Not to the exclusion of me, at least; my hormones are rearranging
themselves very rapidly. But I don’t want you to get rid of her when she is our only way of communicating. Be nice to her; she’s a nice kid. But you’re always nice to everyone.
I will write every day-and I will cry into my pillow and be worried to death any day I don’t hear from you.
My love forever and forever, B
P.S. The smear is little Hugh’s right footprint.
wake.
Hugh kissed the letter, then got into bed, clutching it. Kitten did not.
Chapter 14
Hugh found learning to read and write Language not difficult. Spelling was phonetic, a sign for every sound. There were no silent letters and never any question about spelling or pronunciation. Accent was on the penultima unless marked; the system was as free from traps as Esperanto. He could sound out any word as soon as he had learned the 47-letter alphabet, and, with thought, he could spell any word he could pronounce.
Writing and printing were alike, cursive, and a printed page looked like one written by a skilled penman. He was not surprised to find that it looked like Arabic and a search in the Britannica confirmed that the alphabet must have derived from Arabic of his time. Half a dozen letters had not changed; some were similar although changed. There were many new letters to cover the expansion into a system of one sound, one sign-plus letters for sounds XXth century Arabic had never used. Search in the Britannica convinced him that Arabic, French, and Swahili were the main roots of Language, plus Uncle alone knew what else. He could not confirm this; a dictionary with derivations, such as he had been used to for English, apparently did not exist-and his teachers seemed convinced that Language had always been just as they knew it. The concept of change baffled them.
It was only of intellectual interest; Hugh knew neither Arabic, French, nor Swahili. He had learned a little Latin and less German in high school, and had struggled to learn Russian in his later years. He was not equipped to study the roots of Language, he was merely curious.
Nor did he dare spend time on it; he wanted to please Their Charity, butter him up so that he might, eventually, petition the boon of seeing Barbara-and that meant a flood of translated articles. Hugh worked very hard.
The second day after his elevation, Hugh asked for Duke, and Memtok sent for him. Duke was rather worn down-there were lines in his face-but he spoke Language. Duke spoke it not as well as his father and apparently had tangled more with his teachers; his mood seemed to oscillate between hopelessness and rebellion, and he limped badly.
Memtok made no objection to transferring Duke to the Department of Ancient History. “Glad to get rid of him. He’s too monstrous big for stud, yet he doesn’t seem to be good for anything else. Certainly, put him to work. I can’t bear to see a servant lying around, eating his head off, doing nothing.”
So Hugh took him. Duke looked over Hugh’s private apartment and said, “Christ! You certainly managed to come up smelling like a rose. How come?”
Hugh explained the situation. “So I want you to translate legal articles and related subjects-whatever you can do best.”
Duke shoved his fists together and looked stubborn. “You can stuff it.” “Duke, don’t take that attitude. This is an opportunity.”
“For you, maybe. What are you doing about Mother?”
“What can I do? I’m not allowed to see her, neither are you. You know that. But Joe assures me that she is not only comfortable and well treated, but happy.”
“So he says. Or so you say he says. I want to see it myself. I damn well insist on it.”
“Very well, insist on it. Go see Memtok about it. But I must warn you, I can’t protect you from him.”
“Rats. I know what that slimy little bastard would say-and what he would do.” Duke scowled and rubbed his injured leg. “It’s up to you to arrange it.
You’ve got such an unholy drag around here, the least you can do is use it to protect Mother.”
“Duke, I don’t have that sort of drag. I’m being pampered for the reason a race horse is pampered…and I have just as little to say about it as a race horse has. But I can cut you in on pampering if you cooperate-decent quarters, immunity from mistreatment, a pleasant place to work. But I can no more get you into women’s quarters, or have Grace sent here, than I can go to the Moon. They have harem rules here, as you know.”
“And you are content to sit here and be a trained seal for that ape, and neglect Mother? Count me out!”
“Duke, I won’t argue. I’ll assign you a room and send you a volume of the Britannica each day. Then it’s up to you. If you won’t work, I’ll try to keep Memtok from knowing it. But I think he has spies all over the place.”
Hugh let it go at that. At first he got no help out of Duke. But boredom worked where argument failed; Duke could not stand to be shut up in a room with nothing to do. He was not locked up but he did not venture out much because there was always the chance that he might run into Memtok, or some other whip-carrying upper servant, who might want to know what he was doing, and why-servants were expected to look busy even if they weren’t, from morning prayer to evening prayer.
Duke began to produce translations and, with them, a complaint that he was short on vocabulary. Hugh was able to have assigned to him a tempered clerk who had worked in Their Charity’s legal affairs.
But he rarely saw Duke-it seemed to be the only way they could stay out of arguments. Duke’s output speeded up after the first week but fell off in quality-Duke had discovered the sovereign power of “Happiness.”
Hugh considered warning Duke about the drug, decided against it. If it kept Duke contented, who was he to deny him this anodyne? The quality of Duke’s translations did not worry Hugh; Their Charity had no way to judge- unless Joe rendered an opinion, which seemed unlikely. He himself was not trying too hard to turn out good translations; “not good, but Wednesday” was the principle he used: Give the boss lucid copy in great quantity-and leave out the hard parts.
Besides, Hugh found that a couple of drinks of Happiness at dinner topped off the day. It allowed him to read Barbara’s daily letter in a warm glow, write a cheerful answer for Kitten to carry back, then to bed and sound sleep.
But Hugh did not use much of it; he was afraid of the stuff. Alcohol, he reasoned, had the advantage of being a poison. It gave fair warning if one started drinking heavily. But this stuff exacted no such price; it merely turned anxiety, depression, worry, boredom, any unpleasant emotion, into an uncritical happy glow. Hugh wondered if it was principally methyl meprobamate? But he knew little chemistry and that little was two thousand years behind times.
As a member of the executive servants’ mess Hugh could have all he wanted. But he noted that Memtok was not the only boss who used the stuff abstemiously; a man did not fight his way up in the servants’ hierarchy by
dulling himself with drugs-but sometimes a servant did get high up, then skidded to the bottom, unable to stand prosperity in the form of unrationed Happiness. Hugh never learned what became of them.
Hugh could even keep a bottle in his rooms-and that solved the problem of Kitten.
Hugh had decided not to ask for a bed for Kitten; he did not want to rub Memtok’s nose in the fact that he was using the child only as a go-between to women’s quarters. Instead he required the girl to make up a bed each night on the divan in his living room.
Kitten was very hurt by this. By now she was sure that Hugh could make better use of a bedwarmer and she regarded it as rebuke to her in her honorable capacity as comfort and solace-and it scared her. If her master did not like her, she might lose the best job she had ever had. (She did not dare report to Memtok that Hugh had no use for her as a bedwarmer; she gave reports on every point but that.)
She wept.
She could not have done better; Hugh Farnham had been a sucker for women’s tears all his life. He took her on his knee and explained that he liked her very much (true), that it was a sad thing but he was too old to appreciate a female bedmate (a lie), and that he slept badly and was disturbed by having anyone in bed with him (a half-truth) — and that he was satisfied with her and wanted her to go on serving him. “Now wipe your eyes and have a drink of this.”
He knew that she used the stuff; she chewed her ration like bubble gum- chewing gum it was in fact; the powder was added to chicle. Most servants preferred gum because they could go dreamily through the day, chewing it while they worked. Kitten passed her empty days chewing it and chewed the played-out cud in Hugh’s quarters after she learned he did not mind. So he did not hesitate to give her a drink.
Kitten went happily to bed and right to sleep, no longer worried that her master might get rid of her. That set a precedent. Each evening, half an hour before Hugh wanted the lights out, he would give her a short drink of it.
For a while he kept track of the level in the bottle. Kitten was often in his quarters when he was not, he knew how much she enjoyed it, and there were no locks in his quarters-his rank entitled him to locks but Memtok had carefully not told him.
He quit bothering when he was convinced that Kitten was not snitching it. In fact, Kitten would have been terrified at the thought of stealing from her master. Her ego was barely big enough for a mouse; she was less than nothing and knew it and had never owned anything, not even a name, until Hugh gave her one. Under his kindness she was beginning to be a person, but it was still the faintest flicker, anything could blow it out. She would no more have risked stealing from him than she would have risked killing him.
Hugh, half by intent, encouraged her confidence. She was a trained bath girl; he gave in and let her scrub his back and handle the nozzles for his bath, dress him, and take care of his clothes. She was a masseuse, too; he sometimes found it pleasant to have his head and neck rubbed after a day spent poring over the fine print or following the lines in a scroll reader-and she was pathetically anxious to do anything to make herself necessary.
“Kitten, what do you do in the daytime?”
“Why, nothing mostly. Sluts of my subcaste mostly don’t have to work if they have night duty. Since I’m having duty every night I’m allowed to stay in the sleep room until midday. So I do, even if I’m not sleepy, because the slutmaster is likely to put one to work if he catches one just wandering around. Afternoons — Well, mostly I try to stay out of sight. That’s best.
Safest.”
“I see. You can hide out in here if you like. Or can you?”
Her face lit up. “If you give me a pass, I can.”
“All right, I will. You can watch television — No, it’s not on at that hour. Mmm, you don’t know how to read. Or do you?”
“Oh, no, sir! I wouldn’t dare petition.”
“Hmm — ” Hugh knew that permission to learn to read could not be granted even by Memtok; it required Their Charity’s permission and was granted only after investigation of the necessity. Furthermore, anything he did that was out of line jeopardized his thin chances of reunion with Barbara.
But — Damn it, a man had to be a man! “There are scrolls in here and a reader. Do you want to learn?”
“Uncle protect us!”
“Don’t swear. If you want to-and can keep your pretty little mouth shut- I’ll teach you. Don’t look so damned scared! You don’t have to decide now.
Tell me later. Just don’t talk about it. To anyone.”
Kitten did not. It scared her not to report it, but she had a reflex for self-preservation and felt without knowing why that to report this would endanger her happy setup.
Kitten became substitute family life for Hugh. She sent him to work cheerful, greeted him with a smile when he came back, talked if he wanted to talk and never spoke unless spoken to. Most evenings she curled up ‘in front of the television-Hugh thought of it as “the television” and it was in fact closed-circuit television under principles not known to him, in color, in three dimensions, and without lines.
It played every evening in the servants’ main hall, from evening prayer until lights-out, to a packed house, and there were outlets in the apartments of executive servants. Hugh had watched it several evenings, expecting to gain insight into this strange society he must learn to live in.
He decided that one might as well try to study the United States by watching Gunsmoke. It was blatant melodrama, with acting as stylized as Chinese theater, and the favorite plot seemed to be that of the faithful servant who dies gloriously that his lord may live.
But it was only second in importance to Happiness in the morale of life belowstairs. Kitten loved it.
She would watch it, snapping her gum, and suppressing squeals of excitement, while Hugh read-then sigh happily when the program ended, accept her little drink of Happiness with profuse thanks and a touch of her forehead, and go quietly to sleep. Hugh sometimes went on reading.
He read a great deal-every evening (unless Memtok stopped in to visit) and half of every day. He begrudged the time he spent translating for Their Charity but never neglected it; it was the hopeful key to better things. He had found it necessary to study modern culture if he was to translate matters of ancient history intelligibly. The Summer Palace had a fair library; he was given access when he claimed necessity for his work-Memtok arranged it.
But his true purpose was not translation but to try to understand what had happened to his world to produce this world.
So he usually had a scroll in the reader, in his office, or in his living room. The scroll system of printing he found admirable; it mechanized the oldest form of book into a system far more efficient than bound leaves- drop the double cylinder into the reader, flip it on, and hold still. The letters raced across in front of his eyes several hundred feet at a whack, to the end of the scroll. Then the scroll flipped over and chased back the following line, which was printed upside down to the one just scanned.
The eye wasted no time flipping back and forth at stacked lines. But a slight pressure speeded the gadget up to whatever the brain could accept. As Hugh got used to the phonetics, he acquired speed faster than he had ever managed in English. But he did not find what he was looking for.
Somewhere in ‘the past the distinctions between fact, fiction, history,
and religious writings seemed to have been rubbed out. Even when he got it clear that the East-West War that had bounced him out of his own century was now dated 703 B.C. (Before the Great Change), he still had trouble matching the world he had known with the “history” set forth in these scrolls.
The war itself he didn’t find hard to believe. He had experienced only a worm’s-eye view of the first hours but what the scrolls related matched the possibilities: a missile-and-bomb holocaust that had escalated in its first minutes into “brilliant first strike” and “massive retaliation” and smeared cities from Peiping to Chicago, Toronto to Smolensk; fire storms that had done ten times the damage the bombs did; nerve gas and other poisons that had picked up where fire left off; plagues that were incubating when the shocked survivors were picking themselves up and beginning to hope-plagues that were going strong when fallout was no longer deadly.
Yes, he could believe that. The bright boys had made it possible, and the dull boys they worked for had not only never managed to make the possibility unlikely but had never really believed it when the bright boys delivered what the dull boys ordered.
Not, he reminded himself, that he had believed in “Better red than dead”
— or believe in it now. The aggression had been one-sided as hell-and he did not regret a megaton of the “massive retaliation.”
But there it was. The scrolls said that it had killed off the northern
world.
But how about the rest of it? It says here that the United States, at
the time of the war, held its black population as slaves. Somebody had chopped out a century. On purpose? Or was it honest confusion and almost no records?
There had been, he knew, a great book burning for two centuries during the Turmoil, and even after the Change.
Was it lost history, like Crete? Or did the priests like it better this
way?
And since when were the Chinese classed as “white” and the Hindus as
“black”? Yes, purely on skin color Chinese and Japanese were as light as the average “white” of his time, and Hindus were certainly as dark as most Africans-but it was not the accepted anthropological ordering of his day.
Of course, if all they meant was skin shade-and apparently that was what they did mean-he couldn’t argue. The story maintained that the whites, with their evil ways, destroyed each other almost to the last man…leaving the innocent, charitable, merciful dark race-beloved by Uncle the Mighty-to inherit the Earth.
The few white survivors, spared by Uncle’s mercy, had been succored and cherished as children and now again were waxing numerous under the benevolent guidance of the Chosen. So it read.
Hugh could see that a war which smeared North America, Europe, all of Asia except India, could kill off most whites and almost all Chinese. But what had happened to the white minority in South America, the whites of the Union of South Africa, and the Australians and New Zealanders?
Search as he would, Hugh could not find out. All that seemed certain was that the ‘Chosen were dark whereas servants were pale faces-and usually small. Hugh and his son towered over the other servants. Contrariwise, the few Chosen he had seen were big men.
If present-day whites were descended from Australians, mostly-No, couldn’t be, Aussies had not been runts. And those “Expeditions of Mercy” — were they slave raids? Or pogroms? Or, as the scrolls said, rescue missions for survivors?
The book burnings might account for these discrepancies. It wasn’t clear to Hugh whether all books had been put to the torch, or possibly technical books had been spared-for it was clear that the Chosen had technology superior to that of his time; it seemed unlikely that they had started from scratch.
Or was it unlikely? All the technology of his own time that had amounted to a damn had been less than five hundred years old, most of it less than a hundred, and the most amazing parts less than a generation. Could the world have gone back to a dark ages, then pulled out of it and more, in two thousand years? Of course it could!
Either way, the Koran had been the only book officially exempt from the torch-and Hugh harbored a suspicion that the Koran had not been spared either. He ‘had owned a translation of the Koran, had read it several times.
He wished now that he had put it into the shelter, for the Koran as he now read it in “Language” did not match his memory. For one thing, he had thought that Mahomet was a redheaded Arab; this “Koran” mentioned his skin color repeatedly, as black. And he was sure that the Koran was free of racism. This “improved” version was rabid with it.
Furthermore, this Koran had a new testament with a martyred Messiah. He had taught and had been hanged for it — religious scrolls were all marked with a gallows. Hugh did not object to a new testament; there had been time for a new revelation and religions had them as naturally as a cat has kittens. What he objected to was some revisionist working over the words of the Prophet, apparently to make them fit this new book. That wasn’t fair, that was cheating.
The social organization Hugh found almost as puzzling. He was beginning to get a picture of a complex culture, stable, even static-high technology, few innovations, smooth, efficient-and decadent. Church and State were one — “One Tongue, One King, One People, One God.” The Lord Proprietor was sovereign and supreme pontiff and owned everything under Uncle’s grant, and the Lords Protector such as Ponse were his bishops and held only fiefs. Yet there were plenty of private citizens (Chosen, of course-a white was not a person), shopkeepers, landowners, professional men, etc. A setup for an absolute totalitarian communism yet streaked through with what appeared to be private enterprise — Hell, there were even corporations if he understood what he was reading.
The most interesting point to Hugh (aside from the dismal fact that his own status was fixed by law and custom at zero) was the inheritance system.
Family was everything, yet marriage was almost nothing-present but not important. Descent was through the female line-but power was exercised by males.
This confused Hugh until it suddenly fell into place. Ponse was Lord Protector because he was eldest son of an eldest daughter-whose oldest brother had been Lord Protector before Ponse. Ponse’s heir therefore was his oldest sister’s oldest son-title went down through mother and daughter endlessly, with power vested in the oldest brother of each female heir. It did not matter who Ponse’s father was and it mattered even less what sons he had; none of them could inherit. Ponse inherited from his mother’s brother; his heir was his sister’s son.
Hugh could see that, under this system, marriage would never be important-bastardy might be a concept so abstract as to be unrecognized-but family would be more important than ever. Women (of the Chosen) could never be downgraded; they were more important than males even though they ruled through their brothers-and Religion recognized this; the One God, Uncle the Mighty, had an elder sister, the Eternal Mamaloi…so sacred that she was not prayed to and her name was never used in cursing. She was just there, the Eternal Female Principle that gave all life and being.
Hugh had a feeling that he had read about this sort of descent before, uncle to nephew through the female line, so he searched the Britannica. He was surprised to discover that the setup had prevailed at one time or another in every continent and many cultures.
The Great Change had been when Mamaioi had at last succeeded-working
indirectly, as always-in uniting all Her children under one roof and placing their Uncle in charge. Then She could rest.
Hugh’s comment was: “And God help the human race!”
Hugh kept expecting Their Charity to send for him. But two months passed and he did not, and Hugh was beginning to fret that he would never have a chance to ask to see Barbara-apparently Ponse had no interest in him as long as he kept on grinding out translations. Translating the Britannica looked like a job for several lifetimes; he resolved to stir things up, so he sent one day’s batch with a letter to Their Charity.
A week later the Lord Protector sent for him. Memtok came for Hugh, dancing with impatience but insisting that Hugh wash his armpits, rub himself with deodorant, and put on a clean robe.
The Lord Protector did not seem to care how Hugh smelled; he let him wait while he did something else. Hugh stood in silence…although Grace was present. She was lounging on a divan, playing with cats and chewing gum. She glanced at Hugh, then ignored him, save that her face took on a secret smile that Hugh knew well — He called it “canary that ate the cat.”
Dr. — Livingstone-I-Presume greeted Hugh, jumping down, coming over and rubbing against his ankles. Hugh knew that he should ignore it, wait for the lord to recognize his presence-but this cat had been his friend a long time; he could not snub it. He bent down and stroked the cat.
The skies did not split, Their Charity ignored the breach.
Presently the Lord Protector said, “Boy, come here. What’s this about making money from your translations? What in Uncle gave you the notion I needed money?”
Hugh had got the notion from Memtok. The Chief Domestic had growled about how difficult it was to run things, with penny-pinching from on high getting worse every year.
“May it please Their Charity, this one’s opinions are of no value, it is true, but — “
“Cut the flowery talk, damn you!”
“Ponse, back where-when-I came from there never was a man so rich but what he needed more money. Usually, the richer he was, the more he needed.”
The lord grinned. “‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.’ Hugh, you aren’t just sniffing Happiness. Things are the same now. Well? What’s your idea? Spit it out.”
“It seems to me that there are things in your encyclopaedia which might be turned to a profit. Processes and such that have been lost in the last two thousand years-but might be worth money now.”
“All right, do it. The stuff you send up is satisfactory, what I’ve had time to read. But some of it is trivial. ‘Smith, John, born and died-a politician who did nothing much and did that little poorly.’ Know what I mean?”
“I think so, Ponse.”
“All right, skip that garbage and dig me up four or five juicy ideas I can cash in on.”
Hugh hesitated. Ponse said, “Well? Didn’t you understand?”
“I think I need help. You see, I don’t know anything really, except what goes on belowstairs. I thought Joe might help.”
“How?”
“I understand that he has traveled with you, seen things. He is more likely to be able to pick out subjects that merit study. He could pick the articles, I will translate them, and you can judge whether there is anything to exploit. I can synopsize them, so that you needn’t waste time wading through details if the subject doesn’t merit it.”
“Good idea. I’m sure Joe will be happy to help. All right, send up the encyclopaedia. All.”
Hugh was dismissed so abruptly that he had no chance to mention Barbara.
But, he reflected, he could not have risked it with Grace present.
He considered digging out Duke, telling him that his mother was fat and happy-both literally-but decided against it. He wasn’t sure how pleased Duke would be with a truthful report. They didn’t see eye to eye and that was that.
Chapter 15
Joe sent down a volume every day for many days, with pages marked; Hugh slaved to keep up and to make useful translations. After two weeks Hugh was again sent for.
He expected a conference over some business idea. What he found was Ponse, Joe, and a Chosen he had never seen. Hugh instantly prepared to speak protocol mode, rising.
The Lord Protector said, “Come here, Hugh. Cut the cards. And don’t start any of that tiresome formality, this is family. Private.”
Hugh hesitantly approached. The other Chosen, a big dark man with a permanent scowl, didn’t seem pleased. He was carrying his quirt and twitched it. But Joe looked up and smiled. “I’ve been teaching them contract, Hugh, and our fourth had to be away. I’ve been telling Ponse that you are the best player any where or when. So don’t let me down.”
“I’ll try not to.” Hugh recognized one deck of cards, they had once been his. The other deck appeared to be hand painted and were beautiful. The card table was not from the shelter; fabulous hand craftsmanship had gone into it.
The cut made Hugh partner of the strange Chosen. Hugh tried not to show how nervous it made him, as his partner clearly did not like it. But the Chosen grunted and accepted it.
His partner’s contract, at three spades-by a fluke distribution ‘they made four. His partner growled, “Boy, you underbid, you wasted game. Don’t let it happen again.”
Hugh kept quiet and dealt.
On the next hand Joe and Ponse made five clubs. Hugh’s partner was furious-at Hugh. “If you had led diamonds, we would have set them! And you washed out our leg. I warned you. Now I’m — “
“Mrika!” Ponse said sharply. “This is contract. Play it as such. And put that tickler down. The servant played correctly.”
“It did not! And I’m damned if I care for letting it in the game anyhow.
I can smell the rank, sharp stink of a buck servant no matter how much it’s scrubbed. I don’t think this one is scrubbed at all.”
Hugh felt sweat breaking out in his armpits and flinched. But Ponse said evenly, “Very well, we excuse you. You may leave.”
“That suits me!” The ‘Chosen stood up. “Just one thing before I do — If you don’t quit staffing, Their Mercy will let the North Star Protectorate — “
“Are you planning to put up the money?” Their Charity said sharply. “Me? It’s a Family matter. Not but what I wouldn’t jump at the chance!
Forty million hectares and most of it in prime timber? Of course I would! But I hardly have one bullock to jingle against another-and you know why.”
“Certainly we know. You gamble.”
“Oh, come now! A businessman has to take chances. You can’t call it gambling when — “
“We do call it gambling. We do not object to gambling but we have a vast distaste for losing. If you must lose, you will do it with your own bullocks.”
“But this isn’t gambling, it’s a sure thing-as well as getting us in solid with Their Mercy. The Family — “
“We decide what is good for the Family. Your turn will come soon enough.
In the meantime we are as anxious to please the Lord Proprietor as you are. But not with bullocks the Family doesn’t have in the treasury.”
“You could borrow it. The interest would only come to — . — “
“You wanted to leave, Mrika. We note that you have left.” Ponse picked up cards and began to shuffle.
The younger Chosen snorted and left.
Ponse laid out a solitaire game, started to play. Presently he said to Joe, “Sometimes that young man gets me so annoyed that I would happily change my will.”
Joe looked puzzled. “I thought you could not disinherit him?”
“Oh, no!” Their Charity looked shocked. “Not even a peasant can do that.
Where would we be if there were no stability here on Earth? I wouldn’t dream of it, even if the law permitted it; he’s my heir. I was just thinking of the servants.”
Joe said, “I don’t follow you.”
“Why, you know — No, perhaps you don’t. I keep forgetting that you didn’t grow up among us. My will disposes of things personally mine. Not much- jewelry, scrolls, such. Value probably less than a million. Trivia. Except household servants. Just the household, I’m not talking about servants in mines or on ranches, or in our shipping lines. It’s customary to list all household servants in a will-otherwise they escort their uncle.” He grinned. “It would be a good joke on Mrika if he found that he was going to have to raise the money to adopt fifteen hundred, two thousand servants-or shut the house and live in a tent. I can just see that. Why, the lad can’t take a pee without four servants to shake it. I doubt if he knows how to put on his boots. Hugh, if you tell me to put the black lady on the red lord, I’ll tingle you. I’m not in a good mood.”
Hugh said hastily, “Did you miss a play? I hadn’t noticed.”
“Then why were you staring at the cards?” Hugh had indeed been staring at the game, trying to be invisibie. He had been made very nervous by witnessing a quarrel between Ponse and his nephew. But he had missed not a word, he found it extremely interesting.
Ponse went on, “Which would you prefer, Hugh? To escort me to Heaven? Or stay here and serve Mrika? Don’t answer too quickly. If you stay here, I venture you may be eating your own toes to stay your hunger before I’m gone a year…whereas Heaven is a nice place, so the Good Scroll tells.”
“It’s a hard choice.”
“Well, you don’t have to make it, nor will you know. A servant should never know, it keeps him on his toes. That scoundrel Memtok keeps praying me for the honor of being in my escort. If I thought he was sincere, I would dismiss him for incompetence.” Ponse swept the cards together. “Damn that lad! He’s poor company but I had my liver set on a few good, hard rubbers. Joe, we’ve got to teach more people to play. Being left without a fourth is annoying.”
“Certainly,” agreed Joe. “Right now?”
“No, no. I want to play, damn it, not watch some beginner’s bumbles. I’m growing addicted. Takes a man’s worries off his mind.”
Hugh was hit by inspiration. “Ponse, if you don’t mind having another servant in the game…”
Joe brightened up. “Why, of course! He — “
“Barbara,” Hugh cut in fast, before Joe could mention Duke.
Joe blinked. Then he smoothly picked it up. “He-Hugh, I mean-was about to mention a servant named Barbara. Good bridge player.”
“Well! You’ve been teaching this game belowstairs, Hugh?” Ponse added, “‘Barbara’? A name I don’t recognize. Not one of the upper servants.”
“You remember her,” Joe said. “She was with us when you picked us up.
The tall one.”
“Oh, yes. Bigging, it was. Joe, are you telling me that a slut can play this game?”
“She’s a top player,” Joe assured him. “Plays better than I do. Heavens, Ponse, she can play rings around you. Isn’t that right, Hugh?”
“Barbara is an excellent player.” “This I must see to believe.”
A few minutes later Barbara, freshly bathed and scared, was fetched in. She glanced at Hugh, looked startled silly, opened her mouth, closed it, and stood mute.
Ponse came up to her. “So this is the slut who is supposed to be able to play contract. Stop trembling, little one; nobody’s going to eat you.” In bluff words he convinced her that she was there only to play bridge and that she was expected to relax and be informal-no fancy talk. “Just behave as if you were downstairs, having a good time with other servants. Hear me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Just one thing.” He tapped her on her chest. “When you’re my partner, I shan’t be angry if you make mistakes-after all, you’re only a slut and it’s surprising that you can play an intellectual game at all. But” — he paused — “when you are playing against me, if you fail to fight for every trick, if I even suspect that you are trying to let me win, I guarantee you’ll tingle when you leave. Understand?”
“That’s right,” agreed Joe. “Their Charity expects it. Just play by the book, and play your best.”
“‘By the book,’ ” Ponse repeated. “I’ve never seen this book but that’s the way Joe says he has taught me to play. So do it. All right, let’s cut the cards.”
Hugh hardly listened, he was drinking in the sight of Barbara. She looked well and healthy although it was startling to see her slender again-or almost, he corrected; she was still largish in the fanny and certainly in the bust. She had lost most of her tan and was dressed in the shapeless short robe all female servants wore belowstairs, but ‘he was delighted to see that she had not had her hair removed. It was cropped but could grow back.
He noticed that his own appearance seemed to startle her, realized why.
He said, smiling, “I comb my hair with a washrag now, Barbie. No matter, I didn’t have enough to matter. Now that I’m used to being hairless, I like it.”
“You look distinguished, Hugh.”
“He’s ugly as sin,” said Ponse. “But are we chatting? Or playing bridge?
Your bid, Barba.”
They played for hours. As it progressed, Barbara seemed to relax and enjoy it. She smiled a great deal, usually at Hugh, but also at Joe and even at Their Charity. She played by the book and Ponse never found fault. Hugh decided that their host was a good player, not yet perfect but he remembered what cards had been played and usually bid accurately. Hugh found him a satisfactory partner and an adequate opponent; it was a good game.
But once, with Barbara as Ponse’s partner and contract in her hand, Hugh saw when Ponse laid down the dummy that Ponse had overbid in his answer. So he contrived to lose one sure trick, thereby letting Barbara make contract, game, and rubber.
It got him a glance with no expression from Barbara and Joe gave him a look that had a twinkle in it, but Joe kept his mouth shut. Ponse did not notice. He gave a bass roar, reached across and patted Barbara’s head. “Wonderful, wonderful! Little one, you really can play contract. Why, I doubt if I could have made that myself.”
Nor did Ponse complain when, on the next rubber, Barbara and Hugh gave him and Joe a trouncing. Hugh decided that Ponse had the inborn honesty called “sportsmanship” — plus a good head for cards.
One of the little deaf-mutes trotted in, knelt, and served Their Charity
a tumbler of something cold, then another to Joe. Ponse took a swig, wiped his mouth and said, “Ah, that hits the spot!”
Joe made a whispered suggestion to him. Ponse looked startled and said, “Oh, certainly. Why not?”
So Hugh and Barbara were served. Hugh was pleased to discover ‘that it was apple juice; he wasn’t sure of his ability to play tight bridge had it been Happiness.
During this rubber Hugh noticed that Barbara was squirming a little and seemed to have trouble in concentrating. When the hand ended he said quietly, “Trouble, hon?”
She glanced at Ponse and whispered, “Some. I was about to feed the boys when I was sent for.”
“Oh.” Hugh turned to his host. “Ponse, Barbara needs to stop.,,
Ponse looked up from shuffling. “Plumbing call? One of the maids can show it, I suppose. They must go somewhere.”
“Not that. Well, maybe that, too. What I meant was, Barbara has twins.” “Well? Sluts usually have twins, they have two breasts.”
“That’s the point, she’s nursing them and she’s hours past time. She has to leave.”
Ponse looked annoyed, hesitated, then said, “Oh, garbage. Its milk won’t cake from so short a delay. Here, cut the cards.”
Hugh did not touch them. Ponse said, “Didn’t you hear me?” Hugh stood up~ His heart was pounding and he felt a shudder of fear. “Ponse, Barbara hurts. She needs to nurse her twins right now. I can’t force you to let her- but if you think I’ll play cards while you don’t let her, you’re crazy.”
For long moments the big man stared, without expression. Then suddenly he grinned. “Hugh, I like you. You did something like this once before, didn’t you? The slut is your sister, I suppose.”
“Then you are the one who is crazy. Do you know how close you came to being cold meat?”
“I can guess.”
“I doubt it, you don’t look worried. But I like spunk, even in a servant. Very well, I’ll have its brats fetched. They can suck while we play.”
The twins were fetched and Hugh saw at once that they were the handsomest, healthiest, and loveliest babies that had ever been born; he told Barbara so. He did not immediately get a chance to touch them as Ponse took one in each arm, laughed at them, blew in their faces, and jiggled them. “Fine boys!” he roared. “Fine boys, Barba! Holy little terrors, I’ll bet. Go on, swing that fist, kid! Sock Uncle in the nose again. What do you call them, Barba? Do they have names?”
“This one is Hugh — “
“Eh? Does Hugh have something to do with them? Or thinks he has, perhaps?”
“He’s ‘their father.”
“Well, well! Hugh, you may be ugly, but you have other qualities. If Barba knows what she’s talking about. What’s this one’s name?”
“That one is little Joe. Karl Joseph.”
Ponse lifted an eyebrow at Joe. “So you have sluts naming brats for you, Joe? I’ll have to watch you, you’re a sly one. What did you give Barba?”
“Beg pardon?”
“Birthing present, you idiot. Give her that ring you’re wearing. So many brats in this house named after me that I have to order trinkets by the basket load; they know it obliges me to make them a present. Hugh is lucky, he has nothing to give. Hey, Hughie has teeth!”
Hugh got to hold them while they settled down for combined bridge and nursing. Barbara took them one at a time and played cards with her free hand.
The little maids fussed over the one not nursing and, in due time, took them away. In spite of the handicap Barbara played well, even brilliantly; the long session ended with Ponse top scorer, Barbara close behind, and Joe and Hugh tied for last. Hugh had cheated very little to make it come out that way; the cards had favored Ponse and Barbara when they were partners; they had made two small slams.
Ponse was feeling very jovial about it. “Barba, come here, little one. You tell the slutmaster I said to find a wet nurse for your brats and that I want the vet to dry you up as soon as possible. I want you available as my bridge partner. Or opponent-you give a man a tough fight.”
“Yes, sir. May one speak?” “One may.”
“I would rather nurse them myself. They’re all I have.”
“Well — ” He shrugged. “This seems to be my day for balky servants. I’m afraid you are both still savages. A tingling wouldn’t do you any harm, slut. All right, but you’ll have to play ‘one-handed sometimes; I won’t have brats stopping the game.” He grinned. “Besides, I’d like to see the little rascals occasionally, especially that one that bites. You may go. All.”
Barbara was dismissed so suddenly that Hugh barely had time to exchange smiles with her; he had hoped to walk down with her, steal a private visit.
But His Charity did not dismiss him, so he stayed-with a warm glow in his heart; it had been the happiest time in a long time.
Ponse discussed the articles he had been translating, why none of them offered practical business ventures. “But don’t fret, Hugh; keep plugging and we’ll strike ore yet.” He turned the talk to other matters, still kept Hugh there. Hugh found him a knowledgeable conversationalist, interested in everything, as willing to listen as he was to talk. He seemed to Hugh the epitome of the perfect decadent gentleman-urbane, cosmopolitan, disillusioned, and cynical, a dilettante in arts and sciences, neither merciful nor cruel, unimpressed by his own rank, not racist-he treated Hugh as an intellectual equal.
While they were talking, the little maids served dinner to Ponse and to Joe. Nothing was offered to Hugh, nor did he expect it-nor want it, as he could have meals served in his rooms if he was not on time in the executive servants’ dining room and he had long since decided, from samplings, that Memtok was right: the upper servants ate better than the master.
But when Ponse had finished, he shoved his dishes toward Hugh. “Eat.”
Hugh hesitated a split second; he did not need to be told that he was being honored-for a servant. There was plenty, at least three times as much left as Ponse had eaten. Hugh could not recall that he had ever eaten someone’s leavings, and certainly not with a used spoon. He dug in.
As usual, Their Charity’s menu did not especially please Hugh-somewhat greasy and he had no great liking for pork. Pork was hardly ever served belowstairs but was often part of the menus Memtok sampled, Hugh had noticed. It surprised him, as the revised Koran still contained the dietary laws and the Chosen did follow some of the original Muslim customs. They practiced circumcision, did not use alcohol other than a thin beer, and observed Ramadan at least nominally and called it that. Mahomet would have been shocked by the revisions to his straightforward monotheistic teachings but he would have recognized some of the details.
But the bread was good, the fruits were superb, and so were the ices and many other things; it wasn’t necessary to dine solely on roast. Hugh kept intact his record for enjoying the inevitable.
Ponse was interested in what the climate had been in this region in Hugh’s time. “Joe tells me you sometimes had freezing temperatures. Even snow.”
“Oh, yes, every winter.”
“Fantastic. How cold did it get?”
Hugh had to think. He had not had occasion to learn how these people marked temperatures. “If you consider the range from freezing of water to boiling, it was not unusual for it to get one third of that range lower than freezing.”
Ponse looked surprised. “Are you sure? We call that range, freezing to boiling, one hundred. Are you telling me that it sometimes got as much as thirty-three degrees below freezing?”
Hugh noted with interest that the centigrade scale had survived two millennia-but no reason why not; they used the decimal system in arithmetic and in money. He had to do a conversion in his head. “Yes, that’s what I mean. Nearly cold enough to freeze mercury, and cold enough for that, up in those mountains.” Hugh pointed out a view window.
“Cold enough,” Joe agreed, “to freeze your teeth! Only thing that ever made me long for Mississippi.”
“Where,” asked Ponse, “is Mississippi?”
“It’s not,” Joe told him. “It’s under water now. And good riddance.”
This led to discussion of why the climate had changed and Their Charity sent for the last volume of the Britannica, containing ancient maps, and for modern maps. They poured over them together. Where the Mississippi Valley had been, the Gulf now reached far north. Florida and Yucatan were missing and ‘Cuba was a few small islands. California had a central sea and most of northern Canada was gone.
Similar shrinkages had taken place elsewhere. The Scandinavian Peninsula was an island, the British isles were several small islands, part of the Sahara was under water. What had been lowlands anywhere were missing-Holland, Belgium, Northern Germany could not be found. Nor Denmark-the 3altic was a gulf of the Atlantic.
Hugh looked at it with odd sorrow and had never felt so homesick. He had known it was so, from reading; this was the first map he had seen of it.
“The question,” said Ponse, “is whether the melting of ice ~vas triggered by the dust of the East-West War, or was it a natural change that was, at most, speeded up a little by artificial events? Some of my scientists say one thing, some the other.”
“What do you think?” asked Hugh.
The lord shrugged. “I’m not foolish enough to hold opinions when I have insufficient data; I’ll leave that folly to scientists. I’m simply glad that Uncle saw fit ‘to let me live in an age in which I can go outdoors without freezing my feet. I visited the South Pole once-I have some mines there. Frost on the ground. Dreadful. The place for ice is in a drink.”
Ponse went to the window and stood looking out at the silhouette of mountains against darkening sky. “However, if it got that cold up there now, we would root them out in a hurry. Eh, Joe?”
“Back they would come with their tails between their legs,” Joe agreed.
Hugh looked puzzled. “Ponse means,” Joe explained, “the runners hiding up in the mountains. What they thought you were when we were found.”
“Runners and a few aborigines,” Ponse supplemented. “Savages. Poor creatures who have never been rescued by civilization. It’s hard to save them, Hugh. They don’t stand around waiting to be picked up the way you did. They’re crafty as wolves. The merest shadow in the sky and they freeze and you can’t see them-and they are very destructive of game. Of course we could smoke them out any number of ways. But that would kill the game, can’t have that. Hugh, you’ve lived out there; you must have acquired some feel for it. How would you go about rescuing those critters? Without killing game.”
Mr. Hugh Farnham hesitated only long enough to phrase his reply. “Their Charity knows that this one is a servant. This one’s ears must be at fault in thinking that it heard its humble self called on to see the problem as it
might appear to the Chosen.”
“Why, damn your impudence! Come, come, Hugh, I want your opinion.” “You got my opinion, Ponse. I’m a servant. My sympathies are with the
runaways. And the savages. I didn’t come here willingly. I was dragged.” “Surely you aren’t resenting that now? Of course you were captured, even
Joe was. But there was language difficulty. Now you’ve seen the difference. You know.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Then you know how much your condition has improved. Don’t you sleep in a better bed now? Aren’t you eating better? Uncle! When we picked you up, you were half starved and infested with vermin. You were barely staying alive with the hardest sort of work, I could see. I’m not blind, I’m not stupid; there isn’t a member of my Family down to ‘the lowest cleaner that works half as ‘hard as you had to, or sleeps in as poor a bed-and in a stinking little sty; I could hardly bear the stench before we fumigated it-and as for the food, if that is the word, any servant in this house would turn up his nose at what you ate. Isn’t all that true?”
“Yes.”
“Well?”
“I prefer freedom.”
“‘Freedom!'” Their Charity snorted. “A concept without a referent, like ‘ghosts.’ Meaningless. Hugh, you should study semantics. Modern semantics, I mean; I doubt if they really had such a science in your day. We are all free- to walk our appointed paths. Just as a stone is free to fall when you toss it into the air. No one is free in the abstract meaning you give the word. Do you think 1 am free? Free to change places with you, say? Would I if I could? You bet I would! You have no concept of the worries I have, the work I do.
Sometimes I lie awake half the night, worrying which way to turn next-you won’t find that in servants’ hall. They’re happy, they have no worries. But I have to carry my burden as best I can.”
Hugh looked stubborn. Ponse came over and put his arm around Hugh’s shoulders. “Come, let’s talk this over judicially-two civilized beings. I’m not one of those superstitious persons who thinks a servant can’t think because his skin is pale. Surely you know that. Haven’t I respected your intellect?”
“Well…yes.”
“That’s better. Let me explain some things-Joe has seen them-and you can ask questions, and we’ll arrive at a rational understanding. First-Joe, you’ve seen Chosen here and there who are what our friend Hugh would no doubt describe as ‘free.’ Tell him.”
Joe snorted. “Hugh, you should see-and you would be glad to be privileged to live in Ponse’s household. There is just one phrase I can think of to describe them. Po’ black trash. Like the white trash there used to be in Mississippi. Poor black trash, not knowing where their next meal is.”
“I follow you.”
“I think I do, too,” agreed Their Charity. “A pungent phrase. I look forward to the day when every man will have servants. It can’t come overnight, they’ll have to lift themselves up. But a day when all the Chosen will be served-and all servants as well cared for as they are in my own Family. That’s my ideal. In the meantime I do the best I can. I look after their welfare from birth until they’re called Home by Uncle. They have nothing to fear, utter security-which they wouldn’t have out in those mountains as I’m sure you know better than I. They are happy, they are never overworked — which I am-and they have plenty of fun, which is more than I can say! This bridge game today- the first real fun I’ve had in a month. And they are never punished, only just enough to remind them when they err. Have to do that, you’ve seen how stupid most of them are. Not that I am inferring that you are — No, I tell you
honestly that I think you are smart enough to take care of servants yourself, despite your skin. I’m speaking of the ordinary run. Honestly, Hugh, do you think they could take care of themselves as well as I look out for them?”
“Probably not.” Hugh had heard all this before, only nights ago, and in almost the same words-from Memtok. With the difference that Ponse seemed to be honestly fond of his servants and earnest about their welfare-whereas the Chief Domestic had been openly contemptuous of them, even more strongly so than his veiled contempt for the Chosen. “No, they couldn’t, most of them.”
“Ah! You agree with me.” “No.”
Ponse looked pained. “Hugh, how can we have a rational discussion if you say one thing and contradict it in the next breath?”
“I didn’t contradict myself. I agreed that you took fine care of the welfare of your servants. But I did not agree that I prefer it to freedom.”
“But why, Hugh? Give me a reason, not a philosophical abstraction. If you’re not happy, I want to know why. So that I can correct it.”
“I can give you one reason. I’m not allowed to live with my wife and children.”
“Eh?”
“Barbara. And the twins.”
“Oh. Is that important? You have a bedwarmer. Memtok told me, and I congratulated him on having used initiative in an odd situation. Not much gets past that sly old fox. You have one and she is sure to be more expert at her specialty than the ordinary run of breeding slut. As for the brats, no reason why you can’t see them-just order them fetched to you whenever you like. But who wants to live with brats? Or with a wife? I don’t live with my wife and children, you can bet on that. I see them on appropriate occasions. But who would want to live with them?”
“I would.”
“Well — Uncle! I want you to be happy. It can be arranged.” “It can?”
“Certainly. If you hadn’t put up such a fuss over being tempered, you could have had them with you all along — though I confess I don’t see why. Do you want to see the vet?”
“Uh…no.”
“Well, there’s another choice. I’ll have the slut spayed.” “No!”
Ponse sighed. “You’re hard to please. Be practical, Hugh; can’t change a scientific breeding system to pamper one servant. Do you know how many servants are in this family? Here and at the Palace? Around eighteen hundred, I believe. Do you know what would happen if I allowed unrestricted breeding?
In ten years there would be twice that number. And what would happen next? They would starve! I can’t support them n unlimited breeding. Would if I could, but it’s wishing for the Moon. Worse, for we can go to the Moon any time it’s worth while but nobody can cope with the way servants will breed if left to their own devices. So which is better? To control it? Or let them starve?”
Their Charity sighed. “I wish you were a head shorter, we would work something out. You’ve been in studs’ quarters?”
“I visited it once, with Memtok.”
“You noticed the door? You had to stoop; Memtok walked straight in-he used to be a stud. The doors are that height in ~very studs’ barracks in the world-and no servant is chosen Lf he can’t walk in without stooping. And the slut in this case Ls too tall, too. A wise law, Hugh. I didn’t make it; it was handed down a long time ago by Their Mercy of that time. If they are allowed to breed too tall they start needing to be tingled too often and that’s not good, for master or servant. No, Hugh. Anything within reason. But don’t ask
for the impossible.” He moved from the divan where he had been sitting ~tête –
à — tête with Hugh and sat down at the card table, picked
a deck. “So we’ll say no more about it. Do you know how ~o play double solitaire?”
“Yes.”
“Then come see if you can beat me and let’s be cheerful. A man gets upset when his efforts aren’t appreciated.”
Hugh shut up. He was thinking glumly that Ponse was not a villain. He was exactly like the members of every ruling class in history: honestly convinced of his benevolence and hurt if it was challenged.
They played a game; Hugh lost, his mind was not on it. They started to lay out another. Their Charity remarked, “I must have more cards painted.
These are getting worn.”
Hugh said, “Couldn’t it be done more quickly, using a printer such as we use for scrolls?”
“Eh? Hadn’t thought about it.” The big man rubbed one of the XXth century cards. “This doesn’t seem much like printing. Were they printed?”
“Oh, yes. Thousands at a time. Millions, I should say, figuring the enormous numbers that used to be sold.”
“Really? I wouldn’t have though! that bridge, with its demand on the intellect, would have attracted many people.”
Hugh suddenly put down his cards. “Ponse? You wanted a way to make money.”
“Certainly.”
“You have it in your hand. Joe! Come here and let’s talk about this. How many decks of cards were sold each year in the United States?”
“Gosh, Hugh, I don’t know. Millions, maybe.”
“So I would say. At a gross profit of about ninety percent. Mmm — Ponse, bridge and solitaire aren’t the only games that can be played with these cards. The possibilities are unlimited. There are games simple as solitaire but played by two or three or more players. There are games a dozen people can play at once. There are hard games and easy games, there is even a form of bridge — ‘duplicate,’ it’s called-harder than contract. Ponse, every family-little family-kept one or two or even dozens of decks on hand; it was a rare home that didn’t own a deck. I couldn’t guess how many were sold.
Probably a hundred million decks in use in the United States alone. And you’ve got a virgin market. All it needs is to get people interested.”
“Ponse, Hugh is right,” Joe said solemnly. “The possibilities are unlimited.”
Ponse pursed up his lips. “If we sold them for a bullock a deck, let us say…mmm — “
“Too much,” Joe ‘objected. “You would kill your market before you got started.”
Hugh said, “Joe, what’s that formula for setting a price to maximize profits rather than sales?”
“Works only in a monopoly.”
“Well? How is that done here? Patents and copyrights and such? I haven’t seen anything about it in what I’ve read.”
Joe looked troubled. “Hugh, the Chosen don’t use such a system, they don’t need to. Everything is pretty well worked out, things don’t change much.”
Hugh said, “That’s bad. Two weeks after we start, the market will be flooded with imitations.”
Ponse said, “What are you two jabbering about? Speak Language.” Hugh’s question had necessarily been in English; Joe had answered in English.
Joe said, “Sorry, Ponse,” and explained the ideas behind patent rights, copyright, and monopoly.
Ponse relaxed. “Oh, that’s simple. When a man gets an inspiration from Heaven, the Lord Proprietor forbids anyone else to use it without his let.
Doesn’t happen often, I recall only two cases in my lifetime. But Mighty Uncle has been known to smile.”
Hugh was not surprised to learn how scarce invention was. It was a static culture, with most of what they called “science” in the hands of tempered slaves-and if patenting a new idea was that difficult, there would be little incentive to invent. “Would you say that this idea is an inspiration from Heaven?”
Ponse thought about it. “An inspiration is whatever Their Mercy, in Their wisdom, recognizes as an inspiration.” Suddenly he grinned. “In my opinion, anything that will stack bullocks in the Family coffers is an inspiration. The problem is to make the Proprietor see it. But there are ways. Keep talking.”
Joe said, “Hugh, the protection should extend not only over playing cards but over the games themselves.”
“Of course. If they don’t buy Their Charity’s cards, they must not play his games. Hard to stop, since anybody can fake a deck of cards. But the monopoly should make it illegal.”
“And not just cards like these, but any sort of playing cards. You could play bridge with cards just with numbers on them.”
“Yes.” Hugh pondered. “Joe, there was a Scrabble set in the shelter.” “It’s still around. Ponse’s scientists saved everything. Hugh, I see
what you’re driving at, but nobody here could learn Scrabble. You have to know English.”
“What’s to keep us from inventing Scrabble all over again — in Language? Let me set my staff to making a frequency count of the alphabet as it appears in Language and I’ll have a set of Scrabble, board and tiles and rules, suited to Language, the following day.”
“What in the name of Uncle is Scrabble?”
“It’s a game, Ponse. Quite a good one. But the point is that it’s a game that we can charge more for than we can for a deck of cards.”
“That’s not all,” said Hugh. He began ticking on his fingers. “Parcheesi, Monopoly, backgammon, Old Maid for kids-call it something else- dominoes, anagrams, poker chips and racks, jigsaw puzzles-have you seen any?”
“No.”
“Good for young and old, and all degrees of difficulty. Tinker Toy.
Dice-lots of games with dice. Joe, are there casinos here?”
“Of sorts. There are places to gamble and lots of private gambling.” “Roulette wheels?”
“I don’t believe so.”
“It gets too big to think about. Ponse, you are going to have to sit up nights, counting your money.”
“Servants for such chores. I wish I knew what you two are talking about.
May one ask?”
“Sorry, sir. Joe and I were talking about ancient games.. and not just games but all sorts of recreations that we used to have and have now been lost. At least I think they have been. Joe?”
“The only one I’ve seen that looks familiar is chess.”
“Chess would hold up if anything would. Ponse, the point is that every one of these things has money in it. Surely, you have games now. But these will be novelties. So old they are new again. Ping-Pong…bowling alleys! Joe, have you seen — “
“No.”
“Billiards. Pocket pool. I’ll stop, we’ve got a backlog. Ponse, the first problem is to get a protection from Their Mercy to cover it all-and I see a theory that makes it an inspiration from on high. It was a miracle.”
“What? Garbage. I don’t believe in miracles.”
“You don’t have to believe in it. Look, we were found on the Proprietor’s personal land-and you found us. Doesn’t that look as if Uncle intended for the Proprietor to know about this? And for you as Lord Protector to protect it?”
Ponse grinned. “An argument could be made for such a theory. Might be expensive. But you can’t boil water without feeding the fire, as my aunt used to say.” He stood up. “Hugh, let’s see that Scrabble game. Soon. Joe, we’ll find time for you to explain these other things. We excuse you both. All.”
Kitten was asleep when Hugh returned but she was clutching a note:
Oh, darling, it was so wonderful to see you! ! ! I can’t wait until Their Charity asks us to play bridge again! Isn’t he an old dear? Even if he was thoughtless at one point. He corrected his mistake and that’s the mark of a true gentleman.
I’m so excited at seeing you that I can hardly write, and Kitten is waiting to take this to you.
The twins send you kisses, slobbery ones. Love, love, love!
Your own B.
Hugh read Barbara’s note with mixed feelings. He shared her joy in their reunion, limited as it had been, and eagerly looked forward to the next time Ponse’s pleasure would permit them to be together. As for the rest — Better get her out of here before she acquired a slave mentality! Surely, Ponse was a gentleman within the accepted meaning of the term. He was conscientious about his responsibilities, generous and tolerant with his inferiors. A gentleman.
But he was a revolving son of a bitch, too! And Barbara ought not to be so ready to overlook the fact. Ignore it, yes — one had to. But not forget it.
He must get her free. But how?
He went to bed.
An aching hour later he got up, went into his living room, stood at his window. He could make out against black sky the blacker blackness of the Rocky Mountains.
Somewhere out there, were free men.
He could break this window, go toward the mountains, be lost in them before daylight-find free companions. He need not even break the window-just slip past a nodding watchman, or use the authority symbolized by his whip to go out despite the watch. No real effort was made to keep house servants locked up. A watch was set more to keep intruders out. Most house servants would no more run away than a dog would.
Dogs — One of the studmaster’s duties was keeper of the hounds.
If necessary, he could kill a dog with his hands. But how do you run when burdened with two small babies?
He went to a cupboard, poured himself a stiff drink of Happiness, gulped it down, and went back to bed.
Chapter 16
For the next many days Hugh was busy redesigning the game of Scrabble, translating Hoyle’s Complete Book of Games, dictating rules and descriptions of games and recreations not in Hoyle (such as Ping-Pong, golf, water skiing), attending conferences with Ponse and Joe-playing bridge.
The last was by far the best. With Joe’s help he taught several Chosen
the game, but most sessions were play, with Joe, Ponse, and always Barbara. Ponse had the enthusiasm of a convert; when he was in residence he played bridge every minute he could spare, and always wanted the same four, the best players available.
It seemed to Hugh that Their Charity was honestly fond of Barbara, as fond as he was of the cat he called “Doklivstnipsoom” — never “Doc.” Ponse extended to cats the courtesy due equals, and Doc, or any cat, was free to jump into his lap even when he was bidding a hand. He extended the same courtesy and affection to Barbara as he knew her better, always called her “Barba,” or “Child,” and never again referred to her as “it.” Barbara called him “Ponse,” or “Uncle,” and clearly felt happy in his company.
Sometimes Ponse left Barbara and Hugh alone, once for twenty minutes. These were jewels beyond price; they did not risk losing such a privilege by doing more than hold hands.
If it was time to nurse the boys, Barbara said so and Ponse always ordered them fetched. Once he ordered them fetched when it wasn’t necessary, said that he had not seen them for a week and wanted to see how much they had grown. So the game waited while their “Uncle” Ponse got down on the rug and made foolish noises at them.
Then he had them taken away, five minutes of babies was enough. But he said to Barbara, “Child, they’re growing like sugar cane. I hope I live to see them grow up.”
“You’ll live a long time, Uncle.’!
“Maybe. I’ve outlived a dozen food tasters, but that salts no fish.
Those brats of ours will make magnificent matched footmen. I can see them now, serving in the banquet hail of the Palace-the Residence, I mean, not this cottage. Whose deal is it?”
Hugh saw Grace a few times, but never for more than seconds. If he showed up when she was there, she left at once, displeasure large on her face. If Barbara arrived before Hugh did, Grace was always out of sight. It was clear that she was an habituée of the lord’s informal apartments; it was equally clear that she resented Barbara as much as ever, with bile left over for Hugh. But she never said anything and it seemed likely that she had learned not to cross wills with Their Charity.
It was now official that Grace was bedwarmer to Their Charity. Hugh learned this from Kitten. The sluts knew when the lord was in residence (Hugh often did not) by whether Grace was downstairs or up. She was assigned no other duties and was immune to all whips, even Memtok’s. She was also, the times Hugh glimpsed her, lavishly dressed and bejeweled.
She was also very fat, so fat that Hugh felt relieved that he no longer had even a nominal obligation to share a bed with her. True, all bedwarmers were fat by Hugh’s standards. Even Kitten was plump enough that had she been a XXth century American girl, she would have been at least pretending to diet — Kitten fretted that she was unable to put on weight — and did Hugh like her anyhow?
Kitten was so young that her plumpness was somewhat pleasing, as with a baby. But Hugh found Grace’s fatness another matter-somewhere in that jiggling mass was buried the beautiful girl he had married. He tried not to think about it and could not see why Ponse would like it-if he did. But in truth, Hugh admitted, he did not know that Grace was anything more than nominally Ponse’s bedwarmer. After all, Ponse was alleged to be more than a century old. Would Ponse have any more use for one than Memtok had? Hugh did not know-nor care.
Ponse looked to be perhaps sixty-five and still strong and virile. But Hugh held a private opinion that Grace’s role was odalisque, not houri.
While the question did not matter to him, it did to Duke. Hugh’s first son came storming into Hugh’s office one day and demanded a private interview; Hugh led him to his apartment. He bad not seen Duke for a month. Translations
had been coming in from him; there had been no need to see him.
Hugh tried to make the meeting pleasant. “Sit down, Duke. May I offer you a drink of Happiness?”
“No, thanks! What’s this I hear about Mother?”
“What do you hear, Duke?” (Oh, Lord! Here we go — ) “You know damned well what I mean!”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
Hugh made him spell it out. Duke had his facts correct and, to Hugh’s surprise, had learned them just that day. Since more than four hundred servants had known all along that one of the slut savages-the other one, not the tail skinny one-lived upstairs with Their Charity more than she lived in sluts’ quarters, it seemed incredible that Duke had taken so long to find out. However, Duke had little to do with the other servants and was not popular-a “troublemaker,” Memtok had called him.
Hugh neither confirmed nor denied Duke’s story.
“Well?” Duke demanded. “What are you going to do about it?”
“About what, Duke? Are you suggesting that I put a stop to servants’ hall gossip?”
“I don’t mean that at all! Are you going to sit there like a turd on a rock while your wife is being raped?”
“Probably. You come in here with some story you’ve picked up from a second assistant dishwasher and expect me to do something. I would like to know, first, why do you think this gossip is true? Second, what has what you have told me got to do with rape? Third, what would you expect me to do about it? Fourth, what do you think I can do about it? Take them in ‘order and be specific. Then we may talk about what I will do.”
“Quit twisting things.”
“I’m not twisting anything. Duke, you had an expensive education as a lawyer-I know, I picked up the tab. You used to lecture me about ‘rules of evidence.’ Now use that education. Take those questions in order. Why do you think this gossip is true?”
“Uh…I heard it and checked around. Everybody knows it.”
“So? Everybody knew the Earth was flat, at one time. But what is the allegation? Be specific.”
“Why, I told you. Mother is assigned as that bastard’s bedwarmer.” “Who says so?”
“Why, everybody!”
“Did you ask the slutmaster?” “Do you think I’m crazy?”
“I’ll take that as rhetorical. To shorten this, what ‘everybody knows,’ as you put it, is that Grace is assigned duties upstairs. This could be verified, if true. Possibly in attendance on Their Charity, possibly waiting on the ladies of the household, or perhaps other duties. Do you want an appointment with the slutmaster, so that you can ask him what duties your mother has? I do not know her duties.”
“Uh, you ask him.”
“I shan’t. I feel sure that Grace would regard it as snooping. Let’s assume that you have asked him and that he has told you, as you now suspect only from gossip, that her assignment is as bedwarmer. To Their Charity. On this assumption, made solely for the sake of argument since you haven’t proved it — on this assumption, where does rape come in?”
Duke looked astonished. “I would not have believed it, even of you. Do you mean to sit there and say baldly that you think Mother would do such a thing voluntarily?”
“I long ago gave up trying to guess what your mother would do. But I haven’t said she is doing anything. You have. I don’t know that her assignment is bedwarmer other than through gossip you have repeated without proof. If
true, I still would not know if she had ever carried out the assignment by actually getting into his bed, voluntarily or otherwise-I’ve never seen his bed nor even heard gossip on this point…just your evil thoughts. But if those thoughts are correct, I still would have no opinion as to whether or not anything other than sleep had taken place. I have shared beds with females and done nothing but sleep; it can happen. But even stipulating sexual activity- your assumption, not mine-I doubt that Their Charity has ever raped any female in his life. I doubt it especially now.”
“Crap. There never was a nigger bastard who wouldn’t rape a white woman if he had the chance.”
“Duke! That’s poisonous, insane nonsense. You almost persuade me that you are crazy.”
“I — ,’
“Shut up! You know that Joseph, to give one example, had endless opportunity to rape any of three white women for nine long months. You also know that his behavior was above reproach.”
“Well…he didn’t have a chance to.”
“I told you to shut up this poison. He had endless chance. While you were hunting, any day. He was alone with each of them, many times. Drop it! Slandering Joseph, I mean, even by innuendo. I’m ashamed of you.”
“And I’m ashamed of you. Fat cat for a nigger king.”
“Very well, the shame is mutual. Speaking of fat cats, I don’t really need you. if you want to quit being a fat cat, you can wash dishes or whatever they assign you to.”
“Doesn’t matter to me.”
“Let me know when you wish to be relieved. It will lose you your private cubicle but such luxury is a fat cat privilege. Never mind. I see only one way to get at the facts, if any, underlying these foul suspicions in your mind.
Ask the Lord Protector.”
“Go right ahead! First sensible thing you’ve said.”
“Oh, not me, Duke. I don’t suspect him of rape. But you can ask him. See the Chief Domestic. He’ll see any Palace servant who wants to see him. At the servant’s risk, but I doubt if he’ll tingle anyone in my department without good cause; I do have some fat cat privileges. Tell him you want an audience with the Lord Protector. I think that is all it will take, although you may have to wait a week or two. If Memtok turns you down, tell me. I fancy I can get him to arrange it. Then, when you see the Lord Protector, simply ask him, point-blank.”
“And be lied to. If I ever get that close to that black ape, I’m going to kill him!”
Mr. Farnham sighed. “Duke, I don’t see how one man can be so wrong- headed so many different ways. If you are granted an audience, Memtok will be at your side. With his whip. The Lord Protector will be about fifty feet away. And the whip he carries doesn’t just tingle; it’s a deadly weapon. The old man has lived a long time, he’s not easy to kill.”
“I can try!”
“So you can. If a grasshopper tries to fight a lawnmower, one may admire his courage but not his judgment. But you are equally silly in thinking that Their Charity would lie about it. If he has done what you think he has-raped your mother, forced her to submit-he would feel not the slightest shame, not in any way reluctant to answer you honestly. Duke, he would no more bother to lie to you than it would occur to him to step aside if you were in his way.
However-would you believe your mother?” “Of course I would.”
“Then tell him also that you would like to see her. I am almost certain that he would grant the request. For a few minutes and in his presence. The harem rules he can break if he chooses. If you have the guts to tell him that
you want to hear her confirm whatever he tells you, I think he would be astonished. But I think he would then laugh and grant the petition. If you want to see your mother, assure yourself personally of her welfare and safety, that’s all I can suggest. You can’t see her otherwise. It’s so irregular that your only chance is to spring it on him, face to face.”
Duke looked baffled. “Look, why the devil don’t you ask him? You see him almost every day, so I hear.”
“Me? Yes, I see him fairly often. But ask him about rape? Is that what you mean?”
“Yes, if you choose to put it that way.”
“‘Rape’ is what you claim to be worried about. But I don’t suspect him of rape. I won’t be a front for your evil suspicions. If it is to be done, you must have the guts to do it yourself.” Hugh stood up. “We’ve wasted enough time. Either get back to work, or go see Memtok.”
“I’m not through.”
“Oh, yes, you are. That was an order, not a suggestion.” “If you think I’m scared of that whip — “
“Heavens, Duke, I wouldn’t tingle you myself. If you force me to it, I’ll ask Memtok to chastise you. He’s reputed to be expert. Now get out.
You’ve wasted half my morning.”
Duke left. Hugh stayed, trying to compose himself. A row with Duke always left him shaking; it had been so when the lad was only twelve. But something else troubled him, too. He had used every sophistry he could think of to divert Duke from a hopeless course. That did not worry him, nor did he share Duke’s basic worry. Whatever had happened to Grace, he felt sure that rape was not a factor.
But he was sourly aware of something ‘that Duke, in his delusions, apparently did not realize-the oldest Law of the Conquered, that their women eventually submit-willingly.
Whether his ex-wife had or had not was a matter almost academic. He suspected that she had never been offered opportunity. Either way, she was obviously contented with her lot-smug about it. That troubled him little; he had tried to do his duty by her, she had long since withdrawn herself from him. But he did not want Barbara ever to feel the deadening load of hopelessness that could-and had, all through history-turned chaste women into willing concubines. Much as he loved her, he had no illusions that Barbara was either angel or saint; the Sabine women had stood no chance and neither would she. “Death before dishonor!” was a slogan that did not wear well. In time, it changed to happy cooperation.
He got out his bottle of Happiness, looked at it-put it back. He would never solve his problems that way.
Hugh made no effort to learn if Duke had gone to see Memtok. He got back to work at his endless task of buttering up Their Charity in every way available, whether by good bridge, moneymaking ideas, or simply translating.
He no longer had any hope that the boss would eventually permit him to move Barbara and the twins into his apartment; old Ponse had seemed adamant on that. But favor at court could be useful, even indispensable, no matter what happened-and in the meantime it let him see Barbara occasionally.
He never gave up his purpose of escape. As the summer wore on he realized that the chances were slim of escaping — all four of them escaping, twins in arms-that year. Soon the household would move to the city, and so far as he knew the only possible time to escape was when they were near mountains. No matter. A year, two years, even longer, perhaps wait until the boys could walk. Hard enough even then, but nearly impossible with babies in arms. He must tell Barbara, with whispered urgency, the next time they were left alone even for a minute, what he had in mind-urge her to keep her chin up, and wait.
He didn’t dare write it to her. Ponse could get it translated-other
scholars somewhere understood English, even though Joe would never give him away. Would Grace? He hoped not, but couldn’t guess. Probably Ponse knew all about those notes, had them translated every day, chuckled over them, and did not care.
Perhaps he could work out a code-something as simple as first word, first line, then second line, second word, and so on. Might risk it.
He had figured out one thing in their favor, an advantage that might overcome their lack of sophistication in this society. Runaways rarely succeeded simply because of their appearance. A white skin might be disguised- but servants averaged many inches shorter and many pounds lighter than the Chosen.
Both Barbara and Hugh were tail; they were big enough to pass in that respect for Chosen. Features? The Chosen were not uniform in feature; Hindu influence mixed with Negroid and with other things. His baldness was a problem, he would have to steal a wig. Or make one. But with stolen clothes, squirreled food, weapons of some sort (his two hands!), and makeup-they might be able to pass for “poor black trash” and take to the road.
If it wasn’t too far. If the hounds did not get them. If they did not make some ridiculous bumble through ignorance. But servants, marked by their complexion, were not allowed to go one step outside the household, farm, ranch, or whatever was their lawful cage-without a pass from their patron.
Perhaps he could learn what a pass looked like, forge one. No, Barbara and he could not travel as servants on a forged pass for the very reason that made it dimly possible for them to disguise as Chosen: Their size was distinctive, they would be picked up on sight.
The more Hugh thought about it the more it seemed that he would have to wait at least until next summer.
If they were among the servants picked for the Summer Palace next year –
If they both were — If all four were — He had not thought of that. Christ! Their little family might never be all under this one roof again! Perhaps they would have to run for it now, in the short time left before the move-run and take a chance on hounds, on bears, on those nasty little leopards…with two nursing babies to protect. God! Was ever a man faced with poorer chances for saving his family?
Yes. He himself-when he built that shelter.
Prepare every way he could…and pray for a miracle. He started saving food from meals served in his rooms, such sorts as would keep a while. He kept his eyes open to steal a knife — or anything that could be made into a knife. He kept what he was doing from Kitten’s eyes.
Much sooner than he had hoped he got a chance to acquire makeup. A feast day always meant an orgy of Happiness in servants’ hall; one came that featured amateur theatricals. Hugh was urged to clown the part of Lord Protector in a comic skit. He did not hesitate to do so, Memtok himself had pointed out that his size made him perfect for the part. Hugh roared through it, brandishing a quirt three times as big as Their Charity ever carried.
He was a dramatic success. He saw Ponse watching from the balcony from which Hugh had first seen Happiness issued, watching and laughing. So Hugh ad- libbed, calling out, “Hey, less noise in the balcony! Memtok! Tingle that critter!”
Their Charity laughed harder than ever, the servants were almost hysterical and, at bridge the following day, Ponse patted him and told him that he was the best Lord of Nonsense the pageant had ever had.
Result: one stolen package of pigment which needed only to be mixed with the plentiful deodorant cream to make him the exact shade of the Lord Protector; one wig which covered his baldness with black wavy hair. It was not the wig he had worn in the skit; he had turned that one back to the chief housekeeper, picking a time under Memtok’s eyes and urging Memtok to try it
on. No, it was a wig he had tried on out of several saved from year to year- and which had fitted him just as well. He tried it on, dropped it, kicked it into a corner, recovered it in private-and kept it under his robe for several days until it seemed certain that it hadn’t been missed. It wound up under a file case in his outer office one night when he chose to work later than his clerks.
He was still looking for something he could grind into a knife. He did not see Duke during the three weeks following their row.
Sometimes Duke’s translations came in, sometimes he skipped a day or two; Hugh let him get away with it. But when Hugh could not recall having seen any scrolls come through of the sort Duke was concerned with for a full week, Hugh decided to check up.
Hugh walked to the cubicle that was Duke’s privilege for being a “researcher in history.” He scratched on the door — no answer.
He scratched again, decided that Duke was sleeping, or not in; he slid the door up and looked in.
Duke was not asleep but he was out of this world. He was sprawled naked on his bunk in the most all-out Happiness jag Hugh had ever seen. Duke looked up when the door opened, giggled foolishly, made a gesture, and said, “Hiyah, y’ole bas’ard! How’s tricks?”
Hugh stepped closer for a better look at what he thought he saw, and felt sick at his stomach. “Son, son!”
“Still crepe-hanging, Hughie? Old hooey Hugh, the fake fart!” Gulping, Hugh started to back out, and backed almost into the Chief
Veterinarian. The surgeon smiled and said, “Visiting my patient? He hardly needs it.” He moved past Hugh with a muttered apology, leaned over Duke, peeled an eyelid back, examined him in other ways, said to him jovially, “You’re doing fine, cousin. Let’s give you another little treatment, then I’ll send you in another big meal. How does that sound?”
The vet set a dial on a little instrument, pressed it against Duke’s thigh, waited a moment, and came out. He smiled at Hugh. “Practically recovered. He’ll dream a few hours now, wake up hungry, and not know any time has passed. Then we’ll feed him and give him another dose. A fine patient, he’s raffled beautifully. Doesn’t know what’s happened-and by the time we’re ready to taper him off, he won’t be interested.”
“Who ordered this?”
The surgeon looked surprised. “The Chief Domestic, of course. Why?” “Why wasn’t I told?”
“I don’t know, better ask him. I got it as a routine order, we carried it out in the routine fashion. Sleeping powder in his evening meal, I mean, then surgery that night. Followed by post-surgical care and the usual massive dosage to keep him tranquil. It tends to make some of them a little nervous at first, we vary it to suit the patient. But, as you can see, this patient has taken it as easily as pulling a tooth. By the way, that bridge I installed in your mouth. Satisfactory?”
“What? Yes. Never mind that! I want to know — “
“May it please you, the Chief Domestic is the one to see. Now, if this one may be excused, I’m overdue to hold sick call. I merely stopped by to make sure my patient was happy.”
Hugh went to his apartment and threw up. Then he went looking for Memtok.
Memtok received him into his office at once, invited him to sit down.
Hugh had begun to value the Chief Domestic as a friend, or as the nearest thing he had to a friend. Memtok had formed a habit of dropping in on Hugh in the evenings occasionally and, despite the boss servant’s vinegary approach to life and the vast difference in their backgrounds and values, Hugh found him
shrewd and stimulating and well informed within his limits. Memtok seemed to have the loneliness that a ship’s captain must endure; he seemed pleased to relax and enjoy friendship.
Since the other upper servants were correctly polite with the Chief Researcher rather than warm, Hugh, lonesome himself, had enjoyed Memtok’s unbending and had thought of him as his friend. Until this — Hugh told Memtok bluntly, without protocol, what was on his mind. “Why did you do this?”
Memtok looked surprised. “Such a question! Such a very improper question. Because the Lord Protector ordered it.”
“He did?”
“My dear cousin! Tempering is always by the lord’s order. Oh, I recommend, to be sure. But orders for alterations must come from above. However, if it is any business of yours, in this case I made no recommendation. I was given the order, I had it carried out. All.”
“Certainly it was my business! He works for me.”
“Oh! But he had already been transferred before this was done. Else I would have made a point of telling you. Propriety, cousin, propriety in all things. I hold subordinates strictly accountable. So I never undercut them. Can’t run a taut household if one does. Fair is fair.”
“I wasn’t told he was transferred. Don’t you count that as undercutting?”
“Oh, but you were.” The Chief Domestic glanced at the rack of pigeonholes backing his desk, searched briefly, pulled out a slip. “There it is.” Hugh looked at it. DUTY ASSIGNMENT, CHANGE IN-ONE SERVANT, MALE (savage, rescued & adopted), known as Duke, description — Hugh skipped on down.– relieved of all duties in the Department of Ancient History and assigned to the personal service of Their Charity, effective immediately. BILLETING & MESSING ASSIGNMENTS: Unchanged until further –“I never saw this!”
“It’s my file copy. You got the original.” Memtok pointed at the lower left corner. “Your deputy clerk’s sign. It always pleases me when my executives can read and write, it makes things so much more orderly. With an ignoramus like the Chief Groundskeeper, one can tell him until one’s throat is raw and later the stupid lout will claim that wasn’t the way he heard it-yet a tingling improves his memory only for that day. Disheartening. One can’t be forever tingling an upper servant, it doesn’t work.” Memtok sighed. “I’d recommend a change, if his assistant wasn’t even stupider.”
“Memtok, I never saw this.”
“As may be. It was delivered, your deputy receipted for it. Look around your office. One bullock gets you three you’ll find it. Perhaps you’d like me to tingle your deputy? Glad to.”
“No, no.” Memtok was almost certainly right, the order was probably on his own desk, unread. Hugh’s department had grown to two or three dozen people; there seemed to be more every day. Most of them seemed to be button sorters, all of them wanted to take up his time. Hugh had long since told the earnest, fairly literate clerk who was his deputy that he was not to be bothered-otherwise Hugh would have accomplished no translating after the first week; Parkinson’s Law had taken over. The clerk had obeyed and routine matters stacked up. Every week or so Hugh would go through the stack rapidly, shove it back at his deputy for file or burning or whatever they did with useless papers.
Probably the order transferring Hugh was in the current accumulation. If he had seen it in time — Too late, too late! He put his elbows on his knees and covered his face. Too late! Oh, my son!
Memtok touched his shoulder almost gently. “Cousin, take hold of yourself. Your prerogatives were not abridged. You see ‘that, do you not?”
“Yes. Yes, I see it,” Hugh mumbled through his hands. “Then why are you overwrought?”
“He was-he is-my son.”
“He is? Then why are you behaving as if he were your nephew?” Memtok used the specific form, meaning “your eldest sister’s oldest son” and he was honestly puzzled by the savage’s odd reaction. He could understand a mother being interested in her son-her oldest son, at least. But a father? Uncle!
Memtok had sons, he was certain, throughout the household — “One-Shot Memtok” the former slutmaster used to call him. But he didn’t know who they were and could not imagine wanting to know. Or caring.
“Because — ” Hugh started. “Oh, forget it. You did your duty.
Conceded.”
“Well — You still seem upset. I’ll send for a bottle of Happiness. I’ll join you, this once.”
“No. No, thank you.”
“Oh, come, come! You need it. A tonic is excellent, it is excess that one must avoid.”
“Thanks, Memtok, but I don’t want it. Right now I must be sharp. I want to see Their Charity. Right away if possible. Will you arrange it for me?”
“I can’t do that.”
“Damn it, I know that you can. And I know he will see me if you ask
him.”
“Cousin, I didn’t say that I would not; I said ‘I can’t.’ Their Charity
is not in residence.”
“Oh.” Then he asked to have word sent to Joe. But the Chief Domestic told him that the young Chosen had left with the Lord Protector. He promised to let Hugh know when either of them returned — Yes, at once, cousin.
Hugh skipped dinner, went to his rooms and brooded. He could not avoid tormenting himself with the thought that it was, in part at least, his own fault-no, no, not for failing to read every useless paper that came into his office the instant it arrived; no, that was sheer bad luck. Even if he checked his “junk mail” each morning, it probably would have been too late; the two orders had probably gone out at the same time.
What did anguish his soul was fear that he had pushed the first domino in that quarrel with Duke. He could have lied to the boy, told him that his mother was, to Hugh’s certain knowledge, a maid-in-waiting or some such, to the Lord Protector’s sister, safe inside the royal harem and never seen by a man. Pampered, living the life of Riley, and happy in it — and that other tale was just gossip servants talk to fill their idle minds.
Duke would have believed it because Duke would have wanted to believe
it.
As it was — Perhaps Duke had gone to see Their Charity. Perhaps Memtok
had arranged it, or perhaps Duke had simply tried to bull his way in and the row had reached Ponse’s ears. It was more than possible, he saw now, that his advice to Duke to see the head man might well have resulted in a scene that would have caused Ponse to order the tempering as casually as he would order his air coach. All too likely — He tried to tell himself that no one is ever responsible for another person’s actions. He believed it, he tried to live by it. But he found that cold wisdom no comfort.
At last he quit brooding, got writing materials, and got to work on a letter to Barbara. He had had not even a moment’s chance to tell her his plans for them to escape, no chance to work up a code. But she must be ready at no notice; he must tell her, somehow.
Barbara knew German, he had a smattering from one high school year of it. He knew enough Russian to stumble through a simple conversation, Barbara had picked up a few words from him during their time in the wilderness-a game that they could share without giving Grace cause for jealousy.
He wrote a draft, then painfully translated ‘the letter into a mishmash of German, Russian, colloquial English, beatnik jive, literary allusions, pig
Latin, and special idioms. In the end he had a message that he was sure Barbara could puzzle out, but he was certain that no student of ancient languages could translate it into Language, even in the unlikely event that the scholar knew English, German, and Russian.
He was not afraid that it might be translated by anyone else. If Grace saw it, she would pronounce it gibberish; she knew no Russian, no German. Duke was off in a drug-ridden dream world. Joe might guess at the meaning-but he trusted Joe not to give him away. Nevertheless, he tried to conceal the meaning even from Joe, hashing the syntax and using deliberate misspellings.
The draft read:
My darling,
I have been planning our escape for some time. I do not know how I will manage it but I want you to be ready, day or night, to grab the twins and simply follow ‘me. Steal food ii you can, steal some stout shoes, steal a knife. We’ll head for the mountains. I had intended to wait until next summer, let the boys grow some first. But something has happened to change my mind: Duke has been tempered. I don’t know why and I’m too heartbroken to talk about it. But it could happen to me next. Worse than that — You remember Ponse’s saying that he wanted to see our twins as matched footmen? Darling, studs do not serve in the Banquet Hall. Nor is there any other fate in store for them; they are both going to be tall. It must not happen!
And we can’t wait. The capital city of the Protectorate is somewhere near where St. Louis used to be; we can’t run all the way to the Rocky Mountains carrying our two boys-and we have no way of knowing (and no reason to expect) that all four of us will be sent to the Summer Palace next year.
Be brave. Don’t touch any Happiness drug in any form from here on; our chance is likely to be a split-second one, with no warning.
I love you, Hugh
Kitten came in; he told her to watch the show, not bother him. The child obeyed.
The final draft read:
Luba,
Ya bin smoking komplott seit Hector was weaned. The Count of Monte
Cristo bit, dig? Kinder too klein machs nix-ya hawchoo! Goldiocks’ troubles machs nix-as the fellow said, it’s the only game in town. Good Girl Scouts always follow the Boy Scout motto. Speise, schuhen, messer-what Fagin taught Oliver, nicht? Da! Schnell is die herz von duh apparat; Berlin is too far from the Big Rock Candy and Eliza would never make the final curtain.
Em ander jahr, nyet. It takes two to tango and four to play bridge, all in em kainmer, or the trek is dreck. A house divided is for the vogelen, like doom. Mehr, ya haben schrecken. Mein Kronprinz now rules ‘only the Duchy of Abelard. Page Christine Jorgenson, he answers-I kid you not. Spilt milk butters no parsnips after the barn is burned so weep no more, my lady-but falsetto is not the pitch for detski whose horoscope reads Gemini. Borjemoi! Old King Coal is a Merry Old Soul but he’ll get no zwilhing keilneren from thee. Better a bonny bairn beards bären y begegn Karen-is ratification unanimous? Igday eemay?
Verb. Sap.: I don’t drink, smoke, nor chew, nor run around with twists who do. Cloud nine is endsvffle for this bit. Write soon, even if it’s only five dollars utbay swing the jive; the dump is bugged and the Gay Pay Oo is eager.
Forever-H.
Kitten was long asleep before Hugh finished composing this jargon. He tore the draft into bits and dropped it down the whirlpool, went to bed. After a long time haunted by Duke’s giggling, foolish, happy, drug-blurred face he got up and broke his own injunction to Barbara, dosed his sorrows and his fears with bottled Happiness.
Chapter 17
Barbara’s answer read: Darling,
When you bid three no-trump, my answer is seven no-trump, without hesitation. Then it’s a grand slam-or we go set and don’t cry. Any time you can get four together we’ll be ready to play.
Love always-B.
Nothing else happened that day. Nor the next-or the next. Hugh doggedly dictated translations, his mind not on his work. He was very careful what he ate or drank, since he now knew the surgeon’s humane way of sneaking up on a victim; he ate only from dishes Memtok had eaten from, tried to be crafty by never accepting a fruit or a roll that was closest to him when a servant offered him such, avoided drinking anything at the table-he drank only water which he himself had taken from the tap. He continued to have breakfast in his room, but he started passing up many foods in favor of unpeeled fruits and boiled eggs in the shell.
He knew that these precautions were futile-no Borgia would have found them difficult to outwit-and in any case, if orders came to temper him, they need only grab him after subduing him with a whip if it proved difficult to drug him. But he might have time to protest, to demand that he be taken before the Lord Protector.
As for whips — He resumed karate practice, alone in his rooms. A karate blow delivered fast enough would cause even a whip wielder to lose interest.
There was no real hope behind any of it; he simply intended not to go peacefully. Duke had been right; it would have been better to have fought and died.
He made no attempt to see Duke.
He continued to hide food from his breakfast tray-sugar, salt, hard bread. He assumed that such food must be undrugged even though he ate none of it at the time, because it did not affect Kitten.
He had been going barefoot most of the time but wearing felt slippers for his daily exercise walks in the servants’ garden. Now he complained to Memtok that the gravel hurt his feet through these silly slippers-didn’t the household afford anything better?
He was given heavy leather sandals, wore them thereafter in the garden.
He cultivated the household’s chief engineer, telling him that, in his youth, he had been in charge of construction for his former lord. The engineer was flattered, being not only one of the junior executive servants but also in the habit of hearing mostly complaints rather than friendly interest. Hugh sat with him after dinner and managed to appear knowledgeable largely by listening.
Hugh was invited to look around the plant, and spent a tiring morning crawling over pipes and looking at plans-the engineer could not write but could read a little and understood drawings. It would have been an interesting day in itself if Hugh had been free from worries; Hugh’s background made engineering interesting to him. But he concentrated on trying to memorize
every drawing he saw, match it in his mind with the passageways and rooms he was taken through. He had a deadly serious purpose: Despite having lived most of a summer in this big building, he knew only small pieces of it inside and only a walled garden outside. He needed to know all of it; he needed to know every possible exit from servants’ quarters, what lay behind the guarded door to sluts’ quarters, and most particularly, where in that area Barbara and the twins lived.
He got as far as the meander door that led into the distaff side. The engineer hesitated when the guard suddenly became alert. He said, “Cousin Hugh, I’m sure it’s all right for you to go in here, with me-but maybe we had better go up to the Chief Domestic’s office and have him write you out a pass.”
“Whatever you say, cousin.”
“Well, there really isn’t anything of interest in here. Just the usual appointments of a barracks-water, lights, air service, plumbing, baths, such things. All the interesting stuff, power plant, incinerator, air control, and so forth, is elsewhere. And you know how the boss is-likely to fret over any variation from routine. If it’s all the same to you, I’ll make my inspection in there later.”
“However you want to arrange things,” Hugh answered with a suggestion of affronted dignity.
“Well…everybody knows you’re not one of those disgusting young studs.” The engineer looked embarrassed. “Tell you what — You tell me flatly that you want to see everything
in my department that is-and I’ll trot up to Memtok and tell him you said so. He knows-Uncle! we all know — that you enjoy the favor of Their Charity. You understand me? I don’t mean to presume. Memtok will write out a pass and I’ll be in the clear and so will the guard and the head guard. You wait here and be comfortable. I’ll hurry.”
“Don’t bother. There’s nothing in there I want to see,” Hugh lied. “You’ve seen one bath, you’ve seen ’em all, I always say.”
The engineer smiled in relief. “That’s ‘a good one, I’ll remember that. ‘You’ve seen one bath, you’ve seen ’em all!’ Ha ha! Well, we’ve still got the carpentry shop and the metal shop.”
Hugh went on with him, arm in arm and jovial, while fuming inside. So close! Yet letting Memtok suspect that he had any interest in sluts’ quarters was the last thing he wanted.
But the morning was well spent. Not only did Hugh acquire a burglar’s insight as to weak points of the building (that delivery door to ‘the unloading dock; if it was merely locked at night, it should be possible to break out) but also he picked up two prizes.
The first was a piece of spring steel about eight inches long. Hugh palmed it from some scrap in the metal shop; it wound up taped to his arm, after an unneeded plumbing call, for he had gone prepared to steal.
The second was even more of a prize: a printed drawing of the lowest level, with engineering installations shown boldly — but with every door and passage marked-including sluts’ quarters.
Hugh had admired it. “Uncle, but that’s a beautiful drawing! Your own
work?”
The engineer shyly admitted that it was. Based on architect’s plans, you
understand-but changes keep having to be added.
“Beautiful!” Hugh repeated. “It’s a shame there isn’t more than one
copy.”
“Oh, plenty of copies, they wear out. Would you like one?”
“I would treasure it. Especially if the artist would inscribe it.” When
‘the man hesitated, Hugh moved in fast and said, “May I suggest a wording? Here, I’ll write it out and you copy it.”
Hugh walked away with the print, inscribed: To my dear Cousin Hugh, a fellow craftsman who appreciates beautiful work.
That night he showed it to Kitten. The child was awestruck. She had no concept of maps and was fascinated by the idea that it was possible to put down, just on a piece of paper, the long passages and twisty turns of her world. Hugh showed her how one went from his quarters to the ramp leading up to the executive servants’ dining room, where the servants’ main hall was, how the passage outside led, by two turns, to the garden. She confirmed the routes slowly, frowning in unaccustomed mental effort.
“You must live somewhere over here, Kitten. That is sluts’ quarters.” “It is?”
“Yes. See if you can find where you live. I won’t show you, you know how. I’ll just sit back.”
“Oh. Uncle help me! Let me see. First, I have to come down this ramp — ” She paused to think while Hugh kept his face impassive. She had confirmed what he had almost stopped suspecting; the child was a planted spy. “Then…this is the door?”
“That’s right.”
“Then I walk straight ahead past the slutmaster’s office, clear to the end, and I turn, and…I must live right there!” She clapped her hands and giggled.
“Your billet is across from your mess hail?” “Yes.”
“Then you got it right, first time! That’s wonderful! Now let’s see what else you can figure out.”
For the next quarter hour she took him on a tour of sluts’ quarters- junior and senior common rooms, messes, virgins’ dormitory, bedwarmers’ sleep room, nursery, lying-in, children’s hall, service stalls, baths, playground door, garden door, offices, senior matron’s apartment, everything-and Hugh learned that Barbara was no longer billeted in lying-in. Kitten volunteered it.
“Barbra-you know, the savage slut you write to-she used to be there, and now she’s right there.”
“How can you tell? Those rooms all look alike.”
“I can tell. It’s the second one of the four-mother rooms on this side, when you walk away from the baths.”
Hugh noted with deep interest that a maintenance tunnel ran under the baths, with an access manhole in the passage Barbara’s room was on-and with even deeper interest that this seemed to connect with another that ran clear across the building. Could it be that here was a wide-open unguarded route between all three main areas of servants’ land? Surely not, as the lines seemed to show that any stud with initiative need only crawl a hundred yards to let himself into sluts’ quarters.
Yet it might be true-for how would any stud know where those tunnels
led?
And why would a stud risk it if he guessed? With the ratio of intact
males to breeding sluts about that of bulls to cows on a cattle ranch. And could thumbless hands handle the fastenings?
For that matter, could those trap doors be opened from below?
“You’re a fast learner, Kitten. Now try a part you don’t know as well. Figure out, on the drawing, how to get from our rooms here to my offices. And if you solve that one, here’s a harder one. What turns you would take and what ramp you would use if I told you to take a message to the Chief Domestic?”
She solved the first one after puzzling, the second she traced without hesitation.
At lunch next day, with Memtok at his elbow, Hugh called down the table to the engineer. “Pipes, old cousin! That beautiful drawing you gave me
yesterday — Do you suppose one of your woodworkers could frame it for me? I’d like to hang it over my desk where people can admire it.”
The engineer flushed and grinned widely. “Certainly, Cousin Hugh! How about a nice piece of mahogany?”
“Perfect.” Hugh turned to his left. “Cousin Memtok, our cousin is wasted on pipes and plumbing; he’s an artist. As soon as I have it hung, you must stop by and see what I mean.”
“Glad to, cousin. When I find time. If I find time.”
More than a week passed with no word about Their Charity, nor about Joe- a week of no bridge, and no Barbara. At last, one day at lunch, Memtok said, “By the way, I had been meaning to tell you, the young Chosen Joseph has returned. Do you still want to see him?”
“Certainly. Is Their Charity also in residence?”
“No. Their Gracious sister believes that he may not return until after we go home. Ah, you must see that, cousin. Not a cottage like this. Great doings night and day-and this humble servant wifi be lucky to get three meals in peace all winter. Run, run, run, worry, worry, worry, problems popping right and left,” he said with unctuous satisfaction. “Be glad you’re a scholar.”
Word came a couple of hours later that Joe expected Hugh. He knew his way, having been to Joe’s guest rooms to help teach bridge to Chosen, so he went up alone.
Joe greeted him enthusiastically. “Come in, Hugh! Find a seat. No protocol, nobody here but us chickens. Wait till you hear what I’ve done. Boy, have I been busy! One shop ready to go as a pilot plant before Their Charity finished the wangling for the protection, all on the Q.T. But so organized that we were in production the day protection was granted. Not bad terms, either. Their Mercy takes half, Their Charity hangs onto half and floats the financing, and out of Their Charity’s half I’m cut in for ten percent and manage the company. Of course as we branch out and into other lines-the whole thing is called ‘Inspired Games’ and the charter is written to cover almost any fun you can have out of bed-as we branch out, I’ll need help and that’s a problem; I’m scared old Ponse is going to want to put some of his dull-witted relatives in. Hope not, there’s no place for nepotism when you’re trying to hold down costs. Probably best to train servants for it-cheaper in the long run, with the right sort. How about you, Hugh? Do you think you could swing the management of a factory? It’s a big job; I’ve got a hundred and seven people working already.”
“I don’t see why not. I’ve employed three times that many and never missed a payroll-and I once bossed two thousand skilled trades in the Seabees. But, Joe, I came up here with something on my mind.”
“Uh, all right, spill it. Then I want to show you the plans.” “Joe, you know about Duke?”
“What about Duke?” “Tempered. Didn’t you know?”
“Oh. Yes, I knew. Happened just about as I left. He’s not hurt, is he?
Complications?”
“‘Hurt?’ Joe, he was tempered. You act as if he had merely had a tooth pulled. You knew? Didn’t you try to stop it?”
“In the name of God, why not?”
“Let me finish, can’t you? I don’t recall that you tried to stop it, either.”
“I never had the chance. I never knew.”
“Neither did I. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, but you keep jumping down my throat. I learned about it after it happened.”
“Oh. Sorry. I thought you meant you just stood by and let it happen.”
“Well, I didn’t. Don’t know what I could have done if I had known. Maybe asked Ponse to call you in first, I suppose. Wouldn’t have done any good, so I guess we were both better off not having to fret about it. Maybe all for the best. Now about our plans — If you’ll look at this schematic layout, you’ll see — “
“Joe!”
“Huh?”
“Can’t you see that I’m in no shape to talk about playingcard factories?
Duke is my son.”
Joe folded up his plans. “I’m sorry, Hugh. Let’s talk, if it will make you feel better. Get it off your chest-I suppose you do feel bad about it.
Looking at it from one angle.”
Joe listened, Hugh talked. Presently Joe shook his head. “Hugh, I can set your mind at rest on one point. Duke never did see the Lord Protector. So your advice to Duke-good advice, I think-could not have had anything to do with his being tempered.”
“I hope you’re right. I’d feel like cutting my throat if I knew it was my fault.”
“It’s not, so quit fretting.”
“I’ll try. Joe, whatever possessed Ponse to do it? He knew how we felt about it, from that time it almost happened through a misunderstanding. So why would he? I thought he was my friend.”
Joe looked embarrassed. “You really want to know?” “I’ve got to know.”
“Well…you’re bound to find out. Grace did it.”
“What? Joe, you must be mistaken. Sure, Grace has her faults. But she wouldn’t have that done-to her own son.”
“Well, no, not exactly. I doubt if she knew what it was until after it was done. But just the same, she set it off. She’s been wheedling Ponse almost from the day we got here that she wanted her Dukie with her. She was lonesome. ‘Ponsie, I’m lonesome. Ponsie, you’re being mean to Gracie. Ponsie, I’m going to tickle you until you say Yes. Ponsie, why won’t you?’ — all in that baby whine she uses. Hugh, I guess you didn’t see much of it — “
“None of it.”
“I would have wrung her neck. Ponse just ignored her, except when she tickled him. Then he would laugh and they would roll on the floor and he would tell her to shut up, and make her sit quiet for a while. Treated her just like one of the cats. Honest, I don’t think he ever — I mean, it doesn’t seem likely, from what I saw, that he was interested in her as a — “
“And I’m not interested. Didn’t anybody tell Grace what it would entail, for her to have her son with her?”
“Hugh, I don’t think so. It would never occur to Ponse that explanation was required…and certainly I never discussed it with her. She doesn’t like me, I take up too much of her Ponsie’s time.” Joe wrinkled his nose. “So I doubt if she knew. Of course she should have figured it out; anybody else would have. But, excuse me, since she’s your wife, but I’m not sure she’s bright enough.”
“And hopped up on Happiness, too-every time I caught sight of her. No, she’s not bright. But she’s not my wife, either. Barbara is my wife.”
“Well…legally speaking, a servant can’t have a wife.”
“I wasn’t speaking legally, I was speaking the truth. But even though Grace is no longer my wife, I’m somewhat comforted to know that she probably didn’t know what it would cost Duke.”
Joe looked thoughtful. “Hugh, I don’t think she did but I don’t think she really cares, either…and I’m not sure that you can properly say that it cost Duke anything.”
“You might explain. Perhaps I’m dense.”
“Well, if Grace minds that Duke has been tempered, she doesn’t show it.
She’s pleased as punch. And he doesn’t seem to mind.” “You’ve seen them? Since?”
“Oh, yes. I had breakfast with Their Charity yesterday morning. They were there.”
“I thought Ponse was away?”
“He was back and now he’s gone out to the West Coast. Business. We’re really tearing into it. He was here only a couple of days. But he had this birthday present for Grace. Duke, I mean. Yes, I know it wasn’t her birthday, and anyhow birthdays aren’t anything nowadays; it’s nameday that counts. But she told Ponse she was about to have a birthday and kept wheedling hiin — . –
and you know Ponse, indulgent with animals and kids. So he set it up as a surprise for her. The minute he was back, he made a present of Duke to her. Shucks, they’ve even got a room off Ponse’s private quarters; neither of them sleeps belowstairs, they live up here.”
“Okay, I don’t care where they sleep. You were telling me how Grace felt about it. And Duke.”
“Oh, yes. Can’t say just when she found out what had been done to Duke, all I can say is that she is so happy about it all that she was even cordial with me-telling me what a dear Ponsie was to arrange it and doesn’t Dukie look just grand? In his new clothes? Stuff like that. She’s got him dressed in the fancy livery the servants wear up here, not a robe like that you’re wearing.
She’s even put jewelry on him. Ponse doesn’t mind. He’s an outright gift, a servant’s servant. I don’t think he does a lick of work, he’s just her pet. And she loves it that way.”
“But how about Duke?”
“That’s what I’ve been telling you, Hugh; Duke hasn’t lost by it. He’s snug as a bug in a rug and he knows it. He was almost patronizing to me. You might have thought that I was the one wearing livery. With Grace in solid with the big boss and with her wound around his finger, Duke thinks he’s got it made. Well, he has, Hugh. And I didn’t mind his manner; I could see he was hopped on this tranquilizer you servants use.”
“You call it ‘got it made’ when a man is grabbed and drugged and tempered and then kept drugged so that he doesn’t care? Joe, I’m shocked.”
“Certainly I call it that! Hugh, put your prejudices aside and look at it rationally. Duke is happy. If you don’t believe it, let me take you in there and you talk to him. Talk to both of them. See for yourself.”
“No, I don’t think I could stomach it. I’ll concede that Duke is happy. I’m well aware that if you feed a man enough of that Happiness drug, he’ll be happy as a lark even if you cut off his arms and legs and then start on his head. But you can be that sort of ‘happy’ on morphine. Or heroin. Or opium.
That doesn’t make it a good thing. It’s a tragedy.”
“Oh, don’t be melodramatic, Hugh. These things are all relative. Duke was certain to be tempered eventually. It’s not lawful for a servant as big as he is to be kept for stud, I’m sure you know that. So what difference does it make whether it’s done last week, or next year, or when Ponse dies? The only difference is that he is happy in a life of luxury, instead of hard manual labor in a mine, or a rice swamp, or such. He doesn’t know anything useful, he could never hope to rise very high. High for a servant, I mean.”
“Joe, do you know what you sound like? Like some whitesupremacy apologist telling how well off the darkies used to be, a-sittin’ outside their cabins, a-strummin’ their banjoes, and singin’ spirituals.”
Joe blinked. “I could resent that.”
Hugh Farnham was angry and feeling reckless. “Go ahead and resent it! I can’t stop you. You’re a Chosen, I’m a servant. Can I fetch your white sheet for you, Massah? What time does the Klan meet?”
“Shut up!”
Hugh Farnham shut up. Joe went on quietly, “I won’t bandy words with you. I suppose it does look that way to you. If so, do you expect me to weep? The shoe is on the other foot, that’s all-and high time. I used to be a servant, now I’m a respected businessman-with a good chance of becoming a nephew by marriage of some noble family. Do you think I would swap back, even if I could? For Duke? Not for anybody, I’m no hypocrite. I was a servant, now you are one. What are you beefing about?”
“Joe, you were a decently treated employee. You were not a slave.”
The younger man’s eyes suddenly became opaque and his features took on an ebony hardness Hugh had never seen in him before. “Hugh,” he said softly, “have you ever made a bus trip through Alabama? As a ‘nigger’?”
“Then shut up. You don’t know what you are talking about.” He went on, “The subject is closed and now we’ll talk business. I want you to see what I’ve done and am planning to do. This games notion is the best idea I ever had.”
Hugh did not argue whose idea it had been; he listened while the young man went on with eager enthusiasm. At last Joe put down his pen and sat back. “What do you think of it? Any suggestions? You made some useful suggestions when I proposed it to Ponse-keep on being useful and there will be a good place in it for you.”
Hugh hesitated. It seemed to him that Joe’s plans were too ambitious for a market that was only a potential and a demand that had yet to be created.
But all he said was, “It might be worth while to package with each deck, no extra charge, a rule book.”
“Oh, no, we’ll sell those separately. Make money on them.”
“I didn’t mean a complete Hoyle. Just a pamphlet with some of the simpler games. Cribbage. A couple of solitaire games. One or two others. Do that and the customers start enjoying them at once. It should lead to more sales.”
“Hmm — I’ll think about it.” Joe folded up his papers, set them aside. “Hugh, you got so shirty a while ago that I didn’t tell you one thing I have in mind.”
“Yes?”
“Ponse is a grand old man, but he isn’t going to live forever. I plan to have my own affairs separate from his by then so that I’ll be financially independent. Trade around interests somehow, untangle it. I don’t need to tell you that I’m not anxious to have Mrika as my boss-and I didn’t tell you, so don’t repeat it. But I’ll manage it, I’m looking out for number one.” He grinned. “And when Mrika is Lord Protector I won’t be here. I’ll have a household of my own, a modest one-and I’ll need servants. Guess whom I plan to adopt when I staff it.”
“I couldn’t.”
“Not you-although you may very well be a business servant to me, if it turns out you really can manage a job. No, I had in mind adopting Grace and Duke.”
“Huh?”
“Surprised? Mrika won’t want them, that’s certain. He despises Grace because of her influence over his uncle, and it’s a sure thing he’s not going to like Duke any better. Neither of them is trained and it shouldn’t be expensive to adopt them if I don’t appear too eager. But they would be useful to me. For one thing, since they speak English, I’d be able to talk to them in a language nobody else knows, and that could be an advantage, especially when other servants are around. But best of all — Well, the food here is good but sometimes I get a longing for some plain old American cooking, and Grace is a good cook when she wants to be. So I’ll make her a cook. Duke can’t cook but he can learn to wait on table and answer the door and such. Houseboy, in other
words. How about that?”
Hugh said slowly, “Joe, you don’t want them because Grace can cook.”
Joe grinned unashamedly. “No, not entirely. I think Duke would look real good as my houseboy. And Grace as my cook. Tit for tat. Oh, I’ll treat them decently, Hugh, don’t you worry. They work hard and behave themselves and they won’t get tingled. However, I don’t doubt but what it will take a few tingles before they get the idea.” He twitched his quirt. “And I won’t say I won’t enjoy teaching them. I owe them a little. Three years, Hugh. Three years of Grace’s endless demands, never satisfied with anything-and three years of being treated with patronizing contempt by Duke whenever he was around.”
Hugh said nothing. Joe said, “Well? What do you think of my plan?”
“I thought better of you, Joe. I thought you were a gentleman. It seems I was wrong.”
“So?” Joe barely twitched his quirt. “Boy, we excuse you. All.”
Chapter 18
Hugh came away from Joe’s rooms feeling utterly discouraged. He knew that he had been foolish-no, criminally careless ! — in letting Joe get his goat. He needed Joe. Until he had Barbara and the twins safely hidden in the mountains, he needed every possible source of favor. Joe, Memtok, Ponse, anyone he could find-and probably Joe most of all. Joe was a Chosen, Joe could go anywhere, tell him things he didn’t know, give him things he could not steal. He had even considered, as a last resort, asking Joe to help them to escape.
Not now! Idiot! Utter fool! To risk Barbara and the boys just because you can’t hold your bloody temper.
It seemed to him that things were as bad as they could get-and part of it his own folly.
He did not stand around moping; he looked up Memtok. It had become more urgent than ever to set up some way to communicate with Barbara secretly-and that meant that he had to talk to her-and that meant at least one bridge game in the Lord Protector’s lounge and a snatch of talk even if he had to talk English in front of Ponse. He had to force matters.
Hugh found the Chief Domestic leaving his office. “Cousin Memtok, could you spare me a word?”
Memtok’s habitual frown barely relaxed. “Certainly, cousin. But walk along with me, will you? Trouble, trouble, trouble — you would think that a department head could run his department without someone to wipe his nose, wouldn’t you? You’d be wrong. The freezer flunky complains to the leading butcher and he complains to the chef, and it’s a maintenance matter, and you would think that Gnou would take it up directly with engineering and between them they would settle it. Oh, no! They both come to me with their troubles. You know something about construction, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Hugh admitted, “but I’m not up-to-date in the subject. It has been some years.” (About two thousand, my friend! But we won’t speak of that.)
“Construction is construction. Come along, give me the benefit of your advice.”
(And find out that I’m faking. Chum, I’ll double-talk you to death.) “Certainly. If this humble one’s opinion is worth anything.”
“Damned chill room. It’s been a headache every summer. I’m glad we’ll be back in the Palace soon.”
“Has the date been set? May one ask?”
“One may. A week from tomorrow. So it’s time to think about packing up your department and being ready to move.”
Hugh tried to keep his face calm and his voice steady. “So soon?”
“Why are you looking worried? A few files, some office equipment. Have you any idea how many thousands of items 1 have on inventory? And how much gets stolen, or lost, or damaged simply because you can’t trust any of these fools? Uncle!”
“It must be terribly wearing,” agreed Hugh. “But that brings to mind something. I petitioned you to let me know when Their Charity was next in residence. I learned from the young Chosen, Joseph, that Their Charity returned a day or two ago and is now gone again.”
“Are you criticizing?”
“Uncle forbid! I was just asking.”
“It is true that Their Charity was physically present for a short time. But he was not officially in residence. Not in the best of health, it seemed to me-Uncle protect him.”
“Uncle protect him well!” Hugh answered sincerely. “Under the circumstances naturally you did not ask him to grant me an audience. But could I ask of you the small favor, next time — “
“We’ll talk later. Let’s see what these two helpless ones have to offer.” Head Chef Gnou and the Chief Engineer met them at the entrance to Gnou’s domain, they went on through the kitchen, through the butcher shop, and into the cold room. But they lingered in the butcher shop, Memtok impatient, while parka-like garments were fetched, the Chief Domestic having refused the ones offered on the legitimate grounds that they were soiled.
The butcher shop was crowded with live helpers and dead carcasses-birds, beeves, fish, anything. Hugh reflected that thirty-eight Chosen and four hundred and fifty servants ate a lot of meat. He found the place mildly depressing even though he himself had cleaned and cut and trimmed many an animal.
But only his habitual tight control in the presence of Memtok and his “cousins” in service kept him from showing shock at something he saw on the floor, trimmed from a carcass almost cut up on one block.
It was a dainty, plump, very feminine hand.
Hugh felt dizzy, there was a roaring in his ears. He blinked. Itwas still there. A hand much like Kitten’s — He breathed carefully, controlled the retching within him, kept his back turned until he had command over himself. There had suddenly flooded over him the truth behind certain incongruities, certain idioms, some pointless jokes.
Gnou was making nervous conversation while his boss waited. He moved to the chopping block, unintentionally kicking the dainty little hand underneath into a pile of scraps and said, “Here’s one you won’t have to bother to taste, Chief Domestic. Unless the old one returns unexpectedly.”
“I always bother to taste,” Memtok said coldly. “Their Charity expects his table to be perfect whether he is in residence or not.”
“Oh, yes, surely,” Gnou agreed. “That’s what I always tell my cooks. But
— Well, this very roast illustrates one of my problems. Too fat. You’ll feel that it’s greasy-and so it wifi be. But that’s what comes of using sluts. Now, in my opinion, you can’t find a nicer piece of meat, marbled but firm, than a buck tempered not older than six, then hung at twice that age.”
“No one asked your opinion,” Memtok answered. “Their Charity’s opinion is the only one that counts. They think that sluts are more tender.”
“Oh, I agree, I agree! No offense intended.”
“And none taken. In fact I agree with your opinion. I was simply making clear that your opinion-and mine in this matter-is irrelevant. I see they’ve fetched them. Did they stop to make them?”
The party put on heavy garments, went on inside. The engineer had said nothing up to then, effacing himself other than a nod and a grin to Hugh. Now he explained the problem, a cranky one of refrigeration. Hugh tried to keep
his eyes on it, rather than on the contents of the meat storage room.
Most of the meat was beef and fowl. But one long row of hooks down the center held what he knew he would find — human carcasses, gutted and cleaned and frozen, hanging head down, save that the heads were missing. Young sluts and bucks, he could see, but whether the bucks were tempered or not was no longer evident. He gulped and thanked his unlucky stars that that pathetic little hand had given him warning, at least saved him from fainting.
“Well, Cousin Hugh, what do you think?” “Why, I agree with Pipes.”
“That the problem can’t be solved?”
“No, no.” Hugh had not listened. “His reasoning is correct and he implied the answer. As he says, the problem can’t be solved-now. The thing to do is not to try to patch it up, now. Wait a week. Tear it out. Put in new equipment.”
Memtok looked sour. “Expensive.”
“But cheaper in the long run. Good engineering isn’t accomplished by grudging a few bullocks. Isn’t that right, Pipes?”
The engineer nodded vigorously. “Just what I always say, Cousin Hugh!
You’re absolutely right.”
Memtok still frowned. “Well — Prepare an estimate. Show it to Cousin Hugh before you bring it to me.”
“Yes, sir!”
Memtok paused on the way out and patted the loin of a stripling buck carcass. “That’s what I would call a nice piece of meat. Eh, Hugh?”
“Beautiful,” Hugh agreed with a straight face. “Your nephew, perhaps? Or just a son?”
There was frozen silence. Nobody moved except that Memtok seemed to grow taller. He raised his whip of authority most slightly, no more than tightening his thumbless grip.
Then he grimaced and gave a dry chuckle. “Cousin Hugh, your well-known wit will be the death of me yet. That’s a good one. Gnou, remind me to tell that this evening.”
The Chef agreed and chuckled, the engineer roared. Memtok gave his cold little laugh again. “I’m afraid I can’t claim the honor, Hugh. All of these critters are ranch bred, not one of them is a cousin of ours. Yes, I know how it is in some households, but Their Charity considers it unspeakably vulgar to serve a house servant, even in cases of accidental death — . — And besides, it makes the servants restless.”
“Commendable.”
“Yes. It is gratifying to serve one who is a stickler for propriety.
Enough, enough, time is wasting. Walk back with me, Hugh.”
Once they were clear of the rest Memtok said, “You were saying?” “Excuse me?”
“Come, come, you’re absentminded today. Something about Their Charity not being in residence.”
“Oh, yes. Memtok, could you, as a special favor to me, let me know the minute Their Charity returns? Whether officially in residence or not? Not petition anything for me. Just let me know.” Damn it, with time pouring away like life through a severed artery his only course might be a belly-scraping apology to Joe, then get Joe to intercede.
“No,” said Memtok. “No, I don’t think I can.” “I beg your pardon? Has this one offended you?”
“You mean that witticism? Heaven, no! Some might find it vulgar and one bullock gets you three that if you had told it in sluts’ quarters some of them would have fainted. But if there is one thing I pride myself on, Hugh, it’s my sense of humor — and any day I can’t see a joke simply because I am the butt of it, I’ll petition to turn in my whip. No, it was simply my turn to have a
little joke at your expense. I said, ‘I don’t think I can.’ That is a statement of two meanings-a double-meaning joke, follow me? I don’t think I can tell you when Their Charity returns because he has sent word to me that he is not returning. So you’ll see him next at the Palace…and I promise I’ll let you know when he’s in residence.” The Chief Domestic dug him in the ribs. “I wish you had seen your own face. My joke wasn’t nearly as sharp as yours.
But your jaw dropped. Very comical.”
Hugh excused himself, went to his rooms, took an extra bath, a most thorough one, then simply thought until dinnertime. He braced himself for the ordeal of dinner with a carefully measured dose of Happiness-not enough to affect him later, strong enough to carry him through dinner, now that he knew why “pork” appeared so often on the menu of the Chosen. He suspected that the pork served to servants was really pork. But he intended to eat no more bacon nevertheless. Nor ham, nor pork chops, nor sausage. In fact he might turn vegetarian-at least until they were free in the mountains and it was eat game or starve.
But with a shot of Happiness inside him he was able to smile when Memtok tasted the roast for upstairs and to say, “Greasy?”
“Worse than usual. Taste it.”
“No, thanks. I knew it would be. I would cook up better than that-though no doubt I would be terribly stringy. And tough. Though perhaps Cousin Gnou could tenderize me.”
Memtok laughed until he choked. “Oh, Hugh, don’t ever be that funny while I’m swallowing! You’ll kill me yet.”
“This one hopes not.” Hugh toyed with the beef on his plate, pushed it aside and ate a few nuts.
He was very busy that evening, writing long after Kitten was asleep. It had become utterly necessary to reach Barbara secretly, yet his only means was the insecure route through Kitten. The problem was to write to Barbara in a code that only she could read, and which she would see as a code without having been warned and without the code being explained to her-and yet one which was safe from others. But the double-talk mixture he had last sent her would not do; he was now going to have to give her detailed instructions, ones where it really mattered if she missed a word or failed to guess a concealed meaning.
His last draft was: Darling,
If you were here, I would love a literary gabfest, a good
one. You know what I mean, I am sure. Let’s consider Edgar Allan Poe, for example. Can you recall how I claimed that Poe was the best
writer both to read and to reread of all the mystery writers before or since, and that this was true because he never could be milked
dry on one reading? The answer or answers in The Gold Bug, or certainly that little gem The Murders in the Rue Morgue, or take The Case of
the Purloined Letter, or any of them; same rule will apply to them all, when you consider the very subtle way he always had of
slanting his meaning so that one reaches a full period in his sentences only after much thought. Poe is grand fun and well worth study. Let’s have our old literary talks by letter. How about Mark Twain next? Tired-must go to bed!
Love — Since Hugh had never discussed Edgar Allan Poe with Barbara at any time, he was certain that she would study the note for a hidden message. The only question was whether or not she would find it. He wanted her to read it as:
“If
you
can
read
this
answer
the
same
way
period”
Having done his best he put it aside, first disposing of all trial work, then prepared to do something else much more risky. At that point he would have given his chances of immortal bliss, plus 10 percent, for a flashlight, then settled for a candle. His rooms were lighted, brilliantly or softly as he wished, by glowing translucent spheres set in the upper corners. Hugh did not know what they were save that they were not any sort of light he had ever known. They gave off no heat, seemed not to require wiring, and were controlled by little cranks.
A similar light, the size of a golf ball, was mounted on his scroll reader. It was controlled by twisting it; he had decided tentatively that twisting these spheres polarized them in some way.
He tried to dismount the scroll reader light.
He finally got it loose by breaking the upper frame. It was now a featureless, brilliantly shining ball and nothing he could do would dim it- which was almost as embarrassing as no light at all.
He found that he could conceal it in an armpit under his robe. There was still a glow but not much.
He made sure that Kitten was asleep, turned out all lights, raised his corridor door, looked out. The passageway was lighted by a standing light at an intersection fifty yards away. Regrettably he had to go that way. He had expected no lights at this hour.
He felt his “knife” taped to his left arm-not much of a knife, but patient whetting with a rock picked up from a garden path had put an edge on it, and tape had made a firm grip. It needed hours more work and he could work on it only after Kitten was asleep or in time stolen from working hours. But it felt good to have it there and it was the only knife, chisel, screwdriver, or burglar’s jimmy that he had.
The manhole to the engineering service tunnels lay in the passage to the right after he had to pass the lighted intersection. Any manhole would do but that one was on the route to the veterinary’s quarters; if caught outside his rooms but otherwise without cream on his lip, he planned to plead a sudden stomachache.
The manhole cover swung back easily on a hinge, it was fastened by a clasp that needed only turning to free it. The floor of the tunnel, glimpsed with his shiny sphere, lay four feet below the corridor floor. He started to let himself down and ran into his first trouble.
These manholes and tunnels had been intended for men a foot shorter and fifty pounds lighter than Hugh Farnham, and proportionately smaller in shoulders, hips, hands-and-knees height, and so forth.
But he could make it. He had to.
He wondered how he would make it, crawling and carrying at least one baby. But that he had to do, too. So he would.
He almost trapped himself. Barely in time he found that the underside of the steel door was smooth, no handle, and that it latched automatically by a spring catch.
That settled why no one worried that the studs might gain unplanned access to sluts. But it also settled something else. Hugh had considered snatching this very chance, if he found things quiet at the other end: Wake
Barbara, bring all four of them back via the tunnel-then outside and away, by any of a dozen weak points, away and off to the mountains on foot, reach them before light, find some stream and ford it endwise to throw off hounds. Go, go, go! With almost no food, with nothing but a makeshift knife, with no equipment, a “nightshirt” for clothing, and no hope of anything better. Go!
And save his family, or die with them. But die free!
Perhaps someday his twin sons, wiser in the new ways than himself and toughened by a life fighting nature, could lead an uprising against this foul thing. But all he planned to do, all he could hope for, was get them free, keep them free, alive and free and ungelded, until they were grown and strong.
Or die.
Such was still his plan. He wasted not a moment sorrowing over that spring catch. It merely meant that he must communicate with Barbara, set a time with her, because she would have to open the hatch at the far end.
Tonight he could only reconnoiter.
He found that tape from his knife handle would hold the spring catch back. He tested it from above; the lid could now be swung back without turning the clasp.
But his wild instincts warned him. The tape might not hold until he was back. He might be trapped inside.
He spent a sweating half hour working on that spring catch, using knife and fingers and holding the light ball in his teeth.
At last he managed to get at and break the spring. He removed the catch entirely. The manhole, closed, now looked normal, but it could be opened from underneath with just a push.
Only then did he let himself down inside and close it over him.
He started out on knees and elbows with the light in his mouth, and stopped almost at once. The damned skirt of his robe kept him from crawling! He tried bunching it around his waist. It slid down.
He inched back to the manhole shaft, took the pesky garment off entirely, left it under the manhole, crawled away without it, naked save for the knife strapped to his arm and the light in his teeth. He then made fair progress, although never able to get fully on hands and knees. His elbows had to be bent, his thighs he could not bring erect, and there were places where valves and fittings of the pipes he crawled past forced him almost to his belly.
Nor could he tell how far he was going. However, there were joints in the tunnel about every thirty feet; he counted them and tried to match them in his mind with the engineering drawing. Pass under two manholes…sharp left turn into another tunnel at next manhole…crawl about a hundred and fifty feet and under one manhole — Something more than an hour later he was under a manhole which had to be the one closest to Barbara.
If he had not lost himself in the bowels of the palace — If he had correctly remembered that complex drawing — If the drawing was up to date — (Had two thousand years made any difference in the lag between engineering changes and revisions of prints to match?) If Kitten knew what she was talking about in locating Barbara’s billet by a method so novel to her — If it was still Barbara’s billet — He crouched in the awkward space and tried to press his ear against the shaft’s cover.
He heard a baby cry.
About ten minutes later he heard hushed female voices. They approached, passed over him, and someone stepped on the lid.
Hugh unkinked himself, prepared to return. The space was so tight that the obvious way was to back up the way he had come, so he found himself trying to crawl backward through the tunnel.
That worked so poorly that he came back to the shaft and, with contortions and loss of skin, got turned around.
What seemed hours later he was convinced that he was lost. He began to wonder which was the more likely: Would he starve or die of thirst? Or would some repairman get the shock of his life by finding him?
But he kept on crawling.
His hands found his robe before his eyes saw it. Five minutes later he was in it; seven minutes later (he stopped to listen) he was up and out and had the lid closed. He forced himself not to run back to his rooms.
Kitten was awake.
He wasn’t aware of it until she followed him into the bath. Then she was saying with wide-eyed horror, “Oh, dear! Your poor knees! And your elbows, too.”
“I stumbled and fell down.”
She didn’t argue it, she simply insisted on bathing him and salving and taping the raw places. When she started to pick up his dirty robe, he told her sharply to go to bed. He did not mind her touching his robe but his knife had been on top of it and only by maneuvering had he managed to keep himself between her and it long enough to flip a fold of cloth over the weapon.
Kitten went silently to bed. Hugh hid the knife in its usual place (much too high for Kitten), then went into his living room and found the child crying. He petted her, soothed her, said he had not meant to sound harsh, and fed her a bonus dose of Happiness-sat with her while she drank it, watched her go happily to sleep.
Then he did not even try to get along without it himself. Kitten had gone to sleep with one hand outside her cover. It looked to Hugh exactly like a forlorn little hand he had seen twelve hours earlier on the floor of a butcher shop.
He was exhausted and the drink let him go to sleep. But not to rest. He found himself at a dinner party, black tie and dressy. But he did not like the menu. Hungarians goulash…French fries…Chinese noodles…p0′ boy sandwich…breast of peasant…baked Alaskans-but it was all pork. His host insisted that he taste every dish. “Come, come!” he chided with a wintry smile. “How do you know you don’t like it? One bullock gets you three you’ll learn to love it.”
Hugh moaned and could not wake up.
Kitten did not chatter at breakfast, which suited him. Two hours of nightmare-ridden sleep was not enough, yet it was necessary to go to his office and pretend to work. Mostly he stared at the print framed over his desk while his scroll reader clicked unnoticed. After lunch he sneaked away and tried to nap. But the engineer scratched at his door and apologetically asked him to look over his estimates on refitting the meat cooler. Hugh poured his guest a dollop of Happiness, then pretended to study figures that meant nothing to him. After a decent time he complimented the man, then scrawled a note to Memtok, recommending that the contract be let.
Barbara’s note that night applauded the idea of a literary discussion club by mail and discussed Mark Twain. Hugh was interested only in how it read diagonally:
“Did
I
read
it
correctly
darling
question
mark”
Chapter 19
“Darling we must escape next six days or sooner be ready night after letter has phrase Freedom is a lonely thing — “
For the next three days Hugh’s letters to Barbara were long and chatty and discussed everything from Mark Twain’s use of colloquial idiom to the influence of progressive education on the relaxation of grammar. Her answers were lengthy, equally “literary,” and reported that she would be ready to open the hatch, confirmed that she understood, that she had a little stock of food, had no knife, no shoes-but that her feet were very calloused-and that her only worry was that the twins might cry or that her roommates might wake up, especially as two of them were stifi giving night feedings to their babies.
But for Hugh not to worry, she would manage.
Hugh drew a fresh bottle of Happiness, taped it near the top of the shaft closest to her billet, instructed her to tell her roommates that she had stolen it, then use it to get them so hopped up on the drug that they would either sleep or be so slaphappy that if they did wake, they would do nothing but giggle-and, if possible, get enough of the drug into the twins that the infants would pass out and not cry no matter how they were handled.
Making an extra trip through the tunnels to plant the bottle was a risk Hugh hated to take. But he made it pay. He not only timed himself by the clock in his rooms and learned beyond any possibility of mistake the rat maze he must follow but also he carried a practice load, a package of scrolls taped together to form a mass bigger and heavier, he felt sure, than one of his infant sons would be. This he tied to his chest with a sling made of stolen cloth; it had been a dust cover for the scroll printer in his offices. He made two such slings, one for Barbara, and tore and tied them so they could be shifted to the back later to permit the babies to be carried papoose style.
He found that it was difficult but not impossible to carry a baby in this fashion through the tunnels, and he spotted the places where it was necessary to inch forward with extreme care not to place any pressure on his dummy “precious burden” and still not let the ties on his back catch on engineering fittings above him.
But it could be done and he got back to his rooms without waking Kitten- he had increased her evening bonus of Happiness. He replaced the scrolls, hid his knife and spherical lamp, washed his knees and elbows and anointed them, then sat down and wrote a long P.S. to the letter he had written earlier to tell Barbara how to find the bottle. This postscript added some afterthoughts about the philosophy of Hemingway and remarked that it seemed odd that a writer would in one story say that “freedom is a lonely thing” and in another story state that-and so on.
That night he gave Kitten her usual amplified nightcap, then said, “Not much left in this bottle. Finish it off and I’ll get a fresh one tomorrow.”
“Oh, I’d get terribly silly. You wouldn’t like me.”
“Go ahead, drink it. Have a good time, live it up. What else is life
for?”
Half an hour later Kitten was more than willing to be helped to bed.
Hugh stayed with her until she was snoring heavily. He covered her hands, stood looking down at her, suddenly knelt and kissed her good-bye.
A few minutes later he was down the first manhole.
He took off his robe, piled on it a bundle of what he had collected for survival-food, sandals, wig, two pots of deodorant cream into which he had blended brown pigment. He did not expect to use disguise and h~d little faith in it, but if they were overtaken by daylight before they were in the
mountains, he intended to darken all four of them, tear their robes into something resembling the breechclout and wrap-around which he had learned were the working clothes of free peasant farmers among the Chosen — “poor black trash” as Joe called them-and try to brazen it out, keeping away from people if possible, until it was dark again.
He tied one baby sling to him with the other inside it and started. He hurried, as time was everything. Even if Barbara managed to pass out her roommates promptly, even if he had no trouble breaking out at his preferred exit, even if the crawl back through the tunnels could be made in less than an hour — doubtful, with the kids-they could not be outdoors earlier than midnight, which allowed them five hours of darkness to reach wild country.
Could he hope for three miles an hour? It seemed unlikely, Barbara barefooted and both carrying kids, the country unknown and dark-and those mountains seen from his window seemed to be at least fifteen miles away. It would be a narrow squeak even if everything broke his way.
He made fast time to sluts’ quarters, punishing his knees and elbows.
The bottle was missing, he could feel the tacky places where he had fastened it. He settled himself as comfortably as possible and concentrated on quieting his pounding heart, slowing his breathing, and relaxing. He tried to make his mind blank.
He dozed off. But he was instantly alert when the lid over him was raised.
Barbara made no sound. She handed him one of their sons, he stuffed the limp little body as far down the tunnel as he could reach. She handed him the other, he placed it beside the first, then added a pitiful little bundle she had.
But he did not kiss her until they were down inside-only seconds after he had wakened-and the lid had clicked into place over them.
She clung to him, sobbing; he whispered to her fiercely not to make a sound, then added last-minute instructions into her ear. She quieted instantly; they got busy.
It was agonizingly difficult to get ready for the crawl in a space too small for one and nearly impossible for them both. They did it because they had to. First he helped her get out of the shorter garment sluts wore, then he had her lie down with her legs back in the other reach of the tunnel while he tied a baby sling to her, then a baby was stuffed into each sling and knots tightened to keep each child slung as high in its little hammock as possible. Hugh then knotted the skirt of her garment together, stuffed her hoarded food into the sack thus formed, tied the sleeves around his left leg, and let it drag behind. He had planned to tie it around his waist, but the sleeves were too short.
That done (it seemed to take hours), he had Barbara back up into the far reach of the tunnel, then managed painfully to turn himself and get headed the right way without banging little Hughie’s skull. Or was it Karl Joseph? He had forgotten to ask. Either one, the baby’s warm body against his, its lightly sensed breathing, gave him fresh courage. By God, they would make it! Whatever got in his way would die.
He set out, with the light in his teeth, moving very fast wherever clearance let him do so. He did not slow down for Barbara and had warned her that he would not unless she called out.
She did not, ever. Once her baggage worked loose from his leg. They stopped and he had her tie it to his ankle; that was their only rest. They made good time but it seemed forever before he reached the little pile of plunder he had cached when he set out.
They unslung the babies and caught their breaths.
He helped Barbara back into her shift, rearranged her sling to carry one baby papoose fashion, and made up their luggage into one bundle. All that he
held out was his knife taped to his arm, his robe, and the light. He showed her how to hold the light in her mouth, then spread her lips and let the tiniest trickle leak out between her teeth. She tried it.
“You look ghastly,” he whispered, “Like a jack-o’ — lantern. Now listen carefully. I’m going up. You be ready to hand me my robe instantly. I may reconnoiter.”
“I could help you get it on, right here.”
“No. If I’m caught coming out, there will be a fight and it would slow me down. I won’t want it, probably, until we reach a storeroom that is our next stop. If it’s all clear above, I’ll want you to hand out everything fast, including the baby not on your back. But you will have to carry him as well as the bundle and my robe; I’ve got to have my hands free. Darling, I don’t want to kill anybody but if anyone gets in our way, I will. You understand that, don’t you?”
She nodded. “So I carry everything. Can do, my husband.”
“You follow me, fast. It’s about two city blocks to that storeroom and we probably won’t see anyone. I jiggered its lock this afternoon, stuffed a wad of Kitten’s chewing gum into it. Once inside we’ll rearrange things and see if you can wear my sandals.”
“My feet are all right. Feel.”
“Maybe we’ll take turns wearing them. Then I have to break a lock on a delivery door but I spotted some steel bars a week ago which ought still to be there. Anyhow, I’ll break out. Then away we go, fast. It should be breakfast before we are missed, sometime after that before they are sure we are gone, still longer before a chase is organized., We’ll make it.”
“Sure we will.”
“Just one thing — If I reach for my robe and then close the lid on you, you stay here. Don’t make a sound, don’t try to peek out.”
“I won’t.”
“I might be gone an hour. I might fake a bellyache and have to see the vet, then come back when I can.”
“All right.”
“Barbara, it might be twenty-four hours, if anything goes wrong. Can you stay here and keep the twins quiet that long? If you must?”
“Whatever it takes, Hugh.”
He kissed her. “Now put the light back in your mouth and close your lips. I’m going to sneak a peek.”
He raised the lid an inch, lowered it. “In luck,” he whispered. “Even the standing light is out. Here I go. Be ready to hand things up. Joey first. And don’t show a light.”
He pushed the lid up and flat down without a sound, raised himself, got his feet to the corridor floor, stood up.
A light hit him. “That’s far enough,” a dry voice said, “Don’t move.” He kicked the whip hand so fast that the whip flew aside as he closed.
Then this-and that! — and sure enough! The man’s neck was broken, just as the book said it would be.
Instantly he knelt down. “Everything out! Fast!”
Barbara shoved baby and baggage up to him, was out fast as he took her hand. “Some light,” he whispered. “His went out and I’ve got to dispose of him.” She gave him light. Memtok — Hugh quelled his surprise, stuffed the body down the hole, closed the lid. Barbara was ready, baby on back, baby in left arm, bundle in right. “We go on! Stay close on my heels!” He set out for the intersection, holding his course in the dark by fingertips on the wall.
He never saw the whip that got him. All he knew was the pain.
Chapter 20
For a long time Mr. Hugh Farnham was aware of nothing but pain. When it eased off, he found that he was in a confinement cell like the one in which he had lived his first days under the Protectorate.
He was there three days. He thought it was three days, as he was fed six times. He always knew when they were about to feed him-and to empty his slop jar, for he was not taken outside for any purpose. He would find himself restrained by invisible spider web, then someone would come inside, leave food, replace the slop jar, and go. It was impossible to get the servant who did this to answer him.
After what may have been three days he found himself unexpectedly caught up by that prisoning field (he had just been fed) and his old colleague and “cousin” the Chief Veterinary came in. Hugh had more than a suspicion as to why; his feeling amounted to a conviction, so he pleaded, demanded to be taken to the Lord Protector, and finally shouted.
The surgeon ignored it. He did something to Hugh’s thigh, then left. To Hugh’s limited relief he did not become unconscious, but he found,
when the tanglefoot field let up, that he could not move anyhow and felt lethargic. Shortly two servants came in, picked him up, placed him in a box like a coffin.
Hugh found that he was being shipped somewhere. His shipping case was given casual but not rough handling; once he felt a lift surge and then surge to a stop; his box was placed in something; and some minutes, hours, or days later it was moved again; and presently he was dumped into another confinement room. He knew it was a different one; the walls were light green instead of white. By the time they fed him he had recovered and was again “tangled” while food was placed inside.
This went on for one hundred and twenty-two meals. Hugh kept track by biting a chunk out of his fingernails and scratching the inside of his left arm. This took him less than five minutes each day; he spent the rest of his time worrying and sometimes sleeping. Sleeping was worse than worrying because he always reenacted his escape attempt in his sleep and it always ended in disaster-although not necessarily at the same point. He did not always kill his friend the Chief Domestic and at least twice they got all the way to the mountains before they were caught. But, long or short, it ended the same way and he would wake up sobbing and calling for Barbara.
He worried most about Barbara-and the twins, although the boys were not as real to him. He had never heard of a slut being severely punished for anything. However, he had never heard of a slut being involved in an attempted escape and a killing, either; he just did not know. But he did know that the Lord Protector preferred slut meat for his table.
He tried to tell himself that old Ponse would do nothing to a slut while she was still nursing babies-and that would be a long time yet; among servants, according to Kitten, mothers nursed babies for at least two years.
He worried about Kitten, too. Would the child be punished for something she had had nothing to do with? A completely innocent bystander? Again he did not know. There was “justice” here; it was a major branch of religious writings. But it resembled so little the concept “justice” of his own culture that he had found the stuff almost unreadable.
He spent most of his time on what he thought of as “constructive” worry, i.e., what he should have done rather than what he had done.
He saw now that his plans had been laughably inadequate. He should never have let himself be panicked into moving too soon. It would have been far better to have built up his connection with Joe, never disagreed with him, tickled his vanity, gone to work for him and, in time, prevailed on him to adopt Barbara and the kids. Joe was an accommodating person and old Ponse was
so openhanded that he might simply have made Joe a present of these three useless servants instead of demanding cash. The boys would have been in no danger for years (and perhaps never in danger if Joe owned them), and, in time, Hugh could have expected to become a trusted business servant, with a broad pass allowing him to go anywhere on his master’s business-and Hugh
.would have acquired sophisticated knowledge of how this world worked that a house servant could never acquire.
Once he had learned exactly how it ticked, he could have planned an escape that would work.
Any society man has ever devised, he reminded himself, could be bribed- and a servant who handles money can find ways to steal some. Probably there was an “underground railroad” that ran to the mountains. Yes, he had been far too hasty.
He considered, too, the wider aspects-a slave uprising. He visualized those tunnels being used not for escape but as a secret meeting place-classes in reading and writing, taught in whispers; oaths as mighty as a Mau Mau initiation binding the conspirators as blood brothers with each Chosen having marked against his name a series of dedicated assassins, servants patiently grinding scraps of metal into knives.
This “constructive” dream he enjoyed most-and believed in least. Would these docile sheep ever rebel? It seemed unlikely. He had been classed with them by accident of cornplexion but they were not truly of his breed.
Centuries of selective breeding had made them as little like himself as a lap dog is like a timber wolf.
And yet, and yet, how did he know? He knew only the tempered males, and the few studs he had seen had all been dulled by a liberal ration of Happiness-to~ say nothing of what it might do to a man’s fighting spirit to
lose his thumbs at an early age and be driven around with whips-that-weremore- than-whips.
This matter of racial differences-or the nonsense notion of “racial equality” — had never been examined scientifically; there was too much emotion on both sides. Nobody wanted honest data.
Hugh recalled an area of Pernambuco he had seen while in the Navy, a place where rich plantation owners, dignified, polished, educated in France, were black, while their servants and field hands-giggling, shuffling, shiftless knuckleheads “obviously” incapable of better things-were mostly white men. He had stopped telling this anecdote in the States; it was never really believed and it was almost always resented-even by whites who made a big thing of how anxious they were to “help the American Negro improve himself.” Hugh had formed the opinion that almost all of those bleeding hearts wanted the Negro’s lot improved until it was almost as high as their own — and no longer on their consciences-but the idea that the tables could ever be turned was one they rejected emotionally.
Hugh knew that the tables could indeed be turned. He had seen it once, now he was experiencing it.
But Hugh knew that the situation was still more confused. Many Roman citizens had been “black as the ace of spades” and many slaves of Romans had been as blond as Hitler wanted to be-so any “white man” of European ancestry was certain to have a dash of Negro blood. Sometimes more than a dash. That southern Senator, what was his name? — the one who had built his career on “white supremacy.” Hugh had come across two sardonic facts: This old boy had died from cancer and had had many transfusions-and his blood type was such that the chances were two hundred to one that its owner had nnt inst a tnnch nf thn tarhriish hut nraetk~a1lv thp. whn1~ tar barrel. A navy surgeon had gleefully pointed this out to Hugh and had proved both points in medical literature.
Nevertheless, this confused matter of races would never be straightened
out-because almost nobody wanted the truth.
Take this matter of singing — It had seemed to Hugh that Negroes of his time averaged better singers than had whites; most people seemed to think so. Yet the very persons, white or black, who insisted most loudly that “all races were equal” always seemed happy to agree that Negroes were superior, on the average, in this one way. It reminded Hugh of Orwell’s Animal Farm, in which “AU Animals Are Equal But Some Are More Equal Than Others.”
Well, he knew who wasn’t equal here-despite his statistically certain drop of black blood. Hugh Farnham, namely. He found that he agreed with Joe: When things were unequal, it was much nicer to be on top!
On the sixty-first day in this new place, if it was the sixtyfirst, they came for him, bathed him, cut his nails, rubbed him with deodorant cream, and paraded him before the Lord Protector.
Hugh learned that he still could be humiliated by not being given even a nightshirt as clothing, but he conceded that it was a reasonable precaution in handling a prisoner who killed with his bare hands. His escort was two young Chosen, in uniforms which Hugh assumed to be military, and the whips they carried were definitely not “lesser whips.”
The route they followed was very long; it was clearly a huge building.
The room where he was delivered was very like in spirit to the informal lounge where Hugh had once played bridge. The big view window looked out over a wide tropical river.
Hugh hardly glanced at it; the Lord Protector was there. And so were Barbara and the twins!
The babies were crawling on the floor. But Barbara was breast deep in that invisible quicksand, a trap that claimed T4iwh as snnui as he was halted She smiled at him hut did not speak. He looked her over carefully. She seemed unhurt and healthy, but was thin and had deep circles under her eyes.
He started to speak; she gestured warningly with eyes and head. Hugh then looked at the Lord Protector-and noticed only then that Joe was lounging near him and that Grace and Duke were playing some card game over in a corner, both of them chewing gum and ostentatiously not seeing that Hugh was there. He looked back at Their Charity.
Hugh decided that Ponse had been ill. Despite the fact that Hugh felt comfortably warm in skin, Ponse was wearing a full robe with a shawl over his lap and he looked, for once, almost his reputed age.
But when he spoke, his voice was still resonant. “You may go, Captain.
We excuse you.”
The escort withdrew. Their Charity looked Hugh over soberly. At last he said, “Well, boy, you certainly made a mess of things, didn’t you?” He looked down and played with something in his lap, caught it and pulled it back to the middle of the shawl. Hugh saw that it was a white mouse. He felt sudden sympathy for the mouse. It didn’t seem to like where it was, but if it did manage to escape, the cats would get it. Maggie was watching with deep interest.
Hugh did not answer, the remark seemed rhetorical. But it had startled him very much. Ponse covered the mouse with his hand, looked up. “Well? Say something!”
“You speak English!”
“Don’t look so silly. I’m a scholar, Hugh. Do you think I would let myself be surrounded by people who speak a language I don’t understand? I speak it, and I read it, silly as the spelling is. I’ve been tutored daily by skilled scholars-plus conversation practice with a living dictionary.” He jerked his head toward Grace. “Couldn’t you guess that I would want to read those books of mine? Not be dependent on your hitor-miss translations? I’ve read the Just So Stories twice — charming ! — and I’ve started on the
Odyssey.”
He shifted back to Language. “But we are not here to discuss literature.” Their Charity barely gestured. Four slut servants came running in with a table, placed it in front of the big man, placed things on it. Hugh recognized them-a homemade knife, a wig, two pots for deodorant cream, a bundle, an empty Happiness bottle, a little white sphere now dull, a pair of sandals, two robes, one long, one short, mussed and dirty, and a surprisingly high stack of paper, creased and much written on.
Ponse put the white mouse on the table, stirred the display, said broodingly, “I’m no fool, Hugh. I’ve owned servants all my life. I had you figured out before you had yourself figured out. Doesn’t do to let a man like you mingle with loyal servants, he corrupts them. Gives them ideas they are better off without. I had planned to let you escape as soon as I was through with you, you could have afforded to wait.”
“Do you expect me to believe that?~’
“Doesn’t matter whether you do or don’t. I could not afford to keep you very long-one bad apple rots the rest, as my uncle was fond of saying. Nor could I put you up for adoption and let some unwitting buyer pay good money for a servant who would then corrupt others elsewhere in my realm. No, you had to escape.”
“Even if that is so, I would never have escaped without Barbara and my
boys.”
“I said I am not a fool. Kindly remember it. Of course you would not. I
was going to use Barba-and these darling brats-to force you to escape. At my selected time. Now you’ve ruined it. I must make an example of you. For the benefit of the other servants.” He frowned and picked up the crude knife. “Poor balance. Hugh, did you really expect to make it with this pitiful tackle? Not even shoes for that child by you. If only you had waited, you would have been given opportunity to steal what you needed.”
“Ponse, you are playing with me the way you’ve been playing with that mouse. You weren’t planning to let us escape. Not really escape at least. I would have wound up on your table.”
“Please!” The old man made a grimace of distaste. “Hugh, I’m not well, someone has again been trying to poison me — my nephew, I suppose-and this time almost succeeded. So don’t talk nasty, it upsets my stomach.” He looked Hugh up and down. “Tough. Inedible. An old stud savage is merely garbage. Much too gamy. Besides that, a gentleman doesn’t eat members of his own family, no matter what. So let’s not talk in bad taste. There’s no cause for you to bristle so. I’m not angry with you, just very, very provoked.” He glanced at the twins, said, “Hughie, stop pulling Maggie’s tail.” His voice was neither loud nor sharp; the baby stopped at once. “Admittedly those two would make tasty appetizers were they not of my household. But even had they not been, I would have planned better things for them; they are so cute and so much alike. Did plan better things at first. Until it became clear that they were necessary to forcing you to run.”
Ponse sighed. “You still do not believe a word I’m saying. Hugh, you don’t understand the system. Well, servants never do. Did you ever grow apples?”
“A good eating apple, firm and sweetly tart, is never a product of nature; it is the result of long development from something small and sour and hard and hardly fit for animal fodder. Then it has to be scientifically propagated and protected. On the other hand, too highly developed plants-or animals-can go bad, lose their firmness, their flavor, get mushy and soft and worthless. It’s a two-horned problem. We have it constantly with servants. You must weed out the troublemakers, not let them breed. On the other hand these very troublemakers, the worst of them, are invaluable breeding stock that must
not be lost. So we do both. The run-of-thecrop bad ones we temper and keep. The very worst ones — such as you-we encourage to run. If you live-and some of you do-we can rescue you, or your strong get, at a later time and add you in, judiciously, to a breeding line that has become so soft and docile and stupid that it is no longer worth its keep. Our poor friend Memtok was a result of such pepping up of hrppg~I fln~ niiartc~r ~v~,ap h~’ w~z he never knew it of course-and a good stud that added strength to a line. But far too dangerous and ambitious to be kept too long at stud; he had to be made to see the advantages of being tempered. Most of my upper servants have a recent strain of savage in them; some of them are Memtok’s sons. My engineer, for example. No, Hugh, you would not have wound up on anybody’s table. Nor tempered. I would like to have kept you as a pet, you’re diverting-and a fair bridge hand in the bargain. But I could not let you stay in contact with loyal servants, even as insulated as you were by your fancy title. Presently you would have been put in touch with the underground.”
Hugh opened his mouth and closed it.
“Surprised, eh? But there is always an underground wherever there is a ruling class and a serving class. Which is to say, always. If there were not one, it would be necessary to invent one. However, since there is one, we keep track of it, subsidize it-and use it. In the upper servants’ mess its contact is the veterinary-trusted by everyone and quite shamelessly free of sentiment;
1 don’t like him. If you had confided in him, you would have been guided, advised, and helped. I would have used you to cover about a hundred sluts, then sent you on your way. Don’t look startled, even Their Mercy uses studs who have to stoop a bit to get through the studs’ door when a
freshening of the line is indicated-and there was always the danger that you might get yourself, and those dear boys, killed, and thereby have wasted a fine potential.”
Their Charity picked up the pile of Kitten-delivered mail. “These things
— All my Chief Domestic was expected to do was to thwart you from doing something silly; he never knew the veterinary’s second function. Why, I even had to crack down on Memtok a bit to turn his copies of these over to me — when anyone could have guessed that a stud like you would find a way to get in touch with his slut. I deduced that it would happen that time that you stood up to me about her, our first bridge game. Remember? Perhaps you don’t. But I sent for Memtok, and sure enough, you had already started. Although he was reluctant to admit it. since he had not renorted it.”
Hugh was hardly listening. He was turning over in his mind the glaring fact that he was hearing things told only to dead men. None of the four was going to leave this mom alive. No, perhaps the twins would. Yes, Ponse wanted the breeding line. But he-and Barbara-would never have a chance to talk.
But Ponse was saying, “You still have a chance to correct your mistakes.
And you made lots of them. One note you wrote my scholars assured me was gibberish, not English at all. So I knew it was a secret message whether we could read it or not. Thereafter all your notes were subjected to careful analysis. So of course we found the key-rather naïve to be considered a code, rather clever considering the handicaps. And useful to me. But confound it, Hugh, it cost me! Memtok was naïve about savages, he did not realize that they fight when cornered.”
Ponse scowled. “Damn you, Hugh, your recklessness cost me a valuable property. I wouldn’t have taken ten thousand bullocks for Memtok’s adoption- no, not twenty. And now your life is forfeit. The charge of attempting to run we could overlook, a tingling in front of the other servants would cover that. Destroying your master’s property we could cover up if it had been done secretly. Did you know that that bedwarmer I lent you knew most of what you were up to? Saw much of it? Sluts gossip.”
“She told you?”
“No, damn it, it didn’t tell the half; we had to tingle it out of it.
Then it turned out it knew so much that we could not afford to have it talking and the other servants putting one and one together. So it had to go.”
“You had her killed.” Hugh felt a surge of disgust and said it, knowing that nothing he said could matter now.
“What’s it to you? Its life was forfeit, treason to its master. However, I’m not a spiteful man, the little critter has no moral sense and didn’t know what it was doing-you must have hypnotized it, Hugh-and I am a frugal man; I don’t waste property. It’s adopted so far away that it’ll have trouble under
Hugh sighed. “I’m relieved.”
“Choice about the slut, eh? Was it that good?” “She was innocent. I didn’t want her hurt.”
“As may be. Now, Hugh, you can repair all this costly mess. Pay me back the damage and do yourself a good turn at the same time.”
“How?”
“Quite simple. You’ve cost me my key executive servant, I’ve no one of his caliber to replace him. So you take his place. No scandal, no fuss, no upset belowstairs-every servant who saw any piece of it is already adopted away. And you can tell any story you like about what happened to Memtok. Or even claim you don’t know. Barba, can you refrain from gossip?”
“I certainly can where Hugh’s welfare is concerned!”
“That’s a good child. I would hate to have you muted, it would hamper our bridge game. Although Hugh will be rather busy for bridge. Hugh, here’s the honey that trapped the bear. You take over as Chief Domestic, do the kind of a job I know you can do once you learn the details-and Barba and the twins live with you. What you always wanted. Well, that’s the choice. Be my boss servant and have them with you. Or your lives are forfeit. What do you say?”
Hugh Farnham was so dazed that he was gulping trying to accept, when Their Charity added, “Just one thing. I won’t be able to let you have them with you right away.”
“No?”
“No. I still want to breed a few from you, before you are tempered.
Needn’t be long, if you are as spry as you look.” Barbara said, “No!”
But Hugh Farnham was making a terrible decision. “Wait, Barbara. Ponse.
What about the boys? Will they be tempered, too?”
“Oh.” Ponse thought about it. “You drive a hard bargain, Hugh. Suppose we say that they will not be. Let’s say that I might use them at stud a bit- but not take their thumbs; it would be a dead giveaway for so private a purpose with studs as tall as they are going to be. Then at fourteen or fifteen I let them escape. Does that sult you?” The old man stopped to cough; a spasm racked him. “Damn it, you’re tiring me.”
Hugh pondered it. “Ponse, you may not be alive fourteen or fifteen years from now.”
“True. But it is very impolite for you to say so.” “Can you bind this bargain for your heir? Mrika?”
Ponse rubbed his hair and grinned. “You’re a sharp one, Hugh. What a Chief Domestic you will make! Of course I can’t-which is why I want some get from you, without waiting for the boys to mature. But there is always a choice, just as you have a choice now. I can see to it that you are in my heavenly escort. All of you, the boys, too. Or I can have you all kept alive and you can work out a new bargain, if any. ‘Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi’ — which was the ancients’ way of saying that when the protector leaves there is always a new protector. Just tell me, I’ll do it either way.”
Hugh was thinking over the grim choices when Barbara again spoke up. “Their Charity — “
“Yes, child?”
“You had better have my tongue cut out. Right now, before you let me leave this room. Because I will have nothing to do with this wicked scheme. And I will not keep quiet. No!”
“Barba, Barba, that’s not being a good girl.”
“I am not a girl. I am a woman and a wife and a mother! I will never call you ‘uncle’ again-you are vile! I wifi not play bridge with you ever again, with or without my tongue. We are helpless…but I will give you nothing. What is this you offer? You want my husband to agree to this evil thing in exchange for a few scant years of life for me and for our sons-for as long as God lets that evilness you call your body continue to breathe. Then what? You cheat him even then. We die. Or we are left to the mercy of your nephew who is even worse than you are. Oh, I know! The bedwarmers all hate him, they weep when they are called to serve him-and weep even harder when they come back. But I would not let Hugh make this choice even if you could promise us all a lifetime of luxurv. No! I won’t. I won’t! You trv to do it I’ll kill my babies! Then myself. Then Hugh wifi kill himself I know! No matter what you have done to him!” She stopped, spat as far as she could in the old man’s direction, then burst into tears.
Their Charity said, “Hughie, I told you to stop teasing that cat. It will scratch you.” Slowly he stood up, said, “Reason with them, Joe,” and left the room.
Joe sighed and came over close to them. “Barbara,” he said gently, “take hold of yourself. You aren’t acting in Hugh’s interests even if you think you are. You should advise him to take it. After all, a man Hugh’s age doesn’t have much to lose by it.”
Barbara looked at him as if she had never seen him before in her life.
Then she spat again. Joe was close, she got him in the face.
He jumped and raised his hand. Hugh said sharply, “Joe, if you hit her and I ever get loose, I’ll break your arm!”
“I wasn’t going to hit her,” Joe said slowly. “I was just going to wipe my face. I wouldn’t hit Barbara, Hugh; I admire her. I just don’t think she has good sense.” He took a kerchief to the smear of saliva. “I gu~ss there is no use arguing.”
“None, Joe. I’m sorry I spit on you.”
“That’s all right, Barbara. You’re upset…and you never treated me as a nigger, ever. Well, Hugh?”
“Barbara has decided it. And she always means what she says. I can’t say that I’m sorry. Staying alive here just isn’t worth it, for any of us. Even if I was not to be tempered.”
“I hate to hear you say that, Hugh. All in all, you and I always got along pretty well. Well, if that’s your last word, I might as well go tell Their Charity. Is it?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, Joe.”
“Well — Good-bye, Barbara. Good-bye, Hugh.” He left.
The Lord Protector came back in alone, moving with the slow caution of a man old and sick. “So that’s what you’ve decided,” he said, sitting down and gathering the shawl around him I-fr reached mit fnr the mouise still crnuichinc, on the table top; servants came in and cleared off the table. He went on, “Can’t say that I’m surprised — I’ve played bridge with both of you. Well, now we take up the other choice…Your lives are forfeit and I can’t let you stay here, other than on those terms. So now we send you back.”
“Back where, Ponse?”
“Why, back to your own time, of course. If you make it. Perhaps you will.” He stroked the mouse. “This little fellow made it. Two weeks at least. And it didn’t hurt him. Though one can only guess what two thousand years would do.”
The servants were back and were piling on the table a man’s watch, a Canadian dime, a pair of much worn mountain boots, a hunting knife, some badly made moccasins, a pair 2 of Levis, some ragged denim shorts with a very large waistline, a .45 automatic pistol with belt, two ragged and faded shirts, one somewhat altered, a part of a paper of matches, and a small notebook and pencil.
Ponse looked at the collection. “Was there anything else?” He slid the loaded clip from the pistol, held it in his hand. “If not, get dressed.”
The invisible field let them loose.
Chapter 21
“I don’t see what there is to be surprised about,” Ponse told them. “Hugh, you will remember that I told my scientists that I wanted to know how you got here. No miracles. I told them rather firmly. They understood that I would be most unhappy-and vexed-if the Protectorate’s scientists could not solve it when they had so many hints, so much data. So they did. Probably. At least they were able to move this little fellow. He arrived today, which is why I sent for you. Now we will find out if it works backwards in time as well as forwards-and if the big apparatus works as well as the bench model. I understand it is not so much the amount of power-no atom-kernel bombs necessary — as the precise application of power. But we’ll soon know.” Hugh asked, “How will you know? We will know-if it works. But how will you know?”
“Oh, that. My scientists are clever, when they have incentive. One of them will explain it.”
The scientists were called in, two Chosen and five servants. There was no introduction; Hugh found himself treated as impersonally as the little white mouse who still tried to meet his death on the floor. Hugh was required to take off his shirt and two servant-scientists taped a small package to Hugh’s right shoulder. “What’s that?” It seemed surprisingly heavy for its size.
The servants did not answer; the leading Chosen said, “You will be told.
Come here. See this.”
“This” turned out to be Hugh’s former property, a U. S. Geodetic Survey map of James County. “Do you understand this? Or must we explain it?”
“I understand it.” Hugh used the equals mode, the Chosen ignored it while continuing to speak in protocol mode, falling.
“Then you know that here is where you arrived.”
Hugh agreed, as the man’s finger covered the spot where Hugh’s home had once stood. The Chosen nodded thoughtfully and added, “Do you understand the meaning of these marks?” He pointed to a tiny x-mark and very small figures beside it.
“Certainly. We call that a ‘bench mark.’ Exact location and altitude.
It’s a reference point for all the rest of the map.”
“Excellent.” The Chosen pointed to a similar mark at the summit of Mount James as shown by the map. “Now, tell us, if you know-but don’t lie about it; it will not advantage you-how much error there would be, horizontally and vertically, between these two reference points.”
Hugh thought about it, held up his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart. The Chosen blinked. “It would not have been that accurate in those primitive times. We assume that you are lying. Try again. Or admit that you don’t know.”
“And I suggest that you don’t know what you are talking about. It would be at least that accurate.” Hugh thought of telling him that he had bossed surveying parties in the Seabees and had done his own surveying when he was
getting started as a contractor-and that while he did not know how accurate a geodetic survey was, he did know that enormously more accurate methods had been used in setting those bench marks than were ever used in the ordinary survey.
He decided that explanation would be wasted.
The Chosen looked at him, then glanced at Their Charity. The old man had been listening but his face showed nothing. “Very well. We will assume that the marks are accurate, each to the other. Which is fortunate, as this one is missing” — he pointed to the first one, near where Hugh’s home had been — “whereas this one” — he indicated the summit of Mount James — “is still in place, in solid rock. Now search your memory and do not lie again, as it will matter to you…and it will matter to Their Charity, as a silly lie on your part could waste much effort and Their Charity would be much displeased, we are certain. Where, quite near this reference mark and the same height- certainly no higher! — is-was, I mean, in those primitive times-a flat, level place?”
Hugh thought about it. He knew exactly where that bench mark had been: in the cornerstone of the Southport Savings Bank. It was, or had been, a small brass plate let into the stone beside the larger dedication plate, about eighteen inches above the sidewalk at the northeast corner of the building. It had been placed there shortly after the Southport shopping center had been built. Hugh had often glanced at it in passing; it had always given him a warm feeling of stability to note a bench mark.
The bank had sided on a parking lot shared by the bank, a Safeway Supermarket, and a couple of other shops. “It is level and flat nif this way fnr a distance nf — ” (I-Iiwh estimated the width of that ancient parking lot in feet, placed the figure in modern units.) “Or a little farther. That’s just an estimate, not wholly accurate.”
“But it is flat and level? And no higher than this point?” “A little lower and sloping away. For drainage.”
“Very well. Now place your attention on this configuration.” Again it was Hugh’s property, a Conoco map of the state. “That object fastened to your back you may think of as a clock. We will not explain it, you could not understand. Suffice to say that radiation decay of a metal inside it measures time. That is why it is heavy; it is cased in lead to protect it. You will take it to here.” The Chosen pointed to a town on the map; Hugh noted that it was the home of the state university.
At a gesture the Chosen was handed a slip of paper. To Hugh he said, “Can you read this? Or must it be explained?”
“It says ‘University State Bank,'” Hugh told him. “I seem to recall that there was an institution of that name in that town. I’m not sure, I don’t recall doing business with it.”
“There was,” the Chosen assured him, “and its ruins were recently uncovered. You will go to it. There was, and still is, a strong room, a vault, in its lowest part. You will place this clock in that vault. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“By Their Charity’s wish, that vault has not yet been opened. After you have gone, it will be opened. The clock will be found and we will read it. Do you understand why this is crucial to the experiment? It will not only tell us that you made the time jump safely but also exactly how long the span was-and from this our instruments will be calibrated.” The Chosen looked very fierce. “Do this exactly. Or you will be severely punished.”
Ponse caught Hugh’s eye at this point. The old man was not laughing but his eyes twinkled. “Do it, Hugh,” he said quietly. “That’s a good fellow.”
Hugh said to the Chosen scientist. “I will do it. I underc~t~ind ” The Chosen said, “May it please Their Charity, this one is ready to
weigh them now, and then leave for the site.”
“We’ve changed our mind,” Ponse announced. “We will see this.” He added, “Nerve in good shape, Hugh?”
“Quite.”
“All of you who made the first jump were given this opportunity, did I tell you? Joe turned it down flatly.” The old man glanced over his shoulder. “Grace! Changed your mind, little one?”
Grace looked up. “Ponsie!” she said reproachfully. “You know I would never leave you.”
“Duke?”
The tempered servant did not even look up. He simply shook his head.
Ponse said to the scientist, “Let’s hurry and get them weighed. We intend to sleep at home tonight.”
The weighing was done elsewhere in the Palace. Just before the four were placed on the weighing area the Lord Protector held up the cartridge clip he had removed from the pistol Hugh now wore. “Hugh? Will you undertake not to be foolish with this? Or should I have the pellets separated from the explosives?”
“Uh, I’ll behave.”
“Ah, but how will you behave? If you were impetuous, you might succeed in killing me. But consider what would happen to Barba and our little brats.”
(I had thought of that, you old scoundrel. I’ll still do what seems best to me.) “Ponse, why don’t you let Barbara carry the clip in a pocket? That would keep me from loading and firing very fast even if I did get ideas.”
“A good plan. Here, Barba.”
The boss scientist seemed unhappy at the total weight of his experimental package. “May it please Their Charity, this one finds that body weights of both adults must have lessened markedly since the time of the figures on which the calculations were made.”
“Oh, nothing, nothing, may it please Their Charity. Just a slight delay.
The mass must be exact.” Hurriedly the Chosen started piling metal discs on the platform.
It gave Hugh an idea. “Ponse, you really expect this to work?”
“If I knew the answer, it would not be necessary to try it. I hope it will work.”
“If it does work, we’ll need money right away. Especially if I’m to travel half across the state to bury this clock device.”
“Reasonable. You used gold, did you not? Or was it silver? I see your idea.” The old man gestured. “Stop that weighing.”
“We used both, sometimes, but it had to have our own protectorate’s stamp. Ponse, there were quite a number of American silver dollars in my house when you took it away from me. Are they available?”
They were available and in the Palace and the old man had no objection to using them to make up the missing weight. The boss scientist was fretted over the delay-he explained to his lord that the adjustments were set for an exact time span as well as exact mass in order to place these specimens at a time before the East-West War had started, plus a margin for error-but that delay was reducing the margin and might require recalculation and long and painful recalibration. Hugh did not follow the technicalities.
Nor did Ponse. He cut the scientist off abruptly. “Then recalculate if necessary. All.”
It took more than an hour to locate the man who could locate the man who knew where these particular items of the savage artifacts were filed, then dig them out and fetch them. Ponse sat brooding and playing with his mouse.
Barbara nursed the twins, then changed them with the help of slut servants; Hugh petitioned plumbing calls for each of them-granted, under guard-and all
this changed all the body weights and everything was started over again.
The silver dollars were still in, or had been replaced in, the $100 rolls in which Hugh had hoarded them. They made quite a stack, and (on the happy assumption that the time jump would work) Hugh was pleased that he had lost while imprisoned the considerable paunch he had regrown during his easy days as “Chief Researcher.” However, less than three hundred silver dollars were used in bringing them up to calculated weight-plus a metal slug and some snips of foil.
“If it suits the Lord Protector, this one believes that the specimens should be placed in the container without delay.”
“Then do it! Don’t waste our time.”
The container was floated in. It was a box, metallic, plain, empty, and with no furnishings of any sort, barely high enough for Hugh to stand upright in, barely large enough for all of them. Hugh got into it, helped Barbara in, the babies were handed to them and Hughie started to squawl and set off his brother.
Ponse looked annoyed. “My sluts have been spoiling those brats. Hugh, I’ve decided not to watch it, I’m weary. Goodbye to both of you-and good riddance; neither of you would ever have made a loyal servant. But I’ll miss our bridge games. Barba, you must bring those brats back into line. But don’t break their spunk doing it; they’re fine boys.” He turned and left abruptly.
The hatch was closed down on them and fastened; they were alone. Hugh at once took advantage of it to kiss his wife, somewhat hampered by each of them holding a baby.
“I don’t care what happens now,” Barbara said as soon as her mouth was free. “That’s what I’ve been longing for. Oh, dear, Joey is wet again. How about Hughie?”
“It’s unanimous, Hughie also. But I thought you just said you didn’t care what happens now?”
“Well, I don’t, really. But try explaining that to a baby. I would gladly swap one of those rolls of dollars for ten new diapers.”
“My dear, do you realize that the human race lasted at least a million years with no diapers at all? Whereas we may not last another hour. So let’s not spend it talking about diapers.”
“I simply meant — Wups! They’re moving us.”
“Sit flat on the floor and brace your feet against the wall. Before we have scrambled babies. You were saying?”
“I simply meant, my darling, that I do not care about diapers, I don’t care about anything-now that I have you with me again. But if we aren’t going to die-if this thing works — I’m going to have to be practical. And do you know of anything more practical than diapers?”
“Yes. Kissing. Making love.”
“Well, yes. But they lead to diapers. Darling, could you hold Hughie in your other arm and put this one around me? Uh, they’re moving us again. Hugh, is this thing going to work? Or are we going to be very suddenly dead? Somehow I can imagine time travel frontwards-and anyhow we did it. But I can’t imagine it backwards. I mean, the past has already happened. That’s it. Isn’t it?”
“Well, yes. But you haven’t stated it correctly. The way I see it, there are no paradoxes in time travel, there can’t be. If we are going to make this time jump, then we already did; that’s what happened. And if it doesn’t work, then it’s because it didn’t happen.”
“But it hasn’t happened yet. Therefore, you are saying that it didn’t happen, so it can’t happen. That’s what I said.”
“No, no! We don’t know whether it has already happened or not. If it did, it will. If it didn’t, it won’t.”
“Darling, you’re confusing me.”
“Don’t worry about it. ‘The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves
on’ — and only then do you find out if it goosed you in passing. I think we’ve straightened out on a course; we’re steady now, just the faintest vibration. If they are taking us where I think they are, James County I mean, then we’ve got at least an hour before we need worry about anything.” He tightened his arm around her. “So let’s be happy that hour.”
She snuggled in. “That’s what I was saying. Beloved, we’ve come through so many narrow squeaks together that I’m not ever going to worry again. If it’s an hour, I’ll be happy every second of it. If it’s forty years, I’ll be happy every second of that, too. If it’s together. And if it’s not together, I don’t want it. But either way, we go on. To the end of our day.”
“Yes. ‘To the end of our day.'”
She sighed happily, rearranged a wet and sleeping infant, snuggled into his shoulder and murmured, “This feels like our very first day. In the tank room of the shelter, I mean. We were just as crowded and even warmer-and I was never so happy. And we didn’t know whether we were going to live through that day, either. That night.”
“We didn’t expect to. Else we wouldn’t have twin boys now.”
“So I’m glad we thought we were going to die. Hugh? It isn’t any more crowded than it was that night in the tank room.”
“Woman, you are an insatiable lecher. You’ll shock the boys.”
“I don’t think once in more than a year is being insatiable. And the boys are too young to be shocked. Aw, come on! You said yourself we might be dead in an hour.”
“Yes, we might and you have a point and I’m theoretically in favor of the idea. But the boys do inhibit me and there actually isn’t quite as much room even if we weren’t cluttered up with eight or nine wet babies and I don’t see how it’s mechanically possible. The act would be a tesseract, at least.”
“Well — I guess you’re right. I don’t see any way either; we would probably squash them. But it does seem a shame, if we’re going to die.”
“I refuse to assume that we’re going to die. I won’t ever make that assumption again. All my figuring is based on the assumption that we are going to live. We go on. No matter what happens-we go on.”
“All right. Seven no trump.” “That’s better.”
“Doubled and redoubled. Hugh? Just as soon as the boys are big enough to hold thirteen cards in their pudgy little hands, we’re going to start teaching them contract. Then we’ll have a family four of our own.”
“Suits. And if they can’t learn to play, we’ll temper them and try again.”
“I don’t want ever to hear that word again!” “Sorry.”
“And I don’t want to hear that language again, either, dear. The boys should grow up hearing English.”
“Sorry again. You’re right. But I may slip; I’ve gotten in the habit of thinking in it-all that translating. So allow me a few slips.”
“I’ll always allow you a few slips. Speaking of slips — Did you? With Kitten?”
“No.”
“Why not? I wouldn’t have minded. Well, not much anyhow. She was sweet.
She would baby-sit for me any time I would let her. She loved our boys.”. “Barbara, I don’t want to think about Kitten. It makes me sad. I just
hope whoever has her now is good to her. She didn’t have any defenses at all- like a kitten before it has its eyes open. Helpless. Kitten means to me everything that is utterly damnable about slavery.”
She squeezed his hand. “I hope they’re good to her, too. But, dear, don’t hurt yourself inside about it; there is nothing we can do for her.”
“I know it and that’s why I don’t want to talk about her. But I do miss
her. As a daughter. She was a daughter to me. ‘Bedwarmer’ never entered into it.”
“I didn’t doubt it, dear. But — Well, look here, my good man, maybe this place is too cramped. All right, we’re going to live through it; we go on. Then don’t let me catch you treating me like a daughter! I intend to keep your bed very warm indeed!”
“Mmm — You want to remember that I’m an old man.”
“‘Old man’ my calloused feet! We’ll be the same age for all practical purposes-namely something over four thousand years, counting once each way. And my purposes are very practical, understand me?”
“I understand you. I suppose ‘four thousand years’ is one way to look at it. Though perhaps not for ‘practical purposes.'”
“You won’t get out of it that easily,” she said darkly. “I won’t stand for it.”
“Woman, you’ve got a one-track mind. All right, I’ll do my best. I’ll rest all the time and let you do all the work. Hey, I think we’re there.”
The box was moved several times, then remained stationary a few minutes, then surged straight up with sickening suddenness, stopped with another stomach twister, seemed to hunt a little, and then was perfectly steady.
“You in the experimental chamber,” a voice said out of nowhere. “You are warned to expect a short fall. You are advised to stand up, each of you hold one brat, and be ready to fall. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Hugh answered while helping Barbara to her feet. “How much of a
fall?”
There was no answer. Hugh said, “Hon, I don’t know what they mean. A
‘short fall’ could be one foot, or fifty. Protect Joey with your arms and better bend your knees a little. If it’s quite a fall, then go ahead and go down; don’t try to take it stiff-legged. These jokers don’t give a hoot what happens to us.”
“Bent knees. Protect Joey. All right.” They fell.
Chapter 22
Hugh never did know how far they fell but he decided later that it could not have been more than four feet. One instant they were standing in a well- lighted, cramped box; the next instant they were outdoors, in the dark of night, and falling.
His boots hit, he went down, landing on the right side his rump and on two very hard rolls of silver dollars in hip pocket-rolled with the fall and protected the baby in arms.
Then he rolled to a sitting position. Barbara was near h on her side.
She was not moving. “Barbara! Are you hui
“No,” she said breathlessly. “I don’t think so. Just knoc] the breath out of me.”
“Is Joey all right? Hughie is, but I think he’s more ti wet now.” “Joey is all right.” Joey confirmed this by starting to y his brother
joined him. “He had the breath knocked out of h too, I think. Shut up, Joey; Mother is busy. Hugh, where we?”
He looked around. “We are,” he announced, “in a park lot in a shopping center about four blocks from where I I And apparently somewhere close to our own proper time. least that’s a ‘sixty-one Ford we almost landed on.” The was empty save for this one car. It occurred to him that tl arrival might have been something else than a bump-an plosion, perhaps? — if they had been six feet to the right. he dropped the thought; enough narrow squeaks and one m
didn’t matter.
He stood up and helped Barbara up. She winced and in dim light that came from inside the bank he noticed “Trouble?”
“I turned my ankle when I hit.” “Can you walk?”
“I can walk.”
“I’ll carry both kids. It’s not far.” “Hugh, where are we going?”
“Why, home, of course.” He looked in the window of bank, tried to spot a calendar. He saw one but the stand light was not shining on it; he couldn’t read it. “I wish I ki the date. Honey, I hate to admit it but it does look as if t travel has some paradoxes-and I think we are about to give somebody a terrible shock.”
“Who?”
“Me, maybe. In my earlier incarnation. Maybe I ought to phone him first, not shock him. No, he-I, I mean-wouldn’t believe it. Sure you can walk?” “Certainly.”
“All right. Hold our monsters for a moment and let me set my watch.” He glanced back into the bank where a clock was visible even though the calendar was shadowed. “Okay. Gimine. And holler if you need to stop.”
They set off, Barbara limping but keeping up. He discouraged talk, because he did not have his thoughts in order. To see a town that he had thought of as destroyed so quiet and peaceful on a warm summery night shook him more than he dared admit. He carefully avoided any speculation as to what he might find at his home-except one fleeting thought that if it turned out that his shelter was not yet built, then it never would be and he would try his hand at changing history.
He adjourned that thought, too, and concentrated on being glad that Barbara was a woman who never chattered when her man wanted her to be quiet.
Presently they turned into his driveway, Barbara limping and Hugh beginning to develop cramps in both arms from being unable to shift his double load. There were two cars parked tandem and facing out in the drive; he stopped at the first one, opened the door and said, “Slide in, sit down, and take the load off that ankle. I’ll leave the boys with you and reconnoiter.” The house was brightly lighted.
“Hugh! Don’t do it!” “Why not?”
“This is my car. This is the night!”
He stared at her for a long moment. Then he said quietly, “I’m still going to reconnoiter. You sit here.”
He was back in less than two minutes, jerked open the car door, collapsed onto the seat, let out a gasping sob.
Barbara said, “Darling! Darling!”
“Oh, my God!” He choked and caught his breath. “She’s in there! Grace.
And so am I.” He dropped his face to the steering wheel and sobbed. “Hugh.”
“What? Oh, my God!”
“Stop it, Hugh. I started the engine while you were gone. The keys were in the ignition, I had left them there so that Duke could move it and get out. So let’s go. Can you drive?”
He sobered down. “I can drive.” He took ten seconds to check the instrument board, adjusted the seat backwards, put it in gear, turned right out of his drive. Four minutes later he turned west on the highway into the mountains, being careful to observe the stop sign; it had occurred to him that this was no night to get stopped and pulled off the road for driving without a license.
As he made the turn a clock inthe distance bonged the half hour; he
glanced at his wrist watch, noted a one-minute difference. “Switch on the radio, hon.”
“Hugh, I’m sorry. The durn thing quit and I couldn’t afford to have it repaired.”
“Oh. No matter. The news doesn’t matter, I mean; time is all that matters. I’m trying to estimate how far we can go in an hour. An hour and some minutes. Do you recall what time the first missile hit us?”
“I think you told me it was eleven-forty-seven.”
“That’s my recollection, too. I’m certain of it, I just wanted it confirmed. But it all checks. You made crêpes Suzettes, you and Karen fetched them in just in time to catch the end of the ten o’clock news. I ate pretty quickly-they were wonderful — this booney old character rang the doorbell.
Me, I mean. And I answered it. Call it ten-twenty or a little after. So we just heard half-past chime and my watch agrees. We’ve got about seventy-five minutes to get as far from ground zero as possible.”
Barbara made no comment. Moments later they passed the city limits; Hugh put the speed up from a careful forty-five to an exact sixty-five.
About ten minutes later she said, “Dear? I’m sorry. About Karen, I mean.
Not about anything else.”
“I’m not sorry about anything. No, not about Karen. Hearing her merry laugh again shook me up, ~yes. But now I treasure it. Barbara, for the first time in my life I have a conviction of immortality. Karen is alive right now, back there behind us-and yet we saw her die. So somehow, in some timeless sense, Karen is alive forever, somewhere. Don’t ask me to explain it, but that’s how it is.”
“I’ve always known it, Hugh. But I didn’t dare say so.”
“Dare say anything, damn it! I told you that long ago. So I no longer feel sorrow over Karen. I can’t feel any honest sorrow over Grace. Some people make a career of trying to get their own way; she’s one of them. As for Duke, I hate to think about him. I had great hopes for my son. My first son. But I never had control over his rearing and I certainly had no control over what became of him. And, as Joe pointed out to me, Duke’s not too badly off-if welfare and security and happiness are sufficient criteria.” Hugh shrugged without taking his hands from the wheel. “So I shall forget him. As of this instant I shall endeavor never to think about Duke again.”
Presently he spoke again. “Hon, can you, in spite of being smothered in babies, get at that clock thing on my shoulder and get it off?”
“I’m sure I can.”
“Then do it and chuck it into the ditch. I’d rather throw it away inside the circle of total destruction-if we’re still in it.” He scowled. “I don’t want those people ever to have time travel. Especially Ponse.”
She worked silently for some moments, awkwardly with one hand. She got the radiation clock loose and threw it out into the darkness before she spoke. “Hugh, I don’t think Ponse intended us to accept that offer. I think he made the terms such that he knew that I would refuse, even if you were indlined to sacrifice yourself.”
“Of course! He picked us as guinea pigs-his white mice –.~fl6 and chivvied us into ‘volunteering.’ Barbara, I can stand-and somewhat understand but not forgive-a straight-out son of a bitch. But Ponse was, for my money, much worse. He had good intentions. He could always prove why the hotfoot he was giving you was for your own good. I despise him.”
Barbara said stubbornly, “Hugh, how many white men of today could be trusted with the power Ponse had and use it with as much gentleness as he did use it?”
“Huh? None. Not even yours truly. And that was a low blow about ‘white men.’ Color doesn’t enter into it.”
“I withdraw the word ‘white.’ And I’m sure that you are one who could be
trusted with it. But I don’t know any others.”
“Not even me. Nobody can be trusted with it. The one time I had it I handled it as badly as Ponse. I mean that time I caused a gun to be raised at Duke. I should simply have used karate and knocked him out or even killed him. But not humiliated him. Nobody, Barbara. But Ponse was especially bad. Take Memtok. I’m really sorry that I happened to kill Memtok. He was a man who behaved better than his nature, not worse. Memtok had a streak of meanness, sadism, wide as his back. But he held it closely in check so that he could do his job better. But Ponse — ~ Barbie hon, this is probably a subject on which you and I will never agree. You feel a bit soft toward him because he was sweet to you most of the time and always sweet to our boys. But I despised him because of that-because he was always showing ‘king’s mercy’ — being less cruel than he could have been, but always reminding his victim of how cruel he could be if he were not such a sweet old guy and such a prince of a fellow. I despised him for it. I despised him long before I found out about his having young girls butchered and served for his dinner.”
“What?”
“Didn’t you know? Oh, surely, you must have known. Ponse and I discussed it in our very last talk. Weren’t you listening?”
“I thought that was just heavy sarcasm, on the part of each of you.” “Nope, Ponse is a cannibal. Maybe not a cannibal, since he doesn’t
consider us human. But he does eat us-they all do. Ponse always ate girls. About one a day for his family table, I gathered. Girls about the age and plumpness of Kitten.”
“But — But — Hugh, I ate the same thing he did, lots of times. I must have — I must have — “
“Sure you did. So did I. But not after I knew. Nor did you.” “Honey…you better stop the car. I’m going to be sick.”
“Throw up on the twins if you must. This car doesn’t stop for anything.”
She managed to get the window open, got it mostly outside. Presently he said gently, “Feeling better?”
“Some.”
“Sweetheart, don’t hold what he ate too much against Ponse. He honestly did not know it was wrong-and no doubt cows would feel the same way about us, if they knew. But these other things he knew were wrong. Because he tried to justify them. He rationalized slavery, he rationalized tyranny, he rationalized cruelty, and always wanted the victim to agree and thank him. The headsman expected to be tipped.”
“I don’t want to talk about him, dear. I feel all mixed up inside.” “Sorry. I’m half drunk without a drop and babbling. I’ll shut up. Watch
the traffic behind, I’m going to make a left turn shortly.”
She did so and after they had turned off on a state road, narrower and not as well graded, he said, “I’ve figured out where we’re going. At first I was just putting distance behind us. Now we’ve got a destination. Maybe a safe one.”
“Where, Hugh?”
“A shutdown mine. I had a piece of it, lost some money in it. Now maybe it pays off. The Havely Lode. Nice big tunnels and we can reach the access road from this road. If I can find it in the dark. If we can get there before the trouble starts.” He concentrated on herding the car, changing down on the grades both climbing and on the occasional downhill piece, braking hard before going into a curve, then cornering hard with plenty of throttle in the curves.
After a particularly vicious turn with Barbara on the hairraising outside, she said, “Look, dear, I know you’re doing it to save us. But we can be just as dead from a car crash as from an H-bomb.”
He grinned without slowing. “I used to drive jeeps in the dark with no headlights. Barbie, I won’t kill us. Few people realize how much a car will do
and I’m delighted that this has a manual gear shift. You need it in the mountains. I would not dare drive this way with an automatic shift.”
She shut up and prayed, silently.
The road dropped into a high alp where it met another road; at the intersection there was a light. When he saw it Hugh said, “Read my watch.”
“Eleven-twenty-five.”
“Good. We are slightly over fifty miles from ground zero. From my house, I mean. And the Havely Lode is only five minutes beyond here, I know how to find it now. I see Schmidt’s Corner is open and we are low on gas. We’ll grab some and groceries, too-yes, I recall you told me you had both in this car; we’ll get more-and still make it before the curtain.”
He braked and scattered gravel, stopped by a pump, jumped out. “Run inside and start grabbing stuff. Put the twins on the floor of the car and close the door. Won’t hurt ’em.” He stuck the hose into the car’s tank, started cranking the old-fashioned pump.
She was out in a moment. “There’s nobody here.”
“Honk the horn. The Dutchman is probably back at his house.”
Barbara honked and honked and the babies cried. Hugh hung up the hose. “Fourteen gallons we owe him for. Let’s go in. Should roll in just ten minutes, to be safe.”
Schmidt’s Corner was a gasoline station, a small lunch counter, a one- end grocery store, all of the sort that caters to local people, fishermen, hunters, and the tourist who likes to get off the pavement. Hugh wasted no time trying to rouse out the owner; the place told its own story: All lights were on, the screen door stood open, coffee was simmering on a hot plate, a chair had been knocked over, and the radio was tuned to the emergency frequency. It suddenly spoke up as he came in:
“Bomb warning. Third bomb warning. This is not a drill. Take shelter at once. Any shelter, God damn it, you’re going to be atom-bombed in the next few minutes. I’m damn well going to leave this goddam microphone and dive for the basement myself when impact is five minutes away! So get the lead out, you stupid fools, and quit listening to this chatter! TAKE SHELTER!”
“Grab those empty cartons and start filling them. Don’t pack, just dump stuff in. I’ll trot them out. We’ll fill the back seat and floor.” Hugh started following his own orders, had one carton filled before Barbara did. He rushed it out, rushed back; Barbara had another waiting, and a third almost filled. “Hugh. Stop one second. Look.”
The end carton was not empty. Mama cat, quite used to strangers, stared solemnly out at him while four assorted fuzzy ones nursed. Hugh returned her stare.
He suddenly closed the top of the carton over her. “All right,” he said. “Load something light into another carton so it weighs this one down while I drive. Hurry.” He rushed out to the car with the little family while the mother cat set up agonized complaint.
Barbara followed quickly with a half-loaded carton, put it on top of the cat box. They both rushed back inside. “Take all the canned milk he’s got.” Hugh stopped long enough to put a roll of dollars on top of the cash register. “And grab all the toilet paper or Kleenex you see, too. Three minutes till we leave.”
They left in five minutes but with more cartons; the back seat of the car was well leveled off. “I got a dozen tea towels,” Barbara said gleefully, “and six big packs of Chux.”
“Huh?”
“Diapers, dear, diapers. Might last us past the fallout. I hope. And I grabbed two packs of playing cards, too. Maybe I shouldn’t have.”
“Don’t be hypocritical, my love. Hang onto the kids and be sure that door is locked.” He drove for several hundred yards, with his head hanging
out. “Here!”
The going got very rough. Hugh drove in low gear and very carefully~ A black hole in the side of the mountain loomed up suddenly as he
turned. “Good, we’ve made it! And we drive straight inside.” He started in and tromped on the brake. “Good Lord! A cow.”
“And a calf,” Barbara added, leaning out her side. “I’ll have to back out.”
“Hugh. A cow. With a calf.”
“Uh…how the hell would we feed her?”
“Hugh, it may not burn here at all. And that’s a real live cow.” “Uh…all right, all right. We’ll eat them if we have to.” There was a
wooden wall and a stout door about thirty feet inside the mouth of the mine tunnel. Hugh eased the car forward, forcing the reluctant cow ahead of him, and at last crunched his side of the car against the rock wall to allow the other door to open.
The cow immediately made a break for freedom; Barbara opened her door and thereby stopped her. The calf bawled, the twins echoed him.
Hugh squeezed out past Barbara and the babies, got past the cow and unfastened the door, which was secured by a padlock passed through a hasp but not closed. He shoved the cow’s rump aside and braced the door open. “Kick on the ‘up’ lights. Let it shine in.”
Barbara did, then insisted that cow and calf be taken inside. Hugh muttered something about, “Noah’s bloody ark!” but agreed, largely because the cow was so very much in the way. The door, though wide, was about one inch narrower than bossie; she did not want to go through it. But Hugh got her beaded that way, then kicked her emphatically. She went through. The calf followed his mother.
At which point Hugh discovered why th~ cow was in the tunnel. Someone- presumably someone nearby-had converted the mine to use as a cow barn; there were a dozen or so bales of hay inside. The cow showed no wish to leave once she was at this treasure.
Cartons were carried in, two cartons were dumped and a twin placed in each, with a carton of cat and kittens just beyond and all three weighted down to insure temporary captivity.
While they were unloading Barbara’s survival gear from the trunk, everything suddenly became noonday bright. Barbara said, “Oh, heavens! We aren’t through.”
“We go on unloading. Maybe ten minutes till the sound wave. I don’t know about the shock wave. Here, take the rifle.”
They had the car empty with jeep cans of water and gasoline out but not yet inside when the ground began to tremble and noise of giant subways started. Hugh put the cans inside, yelled, “Move these!”
“Hugh! Come in!”
“Soon.” There was loose hay he had driven over just back of the car. He gathered it up, stuffed it through the door, went back and scavenged, not to save the hay but to reduce fire hazard to gasoline in the car’s tank. He considered backing the car out and letting it plunge down the hill. He decided not to risk it. If it got hot enough to set fire to the car’s gas tank-well, there were side tunnels, deep inside. “Barbara! Do you have a light yet?”
“Yes! Please come inside. Please!”
He went in, barred the door. “Now we move these bales of hay, far back.
You carry the light, I carry the bay. And mind your feet. It is wet a bit farther back. That’s why we shut down. Too much pumping.”
They moved groceries, livestock (human, bovine, and feline) and gear into a side tunnel a hundred yards inside the mountain. They had to wade through several inches of water on the way but the side tunnel was slightly higher and dry. Once Barbara lost a moccasin. “Sorry,” said Hugh. “This
mountain is a sponge. Almost every bore struck water.”
“I,” said Barbara, “am a woman who appreciates water. I have had reason
to.”
Hugh did not answer as the flash of the second bomb suddenly brightened
everything even that deep inside-just through cracks of a wooden wall. He looked at his watch. “Right on time. We’re sitting through a second show of the same movie, Barb. This time I hope it will be cooler.”
“I wonder.”
“If it will be cooler? Sure, it will. Even if it burns outside. I think I know a place where we can go down, and save us, and maybe the cats but not the cow and calf, even if smoke gets pulled in.”
“Hugh, I didn’t mean that.” “What did you mean?”
“Hugh, I didn’t tell you this at the time. I was too upset by it and didn’t want you to get upset. But I don’t own a manual gear shift car.”
“Huh? Then whose car is that outside?”
“Mine. I mean my keys were in it-and it certainly had my stuff in the trunk. But mine had automatic shift.”
“Honey,” he said slowly, “I think you’ve flipped your lid a little.”
“I thought you would think so and that’s why I didn’t say anything until we were safe. But Hugh-listen to me, dear! — I have never owned a manual shift car. I didn’t learn to drive that far back. I don’t know how to drive manual shift.”
He stared thoughtfully. “I don’t understand it.”
“Neither do I. Darling, when you came away from your house, you said, ‘She’s in there. Grace.’ Did you mean you saw her?”
“Why, yes. She was nodding over the television, half passed out.” “But, dearest, Grace had been nodding over the television. But you put
her to bed while I was making crêpes Suzettes. Don’t you remember? When the alert came, you went and got her and carried her down-in her nightgown.”
Hugh Farnham stood quite still for several moments. “So I did,” he agreed. “So I had. Well, let’s get the rest of this gear moved. The big one will be along in about an hour and a half.”
“But will it be?” “What do you mean?”
“Hugh, I don’t know what has happened. Maybe this is a different world. Or maybe it’s the same one but just a tiny bit changed by-well, by us coming back, perhaps.”
“I don’t know. But right now we go on, moving this stuff.”
The big one came on time. It shook them up, did not hurt them. When the air wave hit, it shook them up again. But without casualties other than to the nerves of some very nervous animals-the twins by now seemed to enjoy rough stuff.
Hugh noted the time, then said thoughtfully, “If it is a different world, it is not so very different. And yet — “
“Yet what, dear?”
“Well, it is some different. You wouldn’t forget that about your own car. And I do remember putting Grace to bed early; Duke and I had a talk afterwards. So, it’s different.” Suddenly he grinned. “It could be importantly different. If the future can change the past, or whatever, maybe the past can change the future, too. Maybe the United States won’t be wholly destroyed.
Maybe neither side will be so suicidal as to use plague bombs. Maybe — Hell, maybe Ponse will never get a chance to have teen-age girls for dinner!” He added, “I’m damn’ well going to make a try! To see that he doesn’t.”
“We’ll try! And our boys will try.”
“Yes. But that’s tomorrow. I think the fireworks are over for tonight.
Madame, do you think you can sleep on a pile of hay?”
“Just sleep?”
“You’re too eager. I’ve had a long hard day.”
“You had had a long hard day the other time, too.” “We’ll see.”
Chapter 23
They lived through the missiles, they lived through the bombs, they lived through the fires, they lived through the epidemics-which were not extreme and may not have been weapons; both sides disclaimed them-and they lived through the long period of disorders while civil government writhed like a snake with a broken back. They lived. They went on.
Their sign reads:
FARNHAM’S FREEHOLD
TRADING POST & RESTAURANT BAR
American Vodka Corn Liquor Applejack
Pure Spring Water Grade “A” Milk
Corned Beef & Potatoes Steak & Fried Potatoes Butter & some days Bread Smoked Bear Meat
Jerked Quisling (by the neck)
!!!!Any BOOK Accepted as Cash!!!! DAY NURSERY
!!FREE KITTENS!!
Blacksmithing, Machine Shop, Sheet Metal Work — You Supply the Metal FARNHAM SCHOOL OF CONTRACT BRIDGE
Lessons by Arrangement
Social Evening Every Wednesday WARNING!!!
Ring Bell. Wait. Advance with your Hands Up. Stay on path, avoid mines. We lost three customers last week. We can’t afford to lose you. No sales tax. Hugh & Barbara Farnham & Family
Freeholders
High above their sign their homemade starry flag is flying — and they are still going on.
The End
Posts Regarding Life and Contentment
Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.
Posts about the Changes in America
America is going through a period of change. Change is good… that is, after it occurs. Often however, there are large periods of discomfort as the period of adjustment takes place. Here are some posts that discuss this issue.
More Posts about Life
I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.
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The Cold Equations appeared in the August 1954 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. I can do no better than John Campbell’s original preface to this story: “The Frontier is a strange place – and a frontier is not always easy to recognize. It may lie on the other side of a simple door marked ‘No admittance’ – but it is always deadly dangerous.” — ed, N.E. Lilly
There was nothing to indicate the fact but the white hand of the tiny gauge on the board before him. The control room was empty but for himself; there was no sound other than the murmur of the drives — but the white hand had moved. It had been on zero when the little ship was launched from the Stardust; now, an hour later, it had crept up. There was something in the supply closet across the room, it was saying, some kind of a body that radiated heat.
It could be but one kind of a body — a living, human body.
He leaned back in the pilot’s chair and drew a deep, slow breath, considering what he would have to do. He was an EDS pilot, inured to the sight of death, long since accustomed to it and to viewing the dying of another man with an objective lack of emotion, and he had no choice in what he must do. There could be no alternative — but it required a few moments of conditioning for even an EDS pilot to prepare himself to walk across the room and coldly, deliberately, take the life of a man he had yet to meet.
He would, of course, do it. It was the law, stated very bluntly and definitely in grim Paragraph L, Section 8, of Interstellar Regulations: “Any stowaway discovered in an EDS shall be jettisoned immediately following discovery.”
It was the law, and there could be no appeal.
It was a law not of men’s choosing but made imperative by the circumstances of the space frontier. Galactic expansion had followed the development of the hyperspace drive, and as men scattered wide across the frontier, there had come the problem of contact with the isolated first colonies and exploration parties. The huge hyperspace cruisers were the product of the combined genius and effort of Earth and were long and expensive in the building. They were not available in such numbers that small colonies could possess them. The cruisers carried the colonists to their new worlds and made periodic visits, running on tight schedules, but they could not stop and turn aside to visit colonies scheduled to be visited at another time; such a delay would destroy their schedule and produce a confusion and uncertainty that would wreck the complex interdependence between old Earth and the new worlds of the frontier.
Some method of delivering supplies or assistance when an emergency occurred on a world not scheduled for a visit had been needed, and the Emergency Dispatch Ships had been the answer. Small and collapsible, they occupied little room in the hold of the cruiser; made of light metal and plastics, they were driven by a small rocket drive that consumed relatively little fuel. Each cruiser carried four EDSs, and when a call for aid was received, the nearest cruiser would drop into normal space long enough to launch an EDS with the needed supplies or personnel, then vanish again as it continued on its course.
The cruisers, powered by nuclear converters, did not use the liquid rocket fuel, but nuclear converters were far too large and complex to permit their installation in the EDSs. The cruisers were forced by necessity to carry a limited amount of bulky rocket fuel, and the fuel was rationed with care, the cruiser’s computers determining the exact amount of fuel each EDS would require for its mission. The computers considered the course coordinates, the mass of the EDS, the mass of pilot and cargo; they were very precise and accurate and omitted nothing from their calculations. They could not, however, foresee and allow for the added mass of a stowaway.
The Stardust had received the request from one of the exploration parties stationed on Woden, the six men of the party already being stricken with the fever carried by the green kala midges and their own supply of serum destroyed by the tornado that had torn through their camp. The Stardust had gone through the usual procedure, dropping into normal space to launch the EDS with the fever serum, then vanishing again in hyperspace. Now, an hour later, the gauge was saying there was something more than the small carton of serum in the supply closet.
He let his eyes rest on the narrow white door of the closet. There, just inside, another man lived and breathed and was beginning to feel assured that discovery of his presence would now be too late for the pilot to alter the situation. It was too late; for the man behind the door it was far later than he thought and in a way he would find it terrible to believe.
There could be no alternative. Additional fuel would be used during the hours of deceleration to compensate for the added mass of the stowaway, infinitesimal increments of fuel that would not be missed until the ship had almost reached its destination. Then, at some distance above the ground that might be as near as a thousand feet or as far as tens of thousands of feet, depending upon the mass of ship and cargo and the preceding period of deceleration, the unmissed increments of fuel would make their absence known; the EDS would expend its last drops of fuel with a sputter and go into whistling free fall. Ship and pilot and stowaway would merge together upon impact as a wreckage of metal and plastic, flesh and blood, driven deep into the soil. The stowaway had signed his own death warrant when he concealed himself on the ship; he could not be permitted to take seven others with him.
He looked again at the telltale white hand, then rose to his feet. What he must do would be unpleasant for both of them; the sooner it was over, the better. He stepped across the control room to stand by the white door.
“Come out!” His command was harsh and abrupt above the murmur of the drive.
It seemed he could hear the whisper of a furtive movement inside the closet, then nothing. He visualized the stowaway cowering closer into one corner, suddenly worried by the possible consequences of his act, his self-assurance evaporating.
“I said out!”
He heard the stowaway move to obey, and he waited with his eyes alert on the door and his hand near the blaster at his side.
The door opened and the stowaway stepped through it, smiling. “All right — I give up. Now what?”
It was a girl.
He stared without speaking, his hand dropping away from the blaster, and acceptance of what
he saw coming like a heavy and unexpected physical blow. The stowaway was not a man — she was a girl in her teens, standing before him in little white gypsy sandals, with the top of her brown, curly head hardly higher than his shoulder, with a faint, sweet scent of perfume coming from her, and her smiling face tilted up so her eyes could look unknowing and unafraid into his as she waited for his answer.
Now what? Had it been asked in the deep, defiant voice of a man, he would have answered it with action, quick and efficient. He would have taken the stowaway’s identification disk and ordered him into the air lock. Had the stowaway refused to obey, he would have used the blaster. It would not have taken long; within a minute the body would have been ejected into space — had the stowaway been a man.
He returned to the pilot’s chair and motioned her to seat herself on the boxlike bulk of the drive-control units that were set against the wall beside him. She obeyed, his silence making the smile
fade into the meek and guilty expression of a pup that has been caught in mischief and knows it must be punished.
“You still haven’t told me,” she said. “I’m guilty, so what happens to me now? Do I pay a fine, or what?”
“What are you doing here?” he asked. “Why did you stow away on this EDS?”
“I wanted to see my brother. He’s with the government survey crew on Woden and I haven’t seen him for ten years, not since he left Earth to go into government survey work.” “What was your destination on the Stardust?”
“Mimir. I have a position waiting for me there. My brother has been sending money home all the time to us
— my father and mother and me — and he paid for a special course in linguistics I was taking. I graduated sooner than expected and I was offered this job in Mimir. I knew it would be almost a year before Gerry’s job was done on Woden so he could come on to Mimir, and that’s why I hid in the closet there. There was plenty of room for me and I was willing to pay the fine. There were only the two of us kids — Gerry and I — and I haven’t seen him for so long, and I didn’t want to wait another year when I could see him now, even though I knew I would be breaking some kind of a regulation when I did it.”
I knew I would be breaking some kind of a regulation. In a way, she could not be blamed for her ignorance of the law; she was of Earth and had not realized that the laws of the space frontier must, of necessity, be as hard and relentless as the environment that gave them birth. Yet, to protect such as her from the results of their own ignorance of the frontier, there had been a sign over the door that led to the section of the Stardustthat housed the EDSs, a sign that was plain for all to see and heed: UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL KEEP OUT!
“Does your brother know that you took passage on the Stardust for Mimir?”
“Oh, yes. I sent him a spacegram telling him about my graduation and about going to Mimir on the Stardust a month before I left Earth. I already knew Mimir was where he would be stationed in a little over a year. He gets a promotion then, and he’ll be based on Mimir and not have to stay out a year at a time on field trips, like he does now.”
There were two different survey groups on Woden, and he asked, “What is his name?” “Cross — Gerry Cross. He’s in Group Two — that was the way his address read. Do you know him?”
Group One had requested the serum: Group Two was eight thousand miles away, across the Western Sea.
“No, I’ve never met him,” he said, then turned to the control board and cut the deceleration to a fraction of a gravity, knowing as he did so that it could not avert the ultimate end, yet doing the only thing he could do to prolong that ultimate end. The sensation was like that of the ship suddenly dropping, and the girls involuntary movement of surprise half lifted her from her seat. “We’re going faster now, aren’t we?” she asked. “Why are we doing that?”
He told her the truth. “To save fuel for a little while.” “You mean we don’t have very much?”
He delayed the answer he must give her so soon to ask, “How did you manage to stow away?”
“I just sort of walked in when no one was looking my way,” she said. “I was practicing my Gelanese on the native girl who does the cleaning in the Ship’s Supply office when someone came in with an order for supplies for the survey crew on Woden. I slipped into the closet there after the ship was ready to go just before you came in. It was an impulse of the moment to stow away, so I could get to see Gerry — and from the way you keep looking at me so grim, I’m not sure it was a very wise impulse. But I’ll be a model criminal — or do I mean prisoner?” She smiled at him again. “I intended to pay for my keep on top of paying the fine. I can cook and I can patch clothes for everyone and I know how to do all kinds of useful things, even a little bit about nursing.”
There was one more question to ask:
“Did you know what the supplies were that the survey crew ordered?” “Why, no. Equipment they needed in their work, I supposed.”
Why couldn’t she have been a man with some ulterior motive? A fugitive from justice hoping to lose himself on a raw new world; an opportunist seeking transportation to the new colonies where he might find golden fleece for the taking; a crackpot with a mission. Perhaps once in his lifetime an EDS pilot would find such a stowaway on his ship — warped men, mean and selfish men, brutal and dangerous men — but never before a smiling, blue-eyed girl who was willing to pay her fine and work for her keep that she might see her brother.
He turned to the board and turned the switch that would signal the Stardust. The call would be futile, but he could not, until he had exhausted that one vain hope, seize her and thrust her into the air lock as he would an animal — or a man. The delay, in the meantime, would not be dangerous with the EDS decelerating at fractional gravity.
A voice spoke from the communicator. “Stardust. Identify yourself and proceed.” “Barton, EDS 34GII. Emergency. Give me Commander Delhart.”
There was a faint confusion of noises as the request went through the proper channels. The girl was watching him, no longer smiling.
“Are you going to order them to come back after me?” she asked.
The communicator clicked and there was the sound of a distant voice saying, “Commander, the EDS requests…”
“Are they coming back after me?” she asked again. “Won’t I get to see my brother after all?” “Barton?” The blunt, gruff voice of Commander Delhart came from the communicator. “What’s this about an emergency?”
“A stowaway,” he answered.
“A stowaway?” There was a slight surprise to the question. “That’s rather unusual — but why the ‘emergency’ call? You discovered him in time, so there should be no appreciable danger, and I presume you’ve informed Ship’s Records so his nearest relatives can be notified.”
“That’s why I had to call you, first. The stowaway is still aboard and the circumstances are so different—”
“Different?” the commander interrupted, impatience in his voice. “How can they be different? You know you have a limited supply of fuel; you also know the law as well as I do: ‘Any stowaway discovered in an EDS shall be jettisoned immediately following discovery.’”
There was the sound of a sharply indrawn breath from the girl. “What does he mean?”
“The stowaway is a girl.”
“What?”
“She wanted to see her brother. She’s only a kid and she didn’t know what she was really doing.” “I see.” All the curtness was gone from the commander’s voice. “So you called me in the hope I could do something?” Without waiting for an answer he went on, “I’m sorry — I can do nothing. This cruiser must maintain its schedule; the life of not one person but the lives of many depend on it. I know how you feel but I’m powerless to help you. You’ll have to go through with it. I’ll have you connected with Ship’s Records.” The communicator faded to a faint rustle of sound, and he turned back to the girl. She was leaning forward on the bench, almost rigid, her eyes fixed wide and frightened.
“What did he mean, to go through with it? To jettison me… to go through with it — what did he mean? Not the way it sounded… he couldn’t have. What did he mean — what did he really mean?”
Her time was too short for the comfort of a lie to be more than a cruelly fleeting delusion. “He meant it the way it sounded.”“No!” She recoiled from him as though he had struck her, one hand half raised as though to fend him off and stark unwillingness to believe in her eyes. “It will have to be.” “No! You’re joking — you’re insane! You can’t mean it!” “I’m sorry.” He spoke slowly to her, gently. “I should have told you before — I should have, but I had to do what I could first; I had to call the Stardust. You heard what the commander said.” “But you can’t — if you make me leave the ship, I’ll die.”
“I know.”
She searched his face, and the unwillingness to believe left her eyes, giving way slowly to a look of dazed horror. “You know?” She spoke the words far apart, numbly and wonderingly. “I know. It has to be like that.”
“You mean it — you really mean it.” She sagged back against the wall, small and limp like a little rag doll, and all the protesting and disbelief gone. “You’re going to do it — you’re going to make me die?” “I’m sorry,” he said again. “You’ll never know how sorry I am. It has to be that way and no human in the universe can change it.”
“You’re going to make me die and I didn’t do anything to die for — I didn’t do anything—” He sighed, deep and weary. “I know you didn’t, child. I know you didn’t.” “EDS.” The communicator rapped brisk and metallic. “This is Ship’s Records. Give us all information on subject’s identification disk.” He got out of his chair to stand over her. She clutched the edge of the seat, her upturned face white under the brown hair and the lipstick standing out like a blood-red cupid’s bow.
“Now?”
“I want your identification disk,” he said. She released the edge of the seat and fumbled at the chain that suspended the plastic disk from her neck with fingers that were trembling and awkward. He reached down and unfastened the clasp for her, then returned with the disk to his chair. “Here’s your data, Records: Identification Number T837—” “One moment,” Records interrupted. “This is to be filed on the gray card, of course?” “Yes.” “And the time of execution?” “I’ll tell you later.” “Later? This is highly irregular; the time of the subject’s death is required before—” He kept the thickness out of his voice with an effort. “Then we’ll do it in a highly irregular manner — you’ll hear the disk read first. The subject is a girl and she’s listening to everything that’s said. Are you capable of understanding that?” There was a brief, almost shocked silence; then Records said meekly, “Sorry. Go ahead.”
He began to read the disk, reading it slowly to delay the inevitable for as long as possible, trying to help her by giving her what little time he could to recover from her first horror and let it resolve into the calm of acceptance and resignation.
“Number T8374 dash Y54. Name, Marilyn Lee Cross. Sex, female. Born July 7, 2160.” She was only eighteen. “Height, five-three. Weight, a hundred and ten.” Such a slight weight, yet enough to add fatally to the mass of the shell-thin bubble that was an EDS. “Hair, brown. Eyes, blue. Complexion, light. Blood type O.” Irrelevant data. “Destination, Port City, Mimir.” Invalid data.
He finished and said, “I’ll call you later,” then turned once again to the girl. She was huddled back against the wall, watching him with a look of numb and wondering fascination.
“They’re waiting for you to kill me, aren’t they? They want me dead, don’t they? You and everybody on the cruiser want me dead, don’t you?” Then the numbness broke and her voice was that of a frightened and bewildered child. “Everybody wants me dead and I didn’t do anything. I didn’t hurt anyone — I only wanted to see my brother.” “It’s not the way you think — it isn’t that way at all,” he said. “Nobody wants it this way; nobody would ever let it be this way if it was humanly possible to change it.”
“Then why is it? I don’t understand. Why is it?” “This ship is carrying kala fever serum to Group One on Woden. Their own supply was destroyed by a tornado. Group Two — the crew your brother is in is eight thousand miles away across the Western Sea, and their helicopters can’t cross it to help Group One. The fever is invariably fatal unless the serum can be had in time, and the six men in Group One will die unless this ship reaches them on schedule. These little ships are always given barely enough fuel to reach their destination, and if you stay aboard, your added weight will cause it to use up all its fuel before it reaches the ground. It will crash then, and you and I will die and so will the six men waiting for the fever serum.”
It was a full minute before she spoke, and as she considered his words, the expression of numbness left her eyes. “Is that it?” she asked at last. “Just that the ship doesn’t have enough fuel?” “Yes.” “I can go alone or I can take seven others with me — is that the way it is?” “That’s the way it is.” “And nobody wants me to have to die?” “Nobody.”
“Then maybe — Are you sure nothing can be done about it? Wouldn’t people help me if they could?” “Everyone would like to help you, but there is nothing anyone can do. I did the only thing I could do when I called the Stardust.”
“And it won’t come back — but there might be other cruisers, mightn’t there? Isn’t there any hope at all that there might be someone, somewhere, who could do something to help me?” She was leaning forward a little in her eagerness as she waited for his answer.
“No.” The word was like the drop of a cold stone and she again leaned back against the wall, the hope and eagerness leaving her face. “You’re sure — you know you’re sure?”
“I’m sure. There are no other cruisers within forty light-years; there is nothing and no one to change things.” She dropped her gaze to her lap and began twisting a pleat of her skirt between her fingers, saying no more as her mind began to adapt itself to the grim knowledge.
It was better so; with the going of all hope would go the fear; with the going of all hope would come resignation. She needed time and she could have so little of it. How much?
The EDSs were not equipped with hull-cooling units; their speed had to be reduced to a moderate level before they entered the atmosphere. They were decelerating at .10 gravity, approaching their destination at a far higher speed than the computers had calculated on. The Stardust had been quite near Woden when she launched the EDS; their present velocity was putting them nearer by the second. There would be a critical point, soon to be reached, when he would have to resume deceleration. When he did so, the girls weight would be multiplied by the gravities of deceleration, would become, suddenly, a factor of paramount importance, the factor the computers had been ignorant of when they determined the amount of fuel the EDS should have. She would have to go when deceleration began; it could be no other way. When would that be
— how long could he let her stay? “How long can I stay?”
He winced involuntarily from the words that were so like an echo of his own thoughts. How long? He didn’t know; he would have to ask the ship’s computers. Each EDS was given a meager surplus of fuel to compensate for unfavorable conditions within the atmosphere, and relatively little fuel was being consumed for the time being. The memory banks of the computers would still contain all data pertaining to the course set for the EDS; such data would not be erased until the EDS reached its destination. He had only to give the computers the new data — the girl’s weight and the exact time at which he had reduced the deceleration to .10. “Barton.” Commander Delhart’s voice came abruptly from the communicator as he opened his mouth to call the Stardust. “A check with Records shows me you haven’t completed your report.
Did you reduce the deceleration?”
So the commander knew what he was trying to do.
“I’m decelerating at point ten,” he answered. “I cut the deceleration at seventeen fifty and the weight is a hundred and ten. I would like to stay at point ten as long as the computers say I can. Will you give them the question?”
It was contrary to regulations for an EDS pilot to make any changes in the course or degree of deceleration the computers had set for him, but the commander made no mention of the violation. Neither did he ask the reason for it. It was not necessary for him to ask; he had not become commander of an interstellar cruiser without both intelligence and an understanding of human nature.
He said only, “I’ll have that given to the computers.”
The communicator fell silent and he and the girl waited, neither of them speaking. They would not have to wait long; the computers would give the answer within moments of the asking. The new factors would be fed into the steel maw of the first bank, and the electrical impulses would go through the complex circuits. Here and there a relay might click, a tiny cog turn over, but it would be essentially the electrical impulses that found the answer; formless, mindless, invisible, determining with utter precision how long the pale girl beside him might live. Then five little segments of metal in the second bank would trip in rapid succession against an inked ribbon and a second steel maw would spit out the slip of paper that bore the answer.
The chronometer on the instrument board read 18:10 when the commander spoke again. “You will resume deceleration at nineteen ten.”She looked toward the chronometer, then quickly away from it. “Is that when… when I go?” she asked. He nodded and she dropped her eyes to her lap again.
“I’ll have the course correction given to you,” the commander said.
“Ordinarily I would never permit anything like this, but I understand your position. There is nothing I can do, other than what I’ve just done, and you will not deviate from these new instructions. You will complete your report at nineteen ten. Now — here are the course corrections.”
The voice of some unknown technician read them to him, and he wrote them down on the pad clipped to the edge of the control board. There would, he saw, be periods of deceleration when he neared the atmosphere when the deceleration would be five gravities — and at five gravities, one hundred ten pounds would become five hundred fifty pounds.
The technician finished and he terminated the contact with a brief acknowledgment. Then, hesitating a moment, he reached out and shut off the communicator. It was 18:13 and he would have nothing to report until 19:10. In the meantime, it somehow seemed indecent to permit others to hear what she might say in her last hour.
He began to check the instrument readings, going over them with unnecessary slowness. She would have to accept the circumstances, and there was nothing he could do to help her into acceptance; words of sympathy would only delay it.
It was 18:20 when she stirred from her motionlessness and spoke. “So that’s the way it has to be with me?”He swung around to face her. “You understand now, don’t you? No one would ever let it be like this if it could be changed.”
“I understand,” she said. Some of the color had returned to her face and the lipstick no longer stood out so vividly red. “There isn’t enough fuel for me to stay. When I hid on this ship, I got into something I didn’t know anything about and now I have to pay for it.”
She had violated a man-made law that said KEEP OUT, but the penalty was not for men’s making or desire and it was a penalty men could not revoke. A physical law had decreed: h amount of fuel will power an EDS with a mass of m safely to its destination; and a second physical law had decreed: h amount of fuel will not power an EDS with a mass of m plus x safely to its destination. EDSs obeyed only physical laws, and no amount of human sympathy for her could alter the second law.
“But I’m afraid. I don’t want to die — not now. I want to live, and nobody is doing anything to help me; everybody is letting me go ahead and acting just like nothing was going to happen to me. I’m going to die and nobody cares.”
“We all do,” he said. “I do and the commander does and the clerk in Ship’s Records; we all care and each of us did what little he could to help you. It wasn’t enough — it was almost nothing — but it was all we could do.”
“Not enough fuel — I can understand that,” she said, as though she had not heard his own words. “But to have to die for it.Me alone…”
How hard it must be for her to accept the fact. She had never known danger of death, had never known the environments where the lives of men could be as fragile and fleeting as sea foam tossed against a rocky shore. She belonged on gentle Earth, in that secure and peaceful society where she could be young and gay and laughing with the others of her kind, where life was precious and well guarded and there was always the assurance that tomorrow would come. She belonged in that world of soft winds and a warm sun, music and moonlight and gracious manners, and not on the hard, bleak frontier.
“How did it happen to me so terribly quickly? An hour ago I was on the Stardust, going to Mimir. Now the Stardust is going on without me and I’m going to die and I’ll never see Gerry and Mama and Daddy again — I’ll never see anything again.”
He hesitated, wondering how he could explain it to her so she would really understand and not feel she had somehow been the victim of a reasonlessly cruel injustice. She did not know what the frontier was like; she thought in terms of safe, secure Earth. Pretty girls were not jettisoned on Earth; there was a law against it. On Earth her plight would have filled the newscasts and a fast black patrol ship would have been racing to her rescue. Everyone, everywhere, would have known of Marilyn Lee Cross, and no effort would have been spared to save her life. But this was not Earth and there were no patrol ships; only the Stardust, leaving them behind at many times the speed of light. There was no one to help her; there would be no Marilyn Lee Cross smiling from the newscasts tomorrow. Marilyn Lee Cross would be but a poignant memory for an EDS pilot and a name on a gray card in Ship’s Records.
“It’s different here; it’s not like back on Earth,” he said. “It isn’t that no one cares; it’s that no one can do anything to help. The frontier is big, and here along its rim the colonies and exploration parties are scattered so thin and far between. On Woden, for example, there are only sixteen men — sixteen men on an entire world. The exploration parties, the survey crews, the little first colonies — they’re all fighting alien environments, trying to make a way for those who will follow after. The environments fight back, and those who go first usually make mistakes only once. There is no margin of safety along the rim of the frontier; there can’t be until the way is made for the others who will come later, until the new worlds are tamed and settled. Until then men will have to pay the penalty for making mistakes, with no one to help them, because there is no one to help them.”
“I was going to Mimir,” she said. “I didn’t know about the frontier; I was only going to Mimir and it’s safe.”
“Mimir is safe, but you left the cruiser that was taking you there.” She was silent for a little while. “It was all so wonderful at first; there was plenty of room for me on this ship and I would be seeing Gerry so soon. I didn’t know about the fuel, didn’t know what would happen to me…”
Her words trailed away, and he turned his attention to the viewscreen, not wanting to stare at her as she fought her way through the black horror of fear toward the calm gray of acceptance.
Woden was a ball, enshrouded in the blue haze of its atmosphere, swimming in space against the background of star-sprinkled dead blackness. The great mass of Manning’s Continent sprawled like a gigantic hourglass in the Eastern Sea, with the western half of the Eastern Continent still visible. There was a thin line of shadow along the right–hand edge of the globe, and the Eastern Continent was disappearing into it as the planet turned on its axis. An hour before, the entire continent had been in view; now a thousand miles of it had gone into the thin edge of shadow and around to the night that lay on the other side of the world. The dark blue spot that was Lotus Lake was approaching the shadow. It was somewhere near the southern edge of the lake that Group Two had their camp. It would be night there soon, and quick behind the coming of night the rotation of Woden on its axis would put Group Two beyond the reach of the ship’s radio.
He would have to tell her before it was too late for her to talk to her brother. In a way, it would be better for both of them should they not do so, but it was not for him to decide. To each of them the last words would be something to hold and cherish, something that would cut like the blade of a knife yet would be infinitely precious to remember, she for her own brief moments to live and he for the rest of his life.
He held down the button that would flash the grid lines on the viewscreen and used the known diameter of the planet to estimate the distance the southern tip of Lotus Lake had yet to go until it passed beyond radio range. It was approximately five hundred miles. Five hundred miles; thirty minutes and the chronometer read 18:30. Allowing for error in estimating, it would not be later than 19:05 that the turning of Woden would cut off her brother’s voice.
The first border of the Western continent was already in sight along the left side of the world. Four thousand miles across it lay the shore of the Western Sea and the camp of Group One. It had been in the Western Sea that the tornado had originated, to strike with such fury at the camp and destroy half their prefabricated buildings, including the one that housed the medical supplies. Two days before, the tornado had not existed; it had been no more than great gentle masses of air over the calm Western Sea.
Group One had gone about their routine survey work, unaware of the meeting of air masses out at sea, unaware of the force the union was spawning. It had struck their camp without warning — a thundering, roaring destruction that sought to annihilate all that lay before it. It had passed on, leaving the wreckage in its wake. It had destroyed the labor of months and had doomed six men to die and then, as though its task was accomplished, it once more began to resolve into gentle masses of air. But, for all its deadliness, it had destroyed with neither malice nor intent. It had been a blind and mindless force, obeying the laws of nature, and it would have followed the same course with the same fury had men never existed.
Existence required order, and there was order; the laws of nature, irrevocable and immutable. Men could learn to use them, but men could not change them. The circumference of a circle was always pi times the diameter, and no science of man would ever make it otherwise. The combination of chemical A with chemical B under condition C invariably produced reaction D. The law of gravitation was a rigid equation, and it made no distinction between the fall of a leaf and the ponderous circling of a binary star system.
The nuclear conversion process powered the cruisers that carried men to the stars; the same process in the form of a nova would destroy a world with equal efficiency. The laws were, and the universe moved in obedience to them. Along the frontier were arrayed all the forces of nature, and sometimes they destroyed those who were fighting their way outward from Earth.
The men of the frontier had long ago learned the bitter futility of cursing the forces that would destroy them, for the forces were blind and deaf; the futility of looking to the heavens for mercy, for the stars of the galaxy swung in their long, long sweep of two hundred million years, as inexorably controlled as they by the laws that knew neither hatred nor compassion. The men of the frontier knew — but how was a girl from Earth to fully understand? h amount of fuel will not power an EDS with a mass of m plus x safely to its destination. To him and her brother and parents she was a sweet-faced girl in her teens; to the laws of nature she was x, the unwanted factor in a cold equation.
She stirred again on the seat. “Could I write a letter? I want to write to Mama and Daddy. And I’d like to talk to Gerry. Could you let me talk to him over your radio there?”
“I’ll try to get him,” he said.
He switched on the normal-space transmitter and pressed the signal button. Someone answered the buzzer almost immediately.
“Hello. How’s it going with you fellows now — is the EDS on its way?” “This isn’t Group One; this is the EDS,” he said. “Is Gerry Cross there?”
“Gerry? He and two others went out in the helicopter this morning and aren’t back yet. It’s almost sundown, though, and he ought to be back right away — in less than an hour at the most.”
“Can you connect me through to the radio in his copter?”
“Huh-uh. It’s been out of commission for two months — some printed circuits went haywire and we can’t get any more until the next cruiser stops by. Is it something important — bad news for him, or something?”
“Yes — it’s very important. When he comes in, get him to the transmitter as soon as you possibly can.”
“I’ll do that; I’ll have one of the boys waiting at the field with a truck. Is there anything else I can do?”
“No, I guess that’s all. Get him there as soon as you can and signal me.”
He turned the volume to an inaudible minimum, an act that would not affect the functioning of the signal buzzer, and unclipped the pad of paper from the control board. He tore off the sheet containing his flight instructions and handed the pad to her, together with pencil.
“I’d better write to Gerry too,” she said as she took them. “He might not get back to camp in time.”
She began to write, her fingers still clumsy and uncertain in the way they handled the pencil, and the top of it trembling a little as she poised it between words. He turned back to the viewscreen, to stare at it without seeing it.
She was a lonely little child trying to say her last goodbye, and she would lay out her heart to them. She would tell them how much she loved them and she would tell them to not feel bad about it, that it was only something that must happen eventually to everyone and she was not afraid. The last would be a lie and it would be there to read between the sprawling, uneven lines: a valiant little lie that would make the hurt all the greater for them.
Her brother was of the frontier and he would understand. He would not hate the EDS pilot for doing nothing to prevent her going; he would know there had been nothing the pilot could do. He would understand, though the understanding would not soften the shock and pain when he learned his sister was gone. But the others, her father and mother — they would not understand. They were of Earth and they would think in the manner of those who had never lived where the safety margin of life was a thin, thin line — and sometimes nothing at all. What would they think of the faceless, unknown pilot who had sent her to her death?
They would hate him with cold and terrible intensity, but it really didn’t matter. He would never see them, never know them. He would have only the memories to remind him; only the nights of fear, when a blue-eyed girl in gypsy sandals would come in his dreams to die again…
He scowled at the viewscreen and tried to force his thoughts into less emotional channels. There was nothing he could do to help her. She had unknowingly subjected herself to the penalty of a law that recognized neither innocence nor youth nor beauty, that was incapable of sympathy or leniency. Regret was illogical — and yet, could knowing it to be illogical ever keep it away?
She stopped occasionally, as though trying to find the right words to tell them what she wanted them to know; then the pencil would resume its whispering to the paper. It was 18:37 when she folded the letter in a square and wrote a name on it. She began writing another, twice looking up at the chronometer, as though she feared the black hand might reach its rendezvous before she had finished. It was 18:45 when she folded it as she had done the first letter and wrote a name and address on it.
She held the letters out to him. “Will you take care of these and see that they’re enveloped and mailed?”
“Of course.” He took them from her hand and placed them in a pocket of his gray uniform shirt. “These can’t be sent off until the next cruiser stops by, and the Stardust will have long since told them about me, won’t it?” she asked. He nodded and she went on: “That makes the letters not important in one way, but in another way they’re very important — to me, and to them.” “I know. I understand, and I’ll take care of them.”
She glanced at the chronometer, then back to him. “It seems to move faster all the time, doesn’t it?”
He said nothing, unable to think of anything to say, and she asked, “Do you think Gerry will come back to camp in time?”
“I think so. They said he should be in right away.”
She began to roll the pencil back and forth between her palms. “I hope he does. I feel sick and scared and I want to hear his voice again and maybe I won’t feel so alone. I’m a coward and I can’t help it.”
“No,” he said, “you’re not a coward. You’re afraid, but you’re not a coward.” “Is there a difference?”
He nodded. “A lot of difference.”
“I feel so alone. I never did feel like this before; like I was all by myself and there was nobody to care what happened to me. Always, before, there were Mama and Daddy there and my friends around me. I had lots of friends, and they had a going-away party for me the night before I left.”
Friends and music and laughter for her to remember — and on the viewscreen Lotus Lake was going into the shadow.
“Is it the same with Gerry?” she asked. “I mean, if he should make a mistake, would he have to die for it, all alone and with no one to help him?”
“It’s the same with all, along the frontier; it will always be like that so long as there is a frontier.” “Gerry didn’t tell us. He said the pay was good, and he sent money home all the time because
Daddy’s little shop just brought in a bare living, but he didn’t tell us it was like this.” “He didn’t tell you his work was dangerous?”
“Well — yes. He mentioned that, but we didn’t understand. I always thought danger along the frontier was something that was a lot of fun; an exciting adventure, like in the three-D shows.” A wane smile touched her face for a moment. “Only it’s not, is it? It’s not the same at all, because when it’s real you can’t go home after the show is over.”
“No,” he said. “No, you can’t.”
Her glance flicked from the chronometer to the door of the air lock, then down to the pad and pencil she still held. She shifted her position slightly to lay them on the bench beside her, moving one foot out a little. For the first time he saw that she was not wearing Vegan gypsy sandals, but only cheap imitations; the expensive Vegan leather was some kind of grained plastic, the silver buckle was gilded iron, the jewels were colored glass.
Daddy’s little shop just brought in a bare living… She must have left college in her second year, to take the course in linguistics that would enable her to make her own way and help her brother provide for her parents, earning what she could by part-time work after classes were over. Her personal possessions on the Stardust would be taken back to her parents — they would neither be of much value nor occupy much storage space on the return voyage.
“Isn’t it—” She stopped, and he looked at her questioningly. “Isn’t it cold in here?” she asked, almost apologetically. “Doesn’t it seem cold to you?”
“Why, yes,” he said. He saw by the main temperature gauge that the room was at precisely normal temperature. “Yes, it’s colder than it should be.”
“I wish Gerry would get back before it’s too late. Do you really think he will, and you didn’t just say so to make me feel better?”
“I think he will — they said he would be in pretty soon.” On the viewscreen Lotus Lake had gone into the shadow but for the thin blue line of its western edge, and it was apparent he had overestimated the time she would have in which to talk to her brother.
Reluctantly, he said to her, “His camp will be out of radio range in a few minutes; he’s on that part of Woden that’s in the shadow” — he indicated the viewscreen — “and the turning of Woden will put him beyond contact. There may not be much time left when he comes in — not much time to talk to him before he fades out. I wish I could do something about it — I would call him right now if I could.”
“Not even as much time as I will have to stay?” “I’m afraid not.”
“Then—” She straightened and looked toward the air lock with pale resolution. “Then I’ll go when Gerry passes beyond range. I won’t wait any longer after that — I won’t have anything to wait for.”
Again there was nothing he could say.
“Maybe I shouldn’t wait at all. Maybe I’m selfish — maybe it would be better for Gerry if you just told him about it afterward.”
There was an unconscious pleading for denial in the way she spoke and he said, “He wouldn’t want you to do that, to not wait for him.”
“It’s already coming dark where he is, isn’t it? There will be all the long night before him, and Mama and Daddy don’t know yet that I won’t ever be coming back like I promised them I would. I’ve caused everyone I love to be hurt, haven’t I? I didn’t want to — I didn’t intend to.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “It wasn’t your fault at all. They’ll know that. They’ll understand.” “At first I was so afraid to die that I was a coward and thought only of myself. Now I see how
selfish I was. The terrible thing about dying like this is not that I’ll be gone but that I’ll never see them again; never be able to tell them that I didn’t take them for granted; never be able to tell them I knew of the sacrifices they made to make my life happier, that I knew all the things they did for me and that I loved them so much more than I ever told them.
I’ve never told them any of those things. You don’t tell them such things when you’re young and your life is all before you — you’re so afraid of sounding sentimental and silly. But it’s so different when you have to die — you wish you had told them while you could, and you wish you could tell them you’re sorry for all the little mean things you ever did or said to them. You wish you could tell them that you didn’t really mean to ever hurt their feelings and for them to only remember that you always loved them far more than you ever let them know.”
“You don’t have to tell them that,” he said. “They will know — they’ve always known it.” “Are you sure?” she asked. “How can you be sure? My people are strangers to you.” “Wherever you go, human nature and human hearts are the same.”
“And they will know what I want them to know — that I love them?”
“They’ve always known it, in a way far better than you could ever put in words for them.”
“I keep remembering the things they did for me, and it’s the little things they did that seem to be the most important to me, now. Like Gerry — he sent me a bracelet of fire rubies on my sixteenth birthday. It was beautiful — it must have cost him a month’s pay.
Yet I remember him more for what he did the night my kitten got run over in the street. I was only six years old and he held me in his arms and wiped away my tears and told me not to cry, that Flossy was gone for just a little while, for just long enough to get herself a new fur coat, and she would be on the foot of my bed the very next morning.
I believed him and quit crying and went to sleep dreaming about my kitten coming back. When I woke up the next morning, there was Flossy on the foot of my bed in a brand-new white fur coat, just like he had said she would be. It wasn’t until a long time later that Mama told me Gerry had got the pet-shop owner out of bed at four in the morning and, when the man got mad about it, Gerry told him he was either going to go down and sell him the white kitten right then or he’d break his neck.”
“It’s always the little things you remember people by, all the little things they did because they wanted to do them for you. You’ve done the same for Gerry and your father and mother; all kinds of things that you’ve forgotten about, but that they will never forget.”
“I hope I have. I would like for them to remember me like that.” “They will.”
“I wish—” She swallowed. “The way I’ll die — I wish they wouldn’t ever think of that. I’ve read how people look who die in space — their insides all ruptured and exploded and their lungs out between their teeth and then, a few seconds later, they’re all dry and shapeless and horribly ugly. I don’t want them to ever think of me as something dead and horrible like that.”
“You’re their own, their child and their sister. They could never think of you other than the way you would want them to, the way you looked the last time they saw you.”
“I’m still afraid,” she said. “I can’t help it, but I don’t want Gerry to know it. If he gets back in time, I’m going to act like I’m not afraid at all and—”
The signal buzzer interrupted her, quick and imperative. “Gerry!” She came to her feet. “It’s Gerry now!”
He spun the volume control knob and asked, “Gerry Cross?”
“Is it?”
“Yes,” her brother answered, an undertone of tenseness to his reply. “The bad news — what is it?”
She answered for him, standing close behind him and leaning down a little toward the communicator, her hand resting small and cold on his shoulder.
“Hello, Gerry.” There was only a faint quaver to betray the careful casualness of her voice. “I wanted to see you—” “Marilyn!” There was sudden and terrible apprehension in the way he spoke her name. “What are you doing on that EDS?”
“I wanted to see you,” she said again. “I wanted to see you, so I hid on this ship—” “You hid on it?”
“I’m a stowaway… I didn’t know what it would mean—”
“Marilyn!” It was the cry of a man who calls, hopeless and desperate, to someone already and forever gone from him. “What have you done?”
“I… it’s not—” Then her own composure broke and the cold little hand gripped his shoulder convulsively. “Don’t, Gerry — I only wanted to see you; I didn’t intend to hurt you. Please, Gerry, don’t feel like that—”
Something warm and wet splashed on his wrist, and he slid out of the chair to help her into it and swing the microphone down to her level.
“Don’t feel like that. Don’t let me go knowing you feel like that—”
The sob she had tried to hold back choked in her throat, and her brother spoke to her. “Don’t cry, Marilyn.” His voice was suddenly deep and infinitely gentle, with all the pain held out of it. “Don’t cry, Sis — you mustn’t do that. It’s all right, honey — everything is all right.”
“I—” Her lower lip quivered and she bit into it. “I didn’t want you to feel that way — I just wanted us to say goodbye, because I have to go in a minute.”
“Sure — sure. That’s the way it’ll be, Sis. I didn’t mean to sound the way I did.” Then his voice changed to a tone of quick and urgent demand. “EDS — have you called the Stardust? Did you check with the computers?”
“I called the Stardust almost an hour ago. It can’t turn back; there are no other cruisers within forty light-years, and there isn’t enough fuel.”
“Are you sure that the computers had the correct data — sure of everything?”
“Yes — do you think I could ever let it happen if I wasn’t sure? I did everything I could do. If there was anything at all I could do now, I would do it.”
“He tried to help me, Gerry.” Her lower lip was no longer trembling and the short sleeves of her blouse were wet where she had dried her tears. “No one can help me and I’m not going to cry anymore and everything will be all right with you and Daddy and Mama, won’t it?”
“Sure — sure it will. We’ll make out fine.”
Her brother’s words were beginning to come in more faintly, and he turned the volume control to maximum. “He’s going out of range,” he said to her. “He’ll be gone within another minute.”
“You’re fading out, Gerry,” she said. “You’re going out of range. I wanted to tell you — but I can’t now. We must say goodbye so soon — but maybe I’ll see you again. Maybe I’ll come to you in your dreams with my hair in braids and crying because the kitten in my arms is dead; maybe I’ll be the touch of a breeze that whispers to you as it goes by; maybe I’ll be one of those gold-winged larks you told me about, singing my silly head off to you; maybe, at times, I’ll be nothing you can see, but you will know I’m there beside you.
Think of me like that, Gerry; always like that and not — the other way.”
Dimmed to a whisper by the turning of Woden, the answer came back: “Always like that, Marilyn — always like that and never any other way.” “Our time is up, Gerry — I have to go now.
Good—” Her voice broke in midword and her mouth tried to twist into crying. She pressed her hand hard against it and when she spoke again the words came clear and true: “Goodbye, Gerry.” Faint and ineffably poignant and tender, the last words came from the cold metal of the communicator: “Goodbye, little sister…”
She sat motionless in the hush that followed, as though listening to the shadow-echoes of the words as they died away; then she turned away from the communicator, toward the air lock, and he pulled down the black lever beside him. The inner door of the air lock slid swiftly open to reveal the bare little cell that was waiting for her, and she walked to it.
She walked with her head up and the brown curls brushing her shoulders, with the white sandals stepping as sure and steady as the fractional gravity would permit and the gilded buckles twinkling with little lights of blue and red and crystal. He let her walk alone and made no move to help her, knowing she would not want it that way. She stepped into the air lock and turned to face him, only the pulse in her throat to betray the wild beating of her heart.
“I’m ready,” she said.
He pushed the lever up and the door slid its quick barrier between them, enclosing her in black and utter darkness for her last moments of life. It clicked as it locked in place and he jerked down the red lever. There was a slight waver of the ship as the air gushed from the lock, a vibration to the wall as though something had bumped the outer door in passing; then there was nothing and the ship was dropping true and steady again. He shoved the red lever back to close the door on the empty air lock and turned away, to walk to the pilot’s chair with the slow steps of a man old and weary.
Back in the pilot’s chair he pressed the signal button of the normal-space transmitter. There was no response; he had expected none. Her brother would have to wait through the night until the turning of Woden permitted contact through Group One.
It was not yet time to resume deceleration, and he waited while the ship dropped endlessly downward with him and the drives purred softly. He saw that the white hand of the supply-closet temperature gauge was on zero. A cold equation had been balanced and he was alone on the ship. Something shapeless and ugly was hurrying ahead of him, going to Woden, where her brother was waiting through the night, but the empty ship still lived for a little while with the presence of the girl who had not known about the forces that killed with neither hatred nor malice. It seemed, almost, that she still sat, small and bewildered and frightened, on the metal box beside him, her words echoing hauntingly clear in the void she had left behind her:
I didn’t do anything to die for… I didn’t do anything…
The End
Posts Regarding Life and Contentment
Here are
some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you
might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up
in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society
within communist China. As there are some really stark differences
between the two.
Posts about the Changes in America
America is
going through a period of change. Change is good… that is, after it
occurs. Often however, there are large periods of discomfort as the
period of adjustment takes place. Here are some posts that discuss this
issue.
More Posts about Life
I have
broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones
actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little
different, in subtle ways.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are
reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal
library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come
and enjoy a read or two as well.
Articles & Links
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find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
This is a wonderful story. It is great “escapist reading”, and has some very significant deeper elements.
''there were things that were right and others that were wrong and it was not just a matter of where you were. He felt this with an inner conviction too deep to be influenced by Sam’s cheerful cynicism.''
This ''inner conviction'' places Heinlein's work apart. Morality can't be proved. We must be convinced.
This reflective, thoughtful, wondering threads it's way throughout. Who hasn't pondered -
'Is morality adjustable?
Who says what is right?
How can I know for sure?
Should I forgive myself or punish myself?'
Presented so skillfully, so warmly, I have returned to Max several times in over five decades. I still tear up each visit.
Max is disclosing his deception -
“I was always explaining—in my mind of course, why I did it, justifying myself, pointing out that the system was at fault, not me. Now I don’t want to justify myself. Not that I regret it, not when I think what I would have missed. But I don’t want to duck out of paying for it, either.”
Walther nodded.
“That sounds like a healthy attitude. Captain, no code is perfect. A man must conform with judgment and commonsense, not with blind obedience. I’ve broken rules; some violations I paid for, some I didn’t. This mistake you made could have turned you into a moralistic prig, a ‘Regulation Charlie’ determined to walk the straight and narrow and to see that everyone else obeyed the letter of the law. Or it could have made you a permanent infant who thinks rules are for everyone but him. It doesn’t seem to have had either effect; I think it has matured you.”
Keen insight.
Another theme is the proper use and abuse of authority. Government regulations -
''You don’t believe in anarchy, surely? Our whole society is founded on entrusting grave secrets only to those who are worthy.''
Government protects you -
When the idea soaked in, Max was shocked.
“But they put you in jail for that!”
“Where do you think you are now?”
“Well, I’m not in jail. And I don’t want to be.”
“This whole planet is one big jail, and a crowded one at that.''
Security vs Liberty, a question that all face and choose their answer.
And yet (this is what makes Heinlein fascinating) he is not defiant or disrespectful to authority.
Explains why Max must agree to be Captain . . .
Mr. Samuels said quietly,
“I don’t agree with the Chief Engineer about the unimportance of legal aspects; most of these laws have wise reasons behind them. But I agree with what else he says. Mr. Jones, a ship is not just steel, it is a delicate political entity. Its laws and customs cannot be disregarded without inviting disaster.’’
This deep respect for law and legality drive this story. The dangerous curves are when ‘law’ has to be superseded by ‘legal principles’.
When? Why? How? Well . .
.
“It will be far easier to maintain morale and discipline in this ship with a young captain—with all his officers behind him—than it would be to let passengers and crew suspect that the man who must make the crucial decisions, those life-and-death matters involving the handling of the ship, that this all-powerful man nevertheless can’t be trusted to command the ship. No, sir, such a situation would frighten me; that is how mutinies are born.”
This is deep trust in authority.
However, this power is used to help others, not the captain.
The respect is earned and willingly given.
What a lesson!
Heinlein presents this growing and searching - to submit, defy, accept and use authority in this work. Wonderful!
-Amazon product review by Clay Garner
THE TOMAHAWK
Max liked this time of day, this time of year. With the crops in, he could finish his evening chores early and be lazy. When he had slopped the hogs and fed the chickens, instead of getting supper he followed a path to a rise west of the barn and lay down in the grass, unmindful of chiggers. He had a book with him that he had drawn from the county library last Saturday, Bonforte’s Sky Beasts: A Guide to Exotic Zoology, but he tucked it under his head as a pillow. A blue jay made remarks about his honesty, then shut up when he failed to move. A red squirrel sat on a stump and stared at him, then went on burying nuts.
Max kept his eyes to the northwest. He favored this spot because from it he could see the steel stilts and guide rings of the Chicago, Springfield, & Earthport Ring Road emerge from a slash in the ridge to his right. There was a guide ring at the mouth of the cut, a great steel hoop twenty feet high. A pair of
stilt-like tripods supported another ring a hundred feet out from the cut. A third and last ring, its stilts more than a hundred feet high to keep it level with the others, lay west of him where the ground dropped still more sharply into the valley below. Half way up it he could see the power-link antenna pointing across the gap.
On his left the guides of the C.S.&E. picked up again on the far side of the gap. The entering ring was larger to allow for maximum windage deviation; on its stilts was the receptor antenna for the power link. That ridge was steeper; there was only one more ring before the road disappeared into a tunnel. He had read that, on the Moon, entrance rings were no larger than pass-along rings, since there was never any wind to cause variation in ballistic. When he was a child this entrance ring had been slightly smaller and, during an unprecedented windstorm, a train had struck the ring and produced an unbelievable wreck, with more than four hundred people killed. He had not seen it and his father had not allowed him to poke around afterwards because of the carnage, but the scar of it could still be seen on the lefthand ridge, a
darker green than the rest.
He watched the trains go by whenever possible, not wishing the passengers any bad luck—but still, if there should happen to be a catastrophe, he didn’t want to miss it.
Max kept his eyes fixed on the cut; the Tomahawk was due any instant. Suddenly there was a silver gleam, a shining cylinder with needle nose burst out of the cut, flashed through the last ring and for a breathless moment was in free trajectory between the ridges. Almost before he could swing his eyes the projectile entered the ring across the gap and disappeared into the hillside—just as the sound hit him.
It was a thunderclap that bounced around the hills. Max gasped for air. “Boy!” he said softly. “Boy, oh boy!” The incredible sight and the impact on his ears always affected him the same way. He had heard that for the passengers the train was silent, with the sound trailing them, but he did not know; he had never ridden a train and it seemed unlikely, with Maw and the farm to take care of, that he ever would.
He shifted to a sitting position and opened his book, holding it so that he would be aware of the southwestern sky. Seven minutes after the passing of the Tomahawk he should be able to see, on a clear evening, the launching orbit of the daily Moonship. Although much father away and much less dramatic than the nearby jump of the ring train it was this that he had come to see. Ring trains were all right, but spaceships were his love—even a dinky like the moon shuttle.
But he had just found his place, a description of the intelligent but phlegmatic crustaceans of Epsilon Ceti IV, when he was interrupted by a call behind him. “Oh, Maxie! Maximilian! Max… mil… yan!”
He held still and said nothing.
“Max! I can see you, Max—you come at once, hear me?”
He muttered to himself and got to his feet. He moved slowly down the path, watching the sky over his shoulder until the barn cut off his view. Maw was back and that was that—she’d make his life miserable if he didn’t come in and help. When she had left that morning he had had the impression that she would be gone overnight—not that she had said so; she never did—but he had learned to read the signs. Now he would have to listen to her complaints and her petty gossip when he wanted to read, or just as bad, be disturbed by the slobbering stereovision serials she favored. He had often been tempted to sabotage the pesky SV set—by rights with an ax! He hardly ever got to see the programs he liked.
When he got in sight of the house he stopped suddenly. He had supposed that Maw had ridden the bus from the Corners and walked up the draw as usual. But there was a sporty little unicycle standing near the stoop—and there was someone with her.
He had thought at first it was a “foreigner”—but when he got closer he recognized the man. Max would rather have seen a foreigner, any foreigner. Biff Montgomery was a hillman but he didn’t work a farm; Max couldn’t remember having seen him do any honest work. He had heard it said that Montgomery sometimes hired out as a guard when one of the moonshine stills back in the hills was operating and it might be so—Montgomery was a big, beefy man and the part might fit him.
Max had known Montgomery as long as he could remember, seen him loafing around Clyde’s Corners. But he had ordinarily given him “wagon room” and had had nothing to do with him—until lately: Maw had started being seen with him, even gone to barn dances and huskings with him. Max had tried to tell her that Dad wouldn’t have liked it. But you couldn’t argue with Maw—what she didn’t like she just didn’t hear.
But this was the first time she had ever brought him to the house. Max felt a slow burn of anger starting in
him.
“Hurry up, Maxie!” Maw called out. “Don’t stand there like a dummy.” Max reluctantly moved along and joined them. Maw said, “Maxie, shake hands with your new father,” then looked roguish, as if she had said something witty. Max stared and his mouth sagged open.
Montgomery grinned and stuck out a hand. “Yep, Max, you’re Max Montgomery now—I’m your new pop. But you can call me Monty.”
Max stared at the hand, took it briefly. “My name is Jones,” he said flatly. “Maxie!” protested Maw.
Montgomery laughed jovially. “Don’t rush him, Nellie my love. Let Max get used to it. Live and let live; that’s my motto.” He turned to his wife. “Half a mo’, while I get the baggage.” From one saddlebag of the unicycle he extracted a wad of mussed clothing; from the other, two flat pint bottles. Seeing Max watching him he winked and said, “A toast for the bride.”
His bride was standing by the door; he started to brush on past her. She protested, “But Monty darling, aren’t you going to—”
Montgomery stopped. “Oh. I haven’t much experience in these things. Sure.” He turned to Max—”Here, take the baggage”—and shoved bottles and clothes at him. Then he swung her up in his arms, grunting a bit, and carried her over the threshold, put her down and kissed her while she squealed and blushed.
Max silently followed them, put the items on the table and turned to the stove. It was cold, he had not used it since breakfast. There was an electric range but it had burned out before his father had died and there had never been money to repair it. He took out his pocket knife, made shavings, added kindling and touched the heap with an Everlite. When it flared up he went out to fetch a pail of water.
When he came back Montgomery said, “Wondered where you’d gone. Doesn’t this dump even have running water?”
“No.” Max set the pail down, then added a couple of chunks of cord wood to the fire. His Maw said, “Maxie, you should have had dinner ready.”
Montgomery interceded pleasantly with, “Now, my dear, he didn’t know we were coming. And it leaves time for a toast.” Max kept his back to them, giving his full attention to slicing side meat. The change was so overwhelming that he had not had time to take it in.
Montgomery called to him. “Here, son! Drink your toast to the bride.” “I’ve got to get supper.”
“Nonsense! Here’s your glass. Hurry up.”
Montgomery had poured a finger of amber liquid into the glass; his own glass was half full and that of his bride at least a third. Max accepted it and went to the pail, thinned it with a dipper of water.
“You’ll ruin it.”
“I’m not used to it.”
“Oh, well. Here’s to the blushing bride—and our happy family! Bottoms up!”
Max took a cautious sip and put it down. It tasted to him like the bitter tonic the district nurse had given him one spring. He turned back to his work, only to be interrupted again. “Hey, you didn’t finish it.”
“Look, I got to cook. You don’t want me to burn supper, do you?”
Montgomery shrugged. “Oh, well—the more for the rest of us. We’ll use yours for a chaser. Sonny boy, when I was your age I could empty a tumbler neat and then stand on my hands.”
Max had intended to sup on side meat and warmed-over biscuits, but there was only half a pan left of the biscuits. He scrambled eggs in the grease of the side meat, brewed coffee, and let it go at that. When they sat down Montgomery looked at it and announced, “My dear, starting tomorrow I’ll expect you to live up to what you told me about your cooking. Your boy isn’t much of a cook.” Nevertheless he ate heartily. Max decided not to tell him that he was a better cook than Maw—he’d find out soon enough.
Presently Montgomery sat back and wiped his mouth, then poured himself more coffee and lighted a cigar. Maw said, “Maxie, dear, what’s the dessert?”
“Dessert? Well—there’s that ice cream in the freezer, left over from Solar Union Day.” She looked vexed. “Oh, dear! I’m afraid it’s not there.”
“Huh?”
“Well, I’m afraid I sort of ate it one afternoon when you were out in the south field. It was an awfully hot day.”
Max did not say anything, he was unsurprised. But she was not content to leave it. “You didn’t fix any dessert, Max? But this is a special occasion.”
Montgomery took his cigar out of his mouth. “Stow it, my dear,” he said kindly. “I’m not much for sweets, I’m a meat-and-potatoes man—sticks to the ribs. Let’s talk of pleasanter things.” He turned to Max. “Max, what can you do besides farm?”
Max was startled. “Huh? I’ve never done anything else. Why?”
Montgomery touched the ash of the cigar to his plate. “Because you are all through farming.”
For the second time in two hours Max had more change than he could grasp. “Why? What do you mean?”
“Because we’ve sold the farm.”
Max felt as if he had had a rug jerked out from under him. But he could tell from Maw’s face that it was true. She looked the way she always did when she had put one over on him—triumphant and slightly apprehensive.
“Dad wouldn’t like that,” he said to her harshly. “This land has been in our family for four hundred years.”
“Now, Maxie! I’ve told you I don’t know how many times that I wasn’t cut out for a farm. I was city raised.”
“Clyde’s Corners! Some city!”
“It wasn’t a farm. And I was just a young girl when your father brought me here—you were already a big boy. I’ve still got my life before me. I can’t live it buried on a farm.”
Max raised his voice. “But you promised Dad you’d…”
“Stow it,” Montgomery said firmly. “And keep a civil tongue in your head when you speak to your mother—and to me.”
Max shut up.
“The land is sold and that’s that. How much do you figure this parcel is worth?” “Why, I’ve never thought about it.”
“Whatever you thought, I got more.” He gave Max a wink. “Yes, sir! It was a lucky day for your mother and you when she set her cap for me. I’m a man with his ear to the ground. I knew why an agent was around buying up these worn-out, worthless pieces of property. I…”
“I use government fertilizers.”
“Worthless I said and worthless I meant. For farming, that is.” He put his finger along his nose, looked sly, and explained. It seemed that some big government power project was afoot for which this area had been selected—Montgomery was mysterious about it, from which Max concluded that he didn’t know very much. A syndicate was quietly buying up land in anticipation of government purchase. “So we held ’em up for five times what they expected to pay. Pretty good, huh?”
Maw put in, “You see, Maxie? If your father had known that we would ever get…” “Quiet, Nellie!”
“But I was just going to tell him how much…” “‘Quiet!’ I said.”
She shut up. Montgomery pushed his chair back, stuck his cigar in his mouth, and got up. Max put water on to heat for the dishes, scraped the plates and took the leavings out to the chickens. He stayed out quite a spell, looking at the stars and trying to think. The idea of having Biff Montgomery in the family shook him to his bones. He wondered just what rights a stepfather had, or, rather a step-stepfather, a man who had married his stepmother. He didn’t know.
Presently he decided that he had to go back inside, much as he hated to. He found Montgomery standing at the bookshelf he had built over the stereo receiver; the man was pawing at the books and had piled several on the receiver. He looked around. “You back? Stick around, I want you to tell me about the live stock.”
Maw appeared in the doorway. “Darling,” she said to Montgomery, “can’t that wait till morning?”
“Don’t be in a hurry, my dear,” he answered. “That auctioneer fellow will be here early. I’ve got to have the inventory ready.” He continued to pull books down. “Say, these are pretty things.” He held in his hands half a dozen volumes, printed on the finest of thin paper and bound in limp plastic. “I wonder what they’re worth? Nellie, hand me my specs.”
Max advanced hastily, reached for them. “Those are mine!”
“Huh?” Montgomery glanced at him, then held the books high in the air. “You’re too young to own anything. No, everything goes. A clean sweep and a fresh start.”
“They’re mine! My uncle gave them to me.” He appealed to his mother. “Tell him, Maw.”
Montgomery said quietly, “Yes, Nellie, set this youngster straight—before I have to correct him.” Nellie looked worried. “Well, I don’t rightly know. They did belong to Chet.”
“And Chet was your brother? Then you’re Chet’s heir, not this young cub.” “He wasn’t her brother, he was her brother-in-law!”
“So? No matter. Your father was your uncle’s heir, then, and your mother is your father’s heir. Not you, you’re a minor. That’s the law, son. Sorry.” He put the books on the shelf but remained standing in front of them.
Max felt his right upper lip begin to twitch uncontrollably; he knew that he would not be able to talk coherently. His eyes filled with tears of rage so that he could hardly see. “You… you thief!”
Nellie let out a squawk. “Max!”
Montgomery’s face became coldly malignant. “Now you’ve gone too far. I’m afraid you’ve earned a taste of the strap.” His fingers started unbuckling his heavy belt.
Max took a step backward. Montgomery got the belt loose and took a step forward. Nellie squealed, “Monty! Please!”
“Keep out of this, Nellie.” To Max he said, “We might as well get it settled once and for all who is boss around here. Apologize!”
Max did not answer. Montgomery repeated, “Apologize, and we’ll say no more about it.” He twitched the belt like a cat lashing its tail. Max took another step back; Montgomery stepped forward and grabbed at him.
Max ducked and ran out the open door into darkness. He did not stop until he was sure that Montgomery was not following. Then he caught his breath, still raging. He was almost sorry that Montgomery had not chased him; he didn’t think that anyone could match him on his home grounds in the dark. He knew where the wood pile was; Montgomery didn’t. He knew where the hog wallow was.
Yes, he knew where the well was—even that.
It was a long time before he quieted down enough to think rationally. When he did, he was glad it had ended so easily, Montgomery outweighed him a lot and was reputed to be a mean one in a fight.
If it had ended, he corrected. He wondered if Montgomery would decide to forget it by morning. The light was still on in the living room; he took shelter in the barn and waited, sitting down on the dirt floor and leaning against the planks. After a while he felt terribly tired. He considered sleeping in the barn but there was no fit place to lie down, even though the old mule was dead. Instead he got up and looked at the house.
The light was out in the living room, but he could see a light in the bedroom; they were still awake, surely. Someone had closed the outer door after his flight; it did not lock so there was no difficulty getting in, but he was afraid that Montgomery might hear him. His own room was a shed added at the kitchen end of the main room, opposite the bedroom, but it had no outside door.
No matter—he had solved that problem when he had first grown old enough to wish to get in and out at night without consulting his elders. He crept around the house, found the saw horse, placed it under his window, got on and wiggled loose the nail that held the window. A moment later he stepped silently down into his own room. The door to the main part of the house was closed but he decided not to risk
switching on the light; Montgomery might take it into his head to come out into the living room and see a crack of light under his door. He slipped quietly out of his clothes and crawled into his cot.
Sleep wouldn’t come. Once he began to feel that warm drowsiness, then some tiny noise had brought him wide, stiff awake. Probably just a mouse—but for an instant he had thought that Montgomery was standing over his bed. With his heart pounding, he sat up on the edge of his cot, still in his skin.
Presently he faced up to the problem of what he was to do—not just for the next hour, not just tomorrow morning, but the following morning and all the mornings after that. Montgomery alone presented no problem; he would not voluntarily stay in the same county with the man. But how about Maw?
His father had told him, when he had known that he was dying, “Take care of your mother, son.” Well, he had done so. He had made a crop every year—food in the house and a little money, even if things had been close. When the mule died, he had made do, borrowing McAllister’s team and working it out in labor.
But had Dad meant that he had to take care of his stepmother even if she remarried? It had never occurred to him to consider it. Dad had told him to look out for her and he had done so, even though it had put a stop to school and did not seem to have any end to it.
But she was no longer Mrs. Jones but Mrs. Montgomery. Had Dad meant for him to support Mrs. Montgomery?
Of course not! When a woman married, her husband supported her. Everybody knew that. And Dad wouldn’t expect him to put up with Montgomery. He stood up, his mind suddenly made up.
The only question was what to take with him.
There was little to take. Groping in the dark he found the rucksack he used for hunting hikes and stuffed into it his other shirt and his socks. He added Uncle Chet’s circular astrogation slide rule and the piece of volcanic glass his uncle had brought back for him from the Moon. His citizen’s identification card, his toothbrush, and his father’s razor—not that he needed that very often—about completed the plunder.
There was a loose board back of his cot. He felt for it, pulled it out and groped between the studs—found nothing. He had been hiding a little money from time to time against a rainy day, as Maw couldn’t or wouldn’t save. But apparently she had found it on one of her snooping tours. Well, he still had to leave; it just made it a little more difficult.
He took a deep breath. There was something he must get… Uncle Chet’s books… and they were still (presumably) on the shelf against the wall common with the bedroom. But he had to get them, even at the risk of meeting Montgomery.
Cautiously, most slowly, he opened the door into the living room, stood there with sweat pouring down him. There was still a crack of light under the bedroom door and he hesitated, almost unable to force himself to go on. He heard Montgomery muttering something and Maw giggle.
As his eyes adjusted he could see by the faint light leaking out under the bedroom door something piled at the outer door. It was a deadfall alarm of pots and pans, sure to make a dreadful clatter if the door were opened. Apparently Montgomery had counted on him coming back and expected to be ready to take care of him. He was very glad that he had sneaked in the window.
No use putting it off—he crept across the floor, mindful of the squeaky board near the table. He could not see but he could feel and the volumes were known to his fingers. Carefully he slid them out, being
sure not to knock over the others.
He was all the way back to his own door when he remembered the library book. He stopped in sudden panic.
He couldn’t go back. They might hear him this time—or Montgomery might get up for a drink of water or something.
But in his limited horizon, the theft of a public library book—or failure to return it, which was the same thing—was, if not a mortal sin, at least high on the list of shameful crimes. He stood there, sweating and thinking about it.
Then he went back, the whole long trek, around the squeaky board and tragically onto one he had not remembered. He froze after he hit it, but apparently it had not alarmed the couple in the room beyond. At last he was leaning over the SV receiver and groping at the shelf.
Montgomery, in pawing the books, had changed their arrangement. One after another he had to take them down and try to identify it by touch, opening each and feeling for the perforations on the title page.
It was the fourth one he handled. He got back to his room hurrying slowly, unbearably anxious but afraid to move fast. There at last, he began to shake and had to wait until it wore off. He didn’t chance closing his door but got into his clothes in the dark. Moments later he crept through his window, found the saw horse with his toe, and stepped quietly to the ground.
His shoes were stuffed on top of the books in his rucksack; he decided to leave them there until he was well clear of the house, rather than chance the noise he might make with his feet shod. He swung wide around the house and looked back. The bedroom light was still on; he started to angle down toward the road when he noticed Montgomery’s unicycle. He stopped.
If he continued he would come to the road the bus passed along. Whether he turned right or left there, Montgomery would have a fifty-fifty chance of catching him on the unicycle. Having no money he was dependent on Shank’s ponies to put distance under him; he could not take the bus.
Shucks! Montgomery wouldn’t try to fetch him back. He would say good riddance and forget him!
But the thought fretted him. Suppose Maw urged him? Suppose Montgomery wouldn’t forget an insult and would go to any trouble to “get even”?
He headed back, still swinging wide of the house, and cut across the slopes toward the right of way of the C.S.&E.
Good Samaritan
He wished for a light, but its lack did not bother him much. He knew this country, every slope, almost every tree. He stayed high, working along the hillside, until he reached the exit ring where the trains jumped the gap, and there he came out on the road used by the ring road’s maintenance crews. He sat down and put on his shoes.
The maintenance road was no more than a track cut through trees; it was suited to tractor treads but not
to wheels. But it led down across the gap and up to where the ring road disappeared in the tunnel through the far ridge. He followed it, making good time in the born mountaineer’s easy, loose-jointed walk.
Seventy minutes later he was across the gap and passing under the entrance ring. He went on until he was near the ring that marked the black entrance to the tunnel. He stopped at what he judged to be a safe distance and considered his chances.
The ridge was high, else the rings would have been built in a cut rather than a tunnel. He had often hunted on it and knew that it would take two hours to climb it—in daylight. But the maintenance road ran right through the hill, under the rings. If he followed it, he could go through in ten or fifteen minutes.
Max had never been through the ridge. Legally it was trespass—not that that bothered him, he was trespassing now. Occasionally a hog or a wild animal would wander into the tunnel and be trapped there when a train hurtled through. They died, instantly and without a scratch. Once Max had spotted the carcass of a fox just inside the tunnel and had ducked in and salvaged it. There were no marks on it, but when he skinned it he found that it was a mass of tiny hemorrhages. Several years earlier a man had been caught inside; the maintenance crew brought out the body.
The tunnel was larger than the rings but no larger than necessary to permit the projectile to ride ahead of its own reflected shock wave. Anything alive in the tunnel could not avoid the wave; that unbearable thunderclap, painful at a distance, was so loaded with energy as to be quick death close up.
But Max did not want to climb the ridge; he went over the evening schedule of trains in his mind. The Tomahawk was the one he had watched at sundown; the Javelin he had heard while he was hiding in the barn. The Assegai must have gone by quite a while ago though he didn’t remember hearing it; that left only the midnight Cleaver. He then looked at the sky.
Venus had set, of course, but he was surprised to see Mars still in the west. The Moon had not risen. Let’s see—full moon was last Wednesday. Surely…
The answer he got seemed wrong, so he checked himself by taking a careful eyesight of Vega and compared it with what the Big Dipper told him. Then he whistled softly—despite everything that had happened it was only ten o’clock, give or take five minutes; the stars could not be wrong. In which case the Assegai was not due for another three-quarters of an hour. Except for the faint chance of a special train he had plenty of time.
He headed into the tunnel. He had not gone fifty yards before he began to be sorry and a bit panicky; it was as dark as a sealed coffin. But the going was much easier as the bore was lined to permit smooth shockwave reflections. He had been on his way several minutes, feeling each step but hurrying, when his eyes, adjusting to complete darkness, made out a faint grey circle far ahead. He broke into a trot and then into a dead run as his fear of the place piled up.
He reached the far end with throat burned dry and heart laboring; there he plunged downhill regardless of the sudden roughening of his path as he left the tunnel and hit the maintenance track. He did not slow up until he stood under stilt supports so high that the ring above looked small. There he stood still and fought to catch his breath.
He was slammed forward and knocked off his feet.
He picked himself up groggily, eventually remembered where he was and realized that he had been knocked cold. There was blood on one cheek and his hands and elbows were raw. It was not until he noticed these that he realized what had happened; a train had passed right over him.
It had not been close enough to kill, but it had been close enough to blast him off his feet. It could not have been the Assegai; he looked again at the stars and confirmed it. No, it must have been a special—and he had beaten it out of the tunnel by about a minute.
He began to shake and it was minutes before he pulled himself together, after which he started down the maintenance road as fast as his bruised body could manage. Presently he became aware of an odd fact; the night was silent.
But night is never silent. His ears, tuned from babyhood to the sounds and signs of his hills, should have heard an endless pattern of little night noises—wind in the leaves, the scurrying of his small cousins, tree frogs, calls of insects, owls.
By brutal logic he concluded correctly that he could not hear—”deef as a post”—the shock wave had left him deaf. But there was no way to help it, so he went on; it did not occur to him to return home. At the bottom of this draw, where the stilts were nearly three hundred feet high, the maintenance road crossed a farm road. He turned down hill onto it, having accomplished his first purpose of getting into territory where Montgomery would be less likely to look for him. He was in another watershed now; although still only a few miles from home, nevertheless by going through the ridge he had put himself into a different neighborhood.
He continued downhill for a couple of hours. The road was hardly more than a cart track but it was easier than the maintenance road. Somewhere below, when the hills gave way to the valley where the “foreigners” lived, he would find the freight highway that paralleled the ring road on the route to Earthport—Earthport being his destination although he had only foggy plans as to what he would do when he got there.
The Moon was behind him now and he made good time. A rabbit hopped onto the road ahead, sat up and stared, then skittered away. Seeing it, he regretted not having brought along his squirrel gun. Sure, it was worn out and not worth much and lately it had gotten harder and harder to buy the slugs thrown by the obsolete little weapon—but rabbit in the pot right now would go mighty nice, mighty nice! He realized that he was not only weary but terribly hungry. He had just picked at his supper and it looked like he’d breakfast on his upper lip.
Shortly his attention was distracted from hunger to a ringing in his ears, a ringing that got distressingly worse. He shook his head and pounded his ears but it did not help; he had to make up his mind to ignore it. After another half mile or so he suddenly noticed that he could hear himself walking. He stopped dead, then clapped his hands together. He could hear them smack, cutting through the phantom ringing. With a lighter heart he went on.
At last he came out on a shoulder that overlooked the broad valley. In the moonlight he could make out the sweep of the freight highway leading southwest and could detect, he thought, its fluorescent traffic guide lines. He hurried on down.
He was nearing the highway and could hear the rush of passing freighters when he spotted a light ahead. He approached it cautiously, determined that it was neither vehicle nor farm house. Closer approach showed it to be a small open fire, visible from uphill but shielded from the highway by a shoulder of limestone. A man was squatting over it, stirring the contents of a can resting on rocks over the fire.
Max crept nearer until he was looking down into the hobo jungle. He got a whiff of the stew and his mouth watered. Caught between hunger and a hillman’s ingrown distrust of “foreigners” he lay still and stared. Presently the man set the can off the fire and called out, “Well, don’t hide there! Come on down.”
Max was too startled to answer. The man added, “Come on down into the light. I won’t fetch it up to
you.”
Max got to his feet and shuffled down into the circle of firelight. The man looked up. “Howdy. Draw up a chair.”
“Howdy.” Max sat down across the fire from the tramp. He was not even as well dressed as Max and he needed a shave. Nevertheless he wore his rags with a jaunty air and handled himself with a sparrow’s cockiness.
The man continued to stir the mess in the can then spooned out a sample, blew on it, and tasted it. “About right,” he announced. “Four-day mulligan, just getting ripe. Find yourself a dish.” He got up and picked over a pile of smaller cans behind him, selected one. Max hesitated, then did the same, settling on one that had once contained coffee and appeared not to have been used since. His host served him a liberal portion of stew, then handed him a spoon. Max looked at it.
“If you don’t trust the last man who used it,” the man said reasonably, “hold it in the fire, then wipe it. Me, I don’t worry. If a bug bites me, he dies horribly.” Max took the advice, holding the spoon in the flames until the handle became too hot, then wiped it on his shirt.
The stew was good and his hunger made it superlative. The gravy was thick, there were vegetables and unidentified meat. Max didn’t bother his head about the pedigrees of the materials; he simply enjoyed it. After a while his host said, “Seconds?”
“Huh? Sure. Thanks!”
The second can of stew filled him up and spread through his tissues a warm glow of well-being. He stretched lazily, enjoying his fatigue. “Feel better?” the man asked.
“Gee, yes. Thanks.”
“By the way, you can call me Sam.” “Oh, my name is Max.”
“Glad to know you, Max.”
Max waited before raising a point that had been bothering him. “Uh, Sam? How did you know I was there? Did you hear me?”
Sam grinned. “No. But you were silhouetted against the sky. Don’t ever do that, kid, or it may be the last thing you do.”
Max twisted around and looked up at where he had lurked. Sure enough, Sam was right. He’d be dogged!
Sam added, “Traveled far?” “Huh? Yeah, quite a piece.” “Going far?”
“Uh, pretty far, I guess.”
Sam waited, then said, “Think your folks’ll miss you?”
“Huh? How did you know?”
“That you had run away from home? Well, you have, haven’t you?” “Yeah. Yeah, I guess I have.”
“You looked beat when you dragged in here. Maybe it’s not too late to kill the goose before your bridges are burned. Think about it, kid. It’s rough on the road. I know.”
“Go back? I won’t ever go back!” “As bad as that?”
Max stared into the fire. He needed badly to get his thoughts straight, even if it meant telling a foreigner his private affairs—and this soft-spoken stranger was easy to talk to. “See here, Sam, did you ever have a stepmother?”
“Eh? Can’t remember that I ever had any. The Central Jersey Development Center for State Children used to kiss me good night.”
“Oh.” Max blurted out his story with an occasional sympathetic question from Sam to straighten out its confusion. “So I lit out,” he concluded. “There wasn’t anything else to do. Was there?”
Sam pursed his lips. “I reckon not. This double stepfather of yours—he sounds like a mouse studying to be a rat. You’re well shut of him.”
“You don’t think they’ll try to find me and haul me back, do you?”
Sam stopped to put a piece of wood on the fire. “I am not sure about that.”
“Huh? Why not? I’m no use to him. He doesn’t like me. And Maw won’t care, not really. She may whine a bit, but she won’t turn her hand.”
“Well, there’s the farm.”
“The farm? I don’t care about that, not with Dad gone. Truthfully, it ain’t much. You break your back trying to make a crop. If the Food Conservation Act hadn’t forbidden owners to let farm land fall out of use, Dad would have quit farming long ago. It would take something like this government condemnation to make it possible to find anybody to take it off your hands.”
“That’s what I mean. This joker got your mother to sell it. Now my brand of law may not be much good, but it looks as if that money ought to come to you.”
“What? Oh, I don’t care about the money. I just want to get away from them.”
“Don’t talk that way about money; the powers-that-be will have you shut up for blasphemy. But it probably doesn’t matter how you feel, as I think Citizen Montgomery is going to want to see you awful bad.”
“Why?”
“Did your father leave a will?”
“No. Why? He didn’t have anything to leave but the farm.”
“I don’t know the ins and outs of your state laws, but it’s a sure thing that at least half of that farm belongs to you. Possibly your stepmother has only lifetime tenure in her half, with reversion to you when she dies. But it’s a certainty that she can’t grant a good deed without your signature. Along about time your county courthouse opens up tomorrow morning the buyers are going to find that out. Then they’ll come
high-tailing up, looking for her—and you. And ten minutes later this Montgomery hombre will start looking for you, if he hasn’t already.”
“Oh, me! If they find me, can they make me go back?” “Don’t let them find you. You’ve made a good start.”
Max picked up his rucksack. “I guess I had better get moving. Thanks a lot, Sam. Maybe I can help you someday.”
“Sit down.”
“Look, I had better get as far away as I can.”
“Kid, you’re tired out and your judgment has slipped. How far can you walk tonight, the shape you’re in? Tomorrow morning, bright and early, we’ll go down to the highway, follow it about a mile to the freighters’ restaurant south of here and catch the haulers as they come out from breakfast, feeling good. We’ll promote a ride and you’ll go farther in ten minutes than you could make all night.”
Max had to admit that he was tired, exhausted really, and Sam certainly knew more about these wrinkles than he did. Sam added, “Got a blanket in your bindle?”
“No. Just a shirt… and some books.”
“Books, eh? Read quite a bit myself, when I get a chance. May I see them?”
Somewhat reluctantly Max got them out. Sam held them close to the fire and examined them. “Well, I’ll be a three-eyed Martian! Kid, do you know what you’ve got here?”
“Sure.”
“But you ought not to have these. You’re not a member of the Astrogators’ Guild.” “No, but my uncle was. He was on the first trip to Beta Hydrae,” he added proudly. “No foolin’!”
“Sure as taxes.”
“But you’ve never been in space yourself? No, of course not.”
“But I’m going to be!” Max admitted something that he had never told anyone, his ambition to emulate his uncle and go out to the stars. Sam listened thoughtfully. When Max stopped, he said slowly, “So you want to be an astrogator?”
“I certainly do.”
Sam scratched his nose. “Look, kid, I don’t want to throw cold water, but you know how the world wags. Getting to be an astrogator is almost as difficult as getting into the Plumbers’ Guild. The soup is thin these days and there isn’t enough to go around. The guild won’t welcome you just because you are anxious to be apprenticed. Membership is hereditary, just like all the other high-pay guilds.”
“But my uncle was a member.” “Your uncle isn’t your father.”
“No, but a member who hasn’t any sons gets to nominate someone else. Uncle Chet explained it to me. He always told me he was going to register my nomination.”
“And did he?”
Max was silent. At the time his uncle had died he had been too young to know how to go about finding out. When his father had followed his uncle events had closed in on him—he had never checked up, subconsciously preferring to nurse the dream rather than test it. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I’m going to the Mother Chapter at Earthport and find out.”
“Hmmm—I wish you luck, kid.” He stared into the fire, sadly it seemed to Max. “Well, I’m going to grab some shut-eye, and you had better do the same. If you’re chilly, you’ll find some truck back under that rock shelf—burlap and packing materials and such. It’ll keep you warm, if you don’t mind risking a flea or two.”
Max crawled into the dark hole indicated, found a half-way cave in the limestone. Groping, he located the primitive bedding. He had expected to be wakeful, but he was asleep before Sam finished covering the fire.
He was awakened by sunlight blazing outside. He crawled out, stood up and stretched the stiffness out of his limbs. By the sun he judged it to be about seven o’clock in the morning. Sam was not in sight. He looked around and shouted, not too loudly, and guessed that Sam had gone down to the creek for a drink and a cold wash. Max went back into the shelter and hauled out his rucksack, intending to change his socks.
His uncle’s books were missing.
There was a note on top of his spare shirt: “Dear Max,” it said, “There is more stew in the can. You can warm it up for breakfast. So long—Sam P.S. Sorry.”
Further search disclosed that his identification card was missing, but Sam had not bothered with his other pitiful possessions. Max did not touch the stew but set out down the road, his mind filled with bitter thoughts.
Earthport
The farm road crossed under the freight highway; Max came up on the far side and headed south beside the highway. The route was marked by “NO TRESPASS” signs but the path was well worn. The highway widened to make room for a deceleration strip. At the end of its smooth reach, a mile away, Max could see the restaurant Sam had mentioned.
He shinnied over the fence enclosing the restaurant and parking grounds and went to the parking stalls where a dozen of the big land ships were lined up. One was quivering for departure, its flat bottom a few inches clear of the metallic pavement. Max went to its front end and looked up at the driver’s
compartment. The door was open and he could see the driver at his instrument board. Max called out, “Hey, Mister!”
The driver stuck his head out. “What’s itching you?” “How are the chances of a lift south?”
“Beat it, kid.” The door slammed.
None of the other freighters was raised off the pavement; their control compartments were empty. Max was about to turn away when another giant scooted down the braking strip, reached the parking space, crawled slowly into a stall, and settled to the ground. He considered approaching its driver, but decided to wait until the man had eaten. He went back toward the restaurant building and was looking through the door, watching hungry men demolish food while his mouth watered, when he heard a pleasant voice at his shoulder.
“Excuse me, but you’re blocking the door.” Max jumped aside. “Oh! Sorry.”
“Go ahead. You were first.” The speaker was a man about ten years older than Max. He was profusely freckled and had a one-sided grin. Max saw on his cap the pin of the Teamsters’ Guild. “Go on in,” the man repeated, “before you get trampled in the rush.”
Max had been telling himself that he might catch Sam inside—and, after all, they couldn’t charge him just for coming in, if he didn’t actually eat anything. Underlying was the thought of asking to work for a meal, if the manager looked friendly. The freckled-faced man’s urging tipped the scales; he followed his nose toward the source of the heavenly odors pouring out the door.
The restaurant was crowded; there was one vacant table, for two. The man slid into a chair and said, “Sit down.” When Max hesitated, he added, “Go ahead, put it down. Never like to eat alone.” Max could feel the manager’s eyes on him, he sat down. A waitress handed them each a menu and the hauler looked her over appreciatively. When she left he said, “This dump used to have automatic service—and it went broke. The trade went to the Tivoli, eighty miles down the stretch. Then the new owner threw away the machinery and hired girls and business picked up. Nothing makes food taste better than having a pretty girl put it in front of you. Right?”
“Uh, I guess so. Sure.” Max had not heard what was said. He had seldom been in a restaurant and then only in the lunch counter at Clyde’s Corners. The prices he read frightened him; he wanted to crawl under the table.
His companion looked at him. “What’s the trouble, chum?” “Trouble? Uh, nothing.”
“You broke?” Max’s miserable expression answered him. “Shucks, I’ve been there myself. Relax.” The man waggled his fingers at the waitress. “Come here, honey chile. My partner and I will each have a breakfast steak with a fried egg sitting on top and this and that on the side. I want that egg to be just barely dead. If it is cooked solid, I’ll nail it to the wall as a warning to others. Understand me?”
“I doubt if you’ll be able to get a nail through it,” she retorted and walked away, swaying gently. The hauler kept his eyes on her until she disappeared into the kitchen. “See what I mean? How can machinery compete?”
The steak was good and the egg was not congealed. The hauler told Max to call him “Red” and Max gave his name in exchange. Max was pursuing the last of the yolk with a bit of toast and was considering whether it was time to broach the subject of a ride when Red leaned forward and spoke softly. “Max—you got anything pushing you? Free to take a job?”
“What? Why, maybe. What is it?” “Mind taking a little run southwest?”
“Southwest? Matter of fact, I was headin’ that way.”
“Good. Here’s the deal. The Man says we have to have two teamsters to each rig—or else break for eight hours after driving eight. I can’t; I’ve got a penalty time to meet—and my partner washed out. The flathead got taken drunk and I had to put him down to cool. Now I’ve got a check point to pass a hundred thirty miles down the stretch. They’ll make me lay over if I can’t show another driver.”
“Gee! But I don’t know how to drive, Red. I’m awful sorry.”
Red gestured with his cup. “You won’t have to. You’ll always be the off-watch driver. I wouldn’t trust little Molly Malone to somebody who didn’t know her ways. I’ll keep myself awake with Pep pills and catch up on sleep at Earthport.”
“You’re going all the way to Earthport?” “Right.”
“It’s a deal!”
“Okay, here’s the lash up. Every time we hit a check point you’re in the bunk, asleep. You help me load and unload—I’ve got a partial and a pick-up at Oke City—and I’ll feed you. Right?”
“Right!”
“Then let’s go. I want to scoot before these other dust jumpers get underway. Never can tell, there might be a spotter.” Red flipped a bill down and did not wait for change.
The Molly Malone was two hundred feet long and stream lined such that she had negative lift when cruising. This came to Max’s attention from watching the instruments; when she first quivered and raised, the dial marked ROAD CLEARANCE showed nine inches, but as they gathered speed down the acceleration strip it decreased to six.
“The repulsion works by an inverse-cube law,” Red explained. “The more the wind pushes us down the harder the road pushes us up. Keeps us from jumping over the skyline. The faster we go the steadier we are.”
“Suppose you went so fast that the wind pressure forced the bottom down to the road? Could you stop soon enough to keep from wrecking it?”
“Use your head. The more we squat the harder we are pushed up—inverse-cube, I said.”
“Oh.” Max got out his uncle’s slide rule. “If she just supports her own weight at nine inches clearance, then at three inches the repulsion would be twenty-seven times her weight and at an inch it would be seven hundred and twenty-nine, and at a quarter of an inch—”
“Don’t even think about it. At top speed I can’t get her down to five inches.”
“But what makes her go?”
“It’s a phase relationship. The field crawls forward and Molly tries to catch up—only she can’t. Don’t ask me the theory, I just push the buttons.” Red struck a cigarette and lounged back, one hand on the tiller. “Better get in the bunk, kid. Check point in forty miles.”
The bunk was thwartships abaft the control compartment, a shelf above the seat. Max climbed in and wrapped a blanket around himself. Red handed him a cap. “Pull this down over your eyes. Let the button show.” The button was a teamster’s shield, Max did as he was told.
Presently he heard the sound of wind change from a soft roar to a sigh and then stop. The freighter settled to the pavement and the door opened. He lay still, unable to see what was going on. A strange voice said, “How long you been herding it?”
“Since breakfast at Tony’s.”
“So? How did your eyes get so bloodshot?” “It’s the evil life I lead. Want to see my tongue?”
The inspector ignored this, saying instead, “Your partner didn’t sign his trick.” “Whatever you say. Want me to wake the dumb geek?”
“Umm… don’t bother. You sign for him. Tell him to be more careful.” “Right.”
The Molly Malone pulled out and picked up speed. Max crawled down. “I thought we were sunk when he asked for my signature.”
“That was on purpose,” Red said scornfully. “You have to give them something to yap about, or they’ll dig for it.”
Max liked the freighter. The tremendous speed so close to the ground exhilarated him; he decided that if he could not be a spaceman, this life would not be bad—he’d find out how high the application fee was and start saving. He liked the easy way Red picked out on the pavement ahead the speed line that matched the Molly’s speed and then laid the big craft into a curve. It was usually the outermost line, with the Molly on her side and the horizon tilted up at a crazy angle.
Near Oklahoma City they swooped under the ring guides of the C.S.&E. just as a train went over—the
Razor, by Max’s calculations. “I used to herd those things,” Red remarked, glancing up. “You did?”
“Yep. But they got to worrying me. I hated it every time I made a jump and felt the weight sag out from under me. Then I got a notion that the train had a mind of its own and was just waiting to turn aside instead of entering the next guide ring. That sort of thing is no good. So I found a teamster who wanted to better himself and paid the fine to both guilds to let us swap. Never regretted it. Two hundred miles an hour when you’re close to the ground is enough.”
“Uh, how about space ships?”
“That’s another matter. Elbow room out there. Say, kid, while you’re at Earthport you should take a look at the big babies. They’re quite something.”
The library book had been burning a hole in his rucksack; at Oklahoma City he noticed a postal box at the freight depot and, on impulse, dropped the book into it. After he had mailed it he had a twinge of worry that he might have given a clue to his whereabouts which would get back to Montgomery, but he suppressed the worry—the book had to be returned. Vagrancy in the eyes of the law had not worried him, nor trespass, nor impersonating a licensed teamster—but filching a book was a sin.
Max was asleep in the bunk when they arrived. Red shook him. “End of the line, kid.” Max sat up, yawning. “Where are we?”
“Earthport. Let’s shake a leg and get this baby unloaded.”
It was two hours past sunrise and growing desert hot by the time they got the Molly disgorged. Red stood him to a last meal. Red finished first, paid, then laid a bill down by Max’s plate. “Thanks, kid. That’s for luck. So long.” He was gone while Max still had his mouth hanging open. He had never learned his friend’s name, did not even know his shield number.
Earthport was much the biggest settlement Max had ever seen and everything about it confused him—the hurrying self-centered crowds, the enormous buildings, the slidewalks in place of streets, the noise, the desert sun beating down, the flatness—why, there wasn’t anything you could call a hill closer than the skyline!
He saw his first extra-terrestrial, an eight-foot native of Epsilon Gemini V, striding out of a shop with a package under his left arms—as casually, Max thought, as a farmer doing his week’s shopping at the Corners. Max stared. He knew what the creature was from pictures and SV shows, but seeing one was another matter. Its multiple eyes, like a wreath of yellow grapes around the head, gave it a grotesque faceless appearance. Max let his own head swivel to follow it.
The creature approached a policeman, tapped the top of his cap, and said, “Excuse me, sahr, but can you tirect me to the Tesert Palms Athletic Club?” Max could not tell where the noise came out.
Max finally noticed that he seemed to be the only one staring, so he walked slowly on, while sneaking looks over his shoulder—which resulted in his bumping into a stranger. “Oh, excuse me!” Max blurted. The stranger looked at him. “Take it easy, cousin. You’re in the big city now.” After that he tried to be careful.
He had intended to seek out the Guild Hall of the Mother Chapter of Astrogators at once in the forlorn hope that even without his books and identification card he might still identify himself and find that Uncle Chet had provided for his future. But there was so much to see that he loitered. He found himself presently in front of Imperial House, the hotel that guaranteed to supply any combination of pressure, temperature, lighting, atmosphere, pseudogravitation, and diet favored by any known race of intelligent creatures. He hung around hoping to see some of the guests, but the only one who came out while he was there was wheeled out in a pressurized travel tank and he could not see into it.
He noticed the police guard at the door eyeing him and started to move on—then decided to ask directions, reasoning that if it was all right for a Geminian to question a policeman it certainly must be all right for a human being. He found himself quoting the extra-terrestrial. “Excuse me, sir, but could you direct me to the Astrogators’ Guild Hall?”
The officer looked him over. “At the foot of the Avenue of Planets, just before you reach the port.” “Uh, which way do…”
“New in town?” “Yeah. Yes, sir.”
“Where are you staying?”
“Staying? Why, nowhere yet. I just got here. I…” “What’s your business at the Astrogators’ Hall?”
“It’s on account of my uncle,” Max answered miserably. “Your uncle?”
“He… he’s an astrogator.” He mentally crossed his fingers over the tense.
The policeman inspected again. “Take this slide to the next intersection, change and slide west. Big building with the guild sunburst over the door—can’t miss it. Stay out of restricted areas.” Max left without waiting to find out how he was to know a restricted area. The Guild Hall did prove easy to find; the slidewalk to the west ducked underground and when it emerged at its swing-around Max was deposited in front of it.
But he had not eyes for it. To the west where avenue and buildings ended was the field and on it space ships, stretching away for miles—fast little military darts, stubby Moon shuttles, winged ships that served the satellite stations, robot freighters, graceless and powerful. But directly in front of the gate hardly half a mile away was a great ship that he knew at once, the starship Asgard. He knew her history, Uncle Chet had served in her. A hundred years earlier she had been built out in space as a space-to-space rocket ship; she was then the Prince of Wales. Years passed, her tubes were ripped out and a mass-conversion torch was kindled in her; she became the Einstein. More years passed, for nearly twenty she swung empty around Luna, a lifeless, outmoded hulk. Now in place of the torch she had Horst-Conrad impellers that clutched at the fabric of space itself; thanks to them she was now able to touch Mother Terra. To commemorate her rebirth she had been dubbed Asgard, heavenly home of the gods.
Her massive, pear-shaped body was poised on its smaller end, steadied by an invisible scaffolding of thrust beams. Max knew where they must be, for there was a ring of barricades spotted around her to keep the careless from wandering into the deadly loci.
He pressed his nose against the gate to the field and tried to see more of her, until a voice called out, “Away from there, Jack! Don’t you see that sign?”
Max looked up. Above his head was a sign: RESTRICTED AREA. Reluctantly he moved away and walked back to the Guild Hall.
THE ASTROGATORS’ GUILD
Everything about the hall of the Mother Chapter was to Max’s eyes lavish, churchlike, and frightening. The great doors opened silently as he approached, dilating away into the walls. His feet made no sound on the tesselated floor. He started down the long, high foyer, wondering where he should go, when a firm voice stopped him. “May I help you, please?”
He turned. A beautiful young lady with a severe manner held him with her eye. She was seated behind a desk. Max went up to her. “Uh, maybe you could tell me, Ma’am, who I ought to see. I don’t rightly know just…”
“One moment. Your name, please?” Several minutes later she had wormed out of him the basic facts of his quest. “So far as I can see, you haven’t any status here and no excuse for appealing to the Guild.”
“But I told you…”
“Never mind. I’m going to put it up to the legal office.” She touched a button and a screen raised up on her desk; she spoke to it. “Mr. Hanson, can you spare a moment?”
“Yes, Grace?”
“There is a young man here who claims to be a legacy of the Guild. Will you talk with him?”
The voice answered, “Look, Grace, you know the procedures. Get his address, send him on his way, and send his papers up for consideration.”
She frowned and touched another control. Although Max could see that she continued to talk, no sound reached him. Then she nodded and the screen slid back into the desk. She touched another button and said, “Skeeter!”
A page boy popped out of a door behind her and looked Max over with cold eyes. “Skeeter,” she went on, “take this visitor to Mr. Hanson.”
The page sniffed. “Him?”
“Him. And fasten your collar and spit out that gum.”
Mr. Hanson listened to Max’s story and passed him on to his boss, the chief legal counsel, who listened to a third telling. That official then drummed his desk and made a call, using the silencing device the girl had used.
He then said to Max, “You’re in luck, son. The Most Worthy High Secretary will grant you a few minutes of his time. Now when you go in, don’t sit down, remember to speak only when spoken to, and get out quickly when he indicates that the audience is ended.”
The High Secretary’s office made the lavishness that had thus far filled Max’s eyes seem like austerity. The rug alone could have been swapped for the farm on which Max grew up. There was no communication equipment in evidence, no files, not even a desk. The High Secretary lounged back in a mammoth easy chair while a servant massaged his scalp. He raised his head as Max appeared and said, “Come in, son. Sit down there. What is your name?”
“Maximilian Jones, sir.”
They looked at each other. The Secretary saw a lanky youth who needed a haircut, a bath, and a change of clothes; Max saw a short, fat little man in a wrinkled uniform. His head seemed too big for him and Max could not make up his mind whether the eyes were kindly or cold.
“And you are a nephew of Chester Arthur Jones?” “Yes, sir.”
“I knew Brother Jones well. A fine mathematician.” The High Secretary went on, “I understand that you
have had the misfortune to lose your government Citizen’s Identification. Carl.”
He had not raised his voice but a young man appeared with the speed of a genie. “Yes, sir?”
“Take this young man’s thumb print, call the Bureau of Identification—not here, but the main office at New Washington. My compliments to the Chief of Bureau and tell him that I would be pleased to have immediate identification while you hold the circuit.”
The print was taken speedily; the man called Carl left. The High Secretary went on, “What was your purpose in coming here?” Diffidently Max explained that his uncle had told him that he intended to nominate him for apprenticeship in the guild.
The man nodded. “So I understand. I am sorry to tell you, young fellow, that Brother Jones made no nomination.”
Max had difficulty in taking in the simple statement. So much was his inner pride tied to his pride in his uncle’s profession, so much had he depended on his hope that his uncle had named him his professional heir, that he could not accept at once the verdict that he was nobody and nothing. He blurted out, “You’re sure? Did you look?”
The masseur looked shocked but the High Secretary answered calmly, “The archives have been searched, not once, but twice. There is no possible doubt.” The High Secretary sat up, gestured slightly, and the servant disappeared. “I’m sorry.”
“But he told me,” Max said stubbornly. “He said he was going to.”
“Nevertheless he did not.” The man who had taken the thumb print came in and offered a memorandum to the High Secretary, who glanced at it and waved it away. “I’ve no doubt that he considered you.
Nomination to our brotherhood involves a grave responsibility; it is not unusual for a childless brother to have his eye on a likely lad for a long time before deciding whether or not he measures up. For some reason your uncle did not name you.”
Max was appalled by the humiliating theory that his beloved uncle might have found him unworthy. It could not be true—why, just the day before he died, he had said—he interrupted his thoughts to say, “Sir—I think I know what happened.”
“Eh?”
“Uncle Chester died suddenly. He meant to name me, but he didn’t get a chance. I’m sure of it.”
“Possibly. Men have been known to fail to get their affairs in order before the last orbit. But I must assume that he knew what he was doing.”
“But—”
“That’s all, young man. No, don’t go away. I’ve been thinking about you today.” Max looked startled, the High Secretary smiled and continued, “You see, you are the second ‘Maximilian Jones’ who has come to us with this story.”
“Huh?”
“Huh indeed.” The guild executive reached into a pocket of his chair, pulled out some books and a card, handed them to Max, who stared unbelievingly.
“Uncle Chet’s books!”
“Yes. Another man, older than yourself, came here yesterday with your identification card and these books. He was less ambitious than you are,” he added dryly. “He was willing to settle for a rating less lofty than astrogator.”
“What happened?”
“He left suddenly when we attempted to take his finger prints. I did not see him. But when you showed up today I began to wonder how long a procession of ‘Maximilian Jones’s’ would favor us. Better guard that card in the future—I fancy we have saved you a fine.”
Max placed it in an inner pocket. “Thanks a lot, sir.” He started to put the books in his rucksack. The High Secretary gestured in denial.
“No, no! Return the books, please.” “But Uncle Chet gave them to me.”
“Sorry. At most he loaned them to you—and he should not have done even that. The tools of our profession are never owned individually; they are loaned to each brother. Your uncle should have turned them in when he retired, but some of the brothers have a sentimental fondness for having them in their possession. Give them to me, please.”
Max still hesitated. “Come now,” the guildsman said reasonably. “It would not do for our professional secrets to be floating around loose, available to anyone. Even the hairdressers do not permit that. We have a high responsibility to the public. Only a member of this guild, trained, tested, sworn, and accepted, may lawfully be custodian of those manuals.”
Max’s answer was barely audible. “I don’t see the harm. I’m not going to get to use them, it looks like.”
“You don’t believe in anarchy, surely? Our whole society is founded on entrusting grave secrets only to those who are worthy. But don’t feel sad. Each brother, when he is issued his tools, deposits an earnest with the bursar. In my opinion, since you are the nearest relative of Brother Jones, we may properly repay the earnest to you for their return. Carl.”
The young man appeared again. “The deposit monies, please.” Carl had the money with him—he seemed to earn his living by knowing what the High Secretary was about to want. Max found himself accepting an impressive sheaf of money, more than he had ever touched before, and the books were taken from him before he could think of another objection.
It seemed time to leave, but he was motioned back to his chair. “Personally, I am sorry to disappoint you, but I am merely the servant of my brothers; I have no choice. However… ” The High Secretary fitted his finger tips together. “Our brotherhood takes care of its own. There are funds at my disposal for such cases. How would you like to go into training?”
“For the Guild?”
“No, no! We don’t grant brotherhood as charity. But for some respectable trade, metalsmith, or chef, or tailor—what you wish. Any occupation not hereditary. The brotherhood will sponsor you, pay your ‘prentice fee and, if you make good, lend you your contribution when you are sworn in.”
Max knew he should accept gratefully. He was being offered an opportunity free that most of the swarming masses never got on any terms. But the cross-grained quirk in him that had caused him to
spurn the stew that Sam had left behind made this generous offer stick in his craw. “Thanks just the same,” he answered in tones almost surly, “but I don’t rightly think I can take it.”
The High Secretary looked bleak. “So? It’s your life.” He snapped his fingers, a page appeared, and Max was led quickly out of the Hall.
He stood on the steps of the Guild Hall and wondered dejectedly what he should do next. Even the space ships on the field at the foot of the street did not attract; he could not have looked at one without feeling like crying. He looked to the east instead.
A short distance away a jaunty figure leaned against a trash receptacle. As Max’s eyes rested on the man he straightened up, flipped a cigarette to the pavement, and started toward him.
Max looked at him again. “Sam!” It was undoubtedly the wayfarer who had robbed him—well dressed, clean shaved—but Sam nonetheless. Max hurried toward him.
“Howdy, Max,” Sam greeted him with an unembarrassed grin, “how did you make out?” “I ought to have you arrested!”
“Now, now—keep your voice down. You’re making yourself conspicuous.” Max took a breath and lowered his voice. “You stole my books.”
“Your books? They weren’t yours—and I returned them to their owners. You want to arrest me for that?”
“But you… Well, anyhow you…”
A voice, civil, firm, and official, spoke at Max’s elbow. “Is this person annoying you, sir?” Max turned and found a policeman standing behind him. He started to speak, then bit off the words as he realized the question had been addressed to Sam.
Sam took hold of Max’s upper arm in a gesture that was protective and paternal, but quite firm. “Not at all, officer, thank you.”
“Are you sure? I received word that this chico was headed this way and I’ve had my eye on him.” “He’s a friend of mine. I was waiting for him here.”
“As you say. We have a lot of trouble with vagrants. They all seem to head for Earthport.”
“He’s not a vagrant. He’s a young friend of mine from the country and I’m afraid he’s gotten a bit confused. I’ll be responsible.”
“Very well, sir.”
“Not at all.” Max let himself be led away. When they were out of earshot Sam said, “That was close. That nosy clown would have had us both in the bull pen. You did all right, kid—kept your lip zipped at the right time.”
They were around the corner into a less important street before Sam let go his grip. He stopped and faced Max, grinning. “Well, kid?”
“I should a’ told that cop about you!”
“Why didn’t you? He was right there.”
Max found himself caught by contradictory feelings. He was angry with Sam, no doubt about it, but his first unstudied reaction at seeing him had been the warm pleasure one gets from recognizing a familiar face among strangers—the anger had come a split second later. Now Sam looked at him with easy cynicism, a quizzical smile on his face. “Well, kid?” he repeated. “If you want to turn me in, let’s go back and get it over with. I won’t run.”
Max looked back at him peevishly. “Oh, forget it!” “Thanks. I’m sorry about it, kid. I really am.” “Then why did you do it?”
Sam’s face changed suddenly to a sad, far-away look, then resumed its cheerful cynicism. “I was tempted by an idea, old son—every man has his limits. Some day I’ll tell you. Now, how about a bit to eat and a gab? There’s a joint near here where we can talk without having the nosies leaning over our shoulders.”
“I don’t know as I want to.”
“Oh, come now! The food isn’t much but it’s better than mulligan.”
Max had been ready with a stiff speech about how he would not turn Sam in, but he certainly did not want to eat with him; the mention of mulligan brought him up short. He remembered uneasily that Sam had not inquired as to his morals, but had shared his food.
“Well… okay.”
“That’s my boy!” They went on down the street. The neighborhood was a sort to be found near the port in any port city; once off the pompous Avenue of the Planets it became more crowded, noisier, more alive, and somehow warmer and more friendly despite a strong air of “keep your hand on your purse.” Hole-in-the-wall tailor shops, little restaurants none too clean, cheap hotels, honky-tonks, fun arcades, exhibits both “educational” and “scientific,” street vendors, small theaters with gaudy posters and sounds of music leaking out, shops fronting for betting parlors, tattoo parlors fronting for astrologers, and the inevitable Salvation Army mission gave the street flavor its stylish cousins lacked. Martians in trefoil sunglasses and respirators, humanoids from Beta Corvi III, things with exoskeletons from Allah knew where, all jostled with humans of all shades and all blended in easy camaraderie.
Sam stopped at a shop with the age-old symbol of three golden spheres. “Wait here. Be right out.” Max waited and watched the throng. Sam came out shortly without his coat. “Now we eat.” “Sam! Did you pawn your coat?”
“Give the man a cigar! How did you guess?”
“But… Look, I didn’t know you were broke; you looked prosperous. Get it back, I’ll… I’ll pay for our lunch.”
“Say, that’s sweet of you, kid. But forget it. I don’t need a coat this weather. Truth is, I was dressed up just to make a good impression at—well, a little matter of business.”
Max blurted out, “But how did you… “, then shut up. Sam grinned. “Did I steal the fancy rags? No. I encountered a citizen who believed in percentages and engaged him in a friendly game. Never bet on
percentages, kid; skill is more fundamental. Here we are.”
The room facing the street was a bar, beyond was a restaurant. Sam led him on through the restaurant, through the kitchen, down a passage off which there were card rooms, and ended in a smaller, less pretentious dining room; Sam picked a table in a corner. An enormous Samoan shuffled up, dragging one leg. Sam nodded, “Howdy, Percy.” He turned to Max. “A drink first?”
“Uh, I guess not.”
“Smart lad. Lay off the stuff. Irish for me, Percy, and we’ll both have whatever you had for lunch.” The Samoan waited silently. Sam shrugged and laid money on the table, Percy scooped it up.
Max objected, “But I was going to pay.”
“You can pay for the lunch. Percy owns the place,” he added. “He’s offensively rich, but he didn’t get that way by trusting the likes of me. Now tell me about yourself, old son. How you got here? How you made out with the astrogators… everything. Did they kill the fatted calf?”
“Well, no.” There seemed to be no reason not to tell Sam and he found that he wanted to talk. Sam nodded at the end.
“About what I had guessed. Any plans now?” “No. I don’t know what to do now, Sam.”
“Hmm… it’s an ill wind that has no turning. Eat your lunch and let me think.” Later he added, “Max, what do you want to do?”
“Well… I wanted to be an astrogator…” “That’s out.”
“I know.”
“Tell me, did you want to be an astrogator and nothing else, or did you simply want to go into space?” “Why, I guess I never thought about it any other way.”
“Well, think about it.”
Max did so. “I want to space. If I can’t go as an astrogator, I want to go anyhow. But I don’t see how. The Astrogators’ Guild is the only one I stood a chance for.”
“There are ways.”
“Huh? Do you mean put in for emigration?”
Sam shook his head. “It costs more than you could save to go to one of the desirable colonies—and the ones they give you free rides to I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies.”
“Then what do you mean?”
Sam hesitated. “There are ways to wangle it, old son—if you do what I say. This uncle of yours—you were around him a lot?”
“Why, sure.”
“Talked about space with you?” “Certainly. That’s all we talked about.”
“Hmm… how well do you know the patter?”
“…YOUR MONEY AND MY KNOW-HOW… “
“The patter?” Max looked puzzled. “I suppose I know what everybody knows.” “Where’s the worry hole?”
“Huh? That’s the control room.”
“If the cheater wants a corpse, where does he find it?”
Max looked amused. “That’s just stuff from SV serials, nobody talks like that aboard ship. The cook is the cook, and if he wanted a side of beef, he’d go to the reefer for it.”
“How do you tell a ‘beast’ from an animal?”
“Why, a ‘beast’ is a passenger, but an animal is just an animal, I guess.”
“Suppose you were on a ship for Mars and they announced that the power plant had gone blooie and the ship was going to spiral into the Sun? What would you think?”
“I’d think somebody was trying to scare me. In the first place, you wouldn’t be ‘on’ a ship—’in’ is the right word. Second, a spiral isn’t one of the possible orbits. And third, if a ship was headed for Mars from Earth, it couldn’t fall into the Sun; the orbit would be incompatible.”
“Suppose you were part of a ship’s crew in a strange port and you wanted to go out and look the place over. How would you go about asking the captain for permission?”
“Why, I wouldn’t.” “You’d just jump ship?”
“Let me finish. If I wanted to hit dirt, I’d ask the first officer; the captain doesn’t bother with such things. If the ship was big enough, I’d have to ask my department head first.” Max sat up and held Sam’s eye. “Sam—you’ve been spaceside. Haven’t you?”
“What gave you that notion, kid?” “What’s your guild?”
“Stow it, Max. Ask me no questions and I’ll sell you no pigs in a poke. Maybe I’ve studied up on the jive just as you have.”
“I don’t believe it,” Max said bluntly.
Sam looked pained. Max went on, “What’s this all about? You ask me a bunch of silly questions—sure, I know quite a bit about spaceside; I’ve been reading about it all my life and Uncle Chet would talk by the hour. But what of it?”
Sam looked at him and said softly, “Max—the Asgard is raising next Thursday—for starside. Would you like to be in her?”
Max thought about it. To be in the fabulous Asgard, to be heading out to the stars, to be—he brushed the vision aside. “Don’t talk that way, Sam! You know I’d give my right arm. Why needle me?”
“How much money have you?” “Huh? Why?”
“How much?”
“I haven’t even had time to count it.” Max started to haul out the wad of bills he had been given; Sam hastily and unobtrusively stopped him.
“Psst!” he protested. “Don’t flash a roll in here. Do you want to eat through a slit in your throat? Keep it down!”
Startled, Max took the advice. He was still more startled when he finished the tally; he had known that he had been given quite a lot of money but this was more than he had dreamed. “How much?” Sam persisted. Max told him, Sam swore softly. “Well, it will just have to do.”
“Do for what?”
“You’ll see. Put it away.”
As Max did so he said wonderingly, “Sam, I had no idea those books were so valuable.” “They aren’t.”
“Huh?”
“It’s malarkey. Lots of guilds do it. They want to make it appear that their professional secrets are precious, so they make the candidate put up a wad of dough for his reference books. If those things were published in the ordinary way, they’d sell at a reasonable price.”
“But that’s right, isn’t it? As the Worthy High Secretary explained, it wouldn’t do for just anybody to have that knowledge.”
Sam made a rude noise and pretended to spit. “What difference would it make? Suppose you still had them—you don’t have a ship to conn.”
“But… ” Max stopped and grinned. “I can’t see that it did any good to take them away from me anyhow. I’ve read them, so I know what’s in them.”
“Sure you know. Maybe you even remember some of the methods. But you don’t have all those columns of figures so you can look up the one you need when you need it. That’s what they care about.”
“But I do! I read them, I tell you.” Max wrinkled his forehead, then began to recite: “‘Page 272, Calculated Solutions of the Differential Equation of Motion by the Ricardo Assumption—” He began to reel off a series of seven-place figures. Sam listened in growing surprise, then stopped him.
“Kid, you really remember that? You weren’t making it up?” “Of course not, I read it.”
“Well, I’ll be a beat up… Look, you’re a page-at-a-glance reader? Is that it?”
“No, not exactly. I’m a pretty fast reader, but I do have to read it. But I don’t forget. I never have been able to see how people forget. I can’t forget anything.”
Sam shook his head wonderingly. “I’ve been able to forget a lot of things, thank Heaven.” He thought for a moment. “Maybe we should forget the other caper and exploit this talent of yours. I can think of angles.”
“What do you mean? And what other caper?”
“Hmm… no, I was right the first time. The idea is to get away from here. And with your funny memory the chances are a whole lot better. Even though you sling the slang pretty well I was worried. Now I’m not.”
“Sam, stop talking riddles. What are you figuring on?’
“Okay, kid, I’ll lay it on the table.” He glanced around, leaned forward, and spoke even more quietly. “We take the money and I spread it around carefully. When the Asgard raises, we’re signed on as crewmen.”
“As apprentices? We wouldn’t even have time for ground school. And besides you’re too old to ‘prentice.”
“Use your head! We don’t have enough to pay one apprentice fee, let alone two, in any space guild—and the Asgard isn’t signing ‘prentices anyhow. We’ll be experienced journeymen in one of the guilds, with records to prove it.”
When the idea soaked in, Max was shocked. “But they put you in jail for that!” “Where do you think you are now?”
“Well, I’m not in jail. And I don’t want to be.”
“This whole planet is one big jail, and a crowded one at that. What chance have you got? If you aren’t born rich, or born into one of the hereditary guilds, what can you do? Sign up with one of the labor companies.”
“But there are non-hereditary guilds.”
“Can you pay the fee? You’ve got a year, maybe two until you’re too old to ‘prentice. If you were sharp with cards you might manage it—but can you earn it? You should live so long! Your old man should have saved it; he left you a farm instead.” Sam stopped suddenly, bit his thumb. “Max, I’ll play fair. Your old man did leave you a fair start in life. With the money you’ve got you can go home, hire a shyster, and maybe squeeze that Montgomery item out of the money he swindled for your farm. Then you can buy your apprenticeship in some guild. Do it, kid. I won’t stand in your way.” He watched Max narrowly.
Max reflected that he had just refused a chance to pick a trade and be given a free start. Maybe he should reconsider. Maybe… “No! That’s not what I want. This… this, uh, scheme of yours; how do we do it?”
Sam relaxed and grinned. “My boy!”
Sam got them a room over Percy’s restaurant. There he coached him. Sam went out several times and Max’s money went with him. When Max protested Sam said wearily, “What do you want? To hold my heart as security? Do you want to come along and scare ’em out of the dicker? The people I have to reason with will be taking chances. Or do you think you can arrange matters yourself? It’s your money and my know-how… that’s the partnership.”
Max watched him leave the first time with gnawing doubts, but Sam came back. Once he brought with him an elderly, gross woman who looked Max over as if he were an animal up for auction. Sam did not introduce her but said, “How about it? I thought a mustache would help.”
She looked at Max from one side, then the other. “No,” she decided, “that would just make him look made up for amateur theatricals.” She touched Max’s head with moist, cold fingers; when he drew back, she admonished, “Don’t flinch, honey duck. Aunt Becky has to work on you. No, we’ll move back his hair line above his temples, thin it out on top, and kill its gloss. Some faint wrinkles tattooed around his eyes. Mmm… that’s all. Mustn’t overdo it.”
When this fat artist was through Max looked ten years older. Becky asked if he wanted his hair roots killed, or would he prefer to have his scalp return to normal in time? Sam started to insist on permanence, but she brushed him aside. “I’ll give him a bottle of ‘Miracle Gro’—no extra charge, it’s just rubbing alcohol—and he can make a big thing of using it. How about it, lover? You’re too pretty to age you permanently.”
Max accepted the “Miracle Gro”—hair restored or your money back.
Sam took away his citizen’s identification card, returned with another one. It had his right name, a wrong age, his right serial number, a wrong occupation, his own thumb print, and a wrong address. Max looked at it curiously. “It looks real.”
“It should. The man who made it makes thousands of real ones—but he charges extra for this.” That night Sam brought him a book titled Ship Economy and embossed with the seal of the Guild of Space Stewards, Cooks, and Purser’s Clerks. “Better stay up all night and see how much you can soak up. The man it belongs to won’t sleep more than ten hours even with the jolt Percy slipped into his nightcap. Want a pill to keep you awake?”
“I don’t think so.” Max examined it. It was in fine print and quite thick. But by five in the morning he had finished it. He woke Sam and gave it back, then went to sleep, his head buzzing with stowage and dunnage, moment arms and mass calculations, hydroponics techniques, cargo records, tax forms, diets, food preservation and preparation, daily, weekly, and quarterly accounts, and how to get rats out of a compartment which must not be evacuated. Simple stuff, he decided—he wondered why such things were considered too esoteric for laymen.
On the fourth day of his incarceration Sam fitted him out with spaceside clothes, none of them new, and gave him a worn plastileather personal record book. The first page stated that he was an accepted brother of the Stewards, Cooks, and Purser’s Clerks, having honorably completed his apprenticeship. It listed his skills and it appeared that his dues had been paid each quarter for seven years. What appeared to be his own signature appeared above that of the High Steward, with the seal of the guild embossed through both. The other pages recorded his trips, his efficiency ratings, and other permanent data, each properly signed by the first officers and pursers concerned. He noted with interest that he had been fined three days pay in the Cygnus for smoking in an unauthorized place and that he had once for six weeks been allowed to strike for chartsman, having paid the penalty to the Chartsmen & Computers Guild for
the chance.
“See anything odd?” asked Sam. “It all looks funny to me.”
“It says you’ve been to Luna. Everybody’s been to Luna. But the ships you served in are mostly out of commission and none of the pursers happens to be in Earthport now. The only starship you ever jumped in was lost on the trip immediately after the one you took. Get me?”
“I think so.”
“When you talk to another spaceman, no matter what ship he served in, it’s not one you served in—you won’t be showing this record to anybody but the purser and your boss anyhow.”
“But suppose they served in one of these?”
“Not in the Asgard. We made darn sure. Now I’m going to take you out on an evening of gaiety. You’ll drink warm milk on account of your ulcer and you’ll complain when you can’t get it. And that’s just about all you’ll talk about—your symptoms. You’ll start a reputation right now for being untalkative; you can’t make many mistakes with your mouth shut. Watch yourself, kid, there will be spacemen around you all evening. If you mess it up, I’ll leave you dirtside and raise without you. Let me see you walk again.”
Max walked for him. Sam cursed gently. “Cripes, you still walk like a farmer. Get your feet out of those furrows, boy.”
“No good?”
“It’ll have to do. Grab your bonnet. We’ll strike while the iron’s in the fire and let the bridges fall where they may.”
“SPACEMAN” JONES
The Asgard was to raise the next day. Max woke early and tried to wake Sam, but this proved difficult. At last the older man sat up. “Oh, what a head! What time is it?”
“About six.”
“And you woke me? Only my feeble condition keeps me from causing you to join your ancestors. Go back to sleep.”
“But today’s the day!”
“Who cares? She raises at noon. We’ll sign on at the last minute; that way you won’t have time to make a slip.”
“Sam? How do you know they’ll take us?”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake! It’s all arranged. Now shut up. Or go downstairs and get breakfast—but don’t talk to anybody. If you’re a pal, you’ll bring me a pot of coffee at ten o’clock.”
“And breakfast?”
“Don’t mention food in my presence. Show some respect.” Sam pulled the covers up over his head.
It was nearly eleven thirty when they presented themselves at the gate of the port; ten minutes later before the bus deposited them at the base of the ship. Max looked up at its great, bulging sides but was cut short by a crewman standing at the lift and holding a list. “Names.”
“Anderson.” “Jones.”
He checked them off. “Get in the ship. You should have been here an hour ago.” The three climbed into the cage; it swung clear of the ground and was reeled in, swaying, like a bucket on a well rope.
Sam looked down and shuddered. “Never start a trip feeling good,” he advised Max. “It might make you sorry to be leaving.” The cage was drawn up inside the ship; the lock closed after them and they stepped out into the Asgard. Max was trembling with stage fright.
He had expected to be sworn into the ship’s company by the first officer, as called for by law. But his reception was depressingly unceremonious. The crewman who had checked them into the ship told them to follow him; he led them to the Purser’s office. There the Chief Clerk had them sign and thumbprint the book, yawning the while and tapping his buck teeth. Max surrendered his forged personal record book, while feeling as if the deception were stamped on it in bold letters. But Mr. Kuiper merely chucked it into a file basket. He then turned to them. “This is a taut ship. You’ve started by very nearly missing it. That’s a poor start.”
Sam said nothing. Max said, “Yessir.”
The Chief Clerk went on, “Stow your gear, get your chow, and report back.” He glanced at a wall chart. “One of you in D-112, the other in E-009.”
Max started to ask how to get there, but Sam took his elbow and eased him out of the office. Outside he said, “Don’t ask any questions you can avoid. We’re on Baker deck, that’s all we need to know.” Presently they came to a companionway and started back down. Max felt a sudden change in pressure, Sam grinned. “She’s sealed. Won’t be long now.”
They were in D-112, an eight-man bunkroom, and Sam was showing him how to set the lock on the one empty locker when there was a distant call on a loudspeaker. Max felt momentarily dizzy and his weight seemed to pulse. Then it stopped. Sam remarked, “They were a little slow synchronizing the field—or else this bucket of bolts has an unbalanced phaser.” He clapped Max on the back. “We made it, kid.”
They were in space.
E-009 was down one more deck and on the far side; they left Sam’s gear there and started to look for lunch. Sam stopped a passing engineer’s mate. “Hey, shipmate—we’re fresh caught. Where’s the crew’s mess?”
“Clockwise about eighty and inboard, this deck.” He looked them over. “Fresh caught, eh? Well, you’ll find out.”
“Like that, huh?”
“Worse. A madhouse squared. If I wasn’t married, I’d ‘a’ stayed dirtside.” He went on his way.
Sam said, “Ignore it, kid. All the oldtimers in a ship claim its the worst madhouse in space. A matter of pride.” But their next experience seemed to confirm it; the serving window in the mess room had closed at noon, when the ship lifted; Max mournfully resigned himself to living with a tight belt until supper. But Sam pushed on into the galley and came out presently with two loaded trays. They found empty places and sat down.
“How did you do it?”
“Any cook will feed you if you let him explain first what a louse you are and how by rights he doesn’t have to.”
The food was good—real beef patties, vegetables from the ship’s gardens, wheat bread, a pudding, and coffee. Max polished his platter and wondered if he dared ask for seconds. He decided against it. The talk flowed around him and only once was there danger that his tyro status might show up, that being when a computerman asked him a direct question as to his last trip.
Sam stalled it off. “Imperial survey,” he answered briefly. “We’re both still covered.”
The computerman grinned knowingly. “Which jail were you in? The Imperial Council hasn’t ordered a secret survey in years.”
“This one was so secret they forgot to tell you about it. Write ’em a letter and burn them out about it,” Sam stood up. “Finished, Max?”
On the way back to the Purser’s Office Max worried as to his probable assignment, checking over in his mind the skills and experience he was alleged to have. He need not have worried; Mr. Kuiper, with a fine disregard for such factors, assigned him as stableman.
The Asgard was a combined passenger liner and freighter. She carried this trip Hereford breeding stock, two bulls and two dozen cows, and an assortrnent of other animals consigned for ecologic and economic reasons to colonies—pigs, chickens, sheep, a pair of Angora goats, a family of llamas. It was contrary to Imperial policy to plant most terrestrial fauna on other planets; the colonials were expected to establish economy with indigenous flora and fauna—but some animals have been bred for so many generations for the use of man that they are not easily replaced by exotic creatures. On Gamma Leonis VI (b), New Mars, the saurians known locally as “chuckleheads” or “chucks” could and did replace Percherons as draft animals with greater efficiency and economy—but men disliked them. There was never the familial trust that exists between horses and men; unless a strain of chucks should develop a degree of rapport with men (which seemed unlikely) they would eventually die out and be replaced by the horse, for the unforgivable sin of failing to establish a firm treaty with the most ravenous, intolerant, deadly, and successful of the animals in the explored universe, Man.
There was also a cage of English sparrows. Max never did find out where these noisy little scavengers were believed to be necessary, nor was he acquainted with the complex mathematical analysis by which such conclusions were reached. He simply fed them and tried to keep their quarters clean.
There were cats in the Asgard, too, but most of these were free citizens and crewmen, charged with holding down the rats and mice that had gone into space along with mankind. One of Max’s duties was to change the sand boxes on each deck and take the soiled ones to the oxydizer for processing. The other cats were pets, property of passengers, unhappy prisoners in the kennel off the stables. The passengers’ dogs lived there, too; no dogs were allowed to run free.
Max wanted to look back at Earth and see it as a shrinking globe in the sky, but that was a privilege reserved for passengers. He spent the short period when it would have been possible in hauling (by hand) green timothy hay from the hydroponics airconditioning plant to the stables and in cleaning said stables. It was a task he neither liked nor disliked; by accident he had been assigned to work that he understood.
His immediate boss was the Chief Ship’s Steward, Mr. Giordano. Mr. “Gee” split the ship’s housekeeping with Mr. Dumont, Chief Passengers’ Steward; their domains divided at Charlie deck. Thus Mr. Dumont had passengers’ quarters, officers’ country, offices, and the control and communication stations, while Giordano was responsible for everything down (or aft) to but not including the engineering space—crew’s quarters, mess, and galley, stores, stables and kennel, hydroponics deck, and cargo spaces. Both worked for the Purser, who in turn was responsible to the First Officer.
The organization of starships derived in part from that of military vessels, in part from ocean liners of earlier days, and in part from the circumstances of interstellar travel. The first officer was boss of the ship and a wise captain did not interfere with him. The captain, although by law monarch of his miniature world, turned his eyes outward; the first officer turned his inward. As long as all went well the captain concerned himself only with the control room and with astrogation; the first officer bossed everything else. Even astrogators, communicators, computermen, and chartsmen were under the first officer, although in practice he had nothing to do with them when they were on duty since they worked in the “worry hole” under the captain.
The chief engineer was under the first officer, too, but he was nearly an autonomous satrap. In a taut, well-run ship he kept his bailiwick in such shape that the first officer did not need to worry about it. The chief engineer was responsible not only for the power plant and the Horst-Conrad impellers but for all auxiliary engineering equipment wherever located—for example the pumps and fans of the hydroponics installations, even though the purser, through his chief ship’s steward, took care of the farming thereof.
Such was the usual organization of starship liner-freighters and such was the Asgard. It was not identical with the organization of a man-of-war and very different from that of the cheerless transports used to ship convicts and paupers out to colonies that were being forced—in those ships, the purser’s department was stripped to a clerk or two and the transportees did all the work, cooking, cleaning, handling cargo, everything. But the Asgard carried paid passengers, some of whom measured their wealth in megabucks; they expected luxury hotel service even light-years out in space. Of the three main departments of the Asgard, astrogation, engineering, and housekeeping, the Purser’s was by far the largest.
A first officer could reach that high status from chief astrogator, from chief engineer, or from purser, but only if he were originally an astrogator could he go on to captain. The three officer types were essentially mathematicians, business managers, or physicists; a captain necessarily had to be able to practice the mathematical skill of astrogation. First Officer Walther, as was usually the case with a liner, had formerly been a purser.
The Asgard was a little world, a tiny mobile planet. It had its monarch the captain, its useless nobility the passengers, its technical and governing class, and its hewers of wood and drawers of water. It contained flora and fauna in ecological balance; it carried its miniature sun in its power plant. Although its schedule contemplated only months in space, it was capable of staying in space indefinitely. The chef might run out of caviar, but there would be no lack of food, nor of air, nor of heat and light.
Max decided that he was lucky to be assigned to Mr. Giordano rather than to Chief Clerk Kuiper. Mr.
Kuiper supervised his clerks minutely, but Mr. Gee did not often stir his fat frame out of his
office-stateroom. He was a jovial boss—provided everything ran to suit him. Mr. Gee found it an effort
to go all the way down to the stables; once he became convinced that Max was giving the animals proper care and keeping the place clean he gave up inspecting, merely requiring Max to report daily. This gave Giordano more time for his principal avocation, which was distilling a sort of vodka in a cubby in his stateroom, using materials grown in the hydroponds—also in his charge. He carried on a clandestine trade in his product with the crew. By keeping his mouth shut and his ears open Max learned that this was a usual prerogative of a chief ship’s steward, ignored as long as the steward had the judgment to limit his operations. The ship, of course, had a wine mess and bar, but that was for the “beasts”—crewmen could not patronize it.
“I was once in a ship,” Sam told Max, “where the First clamped down—busted up the still, busted the steward to cleaning decks, and generally threw the book.” He stopped to puff on his cigar, a gift from the passenger steward; they were hiding out in Max’s stables, enjoying a rest and a gab. “Didn’t work out.”
“Why not?”
“Use your head. Forces must balance, old son. For every market there is a supplier. That’s the key to the nutshell. In a month there was a still in durn near every out-of-the-way compartment in the ship and the crew was so demoralized it wasn’t fit to stuff vacuum. So the Captain had a talk with the First and things went back to normal.”
Max thought it over. “Sam? Were you that ship’s steward?” “Huh? What gave you that idea?”
“Well… you’ve been in space before; you no longer make any bones about it. I just thought—well, you’ve never told me what your guild was, nor why you were on dirt, or why you had to fake it to get back to space again. I suppose it’s none of my business.”
Sam’s habitual cynical smile gave way to an expression of sadness. “Max, a lot of things can happen to a man when he thinks he has the world by the tail. Take the case of a friend of mine, name of Roberts. A sergeant in the Imperial Marines, good record, half a dozen star jumps, a combat decoration or two. A smart lad, boning to make warrant officer. But he missed his ship once—hadn’t been on Terra for some time and celebrated too much. Should have turned himself in right away, of course, taken his reduction in rank and lived it down. Trouble was he still had money in his pocket. By the time he was broke and sober it was too late. He never quite had the guts to go back and take his court martial and serve his sentence. Every man has his limits.”
Max said presently, “You trying to say you used to be a marine?”
“Me? Of course not, I was speaking of this guy Richards, just to illustrate what can happen to a man when he’s not looking. Let’s talk of more pleasant things. Kid, what do you plan to do next?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, what do you figure on doing after this jump?’
“Oh. More of the same, I guess. I like spacing. I suppose I’ll try to keep my nose clean and work up to chief steward or chief clerk.”
Sam shook his head. “Think it through, kid. What happens when your record in this ship is mailed to the guild? And another copy is mailed to the Department of Guilds and Labor?”
“What?”
“I’ll tell you. Maybe nothing happens at first, maybe you can space for another cruise. But eventually the red tape unwinds, they compare notes and see that while your ship lists you as an experienced steward’s mate, there isn’t any Max Jones in their files. Comes the day you ground at Terra and a couple of clowns with sidearms are waiting at the foot of the lift to drag you off to the calabozo.”
“But Sam! I thought it was all fixed?”
“Don’t blow a gasket. Look at me, I’m relaxed—and it applies to me, too. More so, for I have other reasons we needn’t go into to want to let sleeping dogs bury their own dead. As for it being ‘all fixed,’ it is—everything I promised. You’re here, aren’t you? But as for the files: old son, it would have taken ten times the money to tamper with guild files, and as for locating a particular microfilm in New Washington and substituting a fake that would show the record you are supposed to have—well, I wouldn’t know how to start, though no doubt it could be done, with enough time, money, and finesse.”
Max felt sensations almost identical with those he had experienced when Montgomery had announced that the farm was sold. Despite his menial position he liked it aboard ship, he had had no intention of ever doing anything else. He got along with his boss, he was making friends, he was as cozy as a bird in its nest. Now the nest was suddenly torn down. Worse, he was in a trap.
He turned white. Sam put a hand on his shoulder. “Stop spinning, kid! You’re not in a jam.” “Jail—”
“Jail my aunt’s Sunday hat! You’re safe as dirt until we get back. You can walk away from the Asgard at Earthport with your wages in your pocket and have days at least, maybe weeks or months, before anyone will notice, either at the guild mother hall or at New Washington. You can lose yourself among four billion people. You won’t be any worse off than you were when you first ran into me—you were trying to get lost then, remember?—and you’ll have one star trip under your belt to tell your kids about. Or they may never look for you; some clerk may chuck your trip record into the file basket and leave it there until it gets lost rather than bother. Or you might be able to persuade a clerk in Mr. Kuiper’s office to lose the duplicates, not mail them in. Nelson, for example; he’s got a hungry look.” Sam eyed him carefully, then added, “Or you might do what I’m going to do.”
Only part of what Sam had said had sunk in. Max let the record play back and gradually calmed down as he began to understand that his situation was not entirely desperate. He was inclined to agree about Nelson, as Nelson had already suggested indirectly that sometimes the efficiency marks on the ship’s books were not necessarily the ones that found their way into the permanent records—under certain circumstances. He put the idea aside, not liking it and having no notion anyhow of how to go about offering a bribe.
When he came, in his mental play back, to Sam’s last remark, it brought him to attention. “What are you
going to do?”
Sam eyed the end of his cigar stub. “I’m not going back.”
This required no diagram to be understood. But, under Imperial decrees, the suggested offense carried even heavier punishment than faking membership in a guild. Deserting was almost treason. “Keep talking,” Max said gruffly.
“Let’s run over where we touch this cruise. Garson’s Planet—domed colonies, like Luna and Mars. In a domed colony you do exactly what the powers-that-be say, or you stop breathing. You might hide out and have a new identity grafted on, but you would still be in the domes. No good, there’s more freedom even back on Terra. Nu Pegasi VI, Halcyon—not bad though pretty cold at aphelion. But it is still
importing more than it exports which means that the Imperials run the show and the locals will help dig out a wanted man. Now we come to Nova Terra, Beta Aquarü X—and that, old son, is what the doctor ordered and why the preacher danced.”
“You’ve been there?”
“Once. I should have stayed. Max, imagine a place like Earth, but sweeter than Terra ever was. Better weather, broader richer lands… forests aching to be cut, game that practically jumps into the stew pot. If you don’t like settlements, you move on until you’ve got no neighbors, poke a seed in the ground, then jump back before it sprouts. No obnoxious insects. Practically no terrestrial diseases and no native diseases that like the flavor of our breed. Gushing rivers. Placid oceans. Man, I’m telling you!”
“But wouldn’t they haul us back from there?”
“Too big. The colonists want more people and they won’t help the Imperials. The Imperial Council has a deuce of a time just collecting taxes. They don’t even try to arrest a deserter outside the bigger towns.” Sam grinned. “You know why?”
“Why?”
“Because it didn’t pay. An Imperial would be sent to Back-and-Beyond to pick up someone; while he was looking he would find some golden-haired daughter of a rancher eyeing him—they run to eight or nine kids, per family and there are always lots of eligible fillies, husband-high and eager. So pretty quick he is a rancher with a beard and a new name and a wife. He was a bachelor and he hasn’t been home lately—or maybe he’s married back on Terra and doesn’t want to go home. Either way, even the Imperial Council can’t fight human nature.”
“I don’t want to get married.”
“That’s your problem. But best of all, the place still has a comfortable looseness about it. No property taxes, outside the towns. Nobody would pay one; they’d just move on, if they didn’t shoot the tax collector instead. No guilds—you can plow a furrow, saw a board, drive a truck, or thread a pipe, all the same day and never ask permission. A man can do anything and there’s no one to stop him, no one to tell him he wasn’t born into the trade, or didn’t start young enough, or hasn’t paid his contribution. There’s more work than there are men to do it and the colonists just don’t care.”
Max tried to imagine such anarchy and could not, he had never experienced it. “But don’t the guilds object?”
“What guilds? Oh, the mother lodges back earthside squawked when they heard, but not even the Imperial Council backed them up. They’re not fools—and you don’t shovel back the ocean with a fork.”
“And that’s where you mean to go. It sounds lovely,” Max said wistfully.
“I do. It is. There was a girl—oh, she’ll be married now; they marry young—but she had sisters. Now here is what I figure on—and you, too, if you want to tag along. First time I hit dirt I’ll make contacts. The last time I rate liberty, which will be the night before the ship raises if possible, I’ll go dirtside, then in a front door and out the back and over the horizon so fast I won’t even be a speck. By the time I’m marked ‘late returning’ I’ll be hundreds of miles away, lying beside a chuckling stream in a virgin wilderness, letting my beard grow and memorizing my new name. Say the word and you’ll be on the bank, fishing.”
Max stirred uneasily. The picture aroused in him a hillbilly homesickness he had hardly been aware of.
But he could not shuffle off his proud persona as a spaceman so quickly. “I’ll think about it.”
“Do that. It’s a good many weeks yet, anyhow.” Sam got to his feet. “I’d better hurry back before Ole Massa Dumont wonders what’s keeping me. Be seeing you, kid—and remember: it’s an ill wind that has no turning.
Eldreth
Max’s duties did not take him above “C” deck except to service the cats’ sand boxes and he usually did that before the passengers were up. He wanted to visit the control room but he had no opportunity, it being still higher than passengers’ quarters. Often an owner of one of the seven dogs and three cats in Max’s custody would come down to visit his pet. This sometimes resulted in a tip. At first his
cross-grained hillbilly pride caused him to refuse, but when Sam heard about it, he swore at him dispassionately. “Don’t be a fool! They can afford it. What’s the sense?”
“But I would exercise their mutts anyhow. It’s my job.” He might have remained unconvinced had it not been that Mr. Gee asked him about it at the end of his first week, seemed to have a shrewd idea of the usual take, and expected a percentage—”for the welfare fund.”
Max asked Sam about the fund, was laughed at. “That’s a very interesting question. Are there any more questions?”
“I suppose not.”
“Max, I like you. But you haven’t learned yet that when in Rome, you shoot Roman candles. Every tribe has its customs and what is moral one place is immoral somewhere else. There are races where a son’s first duty is to kill off his old man and serve him up as a feast as soon as he is old enough to swing it—civilized races, too. Races the Council recognizes diplomatically. What’s your moral judgment on that?”
Max had read of such cultures—the gentle and unwarlike Bnathors, or the wealthy elephantine amphibians of Paldron who were anything but gentle, probably others. He did not feel disposed to pass judgment on nonhumans. Sam went on, “I’ve known stewards who would make Jelly Belly look like a philanthropist. Look at it from his point of view. He regards these things as prerogatives of his position, as rightful a part of his income as his wages. Custom says so. It’s taken him years to get to where he is; he expects his reward.”
Sam, Max reflected, could always out-talk him.
But he could not concede that Sam’s thesis was valid; there were things that were right and others that were wrong and it was not just a matter of where you were. He felt this with an inner conviction too deep to be influenced by Sam’s cheerful cynicism. It worried Max that he was where he was as the result of chicanery, he sometimes lay awake and fretted about it.
But it worried him still more that his deception might come to light. What to do about Sam’s proposal was a problem always on his mind.
The only extra-terrestrial among Max’s charges was a spider puppy from the terrestrian planet Hespera. On beginning his duties in the Asgard Max found the creature in one of the cages intended for cats; Max looked into it and a sad, little, rather simian face looked back at him. “Hello, Man.”
Max knew that some spider puppies had been taught human speech, after a fashion, but it startled him; he jumped back. He then recovered and looked more closely. “Hello yourself,” he answered. “My, but you are a fancy little fellow.” The creature’s fur was a deep, rich green on its back, giving way to orange on the sides and blending to warm cream color on its little round belly.
“Want out,” stated the spider puppy.
“I can’t let you out. I’ve got work to do.” He read the card affixed to the cage: “Mr. Chips” it stated, Pseudocanis hexapoda hesperae, Owner: Miss E. Coburn, A-092; there followed a detailed instruction as to diet and care. Mr. Chips ate grubs, a supply of which was to be found in freezer compartment
H-118, fresh fruits and vegetables, cooked or uncooked, and should receive iodine if neither seaweed nor artichokes was available. Max thumbed through his mind, went over what he had read about the creatures, decided the instructions were reasonable.
“Please out!” Mr. Chips insisted.
It was an appeal hard to resist. No maiden fayre crying from a dungeon tower had ever put it more movingly. The compartment in which the cats were located was small and the door could be fastened; possibly Mr. Chips could be allowed a little run—but later; just now he had to take care of other animals.
When Max left, Mr. Chips was holding onto the bars and sobbing gently. Max looked back and saw that it was crying real tears; a drop trembled on the tip of its ridiculous little nose; it was hard to walk out on it. He had finished with the stables before tackling the kennel; once the dogs and cats were fed and their cages policed he was free to give attention to his new friend. He had fed it first off, which had stopped the crying. When he returned, however, the demand to be let out resumed.
“If I let you out, will you get back in later?”
The spider puppy considered this. A conditional proposition seemed beyond its semantic attainments, for it repeated, “Want out.” Max took a chance.
Mr. Chips landed on his shoulder and started going through his pockets. “Candy,” it demanded. “Candy?”
Max stroked it. “Sorry, chum. I didn’t know.” “Candy?”
“No candy.” Mr. Chips investigated personally, then settled in the crook of Max’s arm, prepared to spend a week or more. It wasn’t, Max decided, much like a puppy and certainly not like a spider, except that six legs seemed excessive. The two front ones had little hands; the middle legs served double duty. It was more like a monkey, but felt like a cat. It had a slightly spicy fragrance and seemed quite clean.
Max tried talking to it, but found its intellectual attainments quite limited. Certainly it used human words meaningfully but its vocabulary was not richer than that which might be expected of a not-too-bright toddler.
When Max tried to return it to its cage there ensued twenty minutes of brisk exercise, broken by stalemates. Mr. Chips swarmed over the cages, causing hysterics among the cats. When at last the spider puppy allowed itself to be caught it still resisted imprisonment, clinging to Max and sobbing. He ended by
walking it like a baby until it fell asleep.
This was a mistake. A precedent had been set and thereafter Max was not permitted to leave the kennel without walking the baby.
He wondered about the “Miss Coburn” described on the tag as Mr. Chips’ owner. All of the owners of cats and dogs had shown up to visit their pets, but Mr. Chips remained unvisited. He visualized her as a sour and hatchet-faced spinster who had received the pet as a going-away present and did not appreciate it. As his friendship with the spider puppy grew his mental picture of Miss E. Coburn became even less attractive.
The Asgard was over a week out and only days from its first spatial transition before Max had a chance to compare conception with fact. He was cleaning the stables, with Mr. Chips riding his shoulder and offering advice, when Max heard a shrill voice from the kennel compartment. “Mr. Chips! Chipsie!
Where are you?”
The spider puppy sat up suddenly and turned its head. Almost immediately a young female appeared in the door; Mr. Chips squealed, “Ellie!” and jumped to her arms. While they were nuzzling each other Max looked her over. Sixteen, he judged, or seventeen. Or maybe even eighteen—shucks, how was a fellow to tell when womenfolk did such funny things to their faces? Anyhow she was no beauty and the expression on her face didn’t help it any.
She looked up at him and scowled. “What were you doing with Chipsie? Answer me that!”
It got his back fur up. “Nothing,” he said stiffly. “If you will excuse me, ma’am, I’ll get on with my work.” He turned his back and bent over his broom.
She grabbed his arm and swung him around. “Answer me! Or… or—I’ll tell the Captain, that’s what I’ll do!”
Max counted ten, then just to be sure, recalled the first dozen 7-place natural logarithms. “That’s your privilege, ma’am,” he said with studied calmness, “but first, what’s your name and what is your business here? I’m in charge of these compartments and responsible for these animals—as the Captain’s representative.” This he knew to be good space law, although the concatenation was long.
She looked startled. “Why, I’m Eldreth Coburn,” she blurted as if anyone should know. “And your business?”
“I came to see Mr. Chips—of course!”
“Very well, ma’am. You may visit your pet for a reasonable period,” he added, quoting verbatim from his station instruction sheet. “Then he goes back in his cage. Don’t disturb the other animals and don’t feed them. That’s orders.”
She started to speak, decided not to and bit her lip. The spider puppy had been looking from face to face and listening to a conversation far beyond its powers, although it may have sensed the emotions involved. Now it reached out and plucked Max’s sleeve. “Max,” Mr. Chips announced brightly. “Max!”
Miss Coburn again looked startled. “Is that your name?”
“Yes, ma’am. Max Jones. I guess he was trying to introduce me. Is that it, old fellow?” “Max,” Mr. Chips repeated firmly. “Ellie.”
Eldreth Coburn looked down, then looked up at Max with a sheepish smile. “You two seem to be friends. I guess I spoke out of turn. Me and my mouth.”
“No offense meant I’m sure, ma’am.”
Max had continued to speak stiffly; she answered quickly, “Oh, but I was rude! I’m sorry—I’m always sorry afterwards. But I got panicky when I saw the cage open and empty and I thought I had lost Chipsie.”
Max grinned grudgingly. “Sure. Don’t blame you a bit. You were scared.”
“That’s it—I was scared.” She glanced at him. “Chipsie calls you Max. May I call you Max?” “Why not? Everybody does—and it’s my name.”
“And you call me Eldreth, Max. Or Ellie.”
She stayed on, playing with the spider puppy, until Max had finished with the cattle. She then said reluctantly, “I guess I had better go, or they’ll be missing me.”
“Are you coming back?” “Oh, of course!” “Ummm… Miss Eldreth…” “Ellie.”
“—May I ask a question?” He hurried on, “Maybe it’s none of my business, but what took you so long? That little fellow has been awful lonesome. He thought you had deserted him.”
“Not ‘he’—’she’.” “Huh?”
“Mr. Chips is a girl,” she said apologetically. “It was a mistake anyone could make. Then it was too late, because it would confuse her to change her name.”
The spider puppy looked up brightly and repeated, “‘Mr. Chips is a girl.’ Candy, Ellie?” “Next time, honey bun.”
Max doubted if the name was important, with the nearest other spider puppy light-years away. “You didn’t answer my question?”
“Oh. I was so mad about that I wanted to bite. They wouldn’t let me.” “Who’s ‘they’? Your folks?”
“Oh, no! The Captain and Mrs. Dumont.” Max decided that it was almost as hard to extract information from her as it was from Mr. Chips. “You see, I came aboard in a stretcher—some silly fever, food poisoning probably. It couldn’t be much because I’m tough. But they kept me in bed and when the Surgeon did let me get up, Mrs. Dumont said I mustn’t go below ‘C’ deck. She had some insipid notion that it wasn’t proper.”
Max understood the stewardess’s objection; he had already discovered that some of his shipmates were
a rough lot—though he doubted that any of them would risk annoying a girl passenger. Why, Captain Blaine would probably space a man for that.
“So I had to sneak out. They’re probably searching for me right now. I’d better scoot.”
This did not fit in with Mr. Chips’ plans; the spider puppy clung to her and sobbed, stopping occasionally to wipe tears away with little fists. “Oh, dear!”
Max looked perturbed. “I guess I’ve spoiled him—her. Mr. Chips, I mean.” He explained how the ceremony of walking the baby had arisen.
Eldreth protested, “But I must go. What’ll I do?”
“Here, let’s see if he—she—will come to me.” Mr. Chips would and did. Eldreth gave her a pat and ran out, whereupon Mr. Chips took even longer than usual to doze off. Max wondered if spider puppies could be hypnotized; the ritual was getting monotonous.
Eldreth showed up next day under the stern eye of Mrs. Dumont. Max was respectful to the stewardess and careful to call Eldreth “Miss Coburn.” She returned alone the next day. He looked past her and raised his eyebrows. “Where’s your chaperone?”
Eldreth giggled. “La Dumont consulted her husband and he called in your boss—the fat one. They agreed that you were a perfect little gentleman, utterly harmless. How do you like that?”
Max considered it. “Well, I’m an ax murderer by profession, but I’m on vacation.” “That’s nice. What have you got there?”
It was a three-dimensional chess set. Max had played the game with his uncle, it being one that all astrogators played. Finding that some of the chartsmen and computermen played it, he had invested his tips in a set from the ship’s slop chest. It was a cheap set, having no attention lights and no arrangements for remote-control moving, being merely stacked transparent trays and pieces molded instead of carved, but it sufficed.
“It’s solid chess. Ever seen it?”
“Yes. But I didn’t know you played it.” “Why not? Ever play flat chess?” “Some.”
“The principles are the same, but there are more pieces and one more direction to move. Here, I’ll show you.
She sat tailor-fashion opposite him and he ran over the moves. “These are robot freighters… pawns. They can be commissioned anything else if they reach the far rim. These four are starships; they are the only ones with funny moves, they correspond with knights. They have to make interspace transitions, always off the level they’re on to some other level and the transition has to be related a certain way, like this—or this. And this is the Imperial flagship; it’s the one that has to be checkmated. Then there is… ” They ran through a practice game, with the help of Mr. Chips, who liked to move the pieces and did not care whose move it was.
Presently he said, “You catch on pretty fast.”
“Thanks.”
“Of course, the real players play four-dimensional chess.” “Do you?”
“Well, no. But I hope to learn some day. It’s just a matter of holding in your mind one more spatial relationship. My uncle used to play it. He was going to teach me, but he died.” He found himself explaining about his uncle. He trailed off without mentioning his own disappointment.
Eldreth picked up one of the starship pieces from a tray. “Say, Max, we’re pretty near our first transition, aren’t we?”
“What time is it?”
“Uh, sixteen twenty-one—say, I’d better get upstairs.”
“Then it’s, uh, about thirty-seven hours and seven minutes, according to the computer crew.”
“Mmm… you seem to know about such things. Could you tell me just what it is we do? I heard the Astrogator talking about it at the table but I couldn’t make head nor tail. We sort of duck into a space warp; isn’t that right?”
“Oh no, not a space warp. That’s a silly term—space doesn’t ‘warp’ except in places where pi isn’t exactly three point one four one five nine two six five three five eight nine seven nine three two three eight four six two six four three three eight three two seven, and so forth—like inside a nucleus. But we’re heading out to a place where space is really flat, not just mildly curved the way it is near a star.
Anomalies are always flat, otherwise they couldn’t fit together—be congruent.” She looked puzzled. “Come again?”
“Look, Eldreth, how far did you go in mathematics?”
“Me? I flunked improper fractions. Miss Mimsey was very vexed with me.” “Miss Mimsey?”
“Miss Mimsey’s School for Young Ladies, so you see I can listen with an open mind.” She made a face. “But you told me that all you went to was a country high school and didn’t get to finish at that. Huh?”
“Yes, but I learned from my uncle. He was a great mathematician. Well, he didn’t have any theorems named after him—but a great one just the same, I think.” He paused. “I don’t know exactly how to tell you; it takes equations. Say! Could you lend me that scarf you’re wearing for a minute?”
“Huh? Why, sure.” She removed it from her neck.
It was a photoprint showing a stylized picture of the solar system, a souvenir of Solar Union Day. In the middle of the square of cloth was the conventional sunburst surrounded by circles representing orbits of solar planets, with a few comets thrown in. The scale was badly distorted and it was useless as a structural picture of the home system, but it sufficed. Max took it and said, “Here’s Mars.”
Eldreth said, “You read it. That’s cheating.”
“Hush a moment. Here’s Jupiter. To go from Mars to Jupiter you have to go from here to here, don’t you?”
“Obviously.”
“But suppose I fold it so that Mars is on top of Jupiter? What’s to prevent just stepping across?” “Nothing, I guess. Except that what works for that scarf wouldn’t work very well in practice. Would it?”
“No, not that near to a star. But it works fine after you back away from a star quite a distance. You see, that’s just what an anomaly is, a place where space is folded back on itself, turning a long distance into no distance at all.”
“Then space is warped.”
“No, no, no! Look, I just folded your scarf. I didn’t stretch it out of shape! I didn’t even wrinkle it. Space is the same way; it’s crumpled like a piece of waste paper—but it’s not warped, just crumpled. Through some extra dimensions, of course.”
“I don’t see any ‘of course’ about it.”
“The math of it is simple, but it’s hard to talk about because you can’t see it. Space—our space—may be crumpled up small enough to stuff into a coffee cup, all hundreds of thousands of light-years of it. A
four-dimensional coffee cup, of course.”
She sighed. “I don’t see how a four-dimensional coffee cup could even hold coffee, much less a whole galaxy.”
“No trouble at all. You could stuff this sheer scarf into a thimble. Same principle. But let me finish. They used to think that nothing could go faster than light. Well, that was both right and wrong. It…”
“How can it be both?”
“That’s one of the Horst anomalies. You can’t go faster than light, not in our space. If you do, you burst out of it. But if you do it where space is folded back and congruent, you pop right back into our own space again—but a long way off. How far off depends on how it’s folded. And that depends on the mass in the space, in a complicated fashion that can’t be described in words but can be calculated.”
“But suppose you do it just anywhere?”
“That’s what happened to the first ones who tried it. They didn’t come back. And that’s why surveys are dangerous; survey ships go poking through anomalies that have been calculated but never tried. That’s also why astrogators get paid so much. They have to head the ship for a place you can’t see and they have to put the ship there just under the speed of light and they have to give it the gun at just the right world point. Drop a decimal point or use a short cut that covers up an indeterminancy and it’s just too bad. Now we’ve been gunning at twenty-four gee ever since we left the atmosphere. We don’t feel it of course because we are carried inside a discontinuity field at an artificial one gravity—that’s another of the anomalies. But we’re getting up close to the speed of light, up against the Einstein Wall; pretty soon we’ll be squeezed through like a watermelon seed between your finger and thumb and we’ll come out near Theta Centauri fifty-eight light-years away. Simple, if you look at it right.”
She shivered. “If we come out, you mean.”
“Well… I suppose so. But it’s not as dangerous as helicopters. And look at it this way: if it weren’t for the anomalies, there never would have been any way for us to reach the stars; the distances are too great.
But looking back, it is obvious that all that emptiness couldn’t be real—there had to be the anomalies. That’s what my uncle used to say.”
“I suppose he must have been right, even if I don’t understand it.” She scrambled to her feet. “But I do know that I had better hoof it back upstairs, or Mrs. Dumont may change her mind.” She hugged Mr. Chips and shoved the little creature into Max’s arms. “Walk the baby—that’s a pal.”
THREE WAYS TO GET AHEAD
Max intended to stay awake during the first transition, but he slept through it. It took place shortly after five in the morning, ship’s time. When he was awakened by idlers’ reveille at six it was all over. He jerked on his clothes, fuming at not having awakened earlier, and hurried to the upper decks. The passageways above Charlie deck were silent and empty; even the early risers among the passengers would not be up for another hour. He went at once to the Bifrost Lounge and crossed it to the view port, placed there for the pleasure of passengers.
The stars looked normal but the familiar, age-old constellations were gone. Only the Milky Way, our own galaxy, seemed as usual—to that enormous spiral of stars, some hundred thousand light-years across, a tiny displacement of less than sixty light-years was inconsequential.
One extremely bright yellow-white star was visible; Max decided that it must be Theta Centauri, sun of Garson’s Planet, their first stop. He left shortly, not wanting to chance being found loafing in passengers’ country. The sand boxes which constituted his excuse were then replaced with greater speed than usual and he was back in crew’s quarters in time for breakfast.
The passage to Garson’s Planet took most of a month even at the high boost possible to Horst-Conrad ship. Eldreth continued to make daily trips to see Mr. Chips—and to talk with and play 3-dee chess with Max. He learned that while she had not been born on Hespera, but in Auckland on Terra, nevertheless Hespera was her home. “Daddy sent me back to have them turn me into a lady, but it didn’t take.”
“What do you mean?”
She grinned. “I’m a problem. That’s why I’ve been sent for. You’re in check, Max. Chipsie! Put that back. I think the little demon is playing on your side.”
He gradually pieced together what she meant. Miss Mimsey’s school had been the third from which she had been expelled. She did not like Earth, she was determined to go home, and she had created a reign of terror at each institution to which she had been entrusted. Her widower father had been determined that she must have a “proper” education, but she had been in a better strategic position to impose her will—her father’s Earthside attorneys had washed their hands of her and shipped her home.
Sam made the mistake of joshing Max about Eldreth. “Have you gotten her to set the day yet, old son?” “Who set what day?”
“Now, now! Everybody in the ship knows about it, except possibly the Captain. Why play dumb with your old pal?”
“I don’t know what you are talking about!”
“I wasn’t criticizing, I was admiring. I’d never have the nerve to plot so high a trajectory myself. But as
grandpop always said, there are just three ways to get ahead; sweat and genius, getting born into the right family, or marrying into it. Of the three, marrying the boss’s daughter is the best, because—Hey! Take it easy!” Sam skipped back out of range.
“Take that back!”
“I do, I do. I was wrong. But my remarks were inspired by sheer admiration. Mistaken, I admit. So I apologize and withdraw the admiration.”
“But… ” Max grinned in spite of himself. It was impossible to stay angry at Sam. Sure, the man was a scamp, probably a deserter, certainly a belittler who always looked at things in the meanest of terms, but—well, there it was. Sam was his friend.
“I knew you were joking. How could I be figuring on getting married when you and I are going to…” “Keep your voice down.” Sam went on quietly, “You’ve made up your mind?”
“Yes. It’s the only way out, I guess. I don’t want to go back to Earth.”
“Good boy! You’ll never regret it.” Sam looked thoughtful. “We’ll need money.” “Well, I’ll have some on the books.”
“Don’t be silly. You try to draw more than spending money and they’ll never let you set foot on dirt. But don’t worry—save your tips, all that Fats will let you keep, and I’ll get us a stake. It’s my turn.”
“How?”
“Lots of ways. You can forget it.”
“Well… all right. Say, Sam, just what did you mean when you—I mean, well, suppose I did want to marry Ellie—I don’t of course; she’s just a kid and anyhow I’m not the type to marry—but just supposing? Why should anybody care?”
Sam looked surprised. “You don’t know?” “Why would I be asking?”
“You don’t know who she is?”
“Huh? Her name’s Eldreth Coburn and she’s on her way home to Hespera, she’s a colonial. What of it?”
“You poor boy! She didn’t mention that she is the only daughter of His Supreme Excellency, General Sir John FitzGerald Coburn, O.B.E., K.B., O.S.U., and probably X.Y.Z., Imperial Ambassador to Hespera and Resident Commissioner Plenipotentiary?”
“Huh? Oh my gosh!”
“Catch on, kid? With the merest trifle of finesse you can be a remittance man, at least. Name your own planet, just as long as it isn’t Hespera.”
“Oh, go boil your head! She’s a nice kid anyhow.”
Sam snickered. “She sure is. As grandpop used to say, ‘It’s an ill wind that gathers no moss.'”
The knowledge disturbed Max. He had realized that Eldreth must be well to do—she was a passenger,
wasn’t she? But he had no awe of wealth. Achievement as exemplified by his uncle held much more respect in his eyes. But the notion that Eldreth came from such an impossibly high stratum—and that he, Maximilian Jones, was considered a fortune-hunter and social climber on that account—was quite upsetting.
He decided to put an end to it. He started by letting his work pile up so that he could say truthfully that he did not have time to play three-dee chess. So Ellie pitched in and helped him. While he was playing the unavoidable game that followed he attempted a direct approach. “See here, Ellie, I don’t think you ought to stay down here and play three-dee chess with me. The other passengers come down to see their pets and they notice. They’ll gossip.”
“Pooh!”
“I mean it. Oh, you and I know it’s all right, but it doesn’t look right.”
She stuck out her lower lip. “Am I going to have trouble with you? You talk just like Miss Mimsey.” “You can come down to see Chipsie, but you’d better come down with one of the other pet owners.”
She started to make a sharp answer, then shrugged, “Okay, this isn’t the most comfortable place anyhow. From now on we play in Bifrost Lounge, afternoons when your work is done and evenings.”
Max protested that Mr. Giordano would not let him; she answered quickly, “Don’t worry about your boss. I can twist him around my little finger.” She illustrated by gesture.
The picture of the gross Mr. Gee in such a position slowed up Max’s answer, but he finally managed to get out, “Ellie, crew members can’t use the passenger lounge. It’s…”
“They can so. More than once, I’ve seen Mr. Dumont having a cup of coffee there with Captain Blaine.”
“You don’t understand. Mr. Dumont is almost an officer, and if the Captain wants him as his guest, well, that’s the Captain’s privilege.”
“You’d be my guest.”
“No, I wouldn’t be.” He tried to explain to her the strict regulation that crew members were not to associate with passengers. “The Captain would be angry if he could see us right now—not at you, at me. If he caught me in the passengers’ lounge he’d kick me all the way clown to ‘H’ deck.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“But… ” He shrugged. “All right. I’ll come up this evening. He won’t kick me, actually; that would be beneath him. He’ll just send Mr. Dumont over to tell me to leave, then he’ll send for me in the morning. I don’t mind being fined a month’s pay if that is what it takes to show you the way things are.”
He could see that he had finally reached her. “Why, I think that’s perfectly rotten! Everybody is equal. Everybody! That’s the law.”
“They are? Only from on top.”
She got up suddenly and left. Max again had to soothe Mr. Chips, but there was no one to soothe him. He decided that the day that he and Sam disappeared over a horizon and lost themselves could not come too soon.
Eldreth returned next day but in company with a Mrs. Mendoza, the devoted owner of a chow who
looked much like her. Eldreth treated Max with the impersonal politeness of a lady “being nice” to servants, except for a brief moment when Mrs. Mendoza was out of earshot.
“Max?”
“Yes, Miss?”
“I’ll ‘Yes, Miss’ you! Look, Max, what was your uncle’s name? Was it Chester Jones?” “Why, yes, it was. But why…”
“Never mind.” Mrs. Mendoza rejoined them. Max was forced to drop it.
The following morning the dry-stores keeper sought him out. “Hey, Max! The Belly wants you. Better hurry—I think you’re in some sort of a jam.”
Max worried as he hurried. He couldn’t think of anything he had done lately; he tried to suppress the horrid fear that Ellie was involved.
It was clear that Mr. Giordano was not pleased but all that he said was, “Report to the Purser’s Office. Jump.” Max jumped.
The Purser was not there; Mr. Kuiper received him and looked him over with a cold eye. “Put on a clean uniform and make it quick. Then report to the Captain’s cabin.”
Max stood still and gulped. Mr. Kuiper barked, “Well? Move!” “Sir,” Max blurted, “I don’t know where the Captain’s cabin is.”
“What? I’ll be switched! Able deck, radius nine oh and outboard.” Max moved.
The Captain was in his cabin. With him was Mr. Samuels the Purser, Mr. Walther the First Officer, and Dr. Hendrix the Astrogator. Max concluded that whatever it was he was about to be tried for, it could be nothing trivial. But he remembered to say, “Steward’s Mate Third Class Jones reporting, sir.”
Captain Blaine looked up. “Oh, yes. Find a chair.” Max found one, sat down on the edge of it. The Captain said to the First Officer, “Under the circumstances, Dutch, I suppose it’s the best thing to do—though it seems a little drastic. You agree, Hal?”
The Purser agreed. Max wondered just how drastic it was and whether he would live through it.
“We’ll log it as an exception, then, Doc, and I’ll write up an explanation for the board. After all, regulations were made to be broken. That’s the end of it.” Max decided that they were simply going to space him and explain it later.
The Captain turned back to his desk in a manner that signified that the meeting was over. The First Officer cleared his throat. “Captain… ” He indicated Max with his eyes.
Captain Blaine looked up again. “Oh, yes! Young man, your name is Jones?” “Yessir.”
“I’ve been looking over your record. I see that you once tried out for chartsman for a short time in the
Thule?”
“Uh, yes, Captain.” “Didn’t you like it?”
“Well, sir.” Max asked himself what Sam would say when confronted by such a ghost. “It was like this… to tell you the truth I didn’t do much except empty ash trays in the Worry—in the control room.” He held his breath.
The Captain smiled briefly. “It can sometimes work out that way. Would you be interested in trying it again?”
“What? Yes, sir!” “Dutch?”
“Captain, ordinarily I see no point in a man striking twice for the same job. But there is this personal matter.”
“Yes, indeed. You can spare him, Hal?”
“Oh, certainly, Captain. He’s hardly a key man where he is.” The Purser smiled. “Bottom deck valet.” The Captain smiled and turned to the Astrogator. “I see no objection, Doc. It’s a guild matter, of course.” “Kelly is willing to try him. He’s short a man, you know.”
“Very well, then…”
“Just a moment, Captain.” The Astrogator turned to Max. “Jones… you had a relative in my guild?” “My uncle, sir. Chester Jones.”
“I served under him. I hope you have some of his skill with figures.” “Uh, I hope so, sir.”
“We shall see. Report to Chief Computerman Kelly.”
Max managed to find the control room without asking directions, although he could hardly see where he was going.
CHARTSMAN JONES
The change in Max’s status changed the whole perspective of his life. His social relations with the other crew members changed not entirely for the better. The control room gang considered themselves the gentry of the crew, a status disputed by the power technicians and resented by the stewards. Max found that the guild he was leaving no longer treated him quite as warmly while the guild for which he was trying out did not as yet accept him.
Mr. Gee simply ignored him—would walk right over him if Max failed to jump aside. He seemed to
regard Max’s trial promotion as a personal affront.
It was necessary for him to hit the slop chest for dress uniforms. Now that his duty station was in the control room, now that he must pass through passengers’ country to go to and from work, it was no longer permissible to slouch around in dungarees. Mr. Kuiper let him sign for them; his cash would not cover it. He had to sign as well for the cost of permission to work out of his guild, with the prospect of going further in debt to both guilds should he be finally accepted. He signed cheerfully.
The control department of the Asgard consisted of two officers and five men—Dr. Hendrix the Astrogator, his assistant astrogator Mr. Simes, Chief Computerman Kelly, Chartsman First Class Kovak, Chtsmn 2/C Smythe, and computermen Noguchi and Lundy, both second class. There was also
“Sack” Bennett, communicator first class, but he was not really a part of the control gang, even though his station was in the Worry Hole; a starship was rarely within radio range of anything except at the very first and last parts of a trip. Bennett doubled as Captain Blaine’s secretary and factotum and owed his nickname to the often-stated belief of the others that he spent most of his life in his bunk.
Since the Asgard was always under boost a continuous watch was kept; not for them were the old, easy days of rocket ships, with ten minutes of piloting followed by weeks of free fall before more piloting was required. Since the Asgard carried no apprentice astrogator, there were only two officers to stand watches (Captain Blaine was necessarily an astrogator himself, but skippers do not stand watches); this lack was made up by Chief Computerman Kelly, who stood a regular watch as control
officer-of-the-watch. The other ratings stood a watch in four; the distinction between a computerman and a chartsman was nominal in a control room dominated by “Decimal Point” Kelly—what a man didn’t know he soon learned, or found another ship.
Easy watches for everyone but Max—he was placed on watch-and-watch for instruction, four hours on followed by four hours off in which he must eat, keep himself clean, relax, and—if he found time—sleep.
But he thrived on it, arriving early and sometimes having to be ordered out of the Worry Hole. Not until much later did he find out that this stiff regime was Kelly’s way of trying to break him, discover his weakness and get rid of him promptly if he failed to measure up.
Not all watches were pleasant. Max’s very first watch was under Mr. Simes. He crawled up the hatch into the control room and looked around him in wonderment. On four sides were the wonderfully delicate parallax cameras. Between two of them Lundy sat at the saddle of the main computer; he looked up and nodded but did not speak. Mr. Simes sat at the control console, facing the hatch; he must have seen Max but gave no sign of it.
There were other instruments crowded around the walls, some of which Max recognized from reading and from seeing pictures, some of which were strange—tell-tales and gauges from each of the ship’s compartments, a screen to reproduce the view aft or “below,” microphone and controls for the ship’s announcing system, the “tank” or vernier stereograph in which plates from the parallax cameras could be compared with charts, spectrostellograph, dopplerscope, multipoint skin temperature recorder, radar repeater for landing, too many things to take in at once.
Overhead through the astrogation dome was the starry universe. He stared at it, mouth agape. Living as he had been, inside a steel cave, he had hardly seen the stars; the firmament had been more with him back home on the farm.
“Hey! You!”
Max shook his head and found Mr. Simes looking at him. “Come here.” Max did so, the assistant astrogator went on, “Don’t you know enough to report to the watch officer when you come on duty?”
“Uh—sorry, sir.”
“Besides that, you’re late.” Max slid his eyes to the chronometer in the console; it still lacked five minutes of the hour. Simes continued, “A sorry state of affairs when crewmen relieve the watch later than the watch officer. What’s your name?”
“Jones, sir.”
Mr. Simes sniffed. He was a red-faced young man with thin, carroty hair and a sniff was his usual conversational embellishment, at least with juniors. “Make a fresh pot of coffee.”
“Aye aye, sir.” Max started to ask where and how, but Mr. Simes had gone back to his reading. Max looked helplessly at Lundy, who indicated a direction with his eyes. Behind the chart safe Max found a coffee maker and under it cups, saucers, sugar, and tins of cream.
He burned himself before getting the hang of the gear’s idiosyncrasies. Mr. Simes accepted the brew without looking at him. Max wondered what to do next, decided to offer a cup to Lundy. The computerman thanked him quietly and Max decided to risk having one himself, since it seemed to be accepted. He took it over beside the computer to drink it.
He was still doing so when the watch officer spoke up. “What is this? A tea party? Jones!” “Yes, sir?”
“Get the place policed up. Looks as if a herd of chucks had been wallowing in it.”
The room seemed clean, but Max found a few scraps of paper to pick up and stuff down the chute, after which he wiped already-gleaming brightwork. He had started to go over things a second time when Lundy motioned him over. Max then helped Lundy change plates in the parallax cameras and watched him while he adjusted the electronic timer. Mr. Simes pushed the ready button himself, which seemed to be his sole work during the watch.
Lundy removed the plates and set them up in the tank for chart comparison, took the readings and logged them. Max gave him nominal help and gathered some notion of how it was done, after which he again wiped brightwork.
It was a long watch. He went to his bunk drained of the elation he had felt.
But watches with Dr. Hendrix and with Chief Kelly were quite different. The Worry Hole was a jolly place under Kelly; he ruled as a benevolent tyrant, shouting, cursing, slandering the coffee, slurring his juniors and being sassed back. Max never touched a polish rag when Kelly was at control; he was kept too busy not merely helping but systematically studying everything in the room. “We haven’t a condemned thing to do,” Kelly shouted at him, “until we hit Carson’s Folly. Nothing to do but to ride this groove down until we hit dirt. So you, my laddy buck, are going to do plenty. When we get there you are going to know this condemned hole better than your mother knew your father—or you can spend your time there learning what you’ve missed while your mates are dirtside getting blind. Get out the instruction manual for the main computer, take off the back plate and get lost in them wires. I don’t want to see anything but your ugly behind the rest of this watch.”
Within ten minutes Kelly was down on his knees with him, helping him trace the intricate circuits.
Max learned, greatly assisted by his photographic memory and still more by the sound grounding in theory he had gotten from his uncle. Kelly was pleased. “I reckon you exaggerated a mite when you said you hadn’t learned anything in the Thule.”
“Well, not much.”
“Johansen have the Worry Hole when you were striking?”
“Uh, yes.” Max hoped frantically that Kelly would not ask other names.
“I thought so. That squarehead wouldn’t tell his own mother how old he was.”
There came a watch when Kelly trusted him to do a dry run for a transition approach on the computer, with Noguchi handling the tables and Kelly substituting for the astrogator by following records of the actual transition the ship had last made. The programming was done orally, as is the case when the astrogator is working under extreme pressure from latest data, just before giving the crucial signal to boost past the speed of light.
Kelly took it much more slowly than would happen in practice, while Noguchi consulted tables and called out figures to Max. He was nervous at first, his fingers trembling so that it was hard to punch the right keys—then he settled down and enjoyed it, feeling as if he and the machine had been born for each other.
Kelly was saying, “—times the binary natural logarithm of zero point eight seven oh nine two.” Max heard Noguchi’s voice call back the datum while he thumbed for the page—but in his mind Max saw the page in front of his eyes long before Noguchi located it; without conscious thought he depressed the right
keys.
“Correction!” sang out Kelly. “Look, meathead, you don’t put in them figures; you wait for translation by Noggy here. How many times I have to tell you?”
“But I did—” Max started, then stopped. Thus far he had managed to keep anyone aboard the Asgard
from learning of his embarrassingly odd memory.
“You did what?” Kelly started to clear the last datum from the board, then hesitated. “Come to think of it, you can’t possibly feed decimal figures into that spaghetti mill. Just what did you do?”
Max knew he was right and hated to appear not to know how to set up a problem. “Why, I put in the figures Noguchi was about to give me.”
“How’s that again?” Kelly stared at him. “You a mind reader?” “No. But I put in the right figures.”
“Hmm… ” Kelly bent over the keyboard. “Call ’em off, Noggy.” The computerman reeled off a string of ones and zeroes, the binary equivalent of the decimal expression Kelly had given him; Kelly checked the depressed keys, his lips moving in concentration. He straightened up. “I once saw a man roll thirteen sevens with honest dice. Was it fool luck, Max?”
“No.”
“Well! Noggy, gimme that book.” Kelly went through the rest of the problem, giving Max raw data and the operations to be performed, but not translating the figures into the binary notation the computer required. He kept thumbing the book and glancing over Max’s shoulder. Max fought off stage fright and punched the keys, while sweat poured into his eyes.
At last Kelly said, “Okay. Twist its tail.” Max flipped the switch which allowed the computer to swallow the program and worry it for an instant; the answer popped out in lights, off or on—the machine’s
equivalent of binary figures.
Kelly translated the lights back into decimal notation, using the manual. He then glanced at the recorded problem. He closed the record book and handed it to Noguchi. “I think I’ll have a cup of coffee,” he said quietly and walked away.
Noguchi reopened it, looked at the lights shining on the board and consulted the manual, after which he looked at Max very oddly. Max saw Kelly staring at him over a cup with the same expression. Max reached up and cleared the board entirely; the lights went out. He got down out of the computerman’s saddle. Nobody said anything.
Max’s next watch was with Dr. Hendrix. He enjoyed watches with the Astrogator almost as much as those with Kelly; Dr. Hendrix was a friendly and soft-spoken gentleman and gave as much attention to training Max as Kelly did. But this time Kelly lingered on after being relieved—in itself nothing, as the Chief Computerman frequently consulted with, or simply visited with, the Astrogator at such times. But today, after relieving the watch, Dr. Hendrix said pleasantly, “Kelly tells me that you are learning to use the computer, Jones?”
“Uh, yes, sir.”
“Very well, let’s have a drill.” Dr. Hendrix dug out an old astrogation log and selected a
transition-approach problem similar to the one Max had set up earlier. Kelly took the manual, ready to act as his “numbers boy”—but did not call the translations. Max waited for the first one; when it did not come, he read the figures from the page shining in his mind and punched them in.
It continued that way. Kelly said nothing, but wet his lips and checked what Max did each time the doctor offered a bit of the problem. Kovak watched from nearby, his eyes moving from actor to actor.
At last Dr. Hendrix closed the book. “I see,” he agreed, as if it were an everyday occurrence. “Jones, that is an extremely interesting talent. I’ve read of such cases, but you are the first I have met. You’ve heard of Blind Tom?”
“No, sir.”
“Perhaps the ship’s library has an account of him.” The Astrogator was silent for a moment. “I don’t mean to belittle your talent, but you are not to use it during an actual maneuver. You understand why?”
“Yes, sir. I guess I do.”
“Better say that you are not to use it unless you think an error has been made—in which case you will speak up at once. But the printed tables remain the final authority.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Good. See me, please, in my room when you come off watch.”
It was “day time” by the ship’s clocks when he went off watch. He went to the passageway outside Dr. Hendrix’s room and waited; there Ellie came across him. “Max!”
“Oh. Hello, Ellie.” He realized uncomfortably that he had not seen her since his tentative promotion.
“Hello he says!” She planted herself in front of him. “You’re a pretty sight—with your bloodshot eyes matching the piping on your shirt. Where have you been? Too good for your old friends? You haven’t even been to see Chipsie.”
He had been, once, although he had not run into Ellie. He had not repeated the visit because the shipmate who had replaced him had not liked being assigned as chambermaid to cows, sheep, llamas, et al.; he had seemed to feel that it was Max’s fault. “I’m sorry,” Max said humbly, “but I haven’t had time.”
“A feeble excuse. Know what you are going to do now? You’re going straight to the lounge and I am going to trim your ears—I’ve figured out a way to box your favorite gambit that will leave you gasping.”
Max opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. “No.” “Speak louder. You used a word I don’t understand.”
“Look, Ellie, be reasonable. I’m waiting for Dr. Hendrix and as soon as he lets me go I’ve got to get some sleep. I’m about ten hours minus.”
“You can sleep any time.”
“Not when you’re standing four hours on and four off. You nap anytime you get a chance.” She looked perplexed. “You don’t mean you work every other watch? Why, that’s criminal.” “Maybe so but that’s how it is.”
“But—I’ll fix that! I’ll speak to the Captain.” “Ellie! Don’t you dare!”
“Why not? Captain Blaine is old sugar pie. Never you mind, I’ll fix it.”
Max took a deep breath, then spoke carefully. “Ellie, don’t say anything to the Captain, not anything. It’s a big opportunity for me and I don’t mind. If you go tampering with things you don’t understand, you’ll ruin my chances. I’ll be sent back to the stables.”
“Oh, he wouldn’t do that.”
“You don’t understand. He may be an ‘old sugar pie’ to you; to me he is the Captain. So don’t.” She pouted. “I was just trying to help.”
“I appreciate it. But don’t. And anyhow, I can’t come to the lounge, ever. It’s off limits for me.”
“But I thought—I think you’re just trying to avoid me. You run around up here now and you dress in pretty clothes. Why not?”
They were interrupted by Dr. Hendrix returning to his room. “Morning, Jones. Good morning, Miss Coburn.” He went on in.
Max said desperately, “Look, Ellie, I’ve got to go.” He turned and knocked on the Astrogator’s door.
Dr. Hendrix ignored having seen him with Ellie. “Sit down, Jones. That was a very interesting exhibition you put on.” The Astrogator went on, “I’m curious to know how far your talent extends. Is it just to figures?”
“Why, I guess not, sir.”
“Do you have to study hard to do it?”
“No, sir.”
“Hmm… We’ll try something. Have you read—let me see—any of the plays of Shakespeare?”
“Uh, we had Hamlet and As You Like It in school, and I read A Winter’s Tale. But I didn’t like it,” he answered honestly.
“In that case I don’t suppose you reread it. Remember any of it?” “Oh, certainly, sir.”
“Hmm—” Dr. Hendrix got down a limp volume.
“Let me see. Act two, scene three; Leontes says, ‘Nor night nor day nor rest: it is but weakness… ‘”
Max picked it up. “… it is but weakness to bear the matter thus; mere weakness. If the cause were not in being… ” He continued until stopped.
“That’s enough. I don’t care much for that play myself. Even the immortal Will had his off days. But how did you happen to have read that book of tables? Shakespeare at his dullest isn’t that dull. I’ve never read them, not what one would call’reading.'”
“Well, sir, Uncle Chet had his astrogation manuals at home after he retired and he used to talk with me a lot. So I read them.”
“Do I understand that you have memorized the entire professional library of an astrogator?” Max took a deep breath. “Well, sir, I’ve read them.”
Dr. Hendrix took from his shelves his own tools of his profession. He did not bother with the binary tables, that being the one Max had shown that he knew. He leafed through them, asked Max questions, finally identifying what he wanted only by page number. He closed the last of them. “Whew!” he commented, and blinked. “While I am aware that there are numerous cases of your talent in the history of psychology, I must admit it is disconcerting to encounter one.” He smiled. “I wonder what Brother Witherspoon would think of this.”
“Sir?”
“Our High Secretary. I’m afraid he would be shocked; he has conservative notions about protecting the’secrets’ of our profession.”
Max said uncomfortably, “Am I likely to get into trouble, sir? I didn’t know it was wrong to read Uncle’s books.”
“What? Nonsense. There are no’secrets’ to astrogation. You use these books on watch, so does every member of the ‘Worry’ gang. The passengers can read them, for all I care. Astrogation isn’t secret; it is merely difficult. Few people are so endowed as to be able to follow accurately the mathematical reasoning necessary to plan a—oh, a transition, let us say. But it suits those who bother with guild politics to make it appear an arcane art—prestige, you know.” Dr. Hendrix paused and tapped on his chair arm. “Jones, I want you to understand me. Kelly thinks you may shape up.”
“Uh, that’s good, sir.”
“But don’t assume that you know more than he does just because you have memorized the books.”
“Oh, no, sir!”
“Actually, your talent isn’t necessary in the control room. The virtues needed are those Kelly has—unflagging attention to duty, thorough knowledge of his tools, meticulous care for details, deep loyalty to his job and his crew and his ship and to those placed over him professionally. Kelly doesn’t need eidetic memory, ordinary good memory combined with intelligence and integrity are what the job takes—and that’s what I want in my control room.”
“Yes, sir.”
The Astrogator hesitated. “I don’t wish to be offensive but I want to add this. Strange talents are sometimes associated with ordinary, or even inferior, mentality—often enough so that the psychologists use the term ‘idiot savant.’ Sorry. You obviously aren’t an idiot, but you are not necessarily a genius, even if you can memorize the Imperial Encyclopedia. My point is: I am more interested in your horse sense and your attention to duty than I am in your phenomenal memory.”
“Uh, I’ll try, sir.”
“I think you’ll make a good chartsman, in time.” Dr. Hendrix indicated that the interview was over; Max got up. “One more thing.”
“Yes, sir?”
“There are excellent reasons of discipline and efficiency why crew members do not associate with passengers.”
Max gulped. “I know, sir.”
“Mind your P’s and Q’s. The members of my department are careful about this point—even then it is difficult.”
Max left feeling deflated. He had gone there feeling that he was about to be awarded something—even a chance to become an astrogator. He now felt sweated down to size.
GARSON’S PLANET
Max did not see much of Sam during the weeks following; the stiff schedule left him little time for visiting. But Sam had prospered.
Like all large ships the Asgard had a miniature police force, experienced ratings who acted as the First Officer’s deputies in enforcing ship’s regulations. Sam, with his talent for politics and a faked certffication as steward’s mate first class, managed during the reshuffle following Max’s transfer to be assigned as master-at-arms for the Purser’s department. He did well, treading on no toes, shutting his eyes to such violations as were ancient prerogatives and enforcing those rules of sanitation, economy, and behavior which were actually needed for a taut, happy ship… all without finding it necessary to haul offenders up before the First Officer for punishment—which suited both Mr. Walther and the crew. When Stores Clerk Maginnis partook too freely of Mr. Gee’s product and insisted on serenading his bunk mates, Sam merely took him to the galley and forced black coffee down him—then the following day took him down
to ‘H’ deck, laid his own shield of office aside, and gave Maginnis a scientific going over that left no scars but deeply marked his soul. In his obscure past Sam had learned to fight, not rough house, not in the stylized mock combat of boxing, but in the skilled art in which an unarmed man becomes a lethal machine.
Sam had selected his victim carefully. Had he reported him Maginnis would have regarded Sam as a snoop, a mere busybody to be outwitted or defied, and had the punishment been severe he might have been turned into a permanent discipline problem—not forgetting that reporting Maginnis might also have endangered a sacred cow, Chief Steward Giordano. As it was, it turned Maginnis into Sam’s strongest supporter and best publicist, as Maginnis’s peculiar but not unique pride required him to regard the man who defeated him as “the hottest thing on two feet, sudden death in each hand, a real man! No nonsense about old Sam—try him yourself and see how you make out. Go on, I want to lay a bet.”
It was not necessary for Sam to set up a second lesson.
A senior engineer’s mate was chief master-at-arms and Sam’s nominal superior; these two constituted the police force of their small town. When the technician asked to go back to power room watch-standing and was replaced by an engineer’s mate third, it was natural that Walther should designate Sam as Chief Master-at-Arms.
He had had his eye on the job from the moment he signed on. Any police chief anywhere has powers far beyond those set forth by law. As long as Sam stayed well buttered up with Mr. Kuiper, Mr. Giordano, and (to a lesser extent) with Mr. Dumont, as long as he was careful to avoid exerting his authority in either the engineering spaces or the Worry Hole, he was the most powerful man in the ship—more powerful in all practical matters than the First Officer himself since he was the First Officer’s visible presence.
Such was the situation when the ship grounded at Garson’s Planet.
Garson’s Planet appears to us to be a piece of junk left over when the universe was finished. It has a surface gravity of one-and-a-quarter, too much for comfort, it is cold as a moneylender’s heart, and it has a methane atmosphere unbreathable by humans. With the sky swarming with better planets it would be avoided were it not an indispensable way station. There is only one survey Horst congruency near Earth’s Sun and transition of it places one near Theta Centauri—and of the thirteen planets of that sun, Carson’s Planet possesses the meager virtue of being least unpleasant.
But there are half a dozen plotted congruencies accessible to Theta Centauri, which makes Carson’s Planet the inevitable cross-roads for trade of the Solar Union.
Max hit dirt there just once, once was plenty. The colony at the space port, partly domed, partly dug in under the domes, was much like the Lunar cities and not unlike the burrows under any major Earth city, but to Max it was novel since he had never been on Luna and had never seen a big city on Terra other than Earthport. He went dirtside with Sam, dressed in his best and filled with curiosity. It was not necessary to put on a pressure suit; the port supplied each passenger liner with a pressure tube from ship’s lock to dome lock.
Once inside Sam headed down into the lower levels. Max protested, “Sam, let’s go up and look around.”
“Huh? Nothing there. A hotel and some expensive shops and clip joints for the pay passengers. Do you want to pay a month’s wages for a steak?”
“No. I want to see out. Here I am on a strange planet and I haven’t seen it at all. I couldn’t see it from the control room when we landed and now I haven’t seen anything but the inside of a trans tube and this.” He
gestured at the corridor walls.
“Nothing to see but a dirty, thick, yellow fog that never lifts. Worse than Venus. But suit yourself. I’ve got things to do, but if you don’t want to stick with me you certainly don’t have to.”
Max decided to stick. They went on down and came out in a wide, lighted corridor not unlike that street in Earthport where Percy’s restaurant was located, save that it was roofed over. There were the same bars, the same tawdry inducements for the stranger to part with cash, even to the tailor shop with the permanent “CLOSING OUT” sale. Several other ships were in and the sector was crowded. Sam looked around. “Now for a place for a quiet drink and a chat.”
“How about there?” Max answered, pointing to a sign reading THE BETTER ‘OLE. “Looks clean and cheerful.”
Sam steered him quickly past it. “It is,” he agreed, “but not for us.” “Why not?”
“Didn’t you notice the customers? Imperial Marines.” “What of that? I’ve got nothing against the Imperials.”
“Mmm… no,” Sam agreed, still hurrying, “but those boys stick together and they have a nasty habit of resenting a civilian who has the bad taste to sit down in a joint they have staked out. Want to get your ribs kicked in?”
“Huh? That wouldn’t happen if I minded my own business, would it?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Suppose a hostess decides that you’re ‘cute’—and the spit-and-polish boy she was with wants to make something of it? Max, you’re a good boy—but there just ain’t no demand for good boys. To stay out of trouble you have to stay away from it.”
They threaded their way through the crowd for another hundred yards before Sam said, “Here we are—provided Lippy is still running the place.” The sign read THE SAFE LANDING; it was larger but not as pleasant as THE BETTER ‘OLE.
“Who’s Lippy?”
“You probably won’t meet him.” Sam led the way in and picked out a table.
Max looked around. It looked like any other fifth-rate bar grille. “Could I get a strawberry soda here? I’ve had a hankering for one for ages—I used always to get one Saturdays when I went to the Corners.”
“They can’t rule you out for trying.”
“Okay. Sam, something you said—you remember the story you told me about your friend in the Imperials? Sergeant Roberts?”
“Who?”
“Or Richards. I didn’t quite catch it.” “Never heard of the guy.”
“But…”
“Never heard of him. Here’s the waiter.”
Nor had the humanoid Sirian waiter heard of strawberry soda. He had no facial muscles but his back skin crawled and rippled with embarrassed lack of comprehension. Max settled for something called “Old Heidelberg” although it had never been within fifty light-years of Germany. It tasted to Max like cold soap suds, but since Sam had paid for it he nursed it along and pretended to drink it.
Sam bounced up almost at once. “Sit tight, kid. I won’t be long.” He spoke to the barman, then disappeared toward the back. A young woman came over to Max’s table.
“Lonely, spaceman?” “Uh, not especially.”
“But I am. Mind if I sit down?” She sank into the chair that Sam had vacated. “Suit yourself. But my friend is coming right back.”
She didn’t answer but turned to the waiter at her elbow. “A brown special, Giggles.” Max made an emphatic gesture of denial. “No!”
“What’s that, dear?”
“Look,” Max answered, blushing, “I may look green as paint—I am, probably. But I don’t buy colored water at house prices. I don’t have much money.”
She looked hurt. “But you have to order or I can’t sit here.”
“Well… ” He glanced at the menu. “I could manage a sandwich, I guess.”
She turned again to the waiter. “Never mind the special, Giggles. A cheese on rye and plenty of mustard.” She turned back to Max. “What’s your name, honey?”
“Max.”
“Mine’s Dolores. Where are you from?” “The Ozarks. That’s Earthside.”
“Now isn’t that a coincidence! I’m from Winnipeg—we’re neighbors!”
Max decided that it might appear so, from that distance. But as Dolores babbled on it became evident that she knew neither the location of the Ozarks nor that of Winnipeg, had probably never been on Terra in her life. She was finishing the sandwich while telling Max that she just adored spacemen, they were so romantic, when Sam returned.
He looked down at her. “How much did you take him for?”
Dolores said indignantly, “That’s no way to talk! Mr. Lipski doesn’t permit…”
“Stow it, kid,” Sam went on, not unkindly. “You didn’t know that my partner is a guest of Lippy. Get me? No’specials,’ no ‘pay-me’s’—you’re wasting your time. Now how much?”
Max said hastily, “It’s okay, Sam. All I bought her was a sandwich.”
“Well… all right. But you’re excused, sister. Later, maybe.” She shrugged and stood up. “Thanks, Max.”
“Not at all, Dolores. I’ll say hello to the folks in Winnipeg.” “Do that.”
Sam did not sit down. “Kid, I have to go out for a while.” “Okay.”
Max started to rise, Sam motioned him back. “No, no. This I’d better do by myself. Wait here, will you? They won’t bother you again—or if they do, ask for Lippy.”
“I won’t have any trouble.”
“I hope not.” Sam looked worried. “I don’t know why I should fret, but there is something about you that arouses the maternal in me. Your big blue eyes I guess.”
“Huh? Oh, go sniff space! Anyway, my eyes are brown.”
“I was speaking,” Sam said gently, “of the eyes of your dewy pink soul. Don’t speak to strangers while I’m gone.”
Max used an expression he had picked up from Mr. Gee; Sam grinned and left.
But Sam’s injunction did not apply to Mr. Simes. Max saw the assistant astrogator appear in the doorway. His face was redder than usual and his eyes looked vague. He let his body revolve slowly as he surveyed the room. Presently his eyes lit on Max and he grinned unpleasantly.
“Well, well, well!” he said as he advanced toward Max. “If it isn’t the Smart Boy.” “Good evening, Mr. Simes.” Max stood up.
“So it’s ‘good evening, Mr. Simes’! But what did you say under your breath?’ “Nothing, sir.”
“Humph! I know! But I think the same thing about you, only worse.” Max did not answer, Simes went on, “Well, aren’t you going to ask me to sit down?”
“Have a seat, sir,” Max said without expression.
“Well, what do you know? The Smart Boy wants me to sit with him.” He sat, called the waiter, ordered, and turned back to Max. “Smart Boy, do you know why I’m sitting with you?”
“No, sir.”
“To put a flea in your ear, that’s why. Since you pulled that hanky-panky with the computer, you’ve been Kelly’s hair-faired—fair-haired—boy. Fair-haired boy,” he repeated carefully. “That gets you nowhere with me. Get this straight: you go sucking around the Astrogator the way Kelly does and I’ll run you out of the control room. Understand me?”
Max felt himself losing his temper. “What do you mean by ‘hanky-panky,’ Mr. Simes?”
“You know. Probably memorized the last half dozen transitions—now you’ve got Kelly and the Professor thinking you’ve memorized the book. A genius in our midst! You know what that is? That’s a lot of…”
Fortunately for Max they were interrupted; he felt a firm hand on his shoulder and Sam’s quiet voice said, “Good evening, Mr. Simes.”
Simes looked confused, then recognized Sam and brightened. “Well, if it isn’t the copper. Sit down, Constable. Have a drink.”
“Don’t mind if I do.” Sam pulled up another chair. “Do you know Smart Boy here?”
“I’ve seen him around.”
“Keep your eye on him. That’s an order. He’s very, very clever. Too clever. Ask him a number. Pick a number between one and ten.”
“Seven.”
Mr. Simes pounded the table. “What did I tell you? He memorized it before you got here. Someday he’s going to memorize one and they’ll stencil it across his chest. You know what, Constable? I don’t trust smart boys. They get ideas.”
Reinforced by Sam’s calming presence Max kept quiet. Giggles had come to the table as soon as Sam joined them; Max saw Sam write something on the back of a menu and pass it with money to the humanoid. But Mr. Simes was too busy with his monologue to notice. Sam let him ramble on, then suddenly interrupted. “You seem to have a friend here, sir.”
“Huh? Where?”
Sam pointed. At the bar Dolores was smiling and gesturing at the assistant navigator to join her. Simes focused his eyes, grinned and said, “Why, so I do! It’s my Great Aunt Sadie.” He got up abruptly.
Sam brushed his hands together. “That disposes of that. Give you a bad time, kid?” “Sort of. Thanks, Sam. But I hate to see him dumped on Dolores. She’s a nice kid.”
“Don’t worry about her. She’ll roll him for every thin he has on him—and a good job, too.” His eyes became hard. “I like an officer who acts like an officer. If he wants to pin one on, he should do it in his own part of town. Oh, well.” Sam relaxed. “Been some changes, eh, kid? Things are different from the way they were when we raised ship at Terra.”
“I’ll say they are!”
“Like it in the Worry gang?”
“It’s more fun than I ever had in my life. And I’m learning fast—so Mr. Kelly says. They’re a swell bunch—except for him.” He nodded toward Simes.
“Don’t let him worry you. The best soup usually has a fly in it. Just don’t let him get anything on you.” “I sure don’t intend to.”
Sam looked at him, then said softly, “Ready to take the dive?”
“Huh?”
“I’m getting our stake together. We’ll be all set.”
Max found it hard to answer. He had known that his transfer had not changed anything basic; he was still in as much danger as ever. But he had been so busy with the joy of hard, interesting work, so dead for sleep when he was not working, that the subject had been pushed back in his mind. Now he drew patterns on the table in the sweat from the glasses and thought about it. “I wish,” he said slowly, “that there was some way to beat it.”
“There is a way, I told you. Your record gets lost.”
Max raised his eyes. “What good would that do? Sure, it would get me another trip. But I don’t want just another trip; I want to stay with it.” He looked down at the table top and carefully sketched an hyperboloid. “I’d better go with you. If I go back to Terra, it’s the labor companies for me—even if I stay out of jail.”
“Nonsense.” “What?”
“Understand me, kid. I’d like to have you with me. A time like that, having a partner at your elbow is the difference between—well, being down in the dumps and being on top. But you can stay in space, with a record as clean as a baby’s.”
“Huh? How?”
“Because you are changing guilds. Now only one paper has to get lost—your strike-out record with the stewards, cooks, and clerks. And they will never miss it because you aren’t on their books, anyhow. You start fresh with the chartsmen and computers, all neat and legal.”
Max sat still and was tempted. “How about the report to the Department of Guilds and Labor?”
“Same thing. Different forms to different offices. I checked. One form gets lost, the other goes in—and Steward’s Mate Jones vanishes into limbo while Apprentice Chartsman Jones starts a clean record.”
“Sam, why don’t you do it? With the drag you’ve got now you could switch to… uh, well, to…”
“To what?” Sam shook his head sadly. “No, old son, there is nothing I can switch to. Besides, there are reasons why I had better be buried deep.” He brightened. “Tell you what—I’ll pick my new name before I take the jump and tell you. Then some day, two years, ten, twenty, you’ll lay over at Nova Terra and look me up. We’ll split a bottle and talk about when we were young and gay. Eh?”
Max smiled though he did not feel happy. “We will, Sam. We surely will.” Then he frowned. “But, Sam, I don’t know how to wangle the deal—and you’ll be gone.”
“I’ll fix it before I leave. I’ve got Nelson eating out of my hand now. Like this: half cash down and half on delivery—and I’ll fix it so that you have something on him—never mind what; you don’t need to know yet. When you ground at Earthport, he asks you to mail the reports because you are going dirtside and he has work to finish. You check to see that the two reports you want are there, then you give him his pay off. Done.”
Max said slowly, “I suppose that’s best.”
“Quit fretting. Everybody has a skeleton in the closet; the thing is to keep ’em there and not at the feast.” He pushed an empty glass aside. “Kid, would you mind if we went back to the ship? Or had you planned to make a night of it?”
“No, I don’t mind.” Max’s elation at setting foot on his first strange planet was gone—Garson’s Hole was, he had to admit, a sorry sample of the Galaxy.
“Then let’s get saddled up. I’ve got stuff to carry and I could use help.”
It turned out to be four fairly large bundles which Sam had cached in public lockers. “What are they?” Max asked curiously.
“Tea cozies, old son. Thousands of them. I’m going to sell ’em to Procyon pinheads as skull caps.” Somewhat affronted, Max shut up.
Everything coming into the ship was supposed to be inspected, but the acting master-at-arms on watch at the lock did not insist on examining the items belonging to the Chief Master-at-Arms any more than he would have searched a ship’s officer. Max helped Sam carry the bundles to the stateroom which was the prerogative of the ship’s chief of police.
“THROUGH THE CARGO HATCH”
From Garson’s Planet to Halcyon around Nu Pegasi is a double dogleg of three transitions, of 105, 487, and 19 light-years respectively to achieve a “straight line” distance of less than 250 light-years. But neither straight-line distance nor pseudo-distance of transition is important; the Asgard covered less than a
light-year between gates. A distance “as the crow flies” is significant only to crows.
The first transition was barely a month out from Carson’s Planet. On raising from there Kelly placed Max on a watch in three, assigning him to Kelly’s own watch, which gave Max much more sleep, afforded him as much instruction (since the watch with Simes was worthless, instruction-wise), and kept Max out of Simes’ way, to his enormous relief. Whether Kelly had planned that feature of it Max never knew—and did not dare ask.
Max’s watch was still an instruction watch, he had no one to relieve nor to be relieved by. It became his habit not to leave the control room until Kelly did, unless told to do so. This resulted in him still being thrown into the company of Dr. Hendrix frequently, since the Astrogator relieved the Chief Computerman and Kelly would usually hang around and chat… during which time the Astrogator would sometimes inquire into Max’s progress.
Occasionally the Captain would show up on Dr. Hendrix’s watch. Shortly after leaving Garson’s Planet Dr. Hendrix took advantage of one such occasion to have Max demonstrate for Captain Blaine and First Officer Walther his odd talent. Max performed without a mistake although the Captain’s presence made him most self-conscious. The Captain watched closely with an expression of gentle surprise. Afterwards he said, “Thank you, lad. That was amazing. Let me see—what is your name?”
“Jones, sir.”
“Jones, yes.” The old man blinked thoughtfully. “It must be terrifying not to be able to forget—especially
in the middle of the night. Keep a clear conscience, son.”
Twelve hours later Dr. Hendrix said to him, “Jones, don’t go away. I want to see you.” “Yes, sir.”
The Astrogator spoke with Kelly for a few moments, then again spoke to Max. “The Captain was impressed by your vaudeville act, Jones. He is wondering whether you have any parallel mathematical ability.”
“Well—no, sir. I’m not a lightning calculator, that is. I saw one in a sideshow once. He could do things I couldn’t.”
Hendrix brushed it aside. “Not important. I believe you told me that your uncle taught you some mathematical theory?”
“Just for astrogation, sir.”
“What do you think I am talking about? Do you know how to compute a transition approach?” “Uh, I think so, sir.”
“Frankly, I doubt it, no matter how much theoretical drill Brother Jones gave you. But go ahead.” “Now, sir?”
“Try it. Pretend you’re the officer of the watch. Kelly will be your assistant. I’ll just be audience. Work the approach we are on. I realize that we aren’t close enough for it to matter—but you are to assume that the safety of the ship depends on it.”
Max took a deep breath. “Aye aye, sir.” He started to get out fresh plates for the cameras. Hendrix said, “No!”
“Sir?”
“If you have the watch, where’s your crew? Noguchi, help him.”
“Aye aye, sir.” Noguchi grinned and came over. While they were bending over the first camera, Noguchi whispered, “Don’t let him rattle you, pal. We’ll give him a good show. Kelly will help you over the humps.”
But Kelly did not help; he acted as “numbers boy” and nothing else, with no hint to show whether Max was right, or wildly wrong. After Max had his sights and had taken his comparison data between plates and charts he did not put the problem through the computer himself, but let Noguchi man the machine, with Kelly translating. After a long time and much sweat the lights blinked what he hoped was the answer.
Dr. Hendrix said nothing but took the same plates to the tank and started to work the problem again, with the same crew. Very quickly the lights blinked on again; the Astrogator took the tables from Kelly and looked up the translation himself. “We differ only in the ninth decimal place. Not bad.”
“I was wrong only in the ninth place, sir?”
“I didn’t say that. Perhaps I was more in error.”
Max started to grin, but Dr. Hendrix frowned. “Why didn’t you take doppler spectra to check?” Max felt a cold chill. “I guess I forgot, sir.”
“I thought you were the man who never forgot?”
Max thought intuitively—and correctly—that two kinds of memory were involved, but he did not have a psychologist’s jargon with which to explain. One sort was like forgetting one’s hat in a restaurant, that could happen to anyone; the other was being unable to recall what the mind had once known.
Hendrix went on, “A control room man must not forget things necessary to the safety of the ship. However as an exercise you solved it very well—except that you have no speed. Had we been pushing close to the speed of light, ready to cross, your ship would have been in Hades and crashed in the River Styx before you got the answer. But it was a good first try.”
He turned away. Kelly jerked his head toward the hatch and Max went below.
As he was falling asleep Max turned over in his mind the notion that Dr. Hendrix might even be thinking of him for—Oh no! He put the thought aside. After all, Kelly could have done it; he had seen him do early approaches many times, and faster, too. Probably Noguchi could have done it.
Certainly Noguchi could have done it, he corrected. After all, there weren’t any “secrets.”
As they approached the first anomaly the easy watch in three for officers and watch in four for the men changed to watch-and-watch, with an astrogator, an assistant, a chartsman, and a computerman on each watch. Max was at last assigned to a regular watch; the first watch was Dr. Hendrix assisted by Chartsman 1/c Kovak, Max as chartsman of the watch and Noguchi on the computer; the other watch was Mr. Simes assisted by Chief Kelly, Smythe as chartsman and Lundy as computerman. Max noticed that Dr. Hendrix had assigned his “first team” to Simes and had taken the less experienced technicians himself. He wondered why, but was pleased not to be working for Simes.
He learned at last why they called it the “Worry Hole.” Dr. Hendrix became a frozen-masked automaton, performing approach correction after correction and demanding quick, accurate, and silent service.
During the last twenty hours of the approach the Astrogator never left the control room, nor did anyone else other than for short periods when nominally off watch. Simes continued to take his regular watch but Dr. Hendrix hung over him, checking everything that he did. Twice he required the junior astrogator to reperform portions of his work and once elbowed him aside and did it himself. The first time it happened Max stared—then he noticed that the others were careful to be busy doing something else whenever Dr. Hendrix spoke privately to Simes.
The tension grew as the critical instant approached. The approach to an anomalous intraspatial transition can hardly be compared to any other form of piloting ever performed by human beings, though it might be compared to the impossible trick of taking off in an atmosphere plane, flying a thousand miles blind—while performing dead reckoning so perfectly as to fly through a narrow tunnel at the far end, without ever seeing the tunnel. A Horst congruency cannot be seen, it can only be calculated by abstruse mathematics of effects of mass on space; a “gateway” is merely unmarked empty space in vaster emptiness. In approaching a planet an astrogator can see his destination, directly or by radar, and his speed is just a few miles per second. But in making a Horstian approach the ship’s speed approaches that of light—and reaches it, at the last instant. The nearest landmarks are many billions of miles away, the landmarks themselves are moving with stellar velocities and appear to be crowding together in the
exaggerated parallax effects possible only when the observer is moving almost as fast as is his single clue to location and speed—the wave fronts of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Like searching at midnight in a dark cellar for a black cat that isn’t there.
Toward the last Kelly himself was on the computer with Lundy at his ear. Smythe and Kovak were charting, passing new data to Dr. Hendrix, who was programming orally to the computer crew, setting up the problems in his head and feeding them to the electronic brain almost without delay. The power room was under his direct control now; he had a switch led out from the control console in each hand, one to nurse the ship along just below speed of light, the other to give the Asgard the final kick that would cause her to burst through.
Max was pushed aside, no task remained in which there was not someone more experienced. On a different level, Simes too had been pushed aside; there was place for only one astrogator at the moment of truth.
Of all those in the Worry Hole only Captain Blaine seemed to be relaxed. He sat in the chair sacred to him, smoking quietly and watching Hendrix. The Astrogator’s face was gray with fatigue, greasy with unwashed sweat. His uniform was open at the collar and looked slept in, though he certainly had not slept. Max looked at him and wondered why he had ever longed to be an astrogator, ever been foolish enough to wish to bear this undivided and unendurable burden.
But the doctor’s crisp voice showed no fatigue; the endless procession of numbers marched out, sharp as print, each spoken so that there could be no mistake, no need to repeat, “nine” always sounded as one syllable, “five” always stretched into two. Max listened and learned and wondered.
He glanced up through the dome, out into space itself, space shown distorted by their unthinkable speed. The stars ahead, or above, had been moving closer together for the past several watches, the huge parallax effect displacing them to the eye so that they seemed to be retreating in the very sector of the sky they were approaching. They were seeing by infra-red waves now, ploughing into oncoming wave trains so fast that doppler effect reduced heat wave lengths to visible light.
The flood of figures stopped. Max looked down, then looked up hastily as he heard Dr. Hendrix say, “Stand by!”
The stars seemed to crawl together, then instantly they were gone to be replaced without any lapse of time whatever by another, new and totally different starry universe.
Hendrix straightened up and sighed, then looked up. “There’s the Albert Memorial,” he said quietly. “And there is the Hexagon. Well, Captain, it seems we made it again.” He turned to Simes. “Take it, Mister.” He let the Captain go first, then followed him down the hatch.
The control gang went back to easy watches; the next transition was many days away. Max continued as chartsman-of -the-watch in place of Kovak, who temporarily replaced Dr. Hendrix while the Astrogator got a week of rest: There was truly not much to do during the early part of a leg and the doctor’s superb skill was not needed. But Max greatly enjoyed the new arrangements; it made him proud to sign the rough log “M. Jones, Chtsmn o/W.” He felt that he had arrived—even though Simes found fault with him and Kelly continued to drill him unmercifully in control room arts.
He was surprised but not apprehensive when he was told, during an off-watch period, to report to the Astrogator. He put on a fresh uniform, slicked his hair clown, and went above “C” deck. “Apprentice Chartsman Jones reporting, sir.”
Kelly was there, having coffee with the Astrogator. Hendrix acknowledged Max’s salutation but left him standing. “Yes, Jones.” He turned to Kelly. “Suppose you break the news.”
“If you say so, sir.” Kelly looked uncomfortable. “Well, Jones, it’s like this—you don’t really belong in my guild.”
Max was so shocked that he could not answer. He was about to say that he had thought—he had understood—he hadn’t known—But he got nothing out; Kelly continued, “The fact is, you ought to buck for astrogator. The Doctor and I have been talking it over.”
The buzzing in his head got worse. He became aware that Dr. Hendrix was repeating, “Well, Jones? Do you want to try it? Or don’t you?”
Max managed to say, “Yes. Yes, sir.”
“Good. Kelly and I have been watching you. He is of the opinion and so am I that you may, just possibly, have the latent ability to develop the skill and speed necessary. The question is: do you think so?”
“Uh… that is—I hope so, sir!”
“So do I,” Hendrix answered dryly. ‘We shall see. If you haven’t, you can revert to your own guild and no harm is done. The experience will make you a better chartsman.” The Astrogator turned to Kelly. “I’ll quiz Jones a bit, Kelly. Then we can make up our minds.”
“Very good, sir.” Kelly stood up.
When the Chief Computerman had gone Hendrix turned to his desk, hauled out a crewman’s personal record. To Max he said harshly, “Is this yours?”
Max looked at it and gulped. “Yes, sir.”
Dr. Hendrix held his eye. “Well? How good a picture is it of your career thus far? Any comment you want to make?”
The pause might have been a dozen heart beats, though to Max it was an endless ordeal. Then a catharsis came bursting up out of him and he heard himself answering, “It’s not a good picture at all, sir. It’s phony from one end to the other.”
Even as he said it, he wondered why. He felt that he had kicked to pieces his one chance to achieve his ambition. Yet, instead of feeling tragic, he felt oddly relaxed.
Hendrix put the personal record back on his desk. “Good,” he answered. “Very good. If you had given any other answer, I would have run you out of my control room. Now, do you want to tell me about it? Sit down.”
So Max sat down and told him. All that he held back was Sam’s name and such details as would have identified Sam. Naturally Dr Hendrix noticed the omission and asked him point blank.
“I won’t tell you, sir.”
Hendrix nodded. “Very well. Let me add that I shall make no attempt to identify this, ah, friend of yours—if by chance he is in this ship.”
“Thank you, sir.”
There followed a considerable silence. At last Hendrix said, “Son, what led you to attempt this preposterous chicanery? Didn’t you realize you would be caught?”
Max thought about it. “I guess I knew I would be, sir—eventually. But I wanted to space and there wasn’t any other way to do it.” When Hendrix did not answer Max went on. After the first relief of being able to tell the truth, he felt defensive, anxious to justify himself—and just a little bit irked that Dr. Hendrix did not see that he had simply done what he had to do—so it seemed to Max. “What would you have done, sir?”
“Me? How can I answer that? What you’re really asking is: do I consider your actions morally wrong, as well as illegal?”
“Uh, I suppose so, sir.”
“Is it wrong to lie and fake and bribe to get what you want? It’s worse than wrong, it’s undignified!”
Dr. Hendrix chewed his lip and continued. “Perhaps that opinion is the sin of the Pharisees… my own weakness. I don’t suppose that a young, penniless tramp, such as you described yourself to be, can afford the luxury of dignity. As for the rest, human personality is a complex thing, nor am I a judge.
Admiral Lord Nelson was a liar, a libertine, and outstandingly undisciplined. President Abraham Lincoln was a vulgarian and nervously unstable. The list is endless. No, Jones, I am not going to pass judgment; you must do that yourself. The authorities having jurisdiction will reckon your offenses; I am concerned only with whether or not you have the qualities I need.”
Max’s emotions received another shock. He had already resigned himself to the idea that he had lost his chance. “Sir?”
“Don’t misunderstand me.” Hendrix tapped the forged record. “I don’t like this. I don’t like it at all. But perhaps you can live down your mistake. In the meantime, I badly need another watch officer; if you measure up, I can use you. Part of it is personal, too; your uncle taught me, I shall try to teach you.”
“Uh, I’ll try, sir. Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. I’m not even feeling particularly friendly to you, at the moment. Don’t talk with anyone. I’ll ask the Captain to call a guild meeting and he and Mr. Simes and I will vote on you. We’ll make you a probationary apprentice which will permit the Captain to appoint you to the temporary rank of merchant cadet. The legalities are a bit different from those of the usual route as you no doubt know.”
Max did not know, though he was aware that officers sometimes came up “through the cargo hatch”—but another point hit him. “Mr. Simes, sir?”
“Certainly. By this procedure, all the astrogators you serve with must pass on you.” “Uh, does it have to unanimous, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Then—Well, sir, you might as well forget it. I mean, I appreciate your willingness to, uh, but… ” His voice trailed off.
Dr. Hendrix smiled mirthlessly. “Hadn’t you better let me worry about that?” “Oh. Sorry, sir.”
“When it has been logged, I’ll notify you. Or ‘when and if,’ if you prefer.”
“Yes, sir.” Max stood up. “Sir? There were, uh, a couple of other things I wondered about.” Hendrix had turned back to his desk. He answered, “Well?” somewhat impatiently.
“Would you mind telling me—just for my curiosity—how you caught me?”
“Oh, that. No doubt you’ve given yourself away to several people. I’m sure Kelly knows, from the subjects he avoided. For example, I once heard Lundy mention to you Kiefer’s Ritz on Luna. Your answer, though noncommittal, implied that you did not really know what dive he was talking about—and it is impossible for a spaceman not to know that place, its entrance faces the east lock to the space port.”
“Oh.”
“But the matter came to the top of my mind in connection with this.” He again indicated the false record. “Jones, I deal in figures and my mind can no more help manipulating them for all the information they contain than I can help breathing. This record says that you went to space a year before your uncle retired—I remember what year that was. But you told me that your uncle had trained you at home and your performance bore out that statement. Two sets of alleged facts were contradictory; need I add that I was fairly sure of the truth?”
“Oh. I guess I wasn’t very smart?’
“No, you weren’t. Figures are sharp things, Jones. Don’t juggle them, you’ll get cut. What was the other matter?”
“Well, sir, I was kind of wondering what was going to happen to me. I mean about that.”
“Oh,” Hendrix answered indifferently, “that’s up to the Stewards & Clerks. My guild won’t take action concerning a disciplinary matter of another guild. Unless, of course, they call it ‘moral turpitude’ and make it stick.”
With that faint comfort Max left, Nevertheless he felt easier than he had at any time since he had signed on. The prospect of punishment seemed less a burden than constantly worrying about getting caught.
Presently he forgot it and exulted in the opportunity—at last!—to take a crack at astrogator. He wished he could tell Sam… or Ellie.
HALCYON
The probationary appointment was logged later that same day. The Captain called him in, swore him in, then congratulated him and called him “Mister” Jones. The ceremony was simple, with no spectator but Hendrix and the Captain’s secretary.
The commonplaces attendant on the change were, for a while, more startling to Max than the promotion itself. They started at once. “You had better take the rest of the day to shake down, Mr. Jones,” the Captain said, blinking vaguely. “Okay, Doc?”
“Certainly, sir.”
“Good. Bennett, will you ask Dumont to step in?”
The Chief Passengers’ Steward was unblinkingly unsurprised to find the recent steward’s mate third a ship’s officer. To the Captain’s query he said, “I was planning to put Mr. Jones in stateroom B-014, sir. Is that satisfactory?”
“No doubt, no doubt.”
“I’ll have boys take care of his luggage at once.”
“Good. You trot along with Dumont, Mr. Jones. No, wait a moment. We must find you a cap.” The Captain went to his wardrobe, fumbled around. “I had one that would do here somewhere.”
Hendrix had been standing with his hands behind him. “I fetched one, Captain. Mr. Jones and I wear the same size, I believe.”
“Good. Though perhaps his head has swelled a bit in the past few minutes. Eh?”
Hendrix grinned savagely. “If it has, I’ll shrink it.” He handed the cap to Max. The wide gold strap and sunburst the Astrogator had removed; substituted was a narrow strap with tiny sunburst surrounded by the qualifying circle of the apprentice. Max thought it must be old insignia saved for sentimental reasons by Hendrix himself. He choked up as he mumbled his thanks, then followed Dumont out of the Captain’s cabin, stumbling over his feet.
When they reached the companionway Dumont stopped. “There is no need to go down to the bunkroom, sir. If you will tell me the combination of your locker, we’ll take care of everything.”
“Oh, gee, Mr. Dumont! I’ve got just a small amount of truck. I can carry it up myself.”
Dumont’s face had the impassivity of a butler’s. “If I may make a suggestion, sir, you might like to see your stateroom while I have the matter taken care of.” It was not a question; Max interpreted it correctly to mean: “Look, dummy, I know the score and you don’t. Do what I tell you before you make a terrible break!”
Max let himself be guided. It is not easy to make the jump from crewman to officer while remaining in the same ship. Dumont knew this, Max did not. Whether his interest was fatherly, or simply a liking for correct protocol—or both—Dumont did not intend to allow the brand-new junior officer to go lower than “C” deck until he had learned to carry his new dignity with grace. So Max sought out stateroom
B-014.
The bunk had a real foam mattress and a spread. There was a tiny wash basin with running water and a mirror. There was a bookshelf over the bunk and a wardrobe for his uniforms. There was even a shelf desk that let down for his convenience. There was a telephone on the wall, a buzzer whereby he could summon the steward’s mate on watch! There was a movable chair all his own, a wastebasket, and—yes!—a little rug on the deck. And best of all, there was a door with a lock.
The fact that the entire room was about as large as a piano box bothered him not at all.
He was opening drawers and poking into things when Dumont returned. Dumont was not carrying Max’s meager possessions himself; that task was delegated to one of his upper-decks staff. The steward’s mate followed Dumont in and said, “Where shall I put this, sir?”
Max realized with sudden embarrassment that the man waiting on him had eaten opposite him for past months. “Oh! Hello, Jim. Just dump it on the bunk. Thanks a lot.”
“Yes, sir. And congratulations!”
“Uh, thanks!” They shook hands. Dumont let that proper ceremony persist for a minimum time, then said, “That’s all now, Gregory. You can go back to the pantry.” He turned to Max. “Anything else, sir?”
“Oh, no, everything is fine.”
“May I suggest that you probably won’t want to sew insignia on these uniforms yourself? Unless you are better with a needle than I am,” Dumont added with just the right chuckle.
“Well, I guess I could.”
“Mrs. Dumont is handy with a needle, taking care of the lady passengers as she does. Suppose I take this one? It can be ready and pressed in time for dinner.”
Max was happy to let him. He was suddenly appalled by a terrifying notion—he was going to have to eat in the Bifrost Lounge!
But there were further disturbances before dinner. He was completing the small task of stowing his possessions when there came a knock on the door, followed immediately by someone coming in. Max found himself nose to nose with Mr. Simes.
Simes looked at the cap on his head and laughed. “Take that thing off before you wear out your ears.” Max did not do so. He said, “You wanted me, sir?”
“Yes. Just long enough, Smart Boy, to give you a word of advice.” “Yes?”
Simes tapped himself on the chest. “Just this. There is only one assistant astrogator in this ship—and I’m it. Remember that. I’ll still be it long after you’ve been busted back to sweeping up after cows. Which is where you belong.”
Max felt a flush crawl up his neck and burn his cheeks. “Why,” he asked, “if you think that, didn’t you veto my appointment?”
Simes laughed again. “Do I look like a fool? The Captain says yes, the Astrogator says yes—should I stick my neck out? It’s easier to wait and let you stick your neck out—which you will. I just wanted to let you know that a dinky piece of gold braid doesn’t mean a thing. You’re still junior to me by plenty. Don’t forget it.”
Max clenched his jaw and did not answer. Simes went on, “Well?” “‘Well’ what?”
“I just gave you an order.”
“Oh. Aye aye, Mr. Simes. I won’t forget it. I certainly won’t.”
Simes looked at him sharply, said, “See that you don’t,” and left. Max was still facing his door, clenching his fists, when Gregory tapped on the door. “Dinner, sir. Five minutes.”
Max delayed as long as he could, wishing mightily that he could slide down to Easy deck and take his usual place in the warm, noisy, relaxed comfort of the crew’s mess. He hesitated in the lounge doorway, paralyzed with stage fright. The beautiful room was blazing with light and looked unfamiliar; he had never been in it save in early morning, to change the sandbox located down the pantry passage—at which times only standing lights were burning.
He was barely in time; some of the ladies were seated but the Captain was still standing. Max realized that he should be near his chair, ready to sit down when the Captain did—or as soon as the ladies were seated, he amended—but where should he go? He was still jittering when he heard his name shouted. “Max!”
Ellie came running up and threw her arms around his neck. “Max! I just heard. I think it’s wonderful!”
She looked at him, her eyes shining, then kissed him on both cheeks.
Max blushed to his ears. He felt as if every eye was turned on him—and he was right. To add to his embarrassment Ellie was dressed in formal evening dress of Hesperan high style, which not only made her look older and much more female, but also shocked his puritanical hillbilly standards.
She let go of him, which was well but left him in danger of collapsing at the knees. She started to babble something, Max did not know what, when Chief Steward Dumont appeared at her elbow. “The Captain is waiting, Miss,” he said firmly.
“Bother to the Captain! Oh, well—see you after dinner, Max.” She headed for the Captain’s table. Dumont touched Max’s sleeve and munnured, “This way, sir.”
His place was at the foot of the Chief Engineer’s table. Max knew Mr. Compagnon by sight but had never spoken to him. The Chief glanced up and said, “Evening, Mr. Jones. Glad to have you with us. Ladies and gentlemen, our new astrogation officer, Mr. Jones. On your right, Mr. Jones, is Mrs. Daigler. Mr. Daigler on her right, then—” and so on, around the table: Dr. and Mrs. Weberbauer and their daughter Rebecca, Mr. and Mrs. Scott, a Mr. Arthur, Senhor and Senhora Vargas.
Mrs. Daigler thought it was lovely, his being promoted. And so nice to have more young people at the table. She was much older than Max but young enough to be handsome and aware of it. She wore more jewels than Max had ever seen and her hair was lacquered into a structure a foot high and studded with pearls. She was as perfectly finished and as expensive as a precision machine and she made Max uncomfortable.
But he was not yet as uncomfortable as he could be. Mrs. Daigler produced a wisp of a handkerchief from her bosom, moistened it and said, “Hold still, Mr. Jones.” She scrubbed his cheek. “Turn your head.” Blushing, Max complied.
“There, that’s better,” Mrs. Daigler announced. “Mama fixed.” She turned away and said, “Don’t you think, Mr. Compagnon, that science, with all the wonderful things they do these days, could discover a lip paint that wouldn’t come off?”
“Stop it, Maggie,” her husband interrupted. “Pay no attention, Mr. Jones. She’s got a streak of sadism as wide as she is.”
“George, you’ll pay for that. Well, Chief?”
The Chief Engineer patted his lips with snowy linen. “I think it must already have been invented, but there
was no market. Women like to brand men, even temporarily.” “Oh, bosh!”
“It’s a woman’s world, ma’am.”
She turned to Max. “Eldreth is a dear, isn’t she? I suppose you knew her ‘dirtside’?—as Mr. Compagnon calls it.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Then how? I mean, after all, there isn’t much opportunity. Or is there?” “Maggie, stop pestering him. Let the man eat his dinner.”
Mrs. Weberbauer on his other side was as easy and motherly as Mrs. Daigler was difficult. Under her soothing presence Max managed to start eating. Then he noticed that the way he grasped a fork was not the way the others did, tried to change, made a mess of it, became aware of his untidy nails, and wanted to crawl under the table. He ate about three hundred calories, mostly bread and butter.
At the end of the meal Mrs. Daigler again gave her attention to him, though she addressed the Chief Engineer. “Mr. Compagnon, isn’t it customary to toast a promotion?”
“Yes,” the Chief conceded. “But he must pay for it. That’s a requirement.”
Max found himself signing a chit presented by Dumont. The price made him blink—his first trip might be a professional success, but so far it had been financial disaster. Champagne, iced in a shiny bucket, accompanied the chit and Dumont cut the wires and drew the cork with a flourish.
The Chief Engineer stood up. “Ladies and gentlemen—I give you Astrogator Jones. May he never misplace a decimal point!”
“Cheers!”—”Bravo!”—”Speech, speech!”
Max stumbled to his feet and muttered, “Thank you.”
His first watch was at eight o’clock the next morning. He ate breakfast alone and reflected happily that as a watch stander he would usually eat either before or after the passengers. He was in the control room a good twenty minutes early.
Kelly glanced up and said, “Good morning, sir.”
Max gulped. “Er—good morning, Chief!” He caught Smythe grinning behind the computer, turned his eyes hastily away.
“Fresh coffee, Mr. Jones. Will you have a cup?” Max let Kelly pour for him; while they drank Kelly quietly went over the details—acceleration schedule, position and vector, power units in use, sights taken, no special orders, etc. Noguchi relieved Smythe, and shortly before the hour Dr. Hendrix appeared.
“Good morning, sir.” “Good morning, Doctor.”
“Morning.” Hendrix accepted coffee, turned to Max. “Have you relieved the officer of the watch?” “Uh, why no, sir.”
“Then do so. It lacks less than a minute of eight.”
Max turned to Kelly and shakily saluted. “I relieve you, sir.”
“Very well, sir.” Kelly went below at once. Dr. Hendrix sat down, took out a book and started to read. Max realized with a chilly feeling that he had been pushed in, to swim or not. He took a deep breath and went over to Noguchi. “Noggy, let’s get the plates ready for the middle o’ watch sights.”
Noguchi glanced at the chronometer. “As you say, sir.” “Well… I guess it is early. Let’s take a few dopplers.”
“Aye aye, sir.” Noguchi climbed out of the saddle where he had been loafing. Max said in a low voice, “Look, Noggy, you don’t have to say’sir’ to me.”
Noguchi answered just as quietly. “Kelly wouldn’t like it if I didn’t. Better let it ride.” “Oh.” Max frowned. “Noggy? How does the rest of the Worry gang feel about it?”
Noguchi did not pretend not to understand. He answered, “Shucks, they’re all rooting for you, if you can swing it.”
“You’re sure?”
“Certain. Just as long as you don’t try to make a big hairy thing out of yourself like—well, like some I could mention.” The computerman added, “Maybe Kovak isn’t exactly cheering. He’s been having a watch of his own, you know—for the first time.”
“He’s sore?”
“Not exactly. He couldn’t expect to keep it long anyhow, not with a transition coming up. He won’t go out of his way to give you trouble, he’ll be fair.”
Max made a mental note to see what he could do to swing Kovak over to his side. The two manned the dopplerscope, took readings on stars forward of vector, checked what they found by spectrostellograph, and compared both with standard plates from the chart safe. At first Max had to remember that he was in charge; then he got so interested in fussy details of measurements that he was no longer self-conscious. At last Noguchi touched his sleeve. “Pushing ten o’clock, sir. I’d better get set up.”
“Huh? Sure, go ahead.” He reminded himself not to help Noggy; the chartsman has his prerogatives, too. But he checked the set up just as Hendrix always did, as Simes rarely did, and as Kelly sometimes did, depending on who had made it.
After they had gotten the new data Max programmed the problem on paper (there being plenty of time), then called it off to Noguchi at the computer. He thumbed the book himself, there being no “numbers boy” available. The figures were as clear in his recollection as ever, but he obeyed Hendrix’s injunction not to depend on memory.
The result worried him. They were not “in the groove.” Not that the Asgard was far out, but the discrepancy was measurable. He checked what he had done, then had Noguchi run the problem again,
using a different programming method. The result came out the same.
Sighing, he computed the correction and started to take it to Hendrix for approval. But the Astrogator still paid no attention; he sat at the console, reading a novel from the ship’s library.
Max made up his mind. He went to the console and said, “Excuse me, sir. I need to get there for a moment.” Hendrix got up without answering and found another seat. Max sat down and called the power room. “Control officer speaking. I intend to increase boost at eleven o’clock. Stand by for time check.”
Hendrix must have heard him, he thought, but the Astrogator gave no sign. Max fed in the correction, set the control chronometer to execute his wishes at eleven plus-or-minus nothing.
Shortly before noon Simes showed up. Max had already written his own log, based on Noguchi’s log, and had signed it “M. Jones.” He had hesitated, then added “C. O. o/W.” Simes went to Dr. Hendrix, saluted, and said, “Ready to relieve you, sir.”
Hendrix spoke his first word since eight o’clock. “He’s got it.”
Simes looked non-plussed, then went to Max. “Ready to relieve you.” Max recited off the situation data while Simes read the log and the order book. Simes interrupted him while he was still listing minor ship’s data. “Okay, I relieve you. Get out of my control room, Mister.” Max got out. Dr. Hendrix had already gone down.
Noguchi had loitered at the foot of the ladder. He caught Max’s eye, made a circle with thumb and finger and nodded. Max grinned at him, started to ask a question; he wanted to know if that discrepancy was a booby trap, intentionally left in by Kelly. Then he decided that it would not be fitting; he’d ask Kelly himself, or figure it from the records. “Thanks, Noggy.”
That watch turned out to be typical only in the one respect that Dr. Hendrix continued to require Max to be officer of the watch himself. He did not again keep quiet but rode Max steadily, drilling him hour after hour, requiring him to take sights and set up problems continuously, as if the Asgard were actually close to transition. He did not permit Max to program on paper but forced him to pretend that time was too short and that data must immediately go into the computer, be acted on at once. Max sweated, with remote controls in each fist and with Hendrix himself acting as “numbers boy.” The Astrogator kept pushing him for speed, speed, and more speed—never at the sacrifice of accuracy, for any error was unforgivable. But the goal was always greater speed.
Once Max objected. “Sir, if you would let me put it right into the machine, I could cut it down a lot.”
Hendrix snapped, “When you have your own control room, you can do that, if you think it wise. Now you’ll do it my way.”
Occasionally Kelly would take over as his supervisor. The Chief Computerman was formal, using such phrases as, “May I suggest, sir—” or “I think I’d do it this way, sir.” But once he broke out with, “Confound it, Max! Don’t ever pull a dumb stunt like that!”
Then he started to amend his remarks. Max grinned. “Please, Chief. For a moment you made me feel at home. Thanks.”
Kelly looked sheepish. “I’m tired, I guess. I could do with a smoke and some java.”
While they were resting Max noted that Lundy was out of earshot and said, “Chief? You know more than I’ll ever learn. Why didn’t you buck for astrogator? Didn’t you ever get a chance?”
Kelly suddenly looked bleak. “I once did,” he said stiffly. “Now I know my limitations.” Max shut up, much embarrassed. Thereafter Kelly reverted to calling him Max whenever they were alone.
Max did not see Sam for more than a week after he moved up to Baker deck. Even then the encounter was chance; he ran across him outside the Purser’s office. “Sam!”
“Good morning, sir!” Sam drew up in a smart salute with a broad grin on his face. “Huh? ‘Good morning, sir’ my foot! How’s it going, Sam?”
“Aren’t you going to return my salute? In my official capacity I can report you, you know. The Captain is very, very fussy about ship’s etiquette.”
Max made a rude noise. “You can hold that salute until you freeze, you clown.”
Sam relaxed. “Kid, I’ve been meaning to get up and congratulate you—but every time I find you’re on watch. You must live in the Worry Hole.”
“Pretty near. Look, I’ll be off this evening until midnight. What do you say I stop down to see you?” Sam shook his head. “I’ll be busy.”
“Busy how? You expecting a jail break? Or a riot, maybe?”
Sam answered soberly, “Kid, don’t get me wrong—but you stick to your end of the ship and I’ll stick to mine. No, no, keep quiet and listen. I’m as proud as if I had invented you. But you can’t fraternize in crew’s quarters, not even with the Chief Master-at-Arms. Not yet.”
“Who’ll know? Who’s to care?”
“You know blamed well that Giordano would love to tell Kuiper that you didn’t know how to behave like an officer—and Old Lady Kuiper would pass it along to the Purser. Take my advice. Have I ever thrown you a curve?”
Max dropped the matter, though he badly wanted a chin with Sam. He needed to tell him that his faked record had been breached and to consult with him as to probable consequences.
Of course, he considered as he returned to his stateroom, there wasn’t a thing to keep him from carrying out his orginal intention of jumping ship with Sam at Nova Terra—except that it was now no longer possible to imagine it. He was an officer.
They were approaching the middle transition; the control room went on watch-and-watch. But still Dr. Hendrix did not take the watch; Simes and Jones alternated. The Astrogator stood every watch with Max but required him to do the work and carry the responsibility himself. Max sweated it out and learned that practice problems and study of theory were nothing like having it matter when he had no way and no time to check. You had to be right, every time—and there was always doubt.
When, during the last twenty-four hours, the Worry gang went on continuous watch, Max thought that Dr. Hendrix would push him aside. But he did not. Simes was pushed aside, yes, but Max took the worry seat, with Hendrix bending over him and watching everything he did, but not interfering. “Great
heavens!” Max thought. “Surely he isn’t going to let me make this transition? I’m not ready for it, not yet. I’ll never keep up.”
But data was coming too fast for further worry; he had to keep processing it, see the answers, and make decisions. It was not until twenty minutes before transition that Hendrix pushed him aside without a word and took over. Max was still recovering when they burst through into a new sky.
The last approach-and-transition before Halcyon was much like the second. There were a couple of weeks of easy watches, headed by Simes, Jones, and Kovak, with both Kelly and Hendrix getting a little rest. Max liked it, both on and off watch. On watch he continued to practice, trying to achieve the inhuman speed of Dr. Hendrix. Off watch he slept and enjoyed himself. The Bifrost Lounge no longer terrified him. He now played three-dee with Ellie there, with Chipsie on his shoulder, giving advice. Ellie had long since waved her eyes at Captain Blaine and convinced him that a pet so well behaved, so well house-broken, and in particular so well mannered (she had trained the spider puppy to say, “Good morning, Captain,” whenever it saw Blaine)—in all respects so civilized should not be forced to live in a cage.
Max had even learned to swap feeble repartee with Mrs. Daigler, thinking up remarks and waiting for a chance. Ellie was threatening to teach him to dance, although he managed to stall her until resumption of watch-and-watch before transition made it impossible.
Again he found himself shoved into the worry seat for the last part of the approach. This time Dr. Hendrix did not displace him until less than ten minutes before burst through.
On the easy drop down to Halcyon Ellie’s determination won out. Max learned to dance. He found that he liked it. He had good rhythm, did not forget her instructions, and Ellie was a fragrant, pleasant armful. “I’ve done all I can,” she announced at last. “You’re the best dancer with two left feet I’ve ever met.” She required him to dance with Rebecca Weberbauer and with Mrs. Daigler. Mrs. Daigler wasn’t so bad after all, as long as she kept her mouth shut—and Rebecca was cute. He began to look forward to the fleshpots of Halcyon, that being Ellie’s stated reason for instructing him; he was to be conscripted as her escort.
Only one thing marred the final leg; Sam was in trouble. Max did not find out about it until after the trouble broke. He got up early to go on watch and found Sam cleaning decks in the silent passages of passenger quarters. He was in dungarees and wearing no shield. “Sam!”
Sam looked up. “Oh. Hi, kid. Keep your voice down, you’ll wake people.” “But Sam, what in Ned are you doing?”
“Me? I seem to be manicuring this deck.” “But why?”
Sam leaned on his broom. “Well, kid, it’s like this. The Captain and I had a difference of opinion. He won.”
“You’ve been busted?”
“Your intuition is dazzling.” “What happened?”
“Max, the less you know about it the better. Don’t fret. Sic transit gloria mundi—Tuesday is usually worse.”
“But—See here, I’ve got to grab chow and go on watch. I’ll look you up later.” “Don’t.”
Max got the story from Noguchi. Sam, it appeared, had set up a casino in an empty storeroom. He might have gotten away with it indefinitely had it remained a cards-and-dice set up, with a rake off for the house—the “house” being the Chief Master-at-Arms. But Sam had added a roulette wheel and that had been his downfall; Giordano had come to suspect that the wheel had less of the element of chance than was customary in better-run gambling halls—and had voiced his suspicion to Chief Clerk Kuiper. From there events took an inevitable course.
“When did he put in this wheel?”
“Right after we raised from Garson’s Planet.” Max thought uncomfortably of the “tea cozies” he had helped Sam bring aboard there. Noguchi went on, “Uh, didn’t you know, sir? I thought you and him were pretty close before—you know, before you moved up decks.”
Max avoided an answer and dug into the log. He found it under the previous day, added by Bennett to Simes’ log. Sam was restricted to the ship for the rest of the trip, final disciplinary action postponed until return to Terra.
That last seemed to mean that Captain Blaine intended to give Sam a chance to show good behavior before making his recommendation to the guilds—the Captain was a sweet old guy, he certainly was. But “restricted”? Then Sam would never get his chance to run away from whatever it was he was running away from. He located Sam as soon as he was off watch, digging him out of his bunkroom and taking him out into the corridor.
Sam looked at him sourly. “I thought I told you not to look me up?”
“Never mind! Sam, I’m worried about you. This’restricted’ angle… it means you won’t have a chance to—”
“Shut up!” It was a whisper but Max shut up. “Now look here,” Sam went on, “Forget it. I got my stake and that’s the important point.”
“But…”
“Do you think they can seal this ship tight enough to keep me in when I decide to leave? Now stay away from me. You’re teacher’s pet and I want to keep it that way. I don’t want you lectured about bad companions, meaning me.”
“But I want to help, Sam. I…”
“Will you kindly get up above ‘C’ deck where you belong?”
He did not see Sam again that leg; presently he stopped worrying about it. Hendrix required him to compute the planetary approach—child’s play compared with a transition—then placed Max at the conn
when they grounded. This was a titulary responsibility since it was precomputed and done on radar-automatic. Max sat with the controls under his hands, ready to override the autopilot—and
Hendrix stood behind him, ready to override him—but there was no need; the Asgard came down by the plotted curve as easy as descending stairs. The thrust beams bit in and Max reported, “Grounded, sir, on schedule.”
“Secure.”
Max spoke into the ship’s announcers. “Secure power room. Secure all space details. Dirtside routine, second section.”
Of the four days they were there he spent the first three nominally supervising, and actually learning from, Kovak in the routine ninety-day inspection and overhaul of control room instruments. Ellie was vexed with him, as she had had different plans. But on the last day he hit dirt with her, chaperoned by Mr. and Mrs. Mendoza.
It was a wonderful holiday. Compared with Terra, Halcyon is a bleak place and Bonaparte is not much of a city. Nevertheless Halcyon is an earth-type planet with breathable air, and the party from the Asgard had not set foot outdoors since Earthport, months of time and unthinkable light-years behind. The season was postaphelion, midsummer, Nu Pegasi burned warm and bright in blue sky. Mr. Mendoza hired a carriage and they drove out into green, rolling countryside behind four snuffling little Halcyon ponies.
There they visited a native pueblo, a great beehive structure of mud, conoid on conoid, and bought souvenirs—two of which turned out to have “Made in Japan” stamped inconspicuously on them.
Their driver, Herr Eisenberg, interpreted for them. The native who sold the souvenirs kept swiveling his eyes, one after another, at Mrs. Mendoza. He twittered some remarks to the driver, who guffawed. “What does he say?” she asked.
“He was complimenting you.” “So? But how?”
“Well… he says you are for a slow fire and no need for seasoning; you’d cook up nicely. And he’d do it, too,” the colonist added, “if you stayed here after dark.”
Mrs. Mendoza gave a little scream. “You didn’t tell us they were cannibals. Josie, take me back!”
Herr Eisenberg looked horrified. “Cannibals? Oh, no, lady! They don’t eat each other, they just eat us—when they can get us, that is. But there hasn’t been an incident in twenty years.”
“But that’s worse!”
“No, it isn’t, lady. Look at it from their viewpoint. They’re civilized. This old fellow would never break one of their laws. But to them we are just so much prime beef, unfortunately hard to catch.”
“Take us back at once! Why, there are hundreds of them, and only five of us.”
“Thousands, lady. But you are safe as long as Gneeri is shining.” He gestured at Nu Pegasi. “It’s bad juju to kill meat during daylight. The spirit stays around to haunt.”
Despite his reassurances the party started back. Max noticed that Eldreth had been unfrightened. He himself had wondered what had kept the natives from tying them up until dark.
They dined at the Josephine, Bonaparte’s best (and only) hotel. But there was a real three-piece
orchestra, a dance floor, and food that was at least a welcome change from the menus of the Bifrost Lounge. Many ship’s passengers and several officers were there; it made a jolly party. Ellie made Max dance between each course. He even got up his nerve to ask Mrs. Daigler for a dance, once she came over and suggested it.
During the intermission Eldreth steered him out on the adjacent balcony. There she looked up at him. “You leave that Daigler hussy alone, hear me?”
“Huh? I didn’t do anything.”
She suddenly smiled warmly. “Of course not, you big sweet ninny. But Ellie has to take care of you.” She turned and leaned on the rail. Halcyon’s early night had fallen, her three moons were chasing each other. The sky blazed with more stars than can be seen in Terra’s lonely neighborhood. Max pointed out the strange constellations and showed her the departure direction they would take tomorrow to reach transition for Nova Terra. He had learned four new skies so far, knew them as well as he knew the one that hung over the Ozarks—and he would learn many more. He was already studying, from the charts, other skies they would be in this trip.
“Oh, Max, isn’t it lovely!”
“Sure is. Say, there’s a meteor. They’re scarce here, mighty scarce.” “Make a wish! Make a wish quick!”
“Okay.” He wished that he would get off easy when it came to the showdown. Then he decided that wasn’t right; he ought to wish old Sam out of his jam—not that he believed in it, either way.
She turned and faced him. “What did you wish?”
“Huh?” He was suddenly self-conscious. “Oh, mustn’t tell, that spoils it.” “All right. But I’ll bet you get your wish,” she added softly.
He thought for a moment that he could have kissed her, right then, if he had played his cards right. But the moment passed and they went inside. The feeling stayed with him on the ride back, made him elated. It was a good old world, even if there were some tough spots. Here he was, practically a junior astrogator on his first trip—and it hadn’t been more than weeks since he was borrowing McAllister’s mules to work the crop and going barefooted a lot to save shoes.
And yet here he was in uniform, riding beside the best-dressed girl in four planets.
He fingered the insignia on his chest. Marrying Ellie wasn’t such an impossible idea now that he was an officer—if he ever decided to marry. Maybe her old man wouldn’t consider an officer—and an astrogator at that—completely ineligible. Ellie wasn’t bad; she had spunk and she played a fair game of three-dee—most girls wouldn’t even be able to learn the rules.
He was still in a warm glow when they reached the ship and were hoisted in. Kelly met him at the lock. “Mr. Jones—the Captain wants to see you.”
“Huh? Oh. G’night, Ellie—I’ll have to run.” He hurried after Kelly. “What’s up?” “Dr. Hendrix is dead.”
TRANSITION
Max questioned Kelly as they hurried up to the Captain’s cabin.
“I don’t know. I just don’t know, Max.” Kelly seemed close to tears. “I saw him before dinner—he came into the Hole to check what you and Kovak have been doing. He seemed all right. But the Purser found him dead in his bunk, the middle of the evening.” He added worriedly, “I don’t know what is going to happen now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well… if I was captain, I’d lay over and send for a relief. But I don’t know.”
For the first time Max realized that this change would make Mr. Simes the astrogator. “How long would it take to get a relief?”
“Figure it out. The Dragon is about three months behind us; she’d pick up our mail. A year about.” In the contradictions of interstellar travel the ships themselves were the fastest method of communication; a radio message (had such a silly thing been attempted) would have taken more than two centuries to reach Earth, a like time for a reply.
Max found the Captain’s cabin open and crowded with officers, all standing around, saying nothing, and looking solemn; he slipped inside without announcing himself and tried to be inconspicuous. Kelly did not go in. Captain Blaine sat at his desk with head bent. Several stragglers, members of the gay party at the Josephine, arrived after Max; First Officer Walther checked them off with his eyes, then said quietly to Blaine, “Ship’s officers all present, sir.”
Captain Blaine raised his head and Max was shocked to see how old he looked. “Gentlemen,” he said in a low voice, “you know the sad news. Dr. Hendrix was found dead in his room this evening. Heart attack. The Surgeon tells me that he passed on about two hours before he was found—and that his death was probably almost painless.”
His voice broke, then he continued. “Brother Hendrix will be placed in his last orbit two hours after we raise ship tomorrow. That is how he would have wished it, the Galaxy was his home. He gave unstintingly of himself that men should ride safely among the stars.”
He paused so long that Max thought that the old man had forgotten that others were present. But when he resumed his voice was almost brisk. “That is all, gentlemen. Astrogators will please remain.”
Max was not sure that he counted as an astrogator but the use of the plural decided him. First Officer Walther started to leave; Blaine called him back. When the four were alone, the Captain said, “Mr.
Simes, you will take over head-of-department duties at once. Mr., uh… “; his eyes rested on Max. “Jones, sir.”
“Mr. Jones will assume your routine duties, of course. This tragedy leaves you short-handed; for the rest of this trip I will stand a regular watch.”
Simes spoke up. “That isn’t necessary, Captain. We’ll make out.”
“Perhaps. But those are my wishes.” “Aye aye, sir.”
“Prepare to lift on schedule. Any questions?” “No, sir.”
“Goodnight, gentlemen. Dutch, stay a moment, please?”
Outside the door Simes started to turn away; Max stopped him. “Mr. Simes?” “Huh? Yes?”
“Any instructions for me, sir?”
Simes looked him over. “You stand your watch, Mister. I’ll handle everything else.”
The next morning Max found a crepe armband on his desk and a notice from the First Officer that mourning would continue for one week. The Asgard raised on schedule, with the Captain sitting quietly in his chair, with Simes at the control console. Max stood near the Captain, with nothing to do. Aside from the absence of Hendrix all was routine—except that Kelly was quite bad-tempered. Simes, Max admitted, handled the maneuver smartly—but it was precomputed, anyone could have done it; shucks, Ellie could have been sitting there. Or Chipsie.
Max had the first watch. Simes left him after enjoining him not to deviate from schedule without phoning him first. An hour later Kovak relieved Max temporarily and Max hurried to the passenger lock. There were five honorary pall bearers, the Captain, Mr. Walther, Simes, Max, and Kelly. Behind them, crowding the passageways, were officers and most of the crew. Max saw no passengers.
The inner door of the lock was opened; two steward’s mates carried the body in and placed it against the outer door. Max was relieved to see that it had been wrapped in a shroud covering it completely. They closed the inner door and withdrew.
The Captain stood facing the door, with Simes and the First Officer standing guard on one side of the door and, on the other side facing them, Max and Kelly. The Captain flung one word over his shoulder: “Pressure!”
Behind stood Bennett wearing a portable phone; he relayed the word to the power room. The pressure gauge over the lock door showed one atmosphere; now it started to crawl upward. The Captain took a little book from his pocket and began to read the service for the dead. Feeling that he could not stand to listen Max watched the pressure gauge. Steadily it climbed. Max reflected that the ship had already passed escape speed for the Nu Pegasi system before he had been relieved; the body would take an open orbit.
The gauge reached ten atmospheres; Captain Blaine closed his book. “Warn the passengers,” he said to Bennett.
Shortly the loudspeakers sounded: “All hands! All passengers! The ship will be in free fall for thirty seconds. Anchor yourselves and do not change position.” Max reached behind him, found one of the many hand holds always present around an airlock and pulled down so that his grip would keep his feet in contact with the deck. A warning siren howled—then suddenly he was weightless as the ship’s boost and the artificial anomalous gravity field were both cut out.
He heard the Captain say loudly and firmly, “‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’ Let the body be cast forth.”
The pressure gauge dropped suddenly to zero and Dr. Hendrix was launched into space, there to roam the stars for all eternity.
Max felt weight again as the power room brought them back to ship-normal. The pressure gauge showed gradually building pressure. People turned away and left, their voices murmuring low. Max went up and relieved the watch.
The following morning Simes moved into Dr. Hendrix’s cabin. There was trouble with First Officer Walther about it—Max heard only third-hand reports—but the Captain upheld Simes; he stayed in the Astrogator’s quarters. The Worry Hole settled into routine not much different from what had gone before, except that Simes’ personality spread through everything. There had never been a posted watch list before; Kelly had always assigned the crewmen and the Doctor had simply informed the top-watch standers orally of his wishes. Now a typed list appeared:
FIRST WATCH Randolph Simes, Astrogator SECOND WATCH Captain Blaine
(M. Jones, acting apprentice, under instruction) THIRD WATCH Kelly, Ch. Cmptrmn. (signed) Randolph Simes, Astrogator
Below was a four-watch list for crewmen, also signed by Simes.
Max looked at it and shrugged it off. It was obvious that Simes had it in for him, though he could not figure out why. It was equally obvious that Simes did not intend to let him do any astrogation and that Max’s chances of being accepted in time as a fullfledged brother had now, with the death of Dr. Hendrix, sunk to zero. Unless, of course, Captain Blaine overrode Simes and forced a favorable report, which was extremely unlikely. Max again began to think of going along with Sam at Nova Terra.
Well, in the meantime he’d stand his watches and try to stay out of trouble. That was that.
There was only one transition to be made between Halcyon and Nova Terra, a leap of ninety-seven light-years three weeks out from Halcyon at a boost of seventeen gravities—the boost always depended on the distance from the star to the gateway, since the purpose was to arrive there just under the speed of light. The Worry Hole stayed on a watch in three for the officers and one in four for crewmen for the first two weeks. Captain Blaine showed up each watch but seemed quite willing for Max to carry out the light duties of that portion of the leg. He gave little instruction—when he did, he was likely to wander off into anecdotes, amusing but not useful.
Max tried to continue his own drill, carrying out the routine middle o’ watch computation as if it were the frantic matter it would have been near transition. Captain Blaine watched him, then said mildly, “Don’t get yourself into a state, son. Always program on paper when possible—always. And take time to check.
Hurrying causes mistakes.” Max said nothing, thinking of Dr. Hendrix, but carried out the orders.
At the end of his first watch under the Captain Max signed the log as usual. When Simes came on watch four hours later, Max was dug out of bed and required to report to the control room. Simes pointed to the log. “What’s the idea, Mister?”
“Of what, sir?”
“Signing the log. You weren’t officer of the watch.”
“Well, sir, the Captain seemed to expect it. I’ve signed a lot of logs and he’s always approved them in the past.”
“Hmm—I’ll speak to the Captain. Go below.”
At the end of his next watch, having received no instructions, Max prepared the log and took it to the Captain. “Sir? Do you want to sign this? Or shall I?”
“Eh?” Blaine looked at it. “Oh, I suppose I had better. Always let a head of department do things his own way if possible. Remember that when you are a skipper, son.” He signed it.
That settled it until the Captain started a habit of not being there, first for short periods, then for longer. The time came when he was absent at the end of the watch; Max phoned Mr. Simes. “Sir, the Captain isn’t here. What do you want me to do?”
“So what? It’s his privilege to leave the control room.”
“But Kelly is ready to relieve and the log isn’t signed. Shall I sign it? Or shall I phone him?” “Phone him? Jumping jeepers, no! Are you crazy?”
“What are your orders, sir?”
Simes was silent, then answered, “Print his name, then sign under it ‘By direction’—and after this use your head.”
They changed to watch-and-watch for the last week. Max continued under the Captain; Kelly assisted Simes. Once the shift was made Blaine became meticulous about being present in the control room and, when Max started to make the first computation, gently pushed him aside. “I had better take over, lad. We’re getting closer now.”
So Max assisted him—and became horrifyingly aware that the Captain was not the man he must once have been. His knowledge of theory was sound and he knew all the short cuts—but his mind tended to wander. Twice in one computation Max had to remind him diplomatically of details. Yet the Old Man seemed unaware of it, was quite cheerful.
It went on that way. Max began to pray that the Captain would let the new Astrogator make the transition himself—much as he despised Simes. He wanted to discuss his misgivings with Kelly—there was no one else with whom it would have been possible—but Kelly was on the opposite watch with Simes. There was nothing to do but worry.
When the last day arrived he discovered that Captain Blaine neither intended to take the ship through himself nor to let Simes do it; he had a system of his own. When they were all in the Worry Hole the Captain said, “I want to show you all a wrinkle that takes the strain out of astrogating. With no reflections on our dear brother, Dr. Hendrix, while he was a great astrogator, none better—nevertheless he worked too hard. Now here is a method taught me by my own master. Kelly, if you will have the remote controls
led out, please.”
He had them seat themselves in a half circle, himself, Simes, and Max, around the saddle of the computer, with Kelly in the saddle. Each of them was armed with programming forms and Captain Blaine held the remote-control switches in his lap. “Now the idea is for us each to work a sight in succession, first me, then Mr. Simes, then Mr. Jones. That way we keep the data flowing without strain. All right, lads, start pitching. Transition stations everyone.”
They made a dry run, then the Captain stood up. “Call me, Mr. Simes, two hours before transition. I believe you and Mr. Jones will find that this method gives you enough rest in the meantime.”
“Yes, sir. But Captain—may I make a suggestion?” “Eh? Certainly, sir.”
“This is a fine system, but I suggest that Kelly be put in the astrogating group instead of Jones. Jones is not experienced. We can put Kovak in the saddle and Lundy on the book.”
Blaine shook his head. “No. Accuracy is everything, sir, so we must have our best operator at the computer. As for Mr. Jones, this is how he must get experience—if he gets rattled, you and I can always fill in for him.” He started to leave, then added, “But Kovak can alternate with Kelly until I return. Mustn’t have anyone getting tired, that way mistakes are made.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Simes said nothing more to Max. They started working sights, alternately, using written programming on printed forms. The sights were coming in on a twenty-minute schedule, giving each of them forty minutes for a problem if he cared to take it. Max began to think that the Captain’s method did have its points.
Certainly Dr. Hendrix had worked himself to death—ships did not wear out but men did.
He had plenty of time to work not only his own problems, but those of Simes. The data came out orally and there was nothing to keep Max from programming Simes’ sights in his head and checking on what went into the computer. So far as he could see Simes was doing all right—though of course there was no real strain involved, not yet.
They ate sandwiches and drank coffee where they sat, leaving their seats only for five minutes or so at a time. Captain Blaine showed up twenty minutes early. He smiled and said cheerily, “Everyone happy and relaxed? Now we really get down to it. I have just time for a cup of coffee.”
A few minutes later he sat down and took over the control switches from Simes. The sights were coming through on a ten-minute schedule now, still ample time. Max continued to work them all, his own on paper and the others in his head. He was always through in time to catch the data for the next sight, program it mentally and check translations as Lundy thumbed the book. It gave him a running picture of how closely they were in the groove, how much hunting they were having to do in approaching their invisible target. It seemed to him that Simes tended to over-correct and that the Captain was somewhat optimistically under-correcting, but neither was so far out as to endanger the ship.
Maybe he was wrong about the Captain—the Old Man seemed to steady down when it mattered. His own corrections, he was glad to see, the Captain applied without question.
After more than an hour with transition forty-five. minutes away Captain Blaine looked up and said, “All right, boys, we’re getting close. Slam them to us as fast as you can now.”
Smythe and Kovak, with Noguchi and Bennett running for them, slipped into high gear; data poured out
in a steady stream. Max continued to work every sight, programming his own in his head and calling off figures faster than he wrote them down. He noticed that Simes was sweating, sometimes erasing and starting over. But the figures Simes called out agreed with what Max thought they should be, from his own mental programming. Captain Blaine seemed relaxed, though he had not speeded up materially and sometimes was still using the computer when Max was ready to pour his sight into it.
At one point Simes spoke too rapidly, slurring his figures, Lundy promptly said, “Repeat, sir!”
“Confound it! Clean out your ears!” But Simes repeated. The Captain glanced up, then bent back to his own problem. As soon as the computer was free Captain Blaine called his own figures to Lundy. Max had already set up the Captain’s sight in his mind, was subconsciously listening while watching Simes.
An alarm bell rang in his mind. “Captain! I don’t check you!” Captain Blaine stopped. “Eh?”
“That program is wrong, sir.”
The Captain did not seem angry. He simply handed his programming board to Simes. “Check me, sir.” Simes glanced quickly at the figures. “I check you, sir!”
Blaine said, “Drop out, Jones. Mr. Simes and I will finish.” “But—”
“Drop out, Mister!”
Max got out of the circle, seething inside. Simes’ check of the Captain’s set up hadn’t meant anything, unless Simes had listened to and remembered (as Max had) the data as it came in. The Captain had transposed an eight and a three in the fifth and sixth decimal places—the set up would look okay unless one knew the correct figures. If Simes had even bothered to check it, he added bitterly.
But Max could not keep from noting and processing the data in his mind. Simes’ next sight should catch the Captain’s error; his correction should repair it. It would be a big correction, Max knew; traveling just under the speed of light the ship clipped a million miles in less than six seconds.
Max could see Simes hesitate as the lights from his next sight popped up on the computer and Lundy translated them back. Why, the man looked frightened! The correction called for would push the ship extremely close to critical speed—Simes paused, then ordered less than half the amount that Max believed was needed.
Blaine applied it and went on with his next problem. When the answer came out the error, multiplied by time and unthinkable velocity, was more glaring than ever. The Captain threw Simes a glance of astonishment, then promptly made a correction. Max could not tell what it was, since it was done without words by means of the switch in his lap.
Simes licked the dryness from his lips. “Captain?”
“Time for just one more sight,” Blaine answered. “I’ll take it myself, Mr. Simes.”
The data were passed to him, he started to lay his problem out on the form. Max saw him erase, then look up; Max followed his gaze. The pre-set on the chronometer above the computer showed the seconds trickling away. “Stand by!” Blaine announced.
Max looked up. The stars were doing the crawling together that marked the last moments before transition. Captain Blaine must have pressed the second switch, the one that would kick them over, while Max was watching, for the stars suddenly blinked out and were replaced instantaneously by another starry firmament, normal in appearance.
The Captain lounged back, looked up. “Well,” he said happily, “I see we made it again.” He got up and headed for the hatch, saying over his shoulder, “Call me when you have laid us in the groove, Mr. Simes.” He disappeared down the hatch.
Max looked up again, trying to recall from the charts he had studied just what piece of this new sky they were facing. Kelly was looking up, too. “Yes, we came through,” Max heard him mutter. “But where?”
Simes also had been looking at the sky. Now he swung around angrily. “What do you mean?” “What I said,” Kelly insisted. “That’s not any sky I ever saw before.”
“Nonsense, man! You just haven’t oriented yourself. Everybody knows that a piece of sky can look strange when you first glance at it. Get out the flat charts for this area; we’ll find our landmarks quickly enough.”
“They are out, sir. Noguchi.”
It took only minutes to convince everyone else in the control room that Kelly was right, only a little longer to convince even Simes. He finally looked up from the charts with a face greenish white. “Not a word to anybody,” he said. “That’s an order—and I’ll bust any man who slips. Kelly, take the watch.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“I’ll be in the Captain’s cabin.” He went below to tell Blaine that the Asgard had come out in unknown space—was lost.
ANYWHERE
Two hours later Max climbed wearily up into the Worry Hole. He had just had a bad half hour, telling the truth as he saw it. Captain Blaine had been disinclined to blame anyone but himself, but had seemed stunned and bewildered. Simes had been nasty. His unstated logic seemed to be that, since it could not possibly be his fault and since it was unthinkable to blame the Captain, it must be Max’s fault. Since Max had been relieved some minutes before transition, his theory seemed to be that Max had caused it by making a disturbance as they were approaching the critical instant—joggled their elbows, so to speak.
Mr. Walther had been present, a mute judge. They spoke of matters’ outside his profession; he had seemed to be studying their faces. Max had stuck doggedly to his story.
He found Kelly still on watch. Kovak and Smythe were taking spectrograms; Noguchi and Lundy were busy with papers. “Want to be relieved?” he said to Kelly.
Kelly looked troubled. “I’m sorry, but you can’t.” “Huh?”
“Mr. Simes phoned while you were on your way up. He says you are not to stand duty until further notice.”
“He did? Well, I’m not surprised.”
“He also said that you were to stay out of the control room.”
Max made a violent statement about Simes. He added, “Well, it was nice while it lasted. Be seeing you.”
He turned away but Kelly stopped him. “Don’t be in a hurry, Max. He won’t be up for a while. I want to know what happened. From the computer I can’t tell what goes on.”
Max told him, drawing on his memory for the figures. Kelly nodded at last. “That confirms what I’ve been able to dig out. The Captain flubbed with a transposition—easy to do. Then Simes didn’t have the guts to make a big correction when it came around to him. But one more thing you don’t know. Neither do they—yet.”
“Huh? What?”
“The power room recorder shows it. Guenther had the watch down there and gave it to me over the phone. No, I didn’t tell him anything was wrong. I just asked for the record; that’s not unusual. By the way, any excitement down below? Passengers blowing their tops?”
“Not when I came up.”
“Won’t be long. They can’t keep this quiet forever. Back to my story—things were already sour but the Captain had one last chance. He applied the correction and a whopping big one. But he applied it with the wrong sign, just backwards.”
Profanity was too weak. All Max could say was, “Oh, my!” “Yeah. Well, there’s the devil to pay and him out to lunch.” “Any idea where we are?”
Kelly pointed to Kovak and Smythe at the spectrostellograph. “They’re fishing, but no bites. Bright stars first, B-types and O’s. But there is nothing that matches the catalogues so far.”
Noguchi and Lundy were using a hand camera. Max asked, “What are they doing?”
“Photographing the records. All of ’em—programming sheets, the rough data from the chartsmen, the computer tape, everything.”
“What good will that do?”
“Maybe none. But sometimes records get lost. Sometimes they even get changed. But not this time. I’m going to have a set of my own.”
The unpleasant implications of Kelly’s comments were sinking into Max’s mind when Noguchi looked up. “That’s all, Boss.”
“Good.” Kelly turned to Max. “Do me a favor. Stick those films in your pocket and take them with you. I want them out of here. I’ll pick them up later.”
“Well… all right.” While Noguchi was unloading the camera Max added to Kelly, “How long do you
think it will take to figure out where we are, checking spectra?”
Kelly looked more troubled than ever. “Max, what makes you think there is anything to find?” “I don’t follow you.”
“Why should anything out there… ” He made a sweeping gesture. “… match up with any charts we’ve got here?”
“You mean,” Max said slowly, “that we might not be in our own galaxy at all? Maybe in another, like the Andromeda Nebula, say?”
“Maybe. But that’s not all. Look, Max, I’m no theoretical physicist, that’s sure, but so far as I know all that theory says is that when you pass the speed of light you have to go out of your own space, somewhere else. You’ve become irrelevant and it won’t hold you. But where you go, unless you are set just right for a Horst congruency, that’s another matter. The theory doesn’t say. Does it?”
Max’s head started to ache. “Gee, I don’t know.”
“Neither do I. But since we weren’t set to duck back into our own space at another point, we may be anywhere. And I mean anywhere. We may be in some other space-time totally unconnected with our own.” He glanced up at the strange stars.
Max went below feeling worse than ever. He passed Simes going up; the Astrogator scowled at him but did not say anything. When Max reached his stateroom he put the films in a drawer—then thought about it, removed the drawer and cached them in dead space behind the drawer.
Max stayed in his room and worried. He fretted over being kept out of the control room, wanting very badly himself to check the sky for known stars. B- and O-type stars—well, that was all right, but there were half a dozen other ways. Globular star clusters, now—they’d be easy to identify; snag four of them and you’d know where you were as clear as reading a street sign. Then it would be just a case of fining it down, because you’d know what to look for and where. After which you’d high-tail it for the nearest charted congruency, whether it took you a week or a year. The ship couldn’t really be lost.
But suppose they weren’t even in the right galaxy?
The thought dismayed him. If that were the case, they’d never get home before the end of time. It was chased out by another thought—suppose Kelly’s suspicion had been correct, that this was an entirely different universe, another system of space and time? What then? He had read enough philosophical fancies to know that there was no theoretical reason for such to be impossible; the Designer might have created an infinity of universes, perhaps all pretty much alike—or perhaps as different as cheese and Wednesday. Millions, billions of them, all side by side from a multidimensional point of view.
Another universe might have different laws, a different speed of light, different gravitational ballistics, a different time rate—why they might get back to find that ten million years had passed and Earth burnt to a cinder!
But the light over his desk burned steadily, his heart pumped as always, obeying familiar laws of hydraulics, his chair pressed up against him—if this was a different sort of space the differences weren’t obvious. And if it was a different universe, there was nothing to be done about it.
A knock came at the door, he let Kelly in and gave him the chair, himself sitting on the bed. “Any news?” “No. Golly I’m tired. Got those pix?”
Max took out the drawer, fished around behind it, gave them to Kelly. “Look, Chief, I got an idea.” “Spill it.”
“Let’s assume that we’re in the right galaxy, because—” “Because if we ain’t, there isn’t any point in trying!”
“Well, yes. All right, we’re in the Milky Way. So we look around, make quick sample star counts and estimate the distance and direction of the center. Then we try to identify spectra of stars in that direction, after deciding what ones we ought to look for and figuring apparent magnitudes for estimated distance. That would…”
“—save a lot of time,” Kelly finished wearily. “Don’t teach your grandpop how to suck eggs. What the deuce do you think I’ve been doing?”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s more than our revered boss thought of. While I been trying to work he’s been bellyachin’ around, finding fault, and trying to get me to say that he was dead right in everything—worrying about himself instead of worrying about his ship. Pfui! By the way, he grabbed the records just like I thought he would—’to show the Captain.’ He says.” Kelly stood up. “I’d better go.”
“Don’t rush. I’ll ring for coffee.”
“Running out of my ears now.” Kelly took the films from his pocket and looked at them dutifully. “I had Noggy make two shots of everything; this is a double set. That’s a good hidey-hole you’ve got. What say we stick one set in there and let it cool? Never can tell.”
“Kelly, you aren’t really expecting trouble over those records? Seems to me we’ve got trouble enough with the ship being lost.”
“Huh? Max, you’re going to make a good officer some day. But you’re innocent. Now I’m a suspenders and belt man. I like to take as few chances as possible. Doc Hendrix—rest his soul!—was the same way.” Kelly waited until Max had returned the spare set to the space back of the drawer, then started to leave. He paused.
“One thing I forgot to tell you, Max. We happened to come out pretty close to a star and a G-type at that.”
“Oh.” Max considered it. “Not one we know?”
“Of course not, or I would have said so. Haven’t sized it yet, but figuring normal range in the G’s we could reach it in not less than four weeks, not more than a year, at high boost. Thought you’d like to know.”
“Well, yes. Thanks. But I can’t see that it makes much difference.”
“No? Doesn’t it seem like a good idea to have a Sol-type star, with maybe Earth-type planets around it, not far off?”
“Well…”
“It does to me. The Adam-and-Eve business is rugged at best—and we might be in for a long stay.” With that he left.
No steward’s mate came to tell Max it was time for dinner; when he noticed that it was past time, he went to the lounge. Most of the passengers were already seated, although some were standing around talking. It was impossible to miss the feeling of unrest in the room. Max saw that the Captain was not at his table, nor was Mr. Walther at his. As he headed for his own table a Mr. Hornsby tried to grab his arm. Max shook him off. “Sorry, sir. I’m in a hurry.”
“Wait a minute! I want to ask you…”
“Sorry.” He hurried on and sat down. Chief Engineer Compagnon was not at the table, but the usual passengers were present. Max said, “Good evening,” and reached for his soup spoon, just to keep busy.
There was no soup to be toyed with, nor were there rolls and butter on the table, although it was ten minutes past the hour. Such things simply did not happen in Chief Steward Dumont’s jurisdiction. Come to think about it, Dumont was not in sight.
Mrs. Daigler put a hand on his arm. “Max? Tell me, dear—what is this silly rumor going around?” Max tried to maintain a poker face. “What rumor, ma’am?”
“You must have heard it! After all, you’re in astrogation. They say that the Captain turned the wrong corner or something and that we’re falling into a star.”
Max tried to give a convincing chuckle. “Who told you that? Whoever it was probably couldn’t tell a star from his elbow.”
“You wouldn’t fool your Aunt Maggie?”
“I can assure you positively that the Asgard is not falling into a star. Not even a small star.” He turned in his chair. “But it does look like something’s fallen into the galley. Dinner is awfully late.”
He remained turned, trying to avoid further questions. It did not work. Mr. Arthur called out sharply, “Mr. Jones!”
He turned back. “Yes?”
“Why stall us? I have been informed authoritatively that the ship is lost.” Max tried to look puzzled. “I don’t follow you. We seem to be in it.”
Mr. Arthur snorted. “You know what I mean! Something went wrong with that whatyoumucallit—transition. We’re lost.”
Max put on a school-teacherish manner, ticking off points on his fingers. “Mr. Arthur, I assure you that the ship is in absolutely no danger. As for being lost, I assure you just as firmly that if we are, the Captain neglected to tell me so. I was in the control room at transition and he seemed quite satisfied with it.
Would you mind telling me who has been spreading this story? It’s a serious thing, starting such rumors. People have been known to panic.”
“Well… it was one of the crew. I don’t know his name.”
Max nodded. “I thought so. Now in my experience in space… ” He went on, quoting from his uncle. “… I have learned that the only thing faster than light is the speed with which a story can spread through a ship. It doesn’t have to have any foundation, it spreads just the same.” He looked around again. “I wonder what has happened to dinner? I’d hate to go on watch hungry.”
Mrs. Weberbauer said nervously, “Then we are all right, Maxie?” “We’re all right, ma’am.”
Mrs. Daigler leaned toward him again and whispered, “Then why are you sweating, Max?”
He was saved by a steward’s mate rushing up to the table and starting to deal out plates of soup. Max stopped him when he came around and said quietly, “Jim, where’s Dumont?”
Out of the corner of his mouth the waiter said, “Cooking.” “Huh? Where’s the chef?”
The steward’s mate leaned down and whispered, “Frenchy is boiled as a judge. I guess he couldn’t take it. You know.”
Max let him go. Mr. Arthur said sharply, “What did he tell you?”
“I was trying to find out what went wrong in the galley,” Max answered. “Seems the cook incapacitated himself.” He spooned up a mouthful of the soup. “From the taste I’d say he had burned his thumb in this so-called chowder. Pretty bad, isn’t it?”
Max was saved from further evasions by the arrival of the First Officer. Mr. Walther went to the Captain’s table and banged on a glass with a spoon. “Your attention, please!”
He waited for quiet, then took a paper from his pocket. “I have an announcement to make on behalf of the Captain. Those of you who are familiar with the theory of astrogation are aware that space is changing constantly, due to the motions of the stars, and that consequently no two trips are exactly alike. Sometimes it is necessary, for this reason, to make certain changes in a ship’s routing. Such a circumstance has arisen in this present trip and the Asgard will be somewhat delayed in reaching her next destination. We regret this, but we can’t change the laws of nature. We hope that you will treat it as a minor inconvenience—or even as additional vacation, in the friendly and comfortable atmosphere of our ship. Please remember, too, that the insurance policy accompanying your ticket covers you completely against loss or damage you may be cost through the ship being behind schedule.”
He put away the paper; Max had the impression that he had not actually been reading from it. “That is all that the Captain had to say, but I want to add something myself. It has come to my attention that someone has been spreading silly rumors about this minor change in schedule. I am sorry if any of you have been alarmed thereby and I assure you that I will take very strict measures if the originator can be identified.” He risked a dignified smile. “But you know how difficult it is to trace down a bit of gossip. In any case, I want to assure you all that the Asgard is in no danger of any sort. The old girl was plying space long before any of us were born, she’ll still be going strong after we all die of old age—bless her sturdy bones!” He turned and left at once.
Max had listened in open-mouthed admiration. He came from country where the “whopper” was a respected literary art and it seemed to him that he had never heard a lie told with more grace, never seen one interwoven with truth with such skill, in his life. Piece by piece, it was impossible to say that anything
the First Officer had said was untrue; taken as a whole it was a flat statement that the Asgard was not lost—a lie if he ever heard one. He turned back toward his table mates. “Will someone pass the butter, please?”
Mr. Arthur caught his eye. “And you told us,” he said sharply, “that nothing was wrong!” Mr. Daigler growled, “Lay off him, Arthur. Max did pretty well, under the circumstances.” Mrs. Weberbauer looked bewildered. “But Mr. Walther said that everything was all right?”
Daigler looked at her with compassion. “We’re in trouble, Mama Weberbauer. That’s obvious. But all we can do is keep calm and trust the ship’s officers. Right, Max?”
“I guess that’s right, sir.”
“THIS ISN’T A PICNIC”
Max kept to his room that evening and the next day, wishing neither to be questioned by passengers nor to answer questions about why he had been relieved of duty. In consequence he missed the riot, having slept through it. He first heard of it when the steward’s mate who tended his room showed up with a black eye. “Who gave you the shiner, Garcia?”
“I’m not sure, sir. It happened in the ruckus last night.” “Ruckus? What ruckus?”
“You mean you don’t know?”
“This is the first I’ve heard of it. What happened?”
Garcia Lopez stared at the overhead. “Well—I wouldn’t want to say too much. You know how it is—nobody wants to testify against a mate. No?”
“Who asked you to peach on a mate? You don’t have to mention names—but what happened?”
“Well, sir. Some of those chicos, they ain’t got much sense.” Slowly Max learned that the unrest among the crew had been greater than that among the passengers, possibly because they understand more clearly the predicament. Some of them had consulted with Giordano’s poor-man’s vodka, then had decided to call on the Captain in a body and demand straight talk. The violence had taken place when the master-at-arms had attempted to turn them back at the companionway to “C” deck.
“Anybody hurt?”
“Not what you’d call hurt. Cut up a little. I picked this up… ” He touched his eye tenderly. “… from being too anxious to see what was going on. Slats Kovak busted an ankle.”
“Kovak! Why would he be in it?” It did not make sense that a member of the Worry gang should take part in anything so unreasonable.
“He was coming down, coming off watch, I guess. Maybe he was backing up the constable. Or maybe
he just got caught in the swinging doors. Your friend Sam Anderson was sure in the thick of it.” Sam! Max felt sick at heart—Sam in trouble again! “You’re sure?”
“I was there.”
“Uh, he wasn’t leading it, was he?”
“Oh, you got me wrong, M—Mr. Jones. He settled it. I never see a man who could use his hands like that. He’d grab two of ’em… clop! their heads would come together. Then he would grab two more.”
Max decided to come out of hiding and do two things; look up Kovak, find out how he was and what he might need or want, and second, look up Sam. But before he could leave Smythe arrived with a watch list to initial. He found that he was assigned watch-and-watch with Simes—and that he himself was due on watch immediately. He went up, wondering what had caused Simes to relent.
Kelly was in the control room; Max looked around, did not see Simes. “You got it, Chief?” “Until you relieve me. This is my last watch.”
“How’s that? Are you his pet peeve now?”
“You could say so. But not the way you think, Max. He drew up a watch list with him and me
heel-and-toe. I politely pointed out the guild rules, that I wasn’t being paid to take the responsibility of top watch.”
“Oh, brother! What did he say?”
“What could he say? He could order me in writing and I could accept in writing, with my objection to the orders entered in the log—and his neck is out a yard. Which left him his choice of putting you back on the list, asking the Captain to split it with him, or turning his cap around and relieving himself for the next few weeks. With Kovak laid up it didn’t leave him much choice. You heard about Kovak?”
“Yes. Say, what was that?” Max glanced over where Noguchi was loafing at the computer and lowered his voice. “Mutiny?”
Kelly’s eyes grew round. “Why, as I understand it, sir, Kovak slipped and fell down a companionway.” “Oh. Like that, huh?”
“That’s what it says in the log.”
“Hmm… well, I guess I had better relieve you. What’s the dope?”
They were in orbit under power for the nearby G-type star; the orders were entered in the Captain’s order book… in Simes’ handwriting but with Captain Blaine’s signature underneath. To Max it looked shaky, as if the Old Man had signed it under emotional stress. Kelly had already placed them in the groove. “Have we given up trying to find out where we are?” Max asked.
“Oh, no. Orders are to spend as much time as routine permits on it. But I’ll lay you seven to two you don’t find anything. Max, this is somewhere else entirely.”
“Don’t give up. How do you know?” “I feel it.”
Nevertheless Max spent the watch “fishing.” But with no luck. Spectrograms, properly taken and measured, are to stars what fingerprints are to men; they can be classified and comparisons made with those on file which are most nearly similar. While he found many which matched fairly closely with catalogued spectra, there was always the difference that makes one identical twin not quite like his brother.
Fifteen minutes before the end of the watch he stopped, and made sure that he was ready to be relieved. While waiting he thought about the shenanigan Kelly had pulled to get him back on duty. Good old Kelly! He knew Kelly well enough to know that he must not thank him; to do so would be to attribute to the Chief Computerman a motive which was “improper”—just wink the other eye and remember it.
Simes stomped in five minutes past the hour. He said nothing but looked over the log and records of observations Max had made. Max waited several minutes while growing more and more annoyed. At last he said, “Are you ready to relieve me, sir?”
“All in good time. I want to see first what you’ve loused up this time.” Max kept his mouth shut. Simes pointed at the log where Max had signed it followed by “C.O. o/W.” “That’s wrong, to start with. Add ‘under instruction.'”
Max breathed deeply. “Whose instruction, sir?” “Mine.”
Max hesitated only momentarily before answering, “No, sir. Not unless you are present during my watch to supervise me.”
“Are you defying me?”
“No, sir. But I’ll take written orders on that point… entered in the log.”
Simes closed the log book and looked him slowly up and down. “Mister, if we weren’t short-handed you wouldn’t be on watch. You aren’t ready for a top watch—and it’s my opinion that you won’t ever be.”
“If that’s the way you feel, sir, I’d just as lief go back to chartsman. Or steward’s mate.”
“That’s where you belong!” Simes’ voice was almost a scream. Noguchi had hung around after Lundy had relieved him; they both looked up, then turned their heads away.
Max made no effort to keep his answer private. “Very good, sir. Will you relieve me? I’ll go tell the First Officer that I am surrendering my temporary appointment and reverting to my permanent billet.”
Max expected a blast. But Simes made a visible effort to control himself and said almost quietly, “See here, Jones, you don’t have the right attitude.”
Max thought to himself, “What have I got to lose?” Aloud he said, “You’re the one who doesn’t have the right attitude, sir.”
“Eh? What’s that?”
“You’ve been riding me ever since I came to work in the Hole. You’ve never bothered to give me any instruction and you’ve found fault with everything I did. Since my probationary appointment it’s been four times worse. You came to my room and told me that you were opposed to my appointment, that you didn’t want me…”
“You can’t prove that!”
“I don’t have to. Now you tell me that I’m not fit to stand the watch you’ve just required me to stand. You’ve made it plain that you will never recommend me for permanent appointment, so obviously I’m wasting my time. I’ll go back to the Purser’s gang and do what I can there. Now, will you relieve me, sir?”
“You’re insubordinate.”
“No, sir, I am not. I have spoken respectfully, stating facts. I have requested that I be relieved—my watch was over a good half hour ago—in order that I may see the First Officer and revert to my permanent billet. As allowed by the rules of both guilds,” Max added.
“I won’t let you.”
“It’s my option, sir. You have no choice.”
Simes’ face showed that he indeed had no choice. He remained silent for some time, then said more quietly, “Forget it. You’re relieved. Be back up here at eight o’clock.”
“Not so fast, sir. You have stated publicly that I am not competent to take the watch. Therefore I can’t accept the responsibility.”
“Confound it! What are you trying to do? Blackmail me?
Max agreed in his mind that such was about it, but he answered, “I wouldn’t say so, sir. You can’t have it both ways.”
“Well—I suppose you are competent to stand this sort of watch. There isn’t anything to do, actually.” “Very good, sir. Will you kindly log the fact?”
“Huh?”
“In view of the circumstances, sir, I insist on the letter of the rules and ask you to log it.”
Simes swore under his breath, then grabbed the stylus and wrote quickly. He swung the log book around. There!”
Max read: “M. Jones is considered qualified to stand a top watch in space, not involving anomaly. (s) R. Simes, Astrogator.”
Max noted the reservation, the exception that would allow Simes to keep him from ever reaching permanent status. But Simes had stayed within the law. Besides, he admitted to himself, he didn’t want to leave the Worry gang. He comforted himself with the thought that since they were all lost together it might never matter what Simes recommended.
“Quite satisfactory, sir.”
Simes grabbed the book. “Now get out. See that you’re back here on time.”
“Aye aye, sir.” Max could not refrain from having the last word, standing up to Simes had gone to his head. “Which reminds me, sir: will you please relieve me on time after this?”
“What?”
“Under the law a man can’t be worked more than four hours out of eight, except for a logged emergency.”
“Go below!”
Max went below, feeling both exultant and sick. He had no taste for fights, never had; they left him with a twisted lump inside. He burst into his room, and almost fell over Sam.
“Sam!”
“The same. What’s eating you, boy? You look like the goblins had been chasing you.”
Max flopped on his bunk and sighed. “I feel that way, too.” He told Sam about the row with Simes.
Sam nodded approval. “That’s the way to deal with a jerk like that—insult him until he apologizes. Give him lumps enough times and he’ll eat out of your hand.”
Max shook his head dolefully. “Today was fun, but he’ll find some way to take it out on me. Oh, well!” “Not so, my lad. Keep your nose clean and wait for the breaks. If a man is stupid and
bad-tempered—which he is, I sized him up long ago—if you are smart and keep your temper, eventually
he leaves himself wide open. That’s a law of nature.”
“Maybe.” Max swung around and sat up. “Sam—you’re wearing your shield again.”
Sam stuck his thumb under the badge of office of Chief Master-at-Arms. “Didn’t you notice?” “I guess I was spinning too fast. Tell me about it—did the First decide to forgive and forget?” “Not precisely. You know about that little excitement last night?”
“Well, yes. But I understand that officially nothing happened?” “Correct. Mr. Walther knows when to pull his punches.” “What did happen? I heard you cracked some skulls together.”
“Nothing much. And not very hard. I’ve seen ships where it would have been regarded as healthy exercise to settle your dinner. Some of the lads got scared and that made them lap up happy water. Then a couple with big mouths and no forehead got the inspiration that it was their right to talk to the Captain about it. Being sheep, they had to go in a flock. If they had run into an officer, he could have sent them back to bed with no trouble. But my unfortunate predecessor happened to run into them and told them to disperse. Which they didn’t. He’s not the diplomatic type, I’m afraid. So he hollered, ‘Hey, Rube!’ in his quaint idiom and the fun began.”
“But where do you figure? You came to help him?”
“Hardly. I was standing at a safe distance, enjoying the festivities, when I noticed Mr. Walther’s bedroom slippers coming down the ladder. Whereupon I waded in and was prominent in the ending. The way to win a medal, Max, is to make sure the general is watching, then act.”
Max grinned. “Somehow I hadn’t figured you for the hero type.”
“Heaven forbid! But it worked out. Mr. Walther sent for me, ate me out, told me that I was a scoundrel and a thief and a nogoodnick—then offered me my shield back if I could keep order below decks. I
looked him in the eye, a sincere type look, and told him I would do my best. So here I am.” “I’m mighty pleased, Sam.”
“Thanks. Then he looked me in the eye and told me that he had reason to suspect—as if he didn’t know!—that there might be a still somewhere in the ship. He ordered me to find it, and then destroy any liquor I found.”
“So? How did Mr. Gee take that?”
“Why, Fats and I disassembled his still and took the pieces back to stores, then we locked up his stock in trade. I pleaded with him not to touch it until the ship was out of its mess. I explained that I would break both his arms if he did.”
Max chuckled. “Well, I’m glad you’re back in good graces. And it was nice of you to come tell me about it.” He yawned. “Sorry. I’m dead for sleep.”
“I’ll vamoose. But I didn’t come to tell you, I came to ask a question.” “Huh? What?”
“Have you seen the Skipper lately?”
Max thought back. “Not since transition. Why?”
“Nor has anyone else. I thought he might be spending his time in the Worry Hole.”
“No. Come to think, he hasn’t been at his table either—at least when I’ve been in the lounge.”
“He’s been eating in his cabin.” Sam stood up. “Very, very interesting. Mmm… I wouldn’t talk about it, Max.”
Simes was monosyllabic when Max relieved him. Thereafter they had no more words; Simes acted as if Max did not exist except for the brief formalities in relieving. The Captain did not show up in the control room. Several times Max was on the point of asking Kelly about it, but each time decided not to. But there were rumors around the ship—the Captain was sick, the Captain was in a coma, Walther and the Surgeon had relieved him of duty, the Captain was constantly at his desk, working out a new and remarkable way to get the ship back to where it belonged.
By now it was accepted that the ship was lost, but the time for hysteria had passed; passengers and crew were calm and there seemed to be general consent that the decision to put down around the solar-type star toward which they were headed was the only reasonable decision. They were close enough now that it had been determined that the star did have planets—no G-class star had ever been found to be without planets, but to pick them up on a stereoplate was consoling.
It came to a choice between planet #3 and planet #4. Bolometric readings showed the star to have a surface temperature slightly over 6000° Kelvin, consistent with its spectrum; it was not much larger than Father Sol; calculated surface temperatures for the third and fourth planets gave a probability that the third might be uncomfortably hot whereas number four might be frigid. Both had atmospheres.
A fast hyperboloid swing past both settled the matter. The bolometer showed number three to be too hot and even number four to be tropical. Number four had a moon which the third did not—another
advantage for four, for it permitted, by examining the satellite’s period, an easy calculation of its mass; from that and its visible diameter its surface gravity was a matter of substitution in classic Newtonian formula… ninety-three percent of Earth-normal, comfortable and rather low in view of its over
ten-thousand-mile diameter. Absorption spectra showed oxygen and several inert gases.
Simes assisted by Kelly placed the Asgard in a pole-to-pole orbit to permit easy examination—Max, as usual, was left to chew his nails.
The Captain did not come to the control room even to watch this maneuver.
They hung in parking orbit while their possible future home was examined from the control room and stared at endlessly from the lounge. It was in the lounge that Ellie tracked Max down. He had hardly seen her during the approach, being too busy and too tired with a continuous heel-and-toe watch and in the second place with much on his mind that he did not want to have wormed out of him. But, once the orbit was established and power was off, under standard doctrine Simes could permit the watch to be taken by crewmen—which he did and again told Max to stay out of the control room.
Max could not resist the fascination of staring at the strange planet; he crowded into the lounge along with the rest. He was standing back and gazing over heads when he felt his arm grabbed. “Where have you been?”
“Working.” He reached out and caressed Chipsie; the spider puppy leaped to his shoulders and started searching him.
“Hmmmph! You don’t work all the time. Do you know that I sent nine notes to your room this past week?”
Max knew. He had saved them but had not answered. “Sorry.”
“Sorry he says. Never mind—Max, tell me all about it.” She turned and looked out. “What have they named it? Is there anybody on it? Where are we going to land? When are we going to land? Max, aren’t you excited?”
“Whew! They haven’t named it yet—we just call it’the planet’ or ‘number four.’ Kelly wants to name it ‘Hendrix.’ Simes is hedging; I think he wants to name it after himself. The Captain hasn’t made any decision that I know of.”
“They ought to name it ‘Truth’ or ‘Hope’ or something like that. Where is the Captain, Max? I haven’t seen the old dear for days.”
“He’s working. This is a busy time for him, of course.” Max reflected that his evasion might be true. “About your other questions, we haven’t seen any signs of cities or towns or anything that looks like civilization.”
“What do you mean by ‘civilization’? Not a lot of dirty old cities surely?”
Max scratched his head and grinned. “You’ve got me. But I don’t see how you could have it, whatever it is, without cities.”
“Why not? Bees have cities, ants have cities, challawabs have cities. None of them is civilized. I can think of a lovely civilization that would just sit around in trees and sing and think beautiful thoughts.”
“Is that what you want?”
“No, it would bore me to death. But I can think about it, can’t I? You didn’t say when we were going to land?”
“I don’t know. When they decide it’s safe.”
“I wish they would hurry. Isn’t it thrilling? Just like Robinson Crusoe, or Swiss Family Robinson—I can’t keep those two straight. Or the first men on Venus.”
“They died.”
“So they did. But we won’t, not on—” She waved her hand at the lovely green and blue and cloudy-white globe. “—not on, uh, I’m going to call it ‘Charity’ because that’s what it looks like.”
Max said soberly, “Ellie, don’t you realize this is serious?” He kept his voice low in order not to alarm others. “This isn’t a picnic. If this place doesn’t work out, it might be pretty awful.”
“Why?”
“Look, don’t quote me and don’t talk about it. But I don’t think any of us will ever get home again.”
She sobered momentarily, then shrugged and smiled. “You can’t frighten me. Sure, I’d like to go home—but if I can’t, well, Charity is going to be good to us. I know it.”
Max shut up.
“—OVER A HUNDRED YEARS—”
The Asgard landed on Charity the following day. Eldreth affixed her choice by the statistical process of referring to the planet by that name, assuming that it was official, and repeating it frequently.
When word was passed that landing would commence at noon, ship’s time, Max went to the control room and simply assumed that it was his right to be present. Simes looked at him sourly but said nothing—for an evident reason: Captain Blaine was present.
Max was shocked at his appearance. The Captain seemed to have aged ten to fifteen years since the bad transition. In place of his habitual cheerful expression was one that Max had trouble tagging—until he recalled that he had seen it on horses, on horses too old to work but still working—head bent, eyes dull, mute and resigned against a fate both inescapable and unbearable. The old man’s skin hung loose, as if he had not eaten for days or weeks. He seemed hardly interested in what was going on around him.
He spoke only once during the maneuver. Just before the chronometer showed noon Simes straightened up from the console and looked at his skipper. Blaine lifted his head and said in a hoarse whisper, “Take her down, Mister.”
An Imperial military ship in landing on a strange spot would normally guide a radar-beacon robot down first, then home in on the beacon. But the Asgard was a merchant liner; she expected to land nowhere but at ports equipped with beams and beacons and other aids. Consequently the landing was made blind by precomputed radar-automatic and was planned for an open valley selected by photograph. The planet was densely wooded in most areas, choice was limited.
Simes presented a picture of the alert pilot, hands poised at the controls, eyes on the radar screen portraying the view below them, while racked in front of him were comparison photographs, radar and visual. The let down was without incident; starry black sky gave way to deep purple, then to blue. There was not even a jar as the ship touched, for its private gravity inside its Horstian field kept them from feeling impressed acceleration. Max knew they were down when he saw Simes cut in the thrust beams to cradle the ship upright.
Simes said to the microphone, “Power room, start auxiliaries and secure. All hands, dirtside routine, first section.” He turned to Blaine. “Grounded, Captain.”
Blaine’s lips shaped the words, “Very good, sir.” He got up and shuffled toward the hatch. When he had gone Simes ordered, “Lundy, take stand-by watch. The rest of you clear the control room.”
Max went down with Kelly. When they reached “A” deck Max said grudgingly, “It was a smart landing I’ll have to admit.”
“Thanks,” said Kelly.
Max glanced at him. “So you calculated it?” “I didn’t say that. I just said, ‘Thanks.'”
“So? Well, you’re welcome.” Max felt his weight pulse and suddenly he was a trifle lighter. “They cut the field. Now we’re really down.”
He was about to invite Kelly into his room for the inevitable coffee when the ship’s speakers sounded: “All hands! All passengers! Report to Bifrost Lounge for an important announcement. Those on watch are ordered to listen in by phone.”
“What’s up?” asked Max. “Why wonder? We’ll go see.”
The lounge was crowded with passengers and crew. First Officer Walther stood near the Captain’s table, counting the crowd with his eyes. Max saw him speak to Bennett, who nodded and hurried away. The large view port was across the lounge from Max; he stretched on his toes and tried to see out. All he could see was hilltops and blue sky.
There was a lessening of the murmur of voices; Max looked around to see Bennett preceding Captain Blaine through the crowd. The Captain went to his table and sat down; the First Officer glanced at him, then cleared his throat loudly. “Quiet, please.”
He went on, “I’ve called you together because Captain Blaine has something he wants to say to you.” He stopped and stepped back respectfully.
Captain Blaine slowly stood up, looked uncertainly around. Max saw him square his thin shoulders and lift his head. “Men,” he said, his voice suddenly firm and strong. “My guests and friends—” he went on, his voice sinking. There was a hush in the lounge, Max could hear the Captain’s labored breathing. He again asserted control of himself and continued, “I have brought you… I have brought you as far as I can… ” His voice trailed off. He looked at them for a long moment, his mouth trembling. It seemed impossible for him to continue. The crowd started to stir.
But he did continue and they immediately quieted. “I have something else to say,” he began, then paused. This pause was longer, when he broke it his voice was a whisper. “I’m sorry. God keep you all.” He
turned and started for the door.
Bennett slipped quickly in front of him. Max could hear him saying quietly and firmly: “Gangway, please. Way for the Captain.” No one said anything until he was gone, but a woman passenger at Max’s elbow was sobbing softly.
Mr. Walther’s sharp, clear voice rang out. “Don’t go away, anyone! I have additional announcements to make.” His manner ignored what they had all just seen. “The time has come to sum up our present situation. As you can see, this planet is much like our Mother Earth. Tests must be made to be sure that the atmosphere is breathable, and so forth; the Surgeon and the Chief Engineer are making them now. But it seems likely that this new planet will prove to be eminently suitable for human beings, probably even more friendly than Earth.
“So far, we have seen no indications of civilized life. On the whole, that seems a good thing. Now as to our resources—The Asgard carries a variety of domestic animals, they will be useful and should be conserved as breeding stock. We have an even wider variety of useful plants, both in the ship’s hydroponic gardens and carried as seeds. We have a limited but adequate supply of tools. Most important of all the ship’s library contains a fair cross-section of our culture. Equally important, we ourselves have our skills and traditions…”
“Mr. Walther!”
“Yes, Mr. Hornsby?”
“Are you trying to tell us that you are dumping us here?”
Walther looked at him coldly. “No. Nobody is being’dumped’ as you put it. You can stay in the ship and you will be treated as a guest as long as the Asgard—or you yourself—is alive. Or until the ship reaches the destination on your ticket. If it does. No, I have been trying to discuss reasonably an open secret; this ship is lost.”
A voiceless sigh went through the room. All of them knew it, but up till now it had not been admitted officially. The flat announcement from a responsible officer echoed like the sentence of a court.
“Let me state the legal position,” Mr. Walther went on. “While this ship was in space you passengers were subject to the authority of the Captain, as defined by law, and through him you were subject to me and the other ship’s officers. Now we have landed. You may go freely… or you may stay. Legally this is an unscheduled stopover; if the ship ever leaves here you may return to it and continue as passengers.
That is my responsibility to you and it will be carried out. But I tell you plainly that at present I have no hope to offer that we will ever leave here—which is why I spoke of colonizing. We are lost.”
In the rear of the room a woman began to scream hysterically, with incoherent sounds of, “… home! I want to go home! Take me…”
Walther’s voice cut through the hubbub. “Dumont! Flannigan! Remove her. Take her to the Surgeon.”
He continued as if nothing had happened. “The ship and the ship’s crew will give every assistance possible, consistent with my legal responsibility to keep the ship in commission, to aid any of you who wish to colonize. Personally I think…”
A surly voice cut in, “Why talk about ‘law’? There is no law here!”
Walther did not even raise his voice. “But there is. As long as this ship is in commission, there is law, no matter how many light-years she may be from her home port. Furthermore, while I have no authority
over any who choose to leave the ship, I strongly advise you to make it your first act dirtside to hold a town meeting, elect officers, and found a constitutional government. I doubt that you can survive otherwise.”
“Mr. Walther.” “Yes, Mr. Daigler?”
“This is obviously no time for recriminations…” “Obviously!”
Daigler grinned wryly. “So I won’t indulge, though I could think of some. But it happens that I know something professionally about the economics of colonizing.”
“Good! We’ll use your knowledge.”
“Will you let me finish? A prime principle in maintaining a colony out of touch with its supply base is to make it large enough. It’s a statistical matter, too small a colony can be overwhelmed by a minor setback. It’s like going into a dice game with too little money: three bad rolls and you’re sunk. Looking around me, it’s evident that we have much less than optimal minimum. In fact—”
“It’s what we have, Mr. Daigler.”
“I see that. I’m not a wishful thinker. What I want to know is, can we count on the crew as well?”
Mr. Walther shook his head. “This ship will not be decommissioned as long as there are men capable of manning it. There is always hope, no matter how small, that we may find a way home. It is even possible that an Imperial survey ship might discover us. I’m sorry—no.”
“That isn’t quite what I asked. I was two jumps ahead of you, I figured you wouldn’t let the crew colonize. But can we count on their help? We seem to have about six females, give or take one, who will probably help to carry on the race. That means that the next generation of our new nation is going to be much smaller. Such a colony would flicker and die, by statistical probability—unless every man jack of us works ten hours a day for the rest of his life, just to give our children a better chance of making it. That’s all right with me, if we all make an all-out try. But it will take all the manpower we have to make sure that some young people who aren’t even born yet get by thirty years from now. Will the crew help?”
Mr. Walther said quietly, “I think you can count on it.” “Good enough.”
A small, red-faced man whose name Max had never learned interrupted. “Good enough, my eye! I’m going to sue the company, I’m going to sue the ship’s officers individually. I’m going to shout it from the… ” Max saw Sam slipping through the crowd to the man’s side, the disturbance stopped abruptly.
“Take him to the Surgeon,” Mr. Walther said wearily. “He can sue us tomorrow. The meeting is adjourned.”
Max started for his room. Eldreth caught up with him. “Max! I want to talk with you.” “All right.” He started back toward the lounge.
“No, I want to talk privately. Let’s go to your room.”
“Huh? Mrs. Dumont would blow her top, then she’d tell Mr. Walther.”
“Bother with all that! Those silly rules are dead. Didn’t you listen at the meeting?” “You’re the one who didn’t listen.”
He took her firmly by the arm, turned her toward the public room. They ran into Mr. and Mrs. Daigler coming the other way. Daigler said, “Max? Are you busy?”
“Yes,” answered Eldreth. “No,” said Max.
“Hmm… you two had better take a vote. I’d like to ask Max some questions. I’ve no objection to your being with us, Eldreth, if you will forgive the intrusion.
She shrugged. “Oh, well, maybe you can handle him. I can’t.”
They went to the Daiglers’ stateroom, larger and more luxurious than Max’s and possessing two chairs. The two women perched on the bed, the men took the chairs. Daigler began, “Max, you impress me as a man who prefers to give a straight answer. There are things I want to know that I didn’t care to ask out there. Maybe you can tell me.”
“I will if I can.”
“Good. I’ve tried to ask Mr. Simes, all I get is a snottily polite brush off. I haven’t been able to get in to see the Captain—after today I see that there wouldn’t have been any point anyhow. Now, can you tell me, with the mathematics left out, what chance we have to get home? Is it one in three, or one in a thousand—or what?”
“Uh, I couldn’t answer it that way.” “Answer it your own way.”
“Well, put it this way. While we don’t know where we are, we know positively where we aren’t. We aren’t within, oh, say a hundred light-years of any explored part of the Galaxy.”
“How do you know? It seems to me that’s a pretty big space to be explored in the weeks since we got off the track.”
“It sure is. It’s a globe twelve hundred trillion miles thick. But we didn’t have to explore it, not exactly.” “Then how?”
“Well, sir, we examined the spectra of all first magnitude stars in sight—and a lot more. None of them is in our catalogues. Some are giants that would be first magnitude anywhere within a hundred light-years of them—they’d be certain to be in the catalogues if a survey ship had ever been that close to them. So we are absolutely certain that we are a long, long way from anywhere that men have ever been before.
Matter of fact, I spoke too conservatively. Make it a globe twice as thick, eight times as big, and you’d still be way over on the conservative side. We’re really lost.”
“Mmm… I’m glad I didn’t ask those questions in the lounge. Is there any possibility that we will ever know where we are?”
“Oh, sure! There are thousands of stars left to examine. Chief Kelly is probably shooting one this minute.”
“Well, then, what are the chances that we will eventually find ourselves?”
“Oh, I’d say they were excellent—in a year or two at the outside. If not from single stars, then from globular star clusters. You realize that the Galaxy is a hundred thousand light-years across, more or less, and we can see only stars that are fairly close. But the globular clusters make good landmarks, too.” Max added the mental reservation, if we aren’t in the wrong galaxy. There seemed no point in burdening them with that dismaying possibility.
Daigler relaxed and took out a cigar. “This is the last of my own brand, but I’ll risk smoking it now. Well, Maggie, I guess you won’t have to learn how to make soap out of wood ashes and hog drippings after all. Whether it’s one year or five, we can sweat it out and go home.”
“I’m glad.” She patted her ornate coiffure with soft, beautifully manicured hands. “I’m hardly the type for it.”
“But you don’t understand!” “Eh? What’s that, Max?”
“I didn’t say we could get back. I just said I thought it was fairly certain we would find out where we are.”
“What’s the difference? We find out, then we go home.”
“No, because we can’t be less than a hundred light-years from explored space.”
“I don’t see the hitch. This ship can do a hundred light-years in a split second. What was the longest leap we made this cruise? Nearly five hundred light-years, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, but—” Max turned to Eldreth. “You understand? Don’t you?” “Well, maybe. That folded-scarf thing you showed me?”
“Yes, yes. Mr. Daigler, sure the Asgard can transit five hundred light-years in no time—or any other distance. But only at calculated and surveyed congruencies. We don’t know of any within a hundred light-years, at least… and we won’t know of any even if we find out where we are because we know where we aren’t. Follow me? That means that the ship would have to travel at top speed for something over a hundred years and maybe much longer, just for the first leg of the trip.”
Mr. Daigler stared thoughtfully at his cigar ash, then took out a pen knife and cut off the burning end. “I’ll save the rest. Well, Maggie, better study up on that homemake soap deal. Thanks, Max. My father was a farmer, I can learn.”
Max said impulsively, “I’ll help you, sir.”
“Oh yes, you did tell us that you used to be a farmer, didn’t you? You should make out all right.” His eyes swung to Eldreth. “You know what I would do, if I were you kids? I’d get the Captain to marry you right away. Then you’d be all set to tackle colonial life right.”
Max blushed to his collar and did not look at Ellie. “I’m afraid I can’t. I’m a crew member, I’m not eligible to colonize.”
Mr. Daigler looked at him curiously. “Such devotion to duty. Well, no doubt Ellie can take her pick among the single men passengers.”
“Charityville” was a going concern within a week. It had a mayor, Mr. Daigler, a main street, Hendrix Avenue, even its first wedding, performed by the mayor in the presence of the villagers—Mr. Arthur and little Becky Weberbauer. The first cottage, now building, was reserved for the newlyweds. It was a log cabin and a very sloppy job, for, while there were those among them who had seen pictures or had even seen log cabins, there was no one who had ever built one before.
There was an air of hope, of common courage, even of gaiety in the new community. The place was fragrant with new starts, forward-looking thoughts. They still slept in the ship and breakfasted there, then carried their lunches and labored mightily, men and women alike, through the short day—Charity spun on her axis in twenty-one-plus hours. They returned at nightfall, dined in the ship, and some found energy to dance a bit before going to bed.
Charity seemed to be all that her name implied. The days were balmy, the nights were mild—and beautiful beyond anything yet found in the Galaxy. Its star (they simply called it “the Sun”) was accompanied by more comets than had yet been seen around any star. A giant with a wide tail stretched from zenith to western horizon, diving at their Sun. Another, not yet so grand but awesome enough to have caused watchers for the end of the world on Earthly hilltops, approached from the north, and two more decorated the southern sky with lace of icy fire.
Concomitant with comets was, necessarily, an equal abundance of meteors. Every night was a shower of falling stars, every day ended like Solar Union Day with a display of fireworks.
They had seen no dangerous animals. Some of the settlers reported seeing centaurlike creatures about the size of Shetland ponies, but they seemed timid and had scurried away when discovered. The prevalent life form appeared to be marsupial mammals in various sizes and shapes. There were no birds, but there was another sort of flying life not found elsewhere—jellyfishlike creatures four or five feet high with dangling tendrils, animated balloons. They appeared to have muscular control over their swollen bladders for they could rise and fall, and could even, by some not evident means, go upwind against a gentle breeze—in higher winds they anchored to treetops, or floated free and let the wind carry them.
They seemed curious about Charityville and would hang over a work site, turning slowly around as if to see everything. But they never got within reach. Some of the settlers wanted to shoot one down and examine it; Mayor Daigler forbade it.
There was another animal too—or might be. They were called “peekers” because all that anyone had seen was something that ducked quickly behind a rock or tree when anyone tried to look. Between the possibly mythical peeker and the ubiquitous balloons the colonists felt that their new neighbors took a deep but not unfriendly interest in what they were doing.
Maggie Daigler—she was “Maggie” to everyone now—had put away her jewels, drawn dungarees from ship’s stores, and chopped off her hair. Her nails were short and usually black with grime. But she looked years younger and quite happy.
In fact, everyone seemed happy but Max.
Ellie was avoiding him. He cursed himself and his big mouth thrice daily and four times at night. Sure, Daigler had spoken out of turn—but was that any reason for him to open his mouth and put his foot in it? Of course, he had never figured on marrying Ellie—but shucks, maybe they were stuck here forever. “Probably,” not “maybe,” he corrected. The ban on joining the colony would be let up in time—in which case, what was the sense in getting in bad with the only eligible girl around?
An astrogator ought to be a bachelor but a farmer needed a wife. Mighty nice to have some one cooking the turnip greens and jointing a chicken while a man was out in the fields. He ought to know—Maw had let it slide often enough. Ellie wouldn’t be like Maw. She was strong and practical and with just a little teaching would do all right.
Besides she was about the prettiest thing he ever saw, if you looked at her right.
When Mr. and Mrs. Dumont, by special dispensation, joined the colony it caused him to act. Since the steward and stewardess would have no duties in a ship without passengers no one could reasonably object—but it gave Max an approach. He went to see the First Officer.
“Probationary Apprentice Jones, sir.”
Walther glanced up. “I think I’d say ‘Assistant Astrogator Jones’ if I were you. Closer to the facts. Come in.”
“Uh, that’s what I wanted to speak with you about, sir.” “So? How?”
“I want to revert to my billet.”
“Eh? Why would you rather be a chartsman than an astrogator? And what difference does it make—now?”
“No, sir. I’m electing to resume my permanent appointment, steward’s mate third.” Walther looked amazed. “There must be more to this. Explain yourself.”
With much stammering Max explained his trouble with Simes. He tried to be fair and finished with the dismal feeling that he had sounded childish. Walther said, “You’re sure about this? Mr. Simes has said nothing to me about you.”
“He wouldn’t, sir. But it’s true. You can ask Kelly.”
Walther thought for a while. “Mr. Jones, I wouldn’t attach too much importance to this. At your age these conflicts of personality often seem more serious than they are. My advice is to forget it and do your work. I’ll speak to Mr. Simes about his keeping you out of the control room. That isn’t proper and I am surprised to hear it.”
“No, sir.”
“‘No, sir’ what?”
“I want to return to steward’s mate.” “Eh? I don’t understand you.”
“Because, sir, I want to join the colony. Like Chief Steward Dumont.”
“Oh… A light begins to dawn.” Walther slapped the desk emphatically. “Absolutely no! Under no circumstances.”
“Sir?”
“Please understand me. This is not discrimination. If you were a steward’s mate and nothing else, I would consider your request—under the special circumstances which I believe pertain. But you are an astrogator. You know our situation. Dr. Hendrix is dead. Captain Blaine—well, you have seen him. He may recover, I cannot plan on it. Mr. Jones, as long as there is any faint hope that this ship will ever lift again, as long as we have crew to work her, no astrogator, no chartsman, no computerman will be relieved from duty for any reason whatsoever. You see that, don’t you?”
“I guess so, sir. Uh, aye aye, sir.”
“Good. By the way, keep this to yourself, but as soon as the colony can get along without us temporarily, I want the ship placed in a parking orbit so that you specialists can maintain a search. You can’t work very well through this atmosphere, can you?”
“No, sir. Our instruments were designed for open space.”
“So we must see that you get it.” The First Officer sat silent, then added, “Mr. Jones—Max, isn’t it? May I speak to you man to man?”
“Uh? Certainly, sir.”
“Mmm… Max, this is none of my business, but treat it as fatherly advice. If you have an opportunity to marry—and want to—you don’t have to join the colony to do it. If we stay, it won’t matter in the long run whether you are crew or a charter member of the village. If we leave, your wife goes with you.”
Max’s ears burned. He could think of nothing to say.
“Hypothetical question, of course. But that’s the proper solution.” Walther stood up. “Why don’t you take the day off? Go take a walk or something. Fresh air will do you good. I’ll speak to Mr. Simes.”
Instead, Max went looking for Sam, did not find him in the ship, discovered that he had gone dirtside. He followed him down and walked the half mile to Charityville.
Before he reached the building that was being worked on he saw a figure separate itself from the gang. He soon saw that it was Eldreth. She stopped in front of him, a sturdy little figure in dirty dungarees. She planted her feet and set fists on her hips.
“Uh, howdy, Ellie.”
“Up to your old tricks! Avoiding me. Explain yourself.”
The injustice of it left him stuttering. “But… Now see here, Ellie, it’s not that way at all. You’ve been…”
“A likely story. You sound like Chipsie caught with her hand in a candy dish. I just wanted to tell you, you reluctant Don Juan, that you have nothing to worry about. I’m not marrying anyone this season. So you can resume the uneven tenor of your ways.”
“But, Ellie… ” he started desperately.
“Want me to put it in writing? Put up a bond?” She looked fiercely at him, then began to laugh, wrinkling her nose. “Oh, Max, you large lout, you arouse the eternal maternal in me. When you are upset your face gets as long as a mule’s. Look, forget it.”
“But, Ellie… Well, all right.” “Pals?”
“Pals.”
She sighed. “I feel better. I don’t know why, but I don’t like to be on the outs with you. Where were you going?”
“Uh, nowhere. Taking a walk.”
“Fine. I’ll go too. Half a sec while I gather in Chipsie.” She turned and called, “Mister Chips! Chipsie!” “I don’t see her.”
“I’ll get her.” She ran off, to return quickly with the spider puppy on her shoulder and a package in her hand. “I picked up my lunch. We can split it.”
“Oh, we won’t be gone that long. Hi, Chipsie baby.” “Hi, Max. Candy?”
He dug into a pocket, found a sugar cube that he had saved several days ago for the purpose; the spider puppy accepted it gravely and said, “Thank you.”
“Yes, we will,” Ellie disagreed, “because some of the men saw a herd of those centaur ponies the other side of that ridge. It’s quite a hike.”
“I don’t think we ought to go that far,” he said doubtfully. “Won’t they miss you?”
“I’ve been doing my share. See my callouses?” She stuck out a grimy paw. “I told Mr. Hornsby that I was suddenly come down with never-get-overs and he would have to find somebody else to hold while he hammered.”
He was pleased to give in. They went up rising ground and into an arroyo and soon were in a grove of primitive conifers. Mr. Chips jumped down from Ellie’s shoulders and scurried up a tree. Max stopped. “Hadn’t we better catch her?”
“You worry too much. Chipsie wouldn’t run away. She’d be scared to death. Chipsie! Here, honey!”
The spider puppy hustled through branches, got directly above them, dropped a cone on Max. Then she laughed, a high giggle. “See? She just wants to play.”
The ridge was high and Max found that his hillbilly’s wind had been lost somewhere among the stars. The arroyo meandered slowly upwards. He was still woodsman enough to keep a sharp eye out for landmarks and directions. At weary last they topped the crest. Ellie paused. “I guess they’re gone,” she said disappointedly, staring out over flatter country below them. “No! Look over there. See them! About two dozen little black dots.”
“Uh huh. Yeah.”
“Let’s go closer. I want a good look.”
“I wonder if that’s smart? We’re a far piece from the ship and I’m not armed.” “Oh, they’re harmless.”
“I was thinking of what else might be in these woods.”
“But we’re already in the woods, and all we’ve seen are the hobgoblins.” She referred to the balloonlike creatures, two of which had trailed them up the arroyo. The humans had grown so used to their presence that they no longer paid them any attention.
“Ellie, it’s time we went back.” “No.”
“Yes. I’m responsible for you. You’ve seen your centaurs.”
“Max Jones, I’m a free citizen. You may be starting back; I’m going to have a close look at those underslung cow ponies.” She started down.
“Well—Wait a moment. I want to get my bearings.” He took a full look around, fixed the scene forever in his mind, and followed her. He was not anxious to thwart her anyhow; he had been mulling over the notion that this was a good time to explain why he had said what he had said to Mr. Daigler—and perhaps lead around to the general subject of the future. He wouldn’t go so far as to talk about marriage—though he might bring it up in the abstract if he could figure out an approach.
How did you approach such a subject? You didn’t just say, “There go the hobgoblins, let’s you and me get married!”
Ellie paused. “There go the hobgloblins. Looks as if they were heading right for the herd.” Max frowned. “Could be. Maybe they talk to them?”
She laughed. “Those things?” She looked him over carefully. “Maxie, I’ve just figured out why I bother with you.”
Huh? Maybe she was going to lead up to it for him. “Why?”
“Because you remind me of Putzie. You get the same puzzled look he does.” “‘Putzie?’ Who is Putzie?”
“Putzie is the man my father shipped me off to Earth to get me away from—and the reason I crushed out of three schools to get back to Hespera. Only Daddy will probably have shipped him off, too. Daddy is tricky. Come here, Chipsie. Don’t go so far.”
She continued, “You’ll love Putzie. He’s nice. Stop it, Chipsie.”
Max despised the man already. “I don’t like to fret you,” he said, “but it’s a long way to Hespera.”
“I know. Let’s not borrow trouble.” She looked him over again. “I might keep you in reserve, if you weren’t so jumpy.”
Before he could think of the right answer she had started down.
The centaurs—it seemed the best name, though the underparts were not much like horses and the parts that stuck up were only vaguely humanoid—clustered near the foot of the hill, not far out from the trees. They weren’t grazing, it was hard to tell what they were doing. The two hobgoblins were over the group, hovering as if in interest just as they did with humans. Ellie insisted on going to the edge of the clearing to see them better.
They reminded Max of clowns made up to look like horses. They had silly, simple expressions and apparently no room for a brain case. They appeared to be marsupials, with pouches almost like bibs. Either they were all females or with this species the male had a pouch too. Several little centaurs were cavorting around, in and out the legs of their elders.
One of the babies spied them, came trotting toward them, sniffling and bleating. Behind it the largest adult pulled out of the herd to watch the young one. The colt scampered up and stopped about twenty feet away.
“Oh, the darling!” Ellie said and ran out a few feet, dropped to one knee. “Come here, pet. Come to mama.”
Max started for her. “Ellie! Come back here!”
The large centaur reached into its pouch, hauled out something, swung it around its head like a gaucho’s throwing rope. “Ellie!”
He reached her just as it let go. The thing struck them, wound around and held them. Ellie screamed and Max struggled to tear it loose—but they were held like Laocoön.
Another line came flying through the air, clung to them. And another.
Mr. Chips had followed Ellie. Now she skittered away, crying. She stopped at the edge of the clearing and shrilled, “Max! Ellie! Come back. Please back!”
CIVILIZATION
Ellie did not faint nor grow hysterical. After that involuntary scream, her next remark was simply, “Max, I’m sorry. My fault.”
The words were almost in his ear, so tightly were they tied together by the clinging ropes. He answered, “I’ll get us loose!” and continued to strain at their bonds.
“Don’t struggle,” she said quietly, “It just makes them tighter. We’ll have to talk our way out of this.”
What she said was true; the harder he strained the tighter the pythonlike bonds held them. “Don’t,” Ellie pleaded. “You’re making it worse. It’s hurting me.” Max desisted.
The largest centaur ambled up and looked them over. Its broad simple face was still more ludicrous close up and its large brown eyes held a look of gentle astonishment. The colt approached from the other side and sniffed curiously, bleated in a high voice. The adult bugled like an elk; the colt shied sideways, then rejoined the herd on a dead run.
“Take it easy,” Ellie whispered. “I think they were scared that we would hurt the baby. Maybe they’ll just look us over and let us go.”
“Maybe. But I wish I could get at my knife.” “I’m glad you can’t. This calls for diplomacy.”
The rest of the herd came up, milled around and looked them over, while exchanging calls that combined bugling, whinnying, and something between a cough and a snort. Max listened. “That’s language,” he decided.
“Of course. And how I wish I had studied it at Miss Mimsey’s.”
The largest centaur leaned over them, smoothed at their bonds; they became looser but still held them. Max said sharply, “I think they are going to untie us. Get ready to run.”
“Yes, boss.”
Another centaur reached into its built-in pouch, took out another of the ropelike things. It dropped to its fore knees, flipped the end so that it curled around Max’s left ankle. The end seemed to weld into a loop, hobbling Max as effectively as a bowline knot; Ellie was treated the same way. The biggest centaur then patted their bonds, which fell off and writhed gently on the ground. It picked them up and stuffed them into its pouch.
The centaur which had hobbled them wrapped the ends of their tethers around its upright trunk, they merged into a belt. After an exchange of sour bugle calls with the leader, it patted the leashes… which then stretched like taffy, becoming quite twenty feet long and much more slender. Max pressed his knife on Ellie and said, “Try to cut yourself loose. If you can, then run for it. I’ll keep them busy.”
“No, Max.”
“Yes! Dawggone it, quit being a brat! You’ve made enough trouble.”
“Yes, Max.” She took the knife and tried to saw through the strange rope near her ankle. The centaurs made no attempt to stop her, but watched with the same air of gentle astonishment. It was as if they had never seen a knife, had no notion of what one was. Presently she gave up. “No good, Max. It’s like trying to slice duraplastic.”
“Why, I keep that knife like a razor. Let me try.”
He had no better luck. He was forced to stop by the herd moving out—walk or be dragged. He managed to close the knife while hopping on one foot to save his balance. The group proceeded at a slow walk for a few steps, then the leader bugled and the centaurs broke into a trot, exactly like ancient cavalry.
Ellie stumbled at once and was dragged. Max sat down, managed to grab his hobble and hang on while shouting, “Hey! Stop!”
Their captor stopped and looked around almost apologetically. Max said, “Look, stupid. We can’t keep up. We’re not horses,” while helping Ellie to her feet. “Are you hurt, kid?”
“I guess not.” She blinked back tears. “If I could lay hands on that hay-burning oaf, he’d be hurt—plenty!”
“You skinned your hand.”
“It won’t kill me. Just tell him to slow down, will you?”
Seeing them on their feet the monster immediately started to trot again. Down they went again, with Max trying to drag them to a halt. This time the leader trotted back from the main herd and consulted their custodian. Max took part, making up in vehemence what he lacked in semantic efficiency.
Perhaps he was effective; their keeper slowed to a fast walk, letting the others go ahead. Another centaur dropped back and became a rear guard. One of the animated balloons, which had continued to hover over the herd, now drifted back and remained over Max and Ellie.
The pace was just bearable, between a fast walk and a dogtrot. The route led across the open, flat floor of the valley and through knee-high grass. The grass saved them somewhat, as the centaur leading them seemed to feel that a fall or two every few hundred yards represented optimum efficiency. He never seemed impatient and would stop and let them get up, but always started off again at a clip brisk for humans. Max and Ellie ceased trying to talk, their throats being burned dry by their panting efforts to keep up. A tiny stream meandered through the bottom of the valley; the centaur jumped easily across it. It was necessary for the humans to wade. Ellie paused in midstream, leaned down and started to drink. Max objected, “Ellie! Don’t drink that—you don’t know that it’s safe.”
“I hope it poisons me so I can lie down and die. Max, I can’t go much farther.”
“Chin up, kid. We’ll get out of this. I’ve been keeping track of where we’ve gone.” He hesitated, then drank also, being terribly thirsty. The centaur let them, then tugged them on.
It was as far again to the rising ground and forest on the other side. They had thought that they were as tired as they could be before they started up hill; they were mistaken. The centaur was agile as a goat and seemed surprised that they found it difficult. Finally Ellie collapsed and would not get up; the centaur came back and stirred her roughly with a three-toed hoof.
Max struck him with both fists. The centaur made no move to retaliate but looked at him with that same stupid astonishment. Their rear guard came up and conversed with it, after which they waited for perhaps ten minutes. Max sat down beside Ellie and said anxiously, “Feeling any better?”
“Don’t talk.”
Presently the guard edged between them and drove Max back by stepping on him, whereupon the other centaur tugged on Ellie’s leash. It contracted and she was forced to scramble to her feet. The centaurs let them rest twice after that. After an endless time, when the local sun was dropping low in the west, they came out on flat table land, still heavily wooded. They continued through trees for a distance which Max’s count of paces told him was under a mile but seemed like ten, then stopped.
They were in a semi-clearing, a space carpeted with fallen needles. Their guard came up to the other centaur and took from him the end of Max’s leash, flipped it around the base of a tree, to which it clung. The other centaur did the same with Ellie’s leash to another tree about forty feet away. Having done so, they roughly urged the two together, while stopping to stroke their bonds until they were stretched out very thin. It allowed Max and Ellie enough slack that they might have passed each other.
This did not seem to please the centaurs. One of them shifted Max’s leash farther back into the surrounding bushes, dragging him with it. This time at the extreme limit allowed by their bonds they were
about six feet apart. “What are they doing?” asked Ellie. “Looks like they don’t want us to combine forces.”
Finished, the centaurs trotted away. Ellie looked after them, began to sob, then cried openly, tears running down her dirty face and leaving tracks. “Stow it,” Max said harshly. “Sniffling will get us nowhere.”
“I can’t help it,” she bawled. “I’ve been brave all day—at least I’ve tried to be. I… ” She collapsed face down and let herself go.
By getting down prone and stretching Max could just reach her head. He patted her tangled hair. “Take it easy, kid,” he said softly. “Cry it out, if you’ll feel better.”
“Oh, Maxie! Tied up… like a dog.”
“We’ll see about that.” He sat up and examined his tether.
Whatever the ropelike leash was, it was not rope. It had a smooth shiny surface which reminded him more of a snake, though the part that wound around his ankle showed no features; it simply flowed around his ankle and merged back into itself.
He lifted the bight and detected a faint throbbing. He stroked it as he had seen the centaurs do and it responded with flowing pulsations, but it neither shrank nor grew longer, nor did it loosen its grip. “Ellie,” he announced, “This thing is alive.”
She lifted a woebegone face. “What thing?” “This rope.”
“Oh, that! Of course.”
“At least,” he went on, “if it isn’t, it’s not really dead.” He tried his knife again, there was no effect. “I’ll bet if I had a match I could make it cry ‘Uncle.’ Got an Everlite, Ellie?”
“I don’t smoke.”
“Neither do I. Well, maybe I can make a fire some other way. Rubbing two sticks together, or something.”
“Do you know how?”
“No.” He continued stroking and patting the living rope, but, though he always got a response in pulsations, he did not seem to have the right touch; the bond stayed as before. He was continuing this fruitless attempt when he heard his name called. “Max! Ellie!”
Ellie sat up with a jerk. “Chipsie! Oh, Max, she followed us. Come here, darling!”
The spider puppy was high above them in a tree. She looked carefully around, then scurried down, making the last ten feet a flying leap into Ellie’s arms. They cuddled and made soft noises, then Ellie straightened up, her eyes shining. “Max, I feel so much better.”
“So do I.” He added, “Though I don’t know why.”
The spider puppy announced gravely, “Chipsie follow.”
Max reached across and petted her. “Yes, Chipsie did. Good girl!”
Ellie hugged the spider puppy. “I don’t feel deserted now, Max. Maybe everything will come out all right.”
“Look, Ellie, we’re not in too bad a spot. Maybe I’ll find the combination to tickle these ropes or snakes or whatever so they’ll give up. If I do, we’ll sneak back tonight.”
“How would we find our way?”
“Don’t worry. I watched every foot of the way, every change of direction, every landmark.” “Even in the dark?”
“Easier in the dark. I know these stars—I sure ought to. But suppose we don’t get loose; we still aren’t licked.”
“Huh? I don’t relish spending my life tied to a tree.”
“You won’t. Look—I think these things are just curious about us. They won’t eat us, that’s sure—they probably live on grass. Maybe they’ll get bored and turn us loose. But if they don’t, it’ll be rough on them.”
“Huh? Why?”
“Because of Mr. Walther and George Daigler—and Sam, Sam Anderson; that’s why. They’re probably beating the bushes for us right now. We are less than ten miles from the ship—five by a straight line.
They’ll find us. Then if these silly-looking centaurs want to get tough, they’ll learn about modern weapons. They and their fool throwing ropes!”
“It might take a long time to find us. Nobody knows where we went.”
“Yes,” he admitted. “If I had a pocket radio. Or some way to signal. Or even a way to build a fire. But I don’t.”
“I never thought. It just seemed like going for a stroll in the park.”
Max thought darkly that he had tried to warn her. Why, even the hills around home weren’t safe if a body didn’t keep his eyes peeled… you could run into a mean old bobcat, or even a bear. Person like Ellie never ‘ud had enough hard knocks to knock sense into her, that was her trouble.
Presently he admitted that he himself hadn’t looked for grief from anything as apparently
chuckled-headed and harmless as these centaur things. Anyhow, as Sam would say, no use cryin’ over spilt milk when the horse was already stolen.
“Ellie.”
“Huh?”
“Do you suppose Chipsie could find her way back?” “Why, I don’t know.”
“If she could, we could send a message.”
Chipsie looked up. “Back?” she inquired. “Please back. Go home.”
Ellie frowned. “I’m afraid Chipsie doesn’t talk that well. She’d probably just hiccup and get incoherent.” “I don’t mean that. I know Chipsie is no mental giant. I…”
“Chipsie is smart!”
“Sure. But I want to send a written message and a map.” He fumbled in a pocket, pulled out a stylus. “Do you have any paper?”
“I’ll see.” She found a folded paper in a dungaree pocket. “Oh, dear! I was supposed to take this to Mr. Giordano. Mr. Hornsby will be so vexed with me.”
“What is it?”
“A requisition for number-ten wire.”
“It doesn’t matter now.” He took the paper, scratched out the memorandum, turned it over and began to draw, stopping to consult the pictures filed in his mind for distances, which way the local sun lay, contours, and other details.
“Max?”
“Quiet, can’t you?” He continued to sketch, then added: “URGENT—to First Officer Walther: Eldreth Coburn and self captured by centaurs. Be careful and watch out for their throwing ropes. Respectfully,
M. Jones.” He handed it to Ellie. “That ought to do it. Is there any way to fasten it to her? I sure don’t want her to drop it.”
“Mmm… let me see. Turn your back, Max.” “Why?”
“Don’t be difficult. Turn your back.”
He did so, shortly she said, “All right now.” He faced her and she handed him a ribbon. “How’s this?”
“Swell!” They managed to tie the ribbon, with the note folded and firmly attached, around Mr. Chips’ waist, anchoring it to a middle limb… not too easy as the spider puppy seemed to think it was a game and was ticklish as well.
“There! Stop squirming, Chipsie, and listen. Ellie wants you to go home.” “Home?”
“Yes, home. Go back to the ship.” “Ellie go home?”
“Ellie can’t go home.” “No.”
“Honey, you’ve got to.” “No.”
“Look, Chipsie. You find Maggie and tell her Ellie said to give you some candy. You give Maggie this.” She tugged at the tied note.
“Candy?”
“Go home. Find Maggie. Maggie will give you candy.” “Ellie go home.”
“Please, Chipsie.”
“Ellie,” Max said urgently, “something is coming.”
Eldreth looked up, saw a centaur coming through the trees. She pointed. “Look, Chipsie! They’re coming! They’ll catch Chipsie! Go home! Run!”
The spider puppy squealed in terror and scurried for the trees. Once on a branch she looked back and whimpered. “Go home!” screamed Ellie. “Find Maggie!”
Mr. Chips shot a glance at the centaur, then disappeared. They had no time to worry further, the centaur was almost up to them. He glanced at them and went on by; it was what followed the centaur that grabbed their attention. Ellie suppressed a shriek. “Max! They’ve caught everybody.”
“No,” he corrected grimly. “Look again.” The gathering gloom had caused him to make the same mistake; it seemed that the entire ship’s company trotted after the centaur in single file, ankle leashed to ankle by living ropes. But only the first glance gave such an impression. These creatures were more than humanoid—but such degraded creatures had never sailed between the stars.
They shuffled quickly along like well-trained animals. One or two looked at Ellie and Max in passing, but their stares were bovine, incurious. Small children not on leash trotted with their mothers, and once Max was startled to see a wrinkled little head peeping out of a pouch—these man-creatures were marsupials, too.
Max controlled a desire to retch and as they passed out of sight he turned to Ellie. “Gosh!” “Max,” Eldreth said hoarsely, “do you suppose we’ve died and gone to our punishment?” “Huh? Don’t be silly. Things are bad enough.”
“I mean it. That was something right out of Dante’s Inferno.”
Max was swallowing uneasily and not feeling good-tempered. “Look, you can pretend you’re dead if you want to. Me, I’m alive and I mean to stay so. Those things weren’t men. Don’t let it throw you.”
“But they were men. Men and women and children.”
“No, they weren’t. Being shaped like us doesn’t make them men. Being a man is something else entirely.” He scowled. “Maybe the centaurs are ‘men.'”
“Oh, no—”
“Don’t be too sure. They seem to run things in this country.”
The discussion was cut short by another arrival. It was almost dark and they did not see the centaur until he entered their clearing. He was followed by three of the—Max decided to call them ‘men’ though he
resented the necessity—followed by three men. They were not on leashes. All three were bearing burdens. The centaur spoke to them; they distributed what they carried.
One of them set down a large clay bowl filled with water in the space separating Max and Ellie. It was the first artifact that any human had seen on Charity and did not indicate a high level of mechanical culture, being crudely modeled and clearly not thrown on a potter’s wheel; it held water, no more could be said for it. A second porter dumped a double armful of small fruits beside the bowl. Two of them splashed into the bowl, he did not bother to fish them out.
Max had to look twice to see what the third slave was carrying. It looked as if he had three large ovoid balls slung by ropes in each of his hands; second inspection showed them to be animals about the size of opossums which he carried by their tails. He went around the clearing, stopping every few feet and lifting one of his burdens to a lower branch. When he had finished they were surrounded by six small creatures, each hanging by its tail. The centaur followed the slave, Max saw him stroke each animal and press a spot on its neck. In each case the entire body of the little animal lit up, began to shine like a firefly with soft silvery light.
The clearing was softly illuminated thereby—well enough, Max thought, to read large print. One of the hobgoblins balloons came sailing silently between trees and anchored to a point thirty feet above them; it seemed to settle down for the night.
The centaur came over to Max and prodded him with a hoof, snorting inquiringly. Max listened carefully, then repeated the sound. The centaur answered and again Max mimicked. This useless exchange continued for a few phrases, then the centaur gave up and left, his train trotting after him.
Ellie shivered. “Phew!” she exclaimed, “I’m glad they’re gone. I can stand the centaurs, a little, but those men… ugh!”
He shared her disgust; they looked less human close up, having hair lines that started where their eyebrows should have been. They were so flat-headed that their ears stuck up above their skulls. But it was not this that had impressed Max. When the centaur had spoken to him Max had gotten his first good look into a centaur’s mouth. Those teeth were never meant for munching grain, they were more like the teeth of a tiger—or a shark.
He decided not to mention this. “Say, wasn’t that the same one that was leading the herd that caught us?” “How would I know? They all look alike.”
“But they don’t, any more than two horses look alike.” “Horses all look alike.”
“But… ” He stopped, baffled by a city viewpoint at which communication failed. “I think it was the same one.”
“I can’t see that it matters.”
“It might. I’m trying to learn their language.”
“I heard you swallowing your tonsils. How did you do that?”
“Oh, you just remember what a sound sounds like, then do it.” He threw his head back and made a very plaintive sound.
“What was that?”
“A shote stuck in a fence. Little shote by the name of Abner I had once.” “It sounds tragic.”
“It was, until I helped him loose. Ellie, I think they’ve bedded us down for the night.” He gestured at the bowl and the fruit beside it. “Like feeding the hogs.”
“Don’t put it that way. Room service. Room service and maid service and lights. Food and drink.” She picked up one of the fruits. It was about the size and shape of a cucumber. “Do you suppose this is fit to eat?”
“I don’t think you ought to try it. Ellie, it would be smart not to eat or drink anything until we are rescued.”
“Well, maybe we could go hungry but we certainly can’t go without water. You die of thirst in a day or two.”
“But we may be rescued before morning.”
“Maybe.” She peeled the fruit. “It smells good. Something like a banana.” He peeled one and sniffed it. “More like a pawpaw.”
“Well?”
“Mmm—Look here, I’ll eat one. If it hasn’t made me sick in a half hour, then you can try one.” “Yes, sir, boss man.” She bit into the one she held. “Mind the seeds.”
“Ellie, you’re a juvenile delinquent.”
She wrinkled her nose and smiled. “You say the sweetest things! I try to be.”
Max bit into his. Not bad—not as much flavor as a pawpaw, but not bad. Some minutes later he was saying, “Maybe we should leave some for breakfast?”
“All right. I’m full anyway.” Ellie leaned over and drank. Without words they had each concluded that the cloying meal required them to risk the water. “There, I feel better. At least we’ll die comfortably. Max? Do you think we dare sleep? I’m dead.”
“I think they are through with us for the night. You sleep, I’ll sit up.”
“No, that’s not fair. Honest, what good would it do to keep watch? We can’t get away.” “Well… here, take my knife. You can sleep with it in your hand.”
“All right.” She reached across the bowl and accepted it. “Good night, Max. I’m going to count sheep.”
“Good night.” He stretched out, shifted and got a tree cone out of his ribs, then tried to relax. Fatigue and a full stomach helped, the knowledge of their plight hindered—and that hobgoblin hanging up there.
Maybe it was keeping watch—but not for their benefit. “Max? Are you asleep?”
“No, Ellie.”
“Hold my hand? I’m scared.” “I can’t reach it.”
“Yes, you can. Swing around the other way.”
He did so, and found that he could reach over his head past the water bowl and clasp her hand. “Thanks, Max. Good night some more.”
He lay on his back and stared up through the trees. Despite the half light given by the luminiferous animals he could see stars and the numerous meteor trails crisscrossing the sky. To avoid thinking he started counting them. Presently they started exploding in his head and he was asleep.
The light of the local sun through the trees awakened him. He raised his head. “I wondered how long you would sleep,” Eldreth announced. “Look who’s here.”
He sat up, wincing with every move, and turned around. Mr. Chips was sitting on Ellie’s middle and peeling one of the papaya-like fruits. “Lo, Maxie.”
“Hello, Chipsie.” He saw that the note was still tied to her. “Bad girl!”
Mr. Chips turned to Ellie for comfort. Tears started to leak out. “No, no,” corrected Ellie. “Good girl. She’s promised to go find Maggie as soon as she finishes breakfast. Haven’t you, dear?”
“Go find Maggie,” the spider puppy agreed.
“Don’t blame her, Max. Spider puppies aren’t nocturnal back home. She just waited until we were quiet, then came back. She couldn’t help it. I found her sleeping in my arm.”
The spider puppy finished eating, then drank daintily from the bowl. Max decided that it didn’t matter, considering who had probably used it before they had. This thought he suppressed quickly. “Find Maggie,” Mr. Chips announced.
“Yes, dear. Go straight back to the ship as fast as you can and find Maggie. Hurry.”
“Find Maggie. Hurry fast. ‘Bye, Maxie.” The spider puppy took to the trees and scampered away in the right direction.
“Do you think she’ll get there?” asked Max.
“I think so. After all, her ancestors found their way through forests and such for a lot of generations. She knows it’s important; we had a long talk.”
“Do you really think she understands that much?”
“She understands about pleasing me and that’s enough. Max, do you suppose they can possibly reach us today? I don’t want to spend another night here.”
“Neither do I. If Chipsie can move faster than we can…” “Oh, she can.”
“Then maybe—if they start quickly.”
“I hope so. Ready for breakfast?” “Did Chipsie leave anything?” “Three apiece. I’ve had mine. Here.”
“Sure you’re lying? There were only five when we went to sleep.” She looked sheepish and allowed him to split the odd one. While they were eating he noticed a change. “Hey, what became of the over-sized lightning bugs?”
“Oh. One of those awful creatures came at dawn and carried them away. I was set to scream but he didn’t come close to me, so I let you sleep.”
“Thanks. I see our chaperone is with us.” The hobgoblin still hung in the tree tops. “Yes, and there have been peekers around all morning, too.”
“Did you get a look at one?”
“Of course not.” She stood up, stretched and winced. “Now to see what beautiful surprises this lovely day brings forth.” She made a sour face. “The program I would pick is to sit right here and never lay eyes on anything until George Daigler shows up with about a dozen armed men. I’d kiss him. I’d kiss all of them.”
“So would I.”
Until well past noon Eldreth’s chosen schedule prevailed, nothing happened. They heard from time to time the bugling and snorting of centaurs but saw none. They talked in desultory fashion, having already disposed of both hopes and fears, and were dozing in the sunshine, when they suddenly came alert to the fact that a centaur was entering the clearing.
Max felt sure that it was the leader of the herd, or at least that it was the one who had fed and watered them. The creature wasted no time, making it clear with kicks and prods that they were to allow themselves to be leashed for travel.
Never once were they free of the living ropes. Max thought of attacking the centaur, perhaps leaping on his back and cutting his throat. But it seemed most unlikely that he could do it quietly enough; one snort might bring the herd down on them. Besides which he knew no way to get free of their bonds even if he killed the centaur. Better wait—especially with a messenger gone for help.
They were led, falling and being dragged occasionally, along the route taken by the party of slaves. It became apparent that they were entering a large centaur settlement. The path opened out into a winding, well-tended road with centaurs going both directions and branching off onto side roads. There were no buildings, none of the outward marks of a civilized race—but there was an air of organization, of custom, of stability. Little centaurs scampered about, got in the way, and were ordered aside. There was activity of various sorts on both sides of the road and grotesque human slaves were almost as numerous as centaurs, carrying burdens, working in unexplained fashions—some with living-rope bonds, some allowed to run free. They could not see much because of the uncomfortable pace they were forced to maintain.
Once Max noted an activity on his side of the road that he wished to see better. He did not mention it to Ellie, not only because talking was difficult but because he did not wish to worry her—but it had looked like an outdoor butcher shop to him. The hanging carcasses were not centaurs.
They stopped at last in a very large clearing, well filled with centaurs. Their master patted the lines that bound them and thereby caused them to shorten until they were fetched close to his sides. He then took his place in a centaur queue.
A large, grizzled, and presumably elderly centaur was holding court on one side of the “square.” He stood with quiet dignity as single centaurs or groups came in succession before him. Max watched with interest so great that he almost lost his fear. Each case would be the cause of much discussion, then the centaur chieftain would make a single remark and the case would be over. The contestants would leave quietly.
The conclusion was inescapable that law or custom was being administered, with the large centaur as arbiter.
There was none of the travesties of men in the clearing but there were underfoot odd animals that looked like flattened-out hogs. Their legs were so short that they seemed more like tractor treads. They were mostly mouth and teeth and snuffling snouts, and whatever they came to, if it was not a centaur’s hoof, they devoured. Max understood from watching them how the area, although thickly inhabited, was kept so clean; these scavengers were animated street cleaners.
Their master gradually worked up toward the head of the line. The last case before theirs concerned the only centaur they had seen which did not seem in vibrant health. He was old and skinny, his coat was dull and his bones stuck pitifully through his hide. One eye was blind, a blank white; the other was inflamed and weeping a thick ichor.
The judge, mayor, or top herd leader discussed his case with two younger healthy centaurs who seemed to be attending him almost as nurses. Then the boss centaur moved from his position of honor and walked around the sick one, inspecting him from all sides. Then he spoke to him.
The old sick one responded feebly, a single snorted word. The chief centaur spoke again, got what seemed to Max the same answer. The chief backed into his former position, set up a curious whinnying cry.
From all sides the squatty scavengers converged on the spot. They formed a ring around the sick one and his attendants, dozens of them, snuffling and grunting. The chief bugled once; one attendant reached into its pouch and hauled forth a creature curled into a knot, the centaur stroked it and it unwound. To Max it looked unpleasantly like an eel.
The attendant extended it toward the sick centaur. It made no move to stop him, but waited, watching with his one good eye. The head of the slender thing was suddenly touched to the neck of the sick centaur; he jerked in the characteristic convulsion of electric shock and collapsed.
The chief centaur snorted once—and the scavengers waddled forward with surprising speed, swarming over the body and concealing it. When they backed away, still snuffling, there were not even bones.
Max called out softly, “Steady, Ellie! Get a grip on yourself, kid.” She answered faintly, “I’m all right.”
A FRIEND IN NEED
For the first time they were turned loose. Their master tickled their bonds, which dropped from their ankles. Max said softly to Ellie, “If you want to run for it, I’ll keep them busy.”
Ellie shook her head. “No good. They’d have me before I went fifty feet. Besides—I can’t find my way back.”
Max shut up, knowing that she was right but having felt obliged to offer. The chief centaur inspected them with the characteristic expression of gentle surprise, exchanged bugling comments with their captor. They were under discussion for some time, there appeared to be some matter to be decided. Max got out his knife. He had no plan, other than a determination that no centaur would approach either one of them with that electric-shock creature, or any other menace, without a fight.
The crisis faded away. Their captor flicked their leashes about their ankles and dragged them off. Fifteen minutes later they were again staked out in the clearing they had occupied. Ellie looked around her after the centaur had gone and sighed. “‘Be it ever so humble… ‘ Max, it actually feels good to get back here.”
“I know.”
The monotony that followed was varied by one thing only: fading hope and mounting despair. They were not treated unkindly; they were simply domestic animals—fed and watered and largely ignored. Once a day they were given water and plenty of the native papayas. After the first night they no longer had the luxury of “artificial” light, nor did the hobgoblin hang over their clearing. But there was no way of escape, short of gnawing off a leg and crawling away.
For two or three days they discussed the possibility of rescue with mounting anxiety, then, having beaten the subject to death they dropped it; it simply added to their distress. Ellie rarely smiled now and she had quit her frivolous back talk; it seemed that it had finally gotten through her armor that this could happen to Eldreth Coburn, only daughter of the rich and almost all-powerful Mr. Commissioner Coburn—a chattel, a barnyard animal of monsters themselves suitable only for zoos.
Max took it a little more philosophically. Never having had much, he did not expect much—not that he enjoyed it. He kept his worst fear secret. Ellie referred to their status as “animals in a zoo” because most of their visitors were small centaurs who came sniffling and bleating around with a curiosity that their elders seemed to lack. He let her description stand because he believed their status worse than that—he thought that they were being fattened for the table.
One week after their capture Eldreth declined to eat breakfast and stayed silent all morning. All that Max could think of to say evoked only monosyllables. In desperation he said, “I’ll beat you at three-dee and spot you two starships.”
That roused her. “You and who else?” she said scornfully. “And with what?” “Well, we could play it in our heads. You know—blindfold.”
She shook her head. “No good. You’d claim your memory was better than mine and I wouldn’t be able to prove you were cheating.”
“Nasty little brat.”
She smiled suddenly. “That’s better. You’ve been too gentle with me lately—it depresses me. Max, we could make a set.”
“How?”
“With these.” She picked up one of many tree cones that littered the clearing. “A big one is a flagship. We can pick various sizes and break the thingamajigs off and such.”
They both got interested. The water bowl was moved aside so that it no longer occupied the center of the space marked by the limits of their tethers and the no-man’s-land between them was brushed free of needles and marked with scratches as boards. The boards had to be side by side; they must stack them in their minds, but that was a common expedient for players with good visualization when using an unpowered set—it saved time between moves.
Pebbles became robots; torn bits of cloth tied to cones distinguished sides and helped to designate pieces. By midafternoon they were ready. They were still playing their first game when darkness forced them to stop. As they lay down to sleep Max said, “I’d better not take your hand. I’d knock over men in the dark.”
“I won’t sleep if you don’t—I won’t feel safe. Besides, that gorilla messed up one board changing the water.”
“That’s all right. I remember where they were.”
“Then you can just remember where they all are, Stretch out your arm.” He groped in the darkness, found her fingers. “Night, Max. Sleep tight.” “Good night, Ellie.”
Thereafter they played from sunup to sundown. Their owner came once, watched them for an hour, went away without a snort. Once when Ellie had fought him to a draw Max said, “You know, Ellie, you play this game awfully well—for a girl.”
“Thank you too much.”
“No, I mean it. I suppose girls are probably as intelligent as men, but most of them don’t act like it. I think it’s because they don’t have to. If a girl is pretty, she doesn’t have to think. Of course, if she can’t get by on her looks, then—well, take you for example. If you…”
“Oh! So I’m ugly, Mr. Jones!”
“Wait a minute. I didn’t say that. Let’s suppose that you were the most beautiful woman since Helen of Troy. In that case, you would… ” He found that he was talking to her back. She had swung round, grabbed her knees, and was ignoring him.
He stretched himself to the limit of his tether, bound leg straight out behind him, and managed to touch her shoulder. “Ellie?”
She shook off his hand. “Keep your distance! You smell like an old goat.”
“Well,” he said reasonably, “you’re no lily yourself. You haven’t had a bath lately either.”
“I know it!” she snapped, and started to sob. “And I hate it. I just… h- h- hate it. I look awful.” “No, you don’t. Not to. me.”
She turned a tear-wet and very dirty face. “Liar.” “Nothing wrong that some soap and water won’t fix.”
“Oh, if only I had some.” She looked at him. “You aren’t at your best yourself, Mr. Jones. You need a haircut and the way your beard grows in patches is ghastly.”
He fingered the untidy stubble on his chin. “I can’t help it.” “Neither can I.” She sighed. “Set up the boards again.”
Thereafter she beat him three straight games, one with a disgraceful idiot’s mate. He looked at the boards sadly when it was over. “And you are the girl who flunked improper fractions?”
“Mr. Jones, has it ever occurred to you, the world being what it is, that women sometimes prefer not to appear too bright?” He was digesting this when she added, “I learned this game at my father’s knee, before I learned to read. I was junior champion of Hespera before I got shanghaied. Stop by sometime and I’ll show you my cup.”
“Is that true? Really?”
“I’d rather play than eat—when I can find competition. But you’re learning. Someday you’ll be able to give me a good game.”
“I guess I don’t understand women.” “That’s an understatement.”
Max was a long time getting to sleep that night. Long after Eldreth was gently snoring he was still staring at the shining tail of the big comet, watching the shooting star trails, and thinking. None of his thoughts was pleasant.
Their position was hopeless, he admitted. Even though Chipsie had failed (he had never pinned much hope on her), searching parties should have found them by now. There was no longer any reason to think that they would be rescued.
And now Ellie was openly contemptuous of him. He had managed to hurt her pride again—again with his big, loose, flapping jaw! Why, he should have told her that she was the prettiest thing this side of paradise, if it would make her feel good—she had mighty little to feel good about these days!
Being captive had been tolerable because of her, he admitted—now he had nothing to look forward to but day after day of losing at three-dee while Ellie grimly proved that girls were as good as men and better. At the end of it they would wind up as an item in the diet of a thing that should never have been born.
If only Dr. Hendrix hadn’t died!
If only he had been firm with Ellie when it mattered.
To top it off, and at the moment almost the worst of all, he felt that if he ate just one more of those blasted pawpaws it would gag him.
He was awakened by a hand on his shoulder and a whisper in his ear. “Max!” “What the—?”
“Quiet! Not a sound.”
It was Sam crouching over him—Sam!
As he sat up, sleep jarred out of him by adrenalin shock, he saw Sam move noiselessly to where Ellie slept. He squatted over her but did not touch her. “Miss Eldreth,” he said softly.
Ellie’s eyes opened and stared. She opened her mouth, Max was terrified that she might cry out. Sam hastily signed for silence; she looked at him and nodded. Sam knelt over her, seemed to study something in the shadow-laced moonlight, then took out a hand gun. There was the briefest of low-energy discharges, entirely silent, and Ellie stood up—free. Sam returned to Max. “Hold still,” he whispered. “I don’t want to burn you.” He knelt over Max’s bound ankle.
When the gun flared Max felt an almost paralyzing constriction around his ankle, then the thing fell off. The amputated major part contracted and jerked away into the shadows. Max stood up. “How—”
“Not a word. Follow me.” Sam led off into the bushes with Ellie behind him and Max following closely. They had gone only twenty yards when there was a whimpering cry of “Ellie!” and the spider puppy landed in Eldreth’s arms. Sam turned suddenly.
“Keep her quiet,” he whispered, “for your life.”
Ellie nodded and started petting the little creature, crooning to it voicelessly. When Chipsie tried to talk, she silenced it, then stuffed it inside her shirt. Sam waited these few moments, now started on without speaking.
They proceeded for several hundred yards as near silently as three people who believe their lives hang on it can manage. Finally Sam stopped. “This is as far as we dare go,” he said in a low voice. “Any farther in the dark and I’d be lost. But I’m pretty sure we are outside their sleeping grounds. We’ll start again at the first light.”
“How did you get here in the dark, then?”
“I didn’t. Chips and I have been hiding in thick bushes since midafternoon, not fifty feet from you.” “Oh.” Max looked around, looked up at the stars. “I can take us back in the dark.”
“You can? It ‘ud be a darn good thing. These babies don’t stir out at night—I think.” “Let me get in the lead. You get behind Ellie.”
It took more than an hour to get to the edge of the tableland. The darkness, the undergrowth, the need for absolute silence, and the fact that Max had to take it slowly to keep his bearings despite his photographic memory all slowed them down. The trip downhill into the valley was even slower.
When they reached the edge of the trees with comparatively flat grassland in front Sam halted them and surveyed the valley by dim moonlight. “Mustn’t get caught in the open,” he whispered. “They can’t throw those snakes too well among trees, but out in the open—oh, brother!”
“You know about the throwing ropes?” “Sure.”
“Sam,” whispered Ellie. “Mr. Anderson, why did…”
“Sssh!” he cautioned. “Explanations later. Straight across, at a dogtrot. Miss Eldreth, you set the pace. Max, pick your bearings and guide us. We’ll run side by side. All set?”
“Just a minute.” Max took the spider puppy from Eldreth, zipping it inside his shirt as she had done. Mr. Chips did not even wake up, but moaned softly like a disturbed baby. “Okay.”
They ran and walked and ran again for a half hour or more, wasting no breath on words, putting everything into gaining distance from the centaur community. Knee-high grass and semi-darkness made the going hard. They were almost to the bottom of the valley and Max was straining to spot the stream when Sam called out, “Down! Down flat!”
Max hit dirt, taking it on his elbows to protect Chips; Ellie flopped beside him. Max turned his head cautiously and whispered, “Centaurs?”
“No. Shut up.”
A hobgoblin balloon, moving at night to Max’s surprise, was drifting across the valley at an altitude of about a hundred feet. Its course would take it past them, missing them by perhaps a hundred yards. Then it veered and came toward them.
It lost altitude and hovered almost over them. Max saw Sam aim carefully, steadying his pistol with both bands. There was momentarily a faint violet pencil from gun to hobgoblin; the creature burst and fell so close by that Max could smell burned meat. Sam returned his weapon and got to his feet. “One less spy,” he said with satisfaction. “Let’s get going, kids.”
“You think those things spy?”
“‘Think’? We know. Those polo ponies have this place organized. Pipe down and make miles.”
Ellie found the stream by falling into it. They hauled her out and waded across, stopping only to drink. On the other bank Sam said, “Where’s your left shoe, Miss Eldreth?”
“It came off in the brook.”
Sam stopped to search but it was useless; the water looked like ink in the faint light. “No good,” he decided. “We could waste the whole night. You’re due for sore feet—sorry. Better throw away your other shoe.”
It did not slow them until they reached the far ridge beyond which lay Charityville and the ship. Soon after they started up Ellie cut her right foot on a rock. She did her best, setting her jaw and not complaining, but it handicapped them. There was a hint of dawn in the air by the time they reached the top. Max started to lead them down the arroyo that he and Ellie had come up so many year-long days ago. Sam stopped him. “Let me get this straight. This isn’t the draw that faces the ship, is it?”
“No, that one is just north of this.” Max reconstructed in his mind how it had looked from the ship and compared it with his memory of the photomap taken as the ship landed. “Actually a shoulder just beyond the next draw faces the ship.”
“I thought so. This is the one Chips led me up, but I want us to stay in the trees as long as possible. It’ll be light by the time we’d be down to the flat.”
“Does it matter? There have never been any centaurs seen in the valley the ship is in.”
“You mean you never saw any. You’ve been away, old son. We’re in danger now—and in worse danger
the closer we get to the ship. Keep your voice down—and lead us to that shoulder that sticks out toward the ship. If you can.”
Max could, though it meant going over strange terrain and keeping his bearings from his memory of a small-scale map. It involved “crossing the furrows,” too, instead of following a dry water course—which led to impasses such as thirty-foot drops that had to be gone painfully around. Sam grew edgy as the light increased and urged them to greater speed and greater silence even as Ellie’s increasingly crippled condition made his demands harder to meet.
“I really am sorry,” he whispered after she had to slide and scramble down a rock slope, checking herself with bare and bloody feet. “But it’s better to get there on stumps than to let them catch you.”
“I know.” Her face contorted but she made no sound. It was daylight by the time Max led them out on the shoulder. Silently he indicated the ship, a half mile away. They were about level with its top.
“Down this way, I think,” he said quietly to Sam. “No.”
“Huh?”
“Chilluns, it’s Uncle Sam’s opinion that we had better lie doggo in those bushes, holding still and letting the beggar flies bite us, until after sundown.”
Max eyed the thousand yard gap. “We could run for it.”
“And four legs run faster than two legs. We’ve learned that lately.”
The bushes selected by Sam grew out to the edge of the shoulder. He crawled through them until he reached a place where he could spy the valley below while still hidden. Ellie and Max wriggled after him. The ground dropped off sharply just beyond them. The ship faced them, to their left and nearer was Charityville.
“Get comfortable,” Sam ordered, “and we’ll take turns keeping guard. Sleep if you can, this will be a long watch.”
Max tried to shift Mr. Chips around so that he might lie flat. A little head poked out of his collar. “Good morning,” the spider puppy said gravely. “Breakfast?”
“No breakfast, hon,” Ellie told her. “Sam, is it all right to let her out?”
“I guess so. But keep her quiet.” Sam was studying the plain below. Max did the same. “Sam? Why don’t we head for the village? It’s closer.”
“Nobody there. Abandoned.”
“What? Look, Sam, can’t you tell us now what’s happened?”
Sam did not take his eyes off the plain. “Okay. But hold it down to whispers. What do you want to know?”
That was a hard one—Max wanted to know everything. “What happened to the village?” “Gave it up. Too dangerous.”
“Huh? Anybody caught?”
“Not permanently. Daigler had a gun. But then the fun began. We thought that all they had were those throwing snakes and that we had scared them off. But they’ve got lots more than that. Things that burrow underground, for example. That’s why the village had to be abandoned.”
“Anybody hurt?”
“Well… the newlyweds were already in residence. Becky Weberbauer is a widow.”
Ellie gasped and Sam whispered sharply to be quiet. Max mulled it over before saying, “Sam, I don’t see why, after they got my message, they didn’t…”
“What message?”
Max explained. Sam shook his head. “The pooch got back all right. By then we knew you were missing and were searching for you—armed, fortunately. But there was no message.”
“Huh? How did you find us?”
“Chips led me, I told you. But that was all. Somebody stuffed her into her old cage and that’s where I found her yesterday. I stopped to pet her, knowing you were gone, Miss Eldreth—and found the poor little thing nearly out of her mind. I finally got it through my head that she knew where you two were.
So… ” He shrugged.
“Oh. But I can’t see,” Max whispered, “why you risked it alone. You already knew they were dangerous; you should have had every man in the ship with you, armed.”
Sam shook his head. “And we would have lost every man. A sneak was possible; the other wasn’t. And we had to get you back.”
“Thanks. I don’t know how to say it, Sam. Anyhow, thanks.”
“Yes,” added Ellie, “and stop calling me ‘Miss Eldreth.’ I’m Ellie to my friends.” “Okay, Ellie. How are the feet?”
“I’ll live.”
“Good.” He turned his head to Max. “But I didn’t say we wanted to get you back, I said we had to. You, Max. No offense, Ellie.”
“Huh? Why me?”
“Well… ” Sam seemed reluctant. “You’ll get the details when you get back. But it looks like you’ll be needed if they take the ship off. You’re the only astrogator left.”
“Huh? What happened to Simes?” “Quiet! He’s dead.”
“For Pete’s sake.” Max decided that, little as he liked Simes, death at the hands of the centaurs he would not have wished on any human; he said so.
“Oh, no, it wasn’t that way. You see, when Captain Blaine died…”
“The Captain, too?” “Yes.”
“I knew he was sick, I didn’t know he was that sick.”
“Well, call it a broken heart. Or honorable hara-kiri. Or an accident. I found an empty box for sleeping pills when I helped pack his things. Maybe he took them, or maybe your pal Simes slipped them in his tea. The Surgeon certified ‘natural causes’ and that’s how it was logged. What is a natural cause when a man can’t bear to live any longer?”
Ellie said softly, “He was a good man.” “Yes,” agreed Sam. “Too good, maybe.” “But how about Simes?”
“Well, now, that was another matter. Simes seemed to feel that he was crown prince, but the First wouldn’t stand for it. Something about some films the Chief Computerman had. Anyhow, he tried to get tough with Walther and I sort of broke his neck. There wasn’t time to be gentle,” Sam added hastily. “Simes pulled a gun.”
“Sam! You aren’t in trouble?”
“None, except here and now. If we—quiet, kids!” He peered more sharply through the bushes. “Not a sound, not a movement,” he whispered. “It may miss us.”
A hobgoblln was drifting down from north, paralleling the ridge above and out from it, as if it were scouting the high land. Max said in Sam’s ear, “Hadn’t we better scrunch back?”
“Too late. Just hold still.”
The balloon drifted abreast of them, stopped, then moved slowly toward them. Max saw that Sam had his gun out. He held his fire until the hobgoblin hovered above them. The shot burned needles and branches but it brought down the thing.
“Sam! There’s another one!”
“Where?” Sam looked where Max pointed. The second hobgoblin apparently had been covering the first, higher and farther out. Even as they watched it veered away and gained altitude.
“Get it, Sam!”
Sam stood up. “Too late. Too far and too late. Well, kids, away we go. No need to keep quiet. Sit down and slide, Ellie; it’ll save your feet some.”
Down they went, scattering rocks and tearing their clothes, with Mr. Chips on her own and enjoying it. At the bottom Sam said, “Max, how fast can you do a half mile?”
“I don’t know. Three minutes.”
“Make it less. Get going. I’ll help Ellie.” “No.”
“You get there! You’re needed.” “No!”
Sam sighed. “Always some confounded hero. Take her other arm.”
They made a couple of hundred yards half carrying Eldreth, when she shook them off. “I can go faster alone,” she panted.
“Okay, let’s go!” Sam rasped.
She proved herself right. Ignoring her injured feet she pumped her short legs in a fashion which did not require Max’s best speed to keep up, but nevertheless kept him panting. The ship grew larger ahead of them. Max saw that the cage was up and wondered how long it would take to attract attention and get it lowered.
They were half way when Sam shouted, “Here comes the cavalry! Speed it up!”
Max glanced over his shoulder. A herd of centaurs—a dozen, two dozen, perhaps more—was sweeping toward them from the hills on a diagonal plainly intended to cut them off. Ellie saw them too and did speed up, with a burst that momentarily outdistanced Max.
They had cut the distance to a few hundred yards when the cage swung free of the lock and sank lazily toward the ground. Max started to shout that they were going to make it when he heard the drum of hooves close behind. Sam yelled, “Beat it, kids! Into the ship.” He stopped.
Max stopped too, while shouting, “Run, Ellie!
Sam snarled, “Run for it, I said! What can you do? Without a gun?”
Max hesitated, torn by an unbearable decision. He saw that Ellie had stopped. Sam glanced back, then backhanded Max across the mouth. “Get moving! Get her inside!”
Max moved, gathering Ellie in one arm and urging her on. Behind them Sam Anderson turned to face his death… dropping to one knee and steadying his pistol over his left forearm in precisely the form approved by the manual.
“—A SHIP IS NOT JUST STEEL—”
The cage hit the ground, four men swarmed out as Max stumbled inside and dumped Ellie on the floor. The door clanged shut behind them, but not too quickly for Mr. Chips. The spider puppy ran to Ellie, clutched her arm and wailed. Eldreth tried to sit up.
“You all right?” Max demanded.
“Uh, sure. But… ” She shut up as Max whirled around and tried to open the cage door.
It would not open. It was not until then that he realized that the lift was off the ground and rising slowly. He punched the “stop” control.
Nothing happened, the car continued upward. About ten feet off the ground it stopped. Max looked up through the grille roof and shouted, “Hey! In the lock, there! Lower away!”
He was ignored. He tried the door again—uselessly, as its safety catch prevented it being opened when the cage was in the air. Frustrated and helpless, he grabbed the bars and looked out. He could see nothing of Sam. The centaurs were milling around in the middle distance. He saw one stumble and go down and then another. Then he saw the four men who had passed him. They were on their bellies in fair skirmish line not far from the cage, each with a shoulder gun and each firing carefully. The range was not great, about three hundred yards; they were taking steady toll. Each silent, almost invisible bolt picked off a centaur.
Max counted seven more centaur casualties—then the monsters broke and ran, scattering toward the hills. The firing continued and several more dropped before distance made firing uncertain.
Somebody shouted, “Hold your fire!” and one of the men stumbled to his feet and ran toward the center of the battle. The others got up and followed him.
When they came back they were carrying something that looked like a bundle of clothing. The cage lowered to the ground, they came inside and laid it gently on the floor. One of them glanced at Eldreth, then quickly removed his jacket and laid it over Sam’s face. Not until then did Max see that it was Mr. Walther.
The other three were Mr. Daigler, a power man whom Max knew only by sight, and Chief Steward Giordano. The fat man was crying openly. “The filthy vermin!” he sobbed. “He never had a chance. They just rode him down and trompled him.” He choked, then added, “But he got at least five of ’em.” His eyes rested on Max without recognition. “He made ’em pay.”
Eldreth said gently, “Is he dead?”
“Huh? Of course. Don’t talk silly.” The steward turned his face away.
The car bumped to a stop. Walther looked in through the lock and said angrily, “Get those bystanders out of the way. What is this? A circus?” He turned back. “Let’s get him in, men.”
As he was bending to help, Max saw Eldreth being led away by Mrs. Dumont. Tenderly they carried Sam in and deposited him on the deck where the Surgeon was waiting. Walther straightened up and seemed to notice Max for the first time. “Mr. Jones? Will you see me in my stateroom as quickly as possible, please?”
“Aye aye, sir. But… ” Max looked down at his friend. “I’d like to…”
Walther cut him short. “There’s nothing you can do. Come away.” He added more gently, “Make it fifteen minutes. That will give you time for a wash and a change.”
Max presented himself on time, showered, his face hastily scraped, and in clean clothes—although lacking a cap. His one cap was somewhere in the far valley, lost on capture. He found Chief Engineer Compagnon and Mr. Samuels, the Purser, with the First Officer. They were seated around a table, having coffee. “Come in, Mr. Jones,” Walther invited. “Sit down. Coffee?”
“Uh, yes, sir.” Max discovered that he was terribly hungry. He loaded the brew with cream and sugar.
They sat for a few minutes, talking of unimportant matters, while Max drank his coffee and steadied down. Presently Walther said, “What shape are you in, Mr. Jones?”
“Why, all right, I guess, sir. Tired, maybe.”
“I imagine so. I’m sorry to have to disturb you. Do you know the situation now?” “Partly, sir. Sam told me… Sam Anderson… ” His voice broke.
“We’re sorry about Anderson,” Mr. Walther said soberly. “In many ways he was one of the best men I ever served with. But go on.”
Max recounted what Sam had had time to tell him, but shortened the statements about Simes and Captain Blaine to the simple fact that they were dead. Walther nodded. “Then you know what we want of you?”
“I think so, sir. You want to raise the ship, so you want me to astrogate.” He hesitated. “I suppose I can.” “Mmm… yes. But that’s not all.”
“Sir?”
“You must be Captain.”
All three had their eyes fixed on him. Max felt lightheaded and for a moment wondered what was wrong. Their faces seemed to swell and then recede. He realized vaguely that he had had little to eat and almost no sleep for many hours and had been running on nerve—yes, that must be what was wrong with him.
From a long distance away he heard Walther’s voice: “… utterly necessary to leave this planet without delay. Now our legal position is clear. In space, only an astrogation officer may command. You are being asked to assume command responsibility while very young but you are the only qualified person—therefore you must do it.”
Max pulled himself together, the wavering figures came into focus. “Mr. Walther?” “Yes?”
“But I’m not an astrogator. I’m just a probationary apprentice.
Chief Engineer Compagnon answered him. “Kelly says you’re an astrogator,” he growled. “Kelly is more of an astrogator than I am!”
Compagnon shook his head. “You can’t pass judgment on yourself.” Samuels nodded agreement.
“Let’s dispose of that,” Walther added. “There is no question of the Chief Computerman becoming captain. Nor does your rank in your guild matter. Line of command, underway, necessarily is limited to astrogators. You are senior in that line, no matter how junior you feel. At this moment, I hold command—until I pass it on. But I can’t take a ship into space. If you refuse… well, I don’t know what we will have to do. I don’t know.”
Max gulped and said, “Look, sir, I’m not refusing duty. I’ll astrogate—shucks, I suppose it’s all right to call me the astrogator, under the circumstances. But there is no reason to pretend that I’m captain. You stay in command while I conn the ship. That’s best, sir—I wouldn’t know how to act like a captain.”
Walther shook his head. “Not legally possible.”
Compagnon added, “I don’t care about the legalities. But I know that responsibility can’t be divided. Frankly, young fellow, I’d rather have Dutch as skipper than you—but he can’t astrogate. I’d be delighted to have Doc Hendrix—but he’s gone. I’d rather hold the sack myself than load it on you—but I’m a physicist and I know just enough of the math of astrogation to know that I couldn’t in a lifetime acquire the speed that an astrogator has to have. Not my temperament. Kelly says you’ve got it already. I’ve shipped with Kelly a good many years, I trust him. So it’s your pidgin, son; you’ve got to take it—and the authority that goes with it. Dutch will help—we’ll all help—but you can’t duck out and hand him the sack.”
Mr. Samuels said quietly, “I don’t agree with the Chief Engineer about the unimportance of legal aspects; most of these laws have wise reasons behind them. But I agree with what else he says. Mr. Jones, a ship is not just steel, it is a delicate political entity. Its laws and customs cannot be disregarded without inviting disaster. It will be far easier to maintain morale and discipline in this ship with a young captain—with all his officers behind him—than it would be to let passengers and crew suspect that the man who must make the crucial decisions, those life-and-death matters involving the handling of the ship, that this
all-powerful man nevertheless can’t be trusted to command the ship. No, sir, such a situation would frighten me; that is how mutinies are born.”
Max felt his heart pounding, his head was aching steadily. Walther looked at him grimly and said, “Well?” “I’ll take it.” He added, “I don’t see what else I can do.”
Walther stood up. “What are your orders, Captain?”
Max sat still and tried to slow his heart. He pressed his fingers to throbbing temples and looked frightened. “Uh, continue with routine. Make preparations to raise ship.”
“Aye aye, sir.” Walther paused, then added, “May I ask when the Captain plans to raise ship?”
He was having trouble focusing again. “When? Not before tomorrow—tomorrow at noon. I’ve got to have a night’s sleep.” He thought to himself that Kelly and he could throw it into a parking orbit, which would get them away from the centaurs—then stop to figure out his next move.
“I think that’s wise, sir. We need the time.”
Compagnon stood up. “If the Captain will excuse me, sir, I’ll get my department started.”
Samuels joined him. “Your cabin is ready, sir—I’ll have your personal effects moved in in a few minutes.”
Max stared at him. He had not yet assimilated the side implications of his new office. Use Captain Blaine’s holy of holies? Sleep in his bed? “Uh, I don’t think that’s necessary. I’m comfortable where I am.”
Samuels glanced at the First Officer, then said, “If you please, Captain, this is one of the things I was talking about when I said that a ship is a delicate political entity.”
“Eh?” Max thought about it, then suddenly felt both the burden descend on him and the strength to meet it. “Very well,” he answered, his voice deepening. “Do it.”
“Yes, sir.” Samuels looked at him. “Also, Captain—if you wish it—I’ll have Lopez stop in and trim your hair.”
Max pushed locks back of his ear. “It is shaggy, isn’t it? Very well.”
The Purser and the Chief Engineer left. Max stood for a moment uncertainly, not sure what his next cue was in this new role. Walther said, “Captain? Can you spare me a few more minutes?”
“Oh, certainly.” They sat down and Walther poured more coffee. Max said, “Mr. Walther? Do you suppose we could ring the pantry and get some toast? I haven’t eaten today.”
“Why, surely! Sorry, sir.” Instead of ringing, the First Officer phoned and ordered a high tea. Then he turned to Max. “Captain, I didn’t give you all the story—nor did I wish to until we were alone.”
“So?”
“Don’t misunderstand me. My turning over command to you did not depend on these other matters—nor is it necessary for your officers to know everything that the Captain knows… even your department heads.”
“Uh, I suppose not.”
Walther stared at his coffee. “Have you heard how Mr. Simes happened to die?”
Max told him what little he had learned from Sam. Walther nodded. “That is essentially correct. Mmmm… It is not good to speak ill of the dead, but Simes was an unstable character. When Captain Blaine passed on, he took it for granted that he was immediately captain of this ship.”
“Well—I suppose it looked that way to him, from the legal standpoint.”
“Not at all! Sorry to correct you, Captain, but that is one hundred percent wrong.”
Max frowned. “I guess I’m dumb—but I thought that was the argument that was used on me?”
“No, sir. The ship being on the ground, command devolved on me, the senior. I am not required to turn command over to an astrogator until—and unless—the ship goes into space. Even then it is not automatically a matter of turning it over to the senior astrogating officer. I have a clearly defined responsibility, with numerous adjudicated cases in point: I must turn command over only to a man I believe can handle it.
“Now I have long had doubts about Mr. Simes, his temperament, I mean. Nevertheless, in this emergency, I would have found it terribly hard not to turn command over to him, once it was decided to raise ship. But before we lost the Captain I had had occasion to dig into Mr. Simes’ ability as an astrogator—partly as a result of a conversation with you. I talked with Kelly—as you have gathered, Kelly is very well thought of. I believe I know now how that last transition went sour; Kelly took pains to show me. That and the fact that Kelly told me bluntly that there wasn’t a member of the Worry gang willing to go into space under Mr. Simes made me decide that, if it ever came up, I’d let this ship sit here forever before I would let Simes be captain. That was just thinking ahead; the Captain was sick and prudence forced me to consider possibilities.
“Then the Captain did die—and Simes announced that he was captain. The fool even moved into the cabin and sent for me. I told him he was not in command and never would be. Then I left, got witnesses and took my chief of police along to eject him. You know what happened. Your life isn’t the only one that Anderson saved; I owe him mine, too.”
Walther abruptly changed the subject. “That phenomenal trick of memory you do—computing without tables or reference books. Can you do it all the time?”
“Uh? Why, yes.”
“Do you know all the tables? Or just some of them?”
“I know all the standard tables and manuals that are what an astrogator calls his ‘working tools.'” Max started to tell about his uncle, Walther interrupted gently.
“If you please, sir. I’m glad to hear it. I’m very glad to hear it. Because the only such books in this ship are the ones in your head.”
Kelly had missed the books, of course—not Walther. When he disclosed his suspicions to Walther the two conducted a search. When that failed, it was announced that one (but only one) set was missing; Walther had offered a reward, and the ship had been combed from stern to astrodome—no manuals.
“I suppose he ditched them dirtside,” Walther finished. You know where that leaves us—we’re in a state of seige. And we’d find them only by accident if we weren’t. So I’m very glad you have the same confidence in your memory that Kelly has.”
Max was beginning to have misgivings—it is one thing to do something as a stunt, quite another to do it of necessity. “It isn’t that bad,” he answered. “Perhaps Kelly never thought of it, but logarithms and binary translation tables can probably be borrowed from engineering—with those we could fudge up methods for any straight hop. The others are needed mostly for anomalous transitions.”
“Kelly thought of that, too. Tell me, Captain, how does a survey ship go back after it penetrates a newly located congruency?”
“Huh? So that is what you want me to do with the ship?”
“It is not for me,” Walther said formally, “to tell the Captain where to take his ship.”
Max said slowly, “I’ve thought about it. I’ve had a lot of time to think lately.” He did not add that he had dwelt on it nights in captivity to save his reason. “Of course, we don’t have the instruments that survey ships carry, nor does applied astrogation go much into the theory of calculating congruencies. And even some survey ships don’t come back.”
“But… ” They were interrupted by a knock on the door. A steward’s mate came in and loaded the table with food. Max felt himself starting to drool.
He spread a slice of toast with butter and jam, and took a big bite. “My, this is good!”
“I should have realized. Have a banana, sir? They look quite good—I believe hydroponics has had to thin them out lately.”
Max shuddered. “I don’t think I’ll ever eat bananas again. Or pawpaws.” “Allergic, Captain?”
“Not exactly. Well… yes.”
He finished the toast and said, “About that possibility. I’ll let you know later.” “Very well, Captain.”
Shortly before the dinner hour Max stood in front of the long mirror in the Captain’s bedroom and looked at himself. His hair was short again and two hours sleep had killed some of his fatigue. He settled a cap on his head at the proper angle—the name in the sweat band was “Hendrix”; he had found it laid out with one of his own uniforms to which captain’s insignia had been added. The sunburst on his chest bothered him—that he was indeed captain he conceded, even though it seemed like a wild dream, but he had felt that he was not entitled to anything but the smaller sunburst and circle, despite his four stripes.
Walther and Samuels had been respectful but firm, with Samuels citing precedents that Max could not check on. Max had given in.
He looked at himself, braced his shoulders, and sighed. He might as well go face them. As he walked down the companionway to the lounge he heard the speakers repeating, “All hands! All passengers! Report to Bifrost Lounge!”
The crowd made way for him silently. He went to the Captain’s table—his table!—and sat down at its head. Walther was standing by the chair. “Good evening, Captain.”
“Evening, Mr. Walther.”
Ellie was seated across from him. She caught his eye and smiled. “Hello, Ellie.” He felt himself blushing.
“Good evening, Captain,” she said firmly. She was dressed in the same high style she had worn the first time he had ever seen her in the lounge; it did not seem possible that this lady could be the same girl whose dirty face had looked at him over three-dee boards scratched in dirt.
“Uh, how are your feet?”
“Bandages and bedroom slippers. But the Surgeon did a fine job. I’ll be dancing tomorrow.” “Don’t rush it.”
She looked at his stripes and his chest. “You should talk.”
Before he could answer the unanswerable Walther leaned over and said quietly, “We’re ready, Captain.” “Oh. Go ahead.” Walther tapped on a water glass.
The First Officer explained the situation in calm tones that made it seem reasonable, inevitable. He concluded by saying, “… and so, in accordance with law and the custom of space, I have relinquished my temporary command to your new captain. Captain Jones!”
Max stood up. He looked around, swallowed, tried to speak, and couldn’t. Then, as effectively as if it had been a dramatic pause and not desperation, he picked up his water tumbler and took a sip. “Guests and fellow crewmen,” he said, “we can’t stay here. You know that. I have been told that our Surgeon calls the system we are up against here’symbiotic enslavement’—like dog to man, only more so, and apparently covering the whole animal kingdom on this planet. Well, men aren’t meant for slavery, symbiotic or any sort. But we are too few to win out now, so we must leave.”
He stopped for another sip and Ellie caught his eye, encouraging him. “Perhaps someday other men will come back—better prepared. As for us, I am going to try to take the Asgard back through the… uh, ‘hole’ you might call it, where we came out. It’s a chancy thing. No one is forced to come along—but it is the only possible way to get home. Anyone who’s afraid to chance it will be landed on the north pole of planet number three—the evening star we have been calling ‘Aphrodite.’ You may be able to survive there, although it is pretty hot even at the poles. If you prefer that alternative, turn your names in this
evening to the Purser. The rest of us will try to get home.” He stopped, then said suddenly, “That’s all,” and sat down.
There was no applause and he felt glumly that he had muffed his first appearance. Conversation started up around the room, crewmen left, and steward’s mates quickly started serving. Ellie looked at him and nodded quietly. Mrs. Mendoza was on his left; she said, “Ma—I mean ‘Captain’—is it really so dangerous? I hardly like the thought of trying anything risky. Isn’t there something else we can do?”
“No.”
“But surely there must be?”
“No. I’d rather not discuss it at the table.”
“But… ” He went on firmly spooning soup, trying not to tremble. When he looked up he was caught by a glittering eye across the table, a Mrs. Montefiore, who preferred to be called “Principessa”—a dubious title. “Dolores, don’t bother him. We want to hear about his adventures—don’t we, Captain?”
“No.”
“Come now! I hear that it was terribly romantic.” She drawled the word and gave Ellie a sly, sidelong look. She looked back at Max with the eye of a predatory bird and showed her teeth. She seemed to have more teeth than was possible. “Tell us all about it!”
“No.”
“But you simply can’t refuse!”
Eldreth smiled at her and said, “Princess darling—your mouth is showing.” Mrs. Montefiore shut up.
After dinner Max caught Walther alone. “Mr. Walther?” “Oh—yes, Captain?”
“Am I correct in thinking that it is my privilege to pick the persons who sit at my table?” “Yes, sir.”
“In that case—that Montefiore female. Will you have her moved, please? Before breakfast?” Walther smiled faintly. “Aye aye, sir.”
THE CAPTAIN OF THE ASGARD
They took Sam down and buried him where he had fallen. Max limited it to himself and Walther and Giordano, sending word to Ellie not to come. There was a guard of honor but it was armed to kill and remained spread out around the grave, eyes on the hills. Max read the service in a voice almost too low to be heard—the best he could manage.
Engineering had hurriedly prepared the marker, a pointed slab of stainless metal. Max looked at it before he placed it and thought about the inscription. “Greater love hath no man”?—no, he had decided that Sam wouldn’t like that, with his cynical contempt of all sentimentality. He had considered, “He played the cards he was dealt”—but that didn’t fit Sam either; if Sam didn’t like the cards, he sometimes slipped in a whole new deck. No, this was more Sam’s style; he shoved it into the ground and read it:
IN MEMORY OF
SERGEANT SAM ANDERSON LATE OF THE
IMPERIAL MARINES
“He ate what was set before him.”
Walther saw the marker for the first time. “So that’s how it was? Somehow I thought so.” “Yes. I never did know his right name. Richards. Or maybe Roberts.”
“Oh.” Walther thought over the implication. “We could get him reinstated, sir, posthumously. His prints will identify him.”
“I think Sam would like that.”
“I’ll see to it, sir, when we get back.” “If we get back.”
“If you please, Captain—when we get back.”
Max went straight to the control room. He had been up the evening before and had gotten the first shock of being treated as captain in the Worry Hole over with. When Kelly greeted him with, “Good morning, Captain,” he was able to be almost casual.
“Morning, Chief. Morning, Lundy.” “Coffee, sir?”
“Thanks. About that parking orbit—is it set up?” “Not yet, sir.”
“Then forget it. I’ve decided to head straight back. We can plan it as we go. Got the films?”
“I picked them up earlier.” They referred to the films cached in Max’s stateroom. Simes had managed to do away with the first set at the time of Captain Blaine’s death; the reserve set was the only record of when and where the Asgard had emerged into this space, including records of routine sights taken immediately after transition.
“Okay. Let’s get busy. Kovak can punch for me.”
The others were drifting in, well ahead of time, as was customary in Kelly’s gang. “If you wish, sir. I’d be
glad to compute for the Captain.”
“Kovak can do it. You might help Noguchi and Lundy with the films.”
“Aye aye, sir.” Data flowed to him presently. He had awakened twice in the night in cold fright that he had lost his unique memory. But when the data started coming, he programmed without effort, appropriate pages opening in his mind. The problem was a short departure to rid themselves of the planet’s influence, an adjustment of position to leave the local sun “behind” for simpler treatment of its field, then a long, straight boost for the neighborhood in which they had first appeared in this space. It need not be precise, for transition would not be attempted on the first pass; they must explore the area, taking many more photographic sights and computing from them, to establish a survey that had never been made.
Departure was computed and impressed on tape for the autopilot and the tape placed in the console long before noon. The ship had been keeping house on local time, about fifty-five standard minutes to the hour; now the ship would return to Greenwich, the time always kept in the control room—dinner would be late and some of the “beasts” would as usual reset their watches the wrong way and blame it on the government.
They synchronized with the power room, the tape started running, there remained nothing to do but press the button a few seconds before preset time and thereby allow the autopilot to raise ship. The phone rang, Smythe took it and looked at Max. “For you, Captain. The Purser.”
“Captain?” Samuels sounded worried. “I dislike to disturb you in the control room.” “No matter. What is it?”
“Mrs. Montefiore. She wants to be landed on Aphrodite.” Max thought a moment. “Anybody else change his mind?” “No, sir.”
“They were all notified to turn in their names last night.”
“I pointed that out to her, sir. Her answers were not entirely logical.”
“Nothing would please me more than to dump her there. But after all, we are responsible for her. Tell her no.
“Aye aye, sir. May I have a little leeway in how I express it?” “Certainly. Just keep her out of my hair.”
Max flipped off the phone, found Kelly at his elbow. “Getting close, sir. Perhaps you will take the console now and check the set up? Before you raise?”
“Eh? No, you take her up, Chief. You’ll have the first watch.”
“Aye aye, Captain.” Kelly sat down at the console, Max took the Captain’s seat, feeling self-conscious. He wished that he had learned to smoke a pipe—it looked right to have the Captain sit back, relaxed and smoking his pipe, while the ship maneuvered.
He felt a slight pulsation and was pressed more firmly into the chair cushions; the Asgard was again on her own private gravity, independent of true accelerations. Moments later the ship raised, but with
nothing to show it but the change out the astrodome from blue sky to star-studded ebony of space.
Max got up and found that he was still holding an imaginary pipe, he hastily dropped it. “I’m going below, Chief. Call me when the departure sights are ready to compute. By the way, what rotation of watches do you plan on?”
Kelly locked the board, got up and joined him. “Well, Captain. I had figured on Kovak and me heel-and-toe, with the boys on one in three. We’ll double up later.”
Max shook his head. “No. You and me and Kovak. And we’ll stay on one in three as long as possible. No telling how long we’ll fiddle around out there before we take a stab at it.”
Kelly lowered his voice. “Captain, may I express an opinion?”
“Kelly, any time you stop being frank with me, I won’t have a chance of swinging this. You know that.”
“Thank you, sir. The Captain should not wear himself out. You have to do all the computing as it is.” Kelly added quietly, “The safety of your ship is more important than—well, perhaps ‘pride’ is the word.”
Max took a long time to reply. He was learning, without the benefit of indoctrination, that a commanding officer is not permitted foibles commonplace in any other role; he himself is ruled more strongly by the powers vested in him than is anyone else. The Captain’s privileges—such as chucking a tiresome female from his table—were minor, while the penalties of the inhuman job had unexpected ramifications.
“Chief,” he said slowly, “is there room to move the coffee mess over behind the computer?” Kelly measured the space with his eye. “Yes, sir. Why?”
“I was thinking that would leave room over here to install a cot.” “You intend to sleep up here, sir?”
“Sometimes. But I was thinking of all of us—you shave up here half the time, as it is. The watches for the next few weeks do not actually require the O.W. to be awake most of the time, so we’ll all doss off when we can. What do you think?”
“It’s against regulations, sir. A bad precedent… and a bad example.” He glanced over at Noguchi and Smythe.
“You would write it up formal and proper, for my signature, citing the regulation and suspending it on an emergency basis ‘for the safety of the ship.'”
“If you say so, sir.”
“You don’t sound convinced, so maybe I’m wrong. Think it over and let me know.”
The cot appeared and the order was posted, but Max never saw either Kelly or Kovak stretched out on the cot. As for himself, had he not used it, he would have had little sleep.
He usually ate in the control room as well. Although there was little to do on their way out to rendezvous with nothingness but take sights to determine the relations of that nothingness with surrounding sky, Max found that when he was not computing he was worrying, or discussing his worries with Kelly.
How did a survey ship find its way back through a newly calculated congruency? And what had gone wrong with those that failed to come back? Perhaps Dr. Hendrix could have figured the other side of an
uncharted congruency using only standard ship’s equipment—or perhaps not. Max decided that Dr. Hendrix could have done it; the man had been a fanatic about his profession, with a wide knowledge of the theoretical physics behind the routine numerical computations—much wider, Max was sure, than most astrogators.
Max knew that survey ships calculated congruencies from both sides, applying to gravitational field theory data gathered on the previously unknown side. He made attempts to rough out such a calculation, then gave up, having no confidence in his results—he was sure of his mathematical operations but unsure of theory and acutely aware of the roughness of his data. There was simply no way to measure accurately the masses of stars light-years away with the instruments in the Asgard.
Kelly seemed relieved at his decision. After that they both gave all their time to an attempt to lay out a “groove” to the unmarked point in the heavens where their photosights said that they had come out—in order that they might eventually scoot down that groove, arriving at the locus just below the speed of light, then kick her over and hope.
A similar maneuver on a planet’s surface would be easy—but there is no true parallel with the situation in the sky. The “fixed” stars move at high speeds and there are no other landmarks; to decide what piece of featureless space corresponds with where one was at another time requires a complicated series of calculations having no “elegant” theoretical solutions. For each charted congruency an astrogator has handed to him a table of precalculated solutions—the “Critical Tables for Charted Anomalies.” Max and Kelly had to fudge up their own.
Max spent so much time in the control room that the First Officer finally suggested that passenger morale would be better if he could show himself in the lounge occasionally. Walther did not add that Max should wear a smile and a look of quiet confidence, but he implied it. Thereafter Max endeavored to dine with his officers and passengers.
He had of course seen very little of Eldreth. When he saw her at the first dinner after Walther’s gentle suggestion she seemed friendly but distant. He decided that she was treating him with respect, which made him wonder if she were ill. He recalled that she had originally come aboard in a stretcher, perhaps she was not as rugged as she pretended to be. He made a mental note to ask the Surgeon—indirectly, of course!
They were dawdling over coffee and Max was beginning to fidget with a desire to get back to the Worry Hole. He reminded himself sharply that Walther expected him not to show anxiety—then looked around and said loudly, “This place is like a morgue. Doesn’t anyone dance here these days? Dumont!”
“Yes, Captain?”
“Let’s have some dance music. Mrs. Mendoza, would you honor me?”
Mrs. Mendoza tittered and accepted. She turned out to be a disgrace to Argentina, no sense of rhythm. But he piloted her around with only minor collisions and got her back to her chair, so timed that he could bow out gracefully. He then exercised the privilege of rank by cutting in on Mrs. Daigler. Maggie’s hair was still short but her splendor otherwise restored.
“We’ve missed you, Captain.”
“I’ve been working. Short-handed, you know.”
“I suppose so. Er… Captain, is it pretty soon now?’
“Before we transit? Not long. It has taken this long because we have had to do an enormous number of fiddlin’ calculations—to be safe, you know.”
“Are we really going home?”
He gave what he hoped was a confident smile. “Absolutely. Don’t start any long book from the ship’s library; the Purser won’t let you take it dirtside.”
She sighed. “I feel better.”
He thanked her for the waltz, looked around, saw Mrs. Montefiore and decided that his obligation to maintain morale did not extend that far. Eldreth was seated, so he went to her. “Feet still bothering you, Ellie?”
“No, Captain. Thank you for asking.” “Then will you dance with me?”
She opened her eyes wide. “You mean the Captain has time for po’ li’l ole me?”
He leaned closer. “One more crack like that, dirty face, and you’ll be tossed into irons.” She giggled and wrinkled her nose. “Aye aye, Captain, sir.”
For a while they danced without talking, with Max a little overpowered by her nearness and wondering why he had not done this sooner. Finally she said, “Max? Have you given up three-dee permanently?”
“Huh? Not at all. After we make this transit I’ll have time to play—if you’ll spot me two starships.”
“I’m sorry I ever told you about that. But I do wish you would say hello to Chipsie sometimes. She was asking this morning, ‘Where Maxie?'”
“Oh, I am sorry. I’d take her up to the control room with me occasionally, except that she might push a button and lose us a month’s work. Go fetch her.”
“The crowd would make her nervous. We’ll go see her.” He shook his head. “Not to your room.”
“Huh? Don’t be silly. I’ve got no reputation left anyhow, and a captain can do as he pleases.”
“That shows you’ve never been a captain. See that vulture watching us?” He indicated Mrs. Montefiore with his eyes. “Now go get Chipsie and no more of your back talk.”
“Aye aye, Captain.”
He scratched Chipsie’s chin, fed her sugar cubes, and assured her that she was the finest spider puppy in that part of the sky. He then excused himself.
He was feeling exhilarated and oddly reassured. Seeing Mr. Walther disappearing into his room, he paused at the companionway and on impulse followed him. A matter had been worrying him, this was as good a time as any.
“Dutch? Are you busy?”
The First Officer turned. “Oh. No, Captain. Come in.”
Max waited during the ceremonial coffee, then broached it. “Something on my mind, Mr. Walther—a personal matter.”
“Anything I can do?”
“I don’t think so. But you’re a lot more experienced than I am; I’d like to tell you about it.” “If the Captain wishes.”
“Look, Dutch, this is a ‘Max’ matter, not a ‘Captain’ matter.”
Walther smiled. “All right. But don’t ask me to change my form of address. I might pick up a bad habit.”
“Okay, okay.” Max had intended to sound out Walther about his phony record: had Dr. Hendrix reported it? Or hadn’t he?
But he found it impossible to follow that line; being a captain had forced him into a different mold. “I want to tell you how I got into this ship.” He told it all, not suppressing Sam’s part now that it no longer could hurt Sam. Walther listened gravely.
“I’ve been waiting for you to mention this, Captain,” he said at last. “Dr. Hendrix reported it to me, in less detail, when he put you up for apprentice astrogator. We agreed that it was a matter that need not be raised inside the ship.”
“It’s what happens after we get back that frets me. If we get back.” “When we get back. Are you asking for advice? Or help? Or what?” “I don’t know. I just wanted to tell you.”
“Mmmm… there are two alternatives. One we could handle here, by altering a not very important report. In which…”
“No, Dutch. I won’t have phony reports going out of the Asgard.”
“I was fairly certain you would say that. I feel the same way, except that I would feel obligated for—well, various reasons—to cover up for you if you asked it.”
“I once intended to arrange a phony on it. I even felt justified. But I can’t do it now.”
“I understand. The remaining alternative is to report it and face the music. In which case I’ll see it through with you—and so will the Chief Engineer and the Purser, I feel sure.”
Max sat back, feeling warm and happy. “Thanks, Dutch. I don’t care what they do to me… just as long as it doesn’t keep me out of space.”
“I don’t think they’ll try to do that, not if you bring this ship in. But if they do—well, they’ll know they’ve been in a fight. Meantime try to forget it.”
“I’ll try.” Max frowned. “Dutch? Tell me the truth, what do you think about the stunt I pulled?” “That’s a hard question, Captain. More important is, how do you feel about it?”
“Me? I don’t know. I know how I used to feel—I felt belligerent.” “Eh?”
“I was always explaining—in my mind of course—why I did it, justifying myself, pointing out that the system was at fault, not me. Now I don’t want to justify myself. Not that I regret it, not when I think what I would have missed. But I don’t want to duck out of paying for it, either.”
Walther nodded. “That sounds like a healthy attitude. Captain, no code is perfect. A man must conform with judgment and commonsense, not with blind obedience. I’ve broken rules; some violations I paid for, some I didn’t. This mistake you made could have turned you into a moralistic prig, a ‘Regulation Charlie’ determined to walk the straight and narrow and to see that everyone else obeyed the letter of the law. Or it could have made you a permanent infant who thinks rules are for everyone but him. It doesn’t seem to have had either effect; I think it has matured you.”
Max grinned. “Well, thanks, Dutch.” He stood up. “I’ll get back up to the Hole and mess up a few figures.”
“Captain? Are you getting enough sleep?”
“Me? Oh, sure, I get a nap almost every watch.”
“Minus four hours, Captain.” Max sat up on the cot in the control room, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. The Asgard was in the groove, had been boosting along it for days, working up to that final burst that would squeeze them out of this space and into another—one they knew or some other, depending on how well their “fudging” had conformed to the true structure of the universe.
Max blinked at Kelly. “How long have you been up here?” “Not long, Captain.”
“Did you get any sleep?” “Well, now, Captain…”
“Forget it, you’re incorrigible. Got one ready?” “Yes, sir.”
“Shoot.” Max sat on the cot while they passed data to him, eyes closed while he programmed the problem and translated it into the binary numbers the computer understood. He had not been out of the Hole more than a few minutes at a time for days. He would doze between sights, wake up and process one, then lie down again.
He had kept Kelly and Kovak on watch-and-watch as long as possible—although it was hard to get Kelly to rest. Lundy, Smythe, and Noguchi had continued to rotate, overlapping when the going got faster in order to help each other with plate changing and readings. For Max there could be no relief; he must process each sight, supplying from his card-file memory the information in the missing manuals.
All the Worry gang were there but Lundy. He came up as Max finished and ordered the correction. “Compliments of cookie,” he announced, setting down a gallon of ice cream.
“What flavor?” asked Max. “Chocolate chip, sir.”
“My favorite. Just remember when you are dishing it that efficiency marks will be coming up one of these days.”
“Now, Captain, that’s not fair. The Chief has a lot more mass to feed than you have.” “And I have a very high metabolic rate,” announced Noguchi. “I need more.”
“Noggy, you have a built-in space warp in each leg. We’ll let Kelly dish it and hope that pride will restrain him.” Max turned to Kelly. “What schedule are we on?”
“Twenty minutes, Captain.” “Think we need that so soon?” “Just to be safe, sir.”
“Okay.” They ran another sight and ate the ice cream, after which Max shifted them to transition stations. Kelly did not take the computer. A key punched by Kovak gave the same answer as one punched by Kelly, and Max wanted Kelly on the vernier stereograph where his long experience could make the best of poor data. Lundy assisted Kelly, with Smythe and Noguchi shooting and running.
At minus two hours Max called Compagnon, told him that they were narrowing down; the Chief Engineer assured him that he would nurse boost and vector himself from there on. “Good hunting, Captain.”
On a ten minute schedule Max still found it easy, though he had to admit he wasn’t as fresh as a still-warm egg. But he was kept comfortably busy and the corrections were pleasantly
small—Compagnon must be doing a real job down there. When the preset on the computer said less than one hour to zero, he stood up and stretched. “Everybody all set. Somebody wake up Noggy.
Everybody got a pepper pill in him? And who’s got one for me?”
Kovak leaned back and handed him one, Max popped it into his mouth and downed it with a swig of coffee. “Grab a last sandwich if you’re going to. All right, gang—let’s hit it!”
The data flowed in a steady stream. After a while Max began to tire. He would no more than pick one correction off the lights on the computer and feed it to the power room than Kelly would have more data ready. A correction showed up that seemed off the curve, as if they were “hunting” excessively. He glanced back at the lights before applying it—then realized that a new set of data was being offered.
“Repeat!” he called out.
Kelly repeated. Max ran the figures over in his mind and found that they meant nothing to him. What had that last correction implied? Had he used a legitimate method in surveying this anomaly? Could you even call it surveying? Was this what a survey ship did to get out? How could they expect a man to…
“Captain!” Kelly said sharply.
He shook his head and sat up. “Sorry. Hold the next one.” With a feeling of panic he reviewed the data in his mind and tried to program. He knew at last how it felt to have the deadline bearing down fast as light—and to lose confidence.
He told himself that he must abort—slide past under the speed of light, spend weeks swinging back, and try again. But he knew that if he did, his nerve would never sustain him for a second try.
At that bad moment a feeling came over him that someone was standing behind his chair, resting hands
on his shoulders—quieting him, soothing him. He began clearly and sharply to call off figures to Kovak.
He was still calling them out with the precision of an automaton twenty minutes later. He accepted one more sight, digested it, sent it on to Kovak with his eyes on the preset. He applied the correction, a tiny one, and called out, “Stand by!” He pressed the button that allowed the chronometer to kick it over on the microsecond. Only then did he look around, but there was no one behind him.
“There’s the Jeep!” he heard Kelly say exultantly. “And there’s the Ugly Duckling!” Max looked up. They were back in the familiar sky of Nu Pegasi and Halcyon.
Five minutes later Kelly and Max were drinking cold coffee and cleaning up the remains of a plate of sandwiches while Noguchi and Smythe completed the post-transition sights. Kovak and Lundy had gone below for a few minutes relief before taking the first watch. Max glanced again at the astrodome. “So we made it. I never thought we would.”
“Really, Captain? There was never any doubt in my mind after you took command.” “Hmmm! I’m glad you didn’t know how I felt.”
Kelly ignored this. “You know, sir, when you are programming your voice sounds amazingly like the Doctor’s.”
Max looked at him sharply. “I had a bad time there once,” he said slowly. “Shortly before zip.” “Yes, sir. I know.”
“Then—Look, this was just a feeling, you see? I don’t go for ghosts. But I had the notion that Doc was standing over me, the way he used to, checking what I did. Then everything was all right.”
Kelly nodded. “Yes. He was here. I was sure he would be.”
“Huh? What do you mean?” Kelly would not explain. He turned instead to inspect post-transition plates, comparing them happily with standard plates from the chart safe—the first such opportunity since the ship was lost.
“I suppose,” said Max when Kelly was through, “that we had better rough out an orbit for Nu Pegasi before we sack in.” He yawned. “Brother, am I dead!”
Kelly said, “For Nu Pegasi, sir?”
“Well, we can’t shoot for Halcyon itself at this distance. What did you have in mind?” “Nothing, sir.”
“Spill it.”
“Well, sir, I guess I had assumed that we would reposition for transit to Nova Terra. But if that is what the Captain wants—”
Max drummed on the chart safe. It had never occurred to him that anyone would expect him to do anything, after accomplishing the impossible, but to shape course for the easy, target-in-sight destination they had left from, there to wait for competent relief.
“You expected me to take her on through? With no tables and no help?” “I did not intend to presume, Captain. It was an unconscious assumption.”
Max straightened up. “Tell Kovak to hold her as she goes. Phone Mr. Walther to see me at once in my cabin.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
The First Officer met him outside his cabin. “Hello, Dutch. Come in.” They entered and Max threw his cap on his desk. “Well, we made it.”
“Yes, sir. I was watching from the lounge.” “You don’t seem surprised.”
“Should I be, Captain?”
Max sprawled in his easy chair, stretching his weary back muscles. “You should be. Yes, sir, you should be.”
“All right. I’m surprised.”
Max looked up and scowled. “Dutch, where is this ship going now?” Walther answered, “The Captain has not yet told me.”
“Confound it! You know what I mean. Our schedule calls for Nova Terra. But there is Halcyon sitting right over there—a blind man could find it with a cane. What destination did you have in mind when you boosted me into command? Tell me what you expected then? Before you tagged me.”
“I had in mind,” Walther answered, “getting a captain for the Asgard.”
“That’s no answer. See here, the passengers have a stake in this. Sure, I had to take this risk for them, no choice. But now there is a choice. Shouldn’t we tell them and let them vote on it?”
Walther shook his head emphatically. “You don’t ask passengers anything, sir. Not in a ship underway. It is not fair to them to ask them. You tell them.”
Max jumped up and strode the length of the cabin. “‘Fair,’ you say. Fair! It’s not fair to me.” He swung and faced Walther. “Well? You’re not a passenger. You’re my First Officer. What do you think we should do?”
Walther stared him in the eye. “I can’t decide that for the Captain. That is why you are Captain.”
Max stood still and closed his eyes. The figures stood out clearly, in neat columns. He went to his phone and savagely punched the call for the control room. “Captain speaking. Is Kelly still there? Oh—good, Chief. We reposition for Nova Terra. Start work—I’ll be up in a minute.”
THE TOMAHAWK
Max liked this time of day, this time of year. He was lying in the grass on the little rise west of the barn, with his head propped up so that he could see to the northwest. If he kept his eyes there, on the exit ring of the C.S.&E. Ring Road, he would be able, any instant now, to see the Tomahawk plunge out and shoot across the gap in free trajectory. At the moment he was not reading, no work was pushing him, he was just being lazy and enjoying the summer evening.
A squirrel sat up near by, stared at him, decided he was harmless and went about its business. A bird swooped past.
There was a breathless hush, then suddenly a silver projectile burst out of the exit ring, plunged across the draw and entered the ring on the far side—just as the sound hit him.
“Boy, oh boy!” he said softly. “It never looks like they’d make it.”
It was all that he had climbed the rise to see, but he did not get up at once. Instead he pulled a letter from his pocket and reread the ending: “… I guess Daddy was glad to get me back in one piece because he finally relented. Putzie and I were married a week ago—and oh Max, I’m so happy! You must visit us the next time you hit dirt at Hespera.” She had added, “P.S. Mr. Chips sends her love—and so do I.”
Quite a gal, Ellie. She usually got her own way, one way or another. He felt a bit sorry for Putzie. Now if they had all stayed on Charity…
Never mind—an astrogator ought not to get married. Fondly he fingered the sunburst on his chest. Too bad he had not been able to stay with the Asgard—but of course they were right; he could not ship as assistant in a ship where he had once been skipper. And assistant astrogator of the Elizabeth Regina was a good billet, too; everybody said the Lizzie was a taut ship.
Besides that, not every young A.A. had a new congruency to his credit, even now being surveyed. He had nothing to kick about. He didn’t even mind the whopping big fine the Council of the Guilds had slapped on him, nor the official admonition that had been entered in his record. They had let him stay in space, which was the important thing, and the admonition appeared right along with the official credit for the “Hendrix” congruency.
And, while he didn’t argue the justice of the punishment—he’d been in the wrong and he knew it—nevertheless the guilds were set up wrong; the rules ought to give everybody a chance. Some day he’d be senior enough to do a little politicking on that point.
In the meantime, if he didn’t get moving, he’d have to buy that taxi. Max got up and started down the slope. The helicab was parked in front of the house and the driver was standing near it, looking out over the great raw gash of the Missouri-Arkansas Power Project. The fields Max once had worked were gone, the cut reached clear into the barn yard. The house was still standing but the door hung by one hinge and some kid had broken all the windows. Max looked at the house and wondered where Maw and the man she had married were now?—not that he really cared and no one around Clyde’s Corners seemed to know. They had told him at the courthouse that Maw had collected her half of the government-condemnation money and the pair of them had left town.
Probably their money was gone by now—Max’s half of the money was gone completely, it hadn’t quite paid his fine. If they were broke, maybe Montgomery was having to do some honest work, for Maw wasn’t the woman to let a man loaf when she was needing. The thought pleased Max; he felt he had a score to settle with Montgomery, but Maw was probably settling it for him.
The driver turned toward him. “Be a big thing when they get this finished. You ready to go, sir?”
Max took a last glance around. “Yes. I’m all through here.” They climbed into the cabin. “Where to? Back to the Corners?”
Max thought about it. He really ought to save money—but shucks, he would save plenty this next trip. “No, fly me over to Springfield and drop me at the southbound ring road station. I’d like to make it in time to catch the Javelin.”
That would put him in Earthport before morning.
The End
Posts Regarding Life and Contentment
Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.
Posts about the Changes in America
America is going through a period of change. Change is good… that is, after it occurs. Often however, there are large periods of discomfort as the period of adjustment takes place. Here are some posts that discuss this issue.
More Posts about Life
I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.
Articles & Links
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This is the full Text of the novel by Robert Heinlein.
Of all the science fiction that is out there in the world, the fiction that is the closest approximation to the way things REALLY work in this universe is not something from Star Trek, or Star Wars. It is instead more like the Robert Heinlein novel “Glory Road”.
That is a very stark truth. Pay attention. Here, I present this novel in it’s entirety to the reader to consider.
Glory Road
Robert A. Heinlein
BRITANNUS (shocked):
Caesar, this is not proper.
THEODOTUS (outraged):
How?
CAESAR (recovering his self-possession):
Pardon him Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
Caesar and Cleopatra, Act II
-George Bernard Shaw
Chapter 1
I know a place where there is no smog and no parking problem and no population explosion . . . no Cold War and no H-bombs and no television commercials . . . no Summit Conferences, no Foreign Aid, no hidden taxes–no income tax. The climate is the sort that Florida and California claim (and neither has), the land is lovely, the people are friendly and hospitable to strangers, the women are beautiful and amazingly anxious to please-
I could go back. I could-
It was an election year with the customary theme of anything you can do I can do better, to a background of beeping sputniks. I was twenty-one but couldn’t figure out which party to vote against.
Instead I phoned my draft board and told them to send me that notice.
I object to conscription the way a lobster objects to boiling water: it may be his finest hour but it’s not his choice. Nevertheless I love my country. Yes, I do, despite propaganda all through school about how patriotism is obsolete. One of my great-grandfathers died at Gettysburg and my father made that long walk back from Chosen Reservoir, so I didn’t buy this new idea. I argued against it in class–until it got me a “D,” in Social Studies, then I shut up and passed the course.
But I didn’t change my opinions to match those of a teacher who didn’t know Little Round Top from Seminary Ridge.
Are you of my generation? If not, do you know why we turned out so wrong-headed? Or did you just write us off as “juvenile delinquents?”
I could write a book. Brother! But I’ll note one key fact: After you’ve spent years and years trying to knock the patriotism out of a boy, don’t expect him to cheer when he gets a notice reading:
GREETINGS: You are hereby ordered for induction into the Armed Forces of the United States-
Talk about a “Lost Generation!” I’ve read that post-World-War-One jazz–Fitzgerald and Hemingway and so on–and it strikes me that all they had to worry about was wood alcohol in bootleg liquor. They had the world by the tail–so why were they crying?
Sure, they had Hitler and the Depression ahead of them. But they didn’t know that. We had Khrushchev and the H-bomb and we certainly did know.
But we were not a “Lost Generation.” We were worse; we were the “Safe Generation.” Not beatniks. The Beats were never more than a few hundred out of millions. Oh, we talked beatnik jive and dug cool sounds in stereo and disagreed with Playboy’s poll of jazz musicians just as earnestly as if it mattered. We read Salinger and Kerouac and used language that shocked our parents and dressed (sometimes) in beatnik fashion. But we didn’t think that bongo drums and a beard compared with money in the bank. We weren’t rebels. We were as conformist as army worms. “Security” was our unspoken watchword.
Most of our watchwords were unspoken but we followed them as compulsively as a baby duck takes to water. “Don’t fight City Hall.” “Get it while the getting is good.” “Don’t get caught.” High goals, these, great moral values, and they all mean “Security.” “Going steady” (my generation’s contribution to the American Dream) was based on security; it insured that Saturday night could never be the loneliest night for the weak. If you went steady, competition was eliminated.
But we had ambitions. Yes, sir! Stall off your draft board and get through college. Get married and get her pregnant, with both families helping you to stay on as a draft-immune student. Line up a job well thought of by draft boards, say with some missile firm. Better yet, take postgraduate work if your folks (or hers) could afford it and have another kid and get safely beyond the draft–besides, a doctor’s degree was a union card, for promotion and pay and retirement.
Short of a pregnant wife with well-to-do parents the greatest security lay in being 4-F. Punctured eardrums were good but an allergy was best. One of my neighbors had a terrible asthma that lasted till his twenty-sixth birthday. No fake–he was allergic to draft boards. Another escape was to convince an army psychiatrist that your interests were more suited to the State Department than to the Army. More than half of my generation were “unfit for military service.”
I don’t find this surprising. There is an old picture of a people traveling by sleigh through deep woods–pursued by wolves. Every now and then they grab one of their number and toss him to the wolves. That’s conscription even if you call it “selective service” and pretty it up with USOs and “veterans’ benefits”–it’s tossing a minority to the wolves while the rest go on with that single-minded pursuit of the three-car garage, the swimming pool, and the safe & secure retirement benefits.
I am not being holier-than-thou; I was after that same three-car garage myself.
However, my folks could not put me through college. My stepfather was an Air Force warrant officer with all he could handle to buy shoes for his own lads. When he was transferred to Germany just before my high school senior year and I was invited to move in with my father’s sister and her husband, both of us were relieved.
I was no better off financially as my uncle-in-law was supporting a first wife–under California law much like being an Alabama field hand before the Civil War. But I had $35 a month as a “surviving dependent of a deceased veteran.” (Not “war orphan,” which is another deal that pays more.) My mother was certain that Dad’s death had resulted from wounds but the Veterans Administration thought differently, so I was just a “surviving dependent.”
$35 a month did not fill the hole I put in their groceries and it was understood that when I graduated I would root for myself. By doing my military time, no doubt–But I had my own plan; I played football and finished senior year season with the California Central Valley secondary school record for yards gained and a broken nose–and started in at the local State College the next fall with a job “sweeping the gym” at $10 more a month than that pension, plus fees.
I couldn’t see the end out my plan was clear: Hang on, teeth and toenails, and get an engineering degree. Avoid the draft and marriage. On graduation get a deferred-status job. Save money and pick up a law degree, too–because, back in Homestead, Florida, a teacher had pointed out that, while engineers made money, the big money and boss jobs went to lawyers. So I was going to beat the game, yes, sir! Be a Horatio Alger hero. I would have headed straight for that law degree but for the fact that the college did not offer law.
At the end of the season my sophomore year they deemphasized football.
We had had a perfect season–no wins. “Flash” Gordon (that’s me–in the sports write-ups) stood one in yardage and points; nevertheless Coach and I were out of jobs. Oh, I “swept the gym” the rest of that year on basketball, fencing, and track, but the alumnus who picked up the tab wasn’t interested in a basketball player who was only six feet one. I spent that summer pushing an idiot stick and trying to line up a deal elsewhere. I turned twenty-one that summer, which chopped that $35/month, too. Shortly after Labor Day I fell back on a previously prepared position, i.e., I made that phone call to my draft board.
I had in mind a year in the Air Force, then win a competitive appointment to the Air Force Academy–be an astronaut and famous, instead of rich.
Well, we can’t all be astronauts. The Air Force had its quota or something. I was in the Army so fast I hardly had time to pack.
So I set out to be the best chaplain’s clerk in the Army; I made sure that “typing” was listed as one of my skills. If I had anything to say about it, I was going to do my time at Fort Carson, typing neat copies while going to night school on the side.
I didn’t have anything to say about it. Ever been in Southeast Asia? It makes Florida look like a desert. Wherever you step it squishes. Instead of tractors they use water buffaloes. The bushes are filled with insects and natives who shoot at you. It wasn’t a war–not even a “Police Action.” We were “Military Advisers.” But a Military Adviser who has been dead four days in that heat smells the same way a corpse does in a real war.
I was promoted to corporal. I was promoted seven times. To corporal.
I didn’t have the right attitude. So my company commander said. My daddy had been a Marine and my stepfather was Air Force; my only Army ambition had been to be a chaplain’s clerk Stateside. I didn’t like the Army. My company commander didn’t like the Army either; he was a first lieutenant who hadn’t made captain and every time he got to brooding Corporal Gordon lost his stripes.
I lost them the last time for telling him that I was writing to my Congressman to find out why I was the only man in Southeast Asia who was going to be retired for old age instead of going home when his time was up–and that made him so mad he not only busted me but went out and was a hero, and then he was dead. And that’s how I got this scar across my broken nose because I was a hero, too, and should have received the Medal of Honor, only nobody was looking.
While I was recovering, they decided to send me home.
Major Ian Hay, back in the “War to End War,” described the structure of military organizations: Regardless of T.O., all military bureaucracies consist of a Surprise Party Department, a Practical Joke Department, and a Fairy Godmother Department. The first two process most matters as the third is very small; the Fairy Godmother Department is one elderly female GS-5 clerk usually out on sick leave.
But when she is at her desk, she sometimes puts down her knitting and picks a name passing across her desk and does something nice. You have seen how I was whipsawed by the Surprise Party and Practical Joke Departments; this time the Fairy Godmother Department picked Pfc. Gordon.
Like this–When I knew that I was going home as soon as my face healed (little brown brother hadn’t sterilized his bolo), I put in a request to be discharged in Wiesbaden, where my family was, rather than California, home of record. I am not criticizing little brown brother; he hadn’t intended me to heal at all–and he would have managed it if he hadn’t been killing my company commander and too hurried to do a good job on me. I hadn’t sterilized my bayonet but he didn’t complain, he just sighed and came apart, like a doll with its sawdust cut. I felt grateful to him; he not only had rigged the dice so that I got out of the Army, he also gave me a great idea.
He and the Ward surgeon–The Surgeon had said, “You’re going to get well, son. But you’ll be scarred like a Heidelberg student.”
Which got me thinking–You couldn’t get a decent job without a degree, any more than you could be a plasterer without being a son or nephew of somebody in the plasterers’ union. But there are degrees and degrees. Sir Isaac Newton, with a degree from a cow college such as mine, would wash bottles for Joe Thumbfingers–if Joe had a degree from a European university.
Why not Heidelberg? I intended to milk my G.I. benefits; I had that in mind when I put in that too hasty call to my draft board.
According to my mother everything was cheaper in Germany. Maybe I could stretch those benefits
into a doctor’s degree. Herr Doktor Gordon, mit scars on der face from Heidelberg yet!–that would rate an extra $3,000 a year from any missile firm.
Hell, I would fight a couple of student duels and add real Heidelberg scars to back up the dandy I had. Fencing was a sport I really enjoyed (though the one that counted least toward “sweeping the gym”). Some people cannot stand knives, swords, bayonets, anything sharp; psychiatrists have a word for it: aichmophobia. Idiots who drive cars a hundred miles an hour on fifty-mile-an-hour roads will nevertheless panic at the sight of a bare blade.
I’ve never been bothered that way and that’s why I’m alive and one reason why I kept being bucked back to corporal. A “Military Adviser” can’t afford to be afraid of knives, bayonets, and such; he must cope with them. I’ve never been afraid of them because I’m always sure I can do unto another what he is planning to do unto me.
I’ve always been right, except that time I made the mistake of being a hero, and that wasn’t too bad a mistake. If I had tried to bug out instead of staying to disembowel him, he would have chopped my spine in two. As it was, he never got a proper swing at me; his jungle cutter just slashed my face as he came apart–leaving me with a nasty wound that was infected long before the helicopters came. But I never felt it. Presently I got dizzy and sat down in the mud and when I woke up, a medic was giving me plasma.
I rather looked forward to trying a Heidelberg duel. They pad your body and arm and neck and put a steel guard on your eyes and nose and across your ears–this is not like encountering a pragmatic Marxist in the jungle. I once handled one of those swords they use in Heidelberg; it was a light, straight saber, sharp on the edge, sharp a few inches on the back–but a blunt point! A toy, suited only to make pretty scars for girls to admire.
I got a map and whaddayuh know!–Heidelberg is just down the road from Wiesbaden. So I requested my discharge in Wiesbaden.
The ward surgeon said, “You’re an optimist, son,” but initialed it. The medical sergeant in charge of paperwork said, “Out of the question, Soldier.” I won’t say money changed hands but the endorsement the hospital’s C.O. signed read FORWARDED. The ward agreed that I was bucking for a psycho; Uncle Sugar does not give free trips around the world to Pfcs.
I was already so far around that I was as close to Hoboken as to San Francisco–and closer to Wiesbaden. However, policy called for shipping returnees back via the Pacific. Military policy is like cancer: Nobody knows where it comes from but it can’t be ignored.
The Fairy Godmother Department woke up and touched me with its wand.
I was about to climb aboard a bucket called the General Jones bound for Manila, Taipei, Yokohama, Pearl, and Seattle when a dispatch came granting my USAREUR, Heidelberg, Germany, by available military transportation, for discharge, at own request see reference foxtrot. Accumulated leave could be taken or paid, see reference bravo. Subject man was authorized to return to Zone Interior (the States) any time within twelve months of separation, via available military transportation at no further expense to the government. Unquote.
The paper-work sergeant called me in and showed me this, his face glowing with innocent glee. “Only there ain’t no ‘available transportation,’ Soldier–so haul ass aboard the General Jones. You’re going to Seattle, like I said.”
I knew what he meant: The only transport going west in a long, long time had sailed for Singapore thirty-six hours earlier. I stared at that dispatch, thinking about boiling oil and wondering if he had held it back just long enough to keep me from sailing under it.
I shook my head. “I’m going to catch the General Smith in Singapore. Be a real human type, Sarge, and cut me a set of orders for it.”
“Your orders are cut. For the Jones. For Seattle.”
“Gosh,” I said thoughtfully. “I guess I had better go cry on the chaplain.” I faded out fast but I didn’t see the chaplain; I went to the airfield. It took five minutes to find that no commercial nor U.S. military flight was headed for Singapore in time to do me any good.
But there was an Australian military transport headed for Singapore that night. Aussies weren’t even “military advisers” out often were around, as “military observers.” I found the planes skipper, a flight leftenant, and put the situation to him. He grinned and said, “Always room for one more bloke. Wheels up shortly after tea, likely. If the old girl will fly.”
I knew it would fly; it was a Gooney Bird, a C-47, mostly patches and God knows how many millions of miles. It would get to Singapore on one engine if asked. I knew my luck was in as soon as I saw that grand old collection of masking tape and glue sitting on the field.
Four hours later I was in her and wheels up.
I checked in aboard USMTS General Smith the next morning, rather wet–the Pride of Tasmania had flown through storms the night before and a Gooney Birds one weakness is that they leak. But who minds clean rain after jungle mud? The ship was sailing that evening which was grand news.
Singapore is like Hong Kong only flat; one afternoon was enough. I had a drink in the old Raffles, another in the Adelphi, got rained on in the Great World amusement peak walked through Change Alley with a hand on my money and the other on my orders–and bought an Irish Sweepstakes ticket.
I don’t gamble, if you will concede that poker is a game of skill. However this was a tribute to the goddess of fortune, thanks for a long run of luck. If she chose to answer with $140,000 US, I wouldn’t throw it in her face. If she didn’t . . . well, the tickets face value was one pound, $2.80 US; I paid $9.00 Singapore, or $3.00 US–a small gesture from a man who had just won a free trip around the world–not to mention coming out of the jungle still breathing.
But I got my three dollars’ worth at once, as I fled out of Change Alley to avoid two dozen other walking banks anxious to sell me more tickets, Singapore dollars, any sort of money–or my hat if I let go of it–reached the street, hailed a cab, and told the driver to take me to the boat landing. This was a victory of spirit over flesh because I had been debating whether to snatch the chance to ease enormous biological back pressure. Good old Scarface Gordon had been an Eagle Scout awfully long and Singapore is one of the Seven Sinful Cities where anything may be had.
I am not implying that I had remained faithful to the Girl Next Door. The young lady back home who had taught me most about the World, the Flesh, and the Devil, with an amazing send-off the night before I was inducted, had “Dear-Johnned” me in basic training; I felt gratitude but no loyalty. She got married soon after, now has two children, neither of them mine.
The real cause of my biological unease was geographical. Those little brown brothers I had been fitting, with and against, all had little brown sisters, many of whom could be had for a price, or even pour l’amour ou pour le sport.
But that had been all the local talent for a long time. Nurses? Nurses are officers–and the rare USO entertainer who got that far from Stateside was even more thoroughly blocked off than were nurses.
I did not object to little brown sisters because they were brown. I was as brown as they were, in my face, except for a long pink scar. I drew the line because they were little.
I was a hundred and ninety pounds of muscle and no fat, and I could never convince myself that a female four feet ten inches tall and weighing less than ninety pounds and looking twelve years old is in fact a freely consenting adult. To me it felt like a grim sort of statutory rape and produced psychic impotence.
Singapore looked like the place to find a big girl. But when I escaped from Change Alley, I suddenly didn’t like people, big or little, male or female, and headed for the ship–and probably saved myself from pox, Cupid’s catarrh, soft chancre, Chinese rot, saltwater itch, and athletes foot–the wisest decision I had made since, at fourteen, I had declined to wrestle a medium-sized alligator.
I told the driver in English what landing I wanted, repeated it in memorized Cantonese (not too well; its a nine-toned language, and French and German are all I had in school), and showed him a map with the landing marked and its name printed in English and drawn in Chinese.
Everybody who left the ship was given one of these maps. In Asia every cab driver speaks enough English to take you to the Red Light district and to shops where you buy “bargains.” But be is never able to find your dock or boat landing.
My cabbie listened, glanced at the map, and said, “Okay, Mac. I dig it,” and took off and rounded a corner with tires squealing while shouting at peddle cabs, coolies, children, dogs. I relaxed, happy at having found this cabbie among thousands.
Suddenly I sat up and shouted for him to stop.
I must explain something; I can’t get lost.
Call it a “psi” talent, like that study they study at Duke. Mother used to say that sonny had a “bump of direction.” Call it what you will, I was six or seven before I realized that other people could get lost. I always know which way is north, the direction of the point where I started and how far away it is. I can head straight back or retrace my steps, even in dark and jungle. This was the main reason why I was always promoted back to corporal and usually shoved into a sergeant’s job. Patrols I headed always came back–the survivors, I mean. This was comforting to city boys who didn’t want to be in that jungle anyhow.
I had shouted because the driver had swung right when he should have swung left and was about to cut back across his own trade
He speeded up.
I yelled again. He no longer dug English.
It was another mile and several tunas later when he had to stop because of a traffic jam. I got out and he jumped out and started screaming in Cantonese and pointing at the meter in his cab. We were surrounded by Chinese adding to the din and smaller ones plucking at my clothes. I kept my hand on my
money and was happy indeed to spot a cop. I yelled and caught his eye.
He came through the crowd brandishing a long staff. He was a Hindu; I said to him, “Do you speak English?”
“Certainly. And I understand American.” I explained my trouble, showed him the map, and said that the driver had picked me up at Chaise Alley and been driving in aides.
The cop nodded and talked with the driver in a third language–Malayan, I suppose. At last the cop said, “He doesn’t understand English. He thought you said to drive to Johore.”
The bridge to Johore is as far as you can get from the anchorage and still be on the Island of Singapore. I said angrily, “The hell he doesn’t understand English!”
The cap shrugged. “You hired him, you must pay what is on the taximeter. Then I will explain to him where you wish to go and arrange a fixed fee.”
“I’ll see him in hell first!”
“That is possible. The distance is quite short–in this neighborhood. I suggest that you pay. The waiting time is mounting up.”
There comes a time when a man must stand up for his rights, or he can’t bear to look at himself in a mirror to shave. I had already shaved, so I paid–$18.50 Sing., for wasting an hour and ending up farther from the landing. The driver wanted a tip but the cop shut him up and then let me walk with him.
Using both hands I hung onto my orders and money, and the Sweepstakes ticket folded in with the money. But my pen disappeared and cigarettes and handkerchief and a Ronson lighter. When I felt ghost fingers at the strap of my watch, I agreed to the cops suggestion that he had a cousin, an honest man, who would drive me to my landing for a fixed–and moderate–fee.
The “cousin” turned out to be just coming down the street; half an hour later I was aboard ship. I shall never forget Singapore, a most educational city.
Chapter 2
Two months later on the French Riviera. The Fairy Godmother Department watched over me across the Indian Ocean, up the Red Sea, and clear to Napoli. I lived a healthy life, exercising and getting tan every morning, sleeping afternoons, playing poker at night. There are many people who do not. Know the odds (poor, but computable) for improving a poker hand in the draw, but are anxious to learn. When we got to Italy I had a beautiful tan and a sizable nest egg.
Early in the voyage someone went broke and wanted to put a Sweepstakes ticket into the game. After some argument Sweepstakes tickets were made valuta at a discount, $2.00 USA per ticket. I finished the trip with fifty-three tickets.
Hitching a flight from Napoli to Frankfurt took only hours. Then the Fairy Godmother Department handed me back to the Surprise Party and Practical Joke Departments.
Before going to Heidelberg I ducked over to Wiesbaden to see my mother, my stepfather and the kids–and found that they had just left for the States, on their way to Elmendorf AFB in Alaska.
So I went to Heidelberg to be processed, and looked the town over while the led tape unwound.
Lovely town–Handsome castle, good beer, and big girls with rosy cheeks and shapes like Coca-Cola bottles–Yes, this looked like a nice place to get a degree. I started inquiring into rooms and such, and met a young kraut wearing a studenten cap and some face scars as ugly as mine–things were looking up.
I discussed my plans with the first sergeant of the transient company.
He shook his head. “Oh, you poor boy!”
Why? No G.I. benefits for Gordon–I wasn’t a veteran.
Never mind that scar. Never mind that I had killed more men in combat than you could crowd into a–well, never mind. That thing was not a “war” and Congress had not passed a bill providing educational benefits for us “Military Advisers.”
I suppose this was my own fault. All my life there had been “G.I. benefits”–why, I had shared a bench in chem lab with a veteran who was going to school on the G.I. Bill.
This fatherly sergeant said, “Don’t take it hard, son. Go home, get a job, wait a year. They’ll pass it and date it bade, almost certainly. You’re young.”
So here I was on the Riviera, a civilian, enjoying a taste of Europe before using that transportation home. Heidelberg was out of the question. Oh, the pay I hadn’t been able to spend in the jungle, plus accumulated leave, plus my winnings at poker, added up to a sum which would have kept me a year in Heidelberg. But it would never stretch enough for a degree. I had been counting on that mythical “G.I. Bill” for eating money and on my cash as a cushion.
My (revised) plan was obvious. Grab that top home before my year was up–grab it before school opened. Use the cash I had to pay board to Aunt and Uncle, work next summer and see what turned up. With the draft no longer hanging over me I could find some way to sweat out that last year even if I couldn’t be “Heir Doktor Gordon.”
However, school didn’t open until fall and here it was spring. I was damn well going to see a little of Europe before I applied nose to grindstone; another such chance might never come.
There was another reason for waiting; those Sweepstakes tickets. The drawing for horses was coming up.
The Irish Sweepstakes starts as a lottery. First they sell enough tickets to paper Grand Central Station. The Irish hospitals get 25 percent and are the only sure winners. Shortly before the race they draw for horses. Let’s say twenty horses are entered. If your ticket fails to draw a horse, its wastepaper. (Oh, there are minor consolation prizes.)
But if you do draw a horse, you still haven’t won. Some horses won’t start. Of those that do, most of them chase the other horses. However, any ticket that draws any horse at all, even a goat that can barely walk to the paddock, that ticket suddenly acquires a value of thousands of dollars between the drawing and the race. Just how much depends on how good the horse is. But prizes are high and the worst horse in the field has been known to win.
I had fifty-three tickets. If one of them drew a horse, I could sell that ticket for enough to put me through Heidelberg.
So I stayed and waited for the drawings.
Europe needn’t be expensive. A youth hostel is luxury to a man who has come out of the boondocks of Southeast Asia and even the French Riviera isn’t expensive if you approach it from underneath. I didn’t stay on La Promenade des Anglais; I had a tiny room four floors up and two kilometers back, and the shared use of some plumbing. There are wonderful night clubs in, Nice but you need not patronize them as the floor show at the beaches is as good . . . and free. I never appreciated what a high art the fan dance can be until the first time I watched a French girl get out of her clothes and into her bikini in plain sight of citizens, tourists, gendarmes, dogs–and me–all without quite violating the lenient French mores concerning “indecent exposure.” Or only momentarily.
Yes, sir, there are things to see and do on the French Riviera without spending money.
The beaches are terrible. Rocks. But rocks are better than jungle mud and I put on trunks and enjoyed the floor show and added to my tan. It was spring, before the tourist season and not crowded, but it was warm and summery and dry. I lay in the sun and was happy and my only luxury was a deposit box with American Egress and the Paris edition of the N.Y. Herald Tribune and The Star’s & Stripes. These I would glance over to see how the Powers-that-be were mismanaging the world, then look for what was new in the unWar I had just been let out of (usually no mention, although we had been told that we were “saving civilization”), then get down to important matters, i.e., news of the Irish Sweepstakes, plus the possibility that The Stars & Stripes might announce that it had all been a hideous dream and I was entitled to educational benefits after all.
Then came crossword puzzles and “Personal” ads. I always read “Personals”; they are a naked look into private lives. Things like: ‘M.L. phone R.S. before noon. Money.’ Makes you wonder who did what to whom, and who got paid?
Presently I found a still cheaper way to live with an even better floor show. Have you heard of l’Il du Levant? It is an island off the Riviera between Marseilles and Nice, and is much like Catalina. It has a village at one end and the French Navy has blocked off the other for guided missiles; the rest of it is hills and beaches and grottoes. There are no automobiles, nor even bicycles. The people who go there don’t want to be reminded of the outside world.
For ten dollars a day you can enjoy luxury equal to forty dollars a day in Nice. Or you can pay five cents a dry for camping and live on a dollar a day–which I did–and there are good cheap restaurants anytime you get tired of cooking.
It is a place that seems to have no rules of any sort. Wait a minute; there is one. Outside the village, Heliopolis, is a sign: LE NU INTEGRAL EST FORMELLEMENT INTERDIT. (“Complete nakedness is strictly forbidden.”)
This means that everyone, man or woman, must put on a little triangle of cloth, a cache-sexe, a G-string, before going inside the village.
Elsewhere, on beaches and in camping grounds and around the island, you don’t have to wear a damned thing and nobody does.
Save for the absence of automobiles and clothes, the Isle of the Levant is like any other bit of back-country France. There is a shortage of fresh water, but the French don’t drink water and you bathe in the Mediterranean and for a franc you can buy enough fresh water for half a dozen sponge baths to rinse cm the salt. Take the train from Nice or Marseilles, get off at Toulon and take a bus to Lavandou, then by boat (an hour and a few minutes) to l’Ile du Levant–then chuck away your cares with your clothes.
I found I could buy the Herald-Trib, a day old, in the village, at the same place (“Au Minimum,” Mme. Alexandre) where I rented a tent and camping gear. I bought groceries at La Brise Marine and camped above La Plage des Grottes, close to the village, and settled down and let my nerves relax while I enjoyed the floor show.
Some people disparage the female form divine. Sex is too good for them; they should have been oysters. All gals are good to look at (including little brown sisters even though they scared me); the only difference is that some look better than others. Some were fat and some were skinny and some were old and some were young. Some looked as if they had stepped straight out of Les Folies Bergeres. I got acquainted with one of those and I wasn’t far off; she was a Swedish girl who was a “nue” in another Paris revue. She practiced English on me and I practiced French on her, and she promised to cook me a Swedish dinner if I was ever in Stockholm and I cooked her a dinner over an alcohol lamp and we got giggly on vin ordinaire, and she wanted to know how I had acquired my scar and I told some lies. Marjatta was good for an old soldiers nerves and I was sad when she had to leave.
But the floor show went on. Three days later I was sitting on Grotto Beach, leaning against a rock and working the crossword puzzle, when suddenly I got cross-eyed trying not to stare at the most stare-able woman I have ever seen in my life.
Woman, girl–I couldn’t be sure. At first glance I thought she was eighteen, maybe twenty; later when I was able to look her square in her face she still looked eighteen but could have been forty. Or a hundred and forty. She had the agelessness of perfect beauty. Like Helen or Troy, or Cleopatra. It seemed possible that she was Helen of Troy but I knew she wasn’t Cleopatra because she was not a redhead; she was a natural blonde. She was a tawny toast color allover without a hint of bikini marks and her hair was the same shade two tones litter. It flowed, unconfined, in graceful waves down her back and seemed never to have been cut.
She was tall, not much shorter than I am, and not too much litter in weight. Not fat, not fat at all save for that graceful padding that smoothes the feminine form, shading the muscles underneath–I was sure there were muscles underneath; she carried herself with the relaxed power of a lioness.
Her shoulders were broad for a woman, as broad as her very female hips; her waist might have seemed thick on a lesser woman, on her it was deliciously slender. Her belly did not sag at all but carried the lovely double-domed curve of perfect muscle tone. Her breasts–only her big rib cage could carry such large ones without appearing too much of a good thing, they jutted firmly out and moved only a trifle when she moved, and they were crowned with rosy brown confections that were frankly nipples, womanly and not virginal.
Her navel was that jewel the Persian poets praised.
Her legs were long for her height; her hands and feet were not small but were slender, graceful. She was graceful in all ways; it was impossible to think of her in a pose ungraceful. Yet she was so lithe and limber that, like a cat, she could have twisted herself into any position.
Her face–How do you describe perfect beauty except to say that when you see it you can’t mistake it? Her lips were full and her mouth rather wide. It was faintly curved in the ghost of a smile even when her features were at rest. Her lips were red but if she was wearing makeup of any sort it had been applied so skillfully that I could not detect it–and that alone would have made her stand out, for that was a year all other females were wearing “Continental” makeup, as artificial as a corset and as bold as a doxy’s smile.
Her nose was straight and large enough for her face, no button. Her eyes-
She caught me staring at her. Certainly women expect to be locked at and expect it unclothed quite as much as when dressed for the ball. But it is rude to stare openly. I had given up the fight in the first ten seconds and was trying to memorize her, every line, every curve.
Her eyes locked with mine and she stared back and I began to blush but couldn’t look away. Her eyes were so deep a blue that they were dark, darker than my own brown eyes.
I said huskily, “Pardonnez-moi, ma’m’selle,” and managed to tear my eyes away.
She answered, in English, “Oh, I don’t mind. Look all you please,” and looked me up and down as carefully as I had inspected her. Her voice was a warm, fall contralto, surprisingly deep in its lowest register.
She took two steps toward me and almost stood over me. I started to get up and she motioned me to stay seated, with a gesture mat assumed obedience as if she were very used to giving orders. “Rest where you are,” she said. The breeze carried her fragrance to me and I got goose flesh all over. “You are American.”
“Yes.” I was certain she was not, yet I was equally certain she was not French. Not only did she have no trace of French accent but also–well, French women are at least slightly provocative at all times; they can’t help it, it’s ingrained in the French culture. There was nothing provocative about this woman–except that she was an incitement to riot just by existing.
But, without being provocative, she had that rare gift for immediate intimacy; she spoke to me as a very old friend might speak, friends who knew each other’s smallest foibles and were utterly easy tete-a-tete. She asked me questions about myself, some of them quite personal, and I answered all of them, honestly, and it never occurred to me that she had no right to quiz me. She never asked my name, nor I hers–nor any question of her.
At last she stopped and looked me over again, carefully and soberly. Then she said thoughtfully, “You are very beautiful,” and added, “Au ‘voir”–turned and walked down the beach into the water and swam away.
I was too stunned to move. Nobody had ever called me “handsome” even before I broke my nose. As for “beautiful!”
But I don’t think it would have done me any good to have chased her, even if I had thought of it in time. That gal could swim.
Chapter 3
I stayed at the plager until sundown, waiting for her to come back. Then I made a hurried supper of bread and cheese and wine, got dressed in my G-string and walked into town. There I prowled bars and restaurants and did not find her, meanwhile window-peeping into cottages wherever shades were not drawn. When the bistros started shutting down, I gave up, went back to my tent, cursed myself for eight kinds of fool– (why couldn’t I have said, “What’s your name and where do you live and where are you staying here?”)–sacked in and went to sleep.
I was up at dawn and checked the plage, ate breakfast, checked the plage again, got “dressed” and went into the village, checked the shops and post office, and bought my Herald-Trib.
Then I was faced with one of the most difficult decisions of my life: I had drawn a horse.
I wasn’t certain at first, as I did not have those fifty-three serial numbers memorized. I had to run back to my tent, dig out a memorandum and check–and I had! It was a number that had stuck in mind because of its pattern: #XDY 34555. I had a horse!
Which meant several thousand dollars, just how much I didn’t know. But enough to put me through Heidelberg . . . if I cashed in on it at once. The Herald-Trib was always a day late there, which meant the drawing had taken place at least two days earlier–and in the meantime that dog could break a leg or be scratched nine other ways. My ticket was important money only as long as “Lucky Star” was listed as a starter.
I had to get to Nice in a hurry and find out where and how you got the best price for a lucky ticket. Dig the ticket out of my deposit box and sell it!
But how about “Helen of Troy”?
Shylock with his soul-torn cry of “Oh, my daughter! Oh, my ducats!” was no more split than I.
I compromised. I wrote a painful note, identifying myself, telling her that I had been suddenly called away and pleading with her either to wait until I returned tomorrow, or at the very least, to leave a note telling me how to find her. I left it with the postmistress along with a description–blond, so tall, hair this long, magnificent poitrine–and twenty francs with a promise of twice that much if she delivered it and got an answer. The postmistress said that she had never seen her but if cette grande blonde ever set foot in the village the note would be delivered.
That left me just time to rush back, dress in off-island clothes, dump my gear with Mme. Alexandre, and catch the boat. Then I had three hours of travel time to worry through.
The trouble was that Lucky Star wasn’t really a dog. My horse rated no farther down than fifth or sixth, no matter who was figuring form. So? Stop while I was ahead and take my profit?
Or go for broke?
It wasn’t easy. Let’s suppose I could sell the ticket for $10,000. Even if I didn’t try any fancy footwork on taxes, I would still keep most of it and get through school.
But I was going to get through school anyway–and did I really want to go to Heidelberg? That student with the dueling scars had been a slob, with his phony pride in scars from fake danger.
Suppose I hung on and grabbed the big one, ￡50,000, or $140,000-
Do you know how much tax a bachelor pays on $140,000 in the Land of the Brave and the Home of the Free?
$103,000, that’s what he pays. That leaves him $37,000.
Did I want to bet about $10,000 against the chance of winning $37,000–with the odds at least 15 to 1 against me?
Brother, that is drawing to an inside straight. The principle is the same whether it’s 37 grand, or jacks-or-better with a two-bit limit.
But suppose I wangled some way to beat the tax, thus betting $10,000 to win $140,000? That made the potential profit match the odds–and $140,000 was not just eating money for college but a fortune that could bring in four or five thousand a year forever.
I wouldn’t be “cheating” Uncle Sugar; the USA had no more moral claim on that money (if I won) than I had on the Holy Roman Empire. What had Uncle Sugar done for me? He had clobbered my father’s life with two wars, one of which we weren’t allowed to win–and thereby made it tough for me to get through college quite aside from what a father may be worth in spiritual intangibles to his son (I didn’t know, I never would know!)–then he had grabbed me out of college and had sent me to fight another unWar and damned near killed me and lost me my sweet girlish laughter.
So how is Uncle Sugar entitled to clip $103,000 and leave me the short end? So he can “lend” it to Poland? Or give it to Brazil? Oh, my back!
There was a way to keep it all (if I won) legal as marriage. Go live in little old tax-free Monaco for a year. Then take it anywhere.
New Zealand, maybe. The Herald-Trib had had the usual headlines, only more so. It looked as if the boys (just big playful boys!) who run this planet were about to hold that major war, the one with ICBMs and H-bombs, any time now.
If a man went as far south as New Zealand there might be something left after the fallout fell out.
New Zealand is supposed to be very pretty and they say that a fisherman there regards a five-pound trout as too small to take home.
I had caught a two-pound trout once.
About then I made a horrible discovery. I didn’t want to go back to school, win, lose, or draw. I no longer gave a damn about three-car garages and swimming pools, nor any other status symbol or “security.” There was no security in this world and only damn fools and mice thought there could be.
Somewhere back in the jungle I had shucked off all ambition of that sort. I had been shot at too many times and had lost interest in supermarkets and exurban subdivisions and tonight is the PTA supper don’t forget dear you promised.
Oh, I wasn’t about to hole up in a monastery. I still wanted-
What did I want?
I wanted a Roc’s egg. I wanted a harem loaded with lovely odalisques less than the dust beneath my chariot wheels, the rust that never stained my sword. I wanted raw red gold in nuggets the size of your fist and feed that lousy claim jumper to the huskies! I wanted to get up feeling brisk and go out and break some lances, Then pick a likely wench for my droit du seigneur–I wanted to stand up to the Baron and dare him to touch my wench! I wanted to hear the purple water chuckling against the skin of the Nancy Lee in the cool of the morning watch and not another sound, nor any movement save the slow tilling of the wings of the albatross that had been pacing us the last thousand miles.
I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I wanted Storisende and Poictesme, and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, “The game’s afoot!” I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and the Lost Dauphin.
I wanted Prester John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake. I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon. I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be what they had promised me it was going to be–instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled-up mess it is.
I had had one chance–for ten minutes yesterday afternoon. Helen of Troy, whatever your true name may be–And I had known it . . . aha I had let it slip away.
Maybe one chance is all you ever get.
The train pulled into Nice.
In the American Express office I went to the banking department and to my deposit box, found the ticket and checked the number against the Herald-Trib–XDY 34555, yes! To stop my trembling, I checked the other tickets and they were wastepaper, just as I thought. I shoved them back into the DOX and asked to see the manager.
I had a money problem and American Express is a bank, not just a travel bureau. I was ushered into the manager’s office and we exchanged names. “I need advice,” I said. “You see, I hold one of the winning Sweepstakes tickets.”
He broke into a grin. “Congratulations! You’re the first person in a long time who has come in here with good news rather than a complaint.”
“Thanks. Uh, my problem is this. I know that a ticket that draws a horse is worth quite a bit up until the race. Depending on the horse, of course.”
“Of course,” he agreed. “What horse did you draw?”
“A fairly good one. Lucky Star–and that’s what makes it tough. If I had drawn H-Bomb, or any of the three favorites–Well, you see how it is. I don’t know whether to sell or hang on, because I don’t know how to figure the odds. Do you know what is being offered for Lucky Star?”
He fitted his finger tips together. “Mr. Gordon, American Express does not give tips on horse races, nor broker the resale of Sweepstakes tickets. However–Do you have the ticket with you?”
I got it out and handed it to him. It had been through poker games and was sweat-marked and crumpled. But that lucky number was unmistakable.
He looked at it. “Do you have your receipt?”
“Not with me.” I started to explain that I had given my stepfathers address–and that my mail had been forwarded to Alaska. He cut me off. “That’s all right.” He touched a switch. “Alice, will you ask M’sieur Renault to step in?”
I was wondering if it really was all right. I had had the savvy to get names and new billets from the original ticket holders and each had promised to send his receipt to me when he got it–but no receipts had reached me. Maybe in Alaska–I had checked on this ticket while at the lockbox; it had been bought by a sergeant now in Stuttgart. Maybe I would have to pay him something or maybe I would have to break his arms.
M. Renault looked like a tired schoolteacher. “M’sieur Renault is our expert on this sort of thing,” the manager explained. “Will you let him examine your ticket, please?” The Frenchman looked at it, then his eyes lit up and be reached into a pocket, produced a jeweler’s loupe, screwed it into his eye. “Excellent!” he said approvingly. “One of the best. Hong Kong, perhaps?
“I bought it in Singapore.”
He nodded and smiled. “That follows.”
The manager was not smiling. He reached into his desk and brought out another Sweepstakes ticket and handed it to me. “Mr. Gordon, this one I bought at Monte Carlo. Will you compare it?”
They looked alike to me, except for serial numbers and the fact that his was crisp and clean. “What am I supposed to look for?”
“Perhaps this will help.” He offered me a large reading glass.
A Sweepstakes ticket is printed on special paper and has an engraved portrait on it and is done in several colors. It is a better job of engraving and printing than many countries use for paper money.
I learned long ago that you can’t change a deuce into an ace by staring at it. I handed back his ticket. “Mine is counterfeit.”
“I didn’t say so, Mr. Gordon. I suggest you get an outside opinion. Say at the office of the Bank of France.”
“I can see it. The engraving lines aren’t sharp and even on mine. They’re broken, some places. Under the glass the print job looks smeared.” I turned. “Right, M’sieur Renault?”
The expert gave a shrug of commiseration. “It is beautiful work, of its sort.”
I thanked them and got out. I checked with the Bank of France, not because I doubted the verdict but because you don’t have a. leg cut off, nor chuck away $140,000, without a second opinion. Their expert didn’t bother with a loupe. “Contrefait” he announced. “Worthless.”
It was impossible to get back to l’Ile du Levant that night. I had dinner and then looked up my former landlady. My broom closet was empty and she let me have it overnight. I didn’t lie awake long.
I was not as depressed as I thought I should be. I felt relaxed, almost relieved. For a while I had had the wonderful sensation of being rich–and I had had its complement, the worries of being rich–and both sensations were interesting and I didn’t care to repeat them, not right away.
Now I had no worries. The only thing to settle was when to go home, and with living so cheap on the island there was no hurry. The only thing that fretted me was that rushing off to Nice might have caused me to miss “Helen of Troy,” cette grande blonde! Si grande . . . si belle . . . si majestueuse! I fell asleep thinking of her.
I had intended to catch the early train, then the first boat. But the day before had used up most of the money on me and I had goofed by failing to get cash while at American Express. Besides, I had not asked for mail. I didn’t expect any, other than from my mother and possibly my aunt–the only close friend I had had in the Army had been killed six months back. Still, I might as well pick up mail as long as I had to wait for money.
So I treated myself to a luxury breakfast. The French think that a man can face the day with chicory and milk, and a croissant, which probably accounts for their unstable politics. I picked a sidewalk cafe by a big kiosk, the only one in Nice that stocked The Stars & Stripes and where the Herald-Trib would be on sale as soon as it was in; ordered a melon, cafe complet for TWO, and an omelette aux herbes fines; and sat back to enjoy life.
When the Herald-Trib arrived, it detracted from my sybaritic pleasure. The headlines were worse than ever and reminded me that I was still going to have to cope with the world; I couldn’t stay on l’Ile du Levant forever.
But why not stay there as long as possible? I still did not want to go to school, and that three-car-garage ambition was as dead as that Sweepstakes ticket. If World War III was about to shift to a rolling boil, there was no point in being an engineer at six or eight thousand a year in Santa Monica only to be caught in the fire storm.
It would be better to live it up, gather ye rosebuds, carpe that old diem, with dollars and days at hand, then–Well, join the Marine Corps maybe, like my dad.
I refolded the paper to the “Personals” column.
They were pretty good. Besides the usual offers of psychic readings and how to learn yoga and the veiled messages from one set of initials to another there were several that were novel. Such as-
REWARD!! Are you contemplating suicide? Assign to me the lease on your apartment and I will make your last clays lavish. Box 323, H-T
Or: Hindu gentleman, non-vegetarian, wishes to meet cultured European, African, or Asian lady owning sports car. Object: improving international relations. Box 107
How do you do that in a sports car?
One was ominous–Hermaphrodites of the World, Arise! You have nothing to lose but your chains. Tel. Opera 59-09
The next one started: ARE YOU A COWARD?
Well, yes, certainly. If possible. If allowed a free choice. I read on:
ARE YOU A COWARD? This is not for you. We badly need a brave man. He must be 23 to 25 years old, in perfect health, at least six feet tall, weigh about 190 pounds, fluent English with some French, proficient with all weapons, some knowledge of engineering and mathematics essential, willing to travel, no family or emotional ties, indomitably courageous and handsome of face and figure. Permanent employment, very high pay, glorious adventure, great danger. You must apply in person, 17, rue Dante, Nice, 2me etage, appt. D.
I read that requirement about face and figure with strong relief. For a giddy moment it had seemed as if someone with a skewed sense of humor had aimed a shaggy joke right at me. Somebody who knew my habit of reading the “Personals.”
That address was only a hundred yards from where I was sitting. I read the ad again.
Then I paid the addition, left a careful tip, went to the kiosk and bought The Stars & Stripes, walked to American Express, got money and picked up my mail, and on to the railroad station. It was over an hour until the next train to Toulon, so I went into the bar, ordered a beer and sat down to read.
Mother was sorry I had missed them in Wiesbaden. Her letter itemized the children’s illnesses, the high prices in Alaska, and expressed regret that they had ever had to leave Germany. I shoved it into my pocket and picked up The Stars & Stripes.
Presently I was reading: ARE YOU A COWARD?–same ad, right to the end.
I threw the paper down with a growl.
There were three other letters. One invited me to contribute to the athletic association of my ex-college; the second offered to advise me in the selection of my investments at a special rate of only $48 a year; the last was a plain envelope without a stamp, evidently handed in at American Express.
It contained only a newspaper clipping, starting: ARE You A COWARD?
It was the same as the other two ads except that in the last sentence one word had been underlined: You must apply in person-
I splurged on a cab to rue Dante. If I hurried, there was time to untangle this hopscotch and still catch the Toulon train. No. 17 was a walk-up; I ran up and, as I approached suite D, I met a young man coming out. He was six feet tall, handsome of face and figure, and looked as if he might be a hermaphrodite.
The lettering on the door read: DR. BALSAMO–HOURS BY APPOINTMENT, in both French and English. The name sounded familiar and vaguely phony out I did not stop to figure it out; I pushed on in.
The office inside was cluttered in a fashion known only to old French lawyers and pack rats. Behind the desk was a gnome-like character with a merry smile, hard eyes, the pinkest face and scalp I’ve ever seen, and a fringe of untidy white hair. He looked at me and giggled. “Welcome! So you are a hero?” Suddenly he whipped out a revolver half as long as he was and just as heavy and pointed it at me. You could have driven a Volkswagen down its snout.
“I’m not a hero,” I said nastily. “I’m a coward. I just came here to find out what the joke is.” I moved sideways while slapping that monstrous piece of ordnance the other way, chopped his wrist, and caught it. Then I handed it back to him. “Don’t play with that thing, or I’ll shove it up your deposition. I’m in a hurry. You’re Doctor Balsamo? You ran that ad?”
“Tut, tut,” he said, not at all annoyed. “Impetuous youth. No, Doctor Balsamo is in there.” He pointed his eyebrows at two doors on the left waft, then pushed a bell button on his desk–the only thing in the room later than Napoleon. “Go in. She’s expecting you.”
” ‘She’? Which door?”
“Ah, the Lady or the Tiger? Does it matter? In the long run? A hero will know. A coward will choose the wrong one, being sure that I lie. Allez-y! Vite, vite! Schnell! Get the lead out, Mac.”
I snorted and jerked open the right-hand door.
The doctor was standing with her back to me at some apparatus against the far wall and she was wearing one of those white, high-collared jackets favored by medical men. On my left was a surgeon’s examining table, on my right a Swedish-modern couch; there were stainless-steel and glass cabinets, and some framed certificates; the whole place was as up-to-date at the outer room was not.
As I closed the door she turned and looked at me and said quietly, “I am very glad that you have come.” Then she smiled and said softly, “You are beautiful,” and came into my arms.
Chapter 4
About a minute and forty seconds and several centuries later “Dr. Balsamo-Helen of Troy” pulled her mouth an inch back from mine and said, “Let me go, please, then undress and lie on the examining table.” I felt as if I had had nine hours of sleep, a needle shower, and three slugs of ice-cold akvavit on an empty stomach. Anything she wanted to do, I wanted to do. But the situation seemed to call for witty repartee. “Huh?” I said.
“Please. You are the one, but nevertheless I must examine you.”
“Well . . . all right,” I agreed. “You’re the doctor,” I added and started to unbutton my shirt. “You are a doctor? Of medicine, I mean.” “Yes. Among other things.”
I kicked out of my shoes. “But why do you want to examine me?”
“For witches’ marks, perhaps. Oh, I shan’t find any, I know. But I must search for other things, too. To protect you.”
That table was cold against my skin. Why don’t they pad those things? “Your name is Balsamo?”
“One of my names,” she said absently while gentle fingers touched me here and there. “A family name, that is.”
“Wait a minute. Count Cagliostro!”
“One of my uncles. Yes, he used that name. Though it isn’t truly his, no more than Balsamo. Uncle Joseph is a very naughty man and quite untruthful.” She touched an old, small scar. “Your appendix has been removed.”
“Yes.”
“Good. Let me see your teeth.”
I opened wide. My face may not be much but I could rent my teeth to advertise Pepsodent. Presently she nodded. “Fluoride marks. Good. Now I must have your blood.”
She could have bitten me in the neck for it and I wouldn’t have minded. Nor been much surprised. But she did it the ordinary way, taking ten cc. from the vein inside my left elbow. She took the sample and put it in that apparatus against the wall. It chirred and whirred and she came back to me. “Listen,
Princess,” I said.
“I am not a princess.”
“Well . . . I don’t know your first name, and you inferred that your last name isn’t really ‘Balsamo’–and I don’t want to call you ‘Doc.’ ” I certainly did not want to call her “Doc”–not the most beautiful girl I had ever seen or hoped to see . . . not after a kiss that had wiped out of memory every other kiss I had ever received. No.
She considered it. “I have many names. What would you like to call me?”
“Is one of them ‘Helen’?”
She smiled like sunshine and I learned that she had dimples. She looked sixteen and in her first party
dress. “You are very gracious. No, she’s not even a relative. That was many, many years ago.” Her face turned thoughtful. “Would you like to call me ‘Ettarre’?”
“Is that one of your names?”
“It is much like one of them, allowing for different spelling and accent. Or it could be ‘Esther’ just as closely. Or ‘Aster.’ Or even ‘Estrellita.’ ”
” ‘Aster,’ ” I repeated. “Star. Lucky Star!”
“I hope that I will be your lucky star,” she said earnestly. “As you will. But what shall I call you?”
I thought about it. I certainly was not going to dig up “Flash–I am not a comic strip. The Army nickname I had held longest was entirely unfit to hand to a lady. At that I preferred it to my given name. My daddy had been proud of a couple of his ancestors–but is that any excuse for hanging “Evelyn Cyril” on a male child? It had forced me to Team to fight before I learned to read.
The name I had picked up in the hospital ward would do. I shrugged. “Oh, Scar is a good enough name.”
” ‘Oscar,’ ” she repeated, broadening the “O” into “Aw,” and stressing both syllables. “A noble name. A hero’s name. Oscar.” She caressed it with her voice.
“No, no! Not ‘Oscar’–‘Scar.’ ‘Scarface.’ For this.”
“Oscar is your name,” she said firmly. “Oscar and Aster. Scar and Star.” She barely touched the scar. “Do you dislike your hero’s mark? Shall I remove it?”
“En? Oh, no. I’m used to it now. It lets me know who it is when I see myself in a mirror.”
“Good. I like it, you wore it when I first saw you. But if you change your mind, let me know.” The gear against the wall went whush, chunk! She turned and took a long strip from it, then whistled softly while she studied it.
“This won’t take long,” she said cheerfully and wheeled the apparatus over to the table. “Hold still while the protector is connected with you, quite still and breathe shallowly.” She made half a dozen connections of tubes to me; they stuck where she placed them. She put over her head what I thought was a fancy stethoscope but after she got it on, it covered her eyes.
She chuckled. “You’re pretty inside, too, Oscar. No, don’t talk.” She kept one hand on my forearm and I waited.
Five minutes later she lifted her hand and stripped off the connections. “That’s all,” she said cheerfully. “No more colds for you, my hero, and you won’t be bothered again by that flux you picked up in the jungle. Now we move to the other room.”
I got off the table and grabbed at my clothes. Star said, “You won’t need them where we are going. Full kit and weapons will be provided.”
I stopped with shoes in one hand and drawers in the other. “Star–”
“Yes, Oscar?”
“What is this all about? Did you run that ad? Was it meant for me? Did you really want to hire me for something?”
She took a deep breath and said soberly, “I advertised. It was meant for you and you only. Yes, there is a job to do . . . as my champion. There will be great adventure . . . and greater treasure . . . and even greater danger–and I fear very much that neither one of us will live through it.” She looked me in the eyes. “Well, sir?”
I wondered how long they had had me in the locked ward. But I didn’t tell her so, because, if that was where I was, she wasn’t there at all. And I wanted her to be there, more than I had ever wanted anything. I said, “Princess . . . you’ve hired yourself a boy.”
She caught her breath. “Come quickly. Time is short.” She led me through a door beyond the Swedish modern couch, unbuttoning her jacket, unzipping her skirt, as she went, and letting garments fall anywhere. Almost at once she was as I had first seen her at the plage.
This room had dark walls and no windows and a soft light from nowhere. There were two tow couches side by side, black they were and looking like biers, and no other furniture. As soon as the door was dosed behind us I was suddenly aware that the room was aching, painfully anechoic; the bare walls gave back no sound.
The couches were in the center of a circle which was part of a large design, in chalk, or white paint, on bare floor. We entered the pattern; she turned and squatted down and completed one line, closing it–and ft was true; she was unable to be awkward, even hunkered down, even with her breasts drooping as she leaned over.
“What is it?” I asked.
“A map to take us where we are going.”
“It looks more like a pentagram.”
She shrugged. “All right, it is a pentacle of power. A schematic circuit diagram would be a better tag. But, my hero, I can’t stop to explain it. Lie down, please, at once.”
I took the right-hand couch as she signed me, but I couldn’t let ft be. “Star, are you a witch?”
“If you like. Please, no talking now.” She lay down, stretched out her hand. “And join hands with me, my lord; it is necessary.”
Her hand was soft and warm and very strong. Presently the light faded to red, then died away. I slept.
Chapter 5
I woke to singing birds.
Her hand was still in mine. I turned my head and she smiled at me. “Good morning, my lord.”
“Good morning. Princess.” I glanced around. We were still lying on those black couches but they were outdoors, in a grassy dell, a clearing in trees beside a softly chuckling stream–a place so casually beautiful that it looked as if it had been put together leaf by leaf by old and unhurried Japanese gardeners.
Warm sunshine splashed through leaves and dappled her golden body. I glanced up at the sun and back at her. “Is it morning?” It had been noonish or later and that sun ought to DC–seemed to be–setting, not rising-
“It is again morning, here.”
Suddenly my bump of direction spun like a top and I felt dizzy. Disoriented–a feeling new to me and very unpleasant. I couldn’t find north.
Then things steadied down. North was that way, upstream–and the sun was rising, maybe nine in the morning, and would pass across the north sky. Southern Hemisphere. No sweat.
No trick at all–Just give the kook a shot of dope while examining him, lug him aboard a 707 and jet him to New Zealand, replenishing the Mickey Finn as needed. Wake him up when you want him.
Only I didn’t say this and never did think it. And it wasn’t true.
She sat up. “Are you hungry?”
I suddenly realized that an omelet some hours ago–how many? –was not enough for a growing boy. I sat up and swung my feet to the grass. “I could eat a horse.”
She grinned. “The shop of La Societe Anonyme de Hippopnage is closed I’m afraid. Will you settle for trout? We must wait a bit, so we might as well eat. And don’t worry, this place is defended.”
” ‘Defended’?”
“Safe.”
“All right. Uh, how about a rod and hooks?”
“I’ll show you.” What she showed me was not fishing tackle but how to tickle fish. But I knew how. We waded into that lovely stream, just pleasantly cool, moving as quietly as possible, and picked a place under a bulging rock, a place where trout like to gather and think–the fishy equivalent of a gentlemen’s club.
You tickle trout by gaining their confidence and then abusing it. In about two minutes I got one, between two and three pounds, and tossed it onto the bank, and Star had one almost as large. “How much can you eat?” she asked.
“Climb out and get dry,” I said. “I’ll get another one.”
“Make it two or three,” she amended. “Rufo will be along.” She waded quietly out.
“Who?”
“Your groom.”
I didn’t argue. I was ready to believe seven impossible things before breakfast, so I went on catching breakfast. I let it go with two more as the last was the biggest trout I’ve ever seen. Those beggars fairly queued up to be grabbed.
By then Star had a fire going and was cleaning fish with a sharp rock. Shucks, any Girl Scout or witch can make fire without matches. I could myself, given several hours and plenty of luck, just by rubbing two dry cliches together. But I noticed that the two short biers were gone. Well, I hadn’t ordered them. I squatted down and took over cleaning the trout.
Star came back shortly with fruits that were apple-like but deep purple in color and with quantities of button mushrooms. She was carrying the plunder on a broad leaf, like canna or ti, only bigger. More like banana leaves.
My mouth started to water. “If only we had salt!”
“I’ll fetch it. It will be rather gritty. I’m afraid.”
Star broiled the fish two ways, over the fire on a forked green stick, and on hot flat limestone where he fire had been–she kept brushing the fire along as she fed it and placed fish and mushrooms sizing where it had been. That way was best, I thought. Little fine grasses turned out to be chives, local style, and tiny clover tasted and looked like sheep sorrel. That, with the salt (which was gritty and coarse and may have been licked by animals before we got it–not that I cared) made the trout the best I’ve ever tasted. Well, weather and scenery and company had much to do with it, too, especially the company.
I was trying to think of a really poetic way of saying, “How about you and me shacking up right here for the next ten thousand years? Either legal or informal–are you married?” when we were interrupted. Which was a shame, for I had thought up some pretty language, all new, for the oldest and most practical suggestion in the world.
Old baldy, the gnome with the oversized six-shooter, was standing behind me and cursing.
I was sure it was cursing although the language was new to me. Star turned her head, spoke in quiet reproval in the same language, made room for him and offered him a trout. He took it and ate quite a bit of it before he said, in English, “Next time I won’t pay him anything. You’ll see.”
“You shouldn’t try to cheat him, Rufo. Have some mushrooms. Where’s the baggage? I want to get dressed.”
“Over there.” He went back to wolfing fish. Rufo was proof that some people should wear clothes. He was pink all over and somewhat potbellied. However, he was amazingly well muscled, which I had never suspected, else I would have been more cautious about taking that cannon away from him. I decided that if he wanted to Indian-wrestle, I would cheat.
He glanced at me past a pound and a half of trout and said, “Is it your wish to be outfitted now, my lord?”
“Huh? Finish your breakfast. And what’s this ‘my lord’ routine? Last time I saw you you were waving a gun in my face.”
“I’m sorry, my lord. But She said to do it . . . and what She says must be done. You understand.”
“That suits me perfectly. Somebody has to drive. But call me ‘Oscar.’ ”
Rufo glanced at Star, she nodded. He grinned. “Okay, Oscar. No hard feelings?”
“Not a bit.”
He put down the fish, wiped his hand on his thigh, and stuck it out. “Swell! You knock em down, I’ll stomp on ’em.”
We shook hands and each of us tried for the knuckle-cracking grip. I think I got a little the better of it, but I decided he might have been a blacksmith at some time.
Star looked very pleased and showed dimples again She had been lounging by the fire; looking line a hamadryad on her coffee break; now she suddenly reached out and placed her strong, slender hand over our clasped fists. “My stout friends,” she said earnestly. “My good boys. Rufo, it will be well.”
“You have a Sight?” he said eagerly.
“No, just a feeling. But I am no longer worried.”
“We can’t do a thing,” Rufo said moodily, “until we deal with Igli.”
“Oscar will dicker with Igli.” Then she was on her feet in one smooth motion. “Stuff that fish in your face and unpack. I need clothes.” She suddenly looked very eager.
Star was more different women than a platoon of WACs–which is only mildly a figure of speech. Right then she was every woman from Eve deciding between two fig leaves to a modern woman whose ambition is to be turned loose in Nieman-Marcus, naked with a checkbook. When I first met her, she had seemed rather a sobersides and no more interested in clothes than I was. I’d never had a chance to be interested in clothes. Being a member of the sloppy generation was a boon to my budget at college, where blue jeans were au fait and a dirty sweat shirt was stylish.
The second time I saw her she had been dressed, but in that lab smock and tailored skirt she had been both a professional woman and a warm friend. But today–this morning whenever that was–she was increasingly full of Bubbles. She had delighted so in catching fish that she had had to smother squeals of glee. And she had then been the perfect Girl Scout, with soot smudged on her cheek and her hair pushed back out of hazard of the fire while she cooked.
Now she was the woman of all ages who just has to get her hands on new clothes. I felt that dressing Star was like putting a paint job on the crown jewels–but I was forced to admit that, if we were not to do the “Me Tarzan, you Jane” bit right in that dell from then on till death do us part, then clothes of some sort, if only to keep her perfect skin from getting scratched by brambles, were needed.
Rufo’s baggage turned out to be a little black box about the size and shape of a portable typewriter. He opened it.
And opened it again.
And Kept on opening it–And kept right on unfolding its sides and letting them down until the durn thing was the size of a small moving van and even more packed. Since I was nicknamed “Truthful James” as soon as I learned to talk and am widely known to have won the hatchet every February 22nd all through school, you must now conclude that I was the victim of an illusion caused by hypnosis and/or drugs.
Me, I’m not sure. Anyone who has studied math knows that the inside does not have to be smaller than the outside, in theory, and anyone who has had the doubtful privilege of seeing a fat woman get in or out of a tight girdle knows that this is true in practice, too. Rufo’s baggage just carried the principle further.
The first thing he dragged out was a big teakwood chest. Star opened it and started pulling out filmy lovelies.
“Oscar, what do you think of this one?” She was holding a long, green dress against her with the skirt draped over one hip to display it. “Like it?”
Of course I liked it. If it was an original–and somehow I knew that Star never wore copies–I didn’t want to think about what it must have cost. “It’s a mighty pretty gown,” I told her. “But–Look, are we going to be traveling?”
“Right away.”
“I don’t see any taxicabs. Aren’t you likely to get that torn?”
“It doesn’t tear. However, I didn’t mean to wear it; I just meant to show it to you. Isn’t it lovely? Shall I model it for you? Rufo, I want those high-heeled sandals with the emeralds.”
Rufo answered in that language he had been cursing in when he arrived. Star shrugged and said, “Don’t be impatient, Rufo; Igli will wait. Anyhow, we can’t talk to Igli earlier than tomorrow morning; milord Oscar must learn the language first.” But she put the green gorgeousness back in the chest.
“Now here is a little number,” she went on, holding it up, “which is just plain naughty: it has no other purpose.”
I could see why. It was mostly skirt, with a little bodice that supported without concealing–a style favored in ancient Crete, I hear, and still popular in the Overseas Weekly, Playboy, and many night clubs. A style that turns droopers into bulgers. Not that Star needed it.
Rufo tapped me on the shoulder. “Boss? Want to look over the ordnance and pick out what you need?”
Star said reprovingly, “Rufo, life is to be savored, not hurried.”
“We’ll have a lot more life to savor if Oscar picks out what he can use best.”
“He won’t need weapons until after we reach a settlement with Igli.” But she didn’t insist on showing more clothes and, while I enjoyed looking at Star, I like to check over weapons, too, especially when I might have to use them, as apparently the job called for.
While I had been watching Star’s style show, Rufo had laid out a collection that looked like a cross between an army-surplus store and a museum–swords, pistols, a lance that must have been twenty feet long, a flame-thrower, two bazookas flanking a Tommy gun, brass knucks, a machete, grenades, bows and arrows, a misericorde-
“You didn’t bring a slingshot,” I said accusingly.
He looked smug. “Which kind do you like, Oscar? The forked sort? Or a real sling?”
“Sorry I mentioned it. I can’t hit the floor with either sort.” I picked up the Tommy chopper, checked that it was empty, started stripping it. It seemed almost new, just fired enough to let the moving parts work in. A Tommy isn’t much more accurate than a pitched baseball and hasn’t much greater effective range. But it does have virtues–you hit a man with it, he goes down and stays down. It is short and not too heavy and has a lot of firepower for a short time. It is a bush weapon, or for any other sort of close-quarters work.
But I like something with a bayonet on the end, in case the party gets intimate–and I like that something to be accurate at long range in case the neighbors get unfriendly from a distance. I put it down and picked up a Springfield–Rock Island Arsenal, as I saw by its serial number, but still a Springfield. I feel the way about a Springfield that I do about a Gooney Bird; some pieces of machinery are ultimate perfection of their sort, the only possible improvement is a radical change in design.
I opened the bolt, stuck my thumbnail in the chamber, looked down the muzzle. The barrel was bright and the lands were unworn–and the muzzle had that tiny star on it; it was a match weapon!
“Rufo, what sort of country will we be going through? Like this around us?”
“Today, yes. But–” He apologetically took the rifle out of my hands. “It is forbidden to use firearms here. Swords, Knives, arrows–anything that cuts or stabs or mauls by your own muscle power. No guns.”
“Who says so?”
He shivered. “Better ask Her.”
“If we can’t use them, why bring them? And I don’t see any ammunition around anyhow.”
“Plenty of ammunition. Later on we will be at–another place–where guns may be used. If we live that long. I was just showing you what we have. What do you like of the lawful weapons? Are you a bowman?”
“I don’t know. Show me how.” He started to say something, then shrugged and selected a bow, slipped a leather guard over his left forearm, picked out an arrow. “That tree,” he said, “the one with the white rock at the foot of it. I’ll try for about as high off the ground as a man’s heart.”
He nocked the shaft, raised and bent and let fly, all in one smooth motion.
The arrow quivered in the tree trunk about four feet off the ground.
Rufo grinned. “Care to match that?”
I didn’t answer. I knew I could not, except by accident. I had once owned a bow, a birthday present. I hadn’t hit much with it and soon the arrows were lost. Nevertheless I made a production out of selecting a bow, and picked the longest and heaviest.
Rufo cleared his throat apologetically. “If I may make a suggestion, that one will pull quite hard–for a beginner.”
I strung it. “Find me a leather.”
The leather slipped on as if it had been made for me and perhaps it had. I picked an arrow to match, barely looked at it as they all seemed straight and true. I didn’t have any hope of hitting that bloody tree; it was fifty yards away and not over a foot thick. I simply intended to sight a bit high up on the trunk and hope that so heavy a bow would give me a flattish trajectory. Mostly I wanted to nock, bend, and loose all in one motion as Rufo had done–to look like Robin Hood even though I was not.
But as I raised and bent that bow and felt the power of it, I felt a surge of exultance–this tool was right for me! We fitted.
I let fly without thinking.
My shaft thudded a hand’s breadth from his.
“Well shot!” Star called out.
Rufo looked at the tree and blinked, then looked reproachfully at Star. She looked haughtily back. “I did not,” she stated. “You know I would not do that. It was a fair trial . . . and a credit to you both.”
Rufo looked thoughtfully at me. “Hmm–Would you care to make a small bet–you name the odds–that you can do that again?”
“I won’t bet,” I said. “I’m chicken.” But I picked up another arrow and nocked it. I liked that bow, I even liked the way the string whanged at the guard on my forearm; I wanted to try it, feel married to it, again.
I loosed it.
The third arrow grew out of a spot between the first two, but closer to his. “Nice bow,” I said. “I’ll keep it. Fetch the shafts.”
Rufo trotted away without speaking. I unstrung the bow, then started looking over the cutlery. I hoped that I would never again have to shoot an arrow; a gambler can’t expect to draw a pat hand every deal–my next shot would likely turn around like a boomerang.
There was too much wealth of edges and points, from a two-handed broadsword suitable for chopping down trees to a little dagger meant for a lady’s stocking. But I picked up and balanced them all . . . and found there the blade that suited me the way Excalibur suited Arthur.
I’ve never seen one quite like it so I don’t know what to call it. A saber, I suppose, as the blade was faintly curved and razor sharp on the edge and sharp rather far back on the back. But it had a point as deadly as a rapier and the curve was not enough to keep it from being used for thrust and counter quite as well as chopping away meat-axe style. The guard was a bell curved back around the knuckles into a semi-basket but cut away enough to permit full moulinet from any guard.
It balanced in the forte less than two inches from the guard, yet the blade was heavy enough to chop bone. It was the sort of sword that feels as if it were an extension of your body.
The grip was honest sharkskin, molded to my hand. There was a motto chased onto the blade but it was so buried in curlicues that I did not take time to study it out. This girl was mine, we fitted! I returned it and buckled belt and scabbard to my bare waist, wanting the touch of it and feeling like Captain John Carter, Jeddak of Jeddaks, and the Gascon and his three friends all in one.
“Will you not dress, milord Oscar?” Star asked.
“Eh? Oh, certainly–I was just trying it on for size. But–Did Rufo fetch my clothes?”
“Did you, Rufo?”
“His clothes? He wouldn’t want those things he was wearing in Nice!”
“What’s wrong with wearing Lederhosen with an aloha shirt?” I demanded.
“What? Oh, nothing at all, milord Oscar,” Rufo answered hastily. “Live and let live I always say. I knew a man once who wore–never mind. Let me show you what I fetched for you.”
I had my choice of everything from a plastic raincoat to full armor. I found the latter depressing because its presence implied that it might be needed. Except for an Army helmet I had never worn armor, didn’t want to, didn’t know how–and didn’t care to mix with rude company that made such protection desirable.
Besides, I didn’t see a horse around, say a Percheron or a Clydesdale, and I couldn’t see myself hiking in one of those tin suits. I’d be slow as crutches, noisy as a subway, and hot as a phone booth. Sweat off ten pounds in five miles. The quilted longjohns that go under that ironmongery would have been too much alone for such beautiful weather; steel on top would turn me into a walking oven and leave me too weak and clumsy to fight my way out of a traffic ticket.
“Star, you said that–” I stopped. She had finished dressing and hadn’t overdone it. Soft leather hiking shoes–buskins really–brown tights, and a short green upper garment halfway between a jacket and a skating dress. This was topped by a perky little hat and the whole costume made her look like a musical corner version of an airline hostess, smart, cute, wholesome, and sexy.
Or maybe Maid Marian, as she had added a double-curve bow about half the size of mine, a quiver, and a dagger. “You,” I said, “look like why the riot started.”
She dimpled and curtsied. (Star never pretended. She knew she was female, she knew she looked good, she liked it that way.) “You said something earlier,” I continued, “about my not needing weapons just yet. Is there any reason why I should wear one of these space suits? They don’t look comfortable.”
“I don’t expect any great danger today,” she said slowly. “But this is not a place where one can call the police. You must decide what you need.”
“But–Damn it. Princess, you know this place and I don’t. I need advice.”
She didn’t answer. I turned to Rufo. He was carefully studying a treetop. I said, “Rufo, get dressed.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Milord Oscar?”
“Schnell! Vite, vite! Get the lead out.”
“Okay.” He dressed quickly, in an outfit that was a man’s version of what Star had selected, with shorts instead of tights.
“Arm yourself,” I said, and started to dress the same way, except that I intended to wear field boots. However, there was a pair of those buskins that appeared to be my size, so I tried them on. They snuggled to my feet like gloves and, anyway, my soles were so hardened by a month barefooted on l’Ile du Levant that I didn’t need heavy boots.
They were not as medieval as they looked; they zipped up the front and were marked inside Fabrique en France.
Pops Rufo had taken the bow he had used before, selected a sword, and had added a dagger. Instead of a dagger I picked out a Solingen hunting knife. I looked longingly at a service .45, but didn’t touch it. If “they,” whoever they were, had a local Sullivan Act, I would go along with the gag.
Star told Rufo to pack, then squatted down with me at a sandy place by the stream and drew a sketch map–route south, dropping downgrade and following the stream except for short cuts, until we reached the Singing Waters. There we would camp for the night.
I got it in my head. “Okay. Anything to warn me about? Do we shoot first? Or wait for them to bomb us?”
“Nothing that I expect, today. Oh, there’s a carnivore about three times the size of a lion. But it is a great coward; it won’t attack a moving man.”
“A fellow after my own heart. All right, we’ll keep moving.”
“If we do see human beings–I don’t expect it–it might be well to nock a shaft . . . but not raise your bow until you feel it is necessary. But I’m not telling you what to do, Oscar; you must decide. Nor will Rufo let fly unless he sees you about to do so.”
Rufo had finished packing. “Okay, let’s go,” I said. We set out. Rufo’s little black box was now rigged as a knapsack and I did not stop to wonder how he could carry a couple of tons on his shoulders. An anti-grav device like Buck Rogers, maybe. Chinese coolie blood. Black magic. Hell, that teakwood chest alone could not have fitted into that backpack by a factor of 30 to I, not to mention the arsenal and assorted oddments.
There is no reason to wonder why I didn’t quiz Star as to where we were, why we were there, how we had got there, what we were going to do, and the details of these dangers I was expected to face. Look, Mac, when you are having the most gorgeous dream of your life and just getting to the point, do you stop to tell yourself that it is logically impossible for that particular babe to be in the hay with you–and thereby wake yourself up? I knew, logically, that everything that had happened since I read that silly ad had been impossible.
So I chucked logic.
Logic is a feeble reed, friend. “Logic” proved that airplanes can’t fly and that H-bombs wont work and that stones don’t fall out of the sky. Logic is a way of saying that anything which didn’t happen yesterday won’t happen tomorrow.
I liked the situation. I didn’t want to wake up, whether in bed, or in a headshrinker ward. Most especially I did not want to wake up still back in that jungle, maybe with that face wound still fresh and no helicopter. Maybe little brown brother had done a full job on me and sent me to Valhalla. Okay, I liked Valhalla.
I was swinging along with a sweet sword knocking against my thigh and a much sweeter girl matching my strides and a slave-serf-groom-something sweating along behind us, doing the carrying and being our “eyes-behind.” Birds were singing and the landscape had been planned by master landscape architects and the air smelled sweet and good. If I never dodged a taxi nor read a headline again, that suited me.
That longbow was a nuisance–but so is an M-l. Star had her little bow slung, shoulder to hip. I tried that, but it tended to catch on things. Also, it made me nervous not to have it ready since she had admitted a chance of needing it. So I unslung it and carried it in my left hand, strung and ready.
We had one alarum on the morning hike. I heard Rufo’s bowstring go thwung! –and I whirled and had my own bow ready, arrow nocked, before I saw what was up.
Or down, rather. A bird like a dusky grouse but larger. Rufo had picked it off a branch, right through the neck. I made note not to compete with him again in archery, and to get him to coach me in the fine points.
He smacked his lips and grinned. “Supper!” For the next mile he plucked it as we walked, then hung it from his belt.
We stopped for lunch one o’clockish at a picnic spot that Star assured me was defended, and Rufo opened his box to suitcase size, and served us lunch: cola cuts, crumbly Provencal cheese, crusty French bread, pears, and two bottles of Chablis. After lunch Star suggested a siesta. The idea was appealing; I had eaten heartily and shared only crumbs with the birds, but I was surprised. “Shouldn’t we push on?”
“You must have a language lesson, Oscar.”
I must tell them at Ponce de Leon High School the better way to study languages. You lie down on soft grass near a chuckling stream on a perfect day, and the most beautiful woman in any world bends over you and looks you in the eyes. She starts speaking softly in a language you do not understand.
After a bit her big eyes get bigger and bigger . . . and bigger . . . and you sink into them.
Then, a long time later, Rufo says, “Erbas, Oscar, ‘t knila voorsht.”
“Okay,” I answered, “I am getting up. Don’t rush me.”
That is the last word I am going to set down in a language that doesn’t fit our alphabet. I had several more lessons, and won’t mention them either, and from then on we spoke this lingo, except when I was forced to span gaps by asking in English. It is a language rich in profanity and in words for making love, and richer than English in some technical subjects–but with surprising holes in it. There is no word for “lawyer” for example.
About an hour before sundown we came to the Singing Waters.
We had been traveling over a high, wooded plateau. The brook where we had caught the trout had been joined by other streams and was now a big creek. Below us, at a place we hadn’t reached yet, it would plunge over high cliffs in a super-Yosemite fall. But here, where we stopped to camp, the water had cut a notch into the plateau, forming cascades, before it took that dive.
“Cascades” is a weak word. Upstream, downstream, everywhere you looked, you saw waterfalls–big ones thirty or fifty feet high, little ones a mouse could have jumped up, every size in between. Terraces and staircases of them there were, smooth water green from rich foliage overhead and water white as whipped cream as it splashed into dense foam.
And you heard them. Tiny falls tinkled in silvery soprano, big falls rumbled in basso profundo. On the grassy alp where we camped it was an ever-present chorale; in the middle of the falls you had to snout to make yourself heard.
Coleridge was there in one of his dope dreams:
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil
seething-
Coleridge must have followed that route and reached the Singing Waters. No wonder he felt like killing that “person from Porlock” who broke in on his best dream. When I am dying, lay me beside the Singing Waters and let them be the last I hear and see.
We stopped on a lawn terrace, flat as a promise and soft as a Kiss, and I helped Rufo unpack. I wanted to learn how he did that trick with the box. I didn’t find out. Each side opened as naturally and reasonably as opening up an ironing board–and then when it opened again that was natural and reasonable, too.
First we pitched a tent for Star–no army-surplus job, this; it was a dainty pavilion of embroidered silk and the rug we spread as a floor must have used up three generations of Bukhara artists. Rufo said to me, “Do you want a tent, Oscar?”
I looked up at the sky and over at the not-yet-setting sun. The air was milk warm and I couldn’t believe that it would rain. I don’t like to be in a tent if there is the least chance of surprise attack. “Are you going to use a tent?”
“Me? Oh, no! But She has to have a tent, always. Then, more likely than not. She’ll decade to sleep out on the grass.”
“I won’t need a tent.” (Let’s see, does a “champion” sleep across the door of his lady’s chamber, weapons at hand? I wasn’t sure about the etiquette of such things; they were never mentioned in “Social Studies.”)
She returned then and said to Rufo, “Defended. The wards were all in place.”
“Recharged?” he fretted.
She tweaked his ear. “I am not senile.” She added, “Soap, Rufo. And come along, Oscar; that’s Rufo’s work.”
Rufo dug a cake of Lux out of that caravan load and gave it to her, then looked at me thoughtfully and handed me a bar of Life Buoy.
The Singing Waters are the best bath ever, in endless variety. Still pools from footbath size to plunges you could swim in, sitz baths that tingled your skin, shower baths from just a trickle up to free-springing jets that would beat your brains in if you stood under them too long.
And you could pick your temperature. Above the cascade we used, a hot spring added itself to the main stream and at the base of this cascade a hidden spring welled out icy cold. No need to fool with taps, just move one way or the other for the temperature you like–or move downstream where it evened out to temperature as gently warm as a mother’s kiss.
We played for a while, with Star squealing and giggling when I splashed her, and answering it by ducking me. We both acted like kids; I felt like one, she looked like one, and she played rough, with muscles of steel under velvet.
Presently I fetched the soap and we scrubbed. When she started shampooing her hair, I came up behind her and helped. She let me, she needed help with the lavish mop, six times as much as most gals bother with these days.
That would have been a wonderful time (with Rufo busy and out of the way) to grab her and hug her, then proceed ruggedly to other matters. Nor am I sure that she would nave made even a token protest; she might have cooperated heartily.
Hell, I know she would not have made a “token” protest. She would either have put me in my place with a cold word or a clout in the ear–or cooperated.
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even start.
I don’t know why. My intentions toward Star had oscillated from dishonorable to honorable and back again, but had always been practical from the moment I laid eyes on her. No, let me put it this way: My intentions were strictly dishonorable always, but with utter willingness to convert them to honorable, later, as soon as we could dig up a justice of the peace.
Yet I found I couldn’t lay a finger on her other than to help her scrub the soap out of her hair.
While I was puzzling over this, both hands buried in heavy blond hair and wondering what was stopping me from putting my arms around that slender-strong waist only inches away from me, I heard a piercing whistle and my name–my new name. I looked around.
Rufo, dressed in his unlovely skin and with towels over his shoulder, was standing on the bank ten feet away and trying to cut through the roar of water to get my attention.
I moved a few feet toward him. “How’s that again?” I didn’t quite snarl.
“I said, ‘Do you want a shave?’ Or are you growing a beard?”
I had been uneasily aware of my face cactus while I was debating whether or not to attempt criminal assault, and that unease had helped to stop me–Gillette, Aqua Velva, Burma Shave, et al., have made the browbeaten American male, namely me, timid about attempting seduction and/or rape unless freshly planed off. And I had a two-day growth.
“I don’t have a razor,” I called back.
He answered by holding up a straight razor.
Star moved up beside me. She reached up and tried my chin between thumb and forefinger. “You would be majestic in a beard,” she said. “Perhaps a Van Dyke, with sneering mustachios.”
I thought so too, if she thought so. Besides, it would cover most of that scar. “Whatever you say. Princess.”
“But I would rather that you stayed as I first saw you. Rufo is a good barber.” She turned toward him. “A hand, Rufo. And my towel.”
Star walked back toward the camp, toweling herself dry–I would have been glad to help, if asked. Rufo said tiredly, “Why didn’t you assert yourself? But She says to shave you, so now I’ve got to–and rush through my own bath, too, so She won’t be kept waiting.”
“If you’ve got a mirror, I’ll do it myself.”
“Ever used a straight razor?”
“No, but I can learn.”
“You’d cut your throat, and She wouldn’t like that. Over here on the bank where I can stand in the warm water. No, no! Don’t sit on it, lie down with your head at the edge. I can’t shave a man who’s sitting up.” He started working lather into my chin.
“You know why? I learned how on corpses, that’s why, making them pretty so that their loved ones would be proud of them. Hold still! You almost lost an ear. I like to shave corpses; they can’t complain, they don’t make suggestions, they don’t talk back–and they always hold still. Best job I ever had. But now you take this job–” He stopped with the blade against my Adam’s apple and started counting his troubles.
“Do I get Saturday off? Hell, I don t even get Sunday off! And look at the hours! Why, I read just the other day that some outfit in New York–You’ve been in New York?”
“I’ve been in New York. And get that guillotine away from my neck while you’re waving your hands like that.”
“You keep talking, you’re bound to get a little nick now and then. This outfit signed a contract for a twenty-five hour week. Week! I’d like to settle for a twenty-five hour day. You know how long I’ve been on the go, right this minute?”
I said I didn’t.
“There, you talked again. More than seventy hours or I’m a liar! And for what? Glory? Is there glory in a little heap of whitened bones? Wealth? Oscar, I’m telling you the truth; I’ve laid out more corpses than a sultan has concubines and never a one of them cared a soggy pretzel whether they were bedecked in rubies the size of your nose and twice as red . . . or rags. What use is wealth to a dead man? Tell me, Oscar, man to man while She can’t hear: Why did you ever let Her talk you into this?”
“I’m enjoying it, so far.”
He sniffed. “That’s what the man said as be passed the fiftieth floor of the Empire State Building. But the sidewalk was waiting for him, just the same. However,” he added darkly, “until you settle with Igli, it’s not a problem. If I had my kit, I could cover that scar so perfectly that everybody would say, ‘Doesn’t he look natural?’ ”
“Never mind. She likes that scar.” (Damn it, he had me doing it!)
“She would. What I’m trying to get over is, if you walk the Glory Road, you are certain to find mostly rocks. But I never chose to walk it. My idea of a nice way to live would be a quiet little parlor, the only one in town, with a selection of caskets, all prices, and a markup that allowed a little leeway to show generosity to the bereaved. Installment plans for those with the foresight to do their planning in advance–for we all have to die, Oscar, we all have to die, and a sensible man might as well sit down over a friendly glass of beer and make his plans with a well-established firm he can trust.”
He leaned confidentially over me. “Look, milord Oscar . . . if by any miracle we get through this alive, you could put in a good word for me with Her. Make Her see that I’m too old for the Glory Road. I can do a lot to make your remaining days comfortable and pleasant . . . if your intentions toward me are comradely.”
“Didn’t we shake on it?”
“Ah, yes, so we did.” He sighed. “One for all and all for one, and Pikes Peak or Bust. You’re done.”
It was still light and Star was in her tent when we got back–and my clothes were laid out. I started to object when I saw them but Rufo said firmly, “She said ‘informal’ and that means black tie.”
I managed everything, even the studs (which were amazing big black pearls), and that tuxedo either had been tailored for me or it had been bought off the rack by someone who knew my height, weight, shoulders, and waist. The label inside the jacket read The English House, Copenhagen.
But the tie whipped me. Rufo showed up while I was struggling with it, had me lie down (I didn’t ask why) and tied it in a jiffy. “Do you want your watch, Oscar?”
“My watch?” So far as I knew it was in a doctors examining room in Nice. “You have it?”
“Yes, sir. I fetched everything of yours but your”–he shuddered–“clothes.”
He was not exaggerating. Everything was there, not only the contents of my pockets but the contents of my American Express deposit box: cash, passport, I.D., et cetera, even those Change Alley Sweepstakes tickets.
I started to ask how he had gotten into my lockbox but decided not to. He had had the key and it might have been something as simple as a fake letter of authority. Or as complex as his magical black box. I thanked him and he went back to his cooking.
I started to throw that stuff away, all but cash and passport. But one can’t be a litterbug in a place as beautiful as the Singing Waters. My sword belt had a leather pouch on it; I stuffed it in there, even the watch, which had stopped.
Rufo had set up a table in front of Star’s dainty tent and rigged a light from a tree over it and set candles on the table. It was dark before she came out . . . and waited. I finally realized that she was waiting for my arm. I led her to her place and seated her and Rufo seated me. He was dressed in a plum-colored footman’s uniform.
The wait for Star had been worth it; she was dressed in the green gown she had offered to model for me earlier. I still don’t know that she used cosmetics but she looked not at all like the lusty Undine who had been ducking me an hour earlier. She looked as if she should be kept under glass. She looked like Liza Doolittle at the Ball.
“Dinner in Rio” started to play, blending with the Singing Waters.
White wine with fish, rose wine with fowl, red wine with roast–Star chatted and smiled and was witty. Once Rufo, while bending over to me to serve, whispered, “The condemned ate heartily.” I told him to go to hell out of the corner of my mouth.
Champagne with the sweet and Rufo solemnly presented the bottle for my approval. I nodded. What would he have done if I had turned it down? Offered another vintage? Napolean with coffee. And cigarettes.
I had been thinking about cigarettes all day. These were Benson & Hedges No. 5 . . . and I had been smoking those black French things to save money.
While we were smoking, Star congratulated Rufo on the dinner and he accepted her compliments gravely and I seconded them. I still don’t know who cooked that hedonistic meal. Rufo did much of it but Star may have done the hard parts while I was being shaved.
After an unhurried happy time, sitting over coffee and brandy with the overhead light doused and only a single candle gleamed on her jewels and lighting her face. Star made a slight movement back from the table and I got up quickly and showed her to her tent. She stopped at its entrance. “Milord Oscar–”
So I kissed her and followed her in-
Like hell I did! I was so damned hypnotized that I bowed over her hand and kissed it. And that was hat.
That left me with nothing to do but get out of that borrowed monkey suit, hand it back to Rufo, and get a blanket from him. He had picked a spot to sleep at one side of her tent, so I picked one on the other and stretched out. It was still so pleasantly warm that even one blanket wasn’t needed.
But I didn’t go to sleep. The truth is, I’ve got a monkey on my back, a habit worse than marijuana though not as expensive as heroin. I can stiff it out and get to sleep anyway–but it wasn’t helping that I could see light in Stars tent and a silhouette that was no longer troubled by a dress.
The fact is I am a compulsive reader. Thirty-five cents’ worth of Gold Medal Original will put me right to sleep. Or Perry Mason. But I’ll read the ads in an old Paris-Match that has been used to wrap herring before I’ll do without.
I got up and went around the tent. “Psst! Rufo.”
“Yes, milord.” He was up fast, a dagger in his hand.
“Look, is there anything to read around this dump?”
“What sort of thing?”
“Anything, just anything. Words in a row.”
“Just a moment.” He was gone a while, using a flashlight around that beachhead dump of plunder. He came back and offered me a book and a small camp lamp. I thanked him, went back, and lay down.
It was an interesting book, written by Albertus Magnus and apparently stolen from the British Museum. Albert offered a long list of recipes for doing unlikely things: how to pacify storms and fly over clouds, how to overcome enemies, how to make a woman be true to you-
Here’s that last one: “If thou wilt that a woman bee not visions nor desire men, take the private members of a Woolfe, and the haires which doe grow on the cheekes, or the eye-brows of him, and the hairs which bee under his beard, and burne it all, and give it to her to drinke, when she knowethe not, and she shal desire no other man.”
This should annoy the “Woolfe.” And if I were the gal, it would annoy me, too; it sounds like a nauseous mixture. But that’s the exact formula, spelling and all, so if you are having trouble keeping her in line and have a “Woolfe” handy, try it. Let me know the results. By mail, not in person.
There were several recipes for making a woman love you who does not but a “Woolfe” was by far the simplest ingredient. Presently I put the book down and the light out and watched the moving silhouette on that translucent silk. Star was brushing her hair.
Then I quit tormenting myself and watched the stars, I’ve never learned the stars of the Southern Hemisphere; you seldom see stars in a place as wet as Southeast Asia and a man with a bump of direction doesn’t need them.
But that southern sky was gorgeous.
I was staring at one very bright star or planet (it seemed to have a disk) when suddenly I realized it was moving.
I sat up. “Hey! Star!”
She called back, “Yes, Oscar?”
“Come see! A sputnik. A big one!”
“Coming.” The light in her tent went out, she joined me quickly, and so did good old Pops Rufo, yawning and scratching his ribs. “Where, milord?” Star asked.
I pointed. “Right there! On second thought it may not be a sputnik; it might be one of our Echo series. It’s awfully big and bright.”
She glanced at me and looked away. Rufo said nothing. I stared at it a while longer, glanced at her.
She was watching me, not it. I looked again, watched it move against the backdrop of stars.
“Star,” I said, “that’s not a sputnik. Nor an Echo balloon. That’s a moon. A real moon.”
“Yes, milord Oscar.”
“Then this is not Earth.”
“That is true.”
“Hmm–” I looked back at the little moon, moving so fast among the stars, west to east.
Star said quietly, “You are not afraid, my hero?”
“Of what?”
“Of being in a strange world.”
“Seems to be a pretty nice world.”
“It is,” she agreed, “in many ways.”
“I like it,” I agreed. “But maybe it’s time I knew more about it. Where are we? How many light-years, r whatever it is, in what direction?”
She sighed. “I will try, milord. But it will not be easy; you have not studied metaphysical geometry–nor many other things. Think of the pages of a book–” I still had that cookbook of Albert the Great under my arm; she took it. “One page may resemble another very much. Or be very different. One page can be so close to another that it touches, at all points–yet have nothing to do with the page against it. We are as close to Earth–right now–as two pages in sequence in a book. And yet we are so far away that light-years cannot express it.”
“Look,” I said, “no need to get fancy about it. I used to watch ‘Twilight Zone.’ You mean another dimension. I dig it.”
She looked troubled “That’s somewhat the idea but–”
Rufo interrupted. “There’s still Igli in the morning.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “If we have to talk to Igli in the morning, maybe we need some sleep. I’m sorry. By the way, who is Igli?”
“You’ll find out,” said Rufo.
I looked up at that hurtling moon. “No doubt. Well, I’m sorry I disturbed you all with a silly mistake. Good night, folks.”
So I crawled back into my sleeping sills, like a proper hero (all muscles and no gonads, usually), and they sacked in too. She didn’t put the light back on, so I had nothing to look at but the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I had fallen into a book.
Well, I hoped it was a success and that the writer would keep me alive for lots of sequels. It was a pretty nice deal for the hero, up to this chapter at least. There was Dejah Thoris, curled up in her sleeping silks not twenty feet away.
I thought seriously of creeping up to the flap of her tent and whispering to her that I wanted to ask a few questions about metaphysical geometry and like matters. Love spells, maybe. Or maybe just tell her that it was cold outside and could I come in?
But I didn’t. Good old faithful Rufo was curled up just the other side of that tent and he had a disconcerting habit of coming awake fast with a dagger in his hand. And he liked to shave corpses. As I’ve said, given a choice. I’m chicken.
I watched the hurtling moons of Barsoom and fell asleep.
Chapter 6
Singing birds are better than alarm clocks and Barsoom was never like this. I stretched happily and smelled coffee and wondered if there was time for a dip before breakfast. It was another perfect day, blue and clear and the sun just up, and I felt like killing dragons before lunch. Small ones, that is.
I smothered a yawn and rolled to my feet. The lovely pavilion was gone and the black box mostly repacked; it was no bigger than a piano box. Star was kneeling before a fire, encouraging the coffee. She was a cavewoman this morning, dressed in a hide that was fancy but not as fancy as her own. From an ocelot, maybe. Or from du Pont.
“Howdy, Princess,” I said. “What’s for breakfast? And where’s your chef?”
“Breakfast later,” she said. “Just a cup of coffee for you now, too hot and too black–best you be bad tempered. Rufo is starting the talk with Igli.” She served it to me in a paper cup.
I drank half a cup, burned my mouth and spat out grounds. Coffee comes in five descending stages: Coffee, Java, Jamoke, Joe, and Carbon Remover. This stuff was no better than grade four.
I stopped then, having caught sight of Rufo. And company, lots of company. Along the edge of our terrace somebody had unloaded Noah’s Ark. There was everything there from aardvarks to zebus, most of them with long yellow teeth.
Rufo was facing this picket line, ten feet this side and opposite a particularly large and uncouth citizen. About then that paper cup came apart and scalded my fingers.
“Want some more?” Star asked.
I blew on my fingers. “No, thanks. This is Igli?”
“Just the one in the middle that Rufo is baiting. The rest have come to see the fun, you can ignore them.”
“Some of them look hungry.”
“Most of the big ones are like Cuvier’s devil, herbivorous. Those outsized lions would eat us–if Igli wins the argument. But only then. Igli is the problem.”
I looked Igli over more carefully. He resembled that scion of the man from Dundee, all chin and no forehead, and he combined the less appetizing features of giants and ogres in ‘The Red Fairy Book’. I never liked that book much.
He was vaguely human, using the term loosely. He was a couple of feet taller than I am and outweighed me three or four hundred pounds but I am much prettier. Hair grew on him in clumps, like a discouraged lawn; and you just knew, without being told, that he had never used a man’s deodorant for manly men. The knots of his muscles had knots on them and his toenails weren’t trimmed.
“Star,” I said, “what’s the nature of the argument we have with him?”
“You must kill him, milord.”
I looked back at him. “Can’t we negotiate a peaceful coexistence? Mutual inspection, cultural exchange, and so forth?”
She shook her head. “He’s not bright enough for that. He’s here to stop us from going down into the valley–and either he dies, or we die.”
I took a deep breath. “Princess, I’ve reached a decision. A man who always obeys the law is even stupider than one who breaks it every chance. This is no time to worry about that local Sullivan Act. I want the flame-thrower, a bazooka, a few grenades, and the heaviest gun in that armory. Can you show me how to dig them out?”
She poked at the fire. “My hero,” she said slowly, “I’m truly sorry–but it isn’t that simple. Did you notice, last night when we were smoking, that Rufo lighted our cigarettes from candles? Not using even so much as a pocket lighter?”
“Well . . . no. I didn’t give it any thought.”
“This rule against firearms and explosives is not a law such as you have back on Earth. It is more than hat; it is impossible to use such things here. Else such things would be used against us.”
“You mean they won t work?”
“They will not work. Perhaps ‘hexed’ is the word.”
“Star. Look at me. Maybe you believe in hexes. I don’t. And I’ll give you seven to two that Tommy uns don’t, either. I intend to find out. Will you give me a hand in unpacking?”
For the first time she looked really upset. “Oh, milord, I beg of you not to!”
“Why not?”
“Even the attempt would be disastrous. Do you believe that I know more about the hazards and dangers–and laws–of this world than you do? Will you believe me when I say that I would not have you die, that in solemn truth my own life and safety depend on yours? Please!”
It is impossible not to believe Star when she lays it on the line. I said thoughtfully, “Maybe you’re right–or that character over there would be carrying a six-inch mortar as a side arm. Uh, Star, I’ve got a still better idea. Why don’t we high tail it back the way we came and homestead that spot where we caught the fish? In five years well have a nice little farm. In ten years, after the word gets around, we’ll have a nice little motel, too, with a free-form swimming pool and a putting green.”
She barely smiled. “Milord Oscar, there is no turning back.”
“Why not? I could find it with my eyes closed.”
“But they would find us. Not Igli but more like him would be sent to harry and kill us.”
I sighed again. “As you say. They claim motels off the main highway are a poor risk anyhow. There’s a attle-axe in that duffel. Maybe I can chop his feet off before he notices me.” She shook her head again. I said, “What’s the matter now? Do I have to fight him with one foot in a ucket? I thought anything that cut or stabbed–anything I did with my own muscles–was okay?”
“It is okay, milord. But it won’t work.”
“Why not?”
“Igli can’t be killed. You see, he is not really alive. He is a construct, made invulnerable for this one urpose. Swords or knives or even axes will not cut him; they bounce off. I have seen it.”
“You mean he is a robot?”
“Not if you are thinking of gears and wheels and printed circuits. ‘Golem’ would be closer. The Igli is an imitation of life.” Star added, “Better than life in some ways, since there is no way–none that I know of–to kill him. But worse, too, as Igli isn’t very bright nor well balanced. He has conceit without judgment. Rufo is working on that now, warming him up for you, getting him so mad he can’t think straight.”
“He is? Gosh! I must be sure to thank Rufo for that. Thank him too much. I think. Well, Princess, what m I supposed to do now?”
She spread her hands as if it were all self-evident. “When you are ready, I will loose the wards–and then you will kill him.”
“But you just said–” I stopped. When they abolished the French Foreign Legion very few cushy billets were left for us romantic types. Umbopa could have handled this. Conan, certainly. Or Hawk Carse. Or even Don Quixote, for that thing was about the size of a windmill. “All right. Princess, let’s get on with it. Is it okay for me to spit on my hands? Or is that cheating?”
She smiled without dimpling and said gravely, “Milord Oscar, we will all spit on our hands; Rufo and I will be fighting right beside you. Either we win . . . or we all die.”
We walked over and joined Rufo. He was making donkeys ears at Igli and shouting, “Who’s your father, Igli? Your mother was a garbage can but who’s your father? Look at him! No belly button! Yaaa!”
Igli retorted, “Your mother barks! Your sister gives green stamps!”–but rather feebly, I thought. It was plain that that remark about belly buttons had cut him to the quick–he didn’t have one. Only reasonable, I suppose.
The above is not quite what either of them said, except the remark about the belly button. I wish I could put it in the original because, in the Nevian language, the insult is a high art at least equal to poetry. In fact the epitome of literary grace is to address your enemy (publicly) in some difficult verse form, say the sestina, with every word dripping vitriol.
Rufo cackled gleefully. “Make one, Igli! Push your finger in and make one. They left you out in the rain and you ran. They forgot to finish you. Call that thing a nose?” He said in an aside to me, in English, “How do you want him. Boss? Rare? Or well done?”
“Keep him busy while I study the matter. He doesn’t understand English?”
“Not a bit.”
“Good. How close can I go to him without getting grabbed?”
“Close as you like as long as the wards are up. But, Boss–look. I’m not supposed to advise you–but when we get down to work, don’t let him get you by the plums.”
“I’ll try not to.”
“You be careful.” Rufo turned his head and shouted, “Yaaa! Igli picks his nose and eats it!” He added, “She is a good doctor, the best, but just the same, you be careful.”
“I will.” I stepped closer to the invisible barrier, looked up at this creature. He glared down at me and made growling noises, so I thumbed my nose at him and gave him a wet, fruity Bronx cheer. I was downwind and it seemed likely that he hadn’t had a bath in thirty or forty years; he smelled worse than a locker room at the half.
It gave me a seed of an idea. “Star, can this cherub swim?”
She looked surprised. “I really don’t know.”
“Maybe they forgot to program him for it. How about you, Rufo?”
Rufo looked smug. “Try me, just try me. I could teach fish. Igli! Tell us why the sow wouldn’t kiss you!”
Star could swim like a seal. My style is more like a ferryboat but I get there. “Star, maybe that thing can’t be killed but it breathes. It’s got some sort of oxygen metabolism, even if it burns kerosene. If we held his head underwater for a while–as long as necessary–I’ll bet the fire would go out.”
She looked wide-eyed. “Milord Oscar . . . my champion . . . I was not mistaken in you.”
“It’s going to take some doing. Ever play water polo, Rufo?”
“I invented it.”
I hoped he had. I had played it–once. Like being ridden on a rail, it is an interesting experience–once. “Rufo, can you lure our chum down toward the bank? I take it that the barrier follows this line of furry and feathery friends? If it does, we can get him almost to that high piece of bank with the deep pool under it–you know, Star, where you dunked me the first time.”
“Nothing to it,” said Rufo. “We move, he’ll come along.”
“I d like to get him running. Star, how long does it take you to unswitch your fence?”
“I can loose the wards in an instant, milord.”
“Okay, here’s the plan. Rufo, I want you to get Igli to chasing you, as fast as possible–and you cut out and head for that high bank just before you reach the stream. Star, when Rufo does that, you chop off the barrier–loose the wards–instantly. Don’t wait for me to say so. Rufo, you dive in and swim like hell; don’t let him grab you. With any luck, if Igli is moving fast, as big and clumsy as he is he’ll go in, too, whether he means to or not. But I’ll be pacing you, flanking you and a bit behind you. If Igli manages to put on the brakes, I’ll hit him with a low tackle and knock him in. Then we all play water polo.”
“Water polo I have never seen,” Star said doubtfully.
“There won’t be any referee. All it means this time is that all three of us jump him, in the water, and shove his head under and keep it there–and help each other to keep him from shoving our heads under. Big as he is, unless he can outswim us he’ll be at a terrible disadvantage. We go on doing this until he is limp and stays limp, never let him get a breath. Then, to make sure, well weigh him down with stones–it won’t matter whether he’s really dead or not. Any questions?”
Rufo grinned like a gargoyle. “This is going to be fun!”
Both those pessimists seemed to think that it would work, so we got started. Rufo shouted an allegation about Igli’s personal habits that even Olympia Press would censor, then dared Igli to race him, offering an obscene improbability as a wager.
It took Igli a lumbering long time to get that carcass moving but when he did get rolling, he was faster than Rufo and left a wake of panicked animals and birds behind him. I’m pretty fast but I was hard pushed to hold position on the giant, flanking and a few paces back, and I hoped that Star would not loose the wards if it appeared that Igli might catch Rufo on dry land.
However, Star did loose the wards just as Rufo cut away from the barrier, and Rufo reached the bank and made a perfect racing dive without slowing down, all to plan.
But nothing else was.
I think Igli was too stupid to twig at once that the barrier was down. He kept on a few paces after Rufo had gone left oblique, then did cut left rather sharply. But he had lost speed and he didn’t have any trouble stopping on dry land.
I hit him a diving tackle, illegal and low, and down he went–but not over into the water. And suddenly I had a double armful of struggling and very smelly Golem.
But I had a wildcat helping me at once, and quickly thereafter Rufo, dripping wet, added his vote.
But it was a stalemate and one that we were bound to lose in time. Igli outweighed all of us put together and seemed to be nothing but muscle and stink and nails and teeth. We were suffering bruises, contusions, and flesh wounds–and we weren’t doing Igli any damage, Oh, he screamed like a TV grunt & groaner every time one of us twisted an ear or bent back a finger, but we weren’t really hurting him and he was decidedly hurting us. There wasn’t a chance of dragging that hulk into the water.
I had started with my arms around his knees and I stayed that way, of necessity, as long as I could, while Star tried to weigh down one of his arms and Rufo the other. But the situation was fluid; Igli thrashed like a rattler with its back broken and was forever getting one limb or another free and trying to gouge and bite. It got us into odd positions and I found myself hanging onto one callused foot, trying to twist it off, while I stared into his open mouth, wide as a bear trap and less appetizing. His teeth needed cleaning.
So I shoved the toe of his foot into his mouth.
Igli screamed, so I kept on shoving, and pretty soon he didn’t have room to scream. I kept on pushing.
When he had swallowed his own left leg up to the knee, be managed to wrench his right arm loose from Star and grabbed at his disappearing leg–and I grabbed his wrist. “Help me!” I yelped to Star.
“Push!”
She got the idea and shoved with me. That arm went into his mouth to the elbow and the leg went farther in, quite a bit of the thigh. By, then Rufo was working with us and forced Igli’s left hand in past his cheek and into the jaws. Igli wasn’t struggling so hard by then, short on air probably, so getting the toe of his right foot started into his mouth simply required determination, with Rufo hauling back on his hairy nostrils while I bore down with a Knee on his chin and Star pushed.
We kept on feeding him into his mouth, gaining an inch at a time and never letting up. He was still quivering and trying to get loose when we had him rolled up clear to his hips, and his rank armpits about to disappear.
It was like rolling a snowball in reverse; the more we pushed, the smaller he got and the more his mouth stretched–ugliest sight I ever have seen. Soon he was down to the size of a medicine ball . . . and then a soccer ball . . . then a baseball and I rolled him between my palms and kept pushing, hard.
–a golf ball, a marble, a pea . . . and finally there was nothing but some dirty grease on my hands.
Rufo took a deep breath. “I guess that’ll teach him not to put his foot in his mouth with his betters. Who’s ready for breakfast?”
“I want to wash my hands first,” I said.
We all bathed, using plenty of soap, then Star took care of our wounds and had Rufo treat hers, under her instructions. Rufo is right; Star is the best medic. The stuff she used on us did not sting, the cuts closed up, the flexible dressings she put over them did not have to be changed, and fell off in time with no infection and no scars. Rufo had one very bad bite, about forty cents’ worth of hamburger out of his left buttock, but when Star was through with him, he could sit down and it didn’t seem to bother him.
Rufo fed us little golden pancakes and big German sausages, popping with fat, and gallons of good coffee. It was almost noon before Star loosed the wards again and we set out for our descent down the cliff.
Chapter 7
The descent beside the great waterfall into Nevia valley is a thousand feet and more than sheer; the cliff overhangs and you go down on a line, spinning slowly like a spider. I don’t advise this; it is dizzy-making and I almost lost those wonderful pancakes.
The view is stupendous. You see the waterfall from the side, free-springing, not wetting the cliff, and falling so far that it shrouds itself in mist before it hits bottom. Then as you turn you face frowning cliff, then a long look out over a valley too lush and green and beautiful to be believed–marsh and forest at the foot of the cliff, cultivated fields in middle distance a few miles away, then far beyond and hazy at the base but sharp at the peaks a mighty wall of snow-covered mountains.
Star had sketched the valley for me. “First we fight our way through the marsh. After that it is easy going–we simply have to look sharp for blood kites. Because we come to a brick road, very nice.”
“A yellow brick road?” I asked.
“Yes. That’s the clay they have. Does it matter?”
“I guess not. Just don’t make a hobbit of it. Then what?”
“After that we’ll stop overnight with a family, the squire of the countryside there. Good people, you’ll enjoy them.”
“And then the going gets tough,” Rufo added.
“Rufo, don’t borrow trouble!” Star scolded. “You will please refrain from comments and allow Oscar to cope with his problems as he comes to them, rested, clear-eyed, and unworried. Do you know anyone else who could have handled Igli?”
“Well, since you put it that way . . . no.”
“I do put it that way. We all sleep in comfort tonight. Isn’t that enough? You’ll enjoy it as much as anyone.”
“So will you.”
“When did I ever fail to enjoy anything? Hold your tongue. Now, Oscar, at the root of the cliff are the Horned Ghosts–no way to avoid them, they’ll see us coming down. With luck we won’t see any of the Cold Water Gang; they stay back in the mists. But if we have the bad luck to encounter both, we may have the good luck that they will fight each other and let us slip away. The path through the marsh is tricky; you had best study, this sketch until you know it. Solid footing is only where little yellow flowers grow no matter how solid and dry a piece looks. But, as you can see, even if you stay carefully on the safe bits, there are so many side trails and dead ends that we could wander all day and be trapped by darkness–and never get out.”
So here I was, coming down first, because the Horned Ghosts would be waiting at the bottom. My privilege. Wasn’t I a “Hero”? Hadn’t I made Igli swallow himself?
But I wished that the Horned Ghosts really were ghosts. They were two-legged animals, omnivorous. They ate anything, including each other, and especially travelers. From the belly up they were described to me as much like the Minotaur; from there down they were splayfooted satyrs. Their upper limbs were short arms but without real hands–no thumbs.
But oh those horns! They had horns like Texas longhorns, but sticking up and forward.
However, there is one way of converting a Horned Ghost into a real ghost. It has a soft place on its skull, like a baby’s soft spot, between those horns. Since the brute charges head down, attempting to impale you, this is the only vulnerable spot that can be reached. All it takes is to stand your ground, don’t flinch, aim for that one little spot–and hit it.
So my task was simple. Go down first, kill as many as necessary to insure that Star would have a safe spot to land, then stand fast and protect her until Rufo was down. After that we were free to carve our way through the marsh to safety. If the Cold Water Gang didn’t join the party-
I tried to ease my position in the sling I was riding–my left leg had gone to sleep–and looked down. A hundred feet below the reception committee had gathered.
It looked like an asparagus patch. Of bayonets.
I signaled to stop lowering. Far above me, Rufo checked the line; I hung there, swaying, and tried to think. If I had them lower me straight into that mob, I might stick one or two before I myself was impaled. Or maybe none–The only certainty was that I would be dead long before my friends could join me.
On the other hand, besides that soft spot between the horns, each of these geeks had a soft underbelly, just made for arrows. If Rufo would lower me a bit-
I signaled to him. I started slowly down, a bit jerkily, and he almost missed my signal to stop again. I had to pull up my feet; some of those babies were a-snorting and a-ramping around and shoving each other for a chance to gore me. One Nijinsky among them did manage to scrape the sole of my left buskin, giving me goose flesh clear to my chin.
Under that strong inducement I pulled myself hand over hand up the line far enough to let me get my feet into the sling instead of my fanny. I stood in it hanging onto the line and standing on one foot and then on the other to work pins and needles out. Then I unslung my bow and strung it. This feat would have been worthy of a trained acrobat–but have you ever tried to bend a bow and let fly while standing in a bight at one end of a thousand-foot line and clinging to the line with one hand?
You lose arrows that way. I lost three and almost lost me.
I tried buckling my belt around the line. That caused me to hang upside down and lost me my Robin Hood hat and more arrows. My audience liked that one; they applauded–I think it was applause–so, for an encore, I tried to shift the belt up around my chest to enable me to hang more or less straight down–and maybe get off an arrow or two.
I didn’t quite lose my sword.
So far, my only results had been to attract customers (“Mama, see the funny man!”) and to make myself swing back and forth like a pendulum.
Bad as the latter was, it did give me an idea. I started increasing that swing, pumping it up like a playground swing. This was slow wore and it took a while to get the hang of it, as the period of that pendulum of which I was the weight was over a minute–and it does no good to try to hurry a pendulum; you have to work with it, not against it. I hoped my friends could see well enough to guess what I was doing and not foul it up.
After an unreasonably long time I was swinging back and forth in a flattish arc about a hundred feet fang, passing very fast over the heads of my audience at the bottom of each swing, slowing to a stop at the end of each swing. At first those spike heads tried to move with me, but they tired of that and squatted near the midpoint and watched, their heads moving as I swung, like spectators of a slow-motion tennis match.
But there is always some confounded innovator. My notion was to drop off at one end of this arc where it just missed the cuff and make a stand there with my back to the wall. The ground was higher there, I would not have so far to drop. But one of those horned horrors figured it out and trotted over to that end of the swing. He was followed by two or three more.
That settled it; I would nave to drop off at the other end. But young Archimedes figured that out, too. He left his buddies at the cliff face and trotted after me. I pulled ahead of him at the low point of the swing–but slowed down and he caught up with me long before I reached the dead point at the end. He had only a hundred feet to do in about thirty seconds–a slow walk. He was under me when I got there.
The odds wouldn’t improve; I kicked my feet clear, hung by one hand and drew sword during that too-slow traverse, and dropped off anyway. My notion was to spit that tender spot on his head before my feet touched the ground.
Instead, I missed and he missed and I knocked him sprawling and sprawled right after him and rolled to my feet and ran for the cuff face nearest me, poking that genius in his belly with my sword without stopping.
That foul blow saved me. His friends and relatives stopped to quarrel over who got the prime ribs before a clot of them moved in my direction. This gave me time to set my feet on a pile of scree at the base of the cliff, where I could play “King of the Castle,” and return my sword and nock an arrow.
I didn’t wait for them to rush me. I simply waited until they were close enough that I could not miss, took a bead on the wishbone of the old bull who was leading them, if he had a wishbone, and let that shaft go with every pound of that heavy bow.
It passed through him and stuck into one behind him.
This led to another quarrel over the price of chops. They ate them, teeth and toenails. That was their weakness: all appetite and too little brain. If they had cooperated, they could have had me in one rush when I first hit the ground. Instead they stopped for lunch.
I glanced up. High above me, Star was a tiny spider on a thread; she grew rapidly larger. I moved crabwise along the wall until I was opposite the point, forty feet from the cliff, where she would touch ground.
When she was about fifty feet up, she signaled Rufo to stop lowering, drew her sword and saluted me. “Magnificent, my Hero!” We were all wearing swords; Star had chosen a dueling sword with a 34″ blade–a big sword for a woman but Star is a big woman. She had also packed her belt pouch with medic’s supplies, an ominous touch had I noticed, but did not, at the time.
I drew and returned her salute. They were not bothering me yet, although some, having finished lunch or having been crowded out, were milling around and looking me over. Then I sheathed again, and nocked an arrow. “Start pumping it up. Star, right toward me. Have Rufo lower you a bit more.”
She returned sword and signaled Rufo. He let her down slowly until she was about nine feet off the ground, where she signaled a stop. “Now pump it up!” I called out. Those bloodthirsty natives had forgotten me; they were watching Star, those not still busy eating Cousin Abbie or Great-Uncle John.
“All right,” she answered. “But I have a throwing line. Can you catch it?”
“Oh!” The smart darling had watched my maneuvers and had figured out what would be needed. “Hold it a moment! Ill make a diversion.” I reached over my shoulder, counted arrows by touch–seven. I had started with twenty and made use of one; the rest were scattered, lost.
I used three in a hurry, right, left, and ahead, picking targets as far away as I dared risk, aiming at midpoint and depending on that wonderful bow to take those shafts straight and flat. Sure enough, the crowd went for fresh meat like a government handout. “Now!”
Ten seconds later I caught her in my arms and collected a split-second kiss for toll.
Ten minutes later Rufo was down by the same tactics, at a cost of three of my arrows and two of Star’s smaller ones. He had to lower himself, sitting in the bight and checking the free end of the line under both armpits; he would have been a sitting duck without help. As soon as he was untangled from the line, he started jerking it down off the cliff, and faking it into a coil.
“Leave that!” Star said sharply. “We haven’t time and it’s too heavy to carry.”
“I’ll put it in the pack.”
“No.”
“It’s a good line,” Rufo persisted. “We’ll need it.”
“You’ll need a shroud if we’re not through the marsh by nightfall.” Star turned to me. “How shall we arch, milord?”
I looked around. In front of us and to the left a few jokers still milled around, apparently hesitant about getting closer. To our right and above us the great cloud at the base of the Tails made iridescent lace in the sky. About three hundred yards in front of us was where we would enter the trees anjust beyond the marsh started.
We went downhill in a tight wedge, myself on point, Rufo and Star following on flank, all of us with arrows nocked. I had told them to draw swords if any Homed Ghost got within fifty feet.
None did. One idiot came straight toward us, alone, and Rufo knocked him over with an arrow at twice that distance. As we came up on the corpse Rufo drew his dagger. “Let it be!” said Star. She eemed edgy.
“I’m just going to get the nuggets and give them to Oscar.”
“And get us all killed. If Oscar wants nuggets, he shall have them.”
“What sort of nuggets?” I asked, without stopping.
“Gold, Boss. Those blighters have gizzards like a chicken. But gold is all they swallow for it. Old ones ield maybe twenty, thirty pounds.”
I whistled.
“Gold is common here,” Star explained. “There is a great heap of it at the base of the falls, inside the loud, washed down over eons. It causes fights between the Ghosts and the Cold Water Gang, ecause the Ghosts have this odd appetite and sometimes risk entering the cloud to satisfy it.”
“I haven’t seen any of the Cold Water Gang yet,” I commented.
“Pray God you don’t,” Rufo answered.
“All the more reason to get deep into the marsh,” Star added. “The Gang doesn’t go into it and even the Ghosts don’t go far in. Despite their splay feet, they can be sucked under.”
“Anything dangerous in the swamp itself?”
“Plenty,” Rufo told me. “So be sure you step on the yellow flowers.”
“Watch where you put your own feet. If that map was right, I won’t lose us. What does a Cold Water Gangster look like?”
Rufo said thoughtfully, “Ever seen a man who had been drowned for a week?” I let the matter drop.
Before we got to the trees I had us sling bows and draw swords. Just inside the cover of trees, they jumped us. Horned Ghosts, I mean, not the Cold Water Gang. An ambush from all sides, I don’t know how many. Rufo killed four or five and Star at least two and I danced around, looking active and trying to survive.
We had to climb up and over bodies to move on, too many to count.
We kept on into the swamp, following the little golden pathfinder flowers and the twists and turns of the map in my head. In about half an hour we came to a clearing big as a double garage. Star said faintly, “This is far enough.” She had been holding one hand pressed to her side but bad not been willing to stop until then, although blood stained her tunic and all down the left leg of her tights.
She let Rufo attend her first, while I guarded the bottleneck into the clearing. I was relieved not to be asked to help, as, after we gently removed her tunic, I felt sick at seeing how badly she had been gored–and never a peep out of her. That golden body–hurt!
As a knight errant, I felt like a slob.
But she was chipper again, once Rufo had followed her instructions. She treated Rufo, then treated me–half a dozen wounds each but scratches compared with the rough one she had taken.
Once she had me patched up she said, “Milord Oscar, how long will it be until we are out of the marsh?”
I ran through it in my head. “Does the going get any worse?”
“Slightly better.”
“Not over an hour.”
“Good. Don’t put those filthy clothes back on. Rufo, unpack a bit and well have clean clothes and more arrows. Oscar, well need them for the blood kites, once we are out of the trees.”
The little black box filled most of the clearing before it was unfolded enough to let Rufo get out clothes and reach the arsenal. But clean clothes and lull quiver made me feel like a new man, especially after Rufo dug out a half liter of brandy and we split it three ways, gurglegurgle! Star replenished her medic’s pouch, then I helped Rufo fold up the luggage.
Maybe Rufo was giddy from brandy and no lunch. Or perhaps from loss of blood. It could have been just the bad luck of an unnoticed patch of slippery mud. He had the box in his arms, about to make the last closure that would fold it to knapsack size, when he slipped, recovered violently, and the box sailed out of his arms into a chocolate-brown pool.
It was far out of reach. I yelled, “Rufo, off with your belt!” I was reaching for the buckle of mine.
“No, no!” screamed Rufo. “Stand back! Get clear!”
A corner of the box was still in sight. With a safety line on me I knew I could get it, even if there was no bottom to the pool. I said so, angrily.
“No, Oscar!” Star said urgently. “He’s right. We march. Quickly.”
So we marched–me leading. Star breathing on my neck, Rufo crowding her heels.
We had gone a hundred yards when there was a mud volcano behind us. Not much noise, just a bass rumble and a slight earthquake, then some very dirty rain. Star quit hurrying and said pleasantly, “Well, that’s that.”
Rufo said, “And all the liquor was in it!”
“I don’t mind that,” Star answered. “Liquor is everywhere. But I had new clothes in there, pretty ones, Oscar. I wanted you to see them; I bought them with you in mind.”
I didn’t answer. I was thinking about a flame-thrower and an M-1 and a couple of cases of ammo. And the liquor, of course.
“Did you hear me, milord?” she persisted. “I wanted to wear them for you.”
“Princess,” I answered, “you have your prettiest clothes right with you, always.”
I heard the happy chuckle that goes with her dimples. “I’m sure that you have often said that before. And no doubt with great success.”
We were out of the swamp long before dark and hit the brick road soon after. Blood kites are no problem. They are such murderous things that if you shoot an arrow in the direction of one of their dives, a kite will swerve and pluck it out of the air, getting the shaft right down its gullet. We usually recovered the arrows.
We were among plowed fields soon after we reached the road and soon the blood kites thinned out. Just at sundown we could see outbuildings and the lights in the manor where Star said that we would spend the night.
Chapter 8
Milord Doral ‘t Giuk Dorali should have been a Texan. I don’t mean that the Doral could have been mistaken for a Texan but he had that you-paid-for-the-lunch-I’ll-pay-for-the-Cadillacs xpansiveness.
His farmhouse was the size of a circus tent and as lavish as a Thanksgiving dinner–rich, sumptuous, fine carvings and inlaid jewels. Nevertheless it had a sloppy, lived-in look and if you didn’t watch where you put your feet, you would step on a child’s toy on a broad, sweeping staircase and wind up with a broken collarbone. There were children and dogs underfoot everywhere and the youngest of each weren’t housebroken. It didn’t worry the Doral. Nothing worried the Doral, he enjoyed life.
We had been passing through his fields for miles (rich as the best Iowa farmland and no winters; Star told me they produced four crops a year)–but it was late in the day and an occasional field hand was all we saw save for one wagon we met on the road. I thought that it was pulled by a team of two pairs of horses. I was mistaken; the team was but one pair and the animals were not horses, they had eight legs each.
All of Nevia valley is like that, the commonplace mixed with the wildly different. Humans were humans, dogs were dogs–but horses weren’t horses. Like Alice trying to cope with the Flamingo, every time I thought I had it licked, t would wiggle loose.
The man driving those equine centipedes stared but not because we were dressed oddly; he was dressed as I was. He was staring at Star, as who wouldn’t? The people working in fields had mostly been dressed in sort of a lava-lava. This garment, a simple wraparound tied off at the waist, is the equivalent in Nevia of overalls or blue jeans for both men and women; what we were wearing was equal to the Gray Flannel Suit or to a woman s basic black. Party or formal clothes–well, that’s another matter.
As we turned into the grounds of the manor we picked up a wake of children and dogs. One kid ran ahead and, when we reached the broad terrace in front of the main house, milord Doral himself came out the great front door. I didn’t pick him for lord of the manor; he was wearing one of those short sarongs, was barefooted and bareheaded. He had thick hair, shot with gray, an imposing beard, and looked like General U. S. Grant.
Star waved and called out, “Jock! Oh, Jocko!” (The name was “Giuk,” but I caught it as “Jock” and Jock he is.)
The Doral stared at us, then lumbered forward like a tank, “Ettyboo! Bless your beautiful blue eyes! Bless your bouncy little bottom! Why didn’t you let me know?” (I have to launder this because Nevian idioms don’t parallel ours. Try translating certain French idioms literally into English and you’ll see what I mean. The Doral was not being vulgar; he was being formally and gallantly polite to an old and highly respected friend.)
He grabbed Star in a hug, lifted her off her feet, kissed her on both cheeks and on the mouth, gnawed one ear, then set her down with an arm around her. “Games and celebrations! Three months of holiday! Races and rassling every day, orgies every night! Prizes for the strongest, the fairest, the wittiest–”
Star stopped him. “Milord Doral–”
“Eh? And a prize of all prizes for the first baby born–”
“Jocko darling! I love you dearly, but tomorrow we must ride. All we ask is a bone to gnaw and a corner to sleep in.”
“Nonsense! You can’t do this to me.”
“You know that I must.”
“Politics be damned! I’ll die at your feet, Sugar Pie. Poor old Jocko’s heart will stop. I feel an attack coming right now.” He felt around his chest. “Someplace here–”
She poked him in the belly. “You old fraud. You’ll die as you’ve lived, and not of heartbreak. Milord Doral–”
“Yes, milady?”
“I bring you a Hero.”
He blinked. “You’re not talking about Rufo? Hi, Rufe, you old polecat! Heard any good ones lately? Get back to the kitchen and pick yourself a lively one.”
“Thank you, milord Doral.” Rufo “made a leg,” bowing deeply, and left us.
Star said firmly, “If the Doral please.”
“I hear.”
Star untangled his arm, stood straight and tall and started to chant:
“By the Singing Laughing Waters
“Came a Hero Fair and Fearless.
“Oscar hight this noble warrior,
“Wise and Strong and never daunted,
“Trapped the Igli with a question,
“Caught him out with paradoxes,
“Shut the Igli’s mouth with Igli.
“Fed him to him, feet and fingers!
“Nevermore the Singing Waters . . .
It went on and on, none of it lies yet none of it quite true–colored like a press agent’s handout. For example, Star told him that I had killed twenty-seven Horned Ghosts, one with my bare hands. I don’t remember that many and as for “bare hands,” that was an accident. I had just stabbed one of those vermin as another one tumbled at my feet, shoved from behind. I didn’t have time to get my sword clear, so I set a foot on one horn and pulled hard on the other with my left hand and his head came apart like snapping a wishbone. But I had done it from desperation, not choice.
Star even ad-libbed a long excursus about my father’s heroism and alleged that my grandaddy had led the chaise at San Juan Hill and then started in on my great-grandfathers. But when she told him how I had picked up that scar that runs from left eye to right jaw, she pulled out all the stops.
Now look, Star had quizzed me the first time I met her and she had encouraged me to tell her more during that long hike the day before. But I did not give her most of the guff she was handing the Doral. She must have had the Surete, the FBI, the Archie Goodwin on me for months. She even named the team we had played against when I busted my nose and I never told her that.
I stood there blushing while the Doral looked me up and down with whistles and snorts of appreciation. When Star ended, with a simple: “Thus it happened,” he let out a long sigh and said, “Could we have that part about Igli over again?”
Star complied, chanting different words and more detail. The Doral listened, frowning and nodding approval. “A heroic solution,” he said. “So he’s a mathematician, too. Where did he study?”
“A natural genius, Jock.”
“It figures.” He stepped up to me, looked me in the eye and put his hands on my shoulders. “The Hero who confounds Igli may choose any house. But he will honor my home by accepting hospitality of roof . . . and table . . . and bed?”
He spoke with great earnestness, holding my eye; I had no chance to look at Star for a hint. And I wanted a hint. The person who says smugly that good manners are the same everywhere and people are just people hasn’t been farther out of Podunk than the next whistle stop. I’m no sophisticate but I had been around enough to learn that. It was a formal speech, stuffed with protocol, and called for a formal answer.
I did the best I could. I put my hands on his shoulders and answered solemnly, “I am honored far beyond any merit of mine, sir.”
“But you accept?” he said anxiously.
“I accept with all my heart.” (“Heart” is close enough. I was having trouble with language.)
He seemed to sigh with relief. “Glorious!” He grabbed me in a bear hug, kissed me on both cheeks, and only some fast dodging kept me from being kissed on the mouth.
Then he straightened up and shouted, “Wine! Beer! Schnapps! Who the dadratted tomfoolery is supposed to be chasing? I’ll skin somebody alive with a rusty file! Chairs! Service for a Hero! Where is everybody?”
That last was uncalled for; while Star was reciting what a great guy I am, some eighteen or fifty people had gathered on the terrace, pushing and shoving and trying to get a better look. Among them must have been the personnel with the day’s duty because a mug of ale was shoved into my hand and a four-ounce glass of 110-proof firewater into the other before the boss stopped yelling. Jocko drank boilermaker style, so I followed suit, then was happy to sit down on a chair that was already behind me, with my teeth loosened, my scalp lifted, and the beer just starting to put out the fire.
Other people plied me with bits of cheese, cold meats, pickled this and that, and unidentified drinking food all tasty, not waiting for me to accept it but shoving it into my mouth if I opened it even to say “Gesundheit!” I ate as offered and soon it blotted up the hydrofluoric acid.
In the meantime the Doral was presenting his household to me. It would have been better had they worn chevrons because I never did get them straightened out as to rank. Clothes didn’t help because, just as the squire was dressed like a field hand, the second scullery maid might (and sometimes did) duck back in and load herself with golden ornaments and her best party dress. Nor were they presented in order of rank.
I barely twigged as to which was the lady of the manor, Jocko’s wife–his senior wife. She was a very comely older woman, a brunette carrying a few pounds extra but with that dividend most fetchingly distributed. She was dressed as casually as Jocko out, fortunately, I noticed her because she went at nce to greet Star and they embraced warmly, two old friends. So I had my ears spread when she was presented to me a moment later–as (and I caught it) the Doral (just as Jocko was the Doral) but with the feminine ending.
I jumped to my feet, grabbed her hand, bowed over it and pressed it to my lips. This isn’t even faintly a Nevian custom but it brought cheers and Mrs. Doral blushed and looked pleased and Jocko grinned proudly.
She was the only one I stood up for. Each of the men and boys made a leg to me, with a bow; all the gals from six to sixty curtsied–not as we know it, but Nevian style. It looted more like a step of the Twist. Balance on one foot and lean back as far as possible, then balance on the other while leaning forward, all the while undulating slowly. This doesn’t sound graceful but it is, and it proved that there was not a case of arthritis nor a slipped disk anywhere on the Doral spread.
Jocko hardly ever bothered with names. The females were “Sweetheart” and “Honeylamb” and “Pretty Puss” and he called all the males, even those who seemed to be older than he was, “Son.”
Possibly most of them were his sons. The setup in Nevia I don’t fully understand. This looked like a feudalism out of our own history–and maybe it was–but whether this mob was the Doral’s slaves, his serfs, his hired hands, or all members of one big family I never got straight. A mixture, I think. Titles didn’t mean anything. The only title Jocko held was that he was singled out by a grammatical inflection as being THE Doral instead of just any of a couple of hundred Dorals. I’ve scattered the tag “milord” here and there in this memoir because Star and Rufo used it, but it was simply a courteous form of address paralleling one in Nevian. “Freiherr” does not mean “free man, and “monsieur” does not mean “my lord”–these things don’t translate well. Star sprinkled her speech with “milords” because she was much too polite to say “Hey, Mac!” even with her intimates.
(The very politest endearments in Nevian would win you a clout in the teeth in the USA.)
Once all hands had been presented to the Gordon, Hero First Class, we adjourned to get ready for the banquet that Jocko, cheated of his three months of revelry, had swapped for his first intention. It Split me off from Star as well as from Rufo; I was escorted to my chambers by my two valettes.
That’s what I said. Female. Plural. It is a good thing that I had become relaxed to female attendants in men’s washrooms, European style, and still more relaxed by Southeast Asia and l’Ile du Levant; they don’t teach you how to cope with valettes in American public schools. Especially when they are young and cute and terribly anxious to please . . . and I had had a long, dangerous day. I learned, first time out on patrol, that nothing hikes up that old biological urge like being shot at and living through it.
It there had been only one, I might have been late to dinner. As it was, they chaperoned each other, though not intentionally, I believe. I patted the redhead on her fanny when the other one wasn’t looking and reached, I thought, an understanding for a later time.
Well, having your back scrubbed is fun, too. Shorn, shampooed, shined, shaved, showered, smelling like a belligerent rose, decked out in the fanciest finely since Cecil B. deMille rewrote the Bible, I was delivered by them to the banquet hall on time.
But the proconsul’s dress uniform I wore was a suit of fatigues compared with Star’s getup. She had
lost all her pretty clothes earlier in the day but our hostess had been able to dig up something.
First a dress that covered Star from chin to ankle–like plate glass. It seemed to be blue smoke, it clung to her and billowed out behind. Underneath was “underwear.” She appeared to be wrapped in twining ivy–but this ivy was gold, picked out in sapphires. It curved across her beautiful belly, divided into strands and cupped her breasts, the coverage being about like a bikini minimum but more startling and much more effective.
Her shoes were sandals in an S-curve of something transparent and springy. Nothing appeared to hold them on, no straps, no clips; her lovely feet, bare, rested on them. It made her appear as if she were on tiptoe about four inches off the floor.
Her great mane of blond hair was built up into a structure as complex as a full-rigged ship, and studded with sapphires. She was wearing a fortune or two of sapphires here and there on her body, too; I won’t itemize.
She spotted me just as I caught sight of her. Her face lit up and she called out, in English, “My Hero, you are beautiful!”
I said “Uh–”
Then I added, “You haven’t been wasting your time, either. Do I sit with you? I’ll need coaching.”
“No, no! You sit with the gentlemen, I sit with the ladies. You won’t have any trouble.”
This is not a bad way to arrange a banquet. We each had separate low tables, the men in a row facing the ladies, with about fifteen feet between them. It wasn’t necessary to make chitchat with the ladies and they all were worth looking at. The Lady Doral was opposite me and was giving Star a run for the Golden Apple. Her costume was opaque some places but not the usual places. Most of it was diamonds. I believe they were diamonds; I don’t think they make rhinestones that big.
About twenty were seated; two or three times that many were serving, entertaining, or milling around. Three girls did nothing but see to it that I did not starve nor die of thirst–I didn’t have to learn how to use their table tools; I never touched them. The girls knelt by me; I sat on a big cushion. Later in the evening Jocko lay flat on his back with his head in a lap so that his maids could pop food into his mouth or hold a cup to his lips.
Jocko had three maids as I did; Star and Mrs. Jocko had two each; the rest struggled along with one apiece. These serving maids illustrate why I had trouble telling the players without a program. My hostess and my Princess were dressed fit to kill, sure–but one of my flunkies, a sixteen-year-old strong contender for Miss Nevia, was dressed only in jewelry but so much of it that she was more “modestly” dressed than Star or Doral Letva, the Lady Doral.
Nor did they act like servants except for their impassioned determination to see that I got drunk and stuffed. They chattered among themselves in teen-age argot and me wisecracks about how big my muscles were, etc., as if I had not been present. Apparently heroes are not expected to talk, for every time I opened my mouth something went into it.
There was always something doing–dancers, jugglers, recitations of poetry–in the space between the tables. Kids wandered around and grabbed tidbits from platters before they reached the tables. One little doll about three years old squatted down in front of me, all big eyes and open mouth, and stared, letting dancers avoid her as best they could. I tried to get her to come to me, but she just stared and played with her toes.
A damsel with a dulcimer strolled among the tables, singing and playing. It could have been a dulcimer, she might have been a damsel.
About two hours along in the feast, Jocko stood up, roared for silence, belched loudly, shook off maids who were trying to steady him, and started to recite.
Same verse, different tune–he was reciting my exploits. I would have thought that he was too drunk to recite a limerick but he sounded off endlessly, in perfect scansion with complex inner rhymes and rippling alliterations, an astounding feat of virtuosity in rhetoric.
He stuck to Star’s story line but embroidered it. I listened with growing admiration, both for him as a poet and for good old Scar Gordon, the one-man army. I decided that I must be a purty goddam hot hero, so when he sat down, I stood up.
The girls had been more successful in getting me drunk than in getting me fed. Most of the food was strange and it was usually tasty. But a cold dish had been fetched in, little frog-like creatures in ice, served whole. You dipped them in a sauce and took them in two bites.
The gal in the jewels grabbed one, dipped it and put it up for me to bite. And it woke up.
This little fellow–call him “Elmer”–Elmer rolled his eyes and looked at me, just as I was about to bite him.
I suddenly wasn’t hungry and jerked my head back.
Miss jewelry Shop laughed heartily, dipped him again, and showed me how to do it. No more Elmer-
I didn’t eat for quite a while and drank more than too much. Every ime a bite was offered me I would see Elmers feet disappearing, and gulp, and have another drink.
That’s why I stood up.
Once up, there was dead silence. The music stopped because the musicians were waiting to see what o improvise as background to my poem.
I suddenly realized that I didn’t have anything to say.
Not anything. There wasn’t a prayer that I could adlib a poem of thanks, a graceful compliment to my
host–m Nevian. Hell, I couldn’t have done it in English.
Star’s eyes were on me. She looked gravely confident.
That did it. I didn’t risk Nevian; I couldn’t even remember how to ask my way to the men’s room. So I ave it to ’em, both barrels, in English. Vachel Lindsay’s “Congo.”
As much of it as I could remember, say about four pages. What I did give them was that compelling rhythm and rhyme scheme double-talking and faking on any fluffs and really slamming it on “beating on a table with the handle of a broom! Boom! Boom! Boomlay boom!” and the orchestra caught the spirit and we rattled the dishes.
The applause was wonderful and Miss Tiffany grabbed my ankle and kissed it.
So I gave them Mr. E. A. Foe’s “Bells” for dessert. Jocko kissed me on my left eye and slobbered on my shoulder.
Then Star stood up and explained, in scansion and rhyme, that in my own land, in my own language, among my own people, warriors and artists all, I was as famous a poet as I was a hero (Which was true. Zero equals zero), and that I had done them the honor of composing my greatest work, in the jewels of my native tongue, a fitting thanks to the Doral and house Doral for Hospitality of roof, of table, of bed–and that she would, in time, do her poor best to render my music into their language.
Between us we got the Oscar.
Then they brought in the piece de resistance, a carcass roasted whole and carried by four men. From the size and shape it might have been roast peasant under glass. But it was dead and it smelled wonderful and I ate a lot of it and sobered up. After the roast there were only eight or nine other things, soups and sherbets and similar shilly-shallying. The party got looser and people didn’t stay at their own tables. One of my girls fell asleep and spilled my wine cup and about then I realized that most of the crowd had gone.
Doral Letva, flanked by two girls, led me to my chambers and put me to bed. They dimmed the lights and withdrew while I was still trying to phrase a gallant good night in their language.
They came back, having shucked all jewelry and other encumbrances and posed at my bedside, the Three Graces. I had decided that the younger ones were mama’s daughters. The older girl was maybe eighteen, full ripe, and a picture of what mama must have been at that age; the younger one seemed five years younger, barely nubile, as pretty for her own age and quite self-conscious. She blushed and dropped her eyes when I looked at her. But her sister stared back with sultry eyes, boldly provocative.
Their mother, an arm around each waist, explained simply but in rhyme that I had honored their roof and their table–and now their bed. What was a Hero’s pleasure? One? Or two? Or all three?
I’m chicken. We know that. If it hadn’t been that little sister was about the size of the little brown sisters who had scared me in the past, maybe I could have shown aplomb.
But, hell, those doors didn’t close. Just arches. And Jocko me bucko might wake up anytime; I didn’t know where he was. I won’t say I’ve never bedded a married woman nor a man’s daughter in his own house–but I’ve followed American cover-up conventions in such matters. This flat-footed proposition scared me worse than the Horned Goats. I mean “Ghosts.”
I struggled to put my decision in poetic language.
I didn’t manage it but I put over the idea of negative,
The little girl started to bawl and fled. Her sister looked daggers, snorted. “Hero!” and went after her. Mama just looked at me and left.
She came back in about two minutes. She spoke very formally, obviously exercising great control, and prayed to know if any woman in this house had met with the Hero’s favor? Her name, please? Or could I describe her? Or would I have them paraded so that I might point her out?
I did my best to explain that, were a choice to be made, she herself would be my choice–but that I was tired and wished to sleep alone.
Letva blinked back tears, wished me a hero’s rest, and left a second time, even faster. For an instant I thought she was going to slap me.
Five seconds later I got up and tried to catch her. But she was gone, the gallery was dark.
I fell asleep and dreamt about the Cold Water Gang. They were even uglier than Rufo had suggested and they were trying to make me eat big gold nuggets all with the eyes of Elmer.
Chapter 9
Rufo shook me awake. “Boss! Get up! Right now!”
I buried my head in the covers. “Go way!” My mouth tasted of spoiled cabbage, my head buzzed, and my ears were on crooked.
“Right now! She says to.”
I got up. Rufo was dressed in our Merry Men clothes and wearing sword, so I dressed the same way and buckled on mine. My valettes were not in sight, nor my borrowed finery. I stumbled after Rufo into the great dining hall. There was Star, dressed to travel, and looking grim. The fancy furnishings of the night before were gone; it was as bleak as an abandoned barn. A bare table was all, and on it a joint of meat, cold in congealed grease and a knife beside it.
I looked at it without relish. “What’s that?”
“Your breakfast, if you want it. But I shall not stay under this roof and eat cold shoulder.” It was a tone, a manner, I had never heard from her.
Rufo touched my sleeve. “Boss. Let’s get out of here. Now.”
So we did. Not a soul was in sight, indoors or out, not even children or dogs. But three dashing steeds were waiting. Those eight-legged tandem ponies, I mean, the horse version of a dachshund, saddled and ready to go. The saddle rigs were complex; each pair of legs had a leather yoke over it and the load was distributed by poles flexing laterally, one on each side, and mounted on this was a chair with a back, a padded seat, and arm rests. A tiller rope ran to each armrest.
A lever on the left was both brake and accelerator and I hate to say how suggestions were conveyed to the beast. However, the “horses” didn’t seem to mind.
They weren’t horses. Their heads were slightly equine but they had pads rather than hoofs and were omnivores, not hayburners. But you grow to like these beasties. Mine was black with white points–beautiful. I named her “Ars Longa.” She had soulful eyes.
Rufo lashed my bow and quiver to a baggage rack behind my chair and showed me how to get aboard, adjust my seat belt, and get comfortable with feet on foot rests rather than stirrups and my back supported–as comfy as first-class seats in an airliner. We took off fast and hit a steady pace of ten miles an hour, single-footing (the only gait longhorses have) but smoothed by that eight-point suspension so that it was like a car on a gravel road.
Star rode ahead, she hadn’t spoken another word. I tried to speak to her but Rufo touched my arm. “Boss, don’t,” he said quietly. “When She is like this, all you can do is wait.”
Once we were underway, Rufo and I knee to knee and Star out of earshot ahead, I said “Rufo, what in the world happened?”
He frowned. “We’ll never know. She and the Doral had a row, that’s clear. But best we pretend it never happened.”
He shut up and so did I. Had Jocko been obnoxious to Star? Drunk he certainly was and amorous he might have been. But I couldn’t visualize Star not being able to handle a man so as to avoid rape without hurting his feelings.
That led to further grim thoughts. If the older sister had come in alone–If Miss Tiffany hadn’t passed out–If my valette with the fiery hair had showed up to undress me as I had understood she would–Oh hell!
Presently Rufo eased his seat belt, lowered his back rest and raised his foot rests to reclining position, covered his face with a kerchief and started to snore. After a while I did the same; it had been a short night, no breakfast, and I had a king-size hangover. My “horse” didn’t need any help; the two held position on Star’s mount.
When I woke I felt better, aside from hunger and thirst. Rufo was still sleeping; Star’s steed was still fifty paces ahead. The countryside was still lush, and ahead perhaps a half-mile was a house–not a lordly manor out a farmhouse. I could see a well sweep and thought of moss-covered buckets, cool and wet and reeking of typhoid–well, I had had my booster shots in Heidelberg; I wanted a drink. Water, I mean. Better yet, beer–they made fine beer hereabouts.
Rufo yawned, put away his kerchief, and raised his seat. “Must have dozed off,” he said with a silly grin.
“Rufo, you see that house?”
“Yes. What about it?”
“Lunch, that’s what. I’ve gone far enough on an empty stomach. And I’m so thirsty that I could squeeze a stone and drink the whey from it.”
“Then best you do so.”
“Huh?”
“Milord, I’m sorry–I’m thirsty, too–but we aren’t stopping there. She wouldn’t like it.”
“She wouldn’t, eh? Rufo, let me set you straight. Just because milady Star is in a pet is no reason for me to ride all day with no food or water. You do as you see fit; I’m stopping for lunch. Uh, do you have any money on you? Local money?”
He shook his head. “You don’t do it that way, not here. Boss. Wait another hour. Please.”
“Why?”
“Because we are still on the Doral’s land, that’s why. I don’t know that he has sent word ahead to have us shot on sight; Jock is a goodhearted old blackguard. But I would rather be wearing full armor; a flight of arrows wouldn’t surprise me. Or a drop net just as we turned in among those trees.”
“You really think so?”
“Depends on how angry he is. I mind once, when a man really offended him, the Doral had this poor rube stripped down and tied by his family jewels and placed–no, I can’t tell that one.” Rufo gulped and looked sick. “Big night last night. I’m not myself. Better we speak of pleasant things. You mentioned squeezing whey from a rock. No doubt you were thinking of the Strong Muldoon?”
“Damn it, don’t change the subject!” My head was throbbing. “I won’t ride under those trees and the man who lets fly a shaft at me had better check his own skin for punctures. I’m thirsty.”
“Boss, Rufo pleaded. “She will neither eat nor drink on the Doral’s land–even if they begged her to. And She’s right. You don’t know the customs. Here one accepts what is freely given . . . but even a child is too proud to touch anything begrudged. Five miles more. Can’t the hero who killed Igli before breakfast hold out another five miles?”
“Well . . . all right, all right! But this is a crazy sort of country, you must admit. Utterly insane.” “Mmmm . . .” he answered. “Have you ever been in Washington, D.C.?” “Well–” I grinned wryly. “Touche! And I forgot that this is your native land. No offense intended.”
“Oh, but it’s not. What made you think so?”
“Why–” I tried to think. Neither Rufo nor Star had said so, but–“You know the customs, you speak the language like a native.” “Milord Oscar, I’ve forgotten how many languages I speak. When I hear one of them, I speak it.”
“Well, you’re not an American. Nor a Frenchman, I think.”
He grinned merrily. “I could show you birth certificates from both countries–or could until we lost our baggage. But, no, I’m not from Earth.”
“Then where are you from?”
Rufo hesitated. “Best you get your facts from Her.”
“Tripe! I’ve got both feet hobbled and a sack over my head. This is ridiculous.”
“Boss,” he said earnestly, “She will answer any question you ask. But you must ask them.”
“I certainly shall!”
“So let’s speak of other matters. You mentioned the Strong Muldoon–”
“You mentioned him.”
“Well, perhaps I did. I never met Muldoon myself, though I’ve been in that part of Ireland. A fine country and the only really logical people on Earth. Facts won’t sway them in the face of higher truth. An admirable people. I heard of Muldoon from one of my uncles, a truthful man who for many years was a ghostwriter of political speeches. But at this time, due to a mischance while writing speeches for rival candidates, he was enjoying a vacation as a free-lance correspondent for an American syndicate specializing in Sunday feature stories. He heard of the Strong Muldoon and tracked him down, taking train from Dublin, then a local bus, and at last Shank’s Mares. He encountered a man plowing a field with a one-horse plow . . . but this man was shoving the plow ahead of himself without benefit of horse, turning a neat eight-inch furrow. ‘Aha!’ said my uncle and called out, ‘Mr. Muldoon!’
“The farmer stopped and called back, ‘Bless you for the mistake, friend!’–picked up the plow in one hand, pointed with it and said, ‘You’ll be finding Muldoon that way. Strong, he is.’
“So my uncle thanked him and went on until he found another man setting out fence posts by shoving them into the ground with his bare hand . . . and in stony soil, it’s true. So again my uncle hailed him as Muldoon.
“The man was so startled he dropped the ten or dozen six-inch posts he had tucked under the other arm. ‘Get along with your blarney, now!’ he called back. You must know that Muldoon lives farther on down this very same road. He’s strong.’
“The next local my uncle saw was building a stone fence. Dry-stone work it was and very neat. This man was trimming the rock without hammer or trowel, splitting them with the edge of his hand and doing the fine trim by pinching off bits with his fingers. So again my uncle addressed a man by that glorious name.
“The man started to speak but his throat was dry from all that stone dust; his voice failed him. So he grabbed up a large rock, squeezed it the way you squeezed Igli–forced water out of it as if it had been a goatskin, drank. Then he said, ‘Not me, my friend. He’s strong, as everyone knows. Why, many is the time that I have seen him insert his little finger–‘ ”
My mind was distracted from this string of lies by a wench pitching hay just across the ditch from the road. She had remarkable pectoral muscles and a lava-lava just suited her. She saw me eyeing her and gave me the eye right back, with a wiggle tossed in.
“You were saying?” I asked.
“Eh? ‘–just to the first joint . . . and hold himself at arm’s length for hours!”
“Rufo,” I said, “I don’t believe it could have been more than a few minutes. Strain on the tissues, and so forth.”
“Boss,” he answered in a hurt tone, “I could take you to the very spot where the Mighty Dugan used to perform this stunt.”
“You said his name was Muldoon.”
“He was a Dugan on his mother’s side, very proud of her he was. You’ll be pleased to know, milord, that the boundary of the Doral’s land is now in sight. Lunch in minutes only.”
“I can use it. With a gallon of anything, even water.”
“Passed by acclamation. Truthfully, milord, I’m not at my best today. I need food and drink and a long siesta before the fighting starts, or I’ll yawn when I should parry. Too large a night.”
“I didn’t see you at the banquet.”
“I was there in spirit. In the kitchen the food is hotter, the choice is better, and the company less formal. But I had no intention of making a night of it. Early to bed is my motto. Moderation in all things. Epictetus. But the pastry cook–Well, she reminds me of another girl I once knew, my partner in a legitimate business, smuggling. But her motto was that anything worth doing at all is worth overdoing–and she did. She smuggled on top of smuggling, a sideline of her own unmentioned to me and not taken into account–for I was listing every item with the customs officers, a copy with the bribe, so that they would know I was honest.
“But a girl can’t walk through the gates fat as a stuffed goose and walk back through them twenty minutes later skinny as the figure one–not that she was, just a manner of speaking–without causing thoughtful glances. If it hadn’t been for the strange thing the dog did in the night, the busies would have nabbed us.”
“What was the strange thing the dog did in the night?”
“Just what I was doing last night. The noise woke us and we were out over the roof and free, but with nothing to show for six months’ hard work but skinned knees. But that pastry cook–You saw her, milord. Brown hair, blue eyes, a widow’s peak and the rest remarkably like Sophia Loren.”
“I have a vague memory of someone like that.”
“Then you didn’t see her, there is nothing vague about Nalia. As may be, I had intended to lead the life sanitary last night, knowing that there would be bloodshed today. You know:
‘Once at night and outen the light;
‘Once in the morning, a new day a-borning’
“–as the Scholar advised. But I hadn’t reckoned with Nalia. So here I am with no sleep and no breakfast and if I’m dead before nightfall in a pool of my own blood, it’ll be partly Nalia’s doing.”
“I’ll shave your corpse, Rufo; that’s a promise.” We had passed the marker into the next county but Star didn’t slow down. “Bye the bye, where did you learn the undertakers trade?”
“The what? Oh! That was a far place indeed. The top of that rise, behind those trees, is a house and that’s where we’ll be having lunch. Nice people.”
“Good!” The thought of lunch was a bright spot as I was again regretting my Boy Scout behavior of the night before. “Rufo, you had it all wrong about the strange thing the dog did in the night.”
“Milord?”
“The dog did nothing in the night, that was the strange thing.”
“Well, it certainly didn’t sound that way,” Rufo said doubtfully.
“Another dog, another far place. Sorry. What I started to say was: A funny thing happened to me on the way to bed last night–and I did lead the life sanitary.”
“Indeed, milord?”
“In deed, if not in thought.” I needed to tell somebody and Rufo was the sort of scoundrel I could trust. I told him the Story of the Three Bares.
“I should have risked it,” I concluded. “And, swelp me, I would have, if that lad had been put to bed–alone–when she should have been. Or I think I would have, regardless of White Shotgun or jumping out windows. Rufo, why do the prettiest gals always have fathers or husbands? But I tell you the truth, there they were–the Big Bare, the Middle-Sized Bare, and the Littlest Bare, close enough to touch and all of them anxious to keep my bed warm–and I didn’t do a damn thing! Go ahead and laugh. I deserve it.”
He didn’t laugh. I turned to look at him and his expression was piteous. “Milord! Oscar my comrade! Tell me it isn’t true!”
“It is true,” I said huffily. “And I regretted it at once. Too late. And you complained about your night!”
“Oh, my Cod!” He threw his mount into high gear and took off. Ars Longa looked back inquiringly over her shoulder, then continued on.
Rufo caught up with Star; they stopped, short of the house where lunch was to be expected. They waited and I joined them. Star was wearing no expression; Rufo looked unbearably embarrassed.
Star said, “Rufo, go beg lunch for us. Fetch it here. I would speak with milord alone.”
“Yes, milady!” He got out fast.
Star said to me, still with no expression, “Milord Hero, is this true? What your groom reports to me?”
“I don’t know what he reported.”
“It concerned your failure–your alleged failure–last night.”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘failure.’ If you want to know what I did after the banquet . . . I slept alone. Period.”
She sighed but her expression did not change. “I wanted to hear it from your lips. To be just.” Then her expression did change and I have never seen such anger. In a low almost passionless voice she began chewing me out:
“Quiet, I am not finished with you. Insulting three innocent ladies offending a staunch–”
“SHUT UP!!!”
The blast blew her hair back. I started in before she could rev up again. “Don’t ever again speak to me that way. Star. Never.”
“But–”
“Hold your tongue, you bad-tempered brat! You have not earned the right to speak to me that way. Nor will any girl ever earn the right. You will always–always!–address me politely and with respect. One more word of your nasty rudeness and I’ll spank you until the tears fly.”
“You wouldn’t dare!”
“Get your hand away from that sword or I’ll take it away from you, down your pants right here on the road, and spank you with it. Till your arse is red and you beg for mercy. Star, I do not fight females–but I do punish naughty children. Ladies I treat as ladies. Spoiled brats I treat as spoiled brats. Star, you could be the Queen of England and the Galactic Overlord all rolled into one–but ONE MORE WORD out of line from you, and down come your tights and you won’t be able to sit for a week. Understand e?”
At last she said in a small voice, “I understand, milord.”
“And besides that. I’m resigning from the hero business. I won’t listen to such talk twice, I won’t work for a person who treats me that way even once.” I sighed, realizing that I had just lost my corporal’s stripes again. But I always felt easier and freer without them.
“Yes, milord.” I could barely hear her. It occurred to me that it was a long way back to Nice. But it didn’t worry me.
“All right, let’s forget it.”
“Yes, milord.” She added quietly, “But may I explain why I spoke as I did?”
“No.”
“Yes, milord.”
A long silent time later Rufo returned. He stopped out of earshot, I motioned him to join us.
We ate silently and I didn’t eat much but the beer was good. Rufo tried once to make chitchat with an impossibility about another of his uncles. It couldn’t have fallen flatter inBoston .
After lunch Star turned her mount–those “horses” have a small turning circle for their wheelbase but t’s easier to bring them full circle in a tight place by leading them. Rufo said, “Milady?”
She said impassively, “I am returning to the Doral.”
“Milady! Please not!”
“Dear Rufo,” she said warmly but sadly. “You can wait up at that house–and if I’m not back in three days, you are free.” She looked at me, looked away. “I hope that milord Oscar will see fit to escort me. But I do not ask it. I have not the right.” She started off.
I was slow in getting Ars Longa turned; I didn’t have the hang of it. Star was a good many bricks down the road; I started after her.
Rufo waited until I was turned, biting his nails, then suddenly climbed aboard and caught up with me. We rode knee to knee, a careful fifty paces behind Star, Finally he said, “This is suicide. You know that, don’t you?”
“No, I didn’t know it.”
“Well, it is.”
I said, “Is that why you are not bothering to say ‘sir’?”
“Milord?” He laughed shortly and said, “I guess it is. No point in that nonsense when you are going to die soon.”
“You’re mistaken.”
“Huh?”
” ‘Huh, milord,’ if you please. Just for practice. But from now on, even if we last only thirty minutes. Because I am running the show now–and not just as her stooge. I don’t want any doubt in your mind as to who is boss once the fighting starts. Otherwise turn around and I’ll give your mount a slap on the rump to get you moving. Hear me?”
“Yes, milord Oscar.” He added thoughtfully, “I knew you were boss as soon as I got back. But I don’t see how you did it. Milord, I have never seen Her meek before. May one ask?”
“One may not. But you have my permission to ask her. If you think it is safe. Now tell me about this ‘suicide’ matter–and don’t say she doesn’t want you to give me advice. From here on you’ll give advice any time I ask–and keep your lip buttoned if I don’t.”
“Yes, milord. All right, the suicide prospects. No way to figure the odds. It depends on how angry the Doral is. But it won’t be a fight, can’t be. Either we get clobbered the instant we poke our noses in . . . or we are safe until we leave his land again, even if he tells us to turn around and ride away.” Rufo looked very thoughtful. “Milord, if you want a blind guess–Well, I figure you’ve insulted the Doral the worst he has ever been hurt in the course of a long and touchy life. So it’s about ninety to ten that, two shakes after we turn off the road, we are all going to be sprouting more arrows than Saint Sebastian.”
“Star, too? She hasn’t done anything. Nor have you.” (Nor I, either, I added to myself. What a country!)
Rufo sighed. “Milord, each world has its own ways. Jock won’t want to hurt Her. He likes Her. He’s terribly fond of Her. You could say that he loves Her. But if he kills you, he has got to loll Her. Anything else would be inhumane by his standards–and he’s a very moral bloke; he’s noted for it. And kill me, too, of course, but I don’t count. He must kill Her even though it will start a chain of events that will wipe him out just as dead once the news gets out. The question is: Does he have to kill you? I figure be has to, knowing these people. Sorry . . . milord.”
I mulled it over. “Then why are you here, Rufo?”
“Milord?”
“You can cut the ‘sirs’ down to one an hour. Why are you here? If your estimate is correct, your one word and one bow can’t affect the outcome. She gave you a fair chance to chicken out. So what is it? Pride? Or are you in love with her?”
“Oh, my God, no!”
Again I saw Rufo really shocked. “Excuse me,” he went on. “You caught me with my guard down.” He thought about it. “Two reasons, I suppose. The first is that if Jock allows us to parley–well. She is quite a talker. In the second place”–he glanced at me–“I’m superstitious, I admit it. You’re a man with luck. I’ve seen it. So I want to be close to you even when reason tells me to run. You could fall in a cesspool and–”
“Nonsense. You should hear my hard-luck story.”
“Maybe in the past. But I’m betting the dice as they roll.” He shut up.
A bit later I said, “You stay here.” I speeded up and joined Star. “Here are the plans,” I told her.
“When we get there, you stay out on the road with Rufo. I’m going in alone.”
She gasped. “Oh, milord! No!”
“Yes.”
“But–”
“Star, do you want me back? As your champion?”
“With all my heart!”
“All right. Then do it my way.”
She waited before answering. “Oscar–”
“Yes, Star.”
“I will do as you say. But will you let me explain before you decide what you will say?”
“Go on.”
“In this world, the place for a lady to ride is by her champion. And that is where I would want to be, my Hero, when in peril. Especially when in peril. But I’m not pleading for sentiment, nor for empty form. Knowing what I now know I can prophesy with certainty that, if you go in first, you will die at once, and I will die–and Rufo–as soon as they can chase us down. That will be quickly, our mounts are tired. On the other hand, if I go in alone–”
“No.”
“Please, milord. I was not proposing, it. If I were to go in alone, I would be almost as likely to die at once as you would be. Or perhaps, instead of feeding me to the pigs, be would simply have me feed the pigs and be a plaything of the pig boys–a fate merciful rather than cold justice in view of my utter degradation in returning without you. But the Doral is fond of me and I think he might let me live . . . as a pig girl and no better than pigs. This I would risk if necessary and wait my chance to escape, for I cannot afford pride; I have no pride, only necessity.” Her voice was husky with tears.
“Star, Star!”
“My darling!”
“Huh? You said–”
“May I say it? We may not have much time. My Hero . . . my darling.” She reached out blindly, I took her hand; she leaned toward me and pressed it to her breast.
Then she straightened up but kept my hand. “I’m all right now. I am a woman when I least expect it. No, my darling Hero, there is only one way for us to go in and that is side by side, proudly. It is not only safest, it is the only way I would wish it–could I afford pride. I can afford anything else. I could buy you theEiffelTower for a trinket, and replace it when you broke it. But not pride.”
“Why is it safest?”
“Because he may–I say ‘may’–let us parley. If I can get in ten words, he’ll grant a hundred. Then a thousand. I may be able to heal his hurt.”
“All right. But–Star, what did I do to hurt him? I didn’t! I went to a lot of trouble not to hurt him.”
She was silent a while, then–“You are an American.”
“What’s that got to do with it? Jock doesn’t know it.”
“It has, perhaps, everything to do with it. No, America is at most a name to the Doral for, although he has studied the Universes, he has never traveled. But–You will not be angry with me again?”
“Uh . . . let’s call a King’s-X on that. Say anything you need to say but explain things. Just don’t chew me out. Oh, hell, chew me out if you like–this once. Just don’t let it be a habit . . . my darling.”
She squeezed my hand. “Never will I again! The error lay in my not realizing that you are American. I don’t know America , not the way Rufo does. If Rufo had been present–But he wasn’t; he was wenching in the kitchen. I suppose I assumed, when you were offered table and root and bed, that you would behave as a Frenchman would. I never dreamed that you would refuse it. Had I known, I could have spun a thousand excuses for you. An oath taken. A holy day in your religion. Jock would have been disappointed but not hurt; he is a man of honor.”
“But–Damn it, I still don’t see why he wants to shoot me for not doing something I would expect, back home, that he might snoot me for doing. In this country, is a plan forced to accept any proposition a gal makes? And why did she run and complain? Why didn’t she keep it secret? Hell, she didn’t even try. She dragged in her daughters.”
“But, darling, it was never a secret. He asked you publicly and publicly you accepted. How would you feel if your bride, on your wedding night, kicked you out of the bedroom? ‘Table, and roof, and bed.’ You accepted.”
” ‘Bed.’ Star, inAmerica beds are multiple-purpose furniture. Sometimes we sleep in them. Just sleep. I didn’t dig it.”
“I know now. You didn’t know the idiom. My fault. But do you now see why he was completely–and publicly–humiliated?”
“Well, yes, but he brought it on himself. He asked me in public. It would have been worse if I had said No then.”
“Not at all. You didn’t have to accept. You could have refused graciously. Perhaps the most graceful way, even though it be a white lie, is for the hero to protest his tragic inability–temporary or permanent–from wounds received in the very battle that proved him a hero.”
“I’ll remember that. But I still don’t see why he was so astoundingly generous in the first place.”
She turned and looked at me. “My darling, is it all right for me to say that you have astounded me every time I have talked with you? And I had thought I had passed beyond all surprises, years ago.”
“It’s mutual. You always astound me. However, I like it–except one time.”
“My lord Hero, how often do you think a simple country squire has a chance to gain for his family a Hero’s son, and raise it as his own? Can you not feel his gall-bitter disappointment at what you snatched from him after he thought you had promised this boon? His shame? His wrath?”
I considered it. “Well, I’ll be dogged. It happens inAmerica , too. But they don’t boast about it.”
“Other countries, other customs. At the very least, he had thought that he had the honor of a hero treating him as a brother. And with luck he expected the get of a hero for house Doral.”
“Wait a minute! Is that why he sent me three? To improve the odds?”
“Oscar, he would eagerly have sent you thirty . . . if you had hinted that you felt heroic enough to attempt it. As it was, he sent his chief wife and his two favorite daughters.” She hesitated. “What I still don’t understand–” She stopped and asked me a blunt question.
“Hell, no!” I protested, blushing. “Not since I was fifteen. But one thing that put me off was that mere child. She’s one. I think.”
Star shrugged. “She may be. But she is not a child; in Nevia she is a woman. And even if she is unbroached as yet, I’ll wager she’s a mother in another twelvemonth. But if you were loath to tap her, why didn’t you shoo her out and take her older sister? That quaint hasn’t been virgin since she’s had breasts, to my certain knowledge–and I hear that Muri is ‘some dish,’ if that is the American idiom.”
I muttered. I had been thinking the same thing. But I didn’t want to discuss it with Star.
She said, “Pardonne-moi, mon cher? Tu as dit?”
“I said I had given up sex crimes for Lent!”
She looked puzzled. “But Lent is over, even on Earth. And it is not, here, at all.”
“Sorry.”
“Still I’m pleased that you didn’t pick Muri over Letva; Muri would have been unbearably stuck-up with her mother after such a thing. But I do understand that you will repair this, if I can straighten it out?” She added, “It makes great difference in how I handle the diplomacies.”
(Star, Star–you are the one I want to bed!) “This is what you wish . . . my darling?”
“Oh, how much it would help!”
“Okay. You’re the doctor. One . . . three . . . thirty–I’ll die trying. But no little kids!” “No problem.
Let me think. If the Doral lets me get in just five words–” She fell silent. Her hand was pleasantly warm. I did some thinking, too. These strange customs had ramifications, some of which I had still shied away from. How was it, if Letva had immediately told her husband what a slob I was-
“Star? Where did you sleep last night?”
She looked around sharply. “Milord . . . is it permitted to ask you, please, to mind your own business?”
“I suppose so. But everybody seems to be minding mine.”
“I am sorry. But I am very much worried and my heaviest worries you do not know as yet. It was a fair question and deserves a fair answer. Hospitality balances, always, and honors flow both ways. I slept in the Doral’s bed. However, if it matters–and it may to you; I still do not understand Americans–I was wounded yesterday, it still bothered me. Jock is a sweet and gentle soul. We slept. Just slept.”
I tried to make it nonchalant. “Sorry about the wound. Does it hurt now?”
“Not at all. The dressing will fall off by tomorrow. However–Last night was not the first time I enjoyed table and roof and bed at house Doral. Jock and I are old friends, beloved friends–which is why I think I can risk that he may grant me a few seconds before killing me.”
“Well, I had figured out most of that.”
“Oscar, by your standards–the way you have been raised–I am a bitch.”
“Oh, never! A princess.”
“A bitch. But I am not of your country and I was reared by another code. By my standards, and they seem good to me, I am a moral woman. Now . . . am I still your darling’?”
“My darling!”
“My darling Hero. My champion. Lean close and kiss me. If we die, I would my mouth be warm with your lips. The entrance is just around this bend.”
“I know.”
A few moments later we rode, swords sheathed and bows unstrung, proudly into the target area.
Chapter 10
Three days later we rode out again.
This time breakfast was sumptuous. This time musicians lined our exit. This time the Doral rode with us.
This time Rufo reeled to his mount, each arm around a wench, a bottle in each hand, then, after busses from a dozen more, was lifted into his seat and belted in the reclining position. He fell asleep, snoring before we set out.
I was kissed good-bye more times than I could count and by some who had no reason to do it so thoroughly–for I was only an apprentice hero, still learning the trade.
It’s not a bad trade, despite long hours, occupational hazards, and utter lack of security; it has fringe benefits, with many openings and rapid advancement for a man with push and willingness to learn. The Doral seemed well pleased with me.
At breakfast he had sung my prowess up to date in a thousand intricate lines. But I was sober and did not let his praises impress me with my own greatness; I knew better. Obviously a little bird had reported to him regularly–but that bird was a liar. John Henry the Steel-Drivin’ Man couldn’t have done what Jocko’s ode said I did.
But I took it with my heroic features noble and impassive, then I stood up and gave them “Casey at the Bat,” putting heart and soul into “Mighty Casey has struck OUT!”
Star gave it a free interpretation. I had (so she sang) praised the ladies of Doral, the ideas being ones associated with Madame Pompadour, Nell Gwyn, Theodora, Ninon de l’Enclos, and Rangy Lil. She didn’t name those famous ladies; instead she was specific, in Nevian eulogy that would have startled Francois Villon.
So I had to come up with an encore. I gave them “Relic’s daughter,” then “Jabberwocky,” with gestures.
Star had interpreted me in spirit; she had said what I would have said had I been capable of extemporizing poetry. Late on the second day I had chanced on Star in the steam room of the manor’s baths. For an hour we lay wrapped in sheets on adjacent slabs, sweating it out and restoring the tissues. Presently I blurted out to her how surprised–and delighted–I was. I did it sheepishly but Star was one to whom I dared bare my soul.
She had listened gravely. When I ran down, she said quietly, “My Hero, as you know, I do not know America. But from what Rufo tells me your culture is unique, among all the Universes.”
“Well, I realize that the USA is not sophisticated in such things, not the way France is.”
” ‘France!’ ” She shrugged, beautifully. ” ‘Latins are lousy lovers.’ I heard that somewhere, I testify that it is true. Oscar, so far as I know, your culture is the only semicivilized one in which love is not recognized as the highest art and given the serious study it deserves.”
“You mean the way they treat it here. Whew! ‘Much too good for the common people!’ ”
“No, I do not mean the way it is treated here.” She spoke in English. “Much as I love our friends here, this is a barbarous culture and their arts are barbaric. Oh, good art of its sort, very good; their approach is honest. But–if we live through this, after our troubles are over–I want you to travel among the Universes. You’ll see what I mean.” She got up, folding her sheet into a toga. I’m glad you are pleased, my Hero. I’m proud of you.”
I lay there a while longer, thinking about what she had said. The “highest art”–and back home we didn’t even study it, much less make any attempt to teach it. Ballet takes years and years. Nor do they hire you to sing at the Met just because you have a loud voice.
Why should “love” be classed as an “instinct”?
Certainly the appetite for sex is an instinct–but did another appetite make every glutton a gourmet, every fry cook a Cordon Bleu? Hell, you had to learn even to be a fry cook.
I walked out of the steam room whistling “The Best Things in Life Are Free”–then chopped it off in sudden sorrow for all my poor, unhappy compatriots cheated of their birthright by the most mammoth hoax in history.
A mile out the Doral bade us good-bye, embracing me, kissing Star and mussing her hair; then he and his escort drew swords and remained at salute until we passed over the next rise. Star and I rode knee to knee while Rufo snored behind us.
I looked at her and her mouth twitched. She caught my eye and said demurely, “Good morning, milord.”
“Good morning, milady. You slept well?”
“Very well, thank you, milord. And you?”
“The same, thank you.”
“So? ‘What was the strange thing the dog did in the night?’ ”
” ‘The dog did nothing in the night, that was the strange thing,’ ” I answered with a straight face. “Really? So gay a dog? Then who was that knight I last saw with a lady?” ”
‘Twasn’t night, ’twas brillig.”
“And your vorpal blade went snicker-snack! My beamish boy!”
“Don’t try to pin your jabberwocking on me, you frolicsome wench,” I said severely. “I’ve got friends, I have–I can prove an alibi. Besides, ‘my strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure.’ ”
“And the line before that one. Yes, I know; your friends told me about it, milord.” Suddenly she grinned and slapped me on the thigh and started bellowing the chorus of “Reilly’s Daughter.” Vita Brevis norted; Ars Longa pricked up her ears and looked around reprovingly.
“Stop it,” I said. “You’re shocking the horses.”
“They aren’t horses and you can’t shock them. Have you seen how they do it, milord? In spite of all those legs? First–”
“Hold your tongue! Ars Longa is a lady, even if you aren’t.”
“I warned you I was a bitch. First she sidles up–”
“I’ve seen it. Muri thought it would amuse me. Instead it gave me an inferiority complex that lasted all afternoon.”
“I venture to disbelieve that it was all afternoon, milord Hero. Let’s sing about Reilly then. You lead, I’ll harmonize.”
“Well–Not too loud, we’ll wake Rufo.”
“Not him, he’s embalmed.”
“Then you’ll wake me, which is worse. Star darling, when and where was Rufo an undertaker? And ow did he get from that into this business? Did they run him out of town?”
She looked puzzled. “Undertaker? Rufo? Not Rufo.”
“He was most circumstantial.”
“So? Milord, Rufo has many faults. But telling the truth is not one of them. Moreover, our people do ot have undertakers.”
“You don’t? Then what do you do with leftover carcasses? Can’t leave them cluttering the parlor. Untidy.”
“I think so, too, but our people do just that: keep them in the parlor. For a few years at least. An overly sentimental custom but we are a sentimental people. Even so, it can be overdone. One of my great aunts kept all her former husbands in her bedchamber–a dreadful clutter and boring, too, because she talked about them, repeating herself and exaggerating. I quit going to see her.”
“Well. Did she dust them?”
“Oh, yes. She was a fussy housekeeper.”
“Uh–How many were there?”
“Seven or eight, I never counted.”
“I see. Star? Is there black-widow blood in your family?”
“What? Oh! But, darling, there is black-widow blood in every woman.” She dimpled, reached over and patted my knee. “But Auntie didn’t kill them. Believe me, my Hero, the women in my family are much too fond of men to waste them. No, Auntie just hated to let them go. I think that is foolish. Look forward, not back.”
” ‘And let the dead past bury its dead.’ Look, if your people keep dead homes around the house, you must have undertakers. Embalmers at least. Or doesn’t the air get thick?”
“Embalming? Oh, no! Just place a stasis on them once you’re sure they are dead. Or dying. Any schoolboy can do that.” She added, “Perhaps I wronged Rufo. He has spent much time on your Earth–he likes the place, it fascinates him–and he may have tried undertaking. But it seems to me an occupation too honest and straightforward to attract him.”
“You never did tell me what your people eventually do with a cadaver.”
“Not bury it. That would shock them silly.” Star shivered. “Even myself and I’ve traveled the
Universes, learned to be indifferent to almost any custom.”
“But what?”
“Much what you did to Igli. Apply a geometrical option and get rid of it.”
“Oh. Star, where did Igli go?”
“I couldn’t guess, milord. I had no chance to calculate it. Perhaps the ones who made him know. But I hink they were even more taken by surprise than I was.”
“I guess I’m dense. Star. You call it geometry; Jocko referred to me as a ‘mathematician.’ But I did what was forced on me by circumstances; I didn’t understand it.”
“Forced on Igli, you should say, milord Hero. What happens when you place an insupportable strain on a mass, such that it cannot remain where it is? While leaving it nowhere to go? This is a schoolboy problem in metaphysical geometry and the eldest proto-paradox, the one about the irresistible force and the immovable body. The mass implodes. It is squeezed out of its own world into some other. This is often the way the people of a universe discover the Universes–but usually as disastrously as you forced it on Igli; it may take millennia before they control it. It may hover around the fringes as ‘magic’ for a long time, sometimes working, sometimes failing, sometimes backfiring on the magician.”
“And you call this ‘mathematics’?”
“How else?”
“I’d call it magic.”
“Yes, surely. As I told Jocko, you have a natural genius. You could be a great warlock.”
I shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t believe in magic.”
“Nor do I,” she answered, “the way you put it. I believe in what is.”
“That’s what I mean, Star. I don’t believe in hocus-pocus. What happened to Igli–I mean, ‘what ppeared to happen to Igli’–could not have happened because it would violate the law of conservation of mass-energy. There must be some other explanation.”
She was politely silent.
So I brought to bear the sturdy common sense of ignorance and prejudice. “Look, Star, I’m not going to believe the impossible simply because I was there. A natural law is a natural law. You have to admit that.”
We rode a few rods before she answered, “May it please milord Hero, the world is not what we wish it to be. It is what it is. No, I have over-assumed. Perhaps it is indeed what we wish it to be.
Either way, it is what it is. Le voila! Behold it, self-demonstrating. Das Ding an sich. Bite it. It is. Ai-je raison? Do I speak truly?”
“That’s what I was saying! The universe is what it is and can’t be changed by jiggery-pokery. It works by exact rules, like a machine.” (I hesitated, remembering a car we had had that was a hypochondriac. It would “fall sick,” then “get well” as soon as a mechanic tried to touch it.) I went on firmly, “Natural law never takes a holiday. The invariability of natural law is the cornerstone of science.”
“So it is.”
“Well?” I demanded.
“So much the worse for science.”
“But–” I shut up and rode in huffy silence.
Presently a slender hand touched my forearm, caressed it. “Such a strong sword arm,” she said softly.
“Milord Hero, may I explain?”
“Talk ahead,” I said. “If you can sell me, you can convert the Pope to Mormonism. I’m stubborn.”
“Would I have picked you out of hundreds of billions to be my champion were you not?”
” ‘Hundreds of billions?’ You mean millions, don’t you?”
“Hear me, milord. Indulge me. Let us be Socratic. I’ll frame the trick questions and you make the tupid answers–and we’ll learn who shaved the barber. Then it will be your turn and I’ll be the silly stooge. Okay?”
“All right, put a nickel in.”
“Very well. Question: Are the customs at house Doral the customs you used at home?”
“What? You know they aren’t. I’ve never been so flabbergasted since the time the preacher’s daughter took me up into the steeple to show me the Holy Ghost.” I chuckled sheepishly. “I’d be blushing yet but I’ve burned out my fuses.”
“Yet the basic difference between Nevian customs and yours lies in only one postulate. Milord, there axe worlds in which males kill females as soon as eggs are laid–and others in which females eat males even as they are being fructified–like that black widow you made cousin to me.”
“I didn’t mean that, Star.”
“I was not offended, my love. An insult is like a drink; it affects one only if accepted. And pride is too heavy baggage for my journey; I have none. Oscar, would you find such worlds stranger than this one?”
“You’re talking about spiders or some such. Not people.”
“I speak of people, the dominant race of each its world. Highly civilized.”
“Ugh!”
“You will not say ‘ugh’ when you see them. They are so different from us that their home life cannot atter to us. Contrariwise, this planet is very like your Earth–yet your customs would shock old Jocko out of song. Darling, your world has a custom unique in the Universes. That is, the Twenty Universes known to me, out of thousands or millions or googols of universes. In the known Twenty Universes only Earth has this astounding custom.”
“Do you mean “War”?”
“Oh, no! Most worlds have warfare. This planet Nevia is one of the few where lolling is retail, rather than wholesale. Here there be Heroes, killing is done with passion. This is a world of love and slaughter, both with gay abandon. No, I mean something much more shocking. Can you guess?”
“Uh . . . television commercials?”
“Close in spirit, but wide of the mark. You have an expression ‘the oldest profession.’ Here–and in all ther known worlds–it isn’t even the youngest. Nobody has heard of it and wouldn’t believe it if he did. We few who visit Earth don’t talk about it. Not that it would matter; most people don’t believe travelers’ tales.”
“Star, are you telling me that there is no prostitution elsewhere in the Universe?”
“The Universes, my darling. None.”
“You know,” I said thoughtfully, “that’s going to be a shock to my first sergeant. None at all?”
“I mean,” she said bluntly, “that whoring seems to have been invented by Earth people and no thers–and the idea would shock old Jocko into impotence. He’s a straitlaced moralist.”
“I’ll be damned! We must be a bunch of slobs.”
“I did not mean to offend, Oscar; I was reciting facts. But this oddity of Earth is not odd in its own context. Any commodity is certain to be sold–bought, sold, leased, rented, bartered, traded, discounted, price-stabilized, inflated, bootlegged, and legislated–and a woman’s ‘commodity’ as it was called on Earth in franker days is no exception. The only wonder is the wild notion of thinking of it as a commodity. Why, it so surprised me that once I even–Never mind. Anything can be made a commodity. Someday I will show you cultures living in spaces, not on planets–nor on fundaments of any sort; not all universes have planets–cultures where the breath of life is sold like a kilo of butter in Provence. Other places so crowded that the privilege of staying alive is subject to tax–and delinquents are killed out of hand by the Department of Eternal Revenue and neighbors not only do not interfere, they are pleased.”
“Good God! Why?”
“They solved death, milord, and most of them won’t emigrate despite endless roomier planets. But we were speaking of Earth. Not only is whoring unknown elsewhere, but its permutations are unknown–dower, bridal price, alimony, separate maintenance, all the variations that color all Earth’s institutions–every custom related even remotely to the incredible notion that what all women have an endless supply of is nevertheless merchandise, to be hoarded and auctioned.”
Ars Longa gave a snort of disgust. No, I don’t think she understood. She understands some Nevian but Star spoke English; Nevian lacks the vocabulary.
“Even your secondary customs,” she went on, “are shaped by this unique institution. Clothing–you’ve noticed that there is no real difference here in how the two sexes dress. I’m in tights this morning and you are in shorts but had it been the other way around no one would have noticed.”
“The hell they wouldn’t! Your tights wouldn’t fit me.”
“They stretch. And body shyness, which is an aspect of sex-specialized clothing. Here nakedness is as unnoteworthy as on that pretty little island where I found you. All hairless peoples sometimes wear clothing and all peoples no matter how hirsute wear ornaments–but nakedness taboo is found only where flesh is merchandise to be packaged or displayed . . . that is to say, on Earth. It parallels ‘Don’t pinch the grapefruit’ and putting false bottoms in berry boxes. If something is never haggled over, there is no need to make a mystery of it.”
“So if we get rid of clothes we get rid of prostitution?”
“Heavens, no! You’ve got it backwards.” She frowned. “I don’t see how Earth could ever get rid of whoring; it’s too much a part of everything you do.”
“Star, you’ve got your facts wrong. There is almost no prostitution in America.”
She looked startled. “Really? But–Isn’t ‘alimony’ an American word? And ‘gold digger’? And ‘coming-out party’?”
“Yes, but prostitution has almost died out. Hell, I wouldn’t know how to go about finding a whorehouse even in an Army town. I’m not saying that you don’t wind up in the nay. But it’s not commercialized. Star, even with an American girl who is well-known to be an easy make-out, if you offered her five bucks–or twenty–it’s ten to one she would slap your face.”
“Then how is it done?”
“You’re nice to her instead. Take her to dinner, maybe to a show. Buy her flowers, girls are suckers for flowers. Then approach the subject politely.”
“Oscar, doesn’t this dinner and show, and possibly flowers, cost more than five dollars? Or even twenty? I understood that American prices were as high as French prices.”
“Well, yes, but you can’t just tip your hat and expect a girl to throw herself on her back. A tightwad–”
“I rest the case. All I was trying to show was that customs can be wildly different in different worlds.”
“That’s true, even on Earth. But–”
“Please, milord. I won’t argue the virtue of American women, nor was I criticizing. Had I been reared in America I think I would want at least an emerald bracelet rather than dinner and a show. But I was leading up to the subject of ‘natural law.’ Is not the invariability of natural” law an unproved assumption? Even on Earth?”
“Well–You haven’t stated it fairly. It’s an assumption, I suppose. But there has never been a case in which it failed to stand up.”
“No black swans? Could it not be that an observer who saw an exception preferred not to believe his eyes? Just as you do not want to believe that Igli ate himself even though you, my Hero, forced him to?
Never mind. Let’s leave Socrates to his Xanthippe. Natural law may be invariable throughout a universe–seems to be, in rigid universes. But it is certain that natural laws vary from universe to universe–and believe this you must, milord, else neither of us will live long!”
I considered it. Damn it, where had Igli gone? “Most unsettling.”
“No more unsettling, once you get used to it, than shifting languages and customs as you shift countries.
How many chemical elements are there on Earth?”
“Uh, ninety-two and a bunch of Johnny-Come-Latelies. A hundred and six or seven.”
“Much the same here. Nevertheless a chemist from Earth would suffer some shocks. The elements aren’t quite the same, nor do they behave quite the same way. H-bombs won’t work here and dynamite won’t explode.”
I said sharply, “Now wait! Are you telling me that electrons and protons aren’t the same here, to get down to basics?”
She shrugged. “Perhaps, perhaps not. What is an electron but a mathematical concept? Have you tasted one lately? Or put salt on the tail of a wavicle? Does it matter?”
“It damn well would matter. A man can starve as dead from lack of trace elements as from lack of bread.”
“True. In some universes we humans must carry food if we visit them–which we sometimes must, if only to change trains. But here, and in each of the universes and countless planets where we humans live, you need not worry; local food will nourish you. Of course, if you lived here many years, then went back to Earth and died soon after and an autopsy were done with fussiest microanalysis, the analyst might not believe his results. But your stomach wouldn’t care.”
I thought about this, my belly stuffed with wonderful food and the air around me sweet and good–certainly my body did not care if there were indeed the differences Star spoke of.
Then I recalled one aspect of life in which little differences cause big differences. I asked Star about it.
She looked blandly innocent. “Do you care, milord? You will be long gone before it matters to Doral. I thought your purpose these three days was simply to help me in my problem? With pleasure in your work, I realize–you threw yourself into the spirit of the occasion.”
“Damn it, quit pulling my leg! I did it to help you. But a man can’t help wondering.”
She slapped my thigh and laughed. “Oh, my very darling! Stop wondering; human races throughout the Universes can crossbreed. Some crosses fruit but seldom and some mule out. But this is not one of them. You will live on here, even if you never return. You’re not sterile; that was one of many things I checked when I examined your beautiful body in Nice. One is never sure how the dice will roll, but–I think the Doral will not be disappointed.”
She leaned toward me. “Would you give your physician data more accurate than that which Jocko sang? I might offer a statistical probability. Or even a Sight.”
“No, I would not! Nosy.”
“It is a long nose, isn’t it? As you wish, milord. In a less personal vein the fact of crossbreeding among humans of different universes–and some animals such as dogs and cats–is a most interesting question. The only certainty is that human beings flourish only in those universes having chemistries so similar that elements that make up deoxyribonucleic acids are so alike as not to matter. As for the rest, every scholar has his theory. Some hold to a teleologic explanation, asserting that Man evolves alike in all essential particulars in every universe that can support him because of Divine Plan–or through blind necessity, depending on whether the scholar takes his religion straight or chases it with soda.
“Some think that we evolved just once–or were created, as may be–and leaked across into other universes. Then they fight over which universe was the home of the race.”
“How can there be any argument?” I objected. “Earth has fossil evidence covering the evolution of man. Other planets either have it or not, and that should settle it.”
“Are you sure, milord? I thought that, on Earth, man’s family tree has as many dotted lines as there are bastards in European royal lines.”
I shut up. I had simply read some popular books. Perhaps she was right; a race that could not agree as to who did what to whom in a war only twenty years back probably didn’t know what Alley Oop did to the upstairs maid a million years ago, when the evidence was only scattered bones. Hadn’t there been hoaxes? The Piltdown Man, or some such?
Star went on, “Whatever the truth, there are leakages between worlds. On your own planet disappearances run to hundreds of thousands and not all are absconders or wife-deserters; see any police department’s files. One usual place is the battlefield. The strain becomes too great and a man slides through a hole he didn’t know was there and winds up ‘missing in action.’ Sometimes–not often–a man is seen to disappear. One of your American writers, Bierce or Pierce, got interested and collected such cases. He collected so many that he was collected, too. And your Earth experiences reverse leakage, the ‘Kaspar Hausers,’ persons from nowhere, speaking no known language and never able to account for themselves.”
“Wait a minute? Why just people?”
“I didn’t say ‘just people.’ Have you never heard of rains of frogs? Of stones? Of blood? Who questions a stray cat’s origin? Are all flying saucers optical illusions? I promise you they are not; some are poor lost astronauts trying to find their way home. My people use space travel very little, as faster-than-light is the readiest way to lose yourself among the Universes. We prefer the safer method of metaphysical geometries–or ‘magic’ in the vulgar speech.”
Star looked thoughtful. “Milord, your Earth may be the home of mankind. Some scholars think so.”
“Why?”
“It touches so many other worlds. It’s the top of the list as a transfer point. If its people render it unfit for life–unlikely, but possible–it will disrupt traffic of a dozen universes. Earth has had its fairy rings, and Gates, and Bifrost Bridges for ages; that one we used in Nice was there before the Romans came.”
“Star, how can you talk about points on Earth ‘touching’ other planets–for centuries on end? The Earth moves around the Sun at twenty miles a second or such, and spins on its axis, not to mention other motions that add up to an involved curve at unthinkable speed. So how can it ‘touch’ other worlds?”
Again we rode in silence. At last Star said, “My Hero, how long did it take you to learn calculus?”
“Why, I haven’t learned it. I’ve studied it a couple of years.”
“Can you tell me how a particle can be a wave?”
“What? Star, that’s quantum mechanics, not calculus. I could give an explanation but it wouldn’t mean anything; I don’t have the math. An engineer doesn’t need it.”
“It would be simplest,” she said diffidently, “to answer your question by saying ‘magic’ just as you answered mine with ‘quantum mechanics.’ But you don’t like that word, so all I can say is that after you study higher geometries, metaphysical and conjectural as well as topological and judicial–if you care to make such study–I will gladly answer. But you won’t need to ask.”
(Ever been told: “Wait till you grow up, dear; then you will understand”? As a kid I didn’t like it from grownups; I liked it still less from a girl I was in love with when I was fully grown.)
Star didn’t let me sulk; she shifted the talk. “Some crossbreedings are from neither accidental slippages nor planned travel. You’ve heard of incubi and succubi?”
“Oh, sure. But I never bother my head with myths.”
“Not myths, darling, no matter how often the legend has been used to explain embarrassing situations. Witches and warlocks are not always saints and some acquire a taste for rape. A person who has learned to open Gates can indulge such vice; he–or she–can sneak up on a sleeping person–maid, chaste wife, virgin boy–work his will and be long gone before cockcrow.” She shuddered.
“Sin at its nastiest. If we catch them, we kill them. I’ve caught a few, I killed them. Sin at its worst, even if the victim learns to like it.” She shuddered again.
“Star, what is your definition of ‘sin’?”
“Can there be more than one? Sin is cruelty and injustice, all else is peccadillo. Oh, a sense of sin comes from violating the customs of your tribe. But breaking custom is not sin even when it feels so; sin is wronging another person.”
“How about ‘sinning against God’?” I persisted.
She looked at me sharply. “So again we shave the barber? First, milord, tell me what you mean by
‘God.’ ”
“I just wanted to see if you would walk into it.”
“I haven’t walked into that one in a mort of years. I’d as lief thrust with a bent wrist, or walk a pentacle in clothes. Speaking of pentacles, my Hero, our destination is not what it was three days ago. Now we go to a Gate I had not expected to use. More dangerous but it can’t be helped.”
“My fault! I’m sorry, Star.”
“My fault, milord. But not all loss. When we lost our luggage I was more worried than I dared show–even though I was never easy about carrying firearms through a world where they may not be used. But our foldbox carried much more than firearms, things we are vulnerable without. The time you spent in soothing the hurt to the Doral’s ladies I spent–in part–in wheedling the Doral for a new kit, almost everything heart could wish but firearms. Not all loss.”
“We are going to another world now?”
“Not later than tomorrow dawn, if we live.”
“Damn it, Star, both you and Rufo talk as if each breath might be our last.”
“As it might be.”
“You’re not expecting an ambush now; we’re still on Doral land. But Rufo is as full of dire forebodings as a cheap melodrama. And you are almost as bad.”
“I’m sorry. Rufo does fret–but he is a good man at your back when trouble starts. As for me, I have been trying to be fair, milord, to let you know what to expect.”
“Instead you confuse me. Don’t you think it’s time you put your cards face up?”
She looked troubled. “And if the Hanging Man is the first card turned?”
“I don’t give a hoot! I can face trouble without fainting–”
“I know you can, my champion.”
“Thanks. But not knowing makes me edgy. So talk.”
“I will answer any question, milord Oscar. I have always been willing to.” “But you know that I don’t know what questions to ask. Maybe a carrier pigeon doesn’t need to know what the war is about–but I feel like a sparrow in a badminton game. So start from the beginning.”
“As you say, milord. About seven thousand years ago–” Star stopped. “Oscar, do you want to know–now all the interplay of politics of a myriad worlds and twenty universes over millennia in arriving at the present crisis? I’ll try if you say, but just to outline it would take more time than remains until we must pass through that Gate. You are my true champion; my life hangs on your courage and skill. Do you want the politics behind my present helpless, almost hopeless predicament–save for you! Or shall I concentrate on the tactical situation?”
(Damn it! I did want the whole story.) “Let’s stick to the tactical situation. For now.”
“I promise,” she said solemnly, “that if we live through it, you shall have every detail. The situation is this: I had intended us to cross Nevia by barge, then through the mountains to reach a Gate beyond the Eternal Peaks. That route is less risky but long.
“But now we must hurry. We will turn off the road late this afternoon and pass through some wild country, and country still worse after dark. The Gate there we must reach before dawn; with luck we may sleep. I hope so, because this Gate takes us to another world at a much more dangerous exit.
“Once there, in that world–Hokesh it is called, or Karth–in Karth-Hokesh we shall be close, too close, to a tall tower, mile high, and, if we win to it, our troubles start. In it is the Never-Born, the Eater of Souls.”
“Star, are you trying to scare me?”
“I would rather you were frightened now, if such is possible, than have you surprised later. My thought, milord, had been to advise you of each danger as we reached it, so that you could concentrate on one at a time. But you overruled me.”
“Maybe you were right. Suppose you give me details on each as we come to it, just the outline now. So I’m to fight the Eater of Souls, am I? The name doesn’t scare me; if he tries to eat my soul, he’ll throw up. What do I fight him with? Spit?”
“That is one way,” she said seriously, “but, with luck, we won’t fight him–it–at all. We want what it guards.”
“And what is that?”
“The Egg of the Phoenix.”
“The Phoenix doesn’t lay eggs.”
“I know, milord. That makes it uniquely valuable.”
“But–”
She hurried on. “That is its name. It is a small object, somewhat larger than an ostrich egg and black. If I do not capture it, many bad things will happen. Among them is a small one: I will die. I mention that because it may not seem small to you–my darling! –and it is easier to tell you that one truth than it is to explain the issues.”
“Okay. We steal the Egg. Then what?”
“Then we go home. To my home. After which you may return to yours. Or remain in mine. Or go where you list, through Twenty Universes and myriad worlds. Under any choice, whatever treasure you fancy is yours; you will have earned it and more . . . as well as my heartfelt thanks, milord Hero, and anything you ask of me.”
(The biggest blank check ever written–If I could cash it.) “Star, you don’t seem to think we will live through it.”
She took a deep breath. “Not likely, milord. I tell you truth. My blunder has forced on us a most desperate alternative.”
“I see. Star, will you marry me? Today?”
Then I said, “Easy there! Don’t fall!” She hadn’t been in danger of falling; the seat belt held her. But she sagged against it. I leaned over and put my arm around her shoulders. “Nothing to cry about. Just give me a yes or a no–and I fight for you anyway. On, I forgot. I love you. Anyhow I think it’s love. A funny, fluttery feeling whenever I look at you or think about you–which is mostly.”
“I love you, milord,” she said huskily. “I have loved you since I first saw you. Yes, a ‘funny, fluttery feeling’ as if everything inside me were about to melt down.”
“Well, not quite that,” I admitted. “But it’s probably opposite polarity for the same thing. Fluttery, anyhow. Chills and lightnings. How do we get married around here?”
“But, milord–my love–you always astound me. I knew you loved me. I hoped that you would tell me before–well, in time. Let me hear it once. I did not expect you to offer to marry me!”
“Why not? I’m a man, you’re a woman. It’s customary?”
“But–Oh, my love, I told you! It isn’t necessary to marry me. By your rules . . . I’m a bitch.”
“Bitch, witch, Sing Along with Mitch! What the hell, honey? That was your word, not mine. You have about convinced me that the rules I was taught are barbarous and yours are the straight goods. Better blow your nose–here, want my hanky?
Star wiped her eyes and blew her nose but instead of the yes-darling I wanted to hear she sat up straight and did not smile. She said formally, “Milord Hero, had you not best sample the wine before you buy the barrel?”
I pretended not to understand.
“Please, milord love,” she insisted. “I mean it. There’s a grassy bit on your side of the road, just ahead. You can lead me to it this moment and willingly I will go.”
I sat high and pretended to peer. “Looks like crab grass. Scratchy.”
“Then p-p-pick your own grass! Milord . . . I am willing, and eager, and not uncomely–but you will learn that I am a Sunday painter compared with artists you will someday meet. I am a working woman. I haven’t been free to give the matter the dedicated study it deserves. Believe me! No, try me. You can’t know that you want to marry me.”
“So you’re a cold and clumsy wench, eh?”
“Well . . . I didn’t say that. I’m only entirely unskilled–and I do have enthusiasm.”
“Yes, like your auntie with the cluttered bedroom–it runs in your family, so you said. Let it stand that I ant to marry you in spite of your obvious faults.”
“But–”
“Star, you talk too much.”
“Yes, milord,” she said meekly.
“We’re getting married. How do we do it? Is the local lord also justice of the peace? If he is, there will be no droit du seigneur; we haven’t time for frivolities.” “Each squire is the local justice,” Star agreed thoughtfully, “and does perform marriages, although most Nevians don’t bother. But–Well, yes, he would expect droit du seigneur and, as you pointed out, we haven’t time to waste.”
“Nor is that my idea of a honeymoon. Star–look at me. I don’t expect to keep you in a cage; I know you weren’t raised that way. But we won’t look up the squire. What’s the local brand of preacher? A celibate brand, by choice.”
“But the squire is the priest, too. Not that religion is an engrossing matter in Nevia; fertility rites are all they bother with. Milord love, the simplest way is to jump over your sword.”
“Is that a marriage ceremony where you come from, Star?”
“No, it’s from your world:
‘Leap rogue, and jump whore,
‘And married be forevermore–‘
“–it’s very old.”
“Mmm–I don’t care for the marriage lines. I may be a rogue but I know what you think of whores. What other chances are there?”
“Let me see. There’s a rumormonger in a village we pass through soon after lunch. They sometimes marry townies who want it known far and wide; the service includes spreading the news.”
“What sort of service?”
“I don’t know. And I don’t care, milord love. Married we will be!”
“That’s the spirit! We won’t stop for lunch.”
“No, milord,” she said firmly, “if wife I am to be, I shall be a good wife and not permit you to skip meals.”
“Henpecking already. I think I’ll beat you.”
“As you will, milord. But you must eat, you are going to need your strength–”
“I certainly will!’
“–for fighting. For now I am ten times as anxious that we both live through it. Here is a place for
lunch.” She turned Vita Brevis off the road; Ars Longa followed. Star looked back over her shoulder and dimpled. “Have I told you today that you are beautiful . . . my love!”
Chapter 11
Rufo’s longhorse followed us onto the grassy verge Star picked for picnicking. He was still limp as a wet sock and snoring. I would have let him sleep but Star was shaking him.
He came awake fast, reaching for his sword and shouting, “A moi! M’aidez! Les vaches!” Fortunately some friend had stored his sword and belt out of reach on the baggage rack aft, along with bow, quiver, and our new foldbox.
Then he shook his head and said, “How many were there?”
“Down from there, old friend,” Star said cheerfully. “We’ve stopped to eat.”
“Eat!” Rufo gulped and shuddered. “Please, milady. No obscenity.” He fumbled at his seat belt and fell out of his saddle; I steadied him. Star was searching through her pouch; she pulled out a vial and offered it to Rufo. He shied back.
“Milady!”
“Shall I hold your nose?” she said sweetly.
“I’ll be all right. Just give me a moment . . . and the hair of the dog.”
“Certainly you’ll be all right. Shall I ask milord Oscar to pin your arms?”
Rufo glanced at me appealingly; Star opened the little bottle. It fizzed and fumes rolled out and down.
“Now!”
Rufo shuddered, held his nose, tossed it down.
I won’t say smoke shot out of his ears. But he flapped like torn canvas in a gale and horrible noises came out.
Then he came into focus as suddenly as a TV picture. He appeared heavier and inches taller and had finned out. His skin was a rosy glow instead of death pallor. “Thank you, milady,” he said cheerfully, his oice resonant and virile. “Someday I hope to return the favor.”
“When the Greeks reckon time by the kalends,” she agreed.
Rufo led the longhorses aside and fed them, opening the foldbox and digging out haunches of bloody eat. Ars Longa ate a hundredweight and Vita Brevis and Mors Profunda even more; on the road these beasts need a high-protein diet. That done, he whistled as he set up table and chairs for Star and myself.
“Sugar pie,” I said to Star, “what’s in that pick-me-up?”
“An old family recipe:
‘Eye of newt and toe of frog,
‘Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
‘Adders fork and blind-worm’s sting,
‘Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing–‘ ”
“Shakespeare!” I said. “Macbeth.”
” ‘Cool it with a baboon’s blood–‘ No, Will got it from me, milord love. That’s the way with writers; they’ll steal anything, file off the serial numbers, and claim it for their own. I got it from my aunt–another aunt–who was a professor of internal medicine. The rhyme is a mnemonic for the real ingredients which are much more complicated–never can tell when you’ll need a hangover cure. I compounded it last night, knowing that Rufo, for the sake of our skins, would need to be at his sharpest today–two doses, in fact, in case you needed one. But you surprised me, my love; you break out with nobility at the oddest times.”
“A family weakness. I can’t help it.”
“Luncheon is served, milady.”
I offered Star my arm. Hot foods were hot, cold ones chilled; this new foldbox, in Lincoln green embossed with the Doral chop, had equipment that the lost box lacked. Everything was delicious and the wines were superb.
Rufo ate heartily from his serving board while keeping an eye on our needs. He had come over to pour the wine for the salad when I broke the news. “Rufo old comrade, milady Star and I are getting married today. I want you to be my best man and help prop me up.”
He dropped the bottle.
Then he was busy wiping me and mopping the table. When at last he spoke, it was to Star. “Milady,” he said tightly, “I have put up with much, uncomplaining, for reasons I need not state. But this is going too far. I won’t let–”
“Hold your tongue!”
“Yes,” I agreed, “hold it while I cut it out. Will you have it fried? Or boiled?”
Rufo looked at me and breathed heavily. Then he left abruptly, withdrawing beyond the serving board.
Star said softly, “Milord love, I am sorry.”
“What twisted his tail?” I said wonderingly. Then I thought of the obvious. “Star! Is Rufo jealous?”
She looked astounded, started to laugh and chopped it off. “No, no, darling! It’s not that at all.
Rufo–Well, Rufo has his foibles but he is utterly dependable where it counts. And we need him. Ignore it. Please, milord.”
“As you say. It would take more than that to make me unhappy today.”
Rufo came back, face impassive, and finished serving. He repacked without speaking and we hit the road.
The road skirted the village green; we left Rufo there and sought out the rumormonger. His shop, a crooked lane away, was easy to spot; an apprentice was beating a drum in front of it and shouting teasers of gossip to a crowd of locals. We pushed through and went inside.
The master rumormonger was reading something in each hand with a third scroll propped against his feet on a desk. He looked, dropped feet to floor, jumped up and made a leg while waving us to seats.
“Come in, come in, my gentles!” be sang out. “You do me great honor, my day is made! And yet if I may say so you have come to the right place whatever your problem whatever your need you have only to speak good news bad news every sort but sad news reputations restored events embellished history rewritten great deeds sung and all work guaranteed by the oldest established news agency in all Nevia news from all worlds all universes propaganda planted or uprooted offset or rechanneled satisfaction guaranteed honesty is the best policy but the client is always right don’t tell me I know I know I have spies in every kitchen ears in every bedroom the Hero Gordon without a doubt and your fame needs no heralds milord but honored am I that you should seek me out a biography perhaps to match your matchless deeds complete with old nurse who recalls in her thin and ancient and oh so persuasive voice the signs and portents at your birth–”
Star chopped him off. “We want to get married.”
His mouth shut, he looked sharply at Star’s waistline and almost bought a punch in the nose. “It is a pleasure. And I must add that I heartily endorse such a public-spirited project. All this modern bundling and canoodling and scuttling without even three cheers or a by-your-leave sends taxes up and profits down that’s logic. I only wish I had time to get married myself as I’ve told my wife many’s the time. Now as to plans, if I may make a modest suggestion–”
“We want to be married by the customs of Earth.”
“Ah, yes, certainly.” He turned to a cabinet near his desk, spun dials. After a bit he said, “Your pardon, gentles, but my head is crammed with a billion facts, large and small, and–that name? Does it start with one ‘R’ or two?”
Star moved around, inspected the dials, made a setting.
The rumormonger blinked. “That universe? We seldom have a call for it. I’ve often wished I had time to travel but business business business–LIBRARY!”
“Yes, Master?” a voice answered.
“The planet Earth, Marriage Customs of–that’s a capital ‘Urr’ and a soft theta.” He added a five-group serial number. “Snap it up!”
In very short time an apprentice came running with a thin scroll. “Librarian says careful how you handle it, Master. Very brittle, he says. He says–”
“Shut up. Your pardon, gentles.” He inserted the scroll in a reader and began to scan.
His eyes bugged out and he sat forward. “Unbeliev–” Then he muttered, “Amazing! Whatever made them think of that!” For several minutes he appeared to forget we were there, simply giving vent to: “Astounding! Fantastic!” and like expressions.
I tapped his elbow. “We’re in a hurry.”
“Eh? Yes, yes, milord Hero Gordon–milady.” Reluctantly he left the scanner, fitted his palms together, and said, “You’ve come to the right place. Not another rumormonger in all Nevia could handle a project this size. Now my thought is–just a rough idea, talking off the top of my head–for the procession we’ll need to call in the surrounding countryside although for the charivari we could make do with just townspeople if you want to keep it modest in accordance with your reputation for dignified simplicity–say one day for the procession and a nominal two nights of charivari with guaranteed noise levels of–”
“Hold it.”
“Milord? I’m not going to make a profit on this; it will be a work of art, a labor of love–just expenses plus a little something for my overhead. It’s my professional judgment, too, that a Samoan pre-ceremony would be more sincere, more touching really, than the optional Zulu rite. For a touch of comedy relief–at no extra charge; one of my file clerks just happens to be seven months along, she’d be glad to run down the aisle and interrupt the ceremony–and of course there is the matter of witnesses to the consummation, how many for each of you, but that needn’t be settled this week; we have the street decorations to think of first, and–”
I took her arm. “We’re leaving.”
“Yes, milord,” Star agreed.
He chased after us, shouting about broken contracts. I put hand to sword and showed six inches of blade; his squawks shut off.
Rufo seemed to be all over his mad; he greeted us civilly, even cheerfully. We mounted and left. We had been riding south a mile or so when I said, “Star darling–”
“Milord love?”
“That ‘jumping over the sword’–that really is a marriage ceremony?”
“A very old one, my darling. I think it dates back to the Crusades.”
“I’ve thought of an updated wording:
‘Jump rogue, and princess leap,
‘My wife art thou and mine to keep!’
“–would that suit you?”
“Yes, yes!”
“But for the second line you say:
‘–thy wife I vow and thine to keep.’
“Got it?”
Star gave a quick gasp. “Yes, my love!”
We left Rufo with the longhorses, giving no explanation, and climbed a little wooded hill. All of Nevia is beautiful, with never a beer can nor a dirty Kleenex to mar its Eden loveliness, but here we found an outdoor temple, a smooth grassy place surrounded by arching trees, an enchanted sanctuary.
I drew my sword and glanced along it, feeling its exquisite balance while noting again the faint ripples left by feather-soft hammer blows of some master swordsmith. I tossed it and caught it by the forte.
“Read the motto. Star.”
She traced it out. ” ‘Dum vivimus, vivamus!’–‘While we live, let us live!’ Yes, my love, yes!” She kissed it and handed it back; I placed it on the ground.
“Know your lines?” I asked.
“Graved in my heart.”
I took her hand in mine. “Jump high. One . . . two . . . three!”
Chapter 12
When I led my bride back down that blessed hill, arm around her waist, Rufo helped us mount without comment. But he could hardly miss that Star now addressed me as: “Milord husband.” He mounted and tailed in, a respectful distance out of earshot.
We rode hand in hand for at least an hour. Whenever I glanced at her, she was smiling; whenever she caught my eye, the smile grew dimples. Once I asked, “How soon must we keep lockout?”
“Not until we leave the road, milord husband.”
That held us another mile. At last she said timidly, “Milord husband?”
“Yes, wife?”
“Do you still think that I am ‘a cold and clumsy wench’?”
“Mmm . . .” I answered thoughtfully, ” ‘cold’–no, I couldn’t honestly say you were cold. But ‘clumsy’–Well, compared with an artist like Muri, let us say–”
“Milord husband!”
“Yes? I was saying
“Are you honing for a kick in the belly?” She added, “American!”
“Wife . . . would you kick me in the belly?”
She was slow in answering and her voice was very low. “No, milord husband. Never.”
“I’m pleased to hear it. But if you did, what would happen?”
“You–you would spank me. With my own sword. But not with your sword. Please, never with your sword . . . my husband.”
“Not with your sword, either. With my hand. Hard. First I would spank you. And then–”
“And then what?”
I told her. “But don’t give me cause. According to plans I have to fight later. And don’t interrupt me in the future.”
“Yes, milord husband.”
“Very well. Now let’s assign Muri an arbitrary score of ten. On that scale you would rate–Let me hink.”
“Three or four, perhaps? Or even five?”
“Quiet. I make it about a thousand. Yes, a thousand, give or take a point. I haven’t a slide rule.”
“Oh, what a beast you are, my darling! Lean close and loss me–and just wait till I tell Muri.”
“You’ll say nothing to Muri, my bride, or you will be paddled. Quit fishing for compliments. You know hat you are, you sword-jumping wench.”
“And what am I?”
“My princess.”
“Oh.”
“And a mink with its tail on fire–and you know it.”
“Is that good? I’ve studied American idiom most carefully but sometimes I am not sure.”
“It’s supposed to be tops. A figure of speech, I’ve never known a mink that well. Now get your mindon other matters, or you may be a widow on your bridal day. Dragons, you say?”
“Not until after nightfall, milord husband–and they aren’t really dragons.”
“As you described them, the difference could matter only to another dragon. Eight feet high at the houlders, a few tons each, and teeth as long as any forearm–all they need is to breathe flame.”
“Oh, but they do! Didn’t I say?”
I sighed. “No, you did not.”
“They don’t exactly breathe fire. That would kill them. They hold their breaths while flaming. It’s wamp gas–methane–from the digestive tract. It’s a controlled belch, with a hypergolic effect from an enzyme secreted between the first and second rows of teeth. The gas bursts into flame on the way out.”
“I don’t care how they do it; they’re flame-throwers. Well? How do you expect me to handle them?”
“I had hoped that you would have ideas. You see,” she added apologetically, “I hadn’t planned on it, I didn’t expect us to come this way.”
“Well–Wife, let’s go back to that village. Set up in competition with our friend the rumormonger–I’ll bet we could outgabble him.”
“Milord husband!”
“Never mind. If you want me to kill dragons every Wednesday and Saturday, I’ll be on call. This flaming methane–Do they spout it from both ends?”
“Oh, just the front end. How could it be both?”
“Easy. See next year’s model. Now quiet; I’m thinking over a tactic. Ill need Rufo. I suppose he has killed dragons before?”
“I don’t know that a man has ever killed one, milord husband.”
“So? My princess, I’m flattered by the confidence you place in me. Or is it desperation? Don’t answer, I don’t want to know. Keep quiet and let me think.”
At the next farmhouse Rufo was sent in to arrange returning the longhorses. They were ours, gifts from the Doral, but we had to send them home, as they could not live where we were going–Muri had promised me that she would keep an eye on Ars Longa and exercise her. Rufo came back with a bumpkin mounted on a heavy draft animal bareback–he Kept shifting numbly between second and third pairs of legs to spare the animal’s back and controlled it by voice.
When we dismounted, retrieved our bows and quivers, and prepared to hoof it, Rufo came up. “Boss, Manure Foot craves to meet the hero and touch his sword. Brush him off?”
Rank hath its duties as well as its privileges. “Fetch him.”
The lad, overgrown and fuzz on his chin, approached eagerly, stumbling over his feet, then made a leg so long he almost fell. “Straighten up, son,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Pug, milord Hero,” he answered shrilly. (“Pug” will do. The Nevian meaning was as rugged as Jocko’s jokes.) “A stout name. What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“A hero, milord! Like yourself.”
I thought of telling him about those rocks on the Glory Road. But he would find them soon enough if ever he tramped it–and either not mind, or turn back and forget the silly business. I nodded approvingly and assured him that there was always room at the top in the Hero business for a lad with spirit–and that the lower the start, the greater the glory . . . so work hard and study hard and wait his opportunity. Keep his guard up but always speak to strange ladies; adventure would come his way. Then I let him touch my sword–but not take it in hand. The Lady Vivamus is mine and I’d rather share my toothbrush.
Once, when I was young, I was presented to a Congressman. He had handed me the same fatherly guff I was now plagiarizing. Like prayer, it can’t do any harm and might do some good, and I found that I was sincere when I said it and no doubt the Congressman was, too. Oh, possibly some harm, as the youngster might get himself killed on the first mile of that road. But that is better than sitting over the fire in your old age, sucking your gums and thinking about the chances you missed and the gals you didn’t tumble. Isn’t it?
I decided that the occasion seemed so important to Pug that it should be marked, so I groped in my pouch and found a U.S. quarter. “What’s the rest of your name. Pug?”
“Just ‘Pug,’ milord. Of house Lerdki, of course.”
“E. C.” to “Easy” because of my style of broken-field running–I never ran harder nor dodged more than the occasion demanded.
“By authority vested in me by Headquarters United States Army Southeast Asia Command, I, the Hero Oscar, ordain that you shall be known henceforth as Lerdki’t Pug Easy. Wear it proudly.”
I gave him the quarter and showed him George Washington on the obverse. “This is the father of my house, a greater hero than I will ever be. He stood tall and proud, spoke the truth, and fought for the right as he saw it, against fearful odds. Try to be like him. And here”–I turned it over–“is the chop of my house, the house he founded. The bird stands for courage, freedom, and ideals soaring high.” (I didn’t tell him that the American Eagle eats carrion, never tackles anything its own size, and will soon be extinct–it does stand for those ideals. A symbol means what you put into it.)
Pug Easy nodded violently and tears started to flow. I had not presented him to my bride; I didn’t know that she would wish to meet him. But she stepped forward and said gently, “Pug Easy, remember the words of milord Hero. Treasure them and they will last you all your life.”
The lad dropped to his knees. Star touched his hair and said, “Stand, Lerdki’t Pug Easy. Stand tall.”
I said good-bye to Ars Longa, told her to be a good girl and I would be back someday. Pug Easy readed back with longhorses tailed up and we set out into the woods, arrows nocked and Rufo eyes-behind. There was a sign where we left the yellow brick road; freely translated it read: ALL HOPE ABANDON, YE WHO ENTER HERE.
(A literal translation is reminiscent of Yellowstone Park: “Warning–the varmints in these woods are not tame. Travelers are warned to stay on the road, as their remains will not be returned to their kin. The Lerdki, His Chop.”)
Presently Star said, “Milord husband–”
“Yes, pretty foots?” I didn’t look at her; I was watching my side and a bit of hers, and keeping an eye overhead as well, as we could be bombed here–something like blood kites but smaller and goes for the eyes.
“My Hero, you are truly noble and you have made your wife most proud.”
“Huh? How?” I had my mind on targets–two kinds on the ground here: a rat big enough to eat cats and willing to eat people, and a wild hog about the same size and not a ham sandwich on him anyplace, all rawhide and bad temper. The hogs were easier targets, I had been told, because they charge straight at you. But don’t miss. And have your sword loosened, you won’t nock a second shaft.
“That lad, Pug Easy. What you did for him.”
“Him? I fed him the old malarkey. Cost nothing.”
“It was a kingly deed, milord husband.”
“Oh, nonsense, diddycums. He expected big talk from a hero, so I did.”
“Oscar my beloved, may a loyal wife point it out to her husband when he speaks nonsense of himself? I have known many heroes and some were such oafs that one would feed them at the back door if their eeds did not claim a place at the table. I have known few men who were noble, for nobility is scarcer far than heroism. But true nobility can always be recognized . . . even in one as belligerently shy about showing it as you are. The lad expected it, so you gave it to him–out noblesse oblige is an emotion felt only by those who are noble.”
“Well, maybe. Star, you are talking too much again. Don’t you think these varmints have ears?”
“Your pardon, milord. They have such good ears that they hear footsteps through the ground long before they hear voices. Let me have the last word, today being my bridal day. If you are–no, when you are gallant to some beauty, let us say Letva–or Muri, damn her lovely eyes! –I do not count it as nobility; it must be assumed to spring from a much commoner emotion than noblesse oblige. But when you speak to a country lout with pigsty on his feet, garlic on his breath, the stink of sweat all over him, and pimples on his face–speak gently and make him feel for the time as noble as you are and let him hope one day to be your equal–I know it is not because you hope to tumble him.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Boys that age are considered a treat in some circles. Give him a bath, perfume him, curl his hair–”
“Milord husband, is it permitted for me to think about kicking you in the belly?”
“Can’t be court-martialed for thinking, that’s the one thing they can’t take away from you. Okay, I prefer girls; I’m a square and can’t help it. What’s this about Muri’s eyes? Longlegs, are you jealous?”
I could hear dimples even though I couldn’t stop to see them. “Only on my wedding day, milord husband; the other days are yours. If I catch you in sportiveness, I shall either not see it, or congratulate you, as may be.”
“I don’t expect you’ll catch me.”
“And I trust you’ll not catch me, milord rogue,” she answered serenely.
She did get the last word, for just then Rufo’s bowstring went Fwung! He called out, “Got ‘im!” and then we were very busy. Hogs so ugly they made razorbacks look like Poland-Chinas–I got one by arrow, down his slobbering throat then fed steel to his brother a frozen second later. Star got a fair hit at hers but it deflected on bone and kept coming and I kicked it in the shoulder as I was still trying to free my blade from its cousin. Steel between its ribs quieted it and Star coolly nocked another shaft and let fly while I was killing it. She got one more with her sword, leaning the point in like a matador at the moment of truth, dancing aside as it came on, dead and unwilling to admit it.
The fight was over. Old Rufo had got three unassisted and a nasty goring; I had a scratch and my bride was unhurt, which I made sure of as soon as things were quiet. Then I mounted guard while our surgeon took care of Rufo, after which she dressed my lesser cut.
“How about it, Rufo?” I asked. “Can you walk?”
“Boss, I won’t stay in this forest if I have to crawl, Let’s mush. Anyhow,” he added, nodding at the worthless pork around us, “we won’t be bothered by rats right away.”
I rotated the formation, placing Rufo and Star ahead with his good leg on the outside and myself taking rear guard, where I should have been all along. Rear guard is slightly safer than point under most conditions but these weren’t most conditions. I had let my blind need to protect my bride personally ffect my judgment.
Having taken the hot spot I then went almost cross-eyed trying not only to see behind but ahead as well, so that I could close fast if Star–yes, and Rufo–got into trouble. Luckily we had a breathing spell in which I sobered down and took to heart the oldest lesson on patrol: You can’t do the other man’s job. Then I gave all my attention to our rear. Rufo, old as he was and wounded, would not die without slaughtering an honor guard to escort him to hell in style–and Star was no fainting heroine. I would bet long odds on her against anyone her own weight, name your weapon or barehanded, and I pity the man who ever tried to rape her; he’s probably still searching for his cojones.
Hogs didn’t bother us again but as evening approached we began to see and oftener to hear those giant rats; they paced us, usually out of sight; they never attacked berserk the way the hogs had; they looked for the best of it, as rats always do.
Rats give me the horrors. Once when I was a kid, my dad dead and Mother not yet remarried, we were flat broke and living in an attic in a condemned building. You could hear rats in the walls and twice rats ran over me in my sleep.
I still wake up screaming.
It doesn’t improve a rat to blow it up to the size of a coyote. These were real rats, even to the whiskers, and shaped like rats save that their legs and pads were too large–perhaps the cube-square law on animal proportions works anywhere.
We didn’t waste an arrow on one unless it was a fair shot and we zigzagged to take advantage of such openness as the forest had–which increased the hazard from above. However, the forest was so dense that attacks from the sky weren’t our first worry.
I got one rat that tailed too closely and just missed another. We had to spend an arrow whenever they got bold; it caused the others to be more cautious. And once, while Rufo was drawing a bow on one and Star was ready with her sword to back him up, one of those vicious little hawks dived on Rufo.
Star cut him out of the air at the bottom of his stoop. Rufo hadn’t even seen it; he was busy nailing brother rat.
We didn’t have to worry about underbrush; this forest was park-like, trees and grass, no dense undergrowth. Not too bad, that stretch, except that we began to run out of arrows. I was fretting about that when I noticed something. “Hey, up ahead! You’re off course. Cut to the right.” Star had set course for me when we left the road but it was up to me to hold it; her bump of direction was erratic and Rufo’s no better.
“Sorry, milord leader,” Star called back. “The going was a trifle steep.”
I closed in. “Rufo, how’s the leg?” There was sweat on his forehead.
Instead of answering me, he said, “Milady, it will be dark soon.”
“I know,” she answered calmly, “so time for a bite of supper. Milord husband, that great flat rock up ahead seems a nice place.”
I thought she had slipped her gears and so did Rufo, but for another reason. “But, milady, we are far ehind schedule.”
“And much later we shall be unless I attend to your leg again.”
“Better you leave me behind,” he muttered.
“Better you keep quiet until your advice is asked,” I told him. “I wouldn’t leave a Horned Ghost to be eaten by rats. Star, how do we do this?”
The great flat rock sticking up like a skull in the trees ahead was the upper surface of a limestone boulder with its base buried. I stood guard in its center with Rufo seated beside me while Star set out wards at cardinal and semi-cardinal points. I didn’t get to see what she did because my eyes had to be peeled for anything beyond her, shaft nocked and ready to knock it down or scare it off, while Rufo watched the other side. However, Star told me later that the wards weren’t even faintly “magic” but were within reach of Earth technology once some bright boy got the idea–an “electrified fence” without the fence, as radio is a telephone without wires, an analogy that won’t hold up.
But it was well that I kept honest lockout instead of trying to puzzle out how she sat up that charmed circle, as she was attacked by the only rat we met that had no sense. He came straight at her, my arrow past her ear warned her, and she finished him off by sword. It was a very old male, missing teeth and white whiskers and likely weak in his mind. He was as large as a wolf, and with two death wounds still a red-eyed, mangy fury.
Once the last ward was placed Star told me that I could stop worrying about the sky; the wards roofed as well as fenced the circle. As Rufo says, if She says it, that settles it. Rufo had partly unfolded the foldbox while he watched; I got out her surgical case, more arrows for all of us, and food. No nonsense about manservant and gentlefolk, we ate together, sitting or sprawling and with Rufo lying flat to give his leg a chance while Star served him, sometimes popping food into his mouth in Nevian hospitality.
She had worked a long time on his leg while I held a light and handed her things. She packed the wound with a pale jelly before sealing a dressing over it. If it hurt, Rufo didn’t mention it.
While we ate it grew dark and the invisible fence began to be lined with eyes, glowing back at us with the light we ate by, and almost as numerous as the crowd the morning Igli ate himself. Most of them I judged to be rats. One group kept to themselves with a break in the circle on each side; I decided these must be hogs; the eyes were higher off the ground.
“Milady love,” I said, “will those wards hold all night?”
“Yes, milord husband.”
“They had better. It is too dark for arrows and I can’t see us hacking our way through that mob. I’m afraid you must revise your schedule again.”
“I can’t, milord Hero. But forget those beasts. Now we fly.”
Rufo groaned. “I was afraid so. You know it makes me seasick.”
“Poor Rufo,” Star said softly. “Never fear, old friend I have a surprise for you. Again such chance as this, I bought Dramamine in Cannes–you know, the drug that saved the Normandy invasion back on Earth. Or perhaps you don’t know.”
Rufo answered, ” ‘Know’? I was in that invasion, milady–and I’m allergic to Dramamine; I fed fish all the way to Omaha Beach. Worst night I’ve ever had–why, I’d rather be here!”
“Rufo,” I asked, “were you really at Omaha Beach?”
“Hell, yes, Boss. I did all of Eisenhower’s thinking.”
“But why? It wasn’t your fight.”
“You might ask yourself why you’re in this fight, Boss. In my case it was French babes. Earthy and uninhibited and always cheerful about it and willing to learn. I remember one little mademoiselle from Armentieres”–he pronounced it correctly–“who hadn’t been–”
Star interrupted. “While you two pursue your bachelor reminiscences, I’ll get the flight gear ready.” She got up and went to the foldbox.
“Go ahead, Rufo,” I said, wondering how far he would stretch this one.
“No,” he said sullenly. “She wouldn’t like it. I can tell. Boss, you’ve had the damnedest effect on Her. More ladylike by the minute and that isn’t like Her at all. First thing you know She will subscribe to Vogue and then there’s no telling how far it will go. I don’t understand it, it can’t be your looks. No offense meant.”
“And none taken. Well, tell me another time. If you can remember it.”
“I’ll never forget her. But, Boss, seasickness isn’t the half of it. You think these woods are infested. Well, the ones we are coming to–wobbly in the knees, at least I will be–those woods have dragons.”
“I know.”
“So She told you? But you have to see it to believe it. The woods are full of ’em. More than there are
Doyles in Boston. Big ones, little ones, and the two-ton teen-age size, hungry all the time. You may fancy
being eaten by a dragon; I don’t. It’s humiliating. And final. They ought to spray the place with
dragonbane, that’s what they ought to do. There ought to be a law.”
Star had returned. “No, there should not be a law,” she said firmly. “Rufo, don’t sound off about things you don’t understand. Disturbing the ecological balance is the worst mistake any government can make.”
Rufo shut up, muttering. I said, “My true love, what use is a dragon? Riddle me that.”
“I’ve never cast a balance sheet on Nevia, it’s not my responsibility. But I can suggest the imbalances that might follow any attempt to get rid of dragons–which the Nevians could do; you’ve seen that their technology is not to be sneered at. These rats and hogs destroy crops. Rats help to keep the hogs down by eating piglets. But rats are even worse than hogs, on food crops. The dragons graze through these very woods in the daytime–dragons are diurnal, rats are nocturnal and go into their holes in the heat of the day. The dragons and hogs keep the underbrush cropped back and the dragons keep the lower limbs trimmed off. But dragons also enjoy a tasty rat, so whenever one locates a rat hole, it gives it a shot of flame, not always killing adults as they dig two holes for each nest, but certainly killing any babies–and then the dragon digs in and has his favorite snack. There is a long-standing agreement, amounting to a treaty, that as long as the dragons stay in their own territory and keep the rats in check, humans will not bother them.”
“But why not kill the rats, and then clean up the dragons?”
“And let the hogs run wild? Please, milord husband, I don’t know all the answers in this case; I simply know that disturbing a natural balance is a matter to be approached with fear and trembling–and a very versatile computer. The Nevians seem content not to bother the dragons.”
“Apparently we’re going to bother them. Will that break the treaty?”
“It’s not really a treaty, it’s folk wisdom with the Nevians, and a conditioned reflex–or possibly instinct–with the dragons. And we aren’t going to bother dragons if we can help it. Have you discussed tactics with Rufo? There won’t be time when we get there.”
So I discussed how to loll dragons with Rufo, while Star listened and finished her preparations. “All right,” Rufo said glumly, “it beats sitting tight, like an oyster on the half shell waiting to be eaten. More dignified. I’m a better archer than you are–or at least as good–so I’ll take the hind end, as I’m not as agile tonight as I should be.”
“Be ready to switch jobs fast if he swings around.”
“You be ready, Boss. I’ll be ready for the best of reasons–my favorite skin.”
Star was ready and Rufo had packed and reslung the foldbox while we conferred. She placed round garters above each knee of each of us, then had us sit on the rock facing our destination. “That oak arrow, Rufo.”
“Star, isn’t this out of the Albertus Magnus book?”
“Similar,” she said. “My formula is more reliable and the ingredients I use on the garters don’t spoil. If you please, milord husband, I must concentrate on my witchery. Place the arrow so that it points at the cave.”
I did so. “Is that precise?” she asked.
“If the map you showed me is correct, it is. That’s aimed just the way I’ve been aiming since we left the road.”
“How far away is the Forest of Dragons?”
“Uh, look, my love, as long as we’re going by air why don’t we go straight to the cave and skip the dragons?”
She said patiently, “I wish we could. But that forest is so dense at the top that we can’t drop straight down at the cave, no elbow room. And the things that live in those trees, high up, are worse than dragons. They grow–”
“Please!” said Rufo. “I’m airsick already and we’re not off the ground.”
“Later, Oscar, if you still want to know. In any case we daren’t risk encountering them–and won’t; they stay up higher than the dragons can reach, they must. How tar to the forest?”
“Mmm, eight and a half miles, by that map and how far we’ve come–and not more than two beyond that to the Cave of the Gate.”
“All right. Arms tight around my waist, both of you, and as much body contact as possible; it’s got to work on all of us equally.” Rufo and I settled each an arm in a hug about her and clasped hands across her tummy. That’s good. Hang on tight.” Star wrote figures on the rock beside the arrow.
It sailed away into the night with us after it.
I don’t see how to avoid calling this magic, as I can’t see any way to build Buck Rogers belts into elastic garters. Oh, if you like, Star hypnotized us, then used psi powers to teleport us eight and a half miles. “Psi” is a better word than “magic”; monosyllables are stronger than polysyllables–see Winston Churchill’s speeches. I don’t understand either word, any more than I can explain why I never get lost. I just think it’s preposterous that other people can.
When I fly in dreams, I use two styles: one is a swan dive and I swoop and swirl and cut didos; the other is sitting Turk fashion like the Little Lame Prince and sailing along by sheer force of personality.
The latter is how we did it, like sailing in a glider with no glider. It was a fine night for flying (all nights in Nevia are fine; it rains just before dawn in the rainy season, they tell me) and the greater moon silvered the ground below us. The woods opened up and became clumps of trees; the forest we were heading for showed black against the distance, much higher and enormously more imposing than the pretty woods behind us. Far off to the left I could glimpse fields of house Lerdki.
We had been in the air about two minutes when Rufo said, “Pa’don me!” and turned his head away. He doesn’t have a weak stomach; he didn’t get a drop on us. It arched like a fountain. That was the only incident of a perfect flight.
Just before we reached the tall trees Star said crisply, “Amech!” We checked like a heli and settled straight down to a three-fanny landing. The arrow rested on the ground in front of us, again dead. Rufo returned it to his quiver. “How do you feel?” I asked. “And how’s your leg?”
He gulped. “Leg’s all right. Ground’s going up and down.”
“Hush!” Star whispered. “Hell be all right. But hush, for your lives!”
We set out moments later, myself leading with drawn sword, Star behind me, and Rufo dogging her, an arrow nocked and ready.
The change from moonlight to deep shadow was blinding and I crept along, feeling for tree trunks and praying that no dragon would be in the path my bump of direction led. Certainly I knew that the dragons slept at night, but I place no faith in dragons. Maybe the bachelors stood watches, the way bachelor baboons do. I wanted to surrender that place of honor to St. George and take a spot farther back.
Once my nose stopped me, a whiff of ancient musk. I waited and slowly became aware of a shape the size of a real estate office–a dragon, sleeping with its head on its tail. I led them around it, making no noise and hoping that my heart wasn’t as loud as it sounded.
My eyes were doing better now, reaching out for every stray moonbeam that trickled down–and something else developed. The ground was mossy and barely phosphorescent the way a rotten log sometimes is. Not much. Oh, very little. But it was the way a darkroom light, almost nothing when you go inside, later is plenty of light. I could see trees now and the ground–and dragons.
I had thought earlier, Oh, what’s a dozen or so dragons in a big forest? Chances are we won’t see one, any more than you cath sight of deer most days in deer country.
The man who gets the all-night parking concession in that forest will make a fortune if he figures out a way to make dragons pay up. We never were out of sight of one after we could see.
Of course these aren’t dragons. No, they are uglier. They are saurians, more like tyrannosaurus rex than anything else–big hindquarters and heavy hind legs, heavy tail, and smaller front legs that they use either in walking or to grasp their prey. The head is mostly teeth. They are omnivores whereas I understand that T. rex ate only meat. This is no help; the dragons eat meat when they can get it, they prefer it. Furthermore, these not-so-fake dragons have evolved that charming trick of burning their own sewer gas. But no evolutionary quirk can be considered odd if you use the way octopi make love as a comparison.
Once, far off to the left, an enormous jet lighted up, with a grunting bellow like a very old alligator. The light stayed on several seconds, then died away. Don’t ask me–two males arguing over a female, maybe. We kept going, but I slowed after the light went out, as even that much was enough to affect our eyes until our night sight recovered.
I’m allergic to dragons–literally, not just scared silly. Allergic the way poor old Rufo is to Dramamine but more the way cat fur affects some people.
My eyes were watering as soon as we were in that forest, then my sinuses started to clog up and before we had gone half a mile I was using my left fist to rub my upper lip as hard as I could, trying to kill a sneeze with pain. At last I couldn’t make it and jammed fingers up my nostrils and bit my lips and the contained explosion almost burst my eardrums. It happened as we were skirting the south end of a truck-and-trailer-size job; I stopped dead and they stopped and we waited. It didn’t wake up.
When I started up, my beloved closed on me, grasped my arm; I stopped again. She reached into her pouch, silently found something, rubbed it on my nose and up my nostrils, then with a gentle push signed that we could move on.
First my nose burned cold, as with Vick’s salve, then it felt numb, and presently it began to clear.
After more than an hour of this agelong spooky sneak through tall trees and giant shapes, I thought we were going to win “home free.” The Cave of the Gate should be not more than a hundred yards ahead and I could see the rise in ground where the entrance would be–and only one dragon in our way and that not in direct line.
I hurried.
There was this little fellow, no bigger than a wallaby and about the same shape, aside from baby teeth four inches long. Maybe he was so young he had to wake to potty in the night, I don’t know. All I know is that I passed close to a tree he was behind and stepped on his tail, and he squealed!
He had every right to. But that’s when it hit the fan. The adult dragon between us and the cave woke up at once. Not a big one–say about forty feet, including the tail.
Good old Rufo went into action as if he had had endless time to rehearse, dashing around to the brute’s south end, arrow nocked and bow bent, ready to loose in a hurry. “Get its tail up!” he called out.
I ran to the front end and tried to antagonize the beast by shouting and waving my sword while wondering how far that flame-thrower could throw. There are only four places to put an arrow into a Nevian dragon; the rest is armored like a rhino only heavier. Those four are his mouth (when open), his eyes (a difficult shot; they are little and piggish), and that spot right under his tail where almost any animal is vulnerable. I had figured that an arrow placed in that tender area should add mightily to that “itching, burning” sensation featured in small ads in the backs of newspapers, the ones that say AVOID SURGERY!
My notion was that, if the dragon, not too bright, was unbearably annoyed at both ends at once, his coordination should go all to hell and we could peck away at him until he was useless, or until he got sick of it and ran. But I had to get his tail up, to let Rufo get in a shot. These creatures, satchel-heavy like old
T. rex, charge head up and front legs up and balance this by lifting the tail. The dragon was weaving its head back and forth and I was trying to weave the other way, so as not to be lined up if it turned on the flame–when suddenly I got my first blast of methane, whiffing it before it lighted, and retreated so fast that I backed into that baby I had stepped on before, went clear over it, landed on my shoulders and rolled, and that saved me. Those flames shoot out about twenty feet. The grown-up dragon had reared up and still could have fried me, but the baby was in the way. It chopped off the flame–but Rufo yelled, “Bull’s-eye!”
The reason that I backed away in time was halitosis. It says here that “pure methane is a colorless, odorless gas.” The GI tract methane wasn’t pure; it was so loaded with homemade ketones and aldehydes that it made an unlimed outhouse smell like Shalimar.
I figure that Stars giving me that salve to open up my nose saved my life. When my nose clamps down I can’t even smell my upper lip.
The action didn’t stop while I figured this out; I did all my thinking either before or after, not during. Shortly after Rufo shot it in the bull’s-eye, the beast got a look of utter indignation, opened its mouth again without flaming and tried to reach its fanny with both hands. It couldn’t–forelegs too short–but it tried. I had returned sword in a hurry once I saw the length of that flame jet and had grabbed my bow. I had time to get one arrow into its mouth, left tonsil maybe.
This message got through faster. With a scream of rage that shook the ground it started for me, belching flame–and Rufo yelled, “A wart seven!”
I was too busy to congratulate him; those critters are fast for their size. But I’m fast, too, and had more incentive. A thing that big can’t change course very fast, but it can swing its head and with it the flame. I got my pants scorched and moved still faster, trying to cut around it.
Star carefully put an arrow into the other tonsil, right where the flame came out, while I was dodging. Then the poor thing tried so hard to turn both ways at both of us that it got tangled in its feet and fell over, a small earthquake. Rufo sank another arrow in its tender behind, and Star loosed one that passed through its tongue and stuck on the fletching, not damaging it but annoying it dreadfully.
It pulled itself into a ball, got to its feet, reared up and tried to flame me again. I could tell it didn’t like me.
And the flame went out.
This was something I had hoped for. A proper dragon, with castles and captive princesses, has as much fire as it needs, like six-shooters in TV oaters. But these creatures fermented their own methane and couldn’t have too big a reserve tank nor under too high pressure–I hoped. If we could nag one into using all its ammo fast, there was bound to be a lag before it recharged.
Meanwhile Rufo and Star were giving it no peace with the pincushion routine. It made a real effort to light up again while I was traversing rapidly, trying to keep that squealing baby dragon between me and the big one, and it behaved like an almost dry Ronson; the flame flickered and caught, shot out a pitiful six feet and went out. But it tried so hard to get me with that last flicker that it fell over again.
I took a chance that it would be sluggy for a second or two like a man who’s been tackled hard, ran in and stuck my sword in its right eye.
It gave one mighty convulsion and quit.
(A lucky poke. They say dinosaurs that big have brains the size of chestnuts. Let’s credit this beast with one the size of a cantaloupe–but it’s still luck if you thrust through an eye socket and get the brain right off. Nothing we had done up to then was more than mosquito bites. But it died from that one poke. St. Michael and St. George guided my blade.)
And Rufo yelled, “Boss! Git fer home!”
A drag race of dragons was closing on us. It felt like that drill in basic where you have to dig a foxhole, then let a tank pass over you.
“This way!” I yelled. “Rufo! This way, not that! Star!” Rufo skidded to a stop, we got headed the same way and I saw the mouth of the cave, black as sin and inviting as a mother’s arms. Star hung back; I shoved her in and Rufo stumbled after her and I turned to face more dragons for my lady love.
But she was yelling, “Milord! Oscar! Inside, you idiot! I must set the wards!”
So I got inside fast and she did, and I never did chew her out for calling her husband an idiot.
Chapter 13
The littlest dragon followed us to the cave, not belligerently (although I don’t trust anything with teeth that size) out more, I think, the way a baby duck follows anyone who leads. It tried to come in after us, drew back suddenly as its snout touched the invisible curtain, like a kitten hit by a static spark. Then it hung around outside, making wheepling noises.
I began to wonder whether or not Stars wards could stop flame. I found out as an old dragon arrived right after that, shoved his head into the opening, jerked it back indignantly just as the kid had, then eyed us and switched on his flame-thrower.
No, the wards don’t stop flame.
We were far enough inside that we didn’t get singed but the smoke and stink and heat were ghastly and just as deadly if it went on long.
An arrow whoofed past my ear and that dragon gave up interest in us. He was replaced by another who wasn’t convinced. Rufo, or possibly Star, convinced him before he had time to light his blowtorch. The air cleared; from somewhere inside there was an outward draft.
Meanwhile Star had made a light and the dragons were holding an indignation meeting. I glanced behind me–a narrow, low passage that dropped and turned. I stopped paying attention to Star and Rufo and the inside of the cave; another committee was calling.
I got the chairman in his soft palate before he could belch. The vice-chairman took over and got in a brief remark about fifteen feet long before he, too, changed his mind. The committee backed off and bellowed bad advice at each other.
The baby dragon hung around all during this. When the adults withdrew he again came to the door, just short of where he had burned his nose. “Koo-werp?” he said plaintively. “Koo-werp? Keet!” Plainly he wanted to come in.
Star touched my arm. “If milord husband pleases, we are ready.”
“Keet!”
“Right away,” I agreed, then yelled, “Beat it, kid! Back to your mama.”
Rufo stuck his head alongside mine. “Probably can’t,” he commented. “Likely that was its mama we ruined.”
I didn’t answer as it made sense; the adult dragon we had finished off had come awake instantly when I stepped on the kid’s tail. This sounds like mother love, if dragons go in for mother love–I wouldn’t know.
But it’s a hell of a note when you can’t even kill a dragon and feel lighthearted afterwards.
We meandered back into that hill, ducking stalactites and stepping around stalagmites while Rufo led with a torch. We arrived in a domed chamber with a floor glazed smooth by unknown years of calcified deposit. It had stalactites in soft pastel shades near the walls and a lovely, almost symmetrical chandelier from the center but no stalagmite under it. Star and Rufo had stuck lumps of the luminescent putty, which is the common night light in Nevia at a dozen points around the room; it bathed the room in a soft light and pointed up the stalactites.
Among them Rufo showed me webs. “Those spinners are harmless,” he said. “Just big and ugly. They don’t even bite like a spider. But–mind your step!” He pulled me back. “These things are poisonous even to touch. Blindworms. That’s what took us so long. Had to be sure the place was clean before warding it. But now that She is settig wards at the entrances I’ll give it one more check.”
The so-called blindworms were translucent, iridescent things the size of large rattlesnakes and slimy-soft like angleworms; I was glad they were dead. Rufo speared them on his sword, a grisly shishkebab, and carried them out through the entrance we had come in.
He was back quickly and Star finished warding. “That’s better,” he said with a sigh as he started cleaning his blade. “Don’t want their perfume around the house. They rot pretty fast and puts me in mind of green hides. Or copra. Did I ever tell you about the time I shipped as a cook out of Sydney? We had a second mate aboard who never bathed and kept a penguin in his stateroom. Female, of course. This bird was no more cleanly than he was and it used to–”
“Rufo,” said Star, “will you help with the baggage?”
“Coming, milady.”
We got out food, sleeping mats, more arrows, things that Star needed for her witching or whatever, and canteens to fill with water, also from the foldbox. Star had warned me earlier that Karth-Hokesh was a place where the local chemistry was not compatible with human life; everything we ate or drank we must fetch with us.
I eyed those one-liter canteens with disfavor. “Baby girl, I think we are cutting rations and water too fine.”
She shook her head. “We won’t need more, truly.”
“Lindbergh flew the Atlantic on just a peanut butter sandwich,” Rufo put in. “But I urged him to take more.”
“How do you know we won’t need more?” I persisted. “Water especially.”
“I’m filling mine with brandy,” Rufo said. “You divvy with me, I’U divvy with you.”
“Milord love, water is heavy. If we try to hang everything on us against any emergency, like the White Knight, we’ll be too weighted down to fight. I’m going to have to strain to usher through three people, weapons, and a minimum of clothing. Living bodies are easiest; I can borrow power from you both. Once-living materials are next; you’ve noticed, I think, that our clothing is wool, our bows of wood, and strings are of gut. Things never living are hardest, steel especially, yet we must have swords and, if we still had firearms, I would strain to the limit to get them through, for now we need them. However, milord Hero, I am simply informing you. You must decide–and I feel sure I can handle, oh, even half a hundredweight more of dead things if necessary. If you will select what your genius tells you.”
“My genius has gone fishing. But, Star my love, there is a simple answer. Take everything.”
“Milord?”
“Jocko set us out with half a ton of food, looks like, and enough wine to float a loan, and a little water. Plus a wide variety of Nevia’s best tools for killing, stabbing, and mayhem. Even armor. And more things. In that foldbox is enough to survive a siege, without eating or drinking anything from Karth-Hokesh. The beauty of it is that it weighs only about fifteen pounds, packed–not the fifty pounds you said you could swing by straining. I’ll strap it on my own back and won’t notice it. It won’t slow me down; it may armor me against a swing at my back. Suits?”
Star’s expression would have fitted a mother whose child has just caught onto the Stork hoax and is wondering how to tackle an awkward subject. “Milord husband, the mass is much too great. I doubt if any witch or warlock could move it unassisted.”
“But folded up?”
“It does not change it, milord; the mass is still there–still more dangerously there. Think of a powerful spring, wound very tight and small, thus storing much energy. It takes enormous power to put a foldbox through a transition in its compacted form, or it explodes.
I recalled a mud volcano that had drenched us and quit arguing. “All right. I’m wrong. But one question–If the mass is there always, why does it weigh so little when folded?”
Star got the same troubled expression. “Your pardon, milord, but we do not share the language–the mathematical language–that would permit me to answer. As yet, I mean; I promise you chance to study if you wish. As a tag, think of it as a tame spacewarp. Or think of the mass being so extremely far away–in a new direction–from the sides of the foldbox that local gravitation hardly matters.”
(I remembered a time when my grandmother had asked me to explain television to her–the guts, not the funny pictures. There are things which cannot be taught in ten easy lessons, nor popularized for the masses; they take years of skull sweat. This be treason in an age when ignorance has come into its own and one man’s opinion is as good as another’s. But there it is. As Star says, the world is what it is–and doesn’t forgive ignorance.)
But I was still curious. “Star, is there any way to tell me why some things go through easier than others? Wood easier than iron, for example?”
She looked rueful. “No, because I don’t know myself. Magic is not science, it is a collection of ways to do things–ways that work but often we don’t know why.”
“Much like engineering. Design by theory, then beef it up anyhow.”
“Yes, milord husband. A magician is a rule-of-thumb engineer.”
“And,” put in Rufo, “a philosopher is a scientist with no thumbs. I’m a philosopher. Best of all professions.”
Star ignored him and got out a sketch block, showed me what she knew of the great tower from which we must steal the Egg of Phoenix. This block appeared to be a big cube of Plexiglas; it looked like it, felt like it, and took thumbprints like it.
But she had a long pointer which sank into it as if the block were air. With its tip she could sketch in three dimensions; it left a thin glowing line whenever she wanted it–a 3-dimensional blackboard.
This wasn’t magic; it was advanced technology–and it will beat the hell out of our methods of engineering drawing when we learn how, especially for complex assemblies such as aviation engines and UHF circuitry–even better than exploded isometric with transparent overlays. The block was about thirty inches on a side and the sketch inside could be looked at from any angle–even turned over and studied from underneath.
The Mile-High Tower was not a spire but a massy block, somewhat like those stepped-back buildings in New York, but enormously larger.
Its interior was a maze.
“Milord champion,” Star said apologetically, “when we left Nice there was in our baggage a finished
sketch of the Tower. Now I must work from memory. However, I had studied the sketch so very long that I believe I can get relations right even if proportions suffer. I feel sure of the true paths, the paths that lead to the Egg. It is possible that false paths and dead ends will not be as complete; I did not study them as hard.”
“Can’t see that it matters,” I assured her. “If I know the true paths, any I don’t know are false ones. Which we won’t use. Except to hide in, in a pinch.”
She drew the true paths in glowing red, false ones in green–and there was a lot more green than red. The critter who designed that tower had a twisty mind. What appeared to be the main entrance went in, up, branched and converged, passed close to the Chamber of the Egg–then went back down by a devious route and dumped you out, like P. T. Barnum’s “This Way to the Egress.”
Other routes went inside and lost you in mazes that could not be solved by follow-the-left-wall. If you did, you’d starve. Even routes marked in red were very complex. Unless you knew where the Egg was guarded, you could enter correctly and still spend this year and next January in fruitless search.
“Star, have you been in the Tower?”
“No, milord. I have been in Karth-Hokesh. But far back in the Grotto Hills. I’ve seen the Tower only from great distance.”
“Somebody must have been in it. Surely your–opponents–didn’t send you a map.”
She said soberly, “Milord, sixty-three brave men have died getting the information I now offer you.”
(So now we try for sixty-four!) I said, “Is there any way to study just the red paths?”
“Certainly, milord.” She touched a control, green lines faded. The red paths started each from one of the three openings, one “door” and two “windows.”
I pointed to the lowest level. “This is the only one of thirty or forty doors that leads to the Egg?”
“That is true.”
“Then just inside that door they’ll be waiting to clobber us.”
“That would seem likely, milord.”
“Hmmm . . .” I turned to Rufo. “Rufe, got any long, strong, lightweight line in that plunder?”
“I’ve got some Jocko uses for hoisting. About like heavy fishing line, breaking strength around fifteen hundred pounds.”
“Good boy!” “Figured you might want it. A thousand yards enough?”
“Yes. Anything lighter than that?”
“Some silk trout line.”
In an hour we had made all preparations I could think of and that maze was as firmly in my head as the alphabet. “Star hon, we’re ready to roll. Want to whomp up your spell?”
“No, milord.”
“Why not? ‘Twere best done quickly.”
“Because I can’t, my darling. These Gates are not true gates; there is always a matter of timing. This one will be ready to open, for a few minutes, about seven hours from now, then cannot be opened again for several weeks.” I had a sour thought. “If the buckos we are after know this, they’ll hit us as we come out.”
“I hope not, milord champion. They should be watching for us to appear from the Grotto Hills, as they know we have a Gate somewhere in those hills–and indeed that is the Gate I planned to use. But this Gate, even if they know of it, is so badly located–for us–that I do not think they would expect us to dare it.”
“You cheer me up more all the time. Have you thought of anything to tell me about what to expect? Tanks? Cavalry? Big green giants with hairy ears?”
She looked troubled. “Anything I say would mislead you, milord. We can assume that their troops will be constructs rather than truly living creatures . . . which means they can be anything. Also, anything may be illusion. I told you about the gravity?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Forgive me. I’m tired and my mind isn’t sharp. The gravity varies, sometimes erratically. A level stretch will seem to be downhill, then quickly uphill. Other things . . . any of which may be illusion.”
Rufo said, “Boss, if it moves, shoot it. If it speaks, cut its throat. That spoils most illusions. You don’t need a program; there’ll be just us–and all the others. So when in doubt, kill it. No sweat.”
I grinned at him. “No sweat. Okay, well worry when we get there. So let’s quit talking.”
“Yes, milord husband,” Star seconded. “We had best get several hours’ sleep.”
Something in her voice had changed. I looked at her and she was subtly different, too. She seemed smaller, softer, more feminine and compliant than the Amazon who had fired arrows into a beast a hundred times her weight less than two hours before.
“A good idea,” I said slowly and looked around. While Star had been sketching the mazes of the Tower, Rufo had repacked what we couldn’t take and–I now noticed–put one sleeping pad on one side of the cave and the other two side by side as far from the first as possible.
I silently questioned her by glancing at Rufo and shrugging an implied, “What now?”
Her answering glance said neither yes nor no. Instead she called out, “Rufo, go to bed and give that leg a chance. Don’t lie on it. Either belly down or face the wall.”
For the first time Rufo showed his disapproval of what we had done. He answered abruptly, not what Star said but what she may have implied: “You couldn’t hire me to look!”
Star said to me in a voice so low I barely heard it, “Forgive him, milord husband. He is an old man, he has his quirks. Once he is in bed I will take down the lights.”
I whispered, “Star my beloved, it still isn’t my idea of how to run a honeymoon.”
She searched my eyes. “This is your will, milord love?”
“Yes. The recipe calls for a jug of wine and a loaf of bread. Not a word about a chaperon. I’m sorry.”
She put a slender hand against my chest, looked up at me. “I am glad, milord.”
“You are?” I didn’t see why she had to say so.
“Yes. We both need sleep. Against the morrow. That your strong sword arm may grant us many morrows.”
I felt better and smiled down at her. “Okay, my princess. But I doubt if I’ll sleep.”
“Ah, but you will!”
“Want to bet?”
“Hear me out, milord darling. Tomorrow . . . after you have won . . . we go quickly to my home. No more waitings, no more troubles. I would that you knew the language of my home, so that you will not feel a stranger. I want it to be your home, at once. So? Will milord husband dispose himself for bed? Lie back and let me give him a language lesson? You will sleep, you know that you will.”
“Well . . . it’s a fine idea. But you need sleep even more than I do.”
“Your pardon, milord, but not so. Four hours’ sleep puts spring in my step and a song on my lips.”
“Well . . . ”
Five minutes later I was stretched out, staring into the most beautiful eyes in any world and listening to
her beloved voice speak softly in a language strange to me . . .
Chapter 14
Rufo was shaking my shoulder. “Breakfast, Boss!” He shoved a sandwich into my hand and a pot of beer into the other. “That’s enough to fight on and lunch is packed. I’ve laid out fresh clothes and your weapons and I’ll dress you as soon as you finish. But snap it up. We’re on in a few minutes.” He was already dressed and belted.
I yawned and took a bite of sandwich (anchovies, ham and mayonnaise, with something that wasn’t quite tomato and lettuce)–and looked around. The place beside me was empty but Star seemed to have just gotten up; she was not dressed. She was on her knees in the center of the room, drawing some large design on the floor.
“Morning, chatterbox,” I said. “Pentacle?”
“Mmm–” she answered, not looking up.
I went over and watched her work. Whatever it was, it was not based on a five-cornered star. It had three major centers, was very intricate, had notations here and there–I recognized neither language nor script–and the only sense I could abstract from it was what appeared to be a hypercube seen face on. “Had breakfast, hon?”
“I fast this morning.”
“You’re skinny now. Is that a tesseract?”
“Stop it!”
I made a leg. “Your pardon, milady.”
“Don’t be formal with me, darling. Love me anyhow and give me a quick kiss–then let me be.”
So I leaned over and gave her a high-caloric kiss, with mayonnaise, and let her be. I dressed while I finished the sandwich and beer, then sought out a natural alcove just short of the wards in the passage, one which had been designated the men’s room. When I came back Rufo was waiting with my sword belt “Boss, you’d be late for your own hanging.”
“I hope so.”
A few minutes later we were standing on that diagram, Star on pitcher’s mound with Rufo and myself at first and third bases. He and I were much hung about, myself with two canteens and Star’s sword belt (on its last notch) as well as my own, Rufo with Star’s bow slung and with two quivers, plus her medic’s kit and lunch. We each had longbow strung and tucked under left arm; we each had drawn sword. Star’s tights were under my belt behind in an untidy tail, her jacket was crumpled under Rufo’s belt, while her buskins and hat were crammed into pockets–etc. We looked like a rummage sale. But this did leave Rufo’s left hand and mine free. We faced outward with swords at ready, reached behind us and Star clasped us each firmly by hand. She stood in the exact center, feet apart and planted solidly and was wearing that required professionally of witches when engaged in heavy work, i.e., not even a bobby pin. She looked magnificent, hair shaggy, eyes shining, and face flushed, and I was sorry to turn my back.
“Ready, my gallants?” she demanded, excitement in her voice.
“Ready,” I confirmed.
“Ave, Imperatrix, nos morituri te–”
“Stop that, Rufo! Silence!” She began to chant in a language unknown to me. The back of my neck prickled.
She stopped, squeezed our hands much harder, and shouted, “Now!”
Sudden as a slammed door, I find I’m a Booth Tarkington hero in a Mickey Spillane situation.
I don’t have time to moan. Here is this thing in front of me, about to chop me down, so I run my blade through his guts and yank it free while he makes up his mind which way to fall; then I dose his buddy the same way. Another one is squatting and trying to get a shot at my legs past the legs of his squad mates. I’m as busy as a one-armed beaver with paperhangers and hardly notice a yank at my belt as Star recovers her sword.
Then I do notice as she kills the hostile who wants to shoot me. Star is everywhere at once, naked as a frog and twice as lively. There was a dropped-elevator sensation at transition, and suddenly reduced gravitation could have been bothersome had we time to indulge it.
Star makes use of it. After stabbing the laddie who tries to shoot me, she sails over my head and the head of a new nuisance, poking him in the neck as she passes and he isn’t a nuisance any longer.
I think she helps Rufo, but I can’t stop to look. I hear his grunts behind me and that tells me that he is still handing out more than he’s catching.
Suddenly he yells, “Down!” and something hits the back of my knees and I go down–land properly limp and am about to roll to my feet when I realize Rufo is the cause. He is belly down by me and shooting what has to be a gun at a moving target out across the plain, himself behind the dead body of one of our playmates.
Star is down, too, but not fighting. Something has poked a hole through her right arm between elbow and shoulder.
Nothing else seemed to be alive around me, but there were targets four to five hundred feet away and opening rapidly. I saw one fall, heard Zzzzt, smelled burning flesh near me. One of those guns was lying across a body to my left; I grabbed it and tried to figure it out. There was a shoulder brace and a tube which should be a barrel; nothing else looked familiar.
“Like this, my Hero.” Star squirmed to me, dragging her wounded arm and leaving a trail of blood. “Race it like a rifle and sight it so. There is a stud under your left thumb. Press it. That’s all–no windage, no elevation.”
And no recoil, as I found when I tracked one of the running figures with the sights and pressed the stud. There was a spurt of smoke and down he went. “Death ray,” or Laser beam, or whatever–line it up, press the stud, and anyone on the far end quit the party with a hole burned in him.
I got a couple more, working right to left, and by then Rufo had done me out of targets. Nothing moved, so far as I could see, anywhere.
Rufo looked around. “Better stay down, Boss.” He rolled to Star, opened her medic’s kit at his own belt, and put a rough and hasty compress on her arm.
Then he turned to me. “How bad are you hurt, Boss?”
“Me? Not a scratch.”
“What’s that on your tunic? Ketchup? Someday somebody is going to offer you a pinch of snuff. Let’s see it.”
I let him open my jacket. Somebody, using a saw-tooth edge, had opened a hole in me on my left side below the ribs. I had not noticed it and hadn’t felt it–until I saw it and then it hurt and I felt queasy. I strongly disapprove of violence done to me. While Rufo dressed it, I looked around to avoid looking at it.
We had killed about a dozen of them right around us, plus maybe half that many who had fled–and had shot all who fled, I think. How? How can a 60-lb. dog armed only with teeth take on, knock down, and hold prisoner an armed man? Ans: By all-out attack.
I think we arrived as they were changing the guard at that spot known to be a Gate–and had we arrived even with swords sheathed we would have been cut down. As it was, we killed a slew before most of them knew a fight was on. They were routed, demoralized, and we slaughtered the rest, including those who tried to bug out. Karate and many serious forms of combat (boxing isn’t serious, nor anything with rules)–all these work that same way: go-for-broke, all-out attack with no wind up. These are not so much skills as an attitude.
I had time to examine our late foes; one was faced toward me with his belly open. “Iglis” I would call them, but of the economy model. No beauty and no belly buttons and not much brain–presumably constructed to do one thing: fight, and try to stay alive. Which describes us, too–but we did it faster.
Looking at them upset my stomach, so I looked at the sky. No improvement–it wasn’t decent sky and wouldn’t come into focus. It crawled and the colors were wrong, as jarring as some abstract paintings. I looked back at our victims, who seemed almost wholesome compared with that “sky.”
While Rufo was doctoring me, Star squirmed into her tights and put on her buskins. “Is it all right for me to sit up to get into my jacket?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Maybe they’ll think we’re dead.” Rufo and I helped her finish dressing without any of us rising up above the barricade of flesh. I’m sure we hurt her arm but all she said was, “Sling my sword left-handed. What now, Oscar?”
“Where are the garters?”
“Got em. But I’m not sure they will work. This is a very odd place.”
“Confidence,” I told her. “That’s what you told me a few minutes ago. Put your little mind to work believing you can do it.” We ranged ourselves and our plunder, now enhanced by three “rifles” plus side arms of the same sort, then laid out the oaken arrow for the top of the Mile-High Tower. It dominated one whole side of the scene, more a mountain than a building, black and monstrous.
“Ready?” asked Star. “Now you two believe, tool” She scrawled with her finger in the sand. “Go!”
We went. Once in the air, I realized what a naked target we were–but we were a target on the ground, too, for anyone up on that tower, and worse if we had hoofed it. “Faster!” I yelled in Stars ear. “Make us go faster!”
We did. Air shrilled past our ears and we bucked and dipped and side-slipped as we passed over those gravitational changes Star had warned me about–and perhaps that saved us; we made an evasive target. However, if we got all of that guard party, it was possible that no one in the Tower knew we had arrived.
The ground below was gray-black desert surrounded by a mountain ringwall like a lunar crater and the Tower filled the place of a central peak. I risked another look at the sky and tried to figure it out. No sun. No stars. No black sky nor blue–light came from all over and the “sky” was ribbons and boiling shapes and shadow holes of all colors.
“What in God’s name land of planet is this?” I demanded.
“It’s not a planet,” she yelled back. “It’s a place, in a different sort of universe. It’s not fit to live in.”
“Somebody lives here.” I indicated the Tower.
“No, no, nobody lives here. That was built just to guard the Egg.”
The monstrousness of that idea didn’t soak in right then. I suddenly recalled that we didn’t dare eat or drink here–and started wondering how we could breathe the air if the chemistry was that poisonous. My chest felt tight and started to burn. So I asked Star and Rufo moaned. (He rated a moan or two; he hadn’t thrown up. I don’t think he had.)
“Oh, at least twelve hours,” she said. “Forget it. No importance.”
Whereupon my chest really hurt and I moaned, too.
We were dumped on top of the Tower right after that; Star barely got out “Amech!” in time to keep us from zooming past.
The top was flat, seemed to be black glass, was about two hundred yards square–and there wasn’t a fiddlewinking thing to fasten a line to. I had counted on at least a ventilator stack.
The Egg of the Phoenix was about a hundred yards straight down. I had had two plans in mind if we ever reached the Tower. There were three openings (out of hundreds) which led to true paths to the Egg–and to the Never-Born, the Eater of Souls, the M.P. guarding it. One was at ground level and I never considered it. A second was a couple of hundred feet off the ground and I had given that serious thought: loose an arrow with a messenger line so that the line passed over any projection above that hole; use that to get the strong line up, then go up the line–no trick for any crack Alpinist, which I wasn’t but Rufo was.
But the great Tower turned out to have no projections, real modern simplicity of design–carried too far.
The third plan was, if we could reach the top, to let ourselves down by a line to the third non-fake entrance, almost on level with the Egg. So here we were, all set–and no place to hitch.
Second thoughts are wonderful thoughts–why hadn’t I had Star drive us straight into that hole in the wall?
Well, it would take very fine sighting of that silly arrow; we might hit the wrong pigeonhole. But the important reason was that I hadn’t thought of it.
Star was sitting and nursing her wounded arm. I said, “Honey, can you fly us, slow and easy, down a couple of setbacks and into that hole we want?”
She looked up with drawn face. “No.”
“Well. Too bad.”
“I hate to tell you–but I burned out the garters on that speed run. They won’t be any good until I can recharge them. Not things I can get here. Green mug-wort, blood of a hare–things like that.”
“Boss,” said Rufo, “how about using the whole top of the Tower as a hitching post?”
“How do you mean?”
“We’ve got lots of line.”
It was a workable notion–walk the line around the top while somebody else held the bitter end, then
tie it and go down what hung over. We did it–and finished up with only a hundred feet too little of line out of a thousand yards.
Star watched us. When I was forced to admit that a hundred feet short was as bad as no line at all, she said thoughtfully, “I wonder if Aaron’s Rod would help?”
“Sure, if it was stuck in the top of this overgrown ping-pong table. What’s Aaron’s Rod?”
“It makes stiff things limp and limp things stiff. No, no, not that. Well, that, too, but what I mean is to lay this line across the roof with about ten feet hanging over the far side. Then make that end and the crossing part of the line steel hard–sort of a hook.”
“Can you do it?”
“I don’t know. It’s from The Key of Solomon and it’s an incantation. It depends on whether I can remember it–and on whether such things work in this universe.”
“Confidence, confidence! Of course you can.”
“I can’t even think how it starts. Darling, can you hypnotize? Rufo can’t–or at least not me.”
“I don’t know a thing about it.”
“Do just the way I do with you for a language lesson. Look me in the eye, talk softly, and tell me to remember the words. Perhaps you had better lay out the line first.”
We did so and I used a hundred feet instead of ten for the bill of the hook, on the more-is-better principle. Star lay back and I started talking to her, softly (and without conviction) but over and over again.
Star closed her eyes and appeared to sleep. Suddenly she started to mumble in tongues.
“Hey, Boss! Damn thing is hard as rock and stiff as a life sentence!”
I told Star to wake up and we slid down to the setback below as fast as we could, praying that it wouldn’t go limp on us. We didn’t shift the line; I simply had Star cause more of it to starch up, then I went on down, made certain that I had the right opening, three rows down and fourteen over, then Star slid down and I caught her in my arms; Rufo lowered the baggage, weapons mostly, and followed. We were in the Tower and had been on the planet–correction: the “place”–we had been in the place called Karth-Hokesh not more than forty minutes.
I stopped, got the building matched in my mind with the sketch block map, fixed the direction and location of the Egg, and the “red line” route to it, the true path.
Okay, go on in a few hundred yards, snag the Egg of the Phoenix and go! My chest stopped hurting.
Chapter 15
“Boss,” said Rufo, “Look out over the plain.”
“At what?”
“At nothing,” he answered. “Those bodies are gone. You sure as hell ought to be able to see them, against black sand and not even a bush to break the view.”
I didn’t look. “That’s the moose’s problem, damn it! We’ve got work to do. Star, can you shoot left-handed? One of these pistol things?”
“Certainly, milord.”
“You stay ten feet behind me and shoot anything that moves. Rufo, you follow Star, bow ready and an arrow nocked. Try for anything you see. Sling one of those guns–make a sling out of a bit of line.” I frowned. “We’ll have to abandon most of this. Star, you can’t bend a bow, so leave it behind, pretty as it is, and your quiver. Rufo can sling my quiver with his; we use the same arrows. I hate to abandon my bow, it suits me so. But I must. Damn.”
“I’ll carry it, my Hero.”
“No, any clutter we can’t use must be junked.” I unhooked my canteen, drank deeply, passed it over. “You two finish it and throw it away.” While Rufo drank, Star slung my bow. “Milord husband? It weighs nothing this way and doesn’t hamper my shooting arm. So?”
“Well–If it gets in your way, cut the string and forget it. Now drink your fill and we go.” I peered
down the corridor we were in–fifteen feet wide and the same high, lighted from nowhere and curving away to the right, which matched the picture in my mind. “Ready? Stay closed up. If we can’t slice it, shoot it, or shaft it, we’ll salute it.” I drew sword and we set out, quick march.
Why my sword, rather than one of those “death ray” guns? Star was carrying one of those and knew more about one than I did. I didn’t even know how to tell if one was charged, nor had I judgment in how long to press the button. She could shoot, her bowmanship proved that, and she was at least as cool in a fight as Rufo or myself.
I had disposed weapons and troops as well as I knew how. Rufo, behind with a stock of arrows, could use them if needed and his position gave him time to shift to either sword or Buck Rogers “rifle” if his judgment said to–and I didn’t need to advise him; he would.
So I was backed up by long-range weapons ancient and ultramodern in the hands of people who knew how to use them and temperament to match–the latter being the more important. (Do you know how many men in a platoon actually shoot in combat? Maybe six. More likely three. The rest freeze up.) Still, why didn’t I sheathe my sword and carry one of those wonder weapons?
A properly balanced sword is the most versatile weapon for close quarters ever devised. Pistols and guns are all offense, no defense; close on him fast and a man with a gun can’t shoot, he has to stop you before you reach him. Close on a man carrying a blade and you’ll be spitted like a roast pigeon–unless you have a blade and can use it better than he can.
A sword never jams, never has to be reloaded, is always ready. Its worst shortcoming is that it takes great skill and patient, loving practice to gain that skill; it can’t be taught to raw recruits in weeks, nor even months.
But most of all (and this was the real reason) to grasp the Lady Vivamus and feel her eagerness to bite gave me courage in a spot where I was scared spitless.
They (whoever “they” were) could shoot us from ambush, gas us, booby-trap us, many things. But they could do those things even if I carried one of those strange guns. Sword in hand, I was relaxed and unafraid–and that made my tiny “command” more nearly safe. If a C.O. needs to carry a rabbit’s foot, he should–and the grip of that sweet sword was bigger medicine than all the rabbits’ feet in Kansas.
The corridor stretched ahead, no break, no sound, no threat. Soon the opening to the outside could no longer be seen. The great Tower felt empty but not dead; it was alive the way a museum is alive at night, with crowding presence and ancient evil. I gripped my sword tightly, then consciously relaxed and flexed my fingers.
We came to a sharp left turn. I stopped short. “Star, this wasn’t on your sketch.”
She didn’t answer. I persisted, “Well, it wasn’t. Was it?”
“I am not sure, milord.”
“Well, I am. Hmm–”
“Boss,” said Rufo, “are you dead sure we entered by the right pigeonhole?”
“I’m certain. I may be wrong but I’m not uncertain–and if I’m wrong, we’re dead pigeons anyhow. Mmm–Rufo, take your bow, put your hat on it, stick it out where a man would IOOK around that corner if he were standing–and time it as I do look out, but lower down.” I got on my belly.
“Ready . . . now!” I sneaked a look six inches above the floor while Rufo tried to draw fire higher up.
Nothing in sight, just bare corridor, straight now.
“Okay, follow me! We hurried around the corner.
I stopped after a few paces. “What the hell?”
“Something wrong Boss?”
“Plenty.” I turned and sniffed. “Wrong as can be. The Egg is up that way,” I said, pointing, “maybe two hundred yards–by the sketch block map.”
“Is that bad?”
“I’m not sure. Because it was that same direction and angle, off on the left, before we turned that corner. So now it ought to be on the right.”
Rufo said, “Look, Boss, why don’t we just follow the passageways you memorized? You may not remember every little–”
“Shut up. Watch ahead, down the corridor. Star, stand there in the corner and watch me. I’m going to try something.”
They placed themselves, Rufo “eyes ahead” and Star where she could see both ways, at the right-angle bend. I went back into the first reach of corridor, then returned. Just short of the bend I closed my eyes and kept on.
I stopped after another dozen steps and opened my eyes. “That proves it,” I said to Rufo.
“Proves what?”
“There isn’t any bend in the corridor.” I pointed to the bend.
Rufo looked worried. “Boss, how do you feel?” He tried to touch my cheek.
I pulled back. “I’m not feverish. Come with me, both of you.” I led them back around that right angle some fifty feet and stopped. “Rufo, loose an arrow at that wall ahead of us at the bend. Lob it so that it hits the wall about ten feet up.”
Rufo sighed but did so. The arrow rose true, disappeared in the wall. Rufo shrugged. “Must be pretty soft up there. You’ve lost us an arrow. Boss.”
“Maybe. Places and follow me.” We took that corner again and here was the spent arrow on the floor somewhat farther along than the distance from loosing to bend. I let Rufo pick it up; he looked closely at the Doral chop by the fletching, returned it to quiver. He said nothing. We kept going.
We came to a place where steps led downward–but where the sketch in my head called for steps leading up. “Mind the first step,” I called back. “Feel for it and don’t fall.”
The steps felt normal, for steps leading downward–with the exception that my bump of direction told me that we were climbing, and our destination changed angle and distance accordingly. I closed my eyes for a quick test and found that I was indeed climbing, only my eyes were deceived. It was like one of those “crooked houses” in amusement parks, in which a “level” floor is anything but level–like that but cubed.
I quit questioning the accuracy of Star’s sketch and tracked its trace in my head regardless of what my eyes told me. When the passageway branched four ways while my memory showed only a simple branching, one being a dead end, I unhesitatingly closed my eyes and followed my nose–and the Egg stayed where it should stay, in my mind.
But the Egg did not necessarily get closer with each twist and turn save in the sense that a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points–is it ever? The path was as twisted as guts in a belly; the architect had used a pretzel for a straight edge. Worse yet, another time when we were climbing “up” stairs–at a piece level by the sketch–a gravitational anomaly caught us with a lull turn and we were suddenly sliding down the ceiling.
No harm done save that it twisted again as we hit bottom and dumped us from ceiling to floor. With both eyes peeled I helped Rufo gather up arrows and off we set again. We were getting close to the lair of the Never-Born–and the Egg.
Passageways began to be narrow and rocky, the false twists tight and hard to negotiate–and the light began to fail.
That wasn’t the worst. I’m not afraid of dark nor of tight places; it takes a department store elevator on Dollar Day to give me claustrophobia. But I began to hear rats.
Rats, lots of rats, running and squeaking in the walls around us, under us, over us. I started to sweat and was sorry I had taken that big drink of water. Darkness and closeness got worse, until we were crawling through a rough tunnel in rock, then inching along on our bellies in total darkness as if tunneling out of Chateau d’If . . . and rats brushed past us now, squeaking and chittering.
No, I didn’t scream. Star was behind me and she didn’t scream and she didn’t complain about her wounded arm–so I couldn’t scream. She patted me on the foot each time she inched forward, to tell me that she was all right and to report that Rufo was okay, too. We didn’t waste strength on talk.
I saw a faint something, two ghosts of light ahead, and stopped and stared and blinked and stared again. Then I whispered to Star, “I see something. Stay put, while I move up and see what it is. Hear me?”
“Yes, milord Hero.”
“Tell Rufo.”
Then I did the only really brave thing I have ever done in my life: I inched forward. Bravery is going on anyhow when you are so terrified your sphincters won’t hold and you can’t breathe and your heart threatens to stop, and that is an exact description for that moment of E. C. Gordon, ex-Pfc. and hero by trade. I was fairly certain what those two faint lights were and the closer I got the more certain I was–I could smell the damned thing and place its outlines.
A rat. Not the common rat that lives in city dumps and sometimes gnaws babies, but a giant rat, big enough to block that rat hole but enough smaller than I am to have room to maneuver in attacking me–room I didn’t have at all. The best I could do was to wriggle forward with my sword in front of me and try to Keep the point aimed so that I would catch him with it, make mm eat steel–because if he dodged past that point I would have nothing but bare hands and no room to use them. He would be at my face.
I gulped sour vomit and inched forward. His eyes seemed to drop a little as if he were crouching to charge.
But no rush came. The lights got more definite and wider apart, and when I had squeezed a foot or two farther I realized with shaking relief that they were not rat’s eyes but something else–anything, I didn’t care what.
I continued to inch forward. Not only was the Egg in that direction but I still didn’t know what it was and I had best see before telling Star to move up.
The “eyes” were twin pinholes in a tapestry that covered the end of that rat hole. I could see its embroidered texture and I found I could look through one of its imperfections when I got up to it.
There was a large room beyond, the floor a couple of feet lower than where I was. At the far end, fifty feet away, a man was standing by a bench, reading a book. Even as I watched he raised his eyes and glanced my way. He seemed to hesitate.
I didn’t. The hole had eased enough so that I managed one foot under and lunged forward, brushing the arras aside with my sword. I stumbled and bounced to my feet, on guard.
He was at least as fast. He had slapped the book down on the bench and drawn sword himself, advanced toward me, while I was popping out of that hole. He stopped, knees bent, wrist straight, left arm back, and point for me, perfect as a fencing master, and looked me over, not yet engaged by three or four feet between our steels.
I did not rush him. There is a go-for-broke tactic, “the target,” taught by the best swordmasters, which consists in headlong advance with arm, wrist, and blade in full extension–all attack and no attempt to parry. But it works only by perfect timing when you see your opponent slacken up momentarily.
Otherwise it is suicide.
This time it would have been suicide; he was as ready as a tomcat with his back up. So I sized him up while he looked me over. He was a smallish neat man with arms long for his height–I might or might not have reach on him, especially as his rapier was an old style, longer than Lady Vivamus (but slower thereby, unless he had a much stronger wrist)–and he was dressed more for the Paris of Richelieu than for Karth-Hokesh. No, that’s not fair; the great black Tower had no styles, else I would have been as out of style in my fake Robin Hood getup. The Iglis we had killed had worn no clothes.
He was an ugly cocky little man with a merry grin and the biggest nose west of Durante–made me think of my first sergeant’s nose, very sensitive he was about being called “Schnozzola.” But the resemblance stopped there; my first sergeant never smiled and had mean, piggish eyes; this man’s eyes were merry and proud.
“Are you Christian?” he demanded.
“What’s it to you?”
“Nothing. Blood’s blood, either way. If Christian you be, confess. If pagan, call your false gods. I’ll allow you no more than three stanzas. But I’m sentimental, I like to know what I’m killing.”
“I’m American.”
“Is that a country? Or a disease? And what are you doing in Hoax?”
” ‘Hoax’? Hokesh?”
He shrugged only with his eyes, his point never moved. “Hoax, Hokesh–a matter of geography and accent; this chateau was once in the Carpathians, so ‘Hokesh’ it is, if ’twill make your death merrier. Come now, let us sing.”
He advanced so fast and smoothly that he seemed to apport and our blades rang as I parried his attack in sixte and riposted, was countered–remise, reprise, beat-and-attack–the phrase ran so smoothly, so long, and in such variation that a spectator might have thought that we were running through Grand Salute.
But I knew! That first lunge was meant to kill me, and so was his every move throughout the phrase. At the same time he was feeling me out, trying my wrist, looking for weaknesses, whether I was afraid of low line and always returned to high or perhaps was a sucker for a disarm. I never lunged, never had a chance to; every part of the phrase was forced on me, I simply replied, tried to stay alive.
I knew in three seconds that I was up against a better swordsman than myself, with a wrist like steel yet supple as a striking snake. He was the only swordsman I have ever met who used prime and octave–used them, I mean, as readily as sixte and carte. Everyone learns them and my own master made me practice them as much as the other six–but most fencers don’t use them; they simply may be forced into them, awkwardly and just before losing a point.
I would lose, not a point, but my life–and I knew, long before the end of that first long phrase, that my life was what I was about to lose, by all odds.
Yet at first clash the idiot began to sing!
“Lunge and counter and thrust,
“Sing me the logic of steel!
“Tell me, sir, how do you feel?
“Riposte and remise if you must
“In logic long known to be just.
“Shall we argue, rebut and refute
“In enthymeme clear as your eye?
“Tell me, sir, why do you sigh?
“Tu es fatigue, sans doute?
“Then sleep while I’m counting the loot.”
The above was long enough for at least thirty almost successful attempts on my life, and on the last word he disengaged as smoothly and unexpectedly as he had engaged.
“Come, come, lad!” he said. “Pick it up! Would let me sing alone? Would die as a clown with ladies watching? Sing! –and say good-bye gracefully, with your last rhyme racing your death rattle.” He banged his right boot in a flamenco stomp. “Try! The price is the same either way.”
I didn’t drop my eyes at the sound of his boot; it’s an old gambit, some fencers stomp on every advance, every feint, on the chance that the noise will startle opponent out of timing, or into rocking back, and thus gain a point. I had last fallen for it before I could shave.
But his words gave me an idea. His lunges were short–full extension is fancy play for foils, too dangerous for real work. But I had been retreating, slowly, with the wall behind me. Shortly, when he re-engaged, I would either be a butterfly pinned to that wall, or stumble over something unseen, go arsy-versy, then spiked like wastepaper in the park. I didn’t dare leave that wall behind me.
Worst, Star would be coming out of that rat hole behind me any moment now and might be killed as she emerged even if I managed to kill him at the same time. But if I could turn him around–My beloved was a practical woman; no “sportsmanship” would keep her steel stinger out of his back.
But the happy counter-thought was that if I went along with his madness, tried to rhyme and sing, he might play me along, amused to hear what I could do, before he killed me.
But I couldn’t afford to stretch it out. Unfelt, he had pinked me in the forearm. Just a bloody scratch that Star could make good as new in minutes–but it would weaken my wrist before long and it disadvantaged me for low line: Blood makes a slippery grip.
“First stanza,” I announced, advancing and barely engaging, foible-a-foible. He respected it, not attacking, playing with the end of my blade, tiny counters and leather-touch parries.
That was what I wanted. I started circling right as I began to recite–and he let me:
“Tweedledum and Tweedledee
“Agreed to rustle cattle.
“Said Tweedledum to Tweedledee
“I’ll use my nice new saddle.”
“Come, come, my old!” he said chidingly. “No stealing. Honor among beeves, always. And rhyme and scansion limp. Let your Carroll fall trippingly off the tongue.”
“I’ll try,” I agreed, still moving right. “Second stanza-
“I sing of two lasses in Birmingham,
“Shall we weep at the scandal concerning them?”-
–and I rushed him.
It didn’t quite work. He had, as I hoped, relaxed the tiniest bit, evidently expecting that I would go on with mock play, tips of Hades alone, while I was reciting.
It caught him barely off guard but he failed to fall back, parrying strongly instead and suddenly we were in an untenable position, corps-a-corps, forte-a-forte, almost tete-a-tete.
He laughed in my face and sprang back as I did, landing us back en garde. But I added something. We had been fencing point only. The point is mightier than the edge but my weapon had both and a man used to the point is sometimes a sucker for a cut. As we separated I flipped my blade at his head.
I meant to split it open. No time for that, no force behind it, but it sliced his right forehead almost to
eyebrow. “Touche” he shouted. “Well struck. And well sung. Let’s have the rest of it.”
“All right,” I agreed, fencing cautiously and waiting for blood to run into his eyes. A scalp wound is the bloodiest of flesh wounds and I had great hopes for this one. And swordplay is an odd thing; you don’t really use your mind, it is much too fast for that. Your wrist thinks and tells your feet and body what to do, bypassing your brain–any thinking you do is for later, stored instructions, like a programmed computer.
I went on:
“They’re now in the dock
“For lifting the–”
No help to me–A right-handed fencer hates to take on a southpaw; it throws everything out of balance, whereas a southpaw is used to the foibles of the right-handed majority–and this son of a witch was just as strong, just as skilled, with his left hand. Worse, he now had toward me the eye undimmed by blood.
He pinked me again, in the kneecap, hurting like fire and slowing me. Despite his wounds, much worse than mine, I knew I couldn’t go on much longer. We settled down to grim work.
There is a riposte in seconde, desperately dangerous but brilliant–if you bring it off. It had won me several matches in 6pee with nothing at stake but a score. It starts from sixte; first your opponent counters. Instead of parrying to carte, you press and bind, sliding all the way down and around his blade and corkscrewing in till your point finds flesh. Or you can beat, counter, and bind, starting from sixte, thus setting it off yourself.
Its shortcoming is that, unless it is done perfectly, it is too late for parry and riposte; you run your own chest against his point.
I didn’t try to initiate it, not against this swordsman; I just thought about it.
We continued to fence, perfectly each of us. Then he stepped back slightly while countering and barely
skidded in his own blood.
My wrist took charge; I corkscrewed in with a perfect bind to seconde–and my blade went through his body. He looked surprised, brought his bell up in salute, and crumpled at the knees as the grip fell from his hand. I had to move forward with my blade as he fell, then started to pull it out of him.
He grasped it. “No, no, my friend, please leave it there. It corks the wine, for a time. Your logic is sharp and touches my heart. Your name, sir?”
“Oscar of Gordon.”
“A good name. One should never be killed by a stranger. Tell me, Oscar of Gordon, have you seen Carcassonne?”
“No.”
“See it. Love a lass, kill a man, write a book, fly to the Moon–I have done all these.” He gasped and foam came out of his mouth, pink. “I’ve even had a house fall on me. What devastating wit! What price honor when timber taps thy top? ‘Top?’ tap? taupe, tape–tonsor! –when timber taps thy tonsor. You shaved mine.”
He choked and went on: “It grows dark. Let us exchange gifts and part friends, if you will. My gift first, in two parts: Item: You are lucky, you shall not die in bed.”
“I guess not.”
“Please. Item: Friar Guillaume’s razor ne’er shaved the barber, it is much too dull. And now your gift, my old–and be quick, I need it. But first–now did that limerick end?”
I told him. He said, very weakly, almost in rattle, “Very good. Keep trying. Now grant me your gift, I am more than ready.” He tried to Sign himself.
So I granted him grace, stood wearily up, went to the bench and collapsed on it, then cleaned both blades, first wiping the little Solingen, then most carefully grooming the Lady Vivamus. I managed to stand and salute him with a clean sword. It had been an honor to know him.
I was sorry I hadn’t asked him his name. He seemed to think I knew it.
I sat heavily down and looked at the arras covering the rat hole at the end of the room and wondered why Star and Rufo hadn’t come out. All that clashing steel and talk–I thought about walking over and shouting for them. But I was too weary to move just yet. I sighed and closed my eyes-
Through sheer boyish high spirits (and carelessness I had been chided for, time and again) I had broken a dozen eggs. My mother looked down at the mess and I could see that she was about to cry. So I clouded up too. She stopped her tears, took me gently by the shoulder, and said, “It’s all right, son. Eggs aren’t that important.” But I was ashamed, so I twisted away and ran.
Downhill I ran, heedless and almost flying–then was shockingly aware that I was at the wheel and the car was out of control. I groped for the brake pedal, couldn’t find it and felt panic . . . then did find it–and felt it sink with that mushiness that means you’ve lost brake-fluid pressure. Something ahead in the road and I couldn’t see. Couldn’t even turn my head and my eyes were clouded with something running down into them. I twisted the wheel and nothing happened–radius rod gone.
Screams in my car as we hit! –and I woke up in bed with a jerk and the screams were my own. I was going to be late to school, disgrace not to be borne. Never born, agony shameful, for the schoolyard was empty; the other kids, scrubbed and virtuous, were in their seats and I couldn’t find my classroom. Hadn’t even had time to go to the bathroom and here I was at my desk with my pants down about to do what I had been too hurried to do before I left home and all the other kids had their hands up but teacher was calling on me. I couldn’t stand up to recite; my pants were not only down I didn’t have any on at all if I stood up they would see it the boys would laugh at me the girls would giggle and look away and tilt their noses. But the unbearable disgrace was that I didn’t know the answer!
“Come, come!” my teacher said sharply. “Don’t waste the class’s time, E.G. You Haven’t Studied Your Lesson.”
Well, no, I hadn’t. Yes, I had, but she had written “Problems 1-6” on the blackboard and I had taken that as “1 and 6”–and this was number 4. But She would never believe me; the excuse was too thin. We pay off on touchdowns, not excuses.
“That’s how it is, Easy,” my Coach went on, his voice more in sorrow than in anger. “Yardage is all very well but you don’t make a nickel unless you cross that old goal line with the egg tucked underneath your arm.” He pointed at the football on his desk. “There it is. I had it gilded and lettered clear back at the beginning of the season, you looked so good and I had so much confidence in you–it was meant to be yours at the end of the season, at a victory banquet.” His brow wrinkled and he spoke as if trying to be fair. “I won’t say you could have saved things all by yourself. But you do take things too easy. Easy–maybe you need another name. When the road gets rough, you could try harder.” He sighed. “My fault, I should have cracked down. Instead, I tried to be a father to you. But I want you to know you aren’t the only one who loses by this–at my age it’s not easy to find a new job.”
I pulled the covers up over my head; I couldn’t stand to look at him. But they wouldn’t let me alone; somebody started shaking my shoulder. “Gordon!”
“Le’me ‘lone!”
“Wake up, Gordon, and get your ass inside. You’re in trouble.”
I certainly was, I could tell that as soon as I stepped into the office. There was a sour taste of vomit in my mouth and I felt awful–as if a herd of buffaloes had walked over me, stepping on me here and there. Dirty ones.
The First Sergeant didn’t look at me when I came in; he let me stand and sweat first. When he did look up, he examined me up and down before speaking.
Then he spoke slowly, letting me taste each word. “Absent Over Leave, terrorizing and insulting native women, unauthorized use of government property . . . scandalous conduct . . . insubordinate and obscene language . . . resisting arrest . . . striking an M.P.–Gordon, why didn’t you steal a horse? We hang horse thieves in these parts. It would make it all so much simpler.”
He smiled at his own wit. The old bastard always had thought he was a wit. He was half right.
But I didn’t give a damn what he said. I realized dully that it had all been a dream, just another of those dreams I had had too often lately, wanting to get out of this aching jungle. Even She hadn’t been real. My–what was her name? –even her name I had made up. Star. My Lucky Star–Oh, Star, my darling, you aren’t!
He went on: “I see you took off your chevrons. Well, that saves time but that’s the only thing good about it. Out of uniform. No shave. And your clothes are filthy! Gordon, you are a disgrace to the Army of the United States. You know that, don’t you? And you can’t sing your way out of this one. No I.D. on you, no pass, using a name not your own. Well, Evelyn Cyril my fine lad, we’ll use your right name now. Officially.”
He swung around in his swivel chair–he hadn’t had his fat ass out of it since they sent him to Asia, no patrols for him. “Just one thing I’m curious about. Where did you get that? And whatever possessed you to try to steal it?” He nodded at a file case behind his desk.
I recognized what was sitting on it, even though it had been painted with gold gilt the last time I recalled seeing it whereas now it was covered with the special black gluey mud they grow in Southeast Asia. I started toward it. “That’s mine!”
“No, no!” he said sharply. “Burny, burny, boy.” He moved the football farther back. “Stealing it doesn’t make it yours. I’ve taken charge of it as evidence. For your information, you phony hero, the docs think he’s going to die.”
“Who?”
“Why should you care who? Two bits to a Bangkok tickul you didn’t know his name when you clobbered him. You can’t go around clobbering natives just because you’re feeling brisk–they’ve got rights, maybe you hadn’t heard. You’re supposed to clobber them only when and where you are told to.”
Suddenly he smiled. It didn’t improve him. With his long, sharp nose and his little bloodshot eyes I suddenly realized how much he looked like a rat.
But he went on smiling and said, “Evelyn my boy, maybe you took off those chevrons too soon.”
“Huh?”
“Yes. There may be a way out of this mess. Sit down.” He repeated sharply, ” ‘Sit down,’ I said. If I had my way we’d simply Section-Eight you and forget you–anything to get rid of you. But the Company Commander has other ideas–a really brilliant idea that could close your whole file. There’s a raid planned for tonight. So”–he leaned over, got a bottle of Four Roses and two cups out of his desk, poured two drinks–“have a drink.”
Everybody knew about that bottle–everybody but the Company Commander, maybe. But the top sergeant had never been known to offer anyone a drink–save one time when he had followed it by telling his victim that he was being recommended for a general court-martial.
“No, thanks.”
“Come on, take it. Hair of the dog. You’re going to need it. Then go take a shower and get yourself looking decent even if you aren’t, before you see the Company Commander.”
I stood up. I wanted that drink, I needed it. I would have settled for the worst rotgut–and Four Roses is pretty smooth–but I would have settled for the firewater old–what was his name? –had used to burst my eardrums.
But I didn’t want to drink with him. I should not drink anything at all here. Nor eat any-
I spat in his face.
He looked utterly shocked and started to melt. I drew my sword and had at him.
It got dark but I kept on laying about me, sometimes connecting, sometimes not.
Chapter 16
Someone was shaking my shoulder. “Wake up!”
“Le’me lone!”
“You’ve got to wake up. Boss, please wake up.”
“Yes, my Hero–please!”
I opened my eyes, smiled at her, then tried to look around. Kee-ripes, what a shambles! In the middle of it, close to me, was a black glass pillar, thick and about five feet high. On top was the Egg. “Is that it?”
“Yep!” agreed Rufo. “That’s it! He looked battered but gay.
“Yes, my Hero champion,” Star confirmed, “that is the true Egg of the Phoenix. I have tested.”
“Uh–” I looked around. “Then where’s old Soul-Eater?”
“You killed it. Before we got here. You still had sword in hand and the Egg tucked tightly under your left arm. We had much trouble getting them loose so that I could work on you.” I looked down my front, saw what she meant, and looked away. Red just isn’t my color. To take my mind off surgery I said to Rufo, “What took you so long?”
Star answered, “I thought we would never find you!”
“How did you find me?”
Rufo said, “Boss, we couldn’t exactly lose you. We simply followed your trail of blood–even when it dead-ended into blank walls. She is stubborn.”
“Uh . . . see any dead men?”
“Three or four. Strangers, no business of ours. Constructs, most likely. We didn’t dally.” He added,
“And we won’t dally getting out, either, once you’re patched up enough to walk. Time is short.”
I flexed my right knee, cautiously. It still hurt where I had been pinked on the kneecap, but what Star had done was taking the soreness out. “My legs are all right. I’ll be able to walk as soon as Star is through. But”–I frowned–“I don’t relish going through that rat tunnel again. Rats give me the willies.”
“What rats, Boss? In which tunnel?”
So I told him.
Star made no comment. Just went on plastering me and sticking on dressings. Rufo said, “Boss, you did get down on your knees and crawl–in a passage just like all the others. I couldn’t see any sense to it but you had proved that you knew what you were doing, so we didn’t argue, we did it. When you told us to wait while you scouted, we did that, too–until we had waited a long time and She decided that we had better try to find you.”
I let it drop.
We left almost at once, going out the “front” way and had no trouble, no illusions, no traps, nothing but the fact that the “true path” was long and tedious. Rufo and I stayed alert, same formation, with Star in the middle carrying the Egg.
Neither Star nor Rufo knew whether we were still likely to be attacked, nor could we have held off
anything stronger than a Cub Scout pack. Only Rufo could bend a bow and I could no longer wield a sword. However, the single necessity was to give Star time to destroy the Egg rather than let it be captured. “But that’s nothing to worry about,” Rufo assured me. “About like being at ground-zero with an A-weapon. You’ll never notice it.”
Once we were outside it was a longish hike to the Grotto Hills and the other Gate. We lunched as we hiked–I was terribly hungry–and shared Rufo’s brandy and Stars water without too much water. I felt pretty good by the time we reached the cave of this Gate; I didn’t even mind sky that wasn’t sky but some sort of roof, nor the odd shifts in gravitation.
A diagram or “pentacle” was already in this cave. Star had only to freshen it, then we waited a bit–that had been the rush, to get there before that “Gate” could be opened; it wouldn’t be available for weeks or perhaps months thereafter–much too long for any human to live in Karth-Hokesh.
We were in position a few minutes early. I was dressed like the Warlord of Mars–just me and sword belt and sword. We all lightened ship to the limit as Star was tired and pulling live things through would be strain enough. Star wanted to save my pet longbow but I vetoed it. She did insist that I keep the Lady Vivamus and I didn’t argue very hard; I didn’t want ever to be separated from my sword again. She touched it and told me that it was not dead metal, but now part of me.
Rufo wore only his unpretty pink skin, plus dressings; his attitude was that a sword was a sword and he had better ones at home. Star was, for professional reasons, wearing no more.
“How long?” asked Rufo, as we joined hands.
“Count down is minus two minutes,” she answered. The clock in Star’s head is as accurate as my bump of direction. She never used a watch.
“You’ve told him?” said Rufo.
“No.”
Rufo said, “Haven’t you any shame? Don’t you think you’ve conned him long enough?” He spoke with surprising roughness and I was about to tell him that he must not speak to her that way. But Star cut him off.
“QUIET!” She began to chant. Then–“Now!”
Suddenly it was a different cave. “Where are we?” I asked. I felt heavier.
“On Nevia’s planet,” Rufo answered. “Other side of the Eternal Peaks–and I’ve got a good mind to get off and see Jocko.”
“Do it,” Star said angrily. “You talk too much.”
“Only if my pal Oscar comes along. Want to, old comrade? I can get us there, take about a week. No dragons. They’ll be glad to see you–especially Muri.”
“You leave Muri out of this!” Star was actually shrill.
“Can’t take it, huh?” he said sourly. “Younger woman and all that.”
“You know that’s not it!”
“Oh, how very much it is!” he retorted. “And how long do you think you can get away with it? It’s not fair, it never was fair. It–”
“Silence! Count down right now!” We joined hands again and whambo! we were in another place.
This was still another cave with one side partly open to the outdoors; the air was very thin and bitterly cold and snow had sifted in. The diagram was let into rock in raw gold. “Where is this?” I wanted to know.
“On your planet,” Star answered. “A place called Tibet.”
“And you could change trains here,” Rufo added, “if She weren’t so stubborn. Or you could walk out–although it’s a long, tough walk; I did it once.” I wasn’t tempted. The last I had heard, Tibet was in the hands of unfriendly peace-lovers. “Will we be here long?” I asked. “This place needs central heating.” I wanted to hear anything but more argument. Star was my beloved and I couldn’t stand by and hear anyone be rude to her–but Rufo was my blood brother by much lost blood; I owed my life to him several times over.
“Not long,” answered Star. She looked drawn and tired. “But time enough to get this straightened out,” added Rufo, “so that you can make up your own mind and not be carried around like a cat in a sack. She should have told you long since. She–”
“Positions!” snapped Star. “Count down coming up. Rufo, if you don’t shut up, I’ll leave you here and let you walk out again–in deep snow barefooted to your chin.”
“Go ahead,” he said. “Threats make me as stubborn as you are. Which is surprising. Oscar, She is–” “SILENCE!”
“–Empress of the Twenty Universes–“
Chapter 17
We were in a large octagonal room, with lavishly beautiful silvery walls. “–and my grandmother,” Rufo finished.
Not ‘Empress,’ ” Star protested. “That’s a silly word for it.”
“Near enough.” “And as for the other, that’s my misfortune, not my fault.” Star jumped to her feet, no longer looking tired, and put one arm around my waist as I got up, while she held the Egg of the Phoenix with the other.
“Oh, darling I’m so happy! We made it! Welcome home, my Hero!”
“Where?” I was sluggy–too many time zones, too many ideas, too fast.
“Home. My home. Your home now–if you’ll have it. Our home.”
“Uh, I see . . . my Empress.” She stomped her foot. “Don’t call me that!”
“The proper form of address,” said Rufo, “is ‘Your Wisdom.’ Isn’t it, Your Wisdom?”
“Oh, Rufo, shut up. Go fetch clothes for us.”
He shook his head. “War’s over and I just got paid off. Fetch ’em yourself. Granny.”
“Rufo, you’re impossible.”
“Sore at me, Granny?”
“I will be if you don’t stop calling me ‘Granny.’ ” Suddenly she handed the Egg to me, put her arms around Rufo and kissed him. “No, Granny’s not sore at you,” she said softly. “You always were a naughty child and I’ll never quite forget the time you put oysters in my bed. But I guess you came by it honestly–from your grandmother.” She kissed him again and mussed his fringe of white hair. “Granny loves you. Granny always will. Next to Oscar, I think you are about perfect–aside from being an unbearable, untruthful, spoiled, disobedient, disrespectful brat.”
“That’s better,” he said. “Come to think of it, I feel the same way about you. What do you want to wear?”
“Mmm . . . get out a lot of things. It’s been so long since I had a decent wardrobe.” She turned back to me. “What would you like to wear, my Hero?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Whatever you think is appropriate–Your Wisdom.”
“Oh, darling, please don’t call me that. Not ever.” She seemed suddenly about to cry.
“All right. What shall I call you?”
“Star is the name you gave me. If you must call me something else, you could call me your ‘princess.’ I’m not a princess–and I’m not an ’empress’ either; that’s a poor translation. But I like being ‘your princess’–the way you say it. Or it can be ‘lively wench’ or any of lots of things you’ve been calling me.” She looked up at me very soberly. “Just like before. Forever.”
“I’ll try . . . my princess.”
“My Hero.”
“But there seems to be a lot I don’t know.”
She shifted from English to Nevian. “Milord husband, I wished to tell all. I sighed to tell you. And milord will be told everything. But I held mortal fear that milord, if told too soon, would refuse to come with me. Not to the Black Tower, but to here. Our home.”
“Perhaps you chanced wisely,” I answered in the same language. “But I am here, milady wife–my princess. So tell me. I wish it.”
She shifted back to English. “I’ll talk, I’ll talk. But it will take time. Darling, will you hold your horses just a bit longer? Having been patient with me–so very patient, my love! –for so long?”
“Okay,” I agreed. “I’ll string along. But, look, I don’t know the streets in this neighborhood, I’ll need some hints. Remember the mistake I made with old Jocko just from not knowing local customs.”
“Yes, dear, I will. But don’t worry, customs are simple here. Primitive societies are always more complex than civilized ones–and this one isn’t primitive.” Rufo dumped then a great heap of clothing at her feet. She turned away, a hand still on my arm, put a finger to her mouth with a very intent, almost worried look. “Now let me see. What shall I wear?”
“Complex” is a relative matter; I’ll sketch only the outlines.
Center is the capital planet of the Twenty Universes. But Star was not “Empress” and it is not an empire.
I’ll go on calling her “Star” as hundreds of names were hers and I’ll call it an “empire” because no other word is close, and I’ll refer to “emperors” and “empresses”–and to the Empress, my wife.
Nobody knows how many universes there are. Theory places no limit: any and all possibilities in unlimited number of combinations of “natural” laws, each sheaf appropriate to its own universe. But this is just theory and Occam’s Razor is much too dull. All that is known in Twenty Universes is that twenty have been discovered, that each has its own laws, and that most of them have planets, or sometimes “places,” where human beings live. I won’t try to say what lives elsewhere.
The Twenty Universes include many real empires. Our Galaxy in our universe has its stellar empires–yet so huge is our Galaxy that our human race may never meet another, save through the Gates that link the universes. Some planets have no known Gates. Earth has many and that is its single importance; otherwise it rates as a backward slum.
Seven thousand years ago a notion was born for coping with political problems too big to handle. It was modest at first: How could a planet be run without ruining it? This planet’s people included expert cyberneticists but otherwise were hardly farther along than we are; they were still burning the barn to get the rats and catching their thumbs in machinery. These experimenters picked an outstanding ruler and tried to help him.
Nobody knew why this bloke was so successful but he was and that was enough; they weren’t hipped on theory. They gave him cybernetic help, taping for him all crises in their history, all known details, what was done, and the outcomes of each, all organized so that he could consult it almost as you consult your memory.
It worked. In time he was supervising the whole planet–Center it was, with another name then. He didn’t rule it, he just untangled hard cases.
They taped also everything this first “Emperor” did, good and bad, for guidance of his successor.
The Egg of the Phoenix is a cybernetic record of the experiences of two hundred and three “emperors” and “empresses,” most of whom “ruled” all the known universes. Like a foldbox, it is bigger inside than out. In use, it is more the size of the Great Pyramid.
Phoenix legends abound throughout the Universes: the creature that dies but is immortal, rising ever young from its own ashes. The Egg is such a wonder, for it is far more than a taped library now; it is a print, right down to their unique personalities, of all experience of all that line from His Wisdom IX through Her Wisdom CCIV, Mrs. Oscar Gordon.
The office is not hereditary. Star’s ancestors include His Wisdom I and most of the other wisdoms–but millions of others have as much “royal” blood. Her grandson Rufo was not picked although he shares all her ancestors. Or perhaps he turned it down. I never asked, it would have reminded him of a time one of his uncles did something obscene and improbable. Nor is it a question one asks.
Once tapped, a candidate’s education includes everything from how to cook tripe to highest mathematics–including all forms of personal combat for it was realized millennia ago that, no matter how well he was guarded, the victim would wear better if he himself could fight like an angry buzz saw. I stumbled on this through asking my beloved an awkward question.
I was still trying to get used to the fact that I had married, a grandmother, whose grandson looked older than I did and was even older than he looked. The people of Center live longer than we do anyway and both Star and Rufo had received “Long-Life” treatment. This takes getting used to. I asked Star, “How long do you ‘wisdoms’ live?”
“Not too long,” she answered almost harshly. “Usually we are assassinated.”
(My big mouth–)
A candidate’s training includes travel in many worlds–not all planets-places inhabited by human beings; nobody lives that long. But many. After a candidate completes all this and if selected as heir, postgraduate work begins: the Egg itself. The heir has imprinted in him (her) the memories, the very personalities, of past emperors. He (She) becomes an integration of them. Star-Plus. A supernova. Her Wisdom.
The living personality is dominant but all that mob is there, too. Without using the Egg, Star could recall experiences that happened to people dead many centuries. With the Egg–herself hooked into the cybernet–she had seven thousand years of sharp, just-yesterday memories.
Star admitted to me that she had hesitated ten years before accepting the nomination. She hadn’t wanted to be all those people; she had wanted to go on being herself, living as she pleased. But the methods used to pick candidates (I don’t know them, they are lodged in the Egg) seem almost infallible; only three have ever refused.
When Star became Empress she had barely started the second half of her training, having had imprinted in her only seven of her predecessors. Imprinting does not take long but the victim needs recovery time between prints–for she gets every damned thing that ever happened to him, bad and good: the time he was cruel to a pet as a child and his recalled shame of it in his mature years, the loss of his virginity, the unbearably tragic time that he goofed a really serious one–all of it.
“I must experience their mistakes,” Star told me. “Mistakes are the only certain way to learn.”
So the whole weary structure is based on subjecting one person to all the miserable errors of seven thousand years.
Mercifully the Egg doesn’t have to be used often. Most of the time Star could be herself, no more bothered by imprinted memories than you are over that nasty remark in second grade. Most problems Star could solve shooting from the hip–no recourse to the Black Room and a full hookup.
For the one thing that stood out as this empirical way of running an empire grew up was that the answer to most problems was: Don’t do anything.
Always King Log, never King Stork–“Live and let live.” “Let well enough alone.” “Time is the best physician.” “Let sleeping dogs lie.” “Leave them alone and they’ll come home, wagging their tails behind them.”
Even positive edicts of the Imperium were usually negative in form: Thou Shalt Not Blow Up Thy Neighbors’ Planet. (Blow your own if you wish.) Hands off the guardians of the Gates. Don’t demand justice, you too will be judged.
Above all, don’t put serious problems to a popular vote. Oh, there is no rule against local democracy, just in imperial matters. Old Rufo–excuse me; Doctor Rufo, a most distinguished comparative culturologist (with a low taste for slumming)–Rufo told me that every human race tries every political form and that democracy is used in. many primitive societies . . . but he didn’t know of any civilized planet using it, as Vox Populi, Vox Dei translates as: “My God! How did we get in this mess!”
But Rufo claimed to enjoy democracy–any time he felt depressed he sampled Washington, and the antics of the French Parliament were second only to the antics of French women.
I asked him how advanced societies ran things.
His brow wrinkled. “Mostly they don’t.”
That described the Empress of Twenty Universes: Mostly she didn’t.
But sometimes she did. She might say: “This mess will clear up if you will take that troublemaker there–What’s your name? You with the goatee–out and shoot him. Do it now.” (I was present. They did it now. He was head of the delegation which had brought the problem to her–some fuss between intergalactic trading empires in the VIIth Universe–and his chief deputy pinned his arms and his own delegates dragged him outside and killed him. Star went on drinking coffee. It’s better coffee than we get back home and I was so upset that I poured myself a cup.)
An Emperor has no power. Yet, if Star decided that a certain planet should be removed, people would get busy and there would be a nova in that sky. Star has never done this but it has been done in the past. Not often–His Wisdom will search his soul (and the Egg) a long time before decreeing anything so final even when his hypertrophied horse sense tells him that there is no other solution.
The Emperor is sole source of Imperial law, sole judge, sole executive–and does very little and has no way to enforce his rulings. What he or she does have is enormous prestige from a system that has worked for seven millennia. This non-system holds together by having no togetherness, no uniformity,
never seeking perfection, no Utopias–just answers good enough to get by, with lots of looseness and room for many ways and attitudes.
Local affairs are local. Infanticide? –they’re your babies, your planet. PTAs, movie censorship, disaster relief–the Empire is ponderously unhelpful.
The Crisis of the Egg started long before I was born. His Wisdom CCIII was assassinated and the Egg stolen at the same time. Some baddies wanted power–and the Egg, by its unique resources, has latent in it key to such power as Genghis Khan never dreamed.
Why should anybody want power? I can’t understand it. But some do, and they did.
So Star came to office hall-trained, faced by the greatest crisis the Empire had ever suffered, and cut off from her storehouse of Wisdom.
But not helpless. Imprinted in her was the experience of seven hypersensible men and she had all the cyber-computer system save that unique part known as the Egg. First she had to find out what had been done with the Egg. It wasn’t safe to mount an attack on the planet of the baddies; it might destroy the Egg.
Available were ways to make a man talk if one didn’t mind using him up. Star didn’t mind. I don’t mean anything so crude as rack and tongs. This was more like peeling an onion, and they peeled several.
Karth-Hokesh is so deadly that it was named for the only explorers to visit it and come back alive. (We were in a “garden subdivision,” the rest is much worse.) The baddies made no attempt to stay there; they just cached the Egg and set guards and booby traps around it and on the routes to it.
I asked Rufo, “What use was the Egg there?”
“None,” he agreed. “But they soon learned that it was no use anywhere–without Her. They needed either its staff of cyberneticists . . . or they needed Her Wisdom. They couldn’t open the Egg. She is the only one who can do that unassisted. So they baited a trap for Her. Capture Her Wisdom, or kill Her–capture by preference, kill Her if need be and then try for key people here at Center. But they didn’t dare risk the second while She was alive.”
Star started a search to determine the best chance of recovering the Egg. Invade Karth-Hokesh? The machines said, “Hell, no!” I would say no, too. How do you mount an invasion into a place where a man not only can’t eat or drink anything local but can’t breathe the air more than a few hours? When a massive assault will destroy what you are after? When your beachheads are two limited Gates?
The computers kept coming up with a silly answer, no matter how the question was framed.
Me.
A “Hero,” that is–a man with a strong back, a weak mind, and a high regard for his own skin. Plus other traits. A raid by a thus-and-so man, if aided by Star herself, might succeed. Rufo was added by a hunch Star had (hunches of Their Wisdoms being equal to strokes of genius) and the machines confirmed this. “I was drafted,” said Rufo. “So I refused. But I never have had any sense where She is concerned, damn it; She spoiled me when I was a kid.”
There followed years of search for the specified man. (Me, again–I’ll never know why.) Meanwhile brave men were feeling out the situation and, eventually, mapping the Tower. Star herself reconnoitered, and got acquainted in Nevia, too.
(Is Nevia part of the “Empire?” It is and it isn’t. Nevia’s planet has the only Gates to Karth-Hokesh other than one from the planet of the baddies; that is its importance to the Empire–and the Empire isn’t important to Nevia at all.)
This “Hero” was most likely to be found on a barbaric planet such as Earth. Star checked, and turned down, endless candidates winnowed from many rough peoples before her nose told her that I might do.
I asked Rufo what chance the machines gave us.
“What makes you say that?” he demanded.
“Well, I know a little of cybernetics.”
“You think you do. Still–There was a prediction. Thirteen percent success, seventeen percent no game–and seventy percent death for us all.”
I whistled. “You should whistle!” he said indignantly. “You didn’t know any more than a cavalry horse knows. You had nothing to be scared of.”
“I was scared.”
“You didn’t have time to be. It was planned so. Our one chance lay in reckless speed and utter surprise. But I knew. Son, when you told us to wait, there in the Tower, and disappeared and didn’t come back, why, I was so scared I caught up on my regretting.”
Once set up, the raid happened as I told it. Or pretty much so, although I may have seen what my mind could accept rather than exactly what happened. I mean “magic.” How many times have savages concluded “magic” when a “civilized” man came along with something the savage couldn’t understand? How often is some tag, such as “television,” accepted by cultural savages (who nevertheless twist dials) when “magic” would be the honest word?
Still, Star never insisted on that word. She accepted it when I insisted on it.
But I would be disappointed if everything I saw turned out to be something Western Electric will build once Bell Labs works the bugs out. There ought to be some magic, somewhere, just for flavor.
Oh, yes, putting me to sleep for the first transition was to keep from scaring a savage silly. Nor did the “black biers” cross over–that was posthypnotic suggestion, by an expert: my wife.
Did I say what happened to the baddies? Nothing. Their Gates were destroyed; they are isolated until they develop star travel. Good enough, by the sloppy standards of the Empire. Their Wisdoms never carry grudges.
Chapter 18
Center is a lovely planet, Earth-like but lacking Earth’s faults. It has been retailored over millennia to make it a Never-Never Land. Desert and snow and jungle were saved enough for pleasure; floods and other disasters were engineered out of existence.
It is uncrowded but has a large population for its size–that of Mars but with oceans. Surface gravity is almost that of Earth. (A higher constant, I understand.) About half the population is transient, as its great beauty and unique cultural assets–focus of twenty universes–make it a tourist’s paradise. Everything is done for the comfort of visitors with an all-out thoroughness like that of the Swiss but with technology not known on Earth.
Star and I had residences a dozen places around the planet (and endless others in other universes); they ranged from palaces to a tiny fishing lodge where Star did her own cooking. Mostly we lived in apartments to an artificial mountain that housed the Egg and its staff; adjacent were halls, conference rooms, secretariat, etc. If Star felt like working she wanted such things at hand. But a system ambassador or visiting emperor of a hundred systems had as much chance of being invited into our private home as a hobo at the back door of a Beverly Hills mansion has of being invited into the drawing room.
But if Star happened to like him, she might fetch him home for a midnight snack. She did that once–a funny little leprechaun with four arms and a habit of tap-dancing his gestures. But she did no official entertaining and felt no obligation to attend social affairs. She did not hold press conferences, make speeches, receive delegations of Girl Scouts, lay cornerstones, proclaim special “Days,” make ceremonial appearances, sign papers, deny rumors, nor any of the time-gnawing things that sovereigns and VIPs do on Earth.
She consulted individuals, often summoning them from other universes, and she had at her disposal all the news from everywhere, organized in a system that had been developed over centuries. It was through this system that she decided what problems to consider. One chronic complaint was that the Imperium ignored “vital questions”–and so it did. Her Wisdom passed judgment only on problems she selected; the bedrock of the system was that most problems solved themselves.
We often went to social events; we both enjoyed parties and, for Her Wisdom and Consort, there was endless choice. There was one negative protocol: Star neither accepted nor regretted invitations, showed up when she pleased and refused to be fussed over. This was a drastic change for capital society as her predecessor had imosed protocol more formal than that of the Vatican.
One hostess complained to me about how dull society had become under the new rules–maybe I could do something?
I did. I looked up Star and told her the remark whereupon we left and joined a drunken artists’ ball–a luau!
Center is such a hash of cultures, races, customs, and styles that it has few rules. The one invariant custom was: Don’t impose your customs on me. People wore what they did at home, or experimented with other styles; any social affair looked like a free-choice costume ball. A guest could show up at a swank party stark naked without causing talk–and some did, a small minority. I don’t mean non-humans or hirsute humans; clothes are not for them. I mean humans who would look at home in New York in American clothes–and others who would attract notice even in l’Ile du Levant because they have no hair at all, not even eyebrows. This is a source of pride to them; it shows their “superiority” to us hairy apes,
they are as proud as a Georgia cracker is of his deficiency in melanin. So they go naked oftener than other human races. I found their appearance startling but one gets used to it.
Star wore clothes outside our home, so I did. Star would never miss a chance to dress up, an endearing weakness that made it possible to forget, at times, her Imperial status. She never dressed twice alike and was ever trying something new–and disappointed if I didn’t notice. Some of her choices would cause heart failure even on a Riviera beach. She believed that a woman’s costume was a failure unless it made men want to tear it off.
One of Star’s most effective outfits was the simplest. Rufo happened to be with us and she got a sudden notion to dress as we had on the Quest of the Egg–and biff, bang, costumes were available, or manufactured to order, as may be; Nevian clothes are most uncommon in Center.
Bows, arrows, and quivers were produced with the same speed and Merry Men were we. It made me feel good to buckle on the Lady Vivamus; she had been hanging untouched on a wall of my study ever since the great black Tower.
Star stood, feet planted wide, fists on hips, head thrown back, eyes bright, and cheeks flushed. “Oh, this is fun! I feel good, I feel young! Darling, promise me, promise me truly, that someday we will again go on an adventure! I get so damn sick of being sensible.”
She spoke English, as the language of Center is ill suited to such ideas. It’s a pidgin language with thousands of years of imports and changes and is uninflected, positional, and flat.
“Suits,” I agreed. “How about it, Rufo? Want to walk that Glory Road?”
“After they pave it.”
“Guff. You’ll come, I know you. Where and when, Star? Never mind ‘where’–just ‘when.’ Skip the party and start right now!”
Suddenly she was not merry. “Darling, you know I can’t. I’m less than a third of the way through my training.”
“I should have busted that Egg when I found it.”
“Don’t be cross, darling. Let’s go to the party and have fun.”
We did. Travel on Center is by apports, artificial “Gates” that require no “magic” (or perhaps still more); one sets destination like punching buttons in an elevator, so there is no traffic problem in cities–nor a thousand other unpleasant things; they don’t let the bones show in their cities. Tonight Star chose to get off short of destination, swagger through a park, and make an entrance. She knows how well tights suit her long legs and solid buttocks; she rolled her hips like a Hindu woman.
Folks, we were a sensation! Swords aren’t worn in Center, save possibly by visitors. Bows and arrows are hen’s teeth, too. We were as conspicuous as a knight in armor on Fifth Avenue.
Star was as happy as a kid playing trick-or-treat. So was I. I felt two axe handles across the shoulders and wanted to hunt dragons.
It was a ball not unlike one on Earth. (According to Rufo, all our races everywhere have the same basic entertainment: get together in mobs to dance, drink, and gossip. He claimed that the stag affair and the hen party are symptoms of a sick culture. I won’t argue.) We swaggered down a grand staircase, music stopped, people stared and gasped–and Star enjoyed being noticed. Musicians got raggedly back to work and guests went back to the negative politeness the Empress usually demanded. But we still got attention. I had thought that the story of the Quest of the Egg was a state secret as I had never heard it mentioned. But, even if known, I still would have expected the details to be known only to us three.
Not so. Everyone knew what those costumes meant, and more. I was at the buffet, sopping up brandy and a Dagwood of my own invention, when I was cornered by Schherazade’s sister, the pretty one. She was of one of the human-but-not-like-us races. She was dressed in rubies the size of your thumb and reasonably opaque cloth. She stood about five-five, barefooted, weighed maybe one twenty and her waist couldn’t have been over fifteen inches, which exaggerated two other measurements that did not need it. She was brunette, with the slantiest eyes I’ve ever seen. She looked like a beautiful cat and looked at me the way a cat looks at a bird.
“Self,” she announced.
“Speak.”
“Sverlani. World–” (Name and code–I had never heard of it.) “Student food designer, mathematicosybaritic.”
“Oscar Gordon. Earth. Soldier.” I omitted the I.D. for Earth; she knew who I was.
“Questions?”
“Ask.”
“Is sword?”
“Is.”
She looked at it and her pupils dilated, “Is-was sword destroy construct guard Egg?” (“Is this sword now present the direct successor in space-time sequential change, aside from theoretical anomalies involved in between-universe transitions, of the sword used to loll the Never-Born?” The double tense of the verb, present-past, stipulates and brushes aside the concept that identity is a meaningless abstraction–is this the sword you actually used, in the everyday meaning, and don’t kid me, soldier. I’m no child.)
“Was-is,” I agreed. (“I was there and I guarantee that I followed it all the way here, so it still is.”)
She gave a little gasp and her nipples stood up. Around each was painted, or perhaps tattooed, the multi-universal design we call “Wall of Troy”–and so strong was her reaction that Ileum’s ramparts crumbled again.
“Touch?” she said pleadingly.
“Touch.”
“Touch twice?” (“Please, may I handle it enough to get the feel of it? Pretty please, with sugar on it! I ask too much and it is your right to refuse, but I guarantee not to hurt it”–they get mileage out of words, but the flavor is in the manner.)
I didn’t want to, not the Lady Vivamus. But I’m a sucker for pretty girls. “Touch . . . twice,” I grudged. I drew it and handed it to her guard foremost, alert to grab it before she put somebody’s eye out or stabbed herself in the foot.
She accepted it gingerly, eyes and mouth big, grasping it by the guard instead of the grip. I had to show her. Her hand was far too small for it; her hands and feet, like her waist, were ultra slender.
She spotted the inscription. “Means?”
Dum vivimus, vivamus doesn’t translate well, not because they can’t understand the idea but because it’s water to a fish. How else would one live? But I tried. “Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.”
She nodded thoughtfully, then poked the air, wrist bent and elbow out. I couldn’t stand it, so I took it from her, dropped slowly into a foil guard, lunged in high line, recovered–a move so graceful that big hairy men look good in it. It’s why ballerinas study fencing.
I saluted and gave it back to her, then adjusted her right elbow and wrist and left arm–this is why ballerinas get half rates, it’s fun for the swordmaster. She lunged, almost pinking a guest in his starboard ham.
I took it back, wiped the blade, sheathed it. We had gathered a solid gallery. I picked up my Dagwood from the buffet, but she wasn’t done with me. “Self jump sword?”
I choked. If she understood the meaning–or if I did–I was being propositioned the most gently I had ever been, in Center. Usually it’s blunt. But surely Star hadn’t spread the details of our wedding ceremony? Rufo? I hadn’t told him but Star might have.
When I didn’t answer, she made herself clear and did not keep her voice down. “Self unvirgin unmother unpregnant fertile.”
I explained as politely as the language permits, which isn’t very, that I was dated up. She dropped the subject, looked at the Dagwood. “Bite touch taste?”
That was another matter; I passed it over. She took a hearty bite, chewed thoughtfully, looked pleased. “Xenic. Primitive. Robust. Strong dissonance. Good art.” Then she drifted away, leaving me wondering. Inside of ten minutes the question was put to me again. I received more propositions than at any other party in Center and I’m sure the sword accounted for the bull market. To be sure, propositions came my way at every social event; I was Her Wisdom’s consort. I could have been an orangutan and offers still would have been made. Some hirsutes looked like orangutans and were socially acceptable but I could have smelled like one. And behaved worse. The truth was that many ladies were curious about what the Empress took to bed, and the fact that I was a savage, or at best a barbarian, made them more curious. There wasn’t any taboo against laying it on the line and quite a few did.
But I was still on my honeymoon. Anyhow, if I had accepted all those offers, I would have gone up with the window shade. But I enjoyed hearing them once I quit cringing at the “Soda? –or ginger ale?” bluntness; it’s good for anybody’s morale to be asked.
As we were undressing that night I said, “Have fun, pretty things?” Star yawned and grinned. “I certainly did. And so did you, old Eagle Scout. Why didn’t you bring that kitten home?”
“What kitten?”
“You know what kitten. The one you were teaching to fence.”
“Meeow!”
“No, no, dear. You should send for her. I heard her state her profession, and there is a strong
connection between good cooking and good–”
“Woman, you talk too much!”
She switched from English to Nevian. “Yes, milord husband. No sound I shall utter that does not break unbidden from love-anguished lips.”
“Milady wife beloved . . . sprite elemental of the Singing Waters–”
Nevian is more useful than the jargon they talk on Center.
Center is a fun place and a Wisdom’s consort has a cushy time. After our first visit to Star’s fishing lodge, I mentioned how nice it would be to go back someday and tickle a few trout at that lovely place, the Gate where we had entered Nevia. “I wish it were on Center.”
“It shall be.”
“Star. You would move it? I know that some Gates, commercial ones, can handle real mass, but, even so–”
“No, no. But just as good. Let me see. It will take a day or so to have it stereoed and measured and air-typed and so forth. Water flow, those things. But meanwhile–There’s nothing much beyond this wall, just a power plant and such. Say a door here and the place where we broiled the fish a hundred yards beyond. Be finished in a week, or we’ll have a new architect. Suits?”
“Star, you’ll do no such thing.”
“Why not, darling?”
“Tear up the whole house to give me a trout stream? Fantastic!”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, it is. Anyhow, sweet, the idea is not to move that stream here, but to go there. A vacation.”
She sighed. “How I would love a vacation.”
“You took an imprint today. Your voice is different.”
“It wears off, Oscar.”
“Star, you’re taking them too fast. You’re wearing yourself out.”
“Perhaps. But I must be the judge of that, as you know.”
“As I don’t know! You can judge the whole goddamn creation–as you do and I know it–but I, your husband, must judge whether you are overworking–and stop it.”
“Darling, darling!”
There were too many incidents like that.
I was not jealous of her. That ghost of my savage past had been laid in Nevia, I was not haunted by it
again.
Nor is Center a place such ghost is likely to walk. Center has as many marriage customs as it has cultures–thousands. They cancel out. Some humans there are monogamous by instinct, as swans are said to be. So it can’t be classed as “virtue.” As courage is bravery in the face of fear, virtue is right conduct in the face of temptation. If there is no temptation, there can be no virtue. But these inflexible monogamists were no hazard. If someone, through ignorance, propositioned one of these chaste ladies, he risked neither a slap nor a knife; she would turn him down and go right on talking. Nor would it matter if her husband overheard; jealousy is never learned in a race automatically monogamous. Not that I ever tested it; to me they looked–and smelled–like spoiled bread dough. Where there is no temptation there is no virtue. But I had chances to show “virtue.” That kitten with the wasp waist tempted me–and I learned that she was of a culture in which females may not marry until they prove themselves pregnable, as in parts of the South Seas and certain places in Europe; she was breaking no taboos of her tribe. I was tempted more by another gal, a sweetie with a lovely figure, a delightful sense of humor, and one of the best dancers in any universe. She didn’t write it on the sidewalk; she just let me know that she was neither too busy nor uninterested, using that argot with skillful indirection.
This was refreshing. Downright “American.” I did inquire (elsewhere) into the customs of her tribe and found that, while they were rigid as to marriage, they were permissive otherwise. I would never do as a son-in-law but the window was open even though the door was locked.
So I chickened. I gave myself a soul-searching and admitted curiosity as morbid as that of any female who propositioned me simply because I was Star’s consort. Sweet little Zhai-ee-van was one of those who didn’t wear clothes. She grew them on the spot; from tip of her nose to her tiny toes she was covered in soft, sleek, gray fur, remarkably like chinchilla. Gorgeous!
I didn’t have the heart, she was too nice a kid.
But this temptation I admitted to Star–and Star implied gently that I must have muscles between my ears; Zhai-ee-van was an outstanding artiste even among her own people, who were esteemed as most talented devotees of Eros.
I stayed chicken. A romp with a kid that sweet should involve love, some at least, and it wasn’t love, just that beautiful fur–along with a fear that a romp with Zhai-ee-van could turn into love and she couldn’t marry me even if Star turned me loose.
Or didn’t turn me loose–Center has no rule against polygamy. Some religions there have rules for and against this and that out this mixture of cultures has endless religions and they cancel each other the way conflicting customs do. Culturologists state a “law” of religious freedom which they say is invariant: Religious freedom in a cultural complex is inversely proportional to the strength of the strongest religion. This is supposed to be one case of a general invariant, that all freedoms arise from cultural conflicts because a custom which is not opposed by its negative is mandatory and always regarded as a “law of nature.”
Rufo didn’t agree; he said his colleagues stated as equations things which are not mensurate and not definable–holes in their heads! –and that freedom was never more than a happy accident because the common jerk, all human races, hates and fears all freedom, not only for his neighbors but for himself, and stamps it out whenever possible.
Back to Topic “A”–Centrists use every sort of marriage contract. Or none. They practice domestic partnership, coition, propagation, friendship, and love–but not necessarily all at once nor with the same person. Contracts could be as complex as a corporate merger, specifying duration, purposes, duties, responsibilities, number and sex of children, genetic selection methods, whether host mothers were to be hired, conditions for canceling and options for extension–anything but “marital fidelity.” It is axiomatic there that this is unenforceable and therefore not contractual.
But marital fidelity is commoner there than it is on Earth; it simply is not legislated. They have an ancient proverb reading Women and Cats. It means: “Women and Cats do as they please, and men and dogs might as well relax to it.” It has its opposite: Men and Weather which is blunter and at least as old, since the weather has long been under control.
The usual contract is no contract; he moves his clothes into her home and stays–until she dumps them outside the door. This form is highly thought of because of its stability: A woman who “tosses his shoes” has a tough time finding another man brave enough to risk her temper.
My “contract” with Star was no more than that if contracts, laws, and customs applied to the Empress, which they did not and could not. But that was not the source of my increasing unease.
Believe me, I was not jealous.
But I was increasingly fretted by those dead men crowding her mind.
One evening as we were dressing for some whing-ding she snapped at me. I had been prattling about how I had spent my day, being tutored in mathematics, and no doubt had been as entertaining as a child reporting a day in kindergarten. But I was enthusiastic, a new world was opening to me–and Star was always patient.
But she snapped at me in a baritone voice.
I stopped cold. “You were imprinted today!”
I could feel her shift gears. “Oh, forgive me, darling! No, I’m not myself, I’m His Wisdom CLXXXII.”
I did a fast sum. “That’s fourteen you’ve taken since the Quest–and you took only seven in all the years before that. What the hell are you trying to do? Burn yourself out? Become an idiot?”
She started to scorch me. Then she answered gently, “No, I am not risking anything of the sort.”
“That isn’t what I near.”
“What you may have heard has no weight, Oscar, as no one else can judge–either my capacity, or what it means to accept an imprint. Unless you have been talking to my heir?”
“No.” I knew she had selected him and I assumed that he had taken a print or two–a standard precaution against assassination. But I hadn’t met him, didn’t want to, and didn’t know who he was.
“Then forget what you’ve been told. It is meaningless.” She sighed. “But, darling, if you don’t mind, I won’t go tonight; best I go to bed and sleep. Old Stinky CLXXXII is the nastiest person I’ve ever been–a brilliant success in a critical age, you must read about him. But inside he was a bad-tempered beast who hated the very people he helped. He’s fresh in me now, I must keep him chained.”
“Okay, let’s go to bed.”
Star shook her head. ” ‘Sleep,’ I said. I’ll use autosuggestion and by morning you won’t know he’s been here. You go to the party. Find an adventure and forget that you have a difficult wife.”
I went but I was too bad-tempered even to consider “adventures.”
Old Nasty wasn’t the worst. I can hold my own in a row–and Star, Amazon though she is, is not big enough to handle me. If she got rough, she would at last get that spanking. Nor would I fear interference from guards; that had been settled from scratch: When we two were alone together, we were private. Any third person changed that, nor did Star have privacy alone, even in her bath. Whether her guards were male or female I don’t know, nor would she have cared. Guards were never in sight. So our spats were private and perhaps did us both good, as temporary relief.
But “the Saint” was harder to take than Old Nasty. He was His Wisdom CXLI and was so goddam noble and spiritual and holier-than-thou that I went fishing for three days. Star herself was robust and full of ginger and joy in life; this bloke didn’t drink, smoke, chew gum, nor utter an unkind word. You could almost see Star’s halo while she was under his influence.
Worse, he had renounced sex when he consecrated himself to the Universes and this had a shocking effect on Star; sweet submissiveness wasn’t her style. So I went fishing.
I’ve one good thing to say for the Saint. Star says that he was the most unsuccessful emperor in all that long line, with genius for doing the wrong thing from pious motives, so she learned more from him than any other; he made every mistake in the book. He was assassinated by disgusted customers after only fifteen years, which isn’t long enough to louse up anything as ponderous as a multi-universe empire.
His Wisdom CXXXVII was a Her–and Star was absent two days. When she came home she explained. “Had to, dear. I’ve always thought I was a rowdy bitch–but she shocked even me.”
“How?”
“I ain’t talkin’, Guv’nor. I gave myself intensive treatment to bury her where you’ll never meet her.”
“I’m curious.”
“I know you are and that’s why I drove a stake through her heart–rough job, she’s my direct ancestor. But I was afraid you might like her better than you do me. That unspeakable trull!”
I’m still curious.
Most of them weren’t bad Joes. But our marriage would have been smoother if I had never known they were there. It’s easier to have a wife who is a touch batty than one who is several platoons–most of them men. To be aware of their ghostly presence even when Star’s own personality was in charge did my libido no good. But I must concede that Star knew the male viewpoint better than any other woman in any history. She didn’t have to guess what would please a man; she knew more about it than I did, from “experience”–and was explosively uninhibited about sharing her unique knowledge.
I shouldn’t complain.
But I did, I blamed her for being those other people. She endured my unjust complaints better than I endured what I felt to be the injustice in my situation vis-a-vis all that mob of ghosts.
Those ghosts weren’t the worst fly in the soup.
I did not have a job. I don’t mean nine-to-five and cut the grass on Saturdays and get drunk at the country club that night; I mean I didn’t have any purpose. Ever look at a male lion in a zoo? Fresh meat on time, females supplied, no hunters to worry about–He’s got it made, hasn’t he?
Then why does he look bored!
I didn’t know I had a problem, at first. I had a beautiful and loving wife; I was so wealthy that there was no way to count it; I lived in a most luxurious home in a city more lovely than any on Earth; everybody I met was nice to me; and best second only to my wonderful wife, I had endless chance to “go to college” in a marvelous and un-Earthly sense, with no need to chase a pigskin. Nor a sheepskin. I need never stop and had any conceivable help. I mean, suppose Albert Einstein drops everything to help with your algebra, pal, or Rand Corporation and General Electric team up to devise visual aids to make something easier for you. This is luxury greater than riches.
I soon found that I could not drink the ocean even held to my lips. Knowledge on Earth alone has grown so out of hand that no man can grasp it–so guess what the bulk is in Twenty Universes, each with its laws, its histories, and Star alone knows how many civilizations.
In a candy factory, employees are urged to eat all they want. They soon stop.
I never stopped entirely; knowledge has more variety. But my studies lacked purpose. The Secret Name of God is no more to be found in twenty universes than in one–and all other subjects are the same size unless you have a natural bent.
I had no bent, I was a dilettante–and I realized it when I saw that my tutors were bored with me. So I let most of them go, stuck with math and multi-universe history, quit trying to know it all.
I thought about going into business. But to enjoy business you must be a businessman at heart (I’m
not), or you have to need dough. I had dough; all I could do was lose it–or, if I won, I would never know whether word had gone out (from any government anywhere): Don’t buck the Empress’s consort, we will make good your losses.
Same with poker. I introduced the game and it caught on fast–and I found that I could no longer play it. Poker must be serious or it’s nothing–out when you own an ocean of money, adding or losing a few drops mean nothing.
I should explain–Her Wisdom’s “civil list” may not have been as large as the expenditures of many big spenders in Center; the place is rich. But it was as big as Star wanted it to be, a bottomless well of wealth. I don’t know how many worlds split the tab, but call it twenty thousand with three billion people each–it was more than that.
A penny each from 60,000,000,000,000 people is six hundred billion dollars. The figures mean nothing except to show that spreading it so thin that nobody could feel it still meant more money than I could dent. Star’s non-government of her un-Empire was an expense, I suppose–but her personal expenses, and mine, no matter how lavish, were irrelevant.
King Midas lost interest in his piggy bank. So did I.
Oh, I spent money. (I never touched any–unnecessary.) Our “flat” (I won’t call it a palace)–our home had a gymnasium more imaginative than any university gym; I had a salle d’armes added and did a lot of fencing, almost every day with all sorts of weapons. I ordered foils made to match the Lady Vivamus and the best swordmasters in several worlds took turns helping me. I had a range added, too, and had my bow picked up from that Gate cave in Karth-Hokesh, and trained in archery and in other aimed weapons. Oh, I spent money as I pleased.
But it wasn’t much fun.
I was sitting in my study one day, doing not a damn thing but brood, while I played with a bowlful of jewels.
I had fiddled with jewelry design a while. It had interested me in high school; I had worked for a jeweler one summer. I can sketch and was fascinated by lovely stones. He lent me books, I got others from the library–and once he made up one of my designs.
I had a Calling.
But jewelers are not draft-deferred so I dropped it–until Center.
You see, there was no way for me to give Star a present unless I made it. So I did. I made costume jewelry of real stones, studying it (expert help, as usual), sending for a lavish selection of stones, drawing designs, sending stones and drawings out to be made up.
I knew that Star enjoyed jeweled costumes; I knew she liked them naughty–not in the sense of crowding the taboos, there weren’t any–but provocative, gilding the lily, accentuating what hardly needs it.
The things I designed would have seemed at home in a French revue–but of real gems. Sapphires and gold suited Star’s blond beauty and I used them. But she could wear any color and I used other gems, too.
Star was delighted with my first try and wore it that evening. I was proud of it; I had swiped the design from memory of a costume worn by a showgirl in a Frankfurt night club my first night out of the Army–a G-string deal, transparent long skirt open from the hip on one side and with sequins on it (I used sapphires), a thing that wasn’t a bra but an emphasizer, completely jeweled, and a doohickey in her hair to match. High golden sandals with sapphire heels.
Star was warmly grateful for others that followed.
But I learned something. I’m not a jewelry designer. I saw no hope of matching the professionals who catered to the wealthy in Center. I soon realized that Star wore my designs because they were my gift, just as mama pins up the kindergarten drawings that sonny brings home. So I quit.
This bowl of gems had been kicking around my study for weeks–fire opals, sardonyx, carnelians, diamonds and turquoise and rubies, moonstones and sapphires and garnets, peridot, emeralds, chrysolite–many with no English names. I ran them through my fingers, watching the many-colored fire falls, and felt sorry for myself. I wondered how much these pretty marbles would cost on Earth? I couldn’t guess within a million dollars.
I didn’t bother to lock them up at night. And I was the bloke who had quit college for lack of tuition and hamburgers.
I pushed them aside and went to my window–there because I had told Star that I didn’t like not having a window in my study. That was on arrival and I didn’t find out for months how much had been torn down to please me; I had thought they had just cut through a wall.
It was a beautiful view, more a park than a city, studded but not cluttered with lovely buildings. It was hard to realize that it was a city bigger than Tokyo; its “bones” didn’t show and its people worked even half a planet away.
There was a murmur soft as bees, like the muted roar one can never escape in New York–but softer, just enough to make me realize that I was surrounded by people, each with his job, his purpose, his function.
My function? Consort.
Gigolo!
Star, without realizing it, had introduced prostitution into a world that had never known it. An innocent world, where man and woman bedded together only for the reason that they both wanted to.
A prince consort is not a prostitute. He has his work and it is often tedious, representing his sovereign mate, laying cornerstones, making speeches. Besides that, he has his duty as royal stud to ensure that the line does not die.
I had none of these. Not even the duty of entertaining Star–hell, within ten miles of me were millions of men who would jump at the chance.
The night before had been bad. It started badly and went on into one of those weary pillow conferences which married couples sometimes have, and aren’t as healthy as a bang-up row. We had had one, as domestic as any working stiff worried over bills and the boss.
Star had done something she had never done before: brought work home. Five men, concerned with some intergalactic hassle–I never knew what as the discussion had been going on for hours and they sometimes spoke a language not known to me.
They ignored me, I was furniture. On Center introductions are rare; if you want to talk to someone, you say “Self,” and wait. If he doesn’t answer, walk off. If he does, exchange identities. None of them did, and I was damned if I would start it. As strangers in my home it was up to them. But they didn’t act as if it was my home.
I sat there, the Invisible Man, getting madder and madder.
They went on arguing, while Star listened. Presently she summoned maids and they started undressing her, brushing her hair. Center is not America, I had no reason to feel shocked. What she was doing was being rude to them, treating them as furniture (she hadn’t missed how they treated me).
One said pettishly, “Your Wisdom, I do wish you would listen as you agreed to.” (I’ve expanded the argot.)
Star said coldly, “I am judge of my conduct. No one else is capable.”
True. She could judge her conduct, they could not. Nor, I realized bitterly, could I. I had been feeling angry at her (even though I knew it didn’t matter) for calling in her maids and starting to ready for bed with these lunks present–and I had intended to tell her not to let it happen again. I resolved not to raise that issue.
Shortly Star chopped them off. “He’s right. You’re wrong. Settle it that way. Get out.”
But I did intend to sneak it in by objecting to her bringing “tradespeople” home.
Star beat me to the punch. The instant we were alone she said, “My love, forgive me. I agreed to hear this silly mix-up and it dragged on and on, then I thought I could finish it quickly if I got them out of chairs, made them stand up here, and made clear that I was bored. I never thought they would wrangle another hour before I could squeeze out the real issue. And I knew that, if I put it over till tomorrow, they would stretch it into hours. But the problem was important, I couldn’t drop it.” She sighed. “That ridiculous man–Yet such people scramble to high places. I considered having him fool-killed. Instead I must let him correct his error, or the situation will break out anew.”
I couldn’t even hint that she had ruled the way she had out of annoyance; the man she had chewed out was the one in whose favor she had ruled. So I said, “Let’s go to bed, you’re tired”–and then didn’t have sense enough to refrain from judging her myself.
Chapter 19
We went to bed.
Presently she said, “Oscar, you are displeased.”
“I didn’t say so.”
“I feel it. Nor is it Just tonight and those tedious clowns. You have been withdrawing yourself, unhappy.” She waited.
“It’s nothing.”
“Oscar, anything which troubles you can never be ‘nothing’ to me. Although I may not realize it until I know what it is.”
“Well–I feel so damn useless!”
She put her soft, strong hand on my chest. “To me you are not useless. Why do you feel useless to yourself?”
“Well–look at this bed!” It was a bed the like of which Americans never dream; it could do everything but kiss you good night–and, like the city, it was beautiful, its bones did not show. “This sack, at home, would cost more–if they could build it–than the best house my mother ever lived in.”
She thought about that. “Would you like to send money to your mother?” She beckoned the bedside communicator. “Is Elmendorf Air Force Base of America address enough?”
(I don’t recall ever telling her where Mother lived.) “No, no!” I gestured at the talker, shutting it off. “I do not want to send her money. Her husband supports her. He won’t take money from me. That’s not the point.”
“Then I don’t see the point as yet. Beds do not matter, it is who is in a bed that counts. My darling, if you don’t like this bed, we can get another. Or sleep on the floor. Beds do not matter.”
“This bed is okay. The only thing wrong is that I didn’t pay for it. You did. This house. My clothes. The food I eat. My–my toys! Every damned thing I have you gave me. Know what I am. Star? A gigolo! Do you Know what a gigolo is? A somewhat-male prostitute.”
One of my wife’s most exasperating habits was, sometimes, to refuse to snap back at me when she knew I was spoiling for a row. She looked at me thoughtfully. “America is a busy place, isn’t it? People work all the time, especially men.”
“Well . . . yes.”
“It isn’t the custom everywhere, even on Earth. A Frenchman isn’t unhappy if he has free time; he orders another cafe au lait and lets the saucers pile up. Nor am I fond of work. Oscar, I ruined our evening from laziness, too anxious to avoid having to redo a weary task tomorrow. I will not make that mistake twice.”
“Star, that doesn’t matter. That’s over with.”
“I know. The first issue is rarely the key. Nor the second. Nor, sometimes, the twenty-second. Oscar, you are not a gigolo.”
“What do you call it? When it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and acts like a duck, I call it a duck. Call it a bunch of roses. It still quacks.”
“No. All this around us–” She waved. “Bed. This beautiful chamber. The food we eat. My clothes and yours. Our lovely pools. The night majordomo on watch against the chance that you or I might demand a singing bird or a ripe melon. Our captive gardens. All we see or touch or use or fancy–and a thousand times as much in distant places, all these you earned with your own strong hands; they are yours, by right.”
I snorted. “They are,” she insisted. “That was our contract. I promised you great adventure, and greater treasure, and even greater danger. You agreed. You said, ‘Princess, you’ve hired yourself a boy.’ ” She smiled. “Such a big boy. Darling, I think the dangers were greater than you guessed . . . so it has pleased me, until now, that the treasure is greater than you were likely to have guessed. Please don’t be shy about accepting it. You have earned it and more–as much as you are ever willing to accept”
“Uh–Even if you are right, it’s too much. I’m drowning in marshmallows!”
“But, Oscar, you don’t have to take one bit you don’t want. We can live simply. In one room with bed folded into wall if it pleases you.”
“That’s no solution.”
“Perhaps you would like bachelor digs, out in town?”
” ‘Tossing my shoes,’ eh?”
She said levelly, “My husband, if your shoes are ever tossed, you must toss them. I jumped over your
sword. I shall not jump back.” “Take it easy!” I said. “It was your suggestion. If I took it wrong, I’m sorry. I know you don t go back on your word. But you might be regretting it.”
“I am not regretting it. Are you?”
“No, Star, no! But–”
“That’s a long pause for so short a word,” she said gravely. “Will you tell me?”
“Uh . . . that’s just it. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell what, Oscar? There are so many things to tell.”
“Well, a lot of things. What I was getting into. About you being the Empress of the whole works, in particular . . . before you let me jump over the sword with you.”
Her face did not change but tears rolled down her cheeks. “I could answer that you did not ask me–”
“I didn’t know what to ask!”
“That is true. I could assert, truthfully, that had you asked I would have answered. I could protest that
I did not ‘let you’ jump over the sword, that you overruled my protests that it was not necessary to offer
me the honor of marriage by the laws of your people . . . that I was a wench you could tumble at will. I could point out that I am not an empress, not royal, but a working woman whose job does not permit her even the luxury of being noble. All these are true. But I will not hide behind them; I will meet your question.” She slipped into Nevian. “Milord Hero, I feared sorely that if I did not bend to your will, you would leave me!”
“Milady wife, truly did you think that your champion would desert you in your peril?” I went on in English, “Well, that nails it to the barn. You married me because the Egg damned well had to be recovered and Your Wisdom told you that I was necessary to the job–and might bug out if you didn’t. Well, Your Wisdom wasn’t sharp on that point; I don’t bug out. Stupid of me but I’m stubborn.” I started to get out of bed.
“Milord love!” She was dying openly.
“Excuse me. Got to find a pair of shoes. See how far I can throw them.” I was being nasty as only a man can be who has had his pride wounded.
“Please, Oscar, please! Hear me first.”
I heaved a sigh. “Talk ahead.”
She grabbed my hand so hard I would have lost fingers had I tried to pull loose. “Hear me out. My beloved, it was not that at all. I knew that you would not give up our quest until it was finished or we were dead. I knew! Not only had I reports reaching back years before I ever saw you but also we had shared joy and danger and hardship; I knew your mettle. But, had it been needed, I could have bound you with a net of words, persuaded you to agree to betrothal only–until the quest was over. You are a romantic, you would have agreed. But, darling, darling! I wanted to many you . . . bind you to me by your rules, so that”–she stopped to sniff back tears–“so that, when you saw all this, and this, and this, and the things you call ‘your toys,’ you still would stay with me. It was not politics, it was low–love romantic and unreasoned, love for your own sweet self.”
She dropped her face into her hands and I could barely hear her. “But I know so little of love. Love is a butterfly that lights when it listeth, leaves as it chooses; it is never bound with chains. I sinned. I tried to bind you. Unjust I knew it was, cruel to you I now see it to be.” Star looked up with crooked smile. “Even Her Wisdom has no wisdom when it comes to being a woman. But, though silly wench I be, I am not too stubborn to know that I have wronged my beloved when my face is rubbed in it. Go, go, get your sword; I will jump back over it and my champion will be free of his silken cage. Go, milord Hero, while my heart is firm.”
“Go fetch your own sword, wench. That paddling is long overdue.”
Suddenly she grinned, all hoyden. “But, darling, my sword is in Karth-Hokesh. Don’t you remember?”
“You can’t avoid it this time!” I grabbed her. Star is a handful and slippery, with amazing muscles. But I’m bigger and she didn’t fight as hard as she could have. Still I lost skin and picked up bruises before I got her legs pinned and one arm twisted behind her. I gave her a couple of hearty spanks, hard enough to print each finger in pink, then lost interest.
Now tell me, were those words straight from her heart–or was it acting by the smartest woman in twenty universes?
Later, Star said, “I’m glad your chest is not a scratchy rug, like some men, my beautiful.”
“I was a pretty baby, too. How many chests have you checked?”
“A random sample. Darling, have you decided to keep me?”
“A while. On good behavior, you understand.”
“I’d rather be kept on bad behavior. But–while you’re feeling mellow–if you are–I had best tell you
another thing–and take my spanking if I must.”
“You’re too anxious. One a day is maximum, hear me?”
“As you will, sir. Yassuh, Boss man. I’ll have my sword fetched in the morning and you can spank me
with it at your leisure. If you think you can catch me. But I must tell this and get it off my chest.”
“There’s nothing on your chest. Unless you count–”
“Please! You’ve been going to our therapists.”
“Once a week.” The first thing Star had ordered was an examination for me so complete as to make an Army physical seem perfunctory. “The Head Sawbones insists that my wounds aren’t healed but I don’t believe him; I’ve never felt better.”
“He, is stalling, Oscar–by my order. You’re healed, I am not unskilled, I was most careful. But–darling, I did this for selfish reasons and now you must tell me if I have been cruel and unjust to you again. I admit I was sneaky. But my intentions were good. However, I know, as the prime lesson of my profession, that good intentions are the source of more folly than all other causes put together.”
“Star, what are you prattling about? Women are the source of all folly.”
“Yes, dearest. Because they always have good intentions–and can prove it. Men sometimes act from rational self-interest, which is safer. But not often.”
“That’s because half their ancestors are female. Why have I been keeping doctor’s appointments if I don t need them?”
“I didn’t say you don’t need them. But you may not think so. Oscar, you are far advanced with
Long-Life treatments.” She eyed me as if ready to parry or retreat.
“Well, I’ll be damned!”
“You object? At this stage it can be reversed.”
“I hadn’t thought about it.” I knew that Long-Life was available on Center but knew also that it was rigidly restricted. Anybody could have it–just before emigrating to a sparsely settled planet. Permanent residents must grow old and die. This was one matter in which one of Star’s predecessors had interfered in local government. Center, with disease practically conquered, great prosperity, and lodestone of a myriad peoples, had grown too crowded, especially when Long-Life sent skyward the average age of death.
This stern rule had thinned the crowds. Some people took Long-Life early, went through a Gate and took their chances in wilderness. More waited until that first twinge that brings awareness of death, then decided that they weren’t too old for a change. And some sat tight and died when their time came.
I knew that twinge; it had been handed to me by a bolo in a jungle. “I guess I have no objection.”
She sighed with relief. “I didn’t know and should not have slipped it into your coffee. Do I rate a spanking?”
“We’ll add it to the list you already rate and give them to you all at once. Probably cripple you. Star, how long is ‘Long-Life’?”
“That’s hard to answer. Very few who have had it have died in bed. If you live as active a life as I know you will–from your temperament–you are most unlikely to die of old age. Nor of disease.”
“And I never grow old?” It takes getting used to.
“Oh, yes, you can grow old. Worse yet, senility stretches in proportion. If you let it. If those around you allow it. However–Darling, how old do I look? Don’t tell me with your heart, tell me with your eyes. By Earth standards. Be truthful, I know the answer.”
It was ever a joy to look at Star but I tried to look at her freshly, for hints of autumn–outer corners of eyes, her hands, for tiny changes in skin–hell, not even a stretch mark, yet I knew she had a grandchild.
“Star, when I first saw you, I guessed eighteen. You turned around and I upped the ante a little. Now, looking closely and not giving you any breaks–not over twenty-five. And that is because your features seem mature. When you laugh, you’re a teen-ager; when you wheedle, or look awestruck, or suddenly delighted with a puppy or kitten or something, you’re about twelve. From the chin up, I mean; from the chin down you can’t pass for less than eighteen.”
“A buxom eighteen,” she added. “Twenty-five Earth years–by rates of growth on Earth–is right on the mark I was shooting at. The age when a woman stops growing and starts aging. Oscar, your apparent age under Long-Life is a matter of choice. Take my Uncle Joseph–the one who sometimes calls himself ‘Count Cagliostro.’ He set himself at thirty-five, because he says that anything younger is a boy. Rufo prefers to look older. He says it gets him respectful treatment, keeps him out of brawls with lounger men–and still lets him give a younger man a shock if one does pick a fight because, as you know, Rufo’s older age is mostly from chin up.”
“Or the shock he can give younger women,” I suggested.
“With Rufo one never knows. Dearest, I didn’t finish telling you. Part of it is teaching the body to repair itself. Your language lessons here–there hasn’t been a one but what a hypno-therapist was waiting to give your body a lesson through your sleeping mind, after your language lesson. Part of apparent age is cosmetic therapy–Rufo need not be bald–but more is controlled by the mind. When you decide what age you like, they can start imprinting it.”
“I’ll think about it. I don’t want to look too much older than you.”
Star looked delighted. “Thank you, dear! You see how selfish I’ve been.”
“How? I missed that point.”
She put a hand over mine. “I didn’t want you to grow old–and die! –while I stayed young.” I blinked at her. “Gosh, lady, that was selfish of you, wasn’t it? But you could varnish me and keep me in the bedroom. Like your aunt.”
She made a face. “You’re a nasty man. She didn’t varnish them.”
“Star, I haven’t seen any of those keepsake corpses around here.”
She looked surprised. “But that’s on the planet where I was born. This universe, another star. Very pretty place. Didn’t I ever say?”
“Star, my darling, mostly you’ve never said.”
“I’m sorry. Oscar, I don’t want to hand you surprises. Ask me. Tonight. Anything.”
I considered it. One thing I had wondered about, a certain lack. Or perhaps the women of her part of
the race had another rhythm. But I had been stopped by the fact that I had married a grandmother–how old? “Star, are you pregnant?”
“Why, no, dear. Oh! Do you want me to be? You want us to have children?”
I stumbled, trying to explain that I hadn’t been sure it was possible–or maybe she was. Star looked troubled. “I’m going to upset you again. I had best tell it all. Oscar, I was no more brought up to luxury than you were. A pleasant childhood, my people were ranchers. I married young and was a simple mathematics teacher, with a hobby research in conjectural and optional geometries. Magic, I mean. Three children. My husband and I got along well . . . until I was nominated. Not selected, just named for examination and possible training. He knew I was a genetic candidate when he married me–but so many millions are. It didn’t seem important.
“He wanted me to refuse. I almost did. But when I accepted, he–well, he ‘tossed my shoes.’ We do it formally there; he published a notice that I was no longer his wife.”
“He did, eh? Mind if I look him up and break his arms?”
“Dear, dear! That was many years ago and far away; he is long dead. It doesn’t matter.”
“In any case he’s dead. Your three kids–one of them is Rufo’s father? Or mother?”
“Oh, no! That was later.”
“Well?”
Star took a deep breath. “Oscar, I have about fifty children.”
That did it. Too many shocks and I guess I showed it, for Star’s face reflected deep concern. She
rushed through the explanation.
When she was named heir, changes were made in her, surgical, biochemical, and endocrinal. Nothing
as drastic as spaying and to different ends and by techniques more subtle than ours. But the result was
that about two hundred tiny bits of Star–ova alive and latent–were stored near absolute zero.
Some fifty had been quickened, mostly by emperors long dead but “alive” in their stored seed–genetic gambles on getting one or more future emperors. Star had not borne them; an heir’s time is too precious. She had never seen most of them; Rufo’s father was an exception. She didn’t say, but I think Star liked to have a child around to play with and love–until the strenuous first years of her reign and the Quest for the Egg left her no time.
This change had a double purpose: to get some hundreds of star-line children from a single mother, and to leave the mother free. By endocrine control of some sort, Star was left free of Eve’s rhythm but in all ways young–not pills nor hormone injections; this was permanent. She was simply a healthy woman who never had “bad days.” This was not for her convenience but to insure that her judgment as the Great Judge would never be whipsawed by her glands. “This is sensible,” she said seriously. “I can remember there used to be days when I would bite the head off my dearest friend for no reason, then burst into tears. One can’t be judicial in that sort of storm.”
“Uh, did it affect your interest? I mean your desire for–”
She gave me a hearty grin. “What do you think?” She added seriously, “The only thing that affects my libido–changes it for the worse, I mean–are . . . is? –English has the oddest structure–is-are those pesky imprintings. Sometimes up, sometimes down–and you’ll remember one woman whose name we won’t mention who affected me so carnivorously that I didn’t dare come near you until I had exorcised her black soul! A fresh imprint affects my judgment as well, so I never hear a case until I have digested the latest one. I’ll be glad when they’re over!”
“So will I.”
“Not as glad as I will be. But, aside from that, darling, I don t vary much as a female and you know it. Just my usual bawdy self who eats young boys for breakfast and seduces them into jumping over swords.” “How many swords?”
She looked at me sharply. “Since my first husband kicked me out I have not been married until I married you, Mr. Gordon. If that is not what you meant, I don’t think you should hold against me things that happened before you were born. If you want details since then, I’ll satisfy your curiosity. Your morbid curiosity, if I may say so.”
“You want to boast. Wench, I won’t pamper it.”
“I do not want to boast! I’ve little to boast about. The Crisis of the Egg left me almost no time in which to be a woman, damn it! Until Oscar the Rooster came along. Thank you, sir.”
“And keep a civil tongue in your head.”
“Yes, sir. Nice Rooster! But you’ve led us far from our muttons, dear. If you want children–yes, darling! There are about two hundred and thirty eggs left and they belong to me. Not to posterity. Not to the dear people, bless their greedy little hearts. Not to those God-playing genetic manipulators. Me! It’s all I own. All else is ex offico. But these are mine . . . and if you want them, they are yours, my only dear.”
I should have said, “Yes!” and kissed her. What I did say was, “Uh, let’s not rush it.”
Her face fell. “As milord Hero husband pleases.”
“Look, don’t get Nevian and formal. I mean, well, it takes getting used to. Syringes and things, I suppose, and monkeying by technicians. And, while I realize you don’t have time to have a baby yourself–”
I was trying to say that, ever since I got straightened out about the Stork, I had taken for granted the usual setup, and artificial insemination was a dirty trick to play even on a cow–and that this job, subcontracted on both sides, made me think of slots in a Horn & Hardart, or a mail-order suit. But give me time and I would adjust. Just as she had adjusted to those damned imprints-
She gripped my hands. “Darling, you needn’t!”
“Needn’t what?”
“Be monkeyed with by technicians. And I will take time to have your baby. If you don’t mind seeing my body get gross and huge–it does, it does, I remember–then happily I will do it. All will be as with other people so far as you are concerned. No syringes. No technicians. Nothing to offend your pride. Oh, I’ll have to be worked on. But I’m used to being handled like a prize cow; it means no more than having my hair shampooed.”
“Star, you would go through nine months of inconvenience–and maybe die in childbirth–to save me a few moments’ annoyance?”
“I shall not die, Three children, remember? Normal deliveries, no trouble.”
“But, as you pointed out, that was ‘many years ago.’ ”
“No matter.”
“Uh, how many years?” (“How old are you, woman?” The question I never dared ask.)
She looked upset. “Does it matter, Oscar?”
“Uh, I suppose not. You know more about medicine than I do–”
She said slowly, “You were asking how old I am, were you not?”
I didn’t say anything. She waited, then went on, “An old saw from your world says that a woman is as young as she feels. And I feel young and I am young and I have zest for life and I can bear a baby–or many babies–m my own belly. But I know–oh, I know! –that your worry is not just that I am too rich and occupy a position not easy for a husband. Yes, I know that part too well; my first husband rejected me for that. But be was my age. The most cruel and unjust thing I have done is that I knew that my age could matter to you–and I kept still. That was why Rufo was so outraged. After you were asleep that night in the cave of the Forest of Dragons he told me so, in biting words. He said he knew I was not above enticing young boys but he never thought that I would sink so low as to trap one into marriage without first telling him. He’s never had a high opinion of his old granny, he said, but this time–”
“Shut up, Star!”
“Yes, milord.”
“It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference!”–and I said it so flatly that I believed it–and do now. “Rufo doesn’t know what I think. You are younger than tomorrow’s dawn–you always will be. That’s the last I want to hear about it!”
“Yes, milord.”
“And knock that off, too. Just say, ‘Okay, Oscar.’ ”
“Yes, Oscar! Okay!”
“Better. Unless you’re honing for another spanking. And I’m too tired.” I changed the subject. “About this other matter–There’s no reason to stretch your pretty tummy if other ways are at hand. I’m a country jake, that’s all; I’m not used to big city ways. When you suggested that you do it yourself, did you mean that they could put you back together the way you were?”
“No. I would simply be host-mother as well as genetic mother.” She smiled and I knew I was making progress. “But saving a tidy sum of that money you don’t want to spend. Those healthy, sturdy women who have other people’s babies charge high. Four babies, they can retire–ten makes them wealthy.”
“I should think they would charge high! Star, I don’t object to spending money. I’ll concede, if you say so, that I’ve earned more than I spend, by my work as a professional hero. That’s a tough racket, too.”
“You’ve earned it.”
“This citified way of having babies–Can you pick it? Boy, or girl?”
“Of course. Male-giving wigglers swim faster, they can be sorted out. That’s why Wisdoms are usually men–I was an unplanned candidate. You shall have a son, Oscar.”
“Might prefer a girl. I’ve a weakness for little girls.”
“A boy, a girl–or both. Or as many as you want.”
“Star, let me study it. Lots of angles–and I don’t think as well as you do.”
“Pooh!”
“If you don’t think better than I do, the cash customers are getting rooked. Mmm, male seed can be stored as easily as eggs?”
“Much easier.”
“That’s all the answer we need now. I’m not too jumpy about syringes; I’ve stood in enough Army queues. I’ll go to the clinic or whatever it is, then we can settle it slowly. When we decide”–I shrugged–“mail the postcard and when it goes clunk! –we’re parents. Or some such. From there on the technicians and those husky gals can handle it.”
“Yes, milo–Okay, darling!”
All better. Almost her little girl face. Certainly her sixteen-year-old face, with new party dress and boys a shivery, delightful danger. “Star, you said earlier that it was often not the second issue out even the twenty-second that matters.”
“Yes.”
“I know what’s wrong with me. I can tell you–and maybe Her Wisdom knows the answer.”
She blinked. “If you can tell me, sweetheart–Her Wisdom will solve it, even if I have to tear the place down and put it back up differently–from here to the next galaxy–or I’ll go out of the Wisdom business!”
“That sounds more like my Lucky Star. All right, it’s not that I’m a gigolo. I’ve earned my coffee and cakes, at least; the Soul-Eater did damn near eat my soul, he knew its exact shape–he . . . it–it knew things I had long forgotten. It was rough and the pay ought to be high. It’s not your age, dearest. Who cares how old Helen of Troy is? You’re the right age forever–can a man be luckier? I’m not jealous of your position; I wouldn’t want it with chocolate icing. I’m not jealous of the men in your life–the lucky stiffs! Not even now, as long as I don’t stumble over them getting to the bathroom.”
“There are no other men in my life now, milord husband.”
“I had no reason to think so. But there is always next week, and even you can’t have a Sight about
that, my beloved. You’ve taught me that marriage is not a form of death–and you obviously aren’t dead, you lively wench.”
“Perhaps not a Sight,” she admitted. “But a feeling.”
“I won’t bet on it. I’ve read the Kinsey Report.”
“What report?”
“He disproved the Mermaid theory. About married women. Forget it. Hypothetical question: If Jocko visited Center, would you still have the same feeling? We should have to invite him to sleep here.”
“The Doral will never leave Nevia.”
“Don’t blame him, Nevia is wonderful. I said If–If he does, will you offer him ‘roof, table, and bed’?”
“That,” she said firmly, “is your decision, milord.”
“Rephrase it: Will you expect me to humiliate Jocko by not returning his hospitality? Gallant old Jocko, who let us live when he was entitled to kill us? Whose bounty–arrows and many things, including a new medic’s kit–kept us alive and let us win back the Egg?”
“By Nevian customs of roof and table and bed,” she insisted, “the husband decides, milord husband.”
“We aren’t in Nevia and here a wife has a mind of her own. You’re dodging, wench.”
She grinned naughtily. “Does that ‘if’ of yours include Muri? And Letva? They’re his favorites, he
wouldn’t travel without them. And how about little what’s-her-name? –the nymphet?”
“I am aware of it, my Hero,” she said levelly. “All I can say is that I intend that this wench shall never give her Hero a moment’s unease–and my intentions are usually carried out. I am not ‘Her Wisdom’ for nothing.”
“Fair enough. I never thought you would cause me that sort of unease. I was trying to show that the task may not be too difficult. Damn it, we’ve wandered off. Here’s my real problem. I’m not good for anything. I’m worthless.”
“Why, my dearest! You’re good for me.”
“But not for myself. Star, gigolo or not, I can’t be a pet poodle. Not even yours. Look, you’ve got a job. It keeps you busy and it’s important. But me? There is nothing for me to do, nothing at all! –nothing better than designing bad jewelry. You know what I am? A hero by trade, so you told me; you recruited me. Now I’m retired. Do you know anything in all twenty universes more useless than a retired hero?”
She mentioned a couple. I said, “You’re stalling. Anyhow they break up the blankness of the male chest. I’m serious, Star. This is the issue that has made me unfit to live with. Darling, I’m asking you to put your whole mind on it–and all those ghostly helpers. Treat it the way you treat an Imperial problem. Forget I’m your husband. Consider my total situation, all you know about me–and tell me what I can do with hands and head and time that is worth doing. Me, being what I am.”
She held still for long minutes, her face in that professional calm she had worn the times I had audited her work. “You are right,” she said at last. “There is nothing worth your powers on this planet.”
“Then what do I do?”
She said tonelessly, “You must leave.”
“Huh?”
“You think I like the answer, my husband? Do you think I like most answers I must give? But you asked me to consider it professionally. I obeyed. That is the answer. You must leave this planet–and me.”
“So my shoes get tossed anyhow?”
“Be not bitter, milord. That is the answer. I can evade and be womanish only in my private life; I cannot refuse to think if I agree to do so as ‘Her Wisdom.’ You must leave me. But, no, no, no, your shoes are not tossed! You will leave, because you must. Not because I wish it.” Her face stayed calm but tears streamed again. “One cannot ride a cat . . . nor hurry a snail . . . nor teach a snake to fly. Nor make a poodle of a Hero. I knew it, I refused to look at it. You will do what you must do. But your shoes will remain ever by my bed, I am not sending you away!” She blinked back tears. “I cannot lie to you, even by silence. I will not say that no other shoes will rest here . . . if you are gone a long time. I have been lonely. There are no words to say how lonely this job is. When you go . . . I shall be lonelier than ever. But you will find your shoes here when you return.”
“When I return? You have a Sight?”
“No, milord Hero. I have only a feeling . . . that if you live . . . you will return. Perhaps many times. But Heroes do not die in bed. Not even this one.” She blinked and tears stopped and her voice was steady. “Now, milord husband, if it please you, shall we dim the lights and rest?”
We did and she put her head on my shoulder and did not cry. But we did not sleep. After an aching time I said, “Star, do you hear what I hear?”
She raised her head. “I hear nothing.”
“The City. Can’t you hear it? People. Machines. Even thoughts so thick your bones feel it and your ear almost catches it.”
“Yes. I know that sound.”
“Star, do you like it here?”
“No. It was never necessary that I like it.”
“Look, damn it! You said that I would leave. Come with me!”
“Oh, Oscar!”
“What do you owe them? Isn’t recovering the Egg enough? Let them take a new victim. Come walk the Glory Road with me again! There must be work in my line somewhere.”
“There is always work for Heroes.”
“Okay, we set up in business, you and I. Heroing isn’t a bad job. The meals are irregular and the pay uncertain–out it’s never dull. We’ll run ads: ‘Gordon & Gordon, Heroing Done Reasonable. No job too large, no job too small. Dragons exterminated by contract, satisfaction guaranteed or no pay. Free estimates on other work. Questing, maiden-rescuing, golden fleece located night or day?’ ”
I was trying to jolly her but Star doesn’t jolly. She answered in sober earnest. “Oscar, if I am to retire, I should train my heir first. True, no one can order me to do anything–but I have a duty to train my replacement.”
“How long will that take?”
“Not long. Thirty years, about.”
“Thirty years!”
“I could force it to twenty-five, I think.”
I sighed. “Star, do you know how old I am?”
“Yes. Not yet twenty-five. But you will get no older!”
“But right now I’m still that age. That’s all the time there has ever been for me. Twenty-five years as a pet poodle and I won’t be a hero, nor anything. I’ll be out of my silly mind.”
She thought about it. “Yes. That is true.”
She turned over, we made a spoon and pretended to sleep.
Later I felt her shoulders shaking and knew that she was sobbing. “Star?”
She didn’t turn her head. All I heard was a choking voice, “Oh, my dear, my very dear! If I were even a hundred years younger!”
Chapter 20
I let the precious, useless gems dribble through my fingers, listlessly pushed them aside. If I were only a hundred years older-
But Star was right. She could not leave her post without relief. Her notion of proper relief, not mine nor anyone else’s. And I couldn’t stay in this upholstered jail much longer without beating my head on the bars.
Yet both of us wanted to stay together.
The real nasty hell of it was that I knew–just as she knew–that each of us would forget. Some, anyhow. Enough so that there would be other shoes, other men, and she would laugh again.
And so would I–She had seen that and had gravely, gently, with subtle consideration for another’s feelings, told me indirectly that I need not feel guilty when next I courted some other girl, in some other land, somewhere.
Then why did I feel like a heel?
How did I get trapped with no way to turn without being forced to choose between hurting my beloved and going clean off my rocker?
I read somewhere about a man who lived on a high mountain, because of asthma, the choking, killing land, while his wife lived on the coast below him, because of heart trouble that could not stand altitude. Sometimes they looked at each other through telescopes.
In the morning there had been no talk of Stars retiring. The unstated quid-pro-quo was that, if she planned to retire, I would hang around (thirty years!) until she did. Her Wisdom had concluded that I could not, and did not speak of it. We had a luxurious breakfast and were cheerful, each with his secret thoughts.
Nor were children mentioned. Oh, I would find that clinic, do what was needed. If she wanted to mix
her star line with my common blood, she could, tomorrow or a hundred years hence. Or smile tenderly
and have it cleaned out with the rest of the trash. None of my people had even been mayor of Podunk
and a plow horse isn’t groomed for the Irish Sweepstakes. If Star put a child together from our genes, it
would be sentiment, a living valentine–a younger poodle she could pet before she let it run free. But
sentiment only, as sticky if not as morbid as that of her aunt with the dead husbands, for the Imperium
could not use my bend sinister.
I looked up at my sword, hanging opposite me. I hadn’t touched it since the party, long past, when Star chose to dress for the Glory Road. I took it down, buckled it on and drew it–felt that surge of liveness and had a sudden vision of a long road and a castle on a hill.
What does a champion owe his lady when the quest is done?
Quit dodging, Gordon! What does a husband owe his wife? This very sword–“Jump Rogue and Princess leap. My wife art thou and mine to keep.” “–for richer, for poorer, for better, for worse . . . to love and to cherish, till death do us part.” That was what I meant by that doggerel and Star had known it and I had known it and knew it now.
When we vowed, it had seemed likely that we would be parted by death that same day. But that didn’t reduce the vow nor the deepness with which I had meant it. I hadn’t jumped the sword to catch a tumble on the grass before I died; I could have had that free. No, I had wanted “–to have and to hold, to love and to cherish, till death do us part”!
Star had kept her vow to the letter. Why did I have itchy feet?
Scratch a hero and find a bum.
And a retired hero was as silly as those out-of-work kings that clutter Europe.
I slammed out of our “flat,” wearing sword and not giving a damn about stares, apported to our therapists, found where I should go, went there, did what was necessary, told the boss biotechnician that Her Wisdom must be told, and jumped down his throat when he asked questions.
Then back to the nearest apport booth and hesitated–I needed companionship the way an Alcoholics-Anonymous needs his hand held. But I had no intimates, just hundreds of acquaintances. It isn’t easy for the Empress’s cosort to have friends.
Rufo it had to be. But in all the months I had been on Center I had never been in Rufo’s home. Center does not practice the barbarous custom of dropping in on people and I had seen Rufo only at the Residence, or on parties; Rufo had never invited me to his home. No, no coldness there; we saw him often, but always he had come to us.
I looked for him in apport listings–no luck. Then as little with see-speak lists. I called the Residence, got the communication officer. He said that “Rufo” was not a surname and tried to brush me off. I said, “Hold it, you overpaid clerk! Switch me off and you’ll be in charge of smoke signals in Timbuktu an hour from now. Now listen. This bloke is elderly, baldheaded, one of his names is ‘Rufo’ I think, and he is a distinguished comparative culturologist. And he is a grandson of Her Wisdom. I think you know who he is and have been dragging your feet from bureaucratic arrogance. You have five minutes. Then I talk to Her Wisdom and ask her, while you pack!”
(“Stop! Danger you! Other old bald Rufo (?) top compculturist. Wisdom egg-sperm-egg. Five-minutes. Liar and/or fool. Wisdom? Catastrophe!”)
In less than five minutes Rufo’s image filled the tank. “Well!” he said. “I wondered who had enough weight to crash my shutoff.”
“Rufo, may I come see you?”
His scalp wrinkled. “Mice in the pantry, son? Your face reminds me of the time my uncle–”
“Please, Rufo!”
“Yes, son,” he said gently. “I’ll send the dancing girls home. Or shall I keep them?”
“I don’t care. How do I find you?”
He told me, I punched his code, added my charge number, and I was there, a thousand miles around the horizon. Rufo’s place was a mansion as lavish as Jocko’s and thousands of years more sophisticated. I gathered an impression that Rufo had the biggest household on Center, all female. I was wrong. But all female servants, visitors, cousins, daughters, made themselves a reception committee–to look at Her Wisdom’s bedmate. Rufo shooed them away and took me to his study. A dancing girl (evidently a secretary) was fussing over papers and tapes. Rufo slapped her fanny out, gave me a comfortable chair, a drink, put cigarettes near me, sat down and said nothing.
Smoking isn’t popular on Center, what they use as tobacco is the reason. I picked up a cigarette.
“Chesterfields! Good God!”
“Have ’em smuggled,” he said. “But they don’t make anything like Sweet Caps anymore. Bridge sweepings and chpped hay.”
I hadn’t smoked in months. But Star had told me that cancer and such I could now forget. So I lit it–and coughed like a Nevian dragon. Vice requires constant practice.
” ‘What news on the Rialto?’ ” Rufo inquired. He glanced at my sword.
“Oh, nothing.” Having interrupted Rufo’s work, I now shied at baring my domestic troubles.
Rufo sat and smoked and waited. I needed to say something and the American cigarette reminded me of an incident, one that had added to my unstable condition. At a party a week earlier, I had met a man thirty-five in appearance, smooth, polite, but with that supercilious air that says: “Your fly is unzipped, old man, but I’m too urbane to mention it.”
But I had been delighted to meet him, he had spoken English!
I had thought that Star, Rufo, and myself were the only ones on Center who spoke English. We often spoke it. Star on my account, Rufo because he liked to practice. He spoke Cockney like a costermonger, Bostonese like Beacon Hill, Aussie like a kangaroo; Rufo knew all English languages.
This chap spoke good General American. “Nebbi is the name, he said, shaking hands where no one shakes hands, “and you’re Gordon, I know. Delighted to meet you.”
“Me, too,” I agreed. “It’s a surprise and a pleasure to hear my own language.”
“Professional knowledge, my dear chap. Comparative culturologist, linguisto-historo-political. You’re American, I know. Let me place it–Deep-South, not born there. Possibly New England. Overlaid with displaced Middle Western, California perhaps. Basic speech, lower-middle class, mixed.”
The smooth oaf was good. Mother and I lived in Boston while my father was away, 1942-45. I’ll never forget those winters; I wore overshoes from November to April. I had lived Deep South, Georgia and Florida, and in California at La Jolla during the Korean unWar and, later, in college. “Lower-middle class”? Mother had not thought so.
“Near enough,” I agreed. “I know one of your colleagues.”
“I know whom you mean, ‘the Mad Scientist.’ Wonderful wacky theories. But tell me: How were things when you left? Especially, how is the United States getting along with its Noble Experiment?”
” ‘Noble Experiment’?” I had to think; Prohibition was gone before I was born. “Oh, that was repealed.”
“Really? I must go back for a field trip. What have you now? A king? I could see that your country was headed that way but I did not expect it so soon.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “I was talking about Prohibition.”
“Oh, that. Symptomatic but not basic. I was speaking of the amusing notion of chatter rule. ‘Democracy.’ A curious delusion–as if adding zeros could produce a sum. But it was tried in your tribal land on a mammoth scale. Before you were born, no doubt. I thought you meant that even the corpse had been swept away.” He smiled. “Then they still have elections and all that?”
“The last time I looked, yes.”
“Oh, wonderful. Fantastic, simply fantastic. Well, we must get together, I want to quiz you. I’ve been studying your planet a long time–the most amazing pathologies in tile explored complex. So long. Don’t take any wooden nickels, as your tribesmen say.”
I told Rufo about it. “Rufe, I know I came from a barbarous planet. But does that excuse his rudeness? Or was it rudeness? I haven’t really got the hang of good manners here.”
Rufo frowned. “It is bad manners anywhere to sneer at a person’s birthplace, tribe, or customs. A man does it at his own risk. If you kill him, nothing will happen to you. It might embarrass Her Wisdom a little. If She can be embarrassed.”
“I won’t kill him, it’s not that important.”
“Then forget it. Nebbi is a snob. He knows a little, understands nothing, and thinks the universes would be better if he had designed them. Ignore him.”
“I will. It was just–look, Rufo, my country isn’t perfect. But I don t enjoy hearing it from a stranger.”
“Who does? I like your country, it has flavor. But–I’m not a stranger and this is not a sneer. Nebbi was right.”
“Huh?”
“Except that he sees only the surface. Democracy can’t work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, that’s all there is–so democracy, a theory based on the assumption that mathematicians and peasants are equal, can never work. Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest man in a given group.
“But a democratic form of government is okay, as long as it doesn’t work. Any social organization does well enough if it isn’t rigid. The framework doesn’t matter as long as there is enough looseness to permit that one man in a multitude to display his genius. Most so-called social scientists seem to think that organization is everything. It is almost nothing–except when it is a straitjacket. It is the incidence of heroes that counts, not the pattern of zeros.”
He added, “Your country has a system free enough to let its heroes work at their trade. It should last a long time–unless its looseness is destroyed from inside.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“I am right. This subject I know and I’m not stupid, as Nebbi thinks. He’s right about the futility of ‘adding zeros’–but he doesn’t realize that he is a zero.”
I grinned. “No point in letting a zero get my goat.”
“None. Especially as you are not. Wherever you go, you will make yourself felt, you won’t be one of the nerd. I respect you, and I don’t respect many. Never people as a whole, I could never be a democrat at heart. To claim to ‘respect’ and even to ‘love’ the great mass with their yaps at one end and smelly feet at the other requires the fatuous, uncritical, saccharine, blind, sentimental slobbishness found in some nursery supervisors, most spaniel dogs, and all missionaries. It isn’t a political system, it’s a disease. But be of good cheer; your American politicians are immune to this disease . . . and your customs allow the non-zero elbow room.”
Rufo glanced at my sword again. “Old friend, you didn’t come here to bitch about Nebbi.” “No.” I looked down at that keen blade. “I fetched this to shave you, Rufo.”
“Eh?”
“I promised I would shave your corpse. I owe it to you for the slick job you did on me. So here I am,
to shave the barber.”
He said slowly, “But I’m not yet a corpse.” He did not move. But his eyes did, estimating distance between us. Rufo wasn’t counting on my being “chivalrous”; he had lived too long.
“Oh, that can be arranged,” I said cheerfully, “unless I get straight answers from you.”
He relaxed a touch. “I’ll try, Oscar.”
“More than try, please. You’re my last chance. Rufo, this must be private. Even from Star.”
“Under the Rose. My word on it.”
“With your fingers crossed, no doubt. But don’t risk it, I’m serious. And straight answers, I need them. I want advice about my marriage.”
He looked glum. “And I meant to go out today. Instead I worked. Oscar, I would rather criticize a woman’s firstborn, or even her taste in hats. Much safer to teach a shark to bite. What if I refuse?”
“Then I shave you!”
“You would, you heavy-handed headsman!” He frowned. ” ‘Straight answers–‘ You don’t want them, you want a shoulder to cry on.”
“Maybe that, too. But I do want straight answers, not the lies you can tell in your sleep.”
“So I lose either way. Telling a man the truth about his marriage is suicide. I think I’ll sit tight and see if
you have the heart to cut me down in cold blood.”
“Oh, Rufo, I’ll put my sword under your lock and key if you like. You know I would never draw against you.”
“I know no such thing,” he said querulously. “There’s always that first time. Scoundrels are predictable, but you’re a man of honor and that frightens me. Can’t we handle this over the see-speak?”
“Come off it, Rufo. I’ve nobody else to turn to. I want you to speak frankly. I know that a marriage counselor has to lay it on the line, pull no punches. For the sake of blood we’ve lost together I ask you to advise me. And frankly, of course!”
” ‘Of course,’ is it? The last time I risked it you were for cutting the tongue out of me.” He looked at me moodily. “But I was ever a fool where friendship speaks. Hear, I’ll dicker ye a fair dicker. You talk, I’ll listen . . . and if it should come about that you’re taking so long that my tired old kidneys complain and I’m forced to leave your welcome company for a moment . . . why, then you’ll misunderstand and go away in a huff and we’ll say no more about it. Eh?”
“Okay.”
“The Chair recognizes you. Proceed.”
So I talked. I talked out my dilemma and frustration, sparing neither self nor Star (it was for her sake, too, and it wasn’t necessary to speak of our most private matters; those, at least, were dandy). But I told our quarrels and many matters best kept in the family, I had to.
Rufo listened. Presently he stood up and paced, looking troubled. Once he tut-tutted over the men Star had brought home. “She shouldn’t have called her maids in. But do forget it, lad. She never remembers that men are shy, whereas females merely have customs. Allow Her this.”
Later he said, “No need to be jealous of Jocko, son. He drives a tack with a sledgehammer.”
“I’m not jealous.”
“That’s what Menelaus said. But leave room for give and take. Every marriage needs it.”
Finally I ran down, having told him Star’s prediction that I would leave. “I’m not blaming her for anything and talking about it has straightened me out. I can sweat it out now, behave myself, and be a good husband. She does make terrible sacrifices to do her job–and the least I can do is make it easier. She’s so sweet and gentle and good.”
Rufo stopped, some distance away with his back to his desk. “You think so?”
“I know so.”
“She’s an old bag!”
I was out of my chair and at him at once. I didn’t draw. Didn’t think of it, wouldn’t have anyhow. I wanted to get my hands on him and punish him for talking that way about my beloved.
He bounced over the desk like a ball and by the time I covered the length of the room, Rufo was behind it, one hand in a drawer.
“Naughty, naughty,” he said. “Oscar, I don’t want to shave you.”
“Come out and fight like a man!”
“Never, old friend. One step closer and you’re dog meat. All your fine promises, your pleadings. ‘Pull no punches’ you said. ‘Lay it on the line’ you said. ‘Speak frankly’ you said. Sit down in that chair.”
” ‘Speaking frankly’ doesn’t mean being insulting!”
“Who’s to judge? Can I submit my remains for approval before I make them? Don’t compound your broken promises with childish illogic. And would you force me to buy a new rug? I never keep one I’ve killed a friend on; the stains make me gloomy. Sit down in that chair.”
I sat down.
“Now,” said Rufo, staying where he was, “you will listen while I talk. Or perhaps you will get up and walk out. In which case I might be so pleased to see the last of your ugly face that that might be that. Or I might be so annoyed at being interrupted that you would drop dead in the doorway, for I’ve much pent up and ready to spill over. Suit yourself.
“I said,” he went on, “that my grandmother is an old bag. I said it brutally, to discharge your tension–and now you’re not likely to take too much offense at many offensive things I still must say. She’s old, you know that, though no doubt you find it easy to forget, mostly. I forget it myself, mostly, even though She was old when I was a babe making messes on the floor and crowing at the dear sight of Her. Bag, She is, and you know it. I could have said ‘experienced woman’ but I had to rap your teeth with it; you’ve been dodging it even while you’ve been telling me how well you know it–and how you don’t care. Granny is an old bag, we start from there.
“And why should She be anything else? Tell yourself the answer. You’re not a fool, you’re merely young. Ordinarily She has but two possible pleasures and the other She can’t indulge.”
“What’s the other one?”
“Handing down bad decisions through sadistic spite, that’s the one She dare not indulge. So let us be thankful that Her body has built into it this harmless safety valve, else we would all suffer grievously before somebody managed to kill Her. Lad, dear lad, can you dream how mortal tired She must be of most things? Your own zest soured in only months. Think what it must be to hear the same old weary mistakes year after year with nothing to hope for but a clever assassin. Then be thankful that She still pleasures in one innocent pleasure. So She’s an old bag and I mean no disrespect; I salute a beneficent balance between two things She must be to do her job.
“Nor did She stop being what She is by reciting a silly rhyme with you one bright day on a hilltop. You think She has taken a vacation from it since, sticking to you only. Possibly She has, if you have quoted Her exactly and I read the words rightly; She always tells the truth.
“But never all the truth–who can? –and She is the most skillful liar by telling the truth you’ll ever meet. I misdoubt your memory missed some innocent-sounding word that gave an escape yet saved your feelings.
“If so, why should She do more than save your feelings? She’s fond of you, that’s dear–but must She be fanatic about it? All Her training, Her special bent, is to avoid fanaticism always, find practical answers. Even though She may not have mixed up the shoes, as yet, if you stay on a week or a year or twenty and time comes when She wants to. She can find ways, not lie to you in words–and hurt Her conscience not at all because She hasn’t any. Just Wisdom, utterly pragmatic.”
Rufo cleared his throat. “Now refutation and counterpoint and contrariwise. I like my grandmother and love Her as much as my meager nature permits and respect Her right down to Her sneaky soul–and I’ll kill you or anyone who gets in Her way or causes Her unhappiness–and only part of this is that She has handed on to me a shadow of Her own self so that I understand Her. If She is spared assassins knife or blast or poison long enough, She’ll go down in history as ‘The Great.’ But you spoke of Her ‘terrible sacrifices.’ Ridiculous! She likes being ‘Her Wisdom,’ the Hub around which all worlds turn. Nor do I believe that She would give it up for you or fifty better. Again, She didn’t lie, as you’ve told it–She said ‘if’ . . . knowing that much can happen in thirty year’s, or twenty-five, among which is the near certainty that you wouldn’t stay that long. A swindle.
“But that’s the least of swindles She’s put over on you. She conned you from the moment you first saw Her and long before. She cheated both ways from the ace, forced you to pick the shell with the pea, sent you like any mark anxious for the best of it, cooled you off when you started to suspect, herded you back into line and to your planned fate–and made you like it. She’s never fussy about method and would con the Virgin Mary and make a pact with the Old One all in one breath, did it suit Her purpose. Oh, you got paid, yes, and good measure to boot; there’s nothing small about Her. But its time you knew you were conned. Mind you, I’m not criticizing Her, I’m applauding–and I helped . . . save for one queasy moment when I felt sorry for the victim. But you were so conned you wouldn’t listen, thank any saints who did. I lost my nerve for a bit, thinking that you were going to a sticky death with your innocent eyes wide. But She was smarter than I am. She always has been.
“Now! I like Her. I respect Her. I admire Her. I even love Her a bit. All of Her, not just Her pretty aspects but also all the impurities that make Her steel as hard as it must be. How about you, sir? What’s your feeling about Her now . . . knowing She conned you, knowing what She is?”
I was still sitting. My drink was by me, untouched all this long harangue.
I took it and stood up. “Here’s to the grandest old bag in twenty universes!”
Rufo bounced over the desk again, grabbed his glass. “Say that loud and often! And to Her, She’d love it! May She be blessed by God, Whoever He is, and kept safe. We’ll never see another like Her, mores the pity! –for we need them by the gross!”
We tossed it down and smashed our grasses. Rufo fetched fresh ones, poured, settled in his chair, and said, “Now for serious drinking. Did I ever tell you about the time my–”
“You did. Rufo, I want to know about this swindle.”
“Such as?”
“Well, I can see much of it. Take that first time we flew–”
He shuddered. “Lets not.”
“I never wondered then. But, since Star can do this, we could have skipped Igli, the Horned Ghosts, the marsh, the time wasted with Jocko–”
“Wasted?”
“For her purpose. And the rats and hogs and possibly the dragons. Flown directly from that first Gate to the second. Right?”
He shook his head. “Wrong.”
“I don’t see it.”
“Assuming that She could fly us that far, a question I hope never to settle, She could have flown us to the Gate She preferred. What would you have done then? If popped almost directly from Nice to Karth-Hokesh? Charged out and fought like a wolverine, as you did? Or said ‘Miss, you’ve made a mistake. Show me the exit from this Fun House–I’m not laughing.’ ”
“Well–I wouldn’t have bugged out”
“But would you have won? Would you have been at that keen edge of readiness it took?”
“I see. Those first rounds were live ammo exercises in my training. Or was it live ammo? Was all that first part swindle? Maybe with hypnotism, to make it feel right? God knows she’s expert. No danger till we reached the Black Tower?”
He shuddered again. “No, no! Oscar, any of that could have killed us. I never fought harder in my life, nor was ever more frightened. None of it could be skipped. I don’t understand all Her reasons. I’m not Her Wisdom. But She would never risk Herself unless necessary. She would sacrifice ten million brave men, were it needed, as the cheaper price. She knows what She’s worth. But She fought beside us with all She has–you saw! Because it had to be.”
“I still don’t understand all of it.”
“Nor will you. Nor will I. She would have sent you in alone, had it been possible. And at that last supreme danger, that thing called ‘Eater of Souls’ because it had done just that to many braves before you . . . had you lost to it, She and I would have tried to fight our way out–I was ready, any moment; I couldn’t tell you–and if we had escaped–unlikely–She would have shed no tears for you. Or not many. Then worked another twenty or thirty or a hundred years to find and con and train anther champion–and fought just as hard by his side. She has courage, that cabbage. She knew how thin our chances were; you didn’t. Did She flinch?”
“No.”
“But you were the key, first to be found, then ground to fit. You yourself act, you’re never a puppet, or
you could never have won. She was the only one who could nudge and wheedle such a man and place
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him where he would act; no lesser person than She could handle the scale of hero She needed. So She searched until She found him . . . and honed him fine. Tell me, why did you take up the sword? It’s no common in America.”
“What?” I had to think. Reading ‘King Arthur’ and ‘The Three Musketeers’, and Burroughs wonderful Mars stories–But every kid does that. “When we moved to Florida, I was a Scout. The Scoutmaster was a Frenchman, taught high school. He started some of us lads. I liked it, it was something I did well. Then in college–”
“Ever wonder why that immigrant got that job in that town? And volunteered for Scout work? Or why your college had a fencing team when many don’t? No matter, if you had gone elsewhere, there would have been fencing in a YMCA or something. Didn’t you have more combat than most of your category?”
“Hell, yes!”
“Could have been killed anytime, too–and She would have turned to another candidate already being honed. Son, I don’t know how you were selected, nor now you were converted from a young punk into the hero you potentially were. Not my job. Mine was simpler–just more dangerous–your groom and your ‘eyes-behind.’ Look around. Fancy quarters for a servant, eh?”
“Well, yes. I had almost forgotten that you were supposed to be my groom.”
” ‘Supposed,’ hell! I was. I went three times to Nevia as Her servant, training for it. Jocko doesn’t know to this day. If I went back, I would be welcome, I think. But only in the kitchen.”
“But why? That part seems silly.”
“Was it? When we snared you, your ego was in feeble shape, it had to be built up–and calling you ‘Boss’ and serving your meals while I stood and you sat, with Her, was part of it.” He gnawed a knuckle and looked annoyed. “I still think She witched your first two arrows. Someday I’d like a return match–with Her not around.”
“I may fool you. I’ve been practicing.”
“Well, forget it. We got the Egg, that’s the important thing. And here’s this bottle and that’s important, too.” He poured again. “Will that be all, ‘Boss’?”
“Damn you, Rufo! Yes, you sweet old scoundrel. You’ve straightened me out. Or conned me again, I don’t know which.”
“No con, Oscar, by the blood we’ve shed. I’ve told the truth as straight as I know it, though it hurt me. I didn’t want to, you’re my friend. Walking that rocky road with you I shall treasure all the days of my life.”
“Uh . . . yes. Me, too. All of it.”
“Then why are you frowning?”
“Rufo, I understand her now–as well as an ordinary person can–and respect her utterly . . . and love her more than ever. But I can’t be anybody’s fancy man. Not even here.”
“I’m glad I didn’t have to say that. Yes. She’s right She’s always right, damn Her! You must leave. For both of you. Oh, She wouldn’t be hurt too much but staying would ruin you, in time. Destroy you, if you’re stubborn.
“I had better get back–and toss my shoes.” I felt better, as if I had told the surgeon: Go ahead. Amputate.
“Don’t do that!”
“What?”
“Why should you? No need for anything final If a marriage is to last a long time–and yours might, even a very long time–then holidays should be long, too. And off the leash, son, with no date to report back and no promises. She knows that knights errant spend their nights erring, She expects it. It has always been so, un droit de la vocation–and necessary. They just don’t mention it in kiddies’ stories where you come from. So go see what’s stirring in your line of work elsewhere and don’t worry. Come back in four or forty years or something, you’ll be welcome. Heroes always sit at the first table, it s their right. And they come and go as they please, and that’s their right, too. On a smaller scale, you re something like Her.”
“High compliment!”
“On a ‘smaller scale,’ I said. Mmm, Oscar, part of your trouble is a need to go home. Your birthing land. To regain your perspective and find out who you are. All travelers feel this, I feel it myself from time to time. When the feeling comes, I pamper it.”
“I hadn’t realized I was homesick. Maybe I am.”
“Maybe She realized it. Maybe She nudged you. Myself, I make it a rule to give any wife of mine a vacation from me whenever her face looks too familiar–for mine must be even more so to her, looking as I do. Why not, lad? Going back to Earth isn’t the same as dying. I’m going there soon, that’s why I’m clearing up this paper work. Happens we might be there the same time . . . and get together for a drink or ten and some laughs and stories. And pinch the waitress and see what she says. Why not?”
Chapter 21
Okay, here I am.
I didn’t leave that week but soon. Star and I spent a tearful, glorious night before I left and she cried as she kissed me “Au ‘voir” (not “Good-bye”). But I knew her tears would dry once I was out of sight; she knew that I knew and I knew she preferred it so, and so did I. Even though I cried, too.
Pan American isn’t as slick as the commercial Gates; I was bunged through in three fast changes and o hocus-pocus. A girl said, “Places, please”–then whambo!
I came out on Earth, dressed in a London suit, pass-port and papers in pocket, the Lady Vivamus in a kit that did not look like a sword case, and in other pockets drafts exchangeable for much gold, for I found that I didn’t mind accepting a hero’s fee. I arrived near Zurich, I don’t know the address; the Gate service sees to that. Instead, I had ways to send messages.
Shortly those drafts became, numbered accounts in three Swiss banks, handled by a lawyer I had been told to see. I bought travelers checks several places and some I mailed ahead and some I carried, for I had no intention of paying Uncle Sugar 91 percent.
You lose track of time on a different day and calendar; there was a week or two left on that free ride home my orders called for. It seemed smart to take it–less conspicuous. So I did–an old four-engine transport, Prestwick to Gander to New York.
Streets looked dirtier, buildings not as tall–and headlines worse than ever. I quit reading newspapers, didn’t stay long; California I thought of as “home.” I phoned Mother; she was reproachful about my not having written and I promised to visit Alaska as soon as I could. How were they all? (I had in mind that my half brothers and sisters might need college help someday.)
They weren’t hurting. My stepfather was on flight orders and had made permanent grade. I asked her to forward any mail to my aunt.
California looked better than New York. But it wasn’t Nevia. Not even Center. It was more crowded than I remembered. All you can say for California towns is that they aren’t as bad as other places. I visited my aunt and uncle because they had been good to me and I was thinking of using some of that gold in Switzerland to buy him free from his first wife. But she had died and they were talking about a swimming pool.
So I kept quiet. I had been almost ruined by too much money, it had grown me up a bit. I followed the rule of Their Wisdoms: Leave well enough alone.
The campus felt smaller and the students looked so young. Reciprocal, I guess. I was coming out of the malt shop across from Administration when two Letter sweaters came in, shoving me aside. The second said, “Watch it, Dad!”
I let him live.
Football had been re-emphasized, new coach, new dressing rooms, stands painted, talk about a stadium. The coach knew who I was; he knew the records and was out to make a name. “You’re coming back, aren’t you?” I told him I didn’t think so.
“Nonsense!” he said. “Gotta get that old sheepskin! Silliest thing on earth to let your hitch in the Army stop you. Now look–” His voice dropped.
No nonsense about “sweeping the gym,” stuff the Conference didn’t like. But a boy could live with a family–and one could be found. If he paid his fees in cash, who cared? Quiet as an undertaker–“That leaves your GI benefits for pocket money.”
“I don’t have any.”
“Man, don’t you read the papers?” He had it on file: While I was gone, that unWar had been made eligible for GI benefits.
I promised to think it over.
But I had no such intention. I had indeed decided to finish my engineering degree, I like to finish things. But not there.
That evening I heard from Joan, the girl who had given me such a fine sendoff, then “Dear-Johnned” me. I intended to look her up, call on her and her husband; I just hadn’t found out her married name yet. But she ran across my aunt, shopping, and phoned me. “Easy!” she said and sounded delighted.
“Who–Wait a minute, Joan!”
I must come to dinner that very night. I told her “Fine,” and that I was looking forward to meeting the lucky galoot she had married.
Joan looked sweet as ever and gave me a hearty arms-around-my-neck smack, a welcome-home kiss, sisterly but good. Then I met the kids, one crib size and the other toddling.
Her husband was in L.A.
Her sister and brother-in-law stayed for one drink; Joan and her sister put the kids to bed while the brother-in-law sat with me and asked how things were in Europe he understood I was just back and then he told me how things were in Europe and what should be done about them. “You know, Mr. Jordan,” he told me, tapping my knee, “a man in the real estate business like I am gets to be a pretty shrewd judge of human nature has to be and while I haven’t actually been in Europe the way you have haven’t had time somebody has to stay home and pay taxes and keep an eye on things while you lucky young fellows are seeing the world but human nature is the same anywhere and if we dropped just one little bomb on Minsk or Pinsk or one of those places they would see the light right quick and we could stop all this diddling around that’s making it tough on the businessman. Don’t you agree?”
I said he had a point. They left and he said that he would ring me tomorrow and show me some choice lots that could be handled on almost nothing down and were certain to go way up what with a new missile plant coming in here soon. “Nice listening to your experiences, Mr. Jordan, real pleasant. Sometime I must tell you about something that happened to me in Tijuana but not with the wife around ha ha!”
Joan said to me, “I can’t see why she married him. Pour me another drink, hon, a double, I need it. I’m going to turn the oven down, dinner will keep.”
We both had a double and then another, and had dinner about eleven. Joan got tearful when I insisted on going home around three. She told me I was chicken and I agreed; she told me things could have been so different if I hadn’t insisted on going into the Army and I agreed again; she told me to go out the back way and not turn on any lights and she never wanted to see me again and Jim was going to Sausalito the seventeenth.
I caught a plane for Los Angeles next day.
Now look–I am not blaming Joan. I like Joan. I respect her and will always be grateful to her. She is a fine person. With superior early advantages–say in Nevia–she’d be a wow! She’s quite a gal, even so. Her house was clean, her babies were clean and healthy and well cared for. She’s generous and thoughtful and good-tempered.
Nor do I feel guilty. If a man has any regard for a girl’s feelings, there is one thing he cannot refuse: a return bout if she wants one. Nor will I pretend that I didn’t want it, too.
But I felt upset all the way to Los Angeles. Not over her husband, he wasn’t hurt. Not over Joanie, she was neither swept off her feet nor likely to suffer remorse. Joanie is a good kid and had made a good adjustment between her nature and an impossible society.
Still, I was upset.
A man must not criticize a woman’s most womanly quality. I must make it clear that little Joanie was just as sweet and just as generous as the younger Joanie who had sent me off to the Army feeling grand. The fault lay with me; I had changed.
My complaints are against the whole culture with no individual sharing more than a speck of blame. Let me quote that widely traveled culturologist and rake, Dr. Rufo:
“Oscar, when you get home, don’t expect too much of your feminine compatriots. You’re sure to be disappointed and the poor dears aren’t to blame. American women, having been conditioned out of their sex instincts, compensate by compulsive interest in rituals over the dead husk of sex . . . and each one is sure she knows ‘intuitively’ the right ritual for conjuring the corpse. She knows and nobody can tell her any different . . . especially a man unlucky enough to be in bed with her. So don’t try. You will either make her furious or crush her spirit. You’ll be attacking that most Sacred of Cows: the myth that women know all about sex, just from being women.”
Rufo had frowned. “The typical American female is sure that she has genius as a couturiere as an interior decorator, as a gourmet cook, and, always, as a courtesan. Usually she is wrong on four counts. But don’t try to tell her so.”
He had added, “Unless you can catch one not over twelve and segregate her, especially from her mother–and even that may be too late. But don’t misunderstand me; it evens out. The American male is convinced that he is a great warrior, a great statesman, and a great lover. Spot checks prove that he is as deluded as she is. Or worse. Historo-culturally speaking, there is strong evidence that the American male, rattier than the female, murdered sex in your country.”
“What can I do about it?”
“Slip over to France now and then. French women are almost as ignorant but not nearly as conceited and often are teachable.”
When my plane landed, I put the subject out of mind as I planned to be an anchorite a while. I learned in the Army that no sex is easier than a starvation allowance–and I had serious plans.
I had decided to be the square I naturally am, with hard work and a purpose in life. I could have used those Swiss bank accounts to be a playboy. But I had been a playboy, it wasn’t my style.
I had been on the biggest binge in history–one I wouldn’t believe if I didn’t have so much loot. Now was time to settle down and join Heroes Anonymous. Being a hero is okay. But a retired hero–first he’s a bore, then he’s a bum.
My first stop was Caltech. I could now afford the best and Caltech’s only rival is where they tried to outlaw sex entirely. I had seen enough of the dreary graveyard in 1942-45.
The Dean of Admissions was not encouraging. “Mr. Gordon, you know that we turn down more than we accept? Nor could we give you full credit on this transcript. No slur on your former school–and we do like to give ex-servicemen a break–but this school has higher standards. Another thing, you won’t find Pasadena a cheap place to live.”
I said I would be happy to take whatever standing I merited, and showed him my bank balance (one of them) and offered a check for a years fees. He wouldn’t take it but loosened up. I left with the impression that a place might be found for E. C. “Oscar” Gordon.
I went downtown and started the process to make me legally “Oscar” instead of “Evelyn Cyril.” Then I started job hunting.
I found one out in the Valley, as a junior draftsman in a division of a subsidiary of a corporation that made tires, food machinery, and other things–missiles in this case. This was part of the Gordon Rehabilitation Plan. A few months over the drafting board would get me into the swing again and I planned to study evenings and behave myself. I found a furnished apartment in Sawtelle and bought a used Ford for commuting.
I felt relaxed then; “Milord Hero” was buried. All that was left was the Lady Vivamus, hanging over the television. But I balanced her in hand first and got a thrill out of it. I decided to find a salle d’armes and join its club. I had seen an archery range in the Valley, too, and there ought to be someplace where American Rifle Association members fired on Sundays. No need to get flabby-
Meanwhile I would forget the loot in Switzerland. It was payable in gold, not funny money, and if I let it sit. It might be worth more–maybe much more–from inflation than from investing it. Someday it would be capital, when I opened my own firm.
That’s what I had my sights on: Boss. A wage slave, even in brackets where Uncle Sugar takes more than half, is still a slave. But I had learned from Her Wisdom that a boss must train; I could not buy “Boss” with gold.
So I settled down. My name change came through; Caltech conceded that I could look forward to moving to Pasadena–and mail caught up with me.
Mother sent it to my aunt, she forwarded it to the hotel address I had first given, eventually it reached my flat. Some were letters mailed in the States over a year ago, sent on to Southeast Asia, then Germany, then Alaska, then more changes before I read them in Sawtelle.
One offered that bargain on investment service again; this time I could Knock off 10 percent more. Another was from the coach at college–on plain stationery and signed in a scrawl. He said certain parties were determined to see the season start off with a bang. Would $250 per month change my mind? Phone his home number, collect. I tore it up.
The next was from the Veterans Administration, dated just after my discharge, telling me that as a result of Barton vs. United States, et al., it had been found that I was legally a “war orphan” and entitled to $110/month for schooling until age twenty-three.
I laughed so hard I hurt.
After some junk was one from a Congressman. He had the honor to inform me that, in cooperation with the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he had submitted a group of special bills to correct injustices resulting from failure to classic correctly persons who were “war orphans,” that the bills had passed under consent, and that he was happy to say that one affecting me allowed me to my twenty-seventh birthday to complete my education inasmuch as my twenty-third birthday had passed before the error was rectified. I am, sir, sincerely, etc.
I couldn’t laugh. I thought how much dirt I would have eaten, or–you name it–the summer I was conscripted if I had been sure of $110 a month. I wrote that Congressman a thank-you letter, the best I knew how.
The next item looked like junk. It was from Hospitals’ Trust, Ltd., therefore a pitch for a donation or a hospital insurance ad–but I couldn’t see why anyone in Dublin would have me on their list.
Hospitals’ Trust asked if I had Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstakes ticket number such-and-such, and its official receipt? This ticket had been sold to J. L. Weatherby, Esq. Its number had been drawn in the second unit drawing, and had been a ticket of the winning horse. J. L. Weatherby had been informed and had notified Hospitals’ Trust, Ltd., that he had disposed of ticket to E. C. Gordon, and, on receiving receipt, had mailed it to such party.
Was I the “E. C. Gordon,” did I have the ticket, did I have the receipt? H. T. Ltd. would appreciate an early reply.
The last item in the stack had an A.P.O. return address. In it was an Irish Sweepstakes receipt–and a note; ‘This should teach me not to play poker. Hope it wins you something–J. L. WEATHERBY.’ The cancellation was over a year old.
I stared at it, then got the papers I had carried through the Universes. I found the matching ticket. It was bloodstained but the number was clear.
I looked at the letter. Second unit drawing-
I started examining tickets under bright light. The others were counterfeit. But the engraving of this ticket and this receipt was sharp as paper money. I don’t know where Weatherby bought that ticket, but he did not buy it from the thief who sold me mine.
Second drawing–I hadn’t known there was more than one. But drawings depend on the number of tickets sold, in units of ￡120,000. I had seen the results of only the first.
Weatherby had mailed the receipt care of Mother, to Wiesbaden, and it must have been in Elmendorf when I was in Nice–then had gone to Nice, and back to Elmendorf because Rufo had left a forwarding address with American Express; Rufo had known all about me of course and had taken steps to cover my disappearance.
On that morning over a year earlier while I sat in a cafe in Nice, I held a winning ticket with the receipt in the mail. If I had looked farther in that Herald-Tribune than the “Personal” ads I would have found the results of the Second Unit drawing and never answered that ad.
I would have collected $140,000, never have seen Star a second time-
Or would Her Wisdom have been balked?
Would I have refused to follow my “Helen of Troy” simply because my pockets were lined with money?
I gave myself the benefit of doubt. I would have walked the Glory Road anyhow!
At least, I hoped so.
Next morning I phoned the plant, then went to a bank and through a routine I had gone through twice
in Nice.
Yes, it was a good ticket. Could the bank be of service in collecting it? I thanked them and left.
A little man from Internal Revenue was on my doorstep-
Almost–He buzzed from below while I was writing to Hospitals’ Trust, Ltd.
Presently I was telling him that I was damned if I would! I’d leave the money in Europe and they could whistle! He said mildly not to take that attitude, as I was just blowing off steam because the IRS didn’t like paying informers’ fees but would if my actions showed that I was trying to evade the tax.
They had me boxed. I collected $140,000 and paid $103,000 to Uncle Sugar. The mild little man pointed out that it was better that way; so often people put off paying and got into trouble.
Had I been in Europe, it would have been $140,000 in gold–but now it was $37,000 in paper–because free and sovereign Americans can’t have gold. They might start a war, or turn Communist, or something. No, I couldn’t leave the $37,000 in Europe as gold; that was illegal, too. They were very polite.
I mailed 10 percent, $3,700, to Sgt. Weatherby and told him the story. I took $33,000 and set up a college trust for my siblings, handled so that my folks wouldn’t know until it was needed. I crossed my fingers and hoped that news about this ticket would not reach Alaska. The L.A. papers never had it, but word got around somehow; I found myself on endless sucker lists, got letters offering golden opportunities begging loans, or demanding gifts.
It was a month before I realized I had forgotten the California State Income Tax. I never did sort out the red ink.
Chapter 22
I got back to the old drawing board, slugged away at books in the evening, watched a little television, weekends some fencing.
But I kept having this dream-
I had it first right after I took that job and now I was having it every night-
I’m heading along this long, long road and I round a curve and there’s a castle up ahead. It’s beautiful, pennants flying from turrets and a winding climb to its drawbridge. But I know, I just know, that there is a princess captive in its dungeon.
That part is always the same. Details vary. Lately the mild little man from Internal Revenue steps into the road and tells me that toll is paid here–10 percent more than whatever I’ve got.
Other times it’s a cop and he leans against my horse (sometimes it has four legs, sometimes eight) and writes a ticket for obstructing traffic, riding with out-of-date license, failing to observe stop sign, and gross insubordination. He wants to know if I have a permit to carry that lance? –and tells me that game laws require me to tag any dragons killed.
Other times I round that turn and a solid wave of freeway traffic, five lanes wide, is coming at me. That one is worst.
I started writing this after the dreams started. I couldn’t see going to a headshrinker and saying, “Look, Doc, I’m a hero by trade and my wife is Empress in another universe–” I had even less desire to lie on his couch and tell how my parents mistreated me as a child (they didn’t) and how I found out about little girls (that s my business).
I decided to talk it out to a typewriter.
It made me feel better but didn’t stop the dreams. But I learned a new word: “acculturated.” It’s what happens when a member of one culture shifts to another, with a sad period when he doesn’t fit. Those Indians you see in Arizona towns, not doing anything, looking in shop windows or just standing. Acculturation. They don’t fit.
I was taking a bus down to see my ear, nose, and throat doctor–Star promised me that her therapy plus that at Center would free me of the common cold–and it has; I don’t catch anything. But even therapists that administer Long-Life can’t protect human tissues against poison gas; L.A. smog was getting me. Eyes burning, nose stopped up–twice a week I went down to get horrid things done to my nose. I used to park my car and go down Wilshire by bus, as parking was impossible close in.
In the bus I overheard two ladies: “–much as I despise them, you can’t give a cocktail party without inviting the Sylvesters.”
It sounded like a foreign language. Then I played it back and understood the words.
But why did she have to invite the Sylvesters?
If she despised them, why didn’t she either ignore them, or drop a rock on their heads?
In God’s name, why give a “cocktail party”? People who don’t like each other particularly, standing around (never enough chairs), talking about things they aren’t interested in, drinking drinks they don’t want (why set a time to take a drink?) and getting high so that they won’t notice they aren’t having fun. Why?
I realized that acculturation had set in. I didn’t fit.
I avoided buses thereafter and picked up five traffic tickets and a smashed fender. I quit studying, too. Books didn’t seem to make sense. It warn’t the way I lamed it back in dear old Center.
But I stuck to my job as a draftsman. I always have been able to draw and soon I was promoted to major work.
One day the Chief Draftsman called me over. “Here, Gordon, this assembly you did–”
I was proud of that job. I had remembered something I had seen on Center and had designed it in, reducing moving parts and improving a clumsy design into one that made me feel good. It was tricky and I had added an extra view. “Well?”
He handed it back. “Do it over. Do it right.”
I explained the improvement and that I had done the drawing a better way to-
He cut me off. “We don’t want it done a better way, we want it done our way.”
“Your privilege,” I agreed and resigned by walking out.
My flat seemed strange at that time on a working day. I started to study ‘Strength of Materials’–and chucked the book aside. Then I stood and looked at the Lady Vivamus.
“Dum Vivimus, Vivamus!” Whistling, I buckled her on, drew blade, felt that thrill run up my arm.
I returned sword, got a few things, traveler’s checks and cash mostly, walked out. I wasn’t going anywhere, just tataway!
I had been striding along maybe twenty minutes when a prowl car pulled up and took me to the station.
Why was I wearing that thing? I explained that gentlemen wore swords.
If I would tell them what movie company I was with, a phone call could clear it up. Or was it television? The Department cooperated but liked to be notified.
Did I have a license for concealed weapons? I said it wasn’t concealed. They told me it was–by that scabbard. I mentioned the Constitution; I was told that the Constitution sure as hell didn’t mean walking around city streets with a toad sticker like that. A cop whispered to the sergeant, “Here’s what we got him on, Sarge. The blade is longer than–” I think it was three inches. There was trouble when they tried to take the Lady Vivamus away from me. Finally I was locked up, sword and all.
Two hours later my lawyer got it changed to “disorderly conduct” and I was released, with talk of a sanity hearing.
I paid him and thanked him and took a cab to the airport and a plane to San Francisco. At the port I bought a large bag, one that would take the Lady Vivamus cater-cornered.
Charlie said he agreed perfectly and his friends would like to hear it. So we went and I paid the driver to wait but took my suitcase inside.
Charlie’s friends didn’t want to hear my theories but the wine was welcome and I sat on the floor and listened to folk singing. The men wore beards and didn’t comb their hair. The beards helped, it made it easy to tell which were girls. One beard stood up and recited a poem. Old Jocko could do better blind drunk but I didn’t say so.
It wasn’t like a party in Nevia and certainly not in Center, except this: I got propositioned. I might have considered it if this girl hadn’t been wearing sandals. Her toes were dirty. I thought of Zhai-ee-van and her dainty, clean fur, and told her thanks, I was under a vow.
The beard who had recited the poem came over and stood in front of me. “Man, like what rumble you picked up that scar?” I said it had been in Southeast Asia. He looked at me scornfully. “Mercenary!”
“Well, not always,” I told him. “Sometimes I fight for free. Like right now.”
I tossed him against a wall and took my suitcase outside and went to the airport–and then Seattle and Anchorage, Alaska, and wound up at Elmendorf AFB, clean, sober, and with the Lady Vivamus disguised as fishing tackle.
Mother was glad to see me and the kids seemed pleased–I had bought presents between planes in Seattle–and my stepdaddy and I swapped yarns.
I did one important thing in Alaska; I flew to Point Barrow. There I found part of what I was looking for: no pressure, no sweat, not many people. You look out across the ice and know that only the North Pole is over that way, and a few Eskimos and fewer white people here. Eskimos are every bit as nice as they have been pictured. Their babies never cry, the adults never seem cross–only the dogs staked-out between the huts are bad-tempered.
But Eskimos are “civilized” now; the old ways are going. You can buy a choc malt at Barrow and airplanes fly daily in a sky that may hold missiles tomorrow.
But they still seal amongst the ice floes, the village is rich when they take a whale, half starved if they don’t. They don’t count time and they don’t seem to worry about anything–ask a man how old he is, he answers: “Oh, I’m quite of an age.” That’s how old Rufo is. Instead of good-bye, they say, “Sometime again!” No particular time and again well see you.
They let me dance with them. You must wear gloves (in their way they are as formal as the Doral) and you stomp and sing with the drums–and I found myself weeping. I don’t know why. It was a dance about a little old man who doesn’t have a wife and now he sees a seal-
I said, “Sometime again!”–went back to Anchorage and to Copenhagen. From 30,000 feet the North
Pole looks like prairie covered with snow, except black lines that are water. I never expected to see the North Pole.
From Copenhagen I went to Stockholm. Majatta was not with her parents but was only a square away. She cooked me that Swedish dinner, and her husband is a good Joe. From Stockholm I phoned a “Personal” ad to the Paris edition of the Herald-Tribune, then went to Paris.
I kept the ad in daily and sat across from the Two Maggots and stacked saucers and tried not to fret. I watched the ma’m’selles and thought about what I might do.
If a man wanted to settle down for forty years or so, wouldn’t Nevia be a nice place? Okay, It has dragons. It doesn’t have flies, nor mosquitoes, nor smog. Nor parking problems, nor freeway complexes that look like diagrams for abdominal surgery. Not a traffic light anywhere.
Muri would be glad to see me. I might marry her. And maybe little whatever-her-name was, her kid sister, too. Why not? Marriage customs aren’t everywhere those they use in Paducah. Star would be pleased; she would like being related to Jocko by marriage.
But I would go see Star first, or soon anyhow, and kick that pile of strange shoes aside. But I wouldn’t stay; it would be “sometime again” which would suit Star. It is a phrase, one of the few, that translates exactly into Centrist jargon–and means exactly the same.
“Sometime again,” because there are other maidens, or pleasing facsimiles, elsewhere, in need of rescuing. Somewhere. And a man must work at his trade, which wise wives know.
“I cannot rest from travel; I will drink life to the lees.” A long road, a trail, a “Tramp Royal,” with no certainty of what you’ll eat or where or if, nor where you’ll sleep, nor with whom. But somewhere is Helen of Troy and all her many sisters and there is still noble work to be done.
A man can stack a lot of saucers in a month and I began to fume instead of dream. Why the hell didn’t Rufo show up? I brought this account up to date from sheer nerves. Has Rufo gone back? Or is he dead?
Or was he “never born”? Am I a psycho discharge and what is in this case I carry with me wherever I go? A sword? I’m afraid to look, so I do–and now I’m afraid to ask. I met an old sergeant once, a thirty-year man, who was convinced that he owned all the diamond mines in Africa; he spent his evenings keeping books on them. Am I just as happily deluded? Are these francs what is left of my monthly disability check?
Does anyone ever get two chances? Is the Door in the Wall always gone when next you look? Where do you catch the boat for Brigadoon? Brother, it’s like the post office in Brooklyn: You can’t get there from here!
I’m going to give Rufo two more weeks-
I’ve heard from Rufo! A clipping of my ad was for warded to him but he had a little trouble. He wouldn’t say much by phone but I gather he was mixed up with a carnivorous Fraulein and got over the border almost sans calottes. But he’ll be here tonight. He is quite agreeable to a change in planets and universes and says he has something interesting in mind. A little risky perhaps, but not dull. I’m sure he’s right both ways. Rufo might steal your cigarettes and certainly your wench but things aren’t dull around him–and he would die defending your rear.
So tomorrow we are heading up that Glory Road, rocks and all!
Got any dragons you need killed?
End
Posts Regarding Life and Contentment
Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.
Posts about the Changes in America
America is going through a period of change. Change is good… that is, after it occurs. Often however, there are large periods of discomfort as the period of adjustment takes place. Here are some posts that discuss this issue.
More Posts about Life
I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.
Articles & Links
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
This is the full text of the Robert Heinlein novel titled “Time for the Stars”. It is a very difficult novel to come across and I feel truly fortunate that I was able to rediscover it.
Executive Summary
The story is classic Science Fiction fare. We are told of Tom and his brother Pat, identical twins, who are asked by the Long Range Foundation (a non-profit making organisation that funds projects for the long-term benefit of mankind) to attend some preliminary tests. The Foundation discovers that, much to the twin’s surprise, they engage in a form of telepathy between themselves.
The usefulness of the twins’ skill becomes apparent when we are told that twelve spaceships are to leave Earth in the hope of discovering new worlds to colonise and so reduce the strain on resources on Earth. Time and distance do not seem to affect telepathic links, which means that messages between twins can be sent instantaneously to each other and faster than a radio message on a spaceship travelling at light-speed.
Consequently Tom and Pat are chosen to act as one telepathic pair, with the eldest, Pat, travelling on the spaceship whilst our narrator, Tom, is to remain on Earth to receive the transmitted messages.
Tom is
consumed by jealousy when the twins are accepted to act as long distance
communicators across space. However, a skiing accident in training
means that, in a bizarre twist of fate, Pat is paralysed and has to stay
on Earth while Tom travels on the Lewis & Clark torchship.
Through
space, as Tom travels towards Tau Ceti and closer to the speed of
light, the time dilation effects become greater and Pat ages much faster
than Tom. The latter part of the book is about how the two of them deal
with some of the dangerous challenges that Tom faces on the frontier of
space.
Time for the Stars book cover artwork by Robert Heinlein.
Time for the Stars
I THE LONG RANGE FOUNDATION
According to their biographies, Destiny’s favored children usually had their lives planned out from scratch. Napoleon was figuring on how to rule France when he was a barefoot boy in Corsica, Alexander the Great much the same, and Einstein was muttering equations in his cradle.
Maybe so. Me, I just muddled along.
In an old book that belonged to my great grandfather Lucas I once saw a cartoon of a man in evening
clothes, going over a ski jump. With an expression of shocked unbelief he is saying: “How did I get up here?”
I know how he felt. How did I get way up here?
I was not even planned on. The untaxed quota for our family was three children, then my brother Pat and I came along in one giant economy package. We were a surprise to everyone, especially to my
parents, my three sisters, and the tax adjusters. I don’t recall being surprised myself but my earliest recollection is a vague feeling of not being quite welcome, even though
Dad and Mum, and Faith, Hope, and Charity treated us okay.
Maybe Dad did not handle the emergency right. Many families get an extra child quota on an exchange basis with another family, or something, especially when the tax-free limit has already been filled with all boys or all girls. But Dad was stubborn, maintaining that the law was unconstitutional, unjust, discriminatory, against public morals, and contrary to the will of God. He could reel off a list of important people who were youngest children of large families, from Benjamin Franklin to the first governor Of Pluto, then he would demand to know where the human race would have been without them?-after which Mother would speak soothingly.
Dad was probably accurate as he was a student of almost everything, even his trade, which was
micromechanics-but especially of history. He wanted to name us for his two heroes in American history, whereas Mother wanted to name us for her favorite artists: This is how I ended up as Thomas Paine Leonardo da Vinci Bartlett and my twin became Patrick Henry Michelangelo Bartlett. Dad called
us Tom and Pat and Mother called us Leo and Michel and our sisters called us Useless and Double- Useless. Dad won by being stubborn.
Dad was stubborn.
He could have paid the annual head tax on us supernumeraries, applied for a seven- person flat, and relaxed to the inevitable. Then he could have asked for reclassification. Instead be claimed exemption for us twins each year, always ended by paying our head tax with his check stamped “Paid under Protest!” and we seven lived in a five-person flat. When Pat and I were little we slept in homemade cribs in the bathroom which could not have been convenient for anybody, then when we were bigger we slept on the living-room couch, which was inconvenient for everybody,
especially our sisters, who found
it cramping to their social life.
Dad could have solved all this by putting in for family emigration to Mars or Venus, or the Jovian
moons, and he used to bring up the subject. But this was the one thing that would make Mum more stubborn
than he was. I don’t know which part of making the High Jump scared her, because she would just settle her mouth and not answer. Dad would point out that big families got preferred treatment for emigration and that the head tax was earmarked to subsidize colonies off Earth and why shouldn’t we benefit by the money we were being robbed of? To say nothing of letting our children grow up with freedom and elbow room, out where there wasn’t a bureaucrat standing behind every productive worker dreaming up more rules and restrictions? Answer me that?
Mother never answered and we never emigrated,
We were always short of money. Two extra mouths, extra taxes, and no family assistance for the two
extras make the stabilized family income law as poor a fit as the clothes Mum cut down for us from Dad’s old ones. It was darn’ seldom that we could afford to dial for dinner like other people and Dad
even used to bring home any of his lunch that he didn’t eat. Mum went back to work as soon as we twins were in kindergarten, but the only household robot we had was an obsolete model “Morris
Garage” Mother’s Helper which was always burning out valves and took almost as long to program as the job would have taken. Pat and I got acquainted with dish water and detergents-at least I did; Pat usually insisted on doing the sterilizing or had a sore thumb or something.
Dad used to talk about the intangible benefits of being poor-learning to stand on your own feet,
building character, and all that. By the time I was old enough to understand I was old enough to wish
they weren’t so intangible, but, thinking back, maybe he had a point. We did have fun. Pat and I raised hamsters in the service unit and Mum never objected. When we turned the bath into a chem lab the girls did make unfriendly comments but when Dad put his foot down, they sweet-talked him into picking it up again and after that they hung their laundry somewhere else, and later Mum stood between us and the house manager
when we poured acid down the drain and did the plumbing no good.
The only time I can remember when Mum put her foot down was when her brother, Uncle Steve, came back from Mars and gave us some canal worms which we planned to raise and sell at a profit. But when Dad stepped on one in the shower (we had not discussed our plans with him) she made us give them to the zoo, except the one Dad had stepped on, which was useless. Shortly after that we ran away from home to join the High Marines-Uncle Steve was a ballistics sergeant-and when lying about our age did not work and they fetched us back, Mum not only did not scold us but had fed our snakes and our
silkworms while we were gone.
Oh, I guess we were happy. It is hard to tell at the time. Pat and I were very close and did everything
together but I want to get one thing straight: being a twin is not the Damon-and-Pythias dream that throb writers would have you think. It makes you close to another
person to be born with him, share a room with him, eat with him, play with him, work with him, and hardly ever do anything without him as far back as you can remember, and farther according to witnesses. It makes you close; it makes you almost indispensable to each other-but it does not necessarily make you love him.
I want to get this straight because there has been a lot of nonsense talked about it since twins got to be suddenly important. I’m me; I’m not my brother Pat. I could always tell us apart, even if other people couldn’t. He is the right-handed one; I’m the left-handed one. And from my point of view I’m the one who almost always got the small piece of cake.
I can remember times when he got both pieces through a fast shuffle. I’m not speaking in general; I’m thinking of a certain white cake with chocolate icing and how he confused things so that he got my piece, too, Mum and Dad thinking he was both of us, despite my protests. Dessert can be the high point of the day when you are eight, which was what we were then.
I am not complaining about these things … even though
I feel a dull lump of anger even now, after all the years and miles, at the recollection of being punished because Dad and Mum thought I was the one who was trying to wangle two desserts. But I’m just trying to tell the truth. Doctor Devereaux said to write it all down and where I have to start is how it feels to be a twin. You aren’t a twin, are you? Maybe you are but the chances are forty-four to one that you aren’t-not even a fraternal, whereas Pat and I are identicals which is four times as unlikely.
They say that one twin is always retarded-I don’t think so. Pat and I were always as near alike as two
shoes of a pair. The few times we showed any difference I was a quarter inch taller or a pound heavier,
then we would even out. We got equally good marks in school; we cut our teeth together. What he did
have was more grab than I had, something the psychologists call “pecking order.” But it was so subtle you could not define it and other people could not see it. So far as I know, it started from nothing and
grew into .a pattern that neither of us could break even if we wanted to.
Maybe if the nurse had picked me up first when we were born I would have been the one who got the bigger piece of cake. Or maybe she did-I don’t know how it started.
But don’t think that being a twin is all bad even if
you are on the short
end; it is mostly good. You go
into a crowd of strangers and you are scared and shy-and there is your twin a couple of feet away and
you
aren’t alone any more. Or somebody punches you in the mouth and while you are groggy your
twin has punched him and the fight goes your way. You flunk a quiz and your twin has flunked just as badly and you aren’t alone.
But do not think that being twins is like having a very close and loyal friend. It isn’t like that at all and it is a great deal closer.
Pat and I had our first contact with the Long Range Foundation when this
Mr.
Geeking showed up at our home. I did not warm to him. Dad didn’t like him either
and
wanted to hustle him out, but he was
already seated with coffee at his elbow for Mother’s notions of hospitality were firm.
So this Geeking item was allowed to state his business. He was, he said, a field representative of
“Genetics Investigations.”
“What’s that?” Dad said sharply.
‘Genetics Investigations’
is a scientific agency, Mr. Bartlett. This present project is one of gathering data concerning twins. It is in the public interest and we hope that you will cooperate.”
Dad took a deep breath and hauled out the imaginary soapbox he always had ready. “More government meddling! I’m a decent citizen; I pay my bills and support
my family. My boys are just like other boys and I’m sick and tired of the government’s attitude about them. I’m not going to have them poked and prodded and investigated to satisfy some bureaucrat. All we ask is to be left alone-and
that the government admit the obvious fact that my boys have as much right to breathe air and occupy space as anyone else!”
Dad wasn’t stupid; it was just that he had a reaction pattern where Pat and I were concerned as
automatic as the snarl of a dog who has been kicked too often. Mr. Geeking tried to soothe him but Dad
can’t be interrupted when he has started that tape. “You tell the Department of Population Control that I’m not having their ‘genetics investigations.’ What do they want to find out? How to keep people from having twins, probably. What’s wrong with twins? Where would Rome have been without
Romulus
and Remus?-answer me that! Mister, do you know how many-”
“Please, Mr. Bartlett, I’m not from the government.” “Eh? Well, why didn’t you say so? Who are you from?”
“Genetics Investigations is an agency of the Long Range Foundation.”
I felt Pat’s sudden interest.
Everybody has heard of the Long Range Foundation, but it happened that Pat and I had just done a term paper on non-profit corporations and had used the Long Range Foundation as a type example.
We got interested in the purposes of the Long Range Foundation. Its coat of arms reads: “Bread Cast Upon the Waters,”
and its charter is headed: “Dedicated to the Welfare of Our Descendants.” The charter goes on with a lot of lawyers’ fog but the way the directors have interpreted it has been to spend money only on things that no government and no other corporation would touch. It wasn’t enough for a proposed project to be interesting to science or socially desirable; it also had to be so horribly
expensive that no one else would touch it and the prospective results had to lie so far in the future that it could not be justified to taxpayers or shareholders. To make the LRF directors light up with enthusiasm you had to suggest something that cost a billion or more and probably wouldn’t show results for ten generations, if ever … something like how to control the weather (they’re working on
that) or where does your lap go when you stand up.
The funny thing is that bread cast upon waters does come back seven hundred fold; the most preposterous projects made the LRF embarrassing amounts of money-”embarrassing” to a non-profit corporation that is. Take space travel: it seemed tailor-made, back a couple of hundred years ago, for
LRF, since it was fantastically expensive and offered no probable results comparable with the investment: There was a time when governments did some work on it for military reasons,
but the Concord of Bayreuth in 1980 put a stop even to that.
So the Long Range Foundation stepped in and happily began wasting money. It came at a time when
the
corporation unfortunately had made a few billions on the Thompson mass-converter when they had
expected to spend at least a century on pure research; since they could not declare
a dividend (no stockholders), they had to get rid of the money somehow and space travel looked like a rat hole to pour it down.
Even the kids know what happened to that: Ortega’s torch made space travel inside the solar system cheap, fast, and easy, and the one-way energy screen made colonization practical and profitable; the LRF could not unload fast enough to keep from making lots more money.
I did not think all this that evening; LRF was just something that Pat and I happened to know more about than most high school seniors … more than Dad knew, apparently, for he snorted and answered, “The Long Range Foundation,
eh? I’d almost rather you were from the government. If boondoggles
like that were properly taxed, the government wouldn’t be squeezing head taxes out of its citizens.”
This was not a fair statement, not a “flat-curve relationship,” as they call it in Beginning Mathematical Empiricism. Mr. McKeefe had told us to estimate the influence, if any, of LRF on the technology “yeast-form” growth curve; either I should have flunked the course
or LRF had kept the curve from leveling off early in the 21st century-I mean to say, the “cultural inheritance,” the accumulation of
knowledge and wealth that keeps us from being savages, had increased greatly as a result of the tax- free status of such non-profit research corporations.
I didn’t dream up that opinion; there are figures to
prove it. What would have happened if the tribal elders had forced Ugh to hunt with the rest of the tribe instead of staying home and whittling out the first wheel while the idea was bright in his mind?
Mr. Geeking answered, “I can’t debate the merits of such matters, Mr. Bartlett. I’m merely an employee.
“And I’m paying your salary, indirectly and unwillingly, but paying it nevertheless.”
I wanted to get into the argument but I could feel Pat holding back. It did not matter; Mr. Geeking
shrugged and said, “If so, I thank you. But all I came here for was to ask your
twin boys to take a few tests and answer some questions. The tests are harmless and the results will be kept confidential.”
“What are you trying to find out?”
I think Mr. Geeking was telling the truth when he answered, “I don’t know. I’m merely a field agent; I’m not in charge of the project.”
Pat cut in. “I don’t see why not, Dad. Do you have the tests in your briefcase, Mr. Geeking?” “Now, Patrick-”
“It’s all right, Dad. Let’s see the tests, Mr. Geeking.”
“Uh, that’s not what we had in mind. The Project has set up local offices in the TransLunar Building.
The
tests take about half a day.”
“All the way downtown, huh, and a half day’s ‘time … what do you pay?” “Eh? The subjects are asked to contribute their time in the interests of science.”
Pat shook his head. “Sorry, Mr. Geeking. This is exam week … and my brother
and
I have part-time school jobs, too.”
I kept quiet. Our exams were over, except Analysis of History, which is a snap course involving no
math but statistics and pseudospatial calculus, and the school chem lab we worked in was closed for
examinations.
I was sure Dad did not know these things, or he would have butted in; Dad can shift from prejudice to being a Roman judge at the drop of a hint.
Pat stood up, so I stood up. Mr. Geeking sat tight. “Arrangements can be made,” he said evenly.
Pat stuck him as much as we made for a month of washing bottles in the lab, just for one afternoon’s
work-then upped the ante when it was made clear that we would be obliged to take the tests together
(as
if we would have done it any other way!). Mr. Geeking paid without a quiver, in cash,
in advance.
II
THE NATURAL LOGARITHM OF TWO
I never in my life saw so many twins as were waiting on the fortieth floor of the TransLunar Building
the
following Wednesday afternoon. I don’t like to be around
twins, they make me think I’m seeing double. Don’t tell me I’m inconsistent; I never saw the twins I am part of-I just saw Pat.
Pat felt the same way; we had never been chummy with other twins. He looked around and whistled.
“Tom, did you over see such a mess of spare parts?”
“Never.”
“If I were in charge, I’d shoot half of them.” He hadn’t spoken loud enough to offend anyone; Pat and
I used a prison-yard whisper that no one else could hear although we never had trouble understanding it. “Depressing, isn’t it?”
Then he whistled softly and I looked where he was looking. Twins of course, but this was a case of when once is good,
twice is better. They were red-headed sisters, younger than we were but not too young-sixteen, maybe-and cute as Persian kittens.
Those sisters had the effect on us that a light has on a moth. Pat whispered, “Tom, we owe it to them to
grant them a little of our time,” and headed toward them, with me in step. They were dressed in fake Scottish outfits, green plaid which made their hair flame like bonfires and to us they looked as pretty as a new fall of snow.
And just as chilly. Pat got halfway through
his opening speech when he trailed off and shut up; they were staring through him. I was blushing and the only thing that kept it from being a major
embarrassing incident was a loudspeaker that commenced to bray:
“Attention, please! You are requested to report to the door marked with your surname initial.” So we went to door A- to-D and the red-headed sisters headed toward the other end of the alphabet without ever having seen us at all. As we queued up Pat muttered, “Is there egg on my chin? Or have they taken
a vow to be old maids?”
“Probably both,” I answered. “Anyhow, I prefer blondes.” This was true, since Maudie was a blonde.
Pat
and I had been dating Maudie Kauric for about a year-going steady you could call it, though in my
case it usually meant that I was stuck with Maudie’s chum Hedda Staley, whose notion of dazzling conversation was to ask me if I didn’t think Maudie was the cutest thing ever? Since this was true and
unanswerable, our talk did not sparkle.
“Well, so do I,” Pat agreed, without saying which blonde-Maudie was the only subject on which we were reticent with each other. “But I have never had a closed mind.”
He shrugged and added cheerfully,
“Anyhow, there are other possibilities.”
There certainly were, for of the hundreds of twins present maybe a third were near enough our age not to be out of the question and half of them, as near as I could tell without counting, were of the sex that turns a mere crowd into a social event. However, none came up to the high standards of the redheads, so
I began looking over the crowd as a whole.
The oldest pair I saw, two grown men, seemed to be not older than the early thirties and I saw one set of little girls about twelve-they had their mother in tow. But most of them were within a loud shout of
twenty. I had concluded that “Genetics Investigations” was picking its samples by age groups when I found
that we were at the head of the line and a clerk was saying, “Names, please?”
For the next two hours we were passed from one data collector to another, being fingerprinted, giving
blood samples, checking “yes” or “no” to hundreds of silly questions that can’t be answered “yes” or “no.” The physical examination was thorough and involved the usual carefully planned nonsense of keeping a person standing in bare feet on a cold floor in a room five degrees too chilly for naked human
skin while prodding the victim and asking him rude personal questions.
I was thoroughly bored and was not even amused when Pat whispered that we should strip the clothes off the doctor now and prod him in the belly and get the nurse
to record how he liked it? My only
pleasant thought was that Pat had stuck them plenty for their fun. Then they let us get dressed and
ushered us into a room where a rather pretty woman sat behind a desk. She had a transparency viewer
on her desk and was looking at two personality profiles superimposed on it. They almost matched and I tried to sneak a look to see where they did not. But I could not tell Pat’s from my own and anyhow
I’m not a mathematical psychologist.
She smiled and said, “Sit down, boys. I’m Doctor Arnault.” She held up the profiles and a bunch of punched cards and added, “Perfect mirror twins, even to dextrocardia. This should be interesting.”
Pat tried to look at the papers.
“What’s our I.Q. this time, Doctor?”
“Never mind.” She put the papers down and covered them, then picked up a deck of cards. “Have you
ever used these?”
Of course we had, for they were the
classic Rhine test cards, wiggles and stars and so forth. Every high school psychology class has a set and a high score almost always means that some bright boy has figure out a way to cold-deck the teacher. In fact Pat had worked out a simple way to cheat when our teacher,
with a tired lack of anger, split us up and made us run tests only with other people-whereupon our scores dropped to the limits of standard error. So I was already certain that Pat and I weren’t ESP freaks
and
the Rhine cards were just another boring test.
But I could feel Pat become attentive. “Keep your ears open, kid,” I heard him whisper, “and we’ll make this interesting.” Dr. Arnault did not hear him, of course.
I wasn’t sure we ought to but I knew if he could manage to signal to me I would not be able to refrain
from
fudging the results. But I need not have worried; Dr. Arnault took Pat out and returned without him. She was hooked by microphone
to the other test room but there was no chance to whisper through
it; it was hot only when she switched it on.
She started right in. “First test run in twenty seconds, Mabel,” she said into the mike and switched it off, then turned to me. “Look at the cards as I turn them,” she said.
“Don’t try, don’t strain. Just look at them.”
So I looked at the cards. This went on with variations for maybe an hour. Sometimes
I was supposed to
be receiving, sometimes sending. As far as I was concerned nothing happened, for they never told us our
scores.
Finally Dr. Arnault looked at a score sheet and said, “Tom, I want to give you a mild injection. It won’t hurt you and it’ll wear off before you go home. Okay?”
“What sort?” I said suspiciously.
“Don’t fret; it is harmless. I don’t want to tell you or you might unconsciously show the reaction you expected.”
“Uh, what does my brother say? Does he get one, too?” “Never mind, please. I’m asking you.”
I still hesitated. Dad did not favor injections and such unless necessary; he had made a fuss over our
taking part in the encephalitis program. “Are you an M.D.?” I asked. “No, my degree is in science. Why?”
“Then how do you know it’s harmless?”
She bit her lip, then answered, “I’11 send for a doctor of medicine, if you prefer.”
“Uh, no, I guess that won’t be necessary.” I was remembering something that Dad had said about the sleeping sickness shots and I added, “Does the Long Range Foundation carry liability insurance for
this?”
“What? Why, I think so. Yes, I’m sure they do.” She looked at me and added, “Tom, how does a boy your age get to be so suspicions?”
“Huh? Why ask me? You’re the psychologist, ma’am. Anyhow,” I added, “if you had sat on as many tacks as I have, you’d be suspicions too.”
“Mmm … never mind. I’ve been studying for years and I still don’t know what the younger generation is coming to. Well, are you going to take the injection?”
“Uh, I’ll take it-since the LRF carries insurance. Just write out what it is you are giving me and sign it.”
She got two bright pink spots in her cheeks. But she took out stationery, wrote on it, folded it into an envelope and sealed it. “Put it in your pocket,” she said briskly. “Don’t look at it until the experiments are over. Now bare your left forearm.”
As she gave me the shot she said sweetly, “This is going to sting a little…I hope.” It did.
She turned out all the lights except the light in the transparency viewer. “Are you comfortable?” “Sure.”
“I’m sorry if I seemed vexed. I want you to relax and be comfortable.” She came over and did
something to the chair I was in; it opened out gently until I was practically lying in a hammock. “Relax and don’t fight it. If you find yourself getting sleepy, that is to be expected.” She sat down and all I
could see was her face, illuminated by the viewer. She was awfully pretty, I decided, even though she was too old for it to matter … at least thirty, maybe older. And she was nice, too. She spoke
for a few minutes in her gentle voice but I don’t remember exactly what she said.
I must have gone to sleep, for next it was pitch dark and Pat was right there by me, although I hadn’t noticed the light go out nor the door being opened. I started to speak when I heard him whisper:
“Tom, did you ever see such nonsensical rigamarole?”
I whispered back, “Reminds me of the time we were initiated into the Congo Cannibals.” “Keep your voice down; they’ll catch on.”
“You’re the one who is talking too loud: Anyhow, who cares? Let’s give ‘em the Cannibal war whoop and scare ‘em out of their shoes.”
“Later, later. Right now my girl friend Mabel wants me to give you a string of numbers. So we’ll let them have their fun first. After all, they’re paying for it.”
“Okay.”
“Point six nine three one.”
“That’s the natural logarithm of two.”
“What did you think it was? Mabel’s telephone number? Shut up and listen. Just repeat the numbers back. Three point one four one five nine…”
It went on quite a while. Some were familiar numbers like the first two; the rest may have been random or even Mabel’s phone number, for all of me. I got bored and was beginning to think about sticking in a war whoop on my own when Dr. Arnault said
quietly, “End of test run. Both of you please keep quiet and relax for a few minutes. Mabel, I’ll meet you in the data comparison room.” I heard her go out, so I dropped the war whoop notion and relaxed. Repeating all those numbers in the dark had
made me dopey anyhow-and as Uncle Steve says, when you get a chance to rest, do so; you may not get another chance soon.
Presently I heard the door open again, then I was blinking at bright lights. Dr. Arnault said, “That’s all today, Tom … and thank you very much. We want to see you and your brother at the same time tomorrow.”
I blinked again and looked around.
“Where’s Pat? What does he say?”
“You’ll find him in the outer lobby. He told me that you could come tomorrow. You can, can’t you?” “Uh, I suppose
so, if it’s
all
right with him.” I was feeling sheepish about the trick we had pulled, so I
added, “Dr. Arnault? I’m sorry I annoyed you.”
She patted my hand and smiled. “That’s all right, You were right to be cautious and you were a good subject. You should see the wild ones we sometimes draw. See you tomorrow.”
Pat was waiting in the big room where we had seen the redheads. He fell into step and we headed for the drop.
“I raised the fee for tomorrow,” he whispered smugly.
“You did? Pat, do you think we should do this? I mean, fun is fun, but if
they ever twig that we are faking, they’ll be sore. They might even make us pay back what they’ve already paid us.”
“How can they? We’ve been paid to show up and take tests. We’ve done that. It’s up to them to rig tests that can’t be beaten. I could, if I were doing it.”
“Pat, you’re dishonest and crooked, both.” I thought
about Dr. Arnault… she was a nice lady. “I think I’ll stay home tomorrow.”
I said this just as Pat stepped off the drop. He was ten feet below me all the way down and had forty stories in which to consider his answer. As I landed beside him he answered by changing the subject. “They gave you a hypodermic?”
“Yes.”
“Did you think to make them sign an admission of liability, or did you goof?”
“Well, sort of.” I felt in my pocket for the envelope; I’d forgotten about it. “I made Dr. Arnault write down what she was giving us.”
Pat reached for the envelope. “My apologies, maestro. With my brains and your luck we’ve got them where we want them.” He started to open the envelope. “I bet it was neopentothal-or one of the barbiturates.”
I snatched it back. “That’s mine.”
“Well, open it,” he answered, “and don’t obstruct traffic. I want to see what dream drug they gave us.” We had come out into the pedestrian level and his advice did have merit. Before opening it I led us
across the change strips onto the fast-west strip and stepped behind a windbreak. As I unfolded the paper Pat read over my shoulder:
“‘Long Range Fumbling, and so forth-injections given to subjects 7L435 & -6 T. P. Bartlett & P. H.
Bartlett (iden-twins)-each one-tenth c.c. distilled water raised to normal salinity,’ signed ‘Doris Arnault, Sc.D., for the Foundation.’ Tom, we’ve been hoaxed!”
I stared at it, trying to fit what I had experienced with what the paper said. Pat added hopefully, “Or is this the hoax? Were we injected with something else and they didn’t want to admit it?”
“No,” I said slowly. I was sure Dr. Arnault wouldn’t write down “water” and actually give us one of
the
sleeping drugs-she wasn’t that sort of person.
“Pat, we weren’t drugged…we were hypnotized.”
He shook his head. “Impossible. Granting that I could be hypnotized, you couldn’t be. Nothing there to hypnotize. And I wasn’t hypnotized, comrade. No spinning lights, no passes with the hands-why, my
girl Mabel didn’t even stare in my eyes. She just gave me the shot and told me to take it easy and let it take effect.”
“Don’t be juvenile, Pat. Spinning lights and such is for suckers. I don’t care whether you call it hypnotism or salesmanship. They gave us hypos and suggested that we would be sleepy-so we fell asleep.”
“So I was sleepy! Anyhow that wasn’t quite what Mabel did. She told me not to
go to sleep, or if I did,
to
wake up when she called me. Then when they brought
you in, she-”
“Wait a minute. You mean when they moved you back into the room I was in-”
“No, I don’t mean anything of the sort. After they brought
you in, Mabel gave me this list of numbers
and
I read them to you and-”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Pat, you’re mixed up. How could you read them in pitch darkness? She must have read them to you. I mean-” I stopped, for I was getting mixed up myself. Well, she could have read to him from another room. “Were you wearing headphones?”
“What’s that got to do with it? Anyhow, it wasn’t pitch dark, not after
they brought
you in. She held up
the
numbers on a board that was rigged with a light of its own, enough to let me see the numbers and
her
hands.”
“Pat, I wish you wouldn’t keep repeating nonsense. Hypnotized or not, I was never so dopey that I
couldn’t notice anything that happened. I was never moved anywhere; they probably wheeled you in without disturbing you. And the room we were in was pitch dark, not a glimmer.”
Pat did not answer right away, which wasn’t like him. At last he said, “Tom, are you sure?” “Sure I’m sure!”
He sighed. “I hate to say this, because
I know what you will say. But
what are you supposed to do
when none of your theories fits?”
“Huh? Is this a quiz? You throw ‘em away and try a new one. Basic methodology, freshman year.” “Okay, just slip this on for size, don’t mind the pattern: Tom, my boy, brace yourself-we’re mind
readers.”
I tried it and did not like
it. “Pat, just because you can’t explain everything is no reason to talk like the fat old women who go to fortune tellers. We’re muddled, I admit, whether it was drugs or hypnosis. But we couldn’t have been reading each other’s minds or we would have been doing it years ago. We would
have noticed.”
“Not necessarily. There’s never anything much going on in your mind, so why should I notice?” “But it stands to reason-”
“What’s the natural log of two?”
“‘Point six nine three one’ is what you said, though I’ve got very little use for four-place tables. What’s that got to do with it?”
“I used four-place because she gave it to me that way. Do you remember what she said just before I gave you that number?”
“Huh? Who?”
“Mabel. Dr. Mabel Lichtenstein. What did she say?” “Nobody said anything.”
“Tom, my senile symbiote, she told me what to do, to wit, read the numbers
to
you. She told me this in
a clear, penetrating soprano. You didn’t hear her?”
“No.”
“Then you weren’t in the same room. You weren’t within earshot, even though I was prepared to swear
that they had shoved you in right by me. I knew you were there. But you weren’t. So it was telepathy.”
I was confused. I didn’t feel telepathic; I merely felt hungry.
“Me, too, on both counts,” Pat agreed. “So let’s stop at Berkeley Station end get a sandwich.”
I followed him off the strips, feeling not quite as hungry and even more confused. Pat had answered a remark I had not made.
II
PROJECT LEBENSRAUM
Even though I was told to take my time and tell everything, it can’t be done. I haven’t had time to add
to
this for days, but even if I didn’t have to work I still could not “tell all,” because it takes more than a day to write down what happens
in
one day. The harder you try the farther behind you get. So I’m going to quit trying and just hit the high spots.
Anyhow everybody knows the general outline of Project Lebensraum.
We did not say anything to Mum and Dad about that first day. You can’t expose parents to that sort of thing; they get jittery and start issuing edicts. We just told them the tests would run a second day and
that nobody had told us what the results were.
Dr. Arnault seemed unsurprised when we told her we knew the score, even when I blurted out that we thought we had been faking but apparently weren’t. She just nodded and said that it had been necessary to encourage us to think that everything was commonplace, even if there had to be a little fibbing on
both sides. “I had the advantage of having your personality analyses to guide me,” she added.
“Sometimes in psychology you have to go roundabout to arrive at the truth.
“We’ll try a more direct way today,” she went on. “We’ll put you two back to back but close enough together that you unquestionably can hear
each other. But I am going to use a sound screen to cut you
off
partly or completely from time to time without your knowing it.”
It was a lot harder the second time. Naturally we tried and naturally we flubbed. But Dr. Arnault was patient and so was Dr. Lichtenstein-Pat’s “Dr. Mabel.” She preferred to be called Dr. Mabel; she was
short and pudgy and younger than Dr. Arnault and about as cute as a female can be and still look like a sofa pillow. It wasn’t until later that we found out she was boss of the research team and world famous. “Giggly little fat girl” was an act she used to put ordinary people, meaning Pat and myself, at their ease.
I guess this proves you should ignore
the package and read the fine print.
So she giggled and Dr. Arnault looked serious and we could not tell whether we were reading minds or
not. I could hear Tom’s whispers-they told us to go ahead and whisper-and he could hear mine and sometimes they would fade. I was sure we weren’t getting anything, not telepathy I mean, for it was just the way Pat and I used to whisper answers back and forth in school without getting caught.
Finally Dr. Mabel giggled sheepishly and said, “I guess that’s
enough for today. Don’t you think so, Doctor?”
Dr. Arnault agreed and Pat and I sat up and faced each other. I said, “I suppose
yesterday was a fluke. I guess we disappointed you.”
Dr. Mabel looked like a startled kitten. Dr. Arnault answered soberly, “I don’t know what you
expected, Tom, but for the past hour you and your brother have been cut off from hearing each other during every test run.”
“But I did hear him.”
“You certainly did. But not with your ears. We’ve been recording each side of the sound barrier. Perhaps we should play back part of it.”
Dr. Mabel giggled. “That’s a good idea.” So they did. It started out with all four voices while they told us what they wanted, then there were just my whispers and Pat’s, reading lines back and forth from The Comedy of Errors. They must have had parabolic mikes focused on us for our whispers sounded like a windstorm.
Pat’s whispers gradually faded out. But mine kept right on going…answering a dead silence.
We signed a research contract with the Foundation and Dad countersigned it, after an argument. He thought mind-reading was folderol and we did not dispute him, since the clincher was that money was
scarce as always and it was a better-paying job than any summer
job
we could get, fat enough to insure that we could start college even if our scholarships didn’t come through.
But before the summer was over they let us in on the connection between “Genetics Investigations” and “Project Lebensraum.” That was a horse of another color-a very dark black, from our parents’
standpoint.
Long before that time Pat and I could telepath as easily as we could talk and just as accurately, without special nursing and at any distance. We must have been doing it for years without
knowing it-in fact Dr. Arnault made a surprise recording of our prison-yard whispering (when we weren’t trying to telepath,
just our ordinary private conversation) and proved that neither one of us could understand our recorded
whispers when we were keeping it down low to keep other people from hearing.
She told us that it was theoretically possible that everyone was potentially telepathic, but that it had
proved difficult to demonstrate it except with identical twins-and then only with about ten per cent.
“We don’t know why, but think of an analogy with tuned radio circuits.”
“Brain waves?” I asked.
“Don’t push the analogy too far. It can’t be the brain waves we detect with an encephalograph equipment or we would have been selling commercial telepathic equipment long since. And the human brain is not a radio. But whatever it is, two persons from the same egg stand an enormously better
chance of being ‘tuned in’ than two non-twins do. I can’t read your mind and you can’t read mine and
perhaps we never will. There have been only a few cases in all the history of psychology of people who appeared to be able to ‘tune in’ on just anyone, and most of those aren’t well documented.”
Pat grinned and winked at Dr. Mabel. “So we are a couple of freaks.”
She looked wide-eyed and started to answer but Dr. Arnault beat her to it. “Not at all, Pat. In you it is normal. But we do have teams in the project who are not identical twins. Some husbands and wives, a few fraternal siblings, even some pairs who were brought
together by the research itself. They are the ‘freaks.’ If we could find out how they do it, we. might be able to set up conditions to let anyone do it.”
Dr. Mabel shivered. “What a terrible thought! There is too little privacy now.”
I repeated this to Maudie (with Pat’s interruptions and corrections)
because the news services had found
out what was going on in “Genetics Investigations” and naturally we “mind readers” came in for
a lot of silly publicity and just as naturally, under Hedda Staley’s mush-headed prodding, Maudie began to wonder if a girl had any privacy? She had, of course; I could not have read her mind with a search warrant, nor could Pat. She would have believed our simple statement if Hedda had not harped
on it. She nearly managed to bust us up with Maudie, but we jettisoned her instead and we had
threesome dates with Maudie until Pat was sent away.
But that wasn’t until nearly the end of the summer after they explained Project Lebensraum.
About a week before our contract was to run out they gathered us twins together to talk to us. There
had been hundreds that first day, dozens the second day, but just enough to crowd a big conference room by the end of summer. The redheads were among the survivors but Pat and I did not sit by them even though there was room; they still maintained their icicle attitude and were self-centered as oysters. The rest of us were all old friends by now.
A Mr. Howard was introduced as representing the Foundation. He ladled out the usual guff about being
happy to meet us and appreciating the honor
and so forth. Pat said to me. “Hang onto your wallet,
Tom. This bloke is selling something.” Now that we knew what we were doing Pat and I talked in the presence of other people even more than we used to. We no longer bothered to whisper since we had
had
proved to us that we weren’t hearing the whispers. But we did subvocalize the words silently, as it helped in being understood. Early in the summer we had tried to do without
words and read minds directly but it did not work. Oh, I could latch on to Pat, but the silly, incoherent rumbling that went on his mind in place of thought was confusing and annoying, as senseless as finding yourself inside another person’s dream. So I learned not to listen unless he “spoke” to me and he did the same. When we did, we used words and sentences like anybody else. There was none of this fantastic, impossible popular nonsense about instantly grasping the contents of another person’s mind; we simply “talked.”
One thing that had bothered me was why Pat’s telepathic “voice” sounded like his real one. It had not worried me when I did not know what we were doing, but once I realized that these “sounds”
weren’t sounds, it bothered me. I began to wonder if I was all there and for a week I could not “hear” him- psychosomatic telepathic-deafness Dr. Arnault called it.
She got me straightened out by explaining what hearing is. You don’t hear with your ears, you hear
with your brain; you don’t see with your eyes, you see with your
brain. When you touch something, the sensation is not in your finger, it is inside your head. The ears and eyes and fingers are just data collectors; it is the brain that abstracts order out of a chaos of data and gives it meaning. “A new baby
does not really see,” she said. “Watch the eyes of one and you can see that it doesn’t. Its eyes
work
but its brain has not yet learned to see. But once the brain has acquired the habits of abstracting as ‘seeing’
and
‘hearing,’ the habit persists. How would you expect to ‘hear’ what your twin says
to
you telepathically? As little tinkling bells or dancing lights? Not at all. You expect words, your brain ‘hears’ words; it is a process it is used to and knows how to handle.”
I no longer worried about it, I could hear Pat’s voice clearer than I could hear the voice of the speaker
addressing us. No doubt there were fifty other conversations around
us, but I heard no one but Pat and
it
was obvious that the speaker could not hear anybody (and that he did not know
much about telepathy) for he went on:
“Possibly a lot of you wonderful people-” (This with a sickening smile) “-are reading my mind right now. I hope not, or if you are I hope you will bear
with me until I have said my say.”
“What did I tell you?” Pat put in. “Don’t sign anything until l check it.”
(“Shut up,”). I told him. (“I want to listen.”) His voice used to sound like a whisper; now it tended to
drown out real sounds. “
Mr. Howard went on, “Perhaps you have wondered why the Long Range Foundation has sponsored this research. The Foundation is always interested in anything which will add to human knowledge. But there is a much more important reason,
a supremely important reason … and a grand purpose
to which you yourselves can be supremely important.”
“See? Be sure to count your change.” (“Quiet, Pat.”)
“Let me quote,” Mr. Howard continued, “from the charter of the Long Range Foundation: ‘Dedicated
to
the welfare of our descendants.’ “ He paused dramatically-I think that was what he intended; “Ladies and gentlemen, what one thing above all is necessary for our descendants?”
“Ancestors!” Pat answered promptly. For a second I thought that he had used his vocal cords, But nobody else noticed.
“There can be only one answer-living room! Room to grow, room to raise families, broad acres of fertile grain, room for parks and schools and homes. We have over five billion human souls on this planet; it was crowded to the point of marginal starvation more than a century ago with only half that number. Yet this afternoon there are a quarter of a million more of us than there were at this same hour yesterday – ninety million more people each year. Only by monumental efforts of reclamation and
conservation, plus population control measures that grow daily more difficult, have we been able to stave off starvation. We have placed a sea in the Sahara, we have melted the Greenland ice cap, we have watered the windy steppes, yet each year there is more and more pressure
for more and more room for endlessly more people.”
I don’t care for orations and this was all old stuff. Shucks, Pat and I knew it if anyone did; we were the kittens that should have been drowned; our old man paid a yearly fine for our very existence.
“It has been a century since the inception of interplanetary travel; man has spread through
the Solar System. One would think that nine planets would be ample for a race too fertile for one. Yet you all know that such has not been the case. Of the daughters of Father
Sol only fair Terra is truly suited to Man.”
“I’ll bet he writes advertising slogans.” (“Poor ones,”) I agreed.
“Colonize the others we have done, but only at a great cost. The sturdy Dutch in pushing back the sea have not faced such grim and nearly hopeless tasks as the colonists of Mars and Venus and Ganymede. What the human race needs and must have are not these frozen or burning or airless discards of
creation.
We need more planets like this gentle one we are standing on. And there are more, many more!” He waved his hands at the ceiling and looked up.
“There are dozens, hundreds, thousands, countless hordes of them … out there. Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for the stars!”
“Here comes the pitch,” Pat said quietly. “A fast curve, breaking inside.” (“Pat, what the deuce is he driving at?”)
“He’s a real estate agent.”
Pat was not far off: but I am not going to quote the rest of Mr. Howard’s speech. He was a good sort when we got to know him but he was dazzled by the sound of his own voice, so I’ll summarize. He reminded us that the Torchship Avant-Garde had headed out to Proxima Centauri six years back. Pat and I knew about it not only from the news but because mother’s brother, Uncle Steve, had put in for it-
he was turned down, but for a while we enjoyed prestige just from being related to somebody on the list-I guess we gave the impression around school that Uncle Steve was certain to be chosen.
Nobody had heard from the Avant-Garde and maybe she would be back in fifteen or twenty years and
maybe not. The reason we hadn’t heard from her, as Mr. Howard pointed out and everybody knows,
is that you don’t send radio messages back from a ship light-years away and traveling just under the speed of light. Even if you assumed that a ship could carry a power plant big enough to punch radio
messages across light-years (which may not be impossible in some cosmic sense but surely is
impossible in terms of modem engineering)-even so, what use are messages which travel just barely
faster than the ship that sends them? The Avant-Garde would be home almost as quickly as any report she could send, even by radio.
Some fuzzbrain asked about messenger rockets. Mr. Howard looked pained and tried to answer and I
didn’t listen. If radio isn’t fast enough,
how can a messenger
rocket be faster? I’ll bet Dr. Einstein spun
in his grave.
Mr. Howard hurried on before there were any more silly interruptions. The Long Range Foundation
proposed to send out a dozen more starships in all directions to explore Sol-type solar systems for
Earth-type planets, planets for coloniza tion. The ships might be gone a long time, for each one would
explore more than one solar system.
“And this, ladies and gentlemen, is where you are indispensable to this great project for living room-
for you will be the means whereby the captains of those ships report back what they have found!”
Even Pat kept quiet.
Presently a man stood up in the back of the room. He was one of the oldest twins among us; he and his brother were about thirty-five. “Excuse me, Mr. Howard, but may I ask a question?”
. “Surely.”
“I am Gregory Graham; this is my brother Grant Graham. We’re physicists. Now we don’t claim to be expert in cosmic phenomena but we do know something about communication theory. Granting for the sake of argument that telepathy would work over interstellar distances-I don’t think so but I’ve no
proof that it wouldn’t-even granting that, I can’t see where it helps. Telepathy, light, radio waves, even
gravity, are all limited to the speed of light. That is in the very nature of the physical universe, an
ultimate limit for all communication. Any other view falls into the ancient philosophical contradiction of action-at-a-distance. It is just possible that you might use telepathy to report findings and let the ship go on to new explorations-but the message would still take light-years to come back. Communication
back and forth between a starship and Earth, even by telepathy, is utterly impossible, contrary to the known laws of physics.” He looked apologetic and sat down.
I thought Graham had him on the hip. Pat and I got good marks in physics and what Graham had said was the straight word, right out of the book. But Howard did not seem bothered. “I’ll let an expert answer. Dr. Lichtenstein? If you please-”
Dr. Mabel stood up and blushed and giggled and looked flustered and said, “I’m terribly sorry, Mr.
Graham, I really am, but telepathy isn’t like that at all.” She giggled again and said, “I shouldn’t be saying this, since you are telepathic and I’m not, but telepathy doesn’t pay the least bit of attention to the speed of light.”
“But it has to. The laws of physics-”
“Oh, dear! Have we given you the impression that telepathy is physical?” She twisted her hands. “It probably isn’t.”
“Everything is physical. I include ‘physiological,’ of course.”
“It is? You do? Oh, I wish I could be sure … but physics has always
been much too deep for me. But I don’t know how you can be sure that telepathy is physical; we haven’t been able to make it register on any instrument. Dear me, we don’t even know how consciousness hooks
into matter. Is consciousness physical? I’m sure I don’t know. But we do know that telepathy is faster than light because we measured it.”
Pat sat up with a jerk, “Stick around,
kid. I think we’ll stay for the second show.” Graham looked stunned. Dr. Mabel said hastily, “I didn’t do it; it was Dr; Abernathy.” “Horatio Abernathy?” demanded Graham.
“Yes, that’s his first name, though I never dared call him by it. He’s rather important.”
“Just the Nobel prize,” Graham said grimly, “in field theory. Go on. What did he find?”
“Well, we sent this one twin out to Ganymede-such an awfully long way. Then we used simultaneous radio-telephony and telepathy messages, with the twin on Ganymede talking by radio while he was talking directly-telepathically, I mean-to his twin back in Buenos Aires. The telepathic message always beat the radio message by about forty minutes. That would be right, wouldn’t it? You can see the exact figures in my office.”
Graham managed to close his month. “When did this happen? Why hasn’t it been published? Who has
been keeping it secret? It’s the most important thing since the Michelson-Morley experiment-it’s terrible!”
Dr. Mabel looked upset and Mr. Howard butted in soothingly. “Nobody has been suppressing
knowledge, Mr. Graham, and Dr. Abernathy is preparing an article for publication in the Physical Review. However I admit that the Foundation did ask him not to give out an advance release in order
to
give us time to go ahead with another project-the one you know as ‘Genetics Investigations’-on a crash- priority basis. We felt we were entitled to search out and attempt to sign up potential telepathic teams before every psychological laboratory and, for that matter, every ambitious showman, tried to
beat us to it. Dr. Abernathy was willing-he
doesn’t like premature publication.”
“If it will make you feel better, Mr. Graham,” Dr. Mabel said diffidently, “telepathy doesn’t pay
attention to the inverse-square law either. The signal strength was as strong at half a billion miles as
when the paired telepaths were in adjoining rooms.”
Graham sat down heavily. “I don’t know whether it does or it doesn’t. I’m busy rearranging everything
I have ever believed.”
The interruption by the Graham brothers had explained some things but had pulled us away from the purpose of the meeting, which was for Mr. Howard to sell us on signing up as spacemen. He did not have to sell me. I guess every boy wants to go out into space; Pat and I had run away from home once to enlist in the High Marines-and this was much more than just getting on the Earth-Mars-Venus run; this meant exploring the stars.
The Stars!
“We’ve told you about this before your research contracts run out,” Mr. Howard explained, “so that you will have time to consider it, time for us to explain the conditions and advantages.”
I did not care what the advantages
were. If they had invited me to hook a sled on behind, I would have said yes, not worrying about torch blast or space suits or anything.
“Both members of each telepathic team will be equally well taken care of,” he assured us. “The starside member will have good pay and good working conditions
in the finest of modern torchships in the company of crews selected for psychological compatibility as well as for special training; the earthside member will have his financial future assured, as well as his physical welfare.” He smiled.
“Most assuredly his physical welfare, for it is necessary that he be kept alive and well as long as
science can keep him so. It is not too much to say that signing this contract will add thirty years to your
lives.”
It burst on me why the twins they had tested had been young people. The twin who went out to the stars would not age very much, not at the speed of light. Even if he stayed away a century it would not seem that long to him-but his twin who stayed behind would grow older. They would have to pamper
him
like royalty, keep him alive-or their “radio” would break down.
Pat said, “Milky Way, here I come!”
But Mr. Howard was still talking. “We want you to think this over carefully; it is the most important decision you will ever make. On the shoulders of you few and others like you in other cities around the globe, all told just a tiny fraction of one per cent of the human race, on you precious
few rest the hopes of all humanity. So think carefully and give us a chance to explain anything which may trouble you.
Don’t act hastily.”
The red-headed twins got up and walked out, noses in the air. They did not have to speak to make it clear that they would have nothing to do with anything so unladylike, so rude and crude, as exploring
space. In the silence in which they paraded out Pat said to me, “There go the Pioneer Mothers. That’s the spirit that discovered America.” As they passed us he cut loose with a loud razzberry-and I suddenly realized that he was not telepathing when the redheads stiffened and hurried faster. There was an embarrassed laugh and Mr. Howard quickly picked up the business at hand as if nothing had happened
while I bawled Pat out.
Mr. Howard asked us to come back at the usual time tomorrow, when Foundation representatives would explain details. He invited us to bring our lawyers, or (those of us who were under age, which was more than half) our parents and their lawyers.
Pat was bubbling over as we left, but I had lost my enthusiasm. In the middle of Mr. Howard’s speech I had had a great light dawn: one of us was going to have to stay behind and I knew as certainly as bread falls butter side down which one it would be. A possible thirty more years
on my life was no inducement to me. What use is thirty extra years wrapped in cottonwool? There would be no spacing
for the twin left behind, not even inside the Solar System … and I had never even been to the Moon.
I tried to butt in on Pat’s enthusiasm and put it to him fair
and
square, for I was darned if I was going to take the small piece of cake this time without argument.
“Look, Pat, I’ll draw straws with you for it. Or match coins.” “Huh? What are you talking about?”
“You know what I’m talking about!”
He just brushed it aside and grinned. “You worry too much, Tom. They’ll pick the teams the way they
want to. It won’t be up to us.”
I know he was determined to go and I knew I would lose.
IV HALF A LOAF
Our parents made the predictable uproar. A conference in the Bartlett family always sounded like a zoo
at
feeding time but this one set a new high. In addition
to Pat and myself, Faith, Hope, and Charity, and
our parents, there was Faith’s fairly new husband, Frank Dubois, and Hope’s brand- new fiancé, Lothar
Sembrich. The last two did not count and both of them seemed to me to be examples of what lengths a girl will go to in order to get married, but they used up space and occasionally contributed remarks to confuse the issue. But Mother’s brother, Uncle Steve, was there, too, having popped up on Earthside furlough.
It was Uncle Steve’s presence that decided Pat to bring it out in the open instead of waiting to tackle Dad and Mum one at a time. Both of them considered Uncle Steve a disturbing influence but they were proud of him; one of his rare visits was always a holiday.
Mr. Howard had given us a sample contract to take home and look over. After dinner Pat said, “By the way, Dad, the Foundation offered us a new contract today, a long-term one.” He took it out of his
pocket but did not offer it to Dad.
“I trust you told them that you were about to start school again?”
“Sure, we told them that, but they insisted that we take the contract home to show our parents. Okay, we knew what your answer would be.” Pat started to put the contract into his pocket.
I said to Pat privately, (“What’s the silly idea? You’ve made him say ‘no’ and now he can’t back down.”)
“Not yet he hasn’t,” Pat answered on our private circuit. “Don’t joggle my elbow.”
Dad was already reaching out a hand. “Let me see it, You should never make up your mind without knowing the facts.”
Pat was not quick about passing it over. “Well, there is a scholarship clause,” he admitted, “but Tom and I wouldn’t be able to go to school together the way we always have.”
“That’s not necessarily bad. You two are too dependent on each other. Some day you will have to face the cold, cruel world alone … and going to different schools might be a good place to start.”
Pat stuck out the contract, folded to the second page, “It’s paragraph ten.”
Dad read paragraph ten first, just as Pat meant him to do, and his eyebrows went up. Paragraph ten agreed that the party of the first part, the LRF, would keep the party of the second part in any school of
his
choice, all expenses, for the duration of the contract, or a shorter time at his option, and agreed to
do the same for the party of the third part after the completion of the active period of the contract, plus tutoring during the active period-all of which was a long-winded way of saying that the Foundation would put the one who stayed home through school now and the one who went starside through
school when he got back… all this in addition to our salaries; see paragraph seven.
So Dad turned to paragraph seven and his eyebrows went higher and his pipe went out. He looked at Pat. “Do I understand that they intend to appoint you two ‘communications technicians tenth grade’ with no experience?”
Uncle Steve sat up and almost knocked his chair over.
“Bruce, did you say ‘tenth grade’?”
“So it says.”
“Regular LRF pay scales?”
“Yes. I don’t know how much that is, but I believe they ordinarily hire skilled ratings beginning at third grade.”
Uncle Steve whistled. “I’d hate to tell you how much money it is, Bruce-but the chief electron pusher
on Pluto is tenth pay grade … and it took him twenty years and a doctor’s degree to get there.” Uncle Steve looked at us.
“Give out, shipmates. Where did they bury the body? Is it a bribe?” Pat did not answer. Uncle Steve turned to Dad and said, “Never mind the fine print, Bruce; just have the kids sign it. Each one of them will make more than you and me together. Never argue with Santa Claus.”
But Dad was already reading the fine print, from sub-paragraph one-A to the penalty clauses. It was
written in lawyer language but what it did was to sign us up as crew members for one voyage of an LRF ship, except that one of us was required to perform his duties Earthside. There was lots more to
nail it down so that the one who stayed Earth-side could not wiggle out, but that was all it amounted to.
The contact did not say where the ship would go or how long the voyage would last.
Dad finally put the contract down and Charity grabbed it. Dad took it from her and passed it over to Mother. Then he said, “Boys, this contract looks so favorable that I suspect there must be a catch. Tomorrow morning I’m going to get hold of Judge Holland and ask him to go over
it
with me. But if I
read it correctly, you are being offered all these benefits-and an extravagant salary-provided one of you
makes one voyage in the Lewis and Clark.”
Uncle Steve said suddenly, “The Lewis and Clark, Bruce?”
“The Lewis and Clark, or such sister ship as may be designated. Why? You know the ship, Steve?” Uncle Steve got poker-faced and answered, “I’ve never been in her. New ship, I understand. Well
equipped.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” Dad looked at Mum. “Well, Molly?”
Mother did not answer. She was reading the contract and steadily getting whiter. Uncle Steve caught my eye and shook his head very slightly. I said to Pat, (“Uncle Steve has spotted the catch in it.”)
“He won’t hinder. “
Mother looked up at last and spoke to Dad in a high voice. “I suppose
you are going to consent?” She sounded sick. She put down the contract and Charity grabbed it again just as Hope grabbed it from the other side. It ended with our brother-in-law Frank Dubois holding it while everybody else read over his
shoulders.
“Now, my dear,” Dad said mildly, “remember that boys do grow up. I would like to keep the family
together forever-but it can’t be that way and you know it.”
“Bruce, you promised that they would not go out into space.”
Her brother shot her a glance-his chest was covered with ribbons he had won in space. But Dad went on just as mildly. “Not quite, dear. I promised you that I would not consent to minority enlistment in the peace forces; I want them to finish school and I did not want you upset. But this is another matter … and, if we refuse, it won’t be long before they can enlist whether we like it or not.”
Mother turned to Uncle Steve and said bitterly, “Stephen, you put this idea in their heads.” He looked annoyed then answered as gently as Dad.
“Take it easy, Sis. I’ve been away; you can’t pin this on me. Anyhow, you don’t put ideas in boys’
heads; they grow them naturally.”
Frank Dubois cleared his throat and said loudly, “Since this seems to be a family conference, no doubt you would like my opinion.”
I said, to Pat only, (‘Nobody asked your opinion, you lard head!”) Pat answered, “Let him talk. He’s our secret weapon, maybe.”
“If you want the considered judgment of an experienced businessman, this so-called contract is either a practical joke or a proposition so preposterous as to be treated with contempt. I understand that the twins are supposed to have some freak talent-although I’ve seen no evidence of it-but the idea of
paying them more than a man receives in his mature years, well, it’s just not the right way to raise boys. If they were sons of mine, I would forbid it. Of course, they’re not-”
“No, they’re not,” Dad agreed.
Frank looked sharply at him. “Was that sarcasm, Father Bartlett? I’m merely trying to help. But as I
told you the other day, if the twins will go to some good business school and work hard, I’d find a place for them in the bakery. If they make good, there is no reason why they should not do as well as I have done.” Frank was his father’s junior partner in an automated bakery; he always managed to let people know how much money he made. “But as for this notion of going out into space, I’ve always said that if a man expects to make anything of himself, he should stay home and work. Excuse me, Steve.”
Uncle Steve said woodenly, “I’d be glad to excuse you.” “Eh?”
“Forget it, forget it. You stay out of space and I’ll promise not to bake any bread. By the way, there’s flour on your lapel.”
Frank glanced down hastily. Faith brushed at his jacket and said, “Why, that’s just powder.”
“Of course it is,” Frank agreed, brushing at it himself. “I’ll have you know, Steve, that I’m usually
much too busy to go down on the processing floor. I’m hardly ever out of the office.”
“So I suspected.”
Frank decided that he and Faith were late for another appointment and got up to go, when Dad stopped them.
“Frank? What was that about my boys being freaks?” “What? I never said anything of the sort.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
They left in a sticky silence, except that Pat was humming silently and loudly the March of the Gladiators. “We’ve got it won, kid!”
It seemed so to me, too-but
Pat had to press our luck. He picked up the contract. “Then it’s okay,
Dad?”
“Mmm … I want to consult Judge Holland-and I’m not speaking for your mother.” That did not worry us; Mum wouldn’t hold out if Dad agreed, especially not with Uncle Steve around.
“But you could say that the matter has not been disapproved.” He frowned. “By the way, there is no time limit mentioned
in
there.”
Uncle Steve fielded that one for us; “That’s customary on a commercial ship, Bruce … which is what
this is, legally. You sign on for the voyage, home planet to home planet.” “Uh, no doubt. But didn’t they give you some idea, boys?”
I
heard Pat moan, “There goes the ball game. What’ll we tell him, Tom” Dad waited and Uncle Steve eyed us.
Finally Uncle Steve said, “Better speak up, boys. Perhaps I should have mentioned that I’m trying to get a billet on one of those ships myself-special discharge and such. So I know.”
Pat muttered something. Dad said sharply, “Speak up, son.” “They told us the voyage would probably last … about a century.”
Mum fainted and Uncle Steve caught her and everybody rushed around
with cold compresses getting in each other’s way and we were all upset. Once she pulled out of it Uncle Steve said to Dad, “Bruce? I’m going to take the boys out and buy them a tall, strong sarsaparilla and get them out from under foot.
You
won’t want to talk tonight anyhow.”
Dad agreed absently that it was a good. idea. I guess Dad loved all of us; nevertheless,
when the chips were down,
nobody counted but Mother.
Uncle Steve took us to a place where be could get something more to his taste than sarsaparilla, then vetoed it when Pat tried to order
beer. “Don’t try to show off, youngster. You are not going to put me in the position of serving liquor to my sister’s kids.”
“Beer can’t hurt you.”
“So? I’m still looking for the bloke who told me it was a soft drink. I’m going to beat him to a pulp with a stein. Pipe down.” So we picked soft drinks and he drank some horrible mixture he called a Martian shandy and we talked about Project Lebensraum. He knew more about it than we did even though no press release had been made until that day-I suppose the fact that he had been assigned to the Chief of Staff’s office had something to do with it, but he did not say.
Presently Pat looked worried and said, “See here, Uncle Steve, is there any chance that they will let us? Or should Tom and I just forget it?”
“Eh? Of course they are going to let you do it.”
“Huh? It didn’t look like
it tonight. If I know Dad, he would skin us for rugs rather than make Mum unhappy.”
“No doubt. And a good idea. But believe me, boys, this is in the bag … provided you use the right arguments.”
“Which is?”
“Mmm … boys, being a staff rating, I’ve served with a lot of high brass. When you are right and a general is wrong, there is only one way to get him to change his mind. You shut up and don’t argue.
You
let the facts speak for themselves and give him time to figure out a logical reason for reversing
himself.”
Pat looked unconvinced; Uncle Steve went on, “Believe me. Your pop is a reasonable man and, while your mother is not, she would rather be hurt herself than make anybody she loves unhappy. That contract is all in your favor and they can’t refuse-provided you give them time to adjust to the idea. But if you tease and bulldoze and argue the way you usually do, you’ll get them united against you.”
“Huh? But I never tease, I merely use logical-”
“Stow it, you make me tired. Pat, you were one of the most unlovable brats that ever squawled to get his own way … and, Tom, you weren’t any better. You haven’t mellowed with age; you’ve simply sharpened your techniques. Now you are being offered something free that I would give my right arm to have. I ought to stand aside and let you flub it. But I won’t. Keep your flapping mouths shut, play this easy, and it’s yours. Try your usual loathsome tactics and you lose.”
We would not take that sort of talk from most people. Anybody else and Pat would have given me the signal and he’d ‘ve hit him high while I hit him low. But you don’t argue that way with a man who wears the Ceres ribbon; you listen. Pat didn’t even mutter to me about it.
So we talked about Project Lebensraum itself. Twelve ships were to go out, radiating from Sol approximately in axes of a dodecahedron-but only approximately, as each ship’s mission would be, not to search a volume of space, but to visit as many Sol-type stars as possible in the shortest time. Uncle Steve explained how they worked out a “mini-max” search curve for each ship but I did not understand
it; it involved a type of calculus we had not studied.. Not that it mattered; each ship was to spend as much time exploring and as little time making the jumps as possible.
But Pat could not keep from coming back to the idea of how to sell the deal to our parents. “Uncle Steve? Granting that you are right about playing it easy, here’s an argument that maybe they should hear? Maybe you could use it on them?”
“Um?”
“Well, if half a loaf is better than none, maybe they haven’t realized that this way one of us stays
home.” I caught
a phrase of what Pat had started to say, which was not “one of us stays home,” but “Tom stays
home.” I started to object, then let it ride. He hadn’t said it. Pat went on, “They know we want to space. If they don’t let us do this, we’ll do it any way we can. If we joined your corps,
we
might come home on leave-but not often. If we emigrate, we might as well be dead; very few emigrants
make enough to afford a trip back to Earth, not while their parents are still alive, at least. So if they keep us home now, as soon as we are of age they probably will never see us again. But if they agree,
not only does one stay home, but they are always in touch with the other one-that’s the whole purpose in using us telepath pairs.” Pat looked anxiously at Uncle Steve.
“Shouldn’t we point that out? Or will you slip them the idea?”
Uncle Steve did not answer right away, although
I could not see anything wrong with the logic. Two from two leaves zero, but one from two still leaves one.
Finally he answered slowly, “Pat, can’t you get it through your thick head to leave well enough
alone?”
“I don’t see what’s wrong with my logic.”
“Since when was an emotional argument won by logic? You should read about the time King Solomon
proposed to divvy up the baby.” He took a pull at his glass and wiped his mouth. “What I am about to
tell you is strictly confidential. Did you know that the Planetary League considered commissioning these ships as warships?”
“Huh? Why?
Mr.
Howard didn’t say-”
“Keep your voice down. Project Lebensraum is of supreme interest to the Department of Peace. When
it
comes down to it, the root cause of war is always population pressure no matter what other factors enter in.”
“But we’ve abolished war.”
“So we have. So chaps like me get paid to stomp out brush fires before they burn the whole forest.
Boys, if I tell you the rest of this, you’ve got to keep it to yourselves now and forever.” I
don’t like secrets. I’d rather owe money. You can’t pay back a secret. But we promised.
“Okay. I saw the estimates the Department of Peace made on this project at the request of LRF. When
the
Avant-Garde was sent out, they gave her one chance in nine of returning. We’ve got better equipment now; they figure one chance in six for each planetary system visited. Each ship visits an
average of six stars on the schedule laid out-so each ship has one chance in thirty-six of coming back. For
twelve ships that means one chance in three of maybe one ship coming back. That’s where you freaks come in.”
“Don’t call us ‘freaks’!”
We answered together.
“ ‘Freaks,’ “ he repeated. “And everybody is mighty glad you freaks are around,
because without you the thing is impossible. Ships and crews are expendable-ships are just money and they can always find
people like me with more curiosity than sense to man the ships. But while the ships are expendable, the knowledge they will gather is not expendable. Nobody at the top expects these ships to come back-but we’ve got to locate those earth-type planets; the human race needs them. That is what you boys are for: to report back. Then it won’t matter that the ships won’t come back.”
“I’m not scared,” I said firmly.
Pat glanced at me and looked away. I hadn’t telepathed but I had told him plainly that the matter was
not settled as to which one of us would go. Uncle Steve looked at me soberly and said, “I didn’t expect you to be, at your age. Nor am I; I’ve been living on borrowed time since I was nineteen. By now I’m so convinced of my own luck that if one ship comes back, I’m sure it will be mine. But do you see why
it
would be silly to argue with your mother that half a set of twins is better than none? Emotionally your argument is all wrong. Go read the Parable of the Lost Sheep. You point out to your mother that one of you will be safe at home and it will simply fix her
mind on the fact that the other
one isn’t safe and isn’t home. If your Pop tries to reassure her, he is likely to stumble onto these facts-for they aren’t secret, not the facts on which the statisticians based their predictions;
it is just that the publicity about this project will emphasize the positive and play down the negative.”
“Uncle Steve,” objected Pat, “I don’t see how they can be sure that most of the ships will be lost.” “They can’t be sure. But these are actually optimistic assumptions based on what experience the race
has had with investigating strange places. It’s like this, Pat: you can be right over and over again, but when it comes to exploring strange places, the first time you guess wrong is the last guess you make. You’re dead. Ever looked at the figures about it in just this one tiny solar system? Exploration is like Russian roulette; you can win and win, but if you keep on, it will kill you, certain.
So
don’t get your parents stirred up on this phase of the matter. I don’t mind-a man is entitled to die the way he wants to; that’s one thing they haven’t taxed. But there is no use in drawing attention to the fact that one of you two isn’t coming back.”
V THE PARTY OF THE SECOND PART
Uncle Steve was right about the folks giving in; Pat left for the training course three weeks later.
I still don’t know just how it was that Pat got to be the one. We never matched for it, we never had a knock-down argument, and I never agreed. But Pat went.
I tried to settle it with him several times but he always put me off, telling me not to worry and to wait and see how things worked out. Presently I found it taken for granted that Pat was going and I was
staying. Maybe I should have made a stand the day we signed the contract, when Pat hung back and let me sign first, thereby getting me down on paper as the party of the second part who stayed home,
instead of party of the third part who went. But it had not seemed worth making a row about, as the two were interchangeable by agreement among the three parties to the contact. Pat pointed this out to me just before we signed; the important thing was to get the contract signed while our parents were holding
still-get their signatures.
Was Pat trying to put one over on me right then? If so, I didn’t catch him wording his thoughts. Contrariwise, would I have tried the same thing on him if I had thought
of it? I don’t know, I just don’t know. In any case, I gradually became aware that the matter was settled; the family took it for granted and so did the LRF people. So I told Pat it was not settled. He just shrugged and reminded me that it had not been his doing. Maybe I could get them to change their minds… if I didn’t care whether or not I
upset the applecart.
I didn’t want to do that. We did not know that the LRF would have got down on its knees and wept rather than let any young and healthy telepath pair get away from them; we thought
they had plenty to
choose from. I thought that if
I made a fuss they might tear up the contract, which they could do up till D-Day by paying a small penalty.
Instead I got Dad alone and talked to him. This shows how desperate I was; neither Pat nor I ever went alone to our parents about the other one. I didn’t feel easy about it, but stammered and stuttered and had trouble making Dad understand why I felt swindled.
Dad looked troubled and said, “Tom, I thought
you and your brother had settled this between you?” “That’s what I’m trying to tell you! We didn’t.”
“What do you expect me to do?”
“Why, I want you to make him be fair
about it. We ought to match for it, or something. Or you could do it for us and keep it fair and square. Would you?”
Dad gave
attention to his pipe the way he does when he is stalling. At last he said, “Tom, I don’t see how you can back out now, after everything is settled. Unless you want me to break the contract? It wouldn’t be easy but I can.”
“But I don’t have to break the contract. I just want an even chance. If I lose, I’ll shut up. If I win, it won’t change anything-except that I would go and Pat would stay.”
“Mmm …” Dad puffed on his pipe and looked thoughtful. “Tom, have you looked at your mother
lately?”
I had, but I hadn’t talked with her much. She was moving around
like a zombie, looking grief-stricken
and
hurt. “Why?”
“I can’t do this
to
her. She’s
already going through
the agony of losing your brother; I can’t put her
through
it on your account, too. She couldn’t stand
it.”
I knew she was feeling bad, but I could not see what difference it would make if we swapped. “You’re not suggesting that Mum wants it this way? That she would rather have Pat go than me?”
“I am not. Your mother loves you both, equally,” “Then it would be just the same to her.”
“It would not. She’s undergoing the grief of losing one of her sons. If you swapped now, she would
have to go through
it afresh for her other son. That wouldn’t be fair.” He knocked his pipe against an ash tray, which was the same as gaveling that the meeting was adjourned. “No, son, I’m afraid that you
will just have to stand by your agreement.”
It was hopeless so I shut up. With Dad, bringing Mum’s
welfare into it was the same as trumping an ace.
Pat left for the training center four days later. I didn’t see much of him except the hours we spent down
at
the TransLunar Building for he was dating Maudie every night and I was not included. He pointed
out that this was the last he would see of her whereas I would have plenty of time-so get lost, please. I
did
not argue; it was not only fair, taken by itself, but I did not want to go along on their dates under the circumstances. Pat and I were farther apart those last few days than we had ever been.
It did not affect our telepathic ability, however, whatever this “tuning” was that some minds could do went right on and we could do it as easily as we could talk … and turn it off as easily, too. We didn’t have to “concentrate” or “clear our minds” or any of that Eastern mysticism nonsense. When we wanted to “talk,”
we talked.
When Pat left I felt lost. Sure, I was in touch with him four hours a day and any other time I cared to call him, but you can’t live your whole life doing things by two’s without getting out of joint when you
have to do things by one’s. I didn’t have new habits yet. I’d get ready to go someplace, then I would stop at the door and wonder
what I had forgotten. Just Pat. It is mighty lonesome to start off somewhere by yourself when you’ve always done it with someone.
Besides that, Mum was being brightly cheerful and tender and downright unbearable, and my sleep
was
all broken up. The training center worked on Switzerland’s time zone which meant that I, and all other twins who were staying behind no matter where on. Earth they were, worked our practice messages on Swiss time, too. Pat would whistle in my ears and wake me at two in the morning each night and then I would work until dawn and try to catch up on sleep in the daytime.
It was inconvenient but necessary and I was well paid. For the first time in my life I had plenty of
money. So did all of our family, for I started paying a fat board bill despite Dad’s objections. I even bought
myself a watch (Pat had taken ours with him) without
worrying about the price, and we were talking about moving into a bigger place.
But the LRF was crowding more and more into my life and I began to realize that the contract covered more than just recording messages from my twin. The geriatrics program started at once. “Geriatrics” is a funny term to use about a person not old enough to vote but it had the special meaning here of
making me live as long as possible by starting on me at once. What I ate was no longer my business; I had to follow the diet they ordered, no more sandwiches picked up casually. There was a long list of
“special hazard”
things I must not do. They gave me shots for everything from housemaid’s knee to
parrot fever and I had a physical examination so thorough
as to make every other one seem like a mere laying on of hands.
The only consolation was that Pat told me they were doing. the same to him. We might be common as
mud most ways but we were irreplaceable communication equipment to LRF, so we got the treatment a prize race horse or a prime minister gets and which common people hardly ever get. It was a nuisance.
I did not call Maudie the first week or ten days after Pat left; I didn’t feel easy about her. Finally she called me and asked if I were angry with her or was she in quarantine? So we made a date for that night. It was not festive. She called me “Pat” a couple of times, which she used to do every now and then and it had never
mattered, since Pat and I were used to people mixing up our names. But now it was awkward, because
Pat’s ghost was a skeleton at the feast.
The second time she did it I said angrily, “If you want to talk to Pat, I can get in touch with him in half a second!”
“What? Why, Tom!”
“Oh, I know you would rather
I was Pat! If you think I enjoy being second choice, think again.”
She got tears in her eyes and I got ashamed and more difficult. So we had a bitter argument and then I was telling her how I had been swindled.
Her reaction wasn’t what I expected. Instead of sympathy she said, “Oh, Tom, Tom! Can’t you see that Pat didn’t do this to you? You did it to yourself.”
“Huh?”
“It’s not his fault;
it’s your own. I used to get so tired of the way you let him push you
around. You liked having him push you around. You’ve got a ‘will to fail.’“
I was so angry I had trouble answering. “What are you talking about? That sounds like a lot of cheap,
chimney-corner psychiatry to me. Next thing you know you’ll be telling me I have a ‘death wish.’“
She blinked back tears.
“No. Maybe Pat has that. He was always kidding about it but, just the same, I know
how dangerous it is. I know we won’t see him again.”
I chewed that over. “Are you trying to say,” I said slowly, “that I let Pat do me out of it because I was afraid to go?”
“What? Why, Tom dear, I never said anything of the sort.”
“It sounded like it.” Then I knew why it sounded like it. Maybe I was afraid. Maybe I had struggled
just hard enough to let Pat win… because
I knew what was going to happen to the one who went.
Maybe I was a coward.
We made it up and the date seemed about to end satisfactorily. When I took her home I was thinking of trying to kiss her good
night-I never had, what with the way Pat and I were
always in each other’s hair. I think she expected me to, too.., when Pat suddenly whistled at me.
“Hey! You awake, mate?”
(“Certainly,”) I answered shortly. (“But I’m busy.”)
“How busy? Are you out with my girl?”
(“What makes you think that?”)
“You are, aren’t you? I figured you were. How are you making out?” (“Mind your own business!”)
“Sure, sure! Just say hello to her for me. Hi, Maudie!” Maudie said, “Tom, what are you so preoccupied about?”
I answered, “Oh, it’s just Pat. He says to say hello to you.” “Oh… well, hello to him from me.”
So I did. Pat chuckled. “Kiss her good
night for me.” So I didn’t,
not for either of us.
But I called her again the next day and we went out together regularly after that. Things began to be awfully pleasant where Maudie was concerned … so pleasant that I even thought about the fact that college students sometimes got married and now I would be able to afford it, if it happened to work out that way. Oh, I wasn’t dead sure I wanted to tie myself down so young, but it is mighty lonely to be alone when you’ve always
had
somebody with you.
Then they brought Pat home on a shutter.
It was actually an ambulance craft, specially chartered. The idiot had sneaked off and tried skiing, which he knew as much about as I know about pearl diving. He did not have much of a tumble; he practically fell over his own feet. But there he was, being carried into our flat on a stretcher, numb from the waist down and his legs useless. He should have been taken to a hospital, but he wanted to come home and Mum wanted him to come home, so Dad insisted on it. He wound up in the room Faith had vacated and I went back to sleeping on the couch.
The household was all upset, worse than it had been when Pat went away. Dad almost threw Frank
Dubois out of the house
when Frank said that now that this space travel nonsense was disposed of, he was still prepared to give Pat a job if he would study bookkeeping, since a bookkeeper could work
from
a wheelchair. I don’t know; maybe Frank had good intentions, but I sometimes think “good intentions”
should be declared a capital crime.
But the thing that made me downright queasy was the way Mother took it. She was full of tears and
sympathy and she could not do enough for Pat-she spent hours rubbing his legs, until she was ready to collapse. But I could see, even if Dad couldn’t, that she was indecently happy-she had her “baby” back. Oh,
the tears weren’t fake … but females seem able to cry and be happy at the same time.
We all knew that the “space travel nonsense” was washed up, but we did not discuss it, not even Pat and I; while he was flat on his back and helpless and no doubt feeling even worse than I did was no time to blame him for hogging things and then wasting our chance. Maybe I was bitter but it was no
time to let him know. I was uneasily aware that the fat LRF cheeks would stop soon and the family
would be short of money again when we needed it most and I regretted that expensive watch and the money I had blown in taking Maudie to places we had never been able to afford, but I avoided thinking
about even that; it was spilt milk. But I did wonder what kind of a job I could get instead of starting college.
I was taken off guard when Mr. Howard showed up-I had halfway expected that LRF would carry us on the payroll until after Pat was operated on, even though the accident was not their fault and was the result of Pat’s not obeying their regulations. But with the heaps of money they had I thought
they might be generous.
But Mr. Howard did not even raise the question of the Foundation paying for, or not paying for, Pat’s disability; he simply wanted to know how soon I would be ready to report to the training center?
I was confused and Mother was hysterical and Dad was angry and Mr. Howard was bland. To listen to
him
you would have thought that nothing had happened, certainly nothing which involved the slightest idea of letting us out of our contract. The parties of the second part and of the third part were
interchangeable; since Pat could not go, naturally I would. Nothing had happened which interfered with our
efficiency as a communication team. To be sure, they had let us have a few days to quiet down in view of the sad accident-but could I report at once? Time was short.
Dad got purple and almost incoherent. Hadn’t they done enough
to his family? Didn’t they have any decency? Any consideration?
In the middle of it, while I was trying to adjust to the new situation and wandering what I should say,
Pat
called me silently. “Tom! Come here!”
I excused myself and hurried to him. Pat and I had hardly telepathed at all since he had been hurt. A
few
times he had called me in the night to fetch him a drink of water or something like that, but we had
never really talked, either out loud or in our minds. There was just this black, moody silence that shut me out. I didn’t know how to cope with it; it was the first time either
of us had ever been ill without the other one.
But when he called I hurried in. “Shut the door.”
I did so. He looked at me grimly. “I caught you before you promised anything, didn’t I?” “Yeah.”
“Go out there and tell Dad I want to see him right away. Tell Mum I asked her to please quit crying, because she is getting me upset.” He smiled sardonically. “Tell Mr. Howard to let me speak to my
parents alone. Then you beat it.”
“Huh?”
“Get out, don’t stop to say good-by and don’t say where you are going. When I want you, I’ll tell you.
If you hang around,
Mother will work on you and get you to promise things.”
He looked at me bleakly.
“You never did have any will power.”
I let the dig slide off; he was ill. “Look,
Pat, you’re up against a combination this time. Mother is
going to get her own way no matter
what and Dad is so stirred up that I’m surprised he hasn’t taken a poke at Mr. Howard.”
“I’ll handle Mother, and Dad, too. Howard should have stayed away. Get going. Split ‘em up, then get lost.”
“All right,” I said uneasily. “Uh… look, Pat, I appreciate He looked at me and his lip curled. “Think I’m doing this for you?”
“Why, I thought-”
“You never think … and I’ve been doing nothing else for days. If I’m going to be a cripple, do you fancy I’m going to spend my life in a public ward? Or here, with Mother drooling over me and Dad pinching pennies and the girls getting sick of the sight of me? Not Patrick! If I have to be like this, I’m going to have the best of everything … nurses to jump when I lift a finger and dancing girls to entertain
me-and you are going to see that the LRF pays
for it. We can keep our contract and we’re going to. Oh,
I know you don’t want to
go, but now you’ve got to.”
“Me? You’re all mixed up. You crowded me out. You-”
“Okay, forget it. You’re rarin’ to go.” He reached, up and punched me in the ribs, then grinned. “So
we’ll both go-for
you’ll take me along every step of the way. Now get out there and break that up.”
I left two days later. When Pat handed Mum his reverse-twist whammie, she did not even fight. If
getting the money to let her sick baby have proper care and everything else he wanted meant that I had to space, well, it was too bad but that was how it was. She told me how much it hurt to have me go but I knew she was not too upset. But I was, rather … I wondered what the score would have been if it had been I who was in Pat’s fix? Would she have let Pat go just as easily simply to get me anything I
wanted? But I decided to stop thinking about it; parents probably don’t know that they are playing
favorites even when they are doing it.
Dad got me alone for a man-to-man talk just before I left. He hemmed and hawed and stuck in
apologies about how he should have talked things over with me before this and seemed even more embarrassed than I was, which was plenty. When he was floundering I let him know that one of our
high school courses had covered most of what he was trying to say. (I didn’t let him know that the course had been an anti-climax.) He brightened up and said, “Well, son, your mother and I have tried to teach you right from wrong. Just remember that you are a Bartlett and you won’t make too many
mistakes. On that other matter, well, if you will always ask yourself whether a girl is the sort you would
be proud to bring home to meet your mother, I’ll be satisfied.”
I promised-it occurred to me that I wasn’t going to have much chance to fall into bad company, not with psychologists practically dissecting everybody in Project Lebensraum. The bad apples were never going into the barrel
When I see how naive parents are I wonder how the human race keeps on being born. Just the same it was touching and I appreciate the ordeal he put himself through to get me squared away-Dad was always a decent guy and meant well.
I had a last date with Maudie but it wasn’t much; we spent it sitting around
Pat’s bed, She did kiss me good-by-Pat told her
to.
Oh, well!
VI TORCHSHIP “LEWIS AND CLARK”
I was in Switzerland only two days. I got a quick look at the lake at Zurich and that was all; the time was jammed with trying to hurry me through
all the things Pat had been studying for weeks. It couldn’t be done, so they gave me spools of minitape which I was to study after the trip started.
I had one advantage: Planetary League Auxiliary Speech was a required freshman course
at our high school-P-L lingo was the working language of Project Lebensraum. I can’t say I could speak it when I got there, but it isn’t hard. Oh, it seems a little silly to say “goed” when you’ve always said “gone” but you get used to it, and of course all technical words are Geneva-International and always have been.
Actually, as subproject officer Professor Brunn pointed out, there was not a lot that a telepathic communicator had to know before going aboard ship; the principal purpose
of the training center had
been to get the crews together, let them eat and live together, so that the psychologists could spot personality frictions which had not been detected through tests.
“There isn’t any doubt about you, son. We have your brother’s record and we know how close your tests come to matching his. You telepaths have to deviate widely from accepted standards before we would disqualify one of you.”
“Sir?’
“Don’t you see? We can turn down a ship’s captain just for low blood sugar before breakfast and a latent tendency to be short
tempered therefrom until he has had his morning porridge. We can fill most billets twenty times over and juggle them until they are matched like a team of acrobats. But not you people. You are so scarce that we must allow you any eccentricity which won’t endanger the ship: I wouldn’t mind if you believed in astrology-you don’t, do you?”
“Goodness, no!” I answered, shocked.
“You see? You’re a normal, intelligent boy; you’ll do. Why, we would take your twin, on a stretcher, if
we had to.”
Only telepaths were left when I got to Zurich. The captains and the astrogation and torch crews had joined the ships first, and then the specialists and staff people. All the “idlers” were aboard but us. And
I hardly had time to get acquainted even with my fellow mind readers.
They were an odd bunch and I began to see what Professor Brunn meant by saying that we freaks had
to
be allowed a little leeway. There were a dozen of us-just for the Lewis and Clark, I mean; there were a hundred and fifty for the twelve ships of the fleet, which was every telepathic pair that LRF had been
able to sign up. I asked one of them, Bernhard van Houten, why each ship was going to carry so many telepaths?
He looked at me pityingly. “Use your head, Tom. If a radio burns out a valve, what do you do?” “Why, you replace it.”
“There’s your answer. We’re spare parts. If either end of a telepair dies or anything, that ‘radio’ is
burned out, permanently. So they plug in another one of us. They want to be sure they have at least one telepair still working right up to the end of the trip…they hope.”
I hardly had time to learn their names before we were whisked away. There was myself and Bernhard van Houten, a Chinese-Peruvian girl named Mei-Ling Jones (only she pronounced it “Hone-Ace”),
Rupert Hauptman, Anna Horoshen, Gloria Maria Antonita Docampo, Sam Rojas, and Prudence Mathews. These were more or less my age. Then there was Dusty Rhodes who looked twelve and
claimed to be fourteen. I wondered how LRF had persuaded his parents to permit such a child to go.
Maybe they hated him; it would have been easy to do.
Then there were three who were older than the rest of us: Miss Gamma Furtney, Cas Warner, and
Alfred McNeil. Miss Gamma was a weirdie, the sort of old maid who never admits to more than thirty; she was our triplet. LRF had scraped up four sets of triplets who were m-r’s and could be persuaded to
go; they were going to be used to tie the twelve ships together into four groups
of three, then the groups
could be hooked with four sets of twins.
Since triplets are eighty-six times as scarce as twins it was surprising that they could find enough who were telepathic and would go, without
worrying about whether or not they were weirdies. I suspect that the Misses Alpha, Beta, and Gamma Furtney were attracted by the Einstein time effect; they could get even with all the men who had not married them by not getting older
while those men died of old age.
We were a “corner” ship and Cas Warner
was
our sidewise twin, who would hook us through his twin to the Vasco da Gama, thus linking two groups of three. Other sidewise twins tied the other comers.
The
ones who worked ship-to-ship did not have to be young, since their twins (or triplets) were not left back on Earth, to grow older while their brothers or sisters stayed young through relativity. Cas Warner
was
forty-five, a nice quiet chap who seemed to enjoy eating with us kids.
The twelfth was Mr. (“Call me ‘Uncle Alfred’ “) McNeil, and he was an old darling. He was a Negro, his age was anything from sixty-five on up (I couldn’t guess), and he had the saintliness that old people get when they don’t turn sour and self-centered instead…to look at him you would bet heavy odds that he was a deacon in his church.
I got acquainted with him because I was terribly homesick the first night I was in Zurich and he noticed it and invited me to his room after supper and sort of soothed me. I thought he was one of the Foundation psychologists, like Professor Brunn-but
no, he was half of a telepair himself…and not even a sidewise twin; his partner was staying on Earth.
I couldn’t believe it until be showed me a picture
of his pair partner-a little girl with merry eyes and pigtails-and I finally got it through my thick head that here was that rarity, a telepathic pair who were not twins. She was Celestine Regina Johnson, his great-niece-only be called her “Sugar Pie” after he introduced me to the photograph and had told her who I was.
I had to pause and tell Pat about it, not remembering that he had already met them.
Uncle Alfred was retired and had been playmate-in-chief to his baby great-niece, for he had lived with his niece and her husband. He had taught the baby to talk. When her parents were both killed
in an accident he had gone back to work rather than let the child be adopted. “I found
out that I could keep
tabs on Sugar Pie even when I couldn’t see her. She was always a good baby and it meant I could watch out
for her even when I had to be away. I knew it was a gift; I figured that the Lord in His infinite mercy had granted what I needed to let me take care of my little one.”
The only thing that had worried him was that he might not live long enough; or, worse still, not be able to work long enough, to permit him to bring up Sugar Pie and get her started right. Then Project Lebensraum had solved everything. No, he didn’t mind being away from her because be was not away from her; he was with her every minute.
I gathered an impression that he could actually see her but I didn’t want to ask. In any case, with him stone walls did not a prison make nor light-years a separation. He knew that the Infinite Mercy that had
kept them together this long would keep them together long enough
for him to finish his appointed
task. What happened after that was up to the Lord.
I had never met anybody who was so quietly, serenely happy. I didn’t feel homesick again until I left
him and went to bed. So I called Pat and told him about getting acquainted with Uncle Alfred. He said
sure, Uncle All was a sweet old codger…
and
now I should shut
up and go to sleep, as I had a hard day
ahead of me tomorrow.
Then they zoomed us out to the South Pacific and we spent one night on Canton Atoll before we went aboard They wouldn’t let us swim in the lagoon
even though Sam had arranged a picnic party of me and himself and Mei-Ling and Gloria; swimming was one of the unnecessary hazards. Instead we went to bed early and were awakened two hours before dawn-a ghastly time of day, particularly when your
time sense has been badgered by crossing too many time zones too fast. I began to wonder what I was
doing there and why?
The Lewis and Clark was a few hundred miles east of there in an unused part of the ocean. I had not realized how much water
there was until I took a look at it from the air-and at that you see just the top.
If they could figure some way to use all those wet acres as thoroughly as they use the Mississippi Valley they wouldn’t need other planets.
From the air the Lewis and Clark looked like a basketball floating in water; you could not see that it was really shaped like a turnip. It floated with the torch down; the hemispherical upper part was all that showed. I got one look at her, with submersible freighters around
her looking tiny in comparison,
then our bus was hovering over her and we were being told to mind our step on the ladder and not leave anything behind in the bus. It occurred to me that it wouldn’t do any good to write to Lost-and-Found if
we did. It was a chilly thought
… I guess I was still homesick, but mostly I was excited.
I got lost a couple of times and finally found my stateroom just as the speaker system was booming: “All hands, prepare for acceleration. Idlers strap down. Boost stations report in order. Minus fourteen
minutes.” The man talking was so matter of fact that he might as well have been saying, “Local passengers change at Birmingham.”
The stateroom was big enough, with a double wardrobe
and a desk with a built-in viewer-recorder and
a little wash-stand and two pull-down beds. They were down, which limited the floor space. Nobody else was around so I picked one, lay down and fastened the three safety belts. I had just done so when
that little runt Dusty Rhodes stuck his head in. “Hey! You got my bed!”
I started to tell him off, then decided that just before boost was no time for an argument. “Suit yourself,” I answered, unstrapped, and moved into the other one, strapped down again.
Dusty looked annoyed; I think he wanted an argument. Instead of climbing into the one I had vacated, he stuck his head out the door and looked around. I said, “Better strap down. They already passed the word.”
“Tripe,” he answered without turning. “There’s plenty of time. I’ll take a quick look in the control room.”
I was going to suggest that he go outside while he was about it when a ship’s officer came through, checking the rooms. “In you get, son,” he said briskly, using the no-nonsense tone in which you tell a dog to heel. Dusty opened his mouth, closed it, and climbed in. Then the officer “baby-strapped” him,
pulling the buckles around so that they could not be reached by the person in the bunk. He even put the chest strap around Dusty’s arms.
He then checked my belts. I had my arms outside the straps but all he said was, “Keep your arms on the mattress during boost,” and left.
A female voice said, “All special communicators link with your telepartners.”
I had been checking with Pat ever since I woke up and had described the Lewis and Clark to him when
we first sighted her and then inside as well. Nevertheless I said, (“Are you there, Pat?”)
“Naturally. I’m not going anyplace. What’s the word?”
(“Boost in about ten minutes. They just told us to link with our partners during boost.”)
“You had better stay linked, or I’ll beat your ears off! I don’t want to miss anything. (“Okay, okay, don’t race your engine. Pat? This isn’t quite the way I thought it would be.”) “Huh? How?”
(“I don’t know. I guess I expected brass bands and speeches and such. After all, this is a big day. But aside from pictures they took of us last night at Canton Atoll, there was more fuss made when we started for Scout camp.”)
Pat chuckled. “Brass bands would get wet where you are-not to mention soaked with neutrons.” (“Sure, sure.”) I didn’t have to be told that a torchship needs elbow room for a boost. Even when they
perfected a way to let them make direct boost from Earth-zero instead of from a space station,
they still needed a few thousand square miles of ocean-and at that you heard ignorant prattle about how the back
wash was changing the climate and the government ought
to do something.
“Anyhow, there are plenty of brass bands and speeches. We are watching one by the Honorable J. Dillberry Egghead… shall I read it back?”
(“Uh, don’t bother. Who’s ‘we’?”)
“All of us. Faith and Frank just came in.”
I was about to ask about Maudie when a new voice came over the system: “Welcome aboard, friends. This is the Captain. We will break loose at an easy three gravities; nevertheless, I want to warn you to
relax and keep your arms inside your couches. The triple boost will last only six minutes, then you will be allowed to get up. We take off in number two position, just after the Henry Hudson.”
I repeated to Pat what the Captain was saying practically as fast as he said it; this was one of the things
we had practiced while he was at the training center: letting your directed thoughts echo what somebody else was saying so that a telepair acted almost like a microphone and a speaker. I suppose he was doing the same at the other end, echoing the Captain’s words to the family a split second behind me-it’s not hard with practice.
The Captain said, “The Henry is on her final run-down
… ten seconds…
five seconds… now!”
I saw something like heat lightning even though
I was in a closed room. For a few seconds there was a sound over the speaker like sleet on a window, soft and sibilant and far away. Pat said, “Boy!”
(“What is it, Pat?”)
“She got up out of there as if she had sat on a bee. Just a hole in the water and a flash of light. Wait a sec-they’re shifting the view pick-up from the space station
to Luna.”
(“You’ve got a lot better view than I have. All I can see is the ceiling of this room.”)
The female voice said, “Mr. Warner! Miss Furtney! Tween-ships telepairs start recording.”
The Captain said, “All hands, ready for boost. Stand by for count down,”
and another voice started in, “Sixty seconds … fifty-five … fifty … forty-five … holding on-forty-five … holding forty-five… holding…
holding…”
-until I was ready to scream.
“Tom, what’s wrong?” (“How should I know?”)
“Forty… thirty-five … thirty…”
“Tom, Mum wants me to tell you to be very careful.”
(“What does she think I can do? I’m just lying here, strapped down.”)
“I know.” Pat chuckled. “Hang on tight to the brush, you lucky stiff; they are about to take away the ladder.”
“… four!… Three!… Two!… ONE!”
I didn’t see a flash, I didn’t hear anything. I simply got very heavy-like being on the bottom of a football pile-up.
“There’s nothing but steam where you were.” I didn’t answer, I was having trouble breathing.
“They’ve shifted the pick-up.
They’re following you with a telephoto now. Tom, you ought to see this … you look just like a sun. It burns the rest of the picture
right out of the tank.”
(“How can I see it?”)
I said crossly. (“I’m in it.’) “You sound choked up. Are you all right?”
(“You’d sound choked, too, if you had sand bags piled across your chest.”) “Is it bad?”
(“It’s not good. But it’s all right, I guess.”)
Pat let up on me and did a right good job of describing what he was seeing by television. The Richard
E. Byrd took off just after we did, before we had finished the high boost to get escape velocity from Earth; he told me all about it. I didn’t have anything to say anyhow; I couldn’t see anything and I didn’t feel like chattering. I just wanted to hold still and feel miserable.
I suppose it was only six minutes but it felt more like
an hour. After a long, long time, when I had decided the controls were jammed and we were going to keep on at high boost until we passed the speed of light, the pressure suddenly relaxed and I felt light as a snowflake … if it hadn’t been for the straps I would have floated up to the ceiling.
“We have reduced to one hundred and ten per cent of one gravity,” the Captain said cheerfully. “Our cruising boost will be higher, but we will give the newcomers among us a while to get used to it.” His
tone changed and he said briskly, “All stations, secure from blast-off and set space watches, third section.”
I loosened my straps and sat up and then stood up. Maybe we were ten per cent heavy, but it did not feel like it; I felt fine. I started for the door, intending to look around more than I had been able to when
I came aboard.
Dusty Rhodes yelled at me. “Hey! Come back here and unstrap me! That moron fastened the buckles
out of my reach.”
I turned and looked at him. “Say ‘please.’“
What Dusty answered was not “please.” Nevertheless I let him loose. I should have made him say it; it might have saved trouble later.
VII 19,900 WAYS
The first thing that happened in the L.C. made me think I was dreaming-I
ran into Uncle Steve.
I was walking along the circular passageway that joined the staterooms on my deck and looking for the passage inboard, toward the axis of the ship. As I turned the comer I bumped into someone. I said,
“Excuse me,” and started to go past when the other person grabbed my arm and clapped me on the shoulder. I looked up and it was Uncle Steve, grinning and shouting at me. “Hi, shipmate! Welcome aboard!”
“Uncle Steve! What are you doing here?”
“Special assignment from the General Staff … to keep you out of trouble.” “Huh?”
There was no mystery when he explained. Uncle Steve had known
for a month that his application for special discharge to take service with the LRF for Project Lebensraum had been approved; he had not told the family but had spent the time working a swap to permit him to be in the same ship as Pat-or, as
it
turned out, the one I was in.
“I thought
your mother might take it easier if she knew I was keeping an eye on her boy. You can tell her about it the next time you are hooked in with your twin.”
“I’ll tell her
now,” I answered and gave a yell in my mind for Pat. He did not seem terribly interested; I guess a reaction was setting in and he was sore at me for being where he had expected to be. But Mother was there and he said he would tell her. “Okay, she knows.”
Uncle Steve looked at me oddly. “Is it as easy as that?”
I explained that it was just like talking … a little faster, maybe, since you can think words faster than
you
can talk, once you are used to it. But he stopped me. “Never mind. You’re trying to explain color to a blind man. I just wanted Sis to know.”
“Well, okay.” Then I noticed that his uniform was different. The ribbons were the same and it was an
LRF
company uniform, like my own, which did not surprise me-but his chevrons
were gone: “Uncle Steve … you’re wearing major’s leaves!”
He nodded. “Home town boy makes good. Hard work, clean living, and so on.” “Gee, that’s swell!”
“They transferred me at my reserve rank, son, plus one bump for exceptionally neat test papers. Fact is, if I had stayed with the Corps, I would have retired as a ship’s sergeant at best-there’s no promotion in peacetime. But the Project was looking for certain men, not certain ranks, and I happened to have the right number of hands and feet for the job.”
“Just what is your job, Uncle?” “Commander of the ship’s guard.” “Huh? What have you got to guard?”
“That’s a good question. Ask me in a year
or two and I can give you a better
answer. Actually,
‘Commander Landing Force’ would be a better title. When we locate a likely looking planet-’when and if,’ I mean-I’m the laddie who gets
to
go out and check the lay of the land and whether the natives are friendly while you valuable types stay safe and snug in the ship.” He glanced at his wrist. “Let’s go to
chow.”
I wasn’t hungry and wanted to look around,
but Uncle Steve took me firmly by the arm and headed for
the
mess room. “When you have soldiered as long as I have, lad, you will learn that you sleep when you get a chance and that you are never late for chow line.”
It actually was a chow line, cafeteria style. The L.C. did not run to table waiters nor to personal service of any sort, except for the Captain and people on watch. We went through
the line and I found that I
was hungry after all. That meal only, Uncle Steve took me ever to the heads-of-departments table. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is my nephew with two heads, Tom Bartlett. He left his other head dirtside-
he’s a telepair twin. If he does anything he shouldn’t, don’t tell me, just clobber him.” He glanced at me; I was turning red. “Say ‘howdy,’ son … or just nod if you
can’t talk.”
I nodded and sat down. A sweet old girl with the sort of lap babies like to sit on was next to me. She smiled and said, “Glad to have you with us, Tom.” I learned that she was the Chief Ecologist. Her name was Dr. O’Toole, only nobody called her that, and she was married to one of the relativists.
Uncle Steve went around the table, pointing out who was who and what they did: the Chief Engineer.
the
Relativist (Uncle Steve called him the “Astrogator” as the job would be called in an ordinary ship),
Chief Planetologist Harry Gates and the Staff Xenologist, and so forth-I couldn’t remember the names at the time-and Reserve Captain Urqhardt. I didn’t catch the word “reserve” and was surprised at how young he was. But Uncle Steve corrected me: “No, no! He’s not the Captain. He’s the man who will be captain if it turns out we need a spare. Across from you is the Surgeon-don’t let that fool you, either; he never does surgery himself. Dr. Devereaux is the boss head-shrinker.”
I looked puzzled and Uncle Steve went on, “You don’t savvy? Psychiatrist. Doc Dev is watching every
move we make, trying to decide how quick he will have to be with the straitjacket and the needle. Correct, Doc?”
Dr. Devereaux buttered a roll. “Essentially, Major. But finish your meal; we’re not coming for you until later in the day.” He was a fat little toad, ugly as could be, and with a placid, unbreakable calm. He
went on, “I just had an
up setting thought, Major.”
“I thought
that thoughts never upset you?”
“Consider. Here I am charged with keeping quaint characters like you sane … but they forgot to assign anybody to keep me sane. What should I do?”
“Mmm…” Uncle Steve seemed to study it. “I didn’t know that head-shrinkers were supposed to be sane, themselves.”
Dr. Devereaux nodded. “You’ve put your finger on it. As in your profession, Major, being crazy is an asset. Pass the salt, please.”
Uncle Steve shut up and pretended to wipe off blood.
A man came in and sat down; Uncle Steve introduced me and said, “Staff Commander Frick, the Communications Officer. Your boss, Tom.”
Commander Frick nodded and said, “Aren’t you third section, young man?” “Uh, I don’t know, sir.”
“I do … and you should have known. Report to the communications office.” “Uh, you mean now, sir?”
“Right away. You are a half hour late.”
I
said, “Excuse me,” and got up in a hurry, feeling silly. I glanced at Uncle Steve but he wasn’t looking
my
way; he seemed not to have heard it.
The communications office was two decks up, right under the control room; I had trouble finding it. Van Houten was there and Mei-Ling and a man whose name was Travers, who was communicator-of-
the-watch. Mei-Ling was reading a sheaf of papers and did not look up; I knew that she was
telepathing. Van said, “Where the deuce have you been? I’m hungry.”
“I didn’t know,” I protested.
“You’re supposed to know.”
He left and I turned to Mr. Travers. “What do you want me to do?”
He was threading a roll of tape into an autotransmitter; he finished before he answered me. “Take that stack of traffic as she finishes it, and do whatever it is you do with it. Not that it matters.”
“You mean read it to my twin?” “That’s what I said.”
“Do you want him to record?”
“Traffic is always recorded. Didn’t they teach you anything?”
I thought about explaining that they really hadn’t because
there had not been time, when I thought, oh
what’s the use? He probably thought I was Pat and assumed that I had had the full course. I picked up papers Mei-Ling was through
with and sat down.
But Travers went on talking. “I don’t know what you freaks are up here for now anyhow. You’re not needed; we’re still in radio range.”
I put the papers down and stood up: “Don’t call us ‘freaks.’
“
He glanced at me and said, “my, how tall you’ve grown. Sit down and get to work.”
We were about the same height but he was ten years older and maybe thirty pounds
heavier. I might have passed it by if we had been alone, but not with Mei-Ling present.
“I said not to call us ‘freaks.’ It’s not polite.”
He looked tired and not amused but he didn’t stand up. I decided he didn’t want a fight and felt relieved. “All right, all right,” he answered. “Don’t be so touchy. Get busy on that traffic.”
I sat down and looked over the stuff I had to send, then called Pat and told him to start his recorder; this was not a practice message.
He answered, “Call back in half an hour. I’m eating dinner.”
(“I was eating lunch but I didn’t get to finish. Quit stalling, Pat. Take a look at that contract you were so anxious to sign.”)
“You were just as anxious. What’s the matter, kid? Cold feet already?”
(“Maybe, maybe not. I’ve got a hunch that this isn’t going to be one long happy picnic. But I’ve learned one thing already; when the Captain sends for a bucket of paint, he wants a full bucket and no excuses. So switch on that recorder and stand by to take down figures.”)
Pat muttered and gave in, then announced that he was ready after a delay that was almost certainly caused by Mother insisting that he finish dinner. “Ready.”
The traffic was almost entirely figures (concerning the take-off, I suppose) and code. Being such, I had
to have Pat repeat back everything. It was not hard, but it was tedious. The only message in clear was one
from the Captain, ordering roses sent to a Mrs. Detweiler in Brisbane and charged to his LRF
account, with a message: “Thanks for a wonderful farewell dinner.”
Nobody else sent personal messages; I guess they had left no loose ends back on Earth.
I thought about sending some roses to Maudie, but I didn’t want to do it through
Pat. It occurred to me that I could do it through Mei-Ling, then I remembered that, while I had money in the bank, I had appointed Pat my attorney; if I ordered them, he would have to okay the bill I decided not to cross any
bridges I had burned behind me.
Life aboard the L.C., or the Elsie as we called her, settled into a routine. The boost built up another
fifteen per cent which made me weigh a hundred and fifty-eight pounds; my legs ached until I got used to it-but I soon did; there are advantages in being kind of skinny. We freaks stood a watch in five, two
at
a time-Miss Gamma and Cas Warner were not on our list because
they hooked sidewise with other
ships. At first we had a lot of spare time, but the Captain put a stop to that.
Knowing that the LRF did not really expect us to return, I had not thought much about that clause in the contract which provided for tutoring during the trip but I found out that the Captain did not intend
to
forget it. There was school for everybody, not just for us telepaths
who
were still of school
age. He appointed Dr. Devereaux, Mrs. O’Toole, and Mr. Krishnamurti a school board and courses were offered in practically everything, from life drawing to ancient history. The Captain himself taught
that last one; it turned out he knew Sargon the Second and Socrates like brothers.
Uncle Alfred tried to sign up for everything, which was impossible, even if he didn’t eat, sleep, nor
stand watch. He had never, he told me, had time for all the schooling he wanted and now at last he was going to get it. Even my real uncle, Steve, signed up for a couple of courses. I guess I showed surprise at this, for he said, “Look,
Tom, I found out my first cruise that the only way to make space bearable is
to
have something to learn and learn it. I used to take correspondence courses. But this bucket has the finest assemblage of really bright minds you are ever likely to see. If you don’t take advantage of it, you are an idiot. Mama O’Toole’s cooking course, for example: where else can you find a Cordon
Bleu graduate willing to teach you her high art free? I ask you!”
I objected
that I would never need to know how to cook high cuisine.
“What’s that got to do with it? Learning isn’t a means to an end; it is an end in itself. Look at Uncle Alf. He’s as happy as a boy with a new slingshot. Anyhow, if you
don’t sign up for a stiff course, old
Doc Devereaux will find some way to keep you busy, even if it is counting rivets. Why do you think the Captain made him chairman of the board of education?”
“I hadn’t thought about it. “
“Well, think about it. The greatest menace in space is going coffin crazy. You are shut up for a long
time in a small space and these is nothing outside but some mighty thin vacuum … no street lights, no bowling alleys. Inside are the same old faces and you start hating them. So a smart captain makes sure you have something to keep you interested and tired-and ours is the smartest you’ll find or he wouldn’t be on this trip.”
I began to realize that a lot of arrangements in the Elsie were simply to see that we stayed healthy and
reasonably happy. Not just school, but other things. Take the number we bad aboard, for example- almost two hundred. Uncle Steve told me that the Elsie could function as a ship with about ten: a captain, three control officers, three engineer officers, one communicator, one farmer, and a cook.
Shucks, you could cut that to five: two control officers (one in command), two torch watchstanders, and a farmer-cook.
Then why two hundred?
In the first place there was room enough.
The Elsie and the other ships had been rebuilt from the enormous freighters the LRF use to haul supplies out to Pluto and core material back to Earth. In the second place they needed a big scientific staff to investigate the planets we hoped to find. In the third place some were spare parts, like Reserve Captain Urqhardt and, well, me myself. Some of us would die or get killed; the ship had to go on.
But the real point, as I found out, is that no small, isolated social group can be stable. They even have a mathematics for it, with empirical formulas and symbols for “lateral pressures” and “exchange valences” and “exogamic relief.” (That last simply means that the young men of a small village should
find wives outside the village.)
Or look at it this way. Suppose you had a one-man space ship which could cruise alone for several years. Only a man who was already nutty a certain way could run it-otherwise he would soon go
squirrelly some other way and start tearing the controls off the panels. Make it a two-man ship: even if
you
used a couple as fond of each other
as
Romeo and Juliet, by the end of the trip even Juliet would
start showing black-widow blood.
Three is as bad or worse, particularly if they gang up two against one. Big numbers are much safer. Even with only two hundred people there are exactly nineteen thousand nine hundred ways to pair them off, either as friends or enemies, so you see that the social possibilities shoot up rapidly when you increase the numbers. A bigger group means more chances to find friends and more ways to avoid people you don’t like. This is terribly important aboard ship.
Besides elective courses we had required ones called “ship’s training”-by which the Captain meant that every body had to learn at least
one job he had
not signed up for. I stood two watches down in the damping room, whereupon Chief Engineer Roch stated in writing that he did not think that I would
ever make a torcher as I seemed to have an innate lack of talent for nuclear physics. As a matter of fact it made me nervous
to be that close to an atomic power plant and to realize the unleashed hell that was going on a few feet away from me.
I did not make out much better as a farmer, either. I spent two weeks in the air-conditioning plant and
the
only thing I did right was to feed the chickens. When they caught me cross-pollinating the wrong way some squash plants which were special pets of Mrs. O’Toole, she let me go, more in sorrow
than in anger. “Tom,” she said, “what do you do well?”
I thought about it. “Uh, I can wash bottles… and I used to raise hamsters.”
So she sent me over to the research department and I washed beakers in the chem lab and fed the experimental animals. The beakers were unbreakable. They wouldn’t let me touch the electron microscope. It wasn’t bad-I could have been assigned to the laundry.
Out of the 19,900 combinations possible in the Elsie, Dusty Rhodes and I were one of the wrong ones.
I hadn’t signed up for the life sketching class because he was teaching it; the little wart really was a fine draftsman. I know, I’m pretty good at it myself and I would have liked to have been in that class. What was worse, he had an offensively high I.Q., genius plus, much higher than mine, and he could argue rings around me. Along with that he had the manners of a pig and the social graces of a skunk-a bad go, any way you looked at
it.
“Please” and “Thank you” weren’t in his vocabulary. He never made his bed unless someone in
authority stood over him, and I was likely as not to come in and find him lying on mine, wrinkling it and getting the cover
dirty. He never hung up his clothes, he always left our wash basin filthy, and his best mood was complete silence.
Besides that, he didn’t bathe often enough.
Aboard ship that is a crime.
First I was nice to him, then I bawled him out, then I threatened him. Finally I told him that the next thing of his I found on my bed was going straight into the mass converter. He just sneered and the next day I found his camera on my bed and his dirty socks on my pillow.
I tossed the socks into the wash basin, which he had left filled with dirty water, and locked his camera in my wardrobe, intending to let him stew before I gave it back.
He didn’t squawk. Presently I found his camera gone from my wardrobe, in spite of the fact that it was locked with a combination which Messrs. Yale &
Towne had light-heartedly described as
“Invulnerable.” My clean shirts were gone, too … that is, they weren’t clean;
somebody had carefully dirtied every one of them.
I had not complained about him. It had become a point of pride to work it out myself; the idea that I
could not cope with somebody half my size and years my junior did not appeal to me.
But I looked at the mess he had made of my clothes and I said to myself, “Thomas Paine, you had
better admit that you are licked and holler for help-else your only chance will be to plead justifiable homicide.”
But I did not have to complain. The Captain sent for me; Dusty had complained about me instead. “Bartlett, young Rhodes tells me you are picking on him. What’s the situation from your point of
view?”
I started to swell up and explode. Then I let out my breath and tried to calm down; the Captain really
wanted to know.
“I don’t think so, sir, though it is true that we have not been getting along.” “Have you laid hands on him?”
“Uh … I haven’t smacked him, sir. I’ve jerked him off my bed more than once-and I wasn’t gentle about it.”
He sighed. “Maybe you should have smacked him. Out of my sight, of course. Well, tell me about it. Try to tell it straight-and complete.”
So I told him. It sounded trivial and I began to be ashamed of myself …
the Captain had more important things to worry about than whether
or not I had to scrub out a hand basin before I could wash
my
face. But he listened.
Instead of commenting,
maybe telling me that I should be able to handle a younger kid better, the Captain changed the subject.
“Bartlett, you saw that illustration Dusty had in the ship’s paper this morning?”
“Yes, sir. A real beauty,” I admitted. It was a picture of the big earthquake in Santiago,
which had happened after we left Earth.
“Mmm… we have to allow you special-talent people a little leeway. Young Dusty is along because he was the only m-r available who could receive and transmit pictures.”
“Uh, is that important, sir?”
“It could be. We won’t know until we need it. But it could be crucially important. Otherwise I would
never have permitted a spoiled brat to come aboard this ship.” He frowned. “However, Dr. Devereaux
is
of the opinion that Dusty is not a pathological ease.”
“Uh, I never
said he was, sir.”
“Listen, please. He says that the boy has an unbalanced personality-a brain that would do credit to a grown man but with greatly retarded social development. His attitudes and evaluations would suit a boy of five, combined with this clever brain. Furthermore Dr. Devereaux says that he will force the childish
part of Dusty’s personality to grow up, or he’ll turn in his sheepskin.”
“So? I mean, “Yes, sir?’ “
“So you should have smacked him. The only thing wrong with that boy is that his parents should have walloped him, instead of telling him how bright he was.” He sighed again.
“Now I’ve got to do it. Dr. Devereaux tells me I’m the appropriate father image.” “Yes, sir.”
“
‘Yes, sir,’ my aching head. This isn’t a ship; it’s a confounded nursery. Are you having any other
troubles?”
“No, sir.”
“I wondered. Dusty also complained that the regular communicators call you people ‘freaks.’ “ He eyed me.
I didn’t answer. I felt sheepish about it.
“In any case, they won’t again. I once saw a crewman try to knife another one, just because the other persisted in calling him ‘skin head.’ My people are going to behave like ladies and gentlemen or I’ll bang some heads together.” He frowned. “I’m moving Dusty into the room across
from my cabin. If Dusty will leave you alone, you let him alone. If he won’t … well, use your judgment, bearing in mind
that you are responsible for your actions-but
remember that I don’t expect any man to be a doormat. That’s all. Good-by.”
VIII RELATIVITY
I had been in the Elsie a week when it was decided to operate on Pat. Pat told me they were going to do it, but he did not talk about it much. His attitude was the old iron-man, as if he meant to eat peanuts and read comics while they were chopping on him. I think he was scared stiff … I would have been.
Not that I would have understood if I had known the details; I’m no neural surgeon, nor any sort; removing a splinter is about my speed.
But it meant we would be off the watch list for a while, so I told Commander Frick. He already knew
from
messages passed between the ship and LRF; he told me to drop off the watch list the day before my brother was operated and to consider myself available for extra duty during his convalescence. It did not make any difference to him; not only were there other
telepairs but we were still radio-linked to
Earth.
Two weeks after we started spacing
and the day before Pat was to be cut on I was sitting
in my room, wondering whether to go to the communications office and offer my valuable services in cleaning
waste baskets and microfilming files or just sit tight until somebody sent for me.
I had decided on the latter, remembering Uncle Steve’s advice never to volunteer, and was letting down
my bunk, when the squawker boomed: “T. P. Bartlett, special communicator, report to the Relativist!”
I hooked my bunk up while wandering if there was an Eye-Spy concealed in my room-taking down my
bunk during working hours seemed always to result in my being paged. Dr. Babcock was not in the control room and they chased me out, but not before I took a quick look around-the control room was off limits to anyone who did not work there. I found him down in the computation room across from the communications office, where I would have looked in the first place if I hadn’t wanted to see the control room.
I said, “T. P. Bartlett, communicator tenth grade, reporting to the Relativist as ordered.”
Dr. Babcock swung around in his chair
and
looked at me. He was a big raw-boned man,
all hands and feet, and looked more like a lumberjack than a mathematical physicist. I think he played it up-you know, elbows on the table and bad grammar on purpose. Uncle Steve said Babcock had more honorary degrees than most people had socks.
He stared at me and laughed. “Where did you get that fake military manner, son? Siddown. You’re Bartlett?”
I sat. “Yes, sir.”
“What’s this about you and your twin going off the duty list?”
“Well, my brother is in a hospital, sir. They’re going to do something to his spine tomorrow.” “Why didn’t you tell me?” I didn’t answer because it was so unreasonable; I wasn’t even in his
department. “Frick never tells me anything, the Captain never tells me anything, now you never tell me anything. I have to bang around the galley and pick up gossip to find out
what’s going on. I was
planning on working you over tomorrow. You know that don’t you?”
“Uh, no, sir.”
“Of course you don’t, became I never tell anybody anything either. What a way to run a ship! I should have stayed in Vienna. There’s a nice town. Ever have coffee and pastries in the Ring?” He didn’t wait
for an answer. “Nevertheless I was going to work you and your twin over tomorrow-so now we’ll have to do it today. Tell him to stand by.”
“Uh; what do you want him to do, Doctor? He’s already been moved to a hospital.”
“Just tell him to stand by. I’m going, to calibrate you two, that’s what. Figure out your index error.” “Sir?”
“Just tell him-”
So I called Pat. I hadn’t spoken to him since breakfast; I wondered how he was going to take it But he already knew. “Yes, yes,” he said in a tired voice.
“They’re setting up apparatus in my hospital room right now.
Mother made such a fuss I had to send her
out.”
(“Look, Pat, if you don’t want to do this, whatever it is, I’ll tell
them nothing doing. It’s an
imposition.”)
“What difference does it make?” he said irritably. “I’ve got to sweat out the next sixteen hours
somehow. Anyhow, this
may be the last time we work together.”
It was the first time he had shown that it was affecting his nerve. I said hastily, (“Don’t talk that way, Pat. You’re going to get well. You’re going to walk again. Shucks, you’ll even be able to ski if you want to.”)
“Don’t give me that Cheerful Charlie stuff. I’m getting more of it from the folks than I can use. It makes me want to throw up.”
(“Now see here, Pat-”)
“Stow it, stow it! Let’s get on with what they want us to do.” (“Well, all right.”) I spoke aloud: “He’s ready, Doctor.”
“Half a minute. Start your camera, O’Toole.” Dr. Babcock touched something on his desk.
“Commander Frick?”
“Yes, Doctor,” Frick’s voice answered.
“We’re ready. You coming in?”
“All set here,” I heard my boss answer. “We’ll come in.”
A moment later he entered, with Anna Horoshen. In the meantime I took a look around.
One whole wall of the computation room was a computer, smaller than the one at Los Alamos but not much. The blinking lights must have meant something to somebody. Sitting at right angles to it at a console was
Mr.
O’Toole and above the console was a big display scope; at about one-second intervals a flash of
light would peak in the center
of it.
Anna nodded without
speaking; I knew she must be linked. Pat said, “Tom, you’ve got a girl named
Anna Horoshen aboard: Is she around?”
(“Yes. Why?”)
“Say hello to her for me-1 knew her in Zurich. Her sister Becky is here.” He chuckled and I felt better. “Good looking babes, aren’t they? Maudie is jealous.”
Babcock said to Frick, “Tell them to stand by. First synchronizing run, starting from their end.”
“Tell them, Anna,”
She nodded. I wondered why they bothered with a second telepair when they could talk through myself and Pat. I soon found out: Pat and I were too busy.
Pat was sounding out ticks like a clock; I was told to repeat them… and every time I did another peak
of light flashed on the display scope. Babcock watched it, then turned me around so that I couldn’t see and taped a microphone to my voice box. “Again.”
Pat said, “Stand by-” and started ticking again. I did my best to tick right with him but it was the silliest performance possible. I heard Babcock say quietly, “That cut out the feedback and the speed-of- sound lag. I wish there were some way to measure the synaptic rate arose closely.”
Frick said, “Have you talked to Dev about it?” I went on ticking.
“A reverse run now, young lady,” Babcock said, and slipped headphones on me. I immediately heard a ticking like the ticks Pat had been sending. “That’s a spectral metronome you’re listening to, young fellow, timed by monochrome light. It was synchronized with the one your brother is using before we left Earth. Now start ticking at him,”
So I did. It had a hypnotic quality; it was easier
to
get into step and tick with it than it was to get out of step. It was impossible to ignore it. I began to get sleepy but I kept on ticking; I couldn’t stop.
“End of run,” Babcock announced. The ticking stopped and I rubbed my ears.
“Dr. Babcock?”
“ “Huh?”
“How can you tell one tick from another?”
“Eh? You can’t. But O’Toole can, he’s got it all down on film. Same at the other end. Don’t worry
about it; just try to stay in time.”
This silliness continued for more than an hour, sometimes with Pat sending, sometimes myself. At last O’Toole looked up and said, “Fatigue factor is cooking our goose, Doc. The second differences are running all over the lot.”
“Okay, that’s all,” Babcock announced. He turned to me. “You can thank your brother
for me and sign off.”
Commander Frick and Anna left. I hung around.
Presently Dr. Babcock looked up from his desk and said, “You can go, bub. Thanks.”
“Uh, Dr. Babcock?” “Huh? Speak up.”
“Would you mind telling me what this is all about?”
He looked surprised, then said, “Sorry. I’m not used to using people instead of instruments; I forget.
Okay, sit down. This is why you m-r people were brought along: for research into the nature of time.”
I stared. “Sir? I thought we were along to report back on the planets we expect to find.”
“Oh, that- Well, I suppose so, but this is much more important. There are too many people as it is; why
encourage new colonies? A mathematician could solve the population problem in jig time-just shoot every other one.”
Mr. O’Toole said, without looking up, “The thing I like about you, Chief, is your big warm heart.” “Quiet in the gallery, please. Now today, son, we have been trying to find out what time it is.”
I
must have looked as puzzled as I felt for he went on, “Oh, we know what time it is … but too many
different ways. See that?” He pointed at the display scope, still tirelessly making a peak every second. “That’s the Greenwich time tick, pulled in by radio and corrected for relative speed and change of
speed. Then there is the time you were hearing over the earphones; that is the time the ship runs by. Then there is the time you were getting from your brother and passing to us. We’re trying to compare them all, but the trouble is that we have to have people in the circuit and, while a tenth of a second is a short time for the human nervous system, a microsecond is a measurably long time in physics. Any radar system splits up a
microsecond as easily as you slice a pound of butter. So we use a lot of runs to
try to even out our ignorance.”
“Yes, but what do you expect to find out?”
“If I ‘expected,’ I wouldn’t be doing it. But you might say that we are trying to find out what the word “simultaneous” means.”
Mr. O’Toole looked up from the console. “If it means anything,” he amended.
Dr. Babcock glanced at him. “You still here? ‘If it means anything.’ Son, ever since the great Doctor Einstein, ‘simultaneous’ and ‘simultaneity’ have been dirty words to physicists. We chucked the very
concept, denied that it had meaning, and built up a glorious structure of theoretical physics without it.
Then you mind readers came along and kicked it over. Oh, don’t look guilty; every house
needs a housecleaning now and then. If you folks had done your
carnival stunt at just the speed of light, we would have assigned you a place in the files and forgotten you. But you rudely insisted on doing it at something enormously greater than the speed of light, which made you as welcome as a pig at a wedding. You’ve
split us physicists into two schools, those who want to class you as a purely psychological phenomenon and no business of physics-these are the ‘close your eyes and it will go away’ boys-and a second school which realizes that since measurements can be made of whatever this is you do, it is therefore the business of physics to measure and include
it … since physics is, above all,
the
trade of measuring things and assigning definite numerical values to them.”
O’Toole said, “Don’t wax philosophical, Chief.”
“You get back to your numbers, O’Toole; you have no soul These laddies want to measure how fast you do it. They don’t care how fast-they’ve already recovered from the blow that you do it faster than light-but they want to know exactly how fast. They can’t accept the idea that you do it ‘instantaneously,’ for that would require them to go to a different church entirely. They want to assign a definite speed of propagation, such-and-such number of times faster than the speed of light. Then they
can
modify their old equations and go right on happily doing business at the old stand.”
“They will,” agreed O’Toole.
“Then there is a third school of thought, the right one…my own.” O’Toole, without looking up, made a rude noise.
“Is that your asthma coming back?” Babcock said anxiously. “By the way, you got any results?”
“They’re still doing it in nothing flat. Measured time negative as often as positive and never greater
than inherent observational error.”
“You see, son? That’s the correct school. Measure what happens and let the chips fly where they may.” “Hear hear!”
“Quiet, you renegade Irishman. Besides that, you m-r’s give us our first real chance to check another
matter. Are you familiar with the relativity transformations?”
“You mean the Einstein equations? “Surely. You know the one for time?”
I
thought hard Pat and I had taken first-year physics our freshman year; it had been quite a while. I
picked up a piece of paper and wrote down what I thought it was:
“That’s it,” agreed Dr. Babcock. “At a relative velocity of ‘v’ time interval at first frame of reference equals time interval at second frame of reference multiplied by the square root of one minus the square of the relative velocity divided by the square of the speed of light. That’s just the special case, of
course, for constant speeds; it is more complicated for acceleration. But there has been much
disagreement as to what the time equations meant, or if they meant anything.”
I blurted out, “Huh? But I thought
the Einstein theory had been proved?” It suddenly occurred to me that, if the relativity equations were wrong, we were going to be away a mighty long time-Tau Ceti, our first stop, was eleven light-years from the Sun… and that was just our first one; the others were a lot farther.
But everybody said that once we got up near the speed of light the months would breeze past like days.
The
equations said so.
“Attend me. How do you prove that there are eggs in a bird’s nest? Don’t strain your gray matter: go climb the tree and find out. There is no other way. Now we are climbing the tree.”
“Fine!” said O’Toole. “Go climb a tree.”
“Noisy in here. One school of thought
maintained that the equations simply meant that a clock would
read differently if you could read it from a passing star … which you can’t… but that there was no real stretching or shrinking of time-whatever ‘real’ means. Another school pointed to the companion equations for length and mass, maintaining that the famous Michelson-Morley experiment showed that the length transformation was ‘real’ and pointing out that the increase of mass was regularly computed and used for particle-accelerator ballistics and elsewhere in nuclear physics-for
example, in the torch
that pushes this ship. So, they reasoned, the change in time rates must be real, because
the corollary
equations worked in practice. But nobody knew. You have to climb the tree and look.”
“When will we know?” I was still worrying. Staying several years, Einstein time, in the ship I had
counted on. Getting killed in the course of it, the way Uncle Steve said we probably would, I refused to worry about. But dying of old age in the Elsie was not what I had counted on. It was a grim thought, a life sentence shut up inside these steel walls.
“When? Why, we know right now.” “You do? What’s the answer?”
“Don’t hurry me, son. We’ve been gone a couple of weeks, at a boost
of 124% of one gee; we’re up to
about 9,000 miles per second now. We still haven’t come far-call it seven and a half light-hours or
about 5,450,000,000 miles. It will be the better part of a year before we are crowding the speed of light. Nevertheless we have reached a sizable percentage of that speed, about five per cent; that’s enough to show. Easy to measure, with the aid of you mind readers.”
“Well, sir? Is it a real time difference? Or is it just relative?”
“You’re using the wrong words. But it’s ‘real,’ so far as the word means
anything. The ratio right now is about 99.9%.”
“To put it exactly,” added Mr. O’Toole, “Bartlett’s slippage-that’s a technical term I just invented-his
‘slippage’ in time rate from that of his twin has now reached twelve parts in ten thousand.”
“So you would make me a liar for one fiftieth of one per cent?” Babcock complained. “O’Toole, why did I let you come along?”
“So you would have some one to work your arithmetic,” his assistant answered smugly.
Pat told me he did not want me around when they operated, but I came anyway. I locked myself in my room so nobody could disturb me and stuck with him. He didn’t really object; whenever I spoke he answered and the it got to the deadline the more he talked… a cheerful babble about nothing and
everything. It did not fool me.
When they wheeled him into surgery, he said, “Tom, you should see my anesthetist. Pretty as a sunny
day
and just lap size.”
(“Isn’t her face covered with a mask?”)
“Well, not completely. I can see her pretty blue eyes. 1 think I’ll ask her what she’s doing tonight.” (“Maudie won’t like that.”)
“You keep Maudie out of this; a sick man is entitled to privileges. Wait a sec, I’ll ask her.” (“What did she say?”)
“She said, ‘Nothing much,’ and that I would be doing the same for a few days. But I’ll get her phone number.”
(“Two gets you five she won’t give it to you.”)
“Well, I can try… uh uh! Too late, they’re starting in … Tom, you wouldn’t believe this needle; it’s the size of an air
hose. She says she wants me to count. Okay, anything for a laugh… one … two… three…”
Pat got up to seven and I counted with him. All the way through
I kept winding up tighter and tighter to unbearable tension and fear. I knew now what he apparently had been sure of all along,
that he was
not coming out of it. At the count of seven he lost track but his mind did not go silent. Maybe those around
the operating table thought they had him unconscious but I knew better; he was trapped inside and screaming to get out.
I called to him and he called back but we couldn’t find each other. Then I was as trapped and lost and
confused as he was and we groped around in the dark and the cold and the aloneness of the place where you die.
Then I felt the knife whittling at my back and I screamed.
The next thing I remember is a couple of faces floating over me. Somebody said, “I think he’s coming around, Doctor.” The voice did not belong
to anyone; it was a long way off.
Then there was just one face and it said, “Feeling better?” “I guess so. What happened?”
“Drink this. Here, I’ll hold up your head.”
When I woke up again I felt fairly wide awake and could see that I was in the ship’s infirmary. Dr.
Devereaux was there, looking at me. “You decided to come out of it, young fellow?”
“Out of what, Doctor? What happened?”
“I don’t know precisely, but you gave a perfect clinical picture of a patient terminating in surgical shock. By the time we broke
the lock on your door, you were far gone-you gave us a bad time. Can you tell me about it?”
I tried to think, then I remembered. Pat!
I called him in my mind. (“Pat! Where are you, boy?”)
He didn’t answer. I tried again and he still didn’t answer, so I knew. I sat up and managed to choke out,
“My brother … he died!”
Dr. Devereaux said, “Wups! Take it easy. Lie down. He’s not dead … unless he died in the last ten
minutes, which I doubt.”
“But I can’t reach him!
How
do you know? I can’t reach him, I tell you!”
“Come down off the ceiling. Because I’ve been checking on him all morning via the m-r’s on watch.
He’s resting
easily under an eighth grain of hypnal, which is why you can’t raise him. I may be stupid,
son-I was stupid, not to warn you to stay out of it-but I’ve been tinkering with the human mind long enough to figure out approximately what happened to you, given the circumstances. My only excuse is
that I have never encountered such circumstances before.”
I quieted a little. It made sense that I couldn’t wake Pat if they had him under drugs.
Under Dr. Devereaux’s questions I managed to tell him more or less what had happened-not perfectly, because you can’t really tell someone else what goes on inside your head. “Uh, was the operation successful,
Doctor?”
“The patient came through in good shape. We’ll talk about it later. Now turn over.” “Huh?”
“Turn over. I want to take a look at your back.”
He looked at it, then called two of his staff to see it. Presently he touched me. “Does that hurt?” “Ouch! Uh, yes, it’s pretty tender. What’s wrong with my back, Doctor?”
“Nothing, really. But you’ve got two perfect stigmata, just matching the incisions for Macdougal’s operation … which is the technique they used on your brother.”
“Uh, what does that mean?”
“It means that the human mind is complicated and we don’t know much about it. Now roll over and go to sleep. I’m going to keep you in bed a couple of days.”
I didn’t intend to go to sleep but I did. I was awakened by Pat calling me. “Hey, Tom! Where are you? Snap out of it.”
(“I’m right here. What’s the matter?”) “Tom… I’ve got my legs back!”
I answered, (“Yeah, I know,”) and went back to sleep.
IX RELATIVES
Once Pat was over his paralysis I should have had the world by the tail, for I had everything I wanted. Somehow it did not work that way. Before he was hurt, I had known why I was down in the dumps: it was because
he was going and I wasn’t. After he was hurt, I felt guilty because I was getting
what I wanted through
his misfortune. It didn’t seem right to be happy when he was crippled-especially when his crippled condition had got me what I wanted.
So I should have been happy once he was well again.
Were you ever at a party where you were supposed to be having fun and suddenly you realized that you
weren’t? No reason, just no fun and the whole world gray and tasteless?
Some of the things that were putting me off my feed I could see. First there had been Dusty, but that had been cleared up. Then there had been the matter of other people, especially the electron pushers we stood watch with, calling us freaks and other names and acting as if we were. But the Captain had
tromped on that, too, and when we got better acquainted people forgot about such things. One of the relativists, Janet Meers, was a lightning calculator, which made her a freak, too, but everybody took it for granted in her and after a while they took what we did for granted.
After we got out of radio range of Earth the Captain took us out from under Commander Frick and set us up as a department of our own, with “Uncle” Alfred McNeil as head of department and Rupert Hauptman as his assistant-which meant that Rupe kept the watch list while Uncle Alf was in charge of our
mess table and sort of kept us in line. We liked old Unc too well to give him much trouble and if
somebody did get out of line Unc would look sad and the rest of us would slap the culprit down. It worked.
I think Dr. Devereaux recommended it to the Captain. The fact was that Commander Frick resented us.
He was an electrical engineer and had spent his whole life on better and better communication
equipment … then we came along and did it better and faster with no equipment at all. I don’t blame him; I would have been sore, too. But we got along better with Uncle Alf.
I suppose that the Vasco da Gama was part of my trouble. The worst thing about space travel is that absolutely nothing happens. Consequently the biggest event in our day was the morning paper. All day
long each mind reader on watch (when not busy with traffic, which wasn’t much) would copy news. We got the news services free and all the features and Dusty would dress it up by copying pictures sent by his twin Rusty. The communicator on the midwatch would edit it and the m-r and the communicator on
the early morning watch would print it and have it in the mess room by breakfast.
There was no limit to the amount of copy we could have; it was just a question of how much so few people could prepare. Besides Solar System news we carried ships’ news, not only of the Elsie but of
the
eleven others. Everybody (except myself) knew people in the other ships. Either they had met them at Zurich, or the old spacehands, like the Captain and a lot of others, had friends
and acquaintances
reaching back for years.
It was mostly social news, but we enjoyed it more than news from Earth and the System, because we felt closer to the ships in the fleet, even though they were billions of miles away and getting farther by
the
second. When Ray Gilberti and Sumire Watanabe got married in the Leif Ericsson, every ship in the fleet held a celebration. When a baby was born in the Pinta and our Captain was named godfather, it made us all proud.
We were hooked to the Vasco da Gama through Cas Warner, and Miss Gamma Furtney linked us with the Marco Polo and the Santa Maria through
her triplets Miss Alpha and Miss Beta, but we got news
from all the ships by pass-down-the-line. Fleet news was never cut, even if dirtside news had to be. As it was, Mama O’Toole complained that if the editions got any larger, she would either have to issue clean sheets and pillow cases only once a week or engineering would have to build her another laundry
just to wash newspapers. Nevertheless, the ecology department always had clean paper ready, freshly
pressed, for each edition.
We even put out an occasional extra, like the time Lucille LaVonne won “Miss Solar System” and Dusty did a pic of her so perfect you would have sworn it was a photograph. We lost some paper from that as quite a number of people kept their copies for pin-ups
instead of turning them back for reclamation-I did myself. I even got Dusty to autograph it. It startled him but pleased him even though
he was rude about
it-an artist is entitled to credit for his work, I say, even if
he is a poisonous
little squirt.
What I am trying in say is that the Elsie Times was the high point of each day and fleet news was the most important part of it.
I had not been on watch the night before; nevertheless, I was late for breakfast. When I hurried in,
everybody was busy with his copy of the Times
as
usual-but nobody was eating.
I sat down between Van and Prudence and said, “What’s the matter? What’s aching everybody?”
Pru silently handed me a copy of the Times.
The first page was bordered in black. There were oversize headlines: VASCO DA GAMA LOST I couldn’t believe it. The Vasco was headed out for Alpha Centauri but she wouldn’t get there for
another four years, Earth time; she wasn’t even close to the speed of light. There was nothing to have may trouble with, out where she was. It must be a mistake.
I turned to see-story-on-page-two. There was a boxed dispatch from the Commodore in the Santa Maria: “(Official) At 0334 today Greenwich time TS Vasco da Gama (LRF 172) fell out of contact.
Two
special circuits were operating at the time, one Earthside and one to the Magellan. In both cases
transmission ceased without
warning in midst of message and at the same apparent instant by adjusted
times. The ship contained eleven special communicators; it has not proved possible to raise any of them. It must therefore be assumed that the ship is lost, with no survivors.”
The LRF dispatch merely admitted that the ship was out of contact. There was a statement by our
Captain and a longer news story which included comments from other ships; I read them but the whole story was in the headlines … the Vasco was gone wherever it is that ships go when they don’t come back.
I suddenly realized something and looked up. Cas Warner’s chair was empty. Uncle All caught my eye and said quietly, “He knows, Tom. The Captain woke him and told him soon after it happened. The only good thing about it is that he wasn’t linked with his brother when it happened.”
I wasn’t sure that Uncle Alf had the right slant. If Pat got it, I’d want to be with him when it happened,
wouldn’t I? Well, I thought I would. In any case I was sure that Unc would want to be holding Sugar
Pie’s hand if something happened and she had to make the big jump before he did. And Cas and his brother Caleb were close; I knew that.
Later that day the Captain held memorial services and Uncle Alfred preached a short sermon and we all sang the “Prayer for Travelers.” After that we pretended that there never had been a ship named the Vasco da Gama, but it was all pretense.
Cas moved from our table and Mama O’Toole put him to work as an assistant to her. Cas and his brother had been hotel men before LRF tapped them and Cas could be a lot of help to her; keeping a
ship with two hundred people in it in ecological balance is no small job. Goodness, just raising food for
two
hundred people would be a big job even if it did not have to be managed so as to maintain
atmospheric balance; just managing the yeast cultures and the hydroponics took all the time of nine people.
After a few weeks Cas was supervising entering and housekeeping and Mama O’Toole could give all of her time to the scientific and technical end-except that she continued to keep an eye on the cooking.
But the Vasco da Gama should not have made me brood;
I didn’t know anybody in that ship. If Cas
could pull out of it and lead a normal, useful life, I certainly should not have had the mulligrubs.
No, I think it was my birthday as much as anything.
The mess room had two big electric clocks in it, controlled from the relativists’ computation room, and two bank-style calendars over them. When we started out they were all right together, showing
Greenwich time and date. Then, as we continued to accelerate and our speed got closer to that of light,
the
“slippage” between Elsie and the Earth began to show and they got farther and farther out of phase.
At first we talked about it, but presently we didn’t notice the Greenwich set… for what good does it do
you
to know that it is now three in the morning next Wednesday at Greenwich when it is lunch time in
the
ship? It was like time zones and the date line back on Earth: not ordinarily important. I didn’t even notice when Pat groused about the odd times
of day he had to be on duty because I stood watches any time of day myself.
Consequently I was caught flat-footed when Pat woke me with a whistle in the middle of the night and shouted, “Happy birthday!”
(“Huh? Whose?”)
“Yours, dopey. Ours. What’s the matter with you? Can’t you count?” (“But-”)
“Hold it. They are just bringing the cake in and they are going to sing “Happy Birthday.” I’ll echo it for you.”
While they were doing so I got up and slipped on a pair of pants and went down to the mess room. It was the middle of “night” for us and there was just a standing light here. But I could see the clocks and calendars-sure
enough, the Greenwich date was our birthday and figuring back zone time from Greenwich to home made it about dinner time at home.
But it wasn’t my birthday. I was on the other schedule and it didn’t seem right.
“Blew ‘em all out, kid,” Pat announced happily, “That ought to hold us for another year. Mum wants to
know if they baked a cake for you there?”
(“Tell her ‘yes.’ “) They hadn’t, of course. But I didn’t feel like explaining. Mother got jittery easily
enough without trying to explain Einstein time to her. As for Pat, he ought
to know better.
The folks had given Pat a new watch and he told me that there was a box of chocolates addressed to me-should he open it and pass it around? I told him to go ahead, not knowing whether to be grateful that I was remembered or to be annoyed at a “present” I couldn’t possibly see or touch. After
a while I told Pat that I had to get my sleep and please say good night and thank you to everybody for me. But I
didn’t get to sleep; I lay awake until the passageway lights came on,
The following week they did have a birthday cake for me at our table and everybody sang to me and I got a lot of pleasantly intended but useless presents-you can’t give a person
much aboard ship when
you
are eating at the same mess and drawing from the same storerooms. I stood up and thanked them when somebody hollered “Speech!” and I stayed and danced with the girls afterwards. Nevertheless it
still did not seem like my birthday because it had already been my birthday, days earlier.
It was maybe the next day that my Uncle Steve came around and dug me out of my room. “Where you been keeping yourself, youngster?”
“Huh? Nowhere.”
“That’s what I thought.” He settled in my chair and I lay back down on my bunk. “Every time I look
for you, you aren’t in sight. You aren’t on watch or working all the time. Where are you?”
I didn’t say anything. I had been right where I was a lot of the time, just staring at the ceiling. Uncle Steve went on, “When a man takes to crouching in a corner aboard ship, it is usually best, I’ve found, to let him be. Either he will pull out of it by himself, or he’ll go out the airlock one day without bothering with a pressure suit. Either way, he doesn’t want to be monkeyed with. But you’re my sister’s
boy
and I’ve got a responsibility toward you. What’s
wrong? You never show up for fun and games in the evenings and you go around with a long face; what’s eating you?”
“There’s nothing wrong with me!” I said angrily.
Uncle Steve disposed of that with a monosyllable. “Open up, kid. You haven’t been right since the Vasco was lost. Is that the trouble? Is your nerve slipping? If it is, Doc Devereaux has synthetic courage in pills. Nobody need know you take ‘em and no need to be ashamed-everybody finds a crack in his nerve now and again. I’d hate to tell you what a repulsive form it took the first time I went into
action.”
“No, I don’t think that is it.” I thought about it-maybe it was it. “Uncle Steve, what happened to the Vasco?”
He shrugged. “Either her torch cut loose, or they bumped into something.”
“But a torch can’t cut loose… can it? And there is nothing to bump into out here.”
“Correct on both counts. But suppose the torch did blow? The ship would be a pocket-sized nova in
an
umpteenth second. But I can’t think of an easier
way
to go. And the other way would be about as
fast, near enough you would never notice. Did you ever think how much kinetic energy we have wrapped up in this bucket at this speed? Doc Babcock says that as we reach the speed of light we’ll be just a flat wave front, even though
we go happily along eating mashed potatoes and gravy and never
knowing the difference.”
“But we never quite reach the speed of light.”
“Doc pointed that out, too. I should have said ‘if.’ Is that what is bothering you, kid? Fretting that we might go boom! like the Vasco? If so, let me point out that almost all the ways of dying in bed are worse … particularly if you are silly enough to die of old age-a fate I hope to avoid.”
We talked a while longer but did not get anywhere. Then be left, after threatening to dig me out if I
spent more than normal sack time in my room. I suppose Uncle Steve reported me to Dr. Devereaux, although both of them claimed not.
Anyhow, Dr. Devereaux
tackled me the next day, took me around
to his room and sat me down and talked to me. He bad a big sloppy-comfortable stateroom; he never saw anybody in surgery.
I immediately wanted to know why he wanted to talk to me.
He opened his frog eyes wide and looked innocent. “Just happened to get around
to you, Tom.” He picked up a pile of punched cards. “See these? That’s how many people I’ve had a chat with this week. I’ve
got to pretend to earn my pay.”
“Well, you don’t have to waste time on me. I’m doing all right.”
“But I like to waste time, Tom. Psychology is a wonderful racket. You don’t scrub for surgery, you don’t have to stare down people’s dirty throats, you just sit and pretend to listen while somebody
explains that when he was a little boy he didn’t like to play with the other little boys. Now you talk for a
while. Tell me
anything you want to, while I take a nap. If you talk long enough,
I can get rested up
from
the poker party I sat in on last night and still chalk up a day’s work.”
I tried to talk and say nothing. While I was doing so, Pat called me. I told him to call hack; I was busy. Dr. Devereaux was watching my face and said suddenly, “What was on your mind then?”
I explained that it could wait; my twin wanted to talk to me.
“Hmm… Tom, tell me about your twin. I didn’t have time to get well acquainted with him in Zurich.” Before I knew it I had told him a lot about both of us. He was remarkably easy to talk to. Twice I
thought
he had gone to sleep but each time I stopped, he roused himself and asked another question that got me started all over again.
Finally he said, “You know, Tom, identical twins are exceptionally interesting to psychologists-not to mention geneticists, sociologists, and biochemists. You start out from the same egg, as near alike as two organic complexes can be. Then you become two different people. Are the differences environmental? Or is there something else at work?”
I thought about this. “You mean the soul, Doctor?”
“Mmm … ask me next Wednesday. One sometimes holds personal and private views somewhat different from one’s public and scientific opinions. Never mind. The point is that you m-r twins are interesting. I fancy that the serendipitous results of Project Lebensraum will, as usual, be far greater than the intended results.”
“The “Sarah” what, Doctor?”
“Eh? ‘Serendipitous.’
The Adjective for ‘Serendipity.’ Serendipity means that you dig for worms and strike gold. Happens all the time in science. It is the reason why ‘useless’ pure research is always so
much more practical than ‘practical’ work.
But let’s talk about you. I can’t help you with your problems-you have to do that yourself. But let’s kick it around and pretend
that I can, so as to justify my being on the payroll. Now two things stick out like a sore thumb: the first is that you don’t like your brother.”
I started to protest but he brushed it aside. “Let me talk. Why are you sure that I am wrong? Answer: because you have been told from birth that you love him. Siblings always `love’ each other; that is a foundation of our civilization like Mom’s apple pie. People usually believe anything that they are told early and often. Probably a good thing they believe this one, because brothers and sisters often have more opportunity and more reason to hate each other than anyone else.”
“But I like Pat. It’s just-”
“ ‘It’s just’ what?” he insisted gently when I did not finish.
I did not answer and he went on, “It is just that you have every reason to dislike him. He has bossed you and bullied you and grabbed what he wanted. When he could not get it by a straight fight, he used your mother to work on your father to make it come his way. He even got the girl you wanted. Why
should you like him? If a man were no relation-instead of being your twin brother-would you like him for doing those things to you? Or would you hate him?”
I didn’t relish the taste of it. “I wasn’t being fair
to
him, Doctor. I don’t think Pat knew he was hogging
things … and I’m sure our parents never meant to play favorites. Maybe I’m just feeling sorry for myself.”
“Maybe you are. Maybe there isn’t a word of truth in it and you are constitutionally unable to see what’s fair when you yourself are involved. But the point is that this is the way you do feel about it … and you certainly would not like such a person-except that he is your twin brother, so of course
you must ‘love’ him. The two ideas fight each other. So you will continue to be stirred up inside until you
figure out which one is false and get rid of it. That’s up to you.”
“But… doggone
it, Doctor, I do like Pat!”
“Do you? Then you had better dig out of your mind the notion that he has been handing you the dirty
end
of the stick
all these years. But I doubt if you do. You’re fond of him-we’re
all fond of things we are used to, old shoes, old pipes, even the devil we know is better than a strange devil. You’re loyal to him. He’s necessary to you and you are necessary to him. But ‘like’ him? It seems most improbable. On
the
other hand, if you could get it through your head that there is no longer any need to ‘love’ him, nor
even to like him, then you might possibly get to like him a little for what he is. You’ll certainly grow
more tolerant of him, though
I doubt if you will ever like him much. He’s a rather unlikeable cuss.”
“That’s not true! Pat’s always been very popular.”
“Not with me. Mmm … Tom, I cheated. I know your brother better than I let on. Neither one of you is
very likeable, matter of fact, and you are very much alike. Don’t take offense. I can’t abide ‘nice’ people; ‘sweetness and light’ turns my stomach. I like ornery people with a good, hard core of self-
interest-a lucky thing, in view of my profession. You and your brother are about equally selfish, only he is more successful at it. By the way, he likes you.”
“Huh?”
“Yes. The way he would a dog that always came when called. He feels protective toward you, when it doesn’t conflict with his own interests. But he’s rather contemptuous of you; he considers you a weakling-and, in his book, the meek are not entitled to inherit the earth; that’s for chaps like himself.”
I chewed that over and began to get angry. I did not doubt that Pat felt that way about me-patronizing
and
willing to see to it that I got a piece of cake … provided that he got a bigger one.
“The other thing that stands out,” Dr. Devereaux went on, “is that neither you nor your brother wanted
to
go on this trip.”
This was so manifestly untrue and unfair that I opened my mouth and left it open. Dr. Devereaux looked at me. “Yes? You were about to say?”
“Why, that’s the silliest
thing I ever heard, Doctor! The only real trouble Pat and I ever had was because both of us wanted to go and only one of us could.”
He shook his head. “You’ve got it backwards. Both of you wanted to stay behind and only one of you could. Your brother won, as usual.”
“No, he didn’t… well, yes, he did, but the chance to go; not the other way around. And he would have,
too, if it hadn’t been for that accident.”
“ ‘That accident.’ Mmm … yes.” Dr. Devereaux held still, with his head dropped forward and his hands folded across
his belly, for so long that I thought
again that he was asleep. “Tom, I’m going to tell you something that is none of your business, because I think you need to know. I suggest that you never
discuss it with your twin … and if
you do, I’ll make you out a liar, net. Because
it would be bad for him. Understand me?”
“Then don’t tell me,” I said surlily.
“Shut up and listen.” He picked up a file folder. “Here is a report on your brother’s operation, written
in the talk we doctors use to confuse patients. You wouldn’t understand it and, anyhow, it was sent sidewise, through the Santa Maria and in code. You want to know what they found when they opened
your brother up?”
“Uh, not especially.”
“There was no damage to his spinal cord of any sort.”
“Huh? Are you trying to tell me that he was faking his legs being paralyzed? I don’t believe it!” “Easy, now. He wasn’t faking. His legs were paralyzed. He could not possibly fake paralysis so well
that a neurologist could not detect it. I examined him myself; your brother was paralyzed. But not from damage to his spinal cord-which I knew and the surgeons who operated on him knew.”
“But-” I shook my head. “I guess I’m stupid.”
“Aren’t we all? Tom, the human mind is not simple; it is very complex. Up at the top, the conscious
mind has its own ideas and desires, some of them real, some of them impressed on it by propaganda and training and the necessity for putting up a good front and cutting a fine figure to other people.
Down below is the unconscious mind, blind and deaf and stupid and sly, and with-usually-a different set of desires and very different motivations. It wants its own way … and when it doesn’t get it, it raises
a stink until it is satisfied. The trick in easy living is to find out what your unconscious mind really
wants and give it to it on the cheapest terms possible, before it sends you through
emotional bankruptcy
to
get its own way. You know what a psychotic is, Tom?”
“Uh… a crazy person.”
“Crazy’ is a word we’re trying to get rid of, A psychotic is a poor wretch who has had to sell out the shop and go naked to the world to satisfy the demands of his unconscious mind. He’s made a settlement, but it has ruined him. My job is to help people make settlements that won’t ruin them-like a good lawyer, We never try to get them to evade the settlement, just arrange it on the best terms.
“What I’m getting
at is this: your brother managed to make a settlement with his unconscious on fairly
good terms, very good terms considering that he did it without professional help. His conscious mind signed a contract and his unconscious said flatly that he must not carry it out. The conflict was so deep that it would have destroyed some people. But not your brother. His unconscious mind elected to have an accident instead, one that could cause paralysis and sure enough it did-real paralysis, mind you; no fakery. So your brother was honorably excused from an obligation he could not carry out. Then, when it was no longer possible to go on this trip; be was operated on. The surgery merely corrected minor
damage to the bones. But he was encouraged to think that his paralysis would go away-and so it did.” Devereaux shrugged.
I thought about it until I was confused. This conscious and unconscious stuff-I’d studied it and passed quizzes in it … but I didn’t take any stock in it. Doc Devereaux could talk figures
of speech until he was
blue in the face but it didn’t get around
the fact that both Pat and I had wanted to go and the only reason Pat had to stay behind was because be had hurt himself in that accident. Maybe the paralysis was hysterical, maybe be had scared himself into thinking he was hurt worse than he was. But that didn’t make any difference.
But Doc Devereaux talked as if the accident wasn’t an accident. Well, what of it? Maybe Pat was
scared green and had been too proud to show it-I still didn’t think he had taken a tumble on a mountainside on purpose.
In any case, Doc was dead wrong on one thing: I had wanted to go. Oh, maybe I had been a little scared and I knew I had been homesick at first-but that was only natural.
(“Then why are you so down in dumps, stupid?”)
That wasn’t Pat talking; that was me, talking to myself. Shucks, maybe it was my unconscious mind,
talking out loud for once, “Doc?”
“Yes, Tom.”
“You say I didn’t really want to come along?” “It looks that way.”
“But you said the unconscious mind always wins. You can’t have it both ways.”
He sighed. “That isn’t quite what I said. You were hurried into this. The unconscious is stupid and
often slow; yours did not have time to work up anything as easy as a skiing accident. But it is stubborn. It’s demanding that you go home … which you can’t. But it won’t listen to reason. It just keeps on
nagging you to give it the impossible, like a baby crying for the moon.”
I shrugged. “To hear you tell it, I’m in an impossible moss.”
“Don’t look so danged sourpuss! Mental hygiene is a process of correcting the correctable and adjusting to the inevitable. You’ve
got three choices.”
“I didn’t know I had any.”
“Three. You can keep on going into a spin until your mind builds up a fantasy acceptable to your unconscious…a
psychotic adjustment, what you would call ‘crazy.’ Or you can muddle along as you
are, unhappy and not much use to yourself or your shipmates…
and always with the possibility of
skidding over the line. Or you can dig into your own mind, get acquainted with it, find out what it really wants, show it what it can’t have and why, and strike a healthy bargain with it on the basis of what is possible. If you’ve got guts and gumption, you’ll try the last one. It won’t be easy.” He waited,
looking at me.
“Uh, I guess I’d better try. But how do I do it?”
“Not by moping in your room about might-have-beens, that’s sure.”
“My Uncle Steve-Major Lucas, I mean”-I said slowly, “told me I shouldn’t do that. He wants me to stir around and associate with other people. I guess I should.”
“Surely, surely. But that’s not enough. You can’t chin yourself out of the hole you are in just by
pretending to be the life of the party. You have to get acquainted with yourself.”
“Yes, sir. But how?”
“Well, we can’t do it by having you talk
about yourself every afternoon while I hold your hand. Mmm … I suggest that you try writing down who you are and where you’ve been and how you
got from there to here. You make it thorough enough and maybe you will begin to see ‘why’ as well as ‘how.’ Keep digging and you may find out who you are and what you want and
how
much of it you
can get.”
I must have looked baffled for he said, “Do you keep a diary?” “Sometimes. I’ve got one along.”
“Use it as an outline. ‘The Life and Times of T. P. Bartlett, Gent.’ Make it complete and try to tell the truth-all the truth.”
I thought that over. Some things you don’t want to tell anybody. “Uh, I suppose you’ll want to read it, Doctor?”
“Me? Heaven forbid! I get too little rest without
misguided people. This is for you, son; you’ll be writing
to yourself … only write it as if you didn’t know anything about yourself and had to explain everything. Write it as if you expected to lose your memory and wanted to be sure you could pick up the strings again. Put it all down.”
He frowned and added grudgingly, “If you feel that you have found
out something important and want a second opinion, I suppose I could squeeze in time to read part of it, at least. But I won’t promise. Just write it to yourself-to the one with amnesia.”
So I told him I would try… and I have. I can’t see that it has done any special good (I pulled out of the slump anyhow) and there just isn’t time to do the kind of job he told me
to
do. I’ve had to hurry over
the
last part of this because this is the first free evening I’ve had in a month.
But it’s amazing how much you can remember when you really try.
X RELATIONS
There have been a lot of changes around the Elsie. For one thing we are over the hump now and
backing down the other side, decelerating as fast as we boosted; we’ll be at Tau Ceti in about six
months, ship’s time.
But I am getting ahead of myself. It has been about a year, S-time, since I started this, and about twelve years, Earth time, since we left Earth. But forget E-time; it doesn’t mean anything. We’ve been thirteen months in the ship by S-time and a lot has happened. Pat getting married-no, that didn’t happen
in
the ship and it’s the wrong place to start.
Maybe the place to start is with another marriage, when Chet Travers married Mei-Ling Jones. It met with wide approval, except on the part of one of the engineers who was sweet on her himself. It caused
us freaks and the electron pushers to bury the hatchet to have one of us marry one of them, especially
when Commander Frick came down the aisle in the mess room with the bride on his arm, looking as proud
and solemn as if she had been his daughter. They were a good match; Chet was not yet thirty and
I figure that Mei-Ling is at least twenty-two.
But it resulted in a change in the watch list and Rupe put me on with Prudence Mathews.
I had always liked Pru without paying much attention to her. You had to look twice to know that she was pretty. But she had a way of looking up at you that made you feel important. Up to the time I
started standing watches with her I had more or less left the girls alone; I guess I was “being true to Maudie.” But by then I was writing this confession story for Doe Devereaux; somehow writing things
down gives them finality. I said to myself, “Why not? Tom, old boy, Maudie is as definitely out of your
life as if one of you were dead. But life goes on, right here in this bucket of wind.”
I didn’t do anything drastic; I just enjoyed Pru’s company as much as possible… which turned out to be a lot.
I’ve heard that when the animals
came aboard the Ark two by two, Noah separated them port and starboard. The Elsie isn’t run that way. Chet and Mei-Ling had found
it possible to get well enough
acquainted to want to make it permanent. A little less than half of the crew had come aboard as married
couples; the rest of us didn’t have any obstacles put in our way if we had such things on our minds.
But somehow without
its ever showing we were better chaperoned than is usual back dirtside. It didn’t seem organized … and yet it must have been. If somebody was saying good night a little too long in a passageway after the lights were dimmed, it would just happen that Uncle Alfred had to get up about then and shuffle down the passageway. Or maybe it would be Mama O’Toole, going to make herself a cup of chocolate “to help her get to sleep.”
Or it might be the Captain. I think he had eyes in the hack of his head for everything that went on in the ship. I’m convinced that Mama O’Toole had. Or maybe Unc was actually one of those hypothetical wide-range telepaths but was too polite and too shrewd to let anybody know it.
Or maybe Doe Devereaux had us all so well analyzed those punched cards of his that he always knew
which way the rabbit would jump and could send his dogs to head him off. I wouldn’t put it past him.
But it was always just enough
and not too much. Nobody objected to a kiss or two if somebody wanted to check on the taste; on the other hand we never
had
any of the scandals that pop up every now and then in almost any community. I’m sure we didn’t; you can’t keep such things quiet in a ship. But nobody seemed to see a little low-pressure lalligagging.
Certainly Pru and I never did anything that would arouse criticism.
Nevertheless we were taking up more and more of each other’s time, both on and off watch. I wasn’t serious, not in the sense of thinking about getting married; but I was serious in that it was becoming
important. She began to look at me privately and a bit possessively, or maybe our hands would touch in
passing over a stack of traffic and we could feel the sparks jump.
I felt fine and alive and I didn’t have time to write in these memoirs. I gained four pounds and I certainly wasn’t homesick.
Pru and I got in the habit of stopping off and raiding the pantry whenever we came off a night watch together. Mama O’Toole didn’t mind; she left it unlocked so that anyone who wanted a snack could find one-she said this was our home, not a jail. Pru and I would make a sandwich, or concoct a creative mess, and eat and talk before we turned in. It didn’t matter what we talked about; what mattered was the warm glow we shared.
We came off watch at midnight one night and the mess room was deserted; the poker players had
broken up early and there wasn’t even a late chess game. Pru and I went into the pantry and were just getting set to grill a yeast-cheese sandwich. The pantry is rather cramped; when Pru turned to switch on
the
small grill, she brushed against me:
I got a whiff of her nice, clean hair and something like fresh clover or violets. Then I put my arms
around her.
She didn’t make any fuss. She stopped dead for an instant, then she relaxed.
Girls are nice. They don’t have any bones and I think they must be about five degrees warmer than we are, even if fever thermometers don’t show it. I put my face down and she put her face up and closed her eyes and everything was wonderful
For maybe half a second she kissed me and I knew she was as much in
favor of it as I was, which is as
emphatic as I can put
it.
Then she had broken out of my arms like a wrestler and was standing pressed against the counter across from me and looking terribly upset. Well, so was I. She wasn’t looking at me; she was staring at nothing and seemed to be listening … so I knew; it was the expression she wore when she was linked- only she looked terribly unhappy too.
I said, “Pru! What’s the matter?”
She did not answer; she simply started to leave. She had taken a couple of steps toward the door when I reached out and grabbed her wrist. “Hey, are you mad at me?”
She twisted away, then seemed to realize that I was still there. “I’m sorry, Tom,” she said huskily. “My
sister is angry.”
I had never met Patience Mathews-and now I hardly wanted to. “Huh? Well, of all the silly ways to behave I-”
“My sister doesn’t like you, Tom,” she answered firmly, as if that explained everything. “Good night.” “But-”
“Good night, Tom.”
Pru was as nice as ever at breakfast but when she passed me the rolls the sparks didn’t jump, I wasn’t surprised when Rupe reshuffled the watch list that day but I did not ask why. Pru didn’t avoid me and she
would even dance with me when there was dancing, but the fire was out and neither of us tried to light it again.
A long time later I told Van about it. I got no sympathy.
“Think you’re the first one to get your finger mashed in the door? Pru is a sweet little trick, take it from Grandfather van Houten. But when Sir Galahad himself comes riding up on a white charger, he’s going to have to check with Patience before he can speak to Pru… and I’ll bet you the answer is ‘No!’
Pru is willing, in her sweet little half-witted way, but Patience won’t okay anything more cozy than
‘Pease Porridge Hot.’“
“I think it’s a shame. Mind you, it doesn’t matter to me now. But her sister is going to ruin her life.” “It’s her business. Myself, I reached a compromise with my twin years ago-we beat each other’s teeth
in and after
that we cooperated on a businesslike basis. Anyhow, how do you know that Pru isn’t doing
the
same to Patience? Maybe Pru started it.”
It didn’t sour me on girls, not even on girls who had twin sisters who were mind readers, but after that I enjoyed the company of all of them. But for a while I saw more of Unc. He liked to play dominoes, then when we had finished all even up for the evening he liked to talk about Sugar Pie-and to her, of course. He would look at his big photograph of her and so would I and the three of us would talk,
with Unc echoing for both of us. She really was a nice
little girl and it was a lot of fun to get to know a little six-year-old girl-it’s very quaint what they think about.
One night I was talking with them and looking at her picture, as always, when it occurred to me that time had passed and that Sugar Pie must have changed-they grow up fast at that age. I got a brilliant idea. “Unc, why don’t you have Sugar Pie mail a new photograph to Rusty Rhodes? Then he could
transmit it to Dusty and Dusty could draw you one as perfect as that one, only it would be up to date,
show you what she looks like now, huh? How about it, Sugar Pie? Isn’t that a good idea?”
“It isn’t necessary.”
I was looking at the picture and I nearly popped my fuses. For a moment it wasn’t the same picture. Oh,
it was the same merry little girl, but she was a little older, she was shy a front tooth, and her hair was different.
And she was alive. Not just a trukolor stereo, but alive. There’s a difference.
But when I blinked it was the same old picture.
I said hoarsely, “Unc, who said, ‘It isn’t necessary?’ You? Or Sugar Pie?” “Why, Sugar Pie did. I echoed,”
“Yes, Unc … but I didn’t hear you; I heard her.” Then I told him about the photograph.
He nodded. “Yes, that’s the way she looks.
She says to tell you that her tooth is coming in, however.” “Unc… there’s no way to get around it. For a moment I crowded in on your
private wave length.” I was
feeling shaky.
“I knew. So did Sugar
Pie. But you didn’t crowd in, son; a friend is always welcome.”
I was still trying to soak it in. The implications
were more mind-stretching, even, than when Pat and I
found out we could do it. But I didn’t know what they were yet. “Uh, Uric, do you suppose we could
do it again? Sugar Pie?”
“We can try.”
But it didn’t work…
unless I heard her voice as well as Unc’s when she said, “Good night, Tommie.” I
wasn’t sure.
After I got to bed I told Pat about it. He was interested after I convinced him that it really had
happened. “This is worth digging into, old son. I’d better record it. Doc Mabel will want to kick it around.”
(“Uh, wait until I check with Uncle Alf.”)
“Well, all right. I guess it is his baby … in more ways than one. Speaking of his baby, maybe I should go see her? With two of us at each end it might be easier to make it click again. Where does his niece live?”
(“Uh, Johannesburg.”)
“Mmm … that’s a far stretch down the road, but I’m sure the LRF would send me there if Doc Mabel got interested.”
(“Probably. But let me talk to Unc.”)
But Unc
talked to Dr. Devereaux first. They called me in and Doc wanted to try it again at once. He was as near excited as I ever saw him get. I said, “I’m willing, but I doubt
if we’ll got anywhere; we didn’t last night. I think that once was just a fluke.”
“Fluke, spook. If it can be done once, it can be done again, We’ve got to be clever enough to set up the proper conditions.”
He looked at me. “Any objection to a light dose of hypnosis?”
“Me? Why, no, sir. But I don’t hypnotize easily.”
“So? According to your record, Dr. Arnault found it not impossible. Just pretend I’m she.”
I almost laughed in his face. I look more like Cleopatra than he looks like pretty Dr. Arnault. But I agreed to go along with the gag.
“All either of you will need is a light trance to brush
distractions aside and make you receptive.”
I don’t know what a “light
trance” is supposed to feel like. I didn’t feel anything and I wasn’t asleep.
But I started hearing Sugar Pie again.
I
think Dr. Devereaux’s interest was purely scientific; any new fact about what makes people tick
could rouse him out of his chronic torpor. Uncle Alf suggested that Doc was anxious also to set up a new telepathic circuit, just in case. There was a hint in what Unc said that he realized that he himself would not last forever.
But there was a hint of more than that. Uncle Alf let me know very delicately that, if it should come to it, it was good to know that somebody he trusted would be keeping an eye on his baby. He didn’t quite say it, not that baldly, so I didn’t have to answer, or I would have choked up. It was just understood-and
it
was the finest compliment I ever received. I wasn’t sure I deserved it so I decided I would just have to manage to deserve it if I ever had to pay off.
I could “talk” to Uncle Alf now, of course, as well as to Sugar Pie. But I didn’t, except when all three of us were talking together; telepathy is an imposition when it isn’t necessary. I never called Sugar Pie by myself, either, save for a couple of test runs for Doc Devereaux’s benefit to establish that I could
reach her without Unc’s help. That took drugs; Unc would wake up from an ordinary sleep if anyone shouted on that “wave length.” But otherwise I left: her alone; I had no business crowding into a little girl’s mind unless she was ready and expecting company.
It was shortly after that that Pat got married.
XI SLIPPAGE
My relations with Pat got steadily better all during that first boost, after Dr. Devereaux took me in
hand. I found out, after I admitted that I despised and resented Pat, that I no longer did either
one. I cured him of bothering me unnecessarily by bothering him unnecessarily-he could shut off an alarm clock but he couldn’t shut off me. Then we worked out a live-and-let-live formula and got along better.
Presently I found myself looking forward to whatever time we had set for checking with each other and
I realized I liked him, not “again” but “at last,” for I had never felt that warm toward him before.
But even while we were getting closer we were falling apart; “slippage” was catching up with us. As
anyone can see from the relativity formulas, the relationship is not a straight-line one; it isn’t even noticeable at the beginning but it builds up like the dickens at the other end of the scale.
At three-quarters the speed of light he complained that I was drawling, while it seemed to me that he was starting to jabber. At nine-tenths of the speed of light it was close to two for one, but we knew what was wrong now and I talked fast and he talked slow.
At 99% of c, it was seven to one and all we could do to make ourselves understood. Later that day we fell out of touch entirely.
Everybody else was having the same trouble. Sure, telepathy is instantaneous, at least the trillions of
miles between us didn’t cause any lag, not even like the hesitation you get in telephoning from Earth to
Luna nor did the signal strength drop off. But brains are flesh and blood, and thinking takes time… and
our time rates were out of gear. I was thinking so slowly (from Pat’s viewpoint) that he could not slow
down and stay with me; as for him, I knew from time to time that he was trying to reach me but it was
just a squeal in the earphones so far as making sense was concerned.
Even Dusty Rhodes couldn’t make it. His twin couldn’t concentrate on a picture for the long hours
necessary to let Dusty “see” it.
It was upsetting, to say the least, to all of us. Hearing voices is all right, but not when you can’t tell what they are saying and can’t shut them off. Maybe some of the odd cases in psychiatry weren’t crazy at all; maybe the poor wretches were tuned in on a bad wave length.
Unc took it the worst at first and I sat with him all one evening while we both tried together. Then he suddenly regained his serenity; Sugar Pie was thinking about him; that he knew; so being, words weren’t really necessary.
Pru was the only one who flourished; she was out from under the thumb of her sister. She got really
kissed, probably for the first time in her life. No, not by me; I just happened to be wandering down for a drink at the scuttlebutt, then I backed away quietly and let the drink wait. No point in saying who it was, as it didn’t mean anything-I think Pru would have kissed the Captain at that point if he had held
still. Poor little Pru!
We resigned ourselves to having to wait until we slid back down closer into phase. We were still hooked ship-to-ship because the ships were accelerating to the same schedule, and there was much debate back and forth about the dilemma, one which apparently nobody had anticipated. In one way it was not important, since we would not have anything to report until we slowed down and started
checking the stars we were headed for, but in another way it was: the time the Elsie spent at the speed of
light (minus a gnat’s
whisker) was going to seem very short
to us-but it was going to be ten solid
years and a bit over to those back Earth side. As we learned later, Dr. Devereaux and his opposite numbers in the other ships and back in LRF were wondering bow many telepathic pairs they would
have still functioning (if any) after a lapse of years. They had reason to worry. It had already been
established that identical twins
were hardly ever telepairs if they had lived apart for years-that was the other reason why most of those picked were young; most twins are separated by adult life.
But up to then, we hadn’t been “separated” in Project Lebensraum. Sure, we were an unthinkable distance apart but each pair had been in daily linkage and in constant practice by being required to stand regular watches, even if there was nothing to send but the news.
But what would a few years of being out of touch do to rapport between telepartners?
This didn’t bother
me; I didn’t know about it. I got a sort of an answer
out of Mr. O’Toole which caused me to think that a couple of weeks of ship’s time would put us back close
enough in phase to make ourselves understood. In the meantime, no watches to stand so it wasn’t all bad. I went to bed and
tried to ignore
the squeals inside my head.
I was awakened by Pat.
“Tom … answer me, Tom. Can you hear me, Tom? An- (“Hey, Pat, I’m here!”) I was wide awake, out of bed and standing on the floor plates, so excited I could hardly talk.
“Tom!
Oh,
Tom! It’s good to hear you, boy-it’s
been two years since I was last able to raise you.” (“But-”) I started to argue, then shut up. It had been less than a week to me. But I would have to look
at the Greenwich calendar and a check with the computation office before I could even guess how long it had been for Pat.
“Let me talk,
Tom, 1 can’t keep this
up long. They’ve had me under deep hypnosis and drugs for the past six weeks and it has taken me this long to get in touch with you. They don’t dare keep me under much longer.”
(“You mean they’ve got you hypped right now?”)
“Of course, or I couldn’t talk to you at
all. Now-” His voice faded out for a second “Sorry. They had to stop to give me another shot and an intravenous feeding. Now listen and record this schedule: Van
Houten-” He reeled off precise Greenwich times and dates, to the second, for each of us, and faded out while I was reading them back. I caught a “So long” that went up in pitch, then there was silence.
I pulled on pants before I went to wake the Captain but I did not stop for shoes. Then everybody was up and all the daytime lights were turned on even though it was officially night and Mama O’Toole was making coffee and everybody was talking. The relativists were elbowing each other in the computation room and Janet Meers was working out ship’s time for Bernie van Houten’s appointment with his twin without bothering to put it through
the computer because he was first on the list.
Van failed to link with his brother and everybody got jittery and Janet Meers was in tears because somebody suggested that she had made a mistake in the relative times, working it in her head; But Dr. Babcock himself pushed her solution through the computer and checked her to nine decimals.
Then he announced in a chilly tone that he would thank everyone not to criticize his staff thereafter; that was his
privilege.
Gloria linked with her sister right after that and everybody felt better. The Captain sent a dispatch to
the
flagship through
Miss Gamma and got an answer back that two other
ships were back in contact, the Nautilus and the Cristoforo Colombo.
There was no more straggling up to relieve the watch and stopping to grab a bite as we passed the pantry. If the recomputed time said your opposite number would be ready to transmit at 3:17:06 and a short tick, ship’s time, you were waiting for him from three o’clock on and no nonsense, with the recorder rolling and the mike
in front of your lips. It was easy for us in the ship, but
each one of us
knew that his telepair
was
having to undergo both hypnosis and drastic drugging to stay with us at all-
Dr. Devereaux did not seem happy about it.
Nor was there any time for idle chit-chat, not with your twin having to chop maybe an hour out of his life for each word. You recorded what he sent, right the first time and no fumbles; then you transmitted
what the Captain had initialed. If that left a few moments to talk, all right. Usually it did not … which
was
how I got mixed up about Pat’s marriage.
You see, the two weeks bracketing our change-over from boost to deceleration, during which time we reached our peak speed, amounted to about ten years Earthside. That’s 250 to 1 on the average. But it wasn’t all average; at the middle of that period the slippage was much greater, I asked Mr. O’Toole what the maximum was and he just shook his head. There was no way to measure
it, he told me, and the probable errors were larger than the infinitesimal values he was working with.
“Let’s put it this way,” he finished. “I’m glad there is no hay fever in this ship, because one hard sneeze would push us over the edge.”
He was joking, for, as Janet Meers pointed out, as our speed approached the speed of light, our mass approached infinity.
But we fell out of phase again for a whole day.
At the end of one of those peak “watches” (they were never more than a couple of minutes long, S-
time) Pat told me that he and Maudie were going to get married. Then he was gone before I could congratulate him. I started to tell him that I thought Maudie was a little young and wasn’t he rushing things and missed my chance. He was off our band.
I was not exactly jealous.
I examined myself and decided that I was not when I found
out that I could
not remember what Maudie looked like. Oh, I knew what she looked like-blonde, and a little snub nose with a tendency to get freckles across it in the summertime. But I couldn’t call up her face the way I could Pru’s face, or Janet’s. All I felt was a little left out of things.
I did remember to check on the Greenwich, getting Janet to relate it back to the exact time of my last watch. Then I saw that I bad been foolish to criticize. Pat was twenty-three and Maudie was twenty- one, almost twenty-two.
I did manage to say, “Congratulations,” on my next linkage but Pat did not have a chance to answer.
Instead he answered on the next. “Thanks for the congratulations. We’ve named her after Mother but I
think she is going to look like Maudie.”
This flabbergasted me. I had to ask for Janet’s help again and found that everything was all right-I mean, when a couple has been married two years a baby girl is hardly a surprise, is it? Except to me.
All in all, I had to make quite a few readjustments those two weeks. At the beginning Pat and I were the same age, except for an inconsequential slippage. At the end of that period (I figure the end as being
the
time when it was no longer necessary to use extreme measures to let us telepairs
talk) my twin was
more than eleven years older than I was and had a daughter seven years old.
I stopped thinking about Maudie as a girl, certainly not as one I had been sweet on. I decided that she was probably getting fat and sloppy and very, very domestic-she never could resist that second
chocolate éclair. As a matter of fact; Pat and I had grown very far apart, for we had little in common
now.
The minor gossip of the ship, so important to me, bored him; on the other hand, I couldn’t get excited about his flexible construction units and penalty dates. We still telecommunicated satisfactorily
but it was like two strangers using a telephone. I was sorry, for I had grown to like him before he slipped away from me.
But I did want to see my niece. Knowing Sugar Pie had taught me that baby girls are more fun than
puppies and even cuter than kittens.
I remembered the idea I had had about Sugar Pie and braced Dusty on the subject.
He agreed to do it; Dusty can’t turn down a chance to show how well he can draw. Besides, he had mellowed, for him; he no longer snarled when you tried to pet him even though it might be years before he would learn to sit up and beg.
Dusty turned out a beautiful picture. All Baby Molly lacked was little wings to make her a cherub. I
could see a resemblance to myself-to her father, that is. “Dusty, this is a beautiful picture. Is it a good likeness?”
He bristled. “How should I know? But if there is a micron’s s difference, or a shade or tone off that you could pick up with a spectrophotometer, from the pic your brother mailed to my brother, I’ll eat it! But how do I know how the proud parents had the thing prettied up?”
“Sorry, sorry! It’s a swell picture. I wish there were some way I could pay you.” “Don’t stay awake nights; I’ll think of something. My services come high.”
I
took down my pic of Lucille LaVonne and put Molly in her
place. I didn’t throw away the one of Lucille, though.
It was a couple of months
later that I found
out that Dr. Devereaux had seen entirely different possibilities in my being able to use the “wave length” of Uncle Alf and Sugar Pie from the obvious ones I had seen. I had continued to talk with both of them, though not as often as I had at first. Sugar
Pie
was a young lady now, almost eighteen, in normal school at Witwatersrand and already started
practice teaching. Nobody but Unc and I called her “Sugar Pie” and the idea that I might someday substitute for Unc was forgotten-at the rate we were shifting around pretty soon she could bring me up.
But Doe Devereaux had not forgotten the matter. However the negotiations had been conducted by him with LRF without consulting me. Apparently Pat had been told to keep it to himself until they were ready to try it, for the first I knew of it was when I told him to stand by to record some routine traffic (we were back on regular watches by then). “Skip it, old son,” he said. “Pass the traffic to the next victim. You and I are going to try something fresh.”
(“What?”)
“LRF orders, all the way down from the top. Molly has an interim research contract all of her own, just like you and I had.”
(“Huh? She’s not a twin.”)
“Let me count her. No, there’s just one of her-though
she sometimes seems like an entire herd of wild
elephants. But she’s here, and she wants to say hello to Uncle Tom.”
(“Oh, fine. Hello, Molly.”) “Hello, Uncle Tom.”
I
almost jumped out of my skin. I had caught it right off, with no fumbling. (“Hey, who was that? Say
that again!”)
“Hello, Uncle Tom.” She giggled. “I’ve got a new hair bow.”
I gulped. (“I’ll bet you look mighty cute in it, honey. I wish I could see you. Pat! When did this happen?”)
“On and off, for the past ten weeks. It took some tough sessions with Dr. Mabel to make it
click. By the way, it took some tougher sessions with, uh, the former Miss Kouric before she would agree to let
us try it.”
“He means Mommy,” Molly told me in a conspirator’s whisper. “She didn’t like it. But I do, Uncle Tom. I think it’s nice.”
“I’ve got no privacy from either one of them,” Pat complained. “Look, Tom, this is just a test run and
I’m
signing off. I’ve got to get the terror back to her
mother.”
“She’s going to make me take a nap,” Molly agreed in a resigned voice, “and I’m too old for naps. Good-by, Uncle Tom. I love you.”
(“I love you, Molly.”)
I turned around
and Dr. Devereaux and the Captain were standing behind me, ears flapping. “How did
it
go?” Dr. Devereaux demanded, eagerly-for him.
I tried to keep my face straight. “Satisfactorily. Perfect reception.” …. “The kid, too?”
“Why, yes, sir. Did you expect something else?”
He let out a long breath. “Son, if you weren’t needed, I’d beat your brains out with an old phone list.” I think Baby Molly and I were the first secondary communication team in the fleet. We were not the
last. The LRF, proceeding on a hypothesis suggested by the case of Uncle Alfred and Sugar Pie,
assumed that it was possible to form a new team where the potential new member was very young and intimately associated with an adult member of an old team. It worked in some eases. In other cases it could not even be tried because
no child was available.
Pat and Maude had a second baby girl just before we reached the Tau Ceti system. Maudie put her foot down with respect to Lynette; she said two freaks in her
family were enough.
XII TAU CETI
By the time we were a few light-hours
from Tan Ceil we knew that we had not drawn a blank; by stereo and doppler-stereo Harry Gates had photographed half a dozen planets. Harry was not only
senior planetologist; he was boss of the research department. I suppose he had enough degrees to string like beads, but I called him “Harry” because everybody did. He was not the sort you call “Doctor”; he was eager and seemed younger than he was.
To Harry the universe was a complicated toy somebody had given him; he wanted to take it apart and see what made it go. He was delighted with it and willing to discuss it with anybody at any time. I got acquainted with him in the bottle-washing business because Harry didn’t treat lab assistants like robots; he treated them like people and did not mind that he knew so much more than they did-he even seemed
to
think that he could learn something from them.
How he found time to marry Barbara Kuiper I don’t know, but Barbara was a torch watchstander, so it probably started as a discussion of physics and drifted over into biology and sociology;
Harry was interested in everything. But he didn’t find time to he around the night their first baby was born, as that was the night he photographed the planet he named Constance, after the baby. There was objection to
this, because everybody wanted to name it, but the Captain decided that the ancient rule applied: finders of astronomical objects were entitled to name them.
Finding Constance was not an accident. (I mean the planet, not the baby; the baby wasn’t lost.) Harry wanted a planet about fifty to fifty-one million miles from Tau, or perhaps I should say that the LRF wanted one of that distance. You see, while Tau Ceti is a close relative of the Sun, by spectral types,
Tau is smaller and gives off only about three-tenths as much sunshine-so, by the same old tired inverse square law you use to plan the lights for a living room or to arrange a photoflash picture, a planet fifty
million miles from Tau would catch the same amount of sunlight as a planet ninety-three million miles
from
Sol, which is where Earth sits. We weren’t looking for just any planet, or we would have stayed
home in the Solar System; we wanted a reasonable facsimile of Earth or it would not he worth
colonizing.
If you go up on your roof on a dear night, the stars look so plentiful you would think that planets very much like Earth must he as common as eggs in a hen yard. Well, they are: Harry estimates that there arc between a hundred thousand and a hundred million of them in our own Milky Way-and you can multiply that figure by anything you like for the whole universe.
The hitch is that they aren’t conveniently at hand. Tau Ceti was only eleven light-years from Earth; most stars in our own Galaxy average more like fifty thousand light-years from Earth. Even the Long
Range Foundation did not think in those terms; unless a star was within a hundred light-years or so it was silly to think of colonizing it even with torchships. Sure, a torchship can go as far as necessary,
even across the Galaxy-but who is going to he interested in receiving its real estate reports after a couple of ice ages have come and gone? The population problem would he solved one way or another
long before then … maybe the way the Kilkenny cats solved theirs.
But there are only fifteen-hundred-odd stars within a hundred light-years of Earth and only about a hundred and sixty of these are of the same general spectral type as the Sun. Project Lebensraum hoped to check not more than half of these, say seventy-five at the outside-less since we had lost the Vasco da Gama.
If even one real Earth-type planet was turned up in the search, the project would pay off. But there was no certainty that it would. A Sol-type star might not have an Earth-type planet; a planet might be too
close to the fire, or too far, or too small to hold an atmosphere, or too heavy for humanity’s fallen arches, or just too short
on the H20 that figures into everything we do.
Or it might be populated by some rough characters with notions about finders-keepers.
The Vasco da Gama had had the best chance to find the first Earth-type planet as the star she had been
beading for, Alpha Centauri Able, is the only star in this part of the world which really is a twin of the Sun. (Able’s companion, Alpha Centauri Baker, is a different sort, spectral type K.) We had the next best chance, even though Tau Ceti is less like the Sun than is Alpha Centauri-B, for the next closest G- type is about thirteen light years from Earth … which gave us a two-year edge over the Magellan and nearly four over the Nautilus.
Provided we found anything, that is. You can imagine how jubilant we were when Tau Ceti turned out to have pay dirt.
Harry was jubilant, too, but fur the wrong reasons. I had wandered into the observatory, hoping to get a sight of the sky-one of the Elsie’s shortcomings was that it was almost impossible to see out-when he grabbed me and said, “Look at this, pal!”
I looked at it. It was a sheet of paper with figures on it; it could have been Mama O’Toole’s crop- rotation schedule.
“What is it?”
“Can’t you read? It’s Bodes Law, that’s what it is!”
I thought back. Let me see…no, that was Ohm’s Law-then I remembered; Bode’s Law was a simple geometrical progression that described the distances of the Solar planets from the Sun. Nobody had ever been able to find a reason for it and it didn’t work well in some cases, though
I seemed to remember that Neptune, or maybe Pluto, had been discovered by calculations that made use of it. It looked like an accidental relationship.
“What of it?” I asked.
“‘What of it?’ the man says! Good grief! This is the most important thing since Newton got conked with the apple.”
“Maybe so, Harry, but I m a little slow today. I thought Bode’s Law was just an accident. Why couldn’t it be an accident here, too?”
“Accident! Look, Tom, if you roll a seven once, that’s an accident. When you roll a seven eight hundred times in a row, somebody has loaded the dice.”
“But this is only twice.”
“It’s not the same thing. Get me a big enough
sheet of paper
and
I’ll write down the number of zeros it takes to describe how unlikely this ‘accident’ is.” He looked thoughtful. “Tommie, old friend, this is
going to be the key that unlocks how planets are made. They’ll bury us right alongside Galileo for this.
Mmm … Tom, we can’t afford to spend much time in this neighborhood; we’ve got to get out and take a look at the Beta Hydri system and make sure it checks the same way-just to convince the mossbacks
back Earthside, for it will, it will! I gotta go tell the Captain we’ll have to change the schedule.” He stuffed the paper in a pocket and hurried away. I looked around
but the anti-radiation shutters were over the observatory ports; I didn’t get to see out.
Naturally the Captain did not change the schedule; we were out there looking for farm land, not trying to unscrew the inscrutable. A few weeks later we were in orbit around
Constance. It put us into free-fall for the first time during the trip, for we had not even been so during acceleration-deceleration change-
over but had done it in a skew path instead; chief engineers don’t like to shut a torch down unless there is time for an overhaul before starting up again-there was the case of the Peter the Great who shut hers
off,
couldn’t light up again, and fell into the Sun.
I didn’t like free-fall. But it’s all right if you don’t overload your stomach.
Harry did not seem disappointed. He had a whole new planet to play with, so he tabled Bode’s Law
and
got busy. We stayed in orbit, a thousand miles up, while research found out everything possible about Connie without actually touching it: direct visual search, radiation survey, absorption-spectra of her atmosphere. She had two moons, one a nice size, though smaller than Luna, so they were able to measure her surface gravity exactly.
She certainly looked like a home away from home. Commander Frick had his boys and girls set up a relay tank in the mess room, with color and exaggerated stereo, so that we all could see. Connie looked like the pictures they show of Earth from space stations, green and blue and brown and half covered with clouds and wearing polar ice like skullcaps. Her air pressure was lower than ours but her oxygen
ratio was higher; we could breathe it. Absorption spectra showed higher carbon
dioxide but not as high as Earth had during the Coal Age.
She was smaller but had a little more land area than Earth; her oceans were smaller. Every dispatch
back to Earth carried good news and I even managed to get Pat’s mind off his profit-and-loss for a while … he had incorporated us as “Bartlett Brothers, Inc.” and seemed to expect me to be interested in the bookkeeping simply because my accumulated LRF salary had gone into the capitalization. Shucks,
I hadn’t touched money for so long I had forgotten anybody used the stuff.
Naturally our first effort was to find out if anybody was already in occupation … intelligent animal life I mean, capable of using tools, building things, and organizing. If there was, we were under orders to
scoot out of there without
landing, find fuel somewhere else in that system, and let a later party attempt to set up friendly relations; the LRF did not want to repeat the horrible mistake that had been made with Mars.
But the electro-magnetic spectrum showed nothing at all, from gamma radiation
right up to the longest radio wavelengths. If there were people down there, they didn’t use radio and they didn’t show city
lights and they didn’t have atomic power. Nor did they have aircraft, nor roads, nor traffic on the surface of their oceans, nor anything that looked like cities. So we moved down just outside the atmosphere in an “orange slice” pole-to-pole orbit that let us patrol the whole surface, a new sector
each half turn.
Then we searched visually, by photography, and by radar. We didn’t miss anything more conspicuous than a beaver dam, I’m sure. No cities, no houses, no roads, no bridges, no ships, nobody home; Oh,
animals, surely-we could see herds gazing on the plains and we got lesser glimpses of other things. But it looked like a squatter’s paradise.
The Captain sent a dispatch: “I am preparing to land.”
I promptly volunteered for the reconnaissance party. First I braced my uncle Major Lucas to let me join his guard. He told me to go roll my hoop. “If you think I have any use for an untrained recruit,
you’re crazier
than you apparently think I am. If you wanted to soldier, you should have thought of it as soon
as we torched off.”
“But you’ve got men from all the departments in your guard.”
“Every one of ‘em trained soldiers. Seriously, Tom, I can’t afford it. I need men who will protect me; not somebody so green I’ll have to protect him. Sorry.”
So I tackled Harry Gates
to
let me join the scientific party the ship’s
guard would protect. He said, “Certainly, why not? Plenty of dirty work that my gang of prima donnas won’t want to do. You can
start by checking this inventory.”
So I checked while he counted. Presently he said, “How does it feel to be a little green man in a flying saucer?”
“What?”
“An oofoe. We’re an oofoe, do you realize that?”
I finally understood him-an U.F.O., an “unidentified flying object.” There were accounts of the U.F.O.
hysteria in all the histories of space flight. “I suppose
we are an U.F.O., sort of.”
“It’s exactly what we are. The U.F.O.’s were survey ships, just as we are. They looked us over, didn’t like what they saw, and went away. If they hadn’t found Earth crawling with hostile natives, they would have landed and set up housekeeping, just as we are going to do.”
“Harry, do you really believe the U.F.O.’s were anything but imagination or mistakes in reporting? I
thought that theory was exploded long ago.”
“Take another look at the evidence, Tom. There was something going on up in our sky shortly before we took up space jumping ourselves. Sure, most of the reports were phonies. But some weren’t. You
have to believe evidence when you have it in front of you, or else the universe is just too fantastic. Surely you don’t think that human beings are the only ones who ever built star ships?”
“Well … maybe not. But if somebody else has, why haven’t they visited us long ago?”
“Simple arithmetic, pal; it’s a big universe and we’re just one small corner of it. Or maybe they did. That’s my own notion; they surveyed us and Earth wasn’t what they wanted-maybe us, maybe the climate. So the U.F.O.’s went away.” He considered it. “Maybe they landed just long enough to fuel.”
That was all I got out of my tenure as a member of the scientific party; when Harry submitted my name an his list, the Captain drew a line through
it. “No special communicators will leave the ship.”
That settled it; the Captain had a will of iron. Van got to go, as his brother had been killed in an accident while we were at peak-so I called Pat and told him about Van and suggested that Pat drop dead. He didn’t see anything funny in it.
The Elsie landed in ocean comfortably deep, then they used the auxiliaries to bring her close to the shore. She floated high out of the water, as two-thirds of her tanks were empty, burned up, the water
completely disintegrated in boosting us first up to the speed of light, then backing us down again. The engineers were already overhauling her torch before we reached final anchorage. So far as I know, none of them volunteered for the landing party; I think that to most of the engineers the stop on Constance was just a chance to pick up more boost mass and take care of repairs and overhauls they had been
unable to do while underway. They didn’t care where they were or where they were going so long as the torch worked and all the machinery ticked. Dr. Devereaux told me that the Staff Metallurgist had
been out to Pluto six times and had never set foot on any planet but Earth.
“Is that normal?” I asked, thinking how fussy Doc had been about everybody else, including me.
“For his breed of cat,
it’s robust mental health. Any other breed I would lock up and feed through the
keyhole.”
Sam Rojas was as annoyed as I was at the discrimination against us telepaths; he had counted on
planting his feet on strange soil, like Balboa and Columbus and Lundy. He came around to see me about it. “Tom, are you going to stand for it?”
“Well, I don’t want to-but what can we do?
“I’ve been talking to some of the others. It’s simple. We don’t.” “We don’t what?”
“Mmm … we just don’t. Tom, ever since we slowed down, I’ve detected a falling off in my telepathic ability. It seems to be affecting all of us-those I’ve talked to. How about yourself?”
“Why, I haven’t-”
“Think hard,” he interrupted. “Surely you’ve noticed it. Why, I doubt if I could raise my twin right now. It must have something to do with where we are … maybe there is something odd about the radiation of Tau Ceti, or something. Or maybe it comes from Connie. Who knows? And, for that matter,
who can check on us?”
I began to get the pattern. I didn’t answer, because it was a tempting idea.
“If we can’t communicate,” he went on, “we ought to be useful for something else … like the landing
party, for instance. Once we are out of range of this mysterious influence probably we would be able to
make our reports back to Earth all right. Or maybe it would turn out that some of the girls
who
didn’t want to go with the landing party could manage to get in touch with Earth and carry the reports …
provided us freaks weren’t discriminated against.”
“It’s an idea,” I admitted.
“Think about it. You’ll find your special talent getting weaker and weaker. Me, I’m stone deaf already.” He went away.
I toyed with the idea. I knew the Captain would recognize a strike when he saw one … but what could he do? Call us all liars and hang us by our thumbs until we gave in? How could he be certain that we hadn’t all gone sour as m-r’s? The answer was that he could not be certain; nobody but a mind reader
knows what it feels like, nobody but the mind reader himself can tell that he is doing it. When we slipped out of contact at peak he hadn’t doubted us, he had just accepted it. He would have to accept it now, no matter what he thought.
For he had to have us; we were indispensable.
Dad used to he arbitration representative in his guild local; I remembered his saying once that the only
strike worth calling was one in which the workers were so badly needed that the strike would be won before a walkout. That was the pinch we had the Captain in; he had to have us. No strikebreakers closer than eleven light-years. He wouldn’t dare get rough with us.
Except that any one of us could break the strike. Let’s see-Van was out of it and so was Cas Warner; they were no longer telepaired, their twins were dead. Pru’s sister Patience was still alive, but that telepair had never been mended after peak-her sister had refused the risky drugs and hypnosis routine and they never got back into rapport. Miss Gamma did not count, because the ships her two sisters were in were still peaking, so we were cut off from sidewise relay back to Earth until one of them decelerated. Not counting Sam and myself, whom did that leave? And could they be counted on? There was Rupe, Gloria, Anna, and Dusty … and Unc of course. And Mei-Ling.
Yes, they were solid. Making us feel that we were freaks when we first came aboard had consolidated us,
Even if one or two didn’t feel right about it, nobody would let the others down. Not even Mei-Ling
who was married to an outsider. It would work. If Sam could line them up.
I wanted to go dirtside the worst way…and maybe this was the worst way, but I still wanted to.
Just the same, there was something sneaky about it, like a kid spending his Sunday School collection
money.
Sam had until noon the next day to get it lined up, because we were down to one watch a day. A continuous communication watch was not necessary and them was more ship’s work to do now that we were getting ready to explore. I tabled the matter and went down to tag the rats that would he used by the scientific survey.
But I did not have to wait until the following day;
Unc
called us together that evening and we crowded
into his room-all but Miss Gamma and Van and Pru and Cas. Unc looked around, looking horse-faced
and
sad, and said he was sorry we couldn’t all sit down but he wouldn’t keep us long. Then he started a meandering speech about how he thought
of us all as his children and he had grown to love us and we would always be his children, no matter what. Then he started talking about the dignity of being a human being.
“A man pays his bills, keeps himself
clean, respects other people, and keeps his word.
He gets no credit for this; he has to do this much just to stay even with himself. A ticket to heaven comes higher.”
He paused and added, “Especially he keeps his promises.” He looked around
and added, “That’s all I had to say. Oh, I might as well make one announcement while we are here. Rupe has had to shift the watch list around
a little bit.” He picked out Sam Rojas with his eyes. “Sam, I want you to take next watch, tomorrow noon. Will you do it?”
There wasn’t a sound for about three heart heats. Then Sam said slowly, “Why, I guess so, Unc, if you want me to.”
“I’d he much obliged, Sam. One way and another, I don’t want to put anybody else on that watch…and I wouldn’t feel like standing it myself if you couldn’t do it. I guess I would just have to tell the Captain
there wasn’t anybody available. So I’m pleased that you’ll do it.”
“Uh, why, sure, Unc. Don’t worry about it,” And that was the end of the strike.
Unc didn’t let us go quite yet. “I thought
I’d tell you about the change in the watch list while I had you
here and save Rupe from having to take it around to have you initial it. But I called you together
to
ask you about something else. The landing party will be leaving the ship before long. Nice as Constance looks,
I understand that it will he risky … diseases that we don’t know about; animals that might turn
out to he deadly in ways we didn’t expect, almost anything. It occurred to me that we might be able to
help. We could send one of us with the landing party and keep one of us on watch in the ship-and we could arrange for their telepairs to relay by telephone. That way we’d always be in touch with the landing party, even if
radios broke down or no matter what. It would be a lot of extra work and no glory…but it would be worth it if it saved the life of one shipmate.”
Sam said suddenly, “Who are you figuring on to go with the landing party, Unc?”
“Why, I don’t know. It isn’t expected of us and we don’t rate special-hazard pay, so I wouldn’t feel like ordering anybody-I doubt if the Captain would back me up. But I was hoping for enough
volunteers so that we could rotate the dirtside watch.” He blinked and looked unsure of himself. “But nobody is
expected to volunteer. I guess you had better let me know privately. “
He didn’t have to wait; we all volunteered. Even Mei-Ling did and then got mad and cried when Unc pointed out gently that she had better have her husband’s consent-which she wasn’t going to get; the Travers family was expecting a third.
Unc tackled the Captain the next morning. I wanted to hang around and hear the outcome but there was too much work to do. I was surprised, a half hour later, to be paged by speaker down
in the lab; I
washed my hands and hurried up to the Old Man’s cabin.
Unc was there, looking glum, and the Captain was looking stern. I tried to call Unc on the Sugar-Pie band, to find out where things stood, but for once he ignored me. The Captain looked at me coldly and said, “Bartlett, Mr. McNeil has proposed a plan whereby the people in your department want to help out
in the dirtside survey. I’ll tell you right off that I have turned it down. The offer is appreciated-but I have no more intention of risking people in your special category in such duty than I would approve of modifying the ship’s torch to sterilize the dinner dishes. First things first!”
He drummed on his desk. “Nevertheless,
the suggestion has merit. I won’t risk your whole department …but
I might risk one special communicator to increase the safeguards for the landing party. Now it occurred in me that we have one sidewise pair right in this ship, without having to relay through Earth. You and Mr. McNeil. Well? What have you to say?”
I started to say, “Sure!”-then thought
frantically. If I got to go after all that had happened, Sam was going to take a very dark view of it…and so was everybody. They might think I had framed it.
“Well? Speak up!”
Doggone, no matter what they thought, it wasn’t a thing you could refuse. “Captain, you know
perfectly well I volunteered for the landing party several days ago.”
“So you did. All right, I’ll take your
consent for granted. But you misunderstood me. You aren’t going; that will he Mr. McNeil’s job. You’ll stay here and keep in touch with him.”
I was so surprised that I almost missed the next thing the Captain said. I shot a remark to Unc privately: (“What’s this, Unc? Don’t you know that all of them will think you swindled them?”)
This time he answered me, distress in his voice: “I know it, son. He took me by surprise.” (“Well, what are you going to do?”)
“I don’t know. I’m wrong both ways.”
Sugar Pie suddenly cut in with, “Hey! What are you two fussing about?” Unc said gently:
“Go
away, honey. This is man talk.”
“Well!” But she didn’t interrupt again. Perhaps she listened.
The Captain was saying: “-in any doubly-manned position, we will never risk the younger when the older can serve.
That is standard and applies as much to Captain Urqhardt and myself as it does to any other two. The mission comes first. Bartlett, your expected usefulness is at least forty years longer than that of Mr.
McNeil. Therefore he must be preferred for a risk task. Very well, gentlemen. You’ll receive instructions later.”
(“Unc-what are you going to tell Sam? Maybe you agree-I don’t!”) “Don’t joggle my elbow, son.” He went on aloud: “No, Captain.”
The Captain stared. “Why, you old scoundrel! Are you that fond of your skin?”
Unc faced him right back. “It’s the only one I have, Captain. But that doesn’t have anything to do with
the
case. And maybe you were a little hasty in calling me names.”
“Eh?” The Captain turned red. “I’m sorry, McNeil. I take that back. But I think you owe me an explanation for your attitude.”
“I’m going to give it, sir. We’re old men, both of us. I can get along without setting foot on this planet
and so can you. But it looks different to young people. You know perfectly well that my people volunteered for the landing party not because they are angels, not scientists, not philanthropists…but because they are aching to go ashore. You know that; you told me as much, not ten minutes ago. If you
are
honest with yourself, you know that most of these children would never have signed up for this trip if they had suspected that they were to be locked up, never permitted to have what they call an
“adventure.’ They didn’t sign up for money; they signed up for the far horizons. Now you rob them of their reasonable expectations.”
The Captain looked grim. He clenched end unclenched a fist, then said, “There may be something in what you say. But I must make the decisions; I can’t delegate that. My decision stands. You go and Bartlett stays.”
I
said: (“Tell him he won’t get a darn’ message through!”)
Unc didn’t answer me. “I’m afraid not, Captain. This is a volunteer job…and I’m not volunteering.” The Captain said slowly, “I’m not sure that volunteering is necessary. My authority to define a man’s
duty is broad. I rather think you are refusing duty.”
“Not so; Captain. I didn’t say I wouldn’t take your orders; I just said I was not volunteering. But I’d
ask
for written orders, I think, and I would endorse
them: ‘Accepted under protest,’ and ask to have a copy transmitted to the Foundation.
I don’t volunteer.”
“But-confound
it, man! You volunteered with the rest. That’s what you came in here for. And I picked you.”
Unc shook his head. “Not quite, Captain. We volunteered as a group.
You turned us down as a group.
If I gave you the impression that I was volunteering, any other way, I am sorry … but that’s how it is. Now
if you will excuse me, sir, I’ll go back and tell my people you won’t have us.”
The Captain turned pink again. Then he suddenly started to roar with laughter. He jumped up and put his arm around
Unc’s narrow shoulders. “You old scoundrel! You are an old scoundrel, a mutinous
black-hearted scoundrel. You make me long for the days of bread-and-water and the rope’s end. Now sit back down and we’ll work this out. Bartlett, you can go,”
I left, reluctantly, and then stayed away from the other freaks because I didn’t want to answer
questions. But Unc was thoughtful; he called me, mind to mind, as soon as he was out of the Captain’s
cabin and told me the upshot. It was a compromise. He and I and Rupe and Sam would rotate, with the first trick (considered to be the most dangerous) to be his. The girls would take the shipside watch, with
Dusty classed with them because of age. But a bone was thrown
to them: once medicine and research
classed the planet as safe, they would be allowed sightseeing, one at a time. “I had to twist his arm on
that part,” Unc admitted, “but he agreed.”
Then it turned out to be an anticlimax; Connie was about as dangerous as Kansas. Before any human went outside the ship other than encased in a quarantine suit we exposed rats and canaries and hamsters
to
natural atmosphere; they loved it. When the first party went ashore, still in quarantine suits but breathing Connie’s air after it had passed through
electrostatic precipitators, two more experimental animals went with them-Bernhard van Houten and Percival the Pig.
Van had been down in the dumps ever
since his twin was killed; he volunteered and I think Dr.
Devereaux urged the Captain to let him. Somebody had to do it; you can make all the microscopic and
chemical tests you like-the day comes when a living man has to expose his. skin to a planet to find out if it is friendly. As Dr. Babcock says, eventually you must climb the tree. So Van went ashore without a quarantine suit, wearing shorts and shirt and shoes and looking like a scoutmaster.
Percival the Pig did not volunteer, but he thought it was a picnic. He was penned in natural bush and allowed to forage, eating anything from Connie’s soil that he thought
was fit to eat. A pig has advantages as an experimental animal; he eats anything, just as rats and men do, and I understand that his metabolism is much like ours-pigs even catch
many of the same diseases. If Percival prospered, it was almost certain that we would, particularly as Percy had not been given the inoculations that we had, not even the wide-spectrum G.A.R. serum which is supposed to give some protection even against diseases mankind has never encountered before.
Percy got fat, eating anything and drinking brook water, Van got a sunburn and then tanned. Both were healthy and the pioneer party took off their quarantine suits. Then almost everybody (even Percy) came down with a three-day fever and a touch of diarrhea, but everybody recovered and nobody caught it twice.
They rotated after that and all but Uncle Steve and Harry and certain ones whom they picked swapped with someone in the ship. Half of the second party were inoculated with serum made from the blood of
those who bad recovered from three-day fever; most of these did not catch it. But the ones who
returned were not allowed back in the ship at once; they were quarantined on a temporary deck rigged above the top bulge of the Elsie.
I don’t mean to say that the planet was just like a city park-you can get killed,
even in Kansas. There was a big, lizardlike carnivore who was no bargain. One of those got Lefty Gomez the first time our people ran into one and the beast would have killed at least two more if Lefty had been the kind of man who
insists on living forever. I would never have figured Lefty as a hero-he was assistant pastry cook
and
dry-stores keeper back in the ship-but Uncle Steve says that ultimate courage is the commonest human virtue and that seven out of ten are Medal of Honor men, given the circumstances.
Maybe so. I must be one of the other three. I don’t think I would have stood my ground and kept poking away at the thing’s eyes, armed only with a campfire spit.
But tyrannosaurus ceti was not dangerous enough
to give the planet a down check, once we knew he was there and what he was. Any big cat would have been much more dangerous, because cats are smart and he was stupid. You had to shoot first, but an explosive bullet made him lie down and be a rug. He had no real defense against men and someday men would exterminate him.
The shore party camped within sight of the ship on the edge of beautiful Babcock Bay, where we were anchored. The two helicopters patrolled each day, always together so that one could rescue the men in
the
other if it went down, and never more than a few hundred miles from base. Patrols on foot never
went more than ten miles from base; we weren’t trying to conquer the country, but simply trying to find out
if men could conquer and hold it. They could…at least around Babcock Bay…and where men can get a toe hold they usually hang on.
My turn did not come until the fourth rotation and by then they were even letting women go ashore; the worry part was over.
The oddest thing about being outdoors was the sensation of weather; I had been in air-conditioning for
two
years and I had forgotten rain and wind and sunshine in your face. Aboard the Elsie the engineer on watch used to cycle the temperature and humidity and ozone content on a random schedule, which
was
supposed to be good for our metabolisms. But it wasn’t weather; it was more like kissing your sister.
The first drop of rain I felt startled me; I didn’t know what it was. Then I was running up and down
and
dancing like a kid and trying to catch it in my mouth. It was rain, real rain and it was wonderful!
I couldn’t sleep that night. A breeze on my face and the sounds of others sleeping around me and the
distant noises of live things outside our snooper fences and the lack of perfect darkness all kept me awake. A ship is alive, too, and has its noises, but they are different from those outdoors; a planet is
alive in another way.
I got up quietly and tip-toed outside. In front of the men’s quarters about fifty feet away I could see the guardsman on watch. He did not notice me, as he had his head bent over dials and displays from the inner and outer fences and from the screen over us. I did not want to talk, so I went around behind the hut, out of sight of even the dim light from his instruments. Then I stopped and looked up.
It was the first good view of the sky I had had since we had left
Earth and the night was clear. I stood
there, dazzled and a little drunk from it.
Then I started trying to pick out constellations.
It was not hard; eleven light-years is just down the street for most stars. The Dipper was overhead,
looking a little more battered than it does from Earth but perfectly recognizable. Orion blazed near the horizon ahead of me but Procyon had moved over a long way and Sirius was not even in sight-skidded below the skyline, probably, for Sirius is even closer to the Earth than is Tau Ceti and our position
would shift him right across the sky. I tried to do a spherical triangle backwards in my head to figure where to look for Sirius and got dizzy and gave up.
Then I tried to find Sol. I knew where he would be, in Boötes, between Arcturus
and
Virgo-but I had to find Boötes, before I could look for Father Sol.
Boötes was behind me, as close to the skyline as Orion was on the other side. Arcturus had shifted a little and spoiled the club shape of Bootes but there was no doubt in my mind.
There it was! A yellow-white star, the color of Capella, but dimmer, about second magnitude, which was right, both position and magnitude. Besides, it had to be the Sun, because there hadn’t been any star that bright in that location when Pat and I were studying for our astrogation merit badge. It was the Sun.
I stared at it, in a thoughtful melancholy, warm rather than sad. I wondered what Pat was doing? Walking the baby, maybe. Or maybe not; I couldn’t remember what the Greenwich ought to be. There he was, thirty years old and a couple of kids, the best part of his life behind him… and here I was, just old enough
to be finishing my sophomore year in college if I were home.
No, I wouldn’t be; I’d be Pat’s age.
But I wasn’t thirty.
I
cheered up and decided that I had the best break after all, even if it had seemed not so good at first. I
sighed and walled
around a bit, not worrying, for not even one of those lizard brutes could get close to our
night defenses without bringing thunder and lightning down around his ears. If he had ears. Percy’s pen was not far in that rear direction; he heard me and came to his fence, so I walked up and scratched his snout. “Nice place, eh, boy?” I was thinking that when the Elsie did get home-and I no longer
believed Uncle Steve’s dire predictions-when I did get back, I would still be in my early twenties, just a good age to emigrate. And Connie looked like a fine place to come back to.
Percy answered with a snuffling grunt which I interpreted to mean: “You didn’t bring me anything to
eat? A fine way to treat a pal!” Percy and I were old friends; aboard ship I fed him, along with his
brothers and the hamsters and the rats.
“Percy, you’re a pig.”
He did not argue but continued to snuffle into my empty hand. I was thinking that eleven light-years
wasn’t far; it was about right. The stars were still familiar.
Presently Percy got tired of it and so did I, so I wiped my hand on my pants and went back to bed.
XIII IRRELEVANT RELATIONS
Beyond Beta Hydri: I ought to bring this up to date, or else throw it away. I hardly ever have time to
write now, since we are so short handed. Whatever it was we picked up on Constance-or, possibly,
caught from improperly fumigated stores-has left us with more than enough
to do, especially in my department. There are only six left now to handle all the traffic, Unc, myself, Mei-Ling, Anna, Gloria, and Sam. Dusty lived through
it but he is out of touch, apparently permanently. His brother had no kids
for a secondary team and they just slipped apart on the last peak and never matched in again.
I am dependent on my great-niece Kathleen and on Molly, her mother. Pat and I can still talk, but only with their help; if
we try it alone, it’s like trying to make yourself understood in a machine shop. You
know the other fellow is saying something but the more you strain the less you hear. Pat is fifty-four,
now that we have peaked on this leg; we just don’t have anything in common. Since Maude’s death he isn’t interested in anything but business-and I am not interested in that.
Unc is the only one who doesn’t feel his original telepartner slipping away. Celestine is forty-two now; they are coming together instead of separating. I still call her “Sugar Pie,” just to hear her chuckle. It is
hard to realize that she is twice my age; she ought to have braids and a missing front tooth.
All in all, we lost thirty-two people in the Plague. I had it and got well. Doe Devereaux didn’t get well and neither did Prudence nor Rupe. We have to fill in and act as if the others had never been with us. Mei-Ling’s baby died and for a while we thought we were going to lose Mei-Ling, but now she takes
her
watch and does her work and even laughs.
I guess the one we all miss the most is Mama O’Toole.
What else of importance has happened? Well, what can happen in a ship? Nothing. Beta Hydri was a washout. Not only nothing resembling an Earth-type planet, but no oceans-no water oceans, I mean; it was a choice for fuel between ammonia and methane, and the Chief Engineer and the Captain had long worried conferences before they settled for ammonia. Theoretically the Elsie will burn anything; give her mass-converter something to chew on and the old “e equals mc2” gets to work; the torch spits the mass out as radiation
at the speed of light and neutrons at almost the speed of light. But while the converter does not care, all of the torch’s auxiliary equipment is built to handle fluid, preferably water.
We had a choice between ammonia, already liquid, and an outer planet that was mostly ice, but ice not much warmer than absolute zero. So they crossed their fingers, put her down in an ocean of ammonia,
and
filled up the old girl’s tanks. The planet we named Inferno and then called it nastier names. We had
to
sit there four days at two gravities and it was cold, even with the ship’s air
heaters going full blast.
The Beta Hydri system is one I am not going back to; creatures with other metabolisms can have it and welcome. The only one who was pleased was Harry Gates, because the planetary arrangements
followed Bode’s Law. I wouldn’t care if they had been in Vee formation.
The only other thing that sticks in my mind was (of all things!)
political trouble. Our last peak started
just as that war broke out between the Afro-European Federation and Estados Unidos de Sud. It shouldn’t have
meant anything to us-it did not, to most of us, or at least we kept our sympathies to
ourselves. But Mr. Roch, our Chief Engineer, is from the Federation and his first assistant was born in Buenos Aires. When Buenos Aires got it, probably including some of Mr. Regato’s relatives, he blamed his boss personally. Silly, but what can you expect?
After that, the Captain gave orders that he would check Earthside news before it was printed and he reminded us of the special restrictions on communicators in re security of communications.
I think I would have been bright enough to submit that dispatch to the Captain before printing it, but I can’t be
sure. We’d had always had free press in the Elsie.
The only thing that got us out of that mess was that we peaked right after. When we came out of peak,
fourteen years had passed and the latest political line-up had Argentina friends with her former enemies and on the outs with the rest of South America. After a while Mr. Roch and Mr. Regato were back
playing chess together, just as if the Captain had never had to restrict them to keep them from each other’s throats.
Everything that happens back on Earth is a little unreal to me, even though we continue to get the news
when we are not at peak. You get your mind adjusted to a new situation; the Elsie goes through
a
peak … years have passed and everything has changed. They are calling the Planetary League
the “United System” now and they say that the new constitution makes war impossible.
It’s still the Planetary League to me-and it was supposed to make war impossible, too. I wonder what they changed besides the names?
Half of the news I don’t understand. Kathleen tells me that her class has pooled their eveners to buy a Fardie for their school as a graduation present and that they are going to outswing it for the first time at the commencement exercises-then she had to hurry away because she had been co-opted in charge. That was just last watch. Now what is a “Fardie” and what was wrong with it where it was?
The technical news that reaches us I don’t understand, either, but at least I know why and usually
somebody aboard does understand it. The relativists are excited about stuff coming in which is so
technical that it has to be retransmitted and confirmed before it is released-this with Janet Meers
standing behind you and trying to snatch spools out of the recorder. Mr. O’Toole gets excited too, only
the
way he shows it is for the end of his nose to get pink. Dr. Babcock never shows excitement, but he missed coming in for meals two days running after I copied a monograph called “Sumner on Certain
Aspects of Irrelevance.” At the end of that time I sent one back to LRF which Dr. Babcock had written. It was just as crammed with indigestible mathematics, but I gathered that Dr. Babcock was politely calling Professor Sumner a fool.
Janet Meers tried to explain it to me, but all that I got out of it was that the concept of simultaneity was forcing a complete new look at physics.
“Up to now,” she told me, “we’ve concentrated on the relative aspects of the space-time continuum. But
what you m-r people do is irrelevant to space-time. Without time there is no space; without
space there can be no time. Without space-time there can be no conservation of energy-mass. Heavens, there’s nothing. It has driven some of the old-timers out of their minds.
But now we are beginning to
see
how you people may possibly fit into physics-the new physics, I mean; it’s all changed.”
I had had enough trouble with the old-style physics; having to learn a new one made my head ache just to think about it. “What use is it?” I asked.
She looked shocked. “Physics doesn’t have to have any use. It just is.”
“Well, I don’t know. The old physics was useful. Take the torch that drives us, for example-” “Oh, that! That’s not physics, that’s just engineering”-as if I had mentioned something faintly
scandalous.
I will never understand Janet and perhaps it is just as well that she promised to “be a sister to me.” She said that she did not mind my being younger than she was, but that she did not think she could look up to a man who could not solve a fourth-degree function in his head. “… and a wife should always look
up to her husband, don’t you think?”
We were making the boosts at 1.5 gravity now. What with slippage, it cuts each up-boost and each
down-boost to about four months, S-time, even though the jumps are longer, During boost I weigh 220
pounds and I’ve started wearing arch supports, but 50% extra weight is all right and is probably good
for us, since it is too easy not to get enough exercise aboard ship.
The LRF has stopped using the drug stuff to help communications at peak, which would have pleased Dr. Devereaux since he disapproved of it so. Now your telepartner patches in with the help of hypnosis
and
suggestion alone, or you don’t patch. Kathleen managed to cross the last peak with me that way,
but I can see that we are going to lose communication teams all through the fleet, especially those who
have not managed to set up tertiary telepartners. I don’t knew where my own team would be without Kathleen. In the soup, I guess. As it is, the Niña and the Henry Hudson
are each down to two teams and
the
other four ships still in contact with Earth are not much better off. We are probably in the best shape, although we don’t get much fleet news since Miss Gamma fell out of step with her sisters-or lost them, as the case may be; the Santa Maria is listed as “missing” but the Marco Polo is simply carried as
“out
of contact” as she was approaching peak when last heard from and won’t be out of it for several Greenwich years.
We are headed now for a little G-type star
so
dim from Earth that it doesn’t rate a name, nor even a Greek-letter constellation designation, but just a catalog number. From Earth it lies in Phoenix, between
Hydrus the Sea Serpent and Cetus the Whale. (“Hydrus,”
not “Hydra”-Hydra is six R.A. hours over and farther north.) Unc called it a “Whistle Stop” so that is what we dubbed it, because you can’t reel off a Palomar Catalog number each time you speak of where you are going. No doubt it will get an impressive name if it turns out to have a planet half as good as Connie. Incidentally, Connie will he colonized in spite of the epidemic we may have picked up there; the first shiploads are on their way. Whatever the bug was that bit us (and it very possibly may have come from Earth), it is no worse than half a dozen other diseases men have had and have fought back at and licked. At least, that is the official view and the pioneer ships are going on the assumption that they will probably catch it and have to conquer it.
Personally, I figure that one way of dying is as dangerous as another; when you’re dead, you’re dead- even if you die from “nothing serious.” And the Plague, bad as it was, didn’t kill me.
“Whistle Stop” wasn’t worth a stop. We’re on our way to Beta Ceti, sixty-three light-years from Earth. I wish Dusty were still hooked up to transmit pictures; I would like one of my great-grandniece Vicky.
I know what she looks like-carroty red hair, freckles
across her nose, green eyes, a big mouth and braces on her teeth. At present she is sporting a black eye as well, picked up at school when somebody called her a freak and she resented it-I would love to have seen that fight! Oh, I know what she looks like but I’d like a picture anyhow.
It is funny how our family has run to girls. No, when I add it up, counting
all
descendants of my sisters
as
well as my brother, it comes out about
even. But Maude and Pat had two girls and no boys, and I went away and did not get married, so the Bartlett name has died out,
I certainly would like to have a picture of Vicky. I know she is homely, but I’ll bet she is cute, too-the kind of tomboy who always has scabs on her knees because she won’t play the ladylike games. She generally hangs around for a while after we are through transmitting and we talk. Probably she is just being polite, for she obviously thinks of me as being as old as her great-grandfather Bartlett even though her mother has told her that I am not. I suppose it depends on where you sit. I ought to be in my
last year in college now, but she knows that I am Pat’s twin.
If she wants to put a long white beard on me, that is all right with me, for the sake of her company. She was in a hurry this morning but nice about it. “Will you excuse me, please, Uncle Tom? I’ve got to go study for a quiz in algebra.”
(“Realio trulio?”) I said.
“Realio trulio, cross my heart. I’d like to stay.” (“Run along,
Freckle Face. Say hello to the folks.”) “ Bye! I’ll call you a little early tomorrow.”
She really is a nice child.
XIV
ELYSIA
Beta Ceti is a big star in the main spectral sequence, almost big enough to be classed as a giant-a small giant, thirty-seven times as bright as the Sun. It looks so bright from Earth that it has a name of its own, Deneb Kaitos, but we never call it that because “Deneb” brings to mind the other Deneb, Alpha Cygni, which is a real giant in a different part of the sky almost sixteen hundred light-years away.
Since Beta Ceti is so much brighter than the Sun, the planet we had been looking for, if it existed at all, had to be nearly six hundred million miles out, farther than Jupiter is from Sol.
We’ve found one, at five hundred and eighty million miles, which is close enough. Better yet, it is the smallest planet in a system that seems to run to outsizes; the one in the next track beyond is bigger than
Jupiter.
I scheduled most of the routine skyside survey of Elysia, under Harry Gates’
absentminded supervision. Harry is as eager as a fox terrier to finish his magnum opus before he has to knock off and take charge of the ground
survey. He wants to transmit it back Earthside and preserve his name in science’s hall of fame-not that he puts it that way, for Harry isn’t stuck up; nevertheless,
he thinks he has worked out a cosmogony for solar systems which includes Bode’s Law. He says that if he is right, any star in the main spectral sequence will have planets.
Maybe … I would not know. But I can’t see what use a star is without planets and I don’t believe all this complicated universe got here by accident. Planets are meant to be used.
Acting as Harry’s Man Friday has not been difficult. All I had to do was to dig the records of the preliminary survey of Connie out of the microfilms and write up similar schedules for Elysia, modified to allow for our loss of personnel. Everybody was eager to help, because
(so far as we know) we are the only ship to draw a lucky number twice and only one of four to hit even once. But we are down now, water-borne, and waiting for medicine to okay Elysia for ground survey; I’m not quite so rushed. I tried to get in touch with Vicky and just chat this evening. But it happens to be evening back home, too, and Vicky is out on a date and politely put me off.
Vicky grew up some when we peaked this last jump; she now takes notice of boys and does not have as much time for her ancient uncle. (“Is it George?”) I asked when she wanted to know if my call was
important.
“Well, if you must know, it is George!” she blurted out.
(“Don’t get excited, Freckle Face,”) I answered. (“I just asked.”)
“Well, I told you.”
(“Sure, sure. Have a good time, hon, and don’t stay out too late.”)
“You sound just like Daddy.”
I
suppose I did. The fact is I don’t have much use for George, although
I have never
seen him, never will, and don’t know much about him, except that Vicky says that be is “the tenth power” and “first with the worst” in spite of being “ruffily around the round”
if I knew what she meant, but she would
equalize that.
I didn’t know what she meant, but I interpreted it to mean approval slightly qualified and that she expected him to be perfect, or “ricketty all through” when she got through making him over. I suspect him of being the kind of pimply-faced, ignorant young bore that I used to be myself and have always
disliked-something about like Dusty Rhodes at the present without Dusty’s amazing mind.
This sounds
as if I were jealous of a boy I’ll never see over a girl I have never
seen, but that is
ridiculous. My interest is fatherly, or big-brotherly, even though I am effectively no relation to her; i.e., my parents were two of her sixteen great-great-grandparents-a relationship so distant that most people aren’t even aware of relatives of that remote degree.
Or maybe Van’s wild theory has something to it and we are all getting to be cranky old men-just our bodies are staying young. But that is silly. Even though seventy-odd Greenwich years have passed, it has been less than four for me since we left Earth. My true time is hunger and sleep; I’ve slept about fourteen hundred times in the Elsie and eaten three meals and a snack or two for each sleep. That is
four years, not seventy.
No, I’m just disappointed that on my first free evening in a couple of weeks I have nothing better to do
than write in my diary. But, speaking of sleep, I had better get some; the first party will go ashore tomorrow, if medicine
approves, and I will be busy. I won’t be on it but there is plenty to do to get them off.
We are a sorry mess. I don’t know what we can
do now.
I had better begin at the beginning. Elysia checked out in all ways on preliminary survey-breathable atmosphere, climate within Earth limits and apparently less extreme; a water, oxygen and carbon dioxide life cycle; no unusual hazards.
No signs of intelligent life, of course, or we would have skipped it. It is a watery world even more than Terra is, with over 90% oceans and there was talk of naming it “Aquaria” instead of Elysia, but somebody pointed out that there was no sense in picking a name which might make it unattractive to colonists when there seemed to be nearly as much usable land as Earth had.
So we cuddled up to an island as big as Madagascar-almost a continent for Elysia-with the idea that we could cover the whole island in the detailed survey and be able to report that a colony could settle there as fast as LRF could send a ship-we knew that Connie was already settled and we wanted to get this one
settled and make it a clean sweep for the Elsie.
I gave Percy a pat and told him to size up the lay of the land and to let me know if
he found any lady
pigs. Uncle Lucas took the guard ashore and the science party followed the same day. It was clear that Elysia was going to be no more of a problem than Connie had been and almost as big a prize-except for
the
remote possibility of exotic infection we could not handle.
That was two weeks ago.
It started out routine as breakfast. Percy and the other experimental animals flourished on an Elysian
diet; Van failed to catch anything worse than an itch and presently he was trying Elysian food himself-
there were awkward looking four-winged birds which broiled nicely; Van said they reminded him of roast turkey with an overtone of cantaloupe. But Percy the Pig would not touch some fish that were caught and the rats that did eat them died, so sea food was put off until further investigation could be made. The fish did not look like ours; they were flat the wrong way, like a flounder, and they had tendrils something like a catfish which raveled on the ends instead of being spiny. Harry Gates was of the opinion that they were feeling organs and possibly manipulative as well.
The island had nothing like the big-mouthed carnivorous lizards
that got Lefty Gomez. However, there was no telling what might be on other islands, since the land masses were so detached that totally different lines of evolution might have been followed in each island group. Our report was going to recommend that Devereaux Island be settled first, then investigate the others cautiously.
I
was due to go ashore on third rotation, Unc having taken the first week, then a week of rest, and now would take shipside watch while I linked with him from ashore. But at the last minute I agreed to
swap, as Anna was anxious to go.
I did not want to swap, but I had been running the department’s watch list since Rupe’s death and it would have been awkward to refuse. Gloria was going, too, since her husband was on that rotation, but Gloria did not count as her telepartner was on vacation back Earthside.
When they left, I was on top of the Elsie glumly watching them get into the boats. There was a “monkey island” deck temporarily rigged up there, outside the airlock; it was a good place to watch the boats being loaded at the cargo ports lower down. Engineering had completed inspection and overhaul and had about finished filling the boost-mass tanks; the Elsie was low in the water and the cargo ports
were not more than ten feet above waterline. It made loading convenient; at the time we put the first party ashore the tanks were empty and the boats had to be lowered nearly a hundred feet and
passengers had to go down rope ladders-not
easy for people afraid of heights, as so many are. But it was a cinch that day.
The airlock was only large enough for people; anything bigger had to go through the cargo ports. It was possible to rig the cargo ports as airlocks and we had done so on Inferno around Beta Hydri, but when the air was okay we just used them as doors. They were at the cargo deck, underneath the mess
deck and over the auxiliary machinery spaces; our three boats and the two helicopters were carried just inside on that deck. The boats could be swung out on gooseneck davits from where they nested but the helicopters had to be hooked onto boat falls, swung
out, then a second set of falls hooked to them from the monkey island above, by which a helicopter could be scooted up the Elsie’s curved side and onto the temporary top deck, where her jet rotors would be attached.
Mr. Regato cursed the arrangement every time we used it, “Mechanical buffoonery!” was his name for
it.
“I’ve never seen a ship’s architect who wasn’t happy as soon as he had a pretty picture. He never
stops to think that some poor fool is going to have to use his pretty picture.”
As may be, the arrangement did let the helis be unloaded with a minimum of special machinery to get out of order-which, I understand, was a prime purpose
in refitting the ships for the Project. But that day
the
helicopters were outside and ready, one of them at camp and the other tied down near me on the monkey island. All we had to do was to load the boats.
The boats were whale boats molded of glass and teflon and made nonsinkable by plastic foam in all dead spaces. They were so tough that, while you might be able to bash one in, you could not puncture
it with anything short of a drill or a torch, yet they were so light
that four men could lift one that was
empty. It did them no harm to drive them up onto a rocky beach, then they could be unloaded and
easily dragged higher. They were driven by alcohol jets, just as the helis were, but they had oars and
sails as well. We never used the oars although
all the men had gone through a dry drill under my Uncle Steve’s watchful
eye.
The boats had come in the night before loaded with specimens for the research department; now they were going back with people who would replace those ashore. From the monkey island I could see, half a mile away, the people who were coming back, waiting on the beach for the boats. Two of the boats
were lying off, waiting for the third; each had about eighteen people in it and a few bundles of things
requisitioned by Harry Gates for his scientific uses ashore, as well as a week’s supplies for the whole party.
I noticed a movement behind me, turned, and saw that it was the Old Man coming up the airlock hatch. “Good morning, Captain.”
“Morning, Bartlett.” He looked around. “Nice day.”
“Yes, sir…and a nice place.”
“It is indeed.” He looked toward the shore. “I’m going to find some excuse to hit dirt before we leave here. I’ve been on steel too long.”
“I don’t see why not, sir. This place is friendly as a puppy. Not like Inferno.”
“Not a bit.” He turned away, so I did too; you don’t press conversation on the Captain unless he wants
it.
The third boat was loaded now and cast loose; all three were about fifty yards away and were forming a column to go in together. I waved to Gloria and Anna.
At each boat, a long, wet rope as thick as my waist came up out of the water, passed across it amidships and back into the water on the other side. I yelled, “Hey, Captain! Look!”
He turned. The boats rolled sideways and sank-they were pulled under. I heard somebody scream and
the
water was crowded with struggling bodies.
The Captain leaned past me at the raft and looked at the disaster. He said in an ordinary tone, “Can you
start that chopper?”
“Uh, I think so, Captain.” I was not a helicopter pilot but I knew how it worked.
“Then do it.” He leaned far over and yelled, “Get that cargo door closed!” He turned and dived down
the
hatch. I caught a glimpse of what had made him yell as I turned to climb into the helicopter. It was
another of those wet ropes slithering up the Elsie’s side toward the cargo port.
Starting the helicopter was more complicated than I had realized, but there was a check-off list printed on
the instrument panel. I had fumbled my way down to “step four: start impeller” when I was pushed
aside by Ace Wenzel the torchman who was the regular pilot. Ace did something with both hands, the blades started to revolve, making shadows across our faces, and he yelled, “Cast her loose!”
I was shoved out the door as the Surgeon was climbing in; I fell four feet to the deck as the down blast hit me. I picked myself up and looked around.
There was nothing in the water, nothing. Not a body, not a person struggling to keep afloat, no sign of the boats. There was not even floating cargo although some of the packages would float. I knew; I had
packed some of them.
Janet was standing next to me, shaking with dry sobs. I said stupidly, “What happened?”
She tried to control herself and said shakily, “I don’t know. I saw one of them get Otto. It just…it just-” She started to bawl again and turned away.
There wasn’t anything on the water, but now I saw that there was something in the water, under it. From high up you can see down into water if
it
is fairly smooth; arranged around the ship in orderly
ranks were things of some sort. They looked like whales-or
what I think a whale would look like in water; I’ve never seen a whale;
I was just getting it through my confused head that I was looking at the creatures who had destroyed
the
boats when somebody yelled and pointed. On shore the people who were to return were still on the beach, but they were no longer alone-they were surrounded. The things had come ashore, on each side of them and had flanked them. I could not see well at that distance but I could see the sea creatures because they were so much bigger than we were. They didn’t have legs, so far as I could tell, but it did not
slow them down-they were fast.
And our people were being herded into the water.
There was nothing we could do about it, not anything. Under us we had a ship that was the end product
of centuries of technical progress; its torch could destroy a city in the blink of an eye. Ashore the guard had weapons by which one man was equal to an army of older times and there were more such weapons somewhere in the ship. But at the time I did not even know where the armory was, except that it was somewhere in the auxiliary deck-you can live a long time in a ship and never visit all her compartments.
I suppose I should have been down in the auxiliary deck, searching for weapons. But what I did was
stand there, frozen, with a dozen others, and watch it happen.
But somebody had been more alert than I had been. Two men came bursting up through
the hatch; they threw down two ranger guns and started frantically to plug them in and break open packages of ammunition. They could have saved the effort; by the time they were ready to sight in on the enemy, the beach was as empty as the surface of the water. Our shipmates had been pushed and dragged under. The helicopter was hovering over the spot; its rescue ladder was down but there was no one on it.
The helicopter swung around over the island and across
our camp site, then returned to the ship.
While it was moving in to touch down, Chet Travers hurried up the ladder. He looked around,
saw me
and said, “Tom, where’s the Captain?” “In the chopper.”
“Oh.” He frowned. “Well, give him this. Urgent. I’ve got to get back down.” He shoved a paper at me and disappeared. I glanced at it, saw that it was a message form, saw who it was from, and grabbed the Captain’s arm as he stepped out of the heli.
He shrugged me off. “Out of my way!”
“Captain, you’ve got to-it’s a message from the island-from Major Lucas.”
He stopped then and took it from me, then fumbled for his reading glasses, which I could see sticking
out of a pocket. He shoved the dispatch form back at me before I could help him and said, “Read it to
me,
boy.”
So I did. “ ‘From: Commander Ship’s Guard-To: Commanding Officer Lewis and Clark-Oh nine three one-at oh nine oh five survey camp was attacked by hostile natives, believed to be amphibious. After suffering initial heavy losses the attack was beaten off and I have withdrawn with seven survivors to the hilltop north of the camp. We were forced to abandon survey craft number two. At time of attack, exchange party was waiting on beach; we are cut off from them and their situation is not known but must be presumed to be desperate.
“ ‘Discussion: The attack was intelligently organized and was armed. Their principal weapon appears to be a jet of sea water
at
very high pressure but they use also a personal weapon for stabbing and
cutting. It must be assumed that they have other weapons. It must be conditionally assumed that they
are
as intelligent as we are, as well disciplined, and possibly as well armed for the conditions
Their superior numbers give them a present advantage even if they had no better weapons.
“ ‘Recommendations:
My surviving command can hold out where it is against weapons thus far
encountered. It is therefore urgently recommended that immediate measures be limited to rescuing beach party. Ship should then be placed in orbit until a plan can be worked out and weapons improvised to relieve my command without hazard to the ship.-S. Lucas, Commandant, oh nine three six.”“
The Captain took the message and turned toward the hatch without
speaking. Nobody said anything
although
there were at least twenty of us crowded up there. I hesitated, then when I saw that others were going down, I pushed in and followed the Captain.
He stopped two decks down and went into the communications office. I didn’t follow him, but he left the door open. Chet Travers was in there, bent over the gear he used to talk with the camp, and
Commander Frick was leaning over him with a worried look on his face: The Captain said, “Get me Major Lucas.”
Commander Frick looked up. “We’re trying to, Captain. Transmission cut off while they were sending
us a
list of casualties.”
The Captain chewed his lip and looked frustrated, then he said “Keep trying,” and turned. He saw me.
“Bartlett!”
“Yes, sir!”
“You have one of your people over there. Raise him.”
I thought rapidly, trying to remember the Greenwich even as I was calling Vicky-if Vicky was home, she
could get through
on the direct line to LRF and they could hook her with Sam Rojas’s telepartner
and
thence to Sam, and the Captain could talk to Uncle Steve on a four-link relay almost as fast as he could by radio. (“Vicky! Come in, Vicky! Urgent!”)
“Yes; Uncle Tom? What is it? I was asleep.”
Commander Frick said, “I don’t think that will work, Captain. Rojas isn’t on the list of survivors. He was scheduled for rotation; he must have been down at the beach.”
Of course, of course! Sam would have been down at the beach-I had stood by and must have watched
him
being herded into the water!
“What is it, Uncle Tom?” (“Just wait, hon. Stay linked.”)
“Then get me somebody else,” the Captain snapped.
“There isn’t anyone else, Captain,” Frick answered. “Here’s the list of survivors.
Rojas was the only fr- the only special communicator we had ashore.”
The Captain glanced at the list, said, “Pass the word for all hands not on watch to assemble in the mess room on the double.” He turned and walked right through
me. I jumped out of the way.
“What’s the matter, Uncle Tom? You sound worried.”
I tried to control my voice. (“It was a mistake, hon. Just forget it and try to get back to sleep. I’m sorry.”)
“All right. But you still sound worried.”
I hurried after the Captain. Commander Frick’s voice was calling out the order over the ship’s system as we hurried down the ladders, yet he was only a moment or two behind me in reaching the mess room. In a matter of seconds
we were all there … just a handful
of those who had left Earth-about forty. The Captain looked around and said to Cas Warner, “Is this all?”
“I think so, Captain, aside from the engineering watch.” “I left Travers on watch,” added Frick.
“Very well” The Captain turned and faced us. “We are about to rescue the survivors ashore. Volunteers step forward.”
We didn’t step, we surged, all together. I would like to say that I was a split second ahead, because of
Uncle Steve, but it wouldn’t be true. Mrs. Gates was carrying young Harry in her arms and she was as fast as I was.
“Thank you,” the Captain said stiffly. “Now will the women please go over there by the pantry so that I can pick the men who will go.”
“Captain?”
“Yes, Captain Urqhardt?” “I will lead the party.”
“You’ll do nothing of the sort, sir. I will lead: You will now take some women and go down and fetch
what we need.”
Urqhardt barely hesitated, then said, “Aye, aye, sir.”
“That rule-our standing rule for risk-will apply to all of you. In doubly-manned jobs the older man will go. In other jobs, if the job can be dispensed with, the man will go; if it cannot be, the man will stay.” He looked around.
“Dr. Babcock!” “Righto, Skipper!”
Mr. O’Toole said, “Just a moment, Captain. I am a widower and Dr. Babcock is much more-” “Shut up.”
“But-”
“Confound it, sir, must I debate every decision with every one of you? Must I remind you that every
second counts? Get over there with the women.”
Red-faced and angry Mr. O’Toole did as he was told. The Captain went on, “Mr. Warner. Mr. Bach. Dr. Severin-” Quickly he picked those he wanted, then waved the rest of us over toward the pantry.
Uncle Alfred McNeil tried to straighten his stooped shoulders. “Captain, you forgot me. I’m the oldest in my department.”
The Captain’s face softened just a hair. “No, Mr. McNeil, I didn’t forget,” he said quietly, “but the capacity of the chopper is limited-and we have seven to bring back. So I must omit you.”
Unc’s shoulders sagged and I thought
he was going to cry, than he shuffled over away from the selected few. Dusty Rhodes caught my eye and looked smug and proud;
he was one of the chosen. He still did not look more than sixteen and I don’t think he had ever shaved; this was probably the first time in his life that he had ever been treated in all respects as a man.
In spite of the way the others had been shut off short I couldn’t let it stand. I stepped forward again and
touched the Captain’s sleeve. “Captain … you’ve got to let me go! My uncle is over there.”
I thought he was going to explode, but he caught himself.
“I see your point. But you arc a special communicator and we haven’t any spare. I’ll tell Major Lucas that you tried.”
“But-”
“Now shut up and do as you are told-before I kick you half across the compartment.” He turned away as if
I didn’t exist.
Five minutes
later arms had been issued and we were all crowding up the ladders to see them off. Ace
Wenzel started the helicopter at idling speed and jumped out. They filed in, eight of them, with the Captain last. Dusty had a bandolier ever each shoulder and a ranger gun in his hands; he was grinning
excitedly. He threw me a wink and said, “I’ll send you a postcard.”
The Captain paused and said, “Captain Urqhardt.” “Yes, sir.”
The Captain and the reserve captain conferred for a moment; I couldn’t hear them and I don’t think we were meant to hear. Then Captain Urqhardt said loudly, “Aye, aye, sir. It shall be done.”
“Very good, sir.” The Captain stepped in, slammed the door, and took the controls himself. I braced myself against the down blast.
Then we waited.
I alternated between monkey island and the comm office. Chet Travers still could not raise Uncle Steve but he was in touch with the heli. Every time I went top side I looked for the sea things but they seemed to have gone away.
Finally I came down again to the comm room and Chet was looking joyful. “They’ve got ‘em!” he announced.
“They’re off the ground.” I started to ask him about it but he was turning to announce the glad news
over the ship’s system; I ran up to see if I could spot the heli.
I saw it, near the hilltop, about
a mile and a half away. It moved rapidly toward the ship. Soon we could see people inside. As it got closer someone opened a window on the side toward us.
The Captain was not really skilled with a helicopter. He tried to make a landing straight in but his judgment of wind was wrong and be had to swing on past and try again. The maneuver brought
the craft so close to the ship that we could see the passengers plainly. I saw Uncle Steve and he saw me and waved; he did not call out, he just waved. Dusty Rhodes was beside him and saw me, too. He grinned
and
waved and shouted, “Hey, Tom, I rescued your buddy!” He reached back and then Percy’s head
and cloven forehooves showed above the frame, with Dusty holding the pig with one hand and pointing
to
him with the other. They were both grinning.
“Thanks!”
I yelled back. “Hi, Percy!”
The chopper turned a few hundred feet beyond the ship and headed back into the wind.
It was coming straight toward the ship and would have touched down soon when something came out of the water right under it. Some said it was a machine-to me it looked like an enormous elephant’s trunk. A stream of water so solid, hard, and bright that it looked like steel shot out of the end of it; it struck a rotor tip and the heli staggered.
The Captain leaned the craft over and it slipped out of contact. The stream followed it, smashed against the fuselage and again caught a rotor; the heli tilted violently and began to fall.
I’m not much in an emergency; it is hours
later when I figure out what I should have done. This time I acted without thinking. I dived down the ladder without hitting the treads and was on down in the cargo
deck almost at once. The port of that side was closed, as it had been since the Captain ordered it closed earlier; I slapped the switch and it began to grind open. Then I looked around
and saw what I needed: the boat falls, coiled loosely on deck, not yet secured. I grabbed a bitter end and was standing on the port as it was still swinging down to horizontal.
The wrecked helicopter was floating right in front of me and there were people struggling in the water.
“Uncle Steve!” I yelled “Catch!” I threw the line as far as I could.
I had not even seen him as I yelled. It was just the idea that was in the top of my mind. Then I did see him, far beyond where I had been able to throw the line. I heard him call back, “Coming, Tom!” and he started swimming
strongly toward the ship.
I was so much in a daze that I almost pulled the line in to throw it again when I realized that I had
managed to throw far enough for some one. I yelled again. “Harry! Right behind you! Grab on!”
Harry Gates rolled ever in the water, snatched at the line and got it. I started to haul him in.
I almost lost him as I got him to the ship’s skin. One of his arms seemed almost useless and he nearly
lost his grasp. But between us we managed to manhandle him up and into the port; we would not have made it if the Ship had not been so low in the water. He collapsed inside and lay on his face, gasping and sobbing.
I jerked the fall loose from his still clenched hand and turned to throw it to Uncle Steve.
The helicopter was gone, Uncle Steve was gone, again the water was swept clean-except for Percy,
who, with his head high out of water, was swimming with grim determination toward the ship.
I made sure that there were no other people anywhere in the water. Then I tried to think what I could do for Percy.
The poor little porkchop could not grab a line, that was sure. Maybe I could lasso him. I fumbled to get a slip knot in the heavy line. I had just managed it when Percy gave a squeal of terror
and I jerked my
head around just in time to see him pulled under the water.
It wasn’t a mouth that got him. I don’t think it was a mouth.
XV
“CARRY OUT HER MISSION”
I don’t know what I expected after the attack by the behemoths. We just wandered around in a daze. Some of us tried to look out from the monkey island deck until that spouter appeared again and almost knocked one of us off, then Captain Urqhardt ordered all hands to stay inside and the hatch was closed.
I certainly did not expect a message that was brought around after supper (if supper had been served; some made themselves sandwiches) telling me to report at once for heads-of-departments conference.
“That’s you, isn’t it, Tom?” Chet Travers asked me. “They tell me Unc Alfred is on the sick list. His door
is closed.”
“I suppose
it’s me.” Unc had taken it hard and was in bed with a soporific in him, by order of the one remaining medical man, Dr. Pandit.
“Then you had better shag up there.”
First I went to Captain Urqhardt’s room and found it dark, then I got smart and went to the Captain’s cabin. The door was open and some were already around the table with Captain Urqhardt at the head.
“Special communications department, sir,” I announced myself.
“Sit down, Bartlett.”
Harry came in behind me and Urqhardt got up and shut the door and sat down. I looked around,
thinking it was a mighty funny heads-of-departments meeting. Harry Gates was the only boss there who had been such when we left Earth. Mr. Eastman was there instead of Commander Frick. Mama O’Toole was long dead but now Cas was gone too; ecology was represented by Mr. Krishnamurti who
had
merely been in charge of air-conditioning and hydroponics when we had left. Mr. O’Toole was there in place of Dr. Babcock, Mr. Regato instead of Mr. Roch. Sergeant Andreeli, who was also a machinist in engineering, was there in place of Uncle Steve and he was the only member of the ship’s
guard left alive-because he had been sent back to the ship with a broken arm two days earlier. Dr.
Pandit sat where Dr. Devereaux should have been.
And myself
of course but I was just fill-in; Unc was still aboard. Worst of all, there was Captain
Urqhardt sitting where the Captain should have been.
Captain Urqhardt started in. “There is no need to detail our situation; you all know it. We will dispense with the usual departmental reports, too. In my opinion our survey of this planet is as
complete as we can make it with present personnel and equipment… save that an additional report must be made of the hazard encountered today in order that the first colonial party will be prepared to defend
itself. Is there disagreement? Dr. Gates, do you wish to make further investigations here?”
Harry looked surprised and answered, “No, Captain. Not under the circumstances.”
“Comment?” There was none. “Very well,” Urqhardt continued. “I propose
to shape course for Alpha Phoenicis. We will hold memorial services at nine tomorrow morning and boost
at noon. Comment? Mr. O’Toole.”
“Eh? Do you mean can we have the figures ready? I suppose so, if
Janet and I get right on it.” “Do so, as soon as we adjourn. Mr. Regato?”
Regato was looking astounded. “I didn’t expect this, Captain.
“It is short notice, but can your department be ready? I believe you have boost mass aboard.”
“It isn’t that,. Captain. Surely, the torch will be ready. But I thought we would make one long jump for
Earth.”
“What led you to assume that?”
“Why, uh …” The new Chief Engineer stuttered and almost slipped out of P-L lingo into Spanish. “The shape we are in, sir. The engineering department will have to go on watch-and-watch, heel and toe. I
can’t speak for other departments, but they can’t be in much better shape.”
“No, you can’t and I am not asking you to. With respect to your
own
department, is it mechanically ready?”
Regato swallowed. “Yes, sir. But people break down as well as machinery.”
“Wouldn’t you have to stand watch-and-watch to shape course for Sol?” Urqhardt did not wait for the obvious answer, but went on, “I should not have to say this. We are not here for our own convenience; we are here on an assigned mission … as you all know. Earlier today, just before Captain Swanson left, he said to me, “Take charge of my ship, sir. Carry out her mission.” I answered, ‘Aye, aye, sir.’ Let me remind you of that mission: we were sent out to conduct the survey we have been making, with orders
to
continue the search as long as we were in communication with Earth-when we fell out of
communication, we were free to return to Earth, if possible. Gentlemen, we are still in touch with
Earth; our next assigned survey point is Alpha Phoenicis. Could anything be clearer?”
My thoughts were boiling up so that I hardly heard him. I was thinking: who does this guy think he is? Columbus? Or the Flying Dutchman? There were only a little over thirty of us left alive-in a ship that had started with two hundred. The boats were gone, the heli’s were-I almost missed his next remark.
“Bartlett?” “Sir?”
“What about your department?”
It dawned on me that we were the key department-us freaks. When we fell out of touch, he had to turn
back. I was tempted to say that we had all gone deaf, but I knew I couldn’t get away with it. So I stalled.
“As you pointed out, sir, we are in touch with Earth.” “Very well.” His eyes turned toward Dr. Pandit.
“Just a moment, Captain,” I insisted. “There’s more to it.” “Eh? State it.”
“Well, this next jump is about thirty years, isn’t it? Greenwich I mean.” “Of that order. Somewhat less.”
“
‘Of that order.’ There are three special communicators left, myself, Unc-I mean Mr. McNeil-and
Mei-Ling Travers. I think you ought to count Unc out.”
“Why?”
“Because he has his original telepartner
and
she is now as old as he is. Do you think Unc will live another thirty years?”
“But it won’t be thirty years for him-oh, sorry! I see your point. She would be well past a hundred if she
lived at all. Possibly senile.”
“Probably, sir. Or more likely dead.”
“Very well, we won t count McNeil. That leaves two of you. Plenty for essential communication.
“I doubt it, sir. Mei-Ling is a poor bet. She has only a secondary linkage and her partner is over thirty, with no children. Based on other telepairs, I would say that it is most unlikely that they will stay in rapport through another peak … not a thirty-year one.”
“That still leaves yourself.”
I thought suddenly that if I had the guts to jump over the side, they could all go home. But it was just a thought; when I die, it won’t be suicide. “My own case isn’t much better, sir. My telepartner is about-” I had to stop and count up, then the answer did not seem right. “-is about nineteen, sir. No kids. No chance of kids before we peak…
and I couldn’t link in with a brand-new baby anyhow. She’ll be fiftyish when we come out. So far as I know, there hasn’t been a case in the whole fleet of bridging that long a period out of rapport.”
He waited several moments before be answered. “Have you any reason to believe that it is
impossible?”
“Well… no, sir. But it is extremely unlikely.”
“Hmm … do you consider yourself an authority in theory of telepathy?” “Huh? No, sir. I am just a telepath, that’s all.”
“I think he is probably right,” put in Dr. Pandit, “are you an authority, Doctor?” “Me, sir? As you know, my specialty is exotic pathology. But-”
“In that case, we will consult authorities Earthside. Perhaps they can suggest some way to improve our chances. Very probably, under the circumstances, the Foundation will again authorize use of drugs to reduce the possibility that our special communicators might fall out of touch during peak. Or
something.”
I thought of telling him that Vicky wasn’t going to risk dangerous habit-forming drugs. Then I thought better of it. Pat had-and Vicky might.
“That is all, gentlemen. We will boost at noon tomorrow. Uh, one more thing … One of you implied that morale is not too high in the ship. That is correct and I am perhaps more aware of it than you are.
But morale will shake down to normal and we will best be able to forget the losses we have suffered if we all get quickly back to work. I want only to add that you all, as senior officers of
this ship, have most to do with morale by setting an example. I am sure that you will.” He stood up.
I don’t know how news travels in a ship but by the time I got down to the mess room everybody knew that we were boosting tomorrow
… and not for home. It was buzz-buzz and yammer all over. I ducked out
because I didn’t want to discuss it; my thoughts were mixed. I thought
the Captain was insisting on
one more jump from which he couldn’t possibly report his results, if any-and with a nice fat chance that none of us would ever get home. On the other hand I admired the firm way he faced us up to our obligations and brushed aside panic. He had guts.
So did the Flying Dutchman have guts-but at last report he was still trying to round the Cape and not succeeding.
The Captain-Captain Swenson, I corrected-would not have been that bullheaded.
Or would he? According to Urqhardt, the last thing the Captain had said had been to remind Urqhardt that it was up to him to carry out the mission. All of us had been very carefully chosen (except us freaks) and probably the skipper and the relief skipper of each ship were picked primarily for bulldog stubbornness, the very quality that had kept Columbus going on and on when he was running out of
water and his crew was muttering mutiny. I remembered Uncle Steve had once suggested as much.
I decided to go talk to Uncle Steve … then I remembered I couldn’t and I really felt bad. When my parents had died, two peaks back, I had felt bad because
I didn’t feel as bad as I knew I should have felt. When it happened-or rather, by the time I knew about it-they were long dead, people I had not seen in a long time and just faces in a photograph. But Uncle Steve I had seen every day-I had seen today.
And I had been in the habit of kicking my troubles around with him whenever they were too much for
me.
I felt his loss then, the delayed shock you get when you are hit hard. The hurt doesn’t come until you
pull yourself together and realize you’re hit.
It was just as well that somebody tapped on my door then, or I would have bawled.
It was Mei-Ling and her
husband, Chet. I invited them in and they sat down on the bed. Chat got to the point.
“Tom, where do you stand on this?” “On what?”
“This silly business of trying to go on with a skeleton crew.”
“It doesn’t matter where I stand,” I said slowly. “I’m not running the ship.” “Ah, but you are!”
“Huh?”
“I don’t mean quite that, but I do mean you can put a stop to the nonsense. Now, look, Tom, everybody
knows what you told the Captain and-”
“Who’s been talking?”
“Huh? Never mind. If it didn’t leak from you, it probably did from everybody else present; it’s common knowledge. What you told him made sense. What it comes down to is that Urqhardt is
depending on you and you alone to keep him in touch with the home office. So you’re the man with the stick. You can stop him.”
“Huh? Now wait. I’m not the only one. Granted that he isn’t counting on Unc-how about Mei-Ling?” Chat shook
his head. “Mei-Ling isn’t going to ‘think-talk’ for him.”
His wife said, “Now, Chet; I haven’t said so.”
He looked at her fondly. “Don’t be super-stupid, my lovely darling. You know that there is no chance at all that you will be any use to him after
peak. If our brave Captain Urqhardt hasn’t got that through his head now, he will … even if I have to explain to him in words of one syllable.”
“But I might stay linked.”
“Oh, no, you won’t … or I’ll
bash your pretty head in. Our kids are going to grow up on Earth.”
She looked soberly at him and patted his hand. The Travers’s were not expecting again, but everybody
knew they were hoping; I began to see why Chet was adamant… and I became quite sure that Mei-Ling
would not link again after peak-not after her husband had argued with her for a while. What Chet wanted was more important to her than what the Captain wanted, or any abstract duty to a Foundation back on Earth.
Chet went on, “Think it over, Tom, and you will see that you can’t let your shipmates
down. To go on
is suicidal and everybody knows it but the Captain. It’s up to you.” “Uh, I’ll think it over.”
“Do that. But don’t take too long.” They left.
I went to bed but didn’t sleep. The deuce of it was that Chet was almost certainly right … including the certainty that Mei-Ling would never patch in with her telepair after another peak, for she was beginning to slip even now. I had been transmitting mathematical or technical matter which would have fallen to her ever since last peak, because her linking was becoming erratic. Chet wouldn’t have to bash
her
admittedly-pretty head in; she was falling out of touch.
On the other hand…
When I had reached “On the other hand” about eighteen times, I got up and dressed and went looking for
Harry Gates;
it occurred to me that since he was a head of department and present at the meeting, it was proper to talk to him about it.
He wasn’t in his room; Barbara suggested that I try the laboratory. He was there, alone, unpacking specimens that had been sent over the day before. He looked up. “Well, Tom, how is it going?”
“Not too good.”
“I know. Say, I haven’t had a proper chance to thank you. Shall I write it out, or will you have it right off my chest?”
“Uh, let’s take it for granted.” I had not understood him at first, for it is the simple truth that I had
forgotten about pulling him out of the water; I hadn’t had time to think about it.
“As you say.
But I won’t forget it. You know that, don’t you?” “Okay. Harry, I need advice.”
“You do? Well, I’ve got it in all sizes. All of it free and all of it worth what it costs, I’m afraid.” “You were at the meeting tonight.”
“So were you.” He looked worried.
“Yes.” I told him all that had been fretting me, then thought about it and told him all that Chet had
said. “What am I to do, Harry? Chet is right; the chance of doing any good on another jump isn’t worth
it.
Even if we find a planet worth reporting-a chance that is never good,
based on what the fleet has done
as a whoIe-even so, we almost certainly won’t be able to report it except by going back, two centuries after we left. It’s ridiculous and, as Chet says, suicidal, with what we’ve got left. On the other hand, the Captain is right; this is what we signed up for. The ship’s sailing orders say for us to go on.”
Harry carefully unpacked a package of specimens before he answered.
“Tommie, you should ask me an easy one. Ask me whether or not to get married and I’ll tell you like a shot. Or anything else. But there is one thing no man can tell another man and that is whore his duty
lies. That you must decide for yourself.”
I thought about it. “Doggone it, Harry, how do you feel about it?”
“Me?” He stopped what he was doing. “Tom, I just don’t know. For myself personally … well, I’ve been happier in this ship than I have ever been before in my life. I’ve got my wife and kids with me and I’m doing just the work I want to do. With others it may be different.”
“How about your kids?”
“Aye, there’s the rub. A family man-” He frowned. “I can’t advise you, Tom. If I even hint that you
should not do what you signed up to do, I’d be inciting to
mutiny … a capital crime,
for both of us. If I tell you that you must do what the Captain wants, I’d be on safe legal grounds-but it might mean the death of you and me and my kids and all the rest of us… because Chet has horse sense on his side even if the law is against him.” He sighed. “Tom, I just missed checking out today-thanks to you-and my
judgment isn’t back in shape. I can’t advise you; I’d be prejudiced.”
I didn’t answer. I was wishing that Uncle Steve had made it; he always
had
an answer for everything.
“All I can do,” Harry went on, “is to make a weaselly suggestion.”
“Huh? What is it?”
“You might go to the Captain privately and tell him just how worried you are. It might affect his
decisions. At least he ought to know.”
I said I would think about it and thanked him and left. I went to bed and eventually got to sleep. I was awakened in the middle of the night by the ship shaking. The ship always swayed a little when
waterborne, but not this way, nor this much; not on Elysia.
It stopped and then it started again…and again it stopped…and started. I was wondering what…when it suddenly quivered in an entirely different way, one that I recognized; it was the way the torch felt when it was just barely critical. The engineers called it “clearing her throat” and was a regular part of
overhaul and inspection. I decided that Mr. Regato must be working late, and I quieted down again. The bumping did not start up again.
At breakfast I found
out what it was: the behemoths had tried something, nobody knew what, against the ship itself…whereupon the Captain had quite logically ordered Mr. Regato to use the torch against them. Now, although we still did not know much about them, we did know one thing: they were not immune to super-heated steam and intense radioactivity.
This brush with the sea devils braced my spine; I decided to see the Captain as Harry had suggested.
He let me in without keeping me waiting more than five minutes. Then he kept quiet and let me talk as
long as I wanted to. I elaborated the whole picture, as I saw it, without attributing anything to Chet or Harry. I couldn’t tell from his face whether I was reaching him or not, so I put it strongly: that Unc and
Mei-Ling were both out of the picture and that the chance that I would be of any use after the next peak
was
so slight that he was risking his. ship and his crew on very long odds.
When I finished I still didn’t know, nor did he make a direct answer. Instead he said, “Bartlett, for
fifty-five minutes yesterday evening you had two other members of the crew in your room with your
door closed.”
“Huh? Yes, sir.”
“Did you speak to them of this?” I wanted to lie. “Uh…yes, sir.”
“After that you looked up another member of the crew and remained with him until quite late…or
quite early, I should say. Did you speak to him on the same subject?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Very well I am holding you for investigation on two counts: suspicion of inciting to mutiny and suspicion of intent to mutiny. You are under arrest. Go to your room and remain there. No visitors.”
I gulped, Then something Uncle Steve had told me came to my aid-Uncle had been a jawbone
space- lawyer and loved to talk about it. “Aye, aye, sir. But I insist that I be allowed to see counsel of my
choice…and that I be given a public hearing.”
The Captain nodded as if I had told him that it was raining. “Certainly. Your legal rights will be respected. But those matters will have to wait; we are now preparing to get underway. So place yourself
under arrest and get to your quarters.”
He turned away and left me to confine myself. He didn’t even seem angry.
So here I sit, alone in my room. I had to tell Unc he couldn’t come in and, later, Chet. I can’t believe what has happened to me.
XIV
“JUST A MATHEMATICAL ABSTRACTION”
That morning seemed a million years long. Vicky checked with me at the usual time, but I told her that the watch list was being switched around
again and that I would get in touch with her later. “Is
something wrong?” she asked.
“No, hon, we’re just having a little reorganization aboard ship.” “All right. But you sound worried.”
I
not only didn’t tell her that I was in a jam, I didn’t tell her anything about the disaster. Time enough later, after it had aged-unless she found out from official news. Meanwhile there was no reason to get a nice kid upset over something she couldn’t help.
Twenty minutes later Mr. Eastman showed up. I answered the door when he knocked and told him,
“I’m
not to have any visitors.
Sorry.”
He didn’t leave. “I’m not a visitor, Tom; I’m here officially, for the Captain.” “Oh.” I let him in.
He had a tool kit with him. He set it down and said, “The regular and special communication departments have been consolidated, now that we are so shorthanded, so it looks like I’m your boss. It won’t make any difference, I’m sure. But I’m to make a reconnection on your recorder, so that you can record directly into the comm office.”
“Okay. But why?”
He seemed embarrassed, “Well…you were due to go on watch a half
hour ago. We’re going to fix this
so that you can stand your watches conveniently from here. The Captain is annoyed that I didn’t arrange it earlier.” He started unscrewing the access plate to the recorder.
I was speechless. Then I remembered something Uncle Steve had told me. “Hey, wait a minute!” “Eh?”
“Oh, go ahead and rewire it, I don’t care. But I won’t stand any watches.”
He straightened up and looked worried. “Don’t talk like that, Tom, You’re in enough trouble now; don’t make it worse. Let’s pretend you never said it. Okay?”
Mr. Eastman was a decent sort and the only one of the electronics people who had never called us
freaks. I think he was really concerned about me. But I said, “I don’t see how it can be worse. You tell the Captain that I said he could take his watches and-” I stopped. That wasn’t what Uncle Steve would
say. “Sorry. Please tell him this: ‘Communicator Bartlett’s respects to the Captain and he regrets that he cannot perform duty while under arrest’ Got it?”
“Now look here, Tom, that’s not the proper attitude. Surely, there is something in what you say from a standpoint of regulations. But we are shorthanded; everybody has to pitch in and help. You can’t stand
on the letter of the law;
it isn’t fair
to
the rest.”
“Can’t I?” I was breathing hard and exulting in the chance to hit back. “The Captain can’t have his
cake and eat it too. A man under arrest doesn’t perform duty. It’s
always been that way end it always will be. You just tell him what I said.”
He silently finished the reconnection with quick precision.
“You’re sure that’s what you want me to tell him?”
“Quite sure.”
“All right. Hooked the way that thing is now”-he added, pointing a thumb at the recorder-”you can
reach me on if you change your
mind. So long.”
“One more thing-” “Eh?”
“Maybe the Captain hasn’t thought
about it, since his cabin has a bathroom, but I’ve been in here some hours. Who takes me down the passageway and when? Even a prisoner is entitled to regular policing.”
“Oh. I guess I do. Come along.”
That was the high point of the morning. I expected Captain Urqhardt to show up five minutes after Mr. Eastman had left me at my room-breathing fire and spitting cinders. So I rehearsed a couple of
speeches in my head, carefully phrased to keep me inside the law and quite respectful. I knew I had
him.
But nothing happened. The Captain did not show up; nobody showed up. It got to be close to noon. When no word was passed about standing by for boost, I got in my bunk with five minutes to spare and waited.
It was a long five minutes.
About a quarter past twelve I gave up and got up. No lunch either. I heard the gong at twelve-thirty, but still nothing and nobody. I finally decided that I would skip one meal before I complained, because I didn’t want to give him the chance to change the subject by pointing out that I had broken arrest. It occurred to me that I could call Unc and tell him about the failure in the beans department, then I
decided that the longer I waited, the more wrong
the Captain would be.
About an hour after everybody else had finished eating Mr. Krishnamurti showed up with a tray. The fact that he brought it himself instead of sending whoever had pantry duty convinced me that I must be a Very Important Prisoner-particularly as Kris was unanxious to talk to me and even seemed scared of
being near me. He just shoved it in and said, “Put it in the passageway when you are through.”
“Thanks, Kris.”
But buried in the food on the tray was a note: “Bully for you! Don’t weaken and we’ll trim this bird’s
wings. Everybody is pulling for you.” It was unsigned and I did not recognize the handwriting. It wasn’t Krishnamurti’s; I knew his from the time when I was fouling up his farm. Nor was it either of the Travers’s, and certainly not Harry’s.
Finally I decided that I didn’t want to guess whose it was and tore it in pieces and chewed it up, just like the Man in the Iron Mask or the Count of Monte Cristo. I don’t really qualify as a romantic hero,
however, as I didn’t swallow it; I just chewed it up and spat it out. But I made darn sure that note was destroyed, for I not only did not want to
know
who had sent it, I didn’t want anybody ever to know.
Know why? That note didn’t make me feel good; it worried me. Oh, for two minutes it bucked me up; I felt larger than life, the champion of the downtrodden.
Then I realized what the note meant…
Mutiny.
It’s the ugliest word in space. Any other disaster is better.
One of the first things Uncle Steve had told me-told Pat and myself, way back when we were kids-
was: “The Captain is right even when he is wrong.” It was years before I understood it; you have to live
in a ship to know why it is true. And I didn’t understand it in my heart until I read that encouraging
note and realized that somebody was seriously thinking of bucking the Captain’s authority … and that I
was
the symbol of their resistance.
A ship is not just a little world; it is more like a human body. You can’t have democracy in it, not democratic consent at least, no matter how pleasant and democratic the Captain’s manner may be. If you’re in a pinch, you don’t take a vote from your arms and legs and stomach and gizzard and find out what the majority wants. Darn well you don’t! Your brain makes a decision and your
whole being carries it out.
A ship in space is like that all the time and has to be. What Uncle Steve meant was that the Captain had
better be right, you had better pray that he is right even if you disagree with him… because it won’t save the ship to be right yourself
if
he is wrong.
But a ship is not a human body; it is people working together with a degree of selflessness that doesn’t come easy-not to me, at least. The only thing that holds it together is a misty something called its
morale, something you hardly know it has until the ship loses it. I realized then that the Elsie had been losing hers for some time. First Doc Devereaux had died and then Mama O’Toole and both of those were body blows. Now we had lost the Captain and most of the rest… and the Elsie was falling to
pieces.
Maybe the new captain wasn’t too bright, but he was trying to stop it. I began to realize that it wasn’t just machinery breaking down or attacks from hostile natives that lost ships; maybe the worst hazard was some bright young idiot deciding that he was smarter than the Captain and convincing enough
others that he was right. I wondered how many of the eight ships that were out of contact had died proving that their captains were wrong and that somebody like me was right.
It wasn’t nearly enough
to be right.
I got so upset that I thought about going to the Captain and telling him I was wrong and what could I
do to help? Then I realized that I couldn’t do that, either. He had told me to stay in my room-no ‘if’s’ or
‘maybe’s.’ If it was more important to back up the Captain and respect his authority than anything else, then the only thing was to do as I had been ordered and sit tight.
So I did.
Kris brought me dinner, almost on time. Late that evening the speakers blared the usual warning, I lay
down and the, Elsie boosted off Elysia. But we didn’t go on, we dropped into an orbit, for we went into free fall right afterwards. I spent a restless night; I don’t sleep well when I’m weightless.
I was awakened by the ship going into light boost, about a half gravity. Kris brought
me breakfast but I didn’t ask what was going on and he didn’t offer to tell me. About the middle of the morning the ship’s
system called out: “Communicator Bartlett, report to the Captain.” It was repeated before I realized it meant me … then I jumped up, ran my shaver over my face, decided that my uniform would have to do, and hurried up to the cabin.
He looked up when I reported my presence. “Oh, yes. Bartlett, Upon investigation I find that there is
no reason to prefer charges. You are released from arrest and restored to duty. See Mr. Eastman.”
He looked back at his desk and I got sore. I had been seesawing between a feeling of consecrated
loyalty to the ship and to the Captain as the head thereof, and an equally strong desire to kick Urqhardt in the stomach. One kind word from him and I think I would have been his boy, come what may. As it was, I was sore.
“Captain!”
He looked up. “Yes?”
“I think you owe me an apology.”
“You do? I do not think so. I acted in the interest of the whole ship. However, I harbor no ill feelings, if that is of any interest to you.” He looked back at his work, dismissing me … as if
my
hard feelings, if
any, were of no possible importance.
So I got out and reported to Mr. Eastman. There didn’t seem to be anything else to do.
Mei-Ling was in the comm office, sending code groups. She glanced up and I noticed that she looked
tired. Mr. Eastman said, “Hello, Tom. I’m glad you’re here; we need you. Will you raise your telepartner, please?”
One good thing about having a telepath run the special watch list is that other people don’t seem to realize that the other end of each pair-the Earthside partner-is not a disembodied spirit. They eat and sleep and work and raise families, and they can’t be on call whenever somebody decides to send a message. “Is it an emergency?” I asked, glancing at the Greenwich and then at the ship’s clock, Vicky
wouldn’t check with me for another half hour; she might be at home and free, or she might not be.
“Perhaps not ‘emergency’ but ‘urgent’ certainly.”
So I called Vicky and she said she did not mind. (“Code groups, Freckle Face,”) I told her. (“So set your recorder on ‘play back.’ “)
“It’s quivering, Uncle Tom. Agitate at will.”
For three hours we sent code groups,
than which there is nothing more tedious. I assumed that it was
probably Captain Urqhardt’s report of what had happened to us on Elysia, or more likely his second
report after the LRF had jumped him for more details. There was no reason to code it so far as I was
concerned; I had been there-so it must be to keep it from our telepartners until LRF decided to release it. This suited me as I would not have relished passing all that blood and slaughter, in clear
language, to little Vicky.
While we were working the Captain came in and sat down with Mr. Eastman; I could see that they
were cooking up more code groups; the Captain was dictating and Eastman was working the encoding machine. Mei-Ling had long since gone. Finally Vicky said faintly, “Uncle Tom, how urgent are these anagrams? Mother called
me to dinner half an hour ago.
(“Hang on and I’ll find out.”) I turned to the Captain and Mr. Eastman, not sure of which one to ask.
But I caught Eastman’s eye and said, “Mr. Eastman, how rush is this stuff? We want to-”
“Don’t interrupt
us,” the Captain cut in. “Just keep on transmitting. The priority is not your concern.” “Captain, you don’t understand; I’m not speaking for myself. I was about to say-”
“Carry on with your work.”
I said to Vicky, (“Hold on a moment, hon.”) Then I sat back and said, “Aye aye, Captain. I’m perfectly
willing to keep on spelling eye charts all night. But there is nobody at the other end.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean it is dinner time and way past for my partner. If you want special duty at the Earthside end, you’d better coordinate with the LRF comm office. Seems to me that somebody has the watch list all mixed up.”
“I see.” As usual he showed no expression. I was beginning to think he was all robot, with wires instead of veins.
“Very well, Mr. Eastman, get Mr. McNeil and have him relieve Mr. Bartlett.” “Yes, Captain.”
“Excuse me, Captain…” “Yes, Bartlett?”
“Possibly you don’t know that Unc’s partner lives in Greenwich zone minus-two. It’s the middle of the night there-and she is an old lady, past seventy-five. I thought
maybe you would want to know.”
“Mmm, is that right, Eastman?” “I believe so, sir.”
“Cancel that last order. Bartlett, is your partner willing to go on again after an hour’s break for chow? Without clearing it with LRF?”
“I’ll see, sir.” I spoke to Vicky; she hesitated. I said, (“What is it, Freckle Face? A date with George? Say the word and I’ll tell Captain Bligh he can’t have you.”)
“Oh, it’s all right. I’ll throw the switch on George. I just wish they would give us something besides alphabet soup. Okay, one hour.”
(“One hour, sugar plum. Run and eat your salad. Mind your waistline.”) “My waistline is just fine, thank you.”
“Okay, Captain.”
“Very well. Please thank him for me.”
He was so indifferent about it that I added a touch of my own. “My partner is a girl, Captain, not a “him.” Her mother has placed a two-hour
curfew on it. Otherwise it must be arranged with LRF.”
“So. Very well.” He turned to Eastman. “Can’t we manage to coordinate these communication watches?”
“I’m trying, Captain. But it is new to me…and we have only three watchstanders left.”
“A watch in three should not be too difficult. Yet there always
seems to be some reason why we can’t transmit. Comment?”
“Well, sir, you saw the difficulty just now. It’s a matter of coordinating with Earth. Uh, I believe the special communicators usually arranged that themselves. Or one of them did.”
“Which one? Mr. McNeil?”
“I believe Bartlett usually handled it, sir.” “So. Bartlett?”
“I did, sir.”
“Very well, you have the job again. Arrange a continuous watch.” He started to get up.
How do you tell the Captain he can’t have his bucket of paint? Aye aye, sir. But just a minute, Captain-”
“Yes?”
“Do I understand you are authorizing me to arrange a continuous
watch with LRF? Signed with your
release number?”
“Naturally.”
“Well, what do I do if
they won’t agree to such long hours for the old lady? Ask for still longer hours
for the other two? In the case of my partner, you’ll run into parent trouble; she’s a young girl.”
“So. I can’t see why the home office hired such people.”
I didn’t say anything. If he didn’t know that you don’t hire
telepaths the way you hire butchers I wasn’t going to explain.
But he persisted. “Comment?”
“I have no comment, sir. You can’t get more than three or four hours a day out of any of them, except in extreme emergency. Is this one? If it is, I can arrange it without bothering the home office.”
He did not answer directly. Instead he said, “Arrange the best watch list you can. Consult with Mr. Eastman.” As he turned to leave I caught a look of unutterable weariness on his face and suddenly felt sorry for him. At least I didn’t want to swap jobs with him.
Vicky took a trick in the middle of the night, over Kathleen’s objections. Kathleen wanted to take it herself, but the truth was that she and I could no longer work easily without
Vicky in the circuit, at least not anything as difficult as code groups.
The Captain did not come in to breakfast and I got there late. I looked around and found a place by
Janet Meers. We no longer sat by departments-just one big horseshoe table, with the rest of the mess room arranged to look like a lounge, so that it would not seem so empty.
I was just digging into scrambled yeast on toast when Mr. Eastman stood up and tapped a glass for attention. He looked as if he had not slept for days. “Quiet, please. I have a message from the Captain.” He pulled out a sheet and started to read:
“ ‘Notice to All Hands: By direction of the Long Range Foundation the mission of this ship has been modified. We will remain in the neighborhood of Beta Ceti pending rendezvous with Foundation Ship
Serendipity. Rendezvous is expected in approximately one month. Immediately thereafter we will shape orbit for Earth.
“ ‘F. X. Urqhardt, commanding Lewis and Clark.’“
My jaw dropped. Why, the silent creeper! All the time I had been lambasting him in my mind he had
been arguing the home office into canceling our orders … no wonder he had used code; you don’t say in clear language that your ship is a mess and your crew has gone to pot. Not if you can help it, you don’t. I didn’t even resent that he had not trusted us freaks to respect the security of communications;
I wouldn’t have trusted myself, under the circumstances.
Janet’s eyes were shining… like a woman in love, or like a relativistic mathematician who has just found a new way to work a transformation. “So they’ve done it!” she said in a hushed voice.
“Done what?” I asked. She was certainly taking it in a big way; I hadn’t realized she was that anxious to get home.
“Tommie, don’t you see? They’ve done it, they’ve done it, they’ve applied irrelevance. Dr. Babcock
was
right.”
“Huh?”
“Why, it’s perfectly plain. What kind of a ship can get here in a month? An irrelevant ship, of course. One that is faster than light.” She frowned. “But I don’t see why it should take even a month. It shouldn’t take any time at all. It wouldn’t use time.”
I
said, “Take it easy, Janet. I’m stupid this morning-I didn’t have much sleep last night. Why do you say that ship…uh, the Serendipity … is faster than light? That’s impossible.”
“Tommie, Tommie … look, dear, if it was an ordinary ship, in order to rendezvous with us here, it would have had to have left Earth over sixty-three years ago.”
“Well, maybe it did.”
“Tommie! It couldn’t possibly-because that long ago nobody knew that we would be here now. How
could they?”
I figured back. Sixty-three Greenwich years ago… mmm, that would have been sometime during our
first peak. Janet seemed to be right; only an incredible optimist or a fortune teller would have sent a ship from Earth at that time to meet us here now. “I don’t understand it.”
“Don’t you see, Tommie? I’ve explained it to you, I know I have. Irrelevance. Why, you telepaths were the reason the investigation started; you proved that “simultaneity’ was an admissible concept … and the inevitable logical consequence was that time and space do not exist.”
I felt my head begin to ache. “They don’t? Then what is that we seem to be having breakfast in?” “Just a mathematical abstraction, dear. Nothing more.” She smiled and looked motherly. “Poor
‘Sentimental Tommie.’ You worry too much.”
I suppose Janet was right, for we made rendezvous with F. S. Serendipity twenty-nine Greenwich days later. We spent the time moseying out at a half gravity to a locus five billion
miles Galactic-north of Beta Ceti, for it appeared that the Sarah did not want to come too close to the big star. Still, at sixty- three light-years, five billion miles is close shooting-a very near miss. We also spent the time working like mischief to arrange and prepare specimens and in collating data. Besides that, Captain Urqhardt suddenly discovered, now that we were expecting visitors, that lots and lots of things had not been
cleaned and polished lately. He even inspected staterooms, which I thought was snoopy.
The Sarah had a mind reader aboard, which helped when it came time to close rendezvous.
She missed us by nearly two light-hours; then their m-r and myself exchanged coordinates (referred to Beta Ceti)
by relay back Earthside and got each other pinpointed in a hurry. By radar and radio alone we could have fiddled around
for a week-if we had ever made contact at all.
But once that was done, the Sarah turned out to be a fast ship, lively enough
to bug your
eyes out. She was in our lap, showing on our short-range radar, as I was reporting the coordinates she had just had to the Captain. An hour later she was made fast and sealed
to our lock. And she was a little ship. The Elsie had seemed huge when I first joined her; then after a while she was just the right size, or a little cramped for some purposes. But the Sarah wouldn’t have made a decent Earth-Moon
shuttle.
Mr. Whipple came aboard first. He was an incredible character to find in space; he even carried a briefcase. But he took charge at once. He had two men with him and they got busy in a small compartment in the cargo deck. They knew just what compartment they wanted; we had to clear
potatoes out of it in a hurry. They worked in there half a day, installing something they called a “null-
field generator,” working in odd clothes made entirely of hair-fine wires, which covered them like mummies. Mr. Whipple stayed in the door, watching while they worked and smoking a cigar-it was the first I had seen in three years and the smell of it made me ill. The relativists stuck close to him, exchanging excited comments, and so did the engineers, except that they looked baffled and slightly
disgusted. I heard Mr. Regato say, “Maybe so. But a torch is reliable. You can depend on a torch.”
Captain Urqhardt watched it all, Old Stone Face in person.
At last Mr. Whipple put out his cigar and said, “Well, that’s that, Captain. Thompson will stay and take
you in and Bjorkenson will go on in the Sarah. I’m afraid you will have to put up with me, too, for I am going back with you.”
Captain Urqhardt’s face was a gray-white. “Do I understand, sir, that you are relieving me of my command?”
“What? Good heavens, Captain, what makes you say that?”
“You seem to have taken charge of my ship…on behalf of the home office. And now you tell me that this man…er, Thompson-will take us in.”
“Gracious, no. I’m sorry. I’m not used to the niceties of field work; I’ve been in the home office too
long. But just think of Thompson as a … mmm, a sailing master for you. That’s it; he’ll be your pilot.
But no one is displacing you; you’ll remain in command until you can return home and turn over your
ship. Then she’ll be scrapped, of course.”
Mr. Regato said in a queer, high voice, “Did you say “scrapped,” Mr. Whipple?” I felt my stomach give a twist. Scrap the Elsie? No!
“Eh? I spoke
hastily. Nothing has been decided Possibly she will be kept as a museum. In fact, that is a good idea.” He took out a notebook and wrote in it. He put it away and said, “And now, Captain,
if you will, I’d like to speak to all your people. There isn’t much time.”
Captain Urqhardt silently led him back to the mess deck.
When we were assembled, Mr. Whipple smiled and said, “I’m not much at speechmaking. I simply want to thank you all, on behalf of the Foundation, and explain what we are doing. I won’t go into
detail, as I am not a scientist; I am an administrator, busy with the liquidation of Project Lebensraum,
of which you are part. Such salvage and rescue operations as this are necessary; nevertheless,
the Foundation is anxious to free the Serendipity, and her sister ships, the Irrelevant, the Infinity, and Zero, for
their proper work,
that is to say, their survey of stars in the surrounding space.”
Somebody gasped. “But that’s what we were doing!”
“Yes, yes, of course. But times change. One of the null-field ships can visit more stars in a year
than a torchship can visit in a century. You’ll be happy to know that the Zero working alone has located seven Earth-type planets this past month.”
It didn’t make me happy.
Uncle Alfred McNeil
leaned forward and said in a soft, tragic voice that spoke for all of us, “Just a moment, sir. Are you telling us that what we did … wasn’t necessary?”
Mr. Whipple looked startled. “No, no, no! I’m terribly sorry if I gave that impression. What you did was utterly necessary, or there would not be any null ships today. Why, that’s like saying that what Columbus did wasn’t necessary, simply because
we jump across oceans as if they were mud puddles nowadays.”
“Thank you, sir, “ Unc said quietly.
“Perhaps no one has told you just how indispensably necessary Project Lebensraum has been. Very
possibly-things have been in a turmoil around the Foundation for some time-I know I’ve had so little sleep myself that I don’t know what I’ve done and left undone. But you realize, don’t you, that without the telepaths among you, all this progress would not have taken place?” Whipple looked around.
“Who are they? I’d
like to shake hands with them. In any case-I’m not a scientist, mind you; I’m a lawyer-in any case, if we had not had it proved beyond doubt that telepathy is truly instantaneous, proof
measured over many light-years, our scientists might still be looking for errors in the sixth decimal
place and maintaining that telepathic signals do not propagate instantaneously but simply at a speed so great that its exact order was concealed by instrumental error. So I understand, so I am told. So you see,
your great work has produced wondrous
results, much greater than expected, even if they are not quite the results you were looking for.”
I was thinking that if they had told us just a few days sooner, Uncle Steve would still be alive. But he never did want to die in bed.
“But the fruition of your efforts,” Whipple went on, “did not show at once. Like so many things in
science, the new idea had to grow for a long time, among specialists … then the stupendous results
burst suddenly on the world. For myself, if anyone had told me six months ago that I would be out here among the stars today, giving a popular
lecture on the new physics, I wouldn’t have believed him. I’m not sure that I believe it now. But here I am. Among other things, I am here to help you get straightened
away when we get back home.” He smiled and bowed.
“Uh, Mr. Whipple,” Chet Travers asked, “just when will we get home?” “Oh, didn’t I tell you? Almost immediately … say soon after lunch.”
Posts Regarding Life and Contentment
Here are
some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you
might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up
in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society
within communist China. As there are some really stark differences
between the two.
Posts about the Changes in America
America is
going through a period of change. Change is good… that is, after it
occurs. Often however, there are large periods of discomfort as the
period of adjustment takes place. Here are some posts that discuss this
issue.
More Posts about Life
I have
broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones
actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little
different, in subtle ways.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are
reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal
library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come
and enjoy a read or two as well.
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
This is the short story “Life-Line” by Robert Heinlein. It describes an interesting situation. A Professor Pinero builds a machine that will predict how long a person will live. It does this by sending a signal along the world line of a person and detecting the echo from the far end. Professor Pinero’s invention has a powerful impact on the life insurance industry, as well as on his own life…
FOREWORD
The beginning of 1939 found me flat broke following a disastrous political campaign (I ran a strong second best, but in politics there are no prizes for place or show). I was highly skilled in ordnance, gunnery, and fire control for Naval vessels, a skill for which there was no demand ashore—and I had a piece of paper from the Secretary of the Navy telling me that I was a waste of space—"totally and permanently disabled" was the phraseology. I "owned" a heavily-mortgaged house.
About then Thrilling Wonder Stories ran a house ad reading (more or less):
GIANT PRIZE CONTEST—Amateur Writers!!!!!! First Prize $50 Fifty Dollars $50
In 1939 one could fill three station wagons with fifty dollars worth of groceries. Today I can pick up fifty dollars in groceries unassisted—perhaps I've grown stronger. So I wrote the story "Life-Line." It took me four days—I am a slow typist. But I did not send it to Thrilling Wonder; I sent it to Astounding, figuring they would not be so swamped with amateur short stories.
Astounding bought it . . . for $70, or $20 more than that "Grand Prize"—and there was never a chance that I would ever again look for honest work.
LIFE-LINE
The chairman rapped loudly for order. Gradually the catcalls and boos died away as several self-appointed sergeants-at-arms persuaded a few hot-headed individuals to sit down. The speaker on the rostrum by the chairman seemed unaware of the disturbance. His bland, faintly insolent face was impassive. The chairman turned to the speaker and addressed him in a voice in which anger and annoyance were barely restrained.
“Dr. Pinero”—the “Doctor” was faintly stressed—”I must apologize to you for the unseemly outburst during your remarks. I am surprised that my colleagues should so far forget the dignity proper to men of science as to interrupt a speaker, no matter”—he paused and set his mouth—”no matter how great the provocation.” Pinero smiled in his face, a smile that was in some way an open insult. The chairman visibly controlled his temper and continued: “I am anxious that the program be concluded decently and in order. I want you to finish your remarks. Nevertheless, I must ask you to refrain from affronting our intelligence with ideas that any educated man knows to be fallacious. Please confine yourself to your discovery—if you have made one.”
Pinero spread his fat, white hands, palms down. “How can I possibly put a new idea into your heads, if I do not first remove your delusions?”
The audience stirred and muttered. Someone shouted from the rear of the hall: “Throw the charlatan out! We’ve had enough.”
The chairman pounded his gavel.
“Gentlemen! Please!”
Then to Pinero, “Must I remind you that you are not a member of this body, and that we did not invite you?”
Pinero’s eyebrows lifted. “So? I seem to remember an invitation on the letterhead of the Academy.”
The chairman chewed his lower lip before replying. “True, I wrote that invitation myself. But it was at the request of one of the trustees—a fine, public-spirited gentleman, but not a scientist, not a member of the Academy.”
Pinero smiled his irritating smile. “So? I should have guessed. Old Bidwell, not so, of Amalgamated Life Insurance? And he wanted his trained seals to expose me as a fraud, yes? For if I can tell a man the day of his own death, no one will buy his pretty policies. But how can you expose me, if you will not listen to me first? Even supposing you had the wit to understand me? Bah! He has sent jackals to tear down a lion.” He deliberately turned his back on them.
The muttering of the crowd swelled and took on a vicious tone. The chairman cried vainly for order. There arose a figure in the front row.
“Mr. Chairman!”
The chairman grasped the opening and shouted: “Gentlemen! Dr. Van Rhein-Smitt has the floor.” The commotion died away.
The doctor cleared his throat, smoothed the forelock of his beautiful white hair, and thrust one hand into a side pocket of his smartly tailored trousers. He assumed his women’s-club manner.
“Mr. Chairman, fellow members of the Academy of Science, let us have tolerance. Even a murderer has the right to say his say before the State exacts its tribute. Shall we do less? Even though one may be intellectually certain of the verdict? I grant Dr. Pinero every consideration that should be given by this august body to any unaffiliated colleague, even though”—he bowed slightly in Pinero’s direction—”we may not be familiar with the university which bestowed his degree. If what he has to say is false, it cannot harm us. If what he has to say is true, we should know it.” His mellow, cultivated voice rolled on, soothing and calming. “If the eminent doctor’s manner appears a trifle inurbane for our tastes, we must bear in mind that the doctor may be from a place, or a stratum, not so meticulous in these matters. Now our good friend and benefactor has asked us to hear this person and carefully assess the merit of his claims. Let us do so with dignity and decorum.”
He sat down to a rumble of applause, comfortably aware that he had enhanced his reputation as an intellectual leader. Tomorrow the papers would again mention the good sense and persuasive personality of “America’s Handsomest University President.” Who knows; maybe now old Bidwell would come through with that swimming-pool donation.
When the applause had ceased, the chairman turned to where the center of the disturbance sat, hands folded over his little round belly, face serene.
“Will you continue, Dr. Pinero?”
“Why should I?”
The chairman shrugged his shoulders. “You came for that purpose.”
Pinero arose. “So true. So very true. But was I wise to come? Is there anyone here who has an open mind, who can stare a bare fact in the face without blushing? I think not. Even that so-beautiful gentleman who asked you to hear me out has already judged me and condemned me. He seeks order, not truth. Suppose truth defies order, will he accept it? Will you? I think not. Still, if I do not speak, you will win your point by default. The little man in the street will think that you little men have exposed me, Pinero, as a hoaxer, a pretender.
“I will repeat my discovery. In simple language, I have invented a technique to tell how long a man will live. I can give you advance billing of the Angel of Death. I can tell you when the Black Camel will kneel at your door. In five minutes’ time, with my apparatus, I can tell any of you how many grains of sand are still left in your hourglass.” He paused and folded his arms across his chest. For a moment no one spoke. The audience grew restless.
Finally the chairman intervened. “You aren’t finished, Dr. Pinero?”
“What more is there to say?”
“You haven’t told us how your discovery works.”
Pinero’s eyebrows shot up. “You suggest that I should turn over the fruits of my work for children to play with? This is dangerous knowledge, my friend. I keep it for the man who understands it, myself.” He tapped his chest.
“How are we to know that you have anything back of your wild claims?”
“So simple. You send a committee to watch me demonstrate. If it works, fine. You admit it and tell the world so. If it does not work, I am discredited, and will apologize. Even I, Pinero, will apologize.”
A slender, stoop-shouldered man stood up in the back of the hall. The chair recognized him and he spoke.
“Mr. Chairman, how can the eminent doctor seriously propose such a course? Does he expect us to wait around for twenty or thirty years for someone to die and prove his claims?”
Pinero ignored the chair and answered directly.
“Pfui! Such nonsense! Are you so ignorant of statistics that you do not know that in any large group there is at least one who will die in the immediate future? I make you a proposition. Let me test each one of you in this room, and I will name the man who will die within the fortnight, yes, and the day and hour of his death.” He glanced fiercely around the room. “Do you accept?”
Another figure got to his feet, a portly man who spoke in measured syllables. “I, for one, cannot countenance such an experiment. As a medical man, I have noted with sorrow the plain marks of serious heart trouble in many of our older colleagues. If Dr. Pinero knows those symptoms, as he may, and were he to select as his victim one of their number, the man so selected would be likely to die on schedule, whether the distinguished speaker’s mechanical egg timer works or not.”
Another speaker backed him up at once. “Dr. Shepard is right. Why should we waste time on voodoo tricks? It is my belief that this person who calls himself Dr. Pinero wants to use this body to give his statements authority. If we participate in this farce, we play into his hands. I don’t know what his racket is, but you can bet that he has figured out some way to use us for advertising his schemes. I move, Mr. Chairman, that we proceed with our regular business.”
The motion carried by acclamation, but Pinero did not sit down. Amidst cries of “Order! Order!” he shook his untidy head at them, and had his say.
“Barbarians! Imbeciles! Stupid dolts! Your kind have blocked the recognition of every great discovery since time began. Such ignorant canaille are enough to start Galileo spinning in his grave. That fat fool down there twiddling his elk’s tooth calls himself a medical man. Witch doctor would be a better term! That little bald-headed runt over there— You! You style yourself a philosopher, and prate about life and time in your neat categories. What do you know of either one? How can you ever learn when you won’t examine the truth when you have a chance? Bah!” He spat upon the stage. “You call this an Academy of Science. I call it an undertakers’ convention, interested only in embalming the ideas of your red-blooded predecessors.”
He paused for breath and was grasped on each side by two members of the platform committee and rushed out the wings. Several reporters arose hastily from the press table and followed him. The chairman declared the meeting adjourned.* * *
The newspapermen caught up with Pinero as he was going out by the stage door. He walked with a light, springy step, and whistled a little tune. There was no trace of the belligerence he had shown a moment before. They crowded about him. “How about an interview, doc?” “What d’yuh think of modern education?” “You certainly told ’em. What are your views on life after death?” “Take off your hat, doc, and look at the birdie.”
He grinned at them all. “One at a time, boys, and not so fast. I used to be a newspaperman myself. How about coming up to my place?”
A few minutes later they were trying to find places to sit down in Pinero’s messy bed-living room, and lighting his cigars. Pinero looked around and beamed. “What’ll it be, boys? Scotch or Bourbon?” When that was taken care of he got down to business. “Now, boys, what do you want to know?”
“Lay it on the line, doc. Have you got something, or haven’t you?”
“Most assuredly I have something, my young friend.”
“Then tell us how it works. That guff you handed the profs won’t get you anywhere now.”
“Please, my dear fellow. It is my invention. I expect to make money with it. Would you have me give it away to the first person who asks for it?”
“See here, doc, you’ve got to give us something if you expect to get a break in the morning papers. What do you use? A crystal ball?”
“No, not quite. Would you like to see my apparatus?”
“Sure. Now we’re getting somewhere.”
He ushered them into an adjoining room, and waved his hand. “There it is, boys.” The mass of equipment that met their eyes vaguely resembled a medico’s office X-ray gear. Beyond the obvious fact that it used electrical power, and that some of the dials were calibrated in familiar terms, a casual inspection gave no clue to its actual use.
“What’s the principle, doc?”
Pinero pursed his lips and considered. “No doubt you are all familiar with the truism that life is electrical in nature. Well, that truism isn’t worth a damn, but it will help to give you an idea of the principle. You have also been told that time is a fourth dimension. Maybe you believe it, perhaps not. It has been said so many times that it has ceased to have any meaning. It is simply a cliché that windbags use to impress fools. But I want you to try to visualize it now, and try to feel it emotionally.”
He stepped up to one of the reporters. “Suppose we take you as an example. Your name is Rogers, is it not? Very well, Rogers, you are a space-time event having duration four ways. You are not quite six feet tall, you are about twenty inches wide and perhaps ten inches thick. In time, there stretches behind you more of this space-time event, reaching to, perhaps, 1905, of which we see a cross section here at right angles to the time axis, and as thick as the present. At the far end is a baby, smelling of sour milk and drooling its breakfast on its bib. At the other end lies, perhaps, an old man some place in the 1980s. Imagine this space-time event, which we call Rogers, as a long pink worm, continuous through the years. It stretches past us here in 1939, and the cross section we see appears as a single, discrete body. But that is illusion. There is physical continuity to this pink worm, enduring through the years. As a matter of fact, there is physical continuity in this concept to the entire race, for these pink worms branch off from other pink worms. In this fashion the race is like a vine whose branches intertwine and send out shoots. Only by taking a cross section of the vine would we fall into the error of believing that the shootlets were discrete individuals.”
He paused and looked around at their faces. One of them, a dour, hard-bitten chap, put in a word.
“That’s all very pretty, Pinero, if true, but where does that get you?”
Pinero favored him with an unresentful smile. “Patience, my friend. I asked you to think of life as electrical. Now think of our long, pink worm as a conductor of electricity. You have heard, perhaps, of the fact that electrical engineers can, by certain measurements, predict the exact location of a break in a transatlantic cable without ever leaving the shore. I do the same with our pink worms. By applying my instruments to the cross section here in this room I can tell where the break occurs; that is to say, where death takes place. Or, if you like, I can reverse the connections and tell you the date of your birth. But that is uninteresting; you already know it.”
The dour individual sneered. “I’ve caught you, doc. If what you say about the race being like a vine of pink worms is true, you can’t tell birthdays, because the connection with the race is continuous at birth. Your electrical conductor reaches on back through the mother into a man’s remotest ancestors.”
Pinero beamed. “True, and clever, my friend. But you have pushed the analogy too far. It is not done in the precise manner in which one measures the length of an electrical conductor. In some ways it is more like measuring the length of a long corridor by bouncing an echo off the far end. At birth there is a sort of twist in the corridor, and, by proper calibration, I can detect the echo from that twist.”
“Let’s see you prove it!”
“Certainly, my dear friend. Will you be a subject?”
One of the others spoke up. “He’s called your bluff, Luke. Put up or shut up.”
“I’m game. What do I do?”
“First write the date of your birth on a sheet of paper, and hand it to one of your colleagues.”
Luke complied. “Now what?”
“Remove your outer clothing and step upon these scales. Now tell me, were you ever very much thinner, or very much fatter, than you are now? No? What did you weigh at birth? Ten pounds? A fine bouncing baby boy. They don’t come so big anymore.”
“What is all this flubdubbery?”
“I am trying to approximate the average cross section of our long pink conductor, my dear Luke. Now will you seat yourself here? Then place this electrode in your mouth. No, it will not hurt you; the voltage is quite low, less than one microvolt, but I must have a good connection.” The doctor left him and went behind his apparatus, where he lowered a hood over his head before touching his controls. Some of the exposed dials came to life and a low humming came from the machine. It stopped and the doctor popped out of his little hideaway.
“I get sometime in February, 1902. Who has the piece of paper with the date?”
It was produced and unfolded. The custodian read, “February 22, 1902.”
The stillness that followed was broken by a voice from the edge of the little group. “Doc, can I have another drink?”
The tension relaxed, and several spoke at once: “Try it on me, doc.” “Me first, doc; I’m an orphan and really want to know.” “How about it, doc? Give us all a little loose play.”
He smilingly complied, ducking in and out of the hood like a gopher from its hole. When they all had twin slips of paper to prove the doctor’s skill, Luke broke a long silence.
“How about showing how you predict death, Pinero?”
No one answered. Several of them nudged Luke forward. “Go ahead, smart guy. You asked for it.” He allowed himself to be seated in the chair. Pinero changed some of the switches, then entered the hood. When the humming ceased he came out, rubbing his hands briskly together.
“Well, that’s all there is to see, boys. Got enough for a story?”
“Hey, what about the prediction? When does Luke get his ‘thirty?”
Luke faced him. “Yes, how about it?”
Pinero looked pained. “Gentlemen, I am surprised at you. I give that information for a fee. Besides, it is a professional confidence. I never tell anyone but the client who consults me.”
“I don’t mind. Go ahead and tell them.”
“I am very sorry. I really must refuse. I only agreed to show you how; not to give the results.”
Luke ground the butt of his cigarette into the floor. “It’s a hoax, boys. He probably looked up the age of every reporter in town just to be ready to pull this. It won’t wash, Pinero.”
Pinero gazed at him sadly. “Are you married, my friend?”
“No.”
“Do you have anyone dependent on you? Any close relatives?”
“No. Why? Do you want to adopt me?”
Pinero shook his head. “I am very sorry for you, my dear Luke. You will die before tomorrow.”
DEATH PUNCHES TIME CLOCK
. . . within twenty minutes of Pinero’s strange prediction, Timons was struck by a falling sign while walking down Broadway toward the offices of the Daily Herald where he was employed.
Dr. Pinero declined to comment but confirmed the story that he had predicted Timons’ death by means of his so-called chronovitameter. Chief of Police Roy . . .
Legal Notice
To whom it may concern, greetings; I, John Cabot Winthrop III, of the firm of Winthrop, Winthrop, Ditmars and Winthrop, Attorneys-at-law, do affirm that Hugo Pinero of this city did hand to me ten thousand dollars in lawful money of the United States, and did instruct me to place it in escrow with a chartered bank of my selection with escrow instructions as follows:
The entire bond shall be forfeit, and shall forthwith be paid to the first client of Hugo Pinero and/or Sands of Time, Inc., who shall exceed his life tenure as predicted by Hugo Pinero by one per centum, or the estate of the first client who shall fail of such predicted tenure in a like amount, whichever occurs first in point of time.
Subscribed and sworn, John Cabot Winthrop III.
Subscribed and sworn to before me this 2nd day of April, 1939. Albert M. Swanson Notary Public in and for this county and State. My commission expires June 17, 1939.
* * *
“Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. Radio Audience, let’s go to press! Flash! Hugo Pinero, the Miracle Man from Nowhere, has made his thousandth death prediction without anyone claiming the reward he offered to the first person who catches him failing to call the turn. With thirteen of his clients already dead, it is mathematically certain that he has a private line to the main office of the Old Man with the Scythe. That is one piece of news I don’t want to know about before it happens. Your coast-to-coast correspondent will not be a client of Prophet Pinero—”* * *
The judge’s watery baritone cut through the stale air of the courtroom. “Please, Mr. Weems, let us return to our subject. This court granted your prayer for a temporary restraining order, and now you ask that it be made permanent. In rebuttal, Dr. Pinero claims that you have presented no cause and asks that the injunction be lifted, and that I order your client to cease from attempts to interfere with what Pinero describes as a simple, lawful business. As you are not addressing a jury, please omit the rhetoric and tell me in plain language why I should not grant his prayer.”
Mr. Weems jerked his chin nervously, making his flabby gray dewlap drag across his high stiff collar, and resumed:
“May it please the honorable court, I represent the public—”
“Just a moment. I thought you were appearing for Amalgamated Life Insurance.”
“I am, your honor, in a formal sense. In a wider sense I represent several other of the major assurance, fiduciary and financial institutions, their stockholders and policy holders, who constitute a majority of the citizenry. In addition we feel that we protect the interests of the entire population, unorganized, inarticulate and otherwise unprotected.”
“I thought that I represented the public,” observed the judge dryly. “I am afraid I must regard you as appearing for your client of record. But continue. What is your thesis?”
The elderly barrister attempted to swallow his Adam’s apple, then began again: “Your honor, we contend that there are two separate reasons why this injunction should be made permanent, and, further, that each reason is sufficient alone.
“In the first place, this person is engaged in the practice of soothsaying, an occupation proscribed both in common law and in statute. He is a common fortuneteller, a vagabond charlatan who preys on the gullibility of the public. He is cleverer than the ordinary gypsy palm reader, astrologer, or table tipper, and to the same extent more dangerous. He makes false claims of modern scientific methods to give a spurious dignity to the thaumaturgy. We have here in court leading representatives of the Academy of Science to give expert witness as to the absurdity of his claims.
“In the second place, even if this person’s claims were true—granting for the sake of argument such an absurdity—” Mr. Weems permitted himself a thin-lipped smile—”we contend that his activities are contrary to the public interest in general, and unlawfully injurious to the interests of my client in particular. We are prepared to produce numerous exhibits with the legal custodians to prove that this person did publish, or cause to have published, utterances urging the public to dispense with the priceless boon of life insurance to the great detriment of their welfare and to the financial damage of my client.”
Pinero arose in his place. “Your honor, may I say a few words?”
“What is it?”
“I believe I can simplify the situation if permitted to make a brief analysis.”
“Your honor,” put in Weems, “this is most irregular.”
“Patience, Mr. Weems. Your interests will be protected. It seems to me that we need more light and less noise in this matter. If Dr. Pinero can shorten the proceedings by speaking at this time, I am inclined to let him. Proceed, Dr. Pinero.”
“Thank you, your honor. Taking the last of Mr. Weems’ points first. I am prepared to stipulate that I published the utterances he speaks of—”
“One moment, doctor. You have chosen to act as your own attorney. Are you sure you are competent to protect your own interests?”
“I am prepared to chance it, your honor. Our friends here can easily prove what I stipulate.”
“Very well. You may proceed.”
“I will stipulate that many persons have canceled life-insurance policies as a result thereof, but I challenge them to show that anyone so doing has suffered any loss or damage therefrom. It is true that the Amalgamated has lost business through my activities, but that is the natural result of my discovery, which has made their policies as obsolete as the bow and arrow. If an injunction is granted on that ground, I shall set up a coal-oil-lamp factory, and then ask for an injunction against the Edison and General Electric companies to forbid them to manufacture incandescent bulbs.
“I will stipulate that I am engaged in the business of making predictions of death, but I deny that I am practicing magic, black, white or rainbow-colored. If to make predictions by methods of scientific accuracy is illegal, then the actuaries of the Amalgamated have been guilty for years, in that they predict the exact percentage that will die each year in any given large group. I predict death retail; the Amalgamated predicts it wholesale. If their actions are legal, how can mine be illegal?
“I admit that it makes a difference whether I can do what I claim, or not; and I will stipulate that the so-called expert witnesses from the Academy of Science will testify that I cannot. But they know nothing of my method and cannot give truly expert testimony on it—”
“Just a moment, doctor. Mr. Weems, is it true that your expert witnesses are not conversant with Dr. Pinero’s theory and methods?”
Mr. Weems looked worried. He drummed on the table top, then answered. “Will the court grant me a few moments’ indulgence?”
“Certainly.”
Mr. Weems held a hurried whispered consultation with his cohorts, then faced the bench. “We have a procedure to suggest, your honor. If Dr. Pinero will take the stand and explain the theory and practice of his alleged method, then these distinguished scientists will be able to advise the court as to the validity of his claims.”
The judge looked inquiringly at Pinero, who responded: “I will not willingly agree to that. Whether my process is true or false, it would be dangerous to let it fall into the hands of fools and quacks”—he waved his hand at the group of professors seated in the front row, paused and smiled maliciously—”as these gentlemen know quite well. Furthermore, it is not necessary to know the process in order to prove that it will work. Is it necessary to understand the complex miracle of biological reproduction in order to observe that a hen lays eggs? Is it necessary for me to re-educate this entire body of self-appointed custodians of wisdom—cure them of their ingrown superstitions—in order to prove that my predictions are correct?
“There are but two ways of forming an opinion in science. One is the scientific method; the other, the scholastic. One can judge from experiment, or one can blindly accept authority. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all-important, and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything, and facts are junked when they do not fit theory laid down by authority.
“It is this point of view—academic minds clinging like oysters to disproved theories—that has blocked every advance of knowledge in history. I am prepared to prove my method by experiment, and, like Galileo in another court, I insist, ‘It still moves!’
“Once before I offered such proof to this same body of self-styled experts, and they rejected it. I renew my offer; let me measure the life length of the members of the Academy of Science. Let them appoint a committee to judge the results. I will seal my findings in two sets of envelopes; on the outside of each envelope in one set will appear the name of a member; on the inside, the date of his death. In the other envelopes I will place names; on the outside I will place dates. Let the committee place the envelopes in a vault, then meet from time to time to open the appropriate envelopes. In such a large body of men some deaths may be expected, if Amalgamated actuaries can be trusted, every week or two. In such a fashion they will accumulate data very rapidly to prove that Pinero is a liar, or no.”
He stopped, and thrust out his chest until it almost caught up with his little round belly. He glared at the sweating savants. “Well?”
The judge raised his eyebrows, and caught Mr. Weems’ eye. “Do you accept?”
“Your honor, I think the proposal highly improper—”
The judge cut him short. “I warn you that I shall rule against you if you do not accept, or propose an equally reasonable method of arriving at the truth.”
Weems opened his mouth, changed his mind, looked up and down the faces of the learned witnesses, and faced the bench. “We accept, your honor.”
“Very well. Arrange the details between you. The temporary injunction is lifted, and Dr. Pinero must not be molested in the pursuit of his business. Decision on the petition for permanent injunction is reserved without prejudice pending the accumulation of evidence. Before we leave this matter I wish to comment on the theory implied by you, Mr. Weems, when you claimed damage to your client. There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.”* * *
Bidwell grunted in annoyance. “Weems, if you can’t think up anything better than that, Amalgamated is going to need a new chief attorney. It’s been ten weeks since you lost the injunction, and that little wart is coining money hand over fist. Meantime, every insurance firm in the country’s going broke. Hoskins, what’s our loss ratio?”
“It’s hard to say, Mr. Bidwell. It gets worse every day. We’ve paid off thirteen big policies this week; all of them taken out since Pinero started operations.”
A spare little man spoke up. “I say, Bidwell, we aren’t accepting any new applicants for United, until we have time to check and be sure that they have not consulted Pinero. Can’t we afford to wait until the scientists show him up?”
Bidwell snorted. “You blasted optimist! They won’t show him up. Aldrich, can’t you face a fact? The fat little pest has something; how, I don’t know. This is a fight to the finish. If we wait, we’re licked.” He threw his cigar into a cuspidor, and bit savagely into a fresh one. “Clear out of here, all of you! I’ll handle this my way. You, too, Aldrich. United may wait, but Amalgamated won’t.”
Weems cleared his throat apprehensively. “Mr. Bidwell, I trust you will consult me before embarking on any major change in policy?”
Bidwell grunted. They filed out. When they were all gone and the door closed, Bidwell snapped the switch of the interoffice announcer. “O.K.; send him in.”
The outer door opened. A slight, dapper figure stood for a moment at the threshold. His small, dark eyes glanced quickly about the room before he entered, then he moved up to Bidwell with a quick, soft tread. He spoke to Bidwell in a flat, emotionless voice. His face remained impassive except for the live, animal eyes. “You wanted to talk to me?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the proposition?”
“Sit down, and we’ll talk.”* * *
Pinero met the young couple at the door of his inner office.
“Come in, my dears, come in. Sit down. Make yourselves at home. Now tell me, what do you want of Pinero? Surely such young people are not anxious about the final roll call?”
The boy’s pleasant young face showed slight confusion. “Well, you see, Dr. Pinero, I’m Ed Hartley and this is my wife, Betty. We’re going to have . . . that is, Betty is expecting a baby and, well—”
Pinero smiled benignly. “I understand. You want to know how long you will live in order to make the best possible provision for the youngster. Quite wise. Do you both want readings, or just yourself?”
The girl answered, “Both of us, we think.”
Pinero beamed at her. “Quite so. I agree. Your reading presents certain technical difficulties at this time, but I can give you some information now. Now come into my laboratory, my dears, and we’ll commence.”
He rang for their case histories, then showed them into his workshop. “Mrs. Hartley first, please. If you will go behind that screen and remove your shoes and your outer clothing, please.”
He turned away and made some minor adjustments of his apparatus. Ed nodded to his wife, who slipped behind the screen and reappeared almost at once, dressed in a slip. Pinero glanced up.
“This way, my dear. First we must weigh you. There. Now take your place on the stand. This electrode in your mouth. No, Ed, you mustn’t touch her while she is in the circuit. It won’t take a minute. Remain quiet.”
He dove under the machine’s hood and the dials sprang into life. Very shortly he came out, with a perturbed look on his face. “Ed, did you touch her?”
“No, doctor.” Pinero ducked back again and remained a little longer. When he came out this time, he told the girl to get down and dress. He turned to her husband.
“Ed, make yourself ready.”
“What’s Betty’s reading, doctor?”
“There is a little difficulty. I want to test you first.”
When he came out from taking the youth’s reading, his face was more troubled than ever. Ed inquired as to his trouble. Pinero shrugged his shoulders and brought a smile to his lips.
“Nothing to concern you, my boy. A little mechanical misadjustment, I think. But I shan’t be able to give you two your readings today. I shall need to overhaul my machine. Can you come back tomorrow?”
“Why, I think so. Say, I’m sorry about your machine. I hope it isn’t serious.”
“It isn’t, I’m sure. Will you come back into my office and visit for a bit?”
“Thank you, doctor. You are very kind.”
“But, Ed, I’ve got to meet Ellen.”
Pinero turned the full force of his personality on her. “Won’t you grant me a few moments, my dear young lady? I am old, and like the sparkle of young folks’ company. I get very little of it. Please.” He nudged them gently into his office and seated them. Then he ordered lemonade and cookies sent in, offered them cigarettes and lit a cigar.
Forty minutes later Ed listened entranced, while Betty was quite evidently acutely nervous and anxious to leave, as the doctor spun out a story concerning his adventures as a young man in Tierra del Fuego. When the doctor stopped to relight his cigar, she stood up.
“Doctor, we really must leave. Couldn’t we hear the rest tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow? There will not be time tomorrow.”
“But you haven’t time today, either. Your secretary has rung five times.”
“Couldn’t you spare me just a few more minutes?”
“I really can’t today, doctor. I have an appointment. There is someone waiting for me.”
“There is no way to induce you?”
“I’m afraid not. Come, Ed.”
After they had gone, the doctor stepped to the window and stared out over the city. Presently he picked out two tiny figures as they left the office building. He watched them hurry to the corner, wait for the lights to change, then start across the street. When they were part way across, there came the scream of a siren. The two little figures hesitated, started back, stopped and turned. Then a car was upon them. As the car slammed to a stop, they showed up from beneath it, no longer two figures, but simply a limp, unorganized heap of clothing.
Presently the doctor turned away from the window. Then he picked up his phone and spoke to his secretary.
“Cancel my appointments for the rest of the day. . . . No. . . . No one. . . . I don’t care; cancel them.”
Then he sat down in his chair. His cigar went out. Long after dark he held it, still unlighted.* * *
Pinero sat down at his dining table and contemplated the gourmet’s luncheon spread before him. He had ordered this meal with particular care, and had come home a little early in order to enjoy it fully.
Somewhat later he let a few drops of Fiori D’Alpini roll down his throat. The heavy, fragrant syrup warmed his mouth and reminded him of the little mountain flowers for which it was named. He sighed. It had been a good meal, an exquisite meal, and had justified the exotic liqueur.
His musing was interrupted by a disturbance at the front door. The voice of his elderly maidservant was raised in remonstrance. A heavy male voice interrupted her. The commotion moved down the hall and the dining-room door was pushed open.
“Madonna mia! Non si puo’ entrare! The master is eating!”
“Never mind, Angela. I have time to see these gentlemen. You may go.”
Pinero faced the surly-faced spokesman of the intruders. “You have business with me; yes?”
“You bet we have. Decent people have had enough of your damned nonsense.”
“And so?”
The caller did not answer at once. A smaller, dapper individual moved out from behind him and faced Pinero.* * *
“We might as well begin.” The chairman of the committee placed a key in the lock box and opened it. “Wenzell, will you help me pick out today’s envelopes?” He was interrupted by a touch on his arm.
“Dr. Baird, you are wanted on the telephone.”
“Very well. Bring the instrument here.”
When it was fetched he placed the receiver to his ear. “Hello. . . . Yes; speaking. . . . What? . . . No, we have heard nothing. . . . Destroyed the machine, you say. . . . Dead! How? . . . No! No statement. None at all. . . . Call me later.”
He slammed the instrument down and pushed it from him.
“What’s up?”
“Who’s dead now?”
Baird held up one hand. “Quiet, gentlemen, please! Pinero was murdered a few moments ago at his home.”
“Murdered!”
“That isn’t all. About the same time vandals broke into his office and smashed his apparatus.”
No one spoke at first. The committee members glanced around at each other. No one seemed anxious to be the first to comment.
Finally one spoke up. “Get it out.”
“Get what out?”
“Pinero’s envelope. It’s in there, too. I’ve seen it.”
Baird located it, and slowly tore it open. He unfolded the single sheet of paper and scanned it.
“Well? Out with it!”
“One thirteen P.M. . . . today.”
They took this in silence.
Their dynamic calm was broken by a member across the table from Baird reaching for the lock box. Baird interposed a hand.
“What do you want?”
“My prediction. It’s in there—we’re all in there.”
“Yes, yes.”
“We’re all in there.”
“Let’s have them.”
Baird placed both hands over the box. He held the eye of the man opposite him, but did not speak. He licked his lips. The corner of his mouth twitched. His hands shook. Still he did not speak. The man opposite relaxed back into his chair.
“You’re right, of course,” he said.
“Bring me that wastebasket.” Baird’s voice was low and strained, but steady.
He accepted it and dumped the litter on the rug. He placed the tin basket on the table before him. He tore half a dozen envelopes across, set a match to them, and dropped them in the basket. Then he started tearing a double handful at a time, and fed the fire steadily. The smoke made him cough, and tears ran out of his smarting eyes. Someone got up and opened a window. When Baird was through, he pushed the basket away from him, looked down and spoke.
“I’m afraid I’ve ruined this table top.”
Posts Regarding Life and Contentment
Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.
Posts about the Changes in America
America is going through a period of change. Change is good… that is, after it occurs. Often however, there are large periods of discomfort as the period of adjustment takes place. Here are some posts that discuss this issue.
More Posts about Life
I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.
Articles & Links
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
DelilahandtheSpaceRigger " is a science fiction short story by American writer Robert A. Heinlein. OneofhisFutureHistorystories, itoriginallyappearedinBlueBookinDecember 1949 andwasreprintedinhiscollection, TheGreenHillsofEarth (andsubsequentlyThePastThrough Tomorrow). - Wikipedia
Brief Concordance
Fair Employment Commission [mentioned in passing] Bureaucracy that protected workers against discrimination. It prohibited job applications that listed the sex of the applicant.
G. E. Kwiklok Airlock just large enough for a space-suited individual, designed to save time and air.
Delos D. Harriman Business tycoon who inspired and largely funded many space-related endeavors, including the first trip to the moon. Harriman is mentioned indirectly in most of the Future History stories, mostly in businesses and institutions bearing his name. Harriman Enterprises was the contractor that financed Space Station Oneand employed many of the workers on it.
Gloria Brooks McNye, a Communications Engineer, wangles a job as a radio technician and joins the all‐male crew of construction workers building a space station. On her arrival she immediately has a confrontation with the hard‐boiled construction superintendent, who hadn’t realized she was female. He doesn’t want any women “sniffing around my boys” and orders her returned on the next shuttle…
Delilah and the Space-Rigger
SURE, we had trouble building Space Station One—but the trouble was people.
Not that building a station twenty-two thousand three hundred miles out in space is a breeze. It was an engineering feat bigger than the Panama Canal or the Pyramids—or even the Susquehanna Power Pile. But ”Tiny” Larsen built her—and a job Tiny tackles gets built.
I first saw Tiny playing guard on a semi-pro team, working his way through Oppenheimer Tech. He worked summers for me thereafter till he graduated. He stayed in construction and eventually I went to work for him.
Tiny wouldn’t touch a job unless he was satisfied with the engineering. The Station had jobs designed into it that called for six-armed monkeys instead of grown men in space suits. Tiny spotted such boners; not a ton of material went into the sky until the specs and drawings suited him.
But it was people that gave us the headaches. We had a sprinkling of married men, but the rest were wild kids, attracted by high pay and adventure. Some were busted spacemen. Some were specialists, like electricians and instrument men. About half were deep-sea divers, used to working in pressure suits. There were sandhogs and riggers and welders and shipfitters and two circus acrobats.
We fired four of them for being drunk on the job; Tiny had to break one stiff’s arm before he would stay fired. What worried us was where did they get it? Turned out a shipfitter had rigged a heatless still, using the vacuum around us. He was making vodka from potatoes swiped from the commissary. I hated to let him go, but he was too smart.
Since we were falling free in a 24-hour circular orbit, with everything weightless and floating, you’d think that shooting craps was impossible. But a radioman named Peters figured a dodge to substitute steel dice and a magnetic field. He also eliminated the element of chance, so we fired him.
We planned to ship him back in the next supply ship, the R. S. Half Moon. I was in Tiny’s office when she blasted to match our orbit. Tiny swam to the view port. “Send for Peters, Dad,” he said, “and give him the old heave ho, Who’s his relief?”
“Party named G. Brooks McNye,” I told him.
A line came snaking over from the ship. Tiny said, “I don’t believe she’s matched.” He buzzed the radio shack for theship’s motion relative to the Station. The answer didn’t please him and he told them to call the Half Moon.
Tiny waited until the TV screen showed the rocket ship’s C.O. “Good morning, Captain. Why have you placed a line on us?”
“For cargo, naturally. Get your hopheads over here. I want to blast off before we enter the shadow.” The Station spent about an hour and a quarter each day passing through Earth’s shadow; we worked two eleven-hour shifts and skipped the dark period, to avoid rigging lights and heating suits.
Tiny shook his head. “Not until you’ve matched course and
speed with us.”
“I am matched!”
Not to specification, by my instruments.”
“Have a heart, Tiny! I’m short on maneuvering fuel. If I juggle this entire ship to make a minor correction on a few lousy tons of cargo, I’ll be so late I’ll have to put down on a secondary field. I may even have to make a dead-stick landing.” In those days all ships had landing wings.
“Look, Captain,” Tiny said sharply, “the only purpose of your lift was to match orbits for those same few lousy tons. I don’t care if you land in Little America on a pogo stick. The first load here was placed with loving care in the proper orbit and I’m making every other load match. Get that covered wagon into the groove.”
“Very well, Superintendent!” Captain Shields said stiffly.
“Don’t be sore, Don,” Tiny said softly. “By the way, you’ve got a passenger for me?”
“Oh, yes, so I have!” Shields’ face broke out in a grin. “Well, keep him aboard until we unload. Maybe we can beat the shadow yet.”
“Fine, fine! After all, why should I add to your troubles?”
The skipper switched off, leaving my boss looking puzzled.
We didn’t have time to wonder at his words. Shields whipped his ship around on gyros, blasted a second or two, and put her dead in space with us pronto—and used very little fuel, despite his bellyaching. I grabbed every mail we could spare and managed to get the cargo clear before we swung into Earth’s shadow. Weightlessness is an unbelievable advantage in handling freight; we gutted the Half Moon—by hand, mind you—in fifty-four minutes.
The stuff was oxygen tanks, loaded, and aluminum mirrors to shield them, panels of outer skin—sandwich stuff of titanium alloy sheet with foamed glass filling—and cases of jato units to spin the living quarters. Once it was all out and snapped to our cargo line I sent the men back by the same line—I won’t let a man work outside without a line no matter how space happy he figures he is. Then I told Shields to send over the passenger and cast off.
This little guy came out the ship’s air lock, and hooked on to the ship’s line. Handling himself like he was used to space, he set his feet and dived, straight along the stretched line, his snap hook running free. I hurried back and motioned him to follow me. Tiny, the new man, and I reached the air locks together.
Besides the usual cargo lock we had three G. E. Kwikloks.
A Kwiklok is an Iron Maiden without spikes; it fits a man in a suit, leaving just a few pints of air to scavenge, and cycles automatically. A big time saver in changing shifts. I passed through the middlesized one; Tiny, of course, used the big one. Without hesitation the new man pulled himself into the small one.
We went into Tiny’s office. Tiny strapped down, and pushed his helmet back. “Well, McNye,” he said. “Glad to have you with us.”
The new radio tech opened his helmet. I heard a low, pleasant voice answer, “Thank you.”
I stared and didn’t say anything. From where I was I could see that the radio tech was wearing a hair ribbon.
I thought Tiny would explode. He didn’t need to see the hair ribbon; with the helmet up it was clear that the new “man” was as female as Venus de Milo. Tiny sputtered, then he was unstrapped and diving for the view port. “Dad!” he yelled. “Get the radio shack. Stop that ship!”
But the Half Moon was already a ball of fire in the distance, Tiny looked dazed. “Dad,” he said, “who else knows about this?”
“Nobody, so far as I know.”
He thought a bit. “We’ve got to keep her out of sight. That’s it—we keep her locked up and out of sight until the next ship matches in.” He didn’t look at her.
“What in the world are you talking about?” McNye’s voice was higher and no longer pleasant.
Tiny glared. “You, that’s what. What are you—a stowaway?’ “Don’t be silly! I’m G. B. McNye, electronics engineer.
Don’t you have my papers?”
Tiny turned to me. “Dad, this is your fault. How in Chr—pardon me, Miss. How did you let them send you a woman? Didn’t you even read the advance report on her?”
“Me?” I said. “Now see here, you big squarehead! Those forms don’t show sex; the Fair Employment Commission won’t allow it except where it’s pertinent to the job.”
“You’re telling me it’s not pertinent to the job here?”
Not by job classification it ain’t. There’s lots of female radio and radar men, back Earthside.”
“This isn’t Earthside.” He had something. He was thinking of those two-legged wolves swarming over the job outside. And G. B. McNye was pretty. Maybe eight months of no women at all affected my judgment, but she would pass.
“I’ve even heard of female rocket pilots,” I added, for spite. “I don’t care if you’ve heard of female archangels; I’ll have no women here!”
“Just a minute!” If I was riled, she was plain sore. “You’re the construction superintendent, are you not?”
“Yes,” Tiny admitted.
”Very well, then, how do you know what sex I am?”
“Are you trying to deny that you are a woman?”
“Hardly! I’m proud of it. But officially you don’t know what sex G. Brooks McNye is. That’s why I use ‘G’ instead of Gloria. I don’t ask favors.”
Tiny grunted. “You won’t get any. I don’t know how you sneaked in, but get this, McNye, or Gloria, or whatever—you’re fired. You go back on the next ship. Meanwhile we’ll try to keep the men from knowing we’ve got a woman aboard.”
I could see her count ten. “May I speak,” she said finally, “or does your Captain Bligh act extend to that, too?”
“Say your say.”
“I didn’t sneak in. I am on the permanent staff of the Station, Chief Communications Engineer. I took this vacancy myself to get to know the equipment while it was being installed. I’ll live here eventually; I see no reason not to start now.”
Tiny waved it away. “There’ll be men and women both here—some day. Even kids. Right now it’s stag and it’ll stay that way.”
“We’ll see. Anyhow, you can’t fire me; radio personnel don’t work for you.” She had a point; communicators and some other specialists were lent to the contractors, Five Companies, Incorporated, by Harriman Enterprises.
Tiny snorted. “Maybe I can’t fire you; I can send you home. ‘Requisitioned personnel must be satisfactory to the contractor.’—meaning me. Paragraph Seven, clause M; I wrote that clause myself.”
“Then you know that if requisitioned personnel are refused without cause the contractor bears the replacement cost.”
“I’ll risk paying your fare home, but I won’t have you here.”
“You are most unreasonable!”
“Perhaps, but I’ll decide what’s good for the job. I’d rather have a dope peddler than have a woman sniffing around my boys!”
She gasped. Tiny knew he had said too much; he added, “Sorry, Miss. But that’s it. You’ll stay under cover until I can get rid of you.”
Before she could speak I cut in. “Tiny—look behind you!”
Staring in the port was one of the riggers, his eyes bugged out. Three or four more floated up and joined him.
Then Tiny zoomed up to the port and they scattered like minnows. He scared them almost out of their suits; I thought he was going to shove his fists through the quartz.
He came back looking whipped. “Miss,” he said, pointing, “wait in my room.” When she was gone he added, “Dad, what’ll we do?”
I said, “I thought you had made up your mind, Tiny.”
“I have,” he answered peevishly. “Ask the Chief Inspector to come in, will you?”
That showed how far gone he was. The inspection gang belonged to Harriman Enterprises, not to us, and Tiny rated them mere nuisances. Besides, Tiny was an Oppenheimer graduate; Dalrymple was from M.LT.
He came in, brash and cheerful. “Good morning, Superintendent. Morning, Mr. Witherspoon. What can I do for you?”
Glumly, Tiny told the story. Dalrymple looked smug. “She’s right, old man. You can send her back and even specify a male relief. But I can hardly endorse ‘for proper cause’ now, can I?”
“Damnation. Dalrymple, we can’t have a woman around here!”
“A moot point. Not covered by contract, y’know.”
“If your office hadn’t sent us a crooked gambler as her predecessor I wouldn’t be in this jam!”
“There, there! Remember the old blood pressure. Suppose we leave the endorsement open and arbitrate the cost. That’s fair, eh?”
“I suppose so. Thanks.”
“Not at all. But consider this: when you rushed Peters off before interviewing the newcomer, you cut yourself down to one operator. Hammond can’t stand watch twenty-four hours a day.”
“He can sleep in the shack. The alarm will wake him.”
“I can’t accept that. The home office and ships’ frequencies must be guarded at all times. Harriman Enterprises has supplied a qualified operator; I am afraid you must use her for the time being.”
Tiny will always cooperate with the inevitable; he said quietly, “Dad, she’ll take first shift. Better put the married men on that shift.”
Then he called her in. “Go to the radio shack and start makee-learnee, so that Hammond can go off watch soon. Mind what he tells you. He’s a good man.”
“I know,” she said briskly. “I trained him.”
Tiny bit his lip. The C.I. said, ”The Superintendent doesn’t bother with trivia—I’m Robert Dalrymple, Chief Inspector. He probably didn’t introduce his assistant either—Mr. Witherspoon.”
“Call me Dad,” I said.
She smiled and said, “Howdy, Dad.” I felt warm clear through. She went on to Dalrymple, “Odd that we haven’t met before.”
Tiny butted in. “McNye, you’ll sleep in my room—”
She raised her eyebrows; he went on angrily, “Oh, I’ll get my stuff out—at once. And get this: keep the door locked, off shift.”
“You’re darn tootin’ I will!” Tiny blushed.
I was too busy to see much of Miss Gloria. There was cargo to stow, the new tanks to install and shield. That left the most worrisome task of all: putting spin on the living quarters. Even the optimists didn’t expect much interplanetary traffic for some years; nevertheless Harriman Enterprises wanted to get some activities moved in and paying rent against their enormous investment.
I.T.&T. had leased space for a microwave relay station several million a year from television alone. The Weather Bureau was itching to set up its hemispheric integrating station; Palomar Observatory had a concession (Harriman Enterprises donated that space); the Security Council had some hush-hush project; Fermi Physical Labs and Kettering Institute each had space-a dozen tenants wanted to move in now, or sooner, even if we never completed accommodations for tourists and travelers.
There were time bonuses in it for Five Companies, Incorporated—and their help. So we were in a hurry to get spin on the quarters.
People who have never been out have trouble getting through their heads—at least I had—that there is no feeling of weight, no up and down, in a free orbit in space. There’s Earth, round and beautiful, only twenty-odd thousand miles away, close enough to brush your sleeve. You know it’s pulling you towards it. Yet you feel no weight, absolutely none. You float.
Floating is fine for some types of work, but when it’s time to eat, or play cards, or bathe, it’s good to feel weight on your feet. Your dinner stays quiet and you feel more natural.
You’ve seen pictures of the Station—a huge cylinder, like a bass drum, with ships’ nose pockets dimpling its sides. Imagine a snare drum, spinning around inside the bass drum; that’s the living quarters, with centrifugal force pinch-hitting for gravity. We could have spun the whole Station but you can’t berth a ship against a whirling dervish.
So we built a spinning part for creature comfort and an outer, stationary part for docking, tanks, storerooms, and the like. You pass from one to the other at the hub. When Miss Gloria joined us the inner part was closed in and pressurized, but the rest was a skeleton of girders.
Mighty pretty though, a great network of shiny struts and ties against black sky and stars-titanium alloy 1403, light, strong, and non-corrodable. The Station is flimsy compared with a ship, since it doesn’t have to take blastoff stresses. That meant we didn’t dare put on spin by violent means-which is where jato units come in.
“Jato”—Jet Assisted Take-Off—rocket units invented to give airplanes a boost. Now we use them wherever a controlled push is needed, say to get a truck out of the mud on a dam job. We mounted four thousand of them around the frame of the living quarters, each one placed just so. They were wired up and ready to fire when Tiny came to me looking worried. “Dad,” he said, “Let’s drop everything and finish compartment D-113.”
“Okay,” I said. D-113 was in the non-spin part.
“Rig an air lock and stock it with two weeks supplies.”
“That’ll change your mass distribution for spin,” I suggested.
“I’ll refigure it next dark period. Then we’ll shift jatos.”
When Dalrymple heard about it he came charging around. It meant a delay in making rental space available. “What’s the idea?”
Tiny stared at him. They had been cooler than ordinary lately; Dalrymple had been finding excuses to seek out Miss Gloria. He had to pass through Tiny’s office to reach her temporary room, and Tiny had finally told him to get out and stay out. “The idea,” Tiny said slowly, “is to have a pup tent in case the house burns.”
“What do you mean?”
“Suppose we fire up the jatos and the structure cracks? Want to hang around in a space suit until a ship happens by?”
“That’s silly. The stresses have been calculated.”
“That’s what the man said when the bridge fell. We’ll do it my way.”
Dalrymple stormed off.
Tiny’s efforts to keep Gloria fenced up were sort of pitiful. In. the first place, the radio tech’s biggest job was repairing suit
walkie-talkies, done on watch. A rash of such troubles broke out—on her shift. I made some shift transfers and docked a few for costs, too; it’s not proper maintenance when a man deliberately busts his aerial.
There were other symptoms. It became stylish to shave. Men started wearing shirts around quarters and bathing increased to where I thought I would have to rig another water still.
Came the shift when D-113 was ready and the jatos readjusted. I don’t mind saying I was nervous. All hands were ordered out of the quarters and into suits. They perched around the girders and waited.
Men in space suits all look alike; we used numbers and colored armbands. Supervisors had two antennas, one for a gang frequency, one for the supervisors’ circuit. With Tiny and me the second antenna hooked back through the radio shack and to all the gang frequencies-a broadcast.
The supervisors had reported their men clear of the fireworks and 1 was about to give Tiny the word, when this figure came climbing through the girders, inside the danger zone. No safety line. No armband. One antenna.
Miss Gloria, of course. Tiny hauled her out of the blast zone, and anchored her with his own safety line. I heard his voice, harsh in my helmet: “Who do you think you are? A sidewalk superintendent?”
And her voice: “What do you expect me to do? Go park on a star?”
“I told you to stay away from the job. If you can’t obey orders, I’ll lock you up.”
I reached him, switched off my radio and touched helmets. “Boss! Boss!” I said. “You’re broadcasting!”
“Oh—” he says, switches off, and touches helmets with her. We could still hear her; she didn’t switch off. “Why, you big baboon, I came outside because you sent a search party to clear everybody out,” and, “How would I know about a safety line rule? You’ve kept me penned up.” And finally. “We’ll see!”
I dragged him away and he told the boss electrician to go ahead. Then we forgot the row for we were looking at the prettiest fireworks ever seen, a giant St. Catherine’s wheel, rockets blasting all over it. Utterly soundless, out there in space—but beautiful beyond compare.
The blasts died away and there was the living quarters, spinning true as a flywheel—Tiny and I both let out sighs of relief. We all went back inside then to see what weight tasted like.
It tasted funny. I went through the shaft and started down the ladders, feeling myself gain weight as I neared the rim. I felt seasick, like the first time I experienced no weight. I could hardly walk and my calves cramped.
We inspected throughout, then went to the office and sat down. It felt good, just right for comfort, one-third gravity at the rim. Tiny rubbed his chair arms and grinned, “Beats being penned up in D-l13.”
“Speaking of being penned up,” Miss Gloria said, walking
in, “may I have a word with you, Mr. Larsen?”
“Uh? Why, certainly. Matter of fact, I wanted to see you. I owe you an apology, Miss McNye. I was—”
“Forget it,” she cut in. “You were on edge. But I want to know this: how long are you going to keep up this nonsense of trying to chaperone me?”
He studied her. “Not long. Just till your relief arrives.” “So? Who is the shop steward around here?”
“A shipfitter named McAndrews. But you can’t use him. You’re a staff member.”
“Not in the job I’m filling. I am going to talk to him. You’re discriminating against me, and in my off time at that.”
“Perhaps, but you will find I have the authority. Legally I’m a ship’s captain, while on this job. A captain in space has wide discriminatory powers.”
“Then you should use them with discrimination!”
He grinned. “Isn’t that what you just said I was doing?”
We didn’t hear from the shop steward, but Miss Gloria started doing as she pleased. She showed up at the movies, next off shift, with Dalrymple. Tiny left in the middle-good show, too; Lysistrata Goes to Town, relayed up from New York.
As she was coming back alone he stopped her, having seen to it that I was present. “Umm-Miss McNye . . .”
“Yes?”
“I think you should know, uh, well . . . Chief Inspector
Dalrymple is a married man.”
“Are you suggesting that my conduct has been improper?”
“No but—”
“Then mind your own business!” Before he could answer she added, “It might interest you that he told me about your four children.”
Tiny sputtered. “Why . . . why, I’m not even married!”
“So? That makes it worse, doesn’t it?” She swept out.
Tiny quit trying to keep her in her room, but told her to notify him whenever she left it. It kept him busy riding herd on her. I refrained from suggesting that he get Dalrymple to spell him.
But I was surprised when he told me to put through the order
dismissing her. I had been pretty sure he was going to drop it.
“What’s the charge?” I asked. “Insubordination!”
I kept mum. He said, “Well, she won’t take orders.”
“She does her work okay. You give her orders you wouldn’t give to one of the men—and that a man wouldn’t take.”
”You disagree with my orders?”
“That’s not the point. You can’t prove the charge, Tiny.”
“Well, charge her with being female! I can prove that.”
I didn’t say anything. “Dad,” he added wheedlingly, “you know how to write it. ‘No personal animus against Miss McNye, but it is felt that as a matter of policy, and so forth and so on.'”
I wrote it and gave it to Hammond privately. Radio techs are sworn to secrecy but it didn’t surprise me when I was stopped by O’Connor, one of our best metalsmiths. “Look, Dad, is it true that the Old Manis getting rid of Brooksie?”
“Brooksie?”
“Brooksie McNye—says to call her Brooks. Is it true?”
I admitted it, then went on, wondering if I should have lied.
It takes four hours, about, for a ship to lift from Earth. The shift before the Pole Star was due, with Miss Gloria’s relief, thee timekeeper brought me two separation slips. Two men were nothing; we averaged more each ship. An hour later he reached me by supervisors’ circuit, and asked me to come to the time office. I was out on the rim, inspecting a weld job; I said no. “Please, Mr. Witherspoon,” he begged, “you’ve got to.” When one of the boys doesn’t call me ‘Dad,’ it means something. I went.
There was a queue like mail call outside his door; I went in and he shut the door on them. He handed me a double handful of separation slips. “What in the great depths of night is this?” I asked.
”There’s dozens more I ain’t had time to write up yet.”
None of the slips had any reason given-just “own choice.”
“Look, Jimmie—what goes on here?”
“Can’t you dope it out, Dad? Shucks, I’m turning in one, too.”
I told him my guess and he admitted it. So I took the slips, called Tiny and told him for the love of Heaven to come to his office.
Tiny chewed his lip considerable. ”But, Dad, they can’t strike. It’s a non-strike contract with bonds from every union concerned.”
“It’s no strike, Tiny. You can’t stop a man from quitting.”
”They’ll pay their own fares back, so help me!”
“Guess again. Most of ’em have worked long enough for the free ride.”
“We’ll have to hire others quick, or we’ll miss our date.”
“Worse than that, Tiny—we won’t finish. By next dark period you won’t even have a maintenance crew.”
“I’ve never had a gang of men quit me. I’ll talk to them.”
“No good, Tiny. You’re up against something too strong for you.”
“You’re against me, Dad?”
“I’m never against you, Tiny.”
He said, “Dad, you think I’m pig-headed, but I’m right. You can’t have one woman among several hundred men. It drives ’em nutty.”
I didn’t say it affected him the same way; I said, “Is that bad?”
“Of course. I can’t let the job be ruined to humor one woman.”
“Tiny, have you looked at the progress charts lately?” “I’ve hardly had time to—what about them?”
I knew why he hadn’t had time. “You’ll have trouble proving Miss Gloria interfered with the job. We’re ahead of schedule.”
“We are?”
While he was studying the charts I put an arm around his shoulder. “Look, son,” I said, “sex has been around our planet a long time. Earthside, they never get away from it, yet some pretty big jobs get built anyhow. Maybe we’ll just have to learn to live with it here, too. Matter of fact, you had the answer a minute ago.”
“I did? I sure didn’t know it.”
“You said, ‘You can’t have one woman among several hundred men.’ Get me?”
“Huh? No, I don’t. Wait a minute! Maybe I do.”
“Ever tried jiu jitsu? Sometimes you win by relaxing.” “Yes. Yes!”
“When you can’t beat ’em, you jine ’em.”
He buzzed the radio shack. “Have Hammond relieve you, McNye, and come to my office.”
He did it handsomely, stood up and made a speech-he’d been wrong, taken him a long time to see it, hoped there were no hard feelings, etc. He was instructing the home office to see how many jobs could be filled at once with female help. “Don’t forget married couples,” I put in mildly, “and better ask for some older women, too.”
“I’ll do that,” Tiny agreed. “Have I missed anything, Dad?”
“Guess not. We’ll have to rig quarters, but there’s time.” “Okay. I’m telling them to hold the Pole Star, Gloria, so they can send us a few this trip.”
“That’s fine!” She looked really happy.
He chewed his lip. “I’ve a feeling I’ve missed something.
Hmm—I’ve got it. Dad, tell them to send up a chaplain for the Station, as soon as possible. Under the new policy we may need one anytime.” I thought so, too.
Other available copies
Other copies of this work can be found on-line. They have various formats, and various issues of one type or the other.
Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.
More Posts about Life
I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.
I first read this story when I was in Junior High School back in the 1970’s. The school library had a chrome-plated wire-frame arrangement where paper-books could be displayed. There were numerous Robert Heinlein books there, as well as collections of short stories, and works by Fredrick Pohl, and Arthur C. Clark. My favorites, give my age, were the youth-directed simplistic narratives generated by Robert Heinlein.
Book cover from the Science fiction story by Robert Heinlein.
This is a nice little story, and it remains an enjoyable read. Heinlein introduces the reader to the idea that science fiction is not a world of B-grade monsters and flying-saucers, but rather a normal day-to-day life that can and (perhaps) will, take place in exotic locations.
All during the 1950’s and the 1960’s, popular media expounded upon the ideas of “space monsters” and horrible creatures that lived in the depths of space. As a child during that time, we would watch “Space Cadet” and “Fireball XL-5” and imagine what it would be like to battle these hideous creatures.
It was shows like “Space Cadet” that inspired me to study Aerospace Engineering, and desire to fly planes.
The Menace from Earth
by Robert Heinlein
My name is Holly Jones and I’m fifteen. I’m very intelligent but it doesn’t show, because I look like an underdone angel. Insipid.
I was born right here in Luna City, which seems to surprise Earthside types. Actually, I’m third generation; my grandparents pioneered in Site One, where the Memorial is. I live with my parents in Artemis Apartments, the new co-op in Pressure Five, eight hundred feet down near City Hall. But I’m not there much; I’m too busy.
Mornings I attend Tech High and afternoons I study or go flying with Jeff Hardesty—he’s my partner—or whenever a tourist ship is in I guide groundhogs. This day the Gripsholmgrounded at noon so I went straight from school to American Express.
The first gaggle of tourists was trickling in from Quarantine but I didn’t push forward as Mr. Dorcas, the manager, knows I’m the best. Guiding is just temporary (I’m really a spaceship designer), but if you’re doing a job you ought to do it well.
Mr. Dorcas spotted me. “Holly! Here, please. Miss Brentwood, Holly Jones will be your guide.”
“‘Holly,'” she repeated. “What a quaint name. Are you really a guide, dear?”
I’m tolerant of groundhogs—some of my best friends are from Earth. As Daddy says, being born on Luna is luck, not judgment, and most people Earthside are stuck there. After all, Jesus and Guatama Buddha and Dr. Einstein were all groundhogs.
But they can be irritating. If high school kids weren’t guides, whom could they hire? “My license says so,” I said briskly and looked her over the way she was looking me over.
Her face was sort of familiar and I thought perhaps I had seen her picture in those society things you see in Earthside magazines—one of the rich playgirls we get too many of. She was almost loathsomely lovely . . . nylon skin, soft, wavy, silver-blond hair, basic specs about 35-24-34 and enough this and that to make me feel like a matchstick drawing, a low, intimate voice and everything necessary to make plainer females think about pacts with the Devil. But I did not feel apprehensive; she was a groundhog and groundhogs don’t count.
“All city guides are girls,” Mr. Dorcas explained. “Holly is very competent.”
“Oh, I’m sure,” she answered quickly and went into tourist routine number one: surprise that a guide was needed just to find her hotel, amazement at no taxicabs, same for no porters, and raised eyebrows at the prospect of two girls walking alone through “an underground city.”
Mr. Dorcas was patient, ending with: “Miss Brentwood, Luna City is the only metropolis in the Solar System where a woman is really safe—no dark alleys, no deserted neighborhoods, no criminal element.”
I didn’t listen; I just held out my tariff card for Mr. Dorcas to stamp and picked up her bags. Guides shouldn’t carry bags and most tourists are delighted to experience the fact that their thirty-pound allowance weighs only five pounds. But I wanted to get her moving.
We were in the tunnel outside and me with a foot on the slidebelt when she stopped. “I forgot! I want a city map.”
“None available.”
“Really?”
“There’s only one. That’s why you need a guide.”
“But why don’t they supply them? Or would that throw you guides out of work?”
See? “You think guiding is makework? Miss Brentwood, labor is so scarce they’d hire monkeys if they could.”
“Then why not print maps?”
“Because Luna City isn’t flat like—” I almost said, “—groundhog cities,” but I caught myself.
“—like Earthside cities,” I went on. “All you saw from space was the meteor shield. Underneath it spreads out and goes down for miles in a dozen pressure zones.”
“Yes, I know, but why not a map for each level?”
Groundhogs always say, “Yes, I know, but—”
“I can show you the one city map. It’s a stereo tank twenty feet high and even so all you see clearly are big things like the Hall of the Mountain King and hydroponics farms and the Bats’ Cave.”
“‘The Bat’s Cave,'” she repeated. “That’s where they fly, isn’t it?”
“Yes, that’s where we fly.”
“Oh, I want to see it!”
“OK. It first . . . or the city map?”
She decided to go to her hotel first. The regular route to the Zurich is to slide up and west through Gray’s Tunnel past the Martian Embassy, get off at the Mormon Temple, and take a pressure lock down to Diana Boulevard. But I know all the shortcuts; we got off at Macy-Gimbel Upper to go down their personnel hoist. I thought she would enjoy it.
But when I told her to grab a hand grip as it dropped past her, she peered down the shaft and edged back. “You’re joking.”
I was about to take her back the regular way when a neighbor of ours came down the hoist. I said, “Hello, Mrs. Greenberg,” and she called back, “Hi, Holly. How are your folks?”
Susie Greenberg is more than plump. She was hanging by one hand with young David tucked in her other arm and holding the Daily Lunatic, reading as she dropped. Miss Brentwood stared, bit her lip, and said, “How do I do it?”
I said, “Oh, use both hands; I’ll take the bags.” I tied the handles together with my hanky and went first.
She was shaking when we got to the bottom. “Goodness, Holly, how do you stand it? Don’t you get homesick?”
Tourist question number six . . . I said, “I’ve been to Earth,” and let it drop. Two years ago Mother made me visit my aunt in Omaha and I was miserable—hot and cold and dirty and beset by creepy-crawlies. I weighed a ton and I ached and my aunt was always chivvying me to go outdoors and exercise when all I wanted was to crawl into a tub and be quietly wretched. And I had hay fever. Probably you’ve never heard of hay fever—you don’t die but you wish you could.
I was supposed to go to a girls’ boarding school but I phoned Daddy and told him I was desperate and he let me come home. What groundhogs can’t understand is that they live in savagery. But groundhogs are groundhogs and loonies are loonies and never the twain shall meet.
Like all the best hotels the Zurich is in Pressure One on the west side so that it can have a view of Earth. I helped Miss Brentwood register with the roboclerk and found her room; it had its own port. She went straight to it, began staring at Earth and going ooh! and ahh!
I glanced past her and saw that it was a few minutes past thirteen; sunset sliced straight down the tip of India—early enough to snag another client. “Will that be all, Miss Brentwood?”
Instead of answering she said in an awed voice, “Holly, isn’t that the most beautiful sight you ever saw?”
“It’s nice,” I agreed. The view on that side is monotonous except for Earth hanging in the sky—but Earth is what tourists always look at even though they’ve just left it. Still, Earth is pretty. The changing weather is interesting if you don’t have to be in it. Did you ever endure a summer in Omaha?
“It’s gorgeous,” she whispered.
“Sure,” I agreed. “Do you want to go somewhere? Or will you sign my card?”
“What? Excuse me, I was daydreaming. No, not right now—yes, I do! Holly, I want to go out there! I must! Is there time? How much longer will it be light?”
“Huh? It’s two days to sunset.”
She looked startled. “How quaint. Holly, can you get us space suits? I’ve got to go outside.”
I didn’t wince—I’m used to tourist talk. I suppose a pressure suit looked like a space suit to them. I simply said, “We girls aren’t licensed outside. But I can phone a friend.”
Jeff Hardesty is my partner in spaceship designing, so I throw business his way. Jeff is eighteen and already in Goddard Institute, but I’m pushing hard to catch up so that we can set up offices for our firm: “Jones & Hardesty, Spaceship Engineers.” I’m very bright in mathematics, which is everything in space engineering, so I’ll get my degree pretty fast. Meanwhile we design ships anyhow.
I didn’t tell Miss Brentwood this, as tourists think a girl my age can’t possibly be a spaceship designer.
Jeff has arranged his classes to let him guide on Tuesdays and Thursdays; he waits at West City Lock and studies between clients. I reached him on the lockmaster’s phone. Jeff grinned and said, “Hi, Scale Model.”
“Hi, Penalty Weight. Free to take a client?”
“Well, I was supposed to guide a family party, but they’re late.”
“Cancel them. Miss Brentwood . . . step into pickup, please. This is Mr. Hardesty.”
Jeff’s eyes widened and I felt uneasy. But it did not occur to me that Jeff could be attracted by a groundhog . . . even though it is conceded that men are robot slaves of their body chemistry in such matters. I knew she was exceptionally decorative, but it was unthinkable that Jeff could be captivated by any groundhog, no matter how well designed. They don’t speak our language!
I am not romantic about Jeff; we are simply partners. But anything that affects Jones & Hardesty affects me.
When we joined him at West Lock he almost stepped on his tongue in a disgusting display of adolescent rut. I was ashamed of him and, for the first time, apprehensive. Why are males so childish?
Miss Brentwood didn’t seem to mind his behavior. Jeff is a big hulk; suited up for outside he looks like a Frost giant from Das Rheingold; she smiled up at him and thanked him for changing his schedule. He looked even sillier and told her it was a pleasure.
I keep my pressure suit at West Lock so that when I switch a client to Jeff he can invite me to come along for the walk. This time he hardly spoke to me after that platinum menace was in sight. But I helped her pick out a suit and took her into the dressing room and fitted it. Those rental suits take careful adjusting or they will pinch you in tender places once out in vacuum . . . besides those things about them that one girl ought to explain to another.
When I came out with her, not wearing my own, Jeff didn’t even ask why I hadn’t suited up—he took her arm and started toward the lock. I had to butt in to get her to sign my tariff card.
The days that followed were the longest in my life. I saw Jeff only once . . . on the slidebelt in Diana boulevard, going the other way. She was with him.
Though I saw him but once, I knew what was going on. He was cutting classes and three nights running he took her to the Earthview Room of the Duncan Hines. None of my business!—I hope she had more luck teaching him to dance than I had. Jeff is a free citizen and if he wanted to make an utter fool of himself neglecting school and losing sleep over an upholstered groundhog that was his business.
But he should not have neglected the firm’s business!
Jones & Hardesty had a tremendous backlog because we were designing Starship Prometheus. This project we had been slaving over for a year, flying not more than twice a week in order to devote time to it—and that’s a sacrifice.
Of course you can’t build a starship today, because of the power plant. But Daddy thinks that there will soon be a technological break-through and mass-conversion power plants will be built—which means starships. Daddy ought to know—he’s Luna Chief Engineer for Space Lanes and Fermi Lecturer at Goddard Institute. So Jeff and I are designing a self-supporting interstellar ship on that assumption: quarters, auxiliaries, surgery, labs—everything.
Daddy thinks it’s just practice but Mother knows better—Mother is a mathematical chemist for General Synthetics of Luna and is nearly as smart as I am. She realizes that Jones & Hardesty plans to be ready with a finished proposal while other designers are still floundering.
Which was why I was furious with Jeff for wasting time over this creature. We had been working every possible chance. Jeff would show up after dinner, we would finish our homework, then get down to real work, the Prometheus . . . checking each other’s computations, fighting bitterly over details, and having a wonderful time. But the very day I introduced him to Ariel Brentwood, he failed to appear. I had finished my lessons and was wondering whether to start or wait for him—we were making a radical change in power plant shielding—when his mother phoned me. “Jeff asked me to call you, dear. He’s having dinner with a tourist client and can’t come over.”
Mrs. Hardesty was watching me so I looked puzzled and said, “Jeff thought I was expecting him? He has his dates mixed.” I don’t think she believed me; she agreed too quickly.
All that week I was slowly convinced against my will that Jones & Hardesty was being liquidated. Jeff didn’t break any more dates—how can you break a date that hasn’t been made?—but we always went flying Thursday afternoons unless one of us was guiding. He didn’t call. Oh, I know where he was; he took her iceskating in Fingal’s Cave.
I stayed home and worked on the Prometheus, recalculating masses and moment arms for hydroponics and stores on the basis of the shielding change. But I made mistakes and twice I had to look up logarithms instead of remembering . . . I was so used to wrangling with Jeff over everything that I just couldn’t function.
Presently I looked at the name plate of the sheet I was revising. “Jones & Hardesty” it read, like all the rest. I said to myself, “Holly Jones, quit bluffing; this may be The End. You knew that someday Jeff would fall for somebody.”
“Of course . . . but not a groundhog.”
“But he did. What kind of an engineer are you if you can’t face facts? She’s beautiful and rich—she’ll get her father to give him a job Earthside. You hear me? Earthside! So you look for another partner . . . or go into business on your own.”
I erased “Jones & Hardesty” and lettered “Jones & Company” and stared at it. Then I started to erase that, too—but it smeared; I had dripped a tear on it. Which was ridiculous!
The following Tuesday both Daddy and Mother were home for lunch which was unusual as Daddy lunches at the spaceport. Now Daddy can’t even see you unless you’re a spaceship but that day he picked to notice that I had dialed only a salad and hadn’t finished it. “That plate is about eight hundred calories short,” he said, peering at it. “You can’t boost without fuel—aren’t you well?”
“Quite well, thank you,” I answered with dignity.
“Mmm . . . now that I think back, you’ve been moping for several days. Maybe you need a checkup.” He looked at Mother.
“I do not either need a checkup!” I had not been moping—doesn’t a woman have a right not to chatter?
But I hate to have doctors poking at me so I added, “It happens I’m eating lightly because I’m going flying this afternoon. But if you insist, I’ll order pot roast and potatoes and sleep instead!”
“Easy, punkin’,” he answered gently. “I didn’t mean to intrude. Get yourself a snack when you’re through . . . and say hello to Jeff for me.”
I simply answered, “OK,” and asked to be excused; I was humiliated by the assumption that I couldn’t fly without Mr. Jefferson Hardesty but did not wish to discuss it.
Daddy called after me, “Don’t be late for dinner,” and Mother said, “Now, Jacob—” and to me, “Fly until you’re tired, dear; you haven’t been getting much exercise. I’ll leave your dinner in the warmer. Anything you’d like?”
“No, whatever you dial for yourself.” I just wasn’t interested in food, which isn’t like me. As I headed for Bats’ Cave I wondered if I had caught something. But my cheeks didn’t feel warm and my stomach wasn’t upset even if I wasn’t hungry.
Then I had a horrible thought. Could it be that I was jealous? Me?
It was unthinkable. I am not romantic; I am a career woman. Jeff had been my partner and pal, and under my guidance he could have become a great spaceship designer, but our relationship was straightforward . . . a mutual respect for each other’s abilities, with never any of that lovey-dovey stuff. A career woman can’t afford such things—why look at all the professional time Mother had lost over having me!
No, I couldn’t be jealous; I was simply worried sick because my partner had become involved with a groundhog. Jeff isn’t bright about women and, besides, he’s never been to Earth and has illusions about it. If she lured him Earthside, Jones & Hardesty was finished.
And somehow “Jones & Company” wasn’t a substitute: the Prometheus might never be built.
I was at Bats’ Cave when I reached this dismal conclusion. I didn’t feel like flying but I went to the locker room and got my wings anyhow.
Most of the stuff written about Bats’ Cave gives a wrong impression. It’s the air storage tank for the city, just like all the colonies have—the place where the scavenger pumps, deep down, deliver the air until it’s needed. We just happen to be lucky enough to have one big enough to fly in. But it never was built, or anything like that; it’s just a big volcanic bubble, two miles across, and if it had broken through, way back when, it would have been a crater.
Tourists sometimes pity us loonies because we have no chance to swim. Well, I tried it in Omaha and got water up my nose and scared myself silly. Water is for drinking, not playing in; I’ll take flying. I’ve heard groundhogs say, oh yes, they had “flown” many times. But that’s not flying. I did what they talk about, between White Sands and Omaha. I felt awful and got sick. Those things aren’t safe.
I left my shoes and skirt in the locker room and slipped my tail surfaces on my feet, then zipped into my wings and got someone to tighten the shoulder straps. My wings aren’t ready-made condors; they are Storer-Gulls, custom-made for my weight distribution and dimensions. I’ve cost Daddy a pretty penny in wings, outgrowing them so often, but these latest I bought myself with guide fees.
They’re lovely!—titanalloy struts as light and strong as bird bones, tension-compensated wrist-pinion and shoulder joints, natural action in the alula slots, and automatic flap action in stalling. The wing skeleton is dressed in styrene feather-foils with individual quilling of scapulars and primaries. They almost fly themselves.
I folded my wings and went into the lock. While it was cycling I opened my left wing and thumbed the alula control—I had noticed a tendency to sideslip the last time I was airborne. But the alula opened properly and I decided I must have been overcontrolling, easy to do with Storer-Gulls; they’re extremely maneuverable. Then the door showed green and I folded the wing and hurried out, while glancing at the barometer. Seventeen pounds—two more than Earth sea-level and nearly twice what we use in the city; even an ostrich could fly in that. I perked up and felt sorry for all groundhogs, tied down by six times proper weight, who never, never, never could fly.
Not even I could, on Earth. My wing loading is less than a pound per square foot, as wings and all I weigh less than twenty pounds. Earthside that would be over a hundred pounds and I could flap forever and never get off the ground.
I felt so good that I forgot about Jeff and his weakness. I spread my wings, ran a few steps, warped for lift and grabbed air—lifted my feet and was airborne.
I sculled gently and let myself glide toward the air intake at the middle of the floor—the Baby’s Ladder, we call it, because you can ride the updraft clear to the roof, half a mile above, and never move a wing. When I felt it I leaned right, spoiling with right primaries, corrected, and settled in a counterclockwise soaring glide and let it carry me toward the roof.
A couple of hundred feet up, I looked around. The cave was almost empty, not more than two hundred in the air and half that number perched or on the ground—room enough for didoes. So as soon as I was up five hundred feet I leaned out of the updraft and began to beat. Gliding is no effort but flying is as hard work as you care to make it. In gliding I support a mere ten pounds on each arm—shucks, on Earth you work harder than that lying in bed. The lift that keeps you in the air doesn’t take any work; you get it free from the shape of your wings just as long as there is air pouring past them.
Even without an updraft all a level glide takes is gentle sculling with your finger tips to maintain air speed; a feeble old lady could do it. The lift comes from differential air pressures but you don’t have to understand it; you just scull a little and the air supports you, as if you were lying in an utterly perfect bed. Sculling keeps you moving forward just like sculling a rowboat . . . or so I’m told; I’ve never been in a rowboat. I had a chance to in Nebraska but I’m not that foolhardy.
But when you’re really flying, you scull with forearms as well as hands and add power with your shoulder muscles. Instead of only the outer quills of your primaries changing pitch (as in gliding), now your primaries and secondaries clear back to the joint warp sharply on each downbeat and recovery; they no longer lift, they force you forward—while your weight is carried by your scapulars, up under your armpits.
So you fly faster, or climb, or both, through controlling the angle of attack with your feet—with the tail surfaces you wear on your feet, I mean.
Oh dear, this sounds complicated and isn’t—you just do it. You fly exactly as a bird flies. Baby birds can learn it and they aren’t very bright. Anyhow, it’s easy as breathing after you learn . . . and more fun than you can imagine!
I climbed to the roof with powerful beats, increasing my angle of attack and slotting my alulae for lift without burble—climbing at an angle that would stall most fliers. I’m little but it’s all muscle and I’ve been flying since I was six. Once up there I glided and looked around. Down at the floor near the south wall tourists were trying glide wings—if you call those things “wings.” Along the west wall the visitors’ gallery was loaded with goggling tourists. I wondered if Jeff and his Circe character were there and decided to go down and find out.
So I went into a steep dive and swooped toward the gallery, leveled off and flew very fast along it. I didn’t spot Jeff and his groundhoggess but I wasn’t watching where I was going and over took another flier, almost collided. I glimpsed him just in time to stall and drop under, and fell fifty feet before I got control. Neither of us was in danger as the gallery is two hundred feet up, but I looked silly and it was my own fault; I had violated a safety rule.
There aren’t many rules but they are necessary; the first is that orange wings always have the right of way—they’re beginners. This flier did not have orange wings but I was overtaking. The flier underneath—or being overtaken—or nearer the wall—or turning counterclockwise, in that order, has the right of way.
I felt foolish and wondered who had seen me, so I went all the way back up, made sure I had clear air, then stooped like a hawk toward the gallery, spilling wings, lifting tail, and letting myself fall like a rock.
I completed my stoop in front of the gallery, lowering and spreading my tail so hard I could feel leg muscles knot and grabbing air with both wings, alulae slotted. I pulled level in an extremely fast glide along the gallery. I could see their eyes pop and thought smugly, “There! That’ll show ’em!”
When darn if somebody didn’t stoop on me! The blast from a flier braking right over me almost knocked me out of control. I grabbed air and stopped a sideslip, used some shipyard words and looked around to see who had blitzed me. I knew the black-and-gold wing pattern—Mary Muhlenburg, my best girl friend. She swung toward me, pivoting on a wing tip. “Hi, Holly! Scared you, didn’t I?”
“You did not! You better be careful; the flightmaster’ll ground you for a month!”
“Slim chance! He’s down for coffee.”
I flew away, still annoyed, and started to climb. Mary called after me, but I ignored her, thinking, “Mary my girl, I’m going to get over you and fly you right out of the air.”
This was a foolish thought as Mary flies every day and has shoulders and pectoral muscles like Mrs. Hercules. By the time she caught up with me I had cooled off and we flew side by side, still climbing. “Perch?” she called out.
“Perch,” I agreed. Mary has lovely gossip and I could use a breather. We turned toward our usual perch, a ceiling brace for flood lamps—it isn’t supposed to be a perch but the flightmaster hardly ever comes up there.
Mary flew in ahead of me, braked and stalled dead to a perfect landing. I skidded a little but Mary stuck out a wing and steadied me. It isn’t easy to come into a perch, especially when you have to approach level. Two years ago a boy who had just graduated from orange wings tried it . . . knocked off his left alula and primaries on a strut—went fluttering and spinning down two thousand feet and crashed. He could have saved himself—you can come in safely with a badly damaged wing if you spill air with the other and accept the steeper glide, then stall as you land. But this poor kid didn’t know how; he broke his neck, dead as Icarus. I haven’t used that perch since.
We folded our wings and Mary sidled over. “Jeff is looking for you,” she said with a sly grin.
My insides jumped but I answered coolly, “So? I didn’t know he was here.”
“Sure. Down there,” she added, pointing with her left wing. “Spot him?”
Jeff wears striped red and silver, but she was pointing at the tourist glide slope, a mile away. “No.”
“He’s there all right.” She looked at me sidewise. “But I wouldn’t look him up if I were you.”
“Why not? Or for that matter, why should I?” Mary can be exasperating.
“Huh? You always run when he whistles. But he has that Earthside siren in tow again today; you might find it embarrassing.”
“Mary, whatever are you talking about?”
“Huh? Don’t kid me, Holly Jones; you know what I mean.”
“I’m sure I don’t,” I answered with cold dignity.
“Humph! Then you’re the only person in Luna City who doesn’t. Everybody knows you’re crazy about Jeff; everybody knows she’s cut you out . . . and that you are simply simmering with jealousy.”
Mary is my dearest friend but someday I’m going to skin her for a rug. “Mary, that’s preposterously ridiculous! How can you even think such a thing?”
“Look, darling, you don’t have to pretend. I’m for you.” She patted my shoulders with her secondaries.
So I pushed her over backwards. She fell a hundred feet, straightened out, circled and climbed, and came in beside me, still grinning. It gave me time to decide what to say.
“Mary Muhlenburg, in the first place I am not crazy about anyone, least of all Jeff Hardesty. He and I are simply friends. So it’s utterly nonsensical to talk about me being ‘jealous.’ In the second place Miss Brentwood is a lady and doesn’t go around ‘cutting out’ anyone, least of all me. In the third place she is simply a tourist Jeff is guiding—business, nothing more.”
“Sure, sure,” Mary agreed placidly. “I was wrong. Still—” She shrugged her wings and shut up.
“‘Still’ what? Mary, don’t be mealy-mouthed.”
“Mmm . . . I was wondering how you knew I was talking about Ariel Brentwood—since there isn’t anything to it.”
“Why, you mentioned her name.”
“I did not.”
I thought frantically. “Uh, maybe not. But it’s perfectly simple. Miss Brentwood is a client I turned over to Jeff myself, so I assumed that she must be the tourist you meant.”
“So? I don’t recall even saying she was a tourist. But since she is just a tourist you two are splitting, why aren’t you doing the inside guiding while Jeff sticks to outside work? I thought you guides had an agreement?”
“Huh? If he has been guiding her inside the city, I’m not aware of it—”
“You’re the only one who isn’t.”
“—and I’m not interested; that’s up to the grievance committee. But Jeff wouldn’t take a fee for inside guiding in any case.”
“Oh, sure!—not one he could bank. Well, Holly, seeing I was wrong, why don’t you give him a hand with her? She wants to learn to glide.”
Butting in on that pair was farthest from my mind. “If Mr. Hardesty wants my help, he will ask me. In the meantime I shall mind my own business . . . a practice I recommend to you!”
“Relax, shipmate,” she answered, unruffled. “I was doing you a favor.”
“Thank you, I don’t need one.”
“So I’ll be on my way—got to practice for the gymkhana.” She leaned forward and dropped off. But she didn’t practice aerobatics; she dived straight for the tourist slope.
I watched her out of sight, then snaked my left hand out the hand slit and got at my hanky—awkward when you are wearing wings but the floodlights had made my eyes water. I wiped them and blew my nose and put my hanky away and wiggled my hand back into place, then checked everything, thumbs, toes, and fingers, preparatory to dropping off.
But I didn’t. I just sat there, wings drooping, and thought. I had to admit that Mary was partly right; Jeff’s head was turned completely . . . over a groundhog. So sooner or later he would go Earthside and Jones & Hardesty was finished.
Then I reminded myself that I had been planning to be a spaceship designer like Daddy long before Jeff and I teamed up. I wasn’t dependent on anyone; I could stand alone, like Joan of Arc, or Lise Meitner.
I felt better . . . a cold, stern pride, like Lucifer in Paradise Lost.
I recognized the red and silver of Jeff’s wings while he was far off and I thought about slipping quietly away. But Jeff can overtake me if he tries, so I decided, “Holly, don’t be a fool! You have no reason to run . . . just be coolly polite.”
He landed by me but didn’t sidle up. “Hi, Decimal Point.”
“Hi, Zero. Uh, stolen much lately?”
“Just the City Bank but they made me put it back.” He frowned and added, “Holly, are you mad at me?”
“Why, Jeff, whatever gave you such a silly notion?”
“Uh . . . something Mary the Mouth said.”
“Her? Don’t pay any attention to what she says. Half of it’s always wrong and she doesn’t mean the rest.”
“Yeah, a short circuit between her ears. Then you aren’t mad?”
“Of course not. Why should I be?”
“No reason I know of. I haven’t been around to work on the ship for a few days . . . but I’ve been awfully busy.”
“Think nothing of it. I’ve been terribly busy myself.”
“Uh, that’s fine. Look, Test Sample, do me a favor. Help me out with a friend—a client, that is—well, she’s a friend, too. She wants to learn to use glide wings.”
I pretended to consider it. “Anyone I know?”
“Oh, yes. Fact is, you introduced us. Ariel Brentwood.”
“‘Brentwood’? Jeff, there are so many tourists. Let me think. Tall girl? Blonde? Extremely pretty?”
He grinned like a goof and I almost pushed him off. “That’s Ariel!”
“I recall her . . . she expected me to carry her bags. But you don’t need help, Jeff. She seemed very clever. Good sense of balance.”
“Oh, yes, sure, all of that. Well, the fact is, I want you two to know each other. She’s . . . well, she’s just wonderful, Holly. A real person all the way through. You’ll love her when you know her better. Uh . . . this seemed like a good chance.”
I felt dizzy. “Why, that’s very thoughtful, Jeff, but I doubt if she wants to know me better. I’m just a servant she hired—you know groundhogs.”
“But she’s not at all like the ordinary groundhog. And she does want to know you better—she told me so!”
After you told her to think so! I muttered. But I had talked myself into a corner. If I had not been hampered by polite upbringing I would have said, “On your way, vacuum skull! I’m not interested in your groundhog girl friends”—but what I did say was, “OK, Jeff,” then gathered the fox to my bosom and dropped off into a glide.
So I taught Ariel Brentwood to “fly.” Look, those so-called wings they let tourists wear have fifty square feet of lift surface, no controls except warp in the primaries, a built-in dihedral to make them stable as a table, and a few meaningless degrees of hinging to let the wearer think that he is “flying” by waving his arms. The tail is rigid, and canted so that if you stall (almost impossible) you land on your feet. All a tourist does is run a few yards, lift up his feet (he can’t avoid it) and slide down a blanket of air. Then he can tell his grandchildren how he flew, really flew, “just like a bird.”
An ape could learn to “fly” that much.
I put myself to the humiliation of strapping on a set of the silly things and had Ariel watch while I swung into the Baby’s Ladder and let it carry me up a hundred feet to show her that you really and truly could “fly” with them. Then I thankfully got rid of them, strapped her into a larger set, and put on my beautiful Storer-Gulls. I had chased Jeff away (two instructors is too many), but when he saw her wing up, he swooped down and landed by us.
I looked up. “You again.”
“Hello, Ariel. Hi, Blip. Say, you’ve got her shoulder straps too tight.”
“Tut, tut,” I said. “One coach at a time, remember? If you want to help, shuck those gaudy fins and put on some gliders . . . then I’ll use you to show how not to. Otherwise get above two hundred feet and stay there; we don’t need any dining-lounge pilots.”
Jeff pouted like a brat but Ariel backed me up. “Do what teacher says, Jeff. That’s a good boy.”
He wouldn’t put on gliders but he didn’t stay clear either. He circled around us, watching, and got bawled out by the flightmaster for cluttering the tourist area.
I admit Ariel was a good pupil. She didn’t even get sore when I suggested that she was rather mature across the hips to balance well; she just said that she had noticed that I had the slimmest behind around there and she envied me. So I quit trying to get her goat, and found myself almost liking her as long as I kept my mind firmly on teaching. She tried hard and learned fast—good reflexes and (despite my dirty crack) good balance. I remarked on it and she admitted diffidently that she had had ballet training.
About mid-afternoon she said, “Could I possibly try real wings?”
“Huh? Gee, Ariel, I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
There she had me. She had already done all that could be done with those atrocious gliders. If she was to learn more, she had to have real wings. “Ariel, it’s dangerous. It’s not what you’ve been doing, believe me. You might get hurt, even killed.”
“Would you be held responsible?”
“No. You signed a release when you came in.”
“Then I’d like to try it.”
I bit my lip. If she had cracked up without my help, I wouldn’t have shed a tear—but to let her do something too dangerous while she was my pupil . . . well, it smacked of David and Uriah. “Ariel, I can’t stop you . . . but I should put my wings away and not have anything to do with it.”
It was her turn to bite her lip. “If you feel that way, I can’t ask you to coach me. But I still want to. Perhaps Jeff will help me.”
“He probably will,” I blurted out, “if he is as big a fool as I think he is!”
Her company face slipped but she didn’t say anything because just then Jeff stalled in beside us. “What’s the discussion?”
We both tried to tell him and confused him for he got the idea I had suggested it, and started bawling me out. Was I crazy? Was I trying to get Ariel hurt? Didn’t I have any sense?
“Shut up!” I yelled, then added quietly but firmly, “Jefferson Hardesty, you wanted me to teach your girl friend, so I agreed. But don’t butt in and don’t think you can get away with talking to me like that. Now beat it! Take wing. Grab air!”
He swelled up and said slowly, “I absolutely forbid it.”
Silence for five long counts. Then Ariel said quietly, “Come, Holly. Let’s get me some wings.”
“Right, Ariel.”
But they don’t rent real wings. Fliers have their own; they have to. However, there are second-hand ones for sale because kids outgrow them, or people shift to custom-made ones, or something. I found Mr. Schultz who keeps the key, and said that Ariel was thinking of buying but I wouldn’t let her without a tryout. After picking over forty-odd pairs I found a set which Johnny Queveras had outgrown but which I knew were all right. Nevertheless I inspected them carefully. I could hardly reach the finger controls but they fitted Ariel.
While I was helping her into the tail surfaces I said, “Ariel? This is still a bad idea.”
“I know. But we can’t let men think they own us.”
“I suppose not.”
“They do own us, of course. But we shouldn’t let them know it.” She was feeling out the tail controls. “The big toes spread them?”
“Yes. But don’t do it. Just keep your feet together and toes pointed. Look, Ariel, you really aren’t ready. Today all you will do is glide, just as you’ve been doing. Promise?”
She looked me in the eye. “I’ll do exactly what you say . . . not even take wing unless you OK it.”
“OK. Ready?”
“I’m ready.”
“All right. Wups! I goofed. They aren’t orange.”
“Does it matter?”
“It sure does.” There followed a weary argument because Mr. Schultz didn’t want to spray them orange for a tryout. Ariel settled it by buying them, then we had to wait a bit while the solvent dried.
We went back to the tourist slope and I let her glide, cautioning her to hold both alulae open with her thumbs for more lift at slow speeds, while barely sculling with her fingers. She did fine, and stumbled in landing only once. Jeff stuck around, cutting figure eights above us, but we ignored him. Presently I taught her to turn in a wide, gentle bank—you can turn those awful glider things but it takes skill; they’re only meant for straight glide.
Finally I landed by her and said, “Had enough?”
“I’ll never have enough! But I’ll unwing if you say.”
“Tired?”
“No.” She glanced over her wing at the Baby’s Ladder; a dozen fliers were going up it, wings motionless, soaring lazily. “I wish I could do that just once. It must be heaven.”
I chewed it over. “Actually, the higher you are, the safer you are.”
“Then why not?”
“Mmm . . . safer provided you know what you’re doing. Going up that draft is just gliding like you’ve been doing. You lie still and let it lift you half a mile high. Then you come down the same way, circling the wall in a gentle glide. But you’re going to be tempted to do something you don’t understand yet—flap your wings, or cut some caper.”
She shook her head solemnly. “I won’t do anything you haven’t taught me.”
I was still worried. “Look, it’s only half a mile up but you cover five miles getting there and more getting down. Half an hour at least. Will your arms take it?”
“I’m sure they will.”
“Well . . . you can start down anytime; you don’t have to go all the way. Flex your arms a little now and then, so they won’t cramp. Just don’t flap your wings.”
“I won’t.”
“OK.” I spread my wings. “Follow me.”
I led her into the updraft, leaned gently right, then back left to start the counterclockwise climb, all the while sculling very slowly so that she could keep up. Once we were in the groove I called out, “Steady as you are!” and cut out suddenly, climbed and took station thirty feet over and behind her. “Ariel?”
“Yes, Holly?”
“I’ll stay over you. Don’t crane your neck; you don’t have to watch me, I have to watch you. You’re doing fine.”
“I feel fine!”
“Wiggle a little. Don’t stiffen up. It’s a long way to the roof. You can scull harder if you want to.”
“Aye aye, Cap’n!”
“Not tired?”
“Heavens, no! Girl, I’m living!” She giggled. “And mama said I’d never be an angel!”
I didn’t answer because red-and-silver wings came charging at me, braked suddenly and settled into a circle between me and Ariel. Jeff’s face was almost as red as his wings. “What the devil do you think you are doing?”
“Orange wings!” I yelled. “Keep clear!”
“Get down out of here! Both of you!”
“Get out from between me and my pupil. You know the rules.”
“Ariel!” Jeff shouted. “Lean out of the circle and glide down. I’ll stay with you.”
“Jeff Hardesty,” I said savagely, “I give you three seconds to get out from between us—then I’m going to report you for violation of Rule One. For the third time—Orange Wings!“
Jeff growled something, dipped his right wing and dropped out of formation. The idiot sideslipped within five feet of Ariel’s wing tip. I should have reported him for that; all the room you can give a beginner is none too much.
I said, “OK, Ariel?”
“OK, Holly. I’m sorry Jeff is angry.”
“He’ll get over it. Tell me if you feel tired.”
“I’m not. I want to go all the way up. How high are we?”
“Four hundred feet, maybe.”
Jeff flew below us a while, then climbed and flew over us . . . probably for the same reason I did: to see better. It suited me to have two of us watching her as long as he didn’t interfere; I was beginning to fret that Ariel might not realize that the way down was going to be as long and tiring as the way up. I was hoping she would cry uncle. I knew I could glide until forced down by starvation. But a beginner gets tense.
Jeff stayed generally over us, sweeping back and forth—he’s too active to glide very long—while Ariel and I continued to soar, winding slowly up toward the roof. It finally occurred to me when we were about halfway up that I could cry uncle myself; I didn’t have to wait for Ariel to weaken. So I called out, “Ariel? Tired now?”
“No.”
“Well, I am. Could we go down, please?”
She didn’t argue, she just said, “All right. What am I to do?”
“Lean right and get out of the circle.” I intended to have her move out five or six hundred feet, get into the return down draft, and circle the cave down instead of up. I glanced up, looking for Jeff. I finally spotted him some distance away and much higher but coming toward us. I called out, “Jeff! See you on the ground.” He might not have heard me but he would see if he didn’t hear; I glanced back at Ariel.
I couldn’t find her.
Then I saw her, a hundred feet below—flailing her wings and falling, out of control.
I didn’t know how it happened. Maybe she leaned too far, went into a sideslip and started to struggle. But I didn’t try to figure it out; I was simply filled with horror. I seemed to hang there frozen for an hour while I watched her.
But the fact appears to be that I screamed “Jeff!” and broke into a stoop.
But I didn’t seem to fall, couldn’t overtake her. I spilled my wings completely—but couldn’t manage to fall; she was as far away as ever.
You do start slowly, of course; our low gravity is the only thing that makes human flying possible. Even a stone falls a scant three feet in the first second. But that first second seemed endless.
Then I knew I was falling. I could feel rushing air—but I still didn’t seem to close on her. Her struggles must have slowed her somewhat, while I was in an intentional stoop, wings spilled and raised over my head, falling as fast as possible. I had a wild notion that if I could pull even with her, I could shout sense into her head, get her to dive, then straighten out in a glide. But I couldn’t reach her.
This nightmare dragged on for hours.
Actually we didn’t have room to fall for more than twenty seconds; that’s all it takes to stoop a thousand feet. But twenty seconds can be horribly long . . . long enough to regret every foolish thing I had ever done or said, long enough to say a prayer for us both . . . and to say good-by to Jeff in my heart. Long enough to see the floor rushing toward us and know that we were both going to crash if I didn’t overtake her mighty quick.
I glanced up and Jeff was stooping right over us but a long way up. I looked down at once . . . and I was overtaking her . . . I was passing her—I was under her!
Then I was braking with everything I had, almost pulling my wings off. I grabbed air, held it, and started to beat without ever going to level flight. I beat once, twice, three times . . . and hit her from below, jarring us both.
Then the floor hit us.* * *
I felt feeble and dreamily contented. I was on my back in a dim room. I think Mother was with me and I know Daddy was. My nose itched and I tried to scratch it, but my arms wouldn’t work. I fell asleep again.
I woke up hungry and wide awake. I was in a hospital bed and my arms still wouldn’t work, which wasn’t surprising as they were both in casts. A nurse came in with a tray. “Hungry?” she asked.
“Starved,” I admitted.
“We’ll fix that.” She started feeding me like a baby.
I dodged the third spoonful and demanded. “What happened to my arms?”
“Hush,” she said and gagged me with a spoon.
But a nice doctor came in later and answered my question. “Nothing much. Three simple fractures. At your age you’ll heal in no time. But we like your company so I’m holding you for observation of possible internal injury.”
“I’m not hurt inside,” I told him. “At least, I don’t hurt.”
“I told you it was just an excuse.”
“Uh, Doctor?”
“Well?”
“Will I be able to fly again?” I waited, scared.
“Certainly. I’ve seen men hurt worse get up and go three rounds.”
“Oh. Well, thanks. Doctor? What happened to the other girl? Is she . . . did she . . . ?”
“Brentwood? She’s here.”
“She’s right here,” Ariel agreed from the door. “May I come in?”
My jaw dropped, then I said, “Yeah. Sure. Come in.”
The doctor said, “Don’t stay long,” and left. I said, “Well, sit down.”
“Thanks.” She hopped instead of walked and I saw that one foot was bandaged. She got on the end of the bed.
“You hurt your foot.”
She shrugged. “Nothing. A sprain and a torn ligament. Two cracked ribs. But I would have been dead. You know why I’m not?”
I didn’t answer. She touched one of my casts. “That’s why. You broke my fall and I landed on top of you. You saved my life and I broke both your arms.”
“You don’t have to thank me. I would have done it for anybody.”
“I believe you and I wasn’t thanking you. You can’t thank a person for saving your life. I just wanted to make sure you knew that I knew it.”
I didn’t have an answer so I said, “Where’s Jeff? Is he all right?”
“He’ll be along soon. Jeff’s not hurt . . . though I’m surprised he didn’t break both ankles. He stalled in beside us so hard that he should have. But Holly . . . Holly my very dear . . . I slipped in so that you and I could talk about him before he got here.”
I changed the subject quickly. Whatever they had given me made me feel dreamy and good, but not beyond being embarrassed. “Ariel, what happened? You were getting along fine—then suddenly you were in trouble.”
She looked sheepish. “My own fault. You said we were going down, so I looked down. Really looked, I mean. Before that, all my thoughts had been about climbing clear to the roof; I hadn’t thought about how far down the floor was. Then I looked down . . . and got dizzy and panicky and went all to pieces.” She shrugged. “You were right. I wasn’t ready.”
I thought about it and nodded. “I see. But don’t worry—when my arms are well, I’ll take you up again.”
She touched my foot. “Dear Holly. But I won’ be flying again; I’m going back where I belong.”
“Earthside?”
“Yes. I’m taking the Billy Mitchell on Wednesday.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
She frowned slightly. “Are you? Holly, you don’t like me, do you?”
I was startled silly. What can you say? Especially when it’s true? “Well,” I said slowly, “I don’t dislike you. I just don’t know you very well.”
She nodded. “And I don’t know you very well . . . even though I got to know you a lot better in a very few seconds. But Holly . . . listen please and don’t get angry. It’s about Jeff. He hasn’t treated you very well the last few days—while I’ve been here, I mean. But don’t be angry with him. I’m leaving and everything will be the same.”
That ripped it open and I couldn’t ignore it, because if I did, she would assume all sorts of things that weren’t so. So I had to explain . . . about me being a career woman . . . how, if I had seemed upset, it was simply distress at breaking up the firm of Jones & Hardesty before it even finished its first starship . . . how I was not in love with Jeff but simply valued him as a friend and associate . . . but if Jones & Hardesty couldn’t carry on, then Jones & Company would. “So you see, Ariel, it isn’t necessary for you to give up Jeff. If you feel you owe me something, just forget it. It isn’t necessary.”
She blinked and I saw with amazement that she was holding back tears. “Holly, Holly . . . you don’t understand at all.”
“I understand all right. I’m not a child.”
“No, you’re a grown woman . . . but you haven’t found it out.” She held up a finger. “One—Jeff doesn’t love me.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Two . . . I don’t love him.”
“I don’t believe that, either.”
“Three . . . you say you don’t love him—but we’ll take that up when we come to it. Holly, am I beautiful?”
Changing the subject is a female trait but I’ll never learn to do it that fast. “Huh?”
“I said, ‘Am I beautiful?'”
“You know darn well you are!”
“Yes. I can sing a bit and dance, but I would get few parts if I were not, because I’m no better than a third-rate actress. So I have to be beautiful. How old am I?”
I managed not to boggle. “Huh? Older than Jeff thinks you are. Twenty-one, at least. Maybe twenty-two.”
She sighed. “Holly, I’m old enough to be your mother.”
“Huh? I don’t believe that either.”
“I’m glad it doesn’t show. But that’s why, though Jeff is a dear, there never was a chance that I could fall in love with him. But how I feel about him doesn’t matter; the important thing is that he loves you.”
“What? That’s the silliest thing you’ve said yet! Oh, he likes me—or did. But that’s all.” I gulped. “And it’s all I want. Why, you should hear the way he talks to me.”
“I have. But boys that age can’t say what they mean; they get embarrassed.”
“But—”
“Wait, Holly. I saw something you didn’t because you were knocked cold. When you and I bumped, do you know what happened?”
“Uh, no.”
“Jeff arrived like an avenging angel, a split second behind us. He was ripping his wings off as he hit, getting his arms free. He didn’t even look at me. He just stepped across me and picked you up and cradled you in his arms, all the while bawling his eyes out.”
“He did?“
“He did.”
I mulled it over. Maybe the big lunk did kind of like me, after all.
Ariel went on, “So you see, Holly, even if you don’t love him, you must be very gentle with him, because he loves you and you can hurt him terribly.”
I tried to think. Romance was still something that a career woman should shun . . . but if Jeff really did feel that way—well . . . would it be compromising my ideals to marry him just to keep him happy? To keep the firm together? Eventually, that is?
But if I did, it wouldn’t be Jones & Hardesty; it would be Hardesty & Hardesty.
Ariel was still talking: “—you might even fall in love with him. It does happen, hon, and if it did, you’d be sorry if you had chased him away. Some other girl would grab him; he’s awfully nice.”
“But—” I shut up for I heard Jeff’s step—I can always tell it. He stopped in the door and looked at us, frowning.
“Hi, Ariel.”
“Hi, Jeff.”
“Hi, Fraction.” He looked me over. “My, but you’re a mess.”
“You aren’t pretty yourself. I hear you have flat feet.”
“Permanently. How do you brush your teeth with those things on your arms?”
“I don’t.”
Ariel slid off the bed, balanced on one foot. “Must run. See you later, kids.”
“So long, Ariel.”
“Good-by, Ariel. Uh . . . thanks.”
Jeff closed the door after she hopped away, came to the bed and said gruffly, “Hold still.”
Then he put his arms around me and kissed me.
Well, I couldn’t stop him, could I? With both arms broken? Besides, it was consonant with the new policy for the firm. I was startled speechless because Jeff never kisses me, except birthday kisses, which don’t count. But I tried to kiss back and show that I appreciated it.
I don’t know what the stuff was they had been giving me but my ears began to ring and I felt dizzy again.
Then he was leaning over me. “Runt,” he said mournfully, “you sure give me a lot of grief.”
“You’re no bargain yourself, flathead,” I answered with dignity.
“I suppose not.” He looked me over sadly. “What are you crying for?”
I didn’t know that I had been. Then I remembered why. “Oh, Jeff—I busted my pretty wings!”
“We’ll get you more. Uh, brace yourself. I’m going to do it again.”
“All right.” He did.
I suppose Hardesty & Hardesty has more rhythm than Jones & Hardesty.
It really sounds better.*
Afterword by Eric Flint
Once we settled on Clarke’s Rescue Party as the opening story for the anthology, the choice for the second story was practically automatic: This one.
Well . . . not quite. The part that was more or less automatic was that it would be some story by Robert Heinlein. The question of which story in particular, however, was something we had to kick back and forth for a while.
We faced a bit of a problem. For all of us as teenagers, the Heinlein was not really the Heinlein who wrote short stories. It was the Heinlein who wrote that seemingly inexhaustible fountain of young adult novels: Rocket Ship Galileo, Citizen of the Galaxy, Have Spacesuit—Will Travel, Tunnel in the Sky, Time for the Stars, The Star Beast, Farmer in the Sky, Space Cadet, The Rolling Stone, Starman Jones . . . the list seemed to go on and on.
If books had infinite pages—or book buyers had infinitely deep pockets—we would have selected one of those short YA novels for the anthology. Alas, pages are finite and the pockets of customers more finite still, so we had to find another alternative.
We chose this story, because of all Heinlein’s short fiction it probably best captures the spirit of his great young adult novels. Most of Heinlein’s short fiction is quite different, often much grimmer, and—speaking for me, at least, if not necessarily Jim or Dave—not something which had much of an impact on me in my so-called formative years.
Plus, there was another bonus. Again, for me at least. I’m sure I first read this story when I was thirteen. I think that because I remember being absolutely fascinated by the fact that: a) the protagonist from whose viewpoint the story is told is a girl; b) she was really bright; c) she was often confused by her own motives and uncertain of herself, for all that she pretended otherwise.
Leaving factor “a” aside, factors “b” and “c” described me at that age to a T. That bizarre age in a boy’s life when girls had gone from being a very familiar, well-understood and mostly boring phenomenon to something that had suddenly become incredibly mysterious, even more fascinating—and completely confusing.
After reading the story, I remember thinking that I really, really hoped Heinlein knew what he was talking about—and that the depiction of women and girls you generally ran across in science fiction of the time was baloney. With few exceptions, in SF of the time, a female character was doing well if she achieved one-dimensionality. And that dimension was invariably good looks. This was no help at all. I already knew girls were good-looking. What I needed to know was everything else—everything that Heinlein had put at the center of his story.
A year later I was fourteen and I had my first girlfriend, who remained so throughout my high school years. And whatever doubts I might have had that Robert A. Heinlein was the Heinlein were dispelled forever.
Posts Regarding Life and Contentment
Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.
More Posts about Life
I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.
This is the full text of the Ray Bradbury story “All Summer In A Day“. If the illustrations and micro-videos are not loading properly please kindly refresh your browser.
ALL SUMMER IN A DAY
By Ray Bradbury
“Ready?”
“Now?”
“Soon.”
“Do the scientists really know? Will it happen today, will it?”
“Look, look; see for yourself!”
The children pressed to each other like so many roses, so many weeds, intermixed, peering out for a look at the hidden sun.
It rained.
It had been raining for seven years; thousands upon thousands of days compounded and filled from one end to the other with rain, with the drum and gush of water, with the sweet crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they were tidal waves come over the islands.
A thousand forests had been crushed under the rain and grown up a thousand times to be crushed again. And this was the way life was forever on the planet Venus, and this was the schoolroom of the children of the rocket men and women who had come to a raining world to set up civilization and live out their lives.
“It’s stopping, it’s stopping!”
“Yes, yes!”
Margot stood apart from them, from these children who could never remember a time when there wasn’t rain and rain and rain. They were all nine years old, and if there had been a day, seven years ago, when the sun came out for an hour and showed its face to the stunned world, they could not recall.
Sometimes, at night, she heard them stir, in remembrance, and she knew they were dreaming and remembering gold or a yellow crayon or a coin large enough to buy the world with.
She knew they thought they remembered a warmness, like a blushing in the face, in the body, in the arms and legs and trembling hands.
But then they always awoke to the tatting drum, the endless shaking down of clear bead necklaces upon the roof, the walk, the gardens, the forests, and their dreams were gone.
All day yesterday they had read in class about the sun.
About how like a lemon it was, and how hot.
And they had written small stories or essays or poems about it: I think the sun is a flower; That blooms for just one hour.
That was Margot’s poem, read in a quiet voice in the still classroom while the rain was falling outside.
“Aw, you didn’t write that!” protested one of the boys.
“I did,” said Margot, “I did.”
“William!” said the teacher.
There was no escape. They children were relentless.
But that was yesterday.
Now the rain was slackening, and the children were crushed in the great thick windows.
“Where’s teacher?”
“She’ll be back.”
“She’d better hurry; we’ll miss it!”
They turned on themselves, like a feverish wheel, all tumbling spokes.
Margot stoodalone.
She was a very frail girl who looked as if she had been lost in the rain for years and the rain had washed out the blue from her eyes and the red from her mouth and the yellow from her hair. She was an old photograph dusted from an album, whitened away, and if she spoke at all her voice would be a ghost.
Now she stood, separate, staring at the rain and the loud wet world beyond the huge glass.
“What’re you looking at?” said William.
Margot said nothing.
“Speak when you’re spoken to.”
He gave her a shove.
But she did not move; rather she let herself be moved only by him and nothing else. They edged away from her, they would not look at her. She felt them go away. And this was because she would play no games with them in the echoing tunnels of the underground city.
They bullied her. They were relentless in picking on her. She had no where to go and no defense.
If they tagged her and ran, she stood blinking after them and did not follow. When the class sang songs about happiness and life and games her lips barely moved. Only when they sang about the sun and the summer did her lips move as she watched the drenched windows. And then, of course, the biggest crime of all was that she had come here only five years ago from Earth, and she remembered the sun and the way the sun was and the sky was when she was four in Ohio. And they, they had been on Venus all their lives, and they had been only two years old when last the sun came out and had long since forgotten the color and heat of it and the way it really was.
But Margot remembered.
“It’s like a penny,” she said once, eyes closed. “No it’s not!” the children cried.
“It’s like a fire,” she said, “in the stove.”
“You’re lying, you don’t remember!” cried the children.
But she remembered and stood quietly apart from all of them and watched the patterning windows. And once, a month ago, she had refused to shower in the school shower rooms, had clutched her hands to her ears and over her head, screaming the water mustn’t touch her head.
So after that, dimly, dimly; she sensed it, she was different and they knew her difference and kept away.
There was talk that her father and mother were taking her back to Earth next year; it seemed vital to her that they do so, though it would mean the loss of thousands of dollars to her family.
And so, the children hated her for all these reasons of big and little consequence.
The children picked on her remorsefully without letting up.
They hated her pale snow face, her waiting silence, her thinness, and her possible future.
“Get away!” The boy gave her another push.
“What’re you waiting for?”
Then, for the first time, she turned and looked at him. And what she was waiting for was in her eyes.
“Well, don’t wait around here!” cried the boy savagely:
“You won’t see nothing!” Her lips moved.
“Nothing!” he cried. “It was all a joke, wasn’t it?”
He turned to the other children.
“Nothing’s happening today: Is it?” They all blinked at him and then, understanding, laughed and shook their heads.
“Nothing, nothing!”
“Oh, but,” Margot whispered, her eyes helpless.
“But this is the day, the scientists predict, they say, they know, the sun. . .”
Young girl being bullied at School
“All a joke!” said the boy, and seized her roughly.
“Hey, everyone, let’s put her in a closet before teacher comes!”
“No,” said Margot, falling back.
They surged about her, caught her up and bore her, protesting, and then pleading, and then crying, back into a tunnel, a room, a closet, where they slammed and locked the door.
They dragged her into a closet out of the classroom.
They stood looking at the door and saw it tremble from her beating and throwing herself against it.
They heard her muffled cries.
She pounded and threw herself onto the door.
Then, smiling, they turned and went out and back down the tunnel, just as the teacher arrived.
“Ready, children?” She glanced at her watch.
“Yes!” said everyone.
“Are we all here?”
“Yes!”
The rain slackened still more.
They crowded to the huge door.
The rain stopped.
The rain stopped.
It was as if, in the midst of a film, concerning an avalanche, a tornado, a hurricane, a volcanic eruption, something had, first, gone wrong with the sound apparatus, thus muffling and finally cutting off all noise, all of the blasts and repercussions and thunders, and then, second, ripped the film from the projector and inserted in its place a peaceful tropical slide which did not move or tremor.
The world ground to a standstill.
The silence was so immense and unbelievable that you felt your ears had been stuffed or you had lost your hearing altogether.
The children put their hands to their ears.
They stood apart.
The door slid back and the smell of the silent, waiting world came in to them.
The sun came out. It was the color of flaming bronze and it was very large. And the sky around it was a blazing blue tile color. And the jungle burned with sunlight as the children, released from their spell, rushed out, yelling, into the springtime.
“Now, don’t go too far,” called the teacher after them.
“You’ve only two hours, you know. You wouldn’t want to get caught out!”
But they were running and turning their faces up to the sky and feeling the sun on their cheeks like a warm iron; they were taking off their jackets and letting the sun burn their arms.
“Oh, it’s better than the sunlamps, isn’t it?”
“Much, much better!”
They stopped running and stood in the great jungle that covered Venus, that grew and never stopped growing, tumultuously, even as you watched it.
It was a nest of octopi, clustering up great arms of flesh-like weed, wavering, flowering this brief spring.
It was the color of rubber and ash, this jungle, from the many years without sun.
It was the color of stones and white cheeses and ink, and it was the color of the moon.
The children lay out, laughing, on the jungle mattress, and heard it sigh and squeak under them, resilient and alive. They ran among the trees, they slipped and fell, they pushed each other, they played hide-and-seek and tag, but most of all they squinted at the sun until the tears ran down their faces, they put their hands up to that yellowness and that amazing blueness and they breathed of the fresh, fresh air and listened and listened to the silence which suspended them in a blessed sea of no sound and no motion.
They looked at everything and savored everything.
Then, wildly, like animals escaped from their caves, they ran and ran in shouting circles. They ran for an hour and did not stop running. And then
In the midst of their running one of the girls wailed.
Everyone stopped. The girl, standing in the open, held out her hand.
“Oh, look, look,” she said trembling.
They came slowly to look at her opened palm.
She felt a drop of rain on her open palm.
In the center of it, cupped and huge, was a single raindrop.
She began to cry; looking at it.
They glanced quietly at the sky. “Oh.Oh.”
A few cold drops fell on their noses and their cheeks and their mouths.
The sun faded behind a stir of mist. A wind blew cool around them.
They turned and started to walk back toward the underground house, their hands at their sides, their smiles vanishing away.
A boom of thunder startled them and like leaves before a new hurricane, they tumbled upon each other and ran.
Lightning struck ten miles away, five miles away, a mile, a half mile.
The sky darkened into midnight in a flash.
They stood in the doorway of the underground for a moment until it was raining hard.
Then they closed the door and heard the gigantic sound of the rain falling in tons and avalanches, everywhere and forever.
“Will it be seven more years?”
“Yes. Seven.”
Then one of them gave a little cry, “Margot!”
“What?”
“She’s still in the closet where we locked her.”
When you are alone, the rest of the children can do just terrible things to you.
“Margot.”
They stood as if someone had driven them, like so many stakes, into the floor.
They looked at each other and then looked away: They glanced out at the world that was raining now and raining and raining steadily.
They could not meet each other’s glances.
Their faces were solemn and pale.
They looked at their hands and feet, their faces down.
“Margot.” One of the girls said, “Well. . . ?”
No one moved.
“Go on,” whispered the girl.
They walked down the empty school hallway.
They walked slowly down the hall in the sound of cold rain.
They turned through the doorway to the room in the sound of the storm and thunder, lightning on their faces, blue and terrible. They walked over to the closet door slowly and stood by it.
Behind the closet door was only silence.
They unlocked the door, even more slowly, and let Margot out.
Attribution
This story was written by Ray Bradbury, and presented here under Article 22 of China’s Copyright Law. This was first published in the March 1954 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
I have found this version of the story on the Ray Bradbury library portal in Russia, and I have copied it here exactly as found. Credit to the wonderful people at the Ray Bradbury Library for posting it where a smuck like myself can read it within China. (Рэй Брэдбери .RU found at http://www.raybradbury.ru ) And, of course, credit to the great master; Ray Bradbury for providing this work of art for our inspiration and pleasure.
Ray Bradbury is one of my personal heroes and his writings greatly influenced me in ways that I am only just now beginning to understand.
I love the way that Ray Bradbury brings advanced concepts to the masses though his very (seemingly) simplistic stories.
Background
“There was this fence where we pressed our faces and felt the wind turn warm and held to the fence and forgot who we were or where we came from but dreamed of who we might be and where we might go…” -R is for Rocket Ray Bradbury
For years I had amassed a well worn, and dusty collection of Ray Bradbury paperbacks that I would pick up and read for pleasure and inspiration. Later, when I left the United States, and moved to China, I had to leave my treasured books behind. Sigh.
A small collection of well worn, well read and well appreciated Ray Bradbury books. My collection looked a little something like this, only I think the books were a little more worn, and a little yellower.
It is very difficult to come across Ray Bradbury books in China. When ever I find one, I certainly snatch it up. Cost is no object when it comes to these masterpieces. At one time, I must have had five books containing this story.
Posts Regarding Life and Contentment
Here are some
other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might
like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in
America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society
within communist China. As there are some really stark differences
between the two.
More Posts about Life
I have broken
apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions
as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are
reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal
library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come
and enjoy a read or two as well.
