“Strictly as a blind,” I hastily explained. “I was stuck in Chlorella Costa Rica and the only way north seemed to be through the Connie network. They had a cell in the factory, I joined up, turned on the talent, and got transferred to New York. The rest you know.”
She paused for a long time and asked: “Are you sure it’s all right?”
Wishing desperately that it were, I firmly said: “Of course, Hester.”
She gave me a game smile. “I’ll get our rations,” she said, unsnapping herself. “You’d better stay here.”
FORTY hours out, I snarled at Hester: “The blasted blackmarketing steward is going too far! Look at this!” I held up my bulb of water and my ration box. The seal was clearly tampered with on both containers, and visibly there was water missing. “Max rations are supposed to be tamper-proof, but this is plain burglary. How do yours look?”
“Same,” she said listlessly. “You can’t do anything about it. Let’s not eat just yet, Mr. Courtenay.” She made a marked effort to be vivacious. “Tennis, anyone?”
“All right,” I grumbled, and set up the field, borrowed from the ship recreation closet.
She was better at tennis than I, but I took her in straight sets. Her coordination was way off. She’d stab for a right forecourt deep crosscourt return and like as not miss the button entirely—if she didn’t send the ball into the net by failing to surge power with her left hand on the rheostat. A half hour of the exercise seemed to do both of us good. She cheered up and we ate our rations.
There was little enough to do in our cramped quarters. Every eight hours she would go for our tagged rations, I would grumble about the shortage and tampering, we’d have some tennis and then eat. The rest of the time passed somehow watching the ads come and go—all Schocken—on the walls. Well enough, I thought. Schocken’s on the Moon and I won’t be kept from him there. Things weren’t so crowded. Moon to Schocken to Kathy—a twinge of feeling. I could have asked casually what Hester had heard about Jack O’Shea, but I didn’t. I was afraid I might not like what she had heard.
A drab service announcement at last interrupted the parade of ads: cooks to the galley (the David Ricardo was a British ship) FOR FINAL LIQUID FEEDING. THIS IS H-8 AND NO FURTHER SOLID OR LIQUID FOOD SHOULD BE CONSUMED UNTIL TOUCHDOWN.
Hester smiled and went out with our tray.
As usual, it was ten minutes before she returned. We were getting some pull from the Moon by then, enough to unsettle my stomach. I burped miserably while waiting.
SHE came back with two Coffiest bulbs and reproached me gaily: “Why, Mitch, you haven’t set up the tennis court!”
“Didn’t feel like it.” I put out my hand for my bulb. She didn’t give it to me. “Well?”
“Just one set?” she coaxed. “You heard me,” I snapped. “Let’s not forget who’s who around here.” I wouldn’t have said it if it hadn’t been Coffiest, I suppose. The Starrzelius-red bulb kicked things off in me—nagging ghosts of withdrawal symptoms.
She stiffened. “I’m sorry, Mr. Courtenay.” And then she clutched at her middle and threw up, violently, her face distorted. Astounded, I snapped the air regenerator switch to “Blast” and grabbed her. She was moaning with pain.
“Hester,” I said, “what is it?”
“Don’t drink it,” she croaked, her hand kneading her belly. “The Coffiest. Poison. Your rations. I’ve been tasting them.” Her nails tore first the nylon of her midriff and then her skin as she clawed at the pain.
“Send a doctor!” I was yelling into the compartment mike. “Woman’s dying here!”
The chief steward’s voice answered me: “Ship’s doctor’ll be there right away, sir.”
Hester’s contorted face began to relax, frightening me terribly. She said softly: “Bitch Kathy. Running out on you. Mitch and bitch. Funny. You’re too good for her. She wouldn’t have. My life. Yours.” There was another spasm across her face. “Wife versus secretary. A laugh. It always was. You never even kissed me—”
I didn’t get a chance to. She was gone while the ship’s doctor was still hauling himself briskly in along the handline. His face fell. We towed her to the lazarette and he put her in a cardiac-node exciter that started her heart going again. Her chest began to rise and fall and she opened her eyes.
“Where are you?” asked the doctor, loudly and clearly. She moved her head slightly and a pulse of hope shot through me.
“Response?” I whispered to the doctor.
“Random,” he said with professional coldness. He was right. There were more slight head-movements and a nervous flutter of the eyelids, which were working independently. “Who are you?” brought a wrinkle between her eyes and a tremor of the lip, but no more.
Gently enough, the doctor began to explain to me: “I’m going to turn it off. Irreversible clinical death has occurred. It’s often hard for a person with emotional ties to believe-i—”
I watched her eyelids flutter, one with a two-four beat, the other with a three-four beat. “Turn it off,” I said hoarsely. He cut the current and withdrew the needle.
“There was nausea?” he asked. I nodded. “Her first space flight?” I nodded. “Abdominal pain?” I nodded. “No previous distress?” I shook my head. “History of vertigo?” I shrugged; I didn’t know. He was driving at something. He kept asking, and the answers he wanted were as obvious as a magician’s forced card. Allergies, easy bleeding, headaches, painful menses—at last he said decisively: “I believe it’s Fleischman’s Disease. It stems from some derangement of function in the adrenocorticotrophic bodies under free flight, we think. It kicks off a chain reaction of tissue-incompatibilities which affects the cerebrospinal fluid—”
I reached for the bulb and then remembered. “Have one with me,” I said.
He nodded and, with no stalling, drank from one of the nipples of a twin-valve social flask. I saw the level go down—Moon-pull was strong enough for there to be a level—and saw his Adam’s apple work. “Not too much,” he cautioned me. “Touchdown’s soon.”
I stalled with conversation for a few minutes, watching him, and then swallowed half a pint of hundred proof. I could hardly tow myself back to the compartment. I threw up and worked the air regenerator button in time to get most of it.
I was fuzzily glad the stuff had stayed down long enough for the alcohol molecules to be picked out of. the fluid and sent wandering through my body, bringing numbness to my limbs and forgetfulness to my brain.
HANGOVER, grief, fear and the maddening red tape of Moon debarkation. I must have acted pretty stupid. A couple of times I heard the crewmen say to port officials something like: “Take it easy on the guy. He lost his girl in flight.”
The line I took in the cramped receiving room of the endless questionnaires was that I didn’t know anything about the mission. I was Groby, a 6, and the best thing to do would be to send me to Fowler Schocken. I understood that we had been supposed to report to him. They pooh-poohed that possibility and set me to wait on a bench while queries were sent to the Schocken branch in Luna City.
I waited, watched and tried to think. It wasn’t easy. The busy crowds in Receiving were made up of people going from one place to another place to do specified things. I didn’t fit in the pattern; I was a sore thumb. They were going to get me . . .
A tube popped and blinked at the desk yards away. I read between half closed eyes: S-C-H-O-C-K-E-N T-O R-C-V-N-G R-E Q-U-E-R-Y N-O M-I-S-S-I-O-N D-U-E T-H-I-S F-L-I-G-H-T N-O G-R-O-B-Y E-M-P-L-O-Y-E-D B-Y U-S F-O-W-L-E-R S-C-H-O-C-K-E-N U-N-Q-U-E-R-I-E-D B-U-T I-M-P-O-S-S-I-B-L-E A-N-Y U-N-D-E-R S-T-A-R C-L-A-S-S P-E-RS-O-N-N-E-L A-S-S-I-G-N-E-D R-E-P-O-R-T H-I-M A-C-T A-T D-I-S-C-R-E-T-I-O-N O-B-V-I-O-U-S-L-Y N-O-T O-U-R B-A-B-Y E-N-D
They were glancing at me from the desk and talking in low tones. In only a moment they would be beckoning the Burns Detective guards.
I got up from the bench and sauntered into the crowd, with only one alternative left and that a frightening one. I made the casual gestures that, by th
eir order and timing, constitute the Grand Hailing Sign of Distress of the Connies.
A Bums guard shouldered his way through the crowd and put the arm on me. “Are you going to make trouble?” he growled.
“No,” I said thickly. “Lead the way.”
He gestured confidentially at the desk and they waved back, with grins. He marched me, with his nightstick in the small of my back, through the startled crowd. Numbly I let him take me from the receiving dome down a tunnel-like shopping street.
SOUVENIRS OF LUNA
CHEAPEST IN TOWN
YE TASTEE GOODIE SHOPPE
ON YE MOONE
YOUR HOMETOWN PAPER
MOONSUITS RENTED
“50 Years Without a Blowout”
RELIABLE MOONSUIT RENTAL
CO!
“73 Years Without a Blowout”
HOTEL LUNA
MOONMAID FASHIONS
Stunning Conversation Pieces
Prove You Were Here
Warren Astron, D.P.S.
Readings by Appointment Only
blinked and twinkled at me from the shopfronts as new arrivals shuffled up and down, gaping.
“Hold it,” growled the guard. We stepped in front of the Warren Astron sign. He muttered: “Twist the nightstick away from me. Hit me over the head with it. Fire one charge at the streetlight. Duck into Astron’s and give him the grip. Good luck and try not to break my skull.”
“You’re—you’re—” I stammered.
“Yeah. I wish I hadn’t seen the hailing sign. This is going to cost me two stripes and a raise. Get moving.”
He surrendered the nightstick and I tried not to make it too easy or too hard when I clouted him. The buckshot charge boomed out of the stick’s muzzle, shattered the light overhead and brought forth shrieks of dismay from the strollers. It was thunderous in the vaulted street. I darted through the chaste white Adams door of Astron’s in the sudden darkness and blinked at a tall, thin man with a goatee.
“What’s the meaning of this?” he demanded. “I read by appointment—” I took his arm in the grip. “Refuge?” he asked, abruptly, shedding a fussy professional manner.
“Yes. Fast.”
He led me through his parlor into a small, high observatory with a transparent dome, a refracting telescope, Hindu star maps, clocks and desks. One of these desks he heaved at and it turned back on hinges. There was a pit and handholds. “Down you go,” he said.
Down I went, into darkness.
IT was some six feet deep and six by four in area. It had a rough, unfinished feel. A pick and shovel leaned against one wall, and a couple of buckets filled with Moon rock. Obviously work in progress.
I inverted one of the buckets and sat down on it in the dark. After five hundred and seventy-six counted pulse-beats, I sat on the floor, tried to brush Moon rock out of the way and lie down. I heard voices directly overhead. One was the primly professional voice of Astron. The other was the petulant voice of a woman. They seemed to be seated at the desk directly above me.
“—really seems excessive, Doctor.”
“As Madam wishes. If you will excuse me, I shall return to my ephemeris—”
“But, Dr. Astron, I wasn’t implying—”
“Madam will forgive me for jumping to the conclusion that she was unwilling to grant me my customary honorarium. That is correct. Now, please, the birth date and hour?”
She mumbled them, and I wondered briefly about the problem Astron must have with women who shaded their years.
“So . . . Venus in the hours of Mars . . . Mercury ascendant in the trine . . .”
“What’s that?” she asked with shrill suspicion. “I know quite a bit about the Great Art and I never heard that before.”
Blandly: “Madam must realize that a Moon observatory makes possible many things of which she has never heard before. It is possible by Lunar observations to refine the Great Art to a point unattainable in the days when observations were made perforce through the thick and muddled air of Earth.”
“Of course. Please go on, Dr. Astron. Will I be able to look through your telescope and see my planets?”
“Later, Madam. So . . . Mercury ascendant in the trine, the planet of strife and chicanery, yet quartered with Jupiter, the giver of fortune, so . . .”
The “reading” lasted perhaps half an hour, and there were two more like it that followed, and then there was silence. I actually dozed off until a voice called me. The desk had been heaved back again and Astron’s head was silhouetted against the opening. I climbed out stiffly.
“You’re Groby,” he stated.
“Yes.”
“We got a report on you by courier aboard the Ricardo.” I noticed that his hand was in his pocket. “You turn up in Chlorella, you’re a natural-born copysmith, you’re transferred to New York, you get kidnapped in front of the Met—in earnest or by pre-arrangement—you kill a girl and disappear, and now you’re on the Moon. God knows what you’re up to. It’s too much for me. A Central Committee member will be here shortly to try and figure you out. Is there anything you’d care to say? Like confessing that you’re an agent provocateur?”
I said nothing.
“Very well.” Somewhere a door opened and closed. “That will be the Central Committee member.” And my wife Kathy walked into the observatory.
CONCLUDED NEXT MONTH
Gravy Planet
Conclusion of a 3-Part Serial
There’s no awakening as disconcerting as the disillusionment of a man under the delusion that he has no illusions at all!
SYNOPSIS
Mitchell Courtenay, the narrator of this story, had three grave problems—his wife Kathy, who refused to finalize their conditional marriage; the planet Venus; and the Conservationists, commonly known as “Connies,” an outlawed organization.
Kathy, a brilliant surgeon, disliked Courtenay’s ideals. As a young star class copysmith in Fowler Schocken Associates, the largest advertising agency on Earth, Courtenay was dedicated to the highest principle of this completely free enterprise society: Sales. Only through sales, he held, could the economy expand indefinitely. Kathy bitterly wanted to know why it had to, a question that, to Courtenay, was little short of commercial heresy. Added to this marital strain was his jealousy of Kathy’s liking for Jack O’Shea, the midget space pilot who was the only person to reach Venus thus far.
Surprisingly, Courtenay had been selected by Fowler Schocken to head the Venus Project, a contract granted by the Incorporated United States of America to develop and exploit Earth’s sister planet. He had expected Matt Runstead, an older executive in the Company, to be angry and jealous, for Runstead had higher seniority and should logically have been chosen to handle the account. But Runstead evidently was going further than the usual routine attempts to discredit Courtenay by lying, cajoling, bribing his staff, spying on his plans—Runstead seemed to be actively sabotaging the project!
That, however, could have been the work of the Connies, who fought savagely for the conservation of natural resources, and might be expected to combat the use of enormous amounts of metals and fuels needed to colonize and exploit Venus.
As proof of that, there were the two attempts on Courtenay’s life—once when he was in Washington to interview O’Shea, the tiny space pilot, and a ’copter cargo nacelle almost killed him; another when a gunman in a passenger ‘copter tried to shoot him through the window of his apartment. The possibility of a commercial feud was ruled out by Fowler Schocken when Courtenay questioned him about it; there would have been court hearings, counter-claims, perhaps even injunctions, before they were notified of a feud. Obviously, no entrepreneur would be guilty of the high commercial crime of murder without notification, so it must have been the Connies.
But then something even more disturbing occurred. Testing consumer reaction had always been the basis of successful advertising, and Courtenay had picked Cal-Mex to sample attitudes toward colonizing, supporting the gigantic project, buying Venus
ian products, and other such essentials . . . but Runstead’s staff sent in faked information!
Enraged, Courtenay fired the entire staff there and went to the South Pole, where Runstead was “on vacation,” to confront him with his treachery.
Courtenay found him on the slope of Starrzelius Glacier. But Runstead was ready . . . he cut Courtenay down with a slash of skis across the Polar helmet, left him dazed, freezing, beyond hope of rescue. As the fierce cold reached into Courtenay’s unheated suit, he had only two thoughts. One was of Kathy. The other was of death.
When Courtenay awoke, he was in the steerage of a labor-freighter rocketing through the sky . . . bound to a long contract in the Chlorella plantations, imprisoned in a false identity that someone had contrived for him. There was no way of buying his freedom.
As tar as the world was concerned, he had died in an accident in Antarctica.
Approached by the Connies to join their detested organization, Courtenay (alias “Groby”) used them to get back to New York and Schocken Tower. With the help of his loyal secretary, he managed to get to the Moon, where he made contact with a Connie cell. It was not easy—it cost him the life of his secretary, poisoned mysteriously on the Earth-Moon ship—but there was no other method of reaching Fowler Schocken, who was on the Moon to push the Venus Project.
To escape detection by the police guards, Courtenay had to take refuge with a Connie, who called in the leader of the group. The leader turned out to be Courtenay’s own wife, Kathy!
XIII
“MITCH!” Kathy said dazedly. “My God, Mitch!” She laughed, with a note of hysteria. “You wouldn’t wait, would you?” The astrologer took the gun out of his pocket. “Is there—”
“No, Warren. It’s all right. You can leave us alone. Please.” He left. Kathy dropped into a chair, trembling. I couldn’t move. My wife—a king-pin Connie! I had thought I’d known her; I’d been wrong. She had lied to me continuously and I had never known it.
I had loved a lie and not a woman at all.
Collected Short Fiction Page 170