The Collected Stories

by Earl

  It had greater significance, too. Something which allowed Grady to pin his confidence on it strongly. Man was born of woman, in blood. In that flow of blood, Charles Becker would be born again. A strong fundamental memory association, vibrating in every fiber of every man since life began.

  Grady slowly raised the knife. He poised for a moment. He plunged the knife at Becker, who stood stolid, waiting. It must be a deep wound, short of fatal, letting blood gush. An artery. No half measures; easy enough to doctor him for that later.

  Grady used the full power of his muscular arm. Grady pulled back the knife after the third hard thrust at three different parts of the body. Grady stared at the knife.

  Grady slowly walked to his desk. He crossed off the last item. He dropped the pencil. He thought ahead to the report he would make to the psychiatric people, jolting them. Jolting all their pleasant smiles from their calm faces.

  How skin and flesh could turn to iron. Biologic iron, as strong as steel. Stronger than steel. He dropped the knife with its dulled point and twisted blade. Shiny. Unbloody. Intravenous injection of food? The last road was blocked.

  Dr. Grady held onto his smile, for Lora. But he wondered how he could tell her.

  Not that she would be a widow soon; that she had been a widow for three days already.

  1957

  GALACTIC GAMBLE

  The governor’s only defense against malfeasance was the appeal to a dubious law . . .

  WOULD THE law save him in time?

  If not, would they understand? Woumthey see there was nothing else he could do with Pi Pollux? Would they let, him go on with his program? Or, to call a spade a spade, with his sheer gamble?

  Dr. Avery McGull, governor of Pi Pollux, crossed his fingers unscientifically as he saw the jetcopter returning from its long tour. They had cruised the whole planet and had seen everything. He greeted the two men hopefully, but his heart sank at their faces.

  “We’ve seen enough,” said Inspector W.W. Harvey, of Planetary Appointments for Galactic Governors. His frosty white eyebrows were drawn close.

  “Plenty,” added Examiner Gilbert Statt, of the Space Relief Agency.

  “Well,” said McGull, rubbing his hands briskly, “then you can see what a good job I’ve done here, gentlemen.”

  “Good job?” said Harvey icily! He had the perpetual air of a than who had just stepped out of a deep-freeze; even his voice was brittle like the cracking of ice. “The worst job, sir, of any governor of any world in the entire Union. To the shame of PAGG, you’ve made this world a shambles, sir.”

  “A stinking mess,” bit in Statt, “that will cost SRA billions to straighten out.”

  His bony fingers counted out imaginary money in the air, wincingly. “Billions.”

  MCGULL wished he were tall and impressive with fiery eyes and a booming voice. But he was short and neutral, with watery pale eyes and a husk in his throat. “You’ve got this all wrong,” he protested. “Let me explain—”

  “A killer explaining a murder?” said Harvey frigidly. “I’m serving you notice now that you’ll be relieved of duty as governor of Pi Pollux, after I make report at PAGG.”

  “Wait; you must see this right. There’s a certain law on my side—”

  Harvey cut him off again, jerking his white mane.

  “What law, sir? There’s no law that can save you from dismissal.”

  “Yes there is. It’s a higher law than yours. The law of—”

  But Harvey’s ice-water voice drowned him out. “I know the law from A to Z; don’t try to bluff me, McGull—it’s no good. No law can protect you from the charge of sheer incompetence—at the very least. You’ve been governor here for ten years, and accomplished the sum total of nothing. Pi Pollux is the most shabby run-down world in the Union. A more miserable planet I never saw. All the cities are slum from end to end; a planet-wide ghetto. Shocking, sir, disgraceful.”

  “REMEMBER, this was a poor world to start with,” said McGull. “It is almost barren of natural resources like iron, coal, oil, or uranium. Poor soil and a bad climate, too. Mountains and wasteland mainly. Restricted fauna and flora. A sort of world badland. I was given the poorest world in the Galactic Union, gentlemen, believe me.”

  “But it’s even poorer now,” said Harvey coldly. “Don’t expect sympathy from us: we deal only in results. Your job was to better existing conditions as much as possible, help them overcome their handicaps. Organize things. Teach the people how to make the most of what they had.”

  “And to find some economic framework,” followed Statt’s echo, “allowing them to gear into galactic trade. If you had just raised their standard of living one percent, we’d be satisfied. But you instead turned this planet into one vast poorhouse.”

  “Eighty million soul s,” Harvey said, the words dripping like sleet, “dragged from misery to worse wretchedness. To an abyss of disaster, sir.”

  Statt was consulting figures in a notebook, shuddering. “From a poor, needy world, Pi Pollux has been reduced to a beggar world, it will have to go on complete relief now. I estimate it will take 500 billion at least, to set it on its feet. At the least.”

  MCGULL faced them. “Pi Pollux does not need that charity, not a penny of it.”

  Statt stopped mumbling figures. “Don’t joke, McGull, it’s in bad taste. The people wear filthy rags. The children are shoeless, thin, hungry. The pinch of want shows everywhere. In the face of that, you would deny them help? Deny them?”

  “I deny that they need relief,” McGull said.

  “Then where will they get the money they need?” demanded Harvey. “How are they suddenly going to earn billions and billions?”

  “Well, it comes under that law again,” began McGull. “Law?”

  “What law?”

  McGull went on, groping for the right words. “There are potential riches behind the illusion of poverty you saw. In one brief moment, it can change . . . but I’ll begin from the beginning, hear me out. Ten years ago, when I first took over my post, I was shocked when I looked over this world, and tabulated what I had to work with. A poor world, with three strikes against it already. Make it a lush farm world?

  The available soil was next door to sterile. Mining? Not enough bulk minerals to fill a bathtub. Forestry? There are no trees here, only jungles of brittle reeds. Manufacturing? The people are in the ox-cart stage, without machines. A tourist’s paradise,? Not with native scenery bleak and ugly.”

  McGull spread his hands. “In short, every economic road was blocked. I looked myself in the mirror one morning and told myself the truth, I was governor of a worthless world.”

  HE SUDDENLY POINTED a finger at Harvey. He meant it to be dramatic, but knew it was clumsy and forced. “Tell me, what would you have done in the face of all that?”

  “Set them to weaving baskets out of those reeds,” Harvey said promptly. “Making pottery out, clay. Carving things out of stone. Anything that would sell in the galactic market.”

  “Bric-a-brac,” nodded Statt, “is a thriving trade and makes money. Makes good money.”

  “And makes peons,” said McGull. “I thought of another answer for these humanoid people, almost twins of Terrans, who by bad luck got a world out of the garbage heap. There was one other way to give them a place in the sun—a new way never tried before in the galaxy.

  I would use the one resource that remained, the biggest resource of all.”

  “Such as?” prompted Harvey impatiently.

  “The people themselves.”

  “In what way? Speak up, sir, come to the point.”

  “Well, by using them in a new way. By using their—” But McGull choked on it, he couldn’t quite say it, not yet. He said instead. “I launched them on a big gamble, the way you bet on black against red. My stakes, if I win, will put Pi Pollux in the black and out of the red.”

  Harvey sent him a freezing glance. “Are you telling us you set up some sort of lottery here? Set them to gambling, of all things?”r />
  “Yes—no.” McGull swallowed. “Not gambling the way you mean; a different kind of gamble. It can be win all or lose all. And frankly, gentlemen, I don’t know to this day which way it will turn out. What I need is time. Only another year, perhaps only a month, a week, a second. I don’t know. But time is what I’m begging for, gentlemen. Humbly.”

  HARVEY was on his feet, and his words fell like smothering snow. “Time to grind them down still lower?”

  Statt snapped his notebook shut. “Another year and even SRA won’t be able to salvage them. Won’t be able.”

  “Time,” begged McGull.

  “Only six months?”

  “Not one month,” said Harvey.

  “Not one week,” said Statt.

  “Then just one hour,” said McGull.

  They stared.

  “One hour, gentlemen. Follow me. I want to show you what I mean. Maybe then you’ll understand.”

  The two men looked at each other and shrugged. “I guess we can spare one hour,” agreed Harvey.

  McGull patted himself mentally, for the classic kid’s trick of begging for a dollar, then a quarter, and settling for the dime he wanted in the first place.

  Could he still win the big gamble? Would the law save him?

  McGull led them out of his dilapidated governor’s mansion—it was loosely that, very loosely, and past the eye-offending, unpainted hovels that leaned at precarious angles. He led them along a shoddy littered dirt street. It mirrored, in itself, all of impoverished Pi Pollux.

  “You didn’t even teach them common cleanliness,” accused Harvey. “The streets are a disgrace, you could have set them to work tidying up their world, at least.”

  “They’re too busy for such trivial matters, now.”

  “Busy doing what?”

  “Doing what? We said what?”

  IN SILENT answer, McGull led them into a long low ramshackle building of clay and stone. It was filled with a clashing blend of discordant dins. A hundred or more native men were at work, and it seemed somehow as if it were Earth, in some dingy workshop. There was a clutter of things that crammed all available space and made no immediate sense to the eyes.

  “A junk shop?” guessed Harvey, more puzzled than sneering.

  “We noticed other places like this,” reflected Statt.

  “Many of them, in fact. We never got a clear answer from the natives, is it an illegal sweatshop? Is it?”

  “A laboratory,” waved McGull. “These men are scientists, at work on experimental research of all kinds.”

  McGull was watching their faces and knew what he would see.”

  “Really,” said Harvey, dropping the word like an icicle.

  “Now really,” said Statt. “Really.”

  McGull couldn’t blame them. Cluttered, disorganized, this looked like a cartoonist’s caricature. The apparatus of chemistry, physics, biology, electronics, botany, and atomics were scattered and intermixed haphazardly.

  The Polluxan experimenters were equally overlapped, and seemed in one another’s way. There was no pattern or system; it was a jumbled jigsaw, like a satiric stage-play with mad scientists plotting the destruction of the universe. With the universe utterly safe.

  “So that’s it,” said Statt musingly. “That explains it. I refer to figures I saw, investigating the financial background of Pi Pollux at the home office. In your ten years as governor, under the Galactic Lend Lease Act, you asked for billions in scientific apparatus. And of all kinds from archeology to zoology and all apologies in between.”

  MCGULL NODDED. “Most of my requests for new modern research material were turned down, but it didn’t matter really. I settled for any old second-hand stuff. Laboratory hand-me-downs. Even apparatus earmarked, for the junkheap. They gladly dumped it here, all I wanted.”

  Statt was staring. “We thought, of course, you were working with it yourself, doing some good with it for Pi Pollux. But instead, you passed it out to the people. The people?”

  The last was in the nature of a gasp.

  McGull had one defiant smile left. “Yes, I spread it all over the planet. I set all available men to work in laboratories and workshops such as this. All the men that could be spared from basic labor, such as farming and fishing.

  I wheedled enough imported food, clothing, and basics from Galactic Staples to release more men for scientific work. About ten million, all told.”

  “Ten million scientists? Ten million?”

  “I know that surprises you,” McGull said. “Most worlds, even the biggest, have only a few thousand or tens of thousands of scientists—pure research men, that is—hardly ever a million. But Pi Pollux has ten million.”

  Harvey spoke with his white brow jerking. “That isn’t what surprises me, sir. The whole thing is preposterous, without rhyme or reason. Fantastic is the word, you almighty fool, because the original Planetary Survey of this world showed the natives to be sub-human mentally. An average low IQ of only 55. Their brightest minds, their geniuses, hit no more than 95—below Earth’s average. And you’re trying to turn this planet into a scientific asset, with ten million morons?

  MCGULL’S aplomb was a thing of beauty, in the face of that scorn, but inside he was sick.

  “I decided,” he said in empty tones, “that the one chance these people had to make their mark in the galaxy was as a center of advanced science. One chance, and I took it.”

  “I’ll have to report you as not only incompetent,” said Harvey, with genuine pity, “but insane, sir; it adds up no other way. You find a poor, miserable world in need of some saving industry, or means of self support. You could have asked for a billion in carving tools, raw leather, plastic products—anything that would launch them into a simple occupation and a galactic market. But you called for the one thing most wrong for them; scientific apparatus for a race of savages.”

  “Savages,” said McGull, “is not quite the right word.”

  “Nitwits, then. Addlebrains. Call them what you will. Look at them, working at their so-called experiments like stupid, silly oafs.”

  “ ‘Oafs’ isn’t the right word either, but you’re getting warm.”

  McGull knew he was digging his pit deeper with each word. But what did it matter now? Maybe it was all insane. He watched one of the Polluxans, who wore a frayed white coat and a childish grin, as he busily dumped chemicals into a row of test tubes stretching aimlessly. Some sizzled or boiled or shot out flames.

  “Any luck, Gazzio?” asked McGull in galactic patois, but hopelessly. “Any discovery you’re on the track of?”

  “Who knows?” shrugged the Polluxan, grinning. “But it’s exciting fun, anyway.”

  MCGULL SIGHED. It was all insane, yes; the law had failed him. He turned as two other Polluxans came up, jabbering.

  “Poor fellow,” Statt was whispering to Harvey. “McGull went clean out of his head when he started this farce.”

  “Ten million poor misguided people,” Harvey nodded, “led by a crazy man, playing at science like chattering apes who don’t know an electron from a watermellon—”

  “Ah, apes,” said McGull. “You hit the right word at last.”

  “What have apes got to do with it?”

  “Plenty.” McGull turned away from the two Polluxans he had been talking with, and held up an unnamed thing of what seemed rusted old wire twisted around what might be transistors, tied to a lopsided chunk of some metal with clumsy knots of frayed string.

  When he let it drop from his hand, it didn’t drop.

  “Eureka,” said McGull, infinitely tired now that it was over. “Anti-gravity, gentlemen; given up long ago by galactic genius as a dream. Invented this day by two Polluxans whose combined IQ does not equal either of yours.”

  “Apes,” said Harvey, staring at the thing pushing at the ceiling.

  “Apes what?” pleaded Statt. “What?”

  “Once upon a—that is, long ago on Earth,” said Harvey, “some forgotten man stated that if enough apes
pounded away blindly at typewriters for a long enough time, they would eventually write out the Encyclopedia Brittannica, according to a certain law.”

  “Please notify the Galactic Science Bureau,” asked McGull politely, “to have unlimited royalty funds earmarked for Pi Pollux. Have them send . . . oh, say 100 billion immediately. Any small sum like that. Also tell the map makers where Pi Pollux is.” His tone was still polite as he added. “And you know what you can tell PAGG and SRA.”

  McGull had no more time to waste and turned his back on them. “Good day, gentlemen. I’m going to be a busy man running one of the richest worlds. We’ll make Pi Pollux a center of science, me and my apes. Super science, I should say. I think I’m safe in assuming the Law of Chance won’t be repealed.”