A Galaxy Of Strangers

by Lloyd Biggle Jr

  Gloob held up his hand. “Just a moment, now. Not so fast. This thing is more serious than you realize. You could have gone back at any time up until the moment you were put on probation, just by presenting yourselves and thumbprinting a receipt. But now we can’t accept your receipt. You’ve used up your allowance of luxuries, and it will be a long, long time before your thumbprints can be honored by Boolg, Incorporated.”

  “You mean we’re stuck here?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean. Of course, it wasn’t precisely your fault that you didn’t understand our economic system and got into trouble. Our citizens have to keep meticulous records of their purchases. If they want some special luxury, like a Boolg, Incorporated, tour, they conserve their allowance ahead of time, or they reduce their luxury expenditures drastically after they return. Conduct such as yours is rare. It’s considered a serious crime, which is why the punishment is so severe. I’m sure it was unintentional, but you did commit the crime, and our laws won’t permit you to walk away and forget it.”

  “Do you mean you won’t do a thing to get us back?” Allen demanded.

  “What can I do? I can’t sell a luxury tour to you while you’re on probation.”

  There was a brief silence while Allen glared angrily at Gloob. Then he turned to Ann. “This nonsense has gone on long enough,” he said. “We’ll go to the authorities the first thing in the morning and tell them how the negligence of Boolg, Incorporated, got us into this mess and ask to be sent home.”

  “Oh, I say!” Gloob exclaimed. “You can’t do that. There’d be all kinds of unfavorable publicity for Boolg, Incorporated. We might lose our franchise. We specifically agreed that our operations would be kept secret in your world.”

  “Tough,” Allen said. “But I ‘m sure you’ll think of some explanation. Now if you’ll excuse us, we have our packing to do.”

  “But you can’t! You simply can’t! We’ve just opened new terminals in Europe and South America, and our business is developing splendidly. You have no idea what those tours mean to the citizens of this world. To pay a hotel bill instead of being paid, to pay for transportation, to pay for food or anything else that’s purchased, to do a little work and have the employer pay them—why, if the government finds out about you it’ll spoil everything. At best we’d have to shut down our United States terminals, and that’s the most popular place for tours. Why, it’ll be—it’ll be—”

  “It’ll be a dirty shame,” Allen agreed. “Now if you’ll excuse us—”

  Gloob sighed. “All right. I’ll manage it some way. Go ahead and pack.”

  Allen reached for a suitcase. “I don’t see why you make such a problem out of it. All you have to do is smuggle us away from here. You don’t have to pay us a thousand rallods. What would we do with them?”

  “Mmm—yes. Perhaps it can be done without any official record made of it. We’ll see.”

  A heavy fist rattled their door, and the landlady’s rancorous voice called, “Phone for Mr. Allen!”

  Allen and Ann exchanged startled glances. “Who’s calling?” Allen asked.

  “Why don’t you answer it and find out?” the landlady snarled. Allen plodded up three flights of stairs and apprehensively approached the telephone. “Hello.”

  “Mr. Allen?”

  “Speaking.”

  “This is agent Senoj, of the IBF. You’ll remember our conversation of a week or so ago concerning your unemployment taxes.”

  “Not with pleasure,” Allen said. “For your information, I now am employed.”

  “I know. At that time you mentioned that you had some income tax credit coming. We’ve conducted an investigation, and we find that you have received no income taxes for the past five years. The statute of limitations permits no claim of more than five years to be made against the government, but as long as we’ve definitely established this five-year delinquency, we would like to make a settlement with you.”

  “That’s—extremely nice of you,” Allen murmured.

  “We don’t know how this could have happened, but it did happen, and I’d like to have you sign the necessary papers and accept a check in full and final settlement.”

  “How large a check?”

  “With penalties and interest it comes to twenty-five thousand rallods.”

  “You don’t say. Give me your office address, and I’ll look you up in the morning.”

  “What’s wrong with this evening?” the agent said. There was a note of suspicion in his voice.

  “I’m rather busy at the moment. It’s mealtime, you know.”

  “How about an hour from now?”

  “Make it two hours.” Allen glanced at his watch and counted frantically on his fingers. “Four o’clock.”

  “That’s a little late, but—all right. Expect me at four.”

  Allen hurried back down the stairway. “IBF,” he said. “They want to give us twenty-five thousand rallods in back income taxes.”

  “Good heavens!” Gloob exclaimed. “You aren’t serious!”

  “Absolutely. He’s coming at four.”

  “Good heavens! We’ll have to get you out of here. If the government gives you that much money, it’ll also have to give you jobs to let you spend it, and that means high executive positions. You’ll never get away. Here—I’ll help you pack.”

  They left in a frenzied rush, dashing up the stairs and waiting on the stoop while Gloob hurried into the street to hail a taxi. They had

  loaded in their luggage and were climbing in themselves when the landlady charged into the street after them, screaming vile insults.

  “Just what I expected of scum like you,” she shrieked. “Trying to sneak out on me. Just what I expected. But I been keeping my eyes open, I have. Here—one week’s rent for leaving without notice.”

  She handed Allen six rallods.

  Allen and Ann returned to Centralia, and the Globe Travel Agency, and the rambling, California redwood, ten-room ranch house with a rustic lake view. They never bothered to explain their mysterious absence, and in time their friends tired of asking. And if their friends thought it odd that they named their first son Kroywen, none of them mentioned it within their hearing, not even the boy’s godfather, Mr. Gloob.

  A warm friendship developed between Mr. Gloob and the Allens, and the two travel agencies achieved a level of co-operation rare for supposedly competitive enterprises. Working together, Gloob and Allen planned tours and applied their ingenuity to the arrangement of colorful itineraries for a mysterious influx of travelers who quickly made Centralia, Ohio—a most unlikely location for one—a tourist’s mecca.

  Mr. Gloob was a frequent visitor in the Allens’ home, and they had delightful conversations concerning all sorts of subjects except the place of Mr. Gloob’s origin, which by unspoken common consent none of them mentioned.

  One evening, though, when Mr. Gloob sat rocking peacefully, smoking his pipe, and watching his godson kick happily in a playpen, Allen took up the subject of his son’s name. “It was Ann’s idea,” he said. “She insisted on it. And how can the kid ever be a success in life with a backward name like that?”

  Merriment flashed in Gloob’s eyes, but he spoke firmly. “Kroywen,” he said, “is the most forward-sounding name I know.”

  And there the matter rested.

  page 132

  NO BIZ LIKE SHOW BIZ

  Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

  Creeps on this petty pace from day to day

  Wace Renoldon Farley, 673 492 479 341 895 to his friends, was teaching a ballet step to Horace Wangley Whipple. Farley counted aloud: One, two, one, two, one, two; and sometimes he hummed: Hmmm ho, hmmm ho, hmmm ho.

  And while he worked, his mind wove gossamer funeral shrouds for fragments of dead beauty.

  A stage where every man must play a part

  And mine a sad one.

  Whipple was learning to dance because one night in a fit of rage he beat to death his cohabitant, their infant daughter, and h
is mother. (He already had learned four card tricks, one magic act, a comic song, and an inept imitation of an unpopular Director of Public Safety.) He wore a brief ballet skirt and nothing else; sweat glistened on his bulging, hairy stomach as he balanced precariously on his toes and moved, with unsteady, mincing steps, from one side of his cage to the other.

  He reached the bars, resisted the impulse to grab them, and managed an awkward, stumbling pivot without losing his balance. Farley’s hand relaxed on the punishment button. (Whenever Whipple touched anything to steady himself, Farley gave him an electric shock.) The hirsute ballerina looked hauntingly like a clumsily waltzing gorilla in a ballet skirt, but the analogy would have been lost on Farley, who had no personal knowledge of that extinct primate.

  They were two atavists adrift in the wrong time and place. Whipple—whose physique should have been magnificent—in a world where strength and physical skill were meaningless; Farley—whose keen mind was shaped to the exquisite, dramatic interplay, the iridescent beauties of man and fate contending—in a world that had abolished both fate and beauty. The one’s body met the other’s mind only on the simulated musical beat: One, two, one, two.

  Now, by two-headed Janus,

  Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time.

  Farley regarded Whipple with mingled pity and contempt. The slobbering brute’s stuttering gyrations were pathetic, but Farley knew that everyone else would find them hilarious, and the successful addition of this ballet number to Whipple’s necessarily limited repertoire would add a minimum fifty thousand to his price when he came up for auction.

  Farley also knew (this was the fate of one who saw beauty in man’s contention with fate) that the enforcement of inhuman indignities on a human being merely because he’d committed a few murders was an outrage. Behind that fear-twisted face and those blankly staring eyes was an indefinable quality of the human condition that the cage and its accompanying gross humiliations were slowly strangling.

  These atavistic quirks of Farley’s mentality would have deeply disturbed his superiors and his friendly local internal security agents had they so much as suspected them. Farley believed in the human soul, though he did not know what to call it.

  *

  Adjacent to the building that housed the Penal Authority were the crematory ovens and the gas chambers of the International Poverty Control Agency (U.S. Branch). On this day ovens and chambers were not in operation, a fact that disappointed those tourists who rode out on the branch conveyor to gape at the exteriors of the infamous extermination and confinement centers.

  One of them remarked, “Now that’s what I call a job! Work only one day a month!”

  *

  Harl Ranno Lyndyl occupied a cage near Whipple’s. He sat on the floor, vacantly grinning into the infinite. He did not know where he was, or why, or what Farley was saying to Whipple; but when Farley counted or hummed a dance beat, the regularity of the sound awakened in Lyndyl a flicker of response. Farley counted; almost imperceptibly, Lyndyl nodded his head.

  *

  The Penal Authority was located on the edge of a diminishing swamp that once had been a river, and its district, formerly an island, was affectionately referred to as Old Blight, to distinguish it from the various new blights of the districts that surrounded it. It was the leading tourist attraction on the continent, possessing innumerable historic ruins, museums, legendary sites, a vast network of underground conveyors, quaintly ramshackle shops, and two of Earth’s three remaining skyscrapers.

  Tourists thronged the walkways, and the boldest of them timidly made their way into the Anachron, the world’s last surviving public restaurant, the only place on Earth where real food could be bought and consumed. It even had a food store that sold raw and preserved foods for home cooking by those whose apartments were sufficiently anachronistic to still have the means.

  In three of its four dining rooms (the small fourth room was reserved for regular local patrons), tourists held their scoops awkwardly and gummed a few mouthfuls of one of the creamy vegetable stews, or the vegetable curries, or the vegetable chowders, or (at an incredible price) the vegetable souffle before they stole the menus to take home to their disbelieving friends and relatives.

  There were tourist rumors that the Anachron would even serve meat, from unmentionable sources, raw or cooked, and at wholly unbelievable prices, but these were based upon the understandable assumption that a place selling any kind of real food would sell anything. The regular customers knew nothing about it, as repeated governmental investigation had proved. (Any kind of a rumor of meat consumption automatically was subjected to investigation by thirty-seven different governmental departments.) The regular customers tended to be morose, solitary individuals, decent enough citizens, eminently law-abiding, who were afflicted with digestive problems or otherwise allergic to wholesome synthetics, and the government was inclined to regard them more with sympathy than suspicion.

  In the Anachron’s main dining room, Oswald Ossafont Oyner, a tourist, and his family were gazing in stunned disbelief at the steaming bowls that had been placed before them. Oyner gripped his scoop defensively and pointed. “What’s that?”

  “A piece of carrot,” the server answered politely.

  “And-that?”

  “Tomato.”

  “And-those?”

  “Peas.”

  Oyner wielded his scoop, slurped the contents distastefully, and swallowed. A moment later his stomach churned, and he clapped his hand to his mouth for a brief but losing struggle with his own physiology. The server resignedly pointed an autocleaner at the mess. It happened a minimum hundred times a day.

  *

  Wace Farley’s initial success had emboldened him. He decided to teach Whipple two ballet steps, the second to be used to bring the act to a climax. He was counting: One two three, one two three, one two three.

  Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

  The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

  Or to take arms against a sea of trouble …

  At that moment Georg Donnoho Mallod entered. He took one look at the pirouetting Whipple and dissolved in laughter. “Great act!” he gasped. “Great act!”

  The Penal Authority’s Resident Administrator daily congratulated himself on his astuteness in rescuing Farley from the inevitable fate of the unemployed, the ovens. The shy young man had seemed intent on suicide, devoting all of his legally allowed training to such an outlandishly unemployable specialty as ancient dramatic arts; but Mallod had a friend in the Poverty Control Agency who made it his hobby to sift out individuals with unusual qualifications and find employment for them. He mentioned Farley’s specialty to Mallod, and Mallod had reflected that the ancient dramatic arts were, after all, the primitive ancestors of contemporary public attractions. In sifting the moldy mounds of obsolete information Farley must have turned over a few notions that could be adapted to contemporary use. Mallod hired him.

  Farley’s immediate, spectacular success already had gained Mallod a promotion that had been five years overdue, and Mallod was generous enough to publicly give Farley some of the credit for it. Mallod was not aware that Farley hated his work, or that he believed in the human soul.

  “Dr. Savron is coming,” Mallod said.

  Farley continued his count. Since he had never heard of Dr. Savron, he doubted that the visit concerned him. One two three, one two three.

  How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

  Seem to me all the uses of the world.

  “He’s the director of Rolling Acres. That’s the new Public Recreational Center over in District Eleven.”

  “I’ve heard of it,” Farley said. “I didn’t know it had entertainment accommodations.” One two three, one two three.

  “It does,” Mallod said grimly, “and Savron will have a priority order. He’ll want the usual dozen attractions. Why public establishments think they have to compete with private places of entertainment is more than I can understand. I
’ve complained to several legislators about it. Not only is the competition unfair, but it reduces our surpluses. Well—Savron is on the way, and we’ll have to make the best of it. I told Karlson to move a dozen attractions with bids under a thousand to the central concourse.”

  Farley left off his counting. “I have a couple of short-termers I’d be glad to unload. A pickpocket—he’s quite good. We got him back when the Happy Hours exhibit failed, and since he only has six months left to serve—”

  “Good idea. There won’t be any bids, so we might as well let the Rolling Acres budget feed him.”

  “Also, there’s a con woman who has wonderful dexterity. Unfortunately, she’s such an ugly old thing that there were no bids, and now she has less than a year to serve.”

  “Send them down,” Mallod said. “I’ll unload them if I can.”

  “I wish we could unload Lyndyl.”

  “We’ll certainly try. I want you to come along and view Karlson’s attractions. I think it’s mostly his fault we don’t get better bids on them.”

  Farley shrugged and got to his feet. It would be a challenge. Sometimes, if there was a challenge, he forgot that he hated his work.

  The two of them left, and the multi-murderer Whipple, still painfully balanced on his toes, stared after them.

  *

  Even the Anachron’s building was anachronistic, a shabby, eight-sided affair with eight doors, and the restaurant’s regular customers loved it. Many of them had been eating their daily meal there for years, and the private dining room enabled them to enjoy their food undisturbed by gabbing tourists with unpredictable stomachs.

  The regular customers also had their own convenience lounge on the sublevel where stocks of food were stored, and from the convenience lounge, those regular customers who over the years had established themselves as trustworthy followed a labyrinthine path among the pungent-smelling bins to a remote wall. After a meticulous inspection through a secret panel, a secret door opened and they were admitted and for a wholly unconscionable price served a huge, foaming mug of berr, a transaction that would have been investigated by seventy-one outraged governmental departments had it even been suspected.