The 18th Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK ™: Jerome Bixby

by Jerome Bixby

  He cursed aloud, wondering if Marilyn had meant it when she implied that he was the object of her intentions. Gerris was not accustomed to kidding himself—he could very easily be attracted to the girl, without necessarily losing any affection for his wife. He wondered, however, if he could stand up before the concentrated attack Marilyn could undoubtedly institute, and stand up to it well enough to preserve his home.

  He pushed himself out of the chair and took his wife’s picture from his wallet.

  “I love my wife, but Oh You Kid!” Marilyn jeered from behind him.

  He spun around, pushing the photograph into his pocket.

  “Don’t sneak up on me like that!”

  Marilyn laughed. “Okay, Simon Pure. Okay. But don’t forget to look at wifey’s snapshot once in a while, just to keep your morale up.”

  “Go on back to your cabin.” Gerris was badly frightened. Marilyn apparently slept in her underwear.

  She grinned lazily. “Sure. I just wondered what you were doing out here, all by yourself and lonely.”

  “I was thinking of a way to get rid of you,” he snapped.

  “Fat chance, Handsome.” She turned slowly and walked away. As she reached the companionway, she looked back over her shoulder. “But remember—never underestimate the power of a woman.” She stepped into the companionway and disappeared from sight.

  * * * *

  The last day of the passage finally came, and Gerris was a sleepless wreck. Whenever he dozed off, he was liable to be awakened by the feel of Marilyn’s mouth against his lips.

  When they ate at the one food-unit on the ship, her thigh would press his. He was haunted by the devilish twinkle in her eyes.

  When the ship completed turnover, he was grateful for the excuse it gave him to order the girl to strap herself into the bunk. He lashed himself into the control chair with a definite thankfulness that a few more hours would see them landed, with the problem at least partially off his hands.

  Mars filled the periscope lens, rushed up, resolved from a red haze to a patch of dun ground blotted by vegetation, and finally became the blast-obscured surface of the ravaged landing area. The ship rocked into quiescence, and Gerris cut the switches with a sigh of relief.

  He climbed down to Marilyn’s cabin and unstrapped her.

  “Come on, Bombshell. Let’s get it over with.” He picked up his suitcase, handed Marilyn a spare mask, and slipped his own down over his nose and mouth. “Just breathe naturally,” he said, his voice rattling through the filter. “The valve’ll adjust to Mars pressure automatically.”

  “Never fear, Handsome. I always breathe naturally. It’s you that pants once in a while.”

  “Can’t you relax for a minute?” he said wearily. He could picture the look that was going to be on his wife’s face.

  “Stowaway, huh?” Margaret would say, two lines appearing at the corners of her nostrils. “Ah—huh.”

  Carson, the nominal chief of the dome’s staff, would clamp down hard on the pipe he couldn’t smoke outside, but jammed through his mask’s filter anyway. “Well, what’re you going to do about her?” he’d say, and then it would be up to Gerris to admit he didn’t know, and throw the problem to the entire staff. No matter what happened, he wouldn’t be very popular on Mars any more. He doubted if any of the women would ever speak to him again.

  “Well, let’s go, lover,” Marilyn said. Her jawbones showed behind the mask’s edges as she grinned.

  “All right.” He led her to the hatch, opened it, and dropped the folding ladder. They climbed down, into the cup formed by the semicircle of people who had come out of the dome when the ship landed. The scientists—male and female—stared at Marilyn as she stood there, enjoying the situation. Gerris could feel the awkward expression on his face.

  His wife stepped forward.

  “Hello, Madge,” he said.

  “Hello.”

  “Aren’t you going to introduce us?”

  “Uh—sorry. Marilyn, this is Madge. My wife, Madge—Marilyn.”

  Margaret took Marilyn’s hand. “How do you do?”

  Marilyn said “How do you do?” Gerris noticed that some of the confidence in her voice was wavering.

  “I didn’t know there was a new staff member coming in on the ship,” Margaret said.

  “This—uh—that is, Marilyn isn’t exactly a staff member. She— well...” He explained the situation as rapidly as possible. Margaret wrinkled her brow. She looked over at Marilyn, who was posing prettily.

  Margaret turned and took one of the other women by the arm. The woman—Carson’s wife—was looking from Marilyn to a slightly dazed Carson with a cryptic expression on her face. The two women moved away from the rest of the group for a moment, held a lowvoiced consultation, and returned.

  “It’s all fixed,” Margaret said brightly.

  Gerris was astonished. “How? Where’re you going to put her?” he asked, knowing that merely finding a place for Marilyn to stay wasn’t solving more than half the problem.

  “Phil Carson’s going to move into our cubicle with you. I’ll move in with June—they don’t have any children, thank God—and Marilyn moves in with us. One of us will have to sleep in the daytime, of course, but two of us will be awake—” she smiled meaningfully under her mask. “Marilyn, and either June or myself.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Gerris said. “That’s it!” And it was. Until they got authorization to ship the girl back, she’d either be asleep or in the constant company of one of the women.

  “Never underestimate the power of a woman,” he said in an awed voice. “I never thought of that!”

  That fixes everything, he thought happily. Things are fine.

  He kept right on thinking so, until the first time he tried to kiss his wife.

  CARGO TO CALLISTO

  Originally published in Planet Stories, Nov. 1950.

  Sarah emerged from the surface of the Great Canal as sleek and brown as a seal. Laughing and sputtering, she jerked her head once over each round shoulder, parting her soaked hair and revealing her face.

  “Try that once again!” she flung at Joe.

  Joe Caradac ducked her again, and Kent shouted something from the bank that wasn’t quite audible over the squeals and splashes.

  “What?” Joe held his wife’s head firmly between his knees, “What’d you say, Kent?”

  His Senior Intendant’s grin widened as he cupped his hands over it to shout again: “I said—you’ll drown the poor thing!”

  Joe grunted as Sarah cold-bloodedly located a nerve-center in his thigh and bit it. “Not this thing—” he released her, and she bobbed up swearing in sand-coast Martian—“they had to rope it out of a canal to teach it to walk!”

  He narrowed his grey eyes humorously and poised for the attack, but Sarah had conceded and was swimming toward the bank. The setting sun struck a series of glowing V’s in her wake. Joe rubbed his tingling leg and followed. They reached the green slope at the same time and big Kent pulled them up with ease.

  “Ray’s watching the hotdogs,” he said, “and I’ve been watching Ray and I think we’d better get up there or he won’t be able to hold off much longer. His inner man is showing through.”

  * * * *

  The pianist’s dark, saturnine face peered at them over the fire as they came up and he rose, wiping his hands carelessly on his sport tunic. He had evidently gone into the canal-skimmer and changed out of his bathing suit.

  “How do,” he greeted dourly; “the damned thing itched so I took it off.”

  Joe gave himself a last swipe with the towel and tossed it through the open hatch of the skimmer. Sarah carried her towel into the boat and came out presently in a suede skirt and bolero, looking rubbed down and delectable. Joe’s wife was half Martian, and it showed in her long, slender eyebrows and delicately deft nose and chin. She looked worriedly at the three men busy with the frankfurters.

  “There’s something on the telaudio,” she said. “Come
in and listen.”

  “What is it?” Joe asked.

  “Something about somebody escaping from Mars Detain.”

  Ray’s humming stopped. He’d been practicing wrist octaves on a flat rock, and his long hand hung motionless for a moment as if he were reaching for something. Kent set his hotdog across the top of his coffee cup—he was always careful about everything—and stood up.

  Joe looked at his wife, looked at her eyes. They were frightened.

  “That’s pretty near here, isn’t it?” Sarah said. She moved back to let the three men into the boat. They grouped around the telaudio.

  “I don’t think there’s anything to worry about,” Kent said slowly. “They’re bound to catch the men—”

  “They aren’t men.”

  The four listened.

  “—ruthless Aarnians. This warning cannot be taken too seriously. Detain is doing everything in its power to recapture the four criminals but, as is known, the Aarnian psyche is able to leave its body at will and inhabit the body of another entity, subjugating the mind of its host and contro—”

  “My God,” Ray whispered, “I’ve heard of those devils!”

  “—in all likelihood will seek to escape from Mars. To prevent this, all persons now holding tickets for interworld travel must submit to being psycho-screened before entering liners. No more tickets will be sold—”

  Sarah’s eyes were wide and round. “They’d have to leave their bodies behind—here on Mars!”

  Big Kent—because he was one of the Garadacs’ oldest friends and could do such things—put his arm around her shoulders and squeezed. She was shivering.

  “—tenant Smith of Detain informs us that the Aarnians are unable to pronounce certain consonantal dipthongs—such as jee and jay—even if occupying bodies that can normally pronounce such sounds. This is very important, as it may be an only possible means of identification, for the Aarnians will undoubtedly seek new bod—”

  Sarah switched off the telaudio, her brown face openly sick. She bit her lip and looked at each of the three men surrounding her.

  “That gives me the shivers,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

  After that they didn’t talk much. Under the red twilight, they packed up the pots and pans, leaving the unwanted food for the nightcrawling nolls. They spent a lot of time looking over their shoulders as they did this, although each tried to conceal it from the others. At last the skimmer moved silently away from the bank and pointed its nose at the distant haze that was Ofei, By the Great Canal.

  * * * *

  At precisely seven o’clock the telaudio on the headboard of Joe’s bed turned itself on. Sounds pricked the balloon of his disturbed slumber, tugged his mind out to wakefulness. He rolled over and sat up, listening, rubbing his lanky legs.

  Instead of the usual symphonic music, he heard an urgent voice, obviously ad-libbing:

  “—be very, very careful. The criminals—the Aarnians—have still not been found. All residents of Ofei and vicinity are warned— this warning cannot be overemphasized—”

  Joe reached out and clicked on the screen. The announcer’s tunic was wrinkled, his sash was awry. He looked as if he’d been up all night.

  “—are advised to stay within the city limi—”

  Joe snapped off the telaudio and glanced over at Sarah’s bed. She was snoring delicately, one smooth arm pillowing her mass of blue-black hair. Better that she doesn’t hear any more about that business, he decided firmly.

  Joe liked the simple life. No servants, no flunkies, although he could have afforded a dozen. Five sunshiny rooms on the Great Canal, with a nice view of Mars Memorial Park on the bank opposite. He robed himself against the early morning chill and headed for the kitchen. His head ached faintly and, to judge by what little he could remember of it, he’d had a dilly of a nightmare. Something about... being chased, or something? Or smothered by a.

  Even as he stopped in his tracks to try to pin it down, the memory broke, dissolved as if in flight. Frowning, he pushed through the kitchen door and crossed to the deep-freeze, slid it open, and rummaged inside.

  The nightmare wasn’t important, surely, but he mulled it over with interest as he prepared breakfast, for Joe, being rather well adjusted, dreamed rarely, and then mostly about Iowa, back on Earth.... A long-ago picture of a twelve-year-old boy, his first day in college; the boy sitting under his shining Projector, surrounded by a group of thunderstruck Psychologists; the quick death of their initial skepticism, and in its place a growing wonder as it became evident that, although a History spool was whirling in the scanner and the thought-helmet functioning to perfection, the boy’s mind was receiving neither spoken text nor images.

  “You don’t feel anything?” a Psychologist asked skeptically.

  Joe closed his eyes. There was a low, unmusical humming in his ears and that was all. He tried to shake his head and couldn’t, so he said: “No, I don’t.”

  “When was the World Federation formed?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you lying?”

  “No.”

  One of the other Psychologists standing nearby looked up from the little box he held in his hand and said that Joe wasn’t lying.

  The first Psychologist raised his eyebrows. “We’ll try another Projector.”

  While Technicians dismantled Joe’s Projector and examined it for shorts or haywire, the Psychologists had Joe sit down under all the other Projectors in Cubicle 149. Then they tried 148 and 150.

  “It’s some kind of block,” the first Psychologist said finally, looking profound to cover up his tizzy. “There’s some kind of barrier in his mind.”

  Joe Caradac clenched his fists. “That’s not true—I want to learn!”

  “Then you probably will, boy—” the Psychologist sat down to fill in some forms—“but you’ll have to go back three hundred years to do it. You’ll have to learn from books!”

  There the dream would simply end, for no fantasy of wish-fulfillment could have exceeded in satisfaction Joe’s actual conquest of this problem. At eighteen he wore thick glasses—he preferred them to contacts or artificial irises. At twenty he took tests contrived especially for him by the members of Central Education assigned to his case. He was awarded equivalence degrees in Business Administration, Meta-tomics and Interplanetary Law. His marks were the highest of the year, and Joe Caradac’s name was briefly in the newsphones.

  He started with the New Chicago offices of Mars Imports and Exports as a mercury. After six weeks of flying back and forth with memos, he traded his anti-gravs for a desk.

  And on June 32, 2401, the newly appointed Regional Buyer for M. I. and E. got married and was flown to Mars by a chartered spacer to take command of the regional office at Ofei, By the Great Canal...

  * * * *

  He was putting the finishing touches on breakfast when he heard a groan and the sound of a stretch from the bedroom. When he turned around, Sarah was standing in the doorway.

  Joe’s sandy eyebrows went up. His wife was certainly not a modest woman, but considering even that, this morning was an agreeable surprise. Her eyes were still dull—he guessed that she’d worried about those whatyoucallits after going to bed—but she was smiling broadly. Joe began to have visions of missing work for half a day. He smiled back at her and she laughed a little.

  “Holm, Uarnl!” she said.

  Joe was thrusting halved oranges into the juicer. He turned off the machine and grinned.

  “You’ll have to talk plainer than that, little monkey,” he said. He held out a glass of juice. “Drink this—it’ll wake you—up—” The last word faded into an astonished silence.

  Then Joe said, “Hey—come back!” He set down the glass and went into the bedroom.

  She was lying on her bed, her face hidden. Joe dropped onto the edge of the bed and put a tentative hand on her back.

  “Hey now,” he said softly, “if that’s the way you feel about it, I’ll juice up some grapefruit.�
�� He moved his hand down and spanked lightly. “Hey?”

  She didn’t look up. She had turned her head and was looking at the corner of the room by Joe’s bed.

  “I do not feel well. Go away.”

  Joe’s face was immediately concerned. He bent over her, reached for a wrist. “What’s the matter, Sarah? Can I get you anything?” The wrist hung limply in his hand.

  “No. Go away.”

  Joe straightened up and drew his eyebrows together in thought. Sarah was usually tearful and pretty much of a leech when she wasn’t feeling well. Excessive commiserations and breakfast in bed were the rule at such times.

  “Do you want me to get Doc Halprin?”

  The blue-black head shook from side to side.

  “So what am I supposed to do, monkey? I hate to leave you this way.”

  “Go away.”

  “But can’t I—”

  “Go away, damn you!”

  Joe stood up abruptly. He clenched his fists and looked at his wife’s still form and gradually the anger dulled and left him. He had no right to be angry. Everybody got temperamental once in a while.

  But this was the first time she had ever cursed him.

  “O.K.,” he said softly. “I’ll see you tonight.”

  * * * *

  The regional offices of Mars Imports and Exports sat upon a hill at the end—or the beginning—of Ila Boulevard, depending upon which way you were going. It was twenty-five-hundred feet of silver and native marble, and covered four city blocks, and Joe Caradac was top man—literally—since his office and personal staff took up the whole two-hundred and fifty-first floor.

  His morning mail—about twelve letters weeded out of the daily thousands—was gotten out of the way with skill and dispatch. Grinning, he propped his feet on the low, curving window sill and said: “Miss Kal—take an audiogram.” Miss Kal used two of her arms to adjust pad and stylus, looking up expectantly. Her other arms were busy transcribing a previously dictated letter into Venusian—her native tongue, although she spoke sixty-eight—and tugging at a humidified legging that had somehow worked down almost to the floor.