Collected Fiction

by Theodore R. Cogswell

  “But this says you were killed!”

  Reggie skipped over the part which referred to him as an obscure village writer who had gained temporary notoriety in the mid-twenties when his novel Red Hot Mama was banned in Boston, and concentrated on the details of the accident.

  “You’ll note,” he said when he had finished reading, “that this just says that I disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Tevis’s body was found in the wreckage of his machine, but I wasn’t. Luckily for me, the time field, or whatever it was he called it, had already formed around me when his dingbat blew up.”

  “Time travel!” said Akermann in an awed voice. “It’s fantastic!” He gulped suddenly as a practical thought hit him. “This Tevis . . . did he explain how his machine worked?”

  “He tried to,” said the other apologetically, “but I’m afraid I didn’t pay much attention. Things like that have always confused me. He did say something about squaring infinity . . . or was he unsquaring it? I do remember that he said he was doing something with it that nobody had ever thought of before.”

  “Anyway,” continued Reggie, a far away look in his eyes, “it all started in Helopolis, Kansas. I hadn’t seen Tevis since we were undergraduates together and you could have knocked me over with a feather when he came rushing up to me at the bus station and dragged me home with him.

  “He was head of the Physics Department at Helopolis State Teachers College—in fact, he was the Physics Department. They also had him teaching Community Dynamics, Advanced Basket Weaving, and something called Project Four, Democracy at Work.”

  “Do go on,” said Akermann. There was an acid note to his voice that jerked Reginald out of his digression.

  “Anyway,” he said hastily, “during all those years at Helopolis, Tevis had been tinkering away in his basement, trying to build a machine that would put his theory about time travel into practice. He’d just completed it when I hit town on my lecture tour.

  “When we got to his house we settled down for a long talk about the old days, but after thirty years of moving in such completely different directions, we really didn’t have much to talk about. The things I remembered he didn’t—and vice versa—so we soon got around to our own troubles. He had his share, but at least he had tenure. Me, I was making my last round of the women’s clubs, and I knew it.

  ‘My place is in the future,’ I said. ‘It’s just a matter of time before I’m rediscovered. But I’m fifty-four now. Look how long John Donne had to wait. What I need is some way to jump a hundred years into the future.’

  “Tevis didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he jumped up with a wild look in his eyes and dragged me down into his basement. It was there he told me about his time machine. I really didn’t believe it would work, but I was desperate enough to try anything. So I wrote a long letter to Scott—to your great-grandfather—mailed it, and then came back and sat down in an old swivel chair that was surrounded with loops and loops of silvery looking wire.”

  “And?”

  “He pushed a button. It must have blown up just as it kicked me forward. I was hoping that Red Hot Mama would have been rediscovered and gone over well enough so that I would find a comfortable accumulation of royalties—and an established literary position—waiting for me.” The writer paused and looked at the agent forlornly. “I guess I should have had Tevis set the machine for five hundred years. Look how long it took Chaucer.”

  In spite of everything he had gone through, Scott Akermann was still an agent. He hastily leafed through the folder until he found what he was looking for, pulled it out, and smoothed it reverently.

  “What’s that?” asked Reginald.

  “Your original contract with Scott Akermann, Inc. I notice that it contains the usual twelve month cancellation clause. You didn’t, did you?”

  “Didn’t what?”

  “Give notice that you wanted to terminate your contract?”

  Reginald shook his head.

  Akermann began to beam. “I guess that legally I still represent you then.” He coughed delicately. “There have been a few changes since your day. For one thing, the standard agent’s fee is now fifty per cent. I don’t approve of it myself, of course . . .” He coughed again. “But what with inflation, and the war on, and the high price of paper . . .” His face brightened. “But on the other hand, Patagonian rights are only forty per cent.”

  “That’s nice,” said Reginald vaguely. He couldn’t get excited about the division of non-existent royalities. In fact, he couldn’t get excited about anything. The failure of Red Hot Mama to have its expected revival had completely crushed him.

  “But even with necessary deductions,” continued the agent, “you should make enough out of the reprinting of your book to set you up for life.”

  Reprinting! Reginald couldn’t quite believe his ears.

  “Do you really think there’s a chance?” he asked tremulously. “Chance?” Scott laughed. “With a man from the past publicity tie-in we can’t miss.” He put his fingers together and gazed dreamily at the ceiling.

  “First we’ll have a reception for the press, and then a big dinner for the major publishers at the Waldorf-Hilton at which you’ll be the principal speaker.” He closed his eyes and then suddenly snapped them open.

  “Say,” he demanded, “did you by any chance know Grodnick? John Grodnick, the neo-Puritan poet?”

  “Of course,” said Reggie in surprise. “He was a good friend of mine. But why call him neo-Puritan? John’s poetry was strictly wine, women, and song stuff.”

  The agent shrugged. “Not according to the university boys. But anyway he’s really hot this season.” He thought for a moment and then said enthusiastically, ‘The Man Who Knew Grodnick.’ With a kicker like that we’ve really got it made! We’ll keep the build-up going for a couple of months and then we’ll let the big boys fight over reprint rights. What did you say your book was called?”

  “Red Hot Mama,” said Reginald patiently.

  Akermann made a quick note on a scratch pad. “I guess I’d better take a look at it before I do anything else.” He switched on his intercom and gave an order to his robot secretary.

  “Look at the paper!” protested Reginald. “Look at the binding! I’ve been pirated by some cheap, fly-by-night outfit!”

  “Cheap, hell!” said Akermann grimly. He tossed the book down on his desk angerly. “Do you know how much I had to pay for this?”

  Reginald shook his head.

  “Fifty credits!”

  “Is that a lot?”

  “A lot? A credit is worth about two of your mid-twentieth century dollars.”

  Reginald let out a low whistle. “A hundred dollars! For a copy of my book!” He gave an ecstatic smile. “Why didn’t you tell me I was that important.”

  “Because I didn’t know it,” said Akermann sourly. “I’m not in the habit of buying pornography.”

  “PORNOGRAPHY!” Reginald jumped wildly to his feet, “Not that again!”

  “Again?”

  “I went through all that in Boston, But the courts supported me. If you’ll check back into chapter six, you’ll find that when Alice climbs into bed with the sheep herder, she has her bathrobe on and never takes it off. If a dirty minded public chooses to assume she did,” he continued virtuously, “it’s not my responsibility. James Joyce and I, we both—”

  “Mr. Southern!” interrupted Akermann sharply. “You don’t understand the changes that have taken place since your time. For an unmarried couple to go to bed with their clothes on . . . or a married one for that matter . . .” He blushed in spite of himself. “I like a risque story as well as the next man, but after all . . . I mean, really, Reggie . . .” He controlled himself with difficulty. “We’ll just have to think of something else.”

  The trouble was that he couldn’t. “Have you got any ideas?” he said at last.

  “Well,” said Reginald unhappily, “there’s always . . .” His voice broke and it took him a moment before h
e got it back under control again. “There’s always . . .”

  Reginald Southern stepped out on the platform and took an appreciative breath of the dry cool air that billowed in through the open windows. Now that automatic weather control had been installed, Kansas wasn’t so bad after all. He looked down at the smiling faces of the expectant audience (it was a shame, though, that corsets had had to go out with all the rest) and gave them an affectionate nod as he thought of the banquet that was to follow his lecture. After six months of the sloppy synthetics that New Yorkers were so fond of, the prospect of fried chicken and creamed peas was enough to make a man’s salivary glands work overtime.

  As he waited for the toastmistress to finish her introduction, he ran quickly through his mental notes for the coming lecture. He’d better scrap that “most of you are too young to remember line. After a hundred years it wasn’t as complementary as it once had been. The Hemingway story—he’d have to keep that—at least until the current revival was over—but he could dump John Barrymore and restore Grodnick to his rightful place.

  Next year, if the American Classics series brought out Red Hot Mama in an expurgated edition as Akermann had promised they would, he wouldn’t have to make any more one night stands. He’d be able to stay in New York and . . .

  It was the and that did it. He suddenly realized that he couldn’t finish the sentence. The passage of a century hadn’t changed New York. It was still cluttered with the once greats, the burned out rockets who had made a single spectacular flight twenty or thirty years before—and had never gone up again.

  If he wanted it, there was always the place at the bar and the free drinks—tourists were kind—and the talk about the time when the critics would suddenly discover that the old writing was best after all. If he wanted it—but he suddenly realized that he didn’t. Here he was somebody. Here there were people who would listen with respect while he told of John Grodnick and the rest.

  “Dear Ladies,” he said with a note of honest pleasure in his voice, “I can’t tell you how good it is to be back in Kansas.”

  THE ROPER

  John Jacob Niles is, of course, famous for his folk- and folk-type-songs, some of which (the lovely Black Is The Color Of My True Love’s Hair, for instance) he has written himself. The Roper, however, is the result of a collaboration between Mr. Niles and Professor Theodore R. Cogswell, who wrote the lyrics. Readers will remember Professor Cogswell’s other-wordly and incredibly realistic The Cabbage Patch (December, 1957), his bitter and ironic You Know Willie (May, 1957), and other mordant stories. Here he shows a different self than the one familiar to Fellows of the Institute For Twenty-First Century Studies (of which Prof. Cogswell is Secretary), and tells a tale of love and witchery and death.

  One evening as sitting on top of my mountain,

  My feet in the valley, my head in a cloud,

  I was feeling so lonesome that my heart cried inside me

  When I saw such a sight that I shuddered aloud.

  For black bats came awheeling, the big ones like eagles,

  And with them proud ladies in their fine store-bought clothes,

  And leading them all my true love came a flying,

  She was graceful and fair as a wild mountain rose.

  Oh, I called her and kissed her and bade her sit by me

  To be my heart s darling and give my heart ease.

  But she laughed at my wooing and fled like a falcon,

  And climbed like a kestrel on the light evening breeze.

  Then the Roper came flying down out of the sunset

  With a cloth-of-gold lariat that shimmered and shone.

  And he sat down beside me and spoke to me kindly

  And asked why I wept on the mountain alone.

  When I told him he laughed and his rope leapt like lightning,

  And the bats squealed in fear as they fluttered away,

  And the ladies turned pale and flew back to their husbands

  To explain, if they could, where they’d been all that day.

  Then his rope made a turn and looped after my darling

  And nuzzled her throat like a tree-clinging vine.

  And she fell at his feet all a-gasping and choking

  Till the Roper he stomped her and splintered her spine.

  Then lonely, as loudly the rumble of thunder played

  A death-dirge as I whispered a pray’r,

  And cold came the night wind as I knelt down beside her,

  Black as a bat-wing, the shroud of her hair.

  For the bats, they will flee you when the Rope comes for you,

  And there’ll be no forgiveness on that troubled day,

  Be no forgiveness on that troubled day.

  1973

  PARADISE REGAINED

  For the past few years, there has been a lot of worry about the air we breathe. It’s polluted, unfit for human lungs, and despite all the talk, it seems to go on getting worse. Will men in the future do any better? Will they even learn, in time, to take the most hostile atmosphere and make it sweet and fit for men to breathe?

  When Petro Anthos stepped out of the matter transmitter on the planet Hel, the guards promptly surrounded him and searched him for weapons. It was the one thing they did well. As long as the condemned man reached Hel free of weapons, there was little to worry about from him. So they searched him, found nothing, and turned him over to a resident work group. Jennings took him in charge, snarled at him in front of the guards, and then put his arm around his shoulders when they had him in the barracks dome.

  Jennings said, “You’re in luck.”

  Anthos looked at him; this was a thing he had not known, that Hel was peopled with lunatics. Fifty light-years from Earth; a vicious penal colony where one breath of the atmosphere brought choking, gagging, painful death; hard labor seven days a week; a trickle of survival food supplements from Earth in exchange for a daily quota of coal; a place so deadly that its mere existence all but eliminated crime from the populations of Earth. Here he was in the first five minutes of a twenty-year sentence, and a work gang chieftain put an arm around his shoulders and told him he was in luck. Anthos looked at him.

  Jennings was a short stocky man with a potbelly that did not jiggle the slightest bit when he walked. He was dirty and grimy and his clothes were in tatters, but he had a calm air of authority about him that could be felt. Now that he thought about it, Petro Anthos realized that having the arm around his shoulders had probably kept him from screaming, Jennings said, “You’re a gas chromatographer, aren’t you?”

  Anthos nodded numbly.

  “Okay. Now, we don’t have enough time for you to think much about this, but we have to include you in on an escape plan we’ve worked out.”

  Anthos’ heart lurched. He choked and stammered, “Escape? I thought . . . Through the matter transmitter? I saw the other end just now. You can’t possibly. . . .”

  Jennings impatiently waved him quiet. “Not through the matter transmitter. That’s impossible. We’ve found a place on this planet where we can live outside. I know, I know”—he waved again as Anthos started to talk—“you’ve heard that no human being can live outside the domes or outsuits on this planet. Well, you’re almost right. But we’ve found a place, a small valley, that’s barely livable. Once we get to it, we can make it more livable in time. We need a good group to do it, though, and we need a gas chromatographer. We had one, Al Chertsey, but he got a little careless last week and inhaled one good breath of white damp. Burned out his lungs. God, he died hard. You know what it’s like?”

  Anthos nodded. They had made it all too clear to him before they had sentenced him to Hel. The atmosphere would not support life, nor did it screen out the harmful solar radiations. Men had to wear outsuits equipped with back tanks to hold air, special breathing apparatus, protective helmets to keep out radiation and cold. Even the flora and fauna of Hel wouldn’t support human life; they did not contain the vital trace compounds. The local foodstuffs were one of the se
crets of Earth’s hold on Hel. Supplemental nutrients were passed in through the matter transmitter only in response to the quotas of coal that were passed out to Earth. And the ultimate irony was that Earth did not even need the coal, although it had none of its own. Coal was a status symbol, something to be burned in little pots in the living rooms of the very wealthy. Anthos nodded. He knew what it was like.

  Jennings said, looking around at several other men and women gathered near, “It won’t be easy, in the valley, not for a while. But if we’re going to work twelve hours a day, seven days a week, we might as well be doing it for ourselves, not a bunch of sybarites back on Earth.” He looked at Anthos. “You with us?”

  Anthos hesitated. He was thin and frail, and the thought of hard physical work appalled him. But he was a tough-minded chemist, a good gas chromatographer who called the shots as he saw them, which was why he was here in the first place. In the year A.D. 2688 on Earth, one simply does not, as Anthos had done, give analytical results flatly opposed to the analytical results of the Federal Horse Racing Board of Analytical Examiners concerning a urine analysis of a certain Derby winner. Despite all the changes of men and animals on Earth, it was still possible to spike a horse and chemically induce an extraordinary burst of speed.

  Jennings noted the hesitation and said, “Let me introduce you to our people. Ed Jackson, mechanical engineer. So is Frank Stand over there.” Anthos nodded to two grimy people. “Milly Franks and Lenore Meyers are chemists.” Anthos would not have known they were women. “Sy Smith, electrician; Willy George, nothing much but a hard worker; Ernie Hilgard, biologist; Pete Standage, historian; Lex Parker, teacher.” Jennings named a few more, and Anthos had the definite feeling that this was the cream of the penal colony.