American Science Fiction Four Classic Novels 1953-56
Page 13
After the shower I wedged myself into the shuttle and spent two hours zigzagging under the city. My last stop was Times Square, in the heart of the market district. It was mostly a freight station. While cursing consumers hurled crates of protein ticketed for various parts of town onto the belts I tried to phone Kathy again. Again there was nobody home.
I got Hester at the Schocken Tower. I told her: “I want you to raise every cent you can, borrow, clean out your savings, buy a Starrzelius apparel outfit for me, and meet me with it soonest at the place where your mother broke her leg two years ago. The exact place, remember?”
“Mitch,” she said. “Yes, I remember. But my contract—”
“Don’t make me beg you, Hester,” I pleaded. “Trust me. I’ll see you through. For God’s sake, hurry. And—if you get here and I’m in the hands of the guards, don’t recognize me. Now, into action.”
I hung up and slumped in the phone booth until the next party hammered indignantly on the door. I walked slowly around the station, had Coffiest and a cheese sandwich, and rented a morning paper at the newsstand. The story about me was a bored little item on page three out of a possible four: SOUGHT FOR CB & FEMICIDE. It said George Groby had failed to return from pass to his job with Chlorella and had used his free time to burglarize executives’ country in the Taunton Building. He had killed a secretary who stumbled on him and made his escape.
Hester met me half an hour later hard by the loading chute from which a crate had once whizzed to break her mother’s leg. She looked frantically worried; technically she was as guilty of contract breach as “George Groby.”
I took the garment box from her and asked: “Do you have fifteen hundred dollars left?”
“Just about. My mother was frantic—”
“Get us reservations on the next Moon ship; today if possible. Meet me back here; I’ll be wearing the new clothes.”
“Us? The Moon?” she squeaked.
“Yes; us. I’ve got to get off the Earth before I’m killed. And this time it’ll be for keeps.”
12
My little Hester squared her shoulders and proceeded to work miracles.
In ten hours we were grunting side by side under the takeoff acceleration of the Moon ship David Ricardo. She had coldbloodedly passed herself off as a Schocken employee on special detail to the Moon and me as Groby, a sales analyst 6. Naturally the dragnet for Groby, expediter 9, had not included the Astoria spaceport. Sewage workers on the lam from CB and femicide wouldn’t have the money to hop a rocket, of course.
We rated a compartment and the max ration. The David Ricardo was so constructed that most passengers rated compartments and max rations. It wasn’t a trip for the idly curious or the submerged fifteen sixteenths of the population. The Moon was strictly business—mining business—and some sight-seeing. Our fellow-passengers, what we saw of them at the ramp, were preoccupied engineers, a few laborers in the minute steerage, and silly-rich men and women who wanted to say they’d been there.
After take-off, Hester was hysterically gay for a while, and then snapped. She sobbed on my shoulder, frightened at the enormity of what she’d done. She’d been brought up in a deeply moral, sales-fearing home, and you couldn’t expect her to commit the high commercial crime of breaking a labor contract without there being a terrific emotional lashback.
She wailed: “Mr. Courtenay—Mitch—if only I could be sure it was all right! I know you’ve always been good to me and I know you wouldn’t do anything wrong, but I’m so scared and miserable!”
I dried her eyes and made a decision.
“I’ll tell you what it’s all about, Hester,” I said. “You be the judge. Taunton has discovered something very terrible. He’s found out that there are people who are not deterred by the threat of cerebrin as the punishment for an unprovoked commercial murder. He thinks Mr. Schocken grabbed the Venus project from him unethically, and he’ll stop at nothing to get it back. He’s tried twice at least to kill me. I thought Mr. Runstead was one of his agents, assigned to bitch up Schocken’s handling of the Venus account. Now, I don’t know. Mr. Runstead clubbed me when I went after him at the South Pole, spirited me away to a labor freighter under a faked identity, and left a substitute body for mine. And,” I said cautiously, “there are Consies in it.”
She uttered a small shriek.
“I don’t know how they dovetail,” I said. “But I was in a Consie cell—”
“Mis-ter Courtenay! ”
“Strictly as a blind,” I hastily explained. “I was stuck in Chlorella Costa Rica and the only way north seemed to be through the Consie 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 said to Hester: “The blasted black-marketing steward is going too far! Look at this!” I held up my bulb of water and my ration box. The seal had clearly been tampered with on both containers, and visibly there was water missing. “Max rations,” I went on oratorically, “are supposed to be tamper-proof, but this is plain burglary. How do yours look?”
“Same thing,” 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 co-ordination 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 ate her rations and I had mine.
The tennis match before meals became a tradition. 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 might have heard about the midget hero and his triumphal procession from city to city and woman to woman.
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. Let’s eat.” I put out my hand for my bulb. She didn’t give it to me. “Well?”
“Just one set?” she coaxed.
“Hell, girl, 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. I’d been off the stuff for a long time, but you never kick Coffiest.
She stiffened. “I’m sorry, Mr. Courtenay.” And then she clutched violently at her middle, her face distorted. Astounded, I grabbed her. She was deathly pale and limp; she moaned with pain.
“Hester,” I said, “what is it? What—?”
“Send a doctor!” I was yelling into the compartment mike. “Woman’s dying here!”
The chief steward’s voice answered me: “Right away, sir. Ship’s doctor’ll be there right away.”
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, and the ship’s doctor was 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. He kept trying with questions. “Who—are—you?” brought a wrinkle between her eyes and a tremor of the lip, but no more. Except for a minute, ambiguous residue, she was gone.
Gently enough, the doctor began to explain to me: “I’m going to turn it off. You mustn’t think there’s any hope left. Evidently irreversible clinical death has occurred. It’s often hard for a person with emotional ties to believe—”
I watched her eyelids flutter, one with a two-four beat, the other with a three-four beat. “Turn it off,” I said hoarsely. By “it” I meant Hester and not the machine. 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 nodded, though 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, afternoon fatigue—at last he said decisively: “I believe it’s Fleischman’s Disease. We don’t know much about it. It stems from some derangement of function in the adrenocorticotropic bodies under free flight, we think. It kicks off a chain reaction of tissue-incompatibilities which affects the cerebrospinal fluid—”
He looked at me and his tone changed. “I have some alcohol in the locker,” he said. “Would you like—”
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 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.
Hangover, grief, fear, and the maddening red tape of Moon debarkation. I must have acted pretty stupidly. A couple of times I heard 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 and 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-EC-E-I-V-I-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-ER-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-R-S-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
End indeed. 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 standing here and there.
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 gesture that, by their order and timing, constitute the Grand Hailing Sign of Distress of the Consies.
A Burns guard shouldered his way through the crowd and put the arm on me. “Are you going to make trouble?” he demanded.
“No,” I said thickly. “Lead the way.”
He waved confidently 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 taystee goodie shoppe on ye moone
your hometown paper
moonsuits rented
“50 Years Without a Blowout”
reliable moonsuit rental co.
“73 Years Without a Blowout”
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 sauntered up and down, gaping.
“Hold it,” growled the guard. We stopped in front of the Warren Astron sign. He muttered: “Twist the nightstick away from me. Hit me a good lick 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,” he said wryly. “I wish I hadn’t seen the hailing sign.
This is going to cost me two stripes and a raise. Get moving.” I did. 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 Adam 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 on mightily, 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 to it. There was a pick and shovel leaned against one wall, and a couple of buckets filled with moonrock.
Obviously a work in progress.
I inverted one of the buckets and sat on it in the dark. After five hundred and seventy-six counted pulse-beats I sat on the floor and stopped counting. After that got too rugged I tried to brush moonrock out of the way and lie down. After going through this cycle five times I heard voices directly overhead.
One was the fussy, professional voice of Astron. The other was the globby, petulant voice of a fat woman. They seemed to be seated at the desk which sealed my hidey-hole.
“—really seems excessive, my dear 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 house 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.”
“Oh—oh, of course. I’ve heard that, 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 rectangular opening. “Come on out,” he said. “It’s safe for twelve hours.” I climbed out stiffly and noted that the observatory dome had been opaqued.
“You’re Groby,” he stated.
“Yes,” I said, dead-pan.
“We got a report on you by courier aboard the Ricardo.
God knows what you’re up to; it’s too much for me.” 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 kidnaped in front of the Met—in earnest or by prearrangement—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? Or subject to manicdepressive psychosis?”