The Space Opera Megapack: 20 Modern and Classic Science Fiction Tales

by John W. Campbell

  “Check. Like having a baby, but worse. There’s nothing anybody else can do—even you—except maybe hold my hand, like now.”

  “That’s about it. But speaking of holding hands, would it help if we paired again?”

  Belle studied the question for two full minutes; her fine eyes clouded. “No,” she said, finally. “I would enjoy it too much, and you’d…well, you wouldn’t.…”

  “Huh?” he demanded.

  “Oh, physically, of course; but that isn’t enough, or good enough, now. You see, I know what your personal code is. It’s unbelievable, almost—I never heard of one like it, except maybe a priest or two—but I admire you tremendously for it. You would never, willingly, pair with a woman you really loved. That was why you were so glad to break ours off. You can’t deny it.”

  “I won’t try to deny it. But you can’t bluff me, Belle, so please quit trying. Basically, your code is the same as mine. Why else did you initiate our break?”

  Belle’s block went solid, and Garlock said hastily, aloud, “Excuse it, please. Cancel. I’ve just said, and know as an empirical fact, that you’ve got to do the job alone—but I can’t seem to help putting my big, flat foot in it by blundering in anyway. Let’s get to work, shall we?”

  “What at? Interview the Primes, I’d say—tell them to hold themselves in readiness to attend.…”

  “On very short notice.…”

  “Yes. To attend the big meeting on Tellus. We’ll have to make a schedule. It shouldn’t be held until after Fao and Deggi get their ship built—it can’t be held, of course, until after you and Jim are out of SSE. Have you got that figured out yet?”

  “Pretty much.” He told her his plan.

  Belle giggled, then burst into laughter. “So I’m in it, too? Wonderful!”

  “You have to be. If we make him mad enough, he’ll fire you, too.”

  “Without hiring me first? He couldn’t.”

  “He could, very easily. He doesn’t know one-tenth of one percent of his people. If we work it right he’ll assume that you’re one of us wage-slaves, too. Lola, too, for that matter.”

  “Careful, Clee. You and I think this is funny, but Lola wouldn’t. She’d be shocked to her sweet little core, and she’d louse up the whole deal. So be very sure she doesn’t get in on it.”

  “I guess you’re right…well, shall we go out and insult our touchy young friend Semolo? Ready.… Go!”

  “Oh, it’s you again. I tell you.…” the Lizorian began.

  “You will tell me nothing. You will listen. Link your mind to Mitala’s,” and the linked Tellurian minds enforced the order. “In about two weeks the Primes of many worlds will meet in person on Tellus. Arrange your affairs so that on ten minutes’ notice you both can leave Lizoria for Tellus aboard our starship, the Pleiades. That is all.”

  “He’ll come, too,” Belle chortled. “He’ll writhe and scream, but he’ll come.”

  “You couldn’t keep him away,” Garlock agreed.

  On the next planet, Falne, the procedure was a little different. The information was the same, but—“One word of warning,” Garlock added. “It is to be a meeting of minds; not a contest to set up a pecking-order. If you try any such business you will be disciplined; sharply and in public.”

  “Suppose that, under such conditions, we refuse to attend the meeting?”

  “That is your right. There is no coercion whatever. Whether or not you come will depend upon whether or not you two are in reality Seekers after Truth. Until a day.”

  And so it went. Planet after planet. On not one of those worlds had any Prime changed his thinking. Not one was really interested in the Galactic Service as an instrument for the good of all mankind. There were almost as many attitudes as there were Primes; but all were essentially self-centered and selfish.

  “That tears it, Belle—busts it wide open. I can—I mean we together can do either job. That is, either be top boss and run the thing or put in full time beating some sense into those hard skulls. We can’t do both.”

  “On paper, we should,” Belle said, thoughtfully. “You’re Galactic Admiral; I’m your Vice. One job apiece. But we’re not going to be separated. Besides.…”

  “Two (minds) (brains) are much better than one,” both said, except for one word, in unison.

  Belle laughed. “That settles that. The Garlock-Bellamy fusion is Galactic Admiral—so we need a good Vice. Who? Deggi and Fao? They’re cooperative and idealistic enough, but.… Oh, I don’t know exactly what it is they lack. Do you?”

  “No; I can’t put it into words or thoughts. Probably the concept is too new for pigeon-holing. It isn’t exactly strength or hardness or toughness or resilience or brisance—maybe a combination of all five. What we need is a pair like us but better.”

  “There aren’t any.”

  “Don’t be too sure.” Belle glanced at him in surprise and he went on: “Not that we’ve seen, no. But each of those worlds centers a volume of space containing thousands of planets. Including the Tellurian and the Margonian, we now have forty-eight regions defined. Let’s run a very fast search-pattern of Region Forty-nine and see what we come up with.”

  “All right…but suppose we do find somebody who out-Gunthers us?”

  “I’d a lot rather have it that way than the way it is now. I’ll do the hopping, you the checking. Here’s the first one—what do you read?”

  “N. G.”

  “And this one?”

  “The same.”

  “And this?”

  “Ditto.”

  Until, finally: “Clee, just how long are you going to keep this up?”

  “Until we find something or run out of time for the meeting. Belle, I really want to find somebody who amounts to something.”

  “So do I, really, so go ahead.”

  But they did not run out of time. At planet number four-hundred-something, Belle suddenly emitted a shriek—vocally as well as mentally. “Clee! Hold it! Here’s something, I think!”

  “I’m sure there is, and I’m gladder to see you two people than can possibly be expressed.”

  Belle whirled; so did Garlock. A man stood in the middle of the Main; a man shaped very much like Garlock, but with long, badly-tousled hair and a bushy wilderness of fiery-red whiskers.

  “Please excuse this intrusion, Admiral—or should it be plural? Improper address, I’m sure, but your joint tenure is a concept so new and so vast that I am not yet able to grasp it fully—but you are working at such high speed that I had to do something drastic. You will, I trust, remain here long enough to discuss certain matters with my wife and me?”

  “We’ll be very glad to.”

  “Thank you. I will return, then, more decorously, and bring her. One moment.” He disappeared.

  “Wife!” Belle exclaimed, more than half in dismay. “They must be, then.…”

  “Yeah.” The thought of a wife did not bother Garlock at all. “Talk about power! And speed! To get all that stuff and ’port up here in the millisecond or so we had the screens open? Baby Doll, there’s a guy who is what a Prime Operator ought to be!”

  In less than a minute the man reappeared, accompanied by a woman who was very obviously pregnant—eight months or so. Like the man, she was dressed in tight-fitting coveralls. Her hair, however—it was a natural red, too—was cut to a uniform length of eight inches, and each hair individually stood out, perfectly straight and perfectly perpendicular to the element of the scalp from which it sprang.

  “Friends Belle and Clee of Tellus, I present Therea, my wife; and Alsyne, myself; of this planet Thaker. We have numbers, too, but they are never used among friends.”

  Acknowledgments were made and a few minutes of conversation ensued, during which the two couples studied each other.

  “This looks mighty good to me,” Garlock said then. “Shall we go screens half-down, Alsyne, and cry in each other’s beer?”

  In thirty seconds of flashing communication each became thoroughly informed. T
hose minds could send, and could receive, an incredibly vast amount of information in an incredibly brief space of time.

  “Your ship should work and doesn’t,” Garlock said. “Show me; in detail.”

  Alsyne showed him.

  “Oh, I see. You didn’t work out quite all the theory. It has to be activated. Like this.…” Garlock showed Alsyne.

  “I see. Thanks.” Alsyne disappeared and was gone for some ten minutes. He reappeared, grinning hugely behind his flaming wilderness of beard. “It works perfectly; for which our heartfelt thanks. And now that my mind is at complete peace with the universe, we will consider the utterly fascinating subject of your proposed Galactic Service. You two Tellurians, immature although you are, have made two tremendous contributions to the advancement of the Scheme of Things—three, if you count the starship, which is comparatively unimportant—each of such import that no human mind can foresee any fraction of its consequences. First, your Prime Field, the probe and its screen.…”

  “Clee!” Belle drove the thought. “You didn’t give him that, surely!”

  “Tut-tut, my child,” Therea soothed her. “You are alarming yourself about nothing.”

  “The only trouble with you two youngsters is that you aren’t quite—very nearly, of course, but very definitely not quite—grown up.” Alsyne smiled again; not only with mouth and eyes, but with his whole hairy face. “To the mature mind there is no such thing as status. Each knows what he can do best and does it as a matter of course. Rank is not necessary.

  “Second, the unimaginably important contribution of the ability to combine two dissimilar but intimately compatible minds into one tremendously effective fusion. While Therea and I have had only a few moments to play with it, we realize some of its possibilities. Thus, since she is a Doctor of Humanities.…”

  “Oh,” Belle interrupted. “That’s why you knew what I was thinking about, even though I tight-beamed the thought and my screens were tight?”

  “Exactly so. But to continue. With her sympathy and empathy, and my driving force and so on, the job of licking these young Primes into shape is, as your idiom has it, ‘strictly our dish.’ It is a truly delicious thought.

  “You two, on the other hand, have much that we lack. Breadth and depth and scope of imagination and of vision; yet almost incredible will-power and stamina and resolve.…”

  “That’s the word I was trying to think of—will-power,” Belle flashed a thought at Garlock.

  “…qualities virtually always mutually exclusive; but the combination of which makes your fusion uniquely qualified to lead and direct this new and magnificent movement. But Therea and I have been idle and frustrated far too long. We can be of most use, at the moment, on Margonia; working with the Fao-Deggi unit. Therefore, with renewed deep thanks, we go.”

  Man and wife disappeared; and, ten seconds later, the Thakern starship vanished from its world.

  “Well, what do you think of that?” Belle gasped. “I was actually afraid to think, even behind a Prime screen. I don’t know yet whether I want to kiss ’em or kill ’em.”

  “I do. That guy is really a Prime, Belle. He’s older, bigger, and a lot better than I am.”

  “Uh-uh,” she demurred, positively. “Older, yes. More mature—you baby, you!” She snickered gleefully. “If he hadn’t included you in that crack I’d’ve stabbed him, so help me, even though it wasn’t true. He said himself it’s you who has got what it takes to lead and direct, not him.”

  “Us. We, I mean,” he corrected, absently.

  “Uh-huh; us-we. One, now and forever. Hot Dog! Anyway, he wants us to and we want to so everything’s lovely and so let’s get to work on Fatso and his Foster. I think we ought to have some fun for a change and that’ll be a lot. When do we want to hit him?”

  “Any day Monday through Friday. Nine-fifteen A.M. Eastern Daylight time. Plus or minus one minute.”

  “Nice! Catch him in flagrante delicto. Lovely—shovel on the coal, my intrepid engineer!”

  On a Wednesday morning, then, at twelve minutes past nine EDT, the Pleiades hung poised, high over the Chancellery of Solar System Enterprises, Incorporated.

  “Remember, Belle!” Garlock was pacing the Main. “To keep ’em staggering we’ll have to land slugging and beat ’em to every punch. You did a wonderful job on her last time, and it’s been eating on her ever since. She’s probably been rehearsing in front of a mirror just how she’s going to tear you apart next time and just how she’s going to spit out the pieces. Last time, you were cold, stiff, rigidly formal, and polite. So this time it’ll be me, and I’ll be hot and bothered, dirty, low, coarse, lewd, and very, very rough.”

  Belle threw back her head and laughed. “Rough? Yes. Vicious, contemptuous, or ugly; yes. A master of fluent, biting, and pyrotechnic profanity; yes. But low or dirty or coarse or lewd, Clee? Or any one of the four, to say nothing of them all? Uh-uh. Ferber’s a filthy beast, of course; but even he knows you’re one of the cleanest men that ever lived. They’d know it was an act.”

  “Not unless I give ’em time to think—or unless you do, before he fires Jim—in which case we’ll lose the game anyway. But how about you? If I can knock ’em too groggy to think, will you carry on and keep ’em that way?”

  “Watch my blasts!” Belle giggled gleefully. “I never tried anything like that—any more than you have—but I’ll guarantee to be just as low, dirty, coarse, lewd, and crude as you are. Probably more so, because in this particular case it’ll be fun. You see, you’re a man—you can’t possibly despise and detest that slimy stinker either in the same way or as much as I do.”

  “This ought to be good. Cut the rope, Jim.”

  Even before the starship came to rest, Garlock drove a probe into the sanctum sanctorum of the Chancellery—an utterly unheard-of act of insolence.

  “Foster! This is the Pleiades coming in. Garlock calling. Hot up the tri-di and the recorder, Toots. Put Fatso on, and snap into it.… I said shake a leg!”

  “Why, I.… You.…”

  “Stop stuttering and come to life, you half-witted bag! Gimme Ferber and hurry it up—this ship’s tricky.”

  “Why, you… I never.…” Ferber’s outraged First Secretary could scarcely talk. “He…he is.…”

  “I know, Babe, I know—I could set that to music and sing it, with gestures. ‘Chancellor Ferber is in conference and cannot be disturbed,’” he mimicked, savagely. “Put him on now—but quick!”

  The tri-di tank brightened up; Chancellor Ferber’s image appeared. He was disheveled, surprised and angry, but Garlock gave him no chance to speak.

  “Well, Fatso—at last! Where the hell have you been all morning? I want some stuff, just as fast as God will let you get it together,” and he began to read off, as fast as he could talk, a long list of highly technical items.

  Ferber tried for many seconds to break in, and Garlock finally allowed him to do so.

  “Are you crazy, Garlock?” he shouted. “What in hell’s name are you bothering me with that stuff for? You know better than that—make out your requisitions and send them through channels!”

  “Channels, hell!” Garlock shouted back. “Hasn’t it got through your four-inch-thick skull into your idiot’s brain yet that I’m in a hurry? I don’t want this stuff today; I want it day before yesterday—this damned junk-heap is apt to fall apart any minute. So quit goggling and slobbering at me, you wall-eyed, slimy, fat toad. Get that three hundred weight of suet into action. Hump yourself!”

  “You…you… Why, I was never so insulted.…”

  “Insulted? You?” Garlock out-roared him. “Listen, Fatso. If I ever set out to really insult you, you’ll know it—it’ll blister all the paint off the walls. All I’m trying to do now is get you off that fat butt of yours and get some action.”

  Ferber became purple and pounded his desk in consuming anger.

  Garlock yelled louder and pounded harder. “Start rounding up this stuff—but fast—or I’ll come down there and
take your job away from you and do it myself—and for your own greasy hide’s sake you’d better believe I’m not just chomping my choppers, either.”

  “You’ll What?” Ferber screamed. “You’re fired!”

  “You fire me?” Garlock mimicked the scream. “And make it stick? You’d better write that one up for the funnies. Why, you lard-brain, you couldn’t fire a cap-pistol.”

  “Foster!” Ferber yelled. “Terminate Garlock as of now. Insubordination, and misconduct, abuse of position, incompetence, malfeasance—everything else you can think of. Blacklist him all over the System!”

  At the word “fired” Belle, had leaped to her feet and had stopped laughing.

  “Miss Bellamy!” Ferber snapped.

  “Yes, sir?” she answered, sweetly.

  “You are hereby promoted to be Head of the.…”

  “Oh, yeah?” Belle sneered, her voice cutting like a knife. “You unprincipled, lascivious, lecherous Hitler! Have you got the unmitigated gall to take me for a floozie? To think you can add meto your collection of bootlicking, round-heeled tramps?”

  “You’re fired and blacklisted too!”

  “How nice! You know, I don’t know of anything I’d rather have happen to me?”

  “Get James on there—you, James.…”

  “You don’t need to fire me, you fat-headed old goat,” James said, contemptuously. “I’ve already quit—the exact second you fired Clee.”

  “No you didn’t!” Ferber screamed. “Resignation not accepted. You’re Fired! Dishonorably discharged—blacklisted everywhere—you’ll never get another job—anywhere! And here’s your slip, too!” Miss Foster was very fast on the machines.

  James ’ported his slip up into the Pleiades, just as Garlock and Belle had done with theirs, and disappeared with it as they had; reappearing almost instantly.

  “Montandon!”

  “Chancellor Ferber, are you completely out of your mind? You can’t discharge either Miss Bellamy or me.”