Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume One

by Short Story Anthology

  "Johnny," Harry said. He did not have to finish the statement. It had happened before--"Johnny, I've made you a tremendous success. I'm your manager, aren't I? Let's leave it that way."

  "If Johnny thinks he ought to help--" Jo-Anne said.

  "Now, Jo-Anne," Harry Bettis scolded, and led the Under-Secretary to the door.

  * * * * *

  Three days later, the assistant chief of the F.B.I. came to see them. "We regret this, Sloman," he said.

  "You regret what?" Harry Bettis asked.

  "Defense allowed a report on its findings out. That was unwise. We'll have to give you around-the-clock protection, Sloman."

  "Protection from what?" Johnny wanted to know.

  "Enemy agents. The enemy is desperate. At all costs, according to their intelligence reports, they're out to get you."

  "Get him?" said Harry Bettis. "You mean, kill him?"

  "I mean, get him. Get him on their side. Because everything Johnny could do for the forces of peace and democracy, he could be made to do for the forces of aggression. You see?"

  "Yes," said Johnny.

  "No," said Harry Bettis. "This sounds like a government trick--to make Johnny go to work. To make him think it's his patriotic duty--"

  "Well," said Jo-Anne sharply, "isn't it?"

  Harry Bettis smiled. "When he gets as big as Universal Motors, he can become patriotic."

  "Mr. Sloman," the assistant F.B.I. chief said, "they will either try to kidnap you outright, or work on you through someone you love. Therefore, our bodyguards--"

  "Well, let them keep their distance, that's all," Bettis said. "Bad for business. Nobody wants enemy agents hanging around."

  "That's your final decision?" the F.B.I. man asked.

  "Well--" began Johnny.

  "Yes, it's our final decision," said Harry Bettis, showing the F.B.I. man to the door.

  "I don't think you should have done that," Johnny said after he had gone.

  "You just make the weather, Johnny-boy. I'll take care of business."

  "Well--" said Johnny.

  "Johnny!" cried Jo-Anne. "Oh, Johnny! Why don't you act like a man?" And she ran from the room, slamming the door.

  After that, Johnny didn't see her again.

  She was gone.

  Really gone, for certain, not simply walking off in a huff.

  Two weeks later, Johnny got the letter--unofficial--from the Enemy.

  * * * * *

  The F.B.I. was sympathetic, but the Chief said, "You can understand, Mr. Sloman, how our hands are tied. It is not an official letter. We can't prove anything. We don't doubt it for a minute, of course. The cold war enemy has kidnapped your fiancee and taken her to their motherland. But--we can't prove it. Not being able to prove it, we can't do a thing about it. You're aware, of course, of how readily the rest of the world condemns our actions. Not that they wouldn't be on our side if we could prove that this kidnap letter was the real thing, but you realize we won't be able to prove it at all."

  "Oh," said Johnny. He went home. He saw Harry Bettis, who said he was shocked. The note read:

  Mr. Johnny Sloman:

  We have Miss Jo-Anne Davis here in the motherland. The only way she can live a normal life here is if you join her and work for us. We believe you know what the other kind of life is like here.

  Bettis said, "It stumps the hell out of me, Johnny."

  "I'm just waking up," said Johnny slowly. "In a way, it's your fault."

  "Now, don't be a jackass, Johnny."

  Jackass or no, Johnny hit him. His knuckles went crunch and Harry Bettis' nose went crunch and Bettis fell down. He lay there, his nose not looking so good.

  Now, when it was apparently too late, Johnny knew what his course of action should have been. Get rid of the money-grubbing Bettis. Go to work for the government unselfishly. Insure world peace.

  Too late ... too late ...

  Because unless he could somehow save Jo-Anne, he would never predict the weather again--for anyone.

  * * * * *

  "But what you ask is impossible!" the Secretary of Defense said a few days later.

  "If I come back, if I'm successful," Johnny said quietly, "I'm your man, for as long as you want me, without pay."

  "You mean that?" the Secretary asked slowly.

  "I mean it."

  The Secretary nodded grimly, touched a button on his desk. "Get me Air Force Chief of Staff Burns," he said, and, a moment later: "Bernie? Chuck here. We need a plane. A jet-transport to go you-know-where. Cargo? One man, in a parachute. Can you manage it? Immediately, if not sooner. Good boy, Bernie. No ... no, I'm sorry, I can't tell you a thing about it." The Secretary cut the connection, turned to Johnny:

  "You leave this afternoon, Sloman. You realize, of course, there isn't a thing we can do to get you out. Not a thing."

  "Yes," said Johnny.

  "You're a very brave man, or very much in love."

  Hours later, the jet transport took off with Johnny in it.

  He came down near what had been the border of the motherland and Poland. He began to walk. A farmer and his son spotted the parachute, came after him. The son was a Red Army man on leave. The son had a gun. He fired prematurely, and Johnny ran. It was hopeless, he decided. He would never make it. He would never even reach the capital alive, where they were holding Jo-Anne.

  He ran.

  He wished for rain. A blinding rainstorm. The clouds scudded in. The rain fell in buckets. The farmer and his son soon lost sight of Johnny.

  Just to make sure, Johnny ran and let it go on raining.

  * * * * *

  "Floods in their motherland," the Secretary of Defense told the President. "Naturally, their news broadcasts are trying to keep the reports to a minimum, but these are the biggest floods we've ever heard of over there."

  "Our man is there?" the President asked.

  "He was dropped by parachute, sir!"

  * * * * *

  It was snowing when Johnny reached the capital. He had been parachuted into the enemy's motherland, naturally, because propinquity alone assured the success of his strange talent.

  He was tired. His feet ached. He'd been the only one heading for the capital. Hundreds of thousands had been fleeing from the floods ...

  "There he is!" a voice cried in the enemy language. He didn't understand the language, but he understood the tone. His picture had been flashed across the length and breadth of the motherland. He had been spotted.

  He ran. Down an alley, across a muddy yard, floundering to his knees, then his thighs, in thick mud. They came floundering in pursuit. They fired a warning volley of shots. He stumbled and fell face down in the black, stinking mud.

  They took him ...

  * * * * *

  Dark room. One light, on his face. A voice: "We can kill you."

  "Kill me," he said. "My last wish will be for rain. Rain, forever."

  "We can torture you."

  "And I will say, before you start, let it rain and go on raining. Let me be powerless to prevent it. Rain!"

  "We can kill the girl."

  "Your country will float away."

  A fist came at him out of the darkness. Hit him. It was tentative torture. He sobbed and thought: rain, harder. Rain, rain, rain ...

  Water seeped into the dungeon. This had never happened before. The fist went away.

  Outside it rained and rained.

  * * * * *

  "What does he want, comrade?"

  "We don't know, comrade."

  "Give it to him--whatever it is. He has disrupted our entire economy. We face economic disaster unless he--and his rain--leave us in peace."

  "Perhaps that is what he wants. Peace."

  "You fool! We are supposed to want peace. Shut up!"

  "Yes, sir. Comrade."

  "Better ask the party secretary."

  "Yes, comrade."

  The party secretary was asked. The party secretary sighed and nodded.

  Johnny saw the lig
ht of day. And Jo-Anne.

  * * * * *

  A month later, the Secretary of Defense told him. "Thanks to you, they agreed to a German settlement, stopped sending arms to their Red ally in Asia, withdrew their promise of aid to the Arab fanatics, and have freed all foreigners held in their motherland illegally."

  Johnny listened, smiling at Jo-Anne. They had been married two weeks. Naturally, the enemy had been only too glad to see them leave.

  "Just stay available, Sloman," the President beamed from alongside the Secretary of Defense. "As long as they know we can always send you over there again, they'll never try anything. Right?"

  "Yes, sir," said Johnny.

  They called him the Weather Man. They went on calling him the Weather Man, although he retired more or less--except during cases of dire emergency.

  The world called him that, the Weather Man. And, because he had retired to enjoy life with his new wife, they began to suspect, as could be expected, that he had been a fraud.

  But the enemy did not think so. Ever again.

  And that was enough for Johnny.

  THE END

  A Place In The Sun: A "Johnny Mayhem" Adventure, by Stephen Marlowe

  Mayhem, the man of many bodies, had been given some weird assignments in his time, but saving The Glory of the Galaxy wasn't difficult--it was downright impossible!

  The SOS crackled and hummed through subspace at a speed which left laggard light far behind. Since subspace distances do not coincide with normal space distances, the SOS was first picked up by a Fomalhautian freighter bound for Capella although it had been issued from a point in normal space midway between the orbit of Mercury and the sun's corona in the solar system.

  The radioman of the Fomalhautian freighter gave the distress signal to the Deck Officer, who looked at it, blinked, and bolted 'bove decks to the captain's cabin. His face was very white when he reached the door and his heart pounded with excitement. As the Deck Officer crossed an electronic beam before the door a metallic voice said: "The Captain is asleep and will be disturbed for nothing but emergency priority."

  Nodding, the Deck officer stuck his thumb in the whorl-lock of the door and entered the cabin. "Begging your pardon, sir," he cried, "but we just received an SOS from--"

  * * * * *

  The Captain stirred groggily, sat up, switched on a green night light and squinted through it at the Deck Officer. "Well, what is it? Isn't the Eye working?"

  "Yes, sir. An SOS, sir...."

  "If we're close enough to help, subspace or normal space, take the usual steps, lieutenant. Surely you don't need me to--"

  "The usual steps can't be taken, sir. Far as I can make out, that ship is doomed. She's bound on collision course for Sol, only twenty million miles out now."

  "That's too bad, lieutenant," the Captain said with genuine sympathy in his voice. "I'm sorry to hear that. But what do you want me to do about it?"

  "The ship, sir. The ship that sent the SOS--hold on to your hat, sir--"

  "Get to the point now, will you, young man?" the Captain growled sleepily.

  "The ship which sent the SOS signal, the ship heading on collision course for Sol, is the Glory of the Galaxy!"

  For a moment the Captain said nothing. Distantly, you could hear the hum of the subspace drive-unit and the faint whining of the stasis generator. Then the Captain bolted out of bed after unstrapping himself. In his haste he forgot the ship was in weightless deep space and went sailing, arms flailing air, across the room. The lieutenant helped him down and into his magnetic-soled shoes.

  "My God," the Captain said finally. "Why did it happen? Why did it have to happen to the Glory of the Galaxy?"

  "What are you going to do, sir?"

  "I can't do anything. I won't take the responsibility. Have the radioman contact the Hub at once."

  "Yes, sir."

  The Glory of the Galaxy, the SOS ship heading on collision course with the sun, was making its maiden run from the assembly satellites of Earth across the inner solar system via the perihelion passage which would bring it within twenty-odd million miles of the sun, to Mars which now was on the opposite side of Sol from Earth. Aboard the gleaming new ship was the President of the Galactic Federation and his entire cabinet.

  * * * * *

  The Fomalhautian freighter's emergency message was received at the Hub of the Galaxy within moments after it had been sent, although the normal space distance was in the neighborhood of one hundred thousand light years. The message was bounced--in amazingly quick time--from office to office at the hub, cutting through the usual red tape because of its top priority. And--since none of the normal agencies at the Hub could handle it--the message finally arrived at an office which very rarely received official messages of any kind. This was the one unofficial, extra-legal office at the Hub of the Galaxy. Lacking official function, the office had no technical existence and was not to be found in any Directory of the Hub. At the moment, two young men were seated inside. Their sole job was to maintain liaison with a man whose very existence was doubted by most of the human inhabitants of the Galaxy but whose importance could not be measured by mere human standards in those early days when the Galactic League was becoming the Galactic Federation.

  The name of the man with whom they maintained contact was Johnny Mayhem.

  "Did you read it?" the blond man asked.

  "I read it."

  "If it got down here, that means they can't handle it anywhere else."

  "Of course they can't. What the hell could normal slobs like them or like us do about it?"

  "Nothing, I guess. But wait a minute! You don't mean you're going to send Mayhem, without asking him, without telling--"

  "We can't ask him now, can we?"

  "Johnny Mayhem's elan is at the moment speeding from Canopus to Deneb, where on the fourth planet of the Denebian system a dead body is waiting for him in cold storage. The turnover from League to Federation status of the Denebian system is causing trouble in Deneb City, so Mayhem--"

  "Deneb City will probably survive without Mayhem. Well, won't it?"

  "I guess so, but--"

  "I know. The deal is we're supposed to tell Mayhem where he's going and what he can expect. The deal also is, every inhabited world has a body waiting for his elan in cold storage. But don't you think if we could talk to Mayhem now--"

  "It isn't possible. He's in transit."

  "Don't you think if we could talk to him now he would agree to board the Glory of the Galaxy?"

  "How should I know? I'm not Johnny Mayhem."

  "If he doesn't board her, it's certain death for all of them."

  "And if he does board her, what the hell can he do about it? Besides, there isn't any dead body awaiting his elan on that ship or any ship. He wouldn't make a very efficacious ghost."

  "But there are live people. Scores of them. Mayhem's elan is quite capable of possessing a living host."

  "Sure. Theoretically it is. But damn it all, what would the results be? We've never tried it. It's liable to damage Mayhem. As for the host--"

  "The host might die. I know it. But he'll die anyway. The whole shipload of them is heading on collision course for the sun."

  "Does the SOS say why?"

  "No. Maybe Mayhem can find out and do something about it."

  * * * * *

  "Yeah, maybe. That's a hell of a way to risk the life of the most important man in the Galaxy. Because if Mayhem boards that ship and can't do anything about it, he'll die with the rest of them."

  "Why? We could always pluck his elan out again."

  "If he were inhabiting a dead one. In a live body, I don't think so. The attraction would be stronger. There would be forces of cohesion--"

  "That's true. Still, Mayhem's our only hope."

  "I'll admit it's a job for Mayhem, but he's too important."

  "Is he? Don't be a fool. What, actually, is Johnny Mayhem's importance? His importance lies in the very fact that he is expendable. His life--for the furt
herance of the new Galactic Federation."

  "But--"

  "And the President is aboard that ship. Maybe he can't do as much for the Galaxy in the long run as Mayhem can, but don't you see, man, he's a figurehead. Right now he's the most important man in the Galaxy, and if we could talk to him I'm sure Mayhem would agree. Mayhem would want to board that ship."

  "It's funny, we've been working with Mayhem all these years and we never even met the guy."

  "Would you know him if you saw him?"

  "Umm-mm, I guess not. Do you think we really can halt his elan in subspace and divert it over to the Glory of the Galaxy?"

  "I take it you're beginning to see things my way. And the answer to your question is yes."

  "Poor Mayhem. You know, I actually feel sorry for the guy. He's had more adventures than anyone since Homer wrote the Odyssey and there won't ever be any rest for him."

  "Stop feeling sorry for him and start hoping he succeeds."

  "Yeah."

  "And let's see about getting a bead on his elan."

  The two young men walked to a tri-dim chart which took up much of the room. One of them touched a button and blue light glowed within the chart, pulsing brightly and sharply where space-sectors intersected.

  "He's in C-17 now," one of the men said as a gleaming whiteness was suddenly superimposed at a single point on the blue.

  "Can you bead him?"

  "I think so. But I still feel sorry for Mayhem. He's expecting to wake up in a cold-storage corpse on Deneb IV but instead he'll come to in a living body aboard a spaceship on collision course for the sun."

  "Just hope he--"

  "I know. Succeeds. I don't even want to think of the possibility he might fail."

  In seconds, the gleaming white dot crawled across the surface of the tri-dim chart from sector C-17 to sector S-1.

  * * * * *

  The Glory of the Galaxy was now nineteen million miles out from the sun and rushing through space at a hundred miles per second, normal space drive. The Glory of the Galaxy thus moved a million miles closer to fiery destruction every three hours--but since the sun's gravitational force had to be added to that speed, the ship was slated to plunge into the sun's corona in little more than twenty-four hours.

  Since the ship's refrigeration units would function perfectly until the outer hull reached a temperature of eleven hundred degrees Fahrenheit, none of its passengers knew that anything was wrong. Even the members of the crew went through all the normal motions. Only the Glory of the Galaxy's officers in their bright new uniforms and gold braid knew the grim truth of what awaited the gleaming two-thousand ton spaceship less than twenty-four hours away at the exact center of its perihelion passage.