To Be Continued - 1953–58 - The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volume One

by Robert Silverberg

  “What do you mean?” Leopold demanded—with a quiver taking the authority out of his voice.

  “I mean,” said Mattern quietly, “the robot you named Ozymandias. Just why did you decide not to tell me about it?”

  “I had every intention of doing so before our departure,” Leopold said.

  Mattern shrugged. “Be that as it may. You concealed the existence of your find. But your manner last night led us to investigate the area—and since the detectors showed a metal object some twenty miles to the west, we headed that way. Ozymandias was quite surprised to learn that there were other Earthmen here.”

  There was a moment of crackling silence. Then Leopold said, “I’ll have to ask you not to meddle with that robot, Colonel Mattern. I apologize for having neglected to tell you of it—I didn’t think you were quite so interested in our work—but now I must insist you and your men keep away from it.”

  “Oh?” Mattern said crisply. “Why?”

  “Because it’s an archaeological treasure-trove, Colonel. I can’t begin to stress its value to us. Your men might perform some casual experiment with it and shortcircuit its memory channels, or something like that. And so I’ll have to assert the rights of the archaeological group of this expedition. I’ll have to declare Ozymandias part of our preserve, and off bounds for you.”

  Mattern’s voice suddenly hardened. “Sorry, Dr. Leopold. You can’t invoke that now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Ozymandias is part of our preserve. And off bounds for you, Doctor.”

  I thought Leopold would have an apoplectic fit right there in the messhall. He stiffened and went white and strode awkwardly across the room towards Mattern. He choked out a question, inaudible to me.

  Mattern replied, “Security, Doctor. Ozymandias is of military use. Accordingly we’ve brought him to the ship and placed him in sealed quarters, under top-level wraps. With the power entrusted to me for such emergencies, I’m declaring this expedition ended. We return to Earth at once with Ozymandias.”

  Leopold’s eyes bugged. He looked at us for support, but we said nothing. Finally, incredulously, he said, “He’s—of military use?”

  “Of course. He’s a storehouse of data on the ancient Thaiquen weapons. We’ve already learned things from him that are unbelievable in their scope. Why do you think this planet is bare of life, Dr. Leopold? Not even a blade of grass? A million years won’t do that. But a superweapon will. The Thaiquens developed that weapon. And others, too. Weapons that can make your hair curl. And Ozymandias knows every detail of them. Do you think we can waste time letting you people fool with that robot, when he’s loaded with military information that can make America totally impregnable? Sorry, Doctor. Ozymandias is your find, but he belongs to us. And we’re taking him back to Earth.”

  Again the room was silent. Leopold looked at me, at Webster, at Marshall, at Gerhardt. There was nothing that could be said.

  This was basically a militaristic mission. Sure, a few archaeologists had been tacked onto the crew, but fundamentally it was Mattern’s men and not Leopold’s who were important. We weren’t out here so much to increase the fund of general knowledge as to find new weapons and new sources of strategic materials for possible use against the Other Hemisphere.

  And new weapons had been found. New, undreamed-of weapons, product of a science that had endured for three hundred thousand years. All locked up in Ozymandias’ imperishable skull.

  In a harsh voice Leopold said, “Very well, Colonel. I can’t stop you, I suppose.”

  He turned and shuffled out without touching his food, a broken, beaten, suddenly very old man.

  I felt sick.

  Mattern had insisted the planet was useless and that stopping here was a waste of time; Leopold had disagreed, and Leopold had turned out to be right. We had found something of great value.

  We had found a machine that could spew forth new and awesome recipes for death. We held in our hands the sum and essence of the Thaiquen science—the science that had culminated in magnificent weapons, weapons so superb they had succeeded in destroying all life on this world. And now we had access to those weapons. Dead by their own hand, the Thaiquens had thoughtfully left us a heritage of death.

  Grayfaced, I rose from the table and went to my cabin. I wasn’t hungry now.

  “We’ll be blasting off in an hour,” Mattern said behind me as I left. “Get your things in order.”

  I hardly heard him. I was thinking of the deadly cargo we carried, the robot so eager to disgorge its fund of data. I was thinking what would happen when our scientists back on Earth began learning from Ozymandias.

  The works of the Thaiquens now were ours. I thought of the poet’s lines: “Look on my works, ye mighty—and despair.”

  COUNTERPART

  By May of 1958 I had been, by my own reckoning, a professional science-fiction writer for nearly three years, dating from the time in June, 1955, when Randall Garrett and I began collaborating in the mass production of short stories. In those three years I had accomplished all sorts of things far beyond my wildest adolescent fantasies. I had sold several hundred stories to every magazine in the business from the top (Astounding, Galaxy, Fantasy & Science Fiction to the bottom (Bob Lowndes’ various half-cent-a-word-on-publication titles.) I had won the Hugo for Most Promising New Author. My income was considerable and I no longer fretted over how I was going to pay next month’s rent on that elegant apartment on West End Avenue. Indeed, in the summer of 1957 we had splurged on the first of what would be many European journeys for me, a trip to England and France, and within another year or two we were regularly flying down to the West Indies for an annual February holiday also. I developed a taste for good food and fine wines and began to explore New York’s best restaurants. It was a pretty startling life for someone not yet two years out of college.

  Then, too, I had swiftly found a place for myself in the bustling science-fiction social scene of the era, when nearly everybody of any importance in science fiction, except for a few Californians, lived in and around New York City: though I was much younger than everybody else, I moved freely through that dazzling group, readily accepted as a friend by such writers as James Blish, Isaac Asimov, Robert Sheckley, Lester del Rey, Frederik Pohl, Algis Budrys, Damon Knight, Phil Klass (“William Tenn”), Avram Davidson, Theodore Sturgeon, Cyril Kornbluth, Harry Harrison, and many more. One part of me, the star-struck boy who had been reading the fiction of these people since his teens, could hardly cease marveling at the ease with which I had won acceptance within that group; but on some other level I had come to terms with the fact that I was now one of them, the youngest of the s-f pros but a pro nevertheless, and that this was what my life was going to be like thenceforth. And, though most of them are gone by now, I have maintained my friendships with some of those people for more than half a century.

  An aspect of that life that was growing increasingly troublesome to me, however, was the sense that my new friends in the professional s-f community privately deplored the ease with which I moved between the world of seriously conceived science fiction and that of absolute hackwork. Many of them had churned out a bit of hackery now and then when financial pressures required it—Blish and Knight, for example, had written sports stories for Lowndes’ pulp magazines, though they knew next to nothing about sports, and del Rey had written for every kind of pulp there was. But there was a prevailing attitude in the whole crowd that science fiction was something special, a field apart, that it was a kind of holy cause which one should serve to the best of one’s writing abilities. If money troubles arrived, getting a real-world job was preferable to turning out hackwork. (Blish was a public-relations man for a pharmaceuticals company, Kornbluth worked for a press service, Pohl, Budrys, and Harrison had held various kinds of editorial jobs, and even Asimov was only a part-time writer, then, who was still on the faculty of Boston University.) I alone had never held any sort of real-world job, and had never had a thought of getting one. B
y and large, I preferred to write science fiction of the sort that such splendid writers as Sturgeon, Blish, Budrys, and Kornbluth were renowned for; but when the unpaid bills began to mount, I would cheerfully and unhesitatingly turn out whatever some pulp-magazine editor wanted me to write, be it a two-part serial about blue Mercurians and green Martians, or a horror story in which slavering monsters rampaged through Times Square. And few of the others had been so cheerfully and openly opportunistic about writing s-f.

  Whatever reservations my friends in the science-fiction community had about that, they kept them to themselves, so far as I could perceive. They could see, after all, how well I was living—the restaurants, the fine apartment, the trips to Europe—and they couldn’t very well tell me that I ought to give up such things for the sake of artistic purity and resign myself to the sort of difficult lives of constant financial uncertainty that most of them lived. Only the most outspoken of them—Lester del Rey, who always said what he believed and paid no heed to the consequences, and Fred Pohl, another who always expressed himself straightforwardly—ever criticized me to my face for writing all that junk, both of them arguing that there was more commercial benefit in the long run in taking the high road rather than the low. Who, they said, was ever going to reprint that blue-Mercurian stuff in an anthology, or want it expanded into a novel? I’d get my penny a word for the hackwork and all those stories would sink at once into oblivion, they told me, whereas the best science fiction went through one incarnation after another, and I had to admit that there was some logic in that.

  I didn’t crave the monastic austerity of the truly devoted science-fiction writer’s impoverished life, though, and I still had no interest in taking a part-time job. But as I moved along through my twenties I did begin to feel that it was time for me to start distancing myself from some of that opportunism. At the beginning of my career, neither my writing skills nor my experience of the world had been sufficient to let me compete at the highest levels of the s-f field, but that was starting not to be true any longer. Though still not a convert to the ideal of starving for my art, I began to think that if I needed to write rent-payers, I should do them under pseudonyms for markets outside science fiction—men’s magazines, crime-fiction magazines, true confessions, whatever—and, when writing science fiction, try to write with all the ability at my command instead of fulfilling some harried pulp-magazine editor’s need for quickly confected formula merchandise.

  This feeling, which I had sensed in its first inchoate form at the Milford Writers’ Conference of September, 1956, began to crystallize in me at a party at Harlan Ellison’s Manhattan apartment in the summer of 1957, shortly before Harlan’s departure for military service. I was chatting with Algis Budrys and Cyril Kornbluth, two science-fiction writers who had never compromised their ideals despite pressing financial problems. Kornbluth’s health wasn’t good—he was to die the following year at 34—and his children had medical problems too. Budrys, just a few years older than I was, had two small children already and a third on the way. They took outside jobs to supplement their modest writing incomes; I, childless and healthy, financed my taste for high living by writing about blue-skinned Mercurians. Though neither of them said a word to me about any of that, I readily imagined that I felt their silent disapproval. And I went home in a seriously troubled mood that afternoon, experiencing something that was not exactly guilt, nor shame, but, at the minimum, a kind of deep uncertainty. I had become a science-fiction writer because I loved science fiction; I had wanted nothing more than to make myself a member of the community of science-fiction writers; and now, having achieved that, I was writing, most of the time, far below the level of my own abilities. Well, I was who I was and I had written what I had written for what had seemed to me to be good and proper reasons, but if what I had hoped was to leave my mark on science fiction—and that was true—then I had to ask myself whether this was the mark I wanted to leave. Out of this inner crisis, this deep restlessness of the summer of 1957 and the months that followed, came a resolution to put as much distance as I could between myself and the sort of facile, even cynical work that I had been doing so much of the time. One of the first products of that change of attitude was the long story that follows here, “Counterpart,” which I wrote in May, 1958. It is not, God knows, the equal of the kind of material that Theodore Sturgeon, Fritz Leiber, or Cyril Kornbluth were writing at that time. But neither is it a simpleminded slam-bang adventure story. As I had in my teens with “Road to Nightfall,” but only rarely since, I attempted to populate a science-fiction scenario with realistic characters facing realistic dilemmas, and to tell the story with as much intensity as I could summon. My hope was, I suppose, to sell it to Horace Gold’s Galaxy, which from its inception in 1950 had made a specialty of this kind of science fiction. But, as I had seen again and again, Horace, although he often excoriated me for taking the easy way out in my fiction, somehow never wanted to buy my serious stories, only my frivolous ones. John Campbell, now entering the long twilight of his great editorial career, didn’t want it either: he seemed to want only stories that reflected his own ideas, at this time. As I matured, I found myself less and less able to write fiction that suited his ideological needs, and his path and mine were about to diverge forever. Nor could I sell the story to the third of the top magazines, Fantasy & Science Fiction, where Robert P. Mills had replaced Anthony Boucher as editor. Tony might well have bought the story, but Mills did not, and suddenly, with many of the other science-fiction magazines now shutting down as a distribution crisis struck magazine publishing, I found myself out of markets for it. So much, I thought, for artistic integrity! In January, 1959, I took the story over to Hans Stefan Santesson of Fantastic Universe, who had published my equally hard-to-sell “Road to Nightfall” a few months before. Hans accepted it gladly enough, and ran it in his October, 1959 issue.

  But soon Fantastic Universe would disappear too. By the end of 1959, only about half a dozen science-fiction magazines would remain, a vastly shrunken market indeed for free-lance writers. All the action-adventure s-f magazines for which I had done my hackery were swept away overnight, but so were most of the outlets for science fiction of a more serious kind. I had, it seemed, chosen a very poor moment to set out on the high road toward artistic integrity.

  ——————

  Mark Jenner delivered the play’s final line with as much force as he could muster, and the curtain dropped like a shroud, cutting off stage from audience. Jenner gasped for breath and fashioned a warm smile for his face to wear. The other six members of the cast left the wings and arranged themselves around him, and the curtain rose again for the calls. A trickle of applause crossed the footlights.

  This is it, Jenner thought. We’re through.

  He bowed graciously, peering beyond the glare of the foots to count the house. The theater was about three quarters full—but half the people out there were free-riders, pulled in by the management just to give the house a semblance of fullness. And how many of the others were discount-ticket purchasers? Probably, Jenner thought as the curtain dropped again, there were no more than fifty legitimate customers in the house. And so another play went down the drain. A savage voice within him barked mockingly, telling him that it was his fault, that he no longer had what it took to hold an audience, that he lacked the subtle magnetism needed to pull people out of their homes and into the theater.

  There would be no more curtain-calls. Tiredly, Jenner walked off into the wings and saw Dan Hall, the producer, standing there. Abruptly the tinsel glamor of curtain-calls faded. There could be only one reason why Hall was here now, and the dour, sallow cast of the producer’s pudgy face left no doubt in Jenner’s mind. Closing notices would be posted tonight. Tomorrow, Mark Jenner would be back to living off capital again, and waiting out his days.

  “Mark…”

  Jenner stopped. Hall had reached out to touch his arm. “Evening, Dan. How goes it?”

  “Bad.”

  “The r
eceipts?”

  Hall chuckled dryly. “What receipts? We had a houseful of unemployed actors sitting out there on passes; and the advance sale for tomorrow night is about eleven bucks’ worth.”

  “There isn’t going to be any tomorrow night, is there, Dan?” Jenner asked leadenly.

  Hall did not answer. Marie Haas, the ingénue, radiant in the sparkling gown that looked so immodest on so young a girl, glided toward them. She wrapped one arm around the rotund producer, one around Jenner. On stage, the hands were busy pulling the set apart.

  “Big house tonight, wasn’t it?” she twittered.

  “I was just telling Mark,” Hall said. “Most of those people were unemployed actors here on passes.”

  “And,” Jenner added, “there are seven more unemployed actors here on this stage right now.”

  “No!” Marie cried.

  Jenner tried to smile. It was rough on a girl of nineteen to lose her first big play after a ten-day run; but, he thought, it was rougher on a forty-year-old ex-star. It wasn’t so long ago, he told himself, that the name Mark Jenner on a marquee meant an automatic season’s run. Lovely to Look At, opened October 16, 1961, ran 630 performances. Lorelei, opened December 9, 1965, ran 713 performances. Girl of the Dawn, opened February 7, 1969, ran 583 performances.

  Misty Isle, opened March 6, 1977—ran ten performances.

  Jenner peered wearily at the producer. The rest of the cast had gathered round, now, half of them still in war-paint and costume. As the star, Jenner had the right to ask the question. He asked it.

  “We’re through, aren’t we, Dan?”

  Hall nodded slowly. “The theater owner told me tonight that we’re below the minimum draw. He’s exercising option and throwing us out; he wants to rent the place for video. We’re through, all right.”

  Jenner climbed methodically out of his costume, removed his makeup, cocked a sardonic eye on the spangled star on the door of his dressing cubicle, and left the theater. He had arranged to meet his old friend Walt Hollis after the show for a drink. Hollis was an electrician, currently handling the lights for one of the other Broadway shows—one of the hits. They had agreed to meet in a bar Jenner liked, on Forty-ninth Street off Sixth Avenue.