‘Guess there’s nothing I can say, then.’
‘Wait! Don’t go!’ Arthur stretched out a hand, for the crinkled man had moved towards the door. ‘There’s something I want to ask you.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Those two pots – although we never touch ’em, if you look at them you’ll see something. You’ll see they got no dust on them! Shall I tell you why? It’s the traffic vibration from the new by-pass. It jars all the dust off the pots.’
‘Useful,’ the crinkled man said cautiously.
‘But that’s not what worries me,’ Arthur continued. ‘That traffic keeps on getting worse all the time. I’m scared that it will get so bad it’ll shake the pots right off the table. They’re near the edge, aren’t they? They could easily be shaken off, just by all that traffic roaring by. Supposing they are shaken off – does that count?’
He peered up at the crinkled man’s face, but lamplight reflecting from his spectacles hid the eyes. There was a long silence which the crinkled man seemed to break only with reluctance.
‘You know the answer to that one all the time, Arthur,’ he said. It was the only time he ever used the other’s name.
‘Yep,’ Arthur said slowly. ‘Reckon I do. If them pots were rattled off the table, it would mean the intangibles had got me.’
Gloomily, he sank back on to the pillows. The Popular Mechanics slid unregarded on to the floor. After a moment’s hesitation, the crinkled man turned and went to the door; there, he hesitated again.
‘Hope you’ll be up and about again in the spring,’ he said softly.
That made Arthur sit up abruptly, groaning as he did so.
‘Come and see me again!’ he said. ‘You promise you’ll be round again?’
‘I’ll be round,’ the crinkled man said.
Sure enough, his antique truck came creaking back into the multiple lanes of Hapsville traffic another twenty-one years later. He turned off the by-pass and pulled up.
‘Neighbourhoods certainly do change fast,’ he said.
The cinema looked as if it had been shut down for a long time. Now it was evidently used as a furniture warehouse, for a big pantechnicon was loading up divans outside it. Behind Arthur’s place, a block of ugly flats stood; children shrieked and yelled down its side alley. On the other side of the busy highway was a row of small stores selling candies and pop records and the like. Behind the stores was a busy helicopter port.
He made his way down a narrow side alley, and there, squeezed behind the rear of the drug store, was Arthur’s place. Nature, pushed firmly out elsewhere, had reappeared here. Ivy straggled up the posts of the porch and weeds grew tall enough to look in all the windows. Chickweed crowded the front step.
‘What do you want?’
The crinkled man would have jumped if he had been the jumping kind. His challenger was standing in the half-open doorway, smoking a pipe. It was a man in late middle-age, a bull-like man with heavy, unshaven jowls and grey streaking his hair.
‘Arthur!’ the crinkled man exclaimed. And then the other stepped out into a better light to get a closer look at him.
‘No, it can’t be Arthur,’ the crinkled man said. ‘You, must be – Mike, huh?’
‘My name’s Mike. What of it?’
‘You’d be – sixty-four?’
‘What’s that to you? Who are you – police? No – wait a bit! I know who you are. How come you arrive here today of all days?’
‘Why, I just got round to calling.’
‘I see.’ Mike paused and spat into the weeds. He was the image of his father, and evidently did not think any faster.
‘You’re the old pepper and salt guy?’ he enquired.
‘You might call me that, yes.’
‘You better go in and see Ma.’ He moved aside reluctantly to let the crinkled man squeeze by.
Inside, the house was cold and damp and musty. Mabel hobbled slowly round the bedroom, putting things into a large, black bag. When the crinkled man entered the room, she came close to him and stared at him, nodding to herself. She herself smelt cold and damp and musty.
She was eighty-eight. Under her threadbare coat, she had shrunken into a little old lady. Her spectacles glinted on a nose still sharp but incredibly frail. But when she spoke her voice was as incisive as ever.
‘I thought you’d be here,’ she said. ‘I said you’d be here. I told them you’d come. You would want to see how it ended, wouldn’t you? Well – so you shall. We’re selling up. Selling right up. We’re going. Prue got married again – another miller, too. And Mike’s taking me out to his place – got a little shack in the fruit country, San Diego way.’
‘And … Arthur?’ the crinkled man prompted.
She shot him another hard look.
‘As if you didn’t know!’ she exclaimed, her voice too flinty for tears. ‘They buried him this morning. Proper funeral service. I didn’t go. I’m too old for any funerals but my own.’
‘I wish I’d come before …’ he said.
‘You come when you think you’ll come,’ Mabel said, shortly. ‘Arthur kept talking about you, right to the last … He never got out of his bed again since that time he bust up his back down at the garage. Twenty-one years he lay in that bed there …’
She led the way into the front room where they had once drunk diluted soup together. It was very dark there now, a sort of green darkness, with the dirty panes and the weeds at the windows. The room was completely empty except for a table with two little china pots standing on it.
The crinkled man made a note in his book and attempted to sound cheerful.
‘Arthur won his bet all right! I sure do compliment him,’ he said. He walked across the room and stood looking down at the two pots.
‘To think they’ve stood there undisturbed for sixty-six years …’ he said.
‘That’s just what Arthur thought!’ Mabel said. ‘He never stopped worrying over them. I never told him, but I used to pick them up and dust them every day. A woman’s got to keep the place clean. He’d have killed me if he found out, but I just couldn’t bear to see him believing in anything so silly. As you once said, women have got their own intangibles, just like men.’
Nodding understandingly, the crinkled man made one final entry in his notebook. Mabel showed him to the door.
‘Guess I won’t be seeing you again,’ he said.
She shook her head at him curtly, for a moment unable to speak. Then she turned into the house, hobbled back into her dark bedroom, and continued to pack up her things.
Sector Yellow
In a short time, Banya Ban will not have to fight alone. They have agreed to accept help from Iron Arm, the force that most nearly represents an interstellar police.
Assistance sent over such large distances has a habit of arriving years or even generations late. Unfortunately the most speedy means of transportation cannot operate over large distances. The matter transmitters that convey us so easily from one point on a globe to another are ineffective between widely spaced stars.
The reason for this is, of course, that the image at the receiving end has to be an exact replica of the article transmitted. Interstellar interference is such that the signal, even when mastered, is not reliable over a distance greater than eighty light years.
During the early days of mattermitters, before this factor was fully understood, there were many accidents; a man sent across a hundred light years where cosmic activity is high can emerge from the receiver as so many kilos of shredded protein. In Starswarm, where we are accustomed to thinking in terms of thousands of light years, this factor has imposed severe limitations.
In certain sectors where the suns are set closely and the enormous expense of the mattermitters can thus be justified, they are used. One such region lies in the thickly swarming worlds of Sector Yellow bordering the Rift. Sector Yellow lies at the hinge between the two main arms of Starswarm, sectors Diamond and Green.
Although it is on an important trade rou
te, Sector Yellow has a poor reputation and is avoided by the general run of humanity, though the outcasts of many societies have found a home there. It is in Sector Yellow that we find the greatest concentration of nonhuman phyla. Not only are they often unreliable, but no great dependency can be placed on the physical laws of the worlds on which they live.
All this is particularly true of Smith’s Burst, the most notable intragalactic nebula of the region. So it is appropriate, if regrettable, that the narrative that follows should also be unreliable.
Before man became homo interstellar, travellers’ tales were notoriously filled with exaggeration. This narrative appears to be in the tradition.
We include it because it gives a vivid glimpse of a chaotic part of our universe. The text has been somewhat abridged and some indecencies removed. It is a firsthand account of the adventures of one Jami Lancelo Lowther on the Planet Glumpalt in the Hybrid Cluster of Smith’s Burst.
Internal evidence forces us to question some of the incidents related. This much, however, we know: a financier called Lowther made an illegal mattermitter journey, and a planet called Glumpalt exists, on which the Black Sun still rises.
I
A man must suffer many moments of indignity in his life, but see to it that you are never put up for sale as I was.
There I stood, propped up by two shapeless roughs, on an auction platform. I had barely recovered consciousness when I saw below me a crowd yelling prices. It was a nightmare, for the freaks around me could only have issued from a troubled sleep.
The auctioneer had the biggest head of them all. Supported less by his puny body than by four stalks, which had the power of movement like thin legs, the head itself was covered with hair, through bald patches of which glittered eyes and orifices. He was at once ludicrous and frightening.
All the people gathered around this creature were as ugly or as fantastic. None of them had the decency to own one normal head or one ordinary pair of hands. No two were alike, though many were similar. Each one had something fantastic about him: jaws or claws or maws or paws, eyes or antennae or tails.
Surveying this repellent multitude, I knew I was far from sanity and civilisation and the law of Starswarm. I guessed at once that I was on one of the benighted planets in Smith’s Burst.
If the crowd did not confirm this supposition, my surroundings did. The town, which I shall describe more fully later, was a ramshackle series of fortresses and villages set on little islands about which lapped a filthy lake. The name of this town I discovered was Ongustura, although the superstitious rabble was reluctant to name names.
The lake was circled by mountains, featureless and unwelcoming. Cloud obscured most of the sky, but the part that was clear glittered with many points of light. I knew I was somewhere where the stars lay thickly.
All this I took in before being sold.
‘Let’s have a rope around you, creature, and neither of us will come to harm,’ my purchaser said to me, leading me from the platform. In my bewilderment I noticed little, but I thought that he seemed more comely than his fellows, until later observation showed that what I thought was his head was his posterior; his face was set in what I took to be his belly.
For all that, it was a joy to hear him speak Galingua. The rest of the speech had been in some local tongue that meant nothing to me.
‘Heaven be praised that you are civilised, sir – ’
‘Silence, you freak,’ he growled, interrupting me, ‘or I’ll have your tongue tied around your wrist.’
The confusion in my mind and about me was such that it took a while to realise that I was in a market square. Among the ugly mob were many who rode and many who were ridden upon, yet between one and the other there was little to choose. My master – I must call him such – climbed onto a thing like a porpoise, which talked; I was dragged up behind him, he jerked the rein, and we were off.
‘Mind to right! Mind to the left!’ my master called, as we jostled along. We took a street that sloped down into the waters of the lake. The porpoise-thing nosed into it and bore us to another island, getting us rather wet in the process. Heaving us along another street, it stopped before a tall, dirty building.
We dismounted. My master and the porpoise argued in the local tongue until the former produced some coins as big as a saucer, which the creature slipped into a pocket in his saddle before moving off. I was led into the building.
Gloom and squalor surrounded us. May I be preserved from describing any structure on that foul globe! Its owner had once built a single room, covering it with a sloping roof to fend off the rains. When he needed more space, he built another room nearby, connecting them with a covered way. Over the years he had required more and more rooms as he turned his abode into a lodging house. Since no more space was available for him horizontally, he had been forced to build upward – in the most casual manner possible, for the cell (it was no more) to which my master and I ascended was made of sloping tile underfoot. It had once been the roof of the second-storey room below; no one had seen fit to alter it.
There we squatted uncomfortably, my master on a pile of rags I avoided for their smell’s sake.
‘Sleep, you execrable example of protoplasm!’ he cried to me, tugging at the rope around my neck. ‘Sleep, for in only two dervs you and I set out for Anthropophagi Land. Rest while you can.’
A derv was a fifth part of a day, a day being an awderv (aw meaning five) – but the local day was as uncertain as much else there, and an awderv was simply an arbitrary period of about twenty hours.
It seemed sensible to win the confidence of this creature. Were he foolish enough to trust me, my chances of escape would be increased.
‘I cannot sleep for looking at you,’ I said. ‘How beautiful you are, with those massive pincers at the end of your four arms, and that exquisite fringe of green hair – or is it moss? – down the front of your legs.’
‘No two are born alike,’ he said complacently, as if repeating an ancient saying.
‘Some are more beautiful than others.’
‘That talk’s punishable as heresy here in Ongustura,’ my master said, lowering his voice. ‘The law states each fellow is as beautiful as his neighbour.’
‘Then you demonstrate the stupidity of the law.’
He was pleased, and by such touches I won him around to a better mood. He soon told me what I had suspected from his mastery of Galingua, that he was a traveller, a trader, moving from one part of the planet to another. The planet was called Glumpalt; he knew it to be in the intragalactic nebula called Smith’s Burst; beyond that he was totally ignorant. He had never heard of mattermitters, nor had he ever left this accursed world – nor did he ever wish to.
His name was Thrash Pondo-Pons. He was superstitious like all Glumpaltians and as vain as most of them. He looked and smelled bizarre. He had no manners, education or friends, except such as he acquired by accident – a fine representative of his entire heterogeneous race. He had many good points, although these took me longer to discover. He was brave, industrious, resolute, and had a peculiarly sweet resigned attitude towards the blows of fate, which fell as liberally on Glumpalt as elsewhere in the cosmos.
Thrash Pondo-Pons was not even remotely human. Many of his characteristics were not human. Yet I got on with him as well as I could have with a human under similar circumstances.
I did not sleep out the two dervs, nor did he. Towards the end of that time we rose and made a meal. My first food on Glumpalt! Realising I was hungry, I set out to eat as much as I could from the communal trough set before us. Part of the dish was cooked, part raw, part still alive.
Thrash then got his cart ready. It stood behind the lodging house, a complex structure with an iron chassis and a superstructure of wood and canvas. To this, two ‘horses’ were harnessed; one looked something like a caterpillar, one something like an elephant. I was pulled aboard and secured in the back of the cart, and off we started on what was to be a fantastic journey.
&nb
sp; When we came to water, we embarked onto a sort of barge and, as we moved among the islands, I had time to observe Ongustura from the back of the cart. With its crazy buildings, it was most like a series of rubbish dumps, for the debris piled up to make houses covered every bit of land. How many people and things lived there could not be computed – but the place swarmed with multiformed life.
Imagine, then, the leap my heart took when I sighted, amid one rubble pile, a great clean snout of polished metal pointing up to the clouds! There stood a space ship, its bulk indicating that it was some kind of star freighter.
My immediate predicament had not blinded me to the possibility that I might be stranded for ever on this godforsaken globe. It was so primitive that I had not dared to hope it would be on any space lane.
‘Whose is the ship?’ I called to Thrash.
‘TransBurst Traders,’ he replied. ‘I came here to sell them skins and carcasses. They’ll be off for Acrostic in ten awdervs, the day after the Black Sun sets. It’ll be rising in about a week now.’
Acrostic! That was the name of a planet I knew. It lay towards the edge of Smith’s Burst, beyond the Hybrid Cluster in which Glumpalt belonged. Once on Acrostic, it would be comparatively easy to work back to civilisation. I knew now that all my efforts must be bent on escaping from Thrash and getting onto that ship. It was my only hope.
Yet I stayed quiet, for one of Thrash’s five eyes was upon me.
II
We finally reached the edge of the lake. The cart was trundled ashore, and we began to climb a twisting track that led over the mountains.
A leather halter around my neck, a rope around my waist, I walked beside Thrash as we creaked along.
The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One Page 87