Star Science Fiction 1 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Frederik Pohl

Mardin put the question to the prisoner ...

  Once more he wandered on worlds where he could not have lived for a moment. He superintended a work detail of strange dustmotes, long ago conquered and placed under Jovian hegemony. He found himself feeling about them the way he had felt about the Griggoddon eighteen years ago: they were too wonderful to be doomed, he protested. Then he realized that the protest was not his, but that of the sorrowing entity who had lived these experiences. And they went on to other garrisons, other duties.

  The reply he got this time made Mardin gasp. “He says all five of the Jovians were deserting! They had planned it for years, all of them being both fraternity-brothers and brood-brothers. He says that they—well, you might say parachuted down together—and not one of them had a weapon. They each tried in different ways, as they had planned beforehand, to make their surrender known, Ho-Par XV was the only successful one. He brings greetings from clusters as yet unsynthesized.”

  “Stick to the facts, Mardin. No romancing. Why did they desert?”

  “I am sticking to the facts, sir: I’m just trying to give you the flavor as well as the substance. According to Ho-Par XV, they deserted because they were all violently opposed to militarism.”

  “Wha-at?”

  “That, as near as I can render it, is exactly what he said. He says that militarism is ruining their race. It has resulted in all kinds of incorrect choices on the part of the young as to which sex they will assume in the adult state (I don’t understand that part at all myself, sir), it has thrown confusion into an art somewhere between cartography and horticulture that Ho-Par thinks is very important to the future of Jupiter—and it has weighed every Jovian down with an immense burden of guilt because of what their armies and military administration have done to alien life-forms on Ganymede, Titan and Europa, not to mention the half-sentient bubbles of the Saturnian core.”

  “To hell with the latrine-blasted half-sentient bubbles of the Saturnian core!” Billingsley bellowed.

  “Ho-Par XV feels,” the man in the suspended metal armchair went on relentlessly, staring down with delight at the flat stretch of red liquid whose beautifully sane, delicately balanced mind he was paraphrasing, “that his race needs to be stopped for its own sake as well as that of the other forms of life in the Solar System. Creatures trained in warfare are what he calls ‘philosophically anti-life.’ The young Jovians had just about given up hope that Jupiter could be stopped, when humanity came busting through the asteroids. Only trouble is that while we do think and move about three times as fast as they do, the Jovian females—who are the closest thing they have to theoretical scientists— know a lot more than we, dig into a concept more deeply than we can imagine and generally can be expected to keep licking us as they have been, until we are either extinct or enslaved. Ho-Par XV and his brood-brothers decided after the annual smelling session in the Jovian fleet this year to try to change all this. They felt that with our speedier metabolism, we might be able to take a new weapon, which the Jovians have barely got into production, and turn it out fast enough to make a slight—”

  At this point there was a certain amount of noise in the headphones. After a while, Old Rockethead’s voice, suavity gone, came through more or less distinctly: “—-and if you don’t start detailing that weapon immediately, you mangy son of a flea-bitten cur, I will have you broken twelve grades below Ordinary Spaceman and strip the skin off your pimply backside with my own boot the moment I get you back on this platform. I’ll personally see to it that you spend all of your leaves cleaning the filthiest commodes the space fleet can find! Now jump to it!”

  Major Mardin wiped the line of sweat off his upper lip and began detailing the weapon. Who does he think he’s talking to? his mind asked bitterly. I’m no kid, no apple-cheeked youngster, to be snapped at and dressed down with that line of frowsy, ugly barracks-corporal humor! I got a standing ovation from the All-Earth Archaeological Society once, and Dr. Emmanuel Hozzne himself congratulated me on my report.

  But his mouth began detailing the weapon, his mouth went on articulating the difficult ideas which Ho-Par XV and his fellow deserters had painfully translated into faintly recognizable human terms, his mouth dutifully continued to explicate mathematical and physical concepts into the black speaking cone near his chin.

  His mouth went about its business and carried out its orders—but his mind lay agonized at the insult. And then, in a corner of his mind where tenancy was joint, so to speak, a puzzled, warm, highly sensitive and extremely intelligent personality asked a puzzled, tentative question.

  Mardin stopped in mid-sentence, overcome with horror at what he’d almost given away to the alien. He tried to cover up, to fill his mind with memories of contentment, to create non-sequiturs as psychological camouflage. What an idiot to forget that he wasn’t alone in his mind!

  And the question was asked again.Are you not the representative of your people? Are—are there others . . . unlike you?

  Of course not! Mardin told him desperately.Your confusion is due entirely to the fundamental differences between Jovian and Terrestrial thinking—

  “Mardin! Will you stop drooling out of those near-sighted eyes and come the hell to attention? Keep talking, chowder-head, we want the rest of that flatworm’s brain picked!”

  What fundamental differences? Mardin asked himself suddenly, his skull a white-hot furnace of rage. There were more fundamental differences between someone like Billingsley and himself, than between himself and this poetic creature who had risked death and become a traitor to his own race—to preserve the dignity of the Life-force. What did he have in common with this Cain come to judgment, this bemedaled swaggering boor who rejoiced in having reduced all the subtleties of conscious thought to rigidly simple, unavoidable alternatives: kill or be killed! damn or be damned! be powerful or be overpowered! The monster who had tortured his mind endlessly, dispassionately, in the prison on Mars would have found Old Rockethead much more simpatico than Ho-Par XV.

  That is true, that is so! the Jovian’s thought came down emphatically on his mind. And now, friend, blood-brother, whatever you may choose to call yourself, please let me know what kind of creature I have given this weapon to. Let me know what he has done in the past with power, what he may be expected to do in hatching cycles yet to come. Let me know through your mind and your memories and your feelings—for you and I understand each other.

  Mardin let him know.

  ... to the nearest legal representative of the entire human race. As the result of preliminary interrogation by the military authorities a good deal was learned about the life and habits of the enemy. Unfortunately, in the course of further questioning, the Jovian evidently came to regret being taken alive and opened the valves of the gigantic tank which was his space-suit, thus committing suicide instantly and incidentally smoldering his human interpreter in a dense cloud of methane gas. Major Igor Mardin, the interpreter, has been posthumously awarded the Silver Lunar Circlet with doubled jets. The Jovian’s suicide is now being studied by space fleet psychologists to determine whether this may not indicate an unstable mental pattern which will be useful to our deep-space armed forces in the future . . .

  <>

  * * * *

  H. L. GOLD

  In science fiction, nearly everybody reads Galaxy—but how many of its numerous and increasing readers realize that the man who edited their well-loved magazine is also the man who wrote much of the best science and fantasy fiction of the immediate pre-war years? H. L. Gold’s novel None But Lucifer and short stories like Trouble With Water, and Warm, Dark Places ornamented John Campbell’s fondly remembered magazine, Unknown, for most of its all-too-short career. An Army hitch in the South Pacific suspended Gold’s writing for the duration and a bit more—but subsequently, it went ahead, bigger and better than ever, as you can see by . . .

  The Man With English

  Lying in the hospital, Edgar Stone added up his misfortunes as another might count blessings. There
were enough to infuriate the most temperate man, which Stone notoriously was not. He smashed his fist down, accidentally hitting the metal side of the bed, and was astonished by the pleasant feeling. It enraged him even more. The really maddening thing was how simply he had goaded himself into the hospital.

  He’d locked up his drygoods store and driven home for lunch. Nothing unusual about that; he did it every day. With his miserable digestion, he couldn’t stand the restaurant food in town. He pulled into the driveway, rode over a collection of metal shapes his son Arnold had left lying around, and punctured a tire.

  “Rita!” he yelled. “This is going too damned far! Where is that brat?”

  “In here,” she called truculently from the kitchen.

  He kicked open the screen door. His foot went through the mesh.

  “A ripped tire and a torn screen!” he shouted at Arnold, who was sprawled in angular adolescence over a blueprint on the kitchen table. “You’ll pay for them, by God! They’re coming out of your allowance!”

  “I’m sorry, Pop,” the boy said.

  “Sorry, my left foot,” Mrs. Stone shrieked. She whirled on her husband. “You could have watched where you were going. He promised to clean up his things from the driveway right after lunch. And it’s about time you stopped kicking open the door every time you’re mad.”

  “Mad? Who wouldn’t be mad? Me hoping he’d get out of school and come into the store, and he wants to be an engineer. An engineer—and he can’t even make change when he—hah!—helps me out in the store!”

  “He’ll be whatever he wants to be,” she screamed in the conversational tone of the Stone household.

  “Please,” said Arnold. “I can’t concentrate on this plan.”

  Edgar Stone was never one to restrain an angry impulse. He tore up the blueprint and flung the pieces down on the table.

  “Aw, Pop!” Arnold protested.

  “Don’t say ‘Aw, Pop’ to me. You’re not going to waste a summer vacation on junk like this. You’ll eat your lunch and come down to the store. And you’ll do it every day for the rest of the summer!”

  “Oh, he will, will he?” demanded Mrs. Stone. “Hell catch up on his studies. And as for you, you can go back and eat in a restaurant.”

  “You know I can’t stand that slop!”

  “You’ll eat it because you’re not having lunch here any more. I’ve got enough to do without making three meals a day.”

  “But I can’t drive back with that tire—”

  He did, though not with the tire—he took a cab. It cost a dollar plus tip, lunch was a dollar and a half plus tip, bicarb at Rite Drug Store a few doors away and in a great hurry came to another fifteen cents—only it didn’t work.

  And then Miss Ellis came in for some material. Miss Ellis could round out any miserable day. She was fifty, tall, skinny and had thin, disapproving lips. She had a sliver of cloth clipped very meagerly off a hem that she intended to use as a sample.

  “The arms of the slipcover on my reading chair wore through,” she informed him. “I bought the material here, if you remember.”

  Stone didn’t have to look at the fragmentary swatch. “That was about seven years ago—”

  “Six-and-a-half,” she corrected. “I paid enough for it. You’d expect anything that expensive to last.”

  “The style was discontinued. I have something here that—”

  “I do not want to make an entire slipcover, Mr. Stone. All I want is enough to make new panels for the arms. Two yards should do very nicely.”

  Stone smothered a bilious hiccup. “Two yards, Miss Ellis?”

  “At the most.”

  “I sold the last of that material years ago.” He pulled a bolt off a shelf and partly unrolled it for her. “Why not use a different pattern as a kind of contrast?”

  “I want this same pattern,” she said, her thin lips getting even thinner and more obstinate.”

  “Then I’ll have to order it and hope one of my wholesalers still has some of it in stock.”

  “Not without looking for it first right here, you won’t order it for me. You can’t know all these materials you have on these shelves.”

  Stone felt all the familiar symptoms of fury—the sudden pulsing of the temples, the lurch and bump of his heart as adrenalin came surging in like the tide at the Firth of Forth, the quivering of his hands, the angry shout pulsing at his vocal cords from below.

  “I’ll take a look, Miss Ellis,” he said.

  She was president of the Ladies’ Cultural Society and dominated it so thoroughly that the members would go clear to the next town for their dry goods, rather than deal with him, if he offended this sour stick of stubbornness.

  If Stone’s life insurance salesman had been there, he would have tried to keep Stone from climbing the ladder that ran around the three walls of the store. He probably wouldn’t have been in time. Stone stamped up the ladder to reach the highest shelves, where there were scraps of bolts. One of them might have been the remnant of the material Miss Ellis had bought six-and-a-half years ago. But Stone never found out.

  He snatched one, glaring down meanwhile at the top of Miss Ellis’s head, and the ladder skidded out from under him. He felt his skull collide with the counter. He didn’t feel it hit the floor.

  * * * *

  “God damn it!” Stone yelled. “You could at least turn on the lights.”

  “There, there, Edgar. Everything’s fine, just fine.”

  It was his wife’s voice and the tone was so uncommonly soft and soothing that it scared him into a panic.

  “What’s wrong with me?” he asked piteously. “Am I blind?”

  “How many fingers am I holding up?” a man wanted to know.

  Stone was peering into the blackness. All he could see before his eyes was a vague blot against a darker blot.

  “None,” he bleated. “Who are you?”

  “Dr. Rankin. That was a nasty fall you had, Mr. Stone— concussion of course, and a splinter of bone driven into the brain. I had to operate to remove it.”

  “Then you cut out a nerve!” Stone said. “You did something to my eyes!”

  The doctor’s voice sounded puzzled. “There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with them. I’ll take a look, though, and see.”

  “You’ll be all right, dear,” Mrs. Stone said reassuringly, but she didn’t sound as if she believed it.

  “Sure you will, Pop,” said Arnold.

  “Is that young stinker here?” Stone demanded. “He’s the cause of all this!”

  “Temper, temper,” the doctor said. “Accidents happen.”

  Stone heard him lower the Venetian blinds. As if they had been a switch, light sprang up and everything in the hospital became brightly visible.

  “Well!” said Stone. “That’s more like it. It’s night and you’re trying to save electricity, hey?”

  “It’s broad daylight, Edgar dear,” his wife protested. “All Dr. Rankin did was lower the blinds and—”

  “Please,” the doctor said. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather take care of any explanations that have to be made.”

  He came at Stone with an ophthalmoscope. When he flashed it into Stone’s eyes, everything went black and Stone let him know it vociferously.

  “Black?” Dr. Rankin repeated blankly. “Are you positive? Not a sudden glare?”

  “Black,” insisted Stone. “And what’s the idea of putting me in a bed filled with bread crumbs?”

  “It was freshly made—”

  “Crumbs. You heard me. And the pillow has rocks in it.”

  “What else is bothering you?” asked the doctor worriedly.

  “It’s freezing in here.” Stone felt the terror rise in him again. “It was summer when I fell off the ladder. Don’t tell me I’ve been unconscious clear through till winter!”

  “No, Pop,” said Arnold. “That was yesterday—”

  “I’ll take care of this,” Dr. Rankin said firmly. “I’m afraid you and your son will
have to leave, Mrs. Stone. I have to do a few tests on your husband.”

  “Will he be all right?” she appealed.

  “Of course, of course,” he said inattentively, peering with a frown at the shivering patient. “Shock, you know,” he added vaguely.

  “Gosh, Pop,” said Arnold. “I’m sorry this happened. I got the driveway all cleaned up.”

  “And we’ll take care of the store till you’re better,” Mrs. Stone promised.

  “Don’t you dare!” yelled Stone. “You’ll put me out of business!”

  The doctor hastily shut the door on them and came back to the bed. Stone was clutching the light summer blanket around himself. He felt colder than he’d ever been in his life.