And so we went. Both of us talking ourselves blue in the face, swearing by everything, arguing and bargaining, wheeling and dealing. It was touch and go who was going to give up first.
But neither of us did. We both held out until we reached what I’d figured pretty early we were going to wind up with, maybe a little bit more.
Six thousand, one hundred and fifty dollars.
That was the price over and above what Eksar had given me. The final deal. Listen, it could have been worse.
Even so, we almost broke up when we began talking payment.
“Your bank’s not far. We could get there before closing.”
“Why walk myself into a heart attack? My check’s good as gold.”
“Who wants a piece of paper? I want cash. Cash is definite.”
Finally, I managed to talk him into a check. I wrote it out; he took it and gave me the receipts, all of them. Every last receipt I’d signed. Then he picked up his little satchel and marched away.
Straight down Broadway, without even a good-bye. All business, Eksar was, nothing but business. He didn’t look back once.
All business. I found out next morning he’d gone right to the bank and had my check certified before closing time. What do you think of that? I couldn’t do a damn thing: I was out six thousand, one hundred and fifty dollars. Just for talking to someone.
Ricardo said I was a Faust. I walked out of the bank, beating my head with my fist, and I called up him and Morris Burlap and asked them to have lunch with me. I went over the whole story with them in an expensive place that Ricardo picked out. “You’re a Faust,” he said.
“What Faust?” I asked him. “Who Faust? How Faust?”
So naturally he had to tell us all about Faust. Only I was a new kind of Faust, a twentieth century-American one. The other Fausts, they wanted to know everything. I wanted to own everything.
“But I didn’t wind up owning,” I pointed out. “I got taken. Six thousand, one hundred and fifty dollars’ worth I got taken.”
Ricardo chuckled and leaned back in his chair. “O my sweet gold,” he said under his breath. “O my sweet gold.”
“What?”
“A quotation, Bernie. From Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus. I forget the context, but it seems apt. ‘O my sweet gold.’”
I looked from him to Morris Burlap, but nobody can ever tell when Morris Burlap is puzzled. As a matter of fact, he looks more like a professor than Ricardo, him with those thick Harris tweeds and that heavy, thinking look. Ricardo is, you know, a bit too natty.
The two of them added up to all the brains and sharpness a guy could ask for. That’s why I was paying out an arm and a leg for this lunch, on top of all my losses with Eksar.
“Morris, tell the truth. You understand him?”
“What’s there to understand, Bernie? A quote about the sweet gold? It might be the answer, right there.”
Now I looked at Ricardo. He was eating away at a creamy Italian pudding. Two bucks even, those puddings cost in that place.
“Let’s say he was an alien,” Morris Burlap said. “Let’s say he came from somewhere in outer space. OK. Now what would an alien want with U. S. dollars? What’s the rate of exchange out there?”
“You mean he needed it to buy some merchandise here on Earth?”
“That’s exactly what I mean. But what kind of merchandise, that’s the question. What could Earth have that he’d want?”
Ricardo finished the pudding and wiped his lips with a napkin. “I think you’re on the right track, Morris,” he said, and I swung my attention back to him. “We can postulate a civilization far in advance of our own. One that would feel we’re not quite ready to know about them. One that has placed primitive little Earth strictly off limits—a restriction only desperate criminals dare ignore.”
“From where come criminals, Ricardo, if they’re so advanced?”
“Laws produce lawbreakers, Bernie, like hens produce eggs. Civilization has nothing to do with it. I’m beginning to see Eksar now. An unprincipled adventurer, a star-man version of those cutthroats who sailed the South Pacific a hundred years or more ago. Once in a while, a ship would smash upon the coral reefs, and a bloody opportunist out of Boston would be stranded for life among primitive, backward tribesmen. I’m sure you can fill in the rest.”
“No, I can’t. And if you don’t mind, Ricardo—”
Morris Burlap said he’d like another brandy. I ordered it. He came as close to smiling as Morris Burlap ever does and leaned toward me confidentially. “Ricardo’s got it, Bernie. Put yourself in this guy Eksar’s position. He wraps up his spaceship on a dirty little planet which it’s against the law to be near in the first place. He can make some half-assed repairs with merchandise that’s available here—but he has to buy the stuff. Any noise, any uproar, and he’ll be grabbed for a Federal rap in outer space. Say you’re Eksar, what do you do?”
I could see it now. “I’d peddle and I’d parlay. Copper bracelets, strings of beads, dollars—whatever I had to lay my hands on to buy the native merchandise, I’d peddle and I’d parlay in deal after deal. Maybe I’d start with a piece of equipment from the ship, then I’d find some novelty item that the natives would go for. But all this is Earth business know-how, human business know-how.”
“Bernie,” Ricardo told me, “Indians once traded pretty little shells for beaver pelts at the exact spot where the stock exchange now stands. Some kind of business goes on in Eksar’s world, I assure you, but its simplest form would make one of our corporate mergers look like a game of potsy on the sidewalk.”
Well, I’d wanted to figure it out. “So I was marked as his fish all the way. I was screwed and blued and tattooed,” I mumbled, “by a hustler superman.”
Ricardo nodded. “By a businessman’s Mephistopheles fleeing the thunderbolts of heaven. He needed to double his money one more time and he’d have enough to repair his ship. He had at his disposal a fantastic sophistication in all the ways of commerce.”
“What Ricardo’s saying,” came an almost soft voice from Morris Burlap, “is the guy who beat you up was a whole lot bigger than you.”
My shoulders felt loose, like they were sliding down off my arms. “What the hell,” I said. “You get stepped on by a horse or you get stepped on by an elephant. You’re still stepped on.”
I paid the check, got myself together and went away.
Then I began to wonder if maybe this was really the story after all. They both enjoyed seeing me up there as an interplanetary jerk. Ricardo’s a brilliant guy, Morris Burlap’s sharp as hell, but so what? Ideas, yes. Facts, no.
So here’s a fact.
My bank statement came at the end of the month with that canceled check I’d given Eksar. It had been endorsed by a big store in the Cortlandt Street area. I know that store. I’ve dealt with them. I went down and asked them about it.
They handle mostly marked-down, surplus electronic equipment. That’s what they said Eksar had bought. A walloping big order of transistors and transformers, resistors and printed circuits, electronic tubes, wiring, tools, gimmicks like that. All mixed up, they said, a lot of components that just didn’t go together. He’d given the clerk the impression that he had an emergency job to do—and he’d take as close as he could get to the things he actually needed. He’d paid a lot of money for freight charges: delivery was to some backwoods town in northern Canada.
That’s a fact, now, I have to admit it. But here’s another one.
I’ve dealt with that store, like I said. Their prices are the lowest in the neighborhood. And why is it, do you think, they can sell so cheap? There’s only one answer: because they buy so cheap. They buy at the lowest prices; they don’t give a damn about quality: all they want to know is, how much markup? I’ve personally sold them job lots of electronic junk that I couldn’t unload anywhere else, condemned stuff, badly wired stuff, stuff that was almost dangerous—it’s a place to sell to when you’ve given up on making a
profit because you yourself have been stuck with inferior merchandise in the first place.
You get the picture? It makes me feel rosy all over.
There is Eksar out in space, the way I see it. He’s fixed up his ship, good enough to travel, and he’s on his way to his next big deal. The motors are humming, the ship is running, and he’s sitting there with a big smile on his dirty face: he’s thinking how he took me, how easy it was.
He’s laughing his head off.
All of a sudden, there’s a screech and a smell of burning. That circuit that’s running the front motor, a wire just got touched through the thin insulation, the circuit tearing the hell out of itself. He gets scared. He turns on the auxiliaries. The auxiliaries don’t go on—you know why?
The vacuum tubes he’s using have come to the end of their rope, they didn’t have much juice to start with. Blooie! That’s the rear motor developing a short circuit. Ka-pow! That’s a defective transformer melting away in the middle of the ship.
And there he is, millions of miles from nowhere, empty space all around him, no more spare parts, tools that practically break in his hands—and not a single, living soul he can hustle.
And here am I, in my office, thinking about it, and I’m laughing my head off. Because it’s just possible, it just could happen, that what goes wrong with his ship is one of the half-dozen or so job lots of really bad electronic equipment that I personally, me, Bernie the Faust, that I sold to that surplus store at one time or another.
That’s all I’d ask. Just to have it happen that way.
Faust. He’d have Faust from me then. Right in the face. Faust. On the head, splitting it open, Faust. Faust I’d give him!
The only trouble is I’ll never know. All I know for sure is that I’m the only guy in history who sold the whole goddamn planet.
And bought it back.
<
~ * ~
A MAN FOR THE MOON
BY LELAND WEBB
On a day a few years back, a 39-year-old airline executive named Leland Webb quit his job. He had worked for the airline 11 years, had received many promotions and was often assured of a bright future. “But,” says Webb, “I began to feel constantly out of breath and suffered from a strong desire to be sick all over my Bigelow. On the day before my fortieth birthday, I told my boss I would take my birthday off. He said no. I took my birthday off. Also the next day. And the next. By this time it was a habit and I never went back.” What he did do was pack his bags and settle down to live modestly in a remote Florida hamlet. Among his luggage, he had included a portable typewriter, for he had decided to take the plunge into a long-unrealized dream—the writing of fiction. After relatively few finger exercises, he began to produce a steady flow of superior fiction that found ready markets in the leading magazines, principally playboy. “A Man for the Moon” is the very first story that rolled from Webb’s portable, and the highest praise we can bestow upon it is that we would never have suspected that fact if Webb hadn’t told us. It is also the only story in this book that is, simultaneously, both science fiction and fantasy. In it, past and future, the Space Age and the age of the conquistadores are melded in a kind of prose ode to courage and discovery.
~ * ~
“TO THE MOON?” I said. I felt the Earth move out from under me and settle on my shoulders. It was heavy.
“To the Moon,” Marco Garcia said. His voice was thick with disappointment. “Congratulations, Abner.”
Johnny Ingraham exploded. “To the bloody Moon!” he shouted. “Abner, my boy, my beamish boy, you’ll be in all the history books!”
But I sat and stared bleakly across the desk at Old Hard Nose Hanrahan. Navy Regs make it plain that an admiral can’t possibly talk bilge to a lieutenant commander, but he was blowing through a paper bugle.
“To the Moon, Mr. Evans,” he said. He slapped the foot-high stack of manila envelopes, all marked top secret, with a slender, bony hand. “The Screaming Mimi has been ready for two years. It took us almost a year to pick three men, you, Garcia and Ingraham. We’ve spent over a year, watching, weighing, measuring, studying the three of you. But it was not until this morning that we picked our man. You kept us waiting a long time, Mr. Evans.”
“Sir, I feel very earthy,” I said. “I think I always have. If I could choose I would choose not to go. But I suppose that makes no difference?”
He shook his head. “The Navy is filled with men who would jump at the chance to go, Mr. Evans,” he said. “But a daredevil would never make it. Flying the Mimi there is only half of it: the man who takes her there has got to bring her back. This is a new kind of beachhead and it takes another kind of man. Quiet, steady, no dash, no flash. A man, Mr. Evans, who may not want to go, but who damned well will want to get back.”
He stood up and we scrambled to our feet. He turned his back on us and walked to the window.
“Final briefing will be in one hour,” he said. “We feel that it is best for you not to have too much time to think. We also feel, Mr. Evans, that for security reasons, it is best to keep you under close guard. Garcia and Ingraham will be responsible to me for your safety and for the Navy’s security.”
He turned and faced us. The friendliness was gone from his face, and he was Old Hard Nose again. “It’s in the Navy tradition to be first,” he said. “Sail us to the Moon, mister. And then sail us back.”
Before he dismissed us, I spoke one more time. “I presume I will be permitted to call my wife?”
“You may not,” he said. “Mrs. Evans, I am sure, has accustomed herself to your absence from home, and this will simply be one more time.”
“Very well, sir,” I said. And thanks, I thought, for God knows I have no idea of how to call a wife and tell her that I am off for the Moon.
We left Old Hard Nose, who had returned to staring out his window. At the entrance to the Administration Building, I stopped and looked at the telephone booths.
“Gentlemen and fellow officers,” I said. “I have things to say to my wife that can be of no possible interest to officers and gentlemen.”
They both shook their heads. We walked on out of the building and cut across the quadrangle. The sun was hellish bright and everything seemed more real, more actual, than usual. Along the way I saw a bird on the lower limb of a mimosa tree. He was a small, ordinary brown fellow and so still I had to look twice to be sure he wasn’t plastic. He was not singing and I nodded to him in appreciation of his tact.
Marco and Johnny also held their tongues. The three of us had been together for two years, putting the Mimi through her paces, and in two years you learn when a man wants nothing from you but silence. And because it was me, and not them, I was in a sullen, senseless rage, as if somehow they had connived against me.
If you were to say to Marco Garcia, “Take the Screaming Mimi to the Moon, and blow it up,” he would have looked at you out of unblinking, sloe-black eyes, and said, “When do I leave?”
And if you were to say to Johnny Ingraham, “Kid, take this damned crate and head for the Moon,” he would let out a squall of laughter you could have heard for a mile. Johnny never objected to a joke simply because he was the victim of it.
And neither of them was married to Delia. Johnny had never gotten around to marrying, and Marco was tied to a dyed-in-the-wool, pluperfect bitch. Neither one of them knew what it was like to have Delia walk up to him and say “I love you,” in her special way of saying it, as though it was something she had invented just for you.
When we reached the Senior BOQ, I was in a cold sweat. There was a buzzing confusion in my ears. If I had been asked right then and there if Lincoln had been shot or run to death, I couldn’t have answered. At the door to their room I turned and said, “I don’t care what you men do, so long as I don’t see you or hear you.”
Marco nodded, and Johnny said, “OK, Ab, but please don’t close the door.”
I went and lay down on the bunk. I made myself stop thinking about Delia. I thought a
bout the Moon. In less than sixty minutes, I would have my final briefing, and then they would seal me into the Screaming Mimi. The time element was sound. If you are going to do it, it’s a good idea not to have much time to think about it.
But the more I thought of it, the less I thought of it. Unless science is wrong, and instead of rock and rubble the Moon was a big green cheese, highly nutritious and an effective cure for coughs and colds and tightness around the chest, it was no good to anybody.
The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Page 14