The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy

by Edited by The Playboy Editors

  Ardelle was silent throughout all that followed. She understood this man of iron and fire, and so through it all she made no sound, no moan. With the other it was different. The other had been playing a kind of game, and he was not at all prepared to pay the price of losing. He died badly.

  And Stapleton? There was an enigma. Here and now, when men need no longer die for their crimes, was a man who refused to admit that a crime had been committed. So little was needed to save him, but that little he refused to give. Here and now, a man need only cry out, “Forgive me, I was wrong. Forgive me,” and he was saved.

  Stapleton turned to watch as the outer door opened to admit a tall gray-haired man. With measured strides the man came close to the bars and looked through at Stapleton. The pain was as strong in his face as ever, the sorrow and pleading as eloquent. His words when he spoke were husky with suffering. “John Stapleton, how say you? Have you erred?”

  Stapleton looked at him and said, “I have not erred. I did what had to be done, nothing more.”

  The man with the gray hair turned away. The walk back to the door was solemn, for his head was bent and his shoulders trembled. Then he was gone.

  There was a stirring and a shuffling of many feet outside the outer door. Stapleton knew they were coming for him, and he stepped back to the center of the cell. He knew how this would be. They would come into his cell fearful that he would unleash his physical might, yet they would be unable to look at him. He would wait a moment, then laugh, then lead the procession to the gallows chamber. He would stand with his head in the enfolding blackness, feeling the snug rope around his throat and the knot behind his left ear. When the moment came there would be no sensation of falling; there would be a mere lightening of pressure against his feet. And the thudding shock and the searing flash of light. Then blackness.

  These things he knew well, but there were other things. There was the doctor who stood by to pronounce him dead at the earliest possible moment; the oxygen-carrying blood must not be kept from the brain longer than 4.3 minutes. Once dead the intravenous needles were inserted and the pumps took over where the heart had failed.

  The surgeons came on next. With high dexterity they repaired the broken cervical vertebra, the torn muscles, the crushed veins and arteries. When they were finished they placed the head and neck in a cast, and turned their attention to the restoration of the heartbeat. This was soon accomplished and, unconscious, Stapleton was wheeled to his cell.

  Usually he recovered consciousness during the middle of January. By March he was out of bed, still wearing his cast. In June he started his exercises, for he insisted on being strong. In August he put aside his cast. All during the fall he grew strong in order that the cycle might begin again on December 28th. How many times had it been since that first time back in 1997? Fourteen? Eighteen? One loses count, but no matter. If this is what they must do, let them.

  But why must they always do it on December 28th?

  <>

  ~ * ~

  SPY STORY

  BY ROBERT SHECKLEY

  Some pages back, in introducing “Love, Incorporated,” we quoted Kingsley Amis’ description of Robert Sheckley: “science-fiction’s premier gadfly.” He is a gadfly whose sting does not spare science fiction itself or the people who write it. Says Sheckley: “S-f seems to be a haven for skilled, artistically-inclined people who are satisfied with a low level of aspiration. They dream of truth and splendor, then sit down and turn out a silly little story about a robot who’s lost his best friend. Bold experimentation, in the world of s-f, is the weary old notion of dispensing with plot. When it gets literary, it is often precious. Its greatest fault is that it maintains so many deadly illusions about itself.” Not surprisingly, Sheckley’s own work is well-plotted, free of preciousness and pomposity, lean, astringent, and lightly brushed with a tint of satire that disguises the often mordant social commentary lying just beneath the entertaining surface. These qualities are divertingly demonstrated in “Spy Story.”

  ~ * ~

  I’M REALLY IN TROUBLE now, more trouble than I ever thought possible. It’s a little difficult to explain how I got into this mess, so maybe I’d better start at the beginning.

  Ever since I graduated trade school in 1991 I’d had a good job as sphinx valve assembler on the Starling Spaceship production line. I really loved those big ships, roaring to Cygnus and Alpha Centaurus and all the other places in the news. I was a young man with a future, I had friends, I even knew some girls.

  But it was no good.

  The job was fine, but I couldn’t do my best work with those hidden cameras focused on my hands. Not that I minded the cameras themselves; it was the whirring noise they made. I couldn’t concentrate.

  I complained to Internal Security. I told them, look, why can’t I have new, quiet cameras, like everybody else? But they were too busy to do anything about it.

  Then lots of little things started to bother me. Like the tape recorder in my TV set. The F.B.I, never adjusted it right, and it hummed all night long. I complained a hundred times. I told them, look, nobody else’s recorder hums that way. Why mine? But they always gave me that speech about winning the cold war, and how they couldn’t please everybody.

  Things like that make a person feel inferior. I suspected my government wasn’t interested in me.

  Take my Spy, for example. I was an 18-D Suspect—the same classification as the Vice-President—and this entitled me to part-time surveillance. But my particular Spy must have thought he was a movie actor, because he always wore a stained trench coat and a slouch hat jammed over his eyes. He was a thin, nervous type, and he followed practically on my heels for fear of losing me.

  Well, he was trying his best. Spying is a competitive business, and I couldn’t help but feel sorry, he was so bad at it. But it was embarrassing, just to be associated with him. My friends laughed themselves sick whenever I showed up with him breathing down the back of my neck. “Bill,” they said, “is that the best you can do?” And my girl friends thought he was creepy.

  Naturally, I went to the Senate Investigations Committee, and said, look, why can’t you give me a trained. Spy, like my friends have?

  They said they’d see, but I knew I wasn’t important enough to swing it.

  All these little things put me on edge, and any psychologist will tell you it doesn’t take something big to drive you bats. I was sick of being ignored, sick of being neglected.

  That’s when I started to think about Deep Space. There were billions of square miles of nothingness out there, dotted with too many stars to count. There were enough Earth-type planets for every man, woman and child. There had to be a spot for me.

  I bought a Universe Light List, and a tattered Galactic Pilot. I read through the Gravity Tide Book, and the Interstellar Pilot Charts. Finally I figured I knew as much as I’d ever know.

  All my savings went into an old Chrysler Star Clipper. This antique leaked oxygen along its seams. It had a touchy atomic pile, and spacewarp drives that might throw you practically anywhere. It was dangerous, but the only life I was risking was my own. At least, that’s what I thought.

  So I got my passport, blue clearance, red clearance, numbers certificate, space-sickness shots and deratification papers. At the job I collected my last day’s pay and waved to the cameras. In the apartment, I packed my clothes and said good-bye to the recorders. On the street, I shook hands with my poor Spy and wished him luck.

  I had burned my bridges behind me.

  All that was left was final clearance, so I hurried down to the Final Clearance Office. A clerk with white hands and a sun lamp tan looked at me dubiously.

  “Where did you wish to go?” he asked me.

  “Space,” I said.

  “Of course. But where in space?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “Just space. Deep Space. Free Space.”

  The clerk sighed wearily. “You’ll have to be more explicit than that, if you want a clearance. Ar
e you going to settle on a planet in American Space? Or did you wish to emigrate to British Space? Or Dutch Space? Or French Space?”

  “I didn’t know space could be owned,” I said.

  “Then you don’t keep up with the times,” he told me, with a superior smirk. “The United States has claimed all space between coordinates 2XA and DB2, except for a small and relatively unimportant segment which is claimed by Mexico. The Soviet Union has coordinates 3DB to L02—a very bleak region, I can assure you. And then there is the Belgian Grant, the Chinese Grant, the Ceylonese Grant, the Nigerian Grant--”

  I stopped him. “Where is Free Space?” I asked.

  “There is none.”

  “None at all? How far do the boundary lines extend?”

  “To infinity,” he told me proudly.

  For a moment it fetched me up short. Somehow I had never considered the possibility of every bit of infinite space being owned. But it was natural enough. After all, somebody had to own it.

  “I want to go into American Space,” I said. It didn’t seem to matter at the time, although it turned out otherwise.

  The clerk nodded sullenly. He checked my records back to the age of five—there was no sense in going back any further— and gave me the Final Clearance.

  The spaceport had my ship all serviced, and I managed to get away without blowing a tube. It wasn’t until Earth dwindled to a pinpoint and disappeared behind me that I realized that I was alone.

  ~ * ~

  Fifty hours out I was making a routine inspection of my stores, when I observed that one of my vegetable sacks had a shape unlike the other sacks. Upon opening it I found a girl, where a hundred pounds of potatoes should have been.

  A stowaway. I stared at her, open-mouthed.

  “Well,” she said, “are you going to help me out? Or would you prefer to close the sack and forget the whole thing?”

  I helped her out. She said, “Your potatoes are lumpy.”

  I could have said the same of her, with considerable approval. She was a slender girl, for the most part, with hair the reddish blonde color of a flaring jet, a pert, dirt-smudged face and brooding blue eyes. On Earth, I would gladly have walked ten miles to meet her. In space, I wasn’t so sure.

  “Could you give me something to eat?” she asked. “All I’ve had since we left is raw carrots.”

  I fixed her a sandwich. While she ate, I asked, “What are you doing here?”

  “You wouldn’t understand,” she said, between mouthfuls.

  “Sure I would.”

  She walked to a porthole and looked out at the spectacle of stars—American stars, most of them—burning in the void of American space.

  “I wanted to be free,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  She sank wearily on my cot. “I suppose you’d call me a romantic,” she said quietly. “I’m the sort of fool who recites poetry to herself in the black night, and cries in front of some absurd little statuette. Yellow autumn leaves make me tremble, and dew on a green lawn seems like the tears of all Earth. My psychiatrist tells me I’m a misfit.”

  She closed her eyes with a weariness I could appreciate.

  Standing in a potato sack for 50 hours can be pretty exhausting.

  “Earth was getting me down,” she said. “I couldn’t stand it —the regimentation, the discipline, the privation, the cold war, the hot war, everything. I wanted to laugh in free air, run through green fields, walk unmolested through gloomy forests, sing--”

  “But why did you pick on me?”

  “You were bound for freedom,” she said. “I’ll leave, if you insist.”

  That was a pretty silly idea, out in the depths of space. And I couldn’t afford the fuel to turn back.

  “You can stay,” I said.

  “Thank you,” she said very softly. “You do understand.”

  “Sure, sure,” I said. “But we’ll have to get a few things straight. First of all--” But she had fallen asleep on my cot, with a trusting smile on her lips.

  Immediately I searched her handbag. I found five lipsticks, a compact, a phial of Venus V perfume, a paper-bound book of poetry, and a badge that read: Special Investigator, FBI.

  I had suspected it, of course. Girls don’t talk that way, but Spies always do.

  It was nice to know my government was still looking out for me. It made space seem less lonely.

  ~ * ~

  The ship moved into the depths of American Space. By working 15 hours out of 24, I managed to keep my spacewarp drive in one piece, my atomic piles reasonably cool, and my hull seams tight. Mavis O’Day (as my Spy was named) made all meals, took care of the light housekeeping, and hid a number of small cameras around the ship. They buzzed abominably, but I pretended not to notice.

  Under the circumstances, however, my relations with Miss O’Day were quite proper.

  The trip was proceeding normally—even happily—until something happened.

  I was dozing at the controls. Suddenly an intense light flared on my starboard bow. I leaped backward, knocking over Mavis as she was inserting a new reel of film into her number three camera.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  “Oh, trample me anytime,” she said.

  I helped her to her feet. Her supple nearness was dangerously pleasant, and the tantalizing scent of Venus V tickled my nostrils.

  “You can let me go now,” she said.

  “I know,” I said, and continued to hold her. My mind inflamed by her nearness, I heard myself saying, “Mavis—I haven’t known you very long, but-”

  “Yes, Bill?” she asked.

  In the madness of the moment I had forgotten our relationship of Suspect and Spy. I don’t know what I might have said. But just then a second light blazed outside the ship.

  I released Mavis and hurried to the controls. With difficulty I throttled the old Star Clipper to an idle, and looked around.

  Outside, in the vast vacuum of space, was a single fragment of rock. Perched upon it was a child in a spacesuit, holding a box of flares in one hand and a tiny spacesuited dog in the other.

  Quickly we got him inside and unbuttoned his spacesuit.

  “My dog-” he said.

  “He’s all right, son,” I told him.

  “Terribly sorry to break in on you this way,” the lad said.

  “Forget it,” I said. “What were you doing out there?”

  “Sir,” he began, in treble tones, “I will have to start at the start. My father was a spaceship test pilot, and he died valiantly, trying to break the light barrier. Mother recently remarried. Her present husband is a large, black-haired man with narrow, shifty eyes and tightly compressed lips. Until recently he was employed as a ribbon clerk in a large department store.

  “He resented my presence from the beginning. I suppose I reminded him of my dead father, with my blonde curls, large oval eyes and merry, outgoing ways. Our relationship smouldered fitfully. Then an uncle of his died (under suspicious circumstances) and he inherited holdings in British Space.

  “Accordingly, we set out in our spaceship. As soon as we reached this deserted area, he said to mother, ‘Rachel, he’s old enough to fend for himself.’ My mother said, ‘Dirk, he’s so young!’ But soft-hearted, laughing mother was no match for the inflexible will of the man I would never call father. He thrust me into my spacesuit, handed me a box of flares, put Flicker into his own little suit, and said, ‘A lad can do all right for himself in space these days.’ ‘Sir,’ I said, ‘there is no planet within two hundred light years.’ ‘You’ll make out,’ he grinned, and thrust me upon this spur of rock.”

  The boy paused for breath, and his dog Flicker looked up at me with moist oval eyes. I gave the dog a bowl of milk and bread, and watched the lad eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Mavis carried the little chap into the bunk room and tenderly tucked him into bed.

  I returned to the controls, started the ship again, and turned on the intercom.

  “Wake up, you little idiot!” I hear
d Mavis say.

  “Lemme sleep,” the boy answered.

  “Wake up! What did Congressional Investigation mean by sending you here? Don’t they realize this is an FBI case?”

  “He’s been reclassified as a 10-F Suspect,” the boy said. “That calls for full surveillance.”

  “Yes, but I’m here,” Mavis cried.

  “You didn’t do so well on your last case,” the boy said. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but Security comes first.”

  “So they send you,” Mavis said, sobbing now. “A twelve-year-old child-”

  “I’ll be thirteen in seven months.”

  “A twelve-year-old child! And I’ve tried so hard! I’ve studied, read books, taken evening courses, listened to lectures-”