The Second Science Fiction Megapack

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  The psychist made a facial sign to the hawk-faced man that meant, “Oh, brother!”

  The hawk-faced man signaled back, “Steady, boy!”

  “It’s not too much to ask,” the psychist agreed. Barlow, sensing a seller’s market, said, “Power!”

  “Power?” the hawk-faced man repeated puzzledly. “Your own hydro station or nuclear pile?”

  “I mean a world dictatorship with me as dictator!”

  “Well, now—” said the psychist, but the hawk-faced man interrupted, “It would take a special emergency act of Congress but the situation warrants it. I think that can be guaranteed.”

  “Could you give us some indication of your plan?” the psychist asked.

  “Ever hear of lemmings?”

  “No.”

  “They are—were, I guess, since you haven’t heard of them—little animals in Norway, and every few years they’d swarm to the coast and swim out to sea until they drowned. I figure on putting some lemming urge into the population.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll save that till I get the right signatures on the deal.”

  The hawk-faced man said, “I’d like to work with you on it, Barlow. My name’s Ryan-Ngana.”

  He put out his hand. Barlow looked closely at the hand, then at the man’s face.

  “Ryan what?”

  “Ngana.”

  “That sounds like an African name.”

  “It is. My mother’s father was a Watusi.”

  Barlow didn’t take the hand.

  “I thought you looked pretty dark. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I don’t think I’d be at my best working with you. There must be somebody else just as well qualified, I’m sure.”

  The psychist made a facial sign to Ryan-Ngana that meant, “Steady yourself, boy!”

  “Very well,” Ryan-Ngana told Barlow. “We’ll see what arrangement can be made.”

  “It’s not that I’m prejudiced, you understand. Some of my best friends—”

  “Mr. Barlow, don’t give it another thought. Anybody who could pick on the lemming analogy is going to be useful to us.”

  And so he would, thought Ryan-Ngana, alone in the office after Tinny-Peete had taken Barlow up to the helicopter stage. So he would. Poprob had exhausted every rational attempt and the new Poprobattacklines would have to be irrational or subrational. This creature from the past with his lemming legends and his improved building lots would be a fountain of precious vicious self-interest. Ryan-Ngana sighed and stretched. He had to go and run the San Francisco subway. Summoned early from the Pole to study Barlow, he’d left unfinished a nice little theorem. Between interruptions, he was slowly constructing an n-dimensional geometry whose foundations and superstructure owed no debt whatsoever to intuition.

  Upstairs, waiting for a helicopter, Barlow was explaining to TinnyPeete that he had nothing against Negroes, and Tinny-Peete wished he had some of Ryan-Ngana’s imperturbability and humor for the ordeal. The helicopter took them to International Airport where, TinnyPeete explained, Barlow would leave for the Pole. The man from the past wasn’t sure he’d like a dreary waste of ice and cold.

  “It’s all right,” said the psychist. “A civilized layout. Warm, pleasant. You’ll be able to work more efficiently there. All the facts at your fingertips, a good secretary—”

  “I’ll need a pretty big staff,” said Barlow, who had learned from thousands of deals never to take the first offer.

  “I meant a private, confidential one,” said Tinny-Peete readily, “but you can have as many as you want. You’ll naturally have top-primary-top-priority if you really have a workable plan.”

  “Let’s not forget this dictatorship angle,” said Barlow.

  He didn’t know that the psychist would just as readily have promised him deification to get him happily on the “rocket” for the Pole. Tinny-Peete had no wish to be torn limb from limb; he knew very well that it would end that way if the population learned from this anachronism that there was a small elite which considered itself head, shoulders, trunk and groin above the rest. The fact that this assumption was perfectly true and the fact that the elite was condemned by its superiority to a life of the most grinding toil would not be considered; the difference would.

  The psychist finally put Barlow aboard the “rocket” with some thirty people—real people—headed for the Pole. Barlow was airsick all the way because of a posthypnotic suggestion Tinny-Peete had planted in him. One idea was to make him as averse as possible to a return trip, and another idea was to spare the other passengers from his aggressive, talkative company.

  * * * *

  Barlow during the first day at the Pole was reminded of his first day in the Army. It was the same now-where-the-hell-are-we-going-to-put-you? business until he took a firm line with them. Then instead of acting like supply sergeants they acted like hotel clerks. It was a wonderful, wonderfully calculated buildup, and one that he failed to suspect. After all, in his time a visitor from the past would have been lionized. At day’s end he reclined in a snug underground billet with the sixty-mile gales roaring yards overhead and tried to put two and two together. It was like old times, he thought—like a coup in real estate where you had the competition by the throat, like a fifty-percent rent boost when you knew damned well there was no place for the tenants to move, like smiling when you read over the breakfast orange juice that the city council had decided to build a school on the ground you had acquired by a deal with the city council.

  And it was simple. He would just sell tundra building lots to eagerly suicidal lemmings, and that was absolutely all there was to solving The Problem that had these double-domes spinning. They’d have to work out most of the details, naturally, but what the hell, that was what subordinates were for. He’d need specialists in advertising, engineering, communications—did they know anything about hypnotism? That might be helpful. If not, there’d have to be a lot of bribery done, but he’d make sure—damned sure—there were unlimited funds. Just selling building lots to lemmings.

  He wished, as he fell asleep, that poor Verna could have been in on this. It was his biggest, most stupendous deal. Verna—that sharp shyster Sam Zimmerman must have swindled her.

  * * * *

  It began the next day with people coming to visit him. He knew the approach. They merely wanted to be helpful to their illustrious visitor from the past, and would he help fill them in about his era, which unfortunately was somewhat obscure historically, and what did he think could be done about The Problem? He told them he was too old to be roped any more, and they wouldn’t get any information out of him until he got a letter of intent from at least the Polar President and a session of the Polar Congress empowered to make him dictator.

  He got the letter and the session. He presented his program, was asked whether his conscience didn’t revolt at its callousness, explained succinctly that a deal was a deal and anybody who wasn’t smart enough to protect himself didn’t deserve protection—“Caveat emptor,” he threw in for scholarship, and had to translate it to “Let the buyer beware.” He didn’t, he stated, give a damn about either the morons or their intelligent slaves; he’d told them his price and that was all he was interested in. Would they meet it or wouldn’t they?

  The Polar President offered to resign in his favor, with certain temporary emergency powers that the Polar Congress would vote him if he thought them necessary. Barlow demanded the title of World Dictator, complete control of world finances, salary to be decided by himself, and the publicity campaign and historical writeup to begin at once.

  “As for the emergency powers,” he added, “they are neither to be temporary nor limited.”

  Somebody wanted the floor to discuss the matter, with the declared hope that perhaps Barlow would modify his demands.

  “You’ve got the proposition,” Barlow said. “I’m not knocking off even ten percent.”

  “But what if the Congress refuses, sir?” the President asked.

  “
Then you can stay up here at the Pole and try to work it out yourselves. I’ll get what I want from the morons. A shrewd operator like me doesn’t have to compromise; I haven’t got a single competitor in this whole cockeyed moronic era.”

  Congress waived debate and voted by show of hands. Barlow won—unanimously.

  “You don’t know how close you came to losing me,” he said in his first official address to the joint Houses. “I’m not the boy to haggle; either I get what I ask, or I go elsewhere. The first thing I want is to see designs for a new palace for me—nothing un-ostentatious, either—and your best painters and sculptors to start working on my portraits and statues. Meanwhile, I’ll get my staff together.” He dismissed the Polar President and the Polar Congress, telling them that he’d let them know when the next meeting would be.

  A week later, the program started with North America the first target. Mrs. Garvy was resting after dinner before the ordeal of turning on the dishwasher. The TV, of course, was on, and it said, “Oooh!”—long, shuddery and ecstatic, the cue for the Parfum Assault Criminale spot commercial.

  “Girls,” said the announcer hoarsely, “do you want your man? It’s easy to get him—easy as a trip to Venus.”

  “Huh?” said Mrs. Garvy.

  “Wassamatter?” snorted her husband, starting out of a doze.

  “Ja hear that?”

  “Wha’?”

  “He said ‘easy like a trip to Venus.’”

  “So?”

  “Well, I thought ya couldn’t get to Venus. I thought they just had that one rocket thing that crashed on the Moon.”

  “Aah, women don’t keep up with the news,” said Garvy righteously, subsiding again.

  “Oh,” said his wife uncertainly.

  And the next day, on Henry’s Other Mistress, there was a new character who had just breezed in: Buzz Rentshaw, Master Rocket Pilot of the Venus run. On Henry’s Other Mistress, “the broadcast drama about you and your neighbors, folksy people, ordinary people, real people!” Mrs. Garvy listened with amazement over a cooling cup of coffee as Buzz made hay of her hazy convictions.

  MONA: Darling, it’s so good to see you again!

  BUZZ: You don’t know how I’ve missed you on that dreary Venus run.

  SOUND: Venetian blind run down, key turned in lock.

  MONA: Was it very dull, dearest?

  BUZZ: Let’s not talk about my humdrum job, darling. Let’s talk about us.

  SOUND: Creaking bed.

  Well, the program was back to normal at last.

  * * * *

  That evening, Mrs. Garvy tried to ask again whether her husband was sure about those rockets, but he was dozing right through Take It and Stick It, so she watched the screen and forgot the puzzle. She was still rocking with laughter at the gag line, “Would you buy it for a quarter?” when the commercial went on for the detergent powder she always faithfully loaded her dishwasher with on the first of every month. The announcer displayed mountains of suds from a tiny piece of the stuff and coyly added, “Of course, Cleano don’t lay around for you to pick up like the soap root on Venus, but it’s pretty cheap and it’s almost pretty near just as good. So for us plain folks who ain’t lucky enough to live up there on Venus, Cleano is the real cleaning stuff!” Then the chorus went into their “Cleano-is-the-stuff” jingle, but Mrs. Garvy didn’t hear it. She was a stubborn woman, but it occurred to her that she was very sick indeed. She didn’t want to worry her husband.

  The next day she quietly made an appointment with her family freud. In the waiting room she picked up a fresh new copy of Readers Pablum and put it down with a faint palpitation. The lead article, according to the table of contents on the cover, was titled “The Most Memorable Venusian I Ever Met.”

  “The freud will see you now,” said the nurse, and Mrs. Garvy tottered into his office. His traditional glasses and whiskers were reassuring.

  She choked out the ritual, “Freud, forgive me, for I have neuroses.”

  He chanted the antiphonal, “Tut, my dear girl, what seems to be the trouble?”

  “I got like a hole in the head,” she quavered. “I seem to forget all kinds of things. Things like everybody seems to know and I don’t.”

  “Well, that happens to everybody occasionally, my dear. I suggest a vacation on Venus.”

  The freud stared, openmouthed, at the empty chair.

  His nurse came in and demanded, “Hey, you see how she scrammed? What was the matter with her?”

  He took off his glasses and whiskers meditatively. “You can search me. I told her she should maybe try a vacation on Venus.” A momentary bafflement came into his face, and he dug through his desk drawers until he found a copy of the four-color, profusely illustrated journal of his profession. It had come that morning, and he had lip-read it, though looking mostly at the pictures. He leafed to the article “Advantages of the Planet Venus in Rest Cures.”

  “It’s right there,” he said.

  The nurse looked.

  “It sure is,” she agreed. “Why shouldn’t it be?”

  “The trouble with these here neurotics,” decided the freud, “is that they all the time got to fight reality. Show in the next twitch.”

  He put on his glasses and whiskers again and forgot Mrs. Garvy and her strange behavior.

  “Freud, forgive me, for I have neuroses.”

  “Tut, my dear girl, what seems to be the trouble?”

  * * * *

  Like many cures of mental disorders, Mrs. Garvy’s was achieved largely by self-treatment. She disciplined herself sternly out of the crazy notion that there had been only one rocket ship and that one a failure. She could join without wincing, eventually, in any conversation on the desirability of Venus as a place to retire, on its fabulous floral profusion.

  Finally she went to Venus. All her friends were trying to book passage with the Evening Star Travel and Real Estate Corporation, but naturally the demand was crushing. She considered herself lucky to get a seat at last for the two-week summer cruise.

  The spaceship took off from a place called Los Alamos, New Mexico. It looked just like all the spaceships on television and in the picture magazines but was more comfortable than you would expect. Mrs. Garvy was delighted with the fifty or so fellow-passengers assembled before takeoff. They were from all over the country, and she had a distinct impression that they were on the brainy side. The captain, a tall, hawk-faced, impressive fellow named Ryan Something-or-other, welcomed them aboard and trusted that their trip would be a memorable one. He regretted that there would be nothing to see because, “due to the meteorite season,” the ports would be dogged down.

  It was disappointing, yet reassuring that the line was taking no chances. There was the expected momentary discomfort at takeoff and then two monotonous days of droning travel through space to be whiled away in the lounge at cards or craps. The landing was a routine bump and the voyagers were issued tablets to swallow to immunize them against any minor ailments. When the tablets took effect, the lock was opened, and Venus was theirs. It looked much like a tropical island on Earth, except for a blanket of cloud overhead. But it had a heady, otherworldly quality that was intoxicating and glamorous. The ten days of the vacation were suffused with a hazy magic. The soap root, as advertised, was free and sudsy. The fruits, mostly tropical varieties transplanted from Earth, were delightful. The simple shelters provided by the travel company were more than adequate for the balmy days and nights. It was with sincere regret that the voyagers filed again into the ship and swallowed more tablets doled out to counteract and sterilize any Venus illnesses they might unwittingly communicate to Earth.

  Vacationing was one thing. Power politics was another.

  At the Pole, a small man was in a soundproof room, his face deathly pale and his body limp in a straight chair. In the American Senate Chamber, Senator Hull-Mendoza (Synd., N. Cal.) was saying, “Mr. President and gentlemen, I would be remiss in my duty as a legislature if’n I didn’t bring to the attention of the
au-gust body I see here a perilous situation which is fraught with peril. As is well known to members of this au-gust body, the perfection of space flight has brought with it a situation I can only describe as fraught with peril. Mr. President and gentlemen, now that swift American rockets now traverse the trackless void of space between this planet and our nearest planetarial neighbor in space—and, gentlemen, I refer to Venus, the star of dawn, the brightest jewel in fair Vulcan’s diadome—now, I say, I want to inquire what steps are being taken to colonize Venus with a vanguard of patriotic citizens like those minutemen of yore.

  “Mr. President and gentlemen! There are in this world nations, envious nations—I do not name Mexico—who by fair means or foul may seek to wrest from Columbia’s grasp the torch of freedom of space; nations whose low living standards and innate depravity give them an unfair advantage over the citizens of our fair republic.

  “This is my program: I suggest that a city of more than 100,000 population be selected by lot. The citizens of the fortunate city are to be awarded choice lands on Venus free and clear, to have and to hold and convey to their descendants. And the national government shall provide free transportation to Venus for these citizens. And this program shall continue, city by city, until there has been deposited on Venus a sufficient vanguard of citizens to protect our manifest rights in that planet.

  “Objections will be raised, for carping critics we have always with us. They will say there isn’t enough steel. They will call it a cheap giveaway. I say there is enough steel for one city’s population to be transferred to Venus, and that is all that is needed. For when the time comes for the second city to be transferred, the first, emptied city can be wrecked for the needed steel! And is it a giveaway? Yes! It is the most glorious giveaway in the history of mankind! Mr. President and gentlemen, there is no time to waste—Venus must be American!”

  Black-Kupperman, at the Pole, opened his eyes and said feebly:

  “The style was a little uneven. Do you think anybody’ll notice?”

  “You did fine, boy; just fine,” Barlow reassured him.

  Hull-Mendoza’s bill became law. Drafting machines at the South Pole were busy around the clock and the Pittsburgh steel mills spewed millions of plates into the Los Alamos spaceport of the Evening Star Travel and Real Estate Corporation. It was going to be Los Angeles, for logistic reasons, and the three most accomplished psychokineticists went to Washington and mingled in the crowd at the drawing to make certain that the Los Angeles capsule slithered into the fingers of the blindfolded Senator. Los Angeles loved the idea and a forest of spaceships began to blossom in the desert. They weren’t very good spaceships, but they didn’t have to be. A team at the Pole worked at Barlow’s direction on a mail setup. There would have to be letters to and from Venus to keep the slightest taint of suspicion from arising. Luckily Barlow remembered that the problem had been solved once before—by Hitler. Relatives of persons incinerated in the furnaces of Lublin or Majdanek continued to get cheery postal cards. The Los Angeles flight went off on schedule, under tremendous press, newsreel and television coverage. The world cheered the gallant Angelenos who were setting off on their patriotic voyage to the land of milk and honey. The forest of spaceships thundered up, and up, and out of sight without untoward incident. Billions envied the Angelenos, cramped and on short rations though they were. Wreckers from San Francisco, whose capsule came up second, moved immediately into the city of the angels for the scrap steel their own flight would require. Senator Hull-Mendoza’s constituents could do no less. The president of Mexico, hypnotically alarmed at this extension of yanqui imperialismo beyond the stratosphere, launched his own Venus-colony program. Across the water it was England versus Ireland, France versus Germany, China versus Russia, India versus Indonesia. Ancient hatreds grew into the flames that were rocket ships assailing the air by hundreds daily.