by Lake, Jay
Si said, “Look, how about another drink?”
Natalie Paskov said, “Oh, I’d love to have a drink with you, Mr....”
“Si,” Si said. He motioned to the bartender with a circular twist of the hand indicating their need for two more of the same. “How come you know so much about it? You don’t meet many people who are interested in space any more. In fact, most people are almost contemptuous, like. Think it’s kind of a big boondoggle deal to help use up a lot of materials and all and keep the economy going.”
Natalie said earnestly, “Why, I’ve been a space fan all my life. I’ve read all about it. Have always known the names of all the space pilots and everything about them, ever since I was a child. I suppose you’d say I have the dream that Doctor Girard-Perregaux spoke about.”
Si chuckled. “A real buff, eh? You know, it’s kind of funny. I was never much interested in it. And I got a darn sight less interested after my first run and I found out what space cafard was.”
She frowned. “I don’t believe I know much about that.”
Sitting in the Kudos Room with the most beautiful girl to whom he had ever talked, Si could be nonchalant about the subject. “Old Gubelin keeps that angle mostly hushed up and out of the magazine and newspaper articles. Says there’s enough adverse publicity about space exploration already. But at this stage of the game when the whole ship’s crammed tight with this automatic scientific apparatus and all, there’s precious little room in the conning tower and you’re the only man aboard. The Doc says later on when ships are bigger and there’s a whole flock of people aboard, there won’t be any such thing as space cafard, but....” Of a sudden the right side of Si Pond’s mouth began to tic and he hurriedly took up his drink and knocked it back.
He cleared his throat. “Let’s talk about some other angle. Look, how about something to eat, Natalie? I’m celebrating my retirement, like. You know, out on the town. If you’re free....”
She put the tip of a finger to her lips, looking for the moment like a small girl rather than an ultra-sophisticate. “Supposedly, I have an appointment,” she said hesitantly.
* * * *
When the mists rolled out in the morning—if it was still morning—it was to the tune of an insistent hotel chime. Si rolled over on his back and growled, “Zo-ro-as-ter, cut that out. What do you want?”
The hotel communicator said softly, “Checking-out time, sir, is at two o’clock.”
Si groaned. He couldn’t place the last of the evening at all. He didn’t remember coming back to the hotel. He couldn’t recall where he had separated from, what was her name ... Natalie.
He vaguely recalled having some absinthe in some fancy club she had taken him to. What was the gag she’d made? Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder. And then the club where they had the gambling machines. And the mists had rolled in on him. Mountains of the Moon! but that girl could drink. He simply wasn’t that used to the stuff. You don’t drink in Space School and you most certainly don’t drink when in space. His binges had been few and far between.
He said now, “I don’t plan on checking out today. Don’t bother me.” He turned to his pillow.
The hotel communicator said quietly, “Sorry, sir, but your credit balance does not show sufficient to pay your bill for another day.”
Si Pond shot up, upright in bed, suddenly cold sober.
His eyes darted about the room, as though he was seeing it for the first time. His clothes, he noted, were thrown over a chair haphazardly. He made his way to them, his face empty, and fished about for his credit card, finding it in a side pocket. He wavered to the teevee-phone and thrust the card against the screen. He demanded, his voice as empty as his expression, “Balance check, please.”
In less than a minute the robot-voice told him: “Ten shares of Inalienable Basic. Current cash credit, forty-two dollars and thirty cents.” The screen went dead.
He sank back into the chair which held his clothes, paying no attention to them. It couldn’t be right. Only yesterday, he’d had twelve shares of Variable Basic, immediately convertible into more than fifty thousand dollars, had he so wished to convert rather than collect dividends indefinitely. Not only had he the twelve shares of Variable Basic, but more than a thousand dollars to his credit.
He banged his fist against his mouth. Conceivably, he might have gone through his thousand dollars. It was possible, though hardly believable. The places he’d gone to with that girl in the Chinese get-up were probably the most expensive in Greater Metropolis. But, however expensive, he couldn’t possibly have spent fifty thousand dollars! Not possibly.
He came to his feet again to head for the teevee screen and demand an audit of the past twenty-four hours from Central Statistics. That’d show it up. Every penny expended. Something was crazy here. Someway that girl had pulled a fast one. She didn’t seem the type. But something had happened to his twelve shares of Variable Basic, and he wasn’t standing for it. It was his security, his defense against slipping back into the ranks of the cloddies, the poor demi-buttocked ranks of the average man, the desperately dull life of those who subsisted on the bounty of the Ultrawelfare State and the proceeds of ten shares of Inalienable Basic.
He dialed Statistics and placed his card against the screen. His voice was strained now. “An audit of all expenditures for the past twenty-four hours.”
Then he sat and watched.
His vacuum-tube trip to Manhattan was the first item. Two dollars and fifty cents. Next was his hotel suite. Fifty dollars. Well, he had known it was going to be expensive. A Slivovitz Sour at the Kudos Room, he found, went for three dollars a throw, and the Far out Coolers Natalie drank, four dollars. Absinthe was worse still, going for ten dollars a drink.
He was impatient. All this didn’t account for anything like a thousand dollars, not to speak of fifty thousand.
The audit threw an item he didn’t understand. A one dollar credit. And then, immediately afterward, a hundred dollar credit. Si scowled.
And then slowly reached out and flicked the set off. For it had all come back to him.
At first he had won. Won so that the other players had crowded around him, watching. Five thousand, ten thousand. Natalie had been jubilant. The others had cheered him on. He’d bet progressively higher, smaller wagers becoming meaningless and thousands being involved on single bets. A five thousand bet on odd had lost, and then another. The kibitzers had gone silent. When he had attempted to place another five thousand bet, the teevee screen robot voice had informed him dispassionately that his current cash credit balance was insufficient to cover that amount.
Yes. He could remember now. He had needed no time to decide, had simply snapped, “Sell one share of Variable Basic at current market value.”
The other eleven shares had taken the route of the first.
When it was finally all gone and he had looked around, it was to find that Natalie Paskov was gone as well.
* * * *
Academician Lofting Gubelin, seated in his office, was being pontifical. His old friend Hans Girard-Perregaux had enough other things on his mind to let him get away with it, only half following the monologue.
“I submit,” Gubelin orated, “that there is evolution in society. But it is by fits and starts, and by no means a constant thing. Whole civilizations can go dormant, so far as progress is concerned, for millennia at a time.”
Girard-Perregaux said mildly, “Isn’t that an exaggeration, Lofting?”
“No, by Zoroaster, it is not! Take the Egyptians. Their greatest monuments, such as the pyramids, were constructed in the earlier dynasties. Khufu, or Cheops, built the largest at Gizeh. He was the founder of the 4th Dynasty, about the year 2900 B. C. Twenty-five dynasties later, and nearly three thousand years, there was no greatly discernable change in the Egyptian culture.”
Gira
rd-Perregaux egged him on gently. “The sole example of your theory I can think of, offhand.”
“Not at all!” Gubelin glared. “The Mayans are a more recent proof. Their culture goes back to at least 500 B. C. At that time their glyph-writing was already wide-spread and their cities, eventually to number in the hundreds, being built. By the time of Christ they had reached their peak. And they remained there until the coming of the Spaniards, neither gaining nor losing, in terms of evolution of society.”
His colleague sighed. “And your point, Lofting?”
“Isn’t it blisteringly obvious?” the other demanded. “We’re in danger of reaching a similar static condition here and now. The Ultrawelfare State!” He snorted indignation. “The Conformist State or the Status Quo State, is more like it. I tell you, Hans, all progress is being dried up. There is no will to delve into the unknown, no burning fever to explore the unexplored. And this time it isn’t a matter of a single area, such as Egypt or Yucatan, but our whole world. If man goes into intellectual coma this time, then all the race slows down, not merely a single element of it.”
He rose suddenly from the desk chair he’d been occupying to pace the room. “The race must find a new frontier, a new ocean to cross, a new enemy to fight.”
Girard-Perregaux raised his eyebrows.
“Don’t be a cloddy,” Gubelin snapped. “You know what I mean. Not a human enemy, not even an alien intelligence. But something against which we must pit our every wit, our every strength, our strongest determination. Otherwise, we go dull, we wither on the vine.”
The other at long last chuckled. “My dear Lofting, you wax absolutely lyrical.”
Gubelin suddenly stopped his pacing, returned to his desk and sank back into his chair. He seemed to add a score of years to his age, and his face sagged. “I don’t know why I take it out on you, Hans. You’re as aware of the situation as I. Man’s next frontier is space. First the planets, and then a reaching out to the stars. This is our new frontier, our new ocean to cross.”
His old friend was nodding. He brought his full attention to the discussion at last. “And we’ll succeed, Lofting. The last trip Pond made gives us ample evidence that we can actually colonize and exploit the Jupiter satellites. Two more runs, at most three, and we can release our findings in such manner that they’ll strike the imaginations of every Tom, Dick and Harry like nothing since Columbus made his highly exaggerated reports on his New World.”
“Two or three more runs,” Gubelin grunted bitterly. “You’ve heard the rumors. Appropriations is going to lower the boom on us. Unless we can get Pond back into harness, we’re sunk. The runs will never be made. I tell you, Hans....”
* * * *
But Hans Girard-Perregaux was wagging him to silence with a finger. “They’ll be made. I’ve taken steps to see friend Seymour Pond comes dragging back to us.”
“But he hates space! The funker probably won’t consent to come within a mile of the New Albuquerque Spaceport for the rest of his life, the blistering cloddy.”
A desk light flicked green, and Girard-Perregaux raised his eyebrows. “Exactly at the psychological moment. If I’m not mistaken, Lofting, that is probably our fallen woman.”
“Our what?”
But Doctor Hans Girard-Perregaux had come to his feet and personally opened the door. “Ah, my dear,” he said affably.
Natalie Paskov, done today in Bulgarian peasant garb, and as faultless in appearance as she had been in the Kudos Room, walked briskly into the office.
“Assignment carried out,” she said crisply.
“Indeed,” Girard-Perregaux said approvingly. “So soon?”
Gubelin looked from one to the other. “What in the blistering name of Zoroaster is going on?”
His friend said. “Academician Gubelin, may I present Operative Natalie of Extraordinary Services Incorporated?”
“Extraordinary Services?” Gubelin blurted.
“In this case,” Natalie said smoothly, even while taking the chair held for her by Doctor Girard-Perregaux, “a particularly apt name. It was a dirty trick.”
“But for a good cause, my dear.”
She shrugged. “So I am often told, when sent on these far-out assignments.”
Girard-Perregaux, in spite of her words, was beaming at her. “Please report in full,” he said, ignoring his colleague’s obvious bewilderment.
Natalie Paskov made it brief. “I picked up the subject in the Kudos Room of the Greater Metropolis Hotel, pretending to be a devotee of the space program as an excuse. It soon developed that he had embarked upon a celebration of his retirement. He was incredibly naive, and allowed me to over-indulge him in semi-narcotics as well as alcohol, so that his defensive inhibitions were low. I then took him to a gambling spot where, so dull that he hardly knew what he was doing, he lost his expendable capital.”
Gubelin had been staring at her, but now he blurted, “But suppose he had won?”
She shrugged it off. “Hardly, the way I was encouraging him to wager. Each time he won, I urged him to double up. It was only a matter of time until ...” she let the sentence dribble away.
Girard-Perregaux rubbed his hands together briskly. “Then, in turn, it is but a matter of time until friend Pond comes around again.”
“That I wouldn’t know,” Natalie Paskov said disinterestedly. “My job is done. However, the poor man seems so utterly opposed to returning to your service that I wouldn’t be surprised if he remained in his retirement, living on his Inalienable Basic shares. He seems literally terrified of being subjected to space cafard again.”
But Hans Girard-Perregaux wagged a finger negatively at her. “Not after having enjoyed a better way of life for the past decade. A person is able to exist on the Inalienable Basic dividends, but it is almost impossible to bring oneself to it once a fuller life has been enjoyed. No, Seymour Pond will never go back to the dullness of life the way it is lived by nine-tenths of our population.”
Natalie came to her feet. “Well, gentlemen, you’ll get your bill—a whopping one. I hope your need justifies this bit of dirty work. Frankly, I am considering my resignation from Extraordinary Services, although I’m no more anxious to live on my Inalienable Basic than poor Si Pond is. Good day, gentlemen.”
She started toward the door.
The teevee-phone on Gubelin’s desk lit up and even as Doctor Girard-Perregaux was saying unctuously to the girl, “Believe me, my dear, the task you have performed, though odious, will serve the whole race,” the teevee-phone said:
“Sir, you asked me to keep track of Pilot Seymour Pond. There is a report on the news. He suicided this morning.”
THE MASKED WORLD, by Jack Williamson
Originally published in Worlds of Tomorrow, October 1963.
The planet wore a mask.
At ten million miles, it was a sullen yellow eye. At one million, a scarred and evil leer. Outside the smoking circle our landing-jets had sterilized, it was a hideous veil of hairy black tentacles and huge sallow blooms, hiding the riddle of its sinister genes.
On most worlds that we astronauts have found, the life is vaguely like our own. Similar nucleotides are linked along similar helical chains of DNA, carrying similar genetic messages. A similar process replicates the chains when the cells divide, to carry the complex blue-prints for a particular root or eye or wing accurately down across ten thousand generations.
But even the genes were different here—enormously complicated. Here the simplest-seeming weed had more and longer chains of DNA than anything we had seen before. What was their message?
We had come to read it, with our new genetic micro-probe. A hundred precious tons of microscopic electronic gear, it was designed to observe and manipulate the smallest units of life. It could reach even those strange genes.
That was our mi
ssion.
Ours was the seventh survey ship to approach the planet. Six before us had been lost without trace. We were to find out why.
Our pilot was Lance Llandark. A lean hard man, silent and cold as the gray-cased micro-probe. We hated him—until someone learned why he had volunteered to come.
His wife had been pilot of the ship before us. When we knew that, we began to hear the hidden tension in his tired voice, monotonously calling on every band: “Come in, Six.... Come in Six....”
Six never came in.
* * * *
For two days, we watched the planet. The shallow ditch our jets had dug. The charred stumps. The jungle beyond—the visible mask of those monstrous genes—rank, dark, utterly alien.
At the third dawn, Lance Llandark took two of us out in a ‘copter. Flying a grid over the landing area, we mapped six shallow pock-marks on that scowling wilderness, where our ships must have landed.
We dropped into the newest crater, where black stumps jutted like broken teeth out of queerly bare red muck. A yellow-scummed stream oozed across it. By the stream we found a fine-boned human skeleton.
A nightmare plant stood guard beside the bones. Its thick leaves were strangely streaked, twisted with vegetable agony, half poison spine and half blighted bloom. Shapeless blobs of rotting fruit were falling from it over those slender bones.
Lance Llandark stood up.
“Her turquoise thunderbird.” He showed us the bit of blackened silver and blue-veined stone. “Back on Terra.... Back when we were student pilots.... We bought it from an Indian in an old, old town called Sante Fe.”
He bent again.
“Lilith?” he whispered. “Lilith, what killed you?”
We found no other bones, nothing even to tell us what force or poison kept the creeping jungle back from that solitary plant. We left at dusk. Tenderly, Lance Llandark brought the gathered bones. Carefully we carried a few leaves and dried pods from that crazy sentinel plant. We found no other clue.