Collected Fiction

by Kris Neville

“Gee . . . A whole kwiggi?”

  “You’d like that?”

  “You bet I would!”

  “Well,” Mr. Smith said, “as soon as they let us send people to them, I’ll talk to your father. I’m sure he’ll let you go.”

  “Gee.”

  “If you’re good ’til then. And don’t put kwiggis together and things like that.”

  “. . . All right. I’ll be good. I promise.”

  The business was over, and Mr. Smith felt expansive.

  “You know, boy,” he said, “there’s all kinds of Cultures. Some of them, you wouldn’t believe. The queerest one—” He bent forward, looking at the boy as if he wanted to say, ‘excepting, of course, the one you want to go to,’—“is one based on—”

  1951

  FRANCHISE

  When a franchise gives an outfit a legal monopoly, there’s only one solid way of breaking that monopoly. But finding it isn’t always easy—which is necessary to make it work at all!

  All of his life Carl Harrill had wanted a million dollars. As a child he had imagined such a sum as an endless stretch of lollipops. As a boy in college, he had calculated its extent in bottles of beer. And now that he was thirty, it had taken another, perhaps more serious, form; it had come to mean a quiet hundred acres in the Ozarks of Earth, a single hydroponic garden, a deep-running stream pregnant with fish, a collection of music tapes—the expensive set, going all the way back to Bing Crosby—a microfilm classics library, a life subscription to a half handful of magazines, a comfortable house with all the modern attachments, a new model helicopter, a . . . oh, yes, he had thought about it at length.

  However, as a practicing trouble shooter working out of Venus port, there seemed very little chance of getting anywhere near that much money. Hope, none the less, mushroomed eternally within him.

  Then one day, two and two suddenly made a very startling four, and the glowing vision of a cool million no longer seemed quite so far away.

  It came to him while he was out on a routine service call. Swamp rust had eaten through the cross-continent surface cable. Operations localized the break and sent him out in charge of a repair unit. Heavy fog vapor was upon the northern continent, and aircraft flying was uncertain. He took the mud-hog. It wheeled along at a monotonous ten miles an hour while the treads throbbed out a sleepy ship-slop-slap. All around there was nothing but the uncompromisingly bleak mud vistas of Venus. After hours of the fog-filled tedium, Carl Harrill pulled the mud-hog in at relay station N umber Four. The crew got out for a stretch.

  The attendant was so glad to see them that he put on his suit and came out. “Hi, Splay-feet. ’Mon in for coffee.”

  The six men entered his quarters. They were comfortable accommodations, but they were as lonesome as a graveyard at midnight.

  “Glad to see you guys,” the attendant beamed. “You out after the break?”

  “Uh-huh,” Carl Harrill admitted.

  “Look—maybe you guys’d do me a big favor.”

  “Maybe. If we can.”

  “Well, how’s about sanding the rust off my plexiglass dome; it’s been worse than usual lately. Ain’t nothin’ to see outside, but just the same I’d like to look out once in a while.”

  Carl Harrill looked at the windows; sure enough, they were thickly coated with the ubiquitous swamp rust.

  “Sure.” Carl Harrill turned to the crew. “You guys mind blasting it off?”

  The foreman rubbed his stubbly chin. “Yah, we can do it.”

  “That’s fine. Thanks,” the attendant said. “I’d sure appreciate it.” After a bit the crew went outside and turned the sand spray on; it cut the rust away magically.

  “Gee. I can see out again,” the attendant said. “I feel like a man getting out of prison.”

  “I’ll bet. This swamp rust is a nuisance. Too bad they can’t rig up a defroster,” Carl Harrill commented.

  “Yeah,” the attendant agreed. “That always puzzled me: why can’t they? You know?”

  “Uh-huh,” Carl Harrill said. “I’ll tell you.” He took out his pipe and tapped tobacco in it. He lit it. “Ya see, swamp gas is plenty active. In fact, about the most active stuff on wheels. It combines with everything, which is why everything on Venus is covered with its rust.” He blew a puff of smoke at the ventilator.

  “The chemists came over to analyze it. They finally gave up. Once they waited a whole month for a pure spout of it just so they could get some of it, uncombined, in a bottle. Took it back to the lab. Only what they had wasn’t pure swamp gas any more. It had coated the inside of the bottle, leaving a rather high order of vacuum. Then, for a while, they thought about using it as an evacuator, but it turned out to be too hard to collect. So they tried leaving everything they could think of out in the atmosphere: gold, diamond, iron, talc, et cetera, et cetera. It combined with them all, O.K. But they couldn’t figure any commercial angle, so they finally gave it up.”

  He sighed and sucked deeply on his pipe. “Now we come along and undo whatever damage it causes.”

  “Well, I’m sure glad to get the stuff off my windows. Thanks again.”

  “Sure. Sure.”

  Carl Harrill sat in silence, thinking. Funny stuff, all right, swamp gas. He chuckled about the chemists and the bottle. Can’t even collect a pure sample. His thoughts slowed to a snail’s pace, and then they backtracked.

  He remembered old Doc Foster. One of the best engineers in the system. Years ago he had attended one of Foster’s seminers.

  Doc had said: “Give me any problem: I’ll give you a theoretical solution.” That embodied his teaching method. Start with a problem; break it down to the essentials; solve it. On paper. Quite simple. At the seminar, one of the students had suggested, almost facetiously, that he tell them how to bottle swamp gas. The class had laughed, but old Doc had taken him at his word. For a week he and the class struggled with the problem. At the end of that time, they had reached the conclusion that there was only one way it could be clone. All that would be required was a complicated refrigerator system using a cushion of any of the inert gases. Whereupon, the class forgot all about it.

  Wheels within wheels began to whirl wildly in Carl Harrill’s brain. He jumped up and snapped his fingers.

  “I can bottle that stuff!”

  “Looking up, startled, the attendant asked, “You mean swamp gas?”

  “Of course, of course,” Carl Harrill muttered vaguely.

  “So what? According to you, that’s about as useful as being able to grow a third thumb.”

  “Huh-uh,” he grunted negatively. “How come? You said yourself that the stuff ain’t no good.”

  “Intrinsically that’s right, but then the old iron bar you have layin’ around in the cellar is no good ’til you need a lever.”

  Carl Harrill stood up; outwardly he was calm. He emptied his pipe and started to get into his suit. “I’ll get my men on the break, and then I’m slappin’ mud back to V-P. ’By.”

  “Well, so long. Drop in any time.” Carl Harrill was in the act of buckling down his helmet. He hesitated. “Jackson,” he said, “when I leave this nutty nightmare called Venus, I ain’t never comin’ back!” He let the helmet fall with a decisive ring.

  Within three months, he was ready to leave. He had a bulky suitcase that contained his model reefer—refrigerator unit—filled with a small quantity of swamp gas, cushioned on layers of all the rare elements.

  It is impossible to overstate his enthusiasm; no sooner was his model safely stored away than he stalked into the head office and slammed down his written resignation.

  The chief was quite startled. “Have you thought about it, Carl?”

  “Uh-huh,” Carl assented.

  “You know what it means?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “If you break this contract, we have to blackball you. That means no job anywhere off Earth. You’ll be Earth-bound, you know that?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  The chief shrugged. “O.K. I hate
to see you go.”

  “Thanks. ’By.” Carl Harrill walked out of the office.

  On his way to the spaceport, he told himself, “If this falls through, Carl, old sock, your goose is done to a turn. If this falls through, you’ll have to teach school; and on a salary like that, you’ll never be able to put away even two dollars for a rainy day.”

  “Uh-huh,” he answered himself.

  He caught the first Interplanet passenger ship to Luna. It was a pleasant voyage. The landing was the famous “feather-bed” type widely advertised over telecasts. “We can park a ship on a crate of eggs and never break one; you drift down on a feather bed—”

  They tugged the ship into the dome.

  Carl Harrill strode down the ramp just as if he already had his million dollars. He stood for a while and watched the carriers shuttle cargo off the Interplanet ship and onto the E-L Lines “elevator.” He shook his head as if he were feeling sorry for somebody, and then he began to laugh.

  A pair of mechanics stopped and looked at him.

  “You O.K., fella?” one asked.

  Carl Harrill stopped laughing. “You guys work for that crummy outfit?” He jerked his thumb in the direction of the E-L Lines.

  “So what, bud?”

  “Better start lookin’ for a new job, then, Jackson.”

  The mechanic looked at his friend. “He’s nuttier’n’ a fruitcake.”

  Carl Harrill walked away whistling.

  The main office of Interplanet, Inc. was the huge building on the side of the dome near the spaceport passenger locks. Carl Harrill walked jauntily up the flight of Earth-marble steps, through the revolving doors, and into the vast lobby. He checked the directory; the man he wanted was on the eighth floor. He took the elevator up.

  The rest of the building hummed with activity. People scurried everywhere. The eighth floor, alone, was quiet.

  Carl Harrill opened, the door marked “Reception Room A.”

  “I want to see Mr. Saunders,” he told the pert blonde at the desk.

  “May I have your name?”

  She had a nice smile, he decided. He told her his name.

  She checked the appointment file. “I’m sorry, Mr. Harrill. You’ll have to have an appointment. The president is in conference.”

  “Look, sweetheart, save that for the yokels. I’m here about the franchise. I can break it.”

  She studied his face for a long moment. “You and every space lawyer from three planets. We have more people in here about that than the patent office has men with perpetual motion machines.”

  “But you listen to them all, honey,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “Yes. We have a lawyer—Mr. Johnson—who’ll talk to you about it. Just a second—” She took out a form card, and picked up a stub of pencil. “How do you spell your last name?”

  He told her, and while he answered the rest of her questions, he kept up a running chatter. “You see, I’m gonna sell this—six foot, three—and then I’m gonna go back to Earth—brown—settle down in the Ozarks—blue, I think—and raise a family . . . no, not yet, sugar . . . hunt and fish, and make like a lazy man.” When the card was filled in, she looked up and smiled at him. It was a sympathetic smile. “I’m sorry for you,” she said.

  He decided she was a very, very nice-looking girl; he particularly liked her eyes.

  “I see them come in,” she continued, “chock full of dreams, like you, and then I see them go out again. They leave their dreams in Mr. Johnson’s office.”

  He noticed she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. Which, it seemed to him, was a fine thing.

  “So don’t feel too badly an hour from now.”

  He smiled. “Shucks, honey, how can a man feel bad when he’s just made a million dollars?”

  She sighed. “At least you’re confident. Good luck, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “Wanna bet?”

  She studied his face; and liked what she saw.

  “Look,” he continued, “if I don’t sell this idea, I’ll buy your dinner and show you the town. If I do, you foot the bill.”

  She dimpled. “It’s a bet,” she said.

  Mr. Johnson read the card. “Well,” he said tiredly, “tell me how you plan it?”

  “Rule seventeen,” Carl Harrill began, “states that if the E-L Lines fail to transport any cargo presented at either terminal, then, from that date, the franchise will be deemed void.” He paused. “I can transport Venus swamp gas. I want to see them handle that cargo.”

  Mr. Johnson shook his head and sighed. “I’m sorry. If you can store it, they can find out how. They’ve got half the resources in the system behind them.”

  “Huh-uh,” Carl Harrill dissented. “It’s—”

  “Please,” the little lawyer interjected, “let me review the history of this thing for you. For thirty years, now, the best legal minds in the system have been trying to find a loophole in the franchise. They can’t. Not that the courts wouldn’t love to break it up; they would. If we could rig up even half a case, we’d get judgment in our favor in five days. But the franchise is ironclad.”

  He studied Carl Harrill’s card, He shook his head and continued.

  “When the Federation gave it to the E-L Lines, they weren’t too careful. They didn’t think that they were giving much away. They signed about what the E-L lawyers gave them. Now, for ninety-nine years they have the exclusive right, in consideration for having landed the first commercial rocket on the Moon, of handling all Earth-Lunar transportation, provided only that they do not discriminate against legal cargo, and that they remain solvent, for the franchise is nontransferable.”

  He settled back.

  “The Federation obviously did not foresee that size and power requirements would make the Earth an impractical base for interplanetary operations, and that the Moon would become, of necessity, the interplanetary way station. So now E-L’s Earth-Lunar ‘elevator’ handles every hit of material going to or from Earth.”

  “They’ve got us all, and it’s’ quite legal.”

  “Yes, but—” Carl Harrill began. “Look. Your idea won’t work. Let me tell you a story. Ten years ago a firm known as Venus-Textiles spent some thirty million dollars bringing a fair-sized meteorite to the Moon. Tons and tons of naked rock. ‘Now,’ they said, ‘let’s see you set that down.’ Well . . . E-L Lines put their engineering staff to work. And, sure enough, they set it down, right in the middle of Siberia. Then they billed Venus-Textiles for the job. It broke the company.

  “Listen, son, no matter how much you spend, E-L Lines can spend more, duplicate your work, charge you for the labor, and . . . I’m sorry. We’d give five million dollars to break their monopoly, but—”

  “Uh. Just a minute, Mr. Johnson. You-got the wrong slant on this. Now, look, bottling swamp gas requires a rather complicated process, and—”

  Two hours later Carl Harrill handed the blond secretary a voucher from Mr. Johnson. “This has been O.K.’d by Saunders over the telephone, but send it in for his personal signature, will you?”

  She took the voucher, looked at it, did a double take, and said, wide-eyed and ineffectually, “Oh!”

  After a moment, she murmured, “Unlimited. You did it! How?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you. He talked and I listened. Then I talked and he listened. Then he called in a bunch of legal lights and they listened. So. I got the go-ahead sign and the expense voucher. Now. all I gotta do is earn my keep.”

  “I asked you how?”

  He smiled. “Shucks, if you knew that you’d be about to make all kinds of money instead of me. But that’s neither here nor there. You and me are going to see the town—on you.”

  She looked down at the papers on her desk. “I . . . I didn’t think you’d come back.”

  “You didn’t? That was the bet, wasn’t it?”

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  He grinned from ear to ear. “I can see that I’m gonna like you. Just for that I’ll put the party on my
expense account.”

  She looked up and smiled at him.

  At eight o’clock the next morning he arrived at the E-L passenger depot and bought a round-trip ticket on the “elevator”. He carried his model of the swamp gas container with him.

  And six months later, he arrived in a battered spaceship; he landed it on the East cargo grapple. They were slow about tugging him in because the port was busy. Finally, however, they jockeyed the ship, with the name Little Bombshell stenciled on the forehull in red, through the cargo space lock. He got out and stretched. His quarters had been cramped on the trip from the Venusian swamps. Little Bombshell was scarcely more than a flying frigidaire there were the twin blasters, the cargo, the reefer equipment, and, in the remaining space, a six-foot bunk for his lanky, six-three frame. He hadn’t slept at all well.

  Still, he was cheerful.

  “Hi,” he greeted the mechanic who came out in a push-about. “Let her alone,” he said, motioning toward the ship. “I’m shuttling cargo. But you can give me a ride over to Administration, if you want to.”

  “Sure. Hop in.”

  Carl Harrill walked into the shuttle office of the E-L Lines with a slow, rolling gait. He wore an innocent smile, and his blue eyes were bland.

  He went to the desk of a second shipping clerk, handed the man his manifest from Venusport and sat down.

  “Reefer cargo?” the clerk asked, seeing the “R” stamped on the paper.

  “Uh-huh. Not normal reefer cargo, though. Special stuff: Venus swamp gas.”

  “Swamp gas?” the clerk repeated incredulously.

  “Swamp gas,” Carl Harrill insisted.

  “Oh—”

  “Well—There’s nothin’ wrong with it, is there?” he asked innocently.

  “It’s . . . it’s . . . well, unusual.” The clerk studied the paper. “I’m afraid it will require some special transportation, if it’s hard to handle.”

  “It is. It will.” Carl Harrill agreed, smiling warmly. “How long do you figure it’ll take?”

  The clerk shuffled the manifest without answering. Then after a moment, he said, “This’ll cost quite a bit.”