Hagger looked surprised. “We haven’t had any trouble with Lippy that I know about.”
“I think he tried to bribe Mark to relax a bit. There’s big money riding on the pennant and the World Series.”
“Mark wouldn’t take a bribe.”
“I’m sure he wouldn’t. But if you have any trouble with Lippy, let me know. A few mentions in my column would cool him off.”
Hagger nodded. “We appreciate everything you’ve done for Mark already. Some of the press still treat him like a freak. Your stories make him seem like a human being.”
“I’ve always considered Mark to be a human being.”
Hagger smiled slightly “Well, he’s still a centaur. Nothing can change that.”
* * * *
Mark Eques hit two home runs in that evening’s game, and ran the bases like a stallion. His fielding was better than ever—so good, in fact, that the opposing manager raised the point in a post-game press conference that Mark should be banned from organized baseball. “He’s not human, after all,” Bunty Simmons grumbled.
I fought my way through the throng to the front row of questioners. “Back in July you all went along with it,” I reminded him. “The gates would increase and everyone would share in the wealth.”
“Well, sure,” he admitted. “We knew people would pay to see a centaur playing ball. What we didn’t know was—”
“—that he’d be so good,” I finished for him.
Through all of this, Roscoe Greene, the scout who’d first signed Mark with the Yankees, was riding high. I heard through the grapevine that he’d gotten a big raise, with a bonus promised if Mark Eques came through strong in the World Series. Greene and I had never really been friends, and I was surprised when he phoned me in Boston the day the Yankees clinched the pennant in the American League East. “Have you heard the news?” he asked without preamble.
“About what?”
“Mark Eques.”
The panic in his voice was catching. “He’s not hurt?”
“Worse than that.”
“What—?”
“It just came over the radio. An expedition on that Greek island has discovered a female centaur!”
“Then he wasn’t kidding me. He said there were females. That’s great news, Roscoe.”
“It’s terrible news.”
“How come?”
“The expedition is financed by Lewis Enterprises, the video people. In case you didn’t know, that’s Lippy Lewis’s brother.”
“My God!”
“I know Lippy’s been trying to bribe Mark. Now he’s got his weapon. Mark may not be tempted by regular women, but a female centaur is something else again!”
* * * *
Well, this latest development really stirred up the press. About the only thing they like better than a bribery scandal is a sex scandal. Although the whereabouts of the newly discovered female centaur was a carefully guarded secret, the papers were full of rumors of a secret tryst with Mark Eques. I phoned Professor Hagger nearly every day in late September, but he assured me there’d been no word from Lippy and no sign of a female centaur.
I spoke with Mark too, of course. The playoffs began in early October, and I covered all the games. The Yankees made short work of the Las Vegas Wheels, capturing four straight behind some good pitching and Mark’s fleet-footed fielding. There was a general feeling that the only team to present a real challenge to the Yankees might be the St. Louis Cardinals, and when the Cards clinched the National League pennant to move on to the World Series, there was talk of the greatest Series since ’75.
I interviewed Mark Eques on the eve of the first game at St. Louis. “What about it, Mark?” I asked. “You seem a little bit troubled and off your feed. Has Lippy Lewis been after you again?”
“Yeah,” the young centaur admitted. “He talked to me.”
“About the newly discovered female?”
Mark nodded. “He showed me pictures.”
“And asked you to throw the game?”
“Either that or not play at all.”
“You were tempted?”
“By the pictures? No.”
“Why not?”
“She’s my sister, Carza.”
“Your—”
“I told you there were females down in the caves. Carza was never as shy as the rest. I should have known she’d be the one to come outside and get caught.”
“If she’s your sister, I’d think you’d be happy at the prospect of seeing her again. Why are you so glum?”
“I guess because I don’t know what Lippy will try next. There’s something about Carza they might discover—”
“What’s that?”
Mark Eques hung his shoulders. “She’s a better ball player than I am.”
* * * *
We learned the following day that Lewis and his people had indeed discovered it. Carza took the field wearing a Cardinals shirt and started warming up with the rest of the team. She was a lovely young woman, frisky and smiling, and she captured the hearts of almost everyone at once. The Yankee owners were not quite so enchanted, and they could be seen huddling with the baseball commissioner in his box. Certainly no one could object to a centaur playing baseball nor to a woman, since Iris Schultz had pitched a full season for the Dodgers. But this was a new player, joining the team just in time for the Series!
The game was delayed an hour while they argued the point, disrupting television schedules around the world, but the commissioner finally ruled that she could play. The teams took the field. It would be centaur against centaur.
For the first few innings the crowd went wild each time Mark or his sister took the field. But it soon became obvious that each of them was so skilled in playing the outfield that nothing less than a home run would make it onto the scoreboard that day. Mark was the better hitter, probably because he’d been playing since July, but he only succeeded in hitting two high flies that Carza caught without any trouble. The crowd wanted hits, but all they were getting was a demonstration of some remarkable fielding.
As the ninth inning ended in a scoreless tie, I spotted Lippy Lewis at a refreshment stand by the back of the stadium. “How’s it going, Lippy? I see you switched your allegiance from the Sox to the Cards.”
“You gotta go with the smart money, Danny,” he said, squeezing some mustard onto a hot dog.
“The smart money used to say you should never bet against the Yankees.”
“Yeah? Well, we got our own centaur now.”
The tenth inning had begun while we chatted, and suddenly there came a groan of anguish from the St. Louis fans. Lippy and I hurried to see what had happened, and I think we were equally horrified to see Carza lying on the field in obvious pain. She’d tripped while chasing a hard-hit grounder to center, and the ball had rolled all the way to the outfield fence for a triple.
Mark hurried to her side as she was carried off the field.
“Marque,” she murmured. “Take me home. I want to go home.”
“Will they have to shoot her?” Lippy asked me.
“No. She’s not a horse.”
The Yankees won it, 1-0, and went on to win the Series, but that was the last game Mark Eques and his sister played. Professor Hagger accompanied them back to the Greek island where he’d first found Mark. During their winter meeting the baseball managers voted to bar any players having more than two legs, whatever their species. The day of the centaur was over as quickly as it had begun.
* * * *
It was sort of a sad ending to the story, and that was one reason I decided to fly over to Antikythira the following spring, to see how Mark and his sister were doing. I feared I’d have difficulty finding them, imagining that they’d retreated deep into their caves after t
heir brush with fame, but I was wrong. Mark was running a messenger service—a sort of Centaur Express—and Carza had fully recovered from her injury.
“She’s too old for the game,” Mark explained. “I remember playing ball when I was only a child.”
“Will you ever play again?” I asked.
“Not in America. I heard they’d banned centaurs. But Carza and I are talking about starting a league over here. An all-centaur league. We think there are enough good players, and it would make a great tourist attraction. We hope to get started by next year.”
When I told Lippy Lewis about it, back in the States, he was interested. “Might be some betting action there,” he decided, “once they get organized. But I’m sorry he didn’t stay in this country and let me handle him.”
“There are no more centaurs in baseball, Lippy,” I reminded him.
“Who’s talking baseball? I wanted to run him in the Kentucky Derby!”
FUTURE CRIMES
ABOUT “CO-INCIDENCE”
“Co-Incidence” is the earliest of Edward Hoch’s stories that is included in this volume. Readers familiar with Hoch’s mystery fiction may find the narrator of this story reminiscent of the narrator of the “Simon Ark” stories. Like the unnamed narrator of that series, both characters are on the staff of Neptune Books, a fictional publisher similar to those Mr. Hoch often wrote for. In this story we meet a woman who uses calculation as a weapon. As an amusing side note, this story about a unique murder was written under the pseudonym “Irwin Booth,” which Hoch derived from two famous real-life killers, Robert Irwin and John Wilkes Booth.
First Publication—Original Science Fiction Stories, September 1956.
CO-INCIDENCE
I first met Rosemary when I joined the editorial staff of Neptune Books, last summer. The job was my big chance because prior to that time my editing experience had been mostly confined to the pulps and a chain of True Crime magazines. For me, Neptune Books was a dream come true—a job with an unlimited future in a fast-growing phase of the publishing industry.
I suppose everyone is familiar with Neptune Books, those twenty-five cent reprints with a picture of a smiling King Neptune as their trademark. They say in the business that the reason Neptune is always smiling is that he’s just seen the latest sales figures. And if it’s true, he has plenty of reason to smile.
For in three short years Neptune Books has risen to the top of the field. Their sales are beyond belief and even their own officers shake their heads in pleased amazement as the money pours in.
The cause of it all, as everyone in the publishing business knows, is Rosemary. At twenty-eight, she is already the brains behind Neptune’s smile. The simple fact is that she is a mathematical genius, not just in the usual sense, but in a very unusual sense.
My first meeting with her came, as I’ve said, the day I started work at Neptune. She was in her tiny office, where she spent most of her time, poring over a list of sales figures from cities all over the country.
She looked up when I entered with Mason, the vice president of Neptune, and as soon as I saw her I knew that the stories about her had not exaggerated.
Sphinxlike, with a somewhat bony face, she was nevertheless attractive—especially when she came out from behind those horn-rimmed eyeglasses. She had the look, the sounds, the manner of power. And I sensed then that she was a very unusual woman.
* * * *
This intuition increased as the weeks went by, and I became one of Rosemary’s few good friends. Whenever I could snatch an hour, I’d sit there in her office, discussing new titles we were planning to reprint and listening to her unfailingly brilliant advice. I was even beginning to feel a romantic inclination toward her, but she never indicated any such feelings toward me. I kept my own emotions in check.
But it was in the distribution end of our business that she proved her devotion and fantastic skill. Neptune handled all its own distribution, which meant shipping books to several hundred wholesalers scattered throughout the country. Rosemary had risen to the post of Circulation Manager, a rare job for a young woman and perhaps the most important position in the whole company.
She would sit at her desk for hours, scrabbling over calculations, and then come up tired but triumphant with the solution. “Increase Salt Lake City’s draw to 5,000 on this title,” she’d order. Or, “Transfer a thousand Westerns from Dallas to Kansas City.” I’d look at her in amazement, and sometimes I’d think she was over-reaching herself, but they always did what she said—and Neptune kept smiling on all those covers.
When I’d ask her about some fantastic bit of luck by which she’d transferred the right books to the right place at the right time, she’d simply sigh and say: “Oh, I heard they were having a convention out there, and figured they could use another thousand of that title.”
After the first few months I got used to this wizardry, and like the others I stopped asking her. I just read books and helped decide which ones to reprint, and watched the money roll in.
* * * *
There was only one thing about the job that was unpleasant. And that was Mason, the vice president. The real owner of Neptune Books was some shadowy midwest Croesus whom no one ever saw; for all practical purposes, Mason was the big boss.
We were on the third floor of an ancient building on West 47th Street, and space was at a minimum. Not that the place wasn’t big enough to start with; but with billing machines, bookkeepers, files, and the other necessities of distribution taking up so much room, we didn’t have an awful lot of floor left for the executive end. Mason had solved his problem by erecting a partition ten feet square, and declaring that the space inside the wall was his private office. He was a big overbearing boor about a lot of little things, and he kept getting under my skin.
About once a week he’d hold what he called a strategy meeting. We’d all crowd into his private office. He’d do most of the talking, outlining company policies and telling us about his foggy future plans. Rosemary, at least, was entitled to a chair at these boring lectures. But I, being the youngest of the editorial staff, usually found myself sitting on the thick green rug that covered the floor.
It was obvious to me from the start that Rosemary and Mason hated each other. Rosemary hated him because he was the only person who stood between her and a place to which she could advance. Mason hated her because he knew her feelings and desires for the vice presidency of Neptune Books. Of course, he couldn’t fire her. By that time, Rosemary’s word was gospel and her every decision went unquestioned. It was the old law of the jungle: eat or be eaten.
We all knew that Mason was waiting for her to make just one mistake, but she never made it. The sales figures kept climbing and Rosemary kept on with her necromancy on paper at her desk. Pretty soon it got so that even a poor title sold a half-million copies—and a million copy sale was considered just average. Rosemary would dash into my office holding a hard-covered edition of some cheap novel that hadn’t sold three thousand copies in the trade edition—and she’d insist we reprint it in soft covers. We’d argue that it hadn’t sold well at all, but she’d simply say: “That’s all the more readers left for us.” Of course, we’d finally agree; and of course, the book would sell around two million copies.
* * * *
By the time I’d been there six months, my friendship with Rosemary had increased to the point where I was taking her to lunch a couple of times a week. It was at one of these luncheon dates, in a little French place off Fifth Avenue, that I finally persuaded her to tell me the secret of her fantastic skill.
“Well,” she said, “I’ve never told this to any of the other vultures but somehow you’re different.” I thanked her quickly and she went on: “It’s all done by figuring the percentage of incidents. It took me nearly five years to work out a sort of slide-rule mathematical equation. I’ve discovered that it’s
mathematically possible to cause any two objects to meet at a given time and place, provided you know enough about these objects and can exercise enough control over one of them. I aim one angle of incidence to meet another angle of incidence. Result? Co-incidence!”
It sounded even more fantastic to me, but I didn’t interrupt.
“In the case of distribution,” she went on, “I figure out just where and when the supply and demand will meet. I send books to that spot—and people buy them. It’s that simple.”
I shook my head and asked for more details.
“Look,” she said, “figuring mathematically that 500 people in Chicago will want one of our new mysteries next Tuesday, I see that that many books get out there. That’s all; my equation works it all out for me. It means getting the books to exactly the spot where the consumer is when he decides he wants that certain book.”
Her eyes drooped as she added ominously: “I can do the same thing with any two objects, knowing enough about them.”
“Why did you choose publishing?”
“I knew it was the best way for me to get to the top fast. The big drawback in publishing has always been, it seems to me, that the books aren’t around at the exact instant that most people want to buy them. By the time they see the book they wanted, the purchasing desire has decreased. Put the books into their hands when their purchasing desire is at its peak, and you’ve got sales.”
“And you say you can do this with other things as well?”
“Certainly. Did you ever stop to think that when a man gets hit with an automobile it’s because both of them have come together at exactly the same time and place by a chain of events? Think of the millions of events, all unconnected, that have resulted in their coming together.”
“And you claim you can control some of these events.”
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