In the Beginning: Tales From the Pulp Era

by Robert Silverberg

  He had a double motive for survival now. One was the simple one of wanting to stay alive; two was the fact that he now thought he had someone to stay alive for. Perhaps.

  He knocked gently at the door.

  “Who’s there?”

  “You don’t know me, but I’m a friend. I’ve come to warn you.”

  A panel in the door opened and Archman found himself staring at a dark-hued eye. “Who are you from, Earthman? What do you want?”

  “Please let me in. Your life depends on my seeing you.”

  A moment passed—then the door opened.

  “Are you the lady Meryola?”

  “I am.”

  She was breathtakingly lovely. She wore but the merest of wraps, and firm breasts, white thighs, were partially visible. There was a soft, clinging sexuality about her, and yet also a streak of hardness, of coldness, that Archman was able to appreciate. He also saw she was no longer very young.

  She was holding a zam-gun squarely before his navel. “Come in, Earthman, and tell me what you will.”

  Archman stepped inside her chambers. She was nearly as tall as he, and her beauty temporarily stunned him.

  “Well?”

  “Do you know Hendrin the Mercurian, milady?”

  “Indeed. Are you from him?”

  “Not at all. But I know Hendrin well. He’s a cheating rogue willing to sell out to any bidder.”

  “This is hardly news,” Meryola said. “What of Hendrin.”

  He eyed her almost insultingly before answering. Meryola was indeed a desirable creature, he thought—but for one night only. Archman mentally compared her with Elissa Hall, who was nearly as beautiful, though not half so flashy. It wasn’t difficult to see why Darrien preferred Elissa’s innocence to this aging, shrewd beauty.

  He smiled. “At this very moment,” he said, “Hendrin is with our master Darrien. He has brought him the girl Elissa, and they are together now.”

  “It’s a lie! Elissa’s in the dungeons!”

  “Would you care to call your jailers, milady?”

  She stared suspiciously at him and picked up the speaking-tube. After nearly a minute had passed, she looked back at Archman. “The line is dead, Earthman.”

  “As is your jailer. Hendrin freed the girl and took her to Darrien. And one other fact might interest you: Darrien has tired of you. He has made out the order for your death.”

  “Lies!”

  Archman shrugged. “Lies, then. But within the hour the knife will be at your throat. He vastly prefers the younger girl. Believe me or not, at your peril. But if you choose to believe me, I can save your life.”

  “How, schemer?”

  He moved closer to her, until he was almost dizzied by her subtle perfume. “You hold the secret of Darrien’s robots. Reveal it to me, and I’ll destroy Darrien. Then, perhaps, another Earthman will claim your favors. Surely you would not object to ruling with me.”

  She laughed, a harsh, indrawn laugh, and it seemed to Archman that the cat’s claws had left their furry sheath. “You? So that’s your motive—you ask me to yield Darrien’s secret in order to place yourself on the throne. Sorry, but I’m not that foolish. You’re an enterprising rascal, whoever you are, but—”

  Suddenly the door burst open. Three Martians, their tusks gleaming, their thick lips drawn back in anticipation of murder, came running in.

  “Darrien’s assassins!” Archman cried. He had his zam-gun drawn in an instant.

  The first Martian died a second later, complete astonishment on his face. A bolt from Meryola’s gun did away with the second, while a third spurt finished the remaining one. Archman leaped nimbly over the bodies and fastened the bolt on the door.

  Then he stooped and snatched a sheet of paper from the sash of one of the fallen Martians. He read it out loud: “To Grojrakh, Chief of the Guards: My displeasure has fallen upon the lady Meryola, and you are to despatch her at once by any means of execution that seems convenient. D.”

  “Let me see that!”

  He handed her the paper. She read it, then cursed and crumpled the sheet. “The pig! The pig!” To Archman she said, “You told the truth, then. Pardon me for mistrusting you—”

  “It was only to be expected. But time grows short.”

  “Right.” Her eyes flashed with the fury of vengeance. “Listen, then: none of the Darriens you have seen is the real one. There are three orthysynthetics which he uses in turn. Darrien himself spends nearly all his time in a secluded chamber on the Fifth Level.”

  “Is the room guarded heavily?”

  “It’s guarded not at all. Only I know how to reach it, and so he sees no reason to post a guard. Well, we’ll give him cause to regret that. Come!”

  “Down this hallway and to the left,” Meryola said.

  This was the moment, Archman thought. It was the culmination of his plan, and the ending of a phase of history that traced its roots to a politician’s pompous words years ago—“Let Venus be our penal colony—”

  So they had planted the seeds of evil on Venus, and they had banished Darrien there to reap them. And with the destruction of Darrien’s empire on Venus, they had permitted Darrien to escape and found yet another den of evil.

  The end was near, now. With Darrien dead the mightiest enemy of justice in the galaxy would have been blotted out. And Darrien would die—betrayed by his own mistress.

  They reached the door.

  It was a plain door, without the baroque ornamentation that characterized the rest of the palace. And behind that door—Darrien.

  “Ready?” Meryola asked.

  Archman nodded. He gripped the zam-gun tightly in one hand, pressed gently against the door with the other, and heaved.

  The door opened.

  “There’s Darrien!” Meryola cried. She raised her zam-gun—but Archman caught her arm.

  Darrien was there, all right, crouching in a corner of the room, his wrinkled face pale with shock. He wore a strange headset, evidently the means with which he controlled the orthysynthetics. And he held as a shield before him—

  Elissa.

  This was one pleasure the tyrant had not been willing to experience vicariously through his robots, evidently. Tears streaked the girl’s eyes; she struggled to escape Darrien’s grasp, without success. Her flesh was bloodless where his fingers held her. There was no sign of Hendrin.

  “Let me shoot them,” Meryola said, striving to pull her arm free of Archman’s grip.

  “The girl hasn’t done anything. She’s just a pawn.”

  “Go ahead, Archman,” Darrien taunted. “Shoot us. Or let dear Meryola do it.”

  Meryola wrenched violently; Archman performed the difficult maneuver of keeping his own gun trained on Darrien while yanking Meryola’s away from her. With two guns, now, he confronted the struggling pair at the far end of the little room.

  “Shoot, Archman!” Elissa cried desperately. “I don’t matter! Kill Darrien while you have the chance.”

  Sweat beaded Archman’s face. Meryola flailed at him, trying to recover her weapon and put an end to her lord and her rival at once.

  The Earthman held his ground while indecision rocked him. His code up to now had been, the ends justify the means. But could he shoot Elissa in cold blood for the sake of blotting out Darrien?

  His finger shook on the triggers. Kill them, the Intelligence agent in him urged. But he couldn’t.

  “The Earthman has gone cowardly at the finish,” Darrien said mockingly. “He holds fire for the sake of this lovely wench.”

  “Damn you, Darrien. I—”

  Meryola screamed. The door burst open, and Hendrin rushed in. Right behind the Mercurian, coming from the opposite direction, came one of Darrien’s orthysynthetic duplicates—Darrien’s identical twin in all respects, probably summoned by Darrien by remote control.

  And the orthysynthetic carried a drawn zam-gun.

  What happened next took but a moment—a fraction of a moment, or even less.

&nb
sp; Meryola took advantage of Archman’s astonishment to seize one of his two zam-guns. But instead of firing at Darrien, she gunned down Hendrin!

  The Mercurian looked incredulous as the zam-gun’s full charge seared into his thick hide, crashing through vital organs with unstoppable fury.

  Meryola laughed as the blue Mercurian fell. “Traitor! Double-dealer! How—”

  The sentence was never finished. The zam-gum in the hand of Darrien’s double spoke, and Meryola pitched forward atop Hendrin, her beauty replaced by charred black crust.

  Archman snapped from his moment of shock, and his gun concluded the fast-action exchange. He put a bolt of force squarely between the orthysynthetic’s eyes, and a third body dropped to the floor.

  From behind him came a cry. “Archman! Now! Now!”

  He whirled and saw, to his astonishment, that Elissa had succeeded in breaking partially loose from Darrien. Archman’s thoughts went back to that moment in Blake Wentworth’s office when, in a drug-induced illusion, he had won the right to participate in this mission by gunning down a Martian across the vast distances of the red desert. His marksmanship now would count in reality.

  His finger tightened on the zam-gun.

  “You wouldn’t dare shoot, Earthman!” Darrien said sneeringly. “You’ll kill the girl!”

  “For once you’re wrong, Darrien,” Archman said. He sucked in his breath and fired.

  A half-inch to the right and his bolt would have killed Elissa Hall. But Archman’s aim was true. Darrien screamed harshly. Archman fired again, and the tyrant fell.

  He found himself quivering all over from the strain and tension of the last few moments. He looked around at the grisly interior of the room. There lay Hendrin, the shrewd Mercurian, who had played one side too many and would never live to collect his pay from Krodrang. There, Meryola, whose beauty had faded. There, the Darrien-robot. And there, Darrien himself, his foul career cut short at last.

  “It’s over,” he said tiredly. He looked at Elissa Hall, whose lovely face was pale with fear. “It’s all over. Darrien’s dead, and the mop-up can begin.”

  “Your aim was good, Archman. But you could have fired at Darrien before. My life doesn’t matter, does it?”

  His eyes met hers. “It does—but you won’t believe that, will you? You think I’m just a killer. All right. That’s all I am. Let’s get out of here.”

  “No—wait.” Suddenly she was clinging to him. “I—I’ve been cruel to you, Archman—but I saw just then that I was wrong. You’re not just the murderer I thought you were. You—you were doing your job, that’s all.”

  He pulled her close, and smiled. He was thinking of Intelligence Chief Wentworth, back on Earth. Wentworth had rated Archman’s capabilities at 97.003%. But Wentworth had been wrong.

  Archman had done the job. That was 100% efficiency. But he had Elissa now, too. Score another 100%. He gently drew her lips to his, knowing now that this mission had been successful beyond all expectations.

  NEW YEAR’S EVE—2000 A.D.

  (1957)

  My meeting with William L. Hamling of Imagination and Imaginative Tales at the 1955 Cleveland s-f convention had led almost immediately to yet another steady writing contract for me. Hamling, a dapper, youthful-looking Chicagoan who, like me, had loved science fiction since his teens, had been Ray Palmer’s managing editor for the Ziff-Davis science-fiction magazines in the late 1940s, and when the Ziff-Davis company moved its editorial offices to New York in 1950 Hamling remained in Chicago, starting his own Chicago-based publishing outfit. Imagination, his first title, was a decent enough lower-echelon s-f magazine, but not even such major names as Robert A. Heinlein and James Blish could get its sales figures up much beyond the break-even point, and in the summer of 1955 Hamling decided to emulate his friend Howard Browne of Amazing and revert to the tried-and-true Ziff-Davis formula of uncomplicated action fiction written to order by a team of staffers. The lead stories for the book would be done by such veteran pulp-magazine stars as Edmond Hamilton and Dwight V. Swain. For the shorter material he turned to the same quartet that was producing most of Browne’s fiction: Lesser, Fairman, Garrett, and Silverberg. Evidently he figured that our capacity for turning out s-f adventure stories to order was infinitely expandible, and, as it happened, he was right. On January 16, 1956, I got this note from my agent, Scott Meredith:

  “We sent one of your yarns to Bill Hamling. While he couldn’t use this yarn, he’s going to write you directly to tell you what he wants in the way of plotting, etc. He does like your stuff and will want to see a lot more of it in the future. You’ll know better what to expect when you get his letter, and then you can get right to work.”

  Hamling’s letter followed a month or so later. What he wanted was short, punchy stories with strong conflicts, lots of color and action, and straightforward resolutions. And he made a very explicit offer: the Garrett-Silverberg team was invited to deliver 50,000 words of fiction a month, all lengths from short-shorts up to 7500 words or so, and we would be paid $500 for each monthly package.

  At that point we were each writing a couple of stories a month for Browne and doing our novelet series for Campbell, and I was sending out solo stories to such editors as Lowndes, Shaw, and Gold as well. And I was still a Columbia undergraduate, starting the second half of my senior year. But college would soon be behind me and by this time I had dauntless confidence in my own prolificity. We accepted the deal. The first package, six stories, went off to Hamling in June, 1956. Early in July we sent him five more, and toward the end of that month another six, and seven in August before I took time off to get married. And so it went, month after month. The $500 checks—$5000 or thereabouts in modern purchasing power—arrived punctually and we split them fifty-fifty regardless of who had written the stories in each package.

  I could not tell you, this long after the fact, which of us actually wrote most of these stories. As I look at them now, some seem to be entirely Randall’s work, some appear to be exclusively mine, and others must have been true collaborations, begun by one of us and finished later the same day by the other. The names under which the stories appeared provide no clue, because Hamling ignored the pseudonyms we put on the manuscripts (“T. H. Ryders,” “William Leigh,” “Eric Rodman,” “Ray McKenzie,” etc.) and randomly stuck bylines of his own choosing on them—“Warren Kastel,” “S. M. Tenneshaw,” “Ivar Jorgensen,” and many another. Sometimes he would put my own name on a story, and sometimes Garrett’s, and in several cases stories written entirely by Garrett appeared under my name and stories written entirely by me appeared under his. Some of these switched stories I can still identify: I know my own stylistic touches, and I also know the areas where Garrett’s superior knowledge of chemistry and physics figured in the plot of a “Silverberg” story that I could not possibly have written then. But it’s a hopeless job to correct the Silverberg and Garrett bibliographies now to indicate that on occasions we found ourselves using each other’s names as pseudonyms.

  The little story here, “New Year’s Eve—2000 A.D.,” from the September, 1957 issue of Imaginative Tales—came out under the “Ivar Jorgensen” name. That byline was originally the property of Paul W. Fairman but was transformed by Browne and then Hamling into a communal pseudonym. This one was wholly my work. I know that not only because such very short stories as these were almost always written by one or the other of us, not both, but also because I am the sort of pedantic guy who believed that the twenty-first century would not begin until January 1, 2001, as one poor sap tries to argue in this story. (I knew better, when the twenty-first century really did come around a few years ago, than to waste breath voicing that point of view.) I think the story is an amusing artifact. I was wrong about the date of the first lunar voyage by 31 years, but I was right on the nose about the premature celebration of the new century at the dawning of Y2K.

  ——————

  George Carhew glanced at his watch. The time was 11:21. He looked around at th
e rest of the guests at the party and said, “Hey! Thirty-nine more minutes and we enter the Twenty-First Century!”

  Abel Marsh squinted sourly at Carhew. “How many times do I have to tell you, George, that the new century won’t begin for another year? 2001 is the first year of the Twenty-First Century, not 2000. You’ll have to wait till next year to celebrate that.”

  “Don’t be so damned picayune,” Carhew snapped. “In half an hour it’ll be the year 2000. Why shouldn’t it be a new century?”

  “Because—”

  “Oh, don’t fight over it, boys,” cooed Maritta Lewis, giggling happily. She was a tall brunette with wide eyes and full lips; she wore a clinging synthoplast off-the-bosom blouse and a sprayon skirt that molded her hips and long legs. “It’s whatever century you want it to be, tonight! Twentieth! Twenty-first! Don’t get an ulcer, dad. Live it up!”

  She climbed out of the web-chair she had been decorating and crossed to the bar. “Come on, you two grouches. What kind of drinks can I get you?”

  “Dial me a Four Planets,” Carhew said.

  “Okay, spaceman. How about you, Abel?”

  “Old-fashioned whiskey sour for me. None of these futuristic drinks.” He grinned. “I still believe it’s the twentieth century, you see.”

  Maritta dialed the drinks and carried them back across the room to the two men, narrowly avoiding spilling them when a wildly dancing couple pranced past.

  Carhew took his drink, observing the firm swell of the girl’s breasts before him. “Care to dance, Maritta?”

  “Why, sure,” she said.

  He sipped at the hopefully-named Four Planets, then put it on the low ebony table near him and stood. Maritta seemed to float into his arms. She wore some new scent, pungent and desirable.

  Carhew drew her tightly to him, and the music billowed loudly around them. They danced silently for a while.

  “You seem moody, George,” she said after a few moments. “Something troubling you?”