In the Beginning: Tales From the Pulp Era

by Robert Silverberg

  Blen Duworn’s muscular face remained impassive, but his tiny antennae were stiff and agitated. “You forget that there was an Earthman who saw the Nirotan drinking blood.”

  “We know the Nirotans can’t drink human blood,” returned Harriman sharply. “Therefore, Harkins was either lying, bribed, or not responsible for what he was saying. I rather think it was the last, Blen Duworn. That you manipulated his mind in such a way as to have him think he saw a Nirotan. And then that you gilded the lily by coming forth as a witness yourself—never dreaming that we’d be uncivilized enough to look at a Nirotan despite his wishes, and find out the truth.”

  Blen Duworn’s eyes suddenly gleamed strangely, and the antennae above his eyes rose rigidly. “You’re very clever, Earthman. You seem to have figured everything out quite neatly. Only—we of Drosk are not blood-drinkers ourselves; medical tests could easily prove that we are just as innocent as the Nirotans are. Why try to fix the blame on us? I’ve never been positive that I saw a Nirotan that morning; it was dark and foggy. If I was the vampire, how did I do the killing?”

  “Drosk is noted for its mechanical skill,” Harriman said. “It isn’t hard to devise an instrument that can tap the jugular, pump out a few liters of blood, and immediately turn the blood to vapor and discharge it into the atmosphere. I’m sure you could create such a device the size of a signet ring, with Drosk’s microminiaturizing techniques. Plunge it into the jugular, draw out the blood, dispose of it—who would be the wiser?”

  “The Nirotans are equally clever at such contrivances,” retorted the Drosk.

  “Yes, they are. But what motive would they have for confirming the popular stereotype of themselves as vampires? No, Blen Duworn, you’ve exhausted all your arguments. I say that the so-called Vampire Menace was cooked up by Drosk conspirators, with an eye toward driving your Nirotan competition off Earth. And—”

  The gleam in Blen Duworn’s eyes grew more intense. Harriman tried to avert the alien’s gaze, but the Drosk snapped, “Look at me, Earthman! At my eyes! You’ve been very clever! But you haven’t counted on one thing, the Drosk hypnotic power, the power with which I persuaded Harkins that he had seen a Nirotan, the power which I will use now to obtain my freedom—”

  Harriman rose, reeling dizzily, as the alien’s mind lashed out at his own. It was impossible to look away, impossible to break the alien’s hold—

  Harriman began to sag. Suddenly the doors opened. Three Security Corpsmen rushed in, seizing Blen Duworn.

  Harriman shook his head to clear it, and smiled faintly. “Thanks,” he muttered. “If you’d waited another minute he would have had me. I hope you got every word down on tape.”

  After that, the rest was simple. “Duworn cracked and gave us the name of his conspirators,” Harriman reported the next day to Director Russell. “Half a dozen Drosk were in on it. The idea was to make it look as if the Nirotans were going vampire all over Terra.”

  “And if you hadn’t illegally examined that bat-creature,” Russell said, “we’d still be going around in circles. You ought to hear the apologies Secretary-General Zachary’s been making to the Nirotans.”

  “Couldn’t be helped, chief. Duworn and the others were banking on our lack of knowledge about the Nirotans. And they came close to succeeding. But what kind of an investigation can you conduct if you don’t know anything about the suspects, even?”

  Russell nodded. “You’ll have to take a reprimand, Neil. That’s just for the record. But there’ll be a promotion coming along right afterward, to take the sting out of it.”

  “Thanks, chief.”

  Secretary-General Zachary managed to convey Earth’s apologies to the Nirotans for the recent indignities they had suffered, and the bat-beings decided to remain on Earth. Drosk, on the other hand, felt compelled to withdraw; it was decided that the six guilty conspirators would be taken back to their home world for punishment according to Drosk law, and all members of the species departed from Earth at once.

  Neil Harriman received his promotion, and once again it was safe for the Nirotans to walk the streets of Earth. But, despite the well-publicized findings that the Nirotans were harmless vegetarians, and despite the confession of the Drosk, few Earthmen passed one of the hulking bat-like beings without a slight shiver of revulsion, and a thought for the ancient legends of the era of superstition, which had so shockingly come alive for a few days during the so-called Vampire Menace of 2104.

  THE INSIDIOUS INVADERS

  (1959)

  Super-Science Stories, which by now was my only surviving market for action-oriented science fiction (Bill Hamling had closed his magazines and the Ziff-Davis pair, under the new editorship of Cele Goldsmith, had ceased to be a haven for staff-written formula fiction), continued to make with the monsters as circulation went on dipping. The June, 1959 number was the glamorous SECOND MONSTER ISSUE!, to which I contributed “The Day the Monsters Broke Loose” and “Beasts of Nightmare Horror,” though other hands than mine were responsible for “Creatures of Green Slime” and “Terror of the Undead Corpses.” August, 1959 was the gaudy THIRD MONSTER ISSUE!, with no less than four pseudonymous Silverberg offerings (“Monsters That Once Were Men,” “Planet of the Angry Giants,” “The Horror in the Attic,” and “Which was the Monster?”). Then Scottie stopped numbering them: the October, 1959 issue, with three more of mine, was labeled simply WEIRD MONSTER ISSUE! That one was the last in the sequence: when I turned those three stories in in March of 1959, Scottie sadly notified me that he would need no more science-fiction stories from me after that. Though Trapped and Guilty were going to continue (for the time being), Super-Science had walked the plank.

  I would miss it. It had supported me in grand style for three years, and the income from it would be hard to replace.

  “The Insidious Invaders” appeared in that final issue under the pseudonym of Eric Rodman. The attentive reader will detect at once the fine hand of W.W. Scott in the story’s title. I called it “The Imitator,” not exactly an inspired title either. The story’s theme—a predatory absorptive alien—is not one for which I can claim any particular originality, but it has, at least, been one that I’ve dealt with in a number of interesting ways over the decades, most notably in my short stories “Passengers” of 1969 and “Amanda and the Alien” of 1983. So “The Insidious Invaders” can be considered an early draft of those two rather more accomplished pieces.

  One oddity that jumped to my attention here when I dug the story out for this book involves the names of the characters—Ted Kennedy and his sister and brother-in-law Marge and Dave Spalding. It’s not the use of “Ted Kennedy” as a character that I’m referring to, for in 1959 John F. Kennedy himself was only then beginning to make himself conspicuous on the national stage and the existence of his kid brother Teddy was unknown to me. But the protagonist of my novel Invaders from Earth, written in the autumn of 1957, was named Ted Kennedy too; his wife’s name was Marge; and there was also a character named Dave Spalding, unrelated to Marge, in the book. There is no other link between the story and the book. The Ted Kennedy of the story is a spaceman; the one of the novel is a public-relations man, as is the Dave Spalding of the novel. Why I used the same names for these two sets of characters, two and a half years apart, is something I can’t explain, nearly fifty years later. Some sort of private joke? Mere coincidence? I have no idea.

  At any rate, with this story I was just about at the end of the phase of my career that had been devoted to writing quick, uncomplicated stories for the low-end science-fiction magazines. All the magazines that published that kind of story had folded, by the middle of 1959, or else had shifted their policies in the direction of the more sophisticated kind of s-f that Astounding and Galaxy were publishing. Since I was committed, by that time, to a life as a full-time writer who depended for his income on high-volume production, I needed to change markets, and I did. My records for the second half of 1959 show that I had begun to write fiction and articles for such slick men’
s magazines of the era as Exotic Adventures, Real Men, and Man’s Life, and that I had found another new slot for my immense productivity in the suddenly hyperactive genre of soft-core erotic paperbacks, where I began turning out two and even three books a month—Suburban Wife, Love Thieves, Summertime Affair, and an almost infinite number of others of that ilk. I was still writing the occasional story for the top-of-the-line s-f magazines, too. Just ahead for me lay an entirely new career as a writer of popular books on archaeological subjects (Lost Cities and Vanished Civilizations, Empires in the Dust, etc.) and then, in the mid-1960s, a return to science fiction with the novels (The Time Hoppers, To Open the Sky, Thorns) that laid the foundation for my present reputation in the field.

  I have no regrets over having written those reams and reams of space-adventure stories back in the 1950s for Amazing, Super-Science, and their competitors. The more of them I wrote, the greater my technical facility as a writer became, something that would stand me in good stead later on. They provided me, also, with the economic stability that a young married man just out of college had to have. Nor was I wasting creative energy that might better have been devoted to writing more ambitious fiction. You would be wrong if you thought that I had stories of the level of “Sundance” or “Enter a Soldier” or “The Secret Sharer” in me in 1957. I may have been a prodigy, but that prodigious I was not, not in my early twenties. Beyond a doubt, though, I was capable back then of “Cosmic Kill” and “Mournful Monster” and the rest of the works reprinted here. So—with a respectful nod to my hard-working younger self—I call them forth from their long stay in obscurity and bring them together for the first time in this book, as a kind of souvenir of the start of my career.

  ——————

  After the incident of the disposal unit, there was no longer any room for reasonable doubt: something peculiar had happened to Ted Kennedy while he was away at space. Marge and Dave Spalding, Kennedy’s sister and brother-in-law, had been watching him all evening, growing more and more puzzled by certain strangenesses in Kennedy’s behavior. But this was the strangest of all.

  He had been wandering around the room, examining the new gadgets that now were standard household fare. They were strange to him, after all the years he had been away. He had been standing by the wall disposal unit, which efficiently and instantly converted matter to energy, and he had suddenly, curiously, stuck his hand near the open entryway to the unit, saying, “This house is so full of new gadgets that I hardly know what anything does. This thing over here—”

  “Watch out, Ted!” Marge Spalding screamed in alarm. “Don’t—”

  She was too late. There was the brief crackling noise of the disposal unit functioning. And Kennedy had thrust his arm in up to the elbow!

  “Ted!” Marge wailed. “Your arm—!” She closed her eyes and felt hysterics starting.

  But Kennedy said in the same calm, strange voice he had been using all evening, “My arm’s all right, Marge. What’s all the excitement about?”

  “But—but that was the wall disposal unit,” Marge muttered bewilderedly. “Anything you put in there gets converted to energy.”

  Kennedy held up an obviously intact arm and smiled, the way one might smile when talking to a child who misunderstands. “Look, Marge. I pulled my arm back in time. See?”

  Dave Spalding, who had been watching the scene with growing confusion, said, “But we heard the sound, Ted. When you activate the unit, it crackles like that.”

  “And I saw you stick your hand in there all the way up to the elbow, Ted!” Marge insisted.

  Kennedy chuckled. “You’re both imagining things. All I did was toss a piece of candy in to see what would happen. My hand didn’t go anywhere near the field.”

  “But I saw your hand go in, Ted,” Marge repeated, getting more stubborn now that the evidence of her own eyes was being contradicted. “And yet—your hand’s all right. I don’t understand.”

  “I tell you my hand didn’t come anywhere near it, Marge,” her brother said forcefully. “Let’s not discuss it any more, shall we?”

  That was the strangest part of the evening so far, Marge thought. But Ted had been behaving peculiarly ever since he came in.

  He had been late, first of all. That was unlike the old Ted. He had been expected about nine, but he was long overdue. Dave Spalding had been pacing the apartment with increasing irritation.

  “It’s past ten, Marge. When’s this spaceman brother of yours getting here? Three in the morning?”

  “Oh, Dave, don’t start getting upset about it,” Marge had said soothingly. “So he’s a little late! Don’t forget it’s five years since he was last on Earth.”

  “Five years or no five years. His ship landed at half past seven. It doesn’t take three hours to get here from the spaceport. I thought you said he was so punctual, Marge.”

  “He used to be. Oh, I don’t know—maybe there was some routine he had to go through, before they would let him leave the spaceport. I understand there’s a comprehensive medical examination for all returning spacemen—”

  “That’s all we need,” Spalding snorted. “Some weird disease he picked up on Alpha Centauri Five, or—”

  “You know they wouldn’t let him near civilians if he had any such diseases.”

  “Well, all I want to say is that if he doesn’t show his face here by eleven, I’m going to go upstairs and go to bed,” Spalding grumbled. “Spaceman or no spaceman. I need my sleep.”

  The doorbell chimed.

  Marge cried, “There he is now, Dave! I knew he’d get here any minute! Be nice to him, Dave. He is my brother, after all. And I haven’t seen him since ’89.”

  “Okay,” Spalding said. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be polite.”

  He walked to the door, hesitated before it a moment, and opened it. A tall young man in spaceman’s uniform stood in the hallway, smiling. There was something about the quality of that smile that made Dave Spalding instantly uncomfortable. As if—as if it were not the smile of a human being, but of some alien thing wearing the mask of humanity.

  “Hello, there,” Spalding said with forced geniality. “Come right on in. My name’s Dave Spalding.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate this, Dave.” Kennedy stepped in. His voice, when he had spoken, had a curious otherwordly undertone.

  Spalding closed the door.

  Marge ran toward her brother, throwing her arms around him. “Ted! Oh, Ted!”

  “Hello, Sis!” Kennedy replied. He thrust her gently away from him. “Stand back—let me look at you.” He whistled appreciatively. “Sister’s a big girl, now, isn’t she?”

  “I’m almost 24,” Marge said “I married Dave three years ago.”

  “You haven’t changed much in the five years I’ve been away,” Kennedy said. “The same red hair—that dimple—the freckles on your nose—”

  “Was there much red tape before you could leave the spaceport?” Spalding broke in brusquely.

  “Just the medical exam,” Kennedy said. “They gave me a quick look to make sure I wasn’t carrying the plague. I was cleared through around quarter past eight.”

  Spalding gave an unfunny chuckle. “You must have stopped off for a little nip or two before coming here, eh?”

  “Nip? No. I came straight here from the spaceport.”

  “But it only takes half an hour by rocket-tube,” Marge said, frowning.

  Kennedy shook his head. “No one said anything to me about a rocket-tube. I took the subway.”

  “The subway!” Spalding laughed. “Oh, really now—the subway, all the way out here! No wonder it took you so long!”

  Marge said, “Dave, the rocket-tube line has only been in operation three and a half years. That’s why Ted didn’t use it. He didn’t know it existed!”

  “The world changes more than you think in five years. The new-model autos that drive themselves—the three-D video—the robots—those things were still brand new and strange, when I was last on Earth. And now
they’re commonplace. To everyone except me.”

  Marge stared keenly at her brother. When he spoke like that, he seemed real. But there was something unconvincing about him, all the same.

  What am I thinking? she wondered. Am I nuts? He’s my brother, that’s all. He looks and acts a little different because he’s been away so long.

  Dave said, “Come on into the living room, Ted. You probably want to rest up. I’ll give you a drink—put a little music on—”

  “And you can tell us all about your five years in space,” Marge said.

  Ted smiled. “Good ideas, all of them.”

  They adjourned to the living room, where Kennedy made himself comfortable in an armchair. Spalding turned the phonograph on. Chamber music welled out into the room. Kennedy nodded his head in time with the music.

  “Mozart,” he said. “You miss him, out in space.”

  “Can I dial you a drink?” Spalding asked.

  “Scotch, thanks. I take it neat.”

  “Same old Ted!” Marge said, reassuring herself. “Still likes the same music, still drinks then same kind of drink.”

  “It’s only been five years, you know. I haven’t been away forever.”